Juno News - Trudeau says bad polls are because Canadians aren't in ＂decision mode＂

00:00:00.000 Transcription by CastingWords

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

00:01:00.000 welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true

00:01:19.680 north hello and welcome to you all canada's most reverent talk show here on this tuesday

00:01:29.200 june 18th 2024 great to have you aboard the program here we are going to cover a little

00:01:35.660 bit of ground today we're going to talk about anti-semitism on campus we'll talk about esg

00:01:40.660 scores and why going woke for corporations does not shockingly mean making more money i know so

00:01:47.920 hard to believe, right? Well, we'll talk about the why that is. But first and foremost, I want to

00:01:52.900 talk about Justin Trudeau. Now, he is doing the Desperation Tour. He has been doing every podcast

00:01:58.540 imaginable. He's been talking to all sorts of people that aren't interested in pushing back.

00:02:02.420 And he also did a rare interview, rare for a prime minister of Canada, on CBC's Power in Politics.

00:02:09.060 Now, I was on Power in Politics a few weeks ago. It's a fun show. David Cochran, as far as CBC

00:02:14.340 Sihos Go is, I think, one of the very fair-minded ones there, notwithstanding Trudeau at that one

00:02:19.920 point gave him some poutine, but we won't hold that against him forever. The thing about it,

00:02:24.120 though, is that Power in Politics is like a political punditry show. So when, I mean,

00:02:29.360 they're supposed to have people talking about what the Prime Minister is doing. So when Justin

00:02:33.020 Trudeau gets on there, it's clear that he's just trying to find any way that he could possibly turn

00:02:38.400 his fortunes around. And those fortunes are not exactly great. You may have seen the most recent

00:02:43.500 polling over the weekend, courtesy of Abacus Data, finding the Conservatives with a 20-point

00:02:49.700 lead over the Liberals. 20-point lead, now that's massive. That is the Conservatives about to take

00:02:56.080 42% of the vote, the Liberals down at 22%, the NDP not that far behind the Liberals to be perfectly

00:03:03.020 frank, and Justin Trudeau has been forced to account for why this is, but well, as he told

00:03:09.560 David Cochran, no, no, the polls, they don't really mean anything. Don't worry about that.

00:03:13.880 Take a look. Despite that optimistic picture, I mean, the country is still angry. You can see it

00:03:19.320 in the mood. And increasingly, Prime Minister, a lot of them are mad at you, right? I know you say

00:03:23.780 you want to beat Pierre Polyev. You keep coming back to that. But what if you are the reason the

00:03:28.880 Liberals can't beat the Conservatives in the next election? Where do you factor that into your

00:03:32.520 thought process? Well, I think, first of all, Canadians are not in a decision mode right now.

00:03:37.180 You know, what you tell a pollster if they ever manage to reach you is very different

00:03:44.260 from the choice Canadians end up making in an election campaign.

00:03:47.820 And fundamentally, and it's not just Canada, but everywhere around the world, and indeed

00:03:52.320 I was talking this with other leaders at the G7 and in Switzerland at the peace conference

00:03:57.400 for Ukraine, everywhere people are struggling with high inflation, with cost of living issues,

00:04:05.840 interest rates, with housing challenges, with child care challenges, all these

00:04:09.740 things. We are doing better than many countries. Doesn't make a difference to

00:04:15.320 someone who can't pay for their groceries, but the way people are

00:04:18.500 everywhere facing a certain amount of frustration. And I truly believe that as

00:04:23.600 we choose to step up on solving those challenges, to contrast with political

00:04:29.540 vision that so far consists from the Conservatives of just making people more

00:04:34.880 angry and saying everything is broken i know canadians are pragmatic people who focus on

00:04:39.600 solutions and that's exactly what we're going to be doing he reminds me when he says oh well

00:04:45.680 canadians aren't in a decision mode he reminds me of christine lagarde the head of the european

00:04:50.400 central bank telling me back in davos when i wanted to ask her a question of i'm in a quiet

00:04:55.360 period right now you just come up with some desperate reason by which you don't need to

00:04:59.440 to answer the question but Canadians are not in decision mode which is true the election is not

00:05:04.840 yet happening he is basically saying there that ah when Canadians are going to vote that's when

00:05:10.540 they're all of a sudden going to come back home to daddy there I'm Justin Trudeau is daddy in this

00:05:14.680 equation so take from that what you will but Trudeau is basically saying that when it's time

00:05:18.760 to vote Canadians will really realize then in decision mode that the liberals are the ones

00:05:25.060 that have their back, that Justin Trudeau is the guy. And the conversations they have with every

00:05:30.780 single pollster going for basically a year now, those conversations are not an accurate

00:05:37.100 representation of how Canadians feel. Funnily enough, when the polls show the Conservatives

00:05:41.420 beating the Liberals, the polls aren't valid. When the polls back in the day used to show the

00:05:45.440 Liberals up ahead, all the polls were showing the Liberals up ahead. That was the weird sort of way

00:05:50.340 that politicians tend to view polls. When they're in their favor, they are good. When they're not

00:05:54.660 in their favor? Ah, well, they're just polls. The only poll that matters is the one on election day.

