A Nazi was invited into the House of Commons, and the whole place erupted in cheers and applause for the honour. Also, the Fraser Institute has a new report on the impact of the government's COID shutdown on public schools. And a Ukrainian veteran who served in Hitler's Waffen SS unit was introduced to the Commons.
00:00:30.000Good day. Welcome to the Corey Morgan Show. This is my weekly hour to bend your ears, do a little ranting, interview some guests and cover some issues that are breaking. And I tell you, they're really breaking this week. It's just been an orgy of issues to try and keep track of. Usually, you know, throughout the summer anyways, it was hard. You're trying to things to come up with things to write columns on in the political realm and things like that. And it's slow. Right now, the hard part is trying to figure out what exactly
00:00:59.780to cover. There is so much going on. It's just been a bizarre, crazy couple of weeks in Canadian politics and news in general. So I've got a good packed show today. A little later, I'll have Paige McPherson on.
00:01:14.280It'll cool things down a little bit, but it's a very important discussion. She's with the Fraser Institute and they released a study on the impacts of the school closures due to COVID over that period of time. You know, we haven't had enough people looking back say, well, was it worth it? Were the shutdowns worth it? Were there benefits to be had? And of course, most importantly, what sort of damage was done? You know, having children out of school for weeks and weeks and weeks at a time was not good for them.
00:01:39.480It came at a cost to them and they've studied that and put out a report on it. So I'm looking forward to that. Of course, we'll have our check-ins and things such as that too. And yes, this is live for a lot of you. Use that comment section, guys. Send those comments my way, questions my way, things like that. Discuss things with each other. I like seeing things being active in there. Just remain civil. That's all. We can be good to each other. So yes, I'm going to get on about, of course, the biggest event of the week. A really unbelievable one. It was one of those times the world really was watching.
00:02:09.480And we had Ukrainian President Zelensky. He was a guest to the House of Commons. The Liberals were celebrating another injection of 600 million Canadian tax dollars going into the Ukrainian war effort. It was a big feel-good moment. Then the entire House rose and they gave an ovation and an applause to a Nazi.
00:02:28.780Nazi. Yeah, I didn't have a slip of the tongue. I'm not talking about a figurative Nazi or a comical Nazi like the soup chef in a Seinfeld episode. Not some goose-stepping neo-Nazi idiot with a shaven head and a swastika tattoo. No, this wasn't even a conscript from the German army in World War II or a simple member of the Nazi party from those times. No, the fellow they were applauding actually served in one of Hitler's SS Waffen units in World War II.
00:02:54.780This was a true, dyed-in-the-wool, literal Nazi. I mean, that term gets thrown around so much that we really have to couch it this time with, no, this is the real thing.
00:03:05.220Now, due to the passage of time, thankfully, it's actually quite difficult to find real Nazis these days.
00:03:10.740But credit where due, the government managed to dig one up and bring him into the House of Commons.
00:03:15.700House Speaker, or I should say former House Speaker, Anthony Roda, has fallen on his sword for the issue now and claims the invitation of the Nazi was solely his own action.
00:03:24.320Now, while Roda certainly appears culpable, it beggars belief that this Nazi slipped through the vetting into the House of Commons with no examination.
00:03:31.420It's no coincidence that a Ukrainian veteran happened to be introduced to the House by the Speaker on the same day the President of Ukraine happened to be there.
00:03:40.420It was a staged, jingoistic event that was supposed to show a common front of support for Ukrainians against Russian aggression.
00:03:47.580The problem was with which war Yaroslav Hanka fought against the Russians in.
00:03:53.260Now, I'm going to speculate on what probably happened. I could be wrong. This is what I figure happened.
00:03:57.040I imagine an order went out to Liberal members just to ask him, try and seek out a Ukrainian veteran, you know, who stood up to the Russians to celebrate in the House while we have Zelisky here.
00:04:07.560Some staffer went scurrying about and managed to find Yaroslav Hanka.
00:04:10.980It was probably a young staffer. If you go to Ottawa, you see them all the time.
00:04:13.560You know, they're usually rushing around in ill-fitting suits.
00:04:15.920And it didn't occur to him that if a person's 98 years old, Ukrainian, and fought against the Russians,
00:04:22.860it's almost a sure thing he served in one of Hitler's Waffen-SS units.
00:04:27.560And he volunteered to join that unit. He wasn't conscripted.
00:04:31.200I've seen some Liberal supporters doggedly trying to point out how Hanka wasn't among the worst of the Nazis.
00:04:36.440That's absurd, and it's not doing their cause any favors.
00:04:39.300I don't care if nowadays Hanka is the sweetest father and grandfather on the planet, you know, and did a good job later in life.
00:04:46.200I don't care if he was the friendliest Nazi in his unit, that he never forgot anybody's birthday,
00:04:50.780or won the Mr. Nazi Congeniality Award every time there was an SS convention.
