Someone far smarter than Justin Trudeau ran the numbers, and she joins me today to tell us just how much Justin Trudeau's Green New Deal is going to cost the Canadian economy. Guest: Chris Sims of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
00:00:41.560The just transition is Justin Trudeau's plan to rewrite the Canadian economy away from reliable fossil fuel-based industries like farming and manufacturing and oil and gas toward some green economy that doesn't exist yet, reliant on green energy that isn't reliable yet.
00:01:10.480Now, Chris Sims, my friend from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, whom I feel like we maybe were hatched from the same egg, she ran the numbers on this and it's appalling.
00:01:23.740Billions upon billions of dollars will be vaporized from the Canadian economy along with all the jobs associated with it.
00:01:32.320So Chris Sims joins me now in an interview we recorded yesterday afternoon to tell us about the financial catastrophe Justin Trudeau's Green New Deal will cause if indeed he does pursue it.
00:01:48.480And if I know anything about Justin Trudeau, he's not all that eager to back off of a bad idea.
00:02:54.620And this is why we had to break it down with a lot of questions.
00:02:57.940OK, so I think we should back up and explain what just transition is as best I can, because it just it's new speak, new world order gobbledygook to be right there.
00:03:08.260So at first, it sounds like one of those jokes on plays on words from the House of Commons.
00:03:13.140Remember about nine months ago or a year ago when they got Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to say just inflation like over and over again in the House of Commons?
00:03:21.960And he didn't notice he was saying his name.
00:03:23.800Over the past weeks, what have we seen from the Conservatives telling Canadians that the problems they're facing with increased affordability, increased prices on everything, difficulty buying gas, difficulty buying computers.
00:03:36.160They've shrugged and said, oh, it's just inflation.
00:03:38.420Well, it's not just inflation, Mr. Speaker.
00:04:27.140It's actually the official name of an official plan of the government of Canada.
00:04:32.280So that includes the cabinet, the elected members of parliament and the politicians sitting on the government side and the bureaucracy, the unelected bureaucrats that we all pay for.
00:04:42.200So the permanent government that we don't elect.
00:04:44.240And what it is, is basically their plan to get to net zero or whatever term you want to use to get to the agreed to amount of carbon emissions internationally.
00:04:59.620So holding ourselves to our own plans that we've agreed to, the Canadian version is called just transition.
00:05:06.800And what it means is just transitioning away from carbon-based fuels, so oil and gas, to normal people speaking.
00:05:17.360What's weird here and interesting is that other countries have their own plans, but all the ones that I saw use the word just in it, too.
00:06:19.380In total, it would affect, they say in the memo, 2.7 million workers.
00:06:28.220So 2.7 million individual jobs and positions.
00:06:32.780So those are human beings that have those jobs.
00:06:35.140If you added up how much money that costs per year just in the salaries, just in the average stats can, run-of-the-mill salaries for those roles, it's about $219 billion per year.
00:07:15.500We're talking energy workers, truckers, farmers, manufacturing, you know, the people who build our homes and keep us warm and feed us, farmers.
00:07:25.680And then Ottawa went into Ottawa mode.
00:07:28.560And that's where they try to explain slash spin slash whatever to say, oh, no, no, no.
00:07:36.500The memo was merely mentioning the totality of the roles within all of these sectors affected, not necessarily Sheila, the ones that are going to be turned upside down by just transition.
00:07:51.620So that's where Franco and I stepped in.
00:08:29.240When you and I were talking earlier this week about just how atrocious this is, I mean, you've narrowed it down to Alberta because it is true.
00:08:37.780This will disproportionately affect the West, not that the bureaucrats in Ottawa care about those sorts of things.
00:08:45.720But just as a percentage of the economy as a whole.
00:08:48.920So when I checked, because I was sort of astounded at the numbers to lose, I think it was two point seven million jobs out of the workforce.
00:09:02.820Canada has a workforce of about 19 million people.
00:09:06.240That's approximately just nuking 14 percent of the workers in the entire country.
00:09:15.600But I think you have to remember that's if you spread that out evenly across the country.
00:09:20.080But that would be disproportionate in the West where the farmers and the energy workers are.
