Sheila Gunn-Reid examines NDP MP Leah Gazan’s bill to criminalize "residential school denialism," defined as questioning unproven claims like the Kamloops "215 bodies" or vague allegations (e.g., "he kicked me in the ass between 1958–1964") settled via Canada’s $3B Independent Assessment Process without evidence. Michelle Sterling reveals Gazan’s great-grandfather, Lakota survivor John Lacaine, was ignored for his positive historical work while she targets critics, and highlights suppressed TRC interviews with staff/clergy due to budget cuts. Gazan’s "phantom genocide" narrative, pushed by Kimberly Murray’s disputed UN reports, drives financial strain and media bias, like The Globe and Mail’s Tanya Talaga. Gunn-Reid argues this war on skepticism stifles nuance, prioritizing trauma over unresolved truths, while defending her solo production process amid Alberta teacher strike debates, where Premier Daniel Smith’s legislation forced unions back to work despite ATA’s opposition. [Automatically generated summary]
A radical NDP MP wants to criminalize asking for proof of criminality.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Have you seen this clip of NDP MP Leah Gazin?
She is for the second time introducing making it a crime to do what she calls residential school denialism, but what normal people would call asking for proof when you are accusing people of serious crimes like murder, abuse, assault, and even genocide.
Look at this.
Madam Speaker, today I am deeply honored to table my private member's bill, an act to amend the criminal code promotion of hatred against Indigenous peoples to end residential school denialism.
I would like to thank the honorable member from Vancouver East for seconding my bill.
A bill I dedicate to all residential school survivors and our family.
Survivors have carried truths that this country needed to hear.
Truths of violence, loss, and resilience.
They shared their stories not to reopen wounds, but to help this country heal.
As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reminded us, without truth, there can be no reconciliation.
Yet today, denialism is spreading, twisting facts, denying genocide, and reigniting harm.
It is not only hurtful, it is dangerous.
It endangers survivors, our families, and our nations who continue the work of truth-telling.
Mr. Speaker, we owe survivors more than words.
We owe them action, and this bill is about protecting their safety, honoring their truths, and ensuring that the hard-won truth of what happened in residential schools is never erased or denied again.
I call on all members of parliament to stand with survivors, to protect the truth, uphold dignity, and walk the path of real reconciliation together.
Thank you, Madam Speaker.
Now, why do you think she wants to make it a crime to ask for proof, to ask for substantiation?
Do you think that it is an acknowledgement that maybe the allegations are not supported by the facts if people started looking for the facts?
I do.
Now, I should tell you, I take a nuanced approach to the idea of residential schools.
Did bad things happen?
Absolutely, definitely.
Is that the exclusive and only experience that people had there?
Also, absolutely, definitely not.
But we can't talk about it.
And in fact, they want to make it illegal for us to talk about it.
And if that is the case, I feel like our first life sentence under Leah Gazzan's new law, which hopefully will not be adopted by the government, will be handed out to my guest today, Michelle Sterling, an independent researcher on the issue of residential schools.
take a listen to our interview.
So joining me now is good friend of the show, Michelle Sterling.
You may know her in another capacity, but today she's appearing as an independent researcher.
And I wanted to have Michelle on the show because she's done such great work on the residential school discoveries or lack thereof and the people involved in pushing the narrative that even questioning what has or hasn't been discovered at residential schools should be criminalized.
And I'm talking specifically, at least this week, about NDP MP Leah Gazin.
Michelle, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Tell us what Leah Gazin wants to do, I guess to people like me and you.
And then we'll get into a little bit more about who exactly Leah Gazin is.
Well, Leah Gazan in the past Parliament submitted a bill C413, which was intended to criminalize residential school denialism in the same way that in terms of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe during World War II, it is forbidden in Canada to deny that the Holocaust happened.
Criminalizing Residential School Denialism00:15:22
So she wants to have that similar thing applied to people like me who bring forward good stories.
She calls it downplaying the damage of Indian residential schools.
And of course, we have in a circle of colleagues an intrepid researcher named Nina Green.
