Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: 3.44 million tons of waste is what Ontario sends to the U.S. 20% of our landfill waste is shipped south and we're about to hit a 50% tariff. That's enough numbers for me. I'm not the numbers guy. Paul Micucci is. Today's show, I promise you, is garbage from beginning to end. Well, look at this. We've got a landfill situation that it seems nobody had an eye.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: No.
And how do we miss that, quite frankly, as we start this tariff war, Mike, no one says, well, maybe we should look at the items we're dealing with, the US with or for, and make sure we have a contingency plan. Oops, we forgot garbage.
[00:00:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: So, you know, and the numbers a little bigger, to tell you the truth. So the numbers a little bit. All told, all the states in the U.S. we're roughly, from what we can tell, looking at different reports, around 27%. 27% of our garbage gets exported to the US between New York and Michigan. So all of a sudden, Mike Rogers. So I don't know if you're following the midterms in the U.S.
[00:01:13] Speaker A: it's heated up there right now.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: October 23rd, Mike Rogers gets on, and I'm going to throw it up right now because you got to watch this video. This is, this tells it all. Let's
[00:01:22] Speaker A: have a look.
[00:01:23] Speaker C: Big news, Michigan. Canada has been sending trash trucks across those bridges into our neighborhoods and into landfills for decades. It has been a huge problem. They fill up our streets, they clog up our streets. This has been a major issue for Michigan residents. Guess what? I called the secretary's office a few days ago and said, listen, I, we need some relief on Canadian terrorists, but if you're going to tariff anything, tariff those trash trucks. Well, guess what they announced today. The Trump administration, President Trump agreed. They're tariffing those trash trucks. Huge progress for us trying to keep those trucks out of Michigan. Guess what, man, this is huge. Second largest landmass country in the world ought to be able to handle its own trash. As I've said, if it's good for Michigan, I'm for it. It's bad for Michigan, I'm against it. Come on, Michigan, we have a state to save.
[00:02:14] Speaker B: So he gets on and you just saw the video.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:02:17] Speaker B: Yeah. So hey, Canada, you're a big landmass. You can deal with your own landfills. The
[00:02:24] Speaker A: second largest landmass in the world should be able to deal with its own landfill situation.
[00:02:28] Speaker B: But here's the thing, Mike, that drives me absolutely crazy. The mainstream news so as we're going through this, you know, we get this news that quite frankly, tariffs, they've just taken during the election, tariffs off. It looks like Trump is, is softening, softening on tariffs on Canada.
[00:02:45] Speaker A: I heard that.
[00:02:46] Speaker B: Right. 22 product line items were removed. Plywood, some paper products, farm machinery, refrigeration equipment. But 100 were added.
I didn't know that until I started prepping for the show.
[00:02:59] Speaker A: So he took 20 off
[00:03:00] Speaker B: and added 100. And, and waste got included in that
[00:03:05] Speaker A: because Mike Rogers sent a note or called up the secretary and said, hey,
[00:03:10] Speaker B: so
[00:03:10] Speaker A: what about these trucks? Don't forget to tax them.
[00:03:13] Speaker B: So we're watching mainstream news, the TV we're watching, we're watching our local news, all of us. And they're saying, you know, the Americans are starting during the midterms to feel. And we're thinking, okay, great, you know, they're going to take some tariffs off. They add 100. And on top of that, at 1201 on October 30, the Canadian Municipal waste, sewage sludge and clinical waste entering the US carry a 50% duty.
He went ahead of the January 1 deadline for steel and auto parts.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:47] Speaker B: So he accelerated it. So he took 22 off and he added another 100. And he
[00:03:53] Speaker A: actually. Landfill right to the front of the line
[00:03:54] Speaker B: and put landfill to the front of the line, which hurts us the most.
[00:03:57] Speaker A: Yeah, but
[00:04:00] Speaker B: we're getting along great and we're having these great discussions.
Well, then, I don't know. This doesn't, you know, if, if, if I take, you know, something from you in the middle of a negotiation, it doesn't look like we're doing very well.
[00:04:11] Speaker A: Right. Well, you know, to your point, before we started the show, we had a little chuckle because we're like, we don't anticipate any of these tariffs when we, when we piss off the U.S. like, we don't
[00:04:22] Speaker B: know. We don't. Provinces don't go around the table and say, hey, is there anything we're at risk at that we want to think about.
So minister on this one is the provincial minister. So this is Todd McCarthy. So he's the guy that basically, you know, now is, is come back and said, hey, we got to do landfills. So we have to actually put land fills and incinerators. We need more landfills and more incinerators in Ontario.
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[00:05:20] Speaker A: and okay, so now a plan comes into place that basically is not knee jerk, but it kind of is. I mean, at some point, and actually to Mike Rogers point, we are the second largest land mass in the world.
[00:05:35] Speaker B: Right.
Well, but
[00:05:37] Speaker A: there's a way to do this. We should be doing it and maybe doing it for the US instead of the other way around.
