Everything is about abortion, even it's not ... BUT IT IS - The Pipeline, Episode 11
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Summary
In this week's episode, we discuss the Alberta Budget, the Conservative Party Leadership Race, and the latest on COVID19, a tech music festival that's basically a music festival for the kids. Plus, we talk about a mystery illness that's been plaguing the Western Standard's senior reporter.
Transcript
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You're listening to The Pipeline, the Western Standards National Affairs Program recording
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Each week we break down the issues, discuss them in depth, and examine some of the broader
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implications for Western Canada and beyond, featuring from Calgary, the Western Standards
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And featuring, returning this week, Deirdre Mitchell-McLean from Strathmore, a senior reporter
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I'm feeling way better than last week when I had some mystery illness, which, hey, maybe
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we'll even talk about a mystery illness this week, hosted by myself, digital editor Paul
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Holmes, coming to you from Victoria, British Columbia, far away from the Alberta budget.
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Topics this week will include the Alberta budget, and the Conservative Party leadership race,
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and my coronavirus, the very latest on COVID-19 2021.
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COVID-19, that is like a music, that's like a kind of a tech music festival, it sounds like.
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You know, yeah, the joke doesn't work the second time.
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Everyone knows, Paul forgot to hit play the first time we attempted to record this.
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And for episode 11, I feel like, you know, forgetting once is pretty good on my previous
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People don't know how many times you've missed this out.
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People have no idea how many times you've missed it.
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And actually, the last couple of weeks, we did a single take.
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So anyway, before we get started, however, we are going to talk about membership of the
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If you are a member, thank you so much for signing up.
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And if you are, if you've been thinking about becoming a member, check out the membership
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page on WesternStandardOnline.com and consider becoming a member today and supporting independent
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So the Alberta budget, I know that there was a very lengthy lockup and that's about
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So Deirdre, why don't you tell a foreigner like myself exactly what went down on budget
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So budget day for those of us who actually live in, you know, breathe for this stuff,
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Lockups started at seven o'clock in the morning.
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So, you know, all of us here just on pins and needles, wondering what the budget was
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And I, I mean, it was, there were no great shocks.
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They only released their previous budget four months ago.
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And Derek, what was your thoughts on the budget?
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Well, there was two schools of thought going into it.
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From my perspective, I had the more pessimistic expectation.
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The two schools of thought were it was just going to continue more or less implementing
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And the other school of thought was this is where they were going to get very serious about
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reducing the size of government, really reducing spending.
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I mean, some of the more hopeful conservatives thought that would be the case.
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And I love to say, I told you so that's exactly what happened.
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It was more or less just as Deirdre said, continuing what happened in the first budget with a few
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It's really steady as she goes from the first budget, which is a cumulative $1 billion reduction
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Listening to the unions and to the NDP and too much of the media, you'd think that they
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were cutting 50 or 70% of the budget, but it's just $1 billion out of a budget that'll
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reach 50, 58 billion if I'm not, or revenue will reach 58 billion.
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So spending around 57.5 billion by 2023, a $1 billion cut over that time, which is pretty
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small considering that Alberta's got a massive budget per capita compared to other provinces.
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But if, you know, we had a huge, huge spending increases under Stelmac, huge spending increases
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under Redford, Prentice was a blip that never really got his budget through, but he had planned
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And then we had big increases again under the NDP, although funny enough, smaller increases
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proportionally under the NDP than we had under both Redford and Stelmac.
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So if we were going into this, as the UCP told us, I think correctly that the NDP had blown
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the budget and that Alberta was spending wildly.
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You think we'd see some actual big spending cuts, but we're seeing $1 billion over four years,
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they are cutting some spending significantly within departments and moving things around.
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So within health, for example, spending on health is staying about the same.
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It's a minor, minor increase, I believe, but it's effectively the same, although not accounting
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You'll want to point that out, but it's more or less staying the same, but they're moving
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And that allows the unions and the NDP to say, look, this particular item, normally in
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acute care where the unions are more sensitive, that's getting a reduction.
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That's because money's moving from A to B within a department.
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So the narrative around this is that spending is just getting slashed and burned, that they're
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taking an ax of things when in fact they're taking a scalpel to it.
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So they're taking all of the heat that they would take politically for genuinely large spending
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cuts right now, but they're not going to actually get much of the credit for it because as we'll
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get into on the revenue side, it is hopeful at best that they're even going to get to a balanced
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budget in four years, because these spending cuts are not that big.
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So post-secondary funding saw probably the biggest cut at around 20%.
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And now granted, like you said, it's the overall that they're looking at.
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So overall, they're only cutting 3% in funding, but, or sorry, 3% of their spending.
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But some areas are definitely seeing a lot more than, than others.
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So while health may be maintained or the health budget may be maintained, post-secondary budget
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And that will, that will be passed on, of course, to future-
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Well, I actually, over the four year period here, they're, they're actually just cutting
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So it's, it's, it's about a billion over four years out of a $58 billion budget.
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Spending is as high now as, as it was, it'll be, spending will be virtually the same as when
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Um, but Deirdre is correct that some departments are going to, are getting, uh, getting it harder
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than others, like, like post-secondary, uh, not to say post-secondary is not important,
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but on the, uh, in the pyramid of our needs, I mean, uh, probably police and firefighters
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Yes, but the government is passing that on to residents.
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No, but in terms, in terms of what government should do, post-secondary is important, but
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a lot, remember, a lot of post-secondary isn't even actually, uh, teaching anybody and getting
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A lot of it is just research and things like that.
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And it's up to universities to determine, uh, you know, how much is, is going to actually
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And, uh, so the government's actually bringing in new, enabling legislation on this, uh, which
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is going to give the minister of, uh, post-secondary education, uh, Dimitri Nicolaes,
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the greatest, uh, greater power over how, how universities are spending their money here
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if they want to be able to get government money.
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But in the bigger picture though, this is Deirdre is right.
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Some departments are, are getting, uh, a significant haircut here.
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Others are, are actually going to see increases.
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Kennedy's talk about government getting directly involved in business, the way, uh, say the
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Trudeau government was federally in the old, the old Trudeau, pure Trudeau or
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law heat in Alberta with the government owning companies, which they're talking about.
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Now you're going to see probably big spending increases in some departments.
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Um, and considering health takes up about 40, 45% of the budget, it probably does need
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But the politics of this is they're, they're taking the heat as if they're slashing and
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burning the government when things are more or less staying the same.
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Uh, so I would figure, uh, and of course I would say this, but I would figure they may
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as well just significantly cut spending because the headlines will be exactly the same regardless.
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Uh, but right now that they, they risk having the worst of both worlds where they take all
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the heat for cutting some spending here, but they might potentially not even get to a balanced
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If they're wild, wild revenue projections don't come to pass.
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Uh, they're, they're predicting oil to average over the next three years, between the three
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years, about, uh, a little, I think they're going to get, they want to project to get the
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65, but, uh, projecting, uh, an average of about 61, $62 a barrel on average over this time
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with, uh, revenue increases, a super boom of increases of $4 billion in 2022 and, uh, another
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I mean, I have a hard time seeing how that's happened.
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Those are numbers that would require like a PST to take place and their numbers are not
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So the point is that they might take all this heat over cutting some, a little bit of spending
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and not actually get the credit for a balanced budget at the end of the road, unless these
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Oh, a provincial budget is typically just health, education, and then a bunch of other
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You can't cut a provincial budget in this country without cutting health and education
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That's where I always kind of thought their, their campaign commitments on this were a
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bit funny is they said, well, you know, we're not going to touch health and education.
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Well, that's 60% of the budget and everything else, you know, like if you're taking the biggest
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piece off the table, um, health and education sound the nicest, but remember those departments
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There's a ton of Alberta's government employees are the best paid in the country.
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Uh, in many cases by a huge margin, that's, what's driving up the costs.
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And if you're not going to touch those things, you're not going to get to a balanced budget,
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which is one reason the Tories, uh, maybe, maybe Deirdre can elaborate on this.
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She did, uh, she did an article on this yesterday.
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Uh, why the Tories have been actually raising some significant taxes in the background, but
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really downplaying it, actually denying that they're doing it, even though it's right there
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And so as much as, you know, why don't you run us through some, maybe some of the taxes
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that are in this budget in the last that have not really gotten very much attention.
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So in the last budget, of course, was bracket creep.
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And I think that we did talk, we have talked about that before, but what bracket creep is,
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is when the government doesn't index income to inflation.
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And so what happens when they don't do that is that if you do get those increases during
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the year, your, uh, tax bracket actually doesn't move with those regular cost of living, uh,
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Now, I will say as well that Alberta has what we have three tax brackets, like we're not
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like other provinces that have like six or seven.
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Um, so it's, it's not as, uh, much of an issue in Alberta, but at the same time, if those
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brackets don't change, when most people are getting, like I said, a cost of living increase
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each year, or just a general raise, they can move into the next tax bracket.
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Um, and normally that would have been indexed to the cost of living and the, uh, cost of
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And that one's always fun because Jason Kenney as Alberta director of the Canadian taxpayer
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Federation was a staunch defender against bracket creep and had been even at the federal level
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So it was just major hypocrisy when he actually gave bracket creep to Alberta was fantastic.
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And then they brought in, uh, they brought in another of other taxes, uh, more along the,
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uh, education property tax, which people don't really understand very well.
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The municipalities collect it for the province.
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Uh, so when education property taxes go up, people tend to actually blame the municipalities
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for it, not the province, but it's, it is a provincial tax that goes to education.
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It's a very strange and regressive tax that we still have, but you know, one of the things
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that's going to be going up by a massive margin.
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Well, it's, it's 3.1% on average, but, uh, I did, um, I did have a friend suggest that
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what the municipalities should do, just like with the carbon tax, when that was listed on
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your, uh, power and gas bills, that it should be listed as, um, you know, provincial government
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They do that in British Columbia, when you get your, when you get your property taxes,
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uh, in most, I think every, I think every municipality, cause we have a government agency that, that
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And there's a standard statement you get, and it shows you what each of those taxes are,
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who gets that money and what you're actually paying.
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And so people do know when they, when they pay the education component, how much of their
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It is there on your statement when you get your, would you get your property tax form
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Uh, but I'm not sure how much the control the municipalities have to more clearly specify.
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We did not increase this tax, the province did, uh, cause the municipalities don't, don't
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Uh, it's the same way as when people, when you pay your income tax, you're not, uh, you're
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not necessarily, people don't even know how much is going to the federal and how much it's
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going to the provincial and how much of that gets washed around and the bureaucracy of Ottawa.
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Uh, now a lot of kind of big government conservatives are okay with these things.
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They say, well, if you don't like tobacco tax, don't smoke.
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Well, the answer should be, if you don't like income tax, don't work.
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The fact is, this is a, this is a personal choice people make, uh, unless the government's
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got a right to tell you what to do with your, with your own adults, what to do with their
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Um, they don't make much sense, but they've increased the tobacco tax in the province.
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So big government, uh, progressives and big government conservatives, both like them.
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Um, but you know, look, vaping is the biggest victory for getting people off of tobacco since
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This is a wildly safer or less harmful, I should say, alternative to smoking.
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Uh, they're saying they're going to do this to prevent youth from getting it.
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Well, it's already illegal for youth to get it.
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If youth are getting this stuff, then clearly the problem was, is with the point of sale
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But you're, you're, you're, you're decreasing the marginal attractiveness of one versus the
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So now on a relative scale, smoking becomes more economical.
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And it's not the business of politicians to say what we can put in our bodies.
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If I want to drink gasoline, that's my business.
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And that's why we have to get rid of the gasoline tax too.
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The vaping tax in the province of British Columbia is 7% because that's our sales tax.
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If you're vaping, uh, you know, come to British Columbia, you pay lower taxes now than Alberta.
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The point of all this is on taxes though, is, uh, Deirdre reported in the standard yesterday.
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Um, the finance minister and the premier are going around saying, we promised we would balance the budget without raising any taxes.
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Some of them big, some of them small tobacco and vaping on the small side, but very big.
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Uh, especially over time will be the education property tax and, uh, the bracket creep increase to, uh, to our income taxes.
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So this is, uh, you know, so people bleeding that, oh, this is all just spending cuts and no tax increases.
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That's going to grow, uh, 800% more than spending will be cut.
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So people who want more taxes and more spending should are getting eight times a better deal out of this than libertarians and conservatives who want to see this done on the spending side.
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From a government revenue perspective, bracket creep is the best thing ever because every additional dollar of taxes comes in at the highest marginal rate for that person.
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And so, you know, you're not getting, if your lowest marginal rate is 15%, you're not getting that on every additional dollar people make.
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You're getting the 35% or whatever percent at the high end, right?
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But remember, Alberta only has three tax brackets.
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Our, our taxes don't increase until we reach 120, is it 120,000?
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So our first tax bracket is up to a hundred and some thousand dollars.
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So like that is, that, that is something that no other province has.
