Ezra Levante examines Jagmeet Singh’s September 5th move to end the NDP-Liberal confidence agreement, framing it as a potential election trigger despite Trudeau’s delayed timeline and Singh’s past support. Pierre Polyev counters with conservative promises of tax cuts and housing solutions, while tensions over Trudeau’s rail strike intervention and Alberta’s senator appointments—like Chris Wells—highlight deeper ideological divides. With 83 MPs’ pensions tied to October deadlines, Singh’s early flexibility and Bernier’s fading influence suggest a calculated power play, but the Green Party’s irrelevance and declining NDP support make an election unlikely before 2025. [Automatically generated summary]
Boy, I was excited when I saw that Jagmeet Singh was breaking off his coalition deal with Justin Trudeau.
I thought we'd be headed into an election, but alas, no, it's just, oh, I don't know what it is.
We'll try and figure that out today.
Our guest for the feature interview is Lauren Gunter from the Emmettson Sun.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
I'm going to show you about five video clips today.
I really want you to see them.
I mean, you could figure it out, I guess, by listening to them, but this is a visual show.
So if you get a subscription to Rebel News Plus, you can watch the video show every day.
Plus, the satisfaction of keeping Rebel News strong, because as you know, we take no money from Trudeau, and it shows.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, Jagmeet Singh breaks his coalition deal with Justin Trudeau.
But are we really going to the election in any hurry?
A feature conversation with Lauren Gunter.
It's September 5th, and this is the Ezra Levance Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Singh's Hopeful Gamble00:15:39
Well, Justin Trudeau governs like he has a majority.
He governs in many ways with an iron fist.
He really doesn't care what the opposition says, which is odd considering how weak his election showing was in the 2021 vote.
But he has as his coalition partner Jagmeet Singh, who has been occasionally making remarks about how I'm going to hold that Justin Trudeau to account, but then rolls over every single time.
This has been going on for years.
But then yesterday something changed.
I'm not sure what.
And Jagmeet Singh announced that he is no longer going to have a contract, a written agreement to prop up Justin Trudeau.
He didn't say he's going to force the fall of the government current election.
He's just saying, well, Justin Trudeau can't take me quite as for granted anymore.
Here, listen to him in his own words.
This is Jagmeet Singh yesterday.
Today, I notified the prime minister that I've ripped up the supply and confidence agreement.
Canadians are fighting a battle, a battle for the future of the middle class.
Justin Trudeau has proven again and again, he will always cave to corporate greed.
The Liberals have let people down.
They don't deserve another chance.
There is an even bigger battle ahead.
The threat of Pierre Polyev and conservative cuts from workers, from retirees, from young people, from patients, from families.
He will cut in order to give more to big corporations and wealthy CEOs.
The fact is, the Liberals are too weak, too selfish, and too beholden to corporate interests to fight for people.
They cannot be the change.
They cannot restore the hope.
They cannot stop the Conservatives, but we can.
In the next federal election, Canadians will choose between Pierre Polyev's callous cuts or hope.
Hope that when we stand united, we win.
That Canada's middle class will once again thrive together.
In Canada, we take care of our neighbors.
That's who we are.
I've embraced that value my whole life.
I'm running for prime minister because together we can and will stop conservative cuts.
We can deliver relief and restore hope.
Fix health care.
Build homes you can afford.
Stop price gouging.
It's always impossible until it isn't.
It can't be done until someone does it.
If we're together, nothing is impossible.
And we won't let them tell us it can't be done.
Big corporations and wealthy CEOs have had their government.
It's the people's time.
Well, that sounds very portentous.
What's happening?
Is he going to force an election?
He didn't quite say, did he?
Well, today we had some reactions to him.
Let's start out with Justin Trudeau himself.
Here's Trudeau's reaction.
Take a look.
An election will come in the coming year, hopefully not till next fall, because in the meantime, we're going to deliver for Canadians.
And the contrast with a conservative leader that wants to cut dental care, cut the school food program, cut the insulin through pharmacare, cut the programs that Canadians are relying on to help them through this difficult time.
Well, that'll be a political decision.
The Canadians get to take in an election.
But in the meantime, I'm not letting down Canadians, and I'm going to stay focused on them.
