The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - June 23, 2026


Mark Carney’s Latest Scandal: Poilievre Rips Apart Alto Rail & Vancouver Developer Giveaway


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Length

21 minutes

Words per minute

175.29

Word count

3,773

Sentence count

168

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

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Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here, and welcome back to the National Telegraph YouTube channel.
00:00:06.240 You know that Alto high-speed rail project that everybody loves so much?
00:00:10.860 And when I say everybody loves it, I mean everybody hates it.
00:00:14.200 Well, in the least shocking piece of news since the sun rising from the east and setting in the west,
00:00:20.240 that $90 billion project is going over budget, baby.
00:00:25.080 Check out this headline from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
00:00:29.480 Liberal government considering high-speed rail route change to include stop in Kingston.
00:00:35.680 Transportation minister says option subject to technical feasibility and project requirements.
00:00:42.380 This is burying the lead like a serial killer would bury a body so that the police don't find it.
00:00:49.600 The liberals are not just changing the route for fun, they're changing it, costing billions of dollars,
00:00:55.780 because, in fact, nobody likes this project, and they have massive conflicts of interest with it,
00:01:02.160 and that's probably why they're still actually going forward with the whole thing.
00:01:05.640 But let's read a little bit of this article, then I want to get to the reaction of Conservative Party leader Pierre Polyev.
00:01:11.980 So it reads here,
00:01:13.120 The Liberal government is awaiting a significant route change for the Alto high-speed rail project
00:01:18.760 that would move the line corridor south towards the shore of Lake Ontario.
00:01:23.680 Quote, I have directed Aalto to develop a southern route option that includes a potential stop in Kingston
00:01:29.300 subject to technical feasibility and project requirements,
00:01:33.260 Transportation Minister Steve McKinnon said in a statement sent to CBC News.
00:01:37.560 Quote, this is an important step towards building a faster, cleaner, and more connected rail network for Canadians.
00:01:45.680 Yeah, no doubt everyone was clamoring for this, especially in the city of Kingston where the route may now go,
00:01:51.520 a city of 140,000 people. Maybe this is some big payout to Liberal MP Mark Gerritsen in Kingston
00:02:00.060 and the Islands. I don't know. But this, the top line that you see there, like it's all one line,
00:02:07.140 but the line that was just going straight diagonal in yellow, that was the original route. And now
00:02:13.580 the new proposed route is going Toronto, Peterborough, Kingston, and then Ottawa, Laval,
00:02:19.480 Montreal, Tras, Rivieres, and then Quebec City. I cannot put more emphasis on how little people
00:02:26.740 want this train. That is the only reason that we're going to potentially spend, I believe the
00:02:31.620 number was another $5 billion doing this different route along Lake Ontario. The reason we're doing
00:02:38.580 this is because the farmers hated it, and there was going to be a giant farmers revolt against
00:02:43.880 the liberals through the regions that the train was going to cut through if they went ahead with
00:02:48.540 this. Because although you usually think of rural voters as being conservative voters,
00:02:54.340 in this region, there's a lot of supply management farmers who vote liberal. And if the liberals put
00:03:01.160 that train through there thinking it was going to be a big political win, all the people that
00:03:05.220 they were going to bisect the land of were never going to vote for them again. Even if you were
00:03:10.700 just in the general area, you probably hated that this train was just cutting the property in half
00:03:15.900 and you'd have to go find a tunnel underneath the train to actually be able to cross underneath it.
00:03:20.960 It was just going to be an absolute mess in the area.
00:03:23.980 And let's take account of who actually wants this.
00:03:28.480 Urbanites who are never going to take it.
00:03:31.480 That is it.
00:03:32.700 Yes, there will be some people who use the Toronto to Ottawa leg a lot.
00:03:37.180 They're called politicians, and that's kind of it.
00:03:39.820 And even then, they don't really need it all that often because, what is it,
00:03:43.000 like a three-hour drive from Toronto to Ottawa, maybe four.
00:03:46.260 If you're a politician, you make that trip maybe every few weeks or so.
00:03:50.000 Really not that big of a deal.
00:03:51.780 The train would cut it maybe in half,
