The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - August 18, 2025


Carney Liberals get hammered by Liberal MP over Air Canada strikes!


Episode Stats

Length

22 minutes

Words per Minute

174.42374

Word Count

3,950

Sentence Count

237

Misogynist Sentences

4

Hate Speech Sentences

3


Summary

Wyatt Clunis back talking about the Air Canada strike and how the Liberal government is handling it, and why they should have been able to handle it better. Plus, a new piece from a Liberal MP who says the government is wrong about Air Canada.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here, and I am back again to talk about the ongoing Air Canada strike fiasco
00:00:07.720 and how badly Prime Minister Mark Carney and the Liberal government is handling it.
00:00:13.020 And that's not just me saying it, it's not the Conservative Party, it's not the NDP,
00:00:17.500 it's not people who used to vote NDP who voted Liberal in this last election who say they're going back to NDP.
00:00:23.100 There is a Liberal MP saying the Liberals are mishandling it.
00:00:26.880 Yeah, he doesn't directly call out Mark Carney or the Jobs and Families Minister Paddy Hagew,
00:00:32.400 but the message is very clear.
00:00:34.600 I'm about to get to this in just a second.
00:00:36.400 I just want to remind you guys, if you're not yet a subscriber to the channel,
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00:00:41.620 I am trying to get to 100,000 subscribers by mid-December of this year
00:00:46.100 so I can avoid paying for dinner for my four friends.
00:00:49.360 I made the dumbest bet of my life, challenging them that if I could get to 100,000,
00:00:53.080 them four would owe me, one guy, dinner, one time.
00:00:57.700 And if I lose, I, one guy, owe them four dinner.
00:01:01.760 That was very awkwardly worded, but you get the whole idea.
00:01:04.660 So subscribe so my bill for dinner in December will be zero rather than like $350.
00:01:12.520 Anyway, so here is Liberal MP for which riding, let's just verify this,
00:01:18.140 I know it's in Toronto, beaches to East York.
00:01:21.640 Nate Erkson Smith says,
00:01:23.980 Some labor disputes are complicated.
00:01:26.800 This one isn't.
00:01:28.340 Air Canada should pay and treat its flight attendants fairly.
00:01:32.600 And this is obviously a big shot across the bow of the leadership of the Liberal government,
00:01:38.620 Carney, Hagew, and others.
00:01:41.240 Nate Erkson Smith was specifically kind of messed over by Carney.
00:01:45.580 You will remember when Carney first became the prime minister after Justin Trudeau stepped down
00:01:51.140 and he won the leadership, he made Nate Erkson Smith the minister of housing.
00:01:57.140 And then post-election, he was no longer the minister of housing,
00:02:01.480 which is very hilarious because he made him the minister of housing so Nate would agree to run for the party
00:02:07.100 and then immediately pulled the rug out from under him
00:02:09.940 and then made the former incompetent mayor of Vancouver the housing minister
00:02:13.900 despite having a terrible housing record of his own.
00:02:18.220 And now we have Nate seemingly agitated and more likely to tell people what he thinks.
00:02:23.960 Now again, he's not saying the Liberal government's screwing this up,
00:02:27.340 how could they, I'm going to leave the party,
00:02:29.720 but everyone knows what Nate is doing here.
00:02:33.660 He is saying that the government who is ordering flight attendants who work for Air Canada
00:02:38.960 to cease their striking and go back to work, that they are taking the wrong position.
00:02:45.820 And frankly, everyone's kind of oversimplifying this,
00:02:49.420 but the group that is oversimplifying it the most is the Liberal government and Mark Carney,
00:02:54.880 who are just saying that, yeah, we just send people back to work
00:02:58.100 and maybe there'll be a better deal made at some point.
00:03:00.840 It's the stupidest position for them to be taking on this entire issue,
00:03:05.560 and I'm here for it.
00:03:06.760 I love seeing the Liberals under pressure and seeing their supporters,
00:03:10.940 their hardcore supporters, still justifying how they're doing the right thing.
00:03:14.620 You know, like we saw people in my last video saying,
00:03:17.480 well, you know, this is no time for a strike.
