Speaker 1: You know, this is another reason why Canada the United
States can't unify, because you know you have these problems right,
it's incompatible technical issues. Ask not what your country can
do for you, Ask what you can do for your country.
Mister garbach Off, tear down this wall.
Speaker 2: It's the Ricochet Podcast. I'm James Willings, joined by Steven
Hayward and we're going to be talking to ezra Levant
about what oh Canada, so let's ever sells a podcast.
Speaker 3: This may be my last day here in this office,
but I will always be boldly and unapologetically Canadian. My
only ask is that no matter what the world throws
at us, you always be the same.
Speaker 4: Why are you running away from simple questions? Just answer
a question? If you talked to President Trump yet, and
I pushed me, when was the last time you answered
a question that you didn't know what was coming.
Speaker 2: Welcome everybody, It's the Ricochet Podcast. To number seven, one
hundred and thirty two. I'm James Lyleax in a beautiful
proto spring day in Minneapolis. I'm joined by Stephen Heywood
in California. I presume, unless, of course, you're off in
Bruges or Peru or somewhere, you parapatetic fellow.
Speaker 1: No, I'm at home today and where it's pouring rain,
so you have better weather than I do.
Speaker 2: That's good. Charles W. Cook is not with us due
to a joyous family occasion, So in his absence we
will attempt to say things in that accent that somehow,
that somehow makes us sound smarter than we actually are.
And that's the only thing I envy Charlie four, among
many other things, like the fact that he's in Florida
and the fact that well he doesn't have to confront
perhaps what we are going to confront right now today. Stephen.
I'm almost tempted to say that I could just make
something up about what's being proposed, or what's happening, or
what's being criticized, and by the time this gets out,
and by the time next week happens, it'll be true.
It will have happened. The continue blizzard of stuff that
follows from this administration. One of the things that interested
me last week is the proposal to cut taxes for
anybody who's making under one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Now,
I support this, but I should also know that I
am the author of How to Make exactly one hundred
and forty nine and ninety nine dollars a year. So
I kind of have a vested interest in this, But
on another level, I do not. I kind of want
everybody to pay taxes, and I would think that in
your striking while the iron is hot mode here, this
would be a great time to say, you know what,
we're going to abolish the entire irs. We're going to
have a flat rate tax, right, and everybody's just going
to fill out a postcard and that's that. Let's say, no,
I'm in complete agreement. We don't want we don't We've
already skewed the income tax to the upper brackets already,
a contrary to what you hear repeatedly from Elizabeth warrens
of the world. And you do want people to have
a stake in the government. I've long thought that even
low income people should pay a little bit so they
have skin in the game. And so no, it's going
the wrong direction to do it that way. And yes,
the flat tax is the right solution. The usual complaints
about the fat fact the flat tax, of course, is
you mean to say that Warren Buffett would pay the
same rate as his secretary, to which I would say, yes,
that's precisely and exactly what I have to say, because
that seems to me in our democracy where we're searching
for equality, I know that equities replaced equality would still
bear me out. I'm an old guy. It would seem
to be that there's something fundamentally unfair about a series
of laws that are skewed adjusted and according to how
much money make or property you have. I've always wondered
exactly how they got the constitutionality of a progressive income
tax passed the Supreme Court? Can you explain? I know nothing,
I know nothing, So could you tell me exactly how
that happened? Well, they did.
Speaker 1: They required a constitutional amendment because Congress did pass as
an income tax in the eighteen nineties and the Supreme
Court struck it down for violating the so called direct
tax clause of Article one. It's a little weird what
a direct tax means, but in practice it meant that
you could not do direct taxes on individuals without doing
a portioning it according to population by state. A lot
of reasons why they did that, and it's kind of strange,
but so the tax incomes directly required the sixteenth Amendment. Now,
the amendment says nothing about the progressivity of the rates.
If you go back and look at the debates in Congress,
some people said, well, first of all, the opponents said, oh,
it would be a very modest tax on just the
very high upper income people. You know, start five percent.
Most people won't pay it, which they didn't for decades.
And the alarmist said, you know, we don't trust you.
We think the rate might get as high as ten
percent someday. Right, So that's how I got it. But yeah,
but the Buffet thing. Look, if you say the same
rate as his secretary, Harry, if he makes ten times
the amount of a secretary, he'll pay ten times a tax. Now,
the odd thing about this proposal is, you know, Buffett's
a strange guy. He takes a very tiny salary from
Berkshire Hathaway. I think it might even be one hundred
and fifty thousand dollars, and he's, you know, he always
just let's just the value of his company is this
sort of main compensation which is not taxed until he
sells it. So I'm tempted to say the opponents of
this should say, somebody wants tax break for Democrat billionaires
like Warren Buffett, just for the confusion in Mayhem, it
would cause.
Speaker 2: The other tax that people grove about is the consumption tax. Yeah,
and that we get away do it with the iris
entirely and fund the government by tariffs and or consumption taxes.
And I've heard that argument back and forth, and I'm
always you know, I hear the argument and I say,
you know what, there's a lot of sense to that.
There really is of the counter argument and say, you
know what, there's a lot of sense to that too.
I'm not crazy about a consumption tax for a variety
of reasons. I don't like I mean, it strikes me
like the VAT or something gets something gets built in
and ends up creeping its way into every single aspect
of a product's construction manufacturer until eventually the price of
everything goes up. And you can say, well, yeah, I
mean the price of everything would go up, but you
you know, need to have more money because you wouldn't
be taxed at this user, at this this exor rate
by the federal government. And I just there's just something
about the absolute simplicity of a flat tax and the
ability and the idea that you could just like do
your taxes in a trice without really thinking. Because here's
the thing. Everybody knows this. You do your taxes right,
you send them in and then if you get them wrong,
the government will tell you what you got wrong. And
I always every April fifteenth, as I mailing it away
and or you know, March, when I'm dropping it off
with the tax preparers, I always say, look, if they
know what I owe, why don't they just tell me?
