The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - June 10, 2025


Liberal Senators snub Carney and join Conservatives!


Episode Stats

Length

17 minutes

Words per Minute

175.85657

Word Count

3,083

Sentence Count

12

Misogynist Sentences

3


Summary

Two more liberal senators crossed the floor and joined the conservative Senate caucus, which is led by Conservative Senator Leo Housakis. What does it mean for the future of the Liberal agenda in Canada? And why did they do it?


Transcript

00:00:00.040 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. A story that may have gone under the radar for you in this last week
00:00:06.940 has been the story of two liberal senators choosing to cross the floor and join the
00:00:12.440 conservative senate caucus. Or I guess I mean to say they were independent senators who joined
00:00:18.100 the conservative caucus because former prime minister Justin Trudeau had this strange habit
00:00:23.820 of appointing his senators not as liberals but as independents and they would go join the
00:00:30.080 independent caucus which made Justin Trudeau seem very moderate and centrist even though
00:00:35.960 many of his senate picks were to the left of the typical liberal member of parliament.
00:00:42.440 Now it seems two of the more moderate liberals are just sick of the way that the liberals do things
00:00:47.820 and now they're choosing to go sit with the conservatives I guess to retain some level of
00:00:52.600 dignity in their political careers. So these senators are Senator David Richard Adam Richards
00:01:00.340 for New Brunswick as well as Senator Mary Jane McCallum both I believe Trudeau appointments at
00:01:07.720 least the one David Adam Richards is a Trudeau appointment and now sitting over in the conservative
00:01:14.240 senate caucus which is being led by Senator Leo Housakis. Again this isn't like the biggest
00:01:21.640 coup on the planet because the senate oftentimes is a rubber stamp for whoever is in government
00:01:27.400 but it is a telling that as a senator who doesn't really have to do anything you still are not
00:01:33.080 comfortable being with the other liberals in the senate and now you want to go sit with the
00:01:38.260 conservatives. Here's a quote from the National Post that they got from David Adam Richards that I
00:01:43.740 think is very elucidating on his mindset when he was crossing and it probably is the exact sort of
00:01:49.380 way that also Jane McCallum was or Mary Jane McCallum was also thinking when she moved over
00:01:56.280 but what he said David Adam Richards is quote for years so many of the concerns I and others had about
00:02:05.180 our country were dismissed by an insular self-absorbed government with almost blind indifference
00:02:11.040 to ordinary men and women quote Richards and then he went on to say now the liberals are insisting on
00:02:17.380 policies that certain senators pleaded for and were so often ridiculed and refused and yeah so he then
00:02:25.700 basically goes on from uh to say in other statements that the liberals were very obviously
00:02:32.340 plagiarizing ideas from the conservatives and that if they're going to just openly plagiarize
00:02:38.940 Tory policies then he may as well go and join the conservatives who are actually championing the
00:02:45.280 ideas that are getting passed and so what I also think went on here because he never left under
00:02:51.380 Trudeau he's leaving under Mark Carney possibly because some of the senders were seeing what would
00:02:57.200 happen once Mark Carney took over for Justin Trudeau was there going to be a real change in leadership
00:03:03.020 style was the government going to change priorities like David Adam Richards had highlighted are they going
00:03:08.840 to talk about the things that actually matter to ordinary men and women and not really if you look
00:03:15.700 at the current liberal agenda it's pretty much just microwave Justin Trudeau stuff with maybe Mark Carney
00:03:22.520 having a little bit more confidence in driving towards their policy goals which is not even necessarily
00:03:29.080 a good thing because many of their policy goals are terrible look at Bill C-3 for a prime example
00:03:34.800 let's just give citizenships to anyone who spent three years in Canada and has a citizenship even if
00:03:42.020 it's not three consecutive years of being here back to back as long as they're here for you know a couple
00:03:49.120 months here and there and they have a citizenship they should be able to pass Canadian citizenship
00:03:53.720 onto their children even if they're being born overseas and that person has no intention of coming back to
00:04:01.020 Canada just an awful awful policy increasing the industrial carbon tax the carbon border adjustment