00:03:19.620 We need to bust up the strike and push them back to work.
00:03:22.280 There's a trade crisis going on, don't you know?
00:03:25.580 Well, they're so thick-headed.
00:03:28.700 You think they would understand that 8% of people who voted NDP in the 2021 election
00:03:35.640 ended up voting Liberal in 2025.
00:03:38.660 And those are the voters who are most likely to say,
00:03:42.060 Liberals have lost my trust in them and I'm going back to vote for the NDP.
00:03:46.620 Because in fact, the NDP are actually doing a pretty good job of capitalizing on this.
00:03:51.020 Are they wrong about the issue?
00:03:52.980 Oh goodness, of course they're wrong about the issue.
00:03:55.280 They're the NDP.
00:03:56.800 It doesn't mean that the flight attendants striking is necessarily wrong.
00:04:00.800 It's that they're basically trying to blame greedy corporations.
00:04:05.220 Guys, you don't have to like airlines.
00:04:08.220 I tend to fly a lot.
00:04:09.560 I actually have a strange affection for airlines.
00:04:12.180 But it's not the airline's fault that the flight attendants aren't paid very well.
00:04:17.840 It's federal and provincial and municipal government policy.
00:04:21.620 It's the amount of airport fees that these airlines have to staple onto their tickets,
00:04:27.280 meaning that their profit margin goes down.
00:04:29.440 It's the fact that they pay high corporate taxes like every corporation,
00:04:32.780 but in a very profit-sensitive industry.
00:04:35.940 And on top of all of this, you have municipal governments that take massive airport rental
00:04:41.760 fees from the airport, which means the airports then have to charge the airlines more airport
00:04:47.320 improvement fees and other baggage and security fees more than they normally would.
00:04:51.820 This is an overall systemic policy failure that the NDP is now turning into greedy corporations.
00:04:58.900 But it's better than the liberals' position, which is go back to work, you filthy animals,
00:05:04.380 and that's it.
00:05:06.320 But here is Don Davies, the interim federal NDP leader, at a picketing event, yelling into a microphone.
00:05:13.560 It honestly doesn't even matter what he's saying.
00:05:17.520 The only thing that matters is that, goodness, look, the NDP has energy for once.
00:05:22.080 It's not like Jagmeet Singh's comatose party lying on the ground wishing for death.
00:05:27.020 Customer service agents, they brought you.
00:05:28.980 Everybody gave concessions to this company when they needed it.
00:05:33.400 You signed 10-year collective agreements, unheard of, in the industry.
00:05:41.780 You rolled back your wages.
00:05:43.740 You took all sorts of working condition concessions.
00:05:47.400 And you did it to help the company.
00:05:49.520 Now, where are we today?
00:05:51.940 This company is making billions of dollars.
00:05:54.640 Their executives are making millions of dollars.
00:05:56.760 And they are sitting here wanting you to work for free.
00:06:00.520 Let me tell you, sisters and brothers, slavery is illegal in this country.
00:06:07.500 Oh my goodness, it's so overwrought, but I'm kind of here for it.
00:06:10.860 Again, it's so stupid.
00:06:12.600 But I like the fact that this is going to start taking a chunk out of the liberals
00:06:16.300 because the liberals have played stupid games,
00:06:19.880 and now they are winning a very stupid prize,
00:06:22.740 which is losing their labor and progressive base.
00:06:26.260 They are going to hold on to some progressives, especially retired progressives,
00:06:30.820 you know, the people who've been voting liberal for, you know, 12 straight years or more.
00:06:34.960 But they are going to lose, again, that 8% of especially younger progressive voters
00:06:39.660 who swapped from voting NDP in this election to voting liberal in order to keep out the conservatives.
00:06:47.620 Tons of social media posts everywhere.
00:06:49.640 All these people saying, well, you know, if they're going to betray us,
00:06:52.540 I'm going to go back and join the NDP again.
00:06:54.660 I'm ripping up my membership.
00:06:55.880 I went through tons of these posts yesterday,
00:06:58.200 posts that have thousands of likes, hundreds of retweets.
00:07:01.600 And I could go over even more now, but it gets a little bit pedantic.
00:07:05.520 But this is such a poor decision for the liberals.
