The Ben Mulroney Show - Ben reacts to Pierre Poilievre's sit-down interview with Jordan Peterson

Episode Date: January 3, 2025

Ben reacts to Pierre Poilievre's sit-down interview with Jordan Peterson If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy

If you're on social media, I'm sure you've come into contact with at least a clip of the Jordan Peterson interview with conservative leader Pierre Poulliev. On the Jordan Peterson podcast Twitter page or X page, that interview, which runs well over an hour, close to two, it has almost 25 million views so far for the entire thing i guess you have to watch a portion of it for it to count as a view uh on jordan peterson's uh page himself hundreds of thousands of views on peers so hundreds of thousands and then god knows how many individual clips have been shared and that doesn't count facebook and that doesn't count Facebook. And that doesn't count YouTube. It's going everywhere. It's going everywhere quickly. And it's a wide-ranging interview.

Yes, it's a friendly interview. But Jordan Peterson does not suffer fools. And had Pierre come in there expecting softball questions or answering in in uh in slogans he would have been called out for it so there's a lot to drill down into my i found the most uh the the thing that resonated with me the most uh was his answer to the question on triggering an election before justin trudeau is replaced as leader for the liberal party by the way you know the liberal media is all saying well surely you wouldn't want to trigger an election before Justin Trudeau is replaced as leader for the Liberal Party. By the way, you know, the liberal media is all saying, well, surely you wouldn't want to trigger an election during the liberal leadership race. Excuse me, the Canadian people are not

obliged, 41 million people are not obliged to wait around while this party sorts out its shit. Like, these guys could have got rid of Trudeau a year and a half ago. They knew he was a disaster then. And now they say, well, we're low in the polls, so we have to get rid of him. Now, you didn't care when he was just depriving single mothers of food for their kids or doubling housing costs or unleashing crime in neighborhoods across the country. But now you're really concerned about getting rid of him because your poll numbers are down and you want to keep your job. Sorry, that's not a good reason to paralyze the entire country in the face, by the way, of a major negotiation with the incoming U.S. president who enters with a massive and powerful mandate and a man who has proven that he can spot weakness from a mile away.

Find one thing that he said that's inaccurate or wrong. Like you might not like Pierre Poliev, but everything he said is absolutely right. Everything. And on top of that, I find the notion, and we've talked about this many times on this show, but the notion that the voter for a liberal leader should proceed a federal election is, I think, on brand with this version of the Liberal Party.

But it is the definition of putting a party over country and they'll suffer in the polls for it. A hundred percent. Meanwhile, they drilled down. A lot of people are saying on my on my Twitter page, on my X page, that nothing was actually discussed here. And those people are hearing what they want to hear because Pierre discusses in broad strokes, obviously, how he would solve our issues on the immigration front. We just have to get back to the best system in the world, which we had for 150 years. Even in the United States, both Democrats and Republicans used to say, they'd get up at a microphone and claim they were going to replicate our system because it was an undeniable success. Immigration was not even controversial before Justin Trudeau because it was so well managed here for so long. And we just need to get back

to that system. Yeah, it was clearly viewed as a net benefit by the immigrants and by Canadians. Absolutely. And in fact, the support for immigration was strongest in kind of the rural resource and agricultural communities where the labor was most needed and welcomed. And people integrated, they arrived here and while they were, we said to people, look, bring your traditions and culture and your stories, but leave the problems at the door. Yeah, again, I'm hearing a whole lot of logic here. And I know for a fact, I remember when I was a kid and I remembered it under various liberal governments. There was a consensus on immigration in this country that it was a net benefit.

The people who were coming in were picked specifically to make this country better. And in turn, by helping make our country better, it provided them with the opportunity to grow their families, grow their businesses. I mean, it was a positive feedback loop that has been broken by this government. And Pierre, in this next clip, ascribes the blame where I think it rightly belongs. We had a population growth of 1.2 million in 2023.

That's on a base of 40 million people so it's an astonishing number of people to bring in in one year everyone now admits that this was a calamity for housing the job market and our health care to himself walked it back recently he walked it back with what was the approximation of a public apology yes well this is after he called everyone who questioned his immigration policy a He walked it back with what was the approximation of a public apology. Yes. Well, this is after he called everyone who questioned his immigration policy, a racist.

Right. And then he adopted the policies that he can see. He was calling racist only a year and a half earlier. It goes on and on. But, and I want to make sure that we have time for this next clip because this is the one that should blow people's minds because we've been stuck in a particular narrative on environmental policy and energy policy for years. We've been the people at the top have been listening to the activists and they frame the debate in a way where no other no other conversation can be had and this is the first time i've ever heard somebody break the paradigm completely in a way that could conceivably allow us to move forward with brand

new ideas on how we can contribute to lowering our greenhouse emissions and making the world a cleaner place. Let's listen to this. National Bank did a study. If you want to talk to these environmental loons that hate our energy sector, they said, great economist, Stefan Mariano out of Calgary, National Bank said, if we displaced half of the electricity demand that India will have added to its grid over the next 20 years by supplying our natural gas instead of them using coal, it would reduce global emissions by 2.5 billion tons, which is three times the emissions of all of Canada. So in other words, by exporting our gas, which is half as emissions intensive as coal, we could do far more than it would, we could even do if we shut our entire economy down and disappeared from the earth. Now, I'm not going to take Pierre Poliev entirely at

his word. He, it may, I'm sure it's a far more complicated equation than that. But I've never heard anything remotely like that ever from anyone. And it sort of told me in my own head, wow, I've been playing somebody else's game here. I have been listening to the loudest voices saying this, the path that we're on is the only path to be on. And I'm sure parts of that path make sense. But why have I never been exposed to this other path? And to me, that is, I'm disappointed in myself, to be honest.

I certainly want to learn more about this. But if that's a viable option to pursue, why have we never even considered it ever? Not once. The idea of expanding our natural gas production that could then displace coal in another country that could reduce greenhouse gases globally. Why aren't we looking at Canadian solutions brought to bear on what is a global problem? Like I said, I'm disappointed in myself for not have had the willingness or the curiosity to look beyond the conversation that we've been having as a nation. It's been one note with one solution and one taxpayer and one carbon tax for years. Where we could be having so many more conversations and bringing so many different solutions to bear on real greenhouse emitters out there. The Indias, the Chinas, the Brazils of the world. If we could bring solutions to them, Canadian solutions to real emitters, that to me was, that's the mind-blowing part.