00:02:54.680Look, he calls her the almighty word that you should never ever refer to a female by, lots of profanity, and more importantly, he takes out his anger on a woman who works in his office, or rather in Catherine McKenna's office, who is not the problem here.
00:03:12.340Any anger you have is not directed to low-level constituency office staffers, but it's to Catherine McKenna.
00:03:18.700Now, I want to jump around to a couple of different aspects of this, because first off, I'm a believer in free speech.
00:03:27.500That means the right to swear, the right to be angry, the right to feel just absolutely horrific things or horrible things about people, about events, whatever you want.
00:03:37.700I am of the mind that if you are in politics, even if you are a political staffer, but especially if you're a politician, you have to have a thick skin.
00:03:47.520You have to have a tough exterior, not because everything that's going to be thrown at you is right or moral or just, but just because that's the nature of the beast.
00:03:55.940You have to be able to take the punches, and not in a literal sense, but the verbal punches, and most people in politics on all sides are.
00:04:03.520However, there is no excuse, regardless of your discontent with government, your discontent with Catherine McKenna, and your anger, to lash out in a way that this person did.
00:04:16.460This is something that was deliberate.
00:04:18.700The guy went out of his way to go to the office, rang the little intercom thing, berated the staffer, didn't just say, McKenna this, McKenna this, you people, all of you, traitors, terrible words.
00:04:30.440Obviously, it was very threatening. Thankfully, the woman did the right thing. She just didn't engage, went back, locked the door, and that was that.
00:04:37.420But there's something very wrong, and even if, even if there is no moral wrong with this in your view, surely you can agree that it isn't helping anyone.
00:04:47.420This is not bringing anyone around to your cause. This is not making it so that people are more likely to say, oh, you know what, you raised some really good points.
00:04:54.220I'm actually on, you know, your team now, instead of Team McKenna. So while I understand a lot of the anger, that is no excuse for the way it was expressed.
00:05:16.480And before anyone says, oh, but what about this side, and what about, I don't care. I don't care. I don't want the whataboutism where, oh, but this Liberal said that, so we're going to, you know, respond.
00:05:26.700No. We can all do better, and leading by example is a darn good way and a darn good place to start if, in your view, the other side is not doing it.
00:05:36.500And this is not just a social media problem. You know, if someone just, you know, says Catherine McKenna this, that on Twitter, she can block them, ignore them, do whatever.
00:05:46.120If someone sends an email, a letter, same sort of thing. It's very different if someone is literally there with a phone in your face, which, by the way, shows that it was deliberate.
00:05:55.180The person shoves the phone in the face of the staffer and, you know, then makes the decision to upload it to the internet.
00:06:00.760So that's the other part is that there wasn't even, ah, you know what, I think I might have overstepped here.
00:06:05.320So even if you agree with everything that was said, surely you can agree this is not the way you make a point.
00:06:13.160And this is not helping anyone. And more importantly, it actually turns people away and off of you because now Catherine McKenna is a victim in the sense that she is the one that more people are siding with.
00:06:25.700Now, she's put out a statement that actually indicates that whole tough skin approach I mentioned.
00:06:30.560She said, Thursday's incident was not a one-off or an isolated occurrence.
00:06:34.040Since my family, my staff and I deal with abusive behavior on a regular basis, that is unacceptable and I am committed to working across party lines to make it stop.
00:06:43.240The statement goes on and says this is, these people just want attention.
00:06:48.440The only attention they should get is from law enforcement. The proper authorities have been notified.
00:06:53.460Now, whether this is or should be a police matter is a different story altogether.
00:07:00.280And I tend to believe that for anything speech related, there has to be a fairly high bar.
00:07:05.940What I don't at all buy into is police responding by saying this is going to be a hate crime investigation.
00:07:12.680The Ottawa police have said their hate crimes unit is the one that's now looking after this.
00:07:17.860I think that, again, there is a very high bar for hate crimes.
00:07:21.700I think legislating intent and emotion behind certain things is never a good idea.
00:07:27.420So I would say that there's definitely a case of the hand being overplayed here.
00:07:32.480But the interesting thing about this whole thing is that, you know, no one was hurt, no one was harmed, and we can be grateful for that.
00:07:41.160These are the types of situations that if someone responds the wrong way, it's easy to see it getting to the point of escalation.
00:07:49.120But rather than saying what Catherine McKenna did here, which is that, you know what, we need to work across party lines to ensure that we have respectful discourse.
00:07:57.820The liberals actually blamed this in a way on Pierre Polyev.
00:08:02.600And this is, again, talk about taking something that's bad that everyone agrees is bad and pushing just a couple of steps further and blaming all conservatives for it based on Pierre Polyev standing up as conservative finance critic.
00:08:15.760This is from a segment on CBC's power and politics in which Liberal MP Adam van Koverden apologized to all of the Dutch listeners if I butchered the last name.
00:08:25.840But I'm going just phonetically here and realizing that I've never actually heard his name said out loud.
00:08:30.060But Adam van Koverden, who's somewhat of a star member of the Liberal Caucus, who says that Pierre Polyev questioning the government is what's responsible for this outburst at Catherine McKenna's office.
00:08:42.280I would just point out that the type of baseless allegations that Mr. Polyev keeps making about our government is one of the things that's fueling the type of action that we saw at Minister McKenna's office today.
00:08:52.480I would beg him to please provide, like, good, constructive criticism when necessary.
00:08:56.960But the baseless allegations, these assumptions and the rhetoric that there's always a scandal is one of the things that's fueling a lot of the difficulty that people are experiencing.
00:09:11.220Our job is to hold this government to account.
00:09:14.700They shoveled a half a billion dollars to an organization that had paid the prime minister's family a half a million dollars and gave an illegal $41,000 vacation to the finance minister.
00:09:26.660They then gave another contract to a company whose vice president is married to the chief of staff.
00:09:32.640This is the behavior of their government, and they can expect that our opposition is going to hold them to account for it.
00:09:37.920We're not going to be intimidated into silence.
00:09:39.760An account is fine, but the baseless allegations and the speculation needs to stop.
00:10:06.580Well, I'm glad Pierre Polyev, in true Pierre Polyev fashion, decided to just stick that exactly where it needed to, which is, you know, just punt that ball right out of the court and say, you know, you're out to lunch if you think this is a conservative problem.
00:10:19.960But this is, again, the challenge when you're talking about discourse is that to liberals, saying that, you know, Catherine McKenna is an effing C word is the same as saying, you know what, Justin Trudeau is behaving in a corrupt fashion.
00:10:34.040Like, they view any criticism of them as being the same and as being offensive.
00:10:39.660And when the liberal government right now is so thin-skinned that it thinks everything is just an affront to their delicate sensibilities, it makes it very difficult to have that cross-party line approach to discourse that Catherine McKenna seemed to want.
00:10:53.700And by the way, this is coming at a time when, as Mr. Polyev pointed out, nothing that he said was untrue.
00:11:00.360The liberals are doing exactly what it is they've been accused of doing.
00:11:04.780And Brian Lilly had a great scoop in the Toronto Sun.
00:11:07.760He had done a lot of the legwork on something that was circulating on Twitter.
00:11:11.400This week, Justin Trudeau's office had put out an itinerary saying he was in Ottawa for private meetings.
00:11:16.840And in actuality, he was at a cottage in Georgian Bay.
00:11:23.060Now, they later corrected this in a subsequent itinerary that just said on August 11th he was in Ontario.
00:11:30.000So they realized that they were, you know, busted lying about where Justin Trudeau was when he was actually, you know, having a good time on vacation.
00:11:37.660Then they decided to just say he's somewhere in Ontario.
00:11:40.160So it's like, where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?
00:11:45.880Except Carmen Sandiego, I think, is actually getting things done when she's on the road.
00:11:49.600Whereas Trudeau is just, you know, pretending to be doing meetings and actually kayaking.
00:11:53.740So right now, all of the liberals that are having to defend Justin Trudeau would, according to Adam Van Koverden, say that this is all just stoking really nasty negativity to start asking questions, to hold the government to account.
00:12:08.700Which is, by the way, inherent in the name of the conservatives in politics right now, the official opposition.
