Opinion
Biden’s Most Shocking Lie
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
A slack-jawed old man looked straight at the floor and lied.
“When [Trump] was president, they were still killing people in Afghanistan and he didn’t do anything about that,” President Joe Biden rasped.
Watching the first presidential debate of 2024, I couldn’t believe Biden dared utter the word, “Afghanistan.” Our current commander-in-chief surrendered 20 years of hard-fought American accomplishments in that dusty, God-forsaken country. Biden handed Afghanistan to the Taliban — along with $8 billion worth of equipment and $2 trillion in lost investment.
Did he think we forgot that the Afghanistan debacle was on his watch? In office for less than three months, Biden insisted the scant 2,500 American troops in Afghanistan be completely withdrawn by Sept. 11, 2021. For comparison, note that Biden had ten times the number of troops guarding Washington for his own inauguration.
Though he later attempted to blame President Donald Trump for his Afghanistan disaster, Biden gave the order and it is archived right here at the Department of Defense.
By broadcasting our withdrawal date to the enemy, abandoning our most strategic military bases including Bagram Air Base and ignoring his top military advisors, Biden turned Operation Enduring Freedom into an enduring embarrassment for the United States.
Biden’s retreat from Kabul was the most humiliating American defeat since the British sacked Washington and burned the White House, Capitol and Navy Yard in August 1814.
As defeats tend to do, the debacle weakened American deterrence around the world. The failed Afghanistan withdrawal undoubtedly emboldened Vladimir Putin in his invasion of Ukraine six months later.
On CNN’s debate stage, Biden shamelessly doubled-down on his lie with yet another — even bigger — lie.
“The truth is, I’m the only president in this century… this decade… that [sic] doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world like [Trump] did,” he said.
For a commander-in-chief to forget the troops who have given their last measure of devotion on his watch is unconscionable. In August 2021, trying to fulfill Biden’s foolish Afghanistan orders, 11 Marines, one Army soldier and one Navy corpsman were killed in the bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport Abbey Gate in Kabul.
Did Biden also forget the three service members who were killed just this January in a drone attack in Jordan?
I served in Afghanistan in 2010-11 and was there again in December 2020 with acting-Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller. We had flown into Kabul to visit troops and meet with Afghanistan’s last U.S. commander, Gen. Austin S. Miller.
Here is a fact, briefed to us while there: In the last eight months of Trump’s first term, there wasn’t a single hostile casualty in Afghanistan. Let that sink in. Afghanistan was more peaceful under President Trump than at any other time since prior to America’s invasion in 2001.
Partisan pundits won’t admit it, but after four years of Trump in office, Afghanistan was stable.
America hadn’t entered any new conflicts. Putin dared not set a toe into Ukraine. Peace was breaking out all over the Middle East with the signing of the Abraham Accords. Russia wasn’t rushing into the arms of China and Iran. Even North Korea had paused its missile tests. In short, the world was more stable and secure.
Let’s hope most Americans will vote to return to Trump’s more effective foreign policy and military strategy.
Morgan Murphy is a former DoD press secretary, national security adviser in the U.S. Senate, a veteran of Afghanistan.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
From the Fraser Institute
By Tegan Hill and Jake Fuss
The Parliamentary Budget Officer recently estimated federal government support for EV initiatives will cost Canadian taxpayers $31.4 billion, which represents roughly $1,043 per tax filer.
According to a new Leger poll, a significant percentage of Gen Z and millennial Canadians don’t believe that billions of dollars in government subsidies to build electric vehicle (EV) plants—including $5 billion to Honda, $13.2 billion to Volkswagen and $15 billion to Stellantis—will benefit them. And based on a large body of research, they’re right.
The poll, which surveyed Canadians aged 18 to 39 who are eligible to vote, found that only 32 per cent of respondents believe these subsidies (a.k.a. corporate welfare) will be of “significant benefit to your generation” while 28 per cent disagree and 25 per cent are on the fence.
