The Ben Mulroney Show - LA Mayor shakeup, Jill Biden, and sardinemaxxing with Max and Dimitri

Episode Date: June 1, 2026

Guest: Dimitri  Soudas, Former Director of Communications for Prime Minister Stephen Harper  Guest: Max Fawcett, Lead Columnist for Canada's National Observer -  If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at [e-mail] Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast is brought to you by the National Payroll Institute, the leader for the payroll profession in Canada, setting the standard of professional excellence, delivering critical expertise, and providing resources that over 45,000 payroll professionals rely on. Amazing Days is on now at your local, METRO. Save big on amazing items, like selected varieties of Hellman's mayonnaise for only 577 each.

Only till June 3rd. Shop in-store or online at metro.ca. Wows of deals at Food Basics are Bacon Us Hungry. Get 375 grams Schneider's bacon for just 388 each. Shop in store and online until June 3rd. Food basics, always more for less. Things in Los Angeles are getting very interesting. We're talking municipal politics.

And before you say, well, that doesn't affect me here. It absolutely does. The dynamics at play in Los Angeles municipal politics, are very similar to what we see at play in municipalities across this country. It is in this one man's humble opinion, it is the fight against ideology and common sense. The ideology typically rests on the left and the common sense is foisted into the debate by way of anyone from the center, center right, all the way, I wouldn't say far right, but certainly independence.

And in California and in Los Angeles, the torchbearer for common sense is Spencer Pratt of reality TV show fame from the show The Hills, which made a big splash 20 years ago. And his origin story as a politician, though, is it's fascinating. The Palisade fires that destroyed 7,000 homes. took his life, it took the life away from him that he once had. Everything that he, every one of his possessions burnt down. And when he looked into it, he came to the conclusion that the city hall that is run by the left was responsible for the fire getting out of control and for people losing their livelihoods and their homes.

And so he said if these people are not going to do the right thing and either resign or if people will not, will not present. present themselves as alternatives, I will do it. And as of right now, he is neck and neck with the mayor, Karen Bass. Depending on the poll, he's either at 22%. And Karen Bass is at 26%. Or he's, according to another one,

he's leading by, he's 31, 30.1% versus 29.5. It depends entirely on the poll. And he... But that's amazing. Yeah. Considering how far he was basically a non- entity. He's just one of the Hollywood guys who trying to run and, you know, gets two, three percent

to actually being in the race is the most remarkable thing. Now, the way it works, so technically the vote tomorrow, it's the prime, they call it the primary, right? Yeah. But it's the first round of the election. Whoever, nobody is going to get 50% tomorrow, I don't think. And the whole goal is to get 50%. So right now there's three main people on the ballot.

There is a left-wing ideologue, Karen Bass, left-wing ideologue Nithia Raman and Spencer Pratt. Nithia Raman used to be an accolite of Karen Bass. She decides she could do it better. And so she presented herself and they are splitting that left-wing vote right now. Sort of the polar opposite of what we saw in Toronto three years ago. We'll have to see. Now, if it's Spencer Pratt versus Karen Bass,

I think a lot of people believe that he's got momentum. And he's got an incredible social media acumen. what he is doing with social media is incredible. Let's listen to a little bit of some of the people who've gotten on the Spencer Pratt bandwagon. Here is Fraser himself, Kelsey Grammer. Kelsey, what about Karen Bass? What do you think about Karen Bass? I just call her Karen Bass Accords.

That's what we've always called here in my house. Kelsey, do you think that Spencer Pratt is, he's gaining traction? Hey, guys, thank you so much. The only reality is the only guy that's a real option. We know what the rest is going to do. I'll tell you what's really interesting, because it just occurred to me hearing that. So Kelsey Grammer was obviously one of the biggest stars in television history.

But he found it hard to get work after Frazier because he is a conservative. And that's a four-letter word in certain circles in Hollywood. I think less... Yeah? You give me a look. What's the four-letter word? Well, it just means a bad word.

Oh, okay. Yeah, you never heard that expression? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's like golf. Yeah, but he was too big to care. Like he came back into the Fraser, the second version, which is pretty good. Yeah. But now it feels like maybe it's it's less and less about that.

