Ezra Levant and Franco Terrazano examine the Coutts Four trial, where Tony Olanik and Chris Carbert face conspiracy-to-murder charges tied to a 2021 trucker blockade—despite two others accepting plea deals for minor offenses. Betty Carbert denies her son’s involvement, calling it media speculation. Meanwhile, CBC CEO Catherine Tate’s $620K salary and $15M in bonuses (amid 50% declining viewership) spark outrage, with calls to defund the broadcaster entirely or sell its luxury properties. The episode ties government overreach in prosecutions to CBC’s taxpayer-funded excesses, questioning whether both reflect a broader anti-Canadian "propaganda" agenda. [Automatically generated summary]
They were the guys charged with conspiracy to commit murder against the police in Coots, Alberta, a couple years ago.
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All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, another week, another visit to Lethbridge for a trial of the trucker blockade.
It's March 18th, and this is the Ezra Levance Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Well, as you can see, I'm back in Lethbridge at the courthouse.
I think I visited this place more often than any other location in the country besides my home or my office.
You know, Starbucks talks about being the third place.
You go to the office, you go home.
Where's that third place you go?
That's Starbucks' internal strategy.
This is my third place.
If I'm not at home or at work, odds are I'm here.
And that's because this is the closest courthouse to the Alberta-Montana border.
Coots on the Alberta side, sweetgrass on the Montana side, where two years and a month ago, a bunch of truckers and farmers and other ordinary Albertans had a blockade in sympathy with the main trucker convoy in Ottawa and a secondary one in Windsor.
Now, police sort of blocked access to Coots, which is a very small village.
It's not even a town.
They blocked it off at a larger town called Milk River.
Search Warrant Conducted00:12:31
It's like they built a giant siege wall around Coots.
You couldn't get past Milk River.
You couldn't bring supplies to people.
You couldn't bring food to people.
It really was a showdown of sorts.
Whereas Ottawa and Windsor are large cities with huge police with lots of resources, Coots is far away.
So the police couldn't go in and pull out the protesters easily.
In fact, they had one sort of attempted show of force.
The men just simply outnumbered them.
And by the way, those huge agricultural vehicles, they're even harder to move than the trucks.
Here's a scene from one of our documentaries on Coots showing that tense moment where all the troops sort of marched out and the men just protesters just sort of said, hey, there, we're not going anywhere.
I don't know if you remember this.
Freedom!
Well, of course, the law gets the last laugh.
They charged a lot of people there.
Now, again, what are they going to charge them with?
Some parking offense?
Well, in the case of Pastor Arthur Pavlovsky, they charged him for giving a sermon to the men, which they said incited their mischief.
And incredibly, he was convicted of that crime.
Rebel News is crowdfunding, along with the Democracy Fund, the legal funds, not only for his trial, but for his appeal.
Again, that was in this building because, of course, this is the closest courthouse to Coutz.
A lot of men there were charged with mischief, which normally is really the most minor offense in the criminal code, something reserved for, like, I don't know, someone who kicks over a garbage can or something, or I don't know, spray paints graffiti.
Really, there's not a lot more you can charge the trucker protesters with.
The worst they did in Ottawa was some parking offenses and horn honking.
That's why they're coming against Tamara Halech with, I think it's incitement to commit mischief.
That's so minor.
I really think it's the longest trial.
Hers is the longest trial of any Canadian ever charged with mischief.
It's been going on for months and it's not done yet.
Well, here in Lethbridge, there's several trials for people who were involved in Coots.
In fact, the Democracy Fund and Rebel News have crowdfunded for 55 people, 55 truckers who were arrested or ticketed or charged with one thing or another.
That's on top of other pandemic issues.
So there's a lot going on.
The Coots 3 case, I don't mean to confuse you, but just to be clear, the Coots III are the so-called leadership group.
They've been charged with mischief, much like Tamara Leach and Chris Barber in Ottawa.
But what I was here for is the so-called Coots IV.
And I know it's very confusing, but those are the four men who were charged one day with a very serious crime of conspiracy to commit murder.
And the police made such a shock and awe show of it.
