Here’s What Pierre Poilievre Told Jordan Peterson

In a nearly two-hour interview with right-wing commentator Jordan Peterson, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre emphasized his appeal to young people, said talking about racism was causing more hate crimes, and called for increasing nuclear, hydro and oil and gas energy to help power artificial intelligence and boost the economy.

Peterson is a Canadian University of Toronto psychology professor who has become a right-wing media star with over eight million subscribers on YouTube and 5.6 million followers on X. He rocketed to fame after refusing to use his students’ and colleagues’ requested pronouns.

Peterson has promoted traditional heterosexual marriage as a cure for much of what ails young men, critiqued “pathological guys who are out there bolstering up the feminists” and recently released a video lecture series on studying the Bible.

Peterson draws fans who are searching for meaning in life and want to learn from someone they see as a great thinker, and his huge social media reach makes him a coveted interview for right-wing politicians.

But his content has a darker side. This July, Peterson shared an hour-long interview with Tommy Robinson, a far-right, anti-immigration activist from the United Kingdom who has been accused of inciting violent riots in England and has been charged with terrorism offences. Since the interview aired, Peterson has continued to repost messages from Robinson’s X account to his 5.6 million followers.

Peterson’s interview with Poilievre was posted on Friday, Jan. 3, just three days before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced he would resign as Liberal leader. With the Conservatives riding high in the polls and Trudeau’s Liberal government expected to fall as soon as Parliament resumes March 24, Poilievre exuded confidence during the one-hour-and-40-minute interview. He also lauded Peterson as a champion of “free speech.”

Here are some of the highlights.

Young people want economic boost, traditional values: Poilievre

Poilievre said much of his support comes from young people who are frustrated with high inflation and skyrocketing housing prices that have put home ownership out of reach for many young Canadians.

He also portrayed young Canadians as yearning after “traditional values” and said young women are hearing their “biological clock ticking” as they wait to be able to afford a home and start having children.

“That's another thing I'm finding, is that a lot of people are really getting back to those values that we were told were unfashionable,” Poilievre told Peterson. “Young people today, they want to have families.”

Poilievre told Peterson he would help young Canadians by focusing on growing the energy sector to create jobs and by boosting home building, including requiring municipalities to allow high-density housing construction in return for federal infrastructure money.

This portion of the video included two advertisements. One promotes Peterson’s Bible series, which featured Peterson speaking with an all-male panel of religious experts. The other promotes an anti-abortion charity, featuring a voiceover telling the story of a woman with eight children in a “tumultuous marriage” who is persuaded to have a ninth child “by God’s design.” The anti-abortion ad closes with a link that includes a promo code linked to Peterson’s show.

More energy to power AI

Poilievre paints a dire economic picture, blaming out-of-control government spending and inflation for the country’s economic woes. He avoids mentioning the COVID-19 pandemic, the cause of much of that increased government spending, and efforts to make borrowing money cheaper during the crisis.

The Conservative leader focuses on one industry in particular as the way to create jobs and economic growth — the energy sector, which for Poilievre includes oil and gas as well as new nuclear power plants.

“We could be powering these data centres with Canadian natural gas generators,” Poilievre said, marvelling at how much more energy is required to power a ChatGPT search versus a standard internet search.

“With nuclear, we have the biggest supply of uranium and we invented the CANDU reactor. We have these incredible nuclear physicists and engineers — 60 per cent of Ontario's energy already comes from nuclear. So we could be powering these facilities.”

Poilievre has made a promise to end the federal carbon tax a central part of his party’s platform. In the interview with Peterson, he called people concerned about climate change “environmental loons that hate our energy.”

Poilievre is also promising the standard conservative policies of cutting taxes and reducing government spending. At several points in the interview, he said his party wants to return to the policies of former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper.

‘Canada first’

Under Trudeau’s government, immigration increased. But scandals around international students and temporary foreign workers being exploited and concerns about the impact on housing costs led the Liberals to announce steep cuts to the number of immigrants allowed into the country.

But immigrants have also become the target of intense racism.

Poilievre said the Liberals have now adopted immigration policies similar to what Conservatives had suggested, and said he wants to see a return to a time when immigrants brought “traditions and culture and your stories, but leave the problems at the door.”

“In the last nine years we've seen that come apart,” Poilievre told Peterson. “Foreign conflicts are now spilling onto our streets. I want to put an end to that.”

Poilievre said he wants to see all Canadians adopt a “common sense of values and identity” no matter where they come from.

“When they get here, they are Canadians first — Canada first. Leave the hyphens — we don’t need to be a hyphenated society.”

Racism ‘imported’ to Canada

Emphasizing that Canadians need to agree on a set of “shared values,” Poilievre said that conversations about racism need to be “put aside” because they are dividing people.

In response to Peterson suggesting that racism had been “imported” to Canada, Poilievre said talking about racism, or “wokeism,” had contributed to a 250 per cent increase in reported hate crimes.

It is true that hate crimes have been sharply increasing in Canada, but experts say that’s not caused by talking about the problem of racism.

According to a 2024 report from the RCMP, “the first pronounced spike in hate crimes began in 2016 and coincided with the rise of populist politics and inflammatory rhetoric directed toward immigrant, racialized and religious minority groups.”

The report says that after a dip between 2017 and 2018, hate crimes increased again, “with a second and pronounced spike thereafter that coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic,” when people of Asian descent were often targeted.

In the past year, online hatred towards South Asian people has increased related to immigration concerns, as have incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia related to the war in Gaza.

A through line is the growing normalization of rhetoric that was once considered extreme or socially unacceptable but has been popularized by the far right moving into mainstream politics.