How Did Trump Impact the Canadian Election? | Brian Lee Crowley

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “Donald Trump is looming so large in the Canadian consciousness right now,” says Brian Lee Crowley.

“And I have seen a lot of my compatriots running around like chickens with their heads cut off, saying, ‘Oh my God, Donald Trump is a mad man. You can’t understand what he’s doing. There’s no rhyme or reason to it.’ And I looked at what Donald Trump was doing, and I thought, ‘Okay, I don’t have to like it. That’s a separate question. But if the question is, ‘Can I understand it?’ The answer is yes.”

Crowley is the founder and managing director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a Canadian think tank whose work is often cited by the Canadian Parliament.

“What exactly is the difference between Canada and America, or Canadians and Americans? It’s not that it’s difficult to answer because there aren’t differences. It’s difficult to answer because the differences are subtle and hard to express,” says Crowley.

“Remember that America broke away through a violent revolution from the crown and the United Kingdom—from Great Britain. Canadians never experienced that.”

In this episode, we dive into the recent election in Canada, Trump’s comments about Canada as America’s 51st state, and what the future of United States–Canada relations may look like.

“Canada exports 50 percent of everything made in the private sector, and the vast bulk of that, like 90 percent, goes to the United States. But [in] the United States, by contrast, foreign trade, or international trade, only represents barely 25 percent of the amount of the American economy, and that’s diversified across all of its trade partners. So, while for Canada, the relationship with the United States is existential, for America, the relationship with Canada is convenient, nice—not existential.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Brian Lee Crowley, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Brian Lee Crowley:

Jan, thanks so much for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:

What happened with the Canadian election, and what did U.S. President Donald Trump have to do with it?

Mr. Crowley:

That’s a very interesting question, Jan. Several things happened to change politics in Canada quite radically in a very short time. One was that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who had become deeply unpopular, suddenly left. He was basically forced out by his party. Second, Donald Trump came to power in Washington. As a result of these changes, the assumption everybody had made that Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party were going to waltz into power unopposed suddenly came crashing down, partly because there was now a new leader of the Liberal Party that had a completely different profile than Justin Trudeau. 

Mark Carney, a former governor of the Bank of Canada, governor of the Bank of England, was someone who seemed to be, to a lot of people, a calm, competent, technocratic kind of leader. He seemed to be, for a number of Canadians, the perfect response to Donald Trump, who started talking about Canada as the 51st state, and how happy America would be to annex Canada, and this makes Canadians deeply nervous.

One of the important reasons why Canada exists as a country is because at several points in our history, we asked ourselves, “Do we want to be Americans?” The answer was, “No.” Yes, we’re a new world country. We share many characteristics with America, but we’re not Americans. We want to have our own model of a New World society, different from Europe, different from the old countries, but that has the same values of freedom and enterprise, just as much as America does, but comes to different conclusions about the role of government, and the pursuit of the common good. 

In that context, Donald Trump’s musings about making Canada the 51st state, and how Canada has nothing constructive or useful to offer the United States, made many Canadians deeply anxious. Mark Carney stepped into that situation and said, “I’m the guy who can represent Canada in an effective way vis-à-vis Donald Trump.” Canadians, not in large numbers, but enough Canadians accepted that argument that he just squeaked past the Conservatives. It was 43 percent of the popular vote for Liberals, almost 42 percent for the Conservatives. That was not much difference, but enough to win enough seats to form a government.

Mr. Jekielek:

For a while, the polling said that it would be a blowout for the Liberals, but then that shifted. What are your thoughts?  

Mr. Crowley:

Yes. In the early stages of the campaign, Donald Trump drove the anxiety levels of Canadians who cared about these issues to unprecedented heights. The issues that had previously been the ones that we thought were going to dominate in the election campaign in Canada—cost of living, efficiency of government, and levels of taxation—these things started to come back to the fore. Ultimately, what happened was the Liberals went from being just streets ahead in the polls to almost level pegging with the Conservatives. It was in that state of public opinion that the voting actually happened. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Canadians have this kind of oppositional identity. I think what you said kind of explains it a little bit. There is an element of the Canadian identity which is clearly not American. Maybe whatever embers of Canadian nationalism that existed came roaring back in the last few months. 