00:07:09.260 Again, this actual situation takes a fulsome policy review.
00:07:14.020 We need tax reform.
00:07:15.260 We need regulatory reform.
00:07:16.820 And we need these workers being treated fairer.
00:07:19.880 Although when you actually dig into it, it's actually CUPE's fault.
00:07:23.280 And you'll see there the CUPE union for the flight attendants is present.
00:07:28.120 They were the ones who signed this bad deal, yet they're still pretending it has nothing to do with them,
00:07:32.140 even though they're the idiots who signed their flight attendants to this strange deal where,
00:07:37.360 yeah, you do make a lot of money per hour when the plane's actually in transit.
00:07:41.960 But when it's not, you get paid nothing.
00:07:44.300 But anyways, I'll let Don Davies scream here for another seven seconds,
00:07:48.240 and then I'm going to move on to something else.
00:07:49.600 Or I guess there's nothing else.
00:07:57.280 They just wanted to hear all the, you know, they're just posting more honking.
00:08:01.000 I do like how they all have, like, trans pride progress flags and whatnot.
00:08:05.280 Like, what does this have to do with anything?
00:08:09.760 What does this have to do with, like, the union strike?
00:08:12.580 Like, and the answer is, it's just progressive nonsense.
00:08:16.300 It's just that everything must be part of the progressive cause.
00:08:19.700 So, you know, bring your pride flags, bring your trans pride progress flags,
00:08:24.100 because something, something flight attendants workers' rights, you know.
00:08:28.580 He's been doing a lot of the stuff about how, like, you know, most of flight attendants are women.
00:08:32.220 It's like, I don't think this has anything to do with this whole situation.
00:08:35.340 It's just, you know, they've gotten a raw deal, in part because their union sucks,
00:08:39.060 and in part because Air Canada only has a 5.7% profit margin because of terrible policy on the federal, provincial, and municipal level.
00:08:47.800 And so they honestly can't really afford to pay them more.
00:08:51.380 There's a CEO out there being paid $12 million.
00:08:55.080 The CEO is being paid $12 million.
00:08:58.180 Okay.
00:08:59.880 And do you know why he's paid $12 million?
00:09:02.920 And I'm not trying to be rude, but because he's worth $12 million.
00:09:07.500 Shareholders would never put up with the CEO of a company being paid $12 million if he was losing them revenue year after year.
00:09:15.360 It's probably because he's at least keeping revenue stable in a tough market, or he's increasing them.
00:09:20.600 That's probably why he's paid all that much money.
00:09:22.440 But here's Don Davies' ex-post about him at the picket lines, saying,
00:09:27.980 It was an honor to join with sisters and brothers supporting flight attendants at YVR this morning.
00:09:34.020 The NDP stands with CUPE to defend free collective bargaining, fair wages, and an end to force-free labor.
00:09:40.700 Shame on liberals for siding with corporate profits over workers.
00:09:45.200 And I want to, oh, that's a different issue there.
00:09:47.740 But I want to jump over to another aspect of this whole issue.
00:09:56.380 And that is the way that, like, I want to jump into kind of a little bit more of the actual details of what's going on here.
00:10:03.440 Because, again, Air Canada is not even necessarily wrong.
00:10:06.140 But, again, the way that the liberals are going about this means that it looks like all they are doing is defending a corporation, which has Brookfield asset management ties, which is not a great look for Carney.
00:10:17.960 I don't think it's that important of an aspect of the story.
00:10:21.160 But, you know, that's present.
00:10:22.700 So maybe you don't want to walk into this situation like an ag road gorilla, swinging your arm, saying,
00:10:30.260 Flight attendants have to go back to work.
00:10:32.260 What is this?
00:10:33.440 They're keeping people from going on vacation and business trips.
00:10:35.920 That's a problem.
00:10:36.840 By the way, that is actually a serious issue here.
00:10:39.460 But when they don't address any of the other policy concerns, when they don't say,
00:10:43.760 Okay, let's have the government kick in some money here to pay for some extra worker benefits for the next month while we settle this.
00:10:50.600 They had no nuanced take, because I think Carney genuinely is just a guy who just believes he should get what he wants.
