Shaun Newman Podcast - #561 - Kris Sims

Episode Date: January 4, 2024

She is the Alberta director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and we are talking all things taxes in 2024: Alberta fuel up 9 cents, carbon tax set to go up on April 1st and journalism should never be paid by the government.  Let me know what you think. Text me 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcastE-transfer here: [e-mail] Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Phone [phone] – general sales line, ask for Grahame and be sure to let us know you’re an SNP listener.

This is Danielle Smith. This is Tammy Peterson. This is Alex Kraner. This is Curtis Stone. This is Tom Romago. And you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Thursday.

How's everybody doing today? I've been having lots of questions coming in about April. SMP presents loosely titled, Ungovernable. And I just wanted to let everybody know. We should have more information in like the next 10 days. I'm still in the States. And until I get back and walk through and have a couple other things, I can't solidify a few things.

give me a week. It's funny. I started talking about this and then I've been having more and more people reaching out and I haven't. So anyways, that's where I'm at. That's where I'm at. Okay. Give me a week and then I'll have more details for you and dates and everything else. There is a bunch of things penciled in and it's going to happen. Just going to make sure before we make it happen that everything is, you know, and say it's actually official. So yeah, there we go. Okay. Today's episode brought to you by Silver Gold Bull, North America's Premier Precious Metals dealer. I need you to scroll to the show notes, folks. And if you're interested, talk to Mr. Graham, email them, thank them for what they do in helping the podcast here in 2024. Of course, they have state of the art distribution centers here in Calgary and down south in Las Vegas. And they ensure fastfully insured discrete shipping right to your doorstep. So if you order anything off of silvergoldbull.ca, it shows up right to your doorstep. It's super cool, super easy.

And tons of people have been reached out. You can literally do that from wherever you're situated. Like, you know, if you're sitting, if you're sitting, if you're sitting, sitting at, I don't know, say a hockey practice like I was the other day. A couple of dads pull out their phone and we were ordering right from there. So I thought that was super cool. And I'm curious, how many people put some in stockings? We talked about it.

I had a few people to discuss that, that they were going to do that. Did any of you do that? I'm kind of curious. McGowan professional chartered accountants. Kristen and Teen, they're looking for people. They're looking to hire a CPA and would really love to grab somebody from our local area who understands the industries and their clients, the clients who operate in and around our community.

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one of you find listeners who is a CPA to, and looking for a change, looking for maybe something fits a little better. For more information, go to visit, go visit McGowanCPA.ca. That's Kristen McGowan's team and they could probably get you

I don't know maybe there's a partnership in the air you know. If you have been over to substack actually, nope,

here are a couple things. We got Tucker Carlson tickets that are going to be drawn on January 10th so you got a little bit of time to get entered. First way you can enter there's five sets of two

and one set is simple. Text me your name and where you're listening from. You're entered. That's one. Then you can go to Substack for option two. You can subscribe and then pledge.

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Anyways, there's three sets going to be given out to the pledges on Substack. So right now, I think as of today, there was 57 pledges. So that means three of those sets are going to the 57 who've pledged. Okay, so that's four. And then if you pay attention to social media, there's going to be some posts coming out there. So you can get entered into three different way to win five sets of two.

Tucker Carlson, January 24th, that night at Rogers Place in Eminton. We got tickets going there. So that's what I got for you today. Now, let's get on to that tale of the tape. She's a former founding reporter for Sun News Network, and now is the Alberta Director for the Canadian Taxpayer Federation. I'm talking about Chris Sims. So buckle up.

Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by Chris Sims. So first off, thanks for hopping on. Happy New Year. Nice to see you. You know, at some point, Chris, of all the people that have been around me, I haven't had you in studio yet. We've got to find a way to get the Canadian Taxpayer Federation to Lloyd Minster.

I think that would be a lot of fun. But right now, I'm in Minnesota, so it really doesn't matter. We're going to do this virtually. but hey happy new year thanks for hopping on um let's let's start shall we uh 20 23 okay you guys just had your naughty nice list i uh i kind of paid attention but i kind of like pulled myself from social media quite a bit too like i was just like i'm tired of staring at this stuff and uh half the time it's just a whole bunch of uh you know it's just disheartening you know and then i'm like oh but i missed the naughty nice list so we should talk about that 2023 when you're looking back at 2023 naughty nice

wherever you want to take us. Yeah, so we can start. Let's finish with good news. So let's start with the naughty list. The naughty list, as always, got some frequent flyers on there. We have CBC CEO Catherine Tate for musing about keeping her massive executive bonus while the CBC was reportedly laying off a bunch of people. Now, I say reportedly because mainstream media is reporting it verbatim

that they're laying off a bunch of people. but I worked there for a while and I still know people who work there and I've gotten a couple of messages saying yeah a lot of these are long time retirement plan blah blah blah replacement things where they're no longer filling a job that's already open all that said if we take it at face value they were going to be cutting a whole bunch of jobs just before Christmas while the CEO Catherine Tate is saying well we're probably going to be keeping our executive bonuses and to her credit Adrian Arsano who is an anchor on the national CBC TV show, actually had her on and was grilling her about it, like grilling her boss on camera. So that was pretty interesting to watch. So she topped the nice list, the naughty list for that one. And then we've got Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Well, how long do you have? But we got all the time you need, Chris, all the time you need. Let me get my book set going on, why he should be on the naughty list. For us, he's on the naughty list because he's cranking up carbon taxes and he's putting the media on payroll. He's doing all sorts of really

bad things, causing inflation, all that jazz. So Prime Minister Trudeau was also on the naughty list. In Alberta, a couple of interesting ones. We stuck the mayors of both Calgary and Edmonton on the naughty list because they increased property taxes while taking a pay raise. A lot of people don't know this. I didn't know this until I looked it up. But the mayors of Edmonton and Calgary make more money are paid more than the Premier of Alberta. So they landed on the naughty list. For our nice list, the one that really stuck out was Wob Canoe, who is the brand new NDP Premier of Manitoba. Why are we putting the NDP Premier Manitoba at the top of our nice list? Because he actually fulfilled a pretty big election promise. He's fully suspended his province's fuel tax.

