Sheila Gunn-Reid and Chris Sims from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation dissect the 2024 Liberal budget’s $40B deficit, ballooning debt to $1.2T since Trudeau’s 2015 tenure, and $1B weekly interest costs—equivalent to the GST—while dismissing "protecting future generations" as Orwellian. The $1B capital gains tax hike, framed as a wealth grab, risks stifling investment like a new BlackBerry HQ, though it spares primary homes. Gunn-Reid mocks gender theory in sports, citing Coach Linda Blade’s Unsporting and criticizing BC’s PST on thrift store items as "gouging the poor," while also speculating female leaders might curb global conflicts. The episode urges Canadians to pressure MPs via taxpayer.com amid Trudeau’s 60%+ unpopularity, warning of creeping socialist policies even in "percolation chambers" like Nanaimo. [Automatically generated summary]
The Liberals just unveiled their new budget and we're all poorer for it.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Now, it's been 10 years since Justin Trudeau famously told us that the budget will balance itself.
Remember this?
The commitment needs to be a commitment to grow the economy and the budget will balance itself.
That was 10 years ago and we haven't had a balanced budget since.
And I don't anticipate we'll have one in the near or the long term.
Why?
Because the Liberals' out of control spending has devastated the finances of our country and has caused an inflationary crisis that is hammering Canadian families.
So joining me today to break down why this budget is so bad and so wrong and so ideological is my friend Chris Sims from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
Take a listen.
So joining me now is my friend Chris Sims from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
Chris, when I saw the budget and how bad it is and how inflationary it is, I knew I had to talk to you so that you could cut through the government jargon and the spin and tell us just how bad it is for Canadian families.
So I'll let you start.
Tell us the worst thing you think is in this budget.
So the worst thing I think is in this budget is its deficit.
So we are now, I think the deficit is around $40 billion in change for this budget.
So if you figure that out and you apply things like the interest charges on our debt.
So debt and deficit are two different things.
Debt is accumulated deficits over time.
It's how much we owe in total.
So in total now, our debt is more than a trillion dollars.
The Trudeau government since 2015 has pretty much doubled it.
So roughly our debt was around $600 billion back before he took over, and now it's more than $1.2 trillion.
So that is why we say he basically doubled the debt.
Now, those numbers are so big, they're hard to understand.
So if you started counting loonies, Sheila, right now, it would take you 30,000 years to count to a trillion.
That's how much debt we're in.
That's how much trouble we're in.
Worse, though, is that we, of course, like anybody who has a line of credit or whatever, any sort of borrowing happens, you have interest charges on that debt.
And my friend Franco Terrazano did the math.
And now we are now paying more than a billion dollars a week just in the interest charges.
That's a hospital a week.
Thank you.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And so it is so eye-watering.
And put it this way, what we're paying now per year on our interest charges on the debt is the equivalent of the GST.
Imagine, imagine back, you know, a few decades ago, back Taxpayers' Federation started in 1990.
One of the main reasons we exist was because we were protesting the GST under then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, how big of an issue the GST has been culturally when it comes to taxation in Canada.
All of that money now, folks, going on to interest payments on the debt, not the principal.
They're not paying it down.
That's just the money going to the bond fund managers on Bay Street.
And so that is really the critical thing that we took away from this budget.
That, and I know politicians spin, and I know they say what they want, but we are getting, we are not getting, we're there.
We are at Orwell level language deceit now.
To have the finance minister stand up on her hind legs and say, this budget is for the protection of future generations.
This is the opposite of that.
Because number one, they have a massive deficit.
And number two, so irresponsibly, Sheila, no plan to ever balance it.
Like ever.
They're not even aspirationally planning on someday balancing this budget.
So the very idea that she would dare say something like, this is for future generations, no, dear.
You are saddling future generations with this massive deficit, this huge debt, and these crippling interest payments for years to come.
And so that is why it's deeply frustrating at the taxpayers level because they're telling you to like it.
