EZRA LEVANT | Has Trudeau's leadership crippled the Canadian Armed Forces beyond repair?
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Summary
Can the Canadian Armed Forces be revived after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has tried to destroy it? A feature conversation with veteran David Redman answers that question and much more on this episode of the Ezra LeVance Show on the Rebel News Network.
Transcript
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You know, Justin Trudeau has tried to finish off the Canadian Armed Forces,
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continuing the awful project that his father, Pierre Trudeau, started.
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Well, today we've got a great guest, David Redman, a veteran,
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and a bit of a scholar and a thinker when it comes to reviving the Canadian military.
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You're really going to appreciate his comments today.
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Tonight, can the Canadian Armed Forces be revived after Trudeau has tried to destroy it?
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A feature conversation with veteran David Redman.
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It's December 31st, and this is the Ezra LeVance Show.
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I think 2025 is going to be a year of great change in Canada, a great change for the world.
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Donald Trump is back as president, and what America does always echoes around the world.
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One of Trump's beefs, and this is stretched back to his first term, is that many NATO countries were not carrying their load.
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I remember the dramatic meetings when he would fly to Europe, be surrounded by NATO leaders, and he would scold them.
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They liked the fact that America was demanding that they live up to the promise.
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Here's a great interaction between Trump and Trudeau, where Trump asks Trudeau,
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what percentage of our GDP is being spent on defense?
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And watch Trudeau sort of fib, and Trump calling him out in a way that no Canadian journalist had done.
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Mr. President, Canada does not meet the 2% standard.
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Well, we'll put them on a payment plan, you know?
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Ron, I'm sure the Prime Minister would love that.
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The number we talk about is 70% increase over these past years, including, and for the coming years,
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including significant investments in our fighter jets, significant investments in our naval fleets,
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we are increasing significantly our defense spending from previous governments that cut it.
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And the President knows well, as well, that Canada has been there for every NATO deployment.
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We have consistently stepped up, sent our troops into harm's way.
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Like most of our allies, there are some countries that, even though they might reach the 2%,
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And I think it's important to look at what is actually being done.
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And the United States and all NATO allies know that Canada is a solid, reliable partner
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that will continue to defend NATO and defend our interests.
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And we do have tremendous coordination with radar, with all of the different things that,
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you know, technologically, we have tremendous coordination between Canada and the United States.
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While things are even worse, it won't surprise you to hear, although Trudeau has certainly
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got the headlines for his bold support of Ukraine during the Russian-Ukraine war, announcing
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In fact, my understanding is that only a single tank was actually delivered.
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And much of the other weaponry was not because it was not up to standard.
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It wasn't co-operational with other equipment sent by our allies.
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This rings true to me when I realized that Canada was not a participant in a major NATO
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You might recall there used to be an annual sort of top gun fighter jet contest in Alberta,
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in Cold Lake, Alberta, called Operation Maple Flag.
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And I think the reason is we can't keep up with the countries that have F-35s and F-22s
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So what will happen in Canada if, as every poll suggests, Pierre Paglia becomes the new
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We lack the American tradition of military service for our political class.
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J.D. Vance, in fact, was at West Point, if my memory serves.
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There is a tradition in American leaders to have a connection to the military.
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Despite having no such personal connection, will Pierre Paglia rebuild the armed forces,
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not just in terms of equipment and payment, but in terms of moral support, in terms of
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giving it a proper mission, not just using it as a press release?
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Joining us now to talk about this is someone who probably knows more than most.
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For 27 years, he served in the Canadian Armed Forces before moving on to other public service
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careers, including acting as an emergency preparedness officer in the Alberta government.
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He recently published a lengthy essay in the C2C Journal, which is a conservative magazine.
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You can find it at C2, the numeral 2, cjournal.ca.
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The essay was called, Unfit for Duty, It is Time to Rebuild the Canadian Armed Forces.
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Well, a 33-page essay, at least that's what it is when I printed it out, that's more than
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I think the timing of your deep review is perfect, because I think the Conservative Party of Canada
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knows that it will be forming government probably within six or nine months, and it's probably
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starting to think, we better put some meat on the bones of our plans.
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I wrote it to get any government, probably the Conservative government, to realize the
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But even more than that, back in March, I published on Frontier Centre for Public Policy an article
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on the complete set of six national interests that define a democracy, one of which, of course,
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And a part of national security is the Canadian Armed Forces for our country, national defence.