00:03:53.500 which is really not that crazy considering all the money that's being put into this.
00:03:58.180 And now let's look at all the people who don't like it.
00:04:00.440 Farmers, Quebec nationalists, who you think would be on board with this
00:04:04.040 because it's mostly a train for them in a lot of ways.
00:04:07.940 Fiscal hawks don't want it.
00:04:09.500 And there might be another group I'm missing here, but, you know, conservatives definitely don't like it. Business liberals don't like it. Farmers don't like it. Quebec nationalists don't like it. And the only people who like it are urbanite people who already vote liberal.
00:04:24.140 There is no point in building this train politically for the liberals, other than there's probably a lot of special interests who donate to the liberals who are interested in seeing this train get developed.
00:04:35.800 You know, they just bailed out a bunch of real estate developers in Vancouver.
00:04:39.940 I have no doubt that a similar issue is taking place here, where friends of the liberals are going to be involved in construction with the Alto Crown Corporation.
00:04:51.280 Anyways, but now I want to cut over to the press conference that Pierre Polyev did where this issue was brought up because I think this issue has become a big winner for the conservatives.
00:05:03.000 There were a lot of conservatives online when this project was first proposed who are, again, I'm not a NIMBY.
00:05:10.020 I'm not someone who's like, don't build anything higher than one story near me or I'm going to have a panic attack.
00:05:15.280 I'm pretty permissive of, you know, I think a lot of building codes can sometimes be a little bit too cumbersome in many cities. Now, I don't like blanket rezoning and stuff like that. That's ridiculous. But I'm also not the opposite of YIMBY of, oh, no, public transportation everywhere. Let's just have tower blocks just popping out of suburban neighborhoods and whatnot.
00:05:36.200 There are a lot of conservatives I would call YIMBY conservatives who are running around saying, well, the conservatives have to be in favor of something. Why can't they support the Alto train? Them opposing the train just makes them look like naysaying jerks. It's a $90 billion project that's going to serve approximately nobody. And we're naysaying if we oppose that. 0.80
00:06:00.660 sorry is being conservative now just bad apparently but whatever now let's get into this clip from uh
00:06:07.940 from your poly of answering a question about the train from uh my friend jared yeager at sitka media
00:06:13.300 thank you hi jared yeager here with sitka media so on the the alto line um sometimes to build for
00:06:20.820 the future you need to spend a little bit of money so i'm wondering are you against high
00:06:24.580 speed rail in canada as a concept or just the way that this project has gone about
00:06:30.660 Now, that is actually a very Jared question, because I'm not trying to take shots at Jared
00:06:35.920 here, but he is very much a Vancouver urbanite, so I could see him being very much in favor
00:06:39.840 of high-speed rail as just a general matter.
00:06:43.700 But I think that Polyev has a good answer to this, because you don't say, oh yeah, I
00:06:48.580 could see it being good for some people, but maybe it costs too much.
00:06:51.680 Don't even give the project any benefit of the doubt.
00:06:55.840 The price tag already makes it a complete failure.
00:06:58.060 There is no point of trying to salvage anything from this, and Pierre Paulyab does not do that.
00:07:05.480 First of all, the Liberals are promising to spend $5 billion over the next year just to study the idea,
00:07:12.960 not to build a single inch of rail.
00:07:17.380 A bunch of Liberal insiders, activists, lawyers will get rich, making single moms, seniors, and small businesses poor. 0.99
00:07:24.220 If this project ever gets built, it will be 15 years from now, 0.88
00:07:27.920 and it will cost every family $8,000 in higher taxes.
00:07:32.940 95% of Canadians will never even use it, and it won't take a single car off the road.
00:07:38.120 It will just take passengers out of airplanes that don't need subsidies.
00:07:43.220 So let's focus on bringing down the cost of living.
00:07:46.200 I would rather, here's my counterproposal.
00:07:49.000 People say, what's your idea?
00:07:49.980 My idea is let's improve the transportation of every single Canadian by taking the GST off used cars.
00:07:56.640 Right now, you're paying double, triple, and even quadruple taxes on the same vehicle as it's sold and resold.
00:08:05.780 Conservatives would use the Alto research money to take taxes off used cars so that you can save $2,000 on your next vehicle.
00:08:15.120 That would give a real tangible savings to real people rather than forcing British Columbians to spend $8,000 per family on a train they will never get to use and from which they will never benefit, even if it ever gets built.
