Western Standard - Triggered： Charest is all in with the WEF.

00:00:00.000 Thank you.

00:00:30.000 Good morning. It's Monday, April 18th, 2022. Three days off, and I forget how to pronounce

00:00:38.860 it already. Welcome to Triggered. I'm Corey Morgan. I hope everybody had a good Easter

00:00:43.940 weekend. Those who are into the observances are just enjoying an extra day off. It was

00:00:50.980 much needed for a lot of us. A lot of people were off still today. The traffic was down

00:00:55.240 coming into downtown Calgary, but I'm afraid at the standard, we took the Friday rather

00:00:58.860 than the Monday. It's one of those weird holidays. I got a hard act to follow today. First thing this

00:01:03.780 morning, for those who didn't catch it, we had Danielle Smith on. She kicked off her show. 1.00

00:01:08.200 She's going to be doing that every day here live at 9 a.m. Well, not every day, Mondays, Wednesdays,

00:01:12.840 Fridays at 9 a.m. And then Saturday, she does an extended show for an hour and a half with a guest.

00:01:18.900 So kind of a deep dive into issues and discussion with them. And yes, that reminder is live. It's

00:01:24.560 great to see everybody coming in and seeing where you're coming from, where you're at, to see Gary

00:01:27.940 Parkin from Lemberg, Saskatchewan. One of our guests today is going to be Chris Oldcorn. He's

00:01:32.480 the Western Standard Saskatchewan Bureau Chief. We're going to talk about some of those issues

00:01:36.240 from our neighbor just to the east of us there. As well, I'm going to have Mark Milkey. He's an

00:01:41.080 author. He was involved with the Fraser Institute and a number of other institutes. And he also put

00:01:47.580 a column in the Western Standard recently. And we're going to talk about equity versus equality.

00:01:51.740 You know, words that sound so similar, yet they have some very serious different meanings to them,

00:01:58.840 depending on the interpretation of them.

00:02:01.800 Some folks who we got from Medicine Hat, lots of local people, Linden, Alberta, good to see you all in there.

00:02:06.940 So the comments, just that reminder too, I like the comments, I like seeing them go discuss things with each other,

00:02:12.120 discuss things with me, send questions for the guests.

00:02:15.140 I do read them all, I don't necessarily read them out.

00:02:17.240 I try to get to what I can, and like I said, just try to stay civil with each other.

00:02:21.740 oh, we want to be nice. We don't have to always agree, but we do want to keep it. You know,

00:02:25.300 that's what's nice about being live. I want to keep that interaction going.

00:02:29.180 So we aren't blocking people for getting too rude with each other. Most of you aren't. It's great.

00:02:34.360 So let's see what I'm going to rant about today. And yes, I brought up the, speaking of triggered,

00:02:38.120 triggered words, economic forum, world economic forum. I know, I know. It's been driven into the

00:02:44.080 ground, but it just keeps coming up. And it seems as if no politician, prominent business person,

00:02:48.780 or media personality can't say anything without a chorus of voices saying that person is a wef

00:02:53.500 plant or something it's really kind of actually gotten out of control unfortunately after a couple

00:02:57.420 of years a bad government policy a massive increase in authoritarianism and some conspiracy

00:03:03.020 theories actually proving to be true though the wef thing really grows some legs the thing with

00:03:07.660 the wef is that it isn't a conspiracy it's right there in front of us it's a group of elitists

00:03:12.780 headed by klaus schwab who meet annually and discuss plans and means to bring about world

00:03:17.660 socialism. They openly speak of using what they call the Great Reset as a means to expand government

00:03:23.080 and reset the economic systems of the world into some sort of form of centralized collectivism.

00:03:28.600 Now, while the wish list of the WF is bold and odious, it doesn't mean they're actually getting

00:03:33.620 anywhere with it. While they like to brag about how many decision makers they have on board,

00:03:37.880 they don't exert nearly the amount of control that many attribute to them. I mean, just because a

00:03:41.980 person's attended one of their events doesn't mean that they embrace the ideology of the group,

00:03:45.220 or just because the group's endorsed or referenced somebody,

00:03:48.040 it doesn't mean that person's controlled

00:03:49.040 or even approves of that group.

00:03:50.920 If you label everybody as a WEF adherent,

00:03:53.260 nobody is a WEF adherent.

00:03:55.380 Now, some people really are adherents to the WEF ideology.

00:03:58.120 Some people really think the organization's plans

00:04:00.300 are a great idea

00:04:01.300 and the government should be implementing them.

00:04:03.880 We don't need to do some sort of deep dive

00:04:05.680 to find these folks.

00:04:06.660 Like the World Economic Forum itself,

00:04:10.820 it's right in the open.

00:04:11.980 So I'm going to play a two-minute clip

00:04:13.320 of Conservative Party of Canada leadership contenders, Jean Charest, as he spoke to Terry

00:04:18.320 Malusky back in 2018 with the CBC about the World Economic Forum. And let's hear what Jean Charest

00:04:25.220 has to say about that organization. Premier of Quebec and the former Deputy Prime Minister of

00:04:29.640 Canada, Jean Charest. I'm very glad you were able to join us, Mr. Charest, and I appreciate your time

00:04:34.400 very much. I want you to know, first of all, if I can ask you, how can this trip to Davos serve

00:04:40.620 Trudeau's purpose I mean how important is it really in promoting Canadian

00:04:44.340 business does it make a difference well Davos is an interesting opportunity I

00:04:48.960 went nine times as premier of Quebec and the advantage Terry is that there are a

00:04:52.800 lot of decision-makers concentrated in the same place same time and you can

00:04:57.900 meet a lot of people and get a lot of work done you've been there so many

00:05:01.620 times so give me an example I mean what happens that actually I'm thinking of

00:05:07.320 the CETA example. It grew out of, I think, you tell me if this is right or wrong, out of some

00:05:12.820 backroom meeting you had at Davos, right? In 2007. And there were a number of people in

00:05:18.680 Europe at the time that I consulted. One of them was the ex-president of Mexico who had done that,

00:05:24.280 a gentleman named Zidio. So the point is, that's where you can meet these people and get things

00:05:29.680 done. So it is a place where you can advance your cause. But it's also a place where typically

00:05:35.820 countries like India or China will go to present themselves. Okay final word now on the big picture I guess for most people watching this they know that Davos is a place where the fancy people in private jets go and talk about things and have a great time and maybe hit the ski slopes. What can you point to to tell the average folks that it makes a difference that the economic results actually do emerge from Davos. You mentioned Cedar. Well that was a long time. That was 2007. What have you done for

00:06:05.800 lately? Well, Terry, it's very simple. First of all, I don't know if a single politician went to

00:06:10.860 Davos who actually skied. Look at it as a shopping center for politicians in the sense that it's an

00:06:16.680 opportunity where you can meet a lot of political investors, that there are companies that will or

00:06:22.540 have or are interested in investing in your country in a very short period of time. And it's a very

00:06:27.400 efficient way of doing business if you look at it that way. So even, yes, it is elitist. It is,

00:06:32.680 There's no doubt about that, movie stars and people.

00:06:36.000 But at the end of the day, a prime minister can get a lot of good work done in Davos

00:06:41.460 when they're well organized to meet a lot of decision makers.

00:06:44.520 Jean Charest, always a pleasure to have you on, sir.

00:06:46.360 Thanks for this.

00:06:47.180 Thank you.

00:06:47.840 Jean Charest, former premier of Quebec.

00:06:51.280 So, yeah, I mean, as can be seen and heard, there's no nefarious hidden agenda.

00:06:55.320 It's all right there in front of us.

00:06:57.480 Charest is being candid, if nothing else.

00:06:59.200 And I don't fault Charest for admitting the event is elitist.

00:07:02.500 any gathering of world leaders will indeed be so by nature. I agree meetings need to be held

00:07:08.120 between politicians and business leaders in order to get things done. What I don't agree with though

00:07:12.080 is that these meetings need to be done with a group that carries an open mandate to take advantage of

00:07:16.180 world misery due to a pandemic in order to impose what they call a reset. This is disturbing.

00:07:22.640 Conferences and gatherings are essential and they need themes. They need to be held with a more

00:07:27.120 neutral platform though than what the World Economic Forum offers. World leaders can gather

00:07:31.460 without tying themselves into what that group does.

00:07:34.480 I mean, those celebrating the World Economic Forum

00:07:36.720 do at least expose themselves to us for what they are.

00:07:39.500 They're the people who want to expand the state.

00:07:41.500 These are the folks that want to bring about world socialism.

00:07:44.460 These are the people who don't feel

00:07:46.080 they should be guided by citizens.

00:07:47.460 They feel they should be directing them.

00:07:49.360 If we want to empower citizens,

00:07:50.840 if we want to protect and expand personal freedoms,

00:07:53.520 if we want to reduce the reach of government,

00:07:55.180 we need to avoid WEF-linked leadership at all costs.

00:07:59.860 When deciding who to support in elections and leadership races,

00:08:02.420 it's worth seeing if the contenders support the WEF.

00:08:04.960 Don't worry, it won't be hard to see them if they do.

00:08:06.980 As with Trudeau and Charest, they tend to wear it right on their sleeves.

00:08:10.440 But again, quit trying to paint anybody and everybody as being WEF-controlled as well, though.

00:08:14.600 If they say they don't support the group, they likely don't.

00:08:17.540 Those who support it make no secret about it.

00:08:20.040 So, watch these things. Keep track, guys.

00:08:23.460 It's for real, but again, it's not as widespread as some other people might think.

00:08:27.860 Now, you know, somebody else saying, where was that?

00:08:31.760 Somebody saying Charest is a liberal plant.

00:08:33.440 He's not a plant.

00:08:34.100 Again, it's not a conspiracy.

00:08:34.940 He is a liberal.

00:08:35.520 He was a liberal premier of Quebec for years there.

00:08:38.740 Nothing hidden, nothing secret.

00:08:40.300 And he's still a liberal.

00:08:41.960 He's just running for a party that happens to have conservative in the name.

00:08:45.460 So let's bring Dave Naylor in to check in with the news and see what's happening in other areas outside of the crazed international conspiracies.

00:08:53.700 Hey, Dave, how's it going?

00:08:54.620 oh hang on wait a minute i thought i was on the danielle smith show no no luck you're still on

00:09:01.420 that second tier show with morgan well this is a great disappointment to me cory a great

00:09:06.540 disappointment how did your uh naked uh easter egg hunt go on the weekend out at the

00:09:13.020 how did the compound oh we dropped our property values by about 20 but i found most of the eggs

00:09:17.820 i'd hate to be one of your neighbors in all honesty what do we have in the news today

00:09:24.700 uh well the the federal government had set up a multi-million dollar fund to help ottawa

00:09:31.220 businesses uh recuperate from that terrible terrible truckers convoy but uh not surprisingly

00:09:37.880 there's not many businesses signing up for it uh probably because they don't need the help

00:09:42.000 It's 37% undersubscribed from what the Liberals had set aside.

00:09:49.000 There's also a poll stating what is the bleeding obvious.

00:09:53.000 The majority of Canadians think electric cars are too expensive.

00:09:57.000 Yeah, no kidding.

00:09:59.000 When the average price is $58,000 and the average car price is $48,000,

00:10:05.000 grand. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out where people are going to most spend

00:10:11.480 their money. The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms has released a sort of report card on

00:10:18.280 which provinces were the worst violators of people's freedoms during COVID lockdowns.

