00:12:33.620I don't have a target for this year, but what I would say is when I launch my platform, it will explicitly link the population growth to the growth in the housing stock to the growth in the number of doctors and nurses.
00:19:43.540I've had on the show Alberta's chief firearms officer, Terry Bryant, who's been like just a tremendous advocate for the sport and a tremendous administrator as well.
00:19:53.120When I was, you know, waiting like four months for my handgun to clear, Alberta was like processing these things in like a week, it seemed like.
00:20:00.920Now we have in Saskatchewan a new CFO appointed.
00:20:04.120I don't know if you've had any dealings with Murray Cowan before.
00:20:06.940I think we're going to have him on the show next week.
00:20:09.560But what are your expectations there from what Saskatchewan's doing with that firearms
00:31:17.440They were saying, well, yeah, you know, we don't like it.
00:31:19.660Same as when the trucker mandate came in.
00:31:21.500They weren't saying this is fundamentally wrong.
00:31:23.340They were saying, well, I mean, supply chains are already pretty rough
00:31:26.840and, you know, it's the grocery store shell.
00:31:28.660Like, they weren't dealing with the issue in the way that it needed to be dealt with.
00:31:33.720And if anything, the Conservatives just went along with this line that, well, he's politicizing vaccines. We don't want to talk about them. They shouldn't be political. It's too important. So he was accepting the Liberal premise on a lot of these very damaging and very dangerous COVID policies.
00:31:50.200Now, let me be perfectly frank when I point out that I think a lot of Canadians did support
00:32:11.380If anything, the problem was that they were not anti-vaccine mandate enough.
00:32:15.720But moreover, I don't buy the fact that the change in fortunes for the Conservatives was largely or even minimally because of the vaccine issue.
00:32:25.660No, it was because the Conservatives had a leader which could not articulate what the Conservatives believed, what he believed.
00:32:32.340They had a leader who would flip on anything he had said even a year and a half earlier about what he would do if he were elected Prime Minister.
00:32:39.960and more importantly, the amount of daylight between him and Justin Trudeau had just shrunk
00:32:45.840to a tiny little sliver of a glimmer by the end of the campaign. So this idea that we could just
00:32:52.680look everywhere else but inward to figure out why the Conservatives lost the election
00:32:58.040is a very convenient, very convenient path for Aaron O'Toole, but it is historic revisionism
00:33:04.140at its worst. This is an issue. I'm ambushing my next guest because I didn't say that I was going
00:33:10.820to talk about this, but I feel Tom Marazzo's up on this. He's a retired captain with the Canadian
00:33:15.700Armed Forces and author of the book, The People's Emergency Act, and joins me now. Tom, you must
00:33:21.300remember that when O'Toole comes out, the trucks are on their way to Ottawa, and he says, all right,
00:33:25.960all right, I got this, guys. Vaccine clinics at truck stops. That's the answer to the mandate.
00:33:34.360nope we're still uh still can't hear you there
00:33:39.820all right we'll get to we'll get that sorted out in just a moment uh but so what i was going to
00:33:45.840talk to tom about and we'll get to this as well is this uh story actually quite a dismal story that
00:33:51.360we have talked about in the past soldiers are increasingly reliant on food banks these are
00:33:57.620soldiers men and women who put on a uniform to serve their country and do so incredibly
00:34:03.400courageously not for a huge amount of money but Canada has not even provided the bare necessities
00:34:09.800to these people we've had reports uh one in the Ottawa Citizen that came out where Canadian
00:34:15.540Forces personnel had to rely on food donations while undergoing training in Ottawa because of
00:34:21.460high living costs there and a lack of support from the military we also see that in New Brunswick
00:34:26.620demand has been doubling at food banks in large part because of the Canadian Forces base in
00:34:33.440Gagetown. The food bank there has reported a doubling of the number of military personnel
00:34:38.600seeking assistance. This goes back to the beginning of COVID. I think I hear rumblings
00:34:43.720from what sounds like Tom Marazzo's microphone there. So we'll get Tom back on here. Tom,
00:34:49.340I think I can hear you now. So we'll get to the food bank stuff, but just, I mean,
00:34:53.860Aaron O'Toole's revisionism, that the Conservatives, first off, took a strong position against vaccine mandates in 2021, but then that they lost because of that is just baffling to me.
00:35:04.260Yeah, that was extremely frustrating to me personally, but also a lot of people that I know.