They had a carefully staged press conference where they showed weapons, which are just regular hunting weapons, but they, you know, to Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal journalists, they're terrifying because it's a gun in camouflage colors because that's how hunters are.
Here's a snippet of that police press conference that was on the eve of the Emergencies Act.
And that's why I think it's evident in retrospect it was a pretext for Trudeau to put the country under martial law.
Here's how the police described it back then.
Our members have been up here and in general we haven't had many incidents involving violence.
But unfortunately an investigation started after a period of time when the initial protesters arrived.
Shortly thereafter we began to receive imminent information of potential threats.
It took some time to investigate that and to determine facts which have led us to several arrests during the night last night.
These arrests and this investigation is continuing.
We have since made another arrest involving this.
The escalation of violence towards the members, including having someone break one of our checkpoints this afternoon and just about hit one of our members on the road.
So we certainly have concerns about how this has developed and our investigation into what could be a number of different charges, a number of different acts, has created a situation where we're investigating conspiracy to attempt to commit murder.
And then we have other investigations involving the firearms clearly.
So a search warrant was conducted last night in the area, it was approximately midnight, 1230, where three trailers associated to a group that had arrived separate to the original protesters, but ended up being a part of this whole situation.
And this group, we conducted a search warrant into three trailers associated to them, resulting in the seizure of weapons, firearms, ammunition, as well as body-worn armor that would normally be a police issue.
And these people were taken into custody.
We have determined that the investigation is ongoing, and we will continue to investigate this for the safety of the public and for the safety of the police.
You know, today while I was sitting in the court, I reread some old CBC articles about the Couts IV and these charges.
And reading it again with what I know now, it's so clear that so much of it is just hearsay or speculation or the sort of fever dream of the police media industrial complex.
They always had this fantasy that the truckers were violent, that it was going to be a January 6th insurrection, which, by the way, itself was not particularly violent.
There were some broken windows for sure, but the only person who was murdered that day was one of the protesters, Ashley Babbitt, if I recall her name.
But still, January 6th in U.S. liberal circles was this terrifying event where we almost lost our democracy.
Trudeau and the media industrial complex wanted that narrative for these truckers.
It never came.
So they were desperate to find that, and they thought they found it in the Coutz 4.
And frankly, it was so shocking, this talk of conspiracy to murder a policeman, that not only did they arrest the four men, but the rest of the peaceful protesters said, yikes, we're out of here.
We didn't sign up for this.
And the men voluntarily shut the Coots blockade down, which, by the way, is an important point.
The Windsor Bridge was cleared before the martial law was invoked, peacefully.
Local police could handle it.
The Coots blockade was cleared voluntarily by the men saying, we're out of here if there were guns.
But Trudeau almost hated that.
In fact, you might recall, we've heard this many times, including at the public inquiry into the Emergencies Act, that the city of Ottawa had negotiated a deal with the truckers, that they would move a number of trucks away and they would move them out of residential areas.
When Trudeau heard that, he pulled the trigger on the Emergencies Act because he didn't want the temperature to be reduced.
He didn't want a negotiated solution.
He wanted to be able to claim, uh-huh, we have our January 6th moment.
So between arresting Jamara Leach in Ottawa and arresting the four men here in southern Alberta, they thought they had it.
I read the information to obtain.
That's the police document.
You can see the words, information to obtain a search warrant.
So that's the list of accusations that police bring to a judge ex parte, which means without the other side there, because you need the sneak attack.
You need the element of surprise when you're executing a search warrant.
And so they showed this document to the judge and saying, judge, give us the search warrant.
And the judge did.
And this document, it's subject to a publication ban with certain exceptions.
You can get the entire document for yourself from the court.
And I've done that, but you cannot publish it.
So I cannot show you most of what's in it.
Certain parts have been given, the judges unsealed them and allowed them to be published.
But I don't want to muck around there, but some of the allegations and accusations in the information to obtain really are dramatic.
And I thought to myself, there's really no way that this many cops would be liars for Trudeau.
But then, as you know, a few months ago, two of the Coots 4 were released on the most modest, the most minor charges that if they had been the charges from the outset, these men would never have spent a day in jail.
