Sheila Gunn-Reid and Chris Sims expose Mark Carney’s $100B debt expansion, carbon tariffs on U.S./Korea/China imports ($500M/year), and 2035 plans to ground 80% of Canada’s oil while banning gas vehicles—despite feasibility doubts. They blame media bias, CBC hostility (costing $1.4B annually), and government payrolls for eroding journalistic accountability, citing lost access to officials and ideological attacks over substance. Gunn-Reid’s CTF urges taxpayer action via petitions at taxpayer.com, framing Carney’s policies as a fiscal fantasy accelerating economic collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
The Liberals and the Conservatives have both announced their economic platforms this week.
I called an expert to help break it down for us.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Mark Carney is supposed to be the mature statesman banker replacement to Justin Trudeau's flighty nonsense, but...
But based on his recently announced economic platform, he's going to spend more than Justin Trudeau, $100 billion more.
Now, that should come as no surprise because he once told a UK journalist that inflation was a sign of a strong economy.
Look at this.
We will be in a position where inflation returns more firmly and policy will need to be adjusted.
And I'd underscore, though, that that is a good scenario because that means that economies are moving forward.
Joining me today to break down the economic platforms of both the Conservatives and the Liberals and to talk about a little bit about the mayhem that unfolded in the media room at the federal leaders debate is my friend Chris Sims of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
Take a listen.
Joining me now is my good friend that I get to share with all of you and good friend to taxpayers everywhere, Chris Sims, the Alberta Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
I wanted to have Chris on for a couple different reasons.
One of them is that she's a former journalist and we just saw the absolute worst behavior I've ever seen in journalism in, well, I guess since I've done this for 10 years, I mean, it was just absolutely unhinged behavior at the debates commission.
But I wanted to have Chris on also to talk about the two platforms of the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party.
And I guess Mark Carney's continuation of Justin Trudeau's overspending, but it's actually even worse.
Tell us about it.
Yeah, big time.
So I've been, like you said, I've been in the game for a long time, closing in on 30 years now of covering politics and journalism and being in the arena.
I was legit surprised that Mark Carney's team put out a platform like that.
Because if I just try to imagine myself as an average person of like, you know, kind of watching the news a little bit, you're going to go do your due diligence and vote.
I would say the main contrast between Mark Carney and Justin Trudeau as, you know, people and politicians and managers is that Mark Carney's that banker guy.
He's the financial guy and he's going to be smart with our money.
That's the general impression I've noticed that a lot of normal people have of him, swing voter types that aren't obsessed with politics like you and I are, Sheila.
And then to take that and say, you know what?
Hold my beer.
I'm going to like pile more money on the debt than Justin Trudeau did.
Like I thought the banker was supposed to be good with money, at least better than the drama teacher, but I guess not.
And so that was super surprising.
And what was also alarming is two things.
One, we do now find out how much he's expecting his brand new carbon tariffs.
This is a new thing, totally separate from the carbon tax.
How much he expects his carbon tariffs to pull in?
Answer, around $500 million is going to be taken from Canadians in the form of his brand new carbon tariffs.
And the big omission I noticed in his costed platform was the industrial carbon tax.
We still don't have a price tag for Mark Carney's huge new hidden industrial carbon tax.
So he's going to blow the bank, spend way more money, borrow way more money.
The main thing here is racking up so much debt because we're already over $1.2 trillion.
He's going to do that.
And now we also find the smoking gun of his carbon tax tariffs.
They call them border adjustments.
So for any of the indie journalists that are following this, if you want to go find it, it's in his platform and it's under border adjustments.
And it's about $100 million one year and $400 million the next.
It ramps up.
So around half a billion dollars, they're expecting to take from Canadians.
So we're seeing a big spending, big borrowing platform coming from current Prime Minister Mark Carney, which is super alarming.
Now, explain these carbon tariffs because I think it's purposefully complicated, as so many of these things are, so that normal people would just throw in the towel and say it's just the way it is.
But it's my understanding that if we are importing products from jurisdictions that don't have a carbon tax, i.e. the Americans, we're going to carbon tax them on the way in the door.
And that will cause prices to go up for Canadians.
So let's say you're buying electronic components from, so Korea or China.
Those are coming in and you are going to pay more for them because Mark Carney is going to inflict a carbon tax on nations that don't have that.
Nailed it.
So you and I use the language like globalist and banker, and I know a lot of our viewers do too.
And this is bankster.
Bankster, nice.
And this, Carney is this.
Like with no ounce of hyperbole.
Like folks can go read his book, Values.
It literally has planet Earth on the front of it with scaffolding around it.
He wrote it while he was the UN envoy for climate change.
Okay.
He definitely is a globalist.
He has said so himself out loud with his face.
Okay.
And he has been a central banker in not just Canada, but also in England.
So this is how he views the world.
And to exactly explain what you just said, Carney views carbon taxes as a cornerstone to the future.
He uses the term cornerstone in his book repeatedly.
And he thinks carbon taxes are so important that he will look around the world.
And if he finds a country that doesn't have a carbon tax, he gets upset.
Like upset.
It's like a moral thing for him.
And so he will punish that country with a tariff on their exports into Canada.
But the end result is the stuff you and I have to buy just gets more expensive.
And even the liberals are admitting they're going to be half a billion dollars more expensive just over the next few years.
So this, again, I have to stress this.
This is separate and apart from his industrial carbon tax.
He's definitely going to put through an industrial carbon tax.
He says so repeatedly.
He makes jokes about the idea that we don't use or produce steel, which is totally dumb.
We definitely use and produce steel in Canada.
But this is separate.
The carbon tariff will be over and above the new carbon tax.
Well, and let's talk about that heavy emitters industrial carbon tax.
We don't know who the heavy emitters are.
Is it agriculture?
It's definitely oil and gas.
It's manufacturing for sure, but if it is agriculture, then food just got more expensive.
And, you know, food inflation is driving people to heat or eat poverty.
And this is all based on the cockamame theory that the heavy emitters are just going to eat the increased cost instead of passing it along down to the consumer.
Farmers are already price takers, not price setters.
We sell into a global market.
And so if you add things on the input side, that makes farmers poorer and makes food cost more money.
And this guy says he's a global banker, but it seems like he doesn't understand basic economics.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which is kind of surprising because he went to Harvard and then to Oxford.
He's got a PhD.
Like if you look at him just on a resume thing and not look at his policies and what he says repeatedly, you're like, oh, he seems like a pretty smart dude.
But unfortunately, you can be super high educated and still have really bad ideas.
And in this case, again, this is not something that we're gleaning from like a six second clip somewhere.
No, Carney is on the record repeatedly in his book.
It's 507 pages long.
There's probably eight hours worth of interview going back over the last five years, including on the BBC long form kind of deep thinky type interviews where he talks about this stuff.
And so I'm pleading with people, go talk to your relatives, okay?
The ones who are swing voters.
And again, no judgment.
I'm a swing voter, okay?
I sit down and I look at all the policies every election and I decide who to vote for personally.
Everybody in my family does the same thing.
So reach out to your swing voter people and ask them, do you know that Mark Carney is going to ban the sale of gasoline and diesel powered cars?
Like starting real soon.
Like starting next year, I think 20 or 25% of all new, all new vehicles are going to have to be fully electric.
This is a huge government mandate that is going to cost you a ton of money.
We do not have the infrastructure for this and it's going to affect your right to a private property issue.
So Carney wants to do that.
Carney wants to keep 80%, 80% of oil and gas in the ground.
When you hear him say, I want Canada to be an energy superpower, he does not mean oil and gas.
He means wind and solar.
How do we know this?
Because he says so in his book.
He says that 90% of global energy needs should be able to be met by the year 2035, which is real soon, from wind and solar.
So you talk to anyone in the energy industry and they go, I don't think we have the chemical density for that, for just wind and solar.
If you go nuclear, they might.
Again, I'm not an energy physicist, okay?
But I do talk to them.
And they always say you have to have both modular and big scale nuclear into that equation if you're going to go there.
And Carney never talks about that.
So I would really push the folks who are thinking about, can I afford this?
What is my price point going to be over the next year?
He wants to nail fuel refineries with his industrial carbon tax.
He wants to hit fertilizer plants with his industrial carbon tax.
Gun Grab Fears00:04:26
And this is what jumped out to me.
And I know you noticed it too there a few weeks ago, Sheila.
He's going to nail things like steel manufacture so hard that the trade unions are backing the blue team.
I have never seen this before in my life, right?
And so now we have pipe fitters.
My late brothers union, the Boilermakers, are supporting the blue team.
And if these colors were reversed, I'd be saying the same thing.
I'm just alerting this to people because I know 50% of Canadians are broke.
Like they're fighting to afford basics.
And it is so easy for people who haven't made a mortgage payment in 20 years.
They're retired.
Their inputs haven't really changed.
It's easy for them to not realize how desperate people are getting because it's hard to share that with people.
Like you may not realize that your neighbors or your adult children or their friends are fighting to afford food because it's not something people like to admit, especially working people.
So I'm just pleading with people to understand the costs here.
And this platform, it was really eye-popping that I saw come from the liberals.
Yeah, I mean, there's one thing in there that I did like, and it was that they didn't set aside money for their gun grab.
Oh, and that's interesting.
You know, leave it to the government to be inept and me to cheer for their ineptitude.
Because Prime Minister Mark Carney has said that he's going to accelerate the gun grab.
You can see that in the candidates that he's choosing.
Like Natalie Provo from Paulisa Souvion, who was a victim of a mass shooting, but that was, I would, in my assessment, a large scale honor crime more than anything else.
And so we know that he has, and she, by the way, quit Justin Trudeau's gun grab committee when she was a lobbyist and activist because they weren't grabbing the guns fast enough.
So she was, she, interesting selection, but there's no money set aside in his in his campaign financial policy announcement for the gun grab.
So maybe they just forgot to put it in.
I'm sorry to be a bubble burster.
No, no, you probably, they'll just write it in.
Of course.
Put that in on the back of the napkin.
I will say about the gun grab, because I don't call it the buyback program because I just buy my, I didn't buy my gun from the government.
Exactly.
I will say, you know, I was a journalist for a long time and I've spoken with everybody from prime ministers to victims of crime.
I have nothing but empathy for the people who lived through things like that.
That is horrific.
My issue, though, is that when you speak to those who are on the front line all the time, like cops, it's the police associations and the police unions who are largely saying that law-abiding firearms owners who go through all of the bells and whistles, they jump through all of the hoops, you have to get all of your registration, they aren't the problem.
Cops say this all the time.
They say it's the gangbangers, it's the illegal guns coming across the border, it's the constant recidivism, it's the fact that the bad guys aren't kept in jail, it's the soft on crime stuff that is leading to this kind of gun crime.
That is what the police officers say who deal with victims of crime every single day.
And so they were really able to kind of aggregate this kind of pain.
And so as far as an individual's pain goes, like I respect that.
I just would respectfully say that it might be misdirected against law-abiding firearms owners who are like I know about you, like all the all the firearms owners I know are really uptight people.
Like we're big rule followers.
You have to be.
You have to be.
You have to be or you're going to go to jail.
Exactly.
And they'll go and melt down your family heirlooms.
Yeah.
I saw actually this week that several police unions and police associations are backing the conservatives tough on crime policies.
Now, before I move on to your assessment of what the conservatives are doing, right, maybe what they're doing wrong as far as their financial policies, I just want to touch on this thing that is just going wild in the independent media, but also the National Post covered it.
Budget Woes and Beyond00:14:50
Joe Warmington asked a question about it to Polyev, and that is the Policy Horizons assessment of what Canada will be like in 2040.
And I should be clear that this is the in-house think tank of the Privy Council office.
These are not just doomsday people and conspiracy theorists.
These are the people who are paid to consider these things and look at what the economic policy will bring to Canada under the current trajectory.
And it's pretty doom and gloom.
It is people killing animals in the public parks to survive.
They use the word landowning aristocracy.
Like this is dialing back society a thousand years to where there are serfs and aristocrats and you're damned to one or enjoying the other based on how you're born.
And these bureaucrats think that that's where Canada is headed in 15 years.
But I think based on Carney's spending, it's closer to, I don't know, 10 years because their analysis was based on the data that they had in January of this year when Justin Trudeau's bad policies were the ones leading the way.
And now we've got Mark Carney spending $100 billion more than that.
Big time.
There's a lot to unpack there.
And actually, I just wanted to legit thank the people who wrote the study because the people who wrote the study, I don't know them personally.
I don't even know their names.
But to generalize, they're probably doing okay.
They're probably living, you know, generally speaking in the national capital region, most likely.
They probably have a house, like they may not, but they likely do.
They're more typically the ones who won't have to live like this.
But credit where it's due.
They empathized enough and kind of blue-skied this enough outside of their own little bubble in order to say, hey, what's going to happen if?
And so thank you.
Like credit to them because this is the reality for a lot of people.
And if I can take off my CTF hat for a second and just speak personally, I was raised on hunted meat.
I was raised on deer meat.
I was raised on moose meat.
We lived next to our First Nations neighbors and we bought a lot of food salmon off of them.
We had a vegetable garden.
For several years there, things were pretty tight when I was a little kid.
Now things got a lot easier, you know, once a bigger job was gotten when I was 10.
But there was a span of time there that was largely caused by the first Trudeau's national energy program.
Now we were more fortunate than some because we were in BC and we held on to our house and we were okay.
I know a lot of folks here in Alberta left the keys on the counter type thing.
Yeah.
And it was rough.
And so I was kind of struck a little bit by the upper government class insight into the reality for a lot of working class blue collar people.
And that is, when things get tight, you have to make some pretty drastic decisions, like going hunting for your food.
And so I hope we don't get there.
I do know that some people do it, of course, for, you know, the pleasure of doing it, for being a good environmental steward, for getting out in the air.
Like not everybody has to hunt in order to sustain themselves, but I do know some people do.
So some people are already there.
So for them to say, hello, government policies can lead to things like this, I think is really important.
