Rebel Roundup： Guests Ezra Levant & Sheila Gunn Reid
Episode Stats
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Summary
Rebel Commander Ezra Levent has just returned from London, and just will you hear what he has to say about the absolutely astonishing behaviour, in a bad way, regarding the UK's media party. Thanks to a faltering economy, pipeline paralysis, and new taxes, well, if you happen to be a member of Team Trudeau, that means scaling back and downsizing and tightening one's belt. Well, but not if you're a Liberal, right? Well, Sheila Gunn-Reed has all the depressing details on how Liberals are lavishly spending your money at a clip that would make even a drunken sailor blush. And we get your letters.
Transcript
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Welcome to Rebel Roundup, ladies and gentlemen, and the rest of you, in which we look back
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at some of the very best commentaries of the week by your favourite Rebels.
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I speak of Tommy Robinson's contempt of court trial, and now, of course, the retrial.
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Rebel Commander Ezra Levent has just returned from London, and just will you hear what he
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has to say about the absolutely astonishing behaviour, in a bad way, regarding the UK's
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Thanks to a faltering economy and pipeline paralysis and new taxes, well, times are tough for so
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That means scaling back and downsizing and tightening one's belt.
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Oh, but not if you happen to be a member of Team Trudeau.
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Well, Sheila Gunn-Reed has all the depressing details on how Liberals are lavishly spending
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your money at a clip that would make even a drunken sailor blush.
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We get your letters every minute of every day, and I'll share some of your responses regarding
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my recent Man on the Street interview, in which we asked folks to weigh in on Sports Illustrated's
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decision to add a plus-size model to their iconic swimsuit issue.
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Tommy Robinson, let me give you the headline right at the top.
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He's been committed to stand trial again for contempt of court.
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He'll be back in court here on July 4th and 5th.
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And this stems back to those incidents back at Leeds a year ago.
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As you know, he's already been held in contempt for that, served 10 weeks in solitary confinement
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The Court of Appeal has quashed that ruling, and yet he has to go stand trial again.
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I don't know if in the entire history of the UK this has ever been done before.
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The trial outside which he was reporting was not disrupted in any way.
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This is clearly punitive, so that's the news, and you can find other videos where we go
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But I want to focus in on something I mentioned in passing in another video, and that is the
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You know the old saying, if a tree falls in the woods and no one's around to hear, did
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I mean, of course it made a sound, but if no one knows it made a sound, it was like
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If they report on something, you know about it, but if they simply ignore something, how do
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And if they all get together to tell a pack of lies about something, how can you ever
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These are all different ways of describing the treatment of Tommy Robinson.
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When he does amazing things, when thousands of people show up for him at an event, if
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the press can't say anything negative, they'll say nothing at all.
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But if he's in any sort of trouble, the press will go to town.
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And there was about a thousand people here today, maybe more on the streets.
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I'm sure out of those thousand, there were one or two who were a bit rough, maybe one
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That will be on the front page of the newspapers.
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I watch Russia Today, that's Putin's state broadcaster.
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The British media, especially the state-run media here, is worse than those.
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And even worse, the biggest media player in the UK, the BBC, is of course taxpayer-funded,
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So in essence, Brits, including those Brits who are passionate Tommy Robinson supporters,
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are paying the freight when it comes to journalism that is so overtly a leftist that it borders
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And just back from his triple across the pond to cover all things Tommy is our rebel commander,
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Now, Ezra, as you stated in your commentary, the UK media is actually worse than the media
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Please tell me you were exaggerating to make a point here.
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I even try and consume some media in foreign languages with what little linguistic skill
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I deliberately follow hostile media accounts on my Twitter because I want to know what
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Because I believe that I am somewhat fluent with propaganda from state broadcasters around
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And I must tell you that I think it was Lenin who had the phrase useful idiots.
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There were communist agents who were part of his team, had a personal loyalty to him.
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But then there were what Lenin called useful idiots.
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Those were people who voluntarily helped Lenin undermine the establishment out of some deluded...
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And they were quite often the most accomplished destroyers for him.
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And so when I tell you that the BBC is a state broadcaster, of course I do mean that literally.
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And they have the sensibilities of the establishment.
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So they have the worst of the state broadcaster.
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So whereas on RT or TWT or Al Jazeera, they're just simply, all right, I'm paid by the dictator.
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These BBCers, these leftists at The Guardian that used to be...
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I mean, there's a lot of newspapers in the UK that used to be influenced by the KGB directly.
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They lustily do the work of the left, whether it was the Soviets during the Cold War or it's the Islamists now.
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And watching them cover Tommy Robinson's trial, I'm not sure what clip you used of me, but was it where I talked about them interrupting the court?
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It's not so much that they subscribe to a leftist agenda and what they're putting out there is propaganda.
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But in that particular case, where they are asking a judge to, oh, you know what, somebody's tweeting there, somebody who's allowed to tweet.
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First of all, A, it's none of their damn business.
