Shaun Newman Podcast - #691 - Kris Sims

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

She is the Alberta Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. We discuss taxes costing the average Canadian more than basic necessities and the increase in censorship coming out of the UK and what we have here in Canada.  Mashup collection Promo Code - 222minutes for 22% off⁠⁠⁠https://snp-8.creator-spring.com/listing/the-mashup-collection⁠⁠ Let me know what you think. Text me 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast E-transfer here: [e-mail] Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Text Grahame: [phone] – and be sure to let them know you’re an SNP listener.

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So buckle up, here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. I'm joined by Chris Sims. Ma'am, thanks for hopping on. Thanks for having us. Well, I tell you, whenever I get into the world of like taxes and people yelling at each other, I'm like, I should just have Chris on, right?

She's gonna have these lovely little sound bites that just, you know, it seems like the rest of us sit and argue for like 10 minutes and you'll be like in 10 seconds, like, da-da-da-da-da. And I'm like, all right, well, let's wrap up the episode, because that's all I wanted to talk about. How's Chris doing today? I'm awesome. I just got back in off the road, went and visited my mom out in British Columbia, so drove the crow's nest number three back home. And anybody who's into Western Canada, especially our history, you got to drive that route. There are some of the oldest buildings we have in the West that are along that route, and you

got to check it out. I'm a little bit grumpy, though, because I got to say, I stopped and took pictures as I do of gas station prices. And the gas price in Castlegar was three cents more than it is here in Lethbridge, Alberta. You know, I hate to bring this up on you, but I'm going to bring it up on you. Okay. Because once upon a time, about eight months ago, I was about to have the premier on and when I was going to bring up gas prices. And you're like, don't you do it, don't you do it. It'll be fine. She knows these things and they'll never, she's going to listen to us and on and on and on and in my infinite wisdom, I thought Chris, Chris Sims can do no wrong. I will not. I will, okay, fair enough. She's right. And what has happened since then, Chris? Have we had any,

any reduction in the gas price? Has anything gone right? No. I mean, a few things have probably gone right, but certainly not on that side of the argument. Yeah, that was my Robert Stanfield moment for folks who don't know who aren't political nerds. Robert Stanfield was the leader of what was then the Conservative Party back in the day. And he famously tried to catch a football in front of a bunch of cameras on Parliament Hill and did not catch it. So pro tip, never do that in front of, in front of the media. So that was my, that was my Bobby. That was me dropping that football. So yeah, so cards on the table. I'm a huge fan of Daniel Smith as a person. I've known her for 20 years. I really like her. And I was very excited when she became premier because she was promising

things like tax cuts. To be fair, they did pass a law that requires balanced budgets, paying down the debt, saving for a rainy day, and keeping spending increases below the rate of inflation plus population growth. That sounds nerdy, but it's super important because if we had done that, like back when the spice girls were topping the charts in the mid-90s, when we first said you should do that, we would have like hundreds of billions of dollars with a B in the bank. So that said, that was good. Lately, man, we are halfway through this mandate of the UCP. We do not have an income tax cut yet. And to your exact point, Sean, and that was wrong, and you were right, you should have asked her.

Our fuel tax is back up 13 cents per liter. Manitoba is eating our lunch on this right now. They've got the lowest fuel taxes in all of Canada, and they're being led by an NDP government. So we've got a surplus. The government can afford to do this in Alberta. we can afford tax cuts. I do not know why they're not doing it. Yeah, I'm figuring, like, you obviously have sat there and stared at this problem for a while, right?

You're sitting there and you're going, why aren't they doing it? Why aren't they doing it, Chris? Two things. One, and it's the same side of the coin. Two different sides of the same coin. One, dome disease, okay? So the Alberta legislature is often referred to as the dome. You get these well-meeting, wild rosy-type politicians.

that are up there in the legislature, and they start getting like this water torture thing of the drip, drip, drip, drip, right? When they're like, you know, we can't cut taxes yet. We have to do this. We have to do that. Like, blah, blah, blah, spend more, spend more, tax more. I think it's part of that where they're just kind of getting inundated, right?

And they're stuck in this thinking of we can't cut taxes yet because it's too drastic. There's that. And the other side of the coin is maybe those of us out here in the wilderness, right, in the Lloyd Minsters and the Lethbridge's and the Red Dears, we're not yelling loud enough, right? Because it's easy to think, just paraphrasing, oh, my friend is in charge, and I like him or her.

