Leslyn Lewis interviewed by Jordan Peterson on Aug. 17, 2022

In politics,
now I'm finding that it is just fear.
Let's create enough fear and then we
can then have this really intrusive policy.
And it doesn't matter what the outcome is, whether
or not that policy will have the outcome of
improving the environment, that just goes out the window.
And that's what's really frustrating to me as
someone who has an education in environmental studies,
that we are not seeing that the policies
have a positive outcome on the environment.
The idea that we have to accept arbitrary limits
to growth, economic growth, which are mostly going to
hurt poor people, and higher energy prices and higher
food prices, which are mostly going to hurt poor
people, and that that's going to help on the
environmental sustainability front, that's just not only nonsense and
a lie, it's an antitruth.
You couldn't say anything farther
from the truth than that.
Hello, everyone.
I'm pleased today to be talking to Dr. Lesley Lewis.
Dr. Lewis is a candidate for the leadership of the
Conservative Party in Canada at the federal level.
And although this is a podcast with an
international audience, the leadership race in Canada on
the conservative front turns out to be something
of some surprising international significance.
Not least, I think, because our Prime Minister, Justin
Trudeau, who I'm not a fan of, for those
of you who don't know, is a real poster boy
for the globalist utopians who are busily attempting
to make this planet far worse.
And so the best challenge to Trudeau on
the political front in Canada will definitely come
from the Conservative Party, who have been the
historical alternatives to Canada's liberals.
And Dr. Lewis is a signal important participant
in that conservative leadership process.
She's more, I think it's fair to say, on
the socially conservative front, but a very interesting person.
And so she's agreed to talk to me today,
which I also think is a good thing.
I've talked to Pierre Poilievre, who's the front
runner in the race, and Roman Barber.
So that'll be three.
Including Doctor Lewis.
That'll be three of the five candidates.
I reached out to John Sherray, who used to be Premier
of Quebec, but his team felt that speaking to a ripper
bait such as myself was probably not in his interest.
And there's another candidate, Aitchison who I
haven't yet talked with and perhaps still
might, if time makes that possible.
But we'll start with the bio.
Leslin Lewis graduated with a Bachelor's
degree from the University of Toronto
Trinity College, graduating magna cum laude.
She has a Master's degree in Environmental Studies from
York University with a concentration in Business and Environment
from the Schulich School of Business and a Juris
Doctor from Osgood Hall Law School.
And a PhD in Law from Osgood Hall Law School.
She and her family are residents of the
town of Dunville, where she serves her community
as Member of Parliament for Haldimand-Norfolk.
Lesley exploded onto the national political scene
when she ran previously for the leadership
of the Conservative Party in 2020.
Despite having no pre established political network
and coming from relative obscurity, her vision
of a strong, united and prosperous nation
resonated with Canadians right across the country.
She finished in third place in the race,
winning the popular vote ahead of eventual winner
Aaron O'Toole and party cofounder Peter McKay. Dr.
Lewis is currently running for the
second time in the current battle
for the Canadian conservative federal leadership.
So welcome, Doctor Lewis.
Thank you very much for making time.
It's quite exciting to have the opportunity to engage
in these long form discussions on the political front.
I think that's something perhaps revolutionary in
Canadian politics to be able to circumvent
the legacy media, let's say.
So welcome to the podcast. Thank you.
It's a great pleasure to be here, and I'm
very honored to be here with you today. Yeah.
So, people, we might as well
start right from the beginning.
Let's do a little bit of
a biographical discussion to begin with.
Tell me a bit about your
family, tell me about your background.
And then also you're very well educated, and
then you made a foray into politics.
Let's walk through that a little bit so that
we can place you in everyone's imagination before we
move to the policy side of things.
Well, as you said, I reside
in a small community called Dunville.
It's in the riding of Haldimand-Norfolk, which is
in the Niagara area south of Hamilton, for those
of you who are familiar with Southern Ontario.
And as you said, I've recently just emerged into
politics and I felt a calling in my life
to really serve, use my skills that I have
honed over the last few decades in education, in
law, and just practical business experience.
Use that to better my country, because right now
I see that our country is at a precipice
and I'm concerned about the future of our country.
I'm concerned about my children and the future that they
will have and the dreams that I've had in this
country and that I've been able to realize.
I'm very concerned that they won't
be there for future generations.
When we look at the $1.3 trillion that we have
in debt and the fact that every day, just to
service that debt, we're paying over $140,000,000 a day just
in interest payments just to service that debt.
And the fact that my children will owe
$45,000 is their share of the national debt.
And so there are so many things that are happening
in this world that are having influences on whether or
not we will survive as a sovereign nation.
And so I think that my experience, lending my experience
to this cause is one of the most noble things
that I feel that I've done in my life.
So when you were in university, you
spend a lot of time in university.
Let's walk through your education.
How do I get it?
Well, maybe that didn't used to be
a problem, although it's become one.
Let's walk through your university career and then
tell me about your developing interest in politics.
So your first degree was at the University of Toronto?
Yes.
It's actually in sociology.
African Studies with a minor
in Women's Studies and philosophy.
So, as you can see, I am well
versed in the social sciences, and I understand
the language of many things that are transpiring. Now.
I went through the education system and throughout my
education I often felt that I was in an
environment that they were trying to mold me.
But in the earlier years at the University
of Toronto, I had the ability to at
least I knew where the limits were.
But I also had the ability to challenge, whereas
I found in my later stages that there was
more conformity in education and there was less diversity
of thought, which was very, very concerning to me.
And even in my later days of teaching, I almost felt
like an undercover agent because I couldn't really necessarily reveal that
I was conservative, although it came out later on because I
was asked to help out the party in 2015 at the
end of my PhD and to run in an election in
a writing that there was a scandal in.
And so I had to step in last minute.
So at the end it was revealed.
But I don't think that many people were really
cognizant of how much of a conservative I was,
because that's not something that's really celebrated in university.
And that sounds like really ironic that one would
say that in an institution of higher learning that
you would not be able to celebrate diversity of
thought, but that's what the end of my university
career was like, and that's really unfortunate.
What years were you studying?
Sociology and women's studies at
the University of Toronto.
Oh, in the 90s, in the early
90s, I completed my first degree. Okay.
