Juno News - Trudeau's olive branch to the west？

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.

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.

Juno News - October 27, 2019

Trudeau's olive branch to the west？

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript