On this episode of the Corey Morgan Show, host Corey Morgan is joined by Jay Hill, a former member of Parliament, to talk about the ongoing corruption investigation into the Canadian Public Service Commission (CSO). They also discuss the media and its relationship with the government.
00:00:30.000Good day. Welcome to the Corey Morgan Show. I am, as the name would imply, Corey Morgan.
00:00:39.340And I'm going to bend your ear for the next hour or so on a number of issues. There's lots to cover.
00:00:45.600Looking on the bright side, you know, I'm always cursing, complaining, going on about things. I'm sort of a grouch. That's okay.
00:00:51.100But it's raining in Alberta. It's finally raining. I mean, you're hearing from some people saying it's not enough. It's too little, too late.
00:00:58.280Okay. But it's still better than nothing. So we could use that cool down. Hopefully some stuff greens up.
00:01:04.400Give our agricultural producers a break and, you know, give our firefighters a break. Just everybody a break.
00:01:10.240Heck, even your lawns at home. Boy, it's been quite the drought going on here so far.
00:01:14.220So, yes, this show runs live for those who are catching it on the social media channels.
00:01:19.760And by all means, use that comment scroll like Scott and Stuart have already. I appreciate it.
00:01:24.900I don't necessarily read them all out, but I see them all there. Helps keep the conversation going.
00:01:28.940Let's just keep it civil, of course, and we can all have a good time.
00:01:33.280Send questions to my guests and such if you like.
00:01:35.840I've got coming in today Jay Hill. He's been on the show a number of times in the past.
00:01:39.600He was a member of parliament for a good number of years before finally retiring out of there.
00:01:44.740I'm looking forward to talking to Jay because there's just, I want to find out about some of the procedure.
00:01:49.500I want to find out what's going on. How on earth do we deal with this, this CCP corruption issue?
00:01:55.860How is it that a minority government can get away with putting off an inquiry so effectively?
00:02:00.260Are there things the opposition can do? Are there not things they could do?
00:02:03.780I think Jay will be able to answer a lot of those questions. So I'm looking forward to that.
00:02:06.800Of course, we'll be checking in with Jay, or Jay, checking in with our news editor, Dave, in a little while.
00:02:14.700But first, I'm going to get on about what's got me going today.
00:02:18.160And it's talking about a nice self-serving subject for me, the media. Yes, the media.
00:02:24.280And, you know, lots of folks are probably familiar with that old saying,
00:06:14.020I mean, come on, they're putting the screws to them. What else do they get to say?
00:06:15.980Well, fine, we don't have to give links. We'll just stop.
00:06:19.120This response, though, is going to harm everybody.
00:06:21.300It's tougher than ever to access a broad spectrum of news coverage and analysis.
00:06:26.200But hope is on the horizon in some ways.
00:06:27.880Elon Musk, I mean, he's proven to be a disruptor indifferent to the establishment, and I love that.
00:06:32.860He's willing to go against the grain and stir up the social media world.
00:06:36.680And Musk has the means to take, and that's the reality of it, the financial beating that comes with going into such a battle.
00:06:43.540Now, whether, for example, one likes Tucker Carlson or not doesn't really matter.
00:06:46.860The unfolding, though, story from his firing from Fox News and his streaming his show on Twitter now is remarkable.
00:06:54.280Carlson's first episode of Tucker on Twitter garnered 114.8 million views between June 6th and June 12th.
00:07:02.380Now, to put that in perspective, the average CNN show draws about 500,000 viewers.
00:07:08.720Just blew them completely out of the water.
00:07:10.840A whole new broadcast medium is exploding on the scene, and it's already leaving the conventional media behind.
00:07:17.860If a show, of course, whether it's Tucker or anything else, can gather millions or tens of millions of viewers, it will draw advertising and revenue.
00:07:27.860If the platform's owned by somebody as intransigent as Elon Musk, you know, it won't capitulate to government control, at least not easily, if ever.
00:07:36.100The battle for free media versus government control media is just heating up in Canada.
00:07:40.360It's going to take some time, but the legacy media outlets will collapse eventually for lack of viewership, despite the government subsidies.
00:07:47.440And we will see independent media outlets.
00:07:49.400Some will come, some will go, but eventually they will establish the new order of media provision.
00:07:53.920The only question now, though, is how long will it take and how much damage will the government cause in trying to maintain an obsolete status quo for its own benefit?
00:08:01.500Well, that's what's got me going today, guys.
00:08:04.980Yes, the battle for your eyes and ears and the federal government using all its tools it can to try and control that.
00:08:12.060And it's just it's it's sad and it's repugnant, to be honest.
00:08:15.420All right, let's talk to our news editor.
00:09:46.740And speaking of Tucker Carlson, we have a story on his third Twitter episode that aired last night talking about the arrest of President Donald Trump and his appearance in the courtroom in Miami yesterday.
00:10:05.760You remember a tweet from the weekend, Corey, on Premier Daniel Smith in her restaurant in High River.
00:10:13.420She was washing dishes there and that tweet got a lot of attention.
00:10:17.180So I guess she's gone from washing dishes to washing her hands of the restaurant because it's now up for sale.
00:10:26.260So if you want to own your own little restaurant on a rail car, give Premier Daniel Smith a call.
00:10:33.220Well, the other thing worth mentioning this morning, Corey, is you remember that $13 billion taxpayer gift to Volkswagen?
