$1B cut from defense, CRTC's plans to regulate the net, podcasts, and of course more slack federal liberals blaming others for their plunders. All that and more coming up this Tuesday's Rant on The Crusty Canuck Podcast.
00:01:32.680And if you like and hear what you see, please click like and subscribe.
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00:01:53.180Anyhow, once again, thank you very much to everybody who has sent me some kind words over my comments section and a couple of nice emails that I received.
00:02:10.160Once again, big round of applause for you wonderful people out there giving this Canuck a chance.
00:02:15.260As the title card said, $1 billion cut from national defense.
00:02:19.620Now, to my American friends out there, Canada has never been a big defense spender.
00:02:26.920Now, I'm not trying to justify any kind of historical events.
00:02:30.780Mind you, I'm not trying to justify a damn thing.
00:02:32.720But when you look at defense spending in this country, it has never, ever been a priority for Canada.
00:02:40.800Now, I've talked to certain politicians over the years when I was running federally.
00:02:44.740I would literally ask MPs that I met in my travels.
00:02:49.800And they'd always say, well, the constituents really don't want a lot of money spent on defense.
00:02:55.020And for being an ex-soldier and seeing the results of budget cuts and the results of slack and idle leadership and the results of certain decisions being made that's supposed to benefit our military, I think those MPs were full of shit.
00:03:12.960Now, I know for a fact that the average Canadian taxpayer, the average Canadian Joe or Jane or June, whoever you want to be pronounced as, whatever, the average Canadian citizen would prefer to have some kind of defense in this country than none at all.
00:03:30.260Now, back in the late 60s, when Pierre Elliott Trudeau became prime minister, he had a real natural disdain for our military until he called in the War Measures Act, I believe, in 1970.
00:03:47.140And after that, he just didn't really give his shit.
00:03:50.200Now, mind you, it was his party that brought in the leopard tanks and his party that brought in the F-18s when they were brand new, okay?
00:03:59.540But you find every prime minister since then has done little to none effort in regards to keeping the military afloat and keeping it alive.
00:04:07.940Now, I'm not saying we have to have a giant military where we have to have 30 aircraft carriers and 36 submarines and supersonic fighter jets and super strategic bombers.
00:04:18.820No, I'm saying we need an Air Force that works, a Navy that works, and an Army that works.
00:04:24.320Now, we also need to understand that there's still a generation of Canadians out there, and a lot of Canadians, a bit younger, who still think that we're just peacekeepers.
00:04:35.200And everything is just honky-dory, and Canadians will come and save the day when it comes to keeping the peace and making sure everything's lovey-dovey,
00:04:44.500when in reality, you still have to train for war when you're keeping the peace, okay?
00:04:50.860So, let's get out of that 1960s mentality, okay?
00:04:54.620Regardless of how tiny this nation is based on populace, we still have a giant landmass to look after, and it has to be defended.
00:05:03.500Now, as a libertarian, I don't believe in sending our troops in harm's way 24-7, this, that, and wherever.
00:05:09.960I believe in looking after this country, and looking after what needs to be done, and in an emergency, in an emergency, okay, then send our men and women someplace.
00:05:20.180But we need the proper equipment and the proper capabilities to do it.
00:05:24.700Now, it's going to probably cost maybe something like $68 to maybe $70 billion a year to meet the NATO standard, okay?
00:05:33.600But then again, when you look at this federal government, how much has been sent to other countries?
00:05:38.860How much kit, how much cash, how much ammo has been sent to other countries?
00:05:44.380Now, I'm going to queue up a couple of stories here, too, in regards to our defense spending.
00:05:48.760My old boss, CDS Wayne Ayer, he used to be our CEO when I was with the Omelette back in 2007, okay?
00:05:56.320He had some valid points, but I'm not really impressed with him just the way he traded the whole pandem and how he made the jibby jabs an issue for our men and women.
00:06:04.540And about 306 of them, I think, were actually kicked out of the military because of their stance against the jibby jabs, but I digress.
00:06:11.620Anyway, here's a story from Lorne Gunter from the Toronto Sun and his assessment in regards to our defense spending and lack thereof.
00:06:20.340So I'll just queue this up here for you.
00:06:24.460And I would like you guys to decide on your own and really, really think about it, too, because there's nothing wrong with having good allies.
00:06:33.560But you can impress your allies by being really, really sufficient, self-sufficient at that matter, too, and to stop worrying about, you know, personal feelings when it comes to military spending.
00:06:46.600Let's start worrying about what has to be done for this country and for the men and women in uniform.
00:06:52.480So I'll just queue that up here, ladies and gentlemen.
00:06:54.460Okay, and we'll go right ahead with this story.
00:07:00.760Earlier this summer, the Wall Street Journal said Canada belonged at the kids' table of NATO spending.
