Sheila Gunn-Reid critiques the Convoy for Freedom to Ottawa, now 21 months old, as a protest against COVID mandates, lockdowns, and masking, while slamming Conservative leader Aaron O’Toole’s vague support and Jason Kenney’s vaccine passport hypocrisy. She contrasts Canada’s strict enforcement with her U.S. road trip, where minimal restrictions prevailed. Corey Morgan introduces Triggered, a new Alberta talk radio show filling mainstream media gaps, with Gunn-Reid praising alternative outlets like convoyreports.com and promoting Rebel News Plus subscriptions. The episode underscores the convoy’s grassroots legitimacy amid elite media dismissal and government overreach. [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.
Tonight, my guest is Corey Morgan, the assistant opinion editor of the Western Standard, and we're talking about the truck convoy, politicians who don't know if they support the truck convoy, and his new show, Triggered.
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Does Erin O'Toole support the Convoy for Freedom to Ottawa?
Does Erin O'Toole even know the answer to that question?
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Envoy for Freedom started as a trucker's protest against cross-border COVID restrictions, but it has really become the symbol for Canadians who are sick of the division and the restrictions and government overreach of the nearly last 23 months of two weeks to flatten the curve.
On Monday morning, Conservative leader Aaron O'Toole was asked in a press conference if he would be meeting with or supporting the truckers who are headed to Ottawa to protest the vaccination mandate for cross-border truckers.
Take a listen.
Several of your MPs have tweeted out support for the convoy.
One of them saying that he felt the prime minister had a vendetta against people who were unvaccinated.
Do you support the convoy, its goals, its objectives, even though the Canadian Trucking Alliance says this could be disruptive?
And to follow, again, repeat Louis' question, will you meet with them when they come to Ottawa?
We've been talking to the Canadian Truckers Alliance, Glenn, for several months.
We've seen a crisis in the supply chain coming for several months, and we've proposed policies to try and help alleviate that.
The most important of which is vaccines.
You didn't answer my question about what you did, Glenn.
You didn't say you're critical to what we need.
You didn't say what you need.
Make sure we keep store shutting down.
Maybe you can answer in response to my next question, sir.
You can say whether you're a- That's why last week, Glenn.
O'Toole couldn't answer because I don't think he knows.
Now, later on in the same day, O'Toole went on Evan Solomon's show to provide clarity, but I think instead he just gave Evan Solomon and the entire country a headache.
Look at this.
Truckers show up on Parliament Hill, sir.
Will you meet them yes or no?
We've been meeting with them for the last few months, and I will continue to meet this week and into the weekend with truckers and with the industry, both individual people suffering, but also the industry.
Three weeks ago, I'm talking about the so-called freedom convoy problem, which would actually tackle the supply chain shortage.
Mr. Trudeau's making inflation worse through his overspending, through his lack of attention on issues like the shortages, and with the fact that he's continuing to just divide people and not deliver on the essential things we need in this pandemic.
Now, I don't think it should be controversial for any conservative politician who believes in conservative values to say I'm against government coercion.
And yet, Aeronautoo can't say that.
And I think up until now, he hadn't even been allowing his caucus to say that either.
Although things are changing, there are many conservative MPs that are coming out against vaccine mandates, at least for the truckers.
But that also means the next logical step is to be against vaccine mandates for every other industry and ultimately every other person, too.
There's so much to talk about with the truck convoy and the politicians' weak response to it and the media's vindictive response to it, which seems very disconnected from the public's overwhelmingly supportive response to it.
So, joining me tonight is someone who's not on the show frequently enough, if you ask me.
It's Corey Morgan of the Western Standard.
Take a listen.
Joining me now from his office in Calgary is the assistant opinion editor at the Western Standard and host of the new show Triggered, Corey Morgan.
Corey, thanks so much for joining me.
There's so much news happening across the country, but a lot of it I think is coming out of Alberta.
