00:04:12.180The academics, the political and media elites of the nation
00:04:14.660count on citizen apathy to maintain their positions.
00:04:18.700You ever wonder why so many universities have gone off the deep end?0.78
00:04:21.560Why so many nutty civic politicians managed to get ridiculous policies entrenched?
00:04:25.800Why despised federal and provincial politicians seem to hold on to their seats forever?0.86
00:04:29.880Well, it's because we let them. It's as simple as that.
00:04:32.480We have the means to fire them and replace them all with whoever we choose,
00:04:36.580but we've given up on that responsibility.
00:04:38.760Voter levels, you know, the turnout levels in most elections are shamefully low across the country,
00:04:43.580especially at the local levels of government.
00:04:45.860We need people to get off their butts more often and cast their ballots.
00:04:49.860The thing is, though, there's more to democracy than just going out to vote.0.62
00:04:53.320People need to start taking part in the process every step along the way.
00:04:56.760It's participatory democracy. It means you have to participate.
00:04:59.760Fewer than 3% of Canadians hold memberships in political parties.
00:05:02.660Is it any wonder the parties continue to select candidates and leaders
00:05:06.280who don't represent the constituents well?
00:05:08.440The number of people who take part in constituency associations,
00:05:11.440school boards, or yes, even library boards, that's even lower. An active and tiny minority
00:05:16.760tail has been wagging the Canadian dog for a long time. A small number of people can achieve a great0.53
00:05:21.720deal of change just by taking part. Now, Parker, he's just encouraging the commoners to take part
00:05:26.500and scaring the bejesus of the establishment folks holding positions of power. PACs have been around
00:05:30.900spending dollars in advertising and holding events for decades. The impact of all that activity is
00:05:34.780limited, though. Having a PAC organizing people to become politically active, though, that's a
00:05:39.780little different. It's having a difference in policy, and that's what's got some people scared.
00:05:43.720Seems as groups have found the path to change, and the establishment knows it, and that's why
00:05:47.420it's gaining that much attention. I'm not trying to cheerlead for them. They tend to be dominated
00:05:51.160by people more socially conservative than I, and, uh, you know, uh, it's not necessarily the best
00:05:57.500pack in the world as far as I'm concerned, but I respect their right to organize and their success
00:06:01.040with it. If you don't like what they're doing, the solution is to not to demonize the group or try
00:06:05.540to make up conspiracy theories. The solution is to fight fire with fire. Get out on the ground,
00:06:09.940then. Go to other meetings. Go out to the polls. Use the democratic means sitting right in front
00:06:13.680of you. The process isn't a secret. It just hasn't been used. If Parker's organization takes people
00:06:19.080from all sides of the political spectrum, you know, or encourages them and gets them active
00:06:22.940in their communities, we're all going to be better for it. If any agenda is going to be questioned,
00:06:27.160is that put forth by those who fear citizens organizing and using legitimate democratic
00:06:31.640tools to achieve change. What's the establishment so afraid of? The unwashed masses daring to stand
00:06:36.920up for themselves? Well, good. It's time the establishment had a shaking up. So keep that0.81
00:06:41.260in mind in your areas. No matter what province you're in, no matter what side of the spectrum
00:06:44.420you're in, take part, guys. Get up. Get out there. You don't have to like what that group's doing.
00:06:49.580If you don't like it, join and fight back. That's all. Either way, I've just been shocked. I've been
00:06:55.500shocked by how much is popping up in the news, how much is going on with it. I mean,
00:06:58.520well this isn't anything that controversial he's he's it's it's an open secret but they're almost
00:07:05.040characterizing it as if it's some sort of conspiracy and this sneaky odious group that's
00:07:09.340going to come in and take over uh you know and undercut the democratic ways well no actually
00:07:14.160it's the opposite it is engaging and using what we have in our hands and it's not so much what
00:07:20.800they're doing that i found striking it's it's been the response of legacy media outlets of
00:07:27.580academics and the usual folks to it. Wow, they are just wound right up. And you know what,
00:07:32.620when I see the establishment wound up like that, then I start to think somebody is flying over the
00:07:38.060target. So I just wanted to get in on that. Like I said, I'm not necessarily hung up on them in
00:07:43.140particular. I'm just, again, quite astounded by how stirred up people are with it. It's nothing
00:07:48.160new. Unions have been doing it for a long, long time on the left, guys. You don't hear the
00:07:53.380establishment media going after them, of course. So looking at some of our stuff, you know,
00:07:58.040some of the stories that have come up, I'm going to talk a little bit about affordability. It kind
00:08:01.220of segues in when we get on to talking about Franco and things. There was a poll released
00:08:04.880recently. There's always polls released. This one's talking about those, and it's pretty sad.