So both Sociology and Women's Studies are
very left -leaning, certainly now, but they
were back in the early 1990s too.
There was kind of a little initial peak of political
correctness in the universities in the early ninety s.
Ninety s.
So two questions there.
Why did you decide to go
into sociology and Women's Studies?
And were you conservative in your orientation then?
If so, how did you bridge that gap?
Well, actually my family came here as immigrants,
and the Liberal Party was the party that
they felt most at home in.
And so although I grew up in an ultra
conservative family, religious wise, economically fiscally conservatives, just the
traditional immigrant family that comes to Canada and has
the foundations of strong family values, believing in strong
faith values and a strong faith in your community
and contributing to that community.
So I would consider myself as growing
up in a conservative family, although it
was a politically liberal family.
And when I went to school, I
didn't even think about politics at all.
I just wanted to get an education.
And I was concerned about some of the social
dilemmas because I was very active in my church
doing prison ministry, working with at risk youth, and
so I was very concerned about the social dilemmas.
And sociology was a natural fit, and
sociology really was about understanding the theoretical
underpinnings of what society was comprised of.
So it was a lot of theory.
And so I didn't really find that
it was left leaning woman studies.
Of course, that was my minor, and that was more so
left leaning, but it was still very theoretical back then.
Now, what I'm finding is a lot of the theories
have become dogma and have seeped into the mainstream narrative
and have become the norm rather than just a theory.
And so that's the difference between when I went
to school in the what's studied now, and you
could have alternative positions back then, whereas now I
find that you're demonized for having critical thought abilities.
Okay?
So the advantage of that would have been
to have gone through that four year initial
period would have been that you became very
conversant, say, with the progressive views.
The downside would have been of the tension that
you would have experienced, I presume, between your beliefs
and the beliefs that were being promoted.
Why weren't you convinced by the
more progressive doctrines of the sociologists
and the women's studies teachers?
And what did that do to you?
Or what did experiencing that tension for four
years due to the way that you conceptualize
your philosophy and your practical approach?
Well, it does shape you, even though you have that
conservative foundation that education does impact on you, because there
are things that I had bought into that I'm just
even now recognizing that may not have been all encompassing
or may not have been ideally where I would have
been had I not had that education.
So there was a notion that I had to
just my success was really based on what I
could materially get from society or my educational pursuits.
There was a lot of friction there with also raising
a family and having a successful marriage, et cetera.
So many of that, I think, may have even
undermined some of the traditional values that I had.
And I don't know whether that's a good or
bad thing because I was able to reconcile it.
And even in university, I joined the Reform Party
because I saw that Preston Manning, his values were
very much in line with what I believed.
And there were questions that I had through
my education that weren't being adequately answered.
And so I just naturally
gravitated towards my upbringing.
And I found that he, as a leader, was somebody
who I believed was a very dignified and upstanding person.
And I saw the values that he had for and
the desires that he had for this country and so
I aligned myself with that party very early on.
So do you think, having been educated
on the progressive front, do you think
that you developed a deeper appreciation for
the perspective that's being put forward there?
I mean, the Progressive argument is something like
people who have authority and status often benefit
from unfair privilege and opportunity and capitalize on
power, let's say, at the expense of people
who are less fortunately situated in the hierarchical
structure of society.
There's some truth to that, obviously, because power
corrupts every human institution and we have to
keep an eye out on it.
Why do you think you were unconvinced by the
more radical stream of the progressive doctrine, especially given
that you were immersed in it for four years
and subject to a fair bit, I imagine, both
of conceptual and peer pressure?
Well, as I said, from a theoretical perspective,
a lot of it does make sense.
The problem that I'm having now
is that it's almost being inverse.
So we know that privilege is relative.
Oftentimes I've walked into a room and people
would say to me, oh, you're a lawyer.
How they would know that perhaps by the way
I speak, by the way I carry myself.
So there is relative privilege in different
aspects of your social ranking, and that's
something that we've always had in society.
The reason why I speak about an inversion
is because what I'm seeing is that they
will often make your identity, your master status.
And so that's what I push back on
right now, because we were able to critically
analyze why that is not good for society.
But I even find myself right now, even in
the conservative race, as someone who has only the
only track record of someone running a conservative leadership
race and winning the popular vote.
As an outsider, I still will not
get media coverage and attention, primarily because
I don't fit their narrative.
And their narrative is that the Conservative
Party is a white racist party.
And so to have me potentially highlight me would
go against the media and the social narrative so
much to the point that in 2020.
Kamala Harris was featured over 8800
times more than I was.
Even though she was not running in our country.
And even though her position was an appointment.
And I was running to earn
my position as a leadership candidate.
As a leader of the Conservative Party.
So those things, it shows you largely how the left
kind of they've reversed even what their beliefs are, to
the point that when you don't fit their narrative, they
come after you and they attack you very viciously.
So it's very perverse because you're objecting on philosophical
grounds to the idea that you should be categorized
by, let's say, your race and your sex.
And yet the Left insists that that's the
cardinal distinction between people and then insists that
people like that should be brought to the
forefront because they've been marginalized and then insists
that that should only be the case.
Clarence Thomas is a good case in point, too, who's
been pilloried like mad for not fitting the mold.
So despite the fact that you have the, let's
say, self evident characteristics that the Left is trumpeting,
the fact that you aren't conducting yourself in a
manner that seems to be ideologically appropriate means that
in some real sense, that your persona non grata.
And that really is interest.
That's the inversion that you're speaking about.
That really is a fascinating phenomenon
as far as I'm concerned.
All right, so after you were at
the University of Toronto, your next degree
was, what, a masters of Environmental studies?
Okay, so that's a bit of a detour.
Now you've jumped from one leftist hotbed into
an even more leftist hotbed, I would say,
because not only are you taking environmental studies,
you're taking environmental studies at York, which is
definitely one of Canada's.
I mean, that place is paralyzed
by strikes about every two years.
I would say it's fair to say that must
be one of Canada's most leftist, higher educational institutions.
And so now you've jumped into environmental studies.
Why environmental studies and why York?
And what was that like?
To be honest with you, I don't even
know why I decided to choose environmental studies,
other than the fact that I had a
deep concern about the environment, about our stewardship.
