Alberta cabinet kerfuffle. Minister Peter Guthrie walks
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Summary
In this week's episode of The Pipeline, Western Standard columnist Corey Morgan and editor-in-chief Nigel Hannaford and reporter Sean Polzer discuss the Alberta Health Services scandal, the proposed Alberta Health Care Act, and the Alberta government's budget.
Transcript
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This is our weekly panel show where we pick a number of issues and analyze them, chew them up,
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and try to give our thoughts and views on them for the viewers.
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Boy, there's just an embarrassment of riches when it comes to stories to try and cover and talk about.
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So on the lineup today, I'll start on the far end.
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We have our energy, business, and general reporter Sean Polzer here to add his view today.
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And as always, the opinion editor, Nigel Hannaford, in the middle there.
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As we shake up our lineup, you're a good, consistent buddy there.
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Well, and I'll let you get to the business out of the way to begin with, though.
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This episode of The Pipeline is sponsored by New World Precious Metals.
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And they're based right here in Alberta by local guys.
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Get into it, guys. The precious metals, that's where it's at.
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We've got a budget coming down, and we'll talk about that after budget, I guess.
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But for now, I mean, the legislature has been dominated as it comes into its opening by a budding Alberta Health Services scandal.
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But of procurement issues, battles between the former head of Alberta Health Services, which is the bureaucracy running it.
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A senior minister, Peter Guthrie, a minister of infrastructure, has resigned suddenly and said he can't function within cabinet any longer.
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I mean, over this scandal, though, he again left with a bunch of allegations of things that, you know, hints at impropriety, but nothing specific and is on the back bench.
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I mean, Nigel, how do you think this kicks off against the start of a legislative session?
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The rough thing about it, though, is that nobody really knows what it is that is rough.
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I mean, all we have as allegations and innuendos and suggestions,
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I mean, there's this idea that somebody has resigned on a matter of principle,
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and Guthrie, I believe, was one of Daniel Smith's early supporters,
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so people are drawing significance from the fact that an early friend has become an early deserter.
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he has not said we can only guess going to the larger issue of the the scandal again I'm not
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sure what the scandal is in any detail there's the implication that perhaps contracts for for
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certain medical procedures which by the way there was a huge demand for this is this is knees and
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hips and things like that. If you need a new hip, if you need a new knee, you're cursing
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if you can't get one. And with an 18-month waiting list, you can see why the government
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that was committed to providing more and faster service for people who had health issues would
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be looking in a way. But the issue seems to be that maybe there's some impropriety about
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who allocated what onto which clinic but nobody's actually come out and said it
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was this clinic and that person did the wrong thing and that person needs to be
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accountable so all we have is Danielle Smith has asked for the
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provincial auditor general to get right on it expedite the report and I guess
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when we have that we'll we'll know more at the moment it's just kind of smelly specific there's
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a lot of smoke but we just don't know what the heck's going on and it's frustrating because i
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mean i i think mostly on board having alternatives private facilities that could hopefully you know
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the principle of having those ease the pressure on these specialized procedures it's fantastic
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conservatives have supported that but if they blow the process it could actually set the development
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of these alternatives back and that's what i'm most fearful of yeah well i i guess if you had
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a procedure in the last couple of months you're probably saying well at least i got mine before
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the everything went wrong yeah no well the premier had a press conference on monday and um you know
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i've kind of been on the edge of this because i've sat in on a few of these uh pressers and
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this is about the extent of my familiarity with it but uh she made the point that um you know
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they've been increasing the health budget since she was elected precisely to
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eliminate that backlog of procedures and I think the I don't quote me on this
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number but I think she said it was something like six billion dollars that
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has gone to AHS and the number of procedures that have actually been
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formed in a hospital has not you know hasn't moved very much whereas the only
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increase has been through these uh private clinics and um you know she made a comment on the
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procurement end of the contracts that uh ahs was bidding them wrong uh that it was equivalent of
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buying a car without the engine and having to pay extra for the tires you know uh that it wasn't an
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apples to apples comparison so uh i i think it's like you said nigel uh you know the jury's still
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out and until somebody actually gets a good auditing and pours through those line items
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in those books we're probably not really going to know yeah well there is definitely some some
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bad blood between the smith government and alberta health services bureaucracy i mean they're
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resisting that the reforms i mean she's broken it up i mean part of what smith was talking about
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that conference was ahs was saying well the procedures for say i think it was knee replacements
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were only four thousand dollars with us but they're eight thousand in the private facility
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but it sounds like they were leaving out a whole lot of the other expenses the implants the
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So now we've got, you know, misrepresenting the figures being batted back and forth.
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We've got an ideological battle going on with our health system, I think is kind of what's
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The idea of performing surgeries in private clinics, it was ideological and political
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even before the present government was elected.
