Off the Record - How can it get any worse for Trudeau？

00:00:00.000 Went and checked out the Reagan movie over the weekend, because, of course, that's what cool people do.

00:00:04.580 It's a biopic.

00:00:05.800 They didn't really miss anything.

00:00:07.600 The only element I wish that they would have kept in there was the challenger.

00:00:11.400 William, I think you're the only one old enough on this call to remember the challenger blowing up.

00:00:15.980 But that was the only part that they missed.

00:00:17.440 Are you guys planning on seeing it?

00:00:21.180 Go ahead, Cosman.

00:00:22.760 From what you've told me about it, absolutely.

00:00:25.480 And Dennis Quaid is in it.

00:00:26.760 I mean, he was on the Joe Rogan podcast, and it was a great appearance.

00:00:30.840 And he seems to have a lot of sympathies that I think we all share.

00:00:35.160 I'm absolutely going to see it.

00:00:36.720 I adore Reagan.

00:00:38.280 And that challenger speech, I remember it, where he ends with that poem where he says,

00:00:43.020 they slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.

00:00:46.500 I think it was just a wonderful speech he gave.

00:00:48.900 Yeah.

00:00:49.640 Speaking of that, actually, the one element that I didn't see Peggy Noonan in there,

00:00:54.100 which was one of his writers at the time.

00:00:56.760 But I must say, start to finish, it was reverent is the term that I would use.

00:01:02.280 And the look on Mr. Quaid's face at the very end of it,

00:01:04.900 when, of course, we all knew that he was leaving us and he wrote that final goodbye letter,

00:01:08.680 there wasn't a dry eye in the theater.

00:01:10.880 And Mr. Quaid did a really good job.

00:01:13.120 Anyway, I wanted to ask you guys if you were going to go watch it,

00:01:16.640 because I went and watched it by myself, and I thought they did a really good job.

00:01:20.440 But we've got a lot going on in Canada right now,

00:01:22.880 so we should probably get this thing started.

00:01:24.400 Welcome to Off the Record.

00:01:32.180 My name is Chris Sims.

00:01:33.200 I'm the Alberta Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

00:01:36.120 You might remember me from such shows as the Andrew Lawton Show here on True North.

00:01:40.280 But Andrew's out there busy pounding lawn signs in and kissing babies,

00:01:44.280 so we wish him all the best.

00:01:45.520 I'm joined now by two of my friends, William McBeth and Cosman Georgia, both with True North.

00:01:51.360 Guys, we have a lot to talk about here.

00:01:54.300 Mostly, mostly, right now, Ottawa is all in a Twitter.

00:01:59.560 The Terrarium Police is in a Twitter.

00:02:01.900 Are we now closer than we were to a federal election?

00:02:05.620 Because did we just watch a big breakup between Jagmeet Singh and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau?

00:02:12.160 I'm not sure.

00:02:13.200 Who wanted to take that up?

00:02:14.420 William, do you want to jump in on that?

00:02:16.420 Yeah, no.

00:02:17.380 I mean, Neil Sedaka had a great song called Breaking Up Is Hard To Do,

00:02:21.660 and I think he may have written it about Jagmeet Singh and Justin Trudeau,

00:02:25.400 because it took Jagmeet Singh years to break up with this,

00:02:29.500 I mean, maybe not abusive partner, but someone who was doing him absolutely no good.

00:02:34.400 So I think we have a clip of Mr. Singh's goodbye letter to Mr. Trudeau.

00:02:41.320 Today, I notified the Prime Minister that I've ripped up the Supply and Confidence Agreement.

00:02:46.320 Canadians are fighting a battle, a battle for the future of the middle class.

00:02:50.340 Justin Trudeau has proven again and again, he will always cave to corporate greed.

00:02:54.760 The Liberals have let people down.

00:02:57.660 They don't deserve another chance.

00:03:00.020 There is an even bigger battle ahead.

00:03:02.840 The threat of Pierre Polyev and conservative cuts from workers,

00:03:08.220 from retirees, from young people, from patients, from families.

00:03:13.100 He will cut in order to give more to big corporations and wealthy CEOs.

00:03:19.100 You know, it's so funny.

00:03:20.700 You have to watch Mr. Singh and in some ways feel just a little bit bad for him,

00:03:25.420 because the guy so clearly in over his head being the leader of a political party,

00:03:30.940 he just gave away all of his political power to keep Justin Trudeau in office.

00:03:37.180 And, you know, every time he came out to complain about Justin Trudeau and the Liberals doing this or doing that,

00:03:43.980 you know, the first question put to him is,

00:03:45.520 but you're the one keeping him in power.

00:03:48.100 You're the one enabling his government to survive.

00:03:51.000 You want to stop Mr. Trudeau?

00:03:52.860 Well, you're the one who has the power to do it.

00:03:55.480 So why won't you?

