Shaun Newman Podcast - #692 - Liam Parfitt & Chace Barber

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

Liam is a co-owner of Freya Logging and Chace is the founder/CEO of Edison Motors. They hop on to discuss the upcoming British Columbia provincial election and what they are seeing in the province. Mashup collection Promo Code - 222minutes for 22% off ⁠⁠⁠https://snp-8.creator-spring.com/listing/the-mashup-collection⁠⁠ Let me know what you think. Text me 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast E-transfer here: [e-mail] Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Text Grahame: [phone] – and be sure to let them know you’re an SNP listener.

This is Vance Crow. This is Tom Longo. This is Drew Weatherhead. This is Marty Up North. This is J.P. Sears, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Wednesday. How's everybody doing?

Shout out to Dan and Chris, my college roommate and his wife put us up for the night in Williston, North Dakota last night. Today, as you listen to this, we are heading for home. So it is the studio tonight for tomorrow's episode. I'm excited. It's been a long time. 45 days to be a. exact since we left on our journey that took us all over the place in the United States, ended up in Minnesota at Mel's parents for several weeks.

I've been podcasting there, obviously, for all of August, and now on our way back. So a shout out to them for putting us up for the night. We got an interesting one here before we get there. Let's start with Silver Gold Bull. One of my favorite things about silver and gold is they provide the ultimate sleep at night insurance policy. That's silver and gold's words. They're offering you the listener smaller than one ounce silver coins, holding

fractional silver gives you real optionality and worst case economic scenarios while a low premium offered only for you the listener means you have a solid investment no matter what comes to pass down in the show notes you can text or email uh graham you can also go to silvergold bowl uh... dot com dot ca depending on which side of the border you are on we were just i was just talking one of the guys from silver gold bowl about the upcoming cornerstone form we're working out some details hopefully we're going to have those coming up here in august uh to all of you guys so you know where to look for it, how to get there, all that good stuff,

and well, hopefully you'll buy tickets and come to it, the second edition of the Cornerstone Forum. Man, if I say, um, one more time. Silver and gold, no matter where you're buying it, what you're buying it for, if you're buying it off silver gold bull or you're buying it from somebody else, buy it off Silver Gold Bowl. It helps me reference SNP or the Sean Newman podcast when you do.

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Next is the deer and steer butchery. Of course, it's barbecue season. They got all the barbecue and smoking cuts to fill your freezers with, the barbecue smoking, the grilling cuts. And if you haven't stopped in to see Amber, their butcheress, originally from Wadena, Saskatchewan, she is the lady running the cornerstone,

the deer and steer butchery. Man, I'm all over the place today. And you can stop in today or give her a call. 780870-8700. They're located on the west side of Lloyd Minster. And certainly with, man, can I say this? I don't want to say this. I think this every year.

With summer slowly coming or quickly coming to an end, you want to make sure. summer is still here folks it's still warm but man where a dog is go uh where is it going when it comes to the deer and steer make sure you're you're grabbing your next uh smoking or grilling cut from them uh once again 780 870 870 800 okay let's get on to our tale of the tape the first is the corner of frea logging the second founder and CEO of edison motors I'm talking about Liam Parfit and Chase Barber. So buckle up, here we go.

Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by Liam Parfit, Chase Barber. Boys, thanks for hopping on. Thanks for having me. So we had the mashup last week, and I'm going to be honest. I always wonder how closely other provinces follow, say, the Alberta election. And I think I get my answer when we read an article on the BC election. I'm like, really?

Like, why haven't I been hearing anything of this? And I'm going to read the article, just a piece of it what we read on the mashup to kind of bring listeners up to speed of why I brought you two on, and then I'd love to get your thoughts. And that's from the Vancouver Sun. It said the biggest development in provincial politics this year is the way the BC Conservatives have steadily closed ground on the BC NDP, a trend documented in the succession of opinion polls

from Research Co. Back in January, the conservatives were already in second place in a research poll, but 21 points behind the NDP by April, the Gapper is reduced to 18, then 10 in May, 7 in June, and now 3 points, 41% versus 38% among decided voters in the most recent research survey reported at the end of July. Jens, you two boys are BC boys. I'm not a BC boy. I'm a Saskatcham boy who transplanted to Alberta.

I pay attention to Alberta politics, but we have, you know, a BC election 67 days out. We got a Saskatchewan election 76 days out. Just bring me up to speed. What the heck is going on in your province? Well, yeah, we're having an election. And I honestly don't know how it's that close right now because objectively, BC is so much worse off that it was like seven, eight years ago.

I think they came to, NDP came to power in 2017. And people were like, oh, they're doing a pretty good job. Like, I'm sorry, but all the sawmills are closing down. The forestry industry is getting the shit kicked out of it. Our hospital emergency room is closed almost one day per week, it seems now. Like, no emergency. You have a heart attack, you break your arm. You better go to Kamloops an hour away or Koloona an hour and a half away because the emergency hospital is closed.

Like, what? And it's a close race. People are looking at that and be like, yeah, we should probably keep going down this road a little farther. Like it's only closed one day a week. I think if we reelect the NDP, we can probably. probably get it to two, three days a week of possible closures. There's just, there's not enough sawmills that have shut down yet. Yeah, we've only lost half of our sawmills.

