Ezra Levant examines Trump’s "Big Beautiful Bill", passed July 3, locking in permanent 2017 tax cuts—boosting a family of four’s pay by over $13K USD—while slashing immigration via $150B for border enforcement and targeting 1M annual deportations. The bill also fast-tracks hearings with Florida’s DeSantis and Noam, using National Guard to cut delays from years to days. Comparing Canada’s $500M+ gun buyback (post-Porta Peak) to Sweden’s Somalis relocating to Ireland, Levant argues both policies fail: licensed owners—2% of gun crime—are hit while illegal firearms remain unaddressed, and Canada’s job growth masks reliance on foreign workers. The episode ties fiscal mismanagement, immigration chaos, and selective enforcement to broader political credibility crises, questioning whether populist policies or bureaucratic overreach will prevail. [Automatically generated summary]
What's this big, beautiful bill that Trump's been talking about?
It was passed into law today, and he's thrilled.
I'll take you through it to explain why this bill is so important and what it means for Canada, especially for making America more competitive while we go the opposite way.
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Tonight, what was Trump's big, beautiful bill, and why did he fight so hard to get it passed today?
It's July 3rd, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Well, tomorrow is the 4th of July, Independence Day in the United States.
But the celebrations at the White House began today with the passage of Trump's big, beautiful bill.
Good News for Full-Time Jobs00:07:18
That's what he actually called it, which sort of makes me chuckle.
Trump and his old team did a full court press to get it through Congress.
Obviously, most Democrats didn't like it, but so too did some Republicans, including some libertarians.
And they've been out of sorts with Trump recently.
They didn't like him bombing Iran.
My view is that America had a very limited military action there, and peace through strength is different than peace through pacifism.
But there's been, at least online, it looked like there was a lot of dissent.
But at the end of the day, the bill passed.
Now, I do want to study the objections of the libertarian wing of the party that was against this bill and, frankly, against any foreign entanglements as well.
I think that was the objection of bombing Iran.
But I think this vote is proof that Donald Trump is the boss of Washington, D.C., at least for now.
Who knows what will happen in the midterm votes just a year and a half away, but for now, he can get a big bill passed.
I mean, there's a lot of log rolling, as they call it, lots of deals in there, but I think it is a pretty MAGA bill.
It reflects what he said in his inaugural address.
I want to take you through a few of the things that were in the bill that is now law.
So there's reason to celebrate that the bill passed, but there were some new job stats for June that just came out.
And we love talking about America because it's so interesting.
We're right next to it.
Donald Trump is a force of nature.
What he does affects us in Canada.
But I'd like you to, in your mind, compare how we are doing and our approach in Canada to that in the United States.
For example, these June statistics.
830,000 new jobs for Native born Americans, as opposed to 348,000 jobs lost for foreign-born workers.
And I think that's been a big push of Trump to get Americans back into the workforce by removing immigrants, including for reasons that they are ultra-low-cost competition for jobs, because many of them are off the books.
They're undocumented, as the left says.
And Trump is for Americans, not temporary foreign workers.
So look at that stat again.
Nearly a million new jobs for Native Americans, Native born Americans, and compared to a job loss for foreign-born.
And In terms of full-time and part-time, the split is 437,000 new full-time jobs, and actually, part-time jobs are being lost.
The unemployment rate is what I meant to mention next.
It's 4.1% in the United States.
That is so low.
That's down from 4.2% just a little bit.
A lot of pundits expected it to go up.
They thought, well, Donald Trump is going to punish the economy with his tariffs.
The economy seems to be absolutely loving things.
And one of the things that it's a trick in Canada, our job numbers look good artificially, not as good as America's, because the government just keeps on hiring.
And those are typically full-time jobs, very highly paid jobs.
In the United States, the number of people employed by the government fell by 275,000 in June, down about half a million since Biden lost.
So the gains are for American citizens in the private sector in full-time jobs.
How's that not winning all over the place?
Anyways, my point is that was some good news that the administration got today.
