Trudeau's Poison Pill in the Senate ｜ Stand on Guard Ep 134
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Summary
Justin Trudeau announces there is no longer any longer any such thing as a liberal senator in Canada. It's a bold move, and it's sure to cause a stir in the Liberal caucus, but what does it mean for the rest of the country?
Transcript
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Hi, happy Victoria Day. Welcome back to another episode of Stand on Guard. I'm your host,
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David Creighton. I just wanted to bring you up to speed on a couple of things today, including
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the poison pill that Justin Trudeau has for the conservatives.
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So we are in a very precarious position in this country. We need political change, but
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Yes, thanks for joining us. And as Sasha the Cat always said, please subscribe. Please
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a part of this experience, how much you want to resolve to resist. And I'm so proud of the
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work we're doing. And I'm very happy to continue to do this. And I hope you're having a great
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Victoria Day weekend. I had a pretty, pretty good weekend. And it's a difficult time for me for
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personal reasons. But we always get through the weekend and we focus on the positives. Don't we
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have to do that? And that's the only way to get through those negative times, those negative
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experiences, to focus on the positive and to be content with what you have and to thank God for
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the, for his mercies and for his blessings. It says, it's a cliche, but we, you know, I've learned
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that over life where I've had a lot, I've had a lot of disappointments and I've had triumphs, but I've
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had disappointments. But in the end, I'm thankful for my blessings. I've learned how to be,
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the, how to be gracious and how to show gratitude. And that's, that's my, my little message here for
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Victoria Day. Thanks so much for watching. I want to talk about the Senate today. And I think,
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you know, this is a incredibly, all I can say, it's a very, very important message right now,
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because I call this the coming constitutional crisis. This is the constitutional crisis on the
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horizon. And to get back to the beginning of this, we have to go all the way back to 2014,
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10 years ago. This is, this is where this all really started to some expect when Justin Trudeau,
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prime minister, and he wasn't prime minister at the time, but he was the liberal leader at the time.
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He wasn't even the official opposition leader. He decided he was going to untether the liberal
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senators from the liberal caucus, that they would no longer be known as liberal senators.
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Let's have a look at the news story at the time. And it'll be interesting to see some of the players
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in this. Some are long gone. Some have different roles today. And we'll point that out.
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Good evening. And thanks for joining us. There's no question. It is a daring move.
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Liberal leader Justin Trudeau stunned pretty well everyone, even those in his own caucus,
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by declaring there is no longer any such thing as a liberal senator. He's kicked them all out of
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the liberal caucus. His way, he says, of cleaning up the scandal-plagued upper house. They'll stay in
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the Senate, but will sit as independents. Shirley Engel has the story of Trudeau's Senate surprise.
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Donna, Trudeau's bombshell this morning blindsided not just liberals,
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but the Senate as a whole too. It's still trying to figure out how this will all play out
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Strip away the spin and you'll find senators who woke up as liberals in a sudden identity crisis.
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How do you feel about being called a former liberal senator?
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I'm not a former liberal. I'm a liberal. And I'm a liberal senator.
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Not anymore, according to liberal leader Justin Trudeau, who broke the news to a room full
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of stunned senators just half an hour before he announced it to the country.
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32 formerly liberal senators are now independent of the national liberal caucus. They are no longer
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part of our parliamentary team. There are no more liberal senators.
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It sounds like he's broken up with you and you're not accepting it.
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I am a liberal. I remain a liberal. I belong to the liberal Senate caucus.
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James Cowan remains leader of this new self-proclaimed liberal Senate caucus,
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but it's unclear just how many of the 32 will stay behind him. George Baker is embracing his new
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So it's got to be depoliticized. Mr. Trudeau has taken the first step. He's to be
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congratulated, and the Canadian people will say,
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Hooray! And okay, Prime Minister, what are you going to do?
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Aha! So you can see the initial reaction was largely positive. What a courageous thing to do.
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I remember writing about this for iPolitics at the time where I was a weekly columnist.
