Mark Carney leaves Asia with no concrete trade agreements, and President Trump refuses to talk to the Canadian PM about anything significant. John Robson joins me to talk about why this might not be so bad, and what we can learn from it.
00:05:58.020I can't believe people fall for his act.
00:05:59.860I mean, I know it worked at Davos for 20 years and he became a very rich man.
00:06:03.780So I understand why he thinks he's saying something.
00:06:06.100But I can't understand why people reading what he says and going, there are no ideas in that cloud of words, think to themselves, oh, I guess wiser and better people than I know what he meant.
00:06:24.420If you go right back to the ads and the impact they had and how Doug Ford came out and said, well, you know, millions, tens of millions of people, billions of people have seen these ads.
00:06:35.860And I think that they have actually undermined our ability to get deals with other countries, countries not named the United States.
00:06:45.060Reason being, countries see the fight that we're having with the United States and they don't necessarily want to kind of get mixed up in any of it.
00:06:52.580You know, they might feel like, well, you know, these two are really going at it.
00:06:58.740You know, do I have to pick a side here?
00:07:00.300And if I'm going to pick a side, I'm going to pick the side in which has a huge market, not the one that has a puny one.
00:07:06.340So I'm making the case that I think that ad and just the ongoing belligerence between ourselves and the United States on trade is a turnoff for other countries with whom we would like to strike trade deals.
00:07:23.740And I think the problem in large measure is that supposedly one of the reasons that Mark Carney ran as the adult in the room, right, by contrast with Justin Trudeau, who clearly never left his adolescence behind, but also Donald Trump, who frequently resembles a six-year-old having a tantrum.
00:07:39.640But when you see Carney and Ford fighting over it, when you saw the ad before it was posted, oh, I didn't see the ad.
00:07:46.960They get the impression that we, too, are governed by squabbling children.
00:07:51.660And we're also much smaller than the United States, and we have a less dynamic economy because we're over-governed by squabbling children.
00:07:58.420And if they just said, look, this was a good ad, it made the point that Ronald Reagan favored free trade.
00:08:04.700And we feel that Americans ought to remember that because they think fondly of Ronald Reagan and gone ahead with grown-up stuff and not taken Trump's tantrum too seriously.
00:08:14.680And also brought in mind that although Trump used the ad as the occasion, he was unhappy with Canadian government for a lot of other reasons, including this very childish decision to recognize the non-existent state of Palestine, or even Mark Carney running the elbows-up election campaign.
00:08:32.240I'm going to go down to the United States and hit Donald Trump physically, beat him up like the old Broad Street bullies, which was a ludicrous claim in every imaginable dimension.
00:08:41.100And so I don't think the Americans think we're serious either.
00:08:44.720And again, I'm not saying Donald Trump is serious, except in the sense that, you know, a heart attack is serious.
00:08:49.860Donald Trump is a frivolous and dangerous person, but he is the president of the United States.
00:09:02.680Govern ourselves well and see if it helps us, but it just might work.
00:09:08.000Yeah, the idea that we need to get into the mud, you know, along with Trump and fight him, you know, stand there like in a boxing ring, you know, trade punches with somebody who's 10 times our size, bad idea.
00:09:21.560And I'm reminded once again of all the countries that the United States levied tariffs on and how many of them actually pushed back with counter tariffs.
00:09:31.060I mean, besides us, it's the Chinese, right?
00:09:45.980And so backlash, you know, counter tariffs, elbows up doesn't work.
00:09:51.940And yet we went down that road and I think it has blown up in our face big time.
00:09:58.000And I would go further to say that it's blown up not only in terms of our relationship with the United States, but potentially other trade partners.
00:10:06.280And again, I have to emphasize that when a country puts tariffs and non-tariff barriers on imports, it hurts itself.
00:10:14.620It raises the price of goods and services for its own people.
00:10:19.200And when they export, they get less for what they give up.
00:10:22.340So it's not a matter of, well, they hurt us.
