Western Standard - The forgotten issues of the election

00:00:00.000 Would you let Jeffrey Epstein watch your kids?

00:00:07.580 Didn't think so.

00:00:09.600 What about his accomplice,

00:00:11.380 Guy Lane Maxwell?

00:00:13.540 Hard pass.

00:00:15.640 So why trust him?

00:00:19.120 Mark Carney, Maxwell's friend, not yours.

00:00:30.000 Good day.

00:00:58.980 Welcome to the Corey Morgan Show. Take two. This is that special episode on the Fridays all the way

00:01:05.220 out through the election. Three months of this, we got sponsored. Is there so much going on? It's

00:01:09.060 a federal election. We don't get them that often. And we need to dig into those issues. Even if you

00:01:14.980 don't want to pay attention to politics through the rest of the year, we should kind of open the

00:01:19.540 eyes and look at this affair more closely during an election campaign period. So yeah, there's lots

00:01:27.300 to cover and lots to talk about. As always, I got a great lineup of guests today. In a little while,

00:01:32.560 I'm going to have Adam Zivo on. He's a freelance columnist for the National Post and a number of

00:01:39.540 other outlets. And he's been very active on a few files, one of which has been the opioid addiction

00:01:45.400 epidemic. It's an ongoing problem, but we're not hearing about it in the election, are we? And we

00:01:50.100 really should. Anybody walking on the streets can see it happening every day. So Adam's going to come

00:01:54.180 want to talk about that. A little after that, we're going to have Sam Cooper on. As I said,

00:01:57.200 my theme today is kind of forgotten election issues because we're just not hearing about

00:02:02.260 these. They were important a little while ago, but we're just not hearing about it in the campaign.

00:02:06.820 So Sam Cooper is going to speak to us about foreign interference. And then Tracy Wilson

00:02:11.700 on firearm rights to talk again. Now that came up in justice a little bit recently. She's with

00:02:17.500 the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights. But some folks better be paying attention. If those

00:02:22.200 Liberals get in, well, that means that the handgun band reversal is never going to happen.

00:02:28.920 Your handguns are now going to be, you know, the de facto ban that Trudeau put on them is going to

00:02:34.660 stay. The other bans that just keep expanding and expanding and expanding, that's going to remain

00:02:40.160 under Kearney. So it's an issue that is worth bringing up and talking about. So we've been

00:02:46.920 expanding our coverage. We've got people all over the place. That reminder to the Western Standard

00:02:50.840 right now is paywall free. You can see all of the stories, the columns, the editorials, the works

00:02:55.300 without paying. It's free till the end of the election. Sponsors have been fantastic as of

00:03:01.060 members. If you haven't got a membership yet, they'll still take one out, but you don't need

00:03:04.480 it right now to read the site. So this is a good chance to get a sample and a taste of what we

00:03:08.280 do on there. And one of the more prolific contributors we've had on the site, of course,

00:03:14.640 on our news reporting and such is Jen Hodgson and we've sent her off in exile to eastern Canada

00:03:21.520 so she can cover things over there and you know it's been pretty cruel treatment of poor Jen she 1.00

00:03:26.660 had to go to a carny rally the other night as well really making her earn her dollars these 0.97

00:03:31.680 days but she's going to check in and let us know how things are looking for her out there in eastern

00:03:37.100 Canada looks like she's scrambling to get her head set up and going out there she'll be on 1.00

00:03:42.440 very shortly. Okay, she's ready to go. So let's see what's happening there. Hello, Jen. 0.97

00:03:48.500 Hey, Corey. How's it going?

00:03:50.620 Good, good. You're settling in then already out there in the land of the dastardly Easterners? 1.00

00:03:56.760 So far, so good. I just got in late last night. So just working away from my parents' house here

00:04:03.580 and looking forward to getting caught up with you about what's been happening in this election so

00:04:08.700 far. Yeah, well, you're the reporter. I just blather with my opinion. So what are the top

00:04:13.820 stories standing out for you, Jen? Right. Well, so we've seen both the Liberal and the Conservative

00:04:21.580 leaders on the campaign trail for the last couple of weeks. And what has really stood out to me is

00:04:28.740 that the Liberals continue to poach Conservative Party policies again and again. So whether it be

00:04:37.580 on crime like we just saw yesterday. Immigration, housing, mining, and even attempting to make it

00:04:47.940 look like, and this is what I think is one of the biggest issues, is the pipeline building. So

00:04:53.080 Carney really speaks out of both sides of his mouth here. So on the one hand, he continues to

00:05:00.340 go along the conservative line saying, yes, we need more building, we need more energy production,

00:05:06.340 we need the infrastructure, we need to make Canada wealthy, which is all along the lines of

00:05:11.440 what Pierre Polyev has been saying. But at the same time, Carney is saying that he will refuse

00:05:17.620 to repeal Bill C-69, which of course we know is the no new pipelines bill. So Carney goes out and

00:05:25.260 has whole press conferences. I personally attended one on Wednesday of this week in Calgary,

00:05:32.060 where he talked about how he plans to make Canada an energy superpower however he refuses to explain

00:05:40.060 how he's going to do that except he implies that he's going to do this through sustainable energy

00:05:46.680 and green energy production which of course we know isn't going to add up to make Canada

00:05:53.480 a global superpower in energy when we have all of this natural oil and gas resources

00:05:59.300 Well, the usual word salads, I mean, he's always been a net zero aficionado. So either he's had

00:06:05.180 an epiphany and he's actually abandoned all that, or he's just saying what he thinks people need to

00:06:09.400 hear to get elected. So you're going to have a good opportunity though, because that's something

00:06:13.240 that happens and it's not unique to Carney. Politicians will say much different things

00:06:17.280 when they're at a rally in one part of the country versus at another. So if you get the chance to see

00:06:22.020 some of his events or anything in Ontario through the course of the campaign, you'll be able to

00:06:25.860 contrast that with what you've seen out here. Yeah, that's a great point. And I definitely do

00:06:30.740 intend to attend his events. That's part of the reason why I'm here in Ontario is to go down

00:06:37.500 these campaign trails as much as I can, of course, you know, within driving distance. But I certainly

00:06:44.560 expect to see both Carney and Polyev at several rallies and campaign events, press conferences

00:06:51.620 over the course of the next few weeks. And seeing Carney's narrative shift slightly as he moves from

00:06:58.540 west to east, I think is going to be an amusing one, not least of which during the debates next

00:07:05.100 week, which I will be attending in Montreal in person. So that's the French debate on April the

00:07:11.600 16th and the English debate on April the 17th. And so seeing what he says in different languages

00:07:18.040 while he's in Quebec I think is going to be key because just about the pipelines thing

00:07:22.700 we know that in Quebec Quebec generally opposes the pipelines being built like vehement

00:07:29.780 opposition to it I'm not saying everyone in Quebec because of course there are people that

00:07:33.760 are pro-energy you know and pro infrastructure in Quebec however the government there is right

00:07:41.920 against it and Carney when he was there last time said that he's not going to repeal this bill

00:07:46.620 C-69. So seeing that be a big focus at the debate, I think that that's going to be something

00:07:53.160 to watch. And Paul Yev has been clear all along that he actually wants to build those pipelines

00:07:59.060 and he will repeal that legislation. The only other party that said that they would repeal

00:08:05.080 Bill C-69 and related bills like the Tinker Band Bill, C-48, I believe, is Maxine Bernier and the

00:08:15.060 People's Party. Every other party, the Liberals, the NDP, of course, the Green, the Bloc, of course,

00:08:21.840 because they're in Quebec, all opposes pipelines, doesn't want to see any new pipelines being built,

00:08:27.560 even though the Liberals say that they want to sometimes, like Carney during the leadership

00:08:33.460 debate back in early March, he explicitly said that he wanted to build a pipeline through Quebec.

00:08:40.000 so he just he just goes back on whatever it is that he says and he'll just say anything willy

00:08:46.500 nilly like he said that well this the thunderstruck acdc song he said well this song i grew up to

00:08:53.160 warming up playing hockey when i was a minor hockey player and at the western standard we

00:08:58.580 looked into that and that song came out in 1990 i think when he was like in his 30s or something

00:09:03.520 and so that's not that's not a huge life-changing statement but it just goes to show how easily

00:09:09.880 he'll just say whatever comes out at the moment that makes him look good. Yeah, well, it's going

00:09:16.840 to be interesting watching the conservative campaign over there as well. I mean, Poliev's

00:09:21.860 in a tough spot if the polls are to be believed. I mean, they're in serious trouble, particularly

00:09:27.180 in Ontario. People are going to be watching. Is he going to pivot? Where would he pivot? I mean,

00:09:32.260 the bottom line is that the Liberals have taken his platform, so it's not like he could pivot to

00:09:36.020 the Liberal platform, he already has it. What can Polyev try to do over there to try and crack that

00:09:41.260 wall that seems to have gone up for him? Yeah, that's a great question. You know,

00:09:46.200 Polyev keeps pushing through. He's got huge turnout for his rallies, like we saw in Edmonton

00:09:52.900 the other night, 15,000 people. In Ontario, his rallies have been maybe between 3,000 and 5,000

00:09:59.780 people so significant turnout but you don't really see um much new coming out of his campaign

00:10:07.540 and i can't say necessarily that that's a positive or a negative thing because he's consistent

00:10:12.980 and that's important and you know he's got these slogans which really appeal to people but

00:10:18.900 sometimes it seems like the slogans might be like what he falls back on because it's

00:10:24.660 is quite scripted and there's not a lot of spontaneity there and you do see

00:10:30.340 poliev trying to get the votes from both sides there are some issues that he just won't go there

00:10:37.860 there are some issues that he stays uh you know liberal light so to speak um this morning he said

00:10:44.660 that he's never gonna touch the abortion legislation which is a liberal issue in

00:10:50.500 canada abortion is fully legal right up till birth and so he's not going to touch that and

00:10:58.180 maybe some conservative people might take issue with that another one is immigration uh pauliev

00:11:05.220 says that he wants to increase immigration with housing but he wants to build a lot of new housing

00:11:12.260 ergo he wants to bring in a lot of immigrants i think he said between 200 and 250 uh

00:11:18.500 about $250,000 a year.

00:11:21.800 Yes.

00:11:22.800 Yeah.

00:11:23.800 So, I mean, it's going to be difficult.

00:11:24.800 I mean, as you said, he hasn't changed anything.

00:11:28.000 He tends to fall back on slogans, which have been very effective.

00:11:30.300 I mean, as a leader of an opposition, when you're in the parliament and you can zing

00:11:33.800 the prime minister with a slogan, it works out great.

00:11:36.200 But right now it seems to be backfiring on him.

00:11:38.900 I think for some of us already liked him.

00:11:40.200 It doesn't bother us, but he's just not resonating well with a lot of people.

00:11:44.100 It seems.

00:11:45.100 Yeah.

00:11:46.100 if you've got a few weeks remaining in a campaign, I mean, now's the time to start

00:11:49.760 reconsidering your approach, I would think. I mean, who knows what approach could change, but

00:11:54.120 if you're going to keep doing the same thing, you're probably not going to gain that lost

00:11:59.080 ground. So I got a feeling that, you know, if we see a sudden turnabout and he changes his campaign

00:12:06.020 direction, it is going to happen somewhere in Ontario, Quebec, where it's such a battleground.

00:12:09.520 So at least you'll be there to report on it for us. Yeah, definitely looking forward to that. I,

00:12:14.060 But seeing a big turnaround, that would certainly give a lot of our viewers some encouragement, I think, because the Conservative Party supporters and the party itself, we've had Conservative MPs come on the Western Standard shows in the last six months or so, talking about how guaranteed this win was perceived to be before Carney stepped into the Liberal leadership role.