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And I've been watching with absolute horror what's happened to our military over the past
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nine years, and like many veterans, I found it completely unacceptable.
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And so what I tried to do is to put into a paper what's happened to our armed forces, why
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we are where we are, and then to present a solution, because you never just bring a challenge in
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the army, you always have to show up with a solution.
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So if you read the paper, the first half defines the problem and states how we got where we
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And the second half presents what's needed to overcome the challenge, and then an actual
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You know, I find it interesting how Donald Trump is sort of threatening NATO.
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I don't think he wants the or else to come through.
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He sort of says, if you don't carry your weight, then we're out of here.
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I think people are deliberately misinterpreting him because they would rather quarrel than fix
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I think Trump's threats have really coaxed Europeans to start to chip in more to their
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And when I hear things coming out of this government's mouth, it's the same as before.
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Back when they were first elected in 2015, they promised new fighter jets, they promised
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new ships, they promised new tanks and equipment for the army, and not a single one of the things
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So anything that they promise now in a knee-jerk reaction to the threats coming from south of
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the border, I believe it's just that, a knee-jerk reaction, once again rhetoric, which won't
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You know, we absolutely depend on the United States to protect us.
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I was just talking with Gordon Chang about the Chinese hot air balloon spy device.
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And it was allowed just to traverse our whole country before it was taken down in the States.
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And I just, I don't know if we would have even spotted it.
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I mean, correct me if my facts are wrong on that.
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I don't think we would have spotted it without them.
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And there might come a time, if we continue on our path of just sort of demoralizing and
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defunding our armed forces, when some hot air balloon, some ship, some country plants a flag
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on some Arctic island, we find out about it months later by accident, and we literally
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Like, I think that would be very much on brand for the Canada of the 2020s if we continue on
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And you'll see, I put the solution in five steps.
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You can't just suddenly say you're going to buy 12 submarines.
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You have to define what is the purpose of the Armed Forces of Canada.
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And from that falls the combat capability of the personnel, and then the appropriate equipment
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And the whole idea that Canada at this point has less operationally deployable personnel than
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the New York City Police Department is not only makes me ashamed, it's terrifying.
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The sovereignty of our country should be our number one aim.
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And for the Armed Forces of Canada, it should be the number one mission, not their sole mission,
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And to do that, they have to have combat-capable people that are capable to deploy on every type
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And as you use as an example, the sovereignty of our North, I believe we need to have mission-oriented
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soldiers in every province and territory in Canada.
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We need an Air Force and a Navy that can protect our three coasts and our airspace.
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But we need to be able to deploy surge capacity into every corner of our country as our number
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Then we need to understand that we share this continent with one of the largest superpowers
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in the world, probably at the present time still the largest.
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And our neighbour to our south counts on us to make sure that we can at least do our part
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to defend our piece of the continent and not allow it to become a hotbed of international
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organisations which mean to do both us and them harm.
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So I believe the Canadian Armed Forces has the outward-looking mission while other members
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of our national security, our border services, our Coast Guard, our police take care of the
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internal measures, but with an Armed Forces that's capable of backing them up from coast
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You know, I was just thinking about the different values.
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Like you say the purpose of a military is very important.
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I'm leafing through your paper here where you talk about purpose.
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Because so many of the reasons and the morale and the mission of a military are at odds with
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And I'm not particularly picking on him because I think there's been a decline under all parties
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But if you deracinate your country, if you pull out the roots, if you erase your history, if you take
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Sir John A. McDonald off the $10 bill, if you change your anthem, if you replace lethality of the
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military with wokeness, if you call your country a country of genociders, if you say we're a post-national
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state, we're really just an address, and you give away your citizenship to anyone who, you know,
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says they're a foreign student, and now we have a million folks.
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Like if you devalue your country so much, of course you're against the military.
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Because the military is the opposite of all those things.
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It's about excellence, not, you know, affirmative action.
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It's about distinguishing our country from foreign countries.
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It's about saying that our judgment is superior to that of our enemies.
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Like it would almost be impossible for someone like Justin Trudeau to support the military
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because every single thing a military requires or a military is, is contrary to his worldview.
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Like you could not have a strong, proud, effective military run by Justin Trudeau because it's
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The first part is why I wrote the paper back in March.
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Canada, 2024, a strong, resilient nation or a fractured country.
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And in it, I defined the six national interests that form any democracy.
