B (8:27)

I'd like to just take and pause a moment. I read an article last night in the Financial Times about a group of people from Alberta. I won't describe them as Albertans who went to the White House seeking the assistance of the United States to break up our country. Now, I understand the desire to hold a referendum to, to talk about the issues you want to talk about. In Canada we got free speech, that's important. But to go to a foreign country and to ask for assistance in breaking up Canada, there's an old fashioned word for that and that word is treason.

A (8:59)

I had Grok, which is the Twitter based artificial intelligence engine. I had it search through the archives of the CBC for any single occasion where the CBC called Quebec separatists treasonous. And it came up with nothing. And then I instructed it, look deeper, look harder. They could not find, they, the artificial intelligence could not find a single instance of the CBC calling a Quebec separatist treasonous. But they certainly ladle that word around with Albertans. And like, there's a lot of layers here. First of all, the double standard between Quebec and Alberta just confirms it in the minds of Albertans. Second of all, the fact that the cbc, a national organ under the Canadian Broadcasting act, is so partisan is another point. And just the fact that they're accusing Albertans who are following a democratic path of being treasonous, basically you're not allowed to object to your position. You're not allowed to do what the Clarity act and the Supreme Court says you can do. You're not allowed to do what Quebec has done twice, and if you dare to speak back, we're going to call you basically the worst crime in the book. My fourth observation is that when you listen to an anti separatist, it's sort of like an inkblot test or it's a Projection. Maybe they project their own sins or their own ideas onto Alberta. It's a scapegoat. I mean, usually they're anti capitalist, anti oil and gas, pro Ottawa, pro globalist. So they seem Alberta sort of like in that book Gulliver's Travels, which is a wonderful book. And it's not just a book for kids, by the way. But remember Gulliver went to a couple of lands. He went to Bo Brobdingnag where everyone was huge and he was little. And he went to Lilliput where he was huge and everyone else was little. And you know, they, they tied him down with a thousand little strings. That's Alberta in the minds of antiseptics. Alberta is this giant that needs to be tied down with thousands of little strings. Social license, carbon taxes, mous carbon capture, you know, tanker band. We have this mighty giant and we have to tie him down. And everything that Alberta doesn't like, they like. It brings out their true nature. Very few, like I say, anti separatists actually try and convince Albertans. They're not trying to make the case that Albertans are better off financially or would have a more sensible foreign policy or a more sensible immigration policy. They know that they can't make the case on the math. Or maybe they don't know and they just are going off half cocked. But I think most of them just take it as an opportunity to virtue signal. Like the, the at issue panel I mentioned. Whoever can be the most anti separatist wins. I don't know, the approval of the Laurentian elites, more money for the cbc. They demand that Alberta be submissive to whatever their ideological pet project is. They just demand it and so they're outraged that Albertans would defy them. My fifth observation is that I don't actually think this is a bargaining chip as opposed to what Quebec often does now. It can be a bargaining chip. When Alberta says we have a demand, there's never an or else. I mean, or else what? What are you going to do? You and what army? Right? This is the ultimate or else. It certainly has been for Quebec. Give three seats out of nine on the Supreme Court or else. Give us control over certain federal jurisdictions like immigration, or else. Let us have our say in who gets to be a judge or else. There's a lot of or else ing out of Quebec. It's a bargaining chip. I really don't think that's what's on the minds of most Albertans as they sign up for this independence referendum. I mean, it could be and it will be. The more real this independence referendum gets, the more I think some pragmatic politicians will say oh yikes, we better appease it. But that's not what's motivating it. It's really not. There's not a separatist industry in Alberta the same way there has been in Quebec for two generations. My sixth observation is that part of this independence movement is a reaction to the same thing happening over and over again. Like that great movie by Bill Murray called Groundhog Day. You know what happened to Alberta during the Social Credit era, during the Great Depression where Alberta actually went bankrupt. And the way that Alberta was treated then and then in the 70s and 80s during the OPEC oil shocks and then during Charlottetown Accord and then during like again and again and again. I think that many new Albertans get to understand that when they come to Alberta. That's never taught in Ontario or Quebec, certainly not in Quebec. I think people are just sort of. They realize there was a hope in Alberta that Pierre Poliev could reset the country. Just like when Stephen Harper won, it reduced the demand for independence because people thought okay, that's our guy, he's not going to favor us so much but he's going to stop the pain, he's going to stop the attacks on us. And he sort of did, but not really. He still appointed kooky left wing judges. He never really dealt with Alberta's over contribution to the country but he gave Alberta enough respect that separatism waned. I think a lot of Westerners were hoping Pierre Poliev would do the same. But now that that victory was snatched away into the jaws of defeat. I think people said you've just seen this movie too many times before. Whether it's Pierre Polyev, Stephen Harper, Preston Manning, whomever, it's just, it's not going to get better. It's structurally broken. I think many Albertans understand that. My seventh point, I saw a little news item that a number of angry NDP's say they will leave Alberta if. Well they didn't quite say if. What if it goes independent. If they have a referendum now. I don't believe this. This reminds me of when Hollywood lovies say if Donald Trump wins in 2024, we're leaving. I think the only one that left was Rosie O' Donnell and I think Ellen DeGeneres and I think they both wan like that's two. No one's going to actually sell their house and move. Move to where? I just don't believe it. But if it happens, win win. I think while I don't think a lot of NDPers or other leftists would leave Alberta, although maybe some people working for the feds will, I think a lot of good people from the rest of Canada would definitely want to join. I mean, I live in Toronto and there's an enormous number of people in Toronto who are doing what they can to get out of the city. I think it really started during COVID when the city was paralyzed by government, by public health minis and a lot of people who could just relocated to Florida. That's often the laptop class, people who could work from wherever, a lot of lawyers, a lot of people in finance. I think that that trend has been, for example. Let me give you an example. There's been so much anti Semitism and crime and anti Semitic crime in Toronto that I just happen to know that an awful lot of Jewish families are looking to get out of Toronto and they're wondering, well, do we go to Florida? Do we go. Where do they go? I think that if Alberta were independent, you would see refugees from the rest of Canada. They would be probably entrepreneurial refugees. They would be people who are sick of living in extreme immigration cities like Toronto and Vancouver. Probably. I think you would. I wish you would see more of an exodus of the NDP socialist types, but I'm quite certain you would see an inflow of good people who have had it with life in other parts of the country. And I think that's one of the things that terrifies