Episodes
The federal Liberals are likely facing an even less friendly Donald Trump administration than last time. And they’re in an even weaker position than they were then, as Brian discusses this week with Postmedia columnist Chris Selley. Their minority government is teetering, mounting scandals are weighing them down, and their mass-immigration and anti-oil policies have hobbled our economy. Meanwhile, Republicans are steamed about our neglect of defence and security, and the president-elect will...
Published 11/18/24
The presidential election came down to the clevers versus the normals, guest John Robson tells Brian this week. Those succeeding in the establishment’s ever more complicated system of official and unofficial rules around work, business, education and identity politics went for Kamala Harris. Everyone else —feeling left behind, ignored and scorned — went for Donald Trump. Including many minorities. Robson, an American historian and National Post columnist, says Trump is clearly unfit for the...
Published 11/11/24
It’s the final hours of a “dumpster fire” of a presidential election, as guest and American political writer J.D. Tuccille calls it. And it’s hard to imagine a worse one. Democrats are back to comparing Donald Trump to Hitler, and Republicans say the Democrats are communists. The vice-presidential picks JD Vance and Tim Walz have had minimal impact while the U.S. media has again beclowned itself running interference for Kamala Harris. But, as Tuccille discusses with Brian, there are serious...
Published 11/04/24
So, the rebels in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s caucus couldn’t convince him to quit. But they’re still fed up, and they still have forceful ways of showing it, as veteran Postmedia politics columnist John Ivison discusses with Brian this week. That may just include sabotaging a confidence vote that could bring down their own government. Now Trudeau is desperately trying anything to survive — including reversing key policies and playing politics over foreign interference. Backtracking on...
Published 10/28/24
Prioritizing medical expertise and skill in doctors is so passé. If powerful activists pushing to redesign Canada’s physician regulators get their way, tomorrow’s doctors will be focusing on promoting anti-oppression and anti-racism. Dr. Mark D’Souza has been on the forefront of the fight to prevent that. He explains to Brian how the radicals’ plan could endanger patient health by sidelining merit in medical schools in favour of equity quotas, while eliminating critical distinctions of sex in...
Published 10/21/24
British Columbia voters are so unhappy that they might elect a party this week that barely existed two years ago: the Conservatives led by John Rustad. No wonder. As veteran B.C. politics columnist Vaughn Palmer tells Brian, voters see crime as out of control; drug decriminalization creating no-go zones everywhere; and immigration soaring even as the housing crisis seems worse than ever. Meanwhile, their made-in-B.C. carbon tax has become punishing. NDP Leader David Eby appears desperate to...
Published 10/14/24
The now legendary “firewall letter” stunned Canadian political watchers. Officially called the Alberta Agenda, it called on the province to start taking back powers from the federal government, refusing to be taken further advantage of. And for 20 years, Alberta governments largely ignored it. But as former provincial finance minister Ted Morton discusses with Brian, Alberta’s UCP government is finally changing that. He was one of the letter’s signatories, along with Stephen Harper, who later...
Published 10/07/24
You’d have to be a fool not to see how the UN has been taken over by malevolent dictatorships. But rather than give up on the ideals the United Nations was founded on, Hillel Neuer forces the world body to face its hypocrisy, antisemitism and despot-worship. The Montreal-born executive director of UN Watch joins Brian this week to talk about his work in Geneva, where he tirelessly torments corrupt UN bodies and delegates by revealing their complicity with the worst human-rights abusers and...
Published 09/30/24
The Conservatives’ attempt to bring down Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government with a non-confidence motion was virtually DOA when the Bloc Québécois quickly said it would refuse to support it. No wonder: With no NDP deal to back the Liberals, the Bloc suddenly finds itself with significant power over the Liberals, as Brian discusses in our politics roundtable with columnist Tasha Kheiriddin and Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson, the team behind Postmedia’s Political Hack newsletter. They also...
Published 09/23/24
If you’ve ever wondered how some self-proclaimed feminists can defend the brutal rapists of Hamas, or how people can passionately believe men can get pregnant, Gad Saad has an explanation. As an academic researcher in behavioural science, Saad has spent his career studying how perceptions and ideas can produce biological effects. He joins Brian this week to discuss how “woke” concepts like postmodernism, moral relativism and social constructionism act like pathogens on people’s minds. He...
Published 09/16/24
The leader of the federal NDP has spent two years thundering righteously against the Liberals —while propping up their minority government through a supply-and-confidence deal. Now, Jagmeet Singh has said he’s for sure, no-joking, super-duper fed up with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and he’s cancelled their bargain, which means giving up his leverage to advance NDP priorities. As former, longtime NDP power-player Karl Bélanger discusses with Brian this week, Singh is out of excuses for...
Published 09/09/24
Fast enough to make your head spin, Canada’s “harm reduction” approach to helping drug addicts went from a few safe injection sites to giving away powerful opioid drugs to addicts. As Adam Zivo, journalist and director of the Canadian Centre for Responsible Drug Policy discusses with Brian, ideologically radical public health officials now even insist that any addiction treatment other than giving addicts more free drugs is racist and colonialist. And despite overdose deaths rising and more...
