Dr. Jordan B. Peterson analyzes Canada’s current and possibly next prime minister, Mark Carney. From his résumé to his book “Values,” Dr. Peterson explores the motivations, contradictions, and unsettling strengths of the man now calling for a snap election. Carney is seeking a mandate from the Canadian people—but is he the right man for the job? This episode was filmed on March 21st, 2025.
Chapter 1: Who is Mark Carney and why is he significant?
Hello, everybody. As some of you may know, and some of you don't, Canada suddenly has a new prime minister. His name is Mark J. Carney, and he's the replacement for Justin Trudeau, running the Liberal Party in Canada. That means that we Canadians need to know who Mark Carney is and why. to the degree that Canada has a role to play internationally that everybody needs to know.
So, if you want to know who Canada's new Prime Minister is, and you want to know who Mark J. Carney is, and whether or not you should support him or vote for him if you're Canadian, or what you should think of him if you're part of the international audience, then this is the podcast for you.
Carney is a mystery to Canadians in large part, not least because he's been a political figure for a very short period of time. And the election that's being called is a snap election. So Canadians aren't going to have, and the rest of the world, aren't going to have a lot of time to get to know him before the determination of his status as prime minister is going to be finalized.
Now, I want to make a case for Carney first, as powerfully as I can, so that we give the devil his due, so to speak, and I think the right way to do that is with a review of his resume. It's quite clear to me that Canadians are entranced with Carney, whose Liberal Party has risen dramatically in the polls in the last month, They're entranced with him for two reasons.
And one is because Trump has been careening around like a bull in the China shop with regards to his comments about Canada, placing tariffs on Canada, describing us as not worthy of having our own country and fated, if we're lucky, to become the 51st state. This has produced a groundswell of...
pro-Canadian sentiment, in consequence, even among liberals who haven't been noted for their patriotism over the last 10 years. This is a common occurrence in Canada, historically. It's very frequently the case that in Canada, we learn to pull together because of a threat, real or supposed, emanating from the American elephant that occupies the place of primacy south of us.
So Carney and the Liberals have got a boost because of Trump's rampaging around, but also because Carney is a new face, a new fresh face, hypothetically. And so the people who are a little leery, let's say, of the Conservatives under Poliev have every reason to hope that Carney is the right
Now, he's capitalized on that to some degree by positioning himself as an outsider who will bring fresh new ideas and a novel and innovative approach to the Canadian political situation, and we'll take that claim apart a little bit later. Suffice it to say that the combination of his novelty
and the knock-off consequences of Trump's comments with regard to Canada have moved the Liberals over the last month from a place where they were essentially facing electoral extinction of a historically unprecedented sort to neck and neck or arguably in the lead of Pierre Poliev's Conservatives. And so, why have Canadians turned to Carney apart from Trump? Well,
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Chapter 2: What are Mark Carney's qualifications and experience?
It means he's listened to Canadians at the ground level and been appraised of their concerns, and Carney doesn't have that. But Polyev is also a career politician. Now, Carney is a career bureaucrat, and he has a resume that, on the face of it, you might be regarded as preferable in its depth to Polyev's.
So I want to familiarize you with his resume, and then I want to walk you through what it signifies, because we should assess not only what he's done and what he looks like on paper, but what that actually means practically and conceptually speaking, and with regards to its impact on Canada and the broader world. So we're going to start by walking through his resume.
So currently, as we already pointed out, he's Prime Minister of Canada, and that's been the case since March 14th. Now, here's a couple of things to understand about that. The first is that he's Prime Minister and he holds no seat in the House of Commons, which means he hasn't faced any electorate. He's not elected. He does not have a mandate from the Canadian people.
And about 130,000 liberals voted for him. So he's basically become prime minister with no test of the validity of his personality or his political stance being presented to Canada by a tiny proportion of the Canadian population. It's about half of 1% of the Canadian electorate.
And so that means it's actually incumbent on him to do exactly what he's doing, which is to call an election, but also not to be parading around the world, let's say, especially in places like Europe, acting as if he is prime minister with a mandate.
Now, he's done a fair bit of that in the last couple of weeks, and we want to keep that in mind, and we also want to keep in mind the fact that the election is very likely to be of incredibly short duration, because there's a reason for that, too. Okay, so currently as prime minister, that's obviously somewhat impressive.
He got a bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1988 and developed an interest in economics at that point. Then he went to the University of Oxford. So these are major league educational institutions. And back in the late 80s and the early 90s, they were still highly credible institutions, I would say. So he was at Harvard in 1988. I was teaching there from 92 to 96.
