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Full Comment

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Full Comment is Canada’s podcast for compelling interviews, controversial opinions and fascinating discussions. Hosted by Brian Lilley. Published by Postmedia, new episodes are released each Monday.
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Episodes

The ‘Online Harms’ Act could censor Twitter, Netflix, and us

Beware of governments making laws to “protect the children,” warns Ian Runkle, this week’s guest. The Liberals’ Bill C-63 rules to stop online child exploitation and revenge porn seem well-intentioned. But the Online Harms Act is so broad it could end up censoring popular streaming entertainment, says Runkle, a lawyer specializing in civil liberties and host of YouTube’s Runkle of the Bailey. More worryingly, as Runkle tells Brian, it’s all wrapped up with stiff new penalties and powers against ...

Mar 11, 202453 min

We're getting zapped by Guilbeault's radical, no-fuel, electrified future

We won’t need roads where we’re going. At least that’s how Liberal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault wants it. He wants to end funding for new roads in Canada and ban cars that use gas or diesel, while forcing our heating and energy to become all-electric. Meanwhile, as energy researcher and commentator Parker Gallant tells Brian this week, we’re throwing billions at battery plants that lack materials and even markets, as buyers shun EVs, as we push demand for power infrastructure we don’t ...

Mar 04, 202447 min

Danielle Smith challenges Trudeau to call an election

The tension between Ottawa and Alberta is rising. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has most recently attacked Premier Danielle Smith’s plans to restrict children from medically transitioning genders. This, after his environment minister demanded the province curb its oil industry and overhaul its gas-dependent power grid. Smith joins Brian Lilley this week, and says that while she would prefer to collaborate with Trudeau, she’ll fight if necessary. Smith also tells Brian why she thinks Trudeau has ...

Feb 26, 202435 min

Israel is invading Rafah regardless of what Trudeau says

Eylon Levy spends his day debunking all the patently ridiculous propaganda against Israel. The latest uproar the government’s official spokesman is facing is the fevered campaign to try keeping Israel from invading Rafah. As Levy tells host Brian Lilley, this plays right into Hamas’s hands. Levy discusses how the international media and naive governments, including Canada’s, are swallowing Hamas’s disinformation, unwittingly doing the terror group’s bidding. And he explains how Israel’s success ...

Feb 19, 202438 min

Not all transgender people think Danielle Smith’s gender policies are unhinged

It’s been a frenzy since Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced sweeping new policies limiting gender transitioning for children. She’s been accused of endangering lives and was blasted by the prime minister. What isn’t happening, as guest Julia Malott tells Brian this week, is a respectful discussion that accepts that all sides want what’s best for kids. Malott is a parent, columnist and online commentator. She’s also transgender. She explains why she doesn’t think Smith’s plans are completel...

Feb 12, 202437 min

Jean Chrétien looks better now compared to the alternative

Liberals were praising Jean Chrétien on his 90th birthday recently. Then, almost immediately afterward, they were distancing themselves from Canada’s 20th prime minister after news he had once tried watering down an Indigenous rights declaration. That’s the peculiar, contradictory legacy of “the little guy from Shawnigan” that former Liberal party president Stephen LeDrew and National Post columnist Chris Selley appraise this week with host Brian Lilley. They discuss the reverence for Chrétien i...

Feb 05, 202449 min

‘Islamofascism-phobia’ and the Iranians standing with Israel

After Hamas’s Oct. 7 mass slaughter of Jews in Israel, a surprising thing happened: Iranians inside the Islamic Republic and Persians around the world declared their support for … Israel. Ontario MPP Goldie Ghamari was one of them. She joins Brian this week to explain how Islamofascism promoted by Tehran and Hamas is the common enemy that Jews and the West share with people from Iran. She also discusses Iran’s alarming infiltration into Canada, how it menaces anti-regime Iranian-Canadians, and t...

Jan 29, 202443 min

Jordan Peterson on why everyone should be afraid of what happened to him

The verdict is final. The courts have now decisively refused to overturn a decision by the College of Psychologists of Ontario that ordered Jordan Peterson into a mandatory rehabilitation program for his politically incorrect tweets, which had nothing to do with his practice and involved no actual patients. As Peterson tells host Brian Lilley, his options are now to either lose his licence, try moving somewhere else, or submit and undergo “re-education” for his controversial opinions. But even m...

Jan 23, 202440 min

The Liberal MP who thinks his party is getting things wrong

He’s publicly objected to his own Liberal government and the prime minister turning against Israel’s war on Hamas. He fought for his party to stand firm for Quebec anglophones against the province’s attacks — and lost. Anthony Housefather has been breaking publicly a lot lately with his own Liberal party on major issues. This week, host Brian Lilley talks to Housefather about what it’s been like to lose these key policy battles and how he manages to keep working alongside caucus colleagues when ...

Jan 15, 202449 min

We shouldn’t be making things this hard for Canadian winemakers

Somehow Donald Ziraldo beat the odds: He and his business partner made an international success out of their Inniskillin Winery in Ontario. Starting back in the days when Canadian wine was dismissed as inferior plonk, they went on to produce and sell highly regarded, award-winning vintages all over the globe. But their story is far too uncommon, as Ziraldo tells Brian in this week’s episode. He believes that Canada is perfectly capable of selling far more excellent wine to the world and making w...

