Shaun Newman Podcast - #848 - Cornerstone Forum

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

The Cornerstone Forum is the Shaun Newman Podcast’s annual event that brings in speakers from around the world to help us navigate the year ahead and to build community. On today’s show you will hear three keynote speeches from:Caylan Ford is the founder of Alberta Classical Academy, an educational institution that emphasizes classical education principles. With a commitment to providing students with a rigorous academic foundation in the liberal arts, she focuses on cultivating critical thinking, moral philosophy, and leadership skills.Chace Barber is the founder of Edison Motors, a company dedicated to revolutionizing the electric vehicle industry. Through Edison Motors, Barber aims to contribute to the clean energy movement and promote sustainable transportation solutions. His focus is on designing and manufacturing high-performance electric vehicles that are accessible and environmentally responsible.Rod Giltaca is the CEO of the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights, an advocacy group focused on defending the rights of Canadian firearm owners. Under his leadership, the CCFR works to protect gun rights, promote firearm safety, and educate the public about responsible firearm ownership.To watch the Full Cornerstone Forum: https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcastGet your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500Silver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]Bow Valley Credit UnionWebsite: www.BowValleycu.comEmail: [e-mail] Use the code “SNP” on all ordersProphet River Links:Website: store.prophetriver.com/Email: [e-mail]

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. How's everybody doing? Happy Wednesday back in the studio, man. It feels nice to be home.

It just feels nice to be home. And all the pressures of not only the 12-hour live stream, stream coming gone and now the Cornerstone Forum, you know, just like that, it's over. And to be back in studio, back home, saw the kids before I came in and record this, and, you know, a couple more days and I'll be right as rain, folks. Not that I was ever anything but that, just a little draggy, just dragging a little bit. We got the Cornerstone Forum. Well, I'll talk about that here in a second.

Let's start here. The number ounces of silver needed to buy an ounce of gold now at near 30-year highs. They say silver is now a bargain price when compared to gold. And it's the perfect time to protect a portion of your savings with silver. And silver gold bowl has a wide variety of the best value silver for every budget. Simply text or email Graham for details. That's down on the show notes. Whether you are a season investor or new to precious metals,

Graham will work with you to answer your questions and recommend the best products to meet your investing goals. Silvergoldbull.com. Just make sure you reference Sean Newman podcast while you're doing it. It can get you special deals, and it's certainly how. helps all of us out. Bow Valley Credit Union. They are your Alberta regulated, fully service financial institution

is proud to present the first in Canada, gold collateral lending, and all of you can lend against your physical gold and silver for favorable rates. It's like a heluck on your gold and silver. And if you don't got any precious metals, they can help you get a loan to purchase that as well. You can email welcome at Bow ValleyCU to get your dot com,

sorry, polealliCCU.com And contact Lian to get your BVCU membership started today. And you can find them at Bow Valley, CU.com in general. We got Caleb Taves, Renegade Acres, when it comes to concrete. They do a fine job, folks, and they help support the podcast by doing the community spotlight. And today on the podcast is three of the keynote speeches and the rest of the Cornerstone Forum. Sorry, three Keynotes, what am I doing here?

Three keynote speeches from the Cornerstone Forum. and I just took three in a row and put them in for today, so it'd give you a taste, and then everything else is going to be, half the show is uploaded on the substack for tonight or today as you listen to this, sorry, as I'm sitting here, it's uploading. So if you want to go see the show, you know, in its entirety and click on different speakers, that type of thing, it's going to be available on substack. Part of it is going to be for free. Part of it's going to be behind a paywall.

So if you're looking to become a paid member, no better time than sitting on the other side of the country. You couldn't make the cornerstone form. You want to see it. It's all going to be up here, hopefully by the end of today. Hopefully, the first part is for sure up. The second part, we're just working on fine-tuning, and then it's all there for you. So if you want to hop on and check out Substack sign up today, it's every week on Sundays. We try to have a week in review, and then Sean gets doing what he's doing.

and I've missed a few weeks, so my apologies to the Substack folks, but the Cornerstone Forum is going to be uploaded, and I think everybody's going to be pretty excited about that. I know I was excited to see the film footage and hear some of the talks, because as you can imagine, me being the time cop, running around, making sure things run smooth. I miss some of the speeches, and I've been really enjoying what I hear and see, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on Substack as well.

You could just text me, that's cool too. If you're listening or watching on Spotify or Apple, YouTube, Rumble, make sure to subscribe, make sure to leave a review, make sure to re-hit retweet on X. Make sure to do all the things. Now, onto that tale of the tape. The Cornerstone Forum is an annual event hosted by, yes, yours truly the Sean Newman podcast, and it is an event designed to take a look at the world today, bring incredible voices who not only shape my worldview, but yours as well,

and try and chart a path forward in the coming year. Today's speakers on the show are Chase Barber, Kaelan Ford, and Rod Giltaka. So buckle up, here we go. I'm retrain my brain. It's good morning, folks. I'm Sean Newman, and I'm going to be the host of today's Cornerstone event, the second annual Cornerstone event. And I guess I've got to start with them.