[00:05:44] Speaker B: But remember, so, okay, by saying to back up a little for little older Canadians, so the younger Canadians, so they can under, you know, get the history on this one. So in the 80s and 90s, coming into the 2000s, there was a lot of controversy about where landfills went. You remember this like you did not. There'd be protests there. Signs
[00:06:06] Speaker A: on people's
[00:06:06] Speaker B: signs on people's yards. People were voted out over landfills. So over time, you know, the, the surcharge for the Americans over in places like Detroit now.
So when I say that most of our, most of our waste goes to the US So when it goes to Michigan, it usually goes to Wayne County.
[00:06:26] Speaker A: Okay,
[00:06:27] Speaker B: so Wayne county is where Detroit is.
So just outside Detroit,
[00:06:33] Speaker A: the other side.
[00:06:33] Speaker B: Yeah, just outside of Detroit, it goes to landfills. There's a couple really big landfills that are there that I know of. I think they're the major ones. The Ann Arbor Hills one. And there's one other one. Oh,
[00:06:43] Speaker A: Ann Arbor is one of the major sites.
[00:06:45] Speaker B: Yes. Okay. So these are huge landfills. You know, they take most. Of course, Michigan being a big state, it has a lot of garbage. Quite frankly, it goes. But we not only ship. So this is interesting, the 50 surcharge is on municipal waste, which is our municipal waste being, you know, our garbage that comes from our homes, our recycling, all those things, our business waste, all those things. But then they also include sewage sludge.
[00:07:15] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:07:16] Speaker B: So. And sewage sludge and clinical waste. So sewage sludge and, you know, I'll throw up a diagram on top. And I don't want to get into the, you know, the technical background of wastewater, but quite frankly, it is the byproduct of what comes out of our wastewater. So as our, you know, as, you know, for our bathroom waste and our water waste and our shower waste, all those things go in human
[00:07:43] Speaker A: hazardous waste. Yeah,
[00:07:44] Speaker B: human hazardous. It goes in, it gets, it gets treated at Our treatment plants. It goes through the treatment plants. The sludge that comes out of it actually goes and gets. Some of it gets actually solidified.
So it goes into bio waste, quite frankly. And then. But some of it is actually sludge. And so that sludge gets shipped places and incinerated. And so that's why, quite frankly, it's interesting because the minister is talking about building more incinerators.
And that's a tough one. That's a tougher one because, you know, the U.S. has about 140 incinerators. We only have a few incinerators.
But that's a tougher one because that has a lot of pollution. Smoke doesn't
[00:08:27] Speaker A: really still have that, that incinerator process.
You know, you and I just drove across the country. I, I can think of about 700 miles of space where this wouldn't impact anybody and actually would still be within reach of, you know, municipalities.
[00:08:46] Speaker B: Well, that's, that's Mike Rogers point. Right. We're a big landmass. We should be able to find. But the issue is shipping. So it's shipping. It's not only where we take our waste. It's, it's the shipping distance. So. Right. Especially with the cost of diesel right now, it's more expensive to move our waste even to the US which is.
I think it's 36 cents a ton. So it's a fairly small charge compared to Canada for those of you, you know, who are metric babies, you know, £2,000 to a ton. So a ton isn't that much, quite frankly. So you can see when you say 3.5 million tons of waste, you know, they're shipping, each of the trucks are taking, you know, a few tons down to the US Dumping and then back they come. That's how it works. So it is a lot of money to get to haul waste into the US even though you're only paying 36 cents a ton.
[00:09:39] Speaker A: And of course, their complaint is not just the waste processing, which is, you know, probably beneficial to them financially, but it's the truck log that, you know, just bogging down these towns where people need access. It's become a major issue for, for Michigan, by the sounds of it.
[00:09:58] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, the cross. But then, but then. So. Oh, I'm going to back up for a minute because the incinerator. I don't want to lose the incineration discussion. So, you know, they do have a process now where they have.
Basically they take the waste and they create energy and they do it through steam turbines. So basically, and I'll throw it up on the screen for you. But they create heat and electricity by actually burning it and then taking the steam from the. Actually the incineration of the garbage and then putting it through boilers, purifying it. And then they get ash, of course, and the ash is the thing that's dangerous. They can now control the ashes and the ash goes down and then it needs to go to the landfills.
[00:10:44] Speaker A: So that becomes solid waste and the ash becomes, I would imagine, a compacted solid waste.
[00:10:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:49] Speaker A: Are we doing this already in Canada, do you know?
[00:10:51] Speaker B: Yeah, we're doing it.
We're doing it a few places we're doing. The one I know is in Clarington, I think, where the minister is from.
So I know there's a big plant there. They do this waste energy, but it's not a major.
Mike, I don't want to, I don't want to get anyone sort of all excited that we can turn all our waste into. To energy.
It's, it's. How do I say it? It's a process. Is it the most economical process? No, it's a process you do because you have garbage,
[00:11:18] Speaker A: right?
[00:11:19] Speaker B: Yeah. So it's, you know, but
[00:11:20] Speaker A: it is, you know, waste is a.
