ASK Salt Spring: Answered - Ep. 56 Elizabeth May Green MP

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

In Ep. 56 of Ask Salt Spring Answered, host Damian Inwood speaks to Elizabeth May about the looming threat of US tariffs and how Canada is handling an attack on our sovereignty from south of the border.

You're listening to episode 56 of our Salt Spring Answered in which we talked to Elizabeth May, the Green Party MP for Salt Spring Island, about the looming threat of Trump tariffs and all the other things associated with the current trade battle with the United States. All right I'm here with Elizabeth May, our Green Party MP from Ottawa and we've just been to our Saltspring and I think it's fair to say apart from an early discussion about the removal of derelict boats and and mooring boys that the The shadow of Donald Trump was looming over the meeting. I think that's be fair to say. I know it is fair to say yeah and Let's just go through some of the things we talked about

There was a question regarding interprovincial trade, which of course has come up as a, you know, discussion of ways of improving our economy, you know, so that we're more, I guess, able to look after ourselves rather than relying on the US so much. You said that you felt that the EU worked better than Canada regarding inter-country trade barriers, I would say, and that we could actually, there were estimates that we could gain $200 to $300 billion, is that correct? In the growth. That's the Parliamentary Budget Office estimate for what inter-provincial trade barriers cost

the Canadian economy just through enforced inefficiencies. If one province has a specific requirement for a certain kind of safety vest and you can't wear that safety vest when you're doing road work on the other side of the border, there's things like that that just aren't sensible reasons for barriers but they've built up over time and we need to remove them. Yeah, I mean that's a huge amount of money isn't it when you're looking at what people have estimated the tariffs would cost us. It's a big chunk isn't it? It is. Yeah, it is. Yeah, so that seems to be a no-brainer. We talked about sovereignty and the Arctic and we didn't really get into it but I know that some people are concerned obviously with Trump's alliance with Putin and you know the

fact that our Arctic is basically undefended, the Canadian Arctic, that this might result in some kind of dual action between the states and Russia to get our resources from the North. What do you think of that? Well, I think it's really unlikely that they would do things militarily. I mean, Trump has been pretty transparent and menacing, but the menace has been around economic threat and saying, I will annex Canada, but I'll use economic force and I'll punish them economically. The idea that we need the United States for our economic existence is nonsense. We allowed ourselves to be deeply integrated into the U.S. economy when we accepted the free trade deal in the 80s and then NAFTA and then renegotiated COSMA with who else but Donald Trump. So the effect of that deep integration means that Trump putting tariffs on goods from Canada into the US will have a negative impact on his economy as well.

I mean, there's a lot of manufacturers in the US who need Canadian steel and need Canadian aluminum. If he makes it cost 25% more, that's going to affect the US economy and its workforce too. He doesn't see that yet, but I do think we can take steps to protect ourselves and in the process be more self-reliant and self-supporting, self-sufficient Canadian economy. To point to another thing we didn't talk about in Ask Salt Spring just now, but that old line that were hewers of wood and drawers of water, it's not untrue that for far too long, centuries even, Canada has been

prepared to be a country that rip and strip economy. Send raw logs somewhere else to somebody else's country's saw mills while we sell a raw log off the Vancouver Island. That's a crime. Why would we do that? We can get at least get value added out of every bit of raw resources that we're using. Use our forests more wisely but get more value out of every tree we log. Those kinds of basic principles make a ton of sense, but we've allowed ourselves to be essentially a source of raw resources for mostly multinational U.S. corporations that are making money that we don't see. So in a weird way,

Trump may have done us a favor because as much as he's scary, and I do think he is a threat to the world, we can as a country decide, okay, we're going to rethink our way of going and move to more of a circular economy where we do derive value from whatever resources we're using and create jobs and improve our productivity and do it all in the interests of our national self-interest so that we're not victimized by a rogue White House. Right, so we've basically taken the easy path haven't we? There's a market down there and so we've we've gone to it. We would have to re-jig our whole economy

though wouldn't we, to turn this around? I don't think we have to rethink our whole economy. We have to think about, well I mean I mentioned earlier the notion of strategic reserves. Why would we ship out any raw resources to another country to process them? A lot of Canadians don't know this, but there wasn't a whole lot of coverage of the details of the Kinder Morgan pipeline proposal back in the day when Kinder Morgan owned it. And I was the only member of parliament who had intervener status at the National Energy Board and went through all of Kinder Morgan's so-called evidence. But one of the things that didn't get much coverage at all is that the union that represents most of the workers in northern Alberta, Unifor, brought evidence before the National Energy

Board to say that building the pipeline would cost Canadian jobs. That Unifor as a union was against building the Kinder Morgan pipeline because they said look, all that's happening is that you'll be shipping raw bitumen out to other countries refineries instead of processing it in Canada. Now the National Energy Board amazingly enough refused to hear Unifor, they didn't mind Kinder Morgan, they refused to hear Uniforce evidence. And their excuse was, believe it or not, the National Energy Board said, that the economic impacts of the Kinder Morgan pipeline were not in their jurisdiction. That they weren't measuring or judging the pipeline project based on whether it was good for jobs or the Canadian economy or not.

