John Bolton - July 12, 2026


Should Canada Bring Back Capital Punishment? A Majority Say Yes!


Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

186.31

Word count

1,437

Sentence count

63

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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, 325 AM, Sunday, July the 12th. I hope you're having
00:00:08.700 a great Sunday and a fantastic weekend. I hope you're keeping cool, hot weather here in Calgary.
00:00:14.360 I'm loving it. It's fantastic. I'm going to keep this one short today. I try to do that. I think
00:00:19.980 most of the time I succeed, less than 10 minutes. I like to keep my videos down so it doesn't take
00:00:25.420 up too much of your valuable time. And I didn't think I'd be talking about this topic this morning.
00:00:30.000 It's something I've been thinking about lately, and actually this has become a little bit more
00:00:34.540 prevalent in Canada over the last month or so. I've read a few stories about this issue that
00:00:40.000 I'm going to discuss today. Why am I talking about the death penalty? Should we bring back
00:00:48.220 the death penalty in Canada? Myself being conservative, and that's got something to do
00:00:53.440 with the way people feel about this. Politics plays a part in how people feel about the death
00:00:58.080 penalty. As a conservative, I think we should have the death penalty when it's absolutely,
00:01:04.200 you're absolutely positive you've got the perpetrator of a violent crime. And why am I
00:01:09.380 talking about this today? Because of this, which happened yesterday in Toronto, two dead in
00:01:16.600 targeted shooting at Toronto Salsa Street Festival that injured four others, public not at risk,
00:01:22.400 police. Now, information pretty sketchy at this point. We don't have all the details here.
00:01:27.520 it's pretty soon after this event two people killed and four more seriously injured after
00:01:33.640 at least two people opened fire at a toronto street festival on saturday police said now did
00:01:38.360 they open fire on a crowd well not necessarily what they're saying is there was an exchange of
00:01:44.720 gunfire between two people who were targeting each other however they could not say if the
00:01:50.400 shooters were deceased or if all the people injured were involved in the altercation there
00:01:55.400 and no arrests, but police don't believe the public is at risk. Two guns were recovered at
00:01:59.760 the scene. More on this story in just a moment. Now, you go over to X right now. I looked up
00:02:04.740 Salsa Festival, and there is a lot of coverage of this event. Mark Carney horrified at the shooting
00:02:11.360 at the St. Clair Festival in Toronto. We've got video like this.
00:02:16.080 these people running for cover some of them thinking they're running for their lives at
00:02:26.260 this festival it's it's horrific that something like this can happen we go down a little further
00:02:31.220 there's more coverage of this and then you get into the politicians i think they're down here
00:02:35.100 there's olivia chow mayor of toronto doug ford devastated by the senseless violence a couple of
00:02:40.760 people dead, others injured, you know, people out on a Saturday afternoon. There's Pierre Pauly,
00:02:45.940 I'm shocked to hear of the shooting at the Salsa on St. Clair Festival in Toronto. So people out
00:02:50.800 enjoying their Saturday afternoon and then running for their lives. And again, innocent bystanders
00:02:56.880 have been injured here. Some may have been killed. We're not sure of all the details at this point.
00:03:02.820 My question to you is, should we bring back the death penalty for people that, as far as I'm
00:03:07.700 concerned are monsters that would walk into a crowd and start firing with hundreds, if not thousands
00:03:12.700 of people that could be hit. These people, I think if they're convicted, I think I'm fully in favor
00:03:20.340 of the death penalty. And the reason I'm bringing this up is because you may have read a little bit
00:03:24.520 about this. There's this article from a couple of weeks ago, or actually this is just from a couple
00:03:29.120 of days ago, pardon me. 50 years after the death penalty was abolished in Canada is support for
00:03:34.820 bringing it back growing article from the globe and mail on july 9th so just a couple of days ago
00:03:40.480 they're a little late to the party on this one because i read an article and you may have read
00:03:44.260 an article on this um back on june 19th most canadians favor return of death penalty for
