Ezra Levant critiques Mark Carney’s "buzzword economics," mocking his Harvard/Oxford credentials and vague phrases like "catalyze the industry" while contrasting them with real business struggles—high taxes, crime, and Chinese market dumping. His proposed Major Projects Office mirrors Soviet bureaucracy, Levant argues, and a UAE FIPA may prioritize foreign investments over domestic growth, as Nutrien bypassed Canada for U.S. potash projects. Meanwhile, Alberta’s Bill 9 uses the Notwithstanding Clause to override court challenges on child gender treatments, sports policies, and ideological medical advocacy, aligning with 70%+ public support in 2024 polls. Carney’s elite-driven, activist approach—seen in fossil fuel divestment pushes and pipeline roadblocks—risks stifling Canada’s economy, while Trudeau’s governance remains similarly detached. [Automatically generated summary]
I'll take you through some of the pros and cons of it.
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Tonight, is it possible that Mark Carney doesn't know anything about economics?
It's November 21st, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Mark Carney doesn't just have one economics degree.
He has several from Harvard and Oxford.
I can't think of a finer education.
And then, of course, off to Goldman Sachs and then the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.
It would almost be absurd to say he doesn't know economics, but maybe that's not precisely the problem.
Maybe a more accurate phrasing is he's a theoretician who can recite theories and philosophies, but he's never actually practiced economics by building the economy, by running a business, by being an entrepreneur, by participating in capitalism, by hiring people, by taking risks.
He's always been a voyeur, watching from the outside, giving his opinions, but never actually being the man in the arena.
You can see little quirks like his overuse of phrases like catalyze the industry and generational and transformative investments.
Those are weird phrases that you hear at places like a TED Talk or the World Economic Forum or the UN or maybe the Bank of England.
But I've never in my entire life heard an actual businessman talk like that.
Real business people, and I'm not talking about you can even be the owner of the local convenience store in your neighborhood.
They would say things like taxes are too high, or I have too much government paperwork, or it's hard to compete with online retailers, or the weak Canadian dollar makes it hard to travel, or crime is forcing us to close some of our locations, or if we don't hire foreign migrant workers, we can't compete with the companies that do.
Or China is dumping cheap goods in our market below cost.
That's what real businessmen sound like if you ask them about things.
Carney never talks that plainly, does he?
He invents things that sound cool but literally make no sense.
Or are politics pretending to be economics, like this little speech?
Today is not just about what we build, it's also about how we build.
We're building sustainably, in each case, reducing emissions and investing in a clean energy future.
Our energy and critical minerals projects are amongst the lowest carbon in the world.
And moreover, they unlock major investments in sustainable growth for generations to come.
Secondly, we're building in solidarity with Canadian workers, creating hundreds of thousands of high-paying union jobs.
And we are always building in partnership with Indigenous peoples to ensure meaningful Indigenous ownership and major economic benefits while promoting the conservation of our natural heritage for future generations.
No real company says, I want to spend extra money reducing the carbon in my company.
There's no economic upside to that, unless there's some fake government program subsidizing that.
I'm not necessarily against unions, but typically when the government is involved, that means paying a premium for labor, really, to buy ideological allies.
And the indigenous thing, I mean, unfortunately, in 2025, that probably means giving Indian bands a veto over your business or even giving up title of your land, which is happening in BC.
At least those comments I just played for you are decipherable, though.
Sometimes it's just buzzwords that I swear he doesn't even know what he's saying.
I'm going to start with something the Secretary General said yesterday, which is that multipolarity without multilateralism can lead to chaos.
It certainly cannot achieve the sustainable development goals.
And I'm very encouraged by the spirit of the interventions and the spirit of this initiative, Secretary General and dear Amina, to bring back multilateralism to these financing issues.
First thing we need is to recognize that we need to use scarce dollars to the maximum effect.
This isn't just about bigger volumes.
It's about using scarce public dollars to maximum effect.
And that is catalyzing financial instruments using risk mitigation tools to better allocate risk between the public and private sector.
I will just refer for speed to the agenda of the Private Sector Investment Lab and what the World Bank has been doing on risk management.
The second point is crowding in institutional capital through originate to distribute models.
There's a lot of words there.
What it basically means is recycling the balance sheets of our international financial institutions.
So they are there catalyzing the new lending.
Once it matures, it's parked off to other holders that can hold it for the long term.
And it's all about action, new action at the MDBs.
