Shaun Newman Podcast - #791 - Cooper - Legg - Oland

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

David Knight Legg served as Premier Jason Kenney's principal adviser, where he was involved in efforts to combat negative perceptions of Alberta's oil and gas sector. He was appointed as the first CEO of the Invest Alberta Corporation in 2020, with the aim of attracting high-value investments to Alberta. After leaving Invest Alberta, he has been in various advisory roles to global banking, investment, and technology firms in Asia and the U.S. Sam Cooper is a prominent Canadian investigative journalist and best-selling author, recognized for his work on Canada-China relations, corruption, and foreign interference. His most recognized work is the book "Wilful Blindness: How a Network of Narcos, Tycoons and CCP Agents Infiltrated the West". Cooper founded The Bureau, an independent investigative journalism platform, aiming to continue his work on uncovering corruption and countering disinformation. Brett Oland is the CEO of Bow Valley Credit Union (BVCU), based in Alberta, Canada. Oland initiated a strategy where part of BVCU's balance sheet was backed by gold to hedge against inflation and economic downturns, which has been both praised for its foresight and criticized by regulators for potentially undermining the banking system's stability. We discuss the Trump Tariff negotiations, the next 30 days, the fentanyl czar and whether this current administration can work with the US. Sam Cooper’s X - x.com/scoopercooper David Knight Legg’s X - x.com/KnightLegg Brett Oland’s X - x.com/brett_oland Cornerstone Forum ‘25 https://www.showpass.com/cornerstone25/ Contribute to the new SNP Studio E-transfer here: [e-mail] Get your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast Silver Gold Bull Links: Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Text Grahame: [phone]

This is Viva Fry. I'm Dr. Peter McCullough. This is Tom Lomago. This is Chuck Pradnik. This is Alex Krenner. Hey, this is Brad Wall. This is J.P. Sears. Hi, this is Frank Paredi.

This is Tammy Peterson. This is Danielle Smith. This is James Lindsay. Hey, this is Brett Kessel, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Wednesday. Man, alive. Do things change minute by minute or what? You know, today's conversation is very, well, it's interesting.

And obviously, you're going to listen to that. I was chuckling, you know, of course, Canada and Trudeau changed things and, you know, now we've got 30-day, you know, ability to work on this border issue and everything else. I was just chuckling. I'm like, cars, try and be as timely as I can. And within hours of me doing the intro for yesterday's episode, everything's changed. And, yeah, so we're here today to talk, you know, today's roundtable is supposed to talk about the tariffs that would be on. Of course, that's, that's, yeah, you'll get to it. Did you know that you can hold physical gold and silver in your registered accounts?

Silver Gold Bowl can help you unlock the potential of your RRSP, TFSA, RRIF, or Kids, RESP by adding physical gold and silver to your accounts. This year's RRS deadline is March 3rd, folks. March 3rd, yeah, you had the, well, I've bungled it a few times, March 3rd. But once the contribution is made, you can invest it into physical precious metal at any time. and Silver Gold Bull is the company I recommend to all of you because when it comes to precious metals, they can help you with their in-house solutions while they're buying, selling, storing.

They got it all. You can text or email Graham down in the show notes for more details or any questions you have surrounding investing in precious metals and for feature silver deals exclusively for you, the SMP listener. If you're on SGB on their website, just make sure any purchases you reference

that you heard about them on the S&P. It helps. It helps. It helps. Bow Valley Credit Union. Is your Alberta regulated, fully serviced, financial institution? Alberta residents can take advantage of low or no-cost bank accounts, personal and business mortgages, loans, credit cards, and investing, with 100% deposit guarantee, compared to big banks with only 100,000 in deposit guarantee, as well as gold and silver in reserve. Don't leave your hard-earned savings and trust with Ottawa standard of inflation and devaluation of currency and taxation.

Shoot an email over to Leanna for your BVC membership at Welcome at Bow ValleyCU.com. If you just want to check out everything, go to bow valley, see you. And you can see all they have to offer. Caleb Taves, Renegade Acres, the Cornerstone Forum, the community spotlight here on the Cornerstone Forum, is heading to Calgary in 2025, May 10th, 2020, 25, of course it's 2025 already. And we've got a whole lineup. You can get tickets down the show notes. We've got the hotel, we've got the trade show, we've got everything there.

Just go to the link, you can see everything. And if you're wanting to get all the details on all the speakers and kind of the breakdown of the day, subscribe to Substack. It's free and it'll give you a play-by-play on what's coming. Planetcom.com.com.ca. Well, here's a couple things. One is I screwed up on it last week. I literally, you know, like I've been having a rough go, you know. First, it was April 29th for the deadline, and that wasn't right.

Then it was April 28th. That wasn't right. Now it's planetcom.com. It's planetcom. dot CA. Sean's having a rough go. When you're busy running and growing a business. Oh, wait, that feels like me.

Trying to stay on top of the ever-changing world of information technology. It can be overwhelming to say the least, I would agree. And they want to take care of you, leaving you to do your thing while they do theirs. For over 22 years, Planetcom is here. has been here to boost your productivity by practically managing every aspect of your IT infrastructure, both in in-house and in the cloud, that ensures you're not too tangled up in technology to get things done. So, planetcom.com.ca has been working on getting the SMP website back up and rolling, and they're supposed to be on Tuesdays, but Sean keeps putting them on Wednesdays.

So I'm also screwing that up. So, you know, we're going to get this right. Carl, if you're listening, we're going to get this right. Oh, my goodness. You know, planetcom.com.com. Don't worry. They're way more on top of things than this guy. I'm just running in circles trying to catch my tail.