They're on our side of the fence or part of our blue team jersey or whatever, so we don't need to do anything. That's not true, unfortunately, and it's hard because it's hard to tell somebody you're friendly with, you're screwing up. You've got to get this truck back on the road, man. You're hitting the ditch. And I think some of us haven't been as vocal as we should have been,

to exactly your point earlier, and that's over now. So we're going to be doing a big press conference on this coming up real soon. Are you going to be in attendance at the Leadership Review? I was thinking about it. Yeah, I was thinking about it for exactly this reason. So Taxpayers Federation, for folks who aren't familiar, we want lower taxes, less waste, and accountable government. We've been around since 1990.

We will yell at any politician who is not getting those three goals done. It doesn't matter what color the jersey is. And for that reason, I think maybe I should go to that review just to kind of get a ground game feel for how people are thinking. It's funny. It seems to be coming up an awful lot with people that I respect who have been on the show who are talking. I was saying the other day, like, how crazy a couple years, you know, changes the temperature of the landscape, right? Because, you know, she wins the UCP nomination. That was a huge deal.

Then everyone thought, no, no, there's no way. Notley's going to come in and steamroller. whatever you know then she gets in and you're going you know I'm no political nerd but I've interviewed enough I think or I'm getting close to where I hear you know like it's right at the start right at the start you want to start putting things in not at the end when you're trying to get reelected I'm like okay well I waited and I think a lot of people have waited and to your point you're like well now we're getting into the point where you don't want to start doing that stuff because you're going to get long in the tooth which leads back to you got to get

reelected and all that good stuff and so you know I the leadership review is like, I'm starting to see all the people that I respect are all going to be there. I'm like, well, it just looks like we're going to be there, you know? And that should be an interesting day or two. But let's hop on to something different

that has been sticking out over the last couple mashups in particular. And it started out with the Frazier study on taxes. I'm sure you saw this. I'm just going to read the end of it, the conclusion. It said the Canadian Consumer Tax Index tracks the total tax bill paid by a Canadian family with the average income from 1961 to 2023. The results show that the tax burden of faced by the average Canadian family has risen compared with 62 years earlier. The total

tax bill now, which includes all types of taxes, has increased 2,705% since 1961. The tax bill has grown more rapidly than any other single expenditure item. When you read this, Were you like, they're kind of inflating it? Are you like, this makes sense? I don't know, Chris. You stare at taxes more than any person I know. And you see this report come out. Were you thinking, oh, this is to get Pierre Poliave elected?

Are you thinking other things? No. The Fraser Institute does outstanding work, just straight up. They've been around for decades as well. And for folks who aren't familiar. So the Taxpayers Federation, we're an advocacy organization. So we do deep dive reports. Franco Tarazano, he's got his master's degree in economics.

Just don't tell anybody. So he does deep dive nerdy reports. He does presentations to parliament. But we do a lot of kind of stunts and hardcore activism. Like everybody email right now, everybody phone right now. Let's hand out golden pig statues. So we're elbows up. Fraser Institute is more of I would describe it as a think tank.

And do they ever do a lot of thinking? So they do a lot of these really valuable statistical reports. And these things take months to put together because I've helped do them here on the Taxpayers Federation side. And so whenever you hear someone say something like this, Sean, you know what? I'm paying about half of everything in taxes right now. About half of it goes to the government. That's because of the Fraser Institute's work. So every single year they have put out this percentage that they put out each year. And that is how far it's gotten down into like the Canadian thinking. Okay. That's why it's in people's brain.

now. It's because of the work at the Fraser Institute. So yeah, they're right. So it's, it's close to half of what you have to spend now is in taxes. And by taxes, they mean taxes, fees, levies, whatever other euphemism they want to tack on to it at every level of government. Here, so I made you this piece of art. So I got this from a garage sale here in Lethbridge. And it was, I'm holding it up for, for folks. Yeah, for folks who can. can't see it. It's three of those, what's the big heavy metal called? Cast iron.

Oh, cast iron, yes. It's heavy. It's three cast iron pigs standing on top of each other. There's a big one, a little one, a big one, a middle one, and a little one at the top. And I think this was a perfect representation of the three levels of government. So municipal takes some, provincial takes some, and federal

takes a big old chunk of it. Okay? So the Fraser Institute does the math, and they add up all layers of government. And survey says close to half of what you pay is going out the door in taxes. This is the part that blew my mind, Sean. You probably noticed it too.

