Candice and Kian are joined by Alex Zoltan, reporter for True North Wire, to talk about Team Canada's disgraceful performance against Team USA in the Stanley Cup Finals, the Prime Minister's decision to prorogate Parliament, and more.
00:05:25.200this was, this was set here. They come right here, right?
00:05:29.280Right before the first contract fight. This was set up. Here you go.
00:05:33.760Coaches and players on both sides said they hope it wouldn't happen tonight. It did.
00:05:37.360It helps in the tone. Charlie McAvoy put one on net. Now we're nine seconds in.
00:05:45.020We had a fight two seconds in, another one one second later.
00:05:49.260Now in the center of the action, it's Colt Pareko and J.T. Miller.
00:05:54.120Some say the bubbles in an arrow truffle piece can take 34 seconds to melt in your mouth.
00:05:59.140Sometimes the very amount you're stuck at the same red light.
00:06:01.840Rich, creamy, chocolatey arrow truffle. Feel the arrow bubbles melt. It's mind bubbling.
00:06:10.900Spilling out onto the ice, and I know fighting is part of the game, and a lot of people like that aspect of the game.
00:06:16.580But to me, it was like, you know, their emotions couldn't be contained.
00:06:19.800I can't imagine the electricity in the building after going through that, having your national anthem booed.
00:06:25.340Like, look, I'm a patriotic Canadian. I love my country.
00:06:27.760If I was in the United States and they were booing my Canadian national anthem, I would be furious.
00:06:31.600So I understand, and I have sympathy and respect for the Americans that took it out that way.
00:06:36.960Oh, yeah, and Team USA ended up beating Team Canada 3-1.
00:06:41.100I don't think I've ever cheered for the Americans in a hockey game in my entire life against Team Canada.
00:06:46.260I can't say I was cheering for the Americans, but I think that Canada deserved that.
00:06:49.660I think Canadians deserved to lose because of the attitude and the behavior that they displayed.
00:06:55.240Look, Alex, my perspective is that this is all an artificial, manufactured story that the legacy media and the Liberal Party want this trade war.
00:07:04.420They want Canadians to be worked up and fighting mad against the Americans because it helps them in the polls.
00:07:38.060Well, I heard a saying many, many years ago that I found very interesting where somebody prospected that hockey is Canada's time to act like Americans.
00:07:54.620We become a bit more aggressive, a bit more violent.
00:07:56.940And so I think that if we look at this as a bit more of a one-off, I mean, booing generally is fun, especially when you're watching sports.
00:08:09.780So I have a little bit of forgiveness in that respect.
00:08:12.880I think that sports arenas are one of those places where you can be a little bit more disrespectful.
00:08:17.200That being said, I understood that the person who was doing the anthem was a veteran.
00:08:20.320And so I think that that makes the situation a little bit more egregious, to your point.
00:08:25.640And I'm trying to look at this a bit more holistically and a bit forgivingly.
00:08:29.600When you're at a sports game, maybe you're having a couple of drinks and you're with your buddies and you let your kind of wild side out.
00:08:38.180To me, though, it's just like they've inserted politics into sports.
00:08:42.360The thing about sports is it's supposed to be an escape from that.
00:08:45.580And so when you have this like political agenda that you know is manufactured, right, you know that it's there to help the Trudeau liberals with their polls.
00:08:54.480Because the more that this issue is spoken about, the more the issue is focused on, the better that they do.
00:08:59.320And the liberals are so good at this, right?
00:09:02.000They're like maniacally evil, but they're good at this.
00:09:04.120They're good at whipping up the mood of the country to suit their political agenda.
00:09:10.100And I feel like this is just like COVID all over again.
00:09:13.220Yeah, I definitely get that sense as well.
00:09:15.580But I also am old enough to remember in the late 90s, I think it was Donovan, Bailey and Johnson.
00:09:20.480There was a lot of friendly competition between Canada and the United States in a variety of different arenas, including hockey and racing and other sports and friendly competition.
00:09:29.660I don't think that there's anything wrong with that.
00:09:48.560He says, I know this tariff battle has got Canadians seemingly pitted against Americans, but I want to make something clear for the record.
