In this episode of The Cory Mortgage Show, host Corey Morgan sits down with Dan McTeague, a former Liberal MP and head of Canadians for Affordable Energy, to discuss Canada's new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau.
00:13:31.040And it's interesting because they don't have a lot of time to play with.
00:13:34.040They've got a federal election looming on them and he's going to see scrutiny and questioning and pressure like he hasn't dealt with before.
00:13:40.040So it's going to be interesting if nothing else, when push comes to shove, because as I said in my opening monologue, you can't hide him from the press forever, particularly when an election comes.
00:13:49.040They're riding a wave of support right now, but if they've tried to ride for another 38 days or so by hiding him, by shielding him, the public is going to, it's not going to pass the smell test.
00:14:09.040Justin Trudeau used to be pretty horrible in his first couple of years for ums and ahs.
00:14:13.040And he got a little better towards the end.
00:14:14.040I found his, his, uh, voice no less grating by the end of his time in there, but at least he, he didn't have quite as many hesitations going on throughout.
00:14:22.040But it's going to be a short and a long campaign at the same time, I think, but we're kind of looking forward to it and kind of dreading it.
00:14:31.040He's no, uh, you're quite familiar with campaigns, been through his share of them and watches politics closely and is very outspoken on X and on his website and in media in general.
00:14:41.040And that's Dan McTeague of, uh, the Canadians for a formal, uh, for Canadians for affordable energy, that tongue twister going on there.
00:14:48.040Also a former liberal member of parliament from back in the days when the liberals were much more respectable than they are today.
00:15:06.040Well, I mean, something interesting that's kind of developed is we've evolved into a two party system in a way for the first time in a long, long time.
00:15:14.040And that's part of what's kind of voted poorly for the conservatives because the NDP are barely a factor anymore.
00:15:20.040And it's, uh, almost trading positions compared to where they were say 10, 15 years ago.
00:15:24.040And it was the liberal party that morphed into the NDP.
00:15:26.040Uh, I lost that election after six, uh, successful, uh, runs.
00:15:31.040And, uh, now it's the other way around.
00:15:33.040So it looks like, uh, the voters in the center left, uh, can't control themselves.
00:15:37.040Uh, they, uh, you're either socialist or you're a grifter or you happen to be, uh, you know, someone who follows a certain particular, uh, you know, warped ideology, uh, whether it's new Democrat or liberal looks like, uh, I can't tell the difference.
00:15:51.040Well, no, they're, they're pretty indistinguishable, particularly under Justin Trudeau.
00:15:54.040I mean, he definitely pulled the party to the left and to the, the realm of the woke, uh, part of what's happening though, is we're seeing an attempted and maybe even a little bit successful.
00:16:03.040So it's far rebranding from Mark Carney.
00:16:05.040I mean, he's, he's, he's taken the bullet out of, uh, Polyev's gun on a carbon tax election by saying he's going to end the consumer carbon tax.
00:16:12.040And he's managing to stay mum on the fact that he's going to dump all of that onto the, uh, emitters and the consumers will still pay for it.
00:16:19.040Um, maybe you could explain some of that, you know, what's going on with the carbon tax games.
00:16:23.040Now, this is more into your specialty and energy.
00:16:25.040You know, uh, Corey, we've talked about this for seven or eight years.
00:16:29.040That said there would come a day when you wouldn't just have unaffordable energy.
00:16:32.040You'd wind up paying a lot for everything else.
00:16:34.040And sooner or later that the country would collapse.
00:16:36.040Of course we had, uh, you know, massive amounts of money, public money being spent to make, uh, public service, uh, people happy, hiring more of them.
00:16:44.040We saw, you know, massive expenditures and during the COVID period.
00:16:48.040And we use all these, uh, funds to, uh, you know, give people the impression that, hey, there's no problem with this, these carbon taxes.
00:17:02.040And, you know, the extent to which Mr. Carney is going to try to distinguish himself from his signature policy, which is carbon taxes under net zero, really, uh, bears a lot of scrutiny.
00:17:13.040Up until he became leader, we, uh, we were surprised at the number of things that he took credit for, uh, including of course, but not limited to, uh, the 1998 balancing the budget where I was a member.
00:17:24.040That's news to me, uh, save the country from the global economic meltdown in 2008.
00:17:30.040Uh, you know, of course, this is a fellow who, uh, did wonderful things in Britain, left nice and early.
00:17:34.040However, despite all that he has said and has been challenged by a very, you know, weak leadership campaign, probably the weakest I've seen in my lifetime.
00:17:42.040And, uh, uh, a media that that really hasn't held his feet to the fire.
00:17:46.040We now see him trying to attempt to, uh, basically, uh, pull the wool over everyone's eyes.
00:17:51.040Now you want to be really, really clear about this.
