Transcript
SPEAKER_03
0:02
This is The Strategist, episode 1254. My name is Zain Velji. With me as always, Stephen Carter, Corey Hogan.
Corey
0:30
that's that's a big one
Carter
0:31
one yeah i'm pretty excited about it it's um as
Carter
0:34
as you know formula one is the best sport and daniel ricardo and today uh yuki sanota were
Carter
0:40
were announced for alfatoria but i was pissed off that they did it the japanese grand prix it plays into racial stereotypes in my mind
Corey
0:48
i mean you could be making all of this up in my opinion
Carter
0:50
opinion i could be jesus
SPEAKER_03
0:52
jesus christ carter i would have preferred more of your afl bullshit cory i see your iron will cracked 30 seconds after after declaring you were off Twitter last episode and you're back giving middle-aged white person takes. Any particular tweets you want to plug?
Corey
1:05
Yeah, I got lured back by all of this APP stuff, this Alberta pension plan stuff. It was a little too much not to yell about. And, you know, as you've sort of identified, I do feel as a middle-aged white person, my opinions are out to the world. So I talked a bit about the fact that this was kind of a mean thing to do to the rest of our Canadians. I talked about the math not working.
Corey
1:30
I mean, they're all there for people to go through. I think you
Carter
1:32
you missed the embarrassing part. This is embarrassing for Jim Denning. That's what I jumped in on. I threw out that it was embarrassing for us as a province. So I also tweeted, Zane, thanks for asking me about it.
SPEAKER_03
1:43
You know what? I'm definitely sorry I asked. Let's move it on to our first segment. Our first segment, what color is the air on your pension planet?
Corey
1:50
Oh, that's pretty good. I get it. It's like what
Corey
1:52
what color planet, but
Corey
1:54
also pension plans. Yeah, it's really nice.
SPEAKER_03
1:57
Guys, I want to spend a bit of time on this one. This week, Danielle Smith stood up with Jim Dinning to give the results of a study on Alberta pulling out of the Canada pension plan. This is, of course, after a campaign where she said the pension would not and should not be an issue. Yeah,
Carter
2:09
Yeah, I mean, do
Carter
2:10
do we trust Danielle Smith at all, Zane? Like, Danielle Smith says one thing and then does something completely different. It's not like she campaigned on a renewables ban for six months, right? She didn't go up and say, you know what, we really have to stop the renewables, Zane.
Carter
2:24
This is who she is. This is how she's going to govern.
Carter
2:28
Issues are going to fly at us one after the other. And it's not like Jason Kenney, where,
Carter
2:32
where, you know, the issue was outside of his control. We did not anticipate, no one anticipated the
Carter
2:39
And so it's unfair to say, oh, Jason Kenney did all this stuff that we didn't expect. He
Carter
2:43
He didn't campaign on it.
Carter
2:44
Jason Kenney had a box. And Corey, you might even know this. You know, there's probably a book somewhere where
Carter
2:50
where Jason Kenney went through his book and said, I promise this did this. promised this, did this.
Corey
2:56
I mean, 100%. That's exactly how he did it. The platform that I think most Albertans gave a bit of a glance to, he considered canon. This feels totally different.
SPEAKER_03
3:06
I'm not sure where to start with this one. There's lots of angles. But let's start here. The report suggested that Alberta was entitled to more than half the total value of the Canadian pension plan, and that between that and our young population, we're promised an Alberta pension that means more retirement income, lower contributions. Lots of people immediately said that's bullshit. Corey, lay this out for us. What the hell is going on? And why are people suggesting this is total nonsense?
Corey
3:29
Well, I mean, we've already sort of dived into it here. So let's just talk about it. The panel came out with this announcement. It was leaked the day before. It was supported by a Jack Mintz column the day before. Hold that thought, watch that space, because one of the things I think is super interesting is this land, sea, and air attack that the government is going to be using on the citizens of Alberta to try to sell this to everybody here but i
Corey
3:53
mean one of the reasons why people immediately reacted and said this is kind of bullshit is because on its face it's bullshit like you you don't need to be super good at math to understand that alberta is not 53 of the canada pension plan you know we're not 53 of the people in there even with there being a separate quebec pension plan we're we're like 20
Carter
4:16
there's a whole bunch of math on this cory it's not just that one piece of math in terms of our population I mean, it
Carter
4:21
it caps out at higher income, you know, high income contributions.
Carter
4:26
contributions. It does not necessarily mean, oh, we've got a higher income. Ergo, we've given so much more. Fifty three percent. Like what kind of cocktail napkin math was this that Jim Denning was doing when this report was being created? I mean, it's I thought Steve Allen debased himself. I'm just in shock that anybody would allow their name to be put onto this. But it's just it's absolutely not. We got an email from a guy named John. We actually have subscribers.
Carter
4:57
he made a really good point. That point is just simply this. Alberta
Carter
5:00
Alberta does not contribute to CPP.
Carter
5:03
Canadian workers contribute to CPP.
Carter
5:07
That is at the core of this is that the same thing with equalization.
Carter
5:11
Alberta does not contribute to equalization.
Carter
5:14
Canadians contribute to equalization.
Corey
5:18
I think it's even more clear than that. And I couldn't agree more. Actually, one of those tweets Zane was talking about was on this very particular topic. It's this idea that when people say, oh, Alberta has paid more into CPP than it's received. It's a net contributor. That's nonsense. That doesn't mean anything. thing there are no here
Corey
5:36
here i am alberta doesn't contribute to cpp i contribute to cpp you do working canadians contribute to it i contribute up to the yearly maximum pensionable earnings and then i'm done and when i retire i will pull that money out and we will be square and it is designed to be square over the life of an individual not over a province all that jim denning and daniel smith have identified frankly is that alberta has a young population and when you're working you pay into cpp and when you're not you pay out but here's a funny thing i'm not going to be the age i am forever and ultimately that loop does have to come to a close it's like in the movie dave you know where there's those loops that had to be i was
Carter
6:18
was thinking of dave and i thought about dave how he screws himself in the future that's
Carter
6:23
that's exactly what i thought and that's all we're doing with this is we're screwing ourselves in the future.