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The first two of those is unity, and the second is national security.
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And then there's good governance, rights and freedoms, economic prosperity and growth, and
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But the first two, unity and sovereignty, without them, the other four might as well not exist.
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And what we've seen in the last nine years is a direct attack on those first two elements.
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The unity of our nation and the unity of our citizens, the intentionally fragmenting and
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breaking up of the members of our Canadian public, and a direct attack on all elements of national
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security, not just the Canadian Armed Forces, our intelligence services, our policing services,
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our courts, all of the pieces that fit into our complete umbrella of national security.
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And the largest tool that was used against it was massive and overwhelming immigration.
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So then I want to go to the second part of what you said.
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When we look at a country, it's the common ethics and values that form the unity of a nation.
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And when you intentionally attack the common ethics and values, you are intentionally trying
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And I always use the country of Switzerland as a good example of a country where you can have
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three cultures, Italian, German, and French, but with one binding set of ethics and values.
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And I believe that the mass immigration that we've seen coming into our country has intentionally
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attacked both the unity and our national security.
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So then the third part of what you've said is about the Armed Forces specifically.
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I presented two years ago to the National Standing Committee on Defence at their request when the Trudeau
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government was trying to re-roll one-third of the Armed Forces of Canada to be the emergency
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management force to take care of wildfires and floods.
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The Armed Forces of Canada is your combat-capable force.
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It's not for fighting wildfires and forest fires.
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It is to fight an enemy using every possible tool to destroy them or neutralize them.
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And so every day that you take away from a combat-capable force, you are taking away a day of them
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And as I say clearly in the paper, to make a sergeant, a sergeant who commands a section of 10 takes 10 years,
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because you have to teach individual skills, collective skills, then battalion skills, brigade skills,
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You need to incorporate them into a complete overall environment.
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You need to give them their personal trade as well as the collective trade to work and fight together.
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People don't even know the words dash down, crawl, observe, sights fire when they come in
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But they have to be taught over and over and over and refreshed and then continuous training
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So if you do anything that takes away from the training cycle and the deployment cycle
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of a combat-capable force, you are eroding that capability.
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There is many other people to do all those other roles.
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Our border services, our police services, emergency management, which is in every province and
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territory of Canada, takes care of wildfires, floods and tornadoes.
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So the three parts, yes, there's an intentional erosion of the unity and the national security,
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There is the breakdown of that ability within the armed forces to do their core mission,
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which is to be combat-capable on a moment's notice to deploy anywhere within our country
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against all enemies, foreign and domestic, but also to be able to deploy in support of our allies in
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North America and wherever else the government of Canada determines is in the national interest of
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our country abroad in support of friends and allies.
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You know, you're talking about the core mission of the military and you're right.
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I remember a few decades ago, there was a bad snowstorm in Toronto.
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And at the time, the mayor, Mel Lastman, wanted the military to come shovel.
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And a very good friend of mine that I'd served in Egypt with back in 1978 was the commander of
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I was in Borden, Ontario, and he was a joke, but he called me up.
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He was a general and he called me up and he says,
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Dave, you haven't happened to see a battalion driving down the road past you.
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I seem to have lost my immediate rapid reaction force.
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I'm told they're on their way to shovel snow in Toronto.
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I closed my complete training establishment and deployed 300 soldiers to help restore power in
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Canadian soldiers are extremely proud when they can be used as the force of last resort.
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To help in emergency management tasks in our country.
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But every minute of every day that they are away from their training and deployment missions
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to fight for our country is a day that their skills diminish.
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And so we should only use them as the force of last resort.
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And what we're seeing in this last nine year period is the armed forces being called routinely
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by premiers of provinces, by mayors of towns to deploy because they have failed to invest
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You know, and and I think of one of the and by the way, you know, I remember growing up,
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people used to say, well, Canada were two things were the best health care in the world.
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I don't know if we have any peacekeepers deployed anywhere.
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I know there's a little force of Canadians in the Baltics, but they're not peacekeepers.
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They're sort of with, I think, in Latvia or Estonia.
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But I mean, David, is it true that we don't actually have any Canadians
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on a UN peacekeeping mission anywhere in the world?
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To the best of my knowledge, we have individuals deployed in UN missions,
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And maybe I need to be a little more clear on the UN peacekeeping.
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And so I did my share of United Nations peacekeeping missions.