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I mean, this is an issue that's gone back years.
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Well, there were always some medical procedures that were performed in private facilities
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Hockey players, I was thinking, you know, MRIs on knees and things like that.
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You know, anything that smacks with a workman's compensation claim or the RCMP or the military
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or indigenous, you know, all of these things fall outside the, can fall outside the provincial
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No, I mean, I'm one of the lucky guys who just reads about knee replacements.
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If I needed one, I would be highly motivated to go deep into this, but the fact of the
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matter is that a lot of people, thousands of people, need these operations.
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The waiting list has been historically anything up to two years
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not from the time that your actual consulting physician says,
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And when you finally see the specialist, then you get,
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well, it's going to be 18 months, it's going to be two years.
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So the idea of taking a chunk of money and saying,
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let's get these caught up because we actually do have the facilities
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And we have physicians who are capable of doing it who don't get any OR time because it won't be funded by Alberta Health.
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The fact that some of these physicians are only limited, surgeons are only limited to like two days OR time a month.
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This is how the bureaucracy controls health costs.
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Well, that's not actually the way to provide a health service.
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Well, and Premier Smith has always been against the concept of rationing health care.
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I mean, this is an issue that goes way back to our time at the Herald when she was on the editorial board.
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Twenty years ago, having these very same discussions with her.
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Well, and the idea that even if you throw more money at it, you know, it doesn't seem to be, the backlogs don't get any shorter.
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So going further, I mean, something that's kind of distressing coming out of this,
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He had some big clashes when he was in Premier Kenney's caucus as well.
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Just some people do better in gelling with the crowd,
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and some just are quick to call out the leadership.
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He put a note forward calling for the resignation of Health Minister Adriana LaGrange, and that got leaked.
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And part of where Peter Guthrie lobbed a bunch of his bombs on the way out the door was actually at Cabinet itself.
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He sounds like he's not getting along with them.
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And again, we get to speculating, but it gets worrisome because the worst enemy of Alberta Conservatives are Alberta Conservatives.
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They love ripping themselves apart within their own parties.
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Do you think that might be signs that we've got some chafing going on in Daniel Smith's cabinet right now?
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You know, I'm not entirely familiar with Mr. Guthrie.
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I do know that the infrastructure portfolio is a very large money portfolio.
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Typically, the person who has been in that portfolio has a considerable amount of power within the cabinet
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just by virtually the amount of dollars that gets spent on a capital budget.
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And talking with some colleagues said, you know, Jason Kenney's biggest problem was, you know, caucus unity.
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And Premier Smith up until now has been able to keep the party fairly well unified.
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But, you know, we know how fast these can get out of hand and get away from her.
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And it seems to me that this could be the sign of some cracks, some internal dissent.
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Let's hope it's, you know, just a small conflagration that can be put out quickly and hope for the best.
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I mean, again, we're left speculating, but when you see so much smoke, you can't help but worry.
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Now, that's right. But, you know, you could also go down the list of things that she seems to have done right and which are broadly approved of.
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I mean, she reacted very well to the initial Trump tariffs threat.
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You know, actually, you want people on the border? We'll put people on the border.
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You know, like it was done. Ottawa, they were still talking about it.
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You know, I guess there are different opinions about the efficacy of putting.
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I know we're going to talk about this later, but the idea of taking people off the street who clearly are not responsible for themselves
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and putting them in a treatment center seems like something everybody can get behind, especially if it's your kid who you're taking off the street.
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You know, and the whole approach that she has taken to fighting drug addiction seems to have been very much more successful than what they're doing across the border in B.C. or back in anywhere else in the country.
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You know, 39% reduction in the death rate compared to our peers.
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These are things that she can take credit from.
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Let's see whether we're still saying this after we see the budget tomorrow, but so far, so good.
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So this could be just one of those dumb bureaucratic bubbles that goes up.
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And when we know the whole story, we won't be so concerned.
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Well, even on your example, though, with the Drug Treatment Center, you're talking two facilities, basically, $189 million.
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Those are the kinds of things that Mr. Guthrie would be signing off on in terms of the contracts and the procurement to actually build those.
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So this is kind of how, you know, it all intersects, right?
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And that segues into where I wanted to go with this.
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And it's another category of the HS that's broken up because that'll be under the mental health and addictions, which used to be all under one umbrella.
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And Premier Smith, I think, is on the right track.
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She's doing the right things and she does take aggressive action rather than just twiddling her thumbs on this issue or more studies or more inquiries, which is great.
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And you know what else is it's also a border issue.
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So this is how the public health issues kind of coincide with some of these tariff issues as well, right?
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Because taking the drugs and the people that are addicted off the streets ultimately ties back into our economy.
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So $189 million, let's call it even $180 million.
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So $90 million for two facilities, you know, one each.
