Latest / The Nation Podcasts / Why Big Oil Wants to Splinter Canada w/ Nora Loreto / The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer

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Why Big Oil Wants to Splinter Canada w/ Nora Loreto / The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born, now is the time of monsters.
• 0:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: With those words from Gramshee, I welcome you to the time of monstrous podcast.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm Geet here of the nation magazine, the sponsor of this podcast.
• 0:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, today I want to take our attention to Canada where many strange things are going on.
• 0:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: There is going to be a referendum in Alberta on the question of separatism, whether the province of Alberta should become the Republic of Alberta.
• 0:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: But one of the things is that it's actually a referendum to hold a referendum.
• 0:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: that hits tied up with all sorts of other issues, not just about Alberta, succeeding from the Dominion of Canada, but also issues involving climate change, the future fossil fuel, the sort of organization of the Canadian federal state, Indigenous land rights, and is connected in unpredictable ways with the other major
• 0:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: So to discuss all this, I'm very happy to have on as guest, Nora Loretta, who's been on the program before, friend of the program.
• 1:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there's a prominent Canadian journalist that has written many books that is working currently on the new one, all dealing with the sort of problems of Canada, which I think that Canadians are usually too polite to talk about.
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: So first of all, Nora, welcome to the program.
• 1:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for having me.
• 1:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: So let's get to it.
• 1:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: What is exactly
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, the headline story, you kind of just talked about it, that the province's green lit, a referendum question, which will come on the ballot in the fall, asking Albertans if they would like to hold another referendum, and in that referendum to discuss whether the night Alberta should be a sovereign state.
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now this is coming from a government that is headed by someone who, I mean, just three
• 1:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And somehow she became the premier of the province of Alberta at the head of a conservative party called the United Conservative Party.
• 2:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: But inside that party has always a wall, since the United has been elements that she comes from that are crazy.
• 2:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that craziness right now has decided to orient itself around the idea of a free and independent Alberta.
• 2:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so they've been
• 2:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: trying to get petition signatures collected to put a question on the ballot about whether or not Albertans would like to seed from Canada.
• 2:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, this has been like very scandalous and a whole bunch of different ways.
• 2:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the scandals, which happened in the course of the collection of the data, was that all elections Alberta data was handed over to what was,
• 2:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: I guess a group of people running a website and so there was a massive data breach where everybody, every voter in Alberta's information was uploaded to a data site or to a website and the guys who are working on that, it's called the Sinsherian Project, they're connected to Americans who are running similar kinds of campaigns for the Republicans.
• 3:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there's that scandal, but then there's also just the regular scandals that are coming with having a crazy government.
• 3:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Danielle Smith, while she's nuts, she's also a pretty cunning politician, and she knows that with all of the focus on the referendum and questions about whether or not Alberto will separate from Canada, distracts from the numerous other scandals that her government is and has been embroiled in.
• 3:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, I don't know.
• 3:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: She is a sort of Trumpian figure in that she's very good at sort of the politics of distraction.
• 3:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think like it might be worth saying something about the nature of her coalition, because I think in some ways it's something that we've seen quite a bit of on the right in many different countries.
• 3:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: The listeners will know in the United States example of the GOP, but I think concerted parties in Europe are very similar.
• 3:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that there's a coalition that includes sort of the traditional center-right business conservatives
• 3:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: But along with a much more radical populist faction that likes to do disruptive stuff, and one of the interesting things of politics in the last decade is that the disruptive anti-system people who had been in the minority, now that's a play of more dominant role in these coalition, so I think that's very interesting.
• 4:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, absolutely.
• 4:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: So each of the Canadian provinces more or less only really have two parties at play.
• 4:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's really important to mention.
• 4:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you've got, while there's many parties that could be running in a provincial election, there tends to only be two that are dominant.
• 4:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Alberta, there was a split on the right.
• 4:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so the classic progressive conservative party, which had been dominant in Alberta politics for decades, had held office for something like 42 years straight at one point.
• 4:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a split where a new party emerged called the Wild Rose Party.
• 4:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Danielle Smith comes out of the Wild Rose Party.
