Candice Malan is joined by Brett Wilson to talk about the decline of Canada over the past decade, and how we can turn things around. Candice is running for re-election in the upcoming election and needs a new Prime Minister.
00:00:15.940He's Beijing's banker, not our prime minister.
00:00:19.260Hi, I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:30.780Folks, we have four more days until the election, until Canadians decide their fate.
00:00:35.600And I wanted to spend the show today talking about what has happened in Canada over the past decade, really paint a picture of our country, which I believe is in decline.
00:00:45.740You know, Pierre Poliev and the Conservatives, one of their slogans is that Canada is broken.
00:00:49.840I think that almost all of us agree with that.
00:00:53.500It's that Canada was this once great country, and we have the potential to be so much better, so much bigger, so much greater.
00:01:00.720And yet, stat after stat, every graph that I'm going to show on the program today just paints a different picture of our great country coming apart, being in decline.
00:01:11.660And so I don't want to just dwell on the negative today, I want to also talk about the positive and how we can turn things around.
00:01:17.160And I'm very pleased today to be joined by Brett Wilson.
00:01:20.560Brett is an investment banker, an entrepreneur, and a philanthropist, and he was the star of CBC's Dragon Den, really did more for entrepreneurship and promoting really just the heroic efforts of free market business people taking risks, innovating exactly what our country needs.
00:01:38.460So, Brett, thank you so much for joining the show. It's an honor to have you today.
00:02:18.240Well, he writes, a Kearney-advised decade of reckless borrowing and debt, dying productivity, over-regulation, climate alarmism, widespread immigration fraud, vastly expanded obese bureaucracy, declining health care, rising crime, declining military, declining infrastructure, and a hollowed-out currency.
00:02:34.640Our dollar is now worth 68 cents to the American dollar per capita.
00:02:39.580Wealth is now ranked alongside Mississippi, the poorest U.S. state.
00:02:43.320So, I mean, he really paints out all of the areas of decline.
00:02:49.580And, I mean, the Quality of Life Index is not a partisan group.
00:04:33.260And again, the results of the last decade have been awful on every level, whether it's politics or it's bureaucracy or it's prisons or it's the economy.
00:05:33.180And then you get down to the poorest U.S. states, Arkansas, West Virginia.
00:05:37.780And that is where Canada would fit in.
00:05:39.740Canada would be between the second poorest and the poorest American state between West Virginia and Mississippi at just $54,900 average GDP.
00:05:50.880This is another way of looking at that.
00:05:53.500The real GDP per capita growth in the OECD.
00:05:56.440So, these are the richest countries, not just comparing ourselves to Americans in the states, but all of the world.
00:06:01.920You can see Ireland, Poland, Turkey, Lithuania.
00:06:04.600Those are the countries that have had tremendous growth over the past decade.
00:06:08.340The United States is sort of middle of the pack with 18%.
00:06:10.520And you have to go all the way to the bottom, the second to least growth, 1.4% over a decade for GDP per capita.
00:06:18.760This is the next graph is showing the same thing, just in a different way.
00:06:43.400The way that it was done under Justin Trudeau, it was really just open the floodgates, let everybody come in to try to artificially boost our GDP.
00:06:50.240And so here it compares the annual population growth with the top graph here, the number of new residential units constructed.
00:07:00.280And it's a shame that this hasn't been a more prominent topic in the election campaign, how immigration has caused so many of these problems.
00:07:08.800You cannot let a million people into the country every year and then only build 100 or 200,000 new homes.
00:07:15.700Like the math just doesn't add up and eventually it catches up on you.
00:07:20.700Annual population growth in Canada versus the change in number of family doctors and hospital beds.
00:07:27.860So while we're having 1 million newcomers, I mean, in 2022-23, we added 2 million people, but at that same year, there were just 800 new doctors, 800 new family doctors added in the country.
00:07:40.760And 1,359 hospital beds were cut during that time.
00:07:46.400So, you know, no wonder our health care is in the state of sin, no wonder our housing costs are spiraling out of control and young Canadians just simply, the math doesn't make sense for them to ever in their entire lives be able to own even a one-bedroom apartment.
00:07:59.820And yet, you know, it's clearly part of it is because of immigration and we don't talk about that.
00:08:07.400Well, certainly the feds don't want to talk about immigration.
00:08:10.260I mean, there's also a bias, there's a perception that there's a possibility or a probability that an immigrant will vote for whoever was in power when they were allowed into the country, allowed into the country without true application, without true qualification.
00:08:27.620And that, I think, is the saddest part of this whole process because I share one of your earlier comments, which is we welcome the world coming here, but on a thoughtful, organized, and respectful basis.