[00:11:22] Speaker B: It's part of life.
[00:11:23] Speaker A: Yeah. It's something that we have to solve, right?
[00:11:26] Speaker B: Yeah. Well,
[00:11:27] Speaker A: I don't think we have a solution at the moment on that, on the shipping front, you know, but you raise a good point. It has to be truckable, right?
[00:11:34] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
[00:11:35] Speaker A: So where do we put it? The problem in Canada and certainly in Ontario, is that we're so congested near the border that. And you would have to probably drive two and a half, three hours in any direction, maybe four hours in any direction to ship garbage to a place in Ontario where it wasn't going to cause complete havoc.
[00:11:55] Speaker B: Right. But. But now with the price of fuel and diesel and everything going up, can you afford to. So now this is interesting. So, you know, and the conundrum is a timeline. So the issue is because it takes.
And this is where, you know, the government, the Ontario government is, Is struggling with the decision.
So again, I talked about the fact that the, you know, the history of landfills, no one wanted them for years. And there used to be protests. It was politically insensitive. Think about it. You're. You're living in a town and I call this the, the. It's like the lottery. I call it the, the waste lottery because quite frank, you're living in a town, your grandparents have left you 300 acres of land.
You're selling off the land every year to pay the property tax on the land because the land's farmland or it's not being used for farmland. So you're trying to, you're trying to stay alive. So every year you're selling a little bit to try to keep as much land, hoping that some development comes, the government shows up in your town and they start looking around and they say your site's the site.
[00:13:04] Speaker A: Suddenly your investment just dropped to next to nothing because.
[00:13:07] Speaker B: Well, no, the guy that they picked the site on is uber wealthy.
[00:13:12] Speaker A: Yeah,
[00:13:12] Speaker B: he's the guy. Everyone else in the town loses all their land value. Right. So it's like one of those things.
It's like the small apartment that gets built or the big apartment that's get built on the block.
And everyone groans because they now know that their home investment just went to zero.
[00:13:29] Speaker A: Plummeted. Yeah.
[00:13:30] Speaker B: Yeah. So quite frankly. But this is worse. This is worse than a quarry. This is worse. This is a landfill. Right. So you don't know. No one's going to buy your house or buy your investment because they don't know if your groundwater is going to get contaminated.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: True.
[00:13:44] Speaker B: So, but you know, landfills. So now I'm going to back up because I don't want to be too hard on landfills because we do need them. But, you know, and landfills have. Actually the technology around landfills is, is improved immensely over the, over the, the last two decades. So whether it's the drainage, you know, and we'll put up a base of. The University of Calgary did a study on it.
[00:14:10] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:14:10] Speaker B: And they did a great job.
And they're, you know, they're, they talk about how now they're highly engineered. It's not like years ago. Remember the landfills when we used to go up to the cottage.
[00:14:19] Speaker A: Oh yeah. You just basically over there in that section which we're going to bury pretty soon.
[00:14:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:25] Speaker A: Is where you throw your, your waste garbage. Over here you can throw your metal stuff and in that bin. It was pretty basic.
[00:14:32] Speaker B: They were like rock quarries that used to get turned into landfills. And quite frankly, the challenge being is they, over time, you know, the groundwater was being contaminated and caused issues. There's not that many people living there, so quite frankly, no one really talked about it.
[00:14:48] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:48] Speaker B: There's cottagers, you know, some lakes, you know, there were lakes we heard about that actually went bad, you know, and people who had bought their cottages lost their investment.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: I remember that. But that was actually even back in the day that Was few and far between. Those were the horror stories. The
[00:15:03] Speaker B: horror stories, yeah. That's what you did here. But
[00:15:05] Speaker A: they were not that advanced. You're right. They were pretty basic.
[00:15:08] Speaker B: They were pretty basic. But now, you know, there's basically, they have a drainage layer. They do a gravel collection pit on the bottom. They put layer of. I call it a membrane now. I call it a pool membrane. But it's not. It's not a pool cover. But. But they actually do a plastic membrane in that's impermeable. So they do a bunch of stuff and then over time they pack it. Pack it. And the leachate systems, collection systems that they have now are amazing. So they, they do a great job on it. And as they crush it down, they actually put pipes into it and they run the methane. You're making a joke about golf courses that are based on landfills, built on landfills.
[00:15:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:51] Speaker B: Have the big methane pipes that are shooting out of the ground.
Well, they actually collect them. And I know they're now starting to do stuff with the methane that are. They're pulling out of the pits.
[00:16:02] Speaker A: That is true. I've seen that in the west coast. Yeah. There's. There's a. Processing. Methane processing facilities. Yeah,
[00:16:08] Speaker B: yeah. So over time, the technology is getting better, but it's still the same issue, you know, the same issue. And it's interesting because as soon as Bill C140 came about, the minister, and we'll throw it up here, right away he had to make comment. The press was right on him.
[00:16:25] Speaker A: Okay, dissect this for me.
