Sheila Gunn-Reid exposes Justin Trudeau’s government prioritizing ideology over justice: Terry Lynn McClintick’s release to an unfenced healing lodge despite violent crimes, Christopher Garnier’s misuse of PTSD benefits, and Maureen Basnicki’s dismissed victimhood claims. The $7-9B Trans Mountain Pipeline halt—backed by 57 references to killer whales—costs 8,000+ families jobs while 40 First Nations support it, yet Trudeau ignored paramountcy. Economic ties across Canada prove resource dependence, but media bias and political alienation fuel frustration, contrasting with Maxine Bernier’s unfiltered challenges and conservative voter solidarity. The ruling class’s detachment from real-world consequences risks eroding Canada’s economic stability and public trust. [Automatically generated summary]
I guess it's tough to be a female victim of violent crime in Trudeau's feminist utopia for female victims.
Four liberal blunders in a little over a week.
Will the mainstream media finally start to notice a pattern?
It's September 29th, 2018.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Ezra Levant Show.
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
You come here once a year with a sign, and you feel morally superior.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I'm publishing is because it's my bloody right to do so.
This week, the world found out that the murderer of little eight-year-old Tori Stafford, Terry Lynn McClintick, isn't even in prison anymore.
Not really.
She's in an Aboriginal healing lodge in Saskatchewan, a place that doesn't even have fences.
And Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale, well, he defends that decision.
I'm going to show you a clip from CTV News.
Please pay attention to how Goodale describes the crime here, which was procuring a little tiny child for sexual assault, the kidnapping of an innocent little girl, and then the murder and disposal of her tiny battered body like it was trash.
Just listen to how Goodale describes it here.
And are you going to make society safer by developing the circumstances in which that life can be changed for the better?
Or released cold turkey at the end of the sentence when there's no chance of preparation?
It's not going to be released until 2030.
Why, Mr. Goodale?
That's a long way away.
Why is she getting into this so early?
Well, the prison management officials have determined this is the best way to both rectify her bad practices in the past, but also to keep the public safe.
Bad practices, hey?
What bad practices is Goodale talking about?
The kidnapping, rape, and murder of a tiny little girl?
Or is he talking about the very recent assault that McClintick pled guilty to that she committed while she was behind bars for Tory's murder?
Those bad practices?
Now, in all of this, something else was revealed.
Yet another layer of injustice for Stafford's family.
I don't know if McClintock is Aboriginal or not, and apparently it doesn't even matter.
Because to get access to these Aboriginal healing lodges instead of the hard prison time these violent offenders deserve, all they have to do is identify as First Nations.
There's no proof required of their First Nations status.
McClintick has absolutely figured out how to game the system here, and somehow Trudeau found a way to blame the conservatives for what happened to McClintick on the Liberals watch here.
Terry Lynn McClintick helped lure Tory, hit Tory three times in the head with a claimmer.
She was on lookout while Tory was raped and then helped place Torrey's body in a garbage bag.
The Prime Minister knows full well that he has the power and authority to change this case in an instant.
Why will he not use his power and authority right now to do the right thing for Tory's family and the right thing for society?
Here, an honorable Prime Minister.
I hope Canadians pay attention to that question and this answer.
In 2014, the individual was transferred to a medium security facility under the previous government.
This individual is still in a medium security facility today.
That question needs to be noticed by Canadians.
That behavior needs to be noticed by Canadians.
Well, now, Trudeau's comments there, they're pretty gross, and they feel a lot like sympathy for the devil.
They really shouldn't surprise us.
He's so apathetic to these young female victims and their families.
You see, after one of Trudeau's Syrian refugees, a man named Ibrahim Ali, was charged with the horrific murder of a 13-year-old Burnaby girl named Marissa Shen, Trudeau was asked about it by McLean's Paul Wells in a sit-down interview.
We've got a little bit of time left.
I wanted to let McLean's readers have at because we got a lot of interest both in all the issues that I've discussed and in a few that we haven't asked about before.
And so I'm going to pass along a few questions that came from McLean's readers.
One is asking what you have to say about the arrest in British Columbia of Ibrahim Ali, who's a Syrian refugee, following the murder of a teenage girl named Marissa Shen.
Obviously, it's devastating news for her family, for her friends.