00:10:24.440 Not really surprisingly, but Quebec took the top spot, taking away most people's

00:10:31.800 freedoms there. Other news, we've got

00:10:35.740 Alex Jones, the Infowars guru down in the States

00:10:39.940 has claimed bankruptcy, basically owes $10 million

00:10:43.580 to the families of the Sandy Hook massacre, which he claimed

00:10:47.720 was a false flag operation and never happened. So he's

00:10:51.620 gone to court to try and protect whatever little money he's got

00:10:55.700 left. Our Christopher Olcorn, who's coming on your show

00:10:59.460 shortly as an update on Saskatchewan COVID figures and they're they're climbing uh climbing slowly

00:11:05.960 upwards uh Duck Duck Go has responded to uh rumors they're a search platform and the rumor

00:11:13.200 was since last month that they were going to uh take all independent media like us out of their

00:11:18.260 search engines but their CEO uh has come forward and said no not true just another one of those

00:11:24.680 fake news uh uh stories uh chris has got another story on the uh the end of the saskatchewan gun

00:11:33.400 amnesty program rcmp and municipal force is getting 241 guns uh potentially off the streets

00:11:41.560 in saskatchewan and dr dennis modry who performed the first heart transplant

00:11:48.840 in Alberta years and years ago.

00:11:52.400 He's now more on the political bent.

00:11:54.800 He's got a column asking whether or not Pierre Paliyev

00:11:57.880 really does understand Western alienation

00:12:02.340 and the fears of the feelings of why many Albertans want to separate.

00:12:08.100 So that's what we've got up now.

00:12:10.640 Draw your attention, Corey, to this afternoon

00:12:12.800 where our Melanie Rizdin will have another interview with Dr. Nagasi.

00:12:17.180 He is one of the more outspoken doctors against the, basically against the mantra of not being able to use other drugs.

00:12:28.440 He was suspended from an Alberta, from all Alberta hospitals for using unprescribed drugs to treat COVID patients.

00:12:36.460 So he's very controversial and I'm sure it'll be a great show coming up later on this early evening, I believe, on our website, Corey.

00:12:46.220 Great. Well, lots on the go as we head into the Easter week.

00:12:50.400 I mean, not everybody is escaped with the spring break and things such as that.

00:12:54.460 And so we'll carry on reporting on it. Thanks for checking in. I'll talk to you later.

00:12:58.360 Well, and I think we have to congratulate our boss man.

00:13:02.400 Derek Fildebrand became the proud father of a bouncing baby boy this morning with Emma.

00:13:08.980 And baby Fritz came in at a whopping eight pounds, 15 ounces, excuse me.

00:13:16.520 So I'm sure Derek will be in later on handing out cigars.

00:13:21.060 Yeah, we'll see about that.

00:13:22.660 But yes, the Phil de Brand clan has expanded this week.

00:13:27.180 It was worth mentioning.

00:13:28.440 So I'm glad everything went well for him.

00:13:30.180 And we'll get a break from Derek for a little while.

00:13:32.360 Exactly.

00:13:32.900 No more ties after your show.

00:13:35.620 Right on.

00:13:36.140 Thanks, Dave.

00:13:37.220 You bet.

00:13:37.560 All right.

00:13:38.980 And that's a good reminder to bring up from Dave.

00:13:42.520 Yes, Melanie Riston, and she's been doing shows and interviews regularly,

00:13:47.320 and they've been very well received.

00:13:49.100 I'm sure a lot of you have already been watching them.

00:13:51.340 Because Mel does them not on a regular basis,

00:13:53.200 say like me or Danielle with scheduled shows,

00:13:55.640 that's just that reminder.

00:13:57.060 Subscribe everywhere, guys.

00:13:58.340 That's how you're going to find these things.

00:13:59.740 That's how you're going to catch these shows when they come out.

00:14:02.160 So whether you're on Rumble, YouTube, Facebook, Twitch,

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00:14:07.620 Are we streaming to LinkedIn?

00:14:08.960 I saw a LinkedIn commenter coming in through there.

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00:14:15.900 because you'll see these specials as they pop up.

00:14:17.940 You know, sometimes we do them as news breaks.

00:14:19.820 We don't give much warning.

00:14:20.860 So it's really important to subscribe

00:14:23.240 and keep those things going

00:14:24.340 so you catch these as they come out.

00:14:26.980 And Mel's stuff is always really good.

00:14:29.800 Also, subscribe to the Western Standard itself.

00:14:33.000 There's that reminder.

00:14:33.820 We talked about DuckDuckGo.

00:14:35.000 It sounds like they backed off.

00:14:36.300 They're not going to get into the business

00:14:37.400 of saying who's real media and who's not media. Unlike our federal government, who has determined

00:14:42.760 that rebel media is not real media. Really? I mean, I don't know. You don't have to like

00:14:47.780 Ezra and Rebel, but whose place is it to say what is or isn't official media? This is dangerous

00:14:54.020 territory to go into. Either way, we don't care. We rely on subscribers to determine whether we're

00:15:00.740 giving a valid, decent product out or not. We rely on you guys, and it's been great.

00:15:05.360 Subscriptions have been going fantastic.

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00:15:42.020 and again if you haven't subscribed yet get on there and do so guys uh maybe i'll speak quickly

00:15:49.040 actually of one of our sponsors uh since i was i was at a firearms show on the weekend there and i

00:15:53.180 did meet with him that's one of the interviews i've got up yeah was if you go to our youtube

00:15:57.360 channel and Facebook and that I spoke with Tony Bernardo of the Canadian Shooting Sports

00:16:03.820 Association. And they had a setup there. They had a draw going on. And what these guys are,

00:16:09.420 are just good advocates for legal, responsible firearm use. They are an association as it makes

00:16:16.480 it sound like you got all sorts of resources there. They got links, whether you want to go

00:16:19.740 for firearms training or whether it's firearm sporting events or where there are gun shows

00:16:25.860 and trade shows, they have all of that on their website, and they're advocating for you. They've

00:16:30.320 had legal challenges in the past to make sure that they are protecting your right to safely and

00:16:35.920 legally enjoy firearms against the Liberal government, because they're always coming for

00:16:39.220 them, guys. They're always looking to take away your property, and if you don't stand up for it,

00:16:44.120 you're going to be out of luck. So get on there, check them out, take out a membership, as with us,

00:16:48.920 because hey, if we don't stand up for ourselves, nobody's going to do it for you.

00:16:51.540 cssa-cila.org. It's the Canadian Shooting Sports Association. If you own firearms or you're looking

00:16:59.660 to own firearms, you got to get on and join those guys. All right, before our next guest gets here,

00:17:05.720 let's talk a little bit about some of the news items Dave brought. Here's the no-brainer of the

00:17:10.180 week, right? Electric cars are unpopular, you know? No crap. Like, how long do we have to go through

00:17:18.420 Well, we know we're going to have to go through it for a long time.

00:17:20.560 It's been years and years, billions and billions of dollars in promotions, on rebates, on infomercials, you name it.

00:17:29.240 And only 5% of Canadians say they own or lease a vehicle that runs on electricity.

00:17:33.940 5%, 95% of us don't.

00:17:37.620 And we don't want to.

00:17:38.880 People aren't rushing out.

00:17:39.860 Even though there's $5,000 cash rebates and all these things to join charger stations, they got to have to admit it's not there, but they won't.

00:17:47.140 So we're talking about now they're moving on to banning, banning the sale of combustion engine

00:17:53.040 cars. They're talking about putting quotas on salespeople. They're talking about forcing plants

00:17:58.040 to get retooled. We're going to be in a lot of trouble, guys, a lot of trouble. I'll tell you,

00:18:02.640 if you want a good investment right now, start buying gasoline and diesel-powered cars because 0.99

00:18:07.000 if these morons in office carry on like they have, these collector's items are going to be worth a 0.97

00:18:12.420 fortune when we have nothing but electric cars available that cost a fortune, don't have good 0.99

00:18:17.120 charging facilities, don't have good range, don't work well in wintertime, and don't have a decent

00:18:21.500 resale value. But, well, public opinion be damned. I mean, this gets back to a government that wants

00:18:28.120 to tell you what to do rather than serve. You know, a government that doesn't trust you on your

00:18:34.040 own to make decent decisions for yourself or the environment around you or for anything like that.

00:18:39.480 They feel they have to be top-down, guiding you, pushing you, or even forcing you. You know,

00:18:44.900 it's that attitude from government. And it's very disturbing and distressing. It's problematic.

00:18:50.320 And that's just another symptom of it. You know, pollsters can find out what Canadians want,

00:18:54.940 but our government, oh, they can find out too. They poll like crazy. The problem we got with

00:18:58.560 our government right now is they don't care what we want. It doesn't matter. They've got an ideology

00:19:03.520 and they're going to push it. And they're going to try and change us. You know, there's a term

00:19:07.680 that used to be used a lot in the past. We used to use over and over social engineering. It's

00:19:11.880 kind of fallen out of use. But it's true. They're trying to change our behavior. It's such an 1.00

00:19:18.660 arrogant attitude, an elitist attitude, the great unwashed masses. We have to model them into this

00:19:24.740 better world of what we think. Look, guys, we will. We're evolving. We're getting better. The world,

00:19:29.400 for the most part, is a better place. People are better people than they were 30 years ago,

00:19:32.860 and we're going to continue to be. Stay out of our hair because the government's agenda isn't

00:19:38.100 necessarily the same as ours. When you get in stirring around with us, it doesn't necessarily

00:19:42.200 lead to better outcomes. Okay, well, let's get on. Speaking of buzzwords and things like that to our

00:19:47.480 first guest for today, and he's been on before, this is author Mark Milkey, and he put a column

00:19:53.300 out with us recently on, it was called the latest hit to taxpayers and entrepreneurs, pay equity

00:20:00.080 salaries are based on Apple banana comparison. So let's bring Mark in and discuss what he was

00:20:05.980 getting that there. Hey, Mark, how are you doing?

00:20:08.260 Corey, I am doing well. Thanks for having me on.

00:20:10.780 Great. No, it's always good to get you here. And you hit on some of these subjects that

00:20:14.300 a lot of people don't like talking about, you know, and that's one of those ones is those two

00:20:18.840 words, equity and equality. They sound so similar. They're kind of in related fields,

00:20:24.040 but they're very different things, aren't they?

00:20:26.060 Well, it's a bit Orwellian. I first wrote on pay equity back in the Financial Post 25 years ago,

00:20:30.520 and we're still dealing with this issue. The notion of pay equity is basically about equal

00:20:35.080 value, equal pay for jobs of equal value. Now, that's the catch right there, value. How do you

00:20:41.660 value jobs? Well, usually the market values a job. If you get a whole bunch of people that are,

00:20:46.980 17 years old, 18 years old, and they're available to work at McDonald's, they're probably going to

00:20:51.280 be paid different than, say, a mining engineer who has to go to university and get training in

00:20:57.520 both the mines and in engineering. But pay equity has come about basically because of lobbying,

00:21:04.180 in part by government unions over the years. That was the first column I wrote on it 25 years ago.

00:21:08.580 More recently, the Doug Ford government in Ontario talked about pay equity. It has a pay equity office,

00:21:13.700 as it turns out. They ran an entire advertorial in the Globe and Mail lauding pay equity. Now,

00:21:19.620 you often hear this in the context of women make two thirds of what men do. No, they don't. That's

00:21:25.620 an average, right? And averages hide a whole bunch of reasons why when you tally up all the money men

00:21:32.980 make all the money women make and come up with an average that doesn't tell you about hours worked, 0.64

00:21:37.860 it doesn't tell you about degrees, it doesn't tell you about time taken off or out of the 0.96

00:21:41.860 workforce to raise children, so on and so forth. So there's a whole bunch of problems with the

00:21:46.580 notion of pay equity as opposed to equality of pay for the exact same job, which is a very

00:21:52.500 different concept. Yeah, and that causes a lot of confusion and such. But I mean, just framing it

00:21:59.060 that way it sounds unfair to people but I mean if it was jobs if it was the exact same job and

00:22:04.100 somebody was paid based on one gender versus another a different amount I mean that's illegal

00:22:07.860 it has been for a long time it's been illegal since the 1950s in Ontario for example I mean

00:22:12.740 in the early 1950s Ontario passed laws against discrimination in employment in lodging in much

00:22:19.780 else based on color based on gender now this is part of the problem today is that people don't

00:22:24.740 know their history, not only their legislative history, but they don't know their legislative

00:22:30.020 history and they don't know their legal history, their statistical history. They don't know how to

00:22:35.760 break down statistics properly or averages. So you get these nonsensical declarations that somehow

00:22:41.220 Canada is this bastion of inequality. No, it's not actually. I mean, if you're an employer in Canada

00:22:48.320 and again, using the example of Ontario, at any point in the last 70 years, you could be hauled

00:22:53.900 to court for discrimination if you pay a woman differently than a man for the exact same job.

