National Post's Conrad Black says US, Canada, UK 'have lost the capacity for self government' at Canada Strong and Free Conference

National Post founder Conrad Black delivered a keystone speech at the conclusion of the Canada Strong and Free Networking Conference in Ottawa on Friday.

Black began by describing the history of conservatism in the United States and Canada. In "the perturbed present," Black said "a glance of both Canada and the United States, and Great Britain as well, might incite the inference that the mainly English speaking countries have lost the capacity for self government."



"But with regime change, as both Canada and the US have surely earned, at least earned the right to enact, we could slightly replicate the tale of the tortoise and the hare."

Black turned to current events in the United States. As he spoke, a few blocks down the street President Joe Biden was meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

"I regret speaking unflatteringly of the American administration when that country's President is visiting us," Black said. "I always respect that great office and I always respect the holder of it."

He continued: "But, however the frankly largely contemptible national political media of the United States may try to disguise the fact, the current administration is a disaster."

"Inflation. Workforce shrinkage. The deluge of 5000 or more illiterate peasants flooding illegally across the southern border every day, covering the smuggling of literally tons of fentanyl from which more Americans die every year than in all the wars of the United States since 1945. The green terror. The imminent arrival of Iran is a nuclear power to join North Korea. The abandonment of $85 billion of modern military hardware to the Taliban. Skyrocketing crime rates. And collapsed education standards."

"This will not be defensible in the elections next year," Black said. He then turned to the topic of former President Donald Trump.

"The ultimate demonstration of the debility of the American political structure is the seven year lawless assault on Donald Trump."

"The leadership of the intelligence agencies and the FBI were knowingly complicit in a completely false allegation against Trump of illegal collusion with a foreign power to distort the 2016 presidential election result."

"He was accused of fomenting an insurrection when he had in fact warned the house speaker that there could be hooligans among the large crowd of his own followers, and he offered 20,000 National Guardsmen as reinforcement for the Capitol, and Speaker Pelosi declined."

"If the notoriously politicized US justice system," Black said, "has been so deformed that a stale dated response to a blackmail attempt by a nightclub stripper, is reconfigured as a crime charged against Trump, it will either assure his reelection or confirm that the United States is no longer in its most important constitutional function a society of laws."

Black turned back to Canada, highlighting issues with the economy, the education system, the healthcare system, the attack on the oil and gas sector, and more.

Black said that he believes Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre will be elected Prime Minister.

"He will effectively defend conservatism from the inevitable barrage of partisan and media, obliquely as harsh and primitive by explaining it accurately as greater freedom for individual Canadians with no diminution of benefit for the disadvantaged. In doing so, I think we will graduate back to having a functioning two-party system for the first time since before World War One, except for the Mulrooney-Turner years."

Black concluded: "The world is rubbing its eyes in astonishment at the woke self-mutilation of America and the sophomoric morality play of government in Canada. I believe that in the one country as in the other, we will not continue to disappoint a world that has come to expect and desperately needs us to do better."