00:12:15.520As in the party that is there to oppose the government and to hold the government to account.
00:12:21.620And incidentally, it doesn't seem like the conservatives are alone in being displeased with Justin Trudeau's government right now.
00:12:29.860Specifically, Finance Minister Bill Morneau, who is perhaps not even respected within his own party right now.
00:13:20.680Hey, you know, Prime Minister's office, Cameron or Chantel, we're asking you, does Justin Trudeau have faith in his Finance Minister, Bill Morneau?
00:13:34.560We'll have to get back to you on this one.
00:13:36.660So there isn't actually an answer that the Trudeau government can give right away as to whether they have confidence in their Finance Minister,
00:13:45.680which in and of itself shows a lack of confidence.
00:13:49.060The fact that they can't even answer without saying, we'll get back to you.
00:14:10.280And a beautiful part of Ontario, if you've never been.
00:14:12.660And Justin Trudeau perhaps was there and they couldn't get to him to ask him,
00:14:17.440hey, in the middle of this pandemic, the middle of this crisis, the middle of this economic situation that's causing millions of Canadians to be on unemployment,
00:14:24.860do you have confidence in your Finance Minister?
00:14:32.540And the part that I found so hilarious about this is like after going to a reporter and saying, yeah, we'll get back to you on that and then not getting back to that.
00:14:42.020So something that in and of itself they know is a vote of non-confidence, basically.
00:14:47.800The PMO then sends this absolutely glowing tribute to Bill Morneau out to at least some media.
00:14:59.240So since we formed government, Minister Morneau has worked relentlessly with all colleagues and closely with the Prime Minister to deliver critical support for Canadians to build a strong and resilient economy.
00:15:10.620In particular, Minister Morneau played a central role that saw Canada develop one of the best economies in the G7.
00:15:17.000A million new jobs over the first mandate.
00:15:19.240OK, no, I'm not going to read the whole thing.
00:15:22.920Then it talks about how his work continued throughout the pandemic with CERB and the wage subsidy and all of these other things.
00:15:28.560And then finally, of course, the Prime Minister has the full confidence in Minister Morneau and any statement to the contrary is false.
00:15:36.440The Prime Minister knows that Minister Morneau and the entire team of cabinet ministers will keep doing the work that Canadians rely on to get them through this pandemic.
00:15:46.220Now, I like that they say, of course he does, as though like the statements came from their non-statements.
00:15:52.840Like the statements to the contrary came because they didn't say anything.
00:15:57.920That nature abhors a vacuum so people fill it with whatever they can.
00:16:02.420So I wonder if, and this is purely speculative on my part, I wonder if they had to kind of negotiate with Morneau behind the scenes on are you going to play ball?
00:16:13.160Or if this is literally just bumbling fools that, you know, can't figure out their left hand from their right hand and that's why this happens.
00:16:23.240I mean, what is that, you know, that idea that you have to put forward?
00:21:44.560The only evidence that CO2 causes warming is in computer models that are built to say it does.
00:21:50.740People don't realize that computer models are not a crystal ball that can predict the future.
00:21:55.780There is no such thing as a crystal ball.
00:21:57.740It's a mythical object, like reading your palm, right, and trying to tell the future by reading your palm.
00:22:04.340A computer model, you put your assumptions in it, and what your assumptions are come out the other end of it.
00:22:11.280It's based on what you assumed was the correct number.
00:22:14.380And they just assume that CO2 will cause warming, so they put that in the computer.
00:22:19.020And, of course, the computer shows warming.
00:22:21.120But just because CO2 is going up now and temperature is going up now in this modern warm period does not mean there is a cause-effect relationship between the two.
00:22:29.740And the only times there seems to be a cause-effect relationship between the two is when temperature drives CO2, not the other way around.
00:22:38.040When the ocean's warm, CO2 comes out of it.
00:22:40.660When the ocean's cool, CO2 goes into it, changing the amount of CO2 there is in the atmosphere.
00:22:47.560But it isn't what's changing the temperature.
00:22:50.280The temperature is being changed on cycles that are with the Milankovitch cycle, which is solar cycles.
00:24:08.760So your position is not that the warming isn't happening, which is, I think, another position that you hear from some of your colleagues that are classed as deniers by people.