[00:16:26] Speaker B: All right.
[00:16:27] Speaker D: There is no, never going to be, never going to be the imposition of a landfill on any municipality that doesn't want it. Municipalities will hold them, depend on whether or not they want a landfill site. But there are benefits, obviously economic benefits to having a landfill site, an expansion to a landfill, or an energy from waste site in a community. But that will be up to municipalities to decide and proponents will come forward with proposals. That's what this legislation does. But it is a call to arms. If we cannot manage our waste and we can't manage it in a multifaceted way, going to have major problems.
[00:17:03] Speaker A: Wow. Okay. Yeah. So what. Basically he said that we'll always have a say in it, but also
[00:17:12] Speaker B: we're passing Bill C140, so you won't have a say in it. And so, you know, and what I mean is there will be an environmental assessment, but it's not an easy thing to govern. This is a tough one because the government a little Bit late to the party, quite frankly. Missed this. Yeah. Should have thought over time we needed a solution as we were going forward rather than just paying Americans a low surcharge per tonnage.
But they didn't, so we missed it. Now we're kind of have to scurry and go. But the problem is now I got to get environmental assessments done. I got to get a community to actually agree to one of these.
[00:17:48] Speaker A: You actually have to push this into a community as opposed to let a community adopt it or find a.
Another alternative. This kind of gives them the power to say, no, no, we're enforcing this build of a landfill.
[00:18:04] Speaker B: Yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll take consultation on it. But it's going here. It's
[00:18:08] Speaker A: going here. Yeah,
[00:18:09] Speaker B: yeah. So, you know, it's kind of funny because he was trying to be diplomatic with the press, saying, you know, we won't put it anywhere. Well, no, you're going to put it somewhere. Right. So it's going.
[00:18:21] Speaker A: I like the way that the more he talked the question quieter he got, his voice just petered out.
[00:18:26] Speaker B: But this one exposed a bunch of really odd things that I think that caught our attention. We started preparing the show, Mike. The first thing, quite frankly, that we hit on the American approach.
So quite frankly, how mad Americans are at Canadians.
And this is the Republican candidate who's actually been on the tariff side. So he's actually been against Trump saying, get rid of the tariffs. And when it came to landfills, he's like, get them out of here. So he's on the phone with Trump to say, get out of here.
And then, quite frankly, the mainstream media's been, as we were going through it, on the fact that Trump was taking tariffs off. Well, he, you know, if we didn't have this landfill issue, I doubt any of us would have looked to the fact that he put 100 new tariffs items on tariffs on items.
[00:19:17] Speaker A: It was,
[00:19:17] Speaker B: took only 22 off. So I'm like,
[00:19:19] Speaker A: it was kind of the canary in the coal mine on a whole whack of new tariffs. And that shocked me when you said that today. I thought, I mean, the way that it's been delivered to us is major tariffs have been removed.
[00:19:32] Speaker B: Yeah,
[00:19:33] Speaker A: that was it.
[00:19:34] Speaker B: No, but, but, but. And
[00:19:35] Speaker A: then one of them, one of them got added so quickly that it affects Ontario instantly on a major level. I mean, we're paying that 50% tax now.
[00:19:45] Speaker B: Now. Yeah. Oh, of course,
[00:19:47] Speaker A: we can't catch up to that.
[00:19:49] Speaker B: So our municipalities is getting ready for the show as we're doing the research on the show, we're kind of going through a bunch of stuff to find what each municipality's landfill capabilities were.
And it was interesting because we, we hit on, which we're going to do another show on, and I won't spend a ton of time on it, but we hit on Vancouver. And there's a really interesting article in the Vancouver sun today which if you get a chance, you should read later. But it talks about the fact that property tax assessment values are significantly higher than residential home prices right now. So almost $400,000 gap.
So they're paying property tax on an assessment that's almost 400,000
[00:20:31] Speaker A: out of whack.
[00:20:32] Speaker B: Out of whack, which we've talked about on shows before. We've had this conversation. I hate to say we told you so, but we were telling a lot of people that this was, this day was going to come. It's come in Vancouver. I'm assuming it's going to come in Toronto. So now you're saying, okay, well, what does that have to do with it? Well, the thing it has to do with it now is we just had, for example, an election in Toronto.
So now the people of Toronto, at some point are. People in Vancouver are going to come forward and say, we do my property tax assessment because I want my mill rate to be based on my actual value of my home. Now,
[00:21:05] Speaker A: I'm not going to lie. Which
[00:21:06] Speaker B: is significantly lower. So then my property tax should go down. It shouldn't go up because that's why you're, you know, this is the process. I paid when it went up, now it's down. I'm not going to pay you on a value that's down.
[00:21:20] Speaker A: How about this? I paid HST at the height of the market.
I paid tax at the height of the market on a home, Right?
[00:21:27] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:21:29] Speaker A: Now I'm watching that very home, that over overinflated nightmare.
Still tax me at that rate at that overinflated rate that I could never get the home sold for.