Mr. Crowley:

It’s a very difficult question to answer. What exactly is the difference between Canada and America, or Canadians and Americans? It’s not that it’s difficult to answer because there aren’t differences. It’s difficult to answer because the differences are subtle and hard to express. I always like to go back to the difference between the founding documents of Canada and the United States.

In the United States, you have a society in which, in this wonderful immortal phrase, people are free to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. Those were not the values that we chose to highlight when we wrote down in our constitution what it was that we were about. We chose to talk instead about peace, order, and good government. I think those phrases actually summarize in a shorthand way some slightly different angles on what’s the purpose of government? How do people fit into a larger society? What are we trying to do together? 

Remember that America broke away through a violent revolution from the Crown and the United Kingdom. Canadians never experienced that. In fact, people often talk about the 13 colonies, forgetting that there were actually 16 colonies, 13 of whom rebelled and three of whom remained loyal to the Crown. Even back at the time of the American Revolution, there were parts of what became Canada that said, “That’s not the route we want to go.” 

We tend to be people who believe more in the quiet, thoughtful evolution of institutions, rather than liking this idea that if you don’t like what you got now—then have a radical break, start again, reinvent. That seems to us a very American way of thinking about things. I don’t say that in a critical way. I’m a great admirer of America. But Canada has chosen an evolutionary path in which we put a little more emphasis on the idea of the common good, a little less emphasis on the idea of individual liberty as the be-all and end-all. We’re great believers in individual freedom, but we don’t think that individual freedom is the entire answer to the purpose of Canada. We think of individual freedom in the context of an ordered society that believes that we collectively can do things together that individually we would find difficult. 

From the outside, those differences don’t appear very great. Europeans come to Canada and say, “Why are you so upset about not being thought of as American?” But from the inside, the differences to us are quite obvious, and without in any way feeling that it means that we’re superior to America, it does make us feel that we’ve chosen a slightly different path in North America. It’s one that our ancestors fought and suffered and paid for and that we have inherited. It’s ours, and that matters to us.

Mr. Jekielek:

In some of your recent writings, you explain the approach of U.S. President Trump and the Trump administration. You understand it better than probably a lot of Americans do. Can you reprise that for us here?

Mr. Crowley:

One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about this is precisely because Donald Trump is looming so large in the Canadian consciousness right now. I have seen a lot of my compatriots running around like chickens with their heads cut off saying, “Oh my God, Donald Trump is a madman. You can’t understand what he’s doing. There’s no rhyme or reason to it.” I looked at what Donald Trump was doing, and I thought, “Okay, I don’t have to like it, but I can understand it.”

There were three major themes that leapt out at me. One is that Donald Trump believes in his guts that America is the top nation in the world. It’s the most important country. It’s the one that sets the stage for almost every other important relationship, alliance, and trading relationship. He feels that America has gone through a period of decline, has lost some of that top nation status, and is being challenged by some other countries. I believe that he sees it as his role as president to restore America to this top nation status. 

Now, I mentioned that there are countries that are challenging America in this top nation status, and of course the one that comes immediately to mind is China. I believe that Donald Trump has in the back of his mind with almost every issue that he wrestles with—whether it’s trade, defense, national security, the drug trade, or fentanyl—that China is our great rival. China is our competitor. China is using many of these issues that America must wrestle with as sticks to beat America with. I mentioned the drug trade as a beautiful example of that. 

Clearly, China has a political strategy behind its trading relationship with the United States in a way that most other Western countries would not. They don’t mix trade and politics the way that China does. Trump has a preoccupation with returning America to the top nation status and removing any ambiguity about that. His sense is that top nation status must mean a muscular response to China. 

