On this week's show, the PM visits his hometown of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to meet with his counterpart, Premier Daniel Smith, to discuss a variety of issues, including the opioid crisis, a bee attack on a reporter's wrist, and more.
00:09:39.500We've got a story on a senator's junket to Rome, 45 grand.
00:09:43.800Believe it or not, they were going to study soil and spend seven days in Rome.
00:09:49.380And that's a nice work if you can get it.
00:09:53.820We've got a new columnist by the name of Hall.
00:09:56.560He jumps in today in the Nenshi fight.
00:09:59.600His leadership campaign now, I guess, to run for the Alberta NDP.
00:10:03.960Our Linda Slobodian has a piece on Jordan Peterson testifying in front of Congress yesterday in the States, talking about Big Brother watching and how surveillance super state is coming to the West.
00:10:20.820And our opinion editor, Nigel Hannaford, has reached all the way to beautiful downtown Cape.
00:10:59.140Yeah, I won't be able to catch Premier Smith's live thing, but I still haven't forgiven you for playing Justin Trudeau's live conference in the newsroom.
00:11:06.320What was that, two, three hours it felt like in the background going on over there?
00:12:01.940All right, so let's see what else is going on in this mad, mad world.
00:12:06.480And it is, this one is, I would see making the rounds.
00:12:10.180So the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in a recent sexual assault case that it was problematic for a lower court judge to refer to the alleged victim as a woman.
00:12:19.800Yes, the court referred to the rape victim as a woman and implying that the more appropriate term should have been person with a vagina.
00:12:30.660This is the Supreme Court of Canada, guys.
00:13:43.360You know, she's certainly no hard right winger, but boy, she's been getting it because she's dared to speak up against the crazed trans stuff.
00:14:08.000And we've got to inject that into everything we do.
00:14:10.940We, we, we can't even talk about a woman in a court anymore.
00:14:14.600It's just, sanity has, has departed from us, guys.
00:14:19.600So, yeah, speaking of sanity, Chrystia Freeland, as Dave mentioned there at the end of things, where was that quote?
00:14:25.280I'm going to look down here and find this.
00:14:27.380But she, she said along the lines of, yeah, you know, every person on the prairie's dream and little piece of heaven would be to, to move to BC.
00:14:34.760You know, I kind of see what she might be trying to get at saying it's a, you know, it's nice out there.
00:14:40.860But talk about divisive, you know, when you're in a federal position, when you say things like that, because yes, the unspoken part is saying life sucks on the prairies.
00:14:50.560If you work hard enough, you might raise enough money for yourself to retire in BC.
00:14:57.060It's nice on the island if you like rainy winters rather than sunny, cool ones.
00:15:01.520You know, there's ups, downs, advantages, disadvantages of every region in the country.
00:15:07.160You know, one of the things I learned as a surveyor, I traveled all over North America.
00:15:10.480I worked literally from up by Tuk-Tuk-Tuk on the Beaufort Sea and the Mackenzie Delta area, all the way down to near the Texas-Mexico border and everything in between.
00:15:21.860And something I found really interesting was no matter where I went, there was cool stuff to be seen and enjoyed and to be had.
00:15:30.020The populations had unique qualities that you could, you know, interact with, get to know people.
00:15:35.640People had pride in their areas and very good reasons to be proud of their areas, whether it was the middle of the desert, whether it was even West Virginia, with some of the, yeah, some of the people have earned their reputation over there.
00:15:47.860And, yes, the prairies, you know, there's lots to be seen and done in the prairies.
00:16:05.420And to have the deputy prime minister imply, perhaps, that the prairies are just a place you have to be, and as soon as you can escape to BC, you should do so, is just divisive and stupid.
00:16:16.980But I guess it's kind of par for the course for Freeland.
00:16:20.700She really is a weird little woman, isn't she?
00:16:22.820And, yeah, so we did have, you know, I'll get on to that, her boss, Justin Trudeau, speaking of weird, and he is weird, he did his news conference.
00:16:43.140I'm interested to hear what Premier Smith's going to say about it.
00:16:45.660I guess the point of this was to come to Calgary and announce a dental program for senior citizens, an expansion of dental coverage for senior citizens.
00:16:58.060It's just like this government is floundering, you know?