It's a terrible tragedy.
Anytime someone is murdered, it's a terrible thing.
I trust our justice system.
I trust our system to go through its processes to both apply consequences to this and to make sure that we're thinking about how we continue to keep people safe.
So no apology to Marissa's family for allowing her alleged killer to come into the country.
Trudeau is defiant.
Nothing in policy will change despite Marissa's young life being lost.
So that's the response is to the deaths of two little girls being completely flubbed by the Liberals this week.
They couldn't seem more cold and heartless and disrespectful to the families of these girls if they were trying.
Now this all brings me to the troubling case of Christopher Garnier.
He brutally murdered an off-duty police officer named Catherine Campbell in 2015 in Halifax before he disposed of her broken body in a garbage can under a bridge.
Garnier claims he gave himself PTSD when he killed Campbell.
And now because Garnier's father is a veteran, Garnier is receiving treatment, courtesy of Veterans Affairs, for the PTSD he gave himself.
Yes, Garnier is receiving treatment for PTSD while actual veterans who got PTSD in the line of duty are doing without.
Let me show you what the Liberals had to say when they were pressed on this incredible, disgusting injustice here.
Mr. Speaker, we're talking about a decision by the Liberal government to pay for the benefits of a convicted killer with money from Veterans Affairs when he's never served a single minute in Canada's military.
If a serving member is found guilty of murder and dishonourably discharged, they and their family would lose all their benefits for the sake of all those who served honourably and continue to fight veterans affairs for the benefits they earned.
Will the Prime Minister commit today to stop paying the benefits of this cop-killer?
The Right Honourable Prime Minister.
Mr. Speaker, we see once again that there is nothing the Conservatives won't stoop to to play politics with tragedies.
I will not answer that question.
Trudeau refused to answer because I guess Catherine's family doesn't deserve answers.
Now the good news is the Liberals, because of intense public pressure, have agreed to stop the PTSD payments to veterans' families.
But we don't know if that's being retroactively applied to Garnier.
And lastly, here's something that has been completely unreported in the mainstream media, and it was the treatment of a 9-11 widow at the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights by a Liberal MP named Arif Virani.
Just watch this lady here.
It is important not to conflate, either in this committee or in front of these witnesses, the difference between terrorism that occurred in Afghanistan and torture that this government was complicit with in Guantanamo.
And after two consecutive defeats in the Supreme Court of Canada on this very issue, when Mr. Cooper's party ostensibly believes in reducing court backlog and courtroom delay, it really begs the logical question as to why one would return to the courts, which we all seem to agree are clogged with yet another likely failed charter claim.
So apropos of that, Ms. Baznicki, if we can agree that addressing court backlog is an important imperative of this bill, is settlement of cases a way of reducing court backlog.
I would like to respond with that the charter, as it stands, does not define victims' rights.
I worked on the victims' bill of rights, and I'm only asking that my rights are regarded as Mr. Carter's rights are regarded.
I am not here to take away from Mr. Cadar's rights.
I'm only suggesting that as a victim, I should have rights too.
Mr. Kadar was a self-confessed terrorist, not in an act in Afghanistan, well, perhaps the venue was Afghanistan, but was convicted and self-confessed in the U.S.
I am a Canadian citizen.
He committed his crime, not alleged, but convicted outside our country.
I'm only asking as a Canadian citizen, as he is, that I have rights too.
And it would appear that there is no balance in this as it stands right now.
He belonged to the very organization that was complicit in the murder of my husband, Al-Qaeda.
You can only imagine how I feel when I see my government give him $10.5 million for a violation of rights.
And I am at the same time begging my country to afford me rights as a victim and a Canadian citizen who was married to a Canadian citizen that lived in Canada.
Maureen Basnicki, that really nice lady asking the questions, lost her husband on 9-11.
She's a victim of Islamic terrorism, Islamic terrorism like that committed by Omar Cotter.
As a Canadian, Mrs. Basnicki paid for the payout to that Islamic terrorist.
But just watch the response of Liberal MP Arif Varani here.
So I'll pass that over to Ron.
just make sure that the record reflects that Mr. Cotter is also a Canadian citizen, Ms. Begzen, but your point is...
Yes, I pointed it out.
I like the court...
