Get ready for Justin Trudeau’s new tax — on plastic
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
169.68375
Summary
Justin Trudeau and his extremist, shouty, Cabinet Minister Catherine McKenna are contemplating a 'plastics tax' to force Canadians to pay for the privilege of using single-use plastic. What's the worst thing they could do? Tax carbon dioxide.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hello, my Rebels. Today, I tell you about something that you might think is fiction.
00:00:03.460
Oh, but I'm reading from a real document. It's a plastics tax. Yeah, you heard me.
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Just stop for a second and think about how much plastic is in your life.
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Now imagine paying a tax to Catherine McKenna for the privilege of using your plastic.
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That's what I'm going to talk about. I want to show you excerpts from the key document.
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But folks, can you become a premium subscriber of the Rebels so you can see the video form?
00:00:27.740
But if you become a premium subscriber, you can see the video version of it, too, which is, I think, quite interesting.
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I also show a picture of a river in China. You've got to see this picture, friends.
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If you go to the rebel.media slash shows, you can become a premium subscriber.
00:00:43.440
Get my show, Sheila Gunn-Reed's show, David Menzies' show.
00:00:46.980
And even if you don't want to watch the video version, if you just like the podcast, it helps us.
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It's eight bucks a month, and that pays the bills. I would be grateful.
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All right, folks, without further to do, here is today's show about the plastics tax.
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Tonight, are you ready for Trudeau's next tax? A tax on plastic.
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It's April 24th, and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.
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Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
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There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
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The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
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Hey, how are you enjoying Justin Trudeau's carbon tax?
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Well, do you know what else is made from carbon, made from hydrocarbons?
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Well, plastics are. Are you ready for a plastics tax?
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Justin Trudeau and his extremist, shouty, Cabinet Minister Catherine McKenna, they're contemplating one.
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I'll get back to that later, but I just got to tell you before I get into their proposal.
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I've never seen an anti-oil protest that would even be possible without oil.
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They all have modern clothing, much of which has some sort of artificial fiber in it.
00:02:07.180
Think of backpacks. Think of high-tech plastic and metal cell phones.
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You really can't function in the modern world without plastic, you know.
00:02:17.420
They weren't kidding in that old movie, The Graduate.
00:02:34.320
Now, that movie was made 52 years ago, if my math is right.
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And wouldn't you know it, that was actually great career advice.
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In many cases, for example, PVC pipes are better than metal pipes or concrete pipes.
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Like water mains, they don't break or leak as much or corrode.
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It's like saying, hey, guys, this telephone invention is really great.
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Even the Unabomber, who renounced modern technology and blew people up.
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Well, take a look at his little cabin in the forest.
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Lots of wood, but of course, you can't make a stove out of wood, so that's iron in there.
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And look at those plastic bags and plastic jugs, and there were plastic water bottles,
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because really, how are you going to keep water?
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In some sort of bladder you make out of an animal, leather or something?
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Are you going to blow glass out of sand or something?
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I know I'm saying the obvious here, but look, they're literally taxing the air right now.
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Carbon dioxide, that naturally occurring trace gas.
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And by that, I mean it's just 400 parts per million parts of air, or it's actually 40,000
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Our breath has literally 100 times more CO2 in it than the regular air.
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That's how insane it is to tax carbon dioxide, the stuff of life.
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I mean, if you're into taxes, why not tax the air?
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People can't live without it, so they've got to pay the tax.
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You have to demonize air a bit, as they've done with carbon.
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That's element number six in the periodic table.
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Well, imagine anathematizing a natural chemical element and teaching people that it's wrong.
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And the problem is no one of authority has called out the crazy.
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They're afraid of being called a denier or whatever.
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So they accept the fake science and try and fight these carbon tax ideas on other grounds.
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If you agree with the premise that carbon, by the way, we're made of carbon, too.
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If we agree with the premise that carbon is poison, which, of course, it's not.
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All life on Earth would die without carbon dioxide.
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All plant life, anything green, anything with chlorophyll in it, uses carbon dioxide and photosynthesis.
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Every single plant and flower and crop would die without CO2.
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If you agree that carbon dioxide is poison, it's pollution, then how can you then oppose fighting the pollution?
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I know I sound crazy talking about how good plastic is because we all just know it.
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Just so we don't pay attention to the wallpaper or we don't pay attention to, you know, things we just know.
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I'll stop because it's nuts to have to make the case for plastic.
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I remember a few years ago watching my old friend and boss, Preston Manning, give a speech at his Manning Center.
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I knew that Manning had utterly changed from the principled Western conservatives who so strongly opposed the Kyoto Protocol in the 90s.
