Preston Manning Quotes

What's the difference between a politician and a catfish? One is a wide-mouthed, bottom-feeding, slime sucker - and the other is a fish.

There are hundreds of Canadian communities that have given more thought to hiring their rink manager than they have to electing their member of Parliament.

Canada is the only country founded on the relentless pursuit of the rodent.

There are more effective ways of tackling environmental problems – including global warming, proliferation of plastics, urban sprawl, and the loss of biodiversity – than by treaties, top-down regulations, and other approaches offered by big governments and their dependents.

An optimist in Canada is someone who think things could be worse

My personal political convictions are rooted in the populist political traditions of western Canada.

Negative is always more newsworthy than positive.

When political and business leaders tell the public - any public - 'We don't trust you to make the right decision' - they prejudice that electorate against the very proposals they want it to accept and undermine public confidence in themselves.

The first lesson, for all Canadians, is that the closed door, top down approaches to constitution making do not provide the public input or debate necessary to achieve a constitutional consensus that will be supported by the people.

Canada has had populist movements in the past, virtually since its inception. I don't think the central Canadian elites have ever understood populism at all, particularly the Western version of it.

The role of the federal government should be neutral toward culture just as it is toward religion.

Nothing disturbs me more than superficiality and mere sloganizing on matters of public policy, and the suspicion that what the speaker is saying represents the full extent of his knowledge on the subject.

In fall 1967, I was given leave of absence by the National Public Affairs Research Foundation to move to Redondo Beach, California, to work on a short-term research contract with TRW.

Populism is about is alienation in large numbers of people, but aggravated and provoked by a deteriorating economic conditions.

Why not learn from the positive aspect of Canadian populism, which is the way to deal with it? Learn from the negative side, but it's more important to learn from the positive side, because it's an enormous amount of energy.

Where you find all the worries about immigration, I think the way to handle that is to listen to the person that's got concerns, and then try to move that in a positive direction, as opposed to decrying it and saying, 'Don't even raise that, you can't raise that.'

In Canada, what I find what people are afraid of or worried about is politicians who denigrate the importance of the resource sectors, which are the basis of our trading capacity.

During his long political career, my father was always active in communicating the Christian gospel from the evangelical perspective.

The trouble with "sacrifices as symbolic acts" is that the immediate impact on those for whom the sacrifice is made quickly fades, while the impact on those who actually make the sacrifice can go on and on.

In many respects, my best friends were dogs.

A revolutionary should neither look or act like one to get ahead in Canada.

Do not ghettoize society by putting people into legal categories of gender, race, ethnicity, language, or other such characteristics.

Besides my religious commitment, the greatest single factor that has enabled me to pursue my business and political objectives has been the security and freedom of my home.

My religious training told me that in times of personal uncertainty one should seek God's direction through personal prayer and study of the Christian scriptures.

I think on all the debate on immigration, and all of that, the class of person that should be given the benefit of the doubt is the genuine refugee that is just in real desperate strait. Some of them are in the United States illegally because of [human] trafficking. They were caught up in trafficking, and you can argue to what extent it's their fault, to what extent they didn't know what they were getting into.