00:10:43.300Well, apparently, according to the parliamentary budget officer, it's already gone up by more than $2 billion, already $2 billion over budget.
00:10:52.800And I think they only announced the thing maybe a month ago.
00:11:37.980Well, it's, yeah, a lot of busy one in the newsroom today.
00:11:41.060Dave, I'll let you get back to putting that up there so you can continue to stay free from, you know, government largesse and keep getting those stories up.
00:14:04.960It's, you know, people, you see the earbuds in with the next generation, they're not listening to radio stations.
00:14:10.700And if these companies weren't being subsidized all this time, then these stations would have adapted, perhaps, or these outlets in general.
00:14:21.540And some of those jobs, perhaps, could have been saved.
00:14:24.260But as it is now, we gave them the money.
00:14:27.280We got little to nothing of benefit out of it.
00:14:29.420Yeah, now they're going to centralize further, as Dave said, into just CTV.
00:14:33.420So we're getting fewer and fewer outlets.
00:14:36.120And none of these outlets are really going to want to ever be too critical of their sugar daddy in Ottawa,
00:14:41.520where they might find the pin pulled on their subsidies.
00:15:19.540And what I kind of said in the email, what I want to get to is we've had all of this federal talk.
00:15:23.360We've had all of this political games going on for months.
00:15:26.740We have a federal government that's in a minority position, but they still, it appears, to be able to skate on a public inquiry.
00:15:35.120Like, I'm just wondering, are there parliamentary things that can be done to address this by the opposition parties, or are there hands tied?
00:15:41.520Well, first of all, absolutely, there are things that can be done.
00:15:46.600I think you're well aware that I hold the dubious distinction of having been the only member of parliament in the history of our Canadian parliament to hold the position of caucus or party whip four times.
00:16:01.100My staff did some research and couldn't find any other time that anybody had been in that position twice, let alone four times.
00:16:08.880And I've also been the house leader, both in opposition for the chief opposition, but also for the government, which is a cabinet position, as you know.
00:16:21.740So I'm very well versed in, certainly in what can happen and how a government can be held accountable.
00:16:32.220Certainly, part of the reason why I decided to try something else other than public life in 2010 was at the time I had reached the, basically the apex of my political career.
00:16:44.000I was in cabinet, I was sort of sitting on the right hand of the prime minister at the time as the government house leader or the leader of the government in the house of commons.
00:16:53.980And as such, in a minority parliament, it's a very, very difficult position normally, certainly for a conservative it is, because you have to negotiate with the other parties, Corey, bill by bill, motion by motion, daily,
00:17:08.640sometimes hourly, sometimes hourly, to try and get anything done for the government's agenda to get it through parliament.
00:17:15.100And, of course, with conservatives, we don't have any natural allies.
00:17:18.800All the other parties are, shall we say, left of centre.
00:17:22.840And so it was immensely stressful for the two minority parliaments that we had from 2006 to 2011, until Prime Minister Harper won his one and only majority.
00:17:35.540So I fully recognise what can be done and what can't be done when it comes to negotiating with the other parties.
00:17:44.700Sadly, for Canadians, we have an opposition party, the NDP, under the leadership of Jagmeet Singh, that has given our prime minister free reign to do whatever the hell he wants.
00:17:56.680And that's totally unlike the way we were held accountable, Harper Conservatives, in those two minorities that I was a part of.
00:18:04.920Yeah, well, and just the talking out of both sides of his mouth, though, whereas Jagmeet Singh has been very critical, rightly so, of this whole scandal.
00:18:14.620I mean, see, we might as well call it that by now.
00:18:16.460You know, the scandal of the Chinese Communist Party interference and the Trudeau government working so hard to block an inquiry by all means.
00:18:23.700But, you know, he's tabling motions, a non-binding motion, a non-binding motion.
00:18:29.640But are there things that can be done that can force this then without bringing down the government?
00:18:34.780He's saying, okay, we'd have to, it's not worth bringing the government down over right now.
00:18:38.660I mean, not all of us might agree, but fine.
00:18:40.980But, you know, is Opposition Day, is there something they could put in as a bill or something that can force this without turning it to a confidence matter?
00:19:13.340But what we did, what Stephen Harper did when prime minister and I as both his house leader and earlier as his government whip,
00:19:22.640we negotiated on a continual basis with the other parties to say, okay, well, how can we work with you to amend this
00:19:31.540so that it doesn't become a confidence measure?
00:19:34.220In fact, we never played that so-called trump card of declaring something a confidence unless we felt very clearly that it was so integral to our government agenda
00:19:46.600for what we were trying to accomplish for Canadians that we had no other choice.
00:19:52.300So that happened very rarely, that we would sort of have a showdown.
00:19:56.060And usually it was behind closed doors where you say, you know, face to face, well, this is so much part of our electoral promises or whatever,
00:20:06.220that if you're insistent, other house leaders, other whips about getting your caucuses to vote against it, and we lose this,
00:20:15.680then we're going to go into an election.
00:20:17.360That's very rare under most circumstances.
00:20:19.740The problem is, is that Jagmeet Singh never plays that card.
00:20:24.800He never, I'm sure he never says to the prime minister, or maybe behind closed doors,
00:20:29.980the prime minister indicates all the time to him, well, you know, if you go against this, Jagmeet,