00:00:14.800I saw that some of the Jays fans might be boycotting the Seattle games this year because that's obviously one of their best series for Seattle because the stadiums are filled with Jays fans and the hotels and the city.
00:00:32.060Well, you know, I'm not just saying, I'm not sure how many people in Seattle are huge Trump voters.
00:00:39.060Like, I'm going out on a limb here and wondering about that.
00:00:42.300I'm dating myself, but I remember going down to Seattle and Ken Griffey Jr. was playing for the Mariners and we got to meet him down on the field.
00:01:18.820I'm the Alberta Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
00:01:22.080I'm joined by Alex Zoltan and Isaac Lamoureux from True North.
00:01:26.640Fellas, there's lots to talk about here and I wanted to get going because we have a pretty packed show.
00:01:30.760So, first up, I don't know if I had this on my bingo card.
00:01:35.380U.S. President Donald Trump went on Fox News, and I think it was on Ingram, and said that he would prefer that the selected Prime Minister, Mark Carney of Canada, he'd prefer that he stay on the job.
00:02:35.280My endgame is I don't want to have a big deficit.
00:02:38.680I don't want to see the United States of America—and you say 60, and I say 200, but it doesn't matter.
00:02:44.560I don't want us to pay 60 or 200 billion dollars to a country that, if they were a state—think of this—it would be our biggest, most beautiful, it would be great.
00:02:54.820Yeah, you know, there was—I forget who said it was—it might have been Pierre Trudeau, who said it's like living next to an elephant.
00:04:04.460Yeah, I don't know what to think of the things Trump has done, especially for the Conservatives' campaign and what that means for the next federal election in Canada,
00:04:17.260because some people I've spoken with have thought that Trump's proposed tariffs, for example, have hurt the Conservatives in their campaign against the Liberals.
00:04:28.260And we've seen the Liberals gain ground in the polls.
00:04:31.260But the most interesting thing, Chris, that I want to talk about, which is a completely different story that I wrote about, was the OECD report, which went into a proposed tariff scenario, and who would be the big winners and losers nationwide—not nationwide, worldwide.
00:04:54.740So, maybe in reading that report, he might start to change his mind, because, look, the tariffs are hurting the American people even more than us.
00:05:02.720We see their GDP is going to go down more than ours is.
00:10:46.220But, yeah, you know, I was thinking about this last night, completely unrelated to the Tesla, but just about the cult-like ideology of people that we've seen.
00:10:55.580I mean, really, they don't care what the cause is that they're fighting against before.
00:11:06.260You know, it just changes at the flip of a switch when the people they look up to in politics, let's say, tell them what they need to hate.
00:11:15.620But perhaps what they're lacking is the reasoning behind it all and the critical thinking that actually lets us know why we believe what we believe.
00:11:24.940I will say I spent 25 years, most of it, as a mainstream journalist.
00:13:10.020And he's on the record many times saying no second carbon tax, which was a weird carbon tax that was buried in fuel regulations, especially there in B.C., Alex.
00:13:56.500It's just harder for you to see the pain as a carbon taxpayer.
00:13:59.920And second, and this is key, by obliterating the industrial carbon tax, it removes the ability for politicians to hide the consumer carbon tax the way that Carney is saying he's going to.
00:14:14.620Alex, I'll let you take the first run at this.
00:14:16.420What were your thoughts when you saw this announcement?
00:14:19.200Well, I actually have more of a question because I'm kind of on the crime beat right now.
00:14:22.240So I'm a little bit outside of this area.
00:14:29.880So if Paul Yev were to get rid of the carbon tax, what would happen in provinces where they've instituted their own carbon tax proactively, like in B.C., for instance?
00:14:51.260So just from what I know of him, because, you know, I go back quite a while, he's not the type to force a province to stop imposing an industrial carbon tax.
00:15:02.480He might think it's dumb or he might talk to the premier, but he's not usually that's not usually his bag.
00:15:07.820But as of right now, he has said it's the federal industrial forcing of it, which is what is happening right now.
00:15:19.480Carney has said he is going to shift the carbon tax costs that we can all see because it annoys him that we can see the carbon tax costs because the peasants get uppity.
00:15:28.340So he's going to shift it over there and then crank it up so that federal element will be gone.
00:15:33.160However, the first carbon tax that you guys pay visibly, like the one that shows up on your Fortis B.C. natural gas bills, your premier, David Eby, has promised to get rid of that B.C. carbon tax if the federal backstop is removed.
00:15:50.720And Carney has said he's reducing the federal one to zero.
00:15:54.100That's when he signed that weird piece of paper.
00:16:37.840No, Chris, this goes back to what you were saying about watching the whole clip, because I remember and how I came to know of this was Paul Yefra pulled up the carbon tax law at a press conference and said, hey, guys, Carney said he's removing the carbon tax.
00:17:05.900I have it in my hands or probably ever did his act in his hands.
00:17:09.400And he actually broke it down for a normal person to understand who was just listening to that press conference, which I think is really key when we're talking about those complex issues.
00:17:18.360As we saw with Alex, even, a reporter, he had to ask you a question right away like it's not entirely clear.
00:17:24.140And just bringing it back to the industrial carbon tax and how it's a hidden tax.
00:17:28.240We've, of course, talked before on the show, Chris, about my heating bill and how the carbon tax was more than the energy itself.
00:17:34.540Now, if they raise the industrial carbon tax, that's not going to be on there.
00:18:29.100It's just stuff that they're reposting for information.
00:18:31.120But there's language on there that is basically counseling politicians who have to deal with us uppity peasants who don't like a visible carbon tax.
