00:00:50.580So, yeah, that's what we're heading into this weekend.
00:00:52.800What are you guys up to in your neck of the woods?
00:00:55.860Definitely nothing as exciting as bull riding, that's for sure.
00:00:58.640You know, basement living, you know, it's great.
00:01:02.500Well, I was going to say, maybe Noah this weekend can do some patchwork on his basement there and repair what appears to be some holes in the ceiling.
00:01:10.200I'm glad it's not in frame right now, but, yeah, there's definitely a hole in frame, actually, now that I'm putting my glasses on.
00:02:04.780No, I was going to actually try to avoid them as much as I as much as I can.
00:02:08.960But, you know, you never know if something good comes up.
00:02:11.860I might pop my head in and see what's going on.
00:02:13.780Well, if you go to buy some poutine on Spark Street or something, maybe they could come out and cover it breathlessly, because at least that would be Canadian content.
00:02:22.360I wanted to bring this up because it was one of those things where I have a lot of Canadian friends and family who are now suddenly talking about the current U.S. vice president and what we're all assuming to be the presumptive nominee for the Democrats in the United States of America.
00:02:38.880They're all suddenly talking about Kamala Harris, like a lot, like way more than I was expecting for like a VP.
00:02:45.720Right. Even as far as our interest in American politics goes.
00:02:49.180And then I was seeing on True North that apparently more than 60 stories on Kamala Harris have been covered at the CBC.
00:02:58.100Like, I don't care about private broadcasting.
00:03:02.340So, yeah, the CBC's Kamala Mania, as it is headlined, 68 stories on Harris campaign in just one month.
00:03:10.360So quick math, that's more than two a day.
00:03:12.820The reason why I've got an issue with this, of course, is because we want to defund the CBC because the CBC cost taxpayers $1.4 billion per year.
00:03:22.140And every time we tell them, you know what, you guys should really be defunded.
00:03:33.820Like, Noah, what went through your mind when you saw that headline?
00:03:38.060Well, I just thought, like, the people who try to justify the CBC's existence don't really have an argument that the CBC should be, you know, promoting American contests,
00:03:46.520especially, you know, skewing their coverage in order to coverage one presidential candidate over the another.
00:03:52.520I just went on, I just popped on the CBC's website before recording, and I saw that, you know, they're doing extensive coverage of the DNC.
00:03:59.520You know, they're talking about Kamala Harris and how to pronounce her name correctly.
00:04:03.960And, you know, they're talking about Michelle Obama's, you know, fantastic speech.
00:04:07.840And then the one story about Trump is a negative story.
00:04:11.520It's basically bashing his campaign for, you know, a mess up or whatever, which is fine, you know.
00:04:16.020So if President Trump is making a mistake and Kamala Harris is making a mistake, then go ahead, cover it.
00:04:21.360But if you're only covering Donald Trump's mistakes and not his triumphs, and you're only covering Kamala Harris's triumphs and not her, you know, mistakes,
00:04:29.500then you're really, you know, showing that you have a bias.
00:04:32.720And even though the CBC has an American bias, they shouldn't even be covering American politics to begin with.
00:04:38.980You have a lot of other Canadian news outlets who do just as good of a job, if not a better job, at covering American politics.
00:04:46.020And you have thousands upon thousands of media organizations in the United States that does a good enough job at covering their own country.
00:04:55.780The CBC's mandate is to cover Canadian topics.
00:05:00.000So I think that, in my mind, when the CBC, they're publishing stories about Kamala Harris incessantly, I'm like, where's the stories about Justin Trudeau?
00:05:09.900Where's the stories about Jagmeet Singh and Premier Ford and the people who are actually in power in Canada and the people that actually matter to Canadians,
00:05:18.240not just the, you know, the Americans who are, you know, doing their own thing, you know, good on them, but they're not Canada.
00:05:26.160Yeah, that's a great point. It kind of reminds me of what their, I don't know what their primetime stuff is like lately.
00:05:31.340I know that very few Canadians are watching it, but it reminds me back when I was a kid where they used to import American primetime shows
00:05:38.280in a desperate attempt to get people to watch Canadian, the Canadian channel, even though it was American shows.
00:05:44.500I kind of have some sympathy for that, trying to get some eyeballs.
00:05:48.040But when it comes to actual news coverage, they always say, but who will defend Canada?
00:05:53.520They always bring it up as their founding mandate, which it was in language.
00:05:57.740In fact, CBC Radio was created back in the 30s and 40s in order, ostensibly, to thwart the big powerhouse radio stations coming out of places like CBS New York and Chicago.