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And I would put it to you that while they were a great source of national pride at times,
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their effectiveness was very limited because in almost every one of them,
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there was no peace to keep unless the nations had already decided they wanted it.
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The forces were routinely sent simply to give a cooling off period.
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So peacekeeping missions are a bit of a misnomer.
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And if you look in my paper, to me, it's not one of the missions that I support.
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I support combat capable training and capability.
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And every type of mission that is not focused on that diminishes the ability of our forces
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I mean, peacekeepers are cast out of the country when the nations involved want to go to war.
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Often peacekeeping is used by third world countries as a source of revenue.
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We've heard terrible stories about some peacekeepers, largely from third world countries as well,
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I guess my only point was, even though it was only for bragging purposes 20 years ago,
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And the fact that, you know, I think the last mission we were on was when Justin Trudeau's mom
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came back from a sort of an eco-tourism trip to Mali, Africa.
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Like, his mom went there and came back and had a huddle with Justin.
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And so he sent peacekeepers to Mali, a very dangerous country.
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Thank God that mission ended with no casualties.
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But I mean, it's so obvious that Trudeau does not believe the core mission of the military is
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If you were to ask him or, and frankly, I think a lot of the entire political class,
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And I bet you half the members of the conservative party who haven't thought
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I bet you 80% of the media, if you ask them the core purpose of the military, they would
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not say it's to project force, to destroy or neutralize the other side, to protect our
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They would talk about, like, I see an absurd story out of the UK.
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They're thinking of having, I think it was in the UK, electric powered military vehicles
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We saw under the Biden-Harris administration, an emphasis on transgenderism in the military.
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These are other, and I mean, to me, they're ridiculous.
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But they certainly have nothing to do with lethality.
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And I don't think the modern liberal state can embrace the idea of we are trying to kill the other
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I don't think they're even comfortable with the idea of a military.
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Well, I start the paper with an ancient quote from ancient Greece.
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And the intent of that quote was, if you don't defend yourself, someone will come in and take
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And then you'll have their army with their foot on your neck.
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Now, my entire point in the paper is to try and refocus that combat capability is the core
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And if you're not training to use it, you are using it.
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But behind it all, and I think President-elect Trump said it very clearly in his first tenure,
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that the threat of a fully combat capable force helps with diplomacy and that that's part of
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If you have in Canada a force that can be deployed and that people know is credible and it can cover
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each of our partnership agreements, all of our alliance agreements, it can defend the sovereignty
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of Canada and assist in the sovereignty of North America, and the world sees it as best in class,
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The mere threat of its use helps in all of our foreign affairs and diplomatic missions because
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Our alliances laugh at us, don't invite us to meetings, intentionally ignore our input.
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Our foreign affairs people have great difficulty getting any credibility in the world because
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they look at us and they know we're not a serious country and we don't take our national security and
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part of that national defense seriously at all.
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I mean, in the last few years, I've heard the phrase AUKUS, which we never heard of before.
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Those three countries sort of smushed together into one word.
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We're still part of the Five Ives intelligence sharing network, though I'm not sure how much
00:28:50.080
our allies are sharing with us, given how the Chinese government has penetrated the parliament.
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It's a they're buying equipment together that it's its own sort of treaty.
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And that name is is a spin off of when I served.
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It was called ABCA, the American, British, Canada, Australia brackets New Zealand.
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And so it used to be ABCA and the sea was clearly us.
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They formed AUKUS because they threw the sea out.
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I mean, we were disproportionately there in World War One, World War Two, in the late 40s.
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I think we had the third largest Navy in the world.
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We actually had an aircraft carrier for a while.
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I mean, we had a whole beach, Juneau Beach, next to our allies, Juneau and Sword and Utah and,
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you know, on Normandy, though, that's that Canada is gone.
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And you can even see it in recruitment efforts.
00:29:52.320
I mean, how important it was to Justin Trudeau to have those tampon dispensers in the men's
00:30:04.160
But regular kit for the soldiers where they had to buy it themselves.
00:30:07.760
There's food banks every year on Canadian military bases.
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I think it was even CFP Borden when they had like Christmas hampers for soldiers who couldn't
00:30:22.080
And we raised money to donate money to this base.
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The government refused to take the check because it was too embarrassing.
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They needed the money, but they refused to take a gift to their Christmas hamper project because
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But they found money for the tampon dispensers.
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I mean, I suppose you're always going to have people who join the military no matter what.