There's Trudeau's reply.
And let's go to Pierre Polyev to round things out.
And then we'll bring in our guest and we're going to chew things over.
Here's Pierre Polliev, the leader of the opposition.
Take a look.
And now, Sell Out Singh has pulled a stunt, the Sellout Singh stunt today, where he came out and claimed that he was wrong, that the coalition was a bad, costly idea, but he refuses to commit to voting for a carbon tax election.
So my message to Sellout Singh is this.
If you're serious about ending your costly carbon tax coalition with Trudeau, then commit today to voting for a carbon tax election at the earliest confidence vote in the House of Commons.
That way we can have a carbon tax election where Canadians will decide between the costly coalition of Trudeau and Sellout Singh that tax your food, punish your work, take your money, double your housing costs, and unleash crime and drugs on your street, or common sense conservatives who will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget, and stop the crime.
Well, there you have it.
The three major party leaders.
What does it all mean?
Does it mean anything at all?
Joining us now via Skype from Alberta's capital city of Edmund to talk about is our friend Lorne Gunter, senior columnist with the Edmondson Sun.
Lorne, great to see you again.
Just the other day, before this announcement was made by Sing, you were sort of laughing about Singh and saying there was really nothing he couldn't abide.
There was no humiliation he couldn't accept from Justin Trudeau.
It was almost like you had a premonition.
Remind us what you were saying right before Singh buckled.
So in 1983, Brian Mulroney beat Joe Clark out of Clark's job.
Clark had been the leader of the PCs and the prime minister.
Mulroney beat him out, took both those jobs, and Clark decided to stick around and serve in Mulroney's cabinet.
And then in 1991, Mulroney put Clark in charge of negotiating a new constitutional deal among the provinces except Quebec that would then be presented to Quebec.
And when he finally got one, Mulroney was out of the country and Clark announced it.
And then Mulroney flew back in a hurry and said, no, Joe was wrong.
There really isn't a deal.
The man had an infinite capacity for political humiliation.
Tom Flanagan, who you know, at U of C prof, said at the time that Clark had the highest threshold for humiliation of anyone in Canadian politics.
And I said, yes, until now.
And he'd been replaced by Sing.
I mean, Singh has spent the last two and a half years swallowing all of the garbage that the liberals threw at them.
They said, oh, we have a pharmacare deal.
No, you don't.
You're covering a couple of drugs.
We have a denticare deal.
No, you don't.
There are very few dentists who are actually participating in it.
And some provinces have pulled out.
Oh, but we have a school food.
No, you don't.
You're shy about, oh, six million kids in the program.
It just doesn't cover anybody.
And so on issue after issue after issue, the liberals would say they lived up to Singh's promises.
And Singh would just sort of, in a meek little way, lap that all up and continue voting for the liberals.
And it was embarrassing.
But I don't think anything has changed.
I mean, to answer your lead-in question, I don't think that Singh's announcement on Wednesday changes anything because he's now said we will only support them on a case-by-case basis.
Well, effectively, that's what they've been doing for the last two and a half years.
And I think the only thing that will come of this is that taxpayers in Canada will be harder hit because the liberals will have to spend even more money to get either the bloc or the NDP to hold them in office.
Of all those clips that we just saw, I think the funniest and at the same time, the most infuriating thing that was said was Trudeau said, well, I hope there's not an election for another year because we're planning to spend the next 12 months delivering on those things that we've promised Canadians.
They've been in power for nine years.
I mean, why are we waiting until the last 12 months for Justin Trudeau to actually figure out how to solve housing, how to solve inflation, how to solve crime?
These are all problems his government has created.
I actually was a little surprised when I saw Polyev's remarks yesterday, this morning.
Sorry, I saw them this morning.
I thought he was weak.
I thought he was contrived.
I thought he kept trying too hard to show the contents of his t-shirt.
And he didn't go after the fact that the liberals and the NDP together for the last two and a half years, the liberals for the last nine, have created all of these problems.
It's liberal bail reform that's led to all the increase in violent crime, much of the increase in violent crime.
It's liberal safe supply that's led to all the open drug use in public places.