They want to do that. New studio coming here in 2025, one of the things that we're pushing for. And I want you to be a part of it, skills, labor, materials, money, be a little on the value, or find a way to be on the wall, the legacy wall with the value for value model. We got Ben Trudeau, Scott and Atlanta, Roitin, Nancy Fleming, Donald Valiant, Kirby Cohen, Grant Milner, Grant Milner and Kathleen Davis, Lewis Stang, Kevin Damon, Tom Icurt, Dannery Paving, McGowan Chartered Accountant, Crude Master, Guardian plumbing and heating, Harris Electric, Amc, Electric, Electrical, Noble Floor Coverings,

Renegade Acres, T-Barr 1 Trucking, Janix, you get the point. Get your name on that wall. It's going to be super cool. If you're listening or watching on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Rumble, make sure to subscribe and leave a review. Watch on an axe, give us a retweet, get us out of some of these echo chambers. All right, let's get on to that tale of the tape. The first is an author and investigative journalist. The second, a CEO of Bow Valley Credit Union, and the third served as Premier Jason Kenney's principal advisor

where he was involved in efforts to combat negative perceptions of Alberta's oil and gas sector. I'm talking about Sam Cooper, Brett Olin, and David Knight-Legg. So buckle up, here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by Sam. Cooper and Brett Oland. Boys, thanks for joining me this morning.

Good to be here. Now, Sam's never been on. Brett obviously has been a, well, I don't know, recurring guest. You've been on several times, I guess. How about we just, Sam, a couple minutes, just a bit of your background. You're a first time around the podcast. I would love to hear just a bit of your background. So the guests, you've been suggested to me over the last couple weeks.

I said to you before we started recording, I've been down a Sam Cooper rabbit hole. which anytime I find a Canadian that I can go down a rabbit hole with, I'm all for it. So maybe just a little bit about yourself. Yeah. I mean, thanks for that intro. It's ironic because what I do is I go down rabbit holes. And it's really quite a time to be alive for an investigative reporter that did 20 years in the mainstream media,

had a strong track record of, you know, the type of reporter that would find something, explosive out, you know, what we call the Vancouver model of money laundering. This is how BC's real estate is just being used egregiously, in fact, is built upon, in a large extent, I say, money laundering from Asia. And it just has sort of taken over the city and the society in a way. And so my work on that, you know, back in the mid-2010s up to 2018, drove the BC government to to strike an anti-money laundering commission called the Cullen Commission. I then, you know, part of my work was discovering how shockingly, you know, hostile states that, you know, the type that we'd be, we could be at war at, like a real kinetic war.

So I'm talking about China, Iran, other states that don't like us and we've been very sleepy and naive in Canada about it are involved in this criminal activity for economic and strategic reasons. And so to cut to the chase, you know, that I, I, as a young reporter in British Columbia, I understood that this activity ultimately led to some compromises in Ottawa and Quebec and Eastern Canada and how trade with China, you know, was really not, in totality the great thing that our leaders in Ottawa had made it out to be for decades. And so I chased that rabbit hole and dug up the what's now known as the Chinese election interference story. And I won't go on about the commission that stemmed out of my work there and sort of the conclusions they came to.

People are in, you know, they're controversial. But that's what I do. I, you know, a bit about me, kind of, you know, an athletic, competitive guy. Unlike you, I didn't get too far in my athletics. And so I discovered, you know, I'm also good at, you know, reading, writing, argumentation. I thought about going into law. Didn't quite do that. I went to University of Toronto for those sort of undergrad studies, and I got into journalism instead.

And in that sort of sense, like Brett, you know, I'm very, you know, intrigued by economic markets. I'm intrigued by law. I'm intrigued by politics. And I find when you're intellectual curious and you can also just talk. normally. I mean, that became sort of my brand. That's what I do in journalism and now I'm doing it on my own at the Bureau and to end my answer. I've rambled too long, but I find there's value in going down rabbit holes and pulling out the best version of truth that an educated North American can pull out, holding it up because as someone that's worked in the media for 20 years, I totally agree that a lot of it is politically influenced and a lot of it is heard thinking. And so, I'm in there trying to wrestle out real stories and separate, you know, the the garbage conspiracy theories from stories that are real because there are, you know, there's corruption.

There is bad politics. There's bad economics, bad law. And so I try to tell, you know, free thinking people, what's real, at least from my point of view. On a podcast, you can pretty much never go too long in a backstory. That's not exactly true. but we appreciate you giving us a little bit of something because once again Sam first time you're on the podcast if we were doing this solo I would I would dig and dig and dig into your background because I find it fascinating and I like to get to no guess. Brett you you you know you can you might as well say a couple things about your background. I think everybody on the podcast already knows who you are but being the CEO of Bow Valley Credit Union and a few other things you've been around my network quite a bit but in saying that maybe just

a quick couple thoughts. Sure, yeah, Brett Olen, CEO of Bow Valley Credit Union. I have a background in accounting. I'm a CPA. I also have an Institute of Corporate Director's designation, which really means I'm good at corporate governance. Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Calgary, grew up in Medicine Hat.

Unlike Sam, I'm not very good at reading and writing. I'm more of an audio guy, but I am pretty. decent with numbers and really tying together literally thousands and thousands of data points to come up with sort of a macro theme, which I'm pretty decent to add. Well, Jens, the reason why I was bringing you all on, you know, like I was sitting here looking at today as we record this thinking, man, if we get 25% tariffs, like what does this mean? What and, you know, and in fairness, I was saying to you guys before, maybe it's a dead issue.

and then you both point out, well, you know, as it's been pointed out, it's only a 30, paused for at least 30 days. So it's very much a real conversation to have. And I guess, you know, the thing on this side that, you know, I've been watching this since when Trump first started talking about it, what's that November? And it's just been kind of picking up steam. And then as it got there, you're like, holy man, is this guy a wizard when it comes to the ultimate deal?

He's got troops from Mexico going up. He's got Justin Trudeau, 1.3 billion on border plan, reinforced the board with new choppers, technology. It all sounds so frankly badass folks. And our Canadian military hasn't sounded anything like that in quite some time. I'm curious, you two staring at this, you know, as it changed minute by minute, what are your thoughts on where we're at with the tariffs from Trump? And I don't know, where our government is at, the fact we don't have a, you know, like prorogation is in

immediate effect. You know, you've got a prime minister who intends to resign and all purposes has resigned, although he's still got the job for the time being. That's a lot, but I'll let you two hop in. I would start by saying, you know, if I can, just on very much on the strong point of my knowledge, you know, I know there's a lot of political debate out there that people are saying, you know, the U.S. government is just using tariffs, sorry, fentanyl as an excuse. Canada doesn't have, you know, any role in fentanyl, certainly not in comparison to Mexico. And because I've written a book on this subject that's read in the U.S. government,

it's read in Germany, it's read in Taiwan, I can say I'm the Canadian subject matter expert on this. And Canada has a very deep problem. You know, I think people in BC or Alberta, at least intellectually honest, are starting to get the idea when we have super labs exposed. you know, this fentanyl productivity or the hub of Western Canada has been a concern to the U.S. government for years now. And I reposted a story on the Bureau this morning of I did a deep lawn form interview with a Vancouver area mayor named Brad West in 2023. He discussed how then Biden's secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, had reached out to several mayors in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Mexico, only one mayor actually in Canada, Brad West.

