John Gormley is a former MP for the Battleford area of Saskatchewan, a former radio host, and a long-time resident of the province. He joins us to talk about the current political situation in the province, and why it s time to look west.
00:03:35.320I mean, he wants, and I'm never sure with Mr. Trudeau, you know, the level of strategy and how long, you know, you connect those beads.
00:03:45.740I mean, if part of the specific strategy is to bring Western Canada into behaving better by limiting our oil and gas, limiting our mining potential, putting us in our place, that's not going to happen.
00:04:01.920I don't know if he's that strategically advanced or if in the short-term obsession with clean energy policy, a number of these 2030 and 2035 dictates, you know, if that's – but we are clearly the casualty of that.
00:04:17.120What you just described there reminded me of the old saying, beatings will continue until morale improves.
00:04:22.960That seems to be his thinking on that.
00:04:25.800So there's a new element of this $42 million fight, but that's overpaying the carbon tax on home heating fuels that Saskatchewan refused to collect.
00:04:39.240I want to get to the court fight in that in a moment, but you mentioned his obsession with clean energy and clean fuels and climate change.
00:04:47.760He's been down in Washington for the NATO meetings over the last week.
00:04:52.460He's trying to say that some of our defense spending or some of our climate change spending has to count towards defense because climate change is a major national security issue.
00:05:04.560I mean, none of the other countries, as far as I know, are doing this, and most of them are all committed to lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
00:05:12.420He's the one saying, we're going to count this.
00:05:15.580Well, if Greta Thunberg is helping him make policy, and I suspect sometimes when he speaks this way, she might be, that's, again, a rational in Trudeau world response.
00:05:29.560It's rational in nobody else's world, and many of the efforts that will continue to reduce the largest emitters of CO2, which are industrial, can be done by adaptation, can be done by innovation, can be done a number of ways.
00:05:46.240Canada has doubled down on taxing citizens for everything, and it hasn't worked, and I know we'll talk about the Saskatchewan standoff.
00:05:59.840Court injunction at this point, it's not a full victory, but it's a temporary victory, and that is the federal government came and tried to essentially garnish $42 million out of the Treasury of Saskatchewan, and the court said, oh, wait, hang on.
00:06:19.920You can't, and as a lawyer, I watch this, and I think, first of all, let's take the step, let's pull it all the way back to division of powers.
00:06:30.800Section 91, section 92 of the Constitution Act of 1867, formerly the British North America Act, the Supreme Court of Canada allowed Ottawa to move into an area of taxation that constitutionally they were not permitted to because climate change and the overheating of the planet was something that wasn't contemplated in 1867.
00:06:57.280It gave Ottawa the ability to fill that void or move in what was called peace order and good government to regulate something it ought not to regulate, in other words, taxing citizens that way.
00:07:11.300It was a very weak decision that hung on peace order and good government.
00:07:15.960On its face, a number of constitutional scholars would think the court got it wrong, but let's assume the court got it right.
00:07:22.800Once you then start to apply that tax, if you're still and getting offside in new ways under the Constitution, does a province simply say, oh, well, you're allowed to levy the tax, so now I have to pay the tax when you tell one part of the country that over half the people who pay the tax don't pay the tax anymore?
00:07:47.700Maybe we should back up and unpack this a bit.
00:07:50.120Of course, the fight over this $42 million is because after the Trudeau government was facing plummeting poll numbers in Atlantic Canada, they decided that they would not charge the carbon tax on home heating oil.
00:08:06.860Now, they say that this is an across-the-country national move, and yes, you can find a few people in Ontario, I think it's about 1% to 2% of the population use home heating oil, mostly in rural areas.
00:08:20.580You can find a few people in Saskatchewan and in Alberta, but where are they mostly?
00:08:24.820They're in Atlantic Canada, and so this was a partisan political party decision dressed up as public policy.
00:08:32.980Scott Moe, Premier of Saskatchewan, looked at this and said, well, if they're not paying it, our people aren't paying it, and the reason you guys can do that is because you're all communists in Saskatchewan, and you still own an energy company, right?
00:08:46.100Sask Energy is the main supplier of natural gas, and he's not charging it on that, so that's what the fight is over.
