Sheila Gunn-Reid exposes Canada’s April 1 carbon tax hike—$65 to $80 per ton—hitting families with extra costs like 17¢/liter on gasoline, while Alberta taxpayers face a $900 net increase despite rebates. The CTF warns this revenue-neutral policy now drains wallets, with 70% of Canadians opposing it amid protests, yet MPs like Trudeau earn $400K+ raises. Meanwhile, BC’s 13% PST on used cars unfairly targets the poor, and failed gun buybacks waste $42M. Gunn-Reid ties protests to real policy shifts, like Alberta scrapping vaccine mandates post-Freedom Convoy, proving public pressure reshapes governance. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
April 1st, April Fool's Day, and our national clown, Justin Trudeau, has decided to make living in Canada even more unbearably expensive.
Hiking the carbon tax has cost on everything from $65 a ton to $80.
This will add hundreds of dollars in tax burden to everyday Canadians, even though Justin Trudeau oft repeats the misinformation that Canadians will receive more back in rebates than they pay in the carbon tax.
Look at this.
The facts matter.
The premiers, conservative premiers specifically, are misleading Canadians.
The conservative opposition in Ottawa and Pierre Polyev are not telling the truth to Canadians.
The parliamentary budget officer himself says very clearly that eight out of 10 families across the country do better with the Canada carbon rebate because we have put a price on pollution.
It is more money in the pockets of families right across the country at a time where more money is needed and it's concrete action to fight climate change at a time where we're seeing the impacts of extreme weather events, floods, fires, droughts.
Conservatives are ideologically opposed to fighting climate change, to making polluters, even big polluters, pay.
And we put a price on pollution that makes sure people are looking for ways to reduce their emissions and families, particularly low-income and middle-income families, do better with more money in their pockets to continue to raise their families and build a future.
That's what our price on pollution is all about.
And that's what the Conservatives, politicians across this country are trying to mislead Canadians about.
But his own parliamentary budget officer says something entirely different, as you'll hear from my guest today, Chris Sims of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, who joined me to break down all the misinformation about the carbon tax, what it means for your family's bottom line, and a lot more on how the government spends your money.
take a listen.
My good friend Chris Sims from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, and we are recording this on Tuesday, April 2nd.
So we are one day into the enormous carbon tax hike.
Chris, tell us how much the carbon tax is going up and how much it is going to cost your average everyday Canadian family already struggling to get by thanks to the government-induced inflation.
Yeah, sorry to be the rain cloud, but I think it's really important that people know the math here.
So the carbon tax is going up to $80 per ton.
What that means is that it's now going to be 17 cents per liter of gasoline, 21 cents per liter of diesel, and 15 cents per cubic meter of natural gas.
We, of course, use natural gas for things like heating our home.
And some people even use it for their electricity.
So that then means that the cost of everything is going up because even if, you know, you're Monica and you're living in downtown Calgary and you're filling up a tiny hatchback, that is not the sum. of your carbon tax bill.
No, no.
Because we all eat and use things.
So all of that stuff is brought to us on a truck.
And a trucker now, just picture this, filling up a big rig is going to be spending over $200 extra just in the carbon tax, filling up those big rigs of diesel.
That's not including the GST, not including other taxes, or of course the price of the fuel.
So that's a huge cost.
And then farmers, farmers are also nailed actually by Justin Trudeau's carbon tax because they have to keep things like barns of chickens alive in the middle of February.
And they can't do that with solar panels.
You have to use natural gas and propane to do that, keep it at 30 degrees Celsius.
And so farmers are actually nailed for heating their barns and drying their grain with the carbon tax.
And so then you get this kind of layering effect at the farm, at the trucking level, at your level of driving to the grocery store, at the store's level, we're keeping things hot and cold using fuels.
And so this is why this is such an enormous cost.
And the parliamentary budget officer did the math.
The average Alberta family will be out net more than $900 this year because of the carbon tax.
That's with rebates factored in.
That's my sign I have back there.
So I was waving that around in Lethbridge yesterday.
So yeah, no matter what Prime Minister Trudeau tries to tell you when he tries to look you dead in the eye and say, my increased taxes are making you richer, just trust me, like that's pretty gross.
