Western Standard - The Pipeline： NDP accuse Smith of prosecution interference

00:00:00.000 good evening i'm derek phildebrand publisher of the western standard and you're watching the

00:00:28.560 pipeline. Today is March 29th, 2023. I want to welcome you all here, especially those of you

00:00:36.120 watching us for the first time on the Wild TV network. Wild TV, Cowboy Channel, RDTV. We're

00:00:43.640 really pleased to be on the network and reaching a whole new audience of people who care about,

00:00:50.240 well, what we're going to talk about today. You're going to get a pretty good feel for us

00:00:52.720 if you haven't heard us before. I'm joined, as usual, we'll have the Western Standards opinion

00:00:57.220 editor Nigel Hannaford. How are you, Nigel? Great today. Good to be here. Also got the Western

00:01:03.200 Standard senior Alberta columnist Corey Morgan here. Corey, finally on cable. Yeah, it's about

00:01:08.700 time. Yeah. And if you haven't seen it already, Corey Morgan, the Corey Morgan show itself is

00:01:14.560 also got its standalone show on the Wild TV network coming to you every week. A few times a

00:01:21.800 week, actually. Fun. All right. Well, here's what we're talking about today. Earlier today,

00:01:29.240 the Alberta NDP and the CBC accused Alberta Premier Danielle Smith of directly contacting

00:01:39.980 and interfering in prosecutions for people in Alberta who have been, who face charges under

00:01:46.660 the Kenney government for not wearing a mask or protesting against lockdowns, various kinds of

00:01:54.280 COVID-related charges like that. But it's a repeated accusation. Now, today there's a audio

00:02:02.880 recording that came out of a conversation between Alberta Premier Daniel Smith and controversial

00:02:07.360 street preacher Archer Pulaski, also former head of the Alberta Independence Party. And she says,

00:02:16.080 I can't really do anything, but I'm talking to justice officials.

00:02:19.800 I'm actually not really sure what the NDP and CBC are so upset about here.

00:02:24.460 Maybe it's just a matter of hair splitting, but CBC is treating this as a big scandal, so we're going to dive into it.

00:02:30.880 We're also going to talk about the federal budget that just came down from Ottawa yesterday.

00:02:36.840 It is a massive, massive increase in spending over an already massive spending budget that was there.

00:02:43.500 new spending across the board, and new subsidies for any kind of energy except for the kind of

00:02:50.560 energy that comes out of the ground and is reliable and profitable. We're also going to

00:02:55.680 talk about kind of a funny one, and don't jump on me until you've listened. You know what I'm

00:03:02.340 going to talk about. The CFL's Canadian player quota, you know, the quota is requiring a certain

00:03:08.060 number of Canadian players on every CFL team. It's

00:03:11.780 unintentionally racist. It kind of started as a joke, but then

00:03:14.900 we started digging into it and studied the issue. And it's

00:03:18.080 pretty funny, an affirmative action program for Canadians 0.52

00:03:21.800 actually ends up resulting very directly in hiring of less

00:03:24.860 black people. It's pretty funny. CBS, the CFL, before you get 1.00

00:03:30.800 crazy, CFL is not racist. They're not white supremacists,

00:03:33.860 none of this stuff. But their quota policy designed to help 0.58

00:03:37.940 employ more Canadians in football inadvertently results in hiring, employing less black players

00:03:45.440 in football. So we're going to dive into it. It's going to have a funny cautionary tale about the

00:03:49.820 dangers of quotas, affirmative action, and hiring on anything other than merit. Before we get going

00:03:54.400 though, I want to thank my favorite sponsor, the Canadian Shooting Sports Association. I've been

00:03:59.000 a member of the CSSA for more than a decade, trusting them with my membership dues every year

00:04:04.380 to represent my interests as a firearms owner in Canada.

00:04:07.580 Without the Canadian Shooting Sports Association,

00:04:10.060 the federal government would have probably seized all of our firearms a long time ago.

00:04:14.040 They are doing yeoman's work in protecting your right to own, use,

00:04:18.120 and safely purchase firearms in Canada.

00:04:21.800 If you're not yet a member of the CSSA, go to cssa-cila.org

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00:04:31.040 It's worth absolutely every penny.

00:04:32.400 And speaking of guns, this is not part of the script here, but speaking of guns, I think we've got to give a shootout to the Nashville Police Department for their wildly efficient and quick response to the shooter at a private Christian school, I think it was, in Nashville.

00:04:52.040 Marked contrast to some of the other tragic school shootings we've seen in the United States.

00:04:58.360 The National Police Department was there fast, went right into the school.

00:05:03.880 A lot of us have seen the video footage and these guys were like John Wick on the job.

00:05:08.660 I think it's a matter of leadership.

00:05:10.820 These guys were given clear instructions, don't let what happened in Texas ever happen here.

00:05:15.600 And so they went and did it.

00:05:16.800 And what I heard at the time, which I was saddened in the Uvalde case, was that the standing operating instructions were get there, seal the area, wait for backup.

00:05:32.260 But they waited an hour.

00:05:34.300 And I wondered if there wasn't some gung-ho fellow who could have just gone in there.

00:05:40.900 That was coming at you, I think, a bad leadership, setting those rules.

00:05:43.880 Yeah.

00:05:44.140 And then cowardice.