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And of course, I had some skepticism, but I didn't really see what was going to unfold here.
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What Trudeau, maybe he had it in mind. Maybe he's just taken advantage of a situation as it's evolved,
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as it's unfolded. I didn't see the full danger of it. I was very skeptical because
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I never obviously trusted Justin Trudeau to do the right thing for any of the right reasons.
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But let's listen to this some more. The Prime Minister was quick to point out how
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little has changed when Trudeau challenged him to disown his 57 conservative senators.
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Mr. Speaker, again, the change announced by the leader today is that unelected
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liberal senators will become unelected senators who happen to be liberal.
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Ridicule aside, Trudeau's populist move steals the spotlight on Senate reform from the Tories and
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the NDP. For Mr. Trudeau to have suddenly realized that the NDP was right is a good thing.
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Now let's go all the way. Let's hope that he understands that getting rid of the Senate
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is also the right thing to do. Both the Tories and the NDP question the timing.
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The Auditor General is expected to soon release a report on senators' expenses that will name names.
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Today, Mr. Trudeau announced a smokescreen to distance himself from the Auditor General's report.
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There he is, Piripaliev, Democratic Reform Minister.
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Would you have thought at the time, 10 years ago, he was going to be poised to become the
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next Prime Minister of Canada and would be opposition leader? I didn't see it, no. But it's interesting.
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There he was, and he had a position like Democratic Reform. He wasn't the finance minister.
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He wasn't the foreign affairs minister. He had the Democratic Reform portfolio.
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And look where he's gone in a decade. And look where the Senate has gone. That's the point of
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this whole exercise. Now, I recently wrote a column for my Substack, and I don't often
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promote my Substack work on this channel, on Stand on Guard, Creighton's right. But I will today,
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because I think this is a topic that nobody is really talking about.
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The subject here is Canada, headed for constitutional crisis with its woke Senate.
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if you have a look at this, you can see, and I'm going to have to put my glasses on to read it.
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As of May 2024, there are 96 of the 105 Senate seats filled.
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Now, where are all these Senates? And this is where it gets very confusing,
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because there are only 13 Conservative Party of Canada Senate seats. And as Denise Batters points
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out here, she recently posted on X, there will be only 10 by the next election.
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That means potentially 95 of these seats will be filled by Liberals calling themselves either
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Independent Senators Group, Canadian Senators Group, Progressive Senate Group.
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And that's who the remainder will be. And this has all been a grand farce.
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Let me tell you, it has all been a grand farce. Because what has happened here is that while
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Justin Trudeau has been Prime Minister, he's appointed 81 Senators.
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Now, he doesn't call them Liberal Party of Canada Senators, but who do you think they're obliged to support?
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Who do you think they are going to side with? Who do you think they owe their Senate seat to? I mean,
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yes, it's rhetorical questions. Obviously, they are in deep debt to Justin Trudeau.
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Now, did he see this coming? I don't know. I don't know if he saw this coming. The problem is,
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now there's Stephen Harper, you saw him in that clip saying,
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this is a big facade, they're going to be Liberal Senators by another name.
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And that's exactly what's happened. But you know the big mistake Stephen Harper made?
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He stopped appointing Conservative Senators before the end of his term as Prime Minister.
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Yeah, he thought he was going to keep on going. He really did think he was going to win that next
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election in 2015. And I won't get into why he lost, but he lost because his communications team
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completely fumbled the football in that election campaign. He put all of the emphasis on Harper,
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none at all on his key ministers, on MPs. It was Harper 24-7. But that's not the point.
