Western Standard - Triggered： Quit trying to force us out of our automobiles!

00:00:00.000 Thank you.

00:00:30.000 Good morning. It's June 9th, 2022. Welcome to Triggered. I'm Corey Morgan. This is the

00:00:38.800 Western Standards daily live show news, events, and of course, interviews. We have a lot of

00:00:44.980 great guests coming all the time. Today's a really packed one. I've got three guests

00:00:48.040 on. I usually go with two, but we've gone with three and there will be lots to discuss

00:00:52.640 of interest. To start with, oh, let's start on some of the lighter stuff. What's going

00:00:57.140 on today? What does June 9th represent? How does it stand out? You don't want to forget those

00:01:02.080 observances, those daily things that are so important. Well, it's Donald Duck Day. I know

00:01:07.220 you all already knew that, but just for those few folks who might have forgotten it, today is Donald

00:01:11.900 Duck Day, and you know, you wouldn't want to be the odd one out at lunchtime going out and not

00:01:16.660 having your proper Donald Duck observance attire or whatever is done to celebrate Donald Duck Day.

00:01:22.540 It's also National Strawberry Rhubarb Pie Day.

00:01:25.540 This is the time to get at it.

00:01:27.060 Cut that stuff up before it gets too long and tough and boil it down.

00:01:32.280 That's a good North American dish, a common one.

00:01:36.360 So, yes, be sure to celebrate your National Strawberry Rhubarb Pies if you're into that.

00:01:40.840 I find them really sweet, though.

00:01:41.980 Got to cut those down with a bit of stuff.

00:01:44.060 Okay, guess why?

00:01:45.300 He's getting into some of the more serious things in political discourse and debate and all that stuff we do around here.

00:01:50.340 We got Benjamin Woodfindon. He's a doctoral student, a young fella, and political and constitutional theorist.

00:01:57.180 And he's written stuff, he's done stuff online, and he wrote a really good column on populism and how it's been labeled.

00:02:05.140 And it's not particularly the type of populism we have going on right now isn't actually as crazy or extreme or pursuing as much change as it can.

00:02:14.840 But it's being used as a term against Pierre Polyev's campaign, for example.

00:02:18.820 So it'll be a good discussion just on those definitions. What is populism? Is it bad? Is it

00:02:23.140 good? Personally, I think it can be both. It depends on what they're doing. After that, I'm

00:02:27.020 going to have George Porter on. Now, he's a veteran Alberta paramedic. He's been lobbying for years and

00:02:33.240 years on fixing Alberta's emergency services system. I mean, we've got some serious, serious

00:02:39.020 problems. Ambulances are being drawn away from rural areas. Red alerts are happening all the

00:02:44.180 time when there's no ambulances available in urban areas and rural areas and people are getting hurt

00:02:50.180 so uh you know there's a lot of discourse going on on last weekend's incident with the dogs

00:02:54.900 I don't know if his reporter's going to go so much into that because it's recent and there's

00:02:58.180 still facts coming out but it's brought the issue to a head and you know it's worth discussing

00:03:02.960 further so since people are looking at the ambulance service let's talk about the real

00:03:06.500 problems going on and then right at the end I'm going to have Dr. Leslyn Lewis on just a quick

00:03:10.400 10-minute shot. And it was her press release that caught my eye on the World Economic Forum

00:03:15.660 kind of travel program, this idea of a digital ID, things that would be shared by Canadians,

00:03:21.400 well, by the Canadian government on your behalf, with the World Economic Forum or with international

00:03:26.080 type of organizations. And of course, she is in opposition to that. So it'll be good to talk to

00:03:33.100 Dr. Lewis and see where she's going with that, because nobody else is really talking about it

00:03:38.060 on the federal leadership front. So yes, comments. I can see people coming in from all over Chauvin.

00:03:43.200 Yes, that land of that big softball. What's that? Straight down from Provost there. Folks out in

00:03:48.440 BC, all over the place again. I love seeing you checking in, guys. It lets me know you're out

00:03:52.880 there and that we're reaching people. So just keep the comments civil, but by all means, use that

00:03:57.880 comment, scroll, and discuss with each other, throw questions my way, throw questions towards

00:04:01.500 the guests. All right, let's get on to what's got me going today. Speaking of populism, well, the

00:04:07.140 opposite of populism is elitism powered by authoritarianism. Climate change extremists

00:04:13.840 are being indulged by authoritarian governments to try and force people out of their vehicles. And

00:04:19.460 while they're failing terribly at getting people out of their cars, they're causing stress and

00:04:24.000 economic damage with their efforts. They can't create appeal for their plans with the majority

00:04:28.160 of citizens, so they're counting on top-down government efforts to further their agenda.

00:04:32.800 And they're getting that effort, you know, getting that help.

00:04:36.180 Despite over a decade of effort on the part of governments to push us into electric vehicles, for example,

00:04:41.360 95% of drivers still won't use them.

00:04:44.320 Electric cars remain an expensive luxury for urban dwelling virtue signalers.

00:04:49.280 We've spent billions trying to force people to embrace electrical vehicles, and it's failed.

00:04:53.800 Governments are responding, though, by spending billions more

00:04:56.360 and continuing to punish people who choose to drive personal internal combustion vehicles.

00:05:01.900 Now, in municipalities across North America, expensive and essential roadway access has been taken away from cars and given over to segregated bicycle lanes.

00:05:11.480 This has only increased traffic congestion in urban centers, and the number of dedicated bicycle commuters has relained as low as it ever was. 0.76

00:05:18.660 Come on, there's only so many spandex aficionados who are really going to go to all that trouble to ride all the way into work and back every day.

00:05:25.060 There's always been a small core of them. It doesn't get any bigger.

00:05:28.320 City planners have felt that if they could just make traffic bad enough

00:05:31.740 and make parking expensive enough,

00:05:33.820 commuters would just toss away their car keys and choose to ride bicycles to work.

00:05:37.960 Never mind that our streets are covered in snow and ice for half the year.

00:05:41.380 Ideological city planners backed by climate-obsessed city mayors and counselors

00:05:45.600 are zoning and creating apartment buildings with no parking provided.

00:05:50.140 Unsurprisingly, such developments have to be heavily subsidized

00:05:52.560 because nobody actually wants to live in them.

00:05:54.620 Even if one doesn't have a vehicle themselves,

00:05:56.220 Do they want to force every visitor to their homes to park miles away and take transit or taxis to come on by and have a beer?

00:06:03.660 Living without practical parking in urban areas is just not desirable.

00:06:08.220 Now, pedestrian zones created in downtown areas have killed some ground-level retail businesses.

00:06:13.640 In Calgary, the once bustling Stephen Avenue Mall, which was a pedestrian zone, sure,

00:06:17.960 but it's turned into an economic dead zone where for lease signs grace most of the storefronts

00:06:22.460 and homeless people rather than shoppers predominantly prowl the Strip.

00:06:26.220 I mean, while the mall had been popular at one time, it's because parking nearby was plentiful, accessible, and affordable.

00:06:31.960 Now, due to traffic snarls and a lack of available parking, people have taken their business to the suburbs, and the place has dried up.

00:06:38.840 But what about transit, though?

00:06:40.580 Well, in many cities, transit's been overrun with addicts, creating disorder and mayhem.

00:06:45.620 In Calgary, thanks to the honor system for fare payment, coupled with a woke city council who refused to crack down on what they call vulnerable people,

00:06:52.640 the transit system has turned into a dystopian nightmare.

00:06:56.180 Violent incidents on trains are commonplace,

00:06:58.360 while discarded syringes and human waste decorate bus shelters and train stations.

00:07:03.340 City Council in Calgary actually closed a number of train stations

00:07:06.180 due to the encampments of violent addicts in them, rather than dealing with the issue.

00:07:10.860 Ridership on Calgary transits at 64% of what it was only two years ago,

00:07:15.680 and it continues to decline.

00:07:17.180 Even with gas nearing $2 a liter,

00:07:19.000 people won't choose to subject themselves to the dangerous nightmare of riding on city trains.

00:07:24.960 Now, Calgary has had its city council dominated with anti-auto zealots since Nahed Nenshi was elected as mayor over a decade ago.

00:07:32.060 The result of 10 years of anti-car policies hasn't taken anybody out of their cars,

00:07:36.740 but it's led to a dysfunctional and dangerous downtown, at least contributed towards it, with over 30% commercial vacancy rates.

00:07:43.960 They've tried to blame this in the past on the oil crash, but that doesn't cut it.

00:07:47.480 New businesses are setting up in Alberta all the time.

00:07:49.720 They just keep building their facilities outside of the city limits.

00:07:53.020 Nobody wants to move a business into a city center with congested traffic, expensive parking, and high crime.

00:07:58.560 It makes it rather hard to draw employees in to work for you.

00:08:02.440 There's no intention that city planners are learning from this or giving up.

00:08:05.660 The city right now in Calgary plans to close a busy street that offers one of the few crossings for a major rail line leaving downtown

00:08:13.400 to build an underpass exclusively for pedestrians and bicycles. 0.72

00:08:17.020 All this is going to do is cause even more traffic havoc and perhaps create a new location for a tent city.

00:08:22.960 Again, these planners and their supporters live in a delusional world

00:08:26.980 where they feel if they could just piss drivers off enough,

00:08:29.960 those drivers will just throw up their hands and stop driving.

00:08:32.400 But it isn't working.

00:08:34.040 Climate zealots just can't seem to realize

00:08:36.040 they need to create a realistic alternative to cars

00:08:38.860 before people are going to stop using them.

00:08:41.680 Electric cars are still too expensive and impractical for most people.

00:08:45.720 Bicycles are a novelty and a hobby for most.

00:08:48.180 Transit is not nearly safe or good enough for people to rely on.

00:08:51.740 If the anti-car crowd would address building an alternative to cars first, they'd have a great deal more success in convincing people to give up on them.

00:09:01.800 Do they really think that a parent of four kids is going to ride a bus and haul groceries for a family that size four times a week?

00:09:08.480 Do they think a person in their 60s is going to ride a bicycle an hour to work every day in January?

00:09:14.560 Do they think a slight young woman is going to subject herself daily to the criminal mayhem on trains in order to get to work?

00:09:20.060 Suburbs and satellite cities are booming while the inner city neighborhoods are declining.

00:09:24.580 Urban planners and climate zealots have to stop, quit, you know, trying to use the stick

00:09:29.020 and they got to find some carrots.

00:09:30.800 The current strategy has been a total failure and it's coming at a terrible cost for all

00:09:34.540 of us.

00:09:34.720 Quit punishing citizens for using the only practical, viable, and affordable form of

00:09:39.800 transportation we have.

00:09:41.420 And that is the personal automobile.

00:09:43.820 All right.

00:09:44.520 Well, the war on cars carries on.

00:09:46.640 Let's get to our newsroom and check in with Dave Naylor

00:09:50.140 and see what else is going on out there.

00:09:51.540 Hey, Dave, how's it going?

00:09:52.600 It's going well, Corey.

00:09:53.620 Do you know why I'm wearing red today?

00:09:56.000 No, I don't.

00:09:56.780 For the rhubarb, maybe?

00:09:58.740 Maybe, but it's more for the Stampeders kicking off their season tonight

00:10:03.100 in CFL action.

00:10:04.800 They're going to destroy the hapless Montreal team.

00:10:09.000 So, yeah, it's good.

00:10:09.720 It's a good day when CFL kicks off

00:10:11.740 and another opportunity to mock our friends in Edmonton,

00:10:15.620 the home of the Edmonton Elks.

00:10:18.060 And it's not even grammarly correct, Corey.

00:10:20.620 How can you have a team that's not even grammarly correct?

00:10:23.380 Well, that's true.

00:10:24.060 And that's where the Battle of Alberta can pick up.

00:10:26.040 And at least Calgary can retain some pride

00:10:28.220 and knock down those nasty Edmontonians in the football field,

00:10:31.920 at least if not in the hockey arenas.

00:10:33.980 Yeah, if Bo Levi stays healthy, it's going to be a good year, I think.

00:10:38.000 We've got some interesting stuff on the site, Corey.

00:10:40.580 The feds in their infinite wisdom have decided

00:10:43.800 they're going to look at putting Health Canada warnings on the front of ground beef labels in

00:10:50.640 Canada because it's, you know, it's got some saturated fats and other bad things in there for

00:10:56.200 you. Obviously, the Canadian Cattlemen's Association has a bit more common sense and

00:11:01.400 they're not too happy with it. So their comments are in the story. We've got Teresa Tam batting

00:11:09.320 down the hatches again. She says the seventh wave of COVID is on the way and it will hit just after

00:11:14.980 Labor Day. So she's telling Canadians to get to get prepared. So deep sigh on that one. Pierre

00:11:22.520 Poliev has released a statement this morning calling on the federal public safety minister

00:11:28.980 Marco Medicino to resign. He's being caught as Canada's lawyer in chief over the Freedom Convoy

00:11:37.260 events he repeatedly said police have had asked the government to bring in the emergencies act

00:11:43.260 and police force after police force have said no no they didn't so polyev wants him out quite

00:11:50.540 rightly uh the ctf has done a access to information release on the board of directors meetings for

00:11:58.700 the bank of canada in 2019 140 000 for the nine board of directors to to have five

00:12:06.860 meetings uh high cost because they stayed in canada's some of canada's most luxurious hotels

00:12:13.340 in their most luxurious suites so 140 000 they rang up in in five meetings uh premier kenny

00:12:21.740 was on hand uh this morning at a big announcement uh at the ufc government's chipping in 23 million

00:12:27.660 dollars to uh to build some uh a quantum hub technology that is way too over my head uh for

00:12:35.260 me to try and explain but our reporter there mel risden did get some uh some face time with the

00:12:41.500 health minister jason copping and uh has questioned him about the uh the horrible tragedy this week

00:12:48.540 of the uh the elderly woman being mauled to death by the three pit bull type dogs and uh and what

00:12:56.060 what the alberta health services are doing about it to try and make sure that uh there's not another

00:13:01.340 30 minute wait, like, uh, like she had to suffer through that time. So, uh, that's what we've got

00:13:06.220 on the go, uh, uh, this morning, Corey, lots to come this afternoon and, uh, go stamps go tonight.

00:13:12.540 Absolutely. Well, you know, I'm going to go out of my way to eat a large steak, just in

00:13:16.540 defiance of health Canada and their latest way of trying to tell me what I'm allowed to eat. 0.94

00:13:21.500 It's utterly ridiculous. Oh man. All right. Steve, I'll talk to you after the show. 0.95

00:13:28.620 See you, Corey.

00:13:30.260 So yes, that was our news editor, Dave Naylor,

00:13:33.300 running through all of those stories.

00:13:35.040 As we see, there's lots breaking,

00:13:36.460 lots already been written,

00:13:37.400 and we have lots of reporters

00:13:39.240 all across the country covering this stuff.

00:13:41.360 As Dave mentioned, Mel Rizdin,

00:13:42.580 yes, she was sent out in the field

00:13:44.240 early this morning to try and get some quotes

00:13:46.080 and I think had a bit of a hard time

00:13:48.200 at a Kenny presser.

00:13:49.060 We'll see how that goes with things such as that.

00:13:51.660 But Mel's always putting stuff out. 1.00

00:13:53.460 Amanda, Eva's back.

00:13:55.120 And then we've got,

00:13:56.180 Rachel, it's hard to start.

00:13:57.260 Well, you see, you know, I used to be able to name the whole news crew quickly just to give them all a thumbs up.

00:14:02.400 But we have over a dozen folks all across out there bringing this stuff to you, writing these stories and getting them out there.

00:14:08.360 So, again, this is where I like to remind everybody the reason we can do that, the reason we're covering this,

00:14:13.020 the reason we're giving you an alternative from the legacy media, the tax bailed out media is because of you guys who have been subscribing.

00:14:19.380 So, again, thank you all to those who have subscribed already.

00:14:23.920 and if you haven't yet, get on there, check it out, westernstandard.news slash membership

00:14:29.200 for $10 a month or even less if you go with an annual plan at $99 a year, you get full

00:14:35.020 unfettered access to all of our columns, our news stories, breaking stories, all of those

00:14:40.460 things on the website. It's well worth it. Again, we never thought twice about paying

00:14:44.200 for a newspaper subscription back in the past, you know, which would cost you more than this

00:14:49.180 and you'd have a whole bunch of newspaper to have to get rid of afterwards. We're not asking

00:14:52.460 for charity. We're just asking for you to pay for us to provide a service so that we can keep

00:14:57.300 expanding and doing as we have. And so again, take out a subscription. That's how we can support

00:15:01.800 independent media and we can keep going and keep expanding. Look at all those names. That's just

00:15:05.040 the news department there. Plus we have a whole pile of freelancers and other folks who are

00:15:09.500 contributing things and columnists. And that is thanks to you. And I should move on, I guess,

00:15:14.000 and talk about the other aspect and support our sponsors and advertisers. Again, like newspaper

00:15:20.080 subscriptions. You paid to get it to your door, but also you would get some advertising in there.

00:15:24.800 That's how we compare bills. It's capitalism. It's great. And in our case, we have advertisers,

00:15:28.720 one of which is Bitcoin Well. And those guys have been a great sponsor for us for quite some time.

00:15:34.560 They're a Western Canadian company. I'll show you how can I not like that. You know, it's a

00:15:39.120 bricks and mortar thing. It's not some digital business way overseas or something like that.

00:15:43.520 This is a publicly traded company with ATMs all across Canada. If you're looking to get into

00:15:48.640 digital currencies get involved with that this is the way to go this is the way to keep your money

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00:16:11.680 the process. So check them out, bitcoinwell.com and take control of your money. Okay, let's see

00:16:18.720 before we get on to our guest, maybe we'll go on on some news stuff. Yeah, so something Dave was

00:16:24.220 talking about. And we'll talk more with my guest a little later. With AHS, boy, the finger pointing

00:16:29.740 game is going all over on that awful incident for people from other regions who might not have been

00:16:35.040 familiar with it. A few days ago, an 86 year old woman was attacked in her garden by three pit bull

00:16:42.720 type dogs. She was terribly mauled. And she passed away. She passed away before she even got to the

00:16:48.380 hospital. And it was found that the ambulance had taken over half an hour to get to her. So now all

00:16:55.500 the fingers are pointing in all sorts of directions. Whose fault is this? And one of the worst that

00:16:59.820 I've seen and we've seen the pleas from the woman who called 9-1, the neighbor went outside and saw

00:17:06.500 her elderly neighbor having been mauled terribly by three dogs. She called 9-1-1 and it sounds like

00:17:12.880 it turned into a gong show, but AHS is sort of blaming her. They're sort of making it sound like

00:17:16.580 the caller wasn't clear on what happened and she's pretty upset. It's unfortunate after a tragedy,

00:17:21.840 we get a bunch of finger pointing rather than Alberta health services maybe just saying,

00:17:25.360 hey, something went wrong, let's fix it. But no, they're trying to blame the caller. And it's

00:17:32.340 bizarre. It sounds like Bylaw Services was the first one who showed up. So yes, the woman called

00:17:36.380 in a dog attack, then you do want to call Bylaw Services. But when she called in, she also said

00:17:42.060 they attacked an 86-year-old woman who's bleeding to death in her backyard. I mean, the AHS is

00:17:48.400 claiming we didn't realize it was a life-threatening situation. Come on. And they're claiming the

00:17:52.680 caller didn't make that clear. I don't know. You see, they won't release the transcript. How clear

00:17:56.820 was it? But even then, even once the bylaw officer got there, the bylaw officer was trying to at

00:18:02.040 least bypass what sounds like some incompetent or messed up 911 systems and get directly to an

00:18:08.100 ambulance to bring them over. And as I brought up earlier in the show, Foothills Hospital, the biggest

00:18:12.360 hospital in Alberta, was only four kilometers away. It was in an ambulance, probably an eight

00:18:17.840 minute drive most. And there's always ambulances sitting around the hospital because they're doing

00:18:21.560 hallway care. And I'm going to talk to my later guest about that, the paramedic I have coming on.

00:18:27.160 But instead, this bylaw officer is desperately calling while this poor woman is dying in her 1.00

00:18:31.240 backyard to get that. Instead, he managed to get fire trucks to arrive. So fire trucks arrived and

00:18:37.100 tried to stabilize the woman. And the fire trucks managed to get through and get to an ambulance and

00:18:42.640 get an ambulance out there. By then it was way too late. It had been 35 minutes as this poor woman

00:18:48.540 passed away. And as I'd heard from another paramedic, you know, staying anonymous, but he

00:18:51.780 said, word is they definitely could have saved her if somebody had intervened in time. I mean,

00:18:56.700 this was a case of trauma and bleeding. And Brenda, pit bull type. Yes, because it was pit bull types. 1.00

00:19:03.620 They were. They were Stratfordshire Terriers. And I'm going to get more on that. That's a

00:19:07.580 separate discussion altogether. Fair enough from a commenter. I'll state right off the bat,

00:19:13.640 I don't like the idea of knee-jerk breed bans at all.

00:19:18.760 I have a big problem with that.

00:19:20.280 I think it's shallow.

00:19:21.000 I think it's the same as the people who are saying

00:19:22.200 we should ban all firearms

00:19:23.260 because people misuse firearms elsewhere as well.

00:19:26.780 But we do have to state things as they were

00:19:29.080 in all three of these dogs.

00:19:30.860 One was an American Pit Bull.

00:19:32.500 One was a Stratfordshire Terrier and another.

00:19:35.300 So, I mean, Pit Bull type does cover the three of them.

00:19:37.380 It's not trying to demonize them.

00:19:38.740 It is just saying what type of breed was involved in this

00:19:42.780 because it does open up an issue that we do need to discuss.

00:19:45.680 And I will be discussing that a little more in the future.

00:19:48.600 Either way, that's a story that's still unfolding as we get more facts,

00:19:52.160 but it's pretty sad to see the big health bureaucracies and the emergency

00:19:55.980 service and everybody pointing fingers at each other in a tragedy,

00:19:59.760 trying to cover their butts rather than having a more productive conversation

00:20:03.700 saying, how can we make sure this doesn't happen again?

00:20:06.320 Hopefully we can turn that conversation that way.

00:20:08.120 As I said, I have a gentleman who's spent decades as a paramedic in Alberta

00:20:11.880 who'll be coming on a little later, and we'll talk a bit about that. First, though, I'm going

00:20:15.120 to bring in Ben and Woodfinding. This will be the first time we've had Ben on the show. I read a

00:20:18.720 great piece he'd written in The Hub talking about populism and how it's been applied with

00:20:23.820 Pierre Polyev's campaign and pointing out that when we're talking about populism, it's really

00:20:29.520 what they're talking about or what Polyev's proposing. Isn't that radical, though? Some

00:20:32.820 are trying to frame it that way. So I was looking forward to this conversation. So hey, Ben,

00:20:37.440 thanks for joining us today. Yeah, good to be with you. So I kind of framed it off to start a bit,

00:20:42.900 you know, and you can see it in that title from your piece, you know, Canada's aspiring populists

00:20:47.020 actually aren't all that radical. Maybe we'll just kind of start there. Where were you looking

00:20:51.140 to go with that? Yeah, well, you know, it was interesting to see some of the responses to the

00:20:56.380 piece. I was kind of trying to make a broad kind of overarching point that we, you know,

00:21:01.280 we certainly have people in this country that you could describe as populists. And, you know,

00:21:05.360 i don't use the word i think some people use it as a pejorative you know as an insult some people

00:21:09.160 use it as a as a you know praise honestly i'm just trying to use it as kind of a descriptive word

00:21:14.080 right i think certain people have that kind of populist streak others don't um so the the kind

00:21:19.040 of broader point i was trying to make in the piece was that you know we do have these kind of populistic

00:21:22.460 kind of figures you know right the pierre pierre probably was obviously kind of the you know the

00:21:26.420 biggest name on the radar right now uh for a variety of reasons uh but the kind of the bigger

00:21:31.020 point i was trying to make was that these these populists are they might be populist but they're

00:21:34.380 not actually um they're not actually that radical in kind of some you know grand significant way

00:21:39.540 they're not trying to kind of like you know radically overturn kind of Canada's existing

00:21:43.460 constitutional order and then uh the kind of the more kind of maybe abstract point I was trying

00:21:48.000 to make is that even our populists are kind of um they're broadly speaking kind of liberals in the

00:21:52.600 real grand sense of the term right they're small out liberals and they're committed to things like

00:21:56.140 freedom uh freedom and equality they have different you know different understandings

00:22:00.520 of what that means from saying kind of progressive or mainstream liberals do. But in some sense,

00:22:05.140 there's, you know, there's differences there, but they're not quite as radical as our kind of

00:22:08.420 certain kind of, I won't name names, but certain kind of legacy media, mainstream media voices

00:22:13.160 want to suggest, right, that we have these real radical, dangerous populists in the midst. And I

00:22:17.040 just don't think that's the case. Yeah, well, and I mean, populism can be applied to a lot of

00:22:22.380 movements or politicians historically that have risen and taken, I guess, a public sentiment and

00:22:27.360 perhaps, you know, inspired it a bit and brought it about and led to often big change. Sometimes

00:22:31.560 it's been horrible. I mean, people could arguably say that the rise of Hitler was a populist movement

00:22:36.380 in its time. But as you rightly pointed out in your column, so was the NDP. When they began,

00:22:42.060 I mean, they were prairie populists coming from the left. So I mean, it doesn't necessarily mean

00:22:46.280 it's bad. It depends on what the individual who is a populist plans to do. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,

00:22:53.220 exactly um i you know it's not just the ndp right the the current conservative party the cpc

00:22:58.580 also has roots in a kind of populist movement right the reform party i think is it was fair

00:23:02.740 i don't think again not an insult i think it's fair to describe reform as a kind of western

00:23:06.260 populist movement and it's also interesting as well that canada you know canada does have a long

00:23:10.420 history of populist movements right i think it's fair to do like reform the ccf what becomes the

00:23:15.540 ndp i think our populist movements i think even you know going back a bit further things like

00:23:19.700 social credit were probably in some sense kind of populist movement so if anything the fact that we

00:23:24.020 kind of were you know we're seeing a bit of a bubbling of populism especially especially you

00:23:27.780 know in western canada again if anything that's not you know that's not some aberration that's

00:23:31.620 in many ways kind of a return to the norm right the things that kind of really have driven uh

00:23:35.940 canadian politics for the last you know century and a half nearly so yeah in that sense again

00:23:40.260 it's really nothing that radical it's not that new no and i mean we've had um well looking to

00:23:46.020 Alberta an example. You look a little young

00:23:48.180 to perhaps remember, but with Ralph Klein

00:23:50.240 sort of, you know, with an internal party

00:23:52.220 rejuvenation movement almost. I mean, the

00:23:54.060 progressive conservatives have been in power in Alberta for

00:23:56.020 decades, but they've been getting stale

00:23:58.000 and he sort of roused

00:24:00.320 up a populist sentiment within

00:24:02.320 the province and rejuvenated

00:24:04.240 his own party through that. And again

00:24:06.240 though, his changes really weren't all that terribly radical

00:24:08.160 though some would dispute that. He wasn't

00:24:10.120 looking to tear down the system. He was just

00:24:12.120 looking to get things back in order, I guess

00:24:14.220 you could say yeah yeah and again i don't think it's you know i um one of my favorite kind of

00:24:19.040 yeah it's like you said it's a bit before my time but um uh the kind of great reform like the west

00:24:24.040 wants it right like that was a that was a populist populist movement but they were you know they were

00:24:28.520 i think you know reform was seeking in some sense kind of you know certain kind of significant

00:24:33.040 changes back in the day i mean the one the most obvious kind of institutional one was that you

00:24:37.560 know the changes to the senate the elected senate having an elected senate um you know so that is

00:24:42.180 in some sense a populist movement right it's an attempt to and that is a kind of I think it's

00:24:47.120 probably fair to call something like that radical and that it is attempting to change something

00:24:50.360 but again you know radical doesn't necessarily mean bad good or bad right you know there could

00:24:55.420 be bad radical changes there could be good radical changes um so um you know and when we look at the

00:25:00.340 kind of crop of populists we have today and again Polyev is just kind of the kind of the creme de la

00:25:04.800 creme of them right now just given his kind of the kind of prominence he's got um you know Polyev's

00:25:09.140 tweaking at the edges on certain things.

00:25:11.340 I think maybe some of the stuff he said about the Bank of Canada

00:25:13.660 is probably his most kind of,

00:25:15.320 it's called like institutionally challenging stuff.

00:25:18.720 But again, if you go and, you know, you don't have to actually,

00:25:21.000 this was a point I tried to make in the piece.

00:25:24.460 You don't have to, like, you don't have to agree

00:25:26.560 with what Poliev is saying per se about the bank.

00:25:28.740 Maybe you think he's completely wrong.

00:25:30.460 But if you actually go and look at what he's saying about the bank,

00:25:33.240 he's basically, he's not suggesting that he wants to kind of,

00:25:36.000 you know, destroy the Bank of Canada in the way that

00:25:38.140 if you go and listen to some of the kind of anti-neoliberal left-wing populists in places like

00:25:43.000 Europe, quite often these people will be quite anti-central banks, but what they're anti is very

00:25:48.340 much the idea of kind of money and the supply of money should essentially belong to the people.

00:25:54.980 That's not what Polier is offering, right? He's basically saying that he's arguing that the Bank

00:25:59.100 of Canada's independence has been undermined by the mass spending and kind of essentially propping

00:26:04.000 up, you know, government agenda for two years. And what he wants to do is to essentially restore

00:26:08.500 the independence. So again, you agree or disagree with Polyev? I'll leave that up to the listener

00:26:14.260 to decide. But what he's saying there is still not a fundamentally, he's not actually radically

00:26:18.540 trying to, you know, change the Bank of Canada. He thinks he's restoring it to what it, you know,

00:26:23.080 what it historically should be, right, which is an independent central bank that's job is to

00:26:26.780 control inflation. Well, that's it. And people dismiss him sometimes. And as you said, almost

00:26:31.080 pejoratively, oh, he's a populist, as if it's a bad thing in and of itself, when realistically,

00:26:35.660 we should be looking at the individual policies within it. I mean, if there's some that you think

00:26:39.580 are too radical or too wrong, then bring out the policies. But to try and dismiss an entire

00:26:43.700 campaign with that word, I think is a misappropriation of the word, and it's not

00:26:47.600 allowing for a better conversation on what's going on. Yeah, yeah. And again, I really, you know,

00:26:52.540 I think a problem with so much Canadian discourse and politics kind of discussion more broadly is

00:26:56.860 that we really do um i think we get lazy sometimes and we just look for analogy like to make kind of

00:27:02.240 lazy comparisons elsewhere right so i think about the people that polyab has been compared to right

00:27:07.200 it's just every kind of every kind of populist under the sun right i've seen you know i've seen

00:27:10.860 him compared to trump obviously to johnson in the uk to marine le pen in france which i think is

00:27:15.760 kind of what a really kind of silly comparison but um you know again if populism is a kind of

00:27:21.940 canadian uh it's an it's an old canadian tradition right i actually think it's much more interesting

00:27:25.900 to compare Poliev to, you know, the older, you know, maybe something like Preston Manning,

00:27:30.000 right? Were there any similarities there? And, you know, I think, and you're right,

00:27:34.040 I don't think, I kind of, I wish people would use populist as kind of just a kind of

00:27:39.920 descriptive label, right? I really think populism, I think, might be described as kind of

00:27:44.040 temperamental, right? There's a kind of, populists certainly have a kind of

00:27:47.100 tempestuousness about, I wouldn't always call it anger, but, you know, they're tapping into

00:27:51.340 something, right, like real frustrations and grievances. So in that sense, I think there's,

00:27:55.440 you know that's a kind of um people will get people again will use that as it is an insult

00:28:00.100 as a pejorative i don't i just think that's it's just so you know people put their cards on the

00:28:04.820 table when they do that um and again so when you you know these people will frame you know polio

00:28:09.380 is this kind of terrifying terrifying populace it's gonna you know destroy the cam that we know

00:28:13.700 and love you know something something like something along those lines um you know and i

00:28:17.540 don't um and i don't even mean this it's funny i got some of the responses to the article thought

00:28:21.660 i was defending polyev someone thought i was attacking polyev i was honestly not trying to do

00:28:25.820 either of those things i was just trying to make the make the observation that like look you might

00:28:29.480 have this might be fair to describe him as a populist but it really is everything he's offering

00:28:33.540 right now is fairly kind of uh milqueto certainly within the kind of narrow boundaries of what's

00:28:38.860 acceptable in canadian discourse right he really isn't challenging any of the kind of real you know

00:28:43.660 the third rate the various many third rails or taboos of canadian politics i don't think it's i

00:28:48.840 I don't think it's hard to say that polyev is really challenging anything like that,

00:28:52.360 or that any of the kind of populist, well, for the most part,

00:28:54.760 any of the populist movements we have in this country right now,

00:28:57.180 you know, there's people here and there that certainly challenge kind of,

00:28:59.840 you know, these third rails,

00:29:00.660 but there's certainly no major kind of figures or movement,

00:29:03.220 I think, that really do, right?

00:29:04.340 So, yeah, I think so much of this discourse is so sloppy and so lazy,

00:29:09.860 and that we think more carefully about these terms,

00:29:12.540 and we actually try and have kind of serious discussions and analyses

00:29:15.420 of what we're talking about here.

00:29:17.120 really kind of changes what your, maybe doesn't change your view of someone like Polyev, but it

00:29:22.000 certainly might temper your fears or your expectations, right? Yeah, well, if there's

00:29:27.680 any hallmark, I guess you could say of a malignant populism, when a leader or a figure is trying to

00:29:33.440 incite or get the people up against, you know, they like to take advantage of xenophobia,

00:29:38.400 and immigration or foreigners is often a tempting target for them. And you kind of go into that as

00:29:44.560 well, at least whatever may be going on with Polyev, immigration hasn't been an area where

00:29:49.060 he's been radical or trying to stir up any sort of negative movements of any sort.

00:29:55.500 No, exactly. And to be, you know, I should say as a first generation immigrant myself,

00:29:58.640 I am, you know, I'm quite pleased with that, right? So I'm not, you know, I'm not, I'm not

00:30:02.020 opposed to immigration. I think we can certainly have debates about, you know, the number of

00:30:06.220 immigrants we have, but it's amazing that even, you know, we had a record number of immigrants

00:30:12.600 to Kandassia was about 400,000 and you know again we don't necessarily have any arguments about

00:30:18.600 specific numbers right but the idea that that is kind of beyond the pale of public discourse I've

00:30:23.240 always thought is kind of very strange right like these are certainly questions people should be

00:30:27.000 able to ask and not be kind of terrified of you know what they'll be accused of being

00:30:31.560 if they bring it up but yeah that was I tried to make the point in the piece that you know

00:30:36.840 Polly it's not challenging that right if anything he's he's trying to appeal to immigrant communities

00:30:41.400 which again i don't think uh is a bad thing right i think that's probably a good thing especially

00:30:45.320 if he wants to win the election um but again you know he's you know he's being you know some of

00:30:49.480 the people he's been compared to right like people like donald trump and uh marine le pen like the

00:30:52.920 idea that what polio is saying there would be kind of you know acceptable to the most hardcore you

00:30:57.800 know most devoted supporters of someone like trump for example it's just kind of silly right like

00:31:02.200 these are different people and we should stop kind of uh we should stop engaging with we should stop

00:31:06.600 using these kind of lazy, lazy comparisons. One other kind of it. So the piece, the piece in

00:31:13.180 question was, was fairly long. You know, I won't say it was short. There was actually, and there

00:31:17.600 was actually a separate section that got cut just for space constraints. And one of the other kind

00:31:23.180 of, so, you know, immigration is obviously one of the third rails of Canadian politics. The other,

00:31:28.440 and I think it's going to be, you know, we're going to be having discussions about this

00:31:30.700 the very near future again is abortion right um now again it's just kind of an object it tend to

00:31:37.000 be a descriptive observation uh lewis i think is going to be a guest later right um leslie lewis

00:31:42.340 is kind of the you know the social conservative in the conservative leadership race right now

00:31:45.740 um she's the she's the pro-life um the pro-life option uh but again if you actually go and look

00:31:51.320 at what she's proposing and what she's campaigning on it's fairly modest stuff in terms of what she's

00:31:55.740 So there's a ban on sex-selective abortions.

