Sheila Gunn Reid and Tom Harris argue COVID-era skepticism toward institutions opens a chance for conservatives to dismantle climate alarmism by rejecting terms like "carbon tax" and pushing adaptation over mitigation, citing Environment Canada and IPCC data. They blame the CPC’s current policies on "Red Tory" advisors, urging open hearings with dissenting scientists like Ian Clark and Ross McKitrick, while warning of elite-driven narratives and past failures like Harper’s 2011 hearing silence. ICSC-Canada’s grassroots strategy—defeating $57B climate plans in Ottawa and exposing risks like well water contamination near wind turbines—proves policy shifts can follow conservative leadership, not public opinion. [Automatically generated summary]
What do the official conservative types have to do to change the agenda around climate change?
My guest today has some advice for them, and I think it's good advice considering he used to work for some of those official conservative types.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
You know, I think society has never been more ripe for a challenge to the accepted orthodoxy around human-induced climate change.
The reason I say this is because all the other accepted orthodoxies around us are sort of falling.
What used to be accepted orthodoxy around gender transition of minors, it seemed to be happening all over the place there for a little bit.
Well, governments across the world are putting backstops in place and preventing children from being even told that they can medically transition their gender, which is not a thing that you can really actually do.
But people also have a great distrust right now in institutions, including government.
They distrust the institutions of justice.
They distrust the institutions of medicine and healthcare.
And a lot of that has to do with all the things we found out to be untrue that we were told were true during the COVID-19 pandemic, or rather the government's overreaction to the COVID-19 pandemic.
So with a rising skepticism amongst the population, maybe now is the time to push back on this accepted narrative that CO2 is the driver of climate change and that humans are the reason there is too much CO2, which is driving climate change.
But how do you do it?
How do you get those people in power to move away from all the things they told us were true for so long?
Carbon Tax Controversy00:14:45
Well, my guest tonight has a pathway for that to happen.
It's Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition.
But a long interview, so I'm going to zip it so you can listen to it.
Joining me now is good friend of the show, Tom Harris, from the International Climate Science Coalition, Canada.
And I wanted to have Tom on the show because, well, it's almost April 1st, and that means April Fool's Day and the Jokers in the House of Commons are raising the carbon tax on Canadians as their way to, as they say, mitigate climate change.
I'm not sure how if I give Justin Trudeau more of my money to waste, it will make the weather better, but that's the logic if you follow the liberals.
But Tom's got some ideas for what the conservative parties and conservative activists can do.
Something different for once, other than the homogenous narrative that comes out of Ottawa, where the only way to deal with climate change is to pay more money to the government because people are causing catastrophic climate change.
And I think when we concede that, we concede the first ditch to the other side, don't we?
Yeah, for sure.
It's interesting because Pierre Polyev two days ago had here in Ottawa an AXA tax rally.
And, you know, he's been having these all across Canada.
We had a couple of our representatives go.
They both left early because it was super loud and super crowded.
But I watched it on the internet and I, you know, assessed it.
But, you know, the trouble here, Sheila, is there's a big disconnect between what the party brass are saying and doing and what the grassroots are doing.
You know, we had a booth at the Strong and Free Networking Conference two years ago, and we were saying, you know, there's no climate emergency.
You know, we were being very candid about the circumstance.
And hundreds of grassroots supporters came up to us and said, yeah, we agree with you, but our leaders aren't saying this.
And in fact, it's interesting because just down the hall, they had a seminar with panelists and everything about a conservative approach to stopping climate change or words to that effect, you know.
So they had a question period afterwards.
And so I sat right in the front row and I was going to ask them some hard questions.
Well, they canceled the question period.
I have a feeling they saw me sitting there.
But regardless, I went to the chairman of the seminar afterwards and I said, Do you think we have dangerous climate change caused by humans that it's worth restructuring our entire infrastructure to try to stop?
And he said, no.
I said, well, then why are you holding a session here about a conservative approach to stopping climate change?
And he said, oh, we fought that war and we already lost it.
I said, we stopped Kyoto, didn't we?
Yeah.
And I said to him, no, you never fought that war.
You had a few people like Preston Manning gave a couple of good speeches on it.
Bob Mills did.
Stephen Harper did.
You know, a few people did that, but you immediately quit and they switched sides.
In fact, Preston Manning switched sides.
Stephen Harper, of course, approved with John Baird the Paris Agreement.
Bob Mills, who I worked for, changed sides totally.
So, I mean, what happened is the leadership never really fought this issue and they just simply succumbed.
They just kind of rolled over and lay dead.
Oh, yeah, okay.
