Political Foibles | Science Matters

Conrad Black on Carney’s Europe Adventure

Conrad Black’s article at Brussels Signal is Carney tells Europe what it wants to hear. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The response to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s address at the European Parliament in Strasbourg on September 17, a day after European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen opened the door to Canada becoming the EU’s first “associate member”, has reflected and aggravated the public policy and psychology gap between Western Europe and the United States. The federal European institutions began as an admirable attempt by Jean Monnet and others to bury once and for all the profound and sanguinary hostility between the principal European states. These were tariff reductions in the facilitation of cooperation at the economic level, especially between France, Germany and Italy. The original six-nation group, including Benelux, gradually intensified cooperation to a political union and expanded steadily to 28 states, from which the United Kingdom has withdrawn.

It was far from a smooth and constant progress. Several countries required consecutive referenda to accede to the goal that was defined as “an ever closer union”, which clearly indicated ultimately a single senior government for all of Western and much of Central Europe. Britain had only voted for a common market and never to have the political institutions that it had developed fairly consistently for nearly 800 years subsumed into the well-intentioned but comparatively untried government machinery of Europe in Brussels. And when finally consulted, the British voted “no”. This was the first major post-Cold War geopolitical abrasion between Europe and America. President Trump offered the British a fast-track into the North American free-trade area, but Theresa May chose to define leaving Europe as in fact confirming its adhesion to it. Boris Johnson was more receptive but too disorganised and preoccupied with resolving the status of Northern Ireland in Europe to address Trump’s invitation, and soon found himself dealing with the irresolute Biden administration.

Trump, like previous Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, saw that a federal Europe was in some measure a revolt against the primacy of the United States in the West, based on the romantic delusion that the European powers, having squandered their world leadership in the world wars and totalitarian movements that Europe inflicted upon the world, could now stand on each other’s shoulders and regain the headship of the planet. American Democratic presidents have tended to view Europe more positively as potentially a welcome equal partner in Western leadership.

Carney has moved Canada past Britain as another important country
purporting to straddle between Europe and the United States.

When he was the governor of the Bank of England, he made short work of any notion of an independent central bank by joining the fear-mongering campaign of the British government to the effect that if Britain seceded from the European Union, grass would grow in the streets of the City of London. Having returned to his native Canada and become prime minister, he won an upset re-election victory for the Liberal Party which under Justin Trudeau had scandalously misgoverned the country as it tumbled down the comparative tables of the world’s most prosperous states, hobbled by an obsession with climate change and generating discontent through excessive but almost entirely legal immigration. (This is a relatively simple matter for Canada since its only substantial land border is with the United States, a country that almost nobody ever flees away from, and illegal entry by sea requires crossing a great ocean.)

The usual anti-American or naïvely globalist organs of the European and British media, such as The Guardian and The Economist, have grappled Carney to their bosoms as someone who validates the beleaguered European project. The United States economy has been growing more than twice as fast as the European Union’s for 20 years, and where Trump has been somewhat bumptious, he has been effective in reducing absurd trade deficits and warning inconstant allies. The principal European powers have floundered and only Italy can now be said to have a serious government. Germany, France and Spain, as well as the United Kingdom, are waiting for firm government from the civilised Right as Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is asserting in Rome.

In Strasbourg, Carney revealed more vividly than he has to
his own countrymen his authoritarian, Davosian leftist biases.

He flattered his audience by rewriting modern history and current economic statistics. Freedom was won in Europe “thanks to the heroism of the European resistance during the war”. Of course, this is rubbish: Europe was liberated by the Americans and British and Canadians and protected by the United States until the Soviet Union, under the American containment strategy, disintegrated. Europe is wallowing economically and its enfeebled response to the Chinese penetration of more than a third of its hybrid car market is to ask, unsuccessfully, for China voluntarily to restrain its presence to 15 per cent. Anyone, including apparently the majority of the citizens of the major European countries, can see that a sharp policy change is called for, and the insane climate change bugbear is being put to death at last.

Carney did not mention in Strasbourg that Canadian exports to the United States are 10 times as much as its exports to Europe, or that the United States represents more than a third of the entire economy of Canada while Canadian trade represents about 2% of the US economy. In Strasbourg, both speaker and audience were dreaming and to this end Carney quoted Goethe misleadingly and inflicted a number of hollow bucolic metaphors on his listeners to promote the notion of a reciprocal magnetic interest between Canada and Europe. It is a complete fantasy and it will not last long.

Addendum: Commentary from Europe

Also at Brussels Signal, Karl Pfefferkorn writes: An empire built on sand. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

After the billing and cooing is over, what does the new partnership between Carney and von der Leyen have to offer their respective citizens? The official announcement suggested greater cooperation in defence, artificial intelligence and the provision of energy. Canada, which once earned its own invasion beach at Normandy, has only the ghost of a military these days and can contribute little to Europe’s efforts to deter Russia. In any case, Canada and the major European powers are guided by NATO’s defence planning, and not any EU attempts to supplant it. Carney clearly hopes to claim a share of Europe’s defence spending bonanza as a preferred partner, but has far less expertise and capacity to offer than the UK, which despite these attributes has yet to earn equal access to the EU’s common defence funds.

Neither Canada nor the EU has sired artificial intelligence companies capable of challenging China or the United States. Cooperation between also-rans is not likely to benefit either. Given their governing tendencies, they are far more likely to cooperate in suffocating their nascent AI industries through overregulation.

Canada does have immense energy resources, but lacks the infrastructure to supply much of it to Europe. Canadian pipelines run west to the Pacific in the service of Asian markets, or east to Ontario, by way of the United States. Any help solving Europe’s energy problems will require the construction of oil and gas loading facilities on Canada’s Atlantic coast, in violation of the environmental orthodoxies espoused by Carney’s Liberal Party. Canada’s oil resources are concentrated in the Alberta oil sands, which are the dirtiest and most carbon intensive of fossil fuels. Large-scale imports of Canadian oil will require a significant relaxation if not the outright abandonment of the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.

Carney is reluctant to reveal his country’s most attractive
quality to the EU: a potential net payer into EU coffers.

If Canada can be lured into a bespoke arrangement, complete with new sinecures in Brussels for civil servants desperate to escape Ottawa, she will pay at least as much as Norway, which remits over half a billion dollars a year for its EEA status. Good for EU finances, but what will Canada get in exchange? Relaxed work rules and membership in the Erasmus study programme will benefit young Canadians, but visa reciprocity will also lure ambitious Europeans toward greater opportunities in North America. Industrial tariffs are already minimal under the CETA agreement, and there is no chance the EU will open the Single Market to increased Canadian agricultural imports.

None of this will offset the risks of alienating Canada’s biggest market, the United States. The prosperity of 40 million Canadians is dependent on the trade surplus they run with 340 million American consumers. Canadian industry is comprehensively integrated into the American market in everything from car parts to advertising. The EU cannot offer anything close to a replacement should the US retaliate against any Canadian deal with Europe.

Carney walked away from a good trade offer from Washington
in a fit of performative hubris, preferring to risk the economic
well-being of his people for the accolades of his European peers.

Given her fraught relations with the White House, Ursula von der Leyen sees little downside in her flirtation with Carney. She is empire-building, not in the old way of territorial conquest, but in the post-modern sense of attaining greater elite regard. The average Commission bureaucrat hopes to make the EU into a workable federal state, but von der Leyen sees it as a citadel of self-regarding virtue for affluent Western elites besieged by angry populists. Granting titles of privilege to loyal servants like Carney elevates her office to the status of a royal court in the realm of the global elect, an objective far more important than the tawdry material needs of factory workers in Duisburg or coal miners in Silesia.

Her neglect of the sources of Europe’s prosperity and her failure
to mobilise the resources of the Commission in their service
will expose her true achievement: an empire built on sand.

PM Carney: Stop Emoting and Get Real, for Canada’s Sake

Posted on 14 Days Ago by Ron Clutz

In this interview, National Post’s Rob Breakenridge speaks with Carleton University business professor Ian Lee about the need for Canadians to accept some of the basic economic realities we’re facing and the potential economic damage from a prolonged trade war. If we’re not careful, Lee warns that we could stumble into a recession or even see capital flight out of the country. For those prefering to read I provide a transcript lightly edited from the captions with my bolds and added images.

RB: Hey folks, I’m Rob Breakenridge for NationalPost.com, and NP comment. Well this unfortunate trade war between Canada and the U.S. has indeed escalated further this week. Canada’s counter tariffs on the U.S. have taken effect and in response the Americans have widened the scope of their own new tariffs on Canadian goods. So Ian Lee, professor at the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University, is joining us for some further thoughts on the impact of this trade war, where this is all going, what Canada’s strategy might possibly be in all of this. Professor Lee, great to have you with us here. IL: My great pleasure. Thanks for inviting me, Rob.

RB: I think a lot of Canadians are looking at this with dismay wondering, you know, how did it get to this point? How did things go so sideways and would it otherwise been a productive trading relationship? Just your thoughts first of all on where we are right now.

IL: It’s almost a tragedy. This is almost a Shakespearean tragedy. I mean I don’t want to become overwrought and over the top but, I’ve been teaching business for 35 years. Before that I was nine years in commercial banking. I’ve lived in this country all my life but I’ve traveled around the world, lived twice in the States on sabbaticals, once in D.C., once in the West Coast just below Silicon Valley. I’ve traveled many, many times across the border because my sister’s an American and I’ve just never seen anything like this.

Our relationship, I mean I’ll say it again, we all know the history, it goes back a quarter of a millennium. It goes back 250 years, way before Confederation. We have the longest border in the world. I won’t even get into the border defended versus undefended. I mean it’s 8,800 kilometers long.It’s stunning. And we have had a pretty good relationship during that time, you know, a few ups and downs. Every now and then Lyndon Johnson got angry at Lester Pearson when he criticized the Vietnam War but by and large it was pretty good. And the trade continues to flow because of the tremendous integration between the two countries and the relationship.

So I’m looking at this and it just seems, I don’t believe that there’s a geopolitical logic to this in the Kissingerian sense. I think that, some emotions have got out of hand, some very unfortunate remarks, yes, and yes, I’m not trying to sugarcoat Donald Trump. I don’t agree with anything he says on tariffs because I support free trade agreements. I supported every free trade agreement since 1988 and free trade agreements take tariffs away. They’re the opposite of tariffs.

But I think that we need to get back to the negotiating table. It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be hard.Winston Churchill taught us it’s far better to jaw jaw than to war war. War is only the very, very, very last resort. Kissinger taught us that too. So I think there’s been mistakes. Yes, I’m a Canadian so I think more mistakes on the American side but still, I think we have to get back to the table and get back to negotiating because we can’t let this fall apart.

RB: Right. And obviously with Trump the first time around we’ve managed to get a renegotiated free trade deal, what we refer to as CUSMA. Clearly Trump 2.0 has a different, more aggressive trade policy, a more protectionist trade policy and they’ve doubled down on a lot of those elements. Do you think Canadians and maybe this government were not prepared for that shift or they didn’t see it coming or that we just sort of thought that, okay, we dealt with this already. We weren’t going to have to worry about these issues.

IL: I think so, I think that they were honest mistakes on our side. We didn’t realize that Trump 2.0 was going to be much more aggressive in his second and final term, limited by the Constitution, we know that, older, maybe not, maybe not wiser. But certainly more aggressive in his speeches and comments in that second campaign. He was much more bitter twisted, you know, in terms of the way he’d been treated by the Democrats. So I think mistakes were made there. We underestimated, maybe we didn’t do our due diligence. And then I think it was, I believe, it was exacerbated. I’m not trying to blame, put on the blame and, you know, I don’t want to offend Andrew Coyne and have him coming after me or anyone else because he makes these arguments that we’re blaming ourselves.

But I know negotiations, whether it’s in a divorce or in a country to country or labor management, and I’ve certainly been involved in two of those categories, it involves both sides and there’s mistakes on both sides in negotiations and there’s interest in both sides. And I think that we used intemperate language at the beginning, at the very beginning. Yes, he was also, but I don’t think we should have responded.