00:12:39.580 so when Canadians saw that it was a battle between Pierre Polyev and Justin Trudeau

00:12:45.220 Pierre Polyev was way ahead in the polls like Trudeau's when he was leading the party was just

00:12:52.480 so far behind that I think it was Michelle Rumpelgardner came on one of our shows and said

00:12:57.880 it's 110% that Pierre Polyev is going to be the next prime minister and so we see this um we well

00:13:04.580 we have seen now now it's quite a bit less clear but uh they're the conservatives thought that it

00:13:10.200 was a sure thing for a long time and so they had their approach they had their slogans and they had

00:13:16.520 their campaign uh but i think a lot of us have been surprised to see actually how well the liberals

00:13:23.320 have been doing in the polls under mark carney apparently a lot of canadians liberal-minded

00:13:29.300 people do in fact support Carney perhaps it looks like you know compared to Trudeau an adult has

00:13:36.220 walked into the room and you know he has this banking history and it seems that people actually

00:13:43.900 are putting some faith in him and so that's something that no one really saw coming and so

00:13:51.040 it's really uh made for an interesting race to be sure and i'm with you that the conservatives

00:13:59.120 really have to do something other than this slogan mongering to uh to do something different in this

00:14:05.360 campaign and really give supporters um what they're looking for and and that is a true conservative

00:14:12.560 perspective people that vote conservative want conservative values want a conservative platform

00:14:19.760 and you know speaking of platform i think something else that the conservatives could do

00:14:24.640 is officially release a platform if you go to the conservative website and this is the same

00:14:30.560 for the liberals the uh ndp same thing the green party they don't have a platform that people can

00:14:38.160 go to their website and see all of the different categories and what that party stands for the and

00:14:44.800 myself i've i've written a long form article a feature article that we continue to update about

00:14:51.040 the parties made from each party and as i was researching for that article the the only party

00:15:00.400 that posted a platform clearly on their website was the people's party of canada and so if you

00:15:06.480 go to their website you'll see every policy that they have everything that they stand for but you

00:15:11.760 don't see that on any other on any other party's website so if the conservatives were to make a

00:15:18.720 platform and put it up there for people to see i think that that would maybe be helpful for people

00:15:23.520 perhaps it's time okay well i'm gonna let you go and get on to our next guest i appreciate

00:15:27.600 you checking in and being there in the belly and the beast out in the east and uh we'll check in

00:15:31.840 with you again soon there's going to be a panel on uh debate night as well i'm certain we'll bring

00:15:35.920 you in to discuss some of that and uh oh thanks for what you're doing out there sounds great corey

00:15:41.520 thanks for having me on thank you so that is the the western standards jen hodgson yeah reporting

00:15:46.160 from out there in ontario again thank you to our subscribers and sponsors i'm going to turn to adam

00:15:52.400 zivo who's even more distant than ontario uh he's he's way the heck out there uh and we're going to

00:15:58.880 talk a little bit about something that i'm just not hearing about in this election even though

00:16:02.240 it was a big issue and that's the opioid epidemic it's still going on it's still killing people

00:16:07.360 It's still in big debates between the enablement groups and the common sense groups, I like to

00:16:14.960 think. But we're not hearing about it in the election. So thank you very much for taking the

00:16:18.640 time to join us today, Adam. Oh, thanks for having me on the show. It's always a pleasure to be here.

00:16:22.540 So what are you doing out in Serbia? Well, I'm covering the massive anti-government protests

00:16:27.440 that have been paralyzing the country for the past four or five months. Essentially, Serbia 0.57

00:16:32.040 is run by an autocrat who has like a mafia state and serbians have finally had enough after 10 0.96

00:16:39.760 years of this uh so there was a really tragic collapse of a train station in novi sad the

00:16:45.680 country's second largest city back in november and there have been mass protests since just last

00:16:51.040 month 300 000 serbs marched in the streets of belgrade which is 4.5 percent of the entire

00:16:57.020 country it's wild here wow yeah i mean it's unimaginable to have that many people come out

00:17:01.520 out here but we've had it very good i mean serbia has been a volatile part of eastern europe for for

00:17:06.480 30 years now uh do you think the changes are going to be for the positive in the end

00:17:11.760 well i would hope so i i don't think you know okay so serbia economically has been developing but

00:17:16.320 politically uh it's really grim right now so you essentially have no opposition most of the media

00:17:22.720 is controlled by the government uh if you're an independent news outlet you're basically banished

00:17:27.760 from the public realm you can't get on many television stations um these students are

00:17:33.520 providing an alternative perspective they're they're pushing against corruption they're

00:17:37.920 pushing against the government's mafia associations um if they're able to succeed and you know put in

00:17:46.240 a new government i think that that would be great but right now no one's sure what's that what's

00:17:51.040 that's going to look like well it'd be interesting to see your coverage i appreciate you being out

00:17:55.520 there i'll i'll turn it back to kind of what i pulled you in for though and and again uh as i

00:18:00.000 said i heard you on the radio the other day too here out in calgary you've been busy and it's been

00:18:04.160 a big area of your focus has been that opioid epidemic why isn't this coming up in the election

00:18:09.920 it was such a big story for for years people see it on the streets and we're just not hearing about

00:18:13.680 it now well i mean i blame donald trump right the moment he started talking about tariffs and

00:18:17.760 potentially annexing canada it became taboo to acknowledge the fact that canada is in some

00:18:23.040 respects broken and that's understandable because when you're facing off you know against a larger

00:18:27.520 foe that is potentially violating your sovereignty you're you're not going to want to criticize your

00:18:32.560 own team right but what i would argue is that if we want to protect our sovereignty in the long

00:18:37.440 term we need to address the fact that many of our domestic policies have failed uh you know there

00:18:42.080 have been 50 000 deaths since 2016 that have been caused by opioids amongst canadians uh our streets

00:18:49.360 are unsafe you know uh think about just all of the lost lives and then all of the lost productivity

00:18:55.600 and economic output that is associated with that of course you know those economic factors are

00:18:59.760 secondary we should care about people for the sake of their lives first but when we talk about you

00:19:05.360 know protecting canada we have to look at it from an economic lens we talk about for example

00:19:10.080 lowering inter-provincial trade barriers well what about keeping our cities safe and keeping people

00:19:15.120 alive well absolutely and i mean some people don't seem to understand as well when it comes to the

00:19:20.560 expenditure on potentially for treatment or even in alberta where there's talking about uh possibly

00:19:25.920 involuntary uh treatment being applied but we have to realize we're already paying for this in many

00:19:30.880 ways i mean when the police are constantly called or when uh emergency responders are constantly

00:19:35.920 called for overdoses the health care costs that we're paying already and it's not getting better

00:19:42.160 so i mean investing in in treatment and rehabilitation can only help of course and

00:19:47.680 and here's the thing we all know that our healthcare system is somewhat collapsing and

00:19:51.440 it's very difficult to get you know a doctor we have this proliferation of hallway medicine

00:19:57.680 uh much of that is driven by the fact that you have a small number of people who are very unwell

00:20:02.160 who are severely addicted to drugs who are using up a large amount of health resources you have

00:20:07.600 people who are overdosing being hospitalized again and again and again and they're taking

00:20:11.760 up space that could be going towards people who have different kinds of health issues.

00:20:17.080 I have friends who work in medicine, I have friends who are nurses, and they're flabbergasted

00:20:22.040 because they see these addicts taking up bed space and often being catered to enabled

00:20:28.520 while they're in hospitals.

00:20:30.580 In BC, there was a big scandal last year where nurses told the media there that they felt

00:20:37.040 unsafe doing their jobs because they were expected to work in environments where they would be

00:20:42.000 exposed to clouds of fentanyl and meth and you know they would they were worried about being

00:20:48.160 assaulted so there are all these spillover effects and i'm shocked that this conversation

00:20:54.320 seems to have disappeared from the minds of canadians given that it was one of the main

00:20:58.560 issues that we were talking about up until the very end of last year yeah and after uh actually

00:21:05.280 Actually, when I heard you on the radio, the host brought on another expert who used that term, and it gets to me, the loaded one, and saying the problem right now is toxic supply.

00:21:15.200 But they imply almost that addiction is sustainable.

00:21:19.380 If we could just control the consumption of it and give them good pure drugs, they'll be all right, and then they can just live as addicts carrying on.

00:21:26.800 And so it just leads to that enablement handing out more supply, and it's not reducing the addiction, and it's causing a lot of problems.

00:21:34.220 but they won't back off on this. Well, so it's an underlying problem with how they're trying to

00:21:37.840 reframe all of this, right? So they try to switch from illegal drugs to unregulated drugs with this

00:21:43.780 idea that if you regulate drugs, aka legalize them, everything will be fine. And then they say,

00:21:48.280 oh, the problem is just with toxic drugs. And they are basically implicitly arguing that overdoses

00:21:53.220 are predominantly or only caused by drugs which are adulterated. But that's not the case, right?

00:22:00.660 There is no such thing as, you know, non-toxic opioids, for example.

00:22:05.880 There is no such thing as non-toxic meth.

00:22:08.240 And we know that because the very reason why we have an opioid crisis in North America to begin with is OxyContin, right?

00:22:16.020 So before the late 1990s, we barely, you know, we had a small number of heroin users in North America.

00:22:22.480 That number was fairly stable.

00:22:24.100 But for the most part, opioids were not a huge deal because we didn't prescribe them.

00:22:29.200 And then, of course, Purdue Pharma, an American pharmaceutical company, released OxyContin, which is a very powerful opioid, told everyone it was safe, that it was fine, it was non-addictive, encouraged overprescribing, and then the opioid crisis ballooned, right?

00:22:45.580 And that was through, you know, legal drugs that came from a regulated source. So these non-toxic drugs in quotation marks, you know, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. But these radical activists who claim to be, you know, academics and researchers, they'll say, oh, the problem is with toxic drugs, toxic drugs, as long as we just regulated, made it non-toxic, everything would be fine.

00:23:07.640 that there's no evidence behind that right they're essentially drug legalization activists who are

00:23:14.180 trying to uh insert through a back door this agenda that most Canadians don't seem to support

00:23:20.260 yeah if I take too much pharmaceutical grade fentanyl it's going to kill me it doesn't matter

00:23:26.760 how pure or well uh created that drug was it's going to kill me it's a very dangerous drug in

00:23:32.200 a non-clinical environment so it's a problem with every level of government dealing with

00:23:36.520 municipal provincial federal what in this federal election though should our candidates be doing to

00:23:41.140 try and move towards a solution well there's a variety of ways we can handle this uh one main

00:23:45.800 one is of course uh to control the flow of drugs into our system sorry into our country and look

00:23:52.140 we're never going to be able to fully stop illicit drugs from flowing into canada but even preventing

00:23:58.460 just a little bit of supply is helpful because when you decrease supply prices go up and then

00:24:04.120 And that, of course, disincentivizes use to a certain degree.

00:24:07.480 The demand for drugs is somewhat elastic.

00:24:10.300 If you make drugs more expensive, fewer people will try it.

00:24:14.220 People who are severely addicted will still use it.

00:24:16.220 But of course, you know, we're talking about early on.

00:24:18.520 And so what I would say here, the most obvious solution here is hiring more policing for the Port of Vancouver.

00:24:24.700 So the Port of Vancouver has not had a dedicated police force since 1997.

