Canada’s reputation for politically driven flip-flopping over important military purchases is getting bad, especially given Ottawa’s plans to dramatically beef up our forces. But here we go again: the Liberals, after cancelling the purchase of the F-35 next-generation fighter jet, then reversing years later, are considering cancelling again to spite a U.S. president who will be gone in 2028. Brian talks with David Bercuson, director of the University of Calgary’s Centre for Military and Strategi...
Nov 24, 2025•54 min
The federal Conservatives were still licking their wounds from the Liberals’ recent minority election victory when they were rocked by a stunning and dispiriting floor-crossing. And they failed to stop the government from passing its budget by a razor-thin margin. That was 20 years ago, as Ian Brodie, former chief of staff to prime minister Stephen Harper, reflects on with Brian. And it looked a lot like what Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are going through today. Back then, it took less than ...
Nov 17, 2025•51 min
He promised a historic budget. He warned of big sacrifices. He said he had a vision. But what Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered was not much more than a big-spending, big-government Trudeau-style plan, with a bit less hostility to business and some long-overdue military funding, as Tasha Kheiriddin and Stuart Thomson, curators of Postmedia’s Political Hack politics newsletter, discuss with Brian. They look at some of the odder budget choices and at the rough reception the plan has gotten from...
Nov 10, 2025•48 min
From Elizabeth May’s permanent iron grip on the Green party; to Jagmeet Singh’s self-destructive Liberal alliance; and the sabotaging of NDP campaigns by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein’s “leap manifesto”: Mark Leiren-Young, a committed environmentalist, saw all of it from a front-row seat. He had worked to help elect the politicians he thought were committed to fighting for his cause. But, as he tells Brian — and describes in his new book Greener Than Thou: Surviving the Toxic Sludge of Canadian Ecop...
Nov 03, 2025•49 min
Did Republican icon Ronald Reagan detest tariffs or love them? For President Donald Trump and his fiercely loyal army of acolytes, the answer is whatever the president says. As Brian discusses with Postmedia political columnists Lorne Gunter and Chris Selley, there’s no reason to be surprised that Trump blew up trade talks over an ad being run by Ontario that quotes Reagan denouncing tariffs, saying it was “fake” (it wasn’t). The lies, absurdism and overbearing demands of a president who insists...
Oct 27, 2025•52 min
The elbows are down, the prime minister is backslapping President Donald Trump, but America’s tariffs just keep coming, and hurting Canada more. The ugly truth is that Ottawa’s been foundering in trade talks with the White House, as former diplomat to the U.S., Louise Blaise, and former trade minister Ed Fast discuss with Brian this week from the Banff Forum in Quebec City. They explain how Mark Carney’s government missed important opportunities, failed to maximize its leverage, and unnecessaril...
Oct 20, 2025•43 min
It’s a major backer of Hamas. It’s an ally of the United States. It has alienated Arab neighbours and spreads toxic propaganda through Al Jazeera but maintains relations with Israel. Since Oct. 7, 2023, the enigmatic Qatar has been a linchpin in negotiations over the war in Gaza. Brian talks to two guests about how this tiny, gas-rich emirate has taken an outsized role in the Middle East. Alon Ben-Meir, retired New York University professor and author, explains how Qatar became central to a Hama...
Oct 13, 2025•1 hr 1 min
The public safety minister admitted his government’s sweeping plan to confiscate thousands of previously legal gun models with a “buyback” is badly flawed. But as Ian Runkle, a lawyer specializing in firearms law, tells Brian, it’s far more troubling than that. Ottawa plans to recreate a form of the hated gun registry that it abandoned long ago. And gun owners won’t necessarily be compensated for turning in their weapons, but will risk violent police raids if they don’t. Tens of thousands of res...
Oct 06, 2025•56 min
No military in history has been as careful as Israel to minimize civilian casualties in war. And no country has been criticized for it like Israel has — including by Canada. That’s the assessment of guests Richard Kemp and John Spencer, former military men and two of the highest authorities on urban warfare. They explain to Brian the groundbreaking lengths the IDF goes to in Gaza to mitigate harm, and wholeheartedly reject claims against Israel by Prime Minister Mark Carney and his confederates ...