00:06:00.020 The reason I bring this up, though, is because the liberal desperation is quite something. And

00:06:04.200 I think liberals increasingly, as I've remarked time and time again, are going to have to realize

00:06:09.180 that Justin Trudeau is the problem and start mounting a campaign to get rid of him if they

00:06:14.520 want to, because he is not going on his own. And again, I'm not telling the liberals what to do.

00:06:19.620 I'm not urging anyone to be removed from office. I'm just saying that if the liberals want

00:06:24.520 him gone, he has not shown any indication that he will be going anywhere of his own volition.

00:06:31.240 And it's interesting when you see the way the Liberals managed to fumble pretty much every

00:06:36.320 single issue. Foreign interference, an issue that could have been one where there was political

00:06:41.320 unanimity, could have been one in which everyone reached across the aisle, has even then become a

00:06:46.620 partisan football. You had Elizabeth May the other day saying, where's the bar? Sorry, no,

00:06:51.960 what she said, something about foreign interference. You also had Jagmeet Singh saying something as

00:06:57.360 well. And you had these two opposing views, basically. Elizabeth May saying, oh, well,

00:07:03.840 there's really nothing there and I'm not worried about it. And Jagmeet Singh saying, yeah, I've got

00:07:08.040 some issues with people in Parliament. And Justin Trudeau refusing to say anything, refusing to say

00:07:14.280 if any Liberal members of Parliament were implicated, instead turning it around on the

00:07:19.920 opposition. But I wanted to show this clip. This is a clip that is rather fascinating to me

00:07:26.000 because Trudeau is talking. This is the same interview he did yesterday with David Cochran

00:07:31.840 on power and politics. And I won't do a windup here. I'll analyze it afterwards, but pay very

00:07:38.080 close attention to how he speaks in this. But is it tenable to just go on without names attached

00:07:43.840 to some of these allegations? I mean, Jagmeet Singh has said that there's nobody in his caucus

00:07:47.960 he needs to worry about.

00:07:49.600 Can you say the same thing with comfort and clarity?

00:07:55.440 I hadn't known that Jagmeet said that.

00:08:01.640 I would be wary of any party leader

00:08:04.100 drawing any sort of conclusion like that.

00:08:07.440 Including Mr. Singh?

00:08:08.380 I would be wary of any party leader

00:08:10.360 drawing any conclusion like that.

00:08:11.880 There is a range of issues around foreign interference

00:08:15.980 that our security agencies, that our various institutions are engaged in.

00:08:23.320 We know that foreign actors are trying to interfere in all different parties 0.99

00:08:30.420 in many different ways and protecting the integrity of our parliamentary system

00:08:35.980 and of people who choose to step forward in Parliament from false or misleading accusations

00:08:41.760 that may well be the goal of some of those countries wishing to interfere.

00:08:45.980 is requiring a level of thoughtfulness that is not always conducive to selling newspapers or headlines,

00:08:54.040 but is what a responsible government must do to continue to engage in foreign interference.

00:09:00.600 And I'll remind you, we are the government that has brought in more measures, more structures,

00:09:07.280 more ways to deal with foreign interference than any other, because no other government ever did anything on that.

00:09:13.520 so it's fascinating to me because on one hand first off he was just remarkably unprepared

00:09:20.640 because jagmeet singh had said that quite a while before that interview as i understand it

00:09:25.020 and justin trudeau is seemingly so baffled by that oh no no party is immune from this that

00:09:30.500 would include his own well why has he not made any moves why has no one been removed from caucus why

00:09:36.020 on one hand is he saying ah yes no one should be uh feel safe here and on the other hand sending

00:09:41.220 out dominic leblanc to say well we've got concerns with how the nsi cop came to its conclusions we've

00:09:46.820 got concerns with the report the liberals are looking to be the party that has stood to benefit

00:09:51.620 the most from foreign interference in canadian democracy part of this is because foreign actors

00:09:57.140 that want to infiltrate canadian institutions will of course back the winner which for the last

