Juno News - Government spending $13 billion for 3,000 jobs

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:00:05.540 This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.

00:00:14.120 Hello everyone and welcome to you all.

00:00:17.100 This is Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show, the Andrew Lawton Show, here on True North.

00:00:21.700 Monday, April 24th, 2023.

00:00:25.820 I think it's 2023, who knows these days.

00:00:28.120 The last three years has basically been one gigantic blur.

00:00:32.760 And what a news day today.

00:00:35.460 Tucker Carlson out at Fox News.

00:00:38.560 Now, I don't know Tucker Carlson particularly well,

00:00:41.320 but I've always thought he was a tremendously talented broadcaster,

00:00:46.460 very shrewd businessman, and also a very principled guy.

00:00:50.280 So I think we can all read between the lines on what happened here.

00:00:53.840 And I think that it's safe to say American media will not be the same, at least for the time being.

00:00:59.300 But I also think he will have no trouble finding a soft landing spot.

00:01:03.680 I don't know if True North can afford Tucker Carlson or if we're after him, given his promise to invade Canada.

00:01:09.460 But you know what? Some of us might even just billet soldiers if the U.S. invades Canada. You never know.

00:01:15.060 And then some guy named Don Orange out at CNN that I was not familiar with, but seems to be, no, it might have been another citrus.

00:01:21.920 Don Pamelo, Don Tangerine, Don Grapefruit, Lime, anyway.

00:01:27.200 Some guy at CNN that apparently was seen by tens of people has also been fired today.

00:01:33.320 So that is the big media landscape here.

00:01:36.420 But I do want to just start off on, well, I guess I've already started off, so now I'm moving to something else.

00:01:42.280 But I do want to take a moment on a bit of a more somber note to talk about the passing of a fantastic Canadian media figure.

00:01:51.920 And someone that I knew very well and have had many, many interactions on air and off air with over the years.

00:01:58.900 And that is Tarek Fattah, who passed away and it was announced by his lovely daughter Natasha Fattah,

00:02:07.260 who's been doing a tremendous job caring for him and keeping all the people in his close and far away orbit,

00:02:14.360 apprised of what's happening.

00:02:15.720 And Natasha posted on Twitter this morning, it's actually quite a touching message here,

00:02:25.960 but what Natasha writes is that he was a lion of Punjab, a son of Hindustan, a lover of Canada,

00:02:32.720 a speaker of truth, a fighter for justice, voice of the downtrodden underdogs and the oppressed.

00:02:39.200 Tarek Fatah has passed the baton on.

00:02:41.420 his revolution will continue with all who knew and loved him. Will you join us? 1949 to 2023.

00:02:49.980 Now, I first met Tarek on The Michael Coren Show, which is a show that itself is a bit dated. It

00:02:56.980 was back on CTS, a station that's no longer in existence. It's been rebranded as something else.

00:03:02.600 And Tarek Vittal was one of the panelists on the left. I was one of the panelists on the right.

00:03:07.160 and we would have some very, very heated debates. 0.88

00:03:11.760 And I was a young little punk, bull in the china shop type,

00:03:16.080 and he was a bit of a bull in the china shop himself,

00:03:18.580 but with a lot more maturity and a lot more, I think, evidence and experience to back it up.

00:03:23.920 But he was always so respectful, as respectful as he was passionate.

00:03:27.960 And we sparred on some things, we agreed on others,

00:03:30.700 we disagreed, of course, as I mentioned, on a few.

00:03:33.620 But I really valued those interactions.

00:03:36.840 And years and years ago, about 2010, when I was in the hospital for quite a while and in a coma, I had been reading, before I was hospitalized, his book, The Jew Is Not My Enemy, which was, at the time, a very provocative book from a Muslim saying, no, no, no, our issues are not with Jews. 0.94

00:03:55.560 And this was something that many people in the Muslim community took issue with, Tarek Fatah's willingness to criticize Islam when he thought it deserved it. 0.84

00:04:06.840 And he did this while also being a tremendously compassionate and caring figure, which made him such a thoughtful commentator.

00:04:14.840 And, you know, years later in 2018, I've never told anyone this, when I was running for office provincially and there was a week where just everyone in the world, it felt like was against me.

00:04:24.100 And there was this bad news story and this bad news story and all of that.

