Sheila Gunn-Reid and Chris Sims of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation critique Alberta’s Taxpayer Protection Act (1995), now weaponized to block carbon tax exemptions for natural gas or propane—affecting millions—while Liberal MPs like Chahal and Bossono cave to Atlantic Canada’s furnace oil lobby. Trudeau’s gun buyback, ballooning from $800M to $4B, fails to curb urban crime but punishes rural hunters, mirroring the costly, ineffective long-gun registry. Their $600M media bailout fuels distrust—trust in journalism is at 23% in Alberta—while economic policies like carbon taxes and inflation strain working families, pushing nonpartisan resistance against government overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
The Alberta government passes Bill 1 and Nobody Trusts the Media.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
This legislative session in Alberta, the first order of business was for the Alberta government to pass a restraining order against itself, limiting the provincial government's ability to raise taxes on its citizens.
And Justin Trudeau, though he has given the mainstream media $600 million in bailouts, people continue to distrust the mainstream media and distrust Justin Trudeau.
And then the gun buyback keeps getting more and more expensive.
What's with that?
We'll talk about it with Chris Sims from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
Take a listen.
So joining me now is my good friend, Chris Sims of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
Chris, one of my favorite things on the internet over the past seven days has been the CTF and the chicken suit.
Tell us about the chicken suit, please.
So this was all inspired out of fury after the members of parliament and the liberal side of things refused to give their constituents the same break that they're giving on fuel oil in Atlantic Canada.
So there was this big thing, of course, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave a carve out exemption for home heating fuel, but it was just for furnace oil.
And it was just for three years until after the next election, right?
So understandably so, people were super ticked off because the vast majority of us don't use furnace oil.
Most of us use natural gas and some folks out in more rural areas and in trailer parks, they use propane.
Those of us who use natural gas and propane, we're getting screwed.
So we're going to pay around $300 extra, thereabouts, just in the carbon tax, just in home heating this winter.
So there was a big vote happening in the House of Commons and it was put forward by the Conservatives and actually supported by the NDP, Hell Has Frozen Over, where they said basically, hey, give the same carbon tax exemption regardless of heating fuel.
Everybody gets it.
Let's play Fairsees.
The Liberals who voted to give their own constituents in Atlantic Canada a break were too chicken to give their constituents elsewhere a break.
So in this case in Alberta, it's George Chahal for Calgary Skyview and it's Randy Bossono.
Those are our two liberal members of parliament here in Alberta.
Randy's up in Edmonton Center.
So we have a whole bunch now of these chicken costumes.
Got a great sale, good Canadian distributor.
And we've deployed them across Canada.
And now we're protesting these members of parliament.
So far, we've just done their offices, but it could escalate at any moment.
You know, that's what I love about the CTF is the costumes, really.
I mean, who could forget the mariachi band in the 90s?
It's one of our favorite things to do.
So I've always loved dressing up.
And the idea that I could actually put this on my CV when I was applying for this job was just magnificent.
And we do it for, so it's fun, but we do it for a reason.
And it's because it really makes politicians mad.
Like you mock them.
And especially if they're just self-important overpaid stuffed shirts, they get really uppity and really miffed really fast when the smelly peasants start criticizing them and start teasing them.
So that is why we have Fibber, who looks a lot like the Italian folklore puppet Pinocchio.
So whenever a politician lies, which is like every day, we could deploy Fibber.
We also have a big honking pink pig and a tuxedo, and he's Porky the Wasteater.
So now this flock of chickens has joined our ranks and we're just showing up now and they deserve it.
Here, this is the sign.
I don't know if you can see it, but it's like, I'm too chicken to cancel the carbon tax on home heating, right?
So I went to the dollar store and I made that sign.
And yeah, we've just been mocking them since.
And we're going to keep it up too, because they had a chance.
They could, if they had voted, if we'd gotten enough liberals to vote with the NDP and the conservatives, that motion would have passed and we'd have a lot better chance of saving everybody 300 bucks this winter.
You know, and to the point of this, this is purely a political move because the liberals were getting into some trouble in Atlantic Canada.
They had their own MPs breaking ranks with them on this.
So they had to throw a bone out to Western or to Eastern Canada.
And they really stand to lose nothing by punishing Western Canada.
Alberta's Taxpayer Protection Act00:15:20
And, you know, if you care about emissions, I don't necessarily, but if you do, why are you giving a break to the dirtier form of heating?
Like this bunker fuel adjacent heating instead of clean burning natural gas.