00:10:58.340 But this was a statement put out by Air Canada itself just this morning saying,
00:11:03.460 CIRB declares flight attendant strike at Air Canada unlawful and orders QP leaders to direct flight attendants back to work.
00:11:12.320 As much as I will defend Air Canada as not the main villain in this situation, I don't even really think they're a villain.
00:11:19.140 They are also handling the situation so badly.
00:11:21.940 It's so heavy handed.
00:11:23.540 And yes, people are missing their flights.
00:11:25.700 Focus on that.
00:11:26.760 Don't focus on how the heavy hand of government is going to come in and force people back to work or find them.
00:11:31.960 But this statement says,
00:11:33.980 Air Canada today said that the Canada Industrial Relations Board, CIRB, has declared ongoing strike activity by the company's 10,000 flight attendants is unlawful and has ordered the leadership of the Canada Union of Public Employees to direct its members to return to work.
00:11:52.720 Following a hearing on August 17th, the CIRB declared that QP strike is unlawful.
00:11:58.880 It ordered the union leadership, which authorized the strike, to immediately tell its members to end the work stoppage.
00:12:05.540 It also directs individual members of the union to cease all unlawful activities and return to work.
00:12:11.020 It is a ruling the board declared, and then it keeps going and just talking more about the details.
00:12:16.640 It should be noted why this is a really bad look.
00:12:19.880 Like, yes, this is what the CIRB said.
00:12:22.320 Let the CIRB say it.
00:12:24.100 Why are you saying it?
00:12:25.740 Because you know that this can result in jailing of QP leadership if they don't do what the CIRB board is telling them to do.
00:12:35.460 It seems a little aggressive on Air Canada's part.
00:12:39.700 But going back to just sort of the discourse on this issue, I do just want to talk about one more aspect of it in this video.
00:12:48.120 And that is the Conservative Party is right to go after the Liberals on this issue, but I don't think they are doing it the right way.
00:12:57.100 They're still going to get benefit out of the issue, but I think if they want to not only be able to land a solid attack on the Liberals, but also promote their Conservative policy, they shouldn't be copying the NDP.
00:13:08.960 We are seeing the NDP trying to turn this into a corporate greed story.
00:13:13.300 They're making billions in revenue, in actual profit.
00:13:17.280 I'm not sure if Air Canada is really making that much money.
00:13:19.700 Again, 5.7% profit margin.
00:13:22.180 But the Conservatives are also repeating the corporate buddies type talking points.
00:13:27.680 And it's a little, I think it's foolish.
00:13:30.260 Really?
00:13:30.580 The Conservatives should be saying flight attendants deserve to be paid for every hour they are at work.
00:13:35.720 We should be reworking their contract to be able to ensure that that is done at a reasonable wage because you can't let them get their full wage right now for every hour they're at work because many of these flight attendants are being paid like $90 an hour.
00:13:49.300 Because the whole point is it's a higher hourly rate because it's only for when the plane's in transit.
00:13:55.940 The current rules mean that oftentimes they're being severely underpaid because of flight delays that they're not being paid during.
00:14:03.380 But what you can say as a Conservative is say we need to rework the contract for these workers.
00:14:08.900 We need to rework the tax system for the airline industry that is basically always teetering on bankruptcy.
00:14:15.320 And the Liberal government shouldn't be forcing people back to work without a real solution.
00:14:20.080 They are basically just clubbing people back to work and making everyone unhappy at the same time.
00:14:25.380 Their actions are just incentivizing more strikes because of how bad their actions look, which means people are missing their flights.
00:14:32.020 They are not actually solving the policy problem.
00:14:34.520 And they are, in fact, actually allowing for, you know, they're allowing a PR win for unions on an issue that they're not exactly 100% right about.
00:14:43.960 Everyone's a little bit right, but a lot of people are also very wrong with the perspective they take.
