Canada

I’m liking this dude’s content more and more over the last month.

I liked this video. Even though the host doesn’t agree with Carney’s positions, he stated them faithfully, which I appreciate, so respect from me (for whatever that’s worth!)

Honestly I think I like Carney because he’s using these market solutions with state involvement, and it’s not just lip service or a vague “we’ll do this”.

I fully believe we should be funding Canadian essentials (healthcare, education, the justice system, disability and guaranteed income for those who need it), but I also think market forces and incentives are among the most powerful tools we have to shape the country.

Anyway, I enjoyed the video, I’m glad that people are looking at Pollievre’s exact duplication of Trump’s rhetoric and getting concerned. We can’t just blindly expect corporations to support Canadians, they’ll always support themselves and their investors first (because the theory of maximizing shareholder value dictates if you treat your shareholders well, they’ll invest more, and your corporation will thrive). But I don’t think it’s feasible for us to just have the government do it all themselves either, on average I expect that to result in less resilient and more expensive systems (competition/adversarial can drive improvements in efficiency).

Transcript (from Youtube, I tried to clean it up by LLama 70b really wanted to summarize it instead of reflow the text)

the Two Front Runners for next prime minister Pierre PV and Mark Carney both made the news this weekend and I think they Illustrated incredibly sharp contrast in campaigns and leadership styles is worth looking at because one campaign is on the rise and the other is trying to Stave off collapse and PV did not help his case this weekend you see Pierre PV is kind of sort of rebranding his campaign since ax the tax and attacking Justin Trudeau seem not to be working anymore since the tax will be ax and Trudeau's leaving office so PV has a new line Canada first Canada last Canada always although he always says it alz for some reason because there have definitely been no right-wing nationalist governments in history that have played out badly no sir no examples but that's his new line Canada first Canada last Canada always what does that mean who's to say but PF decided to highlight this with a Canada first rally which he held in Ottawa and what he said was honestly kind of nuts but there's one line I want to highlight he said quote we will bear any burden and pay any price to protect the sovereignty and Independence of our country which is just not true we know it's not true because what's actually going to happen in the case of us tariffs is government spending and likely taking on some debt but he's also staunchly against deficits and made his approach to a crisis very clear during Co where he said that he wouldn't expand government spending during a crisis quote because we're conservatives so he's laid out a plan and acts surprised it doesn't do a damn thing for you because his new plan really just shows how little imagination he has you see he's kind of pained himself into a corner here how do you focus on building new trade relationships under a gigantic Banner that says Canada first he's clearly pushing out a new sort of Canadian isolationism but at the same time says he will absolutely not Levy any new taxes and doesn't want to take on debt so the question must be asked where will the money come from but don't worry he's laid that out the answer is let the resource industry Go Buck Wild on the country and hope that things work out but of course you won't get a cut of those resource revenues because that would mean taxing those companies and we ain't doing that so really is going to open things up for resource companies deregulate and hope that instead of choosing to pay their stockholders they opt to pay their workers and investing communities natural resource companies of course known for their generosity basically PV announced that he wants to deregulate our resource sector and Greenlight as many projects as possible within 60 days of taking office he would repeal the impact Assessment Act do you know what that is it lets Regulators consider environmental impacts of projects that's it that's what he wants removed screw the environment it's money baby and it's all just resource money it's all he's got he wants to build an East West Pipeline which again the reason why we don't have one is because there isn't a market case the government already had to buy out the last pipeline because it was a huge boondoggle but don't worry Mark Carney wants to build pipelines too because oil and gas forever baby and when it came to the 51st state stuff he echoed the same frankly embarrassing message of capitulation he suggested closen our trade relationship with the United States and said quote you have your grievances with us we have ours with you but I would ask you this question which other country would you rather have as your neighbor and if Canada is not your friend who is but he's really painted himself into a corner here he's trying to cater to a very pro-america base he's framed himself as Canada's Trump but now that Trump is Canada's biggest threat he's still stuck with a base that holds pretty significant support for Donald Trump so he's trying to have it both ways and it's going badly but what really shocked me is that Pierre PV has lost the threat of his campaign entirely it was working because he was focused on the material conditions of people's lives he was talking about a consumer tax cut which resonated because people felt it would directly impact them but now it's just vague claims of Canada first that really just turn out to be resource industry first big business first like for a rally it was shockingly focused on resource money there was really very little for how he's going to help ordinary Canadians I remind you as always Alberta has staggering resource wealth and yet alberon's wages have staged ated their services are underfunded and resource companies are making money hand over fist so when PF talks about growing resource Revenue just know you ain't getting a cut and there was a sharp contract this weekend on Mark carne's appearance on Rosemary Barton's show I think it was a pretty clear strategic decision to do a longer sitdown live interview on the same weekend as Pier pv's rally he's posed a pretty clear Counterpoint to pv's Bluster and tried to establish a more measured tone and he didn't really break a lot of new ground in this interview but he was pretty clear with his plans and he emphasized the importance of talking about tariff negotiations responsibly as a potential leader trying to give a pretty clear Counterpoint to a rally screaming Canada first but he cut an incredibly clear contrast to PV he talked indepth about policy he laid out his plans for carbon emissions reductions by focusing on heavy emitters although he didn't want to get into specifics in what he calls a broad-based middle class tax cut although whenever I hear about middle class tax cuts I always think about society's most vulnerable living in precarity and think yeah the tax cut should really avoid them but ler Carney got into his larger vision for Canada's federal budget and it's actually a pretty solid idea he wants to split the Canadian budget into operating and capital budgets on paper this wouldn't really change much in real life but he would Target three years to balance on the operational budget which is day-to-day government spending but he would be willing to take on debt to use government funds to invest in different sectors of the Canadian economy to drive private investment now this is an interesting approach to getting rid of the constant Pearl clutching around deficits in Canada but I'm not fully sold on it because why do we need private investment why can't the government just invest directly into its people why do we need to lure private dollars with public instead of just spending the public dollars but this is kind of what you'd expect from Carney he's a pretty traditional liberal Market Solutions and using the power of state to try to guide those markets I don't care for it but it's certainly better than the calls for just giving Private Business cart blanch that you see from PF but the big bombshell of the interview that Carney did this weekend was the Revelation that Steven Harper had asked him to be Finance Minister in 2012 now Carney declined because he had just served as Bank of Canada Governor and he felt it would be inappropriate and Harper's former comms director said in a statement to CBC News quote Mark Carney is not telling the whole story and prime minister Harper certainly does not support Mr Carney in any way you'll notice the conspicuous absence of a denial in there H but it seems notable that the conservatives seem very much to have been big fans of Mark Carney only to have fallen out of love when inconvenient funny that but really the reason I wanted to discuss Pia's rally in Carney's interview was because of the sharp Counterpoint that they offer yelling slogans and Simple Solutions to a rally draped and Canadian flags or sitting down for an interview focused on the substance of policy and ideas and while I wasn't satisfied with all of carne's answers at least they're answers he addressed questions he engaged he didn't turn everything into attack on the person asking questions or attacking Justin Trudeau or pev or the leadership race opponents like the name PV wasn't even mentioned until a third of the way through the interview the contrast between Mark Carney and Pierre PV couldn't be more clear one is a serious leader and one isn't one is only willing to speak to Friendly crowds and one will give tough interview speaking of Mark if you're watching open invite to come on stream because if there's anyone who could hold the most qualified Banker in the world's feet to the fire it's a random dude in his basement unless you're scared to enter the Thunderdome Mark take care of yourselves folks [Music]