00:13:35.240the liberals want to take them away. What are you going to do? Well, more money in your pocket.
00:13:41.020And it becomes laughable. It becomes laughable. I can't remember if I came up with it or if it
00:13:45.300was someone else. So I'm prepared to say it might not have been my idea. But you have a conservative
00:13:51.240party that has historically wanted to be Justin Trudeau with a slightly better accountant. The
00:13:55.600one that I did come up with is a prime minister that wants to be an auditor in chief instead of
00:14:01.100a Prime Minister. And it's very dangerous to adopt that thinking. And Conservatives,
00:14:08.080generally speaking, do not look upon the O'Toole years in a particularly favorable light. In fact,
00:14:13.220the period in which O'Toole was the leader in my book about Pierre Paulyab, the title of the
00:14:17.640chapter is The Troubles, with all due respect to our Northern Irish and Irish listeners and viewers.
00:14:23.900But I call it The Troubles because that's really historically in the Conservative Party's history,
00:14:28.120this tumultuous period that, in recent memory anyway, has left a bad taste in a lot of people's
00:14:34.100mouths. And why I bring that up is because the O'Toole years are useful in the sense that they
00:14:40.000show us what happens when we do it the way the left wants us to. They show us what happens
00:14:47.040when we give the left everything they want. We give the media everything they want. We put up
00:14:51.200a moderate conservative leader that has no particular view on social issues that is favorable
00:14:56.660to social conservatives, that doesn't want to talk about things that the conservative base wants to
00:15:01.420talk about, that offers his own conservative alternative to the carbon tax instead of rejecting
00:15:06.000it. And what happens? He gets exactly the same level of support as Andrew Scheer got. And that's
00:15:12.520that. So there's a reason the conservatives showed Aaron O'Toole the door. And there's a reason that
00:15:19.660Pierre Polyev won such a resounding margin in the leadership race. And you fast forward now,
00:15:25.180he has not done this pivot that you often see from conservative leaders when they're in the
00:15:29.980leadership race to afterwards. Remember, Andrew Scheer during his leadership race in 2017 had
00:15:35.000mused about possibly getting rid of CBC's news division, but it was nowhere to be found in his
00:15:39.760platform. Aaron O'Toole came out right out of the gate on his leadership platform and said,
00:15:44.520we need to defund the CBC. And I was like, yes, defund the CBC. And then he was the leader and
00:15:50.660he says, okay, we need to possibly look at striking a committee that will analyze ways
00:15:58.700that maybe could modernize the CBC business model.
00:16:02.820I'm like, that's a heck of a lot longer than defund the CBC.
00:16:06.680And at the end of reading it, I'm more confused about what you believe.
00:16:10.600So here we have a conservative leader.
00:16:12.880And again, whether you vote conservative or not is up to you.
00:16:15.780I'm not pushing you to vote one way or another, but I'm making a point as someone who has
00:16:19.540followed conservative politics for many, many years in this country, who's been involved in it
00:16:23.520at various points, that we're seeing something dramatically different from the norm right now
00:16:28.080in that there is a conservative leader who is unprepared to capitulate and do what every other
00:16:34.880conservative advisor and strategist over the last decade has, not every, but what many of them have
00:16:39.700advised. He's not willing to do that. Instead, he is saying, this is what I believe, this is who we
00:16:44.520are. And my message is the same. And what was interesting is that I did a bunch of interviews
00:16:50.180when my book came out. And whenever you were speaking to like a local host in Halifax or
00:16:55.000Quebec or something, there would always be a question about what's, what is, what is his win
00:16:59.500going to mean for people here? And it's a fair question. And what I found most interesting is
00:17:04.060that I couldn't actually find when I looked that much variation between the message that Polyev
00:17:09.760gives in this city to this city, in this country, or this part of the country to that part of the
00:17:14.260country. The message is pretty consistent in English and in French and Atlantic Canada and
00:17:18.620Alberta. And that's why these things are unifying, because Canadians want authenticity. Canadians want
00:17:24.220a leader they can peg, they want a leader they can understand their perspectives on issues on,
00:17:29.280and you get that with him. And it's a reason he's doing so well. So obviously, the next election is
00:17:34.640still over a year away, most likely. But the Polyev leadership experiment so far, if you want
00:17:39.780to call it that, tells us that everything the elites told you about conservative politics was
00:17:44.820wrong. Not a big surprise, but it's worth making a point of. Let's talk about that censorship
00:17:50.320aspect of this. We spoke last week on the show about how the government is going to spend $200
00:17:54.360million, the parliamentary budget officer says, on establishing this so-called digital safety
00:18:00.020commission. We need a bureaucracy with 330 people to regulate what you do and say online. And as we
00:18:06.480noted with Michelle Remble-Garner, that does not even count the increased workload to the Canadian
00:18:11.880Human Rights Commission and other organs that are going to be involved in this operation.
