00:04:33.560almost as if it'd be a negotiating point.
00:04:35.640Rather than us care about this point of economic trade policy, we're probably going to somehow demand that he respect the pronouns of Lake Ontario.
00:04:44.640Who knows where this will end, but certainly Donald Trump has always used humiliation as a bargaining tool.
00:13:52.180And when he insults Canada and Canadians, the reaction so far has been to forgive Mr. Carney all kinds of things that we might otherwise hold against him,
00:14:05.000like a complete lack of action on any of the plans that he said that he had for the country
00:14:10.920and have in place somebody who mr trump thinks he can handle and so far frankly he's entitled
00:14:21.520to his opinion on that because mr carney has not been an effective uh uh he's not got the deal
00:14:28.120done he can only go on with this for so long and things are going to people are going to say well
00:14:34.240fine. We like the fact that you're an earnest Canadian. We like the fact that you've stood up
00:14:39.960to Trump, but now you have to make a deal. Now you have to get the job done. You said you're the
00:14:45.820guy to handle Trump. Well, handle him and let's get on with making motor cars. I noticed or I
00:14:51.820note he was musing today about renaming the Strait of Hormuz into the Strait of Trump.
00:14:57.000Yeah. You know, it wouldn't be the most unplausible conspiracy theory that Trump and Kanye are actually kind of in on it together.
00:15:10.520Polyev was slated to win possibly the biggest majority government in the history of Canada, and then they got the shit kicked out of them.0.86
00:15:19.620The liberals massively increased their share of the vote, came within a hair of a majority, now have an effective majority.
00:15:27.000um and you know trump would have been aware that every time he opened his mouth about uh 51st state
00:15:36.240stuff the liberal numbers jumped two points every time he said it two points two points two points
00:15:40.380two points carney was in many ways installed by trump and i think it's a mistake for people to
00:15:48.320think that trump cares about maybe the closer ideological affinity of of the conservatives
00:15:54.040with the Republicans. Trump is the least ideological president, at least since Bill
00:16:00.620Clinton, possibly much, much earlier. Hard to say where. But he is, you know, if you just take
00:16:08.760conventional Republican conservative ideas and conventional liberal and Democratic ideas,
00:16:14.220he is remarkably unideological. He would have not fit in a Bush or a Reagan Republican party.
00:16:23.560In fact, he wasn't a member of the Bush or Republican parties.
00:16:27.520So I don't think Trump actually cares.
00:16:29.400You should remind the Democrats that he was actually once a registered Democrat.
00:16:33.240Yeah, but also I don't think he was a conventional Democrat either.
00:23:35.080There was a rally around the flag movement, obviously, when Trump started going after
00:23:42.520you know 51st state and governor trudeau and these things and the liberals were able to capitalize on
00:23:47.660that in the way that the conservatives were not able to and i'm not sure there was a particularly
00:23:51.860effective way for the conservatives to pivot into that it just didn't fit with the brand as well
00:23:57.080uh just because of ideological affinity between republicans and conservatives a lot of canadian
00:24:02.000public saw them as suspect there's just not a lot i think they could have particularly done
00:24:06.540But now that that is done, what is in Paliyev's control is what he's talking about, what he's focusing on.
00:24:15.240And he is still sounding in many ways like it's the same set of issues with Trudeau in 2024.
00:24:24.980The government's less incompetent than it was, and it's still incompetent, but it's less of a front issue for most voters.
00:24:33.760You know, I've said this before, mass migration is a gigantic meta-issue and it feeds into everything. It feeds into cost of living, it feeds into crime, it feeds into public order, feeds into the economy, housing, all of these things.0.78
00:34:00.900interesting right now just in the pure chaos of things uh carolyn finley becomes the leader of
00:34:06.200the bc conservative opposition um you know coming off after a ton of chaos surrounding john rustat
00:34:12.960uh ousted as leader uh i guess the hope was that she'd be able to corral it all back together
00:34:17.780instead it's been quite the opposite rather than bringing it back together it's flown even further
00:34:22.500apart the party looks like a fragment grenade at this point i know some of the messaging early on
00:34:28.980was, oh, it's just the B.C. liberal, kind of the left wing of the party leaving.
00:34:33.100I know you've got an analysis piece out just the other day saying, well, maybe some of
00:34:37.620that is kind of true, but that's not really the full picture.
00:34:40.760What in the hell is happening with the B.C. conservatives right now?
00:34:44.260So I'll share a story with you that I shared with Dave yesterday over an email.
00:34:47.780So when I attended the leadership convention in Vancouver, where Carrie Lynn Finley won,
00:34:54.420it was held at a railway station somewhere downtown, and it was wide open.
00:34:58.880windows and doors. And when she won, everybody, not everybody, a third of the audience all came
00:35:04.300out at once on their way to the parking lot, which is, I assume, not terribly unusual for
00:35:08.720leadership campaigns. There's never going to be 100% consensus. And so some people leave early.
00:35:14.420But what I found particularly interesting was one person came up to me, and I don't know who
00:35:18.440this person is. If they're watching this, I encourage them to reach out to me because I'd
00:35:22.340like to talk to them again. They came up to me and they said, the real winner tonight is you.
00:35:26.860and i said well what do you mean and he said the media the woman who just won is very corrupt
00:35:32.540and you are going to be very very busy now i can't confirm the corruption part but i have been very
00:35:39.500very busy uh well there has been at least uh let's call it corrupt adjacent activity there was
00:35:49.440oh it's beyond corrupt adjacent eric yeah i was being polite and uh trying not to get sued
00:35:54.900Why don't you just give us kind of a quick abbreviated version of what's gone on there with these characters, some of which are connected, obviously, with Alberta and how that's played into the leadership?
00:36:07.500Yeah. So the Alberta part, actually, I think, is being radically overplayed by the left wing media and the legacy media here in B.C.
00:36:13.380I've spoken to many people within the B.C. Conservative Caucus, as well as a few of the defectors.
00:36:17.920And the issue of Alberta independence has never come up. And why?
00:36:22.140No, I mean, some of the characters are from Alberta.
00:36:25.540True. So there's one character in particular named Apollo Chung, who at one point had a high-level position with the Alberta Republican Party.
00:36:32.780He also had a staffer position with the BC NDP, and then he played a major role in Carrie Lynn Finley's leadership campaign.
00:36:40.340So he's kind of been referred to as an ideologically flexible, roving fixer.
00:36:47.980so somebody who is highly competent in the world of politics but really doesn't have any principles
00:36:52.940he was caught in a surreptitious recording where he said that he didn't give an f about the province
00:37:00.460of british columbia and that he thought that the conservative underlings were weird and that0.97
00:37:06.040effing white people were crazy um which i i find to be just an astounding thing to say it's kind of0.93
00:37:12.760funny and it's true yeah it is it is true some of the time he also said that he wasn't going to0.98
00:37:20.440leave until he was given five hundred thousand dollars so it sounded like there was some type
00:37:24.040of embezzlement going on there as well now the reason that this is so outrageous for the bc
00:37:28.880conservative party is that running parallel to that story is another story where they've hired
00:37:33.460a gentleman named chris delaney as the chief of staff and the largest complaint against chris
00:37:38.280Delaney is that he's instituted an almost impossible to pass purity test for new hires.
00:37:44.980And so that's what makes this so absurd. Apollo Chung passed the purity test,
00:37:49.600but almost nobody else can. And I think that that would probably be the simplest explanation for
00:37:56.140why people are giving up on the party. It's not that they're secret liberals. It's not that
00:37:59.660there's a coup d'etat. It's not that they're conspiring together. It's that they've made
00:38:04.520some really, really abysmal choices in terms of staffing. Okay, but Carolyn Finley, the
00:38:10.640conservative leader, she sacked Apollo. I mean, that's an interesting name to go with
00:38:18.600China. Yes, it certainly is. And he calls white people crazy. But she sacked him. She
00:38:27.820obviously had no choice. There's actually been a continued series of like, the heads
00:38:32.480rolling down and it's like that series in the movie Apocalypto with the heads rolling down
00:38:36.140the Mayan temple uh pyramid the Mayan pyramid uh there's lots of heads rolling down uh sacrifices
00:38:43.080to try and save her leadership here um she's cleaned house there uh but the defections continue
00:38:50.440to mount and mount what is the real problem facing her leadership was it just you know
00:39:00.200that she's seen as lacking judgment by putting this kind of weird uh grifting mercenary in
00:39:07.640uh and that was it or or is it a bigger issue the really fascinating thing is that every individual
00:39:14.600who is defected has given their own personal reason and none of them are alike so for instance
00:39:19.640peter millibar he said that it was a combination of different things that clashed with his values
00:39:25.560He famously was running against her in the leadership race, and she infamously criticized him for having a wife who is indigenous and worked for the Kamloops Indian Band as a potential conflict of interest.
00:39:36.060He did not cite that as the only reason, however.
00:39:39.120He said that, you know, there was a number of different things.