00:17:00.500I mean, they're throwing out programs and money and ideas, and doing their announcements in almost a campaign sort of way.
00:17:05.680We'll just pick a random part of the country and plop down and announce another spending program.
00:17:11.760So this dental plan, I don't know, might be good, might not be.
00:17:14.700I'll have to look into the details of it.
00:17:17.640But, I mean, if it's anything like the health care plan, well, it'll be great, except you're going to be waiting a long, long time to get your teeth looked at.
00:17:25.080You know, when you take something I said a while ago, you know, P.J. O'Rourke, one of my favorite writers, said,
00:17:31.160if you think health care is expensive now, just wait until the government makes it free.
00:18:31.960Like we're seeing poll after poll after poll.
00:18:33.980I've never seen so many federal polls, especially when we're this far from what's expected to be the actual election period.
00:18:40.620But it's just because it's a morbid curiosity on the part of the pollsters now when it's amazing how low the support for the Trudeau government is getting.
00:18:51.000Like people are just wondering how bad can this get?
00:18:53.400And it gets worse and worse and worse.
00:18:58.740That's what's kind of fascinating in this dark and morbid sort of way.
00:19:03.580Like how bad is it going to have to get before you realize that nobody gives a hoot about your tax on pollution when they can't pay the rent, when they can't pay for the heat for their house because you've shut down too much of the energy sector.
00:19:23.280What a weird holding pattern we're in and a destructive one and a painful one.
00:19:27.720Because, yeah, unfortunately, Jagmeet's holding him up in there.
00:19:31.400And even if only 20% of the country still wants him as the prime minister or whatever it might be getting down to, we can't get rid of that clown until an election's called.
00:19:40.200And he's showing no signs of wanting to back out.
00:19:43.220He really does believe he can turn this government around.
00:20:23.820All right, something else getting on to the news in general.
00:20:28.620Let's see, the Department of Public Works, Dave mentioned that in a briefing note, claimed that arrive can charges were fair and reasonable.
00:20:34.500Talk about double speak with government.
00:20:36.320You know, talk about when we're getting scammed, we're getting ripped off.
00:21:43.900If the democratic means of trying to change things seems to fail people, people start doing desperate things, and I don't want to see that.
00:21:52.500Of course, Nahed Nenshi, you know, a fellow I'm always happy to go on about, officially entered the NDP race for the leadership in Alberta.
00:22:01.580And, you know, this is going to be an interesting race to watch.
00:22:25.000He was just kind of his own thing all that time.
00:22:26.960But now he's coming in as arrogant and as pompous as ever and saying, well, I'm going to come in and save you guys from yourselves and take over this party and save Alberta.
00:22:35.480And holy crap, you know, it's not just the leftist people claiming, oh, we're so tired of the vitriolic politics and the negative politics and the attack politics.
00:22:46.040Well, in the last two days with what Nenshi's been spouting out, he has called Premier Smith everything from immoral to a liar to you name it.
00:22:55.440Like, he's just lit the ground on fire.
00:22:58.620And this is like day three or two of his official campaign for the leadership of the NDP.
00:23:03.680Can you imagine if that clown wins the leadership?
00:23:07.600What the next few years with him as the leader of the opposition will be like?
00:24:58.140I mean, you know, a number of years ago I would have said it's impossible that Alberta would ever have an NDP government with Rachel Notley as a premier.
00:25:06.200And, boy, I certainly would have been wrong.
00:25:08.180So I'm not going to sit here today and say it's impossible for Nenhen Nenshi to become the premier in a future government.
00:26:00.600Are they going to be true to who they are with their roots?
00:26:02.760Or are they going to jump on with good old NAHED and see if they get a better chance of getting themselves to the premier's chair for that?
00:26:10.620So we'll be watching, of course, and covering that all the way through.
00:26:13.680And, you know, the main thing is, and I've always been hard on Nenshi for years.
00:26:18.060The main thing that's always driven me nuts with him, again, as I said, he's a political chameleon.
00:26:21.740When he first won as mayor, he campaigned as a conservative.
00:26:26.240I mean, those of us who were already familiar with his history at Mount Royal and his time beforehand knew that he was certainly no conservative by any measure.