And so I wanted to sit down and talk with a fellow right-wing-ish Alberton to discuss some of it.
First, let's talk about the thing that's on the top of everybody's mind, and that's the convoy.
I'll tell you why I think it's such a juggernaut and then I'll ask you your opinion.
I think this is the first national movement against not just vaccine mandates, but the lockdown and masking.
I think these guys are an avatar for everything that people have suffered through the last 21 months.
And it's been, you know, churches popping up here and gyms in BC and curfew scoff laws in Quebec.
But this is the first one that is just rolling through all the provinces together.
Why do you think people are so interested in this?
Yeah, I fully agree with what you're talking about.
It is national.
And I think people have been waiting for a larger means to express themselves and saying that they're tired of this.
They want to push back against mandates.
I mean, on multiple levels, it's gone far beyond just the truckers.
That was just the first issue.
And now, people, whether they're waving on the side of the road or donating online, they have a means.
I mean, a lot of the protests before, some of them, to be honest, were a little flaky.
I went to a few, and your average person just didn't want to take part in those.
But this is something they can comfortably say, yes, I'm supporting this.
I'm tired of the status quo with this pandemic mess, and I'm pushing back.
So that this convoy has given them the means for it, and it's just taken off.
I mean, amazingly.
Yeah, it really has taken off.
And I think their GoFundMe before GoFundMe put a hold on it really speaks to the momentum that it has.
Because I think a lot of people can't be on the convoy.
They're not truckers.
They can't take two weeks off work.
They want to do something other than hold a sign on the side of the road, which I think is important to show support for the efforts.
But a lot of people, when they don't know what to do, they say, well, here's 20 bucks, throw some diesel in your truck.
But GoFundMe is now holding on to that.
And we never see that sort of scrutiny from GoFundMe when it's a left-wing cause like BLM or any of those associated movements.
That it seems to be that's just the vehicle that you donate to these causes.
And that's good enough for GoFundMe.
But on the flip side, whenever it's sort of like a conservative thing, there's always this additional layer of scrutiny applied to it.
Yeah, absolutely.
And the mainstream media has jumped all over that.
Oh, and they've acted as if it's been shut down.
So, I mean, it should be clear.
I've been watching that site.
When they shut one down, you can't even donate to it.
They're saying this is a bad cause.
We're not going to support it.
We're out.
What they are doing is just applying their standards to the letter of saying we want to know where the dispersal is going and things like that, which isn't necessarily bad.
But the double standard, yeah, they wouldn't think for a second of doing that to BLM.
And they're in a rocking hard place, I think.
I mean, they're probably standing to make a good chunk of money out of this as well as part of their service, but they're probably getting inundated with, you know, those ridiculous claims that this is a terrorist movement and stuff like that, and they don't want to be caught within it.
So it'll be interesting to see what happens.
But I think if they were going to shut it down, they already would have.
Like, they would have completely stopped this thing.
They just want to make sure they've covered their butts before releasing the funds.
But as you said, it's given people a mechanism.
You know, they might be living in an area that's off the route.
They don't have time.
They have bills to pay.
But hey, yeah, here's 20 bucks.
Here's 50 bucks.
I mean, it's what over 60,000 donors on this.
It's just been astounding.
Yeah.
And some of the donations are enormous, like $10,000, $1,000 here.
These, again, people who just don't know what to do, but finally someone's standing up.
So they say, here's some money.
Supporting Truckers Through Donations00:14:49
Stand up for me.
But you are right to point out that this isn't just, you know, GoFundMe doing this on their own.
GoFundMe has had a ton of pressure from people on the left, organized and powerful in some instances, who are saying, well, what are you going to do about all these people raising money?
We saw it from Gerald Butts, who sort of wanted to nudge GoFundMe in the right direction, and from journalists who seem to think their only job is holding the people to account on behalf of Justin Trudeau.
Yeah, and it's ridiculous.
