00:00:00.000Federal Conservative leader Pierre Polyev is taking a cue from Elon Musk and Donald Trump and is promising to look into foreign funding.
00:00:09.320He says many of the foreign aid grants are going to wasteful causes and he's promising to bring that money back home to Canada and to spend it on Canadian interests like sovereignty in the Arctic and national defence.
00:00:22.940I think most of us are relieved to hear this at the same time as this happy news landed.
00:00:26.880We also heard that Donald Trump is indeed planning to go ahead with tariffs on aluminum and steel.
00:00:33.220Joining us today is the Alberta Director of the Canadian Taxpayer Federation, Chris Sims.
00:00:37.800I'm Rachel Parker. Welcome back to The Rachel Parker Show.
00:00:56.880Hey, everyone. I'm Rachel Parker. Welcome back to The Rachel Parker Show.
00:01:00.360I'm joined now by Alberta Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, Chris Sims.
00:01:05.480Chris, I want to start by asking you, we've seen some rebranding from the Conservatives.
00:01:10.800You know, I've been saying for a while, I don't think that still pitching themselves as a still pitching the federal election as a carbon tax question is the right way to go.
00:01:18.420And now we're seeing them rebrand with this Canada First agenda that I think is really strong.
00:01:23.360I want to just get your thoughts. What are you guys at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation?
00:01:26.840How are you feeling about this rebrand?
00:01:30.720And so I think a lot of us who've been following the United States and especially yourself with your great coverage of it with the Trump administration knew that this would throw a spanner into the works.
00:01:40.840Right. Because generally speaking, a lot of folks who are small C conservative or want smaller government or they're more on the libertarian side of things.
00:01:50.100A lot of them up in Canada will probably like what U.S. President Donald Trump is doing in the United States.
00:01:57.520However, when he starts doing stuff like putting tariffs on Canadians and then we're going to respond with retaliatory tariffs, which are basically just a form of trade taxes.
00:02:07.120Then we get into some pretty murky waters, especially when it comes to the narrative coming from the mainstream media out of eastern Canada.
00:02:16.420So then it becomes quite easy to pitch yourself as a populist politician against, you know, the big bad threat from the United States against U.S. President Donald Trump.
00:02:26.120We're seeing that exactly happen with Ontario Premier Doug Ford.
00:02:29.860You'd think he's running against Trump for his re-election as Premier.
00:02:34.100So politically, we understand, or at least I understand, why Polyev would want to shift a little bit here to make sure that it's not just about the carbon tax.
00:02:44.720But practically speaking, and in reality, we still have the carbon tax.
00:02:52.900And no matter what Carney and his team and those in the mainstream media are saying, he's not getting rid of it.
00:02:59.680Like, this is just a weird narrative change.
00:03:02.960He's going to crank up the carbon tax and then hide it from people and then take away whatever cash rebates they might have gotten.
00:03:09.380So on the practical side of things, we still have the carbon tax and we really hope that Pierre Polyev continues to say he will axe the tax.
00:03:18.640But politically speaking, as far as the narrative goes, I would say they do need to shift positions slightly.
00:03:26.760So part of what we've been seeing over the last few days is, of course, in the United States, we have Elon Musk heading up the Department of Government Efficiency.
00:03:37.240And we've seen Trump's excellent White House press secretary, Carolyn Levitt, announcing to everyone essentially what the American government has been spending money on.
00:03:45.560It's like millions of dollars in different countries for plays on trans people and just crazy things.
00:03:51.500And so, you know, now we've seen people going and taking a look at what the Canadian government is spending money on in the Department of Global Affairs.
00:03:59.240And, you know, the values aren't as high.
00:04:01.100Our government's not quite as big, but we're also spending a shocking amount of money on frivolous projects overseas while Canadians are hurting at home.
00:04:08.140So I was wondering if you could go through some of the most egregious examples that the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has found of inappropriate government funding overseas.
00:04:17.720So this is one of the elements we at the Taxpayers Federation are super excited about when it comes to the Trump administration and DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency, what Elon Musk is heading up with some of his teams there.
00:04:29.540Because we've been fighting this now for decades in Canada, and especially the last 10 years or so, it's reached an acute state of government waste.
00:04:38.440So much so that that's what that golden pig statue is for.
00:04:42.160We hand out trophies in a mock ceremony to politicians and bureaucrats that waste your money.
00:06:00.000We spent thousands and thousands of taxpayer dollars on getting old people in foreign countries to come into an auditorium on camera and talk about their sex lives.
00:06:13.920Worst time, best time, last time, worst time.
00:06:16.680It is the stupidest waste of money, and we also spent thousands of dollars on, there was this, it was actually called a lesbian pirate opera, where two women cross-dress as male pirates and then vanquished the bad guys on the boat, and there's a lot of singing involved.
00:06:35.280Again, if you want to go watch a musical about lesbian pirates, like, fill your peg leg, but don't make taxpayers pay for it.
00:06:44.500And if you're noticing a theme here, Rachel, that's on purpose, because, frankly, the government uses woke as a cloak for government waste.
00:06:54.820They think if they can just slap, like, a rainbow flag on something, and it's still an egregious waste of taxpayers' money, that we'll be too scared to criticize it.
00:07:05.280Waste is waste, and this is a nonsense waste of money.
00:07:10.080One of the interesting things that we've learned since the Doge was created was that a lot of times when foreign funding goes out the door, only a small percentage of the funding that actually goes out the door makes it to the desired destination, and the rest gets caught up somewhere else.
00:07:28.400Maybe, maybe, you know, in contracts to friends of the government are taking a piece out of it.
00:07:34.200But, you know, we've heard a lot of criticism that, you know, foreign funding is not all that it's made out to be.
00:07:39.720Would you say that the situation is similar here in Canada?
00:07:43.220Yeah, because there's next to no oversight.
00:07:45.180So, for example, it's interesting that it's USAID.
00:07:49.200I don't know how they pronounce it down there.
00:07:52.120That that was what it looks like the fountainhead of the waste, at least the funding element was coming from.
00:07:57.000It's very similar up here, where it's in the Department of Global Affairs, what you and I would have called foreign affairs a few years ago.
00:08:03.740And there's this pot of money called the Mission Cultural Fund, but there's not a lot of oversight into this.
00:08:10.840Like, there's only so many auditors that keep the track of books at the federal level in Canada.
00:08:15.700We need more transparency and more accountability because this is the same pot of money people might remember when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took a huge family trip to India.
00:08:28.100It was very early in his term, and he did the whole Mr. Dress-up thing and danced and stuff like that, and it was embarrassing for a lot of people.
00:08:36.280Well, one of the elements of crazy waste there was, again, spending tens of thousands of Canadian taxpayer dollars to fly a Canadian chef from Canada to India to cook him Indian food.
00:08:52.960It's the stupidest thing, but it wasn't singular to Trudeau.
00:08:56.480For the longest time, the Mission Cultural Fund, I'm not kidding, had a pot of money so that a diplomat, some bureaucrat working overseas, if they got hungry, they could pick up the phone and fly in a Canadian chef to cook for them.
00:09:17.440So suffice to say, yeah, we're wondering where a lot of this money is going, but the actual waste that we can even see going out the door is alarming.
00:09:27.620So I have to ask, if we were to see a Conservative government later this year, do you think that there would be a better opportunity for the federal government and potentially even organizations like yours to get their hands on the books and actually do an audit of where all this money has gone?
00:10:04.800So even if Pierre Polyev becomes Prime Minister, and even if he calls for massive audits and will help as best we can, I mean, anybody can steal our homework.
00:10:15.680We don't care if you even give us credit.
00:10:25.560So we don't have the manpower to staff an entire team to help the federal government find waste.
00:10:31.220But if they can take our spirit of finding waste and apply it to other people who are digging through the books, that is what needs to happen.
00:10:40.280The beautiful thing of what's happening in the States right now is that finding government waste has become cool.
00:10:48.540Finally, this is the cool thing for the cool kids to do.
00:10:52.700And if we can get an army of Canadians who are chasing those rabbits, it'll be a huge savings for taxpayers' money.
