00:05:16.020Because, of course, what matters in a minority parliament is a confidence vote.
00:05:21.660So, 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.
00:05:31.320I think we have a clip here of a very recent news conference where reporters were basically asking, Mr. Singh, why are we here?
00:05:39.280If Pierre Polyev moves a non-confidence motion, will you support it?
00:05:44.540In terms of any motion moving forward, we're going to look at that motion before we decide.
00:05:50.220We're not going to presuppose an outcome of that.
00:05:52.360But we have torn up, I have ripped up the agreement with Justin Trudeau.
00:05:55.820And I know that means that an election has now become more likely.
00:05:59.320We are ready to fight an election whenever that happens.
00:06:01.600And 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.
00:06:11.340Want to make it so that the only way you can get care is if you can afford to pay for it out of pocket.
00:06:16.780Or new Democrats, who want to fix our health care system.
00:06:20.780Build it up so it is there for you and your loved ones when you need it.
00:06:23.540That is a choice in the next election.
00:06:26.980He's an old school reporter from CHCH there in Hamilton that was asking him that off the top.
00:06:32.100I 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.
00:06:44.160I 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.
00:06:58.320Well, we'll have to see what the motion says.
00:07:00.280Well, what if the motion just happened to say we have no confidence in the liberal government?
00:07:04.640We're not asking for anything particularly complicated here.
00:07:07.580And 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.
00:07:14.220But, 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.
00:07:31.560That if he gets just a few more months in office, he'll walk away with a pension worth millions of dollars.
00:07:37.200And, 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.
00:07:46.360But 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.
00:07:56.500You 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.
00:08:07.420And there's an election coming up in B.C. right now.
00:08:10.620And 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.
00:08:31.180And I think part of that holds him back and he's not willing to admit support for any non-confidence motion.
00:08:39.800And there's all sorts of, like, reasons behind that, as we've mentioned.
00:08:43.920Yeah, 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.
00:08:53.240So they're going to be the ones that are doing get out the vote.
00:08:56.060They'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.
00:09:02.740And so a lot of parties will share staff and people will move back and forth.
00:09:06.780But the NDP in particular is the same party.
00:09:37.880The new Alberta NDP leader, Nahid Nenshi, he's already made kind of rumblings like this.
00:09:43.160Now, I haven't been able to pin him down on a provincial carbon tax yet.
00:09:46.780I 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.
00:09:54.160Like, we shouldn't be doing this provincially either here in Alberta.
00:10:21.220There 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.
00:10:31.360William, do you think, what do you think is going to happen with Mr. Singh after this announcement?
00:10:35.820Do you think they're just going to keep putting pressure on him internally?
00:10:41.600I don't think he's going to have any easier of a political future post this announcement than he did heading into it.
00:10:49.060You 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.
00:10:57.640You know, they've still got a ton of work to do nominating candidates.
00:11:01.400They've got a lot of work to do raising money.
00:11:06.780And 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.
00:11:31.560So, no, I'm not expecting much from him.
00:11:34.340He'll find ways to support this government, either directly or indirectly.
00:11:39.740Maybe just New Democrats won't show up for some key votes, just enough to keep the liberals in power.
00:11:45.460But he's going to continue getting asked those very same questions.
00:11:48.780If 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?
00:11:54.360Why don't you send Canadians to the polls?
00:11:56.660Interesting 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?
00:12:14.580And so that's when the rubber really hits the road.
00:12:18.000And 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.
00:12:36.040Cosmin, 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.
00:12:44.520And what you were finding is that he could be losing some of what I guess you could describe as his natural voting base.
00:13:35.160Yeah, it was a bad week all around for Prime Minister Trudeau.
00:13:39.800He's losing friends left, right, and center, or left and far left and far from the center.
00:13:45.600But he's losing support in Montreal, which was arguably the last remaining Liberal basket in the country.
00:13:52.220He's now losing support from the LGBTQ community.
00:13:55.640They 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.
00:14:07.460And 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.
00:14:21.920That doesn't look good on a campaign manager's resume.
00:14:25.520So, no, the Prime Minister's friends are apparently fleeing the sinking ship as we speak.
00:14:33.880So 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.
