In this episode, I talk about foreign interference in our political system, and why it's a big deal. I also talk about what I would do if I found out that my own party was colluding with a foreign government.
00:00:00.000I think the best way of portraying to the uninitiated just how far Canada has fallen under the lack of leadership of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
00:00:09.120is that eight and a half years into his time as Prime Minister, we now apparently have a Parliament chock full of traitors.
00:00:17.420So it wasn't enough that the Liberals were just domestically corrupt.
00:00:21.120We needed to export our corruption and let, like, Xi Jinping have a seat in our house through one of the Liberal MPs.
00:00:30.000This is effectively what everyone knows has been going on for a few years, but finally a committee actually investigated it
00:00:37.140and put together a report basically showing just how for sale Canada's government really is right now.
00:00:43.480And that is obviously a massive violation of democracy in Canada that MPs in specific ridings might not really care about their constituents.
00:00:54.560They might care more about what the Chinese government thinks, the Indian government, Pakistani government, Iranian government.
00:01:01.360They care more about what they think than people who actually pay taxes in this country.
00:01:09.540But today what I want to do is kind of break down the discourse around the whole foreign interference, you know, investigation scandals, I guess you would call them.
00:01:19.360And oddly enough, the discourse has been mainly happening between Jagmeet Singh and Elizabeth Mayne.
00:01:26.780And what I'll say up front is I take everything both of these two say with a grain of salt.
00:01:32.840The NDP has a lot to gain pretending it is the peer party because there's no chance of having a foreign government try and, you know, buy their MPs
00:01:41.940because it's a useless party that no foreign government would ever bother with.
00:01:46.240Like, nobody's knocking on the NDP's door trying to get influence inside the government through a new Democratic Party MP.
00:01:53.380That's, you know, that's a really stupid thing to do.
00:01:57.120That would be something like a really poor country would do.
00:01:59.480They don't have enough money to bribe like a liberal or a conservative or a bloc MP.
00:02:04.280So they have to go down the street to the NDP.
00:02:06.640It's like Equatorial Guinea or something like that would be bribing an NDP MP.
00:02:11.000And the Greens are, oddly enough, Elizabeth Mayne at the very least, I'm not sure about what her colleague, the only other Green MP, thinks.
00:02:20.400But she's doing the reverse where she's not acting self-righteous.
00:02:23.800She's almost like downplaying the idea of foreign interference, which might be because the Green Party has always had oddly strange connections to the Russian government.
00:02:34.560You'll notice that it's a strange phenomenon, but Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for president of the U.S., who's been the presidential candidate a couple times already, every time she's in a room with Vladimir Putin, if it's a massive banquet with tons of tables, she's always sat with him.
00:02:51.460And the Green Party has always done a lot of water carrying in Canada for the Russian government.
00:02:57.400The guy who was the runner-up in the last Green Party leadership race, who lost to a NAMI Paul, literally went to Russia to go basically act as a propaganda journalist for them, saying that everything's fantastic here and it's literally the only prosperous country on the planet.
00:03:11.740And actually, the West and the U.S. are the real evils in the world.
00:03:16.460It's nuts, the kind of stuff the Green Party gets up to.
00:03:19.040But I want to just play this clip first of Jagmeet Singh, in a certain sense, doing the right thing and saying that I'd kick out any MP in my caucus if I go look at this report who's implicated in foreign interview.
00:03:31.540It's a little bit empty because, obviously, there's not really that much of a capacity for any NDP MPs to be corrupt in this line of, you know, in this area.
00:03:41.400I'm just saying, would you, on the floor of the House of Commons, if you get the names in your briefing, release them?
00:03:47.780Because you're not a member of the committee, so you would be allowed to do that.
00:03:51.460So, what I've said, what I'm going to do is this, the following.
00:03:54.580If a member of my party, anyone that's a New Democrat, a member of Parliament, I have, I read the briefing, and if they are, it's clear to me that they knowingly work with a foreign government to undermine Canada, I will immediately remove them from caucus.
00:04:11.420There is no way I will approve them to run as a candidate, nor would I allow them to continue to sit in my caucus if they are named, and they knowingly work with a foreign government to undermine our country.
00:04:23.640See, no, I'll give Jagmeet Singh credit for that.
00:04:27.420I hope every leader, if they find out that there is somebody corrupt in their caucus, just kicks them out.
00:04:31.940The kind of dirty secret here is I find that a lot of party politics is so about risk aversion, trying to be as clean as possible in terms of public image, that I could see parties finding someone corrupt in their caucus, and then their first instinct is to say nothing about it.
00:04:49.380Because if we expose that this person is corrupt, maybe there's a bad news story.