00:04:27.480 he messaged me and said some very kind things which in that moment were needed and were from

00:04:34.240 an unlikely source given that he was not at all a conservative i think he voted ndp in that election

00:04:39.260 and i was the conservative candidate but he was incredibly kind and incredibly thoughtful and i

00:04:44.940 know he has left a huge mark both in his family and in his work and he will be missed by me and

00:04:51.140 by many many others so Tarek Fatal we thank you so much for all your work and we miss you and I

00:04:58.000 will just moving on to the news of the day here of which there is quite a bit to get through I

00:05:03.240 want to talk about this story which is actually challenging for me in some ways because it's a

00:05:07.920 local story to a lot of the people in my neighborhood and my immediate circle St. Thomas

00:05:12.520 Ontario small town about half an hour from here getting a giant giga factory from Volkswagen to

00:05:19.320 manufacture batteries for electric vehicles. This is costing Canadian taxpayers $13 billion

00:05:26.360 in subsidies to make 3,000 jobs. That's the claim. Now, they say there are going to be some

00:05:33.280 indirect jobs in the range of 30,000. Even then, we're talking about a large sum. If you do the

00:05:39.320 math, that's about $4.3 million per job, which strikes me as something that might have some

00:05:45.240 better ways to spend it to yield some economic development in southwestern Ontario or beyond

00:05:52.840 in this country. And this is, to my knowledge, the largest bit of corporate welfare in Canada's

00:05:59.420 history. Not even Bombardier, I think, has built a plant that got $13 billion worth of government

00:06:05.280 funding. Aaron Woodrick, who is the director of domestic policy for the Macdonald-Laurier

00:06:11.000 Institute joins me now. Aaron, let's just talk about the math here. Do you think that we are

00:06:17.020 going to get $13 billion worth of value from this? Yeah, it's really hard to see how, Andrew. And

00:06:23.640 look, I empathize. I'm from, like you, I'm from southwestern Ontario. I'm just down the 401 in

00:06:28.160 KW. All my family lives in London. I got friends in St. Thomas. So look, you can be conflicted

00:06:34.120 because there are real people in real community that will benefit from this. But when you zoom

00:06:38.720 out and you ask yourself the amount of money, I mean, just to sort of put the sum into context

00:06:44.300 here, Andrew, you talk about Bombardier. I mean, they were sort of the champions of corporate

00:06:47.940 welfare in this country. They managed to get about $4 billion. That was over 50 years,

00:06:52.960 over dozens of handouts. VW has managed to get more than three times that in one go for a single

00:07:00.020 plant. And the craziest thing of all, wasn't even brought up in question period by anybody the day

00:07:05.620 after this news leak, which was just astonishing to me. I mean, the idea that parties like,

00:07:10.800 you know, the Conservators and the Democrats have nothing to say on this really just kind of floored

00:07:16.260 me. Yeah. And one of the challenges is that you had the provincial Conservative government that

00:07:21.540 has been cheerleading this as well. They were there at the announcement. They've been talking

00:07:26.000 about how great it is. You had the local Conservative MP, Karen Vecchio, who I know

00:07:30.900 quite well was there and was actually used I think quite cynically by Justin Trudeau as a prop on

00:07:36.520 this. He was then chiding her for Pierre Polyev not jumping up and down supporting this. So the

00:07:42.140 idea that we're all just supposed to say it's great for the community so we all rally behind

00:07:46.320 this without looking at the numbers is I think quite concerning. Yeah and you know the dirty

00:07:51.480 little secret here Andrew is most of these politicians if you get them in private off the

00:07:55.420 record they'll all acknowledge that this is a subsidy. They'll all acknowledge that this is not

00:07:59.360 great stuff what they really should say if they were going to be straight with us is guess what

00:08:03.940 vw was shopping around they were going to put this plant wherever they got the best deal

00:08:08.100 so we gave them the best deal you know at least if governments were honest about that and saying

00:08:12.560 you know it's unfortunate that we have to subsidize this stuff but it's the only way to get these

00:08:17.560 kinds of plants i would respect that more i still think it's a bad economic argument and people need

00:08:21.920 to realize that in st thomas for example st thomas a lot of the people that are going to end up at

00:08:27.000 working at this plant are going to be sucked out of other businesses in St. Thomas. It's not

00:08:31.500 necessarily folks who are unemployed in St. Thomas that will fill these jobs. It's people who are

00:08:35.580 working in companies in St. Thomas that won't be able to compete with VW and their federally

00:08:40.620 subsidized jobs. So it's not all, even for places like St. Thomas, it's not a clear win when you

00:08:46.020 think of all the other businesses there that don't get that kind of special treatment.

00:08:50.200 One of the problems with corporate welfare is that it'd be, especially when you compound it

00:08:54.700 with globalization is that you have this system where companies literally do what you just

00:08:59.460 described with Volkswagen. They go shopping around. I think it was back in 2017 when Amazon

00:09:04.480 was remarkably transparent about this. They basically said, we're having a contest on where

00:09:09.140 to build our second headquarters. And it was basically who's going to give us the most money

00:09:12.820 and then we'll go there. In this particular case, Canada was competing with the United States,

00:09:18.400 which is 10 times the size of Canada, has an astronomically larger GDP, more money to work

00:09:24.000 with so how on earth is canada supposed to compete because there is an argument i don't like the

00:09:28.880 argument that these are just the rules of the game now and if you want any investment this is how you