And it wasn't something that I thought that I
was going to make a lot of money from
or that it was on a desired path.
It was almost like a honing signal, like something that
sent out to you and drawing you to that.
But you can't really put your finger on
why it is that you did that degree.
And that's just the best way I can explain it.
I'm very happy that I did do that.
And even that program was very different
than what the Environmental Studies is now.
Even then, I feel that I had a
well rounded, all encompassing education in the environment.
The notion of climate change and the politicization
of climate change wasn't something that I dealt
with as a master's student in the environment.
That is a recent phenomenon that we've taken
climate change, we've politicized it, we've made it
ascientific and we've used it as a revenue
generating tool to conjure up fear.
And that wasn't something that I found in my studies.
Okay, so let's go into that a little bit.
So what did you learn in your company
of years, two years, Masters program, was it?
What did you learn about the environment?
And tell me how that shaped your thinking
now, I'm a big fan people know this.
I'm a big fan of Bjorn Lomborg.
He's done a pretty comprehensive analysis of
sustainability and environmental issues and also a
man named Marion Tupi who wrote a
great book recently called Superabundance.
Both of them are trying very hard to
sort out the priorities of the various environmental
concerns that do, in fact, beset us.
What did you learn at York and what
do you think is of stellar importance on
the environmental front confronting us now?
Well, you'd be surprised what I learned
starting from the theoretical perspective of, say,
Sustainability Our Common Future, that notorious book.
We started from that foundation.
But we also learned the role of Big
Pharma, and that could be all consuming.
We also learned about some of the improprieties
that were committed by Big Pharma in Southern
nations, whether it's South America or African countries.
We also learned about sustainability and
the role of farmers and ability
to sustain the land, intergenerational ability.
We learned about the atmosphere and in a very different
way than how we're talking about it right now.
We knew that nitrogen made up 78% of the atmosphere,
that oxygen made up 21%, and that carbon was 0.4%.
So we talked about carbon reduction in a very
different way than we have done now, which is
more of a politicized way, and it's completely different.
I'm not sure what is being taught now in an
Environmental Studies program, but it was fascinating because we looked
at things like the role of Monsanto and the appropriation
of biodiversity and how that will lead to fewer choices
for people in the farming sector.
So it was something that I was preempted towards, that
I was pre warned that these things were coming.
And we've looked at even African communities in the
role of some of the United Nations food programs,
how they have actually destabilized those communities.
If you look at, say, Reduce, there's a program
called red, reduce emissions for deforestation and degradation.
And that program basically encouraged people in certain
African communities not to cut down trees because
they said it was contributing to a very
bad carbon footprint, it was contributing to depletion
and carbonization of the environment, etc.
And so they encouraged those individuals not to
cut down trees and the people were hungry.
They began to starve.
You saw malnutrition in communities that never had malnutrition
before and so they had to go back and
say, well, we are encouraging them not to cut
down these trees, but they're starving.
In other projects, they encourage people not to.
They were using corn for ethanol
and the people were going hungry.
And so we're looking at all of these programs and
you have to ask whether or not it's serving humanity.
And even if we look at our situation in
Canada and we look at even our resource sector,
in my Master's program, we were taught that resource
development is not mutually exclusive from environmental sustainability.
That's what we were taught.
And so we looked for ways to solve
problems, whether that's through efficient technology, innovative technology,
working with corporations to make sure that their
impact or their footprint is minimal and that
they can remedy some of the damage that's
caused to the environment.
So we looked for solutions, whereas in politics
now I'm finding that it is just fear
that's create enough fear and then we can
then have this really intrusive policy.
And it doesn't matter what the outcome is, whether
or not that policy will have the outcome of
improving the environment, that just goes out the window.
And that's what's really frustrating to me as
someone who has an education in environmental studies
that we are not seeing that the policies
have a positive outcome on the environment.
It's just largely revenue generating.
Yeah, you brought up a bunch of issues.
There one issue I would say is the idea
that somehow we have to make life difficult for
impoverished people so that the environment will improve.
You talked about the injunction to cease
deforestation and the consequent generation of hunger.
The first thing that I think conservatives and
intelligent liberals could agree upon and insist upon
is that there's no pathway to environmental sustainability
that involves making already poor people more miserable.
First of all, because we shouldn't be
making them more miserable, that's for sure.
And second, because people can't care about broader
environmental concerns when they're so desperate, they're worried
about tonight's shelter and the next meal.
And so the idea that we have to accept
arbitrary limits to growth, economic growth which are mostly
going to hurt poor people and higher energy prices
and higher food prices, which are mostly going to
hurt poor people and that's going to help on
the environmental sustainability front, it's not only nonsense and
a lie, it's an anti truth.
You couldn't say anything farther
from the truth than that.
I completely agree with you, Dr. Peterson in that.
And I'll tell you a story that
happened to me during my mas...
Actually, it was during my PhD.
I was unable to publish a paper
because I referenced the term environmental imperialism.
And the peer reviewed reviewers told me I had to
take that word out in order to publish my paper.
So I said, absolutely not. I won't do it.
So I had to keep shopping
it around to different places.
I finally got it published.
And that's really what you're
talking about, is environmental imperialism.
Because what the west is doing now is saying,
we've developed, and yes, our path of development wasn't
good for the environment, and we've learned.
And so now we want you to learn, and
therefore we don't want you to have all the
luxuries that we have because we've destroyed the environment.
You stay in your state of worse. Exactly.
And we will find a way to protect the
environment, not recognizing that you may want to have
electricity, have some of the luxuries that we have.
And instead of finding a way that we could, for
lack of a better word, bring other societies along to
the path of development in an environmentally sustainable way, you
have this notion of environmental imperialism where you say, no,
you can't cut down that tree for food because we
want to protect the forest.
It's an elitism that is
coming into environmental protection.
And I'm going to use the word privilege.
It is a stance of privilege.
I think that's a proper way to use it.
That we in this society, we have the privilege of
having all these luxuries, and then we have the audacity
to tell people that they should not strive for the
same things in their lives, not just to tell them
to force them under power of law to do so.
I mean, we look at what happened to
Sri Lanka as a case in point.
And, you know, my sense I
spent about two years studying issues
of environmental sustainability and economic development.
