Western Standard - February 10, 2023


OE: OE: Trudeau squeezes Danielle Smith's hand just like he squeezes Alberta


Episode Stats

Length

22 minutes

Words per Minute

152.98676

Word Count

3,396

Sentence Count

135

Hate Speech Sentences

4


Summary

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

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's treatment of Alberta Premier Daniel Smith at a meeting with premiers on a proposed new health care plan has ignited a political firestorm in Ottawa. The Western Standard's senior political columnist, David Caillen, explains why this is such a big deal.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Well, welcome to another episode of Ottawa Exposed. I'm David Creighton, the Senior
00:00:13.560 Parliamentary Columnist for the Western Standard. And it's a real pleasure to be back here.
00:00:19.180 Well, we are in a real political firestorm here in Ottawa, largely because of healthcare,
00:00:25.740 but we'll get to that later. But the real story that continues to brew today is Prime Minister
00:00:31.480 Justin Trudeau's treatment of Alberta Premier Daniel Smith when all of the premiers got together
00:00:36.920 to hear Trudeau's proposal on health care. I've got a lot to say about that, but I really want
00:00:43.320 to talk about what happened on Tuesday when Justin Trudeau shook hands, sort of, with Daniel Smith.
00:00:49.980 It was obvious Smith was hesitant to shake hands with Trudeau.
00:00:54.000 This is her primary political opponent, her ideological adversary, and Smith was not comfortable being with Trudeau.
00:01:02.040 A lot of women aren't comfortable with being with Trudeau, as we've seen over the years.
00:01:08.080 And I think what he demonstrated with Daniel Smith is part of a trend that Trudeau is very contemptuous of female politicians.
00:01:17.520 Even though he calls himself this proto-feminist politician, you know, the wave of things to come, he certainly has not demonstrated much of that in real life towards political women, including a liberal MP in his own caucus who resigned years ago and said that Trudeau routinely yelled at her.
00:01:41.220 And we remember the treatment of an NDP MP. He elbowed. And he had his thumb on Daniel Smith's hand. And he was squeezing so hard that he actually left his thumb imprint on her hand.
00:01:56.540 Now, that is absolutely disgusting kind of behavior, and here he is smiling and hamming it up for the cameras as usual, and by his actions, he's showing contempt that approaches abuse towards the premier of Alberta.
00:02:19.240 It's quite clear he is not comfortable with Daniel Smith in the way he talks, in the way he deals with her.
00:02:25.980 But he can't be honest about that, can he?
00:02:28.060 He has to pretend.
00:02:30.120 He's the actor to the end.
00:02:31.840 He is the actor to the end.
00:02:34.200 And that is what Justin Trudeau is all about.
00:02:36.420 Daniel Smith, to her credit, did not feign happiness to be in the Great One's presence.
00:02:44.380 She looked very uncomfortable.
00:02:45.920 And she is.
00:02:47.100 and she was very uncomfortable. So what I said in my column, you know how a picture can say a
00:02:51.760 thousand words? Well, it not only shows Trudeau's contempt for Daniel Smith, it shows Trudeau's
00:02:57.160 contempt for Alberta and how he likes to keep his finger, his thumb on Alberta. And he likes to
00:03:03.000 squeeze Alberta for all it's worth. Now, Trudeau is going on and on about, you know, he wants to
00:03:07.860 find common ground with Alberta on energy issues. But of course, that's impossible. And you have a
00:03:13.700 person like Justin Trudeau, who's committed to green energy to the point of dismantling
00:03:19.860 the energy sector in Canada, the oil and gas industry. He wants to destroy the fossil fuel
00:03:26.000 industry because he believes it's contributing to greenhouse gases, which are creating the
00:03:32.420 climate change crisis, which is going to lead towards the end of the world in a decade.
00:03:37.940 all of this is nonsense. The world is not going to end in 10 years. There is no climate change
00:03:45.980 crisis to that point. And I think rational people understand that. If we go to a green energy
00:03:53.340 program the way Justin Trudeau describes it in his so-called just transition, I call it the Justin
00:03:59.860 transition, we are going to be a society living in the cold and dark, especially in this month
00:04:06.100 february where it's very cold uh actually warmed up here in audible but last week you know we were
00:04:11.220 down to minus 30 with a wind chill of minus 40. try doing that without fossil fuels and we know
00:04:18.580 we're not going to have electric cars overnight because it's virtually impossible to get enough
00:04:24.740 of these minerals including cobalt that you need to power the battery and we're using child labor
00:04:31.300 and i shouldn't say we but china is using child labor to extract these minerals from the ground