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We've got a recipe for a lot of potential trouble if they screw this up.
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That's where we get into procurement again, right?
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there's going to be some people very eager to get those contracts to build maintain operate those
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facilities please keep it clean please don't mess this up please make sure it's a good robust bidding
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process uh you know and that we really have the best interests of the patients and the taxpayers
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in mind that's that's where maybe we should look at the smoke that's going on right now
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and give extra scrutiny to the move on these centers just to make sure it's done right
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Yeah, that's an excellent point, Corey. But I mean, it is very unlikely to be the
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Premier or any of her close associates who would be out there to take a profit from the
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building of those facilities. The place where you've got to keep your eye is on those people
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And in BC, some of that's been breaking with the enablement centres, and I'll call
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them that you know the place where they're handing out the free drugs and and it turns out a lot of
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those operators were making some pretty darn good money from the government feeding these addicts
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and and uh even if the initial people with those centers were well-meaning uh and and that's what
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i mean is that and i don't want to see premier smith's government directly dealing with that's
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where the problems come as well they're there for oversight just make sure that try to make sure
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As you said, the later stages don't go into the wrong road, I guess.
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I was at the press conference on Monday announcing the centers, and I couldn't help but recall, you know, during the election campaign, the premier had a couple.
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you they were very emotional um media briefings with uh talking with some of the families and
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some of the victims and you know so i definitely think that um her heart is in the right place on
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this that uh you know drug addiction is not a choice and that um you know the whatever you
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want to call it forcible confinement um you know to get these people in to force them into treatment
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basically is is the the right approach but what also was struck me was basically just the
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implementation of the policy and all the various levels and how many hoops and things that you have
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to go through with you know capital budgets and operating budgets bureaucracy um now we've split
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it up into different departments and there's a whole reorganization going on there and it seems
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to me that that is probably the biggest most complicated piece of of the whole puzzle to
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like you said actually making it work and and showing results and some of the other discussion
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is is i guess ideological but the taking of somebody's liberty if they haven't committed a
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crime this has already got precedent in under the mental health act if a person's going to harm
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themselves or others it's not easy to do but a person can be you know constrained in a facility
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I believe it would be an action of last resort.
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I've already heard the naysayers, the Smith haters out there saying, oh, they're going to be snatching people up and locking them up.
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It's only when they hit rock bottom before that kind of intervention.
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And I do believe that somebody has to ask for it.
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You know, Corey, contrary to what you may think, and I actually read your columns.
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Well, you know, it's good. It would be easy to sort of click, click, and they're published,
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you know. But I remember one you put out about 18 months ago. You were addressing this very
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subject, and you said it is not an act of kindness to walk past somebody who has just passed out on
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bench in a pool of their own urine. You can't use the argument while they have a right to do that
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because they're past making rational decisions. At what point do you step in and help somebody
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without actually identifying that very point? You pointed out that that particular person
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needs help and needs help now. Exactly. And that's part of why I'm as unvarnished as I am with it.
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They're not in a position to ask for it. Because some people too say, oh,
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know health professionals i mean if they've had somebody's in for their 10th overdose
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they can apply and say maybe we should put this person somewhere controlled and see anyways and
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try and people say well the failure failure rate's so high there's an interesting thing where because
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i haven't seen this done anywhere i've been searching there aren't centers like this anywhere
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so that may not work i sure hope it will but people keep saying it doesn't work well how are
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you saying when you don't have a basic example to draw from i i can't see how even if it's a low
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success rate if you've taken them from that point as you said where they've lost control of their
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functions and they're on a bench and bring them in get them fed detox a couple of weeks so that
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their mind is at least a bit clear even if there's only a 10 chance that they're going to respond to
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treatment at that point boy that's 10 more than if you left it out there well and most rational
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people would choose to be better don't you think i think so yeah but you've got to you've kind of
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got to force them in and dry them out to hit that point of thinking about it i am told by those with
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greater exposure to this that after an extended period of time on drugs your ability to actually
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want your own best interest is somewhat diminished but it it people who say this won't work somehow
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so often leave me with a feeling that they don't want it to work and so why would that be the case
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and what would be in it for them for it to say ah you see we told you it didn't wouldn't work now
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we now we're going to is this back to safe supply you know well it's it's frustrating where it gets
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to that ideological thing like if the safe supply was working honestly if it was working if they
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were handing it out and it led to these people being stabilized and then seeking treatment and
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getting clear i'd say carry on keep giving it to them by all means whatever works i don't care yeah
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And I still believe in perhaps offering safe consumption sites to try and reduce the overdoses,
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not giving them the drugs, but at least giving them a safe spot and also where they can have
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a counsellor handy and try and snatch the man and get them treated. But I just want what works.
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And yeah, as you said, people are dismissing this. It hasn't even been tried yet.