00:40:06.560Rosalind Bird, who is a first-term conservative, true blue conservative, she was also asked to step down in exchange for some sort of party favor.
00:40:13.960She hasn't quite confirmed that, but it's well suggested.
00:40:16.680it. And she said that she was screamed at by her chief of staff, Chris Delaney. And so that's why
00:40:23.520she stepped away. The next person to step away, it's hard to keep track of them all, as I hope
00:40:28.600you can understand. Teresa Watt stepped away because a leaked text message during the campaign0.92
00:40:34.040showed that Carrie Lynn Finley accused her of being CCP, which would be in reference to the
00:40:38.500Chinese Communist Party. And on and on and on it goes. Again, I find it very hard to believe that
00:40:44.920this is some concerted conspiracy against Carrie Lynn Finley when all of these different reasons
00:40:49.760are so individualistic and subjective. It seems like it's just a mess. There's no other way to
00:40:56.440describe it, frankly. And we had number eight today, didn't we, Alex? Correct. Yeah. I'm not
00:41:02.040surprised, but who was this one? So Donegal Wilson, actually, she's, I'm in Penticton right
00:41:06.960now. So she's the MLA for the adjacent riding in Princeton. And her reason for leaving was that
00:41:12.740she said she would give the leadership three months for a chance. And she asked for a private
00:41:17.840meeting with, again, the chief of staff and Carrie Lynn Finley two weeks ago, and the private meeting
00:41:22.960never happened. And so she said, there's no communication. That's another consistent theme,
00:41:26.760actually. It's one of the only consistent themes is the lack of communication. And Alia Warbus,
00:41:33.680who resigned on Monday, her reason was because there was supposed to be a unifying caucus
00:41:38.360meeting on monday morning and they canceled it at the last minute so if you look through the list i
00:41:43.400mean it there's eight people that have left and for eight entirely different reasons none of which
00:41:49.080are on policy by the way nobody has recited any policy difference with the leader whatsoever which
00:41:53.960is also interesting yeah the inducements thing is a little interesting i mean you're not allowed to
00:41:59.720offer like a job or an inducement to resign uh for by-elections but it literally happens every
00:42:07.320single time like we know the way it works the leader you know someone's elected leader i should
00:42:13.760say every single time but most of the time uh you step down you know new leaders elected and
00:42:20.880they don't have a seat someone's gotta step aside they take care of that person that person doesn't
00:42:27.760go stand in the soup kitchen line they get taken care of the rcmp has now launched an investigation
00:42:35.360and is interviewing MLA's today, as a matter of fact.
00:42:39.240Because you're supposed to be indirect about it.
00:43:04.960happens all the time but you're supposed to go about it that way you're not supposed to be like
00:43:09.820hey please resign and if you do that we got this over here waiting for you you know you're not
00:43:16.200supposed to be that brazen about it so yeah now the police are investigating they are
00:43:19.180oh alex what is the over under on uh finley's survival chance here
00:43:27.900oh that is such an interesting question just given the character that she is
00:43:33.820so during the leadership race there was at least five or six times when i thought she was dead in
00:43:38.720the water and one thing that one of her most amazing qualities is that she is an incredibly
00:43:42.900resilient woman um she things just kind of seem to bounce off of her she seems to have like you0.97
00:43:49.180know the the old saying like what is a cat has nine lives and her political career seems to have0.92
00:43:53.900those nine lives however she's used eight yeah exactly we're we're already up to eight so
00:44:00.980So the MLAs have left. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean, there's still another 29 MLAs to go until it's just her and her husband, theoretically speaking. So, yeah, I mean, the by-election coming up here is make or break for her.
00:44:18.920If she loses that, it would mean that a very well-respected, in fact, conservative MLA stepped down to give her an opportunity.
00:44:25.880And if she isn't able to pass that test, then I would say that her days are less than numbered.
00:44:32.740We did have an exclusive poll that Alex got yesterday showing her polling ahead in the writing at the moment.
00:44:40.240But interestingly enough about that poll.
00:44:42.000It's supposed to be a safe conservative seat, yeah.
00:44:44.380Yeah, interestingly enough about that poll.
00:44:46.460And the seat itself actually is a swing riding.
00:44:48.920So it went NDP in 2020 and conservative in 2024.
00:44:53.120But the interesting thing about that poll was that Finley was ahead by double digits against EB, but EB was the preferred premier, which gives you an idea of maybe how well informed the 212 people were that they polled.
00:45:09.780Oh, look, we're actually ahead of time.
00:45:12.680But OK, so we're going to put up in it there.