David Menzies’ arrest—handcuffed while questioning Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland—exposes state-funded media’s complicity, as CBC and others stay silent despite past solidarity. Chris Sims of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation warns laws like C-11 (Online Censorship Act) and C-18 (link tax) could stifle dissent under "misinformation" pretexts, while Canada’s $1T debt saps resources like healthcare. Marco Navarro Gini defends independent journalism, calling for police protection against government hostility, as Trudeau’s bias may have fueled Menzies’ targeting. The episode underscores how taxpayer-funded media and regulatory overreach erode accountability, leaving citizens to demand transparency through advocacy and direct action. [Automatically generated summary]
David Menzies gets falsely arrested and accused of assaulting a police officer while trying to do his job and the parliamentary press gallery in this country, the one subsidized by Justin Trudeau, is notably silent.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Today's a bit of a long show, so I will cut to the chase.
The biggest story in the world over the past couple of days has been my friend David Menzies being falsely accused of assaulting a police officer and then being falsely arrested and detained by police officers while he was trying to do his job to ask the deputy prime minister, Christia Freeland, a former journalist herself, some questions on the street.
Freeland, who has been an outspoken advocate for free speech and freedom of the press, didn't do anything as the opportunity to defend freedom of the press was literally 18 inches away from her as David Menzies was being tackled and handcuffed and stuffed in a police cruiser.
We know it's all fake.
Freeland in the past tried to block me from attending a press conference at a media freedom conference that she was hosting.
She's just another liar, another liberal liar, especially on this issue.
And joining me today to discuss what happened to David Menzies, why we should not be funding the media, and then why the media has all but ignored the lavish parties federal bureaucrats have been throwing themselves is Chris Sims of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and a former journalist herself.
Take a listen to the interview we recorded yesterday afternoon.
So joining me now is my friend, good friend of the show, Chris Sims from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
And we have Canadian Taxpayers Federation issues that we need to talk about.
But I want to talk to Chris first of all because Chris was a journalist and she, in her role at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, is vehemently against government bailing out and or controlling, because I think they're probably the same issue, the Canadian news media.
It's created a landscape where the mainstream media is effectively a monopoly that controls access to politicians and they never get the market correction they so rightly deserve because they continue to produce content Canadians don't want, but the government continues to shoehorn it in front of the eyeballs of Canadian and fund the failures.
And this is particularly top of mind right now because as we're filming this on Tuesday, my friend David Menzies was arrested on the street for doing absolutely nothing wrong except trying to ask the deputy prime minister a question.
Chris, thanks so much for coming on the show and thanks so much for your advocacy for taxpayer responsibility, but also for keeping the media independent in this country.
However, sadly, that ship has really sailed for the vast majority of it.
This is really key, Sheila, because we have three pillars that we stick to for our mandate at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
It's lower taxes, less waste, and accountable government.
And there's no way that we can hold government accountable unless we can speak truth to power.
Unless journalists are free to question authority figures.
We don't care if they're right-wing or left-wing journalists, or they always vote, you know, whatever, you know, fill in the blank for the party.
That doesn't matter.
What matters is a free press.
And for people who don't yet know, the term free press means free from the state, free from government interference and government funding.
Because again, there's no way that you're going to be able to hold any government to account if you, on the one hand of the vice, are putting more and more journalists on government payroll.
And then on the other side of the vice, you are crushing independent journalism through over-regulation and gag orders.
Okay?
That is exactly what is happening in Canada right now.
So we've got the big behemoth that we're all familiar with, the CBC, which takes more than a billion dollars from taxpayers every single year.
That's been the case for a long time, and we want the CBC fully defunded.
What's new under this current administration is that other media, what people usually refer to as legacy media or mainstream media, are increasingly now on government payroll.
And for those who are on government payroll as journalists, the amount they get from the Trudeau government has now doubled.
So it used to be roughly $14-ish thousand dollars per year.
Our friends over at Blacklocks Reporter that don't take government money figured out this amount.
And so did the folks over at Canadaland who don't take government money.
They figured out the math.
Now the Trudeau government has said, hey, that worked out great.
We love having more journalists on government payroll.
Let's double it.
So now it's around $28,000, $29,000 per year per journalist that is on this so-called bailout.