00:03:49.460 murderers poll finds national post i found this surprising when i read this back then you have to
00:03:54.720 ask the question does the death penalty deter crime i think that's questionable i think a lot
00:04:00.000 of people in favor of the death penalty are tired of monsters like the people yesterday who fired at
00:04:05.520 each other in this crowd. We're tired of them getting off with easy sentences and being given
00:04:11.640 an opportunity to get out of jail. Okay, so let's read a bit of this story. A growing number of
00:04:17.820 Canadians say to support the return of the death penalty in this country for convicted murderers,
00:04:22.600 a new poll is found, although that percentage drops when people are given the opportunity
00:04:26.680 to choose life imprisonment with no chance of parole data from research co a vancouver-based
00:04:33.320 market research and public opinion polling firm found that 60 percent of canadians said they would
00:04:37.760 support reinstating the death penalty for murder in canada a six point increase compared to when
00:04:43.080 the same question was asked in february of 2025 i don't know what's happened since february 2025
00:04:47.980 for these numbers to go up so much but that's interesting a further 30 percent said they were
00:04:53.380 opposed, a two-point drop, while 10% were unsure. A separate question asked, all things considered,
00:04:59.860 which of these two approaches would you prefer as a punishment for convicted murderers in Canada,
00:05:05.000 life imprisonment without the possibility of parole or the death penalty? With the possibility
00:05:10.380 of no parole on the table, the percentage in favor of the death penalty dropped to 49%, but it's still
00:05:15.780 almost half, which is amazing, while those choosing life imprisonment stood at 39%, with the remaining
00:05:21.680 12% undecided. So how do you feel about this? And I think what's important here is the way you feel
00:05:28.760 about this issue depends on where you sit politically on the spectrum. As a matter of fact,
00:05:33.260 let's just go back to this National Post story, and it got a pop-up in the way here. Okay, so
00:05:39.580 there's this. There was also support for the idea that the death penalty would save taxpayers the
00:05:44.640 cost of having murderers in prison, 46%, and the notion that murderers cannot be rehabilitated,
00:05:50.160 at 31%. Here's an interesting thing. In the United States, where more people are put to death
00:05:57.360 like this than anywhere else, it's more costly to keep somebody on death row for decade after
00:06:03.680 decade, and very often it can go on for many, many years, than it is to put them in prison for life.
00:06:08.800 Up to 10 times as much in some cases. But here's the interesting thing. Politics also played a part
00:06:15.340 in responses. On the question of the return of capital punishment, 53% of liberal voters in the
00:06:21.500 last election and 55% of new democratic voters were in favor as compared to 81% of conservative
00:06:28.220 voters. So you're much more in favor of the death penalty if you are a conservative than if you are
00:06:34.320 a liberal. And here's what the liberals will do in this situation. Of course, they're outraged
00:06:38.660 that this happened as all of us are, all politicians condemning what happened yesterday.
00:06:43.120 here's what the liberals will do and what they always do they'll use this opportunity to ban
00:06:48.420 more guns and that's their answer to everything the people that shot in this crowd yesterday
00:06:53.920 were criminals they had handguns probably they weren't walking around with long guns
00:06:58.460 likely had handguns and they didn't turn their guns in they don't turn their guns in when it
00:07:04.640 comes to gun grabs by the liberal party the only people who would turn in their guns are law-abiding
00:07:09.680 citizens who would never fire at somebody in a crowd on a street at a salsa festival in Toronto,
00:07:16.100 but that will be the response of the Liberals. You can count on it. What do you think? Should
00:07:20.840 we bring back the death penalty in Canada? I'm in favor. If you're absolutely sure this person 1.00
00:07:27.020 has committed a crime, if they're a monster, I don't think they should remain on the earth
00:07:32.500 and keep breathing. Let me know what you think in the comments. If you like the video, give it a
00:07:36.700 thumbs up, subscribe to the channel, ring the bell for notifications. I'll see you
00:07:40.180 in the next one. Did I keep it below 10 minutes?