That they calculated that your cost of taxes with all three levels of government eclipses food and shelter. Yeah. Shelter, even with the crazy housing prices that still eclipses it. That actually surprised me. Here, I'm going to, what I'm going to do is here. Do you have a chart? Well, I have the chart.

I have literally the entire report pulled up because, like, I'm not getting caught flat-footed this morning with Chris on. So there you go. Like taxes at this point eclipse basic necessities. Yep. Right? Yeah. So I remember thinking as a younger man when I first started working. and maybe you were here at some point

maybe you've never thought like this because I feel like at times I'm a complete and utter moron and when I go back to... Every day when I wake up. When I went back to like when I first started working I would look at my paycheck and I just be like oh, that's what the government needs

to run, you know, honestly, key infrastructure. We're talking hospitals and build roads and bridges and I don't know schools and I was just okay with it. This is what it takes to have the life I live and I get it. And it isn't that long ago that I still thought the same thing. But now, certainly through the start of COVID and onwards,

you see how they spend the money and where it goes. And it doesn't go to any of that. It goes to anything but that. And, you know, I see the chart now that you're spending so much money is more than like the basic necessities. I'm like, like at what point and everybody points back, I feel like our conversations always roll back to this. We've got to wait until Pierre Poliov gets in.

And once Pierre is in, then how long does it take for him to do it? it and will he do it because now he's got to try and get reelected by that voting base and on and on this whole like i'm like what happens here at what point is there a break where people just can't afford to live anymore and bad things start to happen and i don't want that but you look at that and you go when you see the chart of like we're paying more like you know i just think of uh the old robin hood cartoon raise the taxes raise the taxes you're like yeah we're getting to that point if we aren't already passed it. Yeah, we are.

I use that King John or Prince John Lion Giff on Twitter all the time because that was one of you. Back when we were little kids, hey children who have Netflix, we only had so many VHS tapes because they were like 50 bucks at the time, even then. And so Robin Hood with those foxes and stuff was the one that was at my month. It was the best. Yeah, it was great. It was at my aunties. We watched it all the time.

I just got back from there. So to your point, I did want to address the elephant in the room. of exactly what you just said when bad things happen. Okay. We don't want. Okay, I'm a prepper. I try my best. I'm not the best though.

I try my best to, what is it? Gold goats and guns. I try to stick to that. I try to have canned beans and can't. Show it to Tom Luongo. You betcha. I try to do that. But heaven's sake, we don't want that to happen.

And just so I can add in a little side note here. One of the, I don't know, I had lots of cool moments in the Cornerstone Forum. but sitting and smoking his cigar with Tom Luongo after the show was done and having Chris Sims beside us as we smoked our cigars and watched NHEL playoffs if memory served me correct and then talked politics on the side of it I was like if I wasn't so bloody tired right now this would be like an amazing like moment in time where I could just take a picture of this and like never forget it

that was you know if you didn't come to the Cornerstone forum in Lloydminster which is coming back next April 2025 If you didn't come to it, you really should because that's just one of the small memories that was a lot of fun on stage. Well, that was offstage, but on stage. Certainly getting to see my world kind of mesh and mingle is pretty cool.

Because I don't think you knew who Tom wants before that, did you? No, I'd listen to him obviously on your show, but I had never had a chance to meet him yet. And I've since now been on his show. So that was really wonderful to get to meet him. And we talked all about Zach Snyder. We're huge Zach Snyder fan nervous. Yes, which kind of shocked me.

I'm still a little bit shocked by that. but now we're not going to, okay, so that's what we're there. Come back to the prepper. Come back to the prepper. You already did Dead Pool and Wolverine with twos, so we can't do more superhero stuff. Okay. On the side note, did you watch it? Not yet.

My husband went and watched it by himself while I was away, and so he had like his own time. I went and watched Twisters, though. I watched Twisters in Creston. Was Twisters any good? Yeah. Go watch it. You'd like it. Yeah.

And it's pretty family friendly too. Like, there wasn't, like, I took my 11-year-old and I never had to cover his eyes or plug his ears, so it was okay. No, okay, fair enough. Well, you would have to plug his ears multiple times in Deadpool Wolverine. No, he's not seeing that. No, that's fine. That's not kid-friendly.

