Power Struggle
Improving the energy dialogue in Canada (and beyond) through honest, non-partisan, and fact- based conversations.
The energy conversation is personal: it’s in our homes, in our hands, and now, it’s in our ears. Power Struggle invites you to listen in on honest, non-partisan, and fact-based conversations between host Stewart Muir and the leaders and thinkers designing modern energy.
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Power Struggle
Is Canada Sleepwalking Into China's Trap | Election Special Ep.7
Canada desperately wants to diversify its export economy. Many believe expanding to other markets is critical to dealing with the new tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump. But renowned journalist Terry Glavin cautions this shouldn’t mean we integrate with China. The more Canada associates economically with China, the more vulnerable and subservient we become to the whims of the world’s most successful torture state.
In the latest episode of the Power Struggle podcast special election series, Glavin tells host Stewart Muir that Canada must carefully weigh the new geo-political global reality. During the federal election, Prime Minister and Liberal Leader Mark Carney and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre insisted the country needs to move away from US economic dependence. They called for accelerated energy projects and more pipelines. Now that the election is over, it’s time for sober second thought about what this strategy means.
Take the Trans Mountain Pipeline. A huge percentage of its oil already flows to China. Is an expansive, overbearing totalitarian regime the trading partner we want? Forging greater commercial alliances with China could have the opposite effect of the independence Canada wishes to safeguard. We would be sacrificing political sovereignty for the false security of economic independence.
Canada rightly worries about Trump’s calls for annexation. But Trump will be gone within four years. China isn’t going anywhere and is much more dangerous. Gavin discusses the multitude of threats posed by China’s desire for global economic dominance. It can only get worse. What should Canada be doing instead of submitting to China? Listen to find out.
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The energy conversation is polarizing. But the reality is multidimensional. Get the full story with host Stewart Muir.
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Energy sovereignty, I think, is the conversation that we really should have been having through the election. To some extent, I think we were having it, but the overemphasis on pipelines, pipelines, pipelines for their own sake misses the point that well, we actually have pipelines and the pipeline. What is it? $34 billion, I think we shelled out.
Stewart Muir:Trans Mountain.
Terry Glavin:To get the Trans Mountain pipeline built. Where's that oil going?
Stewart Muir:California and China.
Terry Glavin:It's going to China in a very, very big way.
Stewart Muir:Welcome to Powers Trouble. I'm your host, stuart Muir. Today is Friday, april 25th, just three days before Canadians head to the polls in perhaps the most consequential election we've experienced in generations. By the time you listen to this episode, the results will have been decided. Canada will be starting a new political chapter To reflect on where we are and where we might be headed. I'm joined today by renowned journalist and author, terry Glavin. Terry's incisive commentary has shaped Canadian political discourse for decades. Before diving into today's issues, I've asked Terry to read from his powerful 1990 book A Death Feast in Dimla Hamid. Terry, thanks for coming to Power Struggle. Here's your book. It's one of my favorite books.
Terry Glavin:Completely unexpected, and thank you very much, Stuart. We're geezers now.
Stewart Muir:Yes, officially.
Terry Glavin:And you wanted me to read, if I'm not mistaken, right from the opening of that chapter. Chapter 4. Okay.
Stewart Muir:Yes.
Terry Glavin:Here we go. Nola was the last chief to leave Dimna, hamad. The seasons had turned back upon themselves and the city's final punishment began. The arc of the sun ended its northward migration and turned back again to the south. With each new morning the snow line crept further down the mountain sides until the snow began to fall in the streets of Dimnehamet. The people of the great city had grown insolent and careless. They failed to honor the remains of the first returning salmon of spring. First, garen mocked the sky with the first running salmon, with the first salmon running across the salmon weirs, the skies darkened and the snow fell. And it kept falling until all the great houses in Dimlechama disappeared beneath it.
Terry Glavin:There was Fanny Morrison's stone feast to be seen too. It was a gathering to feast for the raising of a headstone, a modern equivalent of a pole raising feast. Fanny had died twenty years earlier, but her son, willie, was never quite settled about his responsibilities in completing the cycle of fireweed feasts for her, and it had been bothering him all those years. And there was the feast for Lelt, the late Fred Johnson of Gitwangach. And there was another feast in Kisbyox, the death feast for Mabel White. And there was much planning and arrangement to be done for the feast of Wee Sake's grandmother, wygette Elsie Morrison.
Stewart Muir:So 37 years ago.
Terry Glavin:God, I was a child reporter for Vancouver Sun when I wrote that yeah, and strangely it has echoes even now. Some things don't seem to change.
Stewart Muir:It's a timeless region and a consequential one, and there's so many passages here I would love to hear you read that one to me speaks of the timelessness of the, the people of that part of the northwest of british. You know it. What? Where is it on a map for someone?
Terry Glavin:oh gosh well if Well. I think most people are vaguely familiar with Prince Rupert say right Prince Rupert, yeah, almost Alaska.
Terry Glavin:Almost Alaska. And if you head up the Skeena River I'm going to say maybe 100 miles you get to the middle of the universe. You get to Dimlehamet, this ancient city state that is said to have existed at the universe. You get to Dimlechamed, this ancient city-state that is said to have existed at the time, roughly at the forks.
