The identity of the shooter has yet to be confirmed, and the media has done nothing to find out who it is. The Western Standard's own reporter and former Prime Minister Nigel Hannaford joins the show to talk about the lack of information coming out from the Mounties and legacy media.
00:00:00.000G'day, welcome. I'm Derek Fildebrandt, publisher of the Western Standard. Today is February 26th.
00:00:30.000Uh, 2026. And you're watching the pipeline. Um, be a bit more somber than usual. Uh, at least for our first, uh, first segment. Probably gonna take twice the regular time for it. Uh, coming on the heels of the mass shooting in, uh, Tumblr, British Columbia. Uh, we've been on it since, uh, word first started to come out of Tumblr last night.
00:01:00.000Uh, we've had reporters doing really, really great work. I've been extremely proud of what they've done. Um, but there has been a lot of obfuscation, deliberate, I would think, in many of the cases in this, from both the RCMP and the legacy mainstream media.
00:01:20.360Um, and this was really a time for independent media like the Western Standard to shine. Um, I guess it was a lonely job. Uh, not many outlets, uh, out there doing it.
00:01:32.120A few of our independent competitors doing their jobs, but none of the legacy guys. We're, we're gonna be talking less about the substance of the issue. I already covered, covered that in a hour long, uh, live stream earlier this morning.
00:01:43.580Um, but I wanna, well, I think we're gonna talk more about how, uh, the media of this and the RCMP's handling of this in the media.
00:01:52.960Uh, we're also gonna take some time, uh, or chipper note, uh, marking the 20, 20th anniversary of Stephen Harper's first election victory in, I think it was January 2000 and, uh...
00:02:08.520I remember it. I was a young lad. Um, uh, we're gonna talk about that. Nigel Hannaford, uh, worked with Stephen Harper. You were his chief speechwriter for many years.
00:02:20.040And, uh, you were in Ottawa, uh, for the celebrations of that. So we'll get to that after. Um, but we've...
00:02:31.260Yeah. Um, traditional. Yeah. Um, and we've got, uh, Dave.
00:02:36.800Dave is gonna be tired. Up late last night, coordinating our news team on, uh, mass shooting in, uh, Tumblr. Uh, but, yeah. Thanks for, thanks for the work you've done.
00:03:22.880Okay. Um, uh, okay. So I, I don't want to talk, really spend much time on, uh, really what everybody knows, but I guess, Dave, maybe just set up, I guess, uh, Western Standard and a few of the other independent media, uh, really, really all, zero legacy media have done anything here.
00:03:47.840Um, their excuse has been, well, the RCMP have not said, therefore, there is no news until they say.
00:03:56.380That sounds like the opposite of what a reporter's job is to do. It's to verify what official sources say, and then when you suspect that there's more to the story, go out and find it and corroborate it with multiple sources, multiple, uh, different facts.
00:04:12.380But the media have just been totally silent and just said, it's not our job to actually find anything out.
00:04:18.580Our job is to passively pass on what the RCMP tell us.
00:04:22.320So the RCMP have said very little, uh, beginning with the identity of the shooter yesterday.
00:05:55.800And, uh, yeah, you know, you're right about the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, if the mainstream media had wanted,
00:06:02.760wanted to do it, they could have done it quite easily, but this story's confused them and scared the hell out of them.
00:06:08.400And they basically, they just didn't know how to handle it.
00:06:10.680So they didn't, they just left it, uh, left it until the RCMP finally came out and said it.
00:06:16.680And they didn't, and they didn't say it in the release, they had to be questioned about it.
00:06:22.320So, yeah, Nigel, um, when, when this happened last night, I mean, they, they said it was a woman in a dress and then the RCMP, that was in the alert that went out on people's phones.
00:06:32.640And then the RCMP said in kind of a brief little, in a little kind of press conference, they said, uh, it was a gun person and immediately suspicious minds say, this is a bit odd.
00:06:45.660Uh, I didn't know the stats at the time, but like, I've pretty much never heard of a female mass school shooter.
00:06:52.000However, it happens, but it is exceedingly rare.
00:07:03.120I want to fine tune a bit more, but the number is, I, I, I was able to come up with is in the last decade for mass school shootings.
00:07:10.340You know, so there's different ways you can wait to bring there's around this exercise, but, um, you know, I had, uh, had it run, ran the numbers on likeliness of committing.
00:07:22.000Uh, relative to their size of the population of committing a mass school shooting.
00:07:27.160Um, for males, uh, they are 1.4 times more likely than the average student to commit a school shooting, mass school shooting.
00:07:35.860Females are 0.1 times more likely, which means much less likely than the average person.
00:07:41.200So credit to ladies, uh, females who identify as males are 18 times more likely to commit a mass school shooting.
00:07:52.000And males who identify as females are, I think it's, uh, if I remember correctly, 54 or 58, 54, 58 times more likely.
00:08:02.580So, you know, we're, we're seeing as I, I talked to, you know, we, we'd all gone home with this blind eye bike.
00:08:07.260I'll tell you if I said 20 bucks, this is not a one.
00:08:11.520Like it's, it's just, they did not take me up on the bat.
