Greg Staley of Diverge Media joins me to explain why the Liberal government acted so quickly in response to the Air Canada strike, and why it was so out of character for them to act so quickly. We talk about the financial incentives behind the scenes and why the government acted the way it did.
00:00:00.000Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. Something that didn't sit right with me and many other Canadians in the aftermath of the Air Canada strike fiasco was just why the Liberal government acted so fast.
00:00:13.400We have seen the Liberals in previous times where there have been strikes be very slow, not forcing a resolution, letting the strike go on for weeks and weeks, disrupting things like packages being shipped around the country, and maybe someone could argue because this was disrupting flights and it was stranding people around the country.
00:00:32.640That's why the Liberals acted so fast. It's not really in their character. And so today I brought on a friend of mine from Diverge Media, Greg Staley, to try and explain maybe why Mark Carney would be so motivated and his ministers in order to jump into the situation and try and come down on the side of Air Canada so quickly.
00:00:54.440I don't think that you and I are anti-Air Canada, Greg, or pro-QP Union, but just to explain why the Liberals are acting very out of character is, I think, something that's needed right now.
00:01:08.380Yeah, so we uncovered some financial incentives and in the grand scheme of things, yeah, it might not be a huge amount, but the other thing it shows is that there's obviously friendships and connections with people in the industry.
00:01:20.480Brookfield's heavily invested in aviation. They brought in the former Air Canada CEO to be an advisor on aviation.
00:01:28.820So there's those friendships, those connections, and I'm sure they're just a phone call away if somebody wanted to give Prime Minister Carney a call and say,
00:01:36.020hey, it's been like 10 hours, let's end this thing already. I think they could have done that.
00:01:40.480This sounds like a bit of a strange thing to bring up in this discussion, but I do think it's relevant.
00:01:47.280So the one Liberal MP who actually spoke out against the government's decision to try and force flight attendants back to work so quickly was Nate Erskine Smith.
00:01:58.100Now, you'll remember when Carney first became Prime Minister before the election was called, he made Nate Erskine Smith, the housing minister, to entice him back to running for the Liberal Party.
00:02:09.140He was going to retire or move on to some other form of politics or another, you know, go into media.
00:02:15.020He runs his own podcast. And so they made them the housing minister.
00:02:19.420And right after the election, they replaced Nate with the former mayor of Vancouver.
00:02:25.740I forget the man's name. It doesn't really matter. He's deeply incompetent. Nobody should know who he is.
00:02:30.180But what I always got from that is that Carney likes people that he likes, you know, people that he's friends with, people he's known a long time.
00:02:40.060He trusts those people more than someone like Nate Erskine Smith, who, you know, maybe I don't like his housing solutions,
00:02:45.900but, you know, compared to the former mayor of Vancouver, was probably going to be more competent.
00:02:50.840And what it feels like in this Erkanda situation is that Carney is jumping into the aid of people that he's known for a while, you know, companies he's interacted with, you know, it's close to his heart.
00:03:03.600Again, Brookfield is working with a former Erkanda CEO.
00:03:07.420And then you wonder why the call goes through to Erkanda so fast.
00:03:10.780But you were telling me something earlier before we started recording about how there was an actual call where Erkanda had no clue what they were going to do unless Carney just did it all for them.
00:03:49.160Like you mentioned on your show the other day, they single handedly in this blunder have given the NDP life and wind in their sails that they didn't otherwise have.
00:03:58.540And it's not like the NDP were some great, you know, they didn't have some great strategy to be relevant again.
00:04:04.260They just got handed this on a silver platter.
00:04:07.400And now what are the liberals have to recover from this?
00:04:10.460But I think they've they've damaged the brand.
00:04:20.800And you just kind of question, like, is any of this being done with the interests of Canadians in mind or is this self-seeking and serving of the inner circle?
00:04:29.980And naturally, you're never going to be able to get a conclusive answer on this unless Carney just comes out and says, oh, yeah, that's totally how I operate.
00:04:37.580But with what we've seen just so far with him back when he was an advisor to Justin Trudeau, an economics advisor, and then after becoming prime minister, there's just a pattern of what he chooses to intervene on, what he chooses to make his big policy initiatives.
00:04:56.680We're going to solve the housing crisis with modular homes.
00:05:00.100Brookfield happens to have a, you know, be involved in modular homes.
00:05:03.920And is it the dollar amount that he's doing this for in order to benefit Brookfield?
00:05:09.100Well, you can go, I want you to go into the specific aviation industry connections between Brookfield and Air Canada a bit.
00:05:16.780And it's not the most amount of money.
00:05:19.320But that's not really the point, though.
00:05:21.260But there is a over, there's a macro pattern of him choosing to benefit industries that Brookfield is invested in.
00:05:28.660They are heavily invested in a lot of government subsidized industries, you know, green tech, batteries, EVs.
00:05:35.100At one point, they tried to buy a pharmaceutical company in Spain that just happened to be getting very cheap blood plasma from Canada blood services.
00:05:44.340It feels like at every from at in every situation, there is some Brookfield inside angle where they get information before anyone else.
00:05:53.560And things just happen to be able to move in their direction, sometimes just in a policy standpoint where other companies benefit, too.
00:06:00.080But it's always macro benefiting Brookfield, who oftentimes is invested in in industries where if it wasn't for the government, they would be failing.
00:06:08.600But but what's the connection with between Brookfield and Air Canada?
00:06:12.220Yeah. So just to quickly outline this, it's detailed in our article that we just released the other day.
00:06:18.860But Brookfield, obviously, the prime minister has, you know, holdings there and what this would look like for his personal holdings.
00:06:27.980But obviously, there's friendships and connections in this industry.
00:06:31.280They hold Brookfield holds approximately a 13.2 percent stake in a company called Coors Aviation and Air Canada also holds a stake in Coors Aviation of about 10 percent.
00:06:42.640So there's the converging of interest there.
00:06:44.580But Brookfield invested three hundred seventy four million dollars into Coors Aviation and under Coors Aviation.
00:06:51.600Their subsidiary is a company called Jazz, and they operate from what I can see from the Air Canada website, over 50 airplanes in the Air Canada fleet.
00:07:14.780But let's just assume he wants to be a good friend here.
00:07:18.140He has a lot of incentive to do things that are good for his friends that aren't good for Canadians.
00:07:23.580Yeah. And that's and that's where I think people overestimate or underestimate.
00:07:27.380I mean, just how much of a conflict that can be of just knowing too many people in the industry.
00:07:35.160There was a big like there was a lot of hubbub around Nigel Wright back when he was the chief of staff of former prime minister Stephen Harper.
00:07:43.920When he was coming in, they were they were really there were people freaking out because he had a lot invested.
00:07:50.780He was from he was a former board member of an aviation company that I believe dealt in actually military type jets and other sort of like hardware like that.
00:08:01.660And that they were thinking that this is too much of a conflict of interest.
00:08:05.220So he actually recused himself from dealing with anything to do with anything aerospace, even if it didn't have to do with the company that he came from specifically.
00:08:15.080And that's the problem we have with Carney's at every single topic that he had every issue that he tackles.
00:08:21.000He's going to know three people who run companies in that area.
00:08:24.880He's going to personally know the board.
00:08:27.200He's going to have worked with people from Air Canada.
00:08:30.040And so this makes it very everything he does.
00:08:33.460And I'm not trying to be unfair to him.
00:08:35.200Everything he does becomes a little bit suspicious when the liberals have a certain reputation for not moving fast when it comes to breaking up strikes.
00:08:43.280And then they suddenly do when it's a company where Carney feasibly knows a lot of people who are still currently at the company, a lot of people who formerly been at the company.
00:08:51.920And so I think that what I think the solution to all this is, is that what the conservatives had been suggesting, the man needs to sell his assets and have them reinvested in a true blind trust.
00:09:02.540I believe he is around seven million dollars in Brookfield right now.
00:09:06.440And people can quibble and say, well, that's not that much of a money when you compare it to people who are uber wealthy.
00:09:12.460It's like, yeah, but it's a lot for him.
00:09:17.640People could be corrupt for different amounts of money.
00:09:20.760Oh, we know personally just from doing the independent media thing, like it doesn't take a lot of money to corrupt people.
00:09:27.820And also sometimes it's not even money.
00:09:29.740Sometimes it's just attention, adulation.
00:09:32.180And yeah, like that's it's all it takes for some people.
00:09:35.660So in Carney's case, it's again, how do you recuse yourself from things as a prime minister?
00:09:40.380Yes, you can sell your assets and still put them in a blind trust.
00:09:42.840But then there will still be all these relationships.
00:09:45.400And again, does he turn around and hurt his friends in order to benefit Canadians?
00:09:50.660Well, he didn't even live here prior to the election.
00:09:53.240So it's not like he was a Canadian patriot in my in my eyes.
00:09:56.500Anyways, you cannot overstate just how badly they screwed up the Air Canada strikes in the sense that it wasn't like it was the not ideal way of dealing with it.
00:10:07.140It was the worst possible thing they could do, force, force people to go back to work with no promise that any issues are going to be fixed.
00:10:15.460And then Patty Hayes, you the the jobs and families minister, comes out later after forcing people back to work.
00:10:23.580Like I think Air Canada actually had to be the one to finally fix the situation by trying to offer some sort of mediation themselves.
00:10:30.920But regardless, the she then comes up with a video saying we support workers.
00:10:35.840It's like, oh, goodness, lady, this is just pouring so much salt on this wound.
00:10:39.680How about you just just pack it in, take the L you they have revived the the NDP.
00:10:46.240I think that is just unquestionable that the NDP got a lot of juice out of this particular situation.
00:10:52.280And now the liberals are again, I cannot because the thing is, I keep hearing that Carney's a man with a plan.
00:10:59.160He's politically like he's an astute political thinker, very intelligent.
00:11:04.080And then when he gets when we're in this situation with Air Canada, the liberals.
00:11:09.680They act like a bunch of not thugs, but they just act stupid, like they just act rashly.
00:12:15.040Like, have you thought through what this actually looks like?
00:12:17.160So either he's so ideologically driven, which I'll address in a moment, that he just doesn't care or he really hasn't thought through these things.
00:12:24.540And I don't think he's ideologically driven as this green elitist that people paint him out to be.
00:12:31.960They are playing both sides of this green agenda where, hey, heads, we win, tails, we win.
00:12:38.120If they monopolize more and more of the market because of government policy that forces more and more small and medium enterprises out,
00:12:44.460it only benefits companies like Brookfield that have their investments in big companies like that because there's less market for them to have to compete with.
00:13:47.680But when the government will subsidize, you know, 10, 20, 30% of the price, I think it goes, Quebec's program is up to $7,000 on, I want to say electric vehicles.
00:14:07.680This is what drives me off the wall of whenever people act like Mark Carney is like an economic genius.
00:14:13.120Yes, he actually did do a good job when he was the Bank of Canada governor because he was listening to Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty because the governor of the Bank of Canada, you know, is supposed to be a seasoned person in finance.
00:14:24.480But at the end of the day, they are supposed to align their monetary policy with what the government is doing.
00:14:29.760So if Harper and Flaherty want to be careful going into the, oh, wait, financial crisis, and they don't want to inflate the currency and blow out spending and cause prices to rise, and they want to kind of ease, you know, put a little money into the economy to kind of be able to spur it, but, you know, keep it very low, much more minimal compared to what then Barack Obama proceeded to do in the United States.
00:14:52.560You know, Carney did that, and he did a good job.
00:14:55.180Once he becomes the Bank of England governor, he has all the answers now.
00:14:59.640And then he actually ends up causing them a lot of problems that former Prime Minister Liz Truss has talked about, that he has all the answers, and he's going to tell you what, you know, well, that what the actual government's policy should be.
00:15:12.820So he starts trying to run the government from reverse, where I'm going to tell you what my monetary policy is going to be, and you're going to align with me, or I'm going to throw you all under the bus and quit.
00:15:23.120You know, because this is right after Brexit, and people like David Cameron are, you know, nervous to make any big mistakes after that.
00:15:29.760And so, like, you know, then Mark Carney's effectively able to dictate a high inflationary spending type financial policy, because he sees that as really good for, you know, like the stock market, because he's like the Brookfield guy.
00:15:45.880And by the way, there's nothing inherently wrong with any of these companies, other than I don't like companies just investing in government subsidized areas.
00:15:53.040But the thing is that he almost has a very bubble-like view of, well, you know, stock market go up.
00:15:59.460You know, when he's Justin Trudeau's economic advisor, it's not shocking that we have a very high immigration rate that pumps the GDP and helps the stock market, but it's terrible for the average person.
00:16:10.940Just because your GDP is going up doesn't mean the average Canadian is going to benefit.
00:16:14.180You know, you can increase GDP as the liberal government has over the last decade, barely, but entirely driven by immigration, and that doesn't help anyone.
00:16:25.320That actually hurts a lot of people in the process when you just look to housing.
00:16:29.200Job market is another example of all these things that are being affected by it.
00:16:33.780But, you know, it's funny, back to the Flaherty and Harper thing, it's kind of like, to use a baseball analogy, Harper's the pitcher, and he threw a perfect game through Flaherty calling the game.
00:16:44.180And Carney's over on first base, and he never touched the ball, but he gets credit.
00:16:48.000Like, he's just there, but he's, even maybe a better analogy is he's not even on the field.
00:16:53.240He's in the dugout writing down the stats of the game, and he somehow gets credit for that from the liberal side of the media.
00:17:01.500And as was pointed out by the conservatives, yeah, no, you don't deserve credit here.
00:17:06.720You were beholden to the ideas and strategy of Stephen Harper and Flaherty.
00:17:14.500But a better look would be what happened in England when he was the Bank of England's governor and what they had to say about what he did there.
00:17:23.460And going on to that, more of that battery issue, the thing that, again, gets under my skin about this is that you're going to have a lot of people thinking, oh, look at all these companies moving into town.
00:17:35.160Oh, look at all these new battery plants.
00:17:36.920And, you know, by the way, Brookfield has several investments in battery companies.
00:17:41.100I'm not saying it's this one, but it's like every single thing.
00:17:44.320You just look at the investment list at Brookfield.
00:17:46.800It's like these are the areas of the economy where even if it's not Brookfield run, this is the companies, the type of companies that Mark Carney appreciates the most.
00:17:55.020Which is, I think, the ideological side of Mark, that he likes battery plants.
00:18:01.240And he likes, you know, EV vehicle manufacturing plants being put into, like, Windsor.
00:18:05.960It's just like we're having an economy that's driven by his personality.
00:18:10.760Much the same way that kind of Trudeau drove the personality almost in a childish way of what companies he likes, what industries he likes and doesn't like.
00:18:19.260But this is not how you build an economy.
00:18:22.440If the government money, yes, sometimes the government gives out a loan to bring in a big company to set up shop here.
00:18:30.980But if they're only going to be here in the long run because you keep writing checks, it's fake jobs.
00:18:37.800You are creating fake jobs to create products that nobody wants unless they're also able to write them off their taxes, which that's oftentimes what we do with EV vehicles in Canada.
00:18:48.840Now we have this EV mandate that at least the conservatives are pushing back on.
00:18:53.780And I always, I hate one of the people when you start talking about the EV mandates.
00:18:57.500They're like, oh, so you don't think people should buy EVs?
00:18:59.480You don't think people should be able to buy EVs?
00:20:20.760You know, I don't care if you want to retrofit your corporate offices.