00:09:55.020Our beef is not with the Canadian people.
00:09:56.760It is with the liberal Canadian government terrorizing the Canadian people.
00:10:00.660Tens of millions of Americans appreciate the Canadian truckers for what they did to destroy COVID protocols worldwide.
00:10:06.720We are now fighting their hostile government to help liberate you.
00:10:09.920Well, I don't know about that last line.
00:10:11.240I don't think that we need any help liberating ourselves.
00:10:14.080Although if Mark Carney becomes the next elected prime minister, I think maybe at that point we might.
00:10:19.840But the point is, I think that, you know, we can get past the politics of it all.
00:10:26.160We all probably agree on a lot more than we disagree with.
00:10:28.800Another one is our friends over at Resistance Coffee Company.
00:11:16.040It's sad how Canadian sporting events, I know it's like that, to go to a Maple Leafs game as well.
00:11:21.100And then you go to a Leafs game and everyone's wearing a suit and people are on their phones not even watching.
00:11:25.640It's not like the hockey games I grew up watching.
00:11:28.200Well, I want to segue that into this Canada First rally that we saw in Ottawa.
00:11:33.860So Pierre Polyev, many people are saying that he gave the speech of his life, that he really rose to the occasion, that he looked and sounded like a prime minister.
00:11:41.060You can see he's back wearing his nice tailored suits.
00:11:45.420And he's gotten away from the sort of like T-shirt and aviator glasses that look that he was going for a while.
00:11:53.440And I think that the imagery, Sean, do we have any B-roll of this?
00:11:56.960You know, the imagery of Pierre Polyev going out there with the huge Maple Leaf, the big backdrop there, a huge, vibrant crowd, really, really enthusiastic.
00:12:10.340He had his beautiful wife, Anna, introduce him.
00:12:12.520And you really got to see a softer side of Pierre, another side of him.
00:12:16.360And then he came out and he gave a big speech, you know, talking about his big plans for Canada, how he would put Canada first, going through his priorities.
00:12:25.720You know, overall, it seemed like a speech by someone who's winning a campaign, right?
00:12:30.660Like you can compare that to what Mark Carney is doing.
00:12:34.820And, you know, Polyev, it just looks like a winning campaign.
00:12:38.880You can see there the big, beautiful Maple Leaf behind him, like a huge, huge crowd of people there.
00:12:46.140I think there was tens of thousands of people in attendance.
00:12:52.860So the focus of his campaign, unfortunately, of the speech, unfortunately, went back to what I think is this manufactured narrative, this idea that the tariffs are coming, that we're in a trade war with the Americans, that it's unavoidable, and that the only thing that we can do is basically turn our backs to the Americans and try to find new partners, try to find new allies, and try to find new trading partners.
00:13:13.860I don't think that's the right approach, Alex.
00:13:15.460I still think that Canada's best approach is to lean into our friendship with the Americans and find a way to make a deal with Trump, because the things that he wants are the things that we want, too, right?
00:14:02.020If they put tariffs on our steel and aluminum, I will put tariffs on their steel and aluminum.
00:14:07.640If they hit us with generalized tariffs, we will respond dollar for dollar.
00:14:15.020Yes, we will carefully target American goods that we don't need, can produce ourselves or we can get elsewhere to maximize the impact on Americans while minimizing the impact on ourselves.
00:14:26.380I think that's a bit of a pipe dream that we can harm them without them harming us.
00:14:31.140Of course, our economy is much, much bigger and much less reliant on ours.
00:14:34.580But, you know, he's saying what he's got to say, I guess.
00:14:38.140Next, we had Pierre Polyev adding this line, which is a little bit of a dig against Americans, quoting Winston Churchill here.
00:15:06.460And I actually agree with Polyev and respectfully disagree a little bit with what you had to say, because I actually don't think that Trump cares whether we have drugs off of our street or not.
00:15:17.680He is simply saying that he wants fentanyl to quit flowing in over the northern border, a claim that I actually find rather nebulous and dubious.
