00:02:41.420his revolution will continue with all who knew and loved him. Will you join us? 1949 to 2023.
00:02:49.980Now, I first met Tarek on The Michael Coren Show, which is a show that itself is a bit dated. It
00:02:56.980was back on CTS, a station that's no longer in existence. It's been rebranded as something else.
00:03:02.600And Tarek Vittal was one of the panelists on the left. I was one of the panelists on the right.
00:03:07.160and we would have some very, very heated debates.
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00:03:11.760And I was a young little punk, bull in the china shop type,
00:03:16.080and he was a bit of a bull in the china shop himself,
00:03:18.580but with a lot more maturity and a lot more, I think, evidence and experience to back it up.
00:03:23.920But he was always so respectful, as respectful as he was passionate.
00:03:27.960And we sparred on some things, we agreed on others,
00:03:30.700we disagreed, of course, as I mentioned, on a few.
00:03:33.620But I really valued those interactions.
00:03:36.840And 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.
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00:03:55.560And 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.
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00:04:06.840And he did this while also being a tremendously compassionate and caring figure, which made him such a thoughtful commentator.
00:04:14.840And, 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.
00:04:24.100And there was this bad news story and this bad news story and all of that.
00:04:27.480he messaged me and said some very kind things which in that moment were needed and were from
00:04:34.240an unlikely source given that he was not at all a conservative i think he voted ndp in that election
00:04:39.260and i was the conservative candidate but he was incredibly kind and incredibly thoughtful and i
00:04:44.940know he has left a huge mark both in his family and in his work and he will be missed by me and
00:04:51.140by many many others so Tarek Fatal we thank you so much for all your work and we miss you and I
00:04:58.000will just moving on to the news of the day here of which there is quite a bit to get through I
00:05:03.240want to talk about this story which is actually challenging for me in some ways because it's a
00:05:07.920local story to a lot of the people in my neighborhood and my immediate circle St. Thomas
00:05:12.520Ontario small town about half an hour from here getting a giant giga factory from Volkswagen to
00:05:19.320manufacture batteries for electric vehicles. This is costing Canadian taxpayers $13 billion
00:05:26.360in subsidies to make 3,000 jobs. That's the claim. Now, they say there are going to be some
00:05:33.280indirect jobs in the range of 30,000. Even then, we're talking about a large sum. If you do the
00:05:39.320math, that's about $4.3 million per job, which strikes me as something that might have some
00:05:45.240better ways to spend it to yield some economic development in southwestern Ontario or beyond
00:05:52.840in this country. And this is, to my knowledge, the largest bit of corporate welfare in Canada's
00:05:59.420history. Not even Bombardier, I think, has built a plant that got $13 billion worth of government
00:06:05.280funding. Aaron Woodrick, who is the director of domestic policy for the Macdonald-Laurier
00:06:11.000Institute joins me now. Aaron, let's just talk about the math here. Do you think that we are
00:06:17.020going to get $13 billion worth of value from this? Yeah, it's really hard to see how, Andrew. And
00:06:23.640look, I empathize. I'm from, like you, I'm from southwestern Ontario. I'm just down the 401 in
00:06:28.160KW. All my family lives in London. I got friends in St. Thomas. So look, you can be conflicted
00:06:34.120because there are real people in real community that will benefit from this. But when you zoom
00:06:38.720out and you ask yourself the amount of money, I mean, just to sort of put the sum into context
00:06:44.300here, Andrew, you talk about Bombardier. I mean, they were sort of the champions of corporate
00:06:47.940welfare in this country. They managed to get about $4 billion. That was over 50 years,
00:06:52.960over dozens of handouts. VW has managed to get more than three times that in one go for a single
00:07:00.020plant. And the craziest thing of all, wasn't even brought up in question period by anybody the day
00:07:05.620after this news leak, which was just astonishing to me. I mean, the idea that parties like,
00:07:10.800you know, the Conservators and the Democrats have nothing to say on this really just kind of floored
00:07:16.260me. Yeah. And one of the challenges is that you had the provincial Conservative government that
00:07:21.540has been cheerleading this as well. They were there at the announcement. They've been talking
00:07:26.000about how great it is. You had the local Conservative MP, Karen Vecchio, who I know
00:07:30.900quite well was there and was actually used I think quite cynically by Justin Trudeau as a prop on
00:07:36.520this. He was then chiding her for Pierre Polyev not jumping up and down supporting this. So the
00:07:42.140idea that we're all just supposed to say it's great for the community so we all rally behind
