Sheila Gunn-Reid examines the Conservative Party of Canada’s (CPC) 24-seat loss in the September 20 election, driven by a right-wing split and Aaron O’Toole’s climate policy reversal, including dropping opposition to a carbon tax despite prior pledges. The PPC surged from 1.6% to 5.1%, winning ridings where CPC votes collapsed, while studies label lockdowns Canada’s worst post-war policy failure. Gunn-Reid argues the CPC must embrace populist skepticism—rejecting Paris Accord targets, solar/wind risks (e.g., child labor in Congo mines, turbine fires), and costly urban mandates—to reclaim its base and prevent further erosion to fringe rivals. [Automatically generated summary]
Oh hey rebels, it's me, Sheila Gunread, and you're listening to a free audio-only recording of my weekly Wednesday night show, The Gun Show.
Now tonight my guest is Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition Canada and we're discussing how Aaron O'Toole's flip-flopping on the carbon tax and the Paris Accord drove people into the loving arms of the People's Party of Canada.
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What caused the vote split on the right side of the spectrum that lost the conservatives to the election?
And how do we fix it?
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Most credible analysis of the recent federal election demonstrated that the vote split on the right accounted for a loss of about two dozen seats for the Conservative Party of Canada.
Amanda Connolly and David Aiken wrote in the Canadian press that the PPC failed to win any seats in the September 20th election, but gathered 5.1% of the popular vote, up from 1.6% in the 2019 federal election.
In 21 ridings across the country, the size of the PPC vote was greater than the number of votes by which the Conservative candidate lost that riding.
12 in Ontario, 5 in BC, 2 in Alberta, 1 in Quebec, and 1 in Newfoundland.
14 of those losses were to Liberals, while six went to the NDP and one to the Bloc Quebecois.
Now, according to Jack Fonseca writing in LifeSight, O'Toole's Liberal Light platform also resulted in a massive drop in the popular vote for the Conservative Party.
In 2019, under Andrew Scheer's leadership, Conservatives won 6,239,227 of the popular vote.
Although numbers are not yet finalized as of this writing, the O'Toole Conservatives received only 5,529,272 of the popular vote.
That means O'Toole presided over a collapse of almost 710,000 votes.
Now, the flip-flopping by O'Toole on key conservative issues, I think, drove voters into the arms of the PPC or just demoralized them enough to stay home.
And one of those key conservative issues was the carbon tax.
After years of opposing one, the Conservatives suddenly wanted to embrace one of their own, but also call it something else, a levy.
Now, that name change didn't fool anyone except maybe Aaron O'Toole himself.
Joining me tonight to discuss how Conservatives can fix their climate policy and maybe mend some fences with the disaffected Conservative base is Tom Harris of the International Climate Science Coalition Canada in an interview we recorded yesterday afternoon.
Joining me now from his home in Ottawa is my friend Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition Canada.
And I wanted to have Tom on the show today because he is such a careful watcher of climate issues and how they, to use the language of the left, intersect with politics.
And you and I were sort of talking back and forth over the last week or so about how I think Aaron O'Toole's flip-flopping on climate issues and in particular the carbon tax really scuttled his chances at winning.
And it sort of drove a lot of people to the PPC.
So I guess my first question is to you.
Why do you think, first of all, do you agree with that?
And if so, how can Aaron O'Toole sort of fix that?
Yeah, I agree with you completely.
In fact, there were 25 writings that if you add the PPC vote to the Conservative vote, you end up with Conservative victories.
And if you add them up and you're taking them away from the Liberals, that would have given the Conservatives a minority government.
And even if a couple of those seats went NDP, which is actually possible, then indeed the Conservatives would still have formed a minority government.
They would have had the most seats.
So you have to look at, well, what's going on here that has driven so many Conservatives away from the Conservative Party?
And you also wonder how many of them just didn't bother to vote.
I have a family member who just said, forget it, I don't agree with any of the leading candidates.
So she didn't vote at all.
So you have to wonder what would have happened if he hadn't had a hard turn left on many issues and the carbon tax and the climate plan in particular.
Now, it's interesting because the PPC actually have a climate plan, which is what the Conservatives should adopt.
But this time he has to do it quite differently.
You know, one of the big problems is that even among conservatives within the party and MPs who actually agree with the climate plan of O'Toole, they're still angry with him because he didn't actually go through his cabinet through his caucus.
He didn't go through the environment critic.
He announced this to the public without having actually cleared it with his own party.
So there are people in the party who are angry about two things.
One is they're angry about the sudden shift left trying to outliberal the liberals on his climate plan with his own carbon tax and everything else.
They're mad at that, but they're also mad because he didn't actually clear it with the caucus.
He didn't clear it with his environment critic.
So he's got a lot of enemies in the party now and among MPs who are quite angry with him for the way he handled this.