Let me take you through some of the themes of the Big Beautiful Bill.
And you know what?
I don't want to pretend I'm an expert in this bill.
In fact, I'd like to get some American commentators to help me unpack it.
But again, some of it is really easy to understand.
I don't think you need to be an expert to understand what tax cuts in the United States will do to Canada's business community and our competitiveness.
I mean, we're already having a tough enough time because of tariffs.
But what if they cut their taxes down there?
In fact, that's one of the selling points of the Big Beautiful Bill.
It makes the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent, lowers taxes for individuals and businesses, increases tax deduction for individuals and married couples, tax relief for small businesses and freelancers.
One of the moves that Trump did, which I think stole some thunder from Democrats who like to portray themselves as standing up for the little guy, is Trump talked about no tax on tips.
You know what I mean?
So who earns tips?
Well, I mean, obviously waiters, bartenders, people like that.
No tax on tips.
That is such a blue-collar, entry-level, pink-collar campaign pledge.
It sounds like something the Democrats would say, no, it's Trump's.
He's also not having tax on overtime.
Now, I don't know how you exactly police the no tax on tips because now you're really encouraging.
It used to be that workers, and I was a waiter back in the day when I was a teenager, you sort of hid what your tips were.
Maybe there's a real incentive to maybe not disclose what you made in cash.
How would the government know?
Well, now, the more money you make in tips, the more money you make tax-free.
So I don't know how it's going to be policed exactly, but in a way, I don't care.
The point is the taxes are going down, and especially for quote, the little people.
I mean, it's one thing for the Democrats to say every billionaire is a policy failure.
That's a phrase I heard that Democrat who's leading the polls for New York City mayor say.
But no, Trump is a billionaire, but I think he's got more blue-collar sensibility than any Democrat around.
You know, experts say a lot of things, but experts who crunch the math here, the Council of Economic Advisors, says his Big Beautiful Bill could mean more than $13,000 more in take-home pay for a family of four.
Like, just stop and think about the size of that.
By the way, that's in real U.S. dollars.
So that's pretty much like $20,000 Canadian dollars more take-home pay for a family of four.
Like, where is that for us?
It's not even a dream for us.
It's not even a possibility.
We all know that everything's going the opposite direction in Canada.
It's going to be more taxes, not less.
I mean, it's hard to even imagine a Canada where a family of four would get a $20,000 tax cut.
And I say that in Canadian dollars.
He's got special help for small business in there about expensing.
I'm not an expert in accounting, but he's trying to really juice private industry as opposed to the Democrats and the liberals in this country who love government investments.
I hate that.
And every politician in Canada does it.
When they spend money, they call it an investment.
Here's Trump cutting taxes to let the private sector actually make investments.
So that's the money side.
And I say that because the U.S. economy is about to really have its golden age again.
And I know that sounds a little bit jingoistic, but oh my God, it is absolutely going to.
In fact, it's already showing strength that exceeds expectations.
Juicing Private Industry00:05:15
And with this bill being passed, how could it not?
And again, who are our chief competitors?
Who is our market?
It is a sad thing that they are our chief competitor and they're going to clean our clock.
I mean, the brain drain.
Talk about the brain drain.
If you are a young entrepreneur in Canada, why?
If you want to open a factory, which side of the border are you going to put that factory on?
Put aside the tariffs alone, just the taxes.
Speaking of borders, I think that's the biggest part of this bill in terms of impact and importance.
I like to follow a young guy named Stephen Miller.
He's not young guys.
He's about my age.
He's a deputy chief of staff.
He is so hardline.
He's interested in a lot of issues, but immigration is by far his most passionate issue.
And he has taken to Twitter in recent days saying that passing this bill was of civilizational importance, as in if we don't do this now, it'll never be done.
There's estimates vary, but I've heard the number 13 million illegal migrants just walked across that southern border and some from our northern border too into America during Joe Biden's disaster term.
And that was on purpose, of course.
There was no physical reason why Biden couldn't keep him out.
Trump didn't need new laws or new budgets to do what he did in his first week.