Everybody knows that's not true, but it's really, really not true, especially here in Alberta.
Average family, you're out more than $900.
And again, this is just going to go up.
Like he has not indicated he's going to reduce it or scrap it or whatever.
Yeah, and emissions aren't going down either because people need to eat.
We need to stay warm.
And, you know, there's another side note that, you know, when Justin Trudeau says, oh, I just offset it all with rebates.
Well, no, because even if that were true, even if the rebates equaled the amount of money they were expropriating from your family cumulatively along the way, even if that were true, it has to be cycled through the hands of a thousand bureaucrats, but they don't work for free either.
That is a great point.
Yeah, it costs us hundreds of millions of dollars to both administer and process the carbon tax and also the GST, which is added to the carbon tax.
I know that just, I get quite a few emails about that of what?
This is a tax on tax.
Yes, brothers and sisters, this is a tax on tax and it's costing you mega bucks.
And your point is exactly correct, Sheila.
And I just want to encourage people because politicians of every strike, once they've been in power for a while, they can kind of take on the characteristics of a bully.
Okay.
And I don't care what party you're in.
And a bully will often tell you that them picking on you is your fault, right?
Okay, this is not your fault, folks.
If you're struggling to get by, if you are shocked at how much it is costing you on your heat bill, if you're like gagging when you're trying to fill up your pickup truck because it's costing you so much money, this is not your fault, okay?
When the prime minister tells you you get more money back than you pay in, don't listen to that, okay?
So, you know, the very, very poor, okay, who can't even afford a car, all right, who are already taking the bus or walking to whatever they need to do close to their home.
Yeah, they're going to be getting some money back.
But again, that's the very, very poor.
When they launched this carbon tax, remember, folks, this was to save the planet.
This was to dramatically reduce emissions in order to save the planet.
This was not supposed to be a wealth redistribution plan.
But now, bizarrely, we are seeing ministers admit to basically that.
It's like, yeah, this is a way to redistribute wealth to those who need it.
Like, this was never what the carbon tax was supposed to be about.
Okay.
And now they're panicking and scrambling and trying to change the narrative.
Don't listen to that noise.
Just picture it like this.
If you gave the government a $20 bill, how are they supposed to turn that into a 50 and hand it back to you?
They can't.
Like, they can't.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Like, government costs money.
It does not like increase the wealth or value of a banknote and hand it back to you.
This is not how this is working.
And so again, anybody who wants the hard math, go check out the Parliamentary Budget Officer report.
I know it sounds daunting, but it's not.
Scroll to the bottom and he's got all the charts on there and look at the very bottom line for Alberta, for example, and it's got that number on it.
And what they did is they didn't just do Monica and her little Honda Civic.
That wasn't it because that, of course, is not the entirety of the carbon tax.
They did the farming.
They did the GST.
They did the administration.
They did the economic holistic cost for the individual for the carbon tax, which is the true cost.
That's how that number is so true.
So again, you're out net more than 900 bucks.
And there are people who, you know, like you realize that this is driving food inflation.
I mean, you don't need a parliamentary budget officer to tell you that your two liter of milk at the grocery store right now costs as much as the four liter did three years ago.
Just go and check it out for yourself.
I looked at that the other day because you have to buy milk.
You just, you have to buy milk.
It's a necessity.
And, you know, grabbing it off the shelf, I'm really realizing I'm paying 100% more for it than I did.
And then when you think about families who are on the cusp who have to make hard nutritional decisions now, not just hard recreational decisions, but nutritional decisions because of the carbon tax.
Yep.
And then there are farmers, right?
Farmers are price takers by and large.
They're not price setters.
So when farmers sell their grain, they take what the price of grain is on the open market that day.
So that when their input costs go up, they just get poor.
They can't pass that along to the consumer whatsoever.
And so they're at the whims of the open market, which normally works for us.
Government isn't gouging us on the other side with their little green schemes.
Yeah, exactly.
If you just want to do a mental note, compare, say, Saskatchewan to Montana.
They're not paying it in Montana.
It's the same stuff that they're growing.