It's liberal spending policies and liberal interest policies that have led to the unaffordability of ordinary middle-class staples like food and gasoline and electricity in your home.
I mean, those are all liberal NDP-created problems.
And that's what I think Polyev needs to keep hammering at.
But it just infuriates me when Trudeau seems to think that, oh, well, you know, it's Pierre Polyev who's going to hand everything over to big corporations and make huge cuts into programs that you middle-class Canadians are depending on.
They create these dinky little programs that have no real impact on inflation or housing or crime or anything like that to create, to correct problems they created.
And then they say, oh, that miserable Pierre Polyev, he's going to cut all those programs you've come to depend on at exactly the wrong thing.
Well, now, if you just reversed a lot of liberal policies, you'd get rid of all of that stuff quite simply.
I mean, this is the worst government Canada has ever had, period.
And so I don't want to hear from Trudeau.
And I don't think Singh is going to pull the plug on these guys anytime soon.
Yeah, I mean, I think the difference between today and yesterday is yesterday Singh basically said to Trudeau, it's a buffet.
You can have everything and anything because we're yours.
And now you can just order them a la carte.
You'll just have to have them for each dish off the menu.
Or another way to look at it is you owned us before.
Now you've got to rent us.
So I think he might actually extract a little bit more because he's going to make demands on a more frequent basis.
But Jagmeet Singh is doing very poorly in the polls.
From what I understand, I'd have to freshen my memory.
I don't think they're doing well fundraising.
I don't think he wants to go to the polls himself.
I think he just realized that Justin Trudeau is so hated.
I mean, David Coletto, who works for the pollster Abacus, he's my favorite pollster to quote because I know he's not particularly sympathetic to the conservatives.
So when he says something that is in their favor, I know he's not saying it easily, so I can trust him more.
He says that when people look at Trudeau, they're more likely to hate him than just to dislike him, which is interesting.
Normally, it's sort of like a bell curve.
Most people are okay, a little bit of dislike, a little bit of like, and it's only the margins that they love you or hate you.
With Trudeau, there's hate.
I think it's people feeling let down, people feeling disillusioned, people just sick of him, sick of that voice, sick of that dramatic actor's style, sick of how he never takes any blame.
I just think that Jagmeet Singh has finally realized that he is hitched to the most hated man in politics, and he wants to get a little bit of room between him, but he doesn't want to stop supporting him.
That's my view.
No, I think that's right.
And the NDP do not want to go to an election now because, as you said, in the last two months, over the summer of 23, it was the liberal support that collapsed, completely collapsed.
You could see it in the polls day after day after day.
They came down and down and down and down.
They have never recovered from that.
This summer, it was the NDP that came down and down and down.
They've lost about a quarter of the support that they had going into summer.
And I bet you that doesn't come back either.
So Singh is hoping against hope that if he pulls away from Trudeau a little tiny bit, he will raise his party standing up at least high enough that they can win the same 25 seats that they won last time.
Because right now, they're headed for about 13 or 14 seats.
They get half their caucus, which is 26 members.
Half their caucus is in BC.
They are at risk of coming out of BC with only four or five seats.
So he's hoping that if he gets a little distance from Trudeau, he can get back up to at least no net loss from the 2021 election.
And they have their fundraising, you're correctly, you're correct in saying that it's collapsed too.
Because why would you give money to the NDP if all you're going to get out of that is reinforcement of liberal policy?
So he had to sort of show that he said it in that video.
I tore up the agreement.
Yes.
So what?
Yeah.
But you're still effectively abiding it.
And Polyev had it right.
He said, look, if Jagmit Singh is serious about this, he will say right now, on the first opportunity when parliament returns after the 20th September, I and my party will vote non-confidence in this government and bring it down and force an election.
He's not going to be able to do that.
That would clearly.
Railroad unions were furious with Trudeau because Trudeau had said to Sing, well, Singh at first threatened Trudeau.
He would pull out of this agreement if Trudeau intervened in the rail strike.
It took 17 hours after the rail strike began for Trudeau to intervene and send it to the binding arbitration.
So the NDP and the rail unions were furious.
The NDP caucus told Singh, apparently, I don't know this directly, but I've been told it by several people around the Hill.