And he talked to them about how the US government believes China is deliberately leveraging fentanyl into North America. It wants to see North Americans die. This is part of the Chinese Communist Party's sort of what I can say is known as a hybrid warfare strategy. Everyone knows what economic war sanctions are, but the US government believes that, you essentially fentanyl is used to make China rich, to launder money around the world, and to kill people, and they want it. And to cut to the chase, Mr. Blinken, a Democrat Secretary of State told Brad West,

Canada's very weak on fentanyl, we need some sort of better coherence of laws because British Columbia is being used to launder money at scale and be. being used by Chinese and Mexican crime. Right? So my point here is that all of this, you know, political debate on X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it, people saying Trump won, Trump lost, or you know, Fentanyl's not the real issue here.

It's the issue. And what I've just told you, people can read that interview and see the facts. The Democrats, this is a nonpartisan issue in the US. And Canada has a big problem. And, you know, if I'm giving my opinion, here, the quicker we face the fact that we're lacking the policing strength, the laws, and we're not looking at fentanyl the way it should be. It's basically a national security

and military issue. When we address that and the U.S., you know, in good faith, we're working together on it, what's wrong with that? And then we can work on whatever economic leverage Mr. Trump may want to gain. I think that's still in play. But if we deal with the fentanyl, that is a real issue here, in my view. I should have pointed to this out to both you at the start. Don't feel like it's ping pong and has come back to me every single time. This is a, you know, as best we can do a roundtable on virtual, we want everybody to feel free to talk, you know, at any point they feel it.

So, Brett, your initial thoughts. Yeah, Trump, it's so amazing to me that, and I guess we've sort of been, brought up to think this way that politicians are being shady and they have some ulterior motive and that type of thing. I think Trump is very lateral and linear in a lot of the ways. And what I mean by that is he's very linear. He's going to be very direct. He's going to say exactly what he wants. And it's so funny that they beat around the Bush in the media and, oh, what does he want? No, this is about something different. No, actually, he told you exactly. exactly what you wanted. And the Canadian and the Mexican government did it. And he basically put a pause on it. And so he got what you wanted. But the thing is, he's a lateral thinker in that there's more at play in my mind than just Canada. He's also got layers that, you know, suggesting China's next, Europe's next. basically a wait and see type thing of almost making an example out of Canada and Mexico and saying,

listen, I'm willing to go this far with my best neighbors here. Where do you think I'm going to go with my worst enemy? So I think it's important to sort of think about the tertiary effects, just even beyond this. And, you know, F around and find out is really what it is with Trump as well. He'll tell you what he wants, but he'll also F around and find out. And there's a bigger plan at play here that we could peel back the onion on. I would jump in on that. I agree with that. I think definitely there's two points to that.

One, he's telling China, you will not acknowledge that you, as our U.S. Congress investigations now say, you're intentionally sending fentanyl into North America. you will never acknowledge that. So one, we're going to show you that we can stop the proxies that unfortunately Mexico and Canada are being used, right? And so again, I bring it back to the military thinking. If you look at it as people in the U.S. government and intelligence do as a sort of hybrid warfare tactic to weaken the real enemy of China

and the United States, which they want to overtake, and that they're using the weak links, Canada and Mexico. Yeah, reverse that military thinking. You're telling China, you can't use these proxies anymore. You're telling the governments, if you want to put it to my opinion, the corrupted in some positions, governments of Mexico and Canada, that you can't turn a blind eye to this stuff that you're profiting from. Your banks are getting rich off of.

Your real estate is getting paid. pumped up, people are getting corrupted. So we're going to put a stop to that and you either understand, we see this as war or you don't. And if you don't, you're getting 25. If you don't after a few months, you're getting 50, right? And as you say, Brett, Beijing is getting the message that this is now serious. Well, I'm curious, Sam, when you look at, because once again, I tell the folks, if you haven't gone down the Sam Cooper rabbit hall, you should. It's interesting. One of the things that I think I took away from some of your interviews is how many high level officials in Canada

are kind of tied up in this web. And so, you know, I'd written before I'd done anything of research on you, you know, like, I don't think Trudeau wants to fix this. After going down a bit of your rabbit hole, I'm like, I don't know if half the government wants to fix this. Like, when you look at Trudeau, does he actually want to fix this, right? I mean, his hands are being forced. Then I go, okay he's only the leader for how much longer if carne becomes the leader of the liberals is he gonna fix us and then i go a little further out let's assume we get an election this year and that it doesn't go the brian lily way of you know 2026 does pierre pill poliav want to fix this like can they actually fix this are we going to have a leader that goes you know i go back to brett's point of like

trump's saying what he wants like let's just let's just fix the problem but every time i get around government and you go let's just fix the problem They start talking about something way over here and the actual problems don't get addressed. I know that's a lot that I just rattled off. But your thoughts on that. Yeah. I mean, I could talk a lot about it. But like in a nutshell, you're right.

