Sheila Gunn-Reid highlights Alberta’s PST-free back-to-school savings—$50 per family, $20M total—while Chris Sims of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation contrasts it with BC’s higher costs and fiscal mismanagement. Sims criticizes Trudeau’s $800B debt trajectory, carbon tax, and Senate appointments like Christopher Wells ("radical sex extremist") and Charles Adler ("Trudeau fan boy"), urging petitions via taxpayer.com to pressure policy changes. Transparency in petition details, like notmysenator.com or stopclassroomgrooming.ca, ensures informed public engagement, reinforcing parental rights amid perceived democratic overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
Did you know that it's much cheaper to buy your school supplies in Alberta?
Chris Sims from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation joins me tonight to tell us about the Alberta Advantage.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Alberta is the last province in this country to avoid having a provincial sales tax, although there are constant pushes from the big-headed people in academia who can afford to pay and increase costs on literally everything for a provincial sales tax.
For them, it is much better to collect more money from the struggling taxpayer than to rein in government spending.
But not having a provincial sales tax makes everything from buying groceries to back to school shopping much more expensive.
In fact, my guest today, my friend Chris Sims of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, a mom just like me with kids going back to school, ran the numbers, broke it down, and she's got the details up next.
So joining me now is my friend and good friend of the show, Chris Sims of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
And I saw this post that you made maybe a week or so ago on X, and it was about just the savings that Albertans have over other parents when we send our kids back to school.
Tell us about this.
Yeah, big time.
So again, this is one of those things, you know, when people join like a new religion or they start a new diet or something and they're the ones that can't shut up about it.
So I'm that person because I've moved here.
You're a crossfitter.
Exactly.
So I moved here from British Columbia where they stick PST on everything, including thrift shopped items and used cars.
So they're really bad for that.
Very mean to poor people.
And I moved here to the wonderful land of Alberta that has no PST.
So I have these fresh eyeballs on everything.
Whenever I buy something and I wince a little at the till, it's not as bad as I was expecting for the tax because we don't have PST here in Alberta.
And I really wanted to highlight it because as you know, Sheila, every now and then there's going to be some paper that comes out, some academic, some politician who intones in a musky way, you know, it is time for us to join the rest of Canada and get a sales tax in Alberta.
No, we don't.
So I worked out the math.
On average, the average Alberta family saves over 50 bucks just on the PST non-existing here, just on back to school shopping.
So I'm not talking about all the rest of the year.
So that's big money.
Across the whole province, if you add up the student population, that's around $20 million that families are saving.
That's amazing.
But, you know, we look at that as Albertans are saving money.
But those are other families across this country being absolutely hammered by this.
So you tack this on to the cost of living.
You know, like it's more money to drive your kids to school.
Busing fees are going up because of the carbon tax, which Justin Trudeau just didn't even factor into the equation.
Other families in the country are paying $50 more than Alberta families.
And I know how hard it is for an Alberta family to make ends meet, which, I mean, it's just atrocious.
It is.
It's disgusting.
And when you think about 50 bucks, I can get two backpacks for that for my kids if I shop smart.
I can even get a pair of winter boots for one of my kids, new, for that kind of money.
And then you start thinking you're right about the other families.
So I'll use British Columbia as an example because it's pretty egregious for their costs.
And also I have first-hand experience there.
So they'll put PST, like I said, on everything from a brand new laptop and, you know, an average laptop nowadays will run you around $300.
Okay.
That's an instant $25 charge, not including the eco fee and all that other nonsense that they stick on there.
That's just PST.
They put PST on almost all clothing, almost all books and pens and paper and supplies.
Now, technically in British Columbia, you can say, hey, these are tax exempt, but like a handful of people know that in British Columbia for school supplies and almost no retailer knows about it.
You have to stand there literally with your calculator and receipt in hand, like citing the law with the clerk.
And even then, the poor clerk probably doesn't know how to give you PST exemption.
And quite often, if you want to go all the way to the mat, you have to register like how many kids you have and how old they are and blah, blah, blah, blah, in order to even get their 7% PST back.
And so if you start thinking about this as a family and you start adding all of that up on the PST on pretty much everything except for fresh food, it's an outrageous burden on families.
And it's when times come around things like Christmas shopping, things like back to school, holidays, that's when it really shows for that price tag.
