On Tuesday morning, many of us woke up to a promise of a Netflix tax. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation joins me tonight to talk about it. Guest: Chris Sims of the Canadian Taxpayer's Federation and Sheila Gunn Reed of the Taxpayers' Federation.
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00:01:19.580The company always passes along the increased cost to the consumer.
00:01:23.680That's exactly what's going to happen now that Justin Trudeau's broadcasting bureaucracy, the CRTC, has promised a 5% streaming tax that will be applied to the likes of Netflix and Paramount Plus and Disney Plus and Amazon Prime and so on down the list.
00:01:42.3205% off the top of your bill will go to support the things that you move to streaming services to escape.
00:01:50.660Boring Canadian content, the CBC, and the shoehorned diversity programming that you see on many of Canada's national broadcasters.
00:02:10.800Or they might not want to do business with Canada altogether as we saw when Justin Trudeau tried to shake down Facebook for the crime of one of Facebook's users linking to Canadian news publishers.
00:02:28.520Facebook just said, well, no more link sharing to Canadian news publishers instead of paying that Justin Trudeau tax.
00:02:36.940So joining me tonight to talk about the implications of this and their recent legal challenge against the CBC is Chris Sims of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
00:02:47.420Joining me now is my friend Chris Sims of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and I wanted to have Chris Sims on because they're engaged in litigation over at the Taxpayers Federation against the CBC and I wanted a big explainer.
00:03:02.720Chris, thanks so much for coming on the show.
00:03:05.220Tell us what you're up to with the state broadcaster, wouldn't you?
00:03:09.540So we've gone back and forth with the state broadcaster now for many years because, of course, here at the Taxpayers Federation, we take offense to the fact that it is costing us about $1.4 billion per year.
00:03:21.260Again, to put that into perspective, folks, you could pay for 7,000 paramedics and 7,000 plumbers combined every year, all the time, for what we pay for the CBC, which almost no Canadian watches.
00:03:34.700So, fast forward, folks might remember back when their CEO, Catherine Tate, who was paid around $500,000 and change, by the way, huge bonus, she was at committee and she was kind of feigning ignorance about whether or not the executives would be getting bonuses at the CBC.
00:03:58.520People might also remember this, I thought I was having a fever dream, Sheila, but at one point, Adrienne Arsenault, the actual anchor of the CBC National News, had her boss on the air.
00:04:11.700It was a super weird interview, very awkward.
00:04:14.600She cited the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, like, out loud with her face and said, well, you're handing out layoff notices around Christmas, so no bonuses for executives this year?
00:04:30.560Sorry, we have freedom of information reports that show that, yes, indeed, executives did get bonuses.
00:04:38.560It was between $14 and $15 million with an M.
00:04:42.620But what we really want to know is which executives got what bonuses and how much.
00:04:50.180So that is specifically what we asked for in our freedom of information request.
00:04:55.460Now, the folks in Ottawa, they worded it much better than I just did, but it was very particular, and that's what they asked for.
00:05:01.760Turns out the CBC kicked the can as hard as they could, Sheila, so that this ATIP information wouldn't come back until after Tate's next committee appearance.
00:05:12.180So that was back in May, and this is where we're like, okay, this is enough silly business, and that is why we have started legal procedures through the access to information law.
00:05:23.200Okay, so there's, like, ombuds people involved, and there's an information commissioner involved, and we are now saying, you need to cough up this specific granular data.
00:05:31.520Which executives got what bonuses and how much?
00:05:36.620And we've done this very similar thing before with the information commissioner, because folks might remember, back when the dearly departed Her Majesty the Queen passed away, there was, of course, a gigantic funeral over in London, England.
00:05:50.360And, of course, the prime minister went.
00:05:52.520What people were a little frustrated about is that some mystery person stayed in a $6,000 per night hotel room.
00:10:50.640Even though bureaucrats, instead of doing their jobs, are telling our veterans to go get made.
00:10:56.120And the CBSA, currently embroiled in the ARRIVE scandal, 96% of them got bonuses.
00:11:04.68098% of Corrections Canada managers received bonuses, no doubt for how they handled the serial killer Paul Bernardo and gay hustler, cannibal killer Luca Magnata.
00:11:18.380Putting those guys in medium security, causing big controversies.
00:12:15.580If you are doing a good job, that is usually when one gets a bonus.
00:12:19.960In any normal situation, that is when one gets a bonus.