I mean, that'll leave us with the other half, right? Yeah, if we, if we were really like the NDP, I bet we can probably get it up to like 75, almost 100% of sawmills close down. Yeah, yeah. And we're running out of wood and there's no, there's no resources left in BC because we cut all the trees down and we pull all our oil and gas out of the ground. there's nothing left. Yeah.

I think part of it, like, if you look at BC, it's always a bit hard to predict because the polls in BC are always a little bit changing. And it's often a three-way race federally. Like, you can see NDP, liberals, and conservatives fighting this freeway race. So probably the most interesting thing in BC in the last year is definitely like basically John Rustad got in a conflict

with Kevin Falcon about various, different things. And John was pushed out of the United Party, which was previously the Liberal Party. Now, Kevin Falcon, like, I met the guy. I think he's a nice guy. He's got a lot of capacity, but he's kind of attached to Christy Clark, which who is fairly unpopular as a leader. And it's kind of like if Christia Freeland ran in seven years, you know, Justin Trudeau's name value doesn't have the same value that it had a little while ago. And I think Kevin Falcons being sort of dragged down by that Christy Clark thing, but something happened. And now the Conservative Party is basically insurgent. And what's interesting

about some of those polls is that the Conservative Party actually has a much higher potential voter base in the NDP right now. So up to 60, 65% of people will vote for the, would consider voting for the Conservatives, whereas only about 42, 43% of people will consider. to vote for the NDP. So the NDP is its top end of the performance, but people are a bit, the Conservative Party is an unknown party right now. And it's actually kind of exciting to see how fast it's grown. And it's very, very diverse. Eleanor Sterco was the, I think she was the police chief in Surrey. You know, she's married to a woman, they got a family. She's kind of one of those, one of those types of people that gets things done. And she just walked away from the United Party, the former liberal

party to join the conservative party. There's kind of been a stampede of United Party members leaving to go to the conservative party. And it's not like it's close, right? So the United Party is probably done at this point. Going into an election, it'd be amazing to get back like 30, 35 points. But I think a lot of people, NDP people, like, I'll say this. I like John Hogan as an NDP leader. I think he's an excellent NDP leader. And he didn't like stop that. We had two pipelines, so we had the big LNG project, we had the oil and gas project, and we had site C. He had an opportunity to stop all three of those. He didn't. That was about $100 billion worth of economic activity that happened through British Columbia and during John Hogan's tenure.

We closed a few sawmills, but a lot of those sawmills, the fax machine had gone on about those ones years before because they were in areas where there wasn't a lot of wood. But we lost the Bear Lake sawmill about six months ago in Prince George. Bear Lake sawmills drowning in wood. It's surrounded by the most wood in the province. basically. And so when David E.B. came in, I think John Hogan was a man of the people and he could walk into a sawmill and just hang out. I think David E.B. is very much like more of an urban guy. He's struggling to get that urban elite ideas. And you know, like these universities tend to be echo chambers now. They all say, oh, this is the way it works and that's good and we shouldn't

change anything. But the common person, the person that has a job, the person that doesn't have a university agreement isn't working for the government in a public sector union job, we're all hurting, right? You can really see it in Prince George right now. People are, you know, I've never seen a resume stack so deep. I mean, we're a fairly new company mowing around seven years. I've never had 40 resumes available in a couple of week period. I've never seen it where, you know, people are just pretty much happy to get a job. I mean, we've had a hundred logging trucks approach us to Hallwood for us in the last little bit. And it's, it's pretty, It's pretty bad rating.

We've been trying to find some wood to go haul with Topsy. Like we got the set of Super Bees and we're ready to go start pulling some loads. And I've been on the phone all morning trying to find some. I finally just found some loads that I can pick up on Monday. Maybe. They're going to let me know on Friday whether or not they're even going on Monday. But like that's like I've been looking for loads for like a week and a half around Merritt. And there's nothing.

Like I can't even test my track to go haul logs. because there's no logs to haul for the electric truck we built. It's not. It's not. And meanwhile, the forest fires are burning about 15 hectares for every hectare we're logging in British Columbia. So, you know, if you look at logging as a tool, it could be used as a tool to reduce the amount of fire hazard by not doing clear cuts. You just do take out some of the logs, especially in like the areas closer to town where you have dense forest close to town. And I was kind of a little bit excited when the NDP got in in 2017 because I thought, well, we're a little bit cookie cutter right now. The BC United Party really gave away a lot of power to the forest industry. And the forest industry made some decisions that were like very economical decisions.

But they didn't look at some of the externalities like nobody really wants to have just pine on the landscape. We like to have aspen and different things so that we can go hunting as well as logging. But it's not exclusive, right? It's nice to go out and pick blueberries and have a job at the sawmill. And we have so much wood in BC. We only manage about a third of the total forest land in BC. And kind of the way the NDPs brought it in, we're only managing about a sixth of it now.

But this idea that just not logging it will save it is ridiculous because it just burns. The big slide we just had in Chilcotein probably had something to do with the fact that that entire hillside burned off a few years ago. So we're not using the forest industry to reduce the fire hazard closer to town. We're not using the forest industry for anything. And part of the problem, I think Chase is like the mills just can't get permits from the Ministry of Forest. They've doubled the number of people at the Ministry of Forest. So you think they'd be able to put out permits faster.