00:31:59.120 There's, I think, a ban on, like, overseas funding for abortions.

00:32:02.440 But even, like, even Lesley Lewis, you know, the social conservative, the pro-life MP in the race, she would never even think to propose something like, it amazes me when I talk to Canadians and they think that, you know, we have kind of, when you tell them about, you know, like, European style, how abortion is generally regulated in Europe versus America, you know, most European countries, I think the abortion limit is around 12 weeks.

00:32:24.280 it varies a little bit but that's you know that's fairly early on right and a pregnancy is basically

00:32:28.680 um at the end of the first trimester um but leslie lewis you know our radical scary social

00:32:34.120 so you know the one that's going to put us back to theocracy if you listen to listen to certain 0.99

00:32:37.960 people she's not proposing you know like a french style or european style uh abortion limits what

00:32:43.560 she's proposing are pretty pretty small it's pretty pretty uh you know not unambitious and modest

00:32:49.560 restrictions by comparison so on all sorts of these topics right these third rail topics these taboos

00:32:54.840 um we really don't have like true radical challenges to them again there might be

00:32:58.920 voices here and there but there certainly isn't like kind of mainstream organized movement that

00:33:03.160 challenges these things we have this fairly narrow and i would suggest you know for better

00:33:07.240 for us i'd say for worse on many things it's very narrow and very stable consensus on all sorts of

00:33:12.360 topics yeah and and uh as you said i'm glad you brought it up you know ms lewis's position on

00:33:18.840 on abortion actually is really where a lot of American Democrats would land. I mean,

00:33:24.080 she would be considered pretty moderate compared to some of the more activist Republicans amongst

00:33:28.200 the bunch. But to even broach the issue immediately starts getting that pushback. And I mean,

00:33:36.120 is that a bit of a cultural thing within Canada too? Although I mean, are we afraid of substantial

00:33:41.220 change? Like, is that why populism as a pejorative is as effective as it can be sometimes when it's

00:33:46.740 used against people because we don't embrace any large radical changes or at least we haven't

00:33:51.640 traditionally you know we talk big but as you said even when these people get into power who

00:33:56.480 did it on a populist wave they don't tend to really change a whole heck of a lot structurally

00:34:00.340 or substantially once they get there yeah um yeah that's my my kind of i think this is true not just

00:34:05.820 in canada but in other places i think canada is generally a more um uh maybe kind of temperamentally

00:34:11.200 modest right place i don't think canada canadians i think are much less quick to kind of anger and

00:34:15.900 age maybe than other places and i think sometimes that's good and i think sometimes that's bad right

00:34:20.140 i think sometimes we should get angry about things that we kind of just let government get away with

00:34:23.900 um but uh you know i think um yeah it's even even um there's obviously kind of structural reasons

00:34:31.260 right why um sometimes changes are just hard to make right there's a kind of status quo that is

00:34:36.540 a status quo for a reason right it's entrenched um and there's so in the desire to you know it

00:34:41.580 takes real real if there is a if there's some sort of major reform you want to embark on

00:34:46.220 um it's going to take real significant kind of desire and will and kind of motivation to do it

00:34:50.540 um so in many ways kind of just a kind of benign status quo prevails not so much because it's

00:34:55.340 popular but just because kind of the the effort to undo it or change it uh which it would take a lot

00:35:00.460 of work uh in the other way um and you know and it depends we can there's all we could go through

00:35:05.740 issue by issue right there's all sorts of things that um you know there are things in canada i

00:35:09.500 I would like to see changed. It doesn't mean that's going to happen, right? It's just kind

00:35:12.880 of a real, it kind of is just unfortunate or fortunate, depending on your perspective,

00:35:17.280 and unfortunate reality about how this country works. I think one kind of major problem we have

00:35:23.080 in Canada is we do have, and this was, again, kind of a broader kind of point about this piece,

00:35:27.240 is we do have a very narrow kind of, you know, I don't want to get too technical, but people

00:35:31.140 sometimes call the over to the window, right? We really do have a kind of narrow window of what

00:35:35.260 generally considered acceptable opinions. So, plenty of people might hold opinions that are

00:35:41.740 actually kind of, you know, outside that fairly narrow window, but especially in kind of media

00:35:46.940 and kind of discourse, that window is so narrow that people that hold those perspectives might

00:35:50.780 either, you know, not express them at all, or just kind of very subtly kind of, you know,

00:35:55.420 hint at it here and there, but be kind of worried about kind of the consequences of saying so. I

00:36:01.500 I mean, if regardless of whether, you know, maybe even if someone generally likes kind of the status quo in Canada today, I would suggest we'd actually benefit from having a kind of wider discourse where there's just a wider range of kind of, you know, permitted, acceptable opinion precisely so that we can actually have more kind of serious, serious engagements and debates over kind of major issues and major topics.

00:36:22.700 I don't think Canada's well served at all by having kind of a very narrow, kind of very thin consensus, because it really just allows a lot of kind of complacency and shallow and sloppy thinking.

00:36:33.060 Right. So, again, even if you generally like kind of, you know, broadly speaking, the kind of consensus in Canada, I think we benefit from a more open, more open, open culture.

00:36:42.100 We can actually have debates about things that maybe, you know, people don't want to have debates about right now for various reasons.

00:36:48.200 Yeah, no, and I appreciate that.

00:36:49.200 We have an opportunity right now with a leadership race

00:36:51.760 where hopefully you get a number of people

00:36:53.360 to talk about some of the individual issues.

00:36:55.800 And if we keep playing a, as I like your use of the term,

00:36:58.600 it's just being lazy by dismissing this

00:37:00.480 as populism here or there and not having the conversation.

00:37:04.120 It doesn't mean you have to like or dislike

00:37:05.460 whatever a candidate's saying,

00:37:06.560 but we need to open up that discourse

00:37:08.620 rather than keep being so polarized

00:37:10.160 and shutting it down with simplistic terms,

00:37:12.980 I guess you could say.

00:37:14.260 So I appreciate you coming on to expand a bit on that.

00:37:16.880 and where can we find more information

00:37:18.440 on what you're writing, what you're doing?

00:37:20.140 That piece that caught my eye was in The Hub.

00:37:22.340 You're active elsewhere as well?

00:37:24.160 Yeah, I generally write for The Hub these days.

00:37:26.620 So The Hub is where you'll see my writing fairly frequently.

00:37:29.200 I'm in the National Post fairly frequently.

00:37:32.360 And if you want to just keep track of what I'm doing,

00:37:35.160 I have a Twitter account you can follow,

00:37:36.720 which is my name, at Ben Woodfinden.

00:37:38.640 And I have a newsletter as well, a sub-stack that I do.

00:37:41.640 It's not super active, but it's all public stuff.

00:37:44.640 So if people want to go back and read some kind of older things I've written,

00:37:47.820 they're, you know, they're welcome to check that out. Yeah.

00:37:50.980 Well, great. Well, thank you again for taking some time to talk to us today.

00:37:53.980 And I look forward to reading more of your pieces.

00:37:56.580 Perhaps we'll talk again down the road.

00:37:58.340 Cheers. Yeah, I would love to be on again. Thank you.

00:38:00.240 Excellent. Thanks.

00:38:01.380 So that was Ben Woodfinden. And as you said, look it up, check it out.

00:38:04.680 He's got a lot of great stuff written out there and it'll be Dr. Ben Woodfinden

00:38:07.900 fairly soon by the sounds of things with his studies and endeavors.

00:38:11.760 So, and again, I just like seeing some nuanced political discourse.

00:38:15.300 And, you know, you know my rants on this show.

00:38:17.000 You know, I get people worked up and go issue by issue.

00:38:19.640 But at the same time, there can be room to talk about things issue by issue.

00:38:23.100 And as he said, you know, it's lazy, it's wasteful.

00:38:25.540 Oh, that person is a populist.

00:38:27.620 So then suddenly it's not worth talking about anymore.

00:38:29.580 Well, that's not right.

00:38:30.340 That's not a good way to open these things up or look into them and follow further.

00:38:35.860 So either way, it was good to have Ben on there to talk about a little bit of that.

00:38:41.680 Let me get another, we've got such a packed show today.

00:38:43.820 I want to make sure I cover our sponsors.

00:38:45.780 So another one of our sponsors I talk about every day is the Canadian Shooting Sports Association.

00:38:51.440 I can imagine their email inbox this last few weeks has been pretty busy.

00:38:55.500 I mean, you know, we have an assault against our ability to use and enjoy and, you know, possess firearms

00:39:02.500 like we haven't seen since the early 90s

00:39:04.820 with Trudeau's handgun freeze

00:39:06.600 and his plans on recategorizing even more firearms.

00:39:09.540 Well, the Canadian Shooting Sports Association is a group.

00:39:12.340 Their name is sort of self-explanatory.

00:39:13.860 They're an association of people who enjoy shooting sports.

00:39:16.340 And that can mean anything from collecting,

00:39:18.160 target shooting by athletes.

00:39:20.020 I mean, that's a fantastic sport.

00:39:21.400 You know, cross country along

00:39:22.360 and then you're heavy breathing

00:39:23.140 and trying to shoot a target in distance.

00:39:25.120 All of those things.

00:39:26.440 And they provide the resources, you know, safe utilization.

00:39:30.180 They give lists for where events are.

00:39:32.500 And most important of all, they advocate on your behalf, they educate, they push back against these

00:39:38.420 moves to take away this fine, you know, ability to be able to utilize firearms safely, because

00:39:43.760 it's the law abiding ones, it's the ones in the association are the ones we always get cracked

00:39:47.440 down on when some lunatic, unfortunately, goes out and does the worst possible thing. Speaking

00:39:52.100 of nuanced discussions, law abiding firearmers are as repelled and disgusted when they see

00:39:57.400 shootings and armed robberies and terrible things like that as anybody else, if not more

00:40:02.440 because you know that it's going to come back on us.

00:40:04.380 So this is where we get together.

00:40:05.660 This is where you organize.

00:40:06.660 You got to join though.

00:40:07.400 You got to take out a membership.

00:40:08.460 That's the only way to stand up for yourself

00:40:09.720 is to join together and do that.

00:40:11.820 And you can do that

00:40:12.520 at the Canadian Shooting Sports Association.

00:40:14.760 Their website is cssa-cila.org

00:40:19.080 or just Google them up and take out a membership

00:40:20.840 because again, if you don't stand up for your rights,

00:40:23.300 nobody's going to do it on your behalf.

00:40:25.480 They're trying.

00:40:26.240 They need your help.

00:40:28.020 All right, listen,

00:40:28.440 I'm just going to look a little over at the comment scroll

00:40:30.540 and see, uh, uh, yeah, lots of discussion on the dogs. You know, I want to, I'm going to have more

00:40:37.340 of that talk next week and that I want to get some guests on to talk about that sort of thing

00:40:41.100 and stuff like that. I want it to be nuanced. I mean, we cover that a lot on the show. Everybody

00:40:43.920 knows I'm an animal lover. Uh, irresponsible animal owners drive me not similar to the firearm

00:40:50.020 things. Right. And, uh, uh, as somebody else was pointing out, this was a trio of dogs. I mean,

00:40:55.280 there's things that happen. I see that with those meatheads in my own house, though they don't get

00:40:58.620 violent when when dogs get together as people talking about the pack mentality and there's

00:41:02.220 truth to it they can stir each other up it gets worse and worse and in this case it again led to

00:41:07.440 them you know dogs that probably i wouldn't be surprised were typically very friendly prior but

00:41:11.340 then worked themselves into a frenzy but it's still unforgivable there's a problem i mean a

00:41:15.100 person died we have to look into that we how did this happen how do we stop this um and in other

00:41:21.520 cases like that so we'll have more talk about that in the future because there are some strong

00:41:25.520 points of views from a number of people on it. I mean, we saw an awful outcome. I feel terrible

00:41:29.380 for, you know, three dogs. They're saying they're still in custody of the Humane Society for now.