00:07:46.320this without looking at the numbers is I think quite concerning. Yeah and you know the dirty
00:07:51.480little secret here Andrew is most of these politicians if you get them in private off the
00:07:55.420record they'll all acknowledge that this is a subsidy. They'll all acknowledge that this is not
00:07:59.360great stuff what they really should say if they were going to be straight with us is guess what
00:08:03.940vw was shopping around they were going to put this plant wherever they got the best deal
00:08:08.100so we gave them the best deal you know at least if governments were honest about that and saying
00:08:12.560you know it's unfortunate that we have to subsidize this stuff but it's the only way to get these
00:08:17.560kinds of plants i would respect that more i still think it's a bad economic argument and people need
00:08:21.920to realize that in st thomas for example st thomas a lot of the people that are going to end up at
00:08:27.000working at this plant are going to be sucked out of other businesses in St. Thomas. It's not
00:08:31.500necessarily folks who are unemployed in St. Thomas that will fill these jobs. It's people who are
00:08:35.580working in companies in St. Thomas that won't be able to compete with VW and their federally
00:08:40.620subsidized jobs. So it's not all, even for places like St. Thomas, it's not a clear win when you
00:08:46.020think of all the other businesses there that don't get that kind of special treatment.
00:08:50.200One of the problems with corporate welfare is that it'd be, especially when you compound it
00:08:54.700with globalization is that you have this system where companies literally do what you just
00:08:59.460described with Volkswagen. They go shopping around. I think it was back in 2017 when Amazon
00:09:04.480was remarkably transparent about this. They basically said, we're having a contest on where
00:09:09.140to build our second headquarters. And it was basically who's going to give us the most money
00:09:12.820and then we'll go there. In this particular case, Canada was competing with the United States,
00:09:18.400which is 10 times the size of Canada, has an astronomically larger GDP, more money to work
00:09:24.000with so how on earth is canada supposed to compete because there is an argument i don't like the
00:09:28.880argument that these are just the rules of the game now and if you want any investment this is how you
00:09:33.100have to do it yeah well first of all it's very it's impossible to compete with economy 10 times
00:09:38.100your size you're never going to be able to match them on everything dollar for dollar um but i think
00:09:42.280the the the unspoken assumption in that is that we have to be in the business of building electric
00:09:46.980cars right it's like we absolutely must be doing this one type of thing and really when you zoom
00:09:52.340out again there's no there's no argument that economically this is something we have to be in
00:09:56.800it's something we want to be in because politically it's popular and it's cool and it's easy to say
00:10:01.380this is the sector of the future but I got news for people governments are not very good at
00:10:05.940predicting the future you know they're not very good at picking winners and losers which is the
00:10:09.660reason they shouldn't do it um so this idea that this is one thing that we absolutely have to be
00:10:14.480in I mean what struck me as interesting Andrews if we want to be a part of for example the supply
00:10:18.880chain for electric vehicles. Well, guess what? Canada has a lot of rare earth minerals that are
00:10:23.740only to be found in Canada. All the subsidies in the world and other countries can't replace that.
00:10:29.500So why not worry about finding ways to get that stuff out of the ground, build the infrastructure
00:10:33.660to the ring of fire? These are things we could do to make sure that Canada is part of the supply
00:10:39.880chain for electric vehicles. But this idea that we have to have this plant in the province or the
00:10:45.020sky will fall. There's just no basis for it other than the government saying, well, this is something
00:10:49.240we want to be in. Yeah, that's actually a very important point. And I think that Canada has been
00:10:54.860certainly under this government very bad at leveraging the things where it naturally has
00:10:59.760a comparative advantage. And one example of that is oil and gas. I mean, this is something where
00:11:04.180we're sitting on the advantage. We're sitting on something that makes it so Canada is able to do
00:11:09.040something that other countries cannot do as easily. Why are we competing with things that
00:11:12.860other places could do as easily that could be in you know lithuania or the united states or
00:11:17.700berlin or st thomas and really make no difference yeah and the sad answer to the reason we don't do
00:11:23.440that andrew is political sexiness there are certain types of jobs that are very attractive
00:11:28.160to politicians building airplanes is one of them building vehicles it sounds fancy it sounds
00:11:32.580innovative oh it's really good yeah aerospace is the aerospace you know these are sectors that
00:11:37.700politicians just love because they sound really, really fancy. Things like forestry and agriculture.
