Jordan Peterson says Canadians choosing path of 'severe pain' with Mark Carney (2025)

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On the disorder issue, Peterson specifically referenced the anti-Israel demonstrations and blockades that are now a regular feature of his former Toronto home.

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“I don’t like seeing that. It’s awful. And all those psychopaths who have been parading around their moral virtue since October 7, they’re plenty emboldened. Plenty,” he said.

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The 190-minute podcast first veered onto the subject of Canadian politics when Peterson mentioned that he had twice read Carney’s 2021 book Values, summarizing it as a manifesto for deindustrialization and central planning that is often at odds with the platform now being pushed by Carney as Liberal leader.

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“All you have to do is read his book, but people don’t, of course, because it’s a book,” said Peterson.

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“Either he’s decided that every single thing he’s ever believed was wrong right to the core,” said Peterson, or he’s a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

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Peterson has been vocal about his disillusionment with the course of the Canadian federal election.

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In an April 11 op-ed for the National Post, he criticized his generation for supporting the Liberals at outsized rates compared to younger voters, saying it represented a misguided attempt to return to the “good old days” of the 1990s.

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“Your children and grandchildren see Carney as he is: not as the warm-milk and grandfatherly-advice 1950s Jimmy Stewart banker who will stand up to the mad Yankee mob and Make Canada Sensible Again but as The Man at the vanguard of anti-growth economic collapse and authoritarian financial control,” he wrote.

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Peterson took up a similar theme with Rogan, attributing Carney’s rise to a kind of reflexive nostalgia.

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“We look at Carney and we don’t pay any attention to politics and we certainly don’t read his goddamned book, and so we see someone who looks like a banker from the 1990s, when everything was just fine in Canada and Canadians were just as rich as Americans and the whole country was stable and peaceful,” he said.

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But Peterson largely attributed the change in Liberal fortunes to U.S. President Donald Trump, citing Trump’s threat to annex Canada as the singular factor that saved the party from likely “extinction.”

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“He’s going to pay for that, because once Carney is elected, Trump will not have a more seasoned enemy in the West,” he said.

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