A day makes a difference. Just one day after the Trudeau government leaked a story to the media suggesting a pipeline deal with Alberta was imminent, Liberal MPs have now denied that any such thing is in the works. Meanwhile, the Premier of British Columbia says, unless the feds use legal means to steamroll the project past the province s objections, there will be no pipeline.
00:02:32.080I'll point out what is obvious to me and has yet to fully sink in for some individuals,
00:02:40.080which is that there is no pipeline project across the north. There is no route. There is no proponent.
00:02:48.080There is no financing. Simply because the Premier of Alberta would like to get rid of the oil tanker ban
00:02:56.080on the north coast does not mean that anybody wants to build this pipeline.
00:03:00.080I don't see any prospect of a pipeline unless it is fully taxpayer funded and the federal government forces it through
00:03:07.080over provincial and Indigenous objections.
00:03:10.080Okay, so why then is the government leaking stories to the Globe and Mail about an imminent pipeline construction deal with Alberta?
00:03:17.080Well, that doesn't make any sense, does it?
00:03:19.080Conservative Party leader Pierre Polyev says if the Karni government does push this project forward,
00:03:25.080it should admit that it was wrong to cancel a similar project nine years ago.
00:03:29.080June of 2014, the Conservative government approved a pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific.
00:03:35.080November 29th, 2016, this Liberal government cancelled that pipeline ordering the Energy Board to dismiss it.
00:03:42.080March 27th, 2021, this current Liberal Prime Minister said that he did not, that he supported cancelling the pipeline.
00:03:51.080We're hoping the Prime Minister will announce that he was wrong and that the Liberal government was wrong to kill the Northern Gateway pipeline that had been approved back in 2014.
00:04:01.080John Robson has some thoughts on all of this. He'll be joining us a few minutes from now.
00:04:06.080Well, the U.S. Ambassador to Canada says any hopes of reopening trade talks between the two countries may depend on Canada buying more F-35 fighter jets.
00:04:16.080Peter Hoekstra has urged Canada to buy up to 88 of the jets from Lockheed Martin instead of switching over to Sweden's Gripen fighter jet.
00:04:26.080We have a framework, Ambassador, that, you know, the USMC or Kuzma, as we like to call it here.
00:04:31.080What is your, what's your most optimistic view of what the next iteration of that agreement will look like?
00:04:36.080Well, on a number of these issues, we are, we're actually waiting to see exactly where the Canadian government is going to come out on this.
00:04:46.080Like I said, on the F-35, we've got all kinds of people and companies that are involved.
00:04:51.080We've got to figure out exactly, you know, what is, we don't, we need to know what it means that you're going to build a Canadian defense infrastructure.
00:05:04.080The Trump administration broke off trade talks with Canada last month when Ontario ran an anti-tariff ad on U.S. network television and upset the Trump administration.
00:05:16.080A senior government bureaucrat says Prime Minister Carney should not have to sell off his stock investment because the country really needs a guy like him right now.
00:05:27.080Carney's multi-million dollar investment may put him in a conflict of interest.
00:05:32.080But Michael Sabia, he's the clerk of the Privy Council, says forcing such a talented man like Carney to do such a thing is complicated.
00:05:40.080When a person runs for prime minister and is that conflicted, should they not divest themselves of all of the assets to ensure that we can have public confidence, restore public confidence that the person who is holding the highest office in the land is not benefiting from decisions that are being made, whether they're on a general basis, given the policy announcements that have been made.
00:06:06.080And when you layer it down to the specifics, there is the potential for profit to be made.
00:06:12.080We need access to the best, the best talent that this country can provide.
00:06:16.080That, I think, requires careful judgment about striking a balance between, on the one hand, the very legitimate point you make with respect to confidence and accountability and transparency, which is what the screen is all about and why we are being so diligent and so careful about that screen.
00:06:36.080Because I endorse 100% the importance of those principles in the eyes of Canadians.
00:06:43.080On the other hand, we also have to be able to get the best talent that we can because Canada needs it.
00:06:48.080You get a great resume, you don't have to worry about stuff like conflicts of interest.
00:06:53.080Depending on where and how the government decides to spend billions of tax dollars, Carney stands to enrich himself and his former friends and employer at Brookfield Asset Management to the tune of billions.
