00:03:07.460at 39, the NDP at 24, and the Green Party with their lowly two seats. Those are the latest
00:03:14.320projections courtesy of 338 Canada, which has a pretty good batting average on this. I mean,
00:03:19.420pollsters always, you have to take their projections and forecasts with a bit of a grain of
00:03:23.920salt. But all of this is a lead into this fascinating story in the Hilltimes that I
00:03:28.600wanted to get to here. The Hilltimes has gotten a Liberal Member of Parliament who's leaked the
00:03:34.640details of this caucus meeting that Liberal MPs had with Justin Trudeau. And he's telling them
00:03:41.460not to worry. No, no, no, don't panic. Everything's going to be fine. You can't expect a dramatic
00:03:46.740boost in public support until next year. So yeah, don't look at the polls this year. You've got to
00:03:52.220wait until next year. That's when we're going to get them. And this is what the Liberal MP,
00:03:56.740and not named, but this is what they are quoted as saying to the Hilltimes. Don't expect us to
00:04:02.060be neck and neck in two months or six months time even. Instead, Trudeau is downplaying
00:04:08.040expectations. It's like treading water when you're drowning. He was telling us to not freak out while
00:04:14.000you're drowning, that you stay calm and you can get back to the top for a lot of the members who
00:04:19.020are below water. So this is this MP who is clearly not too thrilled with what Trudeau was telling
00:04:24.120them, trying to paraphrase it. But effectively, what this MP is saying that Justin Trudeau was
00:04:28.940telling his caucus members, okay, I know it sucks now. I know it's going to suck in a couple of
00:04:34.020months. It's going to suck in six months, but wait until 2025. He's basically that friend that we all
00:04:39.520have when everything's going wrong that says, guys, guys, wait, I have a plan. I have a plan.
00:04:43.340And everyone around is kind of wondering if I think that the plan is probably going to be worse
00:04:48.840than what you've been doing up until this point. Because again, when you have been at the helm
00:04:53.080for eight years as it is. It doesn't matter what your plan for the future is. You've already been
00:04:59.240the one who created this mess. Now, what's interesting is the Hilltimes went to the PMO.
00:05:03.660They went to Justin Trudeau's office and said, why were you telling MPs not to expect any uptick
00:05:10.540in support over the next year? And this is the statement they got from the Prime Minister's
00:05:16.180Press Secretary. The priority of our government is ensuring fairness for every generation of
00:05:22.440Canadian. The government is focused on building more homes, making life more affordable, and
00:05:28.200growing our economy. So I wasn't even hearing like a remote attempt at an answer to the question
00:05:36.200that was asked. It's about fairness for every generation. They're still doing the, every time
00:05:40.940they say generational fairness, you have to take a drink. You'll be passed out drunk by, you know,
00:05:45.2009.30 a.m. on a Monday. But you know what? That is the rule that Justin Trudeau and Christia Freeland
00:05:50.160and all have put out here. Now, the polling, interestingly enough, is showing that Canadians
00:05:55.320are not going on board with the budget. They're not going along with the spending, even the capital
00:06:00.260gains tax, which the Liberals thought would be really good at driving that wedge against the
00:06:04.880so-called wealthy, the 1%, all of that. Even the capital gains tax hasn't really attracted the
00:06:10.800level of support that the Liberals want. 74% of Canadians polled in an innovative research study
00:06:17.200done the other day, said the budget will have a negative impact on the economy. 74%, 16% say it'll
00:06:24.920be positive. So when you put out your flagship budget that you think is going to be the piece
00:06:29.840of legislation that will turn around your flagging fortunes, and you get 16% of people in the country
00:06:36.500to say, yeah, I think that'll make things better, you have got a massive, massive problem on your
00:06:42.560hands. The Conservatives are on track to receive well over 40% of the vote. And this is distributed
00:06:48.580across the country. This isn't just in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Upper BC. This is in parts of the
00:06:55.760country that the Conservatives will need if they're going to have a majority. Now look,
00:06:59.880the Conservatives have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in the past. The 2019 election
00:07:04.360was a winnable one. This was the Justin Trudeau blackface election. The 2021 election was a
00:07:11.180winnable one. This was the so-called unnecessary election. So yes, conservatives could absolutely
00:07:16.720bungle this, but if they have the right team of candidates, if the leader stays on track and stays
00:07:22.320on message, that part is especially critical, then we are able to, I think, turn things around a
00:07:28.660little bit. But what's fascinating about all of this is how unwilling Justin Trudeau is to look
00:07:34.740in the mirror. And I am not in the business of giving liberal members of parliament advice,
00:07:39.740And I should say they're not in the business of listening, even if I were to.