00:08:54.800Absolutely, and here's the other issue. Natural gas is, in terms of the way you generate BTUs of heat, is still one of the most effective methods of heating.
00:09:08.460In Ontario, home heating oil, of course, is the highest producing of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, so the Atlantic has always been way offside.
00:09:21.140So Mr. Trudeau says, well, I'll incent you by not charging it anymore, in other words, I'll allow you to keep per unit of energy, quote, polluting.
00:09:31.620I can't use the word pollutant carbon dioxide in the same sentence, but I shall, because Mr. Trudeau does.
00:09:37.540The Atlantic are multiples greater polluters than Saskatchewan, and they get a free pass, so they're not going to be charged as long as they continue to pollute.
00:09:49.580And then, the incentive will be to move you to heat pumps.
00:09:54.600Well, heat pumps run purely on the electrical grid.
00:11:06.160So something you said in that leads me to another area of the fight.
00:11:14.980Scott Moe, Danielle Smith have both said that they will use all their powers to fight Bill C-59.
00:11:23.460This is the one that it's a budget or implementation bill.
00:11:28.440It's for the fall economic statement, but it includes provisions that the oil and gas industry is incredibly worried about.
00:11:37.260In fact, some of the lobby groups for the oil and gas industry took pretty much everything down off their website and social media
00:11:43.160because they're worried about being prosecuted for false statements.
00:11:48.720And, you know, some of the supporters of the Trudeau government say, well, then they shouldn't make false statements.
00:11:54.500Except who's the arbiter of, you know, what the false statement is?
00:11:58.620You mentioned that natural gas burns cleaner.
00:12:01.820Charlie Angus, if the NDP had a bill before parliament, still does, calling for that to be made illegal to say, well, natural gas burns cleaner than oil.
00:12:11.400Even though it does, he says you shouldn't be allowed to say it because you're greenwashing.
00:12:15.500People are worried that this new power given to the competition tribunal is going to see statements like that prosecuted.
00:12:25.140And, you know, sure, it won't be prosecuted criminally, but it's going to be prosecuted through a judicial process where you can face millions of dollars in fines.
00:12:37.480It is completely, but is it any less insane than a similar regulatory proceeding on two different legs that they want to bring in to the Internet?
00:12:50.820The idea that one can regulate speech, one can regulate a certain commentary.
00:12:56.000So we live in a Canada today, and even though we haven't had the robust kind of free speech that America has under the First Amendment, we had a pretty good Canadian consensus on what constituted free speech under this government, whether it's their favorite hobby horse of the climate panic and crisis, or it's the attempt to regulate the media and the Internet.
00:13:20.660That we're living in a Canada that the sense of free speech is completely diluted, gone.
00:13:25.940So when I'm out in your neck of the woods, when I'm out in Sask, I hear about these things all the time.
00:13:32.860People are very concerned about the erosion of basic liberties.
00:13:58.400People who care deeply about the country and think a little see this being the precursor on a lot of fronts to a Canada that no one ever imagined would be this way.
00:14:11.600And again, so much for Mr. Trudeau's post-national state.
00:14:15.540It's again, did he sit down nine years ago and map out this kind of inexorable decline in Canada?
00:14:25.940Or was this simply a set of unintended consequences?
00:15:03.980We have the same impact on interest rates.
00:15:07.960Affordability is affecting particularly younger families in a lot of pretty important ways.
00:15:14.040On that housing front, one of the conservative MPs put out an infographic the other day showing what percentage of your income you need to pay for an average home in all kinds of places.
00:15:24.840And it's the first time I thought maybe I should move to Regina.
00:16:31.160And the people making the decisions, be they elected officials or bureaucrats, simply don't know what it's like out in a place like Saskatchewan.
00:16:41.220I mean, we have, it's popular, of course, in America to refer to bi-coastalism.
00:16:46.840You know, if you live in New York, you live in L.A., you have an entirely different value set than the so-called flyover states.
00:16:54.920States you fly over on your way between New York and L.A.
00:16:57.860In this country, there is, of course, the famous Laurentian area.
00:17:03.880So pick the, you know, whether it's a Laurentian triangle, the Laurentian section, but pick Ottawa, pick Toronto, head over to Montreal, take all of the people inside that group.
00:17:15.240And then the extended suburb of the Laurentians, of course, is Vancouver.