00:06:09.640Those were some powerhouse radio stations.
00:06:11.720And so all of a sudden, Canada was like, oh, we need our own soap operas.
00:06:15.860Then they started covering the war and then we were off to the races.
00:06:18.600Harrison, what did you think about that headline when you saw that Kamala Harris is getting more than 60 stories covered in one month on the Canadian broadcaster?
00:06:27.340Well, in contrast, Justin Trudeau was only mentioned 18 times in that same amount of time, in that one month period.
00:06:33.440So Harris gets 68 mentions and Trudeau gets 18.
00:06:37.480And it's pretty obvious what they're trying to do here.
00:06:39.660But I want to show you some of the headlines for the coverage that the CBC is pumping out about Kamala Harris.
00:07:11.360Well, when she famously said that you just fall out of a coconut tree.
00:07:14.500They're trying to make that seem as though that is, you know, that is one of Kamala Harris's great examples of her legendary oratory skills.
00:07:22.240We all know Kamala Harris is going to be in the pantheon of great public speakers.
00:07:27.380Falling out of the coconut tree is one of her greatest hits.
00:07:29.680So that's the origin of that particular meme.
00:07:32.440But again, going back to something Noah mentioned, which is the argument that we hear from the most loyal defenders of the CBC is that if there is no CBC, well, then there's going to be no local news coverage of rural areas in Canada.
00:07:46.240There's going to be no important coverage in French language.
00:07:49.820Who's going to be reporting on the stories, on indigenous stories and stories in the far north?
00:07:56.020Well, this is a clear example that even that argument carries no weight because, like I said at the very beginning, if Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, only gets 18 mentions in a month and Harris gets 68,
00:08:06.080imagine how many times they mention the Manitoba Premier or Danielle Smith or local political leaders that actually matter to Canadians.
00:09:56.660I think they've got 11 indigenous languages that they report in.
00:10:00.280And they get a tiny fraction of taxpayers' money.
00:10:02.880It's really just a one-time thing where they have to have like their summer festival day that taxpayers contribute to.
00:10:08.520All the rest of the operations are paid for through their own money that they generate.
00:10:12.840So the CBC trying to use this argument of, oh, well, who will cover indigenous culture?
00:10:17.440It doesn't stand up to scrutiny when you look at the actual numbers.
00:10:21.760With this kind of coverage given to Kamala Harris, we're entering the territory of Harris having to give away some poutines to some of these CBC journalists.
00:10:30.240If you recall, that was the gift that Trudeau gave to David Cochran for near sycophantic coverage.
00:10:37.460Maybe it'll be a coconut poutine concoction will be given to the CBC journalists for all of their very, very helpful coverage for the Harris campaign.
00:11:16.580It's quiet in Canada, unlike the United States.
00:11:18.780So Senate appointments really seem to be breaking news in this country.
00:11:23.760And Charles Adler was appointed by Justin Trudeau to be the next independent senator, a liberal senator.
00:11:31.800And that surprised some of the people who knew Charles Adler before 2019, 2018, say, when he was a conservative.
00:11:40.740He's now, of course, far more progressive.
00:11:43.860You would even consider him to be – most people would consider him to be pretty much on the far left at this point with what he has been tweeting about, the things that he's been talking about on his radio show.
00:11:53.840So he has – he's really kind of – well, he's a changed man.
00:11:57.940And he's going to change even more because he's just been appointed to sit in the Senate.
00:12:01.660And there have been some hilarious examples of Charles Adler, well, let's just say, not being so independent.
00:12:08.160Let's show a couple of these examples here for the audience who are watching on YouTube and Facebook.
00:13:48.580Like, I'd have to really think hard because I was doing hits on his show and booking him for my old radio shows back when he was in Winnipeg at CGOB before Sun News Network ever got started.
00:14:00.300And then I worked with him from startup to shutdown at Sun News Network.
00:14:08.720He worked well with everybody as far as I know.
00:14:11.720And then after Sun News Network was shut down, I did his radio show, his national radio show, at least once a week.
00:14:19.380And so I know a lot of my colleagues at the CTV did his show once a week.
00:14:23.060And I think it's I'm giving all of this context because I think it's important for for truth and facts.
00:14:28.060And so that is the way that things were before.
00:14:32.500Needless to say, there's been a remarkable change, a really notable change, so much so that even in the way he would describe people like that, like forget about the partisan, forget about ideology, just kind of describing a politician like that, like that wasn't really his jam.
00:14:49.600Like he might do that sort of thing, maybe for Margaret Thatcher when really pressed and feeling like nostalgic, but not just your everyday minister.
