In this episode of The Pipeline, Western Standard Opinion Editor Nigel Hannaford and Senior Alberta Columnist Corey Cranky Morgan talk about free tampons in the men's room at the Ottawa International Airport, the federal budget, and the so-called Coots 3.
00:02:11.220And we're going to talk about the Coutts 3.
00:02:13.780You know, you remember the protest and blockade at the Alberta-Montana border during the kind of the height of the fight against COVID lockdowns and mandates.
00:02:25.440The so called coots three, we found out just late last night, were found guilty mischief is miscreants. All right. Well, let's get into it. We're going to start with, I think, no pun intended, the heaviest or the lightest of these three topics.
00:02:43.440um uh free trudeau tampons for men so uh i i was in the i was i was just ready to fly back
00:02:53.040here to alberta leaving ottawa i've never seen it in the men's room uh at the calgary international
00:02:58.660airport but i went to take a leak and lo and behold well this is what happened this is derrick
00:03:05.040Philip Brown of the Western Standard. I'm in the Ottawa International Airport and I came to take
00:03:13.800a leak before my flight and well I just found some that we've reported on but I just never
00:03:20.400really believed it was too stupid to really be real. This is how you're seeing backwards on my
00:03:27.060camera here but that is uh napkin serviette i think that's a maxi pad more or less and a tampon
00:03:34.900i assure you i am not in the ladies room i'm in a federally regulated men's room so uh i don't mean
00:03:42.820to take federal resources from taxpayers here but i'm gonna get a oh no there's no more taxi pads
00:03:49.380for my dick. Let me try tampons. Okay, there's no more out, unfortunately, but I do have a tampon
00:03:57.460here. The machine appears to be out of maxi pads and tampons for men, but here we go. This is, uh,
00:04:07.220this is for me in the men's room at a federally regulated bathroom in the People's Republic of
00:04:14.580of Canada. God bless you people. So it was funny. I was taking a leak and I looked over.
00:04:28.380I saw something and I did double take. I'm like, no, no way. Cause you know, even though
00:04:35.400we've reported, I was like, maybe it's fake news. I've never actually seen these things.
00:04:38.180We know it's on military bases so that our brave soldiers, you know, our fighting men can deal with their monthly visitor.
00:04:49.680Then I saw it, and I just burst out laughing.
00:04:51.840And there was another guy at the other end of the bathroom at the urinal, and he looks over at me, and I'm like, wow, I'm fighting so funny.
00:08:10.880Corey, I mean, the whole thing is hard to keep a straight face with, but maybe speak to the reaction of, like, you know, the Twitterati, you know, the lefty Twitterati, trying to defend it.
00:08:23.400Like, I don't believe they actually, I try to be charitable with people's intentions.
00:08:29.280And even if people have bad ideas or stupid ideas, I try to take them at face value that they're sincerely held bad beliefs.
00:08:35.080But I have a hard time believing that most of them actually believe anything they're saying.
00:08:39.160It's virtue signaling, and that's why they don't like it being mocked, because there's nothing to it.
00:08:43.940If they could point to demand and say, we've had a scourge of woman to men's trans people who found themselves on flights without feminine hygiene products and had to finish their flight with only one sock on, then they would be able to point out the need to provide these products in these spots.
00:09:02.000But we don't have the demand sitting there.
00:09:38.220One of the defenses from the lefties here was that, well, what if men just take them and give them to women at the airport?
00:09:47.940Well, then just put them in the ladies room.1.00
00:09:50.760It's a matter of being, and that's part of the whole trans thing, though, is it always has to be in our face.1.00
00:09:57.420always has to let us know that it's there, and we're expected to embrace it, that we're expected
00:10:03.220to endorse it, and including in our men's rooms. I mean, from the, I don't know a lot of trans
00:10:09.540people, but from the few I have encountered, they just typically want to live their life as trans0.99
00:10:14.620people. They don't want to be in the face. In fact, they typically don't want to bring attention to
00:10:18.560it because they are of the gender they've transitioned to, and they just want to carry1.00
00:10:21.940on from there. They're trying to blend in and just be a normal person living the life as they
00:10:25.980He fits the activists who are making the racket. I don't think a trans man would be all that eager to walk into a crowded men's room and partake in grabbing one of those before going to a stall. They're trying to remain discreet. That's why they're using the men's room and in the first place. But it's just there's no end to it. There's no stop. I did. It's a solution looking for a problem.0.85
00:10:48.280Are you going to let Michelle expense the dollar?0.97
00:17:07.440Yeah. Okay. But yeah, I just, I think a lot of the oversensitivity is that, you know, it's so-called social progress. I hate the term because that implies there is a good end destination that is preordained. It's almost whiggish in its predisposition.