Right.
Like they're blowing your budget.
They're taking your money and they're telling you to be grateful, which is basically immoral when it comes to them wasting your money like this.
Now, one thing I wanted to ask you about is the increase in the capital gains tax.
Yes.
That's one thing that I think for some people, even myself, it can be a little bit confusing what this actually means and what this means, you know, if you're trying to pass wealth on to your children.
It's very complicated.
And I think the liberals rely on the fact that it's complicated.
So people just sort of give up trying to understand it and say, oh, well, this is just a thing that's happening to us.
So can you explain that in a way that the normals can understand?
Yes, because I'm one of the normals.
So to put it nicely, capital gains increases won't directly affect me and it probably won't directly affect some of your viewers.
But for some of your viewers, they could be doing well.
They could be innovators.
They could be big job creators.
And I hope they are.
I hope they've started businesses.
I hope they have great stock portfolios.
And I hope they make income off those stocks.
And so that is where things like capital gains kick in.
I forget what the percentage is, but there is a certain percentage of basically what you would call an income tax coming off of capital gains from the federal government.
What they're doing is they're increasing that percentage.
So again, to the average working person who's scraping by to make rent, this probably is out there in the ether of not affecting them, but it will affect them in a few ways.
Like I said, the innovators, the job creators, the people who wake up with like a fountainhead of ideas and they've got capital to invest, they're much less likely now to take a look at Canada as a place to do that business.
So it's kind of a way of kind of shutting the door and saying, you know what?
You know, we don't want the next BlackBerry to be created here.
We don't want your corporate head office to be stationed here in Canada.
Best just take your money and your investment and your wealth and go do that somewhere else.
And that, of course, hurts the rest of us because that means that you or me or our brothers or our sisters or our kids are not going to get jobs in those places because it's chilling that investment.
And so that is what they're changing there for capital gains.
We were very concerned that it would, so as soon as Franco saw the term capital gains, he read the entire section.
The good news is, knockwood, is this doesn't look like it affects the sale of your house.
So for the longest time, the federal government has been sniffing really hard around the idea of taxing the sale of your primary residence, meaning the house you own and live in.
For the longest time, that's been verboten, taboo.
They don't touch that.
When you make the money off the sale of your own personal home, you keep that money and it's not taxed.
If they were to do so, so say you own a second house and you sell the second house, that taxation you do pay on the sale of that second house.
It's not your own home, actually falls within the parameter of a capital gain.
Right.
So when that term was used, he was like, but no, they say specifically this does not apply to home sales, but you really have to keep an eye on that because they're not done with that.
They keep spending money studying this stupid idea of, you know, taking away the one nest egg that some of us do have.
So those were the major changes that we saw was they're increasing the percentage of the capital gain tax that they take from people who will sell investments.
The other element here, though, that's really unfair and that is pointed out, that's a double taxation.
Right.
Right?
So say you earn your paycheck.
You're already paying your income tax on that, both at the provincial and the federal level.
Then you take what you've got left over.
And if you have money left over, then you put that into an investment.
So this is after tax income.
It's already being taxed.
And now they're increasing the amount of the second taxation.
So again, it's one of those things where they tried to hide it behind a, oh, this only affects like, you know, the have yachts, not the have-nots, as they say.
But the folks who have the yachts are often the ones who employ the rest of us.
And they're the ones who invest in the country.
And especially in a place like Alberta, where you're really trying to attract those big players in investment, it just seems like a totally unnecessary thing to do because if they wanted to balance the budget, they would only have to go back to 2021 level spending.
Yeah, that's if I thought Franco's numbers are wrong, but of course you never think that and you never say it because he's always right.
But he's like, yeah, I'm like, well, how, you know, how deep of a cut would we need to make if we needed to balance it?
Because a $40 billion deficit is a lot.
Nope.
2021.
So remember when he was, when Trudeau was standing there on a fire truck and spraying all of our money everywhere in 2021, we'd need that level of fiscal discipline in order to balance this budget, but they're not.