Like, folks, you cannot hold government to account if you're counting on the government for your paycheck.
Period.
Andrew Coyne, who's been part of, you know, the mainstream media now for many years and he's on the at issue panel at the CBC, he's as mainstream as it gets.
Usually I disagree with him about most things.
He's right about this.
He doesn't think that journalists should be taking a nickel from the government for exactly the reason I just outlined.
And when we see stuff like what happened yesterday, this only makes it that much more important that we focus on this, that we urge every single politician to walk away and cancel media funding by the government.
It has to be a free press.
And you can see exactly who is funded by the media or by the politicians based on their silence.
For example, what happened to David Menzies on Monday afternoon is the biggest story in the world.
David is spending almost all of today, this is Tuesday, doing outside appearances with some of the world's largest networks, including Fox News.
It is trending on Twitter.
Conservative politicians are weighing in, and I'll get to that in a second.
You know who's not weighing in?
The mainstream media.
Pierre Polyev, to his credit, on Monday night, he tweeted that it was crazy what he was seeing happening on the street to David Menzies.
Now, just before we started recording this, he released this tweet.
He said, a journalist was arrested for questioning a liberal minister and the parliamentary press gallery, that's the funded media, doesn't say a word.
Trudeau has divided media into two groups, those he's bought off with bailouts and those he censors and has arrested.
He's right.
Where is the parliamentary press gallery?
coming out on behalf of David Menzies?
Where's Penn Canada?
Where's the Canadian Association of Journalists?
Where's Canadian journalists for, I think it's free expression?
Free expression.
Yeah, the ones who wanted to block Trump from coming into Canada.
What a colonized bunch of weirdos that is.
Yeah, those years ago.
They had a petition.
Like they didn't want, I mean, just these groups are so colonized by government media and their silence tells me everything I need to know about them.
And I can't stress enough what a change this is from the not too distant past.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm not, you know, a green newbie, but I also wasn't reporting in, you know, the 18th century or something.
It was only, I would say, 10, 15 years ago that to your point exactly, and I can give examples, the media, if they were being silenced or pushed out or pushed around, I don't even recall actually ever seeing a journalist pushed or pushed around or arrested in this manner.
And I've been in like riots.
So that was pretty surprising to see.
But whenever there was kind of this attempt by the government to stifle the access of media, media would team up together, like regardless of whether or not, you know, you voted differently or you think your editorial board would write a slightly different op-ed than the other.
I'll give you examples.
So when I was at CTV, I was over in Charlottetown and the Conservative Party, the caucus, who were in government, were having their annual general meeting.
Now, they were having it.
This is Charlottetown, so it's small town, basically.
They were having this meeting in this kind of big complex of a hotel.
And they said, oh, no, no, you can't come in here because it's a private event and you're not allowed in.
It's like, all right, that's fine.
But did you know that the CTV Bureau is actually located in this building?
So I have this magnetic card and I can go where I want.
Globe and Mail and a whole bunch of other reporters teamed up with me and refused to ask any questions until I was allowed into my studio.
Like, again, I didn't work for them.
We were all being paid by different employers.
I think even the CBC stuck up for us there.
And so this happens repeatedly.
Okay.
This happened when I was totally non-political, when I was covering court.
Same sort of thing happened.
It's like, oh, we're not taking questions right now.
It's like, the hell you're not.
You know, this is a democracy and we're a part of the free press and this is how this works.
We get to ask you questions.
Sometimes they can be uncomfortable for you.
That's the whole point of holding truth to power.
So just because a politician doesn't like a question doesn't mean that they can just shut down and wall out all media.
And to your point, this is a change.
Like I always saw journalists teaming up together, even if you didn't like the other reporter.
You just did it out of a sense of duty.
And I don't see that happening anymore.
You know, it's sort of ironic that this is Christia Freeland, security detail, pushing around David Menzies because I think it was two, three, three years ago, maybe even four.
Pandemic makes things blur together.
Sorry, the pandemic overreaction by the government.
But she hosted in conjunction with the UK Foreign Office, the Media Freedom Conference.
And at that media freedom conference, Freeland herself, a former journalist, I should point out.
Yes, I was going to say, let's point that out.
We should point that out.
She's a former journalist who claimed to be an advocate for the free press.