00:07:06.080And we're now joined by John Robson, who's a journalist, historian and documentary filmmaker.
00:07:13.080All right, let's look at what's taken place over the last 48 hours or so.
00:07:18.080So we've had the Globe and Mail story coming out, you know, got everybody excited.
00:07:23.080A lot of people in Alberta saying, oh, finally, there's a deal, you know, in the works, a real deal that would mean a pipeline from the oil sands of Alberta, right to the Pacific coast through Northern BC.
00:07:34.080You know, the government is committed to it today.
00:07:39.080We're seeing a video of, videos of procession of, of liberals coming out.
00:07:44.080Many of them, you know, are blinders as far as the climate goes, saying no way.
00:07:50.080I mean, we're not going to push this past opposition in British Columbia.
00:07:54.080We have to deal with the indigenous communities.
00:07:57.080We have to deal with, you know, extra measures that Alberta is going to have to undertake in order to make oil more palatable to the climate zealots.
00:08:09.080Yeah, well, for my money, journalism in this country could spend more time writing about things that did happen and less time writing about things that insiders say might be going to happen.
00:08:20.080But if they will insist on doing the latter, they ought to do it with a little more sense of what is actually possible.
00:08:28.080I mean, this ties into this larger, weird phenomenon of the major projects office.
00:08:34.080And so we, in Canada, it's very hard to build major projects.
00:08:37.080So the government creates a major projects office.
00:08:39.080And if you were naive, you'd assume that what would then happen is that if a firm wanted to engage in a major project, they would go to the major projects office to seek approval.
00:08:50.080But instead, the prime minister approves things for the major projects office to we know not what.
00:08:55.080Because the next question is, if the prime minister sends something, blesses it, anoints it, and sends it off to the MPO, do they have the power to make it happen?
00:09:05.080So suppose that Mark Carney and Danielle Smith were to say, woo, a pipeline shall be built.
00:09:11.080How does that change the fact that you can't build a pipeline unless you can get through all these regulatory hurdles and the problem that's half regulatory and half sort of political of getting consent from every single Aboriginal group who is or might conceivably be affected by it?
00:09:29.080Including now we're getting land claims from American Aboriginal groups who claim that their ancestors once did something on this territory.
00:09:36.080So the idea that if Mark Carney and Danielle Smith said, let there be pipeline, there would be pipeline, was always silly.
00:09:45.080And then on top of that, you have this problem, as you mentioned about all these liberal MPs marching out to go, whoa, boo, hiss down with fossil fuels, down with pipelines.
00:09:53.080That the people, especially the federal liberal caucus, are trying to be more sane about climate, energy, and the economy.
00:10:02.080But their idea of being more sane isn't that they have ideas that don't make sense, so they should change their ideas.
00:10:07.080What they want to do is have the same ideas, but have them work better.
00:10:10.080And then, of course, you've got the problem that the BC government doesn't think it's insane on the climate file.
00:10:16.080So they're just having the same ideas they've always had, which is that oil is bad and energy should fall from the sky.
00:10:23.080And again, if the media were doing a somewhat better job, they'd be very skeptical of all this stuff.
00:10:28.080One of the things I really dislike, again, about the way journalism is done in this country, by the legacy media in particular, is the hushed tones in which they discuss everything that some politician babbled as though it were necessarily wise and sensible.
00:10:44.080And if they admitted that the people who govern us are, in substantial measure, actual idiots, then, of course, they'd have to admit that they'd spent their whole lifetime covering idiocy and hadn't noticed it.
00:10:54.080They had given it an importance it didn't deserve, and that would be bad on them.
00:10:58.080But their job is to tell us what's happening, not what they wish was happening.
00:11:02.080And so you get a story like Kearney-Smith close to pipeline deal, and almost everything about it is wrong, except the fact that the prime minister is indeed called Kearney and the premier of Alberta is actually called Smith.
00:11:14.080But if you read those stories, you aren't better informed than people who don't read them.
00:11:19.080And that, it seems to me, is a scathing comment on journalism, not to mention, once you look behind the scenes, on the politics of this country, where the prime minister and the premier are trying to reach a deal which, if they did reach it, wouldn't do anything.