The NDP caucus apparently told Singh that he was going to have to face their wrath at their retreat just before parliament returns if he didn't tear up this agreement, because now the liberals had crossed the line that even the sycophantic New Democrats in his caucus could no longer abide.
And the rail unions were going to throw the weight of the private sector union movement behind, guess what?
Behind Pierre Polyev.
If Singh, you can see that.
I mean, a lot of the private sector unions are probably going to sit out the next election.
They don't like the liberals.
They're a little afraid of the PCs.
But Pierre Polyev has done a much better job of speaking to where ordinary people are.
Working Class Concerns00:12:29
And you have to remember now that union members are no longer working class.
They're largely middle class.
If you are in a union and you are a government worker, well, you're above middle class, you're upper middle class.
If you are in a private sector union, you're no longer working class.
You're middle class.
And so when people talk about middle class issues and how it's affecting Canadians, it's affecting labor unions in the private sector every bit as much.
And so they're as attracted to Polyevinist solutions as they are to either of the other two parties in English Canada.
And so there was this perfect storm of anger on the left and union threats and resentment by Singh's own caucus.
And he had to do something.
So what he has done is in name only, he has torn up the supply and confidence agreement.
Wow.
I didn't realize what a big role the rail strike played.
I want to go back to the videos of the three men we showed because each of them, there was something I'd like to remark on.
And you touched on it there by saying that labor unions in 2024, I mean, the government sector labor unions, they're going to go liberal every time, or even NDP.
Or NDP.
But private sector unions, it would be really weird for them to go for the NDP or the liberals because as you say, it's guys making low six figures.
You know, it's hard, like hardworking guys, but they have a level of wealth.
And they typically have, it's work hardworking men who tilt conservative.
And I want to show you just very quick clips.
I don't want to play too long, but when Jagmeet Singh was talking about standing with the workers and standing against the rich CEOs, I thought, who are you?
You think you're Tommy Douglas?
I mean, I don't know if you saw it out there in Edmonton, but in Toronto, there's sort of a fancy fashion, sort of upmarket magazine called Toronto Life.
And it's sort of an aspirational style mag.
And Jagmeet Singh, who's a handsome man, posed for a series of glamour shots in his fine bespoke suits.
He's got a BMW.
And he's a wealthy man who has, he's a handsome man, but he dresses like he's a model and he drops.
I don't know where he gets his money from, but the guy's rich.
For him to say he's with the working class, it just doesn't really ring true.
Here's Pierre Polyev, who he accuses of being anti-labor and pro-CEO.
I just want to give you two clips.
I'm not going to play the long, but this is, I just saw this the other day.
I don't know if you saw it, Lauren.
Pierre Polyev put out a video on Labor Day that I thought, you know what?
He is going for working class conservatives, sort of like Trump did.
Trump the billionaire.
Well, I think he knew how to talk to the working class.
Here's a clip of Pierre Polyev on Labor Day.
Tell me who is going to connect more with workers.
Fancy Pantsy Jagmeet Singh or fairly normal guy Pierre Polyev with this kind of a vid.
A country is built by the people who rise when it is still dark.
The servers and soldiers, the farmers and factory hands, the nurses and night shift workers, often called ordinary people, but they are extraordinary.
They carry the government on their backs with little reward.
You now pay more to bring home less.
That is if you can afford a home at all.
Many live in fear of crime and chaos.
But there is a new dawn rising where hard work is rewarded, where there's affordable food and a home in a safe neighborhood, where everyone gets a fair shot at a good life.
Where common sense is common.
And where, after the night, no matter how long or dark, comes morning.
Let's bring it home.
So that's Pierre Polyev speaking quite honestly and candidly.
I mean, it feels authentic.
Compare that to what he said about CEOs.
He practically sounds like a Marxist when he's bashing CEOs as a class.
He says, don't you send your lobbyists to me.
And he's not the kind of guy who would go to, you mentioned Mulroney earlier.
Mulroney would hang out with the Council of CEOs.
I forget what it used to be called.
They used to be big players, this Council of CEOs, like the Plutocrat Club.
Here's Pierre Polyev from a few months ago, where he basically says, I don't give a damn about your CEOs.