00:18:17.200I believe this is wrong even if it costs nothing. I believe it's wrong even if somehow government
00:18:21.580were to make it profitable. But we'd be remiss to not point out the taxpayer issues here and why
00:18:25.980200 million never means 200 million when government starts spending. Our good friend Chris Sims is
00:18:31.200back. She is the Alberta director with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Chris, I hope you
00:18:36.820had a good weekend. Welcome back. Yes, I did. We had some family in from out of town, and so I was
00:18:41.680a little bit unplugged, so I haven't even watched Pierre's speech yet. I've got to catch up on that.
00:18:46.080Well, you know, you buried the lead. You were partying with Donnie Wahlberg on the weekend.
00:18:50.760Yeah, I was, actually. Just this past, before the last weekend, don't get me started. I'll take up
00:18:55.820your whole show. We went to Salt Lake City and partied with New Kids on the Block. They're
00:19:00.040really fun uh but i did do a little bit of work was it ever interesting driving through montana
00:19:05.400because their state there is in helena their state legislature and i think they only meet
00:19:09.720like a handful of times per year so this has got me thinking now what are taxpayers saving there
00:19:15.480and they pay really low taxes it's open carry to your point with firearms rights so it was quite
00:19:21.320something i couldn't turn my work brain off but yeah i'm trying to get plugged back in and caught
00:19:25.560back up but what really blew my mind was exactly what you just raised was this censorship industrial
00:19:31.320complex that the trudeau government is helping to build here in canada the creepy thing is is that
00:19:37.400this is happening if you look carefully at a lot of what we would consider western english-speaking
00:19:43.480countries in fact in in uk andrew i think they even called it the online harms bill in the same
00:19:50.120way we're calling it this so basically in a nutshell they're going to they're paying off
00:19:55.960the mainstream media they're paying for the cbc we've got bill c11 and we've got bill c63 so it
00:20:02.600creates this censorship vice on free expression here in canada this vice grip and on top of that
00:20:10.040you get to pay for it so you know an army of censors doesn't come cheap right taxpayers have
00:20:15.800to pay for everything and they're now estimating at the parliamentary budget office that it's going
00:20:20.120going to cost minimum 200 million and to your point exactly that's not even touching the massive
00:20:26.080amount of workload that these human rights tribunals are going to be suddenly flooded with
00:20:30.300can you imagine the snitch culture this is going to encourage because you can anonymously call in
00:20:36.400someone that you think is in the future going to maybe hurt your feelings on the internet like
00:20:40.560saying it out loud is crazy if we had been warning about this back in 2015 people would have said
00:20:46.620that you're out to lunch, but here we're, we are, we're this close from it. So the Taxpayers
00:20:51.340Federation, we are fighting it on the cost. Absolutely. Cause it's going to cost people a
00:20:55.420ton of money and we're fighting it on the free expression angle, because if you can't express
00:21:00.660yourself freely, guess what? You can't criticize the government and groups like us would be labeled
00:21:05.380misinformation like that. Yeah. Just, just to go back for a second to what you said about the
00:21:10.900legislatures in the U S I ran, as many people may know for the provincial legislature in Ontario
00:21:15.820many years ago. And I was chatting with an American friend of mine from New Hampshire,
00:21:19.580who was like baffled to learn they make money because in New Hampshire, a state rep makes $200
00:21:24.540a term. And so $100 a year is the salary of a New Hampshire state rep. And they meet like,
00:21:30.320you know, I don't know, maybe twice a year or something like that. And my goodness,
00:21:33.420I would love it if our politicians only had a couple of hours to make it. Because this happened
00:21:37.140in Texas not long ago, where there was a filibuster, which means something in the US,
00:21:41.680Because if you don't pass your bill by the closing of business on a particular day, then you don't get another chance for like several months.
00:21:50.080So when it comes to taxing, like I would love that the Digital Safety Commission wouldn't stand a chance if the government was only there one day a year.
00:21:56.820No, exactly. It's funny. Some mainstream media organizations contact us sometimes and ask us like, oh, don't you wish they were still hard at work and still having more sitting days and blah, blah.
00:22:05.560No, no, don't give them more days to mess things up. You add more government, you mess it up.
00:22:11.140Same sort of thing goes with these ridiculous salaries that are now being paid at city hall
00:22:15.460levels in most places across Canada. They're like, oh, boo-hoo, you know, the mayor is only making
00:22:20.680$200,000 a year. Boo-hoo, the city councilor is only making $120,000. And it's like, no,
00:22:26.680you realize in New Hampshire, exactly to your point, I think they get like gas and sandwich
00:22:31.180money. It's very similar in Montana. And a lot of states, a lot of provinces could be running
00:22:36.680their shops this way. The most direct analog that I can come up with on costs, not for the
00:22:42.800Digital Safety Commission itself, but just in general with government, is the long gun registry,
00:22:47.360which I forget the initial pledge. You might recall better than me, but it was a very paltry
00:22:51.340sum they said this thing was going to cost, and it ends up being well over a billion dollars.