00:03:56.500 And his answer was always something like,

00:03:59.580 and he had no justification.

00:04:03.040 So the fact that he's now finally ripped it up,

00:04:04.800 it must be, in my opinion,

00:04:06.360 a reflection of those very low polling numbers that the New Democrats are seeing right now.

00:04:10.700 So, Cosmin, what do you think?

00:04:12.680 Well, look, I also wonder how that conversation went down.

00:04:15.920 Did Jagmeet Singh call Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with the same serious, like, tone and tough guy attitude he had in that video?

00:04:23.880 Or was it more bittersweet, like, traditional breakups go?

00:04:27.920 And it's funny because this is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's second separation.

00:04:33.220 He separated from his political wife, Jagmeet Singh.

00:04:37.600 And it's, I can't take him seriously.

00:04:41.400 As you mentioned, he's constantly defending the liberals.

00:04:44.800 He's voting their way.

00:04:46.360 And this just seems to be entirely for appearance sake.

00:04:51.000 Yeah, I would jump in on that.

00:04:53.260 I think we have a clip here of a more recent element of it.

00:04:56.560 So I've been around the Hill a long time.

00:04:59.440 I was, worked there for roughly 20 years.

00:05:02.520 So I've seen this sort of political theater before.

00:05:05.960 That's all this was.

00:05:07.040 This whole, I'm ripping up the agreement.

00:05:09.640 I'm throwing his stuff on the lawn.

00:05:11.600 Like, this was a lot of dramatics.

00:05:14.020 Without actual substance.

00:05:16.020 Because, of course, what matters in a minority parliament is a confidence vote.

00:05:21.660 So, to your point, William, he's going to be asked the same questions on case-by-case basis, as he put it, now until the election actually happens.

00:05:31.320 I think we have a clip here of a very recent news conference where reporters were basically asking, Mr. Singh, why are we here?

00:05:39.280 If Pierre Polyev moves a non-confidence motion, will you support it?

00:05:44.540 In terms of any motion moving forward, we're going to look at that motion before we decide.

00:05:50.220 We're not going to presuppose an outcome of that.

00:05:52.360 But we have torn up, I have ripped up the agreement with Justin Trudeau.

00:05:55.820 And I know that means that an election has now become more likely.

00:05:59.320 We are ready to fight an election whenever that happens.

00:06:01.600 And when that election comes, the choice is going to be between Pierre Polyev and conservative cuts, who want to literally destroy our health care system.

00:06:11.340 Want to make it so that the only way you can get care is if you can afford to pay for it out of pocket.

00:06:16.780 Or new Democrats, who want to fix our health care system. 0.99

00:06:20.780 Build it up so it is there for you and your loved ones when you need it.

00:06:23.540 That is a choice in the next election.

00:06:25.260 Yeah, so that was Mr. Sweeney.

00:06:26.980 He's an old school reporter from CHCH there in Hamilton that was asking him that off the top.

00:06:32.100 I found that interesting, guys, that very quickly, as soon as he was finished his speech about ripping up the agreement, most of the reporters asked him questions like that.

00:06:40.400 Okay, when?

00:06:42.900 No, you're absolutely right.

00:06:44.160 I mean, ripping up the agreement means nothing if the Democrats are going to continue to vote to keep the liberal government in power for the next 12 or 14 months until the next election happens under the fixed election law.

00:06:56.140 So, you know, and I love that line.

00:06:58.320 Well, we'll have to see what the motion says.

00:07:00.280 Well, what if the motion just happened to say we have no confidence in the liberal government?

00:07:04.640 We're not asking for anything particularly complicated here.

00:07:07.580 And it shouldn't take you more than a couple seconds, I would say, to figure out how you're going to vote on that issue.

00:07:14.220 But, of course, we also know that some have suggested that Mr. Singh's political strategy is motivated less by his party's policy and ideology and more about the fact that he still needs a little more time in order to qualify for that very generous government-funded pension plan.

00:07:31.560 That if he gets just a few more months in office, he'll walk away with a pension worth millions of dollars.

00:07:37.200 And, you know, I guess only he knows in his own heart what is true, whether he's doing this out of conscience or he's doing it out of self-interest.

00:07:46.360 But I would have to believe that if he genuinely believes the liberals are bad for Canada, if he genuinely believes they're wrong for families, then he would be voting to get rid of this government at the first opportunity.

00:07:56.500 You know, putting personal ambitions aside, there was another reporter who put a question to Jagmeet Singh because the NDP, the federal NDP, is tied to their provincial counterparts.

00:08:07.420 And there's an election coming up in B.C. right now.

00:08:10.620 And I think if Jagmeet Singh were to force an election, it would totally tear that provincial-federal tie apart because he's going to make it about him when the provincial parties, especially in British Columbia and Saskatchewan, are trying to form government in the next election season.

