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 .

Two people were killed and four others injured in a shooting at a Salsa Street Festival in Toronto, Canada on Saturday, July 12th, 2019. Is it time to bring back the death penalty in Canada?

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?