I always say this, and I truly mean it. I'm truly humbled that you would give up your hard-earned money to come to something like this. and probably more importantly, on a Mother's Day weekend, your hard-earned time. So thanks once again for making it and entrusting me to give you something, hopefully that you'll remember for the days ahead. To all the mothers in attendance, when we picked Mother's Day weekend, I assured myself it would be okay. And seeing you all here today ensured that I was partially correct,

I'm sure there are some fantastic women in the audience. I've got to speak to one who probably can't hear me. But this is our 11th event together. My wife and I, she's ran the front door. Many of you would have been checked in by her. And to bring her away from her kids to do this, I know people say behind every great man's a greater woman. And I truly am a testament to that saying.

She is fantastic. And I could gush on, but I just want to give a round of applause to all the moms. in attendance on Mother's Day weekend. You probably noticed when you came down the stairs, there was two sponsors revolving on the screens. That's Silver Gold Bull and Bow Valley Credit Union. When they said, you should bring this to Calgary, I flat out told them no.

I'm like, no, I'm not doing that. And I'd done an event previously outside Lloydminster, and it took years off my life. The stress and just, you know, it wasn't that much fun for me. And so I told them all my problems. and they kept, you know, just come down, come down, come down. So I got to admit, give credit, sorry, where credits do, and that is to Silver Gold Bowl and

Bow Valley Credit Union. They're the reason this is a possibility. They twisted my arm in the best possible way and found a way to bring the Cornerstone forum to Calgary. So a round of applause for Silver Gold Bowl and Bowley Credit Union. My first live event was three years ago, March 22, just after all the shenanigans. I was on stage with Daniel Smith. She was before she was Premier.

Although she did announce on that stage, she was going to run for Premier, so take that. Andre Mamery, Shane Getson, and I ran into him here up top, Dr. Eric Payne. And I would love it if you'd give him a round of applause. Dr. Eric Payne, still, to this day, holds a special place, not only in the downloads of the podcast,

but just what he came on and talked about at a very critical time, I think, in a lot of... I know my life, and I assume others as well. That show, back in March of 2022, I remember thinking, I don't know, days before, I missed the feeling before a big hockey game. I played hockey all my life. And it was, it's a special rush to step out on a clean sheet ice, fans in the stands. And, you know, every hit, ooh, a goal, you know, at home. And I just, I missed it.

And I walked on stage that night. and I found it again. I was like, holy crap, here it is. It's a surreal feeling to be in front of a live audience. And it shocked me back then, and I thought, oh, you know, my new home is the stage. The ice rink has become the stage, and I said it that night.

So you fast forward three years, you know, as the stage has become my new rink. And I can't tell you how surreal it is to be in an arena on an ice floor with all you in attendance, to have some of these amazing speakers here who've shaped my worldview, and I'm sure a lot of you out there. I want to have just a quick round of applause for all the speakers.

I mean, like, you've got people from all over the world, so if you give them a round of applause for giving up a weekend to be here with all of you. Each year, I record upwards of 250 podcasts, seeking the most compelling voices to make sense of our world. And that, folks, is the heart of the Cornerstone Forum. bringing together impactful perspectives to distill what's happening and chart of course forward. And I often see life as a voyage, where like tales of the old, we must brace for approaching storms. And here in Canada, while the liberals have secured their fourth term,

Mark Kearney serves as our prime minister, and I think in a lot of the conversations, there's a growing west-east divide, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Well, you could say the stress in our country is real. It's real in my life. and one of the ways I've found peace and wisdom has come through reading the Bible. This morning I flipped it open and Proverbs 1025 told me

when the storm is swept by the wicked or gone but the righteous stand firm forever and furthermore Proverbs 3, 5, 6 urges trusted in the Lord with all your heart lean not on your own understanding in all your ways submit to him

and he will make your path straight For those not driven by faith, no worries. My wife can attest to this too. I love a good time travel movie. To Tom Luongo, we've talked about Christopher Nolan. He had a great one, tenant. And one of his characters, Neil says to the protagonist, what's happens, happened.

It's an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world. It's not an excuse to do nothing. So today we're here to act, to learn, and to chart a path forward together. And you're going to find on your schedules in front of you, I've got a tough job ahead of me. I want to make sure your time's well spent, and I'm committed to making that happen.

So let's get started showing. I've been asked today to speak about education, and I understood this task to mean that I'm supposed to talk about what is wrong with contemporary education and what we can do about it. And this credential that would seem to qualify me for this task, as John mentioned, is that I'm the founder of the classical academy,

