Matt Brevner’s Kamloops: The Buried Truth documentary exposes unchecked claims of 215 graves at the Kamloops residential school, revealing no federal funds ($26–$28M) were spent despite promises, while institutions amplified outrage without verification. He links this to Canada’s polarized "truth and reconciliation" rhetoric, overshadowing crises like $2,600/month rents and 2,300 annual fentanyl overdoses. Critics argue decriminalizing drugs (e.g., heroin, meth) would worsen addiction, yet policies ignore recovery incentives. Brevner’s work challenges systemic narratives, warning that net-zero extremism and drug liberalization could destabilize housing and healthcare—both tied to oil and gas prosperity. [Automatically generated summary]
BC-based rebel Matt Brevner joins me tonight to discuss his new documentary, Kamloops, The Buried Truth, plus what is plaguing the housing market in Vancouver.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're watching The Gunn Show.
The alleged discovery of hundreds of, at the time we were told, potentially murdered children in a mass grave at a residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia.
sparked a summer of rage and religiously motivated attacks against Christians across this country.
Churches were burned and vandalized and hate crimes against Catholics skyrocketed 260% in one year.
Our prime minister said he understood why the attacks against Christians and their churches were happening.
But what was the foundation of that understanding?
What really happened at Kamloops?
Over a year later, we still don't really know.
And Matt Brevner and Drea Humphrey, two of our Vancouver-based rebels, went on a fact-finding mission.
And their fact-finding mission turned into a documentary called Kamloops, the Buried Truth.
You can see it today if you are a paywalled subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
And you can get information about the documentary at KamloopsDocumentary.com.
So Matt joins me tonight to discuss the making of the documentary, but he's also been doing some work in front of the camera.
And he did a really great video about what Vancouverites would ask the prime minister to do to make life more affordable.
And then he did some work on Vancouver's downtown Eastside, asking the people there what they felt about the potential for the legalization of possession of hard drugs.
And it was shocking and sincere.
And it's the kind of journalism you won't see anywhere else.
So you know what?
Without further ado, I'll just shut up.
Let's go to Matt.
So joining me now is my friend and colleague, Matt Brevner.
Many of you know him as one of our Vancouver-based rebels.
He's also a musician.
We'll get into that in a little bit.
But he's the documentary filmmaker behind Kamloops, The Buried Truth.
And he is behind the camera, but you hear a little bit of him in the documentary too, working with our Rebel News reporter Drea Humphrey to uncover what happened in Kamloops at the residential school there so many years ago, but what's happening there now?
Because we're sort of in the dark with that as well.
Matt, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Tell us a little bit about the documentary.
What was your vision for the documentary?
Sure.
Well, you know, I've produced other films in the past.
This was a little bit different because initially it started out as just going up to do a report on the one-year anniversary of the original press release announcing the findings of 215 bodies in a mass grave.
Basically, a report that created unprecedented self-loathing in most Canadians.
And it was just extremely inflammatory.
I don't mean that as a pun, you know, over 70 churches were vandalized or burned or whatever.
It was a complete mess.
So we went up there not really knowing what we were going to find, but with just the objective just kind of snoop around and go door knocking because we've basically been trying to get answers out of you know the RCMP, the chief band office, the coroners, and no one was really getting back to Dreas.
We're like, okay, well, maybe we need to do a little bit different.
We'll go up there for a couple of days, just make a report, you know, expecting to be like, here's our 20-minute report.
Nothing's changed.
No one's talking to us.
We'll come back soon.
But in reality, it turned out to be, it was just, it was unreal, the amount of people that were just talking to us freely because I guess they didn't realize that we were press and how candid all the conversations were with the chief, the coroner's office, and the RCMP.
Because, you know, it's interesting.
People, I don't think this documentary experience really opened my eyes and made me realize.
Because sometimes, especially when you work in media, it's easy to just see things through such a polarized lens.
But I think most of the people are just cogs in the machine and they don't even really understand the talking points or the like how important it is to maintain certain talking points.
Like, for example, you know, we called, we would call the museum.
And I'm speaking to just the random museum receptionist.
And she is still convinced that there's, you know, yeah, the mass grave where we discovered the 215 kids.
And she still believes that, even though her own chief is saying that, well, actually, that's not the case.
And they're kind of like backpedaling away from it.
Even the RCMP didn't realize that there had been new information afoot.
So it's kind of crazy how unorganized.
And just, yeah, it was eye-opening for sure.