00:04:55.440He was a Nazi, and never should have been invited to the House of Commons, much less applauded.
00:05:01.620Some actions and life choices lead to a permanent stigma being applied.
00:05:06.460Joining one of Hitler's SAS units during World War II is one of those life choices.
00:05:10.840The leader of a nation in the middle of a war was a guest in the House of Commons,
00:05:14.660and he unwittingly found himself joining the rest of the room and applauding a Nazi.
00:05:18.380The damage done went beyond just humiliating Canada and a guest on the world stage.
00:05:23.600Vladimir Putin was surely laughing for hours as Canada managed to create a public relations coup for him.
00:05:29.480While Justin Trudeau wasn't directly involved in this latest national embarrassment, it still happened on his watch.
00:05:36.020The Prime Minister's office surely was behind the planning for this grand event,
00:05:39.700and if their office didn't vet attendees, it must be asked why they didn't.
00:05:43.040Could any MP just bring in whoever they please and have them recognized by the House without any question or vetting?
00:09:24.520The Taylor family has put in an additional $3 million to the new polar bear exhibit.
00:09:30.600That's going to be opening up very, very quickly.
00:09:33.280And it brings their combined donation to more than $11 million.
00:09:40.140So these polar bears coming in from Winnipeg, they're going to have a life of luxury that no other captive polar bear probably has.
00:09:48.240And some amazing scenes last night in Philadelphia, where basically you can go shoplifting anywhere you want now in the United States and not get charged.
00:09:59.520And they had some mob scenes where people were, we won't call it shoplifting, we'll call it looting, looting stores.
00:10:07.620And this comes on the heels of Target announcing they were closing stores across the U.S.
00:10:14.540to try and battle some of this economic loss that they're being faced with mob looting.
00:14:51.020And, you know, there's no sense turning back the clock.
00:14:53.320And at this point, going down, chasing down 98-year-olds and trying, because some people are saying you should be arrested or, you know, sent back to Poland to face justice.
00:15:01.900You know, no, it's just let him and his God, if he has one in his conscience, deal with whatever happened then, along with the others at this point.
00:15:10.540The bottom line, though, is they aren't appropriate to bring in front of the House of Commons.
00:15:15.940So, you know, you should have let the, nobody should have ever heard of this guy outside of his own friends and family until he passed on of old age.
00:15:22.960But now, suddenly, he's one of the most famous men on earth and not in a good way.
00:15:27.700All right, let's turn the page and get on to something, though.
00:15:29.380I have been looking forward to this conversation.
00:15:31.960Like I said, we get distracted with all of this, this haywire stuff coming out of the House of Commons, but we've got a lot of important stuff happening otherwise.
00:15:38.040So we've got Paige McPherson with the Fraser Institute on, and they put out a great study recently, and I'm looking forward to discussing this.
00:15:47.700We didn't talk enough before the pandemic measures happened on cost-benefit, but at least now that we have the benefit of hindsight, let's look at these things and what the impacts were so that, presumably, if there's another such event, we can do things differently.
00:16:06.860So kind of as I framed it there, so you called it the forgotten demographic, and you focused particularly on children in school with the amount of lost time and the impacts that had.
00:16:19.540I mean, we can't pretend there was zero impact, but you guys actually dug in to see what those impacts were then.
00:16:25.380We've often heard the refrain that policymakers, when it came to COVID and school closures, were doing the best with the information that they had at the time.
00:16:34.540So what our report really looks into is what information exactly did policymakers, including governments across Canada, we looked at each provincial government, including in Alberta, where you are, looking at what did they know exactly, and also when did they know it?
00:16:51.740Did they have any information that would guide their policymaking, or were they really just flying blind?
00:16:57.100And I think it's very reasonable to say that, okay, within the first, let's say, one, two, maybe even three months, there wasn't a lot of good data.
00:17:05.980There was a lot of, you know, uncertainty and fear during that period in the pandemic.
00:17:10.840And so school closures happened, but the reality is that in Canada, and including Alberta, schools were closed in Alberta well into January 2022.
00:17:22.200So that's spanning three school years.
00:17:24.580In other parts of Canada, they were closed up until February 2022.
00:17:27.880And so just to put that into context, that is 110 days minimum that Alberta students missed due to school closures related to the pandemic, which began in March of 2020.
00:17:41.880And our report really found that there was a no good reason, no evidence informed reason to believe that school closures would help in terms of the health and safety of children, or even necessarily stopping the spread of COVID-19.
00:17:58.220And certainly we, we knew very early on, if we're being really, really conservative in what we're saying, by December 2020, at the latest, that there was almost no significant health risk to children of COVID-19.
00:18:16.340And yet governments continued to close schools.
00:18:19.520So they really didn't let the data inform their response.
00:18:22.700So, I mean, we all, well, again, there was a lot of conflicting stories and everything going on at the time.
00:18:28.000But as you said, it was starting to become pretty clear.