And Nina started exploring the history of Leah Gazan's own family.
And guess what?
In her own family, she has a very successful Indian residential school thriver, a graduate of the school, her great-grandfather, John Lacaine.
So he was one of the Lakota people who came over the border after Custer's last stand.
And of course, the cavalry was pretty much in hot pursuit.
We gave, we, Canada, gave them asylum in Canada.
And his mother took up with a Northwest Mounted Police officer who sustained the family because they were in very uncertain times.
You know, they didn't have status in Canada.
The buffalo were certainly dying out.
There wasn't much hunting.
So how would you survive?
So anyway, his mother, whose name I'm just going to pronounce properly here if I can find it.
His mother, Teshunke Nupawin, also known as Emma Loves War, she had sort of a common law relationship with Lacaine, who was Archibald Lacaine, a Northwest Mounted Police officer.
And they separated because he was moving to Eastern Canada, but she stayed here.
But the family took on the name Lacaine.
So John Lacaine ended up somehow, because he was considered by the government as non-status and a half-breed, meaning that his father was white, he somehow was admitted to Regina Industrial School.
And there are instances where Métis people were or non-status people were admitted.
It's not very common, but sometimes the local priest would take pity on someone who was very destitute or maybe a promising person, you know, where they saw they could benefit.
Anyway, he graduated successfully, learned carpentry, and he learned to read and write.
He became actually a historian of his people, of the Wild West, if you like, internationally recognized, and he was a devout Catholic.
He helped build the local church.
And so why is she hiding this story from us?
He was a success story.
He homesteaded.
He was a settler.
So he became an independent Indigenous person, having started from probably the worst position possible.
And yet, telling that story, I guess telling that story, what you're doing right now is something that Leah Gazin would seek to criminalize.
Right.
And by contrast, why wouldn't I criminalize her?
Because she is downplaying the benefits of Indian residential schools by concealing her family's history.
Also, in the House of Commons, she told a very sad story about her mother, who was basically in a compromised situation because her grandmother had become, I guess, her life has kind of gone off the rails, as Nina likes to put it.
She had taken up with a Chinese man.
We don't know his name at this point, and had two children, which were Marjorie, Leah's mom, and Bill, her uncle.
And the mother left them in a hotel room and abandoned them.
So they were put into the foster child family services, the child welfare services.
The thing is that this has nothing to do with Indian residential schools.
But Leah Gazan presents the story as if it does.
So her mother, Marjorie, grew up to be a social worker and married Albert Gazan, who was a survivor of the actual Holocaust in World War II.
Canada welcomed him and other members of the family to Canada and gave them refuge too.
And now all Leah Gazan can do is accuse us of genocide.
And I really have a bone to pick with her regarding her motion in the House of Commons, where she got all the House of Commons to support it, to describe Indian residential schools as a genocide.
Well, genocide isn't decided by a vote in the House of Commons.
It's not decided by a travel-weary pope saying, okay, to badgering journalists, okay, okay, it's a genocide.
And, you know, it's not okay.
Like Sean Carlton is one of the people who claims to be an expert on residential school denialism.
He would speak out vehemently against me.
He claims that, you know, they don't owe you their children's bodies, that none of us who demand evidence, you know, that we're being heartless, we're being ghouls.
That's how Mark Miller put it.
Well, I'm sorry, if you're going to accuse me and my country, 10 million Roman Catholics, 19 million Christians, including the Catholics in Canada, half the population of Canada, if you're going to accuse these people of genocide, then we want evidence, we want proper due process of law, and we want proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
We want to follow the rule of law.
The presumption of innocence is enshrined in the charter.
So you can't run around calling Canadians guilty of genocide when the presumption of innocence is the charter right of all Canadians.
And we have no proof that there was a genocide.
Now, you've actually gone one step further.
So you've actually written an open letter at the time.
It was to Sean Frazier, Minister of Justice Attorney General of Canada, basically saying, We need an inquiry into this.
This isn't just good enough for someone to make a claim and then we all just declare a National Day of Mourning and accept the facts as they are without a bone, a body, any evidence, any excavation being done.
