Canadians reject Freeland’s capital gains tax hike
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Summary
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation's Peter Menzies joins the show to talk about the Trudeau government's attempt to get rid of capital gains taxes, the role of government in media, and a story that I almost didn't believe.
Transcript
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welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true
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North. Hello and welcome to The Andrew Lawton Show here on True North. Do not adjust your set. Yes,
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I know it's a different TV show. I do not have an Outer Limits coffee mug. I have to have my
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Twilight Zone coffee mug. I blame inflation. My name is Chris Sims. I'm the Alberta Director for
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the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Andrew and the team at True North have been very kind to me,
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asking me to fill in for Andrew this week, but don't worry, you will have him back from his
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secret assignment in an undisclosed location very soon. So we have a really interesting show for you
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today. We're going to touch a little bit on capital gains tax. What is that exactly? How is it going
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to affect you? What on earth is the Trudeau government doing with it now to screw things up?
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Then we're going to go to the role of government and media, particularly government in media.
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So those of you who have watched the Canadian Taxpayers Federation or watched any of our
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conversations with Andrew Lawton on True North, you know where we stand. We want to defund the CBC.
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We don't think any taxpayers' money or government money, as they call it, should be going to media
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organizations because, well, one, it's a huge waste of money, and two, it's an obvious conflict
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of interest. So one of the fundamental roles of a journalist, doesn't matter if they're coming at
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this from a right wing or left wing or whatever ideology, is to speak truth to power and to hold
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government to account. Sorry, guys, you can't hold government to account if you're counting on
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government for your paycheck. So we're going to do a nice deep dive into that murky territory
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with Peter Menzies, a longtime journalist, longtime editor and publisher of the Calgary Herald,
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and even did some time on the CRTC board. So he's got some really interesting takes there.
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And every now and then, I think it's important to remind ourselves that we aren't alone,
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If you're getting screwed by the government here in Canada, at least take comfort in the
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Across the pond, we actually have some cousins in the Taxpayer Alliance.
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We're going to be joining them later on in the show, highlighting some of the wacky wastes
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of money that's happening across the pond over there in the UK because, hey, they've
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what better time to highlight stuff like that.
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And we're going to leave you with an absolutely ridiculous story.
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If you were getting together with some buddies to go deer hunting,
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what would you bring with you? What sort of a vehicle would you drive?
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Keep that in mind because at the end of the show,
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we're going to be joining my colleague, Carson Binda.
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He's the BC director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation with the story that I
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almost didn't believe. I thought that they were pulling my leg.
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So really good show for you today, as Ed Sullivan would say.
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So rewind, dear listener, rewind, dear viewer, to before the budget.
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So before the budget, we were hearing all sorts of rumors.
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So we were hearing, we were seeing trial balloons for a grocery store tax.
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There were so many trial balloons up there in Ottawa, they blotted out the sun.
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like the media said it was an eclipse, but we know what those were. It was the trial balloons
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for a grocery store tax. So hopefully and luckily that didn't happen. I say hopefully because you
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never know with this government, just wait. The other element was a so-called wealth tax.
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And this is where you get into this sort of, you know, let's go hang out in the quad with our
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sociology class and chat about eating the rich, shall we, in university. It sounds fun
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and it sounds like a good solution. So if we don't have any money, the average working people of
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Canada, and we want some money, let's go to that rich guy. You know, he's got a top hat and a
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monocle. He's carrying around a bag with a money symbol on it and let's go take his money. So it's
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kind of a simplistic thing of let's just tax the rich to death and we'll have all of their money.
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So there was all these rumors about a wealth tax happening then. Again, that doesn't work because
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Number one, super duper wealthy rich people, they have teams of accountants and lawyers.
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Two, physically, if you find the super duper wealthy rich person and you try taking all of their money, they're just going to leave.
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They're going to pack up and leave the country.
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Now, believe it or not, I actually had some commentators saying things like, oh, well, we'll have an exit tax for them then.
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put that down folks like you're getting you know east germany level crazy there let's not start
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just thinking of people as these tax vending machines okay so all of that was going around
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before the budget after the budget and during the budget announcement they came up with a hike
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on the capital gains tax so what that is and again it doesn't affect everybody but what it
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generally is, is an increase to the capital gains tax that already exists. So say you've got a lot
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of investments and you sell them and you make money on it. They're going to then increase the
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amount that the Trudeau government takes from that, from the profit from it. But it doesn't
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just affect people who have stocks, who have a lot of investments and stuff. It also affects people
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if you have a secondary house. So say you're fortunate enough already to have the house that
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you own and live in right now. Say you're older, okay? Say you're in the boomer generation, okay?
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A lot of them, right? They would have gotten into the market early. They've paid off their
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own house that they live in. Generally speaking, there's always exceptions, but they're paid off
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the house they're living in. But quite often, they'll have a cottage or a cabin or even like
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a small apartment or a condo in a downtown area. Quite often, they will have rented it out or
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they've used it for their adult kid to go through university or trade school. And they're often
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counting on the sale of that property to be a big part of their nest egg. Okay. They're either going
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to move to it and live in it when they downsize when they're old and sell the house that they
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currently had lived in, or they're going to sell the secondary property. The reason why I'm
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explaining all of this is because the sale of a secondary property in Canada carries a capital
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gains tax. That is what the Trudeau government is proposing to increase. And I use the term
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proposing lightly, because most of the time, if you have a big tax hike, and you make the
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announcement during the budget, it will be part of the budget. Apparently not. From what we can
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tell, and she has not yet clarified whether or not she's going to do this. What we can tell is
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that Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland wants the bureaucrats at the finance department to just
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make this tax hike happen without a vote in Parliament, without a vote in the House of
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Commons. Okay, so number one, the capital gains tax hike is a dumb idea because it affects a lot
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of people, including physicians and doctors. We're going to get to that in a second. But also,
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if you're going to hike taxes, you better at least have a vote on this plan. Okay? So that's
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totally undemocratic. You have to at least have a vote in the House of Commons on a big tax hike
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like this. So let's get into a bit of the details here. Sean, if we could pull up some of the data
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that we have here from Abacus Data. It looks like they asked quite a few questions of Canadians.
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So let's take a look here. So Abacus Data, again, it's a major polling firm here in Canada. David
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Coletto. I used to work with him back at Sun News Network. So he runs this shop here. So recall of
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capital gains tax changes. So three in five Canadians are informed about the changes to
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the capital gains in the budget. So that's pretty interesting. So sorry about that, Sean. I have to
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move my microphone with me here. Thank you. So three in five Canadians are at least knowledgeable
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about the capital gains tax changes that was in the budget. So that's pretty decent, right?
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enough people know about it. So how, what did they think about it though? Okay. It's enough to know,
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but let's think about what they actually think about it. A quarter are supportive. Okay. So
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that's about 25 ish percent of people. This is interesting. A third oppose it and a remainder
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remain uncommitted or unsure, meaning they don't quite know enough about it to usually answer.
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But that, that number of a third of people saying they oppose it is really interesting.
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Picture that as a percentage of the population or, you know, votes. All right, let's move along here.
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So for their initial opinion, only one in five want the government to pass the capital gains tax
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changes. So that's, you know, come on, guys, that's less than a quarter. So they're getting
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into really low territory here. Now, this is where this is very interesting, okay? Because
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now we're getting into the nitty gritty as to, hey, what does the capital gains tax actually
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affect, namely who does it affect? Doctors. What do we have a shortage of in Canada? Doctors. So
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the impact of tax changes on physicians and access to physicians. So even before more in-depth
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information on the impact of doctors, most Canadians believe there will probably be impacts
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on physicians and waiting lists for care. So those are some really interesting data points there
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from abacus data and that also anecdotally speaking is true so just to give you just a
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bit of personal background i'm fine but i was actually at foothills hospital around a month
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or so ago with a friend and it was just after the budget was announced and just after the capital
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gains tax was announced completely unprompted because like i think i had my taxpayers ball
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cap on or something but i was not there for work i was just there with a friend uh two separate
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doctors, spotted the ball cap, and they brought up the capital gains tax, saying something like
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this, if I remember to paraphrase. Yeah. So back when we were first starting med school or thinking
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about becoming doctors, we were told that because we do not have pensions, okay, the way say a nurse
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would have a pension, or other folks within the medical system would have a pension. Doctors are
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basically private enterprises in a way. They have to kind of run their own clinics and then they
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get hospital privileges. It's a whole complicated thing. But they were told for now, I think more
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than a generation by various types of government that capital gains is their way of saving for
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that pension. So the way they structure their practice, the way they save their money, okay,
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is specific to physicians. And now when they're changing the rules midway through the game and
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they're increasing the capital gains tax, it looks like they're now feeling ripped off.
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And these two separate doctors mentioned, yeah, I've got friends who are also doctors. Some of
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them were in Alberta, some of them were in British Columbia, where they certainly can't spare them.
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And they were saying, you know what, we're going to head out. We're going to move. And that was
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actually shown. I was watching a recent interview on in mainstream media. And one of the cabinet
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ministers in Trudeau's government was asked about this. Hey, what about the effect on physicians?
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Okay, what are you going to do about that? And the answer was so flippant, it was jaw-dropping.
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The minister essentially said, oh, well, we will go find doctors elsewhere and get them to move here.
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As if there's some magical international doctor store that we can all just go shopping at and
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just, sure, no problem, bring them over here to Canada where they're going to get screwed on their
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taxes. So I know there's not a lot of sympathy for super rich people in Canada, but I do think
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we probably need physicians, right? I have a feeling that we have a shortage of those.
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Maybe not such a good idea to chase them out of Canada with increasingly higher taxes. And this
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is the big catch here, okay? Even if you think that increasing the capital gains tax is an answer
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to the woes of the Trudeau government's budget keeping or lack of budget keeping, that this is
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the silver bullet. This is the answer. This is going to work. The amount of money that they're
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going to collect from this increase in the capital gains tax is going to be spent in around five
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days. I'm going to say that again real slow. This huge tax increase where they're going to be
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screwing people on the sale of a secondary residence. Keep in mind this also affects
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if things are passed down in a will to you and you have to sell a family home. Guess what? That's
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not the house you're living in, you're going to get nailed for that. If you're selling a secondary
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residence, like a condo or a cabin, if you happen to be a physician or some other job where you're
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directly affected by capital gains, all that money, Trudeau at his current rate of spending,
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he's going to blow through that in about five days. I have lunch meat in my refrigerator that
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is going to last longer than that amount of money collected. So like the lack of balanced budgets
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and the increase in deficit spending in Canada is just absolutely mind-boggling here. Folks,
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if you have comments on capital gains, if you think this is going directly to directly affect
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you, how you feel this is going to affect physicians, be sure to leave your comments
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in the YouTube channel comment section. And if there's some pretty interesting and or spicy ones,
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we'll try to include them in the show. So this is why I love this format is because it's live
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and we can be interactive. And we are currently, knock wood, not being controlled much by the
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government. But that might change. Joining me now to talk about the role of government,
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the role of taxpayer dollars and censorship here in Canada is Peter Menzies. Mr. Menzies,
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thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for your work on this. I just finished reading
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your piece. I think if I'm paraphrasing it, the CRTC is coming to help newspapers. Can you tell
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us a little bit about that? As I understand it as a former broadcaster myself, CRTC deals with
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radio and television. They so far haven't gotten their hands on print. How are they now possibly
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getting their foot in the door when it comes to what we would typically describe as print,
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even though it's printed on the internet? Okay, well, the CRTC did deal only with radio and
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television until the introduction of the Online Streaming Act and passage about a year ago.