00:08:14.340Uh, you know, uh, it would have been throw good money after that, but we knew.
00:11:57.740Most of these people, I don't mean to be disrespectful or, you know, I'm not trying to have a hot take here, but most of these people are not very convincing.
00:12:05.600So, if I'm looking for a woman in a dress, this is not what I am seeing, at least in most of these cases.
00:12:12.260I don't know what the person looks like.
00:12:13.200We'll have to wait for video footage to come out.
00:12:15.060That arguably put people's lives at risk.
00:12:18.740And then later on, they're inventing terms like gun person.
00:12:45.340The media, the legacy media, the RCMP, they're terrified.
00:12:48.520They're terrified of being labeled anything but what the woke standard is, even when relaying outright facts upon things.
00:12:55.800And that's what's happened with, you know, decades of DEI hires, people getting into senior bureaucratic positions within police forces, you know, the communications positions, people getting into those positions in legacy media.
00:13:08.620We've seen some pretty senior legacy media members canceled over what, stepping over the wrong line.
00:13:21.140So there's a culture of terror where they would set aside facts rather than take a chance on accurately reporting on something if it involves anything in those hot button areas, particularly trans.
00:13:33.440And as you said, when it was breaking, that's when facts have to matter.
00:13:38.280We saw that not too long ago with a sex offender in Edmonton who'd been released.
00:13:42.620And the Edmonton Police Service issued a warning saying this person's a high risk to re-offend.
00:13:46.800And this, this woman is a high risk to re-offend and it had a woman's name and unless you clicked on the article and you opened it up and saw the man there with five o'clock shadow, who was a repeat sex offender, you would actually be looking for a woman.
00:13:59.940Well, you're not making anybody safer by lying to them and saying otherwise.
00:14:04.180But again, they feel that if a person identifies as such, as contrary to reality as that may be, we must refer to them as such.
00:14:12.120And it's doing a disservice to everybody.
00:14:16.440As you said, too, when you pointed out the statistics, I mean, it's, it's a microscopic, thankfully, amount of people who decide to take up a gun and start shooting others.
00:14:25.880But we want to look for precursors and what may make somebody a little more likely than others to be, you know, have that inclination, inclination.
00:14:33.960And clearly there's, there's some mental instability with trans males to a degree that makes them more inclined, which again, still puts them perhaps at one in a thousand versus one in 55,000 for everybody else.
00:14:45.680But if we're going to actually think about trying to prevent these things, then we have to look at things without political correctness, with an unvarnished view and see what the heck led up to this.
00:14:56.680And as long as legacy media and the police are going to wrap themselves around hiding facts through political correctness, we aren't going to get real answers.
00:15:04.540Nigel, I guess that's why we should ban hunting rifles, right?
00:15:18.480Look, to your point, Corey, about how these things, why these things happen.
00:15:23.380Earlier this morning, I was chatting with somebody I worked with in Ottawa all those years ago, and we were talking about the DEI culture in the Canadian Armed Forces.
00:15:35.360And I was hoping that maybe there would be a change of heart within the Armed Forces.
00:15:40.100Now that Mr. Carney has made it very clear that he cares about military matters.
00:15:45.900I mean, Mr. Trudeau did not, said he didn't.
00:16:17.460They didn't get the top job by saying that they disagreed with this stuff, so they own it and they will see that it is enforced.
00:16:24.340That's why the RCMP won't come right out and say, what every one of us now knows, a troubled young man.
00:16:31.500And by the way, I have all kinds of sympathy for people who have to deal with this particular persuasion.
00:16:41.660But that's why they won't come right out and say, look, we had somebody who went off the deep end here, terribly sorry, that was a young man, he wanted to be a woman, and he went out and shot people.
00:16:57.620Now, I want to know, obviously mentally challenged or mentally disturbed, RCMP said they'd been to his house many times, including on firearm complaints.
00:19:13.820But it is clearly statistically significant when males, biological males who identify as females, are 54, 58 times more likely to do this kind of thing than the average student.
00:21:06.100But like, I don't know, just let's all do ourselves a favor and just take five minutes before we hit send on things at this time, you know?
00:23:05.140Check his, uh, check his Facebook feed for it.
00:23:07.700Uh, okay, well, let's turn a bit more towards what's inevitably coming here.
00:23:12.440Uh, you're already seeing it from some of the usual suspects online, but we're going to see it real soon.
00:23:19.080Um, you know, never let a good crisis go to waste.
00:23:23.480And this is going to be used not to, uh, reassess, hey, perhaps we should not, as official government policy, require that people buy into the, you know, gender dysphoria delusions of mentally unwell people who need our help.
00:23:41.740Uh, instead, they're going to take the lesson, well, now we need to ban more guns.
00:23:46.380Now, we, it's not yet totally sure what guns were, were used here.
00:24:10.640Um, but what we do know is, uh, you know, every shooting in the past has been used to try to, um, seize the guns of lawful gun owners.
00:24:23.040Polytechnic was, uh, used for it with the gun, uh, long gun registry.
00:24:26.860Um, the, uh, Dartmouth, Vancouver area mass shooting was used.