Terry Glavin:Well, where the Bulkeley comes in, the Bulkeley River comes into the Skeena, very, very interesting part of the world. It is the westernmost edge of, I guess, what is it? St Paul's province, the Catholic universe of North America, the old Catholic universe and, older still, the western edge of the Athopascan language families which stretch all the way back as far as Hudson's Bay. Really, I mean, there's dozens and dozens of languages, but in that linguist, a huge linguistic group and the coast culture begins right and it becomes increasingly curiously Protestant for all kinds of interesting reasons. And it is right. There. The greatest and most important and most disturbing conflicts or struggles in the land claims disputes in Canada. That was the fulcrum, was right there and of course it ended up producing the leading case on Aboriginal title and rights in Canada, which is Delgamuth versus the Queen.
Stewart Muir:A young reporter at the Vancouver Sun, this Delgamuth case involving the Git-San and what's the claim comes up and you say I want to go up and report this story in the style of what we used to call new journalism, like Harry Southern or some of the other greats. I mean, this really is a classic of a style of reporting, not just, that's another conversation. Right, thanks, but it was uh, momentous at the time. But it's still with us now and it's still yeah, you know, this show is power struggle. It's about energy and how we get energy. To me, the the passion I have for this show comes from that, because it's a human struggle, because you can't say economy without having energy in that, yeah, humans can't persist without energy, but it's a struggle to get it and the struggle of this area persists today, it has been the front lines of that epochal struggle over energy as well.
Stewart Muir:And it's a place in geopolitical terms, which is a term geopolitical that wasn't used much for a long time until Russia invaded Ukraine. It wasn't used in Canada much. You didn't hear it.
Terry Glavin:Well, there were nerds like us who would use it a lot.
Stewart Muir:Occasionally, yes, but suddenly, I bet, when it was talking about it, and if you look at the geopolitics of Canada and its future, it goes through the lands of the Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en people, and we saw that in the headlines in 2020, when the whole country was shut down because of rail blockades. I actually was, I think, the only one who went out there to document this. We put a drone up, we interviewed people at the tracks. There was actually someone who decided they didn't like me being there and chased me off the site at Hazleton, which you write about, and it was a flashpoint then, as it was years ago.
Terry Glavin:Well, it was actually we Sakes at Gitwungach who first stood on the tracks, the CN tracks. By himself he stood there and stopped the train and I have to confess I'm kind of personally vested in this, in that, you know, a lot of my buddies are in the logging industry and the fishing industry. When I was growing up but Wee Sakes, I loved him. He ended up being my first boy's godfather, which required a little bit of backstairs work because he's actually, you know, an Anglican and we're Catholics, and so you had to do a little bit of work with the archdiocese to get that done. But he was a great guy and a great barrel of laughs and he didn't have some kind of chip on his shoulder. He wanted to see a flourishing forest industry in his traditional territories white guys and Indians, as we used to call them and the great concern then was the way the wealth was being drained from the landscape and it was being consolidated. And we're shipping and we still are shipping raw logs off to Asia.
Terry Glavin:And in more recent years, that very same fulcrum, that exact place, has been where you know the great struggles and the arrests and the roadblocks that some of the Soudans have been involved with against the natural gas pipeline that's going through there. And I think what was different then was that the whole point of the assertion of Aboriginal title among the people at the vanguard of that struggle was so that indigenous people would have a stake, a vested stake, in the development and the management of natural resources of their traditional territories, in cooperation with, in collaboration with Umshua white people, their neighbors and quite often their relatives. There are very few politicians who understand that. That's where it all came from. It wasn't about stopping development. That was the last thing that it was about.
Terry Glavin:As a matter of fact, the argument, the successful argument in Aboriginal title law was that Indigenous people have the right to. Aboriginal title implies the right of Indigenous people to exploit the natural resources of their traditional territories in a contemporary manner and to build pipelines, to harvest timber, to develop mines as an Aboriginal right, as a right deriving from an extinguished Aboriginal title. And in recent years it's kind of been turned on its head and I mean, I think, reasonably and for understandable cases in some instances. But that's what it was all about. And, interestingly, the first use of the term reconciliation. We hear it all. We're all in favor of reconciliation. We're not quite sure what that's supposed to mean and as far as I understand, as far as I know, the term reconciliation in law was established in Delgamouk and the point of reconciliation was it was to reconcile Aboriginal rights with crown title, aboriginal title with crown sovereignty. And it has become something else and I think it's become quite gnarly and debris-strewn and contested and not particularly healthy.
Stewart Muir:It feels like one of those terms. I've seen sustainability go through this and it's owned by so-and-so and then so-and-so wants to get a hold of it and it changes and at the end of the day it becomes kind of useless and we need to think of something else if we want to put meaning into it. Campaign looking back over six weeks, which we're going to do here, and maybe talk about the campaign that wasn't. I can't help but think I was reading the Globe and Mail, I think had an editorial. They said look, this country needs energy. We need energy security. We need it to be environmentally acceptable to the populace. We need it to be available and affordable. It needs to drive the industrial development and the economy. We definitely need it to be available and affordable. It needs to drive the industrial development and the economy. We definitely need that. To have that, we can't just say we need energy. We have to admit we need things like pipelines and infrastructure, Otherwise you're just mouthing meaningless platitudes, Nonsense, yes.
Stewart Muir:And so they came down. They said look, we don't think Carney's convincing in what he's offering to get that. But you know what, If you're expecting us to say we think Polyev can do it, don't, because we don't think he's offered the way to get there. Neither one has offered, even though both acknowledge that we yes, it's true, we do need to solve this, we do need that development. Neither one has persuaded the anonymous, the collective voice of the global, and mailed that it's there. So there are those for whom where we are today, wherever that is, is unresolved. So we have a job to do here, Terry. Let's resolve it, let's explain it.