00:04:07.540 all this is absolutely ridiculous and so again we'll probably have to see a little bit more of what
00:04:13.560 these senders say over the coming days but this has been a development over the last week there could
00:04:18.640 be more senders coming over from here because again I genuinely just think there's a lot of people
00:04:23.920 in the liberal senate caucus or independent caucus who aren't full-on leftists who want to make sure that
00:04:30.320 people don't think that they're like complete you know ideologues and that they can actually you
00:04:36.240 know like they have far broader horizons than the very metropolitan progressive politics of the liberal
00:04:44.220 party and at the end of the day ideology doesn't matter when we're just trying to solve things like
00:04:50.260 inflation when we need to lower taxes unless you're just a full-on zealot for the liberals and you just
00:04:56.820 believe in their very high tax high spending subsidy agenda you know anti-oil and gas agenda at some
00:05:04.060 point even someone who's like a pretty consistent liberal will have to say like guys you know people
00:05:08.500 can't make ends meet maybe we should lower taxes but now I want to move on to another thing that the
00:05:14.160 liberals are doing right now that I think highlights again why their appeal is going to be very short
00:05:19.800 lived right now their numbers are up obviously they just won government so they're in a bit of a
00:05:26.380 honeymoon right now but they're pushing this modular home idea which could have some limited success
00:05:33.520 sure as long as you put anything into the ground that people can live in it is going to take some
00:05:40.020 pressure off the housing market but I think something like this in the long run is going to be viewed as
00:05:45.880 one of those key insults to Canadians one of those kind of political generation defining insults that
00:05:53.740 at a time when young Canadians couldn't afford homes they basically started pitching the idea of having
00:05:59.140 prefabricated two-room houses that can be put up for people in order to satisfy them this isn't exactly
00:06:07.020 what your parents were getting back in the 60s 70s 80s and 90s but now you have to put up with
00:06:13.220 literally living in a cheddar box Mr. Speaker one of the policies the Prime Minister campaigned on
00:06:20.520 was building modular housing that is a way to get more homes built faster and we know that by
00:06:29.740 removing barriers to internal trade in our country we can get a modular housing industry going in our
00:06:38.360 country that is one of the solutions to the housing crisis I hope the members opposite will be
00:06:43.200 constructive and support this important legislation
00:06:46.200 Mr. Speaker my generation refuses to live in a shipping container
00:06:53.440 a very good way of putting it from Jacob Mantle here and I think that is something again that is
00:07:02.000 kind of going to define why this is going to be a very short-lived policy win for the liberals even
00:07:07.300 if they start getting a lot of these modular homes built they're basically bribing people the idea is
00:07:12.000 they don't want to get rid of all the regulations that make it difficult to build they don't really
00:07:16.380 want to lower overall taxes although they are stealing the conservative idea of removing the
00:07:21.420 GST on new homes but they don't really want to change the current government structure so instead
00:07:26.500 they'll just give you less home that you can purchase to technically make it cheaper even though
00:07:31.820 per square foot these homes are costing way more than they should back in the day it didn't cost very
00:07:38.840 much to be able to build quite large homes and we're not in the point in Canada where we can't
00:07:44.220 build large homes anymore like oh we're just too big or where you know we're in here like tooth and
00:07:50.660 jowl or whatever we're like way too packed in so we need smaller houses if they just made it easier to
00:07:55.680 build cities could easily expand old houses could be torn down and large houses could be put on their
00:08:01.940 or mostly empty lots we don't need to descend into building you know six plexes and modular homes to
00:08:09.220 do what we could do easier in the 1950s and 60s of just getting regulations out of the way blanket
00:08:16.260 approving an area for building and just getting it done but i'll go back to jacob mantel here uh keeping in
00:08:23.220 his lead up my generation refuses to live in a shipping container
00:08:27.720 oxford economics reports yesterday that toronto's housing market ranks among the worst in the world
00:08:36.700 for affordability at the same time mortgage delinquency rates in toronto are higher than at
00:08:41.780 any time during the pandemic the financial burden is suffocating the next generation of home buyers
