Western Standard - December 31, 2024


HANNAFORD： A new year promises hope for a Canada that has suffered the want of it so long


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

127.7371

Word count

1,227

Sentence count

65

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

As it is the end of the year, I want to share a few thoughts with you about how I see the world alone, and what I expect good things to happen in the world in the next 25 years.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
00:00:00.000 Good evening, Western Standard viewers.
00:00:18.980 I'm Nigel Hannaford, and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show.
00:00:24.500 Normally, I introduce a guest at this point,
00:00:27.520 but as it is the end of the year, I want to share a few thoughts with you about how I see the world
00:00:35.880 alone. So please stay with me as we talk about what to look forward to in 2025.
00:00:44.780 The rule of journalism being always to look for the conflict, it's tempting when looking back
00:00:50.460 over a year to damn the darkness, and there is always darkness to damn. The governor of the 0.67
00:00:56.900 state of Canada remains in office and still thinks a man can be a woman and that a woman can be treated 0.99
00:01:02.380 like trash. Chrystia Freeland is obviously just experiencing things differently. And let's not 0.97
00:01:10.020 even talk about wars and rumors of wars elsewhere in the world. But folks, do you ever get sorry
00:01:16.620 about feeling mad all the time? I do. I also believe that as Sir Winston Churchill said,
00:01:22.820 defeat is never fatal and victory is never final. I see some hope that the common sense struggle
00:01:31.780 has turned in favor of those of us who desire a better country. Let me give you five reasons
00:01:38.880 why I expect good things from 2025. First, woke is on the way out. Oh, it's still around,
00:01:49.280 deeply embedded in bureaucracy and academia.
00:01:52.780 But more and more people in business and industry
00:01:55.560 are starting to say, no more.
00:01:57.600 Ford, Walmart, Molson Coors, John Deere, Lowe's.
00:02:02.940 I could go on.
00:02:03.900 Harley Davidson, Jack Daniels, Tractor Supply.
00:02:08.680 It's going down.
00:02:11.660 Second, parents have had enough of schools
00:02:13.940 messing with their children's heads
00:02:15.600 about whether they're really the gender they were born with.
00:02:20.240 New Brunswick said no.
00:02:22.440 Saskatchewan said no.
00:02:24.800 In Alberta, Premier Smith legislated that children could not have sex change operations
00:02:31.400 before they were 18.
00:02:34.060 The left howls.
00:02:36.080 She then said, by the way, no boys on girls' sports teams either.
00:02:41.740 You could say it was a shame that this must be considered progress because it should be so wretched obvious.
00:02:50.200 But, ladies and gentlemen, if something is broken, it's still a good thing when somebody fixes it.
00:02:57.680 And if this is your subject, take a read of what Western Standard columnist Jonathan Fenn Barron said about it last Saturday in his year-ender.
00:03:07.000 Thousands of Canadians stepped up to fight for the vulnerable, he wrote.
00:03:11.280 There is no better fight.
00:03:13.260 And I, for one, am grateful for all that was done, all who participated, and all that was accomplished.
00:03:21.360 And I say, amen to that.
00:03:26.200 Third, talking of fixing things.
00:03:29.260 If you are living on the prairies and you depend upon natural gas to stay warm during the winter,
00:03:35.480 it's a relief to see that the federal government has finally admitted their goal of carbon net
00:03:43.140 neutral emissions on the entire national power grid by 2035 was never going to happen and it
00:03:50.360 was no use threatening engineers and politicians with jail if they didn't make it 2050 is good
00:03:56.760 enough now not that i'm buying the concept of net neutral emissions or that it's ottawa's call to
00:04:04.420 make. Nor should you. But let not the perfect be the enemy of the good. It is a start, and we have
00:04:14.600 25 years to do something about it. And while we're celebrating that, this moronic rule about 0.97
00:04:23.420 no more gasoline-powered cars after 2035 cannot outlist this government either. Nothing against
00:04:31.900 electric cars, but they're not for everybody in all parts of Canada. Fourth, the American election.
00:04:39.040 You don't have to agree with President-elect Trump, or even to like him, but you cannot fail
00:04:45.160 to see that the mood in the United States has changed for the better since he won the election
00:04:50.520 there. It's not just that Trump is as energetic as his predecessor Biden was unfit. It's the team
00:05:00.300 that Trump has brought together. None of them need the salary. All of the key players, Musk,
00:05:07.060 Ramaswamy, RFK, are wealthy in their own right and have accomplished things in their own right.
00:05:14.800 It is not that there could never be trouble in that paradise either. Strong-willed people fight.
00:05:22.560 But whether it's in building rockets, skyscrapers, or technology, everybody at the top in the United
00:05:29.280 States now got there on their merits, because they could do things, not because they were
00:05:38.600 victims. This is the way it used to be. It appears to be the way it is going to be going forward.
00:05:47.400 Look, we all have sympathy for people who are genuinely disadvantaged.
00:05:52.620 But if you want to get things done, and Lord knows America needs to get things done,
00:05:59.280 Yet somebody who has already done some thing.
00:06:04.680 Which brings us, fifthly, to Canada.
00:06:08.400 We have every reason to hope that there will be a change of government here
00:06:12.520 that will reignite some passion among a people
00:06:15.500 that for nine years has been paying the cost
00:06:18.960 of Justin Trudeau's delusions of adequacy
00:06:22.120 since before the Second World War.
00:06:25.600 This has undoubtedly been for Canada the worst of times.
00:06:29.540 Only the Great Depression comes close.
00:06:32.040 But since 2015, when sunny days was the slogan, Canadians have been betrayed, ruined by government,
00:06:39.440 debt, and inflation, told to feel ashamed of their history, and stripped of their protection.
00:06:45.700 Police forces, disrespected as prime rises, and their military gutted of equipment and
00:06:53.020 honor as the world looks to be a more dangerous place than it has been for years
00:07:01.820 ladies and gentlemen that's about to change the consensus is that this government cannot last
00:07:07.420 it may make it for three more months and the need to pass a budget will force the issue as a matter
00:07:12.540 of confidence or perhaps prime minister will be so trudeau will be so isolated by his own caucus
00:07:20.140 that whatever the rules permit he can in practice no longer govern but it can't last and when he is
00:07:29.980 gone he will be replaced by people with new and better ideas who have not been worn out
00:07:35.740 by scandal disappointment and the scurrilous temptations of office the Trudeau rot is very
00:07:43.660 deep. We should therefore be careful not to ask more of a new government than goodwill, inspiration
00:07:52.200 and hard work can do. What took nine years to tear down will not be rebuilt in a few months or even a
00:07:59.480 few years. But we can expect and do expect to be moving in the right direction. We can expect laws
00:08:06.520 designed to trample free speech, private conscience and the sanctity of public finance to be ripped
00:08:12.380 from the statute books, just like Mr. Singh ripped up that agreement. And we should expect
00:08:18.040 and demand that when the country's new leaders speak of Canada, they will speak not of a land
00:08:24.980 of harm and injustice that must forever pay for its sins. Rather, they will speak of a country
00:08:31.300 on a mission to become what it once was and was always intended to be the place that the world
00:08:36.360 admired wanted to be part of as we used to say simply the best country in the world
00:08:45.800 things can be so much better ladies and gentlemen and i believe that this year they will be better
00:08:53.640 god bless you all and i'd like to wish you a happy new year for the western standard i'm nigel
00:09:06.360 Thank you.