Yeah, we lost.
And, you know, it's a big mistake because I think the ultimate objective of the Conservative Party, Pierre Polyev in particular, should be to kill the climate scare in Canada.
Okay.
That should be the real objective because the carbon tax is only a symptom of the disease.
Okay.
It's a symptom of the disease.
The disease is the idea that we can stop climate change, which is, of course, nonsense.
I mean, it's absolute and total nonsense.
And so what I find is that they seem to lack an overall strategy for how they're going to kill this thing because it's not just the carbon tax.
I mean, the price, of course, permeates all through the whole supply chain.
And, you know, in many, many ways, the climate crisis is crippling farmers.
It's crippling our oil and gas industry.
It's, you know, even anti-abortion people are finding that the climate scare is now linking up with the abortion industry because, of course, they want to have less people on earth.
And, you know, you go through all kinds of, there must be dozens of areas that the climate scare is affecting.
But none of these groups are saying, sorry?
Sorry, municipal taxes.
Oh, yeah.
Ottawa, where you are, where you are one of the most important climate speeches on the continent.
Yeah.
And so what they need is a sensible strategy, a long-term goal to kill the climate scare in Canada.
And it's not just delaying the carbon tax to 2030, 2050, like Daniel Smith is doing.
You know, I really like Daniel Smith, but no, you don't need a carbon or carbon neutral at all.
But, you know, right now, in the Conservative plan, okay, they have the old one still on the internet, which was Aeronautools.
But even in their September 2023 policy document, they say this.
They want the adoption of a pan-Canadian low-carbon, low-carbon, aluminum purchasing policy.
And they say they want to have a purposeful, gradual transition to a lower carbon use future.
What for?
I mean, why do they want to have that?
It's damaging to their industries, you know, to all the industries that support conservatives.
And they go on further to say, including carbon capture technology, which is a disaster.
Okay, that's a recipe for no coal.
Okay.
It's also extremely expensive.
It's also dangerous, potentially dangerous if you're too close to it.
And I know you are.
Battery storage.
Okay.
So you have to say, well, what the Conservatives leadership are saying is, and I'm sure they're strongly influenced by Red Tories in their communications and strategy section.
Okay.
When I worked for the party when it was the Canadian Alliance, I was a legislative assistant for Bob Mills.
What I found was that in the back rooms, while most of the MPs in those days, you know, were definitely conservative, both socially and economically and practically, the Red Tories were in the background.
And when the two parties merged, when the Canadian Alliance merged with the Reform Party, what happened is that the Red Tories in the background, even though they only had two MPs, okay, in the Progressive Conservative Party and they had, I don't know, maybe 25 in the Reform Party, or in those days, the Canadian Alliance.
But what happened is that the people in the back room essentially hijacked the party.
So you ended up with a Red Tory party, which now is not really very different to the Progressive Conservative Party of Brian Mulroney and Kim Campbell.
Okay, so we're right back to where we started.
And what they've been saying, and you can sort of see this, they're saying, well, you know, we can't say these things because the polls show that most Canadians think that we have a climate crisis.
Okay, good.
So that's your starting point.
Your starting point is, sorry, well, in many cases, they're push polls.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
They'll ask people stupid questions like, should we save the climate for future generations?
You know, like I, I can remember my dad was questioned in one of these polls, and he said, how do I answer a stupid question like that?
There's no answer.
When did you stop beating your white?
Yeah, exactly.
Sorry to interrupt you, but I've just seen Abacus data polling that says that even for millennials and Gen Z people, so regular old Trudeau voters or future Trudeau voters, they don't even put climate change in their top five issues.
It's all affordability.
Oh, yeah.
They only care about seeing the fact that the lifestyle of their middle-class parents is completely unattainable for them.
And they are right to be told that the carbon tax is one of the reasons that you will never afford a house.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, it's interesting because StatsCan last month, they came out actually this month, they came out with the inflation figures for February.
And Canada's doing pretty well.
It's 2.8%, okay, which isn't too bad.
But the interesting thing there is that Saskatchewan was only 1.7%.
And StatsCan itself said the difference, which is more than a third, okay, it's 1.1% difference between Canada as a whole and Saskatchewan was because they weren't collecting the carbon tax.
Okay.
And that specific, so they keep saying, oh, it's only fractions of, no, it's huge.
The impact of the carbon tax is huge.
And so my whole point, Sheila, is that they need a long-term strategy where they're going to kill the disease, not just the symptom.
And so I've laid out a few steps here.
Okay.
Now, at first, they're going to say, oh, my God, we can't attack the climate scare.