Terry Glavin:The contradictions that prevail globally now, I think, were front and center to the land struggles and the resource development struggles that obtained when we were boy reporters up there. And I mean serious contradictions and they are broadly geopolitical. When you find yourself barely able to make ends meet and you live in Smithers and you go to Costco or Walmart and you buy pink salmon that's packaged, that was actually fished out of the river, that you can see from the parking lot and was sent to China and was packaged there and then comes all the way back across the Pacific and you're buying it under plastic, I mean this strikes me as an odd way to run an economy, a resource economy, and I think we are. Energy sovereignty, I think, is the conversation that we really should have been having through the election. To some extent, I think we were having it, but the overemphasis on pipelines, pipelines, pipelines for their own sake, misses the point that well, we actually have pipelines and the pipeline. What is it? $34 billion, I think we shelled out.
Stewart Muir:Trans Mountain.
Terry Glavin:To get the Trans Mountain pipeline built. Where's that oil going?
Stewart Muir:California and China.
Terry Glavin:It's going to China in a very, very big way. Our exports to China have been increasing through all of the fighting about the two Michaels and Chinese Beijing's influence operations. In Canada the trade deficit is still outrageous, but exports have been increasing, and it's mainly oil and coal. And this is something that I think really complicates the whole question about Canada's obligations with respect to climate change, which I'm all in favor of us meeting. But you know imposing a carbon tax, you know making some bloke in Prince George pay more at the gas pump when, if you actually look at the, I mean we don't call it global climate change for nothing. Don't call it global climate change for nothing.
Terry Glavin:It's not like Canada's making any great contribution to the flooding of greenhouse gases into the upper stratosphere.
Terry Glavin:In the bigger scheme of things, and when you look at that bigger scheme of things, there's a chart you can find that's being put together by the oil industry and by environmental organizations.
Terry Glavin:It's one of the few confluences of interest that you know they're agreed on is the contribution of greenhouse gases, production of greenhouse gases since 2000, the year 2000. And in fact North America and Europe and Japan, it's basically a flat line. You know there have been all kinds of innovations that of innovations the way we manufacture cars, for one thing that have allowed us to basically more or less level off our greenhouse gas emissions, whereas the Chinese contribution is like that, the line is like that, and you can't pretend that that's not happening and you can't expect ordinary working people to bear this burden when we have senior politicians that are flitting off to China and patting the Chinese on the back for building perhaps less coal mines this year than they did last year and what have you and not having the same commitments, whether they're realistic or not, to net zero as we do, this is really quite huge. This is a really huge issue and it's very difficult in Canada to have an honest conversation about it.
Stewart Muir:I'm struck by the success China has had in becoming a manufacturer at a mega scale of the components of what some call energy transition, although that term I think would be better replaced with what's actually happening energy addition. We're just adding more energy, but let's call it energy transition equipment solar panels and wind cells and electrolyzers and the whole gamut. China has become the dominant supplier of all of that equipment, and if you want to have a green economy in the definition of the renewables lobby, you are going to be getting your equipment from China, where, incidentally, it's made with coal-fired electricity. But let's set that aside.
Terry Glavin:And as often as not, the photovoltaic function of it all is produced in Xinjiang by Uyghur slaves.
Stewart Muir:Such as the rare earth, metals that need to be supplied and all of these things. It's riven with contradictions of this kind, and yet there seems to be the expectation that there's a moral issue here. There's the right and wrong. If you don't accept that we have to buy these components from China for the Western green transition, then you must be a climate denier is one of the is one of the statements you sometimes hear. Another is more the Trumpian side of. We're going to punish China for committing the crime of selling us the things that we've been demanding China sell us for the last 50 years, and they have accumulated the money we gave them when they should have been buying the things we wanted to sell them. So now we've got this Trumpian thing.
Stewart Muir:You called the Trump incoming cabinet. This is back in November, before it even came true. You said the Trump administration would be a cabinet of quote circus freaks and Bond villains, and you're not wrong. Turns out villains, and you're not wrong. So when you look at what Trump has built and you look at his relationship with China, is he doing something different than Canada is? Well, clearly he is. Is he doing something? Maybe better?
Terry Glavin:Okay, that's a good question. All right, Let me say I think Trump's tariffs on China doesn't hurt my feelings.
Stewart Muir:It doesn't make me cry.
Terry Glavin:I just wish we had been doing this a quarter of a century ago or more. The problem is that he's making war on the rest of the world, including the liberal democratic order, while he's also pretending to make war on China. While he's also pretending to make war on China and I say pretending is that if you actually look at his polemics and postures and standpoints and policies, Xi Jinping isn't bothered by any of this. He's described Xi Jinping as his friend.
Stewart Muir:We like.
Terry Glavin:Xi Jinping His vision to the extent that there is one there is to kind of divide up the planner between China, Russia and Washington DC, and China basically owns Africa now. And what is it? Five, seven of the 11 major United Nations agencies are directly or indirectly controlled by China now, and that's largely because of the UN's retreat from the world under the Obama administration, by the way, and the Biden administration it wasn't all Trump but the Chinese are looking at this now and saying, meh, 14% of their exports, 14.5% of their exports goes to the United States Command and control slave economy. You don't think that those guys can figure out what to do. Of course they can figure it out. They're going to be fine.