00:17:26.860But generally, when things go for so-called progress, they don't really fall back within the Western world.
00:17:33.740They go forward and they might slow down a bit, but they always keep on going.
00:17:37.420I think this is the first time they've so severely overplayed their hand that it's now going to swing back.
00:17:44.220And it's going to swing back hard to a place, I think, of tolerance, acceptance and understanding,
00:17:48.920but not suspension of simple common sense, not believing what's in front of our own eyes,
00:17:54.940and not believing simple biology and fact that we've known since before we were cavemen.
00:18:00.260I think the people, you're right, the people who actually bought into it and said,
00:18:03.760well, a man could be a woman and a man can have a baby,1.00
00:18:06.820I think of our prime minister, for example, who is quite committed to the point of view
00:18:11.140that a man is a woman if he says he's a woman.0.80
00:18:14.080So people are going to regret they ever said those things a few years yet.
00:18:24.920Just, I think, yesterday or the day before, we had Trudeau's mega billion super free stuff budget.
00:18:32.960It is the biggest budget in Canadian history.
00:18:36.740Our debt load is now significantly more than it was even by the end of either world war.
00:18:43.040We have spent more money trying to keep Trudeau in office than we spent getting Hitler out.0.66
00:18:48.920New taxes. Sean Spear at the hub had a good point. There was a kind of theory developed in the 90s called Starve the Beast. It was a conservative economic political theory that if we cut taxes enough, there won't be enough revenue, and then we'll then have the political cover to be able to cut spending, cut the size of government itself.
00:19:12.900And he said this is the flip of that strategy called gorge the beast.
00:19:18.640Make the government so big, so massively bloated, that then now you've got the excuses to perpetually raise taxes.
00:19:27.100And so now we see capital gains significantly increased by about a third, a massive increase in it.
00:19:33.060And a lot of people don't understand capital gains, and I'm not going to explain it here because it's terribly boring to explain.
00:19:37.460But it is possibly the most evil tax ever devised, and it is the most economically destructive tax ever devised.
00:19:46.600Canada's productivity is now below Italy.
00:19:48.760And I'm sorry to anyone of Italian descent watching, but it's always been my rule of thumb that if you're richer than Italy, you're a first world country.
00:19:57.980And if you're $1 poorer than Italy, you're a second world country.
00:20:51.220Well, do you think it's the mom and pop store down the road that's financing, you know, 51?
00:20:55.720And that's billions of dollars that could go to program spending, that could go to numerous, numerous things that would far more benefit to us as going to bonds, lending institutions, things such as that.
00:21:11.020It's attacking the economy, as you said, with the capital gains tax hikes.
00:21:14.300And also what gets me with it is it follows that pattern of they're always kicking the can down the road with long-term plans that never come to fruition.
00:21:22.140They budgeted a few years ago and said that the deficit was going to be down to $15 billion.
00:21:25.720by now. People have already forgotten about that, except for dorks like me. And now it's at 41
00:21:29.780billion. And it'll probably be supposed to have balance budget from when Trudeau ran in 2015.
00:21:34.380Oh, yeah. Little, little, little short term deficit, just a little deficit.