We'll be called deniers, you know, and all that sort of thing.
Well, okay.
Yeah, you don't do it all at once.
You don't do what Danielle Smith did back in 2012 when she was leader of the Wild Rose Party.
She was at a leaders' debate and she expressed a sensible doubt about the climate scare.
And oh my God, the audience went crazy.
They were booing and everything else.
And she was ripped up by the media and everything.
Now, that doesn't work.
Obviously, you can't just go from nothing to being a climate realist.
You have to move there gradually and you have to change the language.
You know, this is something that I'm very sad to see that Pier Polyev, for example, talks about, you know, carbon emissions and things like that.
Now, you know, it's interesting because there's a book called The Art of War.
It's an ancient Chinese document and it talks about, you know, what you shouldn't do.
And one of the things you shouldn't do is fight your battles on your enemy's terrain because they understand it a lot better than you.
They know all the escape routes and everything else.
But you see, that's what the conservatives are doing.
They're fighting the battle on the climate alarmist terrain because they're using climate alarmist language.
And I'll just give you an example.
They call it a carbon tax.
What is it really?
It's not a carbon tax.
Carbon is soot or graphite.
And when you say carbon tax, people think of things like this, which is a piece of bituminous coal.
Okay.
They think of something dirty.
So what they should be calling it is a tax on energy, okay, or a tax on everything.
Or if you want to be exact, you call it a tax on carbon dioxide.
Okay, because carbon dioxide is benign.
Instead of calling it carbon pollution, carbon footprint, low carbon energy, and so on, they should call it a carbon dioxide tax or a carbon dioxide everything.
And instead, they're using the language of their enemy.
Okay.
And they have to stop saying or even implying that we need to reduce emissions.
Okay.
Because what that really means in the language of the climate alarmists is carbon dioxide.
Because 80% of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions from humans is carbon dioxide if you don't count water vapor.
Here's another thing.
They constantly complain about how China is expanding and they're boosting their greenhouse gas emissions because they're building coal stations all over the world.
Well, if you're going to be consistent and if CO2 doesn't matter, then they have to stop criticizing China because it just makes it sound like this is bad.
Never talk about a climate emergency or make statements about extreme weather increasing as a rationale for their plans.
I think you could attack China on particulate.
Oh, yeah.
But carbon emissions.
That's right, because they're burning low-quality coal.
So yeah, that's worth attacking them over.
So that's the first thing.
They have to stop you, and they could do this immediately.
They could do it starting tomorrow.
And, you know, the left and the climate activists wouldn't really even notice.
But you see, the trouble is by using the language of their enemy, it's going to be much harder for them later to step back and to actually do the right thing.
So they have to set the stage so that they can eventually do the right thing.
They have to stop boosting carbon sequestration.
Pierre Polyev has been doing this all the time.
First of all, it's not carbon.
It's carbon dioxide.
They have to stop doing it because, you know, as I said before, it's extremely expensive.
It essentially rules out coal.
And it is potentially dangerous.
I hate to tell you, since you live right beside one.
However, I mean, the odds of it escaping while you're there is pretty low.
Now, they have to stop boosting electric vehicles as a solution to climate change, which Pierre Polyev does as well.
That is a mistake because it suggests that the reduction of CO2 is actually important.
I mean, it's okay.
Tell people, yeah, you buy an EV if you want to buy an EV, but there's going to be no more government support any more than any other form of public transit or personal transit.
The last thing here they have to stop doing right now is they have to stop saying we're going to get developing countries to stop using their coal and instead use our clean natural gas.
Yeah, natural gas is great.
We should sell it to them.
We should look for any way possible to sell it to them.
But the idea that we're going to help them stop climate change, no, you're just digging yourself in a hole that's going to be hard to get out of later.
And I'm all for exporting our clean technology to them, scrubbers to make their coal-fired electricity more efficient, less particulate.
That's what we should be exporting to countries that are still using coal to develop their economies.
There are plenty of ways that we can make the world actually cleaner without using CO2.
Well, that's right.
And, you know, coal is a wonderful source.
You know, you have to think about it.
When you have a massive pile of coal on your property, if you're a power station, you've got solid fuel for a year or more.
Okay.
With natural gas, you have to have a pipe coming in all the time.
So if you want to secure the grid, you should have coal as part of your mix.
In a way, it's sort of like nuclear because nuclear they store on site as well.
So it's a very, very secure energy source.
And as you pointed out, there's lots of pollution control techniques that we can use to actually make it a clean, you know, clean fuel to use.
Now, here's something interesting.
