The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - January 28, 2025


Justin Trudeau is packing the Senate on his way out! (Totally unethical)

Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Pierre Poilievre Denise Batters Christopher Wells Stephen Harper Jody Wilson-Raybould Erica Barutz Victor Oh Mulroney Adler
Liberals surging in the polls？ Or Is it a post-Trudeau mirage？ Jagmeet Singh is once again propping up the Trudeau Liberals - No early election

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

174.51

Word count

1,857

Sentence count

117

Harmful content

Misogyny

7

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Justin Trudeau is stepping down as Prime Minister of Canada, and yet he s still going to appoint 10 new liberal independent senators to the Senate on his way out of office. This is absolutely insane, and I m here to talk about it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 If I'm to give Prime Minister Justin Trudeau credit for one thing, while he's been in office, he has never ceased to surprise me in how he is willing to be shameless.
00:00:11.000 He keeps finding new ways to be shameless that I could have never previously imagined.
00:00:16.320 The man is set to step down as Prime Minister in early March, and yet he is still going to appoint 10 new people to Canada's Senate.
00:00:25.540 What? He has a sub-20% approval rating with the Canadian general public, his own party doesn't even like him, and he is still going to appoint 10 new liberals, I mean independent senators, to the Senate on his way out.
00:00:42.820 He's not even fighting the next election, he's just leaving and going on vacation, and he's just going to put 10 random nutcases on the Senate before he leaves.
00:00:52.000 And I think nutcase is the right word to use, because he's been putting people like Dr. Christopher Wells on the Senate, who is a left-wing gender theory radical.
00:01:02.320 What? Stephen Harper, the former Conservative Prime Minister, did not appoint anyone to the Senate in 2015.
00:01:11.020 He allowed for whoever was still the Prime Minister after the 2015 election to have the leeway to appoint some of their own senators.
00:01:18.760 That was him being really fair, probably more fair than he should have been.
00:01:24.320 And Trudeau, with absolutely zero mandate to keep appointing senators, like he legally can, but ethically and morally should he?
00:01:33.300 Obviously not. He is still doing it.
00:01:36.840 Just look at this.
00:01:37.820 So, Trudeau to fill Senate vacancies before retiring, source says.
00:01:41.980 Right now, there's technically only eight vacancies, but the Senate's going to expand, so I believe Quebec's getting a new seat and Ontario's getting a new seat.
00:01:49.800 But this is the current scuttlebutt behind the scenes, that he's going to appoint not only a bunch of new senators, but a bunch of new young senators.
00:01:58.540 Because, as we know, once you reach 75 years old, you automatically step down from the Senate, and Trudeau is going to be able to put a bunch of people in the Senate who could be there for 30-plus years.
00:02:11.320 This is absolutely insane.
00:02:14.820 The thing, too, is that if this happens, these people could easily hold up all of Pierre Polyev and the Conservatives' legislation if they form government after the 2025 federal election.
00:02:25.900 I need to show you something. The one good thing that could come out of this is it might lead Canadians to want Senate reform.
00:02:33.540 That this was so corrupt, this has been so unethically handled, that who can actually trust the makeup of the Senate if it's not just a bunch of spite appointments by unpopular prime ministers on their way out?
00:02:45.960 Look, here are all the independent senators. There are 41 of them right now.
00:02:50.380 Eight vacancies, but that is expanding to 10 quite soon here.
00:02:53.820 Right now, the independent senators almost have a majority.
00:02:58.220 Then we have Canadian senators group, which I believe is some flinky, kind of half-liberal, half-red Tory Senate group.
00:03:06.400 We have 12 conservatives, mostly Harper appointments. I think there might be a Campbell and a Mulroney one there, too.
00:03:12.660 We have the progressive Senate group, which is also mostly liberal appointments.
00:03:16.340 And then we have 12 non-affiliates, some conservatives, some liberals.
00:03:20.340 But if Trudeau jams these 10 on, it will basically be a three-quarters center-left-to-left Senate.
00:03:29.600 If these people attempt to hold up anything from pure poly of the conservatives, they should immediately launch a constitutional reform movement to try and change the Senate to turn it into a triple E Senate.
00:03:43.620 That it's equal, it's elected, and it actually has some accountability with the public.
00:03:48.740 There's another E there I'm forgetting, but I think you got my point.
00:03:51.100 That the problem in Canada right now is there are so many antiquated institutions.
00:03:57.660 Why is it that the judiciary is in the prime minister's office?
00:04:01.800 This is what the SNC-Lavalin scandal is all about, was Jody Wilson-Raybould, who was in the cabinet, being told to give a deferred prosecution agreement to SNC.
00:04:11.320 And technically, that's actually totally cool within the Canadian constitutional rules, because the justice minister is technically subservient to the prime minister.
00:04:21.520 So he can order them to do whatever he wants.
00:04:24.680 And it was only because Wilson-Raybould actually had some amount of integrity that she refused to do it.
00:04:30.980 In the U.S., there is a reason why the judiciary is always supposed to be separate from the president's office.
00:04:38.040 Even their AG can still not basically tell the judiciary what to do.
00:04:44.740 That's one of those things where the judiciary can overrule them. 0.99
00:04:47.540 In Canada, if the AG, the justice minister, just decides, eh, we're not prosecuting them, well, it just doesn't happen.
00:04:53.720 That's how insane things are.
00:04:55.440 And in the Senate, too, the thing is that people can't even name senators.
00:04:59.720 I know some Canadian senators, mostly people like Huzak from Ontario, Denise Batters, I believe she's from Manitoba. 0.88
00:05:08.040 A couple conservatives I recognize the names of.
00:05:11.120 There's one conservative senator who stepped down recently because he reached the age of 75, Victor O., who's just a CCP plant.