But I tell you one thing: this big, beautiful bill is so enormous.
And its almost obsessive focus is on immigration, which, when you think about it, has been the core Trump promise in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
The Customs and Border Protection Service, CBP, that's what they call their border guards, in their last year's budget was $17 billion, which is pretty big.
And ICE had a budget of around $9 billion.
This new big, beautiful bill quadruples the border police budget and triples ICE's enforcement budget.
All told, the global budget for the border, for detention, for deportation, is about $150 billion, which is more, I think, than any military in the world other than the United States own military.
I think that's more than any other country in the world spends on their real army.
I'd have to check to be certain of that.
But in a way, that's what it is.
America was invaded.
That's what you call it when foreign nationals illegally cross the border.
That is, and some of them were not, quote, hostile, but they're there illegally.
And in this bill, Trump fights back with a staggering amount of resources, hiring 10,000 new ICE agents.
ICE is the immigration, I forget exactly what it stands for, immigration control enforcement or something.
Those are the folks who basically arrest illegals and deport them.
It's doubling the current 6,000 deportation officers.
There's going to be 3,000 more Border Patrol agents, along 5,000 more CBP officers.
I don't even know the difference in all these different officers.
They're building an army, and they are aiming to have 3,000 deportations a day, which is a million a year, which if you do the math, you realize that is not even close to what Biden let in.
Even if Trump keeps up that million a year number, he'll have 4 million done by the end of his term.
There's still more than that who came in, but this will set things in motion in the right direction.
And I can hardly wait to see the knock-on effects it has.
I mean, I saw a news story the other day.
There was a meat packing plant, and it was raided by ICE because so many of the workers of the meatpacking plant were there illegally.
And I saw in the news story, what do we do now?
Like, how do we staff the place?
Hey, I got an idea way at the back here.
How about hire Americans?
And the meat packing business in Alberta, in southeastern Alberta, is overwhelmingly foreign migrants.
I don't think they're illegal in Canada.
They may be temporary foreign workers.
I got an idea.
How about hiring Canadians?
And if you're going to pay an extra five bucks an hour, suck it up and maybe charge an extra 50 cents a hot dog or something.
But you're a Canadian.
You have a duty to hire Canadians.
And, you know, I think you're going to see American teenagers get summer jobs again.
I think you're going to see Americans in service jobs again.
Is it really necessary to have millions of foreign migrants in your country just to operate Ubers and DoorDash and takeaway services like that?
Like, how about hire Americans and how about we hire Canadians?
The detention capacity, they're more than doubling it to 100,000 to hold daily family detention centers, which is what Trump has said before.
He has said, when he was asked, do you break up families?
Elon Musk's Silicon Valley Influence00:05:11
He says, I'd rather not.
So they all have to go together.
Welcome to a grown-up being in charge of politics for once.
Hey, there's another move that Trump announced a few days ago with Ron DeSantis, who, by the way, was his rival in this year's primary.
So I'm delighted to see them working together.
And Christy Noam, the Homeland Security boss, was there.
Just let me play a minute.
And, you know, I don't know if this was DeSantis' idea or Trump's or might be Stephen Miller's, but one of the problems, of course, is immigration judges.
First of all, there's a huge backlog.
Second of all, they're all ideologues.
Well, look at this idea that Ron DeSantis says about using lawyers and others within the Florida National Guard to have super quick hearings, real hearings.
They will be real hearings, but they won't be two years from now.
They'll be two days from now.
Here, take a look at this clip.
This is, we're offering up our National Guard and other folks in Florida to be deputized to be immigration judges.
We're working with the Department of Justice for the approvals I'm sure Cam will approve.
But then you have, I'll have a National Guard judge advocate here.
Someone has a notice to appear.
Biden would tell them to come back in three years and appear.
Now you'll be able to appear in like a day or two.
So they're not going to be detained, hopefully, for all that long.
We'll have people here in this facility that can make, you know, it's a bureaucracy.
The president's got to deal with the bureaucracy.