Trudeau, Melanie Jolie, whoever you want to talk about, they have had years to deal with this. I know that in back channels, the U.S. government, as I've said, you know, openly in 2023, a Democrat, you know, U.S. administration was telling us. in Canada, you've got to deal with this. Nothing happened. Let's look at British Columbia. Why did they go to Brad West, a mayor, instead of, you know, Attorney General from the NDP, David Eby or something? Well, look, again, David Eby, his government had to do the Cullen Commission into anti-money laundering. They had 101 recommendations, and they've only put in place three. So that's indicating to me that Eby hasn't done anything about this. Justin Trudeau, you know, in my book and others, I mean, clearly they've shown an action on this issue that's

very important to the United States. Is there a reason of sort of a sin of omission, as they say in the U.S. government, that, you know, you're just not taking this seriously? Or is it complicit? And I assert in my book that very unfortunately, the evidence shows that senior Chinese influence, intelligence, and criminal operatives have been key fundraisers and donors to the Liberal Party of Canada. And that's just a fact. You know, does it mean that when someone's photograph, as I know, someone involved in high-level money laundering investigations for the RCMP, a People's Liberation Army veteran, when they're sitting beside Trudeau at a fundraiser in Vancouver, does it mean that Trudeau is on the take? Not necessarily, but it's a pretty bad sign that, you know, there might be a hesitance to agree with the U.S. government to look into people

that very clearly are involved in nefarious Chinese state activity and have been key supporters of the Trudeau government. That's my view. And I'll certainly, I think, enough backlash, but it's documented. Yeah, just adding on to that, Sam. I'm reading a book right now called The Sam, A Storm Before the Storm by Mike Duncan. And it's about the history of Rome and basically the fall of the Roman Empire.

And you can see a lot of parallels in what's happening right now. All the senators in Rome basically bent over backwards, spent a lot of dollars to getting into the Senate. And then they basically enriched themselves once they got into power. So, you know, whatever they do come hell or high water, they're going to basically enrich themselves. And we see it throughout the world with politics right now. Why do you go in being with a net worth a million bucks and come out with a hundred million net worth? You know, and it's because you're getting enriched and whatever you want to call it, call it bribes, call it corruption.

But it's happening. It's just there's no way around it. So I go back to the end part, you know, like Trudeau's on his way out. Carney is looking to be like he's on his way in. I could be wrong. I could be reading those tea leaves wrong. But that's the way the wind seems to be blowing. And then you, of course, have Pierre Poliev, who up until this point was almost a shoe-in to be the next prime minister of Canada.

When you look at those two individuals and you go, well, we paused it for 30 days, this is going to, I assume, keep coming up until the problem is eliminated, which by all accounts of this conversation, I would say is not going to happen overnight. Can either of those two men be in a position where they can walk in and address this? Or are they as compromised as everybody else? Yeah, I don't see Carney. He just comes from the same camp as Trudeau. We can call it, you know, the Laurentian elites. I don't typically like to wade into the kind of the globalist, but, you know, it is what it is, right?

That's where Carney comes from. You could not be more elite, more international, more globally connected, right, than Mr. Carney is. And that whole camp in Canada, you can just, you can see it online. They are so, they're so emasculated and embarrassed by what has happened, you know, in the past couple months. and yet they've had to admit that this is a real issue, right? And I think, you know, as we said at the start with Brett, the tariffs are still in play. I believe if, you know, if Canada's government, whatever it is, we don't even know what that entity is right now, if it doesn't sign, I believe, you know, some cross-border enforcement treaties,

sort of something on paper saying that, no, we're not just going to take your word that you're going to have a a US-Canada strike force to tackle triads and Mexican cartels in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton. We're actually going to have something on paper that the DEA and the RCP are going to work together and you're not going to be able to give us the excuse anymore, which you've been giving to us for decades that, you know, Canada has a charter of rights and we can't do wiretaps on these known international criminal figures operating by choice in Canada because they have good legal coverage there. So I think if this current government, whatever it is, makes those deals,

that's going to be a step that no leader can wiggle out of because it's on paper. And I think that's what the Trump administration is going to require. As for, you know, Carney, he's just, he's, his, I. ideology and his heart is not into seeing fentanyl as a real issue. Poliev, I, you know, personally, I know someone, some people within the conservative opposition that have read my book and do take this seriously. I mean, Adam Chambers, a younger MP from Ontario, he suggested a private member's anti-money laundering bill that got nowhere, but it had teeth.

So I do think there's a chance that a new conservative government actually would have good faith on this. And I think they need to demonstrate it as well. So there better be choppers in the air, troops on the border, drones picking things up. And they better get serious with finding this. You know, and it's always, you see it in the media that there was concern that, oh, Trump may be worried about this fentanyl. And so all of a sudden in the news, oh, a big fentanyl bust for $80 million or something like that.

And it's, and it's like, you know what? Suddenly. If you see that game, it's like that's just a drop in the bucket compared to what's really happening here. So there has to be good faith that we're actually doing something about this. And yeah, just on Mark Carney, anybody that follows me on Twitter knows I'm very critical of Mark Carney just because I think he's higher up in the food chain than Trudeau. he's been the governor of two central banks, one in Canada, one in England.

When you're closer to the money and there's corruption at the money level, you're getting pretty close to the top there. I see David Knight leg has hopped in and we'll bring him in. He's going to be hopping in mid-sentence here. David, thanks for joining us. Now, David, we're mid-conversation, but maybe. you could just give a little bit of your background. So the audience knows who is entered the conversation.

I came back to Alberta about five years ago to help Jason Kenney get elected and worked on the campaign to put a conservative back in government after the NDP had destroyed the public fisc in Alberta for four years. And I feel like Canada is the same place right now as we look at getting a conservative government into replace the extraordinary debt and the, uh, the disastrous policies that are on the border. They're actually in discussion right now that are the result of letting the NDP liberal consensus

run Canada for nine years. Well, what you've been missing is a long talk or a talk about fentanyl being the real issue and I hope I'm not oversimplifying that, folks. I'm curious your thoughts on, you know, the news. We've got paused for at least 30 days is what Trudeau has announced, along with others, that basically we're going to have a 30-day pause,

a bunch of funding, $1.3 billion to border plan. There's going to be a fentanyl czar, which I want to get everybody's thoughts on. But your initial thoughts on, you know, like, you know, when you were texting me this morning, you're like, do we even have anything to talk about? Sam and Brett would both say, I think I'm not oversimplifying that, you know,

we have 30 days. This is going to be a real conversation until a problem is fixed. Well, look, Sam's done. So what thoughts do you have, David? Of illustrating the point I would make, which I was having a conversation. I was down in the inauguration. I have a couple friends that are joining the administration. I think that in Canada we are so poorly served by our media that a lot of Canadians are actually justified in feeling that this was unfair,

that they just don't, that we aren't told at all by our media. And my brothers, you know, have no idea. They think this is an unfair. He's being a bully. We're sort of told these, you know, anytime you see talking heads say the same thing about 18 times, you sort of wonder who's right on the table. It's my favorite sort of vapid truism that somebody that's never done a deal in their lives. Yeah, I come from a banking background. It's funny to watch these guys that are trying to sound like they're going to be tough when they have no cards to play.