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And Preston gave a speech, and not only did he join the global warming cult, but he came out against plastic.
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There's more effective ways of tackling environmental problems, including global warming, proliferation of plastics, urban sprawl, biodiversity.
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I later found out, to my despair, that Preston Manning was taking money from the Ties Foundation.
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And I've got to tell you, that pretty much broke my heart.
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I mean, the anti-plastic crusade is a real thing.
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Look at this kooky crap that I saw on the CBC website just today.
00:07:07.600
Um, well, sister, I guess that is your religion then, isn't it?
00:07:15.540
You're now some crazy, eco-apocalyptic millenarian or something.
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Hey, do you think the CBC will do that same story for Ramadan or another Muslim holiday, though?
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Anyways, you beat that anti-plastic drum long enough and people pick up the beat.
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And look at this headline in Black Locks Reporter today, which, as you remember, Black Locks
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Reporter, one of the few independent media left in the country that refused to take the
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They're based in Ottawa, so they do great research on Ottawa.
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And, um, they say, Parliament should consider a plastic tax, says in the Environment Canada
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Researchers caution the tax would cost consumers since plastics are found in almost every
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Anyway, so it's called an economic study of the Canadian plastics industry markets and
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And as you can see, it is on Environment Canada Stationary.
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And though they paid external, quote, experts to write it, this project was overseen, funded
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and coordinated by Environment Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada.
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So this is the product of Catherine McKenna's fevered mind.
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So let's talk about climate change for a second.
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We got a report last year that said we have 12 years to take serious climate action.
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It is 43 pages of content, plus all sorts of definitions and summaries and diagrams.
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I could feel my mind slowly pickling like it was in a pickle jar.
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I was slowly going crazy, reading so much crazy.
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And I got to say, if all I did every day was to be immersed in that kind of crazy, I might start to sound like this.
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So let's talk about climate change for a second.
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We got a report last year that said we have 12 years to take serious climate action.
00:10:01.160
I noticed there were plastic Liberal Party signs there.
00:10:07.620
Anyways, this 43-page report, this report that we paid who knows how much money to study a plastics tax, actually treated the idea seriously.
00:10:16.180
It's an insane idea, which is pretty much evident when you read the report.
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Because plastics are so ubiquitous, it really is like taxing air, like taxing carbon.
00:10:30.660
Look at all the amount of plastics, packaging, construction.
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I sort of forgot about how much plastic is in construction.
00:10:45.340
And the idea of recycling all these plastics is nuts, too.
00:10:53.000
I know I'm quoting from the Book of Crazy here.
00:10:56.020
But that shouty cult leader demanded a report on taxing plastic and forcing people to recycle plastic.
00:11:01.440
Even though plastic is harmless, it's not toxic, it's not poisonous, it's fine.
00:11:11.960
But here, let me just quote for a paragraph from this report of Crazy.
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In the automotive and white goods sector, e.g. large appliances such as fridges or stoves,
00:11:27.540
as well as small household appliances like a food processor, electric kettles.
00:11:34.340
The recycling of plastic is almost non-existent.
00:11:47.540
As products are collected for recycling, however, they are usually sent to a shredder where only the material of interest,
00:11:53.760
generally the metal content, is sorted and sent to recyclers.
00:11:57.460
It is indeed more cost-effective and less labor-intensive to crush and shred vehicles or appliances for metal recycling than to dismantle parts, including plastic parts.
00:12:08.120
Now, that's a little bit of sane talk in a reporter.
00:12:23.960
But even these reporters, or this research, they were clear.
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It takes so much effort and energy and manpower to recycle the plastic out of a fridge or a car.
00:12:38.000
It doesn't make any sense because it would be insane to try.
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Or to put it in a way that you think an environmentalist might care about, it would take more energy, more resources to recycle it than you would save by recycling.
00:12:51.260
It would take more resources to recycle a fridge or a car than would be building a new one from scratch.
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That's why you have to subsidize recycling to get it done.
00:13:01.920
It doesn't make sense, especially for things for which there is no shortage at all.
00:13:12.620
It's so cheap to plant new ones and harvest new trees.
00:13:19.860
And by the way, just throw paper in the landfill.
00:13:27.360
It doesn't, you know, it's not biodegradable, but it's inert.
00:13:36.360
It's cheaper ecologically just to make new plastic.
00:13:41.240
The only thing that makes any sense to recycle is metal.
00:13:46.600
Which is why you don't need to pay people to do something so common sense in environmental.
00:13:50.940
People will recycle metal and did long before the government came along.