00:10:01.700 three elections has been the liberals but more crucially and i think this is the really significant

00:10:07.300 point here the liberals have been the most ideologically on side certainly when it comes to

00:10:13.620 china and china's interest the liberals have not taken the view on china that most nations

00:10:19.620 that value their sovereignty would and that certainly in the past the conservatives have

00:10:23.860 taken up so again i'm not at all saying that foreign interference does not affect different

00:10:29.140 parties i'm saying that if you're foreign interfering if you're foreignly interfering

00:10:33.380 if you're an interfering foreigner, whatever the term is, if you are trying to meddle in Canadian

00:10:37.640 democracy, as I've remarked, you're not exactly going to get much bang for your buck in going

00:10:42.700 after Elizabeth May or Jagmeet Singh. So you're basically going to go after one of the two parties

00:10:48.160 that has historically held victory in this country that has held office. And in the last three

00:10:52.900 elections, the Liberals have been the winners. So this is where Canadians should look at this and be

00:10:57.980 very very nervous about a prime minister that is not willing to be transparent a prime minister who

00:11:03.900 could as we talked about yesterday on his own effectively with a stroke of a pen disclose the

00:11:10.460 names release the unredacted report but instead he has chosen not to so justin trudeau when he

00:11:18.860 comes out there and says oh well canadians are not in a decision mode right now that's the only reason

00:11:23.980 were not coming across well in the polls no canadians are not supporting you and your party

00:11:28.460 in the polls because you have just been bungling every single file that you have had your hands on

00:11:33.820 you've had the reverse midas touch for i'd say certainly the last five years some would say you

00:11:38.460 know the last nine years that the liberals have been in power and foreign interference an issue

00:11:43.020 that really comes down to the core question of canada's democracy and we're going to be delving

00:11:47.900 into this on thursday in a longer interview with brian lee crowley this is something where the

00:11:53.260 liberals have once again decided to turn a blind eye to it they have turned a blind eye to it

00:11:58.620 they have chosen to keep things shrouded in secrecy instead of this government that said

00:12:03.820 it was going to be the most transparent government to ever happen in the face of the earth amazing

00:12:08.380 how far we have fallen from that the government that said it was going to overhaul access to

00:12:13.180 information and transparency and openness and has now fought canadians in court has fought the

00:12:18.620 the Speaker of the House in court has fought time and time again to keep the government closed off,

00:12:24.180 to keep information closed off. And it isn't just on foreign interference. It was on SNC-Lavalin.

00:12:30.040 It's on their carbon tax. They don't even want Canadians to see the economic analysis of the

00:12:35.960 carbon tax for crying out loud. A government that can't be transparent about its tax policy

00:12:41.040 cannot be transparent about anything else. And this is why Canadians have, for several other 0.93

00:12:47.180 reasons, turned on a government that was once welcomed with such open arms. I want to turn to

00:12:53.800 an issue that has become very near and dear to my heart, not as a Jewish person, but as someone who

00:12:58.380 has a great deal of love for the Jewish people and a great deal of sympathy for all they've had

00:13:03.200 to endure over the years and over the last nine months in particular. It's no longer news to talk

00:13:09.800 about anti-Semitism on campus. Things that a year ago or two years ago would have been front page

00:13:14.300 News are now relegated to the back pages because we just expect on universities people to say

00:13:19.660 horrendous things about Israel and the Jewish people. Just last week we learned that McGill 1.00

00:13:24.980 University's dissidents, their anti-Israel group, were going to be hosting a summer camp. Oh that

00:13:31.540 sounds so charming. What summer camp is this? Well it is a summer camp for quote-unquote

00:13:36.900 revolutionaries and this is the youth summer program. Now when I went to a summer camp I think

00:13:42.320 the graphic might have been uh kids playing with bubbles or kids uh you know paying playing hopscotch

00:13:47.860 and the chalk or maybe kids doing that parachute game where you lift the parachute up in the air

00:13:52.640 and you sit under it uh but these youth summer campers uh well i see them all wearing kathiyas

00:13:58.080 uh they're reading i don't know if those are quran's or if it's the new hunger games book

00:14:03.620 that suzanne collins has coming out uh one of them is holding what appears to be uh well it's

00:14:09.100 firearm of some kind i don't know uh what kind exactly it's a little blurry there maybe an ak-47

00:14:14.300 of sorts but this is what they're promoting this summer camp has been widely condemned although

00:14:20.860 by all accounts it will still be going on because it doesn't happen with any official standing

00:14:25.020 heck maybe they'll even get some canada summer jobs funding from the government who knows

