Shaun Newman Podcast - #1114 - Trish Wood

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

Trish Wood is an award-winning Canadian investigative journalist, author, documentary producer, and host of the podcast Trish Wood is Critical. She is a free-speech advocate and early COVID-19 policy critic who prioritizes “truth over tribe.” She spent nearly a decade as a host and reporter on CBC’s Emmy Award-winning investigative series The Fifth Estate, where she pursued high-stakes stories involving organized crime, religious fraud, wrongful convictions, and international conflict zones. She created the pioneering wrongful-conviction series I Didn’t Do It and produced the critically acclaimed five-part Amazon Studios documentary Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer, which reframed the case through the perspectives of the women involved. Cornerstone Forum 26’https://shaunnewmanpodcast.substack.com/Silver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]Bow Valley Credit UnionBitcoin: www.bowvalleycu.com/en/personal/investing-wealth/bitcoin-gatewayEmail: [e-mail] Get your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500

This is Brett Weinstein. This is Tom Lomago. This is Bruce Party. This is Alex Krenner. Hey, this is Brad Wall. This is Dr. Pierre Corey. Hi, this is Frank Peretti. This is Daniel Smith.

This is James Lindsay. This is Vance Crow and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast, folks. Happy Thursday. How's everybody's week been going? I feel like it's been a solid week on this end with some of the guests that have been on the show. and I hope you're enjoying the week as much as I have been. Now, before we get to things on the road,

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text your email, Graham. It's down on the show notes. If you're on Apple or Spotify, if you need some help, you can always text me and I can direct you. You can also go online, silvergoldbull.ca.com and just send up for an account there. Order online.

Everything ships directly to your doorstep. It's super slick. And if you've got questions, Graham has answers for you. And he's always open to a conversation. So silvergoldbill.com. When it comes to plumbing and heating, I'm going to point you to Guardian plumbing and heating. They're back in my hometown.

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Caleb Taves, man, I'm just surrounded by beauties on a Thursday as I read through these names. Caleb Taves, if you never met him, he's an awesome dude, and he is Renegade Acres. They did the concrete in the studio. When it comes to concrete, they do fantastic work. donated a spot to, you know, what's going on community-wise. And so I always point to the SMP community right now. That is Substack. We've got, I've been saying it all week. I'm going to say it

again. You know, on Substack, we're trying to put in some things that, you know, you want to be a part of her, add in some things for paid members who've been supporting the podcast before there was anything really there. And now we've got bonus questions going in there from all the guests. We have the Tanner and Days Masterclass on The Life of Paul, and we have a conversation with my wife, which I never thought would happen. And it's up there as well now, all for paid members. So you've got to become a paid member. That helps support the podcast.

You can also just do the free thing and watch the podcast there and get the week in review, you know, and it kind of breaks down every guest and what's going on from the road and a few thoughts there. So if you're interested, substack is a place that I'm going to direct you to. When it comes to the road trip, it's powered by Zebes, their family owned and fine-tuned in Chestermere, Alberta, expert classic car restorations, custom exhaust,

and performance upgrades that keep your ride reliable and roaring. We've been roaring all across Ontario and now a bit of New York as we push on to see some other friends, but it's been super, super fun having a couple problems with the vehicle and then calling Zane and I'm sure he's going, okay, how do I explain this to a guy who has zero background with fixing cars? And he is a great teacher

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All right, let's get on to that tale of The tape. Today's guest is the host of the Trish Wood is critical podcast. Yeah, I'm talking about Trish Wood. So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Shawnee Wood podcast.

I'm sitting with Trish Wood. Trish, thanks for letting me in your house. As I was telling you, we've been on the road now. I think this is like day 42. Obviously, by the time this air is it'll be a little further on. I had not planned to bring the trailer and everything into. Toronto. That was interesting. Me and you were having conversations about the roads. Well, you survived the traffic at least. Well, I tell you what, driving into Toronto on a

Saturday versus all the traffic leaving Toronto on a Saturday was, I felt pretty good about that. It was almost breezy. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But getting back in here, I was like, this is probably taking years off my life, but I have a life. No, it does. And I'm trying to get out of here. I say it on the show's on hiatus now, as everybody knows, but I think I said it on every show for the last two years I got to get out of Toronto. I want out. Well, I want to start there because I think you know this, but if you don't, there's a ton of people from, you know, I live in Alberta, right on the border of Alberta, Saskatchewan,

but the West loves Trishwood. Really? And when you wrote your Substack article, I can't tell you how many times that got sent to me. And I read it, and I was like, ah, that's just a sad moment because I think, you're one of the clear voices and reasonable voices talking about things that we all are interested in. And so I just want to start there. What's been going on in your world? What happened?

Well, so that was a moment, right? That was a moment. I have been doing the podcast for six years. And before that, I did some true crime films. And before that, I was in heavy-duty journalism, like investigative, hard, core, boxes full of secret documents, murder victims, kind of stuff. And I think I've reached a point in the podcast where I thought, are we really doing any good? I mean, it's kind of a lonely thing. I do interact with people who listen, but I wasn't sure we were doing any good. And this may be a

weird thing to say now, but it was my thinking then, that I was watching other podcasters, big ones, focus on stupid stuff and week after week after week focusing on stupid stuff and getting a big response from the audience. And I thought, wow, is this a trajectory one must be on to be successful, which is more conspiratorial, nothing is real. Everything is a bunch of guys in gray suits hiding away, plotting against us. That's what I was seeing. And I'm from two in particular. And I just thought maybe it's time to pack it in for a while and really think about this.

I, you know, as a former mainstream journalist, this is a weird thing to say, but I do think about our guardrails. I do think about are we doing more harm than good sometimes. I do think about, you know what, people, you want me to deliver a certain thing. and I either don't think that certain thing is true, or I don't think it's necessarily good for us to waste time on, right? And that is a really tough business model in podcasting, right? So let me give you a, for instance, what I'm talking about.

We are recording this on the day after they found the body of a former Cambridge University professor, a young guy, 41, black, quite handsome. they found him dead in some neighborhood in London. Anyway, it turns out it was a suicide. And this happened after weeks and weeks and weeks of heavy-duty journalistic scrutiny of what he did, which was plagiarism, a very, very serious and proven, apparently, accusation against somebody who was just appointed to a very big job at maybe the biggest university in the world.

I would think probably Cambridge is that. And as that story was percolating through podcastistan and legacy media, other things about him were coming out. He told lies about running marathons and how long they were and how much money. I mean, he really is what a psychiatrist would call a fabulous, somebody who pathologically lies to enhance their own autobiography, right? So it's kind of a microcosm. So I sat down yesterday.

I was going to write a substack about Jason R. Day, this professor, former professor, and I stopped myself, and I thought, do I want to be part of this pylon? Is this something I want to partake in? Am I elevating the intelligence of my audience with this? And I declined to do it. I didn't decline. I put it to one side for the day to think about it. And at about 4 o'clock yesterday afternoon, I was getting ready to go out for dinner with my husband,

and I saw it moving across the wire that this young guy had been found dead in his apartment in London. Suicide, as a result of the media campaign against him when he got caught perplagiarizing. Now, the reason I say that is because I believe that all the people who reported on that story, all the podcasts. I pulled up an AI on how many there were hundreds of them, hundreds of stories, hundreds of podcasts, all about a kind of an obscure black academic at Cambridge University, which really has nothing to do with our lives. It does expose the DEI fallacy for sure. There's no question about him being a DEI poster boy. But did it really justify the level of scrutiny against this guy that happened over the last couple of weeks?

