Join us as we discuss the disgraceful performance by Team Canada fans in Montreal booing the American National Anthem. We also hear from a True North reporter in Ottawa, Alex Zoltan, who was there to cover the Canada First rally. And we get an update on the prerogation case.
00:20:22.620on immigration, on terrorism, that that would give them assurances that we wouldn't need to
00:20:28.160completely like militarize our border and have checks. I don't know if you've ever crossed the
00:20:32.120U.S.-Mexico border by car. I have several times. And it's wild, like compared to the experience
00:20:37.520of doing it in Canada, where, you know, you just hop in the car with the family, go through,
00:20:41.140show them your passports or whatever, and you're through. In Mexico, like it's like they get you,
00:20:45.580you get out of the car and they search everything in every bag. And like, it's more intense than
00:20:49.620going through an airport security. So I would never want that for Canadians. And I think that
00:20:54.420the best way to do that is to maintain a strong relationship of shared values, not turning our
00:20:59.860backs to the Americans. Okay, I want to move on to some of the... If I could just add one more thing
00:21:04.080to that, actually, which I thought was interesting. So somebody, when I was on my way back from
00:21:07.440Ottawa, somebody who was sitting next to me, they work on yacht motors in the Cayman Islands.
00:21:12.760And they were saying that a lot of the drugs comes in through the ports on private boats.
00:21:16.600And one of the reasons for that is that if you're if you're close to getting caught, you just ditch the drugs into the sea.
00:21:22.620So he says this is actually the preferred method for traffickers versus taking it over the land border.
00:21:28.380And also, as you correctly noted, they don't do a lot of checks at the port either.
00:21:32.740So I think that there's it actually shook my trust a little bit in my faith in the Trump administration that this claim that a bunch of fentanyl was coming over across the northern border was given as much airtime as it was.
00:21:45.000because i i really don't think that the claim holds up to scrutiny or critical thinking
00:21:49.080interesting okay let's move on i want to talk about christia frayland because she
00:21:52.520shared on x a picture of pierre polyev walking onto the stage at his canada first rally and
00:21:59.640basically just said that it was the same as donald trump uh wondering uh she writes we're wondering
00:22:05.560where we've seen this movie before and then she posts a picture do we have the picture there sean
00:22:11.480of basically just Pierre Poliev with the Canada flag.
00:23:22.320I'm connected, I can deliver for the country.
00:23:25.300And my weakness is, you know, people will charge me
00:23:28.260as being elitist or, you know, a globalist
00:23:32.160to use that term, which is, well, that's exactly,
00:23:35.600you know, it happens to be exactly what we need.
00:23:38.740So he's a globalist. He's an elitist. I think that he was using those terms to mock his critics, basically saying that they'll call me that and then kind of laughing it off. But then he pivots and says, but that's exactly what we need, which kind of goes to emphasize and score that he actually does believe that he's an elitist and globalist. And that's what's good for the country. So you're going to get like another four years of rule by expert, rule by elite, Mark Carney. I think that was a pretty disastrous way to answer that question.
00:24:08.740question. What did you think, Alex? Oh, I completely agree. And it always amuses me how
00:24:13.320little central bankers do. I mean, when you think about it, all they do is they take the data that
00:24:19.840was gathered by other people who are smarter than they are, and then they just make a wild guess
00:24:24.080three or four times a year, either up or down, based off of that data that other people collected.
00:24:29.900Central bankers are not experts really in anything. They're just professional guessers.