So what he should do, the ideal thing, and I'll discuss the politically correct thing to do in a second, but the ideal thing is to actually adopt the People's Party of Canada climate policy.
And I'll just read some excerpts of it because it is really perfect.
Okay.
It actually says all the things that most of the grassroots in the Conservative Party actually think.
It said under the title issue, the liberal government is spending billions of dollars at home and abroad to fight global warming or climate change as it is now called to account for every natural weather disaster and its opposite.
In order to lower greenhouse gas emissions, it has imposed taxes and countless regulations.
It subsidizes inefficient and costly green technology and is blocking the development of the oil resources crucial to prosperity.
You know, he goes on to talk about it.
He's not a climate change denier.
This is Maxine Bernier and the people's.
He talks about until 12,000 years ago, much of Canada was under ice.
And thanks to natural climate change, it's that, you know, that's gone away and we live here today.
So he goes through various facts like that, which are, you know, really very good climate realism.
They're practical statements.
And so his plan is this.
And this is exactly what the Conservative plan should be.
It says, given the uncertainties over the scientific basis of global warming and the certainties about the huge costs of measures designed to fight it, there's no reason, no compelling reason to jeopardize our prosperity with more government interventions.
So they're saying, and again, this is what the Canadian Conservative Party, the Conservative Party of Canada, what their policy really should be.
It says a People's Party government will withdraw from the Paris Accord and abandon unrealistic greenhouse gas reduction targets.
And, you know, that is such an obvious thing because two-thirds of all the greenhouse gases that humans emit now is actually coming from the developing world.
China, by far the biggest emitter.
I mean, it's more than twice as much as the United States.
And as we've discussed before, they don't ever have to reduce emissions.
So what Canada does with our 1.6% of world emissions will have no impact on the future trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions.
So, I mean, there really is no point in us working on greenhouse gas reduction targets.
Of course, we should reduce pollution, but CO2 is not pollution.
You know, it's interesting, the People's Party even have a section here where they talk about what CO2 really is.
Thanks.
You know, that's plant-floated.
Yeah.
So it's silly to be trying to reduce emissions.
In fact, it's interesting.
And again, the PPC say this in their platform: we've seen a greening of the earth, an increase in forest density, an increase in crop yield because of rising CO2.
We could double or triple CO2 emissions, and there would be nothing but good happening on the earth.
The next statement from the People's Party is to stop sending billions of dollars to developing countries to help them reduce their emissions.
I mean, that is a complete waste of Canadian money.
To abolish the Liberals' carbon tax, well, that's a bit silly when you think about the Conservatives because they could easily have said, abolish the Liberal and Conservative carbon tax.
Because, you know, O'Toole said, oh, well, it's not a carbon tax, it's a levy.
Sorry, Tom, the NDP tried to say that in Alberta here.
Oh, it's not a tax, it's a levy.
And the conservatives in Alberta said, no, no, no, that's a tax.
But it's funny when their guy says it, oh, no, no, it is a levy and it's totally different.
Like blame.
Various conservative MPs who were trying to defend it as not being a tax.
But, you know, Ezra, I believe in one of the interviews, he said, the dictionary defines it as a synonym.
Anyway, abolish subsidies for green technology.
That's an important one because right now we're dumping so much money into very dangerous and dirty technologies.
We can talk about that later because they're doing that in spades here in Ottawa.
Invest in adaptation strategies if problems arise as a result of any natural climate change.
Well, of course, that's what societies have done throughout history: invest in adaptation.
Right now across Canada at the federal level, only 13% of our funding is going into adaptation to help real people adapt to climate change today.
And this is really a tragedy because many people around the world and even in Canada, certain parts of Canada, they need help adapting to natural climate change.
And yet most of the money is going to this fictitious idea that we can magically stop it.
And then it ends off by saying prioritize implementing practical solutions to make Canada's air, water, and soil cleaner.
So in an ideal world, and you know, after speaking to several people inside the Conservative Party, they have some real, O'Toole's people have some real fence mending to do because they have really alienated so many people in the party.
And by far the best thing to do is to adopt the PPC climate change plan.
And it could actually pull back from the PPC many of the votes that they lost.
But, you know, even for Red Tories who are afraid to contest the science of climate change, they can simply use the argument, very politically correct argument, that at 1.6% of world emissions, Canada's impact is negligible in comparison with China.
And China, of course, has this out clause, Article 4 of the underlying treaty under the Paris Agreement.
It's Article 4 in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
It says that the first and overriding priority of developing nations is poverty alleviation and development.
So you can see what's going to happen.
China, who's building coal stations not only across their country, but around the world.
I mean, they're funding climate or coal stations all across Africa and, you know, really everywhere in the world.
They're going to say, if anyone points out to them, hey, you're not limiting your CO2 emissions in 2030 the way you promised.