Published 09/02/24
We’re still learning how institutions and officials politicized science during the pandemic to justify economic lockdowns, border closures, school shutdowns and other measures that lacked supportive evidence but carried grave consequences. Vanessa Dylyn is the award-winning director of the new documentary Covid Collateral, which shows how real scientific methods and debate were sidelined, even banished, as governments faked expertise during COVID-19 with the help of compliant doctors and...
Published 08/26/24
Not long ago, our practical, moderate approaches were considered exemplars that countries around the world tried to emulate. But as Postmedia’s Tristin Hopper discusses with Brian this week, in just a few years Canada went from paragon to cautionary tale. A model of how one should definitely not handle drug policy, euthanasia, housing, online censorship, gender policy, immigration, and more. Sure, some of this is the work of an activist federal government, Hopper says — but not all of it....
Published 08/19/24
The statistics are undeniable: married people tend to be happier, amass more wealth and live longer, healthier lives than unmarried people, as sociologist Brad Wilcox tells Brian this week. Marriage also reduces child poverty and makes communities safer. So why are so many so-called progressives in politics, the media and other influential spheres so invested in destroying the traditions of marriage and familyhood? There’s something bizarre afoot, notes Wilcox — author of the new book Get...
Published 08/12/24
Chrystia Freeland talks like a patronizing schoolmarm. Mark Carney comes off like a visiting aristocrat. Yet, the federal Liberals face a reckoning sooner or later, and they’ll eventually need someone to replace Justin Trudeau. Having turned his party into a suppressive cult of personality, however, Trudeau has thwarted the rise of any real heirs or heiresses apparent. This week, Brian and former Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella feverishly scour our list of rumoured contenders for a...
Published 08/05/24
As the honeymoon quickly fades for the unelected but anointed Democratic candidate, the ugly truth about Kamala Harris is emerging. As U.S. political columnist J. D. Tuccille details with Brian this week, Harris has proven herself to be alarmingly unserious and personally difficult, with a problematic record on rights. And for Americans who want change, Harris looks like Biden rebranded. Her one advantage, Tuccille says, may be that Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance as his vice-presidential...
Published 07/29/24
It’s been three years since the bombshell media reports first spread claims there was a “mass grave” found at a former Kamloops residential school, and the truth has been playing catch-up ever since. But as our guest this week explains, anyone with knowledge of history should have known the grisly allegations that residential schools had been disappearing children and secretly disposing of them didn’t make sense. Tom Flanagan, co-author of Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth...
Published 07/22/24
The province causing pain in Ottawa’s side these days isn’t Quebec or Alberta — it’s Saskatchewan, where Premier Scott Moe this year unilaterally declared his province would not be forced to pay carbon taxes on natural gas. So far, the courts are backing him up. John Gormley, former dean of the province’s talk radio (and former MP), joins Brian this week to explain how the onetime NDP heartland has turned rebel against the left’s centralized-control agenda, as it fights against Justin...
Published 07/15/24
While the world fixates on the war in Gaza, Israelis in the north are under daily attack from Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Islamist group that’s a key part of Iran’s multi-front war against the Jewish state — and the entire western-led world order. Sarit Zehavi speaks to Brian from her home in the Galilee, as missiles explode in the background, and lush forests around her burn from Hezbollah’s indiscriminate bombing. Zehavi is head of the Alma Research and Education Centre, specializing in...
Published 07/08/24
A collapse of their Toronto—St. Paul fortress is just the beginning. All that remains to be seen is how extensive the Liberals’ inevitable ruin will be once Justin Trudeau’s strange, destructive experiment is over. As Liberal activist and strategist Andrew Perez tells Brian, the prime minister has made the once-mighty, centrist “natural governing” party into something unrecognizable — and likely unelectable — by driving out moderates and effectively merging with the NDP. While pundits and...
Published 07/01/24
If you want the real story about why residents in one of Canada’s biggest cities have for weeks been under orders to ration their water usage, you won’t get it from Calgary’s mayor or city bureaucrats. As local veteran Postmedia journalist Don Braid tells Brian in this week’s episode, the catastrophic water-main explosion is a tale of municipal mismanagement, inferior infrastructure and wilful political blindness. And, Braid says, the same factors — including a whole lot of disintegrating...
Published 06/24/24
Nav Bhatia is instantly recognizable as the turbaned, fanatically exuberant Raptors superfan courtside at every home game. As he tells Brian, he immigrated to Toronto from an India riven by ethnic conflict, to find peace and undreamed-of prosperity here. Discussing his new memoir, The Heart of a Superfan, Bhatia talks about his experience with bigotry, his rise to success, his love for the Raptors, and why he thinks Canada is still the envy of the world. And he explains why he thinks all of...
Published 06/17/24
It may be that the leader of the Conservative party has been preparing for the job of prime minister his whole life. He once entered an essay contest about “If I were prime minister,” advocating for making Canada a bastion of freedom. As Andrew Lawton, author of the new biography, Pierre Poilievre: A Political Life, discusses with Brian, the now opposition leader’s crusade hasn’t much changed since then. Along the way, as Lawton details, Poilievre has innovated new ways of campaigning,...
Published 06/10/24