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


Transcript

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.