00:07:08.800We're only devoting about 1.2% of our GDP to national defense.
00:07:16.860Now, granted, even under the Harper Conservatives, it didn't rise to as high as 1.5%.
00:07:22.180But since the Liberals have come back in 2015, it's fallen to 1.2%.
00:07:27.400Puts us very near the bottom of all the NATO countries in defense spending because the Liberals don't understand the military.
00:07:34.740They don't understand national security.
00:07:36.420It's one of the reasons why they're not worried about Chinese interference, because they don't understand national security.
00:07:42.520And the fact that they don't understand national security and they're not spending money on our military is the reason we're not in what's called AUKUS.
00:07:50.100Australia, the UK, and US, which is a new Pacific security pact against Chinese aggression.
00:07:58.160We weren't even told it was being formed until after it was announced.
00:08:02.840No one trusted Canada enough in Australia, the UK, or the US to let us know they were forming this new alliance, much less ask us to join.
00:08:16.080And as long as Justin Trudeau and the Liberals are unserious about national defense, that's going to continue.
00:08:23.380And I think it's going to continue because they've announced that they're going to cut $1 billion out of our national defense budget.
00:08:29.980Now, that doesn't sound like a whole lot because the national defense budget is $36 billion.
00:08:36.620That's only about 6% of defense spending is coming out in this current budget.
00:08:45.180But overall, in the government, their attempts to economize, they're only cutting 3% from the rest of the budget.
00:08:53.300So they're cutting twice as much from defense spending as they are from the rest of the budget.
00:08:59.920If you want to know why it is that in the last two years, only one of our four submarines has been to sea, one of four, has been at sea in the last two and a half years.
00:09:10.600And it was only there for 43 days, and it sprung a leak, and it had to be brought back to Halifax.
00:09:49.360You remember when the liberals came back to power in 2015?
00:09:52.060They said, oh, yes, we're going to go big into peacekeeping.
00:09:54.520That warmonger Stephen Harper, he only had us in NATO missions in hot zones, in live wars.
00:10:02.240We're going to go back to Canada's mission as a peacekeeper.
00:10:05.980Remember, there has never been a time in the eight years that the Trudeau government has been in power.
00:10:12.100Never been a time in those eight years when we had as many active peacekeepers as we had during all of the Harper years.
00:10:21.820So even when we were in Afghanistan and we were in a hot war, we were still doing more peacekeeping as a nation under Harper than we are doing under Trudeau and the liberals.
00:10:33.100It's pathetic what the liberals have done to our armed forces.
00:10:38.100And now we hear, this may not sound immediately like it's related, now we hear that the governor general spends $1,800 a month on dry cleaning.
00:10:51.040And if she can spend $1,800 a month on dry cleaning, when we can't even put our submarines in the water, we can't go to Haiti to try and bring order to that country that's now run by narcotics gangs.
00:15:31.660So, it's not clear on what basis the Commission believes that online advertising now falls under the Broadcasting Act for the purposes of regulating social media services.
00:15:41.980The takeaway from this decision is obvious.
00:15:45.780Registration is the first step towards regulation, with the Commission already envisioning the prospect of regulating a wide range of services.
00:15:53.620Bill C-11 was never just about web giants, quote-unquote.
00:15:57.460And the latest CRTC decision confirms that the extensive regulatory framework is in the works that is likely to cover podcasts, adult sites, news sites, and a host of other online video and audio services.
00:16:12.680So, basically, what they want to do is they want to regulate it.
00:16:16.560Now, in the government page that I will put in the link for you, it's basically stating that if you make $10 million or more as a podcaster, one could wish, you know, one could wish that I could make that much money.
00:16:36.240Anyway, to make a long story short, they're basically saying if you're making $10 million, you'll have to register with the government.
00:16:42.540Now, Ezra Levant, outspoken, decent guy, you know, owner and operator of Rebel Media, Rebel News, okay, he was told by some RCMP officials who investigated him for writing a book, and they wanted him to register his book with the government.
00:17:02.700Now, I don't know about you, okay, when the fuck do you have to register books?
00:17:09.120When did we start doing that in Canada?
00:17:13.020Now, this here is a stepping stone for podcasts, not just for, you know, online media or online content.
00:17:21.040It's for podcasters and content creators all the same.
00:17:25.680Now, we've got to have government regulation telling us what we can say and what we can do, too.
00:17:29.560And a lot of their excuses from Pablo Rodriguez and, you know, the former heritage minister, now Pascal St. Ange, you know, the present heritage minister, are saying, we are protecting Canadian content.
00:17:44.380Well, what they're going to do is they're going to pick and choose what's Canadian enough for them, what they deem as content worth promoting.
00:18:20.680I don't care if you don't like something, you change the channel, turn the page, flip another page, go to a different website, go to a different server, go to a different video feed, go to a different podcast.