00:35:09.060And, you know, going back to the convoy itself, I remember, and I was quite surprised by it, the fact that the Conservative Party used the actual convoy protest in Ottawa as a means to dethrone Erin O'Toole from the party.
00:35:27.940So initially we took that as a very, very positive action on behalf of the Conservative Party.
00:35:35.420And then Candace Bergen became the interim leader. She did a photo op with a couple of truckers. The next day went into the House of Commons and said, basically, OK, truckers, you've proved your point. Now go home. Right. Which we saw as a massive slap in the face. And, you know, I'm not here to bash conservatives overall. I've done enough of that, you know, as of late.
00:36:00.300But, you know, it was very frustrating because we thought that there was going to be an opportunity where the Conservative Party, the official opposition to the Canadian government, were going to get our back.
00:36:14.680In fact, they used us for their own personal political gain.
00:36:19.140And I think the convoy itself was an opportunity for the Conservatives to dump the leader that they really had a lot of buyer's remorse from.
00:36:27.560but we weren't the beneficiaries of that so in a sense my takeaway is that the convoy itself was
00:36:34.620very convenient for the conservatives but it wasn't overall helpful to the rest of Canada
00:36:39.380at that time especially not the six million unvaccinated Canadians yeah I take I take a bit
00:36:46.520more of a sympathetic view of Candace Bergen's position than you did and again I don't know
00:36:51.780what's in her mind on that but what I took from what she was saying was that you guys didn't have
00:36:56.600a champion in the political system, now you do. And again, you could debate and haggle over whether
00:37:02.940that was an accurate position, but I think that the convoy showed that there had been no real
00:37:09.720leader in the political system. And I've given credit to Maxime Bernier for being the only
00:37:13.460political figure in that election that was doing it. But when I say in the system, I'm talking
00:37:17.720about the fact that no PPC member of parliament had been elected, and that includes Maxime Bernier.
00:37:22.860and you know the problem is is that you had this groundswell that caused the convoy and then you
00:37:29.420had the convoy itself which caused a lot of other people to look around and say oh yeah yeah these
00:37:34.240guys these guys are right and what's fascinating there is that it was only then that the conservatives
00:37:39.880started to take on this issue is that old you know line about you know i need to know where my people
00:37:44.460are going so i can lead them and that was really where the conservatives were on this so i think
00:37:49.020you're right to point out that they only took that position when other people, including you,
00:37:54.020had laid that groundwork and showed that, hey, there is actually a movement here.
00:37:59.100Yeah. And I, you know, a lot of frustration people had, and this is a comment,
00:38:04.180and I'm going to be fair to Pierre Polyev. You know, when he does things I don't like,
00:38:08.700I call it out, but I have to be fair to him. A lot of people attack him because they say,
00:38:13.440where were you during the, the mandates, the lockdowns and all that stuff.
00:38:17.900But the thing is, you know, people like him, he was not the leader of the
00:38:22.500conservative party, he was the, the finance critic, and he did an absolutely
00:38:27.480exceptional job at his portfolio, which was to criticize Trudeau in the finances.
00:38:32.780Had he been maybe the critic for, you know, health Canada, or maybe one of the
00:38:38.260other departments, then you could kind of say that, right?
00:38:41.600So, so we had this sort of glimmer of hope that maybe when he came in, he was
00:38:46.840going to be, um, you know, more, more of that fight that he has had, but he's
00:38:52.480become more sort of, uh, fixated on sort of smaller issues, not necessarily going
00:39:00.040back in time and looking at, you know, issues to me that are important, like,
00:39:05.740you know, investigating what happened during the COVID lockdowns, investigate
00:39:09.960several of those things, all related specifically to COVID-19, I would like to see more of that
00:39:16.680stuff. So, you know, I think Canadians expect a lot from conservatives. You know, I think what we
00:39:25.600need is somebody as intelligent as Pierre Polyev, because he's a very intelligent person, very
00:39:32.160articulate, can get his point across much better than what I'm doing currently at the moment.
00:39:37.320But at the same time, you know, we want somebody who's bold, somebody who is strong, somebody that can say, you can look at that, that person and say, yeah, that guy's got my back.
00:39:50.480Like that guy is the guy that I'm going to go stand behind when it comes to something really, really difficult.
00:39:56.460But I think that they've been overly cautious.