You know, like they want to incentivize us to be cleaner.
You could do that by giving people who heat with natural gas a break.
But the most compelling argument is one that you made on your Twitter account, which you broke the numbers down and actually showed that people who heat with natural gas are still paying more than those who heat with the bunker fuel adjacent home heating oil.
Yeah, you do.
So when people think about home heating, and I know most of your audience will have a full understanding of this, but pretend that we're speaking to our more urban brothers and sisters who it's push button or they don't need to think about it.
You can get your home heating fuel in different ways.
It can be piped directly to you in your house, like we do for natural gas.
Or if you somehow manage to afford heating with electric, that's a form of piped energy because it comes through the wire.
Okay.
Or you need portable fuel.
A truck needs to bring the stuff in the form of energy to then combust or heat or whatever your house in order to provide winter heat.
So that can come in the form of wood if you have a wood stove or wood pellets, same deal.
Bunker oil, as you call it, furnace oil.
So way back in the day across the prairies, it was quite common as well to heat with this oil.
And if you remember the older kind of round, oval, tall, elongated tanks, apparently across the prairies, I didn't realize this, they would have them inside.
Whereas on the East Coast and out on the West Coast, how I grew up, they were outside and they would often supplement wood furnaces.
So you can port that fuel.
You can also, like I said, fill big propane tanks and use them for your propane fuel.
So they're singling out this one tiny little group of people, around three or four percent of Canadians, who still use portable furnace oil.
The rest of us are up the creek.
And you're right.
The rest of us on average are going to be paying more for our carbon tax, for our home heat, because it's a constant piped thing.
It's different from having it in your tank.
And if I can just take the tax hat off for a second and look at this from just an analysis point of view, what's interesting about the Atlantic thing, because I've got family out there, the Atlantic caucus of any political party, the major ones, liberal and conservative, the Atlantic caucus has its own culture.
Okay.
It's older.
Quite often the older set, so my late Nana was like this.
The older set, you would be born a Tory or you were born a liberal because your father and your grandfather were a Tory or a liberal.
So it creates this cultural confidence, I would describe it, within the party and therefore has this special confident caucus within any said party.
These folks turned around to the prime minister.
I don't know how they got him to do it and said, hey, boy, you know, we're losing, we're losing votes here.
I'm plummeting in the polls.
You know, we got to have some action here.
Blah, And they're older, by and large.
If you take a look at Lawrence Macaulay, for example, who's an ag minister, he's been around forever.
So that sort of cultural mentality, I think, got to the PMO and they were able to band together and urge him to do this and give them a carve out.
Around 40% of Prince Edward Islanders, 40, still use furnace oil.
Around 35% of Nova Scotians, including in Halifax, still use furnace oil.
So this is a critically politically important issue for them.
And that is why he blinked.
But the rest of the MPs, they clearly don't have that pull and they clearly don't have that confidence.
And they're clearly too chicken to stand up in the same way.
Yeah, I think also, you know, the people around Justin Trudeau, I think, are much brighter than Justin Trudeau.
And I think they could see the writing on the wall when you see the rise of premiers like Blaine Higgs, conservative premiers who are popular, they're doing well.
The liberals could stand to lose some seats in Atlantic Canada just over this issue.
So again, it never comes down to emissions.
It never comes down to affordability.
It's just using the taxism as a cudgel to punish your enemies and reward your friends.
The science quickly became political science.
Yes.
Real fast.
And for folks who don't know, Atlantic Canada, like yesterday, like just started paying the carbon tax.
So on July 1st, this year, they started paying the full freight of the carbon tax.
The rest of us were.
So 14 cents a liter for gasoline, 17 cents a liter for diesel, 12 cents per cubic meter of natural gas, all that jazz.
We were always doing this.
We were part of the mandatory minimum that Trudeau had imposed on us.
Not Atlantic Canada.
They had a special deal.
They had an exemption up until July 1st this year.
So if you want to know why the polls suddenly went like this there, because they started, they had a sticker shock overnight at the gas pumps.
Overnight, their gasoline price went up like 14 cents a liter.
That's like 10 bucks extra every time you're filling up a minivan.
Boom.
And so that is why that hornet's nest was kicked.
You know, some part of me is kind of cheekily pleased that Trudeau voters are getting mugged by reality, but then I remembered that these are individual families and their pockets are being picked and those are jugs of milk disappearing out of their fridge.
And that's, you know, new skates that kids won't get because Justin Trudeau thinks he can spend your money better than you.
