True Patriot Love - July 07, 2026


TPL Media Crime Update： Crime On The Rise

Topics
tobacco crime markup traffic stop and drug trafficking organized crime in canada
Hosted by
Shara Micucci Mike Wixson
Mentioned
Brady Wedham Ted Kaczynski Deep Dive LessLethal.ca Fentanyl Brennan Luigi
Barbecues Now a Luxury？ Food Prices Soar! #Canada The Arctic： Canada's Northern Development

Episode Stats


Length

19 minutes

Words per minute

176.3

Word count

3,497

Sentence count

165

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

On this week's episode of the Local Crime Update, we discuss the recent shootings of three police officers in the city of Toronto and Montreal, as well as the possible link between these incidents and the growing problem of anti-police sentiment on social media.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 We need to keep an eye on our friends, neighbors, and family.
00:00:04.540 Yep.
00:00:05.380 People who are starting to profess anger through ideology that doesn't match up.
00:00:12.200 Because in the end, this is what it can lead to.
00:00:14.540 And it made me ask this question.
00:00:15.780 Did this man believe in an ideology, or did he simply collect enough grievances to justify violence?
00:00:25.940 Hi, this is tplmedia.ca.
00:00:28.540 Take a look.
00:00:29.220 maybe we are there locally for you go to tplmedia.ca slash local i'm mike this is your weekly
00:00:35.640 crime update joining me this week to talk about the crimes across the nation brady wedham thanks
00:00:41.180 very much for being here man yeah thank you for having me my friend i love talking about crime
00:00:45.880 who doesn't right i know it's a tough docket uh on a friday but uh we make it part of our weekend
00:00:51.700 every weekend just to give an idea of what's been going on across the country uh item number one
00:00:57.140 And off the top, of course, the deadly shooting of police in both Toronto and Montreal.
00:01:04.020 This week, a vigil paid to the officer in Toronto and a procession down one of our major highways to the Congress Centre where his life was honoured.
00:01:19.100 But it does kind of do this more than anything else.
00:01:22.880 There's sort of a renewed focus on firearms and what firearms should be banned in this country.
00:01:29.320 Yep.
00:01:30.380 Now, the police haven't officially come out and said it yet,
00:01:32.840 but the pictures of the gunman and the firearm that was laying beside him,
00:01:37.660 apparently it is an SKS, a Russian-made 10-round magazine semi-automatic rifle.
00:01:43.940 That was the one in Montreal.
00:01:45.060 Montreal, yeah.
00:01:46.180 You know, it's interesting.
00:01:46.980 The emerging consensus right now is that this manifesto they left behind,
00:01:52.960 really, it wasn't really a coherent political document.
00:01:56.380 Scattered, to say the least.
00:01:57.900 It was more the ravings of sort of a laundry list of complaints
00:02:03.580 that didn't match up.
00:02:06.080 There wasn't a lot of consistency.
00:02:07.860 The ideology doesn't really align here.
00:02:10.260 It seems like more of just an angry person.
00:02:14.740 Misogyny, anti-capitalism, anti-police, anti-pornography, anti-Semitic,
00:02:20.740 and conspiracy thinking in ways that don't form sort of a consistent ideology.
00:02:25.800 And I think the one thing that comes out of this is we need to keep an eye
00:02:31.560 on our friends, neighbors, and family.
00:02:35.220 People who are starting to profess anger through ideology that doesn't match up.
00:02:42.460 Because in the end, this is what it can lead to.
00:02:44.740 And it made me ask this question.
00:02:45.980 Did this man believe in an ideology
00:02:47.620 or did he simply collect enough grievances to justify violence?
00:02:51.920 I think the latter is probably the truer statement.
00:02:55.760 You're seeing a lot of this in young people,
00:02:57.560 people my age in their 40s and down,
00:02:59.780 very angry at the way things are right now.
00:03:02.580 There's a lot of things going on globally,
00:03:03.940 a lot of things just inside of the country.
00:03:05.540 Could even just be in your own township and city.
00:03:08.460 But there's a lot of people that are very angry right now
00:03:10.560 and I think they're trying to justify their anger, right?
00:03:12.980 So they're looking at maybe these ideologies don't really line up
00:03:16.320 because they're just trying to get mad at anything they can be mad at.
00:03:18.500 And I guess it doesn't matter what your political belief system is.
00:03:20.520 There's a lot to be mad at.
00:03:22.460 No, but that, I mean, that's a matter of society.
00:03:24.880 But when it leads to violence, it's different.