But in Saskatchewan, they're paying through the nose for that exact same product because of the government's actions.
There's also, so there's the carbon tax makes everything cost more.
And then I was asked about this by the media yesterday.
And it's like, well, what else is driving, you know, food inflation?
And I said, well, inflation.
Inflation itself, which is also the federal government's fault.
So the next time that the federal government tries to say, oh, well, this was, you know, a global phenomenon, like it, like as if like a tsunami suddenly rolled naturally around the earth and they did not cause this.
It's like, no, no, you guys are the ones who locked down businesses, who drove the economy to a grinding halt, who stopped the production of goods.
Okay.
We're talking about dollars and goods and the basics of supply economics here.
So you guys ground the production of goods in many cases to a halt or a trickle for a long time.
And on the other side of things, you printed hundreds of billions of dollars out of thin air.
So as my friend and economist Franco Terrazano would say, you're having too many dollars chasing too few goods.
Bingo, there's inflation.
And so you've got this terrible, perfect storm of both inflation and carbon tax increases, which again is costing people big time money.
Yeah.
Remember when we had that cold snap here on the prairies?
How could we sure do it?
We were threatened with rolling blackouts because we have polluted our electricity grid with green energy.
We brought our coal-fired plants offline and are phasing them out before we could ramp up natural gas production, thanks NDP.
But inflation in Alberta was high that month, but lower in Saskatchewan, because Saskatchewan was able to produce reliable electricity at a reasonable rate without collecting the carbon tax.
And Alberta had to buy coal-fired electricity at an increased cost because of supply demands and charge the carbon tax on it from our friends in Montana and Wyoming.
So that's just one little place where inflation is affected directly by the carbon tax.
And it happened to Alberta, where we're just, we're the Saudi Arabia of coal that we are not allowed to use for some reason.
And it's because of green schemes, carbon taxes, and electricity shortages.
And apparently we're having a dickens of a time of getting new gas-fired plants online.
Yeah.
We're delayed.
And I was talking to my friend Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science, and she said a lot of that has to do with the time.
It takes time to get these natural gas-powered plants online.
And they just can't get built overnight.
And what happened was with the NDP in power, those plants weren't being built with, so you have the NDP in power in Alberta plus Justin Trudeau.
You've got a lot of regulatory uncertainty.
Companies don't want to make multi-billion dollar investments in electricity production in a place where they might tell you actually, now that's illegal.
So we had an element.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
How is that good for anybody's investments?
So, no, I remember that distinctly.
I had to go out and get a little battery pack from my son's fish tank that he takes such good care of.
Like he's so conscientious.
And there was no way I was letting his poor fish die because, of course, they need a bubbler and like a heater and stuff.
It was the middle of, I think it was February, wasn't it?
Yes.
Or January.
That was a big cold snap.
So never did I think moving to Alberta that I would have the premier having an alert going across your phone saying we might have to do rolling blackouts.
That was pretty brutal.
Not NDP, not even once.
That's a lesson for everybody.
Canadians Protest Carbon Tax00:08:33
Now, I wanted to ask you about how it felt to see Canadians out yesterday, Monday, all across the country protesting the hike in the carbon tax.
I know you were out there just doing your little solo protest, but there were thousands of Canadians out in small towns and big cities in places you wouldn't expect it, like Vancouver and Ottawa.
Although Ottawa is becoming a bit of a conservative protest hub lately, something happened there before.
That's weird.
But in spite of the fact that the federal government doesn't like it when conservatives are out protesting on the street, they consider it a national emergency.
People were out there, and I think across all party lines, I should say, protesting the hike in the carbon tax.
And it was, I was at one in Lloyd Minster to the site of, you know, the cross-border holding hands against the carbon tax coming up.
And it was great.
But how did it make you feel as someone who objects to taxes, generally speaking?
You know, it's been something that the CTF has been fighting since it was first hatched in British Columbia way back in 2008 by then liberal, BC Liberal Premier Gordon Campbell.
And that's how it slid under the door in Canada, by the way, because they sold it as revenue neutral.
And to be fair, it was for the first year or so because they did a corresponding income tax cut.
But like an alligator, these things grow and then they eat your family.