00:24:34.020and it's interesting so i want to link this to another story we had mark carney was on cbc with
00:24:40.980rosemary barton yesterday sunday february 16th and he he he said something that i don't
00:24:49.540think or true he says that former prime minister stephen harper once asked him to be the finance
00:24:55.380minister um so he he basically just said that back in 2012 harper was in some way trying to recruit
00:25:02.500him to be the finance minister and he says that it wasn't appropriate because at the time he was a
00:25:08.260bureaucrat um first okay let's play this clip and then i'll get you to react to it it's politics
00:25:14.340right now have you been offered positions in the past i have been offered positions in the past
00:25:19.540i was offered for example prime minister harper asked me if i would be his finance minister
00:25:25.140uh in 2012 wasn't appropriate to proceed with that i didn't so as we know he was the governor
00:25:31.780of the bank of canada and then he moved over and became the governor of the bank of england and
00:25:36.260started sort of a career in english banking and politics uh so kind of strange but all of a sudden
00:25:41.620he's saying that at the time harper was trying to recruit him i don't remember that story at all
00:25:46.900harper's former communications director dimitri sutis denied this claim in a cbc report he wrote
00:25:52.260that mark carney is not telling the whole story and prime minister harper certainly does not
00:25:57.380support Mr. Carney in any way. Dimitri Soudis also shared on Axe a link to a story from back
00:26:05.860in 2012 in the Globe and Mail. The story is called How the Liberal Party Lost Mark Carney.
00:26:11.860But the point of the article, if you read it, is that Mark Carney was very much in the orbit of
00:26:16.900the Liberal Party at that time in 2012. He was a party member, he was part of the party,
00:26:21.860he wasn't a conservative, he wasn't in Harper's circle or Harper's orbit. So it's sort of a
00:26:26.660strange claim um to put out there what do you think alex he's a strange guy generally i mean
00:26:33.780generally ministers of finance also are elected it seems strange to me that he wants to become
00:26:38.980the prime minister without having made any effort at any time in his lifetime of trying to be elected
00:26:45.780in any capacity whatsoever kind of seems like he's jumping the coop a little bit there typically you
00:26:51.540become a member of parliament or you get active at the local level uh it is really characteristic
00:26:58.180of an elitist to want to just jump straight to position a prime minister without ever having
00:27:03.620ever been elected to anything as small as even school council yeah and and to your point that
00:27:09.940like the central banker has a very kind of public role but it's not like he he's acting alone and
00:27:16.980And it's not like a politician where you have to lead a party or, you know, get elected by the people.
00:27:23.320It's like, it's an appointed job. It's a very high profile job.
00:27:26.980I don't think that he has a great track record in either country with the printing of money, borrowing, raising interest rates, all those things that you mentioned.
00:27:34.780But kind of a strange thing to slip in there.
00:27:36.920I think that probably he wants Canadians to think that he is sort of like a bipartisan pick and that he's not as hard left as Trudeau, not as right as Pierre Polyev, kind of the Goldilocks approach there that he's just right.
00:27:52.720One thing that I think had a lot of conservatives feeling a little hopeful about is, so we covered this on the show on Friday, but the polls have shown, since Justin Trudeau resigned and Mark Carney has become the sort of person that looks like he's going to be the next prime minister, the liberals' fortunes have been increasing in the polls.
00:28:10.120So polls have slowly shown liberals chipping away at the conservatives and Pierre Polyev's massive lead.
00:28:15.840Well, there was a new series of polls put out by Abacus Data, a very reputable polling company, that shows that the Conservatives still lead the Liberals by 19 points.
00:28:26.660And so the head of Abacus there, David Coletto, said that he got the results and basically he was so surprised by how big the Conservative lead was that he went back into the field and did another poll just to make sure that what he was seeing was correct.
00:28:42.040And the second poll confirmed that. So you can show this graph, Sean, that shows a federal vote intention. Here we have the Conservatives with 46% and the Liberals all the way down at 27%. So if you look back to a January 27th poll, it shows that, yes, the Liberals are doing better, but their gains are coming at the expense of the NDP, the Bloc, and possibly the Green, whereas the Conservatives are also going up.
00:29:10.040So he's not. So Mark Carney as leader is not chipping away at the conservative lead, according to Abacus and according to that poll.
00:29:17.060So I think there's a lot of conservatives that are very relieved to see that there was a lot of kind of anxiety and concern that maybe with the change in the ballot question,
00:29:26.340the idea that maybe the election is not going to be about cost of living, but instead it's going to be about this looming trade war and this new narrative that the media has managed to create in the last couple weeks here,
00:29:34.960that that would be very bad for the conservatives. But according again to Abacus, that's not the case.