00:03:26.180 That's a matter of society trying to help individuals see clear.
00:03:29.860 I mean, yes, if all you do is follow the news,
00:03:33.020 you know, society and humanity has gone through enormous pressure
00:03:37.700 And an enormous, you know, opposition from the forces around them always, whether it was nature or whether it was war, whether it was starvation or disease.
00:03:51.080 We've made it through as a society, as humanity, by finding solutions to problems together that we will again in times like this.
00:04:00.640 But we need to be reassuring each other and not just giving people the ability to build a laundry list of things that will, in the end, give them a justification for anything that they do, whether it's violence, whether it's going online and perpetrating nonsense.
00:04:19.120 It's really, this is, I think, the calling card on this one for this kind of incel mentality.
00:04:24.900 Yeah, and you're right about saying like human beings find a way to kind of get through anything and everything, right?
00:04:29.660 We are the diamonds in terms of mammals.
00:04:32.220 We are the hardest surface to break through.
00:04:36.000 I'm all for the tigers myself.
00:04:37.760 I digress.
00:04:38.600 Determination is definitely one of our things.
00:04:40.460 But like you said, if there's like a woe is me or a lack of hope
00:04:44.700 that can lead to blending a lot of these problems together
00:04:48.100 and acting out in a violent way,
00:04:49.740 which I don't think there's a problem that we have on this planet
00:04:52.920 that should result in us going into an industry.
00:04:56.280 You know, from what they've said, the location that he was in,
00:04:59.660 was one of the hearts of the pornography industry,
00:05:02.000 the locations down in Montreal.
00:05:04.220 So what does that mean?
00:05:05.180 Well, if you believe some of this manifesto that has been reported,
00:05:09.720 it sounds like he had a big problem with that industry.
00:05:12.640 And this industry is in that area primarily where this went on?
00:05:16.120 Well, I don't know if it's primarily, but it's in that area, yeah.
00:05:18.600 Was he trying to access one of these places?
00:05:20.400 It sounds like it.
00:05:21.180 Yeah, it sounds like it.
00:05:22.400 We've seen this before.
00:05:23.420 We've seen this in the States, right, with Luigi
00:05:26.180 and the CEO of the insurance company and things like that.
00:05:29.160 this is a this is a movement with youth right it's uh disturbing to no end yeah because like i say
00:05:37.480 some critics of this manifesto will tell you everybody's a critic by the way of it
00:05:41.240 will tell you that it was probably a generated it's a mess uh in in a moment of you know uh
00:05:49.240 desperate attempt to create some sort of legacy of the need to exercise this violence yeah and
00:05:57.080 And you can compare it to one of the manifesto that's been published numerous times
00:06:01.220 and one of the most, I guess, probably most read manifestos out there,
00:06:05.420 Ted Kaczynski, we'll use him for an example, the Unabomber.
00:06:08.580 That was coherent.
00:06:09.920 As much as it was wrong, he was worried about the techno movement
00:06:15.020 and the tech movement coming in.
00:06:16.660 And basically where we're at right now,
00:06:18.080 a lot of the stuff that he said in that manifesto is where we're at.
00:06:20.640 But it made sense from the beginning to the end in terms of what his ideology was.
00:06:24.520 His ideology kept a coherence that, I mean, was the writings of a madman, actually.
00:06:30.840 The writings of a madman, but yet writings of a Harvard grad.
00:06:35.100 It was like a blend of, you know, there's a thin line between psycho and brilliance, right?
00:06:40.500 Well, let's widen that margin, I think.
00:06:43.520 You know what I mean?
00:06:44.240 I think as we watch our neighbors, friends, and colleagues start to mount these manifestos of discussion with us,
00:06:51.340 you know those are signals that you know they're creating an incoherent justification for some
00:07:00.500 method of thinking yeah if you're hopefully it's not violent if you're phoning a friend or talking
00:07:04.560 to a loved one and you start hearing some of this stuff this isn't the same as being at a pub in the
00:07:09.440 in the parking lot and hearing this come out of a conversation with a couple soda pops behind you
00:07:14.120 this is a this is something that you can probably catch brady i should take a moment and just say a
00:07:19.020 A lot of the stuff that I've said to you on the phone in traffic
00:07:21.340 on the way into the office needs to be forgiven right now.