I say no. I say no. And I think we're at a time in both legacy media and in indie media where we have to have some rules and guidelines and some thoughtful moments about why we do what we do for a living. And I don't think we've done that in podcasting very much, actually. I don't think we've, we don't have an association. We don't have meetups, really. We don't have festivals where we all get together and talk about the ethics of what we do. We're all kind of lone wolves, right? And I think if we got together and talked about the ethics of what we did, we might be better at it.

Well, I can sit here and say as a younger man and certainly not decorated in your, you know, everything to do with journalism. If you put on something like that, Trish, you just never know. The last time I took a, like, not a break from podcasting, I was putting on all these events. And I'd wanted you to come be on stage with Chris Sims and Byron Christopher, Wayne Peters. And you couldn't make that one. And I was, that was when I was looking at media.

And I had a live show where it brought in what I thought was a bunch of different varying backgrounds in media to discuss media. I wish I'd done it. I don't know what I was doing instead. Well, in fairness back then, to get across the country and a bunch of other things, I'm sure, you know, Everybody. Was it during COVID? No, it was just after COVID. Just after.

But regardless, I did a bunch of those. And then I burnt myself out. And I sat. I understand that. From June 2023 until roughly January, 24. And then I went, oh, I think I know what I want to do. And then I built the Cornerstone Forum, which, you know, the first year was a sellout with 250 people. And then the next year it was 500.

and then this past year we had the premier of Alberta and a whole bunch of other speakers and people fly in from all over the world. We had 700-ish. And you go, when you talk like that, I'm like, if Trishwood put on something about journalistic ethics and some way of doing it,

you might be surprised at the response, at least from here in Canada. Yeah. Because there's a lot of us, I think, like I listen to you and I'm like, man, you just have a way. It's a career in this, right? I think of Chris Sims,

and when she comes on the show and some of the things she said, I even think back to Daniel Smith when she was coming off the radio and started doing the show. It's just like, these people are impressive. There's lots to be learned. And the one thing, as a lone wolf,

you know, I'm nervous to get too caught up into a group because the group seems to go strange ways and I'm just Sean. And I just want to be Sean. At times I'm a little nervous of large groups of media people and ways we're going to steer the world. I get nervous too.

But a lone wolf, I still want to learn things. And I want, you know, one of the reasons I was harassing you of I want to get to Trish, what? I don't care where you are. I just want to come sit with you for, because I've watched you from afar for those six years. And I've been doing a cheap man's version of it on the other end. And I was like, I got to find Trish in Toronto somehow. And, you know, it's funny. I even sweet talked my way into your bill.

A lovely couple looked at me as I probably looked confused and they're like, where are you headed? And then I said the number and they're like, well, who's there? I'm like, is this a trick question? But regardless, they were, they were lovely people. Yeah, it's a good building. Yeah. Yeah, well, you know, I think the group dynamic can be a tool for good. Oh, certainly. Because we have to talk about the ethics of what we do. And the hiatus I'm on from podcasting right now in part was born, I'll just say this, people won't like it, but I'm going to say it, was born of the way that people were covering the Charlie Kirk murder. To do with Erica Kirk and the conspiracies and everything? Look, people won't like this. People enjoy conspiracies. We, you know,

we want to think everything is a conspiracy. There are conspiracies. Absolutely, I'm in. But not everything is. Sometimes the cops get it right. And I spent a lot of time doing investment. investigative true crime. That was my career before COVID and I started the podcast. I had a big series on Amazon, four Amazon Studios on Amazon Prime, a six-parter that did quite well. And I watched indie media use the Charlie Kirk murder as a ratings generator. And what I mean by that is I realized that people and podcasts feel much more free to just pull stuff out of the air and say, well, what about this? I was just thinking about asking this question.

It's not evidence-based. There's no reason for it. It's just kind of a quirky, inflammatory question that's going to get everybody's cortisol going. And then off we are on our way to the races. And I was realizing in the Charlie Kirk story, which I was pretty torn. tormented by because I foolishly watched the video of him being shot. I was trying to figure out what he died of and where the shot went, and we actually got quite far on that, but I was quite tormented by it.

I think it's pretty clear that Tyler Robinson did it. I have no qualms about that at all. But I saw kind of burbling up all these crazy stories about how Erica Kirk was involved, and people at T.P. USA had alterments. just nonsense. You can think it. Maybe you can even say it, but there's no evidence for it. There's literally no forensic evidence that in any way, shape, or form justifies that angle, in my view. And certainly not doing that angle every show week after week after week. There are human people behind what, it was Candace Owens. There are human people behind the allegations she was

making. Erica Kirk, a widow, the young people at T.P.USA who witnessed their boss being killed and for sure felt guilty about not protecting him better. There was one kid, I remember that she focused on, his name was Mikey McCoy, Mike McCoy, young kid. And right when, if you watched a video, right when Charlie shot, you'll see he gets on the phone. That didn't strike me as weird at all. I thought, wow, Charlie is a guy who's got security problems. They've had me. meetings about those security problems, of course, like any organization would. Charlie had Mike as his chief of staff. Of course, the first phone call is call Erica. Tell her her husband's just been shot so she doesn't see it on video. Of course. And that's exactly what I thought he was doing.

We spent weeks and weeks and weeks of Mike McCoy being accused of being in on it because he picked up the phone and made a call right after his boss was shot. When any critically thinking person would have said, gee, they're part of a system. What would this system instruct the chief of staff to do? What would Charlie have wanted his chief of staff to do should he come to any harm? Warn his wife, tell his wife, warn his children. And that's what Mike McCoy did. But he spent weeks being accused of being involved in the murder of his boss. Those podcasts got hundreds of thousands of viewers. And if you say anything contradictory to that in your show or on your substack, people come at you really, really hard. I took a lot of shit for that. And I was just being

like a regular investigative reporter and say, well, can we look at it this way? But you can't. So there was an element of cult-like belief in some of the things that were being said. So I kind of watched that from afar for a while, and then you use the word burnout. I was starting to feel a little bit burned out, and so I took a hiatus, which I'm on now, and I'm using this time, I'm still writing substack, but I'm using this time to really think about the value of what we do and what I can bring to it that adds value to it. There's a ton of great podcasters out there right now. and I just needed a break to kind of settle down.

Maybe I want to come back and do a podcast about being Christian or the greatest book I read last week or something like that. But there's a million, like Jason Rade, like we were talking about, there's a million people saying the same stuff about this guy. And the result of that was not good. So I'm, you know, I'm trying to take a step back and do some deep thinking about how we made. this stuff for good and not for ill and how we enlighten our people.

And the problem we have, Sean, and I'm sure you know this because you're a smart guy, is that I'm not always sure that our audiences want what's best for them. I think conspiracies are fun. Well, why do you think true murder crime podcasts or people love a story and one that is enticing? Yeah, exactly. And the difference between, I worked in true crime and I was good at it, the difference between is that the true crime we worked on as true crime investigative journalists was real. We weren't making stuff up.

Most of it came from court transcripts and witness statements and autopsies, et cetera, et cetera, right? Forensic work. What's happening now, especially around Charlie Kirk and some other cases, is people are just guessing and making stuff up and making assumptions. about evidence without actually reading the police file. It's wild. I've never seen anything like it. So for me, I felt like taking a step back was the right thing right now.

But I'll be back probably in late September is what I'm thinking about. Well, that's good news. Thank you. On what you're seeing at a podcasters, it's kind of an effect of COVID. You know, like COVID, I remember bringing on, I tried really hard at the start to be very, bring somebody on from one side, bring somebody on from the other side. I didn't do that.