She had an opportunity to defend the free press about a foot and a half away from her as the police were arresting David Mendies, and she didn't do a damn thing.
But she also tried to block myself and Andrew Lawton from True North from attending a press conference at the Media Freedom Conference in the UK.
And you know who stood up for us?
Global News.
Foreign media, right?
The foreign media.
Global News, their UK bureau.
And Al Jazeera, of all outlets, stood up for us and said, We're not going to a press conference unless you let these two in.
And they had to let us in.
And at Rebel News, probably a couple years ago, Jason Kenney's government blocked Duncan Kinney, a far-left-wing activist journalist.
I forget which union-funded racket he was working for at the time.
Doesn't even matter.
No.
They blocked him.
And you know what we did?
At no cost, Rebel News, whom he has been absolutely critical of before that and after, said all kinds of mean things.
We provided him our legal research for free.
Said, here, you deserve media freedom.
We don't care where you're from.
And we had a bunch of legal research from the time that Rachel Notley had blocked me from attending press conferences at the legislature and had to have basically a royal commission to determine that she had done something wrong.
But we had a bunch of legal research that we had paid for, and we gave it to this far-left-wing agitator journalist for free because his human rights don't depend on his politics.
And interestingly enough, in a few short years, the script is totally flipped, and journalists only defend journalists that they like these days.
And that's a major problem because now this isn't just the fact that freedom of expression, which is our version of freedom of speech up here in Canada, it isn't just that our freedom of expression is being strangled by overregulation from the government.
It's that it is now seeping down into the culture of the newsrooms and the culture of journalists.
And unfortunately, I'm seeing more and more.
This is an overgeneralization.
I know there are young people who are joining independent media and asking tough questions.
But generally speaking, I'm seeing this sense of permission seeking all the time in young journalists.
It's like, you know, please, mother, may I?
Please, daddy, might I.
That is not towards the state, towards government.
And that is not the instinct of a journalist.
You have to stay within the law, of course.
Don't commit crimes and assault people.
Code of Conduct Concerns00:13:33
Don't be a nut job.
We get all of that.
Decent people understand that and how to stay within the law.
But it's not supposed to be an easy job.
It's not supposed to be comfortable, right?
Even making fun of politicians.
You know, you don't think that gets awkward sometimes?
And it's like they're a human being and you're making fun of them for wasting money.
It's like, yeah, we understand.
But it is our job as journalists and in some cases advocacy organizations to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.
And it's that last part that's important because it's so easy to get intimidated, to want to go along with the cool kids, to not rock the boat, and to ask, to not ask those tougher questions, right?
Of like, how do you figure this?
Why are you wasting money on this?
Why are you gagging the media?
You know, whatever, you know, Mr. Menzies was trying to ask the other day.
It's really easy to do that and to get in this sense of complacency, but now it's worse because it's not just culture and psychology that you're fighting against now.
It's money.
Right.
It's money.
A lot of these journalists are now on payroll from the government.
And they have to know deep down that this is not going to end well, that this is not true journalism, that they have to disavow government funding no matter what happens.
That could mean that their newspaper goes down.
That could mean that their company has to be restructured.
Like, I've been part of a media group that has no longer with us.
It's really, really hard.
But for the sake of being able to hold government to account, regardless of who's in power and regardless of the politics of journalists, we have to get there.
And I wanted to flag something really quick.
Do we have time, Sheila, to flag?
All the time you want.
Okay.
So like we've touched on before many times on your wonderful show, we've got Bill C11, okay, which is often referred to as the Online Censorship Act.
I forget what the government calls it, which is now being applied to online media.
We don't yet know exactly what that looks like, but the CRTC has already warned people that providers of platforms, of podcasts, are going to be subject to it.
So that means Apple Podcasts, that means YouTube, that means probably Rumble.
Depends on how you listen to your podcast.
So that's a problem.
We know that.
Then there's a C-18.
Okay, that's the online link tax.
We call it at the CTF, because that's why you can't see news on Facebook.
Google just caved and they signed a deal with the government.
Again, that is money going directly from these big tech giants to the government and then to the media companies.
In some cases, the CBC.
So direct government graft there.
What's coming next, probably, we don't know yet for sure, is this spring we're likely going to see a reintroduction of the so-called online harms bill.