Jan 08, 202447 min

Best of 2023: Canada’s great addictive hard-drug giveaway experiment somehow goes awry

Over the holidays, we’re looking back at some of the best episodes of 2023, a year where serious questions were raised about whether Canada’s “safe supply” approach to drug addiction was making things worse. A long-time proponent of harm reduction, Dr. Sharon Koivu, an urban doctor in London, Ont., discusses with host Brian Lilley how she has watched with alarm as Canada’s drug policy has shifted from safe, supervised consumption, to pumping quantities of extremely addictive opioids onto the str...

Jan 01, 202450 min

Best of 2023: England’s ‘strictest headmistress’ on how old-school education saves kids

Over the holidays, we’re looking back at some of the best episodes of 2023, a year that saw massive controversy over the state of Canada’s schools. At Katharine Birbalsingh’s inner-city free school in London, students are not to speak in the hallways. Discipline is strict. The kids, heavily drawn from minority groups, memorize knowledge and learn duty. It’s what used to be considered a typical education. But as Birbalsingh tells Brian Lilley this week, she’s now considered a “radical.” The resul...

Dec 25, 202348 min

Special: Rex Murphy’s year-end interview with Pierre Poilievre

An extended video version of this interview will be available starting Tuesday, December 19, 2023, online at National Post ( nationalpost.com ). Special guest host Rex Murphy sits down in person with federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre for a year-end interview. They discuss what’s behind the Tories’ remarkable rise in the polls this year. Poilievre explains why he thinks Trudeau’s increasingly stringent climate policies aren’t what they seem. He and Rex also discuss the identity politic...

Dec 18, 202330 min

Trudeau botched 2023. The Liberals won’t allow a repeat in 2024

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau started the year in fine form. Twelve months later his party is melting down in the polls and Pierre Poilievre is heading what looks like an election-winning juggernaut. But the Conservative leader shouldn’t get too comfortable, as the Full Comment year-end politics panel discusses. Host Brian Lilley is joined this week by Conservative guru Kory Teneycke and former Liberal adviser Warren Kinsella to talk about the federal Liberals’ rebound possibilities in 2024, as ...

Dec 11, 202351 min

Canada is a criminal hotbed and the Mounties can’t handle it

It’s no secret the RCMP is broken. But as Garry Clement discusses with Brian this week, the force’s inability to investigate serious national crimes — money laundering, narcotics, organized crime, Chinese interference, terrorism and more — is turning Canada into a haven for lawlessness. And innocent people are paying for it with their lives. Clement served in the force for 30 years, from undercover to senior roles. In his new book, Under Cover: Inside the Shady World of Organized Crime and the R...

Dec 04, 202340 min

Canada’s worst fiscal crisis in generations is brewing

The financial trouble the Trudeau Liberals have put Canada in looks disturbingly unlike previous debt and deficit hangovers, as William Robson tells Brian Lilley this week. The losses Ottawa has pushed onto the Bank of Canada are choking off desperately needed income, explains Robson, president and CEO of the C.D. Howe Institute. Wages are losing ground. Business investment indicators are the worst since the 1940s. Unfunded pensions are soaring. Federal spending keeps rising. And the government ...

Nov 27, 202350 min

As CBC defunding looms, the network doesn’t know what to do

A lot of the criticisms against Canada’s public broadcaster are fair, acknowledges Richard Stursberg, who was the CBC's executive vice president from 2004 to 2010: The programming doesn’t always reflect the country outside of downtown Toronto; the CBC competes with private broadcasters for advertising, even though it’s government-funded. The problem, which Stursberg says was the case then and remains the case now, is that no one knows what the CBC is supposed to be. And that goes as much for Mot...

Nov 20, 202345 min

Hamas controls the narrative now

Journalists for major news organizations joining the terror attack against Israel. Newscasters that refuse to call Hamas terrorists. Campus lefties insisting the torturers, rapists and murderers are the real victims. All of this and more are how the story westerners hear about the Israel-Hamas war is being distorted to vilify the Jewish state and benefit Hamas, as Israeli-based journalist Caroline Glick discusses with Brian this week. She explains how the number of civilian war casualties public...

Nov 13, 202351 min

Driven into the ditch by Trudeau, Liberals have no clear way out

Almost exactly eight years after rebuilding the Liberals and winning government, Justin Trudeau looks like he could be done as party leader. His once powerful personal brand seems irreparably ruined, especially after his recent surrender on his signature carbon-tax policy. As National Post columnist Chris Selley and host Brian Lilley discuss this week, a Liberal party that became Trudeau’s cult of personality is being dragged back down into potential electoral disaster with him, with no clear sa...

Nov 06, 202353 min

Ben Shapiro on why every Jew he knows is getting a gun

Host Brian Lilley is joined this week by American podcaster, journalist and author Ben Shapiro to discuss the antisemitic pro-Hamas marches in Canada and the U.S. after the terrorist attacks in Israel — and the sense of danger that has American Jews buying guns in case they need to defend their families. How did our society become so degraded? Shapiro tells Brian it’s because we’ve permitted hate to fester in certain communities while surrendering our western values — falling for the sadistic “d...

