Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre speaks following the Fall Economic Statement being tabled in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Dec. 16, 2024.Blair Gable/Reuters

It’s hard to know how to identify Jordan Peterson based on the attention he commands. An academic? A culture warrior? A self-help guru?

In any case, he sat down for a long interview with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre that was released a few days ago, and the conversation unearthed some enlightening things about the man who is likely to become the next prime minister, almost in spite of the instincts of the man interviewing him.

First, despite a commanding and enduring lead in the polls, Mr. Poilievre’s schedule suggests he is not on cruise control. He described a hectic life “bifurcated” between Parliament Hill duties – meeting with his leadership team to plan the day’s approach to committees, Question Period and “the daily prosecution of the government” – and touring to rallies and events.

Mr. Poilievre had just asked his assistant how many appearances he had made over the previous year and the answer was 600. Many of the locations he took pains to mention were distinctly blue-collar – mines, factories, farms.

“You get a practical insight of how the country actually works. Like, who makes the widgets? How do those get made? How does our supply chain come together?” he said. “That practical insight, I think, is important if you want to lead a government, a national economy,” he added.

A while later, Mr. Peterson asked why he thought the Conservatives had been so successful politically over the past couple of years. For a bit, the two of them got tangled up trying to out-dunk each other on the corrosive lefty stupidity galloping across the globe, but then Mr. Poilievre said something interesting.

“The problem we’ve had in this country and all of the countries that have been afflicted by this horrendous, utopian wokeism is that it’s been focused on the grandiosity of the leadership, of the egotistical personalities on top, and not the things that are grand and great about the common people,” he said.

The thing is, if you strip away Mr. Poilievre’s constant, stultifying instinct to kick his ideological opponents in the shins and his insistence on talking about normal people like zoo exhibits, that’s a pretty good summary of where politics is, not just in Canada but far beyond its borders right now. Ordinary people feel the system is rigged and are evicting the fancy types who have done nicely within it.

Possibly the greatest demonstration of Mr. Poilievre’s political skill is how successfully he has positioned himself as the avatar of the first group and excised himself from the second, despite being a literal career politician.

I suppose that since this conversation was on Mr. Peterson’s podcast, he’s entitled to think of himself as the star and indeed, for many in his audience, he is. But unfortunately, he was often so busy unspooling his own big ideas – unmistakably uttered in capitalized words given their importance and specificity to his vision of the world – that he stomped all over interesting insights he was on the edge of eliciting from his guest.

At one point, Mr. Poilievre had just started to explore a pronounced conservative shift among young people, when Mr. Peterson smashed through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man in a three-piece suit, to seize on what this implied of the young men who have been his own most devoted audience. “Well, no wonder,” he said. “Because they’ve been demonized for what, 30 straight years for every aspect of their masculinity, from their play preferences to their proclivity to destroy the planet with their ambition.”

There’s an online meme in which you reply “Sir, this is a Wendy’s” when someone goes on a heavy-handed rant, to indicate that they’ve gone wildly off topic and should just pick a cheeseburger.

Mr. Peterson, sir, this is a Wendy’s.

Otherwise, Mr. Poilievre talked at length about what he sees as the fundamentally broken social contract in Canada. He has a friend whose family came from Italy in 1973, he said, and with the father paving roads and the mother making sandwiches in a seniors’ home, they were able to pay off their house in central Ottawa in seven years. Mr. Poilievre contrasted that with their grandchildren, who despite having advanced degrees and all the advantages that come with that, would not be able to save up even for a down payment for that same house.

Here, and a few other times in the interview, Mr. Peterson asked the most useful and obvious question of Mr. Poilievre at this moment, given how the next federal election is poised to shake out and how imminent it might be: So what’s your plan here?

“What we have to do is stop growing the money supply and start growing the stuff money buys, right?” he said. “Produce more energy, grow more food, build more homes. We have to unleash the free-enterprise system to produce more stuff of value, and this is where we have to remove the artificial scarcity that the government is imposing.”

He gave several other answers on his future plans that amounted to the same idea: Canada and its economy are being deliberately strangled by a control-freaky “radical” government, and simply getting out of the way will allow prosperity and fairness to bloom like so many springtime flowers.

Mr. Poilievre has spent the past few years pointing at major social and economic stress points that the Liberals and various other self-satisfied elites seemed blind to. He noticed the anger and resentment that these fractures were causing, and he gave that feeling a voice and told it where to point the blame.

But so far, his proffered solutions have been no more specific or substantial than the chapter titles of a self-help book in Mr. Peterson’s oeuvre: Unleash. Build. Be Free. That might be great for a podcast audience, but it’s not much in a real world full of big and wicked problems.

And the louder you tell people that everything wrong with their lives is that guy’s fault, the more they will be waiting for your solutions when that guy is gone and all the problems belong to you.

© The Globe and Mail