And that's when I realized, which was a great
delight and shocked to me, that the fastest way
forward to true environmental sustainability was to eradicate poverty.
I thought, well, that's a good deal.
We could eradicate poverty and that'll
be good for the planet.
And then I also thought, and tell
me what you think of this.
The pathway forward to the amelioration of poverty
and environmental sustainability is, let's say, to make
the absolutely poor richer because then they'll start
to care about the environment.
And so once you get them up to about $5,000
a year in GDP, people start to be concerned about
longer term issues because they can afford to.
And then there's a pathway of development there that's quite
clear, as far as I can tell, that involves cheap
energy because energy is work and energy is food.
And so the pathway is something like,
well, people burn dung or wood.
It's better to replace that with coal and then it's
better to replace the coal with oil and the oil
with natural gas and the natural gas conceivably with nuclear
and some judicious mix of renewables and each of those
steps is somewhat more expensive using current technology.
So generally speaking countries have to
pass through that entire developmental sequence.
And I know that the developing world is planning to
generate something like 170 coal fired plants in the next
few years and then I don't know how many nuclear
plants China is planning to build but a lot.
And so instead of interfering with that and making
fossil fuel unconscionably expensive and then driving countries like
China to shop for bad sources of coal instead
of relatively clean burning coal we're moralizing like mad
in our privilege in the west and we're doing
all these people to not only privation and want
in a very fundamental sense but to an environmentally
degraded future.
So the bloody leftists on the environmental front are
not only putting forward a vision that's contrary to
a conservative vision or a true liberal vision but
they're putting forward a vision that isn't going to
result in what they purport to desire.
No, absolutely.
And it goes even beyond, say electrifying the south.
It goes into sustaining their food source and right now
there is a major attack on even their food source.
If you take the situation in Sri Lanka
the situation in Sri Lanka is not much
different than what we will be facing here.
Ironically, it started off with lockdowns.
The lockdowns really crippled the average
person who made their living selling
on the streets through tourism vending.
And that impact was still there when
they imposed even more restrictions on the
nitrogen content in the fertilizer.
So you had people who were used to making
their money by selling tea farming and with the
30% nitrogen content reduction their yields were much less
and so they couldn't sustain themselves economically.
And then you even had the rice farmers in Sri Lanka
also which is a large staple cash crop there
and they also had to deal with the nitrogen content
reduction and so they weren't making the type of money.
So you don't have the money flowing through the
system that you ordinarily would and then you have
from the lockdown the supply chains were so limited
that the cost of everything increased and people have
fewer dollars to even purchase these items now.
And so that's why you saw them raid the presidential palace because a light goes off.
Why should these politicians be living in a palace
in luxury while I cannot even put one meal
a day on the table for my family?
And that's why they said enough is enough.
Okay, so let's put that in context.
Now we talk about the nitrogen issues.
So first thing is that we've seen now a
tremendous amount of unhappiness on the Dutch farmer front.
So the judicial authorities in Holland
accused the Netherlands government of.
Failing to live up to its international obligations
on the pollution Amelioration front and required immediate
action to be taken with regards to nitrogen
pollution which admittedly can be a problem.
Now, the plan that the Netherlands imposed by
compulsion will result in the destruction of a
substantial proportion of the Netherlands farming infrastructure.
And the people who are promoting this say, well, we
think this sector can be resilient enough to manage this.
But the farmers know perfectly well that many of them
are going to be forced out of business as the
politicians themselves have not only admitted but are aiming for.
And now there is this approximately 30% reduction
in the Dutch herd and the associated farms.
And the politicians who are pushing this seem to
think that the whole agricultural sector in the Netherlands
which is the world's second biggest exporter of agricultural
products that the infrastructure there will be able to
tolerate this forced and compelled reduction in supply and
consequent increases in costs.
But my sense is the whole agricultural section
will stagger and fall especially under the weight
of these postcovid supply chain problems.
I can't see how you can take a whole industry
that runs on about a three to 5% margin force
a 30% reduction in its inputs over an eight year
period and expect the whole system to survive.
They don't expect it to survive.
They don't expect it to survive.
Okay, we'll get into that.
Now, just to add a little twist to that.
Now the Dutch farmers are out protesting.
There's 400 of them with their big tractors.
And they don't do that lightly because those
tractors are expensive and they're very busy.
And right in the bloody midst of this,
our prime minister did exactly the same thing.
He unilaterally announced a mandatory 30% reduction in
nitrogen output and he on the farmer side.
And he wasn't even willing to tie that
to units of nitrogen used per unit of
food produced because apparently he doesn't give a
damn whether we produce food effectively.
And then that means that poor people will go hungry.
So what do you make of this?
Again, we said this isn't
even good environmental policy.
It's not going to work.
And I don't know what's going to happen in Sri Lanka.
But my suspicions are the people are going to be
cutting down the forests and eating the animals because what
the hell else are they going to do? Exactly.
You're absolutely correct.
I don't believe that they expect the survival of
the system and the policies are created largely because
they don't believe that system is worth keeping.
And they've said it to the farmers in the Netherlands.
They've said that to them.
In some places, the nitrogen reduction
content is up to 90%.
If it's near conservation in
the Netherlands, up to 90%.
Remember, these farmers, including our farmers they have
been approached about this net zero before.
This is not the first time.
And they were told if you invest in innovative
technologies that would bring down your carbon footprint and
therefore you would get some credit for that.
And so many of those farmers
in the Netherlands, they spent millions
of dollars investing in innovative technology.
And then after that the government said, what?
That's not good enough.
Then they brought in the nitrogen requirements.
So then they imposed the nitrogen
requirements upon an already fragile industry.
And then the Dutch farmers said, well, we
will not be able exactly like in Sri
Lanka, to make the yields that it would
be worth financially, us continuing this industry.
And what did the government say?
Well, if your farms can't sustain itself, they're
not sustainable, we'll buy them or a corporation
will buy them from you, but we cannot
continue to invest in an unsustainable business.
And when the Dutch farmers come out and say, well,
we are one of the largest exporters of cash crops,
certain cash crops, what does the government say?
Oh no, you're not.
You import a lot of the things
that you need to produce that.
And so when you minus that from
the equation, you're actually negligible in the
world scheme of the food supply chain.