The way they treated not only your guests, but you, everything, I think it broke a lot of people. Heck, it broke me for a long time. I was just frustrated. What do you mean by that? The way who treated you? Society, all the social media companies. right like in in a podcast realm you worked really hard to get so many uh hours listened to so many

subscribers on youtube i'm speaking specifically and then when i interviewed chris barber yeah you know it's like i don't know was it days after it doesn't matter they just wiped it clean just boop gone and what are you talking about i didn't know that oh yeah i wiped my entire so like here in canada one of one of the frustrations that i have is i'm like how is it we don't know all the Canadians. And then I think just as I'm starting to get to some level of not even that big of prominence, Trish, it wasn't, you know, I'm talking like maybe 5,000 people had started to follow you on YouTube, but you're just getting the threshold where you can start to earn a bit of money.

And I wasn't doing anything crazy. All I was doing was talking about what was going on and we weren't using the word, what vaccine back then. And it all went away because of the trucker convoy. And now where in the convoy did this interview happen? Were they there? A week before. Oh, the week before.

When I interviewed Chris, he's on the side of the road somewhere. I want to say in the United States, Chris, you'll probably listen to this and you'll correct me. And it's just like this 30-minute friendly chat and I'm like this. I'm thinking this is never going to work. And then I go, well, if you raise a bunch of money, where is it going? Because I'm like, man, this better not be like it's going in my pocket. And he was like, oh, we're going to donate it to the veterans. I'm like, well, at least I got a plan in place.

Okay, I don't mind that. and then probably a week after that, less than that, they'd left. And I went to where in Lloyd the guys going on it had left from. And it was like two days later, I'm like, I got to go. And so I was working full time at the time. I still had three kids and a beautiful wife and everything. And I'm sure it was just like a light switch had flipped on. And off in a vehicle and off we went and we caught it in Thunder Bay, or I guess it dried.

But then Thunder Bay is where I got to ride in it. And I remember just thinking, man, if CBC, or whoever would just come right in this thing and just film the entire thing. It might be the demise of the liberal government, but regardless, your ratings would be so high. The problem was YouTube wouldn't, okay? And so then a whole bunch of people got removed,

and that's on top of all the people on X that were trying to just say, hey, maybe we should look at COVID-19 a little different. You were talking about Batacharya and that group of men and women. And so what they did has broke a lot of people because now it's like, How can I trust anything that's going on

when they went to absolutely insane levels to suppress that maybe Ivermectum was a decent little drug? And so then what do people start doing? They started figuring out how to get around the government because they're not going to let us take it. They're not going to let us do that. And now when you look at Charlie Kirk, you go, well, there's more to it than just a guy getting shot

for what he's saying. Like, it just is. Now, does that mean Erica's all in on it? No, that's not what it means, but that's where this mentality has come from, is in COVID, start out just trying to... We lost faith in everything. And everything.

And how do you build back faith? And you said it really well. You said broken. People are broken when we've lost faith and everything. And I think maybe they meant to do that. But I just want to ask you about being part of the convoy. You were in Thunder Bay, right? Yes.

And I was not there, but I am, as you know, cutting a film about it. So I have access to a lot of footage from up there. Sure. That is where they knew, right? Isn't that where the longest line of trucks was joining up there that they really knew up at Thunder Bay that things were taking off for them? So I don't know when they knew, but there's, so I got in the convoy and rode with a kid, well, now he's a man.

Who am I kidding? You were a man back then too. but his nickname was Pretty Boy. And I rode with him coming out of Thunder Bay. And I remember thinking the compound, oh, yeah, it's pretty big. I don't know what I was thinking. And then it's split in two going from Thunder Bay, as I recall, and it went two different directions because they were worried about,

I think this is just me piecing it together, that the cops are just going to say you can't go any further. And when we got to White River, now whether it was the storm the night before or whatever, the cops were there across the high. and they wouldn't let anybody through and then some truck who knows what was after four hours waiting just bolted around and said enough of this yeah good and I think it was um I think it was North Bay Trish where the two convoys met back up I will never ever forget where that the largest

convoy met back up together because that's a big show I'm thinking of it was coming it was coming It was coming from the on-ramps, and it was in the middle, and you're driving. There was a little car in front of us, and I mean, all the trucks are just revving and smoking, and holy man, the hooting and hollering, thousands of people standing around. It's the middle of the evening at that time, so minus 30, and just people hanging from everywhere, and this little car, this dude gets out and starts playing the trumpet in the middle of the street as it's just jam-packed. And I mean, the road is shaking because there's just so many.

vehicles. It just makes my hair stand up. It was just unbelievable. And at the time, I probably had a phone and I was probably trying to like, holy crap, you got to see this, but not, you know, you're in charter or wall-to-wall traffic. That's what I knew what it was. The points leading up to that, I'd never gotten a full visual of how big it was. But when it all came together at one point in North Bay, you were like, there's just trucks coming from everywhere. There's vehicles and every vehicle is for it and the people on the roads are for it and it's minus 30 and freezing out and people don't care they're just so happy and so hopeful that something can change and we found that in COVID and then you know they went after Tamara and Chris and um Harold says

hello by the way I'm hopefully going to get to run into him yes hopefully get to interview him along the way once again spoiler alert folks um but let me just talk here for you sure for you I'm rambling. No, you're not rambling at all. It's amazing. It's part of history. But I'm just wondering personally, how choked up do you feel even just talking about that moment when you realized it was going to be big?

Like, I get weepy. There are about 10 things about the gone boy I get weepy about, and I can't help it. So I'm assuming you do too. At that time, it's like one of those memories that I can't believe I was a part of. And then you'd turn on the C-B. which I wanted to do to see what they were saying. I wish I'd never done it because it was it was so heartbreaking to realize, holy crap, we're in the middle of something.

So you are having this big kind of spiritual moment about what's happening and our national broadcaster is completely mischaracterizing the event. Yeah, well, what were they saying? I can't even remember anymore. White supremacists, far right, all the things. You know, I'd had Ron McLean on after. maybe, man, I can't remember when we did that interview, but he was talking about that the convoy was all white.

And I was like, Ron, what are you talking about? Now, is it majority white, I guess? But I'm like, we come from a majority white country, so why wouldn't it be? But I'm like, I talked to, I interviewed people from all over the world who moved to Canada who were warning us that where we're heading is to this very dark place.

And then when I talked to the other, side, they just had such a different view of it. I couldn't get my brain around it. I still can't get my brain around Trish. Well, it highlighted what is fundamentally wrong with this country, and that is that we inhabit different solitudes, depending on which media we use, right? If you watch CBC, you think Canada is one thing, and if you watch legacy independent media, you think it's another thing. That's just a fact. And we have to get used to that. And I think it's very, very dangerous. And I think the convoy absolutely proved it. I, in working on the film, I talked to people who hate the convoy and they'll say, well, they were raping people, they were this, they were that.

And I'll say, you know, there was an under oath inquiry into what happened during the convoy and absolutely none of what you think happened happened. There were no charges like that at all. it's just false. You cannot get them to change their minds. It's their reality now, and they want to believe that, and they do believe it, and that's it. Facts will not change their position.

Well, I remember being first night or second night at Ottawa. It's one of the two. And they were talking about Antifa, and there was a lady there, and I was saying, oh, do you want me to walk you back to wherever? Because it might be a little dangerous on the streets.

she looked at me kind of just like, have you been out on the streets? I'm like, well, maybe I should go for a walk. So I went for a walk. It was like 8 o'clock at night, Trish, but dark, right? Yeah. It's, you know, February. And there's families and old folks and just everybody on the street. And this is like 8 at night.