Now, that Supreme Court ruling was good because that's going to allow him to be able to exercise Article 2 the way founders intended.
But you still have bureaucracy.
So we want to cut through that so that we have an efficient operation between Florida and DHS to get the removal of these illegals done.
I think that's the favorite thing I've seen in a week.
Anyway, there's a few other things in this big, beautiful bill.
I mean, as far as I'm concerned, immigration is more important than everything combined.
But they do have a tax credit for metallurgical coal.
I don't know if you know what that is.
There's some coal that you burn for power plants, but metallurgical coal is a special coal that you use to get a certain extreme high heat, high enough to melt steel.
Like you cannot make steel without coal.
And it's been insane to see this war against coal in the West, including in Germany, in Poland, in the UK, and in Canada.
So I just wanted to note that this bill talks about actually giving a tax credit for metallurgical coal.
Donald Trump believes in energy, and he doesn't believe that only China and India get to have it.
Obviously, there's a boost in military funding, including for the border.
There's even a $10 billion Mars mission in there, which suggests that he's still friends with Elon Musk.
Look, I'm sympathetic to concerns about the deficit here, absolutely.
But I agree with Stephen Miller, Trump's Deputy Chief of Staff, who said this is more important than anything else because it reflects and deals with everything else.
You cannot solve any other problem in America without solving immigration, whether it's crime or the anti-Semitism and crazy pro-Hamas protests on the street or the difficulty for young people to get that first job or the high price of housing because there's so many foreign people bidding it out.
There is no issue in the United States or Canada that is not exacerbated, if not even caused by immigration.
And once you stop the flow and then reverse it, and that was the remigration we talked about the other day.
Once you start doing that, I think you're going to see the opposite of a vicious cycle.
You're going to see what they call a virtuous cycle.
We already saw a little bit of that in those job numbers.
With every 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 illegals deported, you're going to see the crime rate fall.
You're going to see fewer protests for Hamas and Iran.
You're going to see Americans getting jobs in factories.
I think that Trump really is applying a simple but difficult plan.
And he really staked everything on this big, beautiful bill, and he got it through.
And I know there were those, including Elon Musk, who thought it did not deal with wasteful spending enough.
And you know what?
He's dead right.
One of my observations, though, is that Elon Musk comes from the world of Silicon Valley, where owners, startup bosses, rule almost by fiat.
I mean, even if they have a board of directors, people like Mark Zuckerberg within his company have preferential stock, and they basically are the deciders.
And when you invest in Facebook, you're really investing in Mark Zuckerberg.
And when you invest in SpaceX or Tesla, you're really investing in Elon Musk.
And we know that because the price of those companies fluctuate, for example, when Elon Musk announced he was going back to Tesla after working in the White House, the price of Tesla went up.
When you are the boss of a fast-moving, disruptive, visionary company, you make decisions like that, and everyone just obeys you out of corporate loyalty, but also out of affection.
That's not how it works in a bipartisan Congress.
You have to make deals that you don't like because power is not centered in one person.
Of course, the president is the most powerful man in America, but there's 100 senators who each think they're extremely important, 435 congressmen.
And there's a lot of jostling and toing and froing.
Minister's Ignorance About Firearms Laws00:15:27
To get a bill with this magnitude passed with its immigration provisions will make the deportations more serious.
And by the way, it won't be the last country to do so.
I predict that Prime Minister Nigel Farage in the UK will follow this path.
He'll see Trump and say, oh, it's possible.
We might do it.
I think in the Netherlands, when they're having another election later this year, you could see Prime Minister Ghert Bilders doing the same thing.
I think if France ever has a fair election and Marine Le Pen becomes president there, you might see it there.
I think the world is moving towards re-migration and Trump is leading the way.
Anyways, that's my update.
That's my take on the big, beautiful bill.
But I will get some Americans on the show to help correct my errors in the days ahead.
Stay with us.
More after this short break.
The liberals are not dumb.
They are perhaps the world's most successful political party.
They used to have rivals in Mexico.
