The McKinnon Report exposes Alberta’s NDP government under Rachel Notley’s leadership, revealing $5,300 per capita healthcare spending—50% higher than BC, Ontario, or Quebec—despite the youngest population and wait times of 26 weeks. Activists stormed a Hutterite turkey farm near Fort McLeod, demanding media access and releasing birds to a sanctuary while refusing to leave, with police allowing them to depart uncharged. Ezra and Sheila Gunread condemn the RCMP’s inaction as a dangerous precedent, linking it to broader bullying of peaceful farming communities by organized protesters, and urge Crown intervention to prevent escalation. Alberta’s economic decline under Notley’s tax hikes and anti-oil policies, paired with bloated union payrolls and city grants, demands urgent spending cuts to restore fiscal health and protect vulnerable groups like Hutterites from further exploitation. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey folks, today's show is about an Alberta multi-party committee report into how to get it back economically.
But actually, I think the highlight of today's podcast is my interview with my friend Sheila Gunread about a turkey invasion.
30, or is it 60 left-wing hippies storm a turkey farm in Alberta, but not just any turkey farm?
They chose one because it was hutterite.
I'll tell you what that means, and Sheila will help me explain in a moment.
Before I get out of the way and let you hear the podcast, please consider becoming a premium subscriber.
It's eight bucks a month or 80 bucks a year.
You get the video version of the show, which I recommend.
You also see David's Menzies show, Sheila's Own Show, and you help us pay the bills.
All right.
Without further ado, here's today's podcast.
You're listening to a Rebel Media podcast.
Tonight, a new multi-party investigation into Alberta's finances shows things are much worse than Rachel Notley ever let on.
It's September 5th, and this is the Answer Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
It's a cliche that when a new government takes over from an old government and they look behind the curtain and look at what's really going on, it's always worse than we knew.
They say so.
Sometimes that's just hyperbole, an opportunity for the new government to lower expectations.
I mean, it's smart.
But when the government that was just ejected was the most extreme socialist government to ever rule, yeah, you know it's really going to be bad, worse than anyone let on, obviously.
I'm talking about Rachel Notley's NDP in Alberta and the mess they left behind.
You can't raise taxes, attack your key industry, hobble any surviving businesses with new regulations, drive away investment, hire a record number of your public service union friends through the government payroll, give them all raises, and expect things to stay together.
Frankly, had the NDP itself won re-election, they would have imploded in their second term.
Much like Bob Ray's Ontario started to implode in the final years of his NDP mandate.
I don't know if you recall that thing called Ray Days.
They were so deep in debt, they were so out of cash that they just started telling bureaucrats, hey, how about just take some days off without pay?
Just don't come in.
I mean, it's great to be a socialist until you run out of other people's money as Bob Ray did and Notley was doing.
Notley was lucky in that she left just before the place fell down.
It's still imploding, by the way, just because Jason Kenney is the premier now hasn't solved the key problems there.
That's still the problem of Justin Trudeau and his war on oil and gas and his carbon tax and his pledge to transition off fossil fuels.
That's still a problem.
I've said time and time again, and you're all tired of hearing me say it, you can't make a choice between what's good for the environment and what's good for the economy.
We can't shut down the oil sands tomorrow.
We need to phase them out.
We need to manage the transition off of our dependence on fossil fuels.
Yeah, just because Rachel Notley's gone, do you think oil companies are lining up to invest while Trudeau is still in power federally?
Or while John Horgan is the premier of BC still, or the insane out-of-control political courts continue to give political wins to foreign-funded environmental lobby groups assuming to stop everything as they just did this week.
Frankly, even if you were to boot out Trudeau and Horgan and put non-crazy judges on the courts, you just can't turn around an industry like that on a dime.
When a company like Shell or Total just up and leaves and shuts down a $5 or $10 billion oil sands project, it doesn't come back just by flipping a switch.
By the way, they're probably busy working in less capricious jurisdictions like Texas or Pennsylvania or Australia or literally 100 other countries that are happy to have jobs and make money off oil and gas.
All right.
Enough preamble.
Here's the news.
Jason Kenney called the doctor and the doctor said it's bad.
The doctor is the McKinnon Commission.
It's a team of doctors led by Janice McKinnon.
Now she's the former finance minister of Saskatchewan under an NDP premier named Roy Romano.
The vice chair of the panel is Mike Percy, former a senior, formerly a senior liberal politician.
Do you see what's happening here?
We have ourselves a multi-partisan or perhaps more accurately a non-partisan group.
And they're experts.
They're not just politicians.
I'm underselling them.
McKinnon is a professor.
Percy is a professor.
We're talking about PhD smart experts here, people who know economics, not just party hacks who know nothing, like Notley's crew.
We're talking about scholars, economists.
There's a couple more researchers on the panel.
And even this strange bird, Dave Mowat, an eco-extremist I don't like one bit.
You'll remember he was the NDP's climate fighting hero.
He actually went down to an Al Gore training camp once.
He runs Alberta Treasury Branch as the provincial government's bank.
And I point out how diverse this is to show you this ain't exactly the Jason Kenney fan club.
It's as multi-party as you get in a place like Alberta.
And here's the thing.
They were unanimous.
Every one of them.
The NDP have left a disaster.
Not just a little blip, not just a small problem, a disaster.
And it's a spending problem.
Here, listen to McKinnon herself.
There is a spending problem here.
If you're spending $3.6 billion more per person in health and you have longer wait times, you have a problem.
Something isn't working.
And we detail there what has to change.
You use hospitals too much.
You rely too much on just doctors.
All of that has to change.
So you get the spending problem under control.
And then you look at the tax mix.
And that will be up to another group of people.
And the government will oversee that.
But I don't think there's a case here for raising taxes.
There's a case here for getting spending under control.
Now, the report that they filed is 82 pages, but it also comes with a 150-page accounting document prepared by KPMG.
They weren't messing around here.
So let me sum it up for you.
Alberta's got to cut with an axe, not a scalpel.
Now, for anyone who's paying attention, Alberta, for the past four years, you're thinking, what more could you possibly cut in that province?
That province has been devastated.
The oil patch is a ghost town, really.
High unemployment, higher than anywhere west of the Atlantic.
Climbing actually just devastated.
When Alberta has higher unemployment than Quebec, you got yourself a problem.
How could you possibly cut more out of those people?
Well, all those people who have been cut, those are real Albertans I've been describing because while real Albertans have been in a deep economic recession for four years, the government sector has been having a party.
Alberta right now has the highest number of government bureaucrats in its history.
And they've never been paid more than right now in history.
It's boom times if you're a bureaucrat in Alberta, in the government.
It's a party.
No surprise there.
The number one occupation of the NDP MLAs last term was government workers.
Notley's own husband was a lobbyist for a government union.
They are doing better than ever after four fat years.
It's those folks who need a cut for the first time in years, which is why I suspect there won't be anyone else who gives a damn when those cuts come other than the public sector unions and the media sympathizers they have.
We've seen this movie before.
Ralph Klein faced the same thing in the 90s when he was tasked with bringing Alberta back from the brink.
Then let's go through the McKinnon report just a bit.
Now, you know what the biggest spending item is for every Canadian province?
It's healthcare.
Or more accurately, government unions who say they do health care.
It's different.
Because most people in the healthcare business in Canada are not nurses or doctors actually making you healthy.
They're bureaucrats, the kind of people Notley truly champion.
Here's proof.
Look at table 12 in the McKinnon Report.
It compares Alberta's healthcare to other key provinces.
BC is a good comparison.
Ontario and Quebec are good comparisons too.
So look at that first line.
Alberta spends more than $5,000 per capita on healthcare a year compared to way less in those other three provinces.
But look at the age-adjusted figures.
And what I think that means is that, I mean, Alberta is a young population compared to other places.
So a healthy 30-year-old male doesn't really use healthcare.
And Alberta's population is amongst the youngest in the country.
I think it is the youngest.
So you adjust for age, and Alberta is way overspending.
More than $5,300 per person.
That's about 50% more spending than other provinces.
But look further, the cost of a standard hospital stay, almost $8,000 compared to far less in those other comparable provinces.
And remember, we're not comparing Alberta to the poorest places.
We're not comparing to Newfoundland.
We're comparing to British Columbia and Ontario, who have as good or better health care than Alberta.
So why is Alberta's health care so expensive?
Four years of socialist governments rewarding their public sector unions as part of it.
But let's be candid, the last few conservative premiers weren't very conservative at all, were they?
One more line.
Just look at the average wait time to get medical care, to get a doctor to see you.
In Alberta, it's 26 weeks.
That's half a year.
That's almost double what it is in Quebec.
So Alberta is spending way more, but getting way less because the government unions are sopping it up.
They've been partying.
The first four recommendations in the McKinnon report are to rein in hospital costs and allow alternative payment systems.
That means private insurance.
That means letting people pay.
You know, a free market might do that.
Let me remind you, this is a report chaired by a former NDP cabinet minister from Saskatchewan, Homo Tommy Douglas.
All right, I spent some time on healthcare, the biggest spending item, but let's look at the next one, schools.
I won't go in equal depth here, but look at this.
On education, the panel recommends that the government should work with education stakeholders to decrease the percentage of government funding that goes to administration and governance, currently 24.6%, to a level comparable to British Columbia, 17%.
Holy moly.
Do you get that?
So what they're saying is Alberta spends a quarter of all education dollars on bureaucrats.
If you look at it, that's actually 50% more than the BC government does, is 25% on administration in Alberta.
That's eight more than 17, which is in Alberta.
So that's 50% more, of course.
Because government unions who have been running the government have had a four-year party.
And frankly, before that, under the Progressive Conservatives.
Look at this one.
I'm not going to go through all of them.
I'm just going to look at a couple.
Recommendation 21, adopt a fiscal rule that limits the annual increases in total program spending to the projected rate of increase in total household incomes in Alberta.
I like that.
So that means if the average family gains only 1% in income in a year, the government can't increase its spending any more than that.
Why should they?
Why should they?
Why are they allowed to be fancy and living high off the hog when the whole province has had four brutal years?
Now, I wonder if the opposite holds true too.
If the average Alberta household loses one or two or three or four or 5%, surely the government should shrink too.
Maybe that's what this whole healthcare and education plan is about.
Look at figure 21.
Alberta pays more for nurses than pretty much anywhere comparable.
Why?
Alberta's cost of living is lower than Vancouver or Toronto.
Taxes are still lower than Vancouver or Toronto.
So why should nurses be paid more in Alberta other than they're part of the government workers union who have partied under an NDP union government?
Look at figure 22.
Alberta teachers make more than even those in Toronto.
How is that even possible?
How's that even possible?
Look at figure 26, grants to cities.
Why does Alberta's provincial government give so much more money to cities than any other place in the country does?
Is the garbage collection in Alberta's cities that much better than in other cities?
Why?
Because Calgary and Edmonton and other towns have left-wing mayors who can't stop spending.
They tax their own people too, by the way.
So Alberta is number one in the country for spending, number one for overspending.
But look at how it's doing on the earning money side.
Not so good.
Look at figure 28.
A decrease in private sector investment in every single year.
Canada's not doing much better as a whole, by the way, under Trudeau, but it's moving slightly in the positive.
Alberta's had four years of disaster and it doesn't look quick to end.
How can you keep ramping up spending when for four years the alarm has been ringing?
Can I quote the panel saying the obvious?
Alberta used to be known as the most entrepreneurial place in Canada.
We used to believe that if there was a good place to invest to start and grow a business, it was Alberta.
Through its research and conversations, the panel has learned that Alberta no longer has that reputation.
Yeah, that's true.
It's shocking, but it's true.
Of course it's true.
We all know it's true.
I won't take you through the whole report.
You can find it pretty quickly online.
Frankly, I don't think you'd be surprised by a single word of it.
It's just a splash of cold water in the face to see it all published in one place and by a multi-partisan group of experts, including liberals and new Democrats and that kooky Al Gore robot named Dave Mowat.
But there's good news underneath all the bad news.
The good news is Albertans.
Look, the idea of fixing things, that's what Alberta does.
True, there have been many companies that have gone out of business in Alberta or just left for greener pastures, but there are plenty of Albertans who have stayed by being smart, by cutting out things they had to cut, by avoiding cutting the things they couldn't cut.
