The Alberta government passes Bill 1, and nobody trusts the media. And then the gun buyback keeps getting more and more expensive. We ll talk about it with Chris Sims from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, and his chicken suit.
00:04:39.420But it's like, I'm too chicken to cancel the carbon tax on home heating, right?
00:04:45.760So I went to the dollar store, and I made that sign.
00:04:48.660And yeah, we've just been mocking them since.
00:04:50.940And we're going to keep it up, too, because they had a chance.
00:04:53.940They could, if they had voted, if we'd gotten enough liberals to vote with the NDP and the conservatives,
00:04:59.200that motion would have passed, and we'd have a lot better chance of saving everybody 300 bucks this winter.
00:05:03.560You know, and to the point of this, this is purely a political move because the liberals were getting into some trouble in Atlantic Canada.
00:05:12.700They had their own MPs breaking ranks with them on this.
00:05:15.360So they had to throw a bone out to Western or to Eastern Canada, and they really stand to lose nothing by punishing Western Canada.
00:05:26.040And, you know, if you care about emissions, I don't necessarily.
00:05:29.920But if you do, why are you giving a break to the dirtier form of heating?
00:05:35.120Like this bunker fuel adjacent heating instead of clean burning natural gas, you know, like they want to incentivize us to be cleaner.
00:05:43.760You could do that by giving people who heat with natural gas a break.
00:05:48.980But the most compelling argument is one that you made on your Twitter account, which you broke the numbers down and actually showed that people who heat with natural gas are still paying more than those who heat with the bunker fuel adjacent home heating oil.
00:06:05.800So when people think about home heating, and I know most of your audience will have a full understanding of this, but pretend that we're speaking to our more urban brothers and sisters who it's push button or they don't need to think about it.
00:06:17.880You can get your home heating fuel in different ways.
00:06:20.440It can be piped directly to you in your house, like we do for natural gas.
00:06:25.100Or if you somehow manage to afford heating with electric, that's a form of piped energy because it comes through the wire.
00:06:36.220A truck needs to bring the stuff in the form of energy to then combust or heat or whatever your house in order to provide winter heat.
00:06:44.780So that can come in the form of wood, if you have a wood stove, or wood pellets, same deal.
00:06:51.580Bunker oil, as you call it, furnace oil.
00:06:54.380So way back in the day across the prairies, it was quite common as well to heat with this oil.
00:06:59.000And if you remember the older kind of round, oval, tall, elongated tanks, apparently across the prairies, I didn't realize this, they would have them inside.
00:07:09.040Whereas on the east coast and out on the west coast, how I grew up, they were outside and they would often supplement wood furnaces.
00:07:40.120And you're right, the rest of us, on average, are going to be paying more for our carbon tax, for our home heat, because it's a constant piped thing.
00:07:49.060It's different from having it in your tank.
00:07:51.940And if I can just take the tax hat off for a second and look at this from just an analysis point of view.
00:07:58.500What's interesting about the Atlantic thing, because I've got family out there, the Atlantic caucus of any political party, the major ones, liberal and conservative, the Atlantic caucus has its own culture.
00:08:12.880Okay, it's older, quite often the older set, so my late Nana was like this, the older set, you would be born a Tory, or you were born a liberal, because your father and your grandfather were a Tory or a liberal.
00:08:29.320So it creates this cultural confidence, I would describe it, within the party, and therefore has this special confident caucus within any said party.
00:08:42.680These folks turned around to the prime minister, I don't know how they got him to do it, and said, hey boy, you know, we're losing votes here.
00:08:50.380I'm plummeting in the polls, you know, we've got to have some action here, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:08:53.660And they're older, by and large. If you take a look at Lawrence McCauley, for example, who's an ag minister, he's been around forever.
00:09:02.240So that sort of cultural mentality, I think, got to the PMO, and they were able to band together and urge him to do this and give them a carve-out.
00:09:12.660Around 40% of Prince Edward Islanders, 40, still use furnace oil.