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There was the point made at the press conference on Monday, there was,
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I forget who the other minister was, his name, but they mentioned a fellow who had overdosed
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something like 17 times in the last month which you know i was thinking oh my god like that's just
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that's every other day this this fellow's overdosing and and they were saying you know
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if we can prevent that 18th time you know that potentially kills this fellow right because one
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of them will be the final one then then you know maybe it's worth it to you know to at least say
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that you tried yeah well maybe some people need to see it another column maybe a human life is worth
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that much yeah like way back when the standard first started i wrote that column that got that
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award that first year and it was just actually writing on experience because i walked i walked
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through the park over from here and i encountered an overdose a young man he didn't make it and
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to look down like we tried cpr and naloxone and it didn't you know until the paramedics got there
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and it was too late and you know i just wrote on it because i i wanted to share the horror
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the helplessness the frustration like this is happening because i think a lot of people who
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don't come downtown people who don't go into these areas yeah could look down at a guy who
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couldn't have been more than in his early 20s you know dead pointlessly you know i mean i don't know
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if anything could have saved him prior i don't know but we can't dismiss this i mean it really
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it's a moral issue and it's part of why it's a pet issue that drives me so much these days on it
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they're like experience it guys go have a look and understand how deep and tragic this is you're
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always going to ask yourself or ask people who are against it if this was your kid what would
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you want well that's what i kind of said online i mean i said if it's your daughter your son
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who's living behind the dumpster doing unimaginable things to get their next fix
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would you really be against just taking that last resort and that's the thing that people have to
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understand this is a last resort but snatching them up putting them into a center yes against
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their will but just trying and we actually without giving too much detail we actually
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kind of had an incident here with a staffer and his son who went through something kind of similar
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where he didn't know whether his son was, you know, alive or dead,
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and it turned out that he was in police custody.
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And it happens in the births, too, but you just, I think it's more visible downtown.
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Again, people say, oh, it's from broken households or things.
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I mean, those are contributing factors, but this could happen to anybody.
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Let's hope these centers go up and save some lives because it's certainly not working otherwise.
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You were talking about the leadership debate, an upbeat in the same center?
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Well, at least we can make light of some of these things or maybe.
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I mean, I haven't talked to one person who sat through the whole thing except for maybe Jen.
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and she was assigned this is the liberal party leadership debate for the contenders the the
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love in i mean you gotta understand it's an internal uh battle so you don't really want
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to cut to the core on it necessarily i i see it when it gets this boring though it means that
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they've already kind of conceded that carney's gonna win so i'm not gonna shoot too hard because
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i want to be in cabinet when he gets there or or they don't want to shoot themselves in the foot
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given the precarious situation that they already kind of find themselves in, it seems.
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Surely this story suggests that they're not so precarious.
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The Liberals take the lead for the first time since 2021, says Ipsos Reid.
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You certainly wouldn't, but in my opinion, a couple of them almost did.
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But, you know, just to say what this story is saying, after nearly four years of conservative dominance in the polls, the Liberal Party of Canada has taken a two-point lead among decided voters.
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Obviously, what has happened is that they have seized upon the opportunity afforded them by President Trump.
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a certain american gentleman who said we're going to apply some tariffs one day
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it was going to be february then it was going to be march now it's going to be april but one
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day tariffs are coming well it was more than that it was a it was a hockey game it was uh
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a lot of provocative statements a lot of stuff so so here we are um and you know for those of us on
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the conservative side of uh of things you look at it through the conservative lens it's quite
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It's quite appalling that the Liberals should profit from this when the things that Trump
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has pointed out are mostly the consequences of their own maladministration for nearly
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Listening to them say, well, we're going to fix the defense, we're going to fix productivity,
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we're going to fix the economy, well, you've been in government for 10 years.
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My wife put it beautifully as she was cooking a dinner there, I'm watching this out of one
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every admission every promise is an admission of guilt right it's a good way to put it very
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good it was a good way to put it you know so uh you know i i'm giving her the credit for that one
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but like there's no good saying we're going to fix productivity when productivity is tanked on
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your watch do it you're the you're still the government it's open to you what frustrates
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with the canadian voters then like how so you just cut the head off of this
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ugly monster and put a new head on it and apparently that's enough you know and at first
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i was dismissing these you know frank graves and eco's okay he's he's frank graves but no we've
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seen a number of polls now from a number of pollsters that are showing a pretty distinct
00:27:29.980
trend that canadians are embracing the liberals again i think it might be soft when it grows that
00:27:35.340
fast it's reactionary it's you know quite a difference between after an election campaign
00:27:40.120
and making up your mind and making x on a ballot but it's real and well you could argue though
00:27:45.020
that the last two years have been kind of out of whack because it's when has a Conservative Party
00:27:50.460
ever had a 25-point lead over any incumbent government, no matter how unpopular,
00:27:56.540
even going back to the days of Mulroney and, you know, the first Trudeau.