00:14:43.740And 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.
00:14:54.500We're very frugal with our donors' money.
00:14:56.460So we had a couple of quick pub nights.
00:14:58.680I was overwhelmed by how many people showed up to these things with like a day and a half notice.
00:15:03.140And what was really interesting is that in places like Red Deer and Edmonton, we were getting people out that I hadn't met before.
00:15:10.800And the reason why is, again, to keep pounding on this is just how dire straits that people are in.
00:15:18.500And I think that might be why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is losing what he would probably assume is natural support base.
00:15:25.860Right. It's I don't know who said it, but a friend of mine says it quite often.
00:15:31.520You can't save the world if you can't pay the rent.
00:15:37.140And 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.
00:15:47.520To put the debt in perspective, they've doubled it.
00:15:50.780So 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.
00:16:03.940Take all their debts, including the first Trudeau.
00:16:10.240And then they printed around 300 billion dollars out of thin air, which made inflation skyrocket while they locked down businesses at the same time.
00:16:21.580And so I think that is why we are seeing these polls just going like this and them losing more more support.
00:16:29.240My 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.
00:16:37.960Are there adults in the room, so to speak?
00:16:40.760Like, 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.
00:18:17.900Do you think he's going to lose more what he would, I guess he would consider base support?
00:18:21.620Well, I wonder how much of this has to do with the Liberals putting all their eggs in the environment basket.
00:18:29.600They've pushed environmental policies from day one.
00:18:33.500And, Chris, you would be great to add to this because the carbon tax, I think, contributes to this a lot.
00:18:40.040Polls are showing that Canadians view affordability, cost of living as a more important policy issue than the environment.
00:18:50.100And 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.
00:19:09.960So 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.
00:19:26.100And it comes across poorly with Canadians.
00:20:11.020So 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.
00:20:19.840Number two, with the environmentalism issue.
00:20:24.060So, 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.
00:20:34.860There was cleaning up, you know, garbage sites.
00:20:38.660There was literally saving the whales.
00:20:43.160There 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.
00:20:53.180It actually reminds me recently, I don't know if you guys saw the recent interview with RFK Jr.
00:20:58.240I 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.
00:21:07.360And he's a good person to talk about it because he started River Keepers.
00:21:11.100I still have my old Mother Earth News magazine with him on the cover of it from the late 80s, early 90s.
00:21:16.540You can eat fish out of the Hudson River now.
00:21:21.640He just made sure to clean up the environment.
00:21:24.320And 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.
00:21:35.000And 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.
00:21:44.460So 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.
00:21:53.120So it's not fixing the problem that they had set out to do.
00:21:57.540If 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.
00:22:06.500But 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.
00:22:15.360Like those, I think they lost normal people when they did that, Cosman.
00:22:21.720Yeah, and the Liberals have claimed that this is a profit neutral thing, but it's always been about the profit.
00:22:28.320And their own, you know, parliamentary budget officers shows that Canadians are not making back a neutral, you know, pay in.
00:22:38.220They're not getting the money that they put in back.
00:22:40.560A lot of people are getting shortchanged.
00:22:42.940And 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?
00:22:55.940We're losing money to funnel to the federal government for, you know, Lord knows what.
00:23:04.240William, did you want to get in on that?
00:23:05.380Yeah, 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.
00:23:19.740Until 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.
00:23:31.340And, you know, Canada produces liquefied natural gas, which burns with less than 50% the greenhouse gas emissions of coal.
00:23:39.500And 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.
00:23:53.340But 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.
00:24:16.640And 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.
00:24:32.100You know, that was a conservative government, Brian Mulroney, who implemented leadership with the United States.
00:24:43.320And, you know, conservatives actually go out and see nature.
00:24:47.100That'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.
00:24:57.980Whereas 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.
00:25:06.320So for the suggestion that conservatives don't care about the environment, completely false.
00:25:28.860Remember 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.
00:25:36.740And 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.
00:25:59.040I was a little bit, hey, true to my environmentalism thing, I was a little bit upset about this.
00:26:03.720So, 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.
00:26:51.640This is the same group of bureaucrats that hired foreign sharpshooters to shoot deer out of a helicopter.