00:24:29.740 seven. And as a result of that, less than 1% of the cargo that goes through that port is checked

00:24:36.840 for illicit contraband. So it's very easy to get stuff in. Some area mayors say that there's

00:24:42.360 literally no downside for organized crime to set up shop there. Now, to give a comparison,

00:24:48.400 the Port of Seattle, which sees similar shipping volumes and of course is in the same area,

00:24:53.220 has similar conditions, has 100 dedicated officers and over 50 support staff. So it shouldn't be that

00:25:00.880 expensive to hire 100, 200 officers to increase the checking of the shipments coming in. But for

00:25:09.960 some reason, we haven't done that, even though we say that, you know, we're a decade into this

00:25:14.520 opioid crisis. And these ports, of course, are under the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal

00:25:21.000 government. So I think this failure is something that we can very squarely blame on the Liberal

00:25:26.240 government. So do you think though, I mean, the Conservatives haven't touched it either. I mean,

00:25:31.960 if this is an area that could be blamed so effectively, why isn't Polly have trying to 1.00

00:25:35.780 make this an issue yet? To be honest, I'm surprised. I think that they should really

00:25:39.740 be touching upon that more. Because I think it's something that people get, right? It's an easy

00:25:46.760 message to say fentanyl and fentanyl precursors are coming through our ports our ports are unguarded

00:25:51.620 let's hire more staff so i think that that's a really easy political win that the conservatives

00:25:56.880 somewhat foolishly uh didn't take up okay so i mean just before i let you go i mean the hardest

00:26:03.560 part of all though in general any level of government you've put a lot of time and work

00:26:07.400 in on this issue where do we go with the solutions it's such a tough one like what are some of the

00:26:11.760 first things we can do no matter what level of government i mean easiest thing we can do at the

00:26:15.640 federal level has also been imposed sentencing reform so uh you know you have a leading hard

00:26:21.200 judiciary which has been implied like which has been imposing a very light sentencing on on drug

00:26:26.220 traffickers so for example in bc for a first time street level fentanyl trafficker the sentencing

00:26:32.840 guideline is around 18 to 36 months right which is obscene because people will sell you know

00:26:38.580 enough fentanyl to kill a whole bunch of people and they'll only get a year and a half to three

00:26:43.640 years in prison. And part of that was made possible by a bill that the Liberals put forward

00:26:49.760 back in 2022, which reduced penalties for drug trafficking and increased the use of conditional

00:26:57.960 sentencing, which essentially puts people under house arrest. So what we need is tougher sentencing

00:27:04.760 guidelines, so strict mandatory minimums, which Pierre Poliette, you know, has obviously advocated

00:27:10.180 for and i think that that would help right because we can't we can't stop drug traffickers if there's

00:27:16.740 no accountability for their actions you can you can hire as many police officers as you want

00:27:21.540 if judges keep releasing traffickers back onto the street with minimal punishment it doesn't matter

00:27:27.460 no it's it's a difficult difficult issue uh but i mean i just hope to see it coming up a bit i mean

00:27:33.460 there's no better opportunity than when you're in an election to get some commitments from some of

00:27:36.980 of these you know people running to lead the country say get that down get it documented so

00:27:41.220 we can get on your case to follow up on it later so i guess we just got to keep nagging them and

00:27:45.620 hope they make it an issue i hope so too um we'll see what happens all right well before i let you

00:27:51.140 go i know you're prolific in the national post where else can people find your work adam well

00:27:56.180 you can find me in the hub so the hub.ca you can find me in the bureau which is sam cooper's uh

00:28:01.220 substack is excellent i'd highly recommend that people subscribe to it you can find me in the

00:28:05.620 Line, which is another popular sub stack. And you can also now find me in City Journal,

00:28:09.300 which is a policy like domestic policy publication based out of the US run by the Manhattan Institute.

00:28:16.100 Right on. Well, I'm going to have Sam on in about 15 minutes and we're going to talk about

00:28:20.260 foreign interference. So we're all in a bunch of good company today. I'll let you get back to

00:28:25.380 covering that protest. Stay safe out there. And I look forward to your reports from there.

00:28:29.300 Sounds good. Thank you so much.

00:28:30.820 Great. Thank you. So you guys, that's Adam Zivo. And also, he didn't mention he's also on

00:28:36.340 X quite a bit. It's always a good spot to find where these things are going and their postings.

00:28:40.020 He's been very good for common sense. He does a lot of coverage on the Ukraine issue and a very

00:28:45.620 big issue has been with the opioid epidemic. It just frustrates me. It's a huge one. Everybody

00:28:50.820 sees it. You see it when you're going into any urban area. You see it in small town areas,

00:28:54.900 you know, towns with two, 3000 people and you'll see a few addicts shuffling around. We never saw

00:28:59.460 that when we were younger. It's changed. So Jacqueline saying, asked earlier, one of the

00:29:06.280 commenters, is Jen able to go to Carney's news briefings? I do believe so. Yes, we haven't been

00:29:10.460 kicked out of his news briefings. We had some issues prior to the election, but I think we

00:29:14.440 haven't had trouble with access so far. So that much is good. And yeah, Jacqueline also saying

00:29:22.200 the problem is the drug traffickers are using kids so they can't be charged. That's something

00:29:25.040 that drug dealers have done for a long, long time. Actually, it's unfortunate. And that's

00:29:29.440 why, I guess, you know, investigatively and punitively, you still got to get to that level

00:29:33.520 above them and hit the serious dealers, not the ground level ones. There's no easy solution.

00:29:40.700 That's part of the problem. It's interesting that Adam brought up the beginnings of this whole

00:29:46.160 epidemic, as I said, and yeah, same thing that I used to see. Calgary used to be a few heroin

00:29:51.340 addicts over in the Inglewood area. It used to be really rough over there. Vancouver, East Hastings

00:29:56.340 was always rough for that, but it was nothing, nothing, nothing like today. I mean, the amount

00:30:01.020 of addicts everywhere is something else. And I saw it in its early stages when he's talking about

00:30:07.360 with the Oxy. I used to work in the States a lot as a surveyor on energy exploration projects. I

00:30:13.480 was doing one in West Virginia and that one really drove something home to me and showed some of the

00:30:17.800 problems with, I mean, I'm very much in favor of reforming Canada's health system and getting more

00:30:22.080 private involvement, but it did show the dark side of some of the profit motivated healthcare

00:30:26.080 providers. So I was running a chainsaw, clearing a line in some brush out there in West Virginia.

00:30:31.660 And there's some thick, nasty thorns and a branch came flying back. I was in a t-shirt. I know

00:30:35.820 there's safety rules or whatever. I had the rest on. A thorn went into my forearm and drove in

00:30:40.780 deep and then slid right under great big, long thing. You could feel it under my skin. It was

00:30:44.160 horrible. So I went to see a doctor. I wanted to get this thing removed. I could feel it down there.

00:30:50.140 It's not, you know, a minor sliver, but it's way too deep for me to do anything with.

00:30:54.540 And I go to this clinic in West Virginia and I wait in the waiting room and people are coming

00:30:59.980 and going, coming and going, coming and going. I finally get in, you know, normal thing.

00:31:03.820 The doctor comes in, the very first thing he asks me, what's your pain level on level one to 10?

00:31:08.540 I said, oh, I don't know. It's not bad. Two or three, you know, if I'm pressing on it,

00:31:13.740 it'll hurt, but it's not bad. He starts looking around and says, well, I can't do anything with

00:31:17.420 that. You'd need a, you know, an orthopedic surgeon to deal with it and everything. It's

00:31:21.660 beyond my ability in this little clinic. I think, oh God, you know, fine. And then again, he pushes,

00:31:27.580 you know, so what's your pain level one to 10 again? And I said, no, it's not bad. I'm all

00:31:31.140 right. So fine. And then he moves out. It was as fast as that. We're talking a five minute visit.

00:31:35.260 I go back to the waiting room and then back to what the most part of my visit was, which was

00:31:39.340 filling out all, you know, I had insurance as I was working in the United States, but I had to

00:31:42.760 fill out all the forms and everything at this clinic. And again, I'm seeing people just coming

00:31:46.500 and going in there. And then finally it struck me. The guy's a pill pusher. That's it. He's

00:31:51.260 selling the Oxy. And we were already seeing that. I was having trouble with my crews. You'd see it

00:31:55.800 on the streets and the towns in the Eastern States. Like it hadn't hit up here yet, but these

00:32:00.300 guys were flogging that crap. These, you know, people would come in and out. The doctors like

00:32:05.080 him would just write prescriptions without a second thought. They sell half the prescription.

00:32:08.680 They consume the other half, uh, the people who pick it up and it built that widespread addiction.

00:32:15.240 And then of course, you know, once Oxy got cracked down on the Americans and they finally

00:32:18.980 realize that there's some massive lawsuits and everything due to that. Well, addicts are still

00:32:23.880 there. Meth really kind of hit the scene. It'd been around a while, but it got a lot bigger

00:32:27.740 because meth is cheaper, harder to control. It's getting around. And then meth spread to fentanyl,

00:32:35.220 which now, you know, I mean that the tiny, tiny effective amount of that drug and how dangerous

00:32:40.320 it is. We see that. If you see that in the streets, if you're not familiar with it, you always see it

00:32:44.560 gives the stoop, right? You see them walking bent over and hunched half over. That's fentanyl.

00:32:48.980 And I mean, it's something else for a procedure I had done last year. I posted pictures of it. I'll

00:32:55.180 spare you guys of it this time around, but that's part of what they gave me fentanyl next to something

00:32:58.800 else for that procedure. I guess it was a wake-through, but you don't remember a single

00:33:01.800 thing. It just knocks you cold. And afterwards I came out of it. It felt like I'd had the best

00:33:05.160 sleep I've ever had in my life. Like there's part of the problem too. There is a clinical use

00:33:09.620 for fentanyl. You wouldn't want to have that used repeatedly two or three days or suddenly you're

00:33:14.560 an addict. And of course, you wouldn't want it used without medical supervision, because I mean,

00:33:20.640 it's a very, very powerful thing. But we haven't had that before. And now, as Joe Mills, you know,

00:33:27.220 a commenter said, you sad situation, it is. And it's hitting everybody. And we got some of it,

00:33:32.580 some of we got to stop the taboo. You know, we can look down our noses and you see that addict

00:33:36.540 shuffling around. But don't forget that it's a person in there, as much as they might be now a

00:33:42.440 scary person, an in-your-face person. However, they fell into that. They also had family. They

00:33:49.480 had parents. They had siblings. And it could happen to anybody. I mean, people say, oh,

00:33:54.920 that must have come from a bad house. Well, not necessarily. This could happen to anybody.

00:33:59.320 So we've really, if we want to be a decent country, not just, you know, as Adam mentioned,

00:34:03.780 I mean, there's the costs. There's the actual costs. And if you want to be just a cold-hearted

00:34:07.240 fiscal conservative, that's fine. It's still in our favor then to try and find ways to treat this

00:34:12.220 epidemic. And the social and human cost is just overwhelming. And the battles that go on,

00:34:20.540 and that's what Adam's been battling with, and others, there's two schools of thought,

00:34:24.620 almost the enablement thought and the treatment side, right? And I remember an interview I saw,

00:34:31.980 I don't know which TV news channel it was. I watch a lot of the legacy news. I got to get my news

00:34:35.480 from everywhere I can. And they were talking about safe consumption sites in Calgary. And this sob

00:34:40.400 story they gave for this girl who said, I'm perfectly fine. I just want to be safe when I

00:34:46.420 go down to take my pills before I go to work for the day, you know, in case I overdose because I've

00:34:50.400 got illegal opioids or whatever. So I need that center so I can do that. But if as long as I've

00:34:54.460 got that, I'm perfectly fine. And again, that messaging, and that's really what it was, was

00:34:59.120 as if you could sustain that addiction, as if it's okay, just as long as you regulate the dose

00:35:05.740 well enough. That's absolutely wrong. Absolutely wrong. And understates the incredible danger

00:35:12.640 of these drugs and the danger of that addiction and people who don't understand addiction. You

00:35:17.820 know, there's the reason the most successful addiction treatment programs, whether you're

00:35:23.980 talking the classic one I attended, AA, or whether it's other ones, if they aren't 12-step based,

00:35:30.640 it doesn't matter. Most of them have the involvement of former addicts because you need

00:35:35.220 that perspective. You need the perspective of somebody who's actually been there. Not some

00:35:39.940 pointy-headed professor who's read all their texts in the works. No, somebody who has found

00:35:46.020 themselves ruining their lives, who felt the compulsion, who know that what they're about to

00:35:52.460 consume is not good for them. It's not going to make them happy. It's not going to make their

00:35:56.620 life any better, but they feel they have to consume it anyways. That's what addiction is about. And if

00:36:02.620 a person's never been in those shoes, they can't understand it. Good on them. I envy anybody who

00:36:07.540 doesn't understand that. Somebody who's never felt the sweats, never saw their hands shake a little

00:36:11.800 because they stopped. That's just on the alcohol level I'm familiar with. We need to deal with it.