00:11:08.780So we aren't doing the very, very basic stuff.
00:11:11.880And then we're like, gee, I wonder why being stupid isn't working.
00:11:14.800Well, you know, I think the answer would be obvious if you weren't stupid.
00:11:19.660I mean, Trump came out recently and said he's got a deal in principle with China on energy.
00:11:26.380I mean, China's been buying a lot of their oil and gas from Russia.
00:11:29.800And so if they're going to start buying from the Americans, I think that's a geopolitical win for the West, especially when you start to look at Ukraine and that whole situation.
00:11:41.020Well, you know, the only way they can, which is by selling oil to India and China and Europe.
00:11:45.780And so I think that was an interesting statement.
00:11:49.200But it was also interesting within the context of Canada kind of being left out in the cold a little bit.
00:11:54.880I mean, isn't it us who should be selling oil to the Chinese, you know, and the rest of these Asian countries?
00:12:01.220And yet we're not in a position to do so.
00:12:03.260Unfortunately, Carney's going to go into that meeting with Xi Jinping and he's not going to have, like to your point earlier, all hat, no cattle.
00:12:14.560We don't have the infrastructure to ship that much oil to Asia.
00:12:18.980I mean, we now have the TransCanada, of course, to do that.
00:12:21.740But that's not enough, you know, for us to really become a player on the world stage as an energy superpower.
00:12:28.540You know, we need the infrastructure in place now and we don't have it.
00:12:32.280I think that really puts us behind the eight ball, John.
00:12:35.280Yeah. And if you remember Justin Trudeau, when Europeans came here with suitcases full of cash saying we want to buy your liquefied natural gas and Trudeau's like there is no business case for liquefied natural gas.
00:12:45.680And the correct response is like the umpire to the strikeout king who protested that the pitch wasn't a strike.
00:13:10.960I don't think he knows what he just said.
00:13:12.480So, yeah, I'm not a big fan of helping China conquer the world, but at the same time, I am a big fan of selling our energy.
00:13:20.940And for that, partly, we need to get over the idea that hydrocarbon energy, that natural gas, the oil and even clean coal are killing the planet.
00:13:29.640And there we need some political courage and some political clarity, not again from the liberals.
00:13:35.320Mark Carney, of course, is a ferocious climate zealot who's also whatever you want at the moment, but not really in this and that and big, long words.
00:13:42.660And then, you know, don't know where he stands.
00:13:44.280But I'd like to see the Conservative Party come out and say, there is no scientific consensus that man-made CO2 is harming the planet.
00:13:54.140And we won't be bullied any further on this subject.
00:13:57.540And we are going to develop and sell our resources and we will sell them to willing customers.
00:14:08.340And as long as you're on the topic of climate zealots, let's talk about what just transpired with Bill Gates, of course, famous billionaire climate activist, a guy who famously proposed blocking out the sun in order to slow down the progress of, you know, the earth-destroying climate change threat.
00:14:27.520Now coming out and saying, well, you know what?
00:14:30.460Climate change is probably not going to lead to the end of the planet as we know it.
00:14:34.520It's still something that needs to be dealt with.
00:14:36.640But he has completely changed his tune.
00:14:39.620And people like Donald Trump are coming out and saying, that proves that we won.
00:14:45.240You know, in terms of the battle for hearts and minds, the side that pushed hyperventilating over climate change has just kind of thrown up his hand and said, you know, this isn't working.
00:15:22.400I remember there was recently somebody posted something online saying, what thing that everybody is saying now will they all deny believing in 10 years?
00:15:30.140And Matt Ridley replied that the weather is getting worse.
00:15:33.420And I can think of other things, but that's a good one that everybody right now who's anybody, and this has been true for 25 years, has had to be a fanatic on net zero.
00:15:44.060And they have had to say that they believe that there are more hurricanes and more wildfires and more this and more that.
00:15:58.780And so I think you're going to see a lot of people backing off.