00:11:32.080As for whether Danielle Smith is being played, I mean, the weird thing about her is that she's always actually been in on the climate cult, right?
00:11:39.080Danielle Smith is like, we've got to get to net zero.
00:11:41.080You know, we've got a carbon capture storage.
00:11:59.080So in a sense, she's playing herself here.
00:12:01.080And as usual, that's not going very well.
00:12:04.080No, but I think that according to the globe, anyway, these were highly placed government sources.
00:12:10.080And I think our Kearney people who leaked that story to the Globe and Mail knowing full well that they would run it.
00:12:16.080And that it would then be basically slaughtered the following day by a procession of liberals who say, no way, Jose, nothing's changed.
00:12:27.080I mean, what you read between the lines here is that the government was prepared to force this pipeline through.
00:12:34.080You know, past British Columbia's objections.
00:12:38.080And in fact, Evie said the same things that unless they're prepared to, you know, steamroll this thing, there's going to be no pipeline.
00:12:46.080But I think if you're going to do a story about the fact that there's a deal imminent, then, you know, the subtext there is that the government is prepared to do whatever it takes to make that pipeline go through.
00:12:58.080And whether, you know, British Columbia wants it or not.
00:13:02.080So that's the that's the sense I got that.
00:13:05.080And that it went on talking about the exemptions to a tanker traffic ban, you know, along the West Coast.
00:13:13.080So there were aspects about the story enough there that made you think that the government was committed to doing this thing.
00:13:19.080And that's why it kind of surprised some people and shocked some people when you had liberal MP after liberal MP coming out and saying, no, this is BS.
00:13:47.080You know, there's no leak out of the government to the Globe and Mail that isn't sanctioned from on high.
00:13:52.080And this was and I'm just trying to figure out exactly what they're on, whether they're gaslighting people, whether they want to make it look like they do want a pipeline.
00:14:00.080But then, you know, shrug their shoulders after the fact and say, well, we we really can't do it without B.C. going along.
00:14:06.080To me, they want to have it on both sides because they know a lot of Canadians do want a pipeline.
00:14:11.080But they understand that this is a question of increasing resource wealth to the country, that that money is going to filter right across the country.
00:14:19.080But, you know, instead of doing that, I think that playing a duplicitous game, the current government is, I think, on one hand, they want to look like they're pushing this thing.
00:14:27.080And on the other hand, they don't want to push this thing at all.
00:14:31.080That's what I think. What would say you?
00:14:34.080I think that it's a mistake to assume these people are cleverer than they look.
00:14:38.080I agree with you that this did come from the top, right?
00:14:40.080These unnamed sources are almost certainly a guy the prime minister told to tell us this thing.
00:14:45.080But again, one of the things you have to understand about Mark Carney is that he's not a practical measures guy.
00:14:51.080He's made himself rich, famous and internationally influential by talking in highfalutin abstractions like Davos man rhetoric, these long polysyllabic catalyzing the leverage of the transformation kind of stuff.
00:15:05.080He hasn't done it by actually accomplishing things.
00:15:08.080And so to assume that he would know what specifically you'd have to manage to do to get a pipeline built is to give the man too much credit.
00:15:18.080And by the way, here, some people think I nitpick, but I'm going to say this because it is important.
00:15:23.080It's not the government. It's the Carney ministry.
00:15:27.080It's the cabinet, the top of the executive branch saying we want this to happen.
00:15:33.080But there's a whole government out there. There's legislature, there's a judiciary and there's a bureaucracy.
00:15:39.080And these people are not obliged to do what the prime minister says.
00:15:43.080In many cases, in fact, the laws say they have to do certain things, even if the prime minister says don't do them.
00:15:49.080And there are rules about getting pipelines approved.
00:15:53.080There are all kinds. I mean, as everybody knows, there's this huge tangle of regulations.
00:15:57.080It's why the prime minister is now off in the UAE trying to get them to invest here because Canadian firms don't want to.
00:16:02.080Neither do Americans. Neither does anybody who's tried it because it's a nightmare.
00:16:06.080And these rules exist, even if Mark Carney says, I do not believe these rules should exist.
00:16:10.080And when you talk about, you know, do whatever it takes or bulldoze or this or that.