It's Canada's first non-sectarian tuition-free classical education program. We opened our first school in the Bridgeland community here in Calgary. We spoke two and a half years ago with under 300 students. This year we have 1,300 and three campuses across two cities and are looking to expand more, as we have about 3,000 students on our wait list. But there are other aspects of my background, like academic training and personal experiences

that I think are actually more salient. and that it afforded me may be more specific in sense into the question of what is wrong with education. One of those is a very long-standing interest, personal, academic, and professional in understanding the nature of totalitarian regimes, and of political and philosophical evil more broadly. And there's always a risk of being accused of hyperbole or insensitivity or in gratitude when we compare our own society to the sort of poorer of 20th century totalitarianism, as it manifested in places like the Soviet Union, North Korea, China, and Germany, for example. In our own society, most of us, there's maybe some exceptions in this room,

are not at much risk of receiving a midnight knock at the door and being hauled off to a hula. The coercive tools of the state that were as ever present in stonomish with Russia for example, are much more subtle in our own society. There's both less naked political violence and far less obvious state enforcement of an official ideology. But the ideology that we have is no less totalizing. Its lies are no less demoralizing or humiliating

than the lies propagated under totalitarian regimes. And the personal consequences of non-compliance can be devastating in their own ways. Some of you are probably familiar with some aspect of my personal biography. I was experienced what we call cancel culture and very into some dramatic fashion, and so I'm pretty familiar with the social implications of this.

Our cultural revolution was not sudden, top-down, it wasn't a cleansing fire that burned the foundations of our society, a culture, or history, of traditions. It was a much slower burden. But it has achieved remarkably similar results, and at times, as a time, has a lot of history. employed eerily similar means. But I remember as a child, I think when my interest in this was first sparked when I was about

14 studying the Russian Revolution. And as I looked at it, and then subsequently the communist revolutions in China, a practice called Bonn, which is persecuted very severely by the Chinese Communist Party today, and certain questions became embedded in my soul, just how could this have happened? Why did so many people participate in such alacrity in the destruction and the impudiation of their civilizations? Did they actually believe the lies they were told to parent? And if not, how did they assent to such obvious falsehoods? How do they allow themselves to be demoralized by repeating slogans that they didn't believe in?

How do they participate in the ritual denunciations, the beatings, even the killing of their fellow human beings? And if they weren't active participants, why did they stand passively? by as this was happening. And there were a couple awful revelations that struck me. First is that it didn't happen overnight. Fertuitous conditions had been laid over several decades in which people came to be able to accept totalitarian rule even sometimes to crave it. And by the time they noticed what was happening, if they did notice, it was too late. It's kind of reminiscent of that line from Hemingway of how did you go bankrupt gradually and then suddenly. The second is that many people

living under these regimes, if they did notice that something was wrong, were simply too demoralized to do anything about it, and they were just keeping their heads down and doing what was necessary to get on. They were trying to preserve themselves. And the people who did actively participate in evil, those who were beating and murdering others in the streets, or in the gulags or the concentration camps, they did so often with a complete conviction that they were on the right side of history, as though the calendar somehow. as the arbiter of morality. Or Sholes-Nitsyn tells us to do evil,

a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good. And these thoughts filled me with a kind of terror. How is it possible that we could do evil while thinking that we're doing good? So I resolved to try to understand and recognize the signs of this philosophical corruption and the means by which I could resist it

first in my own person and hopefully help inoculate us on a broader scale against these so that we're not so easily swept belong by fashionable ideologies. I wanted to be the kind of person who would refuse to inform on or injure others, who would refuse

to participate or acquiesce to a mob. And in the 20 years or so that followed that, I spent a great deal of my time working with refugees and political and religious dissidents who had fled authoritarian regimes, particularly communist China. In my academic work, likewise, I studied 20th century

comparative politics, international human rights law, international criminal law, and worked in some related fields. Now, we're all aware, I think, in our own society that over the last few decades, the parallels between our own society and totalitarianism have maybe become more obvious to some of us. Prescient thinkers like Watzlov Havel and Shulzenitsyn saw this many, many decades ago, but it took me a little while longer. An example of this, for example, is in the academy.

The truth-seeking mission of the university, for example, has largely been supplanted as the teleological goal in favor of something like the remaking of society along certain abstracted ideas of what justice should look like, not how it does look. It's kind of reminiscent of, you know,

Marx had that famous line about how the philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. This is Marx's idea, right? So we're not trying to apprehend reality. We're not trying to describe what is true We're not engaged in what Eric Voglin calls

the loving philosophical endeavor to apprehend the order of being and attune our souls to it. Rather, we're trying to bring the order of being under human control under our dominion and to reshape it. Also, I think many of us are familiar. As I alluded to the demoralizing lies of our own society, again, a very, this is sort of low-hanging fruit, a very obvious example, is the corruption of language

as it relates to biological categories. We talk about pregnant people and uterus havers and the idea that men can become women and vice versa, and this is sort of official doctrine. The distortions of language like this are familiar to anyone who's accustomed to decoding communist propaganda. It's really one of the most startling features of totalitarianism, besides the use of force. It's the use of lies. It's the way that language was used in ways that were disconnected from observable concrete reality. Vatzelvaevil and Joseph Piper described this as a pseudo-reality. Voglin calls it entry into a secondary reality that is divorced from things as they actually are.

And the state of the secondary reality, I will try not to get too philosophical here, one of the challenges is that you lose the idea that reality is given to you, that it has a transcendent source, that there is, let's say, a creator, a god, a logos behind creation. You lose that, and so really, you also lose the transcendent source of kind of moral guidance. There's no more idea that truth, justice, goodness, are actual real qualities that we can apprehend, that we can turn ourselves to, and instead, truth just becomes whatever power says it is. I think that is in many ways the state that we're in today. But what can be done about this?