00:22:59.580 Now, there may be cases, I'm sure there have been cases where employers have tried to get around

00:23:04.100 that. But the point is, it's been illegal for seven decades. It's not about equality. Pay equity

00:23:09.520 is about trying to, it's a rubbery concept of, say, trying to compare clerical workers in the

00:23:15.280 federal civil service, which is actually what I began writing about 25 years ago, and where there

00:23:19.960 is some massive settlement to them worth billions of dollars just because it happens to be female 1.00

00:23:24.620 dominated. The argument is female dominated professions have historically been paid lower 1.00

00:23:30.960 because they're female dominated, say clerical work historically. Well, that's a bit questionable.

00:23:37.400 There are male dominated professions such as soldiering, which actually pay quite low

00:23:41.620 when you tally up the risk of working in that profession. And there's inequalities between

00:23:49.040 male dominated professions such as the nhl and soldiering i mean the average not the average but

00:23:55.200 the pay range i could find if you're in the canadian armed forces starting at a very basic

00:23:59.920 level was something like 36 000 and i think the highest was around 180 000 well in the nhl a

00:24:07.200 starting salary another male dominated professor profession is 900 000 and the top salary is 20

00:24:13.920 million in Canadian dollars. So those are two male-dominated professions. And there are very

00:24:19.840 different reasons, of course, why NHL players make a lot of money and soldiers don't. A lot of people

00:24:24.940 go to NHL games and advertisers spend a lot of money on the NHL, paying the NHL, and so do fans.

00:24:31.800 So there's a reason why the NHL pays a lot better in a male-dominated profession.

00:24:37.400 And soldiers are not paid that well, which is another male-dominated profession. But unless

00:24:43.340 you break these things down, you get stuck in this morass of somehow we live in a great

00:24:48.820 age of inequality when it comes to pay between men and women. It ain't so.

00:24:53.760 Well, and then you start getting into that sensitive area for a lot of people or politically

00:24:59.440 dangerous area, but of acknowledging that there are some differences in inclinations generally

00:25:05.300 among different genders. I mean, of course, there's many women drawn to the STEM fields 1.00

00:25:09.560 And there's many men drawn to nursing or other, you know, cross-gender type of areas.

00:25:14.180 But there's still areas that will remain predominantly dominated by one gender or another.

00:25:18.820 And you should be allowed to admit that. 1.00

00:25:21.580 Well, and there may well be.

00:25:22.500 I mean, Jordan Peterson made this argument famously about five years ago and got into

00:25:27.200 trouble for it, got into trouble in quotes on a UK television interview, which is what

00:25:31.180 sent him into the stratosphere around the world in terms of his publicity for his book,

00:25:35.560 right?

00:25:35.820 when he said, look, the Nordic countries have done everything they can to equalize opportunity,

00:25:40.660 to make sure women have the opportunity to enter the workforce, especially when their children are

00:25:44.280 young, so on and so forth. Nonetheless, there seems to be average differences between the

00:25:48.840 choices that men and women make. Now, look, let's also look at, say, racial incomes.

00:25:55.100 As it turns out, if you're a Taiwanese Canadian, the average income in the 2016 census was 51,000,

00:26:01.620 or the median income, rather.

00:26:03.780 A Somali Canadian, the median income in that year

00:26:06.180 for someone who worked full year or full time was $36,000.

00:26:09.780 That's a $15,000 difference.

00:26:12.060 Now, what goes into the differences

00:26:14.780 between those two groups, Somali Canadians

00:26:17.380 and Taiwanese Canadians?

00:26:18.940 Well, Taiwanese Canadians, on average,

00:26:21.220 have higher education levels, more university degrees

00:26:24.060 as a proportion of the population.

00:26:26.420 And Somali Canadians, on average, are newer to Canada.

00:26:30.220 The average, you know, person who's lived in Canada who has a Somali background is newer than a Taiwanese Canadian or Taiwanese Canadians may have been here for several generations in some cases.

00:26:40.220 So there are differences in incomes because you can't simply come to a country and then start at the top of the economic or career profession.

00:26:48.440 So there's all sorts of reasons why pay equity is such a flawed concept.

00:26:52.420 And the language itself is really deceiving because, again, people think you're talking about equality, the same job, the same pay.

00:26:58.960 And you're not.

00:26:59.420 you're talking about these value comparisons as if you can compare, say, clerical workers in the

00:27:04.080 federal government to soldiering, which are, you know, female dominated and male dominated

00:27:08.660 respectively. Yeah, well, and I mean, most good business models, I mean, are going to naturally

00:27:14.540 gravitate to try and compensate the person who's providing more value to them. I'm certain there's

00:27:19.800 some prejudiced managers and business owners out there, but for the most part, they understand it,

00:27:24.220 you know, we're getting better. I mean, we're beyond that. You just want the best person for

00:27:27.660 that job. And it's just not going to matter what race or gender demographic or even sexual

00:27:33.300 orientation is anymore. I mean, yeah, I mean, the American economist Thomas Sowell has made this

00:27:37.860 point many times that, look, if you think somebody who practices discrimination based on gender or

00:27:43.840 race is going to end up hurting themselves in their own business, because then you're going

00:27:47.380 to hire people based on some qualification like skin color. So if you're prejudiced against black

00:27:53.040 Canadians and you hire someone who's white for that reason alone, you'll miss out on top notch 0.61

00:27:57.120 talent because of your prejudice. It'll drag down your business. It'll hurt your profits. So

00:28:01.520 discrimination is actually a bad economic policy as well. But it has been illegal for 70 years in

00:28:07.880 Canada, depending on the province. But pay equity has never been about equality between, you know,

00:28:13.900 for the exact same pay for the exact same job. It has been about this rubbery notion of, well,

00:28:19.940 we think we can compare workers in various cohorts and somehow come up with, you know,

00:28:25.040 an equality measurement, an equity measurement, and then we should all, we should pay them the

00:28:30.040 same as opposed to, listen, there are reasons why, for example, clerical work or say the real

00:28:35.280 estate profession attracts certain people because there's low barriers to entry, right? And there's

00:28:43.100 a difference between that and perhaps doing deep science research and getting a PhD, I don't know,

00:28:48.680 in neuropsychology, that's going to weed out most of us. So there are reasons, again, why certain

00:28:54.360 professions attract a lot of people. And also the pay is perhaps lower, especially in the clerical

00:28:59.320 profession, because you don't have to go to university for 12 years and learn something

00:29:04.120 about neuropsychology. So of course, clerical work is going to be paid less than neuropsychology,

00:29:09.640 irrespective of whether it's male dominated or female dominated. 0.98

00:29:12.440 Yeah, well, and there's been a lot more participation from females and women in the

00:29:17.080 STEM trades in the last few years, I believe, than there used to be as well. So I mean,

00:29:21.160 I mean, we're going to see them coming into the workforce or developing into senior positions

00:29:24.440 pretty soon, I would imagine.

00:29:26.460 Well, I mean, these things take decades to work out. 1.00

00:29:28.400 I mean, there were women in senior positions already in the workforce. 0.99

00:29:31.500 I mean, obviously, CEOs and others. 1.00

00:29:34.220 I mean, here's the way to think about pay equity. 1.00

00:29:35.780 Let's take the example of an all-female law firm. 1.00

00:29:39.760 This is a hypothetical example I gave in my column in the Western Standard. 0.94

00:29:43.500 Imagine 100 lawyers, all-female, hired at the same time, went to the same university, 0.85

00:29:48.060 had the same grades. 0.98

00:29:49.580 I mean, let's go with the example.

00:29:51.160 because this is the only way to understand the flaw in pay equity psychology and claims.

00:29:56.120 Let's suppose 50 women of those 100 women that are hired at the same time take five years off 1.00

00:30:01.580 or 10 years off to raise kids, come back to the same law firm. Are the 50 female lawyers that 1.00

00:30:07.220 stayed at the law firm that entire time, those entire 10 years, are those 50 women going to say, 0.96

00:30:12.800 yeah, you who have come back now to the firm, former colleague of mine with five years less

00:30:17.560 experience can now make what I do. Of course not, because it's not about gender in this case. What

00:30:23.800 it's about is experience, time served in the law firm. So even a 100 person female law firm, 1.00

00:30:30.360 you're going to see discrimination between women, between the women who have served 10 years in the 0.97

00:30:35.800 law firm and have more experience and those who served only five years because they took time

00:30:40.040 off to raise children, for example, in this particular example. So the flaw with pay equity

00:30:45.480 is it assumes all choices are equal and they're not and so they don't account for those career

00:30:50.280 breaks they don't account for education in many cases they don't account for the time

00:30:54.760 say a new cohort a new immigrant group is in the country versus an established group

00:30:59.160 all of those factors so the doug ford government by pushing the pay equity concept is pushing a

00:31:04.360 pretty flawed notion of why people get paid the way they do yeah so i was wondering though what

00:31:11.240 What's inspiring on an ostensibly conservative government such as Doug Ford's, especially going into an election period, to dive into this morass?

00:31:19.820 I mean, was there really pressure outside of perhaps organized labor to move in this direction?

00:31:23.540 Or is it just being reactive, perhaps, and not really paying close attention to what people are concerned about?

00:31:29.640 I'm not sure how long that the Ontario Pay Equity Office has been in existence.

00:31:32.900 It may have predated the Doug Ford government, but I'm surprised it's still there.

00:31:37.120 And plus, politicians don't have, frankly, don't have time to think deeply about some of these matters.

00:31:41.240 So perhaps, you know, the premier himself or others, you know, in the Ontario caucus haven't given it any thought.

00:31:47.880 It wouldn't be the first time politicians live on a on a phrase and think, well, that sounds nice.

00:31:52.620 Who could be against equity? But it's not the same as equality.

00:31:56.140 So I think it's it's in part because this has been pushed for a quarter century by government unions in particular.

00:32:02.400 And this is where I first noticed it in the late 1990s. And it's very costly to taxpayers.

00:32:06.700 It's also an interference in the marketplace because, again, some professions are going to find have a lot more supply of labor, and that drives down the price of that labor vis-a-vis, again, more specialized professions or, again, public professions such as the NHL, where, of course, a lot of money flows into the NHL, as I mentioned a moment ago, from consumers and advertisers.

00:32:28.600 so uh it's a male-dominated profession um pretty much all male i think and uh but they're paid you

00:32:35.900 know multiples of course again of what a soldier does now in a perfect we're not a perfect world

00:32:41.060 in a world where somehow we could what uh quantify value exactly if we had that omniscient ability

00:32:49.400 of course the soldier is worth more in some value concept we value them more in some in some notion

00:32:55.940 than we do an NHL player because soldiers put their lives on the line, but they're paid a 20th

00:33:01.280 really of, if that, of what soldiers are paid. So again, this says you can't really value

00:33:07.680 professions based on value. You have to let the market decide or what taxpayers can afford to pay

00:33:12.360 soldiers. So, I mean, as we keep swirling that though, because they're difficult buzzwords to

00:33:18.740 battle against. I mean, they're feel good things. People just, if they're not going to look deeply

00:33:22.020 at it, they'll support these things. But I mean, this can really make a mess of some employment

00:33:26.980 markets, public sector and private sector, if we care. Well, it makes a mess of taxpayer finances.

00:33:32.740 When I first wrote on this a quarter century ago, I can't believe it's been that long in the

00:33:37.140 Financial Post, I had women call me up who were entrepreneurs and others who said, I get what's

00:33:42.920 happening. It's government unions trying to shove more money in the direction of government employees. 0.98

00:33:49.040 and they were outraged.