00:05:45.680 those police officers in Texas, there's a time when you disregard rules.

00:05:51.680 Exactly. You don't wait an hour. You might wait five minutes.

00:05:54.680 I think it was Frederick the Great said he kept on firing his generals during the Seven Years War,

00:05:59.680 and he found a general he wanted when he found a general who knew when to disobey orders,

00:06:06.680 when to take initiative on the ground, and the situation calls for it, and you have to break your orders.

00:06:11.680 orders. And I don't know if there was any kind of such bizarre orders in the case of Nashville,

00:06:16.240 but one way or another, it was, I think, good leadership and courage and initiative from the

00:06:21.440 officers there did swift justice. It certainly set the tone for anything like this going forward.

00:06:27.520 Yeah. All right. Well, you know, the story's been going along for a few months now. So I guess we'll

00:06:35.860 back it up. Actually, probably in some of its earliest forms, I guess we kind of touch into

00:06:40.300 this a bit. I asked Danielle Smith in an interview, if she was going to consider pardons, or amnesty

00:06:46.780 for people who had been charged with COVID related charges, specifically anyone, you know, nonviolent

00:06:51.740 non firearms related stuff. And she said a good idea, she was going to look into it.

00:06:58.060 Seems she did look into it. The advice back from the Justice Department was no, okay, can't do that.

00:07:05.500 I was surprised and disappointed. But that's apparently what Justice Department said.

00:07:09.420 Then the CBC came out, did a story and said, there's emails that show crown prosecutors have

00:07:17.260 been contacted by Smith directly, and she is interfering in the prosecution of justice.

00:07:23.740 But then the CBC under, they got some blowback from the government, government said it's defamatory.

00:07:27.900 And then they said, actually, we never even saw the emails. We talked to people who claim to have

00:07:32.300 seen the emails. And then more or less kind of died from there for a while. It's been quiet.

00:07:38.300 Then we go to today. Well, you should mention perhaps that they did an internal search for

00:07:44.140 those emails. Yeah. Like somebody lost their weekend over that went through how many thousand

00:07:49.340 emails? Yeah. A lot. Yeah. Although the government does automatically, the government does delete

00:07:54.300 emails over time. So it's possible wouldn't have been there, but it doesn't appear to have been

00:07:59.900 there. The CBC story has not had any proof to support it yet. That doesn't mean it's not true,

00:08:04.540 but there hasn't been any proof to support it, which if it did go to court is not good. You got

00:08:09.580 to be able to prove your story is true. Then we go to today, and the CBC and NDP, the NDP actually

00:08:16.060 already had this. I think they were waiting to release it during the election, but the CBC got

00:08:19.260 it, releases it today. Technically it's a video, but it's a video of a guy on a phone call, a video

00:08:24.620 of Arthur Pawlowski, a street preacher in Calgary. Probably fair to say he's a controversial figure

00:08:30.780 Until also earlier today, he was the leader of the Alberta Independence Party.

00:08:35.160 That party eats its own pretty quick and turfed him as leader.

00:08:39.780 I guess he wasn't sufficiently something.

00:08:42.120 And he's gone.

00:08:43.840 It was a video of him on the phone with Danielle Smith.

00:08:47.500 And long story short, he's saying, he's asking for updates on pardons, amnesty, that kind of stuff.

00:08:56.820 She's saying, talk to justice.

00:08:58.380 Justice says, I can't do it.

00:09:00.780 but I'm talking to justice every day. We'll see if there's anything we can do.

00:09:05.420 That's I think it. She didn't say I was talking to prosecutors. I could be wrong,

00:09:09.260 you know, send us a message or the comment section here, let us know if I'm wrong.

00:09:13.020 But I didn't see anywhere where she said she's talked to prosecutors. She said she spoke to

00:09:16.620 justice officials. Now that includes bureaucrats, deputy ministers, political advisors,

00:09:22.700 and it does include potentially prosecutors, but she didn't say prosecutors.

00:09:27.260 What's the story? What's the NDP and the CBC going at here? Because I'm not, I'm not yet sure what they're lighting their hair on fire about.

00:09:38.260 And you can't be from what we've heard this morning. First of all, we went back to the to the CBC story because when the CBC puts out something on video, they also back it up with a with a printed story, which is a good thing in there.

00:09:53.260 So they reported pushing Justice Department officials to intervene.

00:10:02.600 Well, Justice Department officials, you just said it yourself,

00:10:05.700 that could include prosecutors, but it doesn't say prosecutors.

00:10:10.000 And the story is that, or the allegation is that prosecutors specifically were contacted.

00:10:19.240 There has been no evidence for that.

00:10:23.260 And the CBC, which is actually covering this story, has not said that either, or at least it hasn't said it in print.

00:10:32.000 We listened to it this morning and, you know, could have missed it, but I don't think it did.

00:10:38.020 And there is no allegation here that Smith did anything unethical.

00:10:43.620 What is unethical in this situation is for a politician to go to a prosecutor, but she's the premier.

00:10:49.220 she can talk to all the justice officials the bureaucrats in the justice department 0.99

00:10:53.860 talk to all of those that she wants that's her job and it's their job to talk back to her and

00:10:59.220 when she says can you do something for these people then they say no we can't or you shouldn't

00:11:10.100 or you can't well that's that seems to be the conversation that took place and the story here

00:11:16.100 I think that's the crux of it. Now, the CBC and the NDP are coming from a place ideologically,

00:11:22.260 for the most part, where they think that people who broke lockdown rules or didn't wear their mask,

00:11:29.460 they should be charged, they're bad people, they committed a crime and you should do the time.