Yeah, one of the things that was really eye-opening for me was that this superheated rhetoric, again, I regret the bad pun there.
I didn't mean it.
But this just how getting the story wrong from the very beginning, not pumping the brakes and waiting for other details to come out, led to a summer of rage against Christians in this country that saw the hate crimes against Catholics skyrocket by 260%.
There's really no consequences now for anybody who got it wrong.
They just get to sort of walk away after Catholics generations later are being held accountable for something that they had no involvement in, but also might not have happened the way it was initially sold to everybody.
Well, yeah, it's interesting because this is also just, it's a multi-pronged attack, right?
It was just very convenient to have this information come out, especially during an election year, especially in the middle of a pandemic on the piggyback of the George Floyd anti-you know, I don't want to, it sounds maybe like I'm oversimplifying it, but the anti-patriarchy, anti-interest institution, anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-Anglo kind of movement that's underpinning a lot of you know the progressive ideology.
This was just an alley oop really for our progressive politicians.
And there's no accountability to even speak on the facts of the matter.
It's just like you just let the lie out, let it do what it's going to do, and then, you know, a quiet, a quiet little subtle asterisk in an article maybe a year down the line.
And it's, it's really a shame that there's no accountability from institutions top to bottom, you know, the media, the government, whatever else, and the damage.
And you ask a random person on the street anywhere in Canada, they're going to tell you that they think that there's at least 215 children found in some sort of mass pit in Kamloops, which couldn't be further from the truth, to be honest.
And you know what?
It's tough because like I have a lot of Indigenous friends.
I have a lot of Indigenous family.
And even producing this documentary, I have to be careful about what I say around them because whether it's right or it's not.
right, whether the information is correct or it's not correct, it's so close to home and it's so hurtful to people, especially the contemporary, our contemporary Indigenous population, because whether this information is true or it's not true, it just piggybacks on all of these biases, all of these cultural identities that they've been fed their whole lives that, you know, white people are out to get them, Christians hate them, you're a victim in your own country.
You're likely to get murdered when you walk the street.
If you're a woman, you're likely to go missing.
Some of these things may be true.
Some of these things aren't true.
But the point being, if you're told this your whole life, every time you leave the door, life's not going to be comfortable for you.
So anyways, even making this film has put me in a very precarious situation because it's not always beneficial to be right, especially when we're talking about family dynamics and relationships you're trying to maintain.
Yeah, it's been kind of ugly, to be honest.
Well, and that's what I like about a difficult documentary to watch that you made.
And that is that you approach it with that care.
And I don't think it's surprising to anybody if I say that you and Drea are both people of color.
Drea has Indigenous background.
And so you do look at it through the lens and you do acknowledge that there is generational hurt and there is generational trauma.
But by perpetuating a lie, you're only exploiting that generational hurt and trauma for political reasons.
And I think that's what so many of our politicians on the left have done.
Yeah, I mean, that's just like a, it's a liberal playbook at this point.
I mean, if you go back and you watch the major election debates that took place before our last election and through the lens of what we know now has happened at Kamloop specifically, I'm not talking about the rest of the rest of the country, but Kamloop specifically, which in all honesty is very little.
And I think it's okay that we admit we know very little because we have to know what we need to bring truth and reconciliation to.
You can't reconcile something you don't know, right?
So anyways, if you watch all of the campaign rhetoric, all of the propaganda from that time, and you're talking about all-time high money printing, we're talking about potential international war conflict.
We're talking about inflation at all-time high.
We're talking about the middle of a pandemic, the worst pandemic in hundreds of years, right?
That's what we're saying, right?
Most of the conversation that dominated our debates were about Kamloops and truth and reconciliation, which, okay, I mean, I understand why that's important, but if we're not, if we don't know what the facts are, it's a bit of a nothing burger.
And then you watch like O'Toole walk into this debate and he's just fumbling because like he's already losing as someone who represents Anglo-Christian conservatives in Canada.
You're already Satan.
So what are you supposed to do?
It's just like, I know maybe that's like, that's not necessarily a narrative that's in this documentary, but after producing it and looking back on our last few years, I'm like, oh my goodness, like I didn't really even understand the cultural impact.
Like when you're in the middle of it and churches are burning and flags are at half mass and it's just like, oh, this is weird.
This is dark.
You don't really, it's hard to see the forest from the trees.
Now, looking back at where our country is and what's come from all this, it's like that was very, that was a very pivotal moment.