Tell us about your open letter about the call for an inquiry.
And I think this is something that will, if they did this, I feel like it would stop a lot of the damage, division, and hate being sewn against Christians in this country.
We saw 100 plus churches being either burned or vandalized in the wake of the Kamloops residential school discovery.
And it's not getting any better.
Tell us about this.
Well, I appeal to Sean Fraser because of a few different things.
First of all, all the things that I just mentioned, the presumption of innocence, etc.
But people don't know that the Missing Children Project, which was part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, started in secret.
And if you want to read all about this, you can read it in Ronald Nisen's book, Truth and Indignation.
He's probably the only person who covered the Truth and Reconciliation Commission at the time.
So it began in secret and continued in secret.
It was never part of the TRC mandate and seems to have benefited most the archaeologists of Canada who have, as an association, agreed to sort of comply with, you know, Indigenous prior right, like we're not going to dig if you don't want us to dig kind of thing, which is, you know, perhaps, yeah, it has perhaps some ethical element to it that you have to do things in a culturally appropriate way.
But, you know, they're really helping bar us from finding information.
Secondly, this is a terrible blood libel on all of Canada, all Canadians, on the Catholic Church worldwide.
Many of the claims that are made are unproven.
As Thompson Highway, who is also a residential school student, said, and he's now an internationally renowned artist of many different genres, writer, musician, etc.
He said, you know, you've heard 7,000 sad stories in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but you haven't heard the 7,000 good stories.
And that's very, very true.
But in fact, at the TRC, as Nisen reports, if people tried to present a good story, they were shouted down.
And it turns out, if you go back in time a little bit to the independent assessment process, which preceded and kind of crossed over, the independent assessment process was an avenue where people who had suffered serious harms could apply for more compensation in the Indian residential school settlement agreement.
So there was a common experience payment of $10,000 for the first year that everybody got whoever went to Indian residential school who's still living.
Then there was like $3,000 a year for subsequent years.
And then there was this independent assessment process where you could sort of privately file a complaint.
Now, what happened in that is that a lot of lawyers had been ginning up the story for years prior.
And so they would be sending forms to reserves and saying, you know, please fill out this form to make your claim.
It won't cost you a penny and we'll get you lots of money.
And so the form would say things, you know, how many times was penis inserted into your anus and, you know, lots of very lurid kind of suggestions.
And so, of course, the idea is that the more complex your case, the more money you get.
And that's exactly what happened.
But as Ronald Nisen points out, a lot of the people who did really suffer could not even fill out the form for a claim because it so traumatized them.
But the people who could fill out the form because they wanted to cash in, could fill out that form and did.
And, you know, there were many aberrations in that process.
It was not due process.
And as a result of the independent assessment process, there are 5,315 people in Canada who are now named as persons of interest as if they are actual criminals who never ever had due process of law to clear their name.
So they could get a letter in the mail that accused them either of something stupid like, he kicked me in the ass.
When did that happen?
Between 1958 and 1964.
Like, how do you defend against that?
Or there was another one that I've seen.
I was running around the gym and as I ran by, he grabbed me by the vagina.
I'm not sure how you could do that.
Anyway, and he did.
I did that twice.
When did that happen?
Between 1960 and 1964.
You know, these absurd claims received compensation.
Why?
Because they were decided on the basis of probability, not on actual evidence and testimony.
And the person who was accused, when they arrived at the adjudication, they were not titled as a defendant.
They were given the name of witness.
They were not allowed to ask questions and they were not allowed to defend themselves.
Like it's a total breach of rule of law in every way possible.
And the accuser was not required to attend.
Like the whole idea of law is that if someone accuses you of something, that you have a right to face them in court with some exceptions.
For instance, you know, child rape or something horrible like that, where the victim is screened or from another location.
But, you know, this is not due process of law.
So the whole thing is totally flawed and contrived.
And Nisen reports that there was one complaint against a priest that he'd sexually assaulted a fellow at a residential school.
Turned out the priest was still in theological college, but apparently that complainant received like $100,000.