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Every other province has at least two to three before they hit 120,000.
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I didn't know we were talking about Bernie Sanders on the podcast today.
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So, so the, uh, to conclude this segment then provincial governments like to tax people.
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The, uh, speaking of politics, the conservative parties leadership race.
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Now, uh, uh, looks, you know, we talked about, I think last week, Derek, that, uh, Peter McKay
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Uh, we're seeing a lot of, uh, uh, O'Toole's racking up quite a few endorsements.
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I saw that, uh, there was an endorsement from Chuck straw this morning.
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What, what, what do you see happening on the ground?
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Well, I, I do agree that Peter McKay has this in the bag because he has, he has the rec, the name recognition.
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He has the, uh, political history and the background to really be able to take away this race.
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But I mean, Andrew Scheer in my mind was not even a contender in 2017.
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Um, so I think it's important that we do pay attention to the other leadership contenders,
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because what if you have another Andrew Scheer and, and who might that possibly be?
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Well, and, and it's interesting cause we're seeing down, you know, just for comparison,
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cause I watch us politics a lot with the democratic race, you know, uh, it started out as being
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Biden versus Sanders, but then all these other people came in and all, you just never know
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And then here we are, you know, a few months later, it's Biden versus Sanders.
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And, and I, I suspect that's probably, uh, you know, what we're going to see, you know,
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in, in the conservative party here is we're going to see a lot of, you know, names fly
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And I think we have seen that already, but, um, I know you, there was some candidates in
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particular that you were looking at, um, for leadership, uh, uh, Deirdre, um, that were
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worth, worth, uh, mentioning and discussing where, uh, before the show.
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So even though I don't see them as having a huge opportunity to, you know, really,
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become something in this leadership race, but there's only two female contenders, Marilyn
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Gladjew out of Ontario and Leslyn Lewis also out of Ontario.
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Um, but still there's only, there's only two female contenders.
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So very pro life and, you know, has, has their endorsement.
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I think, uh, I think she has walked a good line on allowing private members bills, allowing
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free votes because, and I mean, she's just using basic, uh, math saying over 70% of over 75%
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of Canadians want to have things like abortion services available through the public health
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But so Marilyn Gladjew is looking at that and saying, um, you know, private members can
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We can have a discussion about it, but I really don't think it's going to gain traction.
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She doesn't see any need to institute something like, uh, like whipped boats when it comes to
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Leslyn Lewis, like I said, uh, you know, very pro life.
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And now whether or not the thing is as much as some people, I'm sure Derek, you'll comment
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on this as much as a lot of people don't want to see this as gaining, uh, sorry, they don't
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want to see these types of issues gaining traction during the conservative party leadership race.
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Andrew Scheer or his critics, cause it could, it may have not actually stemmed with Andrew
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Scheer, but it kind of did, but his critics made it a really big issue about whether or not,
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um, he would legislate on social issues in that way.
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And the thing is that there are a lot of swing voters in Canada.
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And one of the things that critics and analysts and pundits suggested during the 2019, uh, general
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election was that Andrew Scheer's waffling on the subject just didn't give people, uh, the
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faith that they needed to have in him as a leader to not make these massive changes.
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So whether, whether people like it or not, this is of concern.
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I think to a number of Canadians that would possibly vote for a conservative, um, leader,
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a conservative prime minister, I think it's an issue.
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And I think it's one that they have to deal with and they have to deal with it well in order
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to be contenders in 2023 or whenever that happens.
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I, you know, I, if you'd asked me a few years ago, I would have said that I was reluctantly
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I might've been the, I might've been the Hillary Clinton of a decade ago opinion, you know, safe,
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And, and my opinion, frankly, has evolved over the past few years to become less pro-choice
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than before, because we see these crazy radicals, you know, in the past few years to become less
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vulnerable, you know, uh, you know, that are just, you know, I just wish in this country
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And I probably watched too much U S politics for my own health, but you know, can we, can
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we have a mature adult conversation about this issue without everybody freaking out?
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Like, you know, no, there's no way to have a mature conversation about this.
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And, and, and Canada is fairly unique in the world.
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And so far as like, we have zero regulations on, on abortion zero and most countries in
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the world have some, and they're still somehow surviving and getting along.
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And so, so that's, that's the big problem I have with this is like, you know, if, if you, and
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there was a poll that came out, I wish I could remember the source.
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There was a poll that came out and asked about in particular Canadians supported third trimester
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And the majority of Canadian, I think it was McLean's, but I can't remember.