SPEAKER_03
6:28
That comment brought to you by Flair Airlines, Flair Airlines. We also don't care about the future consequences of our actions. Carter, I want to get you in on this. What's your top line take?
Carter
6:38
do you have a top line take? I mean, our top line take is that it's not good for Alberta. It makes us look bad within Confederation. We're already the ones out there whining about equalization. Now we're whining about APP. The stuff that has been created around all of this, It's based on a on a on a falsehood. And that falsehood is that Alberta is in some fashion being taken advantage of. You've made it very clear this is about equal in equal out type of plan that isn't there to protect us as we age. This is not some sort of tax grab by Ottawa where they're stealing money from us and redistributing it to others. My top line is that we look like fucking assholes. Thanks, Sam. Corey
SPEAKER_03
7:22
Corey respond to that? Well,
Corey
7:24
yeah, I mean, it's kind of hard to argue that he's wrong on this point. And actually, this is kind of the fundamental challenge I have with this. Look, you can go through and you can make an argument on the merits of whether it makes sense for there to be a Canada pension plan or an Alberta pension plan in the province of Alberta. I think that the argument's pretty one-sided, personally. I think it lands on Canada pension plan making sense for a bunch of reasons maybe we'll get into. They largely have to do with scale being so important in this space, The idea that they're de-risked by larger population pools. Both of those things would be lessened with an Alberta pension plan. But at the end of the day, you're kind of telling on yourself that you're a giant asshole. If you're sitting there and you're saying, hey, look at this pension plan. I found this one neat trick that the federal government doesn't want you to know. The way this formula was written in this one way. If we pull out, we think we could get half of the pension, half of the pension. like you're talking about ruining the the retirement of tens of millions of canadians like that is your clever strategy that's
Carter
8:26
it just doesn't even make sense like what are you going to do with that money like what are we going to do with that capital right and that that's the other side of this coin the capital is going to be invested in a dying industry that's kind of the promise of this the promise of this is we need more capital to invest in our oil sands because china's not doing it anymore because the united states isn't investing in our oil oil sands anymore. No one else is investing in our oil sands. And because of that, we need to have more investment.
Carter
8:53
That's dumb ass thinking and getting $500 billion to invest in dying industry is not how the Alberta government is actually going to advance our province.
Corey
9:05
Well, it's an interesting one, because at the end of the day, if you really want to kind of strip away all the bullshit, and I think the notion that we would get 53% of CPP is part of of the bullshit. But there are arguments for and against us being in our own pension, as I was saying. And actually, Trevor Toome wrote a really good paper about this that got released yesterday as well. I mean, I think it's a great primer for anybody who wants to understand the language of the pension, the nature of pensions, some of the considerations here. And I'm going to summarize his work, and I hope I don't do it too poorly. But what it comes down to is, yeah, at this moment, moment, maybe Albertans could have lower premiums or higher money on the back end here when you retire at this moment. But it's riskier, right? So it increases risk. And that's something that Albertans need to sort of consider here. So yeah, that's one of the things that would be in theory of benefit, this idea that you would have, at the moment, potentially lower contributions or higher outputs. The other thing, though, is exactly what Stephen's talking about here. It's this notion that you then have an enormous pot of money that the government can direct towards alberta industries and in fact in this nonsense survey that was put out uh that was one of the things that was listed right like this idea of hey couldn't this be a benefit that we invest in all the
Carter
10:26
the nonsense survey i mean this whole engagement structure is so broken like we don't actually engage now to try and get real feedback from people we're engaging to try and push pull people
Carter
10:38
people into the positions that we want them to take so many people already talking about how broken this fucking survey is and
Carter
10:45
it's it it's a disservice frankly to to the legacy of the communication staff that you had that you know we
Carter
10:53
we used to have a balanced communication staff now it's a propaganda fucking arm again like this is ridiculous well
Corey
11:00
well you know truly
Corey
11:01
truly we did try really hard to make sure that it was the professional public service communications arm I'm not saying there weren't tension moments in my tenure there, frankly, with both premiers that I served. But this
Corey
11:13
this is a pretty wild survey. And I think it goes back to something that I was putting on the table earlier, which is the government seems absolutely hellbent on using everything at its power to try to make this a thing. And so if you look back, there were polls in the spring. And in those polls, Albertans were somewhere between 20 and 30% supportive of leaving the Canada pension plan, like rock bottom numbers, which is why it didn't come up in the election. It's why Danielle Smith said during the election, we're not going to do this. But now, you know, between this kind of miracle math that's allegedly going to give us half of the pension plan, all of the benefits, they just love you to know, to the point that the survey is like, which of these awesome things do you want to do first with all of the great money we're going to have available if we just fuck the rest of the country this way? You know, the reality is there's no handbrakes here. They are going all in and all out on this. I can't tell you the number of Government of Alberta ads I've run across today. As a result, I suspect of either during the survey or just living in Alberta. Yeah,
Carter
12:12
Yeah, I think that it's living in Alberta. RTC Car Carter,
Corey
12:14
Carter, respond to that.
Carter
12:15
Zayn, I've been talking the whole time. Anyways, I think it's about Alberta.
Carter
12:21
And, you know, they
Carter
12:24
are trying to change it from a 20% issue to
Carter
12:27
to a 50% issue. I
Carter
12:28
I mean, the other piece that's coming on this is the actual referendum
Carter
12:33
that we're going to have to actually decide this. Part of me is like, go
Carter
12:38
go for it. Go to a referendum. There's no fucking way we could lose. But do you remember? I don't know. Maybe you don't remember. There was a recent election that
Carter
12:45
that we thought we couldn't lose.