There was a political party there that lasted the better part of a century.
And I suppose you could refer to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
But actually, I think, taken over the sweep of time, the Liberal Party of Canada is the most successful political force in the Western world.
Prove me wrong.
Give me an example to dispute that.
And one of the reasons is that they're just so good at the practical politics of getting elected in Canada.
In the case of Mark Carney, he was not Trudeau.
That was half the battle.
And on his very first day, he scaled down the carbon tax to zero.
The law is still on the books for him to charge that tax.
It's just set to zero for now.
And more than those two things, I think he knew that there was a certain number of primarily Ontarian, sort of Laurentian elites, people who were fairly well off, slightly low information, a little bit of an anti-Americanism.
And so he was able to whip up their fears about Donald Trump annexing the country enough to move, let's say, a million votes back into the Liberal column, which was enough to push him ahead into first place.
They are not dumb.
And one of the things they're good at doing is realizing that the Liberals are the parties, the party of the cities and maybe some of the suburbs.
They are not the party of the rural parts.
In fact, other than occasionally a seat in the North, the Liberals really are shut out of rural Canada, which means, you know, you might think that that is a deficit or a strategic loss, but not when the mass of votes and seats are in the cities.
In fact, it's an opportunity.
Again, think like a liberal for a minute.
You can set up the country parts as a foil.
You can demonize them.
You can run against them.
For example, you can demonize, I mean, I think the most obvious example is firearms.
You can say that ranchers and farmers who use firearms for hunting or taking care of, you know, a coyote coming to hassle the flock or even self-defense, you can demonize those country owners of long arms to distract, to misdirect away from the actual crime wave that has overtaken our main cities.
And there are simply enough Canadians who will buy it to continue putting the Liberals into power.
How is that going right now?
Have the Liberals decided to demonize lawful firearm owners again under Mark Carney the way they did so successfully under Justin Trudeau?
And I'm old enough to remember Alan Rock and his gun registry a generation ago.
What are the liberals up to?
Well, joining us now to tell us the answer is someone who's a bit of an expert in the field.
He is the YouTube journalist for Caliber Magazine, Canada's only firearms magazine.
His name is Dan Fritter, and he joins us now via Zoom.
Great to see you, Dan.
Thanks for taking the time with us.
Thanks for having me.
It's a pleasure.
You know, I'm just thinking right after the cabinet shop, I think it was Andrew Lawton who started putting questions to the new liberal minister in charge of firearms just about licenses and firearms and what's the assault, like the most basic questions.
And the minister had no clue whatsoever.
Here's a quick flashback of that video.
It was sort of a classic.
I think you know the one.
The minister know what an RPAL is.
Minister.
I do not.
Does the minister know what the CFSC is?
Henry Minister.
I do not.
No.
I'll stipulate, Chair, that is the Canadian's firearm safety course that all gun owners in Canada have to do to get their firearms license.
Has the minister ever done the Canadian firearm safety course?
The Honourable Minister.
Speaker, it's my third week on the job.
No, I have not.
The Honourable Member.
Does the minister know what safety classes and safety demands are expected of law-abiding Canadian gun owners?
The honorable minister.
This is not about law-abiding gun owners, Mr. Speaker.
Honourable Member.
How can the minister make that claim when he doesn't know the basic fundamentals of law-abiding gun ownership in this country, Chair?
To someone like you who actually knows something about firearms, or someone like me who cares about the right to own firearms, we might think that being a know-nothing might disqualify a cabinet minister in charge of firearms.
But in the Liberal Party, it's the opposite.
The very fact that he doesn't know what an assault rifle is allows him to speak with great confidence, not being worried about getting any facts wrong.
And so I think that what you and I and Andrew Lawton might have thought was a foolish and embarrassing clip just showed the brilliance of the Liberal appointment.
Maybe I'm being too silly, but what do you think of that?
I would agree, and I think it's also quite concerning because this is obviously a highly technical file.
It has a lot of background to it because we had a pretty resilient and complicated system of firearms regulation pre-existing this government.