Terry Glavin:And I look back to the beginning of this century. You know we all think of September 11th 2001,. Right, I think it was kind of like a blunt trauma wound to the head. Everybody was shaken by this, on the left and the right. I will not disparage George W Bush, as so many people will. I think, if you can, you can't imagine what the world would have been like if we allowed Saddam Hussein to stay in power. I mean, give your head a shake. Guy had to be gone and which was, by the way, the position of the Democratic Party long before George Bush came along.
Terry Glavin:Ironically, one of the things we forget, but the bigger thing that happened last year was in December, and it was when the World Trade Organization was permitted to admit China into its ranks. That was the moment that the West put a knife to its own throat and that has determined largely the course of history ever since. And it is why Russia has been allowed to get away with the genocidal invasion of Ukraine, and it is why our economy has become weakened and why our politics are enfeebled and why Canada is at this juncture now, where we're being pulled between the orbits of two very dark stars. One is impermanent Trump isn't going to be there forever. One is impermanent Trump isn't going to be there forever, but I think inshallah, God willing we have learned that we cannot be as reliant as we have been on trade with the United States. Our economy should not be as reliant as it has become on exports either. And Beijing and that dark star, and those guys aren't going away anytime soon.
Stewart Muir:So are we headed towards a stronger reliance on China?
Terry Glavin:That's my worry. That's my worry. That's a far greater worry that I have than this difficulty that we're having with the Yanks. We're always going to have difficulties with the Yanks. They're a bit mad and it's really quite tragic. I remember saying to a lot of my erstwhile comrades on the left 20 years ago, 25 years ago you might whine about American imperialism as much as you like, but you're going to miss the old bitch when she's gone. And that is what we're seeing now is we're seeing the collapse of the American, the final collapse of the American order. It began under Obama in a very, very, very big way His capitulations throughout the Middle East and the retreat of democracy around the world, where it's measured by Freedom House and VDEM and any number of institutions that track this sort of thing VDEM and any number of institutions that track this sort of thing. I think we're in our 19th year now. Depending on how you add it up, 18 or 19 years of democracy retreat throughout the world.
Stewart Muir:Terry, you've written that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was basically already acting like a governor when Trump started calling him Governor.
Terry Glavin:Trudeau, that was a paradox.
Stewart Muir:Why did you think?
Terry Glavin:that Because all the evidence suggested that. I mean he was indistinguishable from the. You know, a governor of some small, irrelevant but seriously woke democratic state. You know you have a shooting, a mass shooting in Uvalde, texas, and the next thing, you know, he's having this big press conference and announcing how he's going to impose further restrictions on firearms in Canada. There's a leak out of the US Supreme Court about the pending decision on abortion rights. He has another big press conference and makes commitments to ensure that Canadians have full access to abortions. Access to abortions.
Terry Glavin:I don't think there was a single faddish imbecility to come out of an American, an Ivy League universities, social sciences and humanities department, that wasn't adopted by the Trudeau government. We became I mean Canada became was like some kind of social justice Instagram account in charge of a G7 country. I mean it really was comical. And he, you know all of his influences, almost all of his influences were American Trump's pardon me, trudeau's. And the other thing that I've always found fascinating about that, I mean Trumpism is definitely a dear leader cult. I mean, let's be honest about this, for God's sake. Well, so was Trudeauism, very much so. They're both one percenters, everything.
Terry Glavin:If you could look at all of the I mean the most extreme and even crazy things that people were saying about Trump's liaisons with Vladimir Putin's regime in Russia in Trump 1, and a lot of it was crazy are things that can be said accurately about Justin Trudeau's relationship with Xi Jinping's regime in Beijing. If you can imagine Trump elevating the head of the Russian American Business Council to the most senior position in the Senate immediately after getting elected, that's what Whitney Trudeau did. He elevated the head of the China-Canada Business Council to the senior government post in the Senate. If you can imagine Trump assembling all of the key Republican donors in various cash for access soirees across the United States with Russian oligarchs States, that's exactly what Trudeau did with respect to his hopes for a free trade agreement in China. We're China.
Stewart Muir:So yeah Well, can you imagine if Donald Trump did a podcast that was in Canada? Because I've noticed that, whether it's Trudeau or Carney and Paul, it seems like the only podcasts they do are in the US. And early in the campaign, I think someone from the Carney camp I know someone from the Carney camp asked me hey, would you be interested in having Mark Carney on the Power Struggle podcast? I said sure, absolutely I would do that. I'd never heard anything. But then you start showing up on the US podcasts. I don't know what am I?
Terry Glavin:Well, he originally I mean he basically announced his decision to run for the leadership of the Liberal Party on Jon Stewart's show in New York Right. Similarly, I mean you know Trudeau, you know he shows up. The first major interview he did was with the New York Times when he was describing how he.
Stewart Muir:So we're already the 51st state Certainly acting like it.
Terry Glavin:I mean, you know. So I think there's a lot of observations about how the fringes of the Conservative Party and I will call them fringes do very, very closely resemble some of the Trumpist hooliganism. The Yahoos, that's true. But let's be honest about this. Shall we Is all I'm saying.
Stewart Muir:Well, let's get into this election campaign. Did China manipulate this campaign? Is there evidence?
Terry Glavin:Yeah, there's a lot of evidence for that. It's just that the difficulty is in the language that we use. Is it foreign interference? If it's welcomed and invited? If it's solicited, is that interference? You need a flat tire, you've got a flat tire and somebody comes by and fixes your flat tire. Is he interfering with your car? It is welcomed and invited.