00:33:51.440 They'd phone me up about my financial post column.

00:33:53.900 This is a reaction I've had from entrepreneurs.

00:33:55.700 I had, there's an employer up in Fort McMurray

00:33:59.720 who runs a medical company,

00:34:02.100 a nursing company, basically.

00:34:04.840 And she mentioned to me a couple of years ago 0.99

00:34:07.460 that she's got to pay clerical workers 0.97

00:34:09.240 much higher than they would be 1.00

00:34:10.980 and she would have to pay in the private market 1.00

00:34:12.880 because she's competing with government jobs. 1.00

00:34:15.240 So that's what pay equity arguments have done. 1.00

00:34:17.700 again, on this claim that female dominated professions in the past have been lower paying 0.80

00:34:22.860 because they're female dominated, as opposed to, again, the example of clerical work, where there 0.69

00:34:27.200 are a few barriers to entry, lots of supply of labor. And frankly, people can get in and out

00:34:32.600 of that quickly as they decide to go back and provide for their children for a couple of years

00:34:38.320 or work with their children full time, as opposed to work in the private sector workforce outside

00:34:42.360 the home. So these are the things that drive salaries. And my female friend in Fort McMurray,

00:34:48.280 who runs a health company, saw it when she started to pay $80,000 for an assistant that,

00:34:56.120 because the pay was driven up by the government sector because of these artificial

00:35:00.200 boosts because of pay equity increments in the civil service that really did start about 25 years

00:35:05.240 ago. And as times are getting fiscally tight, I mean, we hope some of these areas that we can

00:35:09.960 And it just applies more common sense and just kind of get back to rationale. 0.99

00:35:14.580 Well, again, the example of 50 female lawyers that stay at a law firm throughout their careers, 1.00

00:35:19.420 they're not going to, if they're running the law firm, no one else is, it's not a male-dominated 1.00

00:35:23.100 firm. They're not going to go pay 50 female lawyers who took time off the same as they get 0.91

00:35:27.200 paid because they understand that time served equals higher rates of pay. You get to bill higher 1.00

00:35:31.720 for that sort of experience. Yeah, well, we'll see. I mean, the private market, we know will

00:35:36.780 be driven that way, but the public market, you know, public sector doesn't unfortunately pivot

00:35:41.260 that necessarily as well. But I guess that's our responsibility as voters to try and push

00:35:45.220 for these policies and try and get a better employment policy. Well, it starts by telling

00:35:51.020 the truth. Paying men and women differently for the exact same job has been illegal since the 1950s.

00:35:57.860 Yeah. Well, and I appreciate you being willing to even, you know, bring up and broach those

00:36:01.280 subjects because it has been too sensitive for a lot of people. So as we kind of wrap up here,

00:36:05.040 those. I see you're the president of the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy. That's a new think

00:36:10.080 tank you fired up. It's something I've been thinking about for years, actually, since Jordan

00:36:14.560 Peterson kind of came to prominence. And I thought it's good that he's pushing back on issues of

00:36:18.560 forced expression. It's good that he's taken a very empirical approach, which is why we've named

00:36:24.000 it after Aristotle, really the original empiricist or one of the first empiricists in Western history

00:36:29.440 anyway that i'm aware of right two and a half millennia ago so this idea came up about five

00:36:34.880 years ago but more recently uh we've started it up we're applying for a charitable number

00:36:39.520 precisely to look at some of these issues related to reason related to science uh relating to

00:36:45.360 statistics and more broadly related to democracy and related to civilization i think there's

00:36:51.680 everything these days seems to go to an extreme right away or they seem there seem to be

00:36:55.920 these extreme claims um that have been popping up especially during covid from all over the place

00:37:01.440 but uh in the past couple of years in general i think and we've started the aristotle foundation

00:37:07.040 to say you know look civilization you know has come about because of a lot of hard work and a

00:37:11.920 lot of sacrifice to past generations maybe we should learn from the enlightenment maybe we

00:37:16.160 should you know tack back to reason as opposed to ramping everything up and uh being tribal um

00:37:22.560 in every bad sense of that word in the past couple of years. So the Aristotle Foundation hopefully

00:37:27.120 will be public later this year, but I've started to write some columns and make note that it is

00:37:31.680 coming. Great. And before I let you go, I guess I'll get you a chance to remind everybody you've

00:37:36.400 got a great book out there about the victim cult. Where can people find that? The Victim Cult,

00:37:41.040 How the Culture of Blame Hurts Everyone and Wrecks Civilizations. Thanks for the plug,

00:37:45.200 core it's available online amazon.ca chapters indigo your local bookstore so uh yeah it's

00:37:53.120 and a fact that describes a lot of the problems that i've discussed on your show and elsewhere

00:37:57.440 before and the problem with this this age of everyone's a victim and everyone's making

00:38:02.080 these extreme claims uh based on their own ostensible victimization as opposed to sometimes

00:38:07.920 digging down into the data we're thinking reasonably about issues and say well i'm told

00:38:13.040 the reason, you know, for something is X, but maybe the reason is Y. So it's my attempt to get

00:38:20.540 a little more thought in the public debate. Great. Well, thanks for coming on to talk to

00:38:24.580 us today, Mark. And I appreciate you, you know, writing on those subjects and talking about the

00:38:28.600 things some other people are a little too afraid to get into. So I do appreciate it. And I hope

00:38:32.200 we can talk again soon. Anytime, Corey, certainly. Great. Thanks. So yes, that was Mark Milkey of

00:38:37.880 what's going to be the Aristotle Foundation coming up soon. And he's been involved with

00:38:42.820 with many, many other groups.

00:38:44.460 I believe the Fraser Institute,

00:38:45.880 the Taxpayers Federation.

00:38:47.200 I read a book quite a while back.

00:38:48.760 I don't know if I want to date him that much,

00:38:50.220 but I think it was called Tax Beyond Canadian.

00:38:51.740 I believe that was his as well.

00:38:53.120 And that was some years back

00:38:54.080 that helped inspire me

00:38:54.860 as a young up and coming political.

00:38:56.780 Many great examples of the horrific waste

00:38:58.760 of our dollars in that book.

00:39:01.620 So check it out, guys.

00:39:03.100 And yeah, Mark's always great to talk to

00:39:04.760 with injecting some common sense

00:39:06.460 into some of these issues that are ongoing.

00:39:09.140 So let's look at some of these other issues

00:39:11.200 as we're looking at things.

00:39:14.720 Got some more of those stories.

00:39:17.080 Oh, yes, I think Dave mentioned that.

00:39:18.700 So it's been determined by the Department of Environment

00:39:21.100 that the standstill due to the pandemic and travel bans

00:39:25.980 has been good for the climate.

00:39:27.360 Now, this is a disturbing conclusion

00:39:29.020 that some government bureaucrats have gotten into.

00:39:31.940 And I do get worried when they start talking this way.

00:39:36.260 Because, sure, you know, if we crush the economy enough,

00:39:39.680 if we stuff people in their homes, if we basically break everybody enough, we're going to emit a

00:39:45.600 little less, we're going to have a little less impact on the environment. And when people take

00:39:49.620 environmentalism to the point of a cult, that sounds like a cost benefit worthy of pursuing

00:39:53.660 in their part. But I mean, look at what we've gone through this last two years. And look at the

00:39:58.820 recovery we're going to be going through for the next few years. It's well not worth it for whatever

00:40:04.480 these guys are saying for the difference it made to the environment anyways, you know,

00:40:07.660 what, a quarter of a degree over 50 years or some insane minute amount of change, if indeed it makes

00:40:13.660 one. These guys are looking, and this is getting back to kind of what I was talking about with the

00:40:18.180 Great Reset. This is when we get bureaucrats and political leaders and others looking at the

00:40:24.620 pandemic, looking at a disaster, and that's what it is. It's been a two-year world disaster, and I'm

00:40:28.460 not even talking about the deaths caused by COVID-19. I'm talking about the pressures caused

00:40:32.740 by the lockdowns, the responses, the restrictions,

00:40:36.500 the social cost, the fiscal cost,

00:40:38.800 all of those costs that nobody likes to talk about

00:40:40.780 in government that came from the government's actions

00:40:43.120 on the pandemic had nothing to do with the virus.

00:40:45.480 The virus can't affect your economy.

00:40:47.720 Government responses to it can, and they do.

00:40:51.340 The Great Reset, getting back to that,

00:40:53.380 that's people who see this is an opportunity.

00:40:55.380 If we can just tear things down enough,

00:40:57.980 we can remodel them and build them in a way we like.

00:41:00.960 And it's not just economics.

00:41:02.120 So when you see these guys talking about it with the environment as well, at the same time, they're just looking at this as an opportunity. Hey, you know what? We've proven it now. If we just beat the economy down enough, we'll save all the fluffy bunnies. We'll stop global warming. And maybe David Suzuki's house and Al Gore's houses on the coast won't get flooded when the waters rise. Maybe. But I mean, these reports coming out, this is distressing.

00:41:25.160 and I worry about that.

00:41:28.480 And of course, Stephen Gilbo says

00:41:30.600 something along the lines of process happened step-by-step.

00:41:33.420 But this year's report to the United Nations,

00:41:34.780 we can see that Canada's moving in the right direction.

00:41:37.160 So Gilbo believes we're moving in the right direction.

00:41:39.880 He believes, you know, because of our emissions have gone down,

00:41:42.200 they fell in all the two provinces.

00:41:44.040 Alberta went up 8%.

00:41:45.060 Good for us.

00:41:47.000 And Manitoba went up 6%.

00:41:48.480 But again, that's because we're actually working

00:41:50.240 and providing product for people throughout this.

00:41:52.420 I mean, we needed more energy as we went.

00:41:54.660 So, yes, our emissions went up. Get over it. You know, the hypocrisy of the interregional crap that we deal with, with people consuming fuel, with people heating their houses with gas, with people, electricity, a lot of it's natural gas fired, it's coal, it's things like that.

00:42:08.660 and then they turn around and support extremists like Gilboa saying, 0.97

00:42:12.780 we've got to shut down Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, even with their energy, BC.

00:42:16.220 They don't understand. They're kicking themselves in the nuts. 0.74

00:42:19.180 But they are, and that's what they're pushing with.

00:42:21.620 So that's why even as things slowed down, Alberta's emissions went up.

00:42:25.160 But it's not because we're evil, nasty Albertans, though we are, and that's fine.

00:42:28.620 I'll embrace my evil nastiness as far as the establishment's concerned and many central Canadians. 0.71

00:42:34.140 But it's because no matter how bad the pandemic was, we still had to produce energy.

00:42:38.040 you have to do it. You still got to drive your car. You still have to heat your house. This is

00:42:41.700 Canada. We will die if we don't produce these energy sources. Unicorn dust and the laughter of

00:42:48.240 children won't keep you warm in January. We need to burn fossil fuels for that. But this is where

00:42:55.600 we are sitting and that's where the discourse and the dialogue are right now. You know, global

00:43:01.800 warming, I'll be discussing some of that maybe with Chris Oldcorn when he does come in in a

00:43:05.900 little bit here is Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Boy, they've been enjoying that global warming to the

00:43:10.220 tune of what, a couple of feet of snow in April. Speaking of Saskatchewan, you know, we don't pay

00:43:17.080 enough attention to our neighbors to the east of us. I'm glad to have Chris out there because I

00:43:20.880 mean, Saskatchewan and Alberta have such parallel issues, parallel attitudes, parallel economies.