My experience at Harvard was phenomenal. I thought it was an absolutely remarkable institution. So again, I said I would give the devil his due. And to get a bachelor's from Harvard is a genuine accomplishment. It certainly indicates that you have a fair bit of raw cognitive power and some real conscientious discipline.
And then he went to Oxford, which is another one of the world's premier universities. He got a master's degree in economics in 93 and a doctorate in 95. And then he has an honorary degree from the University of Manitoba, Doctorate of Laws. So educationally, that's very stellar. Now, with regards to his professional experience, he was governor of the Bank of Canada, and that's a major deal as well.
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Chapter 3: What are the core values that Carney promotes?
But the first thing I'd like to point out to all of you who are listening is that although Carney claims that those are core Canadian values, that claim is not correct. Those are core globalist, socialist, utopian, net zero promoting environmentalist values. But the core Canadian values are actually derived from the Judeo-Christian Western, broadly Western and English common law tradition.
And so I'm going to outline what those are, just so you can see the contrast between those values, which are the true Canadian values, and Carney's values, which have this patina or aura of high-flown positive emotion, but bear little relationship to the genuine historical reality and do not describe the values that made Canada the wealthy, free, productive, Western democracy that it is.
So Canada's actually founded on the principles of individual liberty and rights, the rule of law, equality and justice, and equality there doesn't mean equality of outcome and it doesn't mean economic equality. It means equality of value before the law and equality of opportunity. and responsibility and order.
And so those are values that are very different than the value set that Carney is putting forward. And so then you might ask, if Carney didn't derive what he believes Canadian values to be from the historical reality of Canada, From what source did he derive his values? Now, you also might wonder why it's important to even delve into this.
Well, the first conclusion we could draw is that Carney wouldn't have written a whole book about values if he didn't think that it was important to delve into values. And he certainly wouldn't have written a book revealing his own values if he didn't think it was important to communicate to Canadians and people around the world what he thinks Canadian values and his values are and should be.
So my focus on values, although I certainly believe, as he does, that values are fundamentally important, I'm focusing on values because that's the focus that Carney himself chose. All right, so this is where we can link the facts of his resume to an analysis of his genuine motivations. So let's first look in more detail at how Carney translates his core values into the beginnings of policy.
All right. Carney, in his book Values, outlines his support for three of what I regard as the least credible ideas that have emerged on the international landscape and the intellectual landscape in the last 20 years. So first of all, he's an explicit advocate of the diversity, equity and inclusivity principles that have destroyed the modern universities, that have corrupted our
judiciary and our political institutions and that have allowed the liberals to smuggle, the modern federal liberals, to smuggle in what's essentially a relatively radical leftist agenda under the guise of classical liberalism. Diversity, inclusivity and equity, the DEI holy trinity, is a political policy movement predicated on the idea that Western society, and that would include Canada,
is a corrupt patriarchy in its essence that marginalizes a variety of groups, and purposefully so, delegitimizing them, and that the appropriate response to that is to segregate and identify people on the basis of their group identity, and that would include race and sex and gender and all the other isms, all the other ism identities that you may have heard in the last 10 years, to divide people on the basis of those identities and to privilege
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Chapter 4: How does Carney's vision for Canada compare to historical Canadian values?
So Mark Carney and his globalist compatriots genuinely believe that carbon overproduction constitutes an existential threat to humanity. Now, the IPCC, which is the UN body that delves into such things, has not recognized that there's any such thing as a climate emergency. There are climate concerns, but that's not the same as an emergency. And Carney recently claimed to
to eliminate the carbon tax from Canadian consumers, but that's a temporary pause, and he's transferred the carbon tax into the industrial domain so that it's hidden from Canadians, and he's going to continue to pursue it. Now, how do I know that?
Because the primary idea in Carney's book, Values, is that the climate crisis, which translates into carbon dioxide overproduction, is so dire an existential threat every single financial decision that every individual and every institution across the world makes should be focused on the necessity to ameliorate carbon production above all else.
And so make no mistake about it, even though Carney has taken steps to back off the carbon tax in Canada because of its radical and justified unpopularity,
The fundamental axiom of his entire worldview is that human beings are locked in an existential battle with nature itself, and that we're a destructive force and that we're overproducing carbon dioxide, and that's going to decimate the planet, and that we have to do everything we possibly can to ameliorate that threat, no matter what it takes.
And so what that means for someone like Carney, who already believes that it's people like him that should be in control because of their superior intelligence and their better grasp of the realities of the future.