And the rug was pulled out of a lot of people's feet and they didn't even know it.
Yeah.
And, you know, just to go along with the rhetoric of the people who initially pushed the whole mass graves business, that's a crime.
Like that's a genocidal crime.
That's the kind of thing that you see in northern Iraq done by ISIS.
And when as a country, we didn't do any follow-up on that, it seems quite odd to me.
Because if you think there are children buried there and that a crime was committed against these children, and I think if a crime was committed against these children, people should be held accountable.
There should be charges.
But they didn't even excavate.
And that's the oddest part to me in all of this.
If you think there are murder victims laying in a grave, it behooves us as a society to treat those children like any other Canadian child who is buried in a shallow grave in this country.
Find out what happened to them.
But none of that is happening.
Yeah, it's interesting too, because you would imagine once a statement is made, especially by Sarah Boullier, who's the ground printer and radar specialist, to the world that we found what seems to be grave sites plus a juvenile rib bone.
Well, that should essentially pass on the authority in excavating or whatever the case may be beyond just the local municipality police or authority or band RCMP or whatever it is.
This should be a federal issue at this point.
But you're allowed to sound the alarm without being thorough and following through and seeing what's actually going on there.
But something I need to like clarify, which is a bias that I held, because I saw shortly after that this was originally announced, the federal government earmarked, I believe it was either $26 or $28 million for excavation of the site, but also for job stimulus, mental health, all these things.
And so, you know, for me, I was thinking, I was a little bit cynical and I was thinking, okay, they make this announcement, they get $20 something million for a community of less than 5,000 people.
There's no need to excavate now because if you excavate, it's either going to affirm what you believed and it's going to eat up all of that budget, or it's going to be proven wrong.
And then you're kind of stuck with like your tail between your legs and you spent all this money.
So it's a lose-lose, right?
But then we were talking to Roseanne Casimir Cookby, the chief up there, she had said that they actually haven't received a cent.
So, hmm, I'm like, no kidding.
That actually like was really surprising to me.
So the thing is, like these people are just as much, I would say, victims as far as as much as any other basic general Canadian is with this.
Like, you know, there may have been like maybe Sarah Boullier exaggerated what she found a little bit for her so she could puff her chest and get a little bit of social clout or whatever else.
And I think that is a bit of the case.
However, you know, the, I do believe now, especially after going up there and talking to the people up there, that the average, the average member of the Kamloops Shushwetmik band and the people out there, they don't know.
They're just given, they have these experts.
They're told what they're, you know, what they found.
And then they reiterated the information.
Big Mess Revealed00:05:17
But now it's like, oh, wait, it's not maybe like that.
And then you're tough, you're stuck in a really tough position.
You know, like I would imagine her as a chief of, you know, what is it, less than 5,000 people.
Now all of a sudden you're front page international news and you have a direct line with the Pope.
It's like, whoa, that's intense.
That's a big, it's like, oopsie daisy.
Like, what's happening here?
And then you realize, oh, wait, maybe, you know, the person that we hired to scan these lots isn't as credible as maybe we had hoped.
It's like, I don't know, what do you do with that sort of information, right?
So I'm not saying it was all right or handled correctly, but I can understand why things have kind of played out the way they have.
And I do think that this was a little bit of a pulling the cart before the horse thing.
And because people were so tense and pent up and stuck at home and afraid for their lives because of the pandemic and people of color were being told that they were being basically brutalized on the street because of the George Floyd killings and all the killing and all that stuff.
So there's just this pent-up powder cake of energy that was underpinned by this anti-Christian, anti-Anglo, anti-colonial energy and it just exploded.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You are so right to put that in the context that the chief of this band is like the part-time mayor of any small town in any other community in Canada.
And when you have an expert, expert coming along and claiming expertise and telling you this thing happened, why wouldn't you believe her?
Yeah, there's really no point not to believe her.
And, you know, it's, you don't, you can't control that.
Like once that press release is released, and especially if you believe it, like, what do you do with that after the fact?
Right.
I don't even think, because she's, we spoke to her and I was like, well, there's, there's a lot of misinformation.
We're just trying to get the straight, you know, story.
And she's like, well, I've been honest.
We've said that there's now sites of interest and blah, blah, blah.
And I'm like, well, the people don't know that.
She's like, well, there's only so much I can do.
And I genuinely believe her.
Like I do.
I think this whole thing is just a big mess.