So back to your prepping, yes. So the whole idea, I love the old adage, is hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Yes. Right? So we should always do that. On the hope for the best part, though, this is where I think we have the most homework to do. Because, you know, it costs money, yes, but it's pretty easy to buy a flat or wall. or a bunch of beans, right?

Like, it's good to have that. But the real work is getting these politicians to agree with you. Like, we're going to defund the CBC. We're going to scrap the carbon tax. We're going to fix balance. He needs to balance the budget. We're going to stop printing money. We're going to stop causing rampant crazy inflation.

We're going to quit wasting it on nonsense. Making sure that the next guy or gal, who becomes your leader, in Canada's case, the prime minister, you have to get them on the record. And then when they're on the record, then once they get in, you have to hold them to their promises, which is why I was yelling about the fact that we don't have an income tax cut yet.

This is part of the accountability part, because it's a two-way sport. It's up to us, you, me, all of us, listeners, who want these things to happen to hold people to account even when we like them. Especially when we like them. Exactly. We can't just leave it up to them because I'll put it this way.

I'm trying to be as fair as possible. Let's look at it from his perspective. Let's say Pierre Pollyev becomes Prime Minister. Every department is on fire right now. Like they're smoldering ruins. People are running around screaming. Like, it's a disaster. No matter where you look.

Finance, health care, national defense, justice. I can't think of one. Bridges is probably in disarray. I haven't checked. it's up to us to have a list of things for the new administration, the new people to do in order to fix this stuff fast. Because you're right. It has to happen in the early days of an administration or it doesn't get done. Because staff start getting scared, bureaucrats start whispering about the next election, you start worrying about looking too drastic, right, leading up to the next election. And of course, you need to get elected because otherwise if you don't get elected, you won't have power.

and if you don't have power, you can't do these things. See the cycle? So I think right now the key is if you're pissed off, close your eyes and picture your income that goes into your bank account, like your after tax income. Picture that doubling. Picture it doubling the whole time. How much could you do with that money? Could you pay for better medicine for yourself, better school for your kids? Could you pay down your line of credit?

The bloody, the bills that come in when you put your kids in sports. Thank you. Oh my gosh. Imagine. Imagine. I mean, at this point, I'm like, how the heck did my parents put four boys through hockey and a sister through competitive figure skating? I don't understand.

I have three that haven't even hit. Like, they're not old enough to be into like where they're on a traveling team or some weird thing. And back when I played, you traveled everywhere at the very beginning. And the bills had come in for. that are insane. So a little extra money in the bank would be much needed. Yeah. You know, like I think a lot of people can relate to that. It's like, yeah, that would be rather nice. Yep. And so I'll give you a perfect example. And I'm trying to use a personal examples without

getting too personal with people. So I just got back, like I said, from BC, just outside of Vancouver, a couple hours out of Vancouver. And I was chatting with someone who was talking about their house. So this is an older person, right, closing in on 80. They've owned their house forever, right, since the late 1980s. The house now would probably be worth about 1.2, 1.3 with the extra big lot because there's a big garage on it and stuff. There, million dollars, okay, with an M. And I just managed to figure out how much they had paid for it at the time back when they bought it in the early 80s. Adjusted for inflation, this house was. about 200 grand. Okay. Adjusted for inflation because at the time it was like $80,000 or whatever.

So there's actually an inflation calculator. You can look it up. It's for the Bank of Canada. That's why, Sean, that's why your parents, even if they weren't rolling in it, that's why they were able to put kids through hockey. Same sort of thing. I came to the realization I was talking with one of my brothers the other day. We were making the same amount of money now, dollar for dollar, that our parents were back in 1992, the same amount. And yet they were, they had house prices like I said.

Yeah, 70 grand. Yeah. Bingo. This is why. And so this is, so during our deck clock tour, I had a really interesting chat with a gentleman from Red Deer. And he said it like this. He said,

my parents worked really hard all the time, all the time. Nothing was given to them. They worked hard. But because they worked hard, they were always able to hit the next step. It always felt like they were constantly going up steps. And he said something, he said, me and my wife can't even see the next step. That's how, that's why.

