In this episode of The Cory Morgan Show, I talk about the Canadian economic slowdown and how Justin Trudeau is to blame for it. I also talk about what we can look forward to on April 1st, and why we should all be worried about it.
00:00:30.000Good day. Welcome to the Cory Morgan Show. Thanks for joining me on yet another, at least out here in Alberta, cold winter day. March is coming in like a bloody lion. Let's hope it goes out like a lamb. I can't stand winter. I really can't.
00:00:59.180I've been in Canada all my life and still I've just never learned to enjoy winter. Aside from the lack of mosquitoes, I really don't see a lot of good out of it. Either way, hopefully things thaw out pretty soon.
00:01:08.940That'll kind of tie into some talk, you know, about heating, energy, electricity, things like that. So a little later, I'm going to have guests on J.U. and James Walker of the Nano Nuclear Energy.
00:01:20.340These guys are a company that creates micro nuclear reactors and really portable. We're talking about something that can be moved on a tractor trailer in C-cans.
00:01:30.240So perhaps, you know, that's something in the energy mix that might be a bit of a game changer around the world as we all seem to try to scramble to keep our energy sources secure.
00:01:40.040As well, a little later on, I'm going to have Franco Terrazzano check in. We haven't had Franco on for a while. He's with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
00:01:47.060He's got a few updates on what we can look forward to on April 1st. That's the federal government's favorite time of the year to really make us bend over, lube up and take our tax increases for the season.
00:01:57.180So we'll have Franco on to talk a little later. I see Jordan and Mr. Stanley checking in on the comment scroll.
00:02:02.040Well, yes, if you're watching live, guys, be sure to check in. Send me your questions, comments, chat with each other. Just keep it civil.
00:02:09.020That's all, you know, we don't have to be at each other's throats. We lost time for that. But I've only got 45 minutes with you today.
00:02:15.040All right. I'm going to get on with what's got me going, though. I mean, I don't have to be too happy with everything I talk about.
00:02:20.140Let's talk some federal politics. I'm going to quote our leader, Justin Trudeau.
00:02:25.200In 2021, Prime Minister Trudeau infamously said,
00:02:27.920You'll forgive me if I don't think about monetary policy. Unfortunately, Trudeau in that case was actually being absolutely honest.
00:02:34.780He doesn't think about monetary policies. And the cost for his willful ignorance is going to be borne for generations.
00:02:41.320And no, we shouldn't bloody well forgive him. We should be trying to find a way to get that incompetent, unprincipled boob out of office as soon as possible.
00:02:48.660The economic canary in the coal mine in Canada has been dead for years.
00:02:53.020The warnings were clear. Canada was on a path to economic catastrophe.
00:02:56.420But the Trudeau government ignored the signs and charged ahead with their agenda of mass spending coupled with mass immigration.
00:03:03.200I mean, this is a government on the ropes. Their popularity levels are rivaling the end of the Mulroney government when they ended up getting wiped out down to two seats under Kim Campbell.
00:03:12.840And instead of reevaluating what they're doing, they're doubling down with what they've already been doing.
00:03:18.080So, I mean, as the government continued with its policy of borrowing money and pouring it into the economy, guess what? Inflation followed.
00:03:25.160That's economics 101. But remember, Trudeau doesn't think about monetary policy.
00:03:29.360So, action, reaction to try and counter the inflation problems.
00:03:33.180The Bank of Canada has been cranking up interest rates.
00:03:36.120And yeah, that does slow inflation, but that's because it slows the entire economy.
00:03:39.860As businesses defer capital investment and housing starts slow down.
00:03:42.860I mean, to counter the economic slowdown and the risk of recession that comes with that, the government then has opened the floodgates to mass immigration.
00:03:51.980Sure, new immigrants bring skills and resources that do, in the short term, spur the economy.
00:04:48.360In January of this year, just a couple of months ago, business insolvencies in Canada went up 129% over the January period of 2023.
00:04:57.680The taxes, regulations, interest rates, and anti-business climate in Canada is crushing our enterprises.
00:05:02.760Canada is becoming an investment pariah.
00:05:05.480While the Prime Minister might have no idea what he's going to do, you know, and what he is doing to the economy, business leaders do.
00:05:11.760They won't put funding into the economic basket case of Canada.