They would have had their wrists lapped, maybe their gun license taken away for a few years, and that's it.
So they have two men left, and those two men were on trial today.
The formal trial itself has not yet begun.
They're still doing preliminary matters.
And alas, they are covered by a publication ban too.
So I can't really get into it.
Very frustrating to hear very dramatic things being said, but without the ability to report on them or even to characterize them as good for the prosecution or good for the defense.
The reason for this publication ban, when you think about it, it's to preserve the trial itself so that any potential jurors don't have little shreds or shards of evidence in their minds.
Oh, I know all about this.
They're bad dudes.
Or I know all about this.
They're good dudes.
If they heard a police report, if they heard a lawyer on the other side, like if they had some information in advance of the trial, they would probably go in with their mind partly made up and they might just have an out-of-context fact or something like that.
My point is, it's important that the evidence that is being heard today, while very interesting, has to be withheld from prospective jurors until it's properly put to them so they hear all of it, not just a journalist's summary, so they can hear if a lawyer challenges its credibility so they can make up their mind.
It's frustrating that we can't publicize what is being said today, but understand the reason is actually to protect the jury.
So it's one of the few cases where a ban on freedom of expression gets temporary and it's for the higher purpose of justice.
So I hate to say it.
It's actually a good idea to have that publication ban, even though it makes it frustrating for many people.
One of the things people do to get around that is they come and watch the trial.
And alas, we're all jammed into a small courtroom, never enough room.
They say the larger courtroom is under renovations.
I don't know if that's true or not, but it's frustrating to people.
Anyways, there's only two of the Coots 4 remaining because, like I said, the other two copped a plea bargain a few months ago, and they were for minor offenses.
And I don't know if those men would have signed literally anything to get out of jail for two years.
If two of the best years of your life are stolen in jail, you probably would sign just about anything to get back to your life and your family, even if it was false.
But I don't know if it was a forced jailhouse confession, as they call it.
But even if we take it at face value, those two men are out in the world.
So obviously the government doesn't think they're a menace to society anymore.
So why are the other two still in jail if their so-called co-conspirators have been let off to go back into the public?
Two Remaining Accused00:07:13
What is the danger in March 2024 of these two remaining members of the Coots IV if the other two Coots IV are out and about?
Like that alone doesn't make sense.
As you know, the other day I sat down with Betty Carbert, the mother of one of the two remaining accused.
She was a short excerpt from that interview.
Take a look.
I do not believe now what I believed then.
I do not believe your son did what the police said he did.
And I actually think he's being falsely accused.
And I think you're right.
It was a shock to me because everybody might say that I'm his mom.
And so I'm a little biased.
But I also, because I'm his mom, I feel that I know him best.
Because of that, I know that Chris couldn't possibly participate in what he's being accused of for many reasons.
I'm going to talk about those reasons because it's true.
Every mother loves their son.
Every mother remembers her son as a baby and as a little boy.
And even the mothers of actual criminals feel that way.
But I want to talk a little bit.
Let's start with Chris and who he is and how he wound up at the blockade because he was one of the peaceful protesters there.
He just also was one of the four who were swept up in this RCMP raid.
Tell me about how it started.
Why did he go to the blockade?
Why did he go to this protest?
And what did he tell you about it?
Was he in touch with you during the protest?
What do you know about that?
Yeah, he would text me probably every day just to keep me up to date on what was happening.
He was there because of the truckers.
Like he felt that the COVID mandates, it was affecting everybody.
Anybody with a business where they were depending on products going and coming from the U.S. and the truckers having to find, well, probably new jobs because the ones that wouldn't take the shot could no longer go across the border.
So he was there to support them.
What we were talking about there was the difference between the two remaining accused, Tony Olanik and Chris Carbert.
And I know that there's a general solidarity with all of these men, that we don't like the prosecution of them, that it's all politically revved up.
And I think that's true.
But there is an enormous difference between what Chris Carbert said and did and what Tony Olanik said and did.
And I don't know if in the name of political unity and harmony, we should discount some of the crazy things that Tony Olanek said to undercover officers that, you know, were obviously are probably just BS, just puffery, just a guy showing off.
