EZRA LEVANT ｜ Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' passes, declares war on illegal immigration
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Summary
Trump's 'Big, Beautiful' bill passed into law today, and he's thrilled. I'll take you through it to explain why this bill is so important for Canada, especially for making America more competitive while we go the opposite way.
Transcript
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Hello, my friends. What's this big, beautiful bill that Trump's been talking about? It was
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passed into law today, and he's thrilled. I'll take you through it to explain why this bill is
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so important and what it means for Canada, especially for making America more competitive
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while we go the opposite way. But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to what we call
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Tonight, what was Trump's big, beautiful bill, and why did he fight so hard to get it passed
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today? It's July 3rd, and this is The Ezra LeVance Show.
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Well, tomorrow is the 4th of July, Independence Day in the United States, but the celebrations
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of the White House began today with the passage of Trump's big, beautiful bill. That's what he
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actually called it, which sort of makes me chuckle. Trump and his old team did a full-court press to
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get it through Congress. Obviously, most Democrats didn't like it, but so too did some Republicans,
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including some libertarians, and they've been out of sorts with Trump recently. They didn't like him
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bombing Iran. My view is that America had a very limited military action there, and peace through
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strength is different than peace through pacifism, but there's been, at least online, it looked like
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there was a lot of dissent, but at the end of the day, the bill passed. I do want to study the
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objections of the libertarian wing of the party that was against this bill, and frankly, against any
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foreign entanglements as well. I think that was the objection to bombing Iran. But I think this vote
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is proof that Donald Trump is the boss of Washington, D.C., at least for now. Who knows what will happen
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in the midterm votes just a year and a half away, but for now, he can get a big bill passed. I mean,
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there's a lot of log rolling, as they call it, lots of deals in there, but I think it is a pretty
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MAGA bill. It reflects what he said in his inaugural address. I want to take you through
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a few of the things that were in the bill that is now law. So there's reasons to celebrate that
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the bill passed, but there were some new job stats for June that just came out, and we love talking
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about America because it's so interesting. We're right next to it. Donald Trump is a force of nature.
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What he does affects us in Canada. But I'd like you to, in your mind, compare how we are doing
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and our approach in Canada to that in the United States. For example, these June statistics,
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830,000 new jobs for native-born Americans as opposed to 348,000 jobs lost for foreign-born workers.
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And I think that's been a big push of Trump to get Americans back into the workforce by removing
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immigrants, including for reasons that they are ultra-low-cost competition for jobs, because
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many of them are off the books. They're undocumented, as the left says. And Trump is for Americans,
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not temporary foreign workers. So look at that stat again. Nearly a million new jobs for native
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Americans, native-born Americans, and compared to a job loss for foreign-born. And in terms of full-time
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and part-time, the split is 437,000 new full-time jobs. And actually, part-time jobs are being lost.
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The unemployment rate is what I meant to mention next. It's 4.1% in the United States. That is so low.
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That's down from 4.2% just a little bit. A lot of pundits expected it to go up. They thought,
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well, Donald Trump is going to punish the economy with his tariffs. The economy seems to be absolutely
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loving things. And one of the things that's a trick in Canada, our job numbers look good
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artificially, not as good as America's, because the government just keeps on hiring. And those are
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typically full-time jobs, very highly paid jobs. In the United States, the number of people employed
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by the government fell by 275,000 in June, down about half a million since Biden lost. So the gains
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are for American citizens in the private sector in full-time jobs. How's that not winning all over
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the place? Anyways, my point is that was some good news that the administration got today. Let me take
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you through some of the themes of the big, beautiful bill. And you know what? I don't want to pretend I'm
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an expert in this bill. In fact, I'd like to get some American commentators to help me unpack it.
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But again, some of it is really easy to understand. I don't think you need to be an expert to understand
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what tax cuts in the United States will do to Canada's business community and our competitiveness. I mean,
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we're already having a tough enough time because of tariffs. But what if they cut their taxes down there?
