David Bexty’s throne speech rebuttal ties Alberta’s struggles to "hardworking" families, attacking welfare and the TFW program as "legalized indentured slavery," while blaming federal Liberals for pipeline neglect and economic stagnation. Critics like Spencer argue Bexty’s boot-wearing moralism ignores systemic issues—like Alberta’s low oil royalties—and misrepresents Carney’s role in Charles III’s speech. Rising bond yields and Canada’s Treasury bond sales complicate U.S. spending plans, including the 1,200-page BBB, dismissed by Musk despite its lack of oversight. Carney’s proposed 2% military budget (via Coast Guard reclassification) and federally funded housing face skepticism, with debates over sovereignty in domestic manufacturing versus cost-efficient tariffs. The episode underscores how populist rhetoric weaponizes work ethic and regional grievances to bypass structural economic critiques. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that is now on the road.
Didn't plan for this, but it's happening nonetheless.
So I'm in a hotel room, and I'm here today with Jeff, who is not in a hotel room, but still at an undisclosed location.
Enjoying his illusion of anonymity.
Yeah.
Well, you know.
A seven-year-old in 15 minutes of social media research could track me down, but allow me my little illusion.
Everyone feels safe with their illusions of security.
So I'm Spencer, the host of this podcast.
I keep forgetting to say that at the beginning of these episodes.
I just assume everyone knows who I am.
It's not necessarily true.
And today we're going to talk about national debt and how it relates to Canada-U.S. relations.
It's going to be neat.
But we have a very good idea.
I would like to go to the education.
Yeah, well, people are going to learn some stuff today.
And before we go into any of that, I want to remind everyone that if they have any questions, comments, complaints, concerns about anything they hear or see on this podcast, they can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
You want to complain about the drabness of the hotel room behind me?
So drab.
Yeah.
Oh.
Someone's complaining about the drabness of the hotel room.
Already, yeah.
That was well timed.
So, first, before we talk about national debt stuff, we have to talk about another thing that happened fairly recently.
Before it gets too stale, before it gets too far past the moment where it really happened.
So, a lot of Canadians have a lot of feelings about the monarchy.
And, you know, there's pictures on coins and bills and cash and all this stuff.
And, you know, I'm pretty sure they're going to get around.
I don't think I've seen any King Charles cash or coins, have you?
Have they made that?
Not yet, but they're coming.
They're coming.
They're coming.
The first coins have been minted.
Yeah.
So, we have a king named Charles.
We don't talk about him a lot for various reasons, but there was a throne speech.
And this isn't always delivered by the king, despite the fact it's called a throne speech, but this time it was.
And a lot of people had a lot of feelings on why this was happening, why King Charles was coming to deliver a throne speech.
But the essence seems to be that Carney asked him to come and do this, and then he said yes.
Some people have, in their way, have attempted to interpret this in many ways, that he that this is an evil thing that Carney has done.
He has somehow, I think some politicians in Britain were complaining about this, that they've taken up the king's time to do this or something, that he shouldn't be bothered with this.
That whole idea is ridiculous.
If the king didn't want to do it, he would just have told Carney to go screw himself and deal with his throne speech on his own.
Also, like, it's a constitutional monarchy in the UK and here, like, the king is a friggin' spearhead.
He wields no real power.
His time is nothing but FaceTime.
And he can spend it anywhere in the Commonwealth he likes.
Yeah.
And so he arrived.
I don't think he stayed the whole day.
He arrived.
He did his little throne speech.
I didn't even listen to it.
I don't care.
But he did the throne speech, and then the official opposition does a response to the throne speech.
Oh, yeah.
I was looking forward to this.
Yeah, so the leader of the party, the opposition party, is Pierre Polyev.
But he can't do the response to the throne speech because he hasn't been elected into office yet.
Not a member of parliament.
Yeah.
Fun.
So fun.
So another guy did it.
Let me just pull this up.
We have technology at our disposal.
So a guy named David Bexty.
Country, you'll be free to live in dignity and peace.
Stop that.
And sorry, my picture quality on there is terribly poor.
What region does he represent?
I'm trying to make the video larger.
He represents a riding in Alberta called the Bow River Riding.
It's just outside Calgary.
It's right next to the riding that Polyev would be running in, will be running in very shortly to become a member of Parliament, and then he can say things in Parliament.
And he can enter the building without needing an escort, which is also a thing that many people have tried to make great light of, including me.
Whenever he's seen in there without an escort, people point that out.
But this man is David Bexty.
He has just been elected for the first time this go-round.
And this is his response to the throne speech.
I'm going to play that.
No.
Is that short?
Mr. Speaker, there we go.
I'd like to congratulate you on taking the chair as Deputy Speaker Hall.
It's fantastic and Mr. Speaker, I rise in this House today with humility and purpose.
I stand here with a promise, one that shaped my family across generations.
A promise that if you work hard, raise your family, and love your country, you'll be free to live in dignity and peace.
I'm the great-grandson of a pioneer who broke the untamed fields of what would become Alberta before there was power and pavement.
I'm also the son of a farmer who survived communism with nothing but his hands, his family, and the hope that Alberta would be a place where his children could speak freely, live safely, and never bow to a state that hated them.
Oh, dear Lord.
Yeah.
Oh, dear dear Lord.
I paused it there because I felt like we should just stop for a moment and talk about that for a moment.
Yeah.
He survived communism with nothing but his hands.
Yeah, well, you know, that's all just the general rhetoric.
You know, I'm from a great family.
It's been here a long time.
We belong to the land and the land to us.
All that stuff.
Just work hard and love your country and everything will work out right.
Yeah.
But that last sentence there, that was what really kind of perked my interest in this.
That they never need to bow to a government that hates them.
I believe that was exactly what he said, right?
That's precisely what he said, buddy.
Yeah.
Stoke that red meat.
Yeah, so do we like this is an idea that's sort of tossed around in a lot of places among the people who you know don't like Trudeau, haven't liked Trudeau, is that Trudeau hates them and that Carney will also hate them.
Their government hates them.
Yes, and that's not clear at all from my read of the situation.
I mean, this sort of rhetoric comes up in to me, it started, the first time I noted it, was from George W. Bush, where to George W. Bush, Americans weren't like the people with citizenship.
Americans were the people who voted for him.
His people were not all Americans, just the people who voted for him.
Yeah, exactly.
And that idea has trickled down, and it's definitely true.
It's much more true with Trump.
It was less true with Obama.
Generally speaking, I didn't get a lot of sense from him that he only thought of the people who voted for him as like the quote-unquote real Americans in air quotes.
But generally, this idea hasn't been a part of Canadian rhetoric much until sort of recently.