The third thing I add to that is that Trump believes that America has failed to live up to its responsibilities to be the top nation. There are certain parts of American society that have suffered as a result. These people are the ones who were immortalized in J.D. Vance’s book, “Hillbilly Elegy.” He wrote about the people he grew up with and the communities that he knew, sometimes referred to as the Rust Belt or the flyover states. 

I believe that Donald Trump thinks that these people, who form the bedrock of his political support, are people who have been forgotten and left behind by an America abandoning its vocation to be the top nation and refusing to stand up to China. Donald Trump wants to be the tribune of these people. He wants to be their champion.

Think about a very famous phrase widely associated with Donald Trump: “Drill, baby, drill.” People think that this is just Trump in one of his macho moods saying, “I’m going to preside over a huge expansion of the oil and gas industry.” But it’s much more than that. Trump has come to understand the extent to which energy, particularly oil and gas, are tremendously powerful tools. This is back to this theme of restoring America’s greatness and returning it to top nation status. He would look back at the 1970s when America went through two oil crises. 

One was caused by OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, putting an embargo on exports to the United States, which caused huge lines around gas stations. The United States brought in 50 mile-an-hour speed limits to make people drive slower and use less gas. Then there was the Iranian Revolution later in the 70s, which terribly disrupted the world oil supply and caused another energy crisis in the United States. As a result, America had rules that you couldn’t export oil from the United States. 

America was very dependent on oil from the Middle East in particular, and this was a source of great weakness for the United States. Donald Trump then sees how the fracking revolution, the huge increase in the amount of oil being produced by the United States, and America’s transformation from a net oil consumer to a net oil exporter—in fact, the largest exporter in the world, bigger than anybody else—has fundamentally changed the American economy and American national security. He wants to produce vast quantities of energy in a cost-effective way, not only to improve America’s national security, but also to unlock a lot of economic activity that requires access to cheap, reliable energy.

He’s woven all of these things together in a strategy for America. Agree or disagree, if you want to understand anything that Donald Trump does, you can refer back to these four things: top nation, challenge of China, recovering the promise of America for the people who were left behind, and cheap, and plentiful energy as the bedrock of an American economic renaissance. Then you will understand almost everything that Donald Trump does. Why is this lost on so many people? It’s because people get distracted by Donald Trump’s tactics and forget to think about strategy. 

Donald Trump is the inheritor of a great American tradition of showmen. He’s a kind of Barnum and Bailey figure. What he wants to do goes right back to his book, “The Art of the Deal.” I have often believed that people tell you who they are, and you should believe them. Donald Trump has been quite open about who he is, and he conceives of himself as a great dealmaker. 

All of the things that I have described—the relationship with China, the energy renaissance, America’s top nation, restoring its trading dominance—all of these things, he sees them as deals that he can strike. If you inquire into Donald Trump’s personality, his character, how he goes about making deals, one of the things that comes through crystal clear is he says, “My starting point for any major negotiation is I convince the people I’m negotiating with that I am the craziest man in the room. If they don’t do what I want them to do, I will bring everything crashing down.” 

People listen to him and they say, “Oh my God, he’s going to tear everything down. He’s a crazy man.” I actually think what he’s doing is saying, “Look up here at this shiny, frightening object I’m waving in your face,” when he’s actually busy doing something quite different. Tariffs would be a good example. 

People say, “Trump blinked over the tariffs.” One day he’s saying there are going to be 100 percent tariffs, the next day it’s 150 percent tariffs on China, and then something else the next day, and then it’s suspended. They think, “Well, he doesn’t know what he’s doing.” But I think he knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s scaring the pants off the people that he wants to make deals with, and then brings them to the table. 

Now, you can like it or not like it. But I can actually find all these people running around saying, “Oh my God, he’s a crazy man. You can’t understand what he’s doing. He’s a maniac.” They’re actually playing his game. They’re letting him distract them with the shiny object over here, and then they get caught up in his tactics and forget about his strategy, which is quite clear. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Prime Minister Carney is more positively inclined towards communist China than Poilievre. You’ve argued that President Donald Trump’s rhetoric was almost intentional, and he wanted to see Carney elected. But given what you just told me about Trump’s priorities on China, those two things seem at odds. 