So that's exactly what's happened with the carbon tax now.
So CTF has been fighting this forever.
You can even tell because like some of our bumper stickers are old versions.
So it was wonderful to see people speaking up, again, across party lines, saying we want this thing gone and scrapped.
And that is showing true with the polling.
So we've seen polling coming out now that around 70% of Canadians, 7-0, either want this thing frozen or scrapped.
We now, I think Wob Cano of NDP Premier of Manitoba has now officially said, yes, I want this thing frozen or scrapped.
So I think that's now eight out of 10 provincial premiers.
Like that's pretty darn impressive.
And we've also, keep in mind, that's again across party lines because we have the liberal premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, Premier Fury, saying the same thing.
So this is really encouraging to see people finally finding their confidence, finding their bravery in their voice and speaking up and pushing back on this.
And I'm pretty happy to hear, for example, that you said there is a protest in Vancouver.
They should be protesting in Vancouver.
Sure.
Gasoline is $2 something a liter there right now.
That is disgusting.
If you were filling up a family minivan there just doing the math, that's costing you $150 to fill up like a Dodge caravan.
Like that's insane.
I remember Sheila, one of the last conversations I had with a lady in BC before fleeing financially to Alberta was this lady phoned me and Taxpayers Federation, they think like you're the tax person and can help them somehow like with the government and then and so sometimes you wind up just listening because they need somebody to talk.
It's talk therapy a little bit.
Yeah.
It is.
And so this is in the depths of the lockdown.
Things were really rough.
And gas, I forget when this happened.
Maybe I'm getting my times mixed up.
Gas was about $2 a liter.
That I remember.
And she phoned me from Chilliwack.
She was in her 60s.
She was living in a basement suite.
She was paying around $25 to $2,600 a month rent with her adult son living with her, who is a tradesman.
She started crying, Sheila, because her son couldn't afford to fill up even his small little pickup truck, his little Chevy S10, to get himself and his tools over to the job site in Maple Ridge.
Because of course, people had to commute down the valley.
Nobody could afford to live, you know, close to the epicenter of Vancouver, including tradespeople.
And so when that kind of a working person is at their rope's end, this is when people, they must, they must speak up.
Like we don't care who you vote for or whatever, but you need to pay attention to the topics and the conversation.
And it's good that people were out protesting the carbon tax.
Yeah, I was by myself.
I did some media chats yesterday and then I stood on Mayor McGrath here in Lethbridge by the gas station and got people honking and waving.
But it's, I think, I think the tide has turned.
I think it's turning on the carbon tax.
And I don't think that the Trudeau government can sustain this kind of pressure for that much longer when you have that many people speaking up and so many premiers pushing back across party lines.
I'm actually hearing now, scuttlebuts through different staffers and stuff in Ottawa, is that the provincial level of the party of the liberals have put out kind of a communique, so to speak, of keep up the fight.
Don't cave on the carbon tax.
We're not letting go of this one, which is very interesting, especially when you see this fight going on between Trudeau and the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador.
That's either the same or very similar party.
And to have the rank and file at the provincial level saying, you know what?
No, we're going to keep up this fight, that's very telling.
Yeah.
And I mean, I think it's going to manifest at the polls in ways that the liberals don't even I think maybe they do see coming.
But I was reading some abagus polling data because I'm a nerd.
And it was on the electoral topics that are of concern for Gen Z and millennials.
And wouldn't you know it?
Climate change is really not even in the top five.
It's affordability issues.
And they are making the connection now that climate change policies are driving the problem with affordability.
And I think really only the conservatives right now are the ones speaking to young people about those affordability issues.
And they are leaving the Liberal Party in droves.
Like those are your reliable liberal voters.
And they are saying, we can't afford to live in Trudeau's Canada.
And I think the Liberals are going to get mugged by reality at the polls.
Mugged by reality is a great term for this.
And you know what's kind of grim and a little bit fascinating at the same time is, so rewind years ago, before the carbon tax had started costing this amount of money and before it came to this kind of a head.
Because keep in mind, it's not just carbon taxes.
It's trying to block pipelines.
It's trying to strangle energy.