Sep 29, 2025•1 hr 8 min
When he was elected, Prime Minister Mark Carney promised a trade deal with President Donald Trump, a blaze of new major infrastructure projects and a return to affordable middle-class home ownership. Today, Canadian and American trade negotiating teams are barely speaking, the only prioritized projects recently announced were already in the works, and the housing plan looks like a monumental boondoggle with hazy deliverables, as Brian discusses this week with Stuart Thomson and Tasha Kheiriddin,...
Sep 22, 2025•1 hr
The Liberals claim they’ve stopped the flood of temporary workers, foreign students and other immigrants that blew up our housing crisis and devastated the youth job market. Michelle Rempel Garner, the Conservatives’ immigration critic, tells Brian that the reality is nothing close to what they say. Five-million people remain here on temporary visas. Hundreds of thousands of more people are still being allowed in. And the asylum system is being exploited as a backdoor by thousands more making du...
Sep 15, 2025•50 min
What can you do when someone attacks you or your family? After recent high-profile, violent home invasions, police have made it seem like you need to give up and not fight back. That’s wrong, as criminal lawyer Solomon Friedman tells Brian. Friedman explains how the power to defend yourself, your home and others, including killing an assailant if it’s justified, is consistently endorsed by court rulings from long before it was codified in Canadian legislation. But police don’t seem to like it. H...
Sep 08, 2025•55 min
The U.S. Republican party today isn’t what it used to be. But the evolution toward President Donald Trump’s MAGA-ism began decades ago when William F. Buckley launched a revolution on the American right. As Buckley’s official biographer Sam Tanenhaus tells Brian, the late conservative icon was a lot like Trump: a media-savvy wealthy elite who rebelled against the very establishment he came from. In his new book, Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America, Tanenhaus lays out the improb...
Sep 01, 2025•54 min
We all know governments used the pandemic as rationale for stripping away basic Charter rights, even if some think it was justified. John Carpay, president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, remains at the forefront in fighting to get them back. He has a new book out, Corrupted by Fear: How the Charter was betrayed and what Canadians can do about it. And he discusses with Brian why it’s so important to expose the junk science, careless courts and gross media negligence that made ...
Aug 25, 2025•49 min
Before Pierre Poilievre, before Brian Mulroney, there was one leader who made federal conservatives an electoral force to be reckoned with. Before John Diefenbaker, Canada had begun to resemble a Liberal one-party state. Bob Plamondon, author of the new book Freedom Fighter: John Diefenbaker's Battle for Canadian Liberties and Independence, talks with Brian about how Dief became a political sensation bigger than any other prime minister. How he stood against Soviets, while standing up to America...
Aug 18, 2025•51 min
A lot of people in the West misunderstand the motives of Russian president Vladimir Putin in his war against Ukraine. As Andrew Natsios, editor of the new book Russia Under Putin, tells Brian, we won’t understand the war unless we understand demographics. Russia’s population is cratering; the largest country by land mass is rapidly depopulating and becoming vulnerable, particularly to China. While posing as a defender of traditional values has won Putin fans among some American right-wingers, it...
Aug 11, 2025•52 min
For two years, Hamas has used the suffering of Palestinians to manipulate global opinion. As Brian discusses with this week’s guests, it worked: The Hamas-engineered hunger crisis in Gaza has prompted Canada, with France and the U.K., to recognize a Palestinian state based on unenforceable conditions like democratic elections and Hamas relinquishing power — which it says it will never do. Iddo Moed, Israel’s ambassador, says the declarations have already destroyed ceasefire talks. Eylon Levy, fo...
Aug 04, 2025•48 min
One-day sentences for aiding and abetting the Islamic State terror group, a few short years for murder, but possibly more if you’re an anti-vaccine trucker: these stories and loads of others from recent Canadian court cases seem to be undermining the public’s faith in our justice system. Brian chats with Postmedia columnists Jamie Sarkonak and Chris Selley about how things went so wrong and what to do about it. They also discuss the recent acquittal of the five hockey players for sexual assault,...