So as of right now, Manitobans are paying zero provincial fuel tax. They're saving 14 cents per liter. And they are the ones who are paying the lowest fuel taxes in all of Canada. So that was a really good one for a nice list. Yeah, an NDP topping the nice list. That, um, what? Things happen. Right?

Isn't it? You're kind of like, wait, wait a second. Do we talk good about the NDP on this show, folks? I don't know. But hey, when they're doing good things, why wouldn't you? You know, which leads us into 2024. Chris, you know, me and you'd had this chat like a month ago, and you're like,

oh yeah, yeah, no, don't worry about it. They're going to suspend it, they're going to suspend it, they're going to spend it. Taxes went up in Alberta on fuel. I know. I know. So, uh, they made a liar out of me. So I first started getting phone calls probably endish of November, mid-November, because the premier still has her radio show on

Saturdays in Calgary. And you can phone in and ask the premier stuff on like a Saturday morning. And she had said then, oh, and by the way, in the new year, we're going to be partially increasing the fuel tax again. I'm like, what? Say what? No. And so we started this big email campaign. We have a petition list going, pretty big one. And so we started pushing them saying, guys, you can afford to extend the fuel tax holiday. What are you doing? And I thought they were going to say, oh, well, Merry Christmas. We were going to increase the fuel tax, but now we're not going to. Here's our good news round through the media.

And they didn't do it. Instead, they've hiked the fuel tax back up by nine cents per liter. So overnight, as of January 1st, you are now paying an extra nine cents per liter in Alberta for gasoline and diesel. So that makes everything cost more because, of course, it's not just you and me going to grocery store. it's the truckers driving all the stuff to the grocery store. They use diesel. Now it's costing them more here in Alberta. And what do you think that's going to do to everything, Chris?

What do you think that's going to do to everything? So it makes everything cost more, which is why this is so frustrating. Okay. So politically speaking, when the premier first announced this a year ago, she did the right thing. She fully suspended it, 13 cents, poof, gone an entire year. That was awesome. And we told her so repeatedly out loud with our faces and on camera. So it was awesome.

And she said she was doing it for a couple of really important reasons. She said because everything's freaking expensive and nobody can afford Jack. So she didn't put it that way. I'm, you know, crassly paraphrasing. So she said, this is really bad. And so we're going to drop the price of everything. And she said she wanted to shield us from Trudeau's crazy carbon tax hikes. Those two things have not changed.

Those are still major problems. Trudeau's going to jack the carbon tax up this year in just a few weeks' time. and everything is still bloody expensive. And this is Kishon. We can afford it. We can afford to extend the fuel tax holiday. They've got a $5.5 billion surplus in Alberta, but they're not doing it. So we're kind of frustrated.

You know, I read Terazano's email. I can't remember when this was, so forgive me. But it stuck with me in that, you know, she's critical of the carbon tax, right? And how much it is and how much it hurts the economy. And yet she just put her own tax in. Come on. Yeah. Yeah.

So I think two things are happening here. And they're kind of a cross-purposes. This is my hunch. This is my, I'm theorizing. So I think a bit of dome disease is setting in. And what that means is, so I'm from more of the federal school of rough and tumble politics. And when you send your, you know, ideologically pure as the driven snow, grassroots. roots, you know, populist politician into Ottawa and they're going to change everything. That's great.

You've got a head full of steam. And then if they hang around too long and they start listening to the bureaucrats too long and they live in the glebe too long, they start getting what's called auto-washed. Okay? They go mushy. They start racking up expenses. They do dumb stuff like raising taxes. In Alberta, I guess because the legislature building is physically like a dome shape, They call it dome disease. So I think two things are happening. I think the Premier's people around her are getting a bit of dome disease. And they're listening to the bureaucrats at Treasury saying, Premier, Premier, we have to raise taxes.

We need more taxes. These are the same people, Sean, who want a PST in Alberta. Like, they shouldn't be listened to. And two, because the Premier speaks so firmly, correctly so, against Prime Minister Trudeau, that gets her a lot of capital, right? Because I can't disagree with her. She's right to put the boots to Trudeau over things like trying to strangle our energy industry and jack up our carbon taxes and do dumb things.

She's right. But that gives her with this crowd of people who want lower taxes and less waste, it gives her a lot of capital and maybe some cover. But at the end of the day, this is going to hit people in the wallet. No matter how much they like a person, this is going to cost you more now. to drive your kids to school, to buy groceries, to truck your supplies. And it's wrong because they can afford to keep this fuel tax at zero. We wouldn't be squawking about this.

If we were teetering on the brink of a deficit, we wouldn't be pushing them for this. But they're not. They've got a $5.5 billion deficit after a year of not collecting this tax. $500 billion, not deficit. Sorry, surplus. $5.5 billion surplus. We're in the black for surplus. So, get,

okay, riddle me this. They could put 50% of their surplus down on the debt, as they've already agreed to do, which is awesome. And they would still have a more than billion dollar surplus. Yeah, but, I mean, I got into government to make $100 billion off the people. That's what I got into government for, right?

Like, I mean, it's just, it's insanity. Like, you look at, you look at what's going on in our world. And it's like, let's just keep adding more tax to it. Tax is going to solve us. We're going to tax ourselves into oblivion. It's just surprising because I actually agreed with you a month ago and you're like, I don't know. They're going to get rid of this.