Now, that sounds okay, because who wants to harm people on the internet?
Of course, nobody does.
But the catch here is the government could very, very likely put terms like misinformation and disinformation in there.
And some of the reasons why the government wants to do this, according to the folks who are writing columns for the Toronto Star and who are part of the advisory group, are because people are getting radicalized online due to misinformation.
So are they talking about al-Qaeda or are they talking about wrongthink?
Yeah.
Are they talking about government criticism?
Because those are two very different and big things.
Now, there's been this trend to give the CRTC just this infinite amount of power.
You and I were talking about this before we started recording.
The CRTC in C18, that's the Online News Act, the link tax law, they have been granted the power to create a code of conduct for newsrooms.
So this government agency can create a code of conduct for newsrooms.
Now, here's the rub.
They've already lost revenue because of C-18 from Facebook or Meta, Instagram and Facebook.
So not only have they lost ad revenue, but they've also lost traffic, these news companies have.
So they are seeing a substantial drop in their revenue.
You mentioned it.
Google just signed a deal with the government, which means there's a remaining pot of money there.
And these news agencies are desperate because Justin Trudeau tried to fix a system that wasn't broken and cut off a big chunk of their money.
So now they need this money from Google to save jobs, to keep their companies alive.
If you want that money from Google, you have to comport with the code of conduct.
And guess when the code of conduct will come out?
just in advance of the next election.
I wonder what's going to be in there.
Exactly.
See, there might be a big, juicy chunk of meat there as bait.
There's always a hook.
Whenever there's the government involved with the uses, you know, elements of free expression, there's always a hook.
And so now, who gets to write the code of conduct?
The government or hand-picked journalists selected by the government.
Who like again.
Now we're going to have people's own ideological positions, their biases and their own personal politics inflicted upon newsrooms, no matter which newsroom it is.
Again folks, this is why this is really critical for free expression, to have a free press.
I'll give you another example I think I might have mentioned on your show before.
Back many years ago, in the early 2000s leading up to the invasion of Iraq, the liberal government was in power.
Jean-Cretain was prime minister.
It was largely left-wing groups and I read news from everywhere, like every single group.
I read everything as much as I possibly can and I listen to their podcasts, so I was keeping an eye on this.
One was like a message board.
It was largely left-wing groups that were organizing physical everybody show up with your placards and your little noisemakers protests against the invasion of Iraq because they opposed it.
Fair enough.
They largely organized online using these forums, these open message boards, because this is before social media.
Really, there wasn't Facebook or Twitter at the time, so what?
And then?
So they had this massive protest on Parliament Hill, massive protest in Montreal and Toronto, all on the same day.
I remember it.
It was like minus everything.
I think it was in January and so, and I was working on the Hill at the time.
A few days later, Jean Cretan stood up in the House OF Commons and said, we're not going, we're sitting this one out.
Thanks, but no thanks.
That was a pivotal moment in Canadian history.
Choosing to not go go into this, what your opinion on it regardless?
Right, that mattered and people spoke up.
What if the government had had the ability to shut that down online?
Yeah, what if people were not able in their little, you know, commune and hippie left-wing groups, able to organize and express themselves freely?
They wouldn't have been able to organize that actual physical protest.
Maybe it would have changed what the government did.
This is why you have to folks who are listening, who think this is fine.
Imagine that your guy or gal is not the leader.
Imagine you've got somebody in there who's prime minister, with whom you vehemently disagree, but they get to call the shots on what you can see online and what you can say.
This, this is why this free speech is critically important.
Well yeah, I mean, imagine Justin Trudeau could have shut down the convoy online before it physically got rolling.
That's nobody can talk about it, and that is the present day overlay of what you're talking about.
Now, going back to the code of conduct, as I was talking about it and then you were talking about it, I was like you know what.
This reminds me of something very distinct.
It was called the Accurate News And Information Act.
Here in Alberta in the 1930s, the Aberhart government passed a law that forced the newspapers to print the government's op-eds in response to journalism that was critical of the government.
Now the Edmonton Journal took it all the way to the Supreme Court, I believe, overturned the law and won a Pulitzer Prize for it.
But that is exactly what will.
It looks to be.
That is something that will be in this new CRTC code of conduct.