00:36:18.020 It's a weird human trait that we become addicted to these destructive drugs. I mean, a safe supply

00:36:23.560 of meth. You see the addicts too. If you see the ones on the streets and they're skinny as all get

00:36:27.840 out their teeth, they're gone. They got sores all over them. Those are meth addicts. And they're

00:36:32.820 not harmless. These are people now that they can get meth induced psychosis. It's a speedy,

00:36:38.120 speedy drug. And when they go off their kilter on that, they can become very, very dangerous.

00:36:45.500 That's some of the public transit stabbings you hear about and the assaults. We've got to deal

00:36:50.180 with this. And just filling our jails isn't working. And then people say, there's the big

00:36:54.940 with the involuntary treatment. They're really getting on Danielle Smith and she's trying a

00:36:59.900 treatment-focused approach. Jason Kinney started it first and she's carried on. And Alberta's had

00:37:05.740 a reduction in overdoses. It is working versus BC that tried enablement and they just saw thousands

00:37:10.700 and thousands more overdoses. And I'm not wholly against safe consumption sites. It's just that

00:37:15.500 you've got to have a heavy, heavy, heavy treatment focus. They should be nagged and pushed and

00:37:21.020 prodded to get treatment every time they come in for that consumption. They got to be pushed towards

00:37:25.340 that. And when you're talking about compassionate intervention is the term used by the Smith

00:37:30.460 government, how do people say incarcerating people for the crime of being an addict? No.

00:37:36.540 When they've hit bottom, look, we don't have many resources as it is. We can barely keep up with

00:37:41.500 healthcare, addiction treatment, the rest. So the fear mongers are saying Smith's government's just

00:37:45.900 going to come snatching people out of their houses off the streets and shoving them into jails

00:37:49.100 because even if they wanted to do something like that they would never have the resources we're

00:37:54.460 talking there's going to be maybe four or five hundred beds for this they're only going to take

00:37:58.140 people when they've hit bottom we're talking ones when there's been a medical professional

00:38:02.780 who's seen the same overdose for the fifth sixth time because you know it's just a matter of time

00:38:06.700 before one of those overdose is going to be fatal or the police officers who have dealt with the

00:38:10.300 same person over and over or the the again social workers who have found them literally living in

00:38:14.780 in their feces, feces behind a dumpster, because that's the state of hundreds of people right now.

00:38:20.160 Get them in, get them away from the drugs for a while in a controlled environment,

00:38:25.720 feed them, wash them. And maybe, and it's still a long shot, but maybe at that point, that's where

00:38:33.260 you might be able to get through with a 30 day period to try and say, hey, let's get you treated.

00:38:37.940 Let's go further. Let's get you off this crap. Because if you don't intervene, the chance of

00:38:44.480 success is pretty much zero. Once they've hit that point, they're in a death spiral. It's just

00:38:50.140 a matter of time before they die of exposure or being stabbed by another addict or of course an

00:38:55.060 overdose. So people getting on Smith's case, I'm a conservative. I believe in respecting people's

00:39:02.120 individual liberty as much and whenever possible. But I believe in compassionate conservatism. That

00:39:07.900 means we help those who can't help themselves. When a person is that deep in addiction, they

00:39:12.640 can't help themselves. It's covered under the Mental Health Act anyways. When a person

00:39:16.720 is looking likely to harm themselves or others, we can intervene. So let's do it. Yet we get

00:39:22.860 these hysteric leftist enablist weirdos who say, no, no, we just need more free drugs for these

00:39:29.680 people, more handing it out, more enablement. God, how ugly does East Hastings have to look

00:39:36.460 before you admit that it's not bloody working. I just don't know.

00:39:43.940 All right, let's go on another sidetrack. Something depressing again, but fine. Let's

00:39:48.920 bring up the polls. I'm only bringing up one this week because it's enough. And it's abacus. Abacus

00:39:53.440 was the poll that was most favorable to the conservatives all the way through.

00:39:58.980 I mean, they were the slowest to kind of reflect the surge of the liberals. And now they have the

00:40:05.420 Liberals had a 42% lead and the Conservatives at 36. NDP collapsed down to 11. The momentum for

00:40:12.200 the Liberals continues. I don't know how. I don't know why. I don't understand it. I don't get it.

00:40:17.460 I really don't. But I can't deny it. Denying it, I mean, this could be skewed. It could be that the

00:40:23.500 Liberal lead isn't as high as it looks. It could be that they're actually neck and neck. But there's

00:40:28.140 no way the Conservatives, when you've got every polling company saying pretty much the same thing,

00:40:33.660 There's no way the conservatives are holding anything close to the lead they did before.

00:40:37.380 They just are not resonating with people.

00:40:40.340 Mavis is saying, I don't believe the polls.

00:40:42.800 It's fine.

00:40:43.560 You don't have to, but you can't deny them.

00:40:48.760 They might not be 100% accurate, but we're talking dozens of pollsters now.

00:40:53.520 The same thing.

00:40:55.560 The conspiracy to hold that many pollsters in thrall, it just wouldn't work.

00:41:00.980 uh parties do their own internal polling all the time that's one of the things you constantly do

00:41:06.220 during campaign time you're running polls you're running polls you're running polls rest assured

00:41:09.340 if there was a massive public deviation uh in in support from what these polls are reflecting

00:41:16.160 the parties would be screaming a heck of a lot more about it their internals are showing them

00:41:20.740 a same the same pattern and i i got a feeling that they're just as flummoxed about it as we are

00:41:28.480 as I am. I don't quite wrap my mind around it. I don't see how and what it would take to ignore

00:41:34.160 nine years of terrible, terrible liberal government and suddenly change because they

00:41:39.360 put a new face on it. Bumpy Johnson saying, this election is a nightmare scenario for the

00:41:43.540 Conservatives. The NDP collapsed. It's a two-party race. In a two-party race, the Liberals will always

00:41:47.000 win. That's part of it. That's definitely part of it. And the reality was that vote was always

00:41:54.600 split. When the conservatives would win, when Harper won, I can't remember what he won, but it

00:41:58.260 was like 42%. They don't win with a large plurality of votes. So that means that the votes outside of

00:42:05.560 their realm added up to more than what they got. So with the NDP out of the picture, the conservatives

00:42:12.200 are in serious trouble. But part of it too is the conservative support is dropping. It's not

00:42:17.060 staying flat. It's not dropping as fast as the NDP did, but it is dropping. There are still people

00:42:21.400 leaving the conservatives and supporting the liberals for some reason. I don't get it.

00:42:28.220 Joe Mills saying polls have never influenced my voting decision. Well, I like to think for most

00:42:33.840 people it shouldn't, but there is a bandwagon effect. And that's another thing too. And yeah,

00:42:38.260 that's where media has really been pushing these polls and these pollsters and others have that

00:42:42.700 interest because people just have that nature of they want to be on the winning team. Not everybody.

00:42:47.500 I like to think my audience here is smarter than that, but still there is some of that.

00:42:51.760 And when you see it rolling like that, people are more inclined to just get on board with

00:42:55.920 what they feel is the majority, get on board with what they feel is trendy.

00:42:59.060 And that's a little bit of what's happening here too.

00:43:01.100 That's why I was talking a little while back about lawn signs and placements and all that

00:43:04.140 in elections.

00:43:05.060 It doesn't matter on a public street corner where a sign is, but if neighbors, a full

00:43:08.160 cul-de-sac is full of one candidate sign or another, it's going to influence the neighbors

00:43:11.280 a bit and it's going to keep that trend going.

00:43:14.840 there's another big part that nobody saw coming. Christophe Antoine commenters saying as long as

00:43:22.220 Trump's a monster people don't want to be associated with the conservative ideology

00:43:24.980 and that's part of it too, absolutely. Polyev hasn't shown himself to be tight with Trump or

00:43:32.000 anything but if people are going to relate one with the other and there's part of it too. Guys

00:43:37.020 there's not a heck of a lot Trump's done that you could call conservative. He's running a government

00:43:41.820 based on tax increases and collective control. That's not conservative, but it doesn't matter.

00:43:47.720 It's associated as conservative. And he has pissed a lot of people off. And that, if you're associated

00:43:55.560 with him, particularly in Canada, I know there's some people in Alberta love Trump. I know there's

00:43:59.940 some people across Canada that love Trump, but they are a tiny minority. And they are a much

00:44:03.760 smaller minority now than they were three months ago before Trump started all this tariff crap

00:44:09.740 and U.S. 51st stuff.

00:44:13.020 He kept giving the middle finger to Canada

00:44:14.560 and pushing things around.

00:44:17.300 I mean, I was getting annoyed by it.

00:44:20.060 I have, and certainly have,

00:44:21.700 we've got years of my shows and columns

00:44:23.420 and everything to show.

00:44:24.640 Absolutely no use for Trudeau.

00:44:27.340 He's a peckerhead.

00:44:28.240 He's a large part of the reason

00:44:29.720 we're in the mess we're in now.

00:44:30.940 Most of the reason we're in the mess

00:44:32.120 we are right now.

00:44:34.000 But the office,

00:44:36.080 and I'm not a big fan of Confederation.

00:44:37.820 Hey, I wrote the book,

00:44:38.540 The Sovereign's Handbook.

00:44:39.740 But the Office of Prime Minister, the Office of Diplomacy, the way it works country to country, and so on,

00:44:44.360 to prod at our Prime Minister, keep calling him governor, and with that America 51st thing and everything,

00:44:51.880 that even was starting to get on my nerves.

00:44:54.420 So if somebody who loves the United States, can't stand Trudeau, is getting annoyed by this,

00:44:59.600 what does it do to the average moderate Canadian?

00:45:02.980 He built a sense of loathing.

00:45:04.780 And then everybody, even slightly, fairly or unfairly associated with Trump, starts riding down in the polls with him. And that's hitting Poliev too. There is a perfect storm of a lot of ugliness going on. Well, Bumpy John's saying, Trump made me money. First time investor in the down market, Trump has done more for me in less than a year than Canada has done in over a decade. Well, okay. So Trump grabbed a seesaw in the market and started banging it up and down. And some people got lucky and grabbed it on the bottom and wrote it up.

00:45:32.400 does that mean it's a good policy on trump's part though no i mean the money came from somewhere

00:45:38.060 people also took losses loads of losses people saying it's a market correction no it's not when

00:45:42.800 it's induced by government policy it's not a correction it's a reaction both ways and yes

00:45:49.300 some people did make some really good money some people if they knew when he was going to do one

00:45:54.420 of his flip-flops and backtracks they did really well that's called yeah market manipulation it's

00:46:00.660 called inside trading. I'm tired of people making excuses for Trump. He's not doing North America or

00:46:07.360 the world any favors anymore. I thought he was going to be a better reformer. I was hoping for

00:46:11.100 better. But this bizarre tariff obsession, I know we always campaigned on tariffs, but not this kind

00:46:16.960 of lunacy, this reckless shaking of markets all over the bloody world. And it's eventually going

00:46:24.120 to cost him, especially now that he's taken on China. And China is a worthy adversary to take 1.00

00:46:30.360 gone. They're not nice players on the world stage. But you got to be careful when you're

00:46:35.960 talking about putting now tariffs of 130% against China. You got to remember where the price comes

00:46:44.420 down to. And that comes down to the consumer. And most of the things you get today, where do you

00:46:49.480 think you're going to replace these consumer goods once China is not providing them? Because

00:46:57.000 oh, we're going to take all the manufacturing home. Well, it's not going to be overnight to

00:47:00.420 take a cellular manufacturing home or even manufacturing the cheap consumer goods,

00:47:06.280 the toothbrushes, the pens, you name it. They all are marked in China. You go to a dollar store,

00:47:14.360 one of the Americans, it's part of the American culture. There's a dollar general every three

00:47:17.680 blocks. It's all Chinese goods. Go to Walmart, go to Target. And that's most of Trump's babies

00:47:23.100 out there in their pajamas and mid-afternoon shopping. They're going to be pretty upset when

00:47:27.440 the prices double on everything. So, you know, Bumpy's saying, what happens if Trump takes the

00:47:34.060 auto plant jobs from Ontario? They're good jobs. It might be a loss to America now. Yeah, will they

00:47:37.580 though? Is it going to be that much cheaper? Are they going to retool in the States? Like,

00:47:41.880 it doesn't work that easily. They're integrated markets. What Trump is doing is screwing up the

00:47:48.120 North American auto sector, probably going to drive them into a nightmare scenario. And five,

00:47:53.020 six years now when Trump is gone, the opposite of what he was hoping for is going to happen.