And what that's done is slowed permits down. And it's the same story in housing. BC had a 23% decline in housing permits year over year, just that was the latest stats. Like, why are we building 23% less housing when you've got all these people that need a house? And guess what houses are built out of? Wood. Like, B.C. See, we got, we got the land, we got the wood. Like, we have so much wood. People don't get that. Like, we only take out, what, like half a percent of, like, if you take out provincial parks, federal land, private land.

We only take out half a percent of the total amount of wood that the province is set aside, which means that that's like a 200-year cycle at half a percent, which means that we could along, leave it for 200 years, and it would take 200 years to get back to the original. start date, which a lot of people don't understand is they think if you just let a forest go to 300 years, 400 years, they'll all be like coastal old growth that'll grow six, 700 years. Pine, like a pine forest needs fire as part of the ecosystem. Pine cones don't even germinate and release their seeds until they're burnt, which means that it's literally fire is part of it.

The trees grow, they get to be about 100 years old, they die. their leaves fall on the ground, their needles fall on the ground, and then they burn, and then that replenishes the forest. What the forestry industry could do with selective logging, logging, you go in there, you take the trees as they mature, you extract that economic value out of it, you thin it, you reduce the fire danger, and then you replant it. You're basically economically replicating the natural cycle of it all grows and it grows and it grows, and then it all gets destroyed in fire, and then it re-germinates and re-renews itself.

Like, yeah. And the other thing is, Chase, like, every time it burns, you know, the moss layer under the forest, it's called the duff layer. You know, there's like, there's litter. Technical forestry terms is LFH. It's litter fermentation in humus. So the top layer is litter is just to find the older branches. The next layer is kind of like the starting to rot moss,

and then the bottom layer is that black carbon. that's where most of the carbon in a stand is. There's 10,000 meters in a hectare. So if you think about it like this, for every ton of carbon you get when you burn the trees in a forest fire, you're probably getting three or four tons of that forest floor layer. It depends on the stand. It could be one-to-one ratio.

It could be a 10-to-one ratio. But if we harvest it first and don't let it burn and plant it, we get to add more carbon into that carbon layer in the soil, and we can keep replenishing that carbon. The thing about carbon in the stand is you use that carbon, Danny Gardner knows to keep the moisture in a stand. And when you have a moist stand, it's less likely to burn. So we can have a virtuous cycle of reduced smoke.

And, you know, these forest fires are a big deal, right? Our insurance prices on our homes are spiking. We got increasingly evidence for mental illness, physical illness from the smoke in the summertime. Our tourism industry is getting crack kicked out of it because all the smoke that comes down and sits in the valleys. And we have the ability to fix that while while helping fight climate change. and creating the raw material to fix our housing crisis. It's insane that we're not doing it. Like everything we need to do to fix our problems,

especially in the interiors, like right out in our backyard, but no one can get a permit to go and thin some wood because the government's mad at Canfor. I feel like in British Columbia, Canfor in northern BC is the dominant player. And they've been fighting with the Ministry of Forests basically since the NDP got in. I feel like we're the kids and they're our parents,

and they're having a nasty divorce and they're spending all their money on lawyers, and we're going to be left with nothing. It's a really tragic situation for the citizens of British Columbia. And it's time for, I think it's time for a political shift sort of away from sort of urban elite ideas with, you know, bachelor's, minimum bachelors of science. Everybody's been through the same university sort of like training and everybody has the same. Oh, we should give drugs for free because then people won't die of overdoses. But the problem is, you know, you give people free drugs and then they don't really want the hydrogen.

because it doesn't get them high enough. So they sell that to a drug dealer, exchange for fentanyl, which gets them higher. And then a drug dealer goes to the high school and says, hey guys, this is safe heroin. You should buy it for five bucks a pill. We're flooding the streets with all these legal drugs in it. It creates decay inside the town. And then outside the town, you have all these thick forests that are getting thicker and thicker and creating all this smoke and burning it instead of harvesting it, putting it through the sawmills, giving people jobs. And so we need to kind of clean up the forest and we need to kind of clean up clean up our towns a bit. A lot of it's just ideology, right? The ideology is nature is best taken care of by

itself. We don't need industry. And also, you know, people don't choose to be addicts. We should just give them free drugs and a free house. And maybe that will take away all the problems. But it doesn't work in practicality, right? It's theory being applied. But your theory is only as good as the experiment. If the experiment isn't working, you need to look at your theory, but no one's looking at their experiment because there's no feedback loop for them, right? They just, they all agree that that's the way it was because they learned that in school or they had a conversation online about it. I think we look real practical at it. If you were looking in theory, look at Jasper.

A certain area in Jasper was thinned and a certain area was left to nature. You tell me, which area went better? The area that somebody thinned or the area that was left. I would love to do a fly on the wall and see why that big patch of dead pine just to the south of Jasper, which is exactly where the house is burned down, didn't get. Because we were supposed to go back to Jasper when we did the first big one, and it didn't happen. I'm pretty sure there is that it's an ideology that nature's best left to man.

It's a racist ideology, for starters, because First Nations have been managing the landscape for a lot longer than we have in this area. The way they did it, they didn't have machinery to cut down trees, but they used fire. They burnt in spring and they burned it off because they knew that they couldn't eat pine needles or fur needles. They needed grass and shrubs and berries and things for animals to eat. We took that away from them trying to manage for timber, but we've replaced it with something worse, which is just let the trees grow thick and then burn. It's not good for anybody.