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In fact, that's one of the selling points of the big, beautiful bill. It makes the 2017 Trump tax
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cuts permanent, lowers taxes for individuals and businesses, increases tax deduction for
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individuals and married couples, tax relief for small businesses and freelancers. One of the moves
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that Trump did, which I think stole some thunder from Democrats who like to portray themselves as
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standing for the little guy, is Trump talked about no tax on tips. You know what I mean? So who earns
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tips? Well, I mean, obviously waiters, bartenders, people like that. No tax on tips. That is such a
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blue collar, entry level, pink collar campaign pledge. It sounds like something the Democrats would say. No,
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it's Trump's. He's also not having tax on overtime. Now, I don't know how you exactly police
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the no tax on tips, because now you're really encouraging. It used to be that workers, and I
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was a waiter back in the day when I was a teenager, you sort of hid what your tips were. Maybe there's
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a real incentive to maybe not disclose what you made in cash. How would the government know? Well, now,
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the more money you make in tips, the more money you make tax-free. So I don't know how it's going to
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be policed exactly, but in a way, I don't care. The point is the taxes are going down, and especially
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for, quote, the little people. I mean, it's one thing for the Democrats to say every billionaire
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is a policy failure. That's a phrase I heard that Democrat who's leading the polls for New York City
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mayor say. But no, Trump is a billionaire, but I think he's got more blue collar sensibility than
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any Democrat around. You know, experts say a lot of things, but experts who crunched the math here,
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the Council of Economic Advisors, says his big, beautiful bill could mean more than $13,000
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more in take-home pay for a family of four. Like, just stop and think about the size of that.
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By the way, that's in real U.S. dollars. So that's pretty much like $20,000 Canadian more
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take-home pay for a family of four. Like, where is that for us? It's not even a dream for us. It's not
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even a possibility. We all know that everything's going the opposite direction in Canada. It's going
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to be more taxes, not less. I mean, it's hard to even imagine a Canada where a family of four would
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get a $20,000 tax credit. I say that in Canadian dollars. He's got special help for small business
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in there, about expensing. I'm not an expert in accounting, but he's trying to really juice
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private industry as opposed to the Democrats and the liberals in this country who love government,
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quote, investments. I hate that. And every politician in Canada does it. When they spend
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money, they call it an investment. Here's Trump cutting taxes to let the private sector actually
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make investments. So that's the money side. And I say that because the U.S. economy is about to
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really have its golden age again. And I know that sounds a little bit jingoistic, but oh my God,
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it is absolutely going to. In fact, it's already showing strength that exceeds expectations. And
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with this bill being passed, how could it not? And again, who are our chief competitors? Who is our
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market? It is a sad thing that they are our chief competitor and they're going to clean our clock.
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I mean, the brain drain. Talk about the brain drain. If you are a young entrepreneur in Canada,
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why? If you want to open a factory, which side of the border are you going to put that factory on?
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Put aside the tariffs alone just to tax it. Speaking of borders, I think that's the biggest
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part of this bill in terms of impact and importance. I like to follow a young guy named
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Stephen Miller. He's not a young guy. He's about my age. He's a deputy chief of staff. He is so
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hard line. He's interested in a lot of issues, but immigration is by far his most passionate issue.
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And he has taken to Twitter in recent days saying that passing this bill was of civilizational
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importance. As in, if we don't do this now, it'll never be done.
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There's estimates vary, but I've heard the number 13 million illegal migrants just walked across that
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southern border and some from our northern border too into America during Joe Biden's disaster term.
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And that was on purpose. Of course, there was no physical reason why Biden couldn't keep him out.
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Trump didn't need new laws or new budgets to do what he did in his first week.
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He, but I tell you one thing, this big, beautiful bill is so enormous and it's, it's almost obsessive
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focus is on immigration, which when you think about it has been the core Trump promise in 2016,
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2020, and 2024. The Customs and Border Protection Service, CBP, that's what they call their border
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guards. In their last year's budget was $17 billion, which is pretty big. And ICE had a bill, a budget of
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around $9 billion. This new big, beautiful bill quadruples the border police budget and triples ICE's
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enforcement budget. All told, the, the global budget for the border, for detention, for deportation
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is about $150 billion, which is more, I think, than any military in the world, other than the United
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States on military. I think that's more than any other country in the world spends on their,
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on their real army. I'd have to check, uh, to be certain of that. But in a way, that's what it is.
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America was invaded. That's what you call it when foreign nationals illegally crossed the border. That
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is, and then, and some of them were not, quote, hostile, but they're, they're illegally. And in this
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bill, Trump fights back with a staggering amount of resources, hiring 10,000 new ICE agents, ICE is the
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immigration, I forget exactly what it stands for, immigration control enforcement or something.
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Those are the folks who basically, uh, arrest illegals and deport them. Uh, it's doubling the
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current 6,000 deportation officers. There's going to be 3,000 more border patrol agents along 5,000 more
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CBP officers. I, you know, I'm just, I don't even know the difference in all these different officers.
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They're building an army and they are aiming to have 3,000 deportations a day, which is a million a
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year, which if you do the math, you realize that is not even close to what Biden let in. Even if Trump
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keeps up that million a year number, he'll have 4 million done by the end of his term.