That's shocking because in 2021, that was the height of like the pandemic procurement uselessness.
So money was just like falling from the sky, especially if you were a liberal connected ventilator manufacturer like Frank Bayless.
Or if you wanted to make an app that everybody hated.
Right.
If to enter your country again.
Yes.
Yes.
They were.
So remember that.
Exactly what Sheila said.
Picture yourself back in 2021.
Heaven forbid.
But the amount of money that was flowing down Bank Street in Ottawa was a deluge.
They'd have to go back to that level of fiscal discipline to balance this thing.
But what's mind-blowing is that they're not.
And they don't care that they're not.
This is it.
Like, you know, I don't care if you're wearing a red jacket or a blue jacket or whatever.
This is so far apart from what I remember then Prime Minister Jean Kretchen behaving when it came to the budget, his then finance minister Paul Martin, John Manley, for example, a very prominent minister.
I cannot imagine those three politicians, those three ministers or prime ministers behaving like this.
And yet here we are.
They've got massive deficit, no planned budget balance.
They've lost Bill Mourneau.
Bill Morneau lost track of a chalet.
Okay, that's the level of wealth Mr. Lady Curly Fries possesses because he was married into the McCain family.
Why are you calling him Curly Fry?
Mr. Lady Curly Fries, because he's married into the McCain empire.
He lost track of a chalet on his ethics display.
I remember that level of wealth this guy possesses.
And he was a prominent liberal, just a true believer.
He looked at this budget and said, yikes, guys, this offers absolutely no restraint at all in this spending.
And, you know, being a rich guy, I think Bill Mourneau understands that wealthy people, the job creators, that wealth is mobile.
Sure is.
It does not have to stay in Canada.
We just scared away our Tesla is what I think when we see this sort of stuff.
Look at in the United States, businesses are relocating from California to Texas because of the tax regime.
In Alberta, we're trying to get people to relocate from Ontario to Alberta.
Alberta's calling.
You must go.
But this overrides all the work that Alberta is trying to do to attract businesses both from the rest of the country, but also internationally, because that wealth, it can just go get parked somewhere else.
It can go oil patch investment.
It can park in West Texas and North Dakota.
Sure can.
And what, so a few, a little while ago, you probably heard this big thing of like, oh, there could be a grocery tax, God forbid, because that would be so stupid.
Exactly.
Thank you.
There is the second grocery tax.
And then just a general wealth tax.
And so them messing with capital gains is a form of a wealth tax.
But Franco did the math.
And I think what he said was the amount of money that they're projecting that they're going to pull in from this increase to the capital gains tax is going to be spent in about four days.
At the rate of spending from the Trudeau government, they're going to go through this in about four days.
So folks, when you're watching this, you have lunch meat in your fridge that is going to last longer than this tax hike.
Your milk will last longer than this tax hike.
And it's purely ideological, right?
Like it's an eat the rich tax.
It is.
That's what it is.
Which is funny coming from a prime minister who was born with, did we talk about you don't pay the carbon tax unless you have a gigantic mansion and an indoor swimming pool and three big personal cars?
But let's talk about that because Justin Trudeau says you don't pay the carbon tax unless you have an indoor swimming pool and a gajillion cars.
He's describing himself, by the way.
Yes, very much.
Very much.
How out of touch is this guy from the rest of us?
It was mind-blowing.
And so for context, Prime Minister Trudeau was out here in our province.
Sheila, I don't know why you invited him, but he was here.
You know why he was here?
Indoor Pools and Carbon Tax00:03:50
He was here undermining our provincial government.
It was a housing announcement and he cut our housing minister out of it because our housing minister said, you cannot strike these ideological deals with your liberal mayor friends, American Sohe and Edmonton, because he was attaching the housing dollars to green policies.
Yes.
And the mayor said, okay, fine, give us all the money.
And the province said, you don't get to do this.
