00:04:59.900Actually, in expectation of this discussion, I just went through to see.
00:05:04.840I don't think this is a full list of what he's done, but, you know, after Mark Carney took the job, he said, Governor Carney and his flunky Ford.
00:05:16.840Well, do you think Doug Ford is going to sit back and take that?
00:06:00.420What we actually have ended up with now is a country that is so focused on the insults that they're not very good at responding to them, just blind rage.
00:06:15.720You know, what really hurts is when the insults come close to the truth.
00:06:21.440Like the 51st state, maybe not so much.
00:06:24.520Well, when you see the kind of pictures that were posted by Pete Hakeseth of people in the military who are clearly not in the warrior caste,1.00
00:06:38.900then you kind of know that actually that's true.
00:06:45.720our military did a fantastic job in afghanistan best troops in the world and they've inherited a defense bureaucracy that makes advancement of women and sexual minorities more important than fighting skill
00:07:04.920the angst didn't miss that and so when hexath puts out his barbs it hurts because you know it's
00:07:11.040it reflects a certain truth that nobody wants to acknowledge but all of this is is designed
00:07:17.640to weaken us in negotiations right now the country is in uproar and uh there's mr carney has a can
00:07:26.320say what he likes and do what he likes and nobody's going to object because he's representing
00:07:30.340Canada this is what really gets under my skin Dave I want to hear from you about how how you
00:07:37.500think Canadian officials should react um you know my my sense is we should probably not get down in
00:07:45.480the muck with them uh kind of the way sort of as Ford tends to do I mean if we were going to it
00:07:52.980shouldn't be we're like Ontario forever if we're gonna get in the muck get really in the muck
00:12:08.340yeah, I mean the bottom line is it's worked for him
00:12:10.480gotten him results, but he's appealing
00:12:12.400to a different culture than, again, the Canadian political class has to look at. I mean, is it
00:12:16.840more appreciated by the people on the ground who do support Trump when he does that versus
00:12:20.620how would it be received and appreciated by Canadians? I mean, we're a little more restrained.
00:12:24.560We're a little more uptight with those things. A Canadian persona playing that game might not get
00:12:30.060the same success that Trump did. I mean, it's undeniable, as you said, when he shoves, he
00:12:33.480sucked the air out of the room and just owns those debates. But would that tactic work here?
00:12:38.720That's something that's being exposed. There is a cultural difference between Canada and the
00:12:41.540united states i mean we're very close but we're different too and there is a backlash amongst
00:12:45.500some american leaders when governors and border states and whatnot they've all come out0.90
00:12:50.840unanimously and said come on don't be so silly let's you know we rely on canada let's get let's
00:12:56.060get a deal done so it's not 100 that he's got support no but yeah and i mean it's it's hurting0.91
00:13:01.960some states down there but you know if we can wear out this game i guess i mean nevada's hurting
00:13:06.220las vegas you know the snowbird trade is really decimated the numbers in canada is going down i
00:13:11.780mean the bad dollar helps but some people a lot of people are just choosing not to go down it
00:13:15.320i'm not sure what he's trying to achieve here i don't think he's particularly serious about
00:13:20.82051st state stuff i mean if you gave him the option would he go for it oh yeah he absolutely would as
00:13:26.940long as it was named after him or something yeah yeah yeah something like that but if he could
00:13:32.300would he? I have little doubt that yes, he would. But is this an active, serious foreign policy
00:13:38.960goal of the Trump administration? No. So I'm not sure what he's trying to get.
00:13:43.600Well, I think maybe he's trying to keep Mr. Carney right where he is. Carney works for Trump.
00:13:50.980And when he insults Canada and Canadians, the reaction so far has been to forgive Mr. Carney all kinds of things that we might otherwise hold against him, like a complete lack of action on any of the plans that he said that he had for the country, and have in place somebody who Mr. Trump thinks he can handle.
00:14:18.160and so far frankly he's entitled to his opinion on that because mr carney has not been an effective
00:14:25.080he's not got the deal done he can only go on with this for so long and things are going
00:14:33.680people are going to say well fine we we like the fact that you're an earnest canadian we like the
00:14:39.340fact that you've stood up to trump but now you have to make a deal now you have to get the job
00:14:45.080on. You said you were the guy to handle
00:15:12.680possibly the biggest majority government0.99
00:15:15.040in the history of Canada, and then they got the shit kicked out of them.0.98
00:15:20.200The Liberals massively increased their share of the vote,0.98
00:15:24.180came within a hair of a majority, now have an effective majority.
00:15:29.920And, you know, Trump would have been aware that every time he opened his mouth
00:15:34.200about 51st state stuff, the Liberal numbers jumped two points.
00:15:39.080Every time he said it, two points, two points, two points, two points.
