Shaun Newman Podcast - #800 - Blue Collar Roundtable #9

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

Canada 1st or Canada the 51st state? Quick Dick McDick, 222 Minutes and Chace Barber hop on to discuss.Cornerstone Forum ‘25https://www.showpass.com/cornerstone25/Get your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcastSilver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]

Evening, folks, welcome to a blue color roundtable. I'm going to be bringing in some guests here shortly. You know, this is weird. Normally I don't do my ad reads live, but how? We're going to have a little bit of fun tonight. It is episode 800. I don't know if I said that to anyone, but everybody's sitting in the background. Quick Dick and twos and Chase have been on here lots.

And tonight, March, episode 800. So I don't know when that all happened. But hey, here we are. Thanks for hopping in tonight. If you like the conversation, make sure to like, share all that good stuff and try and get us out to a larger audience. Before we get to our guests, I got to talk a couple things here podcast-wise. For lots of you who don't tune into maybe the Spotify, Apple, et cetera, version of it, there's always ads at the start. Normally, they're not in camera, but hey, we're going to have a little bit of fun tonight.

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And for any listener of the podcast, you can also text Graham for details on any feature silver deals exclusively to the SMP listener. This is a Guardian plumbing and heating blue-color round-tie. table. So it'd be weird if they didn't have an ad in here, I would think. You know, when it's February, and I don't know, I was actually asking quick dick before we started how cold it wasn't tough. And he's like, oh, you know, 28. Not that bad. I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm driving here. I feel like my cheeks are still like a little bit rosy. It was, it was 28 without the wind show.

So I don't know what that makes it. Either way. When, when it's February and Lloyd Minster, there are two things you can count on, freezing cold weather, check and guardian plumbing and heating. These guys have been in Keep at Homes, farms, and businesses running smoothly since 2010. And they've been, this is the second year of the blue collar roundtable. Everybody tonight has been on here once before. And this is the first edition of 2025. So excited for Guardian to be on here and to have everybody back on. So if you're looking for a company with plumbing and heating, it doesn't matter if you're in Lloyd Minster or across our great country.

there's a whole bunch of different things. Quick Dick might find this one interesting. They got efficient grain dryers and the Guardian power stations are available across Canada. The power station is an absolute game changer, giving you two-for-one utilities, heat, and electricity from the same reliable system. So if you're looking for some innovation, go to Guardianplumbing.com. Ignite distribution out of Wainwright, Alberta. Another thing that a farmer might be interested. And actually, and Chase might be too with the semis.

They got a filter sale on. It's only once per year. And everything I've been talking about for the last like three weeks, it's below cost pricing. So you can save 50% or more. The highest savings is like 60% percent on all these different fuel filters, et cetera. We're talking tractors.

We're talking semis on and on it goes. It's pretty cool. They can sell all these prices during this event. The manufacturer Wix WI-X filters will subsidize their losses by rebating them back. And how it works is they need all filter orders, placed by March 1st, and then they place one giant filter order directly with the manufacturer, and filters arrive mid-April for pickup so that farmers have them in time to get in the fields. Shane Stafford, 780842-3433.

You can also text me if you're interested. Finally, the Cornerstone Forum. That's my event. It is coming up in, well, May 10th, Calgary. So if you're interested in more details on that, hit me up. All right. Well, since this is live, we're just going to bring some of the guys in. We got the co-host of the mashup, 222 minutes.

Toos! This is actually, I got a fact-check you here already. This is my first time on a blue-collar roundtable. Is it? Yeah, why else would I say that, Sean? Well, and the last time, hey, folks? No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

I didn't realize that. I thought you'd been on one slasher. Well, welcome to the blue-color roundtable, too's. Thanks, Sean. I'm happy to be here. I don't know if this next statement is true, but in my mind it is. I believe he's the number one comedian in Saskatchewan. I don't know if that's true or not, too, but that's how I haven't written. We got Brent Buck coming on today?

He's got over 19 million views on YouTube. I know he's got a whole bunch of other channels that probably amassed to this crazy number. Everybody knows him. Quick Dick, McDick. How you doing, sir? Good. How you guys doing? Hey, buddy.

Yeah, pretty good. Who would you say is the number one comedian in Saskatchewan? Oh, man, there's lots of good comedians in Saskatchewan, actually. You know, Kelly Taylor is right up there. I got a lot of time for Kelly Taylor. Yeah, I do. There's some good dudes in comedy in Saskatchewan, Miles Morrison, Ryan Mockison. There's a ton of them.

Yeah, we've got a lot of great talent in this province. Don Bernstick? Of course. I think it's Don Bernstick who roasted me. I was, anyways, that's a long story. I was sitting as like one of the only white guys in the audience with Mel, and they made fun of me the entire night. It was pretty funny.

Honestly, I laughed. So, finally, we have the founder and CEO of Edison Motors. He's got, can you, I was seeing this, the twos. I don't know how many TikTok followers you have, but Chase Barber's got 800,000 plus. Like, I was like, holy crap. That is significantly more than me. Yeah, well, Chase Barber's got. Barber, welcome to the program.

Hey, thanks for Eric. Having me back here. Yeah, well, the last time we did this, twos wasn't a part of this. Tews is right, but I thought you came on, it doesn't matter. We've been talking, everybody. No, no, it matters.

Keep talking about how right twos was. It might be the only time tonight, folks. Everybody's been talking about Canada first now, right? We had, tomorrow night we have Canada versus the United States in hockey, right, in the finals of the Four Nations Cup. You got Canada booing the states and on and on and it's team Canada. But it all started out with a comment about Canada becoming the 51st state. And I think everybody was ready to get rid of Justin Trudeau at any possible means.

Let's just get rid of him. Now he's intended to resign. And we're going to have a new leader of the Liberal Party and a new prime minister here right away. But everywhere I go, it seems like this Canada 51st state conversation has been, going. I mean, even Doug Ford in the conservative, sorry, in the Ontario election has said in his

like a bunch of his videos, Canada will never become the 51st state. I'm like, it's a provincial election. Am I missing something? Anyway, it just seems like it's part of the conversation. Fair. Now, I want to go around the horn because I just want to start this off nice and easy.

I want to know where everybody stands on Canada becoming the 51st state. And then I'm just going to let you three, do what we always do in a blue color roundtable. I'll let you go back and forth and I'll try and steer the ship somewhat slightly. Who wants to begin? Two's. Sounds great.

We'd love to hear your opinion first. Two's. Okay. All right. So, regardless of, there's a whole bunch of different ways that sovereignty could play out in Canada in the next several years, or perhaps even decades.

But by far, the worst option is the one that we're currently in. every other option that could potentially be on the table would be preferable to our current situation. So any option would be preferable, meaning your force and to becoming the 50 first day? Yes, it's better than what we currently have. And that's my litmus test here is, you know, if you were to just look at it and break it down and say, would this be better for us or worse for us? Well, we're currently in the worst choice possible aside from, like, I don't know, nuclear

Armageddon, but everything after that, you know, if it's not a giant asteroid hitting us, the percentage is getting closer to that happening, to be honest. Yeah, I know, fingers crossed, right? And actually, you know what, on some level? I would even take that sometimes, I think, depending on the day I'm having. But, yeah, where we're at right now in Canada, you put any option on the table. Do you think instead we should? Yes.

That's where I'm at. QDM. It's interesting. I just got back from the States and most people down there. I mean, there's the odd American here and there that is aware of the 51st state joke, and then most of them are not. So I think we're maybe blowing it up to be a little bit bigger of a thing. It is, I'm not interested in being the 51st state, but I am interested in fixing what is Canada.

We've got the potential to be something really good here, and we just keep shitting that potential right out of our ass, and we need to change that. We need to change that fast, because we've got a lot of great things that you should never be willing to roll over and squander to the U.S. There's a lot of things here that they want. And living in the world that we live in right now, I don't think they're in a spot where they would be able to physically force. fully invade us without the rest of the world losing its mind. But they definitely have some economic control over us, right? And that's the things that we need to start changing. But no, I'm a Canadian.

I'd rather be Canadian. And yes, I would really like to fix some of the things that we have going on here. But I did see something posted on X the other day where I think they said the solution was going to be that, yeah, Alberta would go to the U.S. and then Canada could have California. And I was just like, you know, Canadians, I don't think that's the trade that you think is a good thing for us here. It does show you where some of the ideologies are at, though, when they suggest, well, let's just give them the Albertans.

They're the unreasonable ones. And let's get, let's take California. That's a great state. You're like, see, and that's the O'Don Lodakis from the Toronto star. And the guy is, he's a, he writes political comics, but he's just been comically wrong so often. And then this is a point where he accidentally got it right. And he thought it was the other way around, right?