This idea, and it's been sort of foisted upon Trudeau in that I didn't get a sense from Trudeau that he only thought of the people who voted for him as Canadians.
But this is sort of how his opponents have cast him.
That he only thinks of the people who, you know, Ontario and Quebec.
And in that way, that's sort of a Canadian thing.
The idea that, you know, oh, those Eastern prime ministers, they only really think about the East because they only really need the East to get elected, right?
But this is even a departure from that.
Like, it's a step further than that.
Definitely a step further.
It's one thing to, like you say, like Bush did, to just categorically ignore the people who didn't vote for you, like Trump is doing right now.
Or even sometimes attack the people who aren't voting for you, like it's happening right now.
But it's another step entirely to accuse the government that is aligned with the faction that is not yours of hating you.
Yeah.
But you do see the political logic.
Yeah, you do see the populist tones there, right?
Oh, 100%.
At once, it casts yourself as the plucky rebel against the empire, right?
The empire hates the plucky rebel, and the plucky rebel will, as he casts, will keep fighting the way his grandfather fought the communists with his bare hands or whatever.
However that was.
He tilled farms with just his fingernails or whatever.
Yeah, yeah.
Walked to school back and forth in this.
They hate us for our freedom.
Uphill for both ways.
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
Okay.
But, like, specifically that the government hates them.
And not just that the government hates them, but now you have to bend knee to the government that hates you.
Yes, yes, that you'll never bow.
Yeah, because that's right, because that would be a thing that forces you to lessen yourself as a human being.
Yeah, right.
But that's not, you know, people tried to cast Trudeau as an authoritarian.
And I tried to ask them what they saw that led them to that conclusion.
And the answer was always just question marks.
Most of them don't really know what it means for someone to be an authoritarian.
Oh, he's looking for more power.
Well, what do you mean?
What does that mean?
Like, what power?
What power do you think he's ever going to get?
He's going to get voted out and he's never going to have power again.
What power did you think he was going to get?
What does that mean?
It's a meaningless statement.
Unless he's making moves that would thwart another's ability to oppose him some way, but he wasn't really doing that.
I mean, he had a party that had more seats than anyone else.
He had the same amount of power as Stephen Harper did before him.
I don't know.
But this is an advance.
This is an advance on that idea.
The government hates them.
A huge advance on the rhetoric.
Yeah.
100%.
Okay, so let's carry on.
We only had a minute into this thing.
We're already hyped up.
Okay.
My father didn't come to Canada in 1953 for a handout.
He didn't arrive on a student visa or as part of some bureaucratic temporary foreign worker program.
No, Hubert Becksty came to Canada to build, to build a farm, to build a community, to build a country, and most importantly, to build a family.
He paid back his own passage from Europe by laboring in Alberta's sugar beet fields.
On the southern edge of this ferry riding, I represent here today with no welfare, no hotel rooms, no liberal-sponsored welcome package, just sweat, sacrifice, and a belief that what Canada could be was what we should aspire to.
My ancestors actually worked when they came here and they earned their keep, not like these slackers we got here today, these freeloaders that are taking our tax money.
Well said.
Pretty much.
Yeah.
Holy cow.
Yeah, yeah.
Not in my day.
That the newcomers to Canada now are handed all sorts of things, candy and clothing and, you know, extra cell phones or whatever they think they're being handed out.
I find it laughable also that he lumped the temporary foreign worker program in with there.
Yeah.
Because either he has no understanding of how the temporary foreign worker program works, or he's hoping that his base doesn't understand it.
Because the TFP program is not, sorry, TFW program is not a gateway to citizenship.
It's not this easy handout.
What it is, is legalized indentured slavery using foreign nationals.
Yeah, it's good.
We bring in TFWs to work industry jobs.
We've basically legalized in Canada what Trump's ICE crews are chasing down in the States right now.
We use illegal immigrants here as well to farm our fields and perform menial labor that we can't find or don't want, or local businesses don't want to find local minimum wage labor to supply.
So we get somebody from another country that'll come here and work for half of minimum wage.
Except in Canada, it's legal.
It's the TFW program, and it sucks.
But this guy is trying to use it to get his base fired up when it's the opposite of what he's trying to make a case for, which is this seemingly endless tit of government welfare for immigrants.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's the lie that's generally told is that People will regale themselves, regale each other with all the tales of all the riches that people get when they first show up here from some other place, and that all the people who lived here already have to toil, you know, till the soil and make the food grow to feed all the other people that are being welcomed here by the liberal governments.
Yeah, it's fairly disgusting because that's not how it works, and it's pretty insulting to people.
Setting aside, the other point that absolutely must be made here is this man's incredibly thus far ignorant argument completely sets aside any discussion about who was in charge of this land mass region country before ancestors.
Yeah, not even a little bit.
I think they came to a completely unoccupied Pangea of promised land.
And because they put a farm there, that made it theirs.
Yeah, because they procreated and learned and practiced agriculture.
That was somehow uniquely entitled to built.
They built things, Jeff.
They built.
Yeah, so many things that were built.
More and more, more and more.
Press play, press play.
Let's see what else this guy has.
Yeah, there we go.
I chose to raise my own four children in the Alberta countryside because that's where promise still lives.
It lived with my great-grandfather's hands.
It lived in my father's footsteps.
And now it lives in my children.
And let me say this.
I would not be here without the support of my wife, Lorelei, my children, Kyle, Kian, William, and Annalise, my mother, Nadine, and the rest of my extended family.
I also want to thank the many people of Bow River, from Grassy Lakes to Tilly, Jim to Bicycle, Conrad to Six Nation, Arrowwood, Marlowe, Carmen Gay, Barnwell, and everywhere in between.
You are my neighbors.
You are us who I aspire to be, and I hold this seat for you.
I also a program in a community that shaped me early.
I joined when I was nine years old.
At least the Six Nation got a mention.
Speak with confidence, work with purpose, and serve my neighbors.
It's where I first lived the motto I still carry with me today, to learn to do by doing.
Mr. Speaker, I also want to recognize the young people watching today.
In Alberta, the grade 6 curriculum, grade 6 students learn about our political system, and many are watching these proceedings live.
One of those classrooms is taught by Dr. Brian Jackson of Lyalta, and these students are paying attention.
They're learning not from soundbites, but from how we carry ourselves in this house.
Mr. Speaker, the riding that sent me here is called Bow River.
It's not just a place, it's a people.
It's a home.
It's a promise.
You see, much like the people who rely on it, the Bow doesn't ask Ottawa's permission to flow.
It carves through rocks.
It sustains life.
It cuts a path forward whether anyone is in this chamber notices or not.
The bow runs past oil wells shut down by people who've never set foot on a rig.
