Chris Simms and Dan McTague discuss the ban on the sale of gasoline and diesel vehicles in Canada, and why you should not be told what kind of car you should buy. They also talk about a new program that could help you get started in politics.
00:00:00.000Welcome to The Fighter with Chris Simms. I am Chris Simms. I'm the Alberta Director for the
00:00:09.560Canadian Taxpayers Federation. We're always fighting for lower taxes, less waste, and more
00:00:13.740accountable government. We've got a great show for you. First off, if you haven't done so yet,
00:00:18.440please like this video. Remember to share it with your friends. Subscribe to our YouTube channel.
00:00:23.560And most importantly, it's the Christmas time and holy day season, holiday season right now.
00:00:28.860And I wanted to thank you for making us a part of your day. If you're feeling alone,
00:00:35.080you're not alone. We're right here with you. Thanks for being here with us. All right. We've
00:00:39.760got a great show for you because, of course, the federal government is still kind of sort of
00:00:45.040thinking about rolling along with its ban on the sale of gasoline and diesel vehicles, what I would
00:00:52.580otherwise call normal cars and trucks. Okay. This is wrong. Okay. Because it is a crazy waste of money.
00:01:00.800Like we cannot afford this. Canada has un-money. We do not have the infrastructure for this. We do not
00:01:07.720have the charging stations for this. We can't afford this. Also, the subsidies that our levels of
00:01:13.820governments were handing out to these vehicle manufacturers to make these battery-powered
00:01:19.280cars. Gross. Crazy waste of money. And also, the government shouldn't be telling you what kind
00:01:25.740of car you choose to purchase. So, we've got an absolute rock star of a guest on here for you next.
00:01:31.300Dan McTague is coming right up. But first, a word from our sponsor.
00:01:35.040Folks, I want to take a minute to thank today's sponsor, which is Macamie College. So,
00:01:39.540Macamie College has an applied politics and public affair program. It's a two-year evening online
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00:01:50.460organize grassroots movements, and push policy in the right direction. Students will also have
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00:02:22.740slash MACAMI. That's M-A-K-A-M-I. And if you apply through that link and you're successful,
00:02:28.660you get a $500 Juno News scholarship. You know, I went to the University of Alberta and studied
00:02:34.520political science. And the thing you realize when you're doing a university degree is that it
00:02:38.720doesn't lead you to a job. And so, for me, after three years of being a political science student,
00:02:43.620I looked around and realized I had no job skills. I had never worked in politics. Everything was
00:02:48.520theoretical. It was all in the classroom. And I had to start working on political campaigns just to get
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00:03:19.760Okay. Joining me now is Dan McTague. He is with Canadians for Affordable Energy. Dan is the guy I go to
00:03:26.860when we are in the trenches for things like, how much is the second carbon tax costing us? Can you
00:03:32.460do your guru work? How much is gas going to be tomorrow? He's usually pretty good at that too.
00:03:38.080And he has been a fighter on fighting the so-called EV mandate, which is a ban on the sale of regular
00:03:46.160cars and trucks in Canada. Dan, thank you so much for joining us today.
00:03:50.600Chris, it's great to be here. Thanks very much for the introduction as well. Wow. Wonderful time.
00:03:54.920It really is. It's time to celebrate. In all seriousness, it's really special. I'm glad to
00:03:59.580be able to see you over the Christmas season. So, thank you so much.
00:04:02.860Good to be here with your viewers as well. And those who are left alone, we're definitely
00:04:07.620thinking about them and they're here with us. You're right. Absolutely right. Okay. We've had
00:04:12.160some good news, I think. We're seeing companies now backing away from this whole EV mandate thing
00:04:19.200with the production of battery-powered vehicles. Again, if people choose to use their own money to buy
00:04:24.800such things, or if a company of its own free will wants to make and sell them at a profit,
00:04:29.740that's their business. My issue is this crazy government involvement and how much it's really
00:04:35.140going to cost us. Where are we right now with this whole EV mandate thing? Carney delayed it by a year,
00:04:42.540but what is that doing practically here?