Why do I have to go through this whole thing?
And then bite my nails out of fear that I've
got something? So maybe become the fifteenth. We may talk
about that more as the culture, but this is really
the did you ever see?
Speaker 1: Of course he's passed away now, but Don Rumsfeld used
to send in a letter to the IRS with his
tax return every year saying, here's my tax return. I've
signed it like you require, but I cannot vouch for
the accuracy of it because no one can because you
call the By the way people have done this, you
call the IRS a helpline and if you get through,
they'll tell you one thing. You call it again and
get through, you might get a different thing. You can't
even get consistent guidance from the irs. But I'll say
this about the consumption tax. My fear is that we
would get both right, We'll end up in the income tax,
and I think that's what the left really wants. Yeah,
the value added tax. The problem with it is it's
a hidden cost. It's usually twenty percent or more mutually
a sales tax.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: I have thought once in a while, as a theoretical
or a talking point, that maybe we ought to there's
some reasons why consumption tax is a better tax, for
tax efficiency reasons and so forth. But I like the
idea a little bit in theory because it would connect
the cost of government to all citizens. And if citizens
were actually made to pay for all the government they get,
they might want less of it. So my point is
is that there's a small window. Maybe, and listeners will
tell me I'm out of my mind, and they're probably
right that the case for broader based consumption taxes on
everybody would actually change the body politic in favor of
much less spending. Maybe that's too optimistic.
Speaker 2: I think it is too optimistic because a lot of
people just won't make that connection, and they won't figure
out and besides, they like what they're getting. I mean,
look exactly how we've seen about twenty thirty forty percent
of the population absolutely shriek because DOGE has gone and
taken away and demolished one agency, one agency. Right, I
was rooting today, I mean Columbia. Do you think Columbia
is going to get its four hundred million back this
year or because they've made a whole bunch of changes,
shall we say, they've they sort of retrospectively decided that
they acted poorly before when it came to the protests,
and now they're cleaning house because apparently the prospect of
hanging has concentrated in their mind wonderfully. Do you think
they'll get their money back? I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think here we want to borrow the old Reagan
slogan from the Lake Cold War Trust, but verify. I
want to make sure they go through with the expulsions,
that they go through with enforcing new standards including no
one protesters can wear masks on campus and so forth,
And so I think you want to keep the pressure
on and actually build the pressure. I mean, look the
problem with Columbia, and I think they've already put their
middle Eastern Studies program in receivership. The problem with Columbia
these other places, as in as Stepman put it, lives
there in Manhattan, is that these universities have become madrasas
I mean almost literally so in these Middle East Studies
Department and some college presidents are going to have to
wake up and say, the problem is not just our
rules of enforcement on protests, it's the stuff we're teaching
and the faculty we're hiring, and they need to get
rid of them wholesale. Well.
Speaker 2: Political had a headline yesterday that said a Republican have
long hated universities and now finally there's their chance to
show that by dismantling them, which I don't know. It
brings to mind the old of Dodge that the right
knows the arguments of the left, but the left does
not know the artright the right. I mean, yes, I
mean we swim in a culture where it's inevitable that
we're going to hear the arguments of the other side,
but they don't, so let me explain it to them.
It is not that we are a bunch of bou
boisie idiots who don't want none of that book learning
and think everything can be found in the good book
and perhaps at the you know, the at the foot
of your pappy telling you some folk wisdom from six
generations ago. No, that's that's not in at all. We
actually are quite fond of history and culture and great
art and great literature and science and the rest of it.
The problem is that all of these things have been
politicized out of recognition by the people who made the
long march through the institutions. We would be very happy
if the if the English Literature Department was concerned with, oh,
I don't know, English literature as opposed to find the
latest example of wok re to trot out some gender
queer notion of this that or the other, some marginalized experience.
I mean, yeah, you could have that in there, you
can require part of it. But if you're telling me
that a sort of ideological conformity has not taken over
the universities in the arts, in the science and in
the sciences, then you're just not paying attention. Let me
send you some links. So that's it. It's not that
it's not that the right hates book learning and smart
folk and feels inferior to them. No, it's the fact
that this anti civilizational, anti Western civilization mindset seems to
have taken place. And uh and frankly, it's no good,
no do like it, and we're sick of it.
Speaker 1: Oh no, you're absolutely right. I could go on way
too long about this. I'll just say that the rotten
humanities is just it's unbelievable. And then you notice here
and there, And I know a lot about this because
i'm you know, I'm in the higher education world most
of the week. You will find that where there is
a good, great books program that teaches the humanities and
philosophy and history the old fashioned way. Often you'll find
these little programs tucked away at major liberal universities.
Speaker 2: They're wildly popular with.
Speaker 1: Students because they're not teaching jargon and woke ideologies and
all that kind of nonsense.
Speaker 2: They teach it the old fashioned way.
Speaker 1: Let's read Shakespeare instead of implying our own theories about
the social order today and say that, oh, Shakespeare was
a closet gay with father issue, whatever the heck, some
Freudian thing right that was popular for a while. Let's
just read him and let him speak to us directly,
and then talk about it like in normal human beings
that's done so little. But on the other hand, like
I say, they're very popular when you do it that way,
and more universities should get a clue.
Speaker 2: Absolutely so.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 2: The problem is, of course, when they're losing all this
money in John Hopkins I think got eight hundred million,
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to the podcast From the Great North. As a Rule
Evant co founder and CEO of Rebel News, and he's
an author of many books, including the just published Deal
of the Century, the America First plan for Canada's oil sands. Welcome, Ezra,
how you doing great?