Take a look at this.
This is the first time I have spoken to either a Chamber of Commerce or a Board of Trade since I became leader of the Common Sense Conservatives two years ago.
During that time, I've spoken at 110 shop floors and five union local facilities.
And the reason why this is only my first chamber or board of trade has nothing to do with my view on business.
I love business.
I love free enterprise.
I love the people who risk their entire worth in order, their entire family savings in order to start a business and build their dreams.
Rather, the reason this is my first time speaking to a business association of this type is because my experience with the corporate lobbyists in Ottawa, the main groups there, have been that they have been utterly useless in advancing any common sense interests for the people on the ground.
The corporate lobbyists in Ottawa are focused on getting lunches with ministers at the Rito Club or showing off their latest AESG brochure or expecting that politicians are going to do things for them without actually convincing the people on the ground of the benefit to them.
My common sense plan to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget, stop the crime, is a bottom-up free enterprise agenda, not a top-down state capitalism agenda.
It is not about politicians and CEOs working together for their own interests.
It is about unleashing the power of free enterprise so that workers and entrepreneurs and consumers can exchange the voluntary purchase of goods for services, goods for dollars, of investment for interest, and of work for wages.
So I just don't think it's going to stick.
And when you look at demographic support for Pierre Polyev, I think he's going to get more working class support than Jagmeet Singh.
And let me ramble for one more minute, Lauren.
In Trudeau's clip, he talked about the big corporations.
Who's giving tens of billions of dollars to foreign automakers to build electrical cars in Ontario?
That's not the conservatives, the so-called party of the little guy, the coalition between Jagmeet Singh and Justin Trudeau.
They've given tens of billions of dollars in subsidies to the richest multinational companies around.
I don't know.
I just don't think that their class struggle, traditional arguments are working in 2024.
No, they're not.
And it's interesting.
And there's never a direct parallel between American politics and Canadian politics.
But this week, the New York Times had some fascinating polling numbers on swing voters, people who are neither dedicated Democrats nor staunch Republicans.
And they tended to be more men.
They tended to be in trades and in skilled positions rather than in academic positions or professions.
And the number one things for them, it's interesting, it was an interesting combination.
It was economic, standard of living, cost of living issues, and woke agenda.
And if we're at all like that in Canada, there are an awful lot of people who are adrift at the moment because the two parties that they would normally have chosen between, the Liberals and the New Democrats, neither one of them represents their interests, nor knows how to speak to them, nor understands where they're at in the given moment, who don't care.
They're not worried about whether or not there is a capital gains tax on wealthy Canadians and CEOs, which is an obsession of both the NDP and the liberals.
What they care about is somebody who's saying, look, I understand it has gotten harder every time you go to the grocery store for you to fill your cart with the food that your family needs.
And we're going to do everything we can to bring those prices down.
The NDP and the liberals say, oh, that's because there are nasty, greedy CEOs in charge of all of the groceries.
No, it's not.
It's because you put taxes on everything that moves.
If I am going to try and plow a field, I got a carbon tax.
Well, some of the farmers' stuff doesn't have carbon tax on them, but pretty much everything from tilling the soil to driving the trucks to the grocery store to you driving to the grocery store to get it, you've increased the price because you put a carbon tax on it.
And then you spent so much money that you drove up inflation on the monetary side.
And then, you know, you've allowed in last year about 2.3 million new Canadians, all of whom are, I don't blame them.
You and I have had this conversation before.
I do not blame the people who have been let in legally by this government, but they're all looking for health care.
They're all looking for jobs.
They're all looking for housing.
That's, of course, pushed the price up on all of those things in the free market and reduced the availability of them in the public sector.
So, you know, who created this mess?
It's not CEOs and wealthy Canadians.
It's funny.
The Privy Council Office, before the federal budget came out in April, did some focus groups in February where they put out potential, what were potential themes from the federal government about what might go into the budget.
And they were pushing the access to information stuff showed they were pushing this idea that the wealthy should pay a greater share.
The wealthy, the wealthy, the wealthy, they're getting away with murder.
They're, you know, financial murder.
They're the ones who are keeping you down.
It's real class warfare stuff.
And the focus group said, no, no, we're not interested in that.