Well, you look at, I mean, the grocery bill is, I don't know, for some people, it's sneaky. I feel like that's the word I'm going to use because, like, you got to go buy groceries every week. And so if it increased by $3 one week and then another eight the next week, maybe you're not paying attention to it as closely. Some people will pay attention to that and that'll be the one thing they pay attention to. But overall, you know, you go and do it so often, you don't notice the creep and all of a sudden your grocery bills like an extra 50 bucks or you're buying less for the amount of money you have to spend, right? And I think one day we all woke up, whatever day that was, and went, man, when did this happen, you know? And the next one is,

is if you weren't paying attention, your mortgage, right? You went from paying X and then having to, you know, re-up to get your, whatever you do, whether it was a variable or you went five-year fixed or whatever your choice was. And one day you went, holy crap, and there's an extra couple hundred dollars coming out a month or more. And on and on these things go. And when you say, I can't see the next step, I get how, like, it's like quicksand. You know, if you're not paying attention to all these things, and some of it is just like, how do you pay attention to everything? You know, everything, the cost of living is going up. That's what I see out of the, the Fraser Institute report is like whether the number is

2,400%, 2,000%, I'm like, I don't care. At this point, it's going up. That's what it's telling you. And us arguing about that, or anyone being argumentative about that, it's almost laughable. It's like all of what we do as people, whether you're a liberal, conservative, NDP, or whatever, your cost of life has gone up and it's only going to go up i just need to get into the carbon tax all over with you again and go well where does this go in another year not great because it's going up before trudeau's out it will have gone up another time for sure and that's if pierre goes in and cuts

it yeah oh and he has to because he says so every single day so he has to get that done and you're right so this is there's a multi-headed hydra i don't know if you ever watch the dungeon in the Dragons cartoon back when we were kids, but this is, you know, this is the big multi-headed hydra here. It's a big monster. So we've got inflation, okay, which is caused by the government.

Don't let people tell you that inflation is some weird natural phenomena, like some solar burst or something. It's not, okay? What happened was the Trudeau government did two things. They locked things down, okay, during the pandemic,

during the lockdown. So industry largely ground to a halt, the making of things and stuff and widgets, almost stopped. And at the same time, he ramped up the printing press. Okay, he printed like $300 or $400 billion. Okay. So now all of a sudden, as Franco says, you've got way too many dollars chasing way too few things.

Boom, inflation. And this is what we're dealing with right now, and that is the fault of government. Okay. They made those choices to do those things. Add to that, you're right, the carbon tax. Okay. Crazy amount of carbon tax. He keeps on hiking them up. By the time he's, by the time they want to be finished in 2030, the two carbon taxes combined, because we have two now, will cost around 50 cents a liter. Like, just do the math on how much your truck holds, probably holds about 115 liters.

That's an awful lot of money, okay? Just in the tax, just in the two carbon taxes. And so this is what And it's also causing your stuff to be more expensive because, of course, truckers use diesel to run their trucks around. And they deliver everything you eat and use. On average, a trucker filling up his tanks with diesel right now is handing out about $200 extra every time just in the carbon tax. So if Pierre gets in and cuts the carbon tax, okay? Just overnight. I know things in politics doesn't happen overnight. But like, you know, well, can.

yes it can but for the most part it doesn't happen overnight that really frustrates me because you can see how quickly they can move and then they're like well government takes time to get things done and you're like not not true let's say overnight he cuts carbon tax how long do you think it would take for it to start to show um in grocery bills and different things like that because i assume there would be a lag on on how quickly you start to see the prices start to reduce but Have you given that any thought? Yeah. So you should, all things being equal and up and up,

you should see the price come down to the pump immediately. So like within two days or whatever, how long it takes them to do their financing and pick the price, right? Because they base it on how much they're getting back in inventory, right when they're filling up their tanks. They used to work at a gas station. So they'd have to figure that out. That should be pretty darn quick.

Now, as far as the trickle-down effect of savings with trucking goes, that will probably take a little bit long. longer, but you should see it. Because of course, people want to sell you their stuff. And if they're getting it for cheaper, they're going to try to reduce their price so they get you to buy more of it or take it away from the other guy. That's the beauty of the market system. But it is something we need to pay attention to. So if after a few months we're still not seeing some of these prices come down, that's when we start having to say, you know, publicly, hey, grocery store A, I'm going to go shop at grocery store B instead because your prices are still too high. Then you start getting people