Like it isn't just the carbon tax.
It's so much that goes along with that kind of rigid ideology.
But remember years back when we would be having discussions about, say, say small E-environmentalism.
Okay.
I'm talking about keeping your water clean, not destroying an entire species.
With that?
Don't litter.
Exactly.
Don't litter.
Let's not kill off all the whales.
Like those normal environmental sort of concerns that decent people have.
Remember when the smart people were often pointing out, you know what?
As countries, it's not here.
As countries become more wealthy, as people have more disposable income and the ability to, you know, they don't need to worry about feeding their kids.
They don't need to worry as much about being able to afford a house or heat or that sort of stuff.
Then an environmental consciousness can start manifesting.
Then you start wondering, hmm, do I pick the free range eggs versus the caged eggs?
Do I want to go to this direction or that direction?
Because it frees up their minds in order to think about lofty goals like that.
Isn't it startling that now we are seeing the same sort of bare knuckles mentality coming down to our own young people?
And I don't blame them whatsoever.
You know, my family and I moved to Alberta so we could afford a house in our 40s.
So the idea that, you know, a young person in a place like British Columbia, for example, or Toronto, saving for 30 or 40 years for what?
For what?
To be able to afford a house that their parents easily afforded?
And why?
And again, getting back to like inflation has helped cause this.
So much government policy and lack of policy has helped cause these problems.
And so isn't it interesting how now these sort of more lofty foreign affairs magazine ideas have come home to roost here in Canada and they're playing it out economically.
I want to ask you before we move on to a couple of other things.
Why Hike Taxes?00:07:36
You are disappointed in Premier Danielle Smith because she's been so great on the carbon tax and pushing back against the fence on their, you know, clean energy regulations and emissions caps, all the things that stifle economic growth and job creation out here in the West.
She's been great on that.
Yeah, awesome.
Like rock star level.
The gas tax.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I think it's no secret.
I really like Danielle Smith.
I knew her before she was premier.
We both worked on radio.
We would meet each other at conferences and stuff.
She's a super likable person.
In fact, I would hazard to guess people who probably don't even vote for her probably enjoy being in her company, right?
And so I think this is why I'll admit this is kind of a tough situation, a bit of a tricky situation where I would argue most kind of freedom-oriented, small government, low-tax people, especially in Alberta, to exactly your point, really like the premier.
So I want to separate this from the personal.
So this isn't personal.
This is policy.
But what the heck is going on with the fuel tax?
For real.
So I don't get this.
So they did the Alberta government did the right thing when they dropped the Alberta fuel tax, which is usually 13 cents per liter of gasoline and diesel.
They dropped it all the way down to zero.
Premier Smith, when she made her announcement, said, and I'm paraphrasing, affordability is a major crisis.
People are struggling to buy the basics.
I want to, you know, put up a shield against Prime Minister Trudeau's carbon tax.
Again, I'm paraphrasing and do the right thing.
So she dropped it to zero for an entire year, which was awesome.
So Albertan saved around a billion dollars with a B.
It was great.
Really good move.
We praised them to the skies.
I did an entire tour praising this government for doing that.
But now we've come down to this point where yesterday we had this huge carbon tax hike coming from Prime Minister Trudeau, which got a lot of attention.
But on the same day, our provincial fuel tax went all the way back up to 13 cents per liter.
Right.
Like what, what gives?
I like, I am actually puzzled.
I don't understand.
And here we have just today, like, I think it was just an hour ago, NDP, a premier of Manitoba, Wob Canoe, announced, by the way, my fuel tax holiday is extended.
So for the first, yeah, for the foreseeable future, Manitobans are paying zero for their provincial fuel tax.
14 cents gone.
Here in Alberta, full freight, 13 cents a liter.
So this is where it's frustrating where you can cheer on a premier going to a committee and doing the right things, like yelling at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over his carbon tax.
But yet here coming out of Edmonton, we're getting a tax hike nonetheless.
And so this is where I'm in a bit of a quandary.
I would, you know, if a viewer is watching and they have an explanation or some advice for me, like please email me because I'm a bit stump.
Yeah, I don't know how Justin Trudeau's fuel tax is bad, but our fuel tax is good.