What we're interested in is people who can bring down the cost of living and help us to buy our first home because the prices are too high.
And so it is that bread and butter material that I think Polyeb excels at.
And the other two are just off in some sort of Marxist wonderland blaming the head of loblaws.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny.
I looked at Loblaw's financials just yesterday by coincidence.
And if I'm not mistaken, their rate of return on investment is 3.3%.
So, and listen, I hate loblaws for another reason.
They were part of the bread price fixing scheme that literally took billions of dollars worth of bread out of the mouths of poor people.
I despise loblaws, but they're not really the profiteers driving up the prices.
I mean, I'm not here to defend them.
They're not making a lot of dough.
It's the inflation you talk about, which is largely a government creation.
You mentioned briefly the New York Times talking about people thinking about woke issues.
And I jotted down three here.
Woke issues, even sometimes conservative media are scared to talk about it.
Mickey Kaus has a phrase, the undernews.
It's under the, you know, the news talks about official things, but what do people talk about at the water cooler over coffee when they can be quiet and no one's sort of paying, no one's going to cancel them if they say the wrong thing?
Aggressive Activist Provokes Controversy00:02:33
He always put immigration as an underneath issue.
And that's breaking through into the real news these days because it's just so astonishingly large.
But transgenderism, people are worried about that.
Men in sports, the Olympics, again, it broke into the larger discussion, but it's anyone who's got a daughter in school sports knows about it.
Anyone who goes into a change room and sees a bloke in there knows about it.
And the drug legalization of, quote, safe supply.
These are things that people know are new.
They were always a bit of a problem, but they've just been accelerated.
And crime, and Polyev mentioned some of that.
He had a weird start in his video.
He talked about the carbon tax election.
It didn't really, like, I think he took him 30 seconds to find his feet there.
But when he started to talk about drugs and crime again, and I think he found his feet again, those woke issues.
And by the way, they're very strong in immigrant communities.
Do you think the Chinese Canadian community is thrilled with transgenderism, legalized drugs, or the crime wave?
No, they're not.
So I think those things click a lot more rather than the conservatives refer the CEOs.
Like you say, I just don't think that's clicking.
It's like they're generals fighting the last war.
It's like neither Trudeau nor Jack Meet Singh have updated their talking points since Stephen Harper's demise.
Yeah.
So one quick example of the sort of thing you're talking about.
The liberals appointed a senator from Alberta on the weekend who is not just an advocate for the LGBTQ community.
He is a very, very aggressive activist for the LGBTQ community.
In fact, he did it one.
Yeah, he did it at one time, put out an ad, sorry, a cartoon that equated Christians to Nazis and LGBTQ to Jewish victims, which is appalling.
He's absolutely appalling.
But they appointed him because they were hoping.
This is my speculation.
They were hoping his appointment would set off a firestorm against LGBTQ issues, or at least against him, which they could then interpret as an attack on the LGBTQ community broadly.
Provoke Reaction: LGBTQ Senators00:04:54
It hasn't done that.
But why would they want to do that?
Well, it's because they have a lot of MPs in ridings that have large immigrant populations where LGBTQ issues are not popular.
So they can't, as an official party, come out and say things that are LGBTQ friendly.
They were hoping to create, to get, to provoke the conservatives and the Christian communities into saying nasty things about LGBTQ and then reaping the rewards of that.
But so far, hasn't happened.
Yeah.
You know, we've been following that closely.
And the fact that Trudeau made that announcement on the Labor Day long weekend, I think was really telling.
Lord, I don't know if you know this, but we put up a petition called NotMySenator.ca.
We got nearly 25,000 signatures in like two days.
There's a lot of people.
It's not just that Chris Wells is, it's not just that he's for gay rights.
He's for transitioning minor children, as in the drugs, the hormones, and their irreversible surgery for minor children and to keep that out of the realm of parents.
A lot of sports organizations, not a lot, some major sports organizations, the Federation of International Swimming Associations, for one, have rules now, and they've adopted them in the last year or two, that say that once you have reached puberty, there are permanent changes made in the male body that give them advantages in sports.