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And the majority of Canadians are opposed to third trimester abortions.
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As the only guys, guys, guys, guys, this is, let's not, I see what Paul said.
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We're trying to discuss the politics around this.
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And we are really just about to dive into making this the abortion episode.
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If you have something to add to this, go, go ahead.
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Um, women don't decide in the third trimester that they no longer want to have a baby.
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Conversation that belongs between a woman and her doctor.
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And the thing is Ireland was the most perfect example.
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They had, um, I got guys, guys, guys, this is now an abortion.
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We are talking about the Tory leadership race and now we're talking about Ireland.
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And I, I am pulling rank and I'm pulling this back to the Tory leadership race.
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This is, there are some pro-lifers in it and that's controversial.
00:28:10.480
Well, and I, and I think to Deirdre's point and I'll, I'll scale back on this Derek.
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Um, you know, we don't want to turn it into that episode, but.
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Like, you know, people, people are, they're going to look at their leadership camp.
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You can't this leadership campaign and who ultimately the person that is elected leader of the conservative party.
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This is, they're going to have to have a stance on this and it's going to have to be saleable to the Canadian public.
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And this is going to be a perennial issue in every leadership race.
00:28:43.480
And what normally happens is anyone who's got a real chance of winning takes a very soft position on it.
00:28:51.480
They're trying to take a position that don't entirely alienate social conservatives, but don't scare off everybody else who's afraid of anything happening on this.
00:29:02.480
I think actually the majority of Canadians are open to something on this.
00:29:05.480
The problem is the debate it's polarized everywhere on the planet.
00:29:09.480
You have this, but it's particularly polarized in Canada.
00:29:12.480
Anyone brings this up and pro-lifers do themselves no favors when they're saying like, yeah, let's just ban it.
00:29:21.480
That is a very small proportion of Canadians of even pro-lifers who want that.
00:29:25.480
But anyway, this, none of the pro-life candidates are going to win.
00:29:30.480
In fact, no one besides anyone named Peter McKay is going to win.
00:29:36.480
So I agreed to have this as a topic on here because it's happening and it's important, but it's also not important because it's already finished.
00:29:49.480
Peter McKay is the leader elect, or he is essentially the crown prince of the party right now, just waiting for the current king to expire.
00:29:58.480
And I'm actually curious, Derek, because I think you may have paid more attention than I did in the 2017 leadership race.
00:30:05.480
Did you see the possibility of it coming down to Andrew Scheer and Maxine Bernier?
00:30:13.480
We always knew it would be once Kevin O'Leary was out.
00:30:16.480
With Kevin O'Leary in, we thought it would be Bernier versus O'Leary.
00:30:21.480
Funny enough, he actually, O'Leary actually may have won.
00:30:28.480
But once O'Leary was out, we knew it was going to come down to Scheer at the end of the day.
00:30:32.480
But as much as we might compare this to, say, the Republican or Democratic primaries, they're not the same.
00:30:39.480
Because there's no way to weed people out, except in the rare circumstances like O'Leary, where he just decided, oh, shit, I might win this thing.
00:30:47.480
Because, you know, in the states, they stagger voting.
00:30:50.480
You know, you have Iowa, then New Hampshire, South Carolina, Super Tuesday, and they vote in pieces.
00:30:57.480
And so you have a way to test the candidates and the field narrows out.
00:31:01.480
You know, so, OK, Bloomberg, he's not going to be able to buy his way to the presidency as easily as he thought.
00:31:10.480
That does not happen in any Canadian race because we don't have any kind of staggered voting.
00:31:19.480
It's got much less drama and much less strategy behind it than in the American system.
00:31:24.480
I thought Andrew Scheer had a chance of winning it.
00:31:27.480
I went into the convention believing that Bernier had a very strong chance.
00:31:38.480
But I was not discounting Andrew Scheer as crazy as a decision as that might be.
00:31:46.480
I think as an outsider, you know, just, you know, because I wasn't involved much in that one.
00:31:52.480
I knew who Andrew Scheer was and I kind of, you know, I didn't have a strong opinion one way or the other.
00:31:59.480
And I really thought the guy didn't have a chance.
00:32:02.480
Like, you know, I knew he'd be in the top five.
00:32:11.480
I think because I did join to vote and I think I had him like third or fifth or something on my own ballot.