It's not good for the animals. It's not good for climate change. It's not good for biodiversity. And it's not good for people, right? And I think that's one of the main problems, like, some of the ideas coming to university right now is that man's bad. Well, we're here. We're not bad. We're not good.

We have a choice to be good. We need to be way more positive about the future. And I think that winner of the election in BC hopefully provides a more positive vision for British Columbia. We have so much. Like, look at Chase. Look, you could imagine how many logging trucks you could be selling if we had a vibrant logging industry. And here you are. You're kind of pioneering this technology of a hybrid logging truck using old truck, which is about as environmentally and friendly as it gets.

You take an old Kenworth that's, you know, okay, just park it's worth 30 grand. You throw, you know, you repower it basically, but the steel is still good. steel doesn't go bad. It's remember, recycle reuse, and like you're doing everything we should be doing. I'm doing everything we should be doing. Increasing biodiversity,

helping store a carbon in the forest longer. And we're not getting anywhere. Right? So my question as an Albertan now, sitting here watching this, watching the polls of the conservatives go up and the NDP start to fall, I don't fully understand everything going on in BC,

but in fairness to all my BC listeners, Listen, I look at this and I go, we have two elections happening here, possibly a leadership, well, a leadership review, I guess I should say in Alberta. There's a whole bunch of things happening this fall. And I'm hearing you two guys, you know, talk about all this, all these great ideas, okay? How to like thin forest and Chase had, you know, a long time ago had got me around on EVs. I'm like, oh, man, that's, huh, that's an interesting. Well, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, that I will just say before I had chase on I was like I don't understand the point of EVs in the oil field or in my area right like it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense then you start to discuss different ways they can be done the inter in Edison motors and I'm like oh interesting I had a thought about that that's a pretty good idea and yet you know all these good ideas get left in the drawing room floor is what you two are pointing out right because I mean we just had a giant fire and Liam you're talking about the work you did and how means

meaningful it was and you're not saying, oh yeah, the government called me the next day. We've signed six new contracts. I have no idea. Or maybe they've signed contracts with 10 other companies to go do this. They're not doing that, right? There's this ideology of just leave the forest alone. It'll take care of itself. Leave man out of it.

Good. And Chase has his own story with Edison Motors and what he's doing there. So my question is with this election is either parties talking to it. Like have you seen with the conservatives as part of their rise due to talking about what you guys are talking about or are they sticking to other issues i can i can you go ahead jay i mean i feel like the ndp seems to largely be ignoring this fact that the fire burning all our forest down it isn't great they seem to be focused on very urban issues i think you hit the nail on the head like with their current leader it's not horgan it's not the guy that could walk into a sawmill it's a very

urban type that we have leaving the province. And you can tell he's focused on very urban issues, whereas I feel like the conservatives tend to be more rooted in the, like the rural issues affecting 95% of the province. Yeah, I met with, I met with John Rustad on Sunday. So two days ago, we came to my office. Our office isn't real fancy.

It's a bit like yours that are chase. And, you know, like we sat down. and he came in and I was wearing my crocs and you know I wasn't dressed up in a suit or anything but He had some pretty good ideas What I'm kind of excited about the conservatives in the sense that and I was pretty suspicious about them Really up until quite recently, but they've got a really good diversity of candidates And I think they've really sort of brought together a coalition of you know there's there's a type of environmentalist out there that feels like you know what we could do a better job in the environment but we should actually be doing it.

We can't just like carbon tax and let nature take its course because we're all going to be living in smaller and smaller apartments, right? You can only put like three people in a one-bedroom apartment, right? At some point you're sleeping in the toilet. That on the head there with the diverse part with the conservative. They're a new party. I think it's time for change. Like there's enough people with new ideas coming inside that aren't NDP or liberals

or like United. Those people have been in their roles for, for 20 years that they've been in LAs, and they have their way of doing it. I think it's time we have those fresh faces in there. And I've met with Rustad, I've met with a lot of the MLAs from that party, and they're fresh and they're outside the political thing,

and they've got great ideas with a lot of common sense. And honestly, if my money on any two parties right now, it's on either the conservatives or the Greens, and that sounds crazy, but I've met with the leader of the Green Party, And she's also down to earth with a ton of common sense. She's definitely coming at it from an environmental point of view. But a ton of common sense, the conservatives and the greens,

both are the only two parties where their leaders seem to be connected with actual people and what's going on in reality. Yeah. Yeah, I would feel like that, I don't know, like when I was in school, we read Animal Farm by George Orwell, you know, and the pigs took over the farm from the humans, and they got rid of the working class box. or the horse and they sat down at the table at the humans and everyone was looking around.

You couldn't tell they're seeing the pigs and the humans after a while. And I think power corrupts. An absolute power absolutely corrupts is what I remember from animal farm. And I feel like we're at that point where the political power structure in British Columbia. And disappeared. Yeah. Am I back? You're back.