00:09:33.100 have to do it yeah well first of all it's very it's impossible to compete with economy 10 times

00:09:38.100 your size you're never going to be able to match them on everything dollar for dollar um but i think

00:09:42.280 the the the unspoken assumption in that is that we have to be in the business of building electric

00:09:46.980 cars right it's like we absolutely must be doing this one type of thing and really when you zoom

00:09:52.340 out again there's no there's no argument that economically this is something we have to be in

00:09:56.800 it's something we want to be in because politically it's popular and it's cool and it's easy to say

00:10:01.380 this is the sector of the future but I got news for people governments are not very good at

00:10:05.940 predicting the future you know they're not very good at picking winners and losers which is the

00:10:09.660 reason they shouldn't do it um so this idea that this is one thing that we absolutely have to be

00:10:14.480 in I mean what struck me as interesting Andrews if we want to be a part of for example the supply

00:10:18.880 chain for electric vehicles. Well, guess what? Canada has a lot of rare earth minerals that are

00:10:23.740 only to be found in Canada. All the subsidies in the world and other countries can't replace that.

00:10:29.500 So why not worry about finding ways to get that stuff out of the ground, build the infrastructure

00:10:33.660 to the ring of fire? These are things we could do to make sure that Canada is part of the supply

00:10:39.880 chain for electric vehicles. But this idea that we have to have this plant in the province or the

00:10:45.020 sky will fall. There's just no basis for it other than the government saying, well, this is something

00:10:49.240 we want to be in. Yeah, that's actually a very important point. And I think that Canada has been

00:10:54.860 certainly under this government very bad at leveraging the things where it naturally has

00:10:59.760 a comparative advantage. And one example of that is oil and gas. I mean, this is something where

00:11:04.180 we're sitting on the advantage. We're sitting on something that makes it so Canada is able to do

00:11:09.040 something that other countries cannot do as easily. Why are we competing with things that

00:11:12.860 other places could do as easily that could be in you know lithuania or the united states or

00:11:17.700 berlin or st thomas and really make no difference yeah and the sad answer to the reason we don't do

00:11:23.440 that andrew is political sexiness there are certain types of jobs that are very attractive

00:11:28.160 to politicians building airplanes is one of them building vehicles it sounds fancy it sounds

00:11:32.580 innovative oh it's really good yeah aerospace is the aerospace you know these are sectors that

00:11:37.700 politicians just love because they sound really, really fancy. Things like forestry and agriculture.

00:11:44.640 I mean, these sound, it sounds really sort of backwards. And the irony of potash photo op is

00:11:49.460 not going to be as sexy. I agree. But ironically, these jobs are things we have a comparative

00:11:54.020 advantage in. They pay very well. They don't require government subsidies. And ironically,

00:11:58.740 again, in a lot of sectors like agriculture, for example, very, very innovative. Canada has

00:12:02.920 cutting edge technology in these sectors and continues to develop it. But you never hear

00:12:07.200 about it because to politicians from big cities like Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, that sounds

00:12:11.700 like hayseed stuff. And that's the real tragedy here is that Canada actually can compete and win

00:12:17.140 in a lot of sectors. It's just not the sectors that all the Laurentian elites want to chase after

00:12:21.980 because they want to be popular in places like New York and London. And you're not going to do

00:12:26.360 that by focusing on agriculture. So that to me is the real tragedy here is there are a lot of good

00:12:31.140 jobs for a lot of Canadians out there, but the sort of elite political class thumbs their nose

00:12:35.760 at it and does not devote anywhere near the amount of resources and attention to those areas.

00:12:42.000 Is your view that all corporate welfare is bad, that this is just one line item in federal

00:12:46.560 programming that we could get rid of? Yeah, generally speaking, yes. I mean,

00:12:50.560 sometimes people like to come clap back at me and say, well, what about subsidies for oil and gas?

00:12:54.720 I mean, first of all, there aren't as many as these people claim. Most of the people that say

00:12:58.080 there's these billions, they're talking about tax credits, which to me is something very different.

00:13:01.680 When you give someone a tax break or a tax credit, you're letting them keep more of the

00:13:04.720 of the money they've already earned. That's very different than just handing them a pile of money

00:13:08.640 from the taxpayer that they never earned. So that's the one difference. The other answer is, yeah, by

00:13:12.400 all means, end them for every sector. And the reason is, Andrew, there's no way to have a level

00:13:17.200 playing field otherwise. Governments do not know what the best use of investment or people's social

00:13:23.620 skills and talent is. And when you pick and choose, you're distorting the economy. You're driving

00:13:29.420 investment and job choices away from other areas. And that's just not fair. That's not

00:13:34.500 government's role. So I'm all for government trying to lift people up, trying to create an

00:13:39.160 environment where any business in any sector can compete. You do that with tax cuts, with better

00:13:43.300 regulation, things like that. But the idea that governments somehow know better than the

00:13:48.000 marketplace, you know, what should be the employer or what sector we should be in,

00:13:52.500 there's simply no basis for it other than the government thinking that they want to be in

00:13:56.740 certain sectors. I know your focus is obviously on the policy and not the politics here, but I

00:14:02.220 think the two are somewhat linked in this question of how a future government could do anything about

00:14:08.180 this, or even if they could. I mean, is this the type of thing where no matter what happens,

00:14:11.800 if there were an election, say in a year or two years, this is something that now we're on the

00:14:17.420 hook for? I think so. And I think just the reaction to this is telling. Again, the fact

00:14:23.400 that you didn't see, you're not seeing opposition parties.

