The News Rundown

Trudeau government bans TikTok from operating in Canada — but Canadians can still use it

This week produced some interestingly timed news, especially in the wake of the US presidential election. One of the Canadian government's first announcements in the wake of Donald Trump's election was that they were banning TikTok from operating in Canada.
Citing national security concerns, the federal government has ordered TikTok to shutter its Canadian operations — but users will still be able to access the popular video app.
Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne said the decision to wind down TikTok's two Canadian offices — in Toronto and Vancouver — was based on information and evidence that surfaced during a national security review, and the advice of Canada's security and intelligence community.
The statement stressed that the government is not blocking Canadians from accessing the app or using it to create content. Champagne called the usage of TikTok or any other social media site a "personal choice" but he urged Canadians to use TikTok "with eyes wide open." Critics have claimed that TikTok users' data could be obtained by the Chinese government.
U.S. lawmakers have contended that TikTok owner ByteDance is beholden to the Chinese government, which could demand access to the data of TikTok's U.S. consumers through Chinese national security laws that compel organizations to assist with intelligence gathering. ByteDance is also accused of helping to build China's system for cracking down on the Uyghur minority, and of targeting protesters in Hong Kong.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) has warned Canadians, including teenagers, against using TikTok. Former CSIS director David Vigneault said it's "very clear" from the app's design that data gleaned from its users "is available to the government of China" and its large-scale data harvesting goals.
In February 2023, the Canadian government banned the social media platform from all government devices. Later that year, it ordered a national security review of the app. Almost 2 years later, we're finally getting the results and action.
For most Canadians, the decision to end the social media platform's operations in the country will go largely unnoticed. Champagne said those directly affected by the decision are TikTok employees, most of whom aren't Canadian citizens. With the social media platform's Canadian operations ending, those workers will be required to leave the country, depending on their status.
A spokesperson for TikTok said in an email Wednesday that the company plans to take legal action: "Shutting down TikTok's Canadian offices and destroying hundreds of well-paying local jobs is not in anyone's best interest, and today's shutdown order will do just that. We will challenge this order in court."
In a later statement, a spokesperson called Champagne's comment that most affected TikTok employees aren't Canadian citizens "categorically untrue and a troubling insinuation."
"The majority of TikTok's staff in Canada are proud Canadian citizens and permanent residents. We invite the minister to meet our employees whose jobs and livelihoods will be impacted by this order," the spokesperson said.
Philip Mai, co-director of the Toronto Metropolitan University's Social Media Lab, said that personal data collected by platforms like TikTok, Facebook and X can be easily harnessed later to build a profile of users and potentially compromise them.
Mai also says with a federal election around the corner, the federal government may not be keen to upset young voters who are more likely to use TikTok: "It looks like they might be slow-walking the TikTok ban. To bring Canada in line with our Five Eyes partners, they may have to ban the app completely, but that would be way after the election."
And that's the likeliest reason that TikTok is not banned in Canada completely, despite the USA's upcoming ban in January. U.S. President Joe Biden signed a bill into law in April 2023 requiring ByteDance to either sell the social media platform by Jan. 19, 2025, or see TikTok banned in the U.S.
For Canada to do such halfhearted measures show that the Canadian government wants to have their cake and eat it too: stay on the good side of the US, but also not pissing off young people who elected Trudeau in 2015 and if polls are to be believed, may be open to seeking other options in the next election. It's quite cynical, but hey, that's politics.
Supplementals:

‘I’m pissed’: Alberta premier, oil and gas industry slam Ottawa’s new emissions cap

