00:00:00.000Welcome to The Fighter. I'm your host, Chris Sims. We have got a very funny show for you
00:00:10.440because every now and then we need to put our feet up and just point and laugh at the stupidity1.00
00:00:16.300of government and the stupidity of government waste. Now, many of you have probably heard1.00
00:00:21.500about some of the crazier waste stories, right? Most of us have heard about spending thousands
00:00:27.500of dollars on a sex toy show in Germany. Yes, Canadian taxpayers actually did that. Many of you
00:00:34.080might have heard about Calgary's big blue ring, okay, that they've just got sitting there on the
00:00:39.020side of the highway near the airport. Many of you might have heard about Conrad, the dead raccoon
00:00:45.640who died a decade ago in Toronto, that the good taxpayers of Toronto spent thousands of dollars
00:00:52.460on a commemorative plaque for. No, I'm not kidding. Toronto City Hall spent thousands of
00:00:58.740taxpayer dollars in Toronto for a plaque for a dead raccoon. But wait, there's more. You might
00:01:05.220be thinking that the sensible people of the rectangle place, Saskatchewan, would be immune
00:01:11.060from such things. Now the people there have got a ton of common sense. Not so much for the
00:01:16.460government, though. Wait until you find out what Saskatoon City Hall spent nearly $300,000 on.
00:01:27.900You sitting down? Let's find out. Gage Halbrick is my prairie director colleague. So he's
00:01:34.500responsible for Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Gage, I couldn't help myself. When you first told me
00:01:41.320about this story, I actually cried laughing and I couldn't stop. Please tell us what the good
00:01:48.780taxpayers of Saskatoon, the city itself, spent close to $300,000 on. Well, Chris, I can't believe
00:01:58.240I'm going to say this, and it should be obvious, but taxpayers shouldn't be paying hundreds of
00:02:05.900thousands of dollars for large plastic rocks. But that's what the city of Saskatoon decided
00:02:12.660to spend Saskatoon taxpayers' money on, almost $300,000 on three large plastic rocks placed
00:02:22.280around the city. We have pictures, portraits, if you will, of said rocks. Here's one of them.
00:02:29.880Do they have names, Gage? Well, they all are made out of different things, which is kind
00:02:34.900of the theme of what they're supposed to go with, with these plastic rocks. So there's two that are
00:02:39.100located in different parks around the city. And then on this third picture here, you'll see that
00:02:44.240actually the third rock is located in the recycling depot at the dump. So if you're trying to find the
00:02:51.300rock in the evening, you actually can't because it's closed. You can't get into the dump in the
00:02:56.200evening to see that third rock. That's very upsetting. Why is that third rock? Pull that
00:03:04.260pull that picture back up for me, Jake. Why is this third rock imprisoned? Why is it behind
00:03:08.520chain link? I see barbed wire even. Is it dangerous? Well, that's kind of the key information
00:03:12.920here for taxpayers is that the reason that Saskatoon taxpayers paid for this rock is there's
00:03:17.860a program that the city of Saskatoon has that up to 1% of a budget for a project can be used for art.
00:03:25.160So the recycling depot, the material recovery center was the project where they took the money
00:03:29.980from that project and used it on these big plastic rocks. So, of course, one of them had to hang out
00:03:35.700at the dump at the Recycling Depot. Do people come visit it? Like, is this a tourist attraction?
00:03:43.000Do you need to pay to see the giant third rock? Is that the third rock or is it the first rock?
00:03:47.620I don't know. The reason, folks, I am treating this with such reverence is because, of course,
00:03:52.060If the great smart people around Saskatoon City Hall have decided that you taxpayers should be on the hook for a hundred grand a pop, then obviously, you know, these rocks are super important.
00:04:07.600Gage, are people like lining up? Is this on a pamphlet? Do people have to like book a time to come visit the big plastic rock at the garbage dump?
00:04:15.800I think people are a little bit more lining up to yell at city council about how much they're wasting their money, because to put in perspective, right, that $300,000 about how much it costs, that's about the property tax bill of 118 average Saskatoon families, right? So 118 households, their entire city property tax bill didn't go to fixing roads, right? It didn't go to any of other services that people want the city to provide them. It went to building large plastic rocks.
00:04:42.200But to build insult to injury on that one, I called a landscape store, and they said at the high end, if you wanted real rocks, real big boulders, it would cost about half as much as the plastic ones.
00:04:55.020And when I posted this on social media, a bunch of farmers pointed out in the comments that, hey, if the city had shown up to my yard, we have all these rocks we don't want.
