In this week's show, we're joined by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation's Alberta Director, Chris Sims, who fills in for Candice as she's in the midst of a jam-packed day of meetings with the federal Liberal caucus. We also hear from Brian Lilly, senior columnist for the Toronto Sun newspaper chain, who joins us to talk all things pipeline and energy.
00:00:00.000Welcome to the Candace Malcolm Show. My name is Chris Sims. I'm the Alberta Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, filling in for Candace this week.
00:00:11.020Thank you so much for making us a part of your day and your week. If you haven't done so yet, remember to like and subscribe to this YouTube channel, like this video, and most importantly, share this with your friends.
00:00:23.080You'd be surprised on how many folks haven't heard about indie and alternative media sources, and they're not getting the red pills they need. So make sure you share this with your friends.
00:00:33.040Lots to talk about, super busy day today, and that's because you can hear it, okay? The kids are coming back to school in Ottawa. The circus is about to go back into Ottawa.
00:00:43.080But first, they're actually occupying Alberta's capital right now, the Federal Liberal Caucus. What that means is all of the elected MPs are gathering in Edmonton, Alberta.
00:00:55.480So what they're supposed to be doing is putting their heads together, saying, what do we want to do for the fall session? What do we want our priorities to be? What is the opposition going to throw at us?
00:01:05.200All important stuff for the government. But we have some breaking news here that will definitely be throwing a spanner into this works.
00:01:14.040It is from Radio Canada, which is the French arm of our state broadcaster, the CBC.
00:01:20.660But they've got several sources, and they're writing initially in French media, but it's taking off through English media now through translation, and it goes something like this.
00:01:29.680Apparently, a pipeline is not high on the priority list. It's not on the menu for Prime Minister's Mark Carney's to-do list.
00:01:42.980Because as we know, Alberta Premier Daniel Smith and Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe have been crystal clear about this, saying they want Bill C-69 either modified entirely or scrapped altogether.
00:01:56.760That's the so-called no more pipelines law. They want the tanker ban off the West Coast gone.
00:02:03.120Basically, we've got the two kind of real resource-rich powerhouse provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, linking arms and telling Ottawa,
00:02:12.320after 10 years of strangulation, after 10 years of saying no, no, no, no, no to resources and chasing away hundreds of billions of dollars in investment in Canada, that's over.
00:02:24.440We want to change. You have to take this seriously.
00:02:27.640And things like East-West pipelines to get product out to market, the world market, that is a must.
00:02:34.280So if this is true, and if they're not actually going to make this a priority, that's going to be a really big deal.
00:02:42.120Where do we go from here when we're in this kind of a situation in Canada, when we have the House of Commons coming back in Ottawa?
00:02:49.100What's going to be the major issue? Let's find out.
00:02:52.460Joining us now is Brian Lilly. He is the senior columnist for the Toronto Sun newspaper chain.
00:02:58.140Do you like me calling you senior? Or do you want me to call you, like, chief columnist? Like, what would you prefer?
00:03:03.480I don't know if that's my official title, but it does make me sound old, which I guess I am.
00:03:09.300Like, you were my intern, what, 25 years ago?
00:03:12.840So, backstory, yeah. I had to jump in Brian's car when we were working at radio. We were going to a house fire.
00:03:17.840It was like 3 in the morning. That's back when radio stations had stuff and reporters, and we covered things.
00:03:22.860So, yes, Brian Lilly, he is with the Toronto Sun newspaper chain.
00:03:26.680He also is host of his podcast, Full Comment. I strongly recommend that you listen to this podcast.
00:03:35.200No, really, that's how I catch up on stuff on the weekends.
00:03:38.000I'll plug in to talk radio podcasts because you talk to some normies in the mainstream media, and you also talk to people like us in indie media.
00:04:22.400We talked about Churchill or perhaps a port just south of Churchill because, as she pointed out, Churchill, Manitoba is a major tourism destination.
00:04:29.840But there is an opportunity just south of there that if we invest in the right infrastructure, it could be good for getting Alberta oil to eastern Canadian refineries, northeastern American refineries, and off to Europe as well.
00:04:49.020But then you get this news that they're not going to put forward a pipeline.
00:04:53.440And I keep hearing liberals say, well, no company has put forward a proposal.
00:04:58.160I mean, companies don't want to do this.
00:05:01.280Why don't they want to do this, Chris?
00:05:03.320Because the regulatory environment, whether it's Bill C-69, the West Coast tanker ban, the emissions cap, which is really a production cap, all of those things play out.
00:06:08.140You know, as Premier Smith said to me, what really offends Albertans is getting eastern Canadian politicians saying, look, we don't want your product.
00:06:25.200So people are going to, if this does not happen, if Mark Carney, you know, follows through on what Radio Canada is reporting, this is going to hurt national unity in a big, big way.
00:06:42.080My hunch is, is that separation sentiment is slightly higher in Saskatchewan is because of the population weighted in Edmonton.
00:06:50.680There's a lot of kind of government embracing types that live around Edmonton.