It also means that he's facing the kind of existential emergency, carbon dioxide overproduction, that justifies any maneuver possible on the basis that, of course, he has to do that because, after all, he's saving the planet.
And so he can do things like tell Canadians that he's dispensing with the carbon tax, which he hasn't done because it's still on the books and it's only a temporary pause, but he's still an avid advocate of net-zero policies and believes, for example, and Canadians should very much listen to this, that three-quarters of the fossil fuel reserves in the world have to be left in the ground.
Okay, and so he believes that we should approach net zero by the year 2050 and that it'll require a $2 trillion investment on the part of Canadians in order to make that happen.
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Chapter 5: What are the economic implications of Carney's policies?
But we don't have to guess at this anymore because there's been a number of countries, including Canada, that have taken steps to ameliorate fossil fuel utilization and to move towards net zero. And so let's start with Canada. So one of the things you guys might have noticed is that in the last month, Trump signed a trillion-dollar international deal for the sale of natural gas.
Now, the prime minister of Germany The head of Germany, sorry, not the prime minister, and the prime minister of Japan came to Canada a year ago, two years ago, cap in hand, asking the Liberal Party if Canada could make long-term arrangements with their countries to provide them with natural gas. And Trudeau said he couldn't make a business case for that.
and Trump just signed a trillion-dollar deal, and I guess that was the business case, and that's $150,000 for every Canadian family that went down the drain just with that one deal. And there's estimates that the Trudeau Liberals, the Liberal Party, put the kibosh on $650 million worth of natural resource projects over the last 10 years.
And so that's how we've been solving the carbon dioxide crisis from the Canadian perspective. And what's been the consequence of that from the environmental side? Well, first of all, Canada produces such a tiny proportion of carbon dioxide output on the international stage that we don't even count. Plus, our country is so forested that we're radically...
negative in the carbon dioxide production direction anyways. And even if we have rectified our carbon dioxide output by calamitously destroying our fossil fuel economy, it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever, because all that's happened is that China, that has, you know, like,
25 times as many people as Canada and India, which has even more people, economies and populations that are so large that they make Canada fundamentally irrelevant on the industrial and the population side. All they've been doing is picking up the slack. And so China's carbon dioxide output has increased radically over the last 20 years, as has India's, swamping any possible effects of
climate amelioration by tiny populations like Canada. And the Chinese and the Indians think, well, why can't we benefit from industrialization just like the West has? A question Africa is asking as well, and they're absolutely right. And so all it's meant
You can see this with Australia, for example, because Australia has forgone all coal-fired electrical production in their country, but they ship coal to China, and China builds coal plants like mad, as does India.
And since we all breathe the same air, all that's actually happened is the industrial power that could have been Australia's and Canada's has been shifted to China, which is a terrible, authoritarian, communist state, and to India, which at least has the advantage of being somewhat like a Western democracy.
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Chapter 6: How does climate change policy affect Canadians?
Perhaps for the reasons that we just described, perhaps because he's using the reasons we just described, his concern for the future, to justify his grip on power. That's another alternative. Well, let's see how he's conducted himself. He hasn't complained to Canadians with regards to his true aim. It's like, is he a net zero advocate by 2050 or not?
Well, we want to build Canada into an industrial powerhouse. It's like, which is it, buddy? Because you're not going to do both. You're not going to crisscross Canada with fossil fuel pipelines while aiming at net zero by 2050. You're not going to do that. And so you were either wrong and so wrong that it's a miracle, or you're deceiving Canadians because you think the emergency justifies it.
That's the stark reality of the situation. Now, what is the evidence that the more stark reality, for example, that Carney is deceiving Canadians, what's the evidence that that's the case? Okay, well, let's say that it wasn't the case, And that he's playing a straight game. Well, so then you're going to ask yourself, why did he parachute himself into power the way he did?
And why has he claimed publicly that he's an outsider?
But let's say. Oh, boy. Let's say just just just throw it out. I'm trying to preserve the relationship. A wild hypothetical. Let's say the candidate wasn't part of the government. Let's say the candidate did have a lot of economic experience. Let's say the candidate did deal with crises. Let's say the candidate had a plan to deal with the challenges in the here and now.
You sneaky.
You're running as an outsider. I am an outsider.
He proclaimed that on American television on the Jon Stewart show in front of like millions of people. Right. So that's an international plan. We'll give the devil his due a little bit more. Carney's actually learned, he saw what happened under Trudeau.
He can see that the net zero pursuit is untenable, although he has not formally repudiated it one bit, and it's still written down in black and white in his values. But then what would he do? Here, he'd call an election because he's duty bound, morally bound to call an election, and he would make the election long.
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