00:14:29.340 but one group that has been conspicuously silent throughout all of this has has been the group you

00:14:33.900 would expect to be the most vocal about this the jewish studies programs on university campuses

00:14:39.900 now when i was at university i took a class on the jewish history of north america which was a

00:14:45.580 fascinating class i learned a great deal about how integrated jews were in the historic and

00:14:51.100 cultural fabric of canadian and american society and there were a lot of programs just like that

00:14:56.540 around the country and a lot of professors in these spaces that have not been speaking up about

00:15:00.940 this. Barbara Kaye wrote about this in a piece of the National Post where she is

00:15:04.840 one of my favorite columnists and I suspect one of yours as well if you read

00:15:08.660 there. Barbara always good to talk to you thanks for coming on today. It's a

00:15:12.380 pleasure to be here Andrew thanks for having me. So I'll start I let's accept

00:15:16.900 your premise at face value because I think you're very correct about this I

00:15:20.200 have not seen a large and vocal condemnation from these or any other

00:15:24.520 academic groups but is this coming from a tacit or explicit agreement with these

00:15:30.640 activists or is it coming from fear that these professors do not want to stick their necks out

00:15:35.760 and be even further marginalized well first i should say that uh although jewish studies you're

00:15:41.600 correct the jewish studies departments have been institutionally pretty mute uh there have been

00:15:48.000 many individual jewish academics who have been quite vocal but they are vocal as individuals or

00:15:56.400 as part of some very um ad hoc uh networks academic writers networks and they write op-eds

00:16:03.040 and they you know write for all kinds of publications i have no core but they tend to

00:16:07.760 be the pariahs for doing well either they're let's just say that they're out there on their own

00:16:15.040 i mean i don't think they're condemned uh in their you know professionally i don't think they face

00:16:20.640 cancellation within their departments uh but institutionally the jewish studies departments

00:16:26.960 and the jewish studies the association of jewish studies uh which is an american organization i'm

00:16:32.480 not sure if it covers uh canada as well they have been um not only uh not vocal uh in opposition

00:16:43.280 to all this uh anti-zionist and anti-jewish activity uh but they are officially one might say

00:16:51.200 sympathetic to the anti-zionist movement many of them some of them are active in the bds movement

00:16:58.560 just i'll give you one example um a former rabbi in my synagogue in montreal described this to a

00:17:04.880 group of us uh at a learning day at our synagogue he said he had he had when he'd been a rabbi and

00:17:11.840 And then he had taught in the Jewish Studies Department at Drew University.

00:17:15.380 And he said he went to, this was two years ago, he went to the annual conference of Jewish Studies, the Association of Jewish Studies, which is for that discipline.

00:17:24.780 And he said the theme of the conference was justice.

00:17:29.900 And he said the major push of the conference was justice for the Palestinians.

00:17:37.080 And he described one exhibit, an artistic exhibit that was a series of photographs of Palestinian children, only you didn't see their faces.

00:17:46.180 You just saw their outstretched arms and on their arms they had with Sharpies written, you know, tattooed numbers, which I don't have to tell you is a Holocaust inversion tactic of just the lowest and the really very undignified. 0.94

00:18:06.060 and very hurtful, needless to say, to those who remember the Holocaust

00:18:11.220 or who have had relatives killed in the Holocaust.

00:18:13.380 So this idea of using the Holocaust against ourselves 0.78

00:18:17.440 in order to whip up a sentiment of a very acute level for Palestinians

00:18:26.660 as opposed to, and this is the kind of thing you see quite often,

00:18:31.020 And it comes under the heading of what I would call pathological altruism, in which you're so concerned with the harms that your side of a conflict is causing to the other side that you won't take your own side.

00:18:49.400 You know, what was that definition of a liberal? Someone who won't take his own side in an argument? Anyways.

00:18:54.680 yeah and i would also point out too that studying something you know women's studies gender studies 0.99

00:19:02.500 you know jewish studies all of these things it doesn't necessarily mean that there is a support

00:19:08.760 for the group being studied i think you know one example of this there was i forget the name of the

00:19:13.380 university but there was like some men's studies department that was launched and you looked at the

00:19:17.180 uh faculty for it and it was like every single one of them i think probably hated men more than

00:19:22.180 anything else in the world and you know jewish studies that you used to see a lot of jewish

00:19:27.300 professors in there but a lot of them are not necessarily zionists and and again nor should 0.72

00:19:32.900 they be necessarily there shouldn't be a litmus test if you're able to teach the material and

00:19:36.900 teach it well but the reality there is that a lot of these departments a lot of the social sciences

