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Sleeping With The Energy
63 Plays5 years ago
Despite what Jason Kenney (and Rachel Notley) say, our neighbors in BC are not our enemies. There has been so much hype and misinformation around the pipeline debate that we reached across the Rockies to dispel some of the myths. Kai Nagata of Dogwood speaks with us about left wing populism, why he's fighting the Trans Mountain pipeline and the political realities on the ground in B.C.
Further reading:
- Dogwood
- EcoJustice throws down the gauntlet; Kenney responds with bravado; stand by legal action in 30 days
- Amnesty International urges Alberta Premier Jason Kenney to abandon ‘Fight Back Strategy’ in Open Letter
- EcoJustice's submission to the commissioner of the Alberta Public Inquiry Into Anti-Energy Campaigns
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Fundraising Pitch
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey folks, Duncan Kinney here off the top with our penultimate fundraising pitch. Maybe I just like showing off that I know the correct usage of the word penultimate, but yes, it is our second to last fundraising pitch. I won't be hassling you for money for quite some time after both this pitch and the next one. September is coming to a close and we've been grateful for everyone who stepped up to support us so far, but we are not quite there yet.
00:00:22
Speaker
I want to just run through what we do and what we want to do with the Progress Report. To give you a reason why you should be going to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons and become a $15 a month donor, we produce a weekly podcast. That's the thing you're listening to right now. But we also do a weekly email newsletter that goes out to 10,000 Albertans. We are organically growing a left-wing media platform in Alberta.
00:00:44
Speaker
to counter just the terrible awfulness that is post-media and just broadly speaking mainstream media in general.
Challenging Conservative Media
00:00:49
Speaker
We relentlessly fuck with conservatives and they hate us for it. We also are one of the only kind of nonprofits that exist that invest in organizers and volunteers and train folks in how to improve their political skills.
00:01:01
Speaker
So if you like the sound of that, you want to see more of what we do, go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons and become a monthly donor. $15 a month would be fantastic and gets you some sweet to be determined swag. And $30 a month gets you an unalbertant activities committees t-shirt and are in dying. Thanks. So the goal here is 200 patrons. Right now we're in the fifties. So I need you to go to that website, become a patron, start donating money to us. We would really appreciate it. Thanks so much.
Interview with Kai Nagata
00:01:46
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to the Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney. We're back here in Amesqua Tewa Skygan, otherwise known as Edmonton, here in Treaty 6 territory, and we have an incredible guest today, someone who can provide a point of view that we don't often hear in Alberta. We have Kai Nagata, the Communications Director with Dogwood BC.
00:02:06
Speaker
Dogwood is a people-powered, independent nonprofit who are building a grassroots base of engaged citizens who are fundamentally interested in self-determination. They want folks to have democratic control over what happens in their own backyard. Dogwood has been at the forefront of what NBC is better known as the No Tankers campaign. You might be more familiar with the Alberta framing as Pipelines, Pipelines, Pipelines.
Self-Determination and Resource Control
00:02:27
Speaker
Yes, Kainagata is part of an organization that has been fighting pipelines.
00:02:32
Speaker
But don't believe the hype, Alberta listeners. This man isn't out here to snatch your dinner off your plate or beggar you out of your home. Kai and people like him in BC are not our enemy. They are not the devil. They have their reasons for doing what they do. And I'm delighted to have Kai on the show to talk not just about pipelines, but a wide variety of important subjects. Kai, welcome to the show.
00:02:53
Speaker
Thanks for having me. Thanks for smuggling me across the Iron Curtain into the hearts and minds of Albertans. We're facing the exact same problems that working people in Alberta are facing. Concentration of wealth at unprecedented rates that is having a devastating effect on our environment and on regular people. And so in BC, we're trying to fight back. We're trying to
00:03:16
Speaker
bring back some of that decision making power to the people who live here. And we're trying to work with, uh, with first nations and people across British Columbia to carve out some kind of a livable future for ourselves on the, on the Western edge of this continent. So maybe the better question is like, how do you do what you do? Like, what's your theory of change? How do you do the work that dogwood does?
00:03:37
Speaker
I think you need a little bit of history to understand politics in BC and the resource issues that play out in that. Basically, until about 200 years ago, you had a completely different system of economics on the West Coast that was explicitly anti-capitalist. It was about collective ownership and decision-making over resources, and that worked for 14,000 years. Then
00:04:05
Speaker
People came and fucked it up. And so we're dealing with a system in B.C. where you have immense power concentrated in the hands of, in many cases, out of province shareholders who buy politicians, who rig regulatory processes,
00:04:21
Speaker
who engage in open corruption in order to accelerate the exploitation of the people and the resources and the landscapes and the ecosystems here in BC. And then we get basically what falls off the cart on the way by, like the jobs for constructing these mega projects, or we get some of the passive revenue from house prices going through the roof as people rent out their basement suites.
00:04:49
Speaker
everyday people in British Columbia, the benefits go offshore and we are left to deal with the wreckage. We organize people politically to fight back in conjunction with litigation and advocacy by First Nations who are asserting their inherent rights and title on the territories that they never gave up to the Crown, that they never signed treaties, they never
00:05:15
Speaker
were conquered, they never signed over or sold their lands in most parts of BC, so they still have a really strong legal foundation and claim to the land, and then we organize non-indigenous British Columbians in alignment
00:05:30
Speaker
with those principles in order to reclaim some local democratic decision-making control over the shared landscape that we called home. So that means basically organizing in between elections and then sometimes during elections to maximize voter turnout, to increase people's participation in their democracy. And really we see that as the only defense against the
00:05:57
Speaker
the ravages of capital as we've come to know them in BC is to have an engaged, educated, mobilized citizenry. And that is something that we're trying to do in conjunction with allies across the labor movement and the environmental movement, social movements in BC.
00:06:13
Speaker
This sounds a lot like, um, you know, the left-wing populism that I kind of rail about so often on this show, right? That this, again, using the actual kind of definition of populism where the literal people are fighting against a literal elite, it seems kind of baked into the work that you're doing, right? Well, I find that flattering. I mean, in a cultural sense, um, I'm a pretty weird environmentalist. Like I,
00:06:39
Speaker
I am a bow hunter. I used to be in the military. My family are all farmers. They work in the oil sands. They work in logging. They all drive pickup trucks. We don't put the environment ahead of human beings as some sort of like sacred shrine to worship at. It's not about, you know, like drinking wheatgrass and, I don't know, forest bathing. Forest bathing is cool, but the,
00:07:07
Speaker
the object is not to preserve untouched nature in order to enjoy it aesthetically from our Teslas.