Even if they're only 12 or 13 at the time it happens, it still changes muscle mass, it changes bone density, it changes all sorts of things that give men who then transition to women unfair advantages in sports.
So the rule is now, if you reach puberty in swimming, you can never compete as a woman.
Well, that's why people like Chris Wells and other activists in that community have decided that you need to have puberty blocking drugs for 11 and 12 year olds who are thinking of transitioning so that if they choose later to go into sports, they haven't gone through puberty and therefore they would still qualify.
Oh my God.
It's so, it's so, you know what I was in the UK and I heard a speech by a man who leads something called the Gay Men's Network.
He was speaking at a conference.
I wanted to hear what he had to say.
And he said if he were born today, he would have been trans.
That people would have said, oh, you're not gay.
You're a woman trapped in a man's body.
We've got to chop you up.
He actually said transgenderism, as it is expressed by the radical edge, is actually an anti-gay men's movement.
I was shocked to hear that.
I'd never heard that formulation before because he said they just, what if you're just a gay man?
What if you're just gay?
They say, no, we've got to transition you.
He said they would have gone to work on him and destroyed his life.
I had never heard that perspective before.
No, neither of us.
And to give a national seat to a guy who has spent 20 years on this, I think it's outside the norm for Alberta Values.
But the thing about Alberta is it actually has senators elect.
People who actually, I remember 20 plus years ago, I was involved with the Reform Party when we helped get some senators elected because the entire province of Alberta is one riding.
These senators elect have hundreds of thousands of votes.
There's no MLA or MP who gets hundreds of thousands of votes in a day because their districts are small.
But if your district is the whole province of Alberta, you'll rack up such a huge Democratic mandate.
So you've got these people sitting in Alberta.
They call themselves senators elect, sort of like senators in waiting.
Senators in waiting.
And so it wasn't just that Trudeau chose someone outside the norm.
He chose someone in the face of these Alberta elections.
And that, too, I think he was hoping for to provoke a reaction.
Has done the same thing.
Liberal prime ministers have appointed senators in the face of Albertans' desires for decades.
That really isn't anything new.
And it's a slap to the idea that we should elect our own senators.
But yeah, it's, you know, this was more than just that.
It was a trick to try and provoke a backlash against Chris Wells, which hasn't yet materialized because the liberals cannot push the LGBTQ agenda the way they would like to, because in many of their ridings, particularly in Ontario and in Quebec, they have large, mostly Muslim, but not necessarily just Muslim populations.
They have new Canadian populations who don't support their LGBTQ agenda.
Maxime's October Pensions Issue00:06:21
And so therefore, they can't be upfront and honest about it.
They have to do it this sneaky back doorway.
Yeah.
You've been very generous with your time.
I just have two more questions for you that I'd like your thoughts on.
You saw Trudeau talk about an election next fall.
So that would be fall 2025, which would be four years from his last mandate, which is sort of traditional, although he went sooner than that.
He went 2019, 2021.
So he can move quicker if he thinks it's in his interest.
So he was hoping he'd get another year.
Pierre Polyev said, no, call a confidence question as soon as possible.
What's your feeling?
Do you think that despite the announcement yesterday, Jack Meet Singh will be there for his buddy?
He'll be the happy sidekick for a full year, or do you think there will be something that precipitates a falling out?
If it's nine months or 12 months, what does it matter?
They're going to continue to do damage to Canada throughout that period.
It's not imminent.
And so, you know, it's it's do I think we could go in in April, May, or June?
Yes, I think that's probably more likely now than October.
But you have a number of MPs, mostly liberals and new Democrats, but some conservatives too, who do not get their pensions fully vested unless they go until late October of 2025.
Now, Singh, his pension vests in February of next year, because he was elected in a by-election before the election six years ago.
So he could pull the plug and still get his pension as early as about March of next year.
But there are, I'm sorry, I've forgotten the number.
I didn't know we were going to talk about this today, but I think there are 83 MPs whose pensions do not fully vest until October.
And you remember the election by law is supposed to be October 28th, or 21st, but it was moved to October the 28th so that these guys would qualify.
Because if it goes October 21st, they don't get vested.
Wow.
So sneaky guys.
Yeah.
So, you know, do I think we're going to go early?
There's a good possibility of that.