00:06:55.680Speaking of government embracing types that are in Edmonton, the Liberal caucus is having their usual like retreat where they go to some place in Canada that's outside of Ottawa, where we already pay for office buildings.
00:07:06.200And they have their caucus retreat before the House comes back.
00:07:12.280Speaking of what's happening, to your point, straight up, you had a really good interview with the Premier over the weekend.
00:07:18.500And what was funny, this is inside baseball, the Premier was like 30 seconds late and people stood up for a standing ovation to have Premier Smith walk into the room.
00:07:32.240I'm going to defend, I'm going to interrupt here for a moment and defend the idea that the Liberals are holding their caucus retreat in Edmonton.
00:09:22.560All of the oil before that was whale oil, my friends.
00:09:26.380That's why they were this close to going extinct.
00:09:28.500So the next time people get all up in your grill about wanting a pipeline or liking using natural gas and oil, tell them that's what saved the whales.
00:10:54.840It's not like I expected it'd be horrible.
00:10:56.700It's just that, you know, going from a talk radio host to premier, that's a big jump and she is done exceptionally well.
00:11:04.820I think that there are people out my way that don't understand her, that don't understand the province and don't understand why she takes certain positions.
00:11:14.340She was very positive about Alberta's future.
00:11:20.300I think she's going to put forward a positive view.
00:11:23.040Her and Scott Moe, and I've spoken to both of them in public and in private, and they are willing to say, look, we'll work with Mark Carney.
00:11:32.600They're saying that Mark Carney is far different than Justin Trudeau.
00:11:36.080But every premier I've talked to, and I talked to lots of them, have said the same thing.
00:11:40.200Justin Trudeau would show up at a meeting 45 minutes late, lecture you for 15 minutes, ignore everything you said, and leave early.
00:11:48.740Mark Carney shows up on time, and even if he doesn't agree with you, listens and takes notes and asks follow-up questions, does all the things that you expect a leader to do that Justin Trudeau didn't.
00:12:03.260So they've been willing to cut him some slack.
00:12:05.560If he does not deliver on things like a bitumen pipeline, that will stop.
00:12:12.820And I think that when you look at the polling, the entire country is behind building big infrastructure and developing our resources.
00:12:23.120If he doesn't do that, he's going to lose popular support as well.
00:12:26.040Look, you know, this may sound really inside baseball, but there's already been one decision that I think was idiotic, that was an easy win for Carney, and that was to overturn a CRTC decision that said Bell Canada had to hand over its internet lines, its Bell internet fiber lines, that they paid billions of dollars to install in Ontario to tell us, to sell at a discount.
00:12:53.460So, you know, it used to be that if you were going to do that, well, you allowed the company a couple of years to recoup some of their investment.
00:13:00.900And the CRTC said, no, we need cheaper internet, so we need to do this now.
00:13:05.420And Cabinet could have overturned that and said, well, you know, companies won't invest if we don't allow them to recoup their investment.
00:13:14.160Bell stopped laying fiber cable in southern Ontario and Quebec and elsewhere because they just said it makes no sense.
00:13:21.600What they do, they turned around and used the money they saved to buy a company in the United States, why they can get a return on investment.
00:13:28.480We need to make it so that companies can make money.
00:13:33.220You know, you can hate Bell all you want.
00:15:01.740There's a couple of other smart people in the Carney cabinet and the rest of them are economic illiterates who, you know, potentially could be destroying the country.
00:15:10.560Well, they were the ones that were jumping up on tables yelling, oh, captain, my captain, at somebody who is economically illiterate.
00:15:17.700So we are in a totally different world here.
00:15:20.140I think what you meant just to qualify, you meant not lifting the EV mandates, but I think you meant lifting the tariffs on Chinese battery power.
00:15:46.400What the industry needs is certainty, not uncertainty, regardless of industry.
00:15:51.280Again, oil, auto, steel, aluminum, whatever industry, you need certainty.
00:15:57.560And if you're just going to say, well, we'll pause the EV mandates but not get rid of them, and we'll review them for 60 days, that's not certainty.
00:16:31.000If you have a country that, imagine you are Mr. Moneybags and you're a big oil person or you're a big company, right, and you've got money to invest, you've got stuff to sell, you have things to transport and transmit.
00:16:43.800It could be data, it could be oil, you could be manufacturing vehicles.
00:16:47.280And you're looking around at where to put down your purse, what neighborhood are you going to put your purse down in?
00:16:53.440Are you going to put it on a park bench in Japan where it's a very high trust and everybody's helping each other out and everything is normal?
00:17:01.020Or are you going to leave it on a subway somewhere where you know it's going to be gone?
00:17:05.880Where do they want to be confident they're going to put their money?
00:17:09.140And the example of Kinder Morgan getting that pipeline eventually slowly throttlingly slaughtered and killed by the Trudeau government and walking away.
00:17:18.940And then the taxpayer walks in and spends $30 billion on the thing that was supposed to be private investment.
00:17:26.000This is exactly the point you're making here, Brian.
00:17:33.020Well, look, we not only had to have the government buy Kinder Morgan and Trans Mountain, they had to, you know, Trans, or sorry, Keystone XL was killed.
