Juno News - July 10, 2024


Trudeau says cost of living would have been worse without him

Topics
global security concerns
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Mark Norman Andrew Lawton Margaret Trudeau Greta Thunberg Stephen Harper Mike Johnson Michael Savia Mitch McConnell Chrystia Freeland Pierre Trudeau Kathleen Wynne Elizabeth May Mick Jagger Philip Norma
Reality Check： Canada does NOT have the best healthcare Is Freeland getting thrown under the bus？

Episode Stats


Length

45 minutes

Words per minute

157.9

Word count

7,187

Sentence count

291

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

This week, Andrew Lawton is joined by former Vice Admiral Mark Norman and Philip Cross to talk all things energy and climate change in Canada. Plus, a look at why Justin Trudeau is so unpopular in his own country, and why he needs to do something about it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00 Transcription by CastingWords
00:00:30 Thank you.
00:01:00 welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true
00:01:19 north hello and welcome to you all canada's most irreverent talk show here the andrew lotten show
00:01:29 on true north july 10th it is wednesday hump day hope you're having a fantastic week so far
00:01:36 i i totally have been so focused on political news as of late i don't pay attention to weather
00:01:43 reports and it was only like to be honest way way too late it was only like last night that
00:01:49 I started paying attention to this thing called Hurricane Beryl, which is apparently ravaging its
00:01:54 way through Southern Ontario right now. And then I sort of forgot about it. It was something I
00:01:59 would have noticed and heard about. And then I was wondering why it was raining so hard. And then I
00:02:03 was, oh yeah, that must be that hurricane thing. But anyway, hopefully you are staying dry in the
00:02:09 midst of the remnants of Hurricane Beryl. I don't even know if it has a name, because it's not really
00:02:14 a hurricane anymore. It's just rain. It's just heavy rain. But anyway, that's the closest you're
00:02:21 getting to a weather report on the Andrew Lawton show. It's like the most idle chit-chat talking
00:02:26 about the weather. But anyway, good to have you aboard. We are going to be talking very excited
00:02:30 about this in 15 minutes or so with former Vice Admiral Mark Norman. Comes at a very useful time
00:02:37 as Canada is just getting flogged in the United States for not spending enough on defense. This is
00:02:43 a long-standing issue in Canada, really trying to ride the coattails of the United States'
00:02:48 defense spending when it comes to NATO. So we'll talk to Vice Admiral Mark Norman just
00:02:53 very shortly. And later on in the program, Philip Cross on why Canada has just willingly decided to
00:03:01 decarbonize this electricity grid into a more vulnerable state. We are now for the first time
00:03:06 a net importer of electricity, which he says is an entirely preventable problem. So that's going
00:03:13 to be something we'll get into very shortly. But, you know, we've been trying to take on the bigger
00:03:18 picture discussions this week, especially as there hasn't been as much in the way of hard,
00:03:23 hot, fresh news. And I'd be remiss to not point out just the utter ignorance that Justin Trudeau 0.77
00:03:30 has about how unpopular his own government is right now. He's in D.C. He's doing the rounds
00:03:36 while he's down in the United States for the NATO summit. And while he's in the United States,
00:03:41 he's of course talking to media as well, because right now he gets booed and heckled and things
00:03:46 are thrown at him anytime he goes somewhere in Canada. Not that I support doing that,
00:03:50 but that's what happens when he goes places in Canada. So in the US, he hopes that he's able to
00:03:55 perhaps just find a little bit in the way of support there. And that's why when he's doing
00:04:00 this weird reinvention it's always seems to involve like podcasts hosted by americans or
00:04:07 something like that because they're the only people that are willing to talk to him and not
00:04:11 just give him an absolute uh an absolute rough ride but anyway all of that notwithstanding he
00:04:16 was doing a sit down with generation squeeze and he does this weird intergenerational class
00:04:21 warfare type of thing take a look the biggest reason that i used to you know lean on young
00:04:28 people so much is because young people are naturally both more comfortable with
00:04:32 change and more naturally long-term thinkers. When adults reach a certain
00:04:37 point in their life they think of the long term as a linear extension of
00:04:41 whatever moment they're in right now. If you set aside a certain percentage of
00:04:46 your of your income, if you you know pay off the mortgage in a while, if you you
00:04:50 go through your career path in a certain way that you can predict what
00:04:54 your retirement's going to look like. Young people are leaping from living at home to 1.00
00:05:00 high school to university to living out on their own to starting a family. Everything
00:05:05 is such deeply transformational that it's easier to draw on young people for a longer
00:05:10 term thinking than the four year political cycle usually allows to. So for me, leaning
00:05:17 on young people and bringing them in in 2015 was a hugely important part of what shaped
00:05:24 my entry into politics and the irony is now 10 years later I look at those young
00:05:29 people who got involved me the first time they're now in their late 20s and
00:05:34 they're saying I I can't afford a home like I thought you were supposed to be
00:05:38 fixing this and instead the world has gone in the wrong direction and I you
00:05:42 know you can say look it would have been way worse had we not made the
00:05:45 investments we did but that's really the thing that fed into me to the need in
00:05:51 in this budget to say, okay, there's something fundamentally shifted in our economy that young
00:05:58 people don't have the kinds of opportunities they had before. And that's, that's what we're trying
00:06:03 to go at. He says the quiet part out loud, which is that, oh, all of these young people that joined
00:06:12 with me in 2015 are now in their late twenties. And they're saying, I can't afford a house.