00:14:25.860 I mean, remember, in politics, if you spend $13 in an orange juice

00:14:30.000 or $6,000 in a hotel room, you'll hear it for days, right?

00:14:33.540 Or Galen Weston gets an $11 million pay raise.

00:14:36.040 You know, the parties will foam with the mouth

00:14:37.500 over relatively small amounts of money.

00:14:39.420 But $13 billion, not a peep.

00:14:41.980 So I think that suggests this is everyone is afraid to touch this.

00:14:44.560 The other tragedy, Andrew, is as we've seen from other sectors,

00:14:47.020 whether it's aerospace or traditionally in auto,

00:14:49.180 all this buys you is the right to get shaken down again in the future.

00:14:52.440 I mean, people say, well, you know, VW has to meet all these conditions or they're not going to get the money.

00:14:57.280 Well, let's fast forward 10 or 15 years.

00:14:59.560 And then someone comes along and says, well, VW, you better shape up or otherwise you're not going to get your money.

00:15:04.520 And VW says, oh, yeah, is that so?

00:15:07.040 Well, it would be a real shame if someone closed this plant down and moved it to Alabama.

00:15:11.020 What do you think politicians' response is going to be?

00:15:13.120 Of course, they're going to pony up the money again.

00:15:14.960 So once you start this game, you're just setting yourself up to be taken to the cleaners over and over again.

00:15:20.860 I'm not speculating.

00:15:21.980 We've seen it happen. And I fear that that is going to be how this be this, how this story ends

00:15:26.260 as well. Yeah, I fear you're right. And I mean, there are no certainties in economics or anything

00:15:31.360 else. And we also sentimentalize jobs for good reason, because, you know, individual people are

00:15:37.200 not just numbers on a balance sheet, they're human beings. But it becomes a bit of a cudgel

00:15:42.260 that's used against common sense. I remember like the SNC-Lavalin scandal, for one example,

00:15:47.020 Here we had a story that involved bribing dictators in Libya and the results is, oh, but Quebec jobs.

00:15:53.340 And again, here we have, oh, think of the jobs. 0.60

00:15:56.980 Yeah, and I think some people, sorry, GDLS, again, you know, supplying weaponry to a human rights abusing regime and oh, but the jobs.

00:16:04.640 Yep. You know, people also need to remember that, you know, in economies, certain sectors come and go.

00:16:09.080 This idea that we're going to be able to keep, I mean, we might still have, we might still be, you know, horse and buggy economy if people said, well, we can't lose the jobs there.

00:16:16.720 And I give you an example. My hometown Kitchener-Waterloo has gone through so many different iterations. I mean, it was a rubber producer. Then it was an electronics producer. You know, then they switched over to BlackBerry was a giant. BlackBerry went bust and it was supposed to be the end. But guess what happened? All the people that got laid off from BlackBerry, they started new businesses and now there's a thriving ecosystem there.

00:16:36.940 So, you know, there's a saying in free market economics called creative destruction.

00:16:41.820 It sounds bad because there's destruction, but you can't forget the creative part.

00:16:45.860 People have a lot of ingenuity and a lot of entrepreneurship.

00:16:49.700 And, you know, if you create the conditions, if you make it easy to start a business and easy to grow it,

00:16:54.720 you don't have to worry so much about businesses that are dying off because you've got an environment where the next big thing is just around the corner.

00:17:01.780 Aaron Woodrick is the director of federal policy for the, or domestic policy rather,

00:17:06.540 for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Aaron, always a pleasure. Thanks for coming on today.

00:17:10.880 Thanks a lot, Andrew.