00:11:36.420 I think there's a lot of Albertans who don't share the view that the Kennedy government took

00:11:40.980 during that time. But I think it boils down to, was she talking to prosecutors,

00:11:47.300 or was she talking to bureaucrats? Was she talking to people who are actually in charge of cases,

00:11:54.340 and was she intervening on a case-by-case basis? Like, drop this case, don't drop that case,

00:11:59.300 that would be interfering with the prosecution, that would be wrong. Even if the spirit of it

00:12:06.100 was correct because these are, we're on cable now, I can't swear, even if these are BS cases.

00:12:12.180 But if she's talking to just bureaucrats in charge, deputy ministers or people responsible

00:12:17.140 for overseeing things, there doesn't seem to be anything innately wrong with that.

00:12:22.740 Do you think I'm getting at that right? Or is it angry that they talk to anyone,

00:12:27.300 or is it just they're trying to insinuate that it was just, they were talking to prosecutors?

00:12:31.140 Well, I think they're trying to insinuate, you know, I got swept up when the conference came,

00:12:34.340 because, wow, this is, CBC's dedicating 20 minutes to a live broadcast of this, and I made a mistake.

00:12:41.140 I should know better than I went to the Twitter sphere, and oh boy, they're saying she's told him

00:12:45.840 that she spoke with prosecutors, and as Nigel more responsibly looked later at the transcript,

00:12:50.580 no, she didn't say that, because had she said that to Pawlowski, well, then it would be completely

00:12:57.020 contrary to what she'd responded and asked before, so I guess it's still in question. Some people

00:13:03.120 think perhaps she shouldn't be speaking to anybody who's been charged under those things

00:13:06.240 and that that can be debatable, but it's quite a tempest in a teapot compared to then if

00:13:10.860 she'd have been trying to influence prosecutors.

00:13:13.180 You know, Corey, you know what would have been a worse story to come out at this point

00:13:18.080 is after all that she said to encourage people who had taken a position on this, that she

00:13:27.840 got up to Edmonton, just left them behind. There had never even been any discussion about what

00:13:34.480 could be done to alleviate the legal situation that they were in. Now, when the conversation

00:13:40.880 took place, it turned out there wasn't anything. But at least she had the conversation. I find it

00:13:46.480 also, let's go to the bigger level here, higher level here. I find it strange that there is

00:13:51.200 nothing they can do, because these were provincial statute that they're charged under, not the

00:13:55.760 criminal code of Canada nothing federal these were provincial laws this was done under Kenny's watch

00:14:01.600 and for the most part under his and Chandra's orders when Chandra was the health minister

00:14:07.680 couldn't they have just repealed or amended this legislation um I mean pardons and amnesty take

00:14:15.280 place not all the time but it's not an infrequent thing uh it does take place now normally doesn't

00:14:20.800 it's not an individual case-by-case basis. You know, like the U.S. president can pardon,

00:14:26.400 you know, they should have pardoned Methic Snowden. They pardoned a turkey every year.

00:14:31.280 Buddy Canada pardons tend to be more broad-based. You know, they pardoned the wheat pirates, 0.94

00:14:36.880 those pesky Alberta and Saskatchewan farmers who refused to sell their grain to the federal

00:14:41.360 government when the wheat board was in place, and they went to jail for selling their grain

00:14:44.640 on the private market. They were all pardoned under Harper. They're looking federally at a

00:14:49.360 pardon program right now. I think for people who are charged under indecency laws, but it was really

00:14:57.440 just kind of an anti-gay thing a long time ago. We've done this kind of thing before where we've

00:15:02.640 identified clearly unjust laws, we've repealed or amended those laws, and then pardoned people.

00:15:09.680 I'm not sure why we can't do this on a provincial level, even though it's not criminal prosecution,

00:15:13.040 it's provincial statute. I don't know why we can't do that.

00:15:17.120 Yeah, it makes you want to phone up a justice official, doesn't it?

00:15:20.160 I'd like answers. Like, I'd like to see this brief because I think these people do not,

00:15:26.480 you know, if you've, as long as you haven't gotten violent, I can't imagine a case where

00:15:31.040 any of these people truly deserve to be charged. Yeah. You know, one thing that listening to all

00:15:36.400 that was that sort of smug moral rectitude which oozes from so many of the NDP spokesmen saying,

00:15:45.280 shouldn't even be talking to somebody like like arthur polosky you know what he is oh do we i

00:15:51.840 don't know it's uh yeah he's a has quite a profile but to actually say that somebody is um

00:16:01.920 you shouldn't even beneath you beneath you you know like a responsible politician should never

00:16:08.560 it's it's a sad sad state of affairs i don't think it's going anywhere all right we're

00:16:15.120 going to turn now to the federal budget that just came down yesterday from on high in Ottawa.