interested in it. They'll start putting more sales on. The flyers will start looking better. Grocery stores are a very, very competitive situation there, which is why we can't have the government involved because it'll destroy it. So even for example, this is mom stuff, but if you go on a big grocery shop, you'll notice that the barbecue chicken out at the front, they're usually pretty cheap. That's actually a lost leader, meaning it costs the company more to produce that barbecued chicken, but they sell it to you at a loss to keep you in the store and to keep you shopping, right? That's why it's called boss eater. That is how slim their margins are most of the time in grocery stores. So they should react pretty quickly. And if they don't, it's important for us

as people, not the government, people to get vocal. Start contacting the different organizations that run these grocery stores, start saying this is where I'm going to shop instead, bring the competitor's flyer with you to the cashier or better yet to customer service and say, you guys price matching this. This is how you get deals on stuff. And that's also how you push them to get their prices lower. Oh, well, I love there's going to be thousands of people who will be monitoring the grocery stores.

Oh, I will be right there. I'm like, I won't have to worry about that. You know, you bring up inflation, Elon Musk, okay? Yeah. This is what he put out on Twitter, August 9th. He said, the rise in prices, inflation is caused by government overspending, which increases the amount of money faster than the increasing goods and services output. Geez, that sounds a lot like Franco.

That is the vast majority of the problem. Inflation was particularly bad during the COVID years as there was massive government spending despite productivity plunging as people were forced to stay home. This is further exacerbated by excess regulation which prevents the market from solving an unmet need, for example, housing in high demand areas.

Occasionally there is a monopolistic behavior by companies but this is relatively rare and usually only plausible if those companies have gained control of their industry regulator. Again, a government, not private sector problem. And, you know, when you think about it, here's arguably one of the most influential people in social media, right? Like, I mean, the UK will get, I know you love talking censorship. We'll get into that here before I let you out of here. And they've been attacking Elon for that. But for Elon to break it down,

exactly how you just said, how important is that? So critically important. So number one, I am I wake up thankful that he chose to buy Twitter because he could have done a lot. I can't imagine having that kind of money. He could have done a number of things and not bothered. He bought Twitter, changed it to X, whatever. For what he says is free speech purposes. And it has been so essential.

Being able to see people sharing their very clear ideas all sides of the political spectrum. I'm seeing way more of that now, way more open debate. and seeing the long form and live shows, I just watched you in twos live using the X program. Like, it's so nice and clear. So for him to come out and synopsize what we've all been talking about now for years is so important.

Because he's really influential. I don't know how many millions of followers that man has. And keep in mind, it's not just you and me. It's news directors that are reading these things. 193 million. Huge. It's cub reporters that are reading these things that are cutting their teeth and first going to Washington

or first going to Ottawa or London and they're kind of worried. But they see Elon just straightening it out like that really clear with math. That gives them confidence to say, hey, finance minister, why is our deficit $40 billion? So it's really important for all of us to spread the message, but when somebody is influential and powerful as Elon Musk says it, that's super important. It's a good thing.

It's kind of like when on a different on a different maybe a line of thinking when Tucker Carlson came to Alberta and asked Daniel Smith about the Coots 4, right? Like there have been other people talking about it, but when you have a voice like Tucker, anything you bring up or he brings up specifically

is going to catch a whole new audience and a whole new cycle on the information, right? Lots of people talk about him just bringing up the question. Whether or not it was a great question, whether you knew all the answers to it, whether Daniel Smith had the greatest answer back and forth. Everybody kind of looked around. I was like, what was that?

I find the Elon Musk thing really interesting right now with the censorship, right? Because the UK has come out basically saying, if you propagate hate or incite hate or incite violence via social media, they'll come and arrest you. And they're saying, at times, including our own news, that Elon Musk is fueling this. Crazy. Okay, so this is why this is important.

One, isn't it scary that the birthplace or the home base of Door Doorwell is actually seeing this happen now? And so for folks who haven't seen videos, apparently, and again, I always want to go back to original source material or be there myself, so I always put a caveat. Apparently, police are physically going and saying, hey, because of something you said or share it online, there's now physically a bobby at your door in what should be a free country with free expression. The reason why I'm raising this for Canada is that we have a new law that is being pushed through the house pretty quickly called Bill C-63. Bill C-63 kind of picks off

where its older brother Bill C-11 left off. Okay. Bill C-11 was passed into law and that is something that's eventually going to affect this conversation. They will eventually come after podcasts. Okay. C63, though, goes after what they will try to call, and by they, I mean the government. The government will try to call hate speech, okay? You're getting into some dangerous territory there because who gets to decide what is hate speech, right? Then they might start using language like harm. Okay. How do you do harm? So what they've done is they've put an element in this bill that people can't argue with, obviously. There's an element in there that deals with images of child sex abuse.