The cities are a creation of the provincial government and therefore we are in charge of them.
So you're going to give us the money without your strings attached.
You're going to get out of here.
And so Justin Trudeau came anyway to undermine our provincial government because during his press conference after that, he was asked basically about the carbon tax and why I'm paraphrasing, but will you meet with the premiers?
Because remember for a while there, there was a big push to have a first minister's meeting, as they call it.
That's a fancy way of saying premiers, with the prime minister to discuss why he's screwing everybody over with the carbon tax.
And of course, Prime Minister Trudeau is saying, no, I don't want to do that.
And then when the reporter pushed him saying, okay, fine, but are you going to meet with Premier Smith and the rest of the premiers about the carbon tax, he kind of threw his hands up and he said, basically, it is usual.
You get more back than you pay in, which is nonsense for the average person.
And we know that.
But then he went on to say that, you know what?
If you've got a gigantic mansion, an indoor swimming pool, and three big personal cars, yeah, you're going to feel the carbon tax.
But if you don't, then you're mere made whole or you're better, is paraphrasing what he said.
What was shocking about that is, like you said, he's describing himself.
Also, because that's how he was raised.
So 24 Sussex, it was a famous thing back when he was a little kid.
His dad was prime minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, was prime minister.
They famously, taxpayers famously, built him an indoor swimming pool.
And it's all, I've seen it.
I've been in there, not in the pool, but we did a little tour.
And so it's all lined with cedar and there's this little kind of a weird ground level skylight and stuff, like it's built into the ground.
And there's a tunnel that leads to it.
And so for him to describe this was just kind of this out-of-body experience because the parliamentary budget officer has done the math.
The average, not the highest, the average Alberta family will be out more than $900 this year net with rebates factored in.
I don't know about you, Sheila, but the average Alberta families that I know don't have an indoor swimming pool.
Yes, if you have a giant mansion and an indoor swimming pool and three big personal cars, it might not cover all of that.
But for regular families that are hardworking, it puts more money in their pockets.
No.
No, like we have to have, by the way, we have to have above-ground pools here because the ground heaves.
It's like he thinks he knows nothing about Alberta whatsoever.
I didn't know that.
So yeah.
Look around your neighborhood.
There are above ground.
In-ground swimming pools because the ground heaves.
It's a miracle of modern science that we even have roads here with the 80-degree swings and weather that we have.
I liked the three big personal cars too.
Like he had to specify because he didn't mean the ones that are driven by the help.
Right.
The taxpayer-funded ones.
That are episode side.
So yeah, all that is to digress, but it's right on point because this is the problem.
Fundamentally, like all mockery aside, and politicians deserve to be mocked mostly because they hate it.
So we should do it as much as we possibly can.
But all the mockery aside, the fundamental is this, this prime minister and his government don't understand that.
Fundamentally Misunderstood00:02:16
They simply don't seem to understand the mathematics of why their budget is bad.
They weren't contrite about it at all.
They weren't saying, yeah, we know we're going to get back to balance in like two years.
We still need to fix up a few more things that are left over from.
They didn't even come up with any of those excuses.
They just said, nope, here's a massive flaming deficit and we have zero plans to ever balance the budget.
Oh, and we're protecting future generations and you should be grateful.
And so this is why we're really kind of hitting the alarm bell here of saying, folks, like write to your MP because not all of them must think this way.
There's got to be some common sense people within those government ranks that are thinking, really, this is the best we can do?
Why are we doing this to people?
Because they can't afford things.
And it's largely because of things like inflation, which the government caused because they printed hundreds of billions of dollars and the carbon tax.
And now we're just seeing this job, this tax increase on innovators and job creators.
And it's not a good signal to send.
No, I think probably my favorite Justin Trudeau line from that whole week, besides the, you guys, you're in your stupid swimming pools and your SUVs, was when he said, I already met with the premiers in 2016.
I'm like, you met with Kathleen Wynne and Rachel Lawley?
We're on our third premier since then.