I have all my life, I just believe that using pejorative language and insults is not the way to get a deal. And so I think that we, you know, we let the tempers and the emotions take charge rather than the logic and the data, the reality of the self-interest in the negotiations. So the U.S. imposed tariffs on Canada, the U.S. has imposed tariffs on most of its trading partners, and that’s sort of the approach now of this administration.

RB: In terms of Canada responding and the impact of counter tariffs, and now we’re at the point where, as we mentioned at the outset, things have really escalated between the tariffs and the retaliation. Do we have a good understanding in this country, Ian, of what it is we’re doing and the cost and the impact of these kinds of policies?

IL: I don’t, and I don’t belong to any political party, I do not donate funds to any political party, I don’t have a dog in this hunt, I don’t consult with any of these organizations, but I certainly have been teaching strategy in the capstone course and the MBA program and dealing, of course, necessarily with Canadian-American trade relations, because they are our largest trading partner and have been pretty well forever, and certainly in the 20th century and going forward.

I think that the emotions have become so raw and so heated that we have neglected to look, with very hard nose, at the results and the cost of this. I quote Stats all the time, and I mean Stats Canada Stats, also World Trade Organization Stats, government Stats of trade relations and so forth. We are one-thirteenth the size of the United States, but there’s another figure I want to throw up because, probably people know that one.

You know, they’re 32 trillion, we’re about 2.2 trillion expressed in U.S. dollars in terms of GDP, so they dwarf us. I mean, Pierre Trudeau taught us that, you know, we’re the mouse, they’re the elephant. But there’s a lot of Canadians who say, well, you know, they really depend on us, or they’re dependent on Canada. And this has been driving me crazy because I knew that wasn’t true. I understand arithmetic. The totality of Canadian exports annually are about 400 billion. And most people say, wow, that’s a huge amount of money. It’s 1.5% of U.S. GDP.

The idea that they are dependent and we can, ”bring them to their knees”
is just a denial of arithmetic.

This doesn’t require calculus.This doesn’t require a doctorate in economics. I really am being blunt here. You know, the U.S., if you look from a slightly different angle very quickly, the U.S. trades less with the outside world in percentage terms. The key point is we have to normalize the data to percentages. We can’t talk absolutes because the U.S. is so huge. In percentage terms, the U.S. trades less with the world than any other OECD country. 85% of American GDP is American companies trading with American companies in California or Illinois or, across the U.S., 15% with the rest of the world. And we’re a subset of that 15%.

So this idea that we can bring them to their knees because they’re completely dependent on Canada is just preposterous nonsense.The U.S. has relations with just about every country in the world because most countries in the world want to deal with the largest economy, the world hegemon. And so we do not have the leverage that many Canadians think we have. And so I think that that belief has caused us to perhaps be much less willing to compromise when it is in our national strategic self-interest to compromise.

RB: And maybe in certain states or certain industries, you know, Kentucky bourbon felt like it was punched in the nose. We can make, you know, little scores or little hits here and there. But in terms of something that’s really going to move the needle in terms of the American economy or overall cost pressures, is there much that Canada can do in that sense?

IL: I believe there is. I keep quoting Kissinger just because I’ve always admired him. He’s brilliant. He was a strategy prof at Harvard for 25 years before Richard Nixon appointed him to the administration and he convinced Richard Nixon that his policy of refusing to recognize the largest population in the world called China, red China, was just a bad thing. And he caused the Americans to finally recognize China, even though it was then and now an adversary.

So to your question, I think that our emotions have put us into a box. Our reaction is completely: How can we punch him back? How hard can we punch him back? We think only in mono response.It’s how much damage they just disrespected me. So how much disrespect back do we give? Instead of thinking much more strategically, don’t get mad, get even type of logic, and saying, well, you know, there’s things that the Americans want from us and there’s things that we want from them. They were at the table. People seem to forget when they say Donald Trump doesn’t want to negotiate with us. You and I’ve been involved with the negotiations, not at the country level, but people only go into negotiations because they want something from the other side. If there’s nothing I want from somebody else, I’m not going to waste my time talking to them.

And the Americans were at the table up until the very day that it broke. So there’s something they want from us. And we can look at the record. We know that China has the United States by the throat on critical minerals. We know they’re deeply interested in critical minerals to reduce their dependency on China. We know that because it’s in every just about every article in Foreign Policy magazine, Foreign Affairs magazine in Washington by very senior former decision makers, Republican and Democrat, military, legal, commercial. There is a unanimity in Washington, they see China as a mortal existential threat.

We think that this is all about the United States and Canada. It is not. This is really part of a much bigger crisis that’s going on, the whole debate over the so-called China shock 2.0. And those incredible, unsustainable balances, 1.4 trillion net exports and the Chinese Communist Party, the ruling Politburo has in their five-year plan a very short time ago, has promised to double their exports and their manufacturing.

So if we thought we had a crisis in the last 10 years with over-exporting by China, we haven’t seen anything yet. And so we are really part of a much larger issue. And we’ve got to recognize that, that they’re what they’ve said to us allegedly on China wasn’t because they were trying to ruin us or absorb us or put us out of business. It’s because they are focused on China. We mistakenly think they’re focused on us. I go frequently to the United States, and they’re not paying attention to us, but they are very, very aware of China and in every sense of the word.

And I’m not trying to demonize China. I’ve been teaching in China for a third of a century every year in an MBA program. And my Chinese students are outstanding. They’re amazing. They’re disciplined. I have great respect for the Chinese nation and the Chinese people.

But there is no question the studies have shown the China problem. The anti-dumping tribunals have ruled this, that China is cheating in terms of industrial subsidies, five times what they are in Europe or Canada or the US. German Chancellor Merz said last week said that the currency is undervalued by 30 percent. And that’s been very deliberate to, again, give them a competitive advantage.

So what I’m saying is we’ve got to step back. We, Canada, we the negotiators and say it’s not all about us.And we got to at least acknowledge the bigger, larger context that we find ourselves in and in returning to the table. And maybe that will temper our views so that we can make some compromises. And I think we’re going to have to make some compromises to return to the table.

I’ll be very blunt. I’ll put supply management right at the top of the list. It’s been on the US Trade Rep’s list report tabled in the Congress for 50 years. Every president since Reagan. I’m not here to defend Trump, I don’t agree with him at all. But this notion is false, that he’s made up all these ideas that he’s demanding compromises on and it’s never been demanded before by the US. Canadians should be downloading and reading the US Trade Rep report for each year for the last 10, 20, 30 years because they’ve been saying the same thing over and over and over and over again.

I’m not saying that justifies it, but at least it gives you a better understanding of where these demands are coming from.The way I like to put it very quickly, Rob, is the only difference, fundamental difference, aside from the fact he’s far more vulgar and he uses all kinds of language that’s just horrible. But Trump didn’t invent these grievances. They’ve been there for since Reagan, by and large.The difference between Trump and past presidents was past presidents said, look, we don’t like it.

Obama said that to the House of Commons. I’m two kilometers from the Parliament Hill in Ottawa. And he came down here. He said, we’ve got these unhappy irritants. We don’t like them, Canada, but you’re a great ally.We’ve been allies forever and ever. So we are not going to push it and and make it into a huge crisis, basically, was what Obama said. And past presidents said that, too.

The difference with Trump was he took the same set of grievances, threw in a few more, and then said, and this is not acceptable and I am going to punish you. That’s the difference between Trump and past American presidents. They knew about all these trade irritants.They’d been there for a very long time. We ignored them and they looked the other way. The difference is Trump said, I’m not looking the other way. In fact, I’m going to punish you.

And so instead of saying he’s trying to break us, rather he’s just trying to get to compromise and meet the demands that they want on these issues that are very important to them. We have to decide which ones are worth dying on a hill for and which ones are not that important. I cannot see any serious argument that potentially risking a new CUSMA for 8000 dairy farmers in Quebec so that we can continue to double the price of milk and dairy to low income and ordinary Canadians is a hill to die on. It is just not worth it.

We should do what the Australians and the New Zealand government did in 2000 when they paid off the farmers in supply management, gave them generous compensations and said we are ending supply. And they did. We’re the only country in the world now with supply management. That’s the kind of strategic thinking that we need instead of this emotionalism that is the name calling and so forth, because we need to get back to the table.

It’s in our strategic self-interest. We have this border. We have 50,000 businesses exporting to the US, most of them SMEs. Many of them are undercapitalized, like all SMEs, and they’re at risk of failing if they get lose access to that market. And so we can’t treat these ordinary Canadians and the people that work there in a such a cavalier fashion, such a callous fashion, and just say, too bad, we’re angry at Trump. And so you’re just going to be roadkill. I think we have to develop a more strategic approach that is more sensitive and more aware of the larger context. And we’ve got to get back to the table.

RB: So if we don’t and I guess it’s unclear at this point which way things are going to go. But if we do dig in our heels and this is prolonged with the American tariffs remaining in place, our counter tariffs remain in place. This will put costs, puts costs and pressure on the Canadian economy. How worried are you about the fallout from this trade?

IL: I have already said and predicted from past experience. When I was at the Bank of Montreal, main office branch, Ottawa, right beside Westbrook, Parliament Hill. And that’s when interest rates went to twenty one percent. So when people complain about interest rates going to five or six, I said, that is a walk in the park. That’s a picnic. I was there when lending mortgage money was at twenty one percent. It was just unbelievable.

Businesses were going down like ten pins.The unemployment rate went to the highest level since the Great Depression. So I lived through that. That was the worst recession since the Great Depression, much worse than 2009 or any recession since. And it was horrible. And so if we lose access to the largest economy in the world and we have so many small businesses. And according to stats can data from this morning, they account for 73 percent of all private sector employment in Canada, then I believe we’re going to go into a recession.

And we have to start saying, is that what we want? And can we afford this after doubling the debt because of the covid support? And now we have doubled it. And when you look at federal provincial municipal debt as a percentage of GDP, we’re at the same level essentially as the French. And that’s not a compliment. And that’s not we’re not doing well. Contrary to what Finance Minister Champagne says, because he just cherry picks the federal debt and doesn’t include all of the debt, which is the normal practice for the international financial institutions.

So my point is, you know, we could be looking at because, of course, we’re going to support these people. Of course, we’re going to have to inject enormous amounts of stimulus.And this comes right after covid. And it’s so unnecessary. And I still don’t see the exit ramp. So we do that. OK, great. So we do that for six months. Now we’re going to do it for another six months, do it for another year. We can’t do that indefinitely into the future. There’s got to be an exit ramp and we can’t just go on and on and on like this.

And that means, in my judgment, that we must return to the table. Yes, make some compromises on the things that are not critical in a national strategic sense and then negotiate a new deal. And it may be only for two years because we think that, after he leaves office, we can negotiate a better deal. OK, I mean, I have no problem with that, but forget this idea that we can just wait him out and suspend the Canadian economy somehow. We’ll just, you know, suspend it, you know, and if you can’t access the U.S. economy for the next two years, the private sector, well, it’ll come back maybe in two years.

You can’t run a country like that. You can’t run a society saying, well, we we think and we hope and we really are counting on maybe perhaps possibly getting a better deal in two or three or four years. We can’t go down that road. We have to deal with the facts as they are on the table.We have to deal with the reality. Pierre Trudeau famously said to govern is to choose to make tough choices. We it’s now the time for leadership in Canada to make tough choices and have a conversation, a blunt adult conversation with the Canadian people, putting facts on the table, telling Canadians they’re 13 times bigger.They are the world hegemon.

No, we’re not going to lie down on the railroad tracks and let them run over us.
But we are going to have compromises to enable our business sector to
prosper because we don’t want to slide into a recession
or something even worse with capital flight.

Rob, very quickly, I know I’m talking too much, but what really terrifies me is the capital flight. And people say and I get emails, well, this this product, a hockey stick or something, we can live with that. And so they try and nibble me in an argument, you know, this little, micro tariff on this product, can we take the hit? That’s not my fear. It’s not the specific tariff of a specific industry or specific product.