So they disallowed Uniforce evidence. And then of course they ended up saying there was a lot of environmental damage, but it was overwhelmed by the economic benefit, you know, that it was a nation-building project and good for the national economy. Again, if anyone had held them to any kind of internal logic, they just said they didn't have the jurisdiction to even look at evidence on the economic impact, but then they decide the economic impact is positive and outweighs the environmental damage. Well, never mind. If we do think like a country and we do think about where the jobs are, we should listen

to unions like Unifor and when they say shipping out raw bitumen is bad for Canada's economy, we should listen. Yeah, but as you said, I think we don't have the refinery upgrades to process it at this point, right? That's right. That's why, rather than build a pipeline, Canada could have helped Alberta build some upgrade to, I mean, when you go way back to the oil sands project, as misguided as it is, when you go back to the originator, who was someone who actually thought about public policy, Peter Lougheed, who created what was supposed

to be the oil sands project would create a sovereign wealth fund for Albertans, which was then copied by Norway, by the way. Norway has a sovereign wealth fund from its deep sea, North Sea oil, based on what Peter Lougheed was doing for Alberta, which was then scrapped by Ralph Klein. Never mind. Good ideas come from Alberta, but they didn't come from Ralph Klein. They came from Peter Lougheed. That project of Peter Lougheed's, which was the OSSAN's idea, started with one of his

basic premises was quote unquote, think like an owner. Canada's raw resources, we've never thought like owners, we've thought like lackeys of some big transnational capitalist exploiter project and we think like lackeys. There's no excuse for that really. Go back to Peter Lougheed, think like an owner and put rules in place that maximize the benefit of whatever it is we're taking out of the ground or taking out of the forest. Now we talked a bit about Canadian sovereignty and of course the topic of Keir Starmer going to the White House and handing this letter

from Prince Charles inviting Trump on a state visit. And as you said, he didn't give any concern or say anything about the threat to Canadian sovereignty from the US. What do you think should happen there? I mean, should... Starmer should be ashamed. But I mean, he's Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Labour, a so-called lefty, really, and you're going to throw a counter under a bus to appease Trump? I think he should be ashamed. But he is Prime Minister of a separate sovereign

nation. We're connected through the Commonwealth. I look forward to having a chat with him one of these days. I think King Charles might want to have a chat with him. King Charles did put out a statement in support of Canadian sovereignty, but it was on it was on Flag Day and it didn't get a lot of attention. But that's just Trump's MO, divide and conquer. So I guess the thing to do is to remind Starmor, you're in the Commonwealth, aren't you? What do you think? How would you like it if Trump started saying that really the United Kingdom isn't really one country? We'll take Scotland. I've got a golf course there there I'll take it. Like what the heck would Starmor just turn a blind out of that or would he expect that other countries and allies would stand up to a bully and say we

respect sovereignty and the rule of law and the United Nations Charter and if you don't respect those things don't expect us to respect you. Right. Now we talked about it, you talked about the Army of Europe suggestion that because European nations don't really think NATO is gonna work without you know without US involvement that they would form their own form of NATO I guess just from European countries and would Canada join that? I would hope so but I think NATO as a Concept I mean, I think when the Warsaw Pact Disappeared NATO should have disappeared, but those are all you know

In you know historical revisionism that we can't get to anymore at this point, but NATO when Putin invaded Ukraine three years ago, I realized NATO isn't the bulwark and help one would want it to be, because it's essentially muscle bound. The presence of nuclear weapons controlled by NATO and saying if you attack one NATO country you attack all of us has led, now that we have the specter of Putin talking about using nuclear weapons, back to being caught up in mutually assured destruction, that madness and that notion that you can't do anything in terms of conventional

defense of a sovereign country without potentially triggering a nuclear exchange. I think Canada should get out of NATO unless NATO is prepared to commit itself to nuclear disarmament. We have a treaty that more, well enough countries in the world have signed on to it that it's now entered into force as a legally binding treaty. But that's pretty much hypothetical because none of the nuclear nations have signed on. But the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has entered into force.