00:08:08.520It's dejecting. That 60%, I guess, of people who don't own a home yet have given up. They basically
00:08:14.300said, we don't feel we're ever going to own one. We'll never be able to afford one. We'll never
00:08:18.140get the down payment together. Just won't be able to do it. You know, I mean, that's been a hallmark
00:08:22.240of North America, of modern times, of where most people want to go. You want to get up and own your
00:08:27.400little chunk of property, have your home, invest in it, build your nest, maybe, you know, build some
00:08:33.120equity, sell it off, retire, that whole cycle. And now more than half of young Canadians are not
00:08:38.100necessarily young. I mean, you're getting up there. It took me until I was 40 before Jane talked me
00:08:41.080into committing to a mortgage, but they're thinking it's hopeless. I can't get in on a place.
00:08:47.600And I can see that. I mean, the amount required for a down payment in a home, some of the
00:08:52.160the prices of them now and the costs. I mean, how do you get that together as a newer person
00:08:57.740in the working world when you're paying for kids growing up and every other fee that's hitting you?
00:09:01.860But the problem is supply. We don't have enough. And, you know, we've covered that a lot of times
00:09:07.480on here. I've talked about that. I've had Shane Wenzel on as a guest. He's a home builder. He
00:09:11.040talks about to get a home built from start to finish in Calgary takes, from when they propose
00:09:17.340a new development to when you're starting to get constructing. Eight years. Eight years. Millions
00:09:22.760of dollars in applications, forms, studies, permits, layouts, design, all of that. And that's assuming
00:09:29.920it doesn't get rejected somewhere along the way. And that's just Calgary. Every other city is the
00:09:34.500same. They're hindering new developments. So we can't build. And when we do, it costs a fortune.
00:09:39.340Another thing Wenzel pointed out was the green energy requirements coming from the federal
00:09:44.040government, put the cost of the home, they're adding $40,000 to $60,000 to every new house
00:09:48.740because of all these new requirements. Plus, not every contractor can necessarily build to those.
00:09:53.420So we have a shortage of supply, but nobody likes to talk about that. Now, we're talking about
00:09:58.820federal interference into provincial jurisdiction. Stephen Gilboa, one of my favorites, our
00:10:04.240environment minister, and we're going to talk, I'm sure, a bit about him when we discuss the
00:10:08.440carbon tax in a little while. But there's been a big controversy in Ontario with the Greenbelt.
00:10:13.260It's an expansion. I guess they're looking to build a bunch of new homes out there and environmentalists are all lighting their hair on fire and going mad about it.
00:10:20.000It sounds like he's thinking he might be able to intervene on that.
00:10:22.900He might be able to poke in on that and interfere on something that is purely it's not even provincial jurisdiction.
00:10:28.340It's civic. That's how much overreach this federal government, this obsessed federal government with their environmental ideology is that they feel that they can shut down a new home development in an area that needs it.
00:10:40.960I mean, again, we're talking about, what, 400,000 immigrants a year coming into Canada,
00:10:45.140and I'm not in any immigration at all.
00:29:16.980And hey, for all everyone watching right now, please do me a favor.
00:29:20.000If you want to contact a member of parliament, pick up the phone, give them an email and say, hey, why aren't you publicly speaking out against the pay raises?
00:29:28.040I would love to hear what they say to you.
00:29:31.060Yeah, it's when it comes to their own wallets, it's amazing how quiet they get.
00:29:34.540always great to have you on, Franco. Thanks for the work you're doing, and I'm sure we'll talk
00:29:38.700again soon. Take care, Corey. Great. So that was Franco Tarazano, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
00:29:45.480It is always a good chat. It sounds almost repetitive, but it's because, you know, as
00:29:48.960frustrating as it gets, things just keep going the same way. The spending keeps going up. The
00:29:53.120borrowing keeps going up. And again, it's all of us who end up paying the bills, you know,
00:29:58.080comes out of our pockets. We got to keep paying attention. We got to keep fighting it. And that's
00:30:03.440what they're doing. So yes, good discussion. Well, I'm going to get on to another area, I guess,
00:30:08.680of political delusion and frustration and something I go on about. Every city, every
00:30:14.080jurisdiction in Canada is dealing with this. I mean, it's related to a lot of things.
00:30:17.700The bottom line, I think the root of the whole thing is the addiction epidemic that's going on.