I'd like to remind you that I'm a Canadian citizen.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Instead of being shown the respect she deserves for taking the time out of her life to come to committee to advocate for other victims like herself, Liberal MP Arif Varani scolded her.
You see, Mr. Cotter is a Canadian too, Varani said.
Same as Basnicki's husband, same as you and I, except we didn't plead guilty to war crimes and murdering a U.S. Army medic in cold blood and then blinding a Green Beret.
But other than that, Cotter's just like us.
Good God, these liberals and their sympathy for the devil.
Varani needs to apologize, but he won't.
And I doubt he realizes there's anything wrong with what he said.
Liberals keep talking about what a bunch of feminists they are.
They literally cannot shut up about it.
They actually just produced this very wooden and weird video about Gender Equity Week.
I won't show you the whole thing.
It's embarrassing.
But here's a clip.
A lot of those sectors have been male-dominated for a long time.
And we need to make it easier for more people to enter these fields so we can fill these jobs, grow our economy, and strengthen the middle class.
That's why gender equality is an issue for everyone.
Joining Chris Sims00:05:01
Back in reality, four female victims of violent crime are making headlines in a little over the last week.
Four female victims of violent crime mistreated and their families discounted by the Liberals for their liberal agenda.
There's a pattern here, a devastating, disgusting, anti-women pattern.
But the mainstream media is just too sycophantic to notice any of it.
And really, I guess the only gender equity at play here is that Omar Cotter's male victims are being treated just as poorly as the female victims of McClintick and Christopher Garnier.
Up next, after the break, I have an interview with an incredible guest that I recorded earlier this week.
Stay with us.
Thanks for joining me.
I'm going to read an excerpt from an incredible opinion piece in the Toronto Sun.
If you read just one article this year, make it this one.
It starts: while lamenting the potential plight of killer whales, those opposing pipelines could collect hand-me-down rubber boots.
That's one of the things kind-hearted neighbors gave my family when governments and circumstances conspired to send our lives spiraling.
Today, that spiral is just starting its descent for more than 8,000 families who lost their jobs.
With the stroke of a pen, a federal Court of Appeals judge Eleanor Dawson slammed the brakes on the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion.
It's a project that had won 17 times in previous court challenges and got the green light from successive federal governments for five years.
Dawson cited the plight of killer whales 57 times and lack of consultation with First Nations peoples.
What does this mean for the 8,000 jobless?
I can tell you because I grew up in it.
Now, my guest tonight, I'm so excited about this, is the author of this article, someone that I think has been an incredible journalist, the kind of journalist I aspire to be.
And now she's not just an incredible advocate for the Canadian oil patch, but for all Canadian taxpayers.
She's fighting her fight in the belly of the beast.
Joining me now is the BC Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, Chris Sims.
I'm such a super fan.
Chris, thanks for joining me.
Wherever you are right now, it's beautiful.
Where are you?
I'm actually standing on the site of the existing Kinder Morgan, or now known as the Trans Mountain Pipeline, here in the Fraser Valley.
I'm actually physically standing in a big patch of blackberries.
So if you see a bear, could you just let me know and make sure you YouTube it?
Well, that doesn't look like the hellscape that I've been led to believe.
Now, I read an article or an excerpt from your article off the top, and when I first read it, it made me sad because, like so many thousands of Canadians, I lived a very similar childhood experience as you.
I grew up in the devastation of the NEP.
But after I got over my sadness, although the sadness sort of still lingers, I have a hard time getting through your whole article, to be honest with you.
I'm also so glad and grateful that someone who has your platform is trying to humanize every single one of those 8,000 job losses because they're families.
They're families like yours and families like mine who sort of have this uncertain future while the federal government dithers on pipelines.
We don't even know what they're going to do next.
No, we don't.
And they ragged the puck for more than a year after giving this private corporation five years of green lights and victory after victory.
Yes, yes, yes.
And then they just ruined it so much that the company just finally threw up its hands and walked away.
And now taxpayers own this pipeline.
Taxpayers now own the Trans Mountain Pipeline and we're on the hook now for actually getting it expanded and twinned.
And if anybody actually watching this doesn't know yet, it runs from Edmonton all the way through the Rockies, through BC, right where I'm standing here in the Fraser Valley, all the way out to Burnaby to its terminal, to its port.