So they have an answer for everything.
And not only that, when the Dutch farmers said, OK,
let's look at if this is really about the environment
and the Canadian farmers are saying the same thing.
Let's look at our contribution and the contribution
that we make to carbon sequestration when we
plant crops, carbon is in the soil.
And so do we get in Canada the questions
asked, do we get a reduction from our carbon
tax that we're paying to dry the crops?
Can we get a reduction on that carbon tax?
And the question, the answer is no.
In the Netherlands, what was the answer?
The government basically said, well no, you
don't get to do the calculations.
We are the ones who set the calculations.
So the metrics, they don't even
want to negotiate on the metrics.
Which tells you how dictatorial this whole process is,
when you cannot even have people who have tended
to the land for generations, who are probably some
of the most experienced farmers in the world, where
you say their input is not valid.
It tells you that there is an
agenda beyond just protecting the environment.
Because if it were just protecting the environment, you would
want all of these viable inputs and you would want
to say, okay, this practice, if it can be done
in a sustainable manner, let's do it.
No, you impose a restriction that
you know will kill the industry.
Okay, so I'm going to walk through a bunch of that.
Let's lay out the argument here on
the progressive side and take it apart.
The first argument is, oh no,
the environmental apocalypse is coming.
Okay, so now let's think about that.
Is an apocalypse coming?
Well, we've heard about various apocalypse for
the last 40 years, and many of
them needed to be taken seriously.
And so we could say there's some threat,
but let's walk through that little bit more.
It's like, okay, we can see
bad things coming in the future.
Now, my question would be, well, who's
qualified to deal with those hypothetical emergencies?
Now, here's a psychological answer.
You tell me what you think about
this because I've just been formulating it.
So one of the things you do as a
therapist when people are afraid of something is you
teach them how to confront it voluntarily.
And maybe someone's afraid of other people, they're socially
anxious, so they don't like going to parties.
And so you might say, well, your assignment for
this week is to go to a party.
And the person says, well, that makes me too afraid.
I don't think I can do it.
I'll get irritable and it isn't going to work.
And so you say, okay, well, let's scale
it back to find something you can do
that doesn't paralyze you and make you irritable.
And so maybe you say, well, you go say hello to
the person who runs your corner store and introduce yourself.
That's your assignment for the week.
And then they go out and see if they can do that.
You don't want to confront people with a monster
that's so big that it terrifies them into paralysis
or turns them into a tyrant, let's say.
So now you're an environmentalist and you're facing the
apocalypse, and you say, oh my God, I'm so
terrified of this that I'm virtually paralyzed.
And then you say, not only that, it's such
an emergency that I'm 100% justified in using compulsion
on others, not bringing them along voluntarily, not developing
a shared vision, not talking in detail to the
Dutch or the Canadian farmers who are among the
most efficient utilizers of resources per unit of food
grown in the world. None of that.
It's top down.
And so then I would say, look, if
your vision of the future is so apocalyptic
that you're paralyzed into paralysis or you're terrified
into paralysis and you've become a tyrant, then
you're not the right person for the job.
Your own psychological reaction is showing that instead, you
should be out there talking to people, the farmers
in particular, let's say, and maybe we could throw
in the truckers for good measure, who actually have
to deal with these things on a day to
day basis to find a shared vision.
It's not like the bloody farmers want to spend
any more money on fertilizer than they have to
and get people to come along voluntarily.
And so here's the moral hazard, all right?
It's the apocalypse.
That's the claim.
We need net zero, because that means we don't
have to think about all the painful details.
This is terrifying us because it's such
an emergency and therefore conveniently for us.
We need all the decision making
power, and we need it now.
And so the problem here is that the
apocalypse justifies the emergence of a tyrant and
that's what we're seeing play out.
Now, I'll add one more detail to that.
You said we both discussed the idea that
even by the measures that the environmentalists use,
these policies appear to be counterproductive.
They're going to destroy the industries, they're
going to throw people into poverty, they're
going to produce social chaos.
And so then you think, well, OK, if they know,
if they don't know this, then that's unforgivable ignorance.
If they do know it, then it's unforgivable malevolence.
And you might say, well, what's driving that?
How about if we had to choose
between destroying capitalism and saving the environment,
we would choose destroying capitalism.
Well, you've packed a lot into that.
And what I do want to do is just
turn back to this whole climate change narrative.
So we know climate change is
both manmade and it is natural.
The problem is that our solutions, of course, they're
only focused on the manmade component and they want
you to believe that it's only man made, which
that's not true, but that's all we could do
is affect that man made component.
The hypocrisy that we see in the policies
is what I have a problem with.
Every day we're importing 555,000 barrels of
oil a day into Canada, 555,000 miles.
And yet we're importing them from often dictatorship
regimes with poorer environmental records than ours.
So we're rewarding bad behavior and yet we are
saying that we cannot develop our natural resources.
But we're admittingly, stating that we have
not moved past the point where we
can live without those natural resources.
So that's one sense of the hypocrisy that I see.
Another sense is yes, you're right.
It is a deliberate attempt to kill certain industries.
For example, they have been programming us for years
that eating beef is selfish and that if you
continue to eat meat, you're a selfish person.
They've been programming us to want to eat bugs
and to not want to eat especially beef.
And so you see this predictive programming coming out and when
you juxtapose that with something that they say is one of
their saviors, like electric cars and you say, okay, we're going
to do a net zero analysis of beef.
And they like to do that and they
will say that state that you ate Dr.
Peterson last night.
Well, you have to take into consideration the entire
life cycle of that cattle that you ate.
And so they start from the farm, they look at all
of the feces and the dung excreted from that cattle over
its lifetime, its impact on runoff into the water.
They look at how much grass that cattle has
eaten and then they look at the transportation costs
to get that piece of nice beef on your
plate that you ate last night.
And they say, well, when you do the net
zero calculation, that piece of beef is not sustainable.
But let's take an electric car.
They do not start from in a cobalt mine in
Africa or even for a computer in a lithium mine
in Africa with a poor five year old child that
if you look at just the abuse that that child
had to endure, your heart would melt.
It's just such egregious, outrageous circumstances
that those children are put under.
And yet these are the minors of the components
that we need in order to go in that
electric car so they don't start there.