Yeah. Yeah, he actually wanted California. He thought it would be a good trade to take on California and everything, all of their baggage and give away Alberta. You're like, well, I mean, most people in Alberta would be like, yeah, that'd be a great trade because also America would probably be a lot better without California, too. Chase, your thoughts. I mean, I'm looking at Alberta right underneath me, and up top here with me on the screen,

I'm looking at Saskatchewan. Now I'm going to go to BC, resident expert of BC and all things. Screwy there. Mr. Barber, what do you think? Well, I do not want to be part of the U.S. Canada is a beautiful country, and I agree with Quick Dick. We have so much potential here that we could use that we're underusing. But that being said, I also agree that the system could be a lot better.

I would like to see something more what they have in Europe, in the European Union, where France and Germany and Holland and that, they're all still their own countries, but they have free trade. Somebody can work in the U.S., lived in the U.S., like if, I would like that idea, that free movement of people. If somebody thinks that Texas is better, they should be able to be free to move down to Texas. If you have an American that thinks Canada is better, they should be free to move up to Canada. There should be no tariffs, no anything, just open free borders where we can remain our own country, but still be like the European Union and have free trade of people and products between. I think that would be best case scenario. We don't even have that in Canada, my friend.

No, I know. We have so many things to fix. Like, why do we not have that? Oh, but don't worry. We're working on it now. now that our sovereignty is being threatened. We're maybe going to start trying to think about working together as provinces. Who would have thought that would be a good idea?

So if I draw this back, does anyone here, as it sits in Canada, is like, oh, we got a great functioning country, just want to leave Canada the way. S&C. Lavalin? No, right? Nobody's going to say it. No, no, no, no. But they're going to say that. They just got the contract for that new train.

The Orient Express that Trudeau is going to bring in as his last. legacy. People like that are looking at things and saying, yeah, Canada is a pretty good gig. Have they thought of like putting a pipeline directly underneath the high speed train? You can get two birdsoned at once. Or above it or beside it, whatever. It doesn't matter. But you know what?

There's there's no market case for for a pipeline, but there's somehow now a market case for this? I don't know. I'm a big proponent of high speed rail. after going to China and seeing their high speed rail, we need to have high speed rail. Like, it's wicked awesome. Train leaves every like 15, 20 minutes, does 300 kilometers an hour. You just show up.

It's relaxing. Like, they got a bar car on there and a restaurant car in China. You know how awesome that would be? Highway 2, Calgary to Edmonton, high speed rail, 320 kilometers an hour between those two cities. You want to go see an Oilers game? You're in Edmonton. 45 minutes later, you're already in.

Calgary and you've had a and half snap. I think high feed rail is great. I just think we're going to Canadian it up with our government. They're going to be super incompetent. The cost is going to be exponentially more than you possibly in China. It makes sense. They can build that super economically reasonably. Because they have slaves.

No, you know, I thought that before going over to China. Turns out their wage is like $40,000 a year at average. they actually have a decent there is a different mindset that we need to adopt in north america why are they beating us with manufacturing infrastructure everything because they work together and they get bureaucracy out of the way at the corporate level we have so much insane corporate bureaucracy i've learned that from trying to order parts uh you need to you reach out to a company and then they put you in touch with a salesman who says you're in a different regional district talk to this salesman and then maybe this salesman i'm

then, oh, that's actually this guy's part of the region. And then you finally talk to an engineer who doesn't talk to the purchasing department. Then you got to do a credit verification. There's all these steps. And then you get to the end of that and they say, sorry, we've got non-compete supply agreements. We can't sell to you because we're already selling this part to one of your competitors. In China, you just go to a company and say, hey, I need to buy this. They send you an invoice.

You buy it and they send you the part. That's just... Technically, you do have to do a credit check in China, but it's a social credit check. I think with the government before they let you know whether you're allowed to move back and forth or not. And every company in China has to be at least 50% owned by the government. So there's also that. But I do understand what you're saying, though. And look, we do.

It's terrible here, the bureaucracy that we run just to try and get something done. I'm not saying that going straight to a Chinese dictatorship kind of style is the answer. I'm saying learn from the way that their business does it. Because their businesses and corporations operate in that environment. And they figured out a way to be extremely competitive and successful even with an oppressive government. So what we've got in the president in Canada, our businesses could pick it up a little notch and start being a little bit more competitive. Because maybe we don't need to keep giving it to the same oligopolis. I know we talk a lot about American oligopolis in the U.S.

we have some major Canadian oligopolys like S&C Lablin that have so many bureaucratic processes to protect those who are in there from being able to compete. And it's frustrating because I've been trying to sources, many North American made parts. And now I'm trying to move to more Canadian parts. Now that all this tariff thing is coming out, I'm ditching a lot of U.S. suppliers.

But the most frustrating thing, it's not the price, the price I could work with a little bit. But when we're ordering parts from the truck, just getting through the bureaucracy of ordering parts from North America is what makes it so frustrating. Like, honestly, even if price competitive, it's easier to go to China because they're more willing to work with you than North American businesses. And that's what is happening to all a government sector. And it's so much worse in the government sector. So would you say that you admire the fact that they've been able to turn their economy around on a dime? Yeah.

And I think we should be using that for inspiration going forward because we're, we've fucked our economy. There is no doubt about it. The last 10 years have been piss poor for Canada. I think this wake-up call needs to be a wake-up. And rather than just saying China's bad, let's look at the way that China has succeeded. Look how they've turned their economy around,

lifted their entire population out of poverty, switch things up enough that, like, their wage is like an average of $3,000 a year in the 1980s. Now it's $40,000, $50,000 a year. How do we do that in Canada? How do we start manufacturing? do we start producing? How do we start building hospitals and infrastructure and start returning Canada around the same way China did?

Well, I think we need to make it great again is really what needs to happen. Well, that's okay, let's let's let's focus on that question. How do we do that? Stop how do, how do, how do, how do you, to do an environmental assessment of whether a certain type of snail is going to be disrupted from one part of its environment of one of 30 of which it exists. Like, the amount of bullshit that people come up with, and a lot, like a lot of if you dig deep enough on them, or actually, it's foreign interests that keep us from doing a lot of these things. And it's studies that are backed by different countries that want to see Canada do bad. And even the way that oil, let's take crude oil, for example, the way that it moves

throughout our country, it's not just environmentalists in Ottawa named Stephen Gebo that it's trying to keep pipelines and oil moving freely back and forth across the country, Canada. There's a lot of bigger powers down in the U.S. that it would damage greatly if all of a sudden we had three east-to-west pipelines that existed in Canada and started depending more on our own energy than the U.S. is, right? So I've got a really easy solution for that. If it was one big country, or even if Alberta was part of it, then they wouldn't be trying to stop their own pipelines anymore because it would be the same country.

And they wouldn't be sending Leonardo DiCaprio and James Cameron and Jane Fonda up here on private jets to speak out about the oil anymore, because, because it's now their oil. There's a reason why they fly over the oil sands in California to get here. I would disagree with that just because there's a difference between refiners and producers. So all the refineries are in the U.S. and they want to pay the lowest price possible. But Canadian producers like CNRL and all that want it the highest price for their oil. So they're still going to try and block pipelines going east. I guarantee you they'll still fund those environmentalist groups to fight the Canadian side of producers, export and global.

so that the refineries themselves can still pay a lower price. But they'd have to do a major regulatory overhaul to do that. And you say like you might argue, for example, that, you know, it's only one election away from going the complete opposite direction and nothing happens anymore. But Obama, when he was president, in those eight years, they built 11,000 miles of pipeline. That's more than enough to go from Vancouver to St. John's four times.

That's the most environmentally conscious president they've ever had. And he basically built enough to wrap around the world. So, I mean, they would have to do such ridiculous regulatory overhaul to their entire process to stymie this new, newly patriated area that was formerly known as Canada or part of Canada, that it would never go through. Like the amount of hoops that they'd have to jump through to get this stuff. stuff passed to kneecap the region that they just took under their wing, it would never fly. Or we could drop a set of balls and just do it ourselves. Okay, all right. Now, what do you think the chances are that happening, given that Quebec's the lynchpin of this country geographically?

Well, who would be easier to deal with a lot of these big monies that are down in the States or eventually at some point in time everybody getting tough on Quebec? Because at this point in time, there's not a lot of people that seem to want to gang up on Quebec very much. but what does it take for us to start making that push on Quebec, a threat to becoming a 51st state, maybe. So, I mean, it's hypotheticals. You're talking about what if down the road, the rest of Canada got just as mad at fucking Quebec as we are now?

I thought we were both talking hypotheticals because we're talking hypothetically that Alberta had already been annexed by the U.S. Okay, all right. So, but we're talking about what it would look like if it absorbed Canada at least whole or in part not what if the geopolitical landscape of Canada changed to a point

I mean you may as well argue like well what if the geopolitical landscape of Canada changed to the point where we actually had a fair equalization program well then this wouldn't even be an issue well yeah but when are we ever going to get there is I think it's straight up speaking as an economist here that's kind of what that was my background

is awesome the wealth of a the wealth of a population is really based on the goods and services that they can produce. Just joining the U.S. doesn't fix the fact that we're basically a resource extraction colony. Used to be under Britain. Now we're used resource extraction to the states. We send our raw resources to the states. We send our raw resources to China. And we don't process that.