• 4:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: She was the leader of the Wild Rose Party, but was seen as a bit too crazy even for them.
• 4:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when the Wild Rose Party and the progressive conservative party were separate, it allowed the progressive conservative party to be that more standard business friendly.
• 5:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tory that that Canadians and Albertans are used to and it's last notable figure was Jason Kenny who is a radical in his own right.
• 5:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's a he's a Catholic convert fanatic but in the current context he's a lot more calm and statesman Lee which is kind of scary to say
• 5:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: But with that split, the NDP, the Democratic Party, which holds the liberal progressive space in that province, they managed to break through an actually win government several years ago, which was a surprise to say the least.
• 5:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: It pretty much was only possible because of the division on the right, and people could see that.
• 5:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so the NDP ended up having a one term.
• 5:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: government, and then the conservatives created this new party called the United Conservative Party, and through a various jostling and deal making or whatever, a Daniel Smith finds herself at the head of this party, and then the head of the government of Alberta.
• 6:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so it is a tiny minority, but as you say, they have quite a lot of sway over the politics of the province, and it doesn't probably help that Alberta is also
• 6:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so this is a government that is absolutely at the whims of the industry that they don't have any control over the industry and that the governing philosophy seems to be to just remove all barriers possible to the industry to make sure that things go well.
• 6:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because when oil and gas is making lots of money, there's higher salaries and people are employed.
• 6:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: when there's a crash, which there was not too long ago, of course, people lose their jobs, and then all of a sudden, the only thing keeping the economy together are the spows as a boy and gas workers who happen to have public sector jobs working in health care education, or the civil service, for example.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, being basically a petro state is at the core of how Alberta functions, and now you have this conservative group in power that
• 7:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: sees the politics of distraction is being very helpful, but also it becomes this threat that they're able to hold over Ottawa and say, look, we are the most important academic unit in this in this country, you should be interacting with us in a way that recognizes the fact that we could be our own country.
• 7:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so there's the sovereignty question that's happening on the ground
• 7:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: interacting with Alberta almost as if they really are a sovereign country, which I think is kind of the headline news for people that are outside of Alberta.
• 7:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, no, I think that's right.
• 7:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think here we have to kind of provide a little bit of context in sort of the nature of Canadian federalism.
• 7:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like kind of baffling topic, but
• 7:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now in Canada, like traditionally, what we call provinces, they serve equivalent in the United States of States, as we have a quite a bit of responsibility and power.
• 8:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is an outgrowth, actually, of sort of like British colonialism and decisions made by Scottish jurist.
• 8:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: to the in forming this or Canadian state.
• 8:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: So like one is thinking of like Alberta, it's not just like a Texas or a California.
• 8:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: It like all the other provinces has quite a bit of responsibility and power in terms of collecting taxes and in response to earlier over things like education.
• 8:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: and healthcare while their transfer of payments coming from the federal government in Ottawa to finance a many of these things that the actual like sort of nuts and bolts administration is there.
• 8:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: But one of the curiosities of sort of continuing federalism is that I believe that actually like control of natural resources has always been a sort of federal matter.
• 8:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, you have on the one hand these provinces that have actually quite a bit of administrative
• 9:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: that it can fund them into the hands of Ottawa.
• 9:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that perhaps is one of the root problems.
• 9:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: But coming along with that, and I think there's something you brought up, and I want to emphasize this, one way of reconciling the system of sort of,
• 9:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: federal state that's relatively weak with like these kind of like strong provincial governments has been to have sort of like national beatings and former prime minister Pierre Trudeau as he complained about this he didn't want the Canadian prime minister to be the sort of headwader of confederation.
• 9:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I have to be the sort of, you know, like bringing all of the sort of dozen odd provincial and territorial leaders together, and he has to like be the servant of them.
• 9:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I mean, it was the case of that.
• 9:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was the sort of like the model.
• 9:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what I think Carney has been doing, which is very interesting, which I think you've really pointed out it in
• 9:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: has not been given enough attention to it.
• 9:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is he actually sidesteped all that?