00:19:43.060 in general have all been taken over by this oppressor oppressed dynamic and when you can't

00:19:49.140 even teach math or chemistry without talking about decolonizing their curricula uh certainly

00:19:54.340 in jewish studies you're seeing those very same dynamics and i think that's why a lot of these

00:19:57.940 departments have been so silent on this well i agree with you and i i think the this whole the

00:20:04.020 the whole um rubric under way of intersectionality in which jews are routinely excluded uh they are

00:20:13.140 not considered intersectionality is of course the intersectionality of all victims the oppressed

00:20:21.060 and jews are never included in the category of the oppressed they are always part of the oppressor 0.99

00:20:26.980 group so it it sort of conflates jews with um their state and as you say uh many jews are not

00:20:34.900 particularly zionist but when jews in authority over other students or in a position of authority

00:20:41.140 over students and they're in a Jewish studies program become actively anti-Zionist or are part

00:20:47.680 of the BDS movement or are teaching anti-Zionism rather than teaching it as part of, you know,

00:20:56.940 history and here's the situation today and here is when Zionism, the concept started and who

00:21:05.920 started it and who was for it and who was against it. That's history. But once you already have a

00:21:10.740 Jewish state, and Zionism obviously won the argument, you can't keep arguing that Zionism 0.88

00:21:21.620 is a curse, as Naomi Klein has called it. You cannot say it must be ended. How do you end

00:21:30.000 Zionism? You would have to end Israel in order to end Zionism. So it's a very different kettle 0.56

00:21:35.540 of fish last night uh the monk debates andrew um i don't know if you saw them but anyways uh

00:21:40.980 wonderful international lawyer natasha uh hausdorf teamed up with douglas murray the in

00:21:46.100 the incredible douglas murray and they were discussing this very thing and um natasha said

00:21:52.100 look uh you don't have to be a zionist but but think of it as this way it's like if a mother

00:21:58.820 and a father or sorry if if two parents a man and a woman get married and they they say they don't

00:22:03.700 want to have children they've they both agree they don't want to have children but by accident

00:22:08.980 they have a child you don't you don't agree that it's okay to murder the child i mean because they

00:22:14.900 didn't want it right like so we have a state with seven million jews in it that's half the world's 1.00

00:22:19.940 population and for anybody in jewish studies today to be arguing that not only was zionism a mistake

00:22:26.900 but it's a mistake that has to be rectified then you have to be very careful with your words what

00:22:31.300 What do you mean? It was a mistake. And now the state of Israel is illegitimate for that reason. 0.78

00:22:37.660 You know, I'd be happy if all kinds of movements that ended up in national movements that, you know, had been considered illegitimate before they became nations.

00:22:50.860 Israel was created as a nation along with many other nations in the Middle East.

00:22:55.360 nationalism was not a thing a century ago and it became a thing so this i this idea that you could

00:23:04.880 just loosely play with the idea of yeah you know zion is a big mistake uh let's try something else

00:23:11.980 and and there's something else that a lot of jewish studies professors are into now

00:23:16.440 is this thing called diasporism which is yeah zionism was a big mistake uh you know what

00:23:23.100 uh we need to be jews who uh we we we repudiate zionism and uh it's good jews were meant to live 1.00

00:23:32.720 in exile because their their rationale is uh uh it is unnatural for jews to have power over anybody 0.98

00:23:42.140 else okay for other people when you have a very very extreme subset of orthodox jews that believes

00:23:47.740 that but it's an incredible incredible minority there it's there's it's so fringe that i i never

00:23:53.340 even include the natura carta people are like um they're crazy people uh i i consider them literally

00:24:00.380 crazy they are living in such a bubble of and they are have no influence whatsoever except in so far

00:24:07.340 as they are used as tools uh you know by palestinian the palestinian isms and um yeah i mean but but

00:24:17.260 nobody no jew i know ever even mentions them in a calculus of uh where are we going and what's

00:24:23.500 happening in the world they they are beyond beyond the pale so beyond the pale that orthodox jews 1.00

00:24:31.100 want nothing to do with them and even chabad and all these other people they they're off the map 1.00

00:24:36.540 but we're talking now about very mainstream people uh who do have influence and authority in

00:24:41.820 in universities, they're academics. They are in, you know, institutions like Hillel and

00:24:47.860 all kinds of places where young Jews look to them as models and authority figures. And they're saying

00:24:55.140 we should be happy in exile. We should not have power over other people. We've misused it.