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There's still more than that who came in, but this will set things in motion in the right direction.
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And I can, I can hardly wait to see the knock-on effects it has. I mean, I saw a news story the other
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day there was a meatpacking plant and it was raided by ICE because so many of the workers of the meatpacking
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plant were there illegally. And I saw, uh, in the news story, what do we do now? So like, how do we
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staff the place? Hey, I got an idea way at the back here. How about hire Americans? And the,
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the meatpacking business in Alberta, uh, in Southeastern Alberta is overwhelmingly foreign
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migrants. So I don't think they're illegal in Canada. They may be temporary foreign workers.
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I got an idea. How about hiring Canadians? And if you're going to pay an extra five bucks an hour,
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uh, suck it up and maybe charge an extra 50 cents a hot dog or something. But, uh, you're a Canadian,
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you have a duty to hire Canadians. And, you know, I think you're going to see American teenagers
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get summer jobs again. I think you're going to get, see Americans in service jobs again.
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Um, is it really necessary to have millions of foreign migrants in your country just to operate
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Ubers and DoorDash and, and, and take away services like that? Like how about hire Americans and how
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about we hire Canadians? Um, the detention capacity, they're more than doubling into a hundred thousand,
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um, to hold daily, uh, family detention centers. Um, which is, uh, what Trump has said before. He has
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said, uh, he, when he was asked, do you break up families? He says, I'd rather not. So they all have
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to go together. Welcome to a grownup being in charge of politics for once. Hey, there's another
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move that Trump announced a few days ago with Ron DeSantis, who by the way, was his rival in this
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year's primary. So I'm delighted to see them working together. And Kristi Noem, the, uh, Homeland
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Security boss was there. Just let me play a minute of, and you know, I don't know if this was
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DeSantis' idea or Trump's or might be Stephen Miller's, but one of the problems of course,
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is immigration judges. First of all, there's a huge backlog. Second of all, they're all
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ideologues. Well, look at this idea that Ron DeSantis says about using, uh, lawyers and others
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within the, um, Florida national guard to have super quick hearings, real hearings. They will be
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real hearings, but they won't be two years from now. They'll be two days from now. Here,
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take a look at this clip. This is we're offering up our national guard and other folks in Florida
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to be deputized, to be immigration judges. We're working with the department of justice for the
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approvals. I'm sure Pam will approve. Uh, but then you have, I'll have a national guard judge advocate
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here. Someone has a notice to appear. Biden would tell them to come back in three years and appear.
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Now you'll be able to appear in like a day or two. So they're not going to be detained. Hopefully
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for all that long, we'll have people here in this facility that can make, you know,
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it's a bureaucracy. A president's got to deal with the bureaucracy. Now that Supreme court ruling
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was good because that's going to allow him to be able to exercise article to the way founders
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intended, but you still have bureaucracy. So we want to cut through that so that we have an
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efficient operation between Florida and DHS to get the removal of these illegals done.
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I think that's the favorite thing I've seen in a week. Anyway, there's a few other things
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in this big, beautiful bill. I mean, I, as far as I'm concerned, immigration is more important
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than everything combined, but they do have a tax credit for metallurgical coal. I don't
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know if you know what that is. There's some coal that you burn for power plants, but metallurgical
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coal is a special coal that you use to get a certain extreme high heat, high enough to melt
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steel. Like you cannot make steel without coal. And it's been insane to see this war against coal
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in the West, including in Germany, in Poland, in the UK and in Canada. So I just wanted to note that
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this bill talks about actually giving a tax credit for metallurgical coal. Donald Trump believes in
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energy and he doesn't believe that only China and India get to have it. Obviously there's a boost in
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military funding, including for the border. There's even a $10 billion Mars mission in there,
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which suggests that he's still friends with Elon Musk. Look, I'm sympathetic to concerns about the
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deficit here. Absolutely. But I agree with Stephen Miller, the Trump's deputy for staff. He said this
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is more important than anything else because it reflects and deals with everything else. You cannot
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solve any other problem in America without solving immigration, whether it's crime or, or the
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anti-Semitism and crazy pro-Hamas protests on the street, or the difficulty for young people to get
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that first job or the high price of housing because there's so many foreign people bidding it out.