Alberta has been down before and has come back.
Albertans are smart.
They know how to do this.
There are 100 Alberta companies, 1,000, probably 10, probably 10,000 Alberta companies and hundreds of thousands of Alberta families who have dealt with these exact same problems on their own scale, company-wide or family-wide budget.
You're over budgeting your family, you fix it.
Alberta's spending more than they earn, so they've got to get control of their lives, just like 10,000 Alberta companies and hundreds of thousands of Alberta families did.
And they did it.
They cut to survive.
They tightened their belts, and things will be good again one day.
So the province is actually full of people who know how to do this and who are emotionally, well, they've done it before.
So fixing the problem is pretty clear how.
Cut the spending, clear out the government unions, bring in the private sector, stop the growth of government.
Activists Target Hutterite Colony00:15:25
Nothing magical.
It's hard work.
And the private sector has done that hard work for four years on itself.
Now it's time for the public sector to do that too.
They've been riding on the back of the private sector.
They need to take some cuts too.
This McKinnon report provides the multi-party cover to Jason Kenney.
This isn't about the UCP or the NDP.
This is about fixing the whole province.
The panel was unanimous in its advice.
It's time to do it and do not blink.
And you know in advance that the unions will squawk.
They'll take to the streets.
The government unions, that is, the private sector unions in the oil patch and industry, they've already had their cuts.
A lot of them are unemployed.
I don't think you're going to see a lot of oil sands unionized workers standing by their bureaucrat brothers and sisters.
They'll be cheering on the cuts.
Do it!
Or put another way, if it's not done now, it'll never be done.
It could never be done.
Jim Denning used to say, you can't jump a chasm in two leaps, two small leaps.
It's got to be one big jump.
Jason Kenney hasn't yet brought in his first budget.
His political capital will never be higher than it is right now.
His mandate will never be stronger than it is right now.
This report gives him the independent multi-party certification that he has to cut.
He must.
It's not enough.
It won't be enough on its own to save the province.
I'm sorry.
It's not sufficient to save the province by cutting, but it's a necessary first step.
The problems in Ottawa, in BC, in our courts, they'll come later.
But for now, balance the budget in the manner outlined by the new Democrat, Janice McKinnon.
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Well, do you know what Hutterites are?
It's a Christian farming commune, is what I would say.
In other parts of North America, there are similar groups.
You would call them the Amish, for example, in Pennsylvania.
It is basically people who keep themselves generally pacifists who are farmers in communal farms.
And in Alberta, where I originally come from, there's some of the best people around.
They don't make trouble.
They don't go looking for fights, sort of the opposite.
I would even say they're shy.
I know that's a stereotype, but I call them shy.
So I read this story in the paper and I was furious.
Can I read a little bit of it to you?
This is from Global News, which has video of it as well.
Let me read a little bit from the Global News story, and then I'm going to bring in my friend Sheila Gunread, who knows Hutterites well and is friends with many Hutterites and can give her point of view on this story as a farmer.
Let me read a little bit.
Dozens of protesters illegally stormed a southern Alberta Hutterite turkey farm Monday, demanding more transparency and alleging the animals are treated inhumanely.
They went to Fort McLeod, which is not easy to get to.
Like it's not Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, even sound like a major city.
You have to go there.
About 30 people illegally planted themselves inside the Jumbo Valley Hutterite turkey farm, and another 30 stood outside near the highway.
And then get this, the protesters, who said they're not with any particular group, I'm sorry, that's a lie, explained they wanted to highlight the living conditions of the 30,000 turkeys.
Ryan Park, one of the protesters, says, we're out here to expose the injustices that happen to these animals behind closed doors.
We want transparency in the way our food is made.
I believe if people knew what goes on behind these doors, they wouldn't want to consume these products.
Let me read a little bit more, and I'm going to call in Sheila in just a moment, but I'm just so mad at this story.
The owner of the farm refuted that argument.
Mark Cheddar said the animals at his free-range turkey farm have plenty of space and are treated very well.
He said he has nothing to hide.
So he showed the protesters around.
It's our livelihood, he said.
Our boys get up early and come to do work here.
We don't butcher these turkeys.
It's on the food chain.
