PlaidJacketPhilosopher🎙🇨🇦

Husband, father to 4 boys. Exploring the ethics, values, and motivations driving the people behind the scenes that keep our lights on and society functioning.

[PlaidJacketPhilosopher🎙🇨🇦 @JacketPlaid]

@GadSaad High percentage of the takers are astoundingly stupid.

The makers understand.

[PlaidJacketPhilosopher🎙🇨🇦 @JacketPlaid]

@MarkJCarney If only there was some way I could keep more of my own money in my account to pay for food myself.

Oh but then I remember I’m pitching in to pay for your jet-setting tours across the globe to hear why we can’t use plastic straws but we can manufacture and sell them.

[Sean Speer @Sean_Speer]

The admirable consistency of Pierre Poilievre’s conservatism

Pierre Poilievre’s leadership review results were ultimately anticlimactic. Nearly 90 percent of convention delegates endorsed his leadership and his vision of conservatism.

What is that vision of conservatism? We got a window into it during his convention speech last night.

At a time when centre-Right parties around the world are abandoning traditional conservatism in favour of culture wars and dirigiste economics, and some are calling on the Canadian Conservatives to follow in the same direction, Poilievre’s own conservatism, which hasn’t changed since he was a young man, remains notably orthodox—in a good way.

He talked about the hidden costs of big government—not just what it spends, but what it invisibly prevents: investment that never happens, businesses that never form, ambition that slowly gets regulated out of existence. It echoed the old Bastiat insight that public policy must account for what we can easily see as well as the consequences that never make it into the political spotlight.

Poilievre’s cultural message was similarly restrained. It wasn’t framed as a campaign to purify institutions or to wage war on enemies within. It was closer to a small-l liberal ethic: let people live their lives and let government “mind its own business.” That idea has a lineage of its own—one that runs through classical liberalism and into postwar conservative thought, including the Hayekian suspicion that states which claim to reorder society seldom stop at the margins.

And then there was his aspirational thread about recovery, addiction, and rebuilding lives. This was more than a simple law-and-order message. It was a moral claim about agency and redemption and the equal dignity of individuals, including those who’ve fallen. Call it Burkean, call it Christian realist, call it a form of civic faith. It was a powerful expression of Polievre’s case about what kind of citizens remain once government steps back.

There was even a flash of Ronald Reagan’s old axiom about the tendency of governments to regulate, tax, and subsidize things.

This was a speech that will disappoint those calling for a major pivot to the threats and provocation of Donald Trump and who wanted Poilievre to directly address the president’s threat to Canada and Trumpism’s threat to Canadian conservatism. Instead, he mostly focused on the growing gap between the Carney government’s rhetorical ambitions and its actual results and the socio-economic consequences for Canada.

But just because Poilievre didn’t explicitly call out Trump and Trumpism doesn’t mean that he didn’t address it. His articulation of a conservatism rooted in limited government, personal freedom, and the dignity of the individual—what he characterized as “smaller government for bigger citizens”—was an implicit expression of traditional conservative ideas and a rejection of Trumpian illiberalism and those who believe that the Conservative Party ought to remake itself broadly in that image. In a moment of conservative heterodoxy, Polievre deserves credit for his orthodoxy.

Notwithstanding the strong endorsement of Conservative supporters, it’s hard to know if Poilievre will ultimately become Canada’s next prime minister. As we were reminded last year, politics has a way of humbling confident predictions. But his speech was a sign that, either way, he isn’t going to change who he is or what he thinks Canadian conservatism should be.

There’s something admirable about that.

[PlaidJacketPhilosopher🎙🇨🇦 @JacketPlaid]

@IagreeNdisagree Yeah I definitely wasn’t used to it lol. And tough to say. Where I am and the industry I’m in there’s a lot of enthusiasm around it. But I’m also not in the cities and don’t deal frequently with many people outside of O&G or construction.

[PlaidJacketPhilosopher🎙🇨🇦 @JacketPlaid]

@IagreeNdisagree Yeah man I’m hoping so! Family’s doing well, oldest is driving which is crazy lol. Hope you and your family are doing well! I actually spent a few months working between Texas and Colorado this summer! West Texas heat is something else lol.

[PlaidJacketPhilosopher🎙🇨🇦 @JacketPlaid]

@MarkJCarney This is such an embarrassment as a Canadian.

[PlaidJacketPhilosopher🎙🇨🇦 @JacketPlaid]

@KevinVuongxMP That’s been dead for a while now

[PlaidJacketPhilosopher🎙🇨🇦 @JacketPlaid]

@ScottAdamsSays Rest in peace

[PlaidJacketPhilosopher🎙🇨🇦 @JacketPlaid]

@s_guilbeault Good riddance.

[PlaidJacketPhilosopher🎙🇨🇦 @JacketPlaid]

@kinsellawarren 56.3% of Canadians knew this back in April.

[PlaidJacketPhilosopher🎙🇨🇦 @JacketPlaid]

@preta_6 It’s a weird bubble being in the trades, anything and everything gets brought up and talked about.

[PlaidJacketPhilosopher🎙🇨🇦 @JacketPlaid]

@gary_srp We all heard the recording.

You know this is nothing more than political theatre and will not contribute to safer streets.

Lawfully-owned firearms are not on the street, and won’t be.

Scrap it, none of us is being done to protect the public and will not reduce gun crime.

[PlaidJacketPhilosopher🎙🇨🇦 @JacketPlaid]

@RyanHoliday They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer

[PlaidJacketPhilosopher🎙🇨🇦 @JacketPlaid]

@mapleblooded God, I hope so.

[PlaidJacketPhilosopher🎙🇨🇦 @JacketPlaid]

@the_jefferymead As a Canadian, Dean is irrelevant to the vast majority of us too.

[PlaidJacketPhilosopher🎙🇨🇦 @JacketPlaid]

@johnpavlovitz I am Charlie Kirk. And like Charlie - I am not those things.

[PlaidJacketPhilosopher🎙🇨🇦 @JacketPlaid]

@CanadianPolling Yes. I don’t think I’ll ever trust a Liberal Canadian federal government again though.

[PlaidJacketPhilosopher🎙🇨🇦 @JacketPlaid]

@benonwine 90’s and mid 2000’s - none.

[PlaidJacketPhilosopher🎙🇨🇦 @JacketPlaid]

@amirxodom Thank you for this, what an incredible video and breakdown of these talking points.