Unfortunately, this type of taxpayer-funded corporate welfare isn’t new. The federal government spent an estimated $84.6 billion (adjusted for inflation) on business subsidies from 2007 to 2019, the last pre-COVID year of data. Over the same period, provincial and local governments spent another $302.9 billion on business subsidies for their favoured firms and industries. And these figures exclude other forms of government support such as loan guarantees, direct investments and regulatory privileges, so the actual cost of corporate welfare during this period was much higher.
The Trudeau government has shown a particular proclivity for corporate welfare. According to a recent study, federal subsidies have increased by 140 per cent from 2014/15 to 2023/24. But again, the money used to fund these subsidies isn’t free—its funded by taxpayers. The Parliamentary Budget Officer recently estimated federal government support for EV initiatives will cost Canadian taxpayers $31.4 billion, which represents roughly $1,043 per tax filer.
And Canadians are right to be skeptical. Despite what the Trudeau or provincial governments claim, there’s little to no evidence that corporate welfare creates jobs (on net) or produces widespread economic benefits.
Instead, by giving money to select firms, the government simply shifts jobs and investment away from other firms and industries—which are likely more productive, as they don’t require government funding to be economically viable—to the government’s preferred industries and firms, circumventing the preferences of consumers and investors. If Honda, Volkswagen and Stellantis are unwilling to build their EV battery plants in Canada without corporate welfare, that sends a strong signal that those projects make little economic sense.
Finally, higher taxes (or lower government spending in other areas) ultimately fund corporate welfare. And higher taxes depress economic activity—the higher the rates, the more economic activity is discouraged.
Unfortunately, the Trudeau government believes it knows better than investors and entrepreneurs, so it continues to use taxpayer money to allocate scarce resources—including labour—to their favoured projects and industries. And since politicians spend other people’s money, they have little incentive to be careful investors.
Canadians, including young Canadians, are right to be skeptical of corporate welfare. As the evidence suggests, there’s little reason to think it will lead to any economic benefit for them.
Authors:
From the Fraser Institute
Business investment is a foundational requirement for a prosperous economy. It provides the resources to establish new companies, expand existing ones, and invest in new factories, machinery, and technologies. Business investment in Canada has declined markedly for over a decade. It is a major reason why Canadian living standards are stagnating in absolute terms and declining relative to many peer countries, particularly the United States.1
One factor behind declining business investment is the heavy regulatory burden imposed by the current federal government on the extraction sector, which includes: mining, quarrying, and oil and gas. Since 1990, this sector averaged 17.3 percent of total non-residential business investment, and reached as high as 28.7 percent of the total in 2013.2
The federal government has been particularly critical of the oil and gas sector. As an example of such sentiment, in a 2017 speech Prime Minister Trudeau said it would take time to “phase out” the oil sands, indicating the long-term goal of the federal government to eliminate the fossil fuel industry (Muzyka, 2017). The prime minister’s comments were followed by a number of new regulations that directly or indirectly targeted the oil and gas sector:
• In 2019, Bill C-69 amended and introduced federal acts to overhaul the governmental review process for approving major infrastructure projects (Parliament of Canada, 2018). The changes were heavily criticized for prolonging the already lengthy approval process, increasing uncertainty, and further politicizing the process (Green, 2019).
• In 2019, Bill C-48 changed regulations for vessels transporting oil to and from ports on British Columbia’s northern coast, effectively banning such shipments and thus limiting the ability of Canadian firms to export (Parliament of Canada, 2019).
• Indications from the federal government that a mandatory hard cap on GHG emissions would eventually be introduced for the oil and gas sector. In 2023, such a cap was introduced (Kane and Orland, 2023), excluding other GHG emitting sectors of the economy (Watson, 2022).
• In early 2023, the government announced new fuel regulations, which will further increase the cost of fuels beyond the carbon tax (ECCC, 2023).
• In late 2023, with limited consultation with industry or the provinces, the Trudeau government announced major new regulations for methane emissions in the oil and gas sector, which will almost inevitably raise costs and curtail production (Tasker, 2016).