00:25:02.340 But everybody else is allowed to have power over Jews. I mean, if we should be happy to live in 1.00

00:25:10.980 exile then we're basically saying we we are um contracting out our right to have power over

00:25:17.720 anybody and and but you can have power over us you can have power over us but we can't have power

00:25:22.100 over anybody else so how did that work out for us throughout history not so well not not that you

00:25:28.140 know i i was about to ask you you know what what jews think of a certain subject and then as i was

00:25:32.500 doing so the old joke of you know three jews and five opinions come to mind is that you know jews

00:25:36.820 can't even necessarily agree with themselves, let alone each other on a lot of matters.

00:25:39.700 Well, that's true. But the upside of that is, it's both an upside and a downside. The upside is

00:25:44.740 we grant anybody in Israel, here, any Jew can say what's on his mind or her mind without fear

00:25:54.760 of getting bumped off or even spat at or getting doxed on. I mean, we allow perfect freedom of

00:26:04.760 expression within our people and our people we are we are bonded not as christians are by belief

00:26:13.100 we are bonded by peoplehood so we admit to without resentment yeah there's super orthodox and there's

00:26:22.400 totally secular there's atheists and there's this and that we don't care we don't care what we care

00:26:27.260 about is your uh your commitment to jewish peoplehood and to um uh furthering the healthy

00:26:37.860 interests of the jewish people now you that that doesn't mean you have to support israel and

00:26:43.400 everything that israel does you don't have to support zionism you don't have to support any 0.99

00:26:46.880 of that but it doesn't give you license to align yourself with the enemies of the jewish people

00:26:53.480 And to say, yeah, you've got the right idea. Yeah. Eliminating Israel. Good idea. And that's what, you know, these groups like Independent Jewish Voices and Jewish Voices for Peace, they're using their status as Jews to join in the chorus of voices that wish Jews would disappear from the face of the earth. 0.97

00:27:17.700 And they are abetting them and giving comfort to them and saying, speaking as a Jew or, yeah, my grandmother, who's dead, unfortunately, in the Holocaust, would have approved. 0.80

00:27:29.640 That's that's something that you see people like, you know, I've seen Jews say, oh, she she definitely would have been on on BDS. 1.00

00:27:38.540 She definitely would have been ashamed of what Israel's doing. 0.94

00:27:42.060 I don't think so.

00:27:42.820 These are the same as the Christians that say, you know, Jesus would have been trans or something. You see all of this weird revisionism. But I wanted to ask you about that, Barbara, because there is, to use the language and worldview of the left here, which talks about privilege as, you know, basically meriting or taking away the merit of your position.

00:28:03.300 And a lot of the Jews that do this, I've seen, are ones that have tremendous amounts of privilege. 0.96

00:28:09.320 They are Jews that have not had to deal with anti-Semitism, or at least not that I would see.

00:28:14.400 They're Jews that oftentimes are coming from very upper middle class, if not outright wealthy families.

00:28:19.960 And you see this in other groups as well.

00:28:21.780 I mean, the number of environmental activists whose parents are these billionaires or something is insane.

00:28:28.480 But that doesn't really matter when you're saying the quote-unquote right things.

00:28:33.120 in the same way that all of the indigenization of curricula now and the importance of connecting to

00:28:39.520 your people to history doesn't apply to jews because jews are also bound by their history

00:28:44.880 and by their connection to the land that we now call israel but that that deep connection doesn't

00:28:50.240 matter when you have been maligned as the quote-unquote oppressor that's right you i mean

00:28:55.200 you can you can say uh oh uh as some diasporas do they say oh yeah all that stuff about uh

00:29:01.520 next year in jerusalem and uh my heart belongs to zion and all that that's just romantic stuff

00:29:07.040 it's like a metaphor it doesn't literally mean that uh jews have to be attached to the land of

00:29:12.640 israel well sorry but it does and and if you want to detach yourself from the jews i don't care you 1.00

00:29:18.000 know say i'm not a jew anymore i'm out of here fine all i ask is you know what don't dump on

00:29:24.400 the rest of us and don't don't help other people who would really like to see us disappear uh is

00:29:29.840 that too much to ask really and don't say speaking as a jew uh you know even trotsky in in in in the

00:29:36.800 soviet union uh he he uh his name used to be lev bronstein uh but he didn't say speaking as a jew

00:29:44.240 i'm a party member and i i believe that uh you know jews should be uh uh persecuted people like 0.99

00:29:52.400 just you know decide one or the other i'm not with you i'm out of this people

00:29:56.400 goodbye good luck and you know i'll just go my own way but the privileged jews you're talking 0.99

00:30:02.400 about yes they're the university crowd uh they want to be part of the herd they've bought into