It's disgusting. It's horrific. Anybody who does that, in my opinion, should just live the rest of your life in prison. Gone. They should bring back the guillotine, but anyways. So here we are. So here we are. They've put that in there.

And like I said, any reasonable person would say, yeah, of course. So put that through the justice minister. Okay. Go to the justice minister and strengthen that law about that. thing. Why are they sticking it with this other weird octopus of a law that deals with things like speech online, expression online? So if you start getting into something like what is harmful, okay, what would be harmful speech for the Trudeau government? Would it be calling them out on doubling the debt? Would it be saying that the carbon tax only impoverishes people and doesn't

help the environment. Is that harmful to them? Sure is in the polls. See where I'm going? So this is the problem when you start letting bureaucrats, armies of bureaucrats, regulate and police your speech, Sean, right? Because our, for us, it's called freedom of expression in Canada. And so this is what we're seeing now because in BLC 63, if it goes through, we're going to have an army of bureaucrats at your expense, of course, millions of dollars in cost for these new online thought cops, they're going to try to get human rights tribunals to act on them, to police it, so to speak, to pull people in front of the tribunals, to give them hearings and make them testify, all sorts of strange stuff.

What's happening in the UK sure looks like that. And so it's really important to always keep an eye on what's happening over there because they're usually, it's this weird dystopia. They're like about a year in the future, maybe a few more years in the future, but we're so similar culturally and we're a commonwealth, right? Very similar form of government. What they do over in the motherland, so to speak, can often come to roost here. And so I really would stress for people to keep an eye on what is going on over there as far as the government goes on cracking down on free expression speech. Well, I want to bring up the prime minister of UK.

I'm hoping this works. I'll pull up the video. We'll see here if we can hear anything. racial hatred involves publishing or distributing material which is insulting or abusive, which is intended to or likely to start racial hatred. So if you retweet that, then you're republishing that and then potentially you're committing that offense. And we do have dedicated police officers who are scouring social media. Their job is to look at for this material and then follow up with identification arrests and so forth. So it's a really, really serious. People might think they're not doing anything harmful.

They are and the consequences will be visited upon them. And the consequences will be visited upon them. Yeah. So again, you hear that word harm? And I got one more for you here if I may. Yeah. Before we open up chat. batter on this. I just got a, I think it's right here.

Let's try this one. Yep. We will throw the false force of the law at people. And whether you're in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you. Talk to me about that, because we have seen some high profile figures whipping up the hatred. You talked about it in there with the officers, in fact, about this being added to by online commentary. I mean, I'm even thinking of the likes of Elon.

John Musk is getting involved. What are you considering when it comes to dealing with people who are whipping up this kind of behaviour from behind a keyboard and maybe in a different country? Being a keyboard warrior does not make you safe from the law. You can be guilty of offences of incitement, of stirring up racial hatred. There are numerous terrorist offences regarding

the publishing of material. All of those offences are in play if people are provoking, hatred and violence on the streets and we'll come after those individuals just as we will physically confront on the streets the thugs and the obs who are taking who are causing the promise for communities there you go there's there's the two videos that i saw today just on um while one talking about inciting hatred racism that's going to be an offense even retweeting it right you you're participating and the next one being extradition right and they make reference to musk because musk has thrown out several tweets talking about you know civil war

and a couple other things freedom speech in the uk on and on it goes and the fact they have a police official going you know like well you're sitting in another country you know like i go like well this right here then would be like me and twos we joke about it you know and in covid we certainly joked about it about you know like are we going to end up in some you know camp uh and now like you know i I think it was Wayne Peters when I first had all of you on stage in Eminton. Jeez, that's got to be almost two years ago now. And he was bringing up, but I remember thinking, aren't we there? Are we there?