00:16:24.160 I mean you're when Justin Trudeau was running for prime minister the first time 2015 and he said he

00:16:29.680 was just going to run a little deficit and Stephen Harper's kind of little deficit and it turned into

00:16:37.200 these massive deficits and they were certainly not temporary as Trudeau promised you know as Milton

00:16:42.880 Friedman said there's nothing so permanent as a temporary government program. These temporary

00:16:47.440 deficits, small temporary deficits, turned out to be massive permanent deficits.

00:16:55.920 And, you know, we've seen increase and increase over spending and the liberal, you know, COVID

00:16:59.920 is over, crisis is over, but the liberals have to find a new crisis. And that crisis is, well,

00:17:05.360 we're back to global warming. So we're back on that page now. So they increased spending over

00:17:11.200 the last budget by 40 billion dollars 40 billion oh sorry no no uh that's uh the deficit is 40

00:17:19.040 billion i should say 40 billion deficit um paying not for any kind of investments really but for

00:17:26.800 regular program spending and subsidies these are just handouts from the government to provincial

00:17:32.640 governments or to corporations corporate welfare 40 billion dollar deficit and they're projected

00:17:39.680 to continue running deficits literally forever.

00:17:43.860 There was not even a, I remember when I was in the legislature, a finance critic,

00:17:47.980 the NDP would propose these five-year budgets.

00:17:51.800 And they would always show it was balanced in the last year.

00:17:55.460 Now they would introduce another budget and say, ah, something happened, it's not our fault.

00:17:59.880 But the new fifth year, there it shows balance.

00:18:03.080 And then the third year, the NDP, they bring the budget.

00:18:05.560 Ah, sorry, something happened, not our fault.

00:18:07.260 But the new fifth year, they did this every single year, it's the oldest trick in the book.

00:18:11.380 Pierre Trudeau did it every year.

00:18:13.860 Brian Mulroney did it every year.

00:18:18.160 It's a standard thing for governments running deficits.

00:18:21.200 You promise that eventually you're going to run a deficit even if we know it's, I miss swearing.

00:18:25.920 Damn Campbell.

00:18:28.360 Even if we know it's BS, you at least, it's a nod to the theory that a balanced budget would be a fine

00:18:36.860 a notable goal. They don't do that. They have forever deficits. These are literally legislated

00:18:42.980 permanent forever deficits. So it's, yeah, $40 billion deficits in perpetuity and a $20 billion

00:18:52.040 increase in spending, mostly for transfer payments to the provinces, a new unconstitutional dental

00:19:00.500 care program demanded by the NDP, and massive, massive corporate welfare subsidies to anyone

00:19:08.500 in the energy business who is not extracting profitable, cheap, reliable energy from the

00:19:13.940 ground. As long as you're not doing that, you get money. And of course, higher taxes on businesses

00:19:18.420 to theoretically pay for some of it. Nigel, whose budget was this? Was this Justin Trudeau's or was

00:19:26.420 versus Jagmeet Singh's.

00:19:27.840 How budgeted is it anyway?

00:19:28.880 No, I think it is Mr. Trudeau's budget.

00:19:33.100 He doesn't have a principled objection, I don't think,

00:19:36.680 to another welfare program, which is what the dental program is.

00:19:41.620 So I think when Mr. Singh said, this is my price,

00:19:45.300 he was pushing on an open door.

00:19:47.960 I am not privy to the innermost workings of Mr. Trudeau's mind.

00:19:52.060 None of us are.

00:19:52.920 But it looks to me as though he's got some sort of a messiah complex, and it is focused entirely on climate change.

00:20:05.280 He wants to be remembered as a significant figure in Canadian history,

00:20:11.340 and the significance is going to come from what he did to get Canada off oil and natural gas and onto something else.

00:20:21.040 So he puts the money into it, and he's going full bore at it

00:20:24.880 because he knows there's a very good chance that he's on his last lap.

00:20:30.060 He may not win the next election.

00:20:33.500 It depends when it's going to be and what happens in the next couple of years.

00:20:36.660 There's a very good chance he's in the end days of his term as prime minister.

00:20:42.860 And rather than doing what we would call good government,

00:20:46.660 he wants to get done what he wants to get done.

00:20:50.280 Now, like I said, I don't know what goes on inside his mind.

00:20:55.360 Some would suspect that much.

00:20:56.820 I know.

00:20:57.400 Well, I've said that too.

00:20:59.400 But, I mean, to be charitable.

00:21:02.960 Why should I be charitable?

00:21:04.280 This is a punditry show.

00:21:06.420 I think that he's got the bit between his teeth.

00:21:09.080 He wants to do this.

00:21:09.880 He wants to be remembered for doing it.

00:21:11.860 And so that's where this comes from.

00:21:14.480 But, you know, this is what he has actually done.

00:21:17.760 It took us from 1867 to 2015 to run up an accumulated national deficit in the order of $600 billion.

00:21:29.760 That has been doubled in the seven and a half years that Mr. Trudeau has been prime minister.

00:21:37.580 It has been utterly reckless.

00:21:39.960 It has been beyond reckless.

00:21:41.560 It's been irresponsible to the point of dangerous driving.

00:21:45.980 I'd agree with you for the most part about Trudeau's Messiah complex, except I disagree

00:21:54.200 that it's focused singularly on just global warming or climate change.

00:21:59.180 Well, there are other things.

00:22:00.580 I think it just depends what's in the news that day.