00:08:31.180 And I think part of that holds him back and he's not willing to admit support for any non-confidence motion.

00:08:39.800 And there's all sorts of, like, reasons behind that, as we've mentioned.

00:08:43.920 Yeah, for the next couple of months at least, just in practical terms, a lot of their ground game is out in B.C. right now.

00:08:53.240 So they're going to be the ones that are doing get out the vote.

00:08:56.060 They're going to be the ones knocking on doors or the ones handing out the granola bars to all their little, you know, volunteers that are going to be campaigning.

00:09:02.740 And so a lot of parties will share staff and people will move back and forth.

00:09:06.780 But the NDP in particular is the same party.

00:09:10.460 Like, it's the same structure.

00:09:12.420 It isn't just there's some friends among staff.

00:09:14.760 No, no, this is the actual same structure, same constitution.

00:09:17.700 And, you know, Chris, there's already been threats of separation coming from Manitoba and elsewhere.

00:09:22.980 Like, they're not totally, like, unified.

00:09:26.180 And I think a lot of the provincial counterparts see Singh as a liability because of his closeness to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

00:09:33.040 They're tied together.

00:09:34.320 Their fates are intertwined to some degree.

00:09:37.180 Yeah, for sure.

00:09:37.880 The new Alberta NDP leader, Nahid Nenshi, he's already made kind of rumblings like this.

00:09:43.160 Now, I haven't been able to pin him down on a provincial carbon tax yet.

00:09:46.780 I know one of his predecessors who was running for the leadership and then bowed out actually came out and said the consumer carbon tax is dead.

00:09:54.160 Like, we shouldn't be doing this provincially either here in Alberta.

00:09:57.260 Say we got rid of it federally.

00:09:58.600 We shouldn't have one here in Alberta again, which was really important.

00:10:02.240 You've probably noticed, William, too, because, of course, it was the NDP Premier Rachel Notley that invented her own here in Alberta.

00:10:08.120 So to hear any NDP candidate, leadership candidate, say, you know what, that's dead, that was really significant.

00:10:14.520 And I don't know where Nenshi stands on that.

00:10:16.680 I keep asking him, but we don't know yet.

00:10:19.240 But you're right, absolutely right, Cosmin.

00:10:21.220 There is now this kind of, there's a bit of turbulence, I would describe it, ideological turbulence between the provincial elements of the NDP and the federal elements of the NDP.

00:10:31.360 William, do you think, what do you think is going to happen with Mr. Singh after this announcement?

00:10:35.820 Do you think they're just going to keep putting pressure on him internally?

00:10:40.120 You know, it's a great question.

00:10:41.600 I don't think he's going to have any easier of a political future post this announcement than he did heading into it.

00:10:49.060 You know, of all of the federal parties, I would say that the New Democrats are probably the least ready to have a full-scale national election.

00:10:57.640 You know, they've still got a ton of work to do nominating candidates.

00:11:01.400 They've got a lot of work to do raising money.

00:11:03.060 They have to get a platform together.

00:11:06.780 And he's still, I think, dealing with internal divisions in his party, dealing with the fact that so many blue-collar union workers have fled the New Democrats to support Pierre-Paul Lever and the conservatives because they see a better path forward under a conservative government than a New Democrat party that has really become a party of inner big cities, not the same working-class party it always used to be.

00:11:31.560 So, no, I'm not expecting much from him.

00:11:34.340 He'll find ways to support this government, either directly or indirectly.

00:11:39.740 Maybe just New Democrats won't show up for some key votes, just enough to keep the liberals in power.

00:11:45.460 But he's going to continue getting asked those very same questions.

00:11:48.780 If this government is truly as bad as you say it is, why don't you take, you know, why don't you put them out of their misery?

00:11:54.360 Why don't you send Canadians to the polls?

00:11:56.660 Interesting you point out that it could be that the NDP, at least at the federal level, is losing some of its seed corn, some of its base, right?

00:12:03.600 The really urban voters.

00:12:05.300 Now, I would argue that's largely because people can't afford things, period.

00:12:09.980 They can't afford rent.

00:12:11.080 They can't afford food.

00:12:12.440 They can't afford the basics.

00:12:13.700 They can't afford fuel.

00:12:14.580 And so that's when the rubber really hits the road.

00:12:18.000 And if all they're getting with answers from Mr. Singh is kind of more philosophical things and not we are going to scrap the carbon tax or we are going to balance the budget to kill inflation, real meat and potato things like that, I think they're going to drift to some other person who is promising them those things.

00:12:36.040 Cosmin, you were doing a little bit of work over on the other side, on the other team, looking at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's leadership of the Liberals.

00:12:44.520 And what you were finding is that he could be losing some of what I guess you could describe as his natural voting base.

00:12:51.060 Can you tell us a bit about that?

00:12:53.240 Well, for sure.

00:12:53.980 I mean, in Quebec, there's a by-election happening in Montreal right now.