They're going to take, you know, Trump's, I was talking to one of President Trump's tax advisors, and said, this is temporary insanity. You know how bad these tariffs would be for us. I mean, you don't match dollar-for-dollar tariffs when your dollars were 68 cents, right? You don't take what the Americans already know is a terrible idea for them and say, we're going to do the same thing, right?

From a position of deeper, much deeper position of weakness. So there's so much about this that's broken, but the thing that surprises me that hasn't come up in the conversation as much as I thought it would is that Canada is only responsible for about 2% of the illegal border crossings. But in the last four years, we've been the source of over 1,000 terror interdictions in the United States, which is over 90% of all the terror interdictions. Just a few days ago, the FBI arrested a Chinese national accused of selling several hundred million dollars' worth of weapon systems into an Islamic terror group in the media.

Of course, he's a Montreal resident, staying on immigration fraud in Canada. In September, the FBI arrested this guy, Shmuzhabal, who was planning an atrocity against Jewish communities in New York and was stung by the FBI. He is a Pakistani national living in Canada. He's on a student visa. We just got a report from the Globe of Mail two weeks ago. We've lost track of 50,000 people who came into Canada on student visa. and have never attended a university or a school.

Right? So if you're in the U.S. intelligence community and you have the Canadians saying, this feels deeply unfair, we're your best friends, we're only responsible for 2% of the fentanyl, 2% of the illegal immigrants, what's your problem? You say, your asylum fraud and your immigration fraud has reached such epic proportions

that we know that you have over 4,000 criminal and terror syndicates operating in Canada now with impunity, some of them funded by your welfare state, We've caught over a thousand of them. We've got three questions. One, how many didn't we catch? Right? Two, how many are still resident in Canada since we were up to 92% of all our terror

interdictions coming over the northern border? And three, why is it us that has to do? Why isn't your own government, your own media, outraged at the fact that you have this penetration problem? Where was the outrage? The world's top sponsor of terror, the Iranian IRGC, was just designated a terror group in July. of this year after pressure from the Americans say, this is crazy.

Where's the outrage that someone like Melanie Jolie is saying the corrupt Islamist affiliated ICC judge means Canada will arrest Nanyahu lands in Canada in direct contradiction of what the Americans said would happen, right? So we've got a foreign policy that is bizarrely at odds of the Americans on critical issues when it comes to the war on terror and positioning on Iran, which sponsors Hamas Hezboa and and the Houthis. We've got a porous border. We've got immigration and asylum fraud that's reached such levels that this government can't even respond coherently to its own people over what's happened with our student visas in the way that criminals and terrorist syndicates abuse that system.

And I think that, you know, J.D. Vannett said, look, Canada's a fentanyl problem. The, you know, the amount of fentanyl ceased in Canada so far would kill nine and a half million Americans. We're not talking about proportional amounts to what a Mexican cartel is doing. We're talking about the problem itself. And so I think that Canada has to, number one, get serious about what was broken in our border and do real things about it. And I think the backdrop as well that, you know, Rubio is now Secretary of State sent a letter back in May to our government saying two dozen bipartisan standards have had it with you guys being deadbeats on NORAD and NATO. It has to change or there will be consequences.

So I think we're in a position now as a nation where we really have to come to the table, solve some of those things. You saw Trudeau cave immediately on some of that stuff. I think there's a much wider range of things we have to talk about. I think we've got to build a bunch of stuff internally as a nation. And I think the big opportunity in the next 30 days is to say to the Americans, we want to get better at integrating our economy and our security. in ways that make sense for both countries.

And there's actually a lot of overlap between economy and security, especially if you look at energy security, critical mineral security, Northwest Passage and logistics and shipping, AI, etc. All these things, sorry, David, all these things sound so common sense. And if there's one thing I've learned out of this government over nine years,

common sense doesn't fly. So I'm curious, you know, and I just want to steer it to this border czar thing and have your guys' thoughts. Because I think one of the things that's going to happen in the next 30 days, correct me if I'm wrong, you three, is we're going to have a fentanyl, a Canadian fentanyl czar. And just for the listener, you know, I'm like, why those words? Tsar sometimes spelt with a T is an informal title used for certain high level officials in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom typically granted broad power to address a particular issue in this

case. Fentanyl, who, like when you're talking about integrating with the United States over a particular issue, the border, drugs going across it, we're going to have a border czar. Okay, that's great idea. Who is going to become that? If it becomes, you know, I mean, it won't be Christia Freeland, but you get the point. Like, I don't think we're, we're helping ourselves here. We're going to make this issue a heck of a lot worse. Do you have any thoughts on who that might be and whether or not this problem gets better in the next 30 days or worse, Sam, we'll start there. Feel free to hop in, Jess. Yeah, you know, you're right.

Zarr is an American-type position, and that just indicates that the Americans were demanding. We need this. And so I just reposted a story about how Brad West, this strong BC mayor, was engaged out of all the Canadian politicians by Secretary of State Blinken on the issue in 2012. in 2020, 2020, 2020, saying, you know, Canada has weak laws,

it needs to do better. So Brad West has a job, but I mean, someone like him would make this better because he's already demonstrated. He gets the issue. He wants to do something about it. He sees the BC government

is doing nothing. And the Americans already like him. So he would be good. General Rick Hillier is another name, I think of. I can think. of you know a number of retired RCMP officers they might not want to be named you know without me talking to them that I can think of so there is that it really it it could be a

transformative change that's it's a real deal this is not just you know some PR point but the key thing with the czar is and this brings me to my last two points David Eby's government was told by Justice Cullen who struck the you know made 101 recommendations all stemming out of my journalistic work you know they found that billions of dollars drug cash all from china all from this vancouver model of chinese transnational crime laundering fentanyl money is being run through bc casinos and justice cullen said the single most important position is an independent anti-money laundering commissioner that does not report to the bc legislature why because the suggestion was politicians are incentivized to turn a blind eye to this dirty money.