And that's where the oil is shipped out for export.
And because the federal government has done such a terrible job of this, and now we're stuck owning the thing, and now we're stuck with this federal court judge's decision, 8,000 families just lost their jobs.
Struggling Neighbors' Food Relief00:14:27
And I thought it was really important to put a face to those numbers and to put a real story behind numbers like those.
And I know you had a similar experience.
I know a lot of your viewers right now watching this have had very similar experience.
They might be living it right now.
And to them right now, I want to tell them that they're not alone, that people care about what is happening to them and to their families.
They may not see their stories told in literary awards circles and on some mainstream media channels, but people do give a damn.
And so I really wanted to thank the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and Sun Media for both encouraging me to write this.
All of my colleagues at the CTF said, yeah, put that story into words.
And so that's why I wrote it.
I usually try not to make myself the story, but I was getting sick and tired, frankly, of those families who were counting on that pipeline work, this pipeline work, being ignored and not heard.
And so that's why I wrote it.
You know, something in your article really struck a chord with me.
And it was when you were talking about your mom.
Her breaking point was using the no-name soap.
And, you know, I've spoken to other women that are very close to me and they have a similar experience.
It's so funny.
The one woman that I know and love very much, for her, it's the sound of a carpet sweeper because for a time she wasn't able to have power in her house and she just wanted to vacuum like every other woman.
And the sound and the look of a carpet sweeper brings it back to her.
And for another woman that I know, it is the sound of change jingling because when she put her money into the collection plate at church, everybody in the pew would know that she was poor because of the jingling of the change.
And, you know, that really struck a chord with me because it's not just about a job.
It is about dignity for these family who have never taken anything.
Yes, that's exactly right.
And so for my family, my sisters were born in the early 80s.
They were triplets.
I was born first.
Mom and dad tried for a boy and we wound up with four girls.
And so my parents wound up with four kids under the age of four, early 80s.
And just at that exact time is when Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the prime minister at the time, nuked the oil patch.
And so suddenly my dad, who worked for Slumberjay at the time, all around that era, had no job to go back to.
He had come back here home to BC for when my sisters were born.
But then when he turned around to pick up that big paycheck again to go back to the oil patch and really earn that money, it wasn't there.
And so the only thing that got us through was my mom working graveyard shifts at the local hospital as an emergency room nurse.
A lot of my early childhood memories are of her sleeping on the couch because she'd been working all night while we were in bed.
And yeah, it was the no-name soap.
She just had it.
And I can still remember what it smelled like because she brought it home in these big bags, these big plastic bags, and all 12 bars were stuck together and you had to break them apart.
And she just lost it one day in the kitchen because it stank.
It smelled like burnt metal.
It didn't smell like flowers or roses or vanilla or something pretty.
And it's things like that that really stay with you because, like you said, it connects back to dignity, to having pride, to having money to be able to cover the most basic things in life that so many of us can sometimes get away from and we can take for granted.
And for me as a little kid, the reason why I put that in the article, I remember the sound of the box thumping onto our porch up in the woods where we lived.
And I went running outside.
I was a little kid.
And there's this big cardboard box there.
And it was full of like donated stuff.
There was like an old set of roller skates that you needed to strap to your shoes.
And there was a doll in there.
And I remember there were a pair of kind of tinkish, grayish, used gumboots.
And I was a little kid.
So I'm like, hey, please stop.
Yay.
I stuck them on my feet and I was so happy they fit.
But I remember the look on my mom's face.
And I realize that now, as a wife and mother, how hard that must have been.
And so I really wanted to reach out to those families, those oil sands families, those oil patch families, the families who are in trucking right now, who in some cases have bought new trucks, pickups to be able to do this job.
They've put down lease money already between here and Edmonton to be able to do this job.
And it just evaporated out from under them.
And I wanted them to know that they're not alone and that we've gone through this before and we need to fight really hard, but we will get through it.
And back during the NEP, I got to stress, my family did better than a lot of people.
I saw a lot of people, their trucks were repossessed, their boats taken away, they lost their homes.
They literally lost their homes.
They were sleeping in their cars.
Some of them got divorced.
People within my family lost their marriages.
And the unspeakable also happened.
Back then, nobody ever talked about it, but people took their own lives.