And so I really wanted to highlight the difference that we pay here in Alberta.
It is a real Alberta advantage.
And also highlight how unfair this is in other provinces.
And some of the things are just stupid.
Like in Saskatchewan, you pay, correct me if I'm wrong, folks who are listening, it's 6% PST.
You pay it on atlases, but you don't pay it on maps.
In British Columbia, backpacks are taxable, but bags specifically designed to carry books are not.
So it's one of these ridiculous bureaucratic maize hell tax code situations that just winds up costing people a ton of money.
And we don't pay it here in Alberta and we have to fight to keep it that way.
CTF is something that I really appreciate is because you take these like big complex tax issues, which are, I think, specifically complex.
So you just throw up your hands and pay it.
But you break it down by what it means to each individual family.
So you've done calculations about how much your Christmas dinner is, you know, how much it costs less in Alberta than it does in other provinces.
And I think that's really important to not only help Albertans understand how important fighting to keep a PST out of our province is, but how important it is for other provinces to look at their own governments and say, wouldn't it be great if you gave us a little bit of a tax break here?
Yes, exactly.
It is done on purpose.
So if a bureaucrat or a politician can get away with telling you, oh, well, the carbon tax is $80 something per ton, like your eyes glaze over.
Nobody knows what the hell that means.
I don't know what that means, really.
It's like, honey, did you pick up a ton of carbon on the way home?
No.
What is a ton of carbon?
Like what is the ton of carbon?
Exactly.
What is a ton of carbon?
Can you even picture it in your head?
Like I kind of picture like a gigantic like earth mover truck full of like black stuff.
And then what is it taxed based on?
It's crazy.
But if I tell you it's 15 bucks per fill up of a pickup truck, there you go.
That's a roast chicken and a jug of milk.
Fill it up twice.
Now you're buying a turkey with some fixings.
See how that helps?
So it's the same thing with PST.
So here in Alberta, on average, it's around $50 savings per family on the PST.
And this is me cutting it in half.
Okay.
Because there's Deloitte, which does this big survey every year for consumerism.
And they actually estimated that the average Canadian family spends around $700 on back to school.
And so the thrifty mama and me was like, that's really expensive.
So I cut that in half.
Say you spend $350.
Okay.
This is how much we're saving.
So the average Alberta family, saving around 50 bucks.
What they're paying in Ontario, for example, is like $65, $60 extra per family.
Again, this is just for this little window of back to school shopping.
Spread that kind of spending or saving out over the entire year.
And we see why people in other provinces are struggling worse here than in Alberta.
Now, I wanted to stress, though, I do know, and I hear you, folks in Alberta are still struggling, like a lot.
Can I mention something?
So it really annoyed me.
So I've been friends with Rob Snow for a long time.
He's a good friend of mine now.
He's a mainstream media radio host.
He has a national show.
Way back in the day, we started working together in the early 2000s, like back when we had Blackberries and like still had cassette recorders for reporting.
I was on there about a week or so ago with a liberal strategist, well known in the Ottawa sector.
You see her on TV all the time.
And we were talking about the Trudeau government's cabinet retreat in Halifax.
And I said, you know what?
Keep your receipts because the last few retreats you guys have gone on, like in Charlottetown and Vancouver, have been stupid expensive and you're wasting money.
And she snarkily said, oh, well, I guess they should just pack a peanut butter sandwich.
Yeah, they should.
They should also stay home because we have gigantic buildings in Ottawa that taxpayers already pay for.
But you know what stuck in my craw, Sheila?
Is that peanut butter is a staple for food banks.
Peanut butter is one of the things I have noticed between inflation and the carbon tax has gone up ridiculously in the last three years.
I was at a store, a mainstream store with a huge grocery section just yesterday.
Peanut butter was $11, $10.99 for a one kilogram brand name jar of peanut butter.
Not organic, standard, regular peanut butter.
$11.
I used to be able to get peanut butter on sale for $3.75 just a few years ago.
And so I was, that really annoyed me because she said in a really sarcastic way, oh, should we pack peanut butter sandwiches?
Okay.
Number one, we shouldn't be paying for a lobster or whatever at these retreats.
Number two, these retreats shouldn't be happening outside of Ottawa.
There's no reason for it.
And number three, read the room.