This isn't a big deal. And then you listen to part of the press conference is like, well, listen, we could have, we could have increased it all the way. We could have increased it all the way back up to 13 cents. But we only did nine. We feel for you guys, only nine. It's like, yeah, nine cents, you're moron. Like, are they, like, this is the time to take the book.

to the Alberta government right now. And an NDP, a couple provinces over, is doing you, is outdoing you. Like take a little step from Wob Canoe and away you go. Get rid of it. Yeah, it is. And so this is what's frustrating is because they know better. So really sneaky, ridiculous, tired old city hall governments pull this crap all the time. They'll lead up to a budget discussion saying, oh, we're going to have a 15% property tax increase.

Right. And then they actually get down to brass tax and it's like four or five percent increase. And like, see, aren't you thankful to your slave masters that were only increasing your taxes? It's the oldest play in the book. And to see people within the finance department saying something like that of, well, it could have been 13 cents. Like, come on. Like, look around, read the room. A lot of Albertans are still struggling to just afford basics, right?

They're fighting to afford fuel and food and housing. And again, Trudeau is going to increase his carbon tax on us in just a few weeks time, which was largely the point. Well, and one of the things I was telling my American counterparts, you know, when it comes to housing in particular, Chris, is, you know, lots of them down here lock into a 25 year, 30 year mortgage, whereas we have five year fixed. We have, you know, and when you do the math on what houses are coming up for renewal this year, 2019, right? that's a big jump from where we were in 2019 to where we are at, and this only gets worked. So you're like, oh, well, it isn't an app. It's like, no, all these things are compounding right now.

And the government has the opportunity to be like, we realize nine cents isn't probably going to make or break every household. But it is going to help. And maybe we should start helping our people instead of kicking them when some of them are really down. Yeah. And this is where it's frustrating. because again, I think the Premier wants to keep it at zero.

I think this is the Treasury Department and the finance minister that is pushing, saying, you know, OMG, we need higher taxes, we need higher taxes. But I will say that it gets pretty frustrating when you know that, how do I put this nicely, you've hosted talk radio for years, you've listened to the people for years, you've read back issues of our taxpayer magazine, like some of the policy understanding in there is pretty high. So they did great things. They expanded the taxpayer protection act so that they can't increase taxes or create new ones without a referendum. Now this one was a technicality because it was a suspension, so they got that one through. They also passed ballot budget legislation. And this is a

big one. They passed a law on themselves that they can only increase spending at the rate of inflation and population growth, something we've been asking for them to do for like 25 years. So this is all awesome. And then they turn around and jack up the fuel tax on New Year's Day. And this is what's really upsetting now, too. We're hearing rumblings. I think it was Rick Bell and the Sun had posted this. We're hearing rumblings now that they're going to try to slow roll their income tax cut. Remember that big income tax cut that they promised during the election campaign? They were so for people who aren't familiar with Alberta, we have no PST. Up until a couple days ago, we had no fuel tax. Things were.

more affordable largely here because we have lower taxes. But income taxes are a different story. So your first tax bracket in Alberta for income tax right now starts at more than $140,000 per year. That's a very high threshold to have for your low income tax bracket. And it's at 10%. So professionals moving here from British Columbia, for example, or Ontario, are often surprised when they look at their pay stub and they go, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is lower than I was expecting, and you're taking off more. Why? That's because our income tax starts at 10% and goes all the way up to 140 grand. What the UCP campaigned on, a big campaign promise, was to create a lower income tax bracket, so your first $59,000 worth of earnings are going to be at 8% now.

Not the best in Canada, but a heck of a lot better than 10. On average, they were saying that was going to save a two-person working family like 1500 bucks a year. So like nothing to sneeze at. That's a lot of tax savings. And we expected this to be fully announced like in budget, like this coming budget in a few weeks. Like here it is. And now we're hearing rumblings based on what Brooke Bell was saying that, oh, this could be a longer term plan, slow roll. Like, not cool. Not cool at all. They did not say this is going to be slowly drip implemented over four years. So we're getting a little bit cranky here at the Taxpayers Federation. Well, one of the things that I enjoy about having, uh, uh, I don't know, old school journalists on is that, um, the knowledge

base that's sitting there. So here comes probably the greenest question of all. It's like, how quickly can they get rid of the fuel tax? How quickly can they implement what you're talking about with income tax? Like is it, you know, hours, days, weeks? years? So they could do it in hours. Say, I don't like using this word anymore because it's gotten dirty, but say there were an emergency. Beware a government that tries to call everything an emergency because then poof, there goes all your money and your ability to move around.

But say there were an emergency, governments can move very quickly. They can do an equivalent of an order and counsel. So, or where you see in the United States, I forget what they call them. that executive order where the president just signs whatever he or she wants and poof law happens. The equivalent can happen up here and it's called an order in counsel. That usually isn't used. All that said, here in Alberta, the UCP has a majority and they move things along pretty darn briskly in the legislature. Could Daniel Smith sign an order in counsel saying we're getting rid of the fuels tax? Yeah, I believe so. Is that a political suicide move or everybody would be over the moon because

their fuel just went down. Okay, like, I'm stuck to find a person who thinks this is an awesome idea to increase the fuel tax. There's a few people who are economists and they write papers and stuff who are like, yeah, well, it is technically tied to the price of a barrel of oil. That's true. Like, fair enough, they did announce that this is going to be tied to the price of a barrel of oil and that it would go up and down according to it. That is true.

That's the math. but there's always the politics. And the political situation has not changed. In fact, it's gotten worse in many cases. Worse in the sense that life is more unaffordable and we're still dealing with Trudeau's carbon tax increases. And so those two big, and we can afford it. We've got the money in the bank.

They can do this. And so long story short, they could do this quickly. I think it would be a political win. If they did it more slowly, it would take a couple weeks at most. Like, we could have this tied up before the budget. When is the budget? It should be the end of February.

