It's 2026 and it's time for another episode of The KinsellaCast. This week, Warren is joined by Brian Milley and Kareem Assad to talk about Venezuela and Canadian politics. Plus, Warren plays some post-punk classics.
00:12:27.620Yeah, you can laugh at me. I've traded looking at palm trees for looking at snowy rooftops from, well, I'm not in my condo.
00:12:35.040You know, I decided I had to sneak out and let her sleep. So I'm looking at the snowy rooftops from the 24th floor of our library.
00:12:45.980You know, we've got one of those community rooms up on one of the upper floors.
00:12:50.440And it's a very different view than I've seen the last little while.
00:12:55.920But you're a boy from the Hammer and lived in Ottawa and lived in Montreal. You know snow. You don't mind snow. Come on.
00:13:04.940You know, nothing's quite like a Montreal winter. My office was in the Old Port area down on Saint-Jacques Street.
00:13:14.100And if you're, you know, off in NDG, it feels balmy compared to when you go down to the Old Port and the winds whipping in off of the river down in that area.
00:13:30.600And Montreal removes the snow, don't they? Unlike Toronto, who just pushes it to the side, Montreal removes the snow.
00:13:39.100They do it properly. And before we get to Venezuela, just an aside on that, I wonder if Mayor Chow will have a disastrous snowfall in the next couple of weeks
00:13:49.300where she holds a news conference in front of the uncleared sidewalks and blames private contractors for not clearing it
00:13:56.980when in fact it was a sidewalk ploughed by the city.
00:14:01.360Yeah. Well, I mean, just, I remember when I had my place in the beach, so I'm just letting the dogs in.
00:14:09.140The, you know, I go out and I saw senior citizens, you know, with their canes and stuff going on the bike lanes because the sidewalks weren't cleared.
00:14:20.420The bike lanes were. Nobody uses the bike lanes on Woodbine, but that was the only thing that the city was clearing out.
00:14:30.000So, anyway, welcome back to all of that madness and that nonsense.
00:14:33.680And so there was a little bit of news in Venezuela and New York City and Caracas over the weekend.
00:14:40.040And so what's your take on all of it? I think you and I have a similar view about what took place.
00:14:45.100Well, I'll say this. Living for two weeks in California, I heard less about Trump than I have for ages until yesterday morning.
00:14:56.120And that changed still. Californians aren't talking about Trump like they, like we are in Canada.
00:15:01.840They don't, he doesn't live in their mind rent-free where it's like an obsession.
00:15:06.540But then yesterday happened. I woke up and was quite shocked that they'd done what they did.
00:15:13.240I figured something might come with Venezuela, but going in and arresting Nicolas Madero was bigger than what I expected.
00:15:23.940I thought maybe some land bombings, try and get him to smarten up and fly right. That didn't happen.
00:15:30.340Was it a mistake? Did they make a mistake?
00:15:32.580They didn't make a mistake in removing Madero. The mistake, if there is one, will be in how they handle the fallout, which was kind of your column.
00:15:41.960Your Pottery Barn rule, citing Colin Powell to George Bush, is, okay, well, what comes next? And how do they handle it?
00:15:51.500I'm never against, our old colleague, John Robson, used to call it Jacksonian diplomacy.
00:15:56.760He was very much against nation-building, didn't think it worked.
00:16:00.100And he would say, well, you go in, you hit them hard, and you say, don't make me come back or I'll hit you harder.
00:16:05.180And so, you know, I'm more in favor of that after the last couple of decades of failed nation-building attempts.
00:16:15.340But, you know, my initial thing was to look at it from a Canadian perspective, which was not the, oh, my God, we need to get nuclear weapons so he doesn't, you know, do this to us.
00:16:28.400Or, you know, the people saying there'd be no difference than if he kidnapped Mark Carney.
00:16:34.020Well, I don't think Carney's running the drug cartel.
00:16:36.260I don't think Carney has Russian military agents operating in Canada.
00:16:42.760You know, China is not clandestinely scooping up all of our resources to ship back to China.
00:16:51.480But I did think, okay, what does this mean for our oil patch?
00:16:56.800And this was before Trump even went in and said, we're going to run it, and we've already got the oil companies lined up, and they're going in to rebuild.
00:17:05.580Venezuelan heavy crude is very similar to Alberta bitchman.
00:17:09.980They're not exactly the same, but they're very close.
00:17:13.220And the U.S. refineries that take our product can take their product.
00:17:17.940In fact, many of them were built to deal with Venezuelan crude.