Now to put my CTF hat back on, this is why I put this out on X. All of these things that the authors are describing.
So people having to get more grassroots to local government, having to do food sharing co-op programs, having to grow their own food like a victory garden, having to hunt that sort of stuff, that can all seem extreme to some people.
But for other people, it's just surviving.
It's being self-sufficient.
Our grandparents did it and their grandparents did it.
And so I wanted to boil it down to what is causing this.
It's money.
If people don't have enough money, they will have to do things like go hunting for food, go fishing for food, grow their own gardens, only buy secondhand, rely on a food co-op, do room sharing.
That is what happens when people don't have enough money.
And one of the biggest reasons why Canadians do not have enough money right now is because of the government's choices.
So that is the carbon tax that they've been nailing us with since 2019.
Okay, I added it all up.
I went back to 2019.
Sheila, the federal government has taken more than $43 billion from Canadians just in the first carbon tax.
Not including the rebates and all that other stuff, but just that's how much they took in, more than $43 billion.
So the carbon tax was a big one.
They nailed you for the necessities of life for years.
Two, inflation, inflation, inflation, inflation.
They printed money like it was going out of style.
I think it was between $300 and $400 billion out of thin air.
And as any good economist will tell you, when you have too many dollars chasing too few things, you wind up making those things be way too expensive.
Okay.
So those are two huge elements.
And why were they printing money?
And before folks start saying, oh, we had a pandemic, blah, blah, blah, blah.
No, no, no.
The Trudeau government in 2018, 2019 spent more money than they did in any year of the Second World War, adjusted for inflation and population.
So they were already blowing the bank way before anything bad happened after 2020.
So it's because of government choices like a carbon tax on the necessities of life, money printing, and money wasting, which now has us in this boat.
When you add up all levels of government, local, provincial, and federal, almost half of your paycheck is gone.
Do this little practice.
Kind of close your eyes and imagine if you get your salary every two weeks or whatever automatically showing up in your bank account, picture that amount being double.
Double.
What could you do with that money?
Could you afford more nutritious food?
Could you get your car fixed?
Could you maybe save up for your kids' education?
That's how much money the government takes from you.
And so this is why, boy, oh boy, if they seriously keep this Alberta energy cap, Sheila, where it's going to blow a $20 billion hole in our economy and lose 40,000 jobs, if they're going to keep 80% of our oil and gas in the ground, if they're going to block pipelines, if they're going to keep on printing money, if they're going to spend money like Carney is saying he's going to, I'm glad that that group put out that report because maybe it'll be kind of a wake-up call and a warning bell for folks in the suburbs saying,
I don't really want to go here.
We need different government policy.
And again, I would say the same thing.
If the blue team had screwed it up this bad the last 10 years, I'd be having my hair on fire.
But this is a serious moment.
Well, and it puts the federal government of Mark Carney, if he is re-elected, on a collision course with Alberta, because we have a premier who says that she is going to double production of oil and gas.
She does.
And he says, no, actually, we're putting a cap on production and you need to leave 80% in the ground.
Well, she's not going to do that.
And then Danielle Smith said, if you try coming into the buildings where we keep our emissions data, we're going to arrest you for trespassing.
Right.
So it's getting real.
Yeah.
So let's rumble.
No, I wanted to ask your assessment of the blue team.
Yes.
As you say.
What's good, what's bad in their economic policy?
Let's start with the bad because I like ending on the good.
The bad news is, is they are going to keep spending more than what the Canadian, I know, more than what the Canadian Taxpayers Federation would be comfortable with.
Because of course, we're the sticklers, okay?
We want lower taxes, less waste, and more accountable government.
And elements of that are things like balance the budget.
Okay.
Quit spending so much money.
Okay.
So we're always going to be the one way over here on this side of the tent peg yelling at them.
We don't care what color jersey they're wearing.
Quit spending so much money.
So bad first, they're still spending a lot of money.
They're still going to run a deficit.
I think by year four, they said $14 billion deficit.
We would much prefer them to run a balanced budget, at least by the end of a mandate.
So by year four, we're being nice here.
Trust me, we want it done year one.
But if I'm being reasonable, I want it balanced by year four.
We think they can do that without being, you know, harsh and draconian and austerity.
But politics is politics.
And I'm sure they're worried about two things.
One, they're worried about scaring normal people and making them think that there's going to be craziness in the streets.
Number one, spoiler alert, there already is craziness in the streets.
Number two, big time.
And so I also think that they're also bracing themselves because there are so many unknown knowns.
They don't know what they don't know.
And I think they're kind of bracing themselves for the mess if they formed government that they would be dealing with.
So bad news first, we would like them to balance the budget.
The good news is they're spending way less than Kearney.
Like way less than Trudeau, way less than Kearney.