00:12:58.440 And they're not even willing to use his face on their campaign signs.

00:13:03.100 They're putting the candidates forward.

00:13:05.420 Whereas before, you saw in past elections, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's face was plastered everywhere.

00:13:11.800 Everybody wanted to have pictures taken with him.

00:13:15.280 But now they've kind of sidelined him, put him in the background because they know how unpopular he is.

00:13:22.580 So how do you think this is going to reflect on the next election?

00:13:27.680 Are they just simply going to not show Prime Minister Justin Trudeau?

00:13:32.420 I'll put it to you, William, first.

00:13:35.160 Yeah, it was a bad week all around for Prime Minister Trudeau.

00:13:39.800 He's losing friends left, right, and center, or left and far left and far from the center.

00:13:45.600 But he's losing support in Montreal, which was arguably the last remaining Liberal basket in the country.

00:13:52.220 He's now losing support from the LGBTQ community.

00:13:55.640 They put out a couple senior people from different organizations, including a Gallup count, have called on him to step down in order to apparently improve the Liberals' chances of winning.

00:14:07.460 And as if that weren't bad enough, well, he's lost support apparently of his own campaign director, who very recently just announced he was stepping down because possibly he didn't want to lead the Liberal campaign if it was going to be an utter crushing defeat.

00:14:21.920 That doesn't look good on a campaign manager's resume.

00:14:25.520 So, no, the Prime Minister's friends are apparently fleeing the sinking ship as we speak.

00:14:31.640 That's interesting.

00:14:33.880 So I just finished what we would call a debt clock tour, and that is where we took our gigantic debt clock with the big screen on it showing the $1.2 trillion debt that we have here in Canada.

00:14:43.740 And what I was struck by is we only had short notice to give to our supporters because we were frankly just moving it across the province and wanted to use the gas money because we had to go park it back in Saskatchewan.

00:14:54.500 We're very frugal with our donors' money.

00:14:56.460 So we had a couple of quick pub nights.

00:14:58.680 I was overwhelmed by how many people showed up to these things with like a day and a half notice.

00:15:03.140 And what was really interesting is that in places like Red Deer and Edmonton, we were getting people out that I hadn't met before.

00:15:10.800 And the reason why is, again, to keep pounding on this is just how dire straits that people are in.

00:15:18.500 And I think that might be why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is losing what he would probably assume is natural support base.

00:15:25.860 Right. It's I don't know who said it, but a friend of mine says it quite often.

00:15:31.520 You can't save the world if you can't pay the rent.

00:15:35.220 And it's just so true.

00:15:37.140 And so a lot of these other issues might be taking a backseat or a back burner because Prime Minister Trudeau's government has overseen the unaffordability of pretty much everything.

00:15:47.520 To put the debt in perspective, they've doubled it.

00:15:50.780 So picture John A. Macdonald and Laurier and Diefenbaker and King and all those folks who were Prime Minister during times of, you know, drought and depression and world wars all that time.

00:16:03.940 Take all their debts, including the first Trudeau.

00:16:07.180 Double it.

00:16:08.820 That's what they've done.

00:16:10.240 And then they printed around 300 billion dollars out of thin air, which made inflation skyrocket while they locked down businesses at the same time.

00:16:19.160 So it was like the perfect storm.

00:16:21.580 And so I think that is why we are seeing these polls just going like this and them losing more more support.

00:16:29.240 My question to both of you, though, William, you may know because I actually don't because I don't have enough people on the inside there.

00:16:37.960 Are there adults in the room, so to speak?

00:16:40.760 Like, so back in the day when we saw, for example, former Prime Minister Paul Martin turn around and say, I no longer have confidence in Jean Chrétien.

00:16:49.560 I'm paraphrasing.

00:16:50.620 There was a big bun fight and then they took over.

00:16:53.460 There were always these kind of elders in the party.

00:16:56.920 There were always the adults in the room to, you know, put the hand on the shoulder and say, buddy, it's time to take a walk in the snow.

00:17:02.500 Like, let's go.

00:17:03.320 So are those people there in Ottawa when it comes to the Liberals now or have things, has the regime changed so much?

00:17:11.320 Yeah, it's a great question.

00:17:12.740 I certainly think there's nobody within the organization who has any ability to tell the Prime Minister, you know, it's time to go.

00:17:20.540 I think he's built an operation who only tells him what he wants to hear.

00:17:25.200 And it's things like, you're doing a great job, you know, you're just misunderstood.

00:17:30.000 If only you had better communications, Canadians would love your policy agenda.

00:17:35.600 It's unbelievable.

00:17:36.860 And, you know, you did see that attempt in the summer to maybe bring in an outsider.

00:17:41.460 They wooed Mark Carney pretty hard to come back.

00:17:45.420 And I think, frankly, he took one look at the current Liberal government and said, no way am I attaching myself to that bandwagon.