I don't think us just becoming a 51st state is going to fix the fact we would still be treated as a resource state. we would still be sending all of our resources out, they'd get manufactured in other states, and then we'd still buy them back. That's not increasing the Canadian GDP per capita. We should be focusing on making sure that we can add more value to our resource extraction than just joining the U.S. That's not going to fix the problem.

Yes. Okay, I'll jump in here too. The other thing I think that we've got going is there's a lot of people that want to jump on to the bandwidth of yet. We should just join the states, which join the States and it would just make it easy, right? Like, you guys are aware of, like, just per capita debt that each country holds? Like, how would that work, right?

Because ours is about half of what the U.S. is right now. Well, I mean, so the states has five settled territories. They've got, I think, 11 total. But there's, you know, one of them's in a toll somewhere in the middle of nowhere. But, you know, you got American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico. Guam and one other one that always gets forgotten, which they all get forgotten all the time. But they fall underneath the U.S. umbrella,

but they don't pay federal taxes, and they don't get a star on the flag, and they don't get a vote in the president. So, I mean, right there, that last point, it's the exact same situation that we're in in Western Canada right now. Oh, we join a country where we had no say in what happened federally. Well, I would say the two cancel each other out. I would say it would be much worse.

If we're a 51st state, as they say, and we're one state, that means that if we're electing a governor of the state, as they call our prime minister, it's going to, you lose all proportional representation. If we lose our provincial level of government and we all just become one state, that means Quebec and Ontario are only going to be who decides, and we have no local representation at the provincial level,

level to back us up. Like, that's way worse for Western sovereignty. Well, it's exactly the same as Western sovereignty right now, I would say, but at the same time, at the same time,

though, like I take your point, and you're absolutely right, but I don't think that's what would happen. Like, there's a lot of different ways that this could happen. It could be some or all of Canada.

Like, what if we just gave them fucking Quebec, for example? Right? It could be summer all of Canada. And it could be that we joined as a territory rather than throwing another star on the flag. So, I mean, there's many options.

And you're right. You're right. If it was one homogenous unit that was Canada as one individual state that was part of the electoral college, then you're absolutely right. Ontario and fucking Quebec would decide everything, which they already do. They already do, but at least they don't decide it at the provincial level. We still have a provincial legislative assembly in each province. stuff. But I mean, who knows? Maybe there's 61 states in this scenario when they're using 51

because it sounds good. I don't know. All I know is the advantages of being linked and being a state are the dropping of trade barriers, the ability for people to move around, the disadvantages are loss of our national identity. We would just become Americans. Well, I think we can utilize those benefits with something similar to the European Union had. The Shenzhen zone and then you're basically the free trade and free movement of people allows them to drop all their trade barriers, allows people to move between countries, but it still allowed them to keep their identity. A German is still a German, a French is still a French person.

We could keep that if we had something similar to the European Union between Canada and the U.S. We throw up common borders. We have a common border policy, a common immigration policy. We adopt that and say, look, these are outside tariffs. These are outside things between our union, between Canada and the U.S. is there a common immigration. But we still keep that Canadian identity. We can still make our own laws.

We still have our provinces. We take all the advantages. The U.S. gets the advantages, but we still retain our sovereignty. I like that solution. I'm curious your take chase on the Euro, in the European Union because one thing that I've really been trying to look at and see what would be advantageous or not between Canada and US would be the difference between the Canada and the US dollar. From anything I come up with, I would see that we would all need to maintain our own currency.

I think there's a benefit to having a common currency in the ways of it allows trade to happen really easy. Like right now is a business because I buy so many parts from the US. I lose every time I do that exchange rate, the bank takes a little cut off of that, a little cut off of that. And that 2% every time we buy something adds up, the point where now we just keep a separate U.S. bank account just so we don't have to do that.

That being said, you lose your monetary policy in when you have hard times. Well, that's what I was going to say is that I don't know if they'd be interested in tying their boat with our quantitative easing. Well, that's the thing. that it eliminates your ability to do quantitative easing, which honestly with how the last, that could be an advantage in one aspect is that you can't devalue your dollar and create more money through inflation. Like if you're Germany, you can't just start printing euros.

You have to work with the quantity that you were given. Now, on the one hand, it sucks because you had a place like Greece. Greece, when they were going through their tough times, should have probably had some inflationary pressures. They should have devalued the Greek currency a little bit, but they couldn't do that being linked with the euro, which caused places like Germany to have to support Greece, and they had to print more money, and they had to balance out that inflation everywhere. But I do like the fact that you can't have a government like we've had through the liberals where they just run the printing press like crazy.

But we could get the adverse side of that. you could get a very left-leaning government in the U.S. in 20 years that devalues their currency or has a massive debt bubble crash and now you're subject to that. So there's risks and benefits to do it in both. But they cancel each other out again, though, just because Canada, I mean, we've seen that. We can have a far-left-leaning government that devalues the shit out of the currency. Yeah, I think, honestly, an indexed currency would be good. You come out real strong and you just say that, hey, look, one Canadian dollar can transfer directly over to one U.S. dollar.

The central bank just says, hey, the Canadian dollar is exactly going to match the U.S. dollar. They're going to trade on parity or they're going to trade at 1.3. You just set a set rate. That means that you have to naturally adjust your fiscal policy to match the U.S. And if you see that the U.S., though, is losing all of its income, they're just spending like crazy, you can say, well, I don't like what's going on in the U.S. We don't want to see those

inflationary practices. We're going to move away from that backing. I think indexing the currency isn't a bad compromise. Here's Vesper. Vesper was on the last shout out to Vesper. He is from, as Tews would say,

fucking Quebec. No offense, Vesper. Yeah, but I mean, he spent a lot of time in New York or Jersey. He was on the last. Him, Tews, I thought it was a blue color roundtable. It was just alive we did. You, twos, that's why I'm, anyways, I'm giving myself a break. You, uh, I'm saying you

to twos, uh, Clyde, do something. And then Vesperer on a discussion about this. And Bespers says, I absolutely love everyone on the panel, but I'm sorry. Why is everyone talking like all countries you have mentioned have not been captured by criminal syndicates? Are we all living in the same reality? The naive notion of sovereignty in,

uh, sovereignty is and has been an illusion for the past 50 years. Thoughts? I'm with him. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm almost thinking he would have been a good person to have on here, too. He's always got something really interesting to say. It's true, but the, I agree. And this doesn't have to be a one-off conversation.

The goal is to get multiple people talking about this. You know, it doesn't, it tracks me a little bit. But, you know, like, in the first 200 episodes of those podcast guys, I was talking to, you know, Quick take a bit on for sure, twos have been on for sure. But I was talking a lot of hockey players since then. The last 600 plus episodes, not to mention all the mashups,

I've had like this, like how do you fix Canada? Because we can all sit here and go 51st state is a bad idea. But what... We're not all saying that, Sean. What Vesper... True. But in the notion,

actually we are, because if Canada became the 51st state, you would agree that that's a bad deal for Canada and we'd have no voting like Quebec those specific situations Canada of the 51st state we would all agree as if it was just set out we became

one state that'd be a bad idea all right I'd still take that over our current we can say you enter it for the next two hours okay my thing my thing is when you look at it you say what would be better and the US has better regulatory which is a lot more

pro business a lot more personal betterment and the fact that you can go out and pursue that American dream and have two cars in every garage. Whereas in Canada, they say cars are illegal in 2035. Which one are you going to pick? Right. And you say, okay, well, you know what, I want to start a business that's not going to get taxed to death. I want to, I want to be able to sell cattle without having a ridiculous bunch of red tape to jump through.

And I don't want to be thinking that maybe it's better if I just sidesteped the entire legitimate economy. And this is, these are the conversation that I'm sure we're all having where you just say, look, this, this current framework that we're in sucks. I fully agree with you. I just differ in the point that if we're going to join the U.S. as a 51st state, we would have to pass all this legislation to change everything to meet the requirements of the U.S. We would have to change all of our rules and pass big sweeping bills to change things. if we're already going to pass big sweeping bills to change things, how about we just pass big sweeping bills to change things while still being Canadian? Like we can just change.

If we're going to make the change, let's just make the change. Yeah, I agree with that 100% there, Chase. But like, I'm not going to sit here and say that the U.S. is a better place to be or a better place to live than Canada is, which I think is kind of what you're making it out to be, too. It's like, I mean, we might be able to look within what we have going on here in Canada and say, well, this is a real dump and, like, is there's got to be somewhere better to be. But, I mean, you can go talk to a lot of Americans that are down in a lot of different states in the U.S., and they'll tell you the exact same thing about their country, right?