00:24:17.960You're saying that the warming is not anthropogenic.
00:24:35.640It's 1 degree Celsius in 300 years since the peak of the Little Ice Age in 1700, 300 years ago.
00:24:43.500That is what has happened, slight warming.
00:24:46.020We would have expected that because it was in the same cycle as from the Roman warm period into the Dark Ages cold period into the medieval warm period 1,000 years ago into the Little Ice Age.
00:24:58.400The Little Ice Age peaked in 1700, and now we're in the modern warm period.
00:25:02.020So we would have been expecting a warming.
00:25:04.460Those other cycles had nothing to do with CO2 because it stayed the same the whole time, 280 ppm.
00:25:10.360We've raised it up to 415, and it hasn't changed the rate of warming at all.
00:25:16.800The rate of warming is 1 degree per 300 years, which is like the United Nations is predicting amounts up to 5 times or more than that to occur.
00:25:27.100But again, those are all based on computer models, not on real measurements.
00:25:33.900And people are acting as though you can know what the temperature is going to be in 80 years from now.
00:25:39.460Well, and also with great precision about, you know, we've all heard the cataclysmic predictions that we've got 12 years left, basically, and all of these sorts of things.
00:25:47.440But it's not just that things are getting worse that these people say.
00:25:53.920And the flip side, though, I think is almost more dangerous, which is, well, it's a possibility, so shouldn't we prepare for it?
00:26:00.880And then they use that as a justification for all sorts of dangerous economic policies and other public policies.
00:26:06.600We should prepare for an invasion by Martians.
00:26:09.960Well, but to your point that you can't predict the future, how do you push back against these people that say it's a possibility?
00:26:15.840Because that's almost more dangerous than the people that are claiming it's a certainty, the ones that say, well, it may or may not happen, but these are all the things we should do anyway.
00:26:23.920Well, you don't spend half of civilization's wealth on something that might not be true.
00:26:30.560I mean, you have to wait before you do that.
00:26:33.200We didn't prepare for the virus before it happened.
00:26:36.880I mean, sure, we have health agencies and stuff, but you can't do anything about something until it happens.
00:27:03.700And some of them are actually declining.
00:27:06.260And in a warming world, we would actually expect hurricanes to decline because they depend on the difference in temperature between tropical air and temperate air in the north.
00:27:17.640That's why you don't have hurricanes on the equator because the air is all hot there.
00:27:22.240But where the cold air and the warm air meet is where these cyclones are formed.
00:27:26.620And that should go down as the temperature when the earth warms, it warms inadvertently towards the poles.
00:27:33.320It doesn't really change at the equator any significant amount.
00:27:36.420And that's how they can get away with saying Canada is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world because the whole northern hemisphere is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.
00:27:46.540It's called maybe a degree and a half instead of 0.5 at the equator.
00:27:51.520You know, it's always that way when the earth warms and cools.
00:27:55.660It does so inadvertently towards the poles.
00:27:58.040That's why they're so cold and the equator is still so warm.
00:28:01.840But when the earth warms into the greenhouse ages, which are when the earth is warm everywhere, there were forests on Canada's tropical forests at one time on Canada's Arctic islands.
00:28:16.480And then as the world cooled over the last 50,000 years, we're at the tail end of a 50,000 year cooling.
00:28:24.840We're at the tail end of a 50 million year cooling period today.
00:28:29.22050 million years ago was the Eocene Thermal Maximum.
00:28:32.660And it has been cooling in fits and starts over that whole 50 million period until we get to the glaciation we're in now, the Pleistocene Ice Age.
00:28:43.780We are still in the Pleistocene Ice Age.
00:29:15.040You never hear these people talking about what the real climate change that's happened on this Earth from Ice Age to Greenhouse Age back to Ice Age again over a 350 million year period.
00:29:26.720Those are the real changes in climate.
00:29:58.480They're so hell-bent on this alarmist narrative that they're kind of overlooking things that are fully within the realm of their research and all of that?
00:30:08.660And I've heard that argument that, you know, there's no grant funding for proving a negative, but there's lots for proving that it's a problem.