Like, why can some of these folks not read the room?
We've got record demand for food banks and 50% of Canadians are within 200 bucks of not making all their minimum payments.
Why can't this set understand this?
Well, and these are the same people who told me that it was acceptable to go to church over Zoom.
Surely to hell they can have their cabinet retreats over Zoom too.
And as you are, as you rightly point out, read the room.
The top three issues, I think, are inflation, affordability, and healthcare in this country.
And they're off having luxury cabinet retreats while Canadians are struggling to make ends meet and being crushed under these escalating Trudeau taxes.
I mean, it's appalling.
Yeah, pack a peanut butter sandwich or as you say, better yet, stay home.
Yes, exactly.
And their food is paid for too in Ottawa because the members of parliament, I keep repeating this, are technically away from home when they're in Ottawa.
So they're like on the per diem train.
So their food is paid for.
And almost always, especially when the House is in session, I think there's at least two, maybe three, but I think at least two hot meals provided right in the lobby of the House of Commons.
Like big chilled juice bottles, grilled fish, all that stuff every flippin day.
So yeah, maybe you could, you know, suffer and stay in the national capital while you're trying to do the nation's work.
We've before, I want to talk to you about doing the nation's work and how Justin Trudeau doesn't plan to ever, apparently ever balance a budget.
But things are sort of looking up here in Alberta.
Good News, Bad Borrowing00:12:03
We our fiscal update was out.
Shows that we've got an even higher surplus than was estimated.
But you point out that that's good news, but it's not all good news.
Yeah.
So I'll start with the good news because I think everybody needs good news.
So folks, if they remember, so the way that budgets work, okay, is that the big February budget that comes out provincially is really kind of just a fiscal update.
I know that sounds weird, but the final numbers aren't super duper in all the way.
Okay.
So in February, the Alberta government reported a teeny tiny little surplus.
Like in a budget worth around $70 billion, a surplus of $367 million is as thin as a baby kitten's whisker.
So that's fine.
Fast forward to now.
We had our first quarterly fiscal update at the very end of August, beginning of September.
Happens every year.
The good news is, is that the surplus is more than $4 billion with a B. That's good.
The little yellow light of caution I have here on my dashboard, though, and I could sense that tone coming from Minister Horner as well.
So I don't think I'm speaking at a school, is that as he called it, it's an accounting surplus.
So what does that mean exactly?
So that means they don't have a lot of cash on hand for the rest of the fiscal year.
That can sometimes be okay because that means that governments are less likely to blow the money.
Right.
And it also, I think, means that they're not taking in more than they should.
Yes.
So always worried when they say surplus, I'm like, wait, you took too much from me.
Give me my tax cut.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Right.
We'll get to that.
And so I found this very interesting, his kind of tone of caution.
It was a cautious optimism, I would describe it as.
And we shared that.
And so what's happening is this gets a little weird.
They're still borrowing more money.
The debt is going up by a few billion dollars.
It's concerning.
I spoke with the finance department several times that day, and they said, oh, we're borrowing more now because we have a much better rate right now than they're anticipating years going forward.
And so that way we're doing it now.
It's all part of the way that we're balancing it out, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So my note of caution there is that you can't predict a future.
Nobody knows what the rates are going to be.
Nobody knows what's going to roll down the pipe next time.
There could be a disaster, God forbid.
So that's a little bit concerning.
The bright side, though, is that our interest payments, they call them debt servicing costs, our interest payments are going down.
We're spending about $100 million less this year right now, servicing the debt, paying our interest on our credit card in Alberta than we were last year.
So that's good.
So again, it's good news and a little bit of yellow caution lights.
The really good news is that we have got really strong fiscal guardrails in place in Alberta.
It might be some of the strongest actually in North America, definitely the strongest in all of Canada, meaning they must balance the budget.
Okay.
They must keep spending increases below the rate of inflation plus population growth.
We've been telling them to do that since the Backstreet Boys were topping the charts.
If they'd listened to us back in the mid 90s, we'd have $300 billion stuffed under the mattress right now, not including interest.
And they also have to use half of cash surpluses down on the debt with the rest of it either going into the savings fund, heritage fund, or being spent on one-time spending.
The other part of the good news is that the heritage fund keeps going up.
They put more money into it and all of the cash from it, like the basically you'd call it a dividend, right?