00:22:03.260 If it's Black Lives Matter, well, then it's about racial justice. 0.67

00:22:06.600 If it's about truth and reconciliation, well, he'll declare a holiday before you go surfing, 0.86

00:22:12.980 but, you know, he'll jump on these bandwagons.

00:22:15.240 Well, that's true. But he's been very consistent on climate change. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, COVID, it's about locking down and mandates and that kind of stuff. But I think that global warming is the old faithful. When everything else, when there's nothing else burning on the social justice, progressive, liberal front, there's nothing urgently burning, kind of flaring up, you'll go back to the well of global warming as his main state.

00:22:40.340 And there was a definite piece of evidence in here about legacy, and that is that they locked in the carbon tax in a way that makes it very expensive for a future government to get rid of.

00:22:53.720 Now, they already had this to an extent before.

00:22:56.600 Essentially, what it means is, let's say Trudeau loses the next election, Pierre Polyev comes in, and he says, no more carbon tax.

00:23:04.000 Now, there's a bunch of corporate welfare in Canada right now that is paid for by the carbon tax.

00:23:11.000 So, you know, we pay, you fill up your car, some of that money goes into a fund,

00:23:16.000 and Justin Trudeau gives it to corporate welfare buddies who get to spend it on different projects to make themselves money.

00:23:22.000 If Polyev comes in and shuts off that source of revenue, the federal government then needs to continue to pay these corporate welfare bums.

00:23:30.000 bums. And that'll have to come out of other sources of government revenue, your regular personal

00:23:34.240 income tax, corporate tax. So it means, yeah, a future government can get rid of the carbon tax,

00:23:41.220 but they're permanently going to have, at least for a very long time, going to have to continue

00:23:44.780 to pay it. I know you think it's bad policy, Corey. Was it smart politics? He's locking an

00:23:53.940 incumbent into his position. And that's kind of the long-term judge of political success.

00:23:58.580 You said it shows maybe a bit more of an indication that he's doing his swan song.

00:24:03.680 As Nigel said, he wants some sort of legacy.

00:24:05.480 So he was the guy who took on climate change and even kept his successor from managing to undo things.

00:24:11.900 I mean, I don't know if Justin was bright enough to come up with that poison clause in there, but somebody did on his behalf.

00:24:17.580 The problem is, I mean, as you mentioned, with these budgets, and this wasn't unexpected with a big deficit, but it's every government that does it.

00:24:25.760 I mean, just Trudeau has been the worst, but this, it's going to keep happening until Canadians get sick of it.

00:24:31.660 That's what happened. It took until the nineties.

00:24:33.740 And I think the big factor that gets started bankrupt before we took it serious is when that principle gets so big and people see the interest payments.

00:24:40.400 The interest on that this year is going to be $44 billion. That's bigger than the deficit itself.

00:24:45.480 It's up $8 billion in interest, annual interest payments over last year.

00:24:50.600 And that is flushed money. That upsets Canadians. I mean, that upsets me.

00:24:53.720 I loathe that when I'm paying credit card interest if I haven't paid off the balance.

00:24:57.100 Does this upset Canadians?

00:24:58.240 Because Canadians, you know, as a company excluded, seem to have lost their zeal for balanced budgets and responsible fiscal management.

00:25:06.180 It'll take a while.

00:25:07.860 You had a very good line this morning.

00:25:10.680 Are Canadians going to have to be facing bankruptcy before Canadians care about this?

00:25:14.580 Oh, probably.

00:25:15.220 You had a very good line this morning when we were talking about this.

00:25:17.900 and you said look when you've uh when every day you see a train wreck and another train wreck

00:25:24.860 doesn't seem that interesting i think people's eyes are just glazed over by this

00:25:29.100 either by the consistency of it and the other thing you you know it's going to keep on going

00:25:34.300 because they're in such a bind there's only three things they can do they can cut expenses they can

00:25:38.060 raise taxes or they can inflate well they're not going to their their whole brand is spending money

00:25:44.460 so they're not going to cut no so there's a limit to how many taxes you can charge so i think they

00:25:53.260 have to do what they're doing which is pursue policies that devalue money and that makes it

00:26:00.620 easier to handle the the ongoing expenses so we did see some increase in taxes on business

00:26:06.300 we've already massively high taxes on high personal income earners a carbon tax coming in

00:26:12.060 yeah carbon tax but i think they're leery of i mean to really bring in money you'd have to raise

00:26:17.660 the income taxes on low and medium income earners to really increase government spending and that

00:26:23.660 would make them unpopular and so they've kind of maxed out corporate taxes on businesses they've

00:26:29.260 maxed out well they haven't maxed out the carbon tax because they keep on increasing it to wild

00:26:33.340 levels which is going up april 1st um but they've kind of maxed out the taxes for the most part

00:26:39.500 unless we want to get to truly Scandinavian commie territory. The only option seems to be

00:26:45.740 to continue to inflate the money supply, and the money supply has been grossly inflated.

00:26:51.260 Inflation, I've said this before, the media and politicians mix up what inflation actually is.

00:26:58.380 There's cost of living and there's inflation. They're related, but they're different. If

00:27:03.820 If a ship jams up the Suez Canal and that affects the supply chains and prices go up as a result, well, that's cost of living increase.

00:27:13.060 But that's not inflation.

00:27:14.440 Inflation is when the government debases the money supply normally in the modern world by printing more, either physically or digitally.