00:17:11.820 That was Aaron Woodrick. Great insight on this. And yeah, I think the corporate welfare thing

00:17:17.620 is one where you have to just sever your sentimental attachments to a particular sector

00:17:23.900 or even the idea of jobs. And I think it's difficult. And like I said, I mean, I live

00:17:29.140 in london ontario as many of you know and the uh big one of the big employers just not far from

00:17:35.220 uh well it's not far from anyone who lives in london because it's not a huge city is general

00:17:39.240 dynamics land systems which inked a multi-billion dollar deal with saudi arabia to supply light

00:17:45.440 armored vehicles there and this was a deal championed by the conservatives at the time

00:17:49.320 the liberals were very muted in their criticism because again here we have oh well i don't know

00:17:53.240 we don't want to come out against jobs and then when we learned more and more that it sounded like

00:17:58.220 Saudi Arabia was actually using stuff that Canada was shipping over as part of its human rights

00:18:03.180 abuses again there was this push from the conservatives to not politicize this and to

00:18:09.480 focus on the economy the liberals said oh we're outraged we're going to have an inquiry and a

00:18:13.660 review and nothing has ever come from this so basically the deal still goes on and we because

00:18:19.780 of jobs which are important and we are talking about real people we stop listening to all of

00:18:25.880 these other things in us that we probably should listen to, like common sense, economics, human

00:18:31.320 rights. And that's the problem here. So now you have potentially 3,000 people in St. Thomas that

00:18:36.640 are going to get jobs. Many of them may be looking for jobs. Many of them may be employed elsewhere,

00:18:41.300 and they're going to go and work for the Volkswagen plant. But if you're a Canadian

00:18:45.780 taxpayer who has contributed basically 360 bucks a person, I think that was the math that I didn't

00:18:52.720 do that math myself, but you know, however much it costs each individual taxpayer, where's your ROI

00:18:58.080 on that? Are you going to get a discount on your electric Volkswagen? Probably not. We're going to

00:19:03.620 talk a little bit later on about this historical revisionism that we are seeing from Justin Trudeau,

00:19:09.380 but I wanted to just take a little bit of a jaunt out to Alberta, because as you may know, there's

00:19:13.980 an election coming up there in just one month and five days. True North is going to be covering that

00:19:18.860 election quite extensively and we'll have a bit of a preview in one of the episodes I don't know

00:19:24.280 if it's Friday or maybe next week about what we are going to be doing to cover that but one of

00:19:28.820 the big issues in general that I talked about with Premier Danielle Smith on this show about a month

00:19:34.440 ago is the idea of whether she's really campaigning against the NDP in Alberta or is she campaigning

00:19:40.800 against Ottawa and this is I think the big conflict the big tension right in Alberta is that Alberta

00:19:46.520 sees Ottawa as ever increasing in its encroachment on Alberta's terrain, constitutionally, ethically,

00:19:54.280 politically, morally, and for good reasons. So what Daniel Smith has talked about is the idea

00:19:59.500 of doing as much in Alberta without the federal government as is possible within the constitution.

00:20:05.240 And one of the big issues that's come up time and time again is whether it is long overdue to sever

00:20:10.600 ties with the RCMP to kick them out as the provincial police force and create, like Ontario

00:20:16.320 and Quebec have, a provincial police force in Alberta. This was articulated quite well in a

00:20:23.400 comprehensive piece in C2C Journal, which you should definitely add to your reading list. It

00:20:27.840 was written by longtime journalist Doug Furby, who joins me now. Doug, it is good to talk to you.

00:20:33.260 Thanks for coming on today. Oh, thanks for the invitation, Andrew. Great to be here.

00:20:37.340 Now, just for people that don't understand the arrangement, I mean, yes, the RCMP is a national police force, but when it is in a provincial context, it's not operating as such.

00:20:48.360 That's right. It's actually a two-headed monster, if you'll forgive the term. It's really a national police force, and then it's also a force that does community policing.

00:20:57.480 It does it at the provincial level, and it also does it at the city level, the community level.

00:21:03.220 so why is this such an issue in alberta because as we've seen in the firearms debate

00:21:10.140 where alberta has directed the rcmp to not enforce the federal government's gun grab they ultimately

00:21:15.980 have oversight on how the rcmp when it's operating that provincial or community mandate does its job

00:21:22.180 so why does it need to have its own alberta provincial police i think there's a couple of

00:21:27.500 really important reasons there, Andrew. I mean, first and foremost, this started with

00:21:32.400 the Fair Deal panel that was struck in 2019 by the previous premier, Jason Kenney, and

00:21:38.740 that panel recognized in May of 2020 that this would be one of the easiest ways that

00:21:47.740 Alberta could assert a little more of its independence to get out from under the RCMP.

00:21:53.020 And there's lots of examples why that's a good idea.

00:21:56.360 I mean, you think about the floods in High River in which the RCMP swooped in and seized

00:22:02.700 a bunch of people's guns without authorization, ostensibly for safety reasons, but it took

00:22:09.840 those people months and months to get their rightfully owned legal registered weapons

00:22:14.720 back.

00:22:15.160 So there are irritants like that that go on all the time.

00:22:18.600 But I think there's a much larger issue, and that is that any police force that ultimately answers to the federal government, I think we all believe that it can't be as effective and do as good a job as a locally authorized, locally mandated police force.