It's just a matter of what specific government might be in power at the time. That's what you want to call it, that makes our livelihood what it is. We've had a bad one for almost 10 years here now, and we need to change. But I can't fully, with all my heart, say that I'd be better off living in the U.S. than I am here. I've got a lot of great things that I can enjoy here as a Canadian. I would agree with that. I mean, you're still going to have the fish. You're still going to have the deer, but you're not going to have the equalization.

Yeah. That's fine. I mean, but okay, so now you've got a different game if you want to talk about health care. I'm not going to say that we've got a great health care system here. But, I mean, you talk to a lot of people out of that deal with health care down on the states. And that kind of sucks down there, too. There's a lot of different things with some areas that you go when you start dealing with poverty that would make, you know, like Hastings in Vancouver look like a dream-bake

right? Those are niche. I'm a niche. No, no. You put every province and state together. The bottom like eight or nine of them are all Canadian provinces. Like based on what? Per capita.

Per capita GDP. There's like their worst is Mississippi. And if you put Mississippi in Canada, it's like the fourth biggest economy GDP. or per capita. I don't backchecking this one. That sounds wrong. I'm going to back check this. You guys keep talking.

I'm going to look at... It's just like I realize that everybody's, you know, likes to take a dump on Canada here, you know? But I mean, you know, like an average American will spend anywhere between $15,000 to $20,000 a year just on health care, right? Like, granted, I mean, we've got a 43 to 45% tax margin versus a 20% tax margin down in the state. but a lot of places that you work here, you make a higher wage than you do in the States, right?

No. No? No? Are you guys both just clicking around right now or what? I don't know. They both look like they're looking off the screen. Yeah, I'm looking at a GDP per capita. I was telling Sean that this, before you guys got on,

that this would be the best episode to have a Jamie for. And, oh, Murray Henderson, Murray Henderson is being Jamie for us. He said Tuesdays is right. So there you go. Oh, I'm looking at up. GDP per capita of the lowest U.S. state is Mississippi at 47,000 per capita. U.S. dollars?

U.S. dollars. So I got to divide by like 1.4. So the highest Canadian one is Northwest Territories at a hundred dollars. 122, 123,000 by one point. So 80,000. So our highest territory is still about almost twice of the lowest states. And if you look at 80,000, we come in at, you know what, I probably shouldn't use Northwest territories.

That's a terrible example. Let's use Albert. I was thinking now. For capital is not great in Northwest territories. You've got one guy working in a mine and it noticely skews the numbers. Chase tries to be Jamie. for 10 minutes and we end up shitting on them for it. You're doing a fantastic

job, Chase. Thank you. Okay, so Alberta. Alberta is number one. No surprise at 96,000. So, what is that? 97,000 U.S. is 669 Canadian. So say

$67,000 Canadian is Mississippi. Now, are you looking at household income or per capita? Per capita. GDP per capita. I know there's some problems with, GDP, but yeah, that puts Alberta around 75 or so. Yeah. Now, do the Maritimes.

Just do the Maritimes. Let me know when you scroll down that far. Oh, I'm sure that the Maritimes are poor. There is definitely some issues with that. But that puts us around like, Alberta is in the lower half. So our top province is in the lower half of the population. we're not the lowest for everything. There are some areas in Canada that are more wealthier,

but it goes back to what I said too in that we're not going to fix everything if we just become part of the U.S. We don't increase our domestic manufacturing and our domestic product just becoming a state. We need to have the manufacturing to increase domestic product. If we adopt their regulatory processes, we absolutely would because, you know,

there was just something that came out the other day that said that 0.9% of GDP is lost every year in Canada for like the past 15 years or something like that due to regulatory increases. And so here's the thing is it's not like you're going to magically start making more widgets. It's the fact that it costs you less to navigate the process to bring those widgets to market, which is going to put more money in everybody's pocket. And I just think we could make those changes in Canada without having to join in the U.S. I agree with you.

There's Reagan. Look at just the ordeal Edison Motors just had to go through with acquiring land to build trucks. We tried to build. That was something else, yeah. Oh, it was wild. We tried to buy the old Hayes truck. They said it would take three to four years just to be able to get the business permit to operate and build trucks in the old Hayes truck. three to four years and it was only a maybe that we could get it.

And to be clear, that's where trucks used to be manufactured. Yes. I find this funny. Okay. Forgive me, folks. We sit here. We say, you know,

I'm going to say it again, twos. I know you're going to try and nitpick on it. But the 51st state as it sits, if Canada were to become the 51st state, that idea, I believe we're saying no to. Anyways.

Now, you're going to try and say something, but just let me finish for a second. Would you just let me finish? F my life. We literally get to talk again on Friday. Just relax. Everybody sit here and goes, this is a terrible idea. Okay.

And then we complain about how bad Canada is. And we listen to Chase talk about how they won't let him change something. And then I hear about other businesses that have left Canada, I've gone to different parts of the States and are like, just like, boom, they're, they're moving. They're business friendly or just rock it. So then you go, okay, we can have that here in Canada too. How?

How can we possibly have that in here in Canada too when it's just, I'm like, we can sit here and complain about it. We can say we can have it. But I'm like, how do we get there? I've got a perfect example of how many episodes. I've been trying to. Chase, fire away because I've been waiting to hear how we actually get there. Okay. So we were honestly looking at moving down to the states with how awful the regulation was.

but then the Columbia Shuswap Regional District decided that they were going to be a little bit, get rid of too many regulations. The people in the community got together and said there's too many regulations. We're not attracting businesses. The sawmills close down. We need to get people. And they got rid of zoning. They got rid of zoning and they got rid of building permits. So you don't require a building permit to build anything and there's no zoning on the property there.

So they just said, hey, it's your land. You don't need to apply to us to build it. Just follow the provincial building code. Make sure the building's straight. You're adults. You can read the provincial building code yourself and just do it. But that's an area in Canada that got together and said, get rid of the zoning, get rid of the permitting. Let's get business going right here, right now.

They were able to not have a bunch of foreign ownership. All the land of merit is owned by overseas China owners. The land per acre is $800,000 and they won't sell it. The land in Golden, they didn't have that problem. the land was $9,000 an acre, $800,000 versus $9,000 with no zoning or building permits. That's what we need to do if we need to get going. And we can make those changes at the municipal level across Canada.

Dumb question. Do you know the people? Can I interview somebody from there? China? No, not in China. From what, there's no zoning, the, the, the, cause I'm just like, I like good ideas. I like, you know, I want solutions. I really do want that.

I enjoy having the three of you on bantering this too because I think it's a very prominent conversation in Canada right now on like things are really freaking bad, just give us anything. Two's literally said I'd take a meteor at sometimes. That's how bad at times things are in Canada. You walk outside, you go, man, it ain't that bad. I love this place.

But that is what 10 years of the liberal government has done to us. Like, I mean, you love the dirt. We all love the dirt. there's not a single person here who doesn't like this dirt that we live on but that's where it stops i i fundamentally disagree i think that people give the national government more credit than it's worth when it comes down to these issues like zoning building permit things that actually matter to businesses that comes down to the local level and you can find yes there is a lot of local levels in the states where the government has is a lot more friendlier but the change needs to happen at the local

level i think if we just became the 51st state we would still have local government in canada that is very unbusiness friendly that restricts things and if we're going to change things we don't need to do it at the national level we need to go to our city counselors and city members and say do this start slashing that regulation that's what we need to do that would have way more benefit than joining the United States. It's a lot of the stuff starts smaller, right? And Chase is right. It comes down to even just going down to your small town,

your town council meeting stuff. You want to see things start to change here. Eventually, if you get your town, then your municipality and a few of these other things that want to make a change, then eventually they start putting pressure on your member of the legislative assembly. And the one thing that's going to make your MLA squirm

is all of a sudden that they have a whole bunch of municipalities coming out and being like, hey, you guys are the problem. is really a provincial or federal government's job is just to get reelected. They really don't give a shit about anything else, whether they're trying to get into government or whether they're in government right now. When it comes to larger projects, like when we start talking about maybe the Alberta energy regulator or if we start looking nationally at corporations want to invest in something like the energy pipeline, then obviously federal policy is going to have a lot to do with that, right?

But we've got to be careful how far down we go of just free zoning everything and everybody just do anything they want, because if you've ever gone down and worked on a couple oil and gas sites down in the U.S., and you saw how they did things, you'd be like, hey, hold on a minute. I actually kind of like how we use a VAC truck in Canada and how we maybe clean up after ourselves a little bit, too. So as much as we want to just do six shooters from the hips, that's fine. We've got to make sure that we kind of take care of the dirt that we love that we're on, right?

I'm with you there. It's not getting bogged down in too many regulations on there. And that's where I agree. Some of our environmental regulations that we have are great. some of our building purpose. I want to make sure a building is safe and it's not going to collapse. But we already have

we have federal building codes and federal environmental. We have provincial building, provincial environmental. Why don't we get rid of some of that municipal environmental, municipal building things? And let's just get rid of one.