No idea.
That's the kind of thing that gets polite applause from other bankers at a conference in Davos.
But no real businessman says, yes, I want to take real money and build a factory in Canada because of those ideas.
This is a new scheme by Mark Carney.
He wants to add, he's invented it, a major projects office, but it's just another layer of red tape.
There's no magic in it.
We don't actually know what it involves.
We don't actually know what the criteria are, who is making the decisions and how, what the new and additional rules are.
It's not cutting red tape, it's adding more of it and adding mystery and adding politics.
That doesn't work.
Didn't work for Stalin or Mao and for the socialists in Europe.
Sucking work here in Canada, especially now that we're competing with Donald Trump, who's trying to sop up investments from everywhere, including pulling our own factories down there.
Trump is using a carrot and a stick, the carrot of lower taxes, the carrot of access to the world's biggest market, new trade deals, a booming economy, cheap energy, high-tech.
We're competing against that with what?
A new political office where very smart guys will decide which business projects live and which ones die.
If you're good friends with the Liberals, maybe, but look at this from just yesterday.
Just a huge story in its own way.
Nutrien, that's a fertilizer company, rules out Canada for a new export terminal, chooses U.S. site.
Let me read a little bit.
Canadian fertilizer and agricultural giant, Nutrien Limited, has selected Longview, Washington for its new export terminal, worth up to a billion dollars, a blow to the Carney government after it promised to attract sizable investments in the mining and resources sector.
The Washington terminal will export the critical mineral potash to fast-growing markets in the Indo-Pacific, including China, India, and Japan.
Saskatoon-based Nutrient is the largest global producer of potash, one of three key fertilizers used in major agricultural operations alongside nitrogen and phosphate.
The Washington terminal will have a total capacity of 5 to 6 million tons, and the company expects to finalize the investment decision in 2027 and complete construction by 2031.
The major investment plan first announced in May was seen as an early test for Prime Minister Mark Carney's government, which has promised to streamline regulations and approvals and get Canada back to building big projects, especially when it comes to critical minerals like potash.
So, this is a Canadian company in Saskatchewan.
They literally chose to go further away into a foreign country, build the port to export Canadian products in America.
Here's my favorite line from the story: Nutrient didn't, however, consider nationality or politics when deciding on the location, said Chief Commercial Officer Chris Reynolds in an interview with the Globe and Mail.
The decision came down to economics.
Now, that could be true.
But if it's true, it's pretty sad that going further into another country is more economical.
Could be.
I'm able to believe that's plausible.
But I'm guessing there is also an issue about, I don't know, indigenous legal activism.
If you're talking about a port in Vancouver, who owns it?
Tanker or freighter bans.
The federal government has banned tankers.
It's not too big a leap about banning freighters.
I mean, that's exactly what's going on against oil exporters.
Is it too hard to imagine the same war against potash exporters?
Let me ask you: if you had to put aside your politics and just make a decision on your life savings, would you invest in a Canadian port under Mark Carney's rules or an American port under Donald Trump's rules?
You know, that got me thinking a bit about Carney's latest trip.
He really does spend half his time outside of Canada.
I guess he loves to travel.
He always did when he worked for the UN and the World Economic Forum.
He loved meeting foreign big shots in new places.
I can see why.
I can see the appeal.
Lots of variety, always an adventure.
Easier and more fun than running a country with humdrum problems like, I don't know, Hamas violence in our streets, an imploding healthcare system, out-of-control immigration, inflation, de facto recession, housing prices, boring.
Remember, he actually said that the other day.
He was asked about pipelines and he blurted out.
That's boring.
Remember that?
Is this pipeline going to come?
So boring.
It's not actually.
It is.
It is.
No, but it is.
It is because it's.
Look, it's, don't worry, we're on it.
We're on it.
Like, we're on it.
But there is this whole world.
Okay, hands up.
Who's working on the pipeline in this room?
Okay.
Isn't that a problem?
No, no.
No.
Look at all the variety, like, Nav, like, does your, like, it's, We have.
Yeah, if there's more prosperity, they'll get more cell phone services.
But look, look, okay.
So, what's going to drive one of the things with, yeah, don't worry, we're on the pipeline stuff.
Danielle's on line one.
Don't worry.
This is going to happen.
But, well, something's going to happen, let's put it that way.
I mean, who wouldn't want to hang out in Abu Dhabi instead?
