Western Standard - December 16, 2024


LIVE FROM PARLIAMENT： Trudeau Gov't in Crisis

Hosted by
Derek Fildebrandt
Guests
Western Standard
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Mark Carney Nigel Hannaford Chrystia Freeland Michael Ignatieff Steven Guilbeault Stéphane Dion Ignacev Tony
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Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

145.38

Word count

1,743

Sentence count

85

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Christia Freeland resigned just hours before she was supposed to give the Liberal government's fiscal update in the House of Commons. The move throws Justin Trudeau's Liberal government into absolute panic and chaos, and the Liberal caucus is meeting right now in person in Ottawa as Trudeau is on the ropes.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Thank you.
00:00:30.000 We'll be right back.
00:01:00.000 Good evening. I'm Derek Fildebrandt, publisher of the Western Standard.
00:01:10.080 I'm joined by Western Standard opinion editor Nigel Hannaford here.
00:01:14.600 Not from our usual digs. Nigel's technically sitting in the studio, but we're making accommodations today as all hell has broken loose in Ottawa.
00:01:25.200 We woke up here in the West to news that Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Christia Freeland has abruptly resigned just hours before she was supposed to give the Liberal government's fiscal update in the House of Commons, releasing a scathing letter that has thrown Justin Trudeau's Liberal government into absolute panic and chaos.
00:01:55.200 The Liberal Caucus is meeting right now at this very moment in Ottawa as Trudeau is on the rope.
00:02:03.040 So Nigel and I are just in real time here going to try and pick this apart.
00:02:08.020 I've got TV off on my side here.
00:02:10.300 We've still got our news team working.
00:02:11.820 So if there's any updates, I might interrupt myself for Nigel and bring it as they come across the wire here.
00:02:18.080 But Nigel, from the moment we walked into the newsroom today till this very moment, it's just it's been wild.
00:02:25.200 Just a typical day at the office, Derek. You know that.
00:02:29.200 Obviously, McCristia Freeland has just had enough, and she's not the only one. 1.00
00:02:35.200 But clearly, for something of this magnitude, there was a fundamental disagreement between herself and Justin Trudeau.
00:02:44.200 They were friends. I don't think they are now. She describes herself being at odds with him on policy.
00:02:51.760 And since she resigned, we now have the big number that everybody was anxious about
00:03:00.480 in the fiscal update, a combined deficit of $61.9 billion and a program of spending going forward
00:03:10.240 that would have added to that by at least $25 billion next year. So she didn't want to put her
00:03:17.520 her name to it. She said, no, thanks. I'm out of here. The rumor is that he actually asked her to
00:03:25.640 resign and that he had in mind Mark Carney to replace her. Mark Carney, of course, is not a
00:03:32.000 member of the legislature of the House of Commons. He would have had to become one. And the rumor now
00:03:38.780 is that he's not interested anyway. So in many ways, a very bad day for Mr. Trudeau. And there's
00:03:46.580 There's a caucus meeting going on as we meet in person, no joining by remote means.
00:03:54.520 And he's in there defending his position.
00:03:56.960 And the CBC, to their credit, managed to sneak up a camera to one of the windows, get a few
00:04:04.300 shots of the prime minister at the podium.
00:04:07.860 And I have to say that although we thought all hell would be breaking loose inside there,
00:04:11.640 he looked reasonably composed and making a steady case.
00:04:15.520 So I'm not ready to call the outcome of that one at all.
00:04:23.460 You know, yes, a lot of this is prompted by this very strange liberal obsession with Mark Carney.
00:04:32.340 I don't really understand why these guys are so hot to trot about the guy.
00:04:36.740 Perhaps he's great or something, but the single overwhelming challenge facing this government is the fact that Canadians hate it,
00:04:43.300 that it's wildly unpopular in every corner of the country.
00:04:47.500 There's a by-election in BC tonight in a Liberal seat
00:04:50.760 that they're expected to lose by very large margins.
00:04:56.400 And I just don't see how Mark Carney adds a single point to the polls.
00:05:02.540 And yet Justin Trudeau and the Liberals are seemingly obsessed
00:05:06.060 with bringing this guy in.
00:05:07.400 And Justin Trudeau made the mistake of, you know, many an adolescent boy who's got a girlfriend and wants to trade up to a better one and started courting the new girl before and the old girl found out.
00:05:24.080 And in this case, Chris Gia Freeland was told that he wants her to make way for Mark Carney. And she, after 10 years loyal service, arguably one of the most loyal and steadfast members of his cabinet, whatever else you think of her on a policy front or her ability to answer questions in English.
00:05:50.300 um she uh she said no uh i won't be shuffled if you don't want me in finance i'm leaving
00:05:58.240 and she put that in her letter um and and now with this absolute toxic chaos enveloping the
00:06:07.020 government uh i cannot see if mark carney was hesitant about joining the trudeau cabinet before
00:06:13.480 i cannot imagine a world in which he looks at it today this afternoon you know uh you know
00:06:20.060 3.54 Western time, mountain time and says, yeah, this is, this is something I want to put my
00:06:26.900 reputation on. Uh, and then he would have to go run in a by-election to be finance minister.