[00:21:41] Speaker B: Right. So now these cities that were all like, okay, you know, I'm gonna feed 330,000 children at lunch are sitting there with, with this issue of property tax. Now their waste disposal bills are gonna start going up all over the place. Cause quite frankly, it's gonna come back to them. It's 50% increase. Now the Michigan. Here's the interesting thing, which we should have picked up earlier. Also, Gretchen Whitmer, who's the governor of Michigan, she's been, she's hated. She's hated this garbage idea forever. Yeah. And at one point she said it should go to $5 a ton. So she's actually tried to get it to go up to $5 a ton from 36 cents. So we should have at some point said, you know, hey, this could be a problem. Yeah, this could be a problem. So we missed this one. So a number of things we missed. Well, and quite frankly haven't reported on properly is, you know, this issue of tariffs and then not paying attention to what our neighbor was doing with our waste is big, big mistake.
[00:22:46] Speaker A: How long until Olivia Chao tells everybody there's going to be a garbage tax?
[00:22:50] Speaker B: Well, it's interesting. So, you know, so now this is, this is a whole other issue, like I said, for another show. But now, quite frankly, when it comes time, which when you look in writing on her site, this is just one mayor where. And I'm sorry, we're not picking on you, but, but we're using it as an example.
She never said anything about property tax increases. So now if property tax increases are off the table.
[00:23:17] Speaker A: She did talk about it.
[00:23:18] Speaker B: She did talk about. She never did put in writing on her site what that was.
If you look at her platform, we went and actually took a look and recorded all their platforms when the elections were over so we could have them for future shows. She was one of the few mayors that never actually commented on property tax increases. So if you look at it and you say, okay, so, you know, you're going to go to the well. How do you go to the well now? And quite frankly, you have all these increasing costs. So whether or not now we have to build a landfill somewhere else in Ontario, well, the charges for that landfill are going to be significantly higher than what you're paying at the 36 cents a ton to ship to the, to Michigan because it's, you know, it's very, you can only imagine you got to go buy the land, you got to do all this treatment to the land, you have to go through environmental assessments to the land, you have to ship to where you're going to ship it to, far enough out of the city so someone might take it because all the losers, you have to make sure that all the people who lose residential or commercial real estate value around you, if they're one, you know, there's one winner in that lottery and that's the landowner that actually gets the landfill. Right, Right. The rest are all lose.
[00:24:29] Speaker A: Everybody else loses on it, everyone
[00:24:31] Speaker B: else loses. Right.
[00:24:32] Speaker A: You got my, you've got my head spinning over, okay, we're At a place right now where home values are not the same, that means the tax base is going to shrink. And if it doesn't.
[00:24:41] Speaker B: Yeah,
[00:24:42] Speaker A: something's wrong. So let's just say that.
[00:24:46] Speaker B: Well, it can't go higher.
[00:24:47] Speaker A: Well, but
[00:24:48] Speaker B: you're
[00:24:48] Speaker A: stuck. It should be.
So
[00:24:50] Speaker B: it should be going down. Yeah.
[00:24:51] Speaker A: It should be compensated. And, and I think municipalities are going to find themselves in that scenario.
[00:24:55] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:24:57] Speaker A: At the same time all these tariff ridden problems that hit the municipalities like garbage, recycling, even, even certain industries that are, you know, being tariffed, that are everything in that town, whether it's steel and I get it, we pared back some of those, whatever the industry is that's being affected by it.
At the same time the tax base is shrinking and if it doesn't, there should be something looked into. And at the same time we have other. So the municipalities are going to get squeezed at a time where their expenses are going to grow.
How long until some of these municipalities just break?
[00:25:36] Speaker B: Oh yeah. What we've, we've done shows on this. Mike. I think if, if you don't believe amalgamation of municipalities are going to happen shortly,
[00:25:46] Speaker A: it has to.
[00:25:47] Speaker B: I think you're delusional. I think you're, you're out to lunch. You
[00:25:49] Speaker A: know what
[00:25:50] Speaker B: I think? If you think you are living in a small community or a small municipality or, and, and you think it's going to sustain, I, I think you're, you're not focused.
[00:25:59] Speaker A: So I'm, I'm driving through Manitoba and Regina and both of those provinces there are remote townships that are the only thing within, within arm's reach of each other and then there's nothing and there is no amalgamation there. That I think makes a huge difference.
[00:26:19] Speaker B: I think
[00:26:19] Speaker A: they're, now they're going to have to start to think about, I'm sorry, this town isn't going to survive. This is terrible to say, please forgive me, this town isn't going to survive. This one is amalgamation. This one's not going to. Is that what you envision in your mind?
[00:26:35] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's incentive programs to get, incentive programs to get people to relocate. I think we're going to have to figure out. But, but you know, it's interesting, Mike, and back on the landfill thing, it, you know, we think so. When I was going through, you know, Bill C140. Bill, by the way, if anyone gets a chance, take a look at Bill C140. It covers like everything from archeological changes to legislation and it's, it's build Ontario faster. And quite frankly it really does eliminate a lot of current checks and balances, which I think a lot of it is needed. So I'm not criticizing the bill, but it is a very extensive piece of legislation that covers a number of items. You know, the first One is Highway 69, and basically speeds up all the environmental challenges or environmental reviews that happen with respect to that highway.