Yes, they're still adding billions of dollars onto the debt, but it is like, I think, half of what Kearney is planning on adding.
So a huge dramatic improvement on Kearney's plan.
But as staunch, you know, fiscal small C conservatives, we would like them to balance the budget.
The good news is, like I said, they're spending way less, which is great.
And two, I'm so happy to hear this.
They're actually saying that we need a federal taxpayer protection plan.
Yes.
I was so delighted.
I wasn't even expecting it.
It was like having an extra little bit like a gift in the morning.
So for the first time, I think I know the Canadian Alliance still talked about referendums kind of, but not as much.
For the first time really since the Reform Party, we are hearing at the federal level that we want direct democracy, that if you want to hike taxes or invent new ones, you got to get a say-so from us.
You have to have a referendum before you can hike taxes or create new ones.
That's huge.
That is huge.
Because here in Alberta, the Taxpayer Protection Act is what has shielded us all this time from a sales tax.
And that saves families millions of dollars every single year.
Like it is a huge thing.
And the premier just finished beefing it up.
So you can't invent new taxes or hike existing ones again without having a referendum first.
So to hear that at the federal level, to put power back into the hands of the people, that was great.
So we were super thrilled to hear that.
So again, on the other side, we would like them to be balancing the budget.
You know what?
I think they can.
If they get in there and they start making the right changes, I do think that they would be able to have a balanced budget by year four.
They just probably don't want to promise that.
So I'd like to see that.
And, but the big one is Taxpayer Protection Act.
That would be a game changer for people.
You know, I saw some mainstream media journalist types like clutching their pearls and like, how will they ever be able to raise taxes again?
And I'm like, okay.
Yeah.
That's the point.
I accept these terms.
Welcome.
Welcome.
You'll catch on.
But it's, it's typical, right?
I'm so, I'm not surprised at all that the press gallery was acting like that because they think that A, this is all their environment and it's all up to them.
It's their little playground and what they say goes.
And two, a lot of them think that wealth is owned by the state.
Right.
Like by default, and that we're allowed to have some of it back if we're good little peasants.
That's not the way this works.
This is our money.
And also, you know, a lot of them make their income thanks to subsidies and bailouts from the likes of you and I through the hands of the government.
There's one thing that I was excited to see from the Conservatives, and that is reiterating that commitment to get rid of the CBC, which will save us $1.5 billion plus all their advertising contracts.
I think the advertising contracts are about $600 million a year from the federal government.
And I'm happy for that because I don't think that there's any need for a state broadcaster in 2025 Canada.
But also, I experienced the hideousness of the CBC during the debates for the federal leaders.
We were at CBC Radio Canada's building in Ezra's hood, as he put it.
I'm in my hood.
Yeah, Ezra's hood.
We were subjected to two straight days of heckling, jeering, paper throwing arguments directed at us while we quietly just sat there and took it or told the other side, like, hey, calm down.
And then the CBC right outside of where we were sitting, lying about us to the point where they had to issue a retraction.
I saw that.
And I just want you to take your CTF hat off and then put your former journalist hat back on.
Tell me, how are you?
How excited are you that the CBC has been promised to be defunded by the Conservatives if they win?
I can start with the CTF hat on because we want the CBC totally defunded.
That would save us around $1.4 billion per year because it's a huge waste of money.
Next to nobody is watching it.
And also, spoiler, it is a conflict of interest.
Yes.
Journalists should not be paid by the government.
Like having to say that is crazy pants to me.
Like I don't care if, God rest his soul, it were Rex Murphy reading the news and Don Cherry reading the sports.
Government shouldn't be paying their salaries at all, period.
You know what, though, people might watch if it were those people.
Sun News Western Canada Conflict00:10:09
They would.
I know.
I mean, I'd watch, but I'd be like, I shouldn't be paying for this, but it's so funny.
So we shouldn't be paying for this and we shouldn't be paying for any media.
No media.
CBC, CTV, global, any of the newspapers, any of them.
Like not one nickel should go from the state to a newsroom because then it becomes propaganda.
You can't trust it.
Even if, bless their hearts, there's a hardworking journalist in there that is only trying to do the W-5 journalism.
It's the perception of bias that destroys trust.
So this is why this is a, you know, this equation doesn't work.
So they have to absolutely stop funding all journalists, all of them, every one of them.
Two, taking my hat off and going back to when I was a member of the press gallery, I'm not surprised.
Like grown adults throwing paper at you and jeering at you and stuff.
I am not surprised whatsoever.
I have worked in most of these mainstream newsrooms.
Some of the behavior I saw treating colleagues and coworkers within the same newsroom was shocking to me.
It was the most shocking at the CBC.
I was only there for six weeks.
I wouldn't speak to my worst waitress that way, the way I saw some people behaving in the CBC newsroom.