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There's, there is no issue in the United States or Canada that is not exacerbated, if not even caused
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by immigration. And once you stop the flow and then reverse it, and that was the re-migration we talked
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about the other day. Once you start doing that, I think you're going to see the opposite of a vicious
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cycle. You're going to see what they call a virtuous cycle. We already saw a little bit of that in those
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job numbers with every 10,000, 50,000, a hundred thousand illegals deported. You're going to see
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the crime rate fall. You're going to see fewer protests, uh, for Hamas and Iran. You're going to
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see Americans getting jobs in factories. I, I think that Trump really is applying a simple,
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but difficult plan. And he really staked everything on this big, beautiful bill and he got it through.
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And I know there were those, including Elon Musk who thought it did not deal with wasteful spending
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enough. And you know what? He's dead, right? One of my observations though, is that Elon Musk comes
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from the world of Silicon Valley where owners, startup bosses, um, rule almost by fiat. I mean,
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even if they have a board of directors, people like Mark Zuckerberg within his company have preferential
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stock and they basically are the deciders. And when you invest in Facebook, you're really investing
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in Mark Zuckerberg. And when you invest in SpaceX or Tesla, you're really investing in Elon Musk.
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And we know that because the price of those companies fluctuate. For example, when Elon Musk announced
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he was going back to Tesla after working in the white house, the price of Tesla went up. Um,
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when you are the boss of a fast moving, disruptive, uh, visionary company, you make decisions like
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that. And everyone just obeys you out of corporate loyalty, but also out of affection. That's not how
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it works in a bipartisan Congress. You have to make deals that you don't like because power is not
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centered in one person. Of course, the president's the most powerful man in America, but there's a
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hundred senators who each think they're extremely important, 435 congressmen. And there's
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a lot of jostling and to-ing and fro-ing to get a bill with this magnitude passed with its
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immigration provisions will make the deportations more serious. And by the way, it won't be the
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last country to do so. I predict that prime minister Nigel Farage in the UK will follow this
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path. He'll see Trump and say, Oh, it's possible. We might do it. I think in the Netherlands, when
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they're having another election later this year, you could see prime minister here at builders doing
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the same thing. I think if France ever has a fair election and Marine Le Pen becomes president there,
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you might see it there. I think the world is moving towards re-migration and Trump is leading the way.
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Anyways, that's my update. That's my take on the big, beautiful bill, but I will get some Americans
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on the show to help correct my errors in the days ahead. Stay with us more after this short break.
00:20:18.400
Well, the liberals are not dumb. They are perhaps the world's most successful political party.
00:20:24.940
They used to have rivals in Mexico. There was a political party there that lasted the better part
00:20:30.300
of a century. And I suppose you could refer to the communist party of the Soviet Union, but
00:20:35.020
actually, I think taken over the sweep of time, the liberal party of Canada is the most successful
00:20:42.340
political force in the Western world. Prove me wrong. Give me an example to dispute that.
00:20:48.740
And one of the reasons is that they're just so good at the practical politics of getting
00:20:54.700
elected in Canada. In the case of Mark Carney, he was not Trudeau. That was half the battle. And
00:21:00.660
on his very first day, he scaled down the carbon tax to zero. The law is still on the books for him
00:21:07.920
to charge that tax. It's just set to zero for now. And more than those two things, I think he knew that
00:21:16.060
there was a certain number of primarily Ontarian sort of Laurentian elites, people who are fairly well
00:21:23.180
off slightly low information, a little bit of an anti-Americanism. And so he was able to whip up
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their fears about Donald Trump annexing the country enough to move, let's say, a million votes back into
00:21:36.360
the liberal column, which was enough to push him ahead into first place. They are not dumb.
00:21:42.440
And one of the things they're good at doing is realizing that the liberals are the parties,
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the party of the cities and maybe some of the suburbs. They are not the party of the rural parts.