00:08:31.440 Now, I'm not even necessarily against any public infrastructure spending.
00:08:36.600 Obviously, somebody like or public transportation infrastructure spending.
00:08:41.040 Here, Polyev isn't either.
00:08:42.600 But there has to be a general interest.
00:08:44.700 And general interest doesn't just mean if everybody uses it every day, then it's in the general interest. Obviously, no project could ever meet that threshold. But if, let's say, the project cost far less, it was going to be done faster, and maybe we could even have some sort of funding mechanism that allows for more local taxes to go to it, that would be a different situation than Canada's just going to build a train that's probably going to be three quarters empty most of the time,
00:09:13.940 and going to cost way more money than it would ever cost to build this sort of train in another country
00:09:19.700 where it's actually harder to build stuff like this based on the geography.
00:09:24.180 Japan builds similar trains, not maybe as long because Japan's not as big of a country,
00:09:30.520 but they can build trains from point A to point B with mountain ranges to go around for a fraction of the cost.
00:09:37.700 But now I want to jump over to another answer from Apir Polyev's press conference about the bailout money that is going towards Vancouver developers, because these stories are connected, although they are technically different subjects.
00:09:53.520 It's all about special interest funding from the Liberals.
00:09:57.920 They are throwing money at special interests, trying to secure votes for the next election,
00:10:02.240 and the Conservatives should keep hammering on Alto. They should keep hammering on the
00:10:05.900 developer bailout money, because this thematically does get at the heart of what really bothers
00:10:12.520 voters about the government. Sometimes it's not even the dollar value. It's where the money is
00:10:17.600 going. Just like Doug Ford taking everybody off by trying to buy himself a private plane,
00:10:22.080 and I don't even necessarily think that the Ontario Premier shouldn't have his own plane.
00:10:25.880 Maybe he should. But just imagistically, it looks terrible at the time he did it. He has wasted so
00:10:33.340 much more money subsidizing businesses that are linked to the PC party all over the place.
00:10:39.620 He is a subsidy politician. And although the plane only costs maybe like $20 million or whatever
00:10:46.360 it's supposed to cost overall, I'm not sure actually what the price tag is. It's not that
00:10:50.240 big of an expense but it just finally stuck a visual that voters hate to a subject that they
00:10:56.560 usually don't take seriously and it's taxpayer waste yes it's not that much money but finally
00:11:02.140 the thing he spent the money on woke people up to the fact that oh my goodness this ontario 0.98
00:11:06.680 government is spending money in a really stupid fashion that's what the alto train and the 0.98
00:11:11.580 developer bailout is doing for mark carney it's finally shaking some voters awake and saying 0.98
00:11:18.140 really these are the guys saving Canada just throwing 3.2 billion dollars towards Vancouver
00:11:23.160 developers and building a train to nowhere that that these are the guys who are elbows up against
00:11:28.880 Donald Trump the ones who are just burning your cash for literally nothing to benefit insiders
00:11:34.500 and the friends of the liberal party so that's why I really want to highlight uh going forward
00:11:40.660 every time the poly of conservatives start hitting the liberals on these issues because this
00:11:45.620 is where they need to be if they want to start crawling up the polling on who voters trust more
00:11:51.160 on affordability. I was just wondering, you know, what solutions would you propose as an
00:11:56.040 alternative to what the Prime Minister is putting forward? And I know that during the campaign,
00:12:00.260 you proposed cutting the sales tax on all new homes. That's something that we've seen some,
00:12:05.040 you know, initial progress in Ontario with that deal that the Fed struck with the province.
00:12:09.440 Would you like to see that apply on a national level? Or is there anything else further you
00:12:12.620 would like to do to address the kind of glut of condo sales we've seen in dc and other jurisdictions
00:12:16.560 the glut of condo sales is not a problem i like how the the journalist here i'm not sure who it
00:12:21.880 is maybe they're from an outlet i usually like or maybe not doesn't really matter but it was it was
00:12:26.460 pitched to poly of there as well what would you propose as if what carney did was like a default
00:12:33.240 option you you should just nor we just normally just bail out developers for building overly