A couple weeks back we discussed the surprise move by the federal government to support carbon capture and storage for oil producers in Alberta.
This week we see something running completely counter to that with the numbers announced for the federal government’s emission cap.
The cap requires companies to cut emissions by 35% somewhere between 2030 and 2032.
The idea behind this is that reducing emissions not only helps in Canada but also reduces upstream emissions, that is, the emissions caused by producing, refining, and using the product.
The cap while a cap on emissions effectively means that production needs to slow because by 2030 or 2032 the industry won’t be net zero.
The cap is a little bit interesting because the Alberta government, the pathways alliance and its associated companies, and the federal government have been aiming for net zero 2050.
The question then becomes: is this cap designed specifically to shut Alberta down?
The cap represents a 1-million barrel a day production cut by 2030.
Danielle Smith was very blunt in her reaction, she said what most people have been thinking about the Trudeau government.
She said, “I’m pissed — I’m absolutely angry. We’ve been working with these guys for two years because we have a plan that would reduce emissions responsibly by 2050 and they continue to act like they are working collaboratively with us — then they come out with exactly same policy they put forward a year ago, with no changes whatsoever and then trying to mislead the public about the true intent.”
The Premier also believes that the cap violates the Constitution, specifically Section 92A that gives provinces jurisdiction over non-renewable resource development.
People wonder why Alberta has the policies it does and why Smith won the UCP leadership, here we are.
The province plans to challenge the cap in court and invoke the Alberta Sovereignty Act.
The NDP and its leader Naheed Nenshi are seemingly absent on this with no discussions on X or statements issued to the media.
One must assume that the NDP supports the cap.
Danielle Smith said that federal Environment Minister Stephen Guilbeault has a “deranged vendetta” against Alberta.
In a press conference before the cap announcement Guilbeault said that “everyone should do their fair share” and that the oil and gas industry is a major source of emissions but it’s one less than other sectors to reduce them.
There are a lot of assumptions and a lot of ifs in this chain of logic beginning with the risk assessment that climate change poses and what Canada can do about it relative to other countries in the world.
These aren’t things that can be discussed in the presence of the Liberal government or minister Guilbault.
He’s aware there will be backlash but is committed to carrying out the Liberal’s climate goals and with that has the backing of the Prime Minister.
He and the government believe that reducing emissions is the only way Canada’s oil and gas will remain competitive!
Oh no! The new incoming Trump administration wants to have a word about competitiveness.
Russia, the Middle East, and Venezuela are not clean and not ethical. That matters for something and Alberta will be teaching how clean and ethical our energy is in the new school curriculum.
The greenest option doesn’t win. It’s what’s easiest and cheapest to get. Everyone else will provide that while Canada virtue signals and we fall behind everyone.
What’s seemingly different this time is the willingness for Alberta to “do something”.
When Smith was running for UCP leader it was heresy to think positively about the Sovereignty Act.
This week there was an opinion piece published in the Calgary Herald by Don Braid calling on Smith to take a stand beyond what we’ve done.
For those unaware, Braid is what could be described as one of Alberta’s establishment columnists.
Braid brings up Peter Lougheed’s fight against Trudeau senior and the ability that the government had to cut shipments of oil to the east.
The question is: what kind of economic retaliation can Alberta launch that will hurt Guilbeault’s constituents the most? It can’t be with energy since most energy in Eastern Canada comes from the Middle East!
The fight back then as Braid put it was about who would get the money and now the fight is about whether there will be any money.
This is different and raises questions about the economic future of Alberta but also energy producing provinces in Canada.
If this cap goes forward, Alberta and Canada will be the only energy producing country with such a cap.
It also sets the table for the next election for those progressives who are still on the carbon tax, green energy bandwagon, and in particular those people who don’t need to worry about livelihoods tied to these industries.
This is exactly what Trudeau and Guilbeault want.
Supplementals:

B.C. forest sector prognosis becoming progressively grim

For our BC story this week, it's good to take a look away from the BC election, where judicial recounts completed this week in several ridings have confirmed the BC NDP's slimmest of majority governments. When the cabinet gets announced later in the month, we'll have to take a look at the priorities of the newly reduced NDP government, and to see how BC will weather the coming few years.
With that, we need to peek in on one of BC's biggest economic drivers and important rural job creators, the forestry sector. Unfortunately, we've seen mills and operations be curtailed across the province, and much of the industry has fled south, as it does when the country faces economic hardships. With Canada's GDP per capita not rebounding under Justin Trudeau's leadership, we've not seen natural resources industries in Canada do especially well lately.
With North American lumber prices below break-even costs for many sawmills in Canada and the U.S., plus ongoing geopolitical uncertainty, recessionary conditions in China and declining timber supplies around the world, the global outlook for the forestry industry is not particularly rosy.
In British Columbia, once North America’s forest-sector powerhouse, it seems downright dismal. And low lumber prices—a result of inflation and high interest rates squelching North American homebuilding—are only one of a myriad of challenges facing the industry.
According to Natural Resources Canada, the average price for Western SPF (spruce-pine-fir) was below US$400 per thousand board feet—a quarter of the record-high US$1,600 per thousand board feet seen in 2021. The outlook says Canada’s lumber output was 4.4 per cent higher in the first seven months of 2024 compared with 2023, but that B.C.’s output was lower by 2.8 per cent.
A shrinking timber supply has turned B.C. into a high-cost jurisdiction. There have been more than a dozen sawmill and pulp mill closures in the past four years, and a flight of capital to the U.S., where B.C. forestry giants such as Canfor and West Fraser Timber now own as many, if not more, sawmills than they do in Canada.
While the pine beetle infestation that devastated B.C. forests two decades ago is partly responsible for B.C.’s shrinking fibre supply, both federal and provincial government regulations have also eaten into the available timber supply in Canada, and especially in B.C., according to Rob Schuetz, president of Industrial Forest Services, who spoke at last week’s Global Wood Summit organized by Russ Taylor Global and ERA Forest Products Research.
In short, B.C. has an allowable annual cut that is increasingly not allowed to be cut. In the 1990s, B.C. was harvesting 95 per cent of the province’s annual allowable cut (AAC). In the 2000s, that fell to 80 per cent, partly because of the 2008-09 financial crisis in the U.S. that caused a housing market collapse. Since the BC NDP came to power in 2017, the percentage of the AAC that is actually cut has fallen below 50 per cent.
The reasons for the AAC drop include a stack of new policies and regulations: Old growth harvesting moratoria, new forest landscape plans, ecosystem-based land management, increasing parks and protected areas, shared land-use decision-making with First Nations, and federal and provincial caribou habitat protection plans.
Some of these policies are fairly well regarded, especially the old growth moratorium, but the questionable decisions around land management have caused some to scratch their heads at the over-regulation.
For more than a decade now, B.C. forestry companies have been investing in the U.S. This is, in part, a hedge against the softwood lumber duties applied to Canadian lumber imports.
But the U.S. also has a growing fibre basket, thanks in part to the fact that species like southern yellow pine have shorter rotation periods of 20 to 30 years, compared to rotations of 60 to 80 years for species grown in B.C.—lodgepole pine and Douglas fir, for example.
Fleeing to the US will also become more common with newly elected US President Donald Trump's planned tariffs which could include more softwood duties on BC lumber, making it harder for companies operating in BC to sustain their operations.
Whether Trump follows through with plans for removing climate change measures or imposing new tariffs won’t be clear until after he’s sworn in – but contingency planning has already begun north of the border.
While Trump has threatened to impose minimum 10 per cent tariffs across the board for U.S. imports, Conservative Party of BC leader John Rustad pointed to the increased softwood lumber tariff of 14.54 per cent, implemented under Joe Biden’s presidency, that’s already hurting B.C.’s forestry industry.
Rustad said: “Trump’s a deal-maker. Hopefully it gives us an opportunity to do a deal with the Americans, and I think that should be a priority for our government. We have to be looking at how we protect our forest sector, and I think both federally and provincially, they've ignored it.”
BC’s economy is closely tied to our southern neighbour’s, supported, in part, by the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA). CUSMA came into effect in 2020, replacing the North American Free Trade Agreement. Trump may not challenge the agreement which, among other protectionist moves, aims to benefit American farmers, ranchers, and agribusinesses. Ultimately, his aim will be to prioritize American trade advantage and not just support it.
Still, the renewal for the agreement is up in 2026, which is in the middle of Trump's presidency, and will be another hard fought negotiation that will maybe cause our deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland to lie on the floor afterwards, like she did for the first round of negotiations.
In 2022, the US was BC’s primary export destination. That year, it received 57% of this province’s commodity exports to the tune of $37.4 billion in total export value. Tuesday’s election may steeply change the face of that trade relationship. Those changes may be significant in ways we cannot yet imagine with Trump once again at the helm.
BC is resource rich. It has an abundance of critical minerals, wood products and freshwater. In fact, comments Trump made during his campaign about “turning on the faucet” in BC to alleviate its domestic water scarcity issues particularly in California, has environmentalists worried. California also produces $2 billion dollars of fruits and vegetables that end up on dinner tables in BC. Year to year, from 2021 to 2024, BC exports to the US have been on the decline. Trump's proposed trade tariff may exacerbate that trend.
The US lumber market is huge. It’s BC’s largest market for lumber and value-added wood products. Mass timber products are in increasing demand south of the border as builders seek alternatives to regular building operations due to increased costs and resourcing challenges. In 2017, Trump affixed a 27% tariff on softwood lumber before it was lowered again after the CUSMA negotiations. In August, Biden increased the duty on softwood lumber to 14.4% from 8%. At the time of that announcement, Bruce Ralston, BC’s forestry minister, said, “I am immensely disappointed with the U.S. Department of Commerce's decision to increase unfair and unwarranted softwood lumber duties.” Ralston did not run in BC's election and so Premier David Eby will need a new forestry minister to negotiate with the US.
While a Harris win would have felt more status quo to BC residents, the province could see major shifts in trade policies that will have far-reaching impacts in both the short- and long-term with the Trump win. We'll have to wait and see if the province is up to the task of defending our resource industries or if the NDP will become a party of just the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island.
Supplementals:

Firing Line

Donald Trump has a long enemies list, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is on it