00:18:29.820We kind of got very fortunate that among infectious diseases, this one was one that seemed to leave children alone, at least for the most part.
00:18:37.620But I mean, another, when that was brought up, often people would say, well, yes, but they're putting the teachers at risk or they're adding to spread and they'll bring it home to their household and put grandma and grandpa at risk or things like that.
00:18:48.320So did open times with school contribute to the general infection of the population or could a link be found?
00:18:54.560The short answer is that we there's really no clarity in the data.
00:18:59.320There's really no good evidence to say, yes, school closures worked when we're looking in hindsight now in terms of stopping the spread.
00:19:07.840There's certainly some speculation that they might have had some impact, but there's really no good scientific data showing that they worked.
00:19:16.200And that's from the epidemiological review, that portion of our paper.
00:19:20.200Also, it wasn't like we had never thought about school closures before 2020 school closures had been studied in terms of a review of the existing data when it came to coronaviruses, SARS and MERS.
00:19:35.380But before COVID-19, also in the context of influenza and those the same, it was very inconclusive, really, like I said, there was no good evidence that school closures would work for what we had hoped that they would do or what policymakers had hoped that they would do.
00:19:53.420So what was also very clear from the start was that school closures or in other words, missed classroom time would have negative impacts on children from an academic perspective, from a mental health perspective, social outcomes, severe absenteeism.
00:20:11.680These are all of the things that we are now seeing and the other side of our paper, what we look at following school closures, the consequences that children have faced and are continuing to face.
00:20:22.300But the fact is that policymakers in the Alberta government and right across Canada and the Western world, if they had done their due diligence and looked into this information, it was there ahead of time.
00:20:35.520We know that missed classroom time does have severe consequences for kids.
00:20:39.700And like I said, 110 days minimum of missed classroom time in Alberta, that's not including if your school had an outbreak, which would be two kids or more with a positive COVID test,
00:20:49.920or if your your kid had the sniffles and therefore they couldn't go to school because they had a COVID symptom for however long it took them to get over the sniffles.
00:20:57.320So that is a minimum. Kids actually, in effect, missed quite a lot more time than that. And that does have a negative impact.
00:21:04.480Well, absolutely. And I guess something that probably lended to your study, though, was the fact that every province was quite different for the amount of time.
00:21:13.160You had a widespread. There was 10 weeks in B.C. at a minimum and 27 weeks in Ontario and sort of everything in between.
00:21:19.820So I imagine that gave you some data and information to really see the differential and impacts with the provinces that have less closing, fewer closures than the others.
00:21:28.640Absolutely. So in terms of the academic impact, for example, what I will stress is that this is a very preliminary look.
00:21:37.340A lot of what I do in my role at the Fraser Institute is look at standardized test score data and provinces more or less halted standardized testing during COVID.
00:21:46.660And during sort of the school closure period, which we know is a very long period, they're only just starting to reinstate and get those tests back into action.
00:21:54.920So the data that we have is sort of a preliminary peek into the window.
00:21:59.820But we do know that there was impacts, particularly on math scores is something that we found quite striking in our paper.
00:22:08.600It was in Ontario and Nova Scotia, which are the two provinces which did close schools for the longest period of time, that math scores did seem to be quite impacted.
00:22:19.140In Alberta, we looked at the grade six provincial achievement test scores across all subjects.
00:22:26.000There were some minor declines between 2018-19, so the first or the last year not impacted by COVID school closures compared with 2021-2022, which was the first year where you're not seeing the or well, I guess there were still school closures, but where we have that good test score data that we can look at.
00:22:48.720So we did see a minor decline across all subjects.
00:22:51.720In addition, the Calgary Board of Education reported that the number of students who passed the diploma exams, which are a necessity for graduation, so this is a very important exam for students, and therefore this is quite a significant result.
00:23:07.720So in 2021-22, only 63.6% of Alberta grade 12 students who took that exam actually passed it, and in 2018-19, and that was the same change from 2018-19 to 2021-22, they also saw a decline in the English 31 exam, a decline by 9%.
00:23:30.780So we did see some significant learning loss in provinces that did close schools for long periods of time, but really any lost classroom time, even if the school closures were short, would have an impact.
00:23:45.360And we also saw impacts in terms of severe absenteeism, students who were actually out of school more than they were in school.
00:23:52.640The only province that really reported that in a formal way was Ontario, they did see an increase in severe absenteeism, but we've seen from the UK and the US that where severe absenteeism, so students not coming back to school, where it actually increased in the first school closure year, it actually grew even larger in the following year, even if school closures hadn't continued.
00:24:17.700So those effects were really compounding.
00:24:19.700We also saw that mental health impacts in kids in terms of stat scan data, the Mental Health Commission of Canada did a broad survey and found that the youngest kids who were at the lowest physical health risk from COVID-19 actually faced the greatest rates, self-reported, of severe anxiety and depression and other really negative mental health impacts, and they actually were the longest lasting.