Blacklocks is reporting that, and it's the same old liberal consultations, just like when they consult on gun laws and it's like every activist and feminist group, but never gun owners.
It's the same thing here.
They're consulting with activists like the National Council of Canadian Muslims who are saying that there is not enough ability to have retractions, to force retractions in a newspaper.
And so this has to be written into the CRTC code of conduct going forward.
And I would like to know how Paula Simons, liberal senator, former journalist at the Edmonton Journal, how's she going to vote on this sort of stuff?
That's a great question because we have a lot of former journalists who are in.
Yeah, exactly.
I think she'd be opposed to this.
She's been pretty vehement against all of this media stuff coming from the government.
So, but again, this shouldn't matter which political team you usually play for or how you vote.
And so this is it.
And like I liked your reference to often referred to as Bible Bill Aberhart.
That was overturned.
And if that was overturned like almost 100 years ago, folks, what are we doing?
Why are we doing this now all of a sudden all over again, but in a much more far-reaching manner?
Because this is going to affect all of your shows on the internet.
So all of the podcasts, all of these quote-unquote alternative journalists that you rely on right now, left and right wing, are now going to come under probably this code of conduct and or C11 and or whatever is coming down the pipe for these so-called online harms.
Now, this could get tricky in the spring.
Not so sure, but I'm reading some academics who are warning about this.
So I'm not part of the consultation, but I'm reading academic papers on it, or at least the executive summaries of them.
They're warning that the government could make it a form of omnibus bill and that they might group together things like disinformation or what the government calls misinformation with laws that concern, how do I put this, images of child abuse.
I don't like using the other term.
Right.
So absolutely no decent person could possibly speak out against toughening those laws, of course.
But the risk here is that the government might tack on things like, oh, things we call disinformation, things we've decided are misinformation.
They'll be a lot more likely to be.
No government should have them.
This is it.
This is it.
So no government should have that power to be able to call journalists, you know, misinformation and then gag them.
Like that's not cool.
If you disagree with them or you want to dispute facts, go for it.
Like just yell it from the rooftop.
Have your megaphone.
Do it.
But argue the facts.
But labeling somebody misinformation and then criminalizing that expression, like we're in really dark territory.
And again, if folks want to see tougher laws about the other nasty stuff I did mention, that can be done in its own bill through the justice minister.
Yeah.
Like you could start working on that tomorrow if you wanted to.
So I just wanted to flag that for people.
It might not happen that way.
Let's hope it doesn't.
But a couple of academics that I've been reading are saying that this might be the case in the spring.
It's horrifying.
It's horrifying because it makes it nearly politically impossible to oppose an omnibus bill.
How could you?
You couldn't.
That way.
You put that, you put that stuff in the title.
Nobody would be able to argue against it because it's linked together.
So let's hope that doesn't happen.
But I just did want to flag that as a risk.
Yeah, here's hoping the liberals just aren't that clever.
Hope I didn't give them ideas.
Yeah, don't do that.
Now, switching lanes to, you know, the thing that you and I care about, me as a journalist, you as a taxpayer advocate, holding the government to account.
You and I had a very interesting text conversation yesterday about something I called expensive duck salami.
Tell us what the CTF has uncovered, please, Chris.
Expensive duck salami.
Investigative Awards Cost Buck Bucks00:03:42
Okay, so to my point about the beauty of independent and investigative journalists, my friend and colleague Ryan Thorpe, he is the Taxpayers Federation's investigative journalist, a real one.
We pay him and he lives in Ottawa now.
They were an endangered species, as you know.
And so we went out in the wild and we just, you know, gently captured Ryan and we put him in this little terrarium and he lives near Franco, near Parliament Hill, and he writes amazing things.
And so he found all of these ATIP documents, access to information.
And it turns out that, you know, how bureaucrats are accused of, you know, scratching their behinds while watering houseplants and not really doing a whole lot for their middle management jobs.
Well, it gets better than that.
They've actually spent around $400,000, so almost half a million bucks over the last decade on what is it, public service excellence awards.
And these are not just shout outs on email or a pizza party at the last Friday of the month or something like that.
And like, you know, a funny prize.
No, no, no.
These are galas with literal red carpets, hired photographers, gold and antiqued gold statues onto cut black glass.
I'm not joking.
You should see my Rebbe Award.
