The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - August 21, 2023


Classless McKenna Attacks Conservatives as ＂Arsonists＂ For Opposing Carbon Tax

Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Catherine McKenna Justin Trudeau
The Media Cites ＂Experts＂ Only To Push Liberal Talking-Points Shockingly Bad Seat Projections For Justin Trudeau and The Liberals

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

192.84

Word count

1,591

Sentence count

71

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

While people are having to flee from wildfires in British Columbia, Alberta, and the Northwest Territories, Catherine McKenna is demonstrating her absolute lack of empathy by going after the Conservatives as being like arsonists for simply disagreeing with her on environmental policy. It's absolutely ridiculous to be using this situation this way, not only because it's deeply disgusting to be trying to turn this into a partisan issue at the moment, but also because she's completely wrong at the same time.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 While people are having to flee from wildfires in British Columbia, Alberta, and the Northwest Territories, losing their homes and potentially putting their lives in danger, former Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna is demonstrating her absolute lack of empathy by going after the conservatives at this time as being like arsonists for simply disagreeing with her on environmental policy.
00:00:21.740 It's absolutely ridiculous to be using this situation this way, not only because it's deeply disgusting to be trying to turn this into such a partisan issue at the moment, but also while being completely wrong at the same time.
00:00:34.480 I just want to quickly read the tweet that got a lot of people's attention today.
00:00:38.640 Conservative politicians want to fight about a price on carbon pollution.
00:00:42.180 You want to make it free to pollute while Canadians pay with their lives, threatened homes destroyed, and their communities obliterated. 0.97
00:00:47.840 So what are you going to do?
00:00:49.280 You are the arsonists.
00:00:50.560 This is really demonstrating why Catherine McKenna is no longer in the Liberal government.
00:00:56.260 She has absolutely no tact in a very sensitive situation.
00:01:00.740 Like, far be it from me to accuse the Liberals, the current Liberals, of being very empathetic and very concerned about Canadians when tragic situations pop up, but not usually this on-the-nose political from them. 0.98
00:01:14.120 They can sometimes make very stupid statements in tragic situations, but not this bad. 0.97
00:01:19.740 But Catherine McKenna is entirely wrong here. 0.99
00:01:23.120 She's pretending as if, like, carbon taxes and whatnot, all that legislation is currently being held up by the Conservatives in Parliament.
00:01:30.440 We've had a carbon tax for multiple years now.
00:01:33.620 Multiple provinces had carbon taxes way before the Liberals passed them.
00:01:36.940 Yet somehow we keep having more and more wildfires every year.
00:01:41.160 Not really.
00:01:41.820 It's really just, you know, a cycle.
00:01:43.260 Sometimes we have really bad wildfires in a year like this year, and sometimes we don't have as many.
00:01:48.040 But she's going to make this an entirely an anti-conservative narrative because we don't believe that Liberal carbon taxes are going to somehow solve climate change, which they just don't. 0.67
00:01:58.640 You can see all the data that emissions have not been cut by Justin Trudeau's carbon tax.
00:02:03.740 And if anything, it's probably made the entire situation worse.
00:02:07.480 But look, Catherine McKenna can't help herself but try and turn this into a situation where you're a bad person for not agreeing with her,
00:02:14.980 even though she probably can't actually explain how a carbon tax is ever going to stop wildfires.
00:02:20.880 And she's never going to actually answer the idea that if arsonists are increasingly starting fires and that's contributing to wildfires,
00:02:29.720 isn't that a law enforcement issue?
00:02:31.640 It's not a climate change issue.
00:02:33.260 We have not had this same level of arson and misuse of fire in previous years.
00:02:39.040 So obviously, like, are we going to are we going to just tax our way of the situation or should we be maybe passing new legislation against environmental based arson that actually causes wildfires to cut down on this stuff
00:02:53.160 and have tighter law enforcement around dry seasons on people misusing fire at campsites and whatnot?
00:02:59.560 Are we really going to be waiting the 40, 50 years for carbon taxes to potentially start working and be reducing, like, like global warming or whatever?
00:03:10.140 That's obviously obtuse.
00:03:11.520 But this is the mindset of someone like Catherine McKenna, who just sees that you believing environmental policies makes you a good person who wants climate change to stop.
00:03:20.020 And you not passing the same environmental policies means that you're somehow pro people's homes burning down. 0.81
00:03:25.400 It's silly. 0.98
00:03:26.400 It's obtuse. 0.96
00:03:27.240 And now it's not actually getting to the heart of the issue.
00:03:30.120 It's just grandstanding on an issue and hoping that somehow you can beat your opponents into just agreeing with you right now.
00:03:37.200 I don't think that Canadians are actually buying into this idea that if only we had tougher and harder environmental policies,
00:03:44.080 if only we had five more carbon taxes, if only we banned gas cars, somehow these wildfires wouldn't be happening.
00:03:51.240 That's obviously not how it works.
00:03:52.780 We've always had wildfires.
00:03:54.020 And the fact that we had such a spike in wildfires in 2023 compared to the past five years just proves the point that this is not a slow, gradual rise because of some sort of climate change effect.
00:04:05.860 That there's obviously just factors year to year that either make it a wetter season or a drier season.
00:04:11.800 And it's just how it's going to be.
00:04:13.120 Maybe is climate change making it worse slowly over the years?
00:04:16.420 Sure.
00:04:16.740 But you're not going to have an explosion of fires one year to the next simply because the temperature in the country overall has risen by a tenth of a degree over the past 10 years or so.
00:04:28.760 That's not how anything works.
00:04:30.160 I actually think a tenth of a degree over 10 years is faster than they're claiming it's going up.
00:04:34.360 But that's not that's obviously not how it works.
00:04:36.480 And this is where like really good forest management does come into play, that the countries like the provinces and states in the US and Canada that usually have the worst fire problems are usually the ones that have the most environmental protections against logging, that they don't allow a lot of logging to take place or they have entire zones where you're not allowed to do anything.
00:04:55.600 A lot of dead wood builds up over decades and then you eventually have a massive wildfire.
00:05:01.020 That's usually how it works back in the day when people weren't around North America is that you were eventually going to have a wildfire after enough dead leaves and trees built up on the forest floor and made it very easy for a fire to spread.
00:05:13.360 This is why we do not have like super bad wildfires every single year.
00:05:17.620 We have seasons where it's not really all that bad, even if it was dry one year.
00:05:20.840 And we have years where it was dry and then the fire absolutely exploded.
00:05:24.200 It depends on the material that the fire is able to burn that year.
00:05:27.560 And this is where I am.
00:05:28.900 I am encouraged by the Alberta government actually pursuing better forest management and trying to explain to the general public why we need buffers in force.
00:05:38.960 We need to allow logging companies to log certain areas so that we have buffers against wildfires just continuing to go and go and go.
00:05:46.460 But anyways, but I think I just want to also jump over to this other tweet that Catherine McKenna put out that somehow she believes that wildfires are the cause of conservatives opposing carbon taxes.
00:06:00.780 At the same time, she's fear mongering about the conservatives getting rid of the carbon tax.
00:06:04.060 Okay, so if we have a super bad wildfires right now in the year 2023 with the carbon tax, is she saying that somehow this is actually the best we can possibly get the carbon with a file wildfires would be four times as bad right now.
00:06:18.420 If we didn't have the carbon tax or she's saying that somehow because the conservatives in this like mystical sense because the conservatives want to get rid of the carbon tax if they're elected in 2025 that ergo is what is causing like wildfires now is like because they mystically do not believe in the carbon tax enough that the carbon tax is not working.
00:06:37.940 And this is what makes conservatives arsonists because they're not believing hard enough in the carbon tax like it's effectively what she's pitching, but this is what a lot of liberal policies end up falling back on that they'll pass a law and because the law doesn't have a good effect on the problem that they're trying to solve or because it maybe even has a detrimental effect.
00:06:57.600 They'll then claim well the problem would be so much worse if we didn't do what we did, even though they cannot really point to any significant like carbon reductions that have taken place because of the carbon tax because when you're when you're targeting people at the pump, where people going to stop driving their car to work, it's an inelastic good gasoline, obviously people are going to fill up their cars to get to work.
00:07:18.260 So it's all it's really acted as the carbon tax has been a redistribution, redistribution scheme, where everyone gets a lot of people get checks every month, or every few months or so from the government as their climate change rebate.
00:07:32.640 So obviously, this is not going to fight in climate change, if everyone's just being given the money back, the people who bought the gasoline are just being given the money back because they fell below a certain income threshold.
00:07:42.820 That's not an environmentalist measure. That's just simply a wealth redistributionary measure tied to the topic of carbon emissions.
00:07:51.840 But whatever, I can't really expect logic out of Catherine McKenna or ethics, I see.
00:07:57.980 But that should be it for me today. I have my link to my normal gifts and go legal fundraiser in the description below, as well as the TNT email list to sign up to be able to get our content, and I'll see you in the next video.
00:08:08.240 Sorry if this rant's been all over the place, but every once in a while you see something that's frustrating on Twitter and you just got to publish something about it.