00:05:14.760It's a global market and we're being left behind.
00:05:16.760It's not just bad monetary policies that are keeping investment out of Canada.
00:05:19.840It's the environment and attacks on businesses themselves.
00:05:23.600I mean, grocers and oil companies, executives, they've been dragged before parliamentary committees where they've been questioned on their business decisions.
00:05:30.440It's kind of Soviet-like and feel, but that's not surprising considering Trudeau partnered with a socialist to try and remain in power.
00:05:36.840How could any business leader want to come to Canada and set up shop in that sort of environment?
00:05:41.440Having the government constantly attacking and shutting down proposed resource development certainly isn't helping either.
00:05:45.760It doesn't matter if the nation sits on massive natural resource reserves or the government won't allow it to be developed.
00:05:51.280The most frightening indicator, though, of just how far up the economic creek Canada has gone is the GDP per capita ratio.
00:05:58.420To put it in lay terms, add up all of the economic output in Canada and divide it by the population.
00:06:03.480That's the ratio, and that ratio has dropped steadily for the last six quarters.
00:06:07.640You know, the banks are calling it out, economists are calling it out.
00:06:09.660The only ones who seem unconcerned about it are the morons in government under Justin Trudeau.
00:06:13.300Let's look at the comparison. The GDP per capita in the USA is about $70,000 American dollars.
00:06:19.340In Canada, it's $52,000 American dollars and falling.
00:06:22.940The entire nation is becoming poorer, and quickly.
00:06:26.100Trudeau's been on a mass hiring binge of civil servants, but that only helps the unemployment figures.
00:06:30.300Civil servants don't contribute to the economy. They drain from it.
00:06:33.460I mean, Canada's faced depressions and recessions before. Hard times have come and gone.
00:06:36.740But what's happening right now is different.
00:06:38.100Canada's economy is being dismantled and destroyed by the most incompetent and ideologically driven government we have ever seen.
00:06:44.700The only question we have now is how long are we going to let this go before somehow finding a way to pressure that administration out of power?
00:06:50.880I mean, in other countries, people will be out in the streets by now.
00:06:53.160But in Canada, we seem to be still stuck on watching reality TV.
00:06:56.680Trudeau might not like to think about economic policies, but I guess he's not alone.
00:07:00.160Canadian citizens don't like watching it either, but it's going to catch up with you.
00:07:03.580So, guys, all I can say is, it's going bad. It's going bad fast.
00:07:08.400Start paying attention. Let's get that boob out of office sooner rather than later,
00:07:13.080because it's going to take generations to clean up the mess he is creating.
00:07:16.280And some of it's our own fault. We've got to change it.
00:07:18.740All right, that's what's got me ranting and raving to start the day off.
00:07:21.500Let's see what else will get me pissed off today and check in with our news editor, Dave Naylor,
00:07:25.520and see what else is going on in the big, bad world.
00:09:49.540You know, I don't know why these companies aren't learning the mistake of Bud Light.
00:09:54.420Bud Light lost billions in stock value with Dylan Mulvaney and now Doritos has done it.
00:10:00.000They've partnered with a transgender man, woman for two days before they discovered the disgusting text messages he had put out on things he wanted to do to young girls in the middle of the street.
00:10:13.900So his time as a Doritos spokesman ended fairly quickly.
00:10:19.820Our Dave Makachuk, a military expert, has got a column on Canada's attempts to send rockets to Israel.
00:14:04.400But this is what sticks in the mind of the public.
00:14:06.340Because they've got a close election coming this fall.
00:14:08.120And when you've got a cabinet minister going to Paris and touring around, and then it turns out that he spent thousands on a private chauffeur service, $3,500, to go tour things around Paris that had nothing to do even about what he was supposed to be there for.
00:14:27.560He was supposed to be for a nuclear exhibition.
00:14:29.280And instead, he was touring other things.
00:14:30.400Like, I don't mind multitasking with these politicians.
00:14:32.480It's okay you go over there if you've done your business part over on whatever you had to, met the people you had to, and you want to run around and do some touring.
00:14:51.300You can jump in an Uber or a taxi, go see those things, and come back.
00:14:54.080But instead, no, he thought he would expense $3,500 to the taxpayers and go touring.