Like take out the, take out the motivation for the fuel tax, whatever it might be.
If one is making me poorer, then surely the other one is too.
Yeah, it's just money, right?
It's just money.
Like numbers are numbers.
Money is money.
And it's one of those things where even just from a, if you can put my communications hat on, why did they do this on the same day?
Because, right?
Like you could have had the entire song and dance of going to Ottawa and everybody could have just cheered vigorously while you're going after the carbon tax.
But if you do, if you increase your own tax at home, like that took at least 50% of their messaging away.
Sure.
Like, it's one of those things where I almost, it's like, listen, I understand.
He's being a bad man.
He's increasing our carbon tax.
Let him be the bad man today.
I want to help you throw shoes at him, girlfriends.
But why are you hiking my taxes at the same time?
Let me help you.
I've got two shoes, one's for him and one's for you right now.
Yeah, exactly.
And so, and by throwing shoes, I mean that metaphorically, of course.
You know, don't write me letters.
No, please don't.
And, you know, speaking of things all happening on the same day, liberals give themselves an $8,500 pay raise.
And it's not just the liberals, but all MPs who I have note, I should note, some conservative MPs are donating theirs out of solidarity with the struggling Canadian taxpayer.
But MPs got their April Fool's Day raise, 8,500 bucks, I think is the average, while the rest of us get poorer.
Yes.
And again, to your point, I know there, I think there's a few who are saying I'm donating to charity.
Good job.
But we have yet to see a full-throated press conference throwdown.
As soon as I'm leader, I'm scrapping these ridiculous pay hikes.
This is wrong.
We haven't seen that happen yet.
And we really want to.
Franco has said federally, keep in mind that over all these past four years, right, during lockdowns and people losing their businesses, people getting their wages drastically slashed, like losing like pretty much everything.
Every single year, these folks have gotten a raise.
They haven't skipped one.
Right.
That's pretty gross.
And the prime minister, to put a dollar figure on it, is now making around $400,000.
A cabinet minister or leader of the opposition, the very similar sort of levels of authority in the House of Commons, now is close to $300,000.
And to really describe it, like the prime minister lives in a mansion.
Like everything is basically paid for.
Right.
Plus a salary.
That bank.
Pocket money.
Yeah.
Pocket money, $400,000.
And then keep in mind also just MPs in general.
Like for the most part, their power bills are paid.
Their food is paid for.
Their travel is paid for.
All that.
Thank you.
All that stuff that you and I and normal working people are like, oh, got to get these bills paid.
That's covered for the most part for MPs.
Even little things, or people would call it little things.
I actually find it really annoying.
A lot of members of parliament, even when they're in Ottawa, okay, I'm not talking about if they're traveling or having to go somewhere far out of their way, but at Ottawa, where they have apartments, okay, and lunch and dinner are served to them in the House of Commons lobby, like hot fish type stuff.
Yeah.
Every day, they still charge a per diem.
Yeah.
Because they're away from home.
Even though they've got like, they're not just living out of a suitcase.
They're not in a hotel.
They're in like an apartment that is paid for.
But I know not all of them do it, but I know for a fact that some MPs do it every single day.
They rack up the most per diem they can every day while in Ottawa.
It's gross.
Yeah.
Gross.
Totally gross.
So yeah, we want, and again, it happens all on the same day.
And I know it sounds like a cruel joke.
And for the longest time, I couldn't understand what was happening on the same day.
And it's, of course, because it's the end of fiscal.
So fiscal financial nerds, like you and I celebrate New Year's Day on January 1st.
Financial nerds, for some reason, they do this at the end of fiscal, which is April 1st.
So go figure.
I think it's fitting.
It's fitting.
That's the hand of God working there.
They're playing us for fools, Sheila.
Absolutely.
Trudeau's Failed Gun Confiscation00:05:39
Now, before I let you go, I wanted to ask you about The recent news that the Justin Trudeau liberals have managed to waste, unsurprising to, I think, nobody, $42, I think it is, million dollars in their gun confiscation program without confiscating any guns.
And I'm happy, don't get me wrong, I'm happy for the government ineptitude here.