00:24:33.080Banning guns the guy did not use, and every one of the guns that guy used were illegally brought into Canada from the United States.
00:24:40.280Probably with the wink, wink, nudge, nudge of the RCMP, because that was a, there's a lot of dirty pool on what went on there that has been totally swept under the rug.
00:24:49.680Um, here, uh, we don't know enough of the circumstances of the guns themselves, but there's been pictures of what is alleged to be the gun locker.
00:25:30.160But they're going to take it completely on the opposite side.
00:25:32.720Dave, they're going to, uh, they're going to use this to come after guns again.
00:25:36.620Oh, any excuse, any excuse for gun grab, Gary, and I'm not even going to try and say his last name, but any excuse that they can use to, uh, take guns, they will, you know, and that's, that's the bottom line.
00:25:49.800Uh, so, uh, yeah, I would think in a couple of weeks, they'll be announcing some sort of new crackdown.
00:25:54.520Yeah, well, I mean, the, the, the, the line you always use on the conservative side, you know, where are you, who are you going after, uh, gangs with illegal weapons or law-abiding duck hunters with their shotguns?
00:26:07.520Well, you know, if it turns out to be a shotgun, there goes that, I mean, that used to be a pretty easy throwaway line, and now, well, you've got to go back and say, look, it's not the gun, it's the guy who pulled the trigger you brought to, and that's what you're going to say.
00:26:21.760Yeah, I mean, some, I mean, in this case, gosh, how many times did they go to the house?
00:26:27.420Okay, there's a failure of law enforcement here.
00:26:29.360How much of it, like, again, we don't know enough on this side yet, and we're not going to do as the entire legacy media and CBC, they do and say, well, we're just going, we have to wait until the RCMP tells us what is the story.
00:26:41.560After Vancouver, sorry, after Halifax, uh, I think that RCMP has lost all credibility on being a reliable source in reporting on these kinds of things.
00:26:49.560Uh, and that's the real danger of when the ideology takes over from the top and makes, you know, these guys aren't stupid and they're decent, they're decent people, but they makes them afraid to do the job the way the job needs to be done.
00:27:04.360Now, that's where, that's where we're losing in this country.
00:27:06.780If you remember, it was just, uh, what was it, just a few months ago, uh, the RCMP said, uh, I'm paraphrasing here, but the RCMP said, um, you know, uh, signs that your, uh, someone you know might be getting radicalized is, uh, they, uh, maybe they believed in gender equality and they don't anymore.
00:27:22.820And maybe they all of a sudden believe in traditional family values.
00:27:26.500They are the people who are at risk of committing acts of terror and mass murder.
00:27:31.560Not people with a rap sheet who, uh, have regular police visits to their house, uh, clear mental health issues, firearms violations.
00:27:41.020Uh, still confirming this, but it appears to be a pretty long track record online of dreaming of violent acts.
00:27:50.020Uh, when you're talking about a senior official, Derek, it shouldn't be an act of courage to identify somebody who has just shot umpteen people as a gun man, you should, rather than as a gun person.
00:28:07.700It shouldn't be an act of courage to say.
00:29:16.700Could be that, you know, I mean, it's, uh, some of the stuff that we found that we haven't confirmed is his yet is very, very disturbing and obvious cries for help.
00:29:29.080And the kid was locked away for goodness sake.
00:29:31.960And he was, he was let out and he still had guns.
00:29:35.760I mean, it's, it's whether you're trans or not or whatever, it all goes back to mental health and it goes back to the disgraceful lack of funding that all levels of government have put into mental health, uh, since, uh, uh, since I was born.
00:30:15.520But, uh, there's so many common threads.
00:30:18.900It's always, these people are known to authorities and I don't weigh too hard on authorities because, you know, just because someone's on your notice list doesn't mean we could just walk you up in case you might be a mass casualty shooter.
00:30:31.820That's also not a reasonable way to deal with this.
00:30:34.660But what we're doing is clearly not working.
00:30:37.540Uh, you know, when you used to, you know, take your crazy aunt Martha and just drop her off at, uh, Panoka, those days are over.
00:30:44.840You can't just commit someone easily, but maybe we're not committing people easily enough at this point.
00:30:50.140Maybe, like, there's dangerous, disturbed people out there that we're not getting off the street.
00:30:56.440Uh, I'm not sure what the balance is to strike, to, to, to minimize abuse of that system the way, you know, it used to be.
00:32:15.140Uh, this was the week of, um, Harper and the media suddenly discovered the man that they, uh, derided, mocked, and unappreciated when he was actually in power to do something about it.
00:32:25.260Uh, so, uh, it started off with the, uh, unveiling of the official portrait, which is, uh, you know, it's a very, it's a very nice bit of work.
00:32:32.780And, uh, there's been lots of, but Harper obviously made a speech of that.
00:32:37.780And he took the opportunity to, to, uh, point out that the preservation of Conater's existence must be our highest objective.
00:32:47.800Uh, he was totally sincere about that.
00:32:50.300And I'm looking back on those years that Harper was always, um, a hundred percent Canadian patriot.
00:32:57.380Uh, so he came through and then I guess now the media likes to hear that.