00:05:03.000They could have taken for free, but instead the city spent almost $300,000 on them.0.64
00:05:08.240I will also point out that even if, and this is a big if, because most of the time government art sucks. I'm just going to say it. It's terrible. But if you absolutely needed 1% of whatever square sign of the hypotenuse to go towards art, I don't know. Couldn't have they prettied up the downtown or painted a mural or I don't know. I've seen some towns and cities. They all have matching mailboxes or
00:05:38.240fire hydrants. Like it becomes a thing. Like they could have done so much more with so much less
00:05:45.920than three big plastic rocks. I got to tell you, Gage, I've been asked about this. Like all of a
00:05:55.520sudden I'll be talking to like radio in Ontario and they're like, what's with the plastic rocks
00:06:00.100in Saskatoon? Like before we get into the, you know, the scanning of the likenesses of the real
00:06:06.400boulders because i want you to get into that part too but before we get into that what has been the
00:06:11.880response from saskatoon city hall like are they trying to hide away from this story are they
00:06:18.400embarrassed yes there was a city council meeting the other day and one of the reporters that i
00:06:24.000talked to hounded some of the city councillors and one of the city councillors said that at the next
00:06:28.440city council meeting in august he's going to raise a motion and the city's going to try and review
00:06:33.240how art is funded. So hopefully that means less taxpayer money wasted on art. We're going to be
00:06:39.600following that and trying to get the taxpayer army involved to fight back to get those money
00:06:44.300reduced. So it's good to see that we blew up this story, right? People saw it. They saw how much
00:06:48.620money was wasted on these rocks and city council, at least some counselors are listening and
00:06:53.560hopefully moving forward to the right next steps to get rid of wasting so much money on these art
00:06:59.320art projects. Because even as the councillor kind of alluded to, they approved the budget
00:07:04.320for the art, but they didn't necessarily approve what actually it ended up being. So hopefully
00:07:09.080they can even get a little bit more oversight if it's not a straight up budget cut on funding for
00:07:14.200things like this. And the reason we're highlighting this on a national show is because, of course,
00:07:18.780I'm picking on Saskatoon and rightly so. Like, this was a really dumb decision. You shouldn't1.00
00:07:23.840have spent taxpayers' money on three big plastic rocks. Yes, I'm going to keep saying it because
00:07:28.100it's so absurd. You have to keep saying it. But the reason why we're highlighting this in a
00:07:32.240national show, Gage, let's just get into a few more stories. This is not, you know, native to
00:07:38.760Saskatoon to spend stupid amounts of taxpayers' money on really stupid things. People were making1.00
00:07:45.460jokes here where I live in Alberta saying, hey, remember the big blue ring? Like, so there's this
00:07:51.160big blue metal ring that's, you know, nearish to the airport in Calgary. And I was saying, hey,
00:07:56.460why don't we just get the three big plastic rocks and we can try to catapult them through the big
00:08:00.980blue ring. We can have, you can have, you know, summer Olympic games of taxpayer waste. Um, in
00:08:06.860Toronto, uh, they spent thousands of dollars on a plaque for a dead raccoon. Um, I forget how much
00:08:12.060they spent in Nova Scotia on a square of gravel in the woods and tried to call it the next Cape
00:08:17.920Canaveral. Um, in, in Vancouver and in British Columbia, the list goes on, on what they can
00:08:23.500spend stupid amounts of money on. So people really need to pay attention to their local city halls0.80
00:08:29.180and wonder aloud why their property taxes keep on going up. To the point on Saskatoon,
00:08:35.620I just want people to picture that. Did you say 118 households?
00:08:39.940Yeah, worth of property tax spent on these plastic rocks. And I think kind of the point
00:08:45.160you highlighted is the most important one is that if the city has money, any municipality all across
00:08:49.760the country has this money to waste on these ridiculous things, they're taking too much money
00:08:54.580from taxpayers, right? It's a huge thing. And then they're continuing to hike property taxes
00:08:59.200every year, right? We usually have 118 people be property tax free, but instead we got large
00:09:04.340plastic rocks. There's too much time on the hands of bureaucrats at city halls across the country
00:09:10.180if they can dream up scenarios like this. And they're taking too much money from taxpayers to
00:09:14.740sit there and do it. I want people to picture 118 households. So I live in what would be called
00:09:21.360kind of a suburban area, you know, house by house. Next time you're out for a walk and you're going
00:09:26.540through your neighborhood, count 118 houses. That's a big chunk of anyone's neighborhood.