00:41:34.060 We know those ones are going to be put down. I don't like seeing dogs put down either. And

00:41:38.580 but again, you know, this is too dangerous. You can't keep them after that's happened. That's

00:41:43.520 just the way it goes. People come first. People still always come first. Even though I like dogs 0.99

00:41:48.300 more than I like people, I understand legislatively people still come first. Okay, let's look at some

00:41:53.720 new stuff as well going beyond that. And that's, Dave mentioned that the CRTC disapproval level now

00:42:00.580 at 22%, a quarter of Canadians disapprove of the CRTC and that's Canadian Radio Television

00:42:06.780 Commission, or Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Commission. They make it

00:42:12.460 bigger and bigger, it seems all the time. CRTC, it's been around a long time and they've been

00:42:16.900 pushing to control the internet now. I mean, I remember way back at the end of the 90s,

00:42:22.820 there was this big report put out by the CRTC because people are concerned then they're saying

00:42:25.700 we've decided right now we're not going to regulate the internet what it really meant was

00:42:30.180 we don't like all that information being shared but we can't figure out how to regulate the

00:42:33.780 internet so we're just going to pretend that we're going to leave alone for the time being

00:42:36.420 either way it's gotten worse and you know we've had Peter Menzies on before he was a

00:42:42.660 with the CRTC I mean there were days when it was common sense when there was a need of regulation

00:42:46.640 and I'm watching radio broadcasts, things like that.

00:42:50.260 But now it's gone bad

00:42:52.600 and the government's using it as a tool to control information.

00:42:55.520 And with 22% of Canadians disapproving it,

00:42:57.900 which is kind of interesting

00:42:58.660 because I bet you a few years ago,

00:43:01.260 you'd be hard pressed to find 22% of Canadians

00:43:04.760 who even really know what the CRTC is.

00:43:07.480 So this organization that really kind of operated

00:43:09.920 in the background of government for a long, long time

00:43:11.960 is now starting to become front and center

00:43:13.760 and what people are seeing, they aren't liking.

00:43:16.640 I mean, you know, how often do you see any bureaucracy where you, you know, aside from perhaps the Canadian Revenue Agency, where a lot of people all at once would say, no, I actually do not like that agency whatsoever. And in the case of the CRTC, yeah, we're looking at almost a quarter of Canadians surveying say they have an unfavorable opinion of this, you know, which is really just a bureaucratic regulatory body.

00:43:37.360 but that's because of all these announcements.

00:43:40.180 They're going after YouTube videos

00:43:41.520 and the Broadcasting Act

00:43:42.860 and they're going after independent media

00:43:45.080 like ourselves, shows like this.

00:43:47.960 C11, C18, these liberal bills of control

00:43:50.620 are coming after us

00:43:51.780 and they're using the CARTC as a tool

00:43:55.160 to try and control information.

00:43:59.220 Always fear when they try to control information.

00:44:03.080 Here's a, this is from commenter Brad.

00:44:05.640 And Brad there saying, good afternoon, Corey.

00:44:08.300 Andrew Scheer had a good video on this.

00:44:09.740 Okay, so perhaps look up Andrew Scheer and the CRTC and some of their things.

00:44:15.420 There's certainly more to look into.

00:44:16.800 But it's interesting, like I said, what's usually kind of a benign background

00:44:19.560 sort of government bureaucracy, there's many, many of them out there.

00:44:22.300 And suddenly it's actually catching interest and people are not impressed with it.

00:44:28.140 And I guess we could look at it as heartening too.

00:44:31.040 It means more Canadians are paying attention to some of these issues.

00:44:33.540 This is the frustration this show.

00:44:34.740 That's where we feel like we're screaming into the wind sometimes.

00:44:37.500 And I know in a few minutes, I'm going to have my next guest on.

00:44:39.900 And this is a gentleman who's been screaming into the wind about the ambulance coverage in Alberta for years now.

00:44:44.560 I mean, I was looking up some stuff that Mr. Porter had been doing and news articles from seven years ago, you know, talking about what we're seeing now.

00:44:52.960 We knew this.

00:44:53.760 We knew this.

00:44:54.400 And people are still trying, and I appreciate that they're still trying to change things.

00:44:59.280 Eventually, we can hope that enough people finally pay attention.

00:45:02.760 hopefully with as few tragedies as possible to catch people's eyes and make them realize something

00:45:07.520 has to change. It's difficult to make change. It's frustrating. You feel like you're beating

00:45:14.140 your head against the wall. But one thing you can be guaranteed is nothing will change if you give

00:45:17.800 up. That's an assurance. You'll lose for sure if you don't try. So we're going to talk about one

00:45:22.960 of those frustrating things. But the apathy of Canadians is our own worst enemy. Let's look

00:45:29.360 into a little bit more news copy here before we move on to the guest segment though. Oil demand

00:45:34.040 has been, here's the beauty. It's expected to remain steady through 2030, says the Department

00:45:40.420 of the Environment. Of course it is. You know, we've been talking about this for years. It's

00:45:44.920 funny that they suddenly realized this. We're seeing some of that online. You know, you remember

00:45:48.160 it wasn't that long ago. So many activists and people, when the oil prices went low, said that's

00:45:51.820 it. That's it. It's done. Oil demand is never coming back. The world's moved off oil. Let's

00:45:56.080 transition, give up your oil field jobs, move along, it's done. No, it's not. And every economist

00:46:01.780 worth their salt, every energy analyst worth their salt has already said, no, no, we need oil and gas

00:46:07.800 as much as we ever have. In fact, we anticipate the demand is going to grow for quite some time.

00:46:13.480 And it seems the Department of Environment has suddenly just realized that. This is the stuff

00:46:17.500 that starts to get me a little bit worried, though. This is when I start to get a little

00:46:21.360 bit worried. I've talked about that before on this show. I've talked about history repeating itself.

00:46:25.200 I've talked about stuff that happens in Canada. And when this looks so much right now, like it

00:46:29.600 did in the late seventies, early eighties, when interest rates were through the roof, inflation

00:46:34.020 was going crazy. We had an odious Trudeau in power. And for decades, Alberta had been trying

00:46:39.660 to get its oil out East and Eastern leadership kept saying, no, keep your oil out in Alberta.

00:46:44.080 We don't want it. We can get it cheaper from Venezuela, Saudi Arabia. And then suddenly when

00:46:48.000 the prices went through the roof, suddenly Alberta's oil was Canada's oil. Suddenly,

00:46:53.440 well, you guys have got to share it with us. We can't be paying these high prices at the pump

00:46:57.500 while you're pumping it out of the ground out there. Oh dear. This is a problem. This is a 0.98

00:47:01.000 catastrophe. We're going to bring in the national energy program and make it fair. You love that

00:47:06.320 word fair, right? For everybody. So now we've got, you know, it's, it's unfortunate. It shows

00:47:11.160 my mistrust, I guess you could say with the government in general. When I see a positive

00:47:18.740 release, I guess, in a sense from then, it seems to make, you know, some, some common sense with

00:47:23.180 accepting that demand is going to be rising for at least eight, 10 more years, at least.

00:47:28.400 And that's coming from a government bureaucracy. But it also worries me that it's because they're

00:47:32.720 setting the stage to do something untowards for us out in the West with it. We'll wait and see.

00:47:39.380 I mean, we saw also that they're still not too eager to bring stuff along. They approved, you

00:47:43.260 know, the Bay de Nord offshore oil project in Newfoundland with no problems there, but they

00:47:51.360 still shut down an expansion of an Alberta oil sands project. So again, you know, their liking

00:47:58.480 of Western oil still hasn't grown too terribly much. But maybe some reality will start to drift

00:48:03.900 in with our federal masters. And maybe this is some of the first signs of it, right? As I said,

00:48:08.620 there's only what 5% of the country, even though years and years they've been working on it,

00:48:11.680 have gone into electric vehicles. So you got to accept that the big transition isn't going to

00:48:18.080 happen right away. Maybe one day, but not right away. All right. Well, I see my guest in the

00:48:23.200 lobby there, George Porter. If he's ready, I'll bring him in. And we want to talk about

00:48:27.580 AHS ambulance service within Alberta and basically just kind of the mess we've made of it. And Mr.

00:48:33.500 Porter is a veteran paramedic in Alberta who's been on this subject for quite some time. I saw

00:48:40.180 him at a town hall meeting, I believe in Okotoks. It would have been August, I think. And hearing

00:48:45.660 about all the things we're still hearing about today. So thank you very much for joining us

00:48:48.880 today, Mr. Porter. Well, thank you, Corey. I appreciate your interest in this and keeping it

00:48:53.720 front and center and having me here. Yeah. So, I mean, I do want to state, like we had a recent

00:49:00.940 tragedy that's kind of brought ambulance services to the fore, but we're still finding out details.

00:49:05.320 So we'll kind of stay out of those weeds. I mean, it might've been a dispatch issue. It might've been

00:49:09.300 a number of things that happened there. There's certainly some investigation has to happen

00:49:12.900 because something clearly went terribly wrong

00:49:14.640 and then had the worst possible outcome.

00:49:16.720 But it's brought the issue of timely medical service

00:49:20.500 to the forefront, which if you could look at it

00:49:24.100 as a positive development in a sense,

00:49:26.220 now's the time to get out there and talk to people

00:49:28.020 and make them realize that we're all this vulnerable

00:49:29.840 and we very soon could see another tragedy like this

00:49:32.440 as somebody dies waiting for medical service.

00:49:35.760 Well, Corey, people need to understand

00:49:37.620 that this is not an isolated incident.

00:49:41.780 these things are happening on a regular basis it's been just a short while ago a woman in calgary

00:49:49.620 watched her husband bleed to death for an hour before an ambulance showed up they disconnected

00:49:55.860 a call because they had calls stacked up waiting and they couldn't keep her on the line so they

00:50:00.980 did an emergency disconnect i've responded to one myself my longest response time is an hour

00:50:07.940 and 17 minutes for a chest pain collapse turned out to be an old friend of mine and uh yeah it's

00:50:14.500 been a few years ago and so these things are going on on a regular basis it's just ones like this that

00:50:19.700 they tend to hit the media and and become a an issue and alberta health and ems management

00:50:27.460 response is you know it's when you don't have an excuse or when you don't have a solution

00:50:33.780 Corey, you make excuses. And that's all we've seen for years, years.

00:50:40.020 Well, and the frustrating part is, though, there are solutions and you've been proposing solutions and they don't want to hear them.

00:50:46.260 I mean, there's some aspects that come up, you know, from how they did change and centralize the authorities.

00:50:52.460 So suddenly rural ambulances are being all drawn into the urban centers and leaving us without coverage.

00:50:56.700 Well, we didn't have a problem before. The solution is go back to when it was working.

00:51:01.000 I mean, that's one of the ones I think we could kind of work towards.

00:51:04.060 If we had something, it wasn't broke, they tried to fix it, and now we're stranded.

00:51:09.120 Show me any government program that runs effectively and efficiently.

00:51:14.120 And this is certainly part of that.

00:51:18.680 We used to be cutting edge.

00:51:22.100 We used to be leading edge in EMS in this province, and we can't even keep up.

00:51:27.840 It's just been so frustrating and discouraging to see the failures and how far down this has fallen with no action.

00:51:36.560 We have no leadership.

00:51:37.560 We have no leadership in EMS.

00:51:39.240 We have no leadership in Alberta Health Services.

00:51:43.180 All we get is excuses and stats.

00:51:46.200 And, well, you know, you can make stats say anything you want.

00:51:49.980 But nobody does anything.

00:51:52.080 Nobody will stand up and do the right thing for the staff or for patient care.

00:51:57.840 And that's exacerbating the problem. I mean, we're even hearing from other facets saying, oh, we just need more money. We need more resources because we're shorthanded. Well, there's some truth to that, but they're wearing out existing paramedics through this. I imagine the stress of being in such a broken system, I mean, isn't keeping staff retention very high.