2016.
What is that?
Eight years ago?
Okay, well, nothing has changed.
Nothing has changed since then.
I know.
He basically was like, what are they complaining about?
I met with them in 2016.
We had a meeting on carbon pricing, and every single premier came together to work on establishing a pan-Canadian framework on climate change years ago.
I know.
I know.
It's again, it's one of these things where politicians really start losing the public when they get this out of touch.
And it was just such an out-of-touch tour, speaking tour that he had here in this province that it really only galvanized, you know, the provincial government's fight against him.
And it's really frustrating because, again, people are in serious financial jeopardy.
Like, we are still getting phone calls from working families who are saying, I don't know how to afford groceries.
Like, it's bad.
Yeah.
Trust In Journalism Declining00:14:49
And they're just not listening to it.
And what's interesting is to hear, you know, other, so for example, a couple of the leadership contenders for the provincial NDP.
Now, do I, yeah, do I believe them?
I don't know.
But they're still saying it with their faces that they're now opposed to the carbon tax.
We've now got the NDP Premier of Manitoba saying, you know what?
Maybe we should tap the brakes on this thing because people can't afford things.
So much so that he's fully eliminated his fuel tax.
So 14 cents off per liter.
That's NDP.
We've got a liberal premier in Newfoundland and Labrador, Premier Fury, that is fully tooth and nail fighting against this stuff within, you know, depending on how you slice it, kind of his own party family.
Sure.
So, and like you pointed out with Morneau.
So it's not just like the reformers who are saying, you know, we don't like this Prime Minister Trudeau guy.
This is people who have backgrounds in politics, who understand economics, who understand.
They talk to their constituents quite often.
They're on the ground.
They're close to the people.
They're all saying the same thing.
And that's when people really need to listen more.
And I don't know what to tell you.
I'm not seeing indications of listening coming from that cabinet.
No, it's Prime Minister Marie Antoinette, his Potemkin village population.
So much so they gave the country.
Yeah, they gave CBC another $42 million.
Yeah, let's talk about that real quick while I have you.
So deep inside this budget, as is with every budget, I think, as long as the liberals are in charge, more bailout bucks for the failing media.
And they acknowledge as they're handing this money out that the media company they're giving it to is failing.
So they say, like many media organizations, CBC Radio Canada has experienced declining advertising and subscription revenues.
Wonder why.
That's threatened its ability to fulfill its mandate of providing public television and radio programming.
It's like they don't even know that the internet exists and people can just get the news where the news is happening from people on the ground.
But anyways, budget 2024 proposes to provide $42 million to CBC Radio Canada.
Then we're not done yet in the bailouts.
We've got money for CPAC and APTN, which I think is where you can watch Die Hard once a week on APTN.
I'm leaning more because I kind of like their, so I kind of like their six o'clock news and their investigative journalism on First Nations.
I do like their investigative journalism.
Yeah.
But that's very little of what they do.
Mostly it's just reruns of American TV shows and movies.
They have budget 2024 is giving $15 million over two years for public interest programming services, including $5 million to CPAC's capital requirements, and then protecting and promoting local journalism as a key pillar of democracy.
Then they go on to an eat the rich speech.
Over the years, private corporations have bought up media outlets, including small community papers and broadcast channels, but have not been there to support the journalists who are the heartbeat of local news.
So they said, combined with the shifts in the digital platforms of multinational tech giants who are reducing revenue streams, local news is facing critical challenges.
If we allow the erosion of news media, we are enabling this sort of unchecked disinformation and misinformation that will erode our democracy.
And so the government of Canada has announced $59 million over three years to support the local journalism initiative, which will go to written press, community radio, television, and online news services.
So protecting independent journalism by making it dependent on the government.
Which is the complete opposite sauce.
Again, like I said, the amount of double speak, or I don't like saying it's Orwellian because poor Mr. Orwell was warning us about this.
He didn't like it.
Listen.
People need to listen.