00:09:26.240And I think the liberals seem to think this is the acceptable cost of doing business here.
00:09:31.940And I share your suspicion and your caution, which is why I said, you know what, we need in on this and we need to sound the alarm bell.
00:09:41.840Because, again, even if it's just a fraction, we don't have the money for this.
00:09:45.500And it's wrong to throw people out of work like this.
00:09:48.540And to be really paint a picture here, like we said, this is farmers, energy workers, construction workers, manufacturing, truckers.
00:10:00.620These are the people who get the energy out of the ground that keep our homes warm and dry.
00:10:07.240These are the people who literally feed us.
00:10:09.760They're farmers and the truckers who deliver everything we eat and use.
00:10:45.540Because let's look at the past track record, right?
00:10:47.660They've got the No More Pipelines bill.
00:10:50.080They dragged their feet on Trans Mountain for so long and so hard that they nationalized it because Kinder Morgan threw up its hands and went away.
00:11:36.920You know, we think the federal government, the Trudeau government, has certainly told us repeatedly who they are.
00:11:42.940And we should probably believe them, especially when their departmental bureaucrats put out a big honking long memo to their minister saying,
00:11:50.600Hey, folks, this is how much this is going to be impacted or affected.
00:12:01.860And I know I'm rambling on, but I found something that I found really interesting in the memo, and it was about Scotland.
00:12:09.620So what you do, like you know from journalistic practice all this time, is dig in, read the whole document with an open mind, find your data.
00:12:20.100What we found was that they praised Scotland.
00:12:23.580They said, here is an example of something we're really interested in, basically a how-to.
00:13:06.940Well, and you know, when you and I, again, we were talking earlier in the week about this, I tried to sort of put this into context so that, you know, I like to test my theories.
00:13:16.280I'm like, is the West being treated unfairly here?
00:13:18.840Or am I just a hypersensitive Albertan about these sorts of things?
00:13:21.340And I thought, okay, well, let's put this into context with auto manufacturing.
00:13:26.260Roughly 30,000 people work in the associated auto manufacturing industry, which is, by and large, an Eastern Canadian, East Central Canadian sort of thing.
00:13:37.280And for some reason, the liberals are very fiercely protective of the auto manufacturing sector.
00:14:14.040In fact, they routinely subsidize the auto industry to make electric cars that nobody wants to buy anyway and don't work very well, but they continue to do it to protect those jobs.
00:14:24.160And we don't really want our jobs protected here in Alberta.
00:14:26.540We just want to be left alone to do them.
00:14:30.300But the liberals would move heaven and earth to protect just a fraction of those jobs in the auto sector.
00:14:41.000But for them, again, it's just fine and dandy because we're not losing anything.
00:14:46.120We're not losing any liberal votes if we continue to attack the West to please our friends at the United Nations or the World Economic Forum with our policies.
00:14:53.660You hit upon something important there because we noticed a discrepancy in there, too.
00:14:59.120So if we were, again, to take the bureaucrats at face value and say, OK, fine, you're talking about the totality of all of the roles within these sectors.
00:15:07.660They way lowballed the number of people working in manufacturing then because Statistics Canada's stats on how many millions of people work in manufacturing.
00:15:18.120I don't have the numbers right in front of me, but they're like up here.
00:15:21.280And within the memo, it's way down here.
00:15:24.660And the weird thing is, is all the rest of the numbers were pretty roughly accurate for the totality of those roles.
00:15:32.460So in energy, farming and trucking, they were pretty close, but they weren't close for manufacturing.
00:15:40.080They were way lower in the memo for manufacturing than they actually are in the totality of that sector.
00:15:46.900So it leads us to your question exactly of, OK, well, where are you expecting these impacts to happen?
00:15:54.220And is that going to mostly happen out here, out West?
00:15:57.980Or are you just measuring it differently?
00:16:00.780Like, are you calling, you know, a form of farming manufacturing?
00:16:08.280And again, we're not getting these answers.
00:16:10.240And we would really like to see some of the questions and question period be along these lines.
00:16:15.220We're hearing from Canadian Taxpayers Federation supporters, as you can imagine, saying, hello, where are the politicians on this?