It flows past farms taxed by bureaucrats who couldn't grow a weed.
It flows past churches left to burn.
While politicians offered excuses instead of justice, it flows past the homes of veterans, seniors, and families forgotten by the system, but not by me.
The beautiful thing about the bow is this.
You had enough?
Okay.
So, like, the punchline flows past churches left to burn.
For anybody who doesn't understand the context there, who might want to be a Canadian, there's a lot to unpack there.
So we had, what was the name of the inquiry?
What did they formally call it?
The inquiry.
There's been many inquiries.
In any event, in very recent history, at least in Western Canada, a great number of very unfortunate great sites of Native children pulled to schools have been discovered.
This led to a tremendously huge social backlash in Canada.
A lot of people on the left got righteously and rightfully inflamed over this.
And, of course, because these residential schools, by and large, were run by the church, there was a lot of social backlash against the Christian church in Western Canada as a result of these inquiries.
Some people took it to an extreme, and some churches were burned.
And the right-wing media has spun this as yet more attack on the poor, downtrodden white Christian man.
Yeah.
And that's what the church is burned reference is to.
It's not about, you know, the hundreds, God forbid, thousands of Native children left to rot in unmarked graves under school basements.
It's about the handful of churches that were recently burned.
Yeah, not great.
Yeah, yeah.
The residential school program and the mention of that at all in this gentleman's rebuttal to the throne speech?
No, no, just a one-liner for the Sixth City Nation that.
Yeah, he did mention his one local Indian nation.
Good for him.
Good for him.
Carry on.
Yeah, I did.
I just want to direct some attention to a previous episode I did last year.
I did it for Truth and Reconciliation Day with someone that we went to high school with, Jeff, who is a Native man, Indigenous man, who's not old Jordan Aid Sabes.
Mr. Sebastian?
No.
No, Len.
Len Morrison is.
Oh, yeah, Len, awesome.
Yeah, yeah, he came on the podcast.
It was a good time.
We didn't go into great detail on the many parts of that, but we did touch on it, and it was a really good episode.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, let's get back to what this guy has to say.
I want to get mad again.
Yeah, here we go.
Even when the government grinds to a halt, it keeps flowing.
When politicians hostile to Alberta try to strangle our economy, it keeps flowing.
When bureaucrats and glass towers write the rules that cripple our farms, it keeps flowing.
When unelected judges rewrite our rules and call it progress, it keeps flowing.
When they shut down our churches, our rigs, and our rodeos, it keeps flowing.
Not our rodeo.
It cares about trendy acronyms, a performer politics.
It cares about feeding cattle, watering crops, and quenching the thirst of a work.
I just, I can't.
This metaphor has gone on just long enough.
Okay.
Rivers do not want anything.
Okay?
They just follow the laws of physics that have put forth.
They can go left, they can go right, this way, that way.
They follow the path of least resistance, and that's all they do.
They don't care about feeding crops or cattle or anything like that.
This is a speech writer, is what this is.
Right, right.
Very poetic.
Who is university educated in prose, and this is an ode to a river?
Yeah, but it doesn't, rivers don't want anything.
Oh, exactly.
Yeah.
Okay.
Sorry, my pedantic bit is over.
Let's carry on.
Working land, it fuels an ecosystem and economy, and it helps feed the world.
It doesn't wait for permission.
It flows where it needs to flow.
And if it wasn't clear, Mr. Speaker, I'm not just talking about the river.
I'm talking about the people.
Because just like the bow, we move with purpose.
And we're done with waiting for the rest of the country to catch up.
We don't need a national strategy.
We need Ottawa to get out of the way.
Mr. Speaker, I ran to represent the people who built this country and now watch it being dismantled by people who don't understand it.
And worse, don't even like it.
This week, the Prime Minister stood before this country and promised more of the same.
A new housing bureaucracy.
A new set of buzzwords instead of a budget.
And more red tape instead of results.
And not a word, not a single word about oil and gas pipelines or the workers who drive our economy.
Yeah.
Kearney has said a couple things about pipelines.
He just held the goddamn G7 summit in Alberta.
Well, the G7 summit hadn't happened yet when this speech occurred.
We're a little behind.
But Kearney has said very nice things about pipelines.
He likes them very much.
Thank you very much.
He loves them, actually.
This is what we mentioned on this last episode when we're talking about this.
It's likely that they will get everything they ever want from Mark Carney.
And they will still scream about how their government hates Alberta.
And that he never gave them anything.
Ever, ever, ever.
Trudeau definitely didn't ever buy them a pipeline already.
No, no, that isn't even running at full capacity.
Yeah, definitely not.
No, not happening.
Carrying on.
Let's be honest with Canadians.
We don't need to renew the consensus on immigration, the one that's fueled the Liberal political ambition for a decade.
We need to rebuild this country for Canadians.
We don't need to gaslight working families into acceptance of out-of-control immigration while wages stagnate, house prices explode, and services collapse.
We need to restore common sense and put Canadians first in their own country.
We don't need more empty promises.
We need paychecks you can raise a family on, homes you can actually afford, and streets you feel safe walking down.
We need less gatekeeping, less government, and a whole lot more grit.
Mr. Speaker, I come from the part of Canada that feeds this country and fuels its economy.
So you'll understand if I speak plainly.
Because where I come from, words matter, but work and deeds matter more.
Words don't matter in the other places?
No, no.
Okay.
All right, just checking.
Carrying on.
My people are more honest.
I'm here to fight for the honest worker, the family farmer, the righand, the rancher, the welder, the widow, the health worshiper, and every kid who still believes this country can be worth something.
I come to this House with one of the strongest mandates in the nation.
And Mr. Speaker, do you know how I earned it?
I promised to rip this place down to the studs and start rebuilding a country we can recognize again.
The Prime Minister this week showed he's here to do the opposite.
Behind the pageantry and parades, he disrespected the crown by using the king to deliver a tired and empty speech, meant to distract Canadians from a simple truth.
Using the king.
Here's this thing, this idea again.
Kearney has taken advantage.
It's like elder abuse, right?
He's tricked the king into coming all the way to Canada.
Well, I don't think from the Canadian, from his perspective, maybe that's the position from the Brits that are bitching about it.
But from this guy's perspective, it's a dirty move play.
It's like, no, no, no, because all people love the king.
It's a dirty propaganda play to use the king to promote something because you're going to sway elders and elders typically vote conservatives.
So that's dirty pool.
Right.
I think Carney has not been very forthcoming about, you know, why he did this this way.
I think that's exactly why.
Well, that's probably part of it.
But I think a bigger part of it is it's a flex.
It's a reminder that Carney is a big fucking deal.
