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

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

Justin Trudeau's plan to phase out the Alberta oil sands and focus on the green economy is a good one. But what does it actually mean and how does it affect the future of the oil sands? And what role does it play in the growing green economy?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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.