00:24:46.700Contrast that with the oldest segment of the population who was the most at physical health risk of COVID-19, they had a spike at the start in terms of their severe anxiety, but it quickly dissipated, and the rates were actually significantly lower than we saw in the youth.
00:25:04.700So that's why we called the paper the forgotten demographic. It's really that children are bearing a lot of the burden of these COVID-19 school closures and lockdown policies. It's actually lasting quite a long time in terms of those impacts on kids, whereas we're just not seeing that in the older demographics.
00:25:23.700Yeah, I mean, the academic impact is somewhat easier to measure when we have standardized testing and we can see some correlation. The more difficult but possibly more distressing is the social impact. You touched a little upon, I see one of our commenters, Ann McCormack, said their 14-year-old committed suicide the weekend before school starts September 20th.
00:25:42.700You know, the individual cases vary all over the place, but it's certainly there's a lot of vulnerable children. They're suffering from, you know, anxiety. It's a difficult time. Suicide is always a risk and things such as that at the best of times.
00:25:57.700And when you disrupt it with something like this and so much fear and separation from their social peers, it's unquestionable that there's been an impact. But, you know, it's, I guess, difficult to quantify just how much it was.
00:26:11.700Yes, you're right. And that's a really tragic outcome. It's also not an isolated thing. We did see that there were emergency rooms, for example, in Calgary, said that there was an emergency, the emergency room doctors there.
00:26:25.700I forgot which hospital it was, but they reported a significant increase in people who came in, youth who came in due to suicide attempts and self-harm.
00:26:37.700Those Mental Health Commission of Canada surveys and StatsCan surveys and also complemented by CAMH, the Centre for Addictions and Mental Health in Ontario, did Ontario specific studies.
00:26:48.700All really finding the same things, that kids were certainly facing severe anxiety and depression. They were, those rates went up. Rates of reported self-harm or thoughts of suicide did go up amongst youth.
00:27:01.700And, and that, that is a really, really tragic outcome. The other thing that I found interesting when I was reviewing that survey data, because this was another common refrain that, oh, it's just anxiety because of COVID-19, because of the pandemic.
00:27:15.700They're afraid of the virus. They're afraid of the impact that the virus is going to have on their loved ones.
00:27:20.700That was not what the youth survey data showed. It really showed that youth were much more concerned about isolation, family stress from that isolation of being, you know, inside the house, not seeing their friends, missing school.
00:27:35.700It was not, you know, the fear of COVID-19 of the virus itself was actually quite low on the list of concerns for youth in this survey data. And that is, you know, that's really the tragic outcome is that it wasn't the virus.
00:27:49.700It was the policy response to the virus by governments, including the Alberta government, that, that really negatively impacted children.
00:27:58.700So as you said, there was already data on how school closures impact children.
00:28:02.700Now there's certainly a whole much larger set of data to look at and the impacts.
00:28:09.700Have you seen indications that governments are going to be embracing this?
00:28:12.700I'm certain you've been sharing it and sending it their way, but do you think hopefully they've learned from this?
00:28:17.700So if there's another similar event, they, they won't necessarily react as quickly with school closures.
00:28:22.700Well, I certainly hope that that is the case.
00:28:25.700The, the fact is that, you know, there really hasn't been any sort of official national account of school closures.
00:28:33.700Okay. Let's look at exactly what happened.
00:28:36.700You know, our, our paper is, is really one of the only of its kind that, that are looking at this.
00:28:42.700And, and there really hasn't been any kind of government level official assessment of that.
00:28:46.700And that is sort of a depressing fact.
00:28:48.700And maybe governments are working on that behind the scenes and I'm not aware of that.
00:28:52.700But certainly learning from their mistakes would be good.
00:28:55.700I think that, you know, we, we really, like I, like I said, in terms of the academic student success, you know, we see that there has been learning loss, but it is very preliminary.
00:29:06.700And we really won't know the full impact of school closures until, you know, maybe 10 or 20 years from now, because effective, even the World Bank has, has data showing that if you actually have missed classroom time for kids, it results in basically years of effective schooling lost.
00:29:28.700And it's going to be, that it's going to decrease their lifetime earnings at an individual level, and it actually contributes to a decrease in GDP, for the country as a whole.