Public Opinion Polls Needed00:15:45
In Terry Corcoran's article in the Financial Post, he pointed out that, in fact, there was a particular writer, Pav, and I can't remember his last name, but he wrote to Finance Canada and he said, you realize that Environment Canada itself disagrees with what Christopher said about increasing extreme weather and everything else.
And similarly, as Terry pointed out in the article, Terry Corcoran from the Financial Post, there are many times when the government is making statements that are not supported by even the UN IPCC.
And it's interesting because we had a community dialogue here that was put on by a group called CAFE, which is a very left-wing environmental group.
And they said they're following the science.
They're following the IPCC.
Well, I looked up in the IPCC their statements and they're not there.
Okay.
The IPCC never talks about a climate emergency or climate crisis except when they're saying this is what the media says.
So what the government or sorry, sorry, what Pier Polyev and the opposition party need to do right away is every time the liberals say things like Christopher Freeland did or Trudeau does that is actually not in the IPCC documents or in some cases is in there, but it says the opposite, they should correct them.
And they should also say, look, your own environment Canada said that there was no trend in precipitation.
So you're telling us there's going to be more floods or more droughts or whatever.
There's no trend.
Okay.
Your own environment Canada people said that.
Similarly, IPCC says the same thing about extreme weather.
You know, there's really no trend.
So that's something they have to correct the liberals on.
And they can do that safely because their own environment, Canada, says the same thing.
We did this just the other day with Stephen Gilbeau when he said that Canada doesn't need any more roads and he was relying on analysis.
He said this in his speech.
We relied on analysis done by Environment and Climate Change Canada, which said that we don't need any more roads in the network.
So I asked for that analysis.
And guess what?
Doesn't exist.
They don't exist.
It doesn't exist.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, so I mean, it's a very safe thing for them to do to actually hold the government to account when they're saying things that are different to their own environment services.
Now, right now, here's another thing they can do right now.
They should start to shift the CPC focus away from stopping climate change to adaptation, okay, to build resilience with a particular focus on cooling, quite frankly, because that's a lot more dangerous for Canada, a high-latitude country than a little bit of warming.
They should call for all subsidies for wind and solar power to be totally removed.
Okay.
And of course, what the government will jump up and down, they'll say, oh my God, you know, it's cost effective.
You know, we can have wind and solar and it's competitive.
Okay, if it's competitive, take away all of its subsidies.
Because what will happen, of course, is that it won't be competitive anymore.
And it'll underline for people the fact that these are not inexpensive energy sources.
They're extremely expensive.
Now, here's something they can do.
Sorry.
Yeah.
In Alberta, we very recently decided that the wind and solar companies should face the same rigorous environmental legislation that oil and gas companies face.
And the wailing and the gnashing of the teeth from these people has been quite wonderful.
Yeah, wonderful.
That's great.
Never before have they faced having to put up money up front for reclamation.
They've never had to deal with that before.
They've never been told you actually are not allowed to put up wind turbines this close to people.
I'm sorry.
We are protecting all these swaths of Canadian landscape.
We're making sure it is going to be undisturbed by these wholly hideous wind turbines and unmitigatable solar panels.
And they are losing their marbles.
And how can you be happier?
Welcome to the real world, guys.
This is what oil and gas has to deal with all the time.
And they do it quite well.
Oh, yeah.
And if oil and gas kill a single duck, oh man, they're in big trouble.
Oh, boy.
You know, in the United States, believe it or not, they have what's called a take permit, okay, which means that wind turbines can kill a certain number of endangered species.
Now, they should remove all that kind of preferential treatment of wind and solar.
And if they compete, then great, they compete.
But they don't, of course.
They get all this preferential treatment.
Now, you might remember back in 2011, Nancy Green Rain, who was a senator, she held an open hearing and she brought in Tim Patterson from Carlton.
She brought in Ian Clark from Ottawa U, Jan Weiser from Ottawa U, and Ross McKittrick from Guelph University.
And they were speaking to a committee of environment in the Senate, and they gave an alternative point of view on climate.
I mean, that was brilliant, okay?
Now, the sad thing is the Harper government didn't really publicize that.
They should have publicized it like crazy because it was right in the middle of his tenure, but they didn't.
So what they need to do over the next few months is Pierre Polyev, in my opinion, should find a senator who will be like a center point and bring in climate experts on the other side of the climate debate.
Now, it doesn't have to have any association with Pierre.
It could just be a Senate committee hearing in which you bring in people like Ian Clark from Ottawa U.
Okay.
All those people are still alive.
They could bring them in.