That's a layer of bureaucracy that we can peel back that's going to be the most efficient way that we can be competitive again in the future. And we don't need to join the U.S. to prevent peel back that municipal level. We also don't need a 10-year environmental assessment on what a pipeline is going to do either. I mean, like, there's some of the shit we should be able to get done in a couple of months

and be like, hey, we put some of us people on it. Here's what we've got and here's what we came up with. And here's where we should go and here's why. Now let's make it happen, right? I'm with you on that. But nobody were the ones who would vote for something like that. But you've got this whole other side of the country, guys. Everything Manitoba East is going to say, well, we can't just turn it into the wild, wild west.

And you'd say, well, look, you'd say, well, look, we've built millions of clicks of pipeline. We know what we're doing. We get people in and they do the standard stuff. And when there's something weird or deviated or whatever else, like going underneath a river, we assess that individually. But for the most part, this is just, this is Lego at this point, guys. you guys are over-regulating Lego every chance you get. And they're never going to say that.

Hell, even Harper, look at the amount of times that the conservative, the progressive conservatives amended the N.E.B. Act. And they didn't take out the prime minister's veto. And it was still a multi-year application process that was guaranteed to have a federal election in the middle of it. Would you think that was accidental? that was so that he could go to whoever was applying at the time and the people who wanted to work there and say,

look, you guys have to vote for us. You're really going to have to actually put some funding to my party, right? We can't guarantee what's going to happen if we don't win this election. So you have to vote for us. I think one of the issues I really fundamentally have, and I agree with you, but I think we're focusing collectively on the wrong thing.

If we're focusing on pipelines and getting oil across Canada, and we're focusing on the big mega projects that have crazy regulations, those are billion-dollar corporations that are all foreign-owned. And yeah, we couldn't. And I fully agree we can do that. But what I want to see is I want to see more mechanic shops. I want to see local fabrication, welding shops, things that actually make product. Because these big corporations, no matter what we're doing, if we're talking about oil,

we're just exporting oil. Like, okay, we're just exporting our resources. I want to see that. Why do you think we don't refine it locally? Why do you think we don't refine our oil in Canada? Because it's a generational regulatory burden. Like we think like five years for pipeline approval is crazy. It's like 20 plus years to get a refinery approved to be built.

And the reason why we don't do hardly any manufacturing in Canada, present company excluded, what's your three biggest costs? Chase. Three biggest cost to any kind of manufacturing, arts, labor, and overhead, really. Power, I would say. It's not as bad as you think. Really, really not as bad as you. Well, it's going to go up 20% here in a few weeks.

I just put solar panels and fuck it. I'm not, I'm just paying that cost once and have done with it. In all, honestly, bolting tracks together is just a lot more. Like, I'm not as power intensive as. I'd say like a steel fabrication shop. Like I don't have working conveyors or sawmill. Like for a sawmill is crazy high. I've just got mechanics with tools rattling.

Okay. All right. That's crazy high for me. That's fair. But I would say generally speaking, if you're manufacturing something, your three biggest costs are power, people, and raw materials. Materials. We can't get any mining approved in this country. So it all comes from other places.

We've got ridiculous labor protections. and we don't even have, we don't even have democratically, like anonymous democratic votes for unionization. You have to put your name on your vote. Like this is 1863 or some crazy shit.

And then people are looking down the barrel of having ramifications to their careers based on what they put their name on for that vote whether or not to unionize. We don't have any financial disclosure from these unions. B.C. Did you see Chase

who the biggest third party spender of election advertising was in your guys' last provincial election? No. Unions. Why the hell are like, why? Other than just to try

and pad and get preferential treatment, why the hell are unions so invested in which party they get forward? And the conservatives always get a hard time. Like, oh yeah, you're in the pockets of big businesses. The NDP is in the pocket of every fucking union. Right? And so we've got these

ridiculous costs when it comes to manufacturing. We keep raising the carbon tax. We've got the artificially heightened cost. And there isn't a single economist, even the furthest left economist you would ever meet in Canada would tell you that unions artificially inflate the cost of labor.

And then we can't get any of our raw materials because we can't get any mining facilities built. This is, this is like I get the fact, you're right about the small product or, you know, the, the mom and pop shops, if you will. But without unleashing the, unleashing the economic potential at a big level, you don't get any of that stuff working its way through the pipeline. I would, uh, you look at it. Canada exports a ton of minerals. like we are one of China's largest exporters of mining.

We're a net exporter of energy to the U.S. Yeah, a lot of coal. We export 77% of what we produce in Canada. Yeah. So we have enough to that we could definitely still tie into. If China's able to take our ore, ship it all the way across the ocean, refine it, and then sell us to finish steel back, there's no reason we can't put that steel plant here. If you look at energy cost, our energy cost is lower than China's energy cost at the user level.

We net exporter of electricity to the United States. They have a crazy high population. They're trying to build up their capacity. It's really coming down. But it's mainly, all of their demands and their industrializations put a huge spike, which is really increased the price. But for electricity in Canada, we're a huge net exporter of electricity to the United States. we could use that power. So we pay a lot lower rate actually than the U.S. does for electricity.

If you were to look at the business level, we have an abundance of electricity in Canada. We could do better and it's getting worse, but we're still cheaper. So we export 75% of our minerals that we could refine here. We export most of our power that could be used for refining minerals here. We export a lot of the oil and I agree. There's a lot of regulation, but we have a lot of. cost, it's just that we can't really get those things going. And you know what? Here's the issue. Before we were doing the hybrid semi-trucks, we were doing hybrid energy projects with solar, diesel power,

batteries, and just kind of making these communities or ranches or whatever a lot more power usage that they were less intense if they were off-grid. You know what? The biggest hurdle we had on all these projects was municipal or regional district zoning. That is always the one that took the longest to go through. The provincial level, to put in a solar plant or put in a generator set, almost no effort at all. We just send a thing off to the government, say, we're doing this, and they say, okay, yeah, that meets the code. The municipal level would take years to get through for us. So if you want those energy projects, it was in municipal regulation stopping them. I feel like that's something that's really different between BC and maybe even Alberta,

Saskatchewan, at least where I'm at here, we've got fairly friendly, friendly municipalities here to work projects in. I mean, I might be speaking tongue-in-cheek. And you have the highest GDP per capita in Canada. It's not a coincidence. Yeah, we just seem to be in the area where they just kind of let you do your thing, you know what I mean? Do you even tell them, though? Sometimes.

Yeah, it depends what you're doing. I think it's at the fundamental level for a lot of these things as these big major major projects like refineries take industries to support the construction of them and it all grows slowly over time. Well, you need somebody with like every little part in that, the guy that makes the walkways, the steps that makes the plumbing, the fittings, the bathroom scales. All of that has to be made and manufactured to go into these mega projects. Places like I've been down to Texas. I've seen it. They have industrial hubs of people and small businesses all selling parts to fund their mega projects.

If we have zoning that stops those small businesses from starting and buying C&C machines and buying it, the more people that buy C&Cs and welders and different plant equipment, they bring their cost down to supply parts to the mega projects, which brings the cost down on those that then make them more competitive. You need that small grassroots thing. And I've studied China a lot from going over to China. And I can tell you, it's not wages anymore that keeps them cheap. It's their competitive nature.

They have so many smaller businesses all supplying. Like, I have been to the Caterpillar factory that makes all of the D6D8 cats to export to the global market and all the graders. But you look over it and they're all being supplied with local businesses. It's not Kat putting it. They're just putting them all together. But they draw from this factory and this guy's factory and they have supplier A, B, C, and D. A is the biggest one. But then when they need an increase in demand, they go to B, C, or D.

That's what we're missing in Canada is those B, C, D factories that can meet that on-demand volume that allows a major producer like Kat to set up a factory because, yes, they may have their A supplier, but they need a local B, C, and D that says, hey, we've got an increase in demand. I need B, C, and B to give me X number of volume this month. That local guy that has a fab shop says, yes, I'm there. Now that makes it attractive to build a big factory. That's what we're missing. That's what local municipal regulation is choking out.

There's a lot of that in Alberta in Saskatchewan, though. That's why Alberta. You look at the oil field. You go to, you know, we were just talking about Bonneville last week on the mashup. And Bonneville has dozens of welding shops. and that's not even counting all the guys who just run a truck. Alberta, like I was just at Marsap and some of the winch track rigups, they sell winch rigups to the states to support their oil and gas industry.

They're so competitive and we're so good at that oil and gas. Why don't we have that in BC for lumber though? Where's the person making parts for a sawmill to make more efficient sawmill equipment, more efficient forestry equipment? That would need to start at those small shops. It's baked on the beach in Tofino. They're being choked out. Sawmills are like bad for the universe, man.

I mean, like it boils down to everything and you're paying on, Chase, you know, even like, if you look at the egg industry here in Saskatchewan, like we got a lot of, there's a lot of big manufacturers here in Saskatchewan. And we even had an issue with a, with a forego piece of machinery here, not that long ago. I think it was two summers ago. And, I mean, we phoned all over to try and find this part and right up in St. Brew where they make them there. It's like, oh, yeah, we don't have one in stock, but we'll pull a guy out the line. and it'll tool you one up here real fast, just come up here and grab it kind of thing, right?