• 9:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Doesn't have these meetings with the Prime Minister with the provincial leaders, but as he meets with the provincial leaders, especially Daniel Smith on a one-on-one basis, as if she were the actual governing leader of a separate state.
• 10:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: So in some ways, attorneys on behavior is like, it's up already encouraging Alberta separatism.
• 10:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so I have been doing nothing but reading about Canadian federalism for the last six weeks, and so I feel like my mind is like, okay.
• 10:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, I am down a rabbit hole on this question and it isn't, it isn't that obvious, as you say, it is peculiar the way that these things have evolved, you know, Canadians, the Canadian leadership, the British colonial leadership right from the start tried to set up a system in Canada that would not function like the United States, they were very concerned about the power that the states had and they tried to give the most important powers to the federal government.
• 10:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, the most important powers in 1867 were not necessarily what became most important powers in 1967 and then of course, 2026.
• 10:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so while, yes, the federal government has responsibility over land, the provinces also have land management responsibilities, which is why this becomes so messy and complicated.
• 11:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: So those grand meetings with all of the heads of all of the provinces and territories that having those meetings is called executive federalism and executive federalism was how the prime minister's office in Ottawa dealt with the provinces because the other thing too is it's like every individual is voting both for a provincial and a federal representative and oftentimes those people actually are on different sides of the political spectrum or different parties are completely different priorities.
• 11:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so, executive federalism really was changed throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, where it wasn't just Mark Carney changing the model of having these large open negotiations with the provinces.
• 11:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: It really started actually in the 1980s, accelerated under Jean-Pretisian in the 1990s, the Prime Minister who signed free trade, and then Stephen Harper, Justin Trudeau, and
• 12:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: these bilateral negotiations with different provinces.
• 12:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so it's one thing to have a bilateral negotiation with the province of Alberta over something like a pipeline.
• 12:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there's a whole bunch of, there's a whole bunch of legal problems with that.
• 12:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's normative problems with that when it comes to the Canadian Federation.
• 12:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there's also like an even bigger problem than that, which is that like Alberta, it's a land-locked territory.
• 12:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: They just happen to have had dinosaurs millions of years ago there, but if you're going to develop oil and gas in Alberta, it's not like Texas where you have the whole Gulf of Mexico and you're able to export all of the oil and gas from their or imported to refine it Alberta is completely landlocked.
• 12:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so the pipeline system that exists either pipes oil from Alberta south down to Texas or across the country east to west.
• 12:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the big questions right now, if Alberta is like we want another pipeline and the federal government through Mark Carney is negotiating the Danielle Smith, it says we will give you another pipeline that pipelines got to go somewhere.
• 13:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in this is the problem when you erode executive federalism in the way that it's happened, like Daniel Smith cannot say, great, good.
• 13:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're going to have a pipeline here's our proposal, because she needs not only the consent of the other provinces that it would pass through, if this is a decision that's even going to be made by a province, which is why we have a federal government, because ultimately they're the ones that would make the decision.
• 13:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: but you're also then passing through indigenous territories that have legal title over the land that they occupy and they have to be involved in the process as well.
• 13:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: You cannot legally in Canada impose these projects on people.
• 13:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so the question of indigenous sovereignty is also
• 13:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: put a bit of cold water on or maybe adding fuel to the fire in the way that Daniel Smith wants to do it to this referendum question because before the referendum question was accepted by the government a judge had just ruled that the question in and of itself should never have been allowed by elections Alberta because it violates the constitution because it did not consult with indigenous nations within the province of Alberta first nation specifically in Alberta.
• 14:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so these are the tricky, jurisdictional and constitutional questions that are all swirling around right now, and they don't matter to a guy in a pickup truck that's holding up a free Alberta sign saying, you know, Ottawa can go to hell.
• 14:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to be the independent state of Alberta.
• 14:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, the whole idea of Alberta, severed to some raises all sorts of issues.
• 14:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: I do think it's worth emphasizing.
• 14:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a kind of proxy battle for these resource issues.
• 14:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's a long bin, so I mean, I think I first encountered this idea of Alberta's separatism from the sort of top-reschool of political scientist, people like Desmortem.
• 14:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: These are very sort of like right-wing, new conservatives.