It is like a fake Oscar plastic.
I had to like pack it in my clothes to get it home from Toronto when we had our Christmas party because it is so cheap.
It's so fragile.
It's just like, it could be from, I don't want to bash it because I'm very proud of my Rebbe awards.
But of course.
I think it probably was like six or seven dollars.
It probably cost more to engrave it than to buy the statue itself.
That's what we do at Rebel News.
Yeah, like, so the Teddy Waste Awards, the ones we give out every year, I forget which director.
I think it was an Ontario director like 20 years ago found these pig statues at a garden center on like, you know, liquidation and we spray painted them gold.
Like I have them here.
Like I have to keep them now for some reason.
I'm the keeper of the pigs.
But like I have them here.
Like they're back there.
Oh, that's so funny.
Right.
It's like on top of the girls are bobbleheads.
I have more than you even want to know.
And he bought them like for you got a discount if you bought 10,000.
So here they are 10 years later.
He probably has a house full of them.
And then the one I used to give out in British Columbia.
Okay, you'll appreciate this and maybe some of your listeners.
The one I gave out in British Columbia for my own version of the BC Teddies, I literally got, you know, Babe, that movie with the pig?
So they made piggy banks of Babe from like the 90s.
So I found one at Value Village and then I spray bombed him gold and then I went to the pet store and I stuck a little dog tag, like I super glued it onto the front of it.
That's like, I think I spent four bucks.
So this is what I'm saying is that you, we are not saying you shouldn't have fun at work.
We're not saying you shouldn't award excellence if you truly are doing an excellent job.
Like giver.
But do you need to eat duck prosciutto?
Like I had to look that up.
One, how to spell it.
Two, I thought prosciutto was shaved ham.
Me too.
That was like extra salty.
Right.
Dry kid.
But they, you can make it out of duck, apparently, and we all paid for it.
So more than $400,000 over the last decade, including during the Harper administration, I will point out, has been blown on these public service awards galas.
We're Paying for Gold Trophies!00:04:09
And again, these are ceremonies with gowns and red carpets and hired photographers.
And like, there's this other pork something.
I couldn't pronounce it.
Andrew Lawton was able to pronounce it and he like found a picture of it.
Some really fancy food that everybody's paying for.
Again, taxpayers are paying the bill for all this nonsense.
This is absolute government waste.
Like this ceremony shouldn't exist.
If they want to have a get-together at one of their local groups down in Ottawa once or twice a year and hand out their little plastic stuff, that's fine.
But this is just ridiculous.
Well, and what really struck me in that article was that these are awards for excellence, yet almost none of these departments are hitting their performance targets.
Like almost none.
I'm like, what are you celebrating?
Please, what is excellence in your department if you're not meeting your performance targets?
They're participation trophies.
Yes.
Yes.
These are, here we are.
The day has happened.
We are paying for expensive fancy gold participation trophies.
Give them a ribbon then.
Just like give them a ribbon, one of those participation ribbons and a piece of pizza.
Then not antiqued gold.
Yeah, it's one of those really crazy things.
And again, people are going to say, oh, well, you know, you're cherry-picking.
No, no, no, no.
This speaks to the culture of government.
Right.
If you, as a manager or a deputy minister, or whatever who's in charge of this nonsense, if you're willing to blow taxpayers' money on this nonsense year in, year out, it's like the broken windows theory, then you are willing and able and capable of blowing big time taxpayers' money.
So it's because of the silly little things like this and the entitlement like this that leads us to blowing billions of dollars.
Right.
And some of these people are the people who are supposed to say no to the politicians when the politicians are like, actually, this, please, you know, like, this is the expense I need to spend.
Please approve it.
And how do you say no after you've just had an excellent gala for failing all year?
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, how do you talk your minister down from their hair-brained idea of some bullet train?
Like when, you know, your department just finished throwing this massive gala.
Again, this leads to the culture of irresponsibility with taxpayers' money.
And it's one of the reasons why this government has almost doubled the debt.
So we're more than a trillion dollars in debt now.
If you started counting to a trillion right now, it would take you 30,000 years.
I say that.
This is it.
This is it.
If you started stacking loonies, it would take you 30,000 years to count up to a trillion of them.
So again, this is critically important.