00:47:56.820 Hyundai and BMW and Toyota are really going to take those markets because he really screwed them

00:48:01.680 up here. Jacqueline's saying the bigger issue is bigger than what's being talked about. The EU

00:48:09.860 wants the empire back. Well, the EU, that's another jurisdiction all on its own. And I don't

00:48:16.820 know. The EU's mostly been getting weaker over the years. You know, more countries are getting

00:48:21.060 uncomfortable with them. They're not holding things together. I mean, that's where the worst

00:48:24.580 of the globalists and the socialists dwell. There's no doubt about that. I don't know if

00:48:28.800 they're that much of a force, though. They're a factor. There's no doubt about that. But how far

00:48:35.580 they're getting with things, I don't know. I'll give some credit to Trump, though. One of the

00:48:38.440 things he came up with, I think that was just today, is he wants to make daylight savings time

00:48:43.960 permanent. There, I can fully get behind that. One of the dumbest of modern day policies we've

00:48:50.100 got that we just can't seem to get out of is changing the stupid clocks twice a year.

00:48:55.800 Okay, Donald, if you could do that, you know, if you could do that, at least you've done one thing

00:49:01.620 I certainly appreciate and a simple fix. Though I'm not sure if that would be a state or federal

00:49:07.360 jurisdiction. Though I know Trump doesn't really care much about jurisdictions. So if anybody's

00:49:11.400 just going to say, hey, it's going to get done and does it. Well, he would be the one to get that

00:49:14.360 done, I guess. Joe Mills saying, I was in Jasper recently, stores full of Chinese stuff, didn't

00:49:18.680 buy anything. Yeah, you know, tourist goods, other junk crap, everything else. Most of it's Chinese, 1.00

00:49:24.180 but we benefit from some of that. That's what people have to understand as well. We can't bring

00:49:30.400 home these markets. Again, I'm not going to go down to the mom pop corner store laptop manufacturer.

00:49:36.480 The economies of scale and the size and the frame, particularly when it comes to electronics,

00:49:42.680 is part of what's made a lot of our things affordable now.

00:49:46.120 Think about big screen TVs, these flat TVs.

00:49:48.580 I remember a case, what was it, late 90s or so, when the first of these big LED TVs were coming out

00:49:56.160 and there was a store in Edmonton that got a smash and grab and this thing was only a 36-inch TV or 40, I don't remember.

00:50:03.680 It was big for the time though. And it was worth $20,000. Who on earth was buying these things back then? But people did. And now 38 years later, you can go to Walmart and buy one for $300 that's larger, that's thinner, that's lighter, and it gives a better picture.

00:50:20.560 Again, that's not due to domestic manufacturing trends. That's because these things are coming

00:50:25.480 from China. One of my first purchases when I moved to Calgary and got my own apartment when I was

00:50:30.300 like 19 years old, 17 when I first moved, but either way, I remember buying with my first wife,

00:50:35.680 memories start to fade. I bought a VCR though. And it was like $230 back then. That's when you're

00:50:42.520 making like $10 an hour. This is a lot of money on a VCR. I actually bought it on a rent to own

00:50:47.100 payment scale. That's what you had to do with those electronics back then. And that's in those

00:50:52.380 dollars back then. I mean, you don't even get VCRs anymore, but if they still existed, you could

00:50:56.140 probably get one for 20 bucks. Yeah, Bumpy's saying, you know, I still remember the back

00:51:01.780 breaking tube TVs. Yeah, that VCR, I put on a floor model wooden cabinet style TV that I'd

00:51:06.960 gotten from my parents that they used to have a huge, heavy, massive, ugly thing. That was the

00:51:11.580 nature of TVs back then. I'm just saying, see, there's a lot of these products. We're doing

00:51:16.400 better for as consumers because of it. I'm not saying, again, to bend over to China, but let's

00:51:20.680 not pretend that they're ripping us off when we buy these things. They're making a lot of your

00:51:25.240 average everyday goods affordable when they wouldn't be domestically. I mean, if you

00:51:30.120 want to try and turn the clock back, and that's a bit of what Trump's talking about into some

00:51:34.720 magical Norman Rockwell 1950s world, you know, fine, but you got to remember that, well, for one,

00:51:43.920 that world's not coming back. But even if you could, people back then, yeah, you only had one

00:51:51.320 person working and so on. You also didn't fly all over the world for vacations like people do now.

00:51:56.460 You didn't have the consumer goods that people have in their households. You didn't have two

00:52:00.400 or three vehicles in a household. Maybe we are a spoiled society. Maybe we don't need all that

00:52:04.740 stuff. But that stuff has become affordable because of this new intertwined relationships

00:52:13.360 we have with producing countries like India and China. And we're not going to be able to compete

00:52:18.440 with their consumer manufacturing goods. We can't. It's impossible. Labor is much too cheap over

00:52:24.840 there. So I mean, people say, well, the way to do is to bring in tariffs against them so that we

00:52:31.280 can do that. Well, okay, but that means you're going to pay more, a lot more. So how much more

00:52:36.840 are you willing to pay? I'm not willing to pay a heck of a lot more. I think integrated economies

00:52:43.520 are a good idea and conservatives used to think that. The bottom line was freer trade was supposed

00:52:47.960 to be the way to go. Lots of countries all over putting tariffs on, using tariff policy. Yeah,

00:52:52.200 that's because it's been a lazy policy that a lot of countries have used for decades, but it doesn't

00:52:56.280 mean it's a good policy. A lot of countries do a lot of stupid things. So yeah, I'm afraid Sam

00:53:00.940 seems to be running late for some reason. It's unfortunate. Hopefully we can get him on. Sam

00:53:05.600 Cooper was going to talk because the foreign interference factor that that's been won again,

00:53:09.840 that was the biggest news story of the year for a couple of years. And the liberals managed to

00:53:17.960 just keep ragging the puck and dragging it on and having an inquiry that was sort of

00:53:23.580 inconclusive and then hold another little inquiry that didn't really go anywhere.

00:53:28.440 and now we're into an election and nobody's talking about it anymore.

00:53:33.340 We had 11 people in Parliament identified as being compromised through foreign interference.

00:53:40.840 11 people.

00:53:42.040 We never did find out who the hell they are.

00:53:44.640 How many of the ones running in this election are compromised?

00:53:47.900 We don't know.

00:53:49.160 We can't know.

00:53:51.000 And we should, but it's not coming up.

00:53:55.320 People aren't talking about it.

00:53:56.420 And I think part of it is because the, particularly the Chinese, and it's fair enough because the defenders say, well, also the Russians have interfered and India has interfered. Okay, they're all pissing around in the Canadian realm, probably because we're such wimps, we don't identify those who've been compromised. So it just is an invitation for foreign interference. 0.62

00:54:13.540 and I was looking forward to Sam because he really gets to the bottom of a lot of the

00:54:19.780 motivation for some of it, especially with China, because he's really in his book, Willful Blindness,

00:54:24.680 he really broke it down well. Bumpy Johnson saying, I think one of the biggest issues with

00:54:28.520 China's intellectual property theft, Huawei is a prime example for reverse engineering products.

00:54:33.260 Yeah, the Asian manufacturers have always been good at that. It's just been the nature of them 0.99

00:54:39.460 and it's frustrating and it's difficult to stop through corporate espionage or just other ways

00:54:46.100 of getting stuff. We want to reduce it, but it's not going away and they've already undercut on a

00:54:50.280 lot of those items. But getting back to what Sam was pushing on with the Chinese interference and

00:54:58.820 the integrated markets in the bad way, the Chinese use of casinos for money laundering, 0.99

00:55:07.640 for buying up Canadian properties for money laundering.

00:55:12.120 You see, they're bringing in the money.

00:55:13.820 They're selling the fentanyl.

00:55:15.340 It's coming into North America, European markets.

00:55:17.180 They're producing it.

00:55:18.580 Got to launder that money somewhere,

00:55:20.300 as well as money they're getting from other means.

00:55:23.200 Canada was always a soft touch for that.

00:55:25.660 So they're buying up the property that caused a lot of the real estate

00:55:28.800 catastrophe in Vancouver.

00:55:31.720 As well, they were laundering the money in Canadian casinos.

00:55:35.800 and uh they've got these these networks i mean there's part of what we get down to drilling down

00:55:42.660 to and how complicated and ugly some of them you know sam's stuff and adam's stuff tie together in

00:55:47.040 a way when adam was pointing out the ports and here's an area that terrifies um uh governments

00:55:54.180 a lot is dealing with the port the reason they won't they're terrified of the longshoreman's

00:55:59.180 union. They're terrified of the Teamsters. Those unions have corruption issues. That's nothing new, 0.77

00:56:06.860 guys. I mean, look up Jimmy Hoffa. It's been the nature of the Teamsters for a long, long time.

00:56:13.020 And there's a lot of money changing hands on the Vancouver port over there and the people

00:56:17.820 controlling it are the union heads that are very well compensated to make sure that a whole lot

00:56:23.020 lot of product gets through without scrutiny. And, uh, the government does not want to get

00:56:29.440 into a fight with them. Uh, but that leads to this getting worse and worse. We saw how bad it

00:56:34.580 got when the longshoremen went on strike a little while ago, because suddenly we couldn't ship

00:56:37.440 things. We got supply chain issues and the government scrambled in to, uh, intervene and,

00:56:43.260 and, uh, you know, get that thing mediated. They've got the government by the short and curly.

00:56:48.040 So they, I mean, as Adam said, it's mysterious, right?

00:56:51.720 Why can't we just assign a few hundred people?

00:56:54.880 It's not that much cost to be doing security at these ports, checking some of these containers coming in.

00:57:00.160 I mean, if you are, you know, king drug exporter from such and such country, you're trying to get containers full of them.

00:57:06.920 You've got to remember, but a few pounds of fentanyl, I mean, is it enough to supply a nation for a while?

00:57:12.120 It's unbelievable how potent that stuff is.

00:57:14.820 You've got entire C-cans coming in.

00:57:18.040 And they know only 1% of them are even checked.

00:57:22.080 I mean, if you're an exporter, you send out 10 seacans,

00:57:24.820 you know that 10 out of 10 are still probably going to get through.

00:57:28.100 You send out 100, only one of them might get checked.

00:57:31.480 Why not send it here?

00:57:32.980 We've got to at least check.

00:57:34.280 I mean, still, it's a needle in a haystack, but you've got to try.

00:57:39.620 As Adam said as well, if you make it harder, you won't get rid of it,

00:57:44.360 but you'll make it more expensive.

00:57:45.460 You'll make it tougher to find, and it makes people less inclined to get into it in the first place.

00:57:51.380 So you won't lose it that way.

00:57:53.700 But these issues tie together in so, so many ways and follow the money in a sense.

00:58:00.960 And when you get to India, China, they are using Canada kind of as a de facto battleground for criminal enterprises, 0.86

00:58:09.040 whether it's with drugs or other means of interference.