• 14:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Many of them, for American listeners, came out of the context of Leo Strowson, Alan Bloom, and that sort of Reaganite conservatism.
• 15:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they'd always sort of, there's a congregate at the political science department of the University of Calgary.
• 15:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've received a lot of money from the fossil fuel industry.
• 15:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And a lot of sort of prominent space in the sort of business press of Canada in the sort of the old financial post and the national post and the global mail.
• 15:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And from this sort of cohort, the idea is specter of Alberta separatism and it always seemed like a way of pushing the Canadian Confederation to the right.
• 15:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: That this is like a kind of like a threat that you raise as a negotiating tactic so that like Ottawa would have to listen to the concerns
• 15:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Not just of Alberta, but specifically the sort of fossil fuel industry in Alberta.
• 15:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: So is that fair to say like that's the kind of organization of roots of this sort of movement?
• 15:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that ultimately the fossil fuel industry doesn't want regulation at all and if they're able to put pressure on the Canadian Federation by helping to fund or support or whatever separation movements, then all of a sudden all we're talking about as Canadian sovereignty and Canadian federalism.
• 16:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, it was not really a coincidence that the week that the Alberta government was considering the petition and then ultimately passed the petition onto a referendum question.
• 16:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The government of Canada signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of Alberta.
• 16:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Again, as if the government of Alberta is an independent state, and that MOU is inviting Alberta to submit a new pipeline proposal to be considered as one of Mark Carney's projects
• 16:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was also new carbon pricing grid that was agreed to as part of that memorandum of understanding that the pricing is very conservative.
• 16:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is not what is necessary if we are going to actually transition off of oil and gas.
• 17:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: But this was, I mean, it was impossible to see these things happening at the same time and not see a connection between them because Mark Carney isn't just like a happenstance guy.
• 17:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, this was the week where everything was coming to a head with Alberta sovereignty and then out of out of kind of nowhere because the MOU hadn't been discussed in months
• 17:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here we have the demo you signed really good news.
• 17:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The federal government is wholly behind Alberta in its desire to have yet another new pipeline.
• 17:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: We just got like doubled the amount of capacity in the transbound pipeline, which is, I mean, also a ridiculous project that Canadians paid $38 billion for.
• 17:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: But that is the leverage to say like you know Alberta is so important this is the economic engine of Canada and if you aren't going to support us then we're going to start talking about independence even if there's literally no legal basis and then also like we have to say there's no cultural basis like there's literally no difference between
• 17:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: someone that lives on the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan, and someone that lives on the border of Alberta and British Columbia.
• 17:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those people are all the same people.
• 18:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, it's not like Quebec where you cross the border and you literally feel like you're in a different country.
• 18:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, without any linguistic, cultural basis for this discussion, there isn't really an economic basis for this discussion either, because these oil and gas companies operate in other parts of Canada as well, where they can, certainly if they own the pipelines themselves.
• 18:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, I mean, yeah, it's just distraction distraction distraction, but the problem is that distraction works, especially as media has been gutted, and there's not enough journalists to follow up on the scandals.
• 18:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the Globe and Mail, I think, has pretty much two journalists dedicated, it seems like dedicated full-time to just uncovering scandals in the government of Alberta.
• 18:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so Daniel Smith knows very well that this is going to work, and it is all to help
• 18:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: eliminate those barriers to the industry so that they can make even more money and let us not forget that they are making $60 billion extra this year because of the crisis in the straight of hormones.
• 19:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this is not a history that needs very much help.
• 19:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, I mean, there are at the current moment, especially empowered, because oil prices are very high.
• 19:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's a more, it's really interesting sort of freshness that what's going to happen if there is a resolution to the Middle East stuff, which we may not know.
• 19:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because I think, for the oil industry, the ideal, what we have now is actually the ideal price of oil, like it has to be between 180 and 110,
• 19:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like a great price because you can make money like kind of with a fist and it doesn't get so expensive then that people then cycle to move on to other forms of energy but you know whether this is like a long term or a viable thing or you know something a quick profit grab or remains questionable because
• 19:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I don't know like as the price of solar gets slower, I don't know like in normal situations whether Alberta oil is going to be worth it and is actually a good investment.