00:26:35.960But enough Calgarians fell for it and they put him in there.
00:26:38.420And he was so bad, businesses actually had to rally outside of City Hall.
00:26:43.500Business owners, they're not typically the people who protest at City Hall and things like that.
00:26:47.340But they had to get out and basically beg for the tax increases to stop because he was spending so badly and punishing and crushing businesses so badly that they had to just beg him to stop.
00:28:55.040There couldn't have been more than a couple thousand listeners.
00:28:58.020I mean, not to knock the guy's show, but it shows the cancel culture, the lunatics, the people who want to shut down discourse, how quick they are to get on there and try and block the voices they don't want to hear from.
00:29:12.120So 157, the ombudsman at the end of it basically dismissed the complaints and said, piss off.
00:29:20.020They accused this man, though, of Islamophobia, all because he just countered the narrative being spread by his guest on the show.
00:29:45.080And these are things that don't operate on reality.
00:29:48.520They do operate based on complainants.
00:29:50.720And they won't necessarily identify the complainant.
00:29:53.540They won't tell you if there was one or a thousand if you were somebody who was brought before one of their tribunals for something they say crossed a line somewhere.
00:30:26.960But C-63, you see, when I first started reading that bill and when it came out a couple of weeks ago, and it's hundreds of pages long, and it's an omnibus bill.
00:30:38.420And that means they've packed a whole bunch of stuff into one bill.
00:30:41.000And I despise that because this is what the government does.
00:32:04.500For example, I mean, we're certainly hearing a lot of it with the conflict in Israel right now and that they're saying Israel's committing genocide against Palestinians.
00:32:15.420I'm not going to start down the road of that debate right now, but it's debatable.
00:32:20.440There's definitely room for people to say that Israel isn't.
00:32:24.500But if at some point the government or one of these commissions or one of these tribunals determines that it is genocide and somebody dared to say that it isn't,
00:32:32.500they could be subjected to a life sentence, couldn't they?
00:32:37.320Technically, by that bill, that's how insane this bill is.
00:32:40.520Likewise, we've had others talking about criminalizing, referencing anything.
00:32:47.000You know, they talked about criminalizing residential school denialism.
00:32:51.900It's not that people deny, they love using that language because, of course, they're trying to tie it in with Holocaust denial.
00:32:56.380But there's nobody denying that the residential schools existed, but now they want to deny, you know, if anybody should question this narrative.
00:33:03.580We've got Kamloops to this day that the country was turned upside down over almost three years ago now over these anomalies found with ground penetrating radar.
00:33:31.260And we're going to get to a point where, because that's getting called genocide as well, that if you questioned that, you could get a life sentence.
00:33:42.320You know, we have laws about inciting people to a crime.
00:33:47.500I mean, if you're going to stand on a street corner with a bullhorn and say, I want everybody to get together and round up and kill this group.
00:33:55.060I want you to slaughter these people over here.
00:33:57.100I want you to wipe those individuals out over there.
00:33:59.680Yeah, that's certainly trying to promote genocide.
00:34:12.620The other thing that's kind of weird in it, and others have been talking about that, is that there's provisions in that bill to put people under house arrest for suspicion that they might commit a hate crime.
00:34:28.000As we're getting into the realm of 1984, they're talking about sanctions against citizens, locking them in their homes, punishments for crimes they haven't committed yet, but crimes the government fears they might commit.
00:34:41.720Do we have any idea how insane this is?
00:35:28.240All of these bills are about trying to control what people are allowed to say, what they're allowed to talk about, what they're allowed to report on.
00:35:35.800And they're offering criminal sanctions in C-63 heavier than those we offer for second-degree murder.
00:35:43.600We've got some serious, serious issues going on here.
00:35:48.900Meanwhile, what's left of the media, the legacy media, yeah, they're subsidized.
00:35:55.480They're beholden to the federal government.
00:35:57.520But those who they can't fear, you know, bully into submission and those that, or, you know, that they can't threaten, they're trying to bribe.
00:36:06.480So, I mean, they extended the handouts they're going to give to other outlets and so on.
00:36:11.620They're spending more on it with subsidies.
00:36:17.080What do you think happens when that gets put in there?
00:36:19.940Well, I know that's not going to shake the tree, is it?