You're like, if there was anything sinister going on, it would have been snuffed out so fast because all the people there. and they were all like when they the Terry Fox got defaced right yeah I went to go sit there well to face they just put a hat on sorry sorry no when they were worried about people doing things and them writing stories yeah there was a group that was like well we should go sit around there and by the time we got there there was already cabs set up around it to make sure nobody touched it yeah it was so wholesome wholesome and the best that society could ever be was there for that period time. It was unbelievable. I just wanted to stay with that for a minute. Sure. What you just said

was so great. The best society could ever be was there. I think that is absolutely true. I completely agree with that. It's a really smart way to characterize it. And that is the tragedy of the smear campaign from the government and the way they attacked them to get rid of them later, right? They were attacking, in a sense, the heart of goodness in this country, in my view. I would agree. And I once again that's why people have a hard time with you know west we got a referendum coming October 19th and people want to believe in Pierre they really do the problem they got is Pierre won't address some of the major issues until polling says he can now I can be being way too hard on Pierre and that's a fair

assessment yeah I just talk to people all the time because I'm like I wanted Pierre to win the last election yeah heck I think most of the West voted for Pierre and then it didn't happen. And they're like, okay, well, it seems like it's either rigged or the eastern side of Canada has lost its complete and utter mind to allow back in.

Yes, Kearney's a new leader, but all the people in the party to vote them all back in? What are we doing here? You know, and it just seems like, you know, we're going to try the same thing over and over again, hoping for a different result.

Well, that's the definition of insanity for the most part. I think that's true, but I'm not sure that the people who voted liberal wanted a different result. I think they were, the elbows up crowd, remember that?

Yes. I think they were all perfectly happy to have 10 more years of what Trudeau delivered because it didn't seem to be affecting them, right? They're boomers, they had equity in their houses.

Sure, but they have to be paying attention to, you know, like, I live in a bubble. Full stop, I know I do. And that's part of the reason we're getting out on the road so I can remove myself,

from said bubble and interact with more people. Yeah. Good for you, by the way. Do none of them, like I understand they don't put it up to the vaccine, right? But like, I listen to people that were insanely smart during COVID, talking about if you get the vaccine, here's the possible outcomes over the next five years, three to five years. Yeah.

And they, I haven't talked to too many people where they don't have at least a relative or a close friend that was immediately harmed by the vaccine when it first rolled out. At some point, I get your price of your house, but all the people you love and care about are going through just horrific stuff, and you can't see any of that, it just doesn't make any sense to me. And maybe it was only isolated to Alberta. I travel other places, and the stories just keep rolling in. Allison Inquiry coming up here where they're going to have people talk.

That's all over the country. You listen to the Americans. It's all over their country. Heck, I would even go further into Europe in different countries like that. It's all over there. It was a similar thing. It's like, you took this shot. Some people made it through.

I have family members who have made it through unscathed. Did you take it? No, I did not. I have others that... Are you proud of that? Come on. I'm very fortunate, Trish. I was a part of a book club.

I've talked about this lots. Yeah. I don't know if this will make sense to you. I was interviewing Peter McCullough. And then I get off the interview, and the pressure at that point in time was so high, I'm like, oh, maybe I'm just going to go get it. Because you couldn't go to the book club if you didn't.

Is that right? No, no, book club, sorry, kept me off, talk me off the ledge every day. Oh, okay. Wonderful man. Yeah. But the pressure from society was so high. Oh, it was huge. And like...

I couldn't visit my kid at Dalhousie. I couldn't go. I had to call him and say, honey, this is my decision. I love you, but I can't fly. I'm a happy go lucky guy. I like walking in a room and being able to look people and I'm happy to see me and I'm happy to see them. And when I took this stance of like just questioning it, because I still wasn't sure if I was getting or not. I didn't know at the start. I was just like, this seems really odd. The, and the year there until the Freedom Convoy, it was just strange.

I remember trying to wave at a woman I knew and she just looked through me like I didn't exist and I'm like, you have to go, you got to go back and you got to sit there and you got to think on that for a bit and go where would I have to be in my head to do that? I'm like, I just don't know.

I was big in the community for, I'd raised a bunch of money. Even in COVID I raised a bunch of money. But specifically, raising money for the hospital. My third child, I give a lot of credit to the Lloydminster Hospital. They saved not only my wife's life, but my youngest son's life.

And I got asked to do a version of a radiothon, but a podcasting style. So a streamathon. We streamed for 12 hours straight. And the second year, we raised $350,000 off of just talking to people. It was wonderful.

It brought in all these different people, and they just talked about how important the hospital was and why, you know, in the community rally around it. The next year, when they did it, they wouldn't let me in the building. And, you know, I've forgiven and moved on.

Did they say because you're not vaccinated? Is that what they said? Or did they just sort of... If I was going to continue to interview people who held differing views. And they were basically like, if you're going to keep interviewing those, where the hospital kind of looks, you know,

and I was like, I told them back then, I thought we have a really good chance of bringing people back together because I hold different views than some of the people but that's okay. It's okay to have different views we can still get together and raise money for the hospital that's saving kids lives and all the different things no, he wouldn't let me in the building

and then the year we raised $350,000 what made it such a success is I did what I do so 74 interviews and 12 hours something silly like that but there was a guy who ran on a treadmill for 12 hours. So I had a nice little thing where you could, for every kilometer, Mikey runs, it'll be a buck or five bucks or whatever. Yeah.

He ran 124 kilometers that day. Like it was wild. So the next year, they were doing the exact same thing, except they were putting a whole bunch of people on treadmills. And, you know, there'd even been like, okay, if he can't host, could he go run? No, he's not coming in here. And so, you know, like, I had probably... See, there's something wrong with that.

That's really, this is maybe the worst thing that happened around COVID was the ability to divide people. And, you know, saying dividing people is kind of an understatement because it feels much more historical than that. Where people who didn't get vaccinated were actually kind of de-personed. We were dehumanized. Dehumanized, yeah. And I kept saying on the show, I hate to be. make this analogy, but I'm thinking 1942, 1943, not the Holocaust, but the run-up, the run-up, the years before, this is crazy. Like, how can they dehumanize people they know to be good people

because of this one thing? It makes absolutely no sense. And my friend, Ann Bauer, who's a big essayist and has a pretty big Twitter account, was on my show early on, and we talked about it, and she's Jewish. And she said, it made me remember what my parents used to say to me, which is in times of crisis, you have to remember who are your friends that will hide you in the attic? And I thought, is that where we're going? It felt so true to me that she would be wondering about that, you know, because all of us who didn't take the shot suffered in many ways, didn't we?

Well, I think this was a war of America. mental war, right? I've interviewed lots of military guys, and one of them, I showed it to Jamie Sinclair, because he was the first to say it on the podcast, it always starts with a little divide. They'd went to Croatia and Bosnia after what had gone on there, and he's like, it starts with a divide. They just have to pick the divide. Well, we had the divide.

You know, vaccinated versus unvaccinated, and then they used all different terms for the unvaccinated. It's why they had the snitch line. They had... Snitch line. They were quarantine Quarantine hospitals. They were talking about having quarantine field houses

where they hold you. I remember driving to North Battleford to go see if this was actually being built because it was being sent to me. The hysteria just continued to grow and grow and grow. And when the convoy went, it broke all that. It just snapped through it all. And I give that entire group

such immense credit Because one of the things they did that I thought was beautiful was they had filtered it through everyone that no violence. Yeah. Not taking weapons. We're not going there. And I remember halfway to Ottawa, even my hatred of Trudeau had died down where I was like, I actually don't want any harm to come to them. I just want them to talk to people or step out and be done. Because we just, it's time.