Speaker 4: You know today the new Canadian Prime Minister was just
sworn in about an hour ago, and he's Trudeau two
point zero. In fact, he's worse than Trudeau. But he's
also a little bit smarter than Trudeau. So that's bad news.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm here in Minnesota, which is practically Canada, and
I'm afraid he's gonna make rumbling noises about annexing us
and being the next province. But tell us more about
this guy. He's come out of nowhere, and we here
in the States on the conservative side, we were poised
to see Pierre Pounds and replace Justin but now it
seems as if the conservative movement in Canada is on
the back foot thanks to a resurgence of nationalism. Economic nationalis.
Tell us more about this new guy and what you
expect out of him.
Speaker 4: Sure, his name is Mark Carney, and he's been out
of Canada for decades. He was the head of the
Bank of Canada, which would be like our federal Reserve.
But then he went and he became the head of
the Bank of England, which is sort of weird. For
a Canadian and he's been away from Canada ever since.
He has three passports now. He's a globalist in the
true sense of the term. He was on the board
of the World Economic Forum in Davos, that sort of
crypto government. He made a gazillion dollars as an oligarch.
He was the chair of Brookfield Asset Management, which is
like a mini Blackrock. And there's nothing wrong with being
a big shot investor at all, except for like Blackrock,
Brookfield had an eesg obsession, so they had all these
assets under management, and they basically compelled they ordered, They
demanded that any company they invest their investors' money in
subscribed to woke dei methodology, including a huge emphasis on
net zero anti energy ideology. He literally said he was
a fan of Greta Tunberg. This is supposedly a serious
global policy maker and investment manager, saying he was guided
by Greta Tunberg. He has come back to Canada. I
don't think he actually lives in Canada. His wife lives
and works in New York. Brookfield Asset Management just moved
to New York. He's got three passports and again, I listen,
there are people who fly around the world all the time.
That's great, but they don't generally say I now want
my next thing to be Prime Minister of Canada. And
it happened immediately. Let me just give you one last detail.
Justin Trudeau was a deeply unpopular prime minister after nine
years of scandals. So his party basically said we're going
to get rid of you, and you can do that
in a parliamentary system through what's called a vote of
non confidence. So all the MPs would gather in the Parliament,
they would be a vote, and the government would fall
and they would be an election. The writing was on
the wall. He was doomed. So the minute before that
could happen, he ran to what's called the Governor General,
who is the King's representative in Canada, and said, please
dissolve the parliament immediately. Lock the doors immediately, and the
King's Governor General agreed. It would be like on the
eve of a vote to impeach a president if the
president somehow managed to lock all the doors to Congress
and just nan, I'm not letting you in. So for
three months Trudeau governed without parliament. In fact, parliament has
still not been recalled, and in this interregnum, the Liberal
Party had its leadership vote. But here's where it gets
super crazy. Four hundred thousand people signed up for the
Liberal Party in basically a primary, but two hundred and
fifty thousand of those votes were disqualified and we have
no explanation of why. And of the one hundred and
fifty thousand who voted, they allowed children as young as
fourteen to vote, and they allowed foreign nationals to vote
as long as they were permanent residents. So most people
who were registered were not allowed, and amongst those allowed
were children and foreign nationals. And I won't get into
other bizarre things people being excluded. And anyhow, Mark Carney
has been installed, selected, appointed, parachuted in I don't know
what words you would use. He's not even a member
of Parliament, which I can't even remember the last time
that happened. We have a Prime Minister who is not
allowed to sit in the Parliament because he hasn't doesn't
have a seat. I think that he hasn't even I
would be surprised if he's even been to every Canadian province.
We have just had a kind of soft coup and
final detail before I corkt. It's just it's incredible. In
recent elections, the Chinese Communist Party has had an exerted
effort to influence local elections in Canada. And this isn't
a rumor. This has been reported by Ceases. That's our
CIA and the Mounties, that's our FBI. They targeted eleven
districts and they really tried to destabilize those and they
bust in voters like it was quite an operation. And
in we had a judicial inquiry about this, and the
Chinese Communists have a huge interest in manipulating Canadian democracy.
And so all of a sudden, I look at those
four hundred thousand votes in the quarter million that were nuked,
and it was an all online voting process. Of course
it could be hacked. You have an illegitimate prime minister
selected illegitimately, when there's an illegitimate prorogation and dissolution in
the House. We are in the worst of times now.
There is a great Conservative leader in canadaamed Pierre Paul
of Unfortunately Donald Trump yank in the chain of Trudeau
and saying I want to annex you, I want to
make you the fifty first state that has hurt the
pride of a lot of Canadians who have recoiled against it.
So the unintended consequence of mocking Trudeau has been to
pump up the Liberals. Anyways, that's my update. Sorry for
going on for so long. That's the state of affairs
in Canada.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's fascinating and appalling. And what I question is
why this guy. I mean, if you have this cabal
that is going to foist upon the country somebody that's
going to do their bidding exactly, wouldn't you at least
find somebody malleably who could dress up in the raiment
of Canada and politics and patriotism and the rest of
it and make him sound like he's one of the people,
as opposed to finding somebody who is just a cardboard
cutout cliche of the transnational globalism. I mean, it's so blatant.
I don't get why it was in.
Speaker 4: Well, he's campaigning as Captain Canada.
Speaker 2: In two ways.
Speaker 4: He is saying accurately that he was the head of
the Bank of Canada a couple of decades ago. That's true,
so he can claim, well, I worked for Canada, I
helped us guide us through economic storms. That's what he's saying.