00:07:17
Speaker
This is a working landscape that has sustained people for thousands of years. My family's been here since the 1880s, you know, hewing wood and drawing water, living off the land, farming, fishing, you know, operating sawmills. And that landscape, if it's not taken care of, can't sustain an economy, it can't sustain millions of people. And so that's the sort of environmentalism that I engage in. But yeah, I mean, we ran a completely,
00:07:46
Speaker
unrelated campaign about big money in politics in BC. We called it Ban Big Money. We were attacking corporate and union donations, just for fairness. People didn't understand how that was connected to the environmental campaigns that they saw us running. We had to do a lot of education with our own supporters to explain that
00:08:07
Speaker
The reason why a lot of these decisions over resource issues are so fucked up in BC is because those companies are literally buying politicians in front of your eyes. They're not even trying to hide it. And so we ran a populist, anti-elite, anti-billionaire campaign, and we succeeded, along with allies, in getting new laws in BC after the new government was elected.
00:08:29
Speaker
banning corporate union donations. Is that the panacea, the cure-all for corruption and exploitation and environmental degradation in BC? Absolutely not. But it was an example of how if you can actually get a critical mass of everyday people pissed off about how they're being treated unfairly, you can implement transformative reforms. And we saw the same thing in Alberta when the NDP government was first elected there.
00:08:56
Speaker
Well, and this is why I think it's important to have the conversation about what Dogwood does. If Dogwood does ever get brought up in the context of Alberta politics, it's usually kind of hissed out by a conservative as some, you know, one of those, you know, foreign funded eco-terrorists, someone like Brett Wilson railing against you in the work that you do. And I think it's worthwhile to kind of just have you
00:09:17
Speaker
On the show to kind of explicitly talk about the work that you do and that that there is a politics there is a coherent politics there and it does make sense but the question kind of has to be asked especially in the context of the world that we live in and the inquiry in the war room and and
Accusations and Collaborations
00:09:33
Speaker
and and You know all of this rhetoric and discourse that's gone into a foreign funding kind of get a
00:09:41
Speaker
Are you now or have you ever accepted money from tides? And are you the foreign funded radicals that Joe Oliver warned us about?
00:09:49
Speaker
Yeah, totally. And I'll explain why. We work on issues that affect our region and our province. We are above everything else, an organization that's concerned with local control and self-determination and with, like I said, trying to carve out a livable future for ourselves in this province. That means that we work with groups in Washington state. We had a campaign on coal exports because a bunch of US thermal coal producers wanted to send trainloads of
00:10:18
Speaker
of the dirtiest coal in the world out of the port of Vancouver and off to power plants in China and India. And so we worked with a coalition of groups all the way from Seattle back to the coal fields in Montana to shut down a whole string of these export facilities. And so that involved sharing strategy and resources and funding with the whole coalition of partners in the region.
00:10:43
Speaker
same thing on on mining issues i don't know if you are aware of what uh mr murray edwards has been up to in some of his bc dalliances but he has a a mining company called imperial metals that's responsible for the biggest tailings pond disaster in north american history he got off the hook thanks to a bunch of political donations and a cozy relationship with our governing bc liberal party at the time and that kind of shit can't go unchallenged i mean the fact that you can dump the
00:11:09
Speaker
billions of liters of toxic mine waste into the Fraser River, which is the biggest salmon producing river in Canada, and get away with it. It makes me want to vomit and turn inside out. We have partners on the Washington side, like fly fishing associations, conservation groups, that are looking at another Imperial Metals mine in the headwaters of the Skagit River, which is the continental United States' biggest salmon river,
00:11:37
Speaker
It happens to be in Canada and originate in Canada, but if there's ever a disaster like we saw at Mount Paulie, it's going to affect people 100 kilometers to our south in this gadget drainage. We work across the 49th parallel with tribes and with conservation groups and with fish and wildlife groups on issues that
00:12:00
Speaker
transcend that imaginary line across North America. When it comes to environmental issues, wildlife, climate, oil spills, all of those things are connected and you can't address them in isolation from your neighbors.
00:12:15
Speaker
When it comes to oil tankers and the potential for a spill from the Kinder Morgan project, you had a Texas-based company set up shop in British Columbia trying to build this big expansion that would necessarily affect people in the San Juan Islands and Puget Sound. And so we had partners and supporters who wanted to work with us to stop this expansion project, which would affect
00:12:41
Speaker
their salmon runs, their beaches, their property values, whatever their motivations are, those people were threatened by this Texas company. And so they wanted to help us out to stop it. Now it's owned by the government of Canada. And we've seen a lot of that support retreat. So are you saying that borders are made up and fake and that capital treats borders like they're made up and fake and that we probably shouldn't take that argument very seriously about foreign funded radicals? Is that kind of what I'm picking up here?
00:13:12
Speaker
Well, capital treats borders like they're made up in fake until it's time to like find a scapegoat and whip up a bunch of angry people to, I don't know, go after the enemies in their midst. And so, yeah, I think that's what we're seeing now. Or unless they need a convenient tax shelter like Ireland or Panama or whatever. Ah, that's true. Borders are very, very important if you have any amount of wealth stashed away in the Cayman Islands.
00:13:38
Speaker
I do want to go back to the Joe Oliver thing. Joe Oliver essentially calling your organization out and similar organizations out as foreign-funded radicals, that was key to the modern iteration of Dogwood, was it not?
00:13:53
Speaker
I think it was our single biggest fundraising day to date and I wasn't with the organization at the time But I can say, you know, Jason Kenny's victory speech and Jason Kenny launching this Alberta witch hunt Those have been very good days for us. Those have been like five figure days in the old the old PayPal button so yeah anytime that the Alberta government or
00:14:15
Speaker
some ghoul like Joe Oliver comes out and calls us names. It inspires a pretty healthy immune reaction from people in BC and across Canada and some people in Alberta who say, fuck these guys and send us money. So yeah, we, to answer the general question, we raise most of our money from individuals and we raise more money, the more conservatives attack us. So it's hard to, you know, hard to,
00:14:44
Speaker
ask Mr. Kenny to stop calling Dogwood bad names because it's really good for our fundraising.
Government and Environmental Conflicts
00:14:49
Speaker
Well, I think that makes a lot of sense to kind of lead into our next conversation point, which is the Un-Albertan Activities Committee, the $30 million war room, the $2.5 million public inquiry,
00:15:01
Speaker
Jason Kenney campaigned heavily on this idea during the last provincial campaign of fighting back against foreign-funded radicals smearing our precious oil and gas industry. Once he won, those are the things that he set up.
00:15:16
Speaker
And Kenny can't stop talking about this thing here in Alberta. I'm wondering, I mean, obviously among share crowd, you guys use it to fundraise and it's kind of very clear data point of just like of a kangaroo court of this state overreaching in its power. But like, how is it landing broadly in B.C., would you say?