Carter
12:48
Right. And now it's it's all over because now, you know, bottom
Carter
12:52
bottom line, if you promise Albertans something that they desperately want, they will vote for you and
Carter
12:59
and they want more money in their pockets. They want a better pension plan. They want more security as they age. These
Carter
13:04
These are things that Daniel Smith is promising without talking about the other side of it, the costs associated with it, the risks associated with it. Right now, the CPP is backed by a federal government that
Carter
13:16
that prints the fucking money, right?
Carter
13:18
right? Like, would you rather have it backed by the provincial government or the federal government? I choose the feds, right? Right. What are we going to do? Get our fucking payout in in some sort of, you
Carter
13:29
you know, oil and gas products like the way that we pay, you know, royalty rates into the into the Northwest Upgrader where we ship barrels of oil to them. Like, what the fuck is this? Like, it's just not you
Carter
13:41
you and I are going to get three barrels of oil and that's going to be called our fucking retirement. You just know it.
Corey
13:48
Well, yeah, I mean, that's that's that's a bit of a dystopian future.
SPEAKER_03
13:52
future. That comment brought to you by Flair Airlines, Flair Airlines, we also don't care about a future consequences of our AAC actions. Great
Corey
13:59
Great point, Zane. I think you made that one already. But it's more than that. Like, it's not just that they're not caring about the future consequences of the actions. It's that the present consequences are pretty big, too. And so I'm fascinated to see a poll or anything, frankly, that tells me how Albertans reacted to this initial shock and awe. Because, you know, there is a certain wag the dog component to this. There will be conservative supporters who just, even in the polls before who were opposed to it, will say, yeah,
Corey
14:27
yeah, that's fine. And frankly, there'll be supporters of all sorts of parties across the board who will say, actually, I wouldn't mind a bit of a higher retirement. i do
Corey
14:35
do wonder though if it's not just fundamentally built on like
Corey
14:38
like too much of a house of cards i i interestingly even if you were actually friend of the pod jeremy farkas mentioned this on our discord uh that uh this issue is losing in the calgary herald comment section uh that's that's probably not great for
Corey
14:55
for our uh you know conservative government is
Carter
14:57
is there a possibility that they brought it in knowing that it would lose but it's just one of those things that they have to do to to placate the the
Carter
15:04
right wing to to ensure that take back alberta doesn't take back the ucp um
Carter
15:09
um i mean these are the types of things that i wonder about that's why we got our renewables freeze right that's why danielle smith is going to have to look at some sort of you know family first anti-trans youth type of fucking legislation even though danielle smith she's a lot of things a lot of things that aren't necessarily good but i don't think in her core she's a bigot um
Carter
15:29
um but here Here we are. I think she's going to have to bring that legislation just to stay as the leader. Just that, I think that's the way we are. That's our future.
Carter
15:47
Okay, obviously that was weird.
Carter
15:56
you have a sense of what's going on with Zayn? Zayn, you okay, man? like you
Corey
16:00
you uh you maybe want to take a beat but leave this to us for a while let's take
Carter
16:04
take it let's take this for a second cory let's you and i just focus
Carter
16:07
focus on this i
Carter
16:10
from my point of view um
Carter
16:13
this isn't this isn't necessarily bad just for the just for the pension plan problem i think the pension plan is bad but
Carter
16:20
but what this signals to me is that all the other things that were bad that were in those firewall letters that ken bosenkuhl wrote that he's running away from as fast as he possibly can you
Carter
16:30
you know the shots
Carter
16:32
i know he loves that he loves that he doesn't listen but he loves it anyways three
Carter
16:35
three people are going to call him first thing in the morning here's
Carter
16:38
here's you know i think that the you
Carter
16:41
know the next thing is the police department or you know the getting rid of the rcmp and the next thing is is doing another equalization referendum and
Carter
16:47
and pretty soon you just keep stoking things one thing after another and we wind up at
Carter
16:52
at the end game which
Carter
16:56
we're getting so screwed and because the oil and gas market has shifted and because of that it's
Carter
17:03
it's all trudeau's fault right
Carter
17:04
right ask somebody they'll tell you it's trudeau's fault ask them how it's trudeau's fault and that's where they start to stumble that's
Carter
17:11
that's where things start to get a little bit more tricky they don't actually know the question of how it's trudeau's fault they just know that it is trudeau's fault so
Corey
17:19
so let's let's chat this out a little bit it here like let's talk about first
Corey
17:24
first of all the strategy because there's been some consideration thrown out there that perhaps this is well look it's such a ridiculous notion on its surface that you're going to get half of the cpp but uh there's some suggestion that either a that's an opening negotiating position or b it's not remotely serious and it's sort of designed to fail to get to those kinds of hurt feelings and stoked resentments that you're talking about there and then uh c there is this idea that it is a hundred percent serious and uh you know the the same crowd that was pretty convinced that uh they could they could figure out health better than public health officials are have now decided they have figured out kind of you know what i was actually reminded of i'm dead serious here like alberta listeners might remember of a certain age this guy the kudataga george something yeah
Carter
18:13
yeah in my head it's always george costanza but that's not not who it is yeah yeah
Corey
18:17
yeah but uh he when the ndp were elected in 2015 in alberta he started pouring through legislation trying to find loopholes to eliminate the government like just to get rid of them and one of them was he he noticed that actually it's the it's the monarch that has all of the power because of course everything is designed and written as at the time like the queen in council and and all of that now those of you who
Corey
18:41
who have taken elementary school Social studies know that that's because our government acts in the name of the queen or the king now, as the case may be. But George was pretty convinced. He'd found a really clever interpretation, a really clever reading of these things. And to be fair to George, when I was 12 and first read the Constitution of Canada, I thought I could also read into it things that didn't exist. yeah
Corey
19:04
uh and this is not new this this is idea that you read through it and you get this interpretation you kind of ignore that our entire system is based on like precedent and case law and natural justice and some of these concepts that come through and can even override legislation and agreements in some cases when there was kind of this pointing to this act that initiated the cpp saying see that if you read this in this way and you squint and you interpret these words in in this fashion we get half the fucking pension i mean that's what it reminded me of like just this just like kind of the
Corey
19:36
the same energy that the convoy brought to passing around the canadian bill of rights which was a piece of legislation passed under deep and baker as though that was the relevant piece of legislation at the moment right yeah
Corey
19:49
they know just a little just enough to get themselves in giant trouble and be very wrong
Carter
19:54
wrong where else are we living this cory i mean I mean, we're living this in the United States with all these constitutional scholars who read, you know, they're in,
Carter
20:02
in, you know, they're reading into the Constitution. I mean, Freeman
Carter
20:07
Freeman on the land and the sovereign citizens going around and saying, you
Carter
20:12
you can't arrest me. I'm a citizen blank. I don't have to give you my ID. All
Carter
20:16
All of these things are based on the same premise. And that premise is finding a loophole. It's
Carter
20:21
It's not even about, you
Carter
20:23
I honestly believe this. What they're trying to do is get themselves out for what they perceive to be some sort of tyranny. And what confuses the hell out of me is where's the tyranny?