So now that priest is marked for life.
This is why many of the priests and workers from the schools did not show up at the TRC.
And furthermore, you know, because some of them now actually fear for their life because they know that people assume that if they money was awarded, then the person is guilty, when in fact, that's not true at all.
It was only decided on the basis of probability.
And furthermore, in the TRC process, there were two women who were assigned to interview former staff and clergy.
And they began their work and then they were told, well, no, we're going to cut your interviews.
They're not going to be transcribed.
We cut your budget from $100,000 to $10,000.
This is out of a $70 million budget.
And so that valuable information.
that the adult perspective of what was going on was not part of the TRC.
And this is really important because most of the children, I mean, most of the people who testified or they didn't actually testify, they just gave their recollections.
Most of those people were children at the time.
So, you know, if your parents are getting divorced and are involved in horrendous domestic violence, then the police take you away.
They apprehend you to save your life.
All you remember is that you were taken away.
You don't remember what was going on in the family home and they maybe will never tell you.
You know, that's a family secret, right?
But the children's point of view told as adults, you know, is really heartrending.
And it's true, I'm sure that many of them did suffer at home or at the school.
Eyewitness Accounts Revealed00:04:13
But, you know, there was no evidence required.
So you could say anything.
And furthermore, these were in large sharing circles.
So what happens in a sharing circle often is that there's this sense of one-upmanship, you know, that that person said this was awful.
And it's like, for me, now it's my turn to witness.
I'm going to say what was awfuler.
So, I mean, that sounds perhaps unfair, but these are very true psychological elements that are well known.
And one other thing, you know, it is known that psychologists and law enforcement officials know that historic sexual assault testimonies and memories, eyewitness memories of children are usually not very credible.
It's just eyewitness reports or even contemporary eyewitness reports are not very reliable or credible.
So, you know, we've accepted everything that people said at face value.
And here's where Leia Gazan would like to put me in jail for saying this, but I'm saying this was not evidence-based legal due process.
They were statements by people.
The things that happened to them may or may not have happened at the school.
They may have happened within their family or on reserve.
You know, maybe projection.
So, because we know that the incidence of sexual assault and violence on many reserves is extremely high.
So I think we need an inquiry into all of this.
And I think we also need an inquiry into Kimberly Murray's work.
She was a special interlocutor on missing children and unmarked graves related to Indian residential schools.
First of all, her office was located on territory that claims to not be part of Canada.
So were we paying somebody millions of dollars to do this research who's acting as a foreign entity?
Secondly, she was required to report to the Justice Minister, but she, of her own volition, sent off very lurid, unvetted reports to the UN.
And thirdly, she was supposed to be, her mandate required her to be impartial and objective, but she publicly stated and also wrote in her reports that she would not be so.
Now, her reports hand China the advantage.
They hand a weapon to China, who has accused Canada of genocide on the world stage.
And when did that happen?
It happened the day after UNDRIP went through and received royal assent.
So Kimberly Murray's report actually reports actually hand China a weapon against Canada and we paid for it.
So and Kimberly Murray and Lea Gazan have been seen many times in interviews demanding that residential school denialists like me be thrown in jail and fined and silenced.
And you can see why now, because things are not right.
The things that happened are not right.
They were not legal.
And we're paying a huge multi-billion dollar price and our country is being destroyed bit by bit.
Frankly, I think they know they've incentivized lies through cash payments.
And I know that they, I think they know they're getting the story wrong because that's what this is about.
Not only do they not want people asking questions, they want to make it illegal for you to ask questions, which means that they are working really, really hard to protect what they know to be untrue or at least grossly inflated.
Right.
And as I like to say, you know, this went from being like a little cottage industry where I think it began actually in Alberta in Red Deer.
Oblate Records Mystery00:12:57
One of the people from the Moscow Sisa Reserve, formerly Hobima, you know, was looking for his brother who had gone to the Red Deer Industrial School and that child had passed away, I think from influenza.
Anyway, he was looking for some remnant of him.