00:15:34
Speaker
I think for people who are paying attention, I mean, it's landing in the middle of a federal election, so people are distracted. But yeah, it just looks like grotesque political theater from a little hand puppet of the oil industry, right? It's Jason Kenney.
00:15:49
Speaker
bellowing about the enemies in our midst and un-Albertan activities and, oh, he's going to drag people in front of this kangaroo court. From what I've seen from even mainstream columnists, other than the folks paid by post-media to attack us, it's landing as a complete
00:16:12
Speaker
overreach and unrealistic, histrionic, and unlikely to help the oil industry that he claims to hold so dear. So I'm not seeing a lot of sympathy for that outside of Alberta, but I understand that he is playing to a provincial audience, and it probably plays very well with his base. So there's a reason why he's doing it, and there's a reason why that's going to have a different effect in other parts of Canada.
00:16:38
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I'm also curious about how it's landing in Ontario and Quebec, other places, because, because, yeah, it does seem kind of primarily focused on, you know, the hooting chuds in Alberta. I mean, the fundamental premise of the war room, the inquiry is dumb as shit, right? Like the idea that American foundations are funding Canadian climate activism in order to dot, dot, dot profit. Like it's never really quite clear what the motivations are beyond this. And it's I think it's worth actually diving into the
00:17:07
Speaker
the public the mandate of the public inquiry i thought it was the russians i thought they abandoned they abandoned the american oil company conspiracy and now it's about the russians well there's a whole there's the russians are mentioned actually and in the inquiry mandate but let me just let's just
00:17:22
Speaker
We'll talk about the inquiry mandate just for a second here, and I've got the text in front of me here. The commissioner shall inquire into anti-Alberta energy campaigns that are supported in whole or in part by foreign organizations, and in doing so shall inquire into matters including but not limited to the following, whether any foreign organization that has evinced an intent harmful or injurious to the Alberta oil industry has provided financial assistance to a Canadian organization that has disseminated misleading or false information about the Alberta oil and gas industry.
00:17:52
Speaker
You forgot incomplete. Incomplete is one of the adjectives. If they determine that anyone has spread information that is not full of the oil industry's counterpoints, then they could be hauled before this inquiry. Quite possibly. Whether any Canadian organization referred to in the clause that I just read off has also received grants or other discretionary funding from the government of Alberta, from municipal, provincial or territorial governments in Canada or from the government of Canada.
00:18:22
Speaker
whether any Canadian organization referred to in Clause A has charitable status in Canada. So they're kind of going after the underlying premise is that they believe that anti
00:18:33
Speaker
anti-energy, anti-Alberta oil and gas campaigns have been funded by foreign bodies and that in doing so they have disseminated false or misleading information. I mean, the premise of this inquiry is broken from the very start, right? And that's the heart of kind of the submission that EcoJustice put in and we assume the inquiry we will be dealing with in the next 20 some days. You know, the assumption that foreign funded Alberta energy campaigns exist and that they knowingly spread
00:18:59
Speaker
lies and falsehoods like it's it's an interestingly kind of very narrow mandate. But it is and it also has all these weird and just kind of like broadly incorrect assumptions built into it. But I think this is part of like a broader
00:19:17
Speaker
trend, right? And I've said this on the show before, which is that capitalism needs to create enemies, right? And the contradictions within capitalism become apparent to the people who are surviving and living under it. Instead of naming the actual villain in this case, we've got to find a stand-in. And in Alberta's case, it's become kind of foreign-funded environmentalists. But funnily enough, the inquiry's terms of reference
00:19:42
Speaker
doesn't kind of reference the research of Vivian Krause at all. It's the kind of theoretical underpinning of all of this work, but it actually does directly mention Russia. Specifically, I'll read this off here. As part of the inquiry, the commissioner shall examine the work completed by other investigations in other jurisdictions into similar activities or alleged activities, including but not limited to the following. The 2017 report by the officer of the director of national intelligence of the United States of America entitled
00:20:08
Speaker
background to assessing Russian activities and intentions in recent U.S. elections. Okay, so like Russia-gate stuff. And then the 2018 United States House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Majority Staff Report entitled, Russian Attempts to Influence U.S. Domestic Energy Markets by Exploiting Social Media. This is literally in the terms of reference
00:20:33
Speaker
Uh, and the men. Yeah. So I think we're in kind of an Occam's razor situation, right? So if you're sitting in Alberta, either we have like 10 years left to turn the global economy around and cut our emissions
Climate Denialism and First Nations Concerns
00:20:49
Speaker
in half. And obviously if that happens, then we can't build out a huge expansion of oil and gas infrastructure, especially not some of the highest cost, lowest quality crude in the world.
00:21:00
Speaker
And if we're facing this climate emergency, instead, we're going to need to mobilize the state's resources in order to actually plan and implement a revolution in our economy and how people relate to the energy that they consume and use to get around. So either that's happening or that's not happening. And in that case, you have to come up with another reason why people might be anxious about the build out of
00:21:31
Speaker
Oil sands infrastructure and if you don't accept that you're in this climate emergency And that the entire world's economy is going to shift very rapidly very soon Then you have to come up with some alternate explanation, which is like oh, it's the Russians doing it to us because they hate our freedoms or it's American oil companies that are seeking a competitive advantage and these environmental groups become
00:21:57
Speaker
what is that, useful idiots in this theory where the real bad guys are in fact people who think just like you in Houston or New York. And that I think is essentially what Kenny is offering to people who haven't wrapped their minds around the scale and the pace of the climate emergency.
00:22:18
Speaker
And I've heard this referred to as the new climate denialism, and I think that's accurate. People have an easier time imagining that it's just some nefarious plot by a Russian troll farm than
00:22:33
Speaker
maybe the path that we're on is super fucked and we are going to have to change course very quickly and in that context none of the stuff we're building makes sense and we should be retraining people and putting capital and resources and government effort into this new economic direction and if you if you can't accept that or you just can't wrap your head around it then you need to find an alternate explanation for why
00:22:58
Speaker
Greta Thunberg and me and millions of other people around the world are critical of the idea of building up more oil and gas infrastructure at this moment in history. And this idea of the new climate denialism, I think, is extremely useful in just looking at Jason Kennedy's government, right? These folks are sophisticated. They've moved off the kind of friends of science, merchants of doubt.