And I saw that there's a 30% increase in Fort Mac in people taking their own lives in the year 2015, which is just because of the bust.
It's just because of that cycle.
It's not because of this news.
And so I especially want to speak to those people who are there.
Just pull back.
Just pull back.
People love you.
People care about you.
People are listening.
Just hang in there.
It will get better.
You know, you just reminded me of the days of jingle mail with people, for myself too, neighbors who didn't fare as well as we did, people who couldn't grow their own food the way we did or kill their own food.
They were mailing their keys back to the bank.
It happens so frequently.
It became a phenomenon called jingle mail.
And I don't think the elites who are sort of kicking the ball down the road with this pipeline truly understand what it's like to live with that sort of, what's the right word, survivor's guilt.
When your family has nothing, but you're still doing better than your neighbor and you feel bad about that because you couldn't help them more than you already are.
I wanted to ask you, I know, at least it's correct me if I'm wrong, but you didn't really intend to change hearts and minds with this article.
I don't think it was motivated to sort of change the minds of those Laurentian elites who will sort of spit out words like those Albertans with their jacked up trucks and their skidoos and their toys while they reach into a handbag worth more than my ATV.
I don't think your article was designed to make those people feel anything about the oil pageant.
I just don't think they care.
A lot of them don't, unfortunately.
A lot of them don't.
But I'm always, you can have to laugh or cry, right?
And I'm always looking for the silver lining.
And even in that federal court judgment, there was a tiny little window where she said if you do efficient consultation and another review of this, judges don't usually use the word efficient.
And by that, she meant a tight timeline.
I tried to find some little crack of hope in there.
And I wrote it, number one, to put up a flag and to tell people who are in that situation, they're not alone.
We've done this before.
We'll have to do it again.
Keep fighting.
It will get better.
But number two, I wanted to reach those folks who are kind of on the fence.
The, you know, in boardrooms, people would call them the swing voter.
I wanted to reach out to those folks who vote for whoever they want to, but who maybe have an uncle who worked in manufacturing, right, in Ontario, who knows somebody who helped build a highway.
I'm looking for those people who are in that kind of limbo.
They're in that gray area, where they're maybe one generation removed from working class blue-collar families like we have here.
And really tap them on the shoulder and remind them that while they may be a lawyer or an accountant or something really special like that now who might have a lever of power to pull, to pull it and to write to their member of parliament, to write to the prime minister, to call in to talk radio shows, including places like the CBC.
I mean it.
Unless we stand up and holler, we won't be heard.
And so that's who I'm really trying to appeal to there.
I'm trying to reach out to those folks who have probably experienced unemployment in their own lives.
It doesn't just hit the resource sector.
And I'm trying to remind them of what happens when you have a mass unemployment hit a specialized sector like the resource sector, like oil and gas.
And I wanted to really put a human face to it because it's super easy to love a killer whale.
It really is.
I grew up here and I grew up on Vancouver Island.
I absolutely love our natural world.
But those are theoretical issues, right, that can be dealt with usually through math or conservation or being careful of where you're putting your shipping lanes.
I mean, humans can figure this stuff out.
But I really wanted to make it crystal clear to them that judgments like this and foot dragging like this has an immediate impact.
And that immediate impact is little kids maybe not getting a Christmas this year.
It's of parents getting into volcanic arguments.
It's of marriages breaking down.
It's of what I talked about as being unspeakable.
That is an immediate consequence and reality of judgments like these.
And so that is where I really wanted to tap them on the shoulder and to remind them.
I also wanted to point out, and I got to be real clear here, the judgment also said that they needed to do meaningful consultation with some First Nations peoples.
And this can't be stressed enough.
More than 40 First Nations have signed on, signed on, in support of this Trans Mountain Pipeline, including where I'm standing right now, here in the Fraser Valley.
And in my article, I said that some of our neighbors brought us their food salmon at that time.
Those were the First Nations peoples of the area.
That's why I called it food salmon.
They cared, they gave a damn, because not only were they compassionate human beings, they worked in the oil patch too.
And just like today, they're depending on these jobs for this pipeline expansion too.
And I want their voices to be heard as well.
And I don't want those folks who are in power to forget that.
Now, I don't know, maybe you share my theory.
But I feel like there's a level of classism in all of this that, you know, and these are my words, not yours, but elite people and over-educated, useless people.
