Western Standard - June 02, 2022


CORY'S RANT： Justin Trudeau is a pale shadow of his father in gumption and intellect.

Topics
NEP and Western protests
Mentioned
Pierre Trudeau Justin Trudeau Jagmeet Singh Mo Rooney
Triggered： Handgun law is a vanity project for Trudeau. Cory talks about how First Nations can contribute to health care reform.

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

199.8

Word count

1,003

Sentence count

52

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

As I saw protesters gathered outside the Palliser Hotel in Calgary railing against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, I noted the parallels between the political scene today and that of the early 1980s. During the 1970s and 80s, Pierre Trudeau was greeted by protests wherever he went in Western Canada.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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 As I saw protesters, you know, images of a group of protesters gathered outside the Palliser Hotel
00:00:04.720 in Calgary last night and railing against Prime Minister Trudeau, I noted the parallels between
00:00:10.160 the political scene right now and that of the early 1980s, and they were both striking and
00:00:15.200 chilling. I mean, during the 1970s and 80s, Pierre Trudeau was greeted by protests wherever he went
00:00:21.120 in Western Canada, and his favorite haunt during his rare Western visits was at Calgary's Palliser
00:00:25.920 Hotel as well. Well, it's a luxurious spot, so you can see why the Trudeaus like it. 1.00
00:00:29.440 And protesters would gather outside of there when Pierre Trudeau was there every time, as you can
00:00:33.680 see in that picture. Now, while legacy media and defenders of the Canadian establishment like to
00:00:38.960 pretend that vitriolic, heated protests are some sort of new development, they've happened many
00:00:43.840 times in Canada, and they were clearly happening 40, 50 years ago during Pierre Trudeau's tenure as
00:00:49.680 Prime Minister as well. Here, Trudeau never lost an opportunity to display his contempt for Western
00:00:55.600 Canada. In 1982, protesters were waiting for Trudeau at Salmon Arm BC, and Pierre responded to them as
00:01:02.960 they protested by smiling, giving them the middle finger, and then pulling down the shade on his
00:01:07.920 luxury train car. It's henceforth been known as the Trudeau salute. More protesters waited down the line,
00:01:13.920 and they hurled tomatoes at Trudeau's train as it passed into a tunnel under Rogers Pass BC. So again,
00:01:19.600 let's not pretend that this sort of kind of protest is new or anything. It just seems that it always
00:01:23.760 only comes about really when we got a Trudeau in power, and we've had them in too too many times
00:01:28.560 already. In the late early 80s, Canada was an economic basket case. Inflation was running rampant,
00:01:35.200 interest rates were constantly being raised by the Bank of Canada, and energy prices were going through
00:01:39.120 the roof. Sound familiar? Here, Trudeau was coming off of the dismal failure of his wage and price
00:01:44.720 control policies in the late 1970s, and he was desperate to find a way to ease the economic
00:01:49.600 suffering in central Canada. So, Trudeau turned his eyes towards the West's oil and gas, and while
00:01:54.480 the Trudeau government prior had traditionally been indifferent to Canadian oil and basically said,
00:01:59.280 hey, it's Alberta's oil, sell your own stuff, they preferred to import it from Saudi Arabia to serve
00:02:03.840 central Canada. Sound familiar? With world oil prices skyrocketing, Trudeau suddenly declared Alberta's
00:02:10.000 oil to be Canada's oil, and he imposed the National Energy Program. Now, that NEP imposed a massive tax
00:02:16.320 on Western oil, and it applied the funds from those purchases to Eastern Canada so they could keep
00:02:21.440 buying foreign oil at a discount that way, and it also forced Western producers to sell at a grossly
00:02:27.280 discounted made-in-Canada price to the rest of the country. The effect was immediate and devastating for
00:02:32.560 Western Canadians, and so despite high world prices, the industry ground to a halt as producers fled
00:02:37.600 Canada's intrusive regime. The government-owned Petro-Canada was inept and incapable of filling
00:02:42.480 the void. Unemployment spiked, and many bankrupted Westerners literally had to abandon their homes
00:02:47.920 as they couldn't keep up with the high interest rates of the time. When oil prices did later drop,
00:02:53.040 the NEP was actually supposed to provide a floor for Western producers. A minimum price was supposed
00:02:57.440 to be paid by Canadians when the costs got low. That, of course, never happened. Prime Minister Mo Rooney
00:03:03.040 did scrap the NEP, but only when it was clear that it was now going to cost Central Canadians
00:03:07.920 rather than benefit them. He kept it in place for a couple of years after he got elected. People
00:03:11.040 forget that sometimes. Alberta had been drained of somewhere between 50 and 100 billion dollars
00:03:16.480 in that short period of time, and that's a lot of money in those days. Well, it's a lot of money now.
00:03:21.040 We'd been ridden hard and put away wet by the Central Canadian leadership. We were left with a broken
00:03:26.400 economy, half-built buildings in downtown Calgary, and a loathing for the Liberal Party that remains even now.
00:03:32.480 Fast forward to today, and we see rising interest rates, unchecked inflation, and high energy prices
00:03:37.920 while a Trudeau is Prime Minister. Guess what's going to happen soon? Justin Trudeau is a pale shadow
00:03:43.920 of his father in gumption and intellect. His insecurity considering this, though, has led to an
00:03:48.880 increasingly authoritarian approach to governing. He wants to be respected, but he doesn't know how to be.
00:03:54.560 He desperately wants a legacy that would make his dear departed dad proud. And in crunching a new
00:03:59.360 national energy program would give him that. Justin's invocation to the Emergencies Act is
00:04:04.240 proving to be an embarrassment, as opposed to his father's invocation to the War Measures Act,
00:04:08.240 which was applauded by many people. He needs something else. Justin, I think, could try to
00:04:13.360 succeed where his father failed in pinning down those uppity Western Canadians and their oil. 1.00
00:04:18.320 And Jagmeet Singh, of course, would happily support him in such a move. Never mind that the last NEP was a
00:04:23.040 complete catastrophe and failure, and nationalizing oil is always economically disastrous.
00:04:27.680 Justin Trudeau is the Prime Minister who said budgets will balance themselves. He won't understand
00:04:31.680 nuances of economic policies anytime soon. He's driven by spite and desperation for a legacy,
00:04:37.440 and is painting a big red target on the back of Westerners right now.
00:04:40.960 Rest assured, he won't sit by and let the West continue to generate budget surpluses through oil and
00:04:45.680 gas while Central Canada slides deeper into the hole. Hold on to your hats, folks. The West's oil is
00:04:50.960 soon going to become Canada's oil again under another Trudeau. History is repeating. This time,
00:04:55.440 though, when it happens, we'd best be ready to use the only tool that can defend us,
00:04:58.800 and that will be an eventual referendum on independence.