Well, now you're seeing it in the UK. When you talk about the UK being ahead of us, that's the way my brain goes. They're only six months ahead of us, a year ahead of us, whatever it is. How close is Canada to this? Well, pretty close because what's interesting is that they passed laws in the UK with exactly what we're talking about, that deals with things like free expression online. And again, we are not talking about the gross stuff that we were mentioning before. It's easy to separate out the abuse of children and put that in its own law, pass it completely,

and then deal with something like online expression, okay? And what exactly is an online harm according to the government? And in fact, their law used the word harm in it. Ours does too. Like right in the preamble, it talks about, harm. And this is where we start getting into really murky, really scary territory, really fast. Because of course, the entire purpose of having the right to free speech or the right to free expression is that you can hear things said by another that totally offend you. Like,

they disgust you. You think it's abhorrent that somebody is saying something like that. That's the point of having a free right to do so. Because otherwise, if it's all just stuff that we agree with and that never offends us, never causes us to be disgusted by what somebody's saying, that's not a, we wouldn't need to write it down. That wouldn't need to be a freedom. You know, I'm not a lawyer, but one of my friends is, and her name is Christine Van Geind. She's with the Canadian Constitution Foundation. She does excellent work on this stuff, explaining why something like an online harm act could lead to your free speech being stifled. I'll give you an example, and it isn't about speech. It's about,

action, okay? We got one about speech, okay, really quickly. I know we probably have to go. But way back in the early 2000s, okay, leading to the invasion of Iraq, okay? There were lots of folks online, this is before Facebook and Twitter, who were opposed to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, okay? Prime Minister Jean-Cretchen, a liberal prime minister, was in power. All the other times we had gone along with our allies, Great Britain and the United States, into whatever war they were getting involved in. It was just standard because we were allies. This was getting bumpy, though. There were lots of people, tens of thousands of people in Canada that didn't want to go in. They were opposed to the invasion of Iraq. How did they organize their protests? Online through open message boards, which was basically the precursor

to Facebook, precursor to Twitter, okay? And they were all organizing. They were all getting together. Okay, this time, this date, put up these posters, everybody share your picture, blah, blah, blah. That's how they did it. And they were expressing. themselves online. Then they had a massive protest on Parliament Hill. I remember it because I was working up there at the time. And a few days later, Prime Minister Kretchen stood up in the House of Commons and said, you know what, we're listening to the people? We're not going. What if we had had a prime minister at that time who was like, wow, you guys are betraying our allies, the United Kingdom and the United States. What you're saying is harmful. We're going to shut it down.

can't express yourself online. We never would have seen those protests manifest. And I'm using that example because it was largely, not always, largely the left. Our friends on the left, as Reagan would have called them, who protested that. And they were able to express themselves. This is the problem when you give government, no matter what ideology they have, left, right, orange, blue, whatever. When you give them that kind of power to stifle your speech and your expression, we can get down that slippery slope real fast. And we can just look at the Emergencies Act, which of course the federal court has now deemed

was improperly imposed upon us. And a huge part of the Emergencies Act was freezing the bank accounts of people who had made donations to a protest they believed in and the Prime Minister didn't. That sent a chill through so many people both left and right across Canada and made international news.

So the government has proven they're willing to drop hammers. Even when a federal judge, later on says, you guys way overstepped there. And they did. And so this is why we really need to flag this stuff like what's happening in the UK, apart from the content. Remove the content from your mind. Okay. Just think about the fundamental right to free expression and how much power the government has. Because lastly, we were close with this stuff because at the time, a few years ago, Environment Minister Stefan Giebo got pretty mad at us, the Taxpayers Federation,

because we highlighted the fact that one of his department's own reports recommended a truck tax, a pickup truck tax, and an SUV tax that would have cost people like $3,000, $4,000, a big one. It was from his department. He got so mad, Sean, that online he was calling us misinformation or disinformation. It wasn't. It was a fact that, this report was out there. So again, you start getting a minister of the crown talking like that. What happens when they decide that disinformation is harmful and therefore illegal? Well, you get no more freedom convoy. This is it. You get a whole bunch of things that paint a

pretty dark future. Chris Sims, always a pleasure having you on the show. And, you know, certainly enjoy having you break down things. I hope, you know, as time goes on here, who knows. next just less than 90 days we got we got a U.S. election and I mean if anybody thinks it's going to get less crazy between here and there we're all we're all shaking our heads and not a chance and you know and then after that we got a whole other host of things going on Bs I mean in between here in the end of the year you got BC election you got SAS election and then just over a year you got our own election federally so I appreciate you coming on and doing this won't be the last time never is and we'll catch up soon thanks again Chris Thank you.