00:14:49.040 So Conservatives, take a Conservative position on this.
00:14:52.800 Don't just repeat talking points, you know, working class trade union talking points because they're popular right now.
00:14:59.580 You're not going to win these type of NDP voters.
00:15:01.720 The public, the QP voter will never vote Conservative.
00:15:04.960 So at least say something that makes the people getting their flights delayed want to vote Conservative.
00:15:09.560 Say something that makes sort of, you know, people who are small business owners say, you know what?
00:15:13.560 That was a good way of putting it.
00:15:15.060 That's a good solution.
00:15:16.700 Or else you're just going to blend into the background with the NDP.
00:15:19.580 Naturally, biggest loser in this story, still Mark Carney and the Liberals.
00:15:23.320 Obviously, they're just suffering on this issue.
00:15:26.180 They're just incompetent.
00:15:27.480 Again, they have Nate Irkstein-Smith attacking them because it's, you know, they're vulnerable.
00:15:33.000 And Nate has a bone to pick with the party.
00:15:35.120 And I don't think it's just petty politics.
00:15:36.900 I think this is also genuinely what he believes.
00:15:39.900 And you will notice that no Liberal MPs are sounding off about this.
00:15:45.260 Like Stephen Gilbeau, who was the one who ended up pushing, or actually it was Seamus O'Regan.
00:15:50.600 He stepped down, though.
00:15:51.720 But Stephen Gilbeau was very much ballyhooing the former Liberals piece of, like, anti-scab laws that they were pushing.
00:16:00.320 The Liberals have been pushing a lot of big union-type legislation.
00:16:04.460 They've passed a lot of it.
00:16:06.380 And outside of Patty Hayes, you could hear a pin drop in the Liberal caucus right now.
00:16:12.700 Nobody is repping what the government is doing right now.
00:16:15.320 In fact, the one organization repping them the most is Air Canada.
00:16:18.440 They should really get their PR team to bust into the, like, you know, they should fire them all.
00:16:23.300 They should not talk.
00:16:24.020 Hire me.
00:16:25.180 Hire me.
00:16:25.960 I will.
00:16:27.220 Air Canada.
00:16:28.280 Time to get in business with me.
00:16:30.160 I'm kidding, but you get my point.
00:16:31.880 Guys, the Air Canada should say, we'd like to pay them more.
00:16:35.040 Right now, our tax rates are murder.
00:16:36.680 So how about we sit down with the government and the unions and solve this?
00:16:39.960 That's what they should be saying.
00:16:41.620 But we have the Liberals.
00:16:43.440 Patty Hayes drops a bomb in the middle of the room, and they're all like...
00:16:46.800 And then the NDP is taking the initiative from them, which is hilarious because they're probably going to bleed them off about three or four points in the polls.
00:16:54.200 And, yeah, three or four points in the polls is not everything, but considering the fact that they're supposed to be very popular right now, three or four points sinks them back to kind of mediocre, you know, January numbers when Trudeau had first stepped down and the Liberal leadership race started up, but people didn't really know what to think about them.
00:17:13.580 It's not great.
00:17:15.760 I just want to quote somebody who I tend to agree with a lot, and they're the best polling analyst in the country at the moment.
00:17:24.320 This is actually one of the funnier things I saw.
00:17:27.960 This is both from Polling Canada, who was run by an NDP guy, as well as Shreya Teest, who I detect is more of a conservative guy.
00:17:35.280 But they're talking about where the current Liberal actions are being defended the most, and I find this funny.
00:17:42.600 Polling Canada says, the place I've seen come to the defense of Air Canada the most is Blue Sky, LMAO.
00:17:48.720 And then Shreya Teest says, there's a reason why Twitter is more politically diverse than Blue Sky, because on Twitter you can find people from all sides of political spectrum, and on Blue Sky, the only type you can find are Liberals.
00:18:02.500 So on the Twitter competitor Blue Sky, that is very Liberal and very Progressive, they're mostly defending Air Canada, because it's where all the diehard Liberals end up going to.
00:18:15.200 But Shreya Teest predicts, because of the fallout of this issue, he says, I think the Liberal polling numbers will only come down by like 2-4%, that's it.