Jul 28, 2025•50 min
Between President Donald Trump claiming there’s a flood of fentanyl from Canada to the U.S., and people here insisting there’s almost none, the truth is elusive. A new American report gets to the bottom of what’s really going on, and its author, Jonathan Caulkins, talks to Brian about what he found. Specializing in crime systems, the professor from Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College breaks down how global supply chains run by criminal organizations moving from Mexico to China to Australi...
Jul 21, 2025•46 min
We’ve lost sight of where Prime Minister Mark Carney is pointing his elbows as U.S. President Donald Trump keeps smacking Canada with more economic threats. Brian talks this week about Carney’s erratic political shapeshifting with Conservative adviser Ginny Roth and veteran Liberal adviser Warren Kinsella, and asks: Is our new prime minister emerging as a progressive, a conservative, or someone who will just say anything to placate the public? They also discuss the not-so-certain future of Conse...
Jul 14, 2025•55 min
For a moment it seemed all Canadians understood that, facing President Donald Trump’s tariff war, we had to make our economy as resilient and competitive as possible. As Martha Hall Findlay discusses with Brian, there was finally talk of ending Ottawa’s war on oil and gas, building infrastructure and boosting productivity. The government even yanked the aggravating digital services tax. But, explains Findlay, a former Liberal MP, now director of the University of Calgary’s School of Public Polic...
Jul 07, 2025•56 min
Make no mistake: the blows that Israel and America delivered to the Islamic tyrants in Tehran were in many ways crippling. As Kaveh Shahrooz, an Iranian-born Mideast analyst and human rights activist, tells Brian this week, the devastating targeted assassinations of nuclear scientists and military leaders indicate Israel has infiltrated the regime at its highest level. Its nuclear program is shattered, although we wait to learn by how much. And Israel has amputated Iran’s terror network by crush...
Jun 30, 2025•42 min
As the Islamic Republic’s missiles rain down on the Jewish state, and with massive U.S. attacks against Iran’s nuclear sites ratcheting up the war, Brian talks to two Canadians living under fire as they frantically duck in and out of bomb shelters. Postmedia columnist Adam Zivo has been stuck in Israel, unable to get out, while former Canadian ambassador to Israel Vivian Bercovici (also a Postmedia columnist) has been helping evacuate fellow expatriates abandoned by Canada’s government. They tal...
Jun 23, 2025•53 min
There are many lingering questions about the two-day killing spree by Gabriel Wortman that killed 22 people in 2020 in Nova Scotia, even after a joint federal/provincial commission wrapped up its inquiry. Investigative journalist Paul Palango joins Brian to discuss why he thinks all signs point to RCMP covering up that Wortman was working undercover for them before his rampage, as he exposes in his new book, Anatomy of a Cover-Up. He explains that it’s why police did nothing about reports that W...
Jun 16, 2025•52 min
Don’t call it a done deal until it’s done, but America’s ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, tells Brian this week that negotiations between Ottawa and President Donald Trump’s administration are making progress. He explains why he believes things are moving quickly in the right direction to settle the trade war between our two countries. Hoekstra also talks about why he’s looking forward to the next phase of the longstanding bilateral relationship, when he thinks Canada and the U.S. will work ...
Jun 09, 2025•41 min
With the King opening Parliament, and a disciplined agenda, the prime minister modelled a poised and assured break from his unserious predecessor while sending a message to the world about Canadian sovereignty. That’s the verdict of Postmedia’s politics columnist John Ivison and parliamentary bureau chief Stuart Thomson, who join Brian to discuss the first week of Mark Carney’s re-elected government. Now, the easy part is over. Despite promises to cut spending, new estimates show bureaucracy out...
Jun 02, 2025•55 min
Jews get arrested in Toronto for standing up to Hamas cheerleaders; Judaic students hide their identity while public school teachers extol Islam; progressives, along with media and politicians, compare Israel to Nazis and cast Palestinians as blameless martyrs. These are among the reasons Brendan O’Neill, author of After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, tells Brian why he thinks the West has been successfully taken over by people who hate our society