00:18:40.280It's counseling them to do things like a cap and trade carbon tax, which is still a carbon tax, but you just can't see it.
00:19:06.380Which is like a really interesting use of language.
00:19:08.700I don't know if it's divisive so much as it's just wildly unpopular because a carbon tax is very immoral when you think about it, because heating and gas, they live on a very inelastic demand curve.
00:19:20.780Like you don't have an option of whether or not to keep your home in Edmonton.
00:19:24.340If you don't, you freeze to death, you don't have an option of whether or not you can drive to work or not, or else you lose your job and you can't pay your heating and you freeze to death.
00:19:32.080It's like putting a tax on insulin for diabetics.
00:20:59.280This is not an environmental solution because when British Columbia first hatched the carbon tax in 2008, they promised that the carbon tax would reduce emissions by 33 percent below 2007 levels by 2020.
00:21:27.680This is not dug up from his book from two years ago.
00:21:30.380It's what he said out loud with his face.
00:21:32.940He says he wants to crank up the industrial carbon tax and create carbon tax tariffs.
00:21:40.100So stuff coming into Canada for the first time ever will have a carbon tax punishment coming from a country that doesn't have one, i.e. the United States.
00:21:58.980Two, there's a guy named Donald Trump, the President of the United States, who's ringing a dinner bell right now trying to get industry to come to America.
00:22:09.100Well, guess what's going to happen to those manufacturing plants in Ontario?
00:22:14.700They're just going to get up and move.
00:22:16.240Yeah, I'm going to be a bit of a jerk to all sides of the political spectrum and say that 25% tariffs on Canadian goods to solve the fentanyl crisis is just as dim-witted as thinking you can change the weather with taxes to tariffs, as you mentioned.
00:22:29.880Yeah, tariffs are just trade taxes, and they just make things and life more expensive for normal people.
00:22:38.300Did we want to get into, this was quite the eyebrow-raising moment.
00:22:42.280Premier Daniel Smith here in our home province of Alberta, Isaac, kind of throwing down the gauntlet, right?
00:22:50.600So I was trying to read this to understand it, but I haven't had enough time to really analyze it.
00:24:00.380And they've even taken them to court before and won various times, where, of course, the No More Pipelines Act, I think it was, was deemed unconstitutional.
00:24:30.620So how are they going to know what's happening in Alberta?
00:24:33.740Yeah, no, it's, it's, I mean, I certainly don't blame Alberta.
00:24:37.540Like I said, they're actually trying to not only empower industry, but reduce their emissions.
00:24:41.940Unlike Ottawa, who, who, who are just trying to tax people and do nothing about emissions, though they virtue signal and say, oh, this will reduce emissions.
00:24:48.920We know from the data itself, by the way, from the data that in these taxes do nothing to reduce emissions.
00:24:56.540Whereas Alberta is actually trying to empower industry and implement best practices and technologies that will and are reducing emissions.
00:25:06.000And another report I read recently, I forgot which one it was.
00:25:09.940Anyways, yeah, look, Canada can actually be a global player in energy because we have clean energy.
00:25:15.180And the alternative is getting very, very dirty energy from coal producing plants in China.
00:25:21.200So, yeah, if we actually boost up our energy and get it worldwide, we can actually do something in global emissions, not just our little country of 40 odd million people.
00:25:32.460Yeah, to your point, again, Canada is responsible for about 1.4 percent of global emissions.
00:25:38.720We're really fighting on the wrong end of that arithmetic problem if we're really concerned about global emissions.
00:25:44.620I will quickly point out I did I think I saw language such as if the feds try to get into these offices to get this data, it will be like a trespassing situation.
00:26:00.160I will also point out that the parliamentary budget officer, the PDO, OK, the nonpartisan watchdog of the federal budget, has came out with a report very recently.
00:26:10.840I did a stand up in front of a pumper there, a pump jack, and it would cost.
00:26:16.340So the production cap, they call it an emissions cap, but it's a production cap coming from Ottawa imposed on Alberta's oil and gas sector.
00:28:00.400He would straight up add on to the debt, which, by the way, is $1.2 trillion.
00:28:03.740And as we all famously know, our deficit, which is a little baby debt, deficit is a yearly debt that is piled onto the big honking mama debt.
00:28:13.720The baby debt for this fiscal year went from the $40 billion mark to around the $60 billion mark.
00:28:20.460And that is when famously Krista Freeland said, you know what, I'm out of here.
00:28:55.140He'll say something like, we're going to make big polluters pay, which translation, use your universal translator from Star Trek, means businesses, industries, job creators.
00:29:05.640Remember that steel plant that he was standing in with his earplugs in and his eye protection and his hard hat?
00:29:12.560And they couldn't get, apparently, the word on the street is, I don't know if this is true.
00:29:17.400The word on the street is, is they couldn't get workers to stand behind him.
00:29:20.520So they made all of the cabinet ministers put on these outfits.
00:29:24.100And just saying, I don't know if many of those cabinet ministers have worn steel toes before in their lives because they looked a little awkward.
00:29:32.020Alex, just to take it to your neck of the woods there, I saw a few articles come up recently on if EB were to remove the carbon tax, I think it would leave like a $1.5 billion hole in their budget.
00:29:43.720And we already know BC is continuously running record deficits and their credit rating, I think, has decreased like three times or something.
00:29:50.940So I don't know how they're going to deal with losing the carbon tax, the revenue from the carbon tax, because it's revenue neutral.
00:35:50.800Let them know what they spend on their stupid BC carbon tax, which they need to get rid of yesterday, so she can get an understanding of how much a $57 sandwich actually costs the average person.