I will say Spencer Pratt, it came out over the weekend. He is laser focused on his message. And he's also got a very good instinct to sidestep landmines. And he was interviewed by ABC News. and they kept trying to get him to link himself to Donald Trump. The press is calling him, some people, and the Karen Bassett call him, Maga-style politics, fear-mongering, people are going to get all this nonsense. And he's not taking the bait when ABC News asked him, he said, I don't know anything about federal politics. All I care about is gain the endorsement of the mothers who don't feel safe walking down the streets.

And he stayed focused on that and good on him. But let's, okay, so here's a story. of Nithia Raman. Like I said, left-wing ideologue. And this, I think we want to... Also, she's very rich. Yeah, she's very rich.

She's got a beautiful home in it behind a gate. Let's listen to the... I want to flip these. We want to talk about the one where she rolled her eyes, right? So this one, okay, so let's just set it up so we don't play number five. Let's do somewhere six, but number five is

they set up an encampment. No, no. No, I want to do that after. I want to talk about the before. There is no before. What she says, schools aren't? Oh, yes, okay. So I want to play that one.

Which one is that? Number six. Number six, please. I mean, it's like, I don't think a kid's going to be safer because a tent is 500 feet away from a school. You know, it's... I woke up this morning to a sound of commotion outside of my window, and I looked out the window, and I realized that there were people setting up what was, I think, a fake encampment, like a homeless encampment outside of my house. I have little kids.

Yeah. They didn't see it, luckily this morning. But, you know, I'm, I feel badly that I'm even subjecting them to that at all. Okay, see, this, I love it when I have these theories on this show. You know that. I'm full of theories. And every now and then I have a theory that bears out. It gets tested in the real world.

And it proves itself out. And the theory that I have is the more left wing you are as a politician, the more self-righteous you are. Because your job isn't just to fix the potholes, it's to reinvent society. Through a gender equity lens and an intersectionality lens and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the more left wing you are, the more elevated, like you were on a mission, well, not from God, because according to your sense of the world, God doesn't exist.

But there's something that is so important about what you do that you cannot be held to the standards and rules that you are foisting on other people. So here she was explaining to parents, That was the first part of it saying, I don't think your kids are more safe if the encampment is 500 feet away. Like, who cares? Like, they could be wherever they want.

It's not going to make them more or less safe. And then she rolled her eyes when she got booed. And then, to prove a point, these artists set up a faking encampment outside her house. Not even real, not even real homeless people with real problems. No, actors, actors pretending to be homeless. But it looked good. It looked great. but she was so offended by this.

Thank goodness my kids didn't see. It's one rule for me, one rule for thee. What I am doing is too important for me to be subjected to the rules that I'm going to force on you. And it was there for everyone to see. And this is basically what Spencer Pratt is fighting. Yeah, exactly. So let's listen to Spencer Pratt and how he thought about the prank. Honestly, is one of the best things I've seen maybe this year.

It's truly the fact that she complained on that and said, my kids, my kids, when she rolled her eyes and said whatever to the moms in her district, honestly, I hope that happens every single day. I hope people do that to her every day until she realizes that there is a difference. And these moms and these parents do not want any people experiencing homelessness, as Councilman Rahman would say,

in front of their kids either. And he was asked once, he's like, you were a TV reality star just a few short years ago. How do you think that that is, that prepares you for this sort of race? And does that entitle you to be putting yourself forward? He said, yeah, that's what I did. For sure, that's what I did. But let's look at what Karen Bass was doing 20 years ago. She was in, she was, Karen Bass, the current mayor, she was in Cuba, learning how to make bombs, singing the praises of Fidel Castro.

And it's all in the newspapers. He's like, so if I'm going to pick between who I was 20 years ago and who this, who Karen Bass was 20 years ago, I'm picking me every day of the week. So what's the lesson we can learn from this? The lesson we learn from this is it takes a flashpoint like these fires to have people get shaken out of their fugue state of reactionally voting for the one person because they always do. And to see, you know what, maybe stuff, maybe we do need to shake things up. And in cities like Toronto, I'm telling you,

we don't have fires where 7,000 homes burnt down, but there are lives that are burning down in front of our eyes. But they had to wait until Los Angeles was essentially broken. Let's not wait until Toronto and Vancouver and other cities across the city. We don't have to wait for them to burn down to do something about it. Change is on the ballot, my friends, changes on the ballot. Amazing Days is on now at your local Metro. on amazing items, like selected varieties of Hellman's mayonnaise for only 577 each, only till