00:15:26.700I think that there's a bit of a logical leap that some people are making that Trump wants what's best for Canada.
00:15:33.120He said that he wants Canada to stop pouring fentanyl into the United States, which, again, I don't think that that claim necessarily holds up to the data on either the American or the Canadian side.
00:15:44.640And so I actually agree with Polyev's approach.
00:15:47.140I know that it's not necessarily popular, but I think that it's the right approach.
00:15:50.940And I also remember Polyev saying something at a presser I attended where he said it's inexcusable if the issue is over fentanyl to impose a 10% tariff on China and a 25% tariff on Canada.
00:16:01.780In what world does that possibly make sense if your biggest concern is fentanyl?
00:16:05.440Because they already did the tariff on China, right?
00:16:08.260So the tariff on China came in during Trump's first administration.
00:16:11.420Canada didn't have a tariff of that back then.
00:16:13.000So they already have a 25% tariff that came in during Trump 1.0.
00:16:17.260And then now there's an additional 10%.
00:16:32.500And so if there's rampant drug use and drug manufacturing and fentanyl labs across Canada, like we found these super labs.
00:16:40.460I had Sam Cooper on my show last week, and he walked me through in great detail how China is creating and moving all these drugs,
00:16:48.760working with like a United Nations of transnational gangsters from countries like India, Iran, China, Mexico, all operating in Canada.
00:17:00.140Trump very much has it in his interest to shut that down.
00:17:04.000Like it's a lot harder to close down our huge shared border with the United States than it is to just get it under control in Canada in the first place.
00:17:52.460So the Cato Institute did a really great study where they showed that 90% of the fentanyl that is seized comes over across legal points of entry on the northern border.
00:18:00.540That, of course, is a shared responsibility as well.
00:18:03.260So if the drugs are pouring in, then it's as much the Americans' fault as it is our fault to some extent.
00:18:08.660Also, one of the ways that you could backtest the theory that there may be a lot of people crossing over illegally carrying fentanyl would be to look at how many people who have crossed over illegally and been caught doing so, how many of them possessed fentanyl?
00:18:21.300And the amount who possessed any fentanyl at all was 0.02%.
00:18:25.460So I really do find this claim that fentanyl is pouring in from Canada into the United States to be a nebulous one and one not supported either by the data or by the way that the economy and the supply and demand dynamics work when it comes to fentanyl.
00:18:42.200So I was talking to a journalist in Seattle.
00:18:45.080Her name is Katie Daviscord, and she's done quite a bit of research into this subject.
00:18:48.680And you can actually buy a gram of fentanyl in Seattle for a fraction of the cost of buying it in Vancouver.
00:18:54.100And the reason for that is very simple.
00:18:56.520The United States has a lot more fentanyl flowing in from Mexico, whereas Canada really just has domestic production.
00:19:44.240Who does look at their polling numbers here in Canada?
00:19:47.240But I think that a lot of this is really quite petty.
00:19:51.540And I think it is a logical leap to say that, well, if Trump wants fentanyl to stop pouring in from Canada, which, again, I don't necessarily think is an accurate claim, then that means that what he really wants is for us to get rid of fentanyl within Canada to save Canadians.
00:20:06.300And I think it's a bit of a leap to assume that that's what he means, right?
00:20:10.740Well, yeah, I'll take the point that it's a lot more expensive to produce it in Canada and that it's a shared responsibility.
00:20:18.480I would prefer, Alex, that we didn't have a completely closed border, that we didn't have every single vehicle and truck being inspected, that there was just a level of trust between the two countries, that we have similar standards and that we have similar concerns.
00:20:31.860And so to your point about the administration, I think that if we had an administration that was harder and firmer on crime, on immigration, on terrorism, that that would give them assurances that we wouldn't need to completely militarize our border and have checks.
00:20:45.820I don't know if you've ever crossed the U.S.-Mexico border by car.
00:20:49.320I have several times and it's wild, like compared to the experience of doing it in Canada, where, you know, you just hop in the car with the family, go through, show them your passports or whatever, and you're through.
00:20:58.980In Mexico, like it's like they get you get out of the car and they search everything in every bag.