Terry Glavin:There are at least 15 ridings in Canada where it's practically impossible to get elected dog catcher without the approval of the local proxies of the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo. It is deeply vested in the leadership of the Liberal Party in the greater Toronto area parts of Metro Vancouver. The Conservative Party is not immune to this either. They've been very active in monkey-wrenching the Conservative Party as well, nowhere near as successfully as with the Liberal Party, because, of course, in the case of the Liberal Party particularly the Justin Trudeau Liberals, although Khrushchev Liberals as well the Liberal Party essentially became the political wing of the Canada-China Business Council and in the person of Pierre Trudeau you had a person who objectively, whatever you might think of him, like him or not could be described as the most important propaganda asset of the Chinese Communist Party in North America in the 1960s and 1970s.
Stewart Muir:It's bread in the bone with these guys is what I'm saying Now, maybe just to be devil's advocate for China. Just a couple of things I want to throw at you, terry. Okay, look, the current prime minister as we sit here is someone who was the governor of the Bank of England. He is someone who stood up when Keir Starmer was trying to lead the Labour Party into power, and did so successfully. He stood up, mark Carney did on video and endorsed Keir Starmer's government, and presumably there's some friendship or alliance there that persists. We thought we stopped being a colony of the United Kingdom a long, long time ago, but it seems like one might be able to say well, there's a pretty strong alliance. Is that command and control? Is there something in that? Surely a critic of your China arguments might suggest that, and I wonder what you have to say about that.
Terry Glavin:Well, I mean personally. It's difficult for me because I'm a Tague, I come from Fenian stock, I'm Irish Catholic, but we were also loyalists. We're Darcy McGee Catholics, okay, and we have a very deep commitment to a kind of an anti-fascist, anti-nazi tradition on both sides of my mother's and father's sides. I have no difficulty in saying God save the king. I have no difficulty in saying that at all. I think the Commonwealth was a good idea. It didn't work out all that well.
Terry Glavin:A lot of people are reviving the notion of a Canada-Australia-New Zealand-United Kingdom kind of alliance. That's an interesting conversation to have. It doesn't mean being subject to some kind of imperial overseer. In fact, relations with the United States doesn't have to mean that either. But you'd have to kid yourself very, very, very long and hard if you won't acknowledge that that's the kind of relationship that we would enter into and have entered into. The deeper that we associate with China, the closer that we hitch our wagon to that team of horses, the more subservient we will become, the more vulnerable and susceptible we will become to the whims of the world's most successful and dynamic torture state. I mean, it is a matter of values, ultimately. I think and I make no apologies for adhering to the values of my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. There's nothing wrong with shooting Nazis.
Stewart Muir:Well, king Charles is our king and we are a part of the Commonwealth. There's a lot of commonality there, but I am still curious. I mean there will be, say, chinese Canadians who are thinking well, I immigrated from this country, I would like to use my cultural ties to China to be successful in business and in manufacturing, but now we have these tough, these divisions.
Terry Glavin:Yeah, that's my answer. Maybe it's because I run with a rough crowd, okay, maybe it's the company I keep. I've spent more time in synagogues than Catholic churches over the last 15 years. The people that I associate with, I mean, I'm barred from Russia. I can no longer go anywhere near Russia. I'm sanctioned by Russia not officially sanctioned by China yet but I know I'll never be able to return to China.
Terry Glavin:All of the people I know, the Chinese that I know, the Hong Kongers that I know don't have the view that you just expressed. They want rid and shut of the influence of the Chinese Communist Party in their lives and in their country. And I think you really have to choose sides. Sometimes. It does come down to that, and it's complicated because you know we talk about the Chinese community. There's no such thing as the Chinese community in Canada.
Terry Glavin:There used to be something that you could call the Chinese community in Canada. There were Cantonese-speaking people, taishan and Taishanese people, most of them from the five counties at the mouth of the Pearl River Delta. You know the Hongkars and so on, and about 10 years ago that started to change radically. I think Vancouver had about 100,000 people, if you include the family members as well and all the capital that they brought to Greater Vancouver. And you have significant candidates in the Liberal Party today who made enormous profits during that period, bringing Chinese investors over and flying them around Metro Vancouver in helicopters, and the enormous investment in real estate if you want to talk about house prices, which I think we should talk about and you have Mandarin is now the second language of the people that we describe as Chinese in Canada. It's not Cantonese anymore. So you have this strange phenomenon of immense wealth, immense wealth that has migrated to Canada and there's huge investments in real estate and in these property bolt holes and an influx of a population that is extremely wealthy, mandarin speaking, aligned with the Chinese Communist Party and embedded at every single level of the liberal party in the GTA.
Terry Glavin:You've got Mary Ng, you've got you know the people who you know Han Dong. I mean that was just some curious little hilarious side angle, right? I mean the story there that I think everybody misses, that Justin Trudeau knew very well that Han Dong was mobbed up from the very beginning. He knew that that riding election was monkey wrenched and rigged. He was told that by CSIS in the days before the election. I know that they knew because when Han Dong was running for the leadership, was running for the ticket in Don Valley North, I told Gerald Butts personally, gerald and I used to be almost kind of chummy they knew and that's the thing that I think we miss in this is that they knew, they know and they see nothing wrong with it.
Terry Glavin:Okay, people have to get their heads around it. You know. The overwhelming majority of Canadians might recoil in disgust and revulsion and think, oh my God, the Chinese are interfering with our elections and so on. The people involved in these writings and the people involved in the liberal establishment see nothing wrong with it. And once you get that into your head, everything seems. Everything starts to make sense. And I mean so. It's very subjective. I see something wrong with it.