Mr. Crowley:

My view is that Donald Trump looks at the rest of the world through an American lens. The question he asks himself is not, “How should I understand Mark Carney as a Canadian?” He asks himself, “What is the significance of Mark Carney to me as the leader of America?” When he looks at Mark Carney, he’s going to see a guy with a big degree from a fancy university. He’s an international technocrat. He’s been central bank governor in both Canada and the United Kingdom. He is the quintessential Davos man. 

He is everything Donald Trump despises. On top of that, he is close to China. The party he represents has been an active promoter of China as an important partner for Canada for many years. Donald Trump sees Mark Carney as a negotiating partner he can get the better of. I think Donald Trump is going to say behind closed doors, “Look, buddy, there is no alternative for Canada to its relationship with the United States. But America doesn’t need Canada very much. Canada really needs America. You’re going to do what I’m going to tell you, or I am really going to put the boots to you.” 

Mark Carney, as some of his own advisors have written, now that the election is out of the way and he’s reaped the political benefits of presenting himself as the guy who can most effectively represent Canada, he’s going to make a quiet deal with Donald Trump, which gives Donald Trump pretty much everything he wants, because he doesn’t have much alternative. I don’t think he’s going to be very successful in standing up to Donald Trump.

He would like to think he can. But he doesn’t have a lot of cards in his hand, and Donald Trump likes it just fine that way. There are many people who don’t like this, but it’s a profound truth that there is a single North American economy. There are not two national economies in North America, an American and a Canadian, that somehow trade finished products with each other. 

There is a single North American economy, deeply integrated, which happens to fall under the jurisdiction of two separate nation-states, Canada and the United States. There are bits of it that fall under the government of Canada and bits of it that fall under the government of the United States. But that political jurisdiction doesn’t make two separate economies. We have one economy. 

They say that the average North American car crosses the border something like five or six times as it moves through the production process and goes to different plants in either Canada or the United States, because the industry is so integrated. The industry doesn’t think of itself as an American industry and a Canadian industry. They think of themselves as a single combined continental industry. 

Think about the oil industry. America likes to boast about the fact that it is now exporting 10 billion barrels of oil a day. It is the largest exporter of oil in the world. What they often forget to mention is that almost half of that is made possible by the almost 4 billion barrels of oil that they import every day from Canada.  If they didn’t have access to Canadian oil they wouldn’t nearly be the energy overachiever that they think they are. 

Canada is the fourth largest oil producer in the world, and literally 90 percent of that production goes to the United States. In fact, the entire refinery complex in the Gulf Coast is tooled up to process oil that Canada exports and can’t process much of the oil that is produced by fracking in the United States. America fracks, exports that oil, brings oil in from Canada, processes it, and serves American consumers. I could give you more and more examples of this. 

The point is that Canada is one of the most export-dependent countries in the world. This is a huge degree of trade reliance, and literally 85 to 90 percent of it goes to the United States. Again, we don’t exist as a separate economy that only sends finished products to the United States. We are deeply intertwined in these complex production processes.

Mr. Jekielek:

Recently, a representative of the Canadian auto parts makers has scored some wins, because Canadian auto parts are very important to American auto manufacturing.

Mr. Crowley:

When most people think about trade, they think, “Okay, France produces wine and Japan produces cars. France sends wine to Japan in exchange for cars.” This is not at all the relationship that Canada and the United States have. There’s nothing like it. Roughly 60 percent of the trade across the border is actually what they call intra-firm trade. 

In other words, it’s taking place between parts of the same company. They do some part of their production process in Canada, then they send that to another part of their production process in the United States. Cars can cross the border four, five, or six times while they’re being made, and you can multiply this process across many sectors. I hear this rubbish all the time from Canadians saying, “We should uncouple from the United States. We shouldn’t give up our sovereignty. Instead of sending our car parts to the United States, we’re going to send them to Europe or Japan.” 