00:27:23.520 And the federal government has direct control of that.

00:27:25.660 They set the mandate of the Bank of Canada.

00:27:27.640 This has happened under their watch.

00:27:29.720 I think you're on to the point here.

00:27:31.460 I want your feedback, Corey.

00:27:33.820 are we just destined now for a gross round of essentially monetary debasement?

00:27:40.760 I think so for a while.

00:27:42.000 As I said, they only have a few options,

00:27:43.540 and they don't have any appetite to pursue any others.

00:27:46.380 That one gives them a relatively, you know,

00:27:49.480 to avoid an immediate catastrophe of massive tax hikes,

00:27:52.000 and they just don't have the appetite to cut spending.

00:27:54.000 So, yeah, we're going to see more of it, as I said,

00:27:56.320 until Canadians say enough, and that could be a long time.

00:27:59.160 What did you make of that $460 that they're going to give people

00:28:02.940 as a sort of a grocery allowance.

00:28:06.400 It's, that's, you know, as old as to give it,

00:28:09.000 Ralph Bucks or Premier Smith did it here.

00:28:11.560 If you could hand people a little bit of their own money back to them.

00:28:14.280 You know, I think it's kind of insulting.

00:28:16.220 I mean, you've burned through that in two weeks.

00:28:17.800 It was wrong, I think, when the Smith government did it here in Alberta.

00:28:21.440 And it's just as wrong when the Trudeau government's doing it in Ottawa.

00:28:24.580 But I don't see the media going after the Trudeau government for it.

00:28:27.560 They did go after Smith for it.

00:28:28.700 And I think they were right to go after it.

00:28:29.800 It was vote buying.

00:28:30.840 They should have done that.

00:28:31.640 It's just the price of an appetizer on the governor general's plane. So I mean, it's a

00:28:35.960 cold camembert cheese for a senator. It doesn't make that much impact. It's a token gesture.

00:28:42.280 All right. This is a fun one. Now, a trigger warning for those of you who don't like people

00:28:50.600 who get triggered. This story is not about the CFL being racist. It's about a policy designed

00:28:58.680 to do something that's unintentionally sort of racist. So there was a, you know, about one or

00:29:07.480 two months ago, Nigel, we were sitting in the newsroom, kind of shooting the breeze with some

00:29:12.600 of the folks. We're talking about these racial hiring quotas and affirmative action programs

00:29:19.000 at University of Calgary. And I said something, someone says something along the lines of, you

00:29:24.040 You know, if I see someone in a job or in a program, and they're a part of a group that benefits from quota hiring, I can't have, I don't really, I just can't help but not have confidence that they're not the best person for the job.

00:29:36.660 Maybe they don't deserve to be there.

00:29:38.460 And that's unfair to the people who maybe do come from that group and do deserve to be there, but that group gets a quota. 0.75

00:29:45.640 And then I said, yeah, like, it's like when I see Canadians in the CFL.

00:29:50.280 Double triggering.

00:29:51.080 Canadian football fans are going to be offended by this but we all know that the Americans by and

00:29:58.760 large with some notable exceptions Americans are just generally better at football because they

00:30:03.320 have a wildly better football program it's part of their culture you want doesn't really matter

00:30:07.640 your income group for the most part you know as long as you're like above seven years old you

00:30:12.620 want to play football in America you got a shot at playing football you go all the way to the top

00:30:16.400 if you're good work hard not that way in Canada so we you know you see Canadian

00:30:20.900 football players you know for the most part they're not as good and there is a

00:30:24.260 quota in the CFL that I think is 21 members of the team so bit under 50% have

00:30:30.260 to be Canadian and that's designed to ensure that the Canadian Football League

00:30:33.500 is at least plausibly largely Canadian it's not a no not a majority and then I

00:30:41.840 then I got to thinking after I said yeah you know it's like affirmative action for

00:30:45.140 uh canadian players it occurs to me that most of the canadian players are white and most of

00:30:51.380 the american players are black and we have a quota to hire canadians i wonder is this canadian player

00:30:58.980 quota unintentionally resulting in hiring less black people for the job who are better qualified

00:31:05.940 for it than some of these white guys so we did the research uh one of our reporters jonathan

00:31:10.180 Bradley ran the numbers for me, and boy, that's what it turned out. Among the American players

00:31:18.740 in the CFL, there's an average, the average team has five black or non-white players, and it's

00:31:24.980 football. Most black players. Five black players to every one black player among Americans in the

00:31:32.180 CFL. But in the Canadian side, which benefits from quotas, there's two white players to every one

00:31:38.660 black or non-white player um and that means by forcing teams to hire more canadians than you

00:31:48.340 know just a totally merit-based system the canadian canadian football players tend to be

00:31:53.060 white and american football players tend to be black ergo the cfl is racially discriminating

00:32:01.380 unintentionally uh i don't believe for a minute that these guys are intentionally hiring based

00:32:07.140 on race that's not the thing but they are hiring based on nationality just based on nationality

00:32:11.540 one's going to be whiter and one's going to be blacker than the other uh Nigel is there a lesson 0.74

00:32:16.820 in here about unintended consequences and quota hiring here well I think there is for sure um

00:32:23.700 it is the one example that I've heard of in which a system of doing things actually does produce

00:32:32.820 a result that you're probably a little embarrassed by. Does that mean that we shouldn't do it?