And the beauty there is that if the Polyev government then were to publicize it and say, look, we're not climate experts, but it is interesting that a senator brought in these people giving a completely different point of view.
And so that's the first thing.
And once they've had the hearing, they have to make sure it's well publicized.
Okay.
I don't know of anybody in the government that publicized it at all.
Then they have to do some interesting things here.
They have to coordinate non-push public opinion polls.
You know, as I said at the beginning, so often these opinion polls, they're stupid.
I mean, they don't actually give a climate realist like me an opportunity to give any answer because they're asking questions that assume that you think there's a climate crisis.
So, I mean, the first question would be something like this: How much would you personally be prepared to pay per month so that Canada will lead the world in its attempt to, quote, stop climate change?
And, you know, they find in poll after poll in the U.S. that they're only prepared to pay like maybe $50 a month, oh, at most, at most.
And that'll be very powerful because, of course, if you can show that the vast majority of Canadians want to pay almost nothing, then how do you subsidize the programs?
You can ask them a question that has not been asked in polls, and that is this: Do you think that we're in the midst of a climate crisis so severe that it's worth restructuring our entire energy infrastructure in an attempt to protect the climate?
Now, of course, most people will say, I don't know, which is appropriate.
Because the next question, how much do you think it's warm since the mid-19th century?
Most people will probably say, 10 degrees?
It must be something pretty incredible because, of course, we're told all the time it's a climate crisis, but in fact, it's 1.2 degrees.
Okay, so what you have to do is then massively publicize the results of the polls.
And this all sets the stage.
All these primary steps, okay, none of them are particularly difficult or risky for the conservatives to do.
It sets the stage for them to call perhaps a year from now or maybe half a year to call for the government to convene unbiased, open public hearings into the science of climate change with experts on all sides.
Okay, because then Pierre Polyev can say, look, you know, we've seen this little hearing done by a senator, and that sort of raises the question, oh, how settled is the science?
Canadians, generally speaking, don't support spending anything like what's being currently spent.
I mean, I heard last night from Lauren Gunter, he did an excellent interview with Brian Lilly, actually.
And I think he was saying up to $200 billion has been spent by the Trudeau government.
Yeah, up to $200 billion on climate change.
Now, if you divide that by the number of Canadians, it's a lot more than what Canadians want to spend, that's for sure.
So they have to ask them: will you have an open, unbiased public hearing into the science of climate change with experts on all sides of the issue invited to testify?
And there's tons of experts on all sides of the issue.
And I'll show you these reports here, okay, these non-governmental international panel on climate change, there are thousands of references of scientists.
So you can easily find scientists to speak out, not just the four people that I was mentioning.
They're all over the place.
Of course, the government will say no, no, the science is settled, you know.
And of course, then the conservatives can simply say, well, what are the liberals hiding?
If the science is settled, then they won't be able to find anybody on the other side of the debate.
Or are they afraid that Canadians will hear something other than what they want them to hear?
Okay.
I think that they could really make hay about this.
Now, the last two steps are further down the road.
And I know the red Tories in the back room, their hair will stand up when I say this.
But perhaps in a year or after getting elected, then they, the Conservatives, can convene open, unbiased hearings into the science.
And what will happen, of course, is you'll have experts like Ian Clark and Ross McKittrick saying essentially there's no climate crisis.
All of this is just public relations and communications fluff.
It's not real.
Then you'll have people like Andrew Weaver and lots of others saying, yes, there is a climate crisis.
So what will happen is the public will be very confused.
They will not know who they should believe.
Now, that in a way is an appropriate circumstance because the science of climate change is probably the most complex science that we've ever tackled, ever.
Okay.
I mean, it is, it is potentially even harder than the atom bomb.
I mean, it's an enormously complex field.
So, for the average person to judge which of these scientists is right, you know, they can't do it.
And so, what they can do after the hearing, when there's huge confusion, you know, and the media are attacking them for having this hearing, Pierre Polyev can step back and say, Well, look, I don't know whether there's a climate crisis or not.
I'm not a climate expert.
However, there are many experts who don't think there is, and there are some who say that there isn't.
There isn't, then there is.
Okay.
And so he says, Well, until the science is more settled and until the experts actually have some sort of consensus, which they don't have now, despite all this 97% nonsense, we're going to back off on attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, except in cases where it's giving you no regrets policy, where you're reducing pollution at the same time.
I mean, that's fine.
We want to increase energy efficiency as well.
And we're going to focus then on adaptation and resilience.
And if at some point in the future, there's more consensus among the scientists, then yeah, we'll consider having mitigation policies.
But in the meantime, it doesn't make any sense.