It's safe, and we work with the turkey board as far as crowding goes, and we do everything in a very humane way.
Cheddar called it a terrible morning.
I can only imagine.
We tried to deal with them in a very nice manner because it was very agitating, he said, referring to the protesters, not the turkeys.
To see people come off the highway into your farm, I mean, I won't do it.
I don't expect other people to do it, so what kind of people are these is really mind-boggling.
Yeah, that's called a home invasion.
Both groups said that they called RCMP to keep the peace.
Well, to keep the peace.
This was trespass.
This was extortion.
I'll get to that in a moment.
Essentially, and here's the cop talking.
Essentially, we would have the authority to remove them forcibly would have been a bigger issue, said Sergeant Brian Mucha.
So a peaceful resolution is kind of what ended up happening, and they did end up leaving the property.
I'm sorry, that is an unacceptable resolution.
If someone punches you in the nose, it's not, well, we didn't want to escalate, so we let him walk away.
No, that's an assault.
If 30 people storm your property and they say, well, if you let us go, we'll go.
I'm sorry, that's not a resolution.
The job of police is not to keep the peace.
It's to uphold the law.
That's different, isn't it?
Here's the extortion part.
While the incident didn't turn violent, the protesters said they wouldn't leave unless their three demands were met.
They wanted some of the turkeys to be released to a sanctuary, media coverage of the barn's interior, and to walk away without charges.
That's called extortion.
The farm gave them five turkeys, and Global News was allowed to enter into the barn.
Police are investigating.
I am so angry at this story.
Joining me now from Alberta is someone who knows a little bit about farming, a little bit about Hutterites, and a lot about the creepy, weirdo left.
Our friend and chief reporter, Sheila Gunreed.
Sheila, how you doing?
Hey, Ezra, I'm great.
Thanks for having me on.
Like you, this story enrages me because truly, Hutterites are the best possible neighbors that you can have.
Full disclosure, I just live down the road from the Scottford Hutterite colony.
I'm there quite a bit.
In fact, I buy my turkeys there.
Why?
Because unlike these activists, I know that turkeys are not benevolent creatures, but awful, horrible, evil, strong, ugly creatures.
The thing that really irritates me about this is that I believe that these activists, and they say they're activists from all over the prairies, they specifically targeted a Hutterite colony because there are turkey and poultry barns all across the prairies, all across Alberta.
But they targeted a Hutterite barn, I think specifically because of the best qualities of Hutterites, that they're peaceful people, they're neighborly people.
They're called by their religion to be pacifist and non-confrontational.
So this is the safest place for these people to go and invade.
And like you say, a home invasion and to extort some of their property from them.
These turkeys are their property.
Like the farm boss, I think it was Mark Cheddar pointed out.
This is their livelihood.
You need to understand.
Hutterite colonies, it's families.
It's families and families and families that live and work together.
Now they live communally, but they certainly are capitalist.
This is a business, but there's children there.
This is where they live.
This isn't just where they work.
And so when they're invading the barns, they're invading their home.
This truly is a home invasion.
And then when I hear that the police sort of brokered a peace deal with home invaders, that just puts a target on the backs of all the other Hutterite colonies across the province.
I know there's probably at least 20 Hutterite colonies in southern Alberta.
There's other colonies that are very, very close to the Jumbo Valley colony.
That's this one here.
And I'm very worried for the state of affairs.
If the RCMP are just letting activists walk onto the property of these farms and steal livestock and then leave without charges or mass arrests, this is a very dangerous precedent.
It's outrageous, and you're so right.
If you tried taking 30 hippies, and I do not believe for one second, oh, we're just folks who just came together.
Who funded this?
Who paid for this?
Who organized it?
What hand is behind the scenes here?
And I'm not going to speculate theories, but I tell you one thing, these new vegan burgers out there, they're certainly putting a big PR push behind it.
I'm not saying it's them.
I want to know who it is behind it.
And with these cops, you're saying, oh, you can just go.
Hey, guys, you can go now.
We're certainly not going to find it with that kind of keystone cop action.
I'm deeply disappointed in the RCMP.
But let me put it this way.
You go to an industrial-scale corporate turkey farm, and I got nothing against them.
No.