My fear is what the KPMG study showed three weeks ago. Forty two percent of manufacturing businesses in this country are actively examining, moving to the States. In the words of the World Bank, that’s called capital flight. And it’s experienced normally, typically in developing third world countries that are massively mismanaged. Argentina has experienced massive capital flight. Russia has been experiencing massive capital flight the last three or four years.

And and when that capital leaves, those factories aren’t coming back.Those businesses aren’t coming back. They’re not going to say two years later, OK, you changed your mind. You figured out your problems in the States. I’ll come back now. Once they go, they’re gone. And that’s the backbone of our country.They employ 16 million of the 20 million Canadians.

The idea that the public sector is going to save us by buying some submarines and some helicopters is just fantasy. We’ve got to have a vibrant private sector.And so that’s why we’ve got to have a much more tough conversation and put some frank data on the table, one of which is that we cannot bring the US to its knees because that we are a tiny part of their economy.

And I’m hoping that Prime Minister Carney has some kind of a fireside chat with Canadians, a la the Roosevelt back in the back in the back in the in the Depression when he had those fireside chats telling everybody how horrible and terrible life was. He didn’t sugarcoat it.He showed leadership. Same with Winston Churchill. You know, yes, he had optimism, but he said these are very, very dark days.I remember him because my late father was a Brit.

They showed leadership in tough times.They didn’t pander to our worst emotions and anger. And so I’m hoping that Prime Minister Carney will show that leadership and have that tough frank talk with Canadians, because something like 75 or 80 percent of Canadians are saying things like don’t give up a thing to the United States.

Well, we don’t give up anything, then we’re not going to have a deal because negotiations involve giving and taking. That’s what negotiations are. And so that’s what we need in this country. And is that kind of that very hard nosed, tough minded conversation with the Canadian people in a fireside chat and not pour gasoline on the raging fire, making it even more inflammatory and inflamed?

RB: Well, we shall see.Professor Lee, really appreciate the insight. Thank you so much for joining us here. Thanks very much, Rob.Thank you. Really appreciate it. Ian Lee, professor of the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University.My name is Rob Breckenridge. Thanks again for joining us here.

Carney’s Energy Ruse–Pipeline to Nowhere

Posted on July 11 by Ron Clutz

A recent interview exposes how centrist politics and climate obsession corrupt energy investments, in this case to the detriment of Canada. PM Carney is running a charade which will not bode well for Canada, according to this interview of Energy industry expert David Knight Legg by National Post’s Rob Brackenridge. Excerpts from the transcript are below with my bolds and added images. First a reminder of where PM Carney is coming from:

Greetings, folks, I’m Rob Brackenridge for National Post and NP Comment. Alberta has now officially submitted a proposal to the federal government Major Projects Office for a new pipeline to the West Coast. Presumably, that will be fast-tracked by the federal government. We’re expecting that designation of this being in the national interest from the Prime Minister by October. But is all of this enough to really get Canada to where it needs to be, to really fully embrace the opportunity that presents itself and to be that destination for investment and be a global energy superpower?

Well, someone who’s been watching all of this very closely is David Knight Legg. He is a director and an advisor to a number of energy, financial and tech firms, a former principal advisor to Alberta’s premier, former CEO at Invest Alberta Corporation. David, so great to have you with us here. Great to be here, Rob. Great to see you again. Likewise.

It’s been an interesting couple of days. Clearly, the current premier of Alberta has put a lot of work into this, and is trying to pull, I think, the federal government in a much different direction from where it’s been over the past decade. How significant is this milestone, do you think, first of all?

Well, Rob, you know, it’s always hard when you sit outside something as complicated as a negotiation between Ottawa and Alberta, which has skeptics in both their bases, as I’m sure you know. And I had a good conversation with Jason Nixon (Alberta Minister of Finance) last night about it, met the premier briefly. I think it’s really important and I think that it’s not perfect. These deals often aren’t.

But I think one of the testaments to how important it is, is how close it came to being derailed in a variety of ways, just as a little bit of the backstory. And I think that, you know, you sometimes have to take the win that you’ve got. Actually there are a lot of things I’d be critical about. I don’t think it goes far enough.

And I think we have a fundamental problem in a regulatory regime,
which means that governments have to get this involved
in getting basic infrastructure built.

In other countries, you don’t need governments announcing these things. You don’t need a most favored nation status for a project. You have very simple, clean regulations, low taxes, and you allow people to build as long as they meet basic criteria. And I think it’s the absence of that that has become more apparent to more people because of the MOU.

So I think one of the benefits of the MOU has been that it has started a conversation that’s been needed for a long time in Canada over just how hard it’s become to build anything here without official government sanction. And I think that’s a conversation that’s going to continue to persist as this project works its way forward. Yeah, even just the existence of the the major projects office, the Building Canada Act, I mean, it’s a recognition that we have all of this red tape in the way and we create this separate track to try to bypass it. But it just kind of leaves everything else still in place. Right.

So in a way, it’s an acknowledgement that we have that problem, but it doesn’t really address it at the same time. That’s a great that’s a great point. In fact, I think that’s a great way to put it. And that’s actually a conversation that really needs a national conversation that needs to happen.

If you have to create an entirely separate bureaucracy to avoid your current bureaucracy, it might be time to reform your current bureaucracy rather than set up a new set of channels and processes that ultimately are privileging things that still require the government to lean in. And it creates a greenhouse for favoritism and, you know, trying to get the attention of the government to trying to do things rather than a level playing field where anybody can come in and innovate and create. And I think as a nation, we’ve got to do better than this.

You know, it just it looks like 1970s style industrial policy rather than a fair, free, open, entrepreneur led marketplace of ideas and and opportunities. And you have to believe that there are really creative ways of thinking about things that would be initiated across Canada right now if the regulations were simple, the taxes were lower and the process was clear. We’re seeing under this prime minister a little bit of slow dismantling of a lot of the Trudeau legacy, which is maybe long overdue and perhaps needs to be expedited to some degree.

But what does it tell us about then the missed opportunity of the last decade and and all of the cost, all that was wasted as we sort of lived and endured under those policies? You know, Rob, I think one of the things that’s really interesting is Mark Carney was the heart of a lot of those policies. And, you know, half of me believes, you know, that’s what makes him the perfect guy to dismantle them because nobody else is going to be as credible with that liberal base as he would be at turning back some of the environmental overreach that’s restricted the ability to build in Canada. On the other hand, I think that there’s this temptation within this Carney government to maintain control over economic development in a way that means that they constantly have their hand on the wheel.

They’re constantly fidgeting with what they can release. And this is problematic because you will never have government sanctioned projects move as fast as projects that are originating in the private sector and originating with people that are, you know, have to make a bottom line work. So I think, you know, the dismantling of the Trudeau era is so important for the country to move forward, but that’s not sufficient. It’s essential, but it’s not enough to actually start to get the economy rolling again. And you saw this in this really odd condo deal that that happened and a lot of these things where there’s a constant attempt to use government money. We don’t have it.

You know, they’re borrowing it to expand the bureaucracy and also to expand the government reach into things like housing, energy. You know, these are sectors that in most countries are managed without the government having to intervene. Yeah.

And it’s interesting because you mentioned the economy, and obviously that’s an impetus. I know there’s provincial federal dynamics. There’s the energy side of things, but there’s just, you know, when you look at the economic challenges Canada is facing right now and how lethargic our economy has been, the global headwinds we’re facing, the trade uncertainty with the United States. If we’ve got economic advantages, if we’ve got strength, I mean, now’s the time to exploit those advantages. Is there a dawning realization, just with everything that we’re facing now, that we have all of this in front of us? I think so.

I think it started with a paper by Stephen Miran who went on to be the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for the US president back in November 24, when he said the United States should embark on this. This is what the president ended up adopting as formal policy, should embark on a process of integrating its national interests in energy security, military security, and trade security. And immediately they went for Panama. They’re doing deals around the Straits of Malacca. They’re, of course, active in the Straits of Hormuz with Iran, Greenland. They immediately went to taking Venezuelan oil over. I don’t think there’s been enough coverage of that, and that’s one of the things that led to the article that I wrote, which is when the Americans took over the Venezuelan energy supply, the Chinese lost 550,000 barrels of heavy crude, which is chemically identical to what we produce. It opens up an opportunity for us to have a $15 billion a year trade with the Chinese government just on that one replacement supply chain alone. And the idea that we had Northern Gateway effectively blueprinted already, that that’s a 565,000 barrel pipeline that could easily get there.

When you look at why Northern Gateway was ultimately cancelled, it’s a series of just self-imposed rules that have nothing to do with ultimately helping the environment, even though they’re dressed up that way. When you double-click on those rules, they do nothing for the environment, and in some ways they just sort of imagine that Canada can’t do things. We look at a tanker ban and we think the whole world is moving this stuff by tank. Are we the only country incapable of operating shipping and ports in environmentally sensitive areas? We don’t back ourselves enough to figure out that we could still do it as Canadians if they can do it in 50 other countries.

So there’s a lot that I think happened during that Trudeau era that we’re going to have to answer for. And I think we’re starting at least to have the right conversations. And yesterday’s announcement was an important step towards, I think, government saying we need this pipeline. I still dislike the fact they’re putting themselves in the position of being the ones to back it and treating pipelines more like airports or something. That is maybe being realistic about what you do if you do have a kind of very statist government environment. But it would be better if we could go back to a being a nation where free market entrepreneurialism didn’t require a constant government sanction. Yeah, there’s that.

I mean, I think one of the positives here, I mean, with Trans Mountain, we faced a real backlog when it came to the capacity pipeline capacity. Right. So with this, I think there’s the investment, the spinoff that comes with increasing production to fill this pipe and to fill some of the other projects like South Bow or like the Enbridge Mainline expansion, that the expansion, the growth of production is where we could really see a lot of that investment in the economic spinoffs.

How much does that tie into this? Do you think? Look, I think it’s super important. These are supply demand cycles. And the demand side, when you look at Asia, is unprecedented. You know, and so I think that’s a really the point you’re making is critical. I think you could double or we could get to 10 million barrels. Ultimately, there would be no problem in terms of egress and demand.

Almost all the issues related to the investability of that process are tied to issues like whether or not pathways and CCUS (Carbon Capture) is really the most important thing in the world. Or is it more important than some of these commitments to actually produce and supply and ship? And I think that it’s not. You know, our lesson from a lot of the environmental and to the Prime Minister’s credit, he came out and said $200 billion in 10 years of environmental activism from Ottawa produced absolutely nothing of note. It certainly didn’t change the emissions profile of the country in any significant way. In many ways, it harmed the ability for Canada to play a role in reducing global emissions by shipping a lot more of our gas to offset the coal-fired Chinese grid. And so in so many ways, I think there’s been a decade of strategic irrelevance, but also a decade of real economic decline.

And I think this Prime Minister is faced with needing to get over what’s happened in the trade arena. And I think they’re sort of turning a light past the fact that the Americans have said we’re going to do a deal with the Mexicans and not with the Canadians. You know, we’re going to put you guys on this annual review process. Now, a lot of people are saying that’s fine. I don’t think that’s fine. I think that’s an absolute failure to effectively negotiate the past 18 months. And that is starting to put in. I think the Prime Minister is smart enough to know deep down this is a real problem for the country and for him. And when you look at Canada, the Canadian balance sheet of exports, you know that energy is the only place where you’re going to get an immediate return economically on an investment.

So I think he’s still trying to juggle that kind of absolute realism about what works economically with his desire that there still be kind of a signaling effect, at least to his base, that they’re going to take care of the environment. But I’m just not sure when you look at, you know, sitting on the board of an energy company, you look at the costs related to all of these sort of exogenous environmental commitments that Canada is kind of inventing with the hope that it signals environmental commitments. But they’re not really making that big a difference to the planet. And they’re adding extraordinary costs. And they’re often being managed by government bureaucracies that don’t move at the speed of business or commercial interests. So I think it’s an important step.