00:11:44.640I mean, these sound, it sounds really sort of backwards. And the irony of potash photo op is
00:11:49.460not going to be as sexy. I agree. But ironically, these jobs are things we have a comparative
00:11:54.020advantage in. They pay very well. They don't require government subsidies. And ironically,
00:11:58.740again, in a lot of sectors like agriculture, for example, very, very innovative. Canada has
00:12:02.920cutting edge technology in these sectors and continues to develop it. But you never hear
00:12:07.200about it because to politicians from big cities like Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, that sounds
00:12:11.700like hayseed stuff. And that's the real tragedy here is that Canada actually can compete and win
00:12:17.140in a lot of sectors. It's just not the sectors that all the Laurentian elites want to chase after
00:12:21.980because they want to be popular in places like New York and London. And you're not going to do
00:12:26.360that by focusing on agriculture. So that to me is the real tragedy here is there are a lot of good
00:12:31.140jobs for a lot of Canadians out there, but the sort of elite political class thumbs their nose
00:12:35.760at it and does not devote anywhere near the amount of resources and attention to those areas.
00:12:42.000Is your view that all corporate welfare is bad, that this is just one line item in federal
00:12:46.560programming that we could get rid of? Yeah, generally speaking, yes. I mean,
00:12:50.560sometimes people like to come clap back at me and say, well, what about subsidies for oil and gas?
00:12:54.720I mean, first of all, there aren't as many as these people claim. Most of the people that say
00:12:58.080there's these billions, they're talking about tax credits, which to me is something very different.
00:13:01.680When you give someone a tax break or a tax credit, you're letting them keep more of the
00:13:04.720of the money they've already earned. That's very different than just handing them a pile of money
00:13:08.640from the taxpayer that they never earned. So that's the one difference. The other answer is, yeah, by
00:13:12.400all means, end them for every sector. And the reason is, Andrew, there's no way to have a level
00:13:17.200playing field otherwise. Governments do not know what the best use of investment or people's social
00:13:23.620skills and talent is. And when you pick and choose, you're distorting the economy. You're driving
00:13:29.420investment and job choices away from other areas. And that's just not fair. That's not
00:13:34.500government's role. So I'm all for government trying to lift people up, trying to create an
00:13:39.160environment where any business in any sector can compete. You do that with tax cuts, with better
00:13:43.300regulation, things like that. But the idea that governments somehow know better than the
00:13:48.000marketplace, you know, what should be the employer or what sector we should be in,
00:13:52.500there's simply no basis for it other than the government thinking that they want to be in
00:13:56.740certain sectors. I know your focus is obviously on the policy and not the politics here, but I
00:14:02.220think the two are somewhat linked in this question of how a future government could do anything about
00:14:08.180this, or even if they could. I mean, is this the type of thing where no matter what happens,
00:14:11.800if there were an election, say in a year or two years, this is something that now we're on the
00:14:17.420hook for? I think so. And I think just the reaction to this is telling. Again, the fact
00:14:23.400that you didn't see, you're not seeing opposition parties.
00:14:25.860I mean, remember, in politics, if you spend $13 in an orange juice
00:14:30.000or $6,000 in a hotel room, you'll hear it for days, right?
00:14:33.540Or Galen Weston gets an $11 million pay raise.
00:14:36.040You know, the parties will foam with the mouth
00:14:37.500over relatively small amounts of money.
00:15:21.980We've seen it happen. And I fear that that is going to be how this be this, how this story ends
00:15:26.260as well. Yeah, I fear you're right. And I mean, there are no certainties in economics or anything
00:15:31.360else. And we also sentimentalize jobs for good reason, because, you know, individual people are
00:15:37.200not just numbers on a balance sheet, they're human beings. But it becomes a bit of a cudgel
00:15:42.260that's used against common sense. I remember like the SNC-Lavalin scandal, for one example,
00:15:47.020Here we had a story that involved bribing dictators in Libya and the results is, oh, but Quebec jobs.
00:15:53.340And again, here we have, oh, think of the jobs.
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00:15:56.980Yeah, and I think some people, sorry, GDLS, again, you know, supplying weaponry to a human rights abusing regime and oh, but the jobs.
00:16:04.640Yep. You know, people also need to remember that, you know, in economies, certain sectors come and go.
00:16:09.080This 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.
00:16:16.720And 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.