00:07:43.240But liberal MPs have a tool in their toolbox that we never hear discussed.
00:07:47.940They could give Justin Trudeau the old Aaron O'Toole.
00:07:50.380They could give him the bum's rush out of caucus.
00:07:52.420They have something called the Reform Act.
00:07:54.380As MPs, they are able to initiate a vote on Justin Trudeau's leadership,
00:07:59.600and they could have him out the door in one single caucus meeting.
00:08:03.780They could have a letter on a Monday or a Tuesday.
00:08:06.780they could send the letter if it was signed by, I forget the threshold, but a certain number of
00:08:10.860MPs, then they could put this to a vote at a caucus meeting. And Justin Trudeau could literally
00:08:15.580be out the door as leader in nothing flat. But they're not doing that. They're not doing that.
00:08:22.780And I wonder how long liberal MPs are going to sit down and accept what Justin Trudeau is telling
00:08:28.340them here, which is, no, no, I have a plan. We're going to turn it around. It's going to work out
00:08:32.620great. Don't you worry, guys. It's all going to be fine. Obviously, the MP that leaked the details
00:08:37.760of this caucus meeting to the Hilltimes wasn't satisfied. We know there have been a couple of
00:08:42.020other little ones that we are going to see here as well. But what's fascinating to me,
00:08:49.920fascinating to me in all of this is that we have not seen more liberals just for self-preservation
00:08:56.200alone, for self-preservation alone, say, you know what? We want to lengthen our careers.
00:09:05.120We want to lengthen the time that we have around here. Some of them may have just thrown in the
00:09:09.520towel and they say, look, we know we're not going to win again. We know we're done. Let's just ride
00:09:12.780this out until the bitter end. Other ones though are not so easily hoodwinked, you'd think. There
00:09:19.400are some MPs. Let me just go back to those 338 projections for a moment. Liberals could go to
00:09:24.60067 seats. Now there's a range there, anywhere from 50 to 94, but 67 is kind of the sweet spot right
00:09:31.160now that the 338 projections are saying. So if you're one of those 67 and you want to make sure
00:09:37.580you get reelected, you need a liberal party that's going to put its best foot forward.
00:09:42.980And I've always maintained that Justin Trudeau's biggest threat is going to come not from Canadian
00:09:47.880voters, but from his own caucus. That was my theory. I've started softening on the theory a
00:09:52.700little bit because there has been no movement in that caucus. But my goodness, for just their own
00:09:58.740survival, the liberals need to get rid of this guy. Now, that would probably not be what Pierre
00:10:03.820Polyev wants. If you're Pierre Polyev and the conservative team, you're probably champing at
00:10:08.240the bit to get a liberal led by Justin Trudeau, a liberal party led by Trudeau, because then you
00:10:14.860can be the change party. You can be the anti-Trudeau when clearly this guy is not resonating.
00:10:20.180If you caught my show last week, I was talking about how hilarious it is that Justin Trudeau
00:10:24.620thinks the problem is that Canadians haven't heard from him enough. So he's been going on
00:10:28.760this podcast tour. He was doing the podcast with Vox last week. He did one with Freakonomics.