It’s raising some important conversations. But I think the answers to some of those questions, those conversations are raising are going to take us further down the path of a much more liberalized economy when it comes to energy and hopefully a smaller government, a government that can live within its means federally and provincially. Yeah, I guess that’s the takeaway here, right? I mean, you know, it’s fine to say that this is a positive achievement. This is a project that is worthwhile, but to avoid maybe patting ourselves on the back too much and recognize some of these broader challenges we face, what do you think should be the next step here? Rather than just say, see this major projects office, this approach is working to have more meaningful conversation about taxes, about regulation, about just the whole picture. Is that really where the conversation ought to be going?

Yeah, look, I think you’re doing it right now, Rob. I think that this kind of conversation that you’re initiating is really important because I think that the baseline is that we want this nation to succeed. We want Alberta to succeed. We want Canada to succeed. We know that, and I think we’ve been sort of avoiding the fact that we’ve allowed the economy to decline and we’ve become very, very dependent on the United States as a result of that.

I mean, one of the great ironies of the past decade is that by refusing to build these things that would have taken our energy to Asia and to Europe, we’ve created a much deeper dependency on the U.S. markets in every way and across every category. And that dependency is now starting to really hurt us. And I think Ontario is an especially tough, tough place when it comes to this.

But I think the first step here is to start to lay out the way forward. And one of the obvious things to do is look at other nations and say, how are they creating these things in a way that’s actually getting things done? You look at a place, I’ve been spending some time in the United Arab Emirates, which is home to both Abu Dhabi and Dubai. And they just decided in the middle of this war that the Straits of Hormuz were not secure enough.

And so they’re going to build a pipeline. They’re going to have that pipeline done in under a year. And that’s going to move 1.8 million barrels of oil. And when you hear that, you sort of think, makes sense. But then you think, imagine if Canada said, we’re going to build a pipeline, 1.8 million, we’re going to have it done in a year. And we’re going to get this stuff to China as a result of what happened in Venezuela.

Here’s the burning question for me. Why not? Why can’t we be that nation? Half the people building these infrastructure projects in the UAE are coming from Canada, because we’re the best in the world at these things. But those experts can’t build those things in Canada at that speed, because they’re beholden to a series of rules that are often rooted in what used to feel like benign green commitments.

But now we just realize these are constraints that are doing nothing for the planet. And they’re significantly slowing down our ability to actually build the kind of economic stability and security and growth we need.

And I really like the framing that you gave about this event. Yes, this step is good. But before we start celebrating, let’s consider where does this actually go next? Are we still talking about a five to 10 year build process? Is that real? Why can they build something in a year in the UAE that carries almost twice the amount of oil as what we can build? And if there’s geographic or geological reasons why, that’s fine. But I don’t think that’s the case.

I think a lot of it is that we’ve just grown used to and accustomed to operating in a manner that is second rate. And it doesn’t keep up with the speed of business. And it certainly doesn’t keep up with what’s happening globally in the world of energy security and energy supply.

Carney Drives Canada Into Recession

Posted on May 30 by Ron Clutz

In the video speech yesterday, Conservative opposition leader Pierre Poilievre brings the receipts damning PM Carney for Canada sliding into economic recession. Transcript below with my bolds and added images.

The Carney Liberal recession

He’s the only leader in the G7 to have plunged his economy into recession. He’s been Prime Minister for four quarters now. The economy has shrunk in three of those quarters. He’s the only G7 leader who can say that. The economy is smaller today than when Mark Carney became Prime Minister a year ago. He’s the only G7 leader who can say that.

Mark Carney will like to make excuses today, but let me ask him a question. But before I do, I’m going to actually quote back to him something he said to one of you. Mark Carney said to one of the journalists, Rosie, look inside yourself. Well, I’m going to ask Mark Carney to look inside himself, and I’ll ask him directly.

Mr. Carney, if it really is global factors and tariffs that have given Canada the only recession in the G7, why have France, Italy, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States all avoided a recession? They all have the same tariffs and the same global factors, yet none of them, not one, is in recession. Only Mark Carney has the distinction of leading his country into a recession.

Now we know that there will be a lot of excuses today, but excuses will not put food on the dinner table of the 2.2 million people relying on food banks. Excuses will not get the jobs back for the 120,000 people who’ve lost them, as Canada has the second highest unemployment in the G7. Excuses will not allow a young couple to buy a home, as Mark Carney has given Canada the worst housing costs in the G7.

Excuses will not help the mother who is tossing and turning in bed at night wondering how she will make her mortgage payment, as Mark Carney has given Canada the most indebted households anywhere in the G7. By the way, Mark Carney will claim that this is just technical. There’s nothing technical about having an empty stomach because you can’t afford paying the worst food inflation in the G7.

There’s nothing technical about coming home from work and telling your kids that you no longer have a job and that they’re going to have to sell the house because Canada has the second highest unemployment in the G7. That is not technical. It is real. This is a full-blown liberal recession. And it’s not just one or two little data points that cause this, my friends. It is one of many data points that we see today.

For example, in the last few weeks alone, we have fact after fact showing that the liberal economy is collapsing. I’m going to quote from Equifax. Insolvency volumes have increased to levels not seen since 2009, up 19% year over year. Delinquency rates climbed 32% year over year. In the first quarter of this year, insolvency volumes hit a 17-year high, partly due to escalating financial strain on mortgage holders. And one in 1.5 million Canadians missed a minimum debt payment in the first three months of this year alone.

Then there’s the investment numbers, which came out just yesterday. They show that in the first four quarters under this Liberal Prime Minister, Canada saw $1.9 billion of investment flee. That’s $20 billion more than entered our country. That’s a net $20 billion leaving our country to build pipelines, mines, homes, bridges, technology, and other countries for foreign businesses and foreign workers.

Again, we cannot blame foreign factors for that, because the other countries to which that investment fled are facing the same foreign factors. So no more excuses, please. We actually need results. Furthermore, we know that the Prime Minister is fond of doing illusions of action, but here is the core reality. After a year in office, what has really changed in our economic policy? Every anti-development law remains in place, C-69, C-48.

He’s increased the industrial carbon tax six times higher than it was when Justin Trudeau was in office. Home building has actually dropped, and in many provinces the GST still applies to that home building. He’s renamed, not eliminated, renamed the consumer carbon tax, and there are 500 economic projects waiting, some of them for years, just to get through the Liberal bureaucracy permitting system.

Now, we know what won’t fix this. Dazzling speeches at the World Economic Forum, clever-sounding corporate buzzwords, signing fake and unenforceable MOUs in grand halls with stately backdrops, none of these things will reduce costs or boost growth. Announcing projects that were approved many years earlier or making pie-in-the-sky promises like he’s going to double electricity production 25 years from now with no details on how, all of these things are illusions.

They give the impression of action, but in reality, all of the policies of Justin Trudeau remain the same, or they have gotten worse. The deficit has doubled, spending is higher, the only spending that has not gone up is capital spending, precisely the opposite of what Mr. Carney promised. The only way out of this Liberal recession is to reverse the policies that caused it in the first place.

And that is why we are calling for the Prime Minister to get back in the House of Commons next week and introduce a bill to reverse all of the economic policies his party has introduced over the last decade. We don’t need more photo ops, more signing ceremonies, more discussion papers. We need to reverse the Liberal policies that have given Canada the only recession anywhere in the G7.

Conservatives have put forward positive plans to unleash our growth, including a real plan to incentivize the Americans to sign on to tariff-free trade, eliminating capital gains tax on reinvestments in Canada, ending the industrial carbon tax, in fact, cutting taxes on work, energy, home building, and investment, making Canada the fastest place anywhere on earth to get a permit, the freest economy in which to trade, work, invest, and get a return.

Let’s restore the promises of this country where anybody who gets out of bed in the morning can find a terrific job, a job that gives them a great paycheck, that buys affordable food and homes, where our young people can afford to start a family, where our parents can afford to give their children the best start, where our seniors retire in peace and tranquility, and where our economy is truly independent, self-reliant, standing on its own two feet.

That is the mission. Now, let’s turn it into action. Thank you very much. Thank you.

We’ll now take questions from reporters. Please identify yourself and your outlet. One question each.

I can start. Yes, hello, Mr. Poilievre.Laurence Martin from Radio-Canada. It’s an article that just came out this morning. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump administration wants vehicles covered by the CIO, so with low or exempt tariffs, to have at least 50% of American content.Is that an acceptable request in your opinion?

No, I have already proposed a positive plan to eliminate all tariffs on cars, which will force manufacturers to produce one car in the United States for each of their customers in the United States, and one in Canada for each of their customers in Canada. That way, we will be able to increase the production of cars in our two countries, massively, to reverse the commercial deficits that both countries have now. So that’s the only way we can eliminate tariffs between Canada and the United States.

Mr. Carney has given up, and he hasn’t done anything. He’s not at the negotiating table when Mexico is there. And because Mr. Carney is absent, now we’re seeing more dangerous threats compared to our automotive sector. There is no future for our automotive sector without direct and non-tariff access to the United States. That’s why I presented a plan about three months ago to save the automotive sector and to reverse the decline that we’ve seen in Canada for 10 years.

Mr. Carney has done absolutely nothing since then, except make big contradictions. Yesterday, he said that he wants to, and I quote, make America, in his words, great again, after saying that he wanted a break with the United States. So that’s another big failure for Mark Carney, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons why Canada has the only recession among the G7 countries. Yes, well over three months ago, I presented a plan for tariff-free auto trade with the United States, bring back the 1965 auto pact, which would massively increase production in both Canada and the United States, and actually achieve the stated goals of both countries.

Since that time, Mark Carney has been nowhere and done nothing. While the Mexicans are at the negotiating table eating our lunch on auto negotiations, Mark Carney has not shown up for one negotiation so far. The result is that our auto sector is hemorrhaging jobs under his leadership.

In the last 10 years, we’ve lost half of our auto production,
and now we’re losing even more.

But because Mark Carney has done literally nothing to fight for tariff-free trade on autos over the last decade, we’ve lost even more auto jobs, and one of the facts that Statistics Canada reported that led to us being the only country in the G7 in recession is the decline in the auto sector. Yesterday, Mark Carney gave a baffling, confusing, and contradictory speech in which he simultaneously said we need a rupture with the United States, and that we need to make America, in his words, great again. So, his elbows are up and down so fast, he’s doing a rhetorical chicken dance while we lose our auto sector.

Rahim Ahmed from the National Post. Mr. Paliyev, you said that you’ll be campaigning across Alberta for a united Canada. Can you give us an update on any visits that you have scheduled back home in the next few weeks? And are you open to debating folks like Keith Wilson and some of the other prominent Alberta separatists?

We will be back in my home province of Alberta to campaign for a united country, and our message is that all of Canada needs to wrap its arms around Alberta. Let’s ensure that every Albertan knows that Canada loves Alberta, that Canada is Alberta, Alberta is Canada, we need to have a strong united nation right across this country.

And that will mean a stronger province of Alberta, but getting out of the way and off the backs of our energy sector, getting rid of the gun grab, locking up criminals to bring safety to our streets, allowing young Albertans to start families with affordable homes, decentralizing control in the country so that Albertans have more direct decision-making power within their provincial boundaries, that is a positive, optimistic, unifying vision that I will be presenting to all Albertans in all corners of the province.

Mr. Poliev, the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs is in town today. He said this morning to Anita Anand, the Canadian minister, that if the momentum continues, trade could increase by more than 100% in five years, and that the Chinese market would remain open to Canada, and that it would soon become the largest market in the world. How do you think that will be received in the United States, and what is the risk to Canada?

First of all, Mr. Carney is directly in a conflict of interest. He went to China to receive a loan of $200 million from a bank controlled by the Chinese government a few months before he took office. He still has investments in Brookfield that he wants to expand his business in China. He has already allowed Brookfield to be at the table of discussions and talks by representing Canada. It has never happened that a prime minister sends his company to make talks.

We want a prime minister who defends Canada’s interests and not his company. Obviously, to say that we can replace the United States with China is not realistic when we sell 20 times more to the United States than we sell to China. Perhaps one of the reasons why Canada is the only country in recession among the G7 countries is our bad calculation of Mark Carney, a man who has been wrong on all economic issues for a decade.