Well, fortunately, I think it's easy to despair, but we can. look back in history and find examples and models of people who likewise were confronted with a state of civilizational decay, of spiritual and philosophical inversion and disorder, and who found ways to try to rectify the sources of moral order in their civilizations. One example of that is Plato, of course. Plato, I think, like, well, okay, I'm going to stay in the West. I'm not going to go into the East and look at the Confucian parallels. But Plato attempted to try to restore the sources of order through politics, and he wasn't really successful. And one of the things he realized was that there are simply too few properly formed people, friends, with whom he could actually affect real change. If you want to accomplish something in politics, you need friends, you need a

sort of critical mass of people who know how to do it and know where to go. And he lacked that. This is, you know, if you've ever read Thucydides, there are vivid descriptions of the moral and spiritual collapse of Hellenistic society, and that's what Plato was dealing with. So he resolved instead to start his academy, named after the attic hero Academos, so it was in the glade of Academos, that he decided the way to set the right the order of the world was to actually train the next generation, to form the souls through education. And it's worth analyzing what that term means. education comes from the Latin educare, which actually means to extract, to draw out. And that raises the question, well, what are we drawing people out of? What are we drawing them towards? Plato illustrates this idea or the ideal of the educator with his parable of the cave. I'm sure many of you are familiar with it. But in the parable of the cave,

you have this image of prisoners who are in a cave, changed to a wall, their necks and their legs are bound. And so they can only face in one direction. They're looking at another wall of the cave. And sitting and right behind them, what they're chained to, is a low wall, and behind it is a perpetually blazing flame. And some people, there are people, I don't know who they are, really, but they've got these little figurines, vases and figurines of animals and of people, basically puppets, and they pass them between the flame and the low wall to cast shadows in front of the prisoners. And the prisoners mistake this display of shadows as the whole of reality, not realizing it's actually just a sort of vague, a shadow or projection or a simulacrum. But one day then, one of the prisoners is forcibly made to stand up.

He's unshackled and he's turned around. His soul is turned around and he sees for the first time the actual the flame. And this is very startling. It pains the eyes if you're accustomed to darkness to suddenly see the source of light. And then he's pulled out of the cave and in. into the light of the sun. This is even more dazzling, and again, more painful. But this is the glimpse of the actual source of reality. It's the vision of the Agathon, what Ockley-Bergson calls the opening of the soul. You apprehend the truth of things as they really are. And in contrast to that,

the shadows on the cave wall no longer hold any significance. Now, if this person tries to go back down into the cave and rouse his fellow prisoners and tell them that they've been entranced all along by false appearances, by mere shadows. They won't believe him. They'll probably set upon him and kill him if they don't mock him first or some combination of all of these. But the duty of the philosophers,

Plato says, is to go back down into the cave. So no coincidence, actually. The very first lines of the Republic are, I went down. So Plato is undertaking this task to go back down into the cave and to turn people's souls around, away from the things that are ephemeral,

fleeting and unreal, and toward the ultimate source of our being and the ultimate truth. So my tie, see my clock is starting to run down, but I'll just add, there's one more little etymological lesson that I think is valuable. I just talked about the term education, which means to draw out into the light of reality. That, by the way, if you're going to be an educator, the whole task is predicated on the idea that there is a reality, that there is a sort of capitalty truth. This is a very, an idea that makes a lot of educators today squirm. They say, no, there's my truth and there's your truth,

and they're all fungible and they're all subjective. A person with that attitude cannot educate because there's nothing toward which they would turn the soul. But another term I'll look at is the word school. I run multiple schools. I talk to a lot of people who work in schools, and whenever I ask them, what does school mean? Most people don't know.

School comes from the Greek Schole. which means leisure. It's sort of the opposite of what we often think of when we think of the tedium of going to school. And so what is leisure, really? For that definition, I think it's helpful to turn to Joseph Piper, who's a great 20th century philosopher, and he describes leisure as an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence. It means not being busy, but letting things take their course. Anyone familiar with Chinese philosophy would recognize the parallels to the Taoist idea

of Wu Wei to be without action or intent. It is a form of silence that is the prerequisite for the apprehension of reality. Only the silent can hear, and those who are not silent do not hear. It's a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude. And it is the prerequisite

for the capacity to steep oneself in the whole of creation. So if I can leave you with one thing today, it is, I hope that you, amidst friends and amidst learning, that you also tape time for silent apprehension, and that's the means by which we can actually attune our souls to the things that are permanent and real.

Thanks. This is honestly way worse, too, being in front of everyone, because normally when I'm just doing the podcast with Sean, I'm just looking at Sean, but I get to look at you guys. Well, so to get started, my name's Chase. I'm with Edison Motors, and basically my story is about three years ago. We decided to build our own trucks.