00:10:35.360I should have actually pulled something in his interview with them that I found hilarious. He
00:10:43.360called himself a social activist a social activist this is what he said the exact quote here i'm
00:10:52.400ultimately a social activist who's going to look to how i can have a positive impact on the world
00:11:00.400you are the prime minister of canada you are the head of government of this country
00:11:04.160you have won three elections you've had a tremendous opportunity to put whatever change
00:11:08.800in place that you want and he is still trying to say oh i'm just this left-wing progressive activist
00:11:13.920type which i mean look maybe you want to say he is but the thing about activists is that activists
00:11:18.720are not actor i mean he's an actor in the the sense of you know drama teacher but uh the thing
00:11:23.760about him is that he is in a position where he could be actioning things that he wants and the
00:11:29.040progressives i think were fed up with him even before people on the right were because the
00:11:33.040progressives had such high hopes for him that he didn't deliver on it's like okay he gets in
00:11:37.360he legalized his pot. Everything else just kind of goes by the wayside. He hasn't reconciled with
00:11:42.000Indigenous people. He hasn't fixed gender inequality. He hasn't done all of this. It's
00:11:46.020just been window dressing, and people have absolutely tired of it. Now, I do want to do,
00:11:50.940just before we move on to our next guest here, I want to do a little bit of an I told you so
00:11:56.080moment. So last weekend, this past weekend, Vashi Kapelos on CTV did a sit-down interview
00:12:03.440with, or sorry, she did a, she's CTV, yeah, I think she's CTV, sorry, I mixed it up.
00:12:08.700She did a sit-down interview with the president of Poland, and she asked a question that I think
00:12:14.380is a very well-suited one for leaders of European nations. This is that clip.
00:12:19.620I want to ask you a bit about your visit specifically here to Canada. You mentioned
00:12:22.640defense spending. I'll get to that in a moment. You're here at an energy conference, and I have
00:12:27.720spoken to a number of other European leaders in the past few months about Canadian energy in
00:12:32.540particular and efforts underway in Europe to wean itself off of any kind of
00:12:36.800dependence on Russia. Poland has been largely successful in that so far. I'm
00:12:40.820wondering though when it comes to in particular liquefied natural gas, if that
00:12:44.360is a Canadian product Poland is interested in? Of course, yes. If only
00:12:51.860Canada is ready to supply its energy gas to Poland, we have got our energy
00:12:57.680terminal in Świnoujštje right now. It has got reloading capacities. We're extending them. We
00:13:03.480are extending the terminal and we also have plans to set up another LNG terminal in the part of
00:13:11.420Gdańsk. If Canada offered its LNG to us and if this gas could be bought attractively at attractive
00:13:21.140prices, well, we have been receiving gas from US companies. We have been receiving gas also from
00:13:26.500Qatar. In the same way, we would be ready to negotiate, to talk and to accept Canadian gas
00:13:33.380as well. Even more so that there is an investment connected with one of the LNG terminals on the
00:13:40.000eastern coast of Canada. And there is our PKA Arlen, our concern, our company participating in
00:13:46.800that. So he's saying there, oh, absolutely. Yeah, we love Canadian LNG. We'd like to buy it right
00:13:53.600now we have to get some from the US but also some from Qatar we'd rather buy from Canada let's get a
00:13:58.440good market price if only the Canadian government were willing to offer it and this is a great
00:14:03.180question it was a phenomenal answer not all that a surprising answer energy independence and energy
00:14:08.440security are crucial in Europe countries that don't want to have to be reliant on Russian oil
00:14:14.440and gas will be able to buy from elsewhere if only elsewhere is willing to sell it so Justin
00:14:20.580Trudeau, he's the guy that gets up there and says, oh, there's no business case. But why I found that
00:14:25.280interview with the Polish, the head of Poland so fascinating is because I had said something two
00:14:31.020weeks ago at the Canada Strong and Free Network conference that proved eerily prescient.
