Opinion
Oh For Truck’s Sake – a KinderMorgan Story
By Cory G. Litzenberger, CPA, CMA, CFP, C.Mgr – President & Founder of CGL Strategic Business & Tax Advisors (CGLtax.ca)
Say you have a 1953 F-100 pickup truck. It has a 110 horsepower V8 that still works fine. You’ve done regular maintenance and repairs, and you have fixed it repeatedly to keep it on the road, but the job it performs just isn’t enough anymore to meet the demand of your customers.
The old truck isn’t what it used to be. You can’t accelerate as fast, can’t get to where you want to go as quickly, it costs more to run, and the towing capacity isn’t what you need to be at full efficiency.
To most people, the truck is a classic, and many would see it as something worth saving and restoring. Now, you aren’t willing to part with it just yet either, but you know that in order to keep your business running you can’t continue with only this old truck.
As a result, the time has come for an upgrade, so you can continue operations. The new model has an engine with over 400 horsepower, better fuel efficiency, new technology, more safety features, and can easily meet the needs of your business and the needs of your customers for many years to come.
There is only one catch.
You can’t easily get the truck.
The Canadian government is requiring you to have permits, licenses, and approvals before getting the truck.
Then once you get them, the BC government is saying that you shouldn’t have been approved to get the truck.
While you patiently file all papers and deal with all legal proceedings, there are now protestors and politicians blocking any route you try to prevent you from getting the truck.
Meanwhile, you keep using your old truck and see your competitors starting to get new trucks in other jurisdictions and start shipping to your customers while you still patiently wait for your own new truck.
But now the time has come to do something.
If you don’t get your new truck soon, you will have no choice but to go get your new truck somewhere else or you could lose a lot of business.
You aren’t asking for money, you’re just tired of being patient. Your business depends on it, and the delays preventing you from getting the truck are threatening your business.
All you want is for the protestors to move and the governments to stop changing their minds, so you can have the truck.
So what does the government decide to do to help you?
Instead of removing the protestors and sticking to the approvals already granted, they will buy your old truck and bring in their own new truck to compete against you instead.
Say goodbye to something that has been working for you for 65 years, and say hello to your new competitor.
So instead of helping your business, they are telling you to leave it behind and go somewhere else.
Now at least you’ll have the money to put towards that new truck you want, except now you not only have to do it elsewhere, you now have another competitor also getting a new truck, and still has the old one that you were going to use to help pay for the new one.
If this were you, would you ever want to come back to Canada?
Personally, I would enjoy my new truck somewhere else and never look back.
From the X account of Andrew Scheer
Mark Carney spent his entire life promoting the carbon tax.
Now he’s trying to scam Canadians out of billions and to do it he’s put a whole crew together.
It could be the biggest con job in Canadian history. Only YOU can stop it! pic.twitter.com/1DyywsynBN
— Andrew Scheer (@AndrewScheer) February 22, 2025
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Newt Gingrich
In an amazing show of courage, Vice President J.D. Vance offered an intervention for some of our European allies.
That is the best way to think of the two historic speeches he made in France and Germany last week.
In Paris, Vice President Vance pledged the United States would do whatever it takes to lead the world in the development of Artificial Intelligence. He went on to assert that Europe’s automatic response to regulate technological change rather than adapt to it was doomed to fail.
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Vance warned the Europeans that the Trump administration would retaliate to protect American high-tech companies from being fined and regulated by the European community.
Then, Vance went to the Munich Security Conference. It is the annual meeting of European leaders concerned about defense and threats to peace. The Vice President shocked the Europeans by launching a frontal assault on the decay of their political system.
As Vance put it:
“But while the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine, and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense, the threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values — values shared with the United States of America.”
He then went through a litany of specific complaints about the behavior of different European countries. They ranged from failing to control immigration, suppressing free speech, and Brussels seeking to control and define futures of independent countries such as Hungary and Romania.
The leading French newspaper, Le Monde (their equivalent of the New York Times) asserted that the American Vice President was declaring “ideological war on Europe.”
Le Monde was right. The European elites have been decaying for at least two generations. They hide behind their privileged status and take ideological positions that feel good but are destructive. Europe’s failures are devastating for most everyday Europeans.
I have personal knowledge about this. I have a Ph.D. in Modern European History – and I have lived in France, Germany, Belgium and Italy. As a young Army dependent, we were living in France when the French Army came back from Algeria, killed the French Fourth Republic and brought back General Charles de Gaulle to establish the Fifth Republic.
It is now the longest serving non-royal government in French history.
The European elites value each other’s opinions more than they value serving the people of Europe. The European elites live in a fantasy world of green policies that destroy industries and jobs, welfare policies which destroy the work ethic, and immigration policies which undermine the popular culture. They simply hope for a peaceful world without a strong military.
Meanwhile, state enforced speech codes protect Islamic extremists at the expense of local citizens.
The result has been a steady decline of European culture, economic development, and defensive capacity.
The Afghan Islamist who wounded more than two dozen people and killed a mother and her two-year-old daughter with a car two days before the supposed security conference signals the willful avoidance of reality at the heart of the elite European worldview.
To be clear, I admire European civilization. I believe America is far stronger and safer if Europe is healthy and capable of growing and defending itself.
I hope vice president Vance’s intervention at least starts European elites thinking about what must be done to revive their continent.
For more commentary from Newt Gingrich, visit Gingrich360.com. Also subscribe to the Newt’s World podcast.
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