Then you look at the battery, right?
And no, let's look at the fact
that the battery has to be charged.
What is it charged with?
It's charged with carbon, but yet that's
not included in the carbon footprint.
And then you look at the battery, the disposal of
that battery at the end of the life cycle of
that car, and you know that to decompose that battery
will take, I think, by one calculation don't quote me.
I think I heard 75 years.
So when you look at the life cycle of that and you
do a net zero calculation on that, you will see that it
is not as green as we are told that it is.
And many of the green products are not as green.
Well, didn't the EU a month ago redefine
green to include natural gas and nuclear?
Which begs a major question, which is, well, why
weren't they defined that way to begin with?
And what's the grounds for the reclassification?
And, well, on the nuclear front that's been bothering me for
years, it's like, well, France has done a pretty good job
providing a stable power grid for a number of decades now,
and that's about as green as it gets.
There's the problem of disposal of nuclear
waste, but that's a manageable problem.
There's always a problem with energy solutions.
I just can't help but see that.
And I've watched the environmentalist leftists do this internal
battle of ethics because the left, at least in
principle, let's say they have two broad concerns.
Well, three.
One is amelioration of absolute poverty.
Another is amelioration of relative poverty.
That's the inequality argument.
And the third is
something like environmental sustainability.
And so then you might say, well, what
happens when those goals run into paradoxical juxtaposition?
And so then you have to decide if you're going to
save the planet or you're going to save the poor.
And the answer on the environmental front, as
far as I can tell, continually has been,
oh, to hell with the poor.
We're going to save the planet.
And then the catastrophe of that is, well, if
you don't save the poor along with the planet,
then you doom the planet and the poor.
And that seems like a really bad solution to me.
that the net zero calculation now is basically an
attempt to really transition us from one economic mode
of production to a new one.
And it's been very clearly stated.
It's been very clearly stated by Claus
Schwab in his book The Great Reset.
This is not a conspiracy.
You can find it on Amazon.
And that's not a pitch for him.
It's also a terrible book.
It's a terrible book.
I read that book.
It is full of platitudes.
It's full of platitudes, that book.
And there's not a lot of substantiating the grand
theories in the book, but it is a grand
theory of where they see our entire society going.
And one of the big champions of
this grand theory is Justin Trudeau.
He wants to remake our society in
a postnationalist image of what he considers
to be an Egalitarian Flat society.
But there are still a lot of inequities.
If you look at the recent conference that they
had in Davos, they basically put limousines on jets
in order to get them over there so that
they could be driven around in luxury.
But yet they want to limit
the travel of average Canadians.
And so you see this dichotomy and this two
tiered society being created, one where they're going after
the food supply chain to control your consumption.
And the only way they can
do that is through the farmers.
Then the second thing is to go
after your consumption and daily purchasing, which
will come through environmental Social governance.
And the Environmental Social Governance Program is
a completely new international accounting program that
requires small and medium sized businesses to
allocate the carbon footprint of every single
product that they sell.
To quantify that, different users
will have different products.
You may use your camera once a year on vacation,
and another person may use it every day to film.
So the carbon footprint, it's almost impossible
to measure, but yet they're coming up
with this system which can only be
implemented by lawyers, accountants, consultants.
So you have the lawyers, the accountants and
contractors getting wealthy, while small businesses will be
struggling under more red tape than they have
now to be able to meet these standards
of this environmental social governance.
And the ironic thing about this, Dr.
Peterson, is that if these same companies are
operating, say, in China or overseas, the same
Canadian companies do not have to subject those
citizens and that country purchasers to that same
level of tracking the carbon footprint. Right?
Well, so this is a crucial issue here
because one of the things we really have
to understand is that if we don't develop
our ability to generate and disseminate cheap energy
in the developed countries where we have not
only high standards of environmental stewardship on the
legal front, but an ethos of environmental stewardship
among the distributed business class, it's already there.
They're already aiming at that.
All that's going to happen is that worst
providers elsewhere are going to be brought aboard.
As you said, we're buying oil
from, let's say Canada isn't.
I don't think we import oil from Russia, but obviously
the Europeans import fossil fuels from Russia like mad.
All we're doing is enabling the Chinese and the dictatorial
Gulf states to fill in the gaps, let's say.
Absolutely, I cannot see in any possible way how
that's going to be good for poor people or
good for the environment in any sense whatsoever.
And I think your comments about Trudeau being a poster
boy for the cloud schwab and the WEF types.
And also your comments on ESG.
Which everyone should know about the ESG mandates
that are coming in at the corporate level.
If we get snookered into a digital currency.
Which seems to me to be highly probable.
Then not only are corporate expenses going
to have to be accounted for in
terms of their hypothetical carbon footprint.
But every bloody purchase that individuals make is going
to be subject to exactly the same kind of
analysis and taxation and nudging and pressure.
And so every consumer decision we make is
going to be weighed up in terms of
our environmental impact for no good outcome.
Let's make that clear.
To make everything more expensive, to make energy more
expensive, to make food more inaccessible, to hurt the
planet, to make it more difficult for people to
conduct their business and for poor people to starve.
That's the bloody vision that's being put forth by
the half wit cliche mongers like Claude Schwab.
Well, let me first speak about the first
point that you made about bad actors.
So we have the third largest accessible oil reserves on
the planet in Canada, which we leave largely untapped.
And right now in Europe, 40% of
their supply is coming from Russia.
If we were able to develop our natural resources, even
get our LNG to tide water, get it over to
Europe, we could actually offset dependency on Russian oil.
And so you're absolutely right that
the need is still there.
And the fact that our government has implemented industry
killing policies like Bill C 48 and Bill C
69, that is basically just a stymie our production.
It is the same thing that when
we implement these policies on our farmers,
it's really affecting our global supply chain.
When we have these social governance rules that are imposed
on Canadian businesses, it means that we will not be
producing at the level that we should be producing.
We are actually being dependent on foreign
countries to produce and import it.
And that's why we will continue to have
such large trade deficits and trade deficits.
Some people will say, well, that tells
you that you have a rich nation
and you don't have to produce everything.
But we see what dependency can cause.
Jerry Covette, Basic PPEs we had to import where
we had the capacity to produce those here.
And so we have to make
sure that we're optimizing our capacity.