00:21:53.000
In fact, other than occasionally a seat in the north, the liberals really are shut out of rural
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Canada, which means, you know, you might think that that is a deficit or a strategic loss, but not when
00:22:05.120
the mass of votes and seats are in the cities. In fact, it's an opportunity. Again, think like a liberal
00:22:11.440
for a minute. You can set up the country parts as a foil. You can demonize them. You can run against
00:22:20.080
them. For example, you can demonize, I mean, I think the most obvious example is firearms. You can say
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that ranchers and farmers who use firearms for hunting or taking care of, you know, a coyote coming to
00:22:35.860
hassle to flock or even self-defense. You can demonize those country owners of long arms to distract, to
00:22:43.900
misdirect away from the actual crime wave that has overtaken our main cities. And there are simply enough
00:22:52.400
Canadians who will buy it to continue putting the liberals into power. How is that going right now? Have the
00:23:00.240
liberals decided to demonize lawful firearm owners again under Mark Carney, the way they did so
00:23:07.080
successfully under Justin Trudeau. And I'm old enough to remember Alan Rock and his gun registry a
00:23:13.220
generation ago. What are the liberals up to? Well, joining us now to tell us the answer is someone who's
00:23:19.460
a bit of an expert in the field. He is the YouTube journalist for Caliber magazine, Canada's only firearms
00:23:26.660
magazine. His name is Dan Fritter, and he joins us now via Zoom. Great to see you, Dan. Thanks for
00:23:31.580
taking the time with us. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. You know, I'm just thinking right
00:23:39.800
after the cabinet chapel, I think it was Andrew Lawton who started putting questions to the new
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liberal minister in charge of firearms, just about licenses and firearms and what's the assault,
00:23:51.380
like the most basic questions. And the minister had no clue whatsoever. Um, here's a quick flashback
00:23:59.660
of that video. It was sort of a classic. I think, you know, the one. The minister know what an RPAL is?
00:24:04.720
I'm a minister. I do not. Remember. Does the minister know what the CFSC is? I'm a minister.
00:24:14.900
I do not. No. Remember. I'll stipulate chair. That is the Canadians firearm safety course that all gun
00:24:21.020
owners in Canada have to do to get their firearms license. Has the minister ever done the Canadian
00:24:25.440
firearm safety course? The Honourable Minister. Speaker, it's my third week on the job. No,
00:24:30.540
I have not. The Honourable Member. Does the minister know what safety classes and safety
00:24:36.020
demands are expected of law-abiding Canadian gun owners? The Honourable Minister. This is not about
00:24:41.460
law-abiding gun owners, Mr. Speaker. The Honourable Member. How can the minister make that claim when he
00:24:46.980
doesn't know the basic fundamentals of law-abiding gun ownership in this country, Chair?
00:24:51.060
To someone like you who actually knows something about firearms or someone like me who cares about
00:24:55.220
the right to own firearms, we might think that being a know-nothing might disqualify a cabinet
00:25:01.520
minister in charge of firearms. But in the Liberal Party, it's the opposite. The very fact that he
00:25:06.140
doesn't know what an assault rifle is allows him to speak with great confidence, not being worried
00:25:12.480
about getting any facts wrong. And so I think that what you and I and Andrew Lawton might have thought
00:25:17.840
was a foolish and embarrassing clip just showed the brilliance of the Liberal appointment. Maybe I'm
00:25:23.300
being too silly, but what do you think of that? I would agree. And I think it's also quite
00:25:29.400
concerning because this is obviously a highly technical file. It has a lot of background to it
00:25:34.560
because we had a pretty resilient and complicated system of firearms regulation pre-existing this
00:25:41.580
government. However, what's happened under Trudeau, who most are aware, kind of made edicts and then
00:25:48.620
government had to react to them. And there was no, from what we can tell, no room for government
00:25:53.420
departments to shift on those edicts, no matter how poorly informed they may have been. So we now
00:25:59.940
have a minister who seems to know very little to nothing about the existing firearms laws. And worse
00:26:07.320
still, he doesn't seem to have a staff underneath him that are familiar with how they could possibly
00:26:15.000
consult the minister and provide him with more information to make more informed decisions and
00:26:19.720
policies. Because as we've seen for the last five years, they've simply been doing what Justin Joe and
00:26:24.760
the PMO kind of ordered through the minister. And moreover, we've had five ministers overseeing this in
00:26:31.480
five years. So it's not like we've had a nice, long, continuous, consistent, you know, hand on the
00:26:38.020
rudder. It's been person after person after person. And each one has seemingly gotten less capable of getting a
00:26:44.380
handle on this stuff. And the whole time, the programs that Justin Trudeau launched primarily in 2020 have just
00:26:51.160
been expanding and expanding and expanding as effectively what seems to be the bureaucrats are just sort of
00:26:57.240
inflating this stuff more and more and more. You know, it's you said a lot of interesting things.