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Harper made a very strategic error, very big strategic error in saying, I'm not going to
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appoint any more senators until the system's reformed. So while Stephen Harper was Prime
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Minister, yeah, he appointed some elected senators from Alberta, people in Alberta elected people to
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send to the Senate. Stephen Harper said, yeah, sure, I'll appoint them. That's fine. And he could do that
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without violating the Constitution because he's still appointing them. They might be independently
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elected in the province, but Stephen Harper is still making the decision to appoint them so there's
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no contravention of the Constitution. Now, right now, if we want to change the Senate into an elected
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body, I won't get into the abolition of the Senate. That's choice number two. I won't deal with that too
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extensively. I've always been a supporter of an elected Senate, a Triple East Senate, going back to
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Reform Party days. To do that, we need a constitutional amendment. And to get a constitutional amendment in
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Canada, you need seven out of the 10 provinces comprising 50, over 50%, 50% plus one of the
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Canadian population. And you need it approved in the House of Commons and the Senate. So the Senate
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basically has to vote itself out of existence or has to vote itself to be elected.
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Now, we have not even contemplated in Canada using this amending formula. And I remember when
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the Constitution was repatriated, there was all of this vague talk about amending formula, amending
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formula. And at the time, I really didn't consider what it actually meant. That it meant, how do we change
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this Constitution in the future if we want to do so? Well, the formula they came up with was a 7 out of
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10, 50% of the population and approval by the House of Commons and the Senate. Nobody wants to go into
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that territory. Now, this is absolutely completely bizarre because the United States has a Constitution.
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They've amended it dozens of times. They've amended it to raise the voting age. They've amended it
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to have presidential term limits. They amended it twice in the space of just over a decade
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to first implement and then repeal prohibition. That's called political will. When people want to do
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something, they do it. The will was there to implement prohibition in 1919. The will was there
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in 1932 to repeal it because they said, hey, it didn't work. We're going to repeal it. And they did
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it. They amended the Constitution. They've done that time after time after time. They amended the
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Constitution to elect their own senators. How come we can't do that in Canada? How come that seems so
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arduous, so impossible? Well, we've got to get beyond that. But what's the poison pill that I'm
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talking about? Because I really haven't addressed that. Yeah, the Senate is full of woke liberals.
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And the last time I sat in the Senate to listen to debate on a farm bill, I couldn't believe how woke
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some of these senators are. They're even worse than the average liberal MP. So these are the kind of
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people we're dealing with. So here's the constitutional crisis. Pierre Polyev and the Conservative Party
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of Canada form the next government. Probably going to happen, barring a political disaster for them.
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They will be the next government of Canada in about less than a year and a half, perhaps less time,
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if we can get a non-confidence vote motion, vote in the House of Commons to end the Trudeau government.
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However, what happens with a new Conservative government that wants to repeal a lot of liberal
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legislation, wants to repeal the carbon tax, wants to repeal censorship bills, wants to limit at least
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euthanasia and perhaps repeal the whole euthanasia program? How do you think the woke Senate is going to
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react to that? Great! Bring on the legislation, Mr. Polyev. New Prime Minister, we're going to pass that.
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I doubt it very much. They're going to be an obdurate Senate roadblock. They're going to try to stop
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every policy they disagree with. And there's going to be a logjam in the Senate that could take years.
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Now, has this happened before? Usually the Senate acquiesces to the will of the elected House of
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Commons because they represent, it represents, the members represent the will of the people, the
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democratic will of the people. The Senate does not. It's appointed. And believe me, there are some good
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senators. I remain a good friend of Senator Pamela Wallen. She's a damn good senator. She's an independent
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now, but she has done wonderful work over the years. Unfortunately, there's a lot of people in the Senate
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who are picking up a paycheck and massaging a travel account, an expense account, and they're having a hell of a
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good time. They're living the life of Riley at public expense and really aren't fulfilling any legitimate
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public role. And if they become part of the problem in the next government, I think we have to look at
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ways to change the Senate, yes. But what happens in the interim? We're not going to get a constitutional
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amendment in 2015. We're not going to be able to change the Senate radically in 2015. So what happens?
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1909, this guy here, David Lloyd George, he's Chancellor of the Exchequer. That's the finance
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minister in Great Britain. He introduces what's called a people's budget, raises taxes on the wealthy
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to pay for a very moderate welfare state, largely focusing on old age pensions and very little
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else. But the reaction, the response from the House of Lords, their Senate, is to say,
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not, we're not passing this. This bill will not pass. This budget will not pass. We're not going to move
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on this. So they exercise what is called the Senate veto. And they say that the budget will not pass.