00:22:36.860 this idea is not a really new idea you go back to the alberta firewall letter and this was

00:22:45.580 one of the things that was put forward that alberta should assert itself and at the time i

00:22:49.980 think it was to let the contract expire in 2012 if i recall for for the rcmp and set up an alberta

00:22:56.480 provincial police force but again conservative governments in alberta even ralph klein have not

00:23:01.460 accepted this they've not actually moved ahead with this so what's been the sticking point is

00:23:05.960 it just cost is it other people not seeing the need i think it's a matter of political will i

00:23:11.780 mean when you look at the um polling that's done about the public attitude about the rcmp

00:23:18.240 a lot of people support the rcmp in polls and i'm going to distinguish between the rcmp officers and

00:23:26.960 the rcmp leadership because there's very little confidence in the leadership the senior leadership

00:23:32.300 at the ICMP. But there is a sentimental attachment to the ICMP. And so you've got the Alberta

00:23:39.020 Municipal Association coming out saying we don't want to have a provincial police force,

00:23:44.700 we want to stick with the ICMP. So there's a political risk for any government to move ahead

00:23:50.700 with this proposal because there's so much sentiment that it's almost a nostalgic attachment

00:23:56.220 to what we thought of as one of the great police forces in the world at one point.

00:24:04.800 So let's talk about where the current Alberta government is.

00:24:09.000 Now, obviously, this is a government that, as I mentioned, is seeking re-election.

00:24:12.280 We don't know if it's going to be a UCP government in six weeks or an NDP government.

00:24:17.520 But where is the Danielle Smith government on this issue?

00:24:19.740 well the the government ministers uh who are responsible for this the justice minister

00:24:26.740 is very closed mouth about it i know that he personally is in favor of replacing the rcmp

00:24:35.800 with the provincial police force i think mike ellis the safety minister feels the same way

00:24:42.060 and i think the government if they felt if they saw their way clear to do this would act very

00:24:48.400 quickly on it. As you know, as you talked about, we've got an election on the horizon. It's not a

00:24:55.020 good time to take a politically risky move. I think if the Smith government is able to get a

00:25:01.940 new mandate, a majority government, I would bet that they would move pretty quickly on this.

00:25:08.520 You know, we've seen in the last couple of years in particular, some profound institutional

00:25:14.320 failings by the RCMP. I think we can point to the Emergencies Act and a lot of what we learned

00:25:20.080 during the Public Order Emergency Commission, certainly the Nova Scotia killing, which you've

00:25:25.320 referenced in your piece here in C2C Journal, just profound failures. We saw evidence of the

00:25:32.200 RCMP really just running political interference for the Liberal government. So this is not an

00:25:36.360 institution that when you, again, not talking about the individual frontline officers, it's not

00:25:40.960 an institution that is without controversy, that's without challenges to its ethics, to its efficacy.

00:25:47.360 So it shouldn't be, I think, a difficult sell to voters if they care about the issue. And I guess

00:25:54.660 that's the question. I don't know if this is an issue that matters to a lot of people, or if

00:25:59.520 their sense is, is it going to be better at solving crime? Is it going to be better at dealing with

00:26:04.340 the property crime in my city? And is there an argument one way or another about whether

00:26:09.240 you would get better policing from an Alberta force, or do you think that is relatively equivalent?

00:26:15.100 Andrew, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that you would get better policing. The devil

00:26:21.940 is always in the details, but one of the communities that I looked at in that article

00:26:28.840 that you referenced in the CDC Journal was Grand Prairie. That city has been looking at

00:26:34.260 getting out of RCMP contracts and doing their own police force,

00:26:39.360 they've moved ahead with that.

00:26:41.180 And I talked with one of the counselors who was a leader in that,

00:26:44.520 and he has spent hundreds of hours looking into this.

00:26:48.080 And there's a couple of real sore points with the RCMP.

00:26:50.660 One of them is when the town suggests unusual or unique initiatives,

00:26:58.540 let's get more officers out into the community, more social interaction.

00:27:02.820 this then has to go up through the hierarchy in the RCMP

00:27:06.840 and in one case, one initiative that they proposed

00:27:10.000 it took 15 years to get that initiative approved

00:27:14.420 15 years, those criminals have grown up and moved on since then

00:27:19.580 and so there's that

00:27:23.360 there's this stasis, this inability to get anything done

00:27:27.240 and then I think the other thing is

00:27:29.700 You know, the RCMP, a lot of the officers who start in the smaller communities are looking to build their careers.

00:27:37.700 So they'll spend a couple of years in a small Alberta town, and then they're looking to move up and out.

00:27:44.200 And oftentimes that's out of the province.

00:27:46.560 So you don't get the officers staying in the community, knowing the people at the same level,

00:27:51.740 really knowing what's going on in that community as well as you would if you had a local police force.

00:27:57.160 The other thing is, there's one other thing.