Like, remember, in that saloon in Coots, Coots is such a small place.
All the men sort of hung out in this one saloon.
It's where they met.
It's where they talked.
It's where they ate and drank.
And people could come and go.
And there were uniformed police officers in there, but there were also plenty of undercover officers, including attractive enough young women.
And so you've got these men who have just been cramped up with other men for a week or two.
And these attractive young women are hanging on their every word.
And there's a male instinct.
I might have even had it once in my life myself.
When you're meeting a young woman, you want to show off a little bit.
You want to be a little tougher than you are, a little braver than you are.
You want to embellish your stories just a weed bit.
I don't know.
I think it's a male instinct even more than a female instinct.
And so one of the defendants, Tony Olanik, told big stories.
And again, I'm not referring to anything I've heard in court, but rather to things that have been published due to the court revising the publication ban.
Tony Olanik wouldn't stop running his mouth about what they were planning and what they were doing and how they would fight back.
And he used language that I think seasoned police commanders would say, oh, that's just BS.
That's just a guy showing off for girls.
But remember what the times were like in mid-February 2022.
There was enormous pressure by Trudeau on the police to find him something, anything.
Remember, they had that hoax of, oh, and the truckers lit an arson attack in a condo in Ottawa.
I don't know if you remember about that.
Complete hoax.
They had the hoax of the swastika flag.
By the way, it's clear that the media doesn't care about anti-Semitic flags.
We've had anti-Semitic flags at Hamas eight marches for six months.
CBC hasn't done an expose on that yet.
But like I say, the police were hunting, hunting, hunting for anything.
And here's this guy in a saloon bragging to a couple of undercover female officers about his plans for a revolution.
Yeah, you bet they're going to say, go with it, even though he's a BSer, even though there's no evidence of it.
We got to give something to the boss.
The boss, of course, being Justin Trudeau and his crooked RCMP commissioner at the time, Brenda Lucky.
And I think that that old World War II saying, loose lips, sink ships, I think that's what happened here.
Now, perhaps I'm not showing the solidarity with Tony Olanik that one would want me to do.
But listen, if he did commit the crime of conspiracy to commit murder, then he should do the time.
Just don't believe he did that.
I was thinking about the elements necessary to convict someone of conspiracy to commit murder.
And this is beyond a reasonable doubt.
First of all, you need another person.
That's why I think they've trapped Chris Carbert there.
But second of all, not only do you have to have the intention to commit this murder, you have to agree to do it.
Not just, hey, it's an idle plan or wouldn't be neat if, or maybe we'll do it.
You have to, okay, are we agreed?
Are we going to do this?
Yes, go.
I just don't believe that the cops have that.
And I think that they've been stretching this out to punish everyone.
Trudeau is extremely vengeful.
He has vendettas like that.
If you cross him, he will take it out of your hide.
He did to Tamara Leach.
He did to Pastor Arthur Pavlovsky.
And I think that may be what's going on in here.
We're going to cover this.
One of our mottos of Rebel News is follow the facts wherever they lead.
And there are some troubling facts here.
I do not believe that two years in prison is appropriate for a guy just being a blowhard and a braggart.
And based on what's emerged in recent months, including the plea deal, I don't think Tony Olinek had a conspiracy to commit murder.
I think he had just a big mouth, and that was enough for the government to go to war against these truckers.
We'll find out.
Unfortunately, I can't tell you more of what's going on inside there because it's covered by a publication about.
I'm delighted to say that Robert Krachik, our reporter who covered the Tamara Leach trials, is going to be here for the duration of the Coots 4 and the Coots 3.
And you've seen his work with Tamara Leach, and I think he's really the right fit for this.
So that's my report from here.
By the way, if you want to chip into the legal defense fund for Chris Carbert, we've set up a special fund for him at helpchris.ca.
CBC Bonuses Controversy00:14:41
So feel free to chip in if you think that he was overcharged and this is a political trial.
That's my report from here in Coots.
Now we'll go back to our regular programming of the Ezra LeVant Show.
Just a few weeks ago, I think it was in late January, when the CBC's CEO, Catherine Tate, was in Parliament answering prickly questions about their pay and their bonuses and their perks.
