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Well, here we are on the Sunday special with former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

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I want to talk. With that said, now you're on this book tour. You have a brand new book out right here right now. Politics and leadership in the age of disruption really is all about populism.

I want to start by talking a little bit about your personal political journey.

So were you always conservative? How did you find yourself?

So long story. When I was, you know, kind of a bright, eager, gold medalist high school student. I came out of conventional public education with left liberal, conventional, left liberal views. I had a big sea change when I was in my early 20s.

I was working in the oil industry and the government of then Pierre Trudeau brought in something called the National Energy Program

in which they tried to socialize and re-engineer the entire industry.

They drove the unemployment rate from 3% to 13% in six months,

not to mention what they did to taxes and the deficit and ultimately a national recession.

And so that really transformed my political thinking.

And then I worked in politics and kind of went from there, from being a, I kind of went to the right, became a then conventional, more centerous conservative, became more, as I watched the, in 1984, we elected a conservative government that I went work for, turned out not to be very conservative and kind of, but kind of had the effect of making me more philosophically conservative.

Long story after that, I left the government. I ended up getting involved in the founding of a populist conservative party, the Reform Party of Canada, that eventually morphed into, through various mergers, morphed into the

new Conservative Party of Canada that I founded. And so that's kind of my background. So I've been

a conservative since I was in my early 20s. And I've been kind of had a populist conservative bent since my late 20s when I kind of got exposure to that stream of conservatism.

And I'm also an economist by training.

So that obviously helped to further my conservative viewpoint.

So who are your sort of chief ideological influences, like books that you'd read or folks that you watch and you thought, okay, well, that person is expositing a sort of conservatism that I find attractive.

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