00:17:54.040I know their effect on consumers to the 10th of a cent.
00:17:57.040And I can tell you with full regard to my 18 years as a liberal member parliament, this is a shell game, but on, they are basically going to take this off for the period of campaign and restore it.
00:18:08.040So every consumer is going to pay for it out there. Why? Because the framework legislation has not been changed, nor have the liberals indicated that they have any intention of changing it.
00:18:16.040If they win the government, you and I and everybody in this country are going to pay a hell lot more than what we're paying today.
00:18:20.040And if you don't like what you've seen over the past four or five years, while he was our prime economic advisor, I got news for you.
00:18:26.040You're going to hate what you see in the next four or five years.
00:18:28.040If you give these people a fourth mandate to further ruin the country.
00:18:31.040No, it's been getting very troubling to think that might be what's actually happening.
00:18:35.040I mean, you know, people I'm hoping will just kind of pay a little more attention.
00:18:39.040I mean, it's been such an insane, tumultuous time.
00:18:41.040You turn on the news and your head just spins.
00:18:43.040Even as a news junkie and wonk like me, I get tired of it eventually.
00:18:46.040Like, holy cow, the craziness coming out of the White House, the craziness coming from our domestic leaders.
00:18:53.040And I think that gives people like Carney room to sort of pull the wool over their eyes, as you said, because people's eyes are all over the place.
00:19:00.040They don't even know where to focus anymore.
00:19:02.040They just want to see stability, even if it's fake.
00:19:05.040Well, they can't reward people who've been giving us bad service for the last several years.
00:19:09.040I think I noticed the fact that Donald Trump seems to be endorsing Mark Carney over Pierre Polly.
00:19:14.040And it'll go hand in hand with all the Canadians who've suddenly rediscovered their nation.
00:19:18.040You know, elbows up nonsense and, you know, the Canadian flag and buying Canadian.
00:19:23.040Where the hell were you for the past 10 years?
00:19:25.040When you denigrated the nation, when you tore down statues, when you poured paint on top of them, when you were ashamed of your past, when you bent a knee.
00:19:32.040I mean, look, Canadians have really got to think about the story.
00:19:35.040It's not just about the politicians, but Canadians who really need to smarten it up and bring their game up a little higher.
00:19:41.040Because at this point, it seems to me as someone who's experienced in the trenches, knocking on tens of thousands of doors here in eastern Canada.
00:19:47.040There's been a degradation, not in the quality of our politicians.
00:20:02.040I think once there's fair and, you know, balance between the two operating parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives in the next election,
00:20:10.040I think it's going to Canadians are going to find to get what they've been paying for for several years.
00:20:15.040And that's a real honest answer on these things, especially on the carbon tax, where it needs to be scrapped, along with the net zero fantasies that are very prodigious to Canada,
00:20:22.040while the Liberals can spend the next four or five terms rebuilding themselves and getting back to the center where they were when I was an empty.
00:20:28.040Yeah, well, and back to energy and back to kind of this new discovery.
00:20:32.040It seems a lot of progressive Canadians and net zero people and all the rest have suddenly realized that maybe getting more pipelines to the coast might be a good idea.
00:20:40.040Something Alberta has been screaming from the rafters for over a decade now.
00:20:44.040But to be honest, I don't believe them when they say they're going to expand them.
00:20:49.040It doesn't gel with their net zero ideology.
00:20:52.040I mean, they'll claim it right now, but I don't see them doing it if they manage to get in for another term.
00:20:55.040They'll just regulate it to death again.
00:20:58.040Yeah. Well, you know, what's the good of building a pipeline if you're not prepared to put anything within it?
00:21:02.040I mean, if you cut, you cap your natural gas, you cap your oil and you put emissions on it so that, I mean, the PBO, the parliamentary budget officer came out and said,
00:21:08.040this is going to have a catastrophic effect, not just on Alberta and producers, provinces, but the entire country as a whole.
00:21:14.040Look, Canadians really have to get up their game.
00:21:17.040I mean, I heard this nonsense from the left and from the greenies saying for the years, oh, we should refine our own, all of our own oil.
00:21:22.040And then I said, well, how the hell are you going to get it to market if you still have a problem?
00:21:51.040There isn't a single Canadian who can argue right now that they don't think things are worse now than what they were 10 years ago.
00:21:56.040And that's because we have a reckless and irresponsible government that has found this country ability to spend that we didn't need to spend on.
00:22:03.040And for which we have destroyed our ability, the golden goose of fuel, oil and gas, but manufacturing as well.
00:22:08.040And we've invested money in things like electric vehicles.
00:22:11.040For God's sakes, we put up tariffs against the Chinese who've had a 10 year, 15 years advantage.
00:22:23.040There isn't nothing this government has touched that hasn't hurt the Canadian public.