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Bill C-11, it's known as, in its previous incarceration, it was notorious as Bill C-10.
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And that gave the CRTC authority over the global internet, with the one restriction being that
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it would only deal with uh video and audio and so that would keep it within its normal realm
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one would think because the the bill envisions that that uh the internet is broadcasting
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essentially so what's happened is they got lobbied heavily in the fall at their hearing
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their first introductory hearing on bill c11 uh by bell media and other big companies who want
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funding for their news. They say their news is in crisis, which it probably is. It's in crisis
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sort of everywhere at the moment under the old structures. So the CRTC announced a couple of
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weeks ago that it's going to have a consultation followed by a public hearing. And it said it will
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get into talking about what it wants to talk about is the delivery of quality,
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trusted news in Canada, including online. So that's what caught my attention because,
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hey, guess what? Just about everybody's online now, right? That I believe is the primary means
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of communication. People still watch television. People still listen to the radio. And some people,
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not many, about 5%, still buy a printed newspaper. But now, because everybody's
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online and the CRTC is online and because just about everything you get online now comes with
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this little tool that will read the story to you that's audio and that I suspect is the door that
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has been kicked open and that the CRTC will walk through I gotta ask you because I don't I read
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most of your pieces and I really appreciate them and what I as a nod to your objectivity sir
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I don't quite know exactly where you stand on some of this and feel free to not directly answer if you don't feel comfortable.
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But you worked for a long time with the Calgary Herald as both editor and publisher, I believe, worked in sports journalism.
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How how do you what role do you see government playing in media?
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If you could wave a wand and you could make everything exactly as it should be for objective, independent journalism to occur.
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What role do you think government should play in newsrooms, if any?
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The way the communication world is set up today, I believe they should play absolutely none.
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I think it's absolutely none of their business.
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I'm very much in agreement with the sort of Jeffersonian view of the world that governments should only do what only governments can do.
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and they should focus on doing that well and leaving the rest of the world to that.
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There was recently a clip of the manager of the Spectator in Britain speaking to the Scottish Parliament
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and I agree with what he said is that at its core the relationship between media and government should always be bad.
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yes yes it should be adversarial in a way um even if the if the journalists themselves because we're
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not robots and i worked in journalism for 20 something years um you're raised a certain way
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you have certain opinions but you can work hard to be balanced and objective in your delivery
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of your story despite where they happen to come from if it's from a right or left angle
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i always thought that it was my job to ask tough questions of the government in power
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To comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable
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Essentially being on a form of government payroll
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That they could possibly hold government to account
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I don't know, Sean, if we have a quote board of Andrew Coyne
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It's slowly loading here. So if the trends of the past five years continue by 2030, almost 100% of legacy newsroom salaries will be paid, as Coyne put it, by the people we write about, and almost no one will be bothering to buy what is written.
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And I thought that your inclusion of that quote was very apt. And it was years ago that Coyne also had pointed out that this is just an obvious conflict of interest.
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Like, if so many journalists feel this way of like, you know, government back off.
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That's written by a dear friend of mine, Ryan Thorpe.
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He's our investigative journalist now who spent years in the newspaper industry, an industry he loves.
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How did we wind up on government payroll as journalists?
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Well, I mean, it's a pretty long story, but I mean, to try to make it reasonably tight, I mean, the internet got invented, the World Wide Web got invented, and social media invented better ways to reach people for advertisers.
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Much more targeted advertising, much more efficient, much better.
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Kijiji and Craigslist took away all the classified revenue from newspapers.
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newspapers had been actually it was very easy to make money in newspapers for a very long time
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because of their dominance of the market and because they managed not just news but a lot
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of stuff like i said classified advertising that sort of stuff if you wanted you know to buy a car
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you wanted to buy a house you wanted to rent something that's where you had to go and then
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it all just disappeared newspapers had no response and now they find themselves they cut back and cut
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back and cut back. And now they find themselves nearing the end of that path of, I guess what
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you'd say is inability to adjust to technological change. I mean, it's the same as why don't we have
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a horse and buggy industry anymore? Somebody invented the automobile. But the fact of the
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matter is people still move around. So my view is, is that just because the horse that journalism
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was riding is dying, that doesn't mean journalism has to die. It just needs to find a new horse.