He's a world-renowned economist.
He's upset the phone and calls the king of fucking England.
Yeah.
And he can call other people and they answer the phone when he calls.
Like, that's that to me is a flex, right?
Yeah, for sure.
That's flexible.
Yeah.
Because, like, didn't he pull the same thing on?
It might have to do with this bond thing, but I heard, could be true, could be bullshit, but the story I heard was in one of the recent iterations of Trump's tariff flexes, Carney quietly went around to the other world leaders, and they all tabulated how much U.S. bond they collectively held, because all these countries buy each other's bonds.
And they threatened Trump with a bond run if he didn't back off.
Right.
Well, we're going to get into that.
Okay.
Yeah, for sure.
But yeah, I just wanted to stop in on that point because, again, he's trying to rattle that certain cage that Carney, I don't know, took advantage of some situation somehow, did some kind of dirty move by having the king show up, which doesn't make any sense.
To be fair, to be fair, Al, the thing that does bear recognizing here, and this is the cornerstone of every great propaganda speech, is that you salt it with at least a modest amount of actual truths.
Right?
Which part is true here?
You need a sprinkling of facts in there.
So one of the cornerstone right-wing gripes about what the left-wing government has done since they've been in power, and to be clear, the liberals aren't actually left-wing.
They're centrists.
They're an opportunistic government.
They go whichever way the wind is blowing.
But one of their gripes is, oh, well, like the Liberals crippled the economy with a great big immigration run.
And like, yes, that's true.
Like, we have had very high immigration levels in Canada since the Liberals came to power.
But this, again, was as a direct spin-off of the temporary foreign worker program's declining popularity, which was actually introduced by the previous Harper Conservative government.
And the TFW program got out of control.
And when the Libs came in, that was one of the first things they fixed.
But the business community was still like, no, no, we still need cheap labor.
So the solution to that is more immigration.
And it's something that plays well to a left-wing base because we are opening our arms to the poor and the downtrodden around the world to come and live the great Canadian dream and build better lives for themselves.
And from a purely left-wing, open-hearted, idealistic standpoint, yes, 100% factual.
But it is a hard fact, as we've learned with the recent explosion in the Canadian housing market.
We still only have a finite amount of available accessible resources here.
So when you put those kinds of pressures on the working class population, you get record inflation, which is what we're dealing with.
That core issue that the right gripes about is grounded in actual real economic fact that we need to manage, that we need to manage better.
And it's something that the left always just calls racist and ignores.
And it's something that we actually have to recognize.
Like, part of one of our biggest problems we have in this incredibly divisive and tribalistic political environment we live in now is it's so hard to grasp and understand your opponent's position because your media and your propaganda from your faction does its best to twist everything in their position into the most unfavorable light possible.
We need to understand that there are gripes that the right wing has that are legitimate and should be addressed.
Yeah.
And that's one of them.
We need stricter immigration control because we cannot just have the doors wide open forever.
That's ridiculous.
And you can say that it's about NIMBY white racists that want to keep Canada for Canadians, meaning they want to keep it for white English-speaking Christian Canadians.
And yes, those guys are out there.
And yes, that is racist as shit.
They exist.
But that doesn't change the fact that if we're not limitless immigration, we will all be poor.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But we'll be equally poor, right?
No, because we can fight our ways out of the communism with our two hands.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
What's this guy got next?
Let's see.
All right.
He's still stumbling forward on the heels of Justin Trudeau's failed record.
Mr. Speaker, I have deep respect for our institutions, but what Canadians needed this week wasn't ceremonial flourishes.
They needed substance.
Not sentiment, but solutions.
Not more speeches from elites and suits, but action for people in coveralls.
The farmers, the builders, the righands, the parents wondering how they are for groceries and heat at the same time.
Canadians are tired of being lectured.
They're tired of being told everything is fine when they can see with their eyes that it's not.
Here we go.
This country has a proud and noble history.
It was built by pioneers, sustained by families, and defended by those willing to risk everything for the promise of freedom and prosperity.
But after a decade of mismanagement and division from the Liberal front bench, that promise is fading.
Alberta separatism is no longer a fringe idea.
I heard it at the doors more times than I can count.
And I'll tell you plainly, Alberta staying in Confederation is not up to me, and it's not up to the Liberal government.
It's up to the people of Alberta.
And the Albertans know that they have options.
That's the bomb dropping right there, right?
Boom.
Yeah.
Mike drop.
It's beating that separatist drum.
So there is a process that the government came up with when Quebec was strongly beating the drums of separatism.
You can run a referendum.
And it's not just up to the province that wants to separate.
Exactly.
But like he's saying.
That's what they like to pretend, though.
All we have to do is want to leave.
And then we get to leave.
Yeah.
Right.
You click your heels together three times and say there's no place like home, and then you go there.
It's as simple as that.
But it's also, it's playing into the same rhetoric as his pretty little Bow River metaphor, right?
Like if the people of Alberta want to leave, they'll leave because they just don't listen to no government.
Yeah, yeah, that's the guy who works in government.
Says the guy who said in his speech, I got elected with the largest mandate ever because as a politician, I promised to destroy politics.
Yeah.
Rebuild this place from the ground up.
Yeah, but this is a view of what we're looking at.
Let's get the last minute in here.
If this house continues to insult, abuse, and neglect Alberta, if it refuses to treat our people as well.
Stop it now.
Stop the respect that they've earned.
Stop it now.
Insult, abuse, and neglect, really?
Yeah, I know.
Yeah.
Really?
Yeah.
Insult, abuse, yeah.
It's this is like the hardcore, ultra-right-wing, like, uh, uh, cis-white alpha male bullshit persecution rhetoric.
Yeah.
Right?
Like, no matter what is put in front of them.
No, no, no.
I'm pushed down because I'm the Christian white man.
Because I'm the actual hard-working person.
I'm the only hard-working person in the room.
I have a monopoly on work ethic.
The hardest person.
Hardest working.
Hardest-working person.
And because I work so hard, I don't have to listen to anyone either.
This goes hand in hand with the anti-welfare rhetoric, right?
This general notion that I have things because I don't know what they're doing.
I didn't need no welfare.
Yeah, I don't need no welfare.
Anyone who's a guy who works in a cyclical energy industry who is regularly laid off and relies on EI.
Anyone who gets anything without having to have worked for it is a terrible person by definition.
And therefore your natural moral goodness stems solely from the amount of work you do.
And the extension there becomes, the next layer on that onion becomes the amount of work you do leads to a greater amount of morality.
And therefore, having worked harder, you're more morally sound.
And then the next layer on top of that is that Alberta, Albertans have a greater amount of income because they have worked harder and are more moral.