I think it's the third week of February. So you think this is, well, obviously, this is factored into the budget, right? By having nine cents extra on every liter of gas, they've got X amount of dollars that they're going to earmark for something. Yep, exactly. And this is, I'm so glad you put it that way, because this is when you get to the something. What are they spending money on? Now, a lot of Albertans have priority. like they want, you know, housing regulations dropped and red tape cuts so that more homes could be built.

They want more police on the street, right? They literally have a minister of red tape reduction. I can't make this up. I think I've said this on the podcast multiple times. I'll be the red tape reduction guy. Give me a set of scissors. We'll get rid of it real fast. See, I'll have a job for a couple hours and people are like, wow, that was quick.

Now, this minister's going to sit there for four years and red tape reduction. Punch me in. My favorite. Well, it's the most ridiculous title. Can you imagine getting except, well, what position are you? Red tape reduction. Okay. Right.

Okay. We've created a position of red tape reduction. I know. I know. My favorite, though, was the minister of middle class and those working hard to join it. And then she couldn't define what middle class was on TV. Oh, boy. That was epic.

Yeah, that was federal. That was federal. But all this is to say they could move quickly on this. This will come up in the budget. And if you actually, if you go back and look at their budget, documents. Over the last three years, their tax revenue column has been increasing year over year for the past three years without this fuel tax for an entire year and not including bitumen royalties. We're just talking taxes, not royalties. So they're not hurting for our money. They don't need

more of our revenue. And when you get to the spending part, they already got enough of it, Chris. They have, they're swimming in our money. They have, so much of our money. Like, they don't need more. Can you imagine, like, oh, we give them nine cents and then, and then all of a sudden in your town or city, you just get a delivery of cash to your front door. Okay, maybe I'd take that, but somehow they'd still find a way to skim it. So it's like at some point, folks, we just stop taking our money.

Yes, yes. Stop taxing how we get everything. This is like, literally this is how we get everything. And if I can just appeal, because I'm one of your long-time listeners, and, if I can appeal to your listeners, don't get blinded by the color of the jersey. Okay. If you happen to like that party, that's great. I understand.

But at the end of the day, if they're hiking your taxes and wasting your money, that's not cool. Okay? You can't just criticize people when they're wearing an orange jersey and let them completely off the hook when they're wearing a blue jersey. Look at it this way. Would you let a friend make a big mistake? no, you would jump in and intervene. So if you want to look at it that way, look at it that way.

And when we see things like this massive long-time trip down to a UN conference to try to convince people that their ideology is wrong, like power to you, but that looked expensive. And I know you're a big hockey guy, but we don't think taxpayer dollars should be going to NHL ranks. That can be paid in other ways, okay? if people want to go watch the NHL, we get it. So we're really keeping an eye now on, okay, they're increasing our fuel tax, what are they going to waste our money on next? So we're keeping a close eye.

Well, I was telling you, you know, off air, I guess, when I had her on right before Christmas, probably, and I, you know, there's going to be a whole bunch of the listenership that wishes I pushed harder, and then there's going to be a whole, I don't know. I just like, man, I don't want to criticize Danielle. She literally ran on things that I believed in and did the podcast circuit to, I think, win that nomination.

I thought she was really brilliant and going on and all the different things. Now that she's in, if she steps out of line, she gets attacked by all the legacy, or as one of my brothers calls it, the regime media, right? And you just, and on and on it goes. Except it's like, yeah, but some of the things she talked about, she hasn't done. So she's a politician now. She's my leader. We have to try and hold her accountable to that.

And now in Alberta where you don't need to have the fuel, if Manitoba can do it, Alberta sure is hell to do it, right? Like, I mean, come on. Knock off this, the taxes. And like, let's try and make, I don't know, Alberta the place to be. With her at the helm, it is the place to be in Canada right now. Oh, for sure. And like the numbers show that. I think it was something crazy, like 60,000 to British Columbians moved here in like the last quarter and like the summer quarter.

like just this past summer, like a huge number of people. 60,000? I think that's how much it was, but it was in the tens of thousands of people. And we need to keep in mind, it's not just, you know, average families, right? It's people with companies and businesses, like moving here.

Like, that's awesome. Like, we want to see more of that. It's interesting, though, because as cool as that is, there's a lot of businesses in Alberta that are threatening to leave because they're staring at federal things. They're staring at all the taxes. and tax incentives to stay, the red tape, and on and on it goes, right?

Because you can go down to, I don't know, different places in the states. We're like, please, just come on in. Let's have some, you want to do business here? Great. We'd love you to do business. I mean, the fact we have a red tape reduction minister says everything. And the fact that the UCP can't figure out that adding nine cents to gas and diesel is a bad idea, and people should be upset about that and should have their voices heard here so we don't go six months.

before everyone just comes, oh, it's the status quo. It's like, no, it's not. We can push back against this. We don't have to. Yeah, we can. Like, we don't want it. So let's not do it. Yeah, exactly.

Because then when you try to get rid of something that's already there, it's way harder. And you got her on record there. I think you did a good job, journalistically, because especially when somebody has crossed over and now they're in a form of power, quite often it's the journalist or the interviewer's job, to just simply get them on record as much as possible. to get them commit to timelines, to get them on record, and that way they can be, you know,

either lauded later for keeping said promise or held accountable if they're dragging their feet. And this goes for all political stripes. So, no, that was good, man. It's funny. Shane gets and comes to mind. Shane, if you're listening, shout out to you. But I tried getting him the Alberta pension plan. I was like, okay, when?