00:08:47.280 and history has shown us mr speaker if you fail to plan you are planning to fail a budget is a plan
00:08:54.000 mr speaker so my question to the prime minister is when will canadians see one that's another good
00:08:59.400 point that that reminds me of something else i want to talk about with the budget although the
00:09:04.200 conservatives have been bringing up a lot so it's hard to miss this as a a key uh issue right now
00:09:09.580 that the liberals are promising a lot of stuff that they do not have the budget for and when i say
00:09:17.000 they don't have the budget for it i mean they copied and pasted justin trudeau's budget from 2024
00:09:22.040 into 2025 they have very few cost savings that they found yeah i guess they don't need to send
00:09:29.200 out the consumer carbon tax rebates so that saves them like a small bit of money but they also got
00:09:34.560 rid of consumer carbon tax that was paying for those rebates uh and at the same time they're jacking
00:09:39.580 up the industrial carbon tax but not giving out rebates so basically the government is now just
00:09:43.760 bringing in that revenue for itself and not even cutting people checks anymore but the liberals
00:09:49.380 are promising things like these modular home programs and they're going to now raise our gdp
00:09:54.800 spending on the military to two percent of our gdp but we don't have a spending plan that bakes that
00:10:01.100 stuff in because again we copied and pasted trudeau's plan from 24 into 2025 but then we're going to be
00:10:07.560 increasing military spending from like 1.2 or 1.3 percent of gdp up to two percent that's not
00:10:16.180 something that we have budgeted right now so our current budget could well easily pass 600 billion
00:10:22.980 650 billion this year because these are big spending items that are not baked into the previous budget
00:10:29.400 that they're proposing spending for 10 years ago canada's defense spending fell to less than one
00:10:36.880 percent of gdp it has since doubled in cash terms but it's still not close enough to face these mounting
00:10:45.740 risks he's kind of side swiping stephen harper here because yes in the last year of uh stephen harper's
00:10:53.760 like leadership of the country our gdp spending on the military fell to like 0.8 or something like
00:11:01.920 that and then it had been almost doubled by trudeau the problem is the spending wasn't the problem we
00:11:08.520 should be spending more it's the allocation so when he's proposing as he's going to get to here
00:11:13.980 of spending two percent of gdp on the military we don't really have any way of absorbing that properly
00:11:22.420 into you know tanks jets arms you know artillery because we currently spend more than we did
00:11:31.240 under harper but under harper we actually had a functioning military and under justin trudeau with
00:11:36.300 far more spending our military has mostly turned into an hr department that sometimes that has a few
00:11:41.880 guns lying around the brave women and men who are protecting our sovereignty do not have the
00:11:48.260 resources they need for a riskier world our military infrastructure and equipment have aged hindering
00:11:55.760 our military preparedness I give an example or two only one of our four submarines is seaworthy less
00:12:06.500 than half our maritime fleet and land vehicles are operational more broadly we're too reliant on the
00:12:13.700 united states and so for all those reasons I'm announcing today that Canada will achieve
00:12:19.620 nato's two percent of gdp target this year half a decade ahead of schedule but again this isn't even
00:12:29.840 part of the current budget we his spending bill he's put forward the oic uh the order and council 33
00:12:37.100 billion that he signed himself over doesn't include this two percent I'm all for getting to two percent
00:12:41.860 but I'd also want to cut wasteful spending and cut taxes at the same time which is totally doable but
00:12:48.360 he doesn't want to do those other two things so he's just going to jack up spending on the military
00:12:52.960 with no real plan on spending it again he was the economic advisor for trudeau for five straight years
00:13:00.280 he could have stuck his finger in more pies than just the economy somehow when he was around for five
00:13:05.900 years he wasn't able to influence things enough to actually put some money towards the military to create
00:13:11.080 jobs you know this is during covid you could have even said well we want to make sure those submarines
00:13:15.920 are seaworthy so we're gonna throw a bunch of our covid money towards them to create jobs for people
00:13:21.180 to repair them and get them up to the you know to that to that seaworthy level we could have done that