00:29:42.700a whole when kids are not in school, the amount that they should be in school, when they're not
00:29:47.840learning. Of course, you know, I'll give the caveat that there are some kids who probably did really
00:29:53.180well in this environment that actually discovered that they loved homeschooling or something as a
00:29:58.020result. But there was a lot of kids whose parents had to continue to go to work. They had nobody at
00:30:03.060home helping them with their schoolwork. And this is what we see. There are kids who basically
00:30:07.780disappeared, who just fell out of the school system completely. And so we won't know exactly
00:30:13.060the societal impacts of that for many years to come. But hopefully governments will pay attention
00:30:17.780to the fact that school closures are the root issue in a lot of what we are facing today and what we
00:30:24.920will face in the years to come. Well, I appreciate you guys studying that and compiling it. I mean,
00:30:30.000we know it's a matter of if and when. There seems to be some people just eager to hit the panic button
00:30:33.880at every possible opportunity and react to things. At least there's that much more data that, you know,
00:30:39.160some of us can pull up and say, no, hang on a second. Hang on. This might not be worth it. Here's
00:30:44.600what happened last time. Let's consider a little further before we do something like closing up a
00:30:49.400school. There's much more, of course, you covered in that. And it's a great piece. Where can people find
00:30:54.360the full study and then your other work? Yeah, thanks so much. So they can find the full study. It's called
00:30:59.640The Forgotten Demographic at fraserinstitute.org. And you can find all of the rest of our education
00:31:05.320policy work and all the other policy work that we do. I appreciate it. Great. Thanks,
00:31:09.400Paige. I really appreciate you coming on to talk to us about it. And the, you know, the fact that you
00:31:13.160guys went in and dug that up. So we have that resource available and we can't undo the past,
00:31:17.800but hopefully we can learn from it. Thank you. I agree. Great. Thanks. I'll talk to you again. I hope
00:31:22.920to. So as we said, that was Paige McPherson with the Fraser Institute. And yes, it was a very
00:31:29.320important piece and a very good one. You know, you can't overstate the amount of impact with kids.
00:31:34.360It's different with them. They're in a developmental stage. You know, the impact on one of us,
00:31:38.760a two-, three-year period when you're in your 30s, 40s, 50s, we see the world differently by then. We've
00:31:43.800developed. It still disrupts our lives. But remember when you were a kid, I mean, a week was an eternity back
00:31:49.880then. So when you're talking two years of strangeness, of fear, of masking, of closing,
00:31:54.440of in school and out of school, I think the best analogy of showing the children's view of timelines,
00:32:00.680we all know as we get older, you know, is looking at life as like a roll of toilet paper. I know it's
00:32:04.120an odd analogy, but you know, you start pulling it and it just keeps coming and coming. But once you're
00:32:08.120getting closer and closer to the end, it's going faster and faster. That's your perception of time as a
00:32:12.680child. That's why a month just seems like years to you when you're a child. And a month blasts by us now
00:32:17.960that we're, you know, some of us in our 50s. But again, these are times that you can't get back.
00:32:23.400You know, you can't undo what happened to that child in that period. It's a big percentage of
00:32:29.160their life was living in that world. I really, you know, children are impressionable. They trust us.
00:32:35.000They want, I think it's, you know, ingrained into us to be listening to our elders and learning from
00:32:40.680them. So when they're getting this messaging of, there's a virus that could kill you if you take your
00:32:45.960mask off, or if you don't wash your hands enough times, you're going to kill your grandma or you
00:32:50.200know, I mean, that's the sort of things these kids were terrified. I mean, we want to be responsible
00:32:55.240during the pandemic, I could certainly understand we want to reduce transmission, you want to
00:33:00.040encourage, you know, common sense ideas, handwashing things like that, but shutting down the schools
00:33:05.480for weeks and weeks on end. And as we're seeing, we saw very little benefit. If this was a an infection
00:33:12.040that had been predominantly harming children, that's a different story. If you look at the
00:33:16.600history of the Spanish flu, for example, actually, it was children were some of the ones getting
00:33:20.600terribly hit by that flu. That was a different virus. Perhaps closing schools would make a heck
00:33:25.560of a lot more sense if it was something like that. But we seem to be stuck on this notion that everybody
00:33:31.240from cradle to elderly grave should have been separated. And we did a lot of damage. And it wasn't
00:33:36.680just in the schools, you know, that's what got me to I mean, remember the imagery of arresting people
00:33:41.480for playing hockey for kids for getting out again for socializing for, you know, roped off playgrounds,
00:33:47.160they filled a skate park in one city with sand, you know, and then so the skateboarders wouldn't get
00:33:53.160out. It was just insane. And it's like we always say, if we don't learn at least from these past things,
00:33:59.400though, we will repeat them. There are people ready to panic, we, we see that, and whatever her name
00:34:05.560is, Neely whatever the unusual school board member out in Ontario, who's always causing a ruckus out
00:34:12.040there, Kaplan Murr or something like that. But I mean, she is terrified of COVID. She's masked
00:34:18.760everywhere she goes. She's kind of like Alberta's Dr. Vipon. She's certain there's a boogeyman around
00:34:23.480every corner. People like her will close a school in a heartbeat given another chance. So, and people
00:34:30.760fear for the safety of their children. If you're getting told by the authorities, you're getting told by
00:34:33.960the news, you're getting told by everybody, we have to close these schools for their safety. Well,
00:34:36.920parents will comply. But the impact is huge. That's what we needed was cost benefit throughout
00:34:42.120the entire pandemic. And we never did it. We didn't do it before. But at least we're starting to do it
00:34:46.840after at least the Fraser Institute is so I appreciate that on their part. So okay, I'll turn the page on to
00:34:53.480something similar, though, and some Dave mentioned that for people across the country might not have
00:34:58.120heard about it. But yeah, Alberta had a huge E coli breakout in daycares, you know, again,
00:35:02.440speaking of the safety of our children, and the irony and weirdness of it with a vegan meatloaf
00:35:11.560being part of the cause the E coli. I mean, it just sounds like it's an oxymoron rate to begin with.