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And what they've decided in the meantime, what a lot of the proprietors who were fading away
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decided in the mean hunt time was that that new horse would be the government as opposed to
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serving readers. So you now have a situation, Rudyard Griffiths of the Hub pointed out
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recently that, I mean, more than 50% of newsroom salaries are now being subsidized either through
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a tax credit, or in some cases directly through Canada. In Quebec, the percentage is even higher
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because the Quebec government gets into that. And I would also make the point which I don't think
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that journalists themselves have to be, you know, are going to be worse because of this.
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But what people think of them will definitely be worse. And no matter what you, no matter
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how pristine you you believe yourself to be and no matter how pristine you are in the conduct of
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your work if people don't trust that that setup you're done you're cooked it's over right so as
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andrew was pointing out um eventually i mean if you don't need to serve your readers right if
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you've got enough money right if you don't need to sell subscriptions if you don't need to care
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about how many people watch your show if you don't need to care about any of that stuff why
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will you right you'll just become self-serving and and just government funded i mean just
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build a building right make them all public servants and have them move in right the pensions
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are better right so um yeah this is not a this is not a solution it's it's it's really quite
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pathetic um some sort of temporary transitional thing and there are there are things government
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can do. That there are public policies that could be in place that would allow for
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the CBC being central to this, for journalism to be sustainable. I don't think it's ever going to
00:25:02.820
be as profitable as it once was, but it can be sustainable if government does the right things
00:25:09.780
and stops doing the wrong things. You really nailed it there when it comes to truth and
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perception as a journalist you're not you know you're not selling widgets you
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know you're not selling shoes or toothbrushes you are conveying
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information usually information hopefully that you as a journalist or
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reporter has heard firsthand so if you're covering a court case or city
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hall something like that I know I'm speaking like a dinosaur here because
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there's so few beat reporters actually out on the street anymore with a mic in
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hand but for a viewer or a reader or a listener consuming that news you have to trust the person's
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perception and trust that they have written down the answers as best as they can as accurately as
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they can and if suddenly you no longer trust that conveyor of information that's it like you said
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you're done i saw a recent a recent poll they put out a it's a i forget what it's called but it's an
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annual survey on trust that they've put out for 30 something years. And it was a shocking number.
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I think it was 54% of Canadians now believe that journalists are purposefully saying things they
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know to be untrue. Not flubbing, not accidentally making a typo, not getting a name wrong,
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saying they are purposefully misleading people with statements they know to be false.
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And once you get past that huge mark of 50% in the journalism industry, I don't really see a way
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back for it here. I wanted to, before I let you go, and I really appreciate your work on this,
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where do you see censorship coming into this? I'm not sure if you wanted to go there with me,
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but apart from, I kind of see it as a vice, okay? And it's got two sides. For me, one side of it is
00:26:57.140
government funding of journalists, government involvement in newsrooms, right? Crank, crank,
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On the other side of it, though, are things like Bill C-11, Bill C-63, which many have said is a form of government censorship.
00:27:10.720
Yes, in the case of Bill C-63, they're trying to couch it in child protection.
00:27:15.000
They should split that bill, OK, and only let that happen on its own.
00:27:19.780
Where do you see government censorship of stifling information, of downgrading people's algorithms to the point where they don't see shows like this anymore?
00:27:28.860
Do you see government playing a role there, too?
00:27:31.300
I think that could happen. I think there's two types of censorship that you'll see. One is self-censorship. And for people who argue that, no, no, no, government funding won't affect our news judgment. I mean, some of the publishers that were pushing for the government funding nakedly used their platforms to campaign for this legislation and stifled dissenting point of views on their pages.
00:27:57.520
So that was self-censorship. I believe in freedom of the press so they can do whatever they want with their press, but you also have to be accountable for it, right? So if you do that, people will trust you less. That's the outcome of that. And trust is a commodity, as we all know from other parts of our lives, whether at work or personally, trust, once it is degraded, is very, very difficult to rebuild.
00:28:21.700
It's not something that you can just snap your fingers and get back.
00:28:30.220
In terms of the government's role, if the CRTC,
00:28:33.120
the CRTC already has control of television and radio in terms of that.
00:28:39.400
And part of the Broadcasting Act says that the CRTC's job
00:28:43.680
is to ensure that the system that they are governing is of high standard.
00:28:49.320
now that's about as subjective a statement as you can make right i mean it basically
00:28:55.880
i mean right now i mean they they they uh they allow a lot of things they allow like uh pornography
00:29:03.320
channels and and and and that sort of stuff that that that are available to people and that i
00:29:09.000
assume that they then believe that that is of high standard or they make sure that it's high standard
00:29:13.320
porn in terms of that, right? Not the cheap stuff, the good stuff. Yeah, yeah. Don't give them ideas,
00:29:19.380
they'll assign a panel. That's right. But once you get into that, you know, so they've not got
00:29:26.840
carried away with that, but they do have the ability that with that subjective high standard
00:29:32.320
to put things into place, like the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council was sort of created,
00:29:38.140
the CRTC wanted it to be arm's length, but its decisions can still be appealed to the CRTC.
00:29:43.320
And it sort of sets the guidelines for radio and television, which in my view is one of the reasons why they all kind of seem the same.
00:29:51.400
Like you don't have, there's not the sort of dynamic diversity of points of view that you see on the Internet because everybody's trying to stay within those set rules.
00:30:01.560
And then you self-censor within those sorts of things.
00:30:04.600
So the CBSC, for instance, said years ago that the Dire Straits song, Money for Nothing, should be banned.