00:29:40.040so what are your thoughts on that well if you go into the streets and you ask people are you
00:29:45.000enthusiastic about mark carney i imagine you're not going to get a lot of people saying yes i'm
00:29:49.960extremely enthusiastic about mark carney this definitely seems like a mainstream media
00:29:55.240fake narrative the idea that mark carney is this there's a carney mania going on is uh
00:30:01.080kind of patently ridiculous in my opinion and i'm glad that the polling data from abacus shows that
00:30:06.040yeah it's hard to um imagine just like a lot of groundswell support for a wealthy banker that's
00:30:13.800swooped in after like being out of the country for several decades i that's just not really the
00:30:18.440profile of a politician that you can imagine you know having a lot of popularity among canadians
00:30:23.800it seems that the liberals have tried to do this several times and it doesn't work for them
00:30:27.560uh but i mean mark carney does seem like i'll get this pretty nice guy he seems like a nice person
00:30:33.960um it's just that his ideas are all wrong and his background is wrong and he's arrogant about it and
00:30:39.720i i just i don't think that that's going to be appealing i heard him described once as timu
00:30:44.040michael ignatiev yeah the liberals have tried this several times and it never seems to work out well
00:30:51.800for them and i don't think that this is going to be an exception to the to the rule i completely
00:30:55.960agree okay i want to move on to some reactions so as you hopefully everyone's caught this interview
00:31:01.400that we did with Pierre Polyev. I flew out to Ottawa and sat down with the Conservative leader.
00:31:06.720I think it was the first long form sit down interview he had done since the Jordan Peterson
00:31:10.940one that he did at the very beginning of the year. And I just want to sort of talk a little bit about
00:31:15.740my takeaway from the interview and a little bit of the media's reaction. So for me, the thing,
00:31:22.740first of all, I was delighted that Pierre Polyev would sit down with me and do an interview with
00:31:26.240me. I think it was a great sign for independent media that he doesn't believe in the sort of
00:31:30.880lockdown club that you have to be part of the parliamentary press gallery or work for a legacy
00:31:35.660media press outlet in order to get access to a politician. I think that's the exact correct
00:31:39.960step for the future. And it was nice to see that juxtaposed that with the fact that our reporters
00:31:45.320weren't even let into the room for Mark Carney's launch event in Edmonton. Even mild-mannered,
00:31:50.460polite Isaac Lamoureux, who's from Edmonton, wasn't allowed into the room. So, you know,
00:31:55.680huge difference in terms of access. I think that my questions on immigration, asking him about
00:32:03.600deportations of illegals, deportation of people who commit violent crimes, you know, he mentioned
00:32:09.260specifically people that go to these Gaza rallies and, you know, commit hate crimes and try to burn
00:32:14.260down synagogues, all kinds of stuff, that he would have no tolerance for that. And he would deport
00:32:19.220those people and cancel their visas. He talked about how he wanted to get the immigration levels
00:32:23.380back down to the Harper era, which some people in our audience will say, well, that's not good
00:32:27.460enough. We want to have more of an immigration break. But I think when you think about the fact
00:32:31.180that Justin Trudeau is letting in half a million new permanent residents every year, plus another
00:32:36.080million some students and temporary for visas, I think we end up having somewhere in the orbit
00:32:41.180between two and three million newcomers a year. And Pierre's saying, let's bring it back down to
00:32:45.540200 to 250. I think that that is huge. And I was very pleased to hear him say that. And then this
00:32:53.000was the clip that really melted the minds of the legacy media. So I asked him about access to
00:33:00.540politicians, like I mentioned, versus the parliamentary press gallery. Like part of the
00:33:04.720problem with independent press is that we can't get into the parliamentary press gallery because
00:33:08.760it's run by this kind of like mean girl group who don't acknowledge us as real journalists because
00:33:14.860we don't work for one of their outlets. So he's saying that those people won't be in charge
00:33:18.580anymore and he would let everyone in. So I think we have a little clip of what that looked like.