You know, the power structures need to be refreshed. You know, they really do. And I think the conservative party's got the best shot. My favorite would be a conservative minority with a green supply agreement just to make sure we're making those good decisions around the environment. But not this environmentalism that doesn't include humans. Humans are part of nature. We're here. We're not going anywhere. We need to figure out better ways to do things, not just stop. No? 100%. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. There's a weird environmental thing where it says, leave it to nature. It's better before the white man got here. And you're right. It's super racist because, any First Nation will tell you that they managed their forest with fires. They would burn out an area and then a couple years later. It was a planned burn and they would literally manage their forest.

It's super offensive that we're like, it's best left to nature. Well, the first nations were here managing their forest for 10,000 years before us. And now we've got a bunch of academics at UBC and, well, don't cut anything. Just don't cut anything. And it seems like... And I would say the university, they're figuring out, right? Like they're saying, hey, you know, like actually there is room. But I think everybody just has, like, the idea of a national park to me is offensive, right?

It's like, we just made this park and we, you know, like, national parks are some of the least progressive and, um, and the most bureaucratically complicated things on the planet with the idea that everything's perfectly, leave it alone. We can't have any changes and it excludes First Nations often. Um, and honestly like, like as a, as someone as a northerner, you're a small town guy. like the distance between your average First Nations desires and the average local of these interior places is very, very small. And there's a great gap as soon as you go into a big city and you're talking to someone with a master's degree and some kind of social, socialism, I don't know, sociology. And they've got all these like ideas, but those ideas aren't really honed in reality. They're sort of been built up in cloistered areas. They're like, those ideas don't work on the ground.

And that's what we're seeing across Canada in the last 10 years. We have GDP for capital shrinking. We're increasing the number of people coming in. And my wife's an immigrant and Frey is built with immigrants. And I'm fully pro-immigration. There needs to be a plan, right? You can't just open up the gates and say, come on in, let's go. We need to say, hey, we got a place for you to live and we have a decent job for you to do.

It's not just like, well, there's three, seven-eleven jobs. So if we bring in four people, we can get the cost of 7-Eleven job down three bucks an hour. so that the 7-11 owner can bake a bit more money. Like when you let too many people in, the only ones that benefit are the big corporations, right? Like, not no local people benefit. No problem with immigrants. But it's being used by large corporations like Tim Hortons and 7-Eleven for wage.

Oh, you guys want to get paid too much? You want your stand, like the cost of living's gone up and you've asked for your wages to go up. Fuck no. We'll bring in 400,000 people from India to fill those spots for absolutely no much. We don't have housing for them. We'll just cram them. It's exploitation. It's not fair to the immigrants coming in because they're being told that they're in a better life.

They're getting all this propaganda about the Canadian dream. They get over here and they find out that wage they thought was really good in India, doesn't buy shit and they're crammed into it. And you talk to someone there, well, my life isn't better off. Like, maybe my kids will be better. And it doesn't do any good, too, for the countries that we're taking the immigrants from. Because we end up, that is the argument, we take the best people, the people that have the financial means to move, they have the ambition, the desire to better themselves. But those end up being the best people to build up their own countries.

There are people that start businesses, jobs, they're engineers, they have a lot of education and they're ambitious. What do we do? We rob the most ambitious people from a country. We take them over here. We put them working, making coffee and Tim Hortons, and we leave that country without people that actually build up that country and build the standard. of living there to meet our standard of living. I'm curious, gents, you know, like where it sits

with immigration, you know, I don't know the background of both of you, but at one point, you know, for much of Canada's history, we all come from people who immigrated across the country, right? So like my roots aren't Canadian for 600 years, they go somewhere else.

When you look at immigration right now and you see what's going on down on the south border of the United States, you see how many people they're bringing into Canada in general, do you still think we're getting the best immigrants coming to this this country or is this something different because i i i think um hitting on that point to make sure we're not just breathing on that point to make sure we're not just brazen my oh yeah immigration's fine it's like well i think immigration's fine i got but where it's at right now i don't think many people would agree with that including myself

in that i just don't think we're getting the best anymore right and if we are we have nothing we're not allowing them to do the job they're allowed to do which has been a thing for a long time but now you're you're ramming in thousands upon thousands of people into every city across Canada and it's not fair because there isn't the housing and there's not the health care infrastructure so but we haven't ramped up medical doctor it like like I haven't had a family doctor for a while and I'm not alone I there's there's no is that all three of us just just nobody nobody has a family doctor yeah okay carry on I think that's wild that all three of us are like Yeah.

There's this. You know what I'm helping. It's a website that track hospital beds per 1,000 people. It's a statistic that's tracked across many countries. And back in the 1970s, we had about 10 or 11 hospital beds for every 1,000 people. Now we're down to about two to three hospital beds for every 1,000 people. We've lost seven hospital beds for every 1,000 people in Canada. Is it that nuts to suggest?

that hey, why don't we tie immigration to houses and hospital beds and schools? Like, okay, we have 10 hospital beds for every 1,000 people. Okay, we're at 12 hospital beds for 1,000 people. Why don't we allow in a few more thousand immigrants? Because we have extra capacity. How about we just like, index it to something? Just fucking index it. If you actually need the workers and the jobs and everything and they're coming in and they're doing all these benefits that the government says they're going to do. Like they're going to pay more. more taxes and we're going to have more revenue and that more revenue will fund better services and things and it'll be better for the country.