My reaction is they obviously know nothing about how cars are made. Sometimes people say, “We should reduce our dependence on the United States and join the European Union.” What? Are you seriously suggesting that this deep economic integration between Canada and the United States that has been built up literally over centuries can overnight somehow be cut apart with a pair of scissors, and then tomorrow we’ll have exactly the same relationship with the European Union? This is just nonsensical. And then we are asking why Donald Trump has all the cards, right?

Mr. Jekielek: 

Right, because so far we’ve been talking about how Canada is important to the U.S. in all these ways. What about the other side? 

Mr. Crowley:

I’ve talked about the fact that Canada exports 50 percent of everything made in the private sector, and the vast bulk of that, like 90 percent, goes to the United States. But for the United States, foreign trade or international trade only represents barely 25 percent of the American economy, and that’s diversified across all of its trade partners. For Canada, the relationship with the United States is existential. But for America, the relationship with Canada is convenient, nice, but not existential. 

When Donald Trump says we don’t get anything useful from Canada, he’s talking rubbish. Instead, he could have said, “We like our relationship with Canada. We get some nice things from Canada, but we could get them from somewhere else. It would be slightly inconvenient for us to do that, but we could do it.” If he’d said that, he would have been speaking the truth. 

Mr. Jekielek:

But this is all about his negotiating position. 

Mr. Crowley:

Of course. I didn’t mean to say that it was surprising that Donald Trump was not speaking the truth. This is part of his negotiating tactic. He knows Canada’s vulnerability to the United States and he knows that for Canada, there is no realistic alternative. He’s basically signaling to Canadians that he knows this, and he’s going to have high expectations for any negotiations that will take place between Canada and the United States over the nature of our trade and other relationships. 

Let me put it a different way. Canada has been failing to keep up its end of the bargain with the United States that we will be a reliable ally on defense. We have not been a reliable ally on defense. That we will be the country that will look after the Arctic flank of North America. We have not been looking after the Arctic flank of North America. That we will be enforcing the rule of law in Canada and ensuring that Canada cannot be used as a launching pad for drug trade with the United States. 

He exaggerates to some extent the degree to which this happens, but there’s no doubt that Canada is part of the international network that is flooding the United States with fentanyl. By the way, the biggest role that we play in that is that we have become a haven for money laundering for the people who are actually behind the drug trade, which is mostly China. 

Those are just a few examples of ways in which I think America is entitled to say to Canada, you’ve not been holding up your end of the bargain. That’s one of the reasons why I have been urging people on both sides of the border to think about what I call a grand bargain between Canada and the United States. 

Let’s not get caught in the weeds on the trade relationship, which is very important. Let’s just make sure we get that right. But there are also border management issues, defense issues, national security issues, drug trade issues, and organized crime issues, all of which touch on the Canada-U.S. relationship. 

We should sit down with Donald Trump, because he’s a great deal maker. We should say to him, “Mr. Trump, we are prepared to negotiate across this whole range of issues and make a bargain that will be in Canada’s best interest. We’re not here to sell out Canada’s interest. But you will be able to sell Americans a great deal that you have negotiated on their behalf, and that is also in their interest.” I believe there’s a lot of room for us to do that. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Sam Cooper wrote an article about Canadian authorities not cooperating with the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] around carfentanil production. Cleo Pascal described Canada as a net security detractor for the United States. Canada is currently deeply reliant on the U.S. for its security. The current administration in the U.S. wants to get all this in order for those relationships to make sense. What are your thoughts?

Mr. Crowley:

Canada was a founding member of NATO, the North American Treaty Organization. The purpose of NATO was to protect the liberal democracies from external threats in the post-WWII world where Germany and France were a smoking ruin. Britain had been destroyed by the war effort. America was rich and powerful and was willing to put that wealth and power on the line to make sure that the liberal democracies, particularly in Europe, could not be bullied and taken over, particularly by the Soviet Union. 