00:27:59.080 I think that there would be a much higher level of coordination

00:28:01.980 between Alberta agencies, other Alberta agencies,

00:28:06.280 such as social service agencies and the police service.

00:28:10.100 So I think, in effect, we would have more boots on the ground,

00:28:13.840 that they may not all be sworn officers,

00:28:16.100 but we've got more people out there looking for public safety.

00:28:20.360 Well, it's certainly an interesting debate.

00:28:22.460 You can read the piece here at c2cjournal.ca.

00:28:25.860 It is called Crime and Mismanagement, Why It's Time to Drop the RCMP and Create an Alberta Police.

00:28:31.900 Doug Furby is the author, and it's with me now.

00:28:33.980 Doug, thanks so much for coming on today. Good to talk to you.

00:28:36.420 My pleasure.

00:28:38.500 Pleasure to talk to you, Andrew.

00:28:40.220 Thank you very much, Doug.

00:28:42.300 This is a story that came up today that I must admit,

00:28:46.740 when I was just sort of casually bouncing around the internet looking at things to talk about,

00:28:51.180 and I heard it playing, I was like, oh, that sounded a weird little thing.

00:28:55.400 I thought it was a deep fake.

00:28:56.880 I don't know if you know these things.

00:28:58.060 It's like before AI, it's this technology that lets you just make a video of someone

00:29:05.060 saying something that they never said.

00:29:07.620 And some of these things are getting quite convincing.

00:29:10.100 My whole show actually has been a deep fake.

00:29:12.120 Like I said in the last show, I'm actually not here.

00:29:14.760 But this was a video that I saw.

00:29:17.620 I'm like, oh, there's no way Justin Trudeau could have dared say that.

00:29:20.340 This must be a deep fake.

00:29:21.540 But no, it was not a deep fake.

00:29:23.620 This was him sitting down at a round table at the University of Ottawa with the president of Germany

00:29:29.540 and engaging in a little bit of a historical revisionist exercise.

00:29:34.980 Take a look.

00:29:37.500 And all of the scientists and the medical experts and the researchers,

00:29:43.180 not just in Canada but around the world,

00:29:47.340 understood that vaccination was going to be the way through this.

00:29:51.000 and therefore while not forcing anyone to get vaccinated

00:29:56.740 I chose to make sure that all the incentives

00:30:00.380 and all the protections were there

00:30:03.060 to encourage Canadians to get vaccinated

00:30:05.380 and that's exactly what they did

00:30:07.180 we got vaccinated to a higher level

00:30:08.980 than just about any other of our peer countries

00:30:11.420 and that's why we had a less deadly pandemic

00:30:14.780 than most other countries

00:30:16.280 now I see a lot of people nodding along with that

00:30:20.220 but boy oh boy you know the comments section on the live stream right now is exploding with people

00:30:27.560 who are in deep deep disagreement with everything i just said and we have to figure out how

00:30:38.360 to continue to protect those people because my job as prime minister is to keep people alive

00:30:48.420 and keep people safe and keep democracy going whether or not they choose to believe that's

00:30:55.240 what i'm doing or not when he references people in the comment section disagreeing i'm like

00:31:04.040 hi are you talking i'm not commenting but are you talking about me so he his first claim there that

00:31:09.540 we have to unpack is that he never forced anyone to get vaccinated he just offered a bunch of

00:31:15.400 incentives for people who did it. This is a little montage that we have shared clips of

00:31:22.340 in the past on this show about all of the things Justin Trudeau has said

00:31:27.900 about the unvaccinated and the stakes of being unvaccinated.

00:31:34.680 If you don't want to get vaccinated, that's your choice. But don't think you can get on a plane

00:31:40.420 or a train besides vaccinated people and put them at risk.

00:31:44.300 The small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa

00:31:50.360 or who are holding unacceptable views that they're expressing

00:31:54.920 do not represent the views of Canadians who have been there.

00:32:00.560 Concerns expressed by a few people gathered in Ottawa right now

00:32:04.880 are not new, not surprising, are heard, but are a continuation of what we've unfortunately seen

00:32:12.580 in disinformation and misinformation online, conspiracy theorists about microchips, about

00:32:19.400 God knows what else that go with the tinfoil hats. Conservative party members can stand with

00:32:24.920 people who wave swastikas. They can stand with people who wave the confederate.

00:32:29.700 that list by the way went on for another i don't know minute or so uh this little montage of his

00:32:40.220 comments about uh the unvaccinated about people that don't get vaccinated about people that

00:32:44.440 protest against his vaccine mandates do these sound like just little incentives they're little

00:32:49.160 incentives it's your choice do what you want but it's all good we're just gonna just try to coax

00:32:54.260 you in the right direction? No. Justin Trudeau's entire approach was to vilify and demonize

00:33:01.820 anyone who, for whatever reason, did not want to get vaccinated against COVID. That was his

00:33:08.300 government's approach. So when he says we never forced anyone, let's talk about what his government

00:33:17.000 did. His government forced people who were unvaccinated into a two-week-long quarantine

00:33:23.200 after they entered their own country if, that is, they had been able to leave

00:33:27.420 because they were not allowed to board a plane in Canada

00:33:30.980 or to otherwise, in some cases, go into different provinces.