He was wrong on the carbon tax, on the plans to keep all oil on the ground, his opposition to pipelines, his support for monetary pressure. He has been wrong on all economic issues for a decade, and we see that he is still wrong on global issues. Do you think China will do anything to make Beijing unhappy? Of course not. He won’t do anything to make Beijing unhappy.

A year after Mark Carney said that China was the single biggest risk to Canada, he claimed that we were going to have a full rupture with the United States in favour of a strategic partnership for a new world order with the dictatorship in Beijing. Of course, Mr. Carney is in a terrible conflict of interest.

He went and got a $200 million loan for his company from a state-backed Chinese bank while he was the economic advisor to Justin Trudeau. That loan is still owed, my understanding is, by Brookfield, which the Prime Minister continues to be invested in. He allowed Brookfield to be at the table for discussions.

Mr. Carney has got to be clear that he should represent Canada’s interests, not his corporation’s interests. Maybe one of the reasons why Canada is the only G7 country in recession right now is because he is miscalculating on trade, just like everything else. He has been wrong on every economic question over the last decade, and Canadians are paying the price.

He was wrong on carbon taxes, wrong on keeping half our oil in the ground, wrong to oppose a pipeline to the Pacific, wrong to support money-printing inflation, and now he is wrong in his trade priorities. We sell 20 times more to the United States than we sell to China. That is just a mathematical fact, and Mark Carney’s Brookfield interests in China will not change that.

We need a Prime Minister who is fighting for our workers in this country. We should have the best economy in the G7, not the worst. In Q3 2025, the economy grew at an annualized rate by 2.6%. We have economists saying that today’s numbers are so nominal that they could be forecasted away and revised away.

Aren’t you jumping the gun a little bit and calling this a full-blown recession? I know that there are a lot of excuses being made for Mark Carney today, and I am not surprised. By the way, which outlet are you with? The Hilltop. Is 2.6% economic growth an excuse, or is that just the numbers? There is no 2.6% economic growth. You are having to go back? How many quarters are you having to go back now? Two quarters. You are having to go back. Let’s get this straight.

There have been four quarters since Mark Carney became Prime Minister. The economy shrunk in three of those four quarters. Canada is the only G7 country for which that is the case. There has now been an entire year of Mark Carney that is recorded in economic data, and the GDP is smaller today than when he took office. That is only true of Canada among G7 countries.

Now there are two back-to-back quarters where the economy shrunk,
which is the literal definition of a recession.

By the way, it is not just that our economy is shrinking quarter after quarter. It is that we have the second highest unemployment in the G7. You think that the 120,000 people that lost their jobs since the beginning of this year call this just a technical recession? No. They call this real job loss. Then you have the delinquency rate that is up 32% year over year at 17-year highs. We have the highest household debt of any country in the G7, the worst housing costs of any country in the G7, and for most of the last year, the worst food price inflation of any country in the G7.

So yes, you are making excuses and trying to hide from the reality that Mark Carney has given Canada the worst economy in the G7. It is time to stop making excuses, not for political reasons. It is time to stop making those excuses because this is people’s lives. Behind these statistics are empty stomachs, empty fridges, and empty bank accounts. Behind these numbers are 120,000 people who have come home to their kids saying, we cannot have you registered for hockey this year. We have to sell our home. I do not know what we are going to do. That is the reality of Mark Carney’s economy, and it is trying to stop covering it up with illusions.

Good afternoon, Pierre. So, Pierre, on national defence, Pierre. I will get your question, but I just have to get this. On national defence, yesterday, CanSec, the conference, concluded, and both of your former colleagues in Aeronautical and Peter McKay sang praise of the government’s shift of national defence policy under Mark Carney’s leadership. What do you make of the shift of that national defence strategy and procurement specifically? And also, do you believe you are losing ground to Mark Carney in an issue like national defence to the progressive conservative flank of your party?

No. What we have seen is a lot of illusions from Mark Carney, a lot of spending on bureaucracy, on procurement, and on consultants. A lot of big corporations will get very rich. The problem is that the money is not reaching the equipment in the hands of the soldiers. We 100% support more military spending, but we want to turn that spending into better equipment and better results for our soldiers, not more expensive bureaucracy, more confusing procurement, and more profits for multinational defence contractors.

So, Pierre, your final validation is that there is influence of Mark Carney’s leadership into the media.

Who can even ask questions? I think it is very troubling. The question for those who could not hear is that Mr. Carney has decided to protect the minister from Beijing by not allowing media to enter the room and only to release state photography of the meeting. That is how things are done in Beijing, and now Mark Carney is importing those methods here. Even one liberal commentator on CBC, Althea Raj, said that Mark Carney has an authoritarian streak.

I would remind him that he is supposed to work for Canadians, not for Beijing, not for Brookfield and its Chinese investments. He should open up and actually take questions from the media, like I am doing here today. By the way, he should actually show up in the House of Commons and answer questions there. We see that Mark Carney cannot take difficult questions because his illusion shatters under any scrutiny, but that is not how Canada works.

We are a free and open democracy, not an authoritarian state. Yes, I find it very disturbing that Mr. Carney forbids the media to take pictures and ask questions. He is trying to import protocols from the regime in Beijing, here in Canada. It is not democratic. There are certain CBC commentators who have noticed that he has an authoritarian streak, and now he is using it to promote Beijing’s dictatorship. I remind Mr. Carney that we are a democracy in Canada.

We work for the Canadian people and not for Beijing’s leaders. We should be willing to talk and trade with China. It is a brilliant civilization with hard-working, decent people, but we have to do so with our eyes open. This is a dictatorship that Mr. Carney himself acknowledged was the biggest threat to Canada only a year ago. Our interests in Canada are in being sovereign, self-reliant, and standing on our own two feet, ensuring that we have full control over our technology, our economy, and our minerals. Never will we be vulnerable to the aggressive instincts of a foreign dictatorship.

We have not proposed that. We think that the government should focus on reducing the cost of government spending. It should unleash free enterprise so that our small businesses, our workers, and our investors can make Canada the richest and most affordable country anywhere on Earth.

First of all, we should allow the savings that come as a result of AI to be passed on to consumers. They should not be inflated away through more money printing. Second of all, we cannot allow the government to use high-tech companies as a surveillance arm of the state. That is why we are fighting against the changes proposed in C-22.

We are very worried about excessive government power for surveillance and for control of the population. We need to have a free and open society where Canadians can use the tools that AI offers to make their lives affordable, empowered, make their paycheques bigger, and their lives less complicated. At the same time, we need to make sure that the government does not abuse that technology for its own control. Thank you very much.

The Superclass and Technocrats Busy Designing Our Future (Jacob Nordangård)

Posted on May 18 by Ron Clutz

The plans and intentions are exposed in a Clintel article From the Polycrisis to a World Government. Climate Alarmism is part of a much bigger agenda driven by the UN, says Swedish scientist, author, and musician Jacob Nordangård. What is the real plan behind all this? The Swiss news outlet Transition News spoke with Nordangård. Excerpts below with my bolds and added images.

Transition News: Some believe that the recent crises and the associated profiteering are pure coincidence and that capitalism simply works this way: one thing leads to another, no one is planning a world government. However, in your book “The Digital World Control”, which has just been published in an updated and expanded German and English edition, you clearly demonstrate that some are following a specific plan, with the United Nations at its center. On what sources do you base your research?

Nordangård: I use original sources from the United Nations and all those organizations that prepared the UN’s Pact for the Future. This means, my research is primarily based on the statements of these institutions themselves. I also consult other sources, for example, the World Economic Forum (WEF), which has entered into a partnership with the United Nations.

The official signing of the agreement took place in June 2019, attended by former WEF CEO Klaus Schwab, then-WEF President Børge Brende, UN Secretary-General António Guterres, and UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed. However, the UN and the WEF had already been cooperating prior to this. Mohammed, for example, served on the board of the Young Global Leaders program. This means that the United Nations and the WEF had been closely linked for about a decade before the official partnership.

When I wrote the Swedish edition of this book, I was focused on the UN’s Our Common Agenda. It was only with the release of the Epstein files that I realized how Epstein was deeply involved with some of the key figures of this UN agenda, such as Brende. Jeffrey Epstein was a member of the Trilateral Commission, which was established by David Rockefeller in 1973. Rockefeller brought Epstein into this group and also into the Council on Foreign Relations, another important think tank that primarily shapes American foreign policy.

Currently, the focus is primarily on sex trafficking and the minors involved. But Epstein was important for connecting people. For example, he befriended Brende, the former president of the World Economic Forum, and they discussed how the WEF could take on the role of the United Nations. He was therefore a key figure in these influential networks.

The modern concept of scientific dictatorship can be traced back to H. G. Wells. But Julian Huxley, a friend of Wells, and the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin also held similar views on technological change and a technological society, a kind of techno-utopia.

The twelve proposals of the United Nations contained in Our Common Agenda was published in 2021 to establish commitments for implementing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These commitments include, among other things: leave no one behind, build trust, and listen to young people. It all sounds quite reasonable. What does this have to do with a scientific dictatorship or a techno-utopia?

Such plans are always packaged in fine words. But we need to see the plans behind these well chosen words. Let’s take the slogan “Leave no one behind” and look at what the UN’s Our Common Agenda and Pact for the Future actually intend:

It’s about the digitization of more or less everything on this planet,
everything that can be recorded and monitored.

It is a perfectly ordered and controlled system. No one is to be left behind, as everyone must be part of the system. As a precaution, everyone is monitored.

And when “we” say they want to listen to people, according to “our shared agenda”, it’s about learning what people do and think. Not about giving citizens a real say. “We” have a vision and a pact for the future. And “our” plans are to be implemented, so “we” want to know how people react.

Pseudoscience as Religion

But everything is based on “their” science. I consider this to be pseudoscience. It’s not real science, but a political vision sold as science. I taught and researched at the university for many years—science means questioning everything in order to constantly improve. But here, “science”, which is largely based on model calculations and computer simulations, is being instrumentalized as a religion: If people follow “our” path, it leads to paradise; if not, it leads to hell. “We” must therefore convince people to choose the path “we” discuss at the United Nations. “We” have this one great goal.

Our Common Agenda and The Pact for the Future are
based on behavioral design and behavioral science.

This behaviorism is used to steer people in the right direction. This corresponds to totalitarian thinking. It is not a particularly empathetic way of dealing with people, but rather turns them into objects that can be programmed to better conform to the visions of those behind these plans.

And when they say: “We want to listen to young people and work with them,” it basically means that young people are to be steered in a certain direction.

Young people can’t simply express their opinions freely. They are asked: “What do you think of climate policy? Should it be stricter or more lenient?” “I don’t believe in it” is not an acceptable answer. These “facts” must not be questioned. Questionnaires and focus groups serve only to justify the implemented measures.

Why is there such a focus on the year 2030? Because these 15-year plans exist. From 2000 onwards, there was this test run with the Millennium Development Goals until 2015 – few have heard of it or remember it – and the goals were not met. But this time, for the year 2030, everything has gained enormous importance and has been used for propaganda purposes since 2015. However, I suspect that the United Nations will no longer be able to successfully implement the Sustainable Development Goals as they are presented to the public by 2030.

So there will be new goals for 2045 – a crucial milestone. In future scenarios, the project is described as The Great Transition – the aim is to establish a world government by the UN’s 100th anniversary. The period leading up to it is a transitional phase, and we are currently in the first stage of this transformation. 2030 is simply a pivotal year on the path to achieving this goal.

Cyber-biological Systems

How does artificial intelligence (AI) contribute to implementing this one world government? I believe the elites of this world view AI as a perfect system because they previously relied on other people to carry out their orders – that is why totalitarian systems can never last in the long run.

If they use this AI-driven system instead, no one stands in the elites’ way: no one can destroy it from within. They can set rules and regulations and tell the autonomous AI system, the world’s control system, what they want to achieve, and it will be implemented.

From where does this idea that humanity could unite with machines and the financial system actually stem? This too is an old idea and closely linked to transhumanism. Eugenics, with its aim of changing and improving humanity, is part of this. Transhumanism has taken this to a new level by using technology to modify us, integrate us into the system, and digitize us.