00:04:36.340 this is absolutely appalling but once again people like justin trudeau just brush this off
00:04:42.500 as if it's not a big deal and of course it's a it's a very big deal and it's it's it's something
00:04:49.300 i think that trudeau has got to come to terms with but he won't so what is trudeau trying to do here
00:04:58.740 why is you know he's there's no common ground with alberta because if you look at alberta's
00:05:04.900 bottom line it talks about things like liquid natural gas uh exports to asia
00:05:13.320 even if we just look at that one example justin trudeau refused to export our liquid natural gas
00:05:22.600 to Germany. Pretty safe market. Probably billions of dollars. But he said there was no business
00:05:29.460 case for that. So I don't see a lot of common ground here. And frankly, neither does Justin
00:05:35.480 Trudeau. So what is he doing? He is preparing for an election. And health care, which was
00:05:44.640 at the background of this meeting with Daniel Smith, his first meeting with the Oberyn
00:05:48.100 Premier ever. It was to announce that he was going to put $46.2 billion of new money into the
00:05:56.640 healthcare program. I say healthcare, and I think it's a misnomer because we have some of the worst
00:06:02.820 healthcare in the world. And I'll be getting to that shortly. But Justin Trudeau is putting all
00:06:09.300 of his eggs now in the healthcare basket in the hopes that this is going to resuscitate his
00:06:15.100 prime ministership his leadership and the hopes of the liberal party to capture the next election
00:06:22.060 and to regain power i do not think that's highly likely and why is he putting it all in the
00:06:29.500 health care basket well time after time we see polls saying canadians are really concerned
00:06:34.540 about health care that they're really concerned about their health care running out or the fact
00:06:40.300 that it's underfunded so trudeau figures he's got a real good political issue here and he thinks he
00:06:47.260 can run at it run on it why does he think health care is so important because frankly he doesn't
00:06:52.540 have any more baskets to put his eggs in he has spent so much time promoting and propagating
00:07:00.700 woke policies that are dividing the country that are creating divisiveness he spent so much time
00:07:06.700 on identity politics including his recent appointment of islamophobia czar
00:07:12.620 this is dividing canada and angering canadians we want to be united we don't want to talk about our
00:07:18.700 differences and that's all trudeau wants to do because he thinks he's going to capture votes
00:07:23.660 and health care he thinks is the saving value for him i'll tell you why it's not going to work
00:07:30.060 because you can keep pouring billions of dollars into our health care system
00:07:34.460 and it's not going to work because it's imploding and it's basically a broken system.
00:07:41.580 You know how broken it is? And I figured this out. I don't know how many other
00:07:48.180 journalists or academics have actually sat down and said, okay, how much are we paying in taxes
00:07:56.720 versus how much are Americans paying for their private health insurance? I think it's a valid
00:08:03.600 question because the fraser institute of course every year puts out a report on health care
00:08:08.560 and it's it's absolutely shocking what we are what we are paying
00:08:15.520 in health care and i mean and the fraser institute outlines this very well
00:08:22.080 so if you are a family of four with a combined income of 156 000 86 dollars which is not a lot
00:08:29.520 of money this is not wealthy with considering inflation and considering how much we do pay in
00:08:36.640 taxes overall you can expect to pay fifteen thousand dollars eight hundred and forty seven
00:08:41.360 dollars alone for your health care for family of four now that's based on 2022 it's going to
00:08:48.800 be going higher as trudeau puts more and more money into the health care system and
00:08:53.920 And it continues to be dysfunctional.
00:08:58.760 Now, what concerns me about this is that, okay, so if we're paying that much in taxes, which is real money, it's not something that's out there.
00:09:09.640 This is money that's coming from your pocket.
00:09:12.620 And if you're not paying it in taxes, you'd be paying it for something else worthwhile.
00:09:17.040 So what is the average American household paying for private, for profit, health care?
00:09:26.280 For a family of four, $1,437 a month.
00:09:32.300 Now, you do the arithmetic.
00:09:34.680 We are paying marginally less in Canada for our health care system than they are in the United States.
00:09:45.020 Now, I think this is absolutely shocking.
00:09:47.240 And I don't know how many people actually tried to figure this out.
00:09:53.120 But once you get this in your head, you say, well, we're paying all of this.
00:09:58.200 And yet we have massive wait times.
00:10:00.100 Wait times.
00:10:01.340 I mentioned the fact in my column that you remember Bernie, Senator Bernie Sanders, the independent from Vermont, who perpetually runs as a Democrat for the presidential nomination.