00:09:17.520Around 35% of Nova Scotians, including in Halifax, still use furnace oil.
00:09:24.700So this is a critically, politically important issue for them, and that is why he blinked.
00:09:29.960But the rest of the MPs, they clearly don't have that pull, and they clearly don't have that confidence, and they're clearly too chicken to stand up in the same way.
00:09:40.040Yeah, I think also, you know, the people around Justin Trudeau, I think, are much brighter than Justin Trudeau.
00:09:46.960And I think they could see the writing on the wall when you see the rise of premiers like Blaine Higgs, conservative premiers, who are popular, they're doing well.
00:09:56.740The liberals could stand to lose some seats in Atlantic Canada just over this issue.
00:10:03.720So, again, it never comes down to emissions. It never comes down to affordability.
00:10:07.900It's just using the taxism as a cudgel to punish your enemies and reward your friends.
00:10:14.320The science quickly became political science.
00:10:49.300They had an exemption up until July 1st this year.
00:10:53.280So if you want to know why the polls suddenly went like this there, because they started, they had a sticker shock overnight at the gas pumps.
00:11:00.840Overnight, their gasoline price went up like 14 cents a litre.
00:11:04.660That's like 10 bucks extra every time you're filling up a minivan.
00:13:03.360We now have Premier Daniel Smith, who had already mentioned something like this back when we were getting her to sign our No PST pledge when she was first running for leadership.
00:13:58.780And they have to make the case to Albertans why they can't find efficiencies, why they can't claw back on the bureaucracy or, you know, like if they try to make that case to Albertans, Albertans are going to be making the case right back to them.
00:14:10.620Actually, you have X number of middle managers at Alberta Health Services.
00:14:14.820Do you think we could do with maybe 10 instead of 12 supervising the one guy who uses the mop?
00:14:22.900Yes, which is exactly the situation of government.
00:14:28.340I don't have all the numbers solid yet.
00:14:31.400But every year, especially here in Alberta, we do what's called a pre-budget report.
00:14:35.820And so that's where we go through all the past budgets and we find efficiencies and we just nerd out.
00:14:40.700And then we give it to the government and it's like, here, please steal our ideas, have at it, put your name on it, give her because it just saves people money.
00:14:50.180So the next time somebody says something like, oh, well, we're cut to the bone.
00:14:56.220Folks might also remember that in the last spring, the government here in Alberta committed to keeping spending increases to the rate of inflation and population growth.
00:15:16.000But it's just by the rate of inflation and population growth.
00:15:18.460So we at the Taxpayers Federation have been asking for that simple little economics rule, that little guardrail to be in place since the mid-90s.
00:15:27.420So I went back through all of the budgets to the mid-90s and I did a what-if experiment.
00:15:33.840What if they had put this rule in, which they've agreed to now?
00:15:37.580What if we had done this in the mid-90s?
00:18:13.820It's one of the best taxpayer protections in all of North America, like game changer stuff.
00:18:20.160I want to switch lanes a little bit to something that you and I have talked about previously,
00:18:25.200and that is Justin Trudeau's gun buyback, which is not a buyback at all.
00:18:29.240It's a compensation for confiscation program.
00:18:33.260And that has just been kicked down the road until 2025.
00:18:37.320So for people who are unaware, Justin Trudeau decided that 1,500, now it's closer to 2,000 models of Canadian long guns were too dangerous to be in the arms of Canadians.
00:18:50.120And also subsequently grandfathered out handgun ownership.
00:18:55.280But as I said, he decided these guns were too dangerous to be in the hands of Canadians.
00:19:00.220And so they needed to be outlawed immediately.
00:19:04.640However, he's letting us hang on to them until 2025.
00:19:15.220So deadly and so in the interest of public safety that you can just hang on to them until 2025 because Justin Trudeau can't figure out how to compensate people for taking their property away and scapegoating, law-abiding Canadian firearms owners for the failings of progressive cities.
00:19:32.580Yeah. So this would have been a huge mess.