00:30:17.380
And I mean, the artists themselves did an alternative version and that sort of stuff.
00:30:22.860
But that was based on the complaint of one woman in Newfoundland, one, about a radio station.
00:30:31.560
and the radio station had said okay in the future we'll play the other version or something like
00:30:35.640
that but it wasn't enough and so there's there once you open that door what i'm trying to get
00:30:41.560
at is there's no shortage of people out there who will be banging on doors asking for you to be
00:30:49.160
shut down yep right um for all kinds of reasons there's right now the crtc still has before it
00:30:56.360
and appealed by a group to have Fox News taken off cable in Canada.
00:31:06.440
Two years ago, they took RT, the Russian state television, off.
00:31:12.140
It took them about two weeks to do that because the government basically,
00:31:15.600
the government isn't allowed to direct them to do something,
00:31:19.700
but the government asked them, nudge, nudge, wink, wink,
00:31:23.420
could you review the status please of rt right and they got rid of it there's also complaints
00:31:29.520
before it to get rid of chinese state television which have i think have been before it for about
00:31:35.640
four years now and they've done absolutely nothing about that so they deal with what they want to
00:31:40.360
deal with they don't deal with what they don't want to deal with and that's the world you're in
00:31:45.120
where somebody and the big point is somebody other than your publisher or your owner is looking over
00:31:53.040
your shoulder yep and that's exactly the world we're in right now uh mr menzies i can't thank
0.76
00:31:58.560
you enough for your work on this folks if you care about independent journalism if you care
00:32:03.520
about government creeping into the newsrooms of the nation and censorship do pick up mr menzies
00:32:09.200
work you can find it all over the place including the mcdonald laurier institute and several sources
00:32:14.000
online sir thank you so much for your time thanks so much for your interest great to chat with you
00:32:17.920
thanks thank you so once again folks uh it shows like this okay that are going to be coming under
00:32:24.560
the eye of the crtc that mr menzies just described and if you want shows like this to continue with
00:32:32.080
the free flow of information if you wish you know tv channels like sun news network was still around
00:32:38.240
things like that we really need to push back on government censorship and government funding of
00:32:43.920
newsrooms, okay? So, I do encourage you that if you care about this stuff, read independent
00:32:49.840
journalism, okay, that is not government funded like Mr. Menzies. Also, pick up the phone,
00:32:54.720
send an email, and make a phone call to your member of parliament. Tell them that independent
0.88
00:32:59.440
journalism and a lack of government censorship, a free press in Canada, is a voting issue for you.
00:33:06.640
Hey, speaking of votes, I hear the motherland calling. The United Kingdom is going to be going
00:33:13.760
into an election campaign really soon. And as always, of course, taxpayers are going to be
00:33:21.440
getting screwed again. It sounds like they're not really going to be campaigning on lowering taxes,
00:33:27.900
especially for working people over there in Great Britain. So who's fighting this sort of stuff?
00:33:33.480
Well, you may not know this, but the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, we have kind of distant
00:33:38.760
cousins in different parts of the world. New Zealand is one of them. And over in the UK,
00:33:44.580
there's something called the Taxpayers Alliance. And I wanted to check in right now with a friend
00:33:50.820
of ours. His name is Elliot Keck, and he is with the Taxpayers Alliance. And we're going to chat
00:33:55.860
about government waste and the upcoming election. Elliot, thanks for joining us.
00:34:02.900
Now, we always deal with the serious nature of taxpayers getting ripped off on both sides
00:34:09.220
of the pond. Here in Canada, we often talk about things like the carbon tax. We now have a new
00:34:14.680
increase in our capital gains tax. So whenever anybody sells a secondary home, or if you happen
00:34:19.180
to be a physician, you're going to get screwed with higher taxes. But we also get to have a
00:34:23.620
little bit of fun. We hand out our little golden pig statues here to our politicians who waste
00:34:28.080
money and i saw you guys were having a bit of fun recently what's going on you guys have a
00:34:32.960
university that was getting money to decolonize treasure island can you explain this to us
00:34:39.520
yeah so i mean listen i think the first thing to say is wherever government exists taxpayers are
00:34:44.600
going to be getting screwed and it's really just about the degree to which they're being screwed
00:34:49.440
and some places have it better than others but yeah you're right to point to a little bit of
00:34:54.200
research that we did, we regularly go through the grants that universities in the United Kingdom
00:34:58.800
receive. There's a range of different research councils that fund projects in universities. Some
00:35:05.860
of those research councils fund incredibly important work on science and technology and
00:35:10.420
all the sort of stuff that actually really everybody agrees with. But some of these research
00:35:14.960
councils give money to, frankly, the ridiculous and the absurd. And in one case, ÂŁ800,000 was given
00:35:22.960
to a university to decolonise the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, of course, the great
00:35:28.600
19th century Scottish author responsible for Treasure Island, as mentioned there, but also
00:35:33.960
the curious case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And the view of Treasure Island is that, you know,
00:35:39.360
it's about the Caribbean and about a different culture and that it uses colonial language and
00:35:45.440
colonial terms and a colonial mindset to portray that culture. And it's about time that we decolonise
00:35:51.440
those terms and now it's one thing to make that argument but if if you're going to do that i think
00:35:56.160
you can do that on your own dime and not the taxpayers yes exactly we have very similar uh
00:36:01.280
silly nonsense happening over here we just finished recently having our awards where
00:36:06.000
a lady was paid thirty thousand dollars to fly around the world and at one point she's she's an
1.00
00:36:11.120
artist she flopped around on a lawn chair for eight minutes like this was her art and we all
1.00
00:36:18.720
paid $15,000 for that. Same sort of thing where if you want to research something like this on
00:36:24.480
decolonizing Treasure Island, why don't they just pay for it themselves? If they think that this is
00:36:30.280
so vital, why do they hit up the taxpayers for it? Well, I think because they know that they can get
00:36:36.040
various government bodies to fund it. So why fund it yourself if you know that you can trick some
00:36:39.920
unsuspecting bureaucrat or potentially some supportive bureaucrat to pay for it for you.