The US election results this past week produced Donald Trump’s second term as President.
It became clear early on election night that Trump would win.
Trump won the states he lost in 2020, won the states he won in 2016, and added onto it by winning Nevada which hasn’t voted for the Republicans since 2004.
Trump is also set to win the popular vote, again something the Republicans have not done since 2004.
He also won the largest number of blacks, latinos, and new immigrants that the Republican party has won in decades.
He will also have the Senate and likely the House of Representatives as well.
Trump has a mandate to carry out his platform and agenda in the US.
The Canadian media and establishment were and are in shock.
The pollsters said it was a coin toss but analytics into the polling shows that something was happening with the sheer number of pollsters showing a tie.
What was supposed to be close turned out to be a Trump landslide.
Canadian media, establishment types, and politicians are having trouble reconciling the win.
Justin Trudeau congratulated Donald Trump on Wednesday citing a “decisive win” and said, “The friendship between Canada and the U.S. is the envy of the world. I know President Trump and I will work together to create more opportunity, prosperity, and security for both of our nations.”
Pierre Poilievre also congratulated Donald Trump in a post on X saying, “The U.S. is Canada’s best friend and biggest trading partner, and I will work with the President to benefit both countries. My mission: save our jobs.”
He also listed off what the US has been able to do under the Trudeau’s administration due to the carbon tax, taxes, and other regulations.
The reality of what has happened is that Canada needs to be careful and it needs to compete. But also remember that Donald Trump famously called Justin Trudeau meek and mild.
Thomas Mulcair, former NDP opposition leader, said that Trump’s enemy list includes Justin Trudeau and that will complicate the relationship going forward despite the platitudes offered this week.
There are very few areas where a US Trump administration agrees with the Trudeau administration whether it be energy, foreign policy, or migration.
Trump has promised increased tariffs which could hurt Ontario and Quebec the most but also there’s haziness on where we stand on our energy relationship.
One of the biggest issues of the Trump Presidency that the Liberal government denied existed for years was the issues of illegal asylum seekers in Canada entering primarily through Roxham Road.
This followed Justin Trudeau’s 2017 #WelcomeToCanada tweet that we discussed on the first episode of Western Context.
The RCMP is already preparing for such a situation where those who may be deported from the US try to slip into Canada.
The US-Canada border is one of the largest undefended borders in the world and it is very porous due to the nature of the relationship between Canada and the US.
The RCMP is said to be acquiring assets, putting officers in place, setting up buildings, and buying vehicles.
This does lead to the unfortunate discussion that there is a discussion within the union that governs CBSA officers that they feel that between 2000 and 3000 new officers are needed to adequately manage the border.
The government says they’re ready but for a government that has had immigration and migration as its achilles heel, this statement does not inspire confidence.
These issues and competing with the US is what our government should be focused on and based on Poilievre’s congratulations suggests that’s what his government would be focused on.
Instead the media and Liberals are suggesting that the Conservatives are “maple syrup MAGA” and instead we need the Team Canada approach from the last Trump administration.
There are already terms being thrown about like maple syrup MAGA and others about Canada’s conservatives that paint them as cozing to Trump’s MAGA policies.
The reality though is that for anyone who has been following the Poilievre playbook is that the discussion since 2022 has been on affordability through means like reducing inflation, the cost of everything, and abolishing the carbon tax.
The Trump campaign in 2024 brought supporters on from the traditional Republican fold but also brought in disillusioned Democrats like Tulsi Gabbard, Robert Kennedy Junior, Elon Musk, and other characters reminiscent of a crew of a pirate ship.
Poilievre’s policy is distinctly Canadian in terms of Canadian populism born on the prairies about 100 years ago.
Policies that have been in use for years in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and the Reform and Canadian Alliance Parties.
Poilievre is not maple syrup MAGA despite what branders in the Liberals and media may say.
Our number one job needs to be competing with the US on taxes, regulation, energy production, and ensuring our economies mesh together.
Virtue signalling from Trudeau will end badly as we found out in the first Trump administration.
It’s a time to be serious and focus on Canada and ensuring we don’t get caught in the wake of a US rushing to lower taxes, de-regulate, and tariff foreign economies.
Is Trudeau up to the task? We shall see.
Supplementals:

Quote of the Week

“Trump’s a deal-maker. Hopefully it gives us an opportunity to do a deal with the Americans, and I think that should be a priority for our government. We have to be looking at how we protect our forest sector, and I think both federally and provincially, they've ignored it.” - Conservative Party of BC leader John Rustad on BC’s forestry sector

Word of the Week

Derangement - the state of being completely unable to think clearly or behave in a controlled way, especially because of mental illness

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Show Data

Episode Title: He’s Back
Teaser: Canada bans TikTok operations but not the app, Alberta slams Trudeau’s deranged emissions cap, and BC’s forestry sector faces new challenges. Also, Donald Trump's election win will make things interesting for Canada.
Recorded Date: November 9, 2024
Release Date: November 10, 2024
Duration:1:00:24
Edit Notes: Shane cough

Podcast Summary Notes

Duration: XX:XX