00:16:23.260Why, other than our premier and other than like provincial leaders, where are the federal politicians on this jumping up and down saying what's on what's going on to just transition?
00:16:32.720And what are you going to do with our job and how much is this going to cost?
00:17:10.000That reminds me of the time when I was at Sun News Network, rested peacefully kind of, and we were spending taxpayers' money on, how do I put this, adult films?
00:17:43.800Look, it's a reminisce hour with Sheila and Chris.
00:17:48.320Judy Skrull, I think she was, like, helping foreign-trained workers get into the country, and they were exotic dancers from Eastern Europe.
00:17:59.360Filling the gap in the workforce, Judy.
00:18:01.540There were a few cartoons out about that one.
00:18:04.240But, yeah, this is why we're asking, where are these jobs going to be cut?
00:18:24.440But even if you nuke a fraction of them, that's still billions of dollars and thousands and thousands and thousands of people out of work in really essential roles.
00:18:45.360And they reference it right here in the memo.
00:18:47.300So, if they're using Scotland, as an example, out loud with their face, and it's $35 billion, we should probably know what's going on there.
00:18:58.020Well, and there's all these trickle-down effects of supply chain issues.
00:19:02.400So, now you have Canadian farmers unable to be productive and going out of business because they are just jobs up on the altar of climate change.
00:19:12.960And so, now you have to source your food, which would have been locally sourced.
00:19:17.120And, you know, now they tell me they care about greenhouse gas emissions, but trucking your food from somewhere else on the world into Canada doesn't seem all that green to me.
00:19:28.580So, there's all these extra ramifications.
00:19:30.880And then, you know, we've seen how fragile supply chains are.
00:19:36.420One shutdown somewhere can make it impossible for you to get plywood for some reason.
00:19:43.860And there are those things that these lessons we've all just lived through in the last three years that the liberals just refuse to learn.
00:19:50.240Yeah. And this is where it gets frustrating because they keep trying to do these.
00:19:55.380I said it in one of my pieces, I think.
00:19:57.820There's something typical about bureaucrats quite often is if you let them.
00:20:01.660They like playing like it's almost like a world builder video game.
00:20:36.960And so we get real nervous when we see government bureaucrats tinkering with something as important as energy, trucking, farming, construction, manufacturing.
00:20:50.020Like these are all huge industries that make life as we know it in modern Canada possible.
00:20:54.840So forgive us if we get nervous when there's literally a memo explaining what they're going to do and we're asking them to confirm that this is indeed what they're going to do.
00:21:04.780So we're glad that Premier Smith sounded the alarm bell.
00:21:07.860We're glad that we've got Columbus here in Alberta who are all doing the same, yourself included.
00:21:12.700But we're not seeing this resonate as much as it should yet in Ottawa.
00:21:17.380And I think there's just too much out there.
00:21:19.700There's just so much waste and so much going on, like you were talking before we started chatting about the long term contracts in order to pay attention to it.
00:21:28.560So this is why we're trying to get the data out there.
00:21:31.440Let's just touch on McKinsey really quick, because I have the I have my conspiracy theories and I think they're probably conspiracy facts.
00:21:39.120I just have to wait a little bit about why the government hires these expensive outside contractors to do work, which normally could easily be done within a federal bureaucracy.
00:21:50.220If they would, as you say, put their pants on and actually just go into the office, that would be helpful.
00:21:55.380And I don't want to grow the size and scope of government.
00:22:03.700But the government seems to be contracting with these outside consulting firms to do work that could be done within a ministry.
00:22:10.920And I think they're doing it to obscure transparency and access to information, because I can't get my hands on those emails from McKinsey, who just got an 80 year contract.
00:22:21.780But I can get my hands on bureaucrats emails.
00:22:25.180So I think this is an extra layer of just obscuring whatever is happening, whatever the government is spending money on, what they have in store for the public by putting it in the hands of a third party.
00:22:37.160And then, like you said, you can't find the information because it is not government.
00:22:41.780So this leads us to, you know, the CTF, Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
00:22:45.180We were started 30 years ago for low taxes, less waste and government accountability.