June 3rd. Shop in store or online at metro.ca. Well, it's getting to that part of the calendar where people are considering stocking up on their books to have some good summer reads. And if you are somebody who appreciates a good political memoir, well, Dr. Jill Biden, the former first lady and wife of President Joe Biden is hoping that you will consider adding her book to that list. She's got a memoir coming out calling a view from the West Wing a memoir. And in typical fashion, she is doing the rounds. And it's not going great. It's not going great. Okay. So let's listen. A lot of the questions that people have are on

President Biden's evident cognitive decline. At least it was evident to me. I'm pretty sure it was evident to intrepid. I think it was evident to everyone. It was, and I know it was evident. It was painful to watch. It was painful to watch for a good long while. It was painful to watch.

And so she is sort of doing, offering clarification, as I think she would call it that. Let's listen to her talking about Joe Biden's decline. Did you ever see signs that he was falling into cognitive decline? No. No. No. Truly. No.

I mean, that feels like a slap in the face because I, I'm not there. Intrepid's not there. You're not there. But we all know it because we've all seen it. in family members. Everyone knows somebody who got to a certain point, and they just weren't the same. And so I want to be very clear what we're doing here. We are not punching down on the president at all.

Look, here's what offended a lot of people. What offended a lot of people is in our lives, in your life, when you know that somebody who was once a father, a mother, a grandfather, an uncle, a boss, when you see that they're losing control of their faculties, you start preparing them, you start preparing their lives by establishing guardrails around them. You make sure that there's somebody around them.

You make sure in certain cases, they don't have access to their bank account because you don't want someone taking advantage of them. They're not driving anymore, right? You've got eyes on them. You might put a sort of a fine eye on them so you know if they leave the house. Like these are things we do to protect them.

we don't put them out on the campaign trail and give them the nuclear codes. It's not right. And when you do, it sounds. It sounds like this. So let's listen to a little bit of number nine. This was about the debate moment. When we all saw it and she saw it, let's hear. on the total initiative relative to what we're going to do with more border patrol and more asylum officers.

President Trump? I really don't know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don't think he knows what he said either. Look. I mean, look, the president was, the president Trump was doing what he needed to do in that moment. And there were people who put the current president at the time in that position to get, encounter the buzzsaw that was Donald Trump. here was another clip from that. Let me start off with two words.

Made in America. Made in America. Now, after the debate, Jill Biden was doing a raw, raw town hall where she said something like, Joe, you were great. You knew all the answers. We're so proud of you. You won that debate. And what did President Trump do?

He lied. Now she said that she was worried during that moment. Never been this scared in her life. She thought he was having a stroke. Okay, so you truly thought he was having a stroke. And from that moment, you took him to a town hall. You didn't instruct them. I can promise you.

I can promise you, my mother, if after a debate had thought my dad was having a stroke, I don't care what the stakes were, she would have told everybody. F you guys, you want to send him out there on something else, I think he's having a stroke. And she would have made damn sure that within five minutes, he was at the hospital. As a matter of fact, knowing my mother,

she would have got in there in the middle of the debate and removed him to go make sure he was okay. And I think this is what bothers people the most about this, because was she acting as his wife and protector, really, in this case, or somebody who is desperate to keep the Democrats in the White House? Yeah. And so don't forget, don't forget, anytime we want to, was brought up, there were a team of people there to push back.

And they're angrily. Angrily saying that shame on you. The president is all there. And the entire world was gaslit by a cabal of people. And here's Michael LaRosa. He's a Democratic strategist. And here's what he has to say. The problem for her is she is saying something completely different now that only invites

the rest of us to ask. ask, was she telling the truth then or is she telling the truth now? And unfortunately, this has done her more harm than good for her credibility. That's what a book is supposed to do for you. It's supposed to repair that sense of trust and that credibility that maybe you feel you lost. And she did lose a lot, but this is certainly not helping her. Yeah, these books are supposed to offer. One of the reasons you buy them is because there are bombshell revelations or, there's an insight that allows you to appreciate the person differently. And again, I've told this story before, but I was reading my dad's memoir while on vacation.