Speaking of people being allowed to spend their money better than the government, I said this off air, but I think this is like we may as well call this the CTF bill, Bill 1 in Alberta.
The government of Alberta has, I guess, sought a restraining order against itself from tax hikes.
And I think it's wonderful.
Tell us about it.
Okay, I might have to use that line.
That's really good.
So, here in the beautiful land of Alberta, which I have moved to over the past year and a half, thank you for taking me in, Sheila.
We're monitoring both sides of the province here.
I'm down south, she's up north.
So, here in the beautiful province of Alberta, we have something called the Taxpayer Protection Act.
Okay, the late former premier Ralph Klein put it in place back in 1995.
And so, up until just recently, the Taxpayer Protection Act only excluded a provincial sales tax from happening without a referendum.
Put bluntly, if the government ever wanted to push a PST on us here in Alberta, they'd have to win a referendum from the people first.
That is why we don't have a PST.
So, it saves people billions of dollars if you take a look at the entire province.
And anybody who's done any shopping in Alberta and waits at the till and it doesn't sting as bad remembers what that feels like.
So, we don't have a PST.
That's baked into the Taxpayer Protection Act.
Fast forward, we now have Premier Danielle Smith, who had already mentioned something like this back when we were getting her to sign our no PST pledge when she was first running for leadership.
She kind of alluded to it, and I got this weird impression that she was like reading back issues of our magazines and like our white papers and stuff.
I was like, oh, wow, I better get up to speed because she knows she's an extra.
She's nerdy enough to do that.
Yeah, so nerdy.
And like, I hadn't even read some of this stuff.
So I was like, Holy smokes, I got to get up to speed.
So, what they did is they have now altered the Taxpayer Protection Act, which is usually a bit freaky because you don't want that changed.
But if they ever want to increase income taxes or business taxes, they need to win a referendum first.
So, if they ever try to hike taxes in Alberta again, we need to say yes.
It's huge.
Yeah, they need, we need to say yes, and they have to make the case to Albertans why they can't find efficiencies, why they can't claw back on the bureaucracy.
Or, you know, like if they try to make that case to Albertans, Albertans are going to be making the case right back to them.
Actually, you have X number of middle managers at Alberta Health Services.
Do you think we could do with maybe 10 instead of 12?
Yeah, supervising the one guy who uses the mop.
Yes, which is exactly the situation of government.
I'll give you a quick sneak peek.
I don't have all the numbers solid yet, but every year, especially here in Alberta, we do what's called a pre-budget report.
And so, that's where we go through all the past budgets and we find efficiencies and we just nerd out.
And then we give it to the government.
It's like, here, please steal our ideas.
Have at it.
Put your name on it, give her, because it just saves people money.
So, the next time somebody says something like, Oh, well, we're cut to the bone.
This is austerity.
There's nothing we can do.
Folks might also remember that in the last spring, the government here in Alberta committed to keeping spending increases to the rate of inflation and population growth.
Okay, nice standard rule.
You're not cutting, you're not, you're still increasing, but it's just by the rate of inflation and population growth.
So, we at the Taxpayers Federation have been asking for that simple little economics rule, that little guardrail to be in place since the mid-90s.
So, I went back through all of the budgets to the mid-90s and I did a what-if experiment.
What if they had put this rule in, which they've agreed to now?
What if we had done this in the mid-90s?
How much money would we have?
Hundreds of billions of dollars, Sheila.
And I have to be clear, this is not windfalls.
Got nothing to do with natural resource windfalls, no roller coaster involved.
This is simply if they had kept spending at that level of check, we would have hundreds of billions of dollars.
So the next time somebody says there's nothing to cut, there's nothing we can do.
No, no, no, that's not true.
Even simple little discipline rules like that would have had us head and shoulders miles above people right now.
It's very sad.
That's very sorry.
But hey, we started now.
So picture 20 years late than never, I guess.
I'm very pleased to see this because basically this means that it is going to be almost impossible for the government to raise taxes in Alberta unless they repeal this law or completely ignore it altogether like the Redford PCs did.
Yes.
So good luck with that.
So I've noticed something about Albertans is that they take action.
They don't take stuff lying down and they get really involved.
It's really quite inspiring from a grassroots perspective.
And so nobody has dared touch Knockwood since 1995, since Klein put it in.
Nobody has dared touch the Taxpayer Protection Act.
Nobody has put in a PST here in Alberta.
They're now enshrining that same protection inside of that little vault.