So. And there's a bunch of other stuff in there, including landfill legislation, which, you know, I know the minister wants to be consultive, which is great. Yeah. But at the end of the day, it says what it says, and that is. Yeah,
[00:27:47] Speaker A: it doesn't really
[00:27:48] Speaker B: doesn't. It's not a municipal decision anymore.
[00:27:50] Speaker A: Sorry, just to zoom in on highway. The Highway 69 issue.
That to me is the natural. So funny that this came up that in my mind was the natural transport lane for our own garbage. Could we find a landfill solution in Ontario? That. That would be a really integral route.
And can we.
Can we right now bypass the nonsense that Michigan's experiencing with overflow of garbage traffic? Hey, before we go any further, please hit the subscribe button right now. If you want the raw debates, the full uncut conversations you won't see here, head straight to TPL Media, ca subscribe and lock in your membership. Trust me, you don't want to miss what happens behind the paywall. All right, back to the show.
[00:28:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I think we could. I think you need the roads. You need someone to buy into it, quite frankly.
There's going, you know, whether they protest or not, it's going to happen. You know, you're seeing what's happening with things, you know, which I don't disagree with. You know, for example, bike lanes. Right. There's a lot of stuff changing right now. I think, quite frankly, you're seeing majority government make some interesting moves that I think are good, and I think they have some good things in. I think they're challenging for some people. And you're seeing people, you know, get out there and protest and get their views known. So, you know, there's a pros and cons to every decision. I think what they're trying to do is speed those decisions up now.
[00:29:17] Speaker A: Well, I think that we do let protest delay way too much in. In Canada. We. We just want. We don't want to hurt anybody's feelings for whatever reason.
[00:29:25] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now it's interesting. We think, you know, a lot of people are saying, well, why don't we just wait till after the midterms because the garbage conundrum will go away. I don't think the garbage conundrum is going to go away. Because if Mike Rogers, you know, Trump is out there stumping for all these guys, trying to get them through the midterm, including Rogers, I think there's a lot going on there.
[00:29:46] Speaker A: It may go away, but still, like you said,
[00:29:48] Speaker B: if the Democrat gets in, is it going to go away? Is he going to be, is he going to take a different position on landfills in Michigan, especially in Wayne county, which is, you know, where, you know, it's a poor county, quite frankly, that's probably why a lot of the reason it ended up there.
Landfills went to a county that, quite frankly, outside of Detroit, that just needed the economic, needed some stimulus, and landfills were kind of what they had. You know, you got to remember, you remember the time I remember not even so long ago, quite frankly, sitting over in Windsor and having a beer and watching, watching the warehouses burn.
[00:30:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:26] Speaker B: Because the, you know, the Detroit Fire Department only were so shorthanded,
[00:30:30] Speaker A: they could only respond to some of the fires.
[00:30:32] Speaker B: Well, their solution was to mitigate. So they, they didn't even try to fight the fires. They just let them burn to the ground and try to make sure they didn't spread. So they would just put a perimeter around the buildings.
[00:30:42] Speaker A: Okay, that one can't burn again.
[00:30:44] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that was their, that was their strategy. And we used to watch night after night all summer long, you know, as the, as the, as the warehouses and the buildings burnt. So this is kind of what we have to deal with.
[00:30:58] Speaker A: You know, it kind of.
By the way, I promised my wife I would show this image, if you don't mind throwing it up, Nick. Of what our garbage looks like going to the US That's a pretty significant.
[00:31:10] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. How many football fields? It's like 10, 10 or 15 football fields of garbage piled so many feet high, 30 or 40ft high, it's like crazy.
[00:31:20] Speaker A: I believe it's a hell of a lot more than that in the way of football fields. It is a nation when you take a look at it. But having said that, it does kind of put into perspective how big the problem is. And to your point, the midterms only, at best, the midterms stave this off for another day because as you point out, Michigan's been against this, Ohio has been against this, New York has been against this for a long time now. So what we saw was a tariff bubble up really quickly, bite us in the ass.
It's going to bite us in the ass again. We need to find A solution for this. Well, and it is, by the way, I should point out 20%, 27% of our garbage going down there. Okay. It's still only 27% of our overall waste, but it's significant categories of waste we don't have the means to manage at the moment.
[00:32:13] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And if now with it shut off, Mike, we only had till 2037 till our landfills were full.
[00:32:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:32:21] Speaker B: So now with this being shut off, we have till 2034.
So it's. It's eliminated. Three years. Three
[00:32:27] Speaker A: years.
[00:32:28] Speaker B: So three years off that timeline, they're saying it takes a decade to build a landfill.