So look, let's get David Eby, if he's really serious, don't be targeting red states with, with, you know, liquor bans, which is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of, just triggering the Americans. Look, David Eby, put that AML commissioner in place and have them working hand in hand with the fentanyl czar, whether it's Brad West or someone else. My last point, if it's a PMO lackey put up by Katie Telford and Gerald Butts or Mark Carney or whoever, we can welcome those tariffs because they're coming in. Here's my problem with when when you talk about AML and things like that, especially when you brought up Christia Freeland, Sean, is as a banker, these rules are egregious already with FinTrack and AML and the amount of monitoring. that we have and at the end of the day, we're going to feel a lot of pain just in the general

public if they want to strengthen these anti-money laundering laws because it's like it's getting to the point where last year, AML wanted to basically have us document every single cash transaction that came through, whether it was five bucks from grandma or was it a million dollar sale of a house. They wanted to document this all, and it was all supposed to go into the void of FinTrack. So I think we have to walk very carefully where, you know, anytime you talk about beefing up security, there has to be a counter conversation of what liberties are we sacrificing here. And how can we balance this properly so we're not under a police state?

I agree. And the thing is that they're asking for all this information. from good honest taxpaying businesses, and they're letting the known money launderers, which I say includes some banks, some law firms, some politicians. They're letting them go, right? Because Canada can't prosecute it. So you can't collect that information without prosecuting the bad guys who our government knows who they are, basically.

Do we think that the United States is going to have heavy say? a healthy say in who our border desir is, or do we think this is going to come down to the liberals picking who it is? David, you know better. I hope that in the spirit of collaborative negotiation, not this weird, we're team Canada hiding in our locker room in CBC studios trying to talk tough.

You know, I hope there's a new spirit of collaboration that includes something radical, like actually going to D.C. with people that the new administration like and respect and having open conversations about what would make this work better, that our government becomes responsive and also this bizarre attempt

to make everything that's happening right now and to a partisan point scoring by the Liberal Party, by the NDP, by sad people like David E.B. and others that see the world mostly through their ideological lens and not enough through the lens of Canada, but I've had it to hear with the idea that some self-appointed

Hills, pundits can speak for the Teen Canada approach when none of them have shown up. You know, they were invisible in D.C. Through the inauguration, hundreds of people from different countries, meeting people, going out, talking, having conversations,

meeting with State Department. Whoever we choose, as the Fennel-Zar, is going to be one piece in a very large puzzle that's going to have to be a new era of a relationship where we say,

we know that American taxpayers will no longer pick up Canada's free-loading for NATO. And so we are going to change the game on this. We're going to get serious about it. We're going to have to build. I personally hope that we move towards a NORAD system that includes land and sea. Now all those security, and that we're in August pillar too, like the UK and Australia in the US.

We've been out of that, right? And we have the largest undefended sea border in the planet with Russian subs sitting off of it. All these issues are only lost on Canadians, by the way. Like, we have the only press corps that isn't as concerned as Australia, the UK, and the U.S., that we're completely undefended in the north where the Russians have brought all the shipbreaker advantages and are wandering through our territorial space with impunity. We're more worried about the Americans making demands on our border than the Russians and

Chinese violating it every single day. So in military and security circles, people are dumbfounded at the lack of self-finding. respect that Canada has for its own borders, the lack of respect it has for its allies, the lack of respect it's had for the Americans saying, we'd like you to fix the border. And everyone in Canada sort of quickly line up and said, Trump's a bully, number one, this is super mean, number two. This fandolphing thing is a pretext for economic control of Canada, making it into the 51st state.

And we're going to act like an insecure ex-girlfriend for two months straight out loud in Canada only and not have any conversations. does anybody important in the United States. It's so embarrassing. I was, you know, you're watching, it's so hard to, like, be in the States and watch Canadian news. You watch Canadian news and people to make, this is hurtful. You're like, what is going?

You know, this is toxic. I'm like, this is not a high school prom. This is a superpower saying we have a vulnerability on the North we've never had before. We'll talk about it in terms of fentanyl because you can solve that. But if you want to get into the list, We have a NORAD problem. We have a NATO problem. We have an AUKIS problem.

We have an offshore problem. We have a problem with your children. There's a problem. You haven't done the geological mapping. We're trying to fry some really big fish over in Russia right now. So if we need to signal the world that our best friend is going to face in America First border policy, you're damn right. We're going to do it.

And you're going to come to us and then give us everything you want to do that you'd never wanted to announce that loud in Canada that you were doing because you didn't want to look like you were caving until the last minute. So I think that's a long answer, but I think, yeah, the best thing to do is to go to the Americans and say, here's a plan on fentanyl. J.D. Vance, you've written a book about how opioids destroyed everyone in the community around you. We understand that your base has said we've had it with watching little kids killed off by these pills. We know that we've become a bad border and we know that it's not the net amount of the fentanyl. It's the fact that it's grown 700% in the last few years. That's your big problem with what's happening with their ability

to drop law enforcement. And we know that all the people that are doing it are known criminal and terror syndicates. They're all in the same, they're all the same gang. You know, if you're a criminal syndicate and a cartel, you use the terror guys to enforce things because this is symbiotic, badness. And it's all in the shared. underground corridors. So I think, yeah, I think we should make sure the U.S. is involved with who ours are. It's more importantly what our overall strategy is. And use that to build a better overall relationship. But it's going to have to be less partisan. Mark Carney shows zero skill at playing this except for his own purposes, pretending to be serious. You know, the climate

grift continues as he sort of uses these weasily words around existing infrastructure and other things that won't work. So I think the Americans are pushing us in a direction to have hard conversations we should have been having for Canadian safety and security five years ago. Does anyone, maybe it's the cynical side of me, maybe it's just the fact I've lived under Justin Trudeau now for almost a decade. Like I listened to all three you talk and I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense.