And because Donald Trump is you know, Trump's got that banter,
He's got that Manhattan, you know style nicknaming people. Let
you know, he even did it to people who are
now his allies and friends. Little Marco Rubio, Lion, Ted Cruz,
Now these people are his allies. Trump's got that style
which is a little harsh to the Canadian ear, which
is maybe a little bit sensitive. And so when you
say to someone, hey, join the United States and be
a state, I mean for some people, they as a
thought exercise, they say, oh, that's a good idea. We'd
be wealthier, we'd be freer, we'd have an army. But
for many other people, it would be like going up
to a married woman and saying, ditch your husband and
run off with me. So it's an indecent proposal of sorts.
I mean, I guess if someone was contemplating a divorce,
or if they weren't married yet, if they would treat
it as a real proposal. But I think that's how
it landed emotionally, as a lot of Canadians say, how
dare you? Even though we have our flaws, we're not
just going to join you. And I know it was banter,
and I know it was Trump just yanking the chain
of Trudeau, but I think that that gave the Liberal
Party a new story to tell. We are the defenders
of Canada. Anyone who's not with us is an American shill.
And you're not for Trump, are you? Because Pierre Paul of,
the Conservative Leader of Canada, had a twenty point lead
over the Liberals. Now maybe it's a ten point lead.
I've seen some polls that put the Liberals ahead because
the Liberals are saying, we're captain Canada. If you're not
for us, you're a trader, they use that word, and
we must unite to stop the evil Trump. Wouldn't you
rather if you're a left wing Canadian, wouldn't you rather
run against Trump than run against a popular conservative Canadian?
So that's the situation in Canada.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, Ezra, it's Steve Hayward out in California, and
I feel you're pain because we suffer under our version
of Justin Trudeau in the form of Gavin Newsom.
Speaker 2: But the less said about that, the better.
Speaker 4: Look.
Speaker 2: I want to turn to your new book.
Speaker 1: I want to talk a bit about this fifty first
state business, but I want to work into it in
a roundabout way through your new book, A Deal the
Century about Canada's oil sands. Can you give us a
thumbnail sketch of what you're on about here? And then
I got a follow up question about whether it's a
good idea depending on this and that, So go ahead.
Speaker 4: Sure. I don't think all America. I don't think most
Americans would know that the third largest oil reserve country
in the world, after Saudi Radio and Venezuela is Canada.
And it's just, you know, a couple hundred miles north
of Montana in my home province of Alberta. And it's
sort of a new fangled technology. It's oil sand. So
it's literally sandy oil. So how did you get the
oil separated from the sand? It took them a while
to figure that out, but when they cracked that secret
about twenty five years ago, wow, it just And so
today Canada is the number one source of oil imports
into America, which is a wonderful thing because it's displacing
conflict oil from opek. I like to call the oil
sands ethical oil. If I was thinking, yes, if I
was thinking like a liberal, what are the ethics of oil? Well,
are you environmentally responsible, that's a good one. Do you
take the proceeds from your oil and you doing good
things with it? Or did you spend it on terrorism
and the military. That's a good question to ask Qatar
or Russia. Right, are you respectful of workers? Do you
pay them? Well, it's a good question to ask the
Petro states in the Gulf. And finally, do you respect
civil liberties? Canada is one of the few ethical oil
producers in the world, compared to the conflict oil of Opec. Now,
that's an argument that might win over some liberals, but
if you're in America first Republican, I think there's a
different way to phrase it. And the reason I'm talking
about oil is this. Donald Trump has repeatedly said we
have a huge trade deficit with Canada. That ain't fair. Well,
the reason there's that huge trade deficit is because of
the oil. And if you weren't buying Canadian oil, you'd
be buying it from Venezuela and Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, god forbid,
I ran none of those places are better options. So
Trump wants to put a tariff on the oil. Sized
trouble is, you know, you put a tariff on a
Honda factory in Mexico. You can move the Honda factory
to the States and you've got what Trump likes, American jobs,
American factory in the American market. But you can't. The
tariff is not going to move the oil. So it's
not going to get up and move down to the States.
So what's happening is that tariff and Trump has proposed
to ten percent tariff on oil. Well, all that's going
to do is add ten percent to the price of
the oil that is the feedstock for these American refineries.
One more thing about that American about that oil sense
who's actually in Alberta developing the oil scents.
Speaker 2: It's Americans.
Speaker 4: Imperial Oil that's the local subsidiary of Exxonomobile and Canadian companies.
Guess who owns them, Big US pension fund. So you
got Americans producing the oil, Americans refining the oil. American
American American map. The USMCA gives America preferential access. It's
as American as can be. Terriffing. It doesn't do any
of your America first ideas. So here was my pitch,
and I call it deal of the century. And that's
this new book I wrote, why do I call it
deal of the century? Because Trump thinks like a real
estate man. He says he wants to acquire Greenland. I
can see why if you look at the map. He's
talking about Panama. That's smart. Well, Canada is the oil
sands is a bigger deal than either of those times
ten because there's one hundred and seventy billion barrels of
ethical oil just sitting there. And I did the math.
If you double the production, double the annual production of
the oil sands, which Alberta, their premier, says she wants
to do. And if America bought that, it would displace
all of the OPEC oil that America buys. And what's
the value of that fifty years at approximately seventy seventy
five bucks of barrels? A little bit less than that.
Now that's a thirteen trillion dollar deal. But the best
part is America is no longer beholden to the Persian Gulf.
Speaker 2: Did you know that the.
Speaker 4: Fifth Fleet, the United States fifth Fleet, costs about fifty
billion dollars a year just to patrol the Persian Sea. Lings,
It's like, it's like you have agreed to be the
fifty billion dollar year Brinks truck to let the Saudis
and the Bahrainis and the Amoradis sell their oil. You're
the global cop if you didn't have to do that,
Like you could still mess around in the Middle East
if you want to, but now you don't have to.
Cazerill's coming down through the Keystone XL pipeline and others.