00:17:22.480And it hasn't really been on the market for a long time, and that's been a bit of a boon for Canadian oil producers.
00:17:34.060Yes, I understand the argument that it's going to take a while, but we're not talking a long while to upgrade.
00:17:42.260We're talking within two to three years that the infrastructure in Venezuela could be improved to the point where they start putting out three million barrels a day of extra oil.
00:18:01.280Well, if that happens, Western Canadian Select, which is what our oil trades as, right now it's trading at about $45 a barrel, I believe.
00:18:45.880And here's my real concern is that we do need to do things like a pipeline to Northwestern British Columbia, or as Premier Smith recently said, well, if we can't get it there, we'll follow the same route that they did for their potash exports and we'll go through Washington State.
00:19:03.220We need something to start shipping the oil to Asia and not just have the one customer.
00:19:08.940Well, we may not have the one customer much longer.
00:19:11.360And what will happen to say Ross Perot is we're going to hear a giant sucking sound of capital expenditure.
00:19:19.460CapEx is going to go to, if Trump can pull this off and make it safe for the companies to go in, capital expenditure is going to go to Venezuela, not Canada.
00:19:45.280I felt just on the basis of human rights and stability in this hemisphere that Trump was only doing what Biden had clearly been planning on doing.
00:19:58.560I mean, Biden was the guy who drew up the indictment against Maduro.
00:20:02.820So, but was it, you know, you've got a lot of people, not all of them are fucking maniacs saying, well, this is all about oil.
00:20:10.540I mean, I guess oil must have factored into the calculations the Americans were making, didn't it?
00:20:18.460They were explicit about that yesterday.
00:20:21.000But let me just point out that faced with what he was looking at, I don't know an American president that wouldn't have done this eventually.
00:20:31.060In October, Russia signed a cooperation, military cooperation agreement with Venezuela.
00:20:38.080They were shipping arms into Venezuela.
00:20:40.600China, as I mentioned earlier, scooping up all of the critical minerals and critical mineral rights.
00:20:46.680Iran, which is, you know, the supplier for Hezbollah and Hamas, who have both been hosted in Venezuela.
00:20:57.120Iran is building those drones that they've been using to attack Israel, the drones they've been using to, you know, give to the Houthis in Yemen.
00:21:08.860They've now transferred the technology and the capability to build those into Venezuela.
00:21:13.860Those drones from Venezuela couldn't hit any point in Florida.
00:22:59.320Well, our pro-Hamas, purportedly pro-Palestinian friends, have turned their guns from Israel, at least for the time being, onto the United States.
00:23:12.620And this is what they consider to be a legal act in Venezuela.
00:34:58.540It was really just a matter of what will be the next big thing, not if there will be a next big thing.
00:35:07.480I think the Venezuela story is appealing for a couple of reasons.
00:35:13.480You know, on the one hand, these big issues of sovereignty and, you know, ideology and Trump being obviously a lightning rod and the catalyst in some ways.
00:35:34.720And, you know, that's been on the back burner over the past year, at least, this cementing anti-Trump sentiment.
00:35:48.160And so regardless of whether, you know, regardless of what objective action he takes is going to come with heat.
00:35:58.240He has openly talked about wanting Venezuela's resources.
00:36:02.500So that gets neatly into sort of the anti-imperial, omni-cause protest circuit and their outlook on life.
00:36:12.560So I think that that's why this now will be sort of the next flashpoint.
00:36:18.940Like it's, you can't, at the same time, you have protests and uprisings in Iran that haven't...
00:36:26.460Yeah, and I want to talk to you about that.
00:36:28.760So, well, just to, no, keep, you keep going and then I'll ask you my question about Iran because I've noticed the same thing.
00:36:38.400It's like, well, why are you so upset about Venezuela and not so upset about Iran?
00:36:44.560Yeah, that just hasn't ignited or captured their attention or interest in the same way.
00:36:50.780And I say they kind of, it's a, you know, an amorphous they, but at least what I've seen so far in very early initial protests, hands off Venezuela, lots of familiar faces from the protest circuit.
00:37:06.760Some people who, you know, are maybe single issue protesters and this does affect them either personally or, you know, so there are new players who will emerge.
00:37:19.520But many of the same and their, yeah, their attention is directed towards this, not that.
00:37:26.600You would, a minute ago, you referred to that as kind of this anti-imperial sentiment.
00:37:43.620As an empire, as settler colonial nations, as sort of invalid in the way that they, the U.S. in particular, attempt to exert influence outside of its own borders.