Now, that was a long time ago. NATO was founded in 1949. Part of Donald Trump’s whole approach to the rest of the world is to say, and I’m paraphrasing,  “Look, all of our so-called allies have been free riding on America’s defense effort. It has been 70 years since the founding of NATO, and they’re still contributing only a fraction to their collective defense that America is contributing. Canada, one of those founding members of NATO, is one of the worst laggards.” 

Canada signed up for a treaty that in Article 5 commits all the members of the alliance to the proposition that if a member of the alliance is invaded by another country, it will be regarded as an attack on all of those countries and everyone will come to the defense of the country to attack. Article 5, by the way, has only been invoked once, and that was when America asked its allies to help them invade Afghanistan, because they had been the launching pad for 9/11. 

Several years ago NATO said, “America is correct that the other allies are not living up to their obligations, and we need to fix this.” So NATO made a formal declaration that the target for all NATO members in terms of defense spending is that all of them are expected to spend a minimum of 2 percent of their GDP, that is, 2 percent of their national wealth generated every year should be spent on defense. Canada is around 1.3 percent, making us one of the two or three worst-performing members of the NATO alliance.

In private meetings, our previous prime minister, Justin Trudeau, explicitly said to his NATO partners, as reported in the media, “We’re never going to reach 2 percent. Don’t expect us to do this.” He paid lip service to it in public, but made it very clear that Canada had other things to do with its money. George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, both Democrats and Republicans, have all said to the NATO alliance, “You have got to do a better job on defense spending.” 

Almost everybody else in the alliance has made some progress. Some countries have done significantly more than was asked of them. Most of these countries are close to Russia and they are frightened by them, like Poland and the Baltic republics. Canada has just stood back and said, “Sorry, we have other things we want to do with that money.” They want all the benefits of being a member of the NATO club, but they don’t want to pay the dues.

Mr. Jekielek:

The U.S. needs to protect Canada, whether or not there is NATO. 

Mr. Crowley:

That is a fair point. America would never allow another country to invade Canada because the next stop would be America, wouldn’t it?

Mr. Jekielek: 

This extensive, deep infiltration of Canada by the Chinese Communist Party is part of this discussion. It’s not just about tariffs.

Mr. Crowley:

I completely agree. While I am skeptical that the current government of Canada will take a hard line on China, I am very hopeful that America should, and quite properly can ask for that. It will be a tough pill for the Liberal Party of Canada to swallow because they have, to a considerable extent, hitched their wagon to China as a rising power. But for all the reasons we’ve talked about—Canada’s profound vulnerability to hostility from America, China’s complete inability to step in and be for us what America is in terms of trade partner, security partner, and defense partner—I really think it’s crucial.

Mr. Jekielek:

China is also a totalitarian state that is actively eradicating entire groups of its own people. 

Mr. Crowley:

On almost every level, China is a poor partner for Canada. It wants Canada’s resources but is not the least bit interested in any kind of serious Canadian manufacturers or processed goods. People complain about our relationship with the United States because they think it’s all about natural resources. I don’t think that is correct, but people say it.

 If we were to deepen our relationship with China, they would only care about us as a storehouse of natural resources that they could dominate. In every way, China is not just a poor substitute. It’s a completely impossible substitute for our relationship with the United States. If the United States puts it in the starkest possible terms and says, “Look, you can either have a close relationship with the United States, which seems to be something you want and is clearly in your interest, or you can have a closer relationship with China. The two are not compatible.”

Mr. Jekielek:

What do you think about the U.S. administration’s interest in Greenland?

Mr. Crowley:

This is a very interesting example of people being distracted by Trumpian tactics and not thinking carefully enough about Trumpian strategy. Trump makes a lot of noise about annexing Greenland or buying it from Denmark, just like he makes a lot of noise about Canada being the 51st state. What he is doing is softening up both the Danes and the Greenlanders for negotiation over what Donald Trump really needs from Greenland. 

America has had a relationship with Greenland for years with U.S. military bases there. If Trump wants more of that, which I believe he does, Greenland would be willing to give him that. He’s softening them up with the threat of annexation. It’s back to this idea that he loves to scare his negotiating partners before they ever get to the table. 