00:13:26.360 but he never did it at the time he never suggested it there was no action taken on it under trudeau
00:13:31.340 when he was around and a heavy influence on the government so I don't really trust he's doing anything now
00:13:36.680 other than creating a jobs program that isn't actually going to get make the military any better
00:13:41.980 off it'll it will but I don't think to the amount of money that we're spending we're not going to be
00:13:47.120 getting good bang for our buck just as we were under Stephen Harper where the amount of money we put
00:13:53.600 forward was actually going towards the right things and now under trudeau with far more spending we were
00:13:59.060 not getting any of the right things so I don't think taking what we currently spend and then jacking it up
00:14:04.480 to two percent is going to be actually beneficial at least in the short to medium term I think that
00:14:11.320 it's going to take this government quite a long time to actually sort itself out because if you
00:14:16.260 think these guys are going to cut the worthless uh jobs inside the military and shift back to actual
00:14:21.860 equipment and uh soldiery you're out of your minds these people are totally fine with the military
00:14:28.220 being a repository for you know people in HR and management and bureaucracy anyways so that should
00:14:36.900 be it for me today guys I do want to quickly plug something because I mentioned it yesterday but I
00:14:41.420 kind of want to mention it uh from here on out I'm not going to say it every video but if you live in the
00:14:47.080 city of Calgary I have a link below in the description as well as pinned to the top the comments
00:14:52.000 for Sonia Sharp's mayoral website make sure you sign up for a lawn sign if you live in Calgary because
00:14:58.780 we actually need a conservative mayor and Sonia Sharp is the most conservative person who can actually
00:15:03.520 win running for the mayoralship so make sure you sign up for that I've had people reach out to me and
00:15:08.740 say like well Jeff Davison is a conservative not really you read his website and he won't even commit
00:15:14.660 to cutting spending he's just saying I'm going to freeze taxes what do you mean freeze taxes because even if
00:15:20.600 you freeze the rate taxes will still go up because people's home values go up over time and your
00:15:26.960 property tax rate is based on the home value that is the weaselly way that previous mayors have
00:15:33.080 actually raised the amount of tax that you're paying by just re-evaluating your house upward very
00:15:39.140 aggressively you know even kind of going over what your house is probably really worth in order to
00:15:44.080 extract more dollars from you I think a new mayor needs to actually reduce the rate so even
00:15:50.500 if your house value goes up you're paying less in property taxes this is a bit of a Calgary rabbit
00:15:56.580 hole but again I encourage people if you live in the city preemptively sign up to get a lawn sign you're
00:16:01.660 probably not going to get it right away mayoral election is until October but do it now because
00:16:05.820 we need to box out all these fake conservatives so that we have someone who can actually win
00:16:10.660 in the mayor mayor's race rather than scrambling in the last month and trying to get behind one guy which
00:16:16.440 never works you get behind someone early and you stick to them and I'm getting behind
00:16:20.540 Sonia Sharp who I think is probably the best person for the job I'm going to break down some polling
00:16:27.120 for the Calgary mayoral race because that's actually an interesting thing to dissect polling on people
00:16:32.560 have been trying to put around polls showing well see Jeff Davison has like 14 percent and Sonia Sharp
00:16:38.100 only has seven okay the problem with that is the person leading those polls is like at 25 percent
00:16:44.240 and it's Jeremy Farkas and behind him is Jody Gondek is it because those two people are good candidates
00:16:50.640 no it's because we're so far out polling just says whose name do you recognize and that's it
00:16:56.720 Gondek didn't even have the highest name recognition in the 2021 race but she won because her campaign
00:17:03.620 was well run Jeremy Farkas had the highest name recognition last time and got clobbered arguably
00:17:09.020 Jeff Davison had as had higher name recognition than Jody Gondek did and he also got clobbered
00:17:15.380 because they ran bad campaigns because they weren't really that conservative so conservatives didn't
00:17:20.720 turn out for them so we're trying to change it this year make sure you buy a lawn sign not buy a lawn sign
00:17:25.860 sign up for a lawn sign if you live in Calgary so anyways that's it for me today guys see you later