When? When is the referendum? When? And it's funny, politicians don't love that question, do they? they hate it no it's one of the five ws that i think they fear most is when you know it's like we just want to know when like and i'm not even being normal it doesn't have to be tomorrow i just like is it twenty twenty four is it twenty five is it twenty six is before your next like i would just like to know when well we got we got some we got some talks to do and we got it's like that is the biggest political dance i've ever seen that's an interesting one from this side uh chris it really is it really

is. And so I've worked in government as, you know, an assistance type thing. And I will say, sometimes you walk into those meetings with the bureaucrats. And that's the permanent government. So that's the government that people never see. You pay a hell of a lot of money for it and they never have to get elected. So the bureaucrats who run the departments, they'll sit there with these ministers and their binders will be this high. And they'll have tabs and color coding and blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, they love meetings, Sean. It's their favorite thing ever. You know those moments where you're saying in a meeting? You're like, please kill me now. Couldn't have this been an email? Like, you know those ribbons? I survived a meeting that should have been an email.

They love that stuff. And so when you see politicians and their eyes glaze over and they kind of start sweating and they said, well, that's going to take some time. Quite often that's what they're thinking about. They're thinking of the bureaucrats. You know what they need to do? They need to bring in a couple blue collar guys. We're going to do our first ever blue color round table on this on the podcast here later January. A guy coming from Manitoba, a guy from Rocky Mountain House, a guy from Lloyd Minster, should be interesting.

And maybe one of the questions should be, how do you think we should do some red tape reduction? But can you imagine walking in one of those meetings with those guys? I mean, they would chew some people up and spit them out and that would be a lot of fun. I think that'd be if you should put it on video camera as well. I mean, like, let them have at it.

Let's get some things moving. moving here. Do we want to get out of this or not? I had to do that a couple times where I've said, okay, listen, if you don't move on this issue, like I'm just phoning, I'm calling a press conference. They're like, it's 10 o'clock at night. I said, I don't care. We're going to live stream.

And you're all going to be famous, you people who never have your name out there. I'm going to name all of you. I can't remember if I've asked you this. As far as the Alberta pension plan, are you for that? Are you against that? Where do you come out on that? We're in the middle of surveying our people,

on this because it's pretty complicated. Now, taking off my CTF hat and just looking at it directly, it sounds good. Like, it sounds like you'd get a lot more money back. But we're the taxpayers' Federation. Yes. Right. So we've got federal level of support. So it's not just folks. So the Alberta in you is like, yeah, this is a great idea. But the Federation says, Chris, you're not allowed to think that way. You're part of the Federation. Well, you got to keep all that in mind, right? And then there's also just practically speaking, trying to extricate yourself from something that expensive and complicated. How easily do you think that the feds are going to let you go? They're not.

So, right. And so, and then you start getting into investment and people being stooped. And that's probably the fact they won't let you leave or they're going to make it difficult is probably all the more reason to leave. It's like, to me, I can say it. It's probably high time we got out. Anytime you can remove control from the opposite side of Canada. Yeah, it's probably Get to the referendum, please.

Local smaller government is almost always the better way to go because you have more accountability and it usually costs you much less and you have immediate results. Do you know of a place in Alberta or Canada where that is happening? Smaller government? Smaller government locally.

Like where they're wrestling power out of even Alberta, let's say. Yeah, they had an entire village of, I think its name was Riley. We put them on the nice list. The entire village of Riley used their local city hall recall legislation to get rid of a mayor that they found to be spending money way too much and not being held accountable. They said, hey, dude, why are you spending all this money? He's like, you know, I don't care.

I'm paraphrasing again. And they said, well, we sure care. And here in Alberta, we're the only ones in Canada that have the power of recall at the local government level. And what that means is, say you've got a mayor or a city councilor and they're screwing around, like big time. They're screwing up, they're wasting money, doing whatever. And you don't want to sit around and wait and pay their salary until the next election. You as a constituent in their ward, or whatever it is, can go get enough signatures on a petition and force a by-election, which is a brand-new baby

election that pops up in between big elections. And you can fire them. So you can vote them out. That's the only one in all of Canada. We have that. So yes, that village actually ousted their mayor doing that and that is smaller accountable government. We were super happy. And with recall, is it 51% of the voting population? It's pretty high. It's pretty high threshold. Yeah, yeah. So we do that for a few reasons. Yeah, yeah, big time. Right. And so that's where I'm really encouraged by people who say things like, you know what, you just need to get off the bench. Only one or two percent of Canadians are members of parties or one or two percent of Canadians go to these annual general meetings and

vote on policy. Very few people actually get involved with politics outside of voting once every four years. But if you take that extra step and you become more engaged, you can enact change. And the village there, man, that's proof. And we want to see that across Canada. Every single city hall should be subject to the same kind of recall legislation. Yeah, it should be you just think of how, you know, the world juniors, you know, obviously Team Canada, getting knocked out of that, you know, and you can just feel the entire Canadian hockey culture sag, right, Don Cherry comes out, don't be too hard on the boys. And you're like, yeah, fair enough. I know I shared that. Don't be too hard on them, you know. And you go, I wonder, but I've always wondered

this. I shouldn't say always, since I've started digging you more into politics and like the side of Canada that everybody's eyes glaze over, I'm like, How do you do it so that people show up in droves and stare at it like it's the World Juniors? Because you don't need to tell anybody that the World Juniors is starting on Boxing Day and like, let's show up and away we go. I think we are now at the moment when I'm paraphrasing, and I know Pierre had paraphrased off somebody else. Basically, if you don't take an interest in politics, politics will eventually take an interest in you. So if you're not at the table, you're going to wind up being on the menu. And that sounds kind of grammar silly, but it's true.

And I think we are at that point. Like here in Alberta, it's a little bit more affordable, but not that much. And if you start listening to people who are working in, I'm not even talking downtown Toronto in Ontario, ask the working class people of London or Perth or, you know, Arnprayer, they're fighting. like just to keep above their bills. And in some cases, they're not keeping up with their bills. Using lines of credit to pay their bills, their basic bills. And so I think we are now at that point where people must get engaged. Because otherwise, they're going to be taxed literally out of house and home.