And then the equalization program causes Quebec to have money that was put in there by the hardworking, good, moral people of the world, and that therefore they're getting something they didn't work for and they're morally terrible.
That's more or less the arithmetic that's happening here inside.
That the amount of wear on your work boots.
Yeah, the amount of wear on your work boots is directly related to how good of a person you are.
I just have to make that point.
Like, that's how I was raised.
Like, I really was.
Like, my parents had the opportunity to go on welfare a couple times, and they refused.
They lived poor, for better or for worse.
That's just what they did.
And, you know, it's hard to say whether my family was better for it or not.
I don't know.
I can't make that call, right?
But the idea was definitely there.
That was a thing they both believed strongly, very, very strongly.
That, you know, getting something, getting that handout was for people who are of lesser stock, right?
And it's fair.
And I'm not, like, I'm not saying that that's a good and noble notion.
That's just what they believed.
And I'm educated enough to know, and I have enough wisdom to know that that's not necessarily true.
You know, like, like, I don't look down at people who need to use social programs like those to get past a tough period, right?
I've had to go on EI.
I've never had to go on welfare.
But that doesn't mean that that makes me a better person because I didn't.
The way I calculate it myself is that if I'm not on that, that allows another person who needs it more to use it, right?
That's just how I look at it.
But that's, you know, this is the moral calculation that he's making and a lot of other people who hear it are making in their heads, is that, you know, the scuff marks on your work boots tell everything you need to know about a person.
Well, it's part of a great big bill of bullshit that they push on the Albertan populace because it's very, the right-wing government is very invested in the people blaming the federal, ideally left-wing federal government for all of their ills.
Because, like, objectively, with its natural resources, Alberta has made a very bad deal with the private sector compared to other regions with similar reserves.
Oh, 100%.
There's all sorts of math out there showing how Norway has made a much better deal and has achieved much more general wealth for all of the people and energy independence by simply saying, no, actually, we're not just going to bend over and let you take the raw materials out and go process it elsewhere and do whatever you want with it.
We actually are going to charge stiff royalties and demand that you keep all the processing and refining jobs here and have all of that infrastructure inside our country's borders so we can make finished product.
And if you don't want to do that, you can't have our oil.
Alberta didn't do that.
And so Alberta is very exposed to the boom and bust nature of the price of oil because all they sell is raw product.
So the only thing they have going for them is the price of raw product.
Well, there is some processing that happens there.
Well, compared to the volume of crude that's pulled out of the ground, it's a small percentage.
But it is some that is used to create gasoline that's made in Alberta that's sold up.
That's a thing that's said is that I would bet you that when oil jobs below $100 a barrel, those workers don't get laid off.
Yeah, probably not.
I don't know.
Probably not.
But this is my point.
The working class, and I'm sure you've experienced it as much as anyone.
Most of my experience is anecdotal because I only surf the rim of Alberta industrial work for a couple years.
But the bulk of the industrial energy sector working class is tied to boom and bust oil and has regularly experienced extended periods of layoff and poverty because the price of oil is down or world supply is fucked.
And they've been very exposed to that.
And the fault of that lays at the feet of their local governments that made shitty deals with the oil companies to not ensure that wealth stayed in the hands of the people who lived in the province.
But that government doesn't want to get the blame for it.
So they need to shift that blame to the federal government and say, you're poorly off because of excessive regulation from the feds.
Not because we took this incredible energy wealth and gave it away for nothing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I know, yeah.
Okay.
Well, I don't care about the rest of the speech.
That's the problem.
Oh, come on.
No, let's finish it.
Let's finish it up.
Okay, all right, all right.
Let's give him his lesson.
And the future of this country is not guaranteed.
None of us should assume that we'll have this job here tomorrow.
At any moment, this government could lose the confidence of the House.
And when that moment comes, Canadians will remember who stayed with them and who stood in their way.
Because when the system stalls, the Bow River keeps flowing.
When this government offers platitudes instead of a plan, the Bow keeps flowing.
When they forget who built this country, we remember and we keep moving.
Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the people of Bow River for one of the strongest mandates in this nation.
To my family and my friends, my neighbors, thank you for trusting me with this duty.
I won't let you down.
I didn't come here to rub shoulders with royalty.
I came here to fight for the families, farmers, and energy workers who build this country.
And I'll keep fighting until the Liberal government gets the message.
Because that promise still lives, and I intend to keep it.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
So at the end, I think there were, I might have to count again, but I'm pretty sure there were five references to righands and or energy workers of some description.
And one reference to the Six Second Nation.
Just in case anyone is keeping score at home of what David Bexty thinks is important.
Yeah.
Okay.
So.
Remove that.
All right.
That's crazy.
And that's supposed to be the rebuttal to the throne speech.
Yeah, you know, they get a chance to talk and do their thing sort of immediately after.
If you had, like, I didn't watch the throne speech, and nothing in his rebuttal gives me any indication as to what was in it.
Like, it's like his speech was written by a speechwriter three days ago that was just like, whatever the throne speech says, just call it bullshit platitudes from a monarch.
Right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, that's probably exactly it.
And for all I know, that's what the throne speech was.
I don't know.
What the hell does King Charles know what to say?
I don't know.
His speech was probably written by Carney.
He was fed copy too.
I'm sure, yeah.
Whatever.
But the fact that the official response to the throne speech included direct Alberta separatist stuff and eating that drum.
Actually, I meant to mention that.
I don't know if I mentioned it prior to when we started taping, but I had a recent job in my hometown here in BC at a sawmill.
And the system that I was working there to service, the panel happened to be in the lunchroom when they took a coffee break while I was working.
And I got to basically just eavesdrop on a room full of sawmill workers in BC.
And I was actually shocked to hear one of these guys talk very confidently about how, like, he could have been wearing a red ball cap, man.
Like, 100% pro-Trump, like, down with the Iran.
And, yeah, did you hear that, like, 45% of the people in Alberta want to separate?
And so do 35% of the people in BC.
We're so close.
Like, by the time my kids go into high school, we're going to have our own country.
Like, there's a small segment of the population that is really buying into this rhetoric that actually honestly, truly believe that this small wingnut fringe faction is actually super close to holding the majority vote.
It's ridiculous.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I don't.
They're not anywhere close in BC.
They're not even barely on the mark in BC.
Yeah, but there's groups of them like that.
Yeah.
I am going to have to edit you there, though.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, getting back to the show.
So we want to talk a little bit about what it means, what national debt is about and what it means to our current moment right now.
We're going to have an extra video here.
Alright.
Make that full screen.
So this is from a YouTube channel called TLDR News.
They have separate channels for sort of each region, and then this one is just global.
It's kind of all the regions.
And they're very simple.