00:27:02.200
So I think one of them is how Justin Trudeau would just govern really by optics first press release first
00:27:08.040
policy second, I want to say something really passionate. And then the smart people will figure
00:27:13.080
out how that's supposed to work. And luckily, that meant a lot of things he had schemed up never actually
00:27:19.080
got implemented, because it was just about the initial press hype. But I mean, it has been so long in
00:27:26.120
that they are actually doing some terrible things. Let me bring your attention to a recent story
00:27:32.600
written by Tristan Hopper. In the National Post, his headline was internal report shows Ottawa doubt
00:27:40.280
over budget gun buyback will ever work. And let me just read you the first sentence. The Liberal
00:27:46.360
government's plan to quote buy back thousands of once legal Canadian firearms is not on schedule and
00:27:53.560
over budget. But a newly released internal report shows that Ottawa is doubtful that it is working
00:27:59.560
as announced. Do you have any update on that? I mean, the idea that they've spent half a billion
00:28:04.280
dollars so far, and haven't actually bought back any guns, it feels like the arrive can app like it
00:28:09.880
feels as much about a source of fraud or padded budgets is actually a gun project. Maybe everything
00:28:15.800
the Liberals do is just a patronage deal. Today, it looks like an arrive can app tomorrow looks like a
00:28:20.840
gun buyback. It's all about just lucrative contracts to buddies. I don't know. You tell me what's going
00:28:25.880
on with the gun buyback. I think effectively, you know, going back to what you'd said previously as
00:28:30.200
well, Trudeau had these really impassioned statements he would make and then, you know,
00:28:34.680
jump how high was sort of the response. For example, in the gun buyback we're discussing now,
00:28:39.800
he made this announcement in the wake of the massacre of Porta Peak. And then they consulted with the New
00:28:44.440
Zealand government because obviously Jacinda Ardern had made international headlines for
00:28:48.680
making a very similar pronouncement. And no one seems to have stepped in to tell him that Canada
00:28:53.480
is a very different country from New Zealand. We are not an island nation off the coast of countries
00:28:58.360
that have massive existing gun bans. We are bolted to the most heavily armed country in the world,
00:29:02.840
and it's not close for second place where criminals get the primary source of their firearms. So they were
00:29:08.680
embarking on this plan, consulting with the New Zealand police, and it's just been slowly turning
00:29:14.840
forward. So on one hand, they are doing it, they've bought back just over 12,000 firearms from
00:29:19.000
businesses at this point. But it's not getting any, it's taken five years for them to do that. And
00:29:25.160
those are businesses, it's a very small number of the overall firearms are targeting. It's just sort of
00:29:30.280
crawling towards an eventual failure. And moreover, you have to be careful, because I think the
00:29:35.080
government will frame a lot of this discussion around buyback, and they have in the past,
00:29:38.760
around the getting of guns is the success of this program, instead of looking at does it have
00:29:45.240
any impact on public safety. And in that regard, since 2015, violence with firearms in Canada has
00:29:50.840
increased relatively steadily. It is about 19% higher today than it was in 2015. And since 2020,
00:29:57.480
when these long guns were banned by Trudeau, it's still continued to increase. So it's not having any
00:30:02.840
impact on public safety, but it is costing phenomenal sums of money. By the end of this year,
00:30:08.440
with the amount of money that the government has dedicated to it, and the previous spending,
00:30:12.120
it'll be somewhere around $830 million. Now, I just did some quick math. If you say that they've
00:30:18.600
bought back 12,000 weapons, and if we're going to use the $500 million figure, and maybe the figure's
00:30:25.880
bigger now, that works out to about $4,000 per gun. Now, I'm just looking behind you there on the wall,
00:30:32.520
are a number of rifles. Are those the kind of guns, and I can't tell,
00:30:38.040
I think there's some rifles there. I don't know if you have a shotgun there. I can't quite tell.
00:30:41.720
I'm not an expert. Spending $4,000 a gun to buy them back, that seems a little stiff. I mean,
00:30:49.240
those firearms behind you, how much would those cost if you went to a store and bought them?
00:30:53.800
Well, they vary. Probably anywhere between, you know, a few hundred bucks,
00:30:57.640
two more than I would want to admit to my wife. But they've also got, you know, $25,000 rifles.
00:31:03.480
They've got rifles that they're paying six figures for. They're very rare African hunting rifles.
00:31:08.840
It's all over the map. And moreover, the amount of money that's been spent, a lot of people are
00:31:12.840
saying, well, it's because of the setup costs and whatnot. You know, for example, they budgeted
00:31:18.200
$100 million in operating expenses with public safety for this year to oversee phase two,
00:31:23.080
the component that involves individuals. But last year, they budgeted $30 million for businesses.
00:31:27.800
And if they targeted, you know, we bring it back to the 12,000 guns they bought from businesses,
00:31:32.600
that's actually more guns than they thought they were going to get. They estimated there were only
00:31:36.760
9,000 guns impacted at businesses. They got 135% compliance, which is obviously impossible.
00:31:44.200
So their estimates on the individual numbers are likely incorrect as well. And they've now recognized
00:31:49.720
that actually saying that they have a 13 year gap in the data, so it likely isn't accurate.