00:32:41.220 So that's the big question here. There is a reasonable goal in that quota. It's that the

00:32:51.740 Canadian football league should have some Canadians playing in it. And as I said,

00:32:54.540 God, I... CFL is the only league I watch, and I beat it up all the time. It's such a typically

00:33:01.000 canadian thing but can you know canadian football is players are just not for the most part the

00:33:06.440 caliber of americans there's big exceptions like bc's roark uh incredible quarterback canadian

00:33:13.240 top talent uh he's definitely headed for the nfl one day if he's not already signed he actually

00:33:17.320 might be i'm not sure um the goal is to ensure the cfl's canadian and that makes sense because

00:33:23.880 if we didn't have a Canadian quota on a team, CFL teams would be almost entirely American,

00:33:31.160 almost entirely American. That's the inevitable consequence of what would happen.

00:33:36.680 So is it, despite the result of this having some racial skewing, is it still a good idea to keep

00:33:42.840 the quota? The only alternative seems to be get rid of it and accept that the CFL would become

00:33:47.400 an American game on Canadian soil. Well, I guess there was one option as you're trying to

00:33:51.240 try and persuade some americans to become canadian citizens well that does that does happen some

00:33:56.200 long-time cfl players do become canadians and the but the other thing is you know we talk a lot

00:34:01.160 about discrimination and just the very sound of the word uh people start to start to freak out

00:34:07.240 but we actually discriminate for a lot of reasons and nobody complains if you are an airline pilot

00:34:14.280 Your career comes to an end at a certain age. Why do they do that? Because your health is at

00:34:22.700 greater risk as you get older. So, therefore, everybody comes, I think, at 65. I think everybody

00:34:29.340 stops flying commercially at 65. That's discriminatory. If Fred earns more money

00:34:39.180 than bill fred will pay a higher rate of income tax that is discriminatory but we accept that

00:34:46.980 because we think that in some way it is fair just as yeah well i'm sorry i like the flat tax in

00:34:53.800 alberta but that's that to me is fairness but i understand that there's a an argument that the

00:34:59.160 more you are in the more you should contribute so you know you don't have to agree with it most

00:35:03.880 people think it's absolutely acceptable. And if that is discrimination, they're all for it.

00:35:09.600 So you've got to think, when is discrimination acceptable? Because obviously some discrimination

00:35:16.560 is. And I think the CFL quota system, yeah, you're right. It would just be American players

00:35:21.980 playing on Canadian fields if there wasn't some way to, if it was solely on merit.

00:35:27.420 Corey, what do you think would be the best way to deal with this? Is it, because this is, if I might say so myself, a little self-flattering, I think it kind of encapsulates the decision here.

00:35:40.380 You either have a large contingent of Canadians playing in the Canadian Football League, and you've accepted that that's going to result in some unintentional racist hiring practices, or you're going to eliminate unintentional racist hiring practices, and you just accept it's an American team.

00:36:00.660 those are the only two kind of plausible ways i see forward other than kind of micro micro quotas

00:36:07.960 within the canadian quotas and we'd just you know be a laughing stock to do that it's difficult yeah

00:36:12.440 i mean they see i'm opposite i watch nothing but nfl and i can't bring myself to really enjoy cfl i

00:36:17.480 know there's some good ball and some good players but i want to see the best i want to see the

00:36:21.600 elites i want to see those bizarre outstanding athletes who can tiptoe on the sideline for that

00:36:27.360 And that's what I'm talking about. That's why I watch it, because I know that the CFL almost purposely handicaps. 0.92

00:36:33.260 Pretend for a moment you care about your Alberta's own football team. Pretend you care for a moment.

00:36:40.460 And I do care because I know their identity would be completely overwhelmed if you just allowed the superior base of players to flood in.

00:36:48.940 And even then, they still wouldn't have a team that could compete with an American NFL.

00:36:52.840 No, just the money's not there to compete with the NFL.

00:36:54.800 Yeah. So they're in a tough spot. It was unintentional, as you said, maybe just if anything, they want to try and develop more broad-based football player development within Canada so we can get more up and coming players who are up. But again, that won't change the racial makeup.

00:37:14.020 No.

00:37:14.920 So you've just exposed something that a beleaguered league probably didn't need to hear about.

00:37:19.240 I was very, you know, you saw Nigel how cringe I was to publish this because the last thing I want to do is damage the CFL.

00:37:27.360 It's the only bloody league I watch and I know it's not the greatest league, but it's my league.

00:37:32.280 I just, I don't know what the best way forward is.

00:37:35.380 I always default to merit and for the most part, it's merit.

00:37:39.600 They're obviously infinitely better football players than me, but I wanted to be a CFL player.

00:37:44.940 I was like the only kid who wanted to be a professional football player who never even thought about the NFL.

00:37:49.060 I was like, I want to be in the CFL. That's the best of me. I want to be a CFL football player.

00:37:53.660 But I went to schools that didn't have football programs. So I played rugby and Aussie rules

00:37:58.020 football. I was on the closest cheap things I could to football. But we just don't have the

00:38:04.440 program. But I don't know, Nigel, what do you think is better? Do we just go purely merit-based

00:38:08.900 and accept Canadians are pretty much not playing the game? Or do we keep Canadians in the game and 0.60

00:38:14.420 except that it's kind of unintentionally going to result in subpar outcomes in terms of fairness. 0.57

00:38:23.460 This is a little bit like asking a vegetarian whether he prefers the stock handling practices in beef or in pork.