We were looking at electric trucks, and I saw a lot of the benefit of these trucks. There was definitely some benefits of electric. I like the thousand horsepower. 1,200 horsepower, that's what I wanted. But we saw that there was an issue with that involving range, and we're hauling logs, and one day we looked over at the old La Torano log loader. I used to haul logs out of merit. We were hauling into Aspen planers, and I looked at this old Laternal log loader,

and they had three of them. One was built in 1967. One was built in 1969. The other one was built in 71. So these trucks and these machines are over 50 years old and they were all diesel electric. So they were full hybrid machines. They had electric drawworks, electric hub drive motors, and they had an old Detroit diesel generator

to power everything. They were super efficient. These trucks were 50 years old. They were still unloading 200 trucks per day. Then we started looking into freight trains and those were all diesel electric and it suddenly occurred to us, well, why don't we just do that for electric trucks? I mean, if freight trains have been doing it since the 1930s, how hard could it be? And we decided, well, none of the other manufacturers were building a truck for us. I saw the advantage as being a logger out of BC with these trucks. We're going uphill empty. We grab the logs of the top of the

hill and we have all that regenerative energy when we're coming down that we can recapture that energy coming down to store it into the batteries to keep moving. And then when you need to get a little bit of extra range, the batteries get low, you fire up that diesel generator, it recharges the batteries, and it goes to the mill. But nobody was doing that. Everyone wanted full electric, has to be 100% zero emissions. Or it has to be hydrogen or something. Like, let's just put, let's just copy that old Laternal. If RJ Laeterno could build it in the 1960s, I'm sure we could probably figure it out. And, well, how hard could it be? Turns out it was very hard. Really, really hard. Way harder than you would think. But we built a couple prototypes and the first one kind of socked. Really sucked. And the second prototype, but did a little better. Still sucked a bit, but it was an improvement. And we were able to take that truck out to customers. We were able to show them how it worked. Let them drive it. Let them pull some of their loads around. They could see the power. They could see the torque. We were showing a 30 to 40% reduction in fuel cost.

in some of these operations. Actually, some of them can show up as high as 60, 70, but that's extreme logging examples. So this showed real fuel cost, and where a logging truck burning $15,000, $20,000 a month in fuel, that 35% fuel cost, well, that's working out to $5,000, $6,000 a month. That's a truck payment rate there. So, well, that correlated directly with the emission results.

If you're burning less fuel and you're electric and your hybrid, you're doing less emissions. And then it got on to our second point why we started this company and why I've been very vocal on YouTube and we've been trying to show how it works is there's a lot of the ways that the industry is going that I don't like.

You see these trucks. You see tractors, you see heavy equipment, you can't fix them, you can't repair them, you buy them, a $400 sensor goes out, shuts your whole machine down, you need a computer program that's $30,000 to fix the sensor and plug it back in.

And this is a trend that's been continuing in the trucking and the heavy equipment industry for a long time and this planned obsolescence, lack of right to repair. And all of a sudden realize, like, if this equipment is built in the 1960s, 1970s, and they've been maintaining it and repairing it, it's pretty reliable. And when you fundamentally look at electrics, like, trust me, if a bunch of loggers, like, we built these trucks in my parents' backyard. If a bunch of truckers and loggers could figure out how to build this in the parents' backyard, there's no reason you need a bunch of specialized tools and specialized parts and knowledge. Electric motors, after all, it's a big piece of copper wrapped around a magnet with two bearings. There's not a lot that really can go wrong.

A diesel generator running flat out as a generator can just run at one peak RPM. It's going to last a long time. So why all of a sudden are these parts getting so expensive? So that was the other reason we kind of started this company. We realized that we could take those off-the-shelf parts, and we could grab them, figure out what works, put them into a truck. I mean, a tight 30-30 brake pot has been a tight-30 brake pot since 1955. We don't need to reinvent the wheel.

So we put all those things together, and the result was a couple working trucks. Showed off. Now we're building the next 10 trucks. That was a whole... to find a place to build the 10 trucks. We asked my mom and she did have a problem with them all 10 being built in their backyard at this point as we start growing. So there has been some struggles with that. We used to have a great truck manufacturing history in this province in this country. Kenworth used to be a Canadian company. They were built down in Vancouver. Hayes, Pacific,

both built down in Langley. Western Star used to have a huge truck plant in Colon And you ask anyone back in the day, the toughest trucks on the road were Kenworth, Pacific, Hayes, and Western Sar. They were built in Canada by the Canadian industry to serve the Canadian industry. And then what happened? They got bought out by American companies, shut the plant down. Packar acquired Hayes, immediately shut Hayes truck production down six months later. Well, they took over Kenworth, took over Kenworth Canada, or Canadian Kenworth, shut the plant down. Pacific was bought out by international, the plant shut down.

Western Star was bought out by Daimler and Freightliner. They shut that plant down in Colonna, moved all the jobs down south. And what have we seen? We've seen a deterioration in the quality. They're serving the U.S. market, which is fair. It is a bigger market for these truck producers. The U.S. market buys 10 times more trucks than we do. They got 10 times a population, but it's a different market than we have.

Like, when you look at it, they're hauling dry vans with 80,000. They have a max limit whereas in Canada, Alberta, BC, we're going up to 150,000 pounds. It's a different market that's just not being served, but that goes back to where we were doing in our struggles. So we actually were going to buy the old, this is how crazy Canada is, we were going to buy the old hayes truck production plant up in Terrace, BC. That plant is still there. It hasn't been used in 20 years.