00:13:54.680
Because it's a lot cheaper to recycle metal than mine more metal from the center of the earth.
00:13:59.020
I don't know if you remember, but until a year ago, did you know that Canada shipped most of our, quote, recycling to China?
00:14:08.700
We literally paid to put trash on trains and trains to boats and send our trash around the world across the largest ocean, the Pacific, to China.
00:14:27.960
And we would close our eyes and ears and pretend we were recycling it.
00:14:32.660
As opposed to what, do you think China was really recycling it?
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Or do you think it was just dumping it in a river or someplace?
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But then, I don't know, for some reason about a year ago, China suddenly said, no, no, no, keep your crap.
00:14:47.520
So cities all across Canada started to warehouse it.
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While we all kept sorting our garbage and our recyclables as if it was being recycled, it was being warehoused.
00:15:02.380
Lots of government sector jobs involved in this whole BS.
00:15:15.080
Here's a story this week in the Philippines Star newspaper.
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Take back garbage or I will sail to Canada and dump trash.
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Now, can I read a little bit about the garbage war that's looming with the Philippines?
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President Duterte ordered the Customs Bureau to return to Canada the trash it sent to the Philippines a few years ago.
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As he chided the North American country for supposedly turning Manila into a dump site.
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Duterte said Tuesday that Canada should prepare a grand reception for its waste,
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They've been holding our garbage for six years.
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They better pull that thing out or I will set sail.
00:16:12.060
Here, can I play a quick clip of this president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, declaring a garbage war against Justin Trudeau.
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I will advise Canada that your garbage is on the way.
00:16:46.160
I should warn the president of the Philippines.
00:16:53.120
That when he sails it to the West Coast, he will encounter the city of Victoria,
00:16:59.460
which dumps its raw, untreated sewage right into the Pacific Ocean.
00:17:07.860
I got to say, why are we sending our garbage to the Philippines and you thought it was recycled?
00:17:21.000
This report that Catherine McKenna commissioned?
00:17:25.660
Well, as always, the liberals want to do what they do.
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The word tax appeared 11 times in this document.
00:17:39.460
Set two, get everybody on board to collect all plastics.
00:17:43.000
Create sector-specific requirements for collection, e.g. extended producer responsibility, performance agreements.
00:17:49.860
Restrict disposal, e.g. landfill taxes or bans.
00:17:55.220
Require incentivized collection, e.g. industry targets, deposit refund.
00:17:59.640
Develop more consistent requirements and rules across Canada, e.g. common curbside recycling.
00:18:03.980
Improve public information on collection and recyclability.
00:18:10.160
So they're going to ban plastics in the landfill.
00:18:14.280
They're going to require people to pay a deposit for anything plastic.
00:18:20.560
How many garbage cans do you have at home right now?
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Because I live in the People's Republic of Toronto.
00:18:38.540
That requires manufacturers to provide repair information, tools, and replacement parts to independent repair shops as well as product owners.
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I guess things aren't hard enough to be a manufacturer in Canada.
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If something you have that goes wrong, well, the factory now has a legal obligation to repair it for you.
00:18:59.580
It needs repair less than most other materials.
00:19:02.000
But now you're going to have lawyers suing manufacturers because you have a completely new, made-up, legal right to have your stuff repaired.
00:19:17.860
It's like someone said, hey, write a 43-page report about how we would go about taxing.
00:19:28.980
Just something so weird and dumb, like a silly children's book story about the evil king who taxed smiles or something.
00:19:36.040
But actually telling a group of economists and bureaucrats, can you write a study about this?
00:19:42.160
And they'd say, yeah, if you pay us enough, we'll actually draft a plan to tax smiles or whatever.
00:19:51.380
I know that's a stupid comparison, but I really can't come up with anything as dumb because they've already decided to tax air or at least carbon dioxide.
00:20:08.640
Stemming the plastic tide, 10 rivers contribute most of the plastic in the oceans.
00:20:15.620
And I don't know if you guys can scroll down there, but the Yangtze River alone pours up to an estimate.
00:20:23.940
The Yangtze River alone pours an estimated 1.5 million tons of plastic into the Yellow Sea.
00:20:48.380
We don't need to punish Canadians by banning straws here.
00:20:53.500
So the problem of air or carbon dioxide is also not a Canadian problem.
00:20:59.060
We emit 2% of the world's man-made carbon dioxide in Canada.
00:21:02.860
China is by far the world's biggest, bigger than any other country.
00:21:06.980
But we're taxing and punishing Canadians with a carbon tax to solve really a Chinese issue that isn't even a real problem.