Well, cool. Build the extra services when they come in there and index it to that. Yeah, but I think, Chase, I think we're talking federal politics here, but I think the issue is that the GDP would be shrinking in Canada if we didn't have that surge in immigration and then we'd be in an official recession instead of an unofficial recession. And then, you know, so like a lot of this stuff just goes back to massaging, statistics at high levels and making decisions to make it look like it's good instead of actually making it good. And I think like honestly, I feel like John Oregon was an excellent leader. I didn't,

I didn't feel like things got worse right away. But in the last few years, it's really gone downhill at so many levels to the point where, and even like, you know, I have friends that work for the provincial civil service. And, you know, one friend told me he had, you know, 8% of the people that worked in his office or in his entire organization. We're managers, now it's like 38% managers. So we've surged up the public sector hiring. We've surged up the amount of middle management in the public sector and there needs to be a sort of return

to efficiency there because the best example is housing, right? Like if you look at building permits, it used to cost 150 bucks a square foot to build a house. That wasn't that long ago, like 15 years ago. There's 200. I was talking to somebody yesterday, $450 square foot to build a house. So we've added all these layers of bureaucracy and building specs and code additions. Well, we're going to get to net zero having houses that have no airflow.

But it's like, but now we can't afford a house. Oh, the economy is slowing down because nobody can afford a house. Let's let even more people in when we don't even have enough houses. I think it's it's incompetent. It's incompetent. You know, we get permits to build a fucking shock to build trucks. Like we were going to move up to Terrace. We, the city economic development officer invited us up there, gave us a full one-day tour,

explained all the benefits of terrorists. We're like, okay, this is a pretty good town. Yeah, we found a shop. You've got to love Terrace. It really was amazing. It was amazing. One and a half million. We had the financing in place to buy the shop.

We had a deal done all. signed up, ready to go. All we needed, we talked to the city and they said, yeah, we'd love to have a business like Edison Motors. That's the kind of long-term, stable thing. You guys are going to be hiring 40, 50 people for permanent full-time jobs, well-paying jobs. They said, yeah, it went to just two dickheads, really, at the city. And they had this grand 15-year plan that they were going to do. they would not give us permission and like a business permit to operate zoning permit to build semi-tracks. They said you can build pickup trucks, but the full-size trucks are out.

What we can do is we can give you, though, a three-year temporary permit. So you can build semi-trucks for three years, but you can only work between, I forget. It was like 7 o'clock in the morning and 6 o'clock in the afternoon. Those are the only hours you're allowed to work because it may, like, it doesn't fit in the city's 15 year goal. Like this is a business. We had the cash ready to buy, move into a shop. We were going to hire 40 to 50 people at like 40 bucks an hour, good long-term jobs. We have customers that have bought trucks ready to go. We just got to build those trucks. But it came down to a permit and they're like, well, we know it was a truck manufacturing shop. It used to be the old Hayes where they built

that you're that's the shop that's what they used to build here and they're like well that was 20 years ago that they shut down and I think now it would be better zoned as light commercial so a fucking coffee shop like this big hay shop with the massive overhead cranes big bador that sat abandoned for 20 years

somebody's gonna come along like you know what that should probably be a Starbucks maybe it's important but that's I think that's that bureaucratic government worker that got their degree, their parents did well, they've done well, they bought their house 20 years ago, they don't care if we build less houses because the value of their house goes up, right? And they emphasize a little bit with their kids, but, you know, like, they don't emphasize enough with their kids. I look at my kid, he's trying to buy a house.

Like, how does a 24-year-old or a 22-year-old afford a house outside of small towns of British Columbia right now, you know, it's $700,000 for a house in a lot of places? or more. We're excluding our children here. And I think like I think our generation, what, um, Chase, how old are you? You 45 or something like that? Uh, 36. 36. Right on. Well, we're, you're, you're millennial. I'm Gen X and I think Sean's Gen X too. A year, you're 77 or something, Sean. I'd get. You're younger than that. 38, 38. Well, I'm the old man here. I'm 45. You are the old man. Yeah. So I'm Gen X and you guys millennials but I think I think that like we're pissed off with the way things are going and it's

not working like all these ideas the problem that I see is that you have this massive wealth accumulation inside of my generation and older and I'm right at the cost of my generation I'm 79 right so I missed being a millennial by six months but when you look at the wealth development that we've given the older people with their homes when we stop building homes we just make their homes worth more money there's no reason why a house and Calgary should be $800,000. It was $200,000 20 years ago. But if we don't let more homes get built, the people that own the home. So there's an evil side to all this bureaucracy. And people will always respond to if it makes me richer, I will do it. So if I can stop that, if that truck

shop would somehow make too much noise because my house was 600 meters away and there'd be traffic coming in at 6 in at 6 in the morning and I don't want to get up at 6 in morning, I'd just stop it. And that's where we're killing this generation is not, you know, it's got to, it's got to change. It's got to change pretty soon, I think. Like, we can't, like, we're at that sort of inflection point, I feel, where we need, we need to empower particularly millennials because you guys are, Chase, you're the future. I'm in the future, too, but I'm already an old man in this room. But, like, we're, we're getting held back by decisions that are, basically, it's an evil decision to not allow a larger building to get built. if you're in a single family street.