00:07:24.260 Okay.
00:07:24.740 Next story, Winnipeg, Manitoba,
00:07:26.340 illegal cigarette trade tied to organized crime.
00:07:29.280 Following Manitoba's record drug investigation,
00:07:33.000 authorities continue to highlight the role of contraband tobacco
00:07:36.580 in financing organized crime.
00:07:39.380 Police say illicit cigarette sales generate enormous profits
00:07:42.180 that are often linked to drug trafficking, weapons offenses,
00:07:45.380 and other criminal enterprises,
00:07:46.400 making the underground tobacco market a growing public safety concern.
00:07:51.320 Well, here we are again.
00:07:52.580 When I was a young lad, I used to hear about the stories
00:07:55.180 with the Montreal tobacco mob
00:07:58.160 and all the issues that were going on then
00:08:00.660 and all of the people that were being attacked
00:08:03.200 on behalf of that group.
00:08:05.440 And it sounds like 30-something years later,
00:08:07.820 we haven't gotten really far away from still...
00:08:09.940 I wonder if we've come back to this.
00:08:11.920 What is going on with tobacco?
00:08:13.360 Well, I have to think that in some ways, this might be indicative that the drug market has fallen off.
00:08:21.400 Fentanyl has probably killed a lot of the drug market.
00:08:24.960 Cannabis is legal.
00:08:26.420 These were two major crime operations that were easy to undertake in a warehouse far away.
00:08:33.420 But this is interesting as well.
00:08:34.920 Look at this.
00:08:35.400 Kingston, Ontario, major contraband tobacco seizure.
00:08:38.780 Police announced a major seizure of approximately 171,000 packs of contraband cigarettes,
00:08:45.640 one of the larger tobacco enforcement actions in eastern Ontario.
00:08:48.980 Investigators say the illegal tobacco market deprives governments of tax revenue
00:08:53.920 while providing significant income for organized crime individuals.
00:09:00.200 There is, and they're not wrong when they say tax revenue.
00:09:03.840 If anybody has ever smoked a pack of cigarettes in the past year here in Canada,
00:09:08.900 the prices of cigarettes are outrageous.
00:09:11.920 And one of the reasons why is maybe it's a deterrent to make you not smoke them,
00:09:15.260 and hats off to that.
00:09:16.780 But a lot of it is because of the taxes.
00:09:18.580 So there's a huge markup on packs of cigarettes, right?
00:09:21.700 It doesn't cost much to produce a pack of cigarettes.
00:09:23.720 It doesn't cost much to produce it off the line.
00:09:26.640 But it costs a lot to buy it as a consumer.
00:09:29.200 Okay, well, let's compare.
00:09:29.660 A pack of contraband cigarettes is how much?
00:09:32.420 Roughly $5 to $6, maybe $7?
00:09:35.160 $3 to $11.
00:09:36.520 $3 to $11.
00:09:37.680 And how much is a government taxed and officiated pack of cigarettes?
00:09:43.740 Roughly, I think right now in most provinces, $17 to $24.
00:09:49.080 That's a lot.
00:09:50.720 It's a big markup.
00:09:51.480 That's a huge amount of markup without the tax man involved.
00:09:54.800 Let's continue on.
00:09:56.120 Brandon, Manitoba.
00:09:57.160 Being there, traffic stop uncovers drug and illegal cigarettes.
00:10:02.420 Drugs and illegal cigarettes continue to be discussed here.
00:10:06.620 A routine traffic stop led Brennan police to lay trafficking charges
00:10:10.640 after officers allegedly discovered cocaine, methamphetamine, fentanyl,
00:10:15.440 and roughly $17,000 in cash and unstamped cigarettes.
00:10:19.940 Investigators say seizures like this illustrate how drug trafficking
00:10:24.380 and contraband tobacco frequently overlap in organized crime activity.
00:10:30.780 Yeah, so why do we think that is?
00:10:32.420 Why do we think that those two things are in the same boat?
00:10:35.880 And this leads us to our deeper dive today.
00:10:39.840 By the way, before we get into the deep dive,
00:10:42.300 I'll remind you to subscribe, tell a friend about what we're up to here.
00:10:46.280 Earlier in the week, some of the crime discussion revolved around
00:10:49.700 what happened in Montreal.
00:10:51.960 Jim and I took a moment to talk about policing in this country,
00:10:55.280 how dangerous it is, how we found ourselves in this situation.
00:10:58.740 I'll recommend that you go back and listen to that episode.
00:11:00.920 and we'll continue to follow crime every week,
00:11:06.060 so make sure you subscribe for that.
00:11:08.300 Today's Deep Dive brought to you by LessLethal.ca,
00:11:12.960 launchers that we like to use, to be honest with you.
00:11:16.180 Stand your ground.
00:11:18.200 Yeah.
00:11:19.120 Where'd that come from?
00:11:19.900 That's a good slogan.
00:11:20.720 You should give that to them.
