Canada's climate tyrant doesn't care what the courts say
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
187.57845
Summary
Environment Minister Stephen Gilbeau is fighting a federal court ruling that strikes down his ban on single-use plastic cups and utensils. Vashi Capellos of CTV News pushes back, pointing out that the court last year ruled that the ban was unconstitutional.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
I think it stands to reason by observing their behavior. If every federal liberal minister was
00:00:05.520
offered the chance to click a button and become Canada's dictator tomorrow, a lot of them would do
00:00:11.020
it. And I think the man that that is most true about is Canada's environment minister, Stephen
00:00:16.540
Gilboa, a man I don't think actually cares about Canada's constitution whatsoever. He doesn't care
00:00:22.220
about the rule of law or anyone's perspective, but his very own. He is a radical environmentalist.
00:00:28.480
And because he has a radical utopian vision, he believes that anyone in his way is a villain
00:00:34.120
who he must basically either brush aside or destroy. And that's how we get crazy interviews
00:00:40.100
like this, where Vashi Capellos from CTV News is actually pushing back on Stephen Gilboa,
00:00:45.320
pointing out that the court last year said his single-use plastic ban was unconstitutional,
00:00:50.860
a massive overreach of government power. And Gilboa just doesn't seem to get it. He doesn't care.
00:00:55.960
He just thinks that, well, I'm doing the right thing, so I'm allowed to do whatever I want.
00:01:00.060
And I can twist whatever the judge said to basically saying, do whatever you want,
00:01:04.100
Gilboa, wink. And like that, I just have to basically make tiny concessions here and there.
00:01:08.640
Like, no, no, you can't just ban entire materials from being used on a daily basis for functions that
00:01:14.880
they're better at than paper and metal and others. It's insane that he thought this could ever be
00:01:19.580
upheld in even a liberal court, that ban. Anyways, here's the interview. But before I start
00:01:25.920
playing the interview, I just want to do two things. One, point out that that is the ugliest
00:01:30.640
suit I've ever seen. I don't know why he keeps wearing it. It's like plaid, but also baby puke
00:01:36.260
pink. It's horrifying. And then he's wearing like a tie that he stole from a discotheque in the 1970s.
00:01:43.000
Anyways, I hate terrible menswear. It is my biggest pet peeve. But also, I just quickly want to plug
00:01:48.840
the fact that I have the GiveSendGo link for the National Telegraph's legal fund in the description
00:01:52.800
of this video. We're being sued by a Chinese billionaire developer for defamation that he
00:01:57.180
has not actually submitted any evidence to prove after over two years. He's just trying to abuse us
00:02:01.060
in court. And we had a $3,000 bill come up for our legal, you know, our defense. So if you want to
00:02:06.380
donate anything, it really helps us out. GiveSendGo link in the description below. But here's
00:02:10.320
Gilboa being absolutely delusional. I'm glad you brought up the ban that your
00:02:15.660
government brought in. Because I did want to ask you if the recent federal court decision
00:02:20.720
of late last year has that sort of, you know, essentially ruled that something cabinet had
00:02:27.580
decided on that underpinned that ban was constituted overreach. Has that undermined your negotiating
00:02:33.780
position at these at these meetings? Actually, Vashi, the federal court judge didn't rule that
00:02:41.700
it was federal overreach. They said that that judge said that there was, in her view, there
00:02:47.100
wasn't enough scientific evidence to talk about plastics as toxics. That is the definition of
00:02:53.780
overreach. You are trying to ban something that there is no grounds to ban. There is no federal
00:03:00.480
reason in order to ban that. You can't just ban anything and just because, well, we just didn't
00:03:06.540
have enough reason yet to ban it. Like, no, you actually need like an actual immediate threat
00:03:11.660
coming from that object, like asbestos. That makes sense. You can't just say like plastic straws
00:03:16.340
because I don't like them. It's completely insane that they're even thinking that it's
00:03:20.400
environmental to ban plastic straws and other single-use plastics. They take less energy to create
00:03:25.500
than paper products, than metal, and whatnot. But Stephen Gilbeau thinks for some reason that this
00:03:30.840
is not actually a challenge to him. It's just an issue that he has to get around.
00:03:35.180
Products. And I respectfully disagree with that federal court judge, which is why we...
00:03:41.920
It's constitutional ruling. It's not really whether or not you agree with him or not.
00:03:45.600
It depends on how you carry forward. You just are not allowed to get around. You're not allowed to do
00:03:51.780
this ban. Appeal with the federal court of appeal. No one thinks that we can ban our way out of plastic
00:03:57.020
pollution. Stop doing it then. We can't recycle our way out of plastic pollution. We have to adopt
00:04:02.140
a number of different solutions for different stages of plastic pollution and for different types
00:04:06.760
of plastics as well. Sure. Just to respectfully challenge you, though, Minister, my understanding
00:04:11.740
and what I've read from the decision itself was that basically Ottawa had overstepped by labeling
00:04:16.660
all quote-unquote plastic manufactured items as toxic under the Canadian Environmental Protection
00:04:21.900
Act. Evidence shows thousands of different items in that category have different uses and chemical
00:04:27.100
makeups. And basically, you couldn't just arbitrarily say all of them constitute the exact same level
00:04:32.660
of toxicity. Is there any way to address that rather than just ask for, you know, appeal and ask for a
00:04:38.860
stay? And does the ban just continue as is in the interim? So, I mean, I think you and I agree that
00:04:47.480
the federal court judge didn't say that federal government was overreaching on plastics. She
00:04:52.560
disagreed with the characterization of plastics as as toxics. This is what we will be debating.