I mean, this is just a guy at a desk in a blank room.
But they have little bits of graphics, and they just take the news that's happening in the world, and they explain it in a short fashion.
It's concise, it's accurate, and I want to plug this channel.
I like it.
It's very useful for people who don't have a lot of time, like me, who doesn't have a lot of time.
And just the facts.
Yeah, and just the facts.
And they'll actually take, instead of just like, like, sometimes I'll watch a video that's talking about bond yields, and they'll talk about how the bond yields are way up and how that's terrible or whatever.
But I get lost.
But like, why is that terrible?
What does that mean?
What does it mean that they're up or down or whatever?
Like, I don't understand why them being up or down means anything.
But this video, they took the time to explain that with a couple of little graphics here.
So we're going to go through it and anything that needs to be explained to the podcast listeners will have to stop and explain it.
Okay.
So to understand this story, you need to know a little bit about how bond markets actually work.
In short, when a government borrows money, they do it by issuing bonds.
Bonds are essentially defined by three things.
The face value, that is how much the bond costs in the first place.
The coupon, that is the annual interest rate that whoever owns the bond receives, and the maturity.
That is the date when the issuer repays the bondholder the face value of the bond.
To give an example, the U.S. Treasury might issue a bond with a face value of $1,000, a coupon of 5%, and a maturity of 10 years.
If you bought that bond from the Treasury, you would basically lend the US $1,000.
The Treasury would pay you $50 a year for the next 10 years, and after that 10 years, they'd return the whole $1,000.
Importantly, however, the effective annual interest rate or yield of a bond can change if the markets decide that they don't want to pay the face value.
So, for instance, if I tried to resell a bond that I just bought, but the markets were willing to only pay a face value of $900, whoever bought that bond would effectively be paid a higher yield.
After all, $50 is more than 5% of $900.
It's more like 5.5%.
And after 10 years, this new bondholder would also get an extra $100, because the Treasury will pay back the full $1,000 face value.
But this new bondholder only bought the bond for $900.
This means that the effective yield would actually be over 6%.
Now, this would be bad news.
So there was some images on the screen there.
It's giving some numbers.
I can move it back to the right thing there.
The effective yield would actually be over 6%.
Yeah.
I don't think I need to explain that equation.
If you're buying a bond for lower than the face value and then you're going to get paid the full face value back, you've made that extra amount.
Your effective yield is higher.
So maybe I don't need to explain that with all the arithmetic involved there.
But yeah, that only took like a minute and a half, and he explained essentially how bonds and their yields work effectively.
I thought that was pretty good.
So I'm going to pull him off of there.
Come back to full screen.
So U.S. bond yields have recently been rising.
And it's because, as he said, that the yields rise when the price of the bond is lower.
When you try to sell your bond, but people aren't offering as much money for it, you have to sell it for a lower price.
That's just how the markets work.
And therefore, the yields rise.
So that means that the face value, the resale value of the bond is dropping.
So this is related to something that Carney did.
And a lot of people say he's very, very clever.
Because I think he is very, very clever.
Whether you like him or not, I think you can't deny that.
Canada had a bunch of U.S. Treasury bonds, and he sold a bunch.
And right around the same time he sold a bunch, there were a couple other countries that also sold a bunch.
Now, I don't know if they sold all they had.
I don't know.
Some people have said they sold all their bonds.
I don't know if he sold them all, but he sold a bunch.
Enough to make some difference.
Like, Japan sold some U.S. Treasury bonds.
Canada sold some U.S. Treasury bonds.
I can't remember.
I think there might have been a couple European countries that did.
Yeah?
Yes.
So, I mean, for starters, this gives Canada some money back right away.
Like, some of our money, like, we also have debts, right?
And some of our debt is apparently used by U.S. Treasury bonds.
Right?
So this gets some money back in the Treasury on short notice to do something else with.
But it also sort of puts the U.S. in a more difficult spot because right at this same moment, the U.S. is trying to pass this really, really big bill.
It's called the Big, Beautiful Bill.
And for people who are unfortunate enough to have to mention this thing a lot, they're calling it the BBB, right?
For obvious reasons.
And this thing is monster.
It's like 1,200 pages.
It has a huge number of things in it.
It was passed through Congress in the middle of the night.
And I think it's likely that almost no one in Congress read it or read all of it because they're not Johnny 5.
Five internet points to anyone who gets that joke.
And Marjorie Taylor Greene actually admitted that she hadn't read it when she was confronted about some details in it a few days ago.
And it's in the Senate now.
They might send it back to have some things worked over.
It's getting a lot of heat now, so they might do that.
It's hard to say.
But it has everything in there.
And it has a huge amount of extra spending.
Like, for anyone who thought that, I don't know, somehow Trump was a business guy and he was going to balance the budget somehow, that's not even close to true.
In fact, once Elon Musk saw this, this caused Elon Musk to have a bit of a meltdown.
Probably also fueled by the drugs he's taking.
Ketamine seems to be heavy use there.
He said that he thought it was going to bankrupt the U.S. Unclear whether that's really true or not.
In case anyone, it's not clear to anyone, Elon Musk is not an economist.
He's not really a financial guy.
He's not even a tax accountant.
He's not, I mean, I could go on with all the things he's not, right?
He's not any of those things.
So his opinion on whether or not this will bankrupt the U.S. is not, it should hold the exact same weight as if your, you know, some random uncle of yours says that it's going to bankrupt the U.S.
It's that same level of veracity.
They have the exact, more or less same level of knowledge.
But he throws weight because he's a multi-billionaire.
And he owns Twitter.
This is the same rhetoric that we just watched with that last video about hard work equates to better morals.
Yeah.
Hard work also makes you more.
Is measured by the amount of money.
Hard work makes you more wealthy, so if you're wealthier, then you must have worked hard for it.
And by extension, you must be more moralistic.
I am a better person because I'm richer than you.
Yeah, that'll be a different episode.
But you're right.
People do work that logic that way.
And it's not even close to true.
The same people who will say that Elon Musk is a great person and very high level of moral good because he's very, very rich will also say that George Soros is an evil demon who needs to be sacrificed at the stake.
Despite the fact that George Soros also has many billions of dollars at his disposal.
Most of them also say Bill Gates is also demon spawn, right?
So it's very pick and choose as to which one of the supposedly hard-working billionaires they think is morally good based on that.
But where was I going with this?
Yeah, so the bond yields, like, Carney did this.
And Carney is an economist.
He's not just an economist.
He's not like a guy that got a bachelor degree in economics.
He really is a big deal.
We said it before, a big fucking deal.
He ran the Bank of Canada, and then later, the Bank of England, which is like for England to hire a Canadian to run their bank is a big deal.