00:21:03.260And like it's more intense than going through an airport security.
00:21:06.680So I would never want that for Canadians.
00:21:09.020And I think that the best way to do that is to maintain a strong relationship of shared values, not turning our backs to Americans.
00:21:15.720OK, I want to move on to some of the if I could just add one more thing to that, actually, which I thought was interesting.
00:21:21.280So somebody when I was on my way back from Ottawa, somebody who was sitting next to me there, they work on yacht motors in the Cayman Islands.
00:21:27.760And they were saying that a lot of the drugs comes in through the ports on private boats.
00:21:31.980And one of the reasons for that is that if you're if you're close to getting caught, you just ditch the drugs into the sea.
00:21:37.840So he says this is actually the preferred method for traffickers versus taking it over the land border.
00:21:43.180And also, as you correctly noted, they don't do a lot of checks at the port either.
00:21:48.200So I think that there's it actually shook my trust a little bit and my faith in the Trump administration that this claim that a bunch of fentanyl was coming over across the northern border was given as much airtime as it was.
00:22:00.300Because I really don't think that the claim holds up to scrutiny or critical thinking.
00:22:05.580But I want to talk about Chrystia Freeland, because she shared on Axe a picture of Pierre Polyev walking onto the stage at his Canada First rally and basically just said that it was the same as Donald Trump wondering.
00:22:19.000She writes, we're wondering where we've seen this movie before.
00:22:23.240And then she posts a picture. Do we have the picture there, Sean, of basically just Pierre Polyev with the Canada flag?
00:22:32.300No, I guess we don't. And then you can take that down.
00:22:35.760And then and then Trump with the American one.
00:22:38.880So I guess if you have a flag and you do a rally, that must mean that you're just like Trump.
00:22:44.880I want to move on. So Mark Carney came out.
00:22:48.940This was pretty wild to me. So on Saturday morning, he did an interview on a podcast called The Rest is Politics with Alistair Campbell and Anthony Scarmucci.
00:22:57.440So Alistair Campbell is a British journalist and he was a former political staffer and strategist for Tony Blair and the Labour government.
00:23:05.020And then Anthony Scarmucci was a very, very short lived DCOM director of communications for the Trump administration.
00:23:11.360The first time President Trump was in office, they host a podcast.
00:23:14.540They had Mark Carney on there and watching this podcast.
00:23:18.780Basically, they asked, hey, what are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?
00:23:21.900Which, you know, is a pretty standard, straightforward question for a politician.
00:23:26.080You'd think that he'd have a good answer planned.
00:23:28.500I don't think this is a good answer. Let's play that clip.
00:23:34.320My strength is I know how the world works. I know how to get things done.
00:23:37.560I I'm connected. I can deliver for the country.
00:23:40.440My weakness is, you know, people will charge me as being elitist or, you know, globalist to use that term, which is, well, that's exactly, you know, it happens to be exactly what we what we need.
00:23:57.800I think that he was using those terms to mock his critics, basically saying that they'll call me that and then kind of laughing it off.
00:24:04.120But then he pivots and says, but that's exactly what we need, which kind of goes to emphasize and score that he actually does believe that he's an elitist and globalist.
00:24:12.880And that's that's what's good for the country.
00:24:14.860So you're going to get like another four years of rule by expert, rule by elite, Mark Carney.
00:24:21.700I think that was a pretty disastrous way to answer that question.
00:25:45.180So as we know, he was the governor of the Bank of Canada and then he moved over and became the governor of the Bank of England and started sort of a career in English banking and politics.
00:25:55.020So kind of strange that all of a sudden he's saying that at the time Harper was trying to recruit him.
00:26:48.460I mean, generally ministers of finance also are elected.
00:26:52.340It seems strange to me that he wants to become the prime minister without having made any effort at any time in his lifetime of trying to be elected in any capacity whatsoever.
00:27:03.100Kind of seems like he's jumping the coop a little bit there.
00:27:05.720Typically, you become a member of parliament or you get active at the local level.
00:27:10.900It is really characteristic of an elitist to want to just jump straight to a position of prime minister without having ever been elected to anything as small as even school council.