00:15:42.200Carney was in many ways installed by Trump.
00:15:46.940And I think it's a mistake for people to think that Trump cares about maybe the closer ideological affinity of the conservatives with the Republicans.
00:15:55.880Trump is the least ideological president, at least since Bill Clinton, possibly much, much earlier.
00:16:07.060But he is, you know, if you just take conventional Republican conservative ideas and conventional liberal and Democratic ideas, he is remarkably un-ideological.
00:16:18.980He would have not fit in a Bush or a Reagan Republican Party.
00:16:24.200In fact, he wasn't a member of the Bush or Republican parties.
00:16:28.020So I don't think Trump actually cares.
00:16:29.860You should remind the Democrats that he was actually once a registered Democrat.
00:16:33.740Yeah, but also I don't think he was a conventional Democrat either.
00:21:32.940And so the question is, if you suddenly removed Polyearth out of the mix, what would the next guy do that was different in that situation?
00:21:44.680There is actually, until people settle down and start to look at this, realizing that there's another side to the story, there's nothing that anybody can do on the opposition side.
00:21:57.900There isn't a position, in my view, he may differ, but in my view,
00:22:02.280there is no statement that Polyev could have made
00:22:06.400or a position that he could have adopted that people said,
00:22:10.100oh, you know, I never thought of that.
00:28:40.280He's still drawing huge crowds wherever he goes.
00:28:43.780Yeah. And, you know, he's still fighting the good fight. We haven't heard anything yet from anybody in the caucus, you know, complaining about it.
00:28:53.540Except for the, what, how many who have defected to the liberals? That was a significant number.
00:28:58.060They were morally bankrupt, those people, right? They sold out. They sold out their constituents who voted for them.
00:29:59.180What you've got to do is have some balls about fighting going around them.
00:30:03.380And Polyev, to his credit, showed some, but he totally chickened out in the last election.
00:30:08.960His signature promise that he had been campaigning on for years to defund the CBC, he threw that overboard once the polls turned against him.
00:30:17.060And he wanted to try and get some more sympathetic coverage from the CBC.
00:30:23.420His promise to get rid of all the mainstream media bailout subsidies.
00:30:27.840He campaigned on that for years, boom, throw it overboard in the last election to try and gain sympathetic coverage from the media. None of that materialized. He chickened out.
00:30:38.980You know, he's, he doesn't seem to have the courage that he seemed, that he appeared to have earlier on when he was running for the conservative leader and early on as conservative leader.
00:30:55.080He, unfortunately, he is a career politician.
00:30:58.740He's been a politician his entire adult life.
00:31:02.100And so, in some ways, that's a good thing.
00:31:03.820You can be experienced, you know, your way around.
00:31:06.620And where it's a bad thing is it tends to make you extremely risk-adverse.
00:31:10.420You've been trained from cradle to grave to repeat the talking points, to stay on the message.
00:31:16.040You're going to get in less trouble doing that, but it means you're not going to take the big risks when you need to take a big risk.
00:31:22.020If there was opportunities in the last election to take a big risk, he didn't take it.
00:31:25.280He doubled down on his message, and he's still staying the same way now.
00:31:28.920There are things he can do to move the needle right now, and he just seems to be, you know, like you're pulling a string on the back of him, and he just repeats the talking points programmed, and it's boring.
00:32:40.880because they were very hard to corral.
00:32:44.180And they said what they thought, and people loved it.
00:32:47.000You've got big majorities for the social credit government back in those days.
00:32:54.380But we're not dealing with the same population,
00:32:56.640and we're not, frankly, we don't have enough car dealers to do the job.
00:33:00.520So I have to say that much as you long for a charismatic conservative
00:33:05.980who can stay on message but at the same time field the questions
00:33:11.100in such a way that they don't become a talking point for the other side,
00:33:15.220probably what he is doing is safer this is a good uh excellent segue from bc car dealers to
00:33:22.960the bc conservatives we're going to bring in alex now um alex uh geez are you coming to us from a
00:33:30.600in the hindu kush mountains of afghanistan uh i'm coming to you from bc so it's probably just as
00:33:37.500dangerous okay okay uh it's pretty similar now okay um bc has for a long time alberta had the
00:33:46.700undisputed crown as the most interesting political polity in canada particularly on the conservative
00:33:51.660side we have most definitively lost that title uh for the last few years to you guys even we're
00:33:58.640having a referendum on independence and you are still somehow more interesting right now just in
00:34:03.380pure chaos of things uh carolyn finley becomes the leader of the bc conservative opposition
00:34:08.600um you know coming off after a ton of chaos surrounding john rustat uh ousted as leader
00:34:14.980uh i guess the hope was that she'd be able to corral it all back together instead it's been
00:34:19.680quite the opposite rather than bringing it back together it's flown even further apart the the
00:34:24.340party looks like a great fragment grenade at this point i know some of the messaging early on was
00:34:30.020Oh, it's just the B.C. liberal, kind of the left wing of the party leaving.
