John Bolton - January 18, 2026


Should Senator Paula Simons Be Sued？ - Ethics Commissioner Responds


Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

173.08601

Word count

1,098

Sentence count

85

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

A follow-up to a video I did on a recent rant made by Alberta Sen. Paula Simons about the independence movement in Alberta and people who support it, and a letter I wrote to the Senate ethics officer about it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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. Sunday, January the 18th, 3.30 a.m. Panama
00:00:10.180 time. I'm still on vacation in Panama. My wife's sleeping in the room here, but I do
00:00:14.260 have my big blue mug of coffee. I'm hoping I don't wake her up. Thanks so much for being
00:00:19.380 here. And today, I want to do a follow-up on a video I did recently titled, Some People
00:00:25.780 are Complaining About Senator Paula Simons. I'm doing something about her. Senator Paula
00:00:32.620 Simons is an Alberta senator, and as I said in the previous video, she was not elected.
00:00:37.380 We do elect senators in Alberta. She was never elected. She was appointed by Justin Trudeau,
00:00:42.700 and she had some terrible things, disparaging comments to make about Stay Free Alberta and
00:00:49.700 people who support the independence movement. It disgusted me. And when I heard about these
00:00:56.160 comments, I thought, there must be some kind of code of conduct for senators. There has
00:01:01.080 to be, and there is. So what I'm going to do right now, I'm going to read a little bit of
00:01:05.800 my letter, not go through it, but I did get a response to my email that I sent out. So
00:01:12.860 I sent this out to the ethics officer for the Senate, and this is just a short part of what
00:01:18.860 I had to say. I'm writing in relation to the behavior of a Canadian senator named Paula
00:01:22.760 Simons. Ms. Simons, in a recent interview with Courtney Theriot on CHED Edmonton, went
00:01:28.220 on a rant regarding millions of people who live in Alberta. This rant was based on the current
00:01:33.280 independence movement in the province. Ms. Simons said the following, well, I think to
00:01:37.560 be blunt, and I will be blunt, I think a lot of the emotion that's driving the Alberta
00:01:40.960 Prosperity Project is pretty ugly. It's not about making an argument about access to tidewater
00:01:46.240 and pipelines. It's frankly xenophobic. It's frankly racist. It's frankly misogynist,
00:01:51.280 very anti-woman. It's about taking Alberta back to some kind of imaginary 1950s world of,
00:01:56.920 you know, women barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen. And I think this is virulently 1.00
00:02:01.560 transphobic and homophobic. And I went on to describe my disgust with Ms. Simons, and I
00:02:08.480 thought that she should have to live up to some kind of code of conduct. And there is a code 0.99
00:02:13.520 of conduct for senators, which you'll see on the screen right now, and you can read a little
00:02:17.360 bit of it. And I don't think she lives up to this code of conduct. So I wrote a letter
00:02:23.880 and I wanted to get an immediate response to this letter and to what she was saying.
00:02:31.680 So I did get one, and this is what came back to me. And it's re disgraceful comments of a
00:02:38.480 sitting senator. And this is what it says. Dear Mr. Bolton, this is to acknowledge receipt of your
00:02:43.860 email below, dated XX2026, in which you advise that you would like to make a formal complaint
00:02:50.480 about Senator Simons and have provided information in support of it. While the ethics and conflict of
00:02:56.100 interest code for senators does not provide a specific mechanism through which individuals
00:03:01.220 other than senators may file a formal complaint under it, the Senate ethics officer will certainly
00:03:07.360 consider the information you have provided, given that he does have the authority to self-initiate
00:03:13.060 a preliminary review in cases where he has reasonable grounds to believe that a senator has
00:03:18.400 breached his or her obligations under the code. We cannot comment further at this time. Thank you
00:03:23.780 for bringing this matter to our attention. So right now they're looking into it. Do I expect much more
00:03:30.740 from this or anything further from this? Not necessarily. Now, something that I did get along
00:03:38.740 with this that came directly after the email I just read to you was this. And it talks about the Senate
00:03:47.100 ethics commissioner would like to recall the message of disgraceful comments of a sitting senator. Now,
00:03:53.760 I didn't know what this meant. My wife seemed to think that they wanted to recall the previous message.
00:04:00.320 I just read you. I didn't know that was possible until now. My wife did. Apparently, you can't recall
00:04:06.560 emails that you have sent mistakenly or you wanted to get back. So I'm thinking maybe they wrote me the
00:04:13.280 first message. They had regrets and tried to get it back. But I just read to you what I got in my inbox.
00:04:21.320 Do I expect any more to come of this? I would say no. I don't think people are held accountable. I talked
00:04:31.480 about the Emergencies Act on that recent ruling about it. And I'd like to see Justin Trudeau arrested
00:04:37.280 and possibly Chrystia Freeland for what they did to people during the convoy. But I don't think anybody
00:04:43.180 will be held accountable for that. We're talking about government. We're talking about politicians.
00:04:47.400 And I don't think anything is going to happen to Paula Simons. I don't think anything's going to
00:04:52.680 happen at all. This was slander, defamation against millions of people, but also Stay Free Alberta,
00:05:01.660 formerly known as the Alberta Prosperity Project and the people that represent it. Now, I have had
00:05:08.480 somebody pretty high up in the independence movement saying perhaps we should go ahead
00:05:13.260 with a lawsuit against Senator Simons for defamation and slander. And perhaps that's what they should
00:05:20.420 do. What do you think? Whether it would be successful or not, I don't know. But it would be the point
00:05:27.240 that would be made that you cannot say that and paint everybody with the same brush in this movement
00:05:35.380 for independence. So I wanted to get you up to date on what was happening here. What do you think?
00:05:41.140 Should Stay Free Alberta sue Senator Paula Simons for her disgusting and reprehensible comments about 0.72
00:05:50.700 the independence movement and the people who are part of it here in Alberta? I'd love to hear what
00:05:55.720 you have to say. I'll check out the comments and maybe I'll do a follow-up with them as well
00:06:00.580 in upcoming days. Thank you so much for watching. I do appreciate it. Thanks for being patient with me
00:06:06.140 as I've been here in Panama. It's been a little harder to do videos. Today, I managed to get this
00:06:11.200 one done with my wife in the room. She's a pretty heavy sleeper. If you like the video, give it a
00:06:15.780 thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel. Ring the bell for notifications. I will see you in the next one.