00:16:01.840And again, what Gates said also, there was a good, a lot of good sense in his remark that there are other more serious problems that deserve our time and attention.
00:16:09.120And I want to claim that the climate discussion nexus is now vindicated because, of course, we've been saying this for years, that all this attention to carbon pollution, which isn't even pollution, is taking attention away from other kinds of pollution.
00:16:21.640It's taking money, energy, idealism, and even rational thought away from dealing with things that really are killing people, like indoor smoke from cooking with dung and wood, that are killing people now in significant numbers in poor countries.
00:16:34.580The failure to clean up plastic pouring out of many Asian and African rivers into the oceans of the world and then washing back up on the beaches and so forth.
00:16:43.400I saw a thing, by the way, people were swimming in the Chicago River for the first time in almost a century because it has been cleaned up.
00:16:51.180That's what happens when we turn our attention to real pollution problems.
00:16:54.840And again, Bill Gates is thinking about disease in the world.
00:16:58.280If you want to spend trillions of dollars trying to get rid of carbon pollution so the temperature won't go up 0.1 of a degree, which nobody would even notice anyway, or if you want to spend that money eradicating malaria, which is going to make more real difference in people's lives.
00:17:14.100And so I think there's, you know, Jay Budziszewski once said that people are logical slowly.
00:17:18.840And I think that we're at the point where a lot of people are realizing that the predictions of calamity were not accurate, that the proposed remedies aren't going to work, that the cost is way too high and the benefits are way too low and CO2 is not poison.
00:17:34.060And so they're going to sort of tiptoe like Bill Murray and Caddyshack tiptoeing away from a situation they don't want anyone to know they were involved in.
00:17:41.620But I say, I don't want to make it hard and embarrassing for them.
00:17:44.360I say, great, glad they've seen the light.
00:17:46.880Come join us over here on the same side and hope Bill Gates is just at the head of a parade of other people.
00:17:53.400I mean, Greta Thunberg now has gone so crazy on Hamas that I'm not sure I want her on the stage.
00:17:58.560But there's lots of other people who've been really dyed in the world climate fanatics.
00:18:02.120And if they were to stand up and say, I'd like to come on and do a webinar on CDN and explain why I now think I was wrong, I would welcome them with open arms.
00:18:10.280Do not make it hard for people to come back to the light because that's where we need them.
00:18:14.580Yeah, our government, though, doesn't seem to be going along with that moderating opinion that Gates just, you know, showed us.
00:18:26.780And because next week they're going to table this climate competitiveness policy.
00:18:31.840I guess maybe they'll probably be part of the budget or whatever.
00:18:35.200But they're going to talk about how Canada is going to become a major player on the world stage in terms of selling products that are, quote, decarbonized, including oil.
00:18:48.920They're not backing away from any of this.
00:18:51.600And so I'm wondering what it'll take when you even have radical environmental opinions like the ones that Gates has expressed, you know, being scaled back and rolled back.
00:19:02.760And our government appears hell-bent on continuing on with this lunacy.
00:19:10.600I mean, what's it going to take for these people to finally understand that the world has dropped it finally?
00:19:15.720But we're done with the hyperventilating on climate change.
00:19:19.520And we're certainly done with throwing billions of dollars at a problem that doesn't really exist.
00:19:24.700Yeah, I mean, again, I have to make an unkind comment borrowed from a British commentator about their own parliament, that most MPs are NPCs, which for non-gamers, that's non-player characters, these robotic entities with a very limited range of responses.
00:19:39.380You know, the Liberal caucus would vote for a menu if it was put in front of them and the boss would vote for this legislation.
00:19:45.960So all it would take for most of them is for the prime minister to say, OK, now we're going to do that instead.
00:19:50.580And they would all indignantly claim that it was what they'd always believed and they were the best and the conservatives stink and the NDP are maniacs and so on and blah, blah, blah.
00:19:58.600What it would take for Mark Carney to switch, I don't know.