00:33:23.360Let's play that clip, please. The Parliamentary Press Gallery is like an insiders group. They
00:33:27.840don't want to give access to people who don't work for legacy media. What would your policy
00:33:31.720be around allowing access to your government or to you personally for independent media?
00:33:36.860Absolutely. I think their independent media should be allowed on the precinct. There's
00:33:41.000no reason why it should be a small cabal of government approved mouthpieces.
00:33:46.460So I'll just walk us through what happened there. So first we had TVI journalist Hadi Hassan
00:33:54.980shared that clip on X and basically just described what it was in French. We had the
00:34:01.120Toronto Star columnist and CBC pundit Chantal Ebert chimed in. She quote tweeted it and wrote
00:34:08.100sounds familiar somehow. So I guess that's supposed to be a Trump reference and supposed
00:34:13.580make us feel very scared that somehow uh polyev is like a fascist or something um okay and then
00:34:20.620next we had uh her toronto star call uh colleague uh sports columnist this guy is like perpetually
00:34:26.540miserable and angry bruce arthur he weighs in and he said for the record that is candace malcolm
00:34:33.260whose faux news operation true north employs racism and proud boy pusher harrison faulkner
00:34:39.420and malcolm co-founded junior with kian bexty rot
00:34:47.820okay one more one more uh then we had a freelance journalist of parliamentary press gallery
00:34:52.300member dale smith who's a reporter and he is just really amusing uh he really doesn't like us either
00:34:59.260so he he writes on x reminder it's not up to the government to decide who gets gallery membership
00:35:04.380the gallery is self-governing and so yeah that's the point like that's what i said i i didn't ask
00:35:09.420pierre if he could get us into the parliamentary press gallery i said will you give us access
00:35:13.260because the parliamentary press gallery is this insiders club and then uh dale smith added this
00:35:17.580he said regarding the interview question true north slash bexy slash juno news haven't been
00:35:23.500granted membership because they're not actually journalists okay so i guess i guess we're not
00:35:31.580real journalists because we don't know what toe the party line we don't take subsidies from trudeau
00:35:36.460you know we're not we're not loyal obedient members of the press like uh him and his friends
00:35:41.020are so i actually wear that as a badge of honor uh what did you think oh me as well i completely
00:35:45.820agree and i think that there's nothing more banal than a journalist who pretends to be unbiased and
00:35:51.980objective nobody is we're all human beings we all have our own internal biases and so i i'm proudly
00:36:00.060a bit of a conservative partisan i don't mind admitting that when i write something or when
00:36:05.500i'm on a podcast because i think it's important for people to know where i'm coming from
00:36:09.580and i think that's actually part of the new media is what makes it superior to mainstream media is
00:36:14.620that we don't constrain ourselves to this fake this fake position of neutrality that they do
00:36:21.820because they're not neutral and for them to pretend that they are is is completely ridiculous
00:36:26.620and absurd and people are recognizing that and that's why their viewership is down so much and
00:36:30.220why chorus entertainment is a penny stock that's probably going to be going out of business as soon
00:36:34.700as trudeau is out of office well it's funny because yeah like that was the kind of the hit
00:36:39.980that they used to make against me that i was more conservative and to me that's nothing to be
00:36:44.780ashamed of i'm proud of the fact that i'm a conservative i'm probably more socially
00:36:48.620conservative than either of the mainstream political parties in the country actually
00:36:53.100definitely am even more so than the people's party um but that's that's who i am but it's like
00:36:57.980i'm not going to pretend that i'm neutral and pretend that i'm rosemary barton to go out there
00:37:02.460and give interviews even though we know that she is biased from the left but she just doesn't admit
00:37:06.940it and that's that's sort of i think the main difference and you know our news isn't for
00:37:11.260everyone um so if you don't like our perspective then you don't have to watch us we're not trying
00:37:15.420to force it down your throat and we're not trying to take government subsidies we're not saying that
00:38:16.080So the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms were the council representing two Nova Scotians, one of which was a well-practiced lawyer who are challenging Trudeau's decision to advise the governor general to prorope parliament.