Stewart Muir:I make no, well, suppose that whoever the prime minister was said, I'm going to call that glavia and ask him to stop just criticizing me and tell me what I should do about it. That's a tough one. What are that call? What are you going to say, terry, because you've been banging on about this all the time, here's your chance.
Terry Glavin:Well, I think, I mean, things have changed with the whole American business right, Trump has completely, you know, detonated what we used to call the liberal rules-based international order, but I think the emphasis has got to be on. I mean, I am very, very reluctant to propose policy remedies or predict the future, but to the extent that I am inclined to a certain direction, it would be energy sovereignty, for sure, for sure, Interprovincial, a far greater emphasis on interprovincial trade, a far greater emphasis on stability and security. I mean, I'm not proposing conscription, but it sure would be great if we had a massive investment in the Canadian reserves, which would address a lot of youth unemployment, for one thing, and it would mobilize people, particularly young people, and this is the election campaign that we don't talk about. This is what happened. The thing for me, if you can sort of separate it into a domestic issue, which is really hard to do because all of these things have international implications is the bottom third of the Canadian population, most of them are kids. Bottom third of the Canadian population, most of them are kids, the people that we call the lost generation.
Terry Glavin:What we've done to working class people, working class kids in this country, that's a hill I would die on, and it is. We pretend that we can build our way out of it. We can't build our way out of it. It's impossible and it won't happen. I mean, if you think that building is going to do anything for house prices, then explain Vancouver to me. Since the 1970s they've tripled the number of residential units within the city limits of. Vancouver. Should be the cheapest city in North America. It's the most expensive If you don't factor in the speculative value in land and if you don't understand the dynamics of a tulip bulb mania. We have tens of thousands of empty apartments and condos in this country. We've already got it All right.
Terry Glavin:It's not like we haven't been building but at the same time we have outsourced our immigration policy. We've run immigration policy as a series of rackets by strip mall colleges and by high-end universities and by immigration consultants and by provincial governments. You know there's a dizzying array of categories that we rely on. It's got to the point where the immigration department, stats and Statistics Canada the numbers don't add up. Nobody knows how many people live in Canada. I'll put it that way, it's the easiest way to put it Nobody knows. Nobody knows how many temporary permit holders live in this country. We know that at least a half a million their permits have expired and they're out there somewhere. And then there's another. The official federal guess is 50 to 500,000 Canadians who are working or people who are working illegally in Canada. Meanwhile, we brought more than a million people into the country every year for the last three and a half years.
Terry Glavin:We don't have enough houses to go around, we don't have enough jobs to go around, and if anybody thinks we can just add a bunch of houses, it's just not going to happen. Even if both the liberals and the conservatives were magically correct in their projections of how many houses they're capable of building, if we're really, really lucky, after all that construction, 10 years from now we would be in the same situation we're in now and we're not being honest about this. We're not being honest about it. We don't make anything.
Stewart Muir:We don't make the goods we consume. We don't make babies. We don't make the goods we consume. We don't make babies. We have to import those too. Yeah, One of the big lies Our industries. We have to import that. What do we make here?
Terry Glavin:Well, one of the big lies I think that's really upsetting is well, of course, you know these kids these days. They're just lazy and they just play video games and they don't want to have babies. So of course we have to invite all these hard workers to come and do their jobs. The cause and effect lines there are completely wrong. It's not like young people don't want to have families. How do you raise a family in a 700 square foot box on the eighth floor in downtown Victoria, here or Toronto or Vancouver? How many kids are you going to be able to fit into that and you can't afford to buy it anyway? Here or Toronto or Vancouver? How many kids are you going to be able to fit into that and you can't afford to buy it anyway? So I think a lot of this is about culture. The political economy and politics tends to be downstream of culture, and I kind of like it when Polyev talks about the Department of Defense and he says we need to build a warrior culture.
Terry Glavin:Okay, let's do that right, but I really think that we need to be honest about the dystopian culture that we have built for millions and millions of young Canadians. This is unforgivable and we're seeing a lot of the result of that in the 50,000 fentanyl deaths and that's stuff that, to be fair, the kind of radical remedies that would be required to actually deal with this stuff. I don't think either of the liberals or the conservatives are willing to say how bad it is. You don't get elected to office by saying, man, things are so bad I haven't the faintest idea how we could get out of them?
Stewart Muir:Well, one might say hey, boomers, you're going to die anyways and you'll give up your wealth. When that happens, why don't we just speed up the giving up the wealth part of that and redistribute that? Do you think that would be? Well, there are ways to do it.
Terry Glavin:There are ways to do it Taxing the unearned increment on property at point of sale, property at point of sale in order to, you know, at least help suppress the exponential growth in property values and also to fund a little bit of housing. I mean, I just get a kick out of it. You read it every day, you know, oh, another isn't this? Wonderful 700 unit housing has been approved and it only took 18 months, instead of three years, to get all the approvals done. And and you know, uh, 60, 60, you know 60 of the units are going to be affordable. Excuse me, why are we building anything that isn't affordable? And if we can't afford to build affordable housing, then we have to have a conversation about why we can't afford to build affordable housing crowd was the one that shows the gap between the US and Canada in GDP terms over the last 10 years.