00:28:01.060
Exceptional, but a 25-point recovery in a matter of a few weeks.
00:28:03.960
Well, you know, and I didn't sit through the whole thing, but I watched enough of it last night
00:28:09.300
to know that, you know, Carney is not a very good speaker. And when you get on to an election
00:28:15.060
trail, some of these points that you've just made that, you know, they've, they're the authors of,
00:28:21.180
you know, their own demise, there was a reason why they were 25 points down in the polls.
00:28:25.440
And you have to think that, you know, Pollyov is, he's very fluent in French, he's very quick on his
00:28:31.360
feet, he's sharp, he's, he's got a good wit. And, you know, quite frankly, a lot of their policies
00:28:37.940
These are probably more in line with mainstream Canadian views at this point.
00:28:44.320
So I think that once we get out into an election and on the trail, you know, the Krista Freelands
00:28:49.660
and all the lesser lights of the Trudeau era are, you know, they're going to be falling
00:28:57.060
Well, you know, I think maybe Krista Freeland has already committed a fairly major stumble.
0.92
00:29:10.460
It is critical that we spend that money here in Canada on Canadian companies,
00:29:16.440
and we need to be thinking about the next generation of warfare.
00:29:19.680
As we're seeing in Ukraine, drones, AI, these are really important.
00:29:24.780
Our 2% should not be about sending checks to the United States.
00:29:28.980
Critically, we need a plan to defend our own borders, very particularly the Arctic,
00:29:35.000
and we need to be working with our Nordic and EU-NATO partners.
00:29:43.420
we need a plan to protect and defend our shared Arctic without the U.S.
00:29:50.500
And Canada will step up because it's our sovereignty that's at stake as well.
00:29:57.760
So we have actually gone from talking about trade
00:30:00.720
to deploying nuclear weapons to defend the Arctic.
00:30:03.740
And this is somebody who seriously wants to be prime minister.
00:30:08.920
She is, you know, something I said long ago on one of her shows,
00:30:12.240
we were speculating about who might replace Trudeau before he'd even stepped out.
00:30:17.020
And I dismissed her off the beginning because I said, Freeland's just too weird.
00:30:23.720
But, I mean, that is a dangerous sort of conversation.
00:30:26.440
Thankfully, it's just a leadership contender and not a leader talking about these sorts of things.
00:30:29.640
By the way, you have to ask you, did she check with Sir Keir Starmer in Great Britain whether our nuclear weapons would be available?
00:30:38.860
You know, the old Valiant-class submarine on patrol at Canada or Macron in France.
00:30:45.900
That they left the hats open on and catch us fire.
00:30:50.440
I've worked in the Arctic and, you know, when I'm out on the ice, look, we can see land when you get these odd...
00:30:56.020
It's interesting when you get the right air pressure and you can see islands in the distance.
00:30:59.440
and i can see alaska she seems to be forgetting that the americans are an arctic nation as well
00:31:05.840
if we're going to be talking about arctic sovereignty we got to be talking about it with
00:31:08.560
them not saying oh we're going to reach out to uk and put nukes there to stop the big bad americans
00:31:13.840
you nutcase what i find appalling about that clip and about her uh i mean what she was what she was
1.00
00:31:20.800
saying was that america has become predatory therefore we have to have an alternative alliance
00:31:26.240
to america and we got to get we didn't play the whole thing but uh we got to get japan and
00:31:31.680
australia and then she went on about denmark and the nordics and got to get france and britain
00:31:37.040
because they got nuclear weapons yeah great and meanwhile in washington in the basement
00:31:44.720
of the boiler room there is somebody sitting there with a pc and a coffee machine and they've
00:31:50.640
They've been told to watch the liberal debate and report back upstairs if anybody says anything interesting.
00:31:59.900
And all of a sudden she started talking about an alternative nuclear alliance to the United States.
00:32:07.320
We have yet to see what Mr. Trump will make of this.
00:32:10.720
But if he is advised of it and mocks it, then be it on her head for bringing it forward.
00:32:18.040
That was the craziest thing in that whole two-hour session, and there were some other crazy things.
00:32:24.240
For the most part, I mean, they were just campaigning against their own record, though.
00:32:27.780
That was the more outstanding thing of the bunch.
00:32:30.440
So, I mean, I think, again, even most liberals will realize, wow, Freeland, you're just here whatever you are.
00:32:36.460
Carney's got this probably in the bag, but something that hasn't been mentioned enough was the French debate,
00:32:40.880
because it really exposed one fatal flaw the liberals have right now, which they rarely have ever gotten out of leaders.
00:32:46.600
But Kearney can't speak French to save his life.