the antisepress. My eighth observation is that a lot of this is an oblique reaction to Mark Carney, not just the fact that Poliev didn't win and Carney did. I mean, in the last year, look at Carney's conduct. I mean his main dealing with Alberta was to have this complex memorandum of understanding where Alberta had to immediately spend money on carbon capture and jack up certain taxes and maybe by the year 2040 a pipeline would be built. I mean, I don't think many Albertans were persuaded by that. But put aside that just the carnival of insanity World Economic Forum and being an anti American globalist, going to China and saying you're going to sign onto their New World Order, being an anti Trump agitator, doing things like recognizing Hamas run Gaza as the state of Palestine. There's so much garbage being done in the name of Canada. And this goes to my very first point about Alberta independence. It's not really anti Canadian or anti patriotic. It's sort of oh, so Mark Carney is doing that. That is going in such a terrible direction. Oh, another $50 billion for electric vehicles. You're poking America in the eye with a Greenland consulate. You're just doing all these stupid things, corporatist thing, paternalistic gimmicks. And I think a lot of Albertans are saying, you know what? How do we separate from that guy? So when people want to separate, they want to separate from the antics and the shenanigans. And that guy reminds me when Preston Manning wrote in the Globe and Mail that Mark Carney could be the last Prime Minister of united Canada. I think Preston might be right. My ninth point, I think is my most normal point. It's how would the life of an ordinary person change on a normal day in Alberta after a referendum vote or after independence? I gotta say, in so many ways, nothing would change. I mean, there would still be many government services, other ones provided by the province, which is education and health care. They would still be provided by the province. They would just have billions of dollars more because Alberta wouldn't be sending money for equalization or payments anymore. There are some things that would have an Alberta flag on them rather than a Canadian flag. Interesting. This caught me by surprise when I first saw it online. The idea that people could keep their pensions and their passports. And it's true, because those things are issued to individual persons. Why and how would they change? I'm not saying that there wouldn't be an eventual change with the pension plan, but you've got a passport in your hand, it works. What does a passport do? It lets you go into another country, lets you come back from another country. Passport doesn't have your residential address in it, by the way. It just says you're a Canadian citizen. If Alberta were to separate it, how does that void your passport? There would most likely be an Alberta passport and you could probably, if not have both, you could move over to the Alberta passport. But just because there was a vote in a referendum, many of the things that you use wouldn't suddenly vaporize. But just stop and ask yourself, how many things do you use in a given day or a given week that are actually run by Ottawa? When I look at Ottawa, I think of taxes, I think of foolish wokeness, I think of an insane foreign policy, I think of a weak military. I really think of nothing that affects me really in a day to day. I get up, I get in my car, I drive my kids to school or I drive to work, if I have to go to the hospital. None of the things that I do in real life are run from garbage. Collection to bylaw officers. I mean, that's real life. I mean, if Ottawa's dealing with those things, it's an invasion of Alberta's sovereignty. Anyways. I put it to you that most Albertans would have no difference at all in their life if Alberta were to be independent, other than they'd have lower taxes and they would be divorced from the insanity that's going on in Ottawa. My 10th thought is that some things would change, but I think that's all doable. This has all been contemplated before. In Quebec, for example, a lot of the groundwork was thought through. You may recall that Quebec elected a provincial government called the Parti Quebecois. And once they were elected into office, they had all the tools of a government. They had the civil service, they had government budgets. And they studied all these things. They studied questions like passports and stamps and currency and international debt and postal unions and international flights. There's a hundred little things and you think, oh, my God, how do we handle that? Well, you handle that one at a time. And it's been done before in other places like Yugoslavia no longer exists. It's other little countries. Czechoslovakia no longer exists. The Soviet Union is a dozen countries. Now these things can happen. And it's a little bit discombobulating, but it doesn't have to be a lot discombobulating. Look, Canada was an audacious idea, the second largest country in the world. But it was designed as a compromise, really, between Anglo Protestants and French Catholics. That was a beautiful compromise where, I mean, look at our constitution. It protects French rights and education. It didn't contemplate a large, settled, bold, independent minded, individualistic west with more oil and gas wealth than anyone could possibly have dreamed of in the 18th or 19th centuries. And so you have a country that maybe in some ways is too big geographically. You have deep anti Americanism that's whipped up by, I don't know, is it the descendants of united Empire loyalists, people who left the United States after George Washington kicked out the Brits? Is it really echoing from 250 years ago? I don't know. But whatever it is, I think about a lot of Albertans just don't want that. There's a deep anti Americanism. There's political opportunism, there's rent seeking, which is a fancy word of saying people just, you know, wringing out Alberta like a sponge. It's all too much. If Alberta were to be independent, it would not be a disaster. And once it's possible, I think a lot of other things would be Possible immediately too, from Saskatchewan, which I predict would join its sibling right away to Quebec, saying, well, hang on, can we renegotiate our position? I'll tell you one thing, there's lots to talk about in the year ahead and we'll do that talking and I'd like to hear from you too. Stay with us. More ahead. Hey, I got a question for you. How bad does it have to be for the government to hide the dollar amount of how much it's spent on any project? I mean, every day and especially on budget day, the government shows us just how bad it is because they have to. And they brazen it out and they talk about investments. That's just a fancy way of saying spending. But how awful is the truth if the government will do anything to stop the numbers from seeing the light of day? Well, that's exactly what's going on these days with regards to the gun buy back program. Let me read to you the latest release from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. It's entitled Ottawa Blocks details a failed Cape Breton pilot project. Let me just read the first sentence and then I'll bring the Taxpayers Federation into this. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is launching a legal fight after the federal government refused to disclose the details of the gun confiscated during the failed Cape Breton pilot project. I bet they spent like 10 grand a gun. The government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers money in this program. They deserve to know exactly what's happening with the money, says Gage Haubrick, CTF Prairie Director. The government should not be pushing forward with its gun confiscation nationally while leaving taxpayers in the dark on these important details. And joining us now from Saskatoon is Gage Hawbrick. Great to have you on the show. Thanks for being here. I just said it probably cost 10,000 bucks a gun. No, no, it's probably much, much more than that. I forgot we're dealing with what, a nine figure expenditure?