00:23:20
Speaker
bullshit, trying to cast doubt on the science. They've just moved to using the power of the state to fight good faith efforts to reduce carbon pollution. Not only do we have this $2.5 million public inquiry, this $30 million war room, but the government of Alberta has repealed the consumer carbon tax. They've weakened the large emitter carbon tax. They've canceled extremely successful renewable energy procurement programs, which were procuring
00:23:43
Speaker
renewable energy at record low prices. They've canceled residential and commercial solar programs. I imagine they're very likely to weaken or harmonize recently weakened methane regulations in the United States, which is a sneaky, important climate change regulation that it just turns out industry is super invested and not actually doing anything on. That is the new climate denialism. I think we do have to name it and talk about it out loud.
00:24:12
Speaker
Yeah, and people don't like hearing that it is practiced on both sides of the political spectrum. That in fact, it doesn't matter what your ideological professed ideological leanings are, liberals and new Democrats are just as capable of marrying the machinery of the state to fossil capital in service of expanded profits and accumulation of wealth by these
00:24:42
Speaker
oil and gas billionaires. And so whether it's Rachel Notley pumping billions of dollars into an oil by rail terminal, or it's Justin Trudeau putting four and a half billion dollars into buying this leaky old pipeline across BC,
00:24:57
Speaker
This is an example of what seems to happen when politicians of any stripe get too close to the sun. This global power nexus, you get into a position where you're running a government and all of a sudden your principles go out the window and you just start using your powers and state resources in service of
00:25:22
Speaker
of the oil industry. It's very strange, but I don't think it's isolated to Jason Kenney and the Conservative Party. No, and you brought up something that, I mean, has to be a part of this conversation, right? Which is the Trans Mountain pipeline in BC. And I'm curious, it's like, what are Dogwood's concerns? Why are you and the organization you work with fighting Trans Mountain?
00:25:45
Speaker
Well, of all the things that we could be spending 15 or 20 billion of our tax dollars on at this moment in history, an expanded oil sins export pipeline seems like a really dumb bet. And if we are looking at a world where we get anywhere close to reducing
00:26:07
Speaker
our carbon budget to the point that our children and grandchildren have a decent chance of survival. There just isn't any room in that for crude oil exports beyond the next five, maybe 10 years.
00:26:23
Speaker
Like if we actually pull off the transition at the ambition and the scale that is suggested by the science, there's no room in the global energy diet for coal or bitumen in the medium term. And so the idea that we would spend public money that we could literally be spending on affordable housing or fucking transit,
00:26:49
Speaker
or digging holes in the ground and filling them back in again and just paying people wages to do that. Literally anything it seems like would be a better use of those state resources than putting another steel tube in the ground to deliver goop to China. And it just seems like
00:27:06
Speaker
We are at this point in our country where we have to choose a future and then plan towards that, set goals, and actually implement it, and allowing the oil industry to just use state resources to expand forever is a cop-out. I think that from a British Columbian perspective, you add that
00:27:25
Speaker
insult on top of all of the localized risks that we face and the irreversible effects of a disaster, however unlikely. And there's just nothing good in it for us. Like there's no, there's no good reason why people on Burnaby mountain would support having more tanks of flammable goo above their houses on a forested hill.
00:27:51
Speaker
in the middle of a climate crisis and have to pay for it with their tax dollars. It just makes absolutely no sense from this end of the pipeline. And I understand that if you're at the other end of the pipeline, the risk reward ratio is completely inverted. And I understand that in the short term, people would get jobs building the pipeline and then there'd be 50 lucky Charlie's chocolate factory, Oompa Loompa golden ticket winners who get to operate the levers and buttons in the
00:28:18
Speaker
Pumping facilities and work on the project until the thing dies. That's great. They're gonna have like 50 to 100 long-term full-time jobs running the pipeline and then everybody else has to deal with the consequences and that just seems like a Bad deal for Canada and especially at this end of the pipeline in British Columbia the idea of
00:28:42
Speaker
putting our families at that kind of a risk on top of all the other stresses that we're facing in Vancouver and then paying for it with our tax dollars is just ridiculous. I also think one thing that our audience might be kind of aware of circuitously and are familiar with, maybe broadly speaking, but opposition, especially legal opposition to Trans Mountain has been largely driven by First Nations who are along the pipeline route.
00:29:09
Speaker
I'm curious if you could walk our audience through their concerns. As much as I can summarize the pleadings brought forward by First Nations and BC, without being a member of those communities,
00:29:26
Speaker
The essential problem is this, right? If you are a First Nation British Columbia, your territory is not mobile. You can't just pick up and move and say, okay, we're just gonna lay claim to some other part of the province. And so you have to defend the ecological integrity and the drinking water and the homes in your part of the world.
00:29:51
Speaker
And pipelines are very long, linear pieces of infrastructure that cross many neighborhoods and territories and watersheds and rivers and creeks and streams and people's backyards. And so in, I think, Western sort of Canadian culture, the, the answer certainly from people like Joe Oliver or Jean Cochin is just like move, like,
00:30:17
Speaker
Get out of the fucking way. If you don't like a big project that's coming through, then sell your house and move. And that's not an option if you have a multi-generational or multi-thousand-year tie to a particular valley or watershed or territory. And so you have people who are looking at acute long-term risks to things like drinking water. So you have the cold water First Nation near Merritt, B.C.
00:30:44
Speaker
where the original pipeline was built without their consent in the 1950s. They weren't even allowed to hire lawyers. And it literally goes through their community and under their feet and over their aquifer, which is their only source of drinking water. And so the idea of tripling that risk, compounding that risk is just not worth it to them.
00:31:03
Speaker
And it's their right to say that and the government has to listen to them and accommodate those concerns and ideally, you know, achieve or meet their consent for the project to go through. That's nowhere close to what has happened. And so we're seeing similar concerns that are highly, highly localized around specific fish runs, specific archaeological sites, burial sites, because people are defending
00:31:32
Speaker
the part of the world that they are from that they've been from forever and which they have to defend into the future forever in order for their children and their descendants to have a part of the world to call home. And so you add those up and from the Albertan perspective, I'm sure it sounds frivolous or small scale to be like,
00:31:56
Speaker
Oh, I have a problem with this big economic project because I don't want my ancestors exhumed violently and I don't want oil leaking into my kids drinking water. And the response is like, just move, just get out of the way or drink bottled water or whatever. But that logic has gotten us to a place where there aren't a lot of areas left in Canada or in the world where you can actually live off the land and where you can actually
00:32:23
Speaker
Um, eat what you harvest and you can actually drink unfiltered water out of the streams around you. And so that's what people are trying to protect. And down on the west coast, the risk just magnifies the closer you get to the tanker terminal. And so it's, it's inevitable as you're loading oil, uh, that some is going to spill into Burrard Inlet. And for people whose entire history and language and culture is built around that.