We are now, I think the last time I checked, I think we're now paying more on our interest charges on our debt than we do, I think, for healthcare.
I know as a line item, technically in the Department of National Defense, I'm sure there's other expenditures elsewhere in the budget, but as a line item, we're already paying more in interest.
Oh, gross.
Sorry.
All the hospitals we could build.
We might even get a running submarine.
Who knew?
This is it.
And if you're trying to think of a billion, okay, because governments will try to snow you with numbers, okay?
The next time somebody says a billion dollars, picture a hospital.
Because that's roughly how much it costs to build a small but good new hospital.
Or picture a thousand new police officers paid for the next 10 years or 1,000 new nurses or 1,000 new paramedics because it's about $100,000 a year for that salary.
Picture that on the street, 1,000 of them for the next decade.
The next time somebody says $1 billion is wasted.
I mean, it's just, no, that's, I was like, let's leave on a fun note.
And then you take her back to somber.
Sorry, Duck Salami.
Duck Salami.
Citizen Army Pushes Politicians00:09:44
Chris, tell us how people can, first of all, find out about the work that you do at the CTF, but also get involved because the CTF is all about their citizen army.
Yes, and we've got a big one, but we want it to be bigger because this is how we push politicians into making the right decisions.
Because politicians absolutely must hear from us all the time because otherwise they get, what did you call it, captured?
They get captured.
Colonized by the, that's a good term.
They get captured by the bureaucracy in Ottawa who don't know what the real world is like.
So they have no idea.
They get participation trophies for showing up, right?
So we as people need to tell these people, the members of parliament, what to do all the time.
So go to our website, taxpayer.com.
The best way to start interacting with us is to sign the petitions you care about.
Like there's everything there.
Like defund the CBC, take sales taxes off of thrift shop items.
Hello.
There's all sorts of stuff there.
Sign the stuff you care about, cancel the carbon tax, and then you'll start getting correspondence from us.
And then the next time it's time to all gang up on a minister or urge an entire committee to vote one way or threaten to door knock against them in the next election as a group of friends, then you'll get our updates.
So yeah, head on over to our website.
You can buy t-shirts at cost.
We don't make money off of them to give to your friends and family.
But yeah, that's the best way.
And that way we can make things happen.
Okay.
We do gain wins.
And this is the best way to push back.
And it provides fellowship.
It feels like you're not alone anymore in this fight.
And also you get access to stories that the CTF does that the mainstream media just won't touch.
So incredible research, great journalism that you might not find anywhere else.
And so, you know, part of my job here at Rebel News is trying to find out what the politicians are doing behind closed doors with your money.
And you guys do such a great job of that over at the CTF.
Thank you.
They did a great job on this.
Our Ottawa team just blew the doors down.
They definitely did.
Chris, thanks so much for coming on the show.
This is always the quickest hour of work that I do every month when I get to talk to you.
And we'll have you back on again very soon.
You bet.
I say it every week and I realize it's probably getting super duper redundant and repetitive to regular viewers of the show.
But the good news is we're getting new viewers all the time.
And so they need to know the rules.
I give out my email at the end of every show.
It's sheila at rebelnews.com because I invite your viewer feedback.
We don't turn off the comments.
We generally don't delete comments either unless they're spam because without you, there is no Rebel News.
So we need to know what you think about the work that we do here and the stories that we cover and about the things that happen to us.
And that's why I give out my email address.
Like I said, put gun show letters in the subject line so I can find it easily.
But if you're watching us on the free version of the show on YouTube or Rumble, thank you for sitting through those ads, by the way.
Every little bit helps.
but leave a comment in the comment section.
Sometimes I go poking around over there for your comments.
And today's comment comes from a new place.
Now, not new in that I've never had a Twitter account before.
I've had one for far too long and I spend probably far too much time on it.
It's a bit of a time burglar.
But I follow some really smart people over there.
And one of them is Marco Navarro Gini.
He is with the Haltane Institute.
Very smart guy.
And he responded to a tweet from Ujal Dossang.
He is a former liberal MP, NDP cabinet minister.
I think he was a justice minister in BC, if I recall correctly.
Now, Ujal Dossange did the performative hand washing thing that you see these people doing before they talk about David Menzies.
They denounce David Menzies before they denounce his treatment.