So I pity the premier someday in the future who tries to open up that vault.
It's not going to be good because it's not just the Taxpayers Federation and it is us.
I mean, we will, I will bicycle lock my neck to somebody's leg if they try doing something like that.
But it's the people.
Like you have tons of citizens groups and just regular moms and dads and workers here that are really well aware of what's going on and they will hold government to account, which is a good thing to see.
Yeah, we frequently get rid of conservative politicians because they're not conservative enough.
Like that's one of our favorite things to do around here.
It's like the provincial sport.
I'm reading through these books, these like history books, these black history books that were put together by the Bifelds.
And it's I have one right there.
It's a look at us.
Like it's just, it's a very distinctly cultural thing for Alberta.
Saskatchewan might be similar.
I don't know.
Yes.
But it is pretty impressive to see.
And so all of this is to say this is really good news, folks.
Provincially here in Alberta, they cannot raise taxes on you unless you vote to say so.
It's a pretty big deal.
It's one of the best taxpayer protections in all of North America, like game changer stuff.
I want to switch lanes a little bit to something that you and I have talked about previously, and that is Justin Trudeau's gun buyback, which is not a buyback at all.
It's a compensation for confiscation program.
And that has just been kicked down the road until 2025.
So for people who are unaware, Justin Trudeau decided that 1500, now it's closer to 2,000 models of Canadian la guns were too dangerous to be in the arms of Canadians.
And also subsequently grandfathered out handgun ownership.
But as I said, he decided these guns were too dangerous to be in the hands of Canadians.
So they needed to be outlawed immediately.
However, he's letting us hang on to them until 2025.
Immediately years from now.
Years from now.
It was a deadly public safety issue, so deadly and so in the interest of public safety that you can just hang on to them until 2025 because Justin Trudeau can't figure out how to compensate people for taking their property away and scapegoating law-abiding Canadian firearms owners for the failings of progressive cities.
Yeah.
So this would have been a huge mess.
It's already a huge mess.
It's massive.
Yeah.
I've already, I know a lady up in Prince George, this largely contributed to her gun shop being shut down.
It was her only small business because of this nonsense.
And so for the tiny handful of people who watch your show who don't have their firearms licenses, or if you're speaking to, you know, your cousin or whatever who doesn't own firearms.
So this is going after law-abiding, licensed firearms owners.
So in order to get a firearms license in Canada, you have to go through a big long course.
And this is just for long guns.
We're not talking even handguns, just we're talking rifles and shotguns, okay?
That almost every ranch in Canada will have.
If you're living rurally, especially in the West, everybody, they're a tool.
It's like having a chainsaw.
And so the Trudeau government suddenly classified a whole bunch of these long guns as dangerous, almost exclusively based on looks.
Like it could have exactly the same function as the maple encased long gun that has steel that you'd see Elmer Fudd using on the car.
Why Long Guns Became Restricted00:04:30
There's a 410.
There's a 410 on that list simply because it looks cool.
This is it.
This is it.
And so they went after the cosmetic element of it.
And fundamentally, it comes down to for the Taxpayers Federation anyway.
One, this would be a huge waste of money.
And we have evidence to show that it would be because they tried the long gun registry and it was a debacle.
So it was supposed to cost $200 million back in the day.
This is under the Kretchen Liberal government.
It wound up costing well over $1 billion.
And that's back in 90s money.
So huge waste of money.
And the police officers at the front lines of violence themselves have said repeatedly, this does not make people safer.
Like going after duck hunters and people who are trying to keep coyotes away from their cattle, this does not improve safety.
It does nothing to stop gun violence that we see in our urban centers.
Go after those bad guys and bad girls who are doing that with illegal guns.
Don't go after the law abiders.
So this is why the Taxpayers Federation takes a role in it because one, it's a huge waste of money.
And two, it's completely useless.
And we don't like useless wings of government.
Well, and, you know, they can't pin the number down on what this buyback.
I hate you.
Buyback.
As if you bought it from them in the first place.
Right.
They can't pin the number down.
And of course they can't.
So it started off at 800 million, then it went to 1 billion.
Now it's upwards of 2 billion.
It's going to be 4 billion by next year.
And the reason why is a lot of these guns are moving from unregistered.
So you met the requirements to own them.
Perfect.
You went and bought it.
And then maybe you bought it at a gun show.
They checked your license.
They said, yep, you're cool.
You've been vetted daily by the RCMB.
You can have this shotgun.