March 3rd is the third meeting of the parties and I attend as a member of the international parliamentarians for the Treaty for the Proition of nuclear weapons. They are clearly the ultimate weapons of mass destruction and why we would continue to support NATO and be a member state of NATO when we're not dealing with a clear and present danger of weapons of mass destruction held by of weapons of mass destruction held by NATO nations, we need to actually re-examine our engagement in NATO, but we don't even have to ask that question in the abstract because of Trump's actions. It's become right in our face. And that, you know, Denmark was one of the founding nations of NATO and Trump's, you know, inauguration gambit starts talking about I'm going to take Greenland.

Ah, so, and Canada is obviously a NATO nation. Trump is so disrespectful to Canada's role in having supported the US militarily time and time again. Canada and the US jointly run NORAD. NORAD is a modern defense system for our shared airspace, which you might say was put to the test at 9-11. It was a Canadian military officer in charge of NORAD on 9-11. The key decisions to shut down US airspace, to welcome any international flights bound for the United States and redirect them to Canada, all of those decisions were made within moments, but by an integrated

Canada-US military defense shield over our aerospace. And for Trump to say, oh you know, as if Canada is a free rider and we don't exist as a country and we're kind of a joke it's not just insulting it's it's actually factually wrong and he should be taken to account for those kinds of insulting and ignorant statements. Right now you I don't know if you were serious about this but you talked about Canada having its own civil defense form of a you know a domestic home guard almost. I grew up in England watching Dad's Army which I don't know if you ever saw it on television but it was... I heard about it from my dad it was in the home guard. It was very funny interpretation of the way that local

you know villagers basically had a home guard who were there to protect them from the invading German forces. Is that something you really see as being, you know, something we would do in Canada? Yes, but not solely around the military. We need to have a much stronger civil defense civilian force for responding to climate crisis events. It's very clear that without a lot of volunteer efforts throughout British Columbia in response to fires and floods, and particularly from Indigenous nations, we would have had a much greater loss of life. And we have a lot of, which also came up today, of young Canadians who feel that they're

not particularly valued in our society, and they don't feel engaged in community the way a different generation might have been. So I think a civil defense, climate core kind of operation is definitely valuable. Whether or not what we're talking about is a civil defense that says, well, if we're in a significant recession brought on by Trump's economic attack, how do we distribute food to the people who most need it? How do we look after people who are more vulnerable, more marginalized? For all kinds of reasons, I think now that we have a significant resurgence in patriotic fervor would be a good time to

say sign up now we're not quite sure what we're going to ask of you but there may be a moment and we might need to know what are your assets do you have a four-wheel drive do you have an electric vehicle are do you have a ham radio are you prepared to join as we know on salt spring with the the pod system neighborhood to neighborhood, a lot of it is run by local volunteers relying on ham radios. I think across Canada, places that haven't had significant climate emergencies are unaware that in many so-called natural disasters, you lose your cell service, you lose your landlines, and

you really don't know when you go from evacuation alert to evacuation notice what direction are you supposed to drive. If you're driving away from a fire, where is it? If you're driving away from a flood, where is it? How do you communicate any of that? We're also dependent on iPhones and other devices that work with cell service. When cell service goes down, which it does, in major wind storms and major hurricanes and so on, I absolutely think a civil defense corps that's trained up is going to save

lives if it also happens to be that we are dealing with, and I think much more likely, rogue elements from across the border from the US, more than like a trained military, we should be absolutely prepared defense only to volunteers, but we wouldn't hurt the RCMP and the CBSA at all. And actually, I think that RCMP should not be doing local policing in BC, but that's another whole thing. Local police forces, knowing that they've got trained up volunteer civil defense corps, will make us all stronger, regardless of whether we're talking about illegal actors or natural disasters. You're proud boys, I think you mentioned.

I'm very worried about those guys because Trump's let them all out of jail. And he's also helping them to find out who the people were at the Department of Justice who were involved in prosecuting them and sending them to jail. Musk and Trump see nothing wrong with turning over the private information of law enforcement officers to the people who would like revenge and who are violent. This is very very worrying. Now you talked we talked about retaliatory tariffs being a war of attrition. What do you think I I mean, obviously if we impose tariffs on US imports, then our prices are going to rise in the same way that the US prices will rise

when he imposes on us. So should we actually go that route? I mean, obviously we have to defend ourselves against the bully, right? But it's a two-edged sword, isn't it? Well, the government of Canada and all federal party leaders have pretty much, we've all said, okay, right, one for all and all for one. This is an amazing degree of solidarity from people across party lines to say the government of Canada, yes, dollar for dollar retaliatory tariffs. A trade war is not smart. A trade war will hurt both economies, but will bring in retaliatory tariffs.