00:16:36.940So, you know, there's a saying in free market economics called creative destruction.
00:16:41.820It sounds bad because there's destruction, but you can't forget the creative part.
00:16:45.860People have a lot of ingenuity and a lot of entrepreneurship.
00:16:49.700And, you know, if you create the conditions, if you make it easy to start a business and easy to grow it,
00:16:54.720you 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.
00:17:01.780Aaron Woodrick is the director of federal policy for the, or domestic policy rather,
00:17:06.540for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Aaron, always a pleasure. Thanks for coming on today.
00:17:11.820That was Aaron Woodrick. Great insight on this. And yeah, I think the corporate welfare thing
00:17:17.620is one where you have to just sever your sentimental attachments to a particular sector
00:17:23.900or even the idea of jobs. And I think it's difficult. And like I said, I mean, I live
00:17:29.140in london ontario as many of you know and the uh big one of the big employers just not far from
00:17:35.220uh well it's not far from anyone who lives in london because it's not a huge city is general
00:17:39.240dynamics land systems which inked a multi-billion dollar deal with saudi arabia to supply light
00:17:45.440armored vehicles there and this was a deal championed by the conservatives at the time
00:17:49.320the liberals were very muted in their criticism because again here we have oh well i don't know
00:17:53.240we don't want to come out against jobs and then when we learned more and more that it sounded like
00:17:58.220Saudi Arabia was actually using stuff that Canada was shipping over as part of its human rights
00:18:03.180abuses again there was this push from the conservatives to not politicize this and to
00:18:09.480focus on the economy the liberals said oh we're outraged we're going to have an inquiry and a
00:18:13.660review and nothing has ever come from this so basically the deal still goes on and we because
00:18:19.780of jobs which are important and we are talking about real people we stop listening to all of
00:18:25.880these other things in us that we probably should listen to, like common sense, economics, human
00:18:31.320rights. And that's the problem here. So now you have potentially 3,000 people in St. Thomas that
00:18:36.640are going to get jobs. Many of them may be looking for jobs. Many of them may be employed elsewhere,
00:18:41.300and they're going to go and work for the Volkswagen plant. But if you're a Canadian
00:18:45.780taxpayer who has contributed basically 360 bucks a person, I think that was the math that I didn't
00:18:52.720do that math myself, but you know, however much it costs each individual taxpayer, where's your ROI
00:18:58.080on that? Are you going to get a discount on your electric Volkswagen? Probably not. We're going to
00:19:03.620talk a little bit later on about this historical revisionism that we are seeing from Justin Trudeau,
00:19:09.380but I wanted to just take a little bit of a jaunt out to Alberta, because as you may know, there's
00:19:13.980an election coming up there in just one month and five days. True North is going to be covering that
00:19:18.860election quite extensively and we'll have a bit of a preview in one of the episodes I don't know
00:19:24.280if it's Friday or maybe next week about what we are going to be doing to cover that but one of
00:19:28.820the big issues in general that I talked about with Premier Danielle Smith on this show about a month
00:19:34.440ago is the idea of whether she's really campaigning against the NDP in Alberta or is she campaigning
00:19:40.800against Ottawa and this is I think the big conflict the big tension right in Alberta is that Alberta
00:19:46.520sees Ottawa as ever increasing in its encroachment on Alberta's terrain, constitutionally, ethically,
00:19:54.280politically, morally, and for good reasons. So what Daniel Smith has talked about is the idea
00:19:59.500of doing as much in Alberta without the federal government as is possible within the constitution.
00:20:05.240And one of the big issues that's come up time and time again is whether it is long overdue to sever
00:20:10.600ties with the RCMP to kick them out as the provincial police force and create, like Ontario
00:20:16.320and Quebec have, a provincial police force in Alberta. This was articulated quite well in a
00:20:23.400comprehensive piece in C2C Journal, which you should definitely add to your reading list. It
00:20:27.840was written by longtime journalist Doug Furby, who joins me now. Doug, it is good to talk to you.
00:20:33.260Thanks for coming on today. Oh, thanks for the invitation, Andrew. Great to be here.
00:20:37.340Now, 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.
00:20:48.360That'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.
00:20:57.480It does it at the provincial level, and it also does it at the city level, the community level.
