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.
00:00:00.000Well, welcome to another episode of Ottawa Exposed. I'm David Creighton, the Senior
00:00:13.560Parliamentary Columnist for the Western Standard. And it's a real pleasure to be back here.
00:00:19.180Well, we are in a real political firestorm here in Ottawa, largely because of healthcare,
00:00:25.740but we'll get to that later. But the real story that continues to brew today is Prime Minister
00:00:31.480Justin Trudeau's treatment of Alberta Premier Daniel Smith when all of the premiers got together
00:00:36.920to hear Trudeau's proposal on health care. I've got a lot to say about that, but I really want
00:00:43.320to talk about what happened on Tuesday when Justin Trudeau shook hands, sort of, with Daniel Smith.
00:00:49.980It was obvious Smith was hesitant to shake hands with Trudeau.
00:00:54.000This is her primary political opponent, her ideological adversary, and Smith was not comfortable being with Trudeau.
00:01:02.040A lot of women aren't comfortable with being with Trudeau, as we've seen over the years.
00:01:08.080And I think what he demonstrated with Daniel Smith is part of a trend that Trudeau is very contemptuous of female politicians.
00:01:17.520Even 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.
00:01:41.220And 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.
00:01:56.540Now, 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.
00:02:19.240It's quite clear he is not comfortable with Daniel Smith in the way he talks, in the way he deals with her.
00:02:25.980But he can't be honest about that, can he?
00:08:58.760Now, 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.
00:09:09.640This is money that's coming from your pocket.
00:09:12.620And if you're not paying it in taxes, you'd be paying it for something else worthwhile.
00:09:17.040So what is the average American household paying for private, for profit, health care?
00:10:01.340I 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.
00:10:12.120Why 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.
00:10:20.460Now, he ran on a far left platform in 2020 when he was seeking the presidential nomination that he eventually lost to Joe Biden.
00:10:33.880And that included something called Medicare for All.
00:10:37.240Now, it's basically Bernie's system that is modeled on Canada's.
00:10:42.580And 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.
00:10:59.860now at that time he would have had to wait a maximum of 28 days for that emergency surgery
00:11:07.140guess what you ain't got 28 days to have a valve or an artery or a vein to your heart unblocked
00:11:15.860you're going to be dead very very quickly so if he had been in canada he would have been waiting
00:11:22.740for that operation and quite probably would have died before he got it now today that's a minimum
00:11:32.200of 28 days waiting for an angioplasty and it's it's absolutely shocking what we are dealing with
00:11:40.220in Canada Canada spends 300 billion dollars and 13 percent of the GDP on health care 25 percent of
00:11:48.040the federal budget goes to health care. I mean, that's more than national defense. That's more
00:11:52.680than anything, any other single expense. It's all going to health care. And yet we have these
00:11:58.980humongous wait times. And not only that, hundreds of thousands of Canadians are leaving the country
00:12:09.140every year to seek health care elsewhere. And guess where that elsewhere is? Usually the United
00:12:14.880States, because that's where they have to go to get emergency operations and surgery.
00:12:21.700They're not getting it in Canada because they have to wait too long.
00:12:26.460So it's fine to say we have a free system, and it's not free.
00:12:30.560As I said, we're paying for the system in taxes.
00:12:36.120But when that system doesn't work at all, what's the point of having Medicare?
00:12:40.100When we're not getting the health delivery we need, then, yeah, we can say it's free, but it's not working either.
00:14:21.000So I wanted to also touch on the fact that Justin Trudeau knows that health care is the sacred cow of cancer.
00:14:30.720So 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.
00:14:44.120He's going to privatize it. He's going to make it for profit and it's going to decimate you.
00:14:52.720Of course, he's not going to mention the fact that the so-called free system we have right now isn't working at all.
00:14:58.440and it's not free either and your taxes are paying a large part of it but he's going to pretend that
00:15:03.960we're going to have u.s style health care in canada anytime the liberals want to scare canadians
00:15:11.000they talk about u.s style this or that u.s style legal system u.s style politics u.s style health
00:15:17.640care uh u.s style media even though we've uh we're very little difference there now but that is
00:15:25.240exactly where he's going to go with this because he's a very desperate man and he knows he doesn't
00:15:30.920really have anything else to point to in terms of accomplishments the last year has been he's
00:15:37.720been rocked by a lot of bad news and i think the i really do believe that the emergencies act
00:15:47.720invocation is going to stick to him in a negative way we haven't seen the end of that we're still
00:15:52.520waiting for that report to come up by the way he has not yet received his advanced copy so that
00:15:57.960might mean it's february as i record this i think he might not be getting his advanced copy very
00:16:06.200early it's coming out on february 20th and i want everybody to be aware of that because that's going
00:16:11.240to be a major story okay i want to turn from healthcare to another story that we covered this
00:16:19.000week. And it was really outrageous in terms of the optics. And that was the Chinese spy balloon. I
00:16:28.100say that with some degree of authority. I mean, we know it was spying. Why would the Chinese be1.00
00:16:33.140sending weather balloons over North America? Unless, of course, they were considering an
00:16:37.300imminent invasion. But I don't think they're doing it. They're certainly spying. And for people to
00:16:44.120suggest that the Chinese didn't get anything out of this weather balloon that they didn't already
00:16:49.880have with satellites. I don't know how they can say that without knowing what the weather or the
00:16:56.740spy balloon was capable of. So it's an assumption. And, you know, the talk about Donald Trump let
00:17:04.960these things go by, absolute nonsense. The director of national intelligence in the United States
00:17:10.760refuted that said it did not happen but yet this was almost like it was a tragedy or a comedy of
00:17:18.040errors this spy balloon comes down through alaska it goes all the way through canada
00:17:23.840into montana and it drifts over montana and at the time there's a news conference with the pentagon
00:17:32.620spokesman this is a brigadier general writer he comes on and he's at pains to explain why this
00:17:42.220balloon is still floating in the united states and why it got all the way across montana without
00:17:46.460somebody shooting it down clearly it's a violation american aerospace they know it's a spy balloon so
00:17:50.940what's it still doing up there and he says well we didn't want to shoot it down because the debris
00:17:55.580might fall on school children if you've been to montana you know it's got one of the
00:18:01.820one of the lowest population densities in the united states there's lots of open spaces i mean
00:18:08.220they call it big sky country for a reason because it's it's it's a huge state with with very low
00:18:15.660population so they had adequate opportunity to to to get the spy balloon down on montana
00:18:21.420but what did they do they waited and waited and waited until it got off the eastern coast of
00:18:26.060south carolina then they shot it down with an f-22 sidewinder missile now talk about overkill
00:18:34.300and in the in the process of course people are saying biden's weak biden's weak yes he is uh
00:18:40.620biden takes his time to to deal with questions yes he does should have acted sooner yes he should
00:18:46.860but now there's of course an escalation and the rhetoric against china and the united states is
00:18:57.300already in enough trouble with russia by arming ukraine does it really want to arm taiwan now to
00:19:04.240the point of provoking china do we need to worry about nuclear war on two fronts in russia and in0.91
00:19:12.140China. I don't think so. So there's an irony of all this is that Biden could have handled this
00:19:17.440quickly and cheaply, but he did not. He allowed it to escalate into another foreign and defense
00:19:22.900policy problem. And that, of course, is having legs of its own as we watch the situation
00:19:30.780go from there. But as a former public affairs officer in our Air Force, I was saddened to see
00:19:38.680United States Air Force Brigadier General