00:38:31.160 I mean, it's tough, but I think this is one of those cases where, yes, you can justify the discrimination if you want to,

00:38:42.400 because otherwise there wouldn't be much opportunity for Canadian boys to grow up and play football.

00:38:50.080 By the way, you need to thank me.

00:38:51.900 There were three big white guys standing at the front door looking for you this morning.

00:38:56.620 I said that you would be in today. 0.76

00:39:00.180 Oh, some angry white stampeder Canadian players. 1.00

00:39:05.000 They're weaklings, you know. 1.00

00:39:06.360 I like to fashion myself a scrapper, but you got to know when to hold them and know when to fold them.

00:39:14.100 I feel bad about publishing this article because I, and I could tell like in the comment sections who actually read the damn thing and who didn't.

00:39:26.220 You know, you see on Facebook, people see the headline.

00:39:29.260 You know, they see the headline, the CFL's Canadian football, Canadian player quota is unintentionally pretty racist.

00:39:36.360 Well, if you don't know the Western Standard, you might just assume that's another woke headline saying everything is racist, everything is racist today.

00:39:44.420 No.

00:39:45.700 So I could tell really quickly who has a Western Standard membership and pays to read this stuff and who just reads the headlines and rage comments.

00:39:52.700 I could see pretty quickly.

00:39:54.840 Okay.

00:39:56.480 My apologies to the CFL.

00:39:58.120 I really am not trying to be a pain in your ass.

00:39:59.880 Love you guys.

00:40:00.540 And I love the Canadian players.

00:40:02.120 You're not the Americans, but I love our Canadian football players.

00:40:06.920 You're the best, in my view, in my hope.

00:40:11.420 Okay, before we wrap up, though, we'll talk real quickly about this last story.

00:40:16.520 The federal government, you remember during the Freedom Convoy, blacklisted a bunch of people who were involved,

00:40:24.700 people, organizations, and businesses that donated or involved in any way with the Freedom Convoy, 1.00

00:40:30.240 Blacklisted them, ordered the banks to freeze their bank accounts, all sorts of wild stuff that belongs in third world countries, banana republic stuff. 1.00

00:40:39.920 We knew this had happened, but just recently, maybe you fill us in more, Nigel. 1.00

00:40:45.200 The federal government has admitted that they shared this blacklist with foreign governments, including enemy states like the Chinese Communist Party.

00:40:53.280 They've shared the blacklist with them, asking their financial institutions to blacklist these people.

00:40:57.320 And God forbid that they get any kind of banking services overseas.

00:41:03.180 Yeah, well, I doubt that too many of them were dealing in South Korea.

00:41:06.760 But, you know, it's actually quite a long list.

00:41:12.560 I'm crediting Blackbox with this because it's their article.

00:41:15.500 But I shared the black list in the Bank of China, the State Bank of India, BNP Paribas of France, Citibank, New York, Habib Bank of Pakistan,

00:41:26.760 Hanna Financial Group, I won't read them all.

00:41:29.300 There's about 20 foreign banks that have received the proprietorial information

00:41:33.920 about Canadian companies including their account numbers

00:41:40.580 because that's what was frozen, was the account.

00:41:44.780 It wasn't don't do business with ABC trucking.

00:41:47.340 It's don't do business with ABC trucking.

00:41:49.280 And if you see anything going into this account, cut it off, freeze it.

00:41:53.260 Don't move it along.

00:41:54.000 So I hope that the banks overseas have got good security measures in place to prevent

00:42:00.800 hacking. 1.00

00:42:01.800 Well, if we're sharing it with the Chinese communists, we know they're good at hacking. 1.00

00:42:04.800 I'm not sure that they're resisting it. 1.00

00:42:07.380 I would be, if I were in that business, I think I'd be changing my account numbers,

00:42:14.720 but gosh darn it, it's already out there.

00:42:19.240 This was a political prosecution, let's face it.

00:42:22.500 went beyond anything that you could justify in criminality and we have to face the fact that if

00:42:28.980 you upset the government in this country you i hate the term weaponized because that's

00:42:37.460 just a neologism that's bad english but that's what we're talking about they take the systems

00:42:42.580 and they use the systems against you and here's a perfect example of it and it's this is canada

00:42:48.260 this is not the FBI going after Trump supporters. All right. All right. Well, we're going to have

00:42:53.220 to wrap it up there. Nigel, Corey, thank you very much for being part of the show today.

00:42:58.980 I want to thank all of you who watched today, especially those of you watching for the first

00:43:03.140 time on the Wild TV network, RD TV and the Cowboy channel. So glad you could join us. If you're not

00:43:10.820 yet a member of the Western Standard, you need to be. The Western Standard is one of the only media

00:43:14.740 left in the entire country that refuses to accept the federal government's media bailout.

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00:43:24.340 watching on the cable side, and subscriptions or memberships. So if you're not yet a member of the

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00:43:55.600 and God bless.

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Western Standard - March 30, 2023

The Pipeline： NDP accuse Smith of prosecution interference

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