Pipeline Protests and Government Challenges
00:32:51
Speaker
geography, that landscape, the idea of degrading it slowly over time with this big and unnecessary project and then the potential for a catastrophic spill is just more risk than they're willing to bear and that is the argument they've made from the beginning and that is what the government has dismissed and ignored and plowed straight ahead without even taking those concerns into account and so that's why they're in court now
00:33:19
Speaker
is over the consultation. It's not even over the issues that they've brought up. It's about the government's attitude and treatment of these communities and the way that that has broken even the very weak laws that we have in Canada around consultation with Indigenous people.
00:33:35
Speaker
So that's my best summary of the cases that are going ahead, but that's what we're going to see over the next few months in federal court is the six nations that were given leave to appeal to the federal court of appeal are going to be basically laying out the consultation record and explaining how even given every opportunity to listen to them in good faith, take their concerns into account, and then modify and adapt the project
00:34:05
Speaker
In reaction to that, the federal government failed to do that and basically said, fuck you. And so that's where we are, where we are. I mean, it seems like one of the fundamental questions at the heart of Trans Mountain and actually the heart of Canada, really, if you want to get down to it, is do indigenous nations have sovereignty over their territory? Well, in BC, they have a hell of a lot more of it than in Alberta and most other parts of Canada because there are no treaties.
00:34:30
Speaker
Yeah, without treaty, the question in BC becomes much more unclear. But at the start of our show, we acknowledge that we're on Treaty Six territory and it's not just some ceremonial thing. We are here by the grace of those treaties and we do share this land with nations and with people who are here before us. And this question of consultation versus consent, if you consult and they say no and you still bid it anyway, did the consultation matter?
00:34:59
Speaker
These legal questions at the heart of Trans Mountain are really questions at the heart of reconciliation, at the heart of Canada's own existence, and in this rush to build another piece of economic infrastructure,
00:35:17
Speaker
uh, we, uh, haven't taken the time to perhaps consider these things that if a nation that is on the root of the pipeline says no, um, then you don't get to build it. Like, like that is the, where you go around them, right? I mean, this is, we keep hearing the argument that like many first nations along the route say yes. Well, that's great. That's their territory. That's their decision.
00:35:40
Speaker
We believe in local decision-making power. We believe in self-determination. We believe in local sovereignty. And so if those nations say yes, great. The problem with pipelines is that they're very long and they don't function unless they can operate in an unbroken line from one place to another. And so that means you have to either get consent and buy-in from the people whose land you're trying to cross,
00:36:03
Speaker
or go around them. And so the legal stuff, I imagine it sounds like it's going to get wrapped up within the next three to six months. I'm not an expert on the timelines of these things, but it seems like legal strategies are winding down, which kind of lends itself to talk about the next step in the strategy of folks like you who are against this pipeline and working against this pipeline is what are the kind of civil disobedience and direct action strategies that we are likely to see
00:36:33
Speaker
when this thing starts getting built through kind of heavily populated urban centers? Well, I think we're getting a little bit of a taste of the mobilization potential this week in North America. Last week, you had 4 million school children and their supporters and allies marching in cities around the world. This week, we're going to see who turns out in Canadian cities,
00:37:02
Speaker
But there's a watershed moment in the climate movement where children are organizing More bodies in the street than grown-ups have managed to do since probably The start of the iraq war or possibly the peace marches in the 80s and you have this insurgent
00:37:23
Speaker
left populist political current represented by people like Sven Robinson, who's running in the riding where the pipeline or the tank farm and the and the marine terminal would be. And you start to combine those things and imagine
00:37:38
Speaker
figures like Sven Robinson, who's kind of like a Canadian Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, and several hundred thousand school children, and it starts to become pretty difficult to build more fossil fuel infrastructure. You add that on top of the First Nations resistance, which is highly localized, but which in BC has a long, successful tradition
00:38:07
Speaker
And I just don't see how realistically you can push an unwanted pipeline through an unwilling province. I think Harper found that out the hard way with Northern Gateway. And I think that Trudeau, you know, acquiesced to that when he dropped energy East.
00:38:25
Speaker
I think that we're hitting a watershed moment on Trans Mountain where it could be very very difficult indeed for for any government no matter how motivated to physically put a pipeline through the lower mainland. I'm not
00:38:44
Speaker
Advocating civil disobedience, it's a personal decision that carries enormous risks. Oil companies have a very favorable framework in BC to go after the individuals who engage in civil disobedience, take their house, take their assets,
00:39:05
Speaker
Um, criminalize them, punish them. And so, you know, it's not something that people should undertake lightly, but we've already seen hundreds of folks getting arrested at the tank farm just during preparatory construction. And so if they actually try to put that pipe in the ground, I just, I don't see.
00:39:25
Speaker
British Columbians lying down and accepting defeat. That just seems like at the moment we've reached in the overall climate conversation, unlikely that folks will accept that symbolic defeat.
00:39:40
Speaker
Trudeau has been in denial up until now about his ability to sort of charm those folks and demobilize people through his personal powers of rhetoric. Whether he's the prime minister in a month or not, I think any government is going to have a hard time building that thing, especially with public money, especially when
00:40:01
Speaker
It's not even government and police Facilitating private capital. It's literally our money and you've got you've got Canadians saying hang on a minute We could be spending this on on literally anything else. So Yeah, I don't think we've seen a true test of public opinion yet around around construction and and Yes, that resistance will be highly localized in the lower mainland where
00:40:28
Speaker
The construction sites are transit accessible and they're near houses and schools. But yeah, it just it's hard to imagine that thing going through, even if it were to get past the legal challenges in court. I'm also interested in prosecuting the like frames and arguments used by, you know, the federal liberals, the Alberta NDP, now the UCP here in Alberta, and just examining them for a minute and to see if they hold up to kind of any kind of scrutiny.
Economic and Ethical Arguments Against Pipelines
00:40:58
Speaker
I don't want to play devil's advocate, but I will just for a brief, brief second. Argument number one, used by pro pipeline folks, unbridled economic prosperity. By constructing this pipeline, we will be able to remove the differential and the cost discount that
00:41:19
Speaker
Alberta crude, Alberta bitumen gets on the world market, and due to this kind of economic boost, untold prosperity.
00:41:32
Speaker
So this is a Maritime Keystone XL. All of the oil that currently goes onto boats from the Westridge Terminal goes to refineries in Washington and California. It is a Maritime Keystone XL with a portion of it on boats to deliver to US refineries because that's where the best price is. If there were better prices available at other refineries around the world, the boats would go there because it's a free market.
00:41:59
Speaker
So they don't. They go to the places where the price is the best, which is the U.S., and the idea that this would free us from the U.S. market is at this point not consistent with the economics. Now, could those prices go up in Asia in the future?
