The Canadian Taxpayers Federation has a new piece of investigative journalism that will make you think twice before you hand over your money to the state broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It's a story about a bunch of fat cats who are getting paid way more than the average Canadian family.
00:04:10.660I should tell everybody, Chris is also a former journalist.
00:04:14.280So she has a very unique perspective on journalists being paid by the taxpayer, as in she agrees with me.
00:04:22.700They should never be paid by the taxpayer.
00:04:25.360But CBC is, I think, the very worst offender, because not only do they get $1.5-ish billion a year from the taxpayer to subsidize their operations,
00:04:38.620nobody watches, and their salaries are completely out of whack with the rest of the industry.
00:04:46.600Tell us about this latest Canadian Taxpayers Federation investigation into the salary, I would call it a problem, down at the CBC.
00:04:56.480And this actually gets me pretty mad, because, like you just said, I worked in the industry,
00:05:02.120including, like, in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, in, like, mainstream media outlets for years and years, like, 15, 20 years, in and out.
00:05:10.540And what gets me is that it was always kind of this understood thing that for every one journalist working in, like, even, you know, CTV, Global, CFRA Radio, something like that,
00:05:22.700back then, a really, truly private company, for every one of you, there were, like, four CBC reporters there,
00:05:30.900and those four CBC reporters had, like, you know, 20 managers among them.
00:05:36.800That was always the kind of understanding.
00:08:20.700I don't know the difference between those other two, 493 producers, 36 technical producers, 168 senior producers.
00:08:30.660Again, I don't know the distinction between them and the 86 executive producers, 130 advisors, 81 analysts, 120 hosts, 80 project leads, 30 lead architects, whatever that is.
00:08:45.860And then 25 supervisors who appear to do a different role than all the managers.
00:08:50.740So I looked up because, again, I had no idea when an advisor would be in that situation.
00:08:56.820So they've got 130 of them being paid more than $100,000 a year.
00:09:05.660So I just took whatever the, you know, evil Skynet, you know, summation is of an advisor.
00:09:10.460I don't know what that is on the interwebs because I'm too old.
00:09:13.560But apparently an advisor at the CBC could do anything from truly advising on like, you know, the origins of Remembrance Day or something like that, like a legit thing.
00:09:24.640Everything from that, Sheila, to proper DEI implementation.
00:10:30.420And so, yeah, and so I'm minding my own business and sticking to my knitting because I wasn't exactly a fit, even though, again, they were fine to me.
00:10:48.100When people are wondering why the CBC has a 1.8 audience share in primetime, when so many people are saying that they're losing trust in, you know, in all mainstream journalism, to be fair.
00:11:00.460More than 60% of Canadians think that mainstream journalists are deliberately misleading them with things they know to be untrue.
00:11:07.840Like, this is why you're starting to have people tune out and not trust.
00:11:12.300It's when you have one reporter for, like, two dozen middle managers.
00:11:17.060And this is the issue here is we're all paying for it.
00:12:34.060Like we're having to fight the state broadcaster, which is taxpayer funded, in order to find out what our tax dollars are being spent on, even in like anonymous blob amounts.
00:13:51.260It's, I can't even believe that they encouraged you even back then to just watch yoga at your desk.
00:13:58.040I know, like even Ezra, he'll complain like, oh my God, I was on Twitter too much today or on X too much today.
00:14:03.940Like, he's concerned that he's wasting his own time on the internet and then CBC is actively encouraging their employees to waste time on the internet.
00:14:13.620And this was, for the record, this was back around 2011, 2012.
00:14:17.620And again, they were super nice about it.
00:14:54.520Now, speaking of thievery, I think these electric vehicle mandates and the electric vehicle subsidies going to these Ontario and Quebec-based auto manufacturers,
00:15:07.240it's downright thievery from the Canadian taxpayer who will never, even if they wanted these bizarre electric cars that don't really work in our climate,
00:15:17.680And yet they're forced to subsidize them to companies that are going broke, not just in Canada, but around the world.
00:15:23.600And Doug Ford, on one side, he's happy to take the subsidies into his province, but then he's sort of missing the boat on the fact that if we move to entirely electric vehicles, we can't power them.
00:15:52.540But the issue here is that he said he was against the so-called electric vehicle mandate coming from the feds, but in the next breath, he's like, oh, but we should still keep spending.
00:16:33.820I will balance our operational budget in three years.
00:16:36.880We'll spend what we need to with the money we already have.
00:16:40.460And we'll do things that encourage the big investments that create jobs and grow our economy, like building millions of homes, making Canada a clean energy superpower, and creating new trade routes so we're not dependent on the United States.
00:17:09.360So we're trying to urge him to go in one direction, and that is this.
00:17:14.920Get rid of the mandates, meaning let people choose what kind of vehicle they want to purchase, get government out of the way, and scrap the funding.