It was prickly for a number of reasons.
And I think one of them is that Catherine Tate, the CBC CEO, is so argumentative and so partisan, and she can't contain her hatred for the conservatives.
I mean, I get it.
The feeling's mutual, but just the contempt with which she answered questions at this parliamentary hearing was incredible.
She's an atrocious woman.
I don't know if you know this, but she was hired to be the CEO of the CBC.
She was living in New York.
What?
Yeah.
And in fact, she would commute back and forth between New York and the CBC offices.
She didn't even, I don't know if she's eventually moved, but for the longest time she commuted and you paid for that.
Anyways, take a listen to this exchange when Rachel Thomas, the conservative MP who's the critic for the CBC, was trying to get to the bottom of how much they were paying in bonuses.
Hey, when was the last time you got a bonus?
Most Canadians don't get bonuses.
I mean, maybe they get an extra hundred bucks at Christmas time, but bonuses are something that executives at companies get for hugely successful years.
The CBC has had their viewership fall in half since Catherine Tate took over.
Anyways, enough for me.
Watch this atrocious exchange and pay close attention to the key message that this American CEO has: that no, We don't even pay bonuses.
Don't even know what the word means.
Take a look.
For the record, CBC Haju Canada does not award so-called bonuses.
What we have, like every other crown corporation, is at-risk or performance pay, which is a key part of the total compensation of our non-union staff.
Your so-called bonuses, I don't know what you mean by a so-called bonus.
This word is unfamiliar to me.
I don't understand you.
What a wicked liar.
Joining us now to talk about the lie and to prove that it was a lie is our friend Franco Terrazano from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, Franco.
You know, I think everyone felt like they were being lied to there, but you actually have the proof of it.
You guys at the Taxpayers Federation have in your hot little hands an access to information documents showing that not only did they get bonuses, but they used the word bonuses.
Catherine Tate was lying, wasn't she?
What a word salad from the CBC boss.
Hey, what a word salad.
And there is only one thing that I can take from that, deliberately trying to mislead Canadian taxpayers who pay her salary.
But folks, don't worry because the Canadian Taxpayers Federation always keeps the receipts.
We filed an access to information request to the CBC.
And guess what?
The CBC's own documents.
Can you see that there, folks?
What's that word you see?
Bonus.
Bonus, bonus, bonus.
The CBC did, in fact, hand out taxpayer-funded bonuses in 2023, costing you, dear taxpayer, $15 million.
But Ezra, that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Going back to 2015, the CBC's bonuses have cost taxpayer $114 million.
So $15 million in bonuses in 2023, $114 million in bonuses since 2015.
Unbelievable, but completely believable.
You know, bonuses are often paid in industries where performance, you get a base pay for showing up and doing the work, but it's your performance that gives you a bonus.
You know, salesmen know that.
It's a commission.
Stockbrokers, people who there's a real upside if they work hard.
That's where you have a bonus.
The CBC, there really is no risk.
It's like a public utility in that everyone's forced to pay for it.
I'm not sure why there's bonuses being paid at all.
I mean, I suppose if they had spectacular success, but as the conservative MP points out, since Catherine Tate took over, viewership has actually fallen by 50%.
I can't think of any other business in the world where your results have fallen in half.
Even though, you know, Canada's population is larger than ever, only half as many people watch it.
Why are they getting bonuses at all?
Well, that's a great question, Ezra.
You know, in the real world, outside of Ottawa, a bonus is for when you do a good job.
But in Ottawa, in the federal government, that's not what a bonus means to them, right?
They just get a bonus for showing up to work twice a week with their shoes tied.
I feel like that's kind of what's going on here.
But this kind of illustrates the point.
So in that same committee appearance that you played a clip from, Ms. Tate said something along the lines as that this bonus pay goes out to their non-union staff of more than 1,100 employees.
Okay.
Well, they gave out $15 million in bonuses to more than 1,100 employees.
So it sure seems like all of them or nearly all of them were getting a bonus in the managerial, the executive class, the non-union class at the CBC.
But hey, you know what?
It's not like Tate or the other big Whigs at the CBC are hurting, right?