00:12:22.760But when apparently you're with the Trudeau government, no matter what kind of an employee you are, it sounds like, you're going to be getting a bonus.
00:12:44.160Again, there is a big pushback happening in the Ottawa-Gatineau area coming from these government unions because they're mad that apparently they're now being asked to go into the office three days per week.
00:13:08.600What we're seeing here, of course, is that even within the ranks of the federal government employees, quite often, they're not hitting their own marks.
00:13:16.380Really easy ones that they're trying to hit, they're often not hitting them.
00:13:19.840So the idea that they would be told to put on pants and go into the office three times a week while being paid by the taxpayer doesn't seem that outrageous.
00:13:29.960It's 90% of executives and managers are receiving bonuses across the federal government.
00:13:35.140And, yeah, if going to the office is such a cumbersome thing, let's sell the office.
00:13:42.700You know, like I work from home and you work from home because it saves our respective organizations money because they don't have to put me in a physical studio.
00:14:27.360And apparently downtown Ottawa, like it used to be, so I lived down there for years, even like as a pedestrian and a cyclist.
00:14:34.140So I got to know that downtown core really well.
00:14:36.420And it was always a government town in the sense that, yeah, the sidewalks would roll up at about 4.30 and all of the bureaucrats would be taking the buses home back out to Orleans and Canada or wherever they lived.
00:14:47.360But then the last time I went back there, it is just a ghost town.
00:17:14.640Like just shy of 50% goes to various levels of government in taxes and fees.
00:17:20.460So it is like, and we've been slowly the frog boiling in the water, right?
00:17:24.920So it's hard to kind of remember, but just close your eyes and picture your take-home pay doubling.
00:17:30.400That is how much money the government is taking from you.
00:17:32.740And the next time your sister-in-law at dinner tries saying, oh, well, it pays for services, ask yourself how awesome those government services are.
00:17:49.460Now, while we were just ragging on the CBC out, I just want to talk about this thing that I saw this morning, landed in my email.
00:17:59.860The CRTC is now going to make Canadians, even if you try to escape the clutches of unwatchable Canadian content on the CBC and other terrestrial broadcasting, that doesn't matter.
00:18:16.160Because not only are you paying for it through your taxes and subsequent media bailouts, now you're over minding your own business on Netflix.
00:18:25.560You're over on Disney Plus minding your own business.
00:18:27.880Maybe you're watching on Paramount, Amazon Prime.
00:18:47.320And apparently, the only person who's going to escape this tax in all of Canada is Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, because wouldn't you know, she professes to have cancelled her Disney Plus.
00:18:57.980All this stuff gets passed along to the taxpayer and the consumer.
00:19:02.180It doesn't affect the streaming services.
00:19:04.440They just tack it onto our bill at the end of the day.
00:19:07.560So this happened in British Columbia years ago, and they put it in the weirdest possible wording, the provincial government there, but we still found it on budget day.
00:19:18.080And yeah, essentially, it's a Netflix tax.
00:19:22.220So back then, it was applying to Netflix, Spotify, SoundCloud, basically anything that came from outside of Canada that was a streaming service.
00:19:32.900And I think on average, it was going to be adding something like 15 bucks to the bill or something like that.
00:20:32.360It's going to be funneled back in some way, shape, or form to Canadian content programming.
00:20:38.280And again, people aren't watching the CBC.
00:20:41.540And what really was a bee in my bonnet was one of the times when Tate was at committee and she was very rightly getting grilled over the fact that the CBC's ratings are plummeting.
00:20:53.460Like around one-ish percent, give or take, of Canadians are watching the six o'clock news, for example.
00:21:28.240Yeah, they said, the funding will be directed to areas of immediate need in the Canadian broadcasting system, such as local news, on radio and television, French language content, Indigenous content, and content created by and for equity-deserving communities, official language minority communities, and Canadians of diverse backgrounds.
00:22:12.600So that's, again, folks, why you can't post news stories onto Facebook anymore, because Facebook told the Trudeau government to get bent and that they weren't going to be paying a tax, a fee,
00:22:24.880every time that they allowed for a news story to be posted on their sharing service.
00:22:48.660So this whole little snowball started, apparently so, this is how the story goes, with a few print guys.
00:22:55.180So there were a few print guys saying, hey, the CBC's eating our lunch, because, of course, they were only meant to be a broadcast service.
00:23:06.480So a lot of the original print guys were pretty mad about that, saying, you're exceeding your mandate and jumping the fence, and you're mowing my lawn.
