Western Standard - May 30, 2022


CORY'S RANT： Anti-enterprise ideology is killing essential projects

Topics
California water crisis
Mentioned
David Suzuki Maude Barlow
Triggered： Self-defeating politics of envy are killing us Sask children’s libraries defend transgender books for young children.

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

194.95

Word count

1,283

Sentence count

81

Harmful content

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In the late 1980s, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) became a rallying cry for hard-left activists fighting free trade. They focused on the myth that the "Big Bad Americans" would come up and take Canada's water if we allowed free trade, and we wouldn't be able to stop them.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Way back in the late 1980s, the North American issue cause celeb for the hard left protectionist
00:00:05.540 was the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA, in other words. I mean, in lacking a solid
00:00:12.540 economic case for opposing deregulated trade, activists moved on to their usual tactic of
00:00:18.520 playing on fear and emotion. They created the myth, this is what they did in Canada, created
00:00:22.820 the myth that corporations were going to buy all the world's water and they were going to drain us
00:00:27.800 dry. The Council of Canadians was formed and managed by noteworthy leftists such as David Suzuki and
00:00:34.540 Maude Barlow. Yes, those names have been coming up for 30 some years now. The whole point of that
00:00:39.320 organization really was to try and halt free trade and they focused on the message that the big bad
00:00:44.180 Americans would come up and take Canada's water if we allowed free trade and we wouldn't be able to
00:00:48.120 do anything to stop. Their message was simplistic. They always began by pointing out how desperately
00:00:53.320 dry California is and how abundant Canada's fresh water supplies were. They made the case that the
00:00:58.480 Americans would move water from Canada's western lakes and rivers into California for irrigation and
00:01:03.960 drinking while paying pennies, if anything, for it. These myths were often accompanied by pictures of dry
00:01:09.860 farm fields and depleted water reservoirs. It was a real frightening scenario indeed. Free trade was
00:01:15.860 implemented despite the hysteric opposition from Canada's left. People who believe the mythology of the
00:01:21.180 Council of Canadians must have lived in terror with the knowledge that desertification of Canada was
00:01:26.640 impending. So 30 years later, what's happened to Canada's water? Well, nothing, not a thing. What the
00:01:32.440 Council of Canadians and other advocates always glossed over in their fear-mongering was the rather
00:01:36.140 important question of how this grand theft of water would actually happen. Water is actually notoriously
00:01:41.940 difficult to move over long distances. It's heavy, it doesn't compress, and it needs to be moved in
00:01:46.640 very large volumes to have any real impact anywhere. In BC, water would have to be moved over mountain
00:01:53.520 ranges in order to get it down to California and through a few river valleys. From the prairies, it
00:01:58.480 would have to go through multiple large river valleys, including even the Grand Canyon, you know, which are
00:02:03.480 already ironically carrying American water to coastal outlets. It would take a project thousands of times
00:02:09.420 larger than the Panama Canal in order to move the equivalent of a small river from Canadian provinces to
00:02:14.720 California. It just isn't in the cards. But that didn't stop them from claiming they would, and people
00:02:19.220 from falling for it. Years of lobbying against any form of private water sales still has an impact on
00:02:24.620 people. In BC, Nestle experienced fierce opposition for a bottled water facility in the Fraser Valley.
00:02:30.880 Never mind that the Fraser River dumps more fresh water into the ocean in an hour than a hundred bottled
00:02:35.540 water plants could consume in a week. The principle of selling water has been entrenched into the minds
00:02:41.320 of many as being evil. A bottled water makes up a tiny fraction of human water consumption. It
00:02:47.100 garners the most criticism because it's our most visible form of consumption. To be fair, using
00:02:52.900 bottled water is a bit wasteful due to the packaging involved and the presence of safely drinkable water
00:02:58.460 from the tap in at least most communities. It really isn't a big deal though in the environmental or