So Tate's annual pay is somewhere between $470,000 and $620,000.
And that includes, yeah, yeah.
And that includes salary, other benefits, and you guessed it, folks, a bonus.
Now, the CBC won't actually say how much exactly Tate is being paid by the taxpayer or what her bonus is, but I've seen some analysis in other news outlets that suggests that Tate's annual bonus could be in the six figures, depending on where she is in that salary range.
So look, I mean, at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, we're calling for the CBC to be completely defunded.
We don't think they should get a single penny from taxpayers, but at the very least, like end these taxpayer-funded bonuses.
Yeah.
You know, if she's making 600 grand and she's giving a bonus as suggested, her bonus will be six figures.
Her bonus is 100 grand.
Her bonus alone is more than the average Canadian makes in an entire year of work.
The same conservative MP asked some questions about how on earth they could justify any bonuses given the failure.
Listen to this comment about key performance indicators.
That's a term that a lot of businesses use, KPI, key performance indicator.
For example, in a media company, it might be how many viewers you have, how many ad sales you have.
These are measurable key performance indicators that show the success and health of the company.
Listen to what she says are the key performance indicators, given that their viewership has fallen in half and it's declining literally every year.
Just take a listen to this, as you say, word salad, and then let me show you something.
Take a look.
Based on the metrics that are used then, last year, you gave out $16 million in taxpayer-funded bonuses to the staff.
That was an average of $14,000 to staff members at the CBC.
Most Canadians don't even see half of that in a bonus, not even a quarter of that in a yearly bonus.
$14,000 was the average amount that was given to CBC staff.
What were the metrics that were used in order to determine that bonus amount?
So again, the KPIs are published and they're very clearly have to do with performance of the service.
For example, digital reach, for example, engagement with news in the regions, for example, performance on engagement with kids and children.
All of those are published very clearly in our annual report.
And I actually want to, if I may, may I ask?
I think your number is wrong.
If I want to correct the record.
I would just highlight for you that it's interesting to me because you're saying that these are the metrics, but actually the viewership of the CBC is cut in half since you took leadership in 2018.
It's come down by half.
So it's interesting to me that you're giving bonuses or performance awards when in fact the CBC is performing the poorest it's ever performed.
So bonuses keep going up.
They keep skyrocketing.
But performance, as you say, the bonuses are granted based on.
I really, if I may, Madam Chair, I'd like to correct the record.
So she's talking, well, we've got more kids watching, which is really weird and a strange measurement.
But if you look at the annual report that she says, they are failing in every single key performance indicator except for one.
The one that they're smashing is affirmative action hiring.
That's actually one of their KPIs.
They have to have a certain quota of minorities, and they've exceeded that.
That is the greatest success of the CBC, according to them themselves.
They're losing ad money.
They're losing online viewership.
They're losing actual TV viewership.
The only thing they've succeeded at, Franco, is a race-based quota system for hiring.
I can't imagine any other company in the world that was failing on all accounts, saying, well, we're failing, sure, but we sure are getting a lot of minority hires here.
Can you give us points for that?
That's according to their own annual report, Franco.
Well, Ezra, let me just take a step back for a second and kind of point out the obvious here.
Okay.
So Tate has been running around, crying poor, begging the government for more taxpayer cash.
According to Tate, the CBC is chronically underfunded.
So what did the federal government do?
Well, they shoveled an extra $100 million at the CBC, meaning the CBC will cost taxpayers $1.4 billion this year.
But to state the obvious, if the CBC was truly chronically underfunded, which it's not, but if it was, then wouldn't the first thing that you do would be to cut these bonuses out?
Right?
Like that doesn't make any sense to me.
If the cupboards are truly bare, which you and I and all your viewers know that they are not when they're taking more than a billion dollars from taxpayers every year, but if they were truly bare, wouldn't you cut the bonuses?
Now, Tate should be doing the right thing.
I'm not going to hold my breath, but she should be doing the right thing and ending these bonuses.
Okay.
I don't think that's going to happen.
So we need the politicians to stand in.
Now, to their credit, the Conservative Party has been very good on this issue, right?