00:06:32.340 Uh, and, and there's not a single safe liberal seat anywhere in the country right now. Even
00:06:36.780 Justin Trudeau might have a hard time holding a seat in one of the safest liberal seats in the
00:06:41.160 country. Um, but this is all triggered by their, why Nigel do you think they're so obsessed with
00:06:49.380 He's trying to get Mark Carney in this government.
00:06:51.380 Well, look, you're inviting me to articulate the conspiracy theory of government here,
00:06:58.560 and I'm not going to fall for it this time, Derek, but I do find that the liberals have
00:07:04.160 an obsession with experts.
00:07:07.160 You may recall that in 2008 they recruited Michael Ignatieff to be the leader, and at
00:07:14.560 time that they did so. They were just coming off a really bad leadership run with Stéphane Dion,
00:07:20.880 and there is no doubt that Mr. Ignacev is a supremely intelligent, articulate, and actually
00:07:28.640 charming individual. The only problem was that he had no political sense. He was not a door knocker.
00:07:34.880 He was not somebody who dealt easily with people who existed in a lower intellectual plane than he
00:07:41.200 did and it ended badly and they went down to 34 seats now it's that same mentality this will we've
00:07:48.880 got to get somebody in who is an acknowledged superstar and that gosh i wonder what mark
00:07:54.560 carney is doing now now mark carney is actually the un ambassador for climate change and we know
00:08:01.680 that climate change is a very a very dear thing to uh to mr trudeau so i think there would have been
00:08:08.240 a natural tendency for him to look to Carney as somebody who would support him in his campaign on
00:08:14.880 global warming and be able to do so from the perspective of somebody who had been inside the
00:08:19.920 UN and also been inside two central banks and knows how to go out to the investors and say,
00:08:27.840 look, your investments in energy may not be secure. You might want to think about getting
00:08:32.800 out of them and and thereby cripple the energy industry without ever passing a piece of legislation
00:08:41.920 so it could have been some kind of intellectual kinship like that or else it could have just been 0.97
00:08:48.240 a really stupid idea okay okay but i i get their obsession with with experts but i don't under 0.97
00:08:56.240 but trudeau's got enough climate change zealots in his government he's got stephen gilbeau there 1.00
00:09:01.280 I mean, I don't think there's – I can't think of a single member of the Liberal Caucus who is anything less than a zealot on global warming and the need to tax us to hell for it.
00:09:12.080 So that part doesn't make sense to me.
00:09:15.680 Well, Tony is at least a clever zealot.
00:09:18.900 Sure.
00:09:21.480 But I don't know.
00:09:23.520 I'm willing to bet right now – maybe I'll be wrong, been wrong before on these kinds of things.
00:09:28.100 But I'm willing to bet, Nigel, that Mark Carney is not running.
00:09:33.540 He is not going to run for the Liberals.
00:09:35.420 He is not going to be in the cabinet right now.
00:09:39.260 Maybe, possibly, he has interest in leading the Liberals when they're decimated and reduced, possibly, to a historic load.
00:09:47.860 You know, when Trudeau leaves them possibly less seats than Michael Ignatieff did in third place, maybe he'll want to come back then.
00:09:54.300 Probably not.
00:09:55.080 But I'm betting right now he is not going to end up in this caucus.
00:09:58.860 He's not going to end up in this cabinet.
00:10:00.680 And that Trudeau has just created this is a total unforced error that he's going to have all of this political radiation around him.
00:10:08.340 And he's not even going to get his beloved Mark Carney for it.
00:10:11.900 I think you're absolutely right.
00:10:14.440 But also I'm of the opinion that Canadians aren't going to get the election that they're lusting after either.
00:10:21.420 My guess is that what's happening inside that room right now is that Mr. Trudeau is delivering
00:10:26.620 the message to a fractious caucus, which is, look, you can either have me or you can have an election.
00:10:34.860 We've got 10 months to go. If you can wait this thing out with me till the end of tomorrow,
00:10:40.460 we're clear until the end of January when the House reconvenes, and after that we'll see what
00:10:46.300 happens but uh why would we if we go to an election now there's not one of us that's going
00:10:51.960 to be returned to parliament so if that's what you want if your principles are so important to you
00:10:58.320 if your loathing for me personally is that deep well fine i can drop the writ tomorrow
00:11:03.940 but seriously is that what you want that's going in there right now let's get let's get to that in
00:11:11.440 just one moment here uh just there's a meme that kind of sums up my thoughts on this you know i was
00:11:15.920 using the analogy of a guy who he wants to trade up a girlfriend he wants a he wants a prettier
00:11:20.680 girl than he's already got and it just brings to mind oh sorry the meme of uh where is it here
00:11:29.180 oh i can't really show it here but uh you know you can
00:11:33.640 so uh oh can you hear me now nigel yeah i can hear you and it may be that way uh derek i just 0.88
00:11:43.960 Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, like, you know, Trudeau's got his eye on something bigger and better, I guess, than Christia Freeland. But in this case, I just don't think he's going to get either. But so let's talk about the fallout now with his caucus. His caucus is meeting at this very moment in Ottawa.