• 20:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like there's a lot of indications that the oil industry itself does not is not actually you know, every they're very happy to have the Canadian government build these pipelines.
• 20:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know about that.
• 20:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, as we're recording, just yesterday, there is a big deal announced between a state own company in Germany and an LNG project in Canada, the Xilinus project in northern British Columbia.
• 20:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, if you're not too up on Canadian geography, it's kind of hard to find a location further away from Germany than north-west British Columbia, right on the border of Alaska.
• 20:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, the Canadian press announced this, you know, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a huge, huge, huge deal.
• 20:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's going to export all this Canadian LNG to Europe, and then there's a little piece that says, Oh, but there's been no confirmed investors in the project.
• 21:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's okay.
• 21:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, now I've lived.
• 21:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that you've mentioned before, like Cernie's role in all this, and I think in some ways, although obviously he is, you know, saying that the referendum is stupid, and, you know, he's like the voice of the federal government.
• 21:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, in some ways, like, on this particular type of politics, like, suits him.
• 21:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: on a number of levels.
• 21:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like it is sort of like political pressure to do stuff that he seems inclined to do so in any case.
• 21:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's very much a sort of, you know, center-right business liberal, like a central banker who has run like two central banks at Canada and in England, has a kind of classic 1990s vision of a sort of deregulated globalized world.
• 21:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so to get like sort of pressures along this line, I was not a bad thing.
• 21:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And especially if he can like then on a, you know, national level pulls as the defender of Canadian sovereignty.
• 22:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm the one who's opposed to these crazy, out in Alberta, who wanted this story to Federation, who might be in league with Donald Trump.
• 22:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: So he gets to, you know, like, have his cake and eat it, too, right?
• 22:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, you know, we're from Riccarni.
• 22:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: How does all this fit into sort of like, Carni's political,
• 22:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, it's totally, it's basically just butter for him, you know, like he, he has already shed the only person in his caucus that, it says anything about the environment, Stephen Gibbo, just resigned like this week.
• 22:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is a guy who scaled the CN Tower to protest the oil and gas industry and like the year 2000 or 2001.
• 22:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's obviously massively chilled out
• 22:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, for Mark Carney, I mean, he's a guy that cares about what business wants, and when he was the president of Brookfield, he was seen as being this enlightened manager who wanted to use the resources of this massive investment portfolio to push some kinds of green projects.
• 23:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I know that there are a lot of people who were excited about Carnegie given his background in pushing for green projects while as the head of Brookfield or green initiatives, green funding, whatever.
• 23:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's all vanished.
• 23:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was just reading the Liberals platform from last year and their entire environmental platform is completely not anywhere any longer.
• 23:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: It does not exist.
• 23:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is a government that's talking about eliminating Canada's weather radar.
• 23:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: For example, eliminating of experimental farms, right?
• 23:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there's farms dotted all over Canada to help us understand how to grow things better in various climates in Canada, currently just eliminating all of those.
• 23:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's just like the guy does not care about the environment he cares about the economy in the narrowest terms possible.
• 23:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so,
• 24:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Having a foil and Daniel Smith, like just like Daniel Smith needs the foil of the referendum to be able to distract from what's going on in that province, Carney needs the foil and Alberta to be able to, you know, be Captain Canada in the exact same way that he was.
• 24:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: sending off the attacks of Donald Trump, which basically is what go ahead and elect it.
• 24:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's not forget that when Carnegie jumped into the race to run for Prime Minister, I think he was behind the conservative spy like, and he was double digit, a percentage points might have been as big as 20, that he seemed to be the only credible opponent to Donald Trump.
• 24:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: He can play the exact same role now with Alberta with the added benefit that the anti-Supportist sentiment and the province will vote for him or will at least not be super opposed to him.
• 24:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now Alberta, it's important to note that they're not really a big player when it comes to federal members of parliament.
• 24:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: They don't they don't have that many members of parliament.
• 24:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so the power within the House of Commons
• 24:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: tends to be is more much more concentrated in Ontario and Quebec than it is in Western Canada, which is one of the reasons why there is a sovereignty movement in Western Canada.