00:17:19.440So if those are your policy setters, your official pundits, the people who comment for a living, the people who make policy for a living and get elected for a living, that does leave out a big chunk of this country.
00:17:37.500So that's really, this is the Canada that we live in as Western Canadians.
00:17:42.780And yet, even in this part of the country, all you have to do is drive up Highway 17 from Ottawa up the valley, as they say.
00:17:51.480You get a very different point of view that's probably more in line with what you would get driving between Regina and Saskatchewan.
00:17:58.500You can drive up to St. Gabriel de Brandon in that section of Quebec, north of Three Rivers.
00:18:08.180And you're going to, you know, get a viewpoint that, again, much more similar to where you are.
00:18:14.100But the policy setters, as you say, all come from this one area.
00:18:18.820And they don't look at what you have to offer as being as valuable as what we have here.
00:18:26.240And of course, that wouldn't be problematic if inside that Laurentian Triangle, you didn't have the significant number of millions of Canadians and the number of seats.
00:18:38.820So, again, this is how we accept Canada.
00:18:42.560And if you, you know, I go back to when you asked me about, you know, my life in Ottawa in the 1980s, there was a strong sense of regional identity.
00:18:52.300But in the 80s, you were, as a Western Canadian, quite concerned about the cod fishery, because, of course, it was in trouble.
00:19:03.640As a Western Canadian, I gave a crap about the Atlantic.
00:19:08.540I was also concerned about the dairy sector in Quebec.
00:19:11.500I was concerned about forestry in B.C., because there was this sense that if you were to build a Canada at a compromise, you had to look out for certain regions.
00:19:25.380The only reason the aforementioned point about Mr. Trudeau on home heating oil did what he did in Atlantic Canada was he had absolutely safe liberal seats that were messaging him back in the Wednesday caucus meeting every week.
00:20:39.700I think in this, again, the Saskatchewan I was elected in, we had nine Conservatives and five new Democrats.
00:20:47.780After the free trade election, we had four Conservatives and ten new Democrats.
00:20:53.680So most of us were tossed out in 1988 over free trade, which was weird, because the most trade-dependent province in Canada is Saskatchewan.
00:21:03.860It was the strongest oppositional province on the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement.
00:21:08.920So in those days, the NDP had a rural, agrarian presence.
00:21:14.520The NDP was a much wider, more circulating party than they are today.
00:21:18.760Today, the NDP is very much an urban, very, very hard left-wing party, which causes them problems provincially in particular.
00:21:28.760But that would be the biggest distinction.
00:21:31.300The Tories have become a larger tent party.
00:21:35.640The NDP has become a smaller tent, and that's manifesting itself.
00:21:51.000It was explained to me, and I've often said this to anybody who's patient enough to listen, that the week I arrived in Ottawa, an old political hand in the Conservative Party took me out.
00:22:02.560We went to a fancy dining room, and he looked at me and he said, son, you do know the 16% rule.
00:22:08.900And I said, that rule would be, and I didn't have a clue what he meant.
00:22:12.560And he said, when you're a new candidate elected, 84% of the votes you get, every 100 votes, 84 of them you got because of your leader, your party, its policies.
00:22:29.260And he said, with every election, that 16 will grow.
00:22:32.960And I don't know if that's scientific or not, but it stuck with me because it's very true, particularly in national politics.
00:22:40.680Ralph Goodale took that 16, and by the time he was, the poor guy was just drowning.
00:22:49.500I mean, you know, we've talked about the carbon tax.
00:22:51.680Ralph Goodale, who's a brilliant man, I think he was a gold medalist in law school.
00:22:56.320Ralph would look at the camera and actually try to explain that if only we could do away with all income tax, all provincial sales tax, the carbon tax would be the salvation of Saskatchewan.
00:23:08.280And people would listen to him and think, Ralph, did you bump your head?
00:23:12.340I mean, so, you know, Ralph was trying to carry the liberal message.
00:23:17.440His effectiveness, of course, had been he was a terrific local riding MP who probably got out of every 100 votes, 80 were for Ralph.
00:23:27.360Of course, even that couldn't work because by the time Ralph was finally sent packing, Saskatchewan had said, we just don't do liberals anymore and we're not going to.