Carter
20:34
Where's the tyranny? And why would someone like, you know, like, why would people who used to be kind
Carter
20:40
kind of the mainstream start
Carter
20:42
start to buy into this stuff? Because buying into this stuff is just creating more discord within our various communities. I do not understand. I don't understand. Let me
Corey
20:54
me reel you specifically and us generally back, though. What's the strategy here? Do they actually believe this? Is this a bargaining ploy? Or is this not even necessarily meant to happen, but designed just to sort of stoke those fires and continue to have that external enemy?
Carter
21:12
enemy? But let's say that they want to stoke the fires and have the external enemy. I mean, what are you doing? Like you're,
Carter
21:20
you know, like this isn't a car, buying a car negotiation where you walk in, it's listed for $26,000 and you go, I'm going to give you 15, right?
Carter
21:28
right? That's my father's negotiating. That's your opening.
Corey
21:31
That's a bold opening from
Carter
21:33
from 26. And most of the time the salesperson just looked at him and said, no, right? Like, but, you know, that's a bold strategy. It's bold, right? That could happen.
Carter
21:46
is, you know, what
Carter
21:48
what is the rest of Canada going to say to this?
Carter
21:51
The rest of Canada is just simply going to say no.
Carter
21:54
Like there's this, you know, there are a lot of people in my mentions, right? You don't know anything about negotiation.
Carter
22:00
Yeah, actually, I do know something about negotiation. You can't start with
Carter
22:04
with a fucking clown suit on and a clown nose and expect to be taken seriously.
Corey
22:11
yeah i mean this is one of the interesting things for me did they go so far that nobody is going to believe it but the reason why i don't think this is just a stoke fires get fights with trudeau going thing is because the government's putting too much money into it right like it's so clear right now that there's this massive push to get albertans on on board with the idea of an alberta pension plan and listen maybe that's a requirement for any of those three strategies But it certainly seems to me like there was a real intentionality brought to it. We already know that Danielle Smith and Rob Anderson, her policy whisperer, have had these beliefs forever. Danielle Smith wrote about it literally decades ago for the Calgary Herald. Rob Anderson was writing about it much more recently, just before he ran Danielle Smith's campaign. pain. And so they do seem to be true believers on this file. They went silent just
Corey
23:05
before the election. They knew it was unpopular at the time. They intentionally said, no, no, no, this will not be an issue. There would for sure be a conversation with Albertans before it happened. Kind of left out the fact that she was going to use every little bit of the $60 billion organization that is your government to try to convince you that it's a good idea. And now we're going to go to a referendum on it and on what it is remains incredibly murky because we obviously don't know how much money Alberta would actually get. Alberta does have the right to pull out of the CPP, but we don't know how much money Alberta would actually get. We don't know what that pension plan would look like. And to kind of bring it back though, we also don't
Corey
23:47
don't know what kind of governance would be around it. And would we actually use it to shore up industries that we felt were quote unquote under attack? Certainly, even the comments that Danielle smith's made sense make
Corey
23:58
make it pretty clear that yeah we would right and i'm not really sure that we want to be using our pension as a bulwark against the
Corey
24:05
the rest of the world and progress like that seems pretty dodgy
Carter
24:08
dodgy yeah it feels like that might be a bet that you can make with your private pension but please try not to make it with my pension right like it's just it's it's just a step too far but
Carter
24:16
but you know here she is she's got the full force of the government behind her i mean this this does beg the question, Corey, what should we be doing? What are regular people going to have to do in
Carter
24:28
in order to make sure that this doesn't actually happen? Because we are going to be heading towards a referendum. That means we're going to have another election. And I think that
Carter
24:37
there's a lot of people who just don't have much energy for this shit because we're battling the crazies. Do you feel like that's the same position that you're thinking or am I just being negative no
Corey
24:49
no well listen i actually think that's fascinating i wanted to talk about the strategy of the government and the strategy of the opposition but the strategy of albertans who are opposed is maybe a more interesting thing to chat about right now let's
Corey
25:01
let's see um well look let's start with the obvious the government before
Corey
25:07
before doing this and they're kind of running silent mode probably did a lot of polling probably understood which arguments were more compelling to albertans right right? Unfortunately, they had to poll on an issue nobody had really given serious thought to or contemplated, and they did it based on a set of facts that are instantly under heavy assault. The quote-unquote fact of, like, we're going to get half this pension, right? That's not going to happen. It's truly not. Like, we haven't actually unpacked this. I think most people will have seen this, but if
Corey
25:35
if everybody took Alberta's position, the pension would need to be twice as big or more. Like, it's ridiculous, right? Like, the math does not work.