00:10:12.120 Why you can do that, I don't know, because he's an independent yet pretends to be a Democrat when they're looking for a presidential candidate.
00:10:20.460 Now, he ran on a far left platform in 2020 when he was seeking the presidential nomination that he eventually lost to Joe Biden.
00:10:33.880 And that included something called Medicare for All.
00:10:37.240 Now, it's basically Bernie's system that is modeled on Canada's.
00:10:42.580 And he's always saying how much he admires Canadian health care, except when Bernie had to have an emergency angioplasty in 2019, the American system was able to deal with him immediately.
00:10:59.860 now at that time he would have had to wait a maximum of 28 days for that emergency surgery
00:11:07.140 guess what you ain't got 28 days to have a valve or an artery or a vein to your heart unblocked
00:11:15.860 you're going to be dead very very quickly so if he had been in canada he would have been waiting
00:11:22.740 for that operation and quite probably would have died before he got it now today that's a minimum
00:11:32.200 of 28 days waiting for an angioplasty and it's it's absolutely shocking what we are dealing with
00:11:40.220 in Canada Canada spends 300 billion dollars and 13 percent of the GDP on health care 25 percent of
00:11:48.040 the federal budget goes to health care. I mean, that's more than national defense. That's more
00:11:52.680 than anything, any other single expense. It's all going to health care. And yet we have these
00:11:58.980 humongous wait times. And not only that, hundreds of thousands of Canadians are leaving the country
00:12:09.140 every year to seek health care elsewhere. And guess where that elsewhere is? Usually the United
00:12:14.880 States, because that's where they have to go to get emergency operations and surgery.
00:12:21.700 They're not getting it in Canada because they have to wait too long.
00:12:26.460 So it's fine to say we have a free system, and it's not free.
00:12:30.560 As I said, we're paying for the system in taxes.
00:12:36.120 But when that system doesn't work at all, what's the point of having Medicare?
00:12:40.100 When we're not getting the health delivery we need, then, yeah, we can say it's free, but it's not working either.
00:12:52.740 And that is a Canadian tragedy.
00:12:56.460 And it's something I think that we have got to come to terms with.
00:13:00.480 And as Trudeau pours more and more money into this health care system, it's not going to solve the problem.
00:13:09.240 Is this going to make it more expensive?
00:13:11.880 And I think this is, and I say in this column,
00:13:15.360 the Canada's health care system is a very expensive way to die
00:13:19.200 because it's not delivering what it promises to.
00:13:23.540 And why are we like this?
00:13:25.440 Why are we continuing to say that the answer is to pour billions of dollars
00:13:29.540 into this unworkable, dysfunctional health care system?
00:13:33.780 Because we somehow see this as a Canadian totem.
00:13:36.740 We see healthcare and Medicare, socialized medicine as part of the Canadian fabric that can't be rent in any way.
00:13:49.140 And even if it's not working, many Canadians view it that way.
00:13:53.180 And it's time for a reality check, people.
00:13:55.900 When a system isn't working, we need to find another one that does.
00:13:59.100 And that's going to mean more private healthcare.
00:14:01.300 There's no question about that.
00:14:02.660 And I can't say a lot of good things about Ontario Premier Doug Ford.
00:14:07.220 I think he's a faux conservative in many ways.
00:14:09.560 But at least he's examining that option because, let's face it, he has to.
00:14:16.740 The people are demanding it.
00:14:21.000 So I wanted to also touch on the fact that Justin Trudeau knows that health care is the sacred cow of cancer.
00:14:30.720 So he's going to point to Doug Ford and say, ah, this is what opposition leader slash Conservative Party Canada leader Pierre Paglia is going to do to your health care.
00:14:44.120 He's going to privatize it. He's going to make it for profit and it's going to decimate you.
00:14:52.720 Of course, he's not going to mention the fact that the so-called free system we have right now isn't working at all.
00:14:58.440 and it's not free either and your taxes are paying a large part of it but he's going to pretend that
00:15:03.960 we're going to have u.s style health care in canada anytime the liberals want to scare canadians
00:15:11.000 they talk about u.s style this or that u.s style legal system u.s style politics u.s style health
00:15:17.640 care uh u.s style media even though we've uh we're very little difference there now but that is
00:15:25.240 exactly where he's going to go with this because he's a very desperate man and he knows he doesn't
00:15:30.920 really have anything else to point to in terms of accomplishments the last year has been he's