00:30:06.960 the whole intersectional thing they've bought the whole uh and they're very full of self-righteousness

00:30:11.360 they see themselves as a new prophets um and they are using their they're weaponizing their their

00:30:17.360 status their social sociological status uh as jews uh to abet a perniciously anti-semitic 1.00

00:30:26.880 movement uh and then there's the the jews that are just plain ignorant and they're 1.00

00:30:31.440 what i call useful idiots who go along because they get all their news from tick tock and they 1.00

00:30:37.440 um they're incurious they don't know anything about history they they know nothing and they're just 1.00

00:30:43.040 they're foolish silly people they need a cause they're looking for something they they they have 0.99

00:30:48.160 no connection to their jewish history or past or communities uh no no deep connection anyways and 1.00

00:30:54.720 and uh they don't have a cause so they're looking um and in a way they they feel they're this is a

00:31:01.840 social justice cause they've been trained to think that way they think that is that that

00:31:07.600 israel is a colonialist state which it isn't it isn't an apartheid these are all

00:31:12.320 libels but they believe them why shouldn't they their propaganda mill uh you know the the bds

00:31:18.560 crowd their propaganda mill is phenomenal because they don't have to worry about studying or doing

00:31:24.000 anything constructive in life this is their whole life is is relentless propagandizing against

00:31:32.080 israel and the jews well i appreciate it very much and like i've said to you in the past barbara i'm

00:31:38.880 so grateful you continue to use your voice in the way that you do when there are so many costs to

00:31:44.400 doing so in this day and age and i appreciate it very much barbara k thank you thank you andrew

00:31:49.280 all right thanks again always good to chat with barbara k could not no natural segue from that

00:31:54.160 to our next subject i was going to try to think of one but i just couldn't so i'm moving on we're

00:31:58.000 doing when i used to work in talk radio i like you could just throw to the commercial break and not

00:32:01.680 not have to worry about the segue but i do want to talk about esg because this is something we

00:32:05.880 hear a lot of environmental social governance it's often done by companies that want to look

00:32:11.260 woke and say that they're being progressive and you see it tied in with things like the

00:32:15.880 sustainable development goals and all of these other things and you often hear people sell esg

00:32:21.400 because every company wants a good esg score people saying that it actually is good for business

00:32:27.200 too that it's not selling out the bottom line it's not negative to the shareholders well a new

00:32:32.360 study from the Fraser Institute casts doubt on that it says there is not in fact any evidence

00:32:36.560 supporting a positive correlation between ESG ratings and stock market returns this looks at

00:32:42.460 310 companies on the Toronto Stock Exchange the study author joins me now Stephen Globerman

00:32:48.340 senior fellow at the Fraser Institute Stephen good to have you on the show thanks for coming on today

00:32:53.280 thank you for having me so just for people that aren't as familiar with this

00:32:57.680 what is an esg score and what are companies doing to boost their number

00:33:04.560 sees that rate the company's performance along those dimensions environmental activity

00:33:12.960 social activity which is related to who you're hiring how much you're paying your employees

00:33:21.200 and governance which is related to how the company is is is run and uh the rating agencies use uh

00:33:29.440 different specific measures along those three dimensions and then aggregate these measures

00:33:35.040 to come up with an overall rating for a company uh and uh companies um uh pay for these rating

00:33:43.680 uh services because in part they use it to promote uh their their in their performance their their

00:33:50.640 sustainability performance, just to use a broad term to cover those dimensions.

00:33:58.000 Investment managers use those ratings to promote their ESG mutual funds and exchange traded funds

00:34:08.780 to generate business from investors who are concerned about those issues when they place

00:34:16.640 their money in different types of assets.

00:34:18.600 and you've looked at 310 companies on the tsx you've looked at their stock market returns and

00:34:26.120 find no correlation whatsoever positive or negative between the two correct well let me just

00:34:32.280 uh clarify one point which is an important point what what we look at is the change in the esg

00:34:39.800 rating and then we relate that to stock market performance going forward and and the reason

00:34:46.440 that's an important qualification is that a stock price will change because new information about

00:34:56.200 the company's ongoing prospects have changed. So the change in the rating is important because

00:35:04.740 that really can be considered new information about a company's ESG profile. And if investors

00:35:12.420 are really concerned about ESG profile, then it's the new information that they're going to react

00:35:18.380 to. And yes, what we did was we looked at the relationship between the change in the ESG rating

00:35:25.960 across our sample of companies and the performance, the stock performance, which includes, by the way,

00:35:33.360 dividend payments and any stock splits over the next up to 12 months beyond the rating change,

00:35:41.480 which seems a reasonable amount of time to expect investors to react to that new information.