00:32:19.480
He was he was milquetoast enough that I could, you know, I could I could, you know, hold my nose.
00:32:31.480
I think I like to wrap it up, you know, in lieu of a future abortion episode.
00:32:37.480
We're going to have to just do an abortion episode so you guys can get this off your chest.
00:32:45.480
We, you know, when you get three people who are nominally pro-choice in a room fighting on the issue of abortion.
00:32:50.480
It's just goes to show you the the level to which this this issue.
00:33:00.480
The term has got a very different meaning for radical libertarians than for abortion activists.
00:33:16.480
For those of you who tuned into the Conservative Party race, it's over.
00:33:19.480
So onto the coronavirus and which, by the way, we should probably not call it the coronavirus
00:33:25.480
because I learned this week from the WHO that the coronavirus is actually a virus that exists in many forms all over the world all the time.
00:33:38.480
And this the one in particular that we're concerned about is called COVID-19.
00:33:58.480
Now people are dying in the US state of emergency, very close to Canada.
00:34:12.480
Last week on our morning call, there was some talk about us doing a coronavirus story.
00:34:22.480
I mean, it's it's just kind of a clickbait thing.
00:34:27.480
So, you know, if there's a big story related to it, uh, to Western Canada, and it's not
00:34:32.480
just a little clickbait thing, uh, fine, but I more or less said, that's it.
00:34:37.480
A couple hours later, we get a phone call and Deirdre's breaking, uh, biggest story in
00:34:44.480
So Deirdre, why don't you tell us about what the hell happened, uh, to cause me to tear
00:34:49.480
up our no more coronavirus story, uh, rule two hours after I pronounced it.
00:34:55.480
So what happened was we had insider information that a flight in, or sorry, a flight from Vancouver
00:35:04.480
to Winnipeg had been basically quarantined upon landing in Winnipeg because there was
00:35:12.480
a passenger who had become unresponsive during the flight.
00:35:17.480
And so as, as everything was unfolding, I was basically going off of information from
00:35:31.480
We were, we were all trying to get more information, but because we had insider information, we were,
00:35:38.480
we were moving off of what they were telling us.
00:35:41.480
And so the update came, um, I mean by five o'clock I had now heard back from the Winnipeg
00:35:51.480
I had heard back from West jet and both of them.
00:35:55.480
I mean, I, I, I, I got an email from West jet, but I actually spoke to, uh, I believe is
00:36:02.480
Tyler McAfee from the Winnipeg airport authority.
00:36:08.480
Every day is busy at the airport, you know, no big deal.
00:36:14.480
And you know, so it was, um, it was, it was really interesting.
00:36:19.480
But the thing is that that incident, which actually, uh, the, the passenger who became
00:36:28.480
unresponsive during the flight, uh, she, she did test negative for the Corona virus.
00:36:36.480
That was, that was the big fear at the time because this passenger had connected in Vancouver
00:36:44.480
So, I mean, obviously we know that that's kind of ground zero at the moment.
00:36:48.480
Well, it used to be before Iran popped up with all of these cases, but, um,
00:37:03.480
Like they've got over, I think they have over 25 cases now.
00:37:06.480
Well, what was, one thing that was really interesting.
00:37:10.480
One thing that was interesting, uh, in the remaining time we've got here is, uh, so the,
00:37:15.480
the sources we had said that, uh, the, this passenger had, was unresponsive, essentially
00:37:22.480
Uh, and they had come in from China wearing a face mask.
00:37:26.480
Now we all want to be sensitive here, but I would not like to sit beside that person on
00:37:35.480
None of the rest of the media noted that this person was a connection coming in from China
00:37:40.480
That was entirely left out of every other media outlet story.
00:37:43.480
And we don't know if that was this, them being a bit of a, you know, politically correct
00:37:47.480
and sensitive, or if that was just that the airport authority and WestJet were just not
00:37:53.480
We had a totally different, uh, pipeline of information, no pun intended.
00:38:02.480
Uh, but no, none of the others were reporting that.
00:38:05.480
And again, we don't know if that's just, they were being, uh, politically correct about
00:38:08.480
it or, or if they just didn't have it, but either way, it was a big one for the Western
00:38:15.480
And we had Deirdre breaking, uh, break a biggest story in the country that day, even if it turned
00:38:19.480
out not to be Corona virus at the end of the day or whatever we were supposed to call
00:38:37.480
And, uh, if you haven't already, be sure to like, subscribe, hit comment.