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Well, first of all, you had a British accent, so I was straining to make sure I heard things.
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There wasn't a microphone, so I had to listen very carefully.
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It was technical, legal jargon, referring to case law and documents.
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So I had to concentrate very, very hard to understand what was going on in court.
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And the judges were very, everyone in that room was trying to catch every word that was said.
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This is in the most grave court in London called the Old Bailey.
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There was a terrorism inquiry going on at the same time.
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To get into this court, you first have to stand in a sniffer room, like an enclosure where they sniff you for explosives.
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Then you go through another, like, I have never been anywhere other than the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa that has higher security than this court.
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And I'm not even going to call them my counterparts in the BBC and the British Media Party because I refuse to say I'm colleagueed with them in any way.
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Instead of that, instead of paying attention to the substance of what was going on, all they could think about is,
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that Ezra from Canada is saying things that are sympathetic to Tommy.
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Imagine, imagine you're not even paying attention to a trial.
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Imagine you're obsessed with someone who has a different point of view with you.
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Okay, that's not hard to believe me through those two things.
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But then you dare, you arrogate unto yourself some standing before this court to say,
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They wrote a note saying, Your Honor, excuse me, and passed it to the clerk.
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The lawyer was, you know, getting some momentum.
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Then this note comes to the judge and the judges get up and go back and confer.
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You're interrupting a grave trial in which a man may be sent back to prison because you don't like what you,
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And Andrew Lawton, our mutual friend, when he went with me to London last year, they didn't know who he was, right?
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And he told me, and I believe Andrew, because he's not an exaggerator.
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Andrew said, Ezra, one of the journalists said that you should be jailed for your reportage because it incites hate.
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And they were speaking freely because they didn't recognize me.
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And they said that you, Ezra Levant, these are reporters.
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And then the cherry on top is that Dominique Casciani of the BBC did, in fact, contact the police last time.
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So, yeah, I don't know any reporter at Russia Today, Al Jazeera, TWT, Xinhua.
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Maybe Xinhua, that's the Chinese state agency, would call the cops.
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Because basically all Xinhua reporters are Chinese spies anyways.
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But I don't know anyone from Russia Today who would literally pick up the phone and call the police to arrest a rival.
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I'm just over there to report the news to my rebel viewers.
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And people can ignore it or watch it, whatever.
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But these British media party types literally wanted me imprisoned.
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And by complaining to the judge in the middle of the trial, not only did they show contempt of court,
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but they showed that they wanted me to be held in contempt of court simply for reporting.
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And as I use the phrase again, I'm maybe overusing it, but I think I've got it when I say going to the UK.
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And the weather was actually really nice this time.
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And I can't get enough of the architecture and the history.
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And I stayed above an old pub that was in a Charles Dickens story.
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But then I've got this story of this dystopian future.
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And just a hundred little vignettes make me think, oh, my God.
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I've got to show my kids what the UK is like now when it's still recognizable.
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Because in 10 years, that country will bear little resemblance to the country I know.
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And I should say that it already bears little resemblance to the country that I thought I knew.
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And, you know, you've very well stated how the media is shutting down freedom of the press, ironically.
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I mean, we saw Tommy Robinson having his jumbotron truck being shut down by the police.
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We saw Jessica, whose last name I still cannot pronounce properly, being told by a female police officer, get back to the other side and shout your questions over.
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And in both cases, the narrative, Ezra, was what you're doing with the truck, what the questions might be that you might be asking might cause a problem, might cause some kind of crime.
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All I could think of, Ezra, and I'm not exaggerating here, is the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report where we have law enforcement thinking of potential future crimes and you're placed under arrest in the present so you can't carry out that crime.
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They have this, you know, there were some real problems in the UK.
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And it's tough to deal with a terrorist threat, domestic terrorist threat in a democracy.
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And then they also had a phenomenon called football hooligans.
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Basically, normal people who love their team so much travel from stadium to stadium following their football team.
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And they get drunk and they fight the other fans from the other team.
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So they're called football hooligans or we would say soccer hooligans.
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And they would like, let's say 500 would come to a town and meet five.
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So it would be like street fights, just drunken street fights.
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So how do you deal with that in a way that respects civil liberties?
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So they have this thing called ASO, antisocial behaviors, an ASO, antisocial order.
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And there was a real problem they were trying to fix.
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But you put in a law to deal with a real problem that frankly could probably have been dealt with by regular policing.
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The idea of a drunken brawl, that's not new in the history of law enforcement.
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I mean, drunkenness is as old as civilization, which is as old as alcohol, really.
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It's how they had drinkable water for millennia before we had water treatment.
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You drank beer or fermented things for reasons because it would kill the bacteria.
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But these antisocial orders, these pre-crimes, I'm serving you an ASO order to clear or you'll be arrested,
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which was meant to deal with hooliganism, is now being used for anything-ism.