00:22:55.800Yes. What's startling is they initially said it'll cost two million.
00:23:00.580That was it. Yeah, I knew it was something like a rounding error almost.
00:23:03.680little tiny bit and it almost once all the smoke cleared and you start adding lawsuits and fights
00:23:09.120and stuff it was close to two billion with a b so remember folks back when this is way back with
00:23:17.900the chretchen and martin liberals when they had the so-called long gun registry remember you
00:23:22.160probably remember some reform party members as a lark were registering their soldering guns
00:23:26.480successfully silly things like that happening but it was in order to point out what a mockery this
00:23:31.520really was, it ballooned in cost. It wasn't quite $2 billion, but it was closing in on that.
00:23:37.040And to Andrew's point exactly, they'll come out and say, oh, this massive group of censorship
00:23:42.860police that are, you know, run by a bunch of bureaucrats in Ottawa and Gatineau, it'll cost
00:23:47.580you $200 million. Well, look at what happened with ArriveCan. Like that little app should have
00:23:52.500cost around $250,000. It wind up costing us around $60 million. Just imagine how this thing
00:24:01.340going to balloon out of hand for a cost like the censorship elements one thing and then there's a
00:24:06.300huge waste of money on the other yeah and the weaponization of complaints is i think key here
00:24:11.740we're going to be talking in just a few minutes with david clement on the lcbo strike and the
00:24:16.540reason i bring that up is because opsu on its website has a little form where you put in your
00:24:21.340information and you click a button and it automatically sends an email to doug ford's
00:24:25.420office and these sorts of tools are very common when people are trying to gin up public support
00:24:29.660you basically make it so that there's a ready-made form and you can file it and push it and it sends
00:24:35.320it off to maybe the prime minister's office maybe the premier's office maybe every mp in the country
00:24:40.060because people will do this and this was this is the exact kind of thing that i know someone will
00:24:45.220do with the canadian human rights commission complaint process where they'll say you know
00:24:48.880paste the someone will make some tool and they'll say paste the link of the tweet you want to report
00:24:53.740and it'll auto populate a form and send it right to the human rights commission and all of a sudden
00:24:59.020you have people that are running these campaigns because you actually profit. You can make some
00:25:02.820money if you file a complaint under Bill C-63, assuming it passes, and your complaint is deemed
00:25:08.660to have standing, even if you were not harmed in any way from it. So no one at the CHRC has said
00:25:15.480how they're going to prevent against this. And I know being government, their answer is going to be,
00:25:19.500we need to hire a legion of investigators to sift through all these things.
00:25:23.560Yeah, just imagine. And that's exactly to your point. You know, the censorship police and the amount of online gagging that is going on here from the government or it's going to happen if this passes is hard enough to swallow. But the people forget there's a financial incentive to anonymously complaining to a human rights tribunal about your feelings being hurt.
00:25:46.480so just imagine if people are long in the tooth enough like me remember back when Ezra Levant
00:25:52.280was fighting against the human rights tribunal I forget for what he had published western standard
00:25:57.340yeah that was the uh the Muhammad cartoons yeah it was the cartoons right and I do remember to
00:26:01.960their credit I do remember mainstream McLean's magazine getting into similar sort of hot water
00:26:07.100and like you know all about that of course through Mark Stein and so imagine that but now fast
00:26:13.660forward today's culture of, you know, getting offended by things and make it anonymous and
00:26:19.940give people the opportunity to make thousands of dollars. Boy, oh boy. Like they did not.
00:26:25.980I hope I'm saying this right. I hope they didn't think this through. I hope it's this much of a
00:26:31.780disaster because they're doing this by accident. I'm not so sure sometimes, but folks, we really
00:26:36.780need to focus on this. And to your point of, I liked what you played there with Pierre Polyev
00:26:41.280And your point about no longer being holding back so much and worrying about, you know, don't be offensive, don't be gross, but worrying about talking about things like gun rights, right? Worrying about talking about things like, you know, blowing money during the lockdown.
00:26:57.780down. People should be confident enough to speak with their relatives and their friends about this
00:27:02.380sort of stuff now. And that would be my one little nugget of advice I would give people. And it gives
00:27:07.600you a little bit of hope and a little bit of agency of just have that confidence and that
00:27:12.320courage to actually broach some of these topics with people who aren't really that political.