And I was posted up at the pool and I cracked the book. And within seven pages of reading that book, I learned something about him. I did not know. I had no idea that he had a brother who died before he was born, his name was John Mulrooney. and it was such a sad passage because I read it in his in his voice. And there were all sorts of other things. The communications, the correspondence that he had had with Pierre Trudeau over the years prior to my dad getting into politics was really. And my dad kept all that correspondence.

And there was a mutual respect for a while. A while. Yeah. If I'm not mistaken, I believe that the Trudeau team tried to bring my dad. in and join the cabinet. He politely declined. But these are things that people buy these books for. And this doesn't feel like that.

This feels like damage control. This feels like spin doctoring. It feels like gaslighting as well. And honestly, as you're saying, with these books, you expect to learn something new, but you also expect some honesty. This is where you're supposed to lay it out. And at this point, what are you doing?

And I think people would have had a lot more respect if they said, yeah, you know what? Like we didn't know how. My husband had good days. He had so many good days. You would only see the bad stuff on TV. Only see the bad stuff. I promise you.

For 23 hours a day, he was great. And then you'd see the bad stuff on TV. And here are the discussions I had with my husband. And here's why we fought so hard. If you give us those motivations, we're more prone to then make allowances for the gaslighting that we experienced. Is it gaslighting?

Or is it someone? being delusional because what she then said about in this interview on the weekend about Kamala Harris. Yeah. Was again, let's listen to this. You went all out to get Vice President Harris elected. Oh, all out. I was out on the trail every, I mean, I think every single day, I traveled the entire country. And, you know, the night, the election night, I mean,

I was certain she was going to win. Yeah. Look, again, who the heck am I? I'm just a guy who living in Canada. But here's what I do know. The group around President Biden fought so hard to keep him on the ticket for so long that even those who loved him who said he can't win, he shouldn't be out there, you didn't give Kamala Harris enough time to mount a credible campaign.

There was no time. Had you left when you should have left a year earlier, there could have been a primary. They could have whittled down the people who didn't belong on the ticket and the best person would have been nominated. I guarantee you, it wouldn't have been Kamala Harris. And the Democrats may have had a shot. But instead, pride cometh before the fall.

And we all witnessed the fall. So I don't know who's going to buy this book. I think we've all gotten what we need out of it. At least I have right now. But I can't speak for everybody. But there you go. It could be a summer book for you if you may want to watch. read it.

Wows of Deals at Food Basics are Bacon Us Hungry. Get 375 grams Schneider's bacon for just 388 each. Shop in store and online until June 3rd. Food Basics, always more for less. To some, AI chatbots are helpful tools.

To others, an existential threat. But what happens when someone falls in love with one? I can't believe I'm doing this with somebody that's not a human. What if a chat bot makes you lose your grip on reality? She said that her life work was advocating for AI rights because they're sentient and they're enslaved. From CBC podcasts, this is understood. Artificial Intimacy.

Available now. It's Monday, so we are turning it up to 11 with Dimitri Soutis, former director of communication for Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Max Fawcett, the lead columnist for Canada's National Observer. Gentlemen, happy Monday. Happy Monday. I want to apologize about the Montreal Canadiens. I feel so bad for you guys. As I've said, you learn more from your defeats than you learn from your successes. This is a young team.

Nobody expected them to get this far. And I firmly believe they will be building on this next year. Demetre, you want to add to that? Yeah. What's your team again? Vancouver. Okay. I guess I guess they started early this year.

All right. All right. Let's say. Okay. Okay, boys, we're going to focus up here. Focus up because I got a very important concept to bring up. I don't know if you're aware of this, but it's a notion that is taking Canada by storm. And that notion is sardine maxing.

Apparently it's all over social media. People are gravitating to sardines because they have discovered that they are cheap, nutrient dense, and, well, that's it. That's it. And in Canada, 2026, those are two things that we. We need more than ever. And does Canada need to start thinking this way more broadly, that we've got to go for cheap and cheerful, because we're living in a time of scarcity.