You hear them all the time saying defund the CBC.
Their leader, Pierre Polyev, he's gone a step further and has also said that he would end the bonuses for failing government authorities like the Bank of Canada, like the CBC.
Now, that's something that we have to hold him accountable for if he ever does form government.
But where is the action right now?
Because in the last budget, finance minister Christia Freeland said that she would find like a billion dollars in savings at the crown corporations.
And I think that the most obvious place for them to find savings is to end these bonuses for failure.
So that's what we should see.
We should have seen Tate do the right thing in the first place.
But now I think Freeland and the other politicians in the governing party need to step in and put an end to this.
Yeah.
You know, it's incredible.
It feels like they're all just burning the place down in their final year of their disgraced reign.
I mean, they're not even trying to hide it anymore.
By the way, when I mentioned that Catherine Tate was an American, of course, I have nothing against Americans.
It's just very odd to me that in a country of 40 million people that the leader of a cultural industry for Canada's national broadcaster was hired out of New York.
There's so many weird things about it.
It's so fake.
The CBC is all fake.
And it may once a long time ago have had some sort of moral basis.
We need a Canadian national identity because otherwise we'll be swallowed up by American radio stations.
But in an era not only of 500 digital channels, but of endless online content, there is no rationale for the CBC anymore.
None at all.
And I think selling off the CBC isn't just smart financially.
It's just smart in terms of getting rid of a propaganda outlet.
But there's just literally no need for one of a million news sources to be owned by the government, sell it and pay off some debt, reduce taxes, and let Catherine Tate try and find a $600,000 job in the private sector.
I don't think she will.
Last word to you.
Well, look, I agree that the federal government should completely defund the CBC.
I mean, for starters, let's look at the moral issue here, right?
Canadian taxpayers shouldn't be forced to fund a media organization involuntarily, right?
So, what I mean by that is that Canadians should have the right to choose which media organizations that they want to fund with their own money, not be forced to fork over a billion dollars every year through the government, right?
But number two is: look, we have so many other media outlets in here, whether you want to call private media outlets or independent media outlets that have to directly compete with the CBC and they're more than a billion dollars that they get from taxpayers every single year.
That's not fair to independent or private sector media organizations.
CBC's Luxury Offices Stalling Innovation00:02:30
But number three, look, we are in such an innovative world when it comes to the new media organizations that are popping up or other different types of platforms.
So, what the government is essentially doing with the media subsidies and the CBC is stalling the innovation.
So, for those many reasons, I do not think that the CBC should be getting a single penny from Canadian taxpayers.
You know, let me leave you with one last thought.
I know I already said the last word to you, Franco, but I just had an idea while you were talking.
You know, I've observed private sector media companies over the last 10 years try and deal with the new economic realities of the industry.
And one of the things they've done is sold their super high-priced real estate.
In the 20th century, newspapers often were in the heart of the city.
They were sort of a flagship building right on the main street.
Think about where the Toronto Star office is.
Well, a lot of those private sector companies have sold their expensive real estate and either moved out into the suburbs or actually they work virtually, not the CBC in pretty much every city in Canada, the most expensive neighborhood.
That's where the CBC has its palaces.
Think of downtown Toronto, King and John Street, that monstrous office.
I'm not saying it could sell for a billion dollars, but it would be hundreds of millions for sure.
I think that the CBC thinks it's a kind of royalty or aristocracy and they lord it over people.
I think their extreme pay and their luxury offices affects their mindset.
I think that not only should we defund the CBC, we should have an auction.
And for all those progressive do-gooders at the CBC, I say turn the CBC buildings.
If you're not going to sell them, turn them into homeless shelters and let the CBC, their final act be to actually help some people rather than lord it over us.
Thanks for letting me rant a little bit there, Franco, with my idea.
But I was just thinking about all the offices in the private sector newspapers, National Post, Calgary Herald.
I think of all the newspapers that sold their buildings, not the CBC.
Rant over.
Franco, great to see you.
Just I'd like to encourage people to go to the website, taxpayer.com.
The headline of this story is CBC bonuses total $15 million in 2023, even though Catherine Tate claimed they don't even know what a bonus is.