And, you know, I think at that point, after you've done all those preliminary steps, the public will say, yeah, that makes sense.
Until you know what's going on, until the scientists agree, then it doesn't make sense to spend another 200 billion trying to stop something we perhaps can't even stop.
Yeah, I mean, when you've got scientists on either side of the debate arguing about the issue, that would indicate to normal people that the science is very far from settled, regardless of what the media and the liberals keep telling us.
But that's exactly why the media and the liberals don't want these discussions to happen, is because it is proof that the science is not settled.
Well, that's right.
And, you know, it's interesting when I started writing about the climate issue in 1999 with a scientist who doesn't really want me to mention him now because, you know, it's actually dangerous to be a climate skeptic.
It's dangerous to your career.
It's dangerous to all sorts of things.
I mean, Tim Ball had five death threats, and they were serious death threats, okay?
One of our scientists who was from another country, I won't say which country because it would narrow down who I'm talking about, but he had racist death threats against his family for allowing the publication of papers because he was one of the editors of a journal for allowing them to be published.
So, I mean, it's a very dangerous thing for these scientists to speak out in many cases, certainly dangerous to their careers.
So, I mean, I have a huge respect for those four scientists that testified in Nancy's hearing, Nancy Green Rain's hearing, and Nancy herself.
I mean, she was always a climate, she still is, as far as I know, a climate realist, you know, and she's also a fantastic skier even now.
But, you know, I honestly think that the long-term goal of the Conservative Party of Canada should be to rescue Canada, to rescue Canada from the climate scare.
And they need a step-by-step approach, starting with changing the language very quietly in the background.
They don't have to make any noise about it at all.
They just say, you know, Mr. Shudeau, this tax on carbon dioxide, blah, blah, blah.
And they continue to talk.
So in other words, they change the language and they do it quietly.
They stop calling for an emissions cut.
They start focusing on adaptation and they eventually will move the population over to a more realistic point of view.
Now, this idea of always driving policy based on public opinion is a huge mistake.
I think we've talked about this before, but there was a study done a few years ago by researchers at McGill University, Drexel University, and Ohio State.
And the question they were asking is, what is it that drives climate change fears in the public?
And they looked at all sorts of things.
They looked at the science.
They looked at the media.
They looked at statements from leaders and climate activists and things like that.
What they found was that the major factor driving climate skepticism, and of course they hated that, they didn't like climate skepticism.
The major factor was the statement of the elites in society, and in particular, the statements of politicians.
So when somebody in the back room of the Conservative Party says, no, we can't oppose it because public opinion supports it, what they don't realize, they don't appreciate the role they play in determining public opinion.
Now, I'm not advocating that they jump out the way Daniel Smith did in 2012 and express a sensible climate realist position, bam, just like that.
No, they have to build up to it gradually through the kinds of steps I was describing.
And then as they start to say these things, public opinion starts to change.
And in this paper, they gave a really good example.
You remember John McCain was a somewhat left-leaning conservative in the United States, a senator, and he was supporting the climate scare.
And in those days, the Republicans, generally speaking, did support the climate scare.
So you had both parties, Democrats and Republicans, supporting it.
And public support for extreme action on climate change was quite high.
Public Opinion on Climate Action00:09:31
However, when the Republicans split and they started to question the climate scare and started to disagree, public opinion greatly came down with regards to their support for extreme action on climate change.
So what they concluded is it's the leaders in society, and in particular the politicians, who to a large extent drive public opinion.
So if the conservative brass are going to wait until public opinion opposes the climate scare before they start to oppose it, they're going to wait forever because they're one of the drivers of public opinion.
So, you know, I think it really boils down to this.
I mean, do they want to kill the climate scare or not?
And they should very definitely want to kill it because the carbon tax is just one of the symptoms of the disease and they need a sensible long-term strategy to kill it.
And as I said at the beginning, there's a massive disconnect right now between the grassroots who want them to do it and the brass who are following these red Tory advisors, I believe, in the background, and they won't do it.
You know, the Conservative Party of Canada, the federal one, should make note of what happened when Jason Kenney listened to the Red Tories in the background instead of moving along as the blue Tory we all thought he was.
It ended tragically for Jason Kenney.
And I think Albertans, frankly, are better off because of it.
Tom, I could talk to you all day about this issue.
It's one of those things that I love challenging the orthodoxy on.
But how do people support the very important work that you do at the International Climate Science Coalition Canada?
How do they hear your podcast, sign up to some of your releases, and get involved in the fight to change the agenda around this issue?
Yeah, for sure.