00:38:00.440So this all fits neatly into their script about how the world works.
00:38:07.800And it does come from a more socialist background yesterday outside the U.S. consulate.
00:38:15.800And as we've seen consistently throughout the Palestinian protests, you had the communist contingent who are very open and vocal.
00:38:25.940And that is where they are positioned.
00:38:28.980So that's how they see and understand everything that is playing out.
00:38:34.040I've got my book, as you know, and you're in it, full disclosure, out next month.
00:38:41.000And we talk about that, that there has been, I describe it in the book as a bit of an unholy alliance between this Marxist, far left, like radical black block, far left individuals, and variously pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic contingent.
00:39:05.660And they've fused together, they've got an alliance going, that I think would surprise a lot of people.
00:39:12.900Is that something that we're likely to see happen here, where the elements of the far left and anti-Trump people, like I said, the same people, all coming together on Venezuela?
00:39:22.880Yeah, I would say that those are some of the movements that are, have been present and very limited data points so far.
00:39:35.080It's just, yeah, it just started, yeah.
00:39:37.100Major protests and, well, actually there was a pop-up and then a separate protest and then some of these chants were present in Cambridge, right?
00:39:45.360So already it's happening, but we are just very early out.
00:39:49.600And yeah, I do anticipate kind of continuing to see those movements working together, where there is irreconcilable differences, you know, there have been workarounds, either with certain individuals or groups not directly collaborating with one another, or kind of an unspoken, let's agree to disagree on this at the moment.
00:40:17.600And it's, you know, as far as what principles or values are guiding and to what extent are protesters willing to overlook those stated values in service of achieving their broader objectives, I think we've already seen that happen over and over again.
00:40:42.700Yeah. Well, and an example of that perhaps is the newly minted mayor of New York City, one of the biggest cities of the world, Mayor Mondami, issued just a blistering statement about America's actions in Venezuela against Maduro and calling it illegitimate and an act of war and so on.
00:41:03.400Very similar language to the type of thing, perhaps not he, but his followers have been saying about Israel.
00:41:11.080So it's not just on the level of the street, is it? It's starting to orbit into kind of mainstream politics, a lot of these things that you've been observing over the past few years.
00:41:21.340I would agree with that. You know, the, the conflict or the divide is, it certainly extends beyond street level into the very heart of our institutions.
00:41:34.580And, you know, and, you know, it, it, I guess, we will always end on a bleak note, but like it, some of it is, is actually irreconcilable.
00:41:47.420So we, we have collectively, I think we will encounter some difficulties and, you know, not every, it is zero sum in some ways and, you know, how that plays out remains to be seen, but not everyone can be a winner in this.
00:42:10.940Well, let's end on a happier note then. What do you foresee for Canadian politics, for the Canadian culture?
00:42:17.940What do you foresee for the country this year that we can all look forward to? Besides my book, which obviously, you know, people are waiting for breathlessly.
00:42:25.860What do you see on the horizon that's good for all of us?
00:42:29.880I appreciate the underlying optimism that looking into Canada's future could possibly not yield a bleak ending of this discussion.
00:42:42.400You know, I, I think that at least kind of what I've observed in, in the conversations and interactions I've had, which many aren't public.
00:42:53.640Um, and it is just sort of what's the pulse on the street. Um, I think that there, there is a, we've reached a saturation level where people can't, or don't want to tolerate more BS.
00:43:08.520Um, and you know, our, what, regardless of where it comes from on their side, outside their side from the state, like it's just, we are reaching a saturation level.
00:43:19.400Um, at least in certain individuals. Um, and so my hope is that, um, that sentiment can spread and we start rejecting nonsense across the board, um, and sort of are, are less tribal in that.
00:43:35.960Um, of course there's sort of the countervailing opposite momentum that, that also will, will happen where, uh, you know, but, but I, if we're choosing to focus on the positive,
00:43:47.040I think that there are, uh, many of us who have had enough.
00:43:51.240I hear, hear, um, you know, um, I, I too am fed up with bullshit.
00:43:56.500There seems to be an abundance of it everywhere these days.
00:43:59.560So if we can have a little bit less, that is indeed a positive thing.
00:44:03.000So thank you, my friend, um, for your insights this week on what has been actually a surprising week, uh, compared to, I think what we were to be expecting, kind of a quiet start to the new year.
00:44:14.480Well, it, it wasn't, um, so look forward to, uh, talking to you next week, but in the meantime, have a great week.