00:04:52.900So maybe it's better just to kind of let them persist and hope they eventually leave and they stop being a problem for us, rather than us getting rid of them, doing the right thing, but having to take, you know, a hit in the media.
00:05:04.100That's kind of the problem we end up having a lot in Canadian politics.
00:05:07.340Risk aversion ends up meaning that problems kind of persist.
00:05:09.980But now I want to move on to the weird back and forth that Jagmeet Singh and Elizabeth May had on this issue, where she was very downplaying of the problems and he was like almost sensationalizing it, probably more than it needed to be.
00:05:26.440But here is a great edit that I believe Jennifer L. made between the two's different press conferences.
00:05:32.760I have no worries about anyone in the House of Commons.
00:05:36.380The MPs that are involved, wittingly or unwittingly, are they traitors to Canada?
00:05:41.660They are indeed traitors to the country.
00:05:46.700I'm not relieved at all, nor, in fact, I am more disturbed.
00:05:51.920There is no list of MPs who have shown disloyalty to Canada.
00:05:57.860We must find a way to let MPs who are named in this report know that we know what they're up to.
00:06:05.000Yeah, so there is a bit of a tale of two press conferences going on between Jagmeet Singh and Elizabeth May.
00:06:12.940The only thing that I don't want to pull up the clip because it's very long, but the only thing that it does leave out is Elizabeth May, while she's downplaying it, those were mostly moments from the very start of her press conference.
00:06:23.300As it went on, she started saying, well, yeah, there was probably some nominations that foreign countries were effectively helping to rig, and there were some former MPs who just left office recently who were working for foreign governments and passing diplomats' private secrets or, like, you know, foreign agents' privileged secrets from government.
00:06:43.160And even then, she admits she's only read the public report, and she's not actually read the one that requires deeper security clearance, so her testimony is utterly worthless.
00:06:54.320But anyways, that kind of brings us to this other thing that's been going on with it, which is the discourse between both the NDP and the liberals going after Piropoleev for not getting the security clearance to read the report.
00:07:07.320The thing is, and I'll play the clip of Piropoleev explaining this in a second here, I think it's a good thing for people to know about, that it's so strange to see the liberals try to make hay out of this, considering that Trudeau, for 11 weeks, has known the MPs implicated in it, many being likely people from his own caucus, as well as people he's appointed as senator.
00:07:30.600Like, I think this is a very good example of a guy telling on himself, liberal-appointed Senator Wah-Pau-Woo, saying that he opposes any new bill trying to curb foreign interference of, you know, any interference from foreign state agents.
00:07:46.440He was like the one guy who came out saying, I'm going to vote against this.
00:07:49.680There are some other people who abstain strategically, but if you come out and say, hmm, foreign interference bill?
00:07:55.580Well, no, not on my watch. I'm going to guess that you might have some level of ties to the Chinese government.
00:08:03.740Just a guess here. Maybe it's from Taiwan. I'm just assuming he's more, you know, pro-Beijing on terms of what's been going on, because the liberals would never appoint someone who's pro-Taiwan.
00:08:13.520But the liberals posted this on their own social media account a couple days ago.
00:08:17.840The header saying, why won't Piropoleev get his security clearance?
00:08:21.340And the graphic reads, Piropoleev is the sole party leader forgoing access to classified report on foreign interference.
00:08:28.780Now, the conservatives already have two of their own MPs who've already seen the report, the report that Piropoleev would have to get a security clearance to see.
00:08:36.580The reason Piropoleev has said he doesn't want to get is because to get the security clearance wouldn't actually let him then speak about it after.
00:08:43.840You'd have to basically sign an NDA saying, I'm not going to talk about it.
00:08:46.940And so two conservative MPs have seen it. I don't think they're technically allowed to even tell Piropoleev what they said.
00:08:53.200The only people they'd maybe be able to talk about it with are each other, because they both have clearance.
00:08:57.980But this is the problem, is that there might be a lot of game playing going on where Trudeau knows what's in it.
00:09:03.280But if you want to know what's in it, you're also not allowed to speak about it, so you can't call him out.
00:09:08.060So the liberals are oddly using kind of the fog of war here in order to attack Piropoleev.
00:09:12.980And to be clear, the security clearance is not like predicated on getting like a background check or something.
00:09:19.060It's not like Piropoleev might have done something, and so he's not allowed to get the security clearance.
00:09:23.740No, no, no. It's like a security clearance that reading any document would require you to do a new security clearance where like an investigator would make sure that you have no exposures that would prevent you from being able to read it.
00:09:36.320Like, let's say, one of the people implicated probably can't read it, because they can't probably know a lot of this classified information, because they're already not a trusted individual.