This development took place at the beginning of the computer age, especially from the 1990s onward. Like many others, I simply considered it the pipe dreams of a few tech enthusiasts at the time. But now it’s ubiquitous and serves as the foundation of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. These transhumanist ideas found particularly fertile ground at the World Economic Forum.

And in 2019, the United Nations and the WEF entered into this very partnership, enabling the World Economic Forum to support the UN in implementing the 2030 Agenda. This is being achieved using the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, more precisely, cyber-biological systems. In this process, humans, machines, and the financial system are merging. This is a crucial aspect, as it leads to a complete transformation of the old, dying system. We will, therefore, integrate ourselves into the financial system.

From the WEF to an UN 2.0

In 2020, the member states of the United Nations adopted a resolution calling on Secretary-General Guterres to produce a document addressing the following question: How can we create a better, more effective UN that can respond to crises such as a pandemic?

Negotiations then took place, and eleven strategy papers were published. Parts of these were incorporated and supplemented in Our Common Agenda. This agenda is rather concise and only describes the desired goals. In addition, there were policy briefs that are considerably more comprehensive, discussing all topics in detail and developing concrete proposals for achieving the desired goals.

The member states then met to discuss these recommendations and thus develop a document that would serve as a Pact for the Future. There were therefore three successive phases. All states were required to agree to the UN’s Pact for the Future in advance in order to implement it more efficiently.

In 2024 the pact was agreed upon by all member states and adopted by the United Nations and the member states. Russia has stated that it will not implement all points. They intend to follow the points they consider sensible, particularly the digitalization agenda.

A multipolar system with regions is now being prepared. An organization called the Stimson Center has been significantly involved in drafting the recommendations for the UN Pact on the Future and repeatedly emphasizes this future world order with regions.

The geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski co-founded the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller and served for a time as Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor. In his book “The Grand Chessboard”, he developed proposals for how the American empire should function. His goal was to prepare for and shape a new world in which the United States would no longer be the dominant force, but rather the UN would assume this role: The world’s regions would cooperate under the umbrella of the United Nations—a modernized, effective organization capable of operating efficiently on a global scale and no longer merely an informal circle.

We only need to look back three decades to see that much has already been achieved – people are very adaptable. Here in Sweden, cash is hardly used anymore. Thirty years ago, everyone paid in cash; card payments were uncommon. The so-called pandemic or even wars serve to change systems without much fanfare because people are thinking about other things.

Wars are also being fought locally, like here in Sweden, in my hometown: We have bombings, shootings, and crime. At the same time, this agenda is being implemented: Surveillance cameras have been permitted in public streets for two years now, and they are now installed everywhere.

Two sides of the same coin.

Trump and the Polycrisis of the Superclass

In this context, what purpose do crises such as Covid-19, the energy and food crisis – the polycrisis – serve? These crises serve as a trigger. Because in 2024 something very important was not achieved with the UN’s Pact for the Future: the creation of a so-called emergency platform. Instead, we now find ourselves in this permanent crisis situation, which shows the world that we are unprepared and unable to solve these problems.

These events were considered necessary to introduce
new political measures and gain public approval.

And also the actions of US President Donald Trump are creating even more problems. This, too, is about gaining approval for the new world system in order to push through the emergency platform and a UN 2.0. The current multi-crisis will ultimately help those who developed these plans for modernizing the United Nations to obtain the necessary approval for their implementation.

I call him “Wreck-It Trump” because he’s razing the old structure to the ground. He’s destroying the existing system. The United Nations isn’t functioning as it should, and he’s paving the way for something new. Trump is the perfect candidate for it. Nothing will be left of the old system.

And when he’s finished and his time is up, they can simply take over with this new system. Everyone will then say: “Finally, reason prevails. A new system that will make the world safer again.” It’s not about reforms. It’s about power.

Who are these few who want to control the lives of billions of people? They belong to the superclass, as David Rothkopf calls them in his book. These are oligarchs who control the global financial world and the economy. They can be found, for example, in the World Economic Forum and in philanthropic organizations. I wrote about one of these families, and I show how the climate protection agenda came about and what lies behind it.

Here in Sweden, a family named Wallenberg is very powerful. Like the Rockefellers, they belong to the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission. These are extremely influential networks that shaped the old order and now want to gain control of the new one.

They also bring in people from other regions, such as multi-billionaires from India, South Africa, China, and Japan. This elite seems to think they are the chosen ones. Those who have the potential to be successful, to reach the highest positions of power, and to run successful companies consider themselves better than others.

The superclass comprises several thousand individuals worldwide. And among them, of course, there are hierarchies. Some are higher up. But who really knows who’s at the top?

One of the key players driving this agenda is Johan Rockström, who advised Greta Thunberg. Who is this man? Johan Rockström is an agronomist. He was selected by Bert Bolin for a position at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Bolin, in turn, was the first chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and Rockström succeeded him. He is a key figure in climate policy and now heads the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) outside Berlin.

Previously, Rockström headed the Stockholm Resilience Centre. This center was founded with the goal of developing a system for “planetary boundaries”. This explanatory model is crucial for the worldview of the elites and their control system. Rockström and his network of scientists use it to define what we as human beings are even capable of doing on this planet.

He speaks regularly at the World Economic Forum. Furthermore, he is connected to several highly influential networks that advise not only the wealthy and powerful, but also governments worldwide. These include the Climate Governance Commission (CGC), which recommended, even before the 2024 Summit on the Future of Europe, that the UN General Assembly declare a climate emergency because humanity is exceeding planetary boundaries – of which there are nine.

The emergency platform is intended to serve as a means
of implementing the super-class’ plans worldwide.

Rockström belongs to the elite group of scientists who define our limits and determine how many resources we are allowed to use or what we can eat. He is also a member of the organization EAT which advocates for a transformation of the global food system.

This man is very influential, but he’s just one player. Before him, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber headed the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). He advised Angela Merkel, the European Commission, and even the Pope on climate issues. People like Rockström or Schellnhuber work on this topic until they retire, and then there’s a successor. They certainly play an important role in achieving the goals, but the real power brokers are the philanthropists, the super-rich.

What is Sweden’s role when it comes to creating a world government? Sweden acts, in a sense, as a mouthpiece for these influential forces, including the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Bilderberg Group. My home country assumed this role quite early, in the 1950s, and expanded it in the context of climate research and environmental protection.

Sweden hosted the first UN Conference on the Human Environment in 1972, and numerous key players driving this agenda originate from there. However, they are more or less merely proxies for these influential networks. As previously mentioned, the Wallenberg family largely holds the reins in Sweden and controls many large companies; they are very closely connected to the super-class. They have always had influence over the Swedish government—regardless of whether the Social Democrats or the Moderates are in power.

Furthermore, according to futurologist Graham Molitor, innovations are implemented particularly quickly in Sweden. We seem to simply adopt new technologies without questioning them because we are so progressive .

On the other hand, the Green Party in Sweden achieves about six percent of the vote. But that doesn’t matter. Because, if you look more closely at the climate and environmental agenda, you’ll find that it’s not genuine green policy, but rather digital policy. It doesn’t matter whether the country is governed by right or left leaning parties. When it comes to this global agenda, everyone agrees. The Greens are only the activist arm.

I have examined how these environmental organizations are financed and organized by elite networks to popularize these activists and their actions – ultimately, it’s about controlling the entire population, every single individual. That’s why we need these opposition parties and movements.

I also have a history with the Greens; I experienced all of this firsthand. Therefore, it was quite a shock for me when my research revealed that oil barons like the Rockefellers were behind the environmental movement. They were involved in developing precisely the kind of policies that we as Greens supported.

Via Berlin and Kyiv to Technocracy

What purpose does the climate agenda serve, if oil companies exploit this narrative? The Rockefellers and their philanthropists clearly dictate what “we” want to achieve. The climate agenda originated at a meeting with eugenicists in the 1950s. In 1952, John D. Rockefeller III and Detlev Bronk, then head of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), met to discuss a population control plan. This led to the formation of the Population Council. Roger Revelle also attended the same meeting.

In the 1950s, Revelle made global warming a central concern and an important area of research. He also played a crucial role as an advisor to US President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. At that time, there was a project called the Special Studies Project with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, in turn, was managed by the sons or grandsons of John D. Rockefeller. We have David and John D. III, and Lawrence and Winthrop. These brothers received money from the Standard Oil Corporation – oil money – and considered how they wanted to change the world. They came to the conclusion that science was a good way to transform society, given the scientific collaborations between countries. They themselves had established these collaborations, for example, through the Rockefeller Foundation, by providing funding to universities around the world.

The basic idea was that such problems cannot be solved by any one nation alone. They must be solved, more or less, by an international body. So, on the one hand, we have population control, and on the other hand, the idea of a kind of world authority that has to assume control. The other scientific problems were pandemics and the associated global health problems.

Diseases were recognized as a global lever as early as the 1950s. Everything happens quite openly. Why do so few people engage with this topic? Questioning these things comes at a price. After I uncovered these networks, it was very difficult to keep my job as a university lecturer.

When I defended my doctoral thesis – “Ordo ab Chao: The Political History of Biofuels in the European Union. Actors, Networks and Strategies” – in 2012, my opponent said right at the beginning: “You know, my institution has just received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.” The chairman of the Club of Rome also tried to prevent my dissertation from being accepted at all.

But what surprised me most was this: I came from the environmental movement myself, but when I tried to warn my fellow activists that these oil companies were involved, some of them got really angry. The more we talked about sustainable development, the more cars and technologies were introduced. Nobody wanted to question that. Universities and environmental organizations alike receive funding from these foundations. In the end, it’s all about the money.

But I continued working as a lecturer after that, first for a few years at Linköping University and then at Stockholm University. But it became increasingly difficult. Because many, especially junior researchers, discovered that I don’t really subscribe to the climate dogma. And that makes you less trustworthy. We don’t want to tolerate such a “climate denier” at “our” institution.

Apparently, it was just one student who googled me and found out I had written a critical paper on climate change; he probably complained to the head of the institute. For me, this was no longer a pleasant working environment.

But after I wrote the book “The Global Coup-Etat” in the first year of the “pandemic” it became unbearable. Mainstream medicine and the Covid-19 mandates could not be criticized. That was morally unacceptable. The fraudulent scheme was more or less evident by March 2020.

In April 2019, I published my book about the Rockefeller family, describing how their plans for the world were to be achieved through the Fourth Industrial Revolution. While researching climate change, I also came across information related to the health sector. So, it was quite easy for me to put these pieces of the puzzle together.

The mainstream media reacted to my publication about the coup by simply considering it extremist at the time. Sweden was, of course, the better place to live during the “pandemic.” But the media stated, “anyone who doubts that is an idiot.” Alternative media outlets reported on my book, which was published in December 2020, and it quickly sold out.

In 2024, the WEF opened the Global Government Technology Center in Berlin. The goal is to build new systems for governance. These will not be controlled by humans, but by an agent AI. Stanley Milgram coined the term “agentic state” – a state in which someone simply follows the wishes and instructions of the authorities.

A white paper from the Global Government Technology Center bears precisely this title: “The Agentic State”. The agentic AI will be the authoritative body, issuing commands and carrying everything out efficiently, and is intended for use in the UN emergency response platform – without humans who could say: “No, I won’t do that.”

Another Global Government Technology Center is located in Kyiv, where these systems can be tested – this is easier to accomplish in a country at war. That’s why many WEF representatives are working with Ukraine.

How should humanity best respond to this technocratic threat? This attempt by the superclass to rebuild the Babylonian Tower will fail. As soon as the last piece of the puzzle is in place, everything will begin to crumble and collapse. Those building this system use lies and every possible manipulation technique to bring people under their total control. And while the truth lags behind, it is catching up. People see through this. The truth will come to light and wash everything away. So they are trying an impossible undertaking.

At the same time, I think such projects are inevitable. There have always been, and always will be, people who strive for power. When this tower collapses, someone will try to rebuild it. But perhaps we have some time in between to better prepare the world for these psychopaths.