00:11:21.760 No, they can have it.
00:11:23.000 All right.
00:11:23.760 Oh, wait a minute.
00:11:24.320 That's already their slogan, isn't it?
00:11:25.620 That's their slogan.
00:11:26.240 I'm just really good at it.
00:11:27.680 Today's Deeper Dive Canada is extortion and organized crime problem.
00:11:31.980 It is apparent.
00:11:33.220 We have houses being shot at.
00:11:36.580 Yeah.
00:11:36.980 We have...
00:11:37.980 They're stealing cars.
00:11:39.220 They're contraband tobacco, like we talked.
00:11:41.300 Drugs.
00:11:42.000 They're selling weapons.
00:11:43.540 Threats against business owners.
00:11:45.540 Yeah.
00:11:46.100 Massive extortion going on even through cyber crime all the way to physical crime and not through cyber.
00:11:51.380 So this is a...
00:11:53.380 Organized crime seems to be a thing that is rising.
00:11:56.540 Okay, here's the angle.
00:11:57.680 take it to the chat let's all discuss this in uh in the comments section the angle is canada isn't
00:12:04.560 just dealing with random crime stories anymore police are seeing connected networks money from
00:12:10.160 illegal tobacco stolen vehicles drug trafficking and intimidation all feeding the same underground
00:12:16.320 economy a strong show in my mind brady yeah and the question remains uh are we finally going to
00:12:23.520 to start treating organized crime like a national security issue or should we just keep pretending
00:12:28.260 these are isolated local crimes i've said this numerous times on this channel uh and i will
00:12:34.100 continue to say it again fentanyl is a terrorist act well it i mean all of the elements to it seem
00:12:41.480 to be coming from outside the country even if it was inside the country it doesn't matter who's
00:12:46.260 doing it or how it's being done that's not the point i'm trying to make we all know what's going
00:12:50.060 on but it's been reported by numerous people this is a huge problem this should be considered a
00:12:55.260 terrorist act so treat this the same way that if somebody comes into the country doing terrorism
00:13:00.080 yeah the same and the same vibe i don't disagree with you and i i think that it needs to get
00:13:06.300 somewhere now we have three weeks three weeks in a row police have been shot and killed yeah on the
00:13:12.960 job yeah three times this week we had at least three times this week transport trucks pulled
00:13:19.760 over full of illegal cigarettes and drugs yep we've had all all these massive drug busts we
00:13:27.140 heard about a prisoner getting a routine cell check and there was fentanyl in his in his cell
00:13:33.100 and he threw it in the air and three out of the five officers had to go to the hospital
00:13:37.300 this is a problem we need to stop fentanyl in this country now here's the other thing it affects the
00:13:45.560 neighbor the innocent neighbors where extortion is going on it it it puts businesses at jeopardy
00:13:52.660 that are legitimate yeah it's cutting taxes off which you know how i feel about taxes but
00:13:59.980 you know i'm no franco terrazzano yeah you gotta lighten it up a bit i guess you're right no we
00:14:04.980 we all don't like taxes we i i don't mind contributing but i want a receipt yeah give
00:14:10.580 me a receipt give me a receipt like everything else just give me a receipt and i'll you can get
00:14:15.060 more to me if you really wanted it and then it occurs to me that we feed into this pretty easily
00:14:21.420 as a society by a not reacting to it at a federal level for certain we have the inability to say as
00:14:28.980 a nation we have an organized crime problem we do across the country our country is a crime problem
00:14:36.240 in chicago or new york that's our entire nation well if there was an organized crime problem in
00:14:42.920 either of those cities and we've seen them do it there's a task force to take it down yeah and it's
00:14:47.940 not a task force like saying hey can we buy back the legal guns from the farmers and the sports
00:14:52.340 shooters and the legal firearms well you know what let's go get a shot over the bow i saw that you
00:14:56.900 know what i mean like let's let's let's attack the real problems here which is illegal firearms
00:15:01.440 right and and massive amounts of fentanyl coming into this country i think if you attack both of
00:15:06.940 those things and you can start to make a dent there all of this other stuff will slowly start
00:15:11.620 to fall down as well and here's the other thing that we need to think about if we don't start to
00:15:17.560 take this we're putting officers in danger by not going to our politicians yep and saying we need a
