Gerald (Jerry) Butts
speaker
396 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 5 Aug
Gerald (Jerry) Butts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Because what is now known as TC Energy was founded to build that pipeline.
And the big debate at the time and the progressive conservatives under Diefenbaker made common cause with the CCF, which was the precursor to the NDP, making the argument that this should be a fully Canadian pipeline.
And first, there was a debate about whether the route should go through the United States once it passed Thunder Bay.
And second, whether Americans should be allowed to be part of the governance and the investment consortium that build the pipeline in the first place.
And the Liberals were they said no to the former.
They didn't want it being routed through the United States, but they said yes to the latter.
And it almost brought the house down.
Yeah, well, I think that the most difficult issues that we deal with in Canada, and it's probably true of every country, are the ones that are core to, I hesitate to use this word, but I'm betraying my Catholic upbringing.
It's our national theology, right?
You can have a debate about a specific project, whether this is the right project, whether the economics make sense, whether this is where it should go, and this is how it should be built, and these are the people who should or should not benefit from it.
And that, I think, is a rational public policy argument.
The problem with pipelines is that they pick at all of our theological issues as a country.
It's who do we want to be when we grow up?
How do we govern ourselves?
What is our relationship with one another?
Do we really care about one another as much as we say we do?
And when the issues that should be confined or constrained to the first category of criteria where you're judging whether or not they're
on their face a good project or not, become just little more than a platform for people who have deep, well-considered, emotional, long-standing views on the bigger picture theological issues.
That's when you get into real trouble.
And for some reason or other, pipelines always, always, always seem to pick at those theological issues in the country.
Showing 21–40 of 396 · page 2 of 20
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