00:04:44.500Well, he spent some time saying we do a review on this and all comments had to be in by the early
00:04:50.940part of November. And we had an opportunity to say, well, hey, yes, suspended, but it isn't gone.
00:04:57.300It doesn't take effect in two weeks on January 1st, where 20% of all vehicles that are sold
00:05:04.220on any given car lot had to be EVs. That's been held off for 365 more days. But it's not clear at this
00:05:11.540point what he plans to do. This is a Liberal Party and a Prime Minister and a leader who is very heavily
00:05:18.920invested in net zero. And of course, the many points from that policy, including carbon taxes,
00:05:28.460including emissions caps, including blocking pipelines, including, of course, electric vehicle
00:05:34.760mandate, basically forcing you into a vehicle, whether you like it or not. Otherwise, don't drive
00:05:40.120kind of attitude. And it appears that the biggest conflict isn't so much with Canadians who are
00:05:45.340walking away from these things, especially since they can't mooch a few bucks from the government to
00:05:49.140buy them. The conflict is in the Liberal Party. These people are still thinks it's 2015 and that we can
00:05:54.580somehow reinvent the automotive sector at a time in which we've lost tens of thousands of jobs and
00:06:01.340billions of dollars in borrowed money pursuing batteries and plants that no one wants to buy.
00:06:07.880Reality, Chris, you and I, you know, eight, ten years ago talked about this, but reality is starting
00:06:12.100to bite hard. The wokesters out there who thought this was a cool way to proceed. Folks like me who had
00:06:18.800spent not only a lot of time in the centre of government and in politics, but worked in the
00:06:24.480public relations sector of one of the largest companies in Canada, Toyota Canada. I realised how
00:06:28.360ridiculously naive it was to suggest that we could somehow wave a magic wand and get everybody to
00:06:34.320drive what I said respectfully were over-glorified golf carts operating on batteries, which, like my
00:06:43.200little cell phone here in the middle of December, January and February, doesn't work very well when you leave
00:06:48.280them up for a couple of hours in the cold climate. It really is.
00:06:52.160You know, I think you and I first came back in the day when I was working on Parliament Hill. I was a producer for Mike Duffy
00:06:58.120Live, which was the daily show there for the Bell Network at CTV. And we used to get you on as a guest because you were a straight shooter.
00:07:05.160You were with the Liberal Party then. You were a member of the party. You were sounding the alarm bells, to your credit,
00:07:11.040whenever we would have these big global summits and these up with people things and we'd have our politicians jet, I will
00:07:18.040point out, burning jet fuel. And then they would start dictating what we can and can't do. And it was even then we were
00:07:26.040hearing rumblings about carbon taxes and rumblings about forcing people to switch, switch, such a silly
00:07:34.680little word, right? Switch over to battery powered vehicles. Again, if they invented dilithium crystals
00:07:40.360tomorrow and we were all able to do so economically and of our free will, like, give her. That's great. I want
00:07:46.360affordable energy, as your great backdrop says. But it just was not working. The rubber was not hitting the road. What do you
00:07:52.920think it was that finally made these companies say, you know what, this isn't worth it for us? Is it just
00:07:58.520that they're taking a bath on all these losses? I'm older enough to remember and had worked with and
00:08:05.480worked in the campaign in 1979 where the candidate on the other side was this guy. Oh my goodness,
00:08:11.240that's going back. Granddaddy of the first Brazil conference in Canada had to do and we had to go buy
00:08:17.000billions of acres of land in Brazil, rainforest in Brazil, a guy who ran Petro-Canada. We have been
00:08:26.360trying to find ways to minimize and to control the public in terms of how they behave and what they
00:08:33.400can use and how they can improve their standard of living. And the plan and the plot has been around
00:08:39.000for a long, long time. I mean, I'm only giving something that goes back to the late 1970s, so 40,
00:08:44.44040, 50 years. But even before that, Club of Rome and things like that, we know that there's a group