00:21:03.220so why is this such an issue in alberta because as we've seen in the firearms debate
00:21:10.140where alberta has directed the rcmp to not enforce the federal government's gun grab they ultimately
00:21:15.980have oversight on how the rcmp when it's operating that provincial or community mandate does its job
00:21:22.180so why does it need to have its own alberta provincial police i think there's a couple of
00:21:27.500really important reasons there, Andrew. I mean, first and foremost, this started with
00:21:32.400the Fair Deal panel that was struck in 2019 by the previous premier, Jason Kenney, and
00:21:38.740that panel recognized in May of 2020 that this would be one of the easiest ways that
00:21:47.740Alberta could assert a little more of its independence to get out from under the RCMP.
00:21:53.020And there's lots of examples why that's a good idea.
00:21:56.360I mean, you think about the floods in High River in which the RCMP swooped in and seized
00:22:02.700a bunch of people's guns without authorization, ostensibly for safety reasons, but it took
00:22:09.840those people months and months to get their rightfully owned legal registered weapons
00:22:15.160So there are irritants like that that go on all the time.
00:22:18.600But 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.
00:22:36.860this idea is not a really new idea you go back to the alberta firewall letter and this was
00:22:45.580one of the things that was put forward that alberta should assert itself and at the time i
00:22:49.980think it was to let the contract expire in 2012 if i recall for for the rcmp and set up an alberta
00:22:56.480provincial police force but again conservative governments in alberta even ralph klein have not
00:23:01.460accepted this they've not actually moved ahead with this so what's been the sticking point is
00:23:05.960it just cost is it other people not seeing the need i think it's a matter of political will i
00:23:11.780mean when you look at the um polling that's done about the public attitude about the rcmp
00:23:18.240a lot of people support the rcmp in polls and i'm going to distinguish between the rcmp officers and
00:23:26.960the rcmp leadership because there's very little confidence in the leadership the senior leadership
00:23:32.300at the ICMP. But there is a sentimental attachment to the ICMP. And so you've got the Alberta
00:23:39.020Municipal Association coming out saying we don't want to have a provincial police force,
00:23:44.700we want to stick with the ICMP. So there's a political risk for any government to move ahead
00:23:50.700with this proposal because there's so much sentiment that it's almost a nostalgic attachment
00:23:56.220to what we thought of as one of the great police forces in the world at one point.
00:24:04.800So let's talk about where the current Alberta government is.
00:24:09.000Now, obviously, this is a government that, as I mentioned, is seeking re-election.
00:24:12.280We don't know if it's going to be a UCP government in six weeks or an NDP government.
00:24:17.520But where is the Danielle Smith government on this issue?
00:24:19.740well the the government ministers uh who are responsible for this the justice minister
00:24:26.740is very closed mouth about it i know that he personally is in favor of replacing the rcmp
00:24:35.800with the provincial police force i think mike ellis the safety minister feels the same way
00:24:42.060and i think the government if they felt if they saw their way clear to do this would act very
00:24:48.400quickly on it. As you know, as you talked about, we've got an election on the horizon. It's not a
00:24:55.020good time to take a politically risky move. I think if the Smith government is able to get a
00:25:01.940new mandate, a majority government, I would bet that they would move pretty quickly on this.
00:25:08.520You know, we've seen in the last couple of years in particular, some profound institutional
00:25:14.320failings by the RCMP. I think we can point to the Emergencies Act and a lot of what we learned
00:25:20.080during the Public Order Emergency Commission, certainly the Nova Scotia killing, which you've
00:25:25.320referenced in your piece here in C2C Journal, just profound failures. We saw evidence of the
00:25:32.200RCMP really just running political interference for the Liberal government. So this is not an
00:25:36.360institution that when you, again, not talking about the individual frontline officers, it's not
00:25:40.960an institution that is without controversy, that's without challenges to its ethics, to its efficacy.
00:25:47.360So it shouldn't be, I think, a difficult sell to voters if they care about the issue. And I guess
00:25:54.660that's the question. I don't know if this is an issue that matters to a lot of people, or if
00:25:59.520their sense is, is it going to be better at solving crime? Is it going to be better at dealing with
00:26:04.340the property crime in my city? And is there an argument one way or another about whether
00:26:09.240you would get better policing from an Alberta force, or do you think that is relatively equivalent?
00:26:15.100Andrew, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that you would get better policing. The devil
00:26:21.940is always in the details, but one of the communities that I looked at in that article
00:26:28.840that you referenced in the CDC Journal was Grand Prairie. That city has been looking at
00:26:34.260getting out of RCMP contracts and doing their own police force,