00:52:17.660 oh it we have last i heard was 42 percent of the medics are booked off a lot of them with

00:52:24.800 they're just exhausted they're worn out you know and hs ems comes on the news once in a while pats

00:52:31.480 everybody on the head says how much they love the medics aren't they wonderful and but they don't

00:52:35.900 have their back and and the medics know that and we've had a few brave medics that stand up and

00:52:40.740 and and uh even using ahs's own data and they get suspended and one of them while he's suspended

00:52:50.480 for a week his ambulance is out of service because they got no staff to man it we got 350 400 shifts

00:52:58.540 a week in this province that are uncovered they don't have enough medics and

00:53:03.440 And if they did have enough medics, they don't have enough ambulances anymore.

00:53:12.020 Well, and then that's something you did bring up, I believe, again, at that town hall I went to was the discipline on anybody who speaks up.

00:53:19.760 Like, there's no real whistleblower legislation or anything to protect somebody from within the system.

00:53:23.640 If they speak up, they find themselves out of a job, which only adds to the problem.

00:53:27.840 Yep.

00:53:28.880 Yep.

00:53:29.100 there's consequences for speaking up and and uh you know i guess that's why i've been riding this

00:53:34.260 poor tired old horse for going on 13 years lobbying for this cory years and you mean to

00:53:42.380 tell me that there's not one manager and i can't call them leaders there's not one manager in ahs

00:53:48.700 or ems that's been able to come up with a single idea a single solution in third going on 13 years

00:53:57.540 to fix this?

00:53:59.100 Corey, most of this stuff could be turned around in 24 hours

00:54:02.240 if we had a leader, if we had some will, if we had a desire.

00:54:07.180 It's difficult to change legislation, but they did it last week.

00:54:10.780 They said, we don't have enough staff.

00:54:12.020 So, boom, they decide that EMRs can now work ambulance.

00:54:16.600 Emergency medical responders can work with EMTs and paramedics

00:54:19.560 and ambulance because we don't have enough staff.

00:54:22.440 If the will is there, it can happen overnight.

00:54:25.740 that they spend so much time and energy

00:54:28.800 maintaining this dysfunctional status quo,

00:54:33.740 they can spend a fraction of that effort and fix it.

00:54:36.860 Well, and then one of the things

00:54:38.340 that even a lay person like me can see

00:54:39.980 that I would think should be relatively easy to solve

00:54:42.920 was, I mean, I wrote a column,

00:54:45.600 I've written a number of columns on this

00:54:47.040 over the last year and change.

00:54:49.200 So for a picture for it,

00:54:51.180 Nico's pulled it up a couple of times.

00:54:52.800 I just pulled by the Rocky View Hospital.

00:54:54.240 It was just a random time in the middle of the day to have a look.

00:54:56.520 I pulled around back by the emergency area and outside I could see, I believe, five or six ambulances all parked.

00:55:02.540 And then within the enclosed garage area, it looked like there were possibly as many as half a dozen more sitting in there.

00:55:07.400 And that's not an ambulance depot.

00:55:09.480 That's not a storage spot.

00:55:10.380 That's an emergency department.

00:55:11.480 So I can only assume there's paramedics associated with those ambulances all sitting around doing hallway care in that hospital rather than being out in the streets taking care of people in emergency situations.

00:55:22.540 Like, what is it going to take to force the issue to say, look, these aren't nurses, these aren't doctors, these are emergency care professionals, take these patients and let them get back to work?

00:55:32.860 They say that the medics can't leave because that's potentially patient abandonment.

00:55:37.980 Well, Corey, those people are in the safest place they can be.

00:55:40.500 They're in a tertiary care facility.

00:55:43.160 We do have a patient abandonment issue, and that's the patients that are calling 911 and waiting for that elusive ambulance to show up.

00:55:51.280 those are the patients that are being abandoned those are the patients that we have no business

00:55:56.260 ems has no business treating patients in a hospital hallway that's not our job that's

00:56:02.800 we don't have the resources and when we're doing that we can't we can't be out on the street where

00:56:08.440 we're supposed to be and those are moral injuries for these medics they know what's going on they

00:56:12.600 know there's 30 40 calls stacked up waiting for an ambulance to clear someplace to respond

00:56:18.620 and all you get from ahs and ems is gaslighting you get them coming on on media on a regular basis

00:56:25.720 saying you know in spite of what you're hearing um we always have an ambulance available to respond

00:56:31.820 and you lucky albert and get the closest ambulance and the and the general public says

00:56:36.620 what's porter talking about everything's good it's true we do have an ambulance available to

00:56:42.820 respond to calgary right now even though they're they might be in code red but that nearest nearest

00:56:48.360 available ambulance might be Fort McMurray and we're seeing response times more and more and

00:56:55.200 more, an hour, two hours. Last one I'm aware of was an ambulance dispatch from three hours and

00:57:01.460 20 minutes away to respond to an emergency in Edmonton. We see ambulances in Lethbridge

00:57:07.040 responding to emergencies in Calgary. I've seen so many times when there's not a single ambulance

00:57:12.900 available to respond between area cross field and lethbridge they're doing routine transfers 0.89

00:57:20.100 they're stuck in a hospital hallway someplace it's absolutely asinine and that's another uh issue

00:57:27.140 that came up too is using ambulances fully staffed with paramedics for uh non-emergent transportation

00:57:33.780 of patients like why is it impossible just to get a lightly equipped uh vehicle to move somebody

00:57:40.740 rather than taking these specialized emergency vehicles off the streets i hear things like that

00:57:46.020 for all the time corey from people like yourself people non-ems people come up with perfectly

00:57:51.060 viable solutions heck i see the other day that this ahs is leaning on the public for ideas on

00:57:59.140 how to solve the ems crisis what the heck are we paying these managers our supposed leaders for

00:58:04.820 we're going to the public for ideas on what how to fix this we have to form a committee we have

00:58:11.220 to form task forces we have to form have studies to figure out how to solve this it's plain as the

00:58:17.420 day is long cory get those crews out of the hospital hallways so they can do their job

00:58:23.200 quit using ambulances inappropriately i mean the union solution to everything is well we need more

00:58:29.540 ambulances we need more medics likely we do but until you start using what we have appropriately

00:58:35.300 you don't know what you need and you could put 50 more ambulance staffed ambulances on the road

00:58:40.500 tomorrow and the only thing that would result is you got 50 more stacked up in a hospital hallway

00:58:47.620 yeah so i mean it's a big problem with with a bunch of levels but i mean it is there then a

00:58:52.820 short staffing in the hospital emergency areas for the hospital staff that's making them this reliant

00:58:58.020 or uh it's mostly a bad issue and i don't pretend to be an expert in in the hospital problems i've

00:59:05.300 got a lot of ideas that could go towards solving some of that but that's not my area of expertise

00:59:12.020 and ems i told management 13 years ago i said as long as you're willing to let those crews

00:59:19.860 sit in a hospital hallway nothing will change why would it why would the hospital do anything

00:59:24.900 different if you're, you're covering their shortcomings, their shortfall. We have no

00:59:30.900 business being there. We have no business being there. And if they just, if EMS management did

00:59:36.440 just that one thing today, it would be a huge step towards solving a lot of these issues.

00:59:43.920 So dispatch is another area of debate going on right now and concern. And it sounds like with

00:59:49.340 a recent incident, that was definitely something went wrong with dispatch and communication. So

00:59:53.580 everybody's pointing their fingers at each other. And I've been finding a pretty repugnant watching

00:59:56.840 them all play in the blame game when right now we've got a person who needlessly died and you

01:00:01.440 should be seeking bloody solutions rather than trying to blame everybody for it. But

01:00:04.500 something I'd heard before is one of the things with 911 that they will not and cannot tell you

01:00:08.920 ever is how far away is help once you've called. Like I'm just imagining if I were on the scene

01:00:14.880 and I had this poor woman bleeding to death in front of me and I phone and they said, well,

01:00:18.760 it's going to be half an hour. You know what? I'll get the stains on my seat. I'll pack her

01:00:22.920 in the back of my car and drive her the eight minutes it was to Foothills Hospital so she can 1.00

01:00:27.120 get treatment rather than sit here and watch her bleed to death. Why not let citizens get a little 1.00

01:00:31.300 proactive then in these cases, but they won't do it. As far as you know, there's always somebody

01:00:35.180 one minute away. Yep, that's exact. And there was a day when that was true. And those days are long

01:00:42.660 gone. And that is something that we're pushing with our citizen action groups and different

01:00:47.280 meetings we have is people you need to have a plan b you're right the dispatchers should be telling

01:00:53.740 you how far away that ambulance is and giving you the option to the opportunity to look after

01:01:01.500 yourself people you need to have a plan b because ems cannot respond in a timely manner like we

01:01:11.140 used to be able to but it just seems like a ridiculous rule too you know i mean what why

01:01:15.840 are you keeping people in the dark on something as simple as just how long is this emergency

01:01:19.180 service going to be? It seems like more one of those butt covering sorts of rules rather than

01:01:23.600 anything to help anybody else, just so people don't actually know how screwed up it is. 0.87

01:01:27.560 Yep. The friend that I alluded to, that I responded to an hour and that's about an hour

01:01:31.660 and a half. He had a pulse and was breathing for 20 minutes after he went down. They repeatedly

01:01:36.600 called dispatch, you know, so we just put them in the van, take them to the hospital. We're 20

01:01:41.020 minutes away and they said no ambulance is on its way knowing that i was well over an hour away from

01:01:47.380 that location and we got people we got we got ambulance crews responding lights and siren

01:01:54.080 ridiculous distances uh i got a text the other day from a girl who's in tears responding over

01:02:01.480 an hour away for a cardiac arrest they're doing cpr on this guy that's that's putting these crews 0.70

01:02:07.460 at risk driving high speed lights and siren it's putting other motorists on the road at risk

01:02:13.380 for what what are you going to do when you get there an hour and 20 hour and 10 minutes later 0.88

01:02:20.900 it's it's absolutely asinine even a person with the most rudimentary of first aid training knows

01:02:26.740 that i mean just time is of the essence in a number of life-threatening scenarios that can

01:02:31.380 be easily solved with the right resources i mean anaphylactic shock cardiac issues

01:02:37.140 bleeding i mean these are things that your average lay person on the street might not be able to do

01:02:41.220 something about but an ambulance can very readily uh you know stabilize somebody but if they're

01:02:46.580 waiting too bloody long then there's no point yeah well what do we do why are we even responding

01:02:51.940 to things like that and you know as crass as it sounds as i said you know you guys need to phone

01:02:57.780 your supervisor tell dispatch you're not going like send the funeral home as harsh as that is

01:03:03.620 Because that's, that's the reality of it. And, you know, this,

01:03:07.780 this poor gal that had the, uh, uh, the dog attack. And I,

01:03:12.100 I feel so bad for that. And so angry when I heard that. Um,

01:03:18.880 and, and you're right, there's lots of finger pointing. So release the tapes,

01:03:23.740 release the time shots, you know, why not?

01:03:28.900 Yeah. Well, maybe it's time. And that's one of the things is demand our,

01:03:31.700 provincial leaders that's one of the things they can do is start a real investigation not an

01:03:36.820 internal one let's have a task force get on this bloody things you know subpoena those sorts of

01:03:41.480 things let's expose it well minister copying announces that ahs investigated themselves on

01:03:47.400 this and he's happy to announce that we didn't do anything wrong everything's good and so that gets

01:03:53.540 swept under the carpet like all these other terrible tragedies that have happened and we

01:03:58.940 continue doing nothing. There needs to be a post cleaning. And I can tell the frustration in your

01:04:05.320 voice and it's with all of it. But I mean, as I said, kind of at the start, I mean, still,

01:04:09.480 you got it. We got to keep trying. I mean, we wouldn't win otherwise. And right now they are

01:04:14.140 in the middle of a leadership race. It's one of the few times that you get a bunch of them actually

01:04:17.100 paying a little bit of attention. So hopefully some people can make this an issue with those

01:04:21.660 candidates and say, Hey, take a stance on this. Let's document your stance. Let's get your word

01:04:27.460 on this because we're going to follow up on it. And let's change this damn mess because this is 0.99

01:04:31.280 just not acceptable and it's ridiculous. Enough studies, enough committees, enough, enough, 0.99

01:04:37.400 enough. Just do what needs to be done. That's simple. You could, this could be, as I said

01:04:43.900 before, this could be corrected in no time, could be turned around. Just if we had some leadership,

01:04:50.300 we have no leadership at any level. Well, I'll be interviewing probably most, if not all,

01:04:56.580 the candidates over the next couple of months for the leadership and you can rest assured I'll be

01:05:00.000 bringing this one up with them. Is there more you're going to be doing with your organization?