Then he gets to the table and says, “Actually, what I really want is five military bases in Greenland. I want Greenland to be an unsinkable aircraft carrier in a critical passage connecting the Arctic to the Atlantic.” Then the Greenlanders will say, “Yes, where do we sign?” That is what he’s after in his meanderings about Greenland, and I think he will get it. Is it really necessary for him to say, “I’m going to buy Greenland”? This is just how Trump does business.

Mr. Jekielek:

Please tell us about your book, “Gardeners vs. Designers.” 

Mr. Crowley:

I don’t want to talk about it in the abstract. Let me talk about something quite concrete. The idea behind “Gardeners vs. Designers” is that there are two ways to think about the world and two ways to organize ourselves as communities to achieve our goals. One way of doing it is to put the technocrats in charge—the civil servants, the people who have fancy university degrees and who study things. As a guy once said, “You’re one of these people who knows everything about the left side of the tsetse fly and nothing about the right side of the tsetse fly.” 

All these people have fancy degrees and study the world, knowing everything about the statistical representations of our economic activity. That’s one way of organizing. You put those people in charge and say, “Okay, you tell us what to do because you’re the smart people. You know how to organize things.” Many people believe there is no alternative to that. What I was trying to say in “Gardeners vs. Designers” is that there is actually a far better alternative, and a far more effective one.

 

Let me give you a concrete example. A late professor of political thought at a university in the UK, Norman Barry, said, “There were two universities in the Midwest in the United States founded around the same time. At one of them, the designer people—those smart people with university degrees—designed the campus so that it looked beautiful from 30,000 feet, with all these fancy symmetrical pathways.” 

“The only problem was that these fancy symmetrical pathways didn’t lead students to the places they needed to go, so they were always tramping across the lawn to get where they wanted to go, which made ugly pathways in the lawn. The students and the administrators were always fighting over this. At the other university, they did something completely different. They said, ‘Why don’t we find out where people actually want to go first, and then we’ll landscape around that?’” 

That’s exactly what they did. They didn’t bother landscaping for a couple of years. They just let people go where they needed to go. People walked around the campus and marked out pathways that were most effective in getting them from the university residence to the bookstore, from the bookstore to their classroom, and to the student union. 

Then the university administrators came along afterwards and simply paved over the pathways that the students had designed for themselves.  They didn’t need some fancy authority with university degrees and reams of statistics to tell them what they wanted to do and how to do it. At that university, the students and the administration, at least on this question, coexisted quite happily. 

Social order is necessary for all of us to succeed. If you don’t have police, courts, and contracts, you won’t have economic success. You won’t be able to own a house without it being vandalized. You won’t be able to have a car because it will be stolen. You  absolutely need all of these things. 

The question is, are we going to be the kind of society in which people at the top tell us how to behave, where to invest our money, what kind of jobs we want, what kind of university degrees we should have, and what kind of cities we want to live in? Or are we going to be the kind of society in which people make those decisions for themselves? Then the role of the people in charge will be to say, “Okay, how can we support you in the decisions you’ve made?” This is the essence of this contrast I’m drawing between gardeners and designers. It’s such a foundational issue. 

Mr. Jekielek:

The way that society responded to Covid was a case in point.

Mr. Crowley:

Yes, I completely agree. I thought Covid was the high watermark of the designer approach to things. People handed over control of their lives to these smart people, with their briefcases and reams of statistics, and gave them a huge amount of control over their lives. I was quite fascinated to see how many people were willing to hand over control of their lives to these people.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I thought that we shouldn’t have had public health experts, and we shouldn’t have been debating what the right answer was, or how we as a society should organize ourselves in response to Covid. It’s not that. 

What I’m saying is the fact that there were experts doesn’t mean that the experiences that the rest of us had and the knowledge we had about our own lives and how we could organize ourselves to carry out our activities and still protect ourselves with Covid were still valid. All of that was treated as irrelevant and useless. The only thing that mattered was these high-powered people with fancy degrees. What’s interesting is we were told to defer to the experts in public health because otherwise we’ll be endangering everybody. 