The money coming from it is staying in it now.
That used to be moved over to the operating column.
No longer.
So they've passed some really good legislation here.
So it's mostly good news.
I did want to note caution, though, that they are borrowing more money, which is concerning.
Let's just talk about those debt servicing costs.
Those were so high thanks to the NDP and their successive credit downgrades.
The NDP, with their fiscal irresponsibility, their borrowing, their deficit spending caused Alberta's credit rating to fall, which makes borrowing money a lot more expensive.
Now we're seeing improvements in our credit rating and these credit rating agencies have a little bit more confidence in Alberta thanks to those guardrails that you pointed out.
And just being a little bit more prudent makes borrowing a little bit more affordable.
Yes.
Even though I'm against the borrowing.
Yeah, exactly.
And this is it.
And you don't need to take our word for it.
You can actually go to like Moody's and different international credit rating agencies and read their reasoning for giving the province of Alberta credit rating upgrades.
We've had two, maybe three in the last little while.
So that's really good news.
That's the opposite of what's happening in a lot of other provinces.
And the language they give is usually things like, you know, stable expectations of oil prices.
That's fair.
And key here, balanced budgets.
Balanced budgets.
They always mention that saving money, putting it into the savings fund.
They'll list these things as reasons for giving us a better credit rating.
So these are all really positive things, and it's important for people to pay attention to them.
Yeah, I think under Rachel Notley's fiscal governance, we saw maybe six or eight credit downgrades, which is really unheard of because we had been financially strong in this province despite an increase in debt for a very long time.
It just took four fast years to undo so much of that good work.
She never balanced the budget one time.
Like not one time.
In four years, it was consecutive deficit budgets.
So usually going, you know, at the end of your term, you'd expect at least a balanced budget.
Nope.
Nope.
That doesn't seem to really occur to them as a problem.
So, and it is a huge problem.
Look at what's happened to British Columbia.
It's astonishing.
British Columbia used to have balanced budget legislation, believe it or not.
And now looks like they have no plans under the current EB government to ever balance the budget.
And to be fair, when John Horgan was premier before the lockdowns and the madness happened, and Carol James was his finance minister, she seemed to take it pretty seriously with balanced budgets.
And she had some balanced budgets.
Her capital spending was going up, but they had some pretty strong operationally balanced budgets on that column.
That has gone out the window, like gone gone.
And now their debt is just skyrocketing over there.
So here we're in a much better position.
Politicians aren't even trying.
What a segue into Justin Trudeau.
He, you know, the man who once famously said that The budget will balance itself and that he examines the economy from the heart outward, whatever that means.
I guess we're getting what we voted for.
And by we, I mean the royal we and specifically not me.
Because it appears as though the feds are never, ever going to even consider balancing the budget, but they don't have a lot of time left in office, I don't think.
Yeah, it's pretty grim.
I'm trying to, I always try to end on a hopeful note, but it is pretty grim.
So you're right.
They did say that it was going to balance itself.
They did say they would grow the economy from the heart outwards.
He has said in the past he doesn't think of fiscal policy, which is really concerning.
What's key for me, though, is that he did set a deadline for himself.
He said that they were going to run little itty bitty deficits, this Prime Minister Stephen Harper had called them.
But Trudeau promised to balance the budget in 2019.
So forget about the lockdowns.
This is all pre-2020.
He promised to balance the budget then.
They did not.
Like narrator, they did not.
Like, and did they ever not?
So in the year, this is what blows my mind.
And my good friend Franco Terrazano has explained this really well and he's done the math.
The fiscal year 2018, 2019, the Trudeau government spent more money in that year than in any one year of the Second World War, adjusted for inflation and population.
Like nothing crazy was happening.
A tsunami was not hitting Canada.
Aliens were not invading in 2018, 2019, but they still managed to overspend to that extent.
And so this is why, you're exactly right, the parliamentary budget officer has again found that based on what we're doing right now, and if they don't approve new spending, which is almost impossible, and if the economy is super strong, Sheila, they will only balance the budget like coast to a stop in 2040.
I know.
Franco told me that.
I choked.
Yeah, 2040.
And the amount of money I think we're going to spend, I can't remember if it was on interest payments or because we were not balancing the budget, he had worked it out.