Not all of them, but a couple of them.
And so I'm not surprised.
I will just say when we started Sun News Network back in, I think it was 2012, 2011, around there.
We have to keep in mind, Sun News Network was born out of the Sun Media newspaper chain that still exists.
So Toronto Sun, Calgary Sun, Edmonton Sun, that newspaper chain.
So we already had parliamentary press gallery credentials.
Like the Sun chain is old, very, very old.
We were established journalists.
And even then, we're part of a cool new TV startup, the Mean Girling that was happening.
Like, I won't name names, but I was out afterwards, just after we launched, just like out with a couple of people, and a mainstream journalist who I'm sure meant well came up to me and she puts her hand on my hand and she leans forward.
She's like, are you okay?
Like, do you need to go talk?
Like, it was as if I'd been kidnapped.
And I'm like, yeah, I'm fine.
I'm stoked.
I'm from rural Western Canada.
Like, you know, I, you know, I want smaller government.
I want lower taxes.
I want to fight for the working guy.
Like, you know, all tons of my family members worked in the oil patch.
They drove trucks.
We owned guns.
Like, these are my people.
But the idea that this was your people, and here you are in your dirty boots up here on Parliament Hill, so to speak, doing the whole Garth Brooks routine was shocking to them.
And so I'm not, I'm sorry that happened to you.
I'm not surprised whatsoever.
But I will just say, as much as it's good for our audience for them to know, we're not supposed to be the story.
Right.
Journalists, you know, just wanted to ask the questions.
Yep.
And here we are fighting in the terrarium again.
You know, I'll tell you exactly what my question would have been on the second night if I were allowed to ask it.
I was going to ask why the canola tariffs, thanks to the liberals' protectionist policies on electric vehicles from China, are not being treated with the same urgency as those auto tariffs are.
Great question.
We get that all the time because tons of our supporters, of course, are in Western Canada and they are farmers and they are getting brutalized by this.
This is the perfect question for me.
It is because I'm a farmer.
I know this.
I'm living this and I'm from Western Canada.
I've got one chance to ask a question that matters to the people who matter to me and that's our viewers and my friends.
And I was robbed of that thanks to the unhinged buffoonery of the mainstream media and their enablers at the Commission and the CBC.
I will say it's gotten worse since I was in the game because back in the 2006, 2008, whenever I was there was CTV, which we did pretty straight up and down journalism.
Like I cut those clips myself.
Like we chased after, didn't matter if it was a blue politician, red politician.
I liked those days.
It was in the early and mid-2000s.
And I will say that back then, the parliamentary press gallery had a lot more humans in it from different newspapers.
And so there was like a long-standing, I think it was called the Catholic Register sweet lady.
You know, she's always working on her same stuff, God bless her, and would ask the same questions every time.
And that's fine.
And nobody was throwing paper at her.
Nobody was like sneering at her.
Folks who were part of, you'll know, the Western Producer, which is a huge publication for Western Canada for agriculture.
They'd ask those questions.
They absolutely would have asked canola type questions or supply management type questions or dairy questions.
And it was, they did their thing.
And then the other mainstream media would go ask their thing.
But it wasn't like this level of hostility that you're getting now.
And there's two reasons for that, I think.
Well, three.
One, people are just getting more polarized.
I don't know how I can fix it, but it's just my observation.
People are getting more polarized.
Two, tons of journalists are on government payroll now.
Yep.
Outside of the CBC, which is, again, to my point, this is the problem, folks.
You cannot rely on the state for your blood supply or you're going to wind up like this.
And three, the decimation of newsrooms.
There's just fewer people in these newsrooms now.
And there's fewer experienced people.
It's a lot of times it's being run by one or two people nowadays in a local newsroom and they're doing everything.
So they don't have time or the experience to sit down and analyze what's going on, to speak truth to power, to say, you know what?
I remember 10 years ago when you tried that nonsense answer and I'm nailing you about it now because you have the experience.
So it's a combination of those three things.
I'm just sorry that it descended into that.
I listened to it on the way back home from North Battleford last night and that was embarrassing.
Like as a journalist and somebody who tries to practice that trade still, that was embarrassing.
I might have lost my temper in that room, Sheila.
I used my you're late for the school bus voice with a couple of them.
I didn't yell.
I didn't yell, but I was very frustrated that they were not telling the truth.
I said to someone from the CBC, you saw how we've been treated for two days.
You've seen the jeering, the heckling, the swearing, the arguments, unsolicited, and you've reported none of it.
And she's just sort of smirked at me.
I'm sorry.
That sucks.
You know what?
I was thinking about like the olden days of 2015 when Rachel Notley threw me out of the legislature.
I remember that.
And journalists who didn't like me were like, hey, you can't do that.