We need something different. I couldn't have predicted he would have held on as long as he did. It was remarkable. What a completely psychotic behavior on this part. Well, and I think that's what we're seeing out of a lot of different people and a lot of positions of power.

Fauci, like you just, you go, you know this intimately because of your time way back when with AIDS. You look at it and you go, any rational person, well,

what are we finding out? It isn't rational people that are holding power in a lot of these positions. No, you're so right. Like I did a thing with David Lease the other day after Fauci, he had been giving this evidence

in front of the Senate and took the fifth like a hundred times in a row or something? What colors the carpet? My lawyer has advised me like you're a public servant dude making $500,000 a year, you have an obligation, you know?

I mean the arrogance of him but yeah he, I said to David he's personality disordered you know he always has been when he would show up at the AIDS conferences in the late 80s, frequently accompanied by Jonas Salk, because he thought, as he thinks, that a vaccine is the solution to every medical problem, including AIDS, and we still have vaccine for AIDS. But it was clear then, it was clear

from my own experience as a journalist with him. I did a big interview with him at the NIH. That was a pretty knockdown, drag out. Woof. I mean, we really were going at it. And he didn't do well. I laid a glove or two on him over some really important issues. But I realized then that there's something wrong with him. I couldn't understand how a guy as dysfunctional and almost anti-human as he is could rise to the level he did in public health. Like, isn't that the antithesis of what you're supposed to be in public health? It's crazy. And then whoops, he shows up again during COVID. And I remember you remember the old news conferences at the beginning of COVID? Trump was in power.

Yes. And it was Fauci and Deborah Berks and Trump. And Fauci and Deborah Berks, both Democrats, was clearly hated Trump. It was so obvious. And I thought, well, this is not going to end well at all. This is not going to end well. If he's back at it again.

And look what happened. You know, what a disaster. How many people died as a result of COVID public health policy? And, well, how many people lost businesses? You know, like, I mean, it's taken, I think, for a lot of people. I just had Tom Razzow on. He's a good friend. I love Tom.

It was interesting because, you know, I had lots of people reach out saying, I don't know why talking about COVID feels almost therapeutic. Because I don't want to live it anymore. Yeah. But when society won't acknowledge it, it's nice to hear it talked about every once in a while. And I completely understand. because, you know, Fochie gets put on and you go, is anything going to happen? Probably not.

No, nothing will happen. But on the flip side, he'll never be in any sort of office anytime soon. I started crying, watching. When I was watching him taking a bit of a shit kicking at the hearings, I actually started crying. I thought, wooey, redemption, redemption, you know. But I also know as a longtime observer of, well, I used to work in Washington for veterans' organizations, so I know it pretty well. nothing's going to happen.

You know, they protect their own. He was doing what someone wanted him to do, for sure, and he'll get away with that. He'll take a couple of, you know, a couple of shots to the head, but metaphorically speaking, but he won't be punished. He'll retire with full, huge money and all of that stuff. You mentioned you're working on a documentary. I feel like the last time I talked to you about this,

you were working on a documentary. Is it the same one? Yeah, so we've been working on. a convoy film for almost two years, maybe two years now. It began with us following Chris and Tamara through the tail ends of the legal proceedings. So we were back and forth, me and my crew and my co-exact Jackie Vinen, for about eight months.

Every time they had a hearing in Ottawa, we were there. So we were following, part of the film is as following the traviles of enduring lawfare, right? Like imagine your trial is in Ottawa and keeps getting set over, okay, when's the next thing? Oh, in three months? So they're driving back and forth and they're paying their lawyers millions of dollars. For mischief. For mischief.

It's like, it's ridiculous. So part of the film is really covering up close and personal. the destruction of lawfare of these people, lawfare destroying Chris and Tamara. And you see it, because we were behind the scenes with this kind of exclusive access to them at the hotels and stuff. So that was a lot of work, and it cost a lot of money going back and forth

and hiring crews. But the other part of it, well, there's quite a few other parts of it, but I suppose the other part that's taken, so people say, are you still working on that? And I totally get it, right? It's been a while. But the other part of it is collecting the material.

So you would know this better than anybody. This is probably the most photographed and recorded and videotaped and written about and social media posted protest in the history of the world, ever, right? So we spent probably a year just collecting. that stuff. So we've got live streamers. We've got maybe 10 live streamers with maybe 40 or 50 hours of video each that we have to catalog, you know, just for starters. We've got a lot of what we call archival material. We have a lot of stuff from Chris and Tamara that they shot on the scene and in the cab of Big Red as well. They were rolling a lot, so we've captured all of that.

So getting the archive's been really important. It's not just a question of sitting down doing interviews with them, which we've done multiple times in multiple places. And behind the scenes, we were out west at her place and at Chris's Farm, which was lovely, really like his parents a lot. We were down with Harold down there too and Grimsby and all those places. But I think the biggest part of this film for us as a time suck and a money suck has been cataloging this material.

We are compiling history, and the feeling based on what we've cut is like you're there. Because what it does, let me just backtrack for a minute. Part of what we're doing is we're including the under oath testimony from the Public Order Emergencies Commission, which is all these politicians and their bureaucrats under oath having to explain themselves. Most Canadians never saw that. And they don't know that the head of the OPP got up and said under oath, there were no problems there.

We saw no violence. Oh, it was great. Everybody behaved really well. Like, most Canadians don't know that. And there was so much exculpatory stuff at the POEC. So just cataloging the hundreds of hours of that and transcribing and pulling what we want figuring out how we're going to present it so it's not just boring inquiry stuff has been a really big job but we're super proud of it we've figured it out and cataloging all of the citizen shot stuff

that we could get our mitts on to tell the story firsthand so you're not going to have the voice of god narrator saying you know the freedom convoy entered ottawa on january 28th 2022 or whenever it was, you're going to see it happening from the cab of the truck, right? So this is a much bigger undertaking. It's a much more expensive undertaking. I have found handling that much material pretty unwieldy, but we're doing it, and it's going to be amazing. But that's why it's taking everything. Why is it taking so long?

No, I don't wonder why it's taken so long. I go, I want to make sure I don't miss it. Yeah. Oh, you won't. I want to be at the thing. the premiere of this thing, Trish, because I think a lot of people with your background and the way you handle interviews and your podcasts and everything you've touched in your career, for the most part, I would say, that I've seen. It's a level of professionalism. So when you're taking your time,