This was not an instruction manual.
Again, so I was a journalist forever.
You're a journalist now, doing amazing work, by the way, on your deep dives on the ArriveCan and all this great stuff and the Chinese interference stuff.
Like some of that stuff was top-notch W-5 stuff.
No problem.
And so we need journalists.
We do.
We need journalists in Canada, but it is a complete, on its face, conflict of interest for a journalist to be paid by the government.
Why?
Because one of the key callings and duties of a journalist is to hold the powerful to account.
You cannot do that if you are counting on the government for your paycheck.
You can't.
I don't care if you think your peers are driven snow and you're going to be as objective as humanly possible.
Just as in corruption, it is the perception of bias that kills you.
So Canadians aren't dumb.
They know that a huge chunk of the mainstream media and the CBC, obviously, are on government payroll.
Thus, you see the government funding going like this.
Guess what?
Trust in journalism is going like this.
It is crashing.
I think the last number I saw, and it was from the most recent survey on trust that was done.
They do it every year.
It was shocking.
It was like 56 or 57% of Canadians believe that journalists are saying things on purpose that they know to be untrue in order to mislead you.
So it's not a faux pas.
You're not getting a date wrong.
You're not mispronouncing.
Exactly.
It is a deliberate fabrication.
So we have more than 50% of Canadians now thinking this.
And I understand why they're thinking that because they're suspicious, because they know where the money's coming from.
So even if I were trying to take the truth of government at face value, earnestly, of them saying we're trying to save journalism, they're doing the opposite.
This is an election year.
Thank you.
They're doing the opposite.
They're smothering it with government money.
And by doing so, they are killing its reputation for trustworthiness and transparency.
And so again, I would plead with any journalism organization: don't take this money.
Don't take this money.
And when you don't take the money, yell about it.
Proclaim that you do not take government money because otherwise people will often assume that you do.
That's really the only way that we're going to be able to save journalism, small J journalism.
Well, and there are so many good journalists who are still in mainstream media.
Don't get me wrong.
Like I'm the biggest, Rick Bell, Lauren Gunter, Joe Warmington, like Baby.
The war that was nailing him on the, are you going to ask meet with the premiers was from Citi.
She was doing a great job.
Yep.
Yeah.
There are still some great ones out there, but their work becomes tainted by this government money.
And it's sad.
I hate it.
Me too.
And, you know, of course, there's the whole stigma that this funding is just raining down from, you know, the heavens like manna during an election year when the liberals are plummeting in the polls and there is no help for them in sight.
I saw a nanos poll yesterday that said like the visceral dislike of the federal government is like the highest it's been in recent memory.
I think it's like 60%, maybe even greater than that, where people don't just say they're indifferent or don't like the federal government, but they're disgusted with the federal government.
That's where we're at.
And we can track the spending in media to the plummeting in the liberal polls.
You can.
And again, it's frustrating because we do get phone calls of saying, what can we do?
What can we do?
We've got to wait for an election.
I'm a bit of an optimist.
I think that ultimately members of parliament must answer to their constituents.
And they are all human beings in there in those government ranks sitting in those chairs in the House of Commons.
And so that's why I just keep encouraging people to keep speaking up, keep up the pressure, keep banging that drum.
Because I was working on Parliamentilla, I remember when back when Stockwell Day had become leader, I might have my dates fuzzy.
Stockwell Day had become leader of the Canadian Alliance.
And there was a certain segment of the party, I don't know what it was, that was unhappy with him as leader.
And there was pressure for a while.
And then eventually some MPs got up and they left and they sat by themselves.
And that totally kind of wobbles the balance of power within a party.
Look at what happened recently with the Conservatives, right?
There was a school.
That's exactly right.
So it's not identical as far as Andrew.
I don't understand the mechanism within the Liberal Party as well, but I listened pretty closely to the way Warren Kinsella was describing it.
And there's still mechanisms like that.
These are still human beings that are hearing from their constituents all the time.