And I thought, you know, in the olden days of 10 short years ago, if what happened to Drea Humphrey had happened in 2015, I think the entire line of journalists might have said, we're not asking our question until you answer hers.
That's right.
There would have been some solidarity across ideological lines that because everybody should care about freedom of the press, but it's just not like that anymore.
And I got two little stories that you'll like to back that up.
And I won't name names.
So folks who are listening, it's okay.
One, I was working for CTV, again, major national producer.
Like they'd send me ahead of time and I'd get everything going.
And it was at a conservative retreat.
And so they're having a caucus meeting, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I was in Prince Edward Island.
They tried to block me from the building to go in there and cover it.
I'm like, no, no, no, it says right here, open to media.
And they tried this.
It was a local thing and there was crosswires.
But you know, politicians want to control the message.
And if you're in power, doesn't matter if it's blue team or red team, they'll try to control the message.
So it actually wound up on the front page of the Globe and Mail where I'm standing there on the stairs arguing with this person on why we should be allowed in.
Funny for them, the CTV Bureau at the time was physically in that same building in Charlottetown.
So I had the keys.
So we got in.
So that was one thing.
Another time, again, to your point, defending another journalist, Very small statured lady who at the time was working for the Hill Times.
This would have been around 2012, 2013.
I believe I was with Sun News at the time.
And again, it was a conservative event.
Now, to be fair, it was more of a private event, like it was some sort of a dinner cocktaily thing, some reception.
But media were invited.
They did get the invite.
This little Hill Times reporter who I'd known for a long time, we probably vote differently most of the time, but that's okay.
We both walk up.
We've both got our gear.
She's got her recorder.
I've got my camera.
We're walking in there.
We both got our accreditation.
We're both Parliament Hill journalists, press gallery.
And they tried to say, oh, Chris, you can come in, but you can't to the Hill Times person.
I said, well, did you get an invite?
She goes, yeah, I've got it right here on my BlackBerry.
I said, well, I said, I'm not going in unless she goes in.
And if you don't let me in, there's going to be a thing.
Like, I'm going to go back on the air right now.
And they let her in because that's how you do those things.
And back in the day, they either would have stood there and not asked their question until they answered yours or whoever it was, or they would have asked it verbatim.
I saw that in scrums all the time, where they would try to ignore one person's question, and then all of a sudden you ask their question verbatim and you drop yours.
That was always just kind of the understood code among journalists.
And that's clearly gone.
And I am sorry.
I am sorry, because you can't get the news out and you can't get the answer for your canola farmers that you wanted.
Lorraine's Pleading Case00:09:32
The similar, well, we're rehashing stories.
In 2019, Christia Freeland and the Foreign Office of the UK hosted a media freedom conference in London.
We went.
Remember.
We had to get accredited through the UK Foreign Office because our own government wouldn't accredit us.
So we were there.
And then they're holding a press scrum for Christia Freeland.
And her media handler comes out and said, and remember, this is at a media freedom conference.
And they come out and they say, okay, we've got 10 journalists here.
We only have room for eight.
So Sheila, not you, and Andrew Lawton of True North, not you either.
And so to their credit, and I think it's because they are outside of the Mean Girls Cloistered Club and they were the foreign correspondents for Global News and a couple of other outlets, including Al Jazeera of all places, said, Yeah, we're not going unless everybody can go and we'll just wait until you find a bigger room.
And that's 2019 in London.
But back here at home, no, this is solidarity whatsoever.
This is it.
And that should be the way.
Okay.
People are going to have different approaches.
Their readership or their viewership is going to want different product, different information.
That's fine.
But when it comes to the practice of the trade on the ground and trying to speak truth to power, to hold government officials accountable, that is supposed to be the fundamental tenet of your job.
Yep.
So, and you need, like, again, this is why the Taxpayers Federation got involved.
It wasn't just because it's an enormous waste of money.
It's because in order to hold government to account, which is a key issue for us, we need freedom of expression and freedom of the press.
Free press is not like a whole bunch of bundled up newspapers given away for free at Times Square.
That is not free press.
It is free from government interference.
That's the point.
And if we allow a club who can get their noses out of joint for whatever reason, you may not like Ezra, you know, Ezra may not like them, like that's understandable.
That's human beings.
But once you're there actually practicing your craft, you have to be able to aim your microphones at the right direction.
And that is to the powerful.
That is to the government because there's millions of people at home that don't have that privilege, that don't have that megaphone, that don't have that microphone, and they're about to lose their farm.
They're about to have their truck repossessed.
They're wondering how they're going to feed their kids.
Like you need to be able to ask these questions on their behalf.
And this is why I would plead with anyone in journalism.
Okay.
I don't care who you vote for.
You have to be clear with how you practice your craft, though.
And you have to remember where you're sticking the microphone.