But then all these people in different countries who supposedly were great experts actually recommended different things in different places and at different times. At one point it was that masks are completely useless and they won’t do anything for you. Then a couple of weeks later everybody has got to wear a mask or they should be arrested. The idea that there was some obvious, expert, single answer to what we should do about Covid was completely disproven by the Covid experience. 

A friend of mine is the head of a very large car parts manufacturer in Canada. He said that we understood in our particular industry how to protect our workers from the danger of catching Covid. We could have still carried on our economic activities, but nobody was interested. Nobody wanted to go to the trouble of saying to us, “Okay, show us how you can protect your workers. We’re not going to tell you how to do it. You show us that you can do it effectively and we won’t interfere with you. You carry on doing your thing during Covid.” 

But no, we couldn’t do that. We couldn’t trust anybody to take the knowledge that was obvious to us all about the dangers of Covid and how it was transmitted and how you protected yourself. We couldn’t trust people to organize themselves intelligently in order to be able to carry on their activities and protect themselves from Covid. No. We all had to be locked in our houses for months at a time and forbidden in some cases from going to the park because these experts knew everything and we knew nothing.

I hope in retrospect that people have come to understand that while expertise has its place, and I’m not in any way saying that we should ignore experts and that they have nothing to teach us, I’m saying that we must still retain the ability to apply our own intelligence and experience to what experts want to tell us. We are the ones who should have the final say about how we live our lives and not the experts.

Mr. Jekielek:

Please tell us about your think tank, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. 

Mr. Crowley:

I had a fancy job here in Ottawa a few years ago as the Clifford Clark Visiting Economist at the Ministry of Finance. That person is brought in from the outside as the one man or one woman in-house economic policy think tank and gadfly for the entire federal government. It’s quite an interesting position. I had been in this job for two years, and it’s a limited appointment, so I was about to go home. 

I said, “What have I learned from my experience here?” I learned that Ottawa is in a terrible mess. Spending is out of control with programs that don’t achieve anything, and nobody in charge. I said, “Okay, but what can I do about that?” 

It occurred to me that Ottawa was the only G7 capital that didn’t have a national think tank in the capital talking about national policy issues to national policymakers, the national media, and the national electorate. I thought that this was a huge hole in our democratic infrastructure. I set out to fill it, because I’m a think tanker. 

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s kind of shocking. There are a lot of think tanks here in Washington, DC. 

Mr. Crowley:

At last count in Washington, there were 400 think tanks. I’m glad you mentioned Washington, because in setting out to do this, I was inspired by what I call the full-service think tanks in Washington. There’s a bunch of very specialized think tanks that deal with health care, defense policy, and national security. But there’s a handful of them that try to think about everything Washington does, like Heritage, Cato, Brookings, Woodrow Wilson, and the American Enterprise Institute. 

I was inspired by them to try and create something analogous in Ottawa, and the Macdonald-Laurier Institute is that creation. It is a gardener’s creation, by the way. It grew out of our experience with the problems of the federal government and what was going on in other countries. We just a few weeks ago celebrated our 15th anniversary. We are the most mentioned think tank in the Canadian parliament.

We’ve been blacklisted by the Kremlin. I believe a dozen of our senior fellows have been sanctioned by the Kremlin. We’ve been denounced by Beijing. The ambassador from China here regularly tells everybody not to pay any attention to us, which I regard as a great badge of honor. We have grown enormously and become a fixture in a relatively short period of time, and not only in Canada. 

We have now opened our own branch office in Washington, the Center for North American Prosperity and Security [CNAPS], to talk about the Canada-U.S. relationship. We have proven the concept that I had at the very beginning that there was this big hole in Ottawa that needed filling.

Mr. Jekielek:

Brian Lee Crowley, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Crowley:

The pleasure was all mine.

 

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.