00:16:14.080But technically, you have to get regulatory agencies to issue rulings.
00:16:19.080You and then people challenge them in court and then the judges may say, no, it doesn't meet the standards.
00:16:25.080And if the judge says that, you can't just build it anyway.
00:16:28.080We do have the rule of law in this country.
00:16:30.080And again, we have this very sensitive problem that if Aboriginal groups say, boo hoo, you can't do that.
00:16:34.080This is the land where my great great grandfather fished once.
00:16:37.080They're not just going to send in the tanks, right?
00:16:44.080You know, they may send in cops on horseback against the trekkers convoy, but they're not going to do it against Aboriginals out in the wilds of BC.
00:16:52.080The optics of it and to their own self-understanding of who and what they are, they can't do that.
00:16:58.080So if Aboriginal groups are opposed to building a pipeline in this country, it won't get built.
00:17:03.080And there's just there's nothing the Prime Minister can do about that.
00:17:06.080But this is the key point. He doesn't know that.
00:17:09.080Mark Carney thinks that if he and his like-minded, noble, august persons say, let it be in such a manner, you know, that it's just that it just happens, right?
00:17:20.080They spent 20 years flying around the world doing that and came home with $2,000 shoes.
00:17:26.080He doesn't understand how government works.
00:17:29.080He's not interested in how government works.
00:17:32.080If you look at people who get put in cabinet, you think to yourself, what actually qualifies them to fill the post of minister of whatever they just got parachuted into?
00:17:41.080How much do they know about the workings of the bureaucracy?
00:17:43.080How much do they understand the regulatory regime?
00:17:46.080How experienced are they at drafting and revising legislation?
00:18:02.080And I guess in BC, they've only just now noticed that if they impose an EV mandate that's harsher than the rest of the country, then people will buy cars in other provinces.
00:18:11.080Apparently, this didn't occur to them for the better part of 10 years.
00:18:14.080And then you've got the federal government pausing their EV mandate in order to think about what?
00:18:25.080What argument had they previously not considered that they now think they better look at or had previously rejected, but now they're revisiting, thinking maybe there was more to it than what was said?
00:18:34.080You know, they talk again in this pompous, gassy way that they go on and on and on because they've learned this protective rhetorical coding that prevents anybody from asking you what you actually think you're talking about.
00:18:47.080But what do they actually think they're talking about? Canadians don't want EVs. EVs don't work very well.
00:18:51.080And again, when the government does manage to dump billions of dollars into subsidizing some factory, the odds are 50-50.
00:18:57.080They're talking about 100 years from now, and then the thing goes broke in 10 months.
00:19:01.080They don't know what they're doing. They don't know how anything works.
00:19:04.080They are good at politics, or at least they're better than their rivals, but they're not good at governing because it's the only profession, right?
00:19:11.080You know, how do you get to be a plumber? By proving that you know how to plumb, right?
00:19:15.080How do you get to be a doctor? By proving that you know how to do medicine.
00:19:18.080How do you get to govern? By proving that you know how to do politics.
00:19:22.080And they're very different skills. Politics involves making wildly implausible promises in ways that sound good and hide the fact that you don't know how to do it.
00:19:31.080Governance consists of actually getting results. It's a completely different skill set.
00:19:36.080And government in Canada is broken. It's just amazing, right?
00:19:39.080There was this latest thing about these patrol boats that have to be retired because they were terrible.
00:19:43.080And, you know, there was some other procurement story. I'm sorry.
00:19:46.080The details allude me that just broke where, again, they just utterly bungled it and didn't know what they were doing.
00:19:51.080You know, nothing works really in this country with terrible waiting lists and every election, oh, we're going to get rid of waiting lists.
00:19:58.080And then it's like, oh, they're still there. Well, what was your plan for getting rid of them?
00:20:01.080Well, it was to say we're going to get rid of waiting lists.
00:20:04.080They didn't. They don't like we talk about Canada's health system. Oh, it's not like those awful Americans.
00:20:09.080But if you ask a politician who's a defender of our system, why don't we do it more like Switzerland or Australia?
00:20:16.080What you will discover is they haven't got a clue what Switzerland does.
00:20:20.080They haven't got a clue what Australia does.