• 25:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: But if Carney can look like the enlightened and credible leader of the country to even the two thirds of Albertans are more who oppose this, I mean it is just so win-win for him.
• 25:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he'll even be able to use his experience in England from Brexit.
• 25:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's already been Brexit examples thrown around as saying this was an economic disaster for the UK.
• 25:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Carney was living there dealing with the fallout of all of that.
• 25:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so, no, I think that he's got to be loving this frankly.
• 25:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I don't know.
• 25:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it suits his own agenda like so perfectly and it's always I mean, he's very curious about this sort of like liberal coalition that I think pulling a show that like he's actually remarkably popular in Alberta or a liberal leader.
• 25:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is like, you know, like Alberta's a place where the liberal party has actually been like, you know,
• 25:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: long, very weak.
• 25:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And my graphically, he's perhaps worth mentioning that Cardi himself is an Albertian.
• 26:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I believe he was born in the Norse with the family.
• 26:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: He basically grew up in Alberta.
• 26:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And being a liberal, Alberta is a kind of lonely profession, but I think he's actually like, you know, gotten to the position where he's like making the liberal party credible in Alberta again.
• 26:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: more, sort of, you know, center-right coalition, and you know, like, in terms of, like, the larger polling, that's not the electorate he won with.
• 26:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: He won actually, like, in the, you know, better election with a lot of support from people who are like, quite to the left of him, a lot of former NDP voters who are, you know, freaked up by Donald Trump, who, you know, like, co-luster on Carnegie, and freaked out by the uncircinating conservative party, which is, you know, like,
• 26:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it seems like, you know, right now, you're in a pretty good position, but you can kind of see potential features in his own coalition.
• 27:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, it's such a broad coalition that includes former MVP as well as former conservatives.
• 27:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Where does that, like, you're going to have to end up like making somebody mad.
• 27:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I think that Karni is going to be riding a high for another year at least, but that there will be a catastrophic tumble.
• 27:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he's the kind of guy that I'm sure that the second that the winds are like, this is not going very well, that they'll probably be like, I'm out of here.
• 27:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because he's not a politician.
• 27:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the first time he's ever been elected.
• 27:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: He literally walked in from being a career bureaucrat in central banking to the Prime Minister of Canada.
• 27:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so this is not a coalition that's going to last,
• 27:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: very long, but there's no sign that it's going to collapse anytime soon.
• 27:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think of the carny success as being a bit similar to the success of the premiere of the province of Quebec, who also was a businessman who founded the airline company AirTransat and spent a lot of time as a member of provincial legislator who legislate your who are national assembly and so learned how to
• 28:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: learned how to be a politician.
• 28:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: But his coalition was very similar to parties, which is very much pro business.
• 28:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not exactly left-wing or right-wing, because the liberals had just been empowered, and they were very right-wing, and the cat was just, that's his party, was just slightly to the left of that of the liberals, and of course that didn't last.
• 28:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: They became quite to the right.
• 28:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in that situation, Lago was quite popular for one term, and then he had a catastrophic collapse.
• 28:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I kind of think that a similar force is going to be operating on Carney when whatever this contradiction can no longer hold actually falls apart.
• 28:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think the contradiction can survive as long as there's an effective foil.
• 28:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: So like there's like Trump, and there's Daniel Smith, and Alberta separatism.
• 28:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: But like absent that foil is hard to see like how this is a core in politics.
• 28:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think, you know, but having said that,
• 28:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think this is something that perhaps the listeners, especially outside of Canada might not be aware of.
• 29:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: But he's running like a very right-wing government that has like seeded like all sorts of ground that even like earlier the broke our rumors had kept on to him.
• 29:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: So can we say something about that?
• 29:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah.
• 29:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's actually stunning how right-wing his government is.
• 29:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's literally not one thing you can point to to say, oh, would at least he's done this.
• 29:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was good for these people.
• 29:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: He has, he came in at a time where Canada was part of this ridiculous discussion with a NATO about increasing Canadian spending on its defense and military up to 2%.
