“You think [farmers] don’t know what they’re doing? They’re pretty damn sophisticated man, way more sophisticated than our prime minister,” said Peterson.
Dr. Jordan Peterson recently criticized Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on computer scientist Lex Fridman's podcast, calling out Trudeau on his narcissism, his tyrannical nature, and his most recent attack on Canadian farmers in the name of the environment.
Peterson began the segment by playing devil's advocate for Trudeau, by saying that he appears to have a nice family with a loving wife and has avoided frivolous sex scandals, which he says is a positive attribute for a person. Peterson was not so kind, however, when host Fridman asked if Trudeau was acting out of compassion.
https://rumble.com/embed/v1elfwj/?pub=2n05b
"Even if Trudeau was motivated by compassion and it's like, how loving are you first of all?" said Peterson when talking about Trudeau's first move as prime minister, which was to create a gender-balanced cabinet which greatly over-represented women compared to the amount of female Liberal MPs were elected. "No, it was a really bad decision," said Peterson.
"He's expressed contempt for monetary policy. 'I'm not interested in monetary policy,' it's like, okay, but you're prime minister," said Peterson. "He's expressed admiration for the Chinese Communist Party because 'they can be very efficient in their pursuit of environmental goals,' it's like, 'oh yeah, efficiency, eh.' The efficiency of tyranny in the service of your terror."
Peterson then says that he's observed Trudeau for some time and has tried to do so objectively, which he admits is difficult as a western Canadian due to the policies that Trudeau's father put in place.
"I've watched him repeatedly and I've listened to him a lot and I try to do that clinically and with some degree of dispassion, and that's hard because his father Pierre devastated [western Canada] in 1982 with the national energy policy, and Trudeau is doing the same thing again, so as a westerner as well, I have an in-built animus and one that's well deserved, because central Canada, especially the glittery literati elite types in the Ottawa-Montreal-Toronto triangle have exploited the west, and expressed contempt for the west far too much for far too long. That's accelerating at the moment, for example, with Trudeau's recent attack on Canadian farmers," said Peterson.
"He's an enemy of the oil and gas industry, which is an utter and absolute bloody catastrophe, and look what's happened in Europe at least in partial consequence, and he's no friend to the farmers.
"I've tried to steel-man him. I've tried to put myself in the position of the people that I'm criticizing. I think he's a narcissist," said Peterson, a sentiment he's expressed on several occasions.
Peterson was then asked by Fridman if he believes there's a degree "to which power changed him," to which Peterson said that people who are not fit for their jobs always become corrupt.
"If you're not suited for the position, if you're not the man for the position, you can be absolutely, 100 percent sure that the power will corrupt you. How could it not? I mean, at the least, if you don't have the chops for the job, you have to devalue the job to the point that you can feel comfortable inhabiting it," said Peterson.
"So, yes I think that it's corrupted him. Look at him doubling down. We wear masks in flights into Canada, we have to fill out an ArriveCan bureaucratic form on our phones because a passport isn't good enough. We can't get a passport. What if you're 85 and you don't know how to use a smartphone? Oh well, too bad for you... Yes, it's corrupted him," he said.
Fridman asks if Peterson would talk to Trudeau, if given the chance: "If you were to sit down and talk with him and he wanted to talk, would you, and what kind of things would you talk about," he asked.
"If he was willing to talk to me, I'd talk, because I have lots of things I'd like to ask him about. I've had political types in Canada on my podcast and tried to ask them questions. So I'd like to know. Maybe I've got a big part of him wrong, and I probably do, but my observation has been that every chance he had to retreat from his pharaonic position, let's say, he doubled down.
"Our Parliament is not running for the next year. It's still Zoom-in, still Covid-lockdown Parliament, for the next year. It's already been vaguely compromised perhaps by the lockdowns for the last couple of years. This is Parliament we're talking about," Peterson said.
Peterson then shifts focus slightly, and mentions a YouTube comment he saw that asked why Peterson would be a trustworthy voice on "the environmental front."
"I thought, that's a really good question. I said, okay, let's see if we can figure out the principles by which the advice would be trustworthy."
Peterson said he believes he can be deemed trustworthy in regards to climate matters because he isn't a "terrified tyrant," adding that you can tell a terrified tyrant by how they use compulsion on others "when they could use goodwill."
"The farmers in Canada objected, they said 'look, we have every economic reason to use as little fertilizer as we can, because it's expensive. We have satellite maps of where we put the fertilizer. We've cut our fertilizer use so substantially in the last 40 years you can't believe it, and we grow way more food. We're already breaking ourselves in half.
As the Toronto Sun reports, fertilizer is typically the most expensive cost for farmers, and they tend to use only as much as is needed.
Farmers will likely be forced to use more costly, "greener" fertilizer, which will lead to higher prices for consumers.
Groups such as Fertilizer Canada have already been vocally critical of the Trudeau government's "short-sighted approach," arguing that reducing nitrogen fertilizer use "will have considerable impact on Canadian farmers' incomes and reduce overall Canadian exports and GDP."
"And if you know farmers, especially the ones who still survive, you think those people don't know what they're doing? They're pretty damn sophisticated man, way more sophisticated than our prime minister," said Peterson.
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"Now you tell them, 'no, it's a 30 percent reduction and we don't care how much food you're growing.' So it's not a reduction that's dependent on the amount of food produced per unit of fertilizer used, which would be at least, you could imagine... 'So you're producing this much food and this much fertilizer so you're hyper-efficient, maybe we take the 10 percent of farmers who were least efficient and we say to them, you need to get as efficient as the average farmer,' and then they say, 'look our situation is different, we're in a more northern climate, the soil's weaker,' you obviously have to bargain with that but at least you reward them for their productivity.
"Well it's like, Holland isn't going to have beef, where are they going to get it? 'Well you don't need it,' oh I see, you get to tell me what I can eat now, do you? Really? And Holland is going to import food from where that's more efficient on the fertilizer front? There's no one more efficient than Holland, and same with Canada. Isn't this going to make food prices more expensive? Doesn't that mean that hungry people die? Because that is what it means."