00:22:26.040And if you want more of that, if you think you can afford more of that, talk to your kids, talk to your grandchildren and talk to your neighbor, for goodness sakes.
00:22:32.040Because everybody's in very, very dire streets right now.
00:23:37.040And of course, the plant is now is likely to go belly up anytime soon, along with the North Hulse, along with the Lion Battery, the Lion Buses, all of these other things.
00:23:48.040I can see that the smokestacks from here for the old Oakville plant.
00:23:52.040They're supposed to be an EV plant, not turn into an F-250, F-350 plant.
00:23:56.040But, you know, you're looking at a situation where we backed the wrong horse and we continue to make these bad decisions on the assumption that even though the United States has ended its EV mandates,
00:24:05.040even though Canadians are no longer getting subsidized for buying these things, we can still build them because we're trying to pretend that there's a market that exists that doesn't.
00:24:15.040I'm not offended by people who drive EVs.
00:24:17.040If you want to drive one, that's great.
00:24:18.040Not so great, by the way, when it's minus 20 here in Ontario or minus 40 where you guys are.
00:24:23.040But at any rate, if you think you have the electrical infrastructure and the bottomless pit when it comes to subsidies and government debt to pay for these things,
00:24:31.040I think people really need to elude or get rid of their delving into illusions because this is the worst public policy decision I think we've made.
00:25:09.040There's no one commodity that impacts everything across the blanket as much as energy.
00:25:14.040Canada should be an energy superpower.
00:25:16.040I mean, we've got so much for resources, whether it's hydroelectric, whether it's uranium, whether it's natural gas, whether it's you name it.
00:25:23.040We've got it, yet we just seem to be intent on hamstringing ourselves.
00:25:29.040Do you think, though, we could change this into an election about energy?
00:25:33.040Because right now they're all campaigning against Trump.
00:25:35.040And while that might be effective in the short term on polls, it's not going to help us with our economy.
00:25:41.040No, but it's ironic that it's taken Donald Trump to make us appreciate our country and to finally want to build pipelines.
00:25:47.040But look, I worked with Sylvain Charles a while on a project not too long ago in which he said, look, the carbon taxes aren't just hitting energy prices.
00:25:54.040As I had suggested several years ago, it's going to affect everything else, including the cost of food.
00:25:59.040Pushing back against our traditional economists, the usual suspects that we have out there, he paid lots of money for the federal government to basically polish the apple of all this carbon nonsense and net zero nonsense.
00:26:12.040He came on and said, I got two peer reviewed studies that point out that the effect of carbon taxes and government policy to try to green everything and fault Canada for creating all the CO2 in the world, by the way, is a giver of life and is plant food for all intents and purposes.
00:26:26.040Regardless of that, he came with two peer reviewed studies to basically show it to these wonderful economists, a lot of them from Alberta.
00:26:31.040I think Trome and I guess the other ones, Leach, and others that keep coming in and saying, oh, there's no effect, baloney.
00:26:37.040Anybody who's shopping in this country today where they're trying to make ends meet knows full well what's happened.
00:26:41.040And you don't have to just argue or have a discussion with the people that do the food purchasing the house.
00:26:47.040Go to the food banks and understand just how bad the situation has become.
00:26:50.040This should not have happened in our Canada.
00:26:52.040Anybody who tolerates that, might I suggest that you get yourself a brown paper bag, put it over your head, because you've got to be ashamed of yourself for being so ridiculous.
00:27:26.040It's coming from the bottom line of people who are now getting ready to have to pay next month their income taxes, assuming, of course, they can make ends meet.
00:27:48.040He said, we don't have money for this stuff.
00:27:49.040He said, if it's an important issue, go out and fund yourself.
00:27:51.040And that's what these people should do.
00:27:52.040Rather than coming out pretending that they can use their academic credentials to bamboozle us into believing that we're somehow getting a deal.
00:28:00.040Yeah, well, it's going to be on people like yourself and even us over here.
00:28:04.040I think over the course of the next 40 days or so just to try our hardest to keep things on the right discussion and let people realize because it's not that complicated when you really drill down.
00:28:13.040You just got to move the fog out of the way for people when they see how directly these things impact them and they can make their choice on their own.
00:28:24.040Two interviews in Quebec in the next hour or so.
00:28:27.040So I'll continue to deliver the message and as an Easterner, I get it.
00:28:30.040And it's high time the rest of the country recognize the more you do to undermine the very things that make us a great nation, the more distant it is that we're going to keep this country united and economically sustainable.
00:29:01.040If it's good stuff, I will work along with it, but if you're going to be nasty and you're going to be a troll, you're going to get it back with full boots.
00:38:32.040We have less in our pockets all the time.
00:38:35.040And if we put the same dingbats back into power who made that trend in the first place, how on earth could we possibly expect it to change?