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But who would sign up for a military that's under-equipped, that's main job is shoveling
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snow, that's ordered around based on the whim of Trudeau's mum, I talk about Molly, and that
00:31:02.640
I mean, if you were a young Canadian man who wanted adventure and patriotism, you're probably
00:31:08.560
more likely to find it in the British Army or the American Army.
00:31:13.520
In the Latvian deployment, there were serious, clear articles of soldiers buying their own
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personal kit because the supply system couldn't supply it to them.
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We know that we're supposed to be there training other forces how to fight and be combat capable
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on equipment that we don't even have in our own armed forces here in Canada, air defense
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The story goes on and on and on, and so that's why I wrote the paper to try and reorient
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both our political class, but in particular Canadian citizens, and I hope they actually
00:31:56.720
read it and understand that combat capability is something that every country in the world
00:32:02.880
that's a serious nation has, and that all the things that we seem to be using our armed
00:32:12.160
And if you want to have a peacekeeping force, then make a peace corps and let someone, invite
00:32:21.520
someone, you know, I hear Mr. Trump, President-elect Trump, talking about perhaps it's time for
00:32:30.160
For those who haven't read either my paper from March or this paper, the Monroe Doctrine was
00:32:35.920
a real thing back in the late 1800s after the Civil War in the US. It was felt that the United
00:32:42.960
States had the right to all of North America, including Mexico and Canada. And I hear people
00:32:49.040
talking about wanting to be part of the United States. Well, sir, I don't. I am a very proud Canadian.
00:32:56.000
Both my mother and father fought in World War II. Both were in the RCAF. My mother is a WAF.
00:33:01.440
My father is a pilot in the Pacific. My grandfather fought in the First World War in the trenches in
00:33:06.480
France as a Canadian in the first Canadian division. I understand from my travels, 27 years in the army
00:33:16.080
and some pretty awful places in the world, what it means to live in a democracy. But a democracy comes
00:33:23.600
with the responsibility to defend your rights and freedoms. And if you don't, you will lose them.
00:33:30.000
There was a very powerful presentation at the National Citizens Inquiry in Red Deer
00:33:35.680
in April 2023 by a lady who had grown up in the solidarity movement in Poland.
00:33:42.800
And her purpose coming to the NCI was to plead with Canadians to take their rights and freedoms,
00:33:49.840
which were totally demolished during the COVID incident, because she saw happening in Canada,
00:34:01.040
what had happened in Poland. And she did not, she fled Poland to get away from all of that
00:34:07.760
at the end of the solidarity movement. And she saw Poland reemerging in Canada,
00:34:12.640
and she couldn't believe it. If you don't defend your rights and freedoms,
00:34:15.760
you don't have them. And a country that isn't prepared to defend their rights and freedoms,
00:34:20.160
isn't a country worth defending. And that was in the white paper on defense
00:34:24.160
under the Croatian era, who then turned around and tried to destroy the armed forces at that time
00:34:29.680
in the 1990s. So the hypocrisy isn't new. But Canadians need to understand that this beautiful
00:34:36.480
country they live in is being demolished in front of them. With the protests, we see the Hamas supporters
00:34:42.560
in our streets, the Eritrean supporters in our streets, the Kalistani people in the streets,
00:34:48.080
fighting for wards that aren't part of Canada and don't represent the ethics and values of our country.
00:34:53.120
And it's time we took our democracy seriously and stopped bringing people into our country who don't
00:35:00.560
respect our ethics and values, but at the same time standing up for the people that do respect our
00:35:05.920
ethics and values and having a combat capable force that can defend our sovereignty within our own country.
00:35:13.040
Wow, you touched on a lot of things there, for sure. You know, when Trump, in his joking,
00:35:19.600
provocative way, he finds a sensitive spot and he keeps poking at it. And watching different Canadian
00:35:26.720
reactions to the 51st state thing is very illuminating. Your reaction is, you know, if you
00:35:33.920
value being Canadian, you got to keep it, you got to show it, you got to do something about it, not just
00:35:39.120
wine. I saw Jean Charest was saying, we should all be deeply offended. That's not an action plan.