00:21:15.740
That frankly, if we stop wasting all this money and effort on solar panels and wind turbines, maybe we actually have some money to solve the garbage problem if we really cared about the real environment.
00:21:28.800
And I don't see it being adopted in the liberal platform in the election this fall.
00:21:54.120
Well, we have covered the heck out of the Alberta election a couple of weeks ago.
00:22:00.480
And lo and behold, the littlest province voted conservative.
00:22:04.580
At least it looks like it'll be a conservative minority government.
00:22:07.480
Those decisions are not made by voters, actually, but by the lieutenant governor of a province.
00:22:12.740
But it looks like a conservative minority in Prince Edward Island.
00:22:16.420
A little province I always thought was perpetually liberal.
00:22:19.900
My gosh, it's almost as if Justin Trudeau is killing the liberal brand.
00:22:25.640
And at least that's what it looks like from coast to coast, what used to be a swath of red.
00:22:31.080
There's only, I think, two provinces left that are liberal.
00:22:33.600
Joining us now in studio here in Rebel World Headquarters is our reporter, Kian Bextie, who covered the Alberta election so well with Sheila Gunn-Reed.
00:22:42.940
I welcome you here to Rebel World Headquarters, but we certainly have been fighting the fight out there in Alberta.
00:22:48.780
What do you make of Prince Edward Island going conservative?
00:22:51.720
Well, I would attribute it mainly to the surge in the green vote.
00:22:56.320
I think that the left-wing voters in PEI are so disenfranchised with the liberal brand that the liberals came in third place.
00:23:10.180
And they did historically well because they've, I don't even know if they've ever formed opposition before.
00:23:18.060
Now, excuse me, is the Green Party in Prince Edward Island, I know you've been doing some, I mean, I got to tell you, everyone loves Prince Edward Island.
00:23:30.740
I acknowledge that we at the Rebel haven't given it a lot of attention in our time.
00:23:37.320
And you're a Western boy, but give me your thoughts on the Green Party itself.
00:23:42.340
Were people voting for its greenness or its anybody but the liberals-ness?
00:23:49.940
I think it is an anybody but the liberals situation there.
00:23:53.680
And I might even end up going there soon to ask the folks there why they're so disenfranchised with the liberals.
00:24:01.280
And we're seeing it not just in PEI but New Brunswick.
00:24:04.620
They elected the Progressive Conservatives with a coalition with an even farther right-wing party.
00:24:10.600
I was delighted to see in Alberta the liberals got, what, was it 1% of the vote?
00:24:15.820
I think it really, I'm not saying, I'm not joking.
00:24:18.900
There's no, any voter in Alberta who's voting liberal is probably doing it by accident.
00:24:26.720
I think, do criminals have the right to vote in Canada?
00:24:32.620
Well, David Kahn, the leader of the Liberal Party in Alberta, he came in third place in his own riding way.
00:24:41.360
We will not be satisfied until there's no liberals on the ballot.
00:24:44.620
Well, I think it's amazing because the liberals used to boast that this percentage of Canadians
00:24:51.160
live under a premium that supports a carbon tax or something like that.
00:24:55.300
BC has a carbon tax and they're paying some of the highest gas prices in the free world.
00:25:00.680
Europe is worse, but certainly the highest on the continent.
00:25:13.160
Quebec, they're a little bit green, but the party is blue, Francois Legault.
00:25:23.600
I mean, I guess the pendulum swings back and forth.
00:25:26.120
I wonder how much of it is ideology and how much of it is people just tired of Trudeau.
00:25:30.500
Well, they're tired of the gaffes, you know, from India all the way to SNC-Lavalin.
00:25:35.380
And we're going to see what's going to happen in Newfoundland and Labrador because their election
00:25:40.880
The tides are changing in the Maritimes, I think, because it's not just provincially
00:25:53.460
I think that people do punish a federal leader provincially.
00:25:59.020
They also sometimes understand instinctively it's good to have split government.
00:26:05.040
We don't have as many checks and balances in our governing system as the Americans do.
00:26:09.820
I mean, that whole Mueller escapade, which I think a lot of our viewers and I certainly
00:26:13.740
thought was a wild goose chase, a witch hunt as Trump calls it, that's all true.
00:26:18.340
But it shows that there are natural checks and balance on even the most powerful man in
00:26:26.560
Like, there ought to be a special inquiry into the SNC-Lavalin corruption.
00:26:31.180
It's so clearly corrupt there won't be in Canada.
00:26:34.360
So I think organically, intuitively, Canadians say, all right, well, if you're out of control,
00:26:40.080
Justin Trudeau and your liberals, maybe it's good to have some counterweights called Jason
00:26:44.160
Kenny, Doug Ford, and other provincial premiers.