I'm just saying you go to an industrial farm with 30 stinking hippies and you try and go in their turkey barns, you're going to get a shotgun blast to the face.
You're going to get people handcuffing you till the cops arrive.
You're going to get armed farmers showing you what's what.
They literally went to pacifists, and I can't even believe that Cheddar gave them, I mean, and it just shows the turn the other cheek attitude of these saintly people.
They would literally turn the other cheek and give five turkeys to these guys.
I saw your tweet.
Imagine the little Prius with these stinking hippies and a bunch of turkeys pecking at them on their way out.
That made me laugh, but just a moment of laughter amidst an appalling, appalling story.
Well, and there's more to this story.
I did a little research on Jumbo Valley because I am the local Anabaptist defile.
I'm a big Hutterite fan.
Jumbo Valley is a daughter colony of another colony.
So the other colony got big, and so they split.
They bought some land and split.
So Jumbo Valley runs free-range turkeys.
This is the most ethical, if there's such a thing, of all farming.
I mean, I think all farmers are pretty ethical.
But these turkeys are living a good life as far as meat turkeys go.
Jumbo Valley started in 2016.
So these are state-of-the-art, brand new barns that these turkeys are in.
And they're using state-of-the-art farming methods to run free-range turkeys.
And yet, still, that's not enough for these activists to come along and accuse them of being mean or oppressive to their turkeys.
I got to tell you, too, I think you're right that there's some other sinister sort of organization behind these people, because in my contact with the people who were actually there, and I did have a little bit of contact with the activists who were actually there, they're dumb as a pile of hammers.
These people have me, of all people, on their media release list.
So they sent me their pictures from inside the barn.
That shows you just how dumb they are.
I mean, the last person I am is an animal rights activist.
I mean, I suppose I could be in that I like to eat well-loved animals because I think they taste delicious and I insist on eating animals that I knew personally just so I know where my food comes from.
But they sent me their pictures posing with the turkeys, looking longingly into these turkeys' eyes, thinking that I would somehow be sympathetic to their story and run with it.
That just tells you how dumb they are.
I mean, turkeys are known as dumb animals, and this is the turkey protesters are dumb too.
Now, so I didn't know you were on the media release list.
Obviously, Global News was also.
Because I was going to say, I have a bit of an ethical question about Global News participating in this, entering into the property, and being one of the demands of these eco-terrorists that they film inside there.
Again, the fact that the Chether family allowed these creeps to go in and surely allowed Global News in doesn't make it doesn't make it okay.
I'm not sure what the ethical thing to do would be.
If you had been there with a camera, you surely would have been welcomed by the colony because you're an ally of theirs.
I wonder if these farm families felt extorted or threatened to let the cameras on there.
I have to say, this article in Global News is fairly balanced.
It's not anti-Hutterite propaganda or anti-Turkey propaganda, but it doesn't ask the real accountability questions.
Who are these people?
Don't tell me that you can organize 30 people to go into the farm and 30 more on the street.
Don't tell me you can organize 60 people from across Western Canada.
The transportation, the accommodation, the meals, the communications, the plan.
Don't tell me you move 60 people to a small place called Fort McLeod without an organizing hand and financial interest behind it.
Don't tell me that, because I'm not as stupid as a turkey.
Well, and, you know, frankly, I'm surprised these guys didn't get lunch out of the Hutterites.
If you've ever had some dealings with the Hutterites, they'll feed you before they send you on your way.
But nobody did ask these people, why are you all wearing matching t-shirts?
Where did all those T-shirts come from?
Why are you wearing, or why are you using professionally made signs in your sort of grassroots protest?
Who rented the bus, the yellow school bus, they took to get there?
Nobody asked them these questions whatsoever.
They just, you know, you're very right when you say that Global News just played along.
They were part of the extortion demands of these activists.
And giving in, I mean, it's like negotiating with terrorists, right?
Again, because of RCMP inaction and the media's lack of criticism of any of this, just puts a target on our Hutterite friends' backs the next time these people roll into town with their professional t-shirts, professional signs, and their bus transportation.
Queen's Interest in Justice00:06:03
Yeah.
You know, I don't think of myself as a particularly religious person.
I just don't think I am.