00:15:25.880 solution we need you to go to ottawa we need you to really petition for a solution rather than 0.87
00:15:32.320 having lobby groups decide what kind of crap we can have in a pack of potato chips or not let's
00:15:39.960 get a real lobby group saying shut down organized crime in this country and and thanks to you and 0.93
00:15:45.020 paul for the past couple weeks not only bringing it to the forefront through the network but doing
00:15:49.560 doing these shows where you're talking about things like bail reform needs to be adjusted
00:15:53.060 we need to have a better bail system here we need to lock people up for a little bit longer we need
00:15:58.280 more prison systems like thank you guys for at least bringing that out and and putting that not
00:16:02.960 only in my head but putting that in the heads of everybody watching these things need to happen
00:16:06.740 If you think about it, you can't, as a federal government, say, crack down on organized crime because it's vast.
00:16:14.880 Because we don't have a place to put them.
00:16:17.340 We don't have the means to try them.
00:16:19.160 Yeah, and we're not kicking people out of the country.
00:16:21.060 Like, we're not doing what the United States is doing.
00:16:23.040 If we find somebody that's doing something here that shouldn't be here, a lot of the time, like, there has been cases where we've gotten them out of the country. 0.93
00:16:29.060 There's even cases where we've kept them in the country because we didn't want them to lose their citizenship.
00:16:35.420 like come on yeah it's a lot by the way on the citizenship front before we go
00:16:40.460 i wanted to make mention of that so the overall thing on our deep dive and i would imagine this
00:16:45.600 will come up in in a show or two over the next couple of weeks there's a huge uh magnifying
00:16:53.140 glass right now over policing and over crime in this country and the onus isn't on us holding
00:17:01.120 the police accountable but just a reminder they are in charge of ending organized crime yeah
00:17:07.020 right it's not my job it's not my job to be the politician to give them the funds to do it yeah
00:17:13.220 it was my job and your job to vote for who we expected would go and look out for our safety
00:17:18.900 so hold your politicians accountable especially if you voted them in um if you don't mind brady
00:17:25.380 i'll leave with one last thing here a bit of a warning a heads up if you're thinking about if
00:17:30.280 you're watching this and you're thinking about immigrating to canada and you're being told that
00:17:33.800 you can do it through getting a job here and you're dealing with a middle person between an
00:17:38.640 employer and the uh and and your citizenship if you are not directly in touch and you have not
00:17:47.420 been offered a job be careful because this is something that happened the leader post reported
00:17:52.500 on a saskatchewan man sentenced for immigration related crimes involving false job offers yeah
00:17:59.240 So fake or misleading jobs that were used to exploit people
00:18:02.560 who are trying to come here to work, immigrate,
00:18:04.500 or secure legal status in Canada, like you said.
00:18:06.740 This is a new scam.
00:18:08.980 This is a scam that these guys are starting to do
00:18:11.440 to these new people coming into the country.
00:18:13.920 We saw this in many ways when it came to getting into school
00:18:17.480 and using that as your visa permit.
00:18:18.640 They did the same thing, yeah.
00:18:20.360 Not to this degree where you thought that you were coming here
00:18:23.000 to start a new life with a job in hand.
00:18:26.880 Please be careful.
00:18:28.200 It's a warning out there. The federal CBSA has also public publicized immigration fraud enforcement in Saskatchewan, including cases involving falsified immigration documents and fines showing this is not an isolated concern.
00:18:42.780 No, it is something going on. So we'll keep an eye on that. I recommend you do as well.
00:18:47.620 We cover crime every single week right here, and we do it with your help and some of your suggestions.
00:18:55.700 So comment, share your thoughts below, and let us know what you think needs to be done in the way of dealing with crime in our country.
00:19:03.480 If we've missed a story you think is important, we appreciate the heads up.
00:19:07.060 Also, you should check out tplmedia.ca slash local and see if your city is available.
00:19:13.040 And if it's not, stay tuned. It will be.
00:19:15.600 Do you think my city is available?
00:19:16.700 I think your city is available.
00:19:18.120 All right, I'm going there right now.
00:19:46.700 Safety is our top priority. Shop now at lesslethal.ca