00:03:03.640 economic scheme of things. Most of the human use of water comes in the forms of irrigation and
00:03:08.920 industrial uses. It should be remembered water used by humans will eventually go back into the
00:03:12.440 system one way or another. Contaminated water, it's a real issue. Let's not pretend that the
00:03:16.660 water simply vanishes from the world ecosystem the moment it is sprayed on a field or used in a
00:03:21.320 factory. It goes back in the system, guys. Now, California still faces a crisis in water supply,
00:03:26.680 and this is getting to where the stupidity really is getting big. They're draining lakes and rivers dry 1.00
00:03:30.940 as the population grows and an ongoing drought continues. I mean, California is a dry state for the most
00:03:36.080 part. The Mojave Desert isn't a result of global warming. It's thousands of years old. And as long
00:03:41.000 as that state holds a large population, it's going to have challenges with water supply.
00:03:45.160 In most of the world, desalination has been developed in nations with coastal access in order to
00:03:50.960 tap the oceans for supply. Israel, Australia, and North Africa, they're all benefiting from these 0.99
00:03:55.960 projects. Desalination is expensive and energy intensive, but it's getting cheaper and it beats the
00:04:01.720 hell out of dying of thirst or associated hunger when crops fail due to drought. California has
00:04:07.500 a massive coastline along the largest ocean on earth. The state's a natural candidate for
00:04:12.320 large-scale desalination projects. Some plants are already in operation and they're providing
00:04:17.240 water to urban areas. In light of recent developments, though, it looks unlikely that
00:04:21.460 desalination facilities will be developed further in California. Boy, there's a lot of tongue twisters in
00:04:26.440 that one, though. A large project in Orange County, California called Poseidon would have provided 50
00:04:31.680 million gallons a day to the parched Huntington Beach area. Due to environmental and anti-capitalist
00:04:38.140 lobbying, the project application was rejected. Millions of dehydrated citizens just turned their
00:04:43.820 backs on an abundant supply of water in an act of pure idiocy. The environmental case against the plant 0.99
00:04:49.720 was weak. The impact of such a plant on a massive water body like the Pacific Ocean is negligible. A
00:04:55.640 literal drop in the bucket. Modern facilities dispose of brine effectively and the ocean level
00:05:00.760 certainly won't be dropping due to the minuscule removal of water in desalination plants. The reason
00:05:06.080 opposition to the project was successful was due to the demonization of private involvement in utility
00:05:10.720 provision. Much like the Council of Canadians did in the 80s, American leftists created a myth that
00:05:16.080 corporations would gain control of water and would bleed consumers dry. Indeed, it was projected that
00:05:21.760 water bills might raise in California as much as six dollars a month for some consumers due to this
00:05:26.780 plant. Oh, unthinkable. They shout, water's a need. We should never allow it to be sold for profit.
00:05:33.220 Well, food and shelter are needs as well. So who provides either of those better? How good is state
00:05:38.220 funding housing, state funded housing, guys? How well did the state control of agriculture work for the
00:05:43.120 Soviet Union? Just because it's a need doesn't mean the government should run it. In fact, they should be
00:05:47.900 less likely to run it. If people want treated water provided efficiently and affordably, they need to
00:05:52.700 let the private market provide it. Apparently, in California, they'd rather die of thirst.
00:05:58.120 Populations are growing and we need to embrace new technologies in order to sustain them. Nobody can
00:06:03.120 pivot to suit the changing of needs for consumers better than private businesses, yet we continue to
00:06:08.700 shun them. We're in a battle of ideologies and we're losing. The politics of fear and envy are winning
00:06:14.000 and we're all paying that price. And don't think that we're immune from this idiotic ideology here 1.00
00:06:19.020 in Canada. Far from it. People in Canada would apparently rather die on a waiting list than let 1.00
00:06:23.260 private involvement in health care expand. Turning away private medical investment while our system
00:06:27.840 crumbles is no more idiotic than turning away a glass of water while you're dying of thirst. 0.98
00:06:32.080 We're not any better and we got to start thinking harder. 1.00