But I think, well, I know for a fact, especially living in Vancouver, that people's general disposition, especially on the coastal cities and the media hubs, is this progressive ideology that's very anti-Christian white guilt.
So this was just great for that.
This was, we knew it.
We knew we were crappy.
We knew our country sucks.
We knew Christians are bigoted, obviously.
You know, it's kind of weird.
And it just created this like mob flash.
But anyways, there's a lot of stuff in the documentary that hasn't been heard anywhere else.
I'm really excited to share it with people.
But I do want the viewers and our followers to know that this isn't, let's bash the Kamloops band thing.
It's like, it's what do we know, which is actually very little.
And what does that mean now?
And I think that's important that we view things through that skeptical lens, but also not be overly skeptical that it's not sensitive to the actual damage that has been done.
And, you know, the act, like, you know, I'm not for any sense of the word or any stretch of the imagination going to defend residential schools.
So, you know, as some sort of great idea.
I look at them as just more terrible, oppressive government policy, as there's always terrible government oppressive policy.
And I don't think that, I think that maybe says less about the church than it does about the government because they were just a popular institution at the time.
You know, if it was now, it would be just government boarding schools or atheist boarding schools, and it would be the same crap.
So, anyways.
Yeah.
Yeah, it is.
It's that age-old adage that we should always resist the government or frankly anybody else telling you what's right for you and your own kids and your own family.
Now, if people want to get tickets to get information about the showings of the documentary, because we are doing in-person showings ahead of time before we sort of release it to the world, tell us where we can find that.
So Canyon Meadows Cinemas in Calgary on the 28th of this month.
Dre and I will be there.
And Sheila, you're going to be there too, right?
You better believe it.
Awesome.
So yeah, it's because of the spicy nature of the documentary, there isn't a ton of public-facing advertisements.
So unless you're hearing about it on Rebel News, you probably won't hear about it yet.
But yeah, if you're in the Calgary area on the 28th, 7 p.m., come down, you know, come ask us questions, view it with us.
We'd love to share it with you guys.
And otherwise, you can watch it right now on Rebel News Plus.
Yep.
At cameloopsdocumentary.com, people can get more information about that.
And by the way, if you are indeed perhaps a venue owner, manager, maybe you're an independent theater and you think that you would like to bring this movie because you're not afraid of the council culture mob or you believe in free speech and you think that people can make up their own minds, reach out to us.
Rent Control Conundrum00:15:13
Reach out to me directly.
Go to Sheila at RebelNews.com, send me an email, and I'll make sure that gets passed up the supply chain because we are actively looking for places where we can show the movie in person.
Now, moving on from that, Matt, you've been doing some great work in front of the camera, and I'm really happy to see that.
We should get you from behind the camera in front of the lens more often.
And you were out asking people about what the liberals can do to make your life more affordable.
And you sort of did this as the liberals were meeting at a luxury resort to discuss affordability, which is just so perfectly liberal.
And I was sort of shocked when you told me off camera where you were asking these questions.
And because it was in Vancouver, and again, I'm confirming my own biases about Vancouver, but I was shocked because very few people were saying, I need free stuff from the government, which was very refreshing.
Yeah, so just a little backstory.
The Liberals and their cabinet were in Vancouver.
And when they say Vancouver, they really mean the Lower Mainland.
So, you know, the surrounding areas from September 6th, September 8th, on what's called a retreat to discuss affordability for Canadians.
And last time Justin Trudeau was in town, although it was eventually canceled because of protesters, it was in Surrey, which is about 30, 20, 30 kilometers from Vancouver.
But it's also very heavy student population.
It's one of our biggest urban centers in the Lower Mainland.
Lots of East Indians, lots of immigrants.
So I decided to go to Surrey Central, which is like our main station, SkyTrain station there.
And there's a Simon Fraser University campus there and just ask people on the street, since I assumed the Liberals were going to be meeting in Surrey, well, what's something that, you know, Justin Trudeau can do for you to make your life a little bit easier.
And for the people that didn't say or scoff and just laugh and say, I wish he would go away, which was a lot of people, to be honest.
The people that did actually, you know, talk to us overwhelmingly said we need to do something about our housing and our rent.
And I mean, that's no surprise.
I mean, you know, a one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver on average is $2,600.
And that's not just downtown Vancouver.
That's all the lower mainland.
Like, for example, now, as of yesterday, areas in Burnaby, which is 20K out of Vancouver, are more expensive than downtown Vancouver.
So we can't get a break.