And then, so there's no record of this gun between you and the government.
So now the government has no idea how many of these firearms they need to compensate you for.
So there's no possible way they can estimate the cost of the program, let alone the policing required to get these guns out of the hands of normal people.
We, at least in Alberta, know that our government is not going to mandate our RCMP to go door to door to confiscate the property of law-abiding people.
We've got bigger problems for our police to deal with, like the opioid crisis and violent crime and property crime.
We just don't have the resources to be harassing normal people like me.
We've had shootings in both Calgary and Edmonton in the last few days, like broad daylight ones.
So I'm going out on a limb here.
I doubt they're duck hunters.
I'm just saying.
So this is it, where it's one of those things where if I even try to empathize with somebody who doesn't understand guns, I get it.
I get that you're scared and you're believing the government when they're telling you this is going to make you safer, but the police themselves say it won't.
Okay.
Quite often it's the police at the front lines who will, if I'm paraphrasing, say something like, we need to crack down on the gangbangers and the criminals who are running illegal guns quite often across the border.
So if you want to spend money on something, tighten up your border controls.
This is it.
This is it.
A little fence might help.
So don't, you know, no pun intended, don't send your mounties out on some wild goose chase to go track down goose hunters in Brooks, Alberta.
Like there's, there's no point in doing that.
And so, and again, this isn't just the CTF saying this.
This is the cops themselves.
And what was interesting is that these escalating estimations of cost of this confiscation slash buyback program, the numbers that I was seeing being put forward at committee, these were coming from criminologists who teach at Simon Fraser University.
Okay.
This is not, you know, Dougie out in, you know, Red Deer.
This is somebody teaching at a university saying, yeah, this cost is going to balloon quickly.
And it is.
And every time I read an update about the buyback program, it's like, oh, they added another nine zeros to the end of the cost.
Yeah.
For folks who don't own firearms and thinks this doesn't affect you, number one, it does because this is a private property issue.
The Trust Crisis in Journalism00:13:45
And number two, if you just look at the money, okay, pretend they're confiscating coffee makers for whatever reason.
Just look at the money.
Yeah, exactly.
The ones that look like tactical coffee makers.
They would.
Don't give them ideas.
So look at the money, okay, that they could spend $2 billion, $3 billion, whatever.
We don't have that money.
We have unmoney.
We are more than a trillion dollars in debt.
If you started counting your loonies right now with King Charles III's new head on them and you stacked them all up, it would take you 30,000 years to count to a trillion.
So why does that matter?
Because the government is borrowing money to do these stupid things.
By printing and borrowing that money, he's causing inflation.
By he, I mean the prime minister.
Okay.
You're paying for this inflation.
Okay.
When you're out there and everything is more expensive, it's part of this.
Okay.
It's these dumb decisions that waste money and don't help people that is helping to make inflation much worse because the Bank of Canada just prints it and then the government just borrows it.
Now, changing lanes, but still, of course, on the same topic of, I guess, the government spending money on things that they should never spend money on.
Let's talk about the media bailout for a second.
I saw an article in Blacklocks this morning that Justin Trudeau's $600 million media bailout contaminated the media with government money, of course, and thus breached the trust that people have in their journalists to tell them the truth.
Because now you want to know, is this really what happened or is this what the government wants us to think happened?
Because if you tell the truth and you're not going to get any funding from Justin Trudeau, media trust is at an all-time low.
23% of people have confidence in the media right now.
And the numbers are at an all-time low, the lowest in Alberta and then spreading out from there.
The prairies, they're around 20, 23% on the prairies going up in the more liberal places.
But I think the plummeting trust is directly correlated to that media buyout.
Yeah, it's in lockstep.
And this is what you and I and our friends on the left, like Jesse Brown, have been warning about for years since the government first started thinking, hey, we're not wasting enough money by giving the CBC $1.2, $1.3 billion per year.
Let's waste more money.
Let's get more journalists on the government payroll.
That's just a disaster.
And I think sometimes because everything that has happened in the last, especially the last three or four years, has been so big and so confusing and so crazy in some cases that we can lose track of even simple things.
And this is very simple.
It is a direct conflict of interest for journalists to be paid by the government.
Journalists, and I was one for many, many years, including in mainstream media, print, TV, radio, you name it.
Journalists, I don't care if you wake up left or right side of the bed.
You're supposed to hold the government to account.
You're supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
That's your job.
As a journalist, you are given a privileged passkey in many cases into some of these high echelons of government.