00:32:52.300
But even as an English speaker, I can recognize a guy speaking with a very thick English accent,
00:32:56.640
and he couldn't understand the questions, which is, you know,
00:32:59.520
one thing to be able to respond slowly in French.
00:33:01.560
But if you can't understand the question coming at you,
00:33:04.060
Quebec will not vote for a leader who can't speak French.
00:33:08.120
That's just, and Polyev is very fluent in French.
00:33:11.920
And, of course, Bonchette's just going to love mopping the floor with Kearney.
0.93
00:33:16.320
They will, you know, the Liberals, as much as the Poles seem nice now,
00:33:19.420
let's run a campaign when your leader can't speak good French.
00:33:21.760
Well, he wasn't very charismatic in English either.
00:33:27.280
Grouchon wasn't understandable, and he still won it.
00:33:29.140
Kind of academic, you know, what you would expect from a banker.
00:33:33.520
You know, when he launched his campaign in Edmonton, what was that, about a month ago?
00:33:36.760
But when I watched it, I thought, well, compared to Mr. Trudeau, this man sounds mature.
00:33:47.800
He's not an exciting speaker, but at least he's not trying to be an exciting speaker
00:33:56.100
I couldn't help thinking of Michael Ignatius back in 2011.
00:34:06.760
the thing is he's not a campaigner no and never was and somebody should have
00:34:11.920
told him and he he dropped down to 34 seats right so and then he resigned and
00:34:18.340
mr. Trudeau became the leader of the opposition I see Kearney and Ignatia
00:34:23.860
for the same thing you can't it seems that you can't pull experts in from
00:34:28.120
outside and say all right you save us because we politicians have failed which
00:34:33.160
obviously they have uh oh yeah well i don't take that on i mean mr mr carney was uh claiming in
00:34:40.440
the debate last night that he's an expert in economics and a good negotiator have no doubt
00:34:46.240
about it we will see how good but that was that was the difference with trudeau though is that
00:34:52.040
uh uh you know the prime minister was a good debater like in the debate against uh you know
00:34:57.380
harper when he was on the anniversary of his father's death and he wore the black suit and
00:35:06.140
You could say, you know, he's a little empty up here.
00:35:16.180
If Mr. Carney ends up getting elected as leader and then as prime minister,
00:35:25.440
But let's face it, Trump made his billions on being a good negotiator.
00:35:31.180
negotiator while dealing with people like carney in the banks you know it's a big discussion read
00:35:37.940
the damn book you know i do the deal yeah i read your column about how you picked it up at the
0.67
00:35:42.740
church said yeah it's been around for 40 years now this should be a surprise no so i mean just
00:35:48.980
to close on the federal issue though uh assuming carney wins now do you think he's going to make
00:35:53.820
the quick leap and pull for a quick snap election or is he going to try and throw the dice
00:36:01.000
cut a deal with Singh because I mean there should be a confidence vote shortly after parliament
00:36:05.500
resumes so he's not going to have a choice unless he cuts a deal with Singh which is very possible
0.98
00:36:09.820
do you think we're in for a spring election pretty quickly here or yeah I do I don't think
00:36:14.620
he can cut a deal with Singh I think that's toxic and most of the gain in the liberal support is
00:36:19.880
coming at the expense of the NDP you know my partner's from Italy and they have these coalition
00:36:24.840
governments and things you know and I was explaining to her she was saying like why would
00:36:29.000
these people jump from the ndp to the liberals and it was well if you didn't think that the liberals
00:36:33.240
were going to win and you're kind of on that kind of left extreme then maybe you'd throw your vote
00:36:38.360
for singh right but now that they seem to have a chance then you come back home right so i i don't
00:36:45.240
think that he will cut a deal i think there will be a spring election i think you'll go right into
00:36:49.240
it he'll pull the carbon tax so okay i think i agree with you but if i was going to be argumentative
00:36:56.600
for the sake of it. In opinion, that's what we do. If I was going to be argumentative for the sake
00:37:04.360
of it, I would say, well, Mr. Carney can barely order coffee in French. Wouldn't he want to use
00:37:12.840
the excuse that he needed time to hone his language skills? So let's stay with the October date that
00:37:21.240
has been. We will look after things with Mr. Trump in the meantime. And although you're correct in
00:37:29.880
saying, or at least Epsos Reid is saying, that the support that has gone to the Liberals has come
00:37:35.560
from the NDP, nevertheless, as we speak at this moment, the NDP do have the seats. And I can see
00:37:42.840
how Mr. Singh might say, well, you know, when we said that we were not going to support them any
00:37:48.760
longer mr trump hadn't threatened tariffs this changes everything so as a as patriotic canadians
00:37:55.040
we will support the government through this time of crisis and trial you know i could i could see
00:38:01.880
that say more than honing up on his language skills you know as an attempt to maybe put through
00:38:07.440
an economic platform and and throw out some dog bones to the ndp but then why wouldn't if you were
0.82
00:38:13.880
an NDP supporter that would be leaning liberal basically just to vote against
00:38:18.020