00:17:53.880 It's like saying, do you want to hitch your lifeboat to the Titanic after it's already hit the iceberg and been sinking for two hours?

00:18:01.480 He said, no, I'm going to stay in my very cushy, cushy job that I'm enjoying now as a global elite.

00:18:07.740 And I'll wait for the next one.

00:18:09.540 So, no, I don't think there is any grown up left in that Liberal government who's there to say, Prime Minister, you need to go.

00:18:16.800 Cosmin, what's your read on this?

00:18:17.900 Do you think he's going to lose more what he would, I guess he would consider base support?

00:18:21.620 Well, I wonder how much of this has to do with the Liberals putting all their eggs in the environment basket.

00:18:29.600 They've pushed environmental policies from day one.

00:18:33.500 And, Chris, you would be great to add to this because the carbon tax, I think, contributes to this a lot.

00:18:40.040 Polls are showing that Canadians view affordability, cost of living as a more important policy issue than the environment.

00:18:50.100 And the Liberals have essentially branded themselves as these progressive, you know, first class leaders when it comes to pushing environmental policies, policies that are often crafted in international organizations like the United Nations and, you know, the COP summits and all of those things.

00:19:09.960 So there's a huge amount of unpopularity when and virtue signaling, quite frankly, when the government is telling you, no, you need to worry about climate change more than, you know, the nickels and dimes that you're left with at the end of the day.

00:19:26.100 And it comes across poorly with Canadians.

00:19:30.600 That's a great point.

00:19:31.580 There's a lot to tackle there.

00:19:33.600 First, with those, you know, big so-called climate summits that they go to, Canada has shown really poor judgment there.

00:19:44.060 We almost always send the most delegates, even swamping the host countries.

00:19:49.780 So we don't walk the walk, okay?

00:19:53.460 We don't, you know, if you, there's that famous cartoon, I'm sure you've both seen it.

00:19:57.920 It's this younger man and an older man and they're looking up into the sky and it's just black with smoke and all of these jets flying.

00:20:04.520 And he says, Dad, what's that?

00:20:06.200 And he said, politicians flying to the next climate summit.

00:20:09.380 And it's true, right?

00:20:11.020 So there's that little level of hypocrisy, which also, by the way, costs taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars every single time they go to those things.

00:20:19.840 Number two, with the environmentalism issue.

00:20:24.060 So, William, you're old enough to remember, I think, before, before the carbon tax and CO2 overtook that narrative, there was all sorts of stuff.

00:20:34.860 There was cleaning up, you know, garbage sites.

00:20:38.660 There was literally saving the whales.

00:20:40.860 It was keeping rivers clean.

00:20:43.160 There was all sorts of things that didn't involve taxing people to death for driving their minivan or heating their home that were environmental elements and they were good things.

00:20:53.180 It actually reminds me recently, I don't know if you guys saw the recent interview with RFK Jr.

00:20:58.240 I found that pretty interesting that he said we've been tied, I'm paraphrasing him, we've tied ourselves to this carbon thing instead of looking at broader environmentalism issues.

00:21:07.360 And he's a good person to talk about it because he started River Keepers.

00:21:11.100 I still have my old Mother Earth News magazine with him on the cover of it from the late 80s, early 90s.

00:21:16.540 You can eat fish out of the Hudson River now.

00:21:19.560 They didn't carbon tax to do that.

00:21:21.640 He just made sure to clean up the environment.

00:21:24.320 And so I think you really nailed something there, Cosman, where the current government will talk a lot about the environment, but then they're bankrupting average working families without anything really to show for it.

00:21:35.000 And the reason why there's nothing really to show for it, of course, is because Canada is responsible for about 1.2% of global emissions.

00:21:44.460 So even if we all joined in and like went and lived in a cave or ceased to exist, it wouldn't make a dent in global emissions.

00:21:53.120 So it's not fixing the problem that they had set out to do.

00:21:57.540 If instead we sold, say, natural gas, which is much cleaner to a huge emitter like India, we would probably be able to get those global emissions down. 0.52

00:22:06.500 But that doesn't involve carbon taxing you with, you know, 15 bucks every time you fill up your pickup truck, $400 extra per year just to heat your home.

00:22:15.360 Like those, I think they lost normal people when they did that, Cosman.

00:22:21.720 Yeah, and the Liberals have claimed that this is a profit neutral thing, but it's always been about the profit.

00:22:28.320 And their own, you know, parliamentary budget officers shows that Canadians are not making back a neutral, you know, pay in.

00:22:38.220 They're not getting the money that they put in back.

00:22:40.560 A lot of people are getting shortchanged.

00:22:42.940 And when families sit down at the kitchen table and start discussing their budget and the finances, I'm sure the carbon tax comes into the equation because they're asking themselves, what are we paying for here?