And through historical research and a farmer who found some, you know, an abandoned, unmarked grave on the edge of his property, they actually found the headboards and they found that there were three students there and they did have historical records written down.
So they did find this individual who years ago, you know, died and was buried.
And it kind of blossomed from there.
And I, you know, I do like to tell this one story that is, I think, very telling about the whole circumstance, because I think that there are reasons why people see that there or feel that their family members disappeared.
This is a story from Fort Albany.
It's in Eric Bay's book.
And he talks about how a trapper came to the Hudson Bay Post.
He was sick and he said, my wife is sick in the tent and we have no food.
The trapper died.
So the Hudson Bay sent a couple of guys out with food to find the tent.
There, the mother was deceased.
There was a two-month-old baby.
There were three little children, you know, very small, like toddler baby age, and a 16-year-old boy.
The 16-year-old boy they sent on a hunt with family members, the two-month-old baby they gave to a biological aunt, sister, family member, and the three small children they did take away to Indian residential school to care for them.
And while there, one of those children died.
Those children would never have gone back to their community because there was no one to care for them.
Or survived or survived at all.
Right, they wouldn't have survived at all.
And so, but you know, in that community, there would be this feeling that this whole family vanished in one day and those children never came home.
So there must be something bad and awful at the Indian residential school when it's more likely that probably those children maybe became staff there or they learned something and moved on to another community.
But why would they go home?
There was no one that they would know there.
So that's just one example.
Or when people were sent to a TB sanatorium.
So let's say you're seven years old, you're at the school, your TB develops, you probably arrived with latent TB, it develops.
They send you on to a sanatorium.
Most sanatorium treatments were months long, often years long.
In one report, they say that our brother came home.
He went at age seven to the sand.
He came home at age 13.
Like nobody knew who he was.
There had been two or three children born in the interim.
And, you know, for that community, this stranger showing up who's kind of chubby and pale, because that's a condition of the disease and a condition of the treatment.
They feed you up.
You know, you come home and no one knows who you are.
You don't remember the language.
There's these new people in your family and everyone in town is like, who are you?
You're not sorry.
So, you know, because he was this high and he was very active and skinny and you're fat and pale and not active.
It's not you.
So you can see why these thoughts would develop.
So there is some real basis for it, but the idea that thousands of children have vanished, there's no evidence of that.
No.
And I was researching the Edmonton General Hospital because it had been a TB facility.
And there was a local Indigenous fella who, as they were redeveloping the general hospital to be something else, the developer said, okay, if you think that there are just bodies on the grounds here that have been just discarded of Indigenous people, let's look before I start building.
And he did.
No bodies were found.
And the Indigenous fellow just wouldn't let go.
Like there was no sense of relief for him.
Oh, they must have moved them.
They must have moved them or they're somewhere else in the city.
And so I thought, okay, well, what is the underlying psychology of all of this?
And, you know, I think it has something to do with the rates of tuberculosis death once contracted.
Like at some point, it was one in two people who contracted tuberculosis would actually die.
So if you were sent to a residential school, contracted tuberculosis, ended up at a tuberculosis facility in Edmonton or wherever, you had a one in two chance of not going back.
And for the, you know, for the people who said bye to you when you went off to the residential school, they don't know what point along the food chain you passed or why.
Well, and also people have to remember back in the day, there were not the same kind of communication facilities there are now.
And usually when people were very sick or disabled, they were turned over to the government as a ward of the state.
So once there, the government had no particular obligation to report on progress.
It's not like today where you have informed consent and, you know, you have a family member in hospital and they need to do some critical kind of surgery or something.
They, you know, they will phone a loved one and say, this is what we have to do next.
You know, do we have your permission, et cetera, et cetera.
That kind of thing didn't exist then.
It was too onerous, too difficult.
So they did keep records of people, but they didn't necessarily send reports, you know, on a weekly basis.
So people didn't know what was going on.
And also, you know, people should remember that in the time of TB, once people understood that TB was contagious and was actually contagious within families, then people often wanted to be buried without a headstone or the family wanted them to be buried without a headstone or marker because you didn't want people saying, oh, what did your sister die of?