Why Rescinding the Endangerment Finding May Survive Lawfare

Posted on February 12 by Ron Clutz

Some thoughts from my browser AI. My Question: What are the legal matters, such as major questions requiring congressional action, that favor ending EPA CO2 Endangerment Finding?

Search Assistant Reply:

The legal matters surrounding the repeal of the EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding involve the major questions doctrine, which suggests that significant regulatory authority should not be assumed by agencies without clear congressional authorization. This doctrine has been reinforced by recent Supreme Court rulings, indicating that the EPA may need explicit legislative backing to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, thus favoring the argument for ending the Endangerment Finding.

Legal Matters Surrounding the EPA CO2 Endangerment Finding

Major Questions Doctrine

The major questions doctrine is a legal principle that limits the authority of executive agencies, like the EPA, to make significant regulatory decisions without clear congressional authorization. This doctrine has been increasingly applied by the Supreme Court to ensure that major political or economic issues are addressed by Congress rather than delegated to agencies.

Definition: The doctrine asserts that agencies must have explicit congressional authorization to regulate matters of significant economic or political importance.
Recent Cases: The Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA (2022) emphasized that agencies must point to clear congressional authorization for their regulatory actions, particularly when those actions have broad implications.

Implications for the Endangerment Finding

The repeal of the EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding could be supported by arguments based on the major questions doctrine:

Lack of Clear Authorization: Opponents of the Endangerment Finding may argue that the Clean Air Act does not provide the EPA with the authority to regulate greenhouse gases based on global climate change concerns, as these gases are not traditional air pollutants.
Historical Context: The Endangerment Finding was established following the Massachusetts v. EPA (2007) ruling, which recognized greenhouse gases as pollutants. However, the current administration may argue that the regulatory framework established under this finding lacks explicit congressional backing for such extensive regulatory power. [Note: AI got this wrong. Mass v. EPA only ruled EPA could itself decide GHGs are pollutants subject to its regulation. That judgment by EPA regarding auto emissions in 2009 is now rescinded by EPA in 2026.]

Potential Legal Challenges

Court Challenges: Environmental groups are likely to challenge the repeal in court, arguing that the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases is well-supported by the Clean Air Act and previous Supreme Court rulings.
Future Regulations: If the Endangerment Finding is repealed, it could undermine existing regulations on vehicle emissions and other sources of greenhouse gases, leading to further legal disputes over the EPA’s regulatory scope.

The intersection of the major questions doctrine and the Endangerment Finding highlights the ongoing legal debates regarding the EPA’s authority and the role of Congress in environmental regulation.

From SCOTUS Blog June 30, 2022

The Supreme Court on Thursday truncated the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate greenhouse gases. The ruling may hamper President Joe Biden’s plan to fight climate change and could limit the authority of federal agencies across the executive branch.

By a vote of 6-3, the court agreed with Republican-led states and coal companies that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was wrong when it interpreted the Clean Air Act to give the EPA expansive power over carbon emissions. The decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, was handed down on the final opinion day of the 2021-22 term.

Turning to the merits of the case, Roberts wrote that the EPA’s effort to regulate greenhouse gases by making industry-wide changes violated the “major-questions” doctrine – the idea that if Congress wants to give an administrative agency the power to make “decisions of vast economic and political significance,” it must say so clearly.

Section 7411 of the Clean Air Act, Roberts reasoned, had been “designed as a gap filler and had rarely been used in the preceding decades.” But with the CPP, Roberts observed, the EPA sought to rely on Section 7411 to exercise “unprecedented power over American industry.” “There is little reason to think Congress assigned such decisions to” the EPA, Roberts concluded, especially when Congress had previously rejected efforts to enact the kind of program that the EPA wanted to implement with the CPP.

“Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day,’” Roberts wrote. But only Congress, or an agency with express authority from Congress, can adopt a “decision of such magnitude and consequence.”

Roberts’ full-throated embrace of the major-questions doctrine – a judicially created approach to statutory interpretation in challenges to agency authority – likely will have ripple effects far beyond the EPA. His reasoning applies to any major policymaking effort by federal agencies.

In a concurring opinion that was joined by Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Neil Gorsuch emphasized that the dispute before the court involved “basic questions about self-government, equality, fair notice, federalism, and the separation of powers.” The major-questions doctrine, Gorsuch wrote, “seeks to protect against ‘unintentional, oblique, or otherwise unlikely’ intrusions on these interests” by requiring federal agencies to have “clear congressional authorization” when they address important issues. Whether coal- and gas-fired power plants “should be allowed to operate is a question on which people today may disagree, but it is a question everyone can agree is vitally important.”

Net Zero is a Downer, Choose the Way Up

Posted on February 11 by Ron Clutz

In this Net Zero Watch video, Colin Brazier takes us on a journey through Britain’s energy transformation as he looks at how energy abundance spawned the modern world. For those who prefer reading, below is a transcript with my bolds and added images. H/T Not a Lot of People Know That.

How did Britain get to where it did? How did this damp little corner of northwestern Europe become the economic superpower of the Victorian age? A lot of people point to our temperament, our system of government, our heritage, our scientific tradition. But I’d offer a rival explanation. It’s because of this.

This battery, like coal before it, represents energy and Britain’s story is a story of energy, a story of how people climbed out of the cold and darkness and built a girdle around the earth. And it’s a story which began here.

This is Ironbridge Gorge, the Silicon Valley of the 18th century, where coke was first smelted with iron and where the industrial age really began.

For centuries, life was fragile. Families lived by candlelight, worked the land, subject to storm and famine. In this truly organic green economy, energy was provided by muscle, by wind, water and wood. And life was constantly on the brink of collapse.

Then came something extraordinary, coal. Dense, powerful, reliable. Unlike wood or wind, coal delivered more power, more consistently and with a surplus. That surplus transformed Britain. It wasn’t just fuel, it was freedom.

One of the early steam engine locomotives.

Coal powered factories, cities and ships. It broke the stranglehold of the aristocracy because land was no longer the source of all wealth. Energy abundance spread prosperity, dignity and opportunity far beyond the manor house.

Life expectancy rose, death rates fell, cities grew. Children left fields, found trades, found schools, found new futures. Coal wasn’t just about energy. It was the very beginning of the modern world. Energy abundance spread opportunity, dignity and choice. Energy is the fuel of civilisation.

Freedom requires means, the ability to travel, to act, to think, to choose. All of it depends on energy. Energy is not just another input to the economy. It is the foundation of every input. It’s the key to every human action. This was the way up.

But from the late 20th century onwards, something changed. A new philosophy took hold. Instead of celebrating energy as the lifeblood of prosperity, it was recast as the villain. Coal was demonised. Oil and gas became suspect.

Energy abundance, once a mark of progress,
was rebranded as a threat to the planet.

Net zero requires us to make big changes today. “Net zero is our best chance for a sustainable future.” The logic of net zero spreads into almost every aspect of daily life. What cars we drive, what we eat, how we heat our homes, even how many children we are encouraged to have. Petrol and diesel cars banned. Gas boilers ripped out. Smart meters to ration our use of power. Meat consumption cut. Families told to fly less, to travel less, to live with less.

This is not abundance. This is managed decline. Think about it. Not power when you need it, but when the state sees fit. That’s not freedom. That’s rationing. Net zero isn’t about emissions. It’s about control. It is central planning extended into every aspect of life.

The state tells you what you can and what you can’t eat, how to travel, when to use power. They call it green, but to me it feels like a command economy. And like all command economies across the world, it ends up in the same way, in poverty and in misery.

We cannot let it happen here. Claire Coutinho was Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero and retains the brief in opposition. She knows just what effect such a policy will have on the country. Claire, what does net zero mean for growth overall?

The problem with net zero is it’s making us all poorer. Every time a business leaves this country for another country with more polluting energy regime, we are losing jobs, we are losing growth. And for what? So we can become more reliant on other countries for the products that we used to make here.That means fewer jobs here, but higher carbon emissions. It simply doesn’t make sense. And if we carry on down the route that we’re currently travelling, what does the future from a pessimistic position begin to look like? Higher energy bills, fewer jobs. I mean, it simply is not the right path for this country.

Sometimes this whole conversation can be so steeped in declinism. What is the positive vision if we change direction on net zero?

Look, for the last 200 years, Britain has been at the forefront of every industrial revolution. And we can do that again, whether it’s AI, whether it’s robotics, whether it’s space. There are so many things that this country could do if we have access to cheaper energy. Britain is there. We can do this. But we need ministers and governments to focus on providing that cheap energy the country needs.

And here is the twist. Britain gets to make the sacrifice while others get to race ahead. Our emissions in the global scheme of things are negligible. China’s annual increase alone dwarfs our entire output.
We get to pay the cost. They get to enjoy the growth. What we’re left with is the worst of both worlds.
Economic decline at home. No meaningful effect on the climate abroad.

And yet we’re told this is virtuous. That living with less is noble. That accepting decline is moral. But ask yourself, is poverty moral? Is coldness in winter moral? Is telling working families they cannot afford to travel or eat moral? This is not morality. This is coercion dressed up as compassion.

And this is the way down. But decline is not inevitable. We can choose the way up again. Britain has the resources, the ingenuity and the history of leading the world in energy innovation. Coal, oil, gas, nuclear. These are not enemies. They are the foundation stones of modern life. And yes, new technologies can play a part. But they must serve freedom and prosperity, not restrict them.

We need energy abundance, not energy rationing.
Competition, not central planning.
Innovation, not authoritarian diktats.

Britain’s national story really is a story all about energy. Abundance built our freedom. Scarcity may well yet destroy it. We now face a choice. Energy prosperity the way up, or energy poverty the way down. Which future will we choose?

A German Sees WEF Itself Suffer Great Reset

Posted on January 24 by Ron Clutz

Thomas Kolbe reports on a major turnabout in his American Thinker article Hour of the Opponents in Davos. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Machiavelli is dead, long live freedom.

Wednesday was the day of the opponents at the annual World Economic Forum gathering in Davos. Donald Trump and Argentina’s Javier Milei tore apart the WEF agenda. One declared globalism as officially failed, the other wielded an intellectual-ethical scalpel through the decayed body of the establishment.

Norwegian Børge Brende has been the chairman of the World Economic Forum since last year. He took over after a heated internal personnel debate from the WEF’s founder, Klaus Schwab, who for decades dominated the agenda of this shadowy institution for political will-shaping.

Schwab did so with undeniable success. The WEF has become an ideological melting pot of European politics, from which socialist concepts long proven costly in blood and failure continue to resurface — now repackaged as morally renewed, dressed in green.

Whether it’s the EU’s climate-socialist agenda, peculiar ideas like the 15-minute city to restrict individual mobility, or digital control currencies designed to make hidden capital controls palatable — the WEF has always been a source of centralist fantasies of political power.

Fleet of Teslas at WEF Forum

Take the vision of the digital identity of the new global citizen, who no longer exists as an individual but as a managed dataset — this too originates in Davos think tanks. Every person would possess a centralized, supranational digital existence where financial behavior, health status, and political reliability are consolidated into a controllable unit. The culmination of the “transparent citizen,” the final chapter of individual dignity and freedom.

Mobility, nutrition, housing — all are turned into moral tests. The CO2 footprint replaces personal judgment; deviation is social misconduct. Davos has grown in the haze of its control fetish into the symbol of a leadership claim by a detached pseudo-elite.

Hour of the Antagonists

Informal political organizations like the WEF live on media presence. Continuous coverage is their lifeblood, which makes inviting the most powerful political figures — like U.S. president Donald Trump or South America’s rising star, Argentina’s Javier Milei — practically inevitable.

Brende, Schwab, and the roughly one thousand invited guests
surely anticipated what the appearance of the two might bring.
And they were not disappointed.

Trump, outside his MAGA orbit hardly known as a master orator of refined rhetoric, declared the World Economic Forum agenda officially failed in his own unmistakable way. He mocked European energy policy, spoke openly about the continent’s self-destructive migration policies, and presented an US economic record that made even seasoned technocrats sit up:

♦ 5.4 percent growth in the last quarter,
♦ full deregulation of the energy sector, and
♦ a radical downsizing of the federal bureaucracy by 250,000 employees.