00:05:18.240 It was obviously he's a CCP plant.
00:05:20.280 He's, in fact, involved with the person who's suing me that I have that legal fund for, that they took a trip to China together and were guests of the CCP.
00:05:28.940 The Senate is just full of old, corrupt politicians, or there's some good people.
00:05:34.200 Denise Batters and Huzak are perfectly fine. 0.98
00:05:36.620 But it's full of just radical activists who could never get elected dog catcher anywhere because they're nutcases.
00:05:43.400 Dr. Christopher Wells actually was involved in smearing me in press progress back when I was running in Calgary Signal Hill's conservative nomination.
00:05:51.400 He said I was, like, a bigot and transphobic or something because I didn't believe this myth that there's, like, a bunch of trans oppression happening in Canadian schools right now.
00:06:01.200 It's absolutely insane that these people get appointed.
00:06:04.020 There's that, like, hacky radio show host, Adler, who get thrown in.
00:06:07.840 And a lot of these other people, like, liberal senator, independent senator, Wu Pa, that guy is obviously another CCP plant.
00:06:16.620 The Senate is where you put the worst people ever if you're the liberals.
00:06:21.500 This thing needs to be reformed.
00:06:23.240 I would love maybe leave in the comments what you would like for the Senate.
00:06:26.700 I think I would like to move to a Senate model that the U.S. has, that the parliament outside of Quebec is mostly population balanced.
00:06:36.320 And then the Senate, while giving maybe a little bit more to Quebec for that cultural nod, that every province has mega regions where Calgary has a senator, southern Alberta has a senator, northern Alberta has a senator, Edmonton has a senator, major cities get a senator, and then regions get a senator.
00:06:55.020 That would be good.
00:06:55.840 It's not perfectly population balanced, and it has a little bit more give for regions that don't tend to get a lot of representation when it comes to members of parliament.
00:07:04.340 Like northern Ontario, like the territories, you can have one senator for all the territories, that gives them a lot of representation, that's fair, but the West also gets more representation, and you kind of only, you still only give one to Toronto, or maybe Toronto can have two, but it makes it so that population doesn't just rip Canadians off in a direction without regions having to be represented.
00:07:26.140 That's why I actually like the American system, it's obviously not perfect, I like certain things Canada does more than the U.S., I like certain things the U.S. does better than Canada.
00:07:34.420 And in this case, I like the mix that the U.S. has of population and region.
00:07:40.880 The House in the U.S., the federal House, is purely population-based pretty much, except states get at least one House representative, even if it gives them more representation than like the California representative.
00:07:53.120 So Wyoming is technically disproportionately represented, because it only has like 400,000 people and it gets one representative, where a typical California representative is like representing 450,000 people.
00:08:03.860 It doesn't really matter.
00:08:04.500 And then the Senate is purely geographically based, two senators per state, because why would a state sign on to be a state within the United States if it didn't get some amount of leverage within legislation?
00:08:16.400 Why would you sign up as Wyoming if you get one representative and no senator, and basically you're screwed on, if the U.S. wants to move in a direction that's bad for your state, you basically have almost no say on it.
00:08:28.280 And then the presidency is a combination through the electoral college, where a state has as many electors as it has representatives and senators.
00:08:37.920 So Wyoming gets three, and then California would get all of its representatives plus its two senators. 0.96
00:08:43.320 Perfectly fine.
00:08:44.580 Right now, our Senate formula doesn't even make sense.
00:08:47.780 Like, original provinces get 10 senators.
00:08:50.560 So like you have places like Nova Scotia getting 10 senators.
00:08:53.960 How many does Alberta get? 1.00
00:08:55.560 Six.
00:08:56.040 We even elect senators in Alberta.
00:08:59.040 We try to.
00:08:59.800 We basically vote on who we want the prime minister to select, people that the population wants.
00:09:05.780 And Trudeau just ignores us.
00:09:07.440 We should have, I think it's Pam something or other.
00:09:12.020 I'm so sorry.
00:09:12.720 I forget her name.
00:09:14.320 There's like the, there's, we have people.
00:09:16.240 Erica Barudis was one of the second place person in the Alberta Senate election. 0.97
00:09:21.020 She should have been appointed.
00:09:21.920 And we just got ignored because, meh, prime minister gets to appoint whoever they want.
00:09:28.260 And now Trudeau, on his way out, is going to make it so that, in theory, these people could hold up everything that the legislature wants to do.
00:09:35.640 Even if they technically rubber stamp stuff at the end of the day, knowing that if they don't rubber stamp it, then the Senate might get wiped out. 0.60
00:09:42.140 They can still hold stuff up, force it back to the House to get revised or to get more considerations put in it.
00:09:49.820 And they could slow down Polyev's agenda by months to years and then ensure that whatever Polyev's accomplishments are in office are going to be far less than what he could have done if he didn't have to deal with the Senate. 1.00
00:10:02.260 I think the Senate could be a good institution, but right now it is just a complete whack, like a circus of idiots. 0.98
00:10:09.980 It's a circus of useless people who don't do anything outside of the few good senators like Denise Batteries. 1.00
00:10:18.500 Anyways, that's it for me today, guys.
00:10:21.780 Truly, that's the last video today.
00:10:23.220 I made three videos today, but there's so much stuff going on.
00:10:25.780 I hope you understand why I had to talk about this.
00:10:28.100 Leave a comment on what you would think a great Senate formula would be.
00:10:31.260 Do we even need the Senate?
00:10:32.740 What are your thoughts on that?
00:10:34.400 Like this video.
00:10:35.280 Make sure to subscribe to the channel, and I'll see you guys all later.