But it's times like this where the difference between you New Testament turn the other cheek people and me in the Old Testament fire and brimstone people, the God of wrath.
I feel the difference because I have to say I am full of an anger on behalf of these Hutterites, even if they don't feel it for themselves.
And I know a little bit about the law, Sheila.
I know that you have the law as an you can go to court as an individual and say, Judge, I've been personally wronged by these people, and I seek justice in a civil court.
They've committed a tort against me, is the word we use.
Obviously, the Hutterites would never pursue that.
And that's part of the problem here: the Hutterites weren't enforcing their rights because they had this Christian deference even in the face of these.
I'm going to use the word evil.
I'm not going to say it's a deep satanic evil, but it's an abusive, it's an abusive evil.
But the queen has an interest in the law too.
And that's why when you see a criminal case, the victim doesn't have to file the lawsuit against the criminal because the criminal has committed an offense not just against his victim, but against the order of the land, against the queen.
That's why when you see a prosecution, it's the queen versus so-and-so, R. That's the initial of Regina, which means queen in Latin, R versus Smith.
Because even if the person Smith punched is too Christian to sue, the queen will sue with her attorney general because she can't stand the lawlessness.
And that's a very lengthy way of saying the Christian turned the other cheek and the cop turned the other cheek, but the queen must prosecute.
This was a crime.
This was a crime of trespass, of extortion.
I put it to you as a crime of theft.
It was a crime of mischief.
There were many crimes here, and I am not satisfied with this, Sheila.
No, I think it's terrible what happened to these Hutterites, and everything that happened since the moment those activists set their foot on the Hutterite farms has been terrible.
I mean, the inaction by the police, the complicancy of the media, and then this, the Hutterites, like you say, they're Christian pacifists, but that doesn't make them any less a victim of this crime.
And it is the government, the Crown's obligation to do something to make sure that this doesn't happen to them again, because these people will be back.
Yeah.
I'm very mad about this.
You and I should talk offline about things we can possibly do journalistically and otherwise, because I fear that if we rely on the good nature of the victim and the work avoidance, path of least resistance of Sergeant Brian Moocha, that there will be no justice here.
And rather, as you prophesy, there will be more of this because now the precedent is set.
I have some ideas that maybe I'll share with you offline, but I do not feel that we should be done with this, even if Mr. Cheddar is.
I don't think so either.
Like you said, the Hutterites are pacifists.
They're not going to do anything about this, or maybe they will, maybe they won't.
But this is about, at the end of the day, the Hutterites are a family farm just like mine.
And so the same laws that protect my family farm that are enforced to protect my family farm should be enforced to protect theirs.
I could only imagine, it's one thing, I mean, obviously, Mr. Cheddar here is a grown-up, and he can communicate well enough when he can deal with the secular world.
But he talked about his boys, and I wonder what the children thought.
I wonder what the children thought.
I'll tell you one thing.
You bring 30 people onto my backyard when my children are there.
That's not something I'm going to turn the other cheek on too quickly.
All right, I'm in a quiet rage right now.
Sheila, let's see me talk some more about this, and maybe there'll be another chapter here where we get closer to justice.
You bet.
All right, thanks for coming on the show.
You got it, Ezra.
All right, there's my friend and our chief reporter, Alberta Bureau Chief Sheila Gunrid, a farmer in her own right, a friend of Hutterites, you heard it, and of course, a friend of justice.
Stay with us.
more ahead on the rebel.
Hey, what do you think of that Turkey story?
I'm so mad about that.
I think I'm mad especially because they won't fight back for themselves.
If they were regular folks fighting back, yeah, okay, the big boys are grown-ups.
They were, I agree with Sheila completely, they were targeted precisely because they're too nice.
And I, listen, I wish the whole world was nice like that.
But the problem when you got a group of people that are nice like that and you have organized professional protesters, they target them, that's bullying.
That's bullying.
And normally bullying is against kids and you protect the kids.
These Hutterites are childlike in their sense of kindness.
You see what I mean by that?
And the cop, the cop was of no help.
I'm mad about that.
I want to do more.
I'm going to talk to Sheila about what we can do.
All right, that's the end of the show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at the Rebel, to you at home.