So here's the big win, and I'm trying to phrase
it as an America first thing right Number one, You
get all the good stuff from Canada without having to
have the side effects. You don't need a huge Democrat
voting electoral college. You know, you don't need the French
bilingualist like you want to acquire Canada, really you want
another Democrat, you know, two more Democrat cenaters. I don't
think you do. How about take the good stuff and
when and if you're really going to pay Canada ten
thirteen whatever trillion dollars over fifty years, Well, now you
got something to trade. And now you can say, hey, Canada,
you got to reinvest in your military. Now you got
to defend the ARC to with us. You got to
get those f thirty fives going. No more messing around
and by the way, can you let our dairy in
which Canadians would want It would lower prices. And by
the way, how come we can't have American banks on
your main streets offering mortgages. You're not forced to get
a mortgage from an American bank, but can we please
at least be allowed to sell them. So Trump's demands
are actually reasonable. And if Trump says, I'll buy all
your oil. And by the way, I hope Trump likes
this idea because you know who's been sniffing around the
albert oil.
Speaker 2: Sands, well, the Chinese, right, the Chinese.
Speaker 4: In fact, they actually bought an oil sands company about
fifteen years ago. They would buy it all if they could.
Speaker 2: That's right, I think. So I love the idea.
Speaker 1: I've been following the oil sands story for a long
time and I'm sure, as you know, if there's any
kind of oil.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you think environmentalists hate.
Speaker 1: Fracking, they really hate the oil sands in Canada. And
never mind of what they think about as accurate or not,
that doesn't matter. Would it has the bonus of freaking
them out and outraging them even more. But this is
an argument against making Canada the fifty first state. If
I'm Alberta and I'm the oil sands owners, the last
thing I want is to be under the regulatory jurisdiction
of the United States, because actually, you know, Alberta has
a much more permissive regulatory structure, which is why the
industry has flourished there. So I mean, Alberta has always
struck me as the Texas of Canada, the one province
that might really like to join the United States, except
that R. E. P A, even under Trump, would screw
it all up. So that's one argument against the union idea. Anyway,
I love the idea. You said one other thing, though,
that's on my mind, which is quite aside from the
merits of integrating. What's the old Bernard Shaw line at
American England or two nations divided by a common language.
That's just as true of Canada, not so much, you know,
a in a boot butt of the cultural differences are
much larger than a lot of people. And as you
point out, you're likely to get two Democratic senators if
it was just one state, but also forty houseeed or
something like that, because Canada is the size of Californian
population wise. And I'm looking at this thinking just the
politics of it are terrible from a Republican point of view.
Speaker 2: I don't know what Trump is thinking.
Speaker 4: Well I know what Trump was thinking because Senator Marco
Rubio told us he told Captain Herridge, if I'm saying
her name right, yeah, she asked him where did this
whole Canada fifty first state thing come from? And Marco
Rubio said this. He said, when Justin Trudeau flew down
to Mara Lago a couple months ago, Trump asked Trudeau,
what would happen if we zeroed out our trade deficit?
And Trudeau, who's sort of stupid and has never negotiated
anything in his life, blurted out, well, that would be
the end of Canada. If you watch that interview between
Marco Rubio and Catherine Herridge, Rubio, I mean, it was
very plausible the way he described it. Trump said, what
happens if we zero things out? Trudeau said, it's the
end of Canada, which is a crazy thing to say.
First of all, it's not true. Second of all, what
you've just told Trump is your existential dread of what
could happen, and now he knows where to poke you like,
this is the master of giving people mean nicknames. So
he Trump immediately said, oh, well, you should become the
fifty first state. And Trudeau's face I could just imagine
when he realized the weapony. So that's where it came from.
It's a taunt. It's like little rocket Man, or it's
like any of his other tweets, and Trump is here's
I re read parts of Art of the Deal, and
I really recommend that to people if you want to
understand what Trump's doing with these tariffs. He talks about hyperbole,
he talks about knocking the other guy off balance, and
of course that's what he's doing. But here's what Trump,
I think is missing. Trump is used to real estate
deals where the other side wants it badly, and Trump
knows you've got to be able to walk away. That's
half of your strength. But what happens, and this goes
back to your very first question to me, what happens
when the guy on the other side, the guy on
the Canadian side, has the moral hazard of wanting the
negotiation to fail. In fact, a successful negotiation between the
Liberals in Canada and Trump would be terrible for the
Liberals because then you would remove the demon, the risk,
the ogre, the threat. There is no deal that Trump
could offer the Liberals that they would accept. They flipped
the tables on them because they need to fight against them.
In fact, perversely, the more damaging to Canada the fight is,
the more the Liberals can say, you see, and by
the way, that also hides their own economic mismanagement. So
Trump thinks he's in a deal where the other guy
has no cards. He uses that phrase a lot. Hey Zelenski,
you have no cards. And it's true, it's true, it's true.
But what happens if the other guy has a weird strategy,
a comic Kazi strategy that says, I want Trump to
smash Canada like a bowl of eggs because I need
that victim hood to run and beat this Pierre Poulv.
That's what I don't think Trump quite grocks, because I
don't think he pays very close attention to Canada, and
he has actually, contrary to his own instincts, strengthened the
Liberals up here.
Speaker 2: I'm something of an expert on Canada myself, because twice
a year in Cancun and I have conversations with people
from Canada. I love to go down there, and what
a cross section there they are. I mean, I've really
had fascinating conversations about economies in Canada. But one of
the things that people keep avoiding and dancing around, perhaps
because they're a Canadian, is the subject of demographic shifts
and change in Canada. And I don't mean to put
a bowl around Steve's questions about the oil, but we
have you for a limited time, and I am curious
exactly as to how Canada is or not with what
some perceived to be a shift and it's demographic makeup,
or if it's just no big thing and everybody's whistling
and moving along and heal Canada and use your maple
syrup and whatever.