Corey
25:43
You can't be like i'm gonna divvy it up evenly this is my share by the way it's most of it like and you're alberta you're in a you're in a pension with ontario and british columbia which are i don't know if you've heard it's in all the newspapers bigger than alberta so if alberta takes more than half that
Corey
26:02
that leaves less than half for more people you
Corey
26:06
you know a bit of a nonsense equation here you
Carter
26:08
you know what the government i digress the government of canada should just come in and say you know you get to do this the way that we get to do cutting up birthday cake one
Carter
26:15
one of you gets to cut it and the other one gets to choose the half i'm
Corey
26:20
i'm that never actually works by the way you clearly don't have enough kids but we
Carter
26:25
we only had three it was it worked out okay it was fine you know the little brother got nothing so it worked out fine right there
Corey
26:32
there you go yeah um i i have three sisters yeah
Carter
26:40
yeah you were screwed
Corey
26:41
screwed i can tell you as the numbers get bigger it gets problematic um look so when the government polled on this they probably said we know these are the most compelling arguments so that's what we're going to put in the window when it comes out we're going to come out hard with them and of course we can see from the arguments that they're even putting in front of us saying which of these is the most awesome ideas from their survey that they launched which is i think one of the phoniest consultations i've ever seen and you know i i do this for a living so i you know i don't make that comment lightly um it
Corey
27:13
it was hey you could get more money hey you could pay lower premiums hey this money could be invested in alberta or support alberta in some way right and which of these do you think is most important please rank them all of this so all to say the government started from there but the government was pulling on a novel concept we've talked about this like it didn't have it didn't have to deal with counter arguments and economists immediately saying well that's insane and stuff like that yeah
Carter
27:39
yeah the and uh the chorus of them saying that's nuts it was pretty fantastic yeah yeah
Corey
27:45
yeah like and some of them more politely than others like that is a weird interpretation of the words would be one or anyways
Corey
27:52
anyways others just unspooling and losing their minds because it is on its surface a very crazy easy idea.
Corey
28:00
Anyhow, they've done this. They have got a lot of advertising running. They are going to essentially try to make sure every Albertan knows their key messages. And I think that we can boil them down to the three that I've just said here, which is you will pay less, you
Corey
28:15
you will get more, and it will be here in Alberta. Now, I want to be super clear. I want to be super clear to people listening.
Corey
28:24
Number one is probably fake. Certainly in the long term, it's very suspect. Number two is probably fake, certainly in the long term, very suspect.
Corey
28:32
Number three is something they can do, but they are then playing games with your pension, not necessarily looking for maximizing gains, which is what CPP's requirement is.
Corey
28:41
They're now looking at nation building, small end nation building here in Alberta. And that should give us all pause because that's not exactly what we expect from people to do our pensions with. So that's going to happen. if
Corey
28:56
you are thinking as a citizen how do you resist this there's two streams you need to do one is you need to give the government pause if there's any off ramps you want to make sure that they're using them and number two is you need to make sure your fellow citizens know the holes in all three of those arguments and you need to be having those conversations now is the time to make sure you're engaging uncle bob when he says his bullshit stuff that you call him on his bullshit stuff so that aunt mary says hey actually you know when i go to this ballot box i'm not going to vote the way bob's about yeah
Carter
29:28
because it's going to be really important
Carter
29:32
it's going to happen very quickly and we're going to be up against like if we're campaigning against this we're going to be up against the government right
Carter
29:40
right the entire government and it has literally an unlimited budget
Carter
29:46
budget if they wish to allocate it.
Carter
29:48
And you can see what they're doing with the stupid
Carter
29:57
They just throw money at the particular problem and hope that it goes away. I would love to see what they think is the positive result from the Canadian Energy Center, but
Carter
30:06
but we'll never see it.
Carter
30:08
The same way that we'll never see what the positive result is from moving the to the alberta pension plan will only feel the
Carter
30:15
the negatives uh if they come to to pass and i believe you've
Carter
30:18
you've made a very eloquent eloquent case cory that the the premises are false so let's uh zane
Carter
30:27
zane what do you think zane are you okay i
Corey
30:31
i think he's still in the corner there i think he's feeling a little ill
Corey
30:38
here's what you can do today if you're listening and you're kind of pissed off about it all one write
Corey
30:43
write a letter to the premier premier is not going to read it right premier
Corey
30:47
premier does get a report that says these are all of the letters i've got and this is the sentiment of those various letters and uh we'll talk to the people at the premier's correspondence unit and in communications and public engagement and uh get a bit of an understanding of the lay of the land and if they are getting absolutely lambasted and murdered on it i'll
Corey
31:05
i'll tell you something that's pretty tough to hold dear and when the caucus hears that the caucus is going to get a little bit squeamish so put a little bit of pressure on to the premier in that sense second and directly tied to that caucus point put
Corey
31:18
put a little pressure on the caucus because let me tell you something as somebody who used to oversee the premier's correspondence unit
Corey
31:25
premiers and carter you were the chief of staff to a premier premier's pretty fucking used to getting hate in volume
Corey
31:31
volume in massive volume oh
Corey
31:36
you want to rattle them and you want to make sure that there's that kind of volume but be realistic these
Corey
31:40
these are people who are not necessarily going to be thrown by that and they've seen it all before i'll
Corey
31:45
i'll tell you who hasn't seen it all before random mla in a community who got 80 of the vote and gives no fucks yeah right
Corey
31:53
reach out to those mlas because when you're an mla when you're in a constituency office and you get 60 calls 120 calls 240 calls it feels like the sky is fucking falling i want you to to consider, if you get 240 calls in one day at a constituency office, how many calls that is, you know, how many minutes between calls of somebody angrily saying, I got a real problem with this. It feels like it never ends. It feels like you are under assault. It feels like you get off the phone with one person and you've got three voicemails from three other people saying how furious they are. And 240 people is, you
Corey
32:31
you know, not even 1% of the rioting's population. It's going to feel like everybody so make sure you're putting the pressure on those local mlas who are less used to it the
Corey
32:42
the farther they are from the centers of power the less likely there'll be a cabinet minister getting hate all of the time the
Carter
32:48
yeah and uh top up your strategist contributions uh
Carter
32:51
uh at ww no i did
Carter
32:56
did that wrong yeah
Carter
32:57
yeah okay i see where you're going yeah
Corey
33:01
uh and then And look, you
Corey
33:04
you just get out there. You just fight with it.