01:05:03.700 Like where can people find information on how they can try to take part and keep this issue

01:05:07.940 alive and make some change? A lot of communities, particularly around Calgary, have citizen action

01:05:14.660 committees, citizen action groups. Some are very active. Cochran, you had Brian Winters on your

01:05:19.920 show here a while back. You guys did a wonderful job on that program. Brian's a good guy to

01:05:26.200 contact cochran um people need to understand that when you know they talk about code reds when

01:05:32.480 calgary doesn't have any ambulances available to respond nobody talks about rural code reds

01:05:39.480 but people need to understand when calgary's in code red with no ambulances

01:05:43.360 you can be guaranteed there's not an available ambulance within probably 100 kilometers

01:05:49.220 outside of calgary because they've all been sucked into the city and are sitting in hospital

01:05:54.000 hallways or doing calls in the city. It's not just an urban problem. And that's why you see

01:06:01.860 these things where your whole Southern half of Alberta has got no available ambulance to respond.

01:06:06.700 Yeah. I live in Prittis and our ambulance is, uh, basically seems to come back to town for

01:06:11.540 oil changes and then goes back to the city. Yep. Yep. You're absolutely right.

01:06:16.600 All right. Well, thank you for the work you're doing and trying to keep going on this. And

01:06:20.220 thanks for coming on to talk to us about it today. Hopefully one way or another,

01:06:23.100 we can hammer some common sense into them out there and get some positive changes well thank

01:06:27.860 you cory and i uh i told management all these years ago that i would hear until this was fixed

01:06:34.280 and in my wildest dreams i wouldn't have believed that all these years later i'd still be beating

01:06:39.840 this same drum but i'll be here till this is done right on well thank you very much george and uh

01:06:45.760 maybe the next time we talk we'll have something positive to talk about hope here's hoping thank

01:06:50.640 Corey, I appreciate it.

01:06:51.740 Thank you.

01:06:53.420 So, yes, it's George Porter.

01:06:55.100 As I said, yeah, there's a lot of media stories.

01:06:57.380 I'm online.

01:06:57.900 He's taken part with others, like, you know, throughout Cochrane and down the south and

01:07:03.680 holding town hall meetings and trying to bring this out.

01:07:05.420 And, yeah, the rural aspect, there's just so much to cover.

01:07:07.620 15 minutes, 20 minutes isn't enough.

01:07:09.920 And this is multifaceted.

01:07:11.540 The system is falling apart and underserving people on a lot of levels.

01:07:14.980 And the rural areas, yeah, we are in terrible trouble.

01:07:17.840 And you've got to think, too.

01:07:18.640 I mean, we don't necessarily have large trauma centers near us in these rural areas.

01:07:22.440 Having that ability to transport people is more acute down there than even in the city.

01:07:27.720 I mean, it's going to be a longer haul to get to a hospital automatically just because of where you are.

01:07:34.140 And meanwhile, there's nothing around.

01:07:37.260 And that Health Services Association of Alberta, if you look them up and if you're on Twitter, I mean, it's been great.

01:07:42.940 At least they keep pointing it out.

01:07:44.580 They keep putting those nice Google graphics up there showing, hey, check this out.

01:07:48.520 they're dispatching an ambulance from Banff to go to Northeast Calgary, or they're sending one from

01:07:53.180 Brooks to go to Airdrie. Like, it's ridiculous. And of course, what happens then when there's 0.93

01:07:58.580 an accident in Banff? I mean, you're sucking it from somewhere else. You're leaving another 0.97

01:08:02.800 potential catastrophe behind you. And how, as I said, you could see the frustration from Mr.

01:08:09.160 Porter. How has it taken this long just to address this? I mean, people are screaming it from the

01:08:14.780 rooftops. They're holding the meetings. People are dying. Staff are burning out. And there's

01:08:20.040 solutions. This isn't something terribly complicated. As he said, there's a number of

01:08:23.300 changes you could do in five minutes that will start to take the pressure off. I mean,

01:08:27.840 sure, there's bigger systematic changes that have to be made and other things, but

01:08:32.340 there are immediate things right in front of us that we can be doing. And we won't do it.

01:08:38.420 There's this stubborn, entrenched protection of the status quo, this fear of shaking anything up.

01:08:44.400 Plus, the part that infuriated me at that town hall meeting I went to as well was hearing about a paramedic who'd been disciplined and shut down for daring to speak up.

01:08:53.700 So, I mean, they're trying to silence the discourse.

01:08:55.760 You don't try to silence them.

01:08:56.820 You find out what's wrong.

01:08:59.260 And just all over the place.

01:09:02.640 It's just maddening.

01:09:04.860 So let's get on to some other stuff.

01:09:06.600 As George is going to keep on it, I assure you I will, too.

01:09:09.880 or as I said, I've written a number of columns on this one,

01:09:12.220 and I'm going to carry on with it.

01:09:13.880 And any time I can point to good resources, I will.

01:09:16.360 And as I said, I'm going to keep pressing

01:09:18.540 these leadership candidates on this.

01:09:22.200 Because, you know, one of the things, it's an opportunity,

01:09:24.180 I tell you, to get to these candidates when you can,

01:09:28.580 that's when they're most receptive,

01:09:30.100 and corner them and get a hard answer.

01:09:32.260 And if you get whoever it might be

01:09:33.580 who's running for the leadership,

01:09:34.700 and they said during one of these shows,

01:09:36.200 yes, I'm going to change that.

01:09:37.920 I'm going to give it back to the municipalities

01:09:39.740 I'm going to bring in legislation to just outright stop hallway care.

01:09:44.320 Well, if a year later they haven't done it,

01:09:45.940 that's when you pull up that interview and say, hey, Premier,

01:09:48.600 what the hell goes here?

01:09:50.120 What's going on?

01:09:50.800 Why didn't you do this?

01:09:51.540 You said this.

01:09:52.160 Did you lie?

01:09:53.100 You can put their feet to the fire.

01:09:55.820 It's a strategy.

01:09:56.860 You have to use strategy. 0.99

01:09:57.920 I mean, these politicians will blow sunshine up your butt 0.97

01:10:00.020 and avoid committing to anything if they can possibly get away with it. 0.95

01:10:03.800 But you don't have to let them get away with it.

01:10:06.660 Part of it, you know, lands on us.

01:10:07.800 I mean, I know it's, it's, it's not for lack of effort on George's part that, uh, you know,

01:10:12.740 things aren't getting done and he's still carrying on at it, but we just, we've all got to get on

01:10:16.380 them. We've got to get on their cases. We got to keep pressuring them because they won't budge

01:10:20.760 without a foot against their butt. You know, that's just, uh, the hard reality of it with 0.99

01:10:26.480 bureaucracies, with things like this. And now we got too much going on. Uh, let's see, let's get

01:10:31.980 to some other news before Ms. Lewis comes on, which should be any moment now. Let's, this is

01:10:38.080 something, you know, speaking of exhaustion and tiresome and going on. So here we are going into

01:10:43.060 summer, looking forward to what might be one of the better, you know, not Jason Kenney's best

01:10:47.420 summer ever, say of last year, but just, it looks like for the most part, the pandemics behind us

01:10:51.760 has been considered endemic. It's still out there. It's still making some people sick. It's still

01:10:56.580 harming some folks, but we're at the point where we can start living again. We're not masking up,

01:11:01.080 We're traveling. We're seeing family. We're going to sporting events. But we've always got those

01:11:06.460 finger-wagging health experts. And there she is, Dr. Teresa Tam. And right at the beginning of

01:11:11.420 this summer, wagging her finger, saying, we're going to have a seventh wave this fall. It's very

01:11:15.440 likely. So, you know, get ready for it, guys. Don't relax. Don't enjoy life. Don't kick back

01:11:22.720 because, you know, it's coming. And she says in her own state, we can't predict exactly how big

01:11:28.820 it's going to be. Well, then shut up. God, you got to keep us afraid all the time. We're sick 0.99

01:11:34.940 and tired of it. You know what is going to happen, I fear? Because I mean, viruses are real. Pandemics

01:11:39.940 are real. Something really big is going to come down the pipe. And by then people will have lost

01:11:44.220 so much trust in authorities, so much with the government and so much with these health clowns 0.85

01:11:48.800 like Tam, that even when the warnings come out saying, guys, you do have to get into your houses. 0.69

01:11:53.960 You do have to avoid contact. We do have to get this under control. It's really going to hurt

01:11:58.540 people, people aren't going to believe them. They aren't going to comply. And a very serious

01:12:04.100 pandemic is really going to knock people on their butt. I mean, it goes all the way back to the old 0.91

01:12:08.700 children's story of the boy that cried wolf. There's Brenda. Yeah, I just saw the commenter

01:12:13.700 from it. Boy that cried wolf. I mean, I understand. Tam has to watch these things and speak to these

01:12:20.100 things. That's her job. But fear mongering isn't her bloody job. And right now, we aren't in a 0.91

01:12:25.100 crisis point. So quit trying to create one. Quit trying to keep people like this. It's not helping.

01:12:31.120 And, you know, I swear some of these health experts, these ones we see, whether, you know,

01:12:37.280 it's Hinshaw or Tam or some of the others, they're going to miss this pandemic. These were,

01:12:41.280 you know, how often in the past, how often 10 years ago could anybody name their chief medical

01:12:45.460 officer provincially or federally? You've never heard of these guys. These were basement bureaucrats.

01:12:50.000 They were dorks. They were down there tracking syphilis outbreaks at high school dances. 0.99

01:12:53.800 and suddenly they're in the spotlight.

01:12:56.420 They're the most important bureaucrat in the country.

01:12:58.500 They're getting the coverage.

01:13:00.440 They're getting the adoration even.

01:13:02.520 I mean, I remember a while back there were T-shirts being made with hearts for Dina Hinshaw. 0.99

01:13:06.340 You know, there's been some unfair abuse on some of these health professionals too.

01:13:09.820 They're just trying to do a job, but we also have turned them into heroes.

01:13:13.140 And they're medical bureaucrats, guys.

01:13:15.020 Let's not forget that.

01:13:16.720 And it doesn't mean we always have to berate and beat on them,

01:13:19.440 but at the same time, they've got to remember what their role is.

01:13:22.160 And that role is not to be out there being a mouthpiece for whatever politician pays your bills.

01:13:27.840 You're supposed to stick to your job.

01:13:30.160 But no, they're starting the fear machine up, and I don't think it's going to have an impact.

01:13:36.140 I mean, that's the other thing I talked about a little while back and was with, it sounds like there's a push on to redefine what fully vaccinated is and making it three shots.

01:13:48.380 And if they do that, well, despite all the reminders and all the pushing and everything else,

01:13:53.520 less than half of Canadians have gotten their third shot, their booster.

01:13:57.760 I mean, people are getting complacent.

01:13:59.460 They're getting tired of being pushed and twirled around.

01:14:01.320 And I've said it before, I support vaccination.

01:14:03.400 I support free choice in vaccination.

01:14:05.300 There's a big difference between the two.

01:14:06.640 I don't support mandates.

01:14:07.680 I don't support a lot of these things.

01:14:09.500 But I think it's a good idea to get vaccinated.

01:14:11.660 I know the commenters are all going to go wild on me on that.

01:14:13.800 You always do.

01:14:14.240 That's okay.

01:14:15.160 That's okay.

01:14:15.660 We don't have to agree on it.

01:14:16.720 What we can agree on is it has to be a choice. And with every one of these subsequent mandates,

01:14:24.060 though, people are choosing not to. That's what I mean. The trust is dropping. You know,

01:14:27.960 you had 86% of people get the first two shots and less than half have gotten the third one

01:14:32.980 because they're tired out. They don't see the risk as being as great as what we'd always been

01:14:38.300 warned it would be. And if they keep up with this fear mongering, you're going to have a hell of a

01:14:43.800 time, trying to get compliance with health orders down the road if something very seriously occurs.