Pollyov why would you vote against saying if you if he was you know racking
00:38:24.860
up these kind of victories times are bizarre though I said everything's
00:38:28.400
believable now that I mean so I'll kind of turn to to the man south at the
00:38:32.900
border the man and so Trump again is mixed messaging you know this is over
00:38:40.280
and over we don't need Canadian oil we can do without Canadian oil oh yeah we
00:38:43.700
got to get the keystone going well it's it's it's not uh japanese oil coming through it would come
00:38:48.660
through that thing not that i see a lineup of private investors wanting to dive back into the
00:38:52.660
keystone anyways but he's talking about now the importance of bringing in canadian oil
00:38:57.940
while the other next day he's talking about the lack of need for canadian oil this would make
00:39:02.500
him so difficult to negotiate with because you don't really know even what the heck he wants
00:39:05.940
right but the keystone is this thing alive again or what well to your point about you don't know
00:39:11.860
what you're dealing with. That's part of the negotiation strategy. Just when you've got your
00:39:16.320
talking points lined up, he says something different. It seems to work for him. Now, we'll
00:39:24.500
see. The question that I would have is, is that pipe that was laid for Keystone four years ago,
00:39:31.560
five years ago, is that still in the ground? Nope. It's been completely ripped out. And the
00:39:37.180
pipe itself has been sitting out in the field in the middle of Saskatchewan, rusting. It would have
00:39:41.600
to be recast recoded everything you'd have to start over completely from scratch so i would
00:39:48.400
say unless he wanted to build it south going north and then have to deal with our government
00:39:54.080
it's probably a moot point at this point now that said there are some things that they could do that
00:40:04.040
maybe don't require these regulatory hurdles like you can do line looping and you can increase
00:40:09.800
pressure on certain line segments so you can alter the spec of the oil so that
00:40:16.900
flows through with less friction and you wind up with more barrels and as a
00:40:22.640
short-term solution you might be able to increase the capacity you know maybe by
00:40:30.240
something close to a million barrels a day which is still like about 25% which
00:40:34.640
is still fairly significant you know it gives you a little bit of running room
00:40:37.400
maybe for a few years until you could actually come up with a longer term more viable solution but
00:40:43.480
uh ramping production that much too i mean that's a big investment on the the parts of
00:40:47.400
producing to get the production that you're going to have the it's just you've got to get the wells
00:40:52.520
you've got to get the reserves you've worked in the oil patch yes you know it's not an overnight
00:40:56.520
thing and you have to book it and you have to get the financing and you have to have all your ducks
00:41:00.840
in a row and that's what i i guess my frustration i i know you're talking about trump using as a
00:41:05.240
negotiating tool but as we know too the business particularly oil and gas hates instability i mean
00:41:10.920
they just want to know what they're dealing with and we don't know what we're dealing with i just
00:41:14.680
can't see private operators saying yeah you know what i'll dive into this well and trans canada
00:41:20.040
just got burned here back in october for what was it 15 billion dollars so it was their claim under
00:41:24.840
the old nafta you know and it got rejected alberta is still on the hook for one and a half and then
00:41:31.080
then I think there's another two like it's almost three and a half million
00:41:33.900
dollars billion. The problem for Ken when he got in and back stocked. Yeah when
00:41:37.500
Kenny was gonna put his money where his mouth was, our money where his mouth was.
00:41:43.380
So how many miles of Canadian Keystone would have to be rebuilt? All of it.
00:41:50.220
Well yeah but is that 150, 300? What are we looking at? Yeah well I think it's
00:41:55.700
1900 kilometers all the way down to Oklahoma. As Nigel's saying it'd be a
00:42:00.420
couple hundred kilometers up on our end yeah i suppose the smallest the smallest portion of it
00:42:04.740
yeah and it is prairie i mean it's not the worst area to put pipe it if we had the will on the
00:42:09.860
part of both governments and somewhere a private investment it could be done in an expedite it's
00:42:13.940
not like we're crossing mountain ranges no no it's not like the transbound well we'll see yes
00:42:18.980
we're burning the time rate there's just again so much to cover maybe we'll just kind of hit on some
00:42:23.060
lighter notes while we go because we don't know with a lot of these airlines they're dropping
00:42:27.220
from the skies like oh yeah you know there's raining raining cats and dogs and airliners
00:42:32.180
hey um you know i i actually did do a little bit of background work on this one and here's what
00:42:38.020
happens um something bad happens and something bad did happen yes uh immediately the newsrooms
00:42:44.980
of the nations go around and look for comparables they all want to be first to spot a trend
00:42:50.980
and i understand that that's that's we're in the news business that's what we do
00:42:54.820
However, when you actually examine the statistics, you find that there is not a trend that
00:43:05.700
actually, overall, if there is any trend, it's downwards and in the best possible way.