• 29:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Carney is now like,
• 29:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: whole hog in for five percent of our national spending should be spent on the military.
• 29:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: For Americans that might not sound like very much, I mean, it's more than elementary and secondary education spending entirely in the private in the country.
• 29:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we're not a country that has ever spent this kind of money on our military.
• 29:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like it's just not part of the Canadian economy.
• 29:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not really part of Canadian culture either.
• 29:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, things are not militarized here
• 30:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: the Labor Day parade in New York City and being stunned at how militarized the Labor Day parade was.
• 30:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: You don't see that kind of thing in Canada.
• 30:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: But Carney has come in and is like, okay, we're just going to, it's going to be open season on spending.
• 30:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so they're pulling 60 billion dollars out of the federal government in services and they're trying to increase
• 30:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: the spending on the military by 300% by tripling it in a relatively short period of time.
• 30:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so the way that they're doing this is they're throwing enormous sums of money around to purchase like we've heard new fighter jets, new submarines, retrofit or rebuild bases and new capabilities, spending lots of money integrating, you know, northern and Arctic security systems with the United States.
• 30:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then also increasing militarization, increasing the number of people at the border, increasing number of people that work for the world, Canadian amounts of police.
• 30:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's, it's actually stunning how...
• 31:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: quickly this has happened and how frankly, how violently, if Carny is the elite, and he is, how violently the elites are looking at the Canadian population and saying, we need to stop them from acting out.
• 31:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Evidence of that is everywhere.
• 31:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, there's a meeting on right now that Laura just defense conference in Canada called Cansec.
• 31:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Cansec is not a not allowing journalists who are critical of militarization to cover it this year, which is never happened before
• 31:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: We've seen anti war protests be subject to pre-don raids, which is ridiculous, and now you know, there's this big big hub of happening because there was Netanyahu Trump and Ben Gavir refugees that were put in nooses and carried around downtown Montreal this past week.
• 31:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the entire liberal establishment is saying that this is anti-Semitic and this needs to be criminalized.
• 31:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, Karni is this kind of the sleeper guy that's allowing his proxies to whip up this kind of rhetoric.
• 32:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then pretty happily put the pieces in place to be able to make sure that the rhetoric becomes realized in this increased surveillance repression state, making sure that we're not actually able to fight back against.
• 32:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: his policies.
• 32:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: This guy is really slick.
• 32:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's very, very smart.
• 32:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it doesn't sound like he tolerates stupidity around him.
• 32:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like he's very like iron fisted around like the people he works with within the Prime Minister's office, which is very, very different than Justin Trudeau obviously.
• 32:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: and he also knew people to a point like one of the particularities of the Canadian system it's funny I was just having dinner with some friends in Quebec and I was talking about the book that I'm writing and I was like oh my god our democracies in such a bad state and they said well you know Lisa's not as bad as he noticed states and it's like oh
• 32:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is so much worse than the United States, because over 40 years, power in our three branches of government has become so centralized in the Prime Minister's office.
• 33:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Prime Minister's office appoints the cabinet, gives the cabinet their marching orders, is able to punish cabinet ministers in certain ways.
• 33:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: all the people who are back ventures want to get into cabinet, they're disciplined by the ability that the Prime Minister has to appoint people.
• 33:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The guy appoints hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of his of his own people to positions all across the bureaucracy and the political institutions in Canada.
• 33:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: But used by someone like Justin Trudeau, it's a little bit incoherent, it doesn't necessarily always row in the same direction, but used by a guy like Karni who knows how to run of bureaucracy.
• 33:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, this is really dangerous stuff.
• 33:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: We are in a very strange and dangerous time right now in Canada.
• 33:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: uh... you know absolutely uh... at this you are as you mentioned you were working on a book that that would be a good note to sort of like an article as you think it's the book of your work at it is relevant to this so what is this uh... book that we can expect for you yeah so this book is the third in a series called canada in decline and the first two books uh... we're about the social safety net in the control of corporations uh... the control of corporations have over the Canadian economy in politics
• 34:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: the natural third book, of course, is then a book on democracy.