01:14:48.940 And I think it's a matter of time before something serious occurs. I don't know. It's way outside of

01:14:52.540 my expertise, but I just look at general things. We've got billions of people around the world.

01:14:56.220 We do know that viruses mutate. They change. They spread. We get new diseases. These diseases

01:15:00.820 disappear. Something's going to come. We should be learning from this pandemic so that we can

01:15:05.600 better address the next one instead of desperately clinging to it and trying to make this thing last

01:15:10.840 forever. So yeah, I don't know. You just, when I see those stories, I just feel my own shoulders

01:15:18.160 just sort of shrug and drop of exhaustion. Like you guys just aren't going to let this, let us

01:15:23.460 off the hook. And Canada is one of the worst. I mean, I've talked about that. It's killing our 0.98

01:15:26.640 tourism. It's damaging us on all sorts of levels. I mean, we've got, you know, the only mass mandates

01:15:33.080 on planes left on the planet. We're one of the only ones with these vaccine mandates to be able

01:15:37.900 to fly domestically and it's backing up our airports. We're seeing those scenes all over

01:15:41.760 the place. People aren't coming here. And are we seeing, that's the thing, if they say follow the

01:15:46.400 science, well, let's follow the science. On the countries that have opened up, the countries that

01:15:49.840 have allowed air travel without masks, air travel within their countries without vaccination, have

01:15:53.380 there been massive uncontrollable outbreaks because of that? No, they haven't. In fact,

01:15:58.640 it kind of makes you wonder just how negligible some of these health measures are in the first

01:16:02.900 place. So, you know, cut it out, but we don't want to. We're still hung up on this thing.

01:16:10.880 Ah, let's see. I'm afraid Ms. Lewis appears to be late. Hopefully she comes on soon, 0.96

01:16:16.100 but we'll see. We'll continue to talk about some other things. Let's see. Judge, this one's a kind

01:16:23.140 of an odd one. Judges, and Dave mentioned that too, I think, or maybe that was in the news

01:16:27.240 meeting this morning, a judge is reopening a Senate probe into racial discrimination in the

01:16:32.700 Senate. This is odd, you know, so it was a 2015 firing of the first South Asian individual to be

01:16:41.460 appointed a manager in the Senate administration. I mean, it says quite something. I mean, there's a

01:16:45.600 lot of South Asian, you know, that's just people from India in that area and that in Canada, I

01:16:49.660 mean, lots of professionals and very active Canadians. It took that long for somebody to

01:16:54.860 even get into a managerial position in the Senate. I guess that kind of says something. I'm not sure

01:16:59.560 what. But that person did get dismissed for some reason. And seven years in, now we're into still

01:17:05.700 an inquiry pushing on this. This was the director of human resources at the Senate, fired after two

01:17:11.060 years on the job. I guess the question though was, was this person fired because of their race? Or

01:17:19.400 was it just that this person wasn't very good? These are one of the things that needs the

01:17:22.160 investigation. It's making the news though on the story. I don't know. I don't want to speculate

01:17:25.780 too much on that one. Maybe there was a discrimination. Maybe there wasn't. It's an

01:17:29.960 internal thing. I'm just reading the news as I get it. So speaking of moving in the right direction

01:17:35.680 a little bit, here's another story that's a decent. It looks like at least Ontario's top

01:17:40.520 doctors remained, you know, better late than never. And this is really late that most of the

01:17:46.040 remaining COVID-19 mask mandates in the province are going to lift this weekend. So people will

01:17:51.300 be able to start. Here's where some of the baloney comes in. This is something that kind of gets to

01:17:55.320 wonder. So this is the quote from with the high vaccination rates and COVID-19 situation continuing

01:18:00.320 to improve most of the province's remaining requirements, including public transit will

01:18:03.860 expire on June 11th. Okay. But getting back to the science, you know, and again, I'm not anti-vaccination,

01:18:12.620 but we've learned from this vaccination, despite them selling it to us a year ago, speaking of the

01:18:16.480 mistrust, they were selling it to us a year ago saying this was going to stop the spread. And

01:18:20.940 some of them are denying that since we never told you that. Yes, you did. And I played a video

01:18:24.160 showing all of the different health authorities and all the different politicians, all the

01:18:27.460 different media members all saying, if you get vaccinated, it's going to stop the spread.

01:18:30.480 They told us that and they were wrong. They were dead wrong. And that's what changed the whole

01:18:35.820 basis of the vaccination plans. That's when I started really turning against the mandates

01:18:43.400 heavily. I never supported the mandates in the first place. But if there was any basis

01:18:47.980 to try and justify them, it would be because you will spread this to other people if you don't get

01:18:53.600 vaccinated and you go into public situations. Well, it doesn't stop the spread. So there's no

01:18:59.540 point for the bloody mandates. And when they talk about the high vaccination rates being why they

01:19:04.560 don't need masks, what are you talking about? It doesn't make a bloody difference. The vaccination

01:19:09.540 rate for the spread. So you're mixing your issues. And this is a chief medical officer saying this,

01:19:13.940 This is Dr. Kieran Moore in Ontario.

01:19:17.340 Again, the trust, guys.

01:19:19.280 If you're going to make us trust you on issues and things in the future,

01:19:23.180 you've got to quit BSing us right now.

01:19:26.620 It's not happening.

01:19:29.280 Let's see.

01:19:30.020 Let's get on to one more thing here.

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01:20:44.440 Ah, what else we got in the snooze here?

01:20:46.860 Yeah, this is something hitting it.

01:20:48.060 You know, I went on about this.

01:20:49.100 I don't know if I went on the show about it, but I sure went on to everybody near me over

01:20:52.400 it.

01:20:54.360 Passports got backlogged.

01:20:56.460 I had to get my member of parliament to intervene last, it was getting towards December because

01:21:01.740 I was planning to go to the states in January and I did go down, but I was waiting for months

01:21:05.580 and months for my passport renewal.

01:21:07.160 I put in my stuff in like June of last year

01:21:09.660 and it was getting into December

01:21:10.640 and still no sign of this thing.

01:21:12.680 And I would phone their 1-800 line.

01:21:14.320 I would get nothing.

01:21:14.860 I would get the runner out.

01:21:15.960 Oh, it looks like we might have 0.90

01:21:19.320 Leslie and Lewis in the lobby there.

01:21:20.540 We'll see quickly.

01:21:21.260 I'll turn to that quickly if that happens.

01:21:23.340 Either way, the passport delays are just destroying us.

01:21:28.760 You know, when we've got so many other tourism challenges

01:21:30.500 happening and everything else

01:21:31.840 and then to have this on top of it.

01:21:33.760 I mean, I know that's for Canadians

01:21:34.980 who want to travel outward and elsewhere.

01:21:37.160 But all the same, it's not doing us any bloody favours.

01:21:40.520 Can this government get things together?

01:21:41.800 So I had to actually phone the office of my Member of Parliament.

01:21:45.840 I'll put that tip out to other people, though, because it's amazing.

01:21:48.200 Even though the 1-800 number got me nothing, over and over,

01:21:51.040 and for a long period of time, within a week of getting my Member of Parliament on it,

01:21:58.800 or at least his assistant, they managed to get some response.

01:22:04.040 And I got my passport in time, and I was off to the races.

01:22:07.160 So let's see. I'm just looking in the private chat. Okay. I guess the Leslie and Lewis campaign

01:22:14.760 is having technical issues, trying to connect and can't get on the show. I'm not sure what else I

01:22:19.480 can offer during a live broadcast. I know she had another obligation coming up later. So she was

01:22:26.100 only available for 10 minutes and that kind of ran out. So we will try to get her on a third time.

01:22:30.620 I don't know. We'll see. So thanks for at least coming on. These are comments from Steve. He's

01:22:35.680 working on the campaign and uh you know city can answer some questions but that's okay steve uh

01:22:40.800 we'll try and get it a another time so i'm afraid we won't be able to get uh dr lewis on today to

01:22:47.120 talk about that and and it's too bad you know it was an interesting thing she's taking staking some

01:22:51.360 ground that's unique among the conservative race and that's uh talking about the the it was in the

01:22:56.240 press release the world economic forum uh travel program and um if you look it up you know she's

01:23:01.920 She's got all our releases.

01:23:02.860 They're on her website and check it out.

01:23:04.300 You know, get in there.

01:23:05.660 Saying that Canada is the first country along with the Netherlands to sign on with the WEF's pilot project known to introduce the known traveler digital identity, it's called.

01:23:14.540 Other partners include Air Canada, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, ironically, Airport in Montreal and Toronto's Pearson Airport, which of course these airports are not exactly shining examples of good stuff.

01:23:25.920 um but uh she at least is speaking up on it because of course you know a lot of politicians

01:23:31.120 are terrified of touching these things they don't want to talk world economic forum because they get

01:23:34.960 labeled as conspiracy theorists but it's there we know that we we know they're real it's not a

01:23:38.980 conspiracy it's it's an international group that really is focused on control and and uh you know

01:23:44.500 how strong their control or how far they'll get towards their goals well that's what's in question

01:23:48.220 so let's talk about it and this is concerning this is talk about sharing your information this

01:23:52.500 is talking about a digital ID given to organizations

01:23:55.680 that you don't trust.

01:23:57.060 You know, speaking of passports,

01:23:58.180 I mean, it's one thing to give your information

01:23:59.540 to the government of Canada.

01:24:00.800 It's another thing to have them sharing it

01:24:02.500 through these sorts of digital identifications

01:24:05.140 across the world like that.

01:24:07.560 So, I mean, I do appreciate Ms. Lewis bringing,

01:24:09.720 Dr. Lewis bringing that forward as part of her campaign.

01:24:12.780 Perhaps we'll get a chance to talk about it another time.

01:24:15.600 But again, I'll encourage people to go have a look,

01:24:17.700 check out her website, those releases are out there

01:24:19.600 and you can see those sorts of things.

01:24:21.140 who just had unfortunate lines crossed today, I'm afraid.

01:24:25.500 So let's wrap things up.

01:24:27.240 Tomorrow I'm going to have,

01:24:28.560 and this is going to be a fun one, actually.

01:24:30.040 Well, both will be fun.

01:24:31.060 I don't want to knock Mr. Craven,

01:24:32.760 our Ottawa columnist, David Craven.

01:24:38.000 He writes a lot of stuff for us,

01:24:39.960 very prolific, lots of things.

01:24:41.240 He's popular.

01:24:42.140 And we'll talk about some of the stories he's written.

01:24:44.300 He loves getting on there

01:24:45.460 and beating up on Justin Trudeau

01:24:47.220 and things such as that.

01:24:49.000 And after that, I've got author Derek Smith.

01:24:51.140 And he wrote about, where's that title? I don't have it handy. It was like a Dr. Seuss style book. Oh, yes, it was How the Prime Minister Stole Freedom. And it's like a cartoon book. And you go page by page. And it's written poetically, it rhymes and the whole works. And it's got these graphic depictions. It never actually says Justin Trudeau in it.

01:25:12.340 but this theoretical prime minister

01:25:14.900 looks a heck of a lot like Justin Trudeau

01:25:17.680 and the humor is fantastic

01:25:18.740 and it's hit the number one bestseller

01:25:20.260 on Amazon in Canada.

01:25:22.620 It's quite hilarious.

01:25:23.700 I'm really looking forward to talking to him.

01:25:25.160 He's a Calgarian author

01:25:27.000 and we're going to have him to chat about it.

01:25:29.360 I mean, some of those lines, you know,

01:25:30.520 and paralleling, you know, Dr. Seuss,

01:25:32.260 like he's talking about this prime minister

01:25:33.420 and the truckers

01:25:34.120 and how this prime minister was suffering 0.78

01:25:35.620 from a brain that was three sizes too small,

01:25:38.120 for example, things such as that.

01:25:39.820 So we will have him on the show

01:25:42.100 Derek Smith, his name is. And of course, I'll have some sort of new rant and lots of conversations

01:25:46.840 and issues and news items. So thank you all for joining me today, guys. And I will see you all

01:25:51.800 again tomorrow at 1130 a.m. sharp.

01:26:12.100 We'll be right back.

Western Standard - June 10, 2022

Triggered： Quit trying to force us out of our automobiles!

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