That said, what the Green Party wants to do is say we don't want any region of the country, and particularly any workforce and set of workers, to be particularly targeted and victimized by whatever Trump may do. So we strongly favor that Canada should set up strategic reserves. So where, for instance, the people who, the aluminum manufacturing sector in Canada, it's only 13 billion dollars a year of aluminum that we export. It's not a lot to say let's buy up all that aluminum, 13 billion dollars worth. Won't sell it into the United States. We won't have people experiencing in the aluminum sector the problem that no one wants to buy our aluminum because there's a 25% tariff on it. We'll have our own government

buy it and put it in a strategic reserve. How do we afford this? Well, it's back to the Kinder Morgan pipeline. The way Bill Morneau bought the Kinder Morgan pipeline is a fascinating exercise in fiscal alchemy. On the books, we didn't actually spend any money. It was an asset transfer. So Bill Morneau, as former minister of finance, said, okay, I've got $5.5 billion over there, and I'm not spending it. I'm just converting it from cash to a pipeline.

So on the books of the Government of Canada, an asset swap, we didn't actually spend the money. Well, of course we did, we wrote a check to Kinder Morgan, they cashed it in Texas, but on paper we had the same value of an asset. It didn't contribute to debt or deficit. So if we hold strategic reserves in crown corporations of the government of Canada, it's an asset swap and we should be able to protect our own resources from the impact of retaliatory tariffs by not selling. And then our supplier, our manufacturers, are people who, you know, those who log for a living and those who log for a living and those who fish for a living and those who create potash or bitumen or what have you, uranium,

a strategic reserve. We've purchased it to hold onto it in Canada. It's an asset swap. We have wealth. We're hanging onto it. And then if there's a country that's one of our allies and is desperate and says, look, we really could use some of that strategic reserve you've got. At that point, we do end up having to actually, it enters into a cash accounting.

But if it's being sold to a country other than the US, there's no 25% tariff. Except of course Mexico gets it. But Mexican resources and Canadians are also, again, deeply integrated economically. I only found out recently that the province of Saskatchewan has a trade office in Mexico because they do so much business with Mexico. So we can figure out how to protect our economy, be more self-reliant and not, it's not that we're just being bloody-minded and wanting to hurt the US economy, but we can protect our economy and let the US feel what it's like to not buy what they want from us because we've put it in a strategic reserve Yeah, well, I'm certainly buying all my fruit and veg that I can find from Mexico and other countries

Yeah, buying anything from the US and people have a natural instinct for figuring that out, which I think is brilliant Yeah, now you said I know you've been down to Washington and you've talked to Republicans and Democrats You said that Republicans are frightened of Trump, they won't stick their head above the parapet for good reason because he's a bully and we saw that when he was chastising various people from Zelensky to governors and you know. And imagine calling our Prime Minister governor. I mean just the childishness of his insults is just part of his character. Yeah. Yeah, so but but you know privately They're worried about what's happening, right?

Do you think they're gonna get to the point where they're actually gonna do something about it? One would hope that there's some integrity left among Republicans. They've they've I mean from the days when the Tea Party first started and when people like Newt Gingrich were not acceptable by the mainstream Republicans, they've tumbled very, very far. They've drunk whatever Kool-Aid Trump serves up because they see him as a path to power. I'm astonished that they're prepared, people who've run for office and been elected as senators and congressmen are prepared to watch

someone who has no legal authority to do what he's doing like Elon Musk running roughshod over the US Federal Civil Service to decide to fire 13,000 people who work at USAID. This is an agency where the appropriations were approved by the U.S. Congress, so even if it was President Trump doing it as president, it doesn't have the legal authority to do it, much less to delegate it to the richest man on earth who's never been elected anything either, who also I mean running around the world promoting neo-nazis and racists. It's a it it doesn't feel real but we know perfectly well that we're wide awake and this is really happening. So we have to plan ahead, figure out what he's likely

to do, be prepared for it and not back down. Right. Now of course we've got the Liberals having a leadership battle with Mark Carney seeming to be the favorite. I think you said that if he wins you think we'll have an election within a couple of weeks. Yeah I do think so. Parliament prorogued, the Governor General agreed to current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's request back on January 6th that the House should, Parliament should prorogue until March 24th. Why he picked March 24th who knows, but even a bigger mystery is why the Liberal Party decided that from a standing start January 6, they could get a

whole leadership race over and done with by March 9. But what that timing means is that if the new Liberal leader is Mark Carney, March 9, he is immediately Prime Minister because the Liberals have more seats in the House than anyone else, so they have the chance to form government and he would be presumed to be and in fact be the Prime Minister, but without a seat in Parliament. I don't think, I mean it took me a while actually to have the penny drop on this one, even I was thinking about it, well Mark, because I've been thinking, okay March 24th I go back to Parliament and March 24th there'll be a speech from the throne, it'll be down in the

