Western Standard - July 14, 2023


Smith and Trudeau - is it war between them？

Topics
climate and housing crisis
Mentioned
Danielle Smith Trudeau Mike Thomas
CMS： Canada’s system of racial apartheid needs to end MPC Daily Market Update Jul 17, 2023

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

176.29

Word count

1,110

Sentence count

63

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I discuss the Prime Minister's climate change strategy, and why it's not working. I also talk about the housing crisis in Alberta, and how it's directly related to the Trudeau government's climate policies.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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 Trudeau is built, if he's looking for a legacy, clearly he wants to be the prime minister who
00:00:04.600 conquered climate change, or at least as far as Canada's role within it is. And, you know,
00:00:10.060 that was part of, I guess, what anybody would look for. They didn't expect Smith and Trudeau
00:00:13.500 to come out hand in hand and say, wow, we've mended fences and we're going to work together.
00:00:18.380 But if there was a chance you were going to see perhaps a little compromise, a little room,
00:00:22.600 a little ability to say that we can move on some of these targets, that was it. And
00:00:26.740 it's quite clear he's not going to budge an inch, and nor is Premier Smith.
00:00:30.040 And, you know, it's when you read a bit further down in the story, so to speak, that
00:00:36.080 and you look at some of the things that the prime minister says, you realize how contrived this is.
00:00:43.440 Pick this up from, I think, the CBC. They reported Mr. Trudeau as saying, people know,
00:00:51.540 even here in Alberta, as if we're too thick to understand anything really, but even here in
00:00:56.120 Alberta, we understand that the only way to build a strong economy for the future is to protect the
00:01:01.400 environment. That's actually 180 degrees the wrong way around. You want to see a really poor
00:01:07.920 environment, go to a really poor country. If you want to protect the environment, you have to build
00:01:13.620 a strong economy. And this is the kind of tripe that he trots out, but back east, they won't,
00:01:18.660 you know, they won't see through that.
00:01:20.260 Well, and his obsession with the climate and such, we're seeing that with the housing,
00:01:25.940 for example. I mean, I'm just kind of sidetracking a bit, but it still helps, you know, reflect
00:01:29.660 where the Trudeau government's coming from. They acknowledge we have a housing crisis. I mean,
00:01:34.720 rents are flying through the roof, real estate prices. At the same time, they have half a million
00:01:38.420 immigrants a year they plan to bring in, though they don't know where they're going to put them.
00:01:43.100 I had Shane Wenzel from Shane Holmes on before, and he pointed out, I think, new builds for houses,
00:01:48.020 if you follow all of the new restrictions and things to be green. I'm paraphrasing,
00:01:53.700 but it was, I believe, $75,000 a house. It's going to add to the cost of a dwelling. So their
00:02:00.260 views conflict, and they cause trouble for themselves, but their stubbornness on this
00:02:04.680 climate file will not allow them to move on it.
00:02:07.380 No, and especially with the interest rate hike today up to 5%, highest in 22 years,
00:02:12.660 who can afford a house? You know, who can afford to start a mortgage now?
00:02:16.680 Obviously, prices of houses will come down, because in the end, you do the math, you sell
00:02:21.760 the house for what you can get for it, and if the mortgage is high, then you won't be able to ask
00:02:26.240 them. They're not coming down in Calgary.
00:02:28.300 We'll see. Give it time. Get Mike Thomas in here.
00:02:32.160 But that is another example of where you, and you find this so frequently with this government,
00:02:41.480 that the policies conflict with each other. If it is so important to bring down carbon emissions,
00:02:48.700 why would you increase the number of people coming into this unit of geography that you want to,
00:02:57.040 where you want to reduce emissions? Because every individual person generates carbon emissions.
00:03:02.740 They need a place to live. Their house will generate carbon emissions. 0.95
00:03:07.960 They need to get around, whether they go by car, by train, whatever, they're going to generate carbon
00:03:12.860 emissions. The mere act of living here generates carbon emissions. So if you increase the population
00:03:22.020 by a significant fraction, you're working against your whole strategy of reducing carbon emissions.
00:03:28.920 What are these people supposed to do? You know, as I said, as I was saying with the home prices,
00:03:34.140 I mean, those things are luxuries. If you want to have the solar panels and all of these
00:03:37.600 fantastic green notions, you need that money has to come from somewhere. If you have a great deal
00:03:43.480 of royalties coming in or a lot of highly employed people, very well paid, they'll take on those
00:03:49.260 luxuries, but they're taking away our means of making the money to do it while making the demands 0.98
00:03:54.360 for us to pay for these changes. It has to come to a crash.
00:03:57.740 Well, I mean, just look at the electric vehicles, right? Most of them are priced way out of range
00:04:02.260 of most car buyers, right? And then you get them and you got the charger you have to buy.
00:04:09.820 You can only do a couple hundred kilometers on it at the best of times. God knows if we'll even start
00:04:15.020 in minus 40 Calgary night. You know, you can't drive to Vancouver without stopping a couple times
00:04:22.080 and sitting there and getting it all powered up. You know, these are all obstacles that are being
00:04:25.960 placed in front of you and they still want you to buy the electric vehicle, right? It's the same
00:04:31.900 situation as homes.
00:04:32.820 The thing that concerns me about the homes is that speaking specifically of Alberta now
00:04:40.400 and the demand that they meet zero carbon emissions in the electrical generating industry by 2035.
00:04:52.880 Smith says it's impossible.
00:04:54.920 It is impossible.
00:04:55.540 I believe it is impossible. It takes 10 years to get the approvals to build a two-inch pipeline
00:05:03.200 across a field. So how long is it going to take, before they even begin the basic design of the
00:05:10.820 facilities, to get the permission, approval, the environmental permissions,
00:05:19.000 to build the new sites where we are going to generate electricity from what? Sun, wind, maybe nuclear?
00:05:31.440 Have we got a design for a nuclear reactor yet?
00:05:33.620 The green crowds against nuclear.
00:05:35.120 We're not allowed to do that one either.
00:05:36.220 So, you know, I see, and I have not got this as a direct quote from her, but I believe from what
00:05:44.640 she's saying that Danielle Smith foresees the future if we just give in to Ottawa, we'll be
00:05:51.140 facing brownouts and blackouts in 10 years' time if Ottawa insists on zero emissions because we simply
00:05:57.860 do not have time to build the new structures. Even if we had the money, which I guess we probably
00:06:05.500 could find if we had to, there isn't time the way we do things in this country to get all the
00:06:11.020 approvals lined up and the stuff ordered, contracted, constructed, put into service.
00:06:15.820 Can't be done in the 12 years we have.