00:43:25.600 I do feel if and when the independence movement really gets a role in, it has to be province by

00:43:30.620 province, but I'd like to see Alberta and Saskatchewan moving lockstep. But there's a

00:43:34.840 story that came out with a town, let's see, the hamlet of Big

00:43:38.340 Beaver, Saskatchewan. And there was not a single vote for a

00:43:42.800 liberal in that whole town, not a one. And I know this isn't a

00:43:45.740 giant city or anything, but still have an entire town where

00:43:48.720 you didn't get a single vote. That's something to be

00:43:51.680 celebrated. So a shout out to the residents of Big Beaver,

00:43:55.320 Saskatchewan. Not only is the name of your town fodder for

00:43:59.180 many, many tasteless jokes, but at the same time, Big Beaver is

00:44:02.940 also a place that will not vote liberal. I hope that you set an example of tastelessness and good

00:44:10.400 voting that the rest of the country can continue to follow up with. Let's see. So a conservative

00:44:15.480 MP Robert Kitchen won Big Beaver with 85% of the vote. And looks like it's near the Montana border

00:44:24.320 has 65 electors. So yeah, not a whole lot. But you know what? Zero to 65 is the same as zero out of

00:44:30.760 100 is the same amount of zero out of 100,000. That was the perfect liberal voting turnout. So

00:44:35.460 Mr. Kitchen, make sure you pay attention to your big beaver down in South Saskatchewan because they

00:44:40.820 value you. And if you take them for granted, you might end up getting a couple of liberal voters

00:44:45.740 down there. And that would be humiliating after you've set this great example of that. We saw,

00:44:51.240 let's see, Wapella, Saskatchewan, they had 354 people and they had one liberal ballot. But you

00:44:57.920 know, that could have been a typo. I mean, they also said in the story that loan ballots are

00:45:02.040 usually actually cast by party scrutineers. You know, the party's always going to have at least

00:45:05.920 one representative in there watching the polls, but they cut a lot. So, I mean, so let's celebrate

00:45:11.560 some good news things. Let's see another without a liberal supporter, Cola, Manitoba, 1500 people

00:45:18.300 there. And that town didn't have a single liberal supporter either. So, you know, Saskatchewan's not

00:45:24.740 along. See, I like to report on good news stories now and then talk about stuff that's upbeat.

00:45:32.140 Getting onto the downbeat again now. Let's see. Thomas, Mike Thomas, he was in last week. He's

00:45:37.200 great when we get him in and talking on the show. He's written a good column on the Western Standard

00:45:40.960 just to remind everybody as well that interest, the bank rate is going to hit everyone in the

00:45:45.780 pocketbook. You know, everybody knows this. Nobody likes to talk about it, but they got to face it.

00:45:50.100 Some are denying it, which is the major goal is to extinguish Canadian housing markets that have been on fire in the last two years and stabilize prices, a process that may have started before the increase.

00:46:01.980 Of course, the problem with that is when the government starts getting in, trying to directly impact markets, trying to directly change markets, they make a mess of markets.

00:46:12.880 And then you get into seesaws and ups and downs.

00:46:17.000 So, I mean, the inflation is putting pressure on everybody.

00:46:20.820 It can't remain unchecked like that for too much longer.

00:46:23.840 Increasing our, you know, economic development and things like that would help with it.

00:46:29.800 Bringing more things on for supply in general, like such as energy supply, such as housing

00:46:34.440 supply, things like that.

00:46:35.840 Getting off of our farmer's case so our food supplies are better dealt with, that would

00:46:40.900 help. 0.97

00:46:41.120 or getting rid of that supply management policy,

00:46:43.920 which no federal conservative politician

00:46:46.620 is willing to do yet that I can find.

00:46:49.320 But there are things we could do to battle inflation

00:46:51.340 besides just trying to cool off the economy

00:46:53.900 by cranking up interest rates.

00:46:56.420 But the government's not willing to try them.

00:46:58.720 So unfortunately, we're going to be looking forward

00:47:00.860 to some more raising prices, guys.

00:47:06.300 So let's see here.

00:47:08.620 An anti-fraud expert fears

00:47:09.880 the Liberals newly announced Canada Financial Crimes Agency is going to turn out to be

00:47:14.420 ineffectual or worse, persecute some Canadians as was done under the Emergencies Act.

00:47:19.520 Yeah, you know, because the government can't get anything right. That's the reality of it.

00:47:24.460 Even if they mean well, I mean, hey, this sounds good. Financial Crimes Agency. I mean, we're going

00:47:28.880 to crack down on those nasty financial crimes, people committing fraud, people stealing from

00:47:34.600 each other. But again, this is going to try and coordinate with FinTrack and the RCMP and the

00:47:40.340 Canada Revenue Agency because, oh boy, they're certainly competent, aren't they? And I'm sure

00:47:44.260 they will battle fraud with all the efficiency that they have had with the Phoenix pay system

00:47:48.960 that so far after decades and billions of dollars spent, can't even get government paychecks

00:47:52.920 correct. So I do fear and I see the reports already coming out though, that this anti-fraud

00:47:58.620 thing might actually lead to some innocent people getting nailed or put through the ringer. And of

00:48:04.100 course, I got a feeling the guilty ones are rarely going to be caught, but we'll see. I guess we'll

00:48:10.620 let them keep trying. Maybe I'm going to bring our next guest in. He's in studio here. And we've had

00:48:15.380 Chris on the show before, but we haven't had him here in person. And it's Christopher Oldcorn.

00:48:20.540 He's our Saskatchewan bureau chief. But I'll talk about one of our sponsors as he moves into position

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00:49:50.620 All right, let's get to our next guest here.

00:49:53.380 And that's Christopher Goldkorn. Hey, Chris, how's it going?

00:49:56.560 It's going good. Thank you very much for having me.

00:49:58.340 Well, welcome to the Western Standard Studios.

00:50:01.560 Yes, normally I'm in my own studio.

00:50:03.760 Yes. So here you can see where I ran in person and, you know, you can see the frothing marks on the windows and other such things.

00:50:12.460 So you came out for the Easter weekend?

00:50:15.000 Yeah, I came to visit my family here. So my sister moved here 15 years ago, but my parents just moved here last summer.

00:50:20.380 Okay. So we're all here for Easter for the first time, actually, in quite some time that we've all

00:50:24.980 been together. So, yeah. So some of your stories, I mean, things have been taught in the news in

00:50:28.920 Saskatchewan. It has been horrific weather you guys have been enjoying. Yes. Did you deal with

00:50:33.420 much of that on the drive out or was it mostly cleared, I guess, by then? I was lucky. Like,

00:50:37.060 I'm based in Regina and the highway was non-advisable to drive on if you're going east

00:50:43.780 of Regina towards Winnipeg. Parts of it was actually closed for quite some time.

00:50:48.560 uh and some areas now have gone up to about 60 centimeters in total of snow since tuesday

00:50:53.580 uh areas that had very little snow prior to that there's actually a very funny picture of an a and

00:50:59.240 w and they have the picture of it like last weekend and then they have a picture of it now

00:51:03.800 and you have no idea what it is like you can't see any orangeness on the sign nothing so it's

00:51:09.820 it they got really nailed um south of the trans canada highway yeah those true winter blasts we

00:51:16.040 get out on the prairies. If people haven't experienced them, they've been fortunate.

00:51:20.520 But it just comes with living out here. So how long have you been in Saskatchewan now?

00:51:24.540 About a month. I got there the day before the budget, basically. And the budget's been quite

00:51:33.220 interesting. But actually, you were mentioning something about inflation before there.

00:51:37.560 There is another number that's actually way higher than inflation, which is actually the

00:51:43.840 wholesale inflation number. So the people are buying the stuff to make it before it gets to

00:51:49.260 the store and their inflation is at 11.1%, which means it's going to get passed on to us because

00:51:54.820 that one is like an indicator of what's coming next. So you're right. The inflation number is

00:52:00.000 probably going to double or higher than what we are right now, only within a couple of months.

00:52:05.480 It only stands to reason. I mean, we're getting all the alarm bells, but I don't know if enough

00:52:08.520 people are paying attention to. It's funny, things get politicized a lot. Polyev has taken on

00:52:14.440 inflation as a big part of his campaign platform. To be fair, I think in this circumstance, in this

00:52:19.300 economy, inflation will be happening even if Polyev was the prime minister right now. But there are

00:52:23.580 things I think that can be done differently by the federal government than under Polyev than

00:52:28.940 under Trudeau. We just can't tell people enough or warn them like this is coming. As you said,

00:52:33.320 we should watch these indicators. I mean, it's just math. The wholesalers paying this much. If

00:52:37.540 going to make their bills they got to raise the price and the problem is trying to move stuff

00:52:41.620 around right now is almost next to impossible now there's hundreds of ships with stuff on it that

00:52:46.980 haven't been unloaded and if that doesn't get unloaded and you're trying to make something

00:52:51.860 you're gonna have to pay more for what is actually there i mean look at the cost of used cars i mean

00:52:56.100 they're almost as high as like new cars because there's just nothing available supply chains have

00:53:01.780 just been a catastrophe well they messed with supply chains for like almost three years what

00:53:06.100 do you expect i mean you have just in time shipping being the way people have been operating not having

00:53:11.700 big warehouses of the things that they need to let's say make a car it shows up and it's on the

00:53:17.300 car in two hours but when you mess with that for three years guess what you see what we have now

00:53:23.860 and no one was really thinking about that at all at the government level anyways in the last few

00:53:29.540 years because they just shut things down without even thinking about it so on the way in before

00:53:34.020 we're talking, you know, Burden and Saskatchewan, we've seen a lot of parallels. I mean, we're very

00:53:37.140 similar provinces in a lot of ways. There are a lot of similar challenges and issues going on

00:53:43.460 with the Ukraine-Russia war, with the pandemic, many other things. I mean, agriculturally, that's

00:53:48.420 that's going to be an area of a lot of inflation, a lot of pressure. It could be advantageous to

00:53:54.100 some producers, I guess, who've had a hard time, but it's still going to be very hard on consumers,

00:53:57.780 I imagine. Yeah, because where I moved from actually was in Dryden, Ontario,

00:54:03.300 and we would go to the store sometimes and there'd be absolutely no meat on the shelf at all

00:54:07.700 like literally nothing just completely empty because they sold it at a place further away

00:54:14.820 you know that wasn't as far away as dryden was so by the time me got to us the truck was empty

00:54:19.540 um i haven't seen that yet regina but there is a lot of pressure on um particularly trying to

00:54:27.780 like dairy farmers for example had to put their prices up 12 just because their costs are higher

00:54:32.900 you know when fuel goes up everything gets more expensive and fuels up 48 in this past year when

00:54:39.780 you're trying to move a piece of chicken around that piece of chicken is now a lot more expensive

00:54:43.940 take from the farmer and the farmer has to pay more money as well because they're using fuel

00:54:48.180 so it's just it's a compounding effect and it's hard to turn that around and stop it well and a

00:54:54.340 lot i mean people think don't think about things like the amount of natural gas used and green

00:54:58.180 dryers and facilities, or even power being used for pivots and irrigation blocks. I mean, farmers

00:55:05.540 need a lot of power for what they do. And as we keep increasing energy costs, no matter what type

00:55:10.500 of energy, it comes down to our essentials like food. Yeah. And last week, Saskatchewan raised

00:55:17.220 their electricity rates by 8%. And inflation in Saskatchewan is actually at 4.7. It's a whole

00:55:24.180 percent below like the national rate of inflation but they still put it up eight percent and like

00:55:31.860 we're like why are you putting up eight percent it's kind of like are they hedging that they know

00:55:36.660 something is coming they're expecting their costs to go higher and that's why they did it

00:55:41.300 but it makes it makes everything harder for everybody whether you're the farmer whether

00:55:46.020 you're working in an office building using electricity in your home everybody uses

00:55:52.580 electricity and hydro and everybody uses gas and when those prices go up you're stuck and everything

00:55:58.580 has to go up in price because of it in saskatchewan that's one difference to saskatchewan

00:56:02.740 alberta the the electricity is uh still a crown corporation i think it's sask energy over there

00:56:07.140 isn't it so that's fully i mean i know they call it a crown corporation but it answers to the

00:56:11.140 government in the end so when it makes a rate hike like that that's with essentially guidance

00:56:15.460 and consent to the government yes the government's actually the one that put it up which uh through

00:56:20.580 legislation last week actually so so why did they say they were raising it what was their

00:56:25.140 justification in response to that i mean people couldn't have been happy no the they gave sort of

00:56:31.300 two answers um one was they had um a built-in raise from a collective bargaining agreement

00:56:40.900 but that was only a two percent raise in their actual employee costs in terms of wages

00:56:47.700 And then the other excuse they gave was that they're working on these nuclear reactors,

00:56:52.700 these small modular reactors.