It was in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Like I think it was close to like 800 like billion dollars.
It was crazy that we're overspending.
And it's so crazy because part of my job is to pay attention to these committee hearings where it's just spending money, wasting money, giving it to well-connected liberal insiders without any sort of oversight or accountability.
Everybody's getting their pockets lined.
And it's just basic good old common sense.
You watch the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.
Now, when you balloon it up to the federal government, pennies might mean millions of dollars, but they are the millions of dollars just flying out and we end up a trillion dollars in debt.
Yes, before you know it.
And this is how quick it's happened.
So we toured the debt clock very briefly across Alberta because we had to frankly move it from BC to Saskatchewan.
So don't waste the gas money.
Make sure you stop a couple of points.
Makes sense.
Hey, we watched the pennies and the dollars take care of themselves.
And so we did a couple of brief stops in places like Lethbridge and Red Deer and Edmonton.
And we pointed out that the Trudeau government in less than a decade has doubled the debt.
So later this fiscal year, I think right around now, actually, the debt will have doubled.
And it's easy to say that, but like we do with like the turkey dinner and stuff.
No, no, no.
Picture all of the other governments.
Like picture, you know, McDonald, Laurier, Pearson, Diefenbaker, Harper, the first Trudeau.
You know, sometimes, you know, Mackenzie King, like in some cases, they were going through, you know, massive wars, huge recessions, depressions, all of that.
Picture all of those debts now double it.
That's what this Trudeau government has done.
And so to show for it.
Nothing.
Nothing really.
I know.
I know.
And I hate getting like this because it makes people lose hope.
Don't lose hope, folks.
There is a way to do this.
In fact, even if they just went back to their projected spending for like 2021, 2022, our budget would be balanced.
Like they don't need to go crazy austerity, you know, as much as some people would like them to.
They could just simply balance it.
I know.
They could just simply balance it.
Speaking personally, they could balance it just by going back to that projection.
And so there is hope.
There just doesn't seem to be a will right now in this current administration.
Businesses and Tax Rates00:04:25
It needs to be an understanding of, I guess, what Stephen Harper understood is if you get out of the way of business, you can even cut business taxes and those businesses become more profitable and ultimately will generate more money into the economy, which helps pay down the debt.
And there's a real disconnect with these far left-wing governments that they don't understand that you have to stop wringing money out of businesses so that they can spend money to make money, to create jobs, to create new taxpayers.
They just don't seem to understand that.
They don't.
And it's not hard to understand.
Okay.
So back when the UCP was campaigning a little while ago, remember when they were promising tax cuts for all Albertans, they do promise those are coming.
They say the income tax is coming and they're going to come out with a framework, I think, later this month.
And they said it should happen by budget, which is February.
So that's good.
So all that to say is that's what caused me to go really deep into budgets and start looking at tax rates for companies, for businesses, and looking at comparing apples to apples, looking at different provinces, different tax rates.
It's true in all of the cases I was able to see, there might be some outliers out there, but all the cases I was able to see, when they reduced the business taxes, the income from those business taxes went up.
Right, sir.
That sounds counterintuitive, but exactly like you just explained, because that attracts more businesses.
Like more human beings start businesses because of the low tax rates.
And even with those low tax rates, they then pay into that tax.
It was every time I checked in different jurisdictions based on the year, based on the amount, the income went up when the tax rate went down.
This does work.
Money like that, the businesses spend it.
They hire people who then pay income tax.
They buy equipment.
They're paying GST on the equipment.
They're paying gas tax on the equipment.
It just has a knock on a trickle-down economics throughout the entire economy.
And the left just sure doesn't like to admit that that sort of stuff works.
But it's everywhere.
The disconnect happens, I think, is that some people don't understand that productive people want to do stuff.
Yes.
Yes.
They don't just like Scrooge McDonald their way through money.
Yeah.
You know, spitting gold coins out of their bills.
Yes.
Swimming in those little bags of cash.
That isn't what typically, typically, that is not what productive rich people do.
Productive rich people do were the kid that were fidgeting in class.
They were always drawing or making something up or trying to, you know, shoot the teacher with an elastic or something like that.
They were mischievous.
They were curious.
They were innovating.
Productive people like to do stuff.
And what happens when they get more money is they do stuff with that money.