I think they have a level of resentment that the resource sector is really the great equalizer in all of this, where someone who works hard with their back and their hands but has a high school education can earn as much as those elite and fancy people.
And I think there's a lot of resentment around that from sort of Canada's ruling class.
There can be.
I don't discount what you're saying.
There can be.
I've run into it.
I've worked on Parliament Hill for many years.
I've worked in rural Nova Scotia.
I've talked to people from every walk of life, from literally homeless, drug-addicted people who are in desperate straits in like a women's shelter all the way up to the prime minister and everything in between.
Most people are good.
I think a lot of this is misunderstanding.
I truly do.
I think there are those hard-boiled people who don't like other people and will come up with any reason that they want to not like them.
And that can include blue-collar working-class people, people who work in trades, people who drive trucks, people who hunt for their own food, people who fish, people who own ATVs.
There is a class of people who just look down on that.
But we're never going to change those people's minds.
Who we can change is the majority of people who are good, who would only hurt another person by accident.
And this is what I think is happening here.
I think because this has become so theoretical and so top line and all about macro and microeconomics and shipping or not shipping or China or not China, that it's easy to forget that there's human beings behind all of these issues.
And those are the people that I'm trying to remind that there are human beings.
And that's why I'm appealing to them.
Remember when, say, your mom, who was a teacher, was laid off for years and you had to search for work.
Remember when your mom, maybe who was a nurse back in the 80s, the hospital shut down in Saskatchewan and you guys lost your job.
And now that you are maybe an accountant or a writer or a lawyer, maybe you're living in Toronto, maybe you're living in Ottawa or Montreal or somewhere urban and fancy and removed.
Remember where you come from and remember most importantly where your food comes from, where your resources come from, where your electric power comes from, how all of your stuff, your food, your supplies, your furniture was trucked to you using oil and gas.
And to damn oil and gas is to damn the lifeblood of the modern world.
We could not function the way we are right now without oil and gas.
And I encourage those folks who maybe, yeah, like I said now are teachers, crack open your history books to 1850 and set yourself back and think about what that would be like to live without oil and gas.
Because we take it for granted now.
So yeah, I think there is maybe a small percentage of people who are hard-boiled.
They just dislike other people, especially those who are not of their class.
Those sorts of bigots will always exist.
But I heartily believe the vast majority of people are good and they just don't know what they don't know.
And that's what I'm trying to educate them about, what they don't know.
Alberta's Oil Legacy00:08:07
Now, do you think that we've seen the worst of this or is the worst really yet to come?
The reason I say that is I just read an article this morning that Kinder Morgan, who, you know, is looking at liquidating their Canadian assets.
They've already washed their hands of a pipeline.
They're looking at investing in a Bakken shale pipeline in North Dakota, meaning they're happily ready to invest in oil and gas projects.
They just don't want to do it here.
And I mean, the point to be made is that, you know, southern Saskatchewan is bakkin shale, but Kinder Morgan's not investing there.
They're investing on the American side.
And then with this whole C69 environmental review bill that's meandering through the Senate and that's going to give undue political powers to the environment minister to basically squash any environmental review.
I'm really worried about the signal that this is sending to the global investment community.
We're sending a terrible signal to the global investment community.
You talk to anybody worth their weight who understands resources and the resource sector and trade between Canada and the rest of the world, especially the complicated relationship we have with our neighbors to the south and the United States, and we're sending all the wrong signals.
For a company like Kinder Morgan to fight for five years, begging money into our hands, getting approvals to twin a pipeline they literally already owned and operated for years, and to have them walk away, that's enormous.
That's like Microsoft saying, you know what, I'm not dealing with personal computers anymore in this country.
I'm walking away.
That's crazy.
And so that needs to change.
And so to answer your question, I'm really worried about the future too.
But ultimately, this is a democracy.
And the cabinet and the prime minister do represent Canadians and they need to answer to them.
And so I think the best thing that we can do is try to convince them, change their minds, make them realize that our economy, our livelihood, our way of life,
our amazing standard of living all depend on the resource sector at its very foundation, where I'm standing right now, at its very foundation, that they wouldn't be able to fly to New York to address the United Nations unless we had jet fuel and unless we had those minerals that were mined out of the ground to build those airplanes and those jet planes.