You're able to speak truth to power, to shove microphones in faces, to ask tough questions, to not be reverent of your rulers.
And that's a pretty special job.
Okay.
You're being given a lot of trust there.
Okay.
And if you are suddenly now on the payroll of that government, that's gone.
That's gone.
It doesn't matter if you are writing for like, I don't care, the Sudbury Workers Paper, okay?
Or, you know, working for the Rebel.
You shouldn't be on government payroll because you should be paid by your supporters, by your readers, by your viewers through free will donation.
You should have advertisements, whatever it is.
But if you're just in the pay of people in power, you cannot hold the powerful to account.
And here we are.
That is one of the lowest numbers I've ever heard, Sheila, for people trusting journalists.
And if people listening saying, yeah, they deserve it.
I hear you.
Okay.
People are really mad.
They have every right to be mad.
They can barely afford food or home heat.
I get it.
But what I'm worried about is the alternative.
Who, where is our tool now?
Where's our tool now to hold government to account?
Like journalists are supposed to be those noisy dogs, like, you know, reaching out in front of you in order to protect you from government.
And they're supposed to be the ones barking those questions.
If they're not there anymore, that's pretty scary.
And this needs to be fixed like yesterday.
There should be zero money going from government to journalism.
Like zero.
Like the funding for CBC needs to stop tomorrow.
And the so-called media bailout needs to stop tomorrow.
And eventually, hopefully, there'll be enough independent news organizations that grow up from that and they rekindle that trust and we can rebuild it.
I hope.
You know, I think it's twofold with the government giving money to the journalists, but also the journalists, while there is in some instances a perception of contamination, there is a real actual tangible contamination and you can see it in their coverage.
No greater example of this than the coverage of the Freedom Convoy.
Ottawa is a place teeming with journalists.
They either didn't go down and talk to the Freedom Convoy to see actually what their concerns were, or they maligned the Freedom Convoy, or in some instances lied about it directly because it served their purposes of protecting Justin Trot.
They said there was an arson in an apartment building.
That was absolutely not true.
And with the advent of social media and everybody having these things in their hand all the time, you can fact check a journalist in real time.
And I think some journalists have completely forgotten that.
And instead of speaking truth to power and holding the powerful to account on behalf of the people, they very frequently are holding the people to account on behalf of the powerful.
And this is where it gets down to the core of journalism.
And if this is going to maybe bore some of your viewers who aren't journalists.
I don't think so.
Never wanted to be journalists.
But I have lost count of the number of times where as a young journalist in my 20s or even in my 30s, where I haven't been snotty about it, to use a rough term, but I've had a preconceived notion, for example, when I'm going into something, okay?
Where I'm going to go cover an event or a court case or a protest or whatever.
Okay.
And I, you know, talked myself into make sure you get both sides, make sure you ask all the right questions, be open, be thoughtful, but you still have some estimation of something in your head because you're picturing it.
I've lost count, Sheila, of the number of times I have gone to go speak with someone fulsomely and wholly, and I've come away with a changed mind.
That's one of the amazing things about actually talking to other human beings and telling their story.
So so many times, and that is one of like, that's, that's the, the catch with journalism.
That's why people get hooked on being a journalist because you're meeting all these new people and you're sharing their experiences and you're hopefully telling their story, their who, what, where, and why, their W-5.
You're sharing that with everyone.
And that could be anything.
It could be a victim of a crime.
It could be somebody who's a new immigrant.
It could be something even as seemingly dry as a small business that is going out of business because of government regulation.
And then you go talk to the guy and he's crying because he can't get his kid into hockey anymore.
Like these are the human stories that journalists are supposed to tell.
And you're right.
These things are evaporating.
And in that instance, in that case, I remember the best piece of journalism that I read that was printed.
Okay.
There was lots of really good kind of citizen journalism like this.
The best printed piece was written by an academic who taught chemistry, who wrote a blog.
Yes.
And he wandered.
You remember that one?
He wandered the streets.
He wandered down Kent Street and just talked.
With an open mind and he talked to people.
And that's journalism.
And so this is, that just breaks my heart to see that number that it's in the low 20s.
But this is what you're going to have happen if you put them on government payroll.
And it's going to take a while, but it needs to be cut off now.
It's like one of those moments where you have an intervention and you realize that you're doing something really bad for you and you have to stop now.
Like the minute hand has hit your watch and you need to stop.
I don't know how long it's going to take to rebuild that trust with independent news organizations.