[00:32:33] Speaker A: I can see that based on what you're showing us with the new infrastructure that needs built, that. That makes sense. So you gotta buy the land, assess the land, cancel the deal on the land, find new land, assess the land. I, I can see it being at least 10. If we say 10 years, you know what we mean?
[00:32:49] Speaker B: But the problem is, quite frankly, we're out of landfill by.
By 34. So 26 now, 10 years. We're 36 for two years. So we're, we're already missed the timeline.
We're already over. So quite frankly, we either have to expedite something. So to me,
[00:33:05] Speaker A: that's. Or prepare to deal with. Or prepare to take this deal for a period of time.
[00:33:10] Speaker B: Yeah. Or pay. But again, you know, It's a catch 22. At some point. So at some point. This is the interesting part now, and I'm not saying this will happen, and I hope it won't happen, but Trump save. Everyone's right. And Trump does lose in the midterms, and he gets annihilated.
[00:33:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:33:27] Speaker B: So. But he doesn't get annihilated so much that he loses 2/3 of the Senate. So he's not going to be impeached. So quite frankly, if he keeps so much of the Senate and he won't have to worry about an impeachment, because quite frankly, you need 2/3. So he won't have that issue. So it'll be a stalemate. So. And he'll be mad.
So then he'll start to cut things off, slow down border traffic. Canada won't be his favorite son, because quite frankly, and I don't know about you, they're saying over the weekend, the same people that told us one side of the tariff story when it came to landfills, and that's. The mainstream media, are now telling us, quite frankly, that they're talking.
[00:34:08] Speaker A: Yeah,
[00:34:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't believe they're talking. I Don't believe that for one second, Mike.
[00:34:13] Speaker A: How can we believe it?
[00:34:14] Speaker B: No, I don't believe that's, that's just, to me, that's propaganda. And quite frankly, you know, they're putting it out because they're trying to look like they're not hurting Trump before the, the midterms.
[00:34:28] Speaker A: Yeah,
[00:34:28] Speaker B: Trump is saying that because he's trying to tell people in states that are affected by tariffs that he's getting there.
I think, I think this is purely propaganda for our entertainment, Mike,
[00:34:40] Speaker A: also, I would agree, and I don't think the, I say this often. You can't unring bells very easily. You know, like you said, okay, 20 tariffs off 100 new ones over here. You know, there is no, there's no magical spell for unringing the bell on financial things.
We either create a new deal overall, which Trump is not going to do, especially if he blows it up in the midterms.
We're going to have to wait for another administration in there. And even at that point, Michigan's going to stand up. Mike Rogers is going to stand up and say, you're not taking away this source of revenue. And I wonder if Mike Rogers, if his state will see even a single dime of this tariff. I would imagine they don't because it sounds to me like the budget's upside down.
[00:35:27] Speaker B: Well, the budget's upside down. You know, on Friday, I get home and I'm sitting, you know, watching one of Trump's stump speeches from like Iowa or somewhere.
And, you know, I'm sitting there listening and he gets up and he says, I'm going to give, if you vote for me, I'm going to give each and every American $5,000.
[00:35:51] Speaker A: They don't have that money.
[00:35:52] Speaker B: Well, he's, you know, from the tariffs that I'm getting, I'm going to get and from the, all the things going on, the wealth in the nation has increased and I'm going to.
He's, that's part of his plan, right? That's part of his vote for me. And it's that blunt. And I know most Canadians aren't watching, so quite frankly, they probably don't get that. But, you know, he's, of course, you know, he's saying, I'm not on the ballot. On the ballot, but I am, because your candidate is me. I'm representing them. I need your support. I'm going to give you $5,000. And by the way, the Democrats voted 100% against tax free tips and tax free overtime, and those will go away. So you Know, those are compelling arguments. You know, all of a sudden, all of a sudden you got
[00:36:40] Speaker A: me with the $5,000 a vote.
[00:36:42] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, it's a very interesting. And I'm not saying he's going to get there, but I'm saying it's very interesting. It's very interesting to think that you're going to totally wipe him out with some of these promises. So you might win the Democrats might take, you know, a majority of both houses, both chambers, but quite frankly, I
[00:37:00] Speaker A: don't think that's predicted at the moment. But
[00:37:02] Speaker B: no, the Senate, I think, stay with him. Yeah. But quite frankly, anything can happen in elections and polling is very tight right now. But you look at it for sure, he's going to be around for those two years if he's that pissed off that his outcome is not what he wanted.
You know, we could go from tariffs to outright done.
[00:37:25] Speaker A: Yeah, he gets sanctioned.
[00:37:26] Speaker B: Yeah. And then, then we're in a very interesting position because we know we don't have anywhere to ship garbage.
So it's, it's a, you know, it's a balancing act. And quite frankly, we're, we haven't done a good job. We have some challenges going forward. I call it a lottery because someone's going to get picked up.
So some,
[00:37:47] Speaker A: some lucky landowner and his horribly bad luck neighbors are going to take this.