I mean, whose business is it, anyways, where this money is going?
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
If we want one of the worst fundraisers who abuse money, look to the federal government.
They take it without a choice with a gun to our head and they piss it away and put it in their friends' pockets.
So GoFundMe is voluntary.
People, I mean, as far as I'm concerned, if people want to throw their money in the fireplace, it's their money.
And if they're giving it to GoFundMe, let them go.
But it's an indication that this convoy has got the establishment rattled.
It's got the establishment.
Media, the politicians, the bureaucrats, they are shaking up.
Canadians are passive, docile Canadians are finally pushing back and en masse.
And this has them nervous and they're just, you know, striking back in any way they can think of.
Yeah, you know, speaking of docile and passive, the last time I saw the Hutterites out supporting a political cause like this was during Bill 6, the farm unionization law here in Alberta back in 2016 that the NDP brought in, because the NDP don't actually know any real farmers, obviously.
But the Hutterites were out there in full force.
And one of the reasons they were out there during Bill 6 in full force was when they said to the government, Hey, we are a family farm and you can't put these labor laws on us.
The NDP tried to make an exemption for them and they said, You're not going to carve us out of the community.
We worked really hard to be together as neighbors.
And now you're going to give us these special exemptions that will cause division.
The Hutterites in so far, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, they're out along the side of the road.
Women, men, holding signs that say we support the truckers, not Trudeau.
And they were emotional.
We had one of our reporters talk to a few of them.
And the man was quite emotional that, you know, that once again, here they are fighting tyranny.
And right on queue, obviously, the mainstream media and the activist organizations whipped out these same old tropes that this is a racist, misogynist, extremist, anti-Muslim.
That's a new one.
Trucking convoy, they did this with United We Roll.
They're doing this again.
But I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think people just aren't buying it anymore.
They're not falling for any of it.
No, they're sick of it.
And they know that, I mean, anybody going around who's been to a truck stop or gotten out, actually, new Canadians and, you know, to be blunt non-white Canadians actually dominate the trucking industry.
There's a lot of them working in there and they do a great job.
And there are a lot of them taking part in this convoy.
They're the ones very directly affected by it.
So I think, if anything, it galvanizes people.
They realize this is a ridiculous accusation.
It's stupid.
And it ticks people off and makes them more likely to perhaps support it.
And the Hutterites is very significant because, yeah, they try to stay clear and keep to themselves out of these sorts of issues.
But they're also business people.
They're seeing problems with the supply chains.
They drive trucks as well, actually, quite often.
Yep.
And I think it's striking as well that one of the things among Hutter Rates is that they are very bound to be peaceful.
If they thought this was a violent movement by any means, they would not be out there supporting this.
It would go against their actual faith.
So I think it's quite significant to see them coming out on such a rare occasion and supporting something like this.
Yeah, I was talking to a Hutterite yesterday and he told me that 90% of the people on his colony are vaccinated.
Their issue is not vaccination.
Their issue is always and has always been government coercion and government incursion into their lives.
And you are right to point out that so many of them do own trucking colonies or trucking companies on the colonies.
Many of them are class one drivers.
And again, this is where the government wants to drive division.
Our Hutterite friends and neighbors are always driving togetherness, which I think is a symptom of their faith.
Now, let's talk about the politicians because I think it was Monday.
Aaron O'Toole had sort of two chances to come out and support the convoy, which I mean, it should not be a controversial thing for a conservative politician to say, I'm against government coercion, but it was difficult for him.
He had a press conference, I guess it was earlier in the day, that was just a mess.
It was a Trudeau-style thing where he didn't answer a single question and then got frustrated when people noticed he wasn't answering questions.
And then later on in the day with Evan Solomon, you could see Evan Solomon's visible frustration with the whole thing because he kept asking, do you support the truckers?
And even then, his tacit support, Aaron O'Toole's tacit support, you still couldn't see sort of where he fell down on the issue.