00:42:14
Speaker
Sure, but like that's even we're just that you were getting way ahead of the game there like the economic prosperity argument kind of Just assumes that Alberta will benefit that that royalties will go up or it almost assumes that we have a national it almost assumes that we have a Nationalized oil industry in this province, which we don't right if there was economic prosperity the vast vast majority of what it would accrue to the very top 1% of the actual owners and CEOs of the oil companies who are already fucking rich and so
00:42:44
Speaker
We're approaching it from the same thing from from two different ends But i'm saying even if the shit on on the on the maritime end were true The the netbacks would accrue to the shareholders Most of them are not even in alberta and the extremely wealthy assholes who own the calgary flames those kinds of guys
00:43:03
Speaker
not to the people who work on the project and not to the people who draw a paycheck in Alberta. So like, yeah, so I'm just, I'm going to say out loud that the, like, the lines you hear about the economic prosperity from once the pipe line gets built, uh, that it's like vote for Pedro shit, all your wildest dreams will come true. It's, it's one piece of infrastructure. It might cause you get the boost from the project itself and you might see a few years down the road, uh, you know, uh, a differential that, that narrows a little bit, but at the end of the day, that's not going to fundamentally change the economics of
00:43:32
Speaker
Oil production and the oil industry in Alberta and even if it does the vast majority of that would accrue to the richest assholes who we hate anyways the second point that gets brought up and this this really Granted my gears because the Alberta NDP bought into this kind of wholesale is this ethical oil argument you know this is argument initially promulgated by one of the worst human beings to ever exist as real event and
00:43:54
Speaker
And the argument being that because Canada has labor standards and we don't chop people's heads off with swords in Saudi Arabia or because we're not Russia, that our oil is inherently good and just. And I just have to say that
00:44:29
Speaker
We're not selling fucking friendship bracelets at 10,000 villages here. We're selling millions of barrels of oil a day. The only three things that a refinery cares about when a shipment of oil ends up outside of its door is how much does it cost? What is its sulfur content? What is its density? Those are the only three things that they give a shit about. They don't care where it came from. They don't care what the sticker is. They don't care where. They don't care about any of the arguments you make when it comes to ethical oil. Those are literally irrelevant.
00:44:30
Speaker
No one gives a shit.
00:44:53
Speaker
The only reason that that crude is economic is because we stole the land that it's on and you guys don't charge shit for royalties. So if you guys actually implemented, I don't know, a Norway-like model, those refineries would obviously see less profit in refining that goop. There are a couple of other, like,
00:45:17
Speaker
just low-tacular arguments that get made about the benefits of what Trans Mountain would do. One is oil self-sufficiency. This was more of an argument made for Energy East than it was for Trans Mountain Pipeline, but it's still baked into all of your pipeline arguments, which is that
00:45:36
Speaker
that oil self-sufficiency is good and that oil self-sufficiency would happen, and that if British Columbians were using Alberta oil as opposed to American oil or Saudi oil or whatever, that this would somehow be better. Again, in the context of a global oil market that moves trillions of dollars worth of product around every week,
00:45:57
Speaker
Oil self-sufficiency is just like, that's not how this huge, massively leveraged global supply chain works. And the Irvings have even said out loud, even if we were to have built Energy East, that the Irvings were still going to be like, yo, we're going to buy the cheapest oil. They'll buy the cheapest shit. They don't care where it comes from. They don't care how many human heads are floating in those barrels.
00:46:20
Speaker
And so the other argument that you sometimes hear is that Alberta or Canadian crude will somehow solve climate change. This is more of the like LNG argument that like Canadian LNG will somehow solve climate change by displacing coal. We're kind of, we're dabbling in a little of there, but you just kind of like hear when you're not dealing with, when you're dealing with an actor who's like not super interested in the truth, you do hear these like oil self sufficiency and climate change arguments. And it's just worth saying out loud that they're bullshit and that they're bunk.
00:46:49
Speaker
Yeah. And the other, the other big one is like, this is going to fund the transition, right? Like this is going to be such a wildly, uh, you know, prosperous project for all Canadians that this will single-handedly fund the transition. And the response that I have to that is why don't you just take the fucking money that you're spending on the project and put it into the transition, put it into the things that we actually need, put it into energy efficient, affordable housing, put it into transit.
00:47:15
Speaker
the idea that we would nationalize General Motors and build a whole bunch of electric buses in Oshawa, like the idea that we would take 15 or $20 billion, put this pipe in the ground, gamble on there being a market for it for enough years to pay off the loan and the capital costs. And then maybe if we profit from it in the future, we will put that into solar panels. It's like too fucking late. Like we're going to be burned to a crisp by the time that thing breaks even.
00:47:44
Speaker
So the last thing I would say is just that all of those projections assume that people are going to be burning like sulfur-heavy diluted bitumen in 30 or 40 or 50 years. And the only way that that makes economic sense is if Greta Thunberg and all these other kids are
00:48:04
Speaker
corpses like this is this is not realistic in terms of planning our future economy to assume that there will be a market for low-grade heavy crude and so that being the case when we look tanner 20 or 30 years down the road what decisions do we need to make now in order to position ourselves for that renewable economy and Alberta has fantastic
00:48:31
Speaker
renewable resources and solar potential and wind and geothermal. Alberta has the ability to be the energy province, but this fantasy that people are still going to be buying barrels of unrefined heavy crude in 30 or 40 years is driving illogical decisions
00:48:53
Speaker
in the modern day and that's actually closing the door on the things that we need because we're diverting public resources and our tax dollars towards prolonging a version of the economy that is not going to be around for very long. So I don't know, I believe in self-determination and people making their own decisions and sometimes that means people making their own mistakes, but with Alberta sometimes it feels like
00:49:19
Speaker
Fucking wrestling a drunk guy for his car keys like i'm i'm begging you not to get in the truck And for your own good I will appear on this podcast and and and yell about what I think the future is going to look like But you are going to have to make that decision and if albertans want a future where
00:49:40
Speaker
you're not harnessed to a bygone economy and you're not suffering the economic impacts of the oil industry collapsing rapidly over the next 15 years. You are going to have to organize democratically and demand different choices from your leaders because it is your province. Those are your resources and the people that you elect that are accountable to you are the ones who are going to make decisions about what the future looks like.
00:50:08
Speaker
But right now, the model of leadership on display is ticking you guys straight into a brick wall. Yes. And even when it comes to the last government, I think mistakes were made. And there is just some things that I think I need to get off my chest when it comes to the Albert NDP's approach to climate and pipelines.
Political Implications of Pipeline Issues
00:50:29
Speaker
And like, all right, let's hear it. Well, there was just some, just some huge tactical fundamental errors made, which is that one, the Alberta government does not control whether a pipeline gets built. Like it is just not their job. I can 100% confirm that from my seat in Vancouver.
