Stephen Harper’s Conservative party has lost one of its biggest historical supporters: Lord Conrad Black.

Speaking to the Star at the Ideacity conference, Black described his own disillusionment with the party he once famously supported.

“I’m no great enthusiast of Harper’s now,” he told the Star in an interview at Ideacity. “He’s been a competent prime minister, but it’s a government that has run out of steam.”

Black lamented the Conservative Party’s tough-on-crime platform, and said that too many people “languish in jail” while waiting for bail. Black has been outspoken about the need for prison reform both in Canada and the U.S. since his release in 2012 from a three-year stint in an American federal prison for charges related to mail fraud and obstruction of justice.

“The present government’s plan of just building more prisons ... is just nonsense,” he said.

As the former owner of The National Post, Black became known as one of Canada’s strongest Conservative voices. Now, he finds himself weighing the merits of both the Liberals and NDP.

“Justin is underestimated, he deserves a serious look,” he said of Liberal leader Justin Trudeau. NDP leader Tom Mulcair is, “quite responsible on his tax policy by NDP standards” but a “demagogue” and foolish to want to leave NATO, Black says.

Black’s opinions on Canadian politics are a bit of a moot point — he hasn’t been able to vote in this country since he relinquished his citizenship in 2001 in order to obtain a British peerage. Yet after being released from prison, Black chose to return to Canada on a temporary visa, not the U.K.

“I said I’d take my citizenship back and I will, but I was delayed by this nonsense in the United States,” he said.

But lack of citizenship hasn’t stopped him from weighing in on why Canada is a great country or how he can make it better. Before sitting down with the Star, Black gave a speech on Canada’s rise to greatness at Ideacity, a Ted Talk-like conference hosted by Zoomer Media, which produces Black’s weekly talk show.

“It is, I put to you, Canada’s moment,” Black told the crowd.

Black proceeded to school the audience on his version of Canadian history, when great leaders managed to forge a bilingual parliamentary democracy across the Canadian shield despite Quebec nationalism and American bravado.

“I don’t want to sidetrack things with a discussion of the native people who have great merits and many grievances, but when the Europeans arrived here that was a Stone Age culture. They had not invented the wheel,” he told the crowd.

Later, when the Star asked him about Canada’s track record with Aboriginals, he took umbrage with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s use of the term “cultural genocide” to describe the residential school system, saying that it is an “outrage” to use a term that equates Canada with Nazi Germany.

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“I object with some of the excessive, collective, self-defamation that’s going on,” he said.

Black has his own ideas on how to improve the country, including reforming the senate by appointing more non-partisan senators, getting rid of the Governor General and deregulating the securities industry.

Black, who was ordered to pay the U.S. Securities and Exchange millions in fines related to his 2007 conviction, called the SEC a “shakedown operation,” and posited that deregulating the Canadian securities industry could help lure corporate dollars away from the U.S.

In 2015, the Ontario Securities Commission barred Black from ever becoming an officer or director of any public or private company that issues securities in Ontario.

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