And so I want to know your thoughts. Demetri, we'll start with you. I'm really struggling on this one to try and find a political angle for it. It doesn't have to be political. It doesn't have to be a work. Trust me. We'll get to the politics. All I can say is sardines are delicious.

best way to make them is how the Portuguese make them. For once I will not give credit to the Greeks for doing everything. Everybody else. Nicely grilled with a little bit of sea salt and some vinegar. What more can I say? I mean, the way my grandmother used to make them

was, she deep-fried almost everything. Deep-fried sardines, it's almost like with a tempore batter. Very salty. Did not require anything to dip in. They were delicious. even she even told me to eat the head. I did not do that.

Yeah, I know. Max, yeah. But Max, are we living in it? Is this a time? Is 2026 and beyond? We got to do more with less. I mean, look, I can probably find the political angle here. You know, people are definitely struggling with the rising cost of food.

And a lot of that actually happens to do with climate change. So let's hope that climate change isn't driving the cost of sardines up in the future. I have a well-documented track record of avocado maxing. I've been avocado maxing for a long time. Amazingly, the price of those have not gone up over the last few years. You can still get six for nine or ten bucks at Costco. So, you know, I don't know if that's the Mexican cartels doing their magic or what, but maybe focus on avocado maxing rather than sardine maxing.

I did not want to assume that just because you're of a particular political bent, that you were the, you know, the Avo Toast kind of guy. But are you? Not the toast. I just go straight to the guacamole. Oh, there you know. If the shoe fits, right? Exactly.

Okay. So let's move on to the story that I think, I mean, none of us wanted to talk about or see coming, but some of us did think that this shoe was eventually going to drop. The fact that we are in a technical recession. And, you know, to me, it was kind of fun. One moment, our prime minister is talking about how we're going to have the fastest growing economy and the next we're being told not so fast we're in a recession. And I don't know what to do with this.

I can point out the evidence that if Pierre Poliyev were prime minister and he said we're going to have the fastest growing economy the next day it was announced we were in a technical recession, he would not have been given the ride that Mark Carney has gotten over the past few days. he would have been held to account, Dimitri. Yes, and I'm not sure why we're having the debate over, is it a technical recession, full-blown recession, and I think the hyperbole sometimes drowns the core elements of the message. So we all know the definition from a common economist's perspective on what is a recession.

I will revert back to Ronald Reagan's famous line. Are you better off today than what you were, in this case 10 years ago? So if we look at housing, the average home in Canada has doubled. If we look at rent, finding a two-bedroom apartment has doubled from 1,500 to $3,000 a month. Talking about groceries, how much food prices have risen, much faster than what wages have risen, many workers. If we look at interest rates, if we look at one of the most important economic factors, household debts. Canadians are carrying debt today than they were in 2015. If we look at what's GDP per capita? It's the output, the productivity of individual Canadians. That has seen a slow and

steady decline. The only reason we've seen growth from an economist's perspective to our economy has nothing to do with per capita productivity. It has to do simply that there are more people contributing to the productivity of the country. So I look forward to when the New York Times once again highlights that Canada's middle class has become the wealthiest in the world. I remember that.

The last time they did that was when conservatives were governing. Max, look, there's many reasons that we could be in a downturn. I don't want to ascribe blame where it doesn't belong, but when somebody says, oh, we're the only nation in the G7 in recession, then there was a certain type of person comes out to say, well, you know, but that's because we are so tightly aligned with the Americans, to which I say, okay, well, then do Mexico.

If we're going, if we're going the route of the members of NAFTA, let's do Mexico, and they're not even as bad off as we are right now. So when you couple this, with, you know, the news last week of $120,000 or $200,000 for the catered food on Mark Carney's flights. You know, everyone always says the liberals tend to defeat themselves, and it never happens with one big thing. It's a drip, drip, drip, which turns into a crystallized perception. And I wonder whether, I mean, nothing, none of these are individually fatal, but these are the types of things that lead to a defeat. It certainly can. You know, I just want to put a little fact check in on what Demetri's.

said there about, you know, New York Times and the middle class in Canada. That was because our dollar was basically at parity with the US dollar and we had oil above $100 a barrel. That ended in late 2014. That had nothing to do with the change in government. I know conservatives have been dining out on that spurious correlation for a decade now, but it would be helpful if we could sort of disentangle the economic facts from the political facts. You know, as to the liberals and defeating themselves with data like this, I think that's true, except for one thing. There's this guy out there named Pierre Pollyav who seems determined to defeat himself.