00:35:45.040
That's an emotional response. Frankly, one of weakness and one of reaction. You know, there's an
00:35:52.240
old saying, you and what army? You know, as in you have a strong point of view, you believe in something,
00:35:57.680
okay, you and what army? And I think in his own way, Trump is trying to say, well, get a bloody army,
00:36:05.920
get a border, enforce the law. Like if you actually go to the beginning of this whole shenanigans with
00:36:11.120
Trump, he said to Canada Mexico, do me a favor and keep my main campaign promise for me before I even
00:36:18.560
take office, fix the border. Because we share a border where neighbors, you know, good fences make
00:36:23.680
good neighbors. The president of Mexico pretty much said yes right away. She grumbled a bit, but she said
00:36:29.760
yes. Only Canada went into this great hamlet like, you know, you know, soliloquy. How about
00:36:38.960
fix your border? If you think you're a sovereign country, prove it by fixing your border. If you
00:36:44.480
think you're an independent country, prove it by funding your army. In a way, Trump is saying things
00:36:52.480
that hurt feelings, I think that are pointing us towards, well, how about man up? How about fix our
00:37:00.160
problems? If you actually are deeply offended, as Jean Charest says he is, why not say, we'll show
00:37:06.160
those Americans, we'll have a strong border, we'll have a strong military, we won't let them push us
00:37:10.560
around. I think secretly that's what Trump wants. I don't think secretly. I think he's been quite open
00:37:17.840
in Canada about it. And let's be very clear. The United States has been calling us out for an awfully
00:37:23.920
long time. When Obama stood up in our legislature and said, we need more Canada, he wasn't talking
00:37:31.200
about feminism and women's issues. He was, if you go to the speech, he had just opened the whole
00:37:37.920
discussion with the fact that we weren't paying our way and meeting our NATO commitment. And when he said,
00:37:45.120
we need more Canada, he was saying, we need Canada to meet its 2% and to contribute militarily to NATO.
00:37:53.280
And Trump is just simply reiterating what's been said to Canada for an awfully long time.
00:37:58.720
When I served in uniform, back when I did three tours in Germany, from 72 to 99. And when we went on an
00:38:09.520
exercise in Germany, as part of a US or a German Corps, we're talking 130,000 troops deployed.
00:38:18.080
Canada was tiny, but we were respected because we had kept a full mechanized brigade group on the
00:38:25.440
ground and contributed with with good combat capability. And everyone said Canadian soldier
00:38:32.000
was worth 10 of any other soldiers, we just needed to have at least 10 times more to be credible.
00:38:37.840
And so that was being said in the 1980s. This isn't the first time, it won't be the last. But
00:38:43.920
if we don't take it seriously this time, there will be massive trade implications,
00:38:48.800
as there should be. If I can take you back to 1970, when Justin Trudeau's father was the prime
00:38:56.640
minister, and he destroyed the Canadian Armed Forces. When we had a country with 20,000 people,
00:39:02.720
we had an armed forces of 105,000. Pierre Trudeau came to power, cut it to 70,000 with the intention
00:39:09.360
of taking it to 50,000 and turning it into a peace corps until the NATO alliance said,
00:39:14.800
no main battle tank, no committed brigade group in Europe, no trade with Europe. Well,
00:39:22.000
we've come full circle under his son, only it's worse now.
00:39:25.600
Incredible. Well, I think your timing here is sound, because I do believe that 2025 will be the
00:39:33.680
year where Canada says goodbye to Justin Trudeau. In fact, it seems like half of his caucus want him
00:39:39.280
gone already. We're taping this show a couple of days before it goes to air. There's even a chance
00:39:44.320
by the time it airs, Trudeau will be given the boot, but I very much doubt that. I think that it's
00:39:50.240
important that the Conservative Party of Canada reassert the values that give rise to a strong
00:39:57.280
and self-respecting military, because it's not just about equipment and money. It's about the
00:40:03.280
ideas behind the military, why we have one, why we need one, the mindset of the people in the military,
00:40:09.360
what is their purpose and mission. And you're so right that we've lost our way. I've really enjoyed
00:40:14.800
talking with you over the course of the last half hour. Folks, if you want to read the very
00:40:19.760
detailed essay by our guest, you can find it at C2C Journal. That's with the numeral two,
00:40:26.640
C2C Journal. The essay is called Unfit for Duty. It is Time to Rebuild the Canadian Armed Forces. And
00:40:33.760
our guest has been David Redmond. Thanks so much for spending so much time with us.
00:40:38.800
Thank you, sir. All right. Well, there you have it. On behalf of all of us here at Rebel World
00:40:44.320
Headquarters to you at home, good night, and keep fighting for freedom.