Speaker 4: That is, in my opinion, the number one issue in Canada.
Justin Trudeau has raised the immigration and temporary migrant workers
temporary students to two million people per year legally and proportionately,
that would be like eighteen million a year in the US.
That's just the legal that's not even illegal. And that's
the problem we have is and if you come to Toronto,
you'll say, am I in Toronto? There are four point
nine million people in our country on temporary permits that
expire at the end of this year. That's more than
ten percent of the population. You can see it with
your eyes. Every issue is exacerbated. Obviously, housing prices, especially
in the big cities, are beyond the reach of ordinary people.
The average home in Toronto and Montreal is more than
one million dollars. Inflation of other goods, of course, energy costs.
We've got a carbon tax. And of course what happens
when you bring in hundreds of thousands of migrant workers,
you depress wages. So Canadians have wages being depressed, housing
prices being inflated, inflation everywhere. There's one million foreign nationals
who claim to be international students. There aren't even one
million Canadian students in university. There are more foreigners. And
by the way, they come here as students, they never
even go to a school. They're fake schools set up
in strip malls, you know, the local college. They're so
it is so outrageous. A huge effect is economic. Of course,
we have a welfare state and welfare state medicine. You
can imagine what that does. These people in the main
come from low trust societies, so they discover the Canadian
tradition of food banks, Well, they just do their weekly
shopping at food banks. Now there's no such thing as
a food bank in Canada. In fact, some food banks
now say no foreign students allowed because they just, oh,
these suckers are giving away free food. I don't need
to shop like it's And then you have the extreme
side of that, where you have pro Hamas extremists like
you had in Columbia, not just in Campton universities, but
on the streets in Jewish neighborhoods. In Montreal there was
a Hamas riot. So every and Trudeau is doing this
on purpose, and his successor, Mark Carney is doing the
same thing. They can count there are now two million
Muslims in Canada compared to four hundred thousand Jews. So
do the math.
Speaker 1: So, Ezra, I'm will give you a broad last question here.
When I first heard this Trump idea of making Canada
the fifty first state, well, the first things I did
was dust off my shelf because I'm an academic, a
thirty five year old book Continental Divide by Seymour and
Martin Lipsitt, very distinguished American political scientists, Sally deceased now,
and you know, I'm sort of aware of some of
the cultural and political differences between the US and Canada,
and the book really alerted me to how deep and
profound they really are. I think Americans really don't pay
much attention to Canada. Sorry, not much except maybe during
hockey season. And Canadians, I mean, you know, like James
when I you know, my visits to Canada, mostly British Columbia,
but also other Canadians. I know there's a lot of
deep pride in the country, as there should be, and
while not anti American, although there's some of that everywhere,
but while not anti American, I think there is I think,
maybe justly a sense of wounded pride that America sort
of regards Canada with benign neglect or to stain or
make funny about people saying a boot and so forth.
So I don't know what's your sense of I mean,
you mentioned politically this has reinvigorated the Liberal Party in
a foolish, unintended consequence. But to what extent is this,
in an odd way, maybe helpful to some of the
problems you just mentioned, In other words, reinvigorating some sense
of Canadian pride and nationalism and therefore resistance to some
of these adverse transit point two.
Speaker 4: You know it's funny because under Justin Trudeau, our founding
Prime Minister, Sir Johnny McDonald was stripped off the ten
dollar bill. Statues of him were put either torn down
or put in wooden coffins. Our national anthem lyrics were
changed by Trudeau. Our passport, all the imagery in the
passport was stripped. Trudeau denounced Canada as a genocidal project,
and he said the genocide was continuing. He told The
New York Times in his first year of government that
Canada was a post national state with no core values.
During the trucker convoy, this symbol of the truckers appropriated for
their flag was the Canadian flag. They flew to the
Canadian flag, they sang the Canadian anthem, and those were
demonized as right wing hate symbols, woke ideology, saying the
Canada which was the end of the underground railroad, No,
we're the racist ones. They actually had Black lives matter
up here. We were the place where black people fled
to get away from slavery. So we had this whole
woke denaturing of Canada, and in the last sixty days
suddenly The people who hate Canada and told us it
was a sin to be Canadian are now saying raw
rock passing the Canadian flag, So it's all fake. It's
all fake. The man with three passports, who has returned
to grace us with his leadership, is now saying he's
a Canadian. No, he's not. He hasn't lived in Canada
for years, so it's a lie. Just In Trudeau went
on Anderson Cooper show a couple months ago, and Anderson
Cooper said, what is a Canadian? That's a good question.
Imagine the man who's been Prime minister for nine years answering,
we're not American. That's your answer a negative, and it's
an insulting negative. That's like saying, who are you on?
Speaker 2: Not you.
Speaker 4: There's an arrogance too. We have a National bookstore and
their chain motto is the world needs more Canada. This
sort of a patronizing, condescending and the thing is, in
a way Trump exposed that. He said we'll swap your
Canadian minibucks for our real dollars one to one, Yeah,
reminding us that we're poor up here. He said, we'll
defend you, unlike your undefended North Yeah. That's sort of
a thing, and so that it did hurt partly because
it's an indecent proposal to ask Canadians to abandon their loyalty,
which and by the way, forty percent of young people
in one poll that I saw young men in Western Canada,
forty percent of them said I'm up for that. Why
because they can't make a go of it in Canada,
and they also like Donald Trump's pride and nationalism. So,
by the way, his indecent proposal has some takers, but
for most Canadians, they're saying that's a little bit too
much and that Trump kutzba, which which Trump supporters love.
I love it, but I can also see how it
hurts people's feelings. And the liberals are so malleable that
suddenly they've you know, decided that they're patriotic. They're not patriotic,
they're not reducing that they're bringing in migrants from Gaza.
