Juno News - October 27, 2019


Trudeau's olive branch to the west？


Episode Stats

Length

4 minutes

Words per Minute

187.58394

Word Count

838

Sentence Count

33


Summary

Justin Trudeau says he wants to extend an olive branch to provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan. He wants to bring out a peace offering for Western provinces who are talking about separating from Canada. Well here s a couple of things Justin Trudeau can do that, even if he does only one of them, they ll go a long way to meeting that goal.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Justin Trudeau now says he wants to extend an olive branch to provinces
00:00:14.760 like Alberta and Saskatchewan. He says he wants to bring out a peace offering for
00:00:19.440 Western provinces who are talking about separation. Wexit. Alberta separation, you
00:00:24.480 see it trending on social media. Well here's an idea, in fact two ideas, of
00:00:29.160 things Justin Trudeau can do that even if he does only one of them they'll go a
00:00:33.660 long way to meeting that goal. The first one, scrap the carbon tax. That's right,
00:00:40.480 the carbon tax is one of those things that is deeply controversial. Really the
00:00:44.780 country is divided, provinces are divided, political parties are divided on it. We've
00:00:49.900 got three provinces heading to court right now on this and they should not be
00:00:54.100 blamed for this being this acrimonious because they were just doing their own
00:00:57.720 thing when it was the federal government that came in and said we are gonna
00:01:01.200 force this upon you. We don't like what you're doing even though we've
00:01:04.920 previously acknowledged that it is the domain of the provincial government so
00:01:08.820 we're gonna stick our fingers in the pie and tell you how it's done. Justin
00:01:13.980 Trudeau can walk this back. Doug Ford and others have said we're gonna take this all
00:01:18.720 the way up to the Supreme Court of Canada. Well you know what the federal
00:01:21.960 government can just ghost away. They can step out of the battle and say we're not
00:01:26.640 gonna fight this anymore, we're gonna let this thing go gently. Now do I think
00:01:31.200 that's gonna happen? No I don't because when Justin Trudeau gave his speech about
00:01:35.280 trying to bring in disaffected parts of the country after his election pseudo
00:01:41.640 victory the other night where he was downgraded from a majority to a minority, he
00:01:45.420 said the two most important things for Canadians were affordability and climate
00:01:49.560 change. Well actually he didn't say it in that order he said climate change and
00:01:52.680 affordability and he said it about ten times over like a mantra during that
00:01:56.820 media availability on Wednesday. I'm not sure if you can say that when the whole
00:02:02.400 point of that press conference was supposed to be to address some of the
00:02:05.900 frustrations people had out West. He just kept going on about climate change
00:02:09.640 ad nauseum. Stop doing that. Stop doing things like the carbon tax and that'll go a
00:02:15.120 long way to dealing with some of those frustrations that are felt out West. Now
00:02:20.340 we also know that Gerald Butts is a true believer on this file as is Catherine
00:02:24.380 McKenna. Justin Trudeau maybe he got it from them, maybe he got it independently of
00:02:28.200 them. He's sort of a part of that, a trifect of three people at the top who are
00:02:32.220 very serious about this. I don't expect it to happen but I think the onus should be
00:02:37.120 on him. The question shouldn't be why is Doug Ford being so difficult? Why are Jason
00:02:41.640 Kenny and Scott Moe going along with the legal challenge? They're not the ones to
00:02:45.760 blame here. They were the ones who had this happen to them and they are now
00:02:50.420 responding to it. The onus is on Justin Trudeau to answer why he is not actually
00:02:56.160 withdrawing the carbon tax because the carbon tax is a thing that you can
00:03:00.100 really only get away with when you have a majority and he doesn't have it anymore.
00:03:04.560 Speaking of that there's another piece of legislation that you definitely can't
00:03:09.180 get away with if you don't have a majority. And that's Bill C-69, the
00:03:14.000 controversial piece of legislation that is really going to tie the hands of the
00:03:17.700 oil and gas sector and a lot of experts in the industry will basically tell you
00:03:21.620 it makes it impossible for them to get any substantial new projects ever really
00:03:26.500 built in Canada. The way it expands the scope of the assessment process is to
00:03:31.580 bring up a whole bunch of new roadblocks for this. Well when this was in
00:03:36.060 committee and in the Senate legislators were looking at and saying this thing is
00:03:40.020 a mess and they toured the country and they heard from witnesses and they
00:03:43.440 realized it needed reforms and they proposed a whole bunch of amendments and
00:03:47.880 the Liberal government hardly took them up on any of them. While things should be
00:03:53.040 much more difficult to deal with things like this in a minority government
00:03:56.640 situation and Trudeau just managed to do those processes at the end of his
00:04:01.380 majority, now maybe he should step back and take a look at that
00:04:04.740 legislation and go perhaps I misstepped on that, perhaps we can head in a
00:04:09.960 different direction on these files. Look I know these are far-fetched things to
00:04:14.180 think Trudeau is going to do them because they are true believers on this
00:04:16.980 file but he says he wants to deal with Western alienation, well here are two very
00:04:23.100 easy ideas that he can reach for at any moment's notice.