I think everybody's going, can't wait for this to come out. Well, there has to be journalism in it. And I'll tell you why, because the easy thing would be to just tell the story and to maybe disrupt the official COVID narrative in a big way to give Chris and to Merrimor more credibility, which is really easy to do. But what I think people need to understand what we're really trying to show in an absolutely irrefutable way, because the refutation of what was said about them exists on the record under oath is to show that the freedom convoy was the victim of a massive smear campaign orchestrated behind the scenes between the government and legacy media. That is what happened. Most of what was said by government and by legacy media about the convoy was untrue or

exaggerated or said to serve a kind of a purpose. I remember there's a part already in the beginning of the film where Tamara says she's watching the news. They're on the road still. And I think Trudeau has said they're a fringe minority already at that point, right? He says that early on. And they're white supremacists and all this stuff's coming out. And the guy from, oh, what's it called? They go to him whenever they want to make a white working class guy look racist. I've forgotten. It's an organization. It'll come to me. Anyway, he was on saying these guys are all, you know, blah, blah, blah. Anti-hate network? Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's, there's, a point where Tamara gets to Ottawa and the coverage is already negative and nothing has even

happened. They are actually literally pulling up into Ottawa. And the CBC and everybody are saying the police are getting a larger presence there. They're more frightened. There's going to be rogue operators amongst the truckers, all this really crazy stuff. And Tamara looks to the camera and she says, where are they getting this from? Like she's really bewildered. They've spent a few days on the road saying peace, love granola, right? We're all in this together. Anybody who misbehaves is going to get kicked out, you're out. Like that's all they talked about. So they get to Ottawa and all of a sudden there's two solitudes, right? There's the reality of what the truckers did on the way there and what they said and what they meant, what they were going to do. And now there's this

whole new narrative that's been constructed by the government and fed to legacy media saying be afraid be very afraid right so there were even people on the sidewalks in ottawa who were like ah well the the thing i remember is the cops so i talked to the cops the first day which ones are o p p or city do you remember hmm that's a good question i want to say city but actually i couldn't tell you if i remember i just remember they're around parliament helm yeah And it was an older guy, well, older than me, probably 50s would be my guess. And it was the first day, I said, this is pretty cool. And he goes, not really.

And I'm like, you know, he's pretty gruff. And I was like, oh, I'm like, oh, I suppose you get protesting. And then he finished my sentence all the time. This will be nothing different. I said, oh, well, we'll see about that. And then before I left, he said, I'll tell you one thing they're different already, though. And I said, oh, what's that? He goes, somebody's out here at two in the morning last night,

cleaning up all the garbage in all my years. I've never seen that before. And then day two, the thing I noticed was day one, all their arms are crossed. Nobody, they were trying to be and trying to be imposing. By day two,

their arms are down at their side and they're a little more loose. Day two is where I asked a cop. I didn't, you know, in hindsight, it was a really stupid thing to do. They had a 22 on the shoulder and I pushed on the shoulder. I just, what does that badge mean?

Just like, what is that bad? And he got real confrontation. I was like, oh, no, I just want to know. By day three, the masks were down because it was cold, right? You could see their faces. And by day four, I was seeing them high five protesters and anything. And after day four, they'd replace all the cops and bring in, and it would start all over again. They had a cycle running of where you could.

Because if you were around that crowd too long, you were going, I'm sure there was one cop going home watching the mainstream, and then coming back and going, you hear what they're saying about these people? You've seen any of that? Anybody had to arrest anyone? You know, like there's so many great stories from the streets of Ottawa. The cops, to me, are another great one

because they just slowly, day after day, they would lighten up to the point where they were having a good time too. And then they'd change them out and it would start all over again. Yeah. Well, that was the convoy, right? That is the truth of the convoy right there

in that little nugget. And that is what happened at the POEC, which is a tragedy because it completely exculpated the convoy and the convoy's behavior. And most Canadians don't even know what happened because it wasn't covered. Why wasn't it covered by legacy media? Because it incriminated them. It was sane under oath a narrative of what happened at the convoy that was the opposite of what they said. So what would you do with the CBC? Now?

Yes. Would you just, you know, like just defund it, get rid of it, we don't need it. or would there be a different way? Could they hire somebody at the top and they could make the structural changes to make it, you know, the CBC gray again? I can't believe I just said that, but regardless. Yeah.

Well, there's a lot of really talented people there. Most of them are quite left of center as I was when I left there in 99, although I changed. I believe, you know, I'll tell you a funny story and then I'll answer your question. I was fired in 1999, meanly, badly, terribly, in a very kind of Jason R-Day way. It was front-page news. It went on for a very long time, and I wasn't sure I'd survive it.

I was suicidal every day for a year. I'll share that, just so people know we can get through these things. You do get through it. And I had a new baby, too, so it was really tough. And the law department at CBC, a couple guys, I'm not going to name them, who had been my friends, because every time we had a hot story, they would have to come in and vet it. So we'd go over a line by line by line transcript

of what I was saying and what the guests were saying. We'd have to prove it with documents, right? Well, why are you asserting that about this guy? How can you prove that, right? So it's very thorough. And as a result of that kind of work together, we got very, very close. And so when the kind of stuff went down

about me that was not true. People within the corporation, because this is how it rules, had to line up on one side or the other. And so there was nobody really on my side. It was a very dangerous place to be at that point. So the two lawyers who I'd been very close with during my time, my 10 years there, were against me

and actually were involved in firing me because they had to make a legal case to fire me, right? So they wouldn't have to pay me as much money on the way out. So about two years ago, one of those guys who'd been a really good friend took me to lunch at Toroni. He called out of the blue and he said, I'm retiring from CBC. Let's have lunch. And I said, I forgive you. Like I understand you had a job to do.

I've never held a grudge against you guys. I get it. It's a hard place to work. He took me out for lunch and he said, I want to apologize. I shouldn't have done it. I knew it was a lie. You're a great person. You were my friend.

I was a bad person for doing that. imagine that it was like so shocking and he was crying he's crying that is the cbc good people do bad things because the pressure in there to behave a certain way is so i don't know if i don't know if i've ever shared this story before i won't use any names but of a very good friend of mine and i were in the middle of covid him vaccinated me unvaccinated yeah but we discussed things all through COVID. And it was when, it was right around the time the Toronto Star had the headline about the unvaccinated, you'd all die. You mean the front page? Sorry, the front page. Yes, not the headline. I'll never forget it. And so we were having an argument. And it's maybe the one time of my life

where instead of just leaving alone, I just kept pushing. I just wanted to find how close we were because I just interviewed a military guy saying it always starts with a divide. And then you see the headline and you're like, holy crap. It feels like we're awfully close to us. And so we were talking about our kids, and I was saying, you know, like, my son has a problem and has to go to the hospital. But now he's ahead of your son. Are we saying that you're going to bump my son? And he goes, if he's not vaccinated, yes. Okay.

And I was like, I was like, okay. And I was driving away and I was sitting there and I was like, I was the one pushing. I was pushing and getting the motion to. I think in hindsight, cloud judgment, but I wanted to know. And he called me on the ride home, probably like five minutes later. And he goes, I don't know why I ever said that. I would never wish that upon your son ever. And we've made very good friends.

He didn't mean it. He didn't mean it because I was getting them worked up. But I wanted to know how close we were in society to where we would do things like that to each other. And we were awfully close. I don't, like I think people understand that we were close. But I don't think we truly understand how close we were at that point in time when friends could argue about it. And they just couldn't get past anymore. And then they're saying, oh, we're filling up the hospitals.

Bullshit. Like, you know, you come all the way back to what podcasters and, you know, some of the things, you know, like, you never think about it. I think it's a very valid point where you're talking about with ethics and how you approach a story and doing the research or reading the documents. So you can actually see what the documents say because it would be very healthy for everyone who does this job. But we can't forget that it was a time that you went and did all the work

and they still wouldn't do you anything. They wouldn't talk to you or they'd frame it or they'd call you this or they'd take a picture of that and so many people are just done with it, Trish. They don't care. They don't care what some Ivy League scholar feels when he lies about everything. This is such a good point.

He's like, you want to, lie? Well, here's the consequence of that. If you want to sit there and be foci and have a 40 year, 50 year career of being the guy, there's going to be a problem with that. And if you can't reconcile that when it happens to you, chances are you get what you deserve. And you have summed up in that very astute comment, exactly why I'm stepping back. Because what you're saying is what I was thinking with a slightly different twist. Sure. That is that subject matter expertise is now dispensed with, right? I'll give you an example.