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That spurs the government of the day, which was actually liberal under Prime Minister Asquith
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and David Lloyd George, who is the finance minister, to fight back. And by 1911, they passed the Parliament
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Act. What does the Parliament Act do? It eliminates the Senate's veto and says the Senate can only hold
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up a bill for a maximum of two years. The Parliament Act was renewed in 1949 and amended to limit the
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Senate's ability to block a bill to one year. We don't have anything like that in Canada. Because
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in the past, the Senate has usually just been that sober second thought, that form of sober second
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thought, and has not tried too hard, has not been drastic in its desire to quench the democratic will of
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the people, to stop the House of Commons from passing legislation. I predict this is going to be a
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problem in the next government, because these people are so woke, they're such left-wing ideologues,
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they will do whatever they think is necessary to stop policies from being passed, legislation from being
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passed, and old liberal Trudeau legacy legislation from being repealed. So this is the poison pill I'm
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referring to. This is the constitutional crisis. We are going to need a Parliament Act in Canada
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to tame, discipline, and control the actions of the unelected appointed Senate, or it's going to
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control politics in Canada. And that's what we need to do. Now, Pierre Polyev is smiling here.
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He won't be smiling when he finds out what he has to deal with, with the unelected Senate. It's going to be
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a disaster. And as I said, Trudeau has appointed 81 senators since he's been in there. They obviously are
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way overborn. They outnumber the conservatives by over 9 to 1 now. So this is going to be a problem,
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and I think we need to start talking about it. I wanted to have Denise Batters on this show to
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talk about this, Senator Denise Batters from Saskatchewan, because she's actually commented on
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this by saying, hey, we're only going to have 10 senators in 2015. But her office got back to me and said,
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no, Senator Batters is not interested in talking about hypothetical situations. Well, I don't buy
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that. Were we willing to talk about the potential for a Second World War after Hitler walked into
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Czechoslovakia in Austria? Was that hypothetical? Or was that something we had to talk about before
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it actually happened? We need to talk about this constitutional crisis with the Senate now before
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it actually happens? And because we need to prepare the legislation now to tame the Senate,
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to make sure they don't do this to the next government, because they are going to do it.
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So a little bit of a history lesson today. We're back tomorrow with Question Period Live.
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It's going to be interesting to see what's going on. They're back for a month now before
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they recess for the summer. We want to make sure the Online Harms Act does not see second reading.
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Definitely. We want Parliament to recess before that happens. But let's have some action, please,
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on this World Health Organization pandemic treaty or agreement, as it's called. Nothing's being said
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about it. It will be signed in June, unless there's sufficient opposition to it. And I'm not hearing
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that from the Conservatives at all. And as I said in an earlier broadcast, the one Member of Parliament
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who has been fighting this, Leslyn Lewis, has apparently been told not to talk about it because
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she won't talk about it on this program when I asked her office about it last week. Or actually,
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it was just, yes, it was last week. So that's where we stand. I'm also interviewing Tamara Leach
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of the Freedom Convoy tomorrow to find out what's happening with her and where things are going with
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that trial, how she's doing financially, and the news that she's able to talk to Chris Barber in public
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again or in private. Anyway, thanks for watching today, folks. I enjoyed this very much. And we're back
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tomorrow, as I said, with Question Period. And please watch the interview with Tamara Leach,
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because in the past, YouTube has tried to suppress my interviews with Tamara. I've done two or three
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of them. This one will not be suppressed, I can promise you that, because you folks are going to
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be watching and supporting it. Thanks so much for watching today, and we'll be back again tomorrow.
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Thank you for watching this episode of Stand on Guard and being a part of the Crayton's Right channel.
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And it's my job to bring that truth to light and to you. Thanks for being a part of the Crayton's Right
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Resistance. And we'll see you again soon. So we are in a very precarious position in this country.
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We need a political change, but we also need to resolve to resist.