00:22:50.460And this is the accountability pillar that's really missing here.
00:22:56.220So, number one, it sounds like it's costing a heck of a lot of money and way too much.
00:23:01.460And number two, it doesn't sound like it's accountable either.
00:23:05.000So it's no wonder it's getting so much press.
00:23:07.800We're really glad that they're hammering on this.
00:23:10.480And again, we always need to do the accountability check by asking ourselves, would we be freaking out if another government were doing this?
00:23:19.480If another party were in power and they were doing the same thing, would we be freaking out?
00:23:44.200And this is how they totally screwed up their hydro system and made hydroelectric power unaffordable for normal people in Ontario.
00:23:51.980Which should be unthinkable because the amount of hydroelectric power, even that something like Niagara Falls generates, is a ton of energy.
00:24:00.280You should be able to harness that for very cheap.
00:24:02.460But what they did is in many cases, they signed 20 and 30-year contracts with friendly outfits to provide solar and wind energy at a huge markup.
00:24:53.160Chancellor Hadrian Trudeau is going to be doing business with McKinsey from his deathbed while he's being, while he has like his IV drip of whatever is going to keep the last Trudeau alive.
00:25:57.440They feel like it's so much money and it's so much waste that it's just too big for them to take on.
00:26:04.860And I just wanted to encourage them that if we all speak up together at the same time, there's a chance that we can start chewing on the foot of that elephant and at least annoy it enough that it moves on.
00:26:16.000So I just want to encourage folks like, you know, the more we speak up, the more we push back, the more we band together and we do critical mass, there's a chance that we could get them to move on this stuff.
00:26:27.460We've seen them sort of slow down on their gun grab because of public pressure.
00:26:31.560We've seen them slow down on their acceleration of the medical assistance and dying protocols to include the mentally ill.
00:26:40.220They've pumped the brakes on that, and that is directly related to pressure from the public and interest groups like your own.
00:26:47.280Now, I wanted to, before I let you go, I want to talk to you about this other multibillion dollar boondoggle that everybody just sort of seems to be shrugging about.
00:26:56.380And that is the CERB erroneous payments.
00:27:00.660Some estimates are 15, some estimates are 30 billion.
00:27:04.560But the good news is from the CRA is that it's too much like the work they're paid to do to try to recoup some of it.
00:27:12.740I've seen a number that says 1,550 convicts who are serving time in the pen received CERB.
00:27:21.580And they try like, and the CRA tried to explain it saying, well, some of them were serving it on the weekend.
00:27:26.220And some of them qualified for CERB before they started their sentence.
00:27:32.800So that's how they ended up with these successive payments.
00:27:36.580But they said, but don't worry, because if somebody was in a federal pen and that was their address, then we just didn't send the payment.
00:27:45.200So I guess if they like gave a address of their cronies house, they could get the CERB.
00:27:51.520And I think that's how we ended up in this place.
00:28:30.780We have records through the courts that tell us when people are doing time.
00:28:37.000It's literally a function of the government.
00:28:39.280So if they don't know those folks are not, you know, eligible, just imagine.
00:28:45.440And so this is where it's frustrating, where we've got billions of dollars because that's so hard to grasp, right?
00:28:52.680I think they take advantage of people's mental kickout over a certain amount of money.
00:28:58.860I personally can imagine about $30,000 because that's like a new truck or a new-to-me truck, not like a brand-new truck, but like a new-to-me truck.
00:30:35.980And if it's not making you mad enough, just remember a few years ago, you and I were talking about this off air.
00:30:42.020CRA is really keen on shaking down teenage girls who work at malls.
00:30:48.920So before COVID madness hit, I think it was about four or five years ago, remember when they were going after girls or whoever, teenagers who worked at the mall,
00:30:59.880if they got a discount on clothes, say you're working at a bootlegger or a clothing store, and you get 25% off your top or your pants,
00:31:08.400they were going after them for taxable benefits.
00:31:12.020And most of them have to wear the clothes that they sell at the store to work.
00:31:20.940So they're going after minimum wage kids or minimum wage people for the tiny little five bucks off, six bucks off the clothes that they're wearing.