But there's also this possibility that even some of the conservative MPs will not be eager to go early because they're going to want that full MP's pension.
Right.
Although they're likely to get re-elected.
It's the guys who aren't going to get re-elected who are most at risk.
Right, right, right.
Here's the last question.
The other day I talked to Maxime Bernier again.
And I've known Maxime Bernier for more than 20 years.
I knew him before he got an MP.
And when he was at the Montreal Economic Institute, he was libertarian.
I always liked him.
I always had a soft spot for him.
I find him stylish.
I like his freedom orientation.
I like that he's politically incorrect.
He's a very charming man.
I think he is.
And that counts for something.
But he's had a lot of losses in a row.
Not only did his PPC lose, but he personally has run in by-elections, and I think he's lost four times.
Now, when I spoke to him the other day, he pointed out that Nigel Farage ran for parliament, I think, seven or eight times before he won.
That's true.
But I said to him, I put it to him, I said, look, when Aaron O'Toole was the leader of the conservatives and when he was too close to the liberals on policy issues, I mean, we were talking about COVID and COVID and lockdowns, but you could also put the carbon tax in there and other things too.
I said there was a demand for another point of view and PPC could absorb that.
But Pierre Polyev is tougher on ideological issues, starting to talk about immigration.
I put it to Maxime Bernier that a lot of the raison d'être of the PPC is being reabsorbed into the Conservative Party.
I think it's true.
What do you think will happen to the more libertarian or more dissident voters?
Well, first of all, I don't think most of the PPC voters were libertarians.
I think that they were dissidents and conspiracy theorists and hard-nosed kind of people who pulled their trailers up to provincial boundaries after April 1 when the carbon tax was increased and have camped out there for six months protesting.
And I think that that, I think they got 2.5% of the vote last time.
I think they're going to go down to under 1% of the vote this time.
I think it's just his hardcore supporters.
Because I do think there is an attraction to winners.
And so if you have right-of-center views and Aaron O'Toole is your champion and you're pretty sure he's going to lose, well, there's no harm in voting for Maxime Bernier.
But if you hate Trudeau, as we talked about so many people do, and you see Polyev as a winner, you don't want to risk that by voting for Maxime Bernier.
You will vote for a Tory candidate.
And, you know, and the other thing is there were, for instance, my MP right now is Randy Boissano.
No, he's awful.
The liberal employment minister.
He only won because there was a People's Party candidate who siphoned off just enough votes from James Cumming, who was the conservative MP until 2021, that Cumming couldn't win.
He took off, if you take a look at the numbers, the People's Party candidate took almost exactly the number that Cumming needed to beat Boissino.
And time after time after time, when I followed Cummings workers around to report on how the election was going, people would say, I'm not voting for you because Jason Kenney has all of these rules about the pandemic.
Well, of course, Kenny had nothing to do with the federal side of things.
But without Kenny there, without the pandemic there, without the biggest single reason I think that Bernier got votes was because he was decidedly against all of the pandemic restrictions.
Without all of that and with the chance that the conservatives are going to win, Max seems not going to do very well.
How about the Green Party?
Green Vote Dilemma00:01:19
I mean, they always bump around.
They get a few MPs.
I think it's sort of a make work project for Elizabeth May.
When they get strong, sometimes it siphons votes away from the liberals.
They also act as an attack dog in debates against conservatives.
What do you think this next election, do you think there's even room for the Green Party or do you think it's so important that a Green voter would vote liberal or NDP instead?
No.
And I think now, so the winner theory I have that hurts Bernier, the loser theory helps the Greens.
If you're going to lose anyway, there's no point voting for the Liberals.
Right.
You might as well vote for the Greens and vote your heart.
Yeah.
If that's where your heart is.
Yeah.
Very interesting.
So, you know, they might win two seats.
They might win three.
I doubt they'd win three, but they might win two.
They've won two before.
Yeah.
But no, they're a non-entity politically.
Well, the media sure loves them, if nothing else.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
Well, listen, Lauren, it's great to catch up with you.
Thanks for spending so much time with us.
I was excited for a moment.
I thought we were going to an election, but you read the fine print.
I don't think there's going to be an election anytime soon.