And it should always be under the mouth of the politician that wants to take your money.
Right.
Instead, they're turning it on the other journalists these days.
This is it.
It's weird.
Leave that for the bar.
Go argue at the bar after.
Get your work done.
That's what we used to do.
Go get your work done.
Get your clips.
Get your stuff filed.
And then go yell at the bar.
Right.
On your own dime, too.
Quit taking it from taxpayers.
Yeah.
Don't expense your drinks to me.
Stop.
Okay.
This has been so nice.
It has been fun.
Before I let you go, because I am two minutes late for a meeting.
Can you please tell us how people can get involved in the CTF and support the work that you do to hold the government to account on behalf of the little guy?
Yes, very quickly.
Go to taxpayer.com, sign up for the petitions.
That will get you on our lists.
And the next time it's time to harass a politician and most importantly, to hear from each other and have a sense of fellowship, you're going to hear from us.
So just go to taxpayer.com and sign some petitions and then you'll be in it.
Chris, thank you so much.
We'll talk very soon.
You bet.
Take care.
As always, the final segment of the show is yours.
I turn it over to you because without you, there's no Rebel News.
So I want to hear what you have to say about the work that we're doing here.
I even give you my email address right now.
It's Sheila at RebelNews.com.
Put gun show letters in the subject line so I know why you're emailing me.
I do get a lot of emails every single day and it's hard to keep them all straight.
So if you would help me on the admin side by putting that in the subject line, I would really appreciate that.
But that's not the only way that you can get in touch with us.
Leave comments on wherever you find clips of the show.
If you're watching us on YouTube or on Rumble, leave comments there because it helps us get higher up in the algorithm.
So if you're watching us there, any of the work that we do, leave a comment, share the clip with your friends, encourage them to leave comments.
And who knows, you might just see your comments read on air.
Now, today's comment section comes from YouTube, but not on a clip of the gun show.
It's actually on another story that I did.
It's on the treatment of Lorraine Brett of the New Westminster Times by Glenn McGregor of, I believe, City TV.
He is one of the poorly behaved journalists from the debates media lockup that we had to deal with.
And he turned his ire on Lorraine after Lorraine asked a question of conservative leader Pierre Polyev about his drug policy.
Lorraine's an expert in this, being an investigative journalist who covers that issue in British Columbia, but also is the mother of a man who's in recovery from drug addiction.
And when she asked that question, like I said, Glenn McGregor turned his ire on her, accused her of being a conservative plant instead of just a mother and a journalist, local journalist, by the way.
This is an announcement in her community who is expertly qualified to ask a question that she did.
They just couldn't believe that someone would ask a reasonable question of the conservatives on their drug policy.
So they went after her.
So I thought I would want to hear what you all had to think about that story.
So I went to YouTube.
As I said, here are your comments.
Chen Dard MD says the guy is lucky to have a mother that cares so much about him.
Yeah.
Yeah, he sure is.
Tom Moose Cohn says, good report, Sheila.
Well, thank you.
Richard Case Simpson 800 says, outstanding.
This is what the media should look like.
I'm sorry you were disrespected by Jimmy at the debate.
You all do such good work there.
Look, I don't even care about being disrespected.
I can put up with their boo-hooing and their jeering or whatever.
I was denied the ability to ask a question that I think you guys wanted answers to.
I got thick skin.
I'm used to the mainstream media crybabies crying at me.
No big deal.
But what they did was they denied you answers and protected the politicians from accountability.
And they blamed us for it, which is a special level of gaslighting.
Rick Schritt 1616 says, this is happening in every community, both big and small across Canada, the drug problem.
And it's impacting quite literally millions of Canadians.
Thank you to Lorraine for speaking up and sharing your story, no doubt.
In British Columbia, it's one of the leading causes of death for young people, if not the leading cause of death for young people.
And it's directly correlated to the Liberal government federally and the provincial NDP government's drug policies.
So yes, it does beg a few questions, doesn't it?
El McGill, I guess it is, 577.
Excellent reporting, Sheila.
Keep up the great work that you and all the rebel reporters do.
Thank you for showing the other side of the story.
Well, you're welcome.
Donald Dicho?
Notice how the message is not challenged.
The messenger is attacked in an effort to diminish the message.
Anytime you see that, it should tell you who the genuine one is.
Exactly.
Like I said, Lorraine is uniquely qualified to ask a question that she did as a mother, a journalist, a local journalist, and an expert in the subject matter.
So much an expert that she testified at the health committee back in December of 2024.
And maybe before these guys went after her as a conservative plant, they might have Googled her name and seen that.
But that would require the most basic level of journalism.
And I saw none of that from them during the debates at all.
They're just ideologues and ill-behaved children, toddlers, complete toddlers.
Anyway, that's the show for today.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week.