They'll say, yeah, but we have an out clause.
We don't have to do it because our first and overriding priority is poverty alleviation and development.
That's what they'll say.
It's pretty obvious.
When they cornered the Chinese negotiator at the Peru climate conference, one of the cops down there, conference of the parties, they asked him about whether they would change this underlying treaty that's under Paris that gives them an out clause.
And, you know, it's funny that I remember his exact words, the negotiator from China, he said, our purpose is to enforce the framework convention, not to change it.
So they've got a sweetheart deal and they know it.
So the conservatives who don't want to contest the science, and I understand many of them are afraid of that, even though I know from my knowledge of the inside of the party that many of them know the science is bologna.
Yeah, they know it's baloney.
But regardless, even for those who don't want to contest it, they can simply say, look, greenhouse gas emissions are going to continue to rise.
And, you know, because we have no control over most of the greenhouse gases in the world.
And those countries who do put out the most, China in particular, are going to continue to emit as much as they want.
So whatever climate change is going to happen is going to happen.
And Canada can't stop it.
So we should focus on adaptation and reduce real pollution for oil, soil, water, and land.
So to me, that's a pretty easy policy to promote.
Okay.
It just makes sense.
And it's not left or right.
It's not, you know, specifically conservative or liberal.
It's just common sense.
Justin Trudeau's Conservative Dilemma00:15:09
I mean, you have to adapt to it because we can't stop it.
And that's where the focus should be.
So that would actually help mend a lot of fences with the many other MPs and also people in the grassroots.
I mean, the grassroots hate the current climate policy of O'Toole.
And, you know, they're very upset about it.
And of course, this is part of the reason it's led to a petition to actually get him out as leader.
So if he wants to mend fences, and I think the only way he should stay in as leader is if he stops this attempt to outliberal the liberals on things like the carbon tax.
He's got to stop that.
And historically, if you actually look at what happened when conservative leaders were conservative, they actually have a very good track record.
I mean, Harper won three elections in a row.
You know, Mike Harris here in Ontario, he won elections.
And Margaret Thatcher raised.
Ralph Klein, he could have been premier for life.
Yeah, exactly.
And it's interesting because Harper even won in the 416 area code around Toronto.
So the idea that you have to shift left to win elections for the conservatives.
Well, we've seen two demonstrations that that's wrong.
And that's, you know, if you're going to drive away your base, I mean, of course you're going to lose.
And, you know, Sheila, you know, Aaron O'Toole tried to put on this brave face in his concession speech that they had done really well and, you know, they're going to really champion and go ahead.
Well, they lost two seats in comparison with Andrew Scheer and the Liberals gained two seats.
So his experiment failed.
Yeah, and sacrificed Alberta MPs for the cause because they're in Alberta, particularly in Edmonton, Kerry Diot lost his seat because of the vote split to the liberal.
And I can guarantee you that is standing on two things, the carbon tax issue and the gun rights issue, both serious flip-flops.
And conservatives are really terrible at articulating their own past on this issue.
Again, if you want to appeal to red Tories who actually care about these things, I don't know why you would, but even if you are a true believing red Tory that climate change is the greatest threat known to man, stand on the conservative track record.
I pulled two weeks ago, I pulled the Environment Canada data.
So this is the data that the liberals keep using.
Yeah.
When Stephen Harper came into power, greenhouse gas emissions were way higher than when he left.
And when he left versus Justin Trudeau in 2019, guess what?
Justin Trudeau is higher with his carbon tax than when Stephen Harper left in 2015.
So the data does not support the liberals plan or the current conservative plan.
Whatever Stephen Harper was doing, let's do that if you care about greenhouse gas emissions.
I don't, but these people keep telling me they do.
Let's try that.
It's the only thing that worked.
Yeah, that's right.
And, you know, mothers and ladies in the 416 area code, they voted for Harper.
You know, if you actually look at the statistics.
So, I mean, the bottom line is that their policy doesn't make any sense.
And, you know, you have to ask, well, who would be driving this?
Well, I go back to the time when I worked for the Canadian Alliance and they merged with the Conservative Party, you know, the Progressive Conservatives.
And you would think that the party would have been genuinely conservative because, you know, they only had two MPs left and the Progressive Conservatives after Kim Campbell's terrible election results.
And all the rest were Canadian Alliance MPs.
So I thought that the party was going to become truly conservative.
And yet what happened is because the backroom people, the head of communications, the head of strategy, because these enablers in the back room were red Tories, they pulled the party right back to the red Tory position.
I'm living through this, Tom, in Alberta right now.
I am living through this because we thought we're getting Jason Kenney.
He's a deep blue Tory.
The wild rose is strong.
They're going to drive the agenda.
Nope.