00:35:17.080But the real meatloaf had infection as well. But it's not funny at all. In reality, hundreds of kids
00:35:23.560got hit with bad infections. I mean, a number of them were in hospital number of got dialysis,
00:35:29.160they could have some very permanent, you know, kidney damage, things like that. It's a terrible,
00:35:32.840terrible mess. And everybody's scrambling and pointing fingers and trying to get to the bottom
00:35:36.760of that. At least they found the root of it. And I guess we got a caution against overreaction.
00:35:45.400That was the most appalling and terrible thing we can think of happening with children in care,
00:35:51.000daycare. I mean, you put your kids there, you don't want them dying of poisoning from bloody food.
00:35:55.160But people are saying we need more inspectors, we need more cracking down, we need more of this,
00:35:58.440we need more of that. I listened to one person saying every restaurant and kitchen in the whole
00:36:03.320province needs to have every employee trained in food safety. Okay, we need to make sure these
00:36:11.320things don't happen as very little as reasonably possible. I know people say zero, never. Well,
00:36:15.800that's not going to happen. We can only mitigate, we can minimize. And we do want to keep up like,
00:36:21.800I owned a pub and restaurant, we were regularly inspected. AHS was very thorough. If we'd have
00:36:26.840been doing things that were really beyond the pale, we would be shut down. I mean, some people
00:36:31.960are saying, why wasn't this place shut down earlier? It had roaches that were found in it
00:36:36.360and some other things. Yeah, there's some questions to be asked. Ironically, I mean,
00:36:40.360that's an indication of a dirty kitchen. There's no doubt about that. But the roaches probably wouldn't
00:36:44.680have been the cause of the E. coli. If you really look at the roots of that, I mean, somebody was infected,
00:36:48.040wasn't washing their hands after using the washroom, they're preparing food. Yeah,
00:36:51.240disgusting subject matter on a lunch time show. But like everything else, and again,
00:36:57.160when we get children involved, all I'm saying is, let's not, I mean, we should react strongly,
00:37:02.520but let's not overreact in the sense of bringing in a bunch more legislation and pressure when we
00:37:07.480don't necessarily need it. Remember, if you put that expense, as I said, I owned a pub,
00:37:12.920your average margin in that, it's just like the grocery world, it's like 5%. And if you suddenly
00:37:19.560put that new staff training cost up where you had to train each and every one of them on that
00:37:23.320multiple day course in food safety, and there's rules, you have to have some staff members with
00:37:27.320it so that somebody in that kitchen knows how to properly manage the kitchen, that's already there,
00:37:30.520and it's good. If you're requiring that for everybody from the dishwasher to the prep cook to the
00:37:36.120line cooks and everything, you're going to shoot the cost of operation through the roof in a narrow
00:37:40.760margin business, it will put some restaurants over the edge, and it will put the price of everything
00:37:45.560up again, everything comes with a cost. So yeah, let's let's find out what happened with the kitchen
00:37:50.920with those kids and things like that. But let's not let the legislators and bureaucrats go too wild
00:37:56.680with extra controls to respond to this. Likewise, with school closures, you know, if we're not seeing
00:38:05.080as much benefit as we should out of it, then then let's not be doing it again. And it depends on the
00:38:11.480infection, things are different every time, if it's a different bug, we might have a different
00:38:18.200reaction to it. All right, let's see, let's talk about government efficiency, right? So the Canadian
00:38:23.880Mortgage and Housing Corporation is one of the announcements, this one kind of just flew away.
00:38:27.880I mean, as the government talked about it wasn't a bad policy, to be honest,
00:38:31.160they're talking about giving a GST holiday for the construction of rental projects. But what does
00:38:37.640that mean exactly? It sounds like if you're building an apartment building, I guess you'll get a GST
00:38:42.120break on the materials or some of the contracting or services you got when you built it. And it could
00:38:46.920add up to about 383 million a year. But they have no idea how many units that will actually lead to.
00:38:54.440Like I said, reducing taxes is always a good thing, it'll always help, it'll bring down the expenses.
00:38:59.080But they figure the cabinet estimates on how many units this will help facilitate is between the
00:39:03.880thousands to millions. Yeah, that's how wide the spread is. In other words, they have no idea.