Senate and then we'll do this and we'll do that. I know what these things look like and how long the debate on the speech from the throne usually takes and I suddenly realized well if Mark Carney is the Prime Minister we're not going to start March 24th or have a speech from the throne or have a single question or vote in parliament because Mark Carney can't speak or vote or even take a seat in Parliament to sit there and not say anything. I mean Unless you're a member of Parliament, you you literally don't get in the room So I don't think he's gonna want to start his time as if he does win liberal leadership

I can't imagine that he'd want to give Pierre Poilé the enormous gift of even one time Pierre Poilé of saying, Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the Prime Minister. Oh, right. He can't get in here, can he? He doesn't have a seat. I mean, I think a lot of Canadians, even knowing in the abstract that Mark Carney doesn't have a seat and still legally can become Prime Minister, the reality of him not being allowed in the room will probably be a shock for people and then it'll make it harder in an election campaign for Mark Carney to convince people to support his party.

He could be up in a public gallery, couldn't he? No. He can't be. Well, he'd be in the public gallery, yes. He'd be in the public gallery, obviously. His deputy would be on the floor, right? Yeah, he wouldn't be able to take any seat at all in the MP section. Right. Which brings us to the Green, the Provincial Green Party.

We have a similar situation here, don't we, with Sonia stepping down. Neither of our two incumbent MLAs are running for leadership. Do you see that as a problem for the provincial green party? No, not really. I mean, I think it's a terrible shame to lose Sonia because someone of her talent and extraordinary, she's extraordinarily articulate and she's thoughtful and she's calm. She's really, really kind. And I hate losing her from public life in British Columbia. We really need her.

But it was, you know, these things happen. And thank heavens, I mean, Rosted could have gotten a majority of seats, so we dodged that bullet. Eby's behaving so badly, so badly, in terms of abandoning positions that I thought he held because he actually understood issues, but he's running away from things he used to understand, whether climate or opioid

crisis. But, and imagine, just sounded just like Russ did, a whole list of resource projects he wants approved without any environmental review. This is shameful. So I've never been a big fan of provincial NDP or obviously Rustad and the Conservative Party. You know, I'm pretty nonpartisan in lots of ways. I look back at Gordon Campbell and think that was a really well constructed carbon price he brought in and it was it was absolutely letter-perfect in terms of being revenue neutral and every dollar taken in on

pricing pollution was a dollar taken off our provincial income taxes. It was it was really well done and Gordon Campbell became concerned about the climate crisis because of the loss of an area of forest two times the size of Sweden of Interior Lodgepole Pine due to the pine beetle outbreak. Gordon Campbell was told by his officials that the pine beetle wasn't wiped out by a cold snap in winter. So you ended up getting someone through a real lived experience of a multi-billion dollar climate disaster befalling the economy of BC and then coming up with a really good response in the BC carbon price which the NDP ran against as acts the tax. So I'm not a fan of the BC NDP,

and I'm particularly not a fan of the BC Conservatives, or for that matter, their old Liberal Party brand under Christy Clark. The only party in this province that I, obviously I'm a federal green, but we're not connected parties, but as a British Columbian, I'm grateful every day that we've got Robert Botterill

as our MLA here and Jeremy Valerian winning down in Squamish area in West Van Cedarsky. But I really miss having Sonia as leader. That said, whoever wins the NDP, rather, whoever wins the Green Party leadership race this time around, and I don't even know the people who are likely to run, but I'm sure they'll win a seat quickly in the next by-election. There's by-elections that happen here and there all the time. And I think that the BC Green brand came through the election strongly. People are grateful that they have two green MLAs and if it wasn't for Jeremy

Valeriet and Robert Botterill, we wouldn't have the current agreement between the BC Greens and the BC NDP to try to hold them to account. Yeah. Okay, Elizabeth, we've covered a lot of territory. Thanks very much for coming in. You've been listening to Ask Salt Spring Answered on CHIRFM. We are the Sound of the Gulf Islands. Thanks a lot. Thank you. It's just wonderful to be back on Salt Spring and there's nothing like Ask Salt Spring anywhere else I've ever been. So there we go. But there's nothing like Salt Spring anywhere else. So there you go. Thank you.