00:31:54.600
So the numbers that we're talking about already are, they're going to go up. The amount that's
00:31:59.320
budgeted this year with public safety alone is basically $460 million. That's not going to cover
00:32:04.600
the procedural costs that they're looking at. And again, it's not that this program is going to fail
00:32:10.360
because a lack of compliance or anything else like that. It's going to fail because the people who
00:32:14.040
they are taking guns from are literally the ones who are least likely to use a firearm in the commission
00:32:19.160
of a crime. Licensed gun owners account for like less than 2% of all violent crime
00:32:24.280
involving a firearm. So it's, it's, it's specifically targeting a population of people
00:32:29.000
who aren't, aren't contributing to the public safety issue Canada's facing. And Bill Blair even
00:32:35.000
admitted this earlier in the program where he said, we won't be buying guns from criminals
00:32:38.440
unless you have a firearms license. The government isn't going to give you a check for your gun.
00:32:43.160
You know, the whole thing about these, I think in the States, they use the word a gun amnesty.
00:32:46.920
They don't ask you where it got, where you got it from. They just want the gun off the street.
00:32:51.560
If you're literally saying you have to show you have a license to sell to us,
00:32:56.280
by definition, you're not going to get a single illegal gun. By definition, by, by virtue of the
00:33:02.520
engineering of this plan, you cannot get illegal guns off the streets if you require a license.
00:33:08.040
That seems like the opposite of what they should be doing.
00:33:11.560
Oh, it is. And, and your comparison to the arrive can app, it's very, uh, timely for current stuff.
00:33:17.400
But for those that have longer memories, remembering the long gun registrates,
00:33:20.920
this is a program doomed to fail because the targeted population is in country in crime.
00:33:24.920
But unlike the arrive can app, it also can't end because the amnesty that currently exists for gun
00:33:29.800
owners, like right now, if you own these firearms, you just have to keep them and store them away.
00:33:33.800
You can't take them to the range. You can't sell them. You can't transfer them. You just have to keep
00:33:36.760
them. And we've been told by the RCMP to wait for the program to launch so that you can get them
00:33:41.320
sent off and destroyed. Uh, that amnesty is likely going to be around in perpetuity because
00:33:46.840
the crown is not terribly interested in charging people with possession of a prohibited firearm.
00:33:51.800
If you have a license and you didn't even know that it was illegal, because in a lot of cases
00:33:55.320
you're dealing with people that live, like you said, in rural areas there, they may own a firearm,
00:33:59.720
but they are not gun nuts. So to speak, they don't read about it. They don't
00:34:03.800
bother interfacing with a lot of news sources. And because they have banned
00:34:07.800
at this point, tens of thousands of varieties of firearm, there's plenty of people out there who
00:34:12.200
own these guns and are still using them and have no idea that they're prohibited whatsoever.
00:34:16.200
And those are the sorts of people the crown does not want to charge. So this amnesty is going to be
00:34:20.120
around forever, just like the long gun registry amnesty was, which means that the program is going
00:34:24.200
to have to remain funded for just as long. There's, there's no point because these,
00:34:28.920
most of these guns are non-restricted, non-restricted and thus not registered.
00:34:32.920
The government doesn't know where they are, how many there are. So there's no way for the government
00:34:37.240
to a provide an actual compliance number because they don't know. And B say, we're done now.
00:34:43.080
We got to a hundred percent. We're good to go. Um, so they're just going to have to keep putting
00:34:47.240
money into this, like the long gun registry. So as we are now knocking on a billion dollars by the end
00:34:53.160
of this by March, um, that number will just continue to keep snowballing and, you know,
00:34:59.640
potentially we'll see the same thing happen that we saw with the long gun registry. Eventually that
00:35:03.080
number becomes big enough. The average person sort of recognizes they're not getting value for it and
00:35:07.480
they'll just scrap the whole thing. Uh, cause it's, it can't meet its stated goal, but it will certainly
00:35:12.280
cost a lot of money. Uh, hopefully that's sooner rather than later. Yeah. Well, it'd be interesting to
00:35:17.080
see how aggressive and interested, uh, Mark Carney is on this file. Um, but he's a winner. I mean,
00:35:23.880
he just won and he wants to win. And I mean, I'd have to look at the electoral map, but I don't
00:35:29.480
think he has any, um, significant rural MPs. I'm not saying he has zero, but it's got to be close to
00:35:36.280
zero. He doesn't care. I learned, you know, the one factor I learned in our conversation today that
00:35:41.000
I think I'm going to repeat a hundred times is that the gun buyback literally makes it impossible to
00:35:46.920
get an illegal gun off the street because you got to go in with clean hands as they say. And the
00:35:53.000
whole point of the gun is to get the dirty hands guns. That's just unbelievable. It's a perfect,
00:35:59.640
uh, encapsulation of the modern liberal party, complete, complete virtue signaling, uh, not
00:36:06.760
actually accomplishing a policy objective, spending as much money as possible as imaginable and, um,
00:36:15.000
no, no, no, no sunset on their new office. And, you know, there'll be people getting pensions.