To have anyone that's not, strictly speaking, British run the bank was difficult for them.
Well, his citizenship was a tremendous issue of contention during the election.
Because post, I assumed he changed his citizenship before he became the governor of the Bank of England.
Perhaps that's something that came after.
In any event, by the time he was done with that stint, he had dual citizenship, Canadian and British.
And he was actually painted into a corner by the media and forced to promise that he would renounce his British citizenship and retain solely Canadian citizenship if only.
I don't know what the British citizenship, I hadn't read that, but he did obtain Irish citizenship based on being of Irish descent.
Descent.
This is a thing that Irish people that the government of Ireland lets people do.
And hold on.
Okay.
Back from just a little break there.
Yeah, Carney did obtain Irish citizenship.
This is the thing that the government of Ireland lets people who can prove that they have Irish descent do with their sort of diaspora populations, right?
And I think he had to renounce that.
Yeah.
But I don't think he was ever British citizen.
I don't know.
Maybe the British made him become a British citizen because that's what their price was for running the Bank of England.
I don't know.
The British are weird.
But he sort of, I mean, he handled the Bank of Canada helping Canada get past the mortgage debt crisis.
He managed the Bank of England through Brexit.
These have been two very major economic crises that were experienced by entire nations, and he helped them.
The subprime mortgage meltdown, for anyone who's too young to have personally experienced it, was a financially terrifying time.
And Canada actually, Canadian citizens in general, got through that much more unscathed, by and large, than their American counterparts to the South, who basically got hung out to dry by their financial system.
Yeah.
Like the working class was left holding the bag in the States 100%.
And we were spared the worst of that, primarily because of Kearney's stewardship.
Yeah.
And things aren't great in Britain after Brexit, but they're not catastrophic.
And a lot of people credit Kearney with that, too.
Well, yeah.
Like he's a cleanup hitter that you bring in to fix a terrible mess.
And he doesn't get you, you know, golden sunsets and glory, but he does help you avoid bankruptcy.
Yeah.
He might be able to keep you in the playoffs.
Yeah.
So here you have a very smart guy who gets elected to become Prime Minister of Canada.
And he has come through, personally ran the system coming through two major crises and now is Prime Minister now instead of just the manager of the bank of the nation for another economic crisis.
And he's saying things like that we need to reimagine some things about how this economic thing works.
And so a couple of numbers here.
A couple of numbers here.
hasn't released a budget so in this speech because he knows his budgets going to be completely blown Well, I think it has to be.
There's going to be like monumental deficit spending, the likes of which we haven't seen since COVID.
So he put together...
So they're obviously pushing that as far down the road as they can.
He said it'll be in the fall, the official budget, which he's allowed to do.
It doesn't have to have it right now.
People are complaining that he hasn't done it.
I think it's not reasonable to think that he couldn't have done it.
I think he could have done a budget.
He has every major economist and financial accountant that's within a three-hour flight of his location on speed dial, he could have gotten a budget done by now very easily if he wanted to.
I think you're right to say that if he hasn't done it, it's because he doesn't want to do it right now.
But he did put together a thing that they're calling something like an outline of spending.
And in his outline, he promised to try, but we'll try to try.
Oh, this, we are getting close to a, what did Trump call his health care plan?
He had an outline of a plan.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're close to that here, actually.
We have an outline of a sketch of an idea of a plan.
Yeah, yeah.
I have a, I have a, what was, I can't remember what Trump actually said during that.
Anyway, it was something like that.
Have an idea of a plan.
And this is kind of what this is.
His outline of spending outlines roughly a budget of $486 billion, which is very close to what the previous year's budget was.
Except that there's a couple other spending commitments from the last year that aren't included yet, and they will push it if they're just added straight on to what he's looking to spend.
That will push it to about $554 billion.
That's more than anyone has spent in a year that hasn't been full economic crisis.
Some people wonder, to some people who are losing their jobs at car manufacturing plants in Ontario, this is full economic crisis.
So I'm not going to try to downplay that at all because having Ontario's economy tank will be fucking terrible for everyone in Canada.
Let's just put that right out there.
There's no way Alberta can make up the slack.
Sorry.
You cannot.
There's no way any other province, collection of provinces combined, maybe all the rest of the provinces combined could make up the slack, but Quebec isn't going to pull their part, so already we're behind.
But this is here's what I'm thinking here, and you're going to tell me if I'm crazy or not.
You're probably going to tell me I'm wrong, and that's okay.
But here we have a guy who's, in his mind, might be thinking about how he gets to get his name on one of those shiny world-level prizes.
Nobel Prize in Economics or one of these mathematical economic prizes that they give out every couple years or whatever, right?
You know, by reimagining and rethinking the machine that makes the thing run, right?
And in doing so, if that's the case, he's going to be using Canada as his guinea pig, right?
His prototype model for how this works.
Like the idea of the college football coach who pushes all of his players way too hard, frequently to the point of failure or lifelong injury because they are a constantly refreshing supply for him.
Because there's constantly new players coming in every year.
And if he's the one that makes it to whatever championship or whatever every year, then he gets to say he was the best coach or whatever.
Exactly.
Yeah, so that's a thing that I'm concerned about right now.
What do you think of my thought here?
Am I crazy?
If what we're dealing with is a man's ego, the liberal propaganda machine has done an excellent job of wiping out any hint of that anywhere in the news.
I haven't seen anything to that effect anywhere.
And it's honestly a thought I personally have never entertained, perhaps because I vote left, so I was fed that news cycle of Carney just being like the left-wing Stephen Harper.
I haven't seen it anywhere in the news.
We're in a period of tremendous financial distress, and when you're in that period of time, you want an accountant in charge.
Well, I think he's the best option we have.
And I haven't gotten really much of an impression from any of the media that I've seen or any of the time he's been in front of camera that we're dealing with a man who has An elevated sense of arrogance or self-importance.
If anything, he strikes me as maybe even mildly on the spectrum, like very business-like and about the task at hand and what we're talking about, frigging only.
Like, he doesn't have Trudeau's charm.
No.
He's not, like, he needs work to be a politician.
He is not as personable as many of his peers.
Yeah.
I agree with that.
I watched a couple of his campaign stops during the election.
Yeah.
He was, to me, a person who was recognizable and even relatable, which was true also, I think, for me of Trudeau, except that Trudeau had that shiny glean to him.
He smiled too much.
He looked like he was trying to sell me something whenever he was on the ground.
Trading hard on the cult of personality.
Pretty much.
Carney has no cult of personality.
That's Carney is treating this like he is a forensic accountant tasked with salvaging a company from bankruptcy.
And that's precisely who I want in charge.