However, what's happened under Trudeau, who most are aware kind of made edicts and then government had to react to them.
And there was no, from what we can tell, no room for government departments to shift on those edicts, no matter how poorly informed they may have been.
So we now have a minister who seems to know very little to nothing about the existing firearms laws.
And worse still, he doesn't seem to have a staff underneath him that are familiar with how they could possibly consult the minister and provide him with more information to make more informed decisions and policies.
Because as we've seen for the last five years, they've simply been doing what Justin Trudeau and the PMO kind of ordered through the minister.
And moreover, we've had five ministers overseeing this in five years.
So it's not like we've had a nice, long, continuous, consistent, you know, hand on the rudder.
It's been person after person after person, and each one has seemingly gotten less capable of getting a handle on this stuff.
And the whole time, the programs that Justin Trudeau launched primarily in 2020 have just been expanding and expanding and expanding as effectively what seems to be the bureaucrats are just sort of inflating this stuff more and more and more.
You know, you said a lot of interesting things there.
I think one of them is how Justin Trudeau would just govern really by optics first, press release first, policy second.
I want to say something really passionate, and then the smart people will figure out how that's supposed to work.
And luckily, that meant a lot of things he had schemed up never actually got implemented because it was just about the initial press hype.
But I mean, it has been so long in firearms that they are actually doing some terrible things.
Let me bring your attention to a recent story written by Tristan Hopper in the National Post.
Headline was internal report shows Ottawa doubt over budget gun buyback will ever work.
And let me just read you the first sentence.
The Liberal government's plan to, quote, buy back thousands of once legal Canadian firearms is not on schedule and over budget.
But a newly released internal report shows that Ottawa is doubtful that it is working as announced.
Do you have any update on that?
I mean, the idea that they've spent half a billion dollars so far and haven't actually bought back any guns, it feels like the Arrive Can app.
Like it feels as much about a source of fraud or padded budgets as actually a gun project.
Maybe everything the Liberals do is just a patronage deal.
Today it looks like an ArriveCan app.
Tomorrow it looks like a gun buyback.
It's all about just lucrative contracts to buddies.
I don't know.
You tell me what's going on with the gun buyback.
Effectively, you know, going back to what you'd said previously as well, Trudeau had these really impassioned statements he would make and then, you know, jump how high was sort of the response.
For example, in the gun buyback we're discussing now, he made this announcement in the wake of the massacre of Porta Peak.
And then they consulted with the New Zealand government because obviously Jacinda Ardern had made international headlines for making a very similar pronouncement.
And no one seems to have stepped in to tell him that Canada is a very different country from New Zealand.
We are not an island nation off the coast of countries that have massive existing gun bans.
We are bolted to the most heavily armed country in the world and it's not close for second place where criminals get the primary source of their firearms.
So they were embarking on this plan, consulting with the New Zealand police, and it's just been slowly churning forward.
So on one hand, they are doing it.
They've bought back just over 12,000 firearms from businesses at this point.
But it's not getting any, it's taken five years for them to do that.
And those are businesses.
It's a very small number of the overall firearms they're targeting.
It's just sort of crawling towards an eventual failure.
And moreover, you have to be careful because I think the government will frame a lot of this discussion around buyback, and they have in the past, around the getting of guns is the success of this program, instead of looking at does it have any impact on public safety.
And in that regard, since 2015, violence with firearms in Canada has increased relatively steadily.
It is about 19% higher today than it was in 2015.
And since 2020, when these long guns were banned by Trudeau, it's still continued to increase.
So it's not having any impact on public safety, but it is costing phenomenal sums of money.
By the end of this year, with the amount of money that the government has dedicated to it and the previous spending, it'll be somewhere around $830 million.
Now, I just did some quick math.
If you say that they've bought back 12,000 weapons, and if we're going to use the $500 million figure, and maybe the figure's bigger now, that works out to about $4,000 per gun.
Now, I'm just looking behind you there on the wall are a number of rifles.
Are those the kind of guns?
And I can't tell.