00:20:22.080People can be on the health care file in this country for a decade and be a go to source for the media.
00:20:27.080And they have no idea what is being done in other advanced countries where they have universal coverage, but they don't have waiting lists because they allow private insurance.
00:20:37.080It's so simple, but it's not that they disagree with it. They don't know about it.
00:20:42.080And we just, we need to stop pretending our politicians know things because it's giving us this incredibly feeble and infuriating system of government or like the CRA, right?
00:20:53.080Where they, the largest expansion of any part of the bureaucracy, almost 50% more people than when Trudeau came into office and they still can't answer the phone.
00:21:02.080That's so true. Since you brought up the issue of procurement rather, I might as well ask you about the F-35 issue.
00:21:10.080Now we've had the U.S. ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, come out and basically tie the reopening of trade talks, which of course have been off until, since October 23rd, with the procurement of F-35s.
00:21:27.080Now it's out that, you know, we're kicking the tires on this Swedish aircraft, this fighter jet, the Gripen.
00:21:34.080And Hoekstra says, oh, by the way, you know, you should buy the 88 that you originally committed to buying or looked at buying from Lockheed Martin.
00:21:45.080I think we're on the hook for 16, but not the rest. And so he's, he's tying the two in. I mean, I've saw, I've seen some of the reaction from people who say this is a kind of rigmanship.
00:21:58.080This is extortion and we're, you know, they're blackmailing us into buying their planes.
00:22:04.080But I think, you know, we'll buy the best planes. I mean, how do you see this issue playing out?
00:22:10.080In all the usual idiotic ways, we will eventually end up buying F-35s because, oh, we're committed to and we've annoyed the United States quite enough.
00:22:20.300But you remember the idea here was that these things would be our go-to fighter aircraft for 40 years.
00:22:26.160And so this is like forming a plan in 1918 to have biplanes in the Battle of Britain, except that technology is moving faster these days.
00:22:38.020It's clear from what's happening in Ukraine that the future of warfare, including aerial warfare, is unmanned drones.
00:22:44.220Manned fighter aircraft are the past. They're not the future.
00:22:48.580And by the time we actually get these planes, you know, A, the Chinese will have invaded Taiwan and will have gone, oh, oh, isn't it awful?
00:22:55.880And they'll be obsolete. It's ridiculous that we've been thinking of buying them.
00:22:59.900We should be going with drones. That's where things are going.
00:23:04.660They can do all kinds of things that manned fighter aircraft can't do because one thing, you don't have to protect the pilot against all the G-forces.
00:23:11.520We're completely in the wrong market. And we can't make a decision.
00:23:19.180How long has this been going on for? Decades. Decades. And where are the airplanes?
00:23:26.000They're nowhere. That's what you're talking about government in this country being broken.
00:23:28.900The people who run this country know how to talk. They know how to leak to the Globe and Mail.
00:23:32.240They know how to sound pompous. They don't know how to buy an airplane.
00:23:36.480And we've been through this on procurement after procurement. It's not just bad luck on this one or the politics of it.
00:23:43.060Over and over and over again, it takes us decades. Look at our frigates.
00:23:46.620Our frigates are decades old. They're rusted out. We bought used diesel submarines from the UK.
00:23:53.460Recently, D&D put out this press release about how this one they'd managed to cobble together.
00:23:57.060It's the best submarine in our fleet. It's the only submarine in our fleet.
00:24:01.740And they're not embarrassed. They put this kind of thing in a press release and they don't get called out on it.
00:24:07.420But what they can't do is get us submarines. Right?
00:24:10.940Our Navy has no ships. Our Air Force has no planes.
00:24:14.820Our Army has no soldiers. And if it did have soldiers, it couldn't give them weapons.
00:24:19.540If there was a major conflict, Canada could not put a thousand people in the field able to fight.
00:24:27.820And yet, the national debate about defense never focuses on the fact that our military capability has collapsed because it's in the hands of idiots.
00:24:37.900And that is a cross party. Stephen Harper was no better.
00:24:41.600You know, Jack Ranassene wrote a who killed the Canadian military.
00:24:43.940It feels like it was 30 years ago now.
00:24:45.780And the Canadian military has been dead ever since.