SPEAKER_03
33:07
Sorry about that, guys. I'm back and feeling fine now. I think it was something I ate or maybe how terrible your takes were. But I'm back and ready to move it on to our next segment. Our next segment, your green belt was the only thing holding up your pants. And now I can see your red ass.
SPEAKER_03
33:23
Carter, respond to that. that
Carter
33:24
um well i am really not sure what to say about uh i mean
Corey
33:32
mean like the segment title
Carter
33:34
title it was okay it
Carter
33:36
you know i mean now you kind of get caught off off guard right like um
Carter
33:41
your red ass and the problem is i think i visualized i
Carter
33:44
think the problem is and
Carter
33:46
and i'm not even sure i visualized with doug ford i think i might have visualized the other ford and it was was redder right like it was way worse so i'm i'm i'm
Carter
33:56
i'm not happy but i'll tell you what i'll tell you what zane thanks for coming back first of all and secondly thank
Carter
34:02
thank you for teeing this up for me because the biggest thing the
Carter
34:05
the most important thing and the thing that cory and i actually talked about today is
Carter
34:10
is we predicted this we were the ones in
Carter
34:13
in the when when it looked like this was going to keep going forward when everybody was making billions it was cory hogan and steven Stephen Carter standing against the world, standing against the world, waving a flag saying there's no way that Doug Ford is a talented enough politician. We said this. Doug Ford is a talented enough politician. He's going to walk this back.
Carter
34:35
You and I both said it.
Corey
34:37
did. We said there'd be lawsuits. We said it'd be messy. But we said right now the punishment and crime did not match. So this was the option they had. Absolutely. I
SPEAKER_03
34:45
I think that's such an important point. And if I'm not mistaken, you two called that something like this would happen. Corey, respond to that.
Corey
35:01
I totally, yeah. I mean, I think we did call it. And it's a big deal that you have to walk back something like this. You know, you walk back $8 billion of potential upside. side there was perhaps the greatest beaverton headline in the history of beaverton yesterday which was that doug ford was being invited by developers to a no hard feelings party at 4 a.m on the docks that's
Carter
35:31
that's so good the beaverton's an underappreciated canadian resource it's yeah it
Corey
35:38
was but you know the reality is this this particular change this action that doug ford took is big
Corey
35:45
big um and we've seen another cabinet minister leave even today uh in the fallout from all of this his cabinet did not look super happy standing behind him but of course they were also trying to look serious and i think when politicians try to look serious they often look pissed off and it was just a um it was just a you know it was a really dramatic moment and it's hardly the end of this particular incident i think cory respond to that i
Corey
36:14
carter could take it yeah and respond to that thanks
Carter
36:17
thanks zane uh yeah
Carter
36:19
yeah i mean i think that sometimes
Carter
36:21
sometimes politics is a messy business right and we make the bad choice and
Carter
36:26
good politicians and our group and i think this is interesting because now we're putting doug ford in the good politician category but but good politicians are able to walk back bad decisions. I mean, it's germane
Carter
36:37
germane to the earlier conversation about the Alberta pension plan. Would Danielle
Carter
36:41
Danielle Smith be able to walk back that bad decision? I'm not sure that Danielle Smith would be because she doesn't have the genetics of Ralph Klein and Doug Ford, who have this kind of talent of saying, my bad, let's back that up, I made a mistake. So, yeah, I think that that's absolutely
Carter
37:06
Carter, respond to that.