I think there's some rifles there.
I don't know if you have a shotgun there.
I can't quite tell.
I'm not an expert.
Spending $4,000 a gun to buy them back, that seems a little stiff.
I mean, those firearms behind you, how much would those cost if you went to a store and bought them?
Well, they vary probably anywhere between a few hundred bucks to more than I would want to admit to my wife.
But they've also got $25,000 rifles.
They've got rifles that they're paying six figures for.
They're very rare African hunting rifles.
It's all over the map.
And moreover, the amount of money that's been spent, a lot of people are saying, well, that's because of the setup costs and whatnot.
For example, they've budgeted $100 million in operating expenses with public safety for this year to oversee phase two, the component that involves individuals.
But last year, they budgeted $30 million for businesses.
And if they targeted, we bring it back to the 12,000 guns that they bought from businesses.
That's actually more guns than they thought they were going to get.
They estimated there were only 9,000 guns impacted at businesses.
They got 135% compliance, which is obviously impossible.
So their estimates on the individual numbers are likely incorrect as well.
And they've now recognized that, actually saying that they have a 13-year gap in the data, so it likely isn't accurate.
So the numbers that we're talking about already, they're going to go up.
The amount that's budgeted this year with public safety alone is basically $460 million.
That's not going to cover the procedural costs that they're looking at.
And again, it's not that this program is going to fail because a lack of compliance or anything else like that.
It's going to fail because the people who they are taking guns from are literally the ones who are least likely to use a firearm in the commission of a crime.
They account for licensed gun owners account for like less than 2% of all violent crime involving a firearm.
So it's specifically targeting a population of people who aren't contributing to the public safety issue Canada is facing.
And Bill Blair even admitted this earlier in the program, where he said, we won't be buying guns from criminals.
Unless you have a firearms license, the government isn't going to give you a check for your gun.
You know, the whole thing about these, I think in the States, they use the word a gun amnesty.
They don't ask you where you got it from.
They just want the gun off the street.
If you're literally saying you have to show you have a license to sell it to us, by definition, you're not going to get a single illegal gun.
By definition, by virtue of the engineering of this plan, you cannot get illegal guns off the streets if you require a license.
That seems like the opposite of what they should be doing.
Oh, it is.
And your comparison to the ArriveCan app, it's very timely for current stuff, but for those that have longer memories remembering a long gun registry, this is a program doomed to fail because the targeted population is infantry in crime.
But unlike the ArriveCan app, it also can't end because the amnesty that currently exists for gun owners, like right now, if you own these firearms, you just have to keep them and store them away.
You can't take them to the range.
You can't sell them.
You can't transfer them.
You just have to keep them.
And we've been told by the RCMP to wait for the program to launch so that you can get them sent off and destroyed.
That amnesty is likely going to be around in perpetuity because the Crown is not terribly interested in charging people with possession of a prohibited firearm if you have a license and you didn't even know that it was illegal.
Because in a lot of cases, you're dealing with people that live, like you said, in rural areas.
They may own a firearm, but they are not gun nuts, so to speak.
They don't read about it.
They don't bother interfacing with a lot of news sources.
And because they have banned, at this point, tens of thousands of varieties of firearm, there's plenty of people out there who own these guns and are still using them and have no idea that they're prohibited whatsoever.
And those are the sorts of people that the Crown does not want to charge.
So this amnesty is going to be around forever, just like the long gun registry amnesty was, which means that the program is going to have to remain funded for just as long.
There's no point because most of these guns are non-restricted and thus not registered.
The government doesn't know where they are, how many there are.
So there's no way for the government to A, provide an actual compliance number because they don't know.
And B, say, we're done now.
Government's Unknown Arsenal00:03:39
We got to 100%.
We're good to go.
So they're just going to have to keep putting money into this like the long gun registry.
So as we are now knocking on a billion dollars by the end of this, by March, that number will just continue to keep snowballing.
And, you know, potentially we'll see the same thing happen that we saw with the long gun registry.