00:36:44.740
But the problem that we have in the United Kingdom, and I'm sure this is happening to some extent in
00:36:48.520
Canada is we're finding that these attitudes are spreading from the bits where you'd expect to
00:36:54.340
find those attitudes into the areas where actually you'd think would be cordoned off from them. So
00:36:59.600
just take a recent example, our Engineering Research Council, a research council that you'd
00:37:04.080
think would be funding very important work, has recently granted one and a half million pounds
00:37:08.660
to study how men are represented in politics, something completely unrelated to engineering.
00:37:14.800
but yet for some reason that council is funding it to the tune of a million and a half pounds so
00:37:19.040
what's really concerning is not just that there is the you know parts of the state that let's
00:37:23.120
be honest you expect to fund this sort of stuff actually that sort of attitude is starting to
00:37:27.040
creep into the bits of the state which you'd expect would be funding serious stuff so just
00:37:31.360
to be very clear you mean engineering engineering like bridge building and aerospace exactly yeah
00:37:37.360
engineering engineering is a good way to put it now you guys do have an election process that is
00:37:43.760
slowly going to be rolling out unless the prime minister decides to change his mind uh what sort
00:37:48.640
of things are you looking for in the uk election from taxpayers are there big tax issues going into
00:37:53.680
this vote i think there's unlikely to be um the conservative party claim that they'll cut taxes
00:37:59.120
in the next election the reality is that over the last five years they've done very little in the way
00:38:03.600
of tax cuts in fact they've done far more in the way of uh tax rises so tpa research has found for
00:38:09.120
for example, that the tax burden is heading for an 80-year high at its current trajectory and
00:38:14.480
it's already sitting at a 70-year high. So listen, again, as the Conservative Party often does, they
00:38:19.660
talk the talk very well, but it's highly unlikely that if they win the election, they would walk
00:38:23.800
the walk given the previous record. As for the Labour Party, they're trying to say as little as
00:38:28.280
possible on tax. They don't want to scare the median voter that they feel alike in which the
00:38:33.400
poll suggests that they have won over. A couple of things they have announced are pretty disastrous
00:38:38.080
policies but unfortunately they do appeal to certain voters and the main one that they're
00:38:42.240
going with at the moment is vat on private schools wow okay i saw i know we only have a few minutes
00:38:48.000
with you and i really appreciate your time i saw you did a brilliant interview a little while ago
00:38:52.400
on axing the tv tax now as far as i understand that is a special sort of tax that the bbc
00:38:59.040
so your version of the cbc imposes on people who have television sets and they're now spending
00:39:04.800
taxpayers money going after folks who they think haven't paid their tv fees is that right
00:39:10.160
yeah so that's absolutely right so this is a pretty outdated system that only exists in a
00:39:14.560
handful of countries now so the reason why it exists is in the 1920s when uh the bbc was set
00:39:19.760
up that was the only channel you could get you know there wasn't the bandwidth to create other
00:39:23.280
channels and nor could you block people from getting the bbc so basically if you bought a tv
00:39:28.400
you'd have access to the bbc you couldn't be precluded from access to the bbc and therefore
00:39:32.720
a tv license was an appropriate uh fee to charge uh for people to own a tv but you can now stop
00:39:38.800
people from getting the bbc we have that ability you can stop people from getting any channel that
00:39:44.080
you want to uh and um unfortunately we haven't moved on from this funding model so anybody that
00:39:49.280
watches live television and that's any form of live television on any channel has to pay the
00:39:54.960
license fee it's about 169 pounds which is somewhere in in the region of about 250 to 300
00:40:01.200
canadian dollars and whether you watch the pbc whether you support its content and even if you
00:40:05.520
load this content you are legally required to pay it wow that sounds so similar to what we're
00:40:10.480
dealing with over here the cbc takes 1.4 billion dollars from us every single year it's astonishing
00:40:17.760
it's the equivalent of about 7 000 police officers and 7 000 paramedic salaries every single year
00:40:24.320
we just at the taxpayers federation we want to completely defund it we want if people love
00:40:28.480
watching cbc we think they should pay through a subscription i just find it really interesting
00:40:32.880
how many similarities and parallels there are across the pond lastly if you don't mind me
00:40:36.960
asking you where are you guys in the uk when it comes to the government interfering with uh online
00:40:43.840
expression with things like podcasts things like the show we're having right now so here in canada
00:40:49.520
we've got a few different laws that are really starting to clamp down on how people can express
00:40:54.240
themselves uh where are you guys with that are you guys having any government interference when
00:40:58.640
it comes to censorship and free expression well recently we uh saw the online safety bill passed
00:41:05.120
and this was a bill that was uh designed or at least so its um advocates claim to protect children
00:41:10.240
from accessing uh potentially harmful content on the internet it also strengthened protection
00:41:15.520
strengthened um restrictions on illegal content and and those bits of the bill were broadly
00:41:21.120
supported but it also created a requirement for companies such as social media companies
00:41:27.040
to restrict legal but harmful content to adults and ensure that adults were not seeing harmful
00:41:33.120
content even if it was legal now there's been a lot of very very serious warnings from many
00:41:38.720
organizations about the potential ramifications for this we've only just seen the bill passed and
00:41:43.360
so we're yet to see what its actual impacts are but i mean certainly those that have far more
00:41:47.360
expertise than me are warning that it could be very chilling for free speech.