00:34:33.940I know you've got an analysis piece out just the other day saying, well, maybe some of that is kind of true, but that's not really the full picture.
00:34:41.680What in the hell is happening with the B.C. conservatives right now?
00:34:45.160So I'll share a story with you that I shared with Dave yesterday over an email.
00:34:48.700So when I attended the leadership convention in Vancouver, where Carrie Lynn Finley won, it was held at a railway station somewhere downtown, and it was wide open windows and doors.
00:35:00.760And when she won, everybody, not everybody, a third of the audience all came out at once on their way to the parking lot, which is, I assume, not terribly unusual for leadership campaigns.
00:35:11.200There's never going to be 100% consensus, and so some people leave early.
00:35:14.740but what i found particularly interesting was one person came up to me and i don't know who this
00:35:19.520person is if they're watching this i encourage them to reach out to me because i'd like to talk
00:35:23.720to them again they came up to me and they said the real winner tonight is you and i said well0.95
00:35:28.880what do you mean and he said the media the woman who just won is very corrupt and you are going to
00:35:34.740be very very busy now i can't confirm the corruption part but i have been very very busy
00:35:41.100uh well there has been at least uh let's call it corrupt adjacent activity there was
00:35:50.360oh it's beyond corrupt adjacent eric yeah i was being polite and uh trying not to get sued
00:35:55.820why don't you just give us kind of a quick uh abbreviated version of what's gone on there
00:36:00.980with these characters some of which are connected obviously with alberta
00:36:05.080and how that's played into the leadership yeah so the alberta part actually i think is being
00:36:10.460radically overplayed by the left-wing media and the legacy media here in BC. I've spoken to many
00:36:15.220people within the BC Conservative Caucus, as well as a few of the defectors, and the issue
00:36:19.740of Alberta independence has never come up. And why? No, I mean, some of the characters are from
00:36:25.260Alberta. True. So there's one character in particular named Apollo Chung, who at one point
00:36:30.480had a high-level position with the Alberta Republican Party. He also had a staffer position
00:36:35.460with the bc ndp and then he played a major role in carrie lynn finley's leadership campaign
00:36:40.660so he's kind of been referred to as an ideologically flexible roving fixer so somebody
00:36:50.240who is highly competent in the world of politics but really doesn't have any principles he was
00:36:55.000caught in a surreptitious recording where he said that he didn't give an f about the province of
00:37:01.540british columbia and that he thought that the conservative underlings were weird and that0.98
00:37:06.940effing white people were crazy um which i i find to be just an astounding thing to say it's kind0.94
00:37:13.560of funny and it's true yeah it is it is true some of the time he also said that he wasn't going to0.98
00:37:21.360leave until he was given five hundred thousand dollars so it sounded like there was some type
00:37:24.960of embezzlement going on there as well now the reason that this is so outrageous for the bc
00:37:29.800Conservative Party, is that running parallel to that story is another story where they've hired
00:37:34.380a gentleman named Chris Delaney as the chief of staff. And the largest complaint against Chris
00:37:39.200Delaney is that he's instituted an almost impossible to pass purity test for new hires.
00:37:45.840And so that's what makes this so absurd. Apollo Chung passed the purity test,
00:37:50.500but almost nobody else can. And I think that that would probably be the simplest explanation for
00:37:57.060why people are giving up on the party it's not that they're secret liberals it's not that there's
00:38:00.780a coup d'etat it's not that they're conspiring together it's that they've made some really
00:38:06.000really abysmal choices in terms of staffing okay but uh carolyn finley the conservative leader
00:38:12.260she she uh sacked apollo uh that's i mean that's an interesting name to go with churn but yes it
00:38:20.940certainly is and he calls white people crazy um uh but uh she sacked him yeah obviously had no
00:38:29.620choice there's actually been a a continued series of like the heads rolling down and it's like that0.57
00:38:34.660series in the movie apocalypto with the heads rolling down the mayan temple uh pyramid the
00:38:39.180mayan pyramid uh there's lots of heads rolling down uh sacrifices to try and save her leadership
00:38:45.140here um she's cleaned house there uh but the defections continue to mount and mount what is0.93
00:38:54.920the real problem facing her leadership was it just you know that she's seen as lacking judgment
00:39:02.980by putting this kind of weird uh grifting mercenary in uh and that was it or or is it a0.88
00:39:11.080bigger issue? The really fascinating thing is that every individual who is defected has given
00:39:16.840their own personal reason, and none of them are alike. So for instance, Peter Milibar, he said
00:39:21.980that it was a combination of different things that clashed with his values. He famously was
00:39:27.380running against her in the leadership race, and she infamously criticized him for having a wife
00:39:33.160who is Indigenous and worked for the Kamloops Indian Band as a potential conflict of interest.