00:08:38.800And right now it's been none of the above, not thoughtful, not organized, and not respectful.
00:08:43.660And that's a big part of why we're suffering.
00:08:46.040And, of course, the density increases in Ontario and Quebec because there's greater populations and everything else, and it just doesn't make sense.
00:08:54.200The other thing that's happening is obviously a fight and a dispute between what the feds do for Medicare or health care and what the provinces do when they're responsible for health care.
00:09:03.520The confusion just abounds, and at no time did Trudeau ever acknowledge that provinces have rights, provinces have responsibility.
00:09:13.320The things he was trying to do, and just take ESG as an example, for the environment, you know, trying to slap the provinces, and that's obviously, in particular, Alberta, to lesser degree, Saskatchewan, have said,
00:09:24.240we're going to push back, and we're going to try and stop you from attempting to shut down our economy.
00:09:29.600And that goes back to the big picture is, can Carney build Canada?
00:09:34.940And he says yes, and then he says, ah, but Bill C-69, we're just going to keep that in place.
00:09:40.640We don't really need to waive that in order to build infrastructure.
00:09:44.420And again, the idea that Carney, or pardon me, that Poilev has come out with very recently, and this is, it's an old idea, but it's new to the world of politics, and that's the energy corridor.
00:09:55.760Being able to bring energy, and again, it's not just east-west.
00:09:59.560We need an energy corridor that is north-south.
00:10:02.280We need to be able to get to Hudson Bay.
00:10:06.260We need to get down into the states properly.
00:10:08.800Anyway, there's just so much, there's so much that's wrong about the last decade, that it's staggering, if not stunning, that Carney can pretend that the next decade under him would be completely different.
00:10:20.840Well, it's interesting, because he both tries to distance himself from Trudeau and say that he wasn't there, even though, to your point, he has the same group of people around him.
00:10:28.960I think Poilev effectively pointed that out during the debate.
00:10:32.260And in some ways, they're copying the conservative platform, like, you know, the main issue of the debate originally, of the election, sorry, it originally was going to be, well, we have this carbon tax or not.
00:10:42.140Obviously, the Liberals championed it for a decade.
00:10:44.240It's very central to Mark Carney's sort of worldview and idea that getting to net zero is of absolute importance.
00:10:53.640This week, they both put out, both campaigns, the Liberals and the Conservatives, put out their costed budgets.
00:10:58.660And, you know, the top line is sort of both sides want to introduce new spending and rack up more debt.
00:11:05.880Neither of them have a plan to get to balanced budget in the first term.
00:11:08.720I will say that Poilev's campaign and platform included a 70 percent reduction in spending compared to Mark Carney, who does still want to turn on the taps and spend in a Trudeau-esque way, actually spending more money than Trudeau did.
00:11:23.240I wonder if you can comment on which budget you thought was better and which one do you think would be better in creating the growth that our country so desperately needs?
00:11:32.460Well, let me throw a curve with that question first.
00:11:35.580And that's just a comment on Trump, which was obviously a huge part of what's driving the political conversations right now.
00:11:43.180And, again, I know some people hate me for this, but I happen to admire what Trump's trying to do.
00:11:48.680Again, protect the borders, improve trade, reduce war, improve the environment properly and thoughtfully.
00:13:08.120But the fact that we need infrastructure to move our natural resources, and whether you call our natural resources the hydropower of Quebec,
00:13:16.200or the oil and gas industry in Western Canada, or potassium, or uranium, it just doesn't matter.
00:13:24.120There's so many things that we can do better for the world, but we need infrastructure to ship it to the world.
00:13:29.800And that's where the liberals for a decade have failed miserably.
00:13:48.020He said that he won't get rid of Bill C-69, which is the no more pipelines bill, basically.
00:13:52.860The regulations make it so much that you can't get an infrastructure project built.
00:13:57.500In the debate last week, he oddly misspoke and said that we own the Keystone pipeline, which, of course, is not a pipeline that was even completed.
00:14:06.160It's the one that goes into the United States and brings Alberta oil to refineries in Texas.
00:14:11.560It is partially built, but it's not fully built.
00:14:13.360And I think he meant to say the Trans Mountain pipeline.
00:14:18.000He said in English earlier in the campaign, in a campaign stop in Kelowna, that he will use all of the powers of the federal government to get major infrastructure projects like pipelines built.
00:14:29.120He said that he would even use the emergencies power.
00:14:31.900He was called out on that at the debate by block leader Francois Blanchet, Yves-Francois Blanchet.
00:14:37.800And he kind of like tried to walk over it and hand wave it away.
00:14:43.440And so here we are almost at Election Day.
00:14:45.920And I really don't know where the leader stands in terms of pipelines.