00:58:11.800 And we've been letting it go.

00:58:13.540 It's very distressing, to say the least.

00:58:18.800 All right.

00:58:19.860 Let's see.

00:58:21.620 Let's talk about the third party.

00:58:24.180 The NDP collapsed.

00:58:26.200 That led to a lot of the problems that conservatives are having right now.

00:58:31.860 Jen mentioned Bernier is still there.

00:58:34.200 There's the thing.

00:58:35.000 Bernier has been able to take, but it's one of the things you can do when you're a party that's really not going to win anything.

00:58:41.540 but at least they can take the stances straight out on stuff that others are afraid to.

00:58:45.620 And he's proposed the immigration freeze to address the housing crisis.

00:58:49.940 You know, this is not extreme.

00:58:51.840 It shouldn't be considered extreme.

00:58:54.920 Bernier is not going to get anywhere, I'm afraid.

00:58:57.520 For the bottom line, the same reason, anybody who's even slightly conservative realizes it's bad enough

00:59:01.700 for the conservatives with the NDP collapsing and all that going to the NDP,

00:59:05.020 but splitting the vote by going PPC is only going to make it worse.

00:59:07.920 I guess if people just want to vote basically purely on principle, fair enough.

00:59:10.780 That's part of the system. Register your vote for the PPC. Absolutely. Strategic voting is a

00:59:16.440 compromise of one's principles. It's up to the individual. But Bernier is there making points.

00:59:21.680 Bernier was the only one speaking up against supply management. There's another issue that

00:59:26.240 really sends a chill down the back of federal politicians. They're always scared of that one.

00:59:30.900 That's the one where we have paid so many prices. We've lost so many trade deals with Europe, UK,

00:59:36.140 New Zealand, the United States. We're at difficulties with those deals because of our

00:59:39.640 stupid dairy supply management protectionism. It's nuts. Only Bernier has touched that one.

00:59:46.500 I mean, some people are saying that's the reason he didn't win the conservative race years ago,

00:59:49.980 which is probably true because he only lost it by 1%. So Bernier is there and some good people

00:59:54.520 are working really hard running for him. At least I've said that there's a role for people running

00:59:59.900 for alternative parties. At least you're bringing forward issues. And that's what I was talking

01:00:03.800 about today is forgotten issues. Those parties are bringing them up when the other parties won't.

01:00:08.260 and it doesn't mean they get them brought in,

01:00:10.320 but at least they get them into the spotlight a little.

01:00:12.520 And it's important.

01:00:13.580 It's important.

01:00:14.200 It's part of the role.

01:00:17.500 Jen mentioned that, too, with some video, too.

01:00:19.440 So Poliev has vowed not to touch abortion legislation,

01:00:24.540 which, you know, very strong social conservatives,

01:00:28.760 people with those concerns are going to be upset about.

01:00:31.260 But realistically, they've just never made up a large enough portion

01:00:34.600 that it's going to influence conservative policies that much. But it sounds like the election might

01:00:40.920 take a bit of a turn. This has been kind of interesting this time around. The liberals

01:00:44.840 haven't done any of the social attacks like they usually do. I shouldn't say none, but not nearly

01:00:48.420 as much. Normally in a federal election like this by now, we would have heard them saying,

01:00:53.700 Pierre's going to ban abortion. Pierre's going to illegalize same-sex marriage. Pierre's going to

01:00:59.940 illegalize black people, you name it. I mean, they will throw every bit of spaghetti at the 1.00

01:01:03.600 conservatives, to put them as some sort of backwards people who are going to pull everything

01:01:07.660 back to slavery times. But they haven't done that yet. I think part of it is because

01:01:14.860 they haven't felt they need to. The conservatives are just that. That's what I'm talking about too,

01:01:21.660 whether you believe the polls or don't believe the polls. The liberals are doing their internals.

01:01:25.620 If you're campaigning and it's working with what you've been doing so far and it's working,

01:01:31.360 you'd be foolish to change tactic. So why turn it into an election about race, an election about

01:01:39.380 abortion, an election about same-sex marriage? Because again, it never was an issue in past

01:01:43.080 elections until the liberals would bring it up and try and smear conservatives with it.

01:01:46.360 But they aren't doing that this time around, which again tells me of their confidence. I think

01:01:50.320 they're still keeping that in their back pocket, but they don't really need to fire those shots

01:01:56.200 right now. Let's see here. Yeah. So yeah, we're not seeing that happening so much in it.

01:02:05.580 What else we got? Carney. Yeah, here's another one. This one's a big concern. And again,

01:02:09.300 just doesn't seem to resonate with the voters. It just tires me out. Carney's talking about

01:02:13.600 pushing for internet censorship. He wants to control the internet. This has been happening

01:02:17.940 since the 90s. I remember laughing my head off at the CRTC, Canadian Radio Television

01:02:23.720 Commission. Towards the end of the 90s, they did a big study. They had a big group because this

01:02:29.900 internet's coming along and boy, it's spreading information. We don't have a finger on the

01:02:33.180 control of it. For a few months of spending money and jabbering among themselves, they said,

01:02:37.580 we've decided at this time we're not going to regulate it. They just laughed. What it told me

01:02:42.580 at that time even was, no, they just don't know how. People with groups like the CRTC by their

01:02:47.840 very nature want to control. That's what they do. They want to control information. They want to

01:02:52.320 control what you see. They want to control what you say. They want to control how it gets to you.

01:02:56.300 They want to see everything you do. They're authoritarians and you should bloody well be

01:02:59.680 afraid of them. The internet's one of the most empowering tools modern society has. And yes,

01:03:05.780 it's also one of the most dangerous tools, one of the most nasty tools. I mean, the internet has

01:03:09.860 also provided for gross child molesting perverts, the best pipeline of that kind of material they

01:03:16.020 pursue that they've never had before. But it's also allowed people to share information on a

01:03:22.000 good end, to communicate, to study policies, to get information across to each other.

01:03:27.540 Don't let somebody like Carney control the internet for all of us, ostensibly to go after

01:03:34.900 the perverts. I'm probably phrasing it wrong. It's Penn Jillette, I think you said it, though. I love

01:03:43.000 as far as libertarians go. He said, you know, when something big and bad happens, I think it

01:03:48.360 was mostly in cases of gun control he was talking about, which I will talk to Tracy in a little

01:03:51.900 while about. You know, when something bad happens, the government steps in to take rights away from

01:03:56.680 good people. You know, if there's a mass shooting, the government steps in and steals the gun from

01:04:02.100 the law guiding by gun owners. When this case, it's when the liberals see, you know, people

01:04:09.540 grooming children and doing other nasty acts through the internet they plan on sneaking in

01:04:15.580 and taking your rights on the internet that's not the right approach you have to be targeted even

01:04:19.980 if it's tougher respecting the rights of the whole is still more important even though you really do

01:04:25.460 want to crack down and catch that odious minority you want to hit them fine let's get more tax 1.00

01:04:30.400 dollars into officers targeting those sick monsters out there and uh let's get real

01:04:37.580 sentencing going on with those guys. Let's get these perverts behind bars for long, long times. 0.99

01:04:42.820 You can't carry them. Speaking of not being able to reform somebody, you know, it seems that

01:04:46.960 drug rehabilitation at least has some degree of reformation. The recidivism rate for predatory

01:04:58.080 child predators, molesters is like 50%. You can't fix those guys. They are dangerous. That level is

01:05:05.900 way too high. And I've read studies on that and it's just a gross world of those people. Something's

01:05:10.740 wrong in their head. Their fuses aren't functioning right. They're attracted to kids. It's gross. It's

01:05:15.680 damaging. It's disgusting. And it has to be addressed and it's never acceptable. And we can't

01:05:20.900 fix them. Hey, if there was a pill you could give them and bang, all of a sudden their brain's fixed

01:05:25.000 and they're safe on the streets, fine. Let them go. I don't want to spend more money keeping them

01:05:27.460 in jail. But the reality is, you know, in the study I read, they start breaking down. Yeah,

01:05:31.840 yeah, it's 50% for those ones who snatch up kids they don't know. But did you know that incestual 0.72

01:05:36.880 child molestation relationships is only 10% of them re-offend because they're really only into

01:05:41.560 their own kids? Okay, even 10% is too high. Until you guys can start fixing these guys behind bars

01:05:52.920 to get it down to a sub 1% recidivism rate, we're putting our children at risk by letting them out

01:05:59.500 all the time. It's tough. It's tough. We've only got so many prison cells. We've made such a damn

01:06:08.200 mess. Such a mess. Here's one. This is coming up. The Taxpayers Federation brought it up.

01:06:15.400 And I brought this up on my, and I'll have a column coming out on that in the weekend.

01:06:19.500 But the Taxpayers Federation is urging the party leaders to reject a home equity tax. I talked

01:06:23.620 about this the other day too. And you might, if you weren't viewing that the other day, but the

01:06:30.060 liberals have been sniffing around your primary residence equity for years, constantly. They're

01:06:36.400 studying it. They're poking into it. They want a bite out of it. There's no doubt about it. And

01:06:41.780 every time they get caught, no, no, no, no, no, we're not looking at it. We're not looking at it.

01:06:45.860 Well, why did you spend the money to study it? Oh, I don't know how that happened, but,

01:06:49.000 and then they do it again. And then they do it again. And they took that Paul Kershaw guy,

01:06:53.140 who's just a fruit loop. And he is, as I said, a wealth redistributionist. He wants to take the

01:06:58.520 home equity of people who've built it up over the years and basically have the government seize it

01:07:02.540 and give it to the next generation. The next generation is getting screwed in a lot of ways.

01:07:07.060 They're having a tough time getting into a house for themselves, building an asset base for

01:07:13.380 themselves. It's much tougher now than it was for us when we were younger. And it was tougher for

01:07:17.380 even us than our parents when it was younger. The markets have changed. But redistributing wealth

01:07:23.500 isn't the way to do it. We need to increase supply. That gets back to Bernier being the one

01:07:29.000 who has the knackers to get out there and say, we got to stop immigration so we can have a better 0.86

01:07:34.060 housing supply. Look, it's just math, guys. It's just math. We've been bringing in more people

01:07:38.980 than we can house. And then when that happens, what do you think happens? The price goes up in

01:07:43.180 the roof. So yeah, it's good. Ask these guys, corner them. Hey, are you going to put a tax

01:07:50.020 on my home equity? Let's get them on the record. It might not stop them, but it's better get them

01:07:53.340 on the record when they say absolutely no, because right now they'd just rather not talk

01:07:56.500 about it. Northern Gal saying it's on your tax return. No need to have it on there if they don't

01:08:00.660 want to tax your primary residence. Exactly. That's the frog and water thing, right? That

01:08:04.200 appeared on tax returns, I don't know, five, six years ago. It doesn't mean anything, but they're

01:08:07.940 asking you about your private home equity if you sold a home. Why? Why? It's another business. Well,

01:08:12.720 because they intend to make it their business.

01:08:16.660 And Joe Mills saying, once upon a time,

01:08:19.540 they wanted to charge us for the water we take from our own wells.

01:08:21.500 Yeah, and I don't think that's gone either.

01:08:22.620 The wells are registered.

01:08:27.640 Authoritarians can't stand people being free.

01:08:31.260 It bugs them.

01:08:32.100 It bugs them by nature.

01:08:33.580 They can't stand people like me who, yeah, I live on an acreage.

01:08:36.100 I got a water well.

01:08:37.020 You guys don't control my water.

01:08:39.240 You can't tell me whether I do or don't fluoridate.

01:08:41.580 You can't tell me how much I'm allowed to use or not allowed to use.

01:08:43.940 It's my own bloody well.

01:08:45.260 I deal with that.

01:08:46.340 They don't like that.

01:08:48.220 And they'll come for it.

01:08:50.120 But housing, if we want to do it again, we need more houses.

01:08:53.840 We need immigrants too.

01:08:55.280 There's no getting around that.

01:08:56.720 But you've got to find the balance.