So going back to Charlie Kirk, which was kind of the bellwether for me, and the fact that I've done a lot of true crime, I'm not saying I know everything I don't, but I do know my way around forensic evidence and forensic medicine and courtrooms and stuff. I do, I do. We got an innocent man out of jail based on our analysis. of the autopsy. We took the time. We did it right and we got them out and we were right to do it. We weren't making stuff up. So there was a lot of discussion in the Charlie Kirk story about it's a conspiracy because he was shot with a 30-ought-6 and all the hunters say, I shoot an elk in the

woods with a 30-0-6 and it blows their head clean off. It can't have been a 30-0-6. Therefore Charlie Kirk is a conspiracy. right so sounds fine i i believe that i thought yeah and they were shooting pot roast in the backyard with 30 out six and stuff like that nice guys i love those guys they're entitled to an opinion as much as any phd is in my opinion but they were wrong um and i found out they were and that fueled my conspiratorial view of the curt case initially then i went to some of the subject matter experts i know and have known, including the guy who wrote the textbook on gunshot wounds. They're called GSWs, right? And they know what they do when they hit from a ballistics perspective, and they know what

they do when they hit from a surgical perspective. There's a whole bunch of different ways to analyze what rounds do in the human body, especially at 30 out 6. It turns out that a 30 out 6 stays in the body 30 to 35% of the time, that is in the medical literature, and that every subject matter expert on that topic will say that and would say it under oath. So I started saying foolishly in my substack and on the show, if the 30-0-6 not leaving Charlie's neck is the basis for the conspiracy, we've got a problem because it's not true. We have to go to the subject matter experts. And what you'll notice after, I know people are already getting mad at me because they like the Charlie Kirk conspiracy. No, I don't know. I think people really respect you, Trish. I hope so.

No, I don't think it's I hope so on this audience. I know we do. Well, I hope so. Because let me say this, if that is wrong, and it is wrong, the idea that it always leaves the body and would always take off Charlie Kirk's head, which clearly it did not, then the house of cards on which, think about this hours and hours and hours of profitable podcasting I'm not going to name the people we all know who they are will be for not it will be for nothing it will be a fraud right and so for me I did speak out about that and I was attacked by some of my own people in my substack they said well that's not what she's saying and I'm like, wow, I cover trials. I can call Vernon Giburth, the grandfather of forensic medicine,

and ask him about the 30 out six, and I did. But that doesn't matter. And it doesn't matter because there is a certain large grouping of podcast listeners and viewers who want that, whether it's true or not. That's a terrible thing to say, but they do. Well, I've been, Iran has really been an interesting, you talk about Charlie.

I look at geopolitical and Trump going into Iran. That has been, I don't know, it was hard when I started talking about COVID, but trying to bring on two different viewpoints, maybe three different viewpoints. On Iran?

You can't. And people, well, I've been doing it. Have you? Oh, yes. Oh, I've been annoying everybody because people are set in their camps Yeah, I certainly am. I'm in my own camp, yeah. What camp are you in?

Well, I just lied. Maybe I'm not my own camp. I would have said three months ago, the Middle East is always a quagmire. Don't do it. Now, I'm not sure what I would say, actually. I'm not sure what I would say is the truth. I couldn't, let's put it this way. I couldn't argue it.

I couldn't argue my position now. One of the best arguments I've heard that I've enjoyed is it's got to be hard to talk about something if you've never been there. And when I think about I ran and I can look at it on a map. Yeah. I can think about it like in my brain of what I think it is. Yeah. I actually have no idea. I just see the ripple effects of how it affects society.

So I get to, from a standpoint of that, try and figure it out. But at the end of the day, I go, I actually don't know. I mean, I just don't know. I can sit and watch the two sides doing what they're doing, saying what they're saying. Donald Trump's saying some crazy stuff, but he's always said crazy stuff. Always, yeah. We were more tolerant of his crazy stuff baby before. Maybe we're sick of it now.

But to answer your question, I wasn't expecting it. So I hedged maybe more than I should have. I am at my heart a non-interventionist. I don't think American military misadventures go well in the Middle East. I don't think they ever have. I wrote a book about the Iraq War. I worked for a veterans group in D.C. That was their position.

I just don't think it ever goes well. They go in very lofty. Oh, like they said, the regime's going to fall in three days. Nobody really thought that. Four weeks. Four weeks. Yeah, and it kind of feels like the two-week thing all over again. Yeah.

Now, they're not losing a lot of guys. So that's good. so that means they'll probably be in there longer, but I just always wonder, like, what are you going to achieve? Yeah, the mullahs are weirdos, but can't people just be governed by weirdos and we'll stay out of it?

Like, do we have to be mucking about in there? I don't think we do. I would say I'm kind of like a Colonel Douglas McGregor person. Sure. That's, I would say I agree mostly with what he says. Well, I've interviewed a lot of people. And probably Mearsheimer, probably Mearsheimer too. There's a whole bunch of people I've interviewed.

on and I've always been uh you know when I actually sat down and thought about it I'm like I just don't like I don't think we need to be in a war yeah right now if they come knocking on our doorstep I mean that's that's a highly different thing and in Canada the way it seems to be um filtering out is we just get we're such a open society it just seems to be through education politics media propaganda however it's sliding in. I got Sam Cooper next week in, in Ottawa. Yeah.

And talking about some of the things in his world or things our world, things he's staring at. He's very smart. Oh, very smart. Yeah. I think he's maybe the best journalist in the country right now, actually. Wow. I'll pass that along to him. Well, he's doing the work.

Like, he's actually doing the investigative work. Not a lot of people are. Yeah. Well, he came and spoke at the Cornerstone Forum this year. Yeah. Well, actually, he was in a debate. on the corner at the cornerstone with whom mad erritt oh i know who he is yeah they were they were talking about uh you know it's funny i had a lot of comments after it saying i think both could be true

both what they were arguing about it both could be true see i yeah that's me i think a lot of things have two sides to them well for sure they do yeah for sure they do i do i do think that like on one hand this on the other hand that hmm now before uh i end this i i do have to ask you i'll burn it One of the reasons for this, Trish, is not that you're from Alberta or have like a... I did live there for a minute and a half. Fair enough. As a child in Calgary on elbow drive. Well, there you go, folks.

A little bit of tiny heritage there. My thought it always goes back to Quebec's 95. And I would have been nine at the time. And I was just, as a kid, I remember thinking, why did they want to leave? Or simple questions. that probably aren't that simple. These days, you know, I could have stayed in Alberta and just interviewed 500 Albertans. Yeah.