00:15:37.720 been rocked by a lot of bad news and i think the i really do believe that the emergencies act
00:15:47.720 invocation is going to stick to him in a negative way we haven't seen the end of that we're still
00:15:52.520 waiting for that report to come up by the way he has not yet received his advanced copy so that
00:15:57.960 might mean it's february as i record this i think he might not be getting his advanced copy very
00:16:06.200 early it's coming out on february 20th and i want everybody to be aware of that because that's going
00:16:11.240 to be a major story okay i want to turn from healthcare to another story that we covered this
00:16:19.000 week. And it was really outrageous in terms of the optics. And that was the Chinese spy balloon. I
00:16:28.100 say that with some degree of authority. I mean, we know it was spying. Why would the Chinese be 1.00
00:16:33.140 sending weather balloons over North America? Unless, of course, they were considering an
00:16:37.300 imminent invasion. But I don't think they're doing it. They're certainly spying. And for people to
00:16:44.120 suggest that the Chinese didn't get anything out of this weather balloon that they didn't already
00:16:49.880 have with satellites. I don't know how they can say that without knowing what the weather or the
00:16:56.740 spy balloon was capable of. So it's an assumption. And, you know, the talk about Donald Trump let
00:17:04.960 these things go by, absolute nonsense. The director of national intelligence in the United States
00:17:10.760 refuted that said it did not happen but yet this was almost like it was a tragedy or a comedy of
00:17:18.040 errors this spy balloon comes down through alaska it goes all the way through canada
00:17:23.840 into montana and it drifts over montana and at the time there's a news conference with the pentagon
00:17:32.620 spokesman this is a brigadier general writer he comes on and he's at pains to explain why this
00:17:42.220 balloon is still floating in the united states and why it got all the way across montana without
00:17:46.460 somebody shooting it down clearly it's a violation american aerospace they know it's a spy balloon so
00:17:50.940 what's it still doing up there and he says well we didn't want to shoot it down because the debris
00:17:55.580 might fall on school children if you've been to montana you know it's got one of the
00:18:01.820 one of the lowest population densities in the united states there's lots of open spaces i mean
00:18:08.220 they call it big sky country for a reason because it's it's it's a huge state with with very low
00:18:15.660 population so they had adequate opportunity to to to get the spy balloon down on montana
00:18:21.420 but what did they do they waited and waited and waited until it got off the eastern coast of
00:18:26.060 south carolina then they shot it down with an f-22 sidewinder missile now talk about overkill
00:18:34.300 and in the in the process of course people are saying biden's weak biden's weak yes he is uh
00:18:40.620 biden takes his time to to deal with questions yes he does should have acted sooner yes he should
00:18:46.860 but now there's of course an escalation and the rhetoric against china and the united states is
00:18:57.300 already in enough trouble with russia by arming ukraine does it really want to arm taiwan now to
00:19:04.240 the point of provoking china do we need to worry about nuclear war on two fronts in russia and in 0.91
00:19:12.140 China. I don't think so. So there's an irony of all this is that Biden could have handled this
00:19:17.440 quickly and cheaply, but he did not. He allowed it to escalate into another foreign and defense
00:19:22.900 policy problem. And that, of course, is having legs of its own as we watch the situation
00:19:30.780 go from there. But as a former public affairs officer in our Air Force, I was saddened to see
00:19:38.680 United States Air Force Brigadier General
00:19:41.660 hum and ha and try
00:19:43.700 to justify Joe Biden's
00:19:45.860 policies. It's always sad to see
00:19:47.820 this. And it doesn't have
00:19:49.760 to happen. But
00:19:51.260 keep your eye
00:19:53.680 on what's going on in Taiwan
00:19:55.660 and in China and Joe Biden
00:19:57.640 who we just had the State of the Union last night
00:19:59.540 and of course Biden's
00:20:01.720 State of the Union is a different state
00:20:03.640 than most people live in because
00:20:05.540 he's not living in the same America 0.91
00:20:07.560 that other Americans live in.
00:20:10.160 And that was reflected in his speech last night.
00:20:14.140 Anyway, I don't know if they had him pumped up on pills or not,
00:20:17.820 but he certainly was the most energetic I've seen him in two years.
00:20:21.920 Now, before we say we take our leave here,
00:20:24.080 I want to remind everybody, read the Western Standard on a daily basis.
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00:21:29.480 and we've got more news coming at you next week at the same time so for david creighton senior
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