00:18:26.180 And he does phrase that in such a way where it's like, oh, it's only 1% or, you know, 2-4%.
00:18:30.620 In many of the polls, the Liberals are only leading the Conservatives by 3-6 points.
00:18:37.620 If you lose 2 points to 4 points, it's now within a margin of error polling divide between the Conservatives and the Liberals.
00:18:45.180 And again, the Liberals are in their honeymoon period, although I think this actually does demarcate when the honeymoon period ends.
00:18:51.600 And in future videos, we're going to get into just how bad the Liberals are looking like on the world stage.
00:18:58.140 They have all the Hamas activists that they were trying to pander to, still harassing them, still attacking them.
00:19:04.140 They have the NATO countries not inviting them to conferences, to, you know, leaders meetings in the United States over the Ukraine-Russia issue.
00:19:14.240 We are just being cut out of everything.
00:19:16.400 And eventually, not all of them, but eventually a lot of the elbows-up Liberals will realize that this is not what they signed up for.
00:19:23.720 I will have a lot of people in comments say, well, you know, you can't convince Liberals.
00:19:28.160 Their minds are impregnable to logic.
00:19:33.400 Yeah, that's kind of every party.
00:19:35.320 You'll get a party diehard, you'll meet, let's say, half of any party's voters are diehards who, unless you basically just start torching the party's platform and you stop standing up for the things that you're supposed to stand up for, those people are ride or die.
00:19:49.860 They'll always say that you're doing the right thing.
00:19:52.000 But elections are not won based on whose support completely collapses down to just 5%.
00:19:58.420 The Liberals don't need to collapse for the Conservatives to win a new election.
00:20:02.600 They just need to outpace the Liberals.
00:20:05.320 And if the Liberals fall from 43%, like we've seen in many of these polls, maybe, let's say, 44%, and they fall down to 39% over this or 41%, and the Conservatives rise from, you know, 38% to 40%, now the Conservatives are in a really good position.
00:20:19.360 And then when we have bad economic news hit the headlines, in the aftermath of a lot of people having the shine taken off the Liberal government for them, people are going to start reacting far more aggressively negatively.
00:20:32.400 And I think if you're a Conservative, this is a good thing.
00:20:35.520 This is probably the first issue that isn't just something that Conservatives will take issue with with the Liberal government.
00:20:41.560 It's something that a lot of different types of voters will take issue with, and it will make them more likely to hear about the other scandals that are currently going on with the Liberal government that they've wanted to ignore and just say, that's just Conservative propaganda.
00:20:54.040 Who cares about what's going on with, you know, Carney's conflicts of interest and Brookfield and what happened with Canada blood services and the $92 billion deficit and this, you know, all the other stuff.
00:21:04.740 That, it's all Conservative conjecture.
00:21:07.260 Well, now it's not all Conservative conjecture.
00:21:10.020 Even the NDP, even the Liberals are criticizing the Liberal government for how they ended up handling this particular issue.
00:21:17.240 That should have been way easier to handle than they've made it look like.
00:21:21.440 But anyways, with that being said, thank you guys for tuning into this video.
00:21:25.820 I am going to be doing a live stream tonight on the Battle River Crowfoot by-election.
00:21:30.240 It's probably going to be a poly of win, obviously, but I think it's still fun to watch the results roll in, especially in the context where there are 214 candidates.
00:21:41.500 Let's see how many candidates get zero votes.
00:21:43.560 I will be very interested to see.
00:21:45.480 Maybe throw in your prediction.
00:21:46.840 I think there's like 195 candidates in this by-election who are longest ballot committee candidates.
00:21:53.020 Predict out of 190, or I think it's like 195, 198, however many there are, predict what percentage of the longest ballot committee candidates will not get a single vote.
00:22:05.240 But with that being said, I will see you guys all later.
00:22:08.780 I will see you guys all later.