And like to have that at your availability is like you almost can't put a dollar factor on it, right? But like now, Borgo has changed hands, you know, and you see a lot of these different companies that are changing hands and getting bigger and the chance of maybe getting that done here are probably slimmer than they used to be. But it's just it's an important piece of the fabric that keeps the whole machine moving, right? Be it in BC or here or anywhere. Like you need these places local to you, manufacturing things.

And St. Brew, like that whole town works for basically. Yeah. Well, a shout out to Borgo who tells you tools. Once upon a time, folks, they sponsored the podcast. It's true story.

I've literally got to have a meeting in the office at St. Brunel of mine. Whatever that I'd be here. But it's like it's a cool area. You know, you got, there's Schulte, there's Depker, there's a whole bunch of stuff. It's all right down in that Humboldt area there, too. It's a very industrious place. And I mean, these are the businesses that

you know, municipally maybe have some challenges, but more provincially and federally, their climate is being made very uncomfortable to be in kind of thing, especially with the rate of tax of a lot of things, right? You know, transportation is a big one of them. You look at what just happened with PV Mark. A big problem of what happened with PV Mark was a company that was trying to try to source local and do the best they can and had some supply chain issues through COVID. They bought tractor supply out in eastern Canada, and then COVID hit him.

immediately and then they had supply chain disruptions and all of a sudden they just could not get that supply chain back and moving and a lot of it had to do with transportation and the way that they used to transport inventory between their stores they would actually use their own transportation fleet right and then you look at the cost of what's happening with transportation in our world right now due to environmental regulation carbon tax a lot of these different things I mean it's making it unviable right well and it's just the carbon tax makes no sense because companies, the fuel is the biggest cost in trucking companies, maybe behind wages. They're trying to lower that. If they could burn less fuel, they would. Making the fuel more

expensive doesn't mean you burn less fuel. You're already trying to lower your fuel consumption as much as you can. All it does, it makes it more expensive. Well, actually, here's a great example. I got a whole box here of door latches. This comes from a Canadian company. They're made here in Canada, they got to get shipped all the way from fucking Quebec in a truck. That means that that package has to travel 4,500 kilometers across the country to get here. If you want to lower your carbon tax, how about you allow a business that says, hey, there's a company making trucks. I want to make door handles in B.C. How about I allow a business to open a factor that makes door handle so I don't have to ship those door handles 4,000 kilometers? That would

you way better for lowering fuel consumption than putting in a carbon tax. Well, I mean, there's so many things like that. It's almost like they don't want Canada to work. They don't. Like some people say that it's a failed experiment, but I would argue that Canada has proceeded exactly how it was intended to go. You've got the West, which is just a resource extraction colony like Chase said. And that's exactly how it was designed to be.

And that's how it is. And until something changes, that is. is all it will ever be. Vesper says the carbon tax makes sense from the perspective of a criminal syndicate. So it completely makes sense when someone is trying to rob you. Yeah. Well, I mean, like I've said this a bunch on the mashup where the problem with the carbon tax is that when you put punitive taxes on goods and services with inelastic demand,

they have negligible changes in the rates of consumption. And that's exactly what Chase was saying, where it doesn't matter how cheap or expensive that fuel is, you're still got to burn it. It's the same on everything. It's the same when they were trying to regulate fertilizer and a few things here a couple of years ago kind of thing. It's just like it, you know, I did a video on it there being like, like somebody thinks we're out here having nitrogen fights with each other and that like we just, we just want to put as much fertilizer as we can on the ground. You just, it's a very scientific process that we go through to get your prescription and get everything right to grow exactly. the target that you think you can grow and where you're at. And anybody from the government coming in to try and change that for you is there to do you harm

and not good, right? And I think that's where when it all boils down to it, just like we could sit here and talk about this all night of what we're going to do and how things are going to change. I think there's some of these systems that are operating from a point where we as the citizens of the system are not a position to change it unless things change drastically, right? I mean, and that's just the big thing. we're not at a position to change it at any kind of federal level. We don't have the power.

The politicians really aren't listening to the average blue collar worker. It's why I am such an advocate at the municipal level. Because you know what? I can respond to a tweet from Justin Trudeau and make a response. He'll never see it. The tweet was by a PR team. Municipal level, I run into the mayor while I'm out shopping for groceries and I can call him a piece of shit.

He can hear that. Yeah. I can actually affect change at that level as an individual. person that I can't for politics wise merely you're 100% right chase and i think Sean i think we've talked about this before i can't remember where it was but uh like it's just like we we have a we have a really good town council we have a really good uh our our our municipality here uh you know our our tax dollars get spent well uh as far as i'm concerned for what i can see and the biggest reason that that happens is because the people that are within our town council and in our on our rm

council are held accountable because you like you say chase you see them every day and you know how they're spending your money and you see if they're getting anything done whether your road's cleared or whether your garbage has been taken away from a place in town or whatever it is when people are held accountable for the decisions that they make with your money it's it's how government functions like it's supposed to and i think what we've seen happen here i'll even say provincially here in Saskatchewan and even federally i mean start seeing how people lose accountability for how they're spending your money right well you're right but again like we're kind of i feel like we're getting away from the the idea of this

which is great because you know can go whatever direction we want but the whole idea between Canada as a complete sovereign nation as it is right now or moving to something different right I mean municipalities

I've got some interesting stories right I know my community was looking down the barrel of getting one of the huge supplier hubs for for retail mega giant and they dicked them around on trying to say you need to foot the bill for a new road.

And they said, you know what, screw it. We're just, there's the next town over is happy to have us all the best, right? I mean, you see stuff like that all the time. I'm sure that in 10 years, the town that isn't golden is going to be kicking themselves for the way they gave you the runaround. But with with this whole Canada thing, you know, something needs to change. change, absolutely. But the people who would be, we can't count on the people we need to vote for change when they're enriched by how broken the system is. I would argue, though, that they get enriched and they want to stay enriched. Having something like the European Union where people

have a choice between two living and working in two different areas, if Canadians could go work down to the U.S. and you have something like the European Union common border migration policy so therefore Canada and the U.S. are on the same level playing field for immigration no more temporary foreign worker exploitation to keep wages low but if that was a case and the government came out with a policy that says hey we're going to put in a carbon tax people are going to say well that's going to make life more expensive all start moving to the U.S well why would they put that thing in there Right now, there's a natural barrier where they kind of bend us over and they got us, they literally got us bent over it.

We're stuck in a rut and they bend us over it. That's just it. Is it we can't just move to the states easily because you would have a lot of Canadians that say, hey, enough is enough. I'm going to move down to the states, but then you get into immigration and the long process on that. If it was just a simple of like, hey, I rent a place in Vancouver, I'm getting screwed over, wages are super low.

I'm going to move to the U.S. if your businesses can't exploit the temporary foreign worker to fill that gap, businesses are going to say, whoa, I need to increase my wages to attract more talent here. And the government starts saying the business community would put pressure on government. The government works for the businesses. There is no doubt about it. But if you have these mega corporations that are like, hey, I can't find workers in Canada, and I'm having to pay too much because people are trying to move to the U.S.,

well, then the government's going to have to start putting in more friendly policies to compete with the U.S. I don't think that the answer is just joining to the U.S. I think it's making Canada more competitive. And I think giving the population more choice makes us more competitive because it also could be the point where it benefits the U.S. too. Healthcare gets way too expensive

or people don't like the crime in an area while they'll move. Maybe they'll come to Canada and we can take the benefit of that. You're right, but what you're saying is completely, contradicting what QDM said an hour ago where you're you're operating under the presumption that people in government exist to make the country good and I I prefer the Austrian idea

which is basically what QDM was saying which is that people existed politics to stay in politics to get more power to keep that power and so like what you're saying would be absolutely correct if you had politicians who actually cared about doing a good job. And I would argue that we do not have any of those at a federal level in this country. We have politicians who go along with what's going to be best for them and their party. It's why Aaron O'Toole ran on a carbon tax four years ago. It's why Pauliev has already said that he's not going to make any major changes to equalization. and it's why Trudeau is willing to burn this entire fucking place to the ground just to rule the ashes. You're not wrong.

I don't know. Don't tell him that case. Like I just kicked a dog. No, you didn't kick a dog. I'm pretty sure that's been along the lines of what's going on. I don't think anybody here is actually said that there's a, that there's a politician federally that's going to do anything good. I don't believe in a single federal politician at this.

level that much. Jagmeet Singh, come on, that guy's a Rolex socialist. Trudeau, he made like what, increased his net worth by $200 million? Like, nobody cares. They're all out to enra-I would argue, though, it's not about them trying to stay in power. I think right now they have a policy of, fuck you, it's my turn to extract as much money as I can while I'm in office until somebody else takes over in office. That seems to be the policy now.