00:56:55.320 They're not a full, like what you would see, like the Pickering nuclear plant.

00:56:59.420 They're very small, but they can create a lot of power.

00:57:02.200 And they're saying that's expensive to do, and they're trying to have one by 2030, maybe.

00:57:09.300 And they've partnered with a few other provinces to make these smaller nuclear reactors,

00:57:15.040 but they're very expensive to make.

00:57:16.900 And the question then becomes, is it worth spending all this money if you're going to cost people all this money over the next eight, 10 years before it's finally even usable to create energy?

00:57:29.980 Like, where are we going to be? Like, should they just put up some solar panels and it's way cheaper?

00:57:35.720 Like, do we actually need to start putting in these nuclear reactors or is there other ways we can use energy cheaply?

00:57:42.580 i mean gas is normally cheap um but they put so many different barriers in so i mean i just i'm

00:57:52.020 doing a story right now it's gonna be up later today on mining in saskatchewan and saskatchewan

00:57:56.980 is the second best place in the world to explore and to mine uh everywhere and a lot of it has to

00:58:05.700 do with the public policy and how easy it is to do business and then also what you have in the

00:58:10.980 ground i mean saskatchewan's a third of all the potash that was made last year and the question

00:58:18.740 then there is well that's a really good spot but now they're getting and there's something tabled

00:58:24.100 in the legislature they're having problems with land claims bc ranked very poorly in this mining

00:58:31.620 study because of land claims because they take so long to move to the legal system saskatchewan

00:58:37.300 is about to have the same problem. Last week, I actually met with the lawyer for the Indigenous

00:58:42.420 group and their consultant about this exact thing. And they are moving forward with the case because

00:58:49.060 right now there is a policy, and I use that term loosely, that they have to send a fax

00:58:56.520 to Indigenous tribe. And they have 30 days. And if they don't hear anything back, 0.56

00:59:03.300 then that's called due diligence in Saskatchewan. Hence the reason they ranked near the top of the

00:59:07.940 world. Well, there was a problem with that in that they sent a fax to an indigenous group that didn't

00:59:14.560 have a fax machine anymore. They removed their fax machine. Exactly. Who keeps fax machines? So

00:59:20.200 they were actually never consulted because they never received the fax. And no one called to say,

00:59:25.720 hey, why? Because normally they get a response back if they want to talk or whatever. And they

00:59:31.580 didn't, but they didn't do anything about it. And this has opened up a big problem, because now

00:59:36.640 there's a legal case where they didn't do their due diligence on a very large mining project.

00:59:42.940 I think, to be honest, the Indigenous group probably has a very good case. I mean, you know,

00:59:47.840 you might as well have a policy saying, well, we sent it through Morse code with the telegraph.

00:59:51.300 Why weren't you guys listening? That's essentially what happened. And they're like,

00:59:55.880 we haven't had a fax machine. Like, they haven't had a fax machine for like seven years or something.

01:00:01.500 They're not even sure where they even got the fax machine number from

01:00:04.420 because it wasn't listed on their website or any of their information.

01:00:08.360 There was no fax number, but they faxed this document.

01:00:11.360 Let's get back to what I was talking about with government earlier.

01:00:13.360 You know, these are guys who can't manage to even get their own payroll system, right?

01:00:16.480 This is a large institution.

01:00:17.340 How long has that Phoenix thing been going on?

01:00:18.640 Oh, decades.

01:00:19.380 And it's not just the liberals.

01:00:20.480 The conservatives didn't fix that thing either.

01:00:22.900 And that's where I get worried about bloated government in general.

01:00:25.780 I mean, it plays into my ideology and biases,

01:00:28.340 but government's terribly inefficient.

01:00:30.300 and it's not unique to Canada.

01:00:32.240 No, governments are just very bad at running anything.

01:00:35.240 I mean, you look at countries with the largest government interference.

01:00:39.220 They tend not to be economically prosperous.

01:00:43.000 They tend to have very high costs for their citizens.

01:00:46.700 My girlfriend's from Brazil.

01:00:48.760 We met in Miami.

01:00:49.740 And in Brazil, there is so much corruption that the cost of even the most basic thing

01:00:58.360 is very high.

01:01:00.300 I mean, it seems that every other president that they have gets sent to jail for corruption,

01:01:06.040 last one being Lula.

01:01:07.580 And they're just unable to operate because the government is so big and so bloated

01:01:13.080 that it hinders what goes on.

01:01:16.140 And if you look at the jobs numbers from this past month,

01:01:19.920 well, half of them were government jobs that were created.

01:01:22.960 And I was having this discussion yesterday with some consultants, actually,

01:01:26.840 who helped people come to Canada.

01:01:28.420 and we were talking about inflation and some of the other issues.

01:01:31.380 And I said, well, it would be, because they asked me about the jobs.

01:01:34.440 And I said, well, the interesting, we actually had two job numbers.

01:01:37.340 We have the number of how many government jobs were created

01:01:39.680 and how many private sector jobs were created.

01:01:41.800 Because if it's a one-to-one ratio, these people here are working,

01:01:44.980 they're not creating enough tax money to pay for the government workers over here.

01:01:48.780 So it would be useful to really know if we had two different types of job numbers.

01:01:53.960 What is the percentage of private jobs to public jobs?

01:01:57.280 Is it 9 to 1? Is it 10 to 1? Because the closer you get to, you know, almost being 1 to 1, you can't afford to pay for that. So it'd be nice to know if they could actually release stats on exactly, yes, there's nine public sector jobs for every one, you know, sorry, private sector job for every one public sector job and things like that.

01:02:17.640 So in the broader section with the budget, though, I mean, Saskatchewan is a very resource-based

01:02:21.560 economy, much like Alberta. We actually balanced our budget here. I mean, due to some credit for

01:02:28.680 some responsible spending, for the most part because of spiking resources. I know it makes

01:02:33.160 UCP supporters cringe when I say that, but there's truth to it. You know, I mean,

01:02:37.160 you've got a good break with the resource prices here. So did Saskatchewan. Was there a plan,

01:02:41.720 though? Does it look like they're moving towards balanced budget or is it still kind of an endless

01:02:46.280 string of deficits like so many well here's the interesting thing um this past year their

01:02:52.760 resources jumped 2.9 billion that they generated the previous year was 1.3 so i got a 1.6 billion

01:03:01.080 increase year over year in the money they generated from resources in the province

01:03:06.440 and they still managed to have a 400 bill 400 million dollar deficit even when their resource

01:03:13.400 revenue is more than doubled and they also put up a bunch of taxes as well 32 new taxes and fees

01:03:21.080 and then they've put on another eight percent on your um electricity bill last week as well

01:03:26.200 so and they've added pst to all kinds of things too so every and and it's weird because every

01:03:31.400 industry that got hit with covet like gyms sports uh all that now there's psc on that so now if you

01:03:37.880 if you want to go to a Rough Rider game, there's PST on that before there wasn't. You want to get

01:03:43.180 a gym membership. There's no GST on that when there wasn't. And it's almost like they're punishing

01:03:47.220 the businesses who they've been punishing for three years with making their product more expensive

01:03:53.200 because they put the PST on it. PST on the Rough Riders. I mean, they're getting into some dangerous

01:03:58.600 waters there. I mean, that's a blasphemy in Saskatchewan. Oh, I know a story where there's

01:04:04.040 are common from the Rough Rider organization, and they are not pleased. They feel that they

01:04:11.300 are being unfairly targeted by the government, like sports and events, because that's basically

01:04:17.020 where they put up a lot of the taxes.

01:04:19.400 Oh, in Saskatchewan, I mean, I'd say arguably they got the best football fans in Canada.

01:04:23.760 I mean, I won't-

01:04:24.200 Oh, yeah, the watermelons on their heads and everything.

01:04:26.960 I remember working out in Saskatchewan, you know, and I'd go to like the co-op gas station,

01:04:30.900 And they'd have a giant rack that's just filled with green items from toques to keychains.

01:04:35.900 It's everywhere.

01:04:36.740 It's just everywhere.

01:04:37.680 It's just part of the identity of the province.

01:04:39.380 So it shows the province is really on a tax grab mentality when they go into such blasphemy.

01:04:46.320 I mean, even if it makes sense.

01:04:47.120 I mean, it's an entertainment thing.

01:04:48.360 It's not a necessity.

01:04:49.800 You know, it should perhaps get a provincial tax.

01:04:51.580 But politically, you've always got to think about what it looks like and who you're going to piss off.

01:04:55.460 And that couldn't have been a winner overall for them.

01:04:57.880 No, and the other thing too is they put tax on kids' clothes.

01:05:02.980 Like you're putting up the price of now having a kid

01:05:06.320 because now there's PST on kids' clothing where there wasn't before.

01:05:11.300 So it's not just the sports and entertainment.

01:05:13.320 They're making life more expensive for everyone

01:05:16.600 and especially people that need help right now.

01:05:20.420 And it's a weird place in Saskatchewan

01:05:22.300 because the NDP gets up and argues for tax cuts

01:05:24.580 and the Saskatchewan party gets up and defends tax increases.

01:05:28.280 It's the weirdest thing.

01:05:29.840 It's kind of bizarre.

01:05:30.900 Well, I mean, I think governments move in cycles.

01:05:32.940 They get too bloated and things come way back in Alberta, you know, to date myself.

01:05:36.240 But the big threat in the end of the 80s, early 90s was the Lougheed and Getty governments

01:05:41.600 had spent and spent and borrowed and borrowed.

01:05:44.000 And I know people have turned Lougheed into a saint, but guys, he was not a fiscal genius

01:05:47.020 when it came to those things.

01:05:48.200 They poured money into some terrible things like Novotel and gainers and were just wasting

01:05:52.600 money.

01:05:52.980 We were massively in debt.

01:05:54.080 and it was the Liberals under Lawrence DeCore

01:05:56.320 were polling ahead of the Conservatives.

01:05:58.460 The Liberals were saying,

01:05:59.380 we've got to get the economy in order

01:06:00.760 and Getty was saying,

01:06:01.920 no, we've got to spend ourselves blind

01:06:03.260 and it was only Ralph Klein coming in

01:06:05.720 with a fiscally responsible budget.

01:06:07.400 I mean, the NDP in Saskatchewan

01:06:09.400 might be on the right formula.

01:06:10.520 In that weird irony,

01:06:11.460 they might come in on a fiscally conservative platform

01:06:14.240 if Mo doesn't figure things out.

01:06:17.240 And the other thing too is

01:06:18.120 if you go back and look historically

01:06:19.740 the last time the NDP was in government,

01:06:22.180 well, they shut down 52 hospitals

01:06:24.020 They had less doctors in the province when they finished being in government in 2007 than when they started.

01:06:32.180 And they also had some big issues where they cut certain health care programs at the colleges and universities.

01:06:40.180 And now we're seeing the problem there.

01:06:42.640 So, for example, there's what's called a registered psychiatric nurse in Saskatchewan.

01:06:47.660 Well, the NDP cut that program in 2001.

01:06:51.460 The Saskatchewan Party brought it back in 2008.

01:06:54.020 Well, they need to replace 120 psychiatric nurses right now per year that are retiring, but they're only training 80 because they can't find anyone to teach it because the demographic that would have the experience to teach it, they weren't training anybody in the province at that time period.

01:07:13.620 Right. So they have this weird gap where they have really young psychiatric nurses, and they have ones that are basically close to retirement or retired, but don't want to go teach for five years over, you know, University of Virginia or whatever.

01:07:26.760 Well, and that ties into one thing I'd like to hit before we're finished. And that's, you wrote on the healthcare, because you've got hallway care going on. There's elements of the Saskatchewan healthcare system that are being overwhelmed. It's not unique to Saskatchewan either. You know, I mean, I've had longer rants about that on problems with the entire Canadian system.