Eventually that number becomes big enough that the average person sort of recognizes they're not getting value for it and they'll just scrap the whole thing because it can't meet its stated goal, but it will certainly cost a lot of money.
Hopefully that's sooner rather than later.
Yeah.
Well, it'll be interesting to see how aggressive and interested Mark Carney is on this file.
But he's a winner.
I mean, he just won and he wants to win.
And I mean, I'd have to look at the electoral map, but I don't think he has any significant rural MPs.
I'm not saying he has zero, but it's got to be close to zero.
He doesn't care.
I learned, you know, the one factor I learned in our conversation today that I think I'm going to repeat 100 times is that the gun buyback literally makes it impossible to get an illegal gun off the street because you've got to go in with clean hands, as they say.
And the whole point of the gun is to get the dirty hands guns.
That's just unbelievable.
It's a perfect encapsulation of the modern Liberal Party, complete virtue signaling, not actually accomplishing a policy objective, spending as much money as possible as imaginable, and no sunset on their new office.
And, you know, there'll be people getting pensions.
This could be a government office that's open for 100 years.
I guess what I'm hearing from you, Dan, is liberal business as usual.
Lashford to you.
Yeah, I think it is.
And I think it's interesting to think about how this will probably shape up because the way that I've seen, you know, in the 14 years that I've been covering this stuff now is that the attitudes have shifted quite a lot.
And although the regulations definitely impact more rural people and gun owners, we're obviously not in a solid economic position.
A lot of Canadians are feeling the squeeze, so to speak.
And I think that no matter where you live, whether or not you have a gun owner or you own guns, that the cost of this program is starting, it will probably have an impact on the credibility of Mark Carney as a fiscal manager, which is obviously a huge component of his image.
Because if people are looking at services getting cut because we have to make NATO commitments and stuff like that, we aren't made of money.
There is no tree in Ottawa that it just falls off of, unfortunately.
So we are going to have to cut things and people will start to look at programs like this and go, well, why isn't this being cut?
Why can't I get a doctor for three weeks or six months or how long it takes, wherever you live?
But we're going to spend a billion dollars taking guns from people who have licenses that say you've literally not committed a crime.
That doesn't make a lot of sense to anyone.
So it might take some time to get there, but it might have an actual impact.
And it'd be interesting to see how guns may elevate into a broader political perspective than being the niche issue it's historically kind of been regarded as.
Well, we'll keep our eyes on it.
Dan Fritter from Caliber Magazine, great to meet you.
Thanks for your time with us today.
Thanks for having me.
Right on.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Welcome back.
Your letters to me.
On remigration, Sherry Hinton says, I love what President Trump is doing.
I live in Arizona, border state.
Trump Sends Haitians Home00:01:34
It's time action is taken.
I hardly can afford food, let alone have non-citizens take my children's food.
Bravo to our president.
Yeah, I think Arizona, Texas, places like that.
I mean, Trump is sending home the Haitians.
He has had tens of thousands of Haitians that are there on sort of a special pass because things have been so awful in Haiti.
It's not a permanent pass.
He's sending them home.
TCZ 7742 says, the problem is Carney will see this as an opportunity and get the remigration to come up to Canada.
You know what?
Don't give him any ideas, but it wouldn't surprise me.
I mean, my theory is those Swedish Somalis took the payment from Sweden and are moving to Ireland because they are moving on to green fields, greener pastures.
We are so unsavvy in Canada.
It makes me sad.
One last letter on Glastonbury.
That was that music festival in the UK that had all sorts of pro-Hamash commentary.
Razor says the saddest part is that he likely won't face any legal repercussions.
Tommy Robinson gets imprisoned for exposing the truth about Islamism, but this guy walks free like nothing happened.
I think you're exactly right.
In fact, Tommy made a tweet to that effect, I think it was yesterday.
He said if he had gone on stage and said the insane things, like, and it was more than that first initial clip, there was a whole rant he went on about death to him and death to him.
Tommy would have been arrested that moment.
Yeah, there's two-tier justice in the UK, isn't there?