You know, I want to keep this street single family. It's like, yeah, but like look at all the people that can't get a house. I talked to someone they rented out a house the other day. $3,000 a month. They had 68 applicants. Right? There's, we talk about all these issues, provincial politics, federal politics. How many key times, and I'm like, even people listening, ask yourself,

how many times do you talk about local politics to people? Sure, we can get around. We talk about immigration. There's these big, big, fun topics to talk about and we can get passionate and slam the desk. And how many times do you actually talk about what's going on municipally? Now, the Conservatives actually wanted me to run for MLA in the Vernon riding. And I was tempted. Really, really honestly had a good talk, even talk with Sean about it for a bit and asked to his advice.

And too busy with Edison. But I realized that a lot of what's going on provincially doesn't matter as much as what's going on at the municipal level. And more people need to get involved because I guarantee you, go have a look. If you're curious and you're listening, Google your town counselors. I guarantee you they are a bunch of 60, 70 year old boomers.

It's the only people that have the fucking time and effort is retirees to go and sit at city council meetings. Most people work a job or most times are part-time jobs. But these tend to be the most corrupt sons of bitches on the planet. They own houses, they own multiple houses, they bought real estate, and they are on city council to disapprove any business, like, or they already own a business. Well, I own a welding shop and I own all these houses. I don't want new businesses because I don't want to have to compete against that well-in shop. I'm not going to approve no zoning.

If I approve that housing development, I own 10 houses and the value of my houses are going to go down. Disapprove. It's not approved. More red tape, more zoning, make it harder. They are the most corrupt sons of bitches. is and if people get worked up and they want to grab a pitchfork and go after Trudeau, no, grab a pitchfork and go after that 70-year-old Karen, 60-year-old Karen sitting on the town council.

She's the one that's saying that houses can't be built. She's the one putting stupid fucking permits in so that businesses can't operate, but nobody gets passionate against that. Everyone cares about Trudeau. NDP, but it's just, it's interesting. You know, the whole reason of starting to, you know, once again, I started off with the thought process of bringing two logging industry guys on to talk about BC politics.

I wasn't sure how that was going to go. But I was like, I don't know that many people in BC. Like I obviously know a few more than I give credit. But I was like, why is it that I hear and see very little about the BC election or the SaaS election? Don't they matter? Do they matter or don't they matter? They haven't called yet.

It hasn't been called yet. Well, and you go down the list to municipal, the lowest level of government. and I think we learned this through COVID. How much does it actually matter? It matters an awful lot. But at some point, like, you have to pick what level you're going to focus on or what level you're going to get involved with

because you can't be everywhere all at once. So holding Trudeau account, I think, needs to happen. Holding a lot of the provincial governments to account needs to happen. And that can go for all the people listening. You get involved wherever you can. And what ability you have, you apply it to the, the I don't know against the machine to the machine yeah yeah way you want to take that

well my god is way more fun though because like you'll never be able to see Trudeau like you never get to actually see Trudeau you can leave a mean message online you're like fuck Trudeau or put a flag I mean you put a fuck Trudeau flag on your truck nobody gives a shit if you're like fuck Steve and Gladys on your truck

and like you meet him at the supermarket you can be like fuck you Steve fucking approve some housing you son of a bitch like that's way more passionate and way more fun you can run into the guy and fight with the guy and i've done it now with so many city counselors so i'm pretty sure i'm pretty sure next week or the week after i have the city uh the mayor of lloyd minster coming on for the first time and like it's been a long time since i had him on this i want to say geez might have been covid times but anyways i'm i'm going to the lowest level of government or whatever the closest to home not the lowest level i guess uh but can you imagine

a whole bunch of flags. What was the guy's name? It doesn't matter. You're driving through your local town. You're like, hey, isn't that the mayor's name? Isn't that the counselor's name? That would be pretty funny. I've actually seen bumper pickers that are local,

locally people pissed off at prominent locals. But I think, like my grandmother said it best, she's 96 and my grandfather's 99. They've been married for 77 years next week. And they say politics is a contact sport. And they met because my grandfather went to Britain to bomb the crap out of the Germans because the Germans were threatened in world domination, right? And I think that like we skipped a couple generations where it didn't matter, right?

Like I'm a Gen X, so we're kind of a little bit less talking. But the boomers, they were born into a peaceful world and fuel was cheap. We were building out. You could build a house for 10, 12,000 bucks and buy a car for 3,000 bucks. And you made $5,000, $6,000 a year, right? And they grew up in this sort of era of abundance and cheap energy and rock and roll. and I mean, there's a lot of cool things happen. And it's continued, but it slowed down in the last 20 years. Like I noticed I just read something today, like 73% of 18 to 24-year-olds are living with their parents, and that's up from like 25% like 25 years ago. So like we got to get back to building things for our kids.

We've got to get back to sort of, and things we've got these big problems. You know, like climate change, I'm full believer in climate change is something that's happening because we're putting too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And it's also inefficient, right? Like take Chase's diesel trucks there. They're burning half the, is it half the diesel? If you're going down a hill and you're charging your power. If you look at our logging operation, we burn half the fuel as the bunch of in the skitter, right?