01:07:41.800 But either way, that's a real problem.

01:07:44.180 I mean, the government's taking in more revenue.

01:07:45.640 The government's spending more.

01:07:47.180 Why are you still treating people in hallways right now?

01:07:50.760 Yes, and actually, in one hospital in Saskatoon, not only do they have hallway medicine, they have lobby medicine.

01:07:59.220 They ran out of places to put beds in the hallway, and they had to put them in the lobby in the hospital.

01:08:05.400 they also had to turn the actual waiting room for the emergency room partially into hospital beds

01:08:12.600 as well um so they were actually treating people in hospital beds and when you put people in those

01:08:19.160 situations like for example there's no oxygen unless you bring a machine because you can't

01:08:23.320 plug it into the wall there's all these things that are at a hospital bed that when you move that

01:08:28.840 into a hallway or into an emergency room or into the lobby none of that's there uh and it creates

01:08:35.560 a very unsafe working environment and the nurses and doctors have been complaining like they're

01:08:39.800 like it's hard to like one we got to move into a bigger area so we spend more time walking around

01:08:46.840 but then it's also harder to actually treat people and then you gotta it's like oh this

01:08:51.080 person needs oxygen do we have enough oxygen machines to move out to do that or do we have

01:08:55.480 have to move someone that's in the er out that doesn't need oxygen and put someone in that doesn't

01:08:59.480 eat and it just becomes a logistical nightmare so what is it the lack of staffing lack of infrastructure

01:09:06.280 why are they so short on everything um they're up in total doctors in the province they're up

01:09:12.360 in nurses in the province they're hiring they just started a program in the philippines to hire

01:09:17.400 3 000 uh healthcare workers over the next two years from the philippines to try and help with

01:09:23.640 the issues um one of the issues they did was they spent a lot of money building hospitals

01:09:29.160 so they didn't really think about staffing them so they built this brand new beautiful

01:09:33.880 facility in north battleford however it's not operational because they have very little staff

01:09:40.840 so it's a small part of the hospital's operational but anything serious they have to send us to

01:09:45.800 saskatoon because they can't deal with it there it's long haul north battleford i mean the

01:09:50.040 the battlefords are a fair sized place i think that probably kind of ties into some bigger

01:09:54.200 problems too i haven't been there in a while but i worked up there a number of times and like

01:09:57.960 it's tough city to live in just to be kind of blunt there's some social challenges in north

01:10:01.880 battleford i could imagine it's hard to draw outside professionals say hey come on up relocate

01:10:06.680 in here where we've got a small town with this high crime rate and with some some issues and

01:10:12.040 challenges i'm just saying it's a you know i'm not trying to throw everything in the lap of

01:10:15.080 government they've got some challenges that are kind of unique i guess to deal with with those

01:10:18.200 hospitals too that um alberta had the same with uh what was a grand cash and they kept running out

01:10:24.200 of doctors because the coal mine closed there wasn't much money but there's still thousands

01:10:27.320 of people in this little town by the mountains but who wants to live up there how do you get a

01:10:30.920 doctor to move up there how do you get a nurse to move up so i had a friend actually moved to north

01:10:35.080 alford about six months ago and when he did his job interview and they said well we got to tell

01:10:39.800 you one thing about the city and he's like okay uh it's the murder capital of canada on a per capita

01:10:48.920 basis uh and since he's been there someone actually burned down a house across the road from his

01:10:55.080 that was arson on purpose someone just did it for the fun of it um now he hasn't seen any murders

01:11:00.600 but um you know good they were actually literally in his job interview when they offered him job we

01:11:05.240 need to we're going to be up front with you about this uh and then like two months after he was

01:11:09.240 there is like posting the video of this house on fire across the street from his house that was

01:11:14.120 abandoned uh that's something that burnt down and this is a problem across saskatchewan actually

01:11:19.240 there um there's a lot of boarded up houses in the downtown parts of both regina and saskatoon

01:11:26.920 and right now in regina uh people are ripping these boarded up houses but to keep warm they

01:11:31.880 start fires and then the house burns down and year over year the uh i talked to the regina

01:11:38.920 fire department about this, they're having three times as many house fires in the downtown area

01:11:43.620 than they did a year ago. And that's part of the problem with the SIS program, the

01:11:49.420 Saskatoon Income Support Program. They have increased the amount of money that a person

01:11:56.380 gets per day on that by $1. However, what that did for everybody in social housing was

01:12:02.340 their total income went up and it went up above a certain threshold. And then their rent jumped by

01:12:07.860 $200. So people can't afford that. So that's why you're seeing a couple of weeks go to the story

01:12:12.800 in the tent city. That tent city is way bigger than when I did the actual story on it just a

01:12:17.060 few weeks ago. And more people are getting kicked out on the 15th. So I'm going to go there later

01:12:21.780 this week because there's a bunch of evictions. So what we have now in Saskatchewan is a bunch

01:12:26.380 of social housing that's empty, that's completely fit to live in. And they're putting people up in

01:12:33.760 hotels and the government was asked about this last week how many hotel rooms are we spending

01:12:39.500 are we getting per night or how much are we spending on those hotel rooms and the government

01:12:44.480 said they don't keep track of that well i don't know if you know anything about accounting but

01:12:49.480 there's this thing called like you know a balance sheet income statements and you have to kind of

01:12:56.240 put numbers in that that reflect what you're actually doing on the ground they're saying

01:13:01.680 they don't track this. The only thing they could tell us was they pay at least $130 per night and

01:13:07.480 they have thousands of hotel rooms every single night that they pay for. This is a huge, massive

01:13:12.280 waste of government money when they have literally thousands of empty social housing

01:13:18.260 that you could move into right this second. And hotel rooms aren't that great to live in. I mean,

01:13:23.340 they don't have full cooking facilities, yards, things like that, that you might get in another

01:13:27.640 another place so i mean they're just a stop gap it's it's unfortunate because i i'm glad i got

01:13:32.080 you in though because as i said they're our eastern neighbor i spent a lot of time working

01:13:34.940 in saskatchewan i said canada's most underrated province in a lot of ways but they got a lot of

01:13:38.960 challenges i see one commenter saying he's in north battleford for summer and he said you know

01:13:43.080 some some crummy people in certain places but fine landscapes because again it's beautiful up

01:13:46.400 there though it's fantastic you want some great fishing just as you get north of north battleford

01:13:50.340 you're getting into towards that lakes and shield country and yeah and that camping hunting fishing

01:13:55.440 is huge in Saskatchewan from what I understand so far.

01:13:59.520 It's a misnomer. People say, oh, it's just this flatland. No, there's a lot more to Saskatchewan

01:14:03.400 than that if you look for it. And it's a value for dollar profit. It's a great

01:14:07.500 place to live too. But just sad to see so many other challenges and

01:14:11.340 political crap going on as usual. Yeah. And they 0.97

01:14:15.100 kind of need to get their house in order in particular on this new

01:14:19.120 CIS thing. It's only two years old. It's replaced an old

01:14:22.820 program of government assistance. But the person who's in charge of it is not very competent. And

01:14:32.240 that's from people around her and also obviously from the opposition. I mean, her answer to

01:14:41.480 absolutely everything is, well, we're keeping an eye on the numbers. And as we get data in,

01:14:45.800 we'll make adjustments. That's literally the answer to anything. You could ask her,

01:14:49.980 what color is the sky and that's the answer she would give you trudeau school oh it's just like

01:14:55.760 the same answer for every single part we're walking we're watching the numbers okay well

01:14:59.780 what do you mean by you're watching the numbers you had all these people that you put into

01:15:05.380 um building in the middle of winter because they got kicked out of social housing and they were

01:15:10.280 living in tents and you can't live in a tent in saskatchewan in the winter time well that was a

01:15:15.860 six-month thing, and then all those people got kicked out at the end of March. And then they're

01:15:19.900 back to the tent city again because they can't get onto social assistance and get into housing 0.88

01:15:25.080 that you can afford. Social assistance in Saskatchewan right now, that your housing 0.94

01:15:29.040 allowance, guess how many apartment buildings in all of Regina that your housing allowance

01:15:34.500 you could actually rent an apartment in? One, guess how many social housing units there are,

01:15:41.620 or buildings there are. Two, one of the social housing units is you can't get into with the

01:15:46.960 amount of housing allowance that you get from the government. It's like, who's making the system up?

01:15:52.680 It's built in an impossibility. And then they got up and said they wanted to get 25% of the people

01:15:58.840 who are on CIS off by the end of the year. And then I asked actually in the scrum the other day,

01:16:04.360 I said, well, where are these people going? And she said, well, to jobs and other opportunities.

01:16:09.160 And I followed up with, well, what do you mean by other opportunities?

01:16:12.880 She's like, well, they could get married and then they'd be off the program if their partner was working.

01:16:19.840 And I'm like, and I'm thinking, and after she left, all of the reporters, we all looked at each other and we're like,

01:16:25.360 did she just say that people should get married so that they don't have to be on government assistance anymore?

01:16:31.620 Because that doesn't sound like a plan. 1.00

01:16:32.980 I thought when she said other opportunities, she's going to be like, well, we're going to get them into training programs 1.00

01:16:37.240 or have them go back to school or something like that no it was go get married it was like either

01:16:42.920 get a job or go get married are the options that she seems to think are available well it's it i'm

01:16:50.440 like we were just all baffled in the media scrum afterwards when she said well you could get married

01:16:55.480 it's like okay maybe single sites uh yeah most things around 10 cities will start springing

01:17:00.520 yeah maybe there's a dating site that they can start hope that something better comes up before

01:17:05.160 the cold weather returns in fall because that's another clock ticking so i appreciate you coming

01:17:09.400 in today and that you're in saskatchewan as i said i mean i really love that province next door and

01:17:14.840 we don't report nearly enough on it you've got you know yourself and others reporting from out

01:17:20.360 there we like to remind everybody there's current news there's important news going on out there

01:17:24.680 and keep track uh there's nico brought it up christopher old corn he's our regina-based

01:17:30.280 reporter for the Western Standard. And yeah, you've got lots to cover and I'm certain you'll

01:17:35.200 be working further on it in the future. Yeah. Well, thank you very much for having me. Great.

01:17:38.780 Great seeing you in person and we will talk to you later. Sounds good. Thanks. Okay. And I'm

01:17:43.140 just going to frame it up with the video in a moment or two here. We had, I've got a guest

01:17:49.900 coming in tomorrow. It's going to be a little bit of a diversion from what we usually do around here.

01:17:55.220 and if people watch Netflix documentaries and things such as that, or if people are close

01:18:01.480 hockey watchers, they might remember the Danbury Trashers. These were a hockey team with the,

01:18:07.240 I believe it was the UHL out in the United States in the East. And it was just a very

01:18:12.660 bizarre story. I'll go more into it once that video plays to give you some background because

01:18:16.820 the founders of that team, the Trashers, the Galante family, are now doing this ice wars

01:18:25.020 thing in alberta and it's coming up in edmonton in a few weeks i'm going to be talking to aj galante

01:18:29.100 tomorrow so they're bringing in uh basically a new sport that's a cross between uh i don't know

01:18:36.060 how you describe it ultimate fighting and hockey so let's run the video here and then we'll talk

01:18:40.140 a little more about that but uh here we go and i think it's gonna be a good one take a look

01:18:55.020 And by Reeves, you're up to a big right hand!

01:19:01.020 Here's him again, he got stripped there.

01:19:05.020 Oh, another one.

01:19:08.020 That one had his mouth, so there you see, he's looking to you.

01:19:11.020 Give me a call! 1.00

01:19:13.020 Let's get going to hell! 1.00

01:19:15.020 Holy! 1.00

01:19:17.020 Woo!

01:19:19.020 What a Tona Stone battle!