00:36:22.260And the government bloody well knows it.
00:36:23.980But then you look at some of the outcomes.
00:36:25.460So, I mean, CBC just had an increase in their budget when word just came down recently, even though they've laid off hundreds and hundreds of people, that they took that money and gave bonuses to their executives.
00:38:10.380I like seeing some of the others breaking ranks.
00:38:13.400And so I like seeing out of people like Margaret Atwood and Michael Geist or even Warren Kinsella on some of these things is at least they hit a point where they realize that it's not leftism.
00:38:24.540It's not rightism that is our problem.
00:38:28.720It's government wanting to control the people too much and how dangerous it is.
00:38:33.560You see, I don't think maybe Margaret Atwood fears the power that Trudeau might wield with something like C63, but maybe she's smart enough to realize.
00:38:44.220When you're giving a government a power, any kind of more increased power or reach over people, you should always envision, would you be comfortable with the government having that power if it was led by somebody you despise?
00:38:58.440You see, liberals will give them all this power to crush people's speech and ability to demonstrate and things like that because that's no problem.
00:39:06.160OK, fine. But do you understand that Trudeau will not be in forever?
00:39:10.160It's going to feel like forever. It already feels like forever, but he's not going to be there forever.
00:39:14.880And as you keep putting in these controls, giving more power and authority to this government, as you keep stripping away individual rights, you better hope the next government isn't vindictive and doesn't use those to crush your end of the political spectrum.
00:39:33.560That's where less government is better government. Marie Perrin saying, I believe Pierre will cancel this bill, says he'll repeal C-11.
00:39:40.280I think he will, too. I think he will, too. But I tell you what, governments lose a lot of appetite for repealing bills once they get in.
00:39:48.800You know, I'm not saying Polly Evans and his government is going to do that.
00:39:52.720I'm just saying it's better to shut these bills off before they get entrenched, because the government can sometimes kick the can down the road once they get into power.
00:40:00.680Right now, suddenly it might turn into a useful tool for themselves, and that can get turned around.
00:40:06.820That's why I do not want that government to have the ability to tell us what we could say, where we could say, how we say, no matter who is in power, because they might not be inclined to get rid of it.
00:40:15.660Similar to Trudeau and his lie saying he was going to reform the electoral system.
00:40:19.120We see that over and over in countries all over the place. We're going to change the electoral system.
00:40:22.680We're going to bring in proportional representation and this and that.
00:40:25.360Look, if the government gets into power with a majority based on the current system, they're not going to change the system that got them in where they were in the first place.
00:40:36.700And Trudeau proved that quite well when he just basically broke and ignored his own promise, which I'm glad of.
00:40:42.880I'm glad of. I can imagine the deals that would be cut.
00:40:45.460It's bad enough with him and Jagmeet Singh as it is right now, but if they had to have a pizza parliament with 12 parties in there and a proportional representation, it would be a catastrophe.
00:40:59.280If we want to talk about whole systems that we could reform, I mean, that's a whole separate discussion.
00:41:03.020You know, if you really have what I would like to see, maybe proportional representation for a Senate and a rep by pop in the parliament and an elected Senate, of course.
00:41:11.900But these are all dreams that would take constitutional reform and that's not going to be happening during our lifetime.
00:41:19.220It's the only way we're going to see constitutional reform is if and when a country or a province is on the brink of or finally separates.
00:41:27.360And, you know, I've written the book on how we should pursue that literally, but that is still going to be a while away yet.
00:41:34.440I'm going to be saying seven premiers are against the carbon tax now and voicing their opinions.
00:41:38.360And that was asked of Trudeau, as I said, during the press conference he had today, and he just talked around it and talked around it and talked around it.
00:41:46.200I think I think this government's getting to the point where they just don't care.
00:41:50.960They do know they're they're in the toilet.
00:41:52.800They do know they aren't going to turn it around.
00:41:56.320And they're just going to keep pushing ahead and putting this stuff in there until they get wiped out.
00:42:00.520And I can't think of any other explanation.
00:42:02.900I mean, when you've got regional leaders all coming out, united against you like this on something like this carbon tax, but he will not back down.
00:42:11.280What a stubborn, ideologically loony man.