That's the job he's been hired to do.
However, I do have a great number of concerns about the plan package that they've come up with to spend our way out of this hole.
And like, as an opening caveat, I completely disagree with the conservative rhetoric, the idea, you know, the old Winston Churchill line about how trying to spend your way out of a recession is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up.
Like, it's no, like, there's, there's proven historic economic points to point to that show, factually, when you hit a recession, sometimes government spending, even deficit spending, is the only thing that can push you out of it.
Because when a market needs a consumer and all the rich people are holding onto their wallets, the government's the only person left to open it up and get the juices flowing again to the working class.
However, there's a lot of stuff they're waiting into that I'm not convinced is a good idea.
I personally have a huge issue with the idea of like federally funded housing.
Like straight up, the government's going to build slums now.
Like our housing situation has gotten so dire, the government's just going to build housing for people.
I don't feel like that's the solution.
I don't know.
Here in BC, we've seen the government's house.
I'm still not convinced that the actual real problem is a lack of houses.
No, this is the point.
I think there's too many people who want to own more than one house.
Well, it's not exclusively that, although you're not off the mark there.
Yeah, it's not like it's a problem that has only one cause.
Yeah, yeah.
But this is also like this was a bubble of supply and demand, again, because we had a big wave of new families that moved to Canada and had no place for them to live.
So that immediately put a lot of upward pressure on housing costs everywhere.
Very simple supply and demand.
If there are more people who need a roof over their head than there are roofs for heads, the cost of roofs go up.
But that's something that the market is already pivoting to fix.
There are towers and apartments and private buildings going up all over the place in Canada, especially in large urban centers where a lot of this immigration has concentrated.
So this is a problem that I think is going to kind of work itself out.
And I don't understand why we want to take on this tremendous new load of debt to provide something that looks like the private sector is going to provide.
We need to deal with Trump.
Like, we need to deal with him.
Like, and as much as the people who voted for Kearney, generally speaking, don't like Trump, it's only through negotiation with Trump that we will reduce the tariffs.
In that way, I think, you know, I don't know how well it's going to work out.
I don't like to cheer for politicians.
But it's possible that it's also very likely that Kearney is more clever than Trump.
More clever than Trump, but has fewer tools with which to maneuver, right?
Yeah, many of us have been more clever than the bully that beat the shit out of us.
Yeah.
So right now we're making promises, right?
So Carney promised a dental plan and even put out the basics of what that looks like.
And, you know, the crowds rejoiced.
This has been a thing that's been talked about for a long time.
And he just waved his hand and said, yeah, you'll get that.
Then he promised that we're going to increase military spending.
To 2% of GDP.
To 2.5% of GDP.
2.5%?
Wow.
It's got to be 2%.
NATO says 2.5%.
Okay.
So for starters, and I don't know why it never happened before, but the number jumped immediately.
And people noted that.
And then they figured out why.
It was because nearly every other NATO nation that has a coastline and has a fleet of boats that patrol that coastline, as in a Coast Guard, they include that as part of their military spending.
And for reasons that I didn't know till now, Canada never did that.
The money we spend patrolling the coastline wasn't used as part of the military budget.
So he just looked at that and went, okay, well, that's got to change.
And then he moved those numbers from that column to that column, and then the numbers changed.
Oh, look, we're spending more on defense.
Yeah, it didn't get us to the 2.5% to meet the NATO commitment, but it got us closer.
But we are going to get there.
And I think he's talking about even maybe more than 2.5%.
But, you know, that's almost ⁇ if we're not involved in a conflict, that's all money that will generally get spent in Canada.
So, I mean, it's not like people are talking about that, like you kind of throw that money away, kind of light it on fire, but that's not really true.
Military is a great employer, just ask the United States.
It is.
It's also a great way to do things like train pilots, train helicopter pilots, train mechanics, train all kinds of people this way fairly cheaply, right?
And also, you can hire a lot of engineers in the military.
And not just military engineers as in the military engineering corps that disables landmines.
I mean, you can have military engineers that, God forbid, design new equipment.
You can have programs to improve all kinds of things, research all kinds of things for improvement.
And this includes like armor for vehicles and better ways to build engines for military vehicles, this sort of thing.
I mean, all that stuff can happen in military budgets.
We used to build, once upon a time, we built military aircraft in Canada.
I met an old guy who actually worked on the Avro Aero program once upon a time.
It was 20 years ago, and he was already a very old man, but he lived in a little town called Caslow.
And I was working at a company that we went around and we did nurse call devices, and I was in the nursing home there, and he was in there visiting his wife, and he was just wandering around, and then he started asking me questions about what I was doing, and then he's just, like old guys do, started telling me stories.
And that came up.
And I was just like, what?
Whoa, what?
This thing that in some Canadian governmental administrations denied that it ever existed?
Like, yeah, wow, right?
But yeah, we used to build airplanes, five of them specifically, but they would have been a lot more than that if it hadn't got shut down.
And, you know, right now they're talking about where do we buy our planes from.
But again, like, the manufacturing that happens at Lockheed Martin or whatever U.S. manufacturer is producing those planes.
There's a tremendous amount of baseline manufacturing that happens in Canada for those things.
Like this is what we're discovering with the tariff war on the auto sector.
The components for an automobile cross the border like eight times in various states of completion before the vehicle finally gets manufactured in whatever country calls it home.
That's why the tariff fight over the automotive sector has gotten so splintered and down to so many different little sub-provisions.
Because both sides are now recognizing, yeah, tariffs are a great idea, but like even if it's American-made, we still need Canadian shit to make it go because they're making shit over there we can't make here.
Right?
See, everything we make here in Canada can be made there, just not tomorrow.
Exactly.
Not in time tomorrow.
And none of the manufacturers are interested in pivoting.
None of the manufacturers.
And this is what nobody under, not no very few people understand, is that like, number one, of course, the capitalist manufacturers have no interest in pivoting and spending a bunch of money on retooling and hiring more expensive local workforce to build something they're already getting made cheaper somewhere else.
They don't want to.
So they're trying to stop their feet and say it can't happen.
It can.
But the reality is while we're in the process of retooling, supply gets interrupted and fucked.
Yeah.
If you're motivating with tariffs, your bridge period, which will last literally years before you get your manufacturing turned over, for years, all of that shit that you're trying to force local manufacturing on will get more expensive.
And then at the end of that, because it's being made by more expensive local labor, it's still going to be more expensive.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But if your objective is to ensure that you have sovereignty in your manufacturing and good local jobs, then a more expensive finished product is sometimes the price of that.
Yeah.
Or perhaps a bite of the profits in the sale of that product is what needs to happen, and that's why there's so much pushback pretty much.