Stewart Muir:It's kind of chugging away like this and then boom, it's just widened right out. And that is the original sin in the view of those who believe that if you can grow the distribution of wealth through growth of the GDP, through the gross domestic product, that's how you have American style lifestyles. Because we don't have that. You can buy a house in the States, even in a lot of the bigger cities, if you're not a highway junior.
Terry Glavin:Yeah, Well, I mean, I think if you look at GDP per capita, that's the thing. I don't know if there was anybody in the Liberal Party who just said you know what, if we just sort of opened the floodgate and basically, you know, invited people to come to Canada by the hundreds of thousands, millions, that that would actually expand the numbers on GDP and it didn't make us look good, I don't know.
Terry Glavin:I don't know what they were thinking. One of the enduring mysteries of the Trudeau government, the Trudeau era, past 10 years how much of this happened deliberately and how much was it by mistake. What?
Terry Glavin:do you think I don't know Half the time, I really don't know. But one of the things that I think the most crippling blow among many to Canada's cultural resilience was the lowering of the flags on Parliament Hill, on all federal buildings across the country, in that year-long national psychotic episode following the discovery of a mass grave that was never discovered. That was animated largely by the federal government and indigenous people were kind of encouraged to play along. Didn't lead that, by the way, didn't lead that whole thing. They were pushed into positions of leadership and essentially, you know whatever crazy things an indigenous person might have said about mass graves. Well, they watch the CBC like the rest of us, don't they? I think that was more damaging, I think, than anything else, because we really did need to believe in ourselves in order to Is that what fed the Canada is broken belief, because I think there is a strong belief for a sound 70% of Canadians I think it was 70% last year said yes, canada's broken.
Terry Glavin:So it's not just some snappy conservative slogan. This is what Canadians actually had come to believe. And one of the interesting things I think about the election campaign is it occurred and it was weird how, how Carney became kind of associated with elbows up and without you know, defending Canadian sovereignty. But there a real. There was going to be a backlash. It was going to there's all this pent-up, suppressed Canadian patriotism right that had really been beaten out of us for a decade by the Trudeau government and there was bound to be, there was bound to be a significant backlash to that and it happened. I mean, you got to remember the liberals wanted Trudeau gone. I mean he didn't have the support of his own caucus. If you want to see the back of that guy as soon as and I think you know Carney has really tried to, disingenuously or not, deliberately and immediately attempted're the largest European country outside of Europe or whatever it was, and it wasn't afraid to be seen in the company of monarchists and so on. So it was going to happen.
Terry Glavin:I think it was going to happen anyway, no matter what Trump did or said, no matter if Kamala Harris had won, we would still be stuck with these deep economic dysfunctions in Canada, and we would still have been at a point where Canadians were beginning to say, well, wait a minute. I'm actually not ashamed to be a Canadian. So all of these strange things combined at once to produce the election that we just had.
Stewart Muir:You've warned that the path ahead might be darker. What did you mean by that?
Terry Glavin:Well, I've always been notoriously optimistic, and one of the things that still leaves me hope for optimism is we don't have the faintest idea what's going to happen tomorrow. You know, I mean, I was reading this study the other day where economists failed to predict 148 of the last 152 recessions, I think it was. So you know, okay, economists, I love you guys, but give me a break. You know, you don't know what's going to happen any more than I do, and also, journalists are terrible soothsayers and fortune tellers. So I don't know what to say.
Terry Glavin:But one of the things that I do take heart in is the fact that nobody saw the Berlin Wall falling. You know, nobody saw that coming. Cia did not see it coming. This collapse of communism Didn't see it. The Arab Spring nobody saw it coming. Nobody saw it coming. And so the world can turn right. No one knows the hour of the night, no one knows the lash to the back of the slave that will cause him to rise up against his master.
Terry Glavin:So I live in hope, and I don't know that. I don't mean to be dreary, but I do think that we are not fully comprehending the precariousness of our situation as a free country. We're not fully grappling with the economic dislocation that so many Canadians are facing, just living paycheck to paycheck, you know, barely being able to make ends meet. And indeed you know, having been sort of lured into the idea that you can invest in property rather than anything productive, god forbid. You know, just some buy some property and now you've got tens of thousands of sort of mom and pop investors across the country that are walking away from their condo investments because they'll never they'll never get a return on it, because people simply can't afford to buy them and people don't want to live in 700 square foot boxes on them. You know, and the remedy that the both parties are proposing, you know, to build a kind of a lennon platz on top of all of these cities in Canada.
Terry Glavin:I don't think people are going to put up with it and I don't think it's going to work either when Ottawa sends out the plans, here you go.
Stewart Muir:you can build this in Edmonton or Toronto.
Terry Glavin:It's a very open and very real question, and a frightening one is does the future belong to China? I don't know the answer to that question.
Stewart Muir:Well, it's tended in that direction and they're willing it to be so through the things they're doing. They have power and money, and Trump is doing them a huge favor by getting you off the playing field in Africa and all over the world. So it seems like the next century is going to be China's.
Terry Glavin:It's quite possible that the coming century is China's century. It's quite possible that the coming century is China's century. It's quite possible. But as I say, you never know. Every once in a while there's a wobble in China which is very interesting. I mean, you know the degree to which they've invested in surveillance and artificial intelligence to control the population. The Chinese are not doing as well as you'd imagine right. Control the population the Chinese are not doing as well as you'd imagine right. And if you question anything, you know you'll be disappeared. You could be the most senior economist with a you know a think tank in Beijing that's intimately connected with the Politburo, the Chinese Communist Party, and if you say the wrong thing, that's the last anyone will hear from you.