00:27:21.920Yeah, and to your point that the central banker has a very kind of public role, but it's not like he's acting alone and it's not like a politician where you have to lead a party or get elected by the people.
00:27:41.740I don't think that he has a great track record in either country with the printing of money, borrowing, raising interest rates, all those things that you mentioned.
00:27:49.960But kind of a strange thing to slip in there.
00:27:52.180I think that probably he wants Canadians to think that he is sort of like a bipartisan pick and that he's not as hard left as Trudeau, not as right as Pierre Polyev.
00:28:02.360Kind of the Goldilocks approach there that he's just right.
00:28:07.880One thing that I think had a lot of conservatives feeling a little hopeful about is, so we covered this in the show on Friday, but the polls have shown since Justin Trudeau resigned and Mark Carney has become the sort of person that looks like he's going to be the next prime minister.
00:28:22.500The liberals' fortunes have been increasing in the polls.
00:28:25.500So polls have slowly shown liberals chipping away at the conservatives and Pierre Polyev's massive lead.
00:28:31.060Well, there was a new series of polls put out by Abacus Data, a very reputable polling company, that shows that the conservatives still lead the liberals by 19 points.
00:28:41.860And so the head of Abacus there, David Coletto, said that he got the results and basically he was so surprised by how big the conservative lead was that he went back into the field and did another poll just to make sure that what he was seeing was correct.
00:28:59.120So you can show this graph, Sean, that shows a federal vote intention.
00:29:04.120Here we have the conservatives with 46 percent and the liberals all the way down at 27 percent.
00:29:10.560So if you look back to a January 27th poll, it shows that, yes, the liberals are doing better, but their gains are coming at the expense of the NDP, the bloc, and possibly the green, whereas the conservatives are also going up.
00:29:24.860So Mark Carney as the leader is not chipping away at the conservative lead, according to Abacus and according to that poll.
00:29:32.140So I think there's a lot of conservatives that are very relieved to see that there was a lot of kind of anxiety and concern that maybe with the change in the ballot question, the idea that maybe the election is not going to be about cost of living, but instead it's going to be about this looming trade war and this new narrative that the media has managed to create in the last couple weeks here.
00:29:50.160That that would be very bad for the conservatives, but according again to Abacus, that's not the case.
00:29:57.840Well, if you go into the streets and you ask people, are you enthusiastic about Mark Carney?
00:30:01.760I imagine you're not going to get a lot of people saying, yes, I'm extremely enthusiastic about Mark Carney.
00:30:07.220This definitely seems like a mainstream media fake narrative.
00:30:11.600The idea that Mark Carney is this, there's a Carney mania going on is kind of patently ridiculous in my opinion.
00:30:18.180And I'm glad that the polling data from Abacus shows that.
00:30:21.300Yeah, it's hard to imagine just like a lot of groundswell support for a wealthy banker that's swooped in after like being out of the country for several decades.
00:30:32.640That's just not really the profile of a politician that you can imagine, you know, having a lot of popularity among Canadians.
00:30:39.000It seems that the liberals have tried to do this several times and it doesn't work for them.
00:30:43.340But I mean, Mark Carney does seem like, I'll get into this, he actually seems a pretty nice guy.
00:30:47.760He seems like a nice person. It's just that his ideas are all wrong and his background is wrong and he's arrogant about it.
00:30:54.700And I just, I don't think that that's going to be appealing.
00:30:57.500I heard him described once as Timu Michael Ignatieff.
00:31:03.320Yeah, the liberals have tried this several times and it never seems to work out well for them.
00:31:07.460And I don't think that this is going to be an exception to the rule.
00:31:10.700I completely agree. Okay, I want to move on to some reactions.
00:31:13.140And so as you, hopefully everyone's caught this interview that we did with Pierre Polyev who flew out to Ottawa and sat down with the conservative leader.
00:31:21.920I think it was the first long form sit down interview he had done since the Jordan Peterson one that he did at the very beginning of the year.
00:31:28.360And I just want to sort of talk a little bit about my takeaway from the interview and a little bit of the media's reaction.