00:22:55.940 We're losing money to funnel to the federal government for, you know, Lord knows what.

00:23:02.700 Yeah, it's a ton of money.

00:23:04.240 William, did you want to get in on that?

00:23:05.380 Yeah, I mean, I think what conservatives find so frustrating about the carbon tax thing is that the point you make exactly, we could do everything perfectly, and it would have zero impact on global carbon emissions.

00:23:19.740 Until there is significant reduction on the part of China, India, and the United States, too, finding better ways to reduce their emissions, it doesn't matter what Canada does.

00:23:31.340 And, you know, Canada produces liquefied natural gas, which burns with less than 50% the greenhouse gas emissions of coal.

00:23:39.500 And we could have become a global exporter of this cleaner form of energy and sending it to places like China and to India to wean them off coal or to at least reduce the amount of coal they're burning.

00:23:53.340 But instead, you know, we've had a government who just did everything they could to kill that industry, saying, you know, oh, there's no business case for it, which is just, you know, infuriating for those of us who are like, well, except for now there's Qatar and all these other places selling liquefied natural gas to people who wanted to buy it from us, you know, and we don't happen to sponsor terror, which is another real upside to doing business with Canada.

00:24:16.640 And people, I think, forget that conservatives have led a lot of the major environmental initiatives in this country, you know, the acid rain treaty, you know, where we were at risk of having a tremendous damage from from acid rain due to pollution, air pollution, sulfur dioxide in the sky.

00:24:32.100 You know, that was a conservative government, Brian Mulroney, who implemented leadership with the United States.

00:24:36.640 Back during Reagan.

00:24:37.620 Yes, yes.

00:24:38.600 Another wonderful thing for our for President Reagan.

00:24:42.480 God rest him.

00:24:43.320 And, you know, conservatives actually go out and see nature.

00:24:47.100 That's another great thing that people forget, that it's by and large conservatives who are the ones who live in rural Canada, who spend their time out in rural Canada, out in nature.

00:24:57.980 Whereas all these people claiming to love the environment, well, they live in skyscrapers in big cities and they don't really ever go to see nature or spend any time with it.

00:25:06.320 So for the suggestion that conservatives don't care about the environment, completely false.

00:25:11.360 Yeah, I hear you.

00:25:12.080 Environmental, environmentalism was always a big deal to me.

00:25:15.300 I hand sewed my baby's cloth diapers.

00:25:17.320 I've literally swum with the salmon.

00:25:19.100 Like, you know, my nickname is hippie, like in all the newsrooms I've ever worked in.

00:25:23.740 Almost all my stuff is thrift because I believe in reusing and recycling things.

00:25:27.360 Remember the old three R's? 1.00

00:25:28.860 Remember all these other elements of being a good environmental steward that wasn't just hung up on the carbon tax, which, by the way, like you pointed out, Cosman, doesn't work.

00:25:36.740 And it costs you a ton of money and the government's trying to tell you that if you give them a 20, you'll get back a 50 magically at no cost to you.

00:25:45.220 They're ripping you off.

00:25:46.460 Okay.

00:25:47.080 Anybody with a bit of common sense understands it doesn't work.

00:25:49.500 Hey, speaking of environmentalism, do you want to end on this fun story about the frog?

00:25:53.540 I think so.

00:25:55.820 I think it's a great story.

00:25:57.080 Okay.

00:25:57.680 Trigger warning.

00:25:59.040 I was a little bit, hey, true to my environmentalism thing, I was a little bit upset about this.

00:26:03.720 So, apparently, Parks Canada, the federal government, spent something like $10,000 over the last few years to cull, which I think meant to kill, one frog.

00:26:21.120 One invasive big honking bullfrog.

00:26:24.300 So, here you go.

00:26:25.400 Here's our headline from our website here.

00:26:26.880 Four years, $10,000, one frog.

00:26:29.560 Inside Parks Canada's costly frog cull.

00:26:31.820 That's by Ryan Thorpe.

00:26:33.740 Yes, we have our own full-time investigative journalist on staff at the Taxpayers Federation.

00:26:39.220 Ryan dug through reams of documents through Freedom of Information requests coming from Parks Canada.

00:26:45.700 People might be remembering, didn't they hire helicopter sharpshooters to kill deer?

00:26:50.900 Yes, they did.

00:26:51.640 This is the same group of bureaucrats that hired foreign sharpshooters to shoot deer out of a helicopter.

00:27:02.860 And we spent millions of dollars on this thing.

00:27:05.700 And this is, again, in one of the most kind of earthy, like, hippy-dippy places that I love in all of Canada.

00:27:13.800 It's in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia.

00:27:17.200 So, they apparently had this problem with invasive deer that were eating too many of the plants that they preferred or something.

00:27:23.940 And so, the bureaucrats from the federal government from Parks Canada blew millions of dollars to shoot a bunch of these deer from helicopters.