C (26:18)

Yeah, well, I mean, just like in that access information request we got back, the government's been kind of mum on the entire numbers when it comes to this gun confiscation scheme. I mean, Ezra, you rightly point out that the government's usually proud of all of the money they're wasting on budget day. But even when it comes to this gun ban scheme, they're keeping those numbers close to heart because they know how awful it's going to be for taxpayers. Right. We saw way back in 2020 when the government first talked about this program, it would cost $200 million, they said. Now we've seen other experts, six years on, say more than 6 billion. And when you're spending that kind of money, taxpayers deserve to know what it's being spent on. That's why we asked the government the simple question. In your Cape Breton pilot project where you confiscated these 25 guns, where the government, by the way, wanted to confiscate 200, what guns did you collect? Were they these weapons of war the public safety minister is scaring us about, or were they plinkers or old antique hunting rifles? Right. So we asked the government that very simple question. They refused to give us the answer, likely because they're embarrassed about what those documents show.

A (27:31)

Yeah. If the whole project only collected 25 firearms, I think my earlier comment about 10,000 bucks a gun is going to be insanely low. You know, it's not that common for police to. To speak out against a justice minister or a public safety minister. You just don't see it a lot. And I think that's proper. I don't want my police being any more political than they are. But this gun buyback idea is so stupid that one police force after another have gone public and saying, we aren't going to do this. I mean, let me give you an example. Here's the Toronto Police association, one of the largest police unions in the country, quote, and this is, I'm reading from your publication here, we know that the gun buyback program is going to have essentially zero impact on the crime in Toronto, said Clayton Campbell, president of the Toronto Police Association. And then you note that dozens of local police take the same position. There is a massive crime wave in this country, and it's not farmers and duck hunters and ranchers with the firearm they inherited from their grandpa or an antique that their grandpa brought back from World War II. It's just not. What's the real motivation for this? Because all the police are saying this won't have anything to do with crime. Is it just for show? Is it for them to tell Montreal and Toronto Liberal voters, hey, guys, we're really going after the gun criminal. What is the point of it?