00:50:47
Speaker
We just won another, we owned your asses in court again today on the turn off the taps legislation. I mean, the ability of the Alberta government to bully its way across other sovereign territories and other provinces is a fantasy. The Alberta government is not the one that's going to make the decision. When the Alberta NDP were putting
00:51:08
Speaker
Yeah, they don't make the decision. And when the NDP put all their eggs in the kind of pipeline basket, they fundamentally put their political future in the hands of not themselves, in the hands of other folks. Of people who were cutting their throat with the other hand. I mean, the insanity of watching the Alberta NDP get in bed with the rally for resources guys and basically the precursors to the yellow vesters is that those people were ready to eat them alive
00:51:37
Speaker
And the and the sort of like centrist triangulation instinct is to go out and be like i'm gonna put on a hard hat and tell these guys i'm gonna get them a pipeline belt like they they hate you with every ounce of their being and they are Organizing to destroy you politically and your instinct is to go out and try to like throw them up Yeah, that was one of the most extremely frustrating things to see the ndp kind of continually leaping into the arms of its enemies going to those
00:52:04
Speaker
you know, rally for resources events put on by people who are literally organizing to defeat them in the next election. But this, I mean, this was a thing that the NDP did on other issues, too, like they kept talking about balanced budgets. Again, you cannot use the frames of your enemies to your advantage. You've got to build your own frames that people like.
00:52:22
Speaker
And fundamentally, the question of pipelines was a loyalty test, right? It was a loyalty test that the Alberta NDP could never win. They would never be looked upon as the most credible political party on this issue, but then they decided to spend so much time, energy, bandwidth of the leader and the party and the government apparatus itself focusing, again, on something that they didn't have any control of whether it got built. Trying to get the truck nuts vote. They're saying, yeah, if you love pipelines, and that is your number one ballot box issue,
00:52:52
Speaker
Don't vote for the UCP vote for us, the NDP, the pipeline party. It just, it made absolutely no sense as an outside observer. I'm glad to hear somebody saying in Alberta say that that was fucking stupid because I just, I didn't understand how that was supposed to win over the hearts and minds of a bunch of Jason Kenny supporters. I want to get a pipeline built.
00:53:14
Speaker
The other argument that got brought up was the climate plan, broadly speaking. The carbon taxes for pipelines equals social license argument. I don't want to spend too much time on this, but I think it is worth deconstructing very briefly, which is that carbon taxes in Alberta were never going to stop first nations who were on the route, who were affected and interested in this project.
00:53:40
Speaker
Why would they care about carbon taxes in Alberta when it is literally their territory and their history that they are fighting, that they are engaging in these legal battles over? Also, why would coastal folks in BC who are worried about tankers, again, care about
00:53:57
Speaker
carbon taxes in Alberta. It just seemed like a bit of a non-sequitur. And I realized that the Alberta NDP probably didn't want to frame it as that, but that's how it ended up being framed by the media, that this social media argument meant that all ENGOs and environmentalists everywhere were going to lay down their arms.
00:54:19
Speaker
I think they lost the plot and the narrative on that. The social license argument worked in one very specific context. It did convince the federal liberals to buy the pipeline.
00:54:32
Speaker
Fantastic, if you can drive your Tesla from 24 Sussex to Parliament, then a carbon tax for a pipeline sounds like a great trade. But if you're a working person in a suburb in Vancouver, if you are trapped in a neighborhood where there is no transit because you can't afford to live anywhere closer to your job, and then you hear that the government is jacking up gas prices,
00:54:58
Speaker
On top of the flaming tanks of goo and all the dead orcas and climate change and breathing benzene if there's ever a spill I mean, how does that make your life any better? And that that's my rant on carbon taxes is that I understand that they're clever economic policy I understand how they well, I don't understand how they work, but I understand that they are
00:55:18
Speaker
You know, it's a good idea and smart people say it's a good idea, but as somebody who has to go and like take my kid to Capoeira, like I got to fill up the fucking car and the gas is more expensive. So whether you tell me, okay, you're going to get that money back later. So actually there was no point in us jacking up the prices anyway, because it all comes out in the wash.
00:55:41
Speaker
Ordinary people are suspicious of a scheme like that because why are you trying to get me to pay more upfront? And it's just dumb politics from a very basic level that doesn't have an effect on emissions nearly in proportion to the amount of political capital you have to sacrifice to bring one in. So I've never understood this obsession with carbon taxes by environmentalists and centrist politicians. If the Suncor CEO
00:56:06
Speaker
thinks that it's a great idea, it's probably not a great idea. Like if you have a bunch of oil companies begging for a carbon tax, it's probably not going to fix climate change. And in the process, you alienate a whole bunch of low information voters, well, not even low info voters, just people who resent having the government slap them with higher gas prices, especially in the lower mainland where they're the highest in North America because of price rigging and cartel behavior. So,
00:56:34
Speaker
The idea that that would somehow convince people to drop their anxieties about climate change and the threat of an oil tanker terminal could only have been dreamed up by people like Brian Topp, who've never been to Vancouver and have never spent time on the West Coast. All right. So final question on this issue, will this, will, broadly speaking, the pipeline issue affect the federal election in the lower mainland and on Vancouver Island?
00:57:04
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. But it's going to affect it in very weird ways because of the multi-party dynamic and because of just how diverse the BC electorate is and how localized those sentiments are. So you can't look at BC as a monolith, just like you can't look at First Nations as a monolith. British Columbia voters are divided up into basically watersheds, neighborhoods,
00:57:30
Speaker
Altitude determines voting behavior based on how high up the hill you live. Your proximity to salt water determines your voting behavior. There's these factors that don't seem to be present in larger, flatter provinces where you see
00:57:50
Speaker
real regional variations within neighborhoods and within ridings and how people vote. And then you add on top of the fact that you've got viable candidates from at least four different parties in many of these ridings, and it's really hard to predict. So yes, the pipeline issue and the oil tanker issue will affect the election, but not necessarily in a linear or predictable way. It's another element that could
00:58:17
Speaker
lead to more conservatives getting elected if you have progressives uh basically sharing the same voters in in these tight races or it could be um it could lead to more greens getting elected which has already been a sort of historic trend that we've seen in british columbia or you could see uh anti-oil and gas new democrats like spend robin's and getting elected on the strength of their positions it's really hard to say um so that that's my cop-out answer is yeah it's going to have an effect but i'm not uh
00:58:47
Speaker
I'm not dumb enough to try to predict that. Well, I just have to say I'm extremely grateful to just to talk to someone who lives in a jurisdiction with some actual federal election drama. Like there is a non-zero chance here that the conservatives just sweep the entire province. Maybe one, two seats, non-conservative seats kind of hold on.