It's been sitting basically abandoned. and we went up there, we struck a deal, we had the financing lined up with an investor who was going to fund the project, fund us to bring that Hayes truck production factory back up to snuff, get her going, and then what does the terrorist local government say? We don't want to see manufacturing here.

No, we're not going to approve your business permit. We do not want to see manufacturing in our city. That's not the look we want. We think that that property and that huge 30,000 square foot manufacturing line would be better sure for commercial services. Something like a coffee shop. It's right on the side of the highway. That would be a pretty big drive-through, I guess, but... It's just, it is absolutely crazy. But we are still doing it,

and we are still showing that despite our government constantly throwing in these hurdles, you can't get a building permit, you can't get a zoning permit, we're still doing it. And that does bring us to the next hurdle, which I know we're talking about, China and we've been putting on tariffs and one of the most frustrating things about that. So we're now setting up our production and we sourced a lot of Canadian businesses, smaller shops that build the parts for our trucks that we are now putting on to the next customer trucks. And what does our government do with all this US stuff?

In order to protect like 500 steel manufacturing jobs in Ontario, recently now they decided to put a tariff on raw steel exports from China. Well, Canada doesn't produce enough. steel for our own domestic supply. We need to get them elsewhere. So what did they do? They just tariff the raw steel that our shops that build our parts need, but they didn't tariff the finished products. So we're talking to these shops that are trying to grow with us. Number one, they can't get their building permits either to grow, but they're trying to get the raw steel so that they can build our parts, that we can build in our trucks. And the government basically said, hey, we don't

want to see that raw steel being manufactured here. We're not going to tariff the finished product from China, but we will tariff the import that our shops use, so that's just that was another crazy thing we've just been dealing with here, but we're still

doing it. It's so frustrating. There is some hope, though, and I didn't even know places like this. So when we were looking, Tara said no, you can't build your trucks here. We don't want to see the manufacturing. The city of Golden reached out to us in the Columbia Swushwap Regional District and a couple landowners. I didn't know this. Do you know that there's areas in Canada? The

Columbia Shuswap Regional District and basically the town of Donald where we're at requires no building permits and has no zoning? Their attitude and we talked with them, their attitude was, hey, we just want to see businesses come in here and do what they need to do. Who is our place to have a zoning? There's already a provincial building code. You have to follow the provincial building code. Follow that and you're good. Why do you need to ask a second thing? And then they're talking to them further. Like, we're able to keep our property taxes low. I don't have a huge permitting office that we got to play for. I don't need all these inspectors. I don't need all this code. Why am I going to delay you six months to a year for you to request a building permit on your own land,

for you to use your, you want to build a test track, you build a test track. You want to build a factory, build a factory. You want to bring employee housing? Bring employee housing. We had to build employee housing. Turns out there's like no housing in Canada anymore, so we had to build houses for the employees to move to the property to do it. Turns out there's a lot to build in trucks. All we had to do was fix the government zoning issues, the government compliance, fix the housing crisis, fix the production supply chains that existed in Canada from the issues and the industries that we lost over the last 30 years.

build the trucks. I do feel like I'm doing a lot of side quest in this game to build trucks, but that is basically the story of Edison Motors. We've been posting it all on YouTube, social media, so everyone can kind of follow along and see these hurdles. Some of these hurdles, they have been government hurdles. We have made some people angry. But we also have shown that you can do it again in Canada. Everyone said that kind of companies only exist. for billionaires with huge tech investors. That kind of innovation, it comes from Silicon Valley. That comes from the Teslas, the Nikolas, the Hylians.

That comes from those Americans with deep pockets and deep venture capital. Well, we showed in Canada that we haven't lost that truck knowledge. We were able to find the guys that used to work for Western Star, find the guys that used to work for Pacific, group together, and we were able to show that a bunch of Canadian JIPO logger, working out in the bush in BC could figure out how this hybrid electric drive system worked better than those Silicon Valley Dushes. Anyways, that is basically my time, but we can do it in Canada. We can bring this manufacturing back. There are a bunch of stupid hurdles we got to get through, but I feel promising for Western Canada. I really, really do.

So, anyways, Sean, thanks for having me up here. Good morning. We're still morning, I think. Close enough. So I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you guys today. It's a real honor. Although when I was watching everyone else, I was like, how am I going to do a mic drop when the mics are mounted to this thing, which was my plan at the end. But anyway, I'll come up with some other interesting way to end it. So the theme of this panel or these conversations is, well, as Sean had told me, was solutions in a world of problems. And we have a couple problems. I think I'm not alone in thinking that. And of course, I'm with the gun lobby in Canada, and we think that firearms are an important part of a free and

equitable society. There's a way that you can have people own firearms and not have a negative impact on public safety. So, you know, there's an argument there. So I wanted to just kind of talk to you about some of the challenges that we face trying to protect those rights because it's very difficult in Canada because we don't have codified rights. Right? I'm very running the gun lobby in Canada. Who would have thought, right? So anyway, and then I just want to share with you a little bit how we're approaching it or

just how we're coping with our big disappointment that we had a couple of weeks ago because it was rather disappointing for us. All right. So, as you know, I'm with the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights. we are the largest and most influential gun lobby organization in Canada by a considerable margin. And it's not a boast, but I'm just going to tell you about some of the stuff that we've done. It has never been done. And the way that we operate and the way that we've gotten so big is what we do is we try,

we dream up everything that could possibly be done, and then we try it. We don't know if any of that stuff's going to work, but at least we have an answer to all of those questions. We have a community who has spent the last 35 years going, oh, if only we had full-page ads and newspapers. If only we get on television. If only we could take the government to court and get a real legal team to do it. If only, well, we've done all these things. So at least we have the answers.