So especially if you have a liberal MP, phone him or her, tell him or her what your groceries are costing, what your heat bills are costing, why you're going to be door knocking against them in the next election.
And I personally am an optimist, and I think they will have to reverse course because they just can't keep spending like this.
They can't keep ignoring people like this.
I think eventually they are going to start listening and they're going to have to scrap the carbon tax, for example.
They're going to have to come forward and saying, you know what?
We actually do need some fiscal discipline and this is what we're going to do.
We're going to get back to balance in three or four years.
Again, I'm probably optimistic, but I do think that's still possible coming from the government.
But we have to keep up the pressure.
Even on a most basic level, some of these liberal MPs are seeing the need for self-preservation showing up at their doorstep right now.
A lot of them see the writing on the wall, I think.
And there might be only one way to save themselves, and that is to break ranks with their own party.
Yes.
And if they know that that is what enough of their constituents want, you just might push them in the right direction.
Now, Chris, I could talk to you all day.
Likewise.
And you do some of that, though.
You do some of mobilizing an army of engaged citizens and taxpayers to have their voices heard to members of parliament or the powers that be.
So tell us how people get involved with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
Thank you.
We are a not-for-profit, non-partisan citizens' advocacy organization started back in 1990, again, in protest of largely the GST back then and the long gun registry.
Remember when that was supposed to cost a little itty-bitty $2 million and it wound up costing almost $2 billion?
They just switched the letter there.
So the Taxpayers Federation, we fight for lower taxes.
And to do that, we get people to sign petitions based on what they want.
So if you want to scrap the gun seizure, for example, if you want to cancel the carbon tax, if you want to defund the CBC, if you want to balance the budget, whatever your flavor is, sign those petitions, okay?
And then you're on our email list and we will call you up for duty when it's time to fight.
So for example, very good recent example.
You probably heard leading up to the budget, they had so many things out there for about a month about a grocery store tax, grocery store tax.
There was so much smoke on this fire, like it was hard to see.
So we mobilized our people and we had a massive campaign of like, everybody email your minister, the minister of finance, everybody email the prime minister, email your MP, say no.
So yes, we did get an increase in capital gains, but there's no grocery store tax.
So CTF supporters paid a big part in that because if they get so much heat, these politicians, they do start to wither.
And so just head on over to our website, taxpayer.com, sign the petitions that speak to you, and then you're part of the team.
And what I like about it too, it isn't just the fight.
It isn't just when you're called upon to email now.
It's kind of like critical mass.
To me, I could be way too nerdy.
But to me, we get all the emails and we respond to them personally.
Like me and Franco and Jay and all my bosses and stuff, we reply to them.
It's kind of a form of fellowship.
And it makes you feel like you're not alone anymore.
And so I'll get choked up.
But there's some like senior citizens in that who haven't chatted with people in quite a while.
And we're in an ongoing correspondence now about smaller government.
Like it's really quite wonderful.
So yeah, thank you for this moment to be able to express this.
Just go to taxpayer.com and sign up.
Yeah.
And there really is an issue for everybody, like charging PST on thrift store items.
I might have written that petition exactly with my own hand.
Yes, it made me mad because I noticed it because I, like you, I'm a thrift shop queen and I'm always thrifting on the weekends.
So yeah, it annoyed me, but not to sound modeling or anything, but I started thinking about like the people who are in really tough.
Yeah.
They're there because that's all we can afford.
And they're getting hit with PST in British Columbia.
So the so-called working party for the everyman, NDP provincial government nails people with PST on thrift shop items.
It is just wrong.
So yeah, if that bugs you, we've got a petition for that too.
It does indeed.
Cause I had to pay it when I was shopping at the Delta Hospice Society thrift store, wherein I found some 10 buy field books and I had to have them.
And then they're like, oh yeah, there's PST on that.
I'm like, thrift store items?
That's crazy.
That's highway robbery.
That's gouging the poor.
I paid it begrudgingly.