Because if you said TB, you know, and it would be the assumption at the time, then you might lose your apartment.
You might get kicked out of your work, you know, because you'd be perceived as a risk.
So, you know, all these historical contexts, these are things that Leah Gazan does not want me to tell you.
But once you understand them, you have a much better picture of what went on in that time.
So I don't think that Leah Gazan should be allowed to shut me up.
I don't think that the House of Commons, which is supposed to support the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada, should be actively involved in trying to shut up people who are independent researchers who are exploring historical data.
And you have to remember, there's thousands of documents.
I can't remember the number off the top of my head, but apparently the Alberta Provincial Archives have something like 52 meters of oblate records to be reviewed and digitized.
You know, so that's just there.
And also at the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation, they have millions of records as well.
And also, you know, when the Senate, the Senate had called a number of people to look into this, you know, supposed lack of records and lack of response and where are the bodies?
We know bodies are out there.
The actual coroner for Manitoba said to them, you know, it's really hard for us to find any information if we don't have a list of names.
And that's the key thing about this.
This is a phantom genocide.
Going back even to the 215 or 200 supposed bodies in Kamloops, no one has a list of names of the alleged missing.
No one has a list of missing persons reports filed by the families that were not resolved in that time period.
So Canadians are paying through the nose, both financially and emotionally, for this claim of genocide.
It's a phantom genocide.
And until there's an inquiry to set things straight, we're still going to be burdened by this terrible injustice to all of us.
Michelle, how do people find your research and the things that you're publishing on this topic?
Because I think it's so important because, you know, you're showing screenshots of historical records that you won't see the other side ever produce.
You look and see and they don't produce anything, like anything.
And you're saying, here's the historical record.
Tell us how people can find your work.
Well, I have a blog called michellesterling.com.
That's S-T-I-R.
And I'm also on Substack called Sorry No More, Exposing the Bitter Roots of Sugar Cane.
I'm also on Medium.
And I'm going to start doing some videos as well.
And, you know, I do want to say one thing.
I feel I feel that the Indigenous community is really suffering from what I call ambiguous losses.
I think their sense of loss is real.
But if you look at it, because they've had so many sudden, tragic deaths in their community over the centuries, actually, you know, from the smallpox epidemic, the Spanish flu, tuberculosis, and more recently, the opioid crisis, suicides, alcoholism.
You know, all these things have stacked up.
So I think the grief is very real, but blaming it on Indian residential schools will not solve anything.
But trying to deal with that unresolved grief over these ambiguous losses can help.
And I've done a report with a number of my essays, and that's what it's called, Ambiguous Losses.
And there's another one that I've done called Confronting Irresponsible Media.
I can't even remember.
Well, on Kindle, it's called mass psychosis.
But the point is that the media have really driven this story.
And if you look at, I did one item about the Globe and Mail.
You know, the whole story of the Kamloops find actually emanated from the Globe and Mail reporter, Tanya Talaga.
And Nina Green, again, our interpret Nina Green, was reviewing Tanya's book, The Knowing.
And it turns out that, you know, parliamentary secretaries were calling and saying, hey, is this real?
Like they had advanced warning and they were like, are these numbers real?
And she's like, yes, for sure, they are.
So it's really the Globe and Mail and Canada Press, the Canadian press, that propagated this story that was based on no evidence whatsoever.
So, you know, that's something else that Sean Fraser can put on his list of inquiries.
Yeah.
Wouldn't that be great if they actually investigated the government-funded media for disinformation?
Michelle, thanks so much for coming on this show.
I'll have you back on, I think, after the UN Climate Change Conference in your other capacity, because I know you and I pay close attention to what the UN is planning to do to, I guess, all of humanity at their little globalist climate cabal meeting this year in the lovely port city of Belém, Brazil.
Michelle, thanks so much for coming on the show.
And as I said, we'll have you back again very soon.
Ensuring Guest Visibility00:04:38
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So I have to look at that because sometimes I've been recording and then discovered that I wasn't actually recording at all.
In fact, I did that before I hit record on this.