By the way, they don't think pipelines are boring.
So he was over there, he says, doing business.
I mean, could be.
His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nayan and I are ready to capitalize on the massive economic opportunities between Canada and the UAE.
With a new investment protection agreement and the launch of free trade negotiations, we'll create more opportunities for workers, businesses, and investors.
Nothing specific.
No businessman talks this way.
We'll catalyze a new arrangement and capitalize or whatever.
This is what someone says when they need to pad things a bit, make nothing into something.
Reminds me of when I was in college and they had to, you know, double space things and use really big print to get the length I needed for an essay assignment.
He's got that weird British spelling thing again.
He spelled capitalized with an S instead of a Z. That's the British way of spelling.
I think that his communications are being run out of the United Kingdom.
There's no other explanation that I can imagine.
I mean, he lived in the UK for a long time.
He, as far as I know, still has his home there.
I think he's got a British team working for him.
But back to the substance.
He says he's negotiating an investment protection agreement with the United Arab Emirates.
Now, what's that?
It's not a free trade agreement.
That's sometimes called an FTA free trade agreement, like NAFTA.
He's talking about a foreign investment promotion and protection agreement.
That's usually called a FIPA.
And it's usually used in a place where politics are iffy and the rule of law is up in the air and you need a special treaty so that people who invest in a country with wobbly rule of law and unreliable courts, they have some extra protection if they get swindled.
I mean, you can see a list of Canada's FIPA agreements.
There's dozens of them.
And they're usually with third world governments that don't have reliable courts.
So if a Canadian company invests in, say, China or Cameroon, I'm just picking a few, the FIPA agreement gives them extra legal protection than if they just went into those wild regimes on their own.
So why do we need a FIPA here?
I suppose it's theoretically possible that an investor from the United Arab Emirates would want some political security before investing in Canada to make sure they weren't screwed over by environmental extremism like the last three pipelines were.
But I think it's actually probably more likely so that Canadians can invest in the United Arab Emirates because they're not a liberal democracy like we are.
They're not independent courts and laws like we are.
In other words, unless Carney is pretty much admitting that we no longer have the rule of law in Canada, I don't think that's what he's saying, this deal that he says he's negotiating suggests that Canadians would be investing in the United Arab Emirates, not the other way around.
So Canadian money is going to go to the United Arab Emirates.
That's why they need this investment protection agreement.
Hang on, is that what he went over there for?
It's like he's still working for Brookfield Asset Management or something, taking Canadian money and investing it in other countries.
I think maybe he's forgotten his job, which is to work for Canada to get investments here, not for other countries.
And it's been on my mind since I've been watching the full court press to get Canada to buy new fighter jets from Sweden instead of from the United States.
Canadian Fighter Jet Controversy00:08:58
Now, Sweden has been neutral until just the last year when it joined NATO.
And as a neutral country, one of its policies was to build its own weapon systems.
And so Saab, which is better known for making cars, they also make fighter jets, which is pretty cool.
We don't do that in Canada, do we?
And one of their planes is the Saab Gripen.
I'm not saying it the right Swedish way.
It's a pretty cool jet, no doubt about it.
Creepin is always ready to participate in any mission, anywhere around the world.
Maximum time in the air is essential for any air force and Gripen's smart design delivers high availability with minimal effort, making it a true mission-enabled.
While refueling on the ground, the pilot can keep the engine running.
The capability, which is called hot refueling, saves time where it matters most.
To keep the downtime to a minimum and allow a quick relaunch for the next sortie.
Gripen, ready for any mission, anywhere.
The Saab Gripen was first flown in the 1980s, though, so it's sort of on par with Canada's CF-18 jets, a little bit more modern, to be candid.
And Sweden sells them around the world to their credit, good for them.
They sell them to places like Brazil and South Africa and Thailand.
The United Kingdom has a few that they operate as training jets, but they're not really used by any countries in the world that are on the front lines of a serious battle.
Like Israel doesn't have them and, you know, Taiwan doesn't have them.
The frontline jet, that would be the U.S.-built F-35.
It's 20 years newer than the Saab Gripen, and it has a lot more advanced technology, including stealth.
F-35s are what Israel has been replacing its older jets with, and they had amazing success in recent wars, including the 12-day war against Iran.
So Canada signed a deal two years ago, Justin Trudeau signed it, to buy F-35s from America, 88 in total, with the first jets arriving next year, actually.