Because it's more efficient. And that's how we create abundance again as we get back to being efficient, right? Like a good example is like if I had an electric vehicle and I want to charge it and I'm making power at some hydro dam in northern BC and I want to charge it in Cranbrook. Do you know how long it takes the electricity to get from the Wacky Bennett dam down to my Cranbrook thing? a quarter second i've built a pipeline it's going to take a day to get it there and i got out 18 pumping stations along the way right electricity just makes more sense um we're we're holding ourselves back in a lot of ways and a lot of it's just to benefit people who are already rich and already own this stuff like land or houses at the local level but politics is a contact sport we all need to get

more involved in it if we're unhappy with what we see we need to change it we need to work on it and it's not easy right like you can have an idea but your idea isn't perfect right you got you got to You got to work on it. You got to not be scared to be wrong. You got to not be scared to get your butt kicked a few times as you work on your idea. And you got to stay on it. You got to stay on that horse. You got to get back on it when it bucks you off.

You want to get to where you're going. And I think... What's that? Just go give a city councilor a good punch in the mouth. It's a contact sport. See what happens. Like that's the local level. Like you're like, oh, we're not approving it.

Just, wham. Like, I guarantee you, I'm not actually recommending for legal reasons. This is a joke. But you would fix a lot of shit at the local level. if you got a corrupt city councilor and they just walked into like freaking overweight foods and punched to the nose like yeah james james the last time i was on this show james steele was supposed to be on the show and he stopped spray bc guy and i got a tons of respect for james he's been on this sort of like one cause like we need to allow some some deciduous trees in our forests

we can't just take all the deciduous out of our plantations and you know like he's he's he knows all the guys at city council and he gets on their case he gets on their case and he's not right all the time but his heart and his passion, we have to stop being scared of being wrong and just try to make things better and forgive people when they're wrong too, right? Like if a city councilor turns around and becomes a better person, you have to forgive them. You can't just cancel them, right? Like nobody's ever canceled. You can't cancel somebody. Cancel culture doesn't work, right?

You cancel somebody. They disappear for a little while and they come back up later, right? So we need to move away from cancellation culture, move to a culture where I say, you know what, that was a bad idea. John Horgan and the memory is going to redo the big museum down there for. for $900 million in Vancouver. And it was this big scandal. He says, you know what? We made a mistake.

We shouldn't do that, right? And more politicians need, instead of like, no, no, it's fine. It's all good. You know, like I, she experienced when I grabbed her butt differently, you know, the reporter entrusted in there with Trudeau a long time ago. Like we have to get back to it. You know, I made a big mistake. That was a big mistake and owning up to those mistakes and moving forward and forgiving.

And also letting some new blood, right? Like we don't need sons of prime ministers being prime minister. It's not a good idea. We don't need leaders. who are in power forever. And I think that's probably why the Conservative Party has surge because the United Party kind of had the business, the old business relationships in British Columbia.

And those old business relationships had kind of gotten detached from the needs of regular British Columbians. And the conservative party is like a ground roots movement. It's green, it's orange, it's the blue-collar section of NDP. Like all these union workers at these sawmills, like they had good jobs because they got wood. And we take that wood away from them with basically incompetence at the provincial level in the Ministry of Forest,

they shut these sawmills down. There are so many people that are suffering from those decisions, and a lot of them are union workers. And so the NDP is kind of like becoming this urban elite party now. And the urban elite, like they don't, they don't, it's an ecosystem. It's like rain and sunshine. You can't just have sunshine, otherwise everything dies. You can't just have rain, otherwise everything just dies.

And you need to have this balance. And we're becoming very unbalanced towards these urban centers where they've sort of like gotten a hold of the power. But if you are in power and you fail to recognize reality, if your province gets two credit downgrades in a short period of time, if I dare say the Forest Minister of British Columbia right now is the hard time telling difference between a pine tree and a birch tree, if you can't tell what reality is, you run into troubles.

And you need to fix that as a government very quickly and put Compton people in, otherwise you get replaced. But everybody has to get involved in democracy. right it doesn't work if if if if if 5% of the people are doing it you know what uh chase um either one of you can have final say i feel like that's kind of like a nice little spot to end it i wanted to bring two guys on to talk about bc politics and i hope the audience will uh shoot me some texts of suggestions for uh whether it's bc whether it's saskatchewan you know um with a couple different elections coming up uh i think it's important to talk about um things that are going on in

of the provinces and specifically this fall coming up I know there's a lot of even this show right Donald Trump and and now Kamala Harris and all the the US politics that's going to happen too but one of the things here in Canada we have wherever you're sitting BC Alberta Saskatchewan specifically there's a lot of things going on this fall that need to be talked about so people know so if you know got any suggestions fire off a text and let me know Chase do you have any final words or Liam either way thanks for for joining me gents but I'll let you have an extra word or two if you if you prefer yeah I people that don't follow BC politics it's going to be

really interesting this fall we got a brand new political party the conservatives they are a bunch of people outside of the normal political sphere just a bunch of average blue collar people normally that are coming together that created this party brand new and it's going to be really interesting to see whether this kind of grassroots common sense going up against this NDP that's morphed in this elite urban party see how that does it neither way it's going to be interesting and i think bc is in for some big changes leam i think i think that's exactly right no jacy said it amen we need we need fresh faces we need to get involved everybody needs to get involved you need to give it to people who haven't been empowered for a long time well thank

Thanks, gents, for doing this. I appreciate you giving me some time today. Yeah, you betcha. Absolutely.