Well, the first thing they should do is go to ICSC-Canada.com and they can see our latest reports.
We've been taking Ottawa as an example to actually take across Canada.
We have a project called Climate Realism in Action.
Okay, it's not enough to be climate realists.
You have to actually do something.
And we have some really great volunteers here in Ottawa who've been working with me and who will go to election debates.
They'll go to committee meetings and things like that.
And, you know, they do it on their own volition.
I mean, they don't work for me or anything, but I'm able to help them prepare questions and bring up points that make sense.
And, you know, we've had huge success.
I mean, during the last election, Catherine McKenney had a massive lead.
Now, we weren't the only ones, of course, who contributed to Mark Sutcliffe winning instead, but we were able to bring into the debate, into these different meetings, you know, some of the points.
I mean, Catherine McKenney supported this $57 billion plan, you know, which was totally crazy for a city of a million.
And, you know, we were able to highlight that.
And we've been told that we contributed to her defeat.
And similarly, we're actually having people speak before the committee.
You know, different volunteers come to me and say, hey, I want to speak before the committee.
I say, great.
What do you want to talk about?
I hate these wind turbines.
So we work together.
So what we're trying to do under the Climate Realism in Action project is we're actually trying to kill, or not kill, that's the wrong way to put it.
We're trying to get the city of Ottawa to develop sensible, science-based and economics-based climate and energy policy.
Okay.
And once we're successful there, and I think we will be because we have a new mayor who's much more sensible.
We have new committee members in the different committees who are also more sensible.
Once we've done that, we plan to spread it across Canada, teaching activists in different cities how they can work to, you know, have sensible climate and energy policy in their communities.
So I'm already working with some activists in Alberta and Hamilton and Oshawa and others, where they reach out and they say, hey, can you do a Zoom call and talk to our people?
We have to go and give a presentation to the city's environment committee.
And so, yeah, I do that.
So that's called Climate Realism in Action.
And people can support that by clicking on the big red donate button in the upper right-hand corner because, of course, we don't get funding from government, that's for sure.
And so the webpage is icsc-canada.com.
We also, of course, have a couple of radio shows.
The main radio show is the one I'll push right now, and that is the America Out Loud.
Okay, we have a show called The Other Side of the Story, and we bring in all sorts of experts.
The thing we've been focusing on there most recently is the destruction of well water on farms because of driving massive stanchions right into the ground.
Boom, boom, boom, boom.
Way through the water table, ruining the water table of people who live nearby these industrial wind farms.
And they're not farms, of course.
It's the wrong term, industrial wind facilities.
So, yeah, people go to AmericaOutLoud.com and they click on the menu and they can choose different shows.
And ours is called The Other Side of the Story.
We actually brought in people who've been victimized by this.
You know, their well water has been ruined.
Christine Burke is a great example in Chatham-Kent County in Ontario.
She had generations of her family live on the farm and they never even bothered to filter the water.
It was great.
And I'll just show you, just a second here.
That is her water now.
Okay.
See this jar here?
That's her water.
That's what comes out of her drinking water tap after generations of not having to even use a filter.
She can't drink it.
Okay.
She has to go into town every day because of these damn wind turbines.
She has to go into town every day and get gallon jugs of water.
Now, they can't do that for their washing and the laundry.
So their clothes have this kind of sediment in it, you know?
And so we're publicizing that through our radio show.
In the most recent one, we had an actual geoscientist come on and he said, yeah, it's the wind turbines that are causing this.
And just have a look.
Imagine you turn on your tap and that's what comes out after generations of clean drinking water.
So, you know, there's a whole many, many groups that are being victimized by the climate scare.
And we're starting to work with various groups and the water people in particular.
So that's us.
You know, if people can support us, we'll keep doing what we're doing.
Well, I'm sure people will.
You are up against the deep pockets of not just the federal government, municipal governments, foreign meddlers out of San Francisco and their well-funded tentacles that meddle in Canadian politics.
You're just, you know, you're in a bit of a David and Goliath situation, but education is key.
And I think you're addressing that and creating an army of volunteers and activists to, you know, take it to the politicians, make them accountable for what they are doing to people's lives with these green energy policies.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, it's interesting.
They can succeed too.
I mean, south of the city, there was a proposal to put in a battery pack, one of these massive best system, battery energy storage systems, which have the potential of massive fire and pollution and all sorts of things.
And quite a number of activists, there were 100 people that went to a city, a hearing that was actually put on by the company.
And I'll tell you, they were angry as heck.
They said, you know, what about this?
What about that?
And the industry were shocked.