00:41:51.520
Wow, that's uncanny really because we now have Bill C-63. It's not yet passed. It's literally
00:41:57.840
referred to as the Online Harms Act and the same sort of thing. There's a whole bunch in there that
00:42:04.640
is perfectly fine for people to pass. Any decent person would want it passed because it's to
00:42:09.120
protect children from images of child sexual abuse. All heinous things that any decent person would
00:42:15.120
want in our criminal code which by the way it's already illegal it's already in the criminal code
00:42:20.480
but couched in that is of course what certainly looks like a clamp down on what should be legal
00:42:26.560
free expression and so it's a little uncanny to see so many parallels Elliot we really appreciate
00:42:32.320
your work over there on the other side of the pond thank you so much for standing up and fighting for
00:42:36.240
taxpayers in the UK thank you and back here on this side of the pond in Canada we're continuing
00:42:45.040
to fight for taxpayers and this is something that Andrew would have talked to Carson about I'm sure
00:42:50.320
because it's a ridiculous waste of money and it's also hilarious so remember at the beginning of
00:42:55.600
the show when I said hey imagine it's fall and you were gearing up with your buddies and you
00:43:00.320
guys were going to go deer hunting what sort of stuff would you bring along with you what sort
00:43:04.480
of vehicle would you take well what about gigantic sniper rifles and a helicopter yeah just add
00:43:11.840
government joining us now is the british columbia director for the canadian taxpayers federation
00:43:17.040
my good friend carson binda uh carson you've got i remember when we were first talking about the
00:43:23.520
story at work i thought that this was like must have been a misunderstanding uh can you please
00:43:29.200
explain to our listeners and our viewers here on the andrew lawton show how much money did taxpayers
00:43:35.520
spend hunting deer out of a helicopter? And how did this happen?
00:43:41.040
Yeah, you're absolutely right, Chris. They are spending a mind-boggling amount of money
00:43:46.720
culling deer from this tiny little island, Sydney Island, just off the coast of Victoria.
00:43:53.200
Now, Parks Canada, instead of, you know, working with the local community culling these deer,
00:43:59.360
they decided to fly in snipers from new zealand in the united states to circle this island in a
00:44:06.000
helicopter shooting down on the deer below um during phase one of the project they spent about
00:44:13.840
eight hundred thousand dollars to kill 80 deer that works out to about 10 grand per deer but
00:44:20.800
hold on folks because that's just the tip of the iceberg we dug up through access information
00:44:26.160
requests that the true cost of this project 12 million dollars they are spending 12 million
00:44:33.600
dollars Chris doing something that the local community has been doing for a decade for free
00:44:39.920
okay so for folks who just woke up from a coma here in Canada hunting especially things like
00:44:47.760
hunting deer is a pretty standard operating procedure especially in parts of rural Canada
00:44:53.280
lots of people, hello, were raised on venison or moose meat. Bambi's not my favorite show. But
00:44:59.820
come on, shooting deer out of a helicopter? Like, I think even seasoned hunters have a problem with
00:45:07.260
that. Absolutely. And look, the proof's in the pudding. We flew in these expert marksmen. We
00:45:13.560
spent hundreds of thousands of dollars getting them trained on using the weapons, the assault
00:45:19.020
rifles they were shooting from the helicopters, but they missed about 20% of the time. 20% of the
00:45:25.860
deer they killed were the wrong species. Now, if you talk to any hunter here in British Columbia,
00:45:31.200
which we've been doing, if they shoot the wrong species of deer, the park ranger comes and takes
00:45:36.600
their rifle and their truck. But Parks Canada managed to shoot the wrong type of deer from
00:45:42.380
these helicopters 20% of the time. So these so-called expert marksmen that we spent hundreds
00:45:49.260
of thousands of dollars bringing in, renting a helicopter for them, getting them trained up,
00:45:54.240
they are clearly the worst option than just working with the local community. And like I said,
00:46:00.160
local hunters on Sydney Island have been doing deer culls for a decade. Just last fall, they killed
00:46:06.760
54 of the right kind of deer at no cost to the taxpayer so this is one of those bizarre stories
00:46:14.120
where if you ever want to waste money just sprinkle in a few bureaucrats and they will dream up the
1.00
00:46:19.320
most absurdly expensive ways of doing anything wow and you know why the local hunters shot the
00:46:26.680
right deer because they can see them and they know what they are and they live in the area and when
00:46:33.240
when they look through their scope, they're like, oh, that's the right kind of deer. Bang. Like,
00:46:38.200
it's really mind-blowing. And to your point on, you know, fish and game, there's fish cops in
00:46:44.300
Canada. If you catch the wrong fish, if it's like a centimeter too small, like I can't even imagine
00:46:50.520
the punishment that will be rained down upon you from the government. But when it's the government
00:46:55.500
actually using our money, that's just fine. They can shoot the wrong deer from a helicopter.