I'm overjoyed that they can't manage to take our guns away.
I'm annoyed with the amount of money they've spent to accomplish nothing.
That's where I'm at.
I feel that way about so many things that the government tries to do.
It's like, oh, wow, that's a horrific waste of money.
Thank goodness it didn't work.
So yeah, they have not confiscated a single firearm from a law-abiding Canadian.
So that's, I guess, a good thing.
Yeah, but they've still, in prime Ottawa fashion, have managed to blow more than $40 million.
And folks who don't yet follow this, you should start paying attention to it because the firearms seizure, I don't like calling it a buyback because I didn't buy my shotgun from Justin Trudeau.
I didn't buy it from the federal government.
And so it's not a buyback.
It's a seizure or a confiscation.
And already they're wasting this much money.
And again, we have to stress that leaders of police officers have said out loud with their faces, this does not help public safety.
What will help public safety is trying to catch illegal guns at the border, okay?
Or putting more boots on the ground to deal with guys in jail.
Thank you.
More bad guys in jail, more boots on the ground, especially in urban communities or in rural communities that need to be have higher patrol for security purposes.
That sort of stuff.
This is coming from the police themselves.
And so this is where things get really frustrating because the government just starts trying to wildly do things that they know very little about.
It costs people a ton of money and it's wrong.
Seizing people's private property is absolutely wrong.
And for folks who don't own firearms, just wait till it's something else that the government wants to seize and you own it legally and lawfully and you're not doing anything wrong because it's eventually going to happen.
They'll start with things like firearms because it's an easy wedge issue.
But so the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, we were instrumental in the fight against the old long gun registry, which wound up costing like, I think it was close to $2 billion by the time the smoke cleared.
Again, didn't make Canadians any safer.
And again, we are also fighting this one as well.
Now, Chris, I could talk to you all day.
Sometimes we do.
We do.
However, I've got to get back to the Foreign Interference Commission to find out how much money and time the government wasted doing nothing about things that we knew were happening.
How do people support the work that you do over at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and not just support the work that you do, but really get involved in the fight?
This is the big part.
So again, we know folks are strapped.
So all that understood.
If you can't donate, we do understand for real.
But we want you as part of the team nonetheless.
So you can join up on whatever version of the army you want, which was great.
So if you're a gunny and you own firearms legally and you want to push back against the confiscation, we have a team for that.
So just go to our website, taxpayer.com, sign the petition with your email and your name against the gun buyback or the gun ban, whatever you want to call it.
And then whenever anything like that happens, whenever there's news about waste, whenever there's new elements of the legislation happening coming through the house, we'll alert you.
Okay.
And we'll either do like a mass email campaign or we'll, you know, get people out at a pub night.
We'll do some sort of organizing.
Same deal goes for things like, you know, defunding the CDC, even niche things like getting rid of the sales tax on used items, which just hurts poor people.
Like those things.
So, we all have a petition for those sorts of things, including scrapping the carbon tax.
Go to our website, taxpayer.com, find out what tickles your fancy, and sign those petitions.
And then you're part of the standing army of taxpayers.
Don't tax my thrifting.
No, I'm annoyed with this.
I know.
British Columbia, you get, they have a terrible PST on used items.
I'm not joking.
I'm not even talking like, you know, mainstream thrift.
So it's not just Value Village where you get nailed with a provincial sales tax.
Like little hospital thrift shops, Sheila.
It's gross.
And they nail people for buying a used car.
If you buy like a 2010 Corolla you've saved up cash for, you're paying through the nose for that.
Like 13%.
Three times do they need the GST on the exact same item?
Oh, and this is just BST in BC.
Oh, so led by, I will point out, led by the NDP provincial government, looking out for the little guy, nuking poor people for buying used cars.
It's pretty bad.
Anyway, don't get me started.
That's a whole other show.
NVP, not even once.
Don't try it.
Don't try it.
Not even once.
Thanks for coming on the show.
Thanks for all the hard work that you do on behalf of Canadian families, just like mine.
And boy, are we ever glad that you're in Alberta now?
Well, we've come to the last segment of the show.