00:11:00.260People will be shocked on how much they're wasting.
00:11:04.140Like, and it's the federal level of government's crazy too.
00:11:06.640But even here in Alberta, we handed out thousands of dollars to some woman here in Alberta so she could flop around on a lawn chair and call it art.
00:11:18.380And then we need to go after the big ticket items, like the CBC is more than a billion dollars.
00:11:24.000There's stuff in Canadian heritage that'll probably make your hair curl for government waste.
00:11:29.120So if we can just take some of the spirit that's happening in the States and apply it up here in Canada, we would save billions of dollars.
00:11:36.780I remember, actually, when we covered that, I think on the Alberta Roundup, that, Archie, you guys should go back and find that episode.
00:12:41.660We spent a ton of taxpayers' money promoting gender diversity and understanding within health care in the Philippines.
00:12:49.260There are people who are on wait lists in Canada for years for a hip replacement, for heart surgery, for knee replacements, who have been paying taxes in Canada their entire lives.
00:13:03.360Why are we spending a nickel on that nonsense in the Philippines?
00:13:07.180So that kind of foreign aid, yeah, that has to go.
00:13:20.180I've had her on my show many times over the years.
00:13:23.260Now we are going to dive into our comment section.
00:13:26.640Jeff has looked over some of your comments from last week, and he's pulled up some of the best ones.
00:13:31.660We're going to take a look at those now.
00:13:33.200Up first from at David Bale says, 30 days in the hole, same as Mexico and Colombia.
00:13:40.760So many people getting suckered into premature actions or reactions, be methodical about this.
00:13:46.720So, essentially, this was a response to the news that Donald Trump would be pausing his plan to implement tariffs on Canada for 30 days.
00:13:54.440I really agree with what David wrote here about people being overly reactionary.
00:13:58.860I think that's essentially what we heard from Viva Frey, that Canadian politicians played right into Donald Trump's hand by freaking out so much over the tariffs and making it such a big news story that, you know, they had no choice but to go and essentially beg Trump for mercy.
00:14:16.200If they had played it cool the whole time, I don't think it would have given Donald Trump as much power to use the tariffs as a bargaining chip.
00:14:23.140But Canadian political leaders stressed, essentially, their residents out over it by making it such a big deal.
00:14:30.320And I think that was probably the wrong move.
00:14:32.440Taking a look at our next comment here.
00:14:34.700This is from user at Shelly Bennett says, Trump, please stop drug and human trafficking at the border.
00:14:44.740I think this is why you've seen a lot of Canadian conservatives, you know, not really be super upset about some of the impact of the tariffs.
00:14:55.980There are actually a lot of people, including myself, you know, we're glad to see that the federal government has been forced to be a little bit more serious at the border.
00:15:03.360That being said, I have a friend who is an OPP officer and apparently police officers in the Niagara region along the border are being paid, offered a significant amount of overtime money to do these shifts.
00:15:18.920And all they're really doing, from what I'm hearing, is driving around the Niagara Falls region.
00:15:24.420And so I don't know if that's exactly a good use of taxpayer money.
00:15:26.840I also don't know how that's helping to strengthen borders.
00:16:05.560That's the new slogan that we've seen the Conservatives come out with.
00:16:08.920I've been signaling for a few weeks now that I don't think it's a good idea for the Conservatives to pitch the election as a carbon tax election.
00:16:15.500I think a lot of Canadians have been saying that, and now we're seeing them essentially rebranding in preparation to go against a different Liberal leader, one who is saying that he will cancel or restructure the carbon tax.
00:16:26.420Now, you can make the argument that the next Liberal leader, probably going to be Mark Carney, is lying about this.
00:16:31.600And I think that there is a strong case to be made there.
00:16:34.100However, I think that's something that Conservatives understand and that the broader electorate might not understand.
00:16:39.620So you really have to actually listen to what the opposition, in this case, Mark Carney, what he's saying.
00:16:45.380And the Conservatives need to position themselves against that, not position themselves against what they think Mark Carney will do, because I think that messaging would be lost on the electorate.
00:16:53.640All right, everyone, that's all we have time for today on The Rachel Parker Show.