Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast season four episode 68. In today's episode dad gets a good glimpse into politics in Canada with his guest Preston Manning. Preston Manning shares his thoughts about growing up at a political family and offers advice to anyone interested in starting a career in politics.

They talk about populism, the Chinese Communist Party, the various movements in the West.

Check out this episode to see how faith plays a role in politics, how slavery ended in Britain, and the development of the reformed party of Canada.

I hope you enjoy this episode.

Hello everyone. I'm pleased to be talking today with Mr Preston Manning, PCCCAOE. He's the founder of the Manning Foundation for Democratic Education and the Manning Center for Building Democracy, which seeks to strengthen the knowledge skills, principles, and ethical foundations of participants in Canada's political processes.

Born in 1942, Preston Manning is the second son of longtime Alberta premier, Ernest C. Manning, who was also a prominent Christian layman and broadcaster.

Growing up in a household which was both political and evangelical, he became intimately familiar with the political and religious experience of Western Canada.

He has written and spoken extensively on navigating the faith, political interface. He served as member of parliament from 93 to 2001 and founded two political parties, the Reform Party of Canada, and the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance, both of which became the official opposition in the Canadian Parliament, and laid the foundation for the Conservative Party of Canada.

He served as leader of the opposition from 97 to 2000 and was also his party's science and technology critic. In 2007, he was made a companion of the Order of Canada, and in 2013 was appointed to the Prairie Council.

Mr Manning graduated from the University of Alberta with a BA in economics and provided consulting services to the energy industry for 20 years before entering the political arena.

He has received honorary degrees from eight Canadian universities and is the author of three books, the new Canada, Think Big, and Faith Leadership and Public Life.

He's currently working on a new book, tentatively entitled Do Something, 365 ways to strengthen democracy and conservatism in Canada.

Mr Manning and his wife Sandra divide their time between Calgary, Alberta and Vancouver, BC, they have five grown children and 12 grandchildren.

Mr Manning, it's really good to see you again. It's been a long time.

That is, yeah, good to see you, Jordan. Great to be with you.

Thank you. Thank you. We met originally. I asked you to come and speak to a group that I had hosted at the University of Toronto for a while, group of intellectuals.

I was really interested in your experiences founding a political party because that's a very, very difficult thing to do and to bring it to fruition and to make it successful.

It became the second largest political party in Canada.

And so you were kind enough to share that entire experience with us. I remember at that point, there was enough divisiveness in Canada with regards to political issues that one of the attendees at that at that seminar was there's about 30 of wouldn't attend.

So that was, you know, not so good, but it was a very interesting.

Understandable. Yes. Yes.

Well, and like the party I was involved in, you know, it actually goes back to recognizing there's two parts of Canada that have third party traditions that aren't don't regularly go back and forth between the traditional conservative party and the Liberal party.

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