And the last segment of the show, I dedicate to you, to what you have to say about the work that we do here at Rebel News, because without you, there's no Rebel News, because we would never take a penny from Justin Trudeau to do the work that we do.
Protests Accomplish Goals00:05:55
So we actually care about what you think about what we're saying here and the stories that we're covering.
And it's the reason I give out my email address right now.
It's Sheila at RebelNews.com.
If you've got something to say about the show today, put gun show letters in the subject line so that it's easier for me to find.
But maybe you are not watching the paywalled version of the show.
Maybe you are waiting around for a couple of days so that you can watch a clip or a segment or even the full show for free on YouTube or Rumble.
And you're sitting through a couple ads.
Thank you for that.
Leave your comment there.
Leave it in the YouTube comments or leave it in the Rumble comments if you don't want your comment censored by the people at Google.
And I go looking over there too.
So actually, today's comments come to us.
There are two of them, although they're on the same issue.
On my reporting from Monday's protest at the Lloydminster, Alberta-Saskatchewan border with relation to the carbon tax hike.
I was there all day with my friend and head of documentary filmmaking here at Rebel News, Kian Simoni, and a couple of our beloved volunteers, Lise from Saskatchewan and Marion.
And we worked hard all day to bring you the other side of the story.
And you know who wasn't there?
CBC.
Anyway, from that location, I was on Ezra's emergency live stream broadcast where us rebels who were out in the world across the country covering the protests, he brought us onto the show remotely.
Anyway, from a ditch for me, along the side of Highway 16 with horns blaring in the background and flags waving in the background.
And we clipped that and we put it up on YouTube.
And I thought, what were people saying about what I had to say while I appeared on that emergency live stream broadcast?
And there were two things that stuck out to me and I want to address them because I think these people are absolutely wrong.
And I'll tell you why, in the nicest possible way.
The first person is Safon Lawrence, 2044, who says, protest amounts to nothing, unfortunately.
We'll just hang tight and we'll come back to that in a second.
And the other one named Extinction Hauling, 247, also writes, protests are a joke.
Government MPs, job, stop it, waste of time.
Okay.
Let's talk about this.
You think protests accomplish nothing?
Perhaps you could talk to somebody from the Freedom Convoy.
So once the Freedom Convoy started rolling here as it rolled through Alberta and hit the Saskatchewan border, guess what happened there?
Restrictions fell.
Once the protesters took to the Coots border crossing in Alberta, our restriction exemptions program, which was our vaccine passport by another name because Justin, or wow, that's a Freudian slip.
Jason Kenney, our premier at the time, I almost called him Justin Trudeau.
He had a restriction exemptions program in place, our vaccine passport, because he couldn't bring himself to call it a vaccine passport, but that's exactly what it was.
It went from, oh, we're going to get rid of it in two weeks to we're going to get rid of it by the end of the week to we're getting rid of it tonight at Windnight.
So the protests accomplished that.
And while the Freedom Convoy during its time in Ottawa didn't get rid of Justin Trudeau, I think the knock-on effect to Justin Trudeau's popularity has been very tangible.
It's just been nosediving since then.
And because even people who genuinely lived in fear of COVID, and even people who believed in the restrictions find how Justin Trudeau treated peaceful protesters in the nation's capital objectionable, treating them as though they were a national emergency, freezing their bank accounts, arresting them, incarcerating them for up to 50 days, as is the case with my friend Tamara Leach.
So protests do accomplish something, especially when they're handled in the best possible way.
Peaceful, resilient, with a common message.
I mean, heck, the reason that old vegetable lasagna butter noodles leader of the Conservative Party, Aaron O'Toole, is no longer in power.
Well, that's because of the Freedom Convoy.
He refused to support the Freedom Convoy.
His own party tossed him out.
So now you have conservative leader Pierre Polyev, who is just walloping Justin Trudeau in the polls.
He's the leader now because of a protest, because of the Freedom Convoy.
So you might think that protests accomplish nothing, but they do.
They do.
And sometimes you are unable to measure that in the immediate aftermath of the protest, but they do accomplish things.
And honestly, what's the option?
Doing nothing?
Is that the option?
Otherwise, no thanks.
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.