01:19:25.860 Okay. So yes, that was just there a little bit of an ad. It's going to be happening on the

01:19:29.960 River Cree Casino up by Edmonton there. They're going to have, I think it's May 21st. They're

01:19:36.140 going to have like eight matches for people. I mean, if you're not into violence and boxing

01:19:40.300 and such that you're not going to like it, but if you like the hockey fights, it's that's purely

01:19:45.580 what it is. They're going to be judged. I think they're 30 second or two minute rounds or something

01:19:49.420 like that. I think it was 30 seconds toe to toe, but either way, I'm going to talk to AJ Galante

01:19:53.480 tell you about it. And if you guys haven't watched that documentary or don't know about the Danville

01:20:01.580 trashers, if you're one of the fans of the old, you know, slap shot movie, this was a story that,

01:20:08.680 you know, I'm not going to bother AJ so much with it tomorrow. That's why I'm going into it today

01:20:11.860 a little bit. Their family is, well, to be blunt, they were tied in with the Gambinos in New York

01:20:19.020 And they owned a trash company and they had, I think, hundreds of trash trucks throughout the eastern states. 0.83

01:20:26.580 And there was a lot of questionable activities with them.

01:20:29.200 They bought, well, the father, Jimmy Galanti, bought a hockey team for his 17-year-old son, A.J. Galanti.

01:20:35.800 And they turned it into basically a goon squad like you've never seen before.

01:20:40.720 It was much right out of slapshot.

01:20:42.660 They reached out and found some of the craziest goons from across the country.

01:20:46.400 and it was just a scene,

01:20:48.720 but it grabbed a lot of attention.

01:20:49.880 This was back in 2004 to 2006,

01:20:52.320 I think they lasted,

01:20:53.720 before Jimmy Galante finally got nailed

01:20:56.540 with a bunch of racketeering charges

01:20:58.520 and went away for, I think, about eight years.

01:21:00.920 And now they've started this Ice Wars thing in Edmonton.

01:21:05.080 I know not everybody is going to like it. 1.00

01:21:07.000 I see Wanda saying it's effing stupid 1.00

01:21:08.620 and somebody saying, 1.00

01:21:11.100 are we back in ancient Rome?

01:21:12.400 And some people saying

01:21:13.380 that's why they stopped watching hockey.

01:21:15.400 Fair enough.

01:21:17.200 And it's not good hockey, but they're not pretending to be.

01:21:20.840 That's part of it.

01:21:22.540 Maybe in a sense, this would give the overflow

01:21:24.300 for the people who like watching the hockey scraps.

01:21:27.020 You can watch the straight out fights with this thing over there

01:21:29.360 and watch people more with the skill and finesse

01:21:31.560 playing hockey on the ice within the real leagues and such.

01:21:34.220 I don't know, but you've really got to watch that Netflix series on it

01:21:38.860 to get some background on the Scalante family

01:21:41.060 because it's a really strange and interesting story.

01:21:44.260 and of all places they picked to bring it up

01:21:46.760 is in Edmonton to kick off their new

01:21:48.880 boxing hockey slash

01:21:50.740 league so

01:21:52.200 it'll still be an interesting conversation

01:21:54.380 even if it isn't a thing for you

01:21:56.280 not to mention just the interesting parts of that whole

01:21:58.740 family and what they're doing and so on

01:22:00.940 it's really

01:22:02.700 unusual so I'm going to have him on tomorrow

01:22:04.680 and we'll talk about

01:22:06.700 that and like I said watch that

01:22:08.080 Netflix series on the Danville

01:22:10.500 or Danbury Trashers

01:22:12.720 It's quite the story to watch and read anyways.

01:22:16.020 Untold, there it is, Crime and Penalties.

01:22:18.320 Again, it's not terrible.

01:22:19.480 It's got some moments, but it's not terribly violent.

01:22:21.380 But it really gives a background of a really unusual league

01:22:23.720 set up by some people of, well,

01:22:26.640 of that sort of interesting family background

01:22:28.460 out in the New York and Connecticut area.

01:22:31.240 Just giving that plug on the way.

01:22:33.020 And somebody's saying, you know,

01:22:35.100 straight up enforcer fighting, seriously.

01:22:37.300 Yeah, if you don't like it, don't buy tickets.

01:22:39.040 I mean, it's as simple as that.

01:22:40.420 I'm not big onto the things that is myself so much with that and everything,

01:22:45.040 but I got no fault of, hey, they're grown, willing participants,

01:22:47.720 and people want to pay ticket prices to go see it.

01:22:50.380 Go to town.

01:22:51.720 Go to town.

01:22:53.080 Something different.

01:22:54.720 Speaking of division and fighting, though, you know,

01:22:56.520 I just want to talk a little more, too, about some of the stuff yesterday.

01:22:59.480 I don't want it to sound like I'm a full-out cheerleader for Pierre Polyav.

01:23:03.520 I just, we can't help but constantly report on it

01:23:06.180 because he's making waves across this country, though.

01:23:08.480 His campaign has been something else. I haven't seen energy like that before. I went to the rally

01:23:13.400 last week with that. We're seeing those rallies packing places full all over the place. And we

01:23:18.780 are watching the Canadian establishment and media, I talked about that last week, just going nuts. He

01:23:24.040 has got them terrified. And there was this meltdown by Frank Graves of ECOS. He owns

01:23:31.120 ECOS Research, and they put out polls and polling, and he went on Twitter with just a tirade that he

01:23:40.200 did delete, and he kind of, in a backhanded, there it is, you know, a backhanded way, apologized, but

01:23:45.640 not really. So, I mean, this is, he says, sorry, so sorry to Jenny Byrne, Jeff Bellingall, and the

01:23:50.280 countless racist dickheads who don't like me. If you hang with Nazis, you are Nazis, and I am coming 0.99

01:23:55.100 for you. And you can call me a raving lunatic, and I will, you're a raving lunatic, Graves, 1.00

01:23:59.360 But I am your worst nightmare, losers. 1.00

01:24:02.080 Now, okay, that's social media talk. 1.00

01:24:04.660 We get that sort of stupid rhetoric on social media all the time, 1.00

01:24:07.820 particularly Twitter. 1.00

01:24:09.380 But it's a little different when you're a man who owns a major polling company.

01:24:13.480 How can you take anything that comes out of ECOS now seriously at all 0.98

01:24:19.840 when you hear the owner of it put out unhinged crap like that? 0.94

01:24:24.760 How can you not believe that his research, 0.98

01:24:30.060 I mean, he's saying he's coming for you.

01:24:31.720 This is a man who's unhinged.

01:24:33.020 This is a man I could see the potential

01:24:35.020 of just at least modeling, massaging,

01:24:37.520 or rigging numbers to look more poorly

01:24:39.420 for the people he doesn't like than the ones he does.

01:24:41.820 The two people he referenced, by the way,

01:24:43.100 Jenny Byrne and Jeff Bellinger,

01:24:44.100 are both political organizers, operatives,

01:24:47.560 whatever you'd call them,

01:24:48.140 and I'm pretty sure they're tied in

01:24:49.460 with the Polyev campaign.

01:24:50.500 That's why he was all wound up with them.

01:24:52.080 I'm not 100% sure on that.

01:24:54.320 But this is the atmosphere that's being built over this.

01:24:57.800 And I don't like seeing it.

01:25:00.020 I really don't.

01:25:01.320 Mainstream media, and we're seeing, you know,

01:25:02.680 reporters, they're talking,

01:25:03.580 they're already calling Polly, you have a white supremacist.

01:25:07.500 You're not seeing that out of the mainstream.

01:25:09.080 We're seeing social media actors doing that,

01:25:10.840 but we're seeing ugly memes.

01:25:12.520 There are mainstream media commenting 0.95

01:25:14.200 that there sure are a lot of white people

01:25:15.840 going to those rallies.

01:25:16.920 Well, yeah, there's a lot of people who aren't.

01:25:18.300 Why do they have to go straight to that narrative?

01:25:21.200 Why?

01:25:22.200 And, you know, we're going to have, they're building another Clinton-Trump type election.

01:25:27.620 And that's what they're making the comparisons to with Polyev as well.

01:25:30.060 He's Trump-like.

01:25:30.860 He's not at all.

01:25:32.180 I mean, his policies are there.

01:25:33.440 He's been in office 18 years.

01:25:35.800 If he was extreme and crazy and going to do something out of bounds, he was in government for a while.

01:25:40.660 He would have done it then.

01:25:42.120 Cut it out, you guys.

01:25:43.380 But what it is is dividing Canadians.

01:25:45.160 It's building that hate.

01:25:46.720 It's building that atmosphere like we've seen in the states where families are actually divided.

01:25:50.660 They can't get together because one person in the family was an open Trump supporter and one was an open Clinton supporter and they still never got over it because we had this sick atmosphere of social media and conventional media feeding this hysteric division between each other on this sort of thing.

01:26:08.180 And it's wrong and it's just not good.

01:26:11.180 And they're working on this. 0.99

01:26:12.340 They're consciously doing that sort of crap. 0.97

01:26:14.300 So that language out of graves isn't that shocking when you see that agenda of making it that heated. 0.98

01:26:20.660 I don't know if it was a purposeful agenda. 0.99

01:26:22.180 Maybe he's just got caught up in that race

01:26:24.100 to try and polarize Canadians.

01:26:26.520 But it was unbecoming to say the least.

01:26:30.940 And again, as I said, 0.99

01:26:31.680 it's not just some ass clown on Twitter 1.00

01:26:33.780 with an anonymous account throwing that crap out there. 1.00

01:26:35.780 They're a dime a dozen. 0.99

01:26:37.340 This is the man who owns ECOS.

01:26:39.840 So anytime you see an ECOS poll,

01:26:41.780 just remember the man who's behind that, 0.99

01:26:43.720 who calls people racist dickheads and Nazis and losers 0.99

01:26:47.040 and says he's gonna come out for them 1.00

01:26:48.500 and that he's their worst nightmare. 0.99

01:26:49.620 So I would say there's no polling worth of crap coming out of that man's company ever again. 0.96

01:26:56.960 Also lets you know how reliable some of those pollsters are in general. 0.97

01:27:01.220 I mean, everybody's got their own personal biases, but if you're a professional, you try to set some aside if you're in a business like that.

01:27:06.960 And that was just ugly.

01:27:08.180 And this is years out from a general election.

01:27:10.740 We don't even know if Polyev is going to win the leadership race.

01:27:12.940 He's just really lighting the world on fire right now.

01:27:15.480 But presuming he does, look at the atmosphere they're building.

01:27:18.680 think of two more years, three more years before the general election, what they will have built

01:27:23.060 by the time he actually gets out there and runs on the ground. It's pretty scary.

01:27:28.060 All right. That's enough out of me for today, kicking off the Monday. It has been a long

01:27:31.960 weekend. Tomorrow I'm going to have, as I said, AJ Galanti is going to come on and we're going to

01:27:35.680 talk about the ice war. It's not everybody's cup of tea, but still it's interesting. And they're

01:27:39.140 kicking it off in Edmonton. It's an Albertan thing. That's why I'm interested as well. It's

01:27:42.820 not just a foreign thing going on. And I want to ask them, why did you pick Edmonton of all

01:27:46.840 places here in Connecticut. As well, you're going to have Shane Wenzel, though, and he's going to

01:27:50.580 come on. He's a Calgary home builder. He's been on the show before. He's written columns for us,

01:27:54.460 and Shane always lends a really good local business perspective, you know, on things like

01:27:59.880 that, home building, inflation, stuff like that, because there's big pressing issues with us.

01:28:04.520 So as well, let's see, Danielle's going to be on on Wednesday morning, so tomorrow you're stuck

01:28:08.640 with just me for the show, but it will be a good one tomorrow. So come on back, guys, at 1130 a.m.

01:28:13.860 tomorrow morning, Mountain Standard Time. And we will do this all again with some new subjects

01:28:18.120 and new guests. Thanks for tuning in.

01:28:43.860 Thank you.

Western Standard - April 19, 2022

Triggered： Charest is all in with the WEF.

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