All the backroom cronies are the same red Tories that have been kicking around for decades and we're right back in Redford country where we started.
Yeah, I have a theory actually as to why that is.
Why are these backroom people also red Tory?
They're in the wrong party, really.
They should be in the Liberal Party.
But you have to think, where do these people end up?
In many cases, they end up in communications firms here in Ottawa.
And they're looking after their own future career because they don't want to be labeled as true blue conservatives because these PR firms that they're looking forward to getting into with good big salaries later on, these PR firms are generally liberal.
So I honestly think that one of the things driving the backroom people to be Red Tories and to not be real conservatives is concern about their future career.
So they are, in fact, in many cases, I think, sacrificing the victory of the party for the sake of not appearing too conservative.
So they'll get hired later in their career to be communications people at various firms here in Ottawa.
And, you know, if you start to reveal that, I think, to more grassroots conservatives, they have a reason to be very angry that these people would rather see the conservatives lose than be true blue conservatives, you know, than the party to be what the grassroots wants the party to be.
They would rather see the party lose.
And, you know, that's my theory.
And I've bounced it off a few people who are in the know and they say, yeah, that makes sense.
That why would the backroom be red Tory?
Well, it's because they're thinking of their own careers, not the party.
Yeah, and their own careers and not the careers of, you know, tens of thousands of Canadians who stand to lose them because of a bad economy at the hands of Justin Trudeau.
And you do make some very good points here about, you know, how you can win actually being a conservative.
Look at the last climate accord before Paris, Kyoto.
The conservatives won on fighting Kyoto.
You know, the liberal leader at the time was so keen on Kyoto, Stefan Dion, that he named his dog Kyoto.
Remember that?
Yeah.
Conservatives won a majority on saying this is a bad idea.
It gives away too much to the UN, too much control over our economy, and it's bad for Canadian jobs.
And they won, articulating that because those women in Toronto, those suburban moms, they'll vote for the jobs of their husbands every day of the week.
And as conservatives, they've done a terrible job articulating that these days.
Yeah.
Well, you know, before Harper was elected, I mean, he called Kyoto a money-sucking socialist scheme.
I mean, it can't be any more derogatory.
It can't be any more derogatory than that.
And yet he went ahead and actually won the election.
You know, I mean, this idea that you have to try to outliberal the liberals, I mean, it's a stupid idea because liberals are not going to vote for pretend liberals.
They're going to vote for liberals.
And, you know, so many of the conservatives went over to the PPC.
I mean, I have many people in my family, People's Party of Canada, many people in my family who voted PPC, you know, because they looked at the platform and they said, yeah, I agree with that.
But they looked at the conservative platform and they said, no, that's ridiculous, you know, on all kinds of issues.
I mean, you remember when the five primary leaders all got up and did that, you know, clapping seals thing, get the jab, where they did it all together.
They do the same thing on climate change.
It's just who's who's going to put my husband out of work faster when I look at the five of them.
And it's, I learned something over the last, I think, five or six years with Justin Trudeau in charge.
The liberals will, liberal voters will excuse a lot of dishonesty.
Conservative voters will not.
You know, conservative voters, you know, like Justin Trudeau still has people who will defend him as a feminist and defend him as a racism fighter, despite groping women and wearing blackface.
But I think for conservative voters, we don't like the flip-flops.
We don't like finding out that we've been misled.
And, you know, we conservatives have to earn our vote.
And I think Aaron O'Toole's got a long way to go before he can do that.
And I'm not sure if he can stay on as leader.
I think he thinks he might be able to, but I don't know if he can.
Well, I think the only way he can stay on is if he tries to actually mend fences with the normal part of the Conservative Party, you know, the grassroots, the MPs that know that the climate scare is bogus.
And, you know, that brings us to the topic of this petition that was just put out by Ben Ben Burt Chen.
You know, he's a person within the Conservative Party of Canada.
He's one of their National Council people, I believe.
But anyway, here's what he says.
He says, we, the undersigned, request that the National Council of the Conservative Party of Canada commence a referendum to recall Aaron O'Toole as the leader of the Conservative Party.
And he lists all sorts of reasons, but the one that I'm most interested in is this, and it's worth discussing a bit.
Aaron O'Toole has betrayed, talking about the Conservative Constitution, on the following points.
And they list several.
And the last one is he broke the trust of members who elected him as a leader by embracing a carbon tax, despite his pledge to never implement one during the leadership race.
And it's interesting because the Taxpayers Federation of Canada, with our friend Chris Sims and the rest of them there in Vancouver, he actually signed a declaration saying he would not have a carbon tax.
Big, you know, had a big poster and a great photo op and everything else.
And he just specifically broke it.
And the taxpayers Federation really attacked him for that.
So, I mean, that's the first thing he needs to do: he has to recognize that if he's going to break major agreements, major pledges, that of course they're going to say, well, then go away.