00:23:37.380So let's talk about provincial politics when we come back from the break in one of the many provinces where there is no provincial liberal party.
00:29:43.400The final part of that test is, if the NDP come back in the cities, you look at the NDP caucus, and you say, who in these people could be the new ministers of a new government?
00:29:55.720At this point in Saskatchewan, I'm not sure Carla Beck is a Premier.
00:30:00.520I sort of start losing count on cabinet material at about four.
00:30:04.100So, the NDP are growing, but they're not a threat yet.
00:30:09.460I warn Sask Party people, if the Sask Party are re-elected this fall, which is quite likely four years hence, if the Sask Party hasn't done a major reset, a major urban policy, major initiatives to be new,
00:30:26.660by that time, there'll be a 21-year-old government, and they will likely find themselves being replaced.
00:31:13.000I drove through Frances, Saskatchewan twice last week, and all I kept thinking as I pulled up to Frances was,
00:31:19.200Carla Beck's from Frances, because she opens every single speech, urban or rural, as a girl from Frances, and then, you know, talks about growing up on a farm.
00:31:29.760The bigger test, though, and a friend of mine who is a, as I am, a political junkie, says,
00:32:32.900And in the past, Yorkton, in the past, those communities were able to sustain NDP MLAs.
00:32:38.280In those ridings, the NDP doesn't even show up.
00:32:43.520They don't represent Weyburn, the home of Tommy Douglas?
00:32:46.860The home of Tommy Douglas and the home of the Bakken oil play and oil production in Saskatchewan, which has been so beaten up by the left and the obsession over pipelines and climate change that, no, you couldn't get a new Democrat elected dog catcher in Weyburn today.
00:33:07.100Is it also still the home of the KFC buffet?
00:33:16.360Humboldt and Weyburn had all-you-can-eat KFC buffets, which was a well-kept secret in many parts of Saskatchewan because we didn't want other people in.
00:33:27.360Well, you know, it sounds good, but then you're going to pay for it later.
00:33:31.420So let's talk about two of the issues that have dogged the Sask Party, and I want to ask you if they've damaged them enough to, you know, give Scott Moe pause for concern.
00:34:31.140And, of course, there are layers and layers underneath it.
00:34:35.180The teachers, the last four contract negotiations, certainly three of them, actually resulted in labor action.
00:34:42.940The teachers' union president for a couple of those disputes was a former NDP candidate, a guy named Patrick Mays.
00:34:52.720The teachers, again, like any big union, you've got average rank-and-file great teachers who go to work every day.
00:35:00.500You've got a union executive and leadership that is as or more left-wing than the Ontario Teachers' Union, the American Teachers' Association.
00:35:10.200I mean, the teachers' union movement is irredeemably hard left-wing, and Saskatchewan's the same.
00:35:20.000In fact, fun fact, the premier who succeeded Tommy Douglas, Woodrow Lloyd, was actually an executive in the Saskatchewan Teachers' Federation and ran the union for years.
00:35:30.400So, in Saskatchewan, the teachers' union has always been a pretty solid NDP ally.
00:35:36.220So, is it a coincidence that this thing hit impasse, hit these sorts of issues six months before an election?
00:35:45.040I didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday, but I'm suspecting, you know, there was a pretty hard political play.
00:35:51.240The government could not, and I don't think they will, give up the ability to run the school system.
00:36:00.940The teachers, and it was an odd bargaining position.
00:36:04.440We want more money, and the two sides were part on money, as they often are, but the teachers said,
00:36:09.780more important is we want in the teachers' union contract class-size composition, the challenges of running individual schools.
00:36:19.680They wanted that bargained in as a teacher issue.
00:36:23.140Well, everybody knows school boards run school divisions, school divisions run schools.
00:36:28.680The provincial legislature, every year, votes an appropriation for school expansion, school renovation, these things.
00:36:36.220So, the teachers had really overreached.
00:36:39.180They were able to use a couple of collective agreements in British Columbia as evidence,
00:36:43.980but other than that, there's scant evidence a union should be running the workplace.
00:36:50.940So, that was the impasse, but the union did very well, I thought, in positioning themselves
00:36:57.180as were simply good, hard-working teachers who want a better environment for your kids.