00:17:45.780You know, Trudeau guys did not fight overly hard against their good buddies, Joe Biden or Obama before that, to try and get it built.
00:17:55.000They did not, you know, fight the Americans on that.
00:18:53.460It, you know, get out of the way, allow business to thrive, allow the, you know, in 2012, our GDP per capita was equal to the United States, meaning that the, the average Canadian was making about the same as the average American.
00:19:18.040That means that your buying power and my buying power and everyone in the audience, their buying power is lower.
00:19:24.820We do not make the money that we, we need to make.
00:19:27.660As Premier Smith said to me on the weekend, if we had Keystone XL, if we had Energy East, if we had Northern Gateway, that would be adding more than $55 billion a year to government coffers that could pay for the NATO committee.
00:19:40.060It could pay for more commitment, it could pay for more schools, it could pay for more hospitals, on and on and on.
00:19:44.400But we have decided to throttle ourselves and whether it is in mining or oil or forestry, we need to get out of our own way.
00:19:56.880We have great industrial capabilities, allow companies to thrive and people will thrive and governments will be able to provide the services they want.
00:20:07.040Or we can keep getting in our own way, not have the money for the services that we want, and whine about how Donald Trump is hurting us.
00:20:14.200No, Trudeau liberals have done more damage to us over the last 10 years than Donald Trump ever will.
00:20:20.740And if we keep getting in our own way, we are just going to keep doing more damage to ourselves than Donald Trump will.
00:20:27.160The Americans are letting their economy thrive.
00:20:41.200Premier Doug Ford, now this is according to the Red Star, but it's in the Toronto Star.
00:20:46.460And Premier Doug Ford, where you're sitting right now, there at Queen's Park in Toronto, the centre of everything,
00:20:51.500apparently said something along the lines of, oh, well, if youth unemployment is super high and people can't get jobs, they just need to look harder.
00:21:00.680Now, I'm paraphrasing, and again, there isn't a clip of this that I've seen yet.
00:21:04.560That did not strike me as the usual populist Ford brother sort of thing that I would have expected out of that Ford nation crowd 10 years ago.
00:21:14.640And I think the latest stat I saw, this was crazy.
00:23:19.380It was 20%, but like Ontario, the unemployment rate dropped in Alberta and Ontario, not because there are more jobs, but because people stopped looking for work.
00:23:34.240And the temporary foreign worker program is a problem.
00:23:37.520It's not the biggest problem, by the way.
00:23:39.480It's one of them, and it's an easy one to attack, but you've also got the International Mobility Program, which has more than a million people with work permits from out of the country coming into Canada.
00:23:50.420You've got the student population, which is significantly higher than it was several years ago.
00:23:56.820Yes, it's dropped from the stupid highs of maybe a year to 18 months ago, but it's still higher than it was.
00:24:24.540But we are adding, as Justin Trudeau said, in April of 2024, we are bringing people faster than we can absorb them.
00:24:32.040And Justin Trudeau, in April of 2014 and in April of 2024, said that these programs help drive down wages and suppress employment for young people.
00:24:42.940So, yeah, this has been a problem, and it needs to be fixed.
00:24:47.240So, on the one hand, there's a bit of truth to what the premier says.
00:24:53.280But we've also got restaurant after restaurant, service job after service job, saying that they're looking to hire temporary foreign workers when you've got unemployment above 6%, 7%, 8%.
00:25:07.600You know, until April of 2022, the federal regulation said that you could not get a labor market impact assessment to bring in a temporary foreign worker if the local unemployment rate was above 6%.
00:25:22.200We have had national and regional unemployment well above 6% for the last 18 months, and they got rid of that.
00:25:30.160They also increased it from 10% of your workforce up to 20%, and in some cases, you can have 30% of your workforce be temporary foreign workers.
00:26:25.060He's still talking about punishing Diageo, the company that owns Crown Royal, and threatening to take all their products off the shelves because he has a political disagreement with them.
00:26:35.500But does he know, like seriously, does he know it's made in Gimli, like big time?
00:27:27.580And an awful lot of it has to do with temporary foreign workers, international mobility program, opening up how many hours international students can work.
00:27:37.440And, you know, I mentioned 190,000 asylum seekers.
00:27:41.940You know that a decade ago we were only getting about 16,000 asylum seekers a year?
00:27:47.560Now we're getting more than 10 times that?
00:28:14.380These new stats come out all the time.
00:28:15.880Brian, every time I open up a new door on stuff, like what you were just saying of, like, the per capita and all this, like, it's awful.
00:28:22.640Like, every time I open up a new thing of, like, okay, you know, carbon tax is a problem, this EV mandate's a problem, and then you tell me something like the disparity with wages and earnings between Canada and the United States now.
00:28:58.580You're going to get shows and stories like this here on Juno News because we help bridge the gap between independent media and the normies over in mainstream media.
00:29:09.440And Brian is one of those game changers, okay?
00:29:14.400And what's really important is that he reads all the headlines, and he reads these stories, and he keeps us up to date on all of this stuff.