Stewart Muir:You could be a Politburo member and you can take a vote on live television.
Terry Glavin:Yep, marshed out Yep, so I don't know. And I think there's a certain kind of emancipation and being able to say I don't know, I don't know. Nobody really does know. So I think you need to just do the right thing and we need to take care of each other. We need to build, build for ourselves. We need to be consuming our own energy first before we think about exporting it.
Terry Glavin:We need to, I mean, if we're going to play a role, a useful role, internationally on the energy file, why in God's name are we not supplying Europe with natural gas? What the hell is that about? And I mean, I would say even, I mean I'm kind of a China hawk, I confess. Right, kind of sounds like it anyway, right, I don't have any objection really to selling too much LNG to China. If it can wean them off coal and oil, okay, that's a transitional thing, whatever. And maybe there aren't enough buyers in the Pacific for our LNG. I don't even know that. I suspect there probably are. But the very idea that we've allowed Europe to sort of languish and to be so reliant on the Beijing satrapy there in Moscow, it really is quite astonishing that we haven't been able to marshal the will and the resources to say damn it, we're going to supply Europe with LNG, we're going to be their guys.
Stewart Muir:So, terry, there's a word I've been hearing for the last six weeks a lot. I don't even know what it means when I hear it from different people. That word is diversification, and I mean in trade terms. I mean because the US is not seemingly going to be a reliable trading partner, at least for four years. We need to diversify, but some people take that to mean one thing and others take it to mean another. What do you think it means?
Terry Glavin:Well, what I would like it to mean is a trade policy that affirms and restores and rebuilds our relationships with liberal democracies. That's what I would hope it would mean. And it's odd, it's a very odd thing that for the last few years, we've had, you know, Rosemary Ng or Mary Ng as our international trade minister. It's funny how that works. Eh, I mean international trade. Nobody talks about her Like it was supposed to be her job. And I, you know, I don't think that there's anyone who would deny the proposition that we are simply too reliant on the United States, we expect too much of them. I don't. I'm not particularly persuaded. You know the security umbrella argument and all that kind of stuff, yeah, Okay, but that's the way the Americans wanted it.
Stewart Muir:Okay.
Terry Glavin:That was the role that the Europeans and Canadians were expected to play in the post. You know, breton Accords and NATO arrangements were to buy American weapons if we're going to buy any weapons at all but basically be the kind of ladies' auxiliary down at the Legion Hall. That was our role. And then too many countries became comfortable in that role and then the Americans said, well, we don't want you to play it anymore. But the Americans were being the beneficiary of this, of these arrangements. Let's not kid ourselves, that's the way they wanted it. And so how do you? You know, what do you? How do you go about? You know, we used to. Maybe we were talking about friend shoring for a while, remember that term was kind of fancy. I guess it was Janet Yellen who was the Commerce Secretary, I think. And I guess it was Janet Yellen who's the Commerce Secretary, I think, and Christy Freeland, who I, by the way, have a lot of regard for, christy Freeland, whatever her economic stuff.
Stewart Muir:Bring manufacturing from countries we don't expect.
Terry Glavin:Yeah, she was good on Ukraine, she was good on China, she was good on Venezuela. I'm sorry, you know. I mean she was about as good as it got, and she was very much a proponent of this proposition that we should be emphasizing trade with fellow democracies and giving fellow democracies a leg up and allowing fellow democracies to do us a favor from time to time. I would hope that that is the kind of diversification in trade that we pursue, Because if all we're doing is, you know, the whole Harold Ennis thesis about Canada is basically to do with hewers of wood and drawers of water, Can we get out of that now, please, Please, about time? Yeah, I mean, you know, there's all kinds of reasons to develop our rare earth industries in Canada for our own purposes, not just to sell them right. Let's have an energy corridor in Canada, but let's emphasize the corridor, a corridor that's actually through Canada instead of partly through the United States. Let's get LNG to Europe. And why don't we build stuff? I mean, I'm not proposing some massive, you know, five-year plan, uh, you know kind of Warsaw Pact building project, but to the extent that we're building anything in this country, let's build it for ourselves, let's, and and I do think that the the one, the one thing that I think is something you can take to the bank, the one thing that I think that, no matter what happens next week or next month or next year, we need to be taking care of each other. We need to hunker down. It's going to be weird. It's going to be very strange. We don't know where things are going with China. It could implode. Be very strange. We don't know where things are going with China. It could implode in a year. We don't know where things are going with the United States. If we think the Democratic Party is our friend, okay If you say so.
Terry Glavin:The war in Ukraine, what's happening in Africa, the genocide in Darfur, I mean what's happening in Sudan alone, is just off the charts compared to anything that we've seen in recent years. Here we need to take care of each other, we need to hunker down and we need to be very, very clear about who our friends are and who we can't particularly rely on. And, um, we cannot be all things to all people. We have to build on what on our strengths, and our strengths do lie in, uh, natural resources, not only um, but we need to build stuff, feed, feed ourselves quote even clothe ourselves. We have to start thinking about that kind of thing feed ourselves, even clothe ourselves. We have to start thinking about that kind of thing, Not being so reliant on trade in the first place.
Stewart Muir:Well, terry Glavin, that's an almost superhuman task. Whoever is going to carry it forward needs to succeed for Canada, so let's hope that your thoughts have provided some timely, salutary advice for that. So thanks for joining me at Power Struggle today.
Terry Glavin:Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I hope I would have made some use of myself in some way, I think you have.