We don't want you as leader.
And that's my answer.
The only way he really can rescue his leadership, in my opinion, is if he stops his current carbon tax in particular, but other things that he's doing to try to outliberal the liberals.
So I have a lot of sympathy.
I mean, I'm not a member of the party, so I can't actually vote.
But last time I checked, they have almost 4,000 of the needed 5,000 votes to actually make the referendum perhaps take hold.
Now, it doesn't necessarily have to take hold, but it still would be, you know, if he gets 5,000 votes, he's got a good chance of it.
So the trouble is, of course, there's nobody kind of waiting in the wings, an obvious leader.
I mean, I think of Pierre Polyev, he's a possibility.
But, you know, Pierre, I like Pierre, but I understand quite a few people don't.
Pierre has some baggage of his own from the past.
But yeah, that's the trouble for the Conservatives right now.
They don't actually have, since they drove Max away, you know, they don't actually have anybody waiting in the wings.
And, you know, it's funny because O'Toole attacked Peter McKay for various things and in particular the climate stuff, which now O'Toole is doing himself.
You know, so I suppose, I mean, if they want to switch from one red Tory to another, they could switch to Peter McKay.
But what's the point?
Right.
You might as well bring in somebody who's really a conservative and who's not going to change their position as soon as they become leader.
I'd love to see maybe a woman from the prairies like Candace Bergen.
She's strong on all the issues that I seem to care about.
And she is pro-jobs and pro-West.
And, you know, it takes that argument away from the liberals that, oh, you know, you're just electing another privileged white man like Trudeau, You know, to have a lady in power, yeah.
Well, that would be great, and and you know, it's um, there are strong conservatives in there, and I think most of them are just being quiet now because they want to protect their jobs.
They're looking at what happened to Derek Sloan, yeah, and Derek Sloan would have been a real candidate too for leadership.
Sure, um, but I don't know how he can do that if he's not part of the party.
By the way, Derek Sloan put out some very nice videos, some very nice videos.
He stood on Parliament Hill and he talked all about the carbon tax, he talked all about climate change.
It was a series of seven videos during the election, which were extremely good.
You know, so people should do a YouTube search on Derek Sloan and climate change.
And he's saying essentially what the PPC-I mean, have you heard is Derek Sloan a potential PPCer?
I have heard that there are reasons that not everybody gets along over there, and that's too bad because I think people should, again, put aside their egos for the betterment of the country.
You know, not saying how Jason Kenney has worked out these days, but in the past, when he came and he said, Wild Rosers, PCers, we have to put aside all the old hurt, all the old grudges, because let me tell you, the PCs who were in power sure treated the wild rosers like dirt.
And I see a lot of that happening when I see Conservative Party partisans talk about PPC voters as though they weren't just the conservative base two short years ago.
Um, and you need, I think the next leader of the Conservative Party or whoever is the leader to mend those fences, it has to be someone who is going to acknowledge how poorly the PPC were treated by the Conservative Party of Canada.
If they ever want to get them back, they have to acknowledge that.
And Jason Kenney did.
That was my point, is he did how things are working out these days.
But back then, that was the only way to bring those two sides together to get rid of Rachel Notley.
And that has to happen federally if you ever want to get rid of Justin Trudeau.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, it's interesting because a lot of media portray the PPC as this extreme party.
But if you actually look at their platforms, really, they're actually quite sensible.
I mean, I have family members who are very keen on the PPC.
Yeah.
You know, and I support that idea because the point is they are doing the things that the conservatives should be doing.
Used to do.
Well, and I sorry to interrupt you, but I think a lot of that extremist rhetoric actually came from the Conservative Party itself.
You know, when they hired a liberal mercenary named Warren Kinsella to smear them in the media and do opposition research on them, instead of just saying, you know what, how did we lose you?
Lockdowns And The PPC00:07:16
Let's do what we can to get you back.
They actually funded a liberal to attack them.
And then now that's part of the ether when you talk about them.
Well, that's right.
And they should be working hard to get their base out as the primary level of support.
They're not.
They're actually, you know, it's funny.
They talk about, oh, we're expanding the tent.
No, you're not expanding the tent.
You're moving left.
You're moving.
You're shoving all those other people out.
That's right.
So you're not expanding because you're not including the traditional conservatives in the party.
They're just saying, heck with you, we're going to vote PPC.
And as I say, I repeat this because it's really interesting to look at the math.
25 ridings, the conservatives could have won.
Certainly the liberals would have lost if the PPC vote went to the conservatives.
And even if you take away a couple of those seats and make them NDP seats instead of liberal seats, you still get a conservative minority government.
And that doesn't even count all the conservative people who just said to heck with it.
We don't agree with anybody.
We're staying home.
So, you know, if they do the math, they can realize what the impact of not expanding the tent, but shifting the tent left.