[00:37:53] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:37:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I think you're probably right. That's. I mean, there's no other reason to have to put this bill into play. And by the way, it feels to me, Paul, like we kind of need to do something of our own. When, when you hear Mike Rogers say, oh, second largest landmass in the world and they can't manage their own landfill.
[00:38:09] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:38:12] Speaker A: And we are, by comparison, so small per capita, you know.
Oh,
[00:38:18] Speaker B: compared to the US Like I, like I mentioned earlier, they're incinerators. I think they have 140 incinerators in the US every second state has, you know, a couple incinerators. So quite frankly, they're garbage. Now, they do ship garbage. You know, it's interesting, when I was doing the research for this, they ship from Maine down to New Brunswick quite a bit of garbage.
[00:38:37] Speaker A: Oh, I didn't know
[00:38:38] Speaker B: that quite of. Actually, in New Brunswick, landfills are quite a big, quite a big industry.
[00:38:43] Speaker A: Well, New Brunswick, let's get our tariff out. Come on.
[00:38:46] Speaker B: Yeah, well, but again, you know, the way we run our Canadian processes, Right. You know, interprovincial trade, everything else, we definitely run province by province. You know, we've seen, quite frankly, last Week we saw when the. The conference. The EU conference was here in Quebec. Look at that whole fiasco. Right. And. And, you know, now, quite frankly, you know, we hear at the end of the week, the interesting. Plamondo and Kearney are going to have a meeting now.
[00:39:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:13] Speaker B: So now it's over. They're going to actually meet. Well, you know, do I believe that, too? I probably don't believe. Well, after
[00:39:18] Speaker A: he said he's not going to the EU summit, I was like, oh, all right. He won't be.
[00:39:22] Speaker B: Yeah, no, no. I think these are just messaging. Right. At this point. Yeah, they will meet. They'll meet, you know, two months from now. But it's just to get everyone comforted down that, you know, that's going to get worked out. But
[00:39:36] Speaker A: I don't think much comes of that meeting, to be honest with you. I mean, Quebec is now poised to do its thing.
[00:39:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:39:43] Speaker A: You know, how did we get to Quebec? But look at this.
Here's my question. Do you think a lot of our garbage goes down to the US and then back up to New Brunswick?
[00:39:51] Speaker B: No. No. No.
[00:39:52] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:39:53] Speaker B: No, I don't. I hope not.
[00:39:55] Speaker A: That would
[00:39:55] Speaker B: be bizarre. There's a vig, there's a Vigo, and it ends up back in New Brunswick.
[00:39:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:59] Speaker B: Right. Foreign exchange. Yeah, but. No, no, but. But, you know, it's interesting because, you know, we. We talk about this quite a bit. There, there's meetings between, you know, whether it be premiers, whether it be premiers and the prime minister.
Hey, garbage, landfills, all these things, big issue. You think at some point there's some conversation that would take place to say, what is our national strategy for landfills?
[00:40:23] Speaker A: Yeah, we can't recycle our way out of this.
[00:40:25] Speaker B: Yeah. So, you know, where does it go? How do we ship, you know, what is our, you know, and we have lots of environmental requirements, quite frankly, every. Every province has their own environmental group, every, you know, the federal environment. We have lots of red tape on this one. But yet it's not a conversation that we. We wanted to sit down and project and talk about, because at the end of the day, so say that, you know, say that that border is cut off from garbage, you know, shipping.
It goes somewhere else in Canada. So then it has to start going because we don't have a landfill ready.
[00:40:58] Speaker A: Right.
[00:40:58] Speaker B: So then the next step is, what's our contingency plan? If that happened, which province would it go to? What would be the surcharge on that process? How would it be passed back to the citizen and Then how do you explain that to citizens now? Because that's going to get. You kind of have to go
[00:41:12] Speaker A: to them with an entire plan, right, saying, okay, for this period of time, we're going to ship to New Brunswick, for example,
[00:41:17] Speaker B: right.
[00:41:17] Speaker A: In that period of time, we're going to be building our own incinerators and begin the.
[00:41:23] Speaker B: My question as a taxpayer is how do we miss this? And why am I paying the bill? And why.
Why wasn't this baked into a plan 10 years ago? So we didn't. We could transition it. Why were we dependent?
You know, it brings up again.
It's like a Pandora's box. When you get into some of these shows, I always tell you that you start on one thing and then you're going down. You're going to. Oh, we forgot that. Oh, wait a minute, we didn't do that. That
[00:41:46] Speaker A: links to this chain. Yeah.
[00:41:47] Speaker B: You know, and I know they're trying to get through it, and I appreciate that. And they're trying to actually get through some red tape.
But, you know, it's a shocking thing about this to me is you think someone would have picked this up along the way. This got to be a red flag for some good
[00:42:01] Speaker A: news, Paul. Good news, Good news.
I think this is the last one we're going to miss on the terraform.
I think we're good. From here on in, we're keeping an eye, right?
[00:42:10] Speaker B: No,
[00:42:10] Speaker A: no. All right, well, thanks. I appreciate this.