But if I can give people a little bit of hope, for a long time in the late 1800s, early 1900s, newspapers were literally owned by a political party or an organization.
Okay.
So we've gone through this ebb and flow and flux of journalism before.
And then I would argue it kind of hit its heyday.
And nobody's perfectly objective.
Keep in mind, you are not a robot.
You're still going to have your time.
And that's the thing.
Everybody knows I'm conservative.
Sure.
And I don't lie about it.
Like my friends at the CBC who are like, we're completely objective.
How dare you imply that we have our own human biases?
Be honest about it.
That's all.
To be honest about it, and I don't want to pay for it.
That's it.
And this is whenever I'm coaching somebody who's a new journalist or whatever, and I'm speaking to them, they'll often have this idea that I'm like, because I have gone through this conveyor belt of a journalism school, I am now objective.
It's like it has created you in a new image.
No, no, you can't be because you're human.
You can't be like this objective robot, but you can be balanced and you can work really hard to be as balanced as you can be.
Keep your ideas in mind and balance them out accordingly.
That makes for really good journalism and be a really good listener.
And to your point, getting back to the direct money, I know there are people who are listening right now or they have friends who are still in mainstream media who say, I work my hard work.
We both do.
We do.
I hear you.
I know you're working really hard.
But like ethics, it's the perception of bias.
So if you're one of those folks who's working really hard and you take that like as an insult that they're on government payroll, you should be the most angry because this is tarnishing your work.
And people are perceiving you as biased, even though you're busting your butt, making sure you're not.
Because the moment money changes hands, it's gone.
It's the same as ethics and corruption.
It's the perception of bias.
Speaking of ethics and corruption, Justin Trudeau's polling numbers seem to be right in line with the trust in media.
I saw 25% of people think have a favorable impression of Justin Trudeau.
That's the latest abacus polling data.
So despite the two-thirds of a billion dollars in bailout money that he gave to the mainstream media, it's not helping him either.
Yeah, I think in this case, there's two things.
One, just government.
Like eight years, it kind of starts.
It's happened to Harper.
Yep.
Yep.
It gets long in the tooth, no matter what color your penny is.
That's one element.
And two, it's really rough out there.
Like it is unaffordable for so many people.
So we here in Alberta, there's still people struggling.
Like we've got a better affordability thing going on here than most of the rest of the country.
But every time I phone and I try to call once a month, I try to call the different food banks once a month to check in on them and see how they're doing because it's a good indicator of how tough it is.
Every time I call, they say something like, I've never seen so many people with jobs coming in here for food.
And that's even, it breaks my heart.
It's even in Alberta.
So just imagine what it's like to be a working family in like Langley or Surrey or Mississauga or, you know, Dartmouth, right?
London, Ontario.
And I think now that the rubber has hit the road and people are fighting to afford groceries and winter heat, that people get really upset and really mad and they demand change, no matter who is in power.
So, and if they see it actually, if they know a little bit more and they know that this government has racked up the deficit, they know this government is causing inflation, they know the government's printing money and hiking up their carbon taxes, they're even more mad because that's culpability.
So I think that's why you're seeing those numbers do that.
Yeah, I think people are starting to understand like in when you have a little bit of wiggle room in your budget, sometimes it's, well, that's just what things cost.
Why Politics Matters Now00:04:19
Sure.
But once things get tight, you realize things cost this much because of all the other things that are happening.
They start to put that together.
And they've also, just very quickly, they've run out of that cushion.
Yeah.
Right.
of like being able to ignore politics because good people should be able to ignore politics.
You should be able to imagine the government is, well, it still leaks and smokes oil a little bit, but it is a machine and it's over there in the corner and it's generally sputtering along.
Okay.
That's generally what government is and should be.
Now the thing has just taken over the whole house.
It's full of smoke.
Like nobody can see straight.
It is a massive burning problem.
And I think now normal people who don't follow politics are suddenly realizing, why can't I afford anything anymore?
It's the whole thing, if you don't take a interest in politics, politics will take an interest in you.
We're at that moment now, I think, which is why you're seeing this crash in the polls.
I think though, CTF plays such an important role in educating the public about why things cost so much and why you feel like your life is completely being controlled from without instead of within.
And that's why I think what you do is just so important.
So Chris, tell us how people can get involved in the work that CTF does because really it's as grassroots as it comes and how they can support the CTF because you won't take a penny from Justin Trudeau, but you won't even take a tax break.
No, Justin Trudeau.
So that I really like that part of the CTF.
It's like, yeah, and we mean it.