01:08:58.560 And we've been overdoing it.

01:08:59.500 And that's getting concerning.

01:09:01.440 When Jen was talking too, reporting some of the latest stuff in Polyos platform,

01:09:05.580 was talking about increasing immigration or keeping it at a few hundred thousand a year level.

01:09:11.580 I don't know. It sounds a little high to me still. It's important, but we got to be careful.

01:09:17.360 And it's not doing immigrants any favors. When you show up in a city and the rent is through the roof and you've got to squash yourselves into a tiny apartment, you're trying to adjust to a new life.

01:09:26.900 You're trying to get used to a new language. You're trying to start a career. You're trying to get rolling.

01:09:31.400 And you're almost bankrupted right off the bat because the housing costs. We need supply. How are we going to get more supply?

01:09:38.960 Well, there's one of the big questions.

01:09:41.600 It means you've got to get the damn government out of the way

01:09:43.020 because they're almost always the problem.

01:09:46.280 I wasn't in Vancouver.

01:09:48.000 I think it was calculated that for a new condo,

01:09:50.960 just the municipal regulations alone took up $30,000 of it, I think.

01:09:58.100 $30,000 just in paperwork just municipally for a condo, for an apartment.

01:10:02.100 We're talking like an 800-square-foot little thing down there.

01:10:05.180 30 grand of it is just to pay the pointy headed bureaucrats shuffling paper back forth up down

01:10:11.560 in circles. We wonder why we're short of housing. It adds up. It's cumulative. You know, that's just

01:10:18.480 the municipal. So yeah, throwing an equity tax on top of that, that's not going to help. That's

01:10:25.600 one of the things that that goofball from Generation Squeeze that Kershaw was talking about

01:10:28.960 too. Yeah, he was trying to make the case a while ago. And again, this guy's a consultant to the

01:10:33.360 liberals. He spoke to them at a cabinet retreat. He was trying to claim that putting a home

01:10:37.800 equity tax on homes would make housing cheaper. What? Only a liberal can think that way. But 0.90

01:10:45.060 well, don't be surprised with what they think. He doesn't have to reason or rationalize with it.

01:10:51.180 He just says it and people accept it. That's some of the other polling. I didn't get all the numbers

01:10:54.700 out this week for all these different poll pictures because they were too maddening.

01:10:58.300 I mean, some of them showing polls asked who's better set to manage Canada's resource industry.

01:11:06.560 And the majority of Canadians say that the Liberals are.

01:11:09.260 The Liberals have screwed it royally for 10 years.

01:11:11.580 And Canadians still think they're the best ones to manage it. 1.00

01:11:13.640 What's the matter with you?

01:11:15.800 I don't know.

01:11:17.720 They're also asked who should take credit for getting rid of the carbon tax.

01:11:23.960 And the majority of Canadians say Carney should.

01:11:26.040 Carney was the architect of the damn

01:11:29.220 thing with Trudeau

01:11:30.200 Poliev spent years pushing 1.00

01:11:32.940 and hammering on that to get rid of it

01:11:34.640 and now it's gone and he doesn't get the credit

01:11:36.800 Canada what is the matter with you

01:11:38.660 and that gets back to

01:11:41.020 what I was talking about with the

01:11:42.700 independence movements and things like that and how they're going to grow

01:11:45.040 guys they are

01:11:45.840 because it's one thing you see in all of those maps

01:11:48.340 it's one of the things you see

01:11:49.780 Northern Gal's bringing me into this 1.00

01:11:52.260 one of my thoughts on succession should the liberals win

01:11:54.100 God forbid. You see that blue chunk, Saskatchewan and Alberta, right in the middle of the country,

01:12:00.300 very blue. The liberal numbers have grown a bit in these two provinces, but not by much because

01:12:05.880 Saskatchewan and Alberta have been pissed on by liberals for generations. The liberals have

01:12:10.460 used us as a resource to siphon from, to be dismissed, a colony. And as I said before,

01:12:19.140 people were calming down because they thought finally the cycle will turn we'll get ourselves

01:12:25.660 at least a term or two of conservatives and it'll be less bad government for a while on the reverse

01:12:31.180 some of the liberal stuff but no lo and behold chop out Trudeau stick a globalist banker in

01:12:37.400 the front of him and all of a sudden Ontario's fallen madly in love with him and we're going to

01:12:41.200 get not only the liberals back but with a bigger majority than what they had in the first place

01:12:46.600 So Northern Gal, you're asking, yeah, it's going to explode. 1.00

01:12:49.880 It's going to explode.

01:12:50.920 People have had it.

01:12:52.560 You know, the only way a country like ours can work with being as large as it is, with having such disparate views.

01:13:01.480 I mean, come on, people from Newfoundland are pretty close to being from a different country.

01:13:05.500 As are people from lower mainland BC, as are people from South Saskatchewan, as are people from Southern Ontario.

01:13:12.800 And Quebec, of course, is Quebec.

01:13:14.980 You have to have a massively decentralized government to allow a great deal of provincial

01:13:20.540 autonomy to try and hold that together. We have the opposite. We have an intrusive federal

01:13:26.020 government. I mean, we have a system that if we followed it would give a lot of provincial rights

01:13:30.840 to provinces, but the governments just don't seem to be following it. So it's not working in the

01:13:36.580 long run. What are we supposed to do? The system's got to change. So how do you change the system?

01:13:43.580 Well, we had Meech Lake and Charlottetown.

01:13:45.660 Those were attempts back in the 90s.

01:13:47.340 Utter failures.

01:13:47.920 Didn't even come close to changing, and they weren't even big changes.

01:13:51.700 So, yeah, if the Liberals get in with the majority,

01:13:55.420 you're going to see an explosive in independent sentiment.

01:13:57.400 Now, remember, right now, and it's funny listening to the Laurentian talking heads

01:14:02.840 dismissing it and poo-pooing it and talking about it, 0.84

01:14:05.460 but we're talking 30%, 33% support in Alberta, Saskatchewan for independence right now.

01:14:11.680 That's before the Liberals winning.

01:14:13.960 A third of the people already are saying we want out.

01:14:18.340 What's it going to be the week after?

01:14:20.760 Now, whether that turns into an effective independence movement, though, is a separate question altogether.

01:14:26.340 Just because there's a large base of people who want it doesn't mean we'd achieve it.

01:14:32.260 Independence movements, and I've been involved in them since I was in my 20s.

01:14:36.060 I started the Alberta Independence Party when I was 29.

01:14:38.400 I wrote the book on it, literally.

01:14:40.820 uh they also have some i mean i know people cringe at it but it's the term can be applied

01:14:46.580 to some people some pretty fringe individuals get involved it is an unusual movement and that's fine

01:14:51.940 everybody's allowed to have a voice but the problem is when the fringe ones dominate they

01:14:55.460 can sour the majority and when you get a new movement that explodes quickly and as it will

01:15:02.820 in a few weeks watch carefully who rises to the top who becomes the voice of the movement

01:15:10.340 What are the propositions of the movement?

01:15:13.000 I've locked horns with some people over this because they've put things in saying a new independent Alberta is going to have it entrenched right in there with God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost.

01:15:24.560 Well, then kiss my ass. 1.00

01:15:25.760 I don't want a theocracy.

01:15:27.500 I will never participate in a theocracy.

01:15:30.780 And I'm not saying people who strongly believe in Christianity should be dismissed

01:15:37.820 or that their practice is not important.

01:15:41.300 Of course it is.

01:15:42.780 But that's where protecting the freedoms of them to practice it are integral,

01:15:47.180 but keep it the heck out of the government.

01:15:50.200 And if an independence movement is dominated by those sorts of things,

01:15:52.920 it's not going anywhere.

01:15:54.680 Because I'm not alone in wanting to ensure that government stays secular.

01:15:59.980 it's pretty darn important. So we'll see, we, we've got a lot coming, right?

01:16:06.180 And plus some people could come out of the woodwork. So some,

01:16:09.040 some brilliant people could show leadership and really take that to the next

01:16:13.880 level. We could, uh, maybe existing leaders will change things.

01:16:18.020 One of the things I have a difference with some people on too,

01:16:20.600 when it comes to that,

01:16:21.360 and I know it sounds contrary to a guy who started the Alberta Independence

01:16:23.460 Party. I don't feel it has to come from a party.

01:16:26.180 it you put independence as a mandate within a party you turn the party single issue you lose

01:16:33.340 sight of all the other stuff and it becomes very difficult to become elected what the party should

01:16:38.800 do is give citizens the means premier smith spoke along those lines in the sense of saying when

01:16:43.460 asked about it that it's in the hands of the voters when uh the time comes if a referendum

01:16:51.160 is invoked. That's up to the citizens. Now Alberta's referendum legislation is garbage. It's

01:16:56.180 impossible to meet the bar, even with a large amount of support for it. You can't get one

01:17:00.380 invoked. The numbers are too high. Anybody who believes that petitioning is possible has never

01:17:05.680 petitioned before. Again, look at those numbers in the timelines. You got to get like hundreds and

01:17:09.860 hundreds of thousands of signatures on an official piece of paper with their name, address, home

01:17:14.160 address, by the way, not mailing address, phone number. It has to be legible. It has to be

01:17:17.880 witnessed. You got 90 days to do it. Petitioning is hard. You know, running elections, going door

01:17:25.280 to door, just to get people to sign your petition, your nomination papers to run.

01:17:30.620 It's difficult. You've got to hammer a lot of doors to get, you know, that hundred signatures

01:17:34.720 or whatnot, federally, I think it is. And of that 20% will be disallowed because somebody signed

01:17:39.900 outside the lines or they didn't put the right address or they didn't spell their name legibly.

01:17:44.520 And a lot of people just don't want to give that name.

01:17:46.780 Like if you were a hardcore, really good petitioner, you might get a hundred signatures a day.

01:17:51.680 If you've got 90 days to come somehow put together five, six, 700,000 signatures to invoke a

01:17:57.820 referendum, how many thousands and thousands of petitioners are you going to need on the ground

01:18:02.820 in that period?

01:18:03.180 It's not going to happen.

01:18:04.440 So the first thing they have to do is get all over Scott Moe and Premier Smith and, you know,

01:18:11.420 just jump on them like a pit bull on a fat kid say that's it we need this referendum legislation 0.99

01:18:17.560 fixed it takes it out of her hands it takes it out of mo's hands just fix the legislation it's

01:18:21.520 still up to voters whether they're going to do anything get them on it get it fixed don't put

01:18:27.060 up with it being as it sits and it also allows the existing government to sort of softly support

01:18:34.800 independence because we know i know damn well there's a number of mlas who strongly support

01:18:39.420 it. They're not going to say it in the open, but they're there. I assure you. And they would

01:18:44.880 support it how they can when it's out arm's length in a referendum situation. But when you bring it

01:18:50.240 into the party itself, it gets difficult. Here's Vicki Bayford. I'm glad she's watching and

01:18:56.960 commented because yes, Vicki is a very much independence minded. She's running for the PPC

01:19:02.420 and she says, it's been awesome going to the debates in yellowheaded writing, seeing

01:19:05.640 that people want electoral reform and equalization and transfer payments. It allows me to introduce

01:19:11.420 the idea of independence. See that? Yes. And that's what I'm talking about. Like when I,

01:19:15.860 I don't want to fully dismiss people who are running for the, uh, I guess you could say

01:19:21.220 fringe parties or side parties in the election because it's still an important role. You're

01:19:25.540 bringing those ideas. She's introducing the idea of independence into these forums that wouldn't 0.94

01:19:28.980 have been there if she wasn't running in the first place. She's going to the doors and making 1.00

01:19:32.380 those points. I don't think Vicky's under any illusion that she's going to win Yellowhead.