00:39:10.120But hey, error on the side of tax cuts, guys, I'll give you credit for doing one thing right once in
00:39:14.200a while, because it doesn't happen bloody often. But yeah, they got no clue, they got no clue.
00:39:18.520It just matches with everything else this government's doing. They're fumbling along,
00:39:21.880they're just shooting in all directions, trying to save their own butts at this point.
00:39:28.920The Post Office, speaking of inefficiency, Canada Post, they kind of made a bit of a comeback. For
00:39:35.320a few years, they were making a bit of a profit. But now, for some years running, they've been losing
00:39:39.960and losing and losing. The last year, they lost $548 million. It's time, I think, to really start
00:39:46.840seriously considering retiring that dinosaur. We don't need it. You know, look at how private
00:39:53.800industry has filled the void. I mean, we don't need letters like we used to. We don't need paper
00:39:59.000bills like we used to. I know some people still rely on that stuff. But we can start phasing that
00:40:03.240out. We really don't need it. You can get everything on your phone now. And as far as packages go and
00:40:08.200everything, Amazon is delivering directly pure, you know, pure letters, part of Canada Post, you know,
00:40:12.440but FedEx, all of those other private careers are doing the job. And they're making money.
00:40:17.000Canada Post, which you would think with such an already established network to be able to deliver
00:40:22.920packages, should be able to take advantage of this new age of so much online ordering and things being
00:40:27.240delivered. But no, they can't. They can't efficiently do it. They're too bloated with their unions and
00:40:31.240inefficiency and old ways of doing things. And they're losing hundreds of millions of dollars a
00:40:35.880year. Again, government just can't do things right. And they won't. So either way, I just say,
00:40:43.480let's start looking towards pulling the pin on those guys. We can get to an end on it.
00:40:49.160Cocaine on a plane. Odd statement in it. You might have seen some of the news. Toronto,
00:40:54.760the Toronto Sun published a story. I think, you know, it was almost media trolling. Hey, I'm not above
00:41:01.400trolling on Twitter and social media and things like that to just kind of poke the hornet's nest a
00:41:05.560little bit and everything. But there was an internet rumor. It started way back when Justin
00:41:10.280Trudeau, again, like, you know, his constant catastrophes and problems everywhere and everything
00:41:15.840he does. He got stuck in India for two extra days because his plane broke down. And he was sitting
00:41:19.820there. And there was a rumor somebody started probably on Facebook or Twitter saying the reason
00:41:23.820that plane's down is because the Indian authorities found cocaine on it and they're not letting him fly
00:41:28.980out. It was ridiculous. You know, I think it's impossible that Trudeau was taking coke. It might explain
00:41:35.380a lot of things, actually. But look, guys, that didn't happen. Even as much as India doesn't like
00:41:41.980Justin Trudeau, they weren't going to send the drug sniffing dogs on a foreign leader's plane while
00:41:47.040he's at a G20 summit. Even if there really was a bunch of coke on there, they wouldn't have been in
00:41:51.460there looking for it. But the Indian media, I did a few interviews on some Indian television networks
00:41:58.080last week. And it's an experience, I'll tell you. They are very, they're very biased. I mean,
00:42:04.680all media's got some biases and everything, but holy cow, these guys are really something else. I
00:42:07.840sat on those panels and it's so torqued and high energy. It was kind of fun to sit on them, but
00:42:12.420they play very loose with some facts and things. Remember, I am far from a defender of Justin Trudeau.
00:42:19.080I spend a large part of my shows all the time ripping into him. But somebody on one of those Indian
00:42:24.080shows the other day said that he had, I love the irony he was playing with it. He said there was
00:42:29.880credible evidence that there was cocaine on Justin Trudeau's plane. And that's why it was held up.
00:42:35.080This was a foreign, former diplomat from India. He used the credible evidence term purposely. That
00:42:43.100was the term that Justin Trudeau used when he stood up and said that India had assassinated somebody on
00:42:49.060Canadian soil. So there was credible evidence. Well, you need to prove it. And yeah, yes. You
00:42:58.300know, so Trevor's saying, yeah, India news channels seem to think he was, you know, yes, what I mean,
00:43:02.140those channels get a lot of traffic. The amount of followers from India I got after doing the,
00:43:06.300you know, on Twitter and such, after doing those interviews was something else. But don't take that
00:43:11.080one to the bank, guys. I, you know, there's a million reasons to get rid of Justin Trudeau.
00:43:15.020So the mythological story of the cocaine on the plane though, is probably not real. As funny as
00:43:22.480it kind of sounds to begin with. Other stuff up on the Western Standard site, Dave mentioned it
00:43:27.700earlier with Target. There's a video showing one of the, the mobs, as he said, they're not thieves,
00:43:31.840they're looters breaking into stores and just stealing everything they can and going to the door.