Carter
37:07
Okay, Zane, I'm going to – thanks,
Corey
37:12
– Someone once told me our voices sound similar though, Steve. Maybe
Carter
37:16
Maybe that's what it is. Maybe our voices sound similar. But Zane, maybe you should go
Carter
37:22
lay down again for a bit. We'll let Corey and I finish this off, this segment on the green belt. um being
Corey
37:29
a new parent is tough and we get it you're tired he's
Carter
37:31
he's gotta be exhausted right like he's lying
Carter
37:34
lying down is the best course of action for him he came back strong he came back strong with with the the segment
Corey
37:48
yeah well look i mean one of the things that i think we are now going to get to see with this greenbelt issue is litigation recrimination uh we'll see if it staunches the bleeding and polls i do think we've now somewhat reconciled the does
Corey
38:04
does the punishment match the crime uh conversation we had in that now it's entirely undone it's a massive government fuck up but you've seen multiple ministers leave you've seen staff leave uh and so it does feel like now we're back in kind of the realm of normalcy and in some ways i wondered if this wasn't also a bit of a legal defense because i think we sometimes forget in these these
Corey
38:29
these ages we live in where people just sort of do shit and their supporters just stand by them sometimes
Corey
38:35
sometimes you go to jail yeah like we've seen entire governments basically go to jail in our lifetime oh
Carter
38:42
oh yeah i mean the saskatchewan government was like i think gordon dirks was the only one who walked away with who walked away without handcuffs on it was a yeah
Carter
38:50
was a significant group of people and uh you
Carter
38:54
you know it these
Carter
38:55
things do have consequences right and this this looked it looked corrupt and
Carter
39:02
and how does it if it looks like it's corrupt how do we ensure that it's not corrupt well the police investigate how do we
Corey
39:07
we make it for
Carter
39:08
for example and they're they're investigating jason kenney as we speak as
Carter
39:13
as we we speak jason kenney is still under investigation by
Carter
39:16
by the rcmp for that fraudulent potentially fraudulent behavior
Carter
39:19
behavior during his leadership and i think that the wheels of justice may turn slowly but they still turn so
Corey
39:26
well i don't i mean it's easy to be cynical about that final point in
Corey
39:32
2023 right as we watch donald trump and we watch everything else going on but that the facts of of the matter are, there
Corey
39:39
there are consequences and the system does somewhat move and it tends to move based on how it perceives the severity of the crime. And so, listen, I'll say this, Jason Kenney is accused of playing games in a leadership contest, which wouldn't even have been like a crime in an earlier iteration. It was only recently we started bringing, you know, overall governance into this yes there's still arguments about whether it was appropriate uh but this is billions of dollars of commercial upside you can't you can't hand wave that away and uh this was i think in many ways is
Corey
40:17
is it gonna sound crazy this is doug ford after some of his worst moments and i wouldn't want this to be misunderstood as me saying what a great guy doug ford is or what a great thing he did but this was an example of why Doug Ford is where he is and continues or until recently had the support he had fail
Corey
40:34
fail relatively fast like I actually feel like if this had been the Trudeau liberals they would have argued about it for six fucking months before they got there Doug Ford
Corey
40:44
took some time maybe more than he should have but not more than you could imagine and uh and somewhat what not
Corey
40:52
not resolved we're not there but he has put a kind of a pin in
Corey
40:56
in this particular matter he's made sure it can't go anywhere from no
Carter
40:58
no and that's the difference between understanding when you're in a crisis when you're and and not understanding when you're in a crisis this has been our ongoing complaint about the trudeau uh the trudeau government and you
Carter
41:11
you know they they continue to misunderstand it whereas whereas ford gets
Carter
41:15
gets it he really does understand it and i don't think that we're i don't want anybody to misinterpret we're not saying this
Carter
41:22
this was a great idea everything unfolded properly what we're saying is guy dug himself a hole stopped digging and actually got out of the hole now
Carter
41:32
will there be a hole further down the road digging out
Carter
41:34
out of the way like we'll
Carter
41:35
getting his way out he's seen he's at the very least stopped digging and
Carter
41:39
and that's a very important first step yeah
Corey
41:42
yeah now listen you stop digging when you're in in the abyss, it's going to take you some time and maybe you never get out of it. But the fact of the matter is, this
Corey
41:50
this was a way to, you
Corey
41:52
you know, to move in the right direction here. It was, let's put it this way. This was a necessary but not sufficient step to resolving the crisis in front of his government. And he took it, which is something that other governments have not shown such speed on.
SPEAKER_03
42:04
Wow, great insights. I've always loved you guys. Let's move it on to our final segment. The over under the lightning round. Stephen Carter, we do this segment for you. We've always done this segment for you. We'll start with you, Stephen.
SPEAKER_03
42:15
The actual amount Alberta could get from the Canada pension plan.
Carter
42:18
I think that it's
Carter
42:20
it's going to be under 20 percent. Trevor Toome has written a paper where Trevor seems to think it's going to be 20 to 25 percent.
Carter
42:26
You know, we have a ton of time for for Trevor. But at
Carter
42:30
at the same time, I think that it
Carter
42:32
it is a negotiation. It is going to be a conversation. And I think that, you know, the rest of Canada has something to say. And because the federal government gives zero fucks about how many seats they win in
Carter
42:44
they have everything to gain by screwing and pushing and pushing as hard as possible against this claim. It'll make them look strong for the rest of the country at
Carter
42:53
at a time, frankly, when Trudeau needs an opportunity to look strong for the rest of the country.
Corey
43:00
I think it'll be under, but maybe for slightly different reasons. And in some ways, it's just reckless speculation. We talked about how a pension really is about me making contributions, me getting my money back. And it's kind of makes me whole over the course of
Corey
43:16
life, right? And yeah, it depends on if I die at 70 or live to 110. Absolutely. You know, whether I come out ahead or quote unquote behind on that particular bargain, but c'est la vie, right? And it's not personal. It's not about me being in Albertan. And it's not even frankly about my income. One of the interesting things about Trevor's paper was that it says when you adjust for age, it has almost no redistributive effect. There's that $3,500 at the start, like you don't pay CPP on the first $3,500.
Corey
43:46
But that's kind of like the end of the redistribution consequences, that and life expectancy being slightly different between provinces. the thing is and
Corey
43:56
i'm getting to my point here eventually just
Corey
43:58
just because you made the contribution in alberta yeah right doesn't
Corey
44:03
doesn't mean you're going to withdraw when you're in alberta so i might in my working years live here i might retire to the lake in british columbia and then i will be withdrawing it in bc but if i'm the cpp i probably have a much clearer picture of that because of i don't know this little thing called my social insurance number right where i made both my my contributions and my subtractions. And so I think it becomes a little bit easier for the CPP to say, you know, sure, yeah, people from Alberta contributed more money than they withdrew over this period of time. But over the longer horizon that is the CPP, here's where that just falls apart for you. And actually, they were in Nanaimo, or they were back in Ontario or New Brunswick or Newfoundland or wherever they ended up going back to. And that's where they made the withdrawals. So, you know what, Alberta, it actually nets out pretty close to your share of the population in CPP, which is like 16, 17%. Like, that's what I suspect is probably going to happen. I don't have any insight into that. But it seems like it's pretty likely that with more information, and let's be super clear, there's a massive asymmetry in information between, I don't know, the Alberta government's panel that effectively did this on a cocktail napkin and CPPIB and the robust information they have there. Yeah,
Corey
45:18
There's got to be a different story that comes out at this point. Obviously, CPP came out really hard, so under.