00:59:07
Speaker
It is just a giant yikes out here in Alberta on the federal election front. So at least there's like interesting races on there. What kind of specific races should folks watch out for in BC and which ones kind of are the most interesting, the most close? Well, Burnaby North Seymour, because we've been talking about it, is an interesting place to watch, right? So it's a coastal riding. It's got Simon Fraser University. It's got the Tank Farm. It's got the Westridge Marine Terminal. It's got a bunch of rich people on the North Shore in Deep Cove.
00:59:36
Speaker
Literally, the only way to get from one side of the riding to the other is either to leave the riding and take a bridge or hop in a kayak, I guess. And so you've got a very diverse mix of voters from different income brackets and socioeconomic backgrounds who are faced with this enormous piece of infrastructure that's
00:59:58
Speaker
maybe under construction, sometimes not, protests. How that will play out is an open question, but you've got some really interesting candidates running there from the Greens, the New Democrats. You've got the Liberal Terry Beach, who broke party ranks and voted against the project on one motion in the House of Commons, but has also said nothing about the federal government's bailout of Kinder Morgan and their use of public money to build the thing. He actually proposed that we turn the whole tank farm into
01:00:29
Speaker
housing that they would just like move all of these millions of barrels of oil to some other magical place and then use this contaminated site to warehouse poor people. It's a very interesting policy proposal that has certainly thrown a wrench in the local race. And then you've got the conservatives who've been historically strong, especially on the on the north shore side of the riding. So, I mean, you could quite likely see
01:00:55
Speaker
I would say any of those three get elected. A new Democrat, you can see the liberal get reelected, or you could see conservative win just because the vote splits evenly among the other three parties that are competing for progressive votes. So that's an interesting one. You've got Vancouver Granville, where Jody Wilson-Raybould, who's a thorn in the side of Trudeau, is pulling support from conservatives, liberals, new Democrats, and Greens because she's emerged as this kind of West Coast folk hero.
01:01:25
Speaker
You've got really ridings on the island that could go any which way because of the uptick in green support. And that's really the stronghold, that's the fortress in Canada for the green movement politically. And it seems to basically have started at the south end of Vancouver Island and is moving north up through Nanaimo with the latest by-election win by Paul Manley. So you could see,
01:01:52
Speaker
You could see races in the mid-island and north island affected by that big upswing in green votes. And some of that could even bleed over to the mainland. So yeah, it's going to be a weird time. And I would guarantee that the electoral map in BC will be more colorful than pretty much any other part of Canada when all this is said and done.
01:02:18
Speaker
Well, definitely more than Alberta.
Sven Robinson and Political Scandals
01:02:21
Speaker
We are getting close to the end of our time here, unfortunately, but I do have to just say that Sven Robinson fucking rules. This was a guy who heckled Reagan in the 80s. He got arrested at Clayacott Sound in the 90s. He got kicked out of China talking about human rights abuses.
01:02:37
Speaker
He had a breakdown and was openly talking about his mental health problems. He was the first openly gay MP. He's been away from the game for what, like a decade or something? He's been away from the game for a while now, but now he's running again in this kind of extremely key writing when it comes to pipeline politics in this country. So I'm definitely kind of watching that race with interest.
01:03:03
Speaker
Um, okay. We do got to get out of here, but do you have any kind of Justin Trudeau in blackface brownface takes that you're dying to get out there? Well, I think I said on Twitter, um, turns out Jagmeet Singh is not the first federal leader in a turbine to run for prime minister. And I think it's really interesting to see the reaction from white progressive Canadians. I mean, I don't think that I.
01:03:33
Speaker
I can't say that personally I was surprised that some private school jock who grew up in the lap of luxury would have a weird hobby like blackface. I'm not surprised that our ruling elite engage in like pantomimes mocking and dehumanizing black and brown people in their fancy parties. I think that I hoped it would have
01:04:00
Speaker
present more of an opportunity for a conversation about how racism is baked into Canadian society ever since colonization, but that was probably optimistic. So from what I can see, voters have a real brown guy in a turban and they have a guy in shoe polish and a bath towel. And
01:04:27
Speaker
A lot of them are saying they prefer the guy in the bath towel. There's just something about him they trust more than the other guy. Some inexplicable factor differentiating them that most white progressive Canadians just feel more comfortable with.
01:04:42
Speaker
Yeah, I'm making the shrug emoji with my hands right now. I mean, my only question is how many Justin Trudeau blackface photos have to emerge before we get universal dental care? But that's just me. Kai.
01:04:57
Speaker
You notice they've thrown out some pretty bold policies in the days since, you know, apparently we're all going to save a thousand bucks on our cell phones and they're going to take away our AR 15s. There's a bunch of stuff that they've really tossed out there to try to distract from this. And yeah, I think the only thing that can get us better, more progressive policy from the liberals is more blackface photos. So keep them coming. Change the channel, baby. Okay. Kai, how can people find you online? Do you have anything to plug, anything to tell people about?
01:05:28
Speaker
Um, uh, you can find me making, uh, dumb jokes on Twitter at Kainagata. That's K-A-I-N-A-G-A-T-A. Really it's just my, um, personal outlet for screaming into the void. Uh, it's just where I say stuff that I can't say in, in emails to our supporters. Uh, cause they're old and they don't go on Twitter or listen to podcasts. Um,
01:05:52
Speaker
And there's DogwoodBC, so at DogwoodBC on Twitter and Instagram. And if you too are aggrieved by the idea of spending your tax dollars building out archaic oil sands infrastructure,
01:06:11
Speaker
Do yourself a favor, enjoy the thrill of subversion and sign up to our mailing list and get a little bit of perspective from the other side of the Rockies. It'll do you good. Dogwoodbc.ca, or you can find us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, whatever your social media platform of choice.
01:06:38
Speaker
Awesome. All right, and if you like this show and want more people to listen to it, please review it, talk about it, share the episode if you like it with your friends, just text it to them. Be like, listen to this, this is really good. Word of mouth is the best way to build an audience for this podcast.
01:06:55
Speaker
And we really kind of depend on our listeners to kind of spread the word. It's also September, which means, again, we are in the middle of our fundraising drive, though we are nearing the end. We are looking for 200 patrons, 200 people who can kick in at least $5 a month to keep this podcast, this newsletter, and everything else we do at Progress Alberta going.
01:07:14
Speaker
If you have the ability to help out, go to the progress report.ca slash patrons, put in your credit card number and contribute. We would really appreciate it. Also, if you have any notes, thoughts, comments, hate mail, things you think I need to hear, I'm on Twitter at Duncan Kinney and you can reach me by email at Duncan K at progress, Alberta.ca. Thanks so much to cosmic family communist for the amazing theme. Thanks for listening and goodbye.