Like it sounds simplistic, but it seems like it's too simple for some people to get.
And that's what we really need to push right now is that we've got the government we've got.
They're the ones in power.
They're the ones that say they want to get this thing built.
And so all we can do is take them at their word and fight as hard as we can trying to convince them.
And now especially here with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation that we own this thing.
So we spent about $4.5 billion on the one I'm standing on right now.
And to actually twin the thing will cost between $7 and $9 billion.
You add all that up, Sheila, and take a look at what we could have bought for it.
You add up that money, it's staggering.
So for every single First Nation across Canada, we could have built state-of-the-art water treatment facilities and septic systems four times over for what we just blew on this pipeline for no reason.
We could build sick, you know, those really fancy rec centers that you see nowadays, the Olympic-sized swimming pools and the hockey rinks and libraries and the theaters.
They just, yeah, they just built a really big one in Calgary.
We could build 67 of them across Canada.
We'd run out of places to stick it in the nine bumps.
We could rebuild Sick Kids Hospital from the ground up three or four times over in Toronto.
Like for what we just blew unnecessarily on this thing.
We didn't have to do this.
All Trudeau needed to do, all the prime minister needed to do, was declare paramountcy.
He didn't even need to pass a bill.
It would have taken about a morning's worth of work.
There's a term called paramountcy.
That's where he says, you know what?
We're the federal government.
We have jurisdiction over this pipeline.
We're going to enforce the rule of law.
Kinder Morgan, you've got your green light.
Go for it.
That's all that needed to happen, and they didn't do it.
So we really got to work hard at convincing them otherwise.
Unbelievable.
Now, I said off the top that you are in the belly of the beast, but I don't really feel like you're in the belly of the beast.
And the reason I say that is because while I think you are an exceptional individual, Chris, I actually think that you're probably indicative of the normal BCer.
And I think sometimes us in Alberta and Saskatchewan to a certain extent, we sort of feel like we're constantly on the defensive with the rest of the country.
The East is trying to pick our pockets and the West is trying to block our pipelines.
But I don't think that that's really what it's like on the ground with the everyday BCer.
That's absolutely true.
So right now I'm physically standing in the Fraser Valley.
So we're in the corridor where Highway 1 comes through, Kinder Morgan Pipeline comes through.
I think there's two or three natural gas pipelines running around me somewhere.
It is promoted and supplied by fishing, logging, mining, you name it.
It is a major resource area.
It really only starts to get anti-Alberta when you cross over the Surrey-Langley border.
I'm not kidding.
As you're driving into Metro Vancouver, it is, you know, very supportive of oil and gas.
Every time I do streeters to go ask people, what do you think of oil and gas?
What do you think about the pipeline?
What do you think about Alberta?
What do you think about resource development?
It's very solidly in favor.
No matter how they vote, and I mean that, it's very solidly in favor of things like that, right up until you get to the Fraser River.
When you cross over between Surrey and over that Portland Bridge into Burnaby, that's where things really change.
And you can take a look at it on any sort of map, depending on how people vote or how they express themselves in polls and opinion polls.
But most of BC is with Alberta on this, including First Nations and people from every ethnic background and walk of life, because most of them depend on the resource sector, even if they don't work in it directly.
And just to give you an example, I remember back when I was at Sun News Network doing a story on a corporation in New Brunswick, of all places, that built modular houses for Fort Mac.
That is how they lived.
They were amazing.
They built these things like Lego pieces and then they shipped them up from northern Alberta and stuck them together.
Their livelihood depended on it and they were almost a world away.
And so many people, it's funny, if you go around the Atlantic Canadian provinces, their phone numbers will be a 780 area code or it'll be a Calgary area code because they fly out to work.
One of the major employers in Atlantic Canada is the oil and gas sector in Alberta.
And like when we're here with my own family, we always lived in BC.
Dad flew out to go to work.
That was my early childhood existence of prime minutes leave for so long.
And so much of Canada depends on it and loves the oil and gas sector that I think it's easy to just forget that most of BC is that way too.
It's just the folks who live in like the heart of Metro Vancouver and who pull the levers of power in Victoria that get an awful lot of media and it's easy to start thinking that you're full of enemies here.
You're really not.