That makes sense. This is why none of this will happen until we have a change of leadership. Like I just, unless Donald Trump literally is sitting at the desk. or J.D. Vance or whoever. No, we're not accepting that person. We're not accepting that person. You're going to give us a list of people, and we're going to go, we're going to vet them all.

Because the problems we're having that you guys are talking about, I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. That makes sense. And then we're going to act like, well, maybe Trudeau in this new era of how Trump is pushing on us, all of a sudden we're going to get the pick for Borders are right. I have a hard time believing that. Maybe that's just my cynicism.

For me, reading sort of, you know, the Globe and Mail stories where you'll see someone cite a source and it'll be a source that can't be identified says we already have a public safety minister and they should be they should be the czar. Or I see, you know, like a captured, you know, Trudeau book author, you know, profile journalist saying it should be the head of CBSA. You know, I'm thinking, is he trial ballooning something for Katie? and quite possibly. And so, yeah, Sean, if, like I said, if we have a PMO lackey that's suggested as a border czar, then I say we're welcoming tariffs. And so it brings us back to, you know, the real issue here. Probably everyone here agrees we need an election and we need it now.

But to take a step back, I mean, I do think that because I've been covering this for years, it's like even with a strong czar in place, there's going to have to be, you know, some understanding that we need a bit of a carve out for shared laws to tackle transnational organized crime, which is connected, you know, to China, which is connected to Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and is using Canada. Like David said, there needs to be a recognition by Canadian citizens that, you know, this is a real issue concern. As I've said before, it's not just magic why your cars are disappearing off the street and, you know, ending up in Saudi Arabia or China. Let's make people understand that, you know, fentanyl cars disappearing, shipped abroad, it's all part of a system that Canada is being

used and everyone needs to care about it and we need, we're going to need some legal changes and it won't be easy because it'll be, as David being from a government background knows, there'll be just the most prominent law firms and lawyers standing in the way of real change here. But I do think there's a growing recognition among Canadian voters and citizens that we got some real issues and it's going to take some real reforms. Yeah. And bully or not, Donald Trump has his mind made up that this is a problem. And he's going to do something about it. And so when he's talking about 51st state, I think he's.

he's telegraphing is basically like, figure this out, or we're not going to give you a choice to figure it out. So in my mind, he's not going to roll over. He's had enough. He's a very big patriot and wants this figured out and wants it figured out quickly. So I would hope that we're in an awful, awful position right now. So we're in purgatory or whatever the word is with the federal government. They can't make a decision. How are we supposed to get something meaningful done in 30 days?

And I struggle with that. At least Daniel Smith seems to be trying to do something, but whatever, Saskatchew and BC borders are right next door. They've got to be able to have lockstep and hand and hand across the border. Yeah, I would say we have to signal good intent. And I would start with picking, you know, a real czar. I'd like to see us sign interoperable agreements that allow the U.S. They have way deeper and more sophisticated systems and capacity to strike than we do,

where we just have a sign-off similar to a lot of what's happening with the RC&P and FBI on notifications. Very similar to what's happening with FinTrack. You know, the Americans have been frustrated at the FinTrack because they've often said, said you have a known IRGC laundering team in Toronto. These are the three names. These are the four fake businesses they're running. This is how it's working. Here you go.

A lot of it's been covered. And Sam, you know, I salute again. Good work. And, you know, what happens is FinTrack is only used to arrest young truckers, their wives, and the little old ladies that sent the money to fund the Bouncy Castle because they were protesting idiotic COVID mandates that were dropped only three months. later because they were right and they had the science better than these so-called public health types.

But Fintrack was employed to destroy civil rights, freeze bank accounts, and used against Canadian citizens for exercising the democratic right to protest. And it's been ignored for the well-known Iranian funding groups and the 600 apparently IRGC agents floating around our streets, half of them claiming asylum because it's a good deal and it kind of allows them to continue to play games with our system. So I would love to see us say, you know what? But we've proven to be incapable under an NDP liberal government of doing anything to anybody that could possibly accuse us of racism.

We've got an industrial complex of lawyers that have figured out how to abuse all of our immigration asylum laws, all of our law enforcement laws, all of our, they've pressed for these bail reforms that allow these criminal syndicates to operate with total impunity no matter what they do. And actually what we need is an interoperable agreement that says, hey, special teams, if you give us and notice that there's a super lab in BC and we're a little bit worried about going in there, we're going to allow Team 3 to go in and rip that place apart, burn it to the ground, and kill all the guys involved by accident because we have this interoperable security agreement. As long as that happens, we can just announce we got rid of a lab.

We haven't gotten serious as a country yet for our own people. This is the thing that blows to my mind. There are, you know, in Alberta, we struggle with what's happening in the opioid crisis. We see it on our streets. We see good kids getting pulled into this stuff. We see, you know, you talk to people in the Sikh community. These Sikh gangs prey on the young men in that community, right? They pull them into this.

It's a threat if you don't go, right? This is bad what's happening to Canadians. The fact that this is that doing these security, fixing this problem, which is a deep problem hurting Canadians, has had to come at the, the knife edge of the American saying, please fix this stuff is embarrassing for us as a nation. And again, the narrative blows my mind. How is it that Canada has gotten to a point where we are forced to do the right thing for Canadians by our friends down south and to pretend that that's bullying, right? It's extraordinary to me that the moral authority of our own government has

fallen so far that their reaction to things is to play this up and immediately punch the of trade wars, they can't win, dumb ideas like trying to target red states, which, by the way, when you win a landslide, isn't every state except a few on both coasts or red state now? You know, like, this is nuts. These guys haven't thought it through. They're trying to talk tough. They have their only interest to staying in power as long as they can by appealing to the sad little domestic perspective that what's happening is mean because the population is uninformed about

how bad we've let this get. So, yeah, on the fentanyls are on the interoperability, I totally agree. I wouldn't give this government any more power. powers over civil rights that it can abuse using financial or criminal law. But I would say part of the answer to our problem is going to be saying to the Americans, you know what? You tell us what you want us to do, and then we will sign deals to let you help us do it. Because that way I find I'm an American and I'm in this business. I say, you know what, they're serious because the fentanyls are, and at least if they can't