Like we had, our gas was almost at 240 during the peak.
Canada or BC is getting its butt like very much whooped because of the inflation and everything else that's happening.
So yeah, overwhelmingly, people were saying, please do something about our rent, which makes sense, especially at like a public transportation hub.
Yeah, it was just fascinating to see these young people who were so in tune with the fact that unless something happens here, I'm never going to be able to afford a house.
Now, I'll ask you, because you're a young person who more at least younger than me, who lives in the greater Vancouver area, which is quickly becoming one of the most expensive places in North America to live, if not the most expensive place in North America to live.
What's the solution to housing prices?
Because I'm not one of those people who believes in rent control, because once you start putting controls on rent, landlords stop being landlords because why?
You can't cover your mortgage.
So what's the solution here?
Is it remove the barriers to new home construction?
Is it maybe we need to pump the brakes on immigration or at least bring those targets down so that there's not such a supply-demand issue?
What's the solution here?
In the famous words of Stephen Harper, austerity.
but here's here's the thing that's that's unfortunate the only thing that's going to okay i have to i have to zoom out so i can paint this picture for our viewers which is what i believe is the issue Canadians have the worst income to debt ratios in all of the G7, which means we spend almost 190% of our disposable income from month to month.
And this has only become worse because of quantitative easing, which is the money printing, the increase of the money supply.
So the problem is Canadians have always been bad with their money.
And this isn't something that started with Justin Trudeau.
Actually, the aggressive quantity easing did start with Stephen Harper to avoid the 2008 financial collapse in the States.
Luckily, Canada just never went through that.
But here's the problem.
Because Canadians are actually really bad with their investments and with their savings and with their debts, a lot of Canadians have treated their houses and their mortgages as a retirement vessel and as an investment.
When in reality, residential housing should never be an investment.
It's supposed to be a commodity.
But some reason in Canada, we're raised up and we're grown thinking that for some reason, a house is an investment.
But nowhere else in the world, you read any sort of financial guru, read any sort of Robert Kiyosaki, he'll tell you like, no, that's not.
That's not what it's supposed to be.
So anyways, people have used their house and the rapid inflation of their house price or house value.
They bought a house 10 years ago for a quarter million.
Now it's worth 1.5.
They've used that money and they pulled out equity from their houses to fund their retirement, fund their second house, buy a house for their kid, buy a car, buy a second car, go to Cabo, like do all these things.
So Canadians have just been perpetually pulling from this piggy bank and going into debt.
So here's the issue now.
If you have a housing supply, because we have record low housing supply, a shortage all across Canada, it's like, I think it's our best market is two months, and a healthy housing market should have six months to a year at least of inventory.
So you quantify that with the bottleneck at municipal levels for building permits, supply issues for building houses.
Here's the thing.
If we can do all these things and build, let's say, like even like Paul Yev wants to do, let's build a million new houses.
Okay, that's good.
And that means someone like me will be able to afford a house in the place I live, hopefully, or at least have affordable rent.
But the problem is people like my parents would automatically have to see their value, the value of their homes drop 30, 40, 50%, maybe even for us to even have a chance to get in.
And at that point, because here's another interesting thing: Canada is the only nation in the G7 that includes residential housing into its GDP projections.
So go figure.
When the liberals say we've actually had an economic recovery, what they're saying is we've actually inflated the value of your home by 30% and we're equating that economic growth into our GDP.
So what happens then if housing prices drop 20, 30, 40, 50% in Canada?
Our economy collapses.
Holy crap, gone, like bad, really bad.
So it's unfortunate because yeah, obviously rent should be cheaper, but at what expense?
You know, yeah, obviously interest rates should be lower, but then at what expense?
You know, so we've really got ourselves into a very difficult position that was that has been exacerbated by, I believe originally Stephen Harper's cabinet with the quantitative easing, which was supposed to be a temporary, a very temporary measure to get us out of the situation, much like income tax was supposed to be a temporary situation.
But they just kept it.
And they just, but they just kept it.
And then the liberals just dumped a bunch of gasoline on it.
And now I don't think they're, I mean, some hopefully there's an economist that can weigh in on this, but anybody on YouTube that's offering some sort of short-term fix or any politician that's saying they're gonna, they're gonna make things more affordable.
It's like, I don't know if it's possible.
But then again, I'm not, I'm not a pedigreed economist.
So I'm hoping someone can prove me wrong.
I plan to die here.
You're never moving.
So it's okay.