00:26:41.600So that aside, there was also a second number that Yves Giraud, the head of the Parliamentary Budget Office, had calculated.
00:26:50.360And that is what the Taxpayers Federation talked about all the time.
00:26:53.160That is what the Conservatives talked about quite often.
00:26:55.420That's frankly what the NDP should be bringing up all the time too.
00:26:58.580So that is basically the, yes, the cost of filling up your vehicle.
00:27:02.420So it's about $20 now per pickup truck, just in the carbon tax, around $400 per household here in Alberta, for example, to heat your home with natural gas.
00:27:46.020All that said, now the Parliamentary Budget Office, I'm not quite sure why, are recalculating the carbon tax cost.
00:27:55.680So I think there was a question as to whether or not the researchers at the Parliamentary Budget Office had included what's often referred to as the industrial carbon taxes of various provinces when they were doing that second calculation number.
00:28:32.160Like, number one, we know that it still costs Canadians.
00:28:34.780Like, you can't put a tax on the lifeblood of the economy of gasoline, diesel, and natural gas, how we eat and heat and move, and not cost Canadians a ton of money.
00:29:00.700So, the Trudeau carbon tax is still a net cost to the majority of Canadian families, is what the verbiage is coming out of that office right now.
00:29:09.820But apparently, that, as far as I understand, that part of the report that they're trying to recalculate, they're apparently not letting him say so.
00:29:19.180They're not letting him release that number or that information.
00:29:22.220It's ongoing right now, as of our taping on Tuesday.
00:29:25.180Like, there's back and forth with a committee and everything and happening in the House of Commons.
00:29:28.700So, that's where we're at as of right now, is apparently the Trudeau government is not letting the Parliamentary Budget Officer release that new number.
00:30:03.840Like, it would be out tomorrow with a press conference and, like, the full meal deal backdrop and stuff.
00:30:08.480Even if they tried to do that, Fred, you try to convince me that you can put a carbon tax on everything we use to heat and eat and move and grow food.
00:30:18.680But, even just numerically, if it somehow magically, numerically came out and said, oh, it costs people much less, it would already be out.
00:30:27.820They wouldn't be trying to suppress that information.
00:30:49.720So, that means, like, in Alberta, when we're refrigerating the groceries in the grocery store, and that the increased cost of electricity adds to the cost of milk, that's not being factored in if they're missing large emitters from all of this.
00:31:29.320So, you try to say, say you use natural gas or propane to heat or cool, like, to heat the barn, and you have to keep your poultry barn at a steady 30.
00:31:38.520Yeah, you're not keeping in the electrification there, too.
00:31:41.600Like, I just finished talking to a lovely gentleman out here.
00:31:44.420I'm talking about the fans in a poultry barn are going constantly.
00:32:49.820The fans and the aerators and the bubblers, of course, to keep all these filters going and stuff and all the aeration and the air movement.
00:33:43.940So, I think, I think the Netflix tax might be distraction chicken away from, like, the bigger ones of how much it's costing people with these Auditor General reports.
00:36:51.760He wrote it in the National Post and it's exactly to our point.
00:36:55.600If you bring the people off of the stands, you get them in the arena, you build the army of people, real people, we will convince politicians to go in the right direction.
00:37:26.560But then sometimes I wish I'm sort of glad they're not.
00:37:30.740Anyway, thanks so much for coming on the show.
00:37:32.480Thanks so much for all the work that you do on behalf of normal people just like me, just trying to keep a little bit of extra money in their bank account.
00:37:40.420And as always, we'll have you back on again very soon.
00:38:14.100Now, last week, I made you the guest of the show.
00:38:19.500Regular viewers of the show will know that I was in the back of an RV filming my show because we were screening our latest documentary called Made, The Dark Side of Canadian Compassion.
00:38:32.240It touches on Justin Trudeau's radical euthanasia policies, what he calls medical assistance in dying.
00:38:38.740I was in a parking lot in Fort St. John, British Columbia while the documentary was showing at the Lido Theatre and I wanted to make good use of my time.
00:38:49.140But as I indicated, I didn't have time to book a show guest and how could I?
00:38:54.400I was filming the show on the fly and I made a call out for your viewer feedback.
00:39:03.000I'll read as many of them as I can on air while still making the show not 10 hours long because, boy, did I ever get a lot of viewer feedback there.
00:39:13.260So I thought I'll go back and pick another one this week.