00:09:46.240They'd maybe be able to read another report based on like water safety or something like that in some small town or whatever.
00:09:52.020You need a security clearance to read it because of some privileged information.
00:09:55.200But like, you have to get, basically, they would look at your unique vectors for potentially having issues reading it.
00:10:02.340That's what that's what this is all about. Polioev could obviously get in five seconds.
00:10:06.480And here is him explaining why he specifically hasn't tried to go get the security clearance to read this.
00:10:12.040I'm not going to be muzzled. And what I think Trudeau is trying to do here is put a bunch of paper in front of me that has information that's already public.
00:10:20.340Mark it secret and then say, you can't speak about this anymore because now you've seen classified material.
00:10:26.380It's a crafty way to silence critics. We already have two conservatives that are cleared to look at these documents and to scrutinize what the prime minister proposes to put in front of me.
00:10:39.440I think that is the right way to go. But at the end of the day, I'm not going to be silenced.
00:10:43.620What we actually need is a full public inquiry with a former judge who's skilled at dealing with national security issues to look into the allegations to see why Beijing interfered in two successive elections to help Trudeau win.
00:10:56.480Why did Beijing give one hundred and forty thousand dollars to the Trudeau Foundation in order to influence the prime minister?
00:11:03.780These are questions to which we need real answers. And only a public inquiry will deliver those answers.
00:11:08.420So, yeah, that's I know. I generally think that's probably the reason why, like everyone's trying to say, like, there's a dark secret reason why he won't get it.
00:11:17.140Like, it would be stupid because if there was like really deep implications for the conservative party in foreign interference, I think the liberals or the NDP would have leaked it at this point, even though Jagmeet Singh says, well, I'll keep it as a responsibility of the conservative party leader and the liberal party leader to call out anybody who might be implicated in the report.
00:11:35.280At the same time, I don't think that Jagmeet Singh could probably help himself if there were like really obvious conservative MPs who are like working for the Indian government or working for like, I don't know, the Laos government or something like that, or the Egyptian government, the Israeli government.
00:11:50.840He'd 100 percent do it in five seconds. And so could there be conservatives in it?
00:11:55.780Yeah, totally. This is the problem, again, with large parties. The larger the party, the more nutcases who could be inside the party willing to work on behalf of a foreign government.
00:12:05.880Naturally, parties with no power don't have many people trying to influence them.
00:12:10.380And so the conservatives could have some people who maybe cut a deal to win a nomination with the help of some foreign embassy selling memberships to people who knew from that community.
00:12:20.460That could have happened. Could have. Yeah, definitely. The thing is, it's probably mostly just the liberal government or the liberal party.
00:12:28.140We I can enlist people right now. Handong is obviously implicated. Jagmeet Singh kind of even hinted at it because after he came out and delivered this press conference,
00:12:36.500he also just made a quick comment that I don't think Handong should ever be let back in the liberal party caucus and then pretended like that had nothing to do with what he had just read.
00:12:44.700It's probably because he's obviously somebody who has had back channels with the Chinese government that the Canadian government found out about or CESIS found out about.
00:12:53.900Maju Jahari is an obvious person who has ties to the Iranian regime, the Islamic regime in Iran.
00:13:00.760He's literally when Iranian parliamentarians come to Canada, they don't have an embassy here.
00:13:05.860They're not supposed to be doing diplomatic missions to Canada.
00:13:08.160But if they do happen to arrive on Canadian shores, oddly enough, they go and meet at Maju Jahari's house.
00:13:13.980And I don't think it's because he makes like a really mean cheese fondue or something like that.
00:13:19.420They just have to try it. Probably he's their boy here.
00:13:22.540And there's a lot of other MPs in the liberal party I could name who obviously have some ties to the Pakistani government or to the Iranian government or others, the Chinese government.
00:13:33.140But for now, we don't know. Trudeau knows. He doesn't want to say anything.
00:13:39.000In a certain sense, he probably should just tear off the band-aid right now.
00:13:43.700Maybe he thinks that there's enough of an exposure for the conservatives that they won't call him out.
00:13:48.420Because even if, let's say, let's say there's 10 MPs who are compromised, 10 MPs and senators,
00:13:53.000maybe 9 out of 10 are liberals and one's a conservative, but they know that if that comes out, there's any conservatives implicated,
00:14:02.120the media are going to cover it like a 50-50 affair.
00:14:05.120Yes, 99% of all of the damage done is from the liberal side, especially since they're literally the government,
00:14:11.780and there's just one random freak from the conservatives.
00:14:14.140But the media will pretend like these are equivalent things.