But as part of the trade dispute with the United States, Mark Carney and his cabinet have said they're rethinking that deal.
They signed the deal, but now they're rethinking it.
And they might go with the Saab Gripen instead.
I mean, it's cheaper for one thing, but mainly it's not American, which I think is their point.
Now, I'd be careful about breaking a signed deal with a major U.S. strategic company, especially given how much Canada has flip-flopped on replacing our jets so far and how reliant we are on the U.S. You might remember a story about a month ago where a U.S.-based aircraft was sent over Vancouver when there was a plane that they thought was maybe a terrorist plane.
No jet from Canada was ready for it.
Same thing with that Chinese hot air balloon.
It was American jets.
We have our defense provided by the United States.
You knew that.
But imagine if we didn't buy the F-35s.
Now, I just don't think that's what you do if you want your trade talks to succeed.
You don't rip up a multi-billion dollar contract that you already signed.
But look, it's been a full court press.
I don't know if you saw the Swedish royal family came to Canada for a visit.
And so did a bunch of Swedish politicians.
Here's a senior Swedish politician, Eba Bush, writing in a tweet that the Gripen is the best fighter jet in the world.
And if we dump the American deal and buy the Gripen instead, they'd give thousands of jobs to Canada.
The short answer is yes.
Sweden is open for business.
And I mean, Jos Gripen is probably the best fighter fighter, tighter jet in the world.
And I think we are prepared to increase that production.
And I mean, Prime Minister Carney has made it very clear, and he's speaking to Minister Jolie as well, that would also then entail job opportunities here in Canada, working for Canada in the interest of the Canadians.
But of course, it would be a great opportunity for the strategic partnership to go from paper to action between Sweden and Canada.
Really?
Thousands of jobs?
CTB reported on the same thing, and they said that if the Gripen were actually to be produced in Canada, that would take about five years to get the first one, to build the factories and to get them up to spec.
Five more years.
Now, the F-35s are starting to arrive in 2026, which is just a month and a half away.
I'm pretty skeptical that either the United States or Swedish jets will be made in Canada, though there will be obviously some local jobs, including maintenance, whichever is bought.
But again, Where's the foreign investments in Canada?
Where are the foreign dollars coming here as opposed to us buying things from other countries?
Carney was just in Korea a week ago or two promising them billions of dollars to buy their submarines.
I get it.
I'm a believer in building up our military, but how does taking Canadian dollars from Canadian taxpayers to give to foreign fighter jet makers and foreign submarine makers, how does that create jobs here?
I mean, I guess on the maintenance side and some crews for the submarines, but I just thought that this was the guy who was going to give us all these investments and jobs.
I mean, check out this weirdness.
Just out of the blue, a week after the budget, a half billion dollars from Canada as a gift to the European Space Agency?
We're not in Europe.
Why are you giving them free money from us?
I mean, why can't the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, why can't all those rich countries pay for their own space agency?
I don't understand it.
I don't understand.
I honestly don't know what kind of economic plan you would call all this.
I say again, on paper, Mark Carney should be the smartest guy in the room, but maybe that's the problem.
Maybe he thinks he's the smartest guy in the room, so he thinks he doesn't have to listen to anyone else, including anyone who's actually run a business, run a company, not just run his mouth.
You know, just over the last couple of days, the Saudi royal family, the crown prince, visited the White House while the Swedish royal family were here.
And the Saudi Royal Prince Mohammed bin Salman, he announced he was going to be bringing an investment to the United States.
He had originally said $600 billion, but he announced he was going to increase that to a trillion dollars.
Thank you, Mr. President.
This relationship has been a relation for about nine decades, and we've been working together for a long time.
But today it's a very important time in our history because there is also a lot of things that we're working on in the future.
We believe in the future of investment for America.
We believe in what you're doing, Mr. President, really creating a lot of good things and good foundation to create more economic growth, more business in America.
And also your work for the world peace.
I believe, Mr. President, today and tomorrow we're going to announce that we are going to increase that $600 billion to almost $1 trillion for investment, real investment and real opportunity by details in many areas.
And the agreement that we are signing today in many areas in technology and AI and earth materials, magnet, et cetera, that will create a lot of investment opportunities for the US.
So you are doing that now.
You're saying to me now that the $600 billion will be $1 trillion.
Definitely, because what we are signing, it will facilitate that.
I like that project.
No, that's great.
I appreciate that.
That's great.