C (29:03)

Well, I think the biggest point there is it, as you mentioned, cops being political. It takes a lot for those guys who are just focused on the everyday of doing their jobs and actually enforcing the laws to stand up and say, hey, this policy, it's not going to work. It's a bad idea. Right. Because you mentioned the crime wave we're seeing across the country. We're seeing other police forces like the president of the RCMP union who said that we need to be focusing on that crime. And that crime is not committed by the duck hunters and the sport shooters. It's by people with illegal guns who smuggle them from other countries. And this ban does nothing to do anything with that. The confiscation does nothing to stop that. Because the important fact of the matter is, when we look at it, is if you're, if you have a gun illegally in your possession so you're a criminal, you can't turn it in to the feds. Under this program, the only people who the feds can take guns from are people who have followed the law.

A (29:57)

Really? So you can't just walk up, you can't just be a guy and walk up and say, I found this gun. So what are you saying?

C (30:04)

Yeah, there's no amnesty for that in the law. As it's written on the amnesty order, it only applies to people who previously owned the gun legally.

A (30:12)

Then by definition you're not going to have any criminals. Like literally the rules say you can't have a criminal do it. If you have to have a gun license to turn a gun in. Oh my God, I didn't even know that fact.

C (30:24)

Exactly. So the only people who are going to turn this in are the people who are the most law abiding, where even though the government's doing a policy they probably disagree with, they think it's their duty to follow the law. Not a single criminal is going to be participating in this because they're not allowed to.

A (30:41)

That is so dumb. Let me read the last sentence of your press release. The premiers of Alberta, Saskatchewan, the Yukon, Manitoba, their ndp, by the way, Ontario, they're pretend Liberals, by the way, the Northwest Territories, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, all say that their provinces will not participate in the program because it is unlikely to make Canadians safer. Like other than Quebec, I think. I don't know if there's anyone I didn't say on that list. Like, no one thinks this is a good idea.

C (31:11)

Yeah, you don't get that kind of consensus in this country unless it's Olympic hockey, which we're gonna be looking at pretty soon. You never get these premieres right. Alberta and Saskatchewan rarely agree with Manitoba on anything. They definitely don't agree with Newfoundland and Labrador. But all of these premiers have stood up, no matter their political stripe, and said, this is a bad program. It's going to waste provincial resources that we want to use to actually keep people safer. All it's going to do is take guns away from the safest people in our Communities it makes absolutely no sense to participate in. You know, even WAB kanu, the NDP premier of Manitoba just talked about how much of a headache this program seems to be. And even his government likes to waste money on the craziest stuff. So when those premiers are talking about a huge amount of waste from Ottawa, everyone should perk up and be like, this is time for this program to go.

A (31:59)

Yeah. And the fact that they're keeping it secret how much money they spend, it's insane. I see that your general counsel, Devin Drover, is getting ready to sue if the information commissioner doesn't hand the money over and the info over on how much money is being spent. I look forward to seeing how that goes. I tell you, it's great to catch up with you. We often talk to Franco Terzano of your organization. It's nice to meet you. Gage Harper. Keep in touch.

C (32:26)

Thanks for having me on.

A (32:27)

All right. There he is, the Prairies Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Stay with us. Your letters to me. Next. Hey, welcome back. Your letters to me on the justice center sandwich board guy. Sister Serena says if he did not put the word pray in the sign, why would they still go after him? Same reason they go after Billboard Chris. They just don't like the message. And they're. I don't know, they're bullies. No one told them about free expression. The world is heading towards censorship. I don't know. Next letter is from Ananda, who says, sounds like he's protesting his service, not providing one. Yeah, you're talking about abortion. Look, you can like or dislike this guy's message, but to have a sandwich board peacefully to say there's no swears, there's no threats, there's no, you know, it's just his point of view. The fact that he's being detained and fined is. Is UN Canadian Oxy fee says. I see Olivia Chow. And the police are upset at your video truck ad about Muslims. You know, I didn't know. They're erupting again. We have a billboard truck, which I love, and we have messages against extremists like Hamas. We have a billboard message that talks about deporting Hamas sympathizers who come to country under false pretenses to be a temporary worker or a student, but in the end, of course, just whip up anti Semitic sentiment. Not just the sentiment, but engage in crime, trespass, nuisance, vandalism, in some cases, uttering threats, in some cases arson, and even shooting in Jewish schools. Yeah, we've got a billboard truck calling all that stuff out if Olivia Chao is mad about that again. Good. Well, that's our show for the day. Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at rebel world headquarters, to you at home, good night. And keep fighting for freedom.