00:31:35.640So for me, the thing, first of all, I was delighted that Pierre Polyev would sit down with me and do an interview with me.
00:31:41.560I think it was a great sign for independent media that he doesn't believe in the sort of lockdown club that you have to be part of the parliamentary press gallery or work for a legacy media press outlet in order to get access to a politician.
00:31:53.620I think that's the exact correct step for the future.
00:31:56.740And it was nice to see that, you know, juxtaposed that with the fact that our reporters weren't even let into the room for Mark Carney's launch event in Edmonton.
00:32:04.320Even mild-mannered, polite Isaac Lamoureux, who's from Edmonton, wasn't allowed into the room.
00:32:09.860So, you know, huge, huge difference in terms of access.
00:32:13.820I think that my questions on immigration, asking him about deportations of illegals, deportation of people who commit violent crimes.
00:32:23.960You know, he mentioned specifically people that go to these Gaza rallies and, you know, commit hate crimes and try to burn down synagogues, all kinds of stuff, that he would have no tolerance for that.
00:32:33.800And he would deport those people and cancel their visas.
00:32:36.100He talked about how he wanted to get the immigration levels back down to the Harper era, which, you know, some people in our audience will say, well, that's not good enough.
00:32:42.940We want to have more of an immigration break.
00:32:44.920But I think when you think about the fact that Justin Trudeau is letting in half a million new permanent residents every year, plus another million-some students and temporary four visas, I think we end up having somewhere in the orbit between two and three million newcomers a year.
00:32:58.520And Pierre's saying, let's bring it back down to 200 to 250.
00:33:04.500And I was very pleased to hear him say that.
00:33:07.580And then this was the clip that really melted the minds of the legacy media.
00:33:12.340So I asked him about access to politicians, like I mentioned, versus the parliamentary press gallery.
00:33:19.160Like, part of the problem with independent press is that we can't get into the parliamentary press gallery because it's run by this kind of, like, mean girl group who don't acknowledge us as real journalists because we don't work for one of their outlets.
00:33:31.860So he's saying that those people won't be in charge anymore and he would let everyone in.
00:33:35.560So I think we have a little clip of what that looked like.
00:33:52.700I think their independent media should be allowed on the precinct.
00:33:55.980There's no reason why it should be a small cabal of government-approved mouthpieces.
00:34:01.640So I'll just walk us through what happened there.
00:34:07.260So first we had TVI journalist Hadi Hassan shared that clip on X and basically just described what it was in French.
00:34:15.120We had the Toronto Star columnist and CBC pundit Chantelle Hebert chimed in.
00:34:21.000She quote tweeted it and wrote, sounds familiar somehow.
00:34:25.740So I guess that's supposed to be a Trump reference and supposed to make us feel very scared that somehow Polly Ev is like a fascist or something.
00:34:34.660Okay, and then next we had her Toronto Star colleague, sports columnist.
00:34:40.660This guy is like perpetually miserable and angry, Bruce Arthur.
00:34:44.060He weighs in and he said, for the record, that is Candace Malcolm, whose faux news operation, True North, employs racism and proud boy pusher Harrison Faulkner and Malcolm co-founded Junior with Kian Bexty.
00:35:32.880He said, regarding the interview question, True North slash Bexty slash Juno News haven't been granted membership because they're not actually journalists.
00:35:44.020Okay, so I guess we're not real journalists because we don't, what, tow the party line.
00:36:13.540And so I'm probably a bit of a conservative partisan.
00:36:16.840I don't mind admitting that when I write something or when I'm on a podcast because I think it's important for people to know where I'm coming from.
00:36:25.000And I think that's actually part of the new media is what makes it superior to mainstream media is that we don't constrain ourselves to this fake position of neutrality that they do because they're not neutral.
00:36:38.080And for them to pretend that they are is completely ridiculous and absurd.
00:36:43.640And that's why their viewership is down so much and why Chorus Entertainment is a penny stock that's probably going to be going out of business as soon as Trudeau is out of office.
00:36:51.060Well, it's funny because, yeah, like that was the kind of the hit that they used to make against me that I was more conservative.