You know, you remind me of the old joke that Fort McMurray is the largest city in Newfoundland.
It's so true.
It's so true.
Well, hey, there's that Robert Munch book, right?
I forget what it's called, but it's all about a family up in Fort Mac.
And if you look carefully in the little kid's bedroom and look on their poster, there's the big flag in Newfoundland there.
They're eating fish.
It's a Newfoundland family that's living up in Fort Mac.
Yeah, I just think that's beautiful.
It's really what our country is all about.
And it's a shame sometimes that as Albertans, we sort of feel alienated when we really have a lot of friends and allies across the entire country.
Bernier's Fearlessness00:03:26
Chris, I think I've taken up enough of your time.
It looks beautiful, so get out there and enjoy your day.
But I want to thank you so much for coming on the show.
I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for writing that poignant article.
And I want to thank you for being such a strong advocate for the forgotten man and his family.
Thank you for having me on and thank you for the work that you do to help these people and their voices matter.
And I really appreciate the time.
Thanks, Chris.
There you have it.
Chris Sims of the Canadian Taxpayer Federation.
She's the BC director and she's fighting for families like yours.
Hey everybody, welcome back.
Now this is the part of the show where Ezra normally reads his viewer feedback.
In other words, his hate mail.
Now I didn't actually get a lot of interesting hate mail this week.
Maybe I'm losing my touch for irritating people or maybe I'm just getting desensitized to the amount of gross things that get slung my way on the internet.
So maybe let's end the show on a more constructive note.
I went to the comments section of our Rebel website and Twitter to see what you guys are saying about what we are covering this week.
Now Ezra had a phenomenal interview with People's Party of Canada leader Maxine Bernier Wednesday night.
If you haven't watched it, go back and do it.
It's great and it's out from behind the paywall for everybody to see.
Ezra asked Bernier some really pointed, tough questions about immigration and Canadian values and the CDC and the dairy cartel and whether or not Bernier thought his new party was too splittist.
On Twitter, Dr. Michael Popp writes, I give Maxine Bernier credit for the courage to go on the Rebel when every other conservative politician hides under their desk.
You know what, Doctor?
I completely agree with you.
Bernier really wants to set himself apart from the often cowardly conservative establishment.
And he wants to take on the bias in the mainstream media.
So speaking directly to potential supporters, all 1 million and then some of our subscribers, is a terrific way to do that.
And I thought that interview was excellent.
And I hope it inspires others to have Bernier's fearlessness when it comes to the mainstream media.
Now, my colleague Ben Davies has a really great video this week about Ted Cruz and his wife being harassed and heckled out of a restaurant.
In response to that story, Paul McCullough comments, this incident has been great advertising for the Republican Party.
Voters have a choice between Republicans and these unhinged mental patients.
You know, Paul, I think you're right.
The crazier the left is, the more the walk away from the left movement grows.
So while public life for high-profile conservatives may become a little more difficult in the foreseeable future, it really is making the fringe left and the mainstream left that's embraced the tactics of these lunatics look more and more like something normal people just don't want anything to do with.
So I guess in that respect, the glass is half full.
Crazier Left, More Walkaways00:01:31
And on my video about Bill Blair's ongoing ignorance about the crisis on the Canadian border and what that means to Canada's newest sanctuary city, Edmonton, Alan Peterson writes, Welcome to Canada, America's septic system.
Flush twice.
It's a long way to Edmonton.
You know, that is a brutally honest way of putting what's happening on the Canadian border.
The people leaving the United States to claim asylum in Canada are already illegally in the United States.
They don't qualify for asylum in the United States.
They don't even qualify for permanent residency because they couldn't follow the rules that got them into the United States in the first place.
And all these people who couldn't obey the rules, follow the rules and do immigration the right way in the United States.
Well, now they're in Canada and headed to Edmonton to use resources Edmonton taxpayers paid for and the city didn't even bother to ask taxpayers their opinion before they did it.
But I want to ask them and I need your help to do it.
You can go to upholdthelaw.ca where I'm trying to crowdfund a proper opinion poll so that Edmontonians can have their say and every little donation helps me.
Well everybody, that's the show for this Friday.
Thank you everybody so much in the Toronto office for helping me put together the show tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
Thank you for your continued support of what we do here at The Rebel.