00:17:25.060Like, stop handing out corporate welfare, taxpayers' money to massive, international, mega-rich corporations.
00:17:48.140So what the market is, of course, is if, you know, Sally wants to purchase a battery-powered vehicle for whatever reason she chooses, that's up to her.
00:17:55.820She goes and buys one with her own money.
00:18:02.160But what the governments are doing, both in Ottawa and Toronto, is one, trying to force people to purchase a certain type of vehicle, in this case, a battery-powered vehicle.
00:18:12.320And two, spend taxpayers' money doing it.
00:18:15.560And it is in the billions of dollars, Sheila.
00:18:18.080And very quickly, to your point exactly, on the energy, the federal government itself has already done studies on this, or at least contracted out studies.
00:18:27.160It's going to cost close to $300 billion to switch over to battery-powered vehicles.
00:18:36.060Like, we do not have the dough for this.
00:18:42.300And the side story in all of this, if we go on a little side quest, is the propping up of the electric vehicle market and the 100% tariffs on the electric vehicles coming in from China to protect the heavily subsidized electric vehicle industry here in Canada have resulted in tariffs on Canadian canola.
00:19:08.360So Western farmers are paying the price for all of Doug Ford's panhandling to the feds.
00:19:16.240And in the meantime, we are busy ignoring the fact that our largest trading partner, with whom we have a very special, specific, integrated auto manufacturing market, like, there's, I think they did an estimate, like, one part, for example, can cross that Windsor Bridge for a vehicle, like, maybe eight times before it's finally finished.
00:19:38.160Into one vehicle, of course, going between Windsor and Detroit, right, as my grandmother used to, you know, pronounce it.
00:19:46.680And the United States is 10 times bigger than us.
00:19:49.400It's a humongous economy compared to us.
00:19:51.440So you start doing supply and demand economics over there, and we're just going to whistle and pretend that that doesn't affect the fact that we have this mandate that they're going to ban the sale of normal gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles by 2035.
00:20:07.720The restrictions start in five months, folks.
00:20:10.740In five months, your local auto dealership will need to sell 20% of their sales must be wholly electric cars.
00:20:20.160If they don't make that quota, tough beans for them.
00:20:24.860And if they don't want penalties, they have to buy into this crazy, like, credit scheme going on with the feds.
00:20:30.460Like, this has got boondoggle written all over it.
00:20:34.060Like, they really, this is one thing, Sheila, if I could beg them to do one thing before they come back into session, it's to have the actual grown adults get together and say, we need to pull the pin on this.
00:20:48.780They can pretend they never met any of these silly ideas so they can start fresh when the house comes back.
00:20:53.920Yeah, and I think we should be wary of what comes next.
00:20:58.940So, if Canadians are not buying these electric vehicles and they have a mandate to meet by 2035, what's the next step to force us into that?
00:21:07.560Probably limiting the parts that we receive to replace our good old reliable combustion engines.
00:21:15.700I think that's the next step to just sort of shoehorn Canadians into this.
00:21:19.180Now, I'm hearing, yeah, sorry, very quickly, I'm hearing all sorts of things about border restrictions and stuff, too.
00:21:24.440So, people thinking they can just cross over and bring it back, they're going to be up in your grill in two seconds.
00:23:30.440Thank you so much for joining us and thank you so much for standing up for families just like mine against government overreach and big spending.
00:26:57.340But I went over to see what you guys were saying.
00:26:59.760People who didn't catch us live, so they weren't able to interact with us live.
00:27:03.800But I wanted to know what you guys were saying.
00:27:07.780So Bitmail5 says, should have had all 215-ish candidates there.
00:27:14.100What a shit show that would have been.
00:27:15.760Now, what he's referring to there is the fact that, I think it was, I checked this morning, it's Wednesday.
00:27:22.300They had 210 candidates registered in that riding because that riding is being targeted by the election meddlers of the longest ballot committee.
00:27:30.800So they're going after Pierre Polyev again.
00:27:32.620They went after him with 90 candidates, 90 plus, I believe it is, actually, in his Ottawa Carleton riding that he lost.
00:27:44.300That's why he's running out here in one of the safest conservative ridings in the entire country, thanks to local MP Damien Keurig, who was in the crowd last night stepping down.
00:27:52.660And instead of fixing the problem after seeing what a problem it was just a few short months ago, Elections Canada, whom I'm not sure do any real work around here at this point, they just let these people rip.
00:28:05.800And now they've more than doubled their election meddling.
00:28:08.760And instead of having the ballot printed, where you can just put a checkmark, they can't do that now because they let this go on and the ballot would be seven feet long.
00:28:24.660Like Shaquille O'Neal could lay down beside the ballot.
00:28:28.580And so now they've moved into just write in.