00:26:47.580
Maybe that's a natural reaction to not having proper structures in place to hold Trudeau and
00:26:57.020
Well, at least in my lifetime, there's never been a situation where this many conservatives
00:27:03.040
It's from Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and now PEI.
00:27:10.640
None of it and the Northwest Territories are consensus governments, so they don't really count.
00:27:14.800
And I guess you could count UConn as a liberal government.
00:27:17.440
But this seven government coalition, almost, of conservatives puts us in a really unique
00:27:23.680
situation where we could even start seeing constitutional amendments that we haven't
00:27:31.900
I can't think of any constitutional amendment for which there's a public appetite right now.
00:27:39.080
I mean, yes, theoretically, the numbers are there, but I just would be surprised to see
00:27:51.040
Albertans have an appetite for property rights, enshrining them in our Constitution.
00:27:54.980
We've had a few cases in both Saskatchewan and Alberta where farmers have been defending
00:28:01.000
And they've been drugged through the courts because Canadians do not have the right to enjoy
00:28:08.440
their property exclusively and maintain that right separate from government.
00:28:12.500
And I think Albertans are frustrated with that.
00:28:18.420
But these are conversations I think conservatives should be having because we have a unique
00:28:26.120
Well, listen, I thought you did a great job in Alberta crisscrossing the province and
00:28:31.380
And, you know, there are 10 provinces, three territories, and a federal election coming.
00:28:35.920
And so hopefully we'll maybe put you on the road.
00:28:38.200
I mean, Alberta's your home, but I think the kind of approach you took to covering that
00:28:44.940
I like the style of really hunting down Anne McGrath and Calgary Varsity.
00:28:50.180
We did some activism with our lawn signs there, too.
00:28:52.480
I think what we did in Alberta, I'd love to replicate elsewhere in the country, and maybe
00:28:57.900
I'm super interested in NBC right now and going to Vancouver to talk to them about their gas
00:29:10.020
I think I saw a premium blend at hitting the $2 mark.
00:29:19.620
It's supposed to make using carbon so painful that you make better choices.
00:29:24.320
I wonder who, do they blame John Horgan more for not standing up against Justin Trudeau?
00:29:32.080
Well, there's special taxes in the city of Vancouver, and of course, they have their own
00:29:39.580
Well, Kean, it's great to see you here in Toronto, and good luck on your journeys.
00:29:55.840
On my monologue yesterday about the CBC producer lashing out at the nobodies who complained
00:30:00.380
about Omar Khadr's Easter Sunday TV appearance, Henry writes,
00:30:03.760
Why exactly is the taxpayer forced to fund the CBC for this kind of garbage?
00:30:11.540
It's a question that we could put to Justin Trudeau, but it's a question we could have
00:30:15.380
put to Stephen Harper for nine years, too, isn't it?
00:30:18.040
And it's a question we should put to Andrew Scheer, because if he becomes prime minister
00:30:21.560
in this fall, which is now a possibility, I wouldn't have thought so six months ago,
00:30:27.720
You think he's going to do anything to rein them in?
00:30:33.700
Michael writes, If the money is really for all Canadians, maybe he should pass some of
00:30:47.660
But you know who has a claim to it is Tabitha Speer and Lane Morris, who sued Omar Khadr and
00:30:52.520
actually have a judgment in an American court for damages.
00:30:56.040
He murdered Tabitha Speer's husband and blinded Lane Morris in one eye.
00:30:59.360
But Trudeau literally colluded with Omar Khadr's lawyers to hide the money from those lawsuits.
00:31:06.540
On my interview with Lauren Gunter, Bruce writes,
00:31:09.980
If I were Kenny, I'd shut off the flow of gas to BC and shut off the flow of money to Quebec.
00:31:14.560
Yeah, you know, I saw a picture today of a gas pump in BC for the premium blend for two bucks.
00:31:24.660
Here, you shut off the oil to that in the existing Trans Mountain pipeline.
00:31:33.020
And the government of Alberta has that constitutional jurisdiction to do that.
00:31:40.520
More to the point, you're going to have no gas.
00:31:44.700
And isn't that really what Justin Trudeau and the premier of BC want?
00:31:50.260
They want a high carbon price to make you make better choices.
00:31:54.840
Now, I think that most British Columbians don't go along with this BS.
00:31:59.940
I've seen every single poll I've ever seen on pipelines shows that British Columbians will support a pipeline if it's just up to standards.
00:32:07.960
I've never seen a single poll showing that more British Columbians oppose pipelines in support.
00:32:15.520
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here, good night.