00:06:16 and I'm like yeah that's kind of an important detail there and he kind of glosses over it he
00:06:22 glosses over it and makes it a point about how baby boomers are the problem at another point in 0.92
00:06:26 that discussion he talks about how baby boomers are basically all living in houses too big and
00:06:31 they should downsize and he's again trying to pit young against old here but this is Justin Trudeau
00:06:38 trying to basically say that I am not the problem young people no you young folks that can't afford 0.98
00:06:43 your homes i'm not the problem it's the baby boomers who are the problem it's the baby boomers 1.00
00:06:48 you have to blame uh perhaps justin trudeau has found some kinship in elizabeth may what say you
00:06:54 elizabeth may i've got another grand baby coming at the end of october and i feel very very committed
00:07:02 as i think everybody my age should baby boomers have this planet and we can't walk away and leave 1.00
00:07:11 it for our kids to fix it. And I'm sorry I just used the F word out loud, but I think kids
00:07:15 understand what I'm saying. I'm a 70-year-old, angry, cranky version of Greta Thunberg. And am
00:07:22 I ready? You bet. There is a dilemma for you. What would you rather have, the original Greta
00:07:31 Thunberg or the angry, cranky, 70-year-old grandma with a trucker mouth Greta Thunberg? 1.00
00:07:38 You get two, you get a day with one of them, and you have to pick it, and you can't choose 0.97
00:07:43 just killing yourself. I think I'd probably take the Swedish Greta Thunberg. But anyway,
00:07:47 that's Elizabeth May's approach. But in a weird way, she and Justin Trudeau are in alignment
00:07:51 on that. They're both trying to blame the baby boomers. They're trying to blame a lot of the
00:07:56 people that are tuning into this show for the perils of the world. Now, let me say first and
00:08:02 foremost that there are obviously demographic realities that factor into the homeownership
00:08:07 dilemma. But it's only when boomers have been able to afford houses that they have something 0.62
00:08:12 to give their kids who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford one, which is a part of the problem
00:08:16 that often does not get discussed here. And just to give you the other side of it,
00:08:21 this is how I suspect the boomers are probably feeling about Justin Trudeau. Now, I don't know
00:08:26 the total audience of a Rolling Stones concert. I assume there are some young people there,
00:08:32 but I would assume based on the age of the Rolling Stones themselves, their audience
00:08:36 skews in a particular direction. Boy, did Mick Jagger misjudge that audience.
00:08:42 Anyway, I mean, we love your Mr. Trudeau. I mean, his family's always been such big fans of our
00:08:49 fans. Oh, it cut off early. But anyway, so what happens then is he pivots to a soccer discussion
00:09:05 because he realizes how much he's misjudged the audience and then he just decides to go uh how
00:09:10 about how about that Canadian soccer team and then everyone cheers for that so he he gets them on that
00:09:16 at least but I think he assumed that again his because his knowledge like he used to party with
00:09:20 Margaret Trudeau so I think his knowledge of Trudeau's popularity is still somewhere stuck in
00:09:25 like you know 1978 with Pierre Trudeau and that was what happened and that was Vancouver like I
00:09:31 I mean, if you're at a Vancouver rock concert and you can't get a, you know, even like one person
00:09:36 cheering for Justin Trudeau's name, I think that tells you something. But I will tell you,
00:09:39 no one is cheering for Justin Trudeau in Washington, D.C. this week, where the NATO
00:09:45 summit is convening and Canada has nowhere to hide for its refusal to increase its defense
00:09:52 spending to 2% of its GDP. This is the commitment that NATO allies have made. It's something that
00:09:58 the U.S. has always had to bear a disproportionate share of. And to be clear, this is not paying
00:10:04 money to NATO. This is paying money to your own national defense so that you can do what is
00:10:10 expected of you as a member of NATO, so that you have the investments in your armed forces
00:10:15 that are required. So it's possible to reach that 2% by just blowing money. That wouldn't
00:10:21 be efficient, but on paper, it would satisfy the criteria. But we're seeing now a tremendous
00:10:26 amount of criticism that I've not recalled from recent years, even when that number that Canada
00:10:31 is spending has been low from Americans. This is a clip from Mike Johnson, who's the U.S. Speaker
00:10:37 of the House. Sir, I have noticed, too, in your press releases and your remarks, you're always,
00:10:43 you were often very careful to mention the countries who are doing their part. And I've
00:10:48 noticed those are the ones that are on the front end of where the danger is. So you want to talk
00:10:52 a little bit about just the Baltic countries and what you've observed from meeting with them and
00:10:56 seeing their troubles? Yeah. When the grenades are close to your own backyard, it gives you
00:11:01 a renewed sense of priority and commitment. I mean, by contrast, shamefully, Canada announced
00:11:08 in the last few days or the last couple of days that they won't be ponying up. They're not going
00:11:13 to do their 2%. Why? Talk about writing on America's coattails. They have the safety and
00:11:19 security of being on our border and not having to worry about that. I think that's shameful.