They won't be able to afford anything. And they're going to rely on food banks more to cover their grocery bills, working people. And then in other cases, excuse me, they're going to see governance slipping away from themselves, even at their local school board level, for example. And that starts affecting their kids and how their kids are getting educated. And so I think, Sean, I think now people are waking up because, like, the house is on fire. So they can't ignore it anymore. It's not down the street.

Like, the house is on fire. They have to grab the extinguisher. Let's talk about Canada in 2024. We've talked a lot about Alberta. Yeah. One of the things that you did for me, this is, well, it had it been a year ago, because it was last March we were in Emmington,

and it was right before March that I announced you were going to be a part of it, because you had this ability to just show me in the next seven years, Sean, this is where we're going. And I was like, oh my God. Let's talk about 2024. And from a more Canadian perspective, federally, I guess is what I'm trying to point out. Because, you know, like one of the things I've started doing a lot on substack is, you know, what are you positive about?

or if you're not positive on the coming year, what are you preparing for? And so one of the things you do very well is you give us a very clear picture of what's coming from taxes here in Canada. What's coming in 2024? So I'll start with the little ones or littler ones. Your payroll taxes are going up. So your CPP, your contributions that are taken off your paycheck federally, they're going up. So I think on average, Franco did the math. I think on average, it's just over $300 extra for people who are paying into payroll taxes,

which is pretty much everybody in Canada. So that means that not only you on your side of things as an employee, but also if you are an employer, those costs are going up. So those are that significant. Alcohol taxes are going up as well. Even right now, a lot of folks don't know this, 50% of the cost of your beer, 70-something% of the cost of your wine, and more than 80% of the cost of your spirits is taxes in Canada. It's astonishing how much we pay. That's going up even more.

I think the amount is just over 4% for this year, and that's on April 1st. And it's an automatic tax increase. They don't even have the balls to vote on it, pardon my language, in the House of Commons. I'm hanging out with you. They don't even have a... off on Chris. They don't have the guts to do this in the House of Commons. It's going up automatically as an escalator tax. So those are ones that are kicking on. The alcohol tax, does it ever, like, does it end in five years?

Or it's just an escalator tax that they put in place that every April 1st for the rest of time goes up? As far as I know, it's for the rest of time. Like the Ice Age glaciers are going to come back and we're still going to have this crap happening. Sorry, I'm old and that's what I was being warned about in junior high, the ice-age glaciers are going to come kill us all. So that, as far as I know, is going to be there forever until we have a government that wakes up and realizes that escalator taxes are undemocratic and we shouldn't have them no matter what it is. Like we don't care what kind of tax it is. It shouldn't be on an escalator. So that needs to change. So those two things are happening.

Your payroll taxes are going up and your alcohol taxes are going up. Okay. The big one, though, that affects absolutely everybody is the carbon tax. Trudeau's mandatory minimum carbon tax is now going to be up to $80 per ton. Right now it's $65 per ton, April 1st, no fooling. It's going up to $80 a ton. What that means in normal people talk is that it's now going to cost you 17 cents extra per liter of gasoline and 21 cents extra per liter of diesel. Home heating is going to be 15 cents per cubic meter. Is that just carbon tax? That's just the carbon tax. So go back to gasoline just for a second. You said 17 cents? Correct. On top of, if you're in Alberta, another nine cents?

Yep. Yep. And there's also a federal excise tax and sales tax on that. What is it currently for Alberta specifically? Carbent tax on gasoline. 14 cents. So let's just play this out just for a quick sec. In 2025, because I can't imagine before then we're having an election, but let's just assume in 2025 we have the election. we have the election as scheduled roughly, and say Pierre gets in and decides to do a bunch of things immediately.

He could, in theory, acts off in that amount of time. I don't know, you know the math better than I do, because that time it won't be 17 cents. It'll be over 20 cents on gasoline. It'll be 21. It'll be 21 cents. So in overnight you could see gasoline drop 21 cents just federally if, and I am going to say it,

he has the balls to do it because once he's in power and sees the money coming in from, that that'll be an interesting dilemma for him, I'm sure. And you go, and oh man, like you just think how much more expensive life is right now. And the government has complete control to be like, we're going to get rid of that, we're going to get rid of that, and we're going to get rid of that, and we're going to try and make things more affordable for you. Yeah, big time. And it's not so, if we did the math, say this happened in 2025. The first carbon tax would be 21 cents per

liter of gasoline by then. There's also the second carbon tax, which he has agreed to get rid of as well. And that fluctuates. Then I think it would be about nine cents a liter. So say just round it up, 30 cents. Gone overnight. And he's agreed to do this. He has promised to do this. I think he said something. Franco interviewed him ages ago for our podcast. And I think he said before lunch, or I hope he said before lunch on his first day. So the two big things that he has constantly mentioned, that Pierre Pahliav is constantly mentioned in his rallies, is that he wants to ax the carbon taxes and defund the CBC. Oh, yeah.

We should bring up your... Show the people. If you're just watching, or if you're watching, look at Chris's shirt, defund the CBC. Tell me that isn't a good-looking shirt. Right? And so, yeah, we created it in-house. Our wonderful executive president actually made this yourself.

So we do it all in-house to save money. And you can buy these on our website. We don't make money off of them. just at cost. I think they're like $20, like all in. And so you can get them in all sorts of colors. Just spread the word to defund the CBC. So Pollyov has committed to scrapping the carbon taxes. So if he were to be prime minister, say as of 2025, yeah, that's around 30 cents per liter, gone for gasoline and more for diesel. And diesel, of course, is what moves everything we eat and use. So your costs are going to go down significantly. And it's always, it's just, it's almost like flabbergasting, how much they could alter certain things here in Canada like immediately, but they choose not to, which means they're really giving us, kicking us with the boots.