I also want to touch on the digital
ID and this whole digitization of our economy.
Yes, it is a transition to a new economy.
The plan is for everything.
Even the way our GDP would be calculated would
be based on a new means of calculation that
would have ingrained in it the carbon footprint.
And so the carbon footprint is almost going
to replace what we know as our dollar.
And when we see centralized digital banking currencies, when
we see that emerging that is creating the infrastructure
and arguably you could even argue that things such
as digital currencies, we're a test ground for creation
of that infrastructure of the new economy.
That's why I think that my inclusion in the
leadership race and in the future of Canada is
so important because I've spent years studying what it
is that we've been embarked upon.
Many people do not understand what is
happening, how every calculation, everything that you
do, will be logged on that blockchain.
The blockchain could see every single transaction
and it's going to be recorded.
And our entire lives are going to be equated on
how much carbon footprint we contribute to society or how
good we are at reducing our carbon footprint. Right?
So that'll be the hallmark by which
all ethical conduct will be evaluated.
And we're setting up an infrastructure
where there can be complete tracking
of everything in relationship to that.
And you might say, well, the planet is in
terrible shape and the first thing we need to
do is to reduce our carbon footprint.
But then I think, well, wait a second.
This goes back to your discussion about the depth
of analysis, let's say on the electric car front.
It's like, well, wait a second, are you so
sure, like 100% to the bottom of your soul
that the most important thing we could possibly embark
upon is carbon output reduction and nothing else?
So let me offer some other alternatives.
If we're going to look at this in a broader
sense, and I got a fair bit of this from
people like Mary and Tupi and Bjorn Lawnberg.
It's like well, Lamberg has put together teams
of economists to analyze where we get the
biggest return per dollar spent which isn't a
bad metric unless you have a better one.
And he rank ordered the UN sustainability
goals in terms of economic viability.
And so let's make that clear.
There are important things to pursue.
They are important things to
pursue internationally and nationally.
One of the ways we determine what's most
important and should be funded is by looking
at something like return on investment.
If we spend a dollar, how much
money does that generate in return?
And Lomberg, who put together ten teams of
economists who worked independently on this and then
aggregated across their findings showed that climate remediation
spending doesn't even enter the top 20.
That if we really wanted to put the planet together
in some long term sense over the next few decades
we'd be funneling a lot more money into such things
as absolute poverty reduction for poor children in the developing
world because the return on investment for early childhood nutrition,
for example, is about $250 to one.
And I can think of other
environmental issues that are more pressing.
So, for example, I worked on the UN committee
that set up some of the sustainability goals.
So I looked at this for a long
time and I do think there are environmental
problems and climate change is one of them.
But where it should be placed on
the list is not exactly clear.
Certainly I would say the problem of oceanic mismanagement
is much more not only pressing and vital but
also remediable for we actually know how to remediate
it and trying to generate any public discussion on
that front is virtually impossible.
And so the environmentalists themselves, they jump
on one issue it's climate change.
They say oh, it's going to be a catastrophe.
And Bjorn Laumberg has done these calculations.
He said look, by the year 2100 given current economic
projections we're going to be about four times richer than
we are now but that's going to be decreased to
some degree because of the additional costs associated with climate
change but will only be 3.5 times richer.
And then we can remediate most of that.
He's also done a death calculation showing that fewer
people are likely to die in the future when
it's warmer than die now because it's cold and
more people freeze to death then get overheated.
And so in terms of human
catastrophe it's not obvious at all.
At least at the present time.
That even if you accept the IPCC climate
change prognostications which you might as well.
For the sake of argument it is not clear
at all that bending and twisting our entire infrastructure
by compulsion and force immediately in an emergency reaction
that feeds all the power to the elite is
actually going to solve any of these problems and
not make them a lot worse.
That is a very good point.
And therein lies the problem.
That is not their solution.
Their solution is really one to
transform our impact on the environment.
And they believe that we are overpopulated.
We have too many people, and so we are over consuming.
And because of our consumption patterns, if we can
bring down our consumption patterns, then we will be
able to reduce the impact on the environment.
So that's essentially what they are trying to do.
Well, that argument I put out
a YouTube video last week.
I wrote an article for the Telegraph about a
Deloitte Memo report that was produced in May.
And the Deloitte consultants, who are the
Davos types, basically said, well, we're facing
this environmental catastrophe, and so we got
to put the brakes on economic growth.
And sure, that's going to cause some disruption in the
short term, meaning the next five decades, but it will
be worth it at some point in the future.
And I think, well, hold on a second here.
You put a lot of economic pressure on
the world supply chain system, food production, energy.
You're going to starve a lot of really
poor people, and somehow you think that's okay.
It's like, here's the deal.
The apocalypse is so nigh that we're going to
have to throw a billion or 2 billion people
into absolute poverty again to make things better.
It's like, what's your evidence that's going
to make things better is Sri Lanka.
Your evidence?
Their aim is more behavior modification and
behavior modification of largely industrialized Western nations.
And so they can track that.
If everything is digitized, if we all have
digital IDs, if our digital IDs, then are
used to facilitate and navigate us through society.
So whether it is financial, whether
it's a purchase, whether it's healthcare.
So your digital ID will be tied into the system,
and then you can monitor your consumption based on that.
Even in the United States right now, you could
go into, I think it's Walgreens, and they have
free coolers with products inside with locks on it.
In the future, it's predicted that those locks you
will be able to put in your digital ID.
If you've had too much sugar, that
ice cream fridge won't open for you.
And so it's a way to monitor your behavior.
And that's what people are not looking at.
They're not looking at all of the promises that have
come out of the World Economic Forum, and they're not
taking it very seriously because we've had Claus Schwab clearly
state that he has penetrated Canada's cabinet.
And to me, that's a very serious thing for
a global businessman to say about an independent democracy.
And we have even our finance minister
that's sitting on the board, one of
the boards of the World Economic Forum.
Many Canadians are very, very concerned about that.
And I think as a strong opposition,
we need to ask questions about that.
Because if these are concerns for Canadians, why.
Are we afraid to delve into these issues of
someone who has shown such an utter disrespect for
our democracy to say that he's penetrated our cabinet?
