Action4Canada - March 06, 2026


John Rustad: Betrayal, Bullying, and the Truth


Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

160.89386

Word count

192

Sentence count

18


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about my experience in the Ontario legislature, and how I dealt with the pressure to conform in order to stay on the right side of the political aisle. I also talk about the bullying I experienced, and what it was like to be in the shadow cabinet.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 John Rustad was backloading the truck with liberals. And not just liberals. We're talking some of these people are truly NDP. They shouldn't be anywhere near our party. So it was a shock, not just to find we just had different variations, you know, different shades of conservatives. We had full-blown NDPers, trans activists in our party, people who were all for controlled speech.
00:00:28.100 It was shocking to my system and I couldn't believe what had happened. And then what happens is you get over there and you start to put your hand up and say, wait a second. And then you get the pressure to conform. And I couldn't believe it. I mean, I've been in a lot of high pressure situations in my life. I practiced law for a long time. I've been in boardrooms. I've been in courtrooms. I've been, I was an arbitrator for 10 years. I've been in broadcasting.
00:00:55.520 I've done a lot of different places, but I've never experienced this intensity of peer pressure, social pressure, and full-on bullying that I have experienced in that legislature, in our caucus and in that legislature. It's horrendous.