00:14:36.960I must say, I've been quite surprised that Justin Trudeau keeps inviting European heads of
00:14:42.680government and state here, because every time they come, they all do an interview with, you know,
00:14:46.880Vashy Kapelos or something and say, oh, I'd love to buy LNG. And then Justin Trudeau has to come
00:14:50.740out and say, oh, there's no business case. Am I right or am I right? I even got the interviewer
00:14:57.320right. I said, oh yeah, every time the European heads of state come, it's Vashy Kapelos they sit
00:15:01.260down with and say they want to buy Canadian LNG. And not two weeks later, here we have
00:15:05.620the Polish president coming. And he's the president, right? Not the prime minister.
00:15:11.120I get them mixed up in these new fandangled republics and all of that. The constitutional
00:15:16.260monarchy is the right one. He is the president. But the fascinating thing is this is literally
00:15:22.540happening. Every time one of these European heads of government or heads of state comes here,
00:15:27.480they're asked the very obvious, very sensible question. They give the obvious, sensible answer.
00:15:31.800And in the end, we are all forced to deal with the fact that Canada is the one putting barriers
00:15:36.820and roadblocks here. I want to shift gears to an entirely different topic. You may have seen
00:15:42.140in Montreal that the very worst of American academia has been imported to Canada in the
00:15:49.160sense that there is now an encampment at McGill University in Montreal that is inhabited and
00:15:55.220occupied by these anti-Israel protesters that are making all sorts of demands, among others,
00:16:01.160that the university divests its endowment funds from anything connected to Israel, that it severs
00:16:06.600ties as a school with Israeli enterprise. And we've also heard reports of very anti-Semitic
00:16:12.620rhetoric and statements, students being harassed for no other reason than their Jewish identity
00:16:18.140and in the values that a lot of Jews, most Jews have of supporting the state of Israel's right
00:16:25.020to exist. And what was fascinating about this is that McGill has kind of just said, oh, well,
00:16:30.300oh, I don't know, all shocks. They've given very little in the way of any sort of pushback as we
00:16:36.180have an encampment that is now entrenching itself and will soon I suspect balloon to other campuses
00:16:41.760Barbara Kay is a columnist with the National Post and the Epoch Times and actually got to see her
00:16:46.520over the weekend briefly at the Civitas conference Barbara always lovely to see you thanks so much
00:16:51.880for coming on today a pleasure a pleasure Andrew oh we uh you're muted there oh perfect I got your
00:16:58.120audio now let me ask you Barbara first off about whether you're surprised by this I mean you've
00:17:02.940lived in montreal for i don't know about all your life but certainly for many years and you've seen
00:17:07.420what's happened since october 7th was this unexpected at mcgill no not at all because
00:17:14.140uh this is kind of like a meme right now uh in fact i can't believe there would be a university
00:17:19.740campus um anywhere in north america that would consider itself uh respectable if it didn't have
00:17:26.700something like this going on an encampment uh because that's what uh that's what is done to
00:17:31.420show what a great social activist you are and especially uh it would be especially uh
00:17:37.820anticipated at universities where there's a large jewish presence as there is at mcgill so
00:17:42.940no it doesn't surprise me at all how about mcgill's response to this because they've basically
00:17:50.060in a lot of ways it looks like they've washed their hands of it and we had uh students that
00:17:54.140were sent out through the student association which is supposed to be i don't know advocating
00:17:58.460on things like tuition fees instead send out students the death toll in Gaza, which based on
00:18:04.860very, very sketchy numbers from the Gazan Health Authority, there we go, just basically pinning
00:18:10.780the deaths of 31,000 people on Israel. And this is the type of rhetoric that students at McGill
00:18:17.560are being bombarded with. Well, you're right. They're not specific about who's dying or how
00:18:25.080many, it might be that 30,000 have been killed, but what they don't specify is that according to
00:18:31.200Israel, 13,000 of them have been terrorists and Hamas has not denied that. So the ratio of those
00:18:38.620killed to civilians killed to militants is actually in urban warfare of this kind quite low.