It's okay for me, but I really feel for the next generation, the sort of millennials and Zoomers who just can't see the Canadian dream in their future.
It's terrible.
Now, one other thing that you've done some really great work on, and again, you approach it with a certain humanity that I admire.
And that was you did a video.
You went to one of the least desirable places, again, in North America, the downtown east side, and you asked the people there what they thought about the province legalizing the possession of small quantities of hard drugs.
So why don't you tell us about that?
Because again, I was surprised, but not really, that people who are either in active recovery or active drug use, they thought this was a bad idea.
So I don't know who the powers that be think they're helping here.
Yeah, it's interesting.
The duality is literally a line called Main Street that splits the West and the East Side.
We went in front of Union Gospel Mission, which is a Christian.
Well, they do rehab.
They do shelter for homeless people and recovery and for women.
And it's awesome, awesome.
If you guys don't know what Union Gospel Mission, they're just, they're the best.
They're just such lovely people.
But we went there and we interviewed a few people that were hanging out outside.
One of them was an artist named Chris Blake, a young recovering addict.
And they told me, well, I asked them what they thought about this policy.
And they said, well, you know, it really makes me feel like people don't care about us.
They don't care if we die or whatever else.
And, you know, they were saying I came from Alberta.
And one of the things that kept me clean is I felt like I had to use my drugs in my shed because they were ashamed about it.
But then it's funny if you listen to like Mike Farnsworth or you listen to like our health minister or whatever else, they'll say the main reason for this initiative is to remove the shame and the stigma.
So then I'm like, okay, if I could see, I could see why this policy on paper could make sense if it was restricted to a zone like three blocks by three blocks, specifically in a downtown east side, so that you're not getting, you're not, you know, bottlenecking the police with petty drug crimes where people get booked and then they're out on the street again.
And also you can't fully rehabilitate these people because if they have a criminal record or they, you know, then they can't get a job and then they're just on the government's teeth like forever.
So like I do see the logic there.
But then when you actually talk to somebody who's going through recovery and you ask them what they've been through and how this could adversely or benefit them, it basically removes the incentive to get clean and to be a normal member and active participating member of society.
So there needs to be some sort of nuance there.
But this is the thing that like really blows my mind about all of it.
We're not just talking about the downtown east side.
We're talking about British Columbia, the whole province, all the way north.
And anybody who's ever been to British Columbia knows we have a drug problem here.
And not just, oh yeah, but not just in the downtown east side.
We have a terrible recreational drug problem here.
Like I didn't even really like understand it.
Like I grew up in New Westminster, British Columbia.
And, you know, I was always scared to death.
I never did drugs.
You know, I maybe smoked some weed or whatever else, but I never tried anything hard, anything that could like wreck my life.
But most of my friends that I grew up with, and I grew up in not a bad neighborhood, but most of the friends that I grew up with, you know, were doing like at least half of the people that I would party with on the weekends.
And these were like the normal kids in school were doing cocaine or ecstasy or MDMA.
Like I didn't realize how bad it was until I went to New York and I was hanging out in like Manhattan with socialites and cocaine was like a special thing that was reserved only for the rich kids and it came out very sparingly.
Like if you come to Canada, especially, sorry, if you come to British Columbia, it is shocking.
Like go to a music festival.
It is absolutely shocking the amount of party drugs.
And then when we have fentanyl coming in through the docks and party drugs are getting laced and cut, well, no wonder we're having 2,300 people die in one year from an opioid epidemic.
It's not just junkies on the street.
It's kids.
It's young parents.
It's people that like to party on the weekends that are dying from these drugs.
So now these recreational drugs, cocaine, methamphetamine, whatever else that's being used in party settings is going to be even more open and even more welcome.
So I expect personally, I expect overdoses to skyrocket because of this policy.
But I would sensibly like to see something that can allow people who want to get sober and rehabilitate and get work to allow them to do that.
Allow them to like, you know, but it's tricky, right?
It has to be more nuanced than black and white criminal record, no criminal record, you know, like, because that's not helping.
So there does need to be nuance, but decriminalizing hard drugs, I don't think is it.
Because if, you know, I think about like my 19-year-old cousin, and as of January, she could walk up to a police officer and bang a needle at heroin in her arm right in front of the cop and the cop can't even take it from her.
Like what, where, where, like, what the hell is happening in this country that you could do something like that, you know?
It's blowing up.