It failed.
And, you know, I think the definition of insanity, of course, is to say, oh, that failed.
So I'm going to do it more.
And that's essentially what O'Toole is saying.
He's saying, give me a chance, give me a chance to do it again.
You say, well, why would you want to do it again?
It was a gross failure.
You had less seats than Andrew Scheer and you driven away to another party most of your grassroots.
I mean, it's just so stupid.
So O'Toole's got to do this.
He's got to not shift the whole party left.
He's got to pull it back to his base.
And then he has a chance, I think, and a reasonable explanation for why he should stay leader.
Otherwise, no, you know, get somebody who's going to appeal to the base and get them out.
I mean, that's the way it should be going.
For me, I think the party needs a complete and total reset.
And I think that means a new leader.
You know, like with regard to just the PPC numbers, I think Alberta has, I think it's 12 rural ridings, we call them, outside of the major centers.
Five of those, PPC finished second.
And some of those deep, deep blue conservative ridings where the vote percentage is down for the conservative in the riding, like 20%.
And so that is the base, the actual base of the Conservative Party, sending them a message.
Are they willing to listen?
I'm not so sure.
I guess the next 90 days, we'll find out.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's also interesting that the PPC went from 1.9% in the 2019 election to over 5% this time.
So if I were an internal person in the Conservative Party, I'd say, whoa, this party is growing quickly, more than doubled their support in just two years.
I mean, they're going to suck away more and more and more Conservative votes from the Conservative Party of Canada.
So that should be a real concern, not trying to outliberal the Liberals.
I mean, the Conservative Party should look at this and say, my God, if we don't move our tent back, we're just going to see next election, they will elect MPs from the PPC and they will get 10, 15% of the vote because it becomes more and more politically correct, of course, more and more acceptable for people to vote PPC as it grows, as it grows.
You know, I went to one of their rallies to see what was going on.
There were a lot of people there, you know, and these were people who, from my conversations, would normally have voted conservative, but they just weren't doing it.
Yeah.
And a lot of young people too.
And, you know, often I think about what their issues are as PPC voters.
And I talked to a lot of them.
And for them, there are really two issues.
It's the climate flip-flop, sort of the gun stuff.
If you are in Western Canada, that's a big issue.
But it's climate change, the flip-flop, and their anti-lockdown.
And those are their two issues.
And for them, the PPC was the only one saying, no, the lockdown is a terrible idea.
Let's get back to normal.
And Ralph Klein, he was once asked what the secret to his political success was.
And he said, I can identify a parade that's already marching and then just jump in front of it and lead it.
And, you know, there's a lot of room for that to happen in Canada.
And if the Conservative Party were smart, they would say, what's the parade that these PPC voters are marching in?
Let us jump in front of it.
But they just aren't.
Yeah, exactly.
And there's some very good studies that the Conservative Party could bring up to oppose the extreme lockdown.
Professor Joffrey at the University of Alberta, for example, he did a cost-benefit analysis.
And I sent the cost-benefit analysis to the Ontario government.
And this is on the lockdowns, you know, looking at what's the actual cost of the lockdowns in human health versus what's the potential cost if there was no lockdown in human health.
And what he calculated was that for the world at large, and this was a study done in late 2019, for the world at large, the ratio was 17 to one.
For Canada, it was 10 to 1.
In other words, the negative impacts of the lockdown were 10 times worse from a health perspective and other perspectives than the COVID even could be.
Okay.
So I took that study, I sent it to the Ontario government.
Of course, I got a silly answer that didn't address the question.
And I asked them, did you do a cost-benefit analysis on the lockdown to show that it's worth doing?
I don't think they have because they never answered.
You know, another professor at Simon Fraser University, an economist, did a study as well.
And he found the same thing.
And you know what, Sheila, his conclusion was pretty dramatic.
He said, I don't recall his name off the top of my head, but people can look it up.
He said that the lockdowns will go down as the greatest policy failure in Canadian history outside of war.
Okay.
And, you know, I have a friend who works in death and dying, and that's kind of a sad field to work in, but you know, people have to do it because families need support and everything else.
And, you know, she's saying that many of the statistics are hugely inflated when it comes to COVID deaths.
And, you know, we could go on and on about that.
I mean, that's a totally different topic.
But yeah, I think that those are the two issues.
It's the climate issue and the lockdown issue that are driving many people to the PPC party.
And on both issues, there's good evidence to support the rational point of view.
You know, I mean, I'm not saying COVID's not real, but the idea that you can close the whole society, schools, and everything else and not have really, really significant negative implications.
I mean, that's just stupid.
You know, and as I say, these experts are saying that the impact of the lockdown is much worse than the COVID even could be.
So, I mean, I'm not an expert in that area, but it's something you really have to look at when you're designing the conservative platform.