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It's now, oh, I didn't say you did anything wrong, but you might do something wrong,
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so I'm worried that you're going to cause an offense, so you must leave now
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So you will actually be causing an offense by not leaving now even though you didn't do an offense.
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And that's Kafka. Kafka couldn't dream that up.
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Ezra, there were so many other bases I wanted to cover,
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but Mr. Producer is screaming my ear that we're out of time.
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What incredible reports you and Jessica filed. Thank you so much.
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I mean, the soccer hooligans talk about the good old days, if you will,
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because the hooligans right now in the U.K., it's the government, it's the police, it's the media.
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Again, Ezra said, you want to see U.K. Classic, book your Air Canada flight right now
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Keep it here. More of a Rubble Roundup to come right after this.
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Today's order paper question comes from Conservative MP Bob Soroya.
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What is the total cost, if any, spending on renovating, redesigning, and refurnishing
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for each ministerial office broken down by basically every available minuscule detail?
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And then Soroya asks for the same to be done for the deputy minister's offices.
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And just look at the amount of time Soroya is asking for.
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It's from April 1st, 2018 to February 25th, 2019.
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Now, I think Soroya wants to know if the Liberals are splurging on themselves
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Now, let's go through some of these expenses together.
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And, like always, we will link the documents in full
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and you can even double-check my work if you want to.
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You don't have to just take my word for everything.
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on renovating their president's office and buying new furniture.
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And here I heard there's an opioid crisis out there.
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fighting their years-long backlog in their bureaucracy
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by spending $22,000 on new furniture for the head of the review board offices
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I guess when the government is giving $50,000 annually to refugee claimants,
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it sort of makes it open season for the bureaucrats involved
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Look, nobody is asking MPs and bureaucrats in Ottawa
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to carry out their business while sitting in mud huts.
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But just check out those numbers being bandied about.
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that Trudeau Liberals are going to enjoy a secure second mandate.
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So, isn't the whole idea of renovating and redecorating offices
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akin to painting the deck chairs on the Titanic
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With more on this latest example of your tax dollars hard at work yet again
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So, Sheila, the first thing that sprung to mind
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Our military veterans are being screwed out of compensation they deserve
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because, in the words of our illustrious prime minister,
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But it seems to me that when it comes to doing the Martha Stewart schtick
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So, Sheila, the optics of this, to say the very least, are brutal.
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But why are they on this spending spree in the first place
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given that so many of them might be packing up their offices
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Yeah, you're assuming that they have foresight.
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I'm pretty sure we figured out that they don't.
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As I was reading through this information package that we had,
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there were stories breaking just that day in the news
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that places like Montreal Lake First Nations Reserve in Saskatchewan,
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50% of their population, that they can identify.
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I mean, and it's hard to identify people who are drug users
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between severely addicted and then the casual drug user.
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50% of their population, a town of 1,200 people, 600, have meth addiction.
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And then you have Crown and Indigenous Services spending nearly $200,000
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making sure that their butts are sitting in fancy chairs.
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And all they get is a smug comment from Justin Trudeau.
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and talk about the greater opioid crisis happening in Canada.
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Again, Health Canada is spending money on office renovations
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but the liberals are focused on spending on themselves
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when they say they don't have money for anybody else.
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You know, you've made excellent, great points there, Sheila.
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is one of the most underreported story happening in Canada right now.
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And certainly, Graffy Narrows, their drinking water,
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As you said, instead of getting help or some funds to improve it,
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when a protester shows up to a Liberal Party of Canada fundraiser.
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Personally, if I was in a position of a politician or a bureaucrat in Ottawa
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I just wouldn't have it in me to have such chutzpah,
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such audacity to spend lavishly on my own office
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as the people who really need the money go without.
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I mean, how does that square with the very idea of Liberalism in the first place?
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Well, Liberalism in Canada means that you're a member of the natural governing party,
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So, you know, they feel like Canadians are in line with Liberal ideology
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and they feel like they are entitled to form government in Canada,
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except for a few blips here and there where people get sick of them
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If these Liberals genuinely believe that they are entitled, I suppose, to their entitlement.
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And if that means nice office furniture while people are languishing,
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waiting for drug treatment beds, then that's just fine.
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I mean, David, the reasons you cited why you couldn't do it
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are the reasons you don't work in the public sector.
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Well, you know, Sheila, I hearken back to more than a decade ago.
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It was an absolutely fascinating story that happened in Toronto
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And it was Rob Ford and another City of Toronto councillor,
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they submitted their expense forms and it was zero or next to zero with both men.
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that Toronto City Council launched an investigation
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that seems to be in any level of political office in Canada
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that you must go out of your way to spend this money?
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Because I think when it comes to the likes of a Holiday or Ford,
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that they get access to as members of city council.
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the constant expenses, the spending on themselves,
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but there's this whole lot of free stuff that they get
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Because as I understand it in government departments,
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when it comes up to the end of the fiscal year,
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you better go out and spend this as quick as possible