00:19:38.800Yeah. I've already, I know a lady up in Prince George, this largely contributed to her gunshot being shut down.
00:19:45.780It was her only small business because of this nonsense.
00:19:49.440And so for the tiny handful of people who watch your show who don't have their firearms licenses, or if you're speaking to, you know, your cousin or whatever who doesn't own firearms.
00:19:59.000So this is going after a law-abiding licensed firearms owners.
00:20:05.640So in order to get a firearms license in Canada, you have to go through a big, long course.
00:20:36.240Like, it could have exactly the same function as, you know, the maple-encased long gun that has steel that you see Elmer Fudd using, okay, on a cartoon.
00:22:41.560And then, so there's no record of this gun between you and the government.
00:22:46.900So now the government has no idea how many of these firearms they need to compensate you for.
00:22:52.280So there's no possible way they can estimate the cost of the program, let alone the policing required to get these guns out of the hands of normal people.
00:23:01.580We, at least in Alberta, know that our government is not going to mandate our RCMP to go door to door to confiscate the property of law-abiding people.
00:23:11.820We've got bigger problems for our police to deal with, like the opioid crisis and violent crime and property crime.
00:23:20.320We just don't have the resources to be harassing normal people like me.
00:23:23.620We've had shootings in both Calgary and Edmonton in the last few days, like broad daylight ones.
00:23:35.620So this is, this is it, where it's one of those things where if I even try to empathize with somebody who doesn't understand guns, I, I get it.
00:23:45.960I get that you're scared and you're believing the government when you're telling, when they're telling you this is going to make you safer.
00:23:51.960But the police themselves say it won't.
00:23:56.140Quite often it's the police at the front lines who will, if I'm paraphrasing, say something like, we need to crack down on the gangbangers and the criminals who are running illegal guns quite often across the border.
00:24:08.320So if you want to spend money on something, tighten up your border controls.
00:24:18.960Don't send your Mounties out on some wild goose chase to go track down goose hunters in Brooks, Alberta.
00:24:26.440Like there's, there's no point in doing that.
00:24:29.000And so, and again, this isn't just the CTF saying this, this is the cops themselves.
00:24:33.140And what was interesting is that these escalating estimations of cost of this confiscation slash buyback program, the numbers that I was seeing being put forward at committee, these were coming from criminologists.
00:25:40.500We are more than a trillion dollars in debt.
00:25:42.680If you started counting your loonies right now with King Charles III's new head on them and you stack them all up, it would take you 30,000 years to count to a trillion.
00:26:15.320It's these dumb decisions that waste money and don't help people that is helping to make inflation much worse because the Bank of Canada just prints it and then the government just borrows it.
00:26:24.420Now, changing lanes, but still, of course, on the same topic of, I guess, the government spending money on things that they should never spend money on.
00:26:37.280Let's talk about the media bailout for a second.
00:26:39.880I saw an article in BlackLux this morning that Justin Trudeau's $600 million media bailout contaminated the media with government money, of course, and thus breached the trust that people have in their journalists to tell them the truth.
00:26:57.760Because now you want to know, is this really what happened or is this what the government wants us to think happened?
00:27:05.680Because if you tell the truth and you're not going to get any funding from Justin Trudeau, media trust is at an all-time low.
00:27:11.68023% of people have confidence in the media right now.
00:27:17.660And the numbers are at an all-time low, the lowest in Alberta, and then spreading out from there.
00:27:25.520The prairies, they're around 20, 23% on the prairies going up in the more liberal places.
00:27:32.180But I think the plummeting trust is directly correlated to that media buyout.
00:28:06.040I think sometimes, because everything that has happened in the last, especially the last three or four years, has been so big and so confusing and so crazy in some cases, that we can lose track of even simple things.
00:29:27.960You shouldn't be on government payroll because you should be paid by your supporters, by your readers, by your viewers, through free will donation.
00:29:36.140You should have advertisements, whatever it is.
00:29:38.720But if you're just in the pay of people in power, you cannot hold the powerful to account.