00:18:46.080But, you know, they'll tell you all kinds of things because they get their information from
00:18:51.200sources that are not reliable. They are determined to make their case for support against Israel,
00:18:59.040that's their main concern is to call Israel out as an evil nation and that's the message.
00:19:06.160And they're delighted to be active like this on campus. This is what students do. You may remember
00:19:12.400in 1968 there were similar demonstrations against the Vietnam War and they were also taking over
00:19:18.480the campuses in fact that was our first experience of students actually taking over campuses and uh
00:19:24.720the administration losing control of the uh of what was happening on their own campuses
00:19:30.720of course in those days the message was peace and love and now it's intifada and hate so that's
00:19:37.120changed um but um i did expect it and i agree with you that the administration is acting in a very
00:19:43.920namby-pamby way because they're not quite sure what to do and they're afraid to take muscular
00:19:49.060action as is required. Well and one of the things that and again you always end up when you're
00:19:54.480talking about any display of this nature with this whataboutism and you know a lot of people
00:19:59.020that had no issue with the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa are saying they've got they want police
00:20:03.020to come in and crack skulls here and the flip side people that wanted police to crack skulls
00:20:07.320in Ottawa with the Freedom Convoy are saying oh no no this is the right to protest so I think
00:20:11.440there's hypocrisy all around. But the one point I'll stress here is that universities have a
00:20:15.820demonstrable track record of treating different demonstrations differently. Like I bet if the
00:20:20.380McGill University Pro-Life Society were to stage a, they would be gone in no time. And here we have
00:20:28.000an encampment of this nature. It's very anti-Israel, bordering on, depending on the rhetoric of the
00:20:33.360individual person, anti-Semitic. And McGill is saying, well, we'd like to come up with a resolution.
00:20:37.440we'll try to talk we'll try to engage and that's not a group that they afford to other or right
00:20:41.760they afford to other groups no they're afraid of this group uh they're not afraid to act as you say
00:20:47.680uh with politically incorrect groups such as pro-lifers um and uh they certainly wouldn't
00:20:54.080tolerate for one second uh you know people that that are saying were that were anti-immigration
00:21:00.000or uh in any way in any way asserting themselves as as white canadians or anything like that uh
00:21:06.960There's a set menu for who is considered racialized and who's considered the victim, and the Palestinians are one of them, and it does not occur to them that these expressions of hatred for Jews, because Jews are not on the victim list, to say, you know, for this one time, we have to agree, the numbers of anti-Semitic incidents and hate incidents are so high,
00:21:35.540I think we're going to just have to include this group of Jews on our campus as amongst the racialized and we can't let this continue to happen. In the United States, we have seen states, Florida and Texas, where the governors have said, no, this just isn't happening.
00:21:54.320You private universities have codes of conduct.
00:22:17.940That's too bad for Jews, for most Jews.
00:22:21.200I think you froze there for a moment, or at least it did on, oh, I got you back now. Sorry, I might be on my end here. This is the glory of doing things live. But I'll ask you about the, well, okay, let me take a step back here. If we talk about what's led us to this point, there have been people sounding the alarm about the increasing rhetoric, the ratcheting up of language.
00:22:42.640At first it was, not at first, but early on we saw people protesting businesses, especially in Toronto, that happened to have a peripheral connection to Israel or no connection at all.
00:22:52.540It was just connected to someone who was Jewish.
00:22:54.840And then you go to this protest against McGill.
00:22:57.080Of all the people complicit in what Israel is doing, if you want to believe that Israel is in the wrong here, I put McGill University very low on that list.
00:23:05.600So the idea of targeting your ire at McGill when you have an issue with Israel and the IDF and the Mossad and all of that is absurd.
00:23:14.400And even if they got what they want or what they say they want and McGill were to divest its funds from Israel, which is not even handled by the university.
00:23:21.460They have an external fund there and sever ties with Israeli academics.