It feels like we've, we've given up as a society on these people instead of saying, you know what, the best way for you to be, for you to feel about yourself and for your families, by the way, who are also victims of the drug abuse of the abuser.
The best way for everybody to move forward is if you get clean and become a productive member of society.
But it feels like we've decided that that's not even an option that these people deserve.
And I agree with you.
There has to be a better way.
But also to use the criminal justice system to incentivize people to stay clean.
For example, you end up with a criminal charge, but maybe after three years or five years, you get an automatic pardon for your drug charge if you've stayed out of trouble.
Because I know that for some people, the cost of getting a pardon is prohibitive when you're trying to get back on your feet.
But maybe it's three years instead of the five or 10 or whatever it is now.
And the, I forget what it is to get a pardon.
It's a lot of money, by the way.
But maybe, maybe it's just an automatic pardon of those charges if you have a history of keeping the peace and being of good behavior so that there's an incentive for you to keep your life on track.
And if you do keep your life on track, this thing doesn't follow you forever and punish you forever when you're not that person anymore.
But yeah, I just, you know, your video was so great because instead of the fancy people talking about what's best for those people over there, you actually went and talked to the people over there whose opinions are so very much disregarded in this whole conversation.
Automatic Pardons for Peacekeepers00:03:51
You know, it's funny, two of the people that we talked to, we talked to a bunch of people actually who were addicts in recovery on the downtown east side.
Two other people we talked to.
One was a younger kind of, she looked like maybe like a raver kind of chick on commercial drive.
Commercial drive is, for those who haven't been to Vancouver, is kind of like our granola kind of hips.
Not really, I wouldn't call it hipster, but it's kind of like granola-y raver culture, hippie culture, epitome on that strip, if you've ever been.
And talked to the raver chick and this other guy who was also visiting from Australia, or I guess he was here on a work permit from Australia, a young liberal kind of type, wearing like the dad hat and the Ray-Bans and like typical kind of, you know, and they both thought it was an excellent idea, you know, awesome.
Yeah, I don't think people should, you know, there shouldn't be any crimes for drugs and blah, blah, blah.
It's just like, they were just the talking points.
There was no like critical thinking about the ramifications of this policy.
It's like, oh, yeah, it's great.
You don't think that the 30-year-old heroin addict should be harassed for shooting heroin on Maine Hastings.
Yeah, that's awesome.
How about the 18-year-old college kid with the eight ball of Coke and Nelson?
How about him?
Do you think that should be illegal?
Like flies.
Like, you know, like not even a thought as to how this could affect the fabric of our society.
And they get to go back to their nice middle class neighborhoods.
They don't get to see the ugly fallout of long-term drug addiction where there's no point of intervention for police or rehab.
Like sometimes people end up getting picked up by cops on a drug charge and they get before a judge who says, go to rehab, we'll stay the charges.
But if there was never that point of intervention, then that person never gets before a judge who says to them, there's a better way.
If you want to stay out of jail, go to rehab and maybe, you know, one in three people take that, take that way out.
But that's one in three people.
That's great.
But, you know, these middle class kids who think, oh, recreational drug use is cool, they never see the ugly side of the fallout of long-term drug use.
Well, the thing is, I think a lot of people in BC specifically, this may not be true across Canada, but they do see the ugly effects because you'll be hard pressed.
Talk to a random person in Vancouver that didn't immigrate here, but was born Here, you'll be hard pressed to talk to someone who doesn't either know someone who's addicted to drugs or died from drugs.
Like you will be very hard pressed.
But the thing is, it's our culture around drugs.
It's this very open, liberal culture around drugs and around like they're coupled with either, they're coupled with freedom and expression in British Columbia, freedom and expression and identity, which make them so dangerous, which is why we can have like the ugly drunken uncle in the attic, aka you know, Hastings and Maine on the downtown east side in front of some of the most expensive real estate in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world,
but then also celebrate, you know, things like mushrooms and MDMA.
And all it's, there's a, there's a cognitive dissonance between what hard drugs actually are and what they're actually doing to people.
And yeah, yeah, most people who come here for the first time or visit are absolutely just shocked by it, by just how open it is here.
Again, you reaffirm my commitment to just stay here and die here.
I'm just going to sit here and die here.
And I'm Catholic, so shame and stigma, we love that stuff.
I don't see a problem with it.
One last thing before I let you go, because I know we're going long, but that's okay.
Tell us, you know, you're a musician, Juno Award-nominated musician.