00:39:37.000He did not cite that as the only reason, however.
00:39:40.080He said that, you know, there was a number of different things.
00:40:06.520Yeah, yeah. Rosalind Bird, who is a first term conservative, true blue conservative. She was also asked to step down in exchange for some sort of party favor. She hasn't quite confirmed that, but it's well suggested. And she said that she was screamed at by her chief of staff, Chris Delaney. And so that's why she stepped away.1.00
00:40:25.840The next person to step away, it's hard to keep track of them all, as I hope you can understand.0.83
00:40:30.960Teresa Watt stepped away because a leaked text message during the campaign showed that Carrie Lynn Finley accused her of being CCP, which would be in reference to the Chinese Communist Party.
00:40:43.600Again, I find it very hard to believe that this is some concerted conspiracy against Carrie Lynn Finley when all of these different reasons are so individualistic and subjective.
00:40:53.160it seems like it's just a mess it's it there's no other way to describe it frankly and we had
00:40:58.880number eight today didn't we uh alex correct yeah so donna gold wilson actually she's i'm in
00:41:07.220penticton right now so she's the mla for the adjacent riding in princeton and her reason
00:41:12.840for leaving was that she said she would give the leadership three months uh for a chance and she
00:41:17.680asked for a private meeting with again the chief of staff and carrie lynn finley two weeks ago
00:41:22.900and the private meeting never happened and so she said there's no communication that's another
00:41:26.760consistent theme actually it's one of the only consistent themes is the lack of communication
00:41:32.000and alia warbus who resigned on monday her reason was because there was supposed to be a unifying
00:41:38.920caucus meeting on monday morning and they canceled it at the last minute so if you look through the
00:41:43.980list i mean there's eight people that have left and for eight entirely different reasons none of
00:41:49.920which are on policy by the way nobody has recited any policy difference with the leader whatsoever
00:41:54.680which is also interesting yeah the inducements thing is a little interesting i mean you're not
00:42:00.180allowed to offer like a job or an inducement to resign uh for by elections but it literally
00:42:07.500happens every single time like we know the way it works the leader you know someone's elected
00:42:13.360leader i shouldn't say every single time but most of the time uh you step down you know
00:42:20.220new leaders elected and they don't have a seat someone's gotta step aside they take care of that
00:42:26.880person that person doesn't go stand in the soup kitchen line they get taken care of but the rcmp
00:42:34.420has now launched an investigation yeah and is interviewing the mlas today as a matter of fact
00:42:39.960Because you're supposed to be indirect about it.
00:43:07.500But you're supposed to go about it that way.
00:43:09.600you're not supposed to be like hey please resign and if you do that we got this over here waiting
00:43:15.320for you you know you're not supposed to be that brazen about it so yeah now the police are
00:43:19.020investigating they are oh alex what is the over under on uh finley's survival chance here
00:43:28.800oh that is such an interesting question just given the character that she is so during the
00:43:36.000leadership race there was at least five or six times when i thought she was dead in the water
00:43:40.020and one thing that one of her most amazing qualities is that she is an incredibly resilient0.64
00:43:44.280woman um she things just kind of seem to bounce off of her she seems to have like you know the
00:43:50.420the old saying like what does a cat has nine lives and her political career seems to have
00:43:54.800those nine lives however she's used eight yeah exactly we're we're already up to eight so
00:44:01.900So the MLAs have left. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean, there's still another 29 MLAs to go until it's just her and her husband, theoretically speaking. So, yeah, I mean, the by-election coming up here is make or break for her.
00:44:19.820If she loses that, it would mean that a very well-respected, in fact, conservative MLA stepped down to give her an opportunity.
00:44:26.800And if she isn't able to pass that test, then I would say that her days are less than numbered.
00:44:33.660We did have an exclusive poll that Alex got yesterday showing her polling ahead in the writing at the moment.
00:44:41.160But interestingly enough about that poll.
00:44:42.900It's supposed to be a safe conservative seat, yeah.
00:44:45.560Yeah, interestingly enough about that poll.
00:44:47.200And the seat itself actually is a swing riding.
00:44:49.820So it went NDP in 2020 and conservative in 2024.
00:44:54.060But the interesting thing about that poll was that Finley was ahead by double digits against EB, but EB was the preferred premier, which gives you an idea of maybe how well-informed the 212 people were that they polled.
00:45:10.700Oh, look, we're actually ahead of time.
00:45:13.580But, okay, so we're going to put a bit there.