00:04:29.860So if you've got a variable rate mortgage with 1% down, and you have about an $850,000 mortgage,
00:04:35.300if rates go up by just 1%, your annual mortgage payments are $8,500 higher, $8,500 more in annual recurring mortgage payments.
00:04:50.500Many families would clearly go bankrupt, given that there are, what, a half of Canadians only have $200 left in the bank account at the end of each month.
00:04:58.920So I think you could have a serious household finance crisis.
00:05:03.940On top of that, that same percentage point increase in interest rates adds $12 billion in annual costs to the federal government.
00:05:12.560So that means that the last thing Trudeau wants is for this financial reality to come to the surface,
00:05:21.800you know, and then have the opposition vote him down and hold him accountable for having caused it.
00:05:27.120So this could give him, you know, two or three years while Canadians are suffering under the hell of higher rates and inflation to avoid democratic accountability.
00:05:37.760And as you said, if he runs out of money with the help of the NDP, he might be able to get through a very unpopular tax increase
00:05:44.860that he would not have been able to pass in a normal minority parliament.
00:05:49.860So we don't know for sure exactly what they're going to do.
00:05:52.860It is possible that he would save tax increases for an eventual, in his eyes, future majority.
00:05:59.940But it is possible that Jagmeet is going to back him up and get that passed.
00:06:06.360And, you know, Candace, one of the worst things about these coalition governments is that the more unpopular they are,
00:06:13.420often the longer they last because the coalition participants don't want to face the music with the voters.
00:06:19.080So they bind together and hold themselves in office.
00:06:22.500And that's why we need to have a strategy to pull it apart one MP at a time.
00:06:27.100On the ethics front, I mean, I think that the bigger issue is where is the RCMP?
00:06:33.000Not so much the ethics commissioner, but where is the RCMP on the WE scandal?
00:06:38.340And on the SNC-Lavalin scandal, the Mounties said they were looking into both and we haven't heard anything back.
00:06:47.460So we hope that that hasn't just gone into the law enforcement black hole again,
00:06:51.600and that there is some legal accountability for what happened in both of those cases.
00:06:57.160We know in both scandals, laws were broken because the ethics commissioner found Morneau guilty
00:07:02.360and found Trudeau guilty for the SNC scandal.
00:07:07.660Now it's time for the RCMP to come clean on whether or not criminal code violations occurred as well.
00:07:14.920Well, it seems like Justin Trudeau always has a way to avoid accountability.
00:07:18.660And I think that's one of the loudest complaints that I hear from True North viewers.
00:07:22.320I want to ask you about the priorities that the NDP and the Liberals have presented,
00:07:26.020because maybe they sound good on paper, the idea of universal pharmacare, universal dental care.
00:07:31.720When I hear about that, it strikes me as so painstakingly out of touch,
00:07:36.240given the financial situation in this country, given the performance of our health care system over the past two years.
00:07:41.800It seems to me that we need serious change on this front,
00:07:44.600not just adding in more goodies, more entitlements to a broken system, essentially.
00:07:50.420I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that.
00:07:52.880Well, the pharmacare idea sounds terrific until you scratch the surface.
00:07:56.720A lot of people will be far worse off in drug coverage if this plan goes ahead.
00:08:02.220Remember, 91% of Canadians have some kind of coverage, most of it through private sector employer-based plans.
00:08:08.580The very poor usually have coverage through their provincial social services.
00:08:13.560And many people purchase their own private insurance for supplementary drug plans already.
00:08:20.860Finally, then there are also the small minority of very wealthy people who just pay out of pocket.
00:08:27.000So the number of people who don't have some coverage and can't afford to pay for their medicine is well below 10%.
00:08:35.060And the answer would be to give them some targeted assistance with their needs,
00:08:40.540rather than creating a national governmental program that would ultimately incentivize employers to dump their private plans.
00:08:47.920And this is where it's going to become extremely unpopular, especially with unionized blue-collar workers.
00:08:54.280If their employers say, well, we're paying for a government plan through taxes,
00:08:58.800so we're not going to provide you with the workplace plan,
00:09:02.960then these workers could end up stuck with an inferior government plan that has a smaller formulary,
00:09:11.060higher deductibles, and much less responsive.
00:09:15.460And you could find the NDP and liberals face a massive backlash from their own voters,
00:09:21.500not just because it costs $20 billion to institute this new national bureaucracy,
00:09:26.960but because people actually get worse drug coverage.
00:09:30.820And so I'm in favor of keeping our market-based system with possibly some incentives to cover the very small minority of people