00:27:32.540 Now, of course, the questions that flood your mind are, couldn't they find any local hunters?

00:27:37.300 Why did they spend millions of dollars?

00:27:40.340 Why helicopters?

00:27:41.880 But now, fast forward, I think I'd laugh if they hadn't actually killed the frog.

00:27:46.680 But I'm kind of sad that they killed the frog.

00:27:48.760 They spent 10 grand trying to get rid of this massive invasive species of big honking bullfrogs.

00:27:54.640 And apparently, they got one frog, William.

00:27:58.000 Yeah, it's an impressive amount of money to kill one single frog.

00:28:01.980 You know, I understand the need to protect ecologically sensitive regions from invasive species.

00:28:09.320 Bullfrogs are jokingly called bully frogs because basically, they will shove any smaller creature they can down their throat in order to consume.

00:28:20.360 So, I can see how that would be problematic.

00:28:21.960 But, you know, it's the sheer incompetence of the program and the cost that came with it that really makes you laugh.

00:28:28.000 I don't know if either of you are familiar with Australia's Great Emu War.

00:28:32.900 It happened quite a long time ago where the Australian military basically decided to eradicate excessive numbers of emus in part of the country.

00:28:42.200 And, of course, they lost to the emus, despite the fact that they were equipped with machine guns.

00:28:46.880 So, you know, I guess we follow in great historical precedence there of governments simply being unable to handle invasive species.

00:28:58.380 That being said, there is an exception to this.

00:29:00.900 It would be the province of Alberta, God bless it, that has effectively eliminated rats in the province.

00:29:07.060 So, if done well, I guess governments can handle invasive species.

00:29:13.420 But with deer and bullfrogs, they just don't seem to understand how to get it done without breaking the bank.

00:29:19.380 Yeah, we don't have any rats in Alberta of the rodent order.

00:29:22.840 Anyway, Cosmin, what do you think of this?

00:29:27.100 Did your eye, were you hopping mad?

00:29:28.780 Well, it just makes me wonder who devises these plans.

00:29:34.680 Like, anybody looking at this situation, I could send my five-year-old son who loves catching frogs, I'll take him on a kayak.

00:29:42.260 All you have to do is promise him a Lego kit, and he'd be able to do it within an hour.

00:29:47.580 It's outrageous.

00:29:49.060 Like, and I want to see the cost broken down.

00:29:52.260 What did they spend $10,000 on?

00:29:55.020 Was it the travel expenses?

00:29:56.680 Who are they hiring?

00:29:57.540 It just doesn't make any sense.

00:30:00.540 How big was their net for the bullfrog?

00:30:02.860 I think we have a picture from, so my colleague, Carson Binda, he's the bee, here he is, good old Carson.

00:30:09.560 He's our British Columbia Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, and he had his press conference in British Columbia just a few minutes ago.

00:30:17.300 And this is a great picture that was snapped by our friends at Western Standard.

00:30:20.820 So, thank you so much, Derek and friends, for taking this picture of Carson.

00:30:23.860 And it's wanted, a real bully, Parks Canada, reward $15,000.

00:30:30.320 So, the overall cost was apparently around $15,000, but specifically narrowed down.

00:30:35.600 When you try to narrow down the timeline of catching this one frog, it was around $10,000 per that one frog.

00:30:41.800 So, I think my team is trying to get t-shirts made of this thing.

00:30:46.460 So, it's one of those ridiculous things, right, where people will often say, who are defending the government, oh, we can't have cuts.

00:30:54.800 You know, what do you want to cut first?

00:30:56.540 You know, schooling for little Timmy or healthcare for your grandma.

00:31:00.680 Like, that's not the case, especially at the federal level.

00:31:04.380 They waste gobs of money. 0.95

00:31:07.600 This is just one example of them wasting gobs of money for something this silly.

00:31:13.820 And again, I totally understand them trying to say, we need to, you know, reduce invasive species.

00:31:19.140 I get that part.

00:31:20.740 Why did they need to blow this much money on it?

00:31:23.340 And why don't they plan better?

00:31:24.940 For folks who are interested, by the way, in those emu wars, I don't know, William, if you've seen it.

00:31:29.400 If you go on YouTube, there's this amazing channel called Oversimplified.

00:31:33.500 It is the best.

00:31:34.700 It's this one dude.

00:31:35.620 I think he used to be a history teacher.

00:31:37.540 And then he got smart and went on YouTube.

00:31:39.420 And it's totally PG.

00:31:40.860 You can watch it with your kids.

00:31:41.980 It's all animated.

00:31:43.340 And he actually, that's how I knew about the emu wars, because my son loves Oversimplified.

00:31:47.180 And I sat there and watched it with him.