00:33:34.660 That was a provincial rule, I'll give you on that one.

00:33:37.260 But to get on a plane, you had to be vaccinated.

00:33:40.060 To get on a train, you had to be vaccinated.

00:33:43.440 If you wanted to work in the public service,

00:33:46.220 why on earth you'd want to work in the public service right now, I have no idea.

00:33:50.020 But if you did, you would have to get vaccinated.

00:33:52.360 you wanted to serve your country wearing a uniform, as perhaps you had done around the world,

00:33:57.780 you would lose your commission if you were not vaccinated. You'd get fired if you were not

00:34:04.040 vaccinated. So let's stop pretending that people in this country had a choice when the government

00:34:11.600 manipulated the outcomes and consequences of not making the choice it wanted you to make

00:34:18.240 to such a point where for some people it was untenable to continue to live without doing

00:34:24.980 something against their will, something they did not want to do. That is what this was. So no,

00:34:31.280 you did not remain able to just free of coercion, make up your own mind. People who could not afford

00:34:40.260 to lose their job had to do it for the sole reason of not being fired. People that would

00:34:46.480 have been able to afford to put food on their children's dinner plates had to get vaccinated

00:34:52.880 that is not a choice free of coercion so no justin drew did not protect and preserve the right to

00:35:00.480 make your own choice while just offering a little incentive you get a little like 50 gift card if

00:35:05.200 you get vaccinated no he made it so some people could not actually live their lives work visit

00:35:10.320 their family members visit dying family members on the other end of the country if they were not

00:35:15.520 vaccinated that justin trudeau is not a choice and by the way it also was not all that effective

00:35:24.160 he talked about this as though there was an efficacy to this program as though when he put

00:35:29.120 in all of these mandates and restrictions it got canadians having this really high vaccination

00:35:34.400 rate canada was on track to have a high vaccination rate in general and it did close to 90 percent of

00:35:40.560 people got the two doses before they changed the definition and made that no longer fully vaccinated

00:35:46.640 and the reason i bring that up is because if you look at the chart and i should have pulled it for

00:35:52.000 today's show i may do this tomorrow if you look at the chart on vaccine uptake in canada it actually

00:35:58.160 was pretty much at a flat line by the time the really restrictive mandates came into effect so

00:36:04.240 So that's late fall of 2021 into the winter of 2022.

00:36:08.960 So when we had the ban on getting on planes,

00:36:12.200 when we had the ban on working in the public service,

00:36:14.560 when we had the Freedom Convoy,

00:36:16.880 which came as a response to this and other aspects of it,

00:36:20.060 when you had the trucker mandate,

00:36:21.780 forgot about that one earlier,

00:36:23.380 vaccination uptake was actually going nowhere.

00:36:27.240 So these measures were not getting more people

00:36:29.720 to be vaccinated.

00:36:30.760 What these measures were doing were demonizing

00:36:33.720 and vilifying and punishing the unvaccinated.

00:36:37.540 And you see it in that very first clip we played there of him

00:36:40.520 at a campaign rally in Calgary,

00:36:42.640 which is you don't get to sit on a plane beside a vaccinated person.

00:36:47.360 That was Justin Trudeau's approach.

00:36:49.240 It had nothing to do with public safety.

00:36:51.440 It had nothing to do with transmission.

00:36:53.120 It was I don't want to see when I'm on a plane 1.00

00:36:55.960 some dirty, nasty, unvaccinated person beside me. 1.00

00:36:59.540 That was the entire intelligentsia, Laurentian elite, 0.99

00:37:02.620 Justin Trudeopian liberal approach. 0.95

00:37:05.180 It was that the unvaccinated 1.00

00:37:06.420 are disgusting, despicable people. 1.00

00:37:08.720 And that's why anyone who took a stand 0.99

00:37:10.580 with the Freedom Convoy 0.92

00:37:11.580 was a fringe, unacceptable swastika waiver

00:37:14.840 in Trudeau's eyes.

00:37:16.140 So you don't get to revise history now

00:37:18.000 and say that you have always protected

00:37:19.940 and preserved the right to make your own choices

00:37:22.100 because that is just a work of fiction.

00:37:25.900 We've got to end things there.

00:37:27.320 My thanks to you all.

00:37:28.420 And we will be back tomorrow

00:37:29.420 with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show

00:37:32.480 thank you, God bless, and good day to you all.

Juno News - April 24, 2023

Government spending $13 billion for 3,000 jobs

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