But yes, it's a great injustice.
Anyways, I was trying to wrap up the show and here we are complaining about the next thing.
Chris, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thanks so much for the work you do on behalf of Canadian families like mine and like yours too.
I'm just so glad to have an ally like you in the fight for smaller government.
likewise thank you well friends we've come to the portion of the show wherein i invite your viewer feedback I say it every week, but it remains as true as ever.
Without you, there's no rebel news.
So I care about what you think about the work that we do here.
We rely on you.
We don't rely on Justin Trudeau as some sort of deep-pocketed sugar daddy making other people's money rain down into our bank accounts like he did in the latest budget with the mainstream media.
That's why I give out my email address right now at Sheila at RebelNews.com.
Put gun show letters, G-U-N-N, show letters in the subject line so it's easier for me to find.
Do you get sometimes, depending on what sort of controversial nonsense I've said on the internet that day?
Sometimes I get like hundreds of emails a day, besides all the work-related stuff.
Caring About Feedback00:04:09
But also, don't let that be the bar for entry.
For example, if you're watching the free version of the show, be it on YouTube or Rumble, or you're listening to it on whatever podcast platform you find us and you've sat through a couple of ads.
Appreciate you for doing that.
Leave us a comment there.
I go looking over there quite frequently, about 50% of the time.
I go looking over there for what you have to say.
So, today's letter comes to us from Malcolm, and it's on last week's show with Linda Blade, Coach Linda Blade, kinesiologist, author, world-renowned coach, track star, truly an expert in the mechanics of the human body and how to make the human body achieve excellence.
That's what she does, that's what she did for herself.
And she has been an outspoken critic of males, biological males, who identify as females for the purposes of sports competition.
It's just plainly unfair.
And as April Hutchinson says, bodies play sports, not ideologies.
And as Ben Shapiro says, facts don't care about your feelings.
You can feel whatever you want, but the facts remain that a male body is stronger and faster with a larger cardiovascular system than a female.
That it just is the way it is.
So we had an in-depth conversation with Coach Linda.
Last time I talked to her, her book just came out.
You can actually get her book at unsporting.com.
That's a Rebel News published book.
And yeah, that was the last time I talked to her.
And a lot has changed in that world since then.
Linda and her co-author, Barbara Kay, were really the first people in Canada who were seeing where gender theory would take women's sports if it were ever something that gained acceptance.
And it did.
And so now we have April Hutchinson fighting for us.
So all that is to say, Malcolm writes me a letter and says, I am an admirer of Dr. Linda Blade and her stand for female rights.
In the broader context, I would suggest that the more effective prime ministers in the world are female.
For example, in Dira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Meyer, and Merkel.
In the UK, Bannerman is touted as the next leader of the Conservative Party.
Sadly, no Canadian, although Alberta has a decisive premier.
Boy, do we ever.
And she's so good on this issue.
Had there been a female leader in Russia or Iran, there would not be so much fighting in the Middle East.
Maybe.
I don't know.
Egg plus sperm equals male or female.
No other options, no transgender, twin gender, or polysexual demi-boy.
Yeah, I know.
I one day I took a look at just the number of Facebook genders there are, and I have no idea what any of them mean.
Like none whatsoever.
I spent a lot of day on urban dictionary, a lot of my day that day on urban dictionary, trying to figure out what sort of sexual abomination I was trying to understand.
Anyway, let's keep going.
Biology is real.
The earth is round.
Sorry, you flat earth believers.
Thanks for the interview.
Malcolm, sorry, no pronouns.
In the Naimo, Malcolm's behind enemy lines out there on Vancouver Island.
You know, we do have a lot of friends in the socialist percolation chamber of Vancouver Island.
I think a lot of the conservatives and the hippies out there sort of come together in the shared ideology of being left alone and rejecting big pharma.
But that might be where the handholding ends.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here or wherever I might be in the same time, in the same place next week.
And as always, don't let the government tell you that you've had too much To think.