00:30:23.560It's definitely an epidemic. It's happening in every city. Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton,
00:30:29.720Vancouver, it seems it's predominantly in the West. Other cities aren't getting hit as hard,
00:30:32.660but every city is getting hit badly. And it's leading again to higher associated crime. It's
00:30:38.740leading to thousands of overdoses, thousands. And we aren't doing enough about it, or we aren't
00:30:46.320doing the right things about it. We've taken an enablement approach over the years. In Calgary,
00:30:51.420it hit ahead the other day. I mean, basically, it's gotten so bad in Calgary and Edmonton. And
00:30:54.900I still want to credit our own Arthur Green. You know, he's been putting a lot of pressure on
00:30:58.060because the enablers don't want to talk about it. They don't want people to see it. They don't want
00:31:01.740people to realize how bad it's gotten and how bad their policies have failed and they've failed
00:31:07.380and uh cliff uh burkhardt pointing out not just cities everywhere that's true even you know
00:31:12.040smaller communities in alberta and everything this this this awful addiction problem is going
00:31:16.580everywhere and i tell you what it's hitting every class every race it doesn't matter people are
00:31:22.900getting nailed by this i i've talked about that on the show before maybe it's because i'm at this
00:31:27.420age group, but I personally know three different people now who have lost sons to overdoses, or
00:31:34.640they call it drug toxicity or poisoning. Now, it doesn't matter. The bottom line is they took
00:31:38.560things that weren't from the doctor and they died because of it, and they didn't intend to. What a
00:31:43.060waste. And we're not talking about people from the rough end of town or people from abusive families,
00:31:47.280though that happens too. Just it can be anybody, guys. And there's people who get addicted later
00:31:52.260in life. I mean, they got onto some prescription opioids because of an injury, and it led to an
00:31:56.720addiction. Either way, the denial has gotten too far. And in Calgary, we've had a policy of denial
00:32:02.320and enablement for a long time. And we saw it yesterday with a press conference where Premier
00:32:07.760Daniel Smith came in and at least addressed one facet of it. And there's a lot of facets,
00:32:12.240but basically said, we need more policing and we're going to fund it. We're going to bring in
00:32:16.30050 more officers in Calgary and 50 in Edmonton, and as well as funding some more things for mental
00:32:22.520health supports and things such as that. But it was almost a shameful press conference as you saw
00:32:27.020Mayor Gondek, who previously had been supportive of defunding the police and feeling that the way
00:32:32.280to address this somehow is to have more social workers out there on the streets. And I mean,
00:32:38.160there's a role for that, absolutely. You want to help people, you want to, you know, get them into
00:32:43.600treatment and things like that. But in the meantime, people are unsafe. And it seemed
00:32:49.520awfully, just the way it went. We've had three stabbings in Calgary in the last three days
00:32:54.640on the transit system in downtown, one of which, and I'll expand a little further into the root
00:33:00.320of that problem too, because this is just so many layers of complication going on.
00:33:04.060But one of those stabbings happened just hours basically before the press conference of Jody
00:33:09.020Gondek standing up there, Calgary's mayor, basically shamefacedly watching a provincial
00:33:14.660leader step in and take over the crime. That really was municipal jurisdiction, but they let
00:33:18.440get out of their hands. And we're seeing numbers that are promising. I've talked about that on the
00:33:22.580show before, but I want to keep talking about it because we've got to look at what's starting to
00:33:26.340work. And there was a great graph that I saw that showed the overdose differences between BC and
00:33:31.840Alberta over the years. Now, BC has very much taken the West Coast approach, just like down in
00:33:37.240Portland, Oregon, or San Francisco, and in Vancouver, we're seeing it. See, if we can just
00:33:43.140enable them enough, if we can just give them enough free drugs, if we can decriminalize enough
00:33:47.380things, if we can allow enough tent cities to set up, somehow these addictions will just go away.
00:33:52.820I mean, the biggest measure of a failure of a policy, of course, is a fatality and an overdose
00:33:57.300is a fatality. So you see those two lines on that chart. And, you know, I'll describe it because
00:34:01.760some people are listening on the podcast, but they really, they follow the same trajectory.
00:34:05.820You can see that both provinces are dealing with the same issues. It rises and drops
00:34:09.280at the same period. But then suddenly something happened just a few years ago. Alberta's overdoses
00:34:14.460dropped dramatically, and they've stayed down. It looks like there's a little bit of a recent uptick
00:34:19.240in them, but for the most part, they've stayed down. BC, on the other hand, has stayed high. Their
00:34:23.320overdoses are way up there, and they had a bit of a drop, but now they're continuing to climb. The
00:34:27.340spread between the two is huge, and again, we've been very hard on Jason Kenney, Premier Kenney,
00:34:32.240former Premier Kenney, for many, many things, but one of the things he did was said, look,
00:34:36.500we need more treatment facilities. We've got to have the availability when somebody hits bottom,
00:34:42.320when somebody's ready for treatment to say, we can get you in, we can help you, and we can treat
00:34:46.780you for your addiction. And with that, Alberta has opened up 8,000 treatment beds, almost double
00:34:53.020what BC has when BC has a larger addiction problem and a larger population. And we're starting to see
00:34:59.860the fruits of that. There's still a problem. I mean, that graph shows there's still, unfortunately,
00:35:05.240hundreds and hundreds, building up to thousands of Albertans dying from overdoses. But it's dropped.
00:35:11.100That's the first sign we've seen some indication of progress on it.