And then if I'm looking at sources or show notes, I sometimes have physical notes on my desk, but that's just like my thoughts.
I jot them down.
I will have the sources of the things I want to talk to the guest about on my screen right here.
So I have a lot of things going on.
Why?
Because I don't have a chase producer.
I don't have somebody in the control room helping me.
I am the control room.
My little cubby under the stairs where I work, it's the control room.
And so I want you to know I'm not paying attention to my guest.
I'm trying to make sure that the show is still recording, becoming a product that I can turn over to you.
And I work alone.
I book my guests on my own.
I record my show on my own.
My producers back in Toronto after I'm done, they give the show a light little edit and gussy it up a little bit.
But the bulk of the work is done by me entirely alone.
So I'm not distracted.
I'm still, as I say, paying close attention to every word coming out of my guest's mouth and respecting their time with me.
I'm just also making sure that the show is still showing, as they say.
Don't attribute malice when incompetence will do.
And in this case, it's actually not incompetence.
End of Teacher Strike00:03:50
It's just working hard to save money because if I can do all those things, then we don't need to hire somebody else.
And we get to be more careful with the money of our donors and subscribers.
That's what I'm trying to do.
I'm doing for people's jobs because we're not the CBC.
So anyway, I thought I would address that because I get that one once in a while.
And if you're a regular viewer, you know I probably answer that same criticism once a year.
And now, on the actual topic of the interview, the end to the teacher strike in Alberta, wherein our United Conservative government, led by Premier Daniel Smith, legislated the teachers back to work because the kids had been out of school for three weeks and held hostage by this nonsense.
Woohoo Wally writes, As a teacher, I'm glad we're back.
The deal is and was always fair.
The Alberta government is investing heavily in Alberta schools.
We got into the profession.
I hope for the kids, not the soapbox.
I don't own any red clothing.
Now, that's a reference to the teachers wearing red back on their first day back after being legislated back to work in protest of the government's back-to-work legislation.
And I would love to believe that Woohoo Wally is the majority of the teachers out there.
I feel like that could be the majority of the teachers, at least at my daughter's school.
She's still in high school.
My other ones are off being adults.
But I think that's the majority.
It's the loud political ones and their union, the ATA, who drown out the voices of these teachers here.
Larry No Toom 3232 says the rejection by teachers was political.
Now, I don't even want to say rejection by the teachers.
It was the ATA, the union, who rejected the deal.
And it's fascinating to think that our government had to bring in back-to-work legislation to give teachers a raise and hire more teachers and put more money into education spending.
It's wild.
FHL Devils says the teachers' union is a political activism body, not an actual for the workers' union anymore.
I believe that wholeheartedly.
It should lose its legal protections and teachers should all be converted into independent contractors, able to negotiate their own wages and benefits based on skills and merit instead of the most useless measure possible, seniority.
Yeah, seniority is just the ability to not get fired in a year, honestly.
Now, do I think teachers should be independent contractors?
I don't know, but there's got to be a better way than forcing people into a collective body that engages in political activism that they don't necessarily support.
I think the answer is right-to-work legislation.
If your workplace is a union workplace, you should have the right not to associate with those people in the same manner that you have a charter-protected right to associate, right?
You have to provide the negative right.
And I think that's the answer.
And I know the unions hate that because when given a choice, people don't join.
They just don't.
The Answer Is Right-To-Work Legislation00:01:08
And I think that's great.
Williams12373 says, You two are awesome.
Keep up the good work that you do.
I think Chris is wonderful.
And I think we're lucky to have her fighting on behalf of Alberta taxpayers.
And she does such good work breaking down these huge, complicated, terrible government ideas and the numbers attached to them by way of tax dollars into things that you can really understand.
Like when she says, you know, a billion dollars is a hospital.
And when you are spending a billion dollars on debt servicing charges, that's one hospital just poof.
You know, I think that's a great way to explain government spending in terms of hospitals or tanks of fuel or individual families.
And that's what she does because it is individual families who bear the burden of these things, whatever your family looks like.
Okay, well, everybody, 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 weekend.