Oh, as hard as they can. So just to be really clear for people who are like, well, how much exactly does that cost me? So as of this year, 2024, when April 1st and it goes up, the carbon tax will cost you around $12 extra to fill your minivan. around 20 bucks extra every time you fill up a pickup truck and about $200 extra every time a trucker is filling up the big rig. And that's on top of the nine cents Alberta just put back in, which is what roughly another $10 or something on a minivan, correct? So right there you're like an extra 30 bucks of fill up, roughly.

Yes, boom. And then you've got all the other tax. And you go like, that isn't that, you go like, that's a lot of money. Think about that. An extra $30 a fill up, you know, down here in the States, Mel's vehicle, now, given it's American dollars, and right there is a huge jump on what we're paying. But regardless, it's like, I don't think we've spent over $30 to fill up her little RAV-4.

Now, once again, it's a small vehicle. I get that. But, like, just doing Chris's numbers, all of a sudden that's $40, or on top of everything else, now it's $60. It's like, and then do that over the course of a year. That's, ah. You're feeling. up every week. Like people sneeze. It's like, oh, 20 bucks. I can get a roast chicken and a jug of milk and like a bag of

spinach for 20 bucks. Like that's for now. That's food off of for now. That's food out of my fridge that you're taking every single time. And again, it's not helping the environment for like your two people that are listening right now. The who's issue, biggest issue is the emissions. And I know you're out there. God love you. Um, I grew up on Vancouver Island. Okay. Like I, I hand sewed my baby's cloth diapers. I recycle everything. I buy stuff used like this leather. jackets even from Value Village. I get it. Okay. You're not helping the environment. Okay. Because Canada's emissions are so minuscule. Okay. Like we could stop everything tomorrow. We could all climb into a cave and stop doing everything tomorrow and it wouldn't make a dent in global emissions. All you're doing is impoverishing working people in Canada. You want to tackle the big end of the arithmetic problem. Sell natural gas to places like India, okay, which have massive emissions. And they're asking to buy our cleaner burning fuel. So do two things at once and do them right. Gee, that sounds like a smart plan. Here in Canada, we don't like smart plans. We just like to, you know, I don't even know anymore.

We should have it. Did you hear, I don't know much about this, so I'm talking at a school, but did you hear that Gibo wants a plastics registry now? Yes, a plastic registry. I'm like, well, the gun registry worked so good. Like, we should, we should definitely have a registry for saran wrap in Ziploc bags. You know. Sorry. Old Giebo. You know, you wonder how he's going to make headlines.

And he's like, let's register all the plastics. You're like, uh-huh. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. That's Canada for you. Okay. Before I let you out of here, we were talking about, one of your big things is journalists can't be on the payroll of government.

And certainly, they've been trying different ways. to do that. They've been censored. Now they're, you know, even, you know, even our little for the kids' sake group, which I guess I should point out has Ken Drysdale coming to Lloyd Minister on January 11th. So for all the Lloyd Minster folk or surrounding area, January 11th, Ken Drysdale's coming. But we've noticed, even on like Facebook and stuff, this little area group has had issues with sharing things. And what does that come from? Well, that comes from our federal government. That's literally what it is. But your big thing is, you know, on a list of things is journalists shouldn't be paid by the government.

Yeah, big time. So this is such a big octopus, but people need to understand it because it is central to your ability to have free expression and therefore freedom and accountability in government in Canada. So two things are happening at once. The Trudeau government is putting more and more what you would call legacy or mainstream journalists on government payroll. They are paying journalists with taxpayers money.

And they're doing it in a big way. They've in fact now doubled the amount of money that they are giving to journalists in the so-called media bailout. People have heard that term a lot. So for a long time, it was around $13,000, $14,000 per year of a journalist's paycheck who was getting the bailout that was coming from the government, the federal government. They've doubled that. Now it's closer to $30,000 a year, Sean, is coming from the federal government for these so-called journalists.

And I use that term, I know it stings, but it's a fact. Journalists cannot be paid by the government, period. We don't care if they're right-wing or left-wing or space aliens or whatever. You must be independent from the government in order to hold government to account. if you're counting on the government for paychecks, you're not going to be able to do that. I think we should have like a little fun experiment. I think the government should give me a billion dollars

and see if I still criticize them. Right? That's it. This is it. And even if you tried your best and tried your best, Sean, it's the perception of bias now, right? I mean, I'm being a little facetious with a billion dollars, but... No, no. To your point. To your point. even if, so like I said, I praised Adrian Narson earlier in the show, even if she's doing her darnest and even, you know, yelling at her boss on camera,

we still know that her paycheck comes from the federal government. So no matter how hard she works or tries to be objective or critical or skeptical, all that stuff, we know that her paycheck's coming from the feds. Let me, I was, I was, so I had Diana Youngstue on, on an episode before Christmas. She's originally from Romania. and she was talking about that Alberta should have its own media source, like Alberta, like that the government should fund Alberta, whatever. And I was like, oh, that's an interesting idea.

She's like, well, communication is like huge. Every time Daniel Smith does something. And I'm paraphrasing Diana, and I apologize because at the time, and then all of a sudden I said, I'm like, yeah, that's an interesting idea. I'm like, all I could hear was you on my shoulder. Like, what are you talking about? We don't fund journalists. Government can't do that.

I'm like, well, actually, Chris Sims would probably be against. this. Alberta starting its own media service, media agency. You're like, that is terrible. Like dead on arrival. No, don't do it. So the government already does this. It's called communications staff. Okay. And a lot of communication staff, like, you know, present has jumped back and forth between government, communications, journalism, et cetera. It's more of a, you know, a dotted line now for a communications professional. Because usually all that means is taking a complex topic and communicating it in a thorough and easy way. If you can do that journalistically,

if you can do that from the government perspective, power to you. We already pay them for that, okay? They have directors of communications, they have press secretaries, they have money to buy cameras and have their own little shows. You can even watch on Facebook. They do an update.