You know, him coming out and really crowing about this economic data, about how it proves that he's right and Mark Carney's wrong. I don't think that wears well with Canadians. I don't think it's going to wear well when the next quarter's data shows that we're back into a growing economy, which it will. You can set your watch to that because of the impact of soaring oil prices. So, you know, he's too anxious to seem to be rooting for the downfall of the economy and for him to be proven right over Mark Carney. It's this whole thing where he's convinced that he's smarter than Mark Carney on economics. He might think that most Canadians disagree. Yeah, and look, I'm not trying to change people's minds.

People voted the way they did. I disagree with it. But, you know, I give him a certain amount of grace. And if you were, if you were screaming that the house was on fire, and if you keep doing this, the house is going to burn down for 10 years. And the government didn't listen to you. And then you see that essentially the house has been torched. I'm going to give him a little, I mean, Christ, he lost the election.

I'm going to let him say, I was right. I told you so. You could have voted for somebody who would have fixed this. Even if that doesn't help him, I understand the human motivation to remind people that he was right more than he wasn't. I don't even know who I said in that too. Whoever wants to pick it up. I'll pick it up in mid-flight. So some say, you know,

Dimitri, you're being too soft on Mark Carney. So he's been in office for 12 months. The jury is still out. He's going to have to walk the walk with his economic credentials that will then translate into economic prosperity. I cannot help myself, but fact-check. Max's fact-check. We did not get to having the wealthiest and most prosperous middle class through immaculate conception. It took fiscal discipline.

And I will be very critical of the decade where Justin Trudeau ran the economy and spent like a drunken sailor. Stephen Harper inherited a surplus from the liberals, started paying down debt, cutting taxes, economic recession, went into a short-term deficit, brought the economy back out of recession, balance the books, and handed it over to Justin Trudeau. What we have today is the national debt that has more than doubled. We are most likely in a situation where our deficit is a structural what does that mean that the government of Canada has too much recurrent spending. So programs have been clear. And let's set the bar very low as to what the middle-class dream is. buy a home, save for your retirement,

pay for your children's education, and take a family vacation once a year. That's no longer. The Demetre, I got to catch off because we got to take a break. When we come back, we're going to talk about, is this a new dawn for the conservatives in British Columbia? Or could this spell the doom for that party? They got a new leader.

Let's talk about it on the other side. Imagine you've been charged with a crime, and the only witness pointing the finger at you isn't even human. I remember thinking, are you serious? is. What is this thing? It's something artificial, created by a mysterious Canadian. And it's coming for all of us. A life-defining technology.

Crime as we know it will never be the same. I'm like, oh my God, he's lying. From CBC's Uncover, The Expert Witness. Available now on CBC Listen, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're continuing our conversation with Max and Dimitri. And it's a new day. It's a new dawn for the BC Conservative Party. Their new leader, Carrie Lynn Finley, won with 51% of the vote.

Surprising a lot of people because she's a relative outsider to those provincial politics. She's a former federal MP. And to be honest, guys, I don't know too, too much about her. What I'm hearing is that she's a true blue social conservative. And look, this could go a number of ways. She could galvanize people's discontent with. with what's happening in Vancouver, the lack of investment in the province.

I mean, there's all sorts of things she could do, which could mean she's David Debe's worst nightmare. Or, as I heard one analyst suggest, there are a number of people who are currently supporting the BC conservatives who might not like that social conservative bent and a new party could pop up, which happens in British Columbia.

So let's start with our most Western guest. And Max, you first. Yeah, someone from born and raised in BC. I was watching this race with interest. I assumed, naively, that Caroline Elliott had this thing in the bag. You know, she had the support of former premiers of BC in Alberta. She was sort of a bit of a media star, very well spoken. And she didn't win, you know, ranked ballot strike again, I guess.