00:09:34.020Those households could have been property tax-free in Saskatoon if it weren't for spending this kind
00:09:40.160of money is what you're saying, Gage. Yeah, that's exactly right. I think that's the way to talk
00:09:43.780about it because the city always says, well, it's not, you know, it's not the biggest amount of
00:09:47.120money, but it's still a clear waste. And it's the waste of 118 families, hard earned money,
00:09:53.380right? Those people worked all year. They had to pay a substantial portion of that money in
00:09:56.800property tax with the idea that would maybe be going to fixing roads, picking up garbage,
00:10:02.600but instead it went to building large plastic rocks. Let's, let's pull up pictures of the
00:10:09.120special rocks again because people paid for them. Now Gage when you first told me about this I
00:10:15.600actually started laughing so hard that I might have forgotten where I was but I think you said
00:10:21.840that these are actually captured likenesses of real boulders. I think you said that. I might
00:10:30.460have dreamt that part. I do have work dreams but the funny thing for folks who are looking oh wow
00:10:35.560it looks pretty flat except for these big rocks. Well, yeah, it's Saskatchewan. One of the neat
00:10:40.180things about the real rocks is that how did a big boulder like this wind up in the middle of
00:10:45.180the prairie, Gage? Well, so they're called, this project is called Modern Erratics, if I have that
00:10:53.600right. So they're trying to make it off of the regular glacial boulders that you find around
00:10:58.520Saskatchewan that were left in the field some long time ago. And as you alluded to, if I recall
00:11:03.900correctly. The funny part about the project as well is that they paid double more than what a
00:11:09.380real boulder would cost. But all of these plastic rocks are 3D scans essentially of real rocks. So
00:11:16.160the real rocks are sitting out there in a field somewhere, presumably, that could have been taken
00:11:21.360to the city for free to beauty up the parks. But instead they decided to, as government does,
00:11:26.860make it as expensive as possible and as weird as possible by making them out of plastic.
00:11:32.220so real boulders had some form of bureaucrat either a photographer being paid by a bureaucrat
00:11:40.280or a bureaucrat him or herself real boulders in saskatchewan somewhere had a bureaucrat come out
00:11:46.600and 3d scan them yeah well really it's much more of a saskatchewan is actually subsidizing alberta
00:11:55.520in this scenario because the artists who made the rocks the plastic rocks are from calgary
00:12:00.100So $300,000 of Saskatoon taxpayer money got sent to your neck of the woods.
00:12:05.440So really, you should be thanking us over here in Saskatchewan.
00:12:09.080Okay, the Saskatchewan talk radio people need to get on this because at that part, I forgot.
00:12:14.360I was more wondering on behalf of the Boulder, like, did they give their consent to have their likenesses captured in 3D form?
00:12:22.540Why didn't they get a car car ride and be allowed to be plopped in the middle of, what is it, a dump, a park?
00:12:28.500and that one looks like it's on the side of a highway yeah so that's again jake what's this
00:12:33.520one so it's another park but the park is on the side of the highway but this is also the part of
00:12:40.860the park that people don't use as much there's another part that's got like a ball diamond and
00:12:44.540stuff that's much nicer but they stuck it on the far side actually they stuck it so far away that
00:12:50.140i did an interview at this specific rock with a reporter and we had to call each other a couple
00:12:54.860times and i had to send her a map pin to try and find the rock she got lost because it's not in a
00:12:59.900you know great place she got lost trying to find the big fake plastic rock okay um there is no
00:13:07.100defense for this but humor me um what was their pitch because you supported this actually they
00:13:15.100were they were talking about it out loud they weren't even hiding it originally it was on
00:13:19.340their website or something and then you started digging around what's their possible justification
00:13:25.180for this nonsense yeah so the city was bragging about it they put out a news release saying wow
00:13:31.900we've got these new sculptures hanging out they didn't really highlight that the sculptures were
00:13:35.980just big plastic rocks i mean you have to know what neurotic is to figure that out and we saw
00:13:40.860there's a quote in the news release from someone who works at the city and they said that these
00:13:45.980artworks aim to foster a deeper connection between residents and the environment. They celebrate
00:13:51.020creativity, spark curiosity, and encourage active participation, inviting the public to explore new
00:13:57.340relationships with the materials we use, reuse, or discard. That's what they want you to get out of
00:14:04.820looking at the really big plastic rocks. I see. Just a little note. I like art. I'm a drama kid.
00:14:13.500I was a drama kid in school. Love art. But just a note to my fellow artsy fartsy drama kids who now for some reason have bureaucrat jobs within City Hall. Could you stop making art out of garbage? Like actual garbage? Because this is dumb. If you don't want to get mocked on national TV, stop making art out of garbage. Because I've noticed we've been covering stuff like this for many years now, Gage, you and I, and all of us at the team at the Taxpayers Federation.
00:14:42.300Have you noticed this theme? Because here in Calgary, remember, they were literally like taping old takeout container garbage to old Christmas tinsel and hanging it in transit windows and like spending thousands of dollars on this nonsense.
00:14:57.380Like it was actual physical garbage you could pull out of a blue bin. Have you noticed this theme, too? It seems to be like their excuse to waste money.
00:15:06.600It's like, oh, it's made of recycled plastic.
00:15:08.720Or, oh, it's supposed to make you think about post-consumer waste.