00:35:48.560 And as you said, there's no statistically significant relationship,

00:35:54.860 meaning any relationship we saw could be due to chance with relative confidence.

00:36:03.040 As we know, stock market returns themselves can be very fickle.

00:36:07.220 They're often influenced by a company's profitability, but not exclusively so.

00:36:11.100 And you're not looking at a company's financial, you're not looking at a company's profitability specifically, you're looking at the stock market return.

00:36:19.400 So have you in other studies you've seen in the US, because I know this hasn't really been done in Canada, seen a relationship between changes in ESG scores and how much a company is making one way or another?

00:36:31.320 Well, you're quite right that the focus of most of the studies, including our study, our recent study, is on stock market returns.

00:36:40.620 But the reason you want to look at stock market returns is because you can't observe future changes in profitability looking at accounting statements.

00:36:49.940 The stock market return, and particularly the change in the price of a stock, reflects what the broad millions of investors think is the future profitability outlook for the company.

00:37:06.100 So looking at the stock market, changing the stock market price is really effectively looking at expectations about future profitability, which are not observable if you look at the counting statements.

00:37:20.740 Now, you might say, well, why not do a very long time series study and look at changes in future profitability?

00:37:27.940 Well, that could be another piece of research, but it's not just the stock price change.

00:37:35.280 It's also because many ESG proponents argue it reduces the risk of a company.

00:37:41.900 And so it's the risk adjusted returns that you want to look at.

00:37:45.160 And that goes beyond profitability.

00:37:47.720 And we have controls for that in our study, controls for the risk profile of the company.

00:37:55.760 So what we're looking at is the stock market's expectation of future profitability adjusted for expected risk.

00:38:02.840 one one of the things that and i realize you're a scientist you're following the numbers here

00:38:08.300 you're not trying to you know make the numbers fit a thesis but there are going to be people

00:38:12.260 that are very hostile to the esg score and the whole regime there that say okay well there's

00:38:17.640 no point and there are going to be people that are supportive of it that say okay well it doesn't

00:38:21.340 cost them anything so it can't hurt well it does cost uh and and that's an important point uh in

00:38:28.760 In fact, there was a piece yesterday in Globe and Mail where a CEO of a small Canadian company was referencing the significant cost to his company of complying with ESG reporting requirements.

00:38:46.320 So, yes, the issue really does ultimately boil down to what are the costs and benefits of setting up a regulatory environment where all this reporting has to be done so ESG ratings can be created if there doesn't seem to be a relationship between ESG ratings and basically the efficiency performance of the company.

00:39:12.340 yeah and i think that's a very significant point and you have i mean i've seen this covering the

00:39:18.580 world economic forum meetings in davos you have all of these companies that are bending over

00:39:23.760 backwards to meet these targets and they're you know integrating with all of these different

00:39:27.560 agencies and you've created this entire industry on esg consulting and esg like all of this and

00:39:34.320 people are making huge money on this uh the shareholders aren't though well the shareholders

00:39:40.240 Are not. And of course, it raises an obvious question. Why are people investing in ESG themed mutual funds? They're paying higher fees to invest in those funds. They don't appear to be getting the net returns that people who are getting who are investing in conventional asset categories. Why do they do this?

00:40:03.240 And really, all you can say, I think, with any kind of reasoned analysis is that there are non-financial benefits that are being realized by these investors, whether it's feel good that we're doing something good for the environment or we're addressing income inequality or racial discrimination.

00:40:27.840 That really is very hard to test.

00:40:30.680 surveys suggest that people do expect to earn higher rates of return, but they're not. And I

00:40:39.400 think that fact needs to be made more widely known. If people continue to want to get psychic

00:40:47.380 benefits or warm glow feelings from how they're investing, that's their business. But they should

00:40:52.840 be informed about what the expected returns will be. Very well said. People can check out the study

00:40:58.820 for themselves over at fraserinstitute.org esg investing and financial returns in canada and

00:41:05.220 stephen globerman good to talk to you i appreciate your time today good to talk to you andrew all

00:41:09.380 right thank you that does it for us for today we'll be back tomorrow with more of canada's

00:41:13.620 most irreverent talk show here on true north thank you god bless and good day to you all

00:41:18.980 thanks for listening to the andrew lawton show support the program by donating to true north

00:41:23.620 at www.tnc.news.

00:41:53.620 We'll be right back.

00:42:23.620 We'll be right back.

Juno News - June 18, 2024

Trudeau says bad polls are because Canadians aren't in ＂decision mode＂

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