Yeah, I think it goes back to one of the drums that you like to beat, and that's adaptation.
There was a way that we could have adapted to this instead of just freaking out with COVID.
Clean Energy's Dark Side00:08:43
I wanted to ask you actually about some of the other work that the International Climate Science Coalition Canada is working on, and that's your report on the City of Ottawa climate plan.
Every time you talk about this, I'm just so flabbergasted at the sheer volume and amount of money that this one city is willing to waste on this one issue when you think about all the other pressing issues that a municipality should worry about.
They think that they are going to, I guess, save the earth from climate change, just the little city of Ottawa, and they are going to just wring every cent out of their taxpayers to do it.
Yeah, and they're going to drive people out of the city eventually.
As we were talking about last time, and by the way, the report is just about ready.
No problem.
The interesting thing is it's such a huge document.
You know, there are three documents in the city of Ottawa's approach to climate change.
There's their declaration of climate emergency, then there's energy evolution, and then there's the climate change master plan.
Well, you know, I'm taking excerpts from it from all three and we're analyzing them.
And it's taken longer than anticipated because it's such a big document.
But, you know, one of the things that people don't realize, they call this, they want to have a clean, resilient city.
I mean, the idea that this is clean, I mean, one of the things that, you know, we had on our America Out Loud radio show, the authors of a book called Clean Energy Exploitations, Helping Citizens Understand the Environmental and Humanity Abuses That Support Clean Energy.
And these two people, you know, an engineer and a policy expert, they actually went around, they looked at all the, you know, where are the raw materials coming from?
You know, cobalt, for example, that is used in many of the batteries.
It's used in much of the renewable energy sector.
And it's interesting because they've found that is up to 40,000 children, some as young as four years old, are working in mines in the Congo mining cobalt.
Okay.
And so here's a quote from the book by Stein and Royal, the two that wrote this book on energy exploitations, talking about the exposure that these children are experiencing to give us our so-called clean energy.
They wrote this.
They wrote, cave-ins, constant exposure to toxic radioactive water, dust, and dangerous air loaded with cobalt, lead, and uranium with other heavy metals breathed into lungs day after day.
So Western citizens can feel good about their Tesla or wind turbine.
Cobalt ore is then sent to China since one of the larger mines in the Congo is the Chinese mine.
And of course, once they get to China, they manufacture the wind and solar power.
They're the biggest manufacturer by far in an extremely environmentally unfriendly way, you know, dumping the effluents into the air and into the water.
And that's not counting the slave labor, by the way.
Yes, exactly.
So what you have is Westerners are supporting what is probably the most environmentally damaging energy sources on the planet.
And, you know, you think, well, oh, once we have them, they're clean, eh?
Well, no, not really, because the turbines and the solar panels that, you know, if you get 20 years out of them, you're doing really well.
And they have to dump, you know, what are they going to do with them?
There are no recycle facilities in Canada for solar cells.
So they have to ship them abroad.
And they often end up in poor countries just dumped in landfills where with rainwater and great ground movement and stuff, they break up and the toxic chemicals all go into the watershed.
And of course, what about the birds and bats?
I mean, millions of birds and bats are being killed by wind turbines.
Ottawa wants to put up 710 of these things bigger than the peace tower.
Where?
Yeah, exactly.
Where are they going to fit them in?
I guess, I mean, they'll have to put them throughout the greenbelt.
So they'll have to cut down a lot of trees.
So, you know, the whole idea, if you want a clean, resilient city, you don't go to wind and solar because, you know, they're the opposite.
They're totally unresilient.
It's a function of the breezes and the sunshine.
I mean, how can that be resilient?
And they're moved to buses.
I mean, did you realize that in Germany, they've now passed a new regulation saying that you can't park battery-powered vehicles in underground parking lots because they're getting so many battery fires.
Okay.
And when you get a battery fire, it doesn't, you can't put it out easily because, of course, you're burning things like lithium.
So you can cool it and you let it sort of burn out on its own.
And of course, that's one of the reasons that these wind turbine fires are so horrific.
They've estimated that when you talk about these huge multi, you know, 60-story wind turbines, about one in every 2,000 burn down every year.
Okay.
Now, when I say burn down, I mean the whole turbine is destroyed.
There's two reasons for that.
One is because it's difficult to get to a turbine fire because it's 60 stories up, but also because they're in remote locations.
And by the time the firefighters get there, you know, the fire is well underway.
So they really have to just let it burn out.
So what you would calculate then is if one in every 2,000 turbines burns to the ground every year around the world, if Ottawa is bringing in 710 of them, that means that even a little more frequently than one every three years is going to burn to the ground.
And I don't know if you heard recently, but there was one of these massive 60-story turbines that it basically fell apart while it was operating in Thunder Bay.