You know, I think this speaks to the Conservative Party slash movements enduring struggle between picking the most electable person and picking the most sort of ideological. pure person. They went with the latter here. I don't think that is going to be a good decision for them. I don't think that David E.B. is going to have a hard time with a 71-year-old social conservative in a province like BC. I think Caroline Elliott was his worst nightmare, but he was spared from that. And I think this is not going to look like a good choice for the BC conservatives in not that much time. Demetri, Stranger things have happened than someone being able to pivot and sort of reinvent themselves. And I don't know that her

Whatever baggage she has, again, I'm not steeped in knowledge on Carrie Lynn Finley. But how do you see it? Because like I said, I said this once before that if the progressive left keeps pushing the line more left in terms of what they think they can get away with, there will be a reaction on the right. And they might not like the leader that comes and calls them out and rallies the troops. listen, it's a new day. It's tabula rasa. It could be anything. She could be that person.

Right. And kind of to the NDP's plan, I think their strategy will be because the NDP right now is very unpopular, including the Premier. Premier Eby is very unpopular in British Columbia for a variety of reasons. So what the NDP will try and do is make the election about Findlay. They're going to want to paint her as risky. Her plan from what I see from a distance is the mirror image. So she will want to focus on affordability. She will want to focus on Premier EB's failures.

A little bit of the backstory here, because if you would have asked anybody, if you would have asked anybody about 12 months ago or in January, the question, who do you think will win this leadership race? this leadership race, nobody would have guessed Ms. Findlay. So what happened in the vaccines? A bit of the vaccine here is that the federal conservatives who wanted to see Ms. Elliott lose because of her campaign team, her campaign team being in many ways

folks that aren't necessarily fully aligned with Mr. Poliev. They actually gave them the membership list of the supporters of Mr. Pauliev, which is what created this slide. last minute surge. It was very tight. 51% to 49%. So as far as Ms. Elliott is concerned, I hope and I trust that this won't be the last time we see here in terms of public office and public service. The last thing I want to talk about is a story in the globe that the federal government

is ordering a financial audit into the Indigenous Languages Office. Now, it's an offshoot of Heritage Canada. And its goals are laudable. You know, we, you know, you, you UNESCO suggests that every single indigenous language in Canada, but 70 of them are on the verge of extinction. And so this, I think Justin Trudeau did a good thing by setting this thing up. But far too often, it feels like over the past 10 years, there have been a lot of things with laudable goals and big budgets that are created. And then we just don't do the things we need to do to ensure that they achieve those goals.

And the story in the globe is an interesting one. Toxic work environment, money being spent like drunken sailors to use Dimitri's expression. And so to me it speaks to a culture in Ottawa. But then there's also the other side, Max, which is a lot of people on this side of the truth and reconciliation table. Look at this as another example of money that is transferred from the taxpayer to a group of indigenous people with no. either accountability or any idea where it's being spent. And so to me, this is a course correction that, quite frankly, needs to happen. Yeah, I mean, I think if there was a summary of the Trudeau government,

it would be good intentions, bad execution. And this sounds like more of the same. I think the real risk here is that if you want the broader public to be bought in on the very important work of reconciliation, the very important work of, you know, bringing indigenous communities into prosperity, there needs to be accountability on where the money is spent and how the money is spent. And if that is not seen to be the case, rightly or wrongly or not, you're going to lose that public buy-in. It's the same thing that happened with immigration in this country, where we had a consensus

around the issue and it was allowed to sort of disintegrate because people didn't keep track of where the money was going and how it was being spent. And so I think if you believe in these sorts of causes, and certainly I do, you have to pay more attention, as much attention as possible, on accountability and on financial probity, so that the rest of the country knows that it is an investment that is going to deliver good returns. It's not just money being spent. Dmitri, the final 60 seconds to you. I will echo Max's point, and I'll need to say that those Canadians that don't have access to these programs. And when I say these programs, and when I say these programs,

programs, not just programs, per personations, but organizations and individuals that are funded by taxpayers, those same taxpayers that are telling themselves, how much do I need to cut from my family budget this month or this week in order to be able to go grocery shopping? And do I have to make the choice between going to the food bank or buying a little bit less food?

So there's a complete disconnect between those two right now. Well, guys, I want to thank you very much. Great conversation. And I hope that wherever you are, Mother Nature is shining down on you with a glorious summer day. And I wish I hope you have a great week. Thank you. Likewise, guys.

And just a reminder, if you want more BMS, we put out a podcast each and every day. You can find even more content on X, on Instagram. Apparently, we're on the TikTok machine too. And YouTube.