SPEAKER_03
45:25
Sticking with you, Corey, Lauren Boebert was filmed vaping and giving a handjob to a date at a traveling Broadway show for the musical Beetlejuice. There's no question. I just wanted to make sure we mentioned that.
Carter
45:36
I'm really glad he brought that up. Are you not glad that he brought it up? First of all, there's a musical called Beetlejuice. How have we not gotten to see it? There is. Well,
Corey
45:45
I'll tell you something. i actually my my daughter does like musical theater stuff and so sometimes you know right now they're doing like a adam's family thing
Carter
45:53
thing that's fine yeah
Corey
45:55
yeah yeah but when you start playing some of those songs you get the recommendations of other musicals and so i did know there was a beetlejuice musical i have to tell you but it it literally starts with a song saying this is a story this is a play about death oh
Corey
46:09
just i don't know i don't know what's turning her crank but it doesn't necessarily seem like it's uh you
Corey
46:14
you know you i don't think it's music to jerk off you
Carter
46:17
you and i went to a musical once do you remember we went to a musical we
Corey
46:21
we did that wasn't music to jerk oh
Carter
46:22
oh but i've never been hornier like that was the horniest i've ever been so
Carter
46:27
so yeah i mean it was pretty great i'm
Corey
46:29
i'm really upset right now yeah we went to chicago that was pretty great and uh i believe you said to me after as we were walking back through times square that you looked over at one point and i had this look on my face like i could have spent this hundred dollars on so much beer yeah
Carter
46:41
yeah you you did not enjoy it as much as i thought you might oops
SPEAKER_03
46:49
final question will albertans vote to leave the canada pension plan carter uh
Carter
46:52
uh no i don't think oh
Corey
46:54
oh hold on let's play Play the Stephen Carter prediction sound.
SPEAKER_00
47:01
Stand by for another Carter prediction.
Corey
47:09
Okay, it's over to you, bud. Oh my God.
Carter
47:13
I don't think that they will. I think that it's a very small idea. I think the problem is going to be, it's going to be a referendum. It's going to be low turnout potentially. But I think this is going to look like the housing debate that just happened in Calgary. everybody's going to get upset about it because this is the, you
Carter
47:29
you know, we're starting to really engage. The progressive side is starting to get far more engaged because they're feeling tremendously under threat.
Corey
47:38
Hogan? Boy, I mean, it feels risky following up with an agreement of Stephen, but look, here's the reality. We know the starting point was pretty low in terms of support for leaving the CPP. Yes, they've come out hard with their big three arguments. I think all All of them are very assailable. And I don't believe fundamentally that that's even where people are going to get hung up. They're going to get hung up on the notion that we're talking about trying to get more than half the pension. Like, I don't know that people are going to get past that in their analysis. They're going to say, well, this is all bullshit. That's obviously not the case. And then when you start having other more serious conversations behind it, like, okay, well, the management of this plan would cost, what, a billion dollars that the panel report report said? I can't
Corey
48:25
can't remember. That's a lot of money. And then there's just the fundamental reality, which we talked a little bit about at the top, but I want to come back to here at the end, which is pensions
Corey
48:36
pensions are better when they're bigger. They
Corey
48:39
de-risk it because, look, just because Alberta's young today doesn't mean Alberta will be young tomorrow. That's a reality. That's actually just how these things generally tend to work, right? We have these demographic bubbles. It's It's part of why the pension looked so much under threat in the 90s before the major reforms that kind of resolved that challenge here. And then there's the simple reality that bigger pensions get better returns. The more money you have to play around with, the more deals are available to you, the more you actually make the market in different ways. And we are way better off working
Corey
49:11
working as part of a bigger pool of money than a smaller pool of money when we're talking about our retirement incomes here, especially if we're doing active management of the fund, which seems to be what everybody is considering in all of these circumstances. that's
Carter
49:22
that's the part that freaks me out too the active management just oh my god like
Carter
49:27
it's just not a great idea and it really puts things at risk and i think that people will see that because they are talking about pensions and pensions are supposed to be safe that's the the foundational piece
Corey
49:39
well and then ultimately i think there'll be a huge element of trust like do you trust this government to get their hands on this money what is the motivation for putting the hands on this money, and what's really in it for us. And there are examples. There is a very obvious example of a pension fund that
Corey
49:57
that is not the CPP, that is a Provincial Prevention Fund, and that's the Quebec Pension Fund. And while it has the same benefits, it has a higher contribution rate. So at the end of the day, their smaller size and dealing with their demographic pressures meant ultimately that people have to pay more to get the same as those of us who are in the CPP. Because the CPP is bigger which
Corey
50:16
means less risk and better remember
Carter
50:18
remember uh the strategist will be fighting this you can up your contributions to the strategist podcast at your earliest convenience thank you that's
SPEAKER_03
50:26
that's a wrap that's a wrap on episode 1254 of the strategists my name is zane velji with me as always stephen carter stephen carter stephen carter stephen carter stephen carter stephen carter stephen carter stephen carter stephen carter stephen carter stephen carter stephen Carter, Stephen Carter, Stephen Carter, Stephen Carter, Stephen Carter, Stephen Carter, Stephen Carter, Stephen Carter, Stephen Carter, Stephen Carter, and Corey Hogan. We'll see you next time.