Oct 30, 202337 min

The difficult history behind the Nazi soldier in Parliament

Historical ignorance is the generous explanation for the House of Commons applauding a veteran of the Nazis’ Waffen SS Galicia division during a visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But the embarrassment and outrage that followed shed little light on exactly how Ukrainians like Yaroslav Hunka found themselves first wearing the infamous Nazi SS uniform, then immigrating to live peaceful postwar lives in Canada. Myroslav Shkandrij, author of a new book, In the Maelstrom: The Waffen-SS...

Oct 23, 202351 min

Obliterating Hamas in Gaza is Israel’s only option now

Gaza not long ago had one of the fastest-growing economies in the world — until Hamas took over, turned it into a terror base and began using Gazans as cannon fodder for anti-Israel public relations, just as its doing now. As Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, discusses with Brian this week, Hamas’s Islamist theocracy has few fans among the Palestinians of Gaza, or indeed elsewhere in the Muslim world. The Israeli government must abandon its failed strategy of trying to contain a ...

Oct 16, 202343 min

The housing crisis is a sign of worse things to come

The shocking political realities behind Canada’s badly broken housing market are sinking in — and the damage spreads much deeper and wider than the generations being unfairly priced out of starter homes. Ben Rabidoux, founder of Edge Realty Analytics, is the guy both federal Conservatives and Liberals turn to for deep housing insights. He joins Brian this week to discuss how waving in millions of temporary residents, many of them students, is causing far more harm — to us and them — than just wi...

Oct 09, 202339 min

England’s ‘strictest headmistress’ on how old-school education saves kids

At Katharine Birbalsingh’s inner-city free school in London, students are not to speak in the hallways. Discipline is strict. Students wear uniforms, sit in rows and listen to instruction. It’s teacher-led learning, not child-centred. The kids, heavily drawn from minority groups, memorize knowledge and learn duty. It’s what used to be considered a typical education. But as Birbalsingh tells Brian this week, she’s now considered a “radical.” The results? The students at Michaela Community School ...

Oct 02, 202348 min

Trudeau isn’t being taken seriously about India

After the prime minister dropped his bombshell assassination accusation against India, the world has waited for him to back it up. But Ujjal Dosanjh says that when it comes to credibility on this file, Justin Trudeau — and Canada — don’t have much. And the unserious way Trudeau has handled allegations around the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar hasn’t helped. Dosanjh, a former Liberal cabinet minister and B.C. NDP premier, joins Brian this week to explain what’s really going on with the allegation...

Sep 25, 202345 min

Welcome to the tolerance witch trials

Don’t call it cancel culture: that masks the grimness of the authoritarian era we’re living in, says author Brendan O’Neill. It’s an anti-enlightenment, he says, that is rapidly and fervently obliterating centuries of western civilizational progress. O’Neill, author of the new book A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable, joins Brian this week to expose the shibboleths we’re all being forced to accept, even though we know they’re not true. And he shows how those of us living in once-liber...

Sep 18, 202350 min

The working class inevitably becomes conservative

It’s not just that Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are leading in national polls: it’s that the party is bringing in new groups, including “the people who get stuff done,” as guest Lord Daniel Hannan calls the working class. The prominent British journalist and Tory politician joins Brian from the Conservative policy convention in Quebec City, where he delivered the keynote address, coming from the U.K. where Conservatives have held government more than 13 years. Hannan discusses why the right ...

Sep 11, 202343 min

Pierre Poilievre is picking the right fights

As federal Conservative party members prepare to gather for their policy convention in Quebec City, they’ll be pushing for a platform that takes on the culture wars, head on. Meanwhile, polls currently show party leader Pierre Poilievre on his way to a majority government as voters rally to his message about the rising costs of housing and living. Long-time Conservative power player Kory Teneycke, manager of Doug Ford’s landslide-winning 2022 Ontario campaign, joins Brian this week to discuss ho...

Sep 04, 202350 min

The amazing story of Terry Fox you haven’t heard

Bill Vigars was starting a new gig at the Canadian Cancer Society when he flew to the East Coast to check out an unknown kid with one leg planning to run a personal marathon a day across Canada for cancer research. Before he knew it, Vigars was helping Terry Fox make the Marathon of Hope a national phenomenon that’s kept Terry’s legacy alive for decades, with nearly a billion dollars since raised in his name. Vigars joins host Brian Lilley this week to talk about his new book, Terry and Me, and ...

Aug 28, 202351 min

How COVID’s ‘pandexicon’ changed the way we speak—and think

Things were different in the “before times.” Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we weren’t all experts in viral variants or polymerase chain reaction tests. We’d never heard of “vaccine apartheid” or “social distancing.” No one drank “quarantinis” after enduring a “covidivorce.” And “self-isolating” and “lockdowns” were things to be avoided. In his new book Pandexicon, author Wayne Grady has chronicled the words that emerged from the COVID-19 catastrophe to decode the message and meaning behind the...

Aug 21, 202346 min
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