00:21:39.680And a lot of the items in this budget are all on long timelines there. Oh, we're spending 8
00:21:44.820billion on this over six years, we're spending 10 billion on that over four years. It's it's an
00:21:50.620ugly, misdirecting, bloated 400 page document of just, yeah, as has been said by some, David
00:21:57.340Dodge, the worst budget we've seen since 1982. Well, you know, they're going out and planning
00:22:02.760to spend money at a time when they can't borrow it as cheaply as they could when they came
00:22:07.040to office. And a lot of the bonds are maturing right now from earlier Trudeau debt and some
00:22:11.980of the later Harper debt. These bonds are maturing and it's costing a lot more to refinance
00:22:17.140the debt um Nigel the it's pretty apparent to everyone i think even liberals would sheepishly
00:22:25.380agree this is a panic budget they're 20 points back in the polls right now that is a they're
00:22:31.380headed for a historic annihilation election here they they'll probably still be the third uh the
00:22:38.900official opposition because the ndp hasn't picked up any votes uh poly has picked up all of the votes
00:22:44.660have been shaken loose. But the liberals are panicking, maybe even save the furniture at this
00:22:50.160point. Do you see anything in here? Like raising taxes on people that are not yourselves is
00:22:58.160generally a political popular thing to do might be economically illiterate and destructive to raise
00:23:03.060capital gains taxes. But most people at least aren't aware that they're paying. Most people
00:23:08.640are paying capital gains, you know, in your pension, your investment portfolio, etc. But most
00:23:13.620people don't know it. Do you think it's smart, maybe class warfare politics for the liberals
00:23:19.000here to try and turn the ship around in terms of polling? I don't know about class warfare
00:23:24.900exactly. What has happened is that because of liberal policies, we have inflation. Because
00:23:31.980we have inflation, we have higher home prices. Add in an increase in immigration, and you have
00:23:39.920got a situation where a whole generation that's now trying to enter the property market can't.
00:23:46.580They're living in their parents' basements. And so that generation has turned to the conservatives
00:23:55.020and that is the basis of Pierre Polliver's huge lead over the liberals. So this budget
00:24:05.160is an attempt to grab some money off the shelf,
00:24:09.760say they're going to fix the problem that they have caused,
00:24:14.620and then go and market themselves to the younger generation.
00:28:01.980Anybody who knows how to do this is already doing it and making a fortune.
00:28:05.860And they'll charge even more now that money's being pumped into a cramped market.
00:28:09.060That's another inflationary action right there.
00:28:12.880I mean, this is the underlying problem with the liberals since day one,
00:28:16.340is that they do not understand basic economics, and they don't listen to people who do.
00:28:21.640perhaps there'd be more uh you know more money to go around for some of these projects if we
00:28:27.820didn't spend a few million a year on tampons for men um it's it's incredible uh and then just coming
00:28:36.240back to the incredible borrowing there is not even a you know i remember when i when i was a finance
00:28:41.680critic for the wild rose in the alberta legislature the ndp would table a budget every year by the way
00:28:46.200Allison Redford and Stelmack did before then predicting in year three or five a balanced budget.
00:28:52.220They never got there. They always just, oh, something happened this year that we could have never foreseen,
00:28:57.860but we're going to do it one year again. So it was always in year five.
00:29:00.760And they had a theoretical balanced budget, just at least paying lip service to it.
00:29:06.460Deliberals don't even have a theoretical best case scenario.
00:29:09.820If all the planets line up, everything goes our way, and we become the richest country in the world overnight, we'll balance the budget theoretically in five or seven years.
00:29:28.740Is PolyEV going to be able to survive four years with the cuts that are going to be required to get the budget under control?
00:29:34.480I mean, balancing it. I mean, if you put a maniac like me in charge, I could balance it, but it's good. I mean, the federal government would be left a heap of rubble, which I think would be a good thing. But it probably is going to be able to survive four years with the huge cuts that are going to be required to get the budget under control when we're spending, I think, $54 billion a year on interest, which is the entire GSD or the entire health budget.
00:30:15.560Well, that's the bar, that's the, so we're already seeing the inflation.
00:30:23.640question about will polyerth be able to do that and and get elected four years later i actually
00:30:33.560think that this is part of what the liberals are doing now is a scorched earth policy making it
00:30:39.960virtually impossible for anybody to do anything so they'll just be filthy unpopular in 2029 and
00:30:45.480back on the liberals who promise all things to all men uh literally cynical stuff but that's
00:30:52.840the game that's being played. What would Polyev do? Well, I think he certainly would cut. That's
00:31:01.840the accusation that Mr. Singh makes against him, that he's going to scrap a bunch of programs. Well,
00:31:07.240I hope he scraps them all and more yet. I mean, some things you just can't afford. And then as
00:31:13.960for taxes, my expectation, my hope, that as a principled conservative, Mr. Polyev would take
00:31:20.760the view that you generate activity by lightning tax loads and it could be a bit of a squeeze at
00:31:28.420first but if you actually get this country working like our real GDP has been below you know it's a
00:31:36.020minus number. Our GDP per capita has now been going down for well over a year. The only thing
00:31:42.520that has made our GDP look positive is escalating house prices which is one of the reasons why I
00:31:48.120think the liberals have allowed it to happen. But if you take care of the essentials, I think it is
00:31:56.820possible to hold this thing back from the brink. That is what Polyev is likely to try to do. He
00:32:02.940can't, but he will certainly cut. I don't know whether it'll be up to him whether there's
00:32:07.940inflation or not. It happens going. Corey, poly of is not, you know, a mealy mouth, wishy-washy
00:32:18.160Tory the way Aaron O'Toole was. Poly of the real deal. You know, we know this guy. He is,
00:32:26.840he means what he says, says what he means. He is a rock rib conservative and understands the
00:32:31.980fiscal files extremely well. He was their finance critic for a long time. He gets this stuff. I
00:32:36.760I think he knows what he needs to do with the budget once he likely comes to power.