00:27:16.860And it might help them decide what they want to do over the next few years when it comes to just
00:27:21.740being in so much debt, the lineups at the food banks, getting rid of something like the carbon
00:27:26.100tax. I think a lot of us need to realize that we don't need to hold back as much as perhaps we
00:27:31.100thought we used to. Censorship doesn't come cheap. Neither does fighting to save the planet. As you
00:27:37.780pointed out here to us, Chris, the ambassador for climate change, which is not a role that existed
00:27:43.260and should exist because, you know, climate change is not a country, believe it or not.
00:27:47.380But our Canadian ambassador to climate change, Catherine Stewart, has spent in the last
00:27:50.960less than two years $254,000 in travel expenses this includes stays at luxury hotels price tag
00:27:59.340up to $623 a night but that's a lot of air travel for someone who is saying we all need to reduce
00:28:05.680our carbon footprint yes exactly it's so so well summed up in that famous cartoon I don't know the
00:28:11.300artist who made it but it shows what looks kind of like a farmer with like a trucker hat standing
00:28:15.720next to what I think is his son and he's looking up in the sky and it's just black with all these
00:28:20.820you know uh airplane smoke trails and they said what's that dad oh politicians flying to the next
00:28:26.040climate summit exactly and this lady i didn't even i to your point i forgot she existed i pay
00:28:33.140her salary and so do you and so do all of your canadian listeners and viewers but i forgot she
00:28:37.880existed number one and now she's racking up these massive costs nothing says save the planet and do
00:28:44.220your part, like sleeping in a $600 a night hotel. And again, it just, it really cheapens the
00:28:50.840efforts that people earnestly make, you know, things like making sure a fish habitat is clean
00:28:55.840or trying to, you know, protect an endangered species. When you let bureaucrats, permanent
00:29:01.020government, this lady was not elected to this job, below your money like this, under this green
00:29:06.720washing auspices of, oh, you know, climate change, it does two things. One, it wastes your money
00:29:12.200completely. Two, it weakens your argument. So the next time you're earnestly trying to say,
00:29:17.600you know what, maybe we should plant a few more trees. Let's make sure we have clean drinking
00:29:21.400water here. It sours people on helping the environment because they see what a scam this
00:29:27.520stuff is. Yeah. And I was reading through her job description because I genuinely was curious what
00:29:33.340it was. And there were a number of points listed, so I don't want to oversimplify. But the first one,
00:29:38.100The first one that the government lists is coordinating with Canadian mission.
00:29:42.060So that's, you know, embassies and permanent offices, coordinating with Canadian missions to put the government of Canada's environmental policies into practice, particularly as those policies relate to climate change.
00:29:52.440So I'm just imagining her flying around to our embassies to make sure they're using LED light bulbs, basically.
00:29:57.820So, you know, she flies to the embassy in I don't know what the capital of Mozambique is.
00:30:01.920I apologize. You know, she flies to our embassy there and says, oh, well, yeah, you know, you're you got rid of the coal furnace.
00:30:07.880great and then she flies to our un mission in new york and says oh yeah you got the leds in
00:30:12.760all right i've saved the planet here let's go inspect your low flush toilet let's make sure
00:30:17.880oh yeah i guess you can see her with like a we should oh that would be a good stunt we should
00:30:23.020send her spools of weather stripping so the next time she's visiting she's at some embassy just
00:30:28.720like yeah with the tape measure there it is they're really easy basically like those door-to-door
00:30:35.080energy efficiency audit salespeople now but she's getting you know 234 000 in travel expenses every
00:30:40.680two years to do it yes exactly and again it's one of those things right where you know you imagine
00:30:45.960250 grand like think of the down payment on a house that people could make with that sort of
00:30:51.240stuff like every single nickel is coming out of taxpayers money like imagine your elderly aunt
00:30:57.240imagine you know your cousin who's just trying to get his trade school going like every nickel
00:31:01.800comes from their pockets. And what do you have to show for it? And that's the crucial point here.
00:31:07.180Emissions have gone up in Canada. All of this government's environmental policy has not amounted
00:31:11.420to a hill of beans. All right, Chris Sims, we will talk to you next Monday. Thanks so much for coming
00:31:15.240on as always. You bet. All right. We'll do the rare focus on Ontario here. It's a big province.
00:31:21.860It happens to be the province I live in here. And it is a province in which you are in a bit of a
00:31:26.940disadvantaged state if you want to buy alcohol right now. The LCBO, the State-Controlled Liquor
00:31:33.680Control Board of Ontario, literally it has control in the name, LCBO. The workers of that, unionized
00:31:40.160public servants under OPSU, have gone on strike. And what's interesting is the level of propaganda
00:31:46.420you're getting from the union on this. This is a video that they put forward defending the LCBO
00:31:53.180monopoly take a look hello pores i'm callum i may be rich but i'm drowning in profits
00:32:02.300that's why i want a big slice of the lcbo sure they invest 2.5 billion dollars in your community
00:32:10.160that's basically nothing to me just like you i struggle to have enough yachts just like you