00:27:02.860And we spent millions of dollars on this thing.
00:27:05.700And this is, again, in one of the most kind of earthy, like, hippy-dippy places that I love in all of Canada.
00:27:13.800It's in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia.
00:27:17.200So, they apparently had this problem with invasive deer that were eating too many of the plants that they preferred or something.
00:27:23.940And so, the bureaucrats from the federal government from Parks Canada blew millions of dollars to shoot a bunch of these deer from helicopters.
00:27:32.540Now, of course, the questions that flood your mind are, couldn't they find any local hunters?
00:27:37.300Why did they spend millions of dollars?
00:27:41.880But now, fast forward, I think I'd laugh if they hadn't actually killed the frog.
00:27:46.680But I'm kind of sad that they killed the frog.
00:27:48.760They spent 10 grand trying to get rid of this massive invasive species of big honking bullfrogs.
00:27:54.640And apparently, they got one frog, William.
00:27:58.000Yeah, it's an impressive amount of money to kill one single frog.
00:28:01.980You know, I understand the need to protect ecologically sensitive regions from invasive species.
00:28:09.320Bullfrogs are jokingly called bully frogs because basically, they will shove any smaller creature they can down their throat in order to consume.
00:28:20.360So, I can see how that would be problematic.
00:28:21.960But, you know, it's the sheer incompetence of the program and the cost that came with it that really makes you laugh.
00:28:28.000I don't know if either of you are familiar with Australia's Great Emu War.
00:28:32.900It happened quite a long time ago where the Australian military basically decided to eradicate excessive numbers of emus in part of the country.
00:28:42.200And, of course, they lost to the emus, despite the fact that they were equipped with machine guns.
00:28:46.880So, you know, I guess we follow in great historical precedence there of governments simply being unable to handle invasive species.
00:28:58.380That being said, there is an exception to this.
00:29:00.900It would be the province of Alberta, God bless it, that has effectively eliminated rats in the province.
00:29:07.060So, if done well, I guess governments can handle invasive species.
00:29:13.420But with deer and bullfrogs, they just don't seem to understand how to get it done without breaking the bank.
00:29:19.380Yeah, we don't have any rats in Alberta of the rodent order.
00:29:22.840Anyway, Cosmin, what do you think of this?
00:30:00.540How big was their net for the bullfrog?
00:30:02.860I think we have a picture from, so my colleague, Carson Binda, he's the bee, here he is, good old Carson.
00:30:09.560He's our British Columbia Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, and he had his press conference in British Columbia just a few minutes ago.
00:30:17.300And this is a great picture that was snapped by our friends at Western Standard.
00:30:20.820So, thank you so much, Derek and friends, for taking this picture of Carson.
00:30:23.860And it's wanted, a real bully, Parks Canada, reward $15,000.
00:30:30.320So, the overall cost was apparently around $15,000, but specifically narrowed down.
00:30:35.600When you try to narrow down the timeline of catching this one frog, it was around $10,000 per that one frog.
00:30:41.800So, I think my team is trying to get t-shirts made of this thing.
00:30:46.460So, it's one of those ridiculous things, right, where people will often say, who are defending the government, oh, we can't have cuts.
00:30:54.800You know, what do you want to cut first?
00:30:56.540You know, schooling for little Timmy or healthcare for your grandma.
00:31:00.680Like, that's not the case, especially at the federal level.
00:31:43.340And he actually, that's how I knew about the emu wars, because my son loves Oversimplified.
00:31:47.180And I sat there and watched it with him.
00:31:48.920At least he was kept in the Commonwealth, right, William?
00:31:52.920Well, 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.
00:32:05.180We often think the government is, it should be the solution of last resort to dealing with any problem.
00:32:11.100You 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.
00:32:30.560And by the way, the cost was zero, because, you know, hunters like to hunt deer.
00:32:35.080That's kind of one of the things they do.
00:32:37.140So, 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.
00:32:53.220We started with Reagan and we can end with him.
00:32:55.760Some of the most scary words in the English language.
00:32:57.960I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
00:33:00.300Guys, thanks so much for a great chat today.
00:34:26.760So his jokes that they put in there are funny.
00:34:29.400But 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.