00:20:25.760I really don't care if you have some other sort of, like, if any of these companies have a DEI program and then they fire people at the same time we're giving them billions of dollars.
00:20:34.640I'm like, goodness, that's called fraud.
00:20:37.360But, and then you live in Saskatchewan, too.
00:20:40.260So I assume that you're not super excited by, you know, them trying to shift people over to electric vehicles.
00:20:47.280Okay, and I defended Pierre Pagliot on this because he's 100% right.
00:20:52.200When he says the banning of gasoline-powered vehicle sales by 2035 will lead to the end of rural life, he is 100% correct.
00:21:01.340Because if you live truly rural, even not, like, that rural, like, I'm 30 minutes from the nearest town.
00:21:42.500I think that's better for the environment to keep that bad boy ticking, not drum up all this new rare earth that's required and all the manufacturing materials.
00:21:51.260Let's just keep that going as long as possible.
00:21:53.240By the way, have we increased the grid capacity of any of our cities enough that we can just have everyone plugging in Cybertrucks?
00:22:00.380Yes, and to make another point about Tesla, I know that people can point to, well, you know, Tesla isn't a successful company, and they sell EVs.
00:22:07.520And a few successful companies in an industry does not prove that the industry has the capacity to be at the size that it currently is.
00:22:16.640Even Tesla arguably wouldn't be as big unless they had the green, the electric veal subsidy in the United States and in other countries, where if you buy a Tesla, you get to write off like $15,000 of it off of your taxes.
00:22:29.920I'm not sure if it's that much, but I remember it was a pretty massive portion of the cost of the vehicle.
00:22:34.080Even with Tesla, though, let's say that generally if you got rid of all these subsidies, it would still be a pretty successful company.
00:22:42.200Okay, that doesn't prove that this is an area of the economy where you need dozens and dozens of companies creating their own EV vehicles and trying to sell them on the market.
00:22:53.960There are niche industries that serve a niche audience.
00:22:56.860You can't take a niche product and try and make it mainstream.
00:23:00.660Look at all the failed products of the 1980s and 90s trying to sell like really strange computers on an open market that the general public did not want.
00:23:09.320You know, you had to wait a while before you made a computer that was actually usable by people who aren't accountants or computer, you know, people who code.
00:23:19.560And again, with the grid, we're going to have brownouts.
00:23:23.340We're going to have blackouts if you end up having to have, you know, I believe when you actually charge a car, it's like more than your own in your entire house for like multiple days of power usage.
00:23:34.560Yeah, you don't have your car plugged in every day, but it's crazy how much power it takes.
00:23:39.040You know, on that rolling blackouts and brownouts thing, it was actually I think when Trudeau was in government 2021.
00:23:44.740I did an article on this futures came.
00:23:47.860I can't remember who put it out, but it was a government agency that put out they they foresee potential rolling blackouts as a result of climate change and trying to reduce carbon footprints.
00:23:59.800So I don't know if they think these two are hand in hand.
00:24:03.940But it does seem like energy insecurity is in the plan or at least how they foresee the future.
00:24:12.200And it definitely doesn't need to be this way.
00:24:14.060And what's frustrating is we live on the richest we're in the richest nation on Earth and we're watching it be pulled apart piece by piece.
00:24:28.760Think of how much money is underneath their feet, but 10 years of this government refusing to do anything in the name of some green ideology that is absolute nonsense to anyone who actually looks objectively at what they're saying.
00:24:42.080Where's your EV battery minerals come from?
00:24:44.980They come from places like that where they don't give a rat's, you know what I mean, about environmental regulations.
00:24:50.940Yet we're supposed to applaud the government and give paths on the back because they want to spend $14 billion on corporate welfare to bring in a company to produce this garbage.
00:25:01.600And so I think with that, I'd love for you to tell people what else you're working on and I'd love to have you back on.
00:25:09.780But yeah, we should have you on just to talk about the EV stuff and all the green tech subsidies when your next article is officially out.