00:43:36.900This idiotic left-wing policies of enablement, whether it comes to drug use or shoplifting or any of
00:43:43.880those things have led, of course, to high crime and high drug use. Yet they still seem mystified
00:43:49.560about it. So Target, yeah, they're closing stores. In San Francisco, there's, and throughout the West
00:43:53.960Coast, there's been Walmarts and all sorts of other stores. They're folding up. They're pulling
00:43:58.000out. They say, we can't do this. We can't make money and it's unsafe to staff. It's a nightmare to
00:44:01.920work there. And you watch some of those videos. It's disturbing. And then there's the other
00:44:05.720bleeding heart, piss and moan, and liberals, oh, well, they're, it just shows how hard up people are
00:44:10.700and they're desperate. No, they aren't. The video showed that in the recent one, it wasn't a food.
00:44:15.820They were stealing. It wasn't clothing. It wasn't necessities. They went to footlocker because they
00:44:20.180wanted Nikes. They went to Lululemon because they wanted yoga pants. And they went to the Apple store,
00:44:26.560not for apples. That's his food. Apple electronic products. Come on guys. They're thieves. They're
00:44:32.380looters. It's intolerable. And until people start pushing back, these stores are going to keep closing.
00:44:37.860And guess what? Stores like Target and that, those were ones that helped people who really were on a
00:44:41.980lower income because they worked with, you know, large volumes of products and they can afford to
00:44:48.140get things to you cheaper. Now those retail outlets won't be there. Jobs are lost and people are going
00:44:52.800to pay more prices for goods. Why? Because of idiotic liberal enablement policies of crime. That's why
00:44:59.440you have to charge people. If they steal things, you have to punish them. Not talking about public
00:45:05.520whippings and hangings, but you can't let them off with nothing. And that's what's been happening down
00:45:08.740there. And this is the consequence that anybody with a quarter of a brain could have seen coming,
00:45:12.940but a quarter of a brain is a big ask when it comes to people in government on either side of
00:45:18.000our border. One final thing we're seeing is as things heat up, Dave mentioned that too, with the
00:45:22.720announcements of emissions caps and things like that, this will be something changing the dynamic
00:45:27.280in Canada because it's been found now that Ontario, the average household, is going to be paying
00:45:33.320another 3,300 a year if they get rid of natural gas out there. So it's not just Alberta is the
00:45:38.940big boy anymore. It's going to hurt Ontario. That changes the dynamic. If it was Quebec,
00:45:43.640we already would have thrown out the emissions caps if they found it was going to hurt them that much.
00:45:47.600But yes, these caps is banning this idiocy of stopping natural gas. When we sit on that resource,
00:45:52.840it's costing everybody from coast to coast, including Ontario. And I think, I think if voters are going
00:46:00.660to push back, this liberal government, this tone deaf government doesn't realize why they're dropping
00:46:04.900in the polls like a stone. It's things like this. People can't pay the rent. They can't buy food.
00:46:09.420They can't get mortgages. And you morons are just adding to every expense with your ideological,
00:46:14.980insane push against the use of fossil fuels, even if they make life affordable and livable.
00:46:20.660Oh, well, all right. That's all I've got for you this week, guys. Make sure to tune in a little
00:46:25.940later. The pipeline will be on. It'll be our panel show. We'll cover a lot more of this sort of stuff.
00:46:30.820And hey, share all this stuff on your social media channels. We need to get it out there.
00:46:34.560It's important. So I appreciate everybody tuning in with me today. And I'll see you all again next
00:46:40.180week at this time. And we'll see what sort of new craziness we'll have to rant about.
00:46:46.980Here's an update on commodity prices in Lethbridge for today. Cash barley remains at 335. Feed wheat is
00:46:52.840steady at 350. While October corn is unchanged at 350. And November-December corn is trading at 318.
00:46:58.540In the milling wheat markets, December Minneapolis futures dropped 13.5 cents to 7.53 per bushel,
00:47:05.960with local hardware at spring bid for October movement at 9.40 per bushel.
00:47:10.040Looking at canola, November futures added $11.90 at 7.2610 per ton, with delivered buys for October
00:47:17.340movement at 16.12 per bushel. In the pulse markets, nearby red lentil prices are holding at 36.5 cents per
00:47:24.120pound, and yellow peas are higher 25 cents at 10.75 a bushel. In the cattle markets, October
00:47:30.500live cattle are higher 45 cents at 185.25 per hundredweight. For more information on pricing
00:47:36.540or picked-up options, give me a call at 403-394-1711. I'm Matt Buscombe at Marketplace
00:47:43.380Commodities. Accurate, real-time marketing information and pricing options.
00:47:47.300Canadian Shooting Sports Association. Without the CSSA, our gun rights would have been taken long,
00:47:54.420long ago. These guys are on the front lines, helping to draft smart and intelligent firearms
00:48:00.080regulations and legislation in Canada. And more importantly, educating the public about how we
00:48:06.080keep guns out of the hands of the wrong people. We've become a member. It's absolutely worth every penny.