00:14:59.860And so my takeaway from this as a Taxpayers Federation is that there's so many people who are now upset about this on both.
00:15:08.260I would describe as the left and the right for different reasons.
00:15:10.640I think it highlights the idea that perhaps it's time to go back to a triple E Senate.
00:15:16.220So Preston Manning, former founder of the Reform Party, he wanted a triple E Senate.
00:15:21.620He wanted it to be equal, elected and effective.
00:15:27.540I'm going to defend the Senate a little tiny bit here, just a smidge when it comes to the idea of independent versus liberal versus PC and all that jazz.
00:15:38.320The Senate, in two separate occasions that I can remember in the last four years, did tap the brakes on a couple of pieces of legislation that would probably be important to True North viewers.
00:15:52.080The one that sticks out in my mind, and I'm going from memory, so please forgive me, is during the Emergencies Act.
00:15:59.480So folks might remember, as far as I can recall, Emergencies Act was rushing through, went through the House of Commons, blah, blah, blah.
00:16:05.680The folks that hit the brakes on that, if I recall correctly, one of them was a Kretchen-appointed liberal senator that said, um, are we really sure about this?
00:16:14.760And now, of course, that we have the federal judge ruling, survey says you shouldn't have done that and you guys overstepped your bounds and blah, blah, blah.
00:16:22.180So I can hear the argument for the idea of sober second thought, but man, when you've got $175,000 per year after six years of service, a huge pension, no way to recall people, it starts getting really unaccountable really fast.
00:16:37.480And I can see why people want to go back to Triple E. Noah, did you want to get in on this?
00:16:40.740Yeah, I think my biggest problem with this story is the sort of deception of it all.
00:16:46.500I think that when Charles Adler declares himself as a conservative, to everyone who knows what he believes nowadays, he's clearly not a conservative.
00:16:56.260I mean, the Conservative Party's leader, Pierre Polyev, you know, say what you will about him, I have some criticism about him, but he's clearly a conservative.
00:17:04.120He's believed in conservatism his entire life, if you read his old essay or whatever.
00:17:08.780But Charles Adler clearly isn't interested in conservatism, at least not anymore.
00:17:13.100And it's completely fine for your political beliefs to evolve over time.
00:17:17.200You know, if your political beliefs don't evolve over time, you're probably an ideologue, right?
00:17:21.280But the problem is, is that if your political beliefs evolve, you should change your label to correspond with your beliefs.
00:17:29.580For example, Charles Adler is not a conservative.
00:17:31.600He should probably call himself a liberal or, you know, a centrist or something like that.
00:17:38.600So I think not only does that bother me a little bit, but also the fact that he's being appointed to a Senate group, the independents, that are mostly comprised of liberals,
00:17:48.920or whether they're appointed by Justin Trudeau or appointed by past liberal prime ministers, which for me, I think is deceptive.
00:17:58.100Because, as was mentioned before, these independent senators more times than not vote with the government.
00:18:06.320And usually these exceptions come from liberals from the Jean Cartier era, for example, where the liberals were a bit more liberal, not illiberal, like they are now.
00:18:17.760So it just seems like Justin Trudeau is trying to deceive the Canadian public when he calls these senators independent.
00:18:24.720They're clearly liberals, even though they don't caucus with the liberals.
00:18:33.560So it's a bit deceptive to call yourself an independent senator when you vote along with the Liberal Party all the time.
00:18:42.240It's deceptive to call yourself a conservative when you're bashing conservatives all the time and praising, you know, liberal minister Sean Fraser.
00:18:48.740And it really does a disservice to trust in Canadian institutions because when Canadians see that these independent senators are not acting independently, when Canadians see that the senator, Charles Adler, who self-declares a conservative, isn't, you know, voting in a very conservative manner, it undermines credibility in our institutions and the people that run them.
00:19:10.580I just wanted to note, I think, I think the jury's still out.
00:19:13.900Aren't we still out on whether or not this will be confirmed?
00:19:16.240I thought I saw something about this is not yet confirmed, whether or not Mr. Adler will become a senator.
00:19:21.140Well, I know that, yeah, the prime minister's office, they sent out a press release saying that Adler and the other senator, which we should probably get to, they were basically confirmed by the Senate committee that basically deals with appointments and the prime minister also announced it.
00:19:38.600So I think it's more or less a done deal.
00:19:41.320First nation, the Manitoba First Nations leaders actually have criticized the appointment and have called on, on the government to rescind Charles Adler's appointment.
00:19:50.660So even, even praising the liberals and praising the left like this has not managed to get him on the side of some of these First Nations chiefs.