00:12:38.900 expensive apartments that nobody wants. No, we do not. And the way that the media always kind of
00:12:45.540 coaches these questions is to indicate to a viewer that, you know, Polyev might be in the wrong.
00:12:51.720 You should assume by default that he's in the wrong because Carney's hands were tied. He had
00:12:56.340 to do it. Well, what do you propose, Polyev? What would have you done differently? Like not done it?
00:13:02.020 That's all Polyev really has to say here. And that's effectively what he does say.
00:13:04.960 so first uh your the question sorry the answer to your question is yes i want to see all taxes
00:13:12.600 taken off home building the sales taxes and we need to incentivize municipalities
00:13:17.620 and provinces to get rid of all of their home building taxes secondly we need to
00:13:22.380 insist that municipalities speed up permits and free up land to get more built very quickly
00:13:27.220 and my infrastructure policy would do that we need to cut the the bureaucracy red tape
00:13:33.680 and taxes that are responsible for our high housing costs under the Liberals here in Canada.
00:13:39.440 That is a real solution. What Mark Carney and the Liberals have done is they've inflated a housing
00:13:45.660 bubble with too much money printing and immigration driving up demand and too much red tape and taxes
00:13:53.680 blocking supply. Having created the housing bubble and now bursting that bubble, now they want to come 1.00
00:14:01.020 and bail out the bankers and developers who profited from it.
00:14:06.000 And this is another example of a tiny club of liberal elites,
00:14:12.060 billionaires and insiders getting rich by making hardworking Canadians poor.
00:14:19.900 And so I'm calling for the Kearney condo bailout of developers and bankers to be cancelled.
00:14:27.100 as for the condos themselves you know what the solution is for them to become affordable
00:14:32.940 the developers need to lower the sale price to a to a level that people can afford to pay and when
00:14:41.580 they do that those condos will sell and some say well the condos the the the developers will lose
00:14:49.520 money somebody's going to lose money so who's it going to be is it going to be the waitress
00:14:54.960 and the welder paying for it on their taxes 0.63
00:14:57.860 so Carney can give a tax-funded bailout,
00:15:01.340 or is it going to be the developers and bankers
00:15:03.460 who are trying to profit off of the bubble in the first place?
00:15:07.060 Now, that kind of reminded me of sort of Milton Friedman's
00:15:11.100 Free to Choose series, because everyone acts like,
00:15:14.060 well, what's going to happen to the developers?
00:15:16.720 Should they just lose money?
00:15:19.000 Well, taxpayers lose money when you bail out the developers.
00:15:22.800 The developers are going to survive.
00:15:24.960 they will survive. And if they don't survive, they've made a lot of bad business decisions.
00:15:30.080 I'm not like pro-business the way that like a Doug Ford and a Mark Carney is pro-business
00:15:35.680 by basically just subsidizing businesses to keep them on life support. That is a liberal policy,
00:15:42.400 simply just having the government give artificial demand to markets whenever businesses cannot sell
00:15:49.200 their products. Same thing when it comes to labor. They will just simply create fake jobs. They will 0.96
00:15:55.900 create fake demand for a fake industry so that more people can be employed in it. Conservatives
00:16:01.480 should be free market people. This is why I do still harass the conservatives. Don't just run
00:16:07.180 on getting rid of the industrial carbon tax or getting rid of the gas tax for a year and some
00:16:11.240 of these other tax schemes that they have, which aren't necessarily bad. They're just complicated
00:16:15.420 and kind of annoying to listen to. Just cut taxes across the board from anywhere from 15% to 25%.
00:16:23.080 I would just say 20% for every bracket, across every bracket, including corporate, and a point
00:16:29.120 off the GST. Run on that, because right now, that is how the conservatives are going to
00:16:35.340 claw back in the polls, claw back the liberals' lead. Look at this chart from Abacus Data.
00:16:42.340 up the rising cost of living right now this is a poll where the liberals were at like 45 percent
00:16:50.300 and the conservatives were at 37 the liberals had an eight point lead uh now i'm going to do this on
00:16:56.560 the whiteboard someday because it is a very busy chart here but if you look at the top line two
00:17:01.460 numbers rising cost of living in the economy the liberals lead on both of them they have the
00:17:06.880 advantage. But the Liberals only lead on rising cost of living by five points, and they only lead
00:17:12.580 on the economy by three. Now, there's other traditional Liberal issues like healthcare and