Well, you know, I talked to some people who
went to these Davos conferences a while back who
stopped going because of the twist that it took.
And I said, well, I asked them,
very credible people, by the way.
I asked them, who is Claude Schwab anyways?
And the answer was, well, he's a conference organizer.
I said, well, how did he develop
such a position of undue influence?
And they said, well, he was very
good at bringing, what would you say,
influential people together and helping them network.
And that elevated them into a
position of, well, unparalleled authority.
In some sense it's like, yeah, fine,
but we're going to sacrifice our national
sovereignty to this international cabal of misinformed.
What would you call it?
Misinformed, low rates, utopia who are
willing to sacrifice the world's poor.
That's the plan.
That seems like a really bad plan.
Let me push back at you on something here.
So now people who are listening to this,
especially critics of the way that you're thinking,
are going to say, well, there's Doctor Lewis
getting all conspiratorial and isn't that just typical
of a social conservative type?
So you talked about the danger of ESGS
and everyone listening should know what those are. ESG.
That's worse than diversity, inclusivity and equity,
by the way, by a large margin.
And so there's the ESG problem,
there's the digital ID problem, there's
the globalist utopian centralizing problem.
Why shouldn't you just be dismissed
as a socially conservative conspiracy theorist?
What makes you think, and this is really a
serious question because the world is pretty weird right
now and it's not that easy to protect yourself
against becoming conspiratorial, let's say, or seeing conspiracies.
What makes you think that your analysis of this
situation is balanced and reasonable and that Canadians could
rely on you for your judicious wisdom?
Well, you've earned a PhD, so you know the grit and
the rigor that you go through to earn a PhD.
So I respect knowledge.
Any information that I put
out there, it's well researched.
If I'm quoting somebody, it's from their own words.
The problem is that the term conspiracy theory
has been used in order to absolve politicians
of their responsibility to answer questions.
It's a psycho term that has been used to gaslight.
Even right now, the United Nations has a
program that they put out on conspiracy theories
on how to deal with a conspiracy theory.
What they tell you is that if you see something
that you don't agree with, that you believe is a
conspiracy theory, report the person write to their editor.
This is all a form of bullying.
Labeling something as a conspiracy theory is an
easy way for you not to deal with
the issue at hand by just dismissing it.
Me, someone with a PhD I respect knowledge.
And I have taken a lot of time to
write to the members of the Conservative Party.
And everything I write, I documented.
At one point when I was telling people that
our government enrolled in a program called the Known
Traveler Digital ID Program, which is a World Economic
Forum program, people said, no, that cannot be.
Why would our government enroll in the Known Traveler Digital
ID Program with the World Economic Forum when I sent
them the link and they can go directly to the
government of Canada's website, they could see that we actually
have done these things, so many things.
What the government does is that they put people in
a place of wilful blindness to make them feel that
embarrassed somehow for actually listening to the things that they
tell them that they're going to do.
Justin Trudeau, after Covet said, this is an
opportunity for us to reset and reimagine our
future, he said that he used those words.
Then when people said, oh, this is what you're planning
to do, then he says, oh, no, it's a conspiracy.
They're gaslighting you.
And to be honest with you, I'm a very
educated person, and I do not care if somebody
labels me a conspiracy theorist, because it just means
that they're not intelligent enough to argue with me.
That's all it means.
And so I really don't care.
My goal is I'm going to save my country.
I'm going to do everything that
I can to save my country.
I'm going to invest every single ounce of my
skill set to making sure that I remain a
Canadian citizen and not a global citizen.
And I am going to continue to inform people.
So there's no shame.
You can call me anything you want.
I'm going to continue to speak.
I'm going to continue to get my message
out there, and I'm going to continue to
send Canadians information and substantiate what I say
with information so Canadians can be informed about
what their government is planning for them.
All right, so you're in this race with Poilievre
Charest, Baber and Aitchison, and Poilievre is the front runner
at the moment by quite a substantial margin.
You keep saying that, but you haven't provided
me with any documentation to substantiate that.
In fact, the media will want you to believe that.
Okay, well, let me ask you this.
Let me ask you this then.
So my understanding is that Poilievre was ahead
of the rest of the candidates on the
Conservative Front in terms of number of memberships
sold in the Conservative Party.
Is that correct?
That's what he said.
I have seen no proof of that.
That's what he said.
He revealed those numbers.
I can tell you that many of the people
that signed up on his website were my supporters
because he sent messages to everybody's supporters telling them
to sign up on their website.
So even a few days before the membership ended,
people who had already signed up with me, got
a message from his campaign saying that they weren't
members, so they went and resigned.
So there were a lot of duplicates in there.
So we do not have the
accurate numbers on who sold what.
Where do you see the relative how
do you conceptualize the relative standing of
the current candidates within the Conservative membership?
So just so that everyone's listing is clear, so
what happens when a new party leader is chosen
is that only party members can vote.
And so the first vote in Canada will
be for the leader of the Conservative Party.
And there's a number of candidates who are running,
and that vote is in September, in mid September.
And so how do you see the relative standing of
the current crop of candidates within the Conservative Party?
So I sold substantially more memberships this time than
the last time when I won the popular vote.
I do not want to get into the
numbers, because when you add up what Mr.
Pauli have said, what Mr.
Brown said, the existing numbers, it's impossible.
So I know that there are untruths there,
and I don't think that there's any benefit
from me in weighing in that way.
What I can tell you is that we now have the
membership list, and we've reached out to the membership list.
I can tell you Mr.
Poilievre is very strong, but Mr.
Charest is not ahead of me.
The media will want you to believe that Mr.
Charest is ahead of me,
they have been promoting him.
In fact, I've done phenomenally well
with almost no media attention.
And the media will try to push as much
as they can the candidate that they prefer.
Of course, they don't prefer me because I speak
a lot of truths that they just do not
want to engage in at this time.
But Canadians are listening.
Canadians are doing their research.
There's lots of information out there.
And the membership is very, very interested in a number
of issues that people are not talking about, such as
the impact of global organizations upon our sovereignty.
Right, which seems to be a
particular, pointed concern of yours.
Let me ask you, then, what distinguishes
you apart from your concern about the
influence, undue influence of these international organizations,
what distinguishes you from the other candidates?
Why should Canadians vote for you compared to them