Speaker 2: That's insane.
Speaker 4: So, oh, believe you me. There's no real Canadian pride
going on, just symbolism and jingoism just to get through
this moment against Donald Trump. I hope it doesn't work,
But the polls are narrowing.
Speaker 2: When Canadian liberals start condemning church burnings, then you'll know
that they're really, really, you know, feigning an appeal to
the population. If Trump had been actually the master of
the the insult nickname, though, I think he would have
started referring to Trudeau as Castro junior. Well he did
allude to Oh, did him?
Speaker 4: He did?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 4: He knows his stuff, and he actually knew Margaret Trudeau
in her wild child days. That's Justin Trudeau's mom. He
refers to her in one of his books. I can't
remember the title. It's not Out of the Deal, It's
another one of his books. How she I mean? Justin
Trudeau is gone now literally today was his last day,
and I think the only saving grace for his nine
years would he was sort of dumb, like he had
a high emotional EQ like he was very good at
being friendly and relating to people, but he was sort
of dumb when it came to policy and sort of lazy.
So there were a lot of terrible things he planned
that didn't get done. He planned one of the worst
censorship regimes known in the world, called the Online Harms Act,
that would have included life in prison for a hate
crime but there is no life in prison in Canada
for anything, not even for murder. But they would have
been for hate. They would have had all that. He
would have established three new censorship bureaus. The only reason
we were spared those, by the way, is because of
his dis of Parliament to save his skin. So if
Trudeau had been more industrious and got these bills through earlier,
he would have done a lot more damage. I mean,
believe me, he's done a lot of damage. And immigration
is a bell that I don't know if you can
unring it. But Canada is a much weaker country now
than when Trudeau took it over. One of the reasons
he juiced immigration so much was to hide the fact
that we are actually in a recession on a per
capita basis. We're getting poor every year per capita. The
only way to hide that is to bring in five
percent of your population every year.
Speaker 2: That's insane.
Speaker 4: There's no country in the world that does that well.
Speaker 2: At least you've space to put them, given the unoccupied
nature of vast sauaws of the country. But no, I
want Canada to thrive. I want Canada to be proud
of Canada. I want Canada to be a partner, and
I hate what's going on in both of the government
and the relationships between the two, because it's like watching
your parents fight. Don't please make up and be Everything
will be well, Hey, folks. Deal of the Century is
what it's called Deal of the Century, the America first
plan for Canada's oil sands. That's as it was, the latest,
and of course you can get him at Rebel News
and elsewhere. We enjoy your work and we thank you
for coming on this the Ricochete podcast, and good luck.
Speaker 4: Thanks, great to see you guys again.
Speaker 2: Bye bye. So you know, when I was mentioning the
the church burnings in Canada, which seemed to be a
consequence of people being angry at the church for all
of the native schools and the desks that they attended,
if I recall correctly, they did a lot of soundings
with the ultracenter of the ground and they couldn't turn
up these mass graves. You read these stories even.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, no, it turned out to be a complete hoax,
kind of like all the church burnings that Bill Clinton
said he remembered from his childhood, when the historical records
show there were none right anywhere around where he lived.
But this is uh, you know, this is a favorite. Well, look,
the Left relies on the hoax as much of the time.
Speaker 2: Bill, do you actually remember specifically the details of the
Bill Clinton years, because I do. I was there. And
when people start to paint the nineties with the nostalgic
brush that people painted the seventies with in the night,
I mean, inevitably every era gets sort of dipped in candy.
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where do we end here? Apparently there was a CR.
They always call it a CR, like everybody knows what
that is, now, yeah, do we? Well?
Speaker 1: No, it's when you don't pass a budget like you're
supposed to in which we haven't been doing for almost
fifty years now, passing a budget properly the way the
law says we should.
Speaker 2: So they just say we.
Speaker 1: Call it an omnibus continuing resolution, which means just keep
the government going at current levels. Except these things are
always cobbled together in the middle of the night. Theyre
always sliped some extra things and new spending in and
Republicans have sometimes tried to block it, and then Republicans,
when they have a majority, had to rely on Democratic.
Speaker 2: Votes to pass it.
Speaker 1: So they finally got wise to this game and passed
a Republican only version, and that has put the Democrats
in a panic because it's got some spending cuts in it.
I think they're modest, but still the arrows in the
right direction and the Democrats so it's a pause here.
You know, political sciences will tell you that the way
you can tell there's a real tectonic shift in politics
going on is not when you change your own party,
as Trump is done, but when you compel the other
party to move your direction. Reagan did that to the
Democrats in the eighties. Margaret Thatcher made labor moderate and
so forth. Well, suddenly Senate Democrats were thinking all week
we're going to borrow the favorite feudal tactic of Republicans
and shut down the government. Apparently they have already collapsed
on this, because I think there are enough of senators
who say this is insane. And by the way, would
you like to be as you know, these government shutdowns,
non essential personnel stay home. Do you want to be
designated as a non essential personnel in the age or.
Speaker 2: The moment of Doge? I don't think so.
Speaker 1: I think the Democrat Apparently, all the rumors are that
the Democratic senators met in the caucus midweek and they
were yelling and screaming at each other so loud you
could hear it out in the hallway. So you know, again,
this is Trump genius and Republican rare Republican competence in Congress.
They're actually going to pass something that moves the ball
down the field in our direction and divide the Democrats
along the way. And that's just lots of fun. I
would be happier if thecr had to be printed out
in everything, A person who voted on it had to
initial the page, every single page. And now with an
autopen Biden style. I mean, because I don't think they're
even at the point now. I mean, when you when
you sign an eu LA on your computer, all they
ask is that you scroll to the end. You know,
the program, the texts that you've scrolled to.