There were two counselors who were actually at the meeting and they saw 100 people, you know, yelling and saying, no, we don't want these battery packs.
Just a few days later, the city council killed the project.
So, you know, climate realism in action can work.
Okay.
And as far as I know, we're the only ones in Canada who are actually coordinating individual activists to actually get up and make solid points.
You know, so I mean, we really need to do this.
It's taking a page out of Saul Linsky's book, Rules for Radicals.
Okay.
When your group is small, you have to make a lot of noise and go to a lot of events and actually make it look like your group is big.
In this case, the group is pretty big, you know, because the farmers, they don't want this on their farms.
Jeez.
Well, Tom, I just want to thank you so much for the work that you do on behalf of climate realists, but also the Canadian taxpayer, because somebody has to pay for all these bad ideas.
And in favor of property rights, as you're defending with the well water problem.
And we'll have you back on again very, very soon.
Well, we've come to the portion of the show wherein we invite your viewer feedback.
I see it every week.
I know it's getting redundant.
It must be to those of you who tune in every single week.
But I actually care about what you think about the work that we do here at Rebel News.
And it's why I give you my email address right now at Sheila at RebelNews.com.
Put gun show letters in the subject line so I know why you're emailing me as one of the hundreds of people who email me every day.
It makes it easier for me to find your comments about the show.
And who knows, I might just read your viewer feedback on air.
But maybe you don't want to email me.
Maybe you are watching a clip of the show or the free version of the show on Rumble or on YouTube.
Leave a comment there.
I go looking over there sometimes for comments.
Handgun Owners' Rights00:04:01
And that's exactly where today's comment comes from.
Actually, I'm going to probably read two because they're both, the second one is just kind of fun.
And they're on last week's show with my friend, Cutie Petuti, Grandma, Tracy Wilson of the Canadian Coalition for Firearms Rights.
And we were talking about the Toronto Sportsman Show and how it was as busy as ever.
In spite of Justin Trudeau's increasing crackdown on firearms rights in this country, it was sort of a hopeful theme of the show.
And she updated us on some of the things the CCFR is doing to fight back against Justin Trudeau's gun grabs and scapegoating of the law abiding for the crimes happening in Toronto and Montreal and Edmonton and Calgary and Vancouver.
What's the common thread there?
Oh, progressive-run cities.
Somehow it's the conservative gun owners' problems if the bad guys are doing bad things in progressive-run cities and getting the benefit of liberal bail policies.
Anyway, someone writes to me on my interview with Tracy, old Alberton, in fact, says, OMG, I hope I get my handgun rights back so I can again buy, sell, and transfer my handguns.
I just want my property rights back.
Really, that's all it is.
The government has arbitrarily decided that handgun owners who have done nothing wrong must be held responsible for the actions of illegal handgun owners.
That's like scapegoating the guy with a black car in Bashaw, Alberta, because a guy who stole a black car ran over somebody in Toronto.
That's the way that gun owners in this country are treated all the time by the liberal government.
Because if they can do this to 650,000 handgun owners in Canada and not respect their property rights, they can do that to anyone for other personal property the government doesn't like.
Exactly.
Exactly.
This is an issue that, while it touches on handgun owners and firearms owners in general, this is an issue about property rights.
Can the government arbitrarily outlaw your property when you have done everything possible to own it legally?
Should they be able to do that because somebody somewhere who didn't do the things that you did to own the property legally did something wrong?
Because that's how handgun owners in this country are treated right now.
Now, in that interview with Tracy, we poked fun at the Toronto police because they famously gave that piece of advice in a town hall, basically telling vehicle owners in Toronto to leave your keys in a place where it would be easy for the thieves to get them,
so that it would be easy for them to steal your car without, I don't know, disrupting your beauty sleep, I guess.
Or so that you wouldn't be subject to a home invasion.
You, I suppose, should just assume the benevolence of people who would be willing to carjack you or break into your home, your castle, while you sleep to steal your property.
You should just assume that they're only there for the car and nothing else.
Anyway, we made fun of him, and so are you people in the comment section.
Schonk 420 says, they won't steal my car, a 2005 Ford Focus wagon that I've hauled pigs and chickens in.
Trash Falls, Radio Knows00:00:46
Open the passenger door and the trash falls out, but there ain't nothing wrong with the radio.
You know, who knows?
There's no accounting for taste.
Maybe the thief has some livestock that they need moved to.
I don't know.
Have you seen how some of these thieves live, these homeless encampments?
I think they'd happily take your 2005 Ford Focus chicken hauler and use it for untold illicit purposes.
Maybe.
I don't know.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week.