• 34:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so this will be out in a year, and I'm looking at how democratic is Canada really and discovering, uh, uh, not very deep.
• 34:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that'll absolutely.
• 34:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's a interesting thing, because it's a long-standing view on interflictal science, like Canadians, are more differential than Americans.
• 34:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a sort of, you know, a loyalist tradition.
• 34:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you know, like, I think that might have had some truths in the past, but as I think over the last 30 or 40 years, we've actually seen a lot of, you know, sort of popular protests in Canada.
• 34:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And on all sorts of fronts on Serantai War, still movement, but also protests on the right on the vaccine issue.
• 35:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, I wonder if we maybe conceptualize Karni, because he does have that sort of like, these sort of like Tori tendencies, is like this is the kind of like elite turned to like pushback against the sort of any possibility of mass politics in Canada.
• 35:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: So absolutely, and I think that like it's, I don't know if Canadians are more deferential, but like literally written into our constitution is this mantra that has always set aside from the Americans, which is that the Canadian government must operate in the peace order and good government of the country.
• 35:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right.
• 35:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that that, you know, the judge has used that to make decisions, like, and have used that to make decisions for 150, 60 years now.
• 35:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like Canadians are ordered that they want peace at kind of all costs, and they want to see good governance.
• 35:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: They want good governance.
• 35:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And and all of this is always an opposition to United States.
• 35:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right.
• 35:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that like to bring it back to the whole question of Alberta sovereignty.
• 35:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Canadians, whether we're talking about Canadians whose parents or grandparents or great grandparents had to decide between Canada and the United States and for whatever reason they immigrated to Canada and not the United States, whether it's people who left the United States to come to Canada or Canadians who went down to the United States, everything about Canada and our identity and our economy has evolved in opposition to the United States.
• 36:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: which is why when a Canadian hears that the United States might want to invade us, people lose their minds.
• 36:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because it's like, this has been an issue for 250 years.
• 36:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Benjamin Franklin invaded Canada.
• 36:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Americans held Montreal for five months at the time of the American Revolution.
• 36:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, we get it.
• 36:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: There has always been a threat of invasion.
• 36:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: But this Canadian identity was really solidified in the 1800s and has always continued in God and even more hard in the 1900s and the 2000s of a true identity that is not American.
• 36:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The sovrentists in Alberta are working with far-right, maga, American free shows.
• 37:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there is, see, Benin, and there is some talk about, are they really talking about Alberta's sovereignty, or are they actually talking about why you become a state of the United States?
• 37:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's a different thing.
• 37:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the reason why they can't say that they want to become a state of the United States is because that would absolutely kill this.
• 37:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's no way that anyone would support that, even probably would cut this the support for an independent Alberta in half right on its own.
• 37:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, it is really important to look at Canadian politics as we are not bombastic, we are not violent or not militaristic like the United States.
• 37:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right.
• 37:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're not capitalist like the United States.
• 37:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that embeds itself in every inch of the Canadian psyche.
• 37:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's a problem, actually, because it's not really good enough to design your, define yourself as who you are not.
• 37:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: But that, but growing in that opposition to how things have happened in the United States really does explain why Canadians are, are more differential.
• 37:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: do believe that we have more democracy, but then actually look at the power of the Prime Minister's office, and it's like, if Trump had the power that Carney had, I mean, it would be a fundamental shift in the United States, like the likes of which Americans couldn't even imagine.
• 38:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Carney knows this country, though.
• 38:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, his father was a principal at a residential school, and in Indian residential school,
• 38:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this guy understands this country's super, super well.
• 38:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: So he's not going to be doing anything that looks bombastic.
• 38:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's all going to be very quiet.
• 38:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And just like his negotiations with Daniel Smith, it'll be behind closed doors.
• 38:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And all Canadians will see will be the signed document, which is the result of whatever happened that we are not privy to.
• 38:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, no, I think that's a very dark portrait, but I think an accurate one.
• 38:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: So what I thank Nora once again for being on the foreground.
• 38:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can listen to more of her analysis on her regular podcast.
• 38:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Nora and Sandy talk politics, which I'll link to in the show notes.
• 38:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, again, thank you.
• 38:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.