00:19:58.880But I do think we're being a little harsh on Charles Adler.
00:20:01.460After all, it's important to recognize that he is a self-proclaimed talk radio legend.
00:20:07.400This is a famous, famous Charles Adler tweet calling himself a legend, a talk radio legend.
00:20:14.100So, you know, it's important to, to, to make sure we give him, we give him his, his due as, as a legend.
00:20:20.380He is a legend amongst us and maybe he will elevate the quality in the Senate and bring in more talk radio legend, legendary moments.
00:20:26.900I wish I had that much self-confidence on myself, you know, I don't know if you want to call that hubris or, you know, just some other devious word in the thesaurus, but I'm definitely not going to, you're never going to see that on my Twitter.
00:20:44.020So did we, I wanted to stress that I think a lot of the pushback apart from people, people who are political nerds or news nerds, all of us included.
00:20:52.060Um, I think the average public is probably annoyed most about this because of the lack of accountability and the lack, like the lack of, uh, cost effectiveness.
00:21:02.080I think a lot of people are still struggling right now.
00:21:04.800We still see record demand for food banks.
00:21:07.180I always check the MNP, uh, bankruptcy numbers and where they ask people, how close are you to not being able to make your ends meet?
00:21:15.64050% half of Canadians are within 200 bucks of not being able to make their minimum payments.
00:21:22.740I'm not talking paying off your credit card or your line of credit.
00:21:25.760I mean, making your minimum payments and making rent and just enough to have food half.
00:21:32.160And so then when they see senators willy nilly making 175 grand plus expenses, like they get catered lunches, they get all these really fancy things on Parliament Hill.
00:21:41.660I think that really grinds people's gears.
00:21:43.520And so I think that's also why this is making news apart from him being, I think, 30 something plus year long broadcaster.
00:21:51.020So there's so much data, so many records on there.
00:21:57.940When Canadians see like, you know, these senators making, uh, let these lavish paychecks, uh, it's not really something that, you know, people can relate to.
00:22:05.220Uh, especially when you're appointing senators that, you know, uh, over their lifetimes, uh, donated to the liberal party, uh, thousands of thousands of dollars.
00:22:12.800And that's, uh, the case with the, uh, Senate appointee Tracy Mugley, who donated to the liberals over 220 times in her lifetime, 221 times, uh, to be specific.
00:22:23.760Between 2006 and 2020, uh, she donated about $18,000, over almost $19,000 to the liberal party, whether that's to her, uh, local EDA, whether that's to the liberal party proper, or in, uh, various liberal leadership elections.
00:22:40.980Uh, some of the highest, uh, donations that she, uh, gave was, uh, I think over $1,000.
00:22:46.320She also gave, uh, almost $1,000 in non-monetary donations.
00:22:50.320So I guess, like, she's buying a lot of coffees for her liberal MPs or something like that.
00:23:14.260So I guess, you know, Trudeau had to, like, you know, get one of his own in there because, uh, you know, she clearly couldn't do it, uh, on the, with the backing of the Canadian people.
00:23:22.680Uh, but yeah, I mean, this is the type of, these are the type of people that are being appointed to the Senate.
00:23:27.140People who have, uh, loads of money to just donate to political parties, uh, and, you know, sitting as independents, even though they're clearly liberal partisans.
00:23:34.820I think that really erodes trust in our institutions, especially the, uh, unelected Senate.
00:23:50.260No, I was just going to say that actually, that when, uh, when, when Justin Trudeau is eventually, uh, ousted as prime minister and the government switches over to the conservative side, it's going to be the same thing.
00:24:00.720It's going to go to people who have donated the conservative party, who have been party loyalists for many years, failed candidates.
00:24:08.960And, you know, it's, uh, it's fun to criticize it now, but it will be topic of conversation for a show on the other side of the debate in a couple of years time when Pierre Poliev makes an appointment like this, but on the conservative side.
00:24:21.940And so it's just going to be what it's going to be.
00:24:24.020And, uh, I think it's fitting to end the, end the show with, uh, with this subject.
00:24:28.700We have our taxpayer, uh, our taxpayer specialist hosting us.
00:24:32.940So this is like the taxpayer story right now in Canada.
00:24:38.760So hopefully the next show will not involve any of my former colleagues or TV hosts, but for some reason it's like a blue light special on these folks.
00:24:48.120So Tom Clark, uh, I loved working with him.
00:25:12.380And we have some of these folks in key positions to be fair around the world and New York city, definitely a key city still around the world.
00:25:20.140The problem here is that there's this residence slash office slash like it's a map dot.