00:36:58.060And to me, that's nothing to be ashamed of.
00:37:00.660I'm proud of the fact that I'm a conservative.
00:37:02.580I'm probably more socially conservative than either of the mainstream political parties in the country.
00:37:08.120Actually, definitely am even more so than the People's Party.
00:37:10.520But that's that's the way it's like I'm not going to pretend that I'm neutral and pretend that I'm Rosemary Barton to go out there and give interviews, even though we know that she is biased from the left.
00:37:22.360And that's that's sort of I think the main difference.
00:37:24.520And, you know, our news isn't for everyone.
00:37:27.380So if you don't like our perspective, then you don't have to watch us.
00:37:30.220We're not trying to force it down your throat and we're not trying to take government subsidies.
00:37:33.760We're not saying that everyone should pay for us.
00:37:35.560We just want to be able to have the opportunity to report to our audience that wants to hear news from our perspective and opinion.
00:37:43.660So, yeah, I find it funny that they get so worked up and so upset over us having just being able to do our job like I don't begrudge them for doing their job.
00:37:54.280But I do think part of it definitely is the fact that we are growing and we have a successful business model and people are interested in our work.
00:38:01.520And I don't think that the same is true for them.
00:38:31.120So the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms were the council representing two Nova Scotians, one of which was a well-practiced lawyer who are challenging Trudeau's decision to advise the governor general to prorogue parliament.
00:38:48.280I think my opinion on it has differed a little bit since I came back.
00:38:53.040And the reason being is that we have to understand that these decisions cut both ways.
00:38:58.920So really, to the Coles Notes version, the question, to put it most simply, is does the government have an unlimited power to prorogue parliament?
00:39:06.720In a sense, no, Section 5 says that the government must sit at least once per year.
00:39:13.540So, no, they don't have an unlimited power.
00:39:15.660But that means that theoretically, they only have to sit once, one day per year.
00:39:20.080The rest of the year, theoretically, they could prorogue forever.
00:39:51.640If they were to do that again, and Polyev didn't have the option of proroguing, or he did have the option of proroguing, but it could be challenged in the courts,
00:39:59.140then that presents a very significant danger to the Conservative Party and democracy generally.
00:40:03.92079% of the appointed judges in Canada are not only Liberal Party members, they're Liberal Party donors.
00:40:12.080And so while I really like this judge, Paul Crampton, who was appointed by Stephen Harper, not all judges are good.
00:40:19.080And we have to remember that judges are just random lawyers who are appointed by politicians.
00:40:25.080They're not accountable to the public.
00:40:26.600And so I think there is some concern, on my part anyway, that it would be a dangerous precedent to have judges drift outside of the legal lane and into the political lane.
00:40:39.780That being said, I'm completely sympathetic to the JCCF's concerns.
00:40:44.080I think that prorogation is completely unsuitable in the current situation that we're in.
00:40:47.820I think it only serves the best interests of the Liberal Party and not Canadians.
00:40:50.880But I am concerned about the precedent that a decision might set in this case.
00:41:08.900Yeah, so they said the lead counsel for the Trudeau government said that they need until at least February 18th to submit responses to the interveners.
00:41:17.140So I don't think we'll see any result before then.
00:41:20.000However, Crampton said that he would be rendering a result well in advance of March 24th, which I do appreciate.
00:41:27.820I'm not super optimistic that this case is going to go through.
00:41:31.340I think that there's probably a good case for a Section 3 challenge to Carney becoming Prime Minister, because Section 3 establishes the Charter, it establishes as a fundamental right that Canadians have a right to vote for the people who represent them in government.
00:41:48.520And Carney being an unelected Prime Minister would be rather unprecedented in the history of Westminster democracies.
00:41:55.080So I think that there may be a good Section 3 challenge for that that might be more appropriate than the challenge for prorogation.
00:42:01.340But again, I want to make it very clear.
00:42:02.780I totally support the JCCF and their concerns.
00:42:05.560I do, however, see the Trudeau government lawyers point that this might establish a bit of a dangerous precedent.