00:36:22.360
There'll be, this could be a government office that's open for a hundred years. I, I, uh, I,
00:36:28.120
I guess what I'm hearing from you, Dan is liberal business as usual. Last word to you.
00:36:34.280
Yeah, I think it is. And I think it's interesting to think about how this will probably shape up because
00:36:40.120
the way that I've seen, you know, in the 14 years that I've been covering this stuff now is that
00:36:43.720
the attitudes have shifted quite a lot. And although the regulations definitely impact more
00:36:48.520
rural people and gun owners, um, we're, we're obviously not in a solid economic position.
00:36:54.120
A lot of Canadians are feeling the squeeze, so to speak. And I think that no matter where you live,
00:36:58.680
whether or not you have a gun owner or you own guns, that, that the cost of this program is starting,
00:37:03.480
it will probably have an impact on the credibility of Mark Carney as a fiscal manager, which is
00:37:09.240
obviously a huge component of his image, because if people are looking at services getting cut,
00:37:14.200
because we have to make, you know, NATO commitments and stuff like that, uh, we aren't made of money.
00:37:18.360
There is no tree in Ottawa that it just falls off of, unfortunately. So, uh, we are going to have
00:37:22.920
to cut things and people will start to look at programs like this and go, well, why isn't this
00:37:26.600
being cut? Why, why can't I get a doctor for three weeks or six months or however long it takes,
00:37:30.760
wherever you live, but we're going to spend a billion dollars taking guns from people who have
00:37:34.600
licenses that say you've literally not committed a crime. Uh, that doesn't make a lot of sense to
00:37:38.600
anyone. So, um, it might take some time to get there, but I, it might have an actual impact and
00:37:43.640
it'd be interesting to see how guns may elevate into a broader political perspective than being the
00:37:48.280
niche issue it's historically kind of been regarded as. Well, we'll keep our eyes on it. Dan Fritter
00:37:53.960
from caliber magazine. Great to meet you. Thanks for your time with us today. Thanks for having me.
00:38:16.840
On re-migration, Sherry Hinton says, I love what president Trump is doing. I live in Arizona,
00:38:21.800
border state. It's time action is taken. I hardly can afford food, let alone have non-citizens take
00:38:27.640
my children's food. Bravo to our president. Yeah. I, I think Arizona, Texas, uh, places like that.
00:38:34.360
I mean, Trump is sending home the Haitians. He has had tens of thousands of Haitians that are there on
00:38:40.120
sort of a special pass because things have been so awful in Haiti. It's not a permanent pass. He's
00:38:45.960
sending them home. Uh, TCZ 7742 says, the problem is Carney will see this as an opportunity and get the
00:38:55.080
re-migration to come up to Canada. You know what? Don't, don't give him any ideas, but it wouldn't
00:39:00.280
surprise me. I mean, my theory is those Swedish Somalis took the payment from Sweden and are moving
00:39:06.280
to Ireland because they're, they are moving on to green fields, greener pastures. We are so unsavvy
00:39:13.880
in Canada. It makes me sad. One last letter on Glastonbury. That was that music festival in the
00:39:19.640
UK that had all sorts of pro Hamas commentary. Razor says, the saddest part is that he likely won't
00:39:26.120
face any legal repercussions. Tommy Robinson gets in prison for exposing the truth about Islamism,
00:39:32.280
but this guy walks free like nothing happened. I think you're exactly right. In fact,
00:39:35.080
Tommy made a tweet to that effect. I think it was yesterday. He said, if he had gone on stage and
00:39:40.600
said the insane things like, and it was more than that first initial clip, there was a whole rant
00:39:46.440
he went on about death to him and death to him. Um, Tommy would have been arrested that moment. Yeah.
00:39:53.000
There's two tier justice in the UK, isn't there? Well, that's our show for today until tomorrow.
00:39:58.440
On behalf of all of us here at rebel world headquarters to you at home. Good night and keep fighting for freedom.