00:11:22 I think if you're going to be a member nation and participant, you need to do your part.
00:11:28 Some have a greater sense of urgency about that, clearly, because the threat is at their own back door.
00:11:32 But here's the reality.
00:11:34 If we don't stop it there, it will come here.
00:11:37 There's no guarantee.
00:11:37 We live under this false assumption or, you know, false sense of security that we would never have a war on our own shores.
00:11:44 But guess what?
00:11:45 The enemy is here.
00:11:46 The border's been wide open for three and a half years.
00:11:48 By some estimates, 16 million illegals have come across.
00:11:51 and they're not all good people. And then we also had his counterpart in the Senate,
00:11:58 well not his direct counterpart, but the Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch
00:12:01 McConnell with a very similar sentiment. We need to step up and a good time to emphasize that is
00:12:08 while NATO is celebrating its 75th anniversary right here in Washington. We need to make it
00:12:14 clear that we're behind NATO. There are allies in Indo-Pacific who are here as well. Every
00:12:25 democratic country in the world is together against this coterie of authoritarians. And
00:12:34 what a great time to emphasize that we're all together. I had a similar conversation
00:12:41 yesterday with the president of latvia i mean they're right up next to the russians
00:12:46 and then the majority leader and i and some others met with the canadian prime minister with all due
00:12:52 respect to our canadian friends they're a long way from hitting the two percent mark
00:12:58 but a whole lot of the rest of the nato members have
00:13:03 that was mitch mcconnell and when he talks about a long way the latest figures from this week that
00:13:07 that Canada will only be spending 1.42% of its GDP on military by 2030.
00:13:14 That comes from the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
00:13:17 I wanted to discuss this and related aspects with former Vice Chief of the Defence Staff,
00:13:22 retired Vice Admiral Mark Norman, who it's a pleasure to have on the show.
00:13:26 Admiral, thank you for coming on. Good to speak to you.
00:13:28 Well, good afternoon, Andrew, to you and your viewers.
00:13:31 And thanks for taking a serious interest in this really important topic.
00:13:37 for people that have not been as familiar with this discussion over the years and i'll be clear
00:13:44 this is not a discussion that just began with justin trudeau it's long-standing where does
00:13:49 that two percent number come from and why has it been determined to matter to nato allies
00:13:54 yeah so without dragging your viewers through the decades-long history of nato you know basically
00:14:02 During the height of the Cold War, everybody was seized with the urgency and need, and it was a smaller community.
00:14:13 And then, you know, as NATO evolved, the member nations grew with the collapse of the former Soviet Union, etc., etc.
00:14:23 We find ourselves in about the last decade or so, as NATO was transitioning out of its enormous contribution to Afghanistan and looking into an unknown future, it was becoming obvious that there was an enormous discrepancy across the member nations with respect to defense spending.
00:14:48 And this was agreed roughly a decade ago, in fact, under Prime Minister Harper initially, that this was the right metric to define sort of a fair and reasonable playing field, if you will, for defense contributions.
00:15:07 contributions, recognizing, of course, that there were some incredibly small and relatively
00:15:14 poor nations, and there were some large and relatively wealthy nations, and that across
00:15:21 the board, this was a good way of measuring contribution in a way which was commensurate
00:15:28 with your relative wealth and your capacity to pay.
00:15:31 And so that's kind of the background that got us to the last couple of years.
00:15:37 And then we can discuss where the wheels have come off the wagon, to put it bluntly.
00:15:42 And just on that note, I mean, there are some countries that are incredibly disproportionate in what they're providing.
00:15:49 The United States being a notable example.
00:15:51 They're up, I think, at about 3.5% of their GDP.
00:15:53 I think Poland is somewhere near 4%, if I recall correctly, or has been.
00:15:58 but spending money there isn't really a guideline for how you're spending it i alluded to this
00:16:04 earlier i mean the government could just you know hire you know a bajillion consultants and you know
00:16:08 say great we've spent this much on defense it doesn't mean they're providing something better
00:16:13 than other countries so has that actually been an issue where you have countries that are spending
00:16:19 money but they're not really getting anything for it yeah so yeah and i i heard your comments
00:16:23 earlier and i think you you know you hit on a valid point so it there's there's sort of two
00:16:29 perspectives on this one um you know ultimately as as taxpayers money here this it needs to be
00:16:35 a responsible use of those funds um i will add that in the last few years a number of things
00:16:42 which were previously not included in canada's calculation have been included including support
00:16:47 to veterans coast guard those kinds of things so uh in theory those should those should um
00:16:54 make us look better but it speaks to the gravity of the problem across the board
00:16:59 that that that there is a significant underspend here in canada but the other part of it is that
00:17:04 you know it's a bit of an imperfect metric and uh you know i i've spoken previously about the fact
00:17:11 that it is it is not an ideal metric but it is the agreed metric and you know to your point
00:17:20 NATO doesn't care how you spend the money they want you to spend the money efficiently and
00:17:26 ultimately the taxpayers of Canada should insist that the money be spent responsibly and efficiently
00:17:31 but the reality is that in the Canadian context there are so many things which are
00:17:38 grossly underfunded that we could and should hit the 2% target. One of the concerns I have
00:17:47 is that our internal mechanisms and processes are so dysfunctional for a variety of reasons
00:17:53 that it would really be difficult to spend that money efficiently, responsibly in the period of
00:18:04 time that our allies are looking for us to spend so i'm not making excuses for anybody but um you
00:18:11 know this has been a problem that's been decades in the making uh it has become uh an acute problem
00:18:18 in the last several years for obvious reasons and um you know that we can't spend our way out of
00:18:25 this um just by throwing money at it but that's what they want us to do but you know what there
00:18:32 There is a legitimate shopping list of things that are required that are not currently funded.
00:18:38 So that's kind of my circular reaction.
00:18:43 Well, and you obviously came up through the Navy in terms of your service to the Canadian Armed Forces.
00:18:48 And as I understand it, that's always been one of the most just notoriously underfunded aspects of the Canadian Armed Forces.
00:18:55 Yeah, well, all of the elements of the Armed Forces have their own problems.
00:19:01 And yes, to your point, one of the challenges with, you know, the Navy tends to be what we describe as the most capital intensive.
00:19:11 Everything is, it's big, it's shiny, it's very expensive to buy, it's very expensive to operate.
00:19:19 You need very sophisticated facilities to support it.
00:19:24 But it's a relatively small, from a people perspective, the Army is kind of the opposite.
00:19:31 It doesn't mean it's not a high tech organization because it is, but it tends not to have the magnitude of equipment. And then the Air Force is kind of in the middle where, you know, the fleets all need to be moderated and the staffing needs to be appropriate.
00:19:48 And what we've got at the moment is we've got a bit of a perfect storm playing out here.
00:19:55 The chronic underfunding of the last couple of decades, in the last few years in particular, means that the capital fleets that should have been replaced, and by fleets I mean everything from trucks to destroyers, need to be replaced.
00:20:09 They're long overdue. That's causing enormous problems in terms of maintaining the current capabilities, which are in many cases, if they're not obsolete, they're rusted out.
00:20:23 And then that has an impact on morale because, you know, a lot of people, if they are inclined to join, don't want to join to operate equipment that's older than them.
00:20:34 And the people that are in and have been in for decades are growing increasingly frustrated with the fact that they can't do what they know they need to do on behalf of Canadians because they don't have the support, both in terms of material support, i.e. funding.
00:20:50 And you know what? There's a significant lack of what I would call moral support, particularly with this government, who, although they're saying the right things, I'm not convinced they actually believe that this is important.
00:21:05 And I think this is part of the reason why this 2% issue has been such a problem for them, because I really don't think they believe in the need for strong defense. They play along, they say the right things, they've got all the right slogans, but deep down in their core, I don't think they genuinely think it's that important.
00:21:25 And, you know, ultimately, all of the things that Canadians love and enjoy and are struggling with on a day-to-day basis, from economics to everything else, are all premised on a secure environment.
00:21:40 And that goes beyond our borders.
00:21:42 The reason why the issue in Ukraine is so troubling is because it's representative of a far bigger problem with respect to a clash, not just a political ideology, but a clash of geopolitical systems.
00:21:59 And if we want to continue to try and rebuild the kind of Canada that we all love, we can't let other external forces determine what kind of global systems we're going to operate under.
00:22:18 I wanted to go back to that clip I played earlier of Speaker Johnson in the U.S. accusing Canada, he said the word shamefully, of riding on the U.S. military's coattails and the U.S. government's coattails on defense.
00:22:31 Because, I mean, the Canadian and American armed forces have longstanding ties and connections. NORAD, one of the most, I'd say, incredible success stories in the world, not just in North America.
00:22:42 that attitude is that reflective of an attitude that exists in the u.s military itself or is that
00:22:50 just an attitude in the u.s political class because i know you would have had a number of
00:22:54 dealings over the years with your counterparts in the united states and i'm curious if that's
00:22:58 just a political posture or if that's something that was a very real sentiment from the americans
00:23:03 yeah no i it's an excellent an excellent question so let me let me preface my comments by saying to
00:23:11 you that historically, and I speak from a historical perspective because I'm no longer
00:23:17 serving, but traditionally throughout my career, there was a heartfelt, genuine acknowledgement
00:23:26 of the caliber of Canadians, be they at sea, in the air, or on the battlefield.
00:23:33 and and uh it was it was um enormous respect and uh you know it was kind of one of these things
00:23:42 uh we love you Canadians we just we just wish there were more of you um was the sentiment and
00:23:48 more not just in terms of the numbers of people themselves but more armed forces uh in essence
00:23:54 and um uh I genuinely believe that that is the undertone I know that on a individual peer for
00:24:03 pure basis that that that level of respect is still is still there however i also know that
00:24:10 in the last couple of years in particular for for a variety of reasons including what i would
00:24:15 describe as the relative if not absence let's just say uh the infrequency or or lack of depth
00:24:23 of canada's presence around the world um has caused a number of allies to start questioning
00:24:30 our commitment, not the competency of the individual, but our commitment. And then
00:24:37 there's also been some issues with respect to some of the recent experiments around
00:24:42 dress deportment and appearance, which have caused some of our allies to kind of shake their heads
00:24:48 and ask what the hell we're thinking. But that level of concern, I believe, is entirely,
00:24:58 um it's transitional it's episodic and and i believe that there's a substance there the bigger
00:25:04 concern is exactly what you characterize which is at the political and national level and um you know
00:25:12 there there's a notwithstanding the politics of this in the current um time frame there's also a
00:25:19 bit of a societal issue here we have enjoyed um living under the umbrella of the united states
00:25:26 for decades um we have enjoyed an incredible degree um at least until recently of of national
00:25:34 prosperity and um all of these have you know allowed us to kind of invest in ourselves if you
00:25:43 want to put it that way as opposed to looking at our responsibilities um more continentally first
00:25:52 and then globally as it relates to defense and security is your sense and this is i guess getting
00:25:59 outside of your military experience and more to your your think tank and analytical roles that
00:26:04 you have now do you think that the public calculation on this changed with russia invading
00:26:10 ukraine because all of a sudden you have a type of war that had seemed very abstract and very
00:26:16 anachronistic for you know basically 80 years that's how happening in in europe and i i don't
00:26:22 know if that sentiment has necessarily translated to north america certainly colleagues of mine i
00:26:27 know in in sweden and estonia it's very real for them and i think that for canadians i'm wondering
00:26:35 if you think that has changed anything at all or if the idea of needing to have defense the idea
00:26:40 of needing to protect against a war is still just a very abstract concept for people so i think the
00:26:46 needle has moved but i don't think it's moved significantly um so the good news is that i
00:26:52 genuinely believe and and certainly polling has shown that there is a heightened sense of awareness
00:26:59 and and concern um and whether that's translating into a belief or a commitment that more needs to
00:27:08 be done um the polling would say yes i'm not really sure that there's a couple of challenges
00:27:16 with this one of them is what you just alluded to in your question is that um you know and the
00:27:22 speaker kind of joked well he didn't joke about it but you know there's the saying the farther you
00:27:26 are from the sound of the guns the less the less the stuff matters so if you're in latvia or estonia
00:27:33 where and by the way we have a battle group canada has a battle group in latvia and then this is a
00:27:37 very real problem for you this this is not a theoretical issue that this this is real um and
00:27:43 And the same goes for, you know, Sweden and Finland, who, by the way, for your viewers, are the latest joiners in NATO in the last few months.
00:27:51 It's a huge step forward.
00:27:53 But when you're far away and you're living under the umbrella of the most powerful nation on the planet and you've lived for maybe a few years or certainly like some of us for our entire adult lives in a system whereby you never really had to worry about it because you just assumed that it was all going to be looked after, it has created a sense of apathy.
00:28:21 So there's there's a fair bit of inertia associated with that apathy. But the reality is that the global security situation is incredibly troubling. And yes, I mean, we've talked about Ukraine. We haven't talked about China. We haven't talked about the real genuine concerns about the growth of China's military and its expansionist philosophies and behaviors.
00:28:49 And, you know, I said this the other day in another conversation. Do I believe that somebody in the next few years is actually going to invade the territory of Canada? It's possible, but I don't think it's very likely.
00:29:04 But there's the problem. If that's the limit of somebody's willingness to accept or understand the scale of the problem, then you can't have the kind of conversation we have to have.
00:29:17 This is about our way of life. This is about how our economies function internationally.
00:29:24 This is about trade. This is about all those things that we hold near and dear. This is about our freedoms. This is about the rule of law. This is about all these things.
00:29:34 And China and Russia and other mal-actors are looking to reset a system that they have watched, observed, and bluntly not liked for the better part of the 20th and 21st centuries. 0.88
00:29:54 And they want to reset the rules of the game.
00:29:57 Now, if people want to live under those new rules, okay, fine.
00:30:02 But this is why this is such a big problem for our peers, our allies, and those like-minded nations that we like to cuddle up to and befriend.
00:30:15 But we're not showing them that we actually care.
00:30:21 You might say we do, but what they're looking for is, okay, come on, Canada, take your own defense seriously.
00:30:28 And that goes back to your question about how you spend the money.
00:30:32 Everybody talks about Article 5 and NATO and, you know, the all for one and one for all kind of philosophy here.
00:30:39 Everybody forgets about Article 4, which basically says you will do everything you can to defend yourself.
00:30:47 And if something happens and you can't, then we will come to your aid under Article 5.
00:30:54 So where's Canada on Article 4?
00:30:57 That's kind of what we're being reminded of, is our obligations, because we're not doing everything we can and everything we should to look after our own territorial integrity and, more importantly, our ability to do what we need to do in the continent in cooperation with the United States.
00:31:18 it's the old airplane safety announcement of put your own mask on before you help your neighbor if
00:31:23 you can't protect yourself and aren't protecting yourself you certainly don't have anything left
00:31:27 to help anything else so uh the fascinating discussion so many other areas we could go with
00:31:31 it i hope we can get you back on admiral mark norman retired vice admiral and also fellow at
00:31:36 the canadian global affairs institute it's been a pleasure sir thank you for your service and for
00:31:40 your time thank you andrew to you and your viewers and you know where to find me take care all right
00:31:45 Thank you so much. Delight to have him on. And I was actually planning, and we still are a bit of a deep dive into the state of Canada's military that we're hoping to do later this summer. So we'll have some more on that as we proceed. But a fascinating topic. And again, a lot of people, even in the comments I was looking at very briefly in the lead up to the show today, people saying, well, why does Canada need to pay to defend Europe? No.
00:32:08 And I'm glad that Admiral Norman talked about the Article 4 section there, because when you spend money on defense, you're first and foremost spending money on your own defense.
00:32:17 You're basically saying to the allies in NATO that you're doing what you can to protect yourself so that they won't have to come in.
00:32:24 There are a couple of countries in the world, I think Costa Rica or El Salvador.
00:32:29 I think it's Costa Rica that just doesn't have a military.
00:32:32 And, you know, again, they're not really able to do all that much for themselves.
00:32:35 So if anything happens, someone decides they want to take over, they have to rely on a benevolent other state to protect them.
00:32:42 And it's easy to see how the free-riding dilemma that Speaker Johnson was talking about of Canada just expecting and Canadians just expecting, well, the United States will save us.
00:32:53 The United States will protect us.
00:32:55 When I was in university, I did a diplomatic simulation with a professor who had actually been a diplomat.
00:33:01 And our simulation was the United States had invaded Canada.
00:33:05 And it was actually a fascinating, fascinating experiment.
00:33:08 Of course, a silly premise, but I can't remember the reason.
00:33:11 I think the reason was that the U.S. had a water shortage and had invaded Canada for fresh water. 0.96
00:33:16 It was something ridiculous like that.
00:33:18 But the whole point is, like, you know, theoretically, Canada and the U.S. might not always be friends.
00:33:23 So the idea that we're expecting them to cover our defense, well, what if they're the ones against whom we need to defend?
00:33:28 I think a lot of Canadians might think we're just throwing in the towel at that point.
00:33:31 But the whole aspect here, and I'm glad that Admiral Norma was talking about this, is about perspective.
00:33:37 It's not about saying we're going to be facing some massive invasion in the next couple of years.
00:33:41 It's about being able to protect ourselves, being able to prepare, and so on.
00:33:46 But it was interesting.
00:33:47 Chrystia Freeland was criticized for this, as most people in the government have been. 0.68
00:33:52 And she just says, oh, everything's fine.
00:33:54 But she kind of makes it out as though it's Harper's fault somehow.
00:33:56 Take a look.
00:33:57 In light of the letter from U.S. lawmakers and warnings from the Business Council of Canada,
00:34:02 was it felt that these meetings the Prime Minister is having today and yesterday in D.C. necessary to reassure Americans?
00:34:10 Thanks for the question.
00:34:12 The Prime Minister is in Washington right now working very hard.
00:34:17 I think it's important for Canadians to recognize that Canada is the seventh biggest defense spender in the entire NATO alliance of 32 countries.
00:34:31 We are a major contributor to our defense and to the defense of our allies.
00:34:37 It's also the case that under Stephen Harper's Conservatives, Canada's defense spending fell to less than 1% to 0.9% of GDP.
00:34:50 Our government has been steadily increasing our investments in defense because we recognize the threats in the world.
00:35:01 and in the budget that I tabled in April we put forward a fully costed plan to get our defense
00:35:11 spending up to nearly 1.8 percent in 2029. That's a long way of saying we're not doing it from
00:35:21 Chrystia Freeland there and again if you don't want to do it own up to it if you don't want to
00:35:25 do it say we think it's unreasonable instead it's just this weird baffle gab that goes every
00:35:30 direction but where anyone asking the question is expecting or hoping it will go we will move
00:35:36 from defense to a different form of territorial independence which is our electricity market now
00:35:42 this is a i also i'll warn you it's a bit in the weeds in some ways but i think it's understandable
00:35:46 because we see rising electricity rates in many places across the country i mean i'm from ontario
00:35:52 which used to have like among the most expensive electricity anywhere in north america except for
00:35:57 I think it was like Hawaii back when Kathleen Wynne was in office.
00:36:00 But we have now seen ourselves become a net importer of electricity as a country.
00:36:07 For the first time, this is quite significant.
00:36:09 We are now importing more electricity than we are producing and exporting.
00:36:14 And this is coming because there is a vulnerability that my next guest believes has been created in large part due to policy here.
00:36:22 A decarbonization-focused energy strategy has allowed this to happen.
00:36:26 Philip Cross is a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and had a great piece in the Financial Post about this.
00:36:32 Philip, always good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on today.
00:36:35 My pleasure. Thanks for having me back so soon, Andrew.
00:36:37 So why does this matter that we are now a net importer? Why is that relevant?
00:36:42 It's relevant because we think of ourselves as a country of almost inexhaustible supplies of electricity.
00:36:49 particularly you know whole a great part of Quebec's self-image is that it's this massive
00:36:57 source of hydro. Newfoundland obviously has a huge hydro development. Ontario has an extensive
00:37:04 network of nuclear plants. Manitoba and British Columbia also have large electricity power
00:37:11 sources and have been adding to them recently. So the fact that you know we have this self-image
00:37:17 that we have all its electricity. And then suddenly this year we had to import more from the US.
00:37:23 Normally we're exporting to the US for the first time ever at the beginning of this year,
00:37:28 we were importing electricity unbalanced from the US. This shows that our supplies of electricity
00:37:35 are not keeping up with demand. You could look at the shortfall this year and blame it on some
00:37:41 temporary factors. You can say it's drought and it's maintenance at nuclear plants, but it risks
00:37:46 because of the fact we are not building up our electrical capacity, this temporary situation
00:37:52 risks becoming permanent if this country doesn't get serious about building out its electricity
00:37:57 supplies. And why do you believe this has been really a problem created by policy in a lot of
00:38:03 ways? Because it's been openly the goal of policy to electrify our energy demand. For example,
00:38:16 the most extreme example is, of course, that we're supposed to not drive gasoline-powered
00:38:20 internal combustion engines in our cars anymore. We're supposed to be driving electric vehicles.
00:38:26 Well, if we're all going to drive electric vehicles, and if we're all going to heat our
00:38:31 homes with electricity and not natural gas or in oil.
00:38:35 And if we're all going to use, um, all kinds of, uh, new technologies
00:38:41 that are powered by the grid, you know, it was predictable.
00:38:44 We were going to need a vast increase in our electricity demand.
00:38:48 Uh, you know, environmentalists say, well, we're supposed to cut back
00:38:52 on our investments in fossil fuels.
00:38:54 The counterpart of that though, is you're supposed to be increasing
00:38:58 your investment in electricity sources and we haven't been doing so one of the things that i
00:39:04 found interesting in your piece is that the government knows it doesn't have the capacity
00:39:11 to create all of this energy through the means they want to i mean that's the thing is that
00:39:16 there's this fatwa against energy that we're using without a viable alternative there but we're so
00:39:22 we're definitely putting the cart before the horse and we're seeing this i think yeah well on the
00:39:27 heels of this op-ed I wrote in the post, there's an interesting article in The Globe today,
00:39:32 Wednesday, that is, that highlights in Quebec, for example. Quebec brought out the trumpets and
00:39:39 announced a great fanfare over the last couple of months that they were going to substantially
00:39:44 build out both their hydro and their wind capacity. It turns out even with this vast expansion,
00:39:51 it's not going to meet even half of the projected increase. Hydro-Quebec admitted a couple of years
00:39:56 ago that its projections about where electricity demand was going was completely wrong. It was
00:40:01 very slow to react. The former head of Hydro-Quebec said, oh, well, this is a great opportunity to
00:40:07 conserve demand and we don't need to build capacity. They replaced her with Michael Savia,
00:40:12 who was formerly the deputy minister of finance here in Ottawa. And Savia is pursuing a program
00:40:18 of aggressively increasing supply, but it's not going to be enough. And that's the frightening
00:40:25 thing is, you know, for BC, for example, to meet its projected hydro electricity demand,
00:40:32 they're not going to have to just build finished Site C, they're going to have to build at least
00:40:36 five more dams the size of Site C. Well, imagine all the problems and delays and arguments about
00:40:42 Site C, multiply that by five. And you can see, you know, this is something that we're going to
00:40:48 have to start tackling right now. I mean, electricity generating plants are built with
00:40:53 the horizon of 10 years from beginning to end. So this isn't something you just go out and throw
00:41:02 up in a couple of years. And I think the concern has to be that, you know, we're going to in the
00:41:09 short run over the next five, 10 years, we're probably going to run chronically short of
00:41:13 electricity. And we're going to be reliant on the Americans to supply our electricity,
00:41:17 which is going to be quite a role reversal for this country.
00:41:21 it was it didn't intentionally come out this way but you're coming on the heels of my discussion
00:41:26 with admiral mark norman in which that's basically defense policy in canada now which is to
00:41:30 ride the coattails of america and now we're doing the same thing on electricity too it seems
00:41:35 one of the things i want to ask you about was alberta now they had a i don't know if mini is
00:41:39 the right word but they had a a relatively short-lived thankfully electricity crisis
00:41:44 in the last few months and is there any lesson to be taken from that that is being taken
00:41:50 Oh, there's two. I mean, we had a couple of near misses in Texas a couple of years ago and in Alberta this year, where the electrical grid almost collapsed. We just didn't have the capacity to meet demand. People don't seem to realize this isn't going to be a three-hour blackout. If your electrical grid goes down, it takes months to come back on stream.
00:42:13 Imagine if a major state like Texas or a province like Alberta goes offline from electricity for weeks or months at a time.
00:42:24 I mean, this would be catastrophic.
00:42:27 I mean, I was aware during my tenure at Sissies Canada that if you want to shut down our society, cut off the juice. 1.00
00:42:35 Every time there's a major power outage.
00:42:39 For example, Ontario had a major one in 2003.
00:42:43 economic activity just grinds to a halt our society cannot function without electricity
00:42:49 and because of the decarbonization move and the desire to get away from fossil fuels we're more
00:42:55 dependent on electricity for energy than ever and yet we are not taking adequate steps to ensure
00:43:04 both the security of supply in the sense of that it can be counted on that it's reliable and it
00:43:10 it won't be interrupted and with security comes affordability we can't increase the price of
00:43:16 electricity by five times we will bankrupt ourselves and especially the poorest members
00:43:21 of our society so we need to make sure that adequate cheap sources of supply are coming on
00:43:28 stream over the next years 10 years to meet projected demand and it seems to be something
00:43:33 that this country is just waking up to and we're we're behind the ball on this one the piece in
00:43:41 the financial post which you should take a look at canada's energy blindness must end written by
00:43:46 philip cross philip always good to talk to you thanks for coming on today thank you all right
00:43:51 and that does it for us for today we'll be back tomorrow with more of canada's most irreverent
00:43:55 talk show close things out for the week thank you god bless and good day to you all thanks for
00:44:01 listening to the Andrew Vaughn Show. Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.
00:44:31 We'll be right back.
00:45:01 We'll be right back.