00:14:50.640Alberta wasn't mentioned very much during the campaign.
00:14:53.760It wasn't mentioned at all, to my recollection, during those two debates.
00:14:57.300And so I'm wondering, like from an Alberta perspective, do you think that these issues have been properly litigated in the public?
00:15:05.660Do you think that more should have been done to discuss these issues of economic development and growth and really grill the leaders to find out exactly where they stand on these issues?
00:15:14.140Well, the federal government, which is liberal, still has an emissions cap contemplated for the energy industry.
00:15:21.840And that's obviously been one of the greatest issues that Danielle Smith and Scott Moe have fought back and thrown elbows saying.
00:15:28.840And partly, you know, when we introduced in Alberta what was called the Sovereignty Act, it was to make sure that we understood as a nation who could control what.
00:15:37.220And at this moment, the liberals think they can control everything.
00:15:40.580And it's that infrastructure failure that's a problem.
00:15:45.740I had the privilege of having dinner with Pierre Polev 12 or 13 years ago.
00:15:51.740I met him with a dinner we were doing with John Baird, had a great conversation, and have stayed friends with him ever since.
00:15:58.220I also had lunch with Mark Carney the week before he was elected by the liberals.
00:16:03.620And he was sitting and he was running around in Calgary, and he knows I've got a few connections here.
00:16:08.020And we had a great conversation about infrastructure, and he was adamant, looked me in the eye and said, I'm certain that we can build pipelines.
00:16:15.520And then a week later, he says, we're not going to restrict Bill 69.
00:16:20.440So the fact that C-69 kills pipelines, and he doesn't want to kill it, tells me the liberals are still confused as to what infrastructure really means.
00:16:28.920So, no, I'm all in on Polev, I'm all in on this idea of energy infrastructure, and not just energy, sorry, natural resource infrastructure, being able to ship what we are great at.
00:16:41.420And again, it goes back to the big picture, potassium, agriculture, farming, trees, coal.
00:18:31.200I'm going to do a photo op just like President Trump did.
00:18:34.520I thought that when President Trump did it, it was quite charming.
00:18:36.720And that actually really helped his appeal, that he actually kind of likes getting into the role of, like, being with the American public, working a working class job.
00:19:33.600I mean, you saw the messages that came out of the president or prime minister, whatever, the prime minister of England, whatever her title was.
00:20:46.300It certainly feels like it's time for a change.
00:20:48.240And it's frustrating to me that some Canadians think that Mark Carney has changed enough that he, you know, because his face wasn't all over, he wasn't part of the Trudeau cabinet.
00:20:56.120It's interesting, though, because Pierre Polly gets critiqued for being a lifelong politician.
00:21:00.580Well, Mark Carney is a lifelong bureaucrat, right?
00:21:02.560And so those are two kind of different skill sets.
00:21:06.000Yes, Mark Carney ended up being the chair of Brookfield.
00:21:10.700You know that there's a difference between being the CEO of a company where you're in charge of actually running the business and doing the operations and being on the board, which Mark Carney was on the board of several of these organizations and he was the chair of the board of Brookfield, which is almost like an advisory role or like a PR role.
00:21:26.840It's not someone who is actually running the business.
00:21:30.180It's someone who's almost like in a, yeah, just some kind of an outside role that helps with the leadership team and helps make decisions.
00:21:38.620So I don't really see, I mean, I suppose on the surface is a very impressive resume, even just, you know, Harvard, Oxford, these big bank government jobs.
00:21:48.040But again, civil service and then when it comes to private sector, it's more like he's just there for the PR.
00:22:23.240Like is Canada on this trajectory of decline that no matter who's in charge, it's sort of too late for us?
00:22:29.880Or do you think that there are a set of policies that can turn Canada into, like can give this new generation, like 20 year olds today, the same kind of opportunities that were available for previous generations?
00:22:42.060Can Canada get itself back up in that comparison so that our average GDP per capita is in line with the Americans?
00:22:51.620Or do you think that it's sort of like too late?
00:23:45.480So, again, I get really apprehensive about a liberal, even a liberal minority government, with the swing being either Block, who I don't think should be running as a federal party, but that's a separate issue, or the NDP, who don't offer anything.
00:24:23.660But we can't do it under a liberal, in a liberal platform.
00:24:26.920Well, it doesn't seem like they've really put together a picture of growth.
00:24:30.540Their entire campaign was really just oriented around who can stop Trump, who can be the most anti-American, who can better sort of balance that out, rather than who can best grow the Canadian economy, which I think is the ballot box question.
00:24:44.480Well, Brett Wilson, we really appreciate your time and your insights.
00:24:46.800Thank you so much for joining the show.