00:47:01.620
Have we gotten any response from Parks Canada about this?
00:47:07.660
I held a press conference here in Victoria yesterday,
00:47:11.860
and just about every media outlet in the province reached out to Parks Canada and said,
00:47:16.520
hey, guys, how'd you manage to spend $12 million hunting a few deer?
00:47:22.360
Why'd you fly in foreign sharpshooters instead of working with the local community at no cost to the taxpayer?
00:47:28.620
So far, we haven't heard a word from Parks Canada.
00:47:32.620
So the bureaucrats are struggling to come up with any explanation for how they managed to waste so much of your money.
00:47:40.620
Now, lastly, years ago, back in my Vancouver Island days, I remember there was a controversy.
00:47:48.620
I think it was up north in B.C. of shooting wolves from a helicopter.
00:47:52.620
helicopter. Like that's bad enough because then maybe you're not harvesting the pelts, but people
00:47:57.220
don't technically, you know, really eat wolf meat. I've been getting a lot of questions and I'm sorry
00:48:01.440
I haven't asked you this yet off air. Do we know what happened with the meat that was shot by the
00:48:07.260
dudes in the helicopter? Like not on the ground, the dudes from what is it, the States and New
00:48:12.880
Zealand who shot the wrong deer. What happened to that meat? Yeah, so they harvested some of the
00:48:19.840
meat. I think it's about 800 kilograms of meat that they were able to harvest. But let's do some
00:48:26.240
math here. They spent $100,000 to harvest 800 kilograms of meat. That's a thousand bucks per
00:48:33.680
kilogram. I mean, I know grocery prices are through the roof right now, but I've never seen a steak or
00:48:39.620
some venison sausages at my local butcher that cost $1,000 per kilogram. It's incredible how much
00:48:48.680
money they managed to waste culling these deer i mean it is truly parks canada bureaucrats role
00:48:55.960
playing as rambo working with americans and new zealanders to shoot deers from helicopters chris
00:49:02.120
it is mind-boggling and i think more than that it just speaks to the culture of waste that will
00:49:07.400
pull out to fester in our federal bureaucracy it's unacceptable and taxpayers like you and i
1.00
00:49:13.560
who are struggling to make our rent and mortgage payments, who are struggling to feed our families,
00:49:23.160
To fly in foreign snipers instead of working with the local community for free.
00:49:28.280
They sure do. Carson and to the entire team that worked on this, thank you so much for bringing
00:49:33.080
us this story. And hey folks, if this bothers you, phone up your Member of Parliament,
00:49:37.800
tell them to get on the horn with Parks Canada. Thanks, Carson.
00:49:42.120
So as we were just saying, you know, hunting is an essential element of Canadian culture for so many people. Like we were speaking with Tracy Wilson earlier this week on the Andrew Lawton Show, I think we are the seventh, seventh highest level of legal law abiding gun ownership in the entire world.
00:50:01.220
Okay, those tools are usually used for things like deer hunting. Frankly, there's no shortage of people on Vancouver Island or on the mainland who would have been willing to go over there if they'd just been given the permission to go harvest those deer much more humanely, frankly, than shooting them out of a helicopter and hiring foreigners to come over and do it.
0.99
00:50:23.220
So again, this just speaks to the culture of waste coming from the federal government and a lack of understanding of true Canadian culture.
00:50:31.460
So today is May 23rd, and I wanted to leave you with this element of Canadian culture.
00:50:37.600
And I'm sorry that it's a sad one, but I think it's really important to mark this date.
00:50:41.880
So on this date, May 23rd, 25 years ago, Canadian wrestling legend Owen Hart died.
00:50:49.360
so a lot of you might remember where you were if you're a wrestling fan here in Canada when you
00:50:54.900
heard the news uh I actually was on the air uh in the radio station funny in Vancouver Island
00:51:01.040
uh when we heard about this and so there's a lot of controversy about what happened but it was of
00:51:07.040
course one night in Kansas City and he was supposed to be coming down about eight stories
00:51:12.380
from the rafters of this coliseum for a big uh big live event there with a bunch of wrestling
0.86
00:51:18.160
fans surrounding him and he was supposed to be coming down on rigging something happened with
00:51:23.280
that rigging and owen hart sadly fell to his death and i just wanted to mark it because
00:51:29.200
wrestling professional wrestling is a huge part of canadian culture and he would have been 59 years
00:51:36.240
old this year so super sad to see that happen just wanted to mark it that it was wow time flies
00:51:42.960
25 years ago today uh owen hart passed away wow look at that picture phil uh was mentioning one
00:51:50.240
of our producers he was mentioning i think they're all gone now except for brett god bless him yeah
00:51:55.440
we got davy boy smith we've got owen hart owen's the one there um with the blonde buzz cut without
00:52:00.320
the uh sunglasses then we got bret hart who thank god is still with us uh he's a good old alberta
00:52:05.600
boy and then uh his dear buddy there jim the anvil nightheart who i believe was his brother-in-law
00:52:12.900
So just wanted to say so sorry to Owen Hart's family.
00:52:17.340
May he rest in peace and condolences and God bless to his loved ones.
00:52:26.140
Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:52:28.360
Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.