get it done, agree with us that when we give them the list of the, you know, 280 IRGC agents that we know are actually actively involved in subversive activity, we can work with them to round those guys up on both sides of the border. We can run a tactical team to do that because we're good at doing that and the Canadians haven't had practice for nine years. And I mean, I know Brett is rightly concerned with, you know, greater powers for FinTrack to collect information from good businesses and then do nothing with it. It's a pure waste. It's onerous. And the practicality of this is as I reported the DEA would come up to you know experts I'll just call them experts in Vancouver and say we know El Chapo is you know whatever top I in BC is

operating there let's get a wire tap up on them and they couldn't do it they could not do it in Canada because of whatever you know the charter being used as a shield being used by the cartels and triads and so it just makes sense that that carve out whether it's a law interoperability, right? Let's save the Canadians from like having to spill their guts to the government and focus on the real problems that both the US and the CIA, CIS, FBI, RCP, they know who the bad guys are. Can I, Sam, it's almost the top of the hour.

I hate to ask this question because I'm like, I feel like it'll take 20 minutes to answer. Do we have any extra time to ask? I'm just curious, why Canada? I was having this discussion yesterday about why Canada? You know, like when the look at the numbers and David pointed out, right? It's not how high the number is of fentanyl being trafficked. Yeah, that's right. I think is if I'm reading you, you correctly, it's like you can see the problem happening.

And I go, what is it about Canada? Well, it's it's the growth and something that I think people are missing a little bit is it's the growth of Vancouver as a decentralized hub that China. and the cartels are using for their fentanyl production. And this is what I documented in willful blindness. You need to look at, if people want to talk about border seizures, look at some of the precursor volumes that have luckily, fortunately, being stopped by CBSA. Like the amount, I'm talking about hundreds of kilograms

of precursors, right? We're talking about buckets of NPP, boatloads. And so when you look at the killing power of what China is delivering into Vancouver as a decentralized production hub where the triads have been set up since the 1980s with a deep, you know, I write in the Bureau in the last week that the triads have infiltrated Vancouver's port. They actually, they have operational control of facilities. And this is known by Canadian intelligence. So when you ask why Canada is, It's because if I have to really be blunt here, there are CIS and RCMP officers that have reported and known that Chinese intelligence and organized crime has corrupted elements at the high political level in Canada.

And this includes high level business persons, lawyers. There are concerns about former prime ministers. I'll leave it at that to the point where they're set, China as a state entity and an organized crime proxy model has such a economic footprint in Vancouver that answers the question, why is the U.S. concerned about us in fentanyl? It's not about, you know, 40 pounds of fentanyl caught at the border last year. It's about that capacity for production and what we don't know about. The last point is Canada is now an export nation. So some of that fentanyl is being routed to Australia, Japan, reloaded, related, and coming, I believe, coming back into American ports where it wouldn't look like it's from Vancouver, but it is, I believe.

Could I say then just to finally, and whether you can disagree or maybe pull holes in it, it's kind of like if you're China, looking at Canada or you're anyone else for that matter who wants to harm the United States specifically, it's kind of like a perfect storm. You got you got ports that are corrupted. You got government officials. You got lawyers. You rattled off a bunch there. Even the highest level of government officials all corrupted. You got lax, beyond lax, criminal laws. And then you got proximity, right?

Like, I mean, honestly, you've got this giant border of the United States that's, you know, relatively unprotected. And so it's almost the perfect storm if you're somebody who doesn't like our friends to the south. Would I be wrong in that summarization? I believe that's the accurate assessment. I've always said that China, if you're doing business with them, you're really doing business with their military. And they look at the world like a risk board. They look at Canada as a beachhead. I do believe that's true. And my evidence here is back in 2017, a state department official started asking me to go out for coffee. And they said, what you're reporting at the Vancouver Sun about all this real estate money from China, all the drug concerns. We have the same concerns that China is getting just much too big of a footprint in Western Canada. And our guys in the DA say your RCP won't work with us. It's all excuses. So, yeah, China is using Canada as a proxy.

I can't say it any simpler. That's the American concern. And people need to realize that we are at war. They recognize that they can't beat the Americans by trying to invade them. So they're basically going to try and destroy them from within. And what better way to do it, like you say, a beachhead right next door? Look, I think we have as a country in front of us in the next few months and USMCA is going to come up to build the best version of this relationship in history. I think we have an opportunity to address exactly what Sam's talking about by saying, look, we want to clean our streets.

We want the Chinese and Iranian machine out of our country. We're committed to getting this fixed for Canadians first and also because it started to pour over the border into America. It's shocking that Canada's reached such a low point that this is the nature of the conversation and that Secretary of State Rubio writing his letter got ignored. You can bet these guys are going to play hardball, but I think there's an opportunity for us to build a critical mineral strategy and Arctic strategy. If we can borrow $50 billion for EVs and light that on fire in only two years, we can make our NATO commitments, right? We're the unsurious country right now. We do nothing for the climate and burn $50 billion betting against Chinese supply chains and Tesla.

I'm not laughing at that. I just find it stunning. And then we show up at NATO being the one deadbeat that can't even meet the R&D requirement. So I think that what's ahead of us is an opportunity to do of reset on security on the border and on the economy, integrate those. And by the way, when we integrate those, that separates us from Mexico. So I personally think that we should offer an integrated NORAD that is totally bilateral. And I think we should say in the next round, we're not going to do a USMCA.

We're going to do a USCA. Mexico can go stuff itself. It's a narco state that's connected to terrorists. They're the ones shipping finished goods over. That's the real trade deficit. Ours is all inputs and cross-border goods finishing. And so I think we're in a moment that's a real opportunity. We have to seize it.

and hopefully we're able to get a new government in to really sort of make that operational because what's ahead of us is a great opportunity with this administration to build something that can make Canadians insanely prosperous if we manage it, right? Jens, appreciate you hopping on and doing this. I'll make sure down on the show notes we put where to find you on social media. And Sam, as I keep pointing out, I went down the San Cooper rabbit hole. The only thing I haven't done is read your book. That's coming shortly.

and I'd push people if they're enjoying this conversation. That might be a good thing to do either way. Thanks for hopping on, fellas, and talking about this.