I think it's every week coming from, you know, the Daniel Smith government. And we would say the same thing if this were a Rachel Notley government, okay? They already have that. The last thing we need is to put more taxpayers' dollars into journalism. Like, just don't do it.

Just into the government's hand in general at this point. Yeah. How about we get it? Grover Norquist, who's with the, he's the Americans for Tax Fairness, I think is technically what his group is called. He's old school. He was part of the Reagan administration actually reducing red tape. He's the guy that gets the American politicians to sign pledges of no tax increases. So when the first Bush president said,

read my lips, no new taxes, and he agreed to the pledge, and then he raised taxes, and then he was gone. That's largely because of Gower Norquist's work. He is the one that said, government should be small enough that I can drown it in the bathtub. It's about there. Oh, that's pretty grim. Pretty, but yeah, it's all right. It could be a goblin. We're not talking about a person, right? It's some weird creature. It's not an actual person. And so it's a good way to visualize it. And so media-wise, you can't have journalists on payroll because then they won't be able to hold the government to account. Even in perception, they won't be able to. And on the other side of the vice, so picture that, okay, they're funding the mainstream media with this side of the vice.

On the other side of the vice, they're crushing online media and independent media, right? Through different things like Bill C-11 and Bill C-18, they're stifling and strangling the voices of, independent media. So now we've got Bill C-18, which is often called the online link tax. That's why you can't see news on Facebook anymore. Okay. Google caved as far as I know. I think they're now paying up to the government and now going to be giving money to groups like the CBC. So there you go. It's another tax because the CBC is government. And then we have C-11, okay, which is like an online censorship bill. It's under the guise of Canadian content of they just want more, you know, Sarah McLaughlin songs played on the radio and, you know, people giving maple syrup recipes. But the moment you give government control over your content, you're running into some dangerous territory. They're now applying C-11 to things like podcasts. How that's going to shake out, we don't know yet. Because they've told podcast providers like Spotify, YouTube. We all know it ain't going to bode well for me. That's what we know. Right? And so, you know, I was at Sun News Network for years from startup to shutdown. And it was largely the actions of the CRTC that helped bring about

its demise. So, and we, we tried to do things when everybody was zigging, we would zag. That was our mandate. We tried to do things from an alternative perspective all the time. And we weren't exactly within the Ottawa halls of power government narrative. Nobody was perfect, though. I'm not saying we were saints. All of that said, we're now seeing this vice grip on information in Canada. We're seeing mainstream media largely getting emptied out. so the newsrooms are almost emptied now and being paid by the government. And on the other side, the government is trying to crush online expression. And so that's why the Taxpayers Federation is fighting it.

Usually this is something that's like, why would the taxpayers federation care? Because if you can't express yourself, you can't organize. And if you can't organize, you can't hold government to account. So this is why we're trying to head this thing on. And we all know how important that was in 2022. Sure do. I think we all recall, you know. Oh, man.

I appreciate you hopping on and doing this. I was 2024, you know, it's, well, 2023 as well. There's been a lot of epiphany moments, and a few of those came when Chris comes on and breaks down taxes. And, you know, you can just, it's just like, oh, okay, I get it. I'm going to ask the same question I ask every time you come on, which is, if I want, I'm going to go back to the, because right now I go federally, we're hooped. I don't care what anyone says until the liberal government is out. I can't see a way around what they're doing because, you know, that's a long story. As far as the Alberta government goes, though, I think there is, how do we put the pressure on Daniel Smith and the UCP to be like, you know, because you said you guys got a huge, you know, basically petition going to get rid of the gas tax?

How do we help push that along so that this, like they feel the pain? speak up. I know this gets said a lot, but it's so true. And I'm going to start with something good. I had just gone to, I think it was in November, I'd gone to this big conference in Red Deer, with Canada's strong and free. A lot of people like going to that. You interviewed Andrew Lawton just beforehand. He was one of the hosts there. And this is just a, you know, or an organic experience that happened in the wild. So I'd gone to this conference where we're all talking about, you know, lower taxes, less waste, more freedom, right? Interviewing really cool authors, right, that have covered a lot of stuff the past three years.

We finished that, and I'd booked some random hotel just to go there and sleep and go back to work, et cetera. We're going through the hotel lobby and there is another Alberta grassroots freedom group having a meeting. Like 200 people sitting there in the lobby. And I went, you know, God bless Alberta. Like here we are a couple blocks down the road. They're not even affiliated. You trip over these groups of holding government to account.

That is so special. Like, I mean it. I have never seen anything like that. And I've been in politics since I was a kid. So that's amazing. And so with that spirit in mind, speak up. Okay? The UCP people typically want to hear from you.

And I'll put it this way. Right now they're in government. They're surrounded by bureaucrats in Edmonton, who are whispering things in. their ear like we need to increase taxes. What about a PST? Get off the revenue roller coaster. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's incumbent upon us as taxpayers and citizens to push back and talk to them. Send them emails every week. Phone them. Get to know their staff in their offices. Do that grassrootsy thing. And you will be able to have smaller government and more freedom here in

Alberta with lower taxes because they will eventually listen to us. I like it. We are going to continue for a couple extra minutes on substack, which means folks, if you want to see a little more Chris Sims, you know where you got to come? We just, we just hit a thousand subscribers. Is that what we're called?

That's awesome. Is that on substack? I don't know. Is that subscribers? I don't know. I got an email about it right before Christmas. I was like, hey. Nice.

I guess a few people are hopping over. So we're going to continue this on substack. I got the Crude Master final question coming her way. So if you want to hop on over there, we're going to take a quick little break. We'll be over on Substack. back.