Juno News - January 15, 2023


We now know Trudeau’s “phase out” the oil sands line was no gaffe


Episode Stats

Length

3 minutes

Words per Minute

210.52632

Word Count

720

Sentence Count

27


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 There's a lot of discussion right now about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's
00:00:03.300 just transition plan, that's what the Liberals are calling it, to basically
00:00:07.500 wind down the Alberta oil sands and replace those jobs and economic activity
00:00:12.460 with elements of the green economy. Now a
00:00:15.860 number of years ago in 2017, Justin Trudeau made headlines,
00:00:19.600 caused a lot of debate by speaking at a public event off the
00:00:23.240 cuff about how he wanted to phase out the oil sands. Now a lot of
00:00:27.680 people took those words to be a sort of gaffe and what does he mean here and
00:00:31.640 how should we interpret all of this? Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, who
00:00:34.800 should be the biggest champion or back then should have been the biggest
00:00:37.480 champion of those jobs, she told people don't get
00:00:40.340 too excited. Those were her words. The PMO actually put out a statement, kind of
00:00:44.960 trying to walk it back a little bit or at least
00:00:47.320 water down that language. But what we have learned in the years
00:00:50.160 since that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is just being
00:00:52.480 honest. He's just saying this is what I want to do. I want to phase out the oil
00:00:55.400 sands and we have seen there's been a whole lot of government decision
00:00:58.600 unfolding in those years to show how he plans to phase out the oil sands.
00:01:03.640 It's really frustrating though because as I've remarked a number of times, I don't
00:01:07.480 think we have a Prime Minister who has an interest in climate issues. I think we
00:01:11.540 have a climate change activist who just happens to be Prime Minister because
00:01:15.480 Trudeau is almost like singularly focused at times when it comes to all of
00:01:19.900 these climate change issues. It's the first or one of the first things he
00:01:23.340 mentions in all situations, in all speeches, whatever he's going on about, he
00:01:27.360 always brings it back to greener, to climate, to transitioning. He's just
00:01:32.400 obsessed with that issue and that's fine. You know, there's a role for those
00:01:36.440 people in that sector, in that line of work. One wonders why didn't Justin Trudeau
00:01:41.300 actually go and try and be an entrepreneur in the green economy or what have
00:01:45.200 you? Why did he have to go and be Prime Minister and bring these things about?
00:01:48.800 Because here's the thing, forcing this sort of change is just not the way things
00:01:54.900 work. You may remember there's this thing called the fax machine a number of
00:01:58.300 years ago and people stopped using the fax machine and they instead went to
00:02:02.360 things like email. And how that happened was not the government said and the
00:02:06.740 Prime Minister at the time, you know, the phase-out happened, I don't know, in the
00:02:09.860 Jean Chrétien years, early part of the Stephen Harper years, we all moved to PDFs and
00:02:13.940 stuff. The Prime Minister didn't get up on a podium in front of the country and do a
00:02:18.540 national address and say, no more fax machines, this other thing is better, we're
00:02:22.660 moving to this other thing and here's the rollout and you must do this percentage
00:02:26.720 of emails by this date. It didn't happen. What happened, of course, was that people
00:02:31.900 said, I like this email thing, it's better. And gradually people started adopting to
00:02:36.120 the new email format and then on their own time they stopped using the fax machine.
00:02:41.500 And there's some sort of transition going on with green products and more electric
00:02:45.340 vehicles are being bought and things are going to change in the years ahead and
00:02:48.620 that's just natural and we should all support innovation. It's not a government
00:02:52.740 thing. I feel like Justin Trudeau and Stephen Globo, they're so passionate about
00:02:57.460 it and they're also so bullying about it. They want to boss people around and they're
00:03:01.160 bringing mandates and they're trying to force people to do it. And it's like, guys, it
00:03:04.780 just doesn't work this way. And to whatever degree there will be a green
00:03:08.040 transition, and of course there is one to some degree, it's going to happen not
00:03:11.920 because of all this bullying that Trudeau has done, it's going to happen in
00:03:16.700 spite of all of it. So all of this effort that the government's doing, it's just
00:03:21.820 like, guys, this is not how these things actually work.