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Economy

Trump’s Wakeup Call to Canada – Oil & Gas is Critical to our Economy

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8 minute read

From EnergyNow.Ca

By Jim Warren

On the bright side, at least President Donald Trump’s threat to impose 25% tariffs on Canadian oil and gas, might have alerted some Central Canadians to the critical importance of oil and gas to the national economy. Trump’s tariff pronouncements may also have forced the Laurentian Elite to rethink the wisdom of allowing anarchy to reign in our immigration system and border management.

Any nation hoping to be a serious player in the areas of international trade and diplomacy needs to meet several critical criteria. Without them a country can have difficulty marketing its goods and services to the world and in retaining meaningful economic and political sovereignty. One of the key criteria is for a country to have a good measure of control over its borders. But there are other elements critical to having effective sovereignty and independence. Having access to versatile, readily transportable energy commodities like oil and gas is one of those essentials. Accordingly, oil and gas are considered strategically important industries.

Lacking any of the major building blocks of strategic economic sovereignty, like the steel and aluminum industries and a thriving manufacturing sector, as well as highly developed transportation sector and the energy industries needed to support all the other sectors can leave a country vulnerable to domination by others. The vulnerabilities can lead to economic and political crises for a country during trade wars, international disputes leading to trade sanctions and embargoes, shooting wars and big natural disasters. A lack of strong trade and military alliances can make matters even worse.

It’s not like there wasn’t a mountain of evidence underlining the strategic importance of oil and gas in the last few years. How smart was it for Angela Merkel to allow Russia, a state run by a psychopath and his team of criminal oligarchs, to control a major portion of its energy supplies? The Ukraine gets it. After its war with Russia began, the Ukrainian government allowed Russian gas to be piped across its territory to Eastern Europe for nearly two years. This was because they realized messing with a commodity critical to bordering states such as Hungary, Slovakia and Romania was politically hazardous.

It is true that a country can still have a thriving economy even if it is missing one or two items from the basket of strategically important industries. Singapore, for example, needs to import fossil fuel but is still considered one of Southeast Asia’s economic tigers. But this is only possible because Singapore is so good at most everything else. It has several other economic engines that perform exceptionally well.

Looking back several decades reminds us that Japan risked entering a World War to obtain the petroleum they needed. To get it, the Japanese concluded they needed to conquer parts of Indonesia. (Similarly they wanted Southeast Asia for its rubber.) They knew these were actions the US wouldn’t tolerate, but they decided they had to do them anyway.

While we’re on the topic of World War II, it is instructive to recall Hitler fought it with one hand tied behind his back. Germany had no oil of its own and gasoline refined from coal and the oil available from their Romanian ally were never enough. That’s why the German’s placed such great hopes in capturing Russia’s Caspian oil fields in 1943. Similarly, Hitler invaded Norway to ensure access to Swedish iron ore—another strategic commodity Germany lacked.

Canada’s oil revenues along with the taxes and royalties collected from those revenues are derived almost entirely from the oil we export to the US. Our export revenues for 2022, following the worst of the covid years, were $123 billion. They accounted for 15.8% of all Canada’s exports and 6.6% of GDP. The following year saw exceptionally high oil prices globally. That year the value of oil Canada’s oil production hit $139 billion and accounted for 7.1% of GDP. Pull even half of those revenues out of the Canadian economy for very long and we’re in economic depression territory.

So, thanks for the wakeup call president Trump. The fact Trump has indicated he will postpone his final decision until February 1, is of some comfort. Danielle Smith has met with him at Mar-a-Lago to make the case against tariffs on Canadian crude. Smith is among the most knowledgeable and capable people there are when it comes to oil and gas production and trade. We couldn’t hope for a better advocate for the producing provinces. She’s certainly a cut above Justin Trudeau and anyone else in his cabinet. Let’s hope Smith she managed to convince Trump how imposing tariffs would harm the economies of both countries.

There is an obvious way to prevent being in this sort of situation in the future – diversify our export opportunities by building more pipelines to tidewater. In my last column I focused on the difficulties involved in getting a pipeline built to the Atlantic coast. The challenges identified focused on the barriers thrown up by Quebec’s politicians and environmentalists. Trump’s ongoing tariff pronouncements suggest it would be in Canada’s national strategic interest to use whatever legal measures are required to sweep those barriers aside in both Quebec and British Columbia to get new tidewater pipelines built.

There is plenty the federal government can do to override the demands of municipalities, special interest groups and provincial governments in support of high national purposes and in emergencies. Section 91 of the constitution gives parliament broad, albeit somewhat vague, powers to do what needs to be done “to make laws for the peace, order and good government of Canada” in all matters not exclusively the jurisdiction of the provinces. And, you would think that if the heavy hand of the Emergencies Act can be used to prevent horn honking and traffic snarls in Ottawa, it could be employed to prevent the environmentally sanctimonious from blocking projects critical to our economic and political sovereignty. Of course doing any of this will require voting the Liberals out of office.

Sorry premier Ford, retaliatory tariffs and export taxes can’t be the only tools employed; especially when they cause self-inflicted wounds.  Unfortunately, until we have more export opportunities for oil and gas we may need to limit our counter attacks on Americans to misleading travel directions and poor restaurant service.