No, we're doing numbers that nobody's ever done.
Trillion dollars from Saudi Arabia into America.
And Mark Carney is toodling around the Gulf announcing, what, a FIPA agreement for if we want to invest in the United Arab Emirates.
Whatever Mark Carney is doing, whatever he calls this, it's not working.
When was the last time you saw a foreign company put billions, let alone a trillion, into Canada?
Canadian companies are finding ways to get their money out of Canada, like that new port.
Foreign companies are happy to take our money and throw us a bone.
I mean, F-35, GRIP, and whatever, but I don't know if it makes any sense.
Doctors And Judges Prime For Change00:12:31
I checked, by the way, Canada's annual exports to Sweden are about $2 billion, and our annual exports to the United Arab Emirates are about the same.
Now, that's not nothing, but it's close to nothing when you compare it with our annual exports to the United States, which are about 100 times bigger than Sweden and UAE combined.
You're not going to be able to offset our failure to get a trade deal with the United States.
But the weird thing is, it looks like we're not even trying to get that trade deal.
I'm actually really worried.
Is it possible that we have a prime minister who, despite his academic credentials, is actually worse at building the economy than Justin Trudeau ever was?
Stay with us for more.
Our government is introducing Bill 9, the Protecting Alberta's Children Statutes Amendment Act.
Bill 9 will invoke the Canadian Charter's Notwithstanding Clause and to amend and uphold three critical pieces of legislation without further court delay or uncertainty.
The Health Statutes Amendment Act 2024, the Education Amendment Act 2024, and the Fairness and Safety and Sport Act 2024.
The notwithstanding clause will apply to the following pieces of legislation.
Bill 26, the Health Statute Amendment Act 2024, prohibits both gender reassignment surgery for children under 18 and the provision of puberty blockers and hormone replacement treatments for the purpose of gender reassignment to children under 16.
Bill 27, the Education Amendment Act 2024, requires schools to obtain parental consent when a student under 16 years of age wishes to change his or her name or pronouns for reasons related to the student's gender identity and requires parental opt-in to pardon me, and requires parental opt-in consent to teaching on gender identity, sexual orientation, or human sexuality.
Bill 29, the Fairness and Safety in Sport Act, requires the governing bodies of amateur competitive sports in Alberta to implement policies that limit participation in women's and girls' sports to those who were born female.
Welcome back, everybody.
You know, the Alberta political party called the United Conservative Party, that's basically the merged right-of-center party that Danielle Smith leads, they are having their annual general meeting in just over a week.
Rebel News will be there in a big way.
We think that Danielle Smith is an interesting newsmaker and perhaps the most effective of all the provincial premiers, not only in championing Alberta causes, but trying to get Canada some action in the United States while Doug Ford of Ontario drops stink bombs like his $75 million attack ad during the U.S. election.
Yeah, that didn't really work out, did it?
Danielle Smith is trying to woo our southern neighbor.
We'll see how that goes.
But she is doing other things like invoking the notwithstanding clause of the Constitution to protect her bills from what she is certain will be legal attacks by activist lawyers and judges who don't share her views.
Joni is down to talk about this.
Is our friend Lauren Gunter who wrote an article just today entitled Smith Government's Use of Notwithstanding Clause is Within the Spirit of the Charter.
And that's in the Edmonton Journal.
Lauren, great to see you again.
Thanks for joining us.
Yeah, you're welcome.
Thanks.
Good to see you.
You know what?
I'm excited about Alberta.
I'm from there originally, and it was always a laboratory for ideas.
Ralph Klein was from there, Stephen Harper, Preston Manning.
I think Danielle, even before that, the CCF.
Yeah.
Which became the NDP.
So, yeah, lots of ideas come out of Alberta.
Some of them good, some of them not for it.
Well, you can even say the social credit.
I mean, that's, you know, a mixed bag there as well.
How is Danielle Smith doing in this tradition of ideological innovators?
And how would you rate her recent move of bringing in rules to treat of how to handle transgender curious kids in school?
I like both her policies and her invoking the notwithstanding clause.
Just start with one simple number.
A couple of professors, one at UBC, one in Guelph, did a study of Supreme Court decisions pertaining to provincial laws.
And in the first 30 years that the charter was in force, the Supreme Court only overturned 20% of provincial laws based on a charter focus.
Since that time, the number has risen to 60%.
So they strike down more than half of provincial laws.