But his MPs, I think, are breaking ranks now.
Yeah, O'Toole's been ridiculously spineless.
And I mean, that's what cost him the federal election.
I won't make any bones about it.
He's got a spine of jelly.
He backed down on the carbon tax.
He backed down on the firearms promises.
And now he won't make a stand on this.
Guys, if we want Trudeau, we'll vote for Trudeau.
If you're not presenting anything different, we might as well get the one with better hair.
And it's just absurd.
And he's not helping himself whatsoever.
I mean, nobody's expecting him to be sitting on the hood of one of the trucks waving a flag, but you can at least say, you know, that you understand why these people are concerned and you support their using the right to go out and demonstrate against what they feel are unfair government controls.
You could just say that.
You see, I just did, and he won't do it.
And it's just he's showing himself as weaker and weaker.
And when we see his MPs, such as Paulie Evans from Alberta ones, coming out strongly in support of this, I'm certain would be in defiance of orders from the leader's office.
I suspect that party's having some very strong internal issues over this.
Yeah, especially like Martin Shields, he said he's going to wait in Ottawa for the trucks to show up.
I think he was one of the first ones, Pierre Polyev, likewise.
I think Glenn Motts, too, if I'm not mistaken, came out in support of the truckers.
And this sort of happened in the afternoon in between Aaron O'Toole's catastrophic earlier in the day press conference to his bizarre appearance on Evan Solomon's show in the evening.
And even then, it didn't even seem like this pressure from within his own caucus, it didn't even then push Aaron O'Toole in the right direction.
What's going on there?
I don't know.
I mean, as we saw just in my own riding, Foothills just released a call for a leadership review of O'Toole.
The dissent, I mean, they've got a wishy-washy leader and the time's ticking on the next election.
So I think the unofficial, we know how that works in political parties, the unofficial campaigns and jockeying is already happening behind closed doors.
And now it's not, it'll lead to a point where they're not only going to defy him a little, there's going to be efforts to undercut him from within.
So if he doesn't show some direction and some leadership, we're going to see this party start really imploding again and pushing for a new leader.
Yeah, and we're going to see, I think, some vote splits continue to cost the conservatives ridings.
I mean, just in Alberta, just the sheer shift of votes that where, you know, conservatives in previous years, they had been winning by, you know, they had been taking home about 70 to 80% of the vote.
We saw that shift down to like 50, 65.
So, I mean, continued frustration with the Conservative Party is showing up in the ballot box.
Speaking of time running out on elections, let's talk a little bit about Jason Kenney because he's come out in support of the truckers, which is great, except for the fact that in Alberta,
because of Jason Kenney's vaccine passport by another name so that he can sleep at night, a trucker who hauls all day cannot walk into a pub after decking off his load and have a beer and a burger without participating in Jason Kenney's biomedical police state.
And I know I'm being hyperbolic there, but it is ridiculous to hear a politician say, these are unjust vaccine mandates against truckers.
Let me see your vax card before you have a beer after work.
Yeah, he's trying to suck and blow at the same time on the issue.
And I mean, I am happy, though, that at least he is coming out as a conservative leader and being outright unabashed in support with the truckers themselves.
So I'll take what good I can with it.
Maybe he's starting to build the framework to start, hopefully come out and say, you know what, we don't need these passports anymore.
Vaccines aren't stopping the spread.
It's just hindering businesses and commerce and we're going to pull out of it.
He's in a tough spot.
I mean, I've been very critical of Premier Kenny, but you know what he would face if he lifted the passport mandate.
People will go haywire.
And I still think he should do it, but he's got to be careful on how he goes about it.
Yeah, I think maybe the convoy is the off-ramp for him and Premier Scott Mo, who have both said, you know, we think this mandate is, as you say, a hindrance to commerce and unnecessary.
Maybe this is that thing that gets them out of their own vaccine passport because how do you roll it back now?