Like you said, hiring people, buying better equipment, making their business more efficient, expanding, starting a new storefront, etc.
And so this is how this works.
And so we're just hoping that eventually some administration will get this message and reduce taxes and get out of the way of people because, man, they folks are really struggling.
I met a couple in Red Deer who works so hard.
He's a drywaller tradesman type person.
His wife works alongside of him.
They buy a house that's from the 40s or 50s and they gut it down to the studs at the top level and they make it so that it's three bedrooms plus a new bathroom.
So it's easier for families to live in, right?
And they barely make money doing it.
Sheila, they're so scared about being nailed with house flipping taxes and like now a threatened home equity tax and these capital gains taxes.
They're living in the garage.
They're literally camping out in the garage, these two hardworking people driving an older truck, like barely making it.
And then they work their butts off to renovate the house one at a time.
They own it.
They live in it.
But they're still so freaked out about being called house flippers or something like that by Trudeau, who's never actually, you know, pulled a wage in his whole life.
Like it gets so frustrating.
Hardworking Renovators Struggle00:09:19
And that was just one couple.
I'm sure there's millions of people in similar situations working that hard across Canada.
And I'll never forget what the gentleman said to me, the husband.
He said, my parents worked really hard.
Same sort of folks, tradesman type, bootstrap type.
But they always made the next step.
I can't see the next step.
That's hard.
And so we really need the government to balance the budget, quit wasting money and scrap these taxes.
That sort of stuff smothers the economy because we need hardworking people like that to be able to take the risk they need to grow their business.
Because if we don't have people like that renovating older houses, there are no affordable houses for those first single families trying to buy their house.
Yep.
Bingo.
Yeah.
It's terrible.
Chris, how do people support the work that you do at the CTF?
Because you guys don't even take favorable tax breaks from the federal government.
So tell us how we can get involved and give you a hand.
Yeah.
So we started back in 1990 by some prairie populists in Alberta and Saskatchewan who were mad at the GST.
And so they were really smart and visionary.
And we don't, so we're not a charity.
We're a not-for-profit.
And yeah, you're right.
We don't even give a tax receipt for donations because we don't want to have, we want to have as little government contact as possible.
We don't want to involve tax dollars as best we can.
And so they can go to taxpayer.com.
And the best way through the door to get involved with us is to sign some of our petitions.
And this is the hope.
This is the good part about the whole story is that I love that because it gives people a sense of agency, ownership, and fellowship.
Yes.
It lets you know you're not alone.
And so sign a petition that speaks to you.
Do you want to defund the CBC?
Do you want to stop giving government taxpayers money to media?
Do you want to scrap the gun confiscation?
I know all of these things.
And I even have one in there for you, Sheila, to take away the PST on thrift shop items in British Columbia because I fervently believe that's an attack on the poor.
And I think it's morally wrong.
So we have all these petitions on there.
Sign the ones that speak to you.
And then you're on our list.
You'll start getting our updates and we'll do calls to action of everybody email the politician now or everybody come out to a pub night.
Right.
And so that's how they go.
Go to taxpayer.com, sign the petitions that are shiny to you and away we go.
It's great, Chris.
Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Um, I hope to see you very soon and I know my will.
I know and I know my viewers feel the same way.
So thanks so much.
I say this every week, but I think it is important to say every week.
Why?
Because we get new viewers all the time and you people have to learn the rules.
But I want to acknowledge with every single show how important your opinions are to me.
I care about what you think about the work that we do here at Rebel NEWS, because without you, without your support, without you sharing our work, without uh, your financial contributions, there really is no Rebel NEWS.
Because we will never take a penny from Justin Trudeau to do the work that we do and like.
How could we ever hold him to account if we did?
But it's not just about Justin Trudeau, it's about all levels of government.
So I give out my email address right now, Sheila at Rebelnews.com.
If you've got a question or comment about my conversation with my friend Chris Sims of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, send it to me.
Put gun show letters in the subject line.
So I know why you're emailing me, but don't let that be the bar for entry if you are watching a free version of the show.
So clips whatever on youtube or rumble if you've shared those with your friends and I do appreciate if you do that, because that's how we get more paid subscribers and they leave a comment over there.
I frequently go and poke around on youtube and rumble for comments because I think if people are saying those things over there, maybe you're thinking them too.
So send me an email, leave a comment might just end up right on air.