So we're not a charity.
So when you give us a donation, we're not writing you a tax credit receipt because we don't want to incur any expense.
And so if what I also like about the CTF is one, we're nonpartisan.
We don't care what color your opinion is.
If you are wasting money or not being accountable, we're going to come after you.
So we've been around since 1990, since before the internet was a thing.
Our main purpose is lower taxes, less waste, and accountable government.
We will do everything from my dear friend in Ottawa, Franco Terrazano, writing a 70-page pre-budget report, pointing out that we are going to have an inflation crisis before pretty much anybody else in Canada was saying it, I will point out, and doing committee work all the way down to us here in chicken suits out in front of the members of parliament office.
Okay.
So if you go to our website, taxpayer.com, just skim through our petitions.
There's something there for everyone.
So if you don't like the gun confiscation, if you don't like the government giving money to journalists, if you want lower income taxes, if you want to scrap the carbon tax, whatever your thing is, I even have one on there, Sheila, to take the PST off used items in British Columbia because it's wrong to nail people at thrift shops.
It is very wrong.
To nail you at thrift shops.
Right.
You know, not to sound modeling, but like I can pay the extra buck or whatever.
But what really gets me going is seeing people in there with families who are fighting to afford it.
And it gets me so mad.
And so I wrote a petition.
So go sign up the petitions, okay, that you care about.
And then you're part of our army.
And we'll, we'll email you whenever it's time to do a big email blast, whenever we're going to be protesting in front of somebody's office in a chicken suit, anything like that.
Just go to the website, taxpayer.com, sign the petitions.
You don't even need to make a donation if you can't.
That's okay.
But then you're part of the army.
And what I love about it is it's fellowship is you no longer feel like you're fighting alone anymore.
You've got a whole bunch of people that feel the same way.
Awesome.
Chris, thanks so much for coming on the show.
And thanks so much for just, you know, taking it to the politicians, but doing it in like a fun and cheeky way.
It's tough out there to keep a happy warrior mindset and you really do.
And we'll have you back on again very, very soon.
Thanks, Sheila.
Well, friends, we've come to the portion of the show where we invite your viewer feedback, unlike the mainstream media.
I actually care about what you think about the work that we're doing here at Rebel News.
It's the reason I give out my email address right now.
It's Sheila at RebelNews.com.
Inviting Viewer Feedback00:03:13
Put gun show letters in the subject line.
And who knows, I might just read your viewer feedback on air.
But if you don't want to send me an email, that's fine too.
Maybe you want to sit through a couple of ads and watch a free version of the show, either on YouTube or Rumble a couple of days after the show comes out.
Maybe leave a comment in the comment section of YouTube or Rumble.
And that's exactly where today's comments come from.
They are taken from last week's free version of the show.
And last week's show was with Rick Iggersich from Canada's National Firearms Association.
We were talking about some of the stuff I talked about with Chris Sims today, the ever-ballooning gun buyback program, compensation for confiscation program, because the Liberals, as you know, they just can't pin down a number and how could they?
Because they don't know what guns they plan to grab or how many of them there are.
So Blue Collar Scholar writes, at least we can be thankful that Trudeau and company are so useless in general.
Can you imagine how much damage they'd have done by now if they were competent?
Right?
You know, I often am sort of grateful that they are as incompetent in implementing some of the more horrific things the liberals would like to do to us.
Yeah, they can't figure out how to first get the guns from the people who are completely law-abiding and then repay the people for the property that they took.
But they know for sure those guns are just so deadly and pose such an issue to public safety that we can have them for at least five years.
Sure.
Anyway, yeah, I'm also, I'm kind of glad that they are as incompetent as they are because could you imagine?
Could you really imagine?
The next comment is from Three Cracked Cheeks.
It's an odd name.
Who writes, Rick is very clear, concise, intelligent, and has a deep understanding of the subject.
The opposite of the Trudeau regime.
No wonder they want to ignore him.
The liberals always think they're just one more gun ban from eliminating crime.
I don't even think the liberals think that grabbing guns from law-abiding people will help the crime problem in this country.
They just know they need to be perceived to be doing something, anything.
And instead of doing the hard thing, which is dealing with the problems in progressive cities and addressing trafficking at Canada's poorest border, they take the path of least resistance and go after the most law-abiding people in the country, gun owners, because they know we will follow the rules.
And so they go after us.
Because criminals, as you know, they don't follow the rules.
That's why they're criminals.
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 and in the same place next week.