Why Carbon Matters in Healthcare00:05:45
What are you working on next?
And where do people find your music?
Cool.
Yeah.
So I'm working on some new music right now.
I've been trying to, after More of Us came out and it did really well and it was a part of this like cultural moment.
It's I've been thinking about what type of music I want to create and put out in the world, what type of content I want to create.
And also working with Drea, doing camera with Drea has been keeping me really busy.
So I'm going to take some time over the next month or so to kind of reassess what I want to put out.
And I'm sitting on a bunch of stuff right now.
So before the end of the year, I'm sure there will be some new stuff.
And hopefully you'll see it, you know, on Rebel, which would be great.
But in the meantime, you can check me out on Spotify at Brevner and see some of my music videos and stuff on Matt Brevner TV on YouTube.
That's great.
I can't wait to see what you do next.
And, you know, at Rebel News, we're your biggest fans.
Matt, thanks so much for coming on the show.
It's been too long.
We'll have you back on very, very soon.
Awesome.
Thanks, Sheila.
Thanks.
Well, friends, this brings us to the portion of the show where we invite your viewer feedback.
You see, unlike the mainstream media who, well, they just want your money, but they actually don't want to hear from you.
I actually care about what you think about the work that we're doing here at Rebel News.
So I invite you to send me a letter of viewer feedback.
Send it to Sheila at RebelNews.com.
Put in the subject line gun show letter so it's really easy for me to find.
But also, sometimes I go trolling around on Rumble for your comments there on our stories.
So do leave a comment there.
I just might find it and read it on air.
Now, today's gun show letter comes to us from a regular viewer of the show.
It's Bruce Acheson.
I believe he lives in Radway, if I'm remembering correctly, Radway, Alberta, beautiful downtown Radway, Alberta.
Anyway, Bruce writes to me on a show that I did a few weeks back with my friend Robbie Picard from Oil Sands Strong.
He's firing up a bus and he's driving all the way across the country to bring the message of how great Canadian oil and gas is for Canadians, for the Canadian economy, for Canadian jobs, for prosperity, but also for peace around the world.
And he's going to tell the stories of the people along the way and how oil and gas has made a difference in their lives and in their community.
Now, Bruce writes to me and says, Hi, Sheila.
I loved your interview with Robbie Picard.
well on his cross-country tour.
Yeah, I bet that's going to be so much fun.
I'm sort of kind of jealous that he gets to do that.
Bruce says, I sure wish our provincial conservative candidates would call net zero what it is.
You know, that's this idea that every project or anything we do in our lives, if it emits carbon emissions, carbon emissions have to be absorbed.
on the other side.
For example, if Bill Gates flies in to a climate change conference on a helicopter, a private helicopter, I should probably just walk everywhere for about a month to offset that.
It's absolutely insane and it's impossible.
But anyway, Bruce writes, any child knows that plants need carbon dioxide.
Yeah, it's called photosynthesis.
And it's not only for heating that propane heaters are used in greenhouses.
Now the lunatics are after nitrogen.
Yes, it is true.
Another life-giving gas needed by plants.
These delusional fools are like the idiot woodsman who saw it off the branch he was sitting on.
Worse yet, we citizens pay the price for their suicidal notions.
Yours in Christ, Bruce.
With also, he signs off for his cat.
But it is true.
I mean, one of my latest shows was with Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science.
And, you know, we were talking about net zero healthcare and you see these radicals within the healthcare industry who are saying, you know, we got to get health care to net zero.
Of all the things that, you know, you shouldn't focus on carbon emissions on probably healthcare is one of the things that even if you're an eco-radical, a member of the green cult, that's one of the things that you should say, you know what?
This is probably worth expending those carbon emissions on.
But there is a movement from within healthcare to say, no, we really have to rethink the carbon emissions in the ambulances and at the hospital and what your carbon emissions are in your end of life, as in, are you worth the electricity to run the ventilator?
It's really chilling stuff.
But even at the most base level, who do these eco-radical doctors think is paying for the healthcare system?
It's the economic prosperity generated by oil and gas.
And so if oil and gas goes away, the healthcare system, which is already very precarious and probably on the precipice of collapse, I would say.
If oil and gas prosperity goes away, that's it.
Kiss your public health care goodbye for what it's worth.
I'm ready for a rejig of the system there, a great reset in the healthcare industry, if you will.
But I would hate for it to come all crashing down before we do that.
But that's what would happen in the healthcare industry if these eco-radical doctors got their way.
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.