00:31:48.920 At least he was kept in the Commonwealth, right, William? 0.77

00:31:52.920 Well, you know, I have to laugh that for those of us who have worked for the government and have seen up close how awful government tends to be at actually solving problems and addressing issues.

00:32:05.180 We often think the government is, it should be the solution of last resort to dealing with any problem.

00:32:11.100 You know, I think in the case of the deer, they simply let a group of hunters out one sunny afternoon, and they were able to shoot and kill about, I think, 500 deer, more than the government had done with its helicopter sniper program had achieved in all of its other time of existence.

00:32:30.560 And by the way, the cost was zero, because, you know, hunters like to hunt deer.

00:32:35.080 That's kind of one of the things they do.

00:32:37.140 So, yeah, you know, when people say, oh, we need a solution, we need the government to take this over, I think, well, I hope we've tried literally every other solution first before we're resorting to the inefficiency and incompetence of government to now try and fix this problem.

00:32:53.220 We started with Reagan and we can end with him.

00:32:55.760 Some of the most scary words in the English language.

00:32:57.960 I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

00:33:00.300 Guys, thanks so much for a great chat today.

00:33:02.820 Thanks.

00:33:03.340 It was great.

00:33:04.000 Thank you, Chris.

00:33:05.160 Thanks so much for watching Off the Record here on True North.

00:33:08.220 And remember, everything that we have just discussed is off the record.

00:33:12.120 Thank you, Chris.

00:33:42.120 And said, you share my birthday.

00:33:44.160 We're both Aquarians.

00:33:45.400 And yeah, this one, this is his own biography, the autobiography.

00:33:49.140 And then actually, I don't know if you've read his own diaries.

00:33:53.000 I haven't yet.

00:33:54.160 No, it's pretty good because you really get the sense of it's funny.

00:33:58.580 He was a big movie star.

00:33:59.800 So you'd think he had a big ego.

00:34:01.720 No, it's always this like self-analysis and like, I hope, please, God, let me be worthy.

00:34:07.800 I really hope I'm up to this task.

00:34:10.100 Like this humble servant sort of approach when talking to himself over and over again.

00:34:16.600 And it's something.

00:34:17.760 Yeah.

00:34:18.120 Go ahead, Cosmic.

00:34:18.700 Is the film like more serious or is it comedic?

00:34:21.900 No, there's nothing funny about it.

00:34:23.740 Well, he was funny.

00:34:25.120 Like Reagan always had a joke.

00:34:26.760 So his jokes that they put in there are funny.

00:34:29.400 But no, it's it was almost to the point of where I'm like, wow, there's almost no real writing in this because it was like, then this happened, then this happened, then this happened.

00:34:38.680 Like, it's basically a straight shot.

00:34:41.200 It's a history drama, pretty much.

00:34:43.320 Yep.

00:34:43.840 Very straight drama.

00:34:44.680 And they didn't create anything.

00:34:46.120 You know what I mean?

00:34:46.520 There was no like weird dialogue back and forth where writers took liberties.

00:34:50.400 The only element that was out even called artistic is the way they framed it.

00:34:54.820 It starts with a young Russian man talking to an old Soviet.

00:34:59.600 And he's like, comrade, how did you let Mother Russia go?

00:35:03.240 And he looks at him.

00:35:04.100 He's like, there was this one man.

00:35:06.460 And it starts.

00:35:08.040 My one criticism of it is that I think they spent too long on the Hollywood phase.

00:35:12.500 Like nobody really cares.

00:35:14.120 They should have done that in about 10 minutes.

00:35:16.040 And they spent like close to an hour on it, which was.

00:35:19.860 Did they do like the McCarthy hearings?

00:35:21.980 Because I'm pretty sure he was called before the Senate committees or the Congress committee.

00:35:27.360 Yeah.

00:35:27.660 Yep.

00:35:27.880 He was right there on American blah, blah, blah.

00:35:31.000 So he was there.

00:35:31.760 They explained why.

00:35:32.680 Because he was also, of course, the head of the Actors Guild.

00:35:34.820 So that's how we got to understand unions and how they worked and all that stuff.

00:35:38.640 So they have him there.

00:35:40.000 I think I spotted Ayn Rand in the background.

00:35:42.420 I think they had her there.

00:35:43.920 But I couldn't.

00:35:44.600 I can't be sure.

00:35:45.440 Because I only watch it in theater.

00:35:46.900 But yeah, I would recommend it.

00:35:48.060 Anybody that's part of the movement, I would recommend it.

00:35:51.660 Reagan had this crazy idea when it came to the Cold War, set him apart from his predecessor.

00:35:56.140 He said, well, I think we should win and they should lose.

00:35:59.860 Which was different than what America had been under Jimmy Carter.

00:36:04.020 So it turns out when that became the goal, they were able to get it done in actually a relatively short amount of time.

00:36:09.280 Thank you.

Off the Record - September 06, 2024

How can it get any worse for Trudeau？

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript