Juno News - January 13, 2023


Rupa takes on the WEF


Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

135.92941

Word count

1,864

Sentence count

79


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Chrystia Freeland sits on the advisory board of the World Economic Forum, and Mark Carney is the former Governor of the Bank of England and the UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance where he is promoting all kinds of net zero emission initiatives.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Well, hello everybody and welcome back to the Rupa Subramanir show.
00:00:21.420 I hope you all had a great holiday season and that it was restful and relaxing
00:00:27.640 and you got to spend time with friends and family and that 2023 has gotten off to a great
00:00:33.700 start for everybody.
00:00:35.280 Well, today we're off metaphorically, if not actually going to the luxurious ski resorts
00:00:42.420 of Switzerland, in particular Davos, which has become all but synonymous with, guess
00:00:47.980 what, the World Economic Forum.
00:00:50.440 For those who don't know what the World Economic Forum is, it's the leading private club masquerading
00:00:56.480 as an international organization that brings together the world's richest and most powerful
00:01:02.320 people on the planet and tries to exert influence on economic and social policies in all major
00:01:08.900 countries in the world, including Canada.
00:01:11.600 Now, Canada has the dubious distinction of playing an outsized role in promoting the narrative
00:01:18.220 that comes out of Davos.
00:01:19.940 Let's call it woke capitalism, you know, whether it's called the Great Reset, which aims to
00:01:26.640 put environmental and social concerns ahead of free market capitalism, and as well as the
00:01:33.720 World Economic Forum's insistence on something called stakeholder capitalism, which would be
00:01:39.660 a major departure from our Anglo-Saxon system of shareholder capitalism.
00:01:44.480 What exactly is this strange concept called stakeholder capitalism?
00:01:49.560 Well, according to stakeholder capitalism, basically businesses should move away from what they do
00:01:56.180 best, which is focus on maximizing returns to shareholders, but rather use company resources.
00:02:04.020 Yes, company resources to solve social problems like issues related to gender, for example, or identity,
00:02:11.400 the environment, and the list goes on and on and on.
00:02:15.040 So as Stu, the ultimate goal is to maximize benefits to stakeholders.
00:02:20.340 That is basically everybody from the employees to customers, and perhaps even other countries,
00:02:26.900 believe it or not.
00:02:28.400 The fundamental problem with this concept, I mean, there are many, many problems.
00:02:32.000 The fundamental concept from really a logical perspective is how does a company balance all of
00:02:38.400 these interests of various stakeholders, there are surely going to be trade-offs involved, right?
00:02:43.500 I mean, my interest is not going to intersect with someone else's interest.
00:02:48.160 My interest as an employee will be different from my interest as a customer, for example.
00:02:53.620 So you can see the problem with this.
00:02:56.160 Now, back to Canada.
00:02:58.140 Canada's Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, Chrystia Freeland, sits on the board of the World Economic Forum,
00:03:05.740 as does Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada.
00:03:12.260 Carney is now UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, where he's promoting all kinds of net zero emission initiatives,
00:03:20.700 especially as it relates to the banking and finance industry.
00:03:26.420 I pointed this out, the fact that Freeland and Carney sit on the advisory board of the World Economic Forum.
00:03:34.520 I pointed this out in an opinion piece I wrote for the National Post back in February 2021.
00:03:42.840 And really, until my piece, it appears that no one had really pointed to this obvious fact that is literally there on the World Economic Forum's page.
00:03:53.360 So it came as a surprise to many people when they discovered that our finance minister and deputy prime minister
00:04:01.320 was actually on the advisory board of the World Economic Forum.
00:04:05.840 Now, I argued in that column that Freeland's presence on the board subverts democracy here in Canada.
00:04:13.740 Now, what do I mean by that?
00:04:17.780 Now, subversion of democracy is obviously by inference.
00:04:21.820 No one's actually going to say we're subverting democracy and you're not going to have a smoking gun of someone actually subverting democracy.
00:04:30.320 It just doesn't work that way.
00:04:32.080 But the point here is that the thought leadership that comes out of Davos punches way above its weight.
00:04:37.780 And it's a small elite gathering of powerful people from academia to business.
00:04:44.160 Freeland and Carney are prominent Canadians who wield considerable influence, not just here in Canada, but internationally as well.
00:04:51.920 At Davos, you'll also find captains of industry and finance, as well as the sordid celebrities like Bono, academics and others,
00:05:03.520 all of whom want to remake our global system along the lines of their shared vision of what they want the world to look like.
00:05:12.880 So why exactly is this problematic, you might ask?
00:05:16.500 For one thing, no one in Canada elected Klaus Schwab, the German entrepreneur and would-be do-gooder to decide on our policies,
00:05:26.540 whether they relate to climate change, social issues or anything else.
00:05:31.200 The fact that Freeland sits at the table and presumably shares many of these views is problematic when you consider that, guess what?
00:05:40.500 Her first responsibility is to the people of Canada, who are the only people the government of Canada and its ministers should be working for.
00:05:50.660 As I pointed in my National Post column from February 2021, there's really no problem if Carney sits on their board,
00:06:00.080 since he doesn't hold public office here in Canada.
00:06:03.020 But there's a potential conflict of interest with Freeland, because Freeland is the second most powerful person in the country after Prime Minister Trudeau.
00:06:12.780 Just imagine the optics of, say, the health minister sat on the board of a pharmaceutical company or a tobacco company.
00:06:23.100 Most people would call that out.
00:06:25.340 And the point is, it would likely never happen.
00:06:28.340 But somehow the World Economic Forum has, through clever marketing and PR, created this aura around them, around themselves,
00:06:37.340 that there's some kind of international organization like the UN, for example.
00:06:42.020 But they're not.
00:06:43.200 They're just a private club.
00:06:44.660 It's a by-invitation club.
00:06:46.760 And they're pushing their own private agenda.
00:06:49.520 And they're pretty bold about it.
00:06:51.060 They're pretty open about what their agenda is.
00:06:53.260 But the World Economic Forum seems to get a free pass because of its progressive agenda.
00:06:59.820 Things like stakeholder capitalism, Great Reset, are concepts that appeal to the left liberal intelligentsia.
00:07:08.020 But for a second, let's play this back differently.
00:07:12.760 Suppose Schwab and the World Economic Forum were promoting conservative values, for example.
00:07:18.900 People, free market capitalism, ethno-nationalism, they wouldn't be treated with such deference, right?
00:07:26.800 I don't think so.
00:07:28.360 Now, leaving aside for the moment the conflict of interest issue here, although in my opinion that's a pretty big issue,
00:07:36.320 the usual pushback is why should anyone care if people, a few powerful people, are gathered for a schmooze fest in the Swiss Alps?
00:07:46.280 Well, it goes back to the subversion of local democracy point that I made earlier.
00:07:52.120 The simple answer is that what happens at Davos helps shape the thinking of political and corporate elites in every major country.
00:08:00.960 And that thinking inevitably becomes part of their mindset.
00:08:05.360 There is no question that the Trudeau government's narrative matches what comes out of Davos.
00:08:10.840 In fact, there's this great example back in 2020 when Trudeau is making a speech at the UN about the Great Reset.
00:08:18.980 And it pretty much reads like something Klaus Schwab wrote word for word.
00:08:24.460 But let's, you know, take a look at the liberal election manifesto from the last general election.
00:08:31.900 Do you see the term Great Reset anywhere?
00:08:34.360 I've looked for it and I don't see it anywhere.
00:08:36.060 Yet those ideas, these ideas like the Great Reset and stakeholder capitalism animate our leaders,
00:08:43.140 especially the liberal party, and can influence their approach to governing.
00:08:49.980 Freeland herself, when she was a journalist, was a very strong critic of the World Economic Forum.
00:08:55.200 She was an outsider and wrote this amazing book called
00:08:59.640 The Plutocrats, The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, published in 2012.
00:09:06.900 And Freeland says, makes a very important point here.
00:09:10.040 And she says, it's easy to dismiss the importance of these networks,
00:09:14.260 the importance of such gatherings, whether it's Davos or anywhere else.
00:09:18.680 But the impact, and this is a quote from her book,
00:09:22.560 the impact of these networks is much less cynical, much more subtle, though not necessarily of less consequence.
00:09:30.660 So what changed?
00:09:32.420 Freeland did a 180 from being an outsider looking in to as cozy an insider as you can get,
00:09:39.760 and presumably takes a more benign view of the influence of global power elites impinging on local democracy.
00:09:46.240 Let's face it, today, if you're a critic of Davos and you point to the gathering of a few powerful people of the super elite
00:09:56.420 who impose their agenda on the rest of us, you're dismissed as a right-wing lunatic, a conspiracy theorist,
00:10:03.900 when in fact, Chrystia Freeland herself points to the many problems of such gatherings
00:10:09.020 as setting an agenda that could potentially subvert local democracy.
00:10:13.020 The irony of that.
00:10:14.500 Anyway, when the World Economic Forum's annual Schmooze Fest convenes next week in Davos,
00:10:21.720 where Chrystia Freeland will be in attendance,
00:10:24.700 I really hope, and I suspect this is a big ask,
00:10:28.600 I hope one of the many Canadian journalists who will be there in attendance
00:10:32.800 will ask her whether it is appropriate for the country's finance minister and deputy prime minister
00:10:38.920 to sit on the board of a private organization.
00:10:42.940 And what led to the 180-degree turn?
00:10:46.140 How did you, Ms. Freeland, go from being a critic of the World Economic Forum to being a cozy insider?
00:10:53.680 The deeper question is, how did all of these people at Davos, which represent not just your garden-variety left-wing NGOs
00:11:03.420 or left-wing political parties for that matter,
00:11:07.220 but you have people like investment bankers, fund managers, CEOs of large corporations,
00:11:13.600 even oil and gas companies, how did they go from being red-blooded capitalists who believed in free market ideals
00:11:21.980 to now believing that the profit motive has to be subordinated to social, environmental, and other non-pecuniary goals?
00:11:32.320 There's no doubt in my mind that there's been a cultural shift where many of the elites go to the best private schools,
00:11:39.420 the best private universities and colleges, come out of these institutions with largely progressive views.
00:11:47.240 So when an ex-central banker like Mark Carney, for whom I have a great deal of respect,
00:11:54.340 says that central banks ought to worry about climate change and build that into monetary policy,
00:11:59.860 he seems to really believe in it.
00:12:03.020 A more cynical explanation would be that some of these powerful elites have just taken over this narrative,
00:12:10.300 I think, to better insulate themselves from political pressure.
00:12:15.160 But basically, they keep doing the same thing.
00:12:17.940 They're given a free pass under the cloak of social and environmental virtue.
00:12:23.380 So when we look at the goings-on at Davos, you can see it in some ways as a grand PR exercise by the world's power elite
00:12:34.680 that they do indeed share these progressive values that are currently in vogue.
00:12:39.540 The problem is, if you keep saying you believe in something, even if that's not true,
00:12:45.140 it will eventually constrain how you're forced to act.
00:12:48.500 What we're sorely lacking, in my opinion, at present is a countercurrent, call it an anti-Davos summit,
00:12:57.240 which promotes the values of individual liberty, free choice, and capitalism.
00:13:05.300 Now, that would be an event I would love to attend.
00:13:08.840 That's it for this week.
00:13:10.160 Thanks for joining me and hope to see you next week.
00:13:12.800 We'll see you next week.