They have to wash their hands of the cooties of rebel news so that the fancy people continue to like them.
And that's exactly what Ujal Dessange did.
This is what he said.
I'm no fan of rebel media.
We've been rebel news for years, by the way.
But the police conduct is disgusting, despicable, and legally actionable.
This is not the Canada I choose to make my home.
Now, this is what Marco Navarro Gini wrote.
And it is so smart.
And he does what I do, and that's renounce the performative theatrical denunciation of David Menzies' style before people defend his right to have that style and ask questions of politicians.
By the way, I should note, the reason David Menzies has to ask questions on the street is because our parliamentary press gallery colleagues in media continue to have these witch trials wherein they block us from joining parliamentary press galleries and legislature press galleries.
Isn't that a funny thing?
Your competitors, who are all funded, by and large, by the government, get to get together and vote to see if you can join their little monopoly on access to the very government which funds them.
Anyway, that's why we ask questions on the street.
Also, if you're like me, I'd rather be with the people than with the horrible monopolized mainstream media journalists who vote to keep out their competition because they have no interest in being better.
Like I'm one of those people who believes that competition makes people better.
They definitely don't.
They don't.
Because why would you keep your competition out?
You know, like iron sharpens iron, as they say.
Except only one of us is iron, right?
Anyways, Marco Navarro Gini, very smart guy.
I recommend that you follow him on Twitter if you're over there, or X, whatever they're calling it now.
If you're over there, follow Marco, very smart guy.
Anyways, he writes, a few random thoughts on the RCMP assaulting David Menzies.
This is not a partisan issue as Dossange's tweet indicates.
Whether one likes rebel news or David Menzies is irrelevant in a liberal democracy.
Preach, Marco.
People should stand against the obstruction and malicious prosecution of members of the press at the hands of any authority, regardless of their personal views.
Whether you recognize Menzies as a journalist or not is inconsequential.
I see this as one of the big like Criticisms or the defenses of the government's actions in the arrest of David Menzies is, well, he's not a real journalist.
Journalism is a thing you do, not a guild you join or a diploma you get.
If you do journalism, guess what?
You're a journalist.
And that's how it works in a free and liberal democracy.
Your critics don't get to decide if you are indeed a journalist, and the government sure as hell doesn't either.
And Justin Trudeau has been told that in court at least twice at the hands of rebel news lawyers and the courts that sided with them.
Anyway, so let's keep going.
Again, doing the disrespectful government bidding, CBC labels him as a rebel news personality.
But does that mean we should refer to CBC News employees as CBC personalities?
They might actually have to have a personality to be labeled as one.
But anyways, that's just a me being petty criticism.
Anyways, let's keep going.
Importantly, all citizens are entitled to question elected officials and ministers of the crown, especially since they often don't answer much on the floor of the house.
The argument that Menzies is not a journalist is a red herring.
He makes a living as a journalist and identifies as one.
Cute argument.
In an age where personal identity is acknowledged, his self-identification should be enough.
The federal government accepts a man's claim of being a woman and provides free tampons for him in the men's washrooms of all federal buildings, CBC included.
Similarly, misgendering is considered a human rights offense.
Therefore, pretending that assaulting a journalist is acceptable because the government and the state news agency don't recognize a news organization is appalling.
The prime minister has made no effort to hide his thoughts about Menzies' employer and has publicly voiced his displeasure.
However, it is not up to him to choose who is a journalist in Canada.
His vocal contempt for rebel news and other independent media may have influenced the animosity and lack of neutrality in the federal officer who unleashed on Menzies.
As a matter of fact, it is precisely because the state media and government officials dislike Menzies and his employer that Menzies and his colleagues, that's me, deserve as much or perhaps even more protection from an independent police force.
Pretending Assault Is Acceptable00:00:50
Thank you, Marco.
I could not have said that better.
You know, especially from the CBC, a news organization that cannot bring itself to call Hamas terrorists, actual terrorists, even though it's a registered terroristic entity here in Canada and they can't tell you what a woman is.
No surprise, they can't tell you that David Menzies has been a working journalist in this country for 39 years.
And my friend David Menzies does more journalism in a day than most members of the subsidized mainstream media will do in a week.
He outperforms them even at his age.
I tease, I tease.
Anyway, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in, everybody.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week.