But I was very curious on what Canada thinks. Yeah. Do you even give it any? I do. I give it a lot of thought. Well, I'm from BC originally. And I've spent a lot of time thinking about my roots out there, which were very maritime-ish. on my mother's side, which is to say the side that I was really close to, my grandfather was a

Finn, as in from Finland, and my uncles, my sister's brothers, were also boat builders and commercial fishermen, all of them, and he owned a marina at Boundary Road and Dike Road in Queensboro, New Westminster, which is now gone, and the Anasus Highway extension is where their house used to be. I can't even look at it. It's so upsetting. I spent my childhood summers there on the dogs. So I grew up around those very, and admiring those very kind of blue-collar West Coast hardworking guys. My uncle Jerry was still fishing out of Prince Rupert two summers ago even. I don't know what he's doing now, but so that shaped me. I live in Ontario, which parts of it I love. I hate living in Midtown Toronto more than anything. And I've said so on

the show for six years. And they say, well, why don't you leave? I understand mostly because of the freedom convoy why people want to leave Alberta and because of COVID. I embraced the convoy as profoundly as I did because we'd finally, not finally, but because we just lost yet another court case around the vaccines. We couldn't win them. We couldn't win them. I think there were four or five, and then the convoy came. And I remember coming in here and saying to my husband, he was sitting right over there. I came out of my office and I said, we've lost another case. there's no way out of this they're doing another lockdown there's no way out what can we do i cannot live this way so we went out we went to the house and we went out to the country for a month just to get me out of here

because i was really in bad shape as a lot of people were i was in really bad shape um now how that connects to your question about alberta is the people in government the Laurentian elites the liberal party, the conservatives who kowtowed to that because they were cowards, those are not my people. And I would say that the elites in Ontario are also not my people. I'm never terrifically comfortable

around them. So I totally understand why Alberta is feeling like it's time to go. When I was doing the film, when I was in production, I was

out there visiting Chris at his parents, Farmsdale, and I was out visiting Tamara and Dwayne, where they live. We spent a lot of time driving those kind of barren highways through the prairies and meeting the people out there, and I fully understood it. They are not like the people here who are running the show, and the people who run the show don't care about people like them. I don't think they care about people like me either, which is why I'm not afraid of them. But I totally understand it. I totally understand the Alberta identity

and the reason that they would want to leave. How many people think the way I do? That they understand about Alberta. Yeah. If you're asking about interviews, I would say along the road, majority. and the people who say they don't understand it

how do they justify that thought what do they say after they've said that that divorce isn't the answer and that most people who get divorced I'm paraphrasing but essentially that divorce you know always isn't better on the other side type thing

and that we you know I think they're looking at a shared history and some of the things that come up in the conversation I've had away from the podcast. I've only found one person, and I actually put him on the podcast because he was just like, we love you. We love Alberta, and we want you to, you know,

he's like, we want you to stay, but I understand if you go. Yeah, that's my feeling. And one, one, I should have stayed and ask more questions, but we've been on the road. So we were, you know, by this time, you can imagine my wife is staring at me going, we need to keep moving.

Yeah. he thought albertans were spoiled and uh were a small province and they would never like it'll never work and i thought that was uh i guess you know as a kid i wanted to understand why quebec wanted to leave why would you want to leave one of the greatest countries in the world and when i drive this country trish i still think that i think wow it's very emotional it's very we could be just a place amongst places but it reminds me it's all about leadership you know like

you can have all the fancy bells and whistles and everything else you've got poor leadership corrupt leadership or all the different levels of leadership it ain't gonna be fun I mean on the flip side

you could you know maybe you got a little bit hard work to do but under the right leadership it just feels like everything's gonna be all right so you're saying and it's something I never really thought of

but there might be a way back through some kind of encouraging dialogue or something. If all of a sudden Mark Carney went and sat with two or three of the leaders of the independence movement, don't you think that would be an interesting? Yes. That would be like, oh wow, maybe something.

For me, when Daniel Smith said on stage, getting asked, sorry, at a press conference, getting asked, and she said, I will not call them traitors. These are my citizens. That is different from COVID time. and what we would I would love to see is Pierre Poliav go sit with them I know what the media is going to say yeah but since when it's talking to people such an evil thing to do well why didn't they upset why didn't they talk to the congoi right but didn't that say everything though I mean yes it did

it said everything like all he had to do was either walk there or send an emissary down there to have a cup of tea with Tamara and they wouldn't do it. That is the basis for the separatist movement in a way. I don't know if it's spoken of, but I think psychologically that dynamic is there. I think there's a chunk that thinks that in Canada we have a uniparty. And Carney was writing editorial saying freeze the bank accounts. That's where that came from.

Carney was out of power, but writing editorial saying freeze their bank accounts. So that is such a huge, like how dare you. Here are all of these peaceful, mostly blue collar people on your doorstep. And you, meanwhile, Black Lives Matter, whose American brothers and sisters were burning down cities. And he's out there taking a knee. And little Tamara and Chris want to have a cup of coffee with somebody from the

narrative, Trish. It doesn't fit the narrative. And so, you know, people can be. I think a lot of people, I was hoping it was going to be more. It definitely hasn't been all of Ontario that understands. That is not true. That understands what? Why Alberta wants to leave.

I would say a lot of them. Really? Yeah. I was expecting the entire north to be like. Yes, me too. You know, I hope they don't leave, but I kind of understand it. That's kind of what I was expecting. I didn't get that answer a whole lot.

and on the podcast I did but the podcast is a little different than an everyday conversation right yeah there's a good chance with if you sit in this world and are willing to come on you probably already think differently than most people yeah totally yeah and that's a

I've created this environment so I you know driving through northern Ontario most people have zero clue who I am so I just like slowly picking away on it and I was expecting to hear more of like yeah the liberals really suck. I actually had to come at it a very different way. I had to come at it from a way of like, you know, how do you like live in XYZ? You know, and then, and then you just slowly let it breathe.

And by the time you let it breathe for 20 minutes, they're talking about crime, they're talking about immigration, they're talking about the cost of living. They're talking about some would talk about made. Others would talk about some of the things going on with the LGBT or men and women's sports. You know, like, and it slowly starts the bubble. And I don't think they're happy. I just don't think for some strange reason they see the conservatives as a way to get out of it, which is really odd to me. Well, it's a uniparty. And also, I think people are burned out. I think COVID burned people out. They don't have a lot of fight left in them. Let me give you an example. There's this, we're looking for property out in eastern Ontario to get out of here. And everything we look at is in the trajectory

of something called the Alto High Speed Rail. Do you know about this? Bits and pieces, yes. Okay. So they're building this stupid boondoggle, overpriced in seeing high-speed rail. We don't need, Canada is a huge country. It's not like little Italy where you're going to high-speed rail, right? It's like a vast country where the people are dispersed. Are you going to take high-speed rail from Peterborough to Trau-Rivier, which is one of this, like, it's insane. But what it means is destroying a lot of biosphere, nature, expropriating farmland. People who live out there are terrified just by the name of it, and you see no alto signs all over every town outside of Kingston, right? And it's just sort of hanging there. It's just hanging over the region

like this awful thing. And I'm thinking to Carney, the conservatives don't want it. Karni loves it. I've been told by a really smart engineer, it's impossible what they want to build. They cannot do it. And yet, real estate prices are depressed. Farmers are worried about and have been worried about losing their land for years. Like it's just so typically liberal party infrastructure BS, right?

It's awful. People are not enjoying their own houses. They're afraid. Yeah. Well, I don't know what to say. Other than, to me, it just seems like

traveling Canada. Government does some things that make no sense. You want to add it a little bit of common sense, but then you go back to the people who get into politics and rise to the highest levels. Yeah, psychos.

Like Tony Fauci. Yes. Right. I appreciate you doing this. Let me in your house and having a conversation. It has been great to meet you. Great to meet you too. Wow.

You're on a big Odyssey, aren't you? Yeah. Yeah. It's been enjoyable through the first month and change now. Has it? Yeah. Well, and I put you at the top of my list for Ontario. I was like, if there's one lady I could run into,

to be Trish Wood. I wanted you back to speak at an event a few years ago and, you know, it didn't work. And I'm glad this time I could weasel my way into Toronto. Not weasling. It's been so fun. Thank you. Well, thanks again.