00:32:43.320But it's going to, I mean, the lefties, the unions are going to be screaming bloody murder in the streets for the kind of spending reductions that are going to be absolutely necessary to avoid a Greek style physical collapse in this country.
00:33:00.120I have a lot of confidence he knows what he needs to do, but the politics is going to be so brutal around it.
00:34:31.100We've got, yeah, Alex Van Herc and Gerhard Janzen. Lots of Dutch in there. It's around there, everyone's Dutch or German, Southern Alberta.
00:34:44.000So, you know, we remember the episode of Coots. It was kind of a protest blockade of the border against mandates and lockdowns. A lot of these guys were truckers who Trudeau essentially had their jobs outlawed for crossing the border.
00:34:59.180couldn't cross the border because of laws Trudeau passed. So I think I generally am not favorable
00:35:03.500to blocking the border. But when your own government says you can't cross your border,
00:35:06.780you've now got some reasonable grounds to block said border that your own government says you
00:35:10.780can't cross. You know, it was kind of a kind of a light Berlin Wall kind of thing Trudeau had built
00:35:15.900here. They've, after a, you know, fairly long drawn out process, last night, the three were
00:35:24.060found guilty of mischief above $5,000 it's odd we have rapists who get released even after being
00:35:34.780convicted but you know the process gets drawn out too long and a rapist that gets let out
00:35:43.820guy who vandalized my motorcycle and as a result I almost got killed in an accident
00:35:49.740And charged, didn't show up for court. Police did absolutely nothing. These three guys are in the protest, but they're now, I'm not sure, they haven't been sentenced yet, so I'm not sure what's going to happen.
00:36:03.320But I'm feeling that the state is going to give them the book. They're going to give them the heaviest time possible, is my guess. I could be wrong.
00:36:12.440But there is certainly the heavy hand of justice here, but still light on anything else. I'm not aware of anyone. Just yesterday, there was a bunch of Hamas supporters blocking a rail terminal in Ontario.
00:36:26.700I'm not aware of a single charge there as actual terrorism supporters block critical infrastructure.
00:36:38.700Are they, do you think the law is being applied equally here to how it is with other groups that media courts are find maybe more sympathetic?
00:36:45.700Definitely isn't. I mean, Idle No More, same thing, they were blocking railroad tracks, nobody would get charged.
00:36:50.700The pipeline and construction in BC, when they were blockading that and violently being removed, they'd always get the charges dropped.
00:36:58.440These guys, they followed through all the way to the very end to make sure they pin and convict a charge upon them.
00:37:05.080I'm not arguing whether or not maybe that's, you know, those charges should be applied to all or they shouldn't have been applied to any.
00:37:12.460But right now, there is definitely a double standard going on.
00:37:14.920You've got to go one way or the other.
00:37:15.840You've got to apply to everyone and apply to no one.
00:37:17.220They're definitely giving everything they can with it.
00:37:19.140This is like the Alberta version of Tamara Leach.0.99
00:37:21.240As Nigel and I were talking about earlier, it's easy to confuse this with the CUTs IV,
00:37:24.740which was a separate set of charges and a whole different ball of wax there.
00:37:28.440These were guys who were just organizers of the protest that had blocked infrastructure
00:37:31.920that had to be removed and broken down eventually.
00:37:35.360But it wasn't a violent action or anything like that with these guys.
00:37:39.920They do want to make sure, though, that at least when it comes to this end of the spectrum,
00:37:44.680if you're going to protest, they want everybody to know you're going to pay a price for it.