01:19:37.020 Maybe, I don't want to dismiss it, but it's probably really, really unlikely. But it doesn't

01:19:40.940 mean you aren't making progress and making steps. And likewise with independence parties and things

01:19:44.960 like that, they're making a bit of progress. But if you look at the numbers of decades and decades

01:19:49.620 of independence parties that have come and gone, and they rarely register more than a couple of

01:19:54.100 points in an election, even when people are pissed off. The waters get muddied too much

01:19:59.980 on that. So suddenly now you've got, you know, there's one of the challenges we've got going on

01:20:07.440 right now. For example, the America 51 idea. Not every independence minded person is supportive

01:20:12.720 of that. That's not where everybody wants to go. If you get a party that starts, it's an

01:20:17.360 independence party, but they're split and fighting with each other over that, then it's gone.

01:20:21.800 What if they don't agree on a healthcare policy or they don't agree on an education policy? The

01:20:27.880 independence thing gets lost. It has to be simple. It has to be getting a province out of the

01:20:35.080 federation. I mean, that's part of what the whole clarity act was about from the nineties saying

01:20:39.860 that this is the mechanism for a province to go. It has to be voted on in a clear referenda.

01:20:45.780 So advocates have to get that referendum going and they have to have a clear question. That

01:20:52.300 question has to be simple. Do you want to be within federation or not? Basically like that,

01:20:56.400 not those exact words, but it has to be like that. Not, do you want to consider independence,

01:21:01.600 maybe being part of the states, maybe be part of three provinces? It's dead. It's dead. It won't

01:21:05.600 work. It won't happen. It's got to be in or out, yes or no. That's step one. You can worry about

01:21:10.380 the other negotiations afterwards, but if you start muddying it all over the place with all

01:21:13.580 those different scenarios, it's done. It's not going to happen. So figure it out. It's a big

01:21:20.100 rabbit hole. You've opened up talking about that, but it's going to be a real one that a lot of

01:21:23.040 independence minded people are going to have to organize and think and work on the day after if

01:21:27.980 the liberals get reelected because we got a lot of things to worry about. I was talking about this

01:21:31.740 looks like my firearms guest is standing me up too so I'm really pulling a good bunch today

01:21:35.760 but we are losing our property. We don't have property rights in Canada. That's one of the

01:21:41.040 biggest issues that's made me an independence supporter throughout all these years too and

01:21:46.680 one of which is firearms. It's property. It's not the right of the government to take it from you

01:21:50.680 but they're going to because Pierre Trudeau didn't give us property rights in the charter.

01:21:55.340 He gave you the right to the enjoyment of property, not the ownership or transfer or

01:22:00.480 possession. No, just the enjoyment. And that means you enjoy it at the pleasure of the government.

01:22:06.560 So that's one issue alone. You can talk about the issues, but when you talk about independence,

01:22:11.920 it has to be a black and white question. And the only thing I'll leave off on that subject

01:22:16.180 as we're talking is you better be ready to know that you're going to win. And here's where I

01:22:21.220 differ with a few of the independence advocates right now too. If you don't think you're going

01:22:26.020 to get a clear win in a referendum, don't go there yet because you will set it back years,

01:22:34.800 years. It's not that easy to get a referendum, right? If you come in and 45% vote to go in a

01:22:41.000 referendum, and you know, that's 55, so it's about to stay, you're not going to get another

01:22:47.500 kick at that cat for the minimum five years. Minimum. Probably more like 10. So if you really

01:22:55.580 want to go, and I know it's hard when you're frustrated, when you're being abused, when your

01:22:59.280 rights are being abused, but you've got to be patient. You've got to know when you go to this

01:23:04.220 referendum that you can win it. That means you've got to have your ground game together. You've got

01:23:07.880 to have leaders pushing that concept. So some people are saying we need to get a referendum

01:23:11.840 invoked as soon as possible. Terrible, terrible, terrible mistake. Because there's not nearly the

01:23:17.900 organization, there's not nearly the support for the concept yet to get a winning vote. And if a

01:23:23.900 vote is going to come, Saskatchewan, Alberta, or even Quebec for that matter, it has to be

01:23:28.460 definitively won. The worst thing we could see is 51% to 49. It should be closer to 60, because then 1.00

01:23:36.340 there's just no getting around it. The majority has spoken. Now we got to move ahead.

01:23:42.180 Timberwolves saying, how do you ease the fear of healthcare change? Yeah, it's a big fear.

01:23:46.800 The other one is, and I saw that when touring with Vicky and others with the Alberta Prosperity

01:23:51.500 Project, things like pension plans and others. And we can explain all of those things. You can

01:23:57.440 talk about how people don't need to be fearful of that, but that takes a bunch of time.

01:24:02.580 So if you hold a referendum, say six months from now, if you pulled it off, you got it going. And

01:24:07.880 I oppose that referendum, let's say, like I wouldn't oppose the referendum. I just think

01:24:10.900 they pull the trigger too early. But let's say I was, you know, put myself in the shoes of an

01:24:14.620 opponent. All I would do is just sow seeds of doubt everywhere. I would say they're going to

01:24:19.640 crash your pension plan. They're going to crash your healthcare plan. The doctors will leave.

01:24:23.940 They're going to blow up your investments. They're going to do all of these things. And I will spread

01:24:28.180 fear and I will make sure that people, as much as they'll be frustrated with federation,

01:24:31.720 will be too fearful to leave it. Which means if you want to win that vote, you got to win those

01:24:39.400 people first. And you got to answer all those questions. And a referendum campaign isn't enough

01:24:43.560 time for it. You need to build that base. And that's going to take you a while. And they're

01:24:48.700 going to have a lot of questions, good ones, bad ones, indifferent. We're in interesting times,

01:24:53.520 guys. Interesting times. I'm going to finish up mentioning something else that's been happening.

01:24:59.820 people who follow me on X and so on might have seen it. It's interesting. Speaking of First

01:25:04.460 Nations, that's another area in independence areas that really needs a lot of debate and

01:25:07.980 discussion, by the way. I get frustrated. I worked in the oil field for 20 years. I worked on a lot

01:25:13.060 of isolated reserves all over North America, and they're in horrible conditions, most of them,

01:25:18.640 and they're getting worse, most of them. And I thought I would show that. I went out a little

01:25:24.020 less than a month ago, out to the Siksika Reserve, and that's one of the better reserves, folks.

01:25:27.520 and they just got billions from Trudeau, literally $20,000 in the pocket of every

01:25:31.600 single person there. And I showed the housing, which is falling apart. I showed the wild dogs,

01:25:36.340 I showed the garbage. I also covered other things. I showed the cemeteries, I showed

01:25:41.440 the college there that was converted from a residential school. And I talked about part of

01:25:48.080 the reason why the housing is having such a problem is because they don't have property

01:25:50.800 rights like everyone else. They don't own the houses. You don't have an incentive to invest

01:25:55.380 in those houses. You're not building an asset for yourself. And the band is in charge of

01:26:00.360 maintenance and the bands are terribly, terribly organized. Either way, the video got about 30,000

01:26:04.860 views. It went fairly viral, but the people in the band got word of it. They got very, very upset.

01:26:09.380 Very upset. Hundreds and hundreds of comments just going bananas in the scroll. If you look

01:26:13.280 up Corey Morgan on YouTube, you'll find it. And I'd like you to, because I'll tell you what's

01:26:17.260 developed now. The band had delivered to me a couple of notices of being charged with trespassing

01:26:27.280 now because I shot this video. Yeah. And they want to charge me $1,000 on each one of these charges

01:26:33.320 too. $2,000. Now, people not familiar with the geography of that area. Yes, I went on a reserve.

01:26:39.920 And no, it's not illegal to go on one. This reserve has three highways through it. Highways.

01:26:45.800 It's not trespassing to drive a damn highway.

01:26:48.140 If you drive from Calgary to Banff, you drive through a reserve.

01:26:50.740 That's a stony reserve.

01:26:51.880 You're not trespassing.

01:26:53.480 It's not trespassing to go on the parking lot of a college.

01:26:56.020 It's not trespassing to go to a cemetery that's marked as an Alberta heritage site.

01:27:00.020 But they're pissed off at the message I put out.

01:27:02.400 They're furious with that.

01:27:03.320 So now they're charging.

01:27:04.760 And they're trying to shut down the messenger.

01:27:08.060 And that's dangerous territory.

01:27:09.580 They don't want to see the corruption on the reserves.

01:27:12.040 They don't want people to see that.

01:27:12.880 They don't want to see the failure of the reserve system and it's failing.

01:27:16.460 It's failing them the most.

01:27:18.820 So I've had these charges and yes, I'm going to fight them.

01:27:21.280 I'm going to fight them.

01:27:22.320 I'm not paying those assholes a nickel, but it's going to take months and it's going to

01:27:26.280 be drawn out.

01:27:26.780 But one of the things I do want to ask of you guys, and no, no, I'm not asking for money.

01:27:30.020 Don't worry about that.

01:27:31.280 I am asking that you find my YouTube channel though.

01:27:35.080 Watch that video and share it because I want to show them that the more you try to shut

01:27:41.500 us up on talking about these issues, the more people are going to see it. It's called the

01:27:46.120 Streisand effect on the internet, if people are familiar with that one. Barbara Streisand had a

01:27:49.420 house out in the coast, Santa Barbara area. And some guy who had a website that was obscure

01:27:54.380 had pictures of nice houses all along the coast on a website. This is years ago. And he had like

01:28:01.520 50 or 100 views of that picture, but somehow Streisand actually found it and realized that

01:28:05.640 her house is on there. And she went bananas and sued this guy for having a picture of her house

01:28:08.960 on his site. And his picture of her house now went from like 500 views to millions and millions

01:28:15.180 and millions of views because Barbara Streisand couldn't leave it alone. If she'd just shut up 0.98

01:28:19.140 and let the guy have his site, it wouldn't have been a problem. Now I'm not expecting millions

01:28:22.540 of views on my video of the reserve, but I think it's an important video to watch. If you've never

01:28:25.860 seen a reserve, give it a watch. Go to the Corey Morgan on YouTube, scroll down. I got a number of

01:28:31.040 videos, but you'll get down to it. It's called a critical tour of the Siksika reserve. And let's

01:28:38.340 get that thing out there and show these guys the more you try to shut us up the more that video is

01:28:45.020 going to be seen and well it's important I'm going to keep you updated on how that fight goes I've

01:28:52.400 been talking already with some legal help it's going to take a long time it sounds like I've

01:28:56.100 got to fight my way through the band with their bs tickets and fines and then of course they'll

01:29:00.380 find me guilty because it's a little kangaroo court on the Indian reserve for that and then

01:29:04.560 I'll have to appeal it up to another court probably if they want to continue to pursue it.

01:29:08.440 But in the meantime, watch the video, share it with other people. Let's keep showing these guys

01:29:14.500 and chances are, yeah, we might see another tour of another reserve sometime soon out of me. I

01:29:18.940 won't be stopped. Well, yeah, I just see an email from Mr. Cooper. Yes, the time zones got messed up

01:29:25.060 and he didn't quite make it. It's unfortunate. I really want to talk to him. So I missed a couple

01:29:30.260 of guests. We'll get Sam back for sure. And I appreciate you guys joining me today as I talked

01:29:37.520 it on through those missing guest segments. There was a lot to cover, a lot of things to talk about.

01:29:41.840 I'll be back on Wednesday. Don't forget the Western Standard right now is free. There's no paywall up.

01:29:48.600 Another sponsor, by the way. Hey, look at the numbers of gold just this last week. I think the

01:29:52.220 other day it gained like 5% in a day. New World Precious Metals. They provide services right here

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01:30:17.500 now are not doing anybody any favors. Check out that sponsor, get on the site. It's free to read

01:30:22.720 here at the Western Standard for the next while. Watch Nigel's show. Watch Jen from Ontario and be

01:30:28.220 sure to tune in with me on Wednesday for my regular

01:30:30.320 show. Thank you for joining

01:30:32.280 me today and we'll see you next week.

01:30:58.220 Thank you.

Western Standard - April 12, 2025

The forgotten issues of the election

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