00:08:49.160of people out there of which people like Mark Carney are extraordinarily well associated with, who've
00:08:56.040tried to find cute, trendy ways to throttle the civilization by basically saying, you will conform
00:09:03.320and you will do what we want and we want you to drive these things and we want you to eat these things
00:09:08.360and we want you to be taxed so that you don't have these things. The reality is that this kind
00:09:14.280of restriction of freedom of improvement of the human condition is really what they're really
00:09:20.200negative about. And it doesn't, it's not lost anybody that while making recommendations to how
00:09:26.120other people can live, they've done very well and ingratiated themselves with tax money by trying to
00:09:31.320bully people or maybe intimidate people or make people feel guilty about what's happened. The
00:09:37.640reality has now become very clear in 2025 that grifters and other elitists have really no measure
00:09:46.520or no truck when it comes to ordaining how society should proceed. What they have done, however, is
00:09:52.760created a, you know, a stunting of the growth of our economy and made a lot of people think twice about
00:09:58.760the future of this country over the past several years in the way I've never seen, not certainly
00:10:03.160since the Great Depression. Amen. If we can look at some of the details here and the money, say if
00:10:08.520if they suddenly waved a magic wand and all of a sudden the vehicles we have parked in our driveways
00:10:13.880and garages were no longer internal combustion engines, bibbidi-bobbidi-boo, they're now a battery
00:10:19.240powered vehicle. The energy required for this was shocking. I did the very rough math and like bare bones,
00:10:27.560Dan, bare bones. We would need like 13 new can-do nuclear reactors just for the current vehicle
00:10:35.400fleet that's not even touching like new vehicles or trucks. I'm not even talking about long-haul
00:10:41.640trucking, talking about privately owned passenger vehicles. And we have unmoney. Each one of those can-do
00:10:48.760nuclear reactors costs around 13 billion dollars to build and at least 10 years. And we're not
00:10:56.840building a whole lot of stuff here in Canada. So we just did not have the money or the juice to do this,
00:11:03.960even if we wanted to. Now, shameless plug, I'm just so passionate about this. This is our new t-shirt
00:11:10.040with the Taxpayers Federation to stop the gas and diesel vehicle ban. To me, this is a huge waste of
00:11:16.680money and it's also just a huge encroachment by government on the lives of people. You know,
00:11:23.400everybody's individual life is so complicated that it's sometimes a big task for just them to manage it.
00:11:30.760The notion that some bureaucrat in Ottawa can dictate something as simple as how you get around
00:11:37.720and how your heater works in your car is just so intrusive. It drives me crazy. Where do you see
00:11:45.240this going? Like, is a year enough delay? Is that an indicator that this idea is dead? Or is he just
00:11:52.920gonna try to figure out a way to make this become a reality? Because I can't get this book out of my
00:11:57.400head, Dan. I read Mark Carney's book when he was the UN Special Envoy on climate blah blah blah, okay?
00:12:04.520All through this book. It's how much he loves types of carbon taxes and he often refers to things like,
00:12:12.120I'm paraphrasing, natural gas-powered power plants and vehicles, like normal gasoline and diesel-powered
00:12:19.240vehicles. He calls them stranded assets in the future over and over again. So where do you see
00:12:27.000this going? Is this a year-long delay meaning it's going to be gone?
00:12:30.200I see Mark Carney having almost been charged under US antitrust legislation. He was coming
00:12:37.720awfully close. Had he not become the leader of the Liberal Party, he would have been nailed badly in
00:12:42.360the same way the Rockefellers were a hundred years ago and other groups that have tried to game the
00:12:47.240system. Mark Carney was trying to basically remove capital from getting to oil and gas producers.
00:12:52.520That's fine. And in trendy Canada, we might accept that because we can all go, I suppose,
00:12:57.240eat bugs and maybe live off of the state of nature living in, you know, with animal skins and eating