00:39:59.040I don't think they've been bold enough until recently.
00:40:02.220I think people like Larry Brock, Larry Brock, without a doubt, is my favorite conservative
00:40:07.020member of parliament because he's tough, he's bold, he's very decisive, he's aggressive
00:40:43.820And again, you actually were incredibly good on that, considering I gave you zero notice until I asked the question that I was going to ask you about that.
00:40:50.600But the issue I wanted to talk about leans on your experience as a veteran in the Canadian Armed Forces.
00:40:57.020We've had, I mean, just a couple of more reports. This is not a new problem by any stretch of
00:41:02.200veterans relying on food banks. And listen, I mean, there is a big place in my heart for men
00:41:09.460and women who serve and, you know, notwithstanding issues that I've talked about on the show with,
00:41:13.940you know, morale in the Canadian Armed Forces and lowering standards and all of that. People
00:41:17.660that do that, for whatever reason, deserve commendation, but they're not even getting
00:41:22.200the bare minimum, which is the ability to buy food. Why is this problem happening, first off?
00:41:28.440Well, I would definitely say it's the same experience right across Canada. It is this
00:41:34.260inflationary pressure that has been brought on by, you know, the government. I mean, the government
00:41:41.120controls monetary and fiscal policy, and the things that we've seen over the last eight years
00:41:46.600are horrendous now this like you said is not a new problem i can remember back as far as 1999
00:41:53.960so i had joined the regular force military in september of 1998 and mclean's magazine put out
00:42:01.400this very scathing review on the the uh the the state of the canadian military they did a story
00:42:08.680about a young uh second lieutenant he was going through to become a pilot but he was working in
00:42:14.920the mall in Saskatchewan as a part-time security guard because he was trying to feed his family.
00:42:21.560You know, there's somebody who wants to serve, but they can't afford to serve. Now, even in my own
00:42:27.480case, you know, there was a time I was just desperate. I wanted to join the regular force
00:42:32.200military and I was thinking seriously about joining as an enlisted non-commissioned member.
00:42:38.680But I looked at it, I'm like, I can't afford to do that because of all the student loans that I
00:42:42.920I have, and this is going back into the late nineties and I was already an
00:42:47.540enlisted person in the reserves at the time, you know, but that McLean's
00:42:52.640article that came out saw sweeping change across the, the, the, the pay
00:42:57.060in the compensation for the Canadian military.
00:42:59.360You know, my rank level at the time that that article came out was also
00:43:02.960second Lieutenant and that, that April, I saw my pay go up just over 14%.
00:43:10.280But, you know, many of the other ranks had much smaller pay increases.
00:43:15.880So, you know, the, the attempt or the justification at the time was to say,
00:43:19.420oh, we want to make it sort of on an even playing field as firefighters
00:48:39.160Yeah. And you know what? Pembroke, great little town, but the issue in Pembroke is nobody in Pembroke changes jobs. The joke used to be you either retire or you die in the position you've got in Pembroke. Nobody, no employer wants to invest time hiring a military spouse, knowing that in, you know, two to four years, they're going to have to replace that person. And this is a real, very, a real phenomenon.
00:49:03.920So the only people I knew that ever got hired, like spouses, were if they were lawyers and if they were teachers, because, you know, there's a teacher getting posted out with her military spouse, male or female, or a lawyer, and then a new one is coming into town.
00:49:21.340So the jobs were very, very difficult in a place like Patawawa to get employment.
00:49:26.840Now, if you're in Oromocto, New Brunswick, you've got to drive 20 kilometers and hope you can get a job in Fredericton.
00:49:32.560If you're in Toronto, it's a little bit different because it's not a military town.
00:49:38.560Edmonton, St. Hubert, I think, is the area that's around CFB Edmonton.
00:49:44.860These are the different dynamics at play.
00:49:47.540And you're right, it really does harm the career opportunities for a spouse.
00:49:53.460I mean, look at the effect it would have on a pension for somebody who has to quit their job every two to four years.
00:49:59.680and if you're an officer's wife it could be a lot shorter than that you know my average posting was
00:50:05.000I did 12 cities in 24 years you know so you're you're really moving around quite a bit and it's
00:50:12.320hard for spouses to earn a long-term pension you know that's another dynamic to this yeah no very
00:50:18.920very well said Tom thank you so much as always for coming on always good to talk to you thanks Andrew