Yeah, this was the beginning of September.
And, you know, if you look at the YouTube video of it, I mean, there's pieces thrown all over the place.
You know, so you don't want to have anybody nearby.
You know, the current sort of setback for industrial wind turbines in Ontario is only 550 meters.
And yet, around the world, they're saying two kilometers is necessary for the protection of people, not just because of the destruction of the turbine, you know, falls apart and throws massive, you know, 747-sized blades all over the place, but also because of this infrasound, this low-frequency sound that penetrates the wall and pummels you day and night, day and night, which drives people away from the turbines.
I mean, it gives them migraines and you know, constant flickering and everything else.
So, you know, it's going to be a nightmare for Ottawa if we really do adopt this plan.
Not only the 37% increase in property tax, like we were talking about last time to pay for this, but of course, increase in massive increase in electricity costs, you know, ugly wind turbines like all over the place, 36 square kilometers of solar panels, if you can believe that.
That's an energy evolution.
Yeah, so Ottawa is not going to be a good place to live, especially when it's minus 30 out and your battery-powered bus breaks down halfway around, as they do in Germany.
So, yeah, it's sad because they're going to reduce greenhouse gases in Ottawa for sure, because a lot of people will leave.
Yeah, you know, it's funny because you hear the left all the time saying that climate change is a human rights issue.
It is.
It's just not a human rights issue in the way that they think it is.
I mean, I don't want any Congolese children enslaved for some rich guy's novelty car, nor do I want all the rural people of Ontario stuck with solar panels so that the people in Ottawa can feel better every time they flick on a light switch.
You shouldn't be offloading your feel-goodery onto other people, making them suffer so that you have, you can placate your climate hypochondria.
Oh, well, exactly.
And, you know, one of the points is that we hear from the left, they're social justice warriors.
Well, what about the doubling and tripling of electric costs that we've seen in Ontario because we got rid of our least expensive form of power?
We got rid of coal.
Whereas what we should have done is brought in the latest pollution control devices and kept our coal, which used to represent a quarter of our electricity.
Now it's zero.
So by getting rid of it, by forcing us to use natural gas, which of course we should be saving for home heating and things, and also building thousands of wind turbines, we've seen a 200% increase in Ontario electricity costs.
You know, that's fairly typical.
And the real people that are hurt are the poor.
So talk about social justice.
Yeah, like look at the rates.
This is the impact of green energy.
It's not green.
It's not cheap.
It's not environmentally friendly.
It is among the dirtiest energy sources on the planet and certainly the worst when it comes to human rights.
Tom, I could probably talk to you all day about how awful and how hypocritical green energy is, but I know that you and I are both very busy.
Why Green Energy Isn't So Green00:02:51
Tom, how do people find the work that you do and how do they support International Climate Science Coalition Canada?
Because you guys are doing some very important work to hold governments to account on behalf of the people for their bad decisions.
Yeah, sure.
Our webpage is icsc-canada.com.
And in the upper right-hand side, you just have a little window there where you put in your email address.
And after our last interview, actually, I got 250 people doing that.
So we really appreciate that.
So those 250 people will get a copy of our Ottawa report, which will be out, you know, probably in a week at the most.
And anybody else who'd like to see that report, because it's very applicable to cities all over the world, because this is not just happening in Ottawa.
Ottawa is an extreme case, but it is happening all over the world where people are trying to move to this unreliable energy source.
So yeah, put your email address in there and we'll keep you up to date.
And hopefully, you know, you'll like it enough to give us a donation.
I hope so too.
And you always forget to plug your podcast, which I think is really good.
So tell people how they can find your podcast.
That's right.
If you go to the ICSC webpage, icsc-canada.com, click on resources, go down to exploratory journeys, and that is my podcast.
And you can listen to our latest versions.
Our latest one was actually with Howard Hayden.
Oh, cool.
About the environmental and energy.
Yeah, it's about, he's a professor of physics, University of Connecticut, and he talks about the problems with wind and solar power.
So, you know, people would enjoy that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, your podcast is easy to find.
It's if you just go into Google Podcast, Exploratory Journeys, it's right there.
And it's conversations you won't hear anywhere else, which I think is great.
You're telling the other side of the story.
Tom, thanks.
Thanks so much for coming on the show.
We'll have you back on again very, very soon.
I'm excited to read, and I know this sounds like I'm a total nerd, but I'm really excited to read your report on the Ottawa climate plan because it's coming to a city near you.
Everybody, it is.
You got to stop it now.
It's spreading.
Thank you.
Thanks, Tom.
Well, my beloved viewers, what do you think?
I think my friend Tom Harris has some great advice for the Conservative Party of Canada and Aaron O'Toole about how to mend some fences.
I'm just not confident that they are going to take it.
I feel as though they have a lot of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in their future to come.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next weekend.