And I can't tell you that it's worked. That's the downside. But that's not going to stop us from continuing to try things and fight these people for every inch that they take. So as an organization, we have built a big tent, and that's something that I do want to make mention of. It's very easy for conservatives. It's like hurting cats because we're independent-minded for us to break into smaller groups all the time and diminish our advantage. There are a lot of us.

We saw that in the vote count in the last federal election. It's very easy for us to atomize ourselves. So you have to build a big tent, so whether it's your business or an organization, that's critically important if you want to survive. The leftists, they'll agree to anything. There's nothing off the table. There's nothing too crazy. So they get along quite well. So we've got to just pay attention to that. So that's one of the reasons why we've become what we have. But in our fight, we have four general problems. We are a minority group where there's about 2.4 million licensed gun owners in Canada, and there's 40 million people in Canada right now. Maybe what, 26 million or adults, right, above 18?

So, you know, we're a minority group, so we get outvoted. So one of our problems is we have to manage the image of what licensed gun owners or legal gun owners look like. We have to assist friendly governments, get friendly governments elected and assist them into helping change our situation for us. And we have to oppose and obstruct unfriendly governments, which has been the CCFR's role since it began in October, at the end of October 2015, just weeks before Justin Trudey. got his majority government, the first one. So that's been a real struggle, and we also have to foster support within the firearms community. We are just as divide in the firearms community as, you know, people are in the general community, right? So that's always a challenge. Now, I don't have time to talk about all the things that the CCFR does. It's really important, especially

for an organization that asks for support from individual gun owners. It's very difficult to ask for support if you're going to use rhetoric to describe what you do. I detest that personally, to be honest with you. So if you're ever wondering what the CCFR does, what does the gun lobby do in Canada? How are they trying to preserve this right? You just for us as an organization, we write everything down and put it on our website. So for 10 years of work, you can go to ccfr.c. It's not a plug, but it's just in case you're curious. Click why join and there's a list probably if you, you know, put on a piece of papers this long of what we've tried in the last 10 years. So some of those things are the usual stuff.

We represent gun owners in the mainstream media. We've done more mainstream media than, I don't know. Gun owners have never had this much exposure, though it's about one-eighth of what anti-gun groups get. But it's really important that someone is representing gun owners as the people that they actually are. Reasonable, law-abiding, contributing members of society. when they put angry gun owners up there,

that just reinforces the stereotypes that the liberals roll out about gun owners, right? So that's some important work that we do. We testify to every committee on every gun bill in both the House and the Senate through the whole thing. We do press conferences on Parliament Hill. We produce mainstream television. So you probably didn't know

that the gun lobby has a weekly show on linear television across the entire country. On Wild TV, it's a specialty channel because that's what we have access to. But still, there's like 1.8 million subscribers to WowTV. And we're in our fifth season, starting our fifth season in this coming September, an actual television show that's been running. Current events for gun owners.

Pretty cool, right? We were never, you know, capable of that before. We've done billboard campaigns across the entire country, pushing people to a reference site where there's videos and content for them to understand the gun debate, that website. That website's up right now. It's gun debate.ca. We've had that up there for about six years.

And we sued the federal government. This was the largest lawsuit in the history of Canada on behalf of gun owners. We put together a team, in fact, right from Calgary, JSS barristers, of constitutionally experienced lawyers to go against the government for, and I'm going to paraphrase all this because I don't have a lot of time. For property rights to determine whether we got them. For defense with a firearm. There was a question there as well, and also addressing the government's overreach, abuse of a legal tool that they have called an order and counsel.

If you're a gun owner, you know all about OICs. The federal court, yeah, total overreach, the federal court determined that the government can do whatever it wants. We spent $3 million, not because we wanted to waste money, because we didn't want to walk away going, oh, if we spent a little more, maybe we would have won. We went all the way and the way it was supposed to be done. We went to the federal court of appeal, and a month ago, we got our verdict. Court of Appeal says, we're not going to interfere with what the government wants to do. So we may have lost those cases, but now you have your answer. You cannot run to the courts unless you are a criminal, right?

When the criminals are in trouble, the charter gets pulled out, and it's like, you can't violate this. But when just normal people go to the courts for help, you're not going to get anything from them. So at least we have an answer. And then, of course, just in the recent election, the CCFR spent about $450,000 as a third-party advertiser. The gun lobby's never had those kinds of resources or those kinds of skills to be able to get Carney attack ads during the Stanley Cup playoffs through Rogers Sportsnet and Chorus and Bell Media. So in the news on CTV, global news, we spread ads all over the place. plus another $100,000 get-out-the-vote campaign, targeted at hunters to get them interested.