Some people are happily participating in the segregation and they're happy to be part of the privileged medical class.
Other people who are vaccinated are objecting to it because they don't want to be a cog in the machinery of segregation.
And then there are just this other chunk of the population that are just stuck at home.
I think, I think, and I hope that the groundswell of support for the truckers against this sort of stuff, I hope it will embolden some better-minded politicians to start do the right, start to do the right thing and roll some of these measures back.
Exactly.
We just hope to maintain some optimism.
I mean, again, this whole thing taking off like this, we haven't seen a pushback like this since the beginning of the pandemic.
And I hope that this trucking convoy is just the beginning of what'll be more and more activities and efforts pushing vaccine.
That's enough.
We got to get back to life as normal.
Now, I think one of the reasons the truckers, especially long-haul truckers, are so resistant to the vaccine mandate is that some of them have been going to the United States, particularly the southern United States, where COVID has not been a thing in a very long time.
And then just, you know, following the science, it seems to change according to how many kilometers you clock on your odometer.
They come back to Canada and they end up experiencing the tyranny of Justin Trudeau and some of their premiers.
And so they've seen how the other side lives, but so have you.
Yes.
And you recently got back from the United States.
Tell us what the state of COVID was like and tell us where you went so we get a good taste of just sort of the difference between Canada and the United States.
Sure.
I was on a 10-day road trip.
I went through five states.
We drove all the way from Alberta down to actually Yuma and the border.
We popped into Mexico as well, actually in Algodoni's for some dental work, which is a separate story.
But aside, I mean, you could tell the pandemic was going.
You'd see masks here and there.
But aside from that, you wouldn't even know what was happening.
As long as I didn't turn on CNN, I wouldn't even know there was a pandemic.
I mean, you'd see, again, the sprinkling of masks and you see hand sanitizers entering stores, but that was it.
And it was a choice.
And there was no such thing as a passport.
I didn't have to prove vaccination to go into any restaurant.
There was no ridiculous plastic barriers between seating or any of this stuff that we're seeing up here.
All of this garbage that's been normalized in Canada.
And that's what I really wanted to get out when I wrote a column.
I'm like, guys, you don't understand.
You don't have to live like this.
And people aren't in other areas.
If they could realize, as you said, the truckers realize it.
They see it.
If more Canadians would find out, the world isn't ending down there.
They're not stacking bodies like Cordwood.
They're actually living and smiling at each other.
And it was very nice.
It was a nice break from up here in this bizarre masked world of pandemic restrictions.
Yeah, I think Scott Moe the other day, he said, you know, the restrictions, they haven't done anything really tangible.
They haven't really done anything good.
But simultaneously, he's not lifting them.
Like he's resisting putting on more, which I guess is as good as it gets with the politician.
It's less bad.
I mean, politicians have a tendency to just go in the wrong direction, generally speaking, anyways.
So he's resisted putting on, you know, more restrictions to deal with the Omicron sniffles.
But he's not repealing the restrictions he has in place, even though he admits that they aren't working.
I don't know how we get out of this.
We have to change public opinion.
I mean, that's what drives these guys.
And unfortunately, we have our, again, our legacy media, you know, running leading polls and putting out crap like saying that a quarter of Canadians want to jail the unvaccinated and they're dividing us.
They're scaring people.
They're upsetting people.
And unfortunately, they've basically got, I mean, these politicians are always running internals and they know there's a majority that don't want to back off on these mandates.
And it's sick.
But that's where people have to change that minority into, or majority into a minority, and the politicians will follow.
But right now, even if they themselves want to roll those mandates back, they know they'll pay a terrible political price for it.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of people out there in the world who've never actually done anything worthwhile for another person.
And so when the TV is telling them you're saving lives by wearing a mask, getting your vaccine and scolding people for going the wrong way in the grocery store, they don't want to let go of that unearned sense of heroism, right?
They want to really hate the pandemic, it is making them the good person they actually never were.