Speaker 2: The end, you clicked the box, and you get accept
But I would like something just to just to know
that they had to go through the gruesome process of
at least acknowledging the length and depth of these things.
On the other hand, one of the things we like
about Doge and the new administration is their ability to
prune and remove, to make things less complex and less burdensome.
The headline you're going to see next week, if not already,
of course, is that the Trump administration proposes an increase
in the amount of mercury in the air. I mean,
I'm absolutely certain that's what it is. And what that
would be is the administration saying, okay, there's a regulation
here that says the acceptable parts per million in the
air or parts per billion is a point zero zero
zero zero zero zero zer one, and we're going to
make that point zero zero zero zero zero zero two negligible,
non noticeable nominally through nothing of the sort, but making
a change that doesn't crimp. Shall we say this, that
or the other thing in the economy that'll be the
main headline. It comes from Zelden the EPA tweeting out.
I mean, he wrote a Wall Street Journal article about it,
but I found it out about it in a tweet
thread where he discussed thirteen or fourteen consequential regulatory rollbacks
that will help energy production and prosperity. So essentially moving
us back to twenty twenty, when you know, the Biden
administration came in and apparently in twenty twenty this was
a dystopian mercury Field hell hole out of the you know,
the dark satanic mills belching their poison into the air
all around the country. So if we roll back to
twenty twenty, I guess we'll have to hope that we
can survive. I'd like to roll it back a little
bit more somewhere between ironized Cody, you know, having a
fake tear and maybe Bill Clinton juice in the caffe standards.
I don't know, but there's all there are so many
regulatory boat anchors that are draped around the economy, and
so many of them come from the EPA and regulations
that have been not exactly codified in law, but but
somehow summoned into existence by the bureaucrats. So what do
you think about these little steps here? I mean, it's
it's it's EV mandates going the way of I love
how the people who say that Trump is doing what
he's doing to make money for his rich, technocratic buddy Elon,
then turns around and does away with EV mandates. Isn't
that sort of counter to the other. Yes, and not really.
Speaker 1: I mean what the Biden administration was doing was heavily
subsidizing Elon's competitors. Now Elon built his company on some subsidies,
but it's become profitable and the leading maker in the world.
And Musk actually said, I think even before the election
that getting rid of the mandates and subsidies would help
his company. So it works either way. I think you're right.
It's a wonderful irony. I do think there broadly, what
Zeldon has announced is something really fundamental. It's not just
tweaking some regulations here there, or even rolling them back,
but the two big ones. And the problem is, I'm
a walk and so I don't want to be wonky
on the podcast because it does walk away well just briefly.
I mean, the two things he's going after is, first,
a thing called the Endangerment Finding and what essentially is
what the Obama EPA used to say, Oh co. Two,
the stuff that each human being breathes out eight hundred
pounds worth a year is a dangerous health hazard, and
they're gonna try and roll that back. And they've done
some I know a bit of the background. They've done
careful legal work to make this stick, and that will
kick the props out from under the EPA trying to
nationalize the electric utility industry, which is what Obama tried
to do and Biden was trying to do it again.
The other one is and this gets boring in a hurry,
and so I won't. I'll get rid of it in
a hurry. They're going to redo the cost of benefit
analysis of prospective global warming, and it's called the social
cost of carbon And as I say, I won't bore
listeners except to say we'll do this. The Biden EPA
said that the present value of future climate damages in
economic terms is one hundred and fifty dollars a ton.
I think that was the figure maybe a little higher.
Now almost nobody ever says what is the social benefit
of fossil fuel use? And the one really credibly economist
is a Dutch guy named Richard Tol who's very well respected.
Speaker 2: In environmental economics.
Speaker 1: He did a calculation a few years ago said the
social benefits of our fossil fuel use is at least
four hundred dollars a ton.
Speaker 2: I think it's probably much higher.
Speaker 1: And all these this is economic flim flamm and mumbo jumbo,
and he changed the assumptions, you get different numbers. But
the problem is the benefits of fossil fuels are overwhelmingly positive.
And no one knows this better than my friend, the
new Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright. And he's going to
be delivering hammer blows to all this stuff, and it's
going to be fun to watch. I think the show
was almost over for the climatistas, as I like to
call them.
Speaker 2: It maybe you know, wankree to you, and it may
sound born, but it's actually important to every single little
aspect of the economy if we're coming up with social
goods and the rest of it. In declaring car, yeah,
I think you're right. I mean, it's as we were.
It always polls low. It's never up there in the
top five or seven issues that people are particularly cared about.
It's something that people not and pay lip service do,
but then live there like precisely if they do. I'm
very concerned about the climate. I'm getting on a plane tomorrow.
Aren't there mutual? Isn't there some sort of consistency? No,
there isn't because I pay carbon credits and I planted,
et cetera. No, it will seem to be one of
those fevers from which we awoke later at home. So
there's that, I mean. But then again, there are people
who I'm sure blame Elon for a great deal of
carbon dumping into the atmosphere, because of course it is
space X rockets, and those people are probably at this
very moment demanding that he turned them into electric vehicles somehow, somehow.
You know, if we can just develop a start rec
warp factor and you know, the the the replicators, all
will be well. All is now over because we come
to the end of the podcast and we release you
now to your life to listen to something else. Will
it be as interesting and as as wonk filled as
as we have given you I don't think so that's
why you come back week after week. But you have
not left us a review on the Apple podcast thing,
have you yet? No? No, I mean I've been begging
you for seven hundred and thirty two episodes. Please do
it now so I can stop cavetching and covelling on't you.
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podcasts to come too, So we'll see you next week.
Hope Charlie's with us, Steven, hope you're with us as well,
And we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet four
point zero. Bye bye bye, James Ricochet Join the conversation