In a rare and uniquely candid interview, former prime minister Stephen Harper warned of a “nihilist” modern left bent on “ripping everything down” and seeking to “end the democratic system.”
“If it plays out, our societies fail,” Harper said in a Tuesday edition of the podcast American Optimist. He added, “the adolescent egos of the woke university crowd is not an alternative governing philosophy for any society.”
The former Conservative leader rejected the claim — taken up in recent years by many senior Democratic politicians and organizations such as Black Lives Matter — that the United States is fundamentally racist.
“What I see is all these supposedly repressed races trying desperately to become Americans,” said Harper.
While the 62-year-old former leader said Western societies should strive to make “constant progress,” it should not be premised on the assumption that “everything is wrong and terrible and awful.”
“I can see lots of things wrong with my own country … and yet you travel around the world and there’s no other time in history and no other place you’d rather be,” he said.
The 40-minute interview also included a veiled criticism of the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. While Harper said he tries not to critique his “successor government,” he implied that a Conservative administration would not have suffered delays in securing adequate doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.
While Canada is now the most-vaccinated country against COVID-19, the mass-vaccination campaign was delayed by several months because of federal procurement problems — most notably a deal with a Chinese vaccine manufacturer that was quashed due to the direct intervention of Beijing.
“When we were in government, we never had any problem making sure we had vaccines well in advance,” said Harper. “So it’s just a matter of competent execution.”
Harper, who was Canada’s prime minister for nearly 10 years, has largely shunned media interviews since his 2015 electoral defeat, aside from a 2018 interview he conducted with Global News to promote the release of his book, Right Here, Right Now.
Harper has also made the occasional appearance on right-leaning U.S. podcasts, such as a one-hour interview in 2018 with the conservative U.S. radio host Ben Shapiro.
The American Optimist interview focused primarily on two issues that Harper has brought up often in his post-political life: the unique geopolitical threat posed by China and the coming economic consequences of rising debt loads around the world.
After witnessing China assume direct control of Hong Kong in 2020, Harper said he now believes there is a risk that Beijing may eventually try to take Taiwan by force. “Ten years ago I would have said the chances of that happening are zero, I no longer think that’s the case,” he said.
Harper was head of a minority government when Canada faced the Great Recession of 2008. While his government counteracted the downturn with a round of aggressive deficit spending, Canada’s response would end up ranking as one of the cheapest and most temporary in the developed world.
With COVID having ushered in another round of near-universal deficit budgets around the world, Canada is now at the other end of the ledger, with per-capita pandemic deficits that are the highest in the G20.
Harper said that he has sympathy that governments would make mistakes in tackling the novel crisis of COVID-19, noting that the pandemic is far more complicated than the Great Recession. “This is a combination pandemic and economic crisis, the solutions for one often being contrary to the solutions for the other,” he said.
Nevertheless, he pointed to continued high spending in both Canada and the United States as “bad macroeconomic policy on an enormous scale.” At a time when the adult populations of both countries are mostly vaccinated, Harper said that governments should be switching gears towards policies that prioritize economic recovery. “I think it’s actually pretty straightforward, but it’s the opposite of what governments are doing,” he said.
Instead, Harper said, governments have emerged from a period of unprecedented economic intervention with a sense of “why can’t we just do this forever?”
The consequences, he said, will inevitably come in the form of inflation, rising interest rates and the end of “affordable debt.”
“People believe the United States can continue to borrow countless trillions of dollars at zero per cent interest,” said Harper. “Not only do I believe that’s not true, I believe that’s actually coming to an end much quicker than people think.”
American Optimist host Joe Lonsdale is a colleague of the ex-prime minister. Lonsdale is a tech investor best known for early investments in the online retailer Wish, and in 2017 Harper became an adviser to Lonsdale’s Silicon Valley venture capital firm 8VC. The ex-prime minister is also an adviser to The Cicero Institute, Lonsdale’s Texas-based think-tank.
Last year, Lonsdale was among a wave of entrepreneurs — among them Tesla CEO Elon Musk — who left California for Texas, citing the Lone Star State’s lower taxes and more business-friendly regulatory regime.
Harper seemed to be referencing Lonsdale’s recent move to Austin, Texas, when at the top of the interview he expressed his pleasure at being in the “land of the free.”
While Harper praised the dynamism of the United States and called it the “flagship” country for democratic liberalism, he said Canada has benefited economically from an immigration policy that is much less restrictive as compared to the United States, calling it a “special advantage” that Canadian businesses have an easier time bringing in skilled labour.
Harper also said that Canada is not burdened by the same levels of political polarization as the U.S., which he called a “serious problem” to the U.S.’ political future.
Harper credited a Canadian parliamentary system where — particularly under minority governments — opposition parties must either vote with the government or remove their confidence and trigger an election. “Your opponents cannot adopt the strategy of defeating you regardless of the consequences,” Harper said.
Speaking to a mainly American audience, Harper also cast the prime minister’s office as a uniquely powerful political position.
In 2009, when then U.S. President Barack Obama could boast majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, Harper said he told the president that he had “less ability to get things done under those circumstances than I did with a minority.” Still, Harper acknowledged the limited global power of a Canadian leader. When Lonsdale asked Harper how he would have responded to Beijing’s 2020 crackdown on the autonomy of Hong Kong, the ex-leader replied “as prime minister of Canada I couldn’t have led repercussions.”
Despite an election now looming in Canada, the topic did not come up once in the American Optimist interview. Harper said while he now keeps a close eye on U.S. politics, he has largely checked out of following Canadian politics “because I’m too emotional about it.”
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