Well, yeah, I would say that you're probably right, although I would say that's a recent pivot. Did you guys ever play that video game Tropico back in the day? Oh, so good. All right, that's basically Tropico. So you got put in charge of this fictional Banana Republic. And so you were trying to basically do just good enough of a job to keep the country together while extracting as much money out of the economy and putting it in your own bank account as possible. and that's more or less

how Canada's been ran at a federal level for quite some time. Yeah, but when you play Tropico and you do that, you realize that the best strategy to get more money into your own personal bank account is really growing the economy. Because when you start off, you have this like a one little business

that doesn't make much. And if you siphon too much off of that, you can't grow your island nation. The best way to make money in that game is build a huge thriving economy so that you have so much income, even if you're not, siphoning that much off that you're

siphoning more up. The pie is bigger. You've got a bigger pie that your tiny wedge is a giant amount. But if you were playing that where you could only, where you had a limited window where it says, okay, you know, you've got one year get as much money as possible. That's exactly what's

happening at the federal level right now. Man, all I ever got was stampede on the Atari. I just figured out why China's winning. They've got a dictatorship with one party. They don't have to worry about the one year, two year to extract as much as possible. They're playing the long run tropical game where they're trying to extract as much

as they can from a bigger pie. That's why China's winning. We need a tyrant. That's what we need. The way we get out of this. No, that's not the thing we need here. But like, that seemed to work really well for them. Yeah, you're like, there's no downside, but we don't want to do it.

But I mean, it clearly works for China. They have some huge benefits from it. But like, that's probably not worth giving up all of the other shit that you have to give up to have that. How do we get a government that acts like China but doesn't act like China? Social credit scores for everyone. Start with Quebec. Yeah, yeah, I just, yeah, you'd get less putteen every time you spoke English. Although part of that, though, like they applied that. I learned a lot about that when I was over there talking to the businesses. And basically their credit score, like our credit, our credit

score, they just apply it to businesses. And it doesn't affect the individual that much, but it's businesses. And a lot of the social credit was going towards corporations. They're like, man, if this corporation doesn't pay its debt and screws over a lot of people here, they're not allowed to open a business in the next town over because their social credit is low. And it's like, how much social good are you put, not just how much money and can you pay back to people you owe? If all of a sudden, or they have environmental issues and they've been polluting a lot, or, or they have releasing a virus. Yeah, they got labor complaints, anything like that.

Like, hey, you're treating your employees like shit. You're damaging the environment. But yeah, your creditors are getting paid. In North America, they're like, that's the number one most important thing. You can get more financing and more credit. In China, they're like, it's social credit, not just you're paying back your debt, but also are your employees well treated? Are they being paid fairly?

Are your environmental things? And that's how they affect their borrowing and business permit. like, hey, you can't open a business in our town unless your social credit is at least this high. You're terrible. You pay shitty wages. You pollute the environment. Your credit's really low. We don't want that business here.

So on the one hand, to an individual level, I don't like it. But to a corporate level, I think it kind of makes sense. Now, okay, this is interesting. This is very interesting because it's a side of it I've never heard before. And it runs directly in the face of most. of the things I've heard about China. And so bear with me while I ask you a potentially really stupid question. How do you know that the people you were hearing this from in China weren't just straight

up fucking lying? In all honesty. We talked about that. So I've been to China now, like three, four trips, talked to a lot of people, gotten real drunk with some suppliers from China. They sure like to take their customers out drinking. And like everyone I've talked to, now they will have. the same arguments that we have.

And I don't like how the government's oppressive on this. Or I don't like it. They'll talk shit about their own government. But then they say things like that. And I catch these little glimps as of like, well, that actually makes a lot of sense. So like if you're shit talking a whole bunch and then you say one really good thing, I'm tending to believe that that good thing is actually a pretty decent thing.

Fair. Well, no, it's, I find this genuinely interesting, right? Because there is a lot of propaganda we have here. in North America about China and what it's like to live in China that I found out wasn't true. There's some things that are true. There's some things that are. And they have the same things that they think about North America that you're like, whoa, no, that's not true at all. Like that's, like, no, we all don't like East Hastings is an isolated incident, guys. Like that's, yeah, that's one street that's really bad in Vancouver, but everywhere

isn't like that. Every major city has an East Hastings right now at this point. It does. But it doesn't exist. all over. All the streets don't look like that. There are still nice areas of cities. Yeah, that's true. As long as you stay away from Adriana. Yeah, there's some exceptions.

But it's, they, there are some nice things about it, and they genuinely seem to be very happy with their government, despite their complaints. They looked at it to where we were talking about, 30, 40 years ago, $4,000 a year salary, up to now, averaging,

40 to 50,000 dollars per year. High speed rail is amazing. And but the government acts like a dictator. They're under a dictatorship and you do lose freedoms under that. Like there's certain things you can't say or can't do that you'll be restricted for. Like they have things that like I would say that you would see in the UK where if you criticize things on social media and speak out wrong, you're going to get in trouble. I don't like that.

Man, this program is probably not here. Yep, seizing people's bank accounts because they're protesting, calling emergency men. Imagine living in a country like that. Yeah, I couldn't imagine. That's honestly, that's the biggest shitty thing is like, we have that. Like, they seize protesters bank accounts. You know who doesn't have that?

You know who doesn't do that? Like, I don't want any of that. But if I'm going to have that, can I at least have the cool train that's really cheap? I want to get on the way to the stadium. You know, have like some hospital beds. Yeah. I would look it up the city.

What is it with Trudeau's and being obsessed with high-speed railings? Honestly, high-speed rail is just wicked sweet. Like, if you used it in Europe, like high-speed rail, stop. Weak.

Okay. Pull it together, Tews. Pull it together. I did catch it. I did catch that. I did catch that. Oh. I'll go into hell.

Okay. All right. We're all going to help. Here face. This is supposed to be a serious conversation. It's totally a serious conversation. Somehow we, wow, this has gone off the rails. We started talking about like, hey, what about Canada and our sovereignty in a first-to-state?

Now we're like, well, maybe China's not so bad. What about the good things China does? You're 100% right. So we're all moving to China. You heard of the top off with saying anything would be better than what we have and now we just had a discussion where like maybe communist China's not so bad either

yeah we're at a low point when you look at comedy's China and you're like well at least we'd have trains yeah unanimously decided we just unanimously decided that we should trade Trudeau for the ghost of Chairman Mao good talk good talk

so yeah I guess I guess your guys's stance on 51 state hasn't changed but now we want to be a province of Beijing All right. We've heard this off with like, hey, do you want to be part of the 51st state and join the U.S.? And you're like, there's probably some advantages. And you're like, but there's also advantages to China.

That reinforces sovereignty because that's where I'm at. We're like, if I'm looking at joining the U.S. as it is becoming a part of the state, maybe just look at joining a province of China. Like if we're setting the bar of like it would be better than what we have now. All right. We can also make the argument for China. We're agreed that we don't want. want to be part of North Korea, correct?

Like, does anybody have any disputes to that? What about Miranmar? They got them sweet temples? Yeah. Does anybody else have anything credible to say before we just shut this down or I feel like you guys won the argument for me. Yeah. Yeah, we're going to be part of China.

Wait a second. We already are. Right? Like, I mean, yeah, we probably already are actually. It's Michelle, it's Michelle, right here. Boom. We already are a province of China, folks. So this train is going to be the Orient Express.

I'm going back to twos going, some days I wish a meteor hit us. And then Chase makes the case for China being not the bad. It's not the bad. Hey, chances with the meteor hitting us are increasing. Like, if you're American and you're watching this, you're like, what the hell are these guys doing? They're arguing about whether or not they want to be a part of our nation. Meanwhile, they just talk themselves into China.

The states has its own issues, right? It's not some perfect eutopia, right? And I kind of feel like, you know, on the other hand, like, when I look at how jaded I feel by this country, when I look at my supposed kinsman booing another national anthem, I'm like, you guys are just fucking embarrassing. and you keep voting to take money away from me and my family, and you keep fucking over everything I try and do to make myself better off. And you're jerks about it the whole time.

And I look at it and I'm like, I kind of feel like I just take a rebound from an abusive relationship. And I would just hop into bed with the next willing person, whether it was the States or maybe. I just want to, you know, go get the yellow fever for a little while or whatever else, right? Just whoever the next country is that's interested in taking me, the answer is going to be yes. But I think that says a lot about the state of the nation as it is right now. I think that's 100% right.

If you can make a case between joining the U.S., joining China, or joining the European Union, you need to have a look at things here. And I just think that if we're going to talk about joining the U.S. because of the advantages, why don't we have a talk about joining China? China has increased, if you want to just increase our gross domestic product, China has done the best increases in standard of living and production. They clearly must have great regulations because they're getting all the business. They're getting all the production.

They're getting the increase in wages. If that's what your goal is, why don't we join China? China has infiltrated Chase Barber. We could all move over there to the small towns in China and just open up proggy restaurants. But they got to... My point is, and I mean, you know, we go to there. I am not going to joining China before that. It was literally Chase on here who tried convincing us to all join the Green Party.