And if you have a provincial government and you got a law that you really want to keep in place, I think you have to put the notwithstanding clause in because some judge, either at the superior court level or up at the Supreme Court, is going to strike it down, particularly if it's not one of the progressive ideas.
And so the three bills that Smith has brought in that are covered by the notwithstanding clause in this case are barring transgender women and girls from participating in women's and girls sports.
If a child has a desire to change their name or gender at school, the school must inform parents.
And there's to be no permanent treatments, no gender affirming treatments for under 16 year olds.
So no puberty blockers, no surgeries, none of the things that cannot be reversed.
And I hear experts on the transgender side all the time say that puberty blockers can be reversed.
But I have seen study after study after study that says that's simply not true.
And so those are the three bills that the Smith government wants to protect from the courts.
And I think that the notwithstanding clause, which was brought in when the charter was debated in 1981, is perfectly in keeping with that.
That's what it's there for.
You know, some judges have said it's a dialogue between the legislature and the judiciary.
And I don't mind that description because let it be a dialogue of, at worst, equals, because I think what happened was the judges thought they were supreme.
And that goes contrary to centuries of Canadian and British lawmaking where Parliament is supreme.
So the legislature needs a way to knock the judges down a peg, not out of malice, just to keep things balanced.
One thing that is on my mind, Lauren, is as you know, judges are put through ideological training sessions.
20 years ago was about feminism.
Then it was about racism.
Now every single judge in Canada goes through transgender orientation, where they basically taught a particular ideology.
My point is there is a 100% chance that a judge who would hear a challenge to these laws from Danielle Smith would at the very least be primed to strike them down because they have been told you have to or you're transphobic.
So I think it's critical that she preventively and preemptively make sure that the judges don't get a big idea.
Well, and I would say not just judges, but also doctors and a lot of educators.
Right.
Not all doctors, but many doctors who got into sexual reassignment into transgender treatment are very much the advocates for it.
And so I have heard case after case after case of parents who've taken their child to a transgender specialist, thinking that that person would then do a lot of evaluations.
You do psychological evaluations, you do cultural and social evaluations.
And often they're offered the first treatment that day.
So, you know, this gender affirmation treatment is built right into the system.
And there are lots.
One of the arguments against the use of notwithstanding clause here is that sometimes parents in Alberta will give their consent to their child under 16 having gender affirming care.
But I know that there are not every case, but lots of cases where that's the parent trying to show how progressive they are.
Right, right.
You know, so I think if you're not 16 years old, it is just too messy to start messing around with that.
And I think Smith and the UCP government are quite right to protect that with the notwithstanding clause and just let it sit there.
Yeah.
You know, I haven't seen any recent polls on the subject, especially in Alberta, but I would be willing to wager that ordinary people find this so obvious and such common sense, especially not having biological men in the change room.
I mean, those American cases of the swimming teams, every person was freaked out by that.
And Trump, by the way, just reached in and stole the crown by saying we're going to end it.
That should have been a feminist cause, but many feminists were terrified or were on the other side.
I think she's going to have a lot of support from this.
I don't have statistical proof of that.
Have you seen any polls on the subject?
Because I've got to think this is popular with the people, even if it's not popular with the lawyers, teachers, and doctors of the world.
The last one I saw was in 2024.
It was a Canadian study, and it showed that a little over 70% of people agreed with the idea that people who are born male should not participate in women's sports.
And is that unfair?
Yes, it is.
But is it an unfairness that cannot be explained?
No, you can't have everything in life.
If you've decided that you're in the wrong body sexually, well, there are going to be things you're going to be excluded from.
I wish I would have been a better hockey player because I really wanted when I was about 12 years old to play any NHL, but my body wasn't built for it.
So is it unfair?
Should there be a law that says I can be given whatever drugs are needed in order to beef me up until I can play professional hockey?
No, it's just there are things that happen in people's lives that are unfair.
And we can be sympathetic.
We can be supportive.
We can find them all sorts of therapies and treatments.
But that doesn't mean then we have to change the whole rest of the world so that they get to do everything they want.
Yeah.
You know, Billboard Chris Elston sometimes has a sandwich board.
You probably know who I'm talking about.
And he and some of his signs are so basic and they're so hard to argue with.
Like no one is born in the wrong body.
When you stop and think about that, that's so basic and profound.
And imagine arguing, no, I was born in the wrong body.
No, you weren't.
No, you weren't.