But sometimes I read emails that come to me for other reasons.
For example, I just got and responded to an email from somebody named Claire and she was emailing me with a concern, and so I thought maybe some of you people have the same concern, so maybe I I shouldn't just address this concern with Claire, but with everybody.
So Claire writes to me, hello, Sheila.
I have emailed Rebel NEWS several times to ask that you actually show the petition you are asking people to sign.
Okay, first of all, if you emailed us several times, i'm sorry, but uh, we do get personally dozens, sometimes a hundred emails a day and uh, sometimes there are just not enough hours in the day to address them all.
I really do try there.
I would be responding to emails 24 hours of the day.
I have never received a reply and petition texts are still not shown.
Why do you expect anyone to sign a petition they can't read?
I find this very annoying and do not appreciate the fact that this concern has never been addressed.
Well Claire, you're getting it addressed right now.
Could you please fix this issue and start providing the text of any petitions you post?
Thank you, Claire.
Well Claire, And I sent an email back to Claire saying, we often receive dozens, if not hundreds, of emails a day.
However, I'm not sure what you mean by not showing the text of the petition.
For example, here's our latest petition against the appointment of Christopher Wells.
Christopher Wells is a radical sex extremist here in Alberta.
And Justin Trudeau has subverted the will of the Alberta electorate because we elect our senators here.
And then the long-standing tradition is that the prime minister then appoints them.
But he has just gone completely around us and appointed his own sex activists instead of the senators and waiting as we call them.
And we ran a petition called notmysenator.com.
And if you go to notmysenator.com, of course we show the text of the petition.
So I don't know what you're talking about, Claire.
Maybe you're not following through to the URL, the specific website that we create for every petition, but it's there.
It says petition, not my senator.
Here's the text of the petition.
We demand that Justin Trudeau resend his appointment of Christopher Wells to the Senate.
If Trudeau refuses to revoke his appointment, then we, the undersigned, demand that all Alberta elected officials should refuse to meet with Wells or give him any legitimacy.
Trudeau must respect democracy, and then you can sign it there.
And at first I thought maybe this is an issue with how it looks on mobile versus desktop, but I went to my phone and it appears, you know, a little bit different, but the text is still exactly the same.
So then I thought, Sheila, keep looking.
Maybe Claire is on to something.
Let's not completely write off her concerns.
So then I went to a petition that I recently ran to double check.
And it's senatorcellout.com or .ca.
And it is on the appointment of Charles Adler, a far left-wing extremist, to the Senate to represent Manitoba.
Charles Adler continues to present him as a conservative while being the biggest Trudeau fan boy alive.
And he's a sellout.
So if you look at where it says sign the petition on the website, my petition is shame on Senator Sellout.
Charles Adler, a former conservative commenter, applied to Justin Trudeau to be a senator.
Well, Trudeau just accepted his application to become Canada's newest senator.
After decades of deriding the Senate as a corrupt institution, a sewer and a barn that needed to burn down, he became one of the sewer dwellers he so previously despised.
Charles Adler is a sellout.
He should step aside.
If you agree, please sign the petition right here on this page to tell Senator Sellout to do just that.
And so that petition is also, the text of the petition is right there.
So maybe, I don't know, Claire, if you're not looking in the right place, but I also attached a screenshot there of how it looked on my phone, just not to prove a point, but just to, I don't know, maybe Claire needed help on where to look.
So if some of you are having that same problem, hopefully that addressed your questions there too.
Awareness Before Signing00:01:22
But we do.
We don't want you signing something that you don't know what you're signing.
We want you to be well aware of what the petition says before you throw your name behind it.
And so it's Claire.
There are no tricks.
That's the petition.
You sign it and we will deliver it.
That's the most important part of the petition.
It's not collecting the names.
It's making sure the person whom the petition is directed at is shown how many people are in favor of the petition.
So, and our petitions aren't always negative.
For example, our stop classroom grooming petition, not only is it targeted at people who are pro-classroom grooming, Nillie Kaplan-Murth of the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, I'm looking at you, but I also went to Saskatchewan and delivered it to their education minister after he took a strong stance in support of parents' rights because we wanted to show him not just how many people are against classroom grooming,
but in support of his actions to defend the rights of parents.
Got it?
Okay, great.
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.