And now he's trying to convince us the next time around that China is the way to go. Chase, we need a birth certificate and some proof that you're actually Canadian here. I just like playing the devil's advocate a little bit. How much kind of do you know? What I'm trying to make is that obviously it is a bad idea to join China. That is not good because basically what we would have to live under is not going to jive with our Canadian values. That's how I feel about joining the U.S. You can make all the economic and business cases there,

but being an American does not align with my values as a Canadian any more than being Chinese does. See, I would just, a big part of this for me is that part of me would be really happy to see the rest of Canada that's been jerks for so long while taking, you know, it was 2007 that that study came out that said that Alberta is sending $20 billion to Confederation every year. that we don't get back. All right.

Now, you account for inflation, and that's something like $27 billion now. And then you put that per capita. It's almost $5,500 per person. And we don't make a big deal out of it. I feel like we'd be a lot more pissed off about it. If every single man, woman, and child, because, I mean, you know what,

even if he called it $20 billion even between Alberta, Saskatchewan and BC, you just averaged it out. Right. And just call it five grand per person. Five grand per person just for easy math, not interested in fact check and just for the sake of the example. If every one of us here had to write a check for $5,000 for every person in their family to you just get a name in the mail. And it'd be like, oh, I got to cut a check to Jean-Philippe Francois, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All right.

And then and then you'd be like, I'm sorry, how do you spell that? again he'd be like uh it has uh an h in it and you'd be like no never mind just make it out to cash if you had to do that every year your perspective on canada would change quite a bit i think oh i think we all have it and a perspective on canada that there lines with you i think we're fundamentally all in agreement with that but here's the thing is they're talking about how to voting for it. They keep voting for it. We talk about this Canadian identity. We have an identity in Western Canada and it is not a Canadian identity. Jamie Sinclair always says you should

have a Western Canada and Eastern Canada. Like basically Chase's idea of the European Union, but two separate countries. Western, Eastern, you come together in war, you come together for, I don't know, tomorrow night's game against the U.S. You get the point. But there's set of values. just differ from the West's set of values. It's completely different. And part of the reason why I really want to go with anything but Confederation in its current format

is because of how pissed off everybody in Eastern Canada is going to be when the taps dry off. And they've got to pay for everything out of their own damn pockets. And I get that that's very jaded and very angry, but I didn't get there overnight. No, you're right. Again, you're right. It is bullshit that we have to spend so much money there. I just don't know if joining the U.S. is the way to make that change versus now I'm just going to be what, subsidizing Mississippi instead? Well, there's no equalization in the U.S. Well, the U.S. does have equalization a lot and they do it through federal taxes. If you have a look at what states are subsidizing other states, you have states like Texas massively subsidizing.

subsidizing through federal grants and emissions. Like you look, they, they have their own screwed up version of equalizations through federal taxes that get paid and then get redistributed to four states. It definitely still happens in the states. Yeah. And like to Chase's point there, like that's, it's just, it's, you go from one situation to the other and it's just, you jump out of the other side of the border and everything that we know here will go over there.

Then all of a sudden, you crack the, you crack the lid off the tent over there. And you're like, oh, wait a minute, oh, this is all fucked up here too. You know, I've got some family members that live down in the states in Colorado and a few other places. And it's just, it's not as shiny as we think it is here. We're just that cow on the other side of the fence here right now thinking our grass is looking pretty shitty. They've got unity problems in the U.S. as well. I mean, there's no hiding that forever, right? I mean, we might have it a little bit worse with what happens with us in Eastern Canada

because of how the demographics of Canada work and through federal transfers. But, you know, I got a lot of stuff in common with some people out in Eastern Canada. but there's some of our work values are very different and we got to figure out a way to get those things fixed my hopeful thing that i just kind of want to put out there and where i was going with the whole thought process of this is it you look at china it objectively has massively improved but they went like you said under chairman mao where owning farmland was banned i went to china I walked out of a Starbucks and looked across the street at another Starbucks. They have gone so capitalist, so free market.

So if you went to the most restrictive government you possibly have to building a thriving society in 20, 30 years, I just want to say that I think that there's hope in Canada that we can go from this liberal government we have now, just extracting money, taking away people's freedoms. And if you can change that to do something similar to what China has, we can revital our own economy. If we put Canada first and we invest the way China did in opening up those regulations,

getting rid of the communist regulations, bringing in some free market regulations, and you've seen what happened there at the local level, there's no reason I don't think that by putting Canada first, we couldn't achieve the same thing in our own way that China did without having to join the U.S. If we put Canada first and did things that were. good for Canada. I think we could all get behind that. Do we have a leader that's going to do that?

No. Do we have people who are going to vote for it? Right now we don't. We have people who are going to vote for a player in a plurality for that situation? No. I love it. I love the idea. I think it's wonderful.

But we don't have any political leaders who will do it. And we don't have a population base that's going to vote for it. I would disagree on the population. base, if you look at some of the local the pollings, people were unhappy with the way things are. You were looking at a total blowout in government. We just,

my biggest fear is that you're going to see a majority and they're going to sit on the fence like a bunch of pussies and not put the laws forward that they need to put. They're just going to sit there with a status quo and they're not going to make the change to actually put Canada first. That's my fear.

Federal government, just a bunch of pussies. Yeah. Kind of, yeah. Honestly, that could be a great bumper sticker. You know what? Like, you know what? I'll say kind of in closing here. I got to jump here right away, guys.

But like, you know, I was just down to Louisville there. And you talk to a lot of people down in the U.S. And a lot that you talk to are like, yeah, it's got to suck. You guys are going to have to pay those tariffs now, eh? And I was like, what did you just say? It sucks. You're going to have to pay those tariffs, hey? I was like, no, like, you guys realize that you pay them, right?

Like, that's how this works. Like, you guys pay that to your government. when you're importing what they have on the tariff list coming into the U.S. We don't pay it. We have deadweight losses on the economy. Of course we do, but just brass tax for how it works. That's how it works, right? Eventually it hurts our business.

Everything goes terrible, right? They start sourcing from the U.S., but from the base of how a tariff works, a lot of them don't understand what it is. And then a lot of them didn't understand the next day after the hockey. I'm like, what the hell you guys booing our anthem for? Because a lot of them are very out of touch with what's going on, right? It's like, you know what?

It's not us booing your anthem. I'd never boo anybody's anthem. I think it's ridiculous thing to do. I think it's a classic case of how we're represented as Canadians is by people that we don't have a lot in common with Odees, right? And it's just from everything that we've been through is two nations. I don't think it's appropriate to boo another anthem. And I don't think we should do it for two reasons.

Reason number one is because it's shitting on the graves of everybody that fought together to keep us where we're at right now in this spoiled little world that we actually live. And number two is it's exactly what Trump wants. is he wants Canada to view their anthem in Canada and wants Americans mad at Canadians. Why are you mad at Canadians? Well, we're mad at them because they booed our anthem. What else?

Is there anything else to it? Well, we don't know. How dare you boo our anthem? Like, we just live in this world where we're all to see all these little things happen and we all just lose our minds over him. And now here we are as a nation that should be a respecting person. We're booing our biggest neighbor's anthem at a hockey game.

It's fucking sad. And I wish people would stop doing it. Boys, any final thoughts? As we like quick to get out of here, we've been going for 90 minutes. We can wrap it up. Any final thoughts? My final thoughts, I just want to put on the record that I'm not pro-China.

I just wanted to make an example of like joining China versus joining the Reds. Green party pro-China. The devil's advocate thing. The EV manufacturer has to put the asterisk at the end. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think we heard loud and clear, Chase, that you are pro-China. That that's what you're hoping happens here.

And that... I think he left. I think he left. It's going to be hanging this flag up over here. It's not related to this at all. Anyway, I didn't want to say, I'm not going to join China. I don't want to join China. I think that would be a terrible mistake.

And I'm indifferent on Chairman Mao. You know you were wearing that his underwear. weren't you? Oh, man. Okay, I want to jump in here real quick and say that I really enjoyed this conversation, but there's one significant aspect where I'm disappointed in everybody else on here.

And you held the silver bullet the whole time and you didn't even know it. The whiskey regulations in the states where it has to be at least 50% corn mash, it makes the whiskey taste horrible. That's why they have such inferior whiskey. is because their government mandates that they have shitty whiskey because it has to be at least 50% corn bash. You throw that into the discussion about the 51st state.

And Tuesday is all of a sudden pro-Canada. And all of a sudden, I'm feeling real uncomfortable. I agree. And also, I'm just going to say it for the record, having a strategic maple syrup reserve is much better than a strategic cheese reserve. Boys, thanks for doing this. And, well, thanks for hopping on. appreciate everyone tuning in tonight and of course on the podcast this will air right away as well so thanks everybody for tuning in.

I see you fellas. Thanks a lot, gentlemen.