00:37:49.140We're going to go after you, we're going to convict you, and you're going to be left for the record and possibly some jail time.
00:38:11.120But you've got to get an equal application of this law, and they're not doing it.
00:38:13.940Nigel, the defense's main defense was that there was no clear leadership. These guys were, they went after these guys rather than everyone because they were the leaders. I think, I don't know all of them, but I, you know, I know at least one was prominent among them.
00:38:32.460But, you know, we had a reporter embedded in the room as these guys made decisions.
00:38:37.700We had unprecedented access during the Coutts blockade.
00:38:41.240And it was amply evident that there was no clear leadership and hierarchy of this.
00:38:47.020It was a couple of guys sitting around the Alamo.
00:38:51.240Like, you know, they certainly there's going to be some stronger personalities that stand out here.
00:38:56.540But, I mean, anybody who understood it knew that, you know, there was no, like, union boss who showed up and led the protest here.
00:39:04.920It was a very decentralized, pretty egalitarian thing here.
00:39:09.860Any idea why their defense that they were not really leaders because it was just kind of a group effort didn't stand up?
00:39:18.400Obviously, the jury couldn't think of a reason why they should get off.
00:39:23.180I have to sort of look at that, look at it from that point of view.
00:39:26.540Well, you know, you can either have good decision-making or bad decision-making, but somehow or other there was decision-making, and the juries decided they needed to answer for it.
00:39:37.340But I don't have a lot of respect for these people.
00:39:41.780Sure, if I'd been trying to get across the border that day, I'd have probably been fed up because my own plans were being interrupted.
00:39:50.460But, you know, progress depends on the unreasonable person.
00:39:53.940And if you look just in the history of the last 150 years at the number of people who have defied a legitimate law because they thought it was wrong, who are now on postage stamps, you have to accept that these guys stood up for what they believed in.
00:40:16.060And they are to be admired for that because they were prepared to take the consequences.
00:41:10.800Ultimately, they came out on the right side. Now they are celebrated. This may not be the year that these three gentlemen get celebrated, but give them credit.
00:41:22.100I'd say a good half of Alberta is still cheering them on right now.
00:41:24.800Absolutely. Rick Strankman built a political career on defying the green exchange.
00:41:30.460Yeah, I had lunch with Rick Strankman just yesterday.
00:41:32.860Oh, yeah. Yeah. And that is a great example. And it involves the border.
00:41:36.480So just a little bit of history for the younger folks, I wasn't paying too much attention to the Wheat Board at this time too, I think I was a teenager, but it used to be illegal for Western, not Eastern, but Western farmers to sell their grain, their barley, etc. to anyone except for the federal government.
00:41:54.060It was, I think it was a World War I measure?
00:42:21.700And to challenge the law, Rick Strankman and his boys drive down to the border, and Rick on the phone, he says,
00:42:28.220Hey, just so you know, I'm about to cross the border with some grain. You better come and stop me.
00:42:32.920And then the next phone call was, CTV, Globe and Mail, Calgary Herald, Calgary Sun, come on down.
00:42:40.440And these guys got arrested, and they went to jail for selling grain.
00:42:45.160And that exposed to Canada how ridiculous the system was.
00:42:48.700People at least didn't even know about it, because their farmers weren't subject.
00:42:51.700to this. And you know, so that's, I know this is a bit of a tangent here, but it was at really,
00:42:57.780it's the same principle. And it was at a Southern Alberta border crossing. I don't think it was,
00:43:01.980no, I think it was Coutts, because that's the main commercial one down south. It could have been
00:43:05.560Coutts. It could have been Coutts. So it's, it's, it's, it's pretty relevant. And in this case,
00:43:10.220like I am generally not down, and we have to try and separate when we like a cause and when we
00:43:15.180don't. But in general, no, you don't block rail crossings. You don't block roads. You don't
00:43:20.520block border crossings. But in this case, the federal government banned Canadians from crossing their own border to do their job. They essentially built an invisible Berlin wall for Canadians. And in that case, when the government takes away your right to do something, you have a right to take away the government's right to do that same thing. So, you know, I think they were justified in this case.0.86
00:43:41.640Part of their problem, we saw that as we watched and poor James interminably stuck down there in the cold weather and around it.
00:43:50.420He did a great job, but they're not good at coming up with an exit strategy.