00:43:14.180
You know, in Canada, the NTSB, that's the American organization, the Canadian equivalent,
00:43:22.020
actually tells us that we've oh where are my notes damn it that's it here we go all right
00:43:31.000
you're the one that uses the transportation safety board received a thousand and twenty
00:43:35.340
reports of air occurrences in 2023 182 actual accidents this is canadian numbers it's 2023
00:43:42.960
an 838 incident and that number is higher than the previous year but it is below the yearly
00:43:50.900
average of 220 accidents reported in the prior 10 years and we're talking to
00:43:56.900
all everything right we are talking that is specifically airplanes crumpled up on
00:44:02.000
a little aluminium bull right there are necessarily commercial oh no that's
00:44:06.800
that's that includes general aviation and that is where most of the most of
00:44:11.420
the sadness is usually the small ones yeah they divide between general
00:44:14.900
aviation and commercial and commercial is pretty bloody safe my stepdad was an
00:44:18.460
inspector yeah yeah well after either can we get him on the show well he's dead but
00:44:25.980
but not in a plane crash no he investigated the plane crashes all right the same pattern
00:44:30.380
in the united states so just a note before we get to our parting shots then folks don't cancel
00:44:33.900
those trips your flights will probably be fine i'm still going to take my fifth wheeled arizona
00:44:37.420
i feel more well i was just going to make the point you know when raiden came in one of his
00:44:40.940
first things you remember he fired something like 15 000 air traffic controllers right and there was
00:44:46.620
and there was a major accident that happened right after that but nobody you know nobody went out of
00:44:51.180
their way to blame him no specifically for it so either way yes it's a it seems to be and it wasn't
00:44:56.300
dei i don't think thankfully and yeah the dei is another all right so parting shots on our way out
00:45:02.540
i'll start with you sean well you know uh i was just going to go back on to the keystone because
00:45:07.900
there seems to be a lot of wishful thinking uh not just on the part of trump but here in canada that
00:45:13.980
somehow this thing's gonna be built but you know like i was saying to nigel before the show like
0.90
00:45:19.500
you know would you put up 15 billion dollars of your own money to you know try to get something
00:45:24.780
into the ground where it might take 10 or 12 years it might be another 30 billion over budget and you
00:45:29.980
have absolutely no idea whether or not it's ever going to actually get built it's a leap of faith
00:45:35.740
so you know chances are you like you and like you said corey the oil patch is very risk averse
00:45:41.100
so chances are you're just gonna wind up leaving that oil in the ground i hate that foot all right
00:45:47.100
so the um yeah i i was relieved i think like everybody else that the asteroid isn't going
00:45:54.620
to hit the earth after all yes and um but i it made me look things up and it turned even
00:46:01.740
in a story like that they managed to drag elon musk into it and try to smear him the the issue
00:46:10.380
is remember six or seven years ago that he put a tesla into orbit uh and this thing is out there
00:46:17.820
is buzzing around if it's somewhere between mars and the sun and people forgot about it you know
00:46:22.940
and then there was a keen little amateur astronomer i see something i see something
00:46:27.180
you know it's a tesla and well he didn't know he just said i see something he definitely
00:46:33.100
covered an asteroid he thought he discovered a new asteroid anyway mr musk you know very
00:46:38.620
irresponsible putting a sports car in space that's just crazy stuff have you ever seen the tesla array
00:46:44.300
now that you've brought it up no it uh passes over and uh you can actually google it and find
00:46:49.820
out when it's going to pass over oh yeah but the first time i saw it was right after the ukraine
00:46:54.060
war and i seem to think that it was the russians are shooting missiles it's actually quite a sight
00:46:59.020
to see you see about 13 of these things oh the starlink yeah yeah starlink yeah yeah that's
00:47:04.060
Starlink. We've wrapped our time. I hope a lot of people are watching on their Starlinks. I know
00:47:08.520
that's what I use down in Pritis anyways. So we've run the time up. I'll leave just with my
00:47:13.920
final quick shot. A trade deficit isn't a subsidy. Look it up, people. I'm tired of this discussion.
00:47:20.360
Okay, well, we've covered a lot of issues. Thank you very much, Nigel. Sean, it just wasn't enough
00:47:24.860
time to cover them all. There's so much to go on about. And your little statement there is
00:47:29.220
very apt as well. Yeah, so thank you all for tuning in, guys. Be sure to take out a subscription
00:47:42.340
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00:47:53.740
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00:48:06.220
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