And of course, when you're a teenager and you have hormones and you're confused and your politics, sure, you have questions, but that is not the time to have, like you say, irreversible surgeries.
When you said that the doctors sometimes have advocates who are racing to perform these treatments, it reminded me a little bit of MAID, Medical Assistance in Dying, where there are some activists who are doctors and they almost immediately point depressed people in the direction of suicide.
And I think there's a real problem with doctors who are not following the do no harm Hippocratic oath.
West Coast Solutions?00:08:18
And I think they're on the made and I think they're on the trans.
There are a pair of doctors, for instance, of the West Coast, who between the two of them have done over 800 made deaths.
And that's because they were both strong advocates before the law was changed that you should be allowed to determine when your own death is.
And so now that the law is there, they're very active in assisting people to get made.
Yeah, that's frustrating.
Hey, let me switch gears.
I really appreciate you talking to me about those things.
Let me talk for one minute about Canada's new approach to building things.
And by Canada, I mean Mark Carney, he has something called the Major Projects Office, which is another layer of bureaucracy.
It doesn't remove any other layers.
It doesn't replace anything.
It's not a consolidation.
It's not a one-stop shop.
It's extra, which is, it really reminds me of when I remember when I was in grade eight, we studied the Soviet Union and we learned about GOSS Plan, which was the central planning agency in the Soviet Union and their five-year plans.
And they knew best how many tons of wheat.
And I mean, that's really how it feels to me.
And I think it's scaring away investors because it feels, even though you've got a Goldman Sachs banker on top of it, it still feels like a managed economy, a directed economy, or as they would say at the World Economic Forum, stakeholder economy.
And I'm really worried about it.
You know what?
The thing that bothers me is that they're going to identify winners and losers.
They haven't come up with an economic plan that would help any industry, any entrepreneur, anyone investor who had an idea to get it up and going.
You have to come to us as an investor and say, I would like to get this project going.
And then if they say yes, they don't guarantee you the project will get going.
They just guarantee you that they will try to help you get rid of the regulation.
So, for instance, Danielle Smith has what she calls the nine bad laws.
And basically, what she's talking about is the tanker ban off the West Coast, the hard cap on emissions for oil and gas, and the No More Pipelines Impact Assessment Act, plus a bunch of others.
But mostly, those are the three that she sees as the big deterrent to investment in Alberta's oil and gas industry.
Well, they're not talking about getting rid of those.
They're talking about saying, well, let's ask these bureaucrats if you can have permission to work around those if you're, you know, and so Carney has said several times, but there is no lead business that's come forward to take on the pipeline project.
So maybe that means there isn't a business case for it.
Oh, it means you still have these ridiculous laws.
You haven't got rid of the laws.
You put a bureaucracy in between the project and the law to somehow try and help the project along.
And I just think it's destined to fail.
You know, he was the head of the Bank of England, the head of the Bank of Canada.
I don't think 99 out of 100 people could explain what he did.
I mean, what do those banks do?
They set interest rates.
Okay, what do you do the rest of the time?
I don't know if anybody knows.
Okay, before that, he was at Goldman Sachs as a consultant.
And since then, he's been a board member of the World Economic Forum.
And he worked for the UN.
And he had something called the Global Financial Alliance for Net Zero, which he basically tried to have a capital strike, like basically to boycott investing in fossil fuels and channel investing in sort of an affirmative action kind of way.
And so he did this while he was the chairman of Brookfield.
And Brookfield is a huge asset manager, a trillion dollars, but he wasn't a hands-on, he's never been a hands-on entrepreneur.
He's never built a business.
He's never run a business.
He's been more a spokesmodel for philosophies, a crusader for ideologies.
Like if you look at those jobs, I don't actually know what the job description of any of them is.
And now he's in charge of things.
I don't know.
I think he's about to find out that the world is not a World Economic Forum TED Talk.
I think you're right.
I think he's going to find out that this isn't just some sort of upper club of Rome World Economic Forum where nice people get together.
There are some experts who then talk to a bunch of multi-millionaires and billionaires so that the billionaires and millionaires can feel good about themselves, that they have learned something from these progressive, great thinkers.
But yeah, it's not the real world.
I'm worried about it.
I really am worried about it.
Give me, I've taken a lot of your time.
I don't want to trap you too much longer.
Lauren, some people are musing that we're about to be surprised and that Mark Carney will cut a deal with Danielle Smith and there will in fact be an oil pipeline to the West Coast.