The growing regulatory burden has a number of implications that impede or even prohibit oil and gas investment, by increasing costs and uncertainty, making it less attractive to invest in Canada. Both a 2022 survey of mining companies and a 2023 survey of petroleum companies identified the same three risks as inhibiting investment in Canadian provinces—uncertainty over disputed land claims, protected areas, and environmental regulations.3
It is also important to recognize that the Trudeau government introduced a carbon tax in 2016, which conceptually should replace regulations related to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions such as those listed previously rather than be an additional policy lever used to manage GHG emissions.4
The regulations discussed above, as well as direct decisions by the federal government had tangible effects on the oil and gas sector:
• In late 2016, the Northern Gateway pipeline running from northern Alberta to Kitimat, British Columbia was cancelled by the Trudeau government, further limiting the ability of firms in Alberta to get their products to export markets (Tasker, 2016).
• In 2017, TransCanada Corp. cancelled its $15.7 billion Energy East pipeline, which would have transported oil from Alberta to Saint John, New Brunswick. The project was cancelled in large measure due to changes in national policy regarding the approval of large infrastructure projects (Canadian Press, 2017).
• While the Trans Mountain pipeline from Edmonton to Burnaby, BC was approved, Kinder Morgan exited the project in 2018 due to uncertainties and questions about the economics of the project, forcing the Trudeau government to take the ownership. The cost of the project has since increased by more than four times the original estimate to $30.9 billion (Globe and Mail Editorial Board, 2023).
• In 2019, US-based Devon Energy announced plans to exit Canada’s oilsands to pursue more profitable opportunities in the United States (Healing, 2019).
• In 2020, Teck Resources abandoned its $20 billion Frontier oilsands mine in Alberta because of increasing regulatory uncertainty (Connolly, 2020).
• In 2020, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway decided not to invest $4 billion in Saguenay LNG, a liquified natural gas plant and pipeline, due to political and regulatory risks (CBC News, 2020).
The divestitures above are not an exhaustive list. Other companies including Norwegian Equinor (formerly Statoil), France’s TotalEnergies SE (formerly Total SA), US-based Murphy Oil, and ConocoPhillips have all reduced their investments in Canada’s oil and gas sector.
The government’s mounting regulations and hostilities towards the oil and gas sector did not go unnoticed outside of Canada. A 2018 article in The Economist listed the many failures to develop pipeline infrastructure in Canada to bring much-demanded oil and gas to market. Indeed, the piece called it a “three-ring circus” that risked “alienating foreign investors who are already pulling back from Canada” (Economist, 2018).
It is first important to acknowledge the overall decline in business investment in Canada since 2014. Overall, total non-residential business investment (inflation-adjusted) declined by 7.3 percent between 2014 and 2022.5, 6
The decline in business investment in the extractive sector (mining, quarrying, and oil and gas) is even more pronounced. Since 2014, business investment excluding residential structures and adjusted for inflation has declined from $101.9 billion to $49.7 billion in 2022, a reduction of 51.2 percent (figure 1).7
A similar decline in business investment of 52.1 percent is observed for conventional oil and gas, falling from $46.6 billion in 2014 to $22.3 billion in 2022 (inflation-adjusted) (figure 1). In percentage terms the decline in non-conventional oil extraction was even larger at 71.2 percent, falling from $37.3 billion in 2014 to $10.7 billion in 2022.8
Simply put, the declines in the extraction sector are larger than the total decline in overall non-residential business
investment between 2014 and 2022, indicating the magnitude of the overall effect of the decline in business investment in this sector.
The importance of business investment to the health of an economy and the rising living standards of citizens cannot be overstated. One of the major challenges facing Canadian prosperity are regulatory barriers, particularly in the oil and gas sector.
In that light, much of the regulatory burden added over the last eight years to the oil and gas sector should simply be eliminated. In some ways this is already being forced on the federal government through court decisions. For instance, in October of 2023, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that parts of Bill C-69 were unconstitutional as they infringed on areas of exclusive provincial jurisdiction, requiring revisions to the Act (Dryden, 2023).
A careful and clear analysis is needed of the costs and benefits of the regulatory measures imposed on the oil and gas sector, including Bill C-48, the recent methane regulations, and the emissions cap. Based on this analysis, the regulatory measures should be adjusted to help improve the ability of Canada’s energy sector to attract and retain investment.
Author:
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Ottawa’s Regulatory Assault on the Extraction Sector and Its Impact on Investment