John Bolton - August 16, 2026


A Video Of The Blindingly Obvious - Has To Be Said


Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

164.84

Word count

1,282

Sentence count

107

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hi, it's John and welcome to the channel. It is Sunday, August 16th, 6.07 a.m. Great to have you
00:00:09.100 along today. I'm getting going a little later this morning than usual. I apologize for that.
00:00:14.260 You know, I have this software issue. And just quickly, I've been trying to get this fixed for
00:00:19.520 weeks. I think I get it fixed and then it comes back again. I'm going to have to solve this today.
00:00:23.980 My apologies if you see some stuttering video. I apologize. But let's get to today's video.
00:00:29.120 And by the time we get to the end of this, you may say, John, you're telling us the blindingly obvious here.
00:00:37.060 And I understand that.
00:00:38.840 But a couple of stories I read this morning, I wanted to get back to a theme I've had previously here on this channel.
00:00:46.460 All right.
00:00:47.080 So let's look at the very first story.
00:00:49.120 And you may be aware of this.
00:00:51.700 You may have read this.
00:00:52.680 I did a video on this earlier this week.
00:00:54.780 A great article from Lauren Gunter in the Toronto Sun, BC land transfers to First Nations
00:01:00.060 post problems for the rest of Canada. There is beautiful Hatley Castle on Vancouver Island
00:01:05.660 sitting on land owned by Indigenous people. The video I did earlier this week, this yellow area
00:01:11.020 you see over British Columbia here is the approximate area of land that will eventually
00:01:16.260 be turned over to Indigenous people in British Columbia. This is what reconciliation looks like,
00:01:21.900 folks. I'll put a card at the end so you can watch that video if you want. So I saw another story and
00:01:29.980 here is the other story that I saw. Now this is from a couple of days ago. You may be aware of
00:01:34.300 this story as well. And there may be a few words in the title of this story at APTN News that you
00:01:43.220 remember. Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation in Alberta claims victory in first battle against mind-boggling
00:01:50.020 AI data center. Now, of course, you remember Alberta, but it's the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation
00:01:55.680 that I want you to think about here. You may remember that. And this is the data center that
00:02:01.880 Kevin O'Leary of the Dragon's Den, Canadian investor, wants to build. Huge project. I think
00:02:07.700 it's a $30 billion investment, which will employ 3,000 people to build it and have 300 permanent
00:02:15.880 employees for this AI data center. Now, I'm not going to get into AI data centers. They're rather
00:02:22.060 contentious. There's something that we're really going to need. I may talk about that in the future,
00:02:27.380 but this is a huge project. Now, let's go to another story. You may remember, those of you
00:02:34.160 particularly in Alberta may remember the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation moves to block Alberta separatist
00:02:40.320 petition in court. This article from very early in the year, January the 3rd, Sturgeon Lake Cree
00:02:46.120 Nation. And then you may remember this story as well a little bit later on. Let's get rid of that
00:02:51.220 box. Alberta separation petition overturned as judge rules in favor of First Nations. Now the 0.98
00:02:57.380 Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation was involved in this, obviously. We can scroll down here. We hear about
00:03:04.020 the lawyers for the First Nations and we hear about the lawyers for the government. We'll come
00:03:09.500 back to that in just a moment. You go down here, you see Athabascan Chippewyan First Nation Chief
00:03:15.940 Alan Adam, who celebrated the ruling. By the way, here's Chief Adam here. Back in 2014, received
00:03:22.660 $55,000 from the Tides Foundation. Went to an event in Toronto with Neil Young to demonize
00:03:29.260 Canada's oil industry. This guy's a piece of work, but there he is right there, right? Fighting
00:03:34.980 against oil and gas. But obviously, the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation was involved here. Their appeal
00:03:42.620 was denied. It was something a little bit different. But my question was this morning,
00:03:47.920 where does the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation get all this money to hire all of these lawyers?
00:03:54.160 They're involved in everything. Now, here's the blindingly obvious you're going to say to me,
00:03:58.440 John. The government. That's where they get their money. And who's the government? Well,
00:04:05.800 we are. It's our money, right? So I went on chat GPT and I thought I'd just do a little bit of a
00:04:11.880 deep dive into them. And I asked, where does the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation get a majority of its
00:04:16.900 income? The majority of Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation's revenue appears to come from government transfers
00:04:22.900 and funding. Well, isn't that a huge surprise? Blindingly obvious, right? So let's just take a
00:04:28.200 look at a little bit of a breakdown here. $35.75 million from the Western Cree Tribal Council.
00:04:35.200 Hmm. We'll come back to that. Indigenous Services Canada, $5.35 million. That's your money. CMHC,
00:04:42.720 the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. That would be your money. And the rest of it
00:04:48.360 is $219,000 from the government of Alberta. The rest of it might be raised by the Sturgeon Lake
00:04:55.660 Cree Nation, but a vast majority comes from the government. But what is the Western Cree Tribal
00:05:02.500 Council? Well, let's find out a little bit about them. Where does the Western Cree Tribal Council
00:05:07.680 get its income? The Western Cree Tribal Council appears to get the overwhelmingly majority of
00:05:15.120 its income from government funding, particularly Indigenous Services Canada, and it works out to
00:05:20.800 about $1.4 billion in federal transfer payments. And that's your money. And that's where the
00:05:27.320 Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation gets a majority of their money. And that's how they pay for all 0.95
00:05:32.660 of these lawyers on both sides of the issue to fight about projects in this country, like data
00:05:39.800 centers, pipelines, and referendums in Alberta, because you're paying for both sides here. Isn't
00:05:45.540 that ridiculous? Now, this is the blindingly obvious, I understand. But here's the other 0.97
00:05:50.900 thing. Here's the kicker. Here's the real kicker here. How many people are involved in blocking
00:05:59.100 all this stuff? We're talking about a $30 billion AI data center. We're talking about blocking
00:06:05.100 a referendum for a province of 5 million people. We're talking about people, not necessarily the
00:06:11.480 Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, but a group of indigenous people in this country, a small
00:06:15.940 group of people that block so many projects and have so much land being transferred to them in
00:06:21.040 British Columbia. Well, the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation has 4,027 registered members. And of that
00:06:28.080 number, only 1,600 are actually on the reserve on crown land. How do we allow this small group of
00:06:36.020 people block so many things in this country? And I'm going to go back to a little theme I had
00:06:41.060 not long ago. If you do not want to be part of the prosperity, if you want to stand in front of
00:06:48.880 the prosperity, you should not benefit from the prosperity of this country. Hardworking people
00:06:55.220 in this country, meaning myself and all the people across the country, including indigenous groups
00:07:01.900 that work hard and want to be part of the prosperity, are paying your way. We are your
00:07:09.000 benefactors, and you're blocking our prosperity. If you do not want to be part of the prosperity,
00:07:14.660 you should not benefit from the prosperity. You should be cut off. I don't care about treaties.
00:07:22.840 $32 billion a year, folks. And that's just a drop in the bucket that we hand over every year
00:07:28.980 for these people to block us. It's getting tiresome. Let me know what you think. Blindingly obvious,
00:07:37.580 but has to be said. If you like this video, give it a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel,
00:07:43.620 ring the bell for notifications. I'll see you in the next one.