Boy, I want to believe that.
Even if it came with outrageous conditions, a pipeline's a pipeline.
I don't believe it, though.
Do you think that in Mark Carney's term, we will see an additional oil pipeline, not gas, not clean grid, but an oil pipeline either to America or to the West?
No, we might see Keystone, but and that would be lovely.
I look like I'm turning my nose up, but I'm not.
But we're not going to see one until the West Coast.
If you watch the Liberal caucus and the cabinet this last week, they've said there are four things that have to be satisfied by Alberta before they will approve a pipeline.
Now, on all the other projects, they have like they have ring of fire mines in Ontario that are environmentally damaging, but they haven't said, oh, they have to have four or five conditions that they have to live up to before we'll approve them.
They approve them right away.
So what they've said in Alberta's case is BC has to agree.
Well, that's unlikely.
First Nations have to agree.
Lots of First Nations have.
But a few First Nations won't, which will give the Liberals an excuse to not have a pipeline, which is, I think, really what they want.
They don't want to have a pipeline.
So they're looking for excuses.
They've said Alberta has to increase its industrial carbon tax by sixfold.
$25 a ton not needs to go up to $150 a ton.
And they have said that we have to build a very expensive carbon capture system that takes the emissions out of the oil drilling and out of the pipeline.
Well, you know, at any point in that process, they can say you're not satisfying our requirements, so therefore you can't have the pipeline.
And what company is going to come in and commit $10, $12 billion with all those hoops there to jump through?
Yeah.
And even if they jump through the hoops, they'll change the rules afterwards.
That's what killed the Energy East pipeline proposal a decade ago, which was the biggest of all the proposals, would have taken more than a million barrels a day from Alberta all the way to St. John, New Brunswick, which, by the way, is the largest refinery in Canada.
Like it was such a lovely project.
It was nation building.
It was helping the East.
It was, you know, getting us off foreign oil.
There was so many things to love about it.
And they just said, no, to European ports.
Flags and Jurisdiction00:02:07
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it's sort of depressing to because I think we have exactly the prime minister that he looks like.
I think we have sort of like if Al Gore became prime minister, it's sort of the same circles.
He's Justin Trudeau, who looks more like a prime minister.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
More ideological.
I think Trudeau was sort of a mascot in a lot of ways.
He wasn't particularly deep.
He memorized a few lines and he looked good saying things.
I think Mark Carney is, I don't want to say deeper, but I think he's more a true believer.
I agree.
I mean, hopefully we can survive this, Lauren.
Great to see you.
Thanks for taking the time with us.
You bet.
All right, there he is, Lauren Condry.
He's the author of the latest article in Edmonton Journal entitled Smith Government's Use of Notwithstanding Clause.
It's within the spirit of the charter.
Stay with us.
letters to me next.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me.
The first one is on the Palestinian flag raising.
LSR 40 says flags are a claimed jurisdiction.
Fascist flags must never be permitted on Canadian shores.
You know, a flag is about jurisdiction that's true.
It also has meaning.
Every flag has meaning.
I think a lot about the British Union Jack and how there's the Scottish and the English and there's like different flags united.
That's why they call it the Union Jack, because you have the English and the Scottish and the different parts of Great Britain together in that flag.
I think of the United States and the meaning of the stars and the stripes.
Flags have meanings.
That's why people wear branded clothing, because they think the logo means something.
That's why people wear the jerseys of their teams they root for.
They have an affiliation.
They want to show you by wearing on the outside what they feel on the inside.
That's a flag.
And to put up the flag of a foreign terrorist group, which is what Gaza is run by.
That's not the Canadian way.
Flags Have Meanings00:00:57
I don't know.
I hated that.
Another letter by New New says about the nudge unit.
We saw the nudging, psychological tactics, and behavioral engineering in their bloody slaughter of the ostriches.
You know, you're onto something there.
There was such a psyop going on.
There was such an enormous government response, of which maybe 10% had to do with the birds.
90% of it was about propaganda, stopping journalism, intimidating journalists.
It was so weird, so weird.
And I think that weirdness raised a lot of red flags with ordinary people.
I don't know.
That was such an atrocious thing.
By the way, I've heard from three sources that the police are investigating rebel news.
Boy, I tell you, that would be a foolish, foolish thing for them to go down that road.
I mean, they already have a bad enough reputation as being censors.