00:38:30.160It was a really interesting case. I think my opinion on it has differed a little bit since I came back.
00:38:37.780And the reason being is that we have to understand that these decisions cut both ways.
00:38:43.080So really, to the Coles Notes version, the question, to put it most simply, is does the government have an unlimited power to prorogue parliament?
00:38:52.460In a sense, no. Section 5 says that the government must sit at least once per year.
00:38:58.260So no, they don't have an unlimited power, but that means that theoretically they only have to sit once, one day per year.
00:39:04.840The rest of the year, theoretically, they could prorogue forever.
00:39:08.120We do have a fixed term limit. So that means that they wouldn't be able to avoid an election within at least five years if they were to do that. It wouldn't be a popular choice. But the concern I have is this. So imagine a situation where Pierre Polyev became prime minister with a slim minority. And immediately the liberals in the NDP created a coalition crisis and tried to overthrow his government.
00:39:32.000Well, that's what they did in 2006, right?
00:39:33.580Exactly, exactly. So this is not unprecedented. If they were to do that again, and Polyev didn't have the option of proroguing, or he did have the option of proroguing, but it could be challenged in the courts, then that presents a very significant danger to the Conservative Party and democracy generally. 79% of the appointed judges in Canada are not only Liberal Party members, they're Liberal Party donors.
00:39:55.840And so while I really like this judge, Paul Crampton, who was appointed by Stephen Harper, not all judges are good. And we have to remember that judges are just random lawyers who are appointed by politicians. They're not elected. They're not accountable to the public. And so I think there is some concern, on my part anyway, that it would be a dangerous precedent to have judges drift outside of the legal lane and into the political lane.
00:40:24.880That being said, I'm completely sympathetic to the GCCF's concerns. I think that prorogation
00:40:29.760is completely unsuitable in the current situation that we're in. I think it only serves the best
00:40:33.760interests of the Liberal Party and not Canadians, but I am concerned about the precedent that
00:40:39.120a decision might set in this case. And so what was the decision? Like,
00:40:43.680are they, was the prorogation overturned? I saw that they were saying that they had to make a
00:40:48.000decision before it becomes moot, but it's getting pretty close to that time anyway. So what's going
00:40:52.960going to happen next? Yeah, so they said the lead counsel for the Trudeau government said that they
00:40:57.540need until at least February 18th to submit responses to the interveners. So I don't think
00:41:02.720we'll see any result before then. However, Crampton said that he would be rendering a result well in
00:41:08.840advance of March 24th, which I do appreciate. I'm not super optimistic that this case is going to go
00:41:15.880through. I think that there's probably a good case for a Section 3 challenge to Carney becoming
00:41:21.700prime minister because section three establishes the charter, it establishes as a fundamental right
00:41:28.100that Canadians have a right to vote for the people who represent them in government.
00:41:33.140And Carney being an unelected prime minister would be rather unprecedented in the history
00:41:37.780of Westminster democracies. So I think that there may be a good section three challenge for that,
00:41:43.140that might be more appropriate than the challenge from prerogation. But again,
00:41:46.580I want to make it very clear, I totally support the JCCF and their concerns. I do, however,
00:41:51.620see the Trudeau government lawyer's point that this might establish a bit of a dangerous precedent.
00:41:56.100Great. Okay, Alex. Well, I appreciate you heading out to Ottawa and doing that report.
00:42:00.100Everyone, you can find Alex's reports at JunoNews.com. He's a True North reporter. And again,
00:42:04.980their journalism is published and posted on Juno News. So Alex, thanks so much for joining the
00:42:10.020Candace Malcolm Show today. It was great to have you on. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.
00:42:14.020All right, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in. Again, have a wonderful, happy
00:42:17.460family day for those in Ontario and Alberta and everyone else. We will see
00:42:22.460you back tomorrow for all the news. Thank you so much.