Yeah, and they don't trust us with personal choice.
Like Jamie and I hit a quilt shop in Utah.
It shows you know the high party life we had on our trip there.
But it was an unusual spot, it was very busy and crowded, actually.
And we realized when we got in that almost everybody in it was masked.
Masked Void News00:02:39
So, you know what?
We grabbed a mask at the front because people were looking uncomfortable.
It wasn't forced, but it was just a courtesy.
Fine.
If you guys are more comfortable with this mask and it's your private property, I'll put one on.
And you know what?
If I was coughing and gagging and sniffling that morning, I wouldn't be going out and around people.
I don't need mandates to tell me these things.
Common courtesy and decency does these things for me, and most people have it.
Yeah, I mean, we've made it through flu seasons immemorial, likewise with cold seasons, with people being respectful, not coughing into their hand and then touching everything in the grocery store.
I generally think people don't do those things.
There's always the one weirdo, but those are everywhere.
Those are also the same people who pull down their masks to pick their nose and then touch the craft dinner.
You see that too.
So now, Corey, I know you got a tight timeline, and so do I.
So why don't you tell us about Triggered, your new show?
When does it air and what do you hope to accomplish with it?
Sure.
Well, I mean, it airs five days a week here in Alberta, 11:30 a.m. until 1 o'clock p.m. Mountain Standard Time.
And it's live.
Like, that's the hard thing.
But what inspired us, I mean, a lot of us grew up with talk radio.
It was a large part of our political growing and learning.
And talk radio, like so much of the other mainstream media, has just gone to crap.
They're cowardly.
There's no hosts who take on strong issues or get themselves triggered and worked up.
It's just news reading practically nowadays.
So we thought we can fill that void.
This is the digital world.
We can have a live production with live guests interactivity with the commenters and things like that.
So we've been developing that show here at the Western Standard.
And yeah, so far it's been going really good.
So we're carrying on with it.
So where can people access that?
Because I think you're filling a huge hole left by Dave Rutherford a very long time ago.
Yeah, we really miss him.
And that's some of that inspiration.
Or even Danielle, you know, Smith, she was doing very well while she was there.
And she basically got driven out because of how horrible it's gotten.
And if you go to westernstandardonline.com, of course, you can see paths to it.
We have our, when we stream, it goes to our YouTube channel, our Rumble channel, our Facebook page, all at the same time.
You just have to go to any of those channels and search for Western Standard and you'll find our channel.
And yeah, the show will come on live.
And of course, if you can't catch it live, the show stays up there.
You can watch it later at your leisure.
Oh, that's awesome.
I'm so glad that you're doing that work.
Again, there's just a huge void in talk radio in Alberta.
Everybody went woke and then went broke and then they got fired, which is fine by me.
And you guys are filling the void, and Candace is.
And it's just great to see the alternative media.
You know, that's the only thing leaving the legacy media hanging around is people thinking there's nowhere else to go and they're finding out, no, there is somewhere else to go.
Alternative Media Landscape00:01:20
And we can see it.
They're declining and good.
They deserve it.
Yeah, couldn't happen to a nicer bunch.
Corey.
Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Best of luck in your new show.
And hopefully we'll have you back on again very, very soon.
Thanks, Sheila.
Always good to talk to you.
Thanks.
I'm very excited for Corey's new show, Triggered.
I've caught a couple episodes of it so far, and it does that thing that conservative talk radio used to do, at least here in Alberta, and that was provide a counterbalance to the homogeneity of the mainstream media landscape here, particularly in print media, where everything is owned by one company, Post Media.
Now, if you'd like to support our independent journalism on the trucking convoy, as we do have a reporter, Mocha Bazurgan, completely embedded inside of it to bring you the other side of the story, the side of the story the mainstream media doesn't want you to see about just how normal and reasonable the truckers are and how normal and reasonable the supporters of the convoy are, please visit convoyreports.com.
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 week.