00:17:18.720 Trump and climate change that, of course, the Liberals are leading on that the Conservatives
00:17:22.960 shouldn't look at. They should just focus on the economy ones. They are actually not as far down
00:17:29.480 as the overall national lead that the Liberals have. That means that those are issues where a
00:17:36.080 lot of Canadians are willing to see the Conservatives as the better affordability party,
00:17:41.400 the better party for the economy. And the way that you market yourself is you got to keep it
00:17:47.180 simple, stupid. You don't run on, well, if you sell stocks, but you reinvest your money in Canada, 1.00
00:17:53.600 you're not going to be hit by capital gains taxes, or I'm going to take the GST off of buying a used
00:18:00.100 car. How about we just slash taxes in general so that people aren't just getting maybe a thousand
00:18:04.980 bucks back on their taxes because there's no industrial carbon tax, no gas taxes. How about
00:18:09.580 they pay 20% less income tax in general, and a point comes off the PST, and the company they
00:18:14.900 work for pays 20% less taxes, and their take home becomes $6,500 more. We need a massive bout of tax
00:18:24.020 reform in this country. And that's how you get to the average person, not through like a long
00:18:29.720 presentation of all the micro taxes and boutique credits that are given out in order to try and
00:18:35.260 pump the economy up, you just slash it. In fact, our tax revenues will probably go up if we cut
00:18:42.500 taxes, because we'll stop chasing people out of the country, and we'll start getting people to
00:18:47.100 retire early to live on their pensions, because what's the point of working when the government
00:18:51.380 takes like 53% of your money anyways? Just cut it. But overall there, I do like the tone of
00:18:58.740 Pierre Polyev in answering that question back. At the end of the day, more Canadians need to ask
00:19:04.300 the question, who pays? Who is losing? Because every time the Liberals say, well, we're creating
00:19:11.460 jobs, we're helping industry. No, no, you're helping that small special interest in direct,
00:19:19.840 which is directly negatively affecting everybody outside of that special interest group.
00:19:26.920 The liberals, when you actually see who they direct tax money at, it turns into like 10% of the population of the country who works in very specific areas that only exist or only sustained in their current form based on liberal subsidies.
00:19:42.100 The conservatives should run against subsidy culture and should run in favor of freedom culture.
00:19:49.440 We want an economic culture of freedom.
00:19:52.640 Do what you want.
00:19:53.560 The government will try and get out of your way.
00:19:55.580 Slash regulations.
00:19:56.940 Slash taxes.
00:19:58.140 Be the destination for investment around the world.
00:20:02.460 Anyways, with all that being said, thank you guys for watching today.
00:20:06.500 I'm also going to be covering in the future the new food inflation numbers, because those are also not fantastic for the Liberals.
00:20:13.360 And at some point, I am going to be trying to cover the North Vancouver Capilano by-election a little bit more in detail.
00:20:20.620 I want to see if I can have Stephen Curran on the show, who is the conservative candidate for that riding.
00:20:25.400 It is actually a winnable by-election, despite being previously a pretty safe Liberal riding.
00:20:30.480 Jonathan Wilkinson is stepping down, I think, in the next few days, or maybe he already has.
00:20:34.840 and then the by-election is going to be sometime in August. We're trying to get as many people
00:20:39.880 signed up for lawn signs in that riding. So if you live in North Vancouver, Capilano,
00:20:43.560 I'll make sure to have a link in the description below and pinned at the top of the comments.
00:20:47.800 Sign up for a lawn sign for that riding and also a volunteer sign up even if you don't live in the
00:20:52.660 riding if you want to help out Stephen Curran. By-elections are crazy. The turnouts are so
00:20:57.920 different than what you'd expect in a general. So if the Conservatives work their butts off in
00:21:02.140 that riding, really hammer on the developer issue, the issue around taxes, the issue around 0.98
00:21:08.520 property being just undermined by aboriginal title, they can win that riding. The liberals
00:21:14.480 are already at disadvantage losing Jonathan Wilkinson, who's slagging them for not being
00:21:18.280 climate zealous enough on the way out. And so the conservatives stick together and the liberal votes
00:21:23.180 start getting split with the NDP and the Greens. Conservatives do have a chance. Anyways, with all
00:21:28.480 that being said, thank you guys for watching. I'll see you all later.