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These were blows to the heart of central planners and declared friends of the “big state.” Heavy on main clauses and rich in imagery, Trump dismantled the Davosites’ fantasies of omnipotence one by one. Planning versus growth, moralism versus prosperity, control versus dynamism — every certainty was exposed like a warped political myth.

His ultimate checkmate came with the sober reminder of Europe’s total dependence on the American military apparatus. Those who cannot defend themselves, the unstated message implied, should be cautious in delivering moral lectures. Greenland salutes.

The outraged media response that followed proves one thing: he hit the mark. And, in essence, did nothing less than openly lay out the conditions of this system’s potential capitulation.

Milei Delivers an Ethical Bankruptcy

Where Trump brought a rhetorical sledgehammer, Milei immediately followed with the elegant intellectual foil. The organizers had clearly hoped to tone down the disruption of their feel-good gathering by seating the two opponents consecutively. But the double act only amplified the effect — and the message.

Milei opened with a jarring statement: “Machiavelli is dead.” Its meaning, however, was unmistakable. The politics of public manipulation and technocratic governance, which have become a guiding principle in EU Europe, do not lead to order but to their own crisis. The state, Milei insisted, must be guided by moral principles and make individual liberty the starting point of political action.

This was the maximum confrontation with the WEF agenda.
The gauntlet had been thrown.

He pressed further. One hundred fifty million people, he alleged, had lost their lives in the name of socialism over the past century; the survivors lived in poverty. Justice, he argued, belongs only to free-trade capitalism: voluntary exchange and the absolute respect for property rights, founded on meritocratic values. This is the recipe for a prosperous civilization.

These words carry weight. In two years, Milei literally turned the helm of his nation: he restored Argentina to growth, radically cut the bureaucracy, and brought inflation under control. Who would have expected that intellectual rigor and ethical grounding could one day inhabit the presidency of a nation as significant as Argentina?

Milei also answered the crucial question of our time:
How can the current cultural crisis be overcome?

Only by returning to the sources, he diagnosed — Greek philosophy as the inspiration of thought, Roman law, republican principles, and above all Judeo-Christian values. Together, these civilizational achievements form the recipe for a Western comeback.

Real wages for Argentina’s registered private sector workers reached 107 on the index (base 2023=100) in February 2025, the highest since August 2018, according to the Observatory of Employment and Business Dynamics.

Milei did not miss an opportunity to deliver a late retort to German chancellor Friedrich Merz. A year ago, Merz had called Milei a politician who tramples his own people and promotes a divisive agenda and continues to foster an anti-business climate. For Milei, however, entrepreneurs are precisely those who drive the innovation of a free-market economy. Politics must stop harassing those trying to build a better world.

In this light, Merz and his government are indeed a burden for anyone striving forward in life, living by values, and resisting the rhetorical trap of vulgar WEF-style socialism.

The Turning Point Has Arrived

Trump and Milei are merely the most visible representatives of an increasingly influential conservative turn. Even if the European press still portrays the American president as a deranged villain and destroyer of a socialist utopia, the message he and Milei deliver is gaining traction.

The cultural and economic crisis of our time is above all a crisis of statism and faith in the strong state. Its seductive arts inevitably lead to megalomania and scenarios of submission — with the civilizational fracture we see today as a consequence.

In Argentina and the United States, the repair work is already underway.
The open question is no longer whether a course correction is possible,
but when Europeans will follow the example of these two.

Canada Climate Policy Built on Corrupt Data

Posted on January 17 by Ron Clutz

Tom Harris and Todd Royal explain why “official” temperature history from Canada government is distorted to invent warming where very little has actually ocurred. Their article: Is Canada basing its climate policies on ‘decision-based evidence-making?’ Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Politicians want us to believe that they base their decisions on solid, verifiable evidence. “Evidence-based decision-making,” they call it. But what if the decision is made first and then the data is selected, or left uncorrected, in order to support the now politically correct decision? That would then be “decision-based evidence-making.” In other words, a complete corruption of honest decision-making.

It seems that Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) is doing exactly that with the country’s temperature data in order to support the government’s mantra that Canada is “warming twice as fast as the global average.” For, if the one-degree anomalous spike in Canada’s “mean temperature” in 1998 is removed from the data, as even ECCC researchers themselves advocated previously should be done to preserve data integrity in cases like this, then Canada is not warming at all and much of the $200 billion spent on the climate file by the federal Liberal government since 2015 is a complete waste.

In 2021, Dr. Joseph Hickey, a data scientist with a PhD in Physics, specializing in complexity science, then an employee of the Bank of Canada, alerted ECCC to this one-degree jump in temperature data across much of Canada, and asked for an explanation. The below graphs of mean, maximum and minimum temperatures constructed with data from three Canadian cities—Moncton (on which Hickey illustrates the step change with red lines), Ottawa and Montreal—are samples of those created by Hickey using ECCC data downloaded on November 11, 2025, data that is the same as that he sent to ECCC researchers as an attachment to his email of June 24, 2021.

Ignoring their previous position about the need to remove such sudden discontinuities from the data, ECCC staff had little to say and left the anomaly in the record, asserting that it was “probably” a real sudden change in temperature.

Making matters worse, another Bank of Canada employee, economist Julien McDonald-Guimond, had already alerted ECCC by email on December 7, 2020, that he had found more than 10,000 instances of days for which the daily minimum temperature was greater than the daily maximum temperature. Again, ECCC staff had no reasonable justification.

With the Canadian government no longer his employer, so Hickey is now free to tell us all what has been going on behind the scenes. This Hickey did on December 23, 2025, when he published the blockbuster report “Artificial stepwise increases in homogenized surface air temperature data invalidate published climate warming claims for Canada.”

Dr. Hickey shows that, if you apply ECCC’s trend analysis method to their data, you find an increase of 1.74° C (which is statistically significant) from 1948 to 2018. And then, he tells us, if you correct for the one-degree step increase in 1998, you find only a 0.29°C rise. That small change “is indistinguishable from zero,” explains Hickey. “There is no evidence of warming.”

Figure 7: Map showing Sr calculated using Tmean, for the break year 1998 with two five-year windows (1993-1997 and 1998-2002) for the 302 3rd generation AHCCD stations with sufficient data. Circle radius is proportional to the absolute value of Sr. Circle colour indicates Sr ranges as follows: blue: Sr < 0; black: 0 ≤ Sr ≤ 1; red: Sr > 1. Moncton, NB (Sr = 2.74) is indicated with a green circle, for reference.

In Figure 7, AHCCD stations with Sr < 0 are coloured blue, while black indicates 0 ≤ Sr ≤ 1, and red indicates Sr > 1. The AHCCD records with the largest stepwise increases at 1998 are located in Eastern and Central Canada (including the stations listed in Table A), and there are many records with discernible steps at 1998 in the Prairies (provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta) and the north of the country. British Columbia remains the main outlier, with most ofits AHCCD stations having no discernible steps at 1998.

Figure 8: Map of trend in Tmean over the period 1998-2018, for the 3rd generation AHCCD stations with sufficient data, calculated using linear least-squares fitting. Circle radius is proportional to the absolute value of the trend. Blue circles correspond to negative trends (trend < 0) and red circles to positive trends (trend > 0).

In Figure 8, the trend for a particular Tmean record is equal to the slope (°C/year) from a linear least-squares fit to its data for 1998-2018, times 21 years. An AHCCD station was considered to have sufficient data if its record had at least 350 days of non-missing daily data per year for every year from 1998 2018. Approximately two thirds of the AHCCD records with sufficient data have negative trends for 1998-2018 using linear least-squares fitting.

Summation

This report demonstrates Environment Canada’s dismissive response to being alerted to a large, apparently non-climatic artifact in its flagship temperature time-series product, an artifact which could, on its own, be responsible for essentially all of the calculated warming for many Canadian locations over the past six or seven decades.

The said apparent artifact, referred to as the “1998 step-increase feature” in this report, is a stepwise increase of approximately 1°C in magnitude occurring at 1998 in the annual mean time-series of daily maximum, minimum, and mean temperatures for many stations across Canada in Environment Canada’s Adjusted and Homogenized Canadian Climate Data (AHCCD).

Canada’s Climate Wake up Call

Posted on January 16 by Ron Clutz

Vijay Jayaraj writes at American Thinker Canada wakes up to climate reality Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Canadian fearmongering about a “climate emergency” served
only to empower a bureaucratic class intent on
controlling consumption and taxing lifestyles.

A recent memorandum of understanding between Canadian prime minister Mark Carney and Alberta premier Danielle Smith represents the inevitable reassertion of economic necessity over the fantasy of “decarbonization” that has gripped Ottawa for the past decade.

Allowing for the construction of a pipeline to transport Albertan oil to a Pacific export terminal, the agreement prompted the resignation of one liberal member of parliament and celebration from the province’s leader. “This is a great day for Alberta,” declared Smith.

Alberta is a major vessel in Canada’s economic bloodstream. The province’s energy sector generates $88 billion in annual gross domestic product (GDP), which is 25% of the Alberta’s total economic output. This revenue flows east to the national capital to fund federal transfers that support public finances of other provinces, some of which oppose the oil production that provides them cash.

Global Warming survey of Canadians, twisted and ignored by Trudeau Liberals.

Atlantic Canada, parts of Quebec, and even Ontario benefit from royalties and tax revenues generated by hydrocarbons extracted thousands of miles away. So-called moral objections to oil sands development are often voiced by inhabitants of Halifax or Montreal, but rarely heard is a willingness to forgo the western revenue that keeps hospitals open and public payrolls funded.

So, it was financial reality that drove Carney to upend expectations established by countless government documents, climate pledges, and regulatory frameworks the previous government put in place to “save the planet” by discouraging the use of fossil fuels.

Canada’s climate industrial complex had predicted that pipelines would become stranded assets and that Alberta would fade into irrelevance as net zero became federal policy. However, the deal signed by Carney moves in the opposite direction, making provisions for new infrastructure and signaling that even Canada’s most climate-obsessed federal leadership cannot govern without fossil fuels.

In technical terms, the federal cap on oil and gas emissions has been suspended. The Clean Electricity Regulation — a proposed constraint on Alberta’s ability to generate affordable power — has been loosened. Timelines for reducing methane emissions have been extended beyond 2030. Yes, there are caveats that appear to impose a soft form of anti-carbon sentiment, but the overall picture has changed.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), a publicly funded institution, has consistently parroted environmental advocates who treat fossil fuels as abominations rather than economic necessities. This messaging has convinced many Canadians that their government is committing a terrible sin by producing energy the world demands. Lost on them is the fact that Canadian oil and natural gas are produced under far more stringent standards than exist in the Middle East, Russia, or other regions.

Energy abundance underpins prosperity. Nations that constrain their energy supply impoverish themselves. Nations that produce reliable, affordable energy benefit their populations and the broader world. Canada should produce the energy for itself and export the surplus to global markets.

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Beyond energy economics, there is another dimension to Canada’s economic future that the legacy climate orthodoxy dismisses: agriculture. Canada’s warming climate has extended growing seasons across the prairies and opened new agricultural possibilities.

According to official data, “total wheat production rose 11.2% year over year to a record 40 million (metric tons) in 2025, surpassing the previous record set in 2013.” Canola production rose 13%, surpassing a record set in 2017. Barley and oat production rose 19% and 17%, respectively.

In all, the output for all principal field crops increased by 4% year-over-year. For the next crop year (2025-2026), total production is projected to reach near record levels, up 3% year-over-year and 8% above the previous five-year average.

Historical analysis demonstrates that climate conditions across Canadian agricultural regions have shifted toward longer growing seasons, with more frost-free days and expanded viable crop zones.

Critics will claim that allowing a new pipeline is a betrayal of future generations. But what truly endangers posterity? A fraction of a degree of warming that extends growing seasons? Or a future of energy scarcity, deindustrialization, and economic stagnation?

Fearmongering about a “climate emergency” served only to empower a bureaucratic class intent on controlling consumption and taxing lifestyles. It did nothing to change atmospheric physics or the needs of people who rely on affordable energy to survive.

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