00:04:57.700
Thank you, Vashi, for making the point for me. But yeah, you can't say, well, he's not there. The judge
00:05:04.440
isn't saying that it's overreach. They're just saying that we're way overreaching by banning something
00:05:09.280
that there's no reason to ban because you can't prove it's toxic the same way asbestos and other
00:05:14.180
chemicals are. In the federal. Yeah, exactly. This is we we we stand by that regulation. In fact,
00:05:22.840
the regulation still applies in Canada. The industry is on board. Scientists are on board.
00:05:27.240
The vast majority of governments are on board. Pretty much everyone is on board with the fact
00:05:31.820
that we need to do this and the time to do it is now. No one's on board. It was like one of the most
00:05:37.120
unpopular policies that the liberals have ever pushed forward. It's unpopular in the same way
00:05:42.760
that like Gondek's plastic bag ban is is unpopular. They're very similar policies, as well as the 15
00:05:48.060
cents for fast food bags, which is now thankfully gone in my city. It was the dumbest thing I've ever seen.
00:05:53.160
But it's unpopular with Canadians in even a more intense way than maybe even the carbon tax,
00:05:58.740
because it's just so silly that I go to a fast food restaurant, I have to use a paper straw,
00:06:04.480
because that's what's going to save the environment. They've proven that they don't
00:06:06.900
even really biodegrade. And again, a paper straw, I've seen the studies, the paper straw takes 10 times
00:06:13.920
the amount of energy to create compared to a plastic straw. A reusable bag takes like tons,
00:06:20.540
thousands times more energy to make a reusable bag than a plastic bag. And people are definitely
00:06:26.640
not reusing those things thousands of times. Plus, you got to wash them if they're fabric,
00:06:31.180
or even if they're plastic, simply because you get meat juice on them, you get other sort of materials
00:06:36.480
that can rot that are touching them, you have to wash them, it can entirely defeat the purpose
00:06:41.300
of saving energy. So much so many environmental, like, like measures, regulations, taxes, have no
00:06:49.160
actual bearing on reality, they're not tied to reality on what an actual environmental issue is.
00:06:55.020
If you want to help the environment, you should be using less resources. And oftentimes, that actually
00:07:00.320
means using the most efficient materials. And when you let the market do what it does, it's naturally
00:07:05.840
going to settle on extremely efficient materials. The market doesn't use inefficient high energy cost
00:07:11.540
materials, because high energy cost materials cost a lot. So the market over time has been
00:07:16.840
incentivized to burn less fuel to make more products. That's why a truck in the 1970s burned way more
00:07:25.040
fuel, it was actually reasonable to classify it as gas guzzler back in the 70s. But the same like
00:07:30.220
companies trucks now burn like 45% less fuel, because people are greedy, and they want to pay
00:07:36.420
as little money for as much value as possible. And that means emissions per capita have gone way down
00:07:42.820
in Canada. But, you know, Stephen Gilboa thinks that all this sort of free market stuff is horribly bad,
00:07:50.380
because like his suit, which I have to comment on again, is horrifyingly gross. Like his suit, he is a
00:07:55.460
massive pinko. And he just believes that government solutions are the only solutions because he might
00:08:01.760
be a radical environmentalist, but he's also a communist. And so his solutions will always hinge
00:08:07.140
on the idea of giving the government as much power as humanly possible. Because really, he wants the
00:08:12.440
utopian society where there's effectively no emissions at all. And the free market's never going
00:08:17.000
to support no emissions because people have to live. And Gilboa thinks that people breathing in and out
00:08:22.040
and not dying is just a little bit of a niggling little technicality, and that he can figure out
00:08:27.300
a way of getting us to net zero, while only half killing us. But yeah, the man's out of his mind,
00:08:33.980
these people need to be removed from government ASAP. I am happy that even though it's the NDP who
00:08:39.540
might be in his riding that somebody's going to beat him, because this man at least has some political
00:08:45.020
clout in elite circles. So I'd rather just be some nutty NDPer who a lot of people see as crazy,
00:08:50.740
because there is a lot of people who just from Stephen Gilboa talking moderate will think,
00:08:55.720
well, he's asking for reasonable things. He's not. He's a flat out dictator. The man would become
00:08:59.940
a dictator tomorrow if he wasn't being bound by the law. The man just wants his vision. So many
00:09:07.620
leftists only use the system to get what they want because they have to. If they could just overthrow
00:09:13.320
society to get what they want, they would do it. And that describes Stephen Gilboa. He's proven in
00:09:19.140
the past from being a criminal that he doesn't care about the law. You shouldn't think that he
00:09:22.760
cares about the law now just because he's wearing a disgusting suit and a horrifyingly, embarrassingly
00:09:27.620
ugly tie. Anyways, sorry, I kept to keep harping on how he dresses. It looks so bad in thumbnails
00:09:32.940
whenever I take screenshots of that for the thumbnail. He looks horrible there, but I'll still
00:09:38.340
have to use it just because now I've mentioned his suit so much, it would be weird if that suit
00:09:42.880
wasn't in the thumbnail. Oh, okay. Anyways, I just want to quickly plug the fact that I,
00:09:48.660
Wyatt Claypool, I'm running in the riding of Calgary Signal Hill for the nomination for the
00:09:52.860
Conservative Party. If you live in this riding, buy a Conservative Party membership and visit my
00:09:56.620
website in the description below, wyattclaypool.com. And again, consider donating to the TNT Legal Fund
00:10:02.740
to help reduce the burden of cost that we've incurred from our lawsuit. We've incurred like $29,000
00:10:08.040
worth of cost fighting this guy. So anything you can donate helps us actually reinvest more into
00:10:13.240
the National Telegraph and not have to put in 100% of everything we make in just fighting these