So we've done a lot of stuff, and that's probably, I don't know, 5% of what we've done. I can't tell you that it's worked. It may have moved the needle a little bit because Carney and the Liberals didn't really bring up gun control at all in this election, which is interesting. That's the first time that ever happened.

So maybe they're seeing a diminishing return on using gun owners to scare urban voters. and that's a long game. So all this to say, and this is important, you know, we suffered a pretty big disappointment, and I just want to kind of lay this out for you. I think I might have enough time. So when we started the CCFR,

we wanted to do all this work that the gun lobby wasn't doing, and there was a lot, right? And building that big tent and attacking the problem that way, we got a lot of support, which is great. But we thought in 2015, especially with Justin Trudeau, right? Like, you know the kind of person he is.

He's a screw up, right? But he's got a, well, he is. He's just a loser. And he's, that wasn't really an applause line. But anyway, he's a loser. But he's got a famous name. And we thought, okay, the finish line is going to be 2019. Who would ever vote for this guy more than once

after seeing the disaster that Canada was? We lost. We're like, okay, guys, let's regroup. Let's keep going. who would ever vote for him a second time? Finish line's 2021. It's all going to pay off now. We lost again.

And it's like after COVID, after everything, the division, the anger, all this stuff, the liberals will not get elected. 2025, that's the finish line. We lost again. So now, of course, even me, you know, somebody that's pretty resilient to this kind of stuff, I'm sitting there thinking, okay, well, do I resign? Do I go back to what I was doing before the CCFR? or do we fold the whole thing up?

Like, you really feel like you failed. And so, luckily, I'm pretty resilient to that kind of stuff. So I was down about that for about six hours, and I'm like, okay, we've got to pivot. Because the way to truly lose is to stop fighting, right? That's when the verdict is in. You lost. So, yeah, that's a good one to applaud for.

So it's, there's a couple of things I think I just want to share with you to provide a little bit of value from this talk. So when you encounter something like we've encountered, like what we're living through right now, the first thing you do is have to decide whether or not you're going to continue, right? That's the first decision. And you're going to have to be agile,

and you're going to have to pivot. And you may have to go at it another way, but that's important. Just make the decision whether you're going to keep going, because there's a lot of options out there. They may not be the options that we think of, but there could be another option that's going to reveal it, down the way. Thinking everyone's head here, there's a few options floating around, right?

Changing the jurisdiction from a, you know, a different perspective so that the federal government isn't governing you anymore. There are options out there, so don't despair. And once you've decided that you have the resources and the will to keep going, it's really important that you tamp down the emotion. The defeatist attitude is what stops us from continuing, right? If you think, like, if you gave a problem to AI, and it's a difficult problem, and it kept coming back to you with solutions, you're like, now that's not the, that's not the solution. Does it get discouraged? Right? Does it like, I don't know what you want anymore and then walk off, well, it doesn't have legs, but, you know, it doesn't. It just

goes back, looks at the data, retools it, and comes back relentlessly. So for us to achieve our goals, we have to figure out what our goals are at any given time, and we have to be relentless. For me, the way I looked at it, and this is sort of what I want to just kind of communicate to you. I looked at this and went, 10 years I've been doing this, and I don't feel like I'm any further head. We are probably in some ways, but I didn't get our guns back. But at the same time, it's like, well, think outside the box. What if this journey is 13 years long? Like, I don't know, right? I don't know when it's going to end. What if it's a lot? What if it's a it's 13 years, and I'm 10 years in, and I'm ready to storm off and say I failed. So I just,

I just want everybody to keep that in mind. Maybe we do got to push forward for another few years. And you know what, maybe we'll have another setback. You know, if you can't guarantee that you are going to get a win, that is not, that's not an excuse to quit. So it's a difficult situation for us. And, you know, you just got to keep going. And we're not going to, we're not going to ever quit as long as there are options on the table. And I think that applies not only for firearm ownership, I think it applies for everything. Every plan, every dream or aspiration that you have to get out from underneath the dominion of these people in the East, you know, you've got to push for it and you have to be relentless. Because if you do, that's always what you're,

you're always looking back at a path like that once you've succeeded in something. Does that make sense. So anyway, I hope that provides a little bit of value. Really appreciate your time today. All right. Hey, folks. That'll do it for today's episode. It was obviously three of the keynote speeches from Saturday at the Cornerstone Forum in Calgary. And if you want more of what happened on Saturday, you can head over to Substack. It's down on my show notes. And it's just the Sean Newman podcast on Substack if you're searching it. And the rest of the show is going to be there. And, uh, Look forward to hearing your thoughts. Part of it is going to be for free so you can watch a few of the videos just to get a taste of it.

And then part of it is behind the paywalls as well. So look forward to hearing your thoughts and look forward to your support if you're so inclined. Either way, thanks for tuned in today and we'll catch up to you tomorrow.