Business

‘Time To Make The Patient Better’: JD Vance Says ‘Big Transition’ Coming To American Economic Policy

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JD Vance on “Rob Schmitt Tonight” discussing tariff results

 

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Hailey Gomez

Vice President JD Vance said Thursday on Newsmax that he believes Americans will “reap the benefits” of the economy as the Trump administration makes a “big transition” on tariffs.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1,679.39 points on Thursday, just a day after President Donald Trump announced reciprocal tariffs against nations charging imports from the U.S. On “Rob Schmitt Tonight,” Schmitt asked Vance about the stock market hit, asking how the White House felt about the “Liberation Day” move.

“We’re feeling good. Look, I frankly thought in some ways it could be worse in the markets, because this is a big transition. You saw what the President said earlier today. It’s like a patient who was very sick,” Vance said. “We did the operation, and now it’s time to make the patient better. That’s exactly what we’re doing. We have to remember that for 40 years, we’ve been doing this for 40 years.”

“American economic policy has rewarded people who ship jobs overseas. It’s taxed our workers. It’s made our supply chains more brittle, and it’s made our country less prosperous, less free and less secure,” Vance added.

Vance recalled that one of his children had been sick and needed antibiotics that were not made in the United States. The Vice President called it a “ridiculous thing” that some medicines invented in the country are no longer manufactured domestically.

“That’s fundamentally what this is about. The national security of manufacturing and making the things that we need, from steel to pharmaceuticals, antibiotics, and so forth, but also the good jobs that come along when you have economic policies that reward investing in America, rather than investing in foreign countries,” Vance said.

WATCH:

With a baseline 10% tariff placed on an estimated 60 countries, higher tariffs were applied to nations like China and Israel. For example, China, which has a 67% tariff on U.S. goods, will now face a 34% tariff from the U.S., while Israel, which has a 33% tariff, will face a 17% U.S. tariff.

“One bad day in the stock market, compared to what President Trump said earlier today, and I think he’s right about this. We’re going to have a booming stock market for a long time because we’re reinvesting in the United States of America. More importantly than that, of course, the people in Wall Street have done well,” Vance said.

“We want them to do well. But we care the most about American workers and about American small businesses, and they’re the ones who are really going to benefit from these policies,” Vance said.

The number of factories in the U.S., Vance said, has declined, adding that “millions of workers” have lost their jobs.

“My town [Middletown, Ohio], where you had 10,000 great American steel workers, and my town was one of the lucky ones, now probably has 1,500 steel workers in that factory because you had economic policies that rewarded shipping our jobs to China instead of investing in American workers,” Vance said. “President Trump ran on changing it. He promised he would change it, and now he has. I think Americans are going to reap the benefits.”

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COVID-19

Trump’s new NIH head fires top Fauci allies and COVID shot promoters, including Fauci’s wife

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From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X. “Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.

On day one of his new job as head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya removed four powerful agency heads, including Dr. Anthony Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, and others associated with the questionable handling of the COVID-19 shots.

Grady, who had served as chief of the agency’s Department of Bioethics, and other longtime Fauci allies in top posts at the NIH involved in the development and distribution of the untested COVID shots produced by Big Pharma were offered jobs in Alaska and other remote locales far away from the NIH’s sprawling Bethesda, Maryland, complex just outside Washington, D.C.

The purge came amid massive layoffs in health-related agencies under the umbrella of Health and Human Services (HHS), now headed by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement’s founder, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long questioned vaccine safety and American medicine’s focus on treating disease rather than preventing it.

A total of about 20,000 personnel – mostly bureaucrats – or about 25 percent of the HHS workforce have been or will be handed pink slips amid Kennedy’s realignment of the agency.

MAHA critics were quick to call Tuesday’s axing of Fauci confederates as “one of the darkest days in modern scientific history” fueled by Kennedy’s desire to exact revenge on Fauci’s former trusted associates who represent the antithesis of the MAHA movement.

However, the revamping of the federal government’s side of the health industry is no more harsh than the treatment meted out by those formerly in control who, at best, suppressed, and worst, punished those who questioned their iron grip on health-industry regulations and standards.

For years, Kennedy’s critics have dismissed his quest to revamp healthcare and his questioning of the efficacy of the COVID-19 mRNA jabs as anti-science, labeling him as an “anti-vaxxer” in order to suppress his messaging.

Dr. Francis Collins – whom Bhattacharya replaced as head of NIH – in an October 2020 email to Fauci condemned Bhattacharya as a “fringe epidemiologist” because he had co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized harmful COVID lockdown policies.

“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X.

“Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.

“We spend 4X more than Italy on healthcare — and live 7 years less. Dead last in cancer rates. This isn’t science — it’s a system profiting off sick kids,” explained Calley Means, RFK Jr. HHS advisor during an interview with Laura Ingraham following the NIH firings.

“Firing the people who oversaw this? That’s step one,” declared Means.

Other NIH officials who were offered reassignments were Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who succeeded Fauci as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Clifford Lane, a close Fauci ally who served as deputy director for clinical research at NIAID, and Dr. Emily Erbelding, NIAID’s microbiology and infectious diseases director.

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