00:00:00.000equalization is tricky because um it comes from a place of compassion of people saying like well
00:00:08.200we're one country we love everybody in the country and we should help our fellow neighbors
00:00:12.540but with the layers of bureaucracy and the the fact that there's no real accountability like
00:00:21.000i i don't want to i don't feel charitable when there's all these intermediate steps involved
00:00:26.860And when Dennis Kelma was working with the APP to create the value of freedom document, they had to pull from multiple sources just to get an accurate picture of what inflows and outflows there actually were.
00:00:55.500No, there absolutely is a reason. And that's because it obfuscates it, right? Because the simplest answer would be that we would all have like a little brother, little sister type thing in Quebec where every year we could each cut a check to Jacques Lemieux for $5,000.
00:01:14.920okay that would be the simplest answer and that would be it but that would be very stark and very
00:01:22.020easy to interpret and it would remove all the ambiguity in the gray area the gray area exists
00:01:27.540because it obfuscates and i gotta push back a little bit james i love you guys but i don't
00:01:34.800buy into the whole it comes from a good place that's just sexy marketing that's just well we
00:01:40.600need to make sure that different parts of Canada have roughly equal access to things like healthcare
00:01:46.400and education. There's a difference between stated intentions and outcomes. There's a huge
00:01:55.320difference. And that's one thing that has come up when I've been talking with people who are on the
00:02:00.640pro-federalist side. They'll say things like, the reason why this exists this way is because, and
00:02:06.580then they'll say something along those lines, depending on what it is we're talking about.
00:02:10.600And the point I push back on in that is that it doesn't really matter why you say you're
00:02:33.420And not to say that I personally believe it's structured in a way like it's, I don't think
00:02:40.480the foundations of it is truly out of a good place but i believe people support um equalization
00:02:48.000because they're saying it comes from a good place so i can understand the relatively uninformed
00:02:55.100person or somebody who hasn't stress tested these ideas that's a great way to put it easy for them
00:03:00.440to feel that it comes from a good place and i can recognize that um when engaging with somebody
00:03:08.440in this topic, because without unpacking anything, I can't assume
00:03:13.720malice from the average person. They just see it as we're one big family, therefore we have to help.
00:03:22.240Yeah. The thing about it is, though, is we're not one big family. There's some huge fundamental
00:03:27.540differences between people in the West and the rest of Canada. And when I say the West,
00:03:35.920I mean I don't mean the prairie provinces because Manitoba for the large part does not fit in with Alberta and Saskatchewan and I don't mean BC except for the northeast part basically the as much as I hate the Rockies because I'm originally from Saskatchewan and I think they should all just be chopped down and you could grow barley but but they've done something really unique in this country in that they created this big wall where if you wanted to go all the way to that wall
00:04:05.920there were so many places to get off the train a couple of hundred years ago where you'd just be
00:04:10.780like, ah, you know what? Screw it. Close enough. I'm going to be a fisherman. Screw it. Close
00:04:16.480enough. I'm whatever along the way. And it's only the foolhardy. I can do this. Bring it on. Let's
00:04:25.960make things happen. People that, that actually went as far as the shadow of the Rockies. And
00:04:33.880every time someone got off the train before them they would say this is why no one will remember
00:04:38.320your name and now you fast forward a couple hundred years because it's just been this
00:04:42.740that's how it started and then you ended up with this self-selecting cycle where you know if somebody
00:04:49.180born in this rough area said hey you know what good enough odds are they moved out east and
00:04:55.920anybody born in sarnia or something like that who said you know what i think i think that i can do
00:05:03.000better. And if I want to work hard enough, I can make a great life for me and my family.
00:05:08.200And the place where I'm going to do that is the West. And so now you've got all these people
00:05:15.940self-selecting over successive generations to where we're fundamentally different.
00:05:22.620In the West, well, in the East, they vote for whoever's going to give them the most stuff.0.97
00:05:28.520and in the west we vote for whoever will fuck the most off and and those two are completely0.99
00:05:37.640incompatible because one of them just says just leave me alone and the other one says1.00
00:05:42.940all your base are belong to us and if you want to win those guys over you just give them our shit0.98
00:05:50.960and that's literally what equalization is that's how ei works that's how um that's how the pensions0.93
00:05:57.580work, pretty much any substantive monetary policy that exists across provinces ends up with the
00:06:06.420money going east, not west. Or in the odd case, it's probably something where a trickle will come
00:06:13.120this way in exchange for a torrent going the other way. But wait, guys, everyone in Canada
00:06:18.560pays the same tax rate okay okay i i love this i i just you hear these dishonest things about how
00:06:32.880equalization doesn't actually everyone pays the same well okay first off just on its head0.97
00:06:39.720if everyone already paid the same what in the great and grandiose fuck is there to equalize
00:06:45.560how how could anything be equalized if everybody's already paying the same thing0.92
00:06:52.540okay secondly money is fungible okay it goes it's sure it doesn't directly go from0.97
00:07:01.420your pocket to buying a baguette in fucking quebec right that's not what happens it goes0.87
00:07:07.800through intermediary steps you pay your taxes to ottawa it moves from this slush fund to that0.98
00:07:13.320slush fund somebody takes a little off the top whatever's left some of it goes here some of it
00:07:19.080goes there maybe it comes around a couple times and eventually it makes its way into gatineau
00:07:24.520and there's actually in finance terms there's they actually have a word for this it's called
00:07:32.300laundering yeah yeah fraud when you when you purposely obfuscate the origin of the money
00:07:39.140and send it to some place in what seems like a legit way,
00:07:43.720that's literally, this is the car wash from Breaking Bad.