00:14:59.760Dude, this is the sort of crap that gets you thrown out of office.
00:15:04.360This is the sort of thing that sticks in the voters' minds.
00:15:06.620I know the voters should be thinking about the billions rather than the thousands, but it's the thousands that resonate with other people.
00:15:13.060People who can't afford their bills, their rent, their mortgage payments, and then they see this sort of arrogance being used with their money.
00:15:38.040But municipalities can actually donate to political parties, which is not good.
00:15:42.740Because the municipalities, of course, I mean, it's an instant conflict of interest.
00:15:45.960The provincial government transfers funds to the municipalities, of course, for infrastructure projects and things such as that.
00:15:52.920The municipalities shouldn't be able to donate to the political parties then because, of course, they're looking to buy favor.
00:16:00.640And again, even if it's not been abused, this voter sees it as abuse.
00:16:05.680And it sounds like tens of thousands of dollars have gone from municipalities towards Saskatchewan party fundraisers.
00:16:11.660These are the cracks that are showing, guys, and you've got to be careful because this fall, if this sort of thing keeps up, this kind of arrogance, you don't understand why the voters are getting turned off you.
00:16:21.920They're going to be replaced this fall, and they're going to be replaced by the NDP.
00:16:24.820And again, you get to a cure that's worse than the disease.
00:16:27.480Alberta learned that lesson the hard way already once.
00:16:29.620I'd hate to see Saskatchewan have to learn to do so as well.
00:16:32.820All right, let's get on to the subject of our guests here.
00:16:36.680I've been looking forward to this, again, energy.
00:16:39.220Energy has been a huge, huge news story and issue that's going on.
00:16:43.160We're, as in Alberta, supposed to be an energy capital of Canada, yet we have shortages, we have instability, and we don't hear about nuclear enough and the developments within it and where it's coming along.
00:16:52.520And these guys with nanonuclear energy sound really exciting, actually, with some of the stuff they've been developing with micronuclear technology.
00:16:59.140And I've got James Walker and hopefully J.U. coming on soon to discuss and expand a bit on that.
00:17:05.480So we've got James for now, and let's see what they've got going.
00:17:43.720So you're absolutely right about those long lead times for those big civil power plants.
00:17:49.220Traditionally, that's because these are very large installations where all the fuel that's going to power in this thing for the next few decades is all up front.
00:17:56.960But the reason why there's big emphasis on SMRs, micro-reactors, is because if you shrink down the reactor and it uses less fuel and it's less complex,
00:18:06.300then the time to actually launch these things is theoretically a lot faster.
00:18:09.900The capital costs comes down, the financing costs related to the capital costs comes down.
00:18:14.740And that's where the U.S. and Canada are beginning to look towards being the future of the nuclear industry.
00:18:21.180So Alberta is actually a great state for industry.
00:18:24.960And already there's quite a lot of industries there that are looking at powering chemical operations, oil and gas operations, remote locations, remote industrial projects.
00:18:34.880Nuclear is the only solution, really, for those things, because wind and solar can't be put anywhere you want.
00:18:42.600They are only intermittent energy sources and they need big storage facilities.
00:23:07.120And I think the waste issue is almost similar to the safety issue in a way.
00:23:11.280But I think the scale of it is not really appreciated.
00:23:14.140So if I just say, like, if you were to take all of the reactors that have ever operated in North America, including the States,
00:23:20.620all the way back to the 50s, and that includes all the aircraft carriers, submarines, all the big civil power plants,
00:23:26.080and you were to collect all of that waste in one location, it wouldn't fill a football field.
00:23:30.940It produces an amazingly small amount of waste, and that's because the energy density of uranium is just so huge.
00:23:38.020So a micro reactor, if you can imagine it, it operates for 15 years, and you're producing less than a golf ball of highly irradiated waste.
00:23:45.980It's not really going to be much of a waste issue.
00:23:48.660Remarkably, actually, with our reactors, because the power output is so much lower than a big civil power plant,
00:23:53.880the burn-up of the fuel is less than 1% after about 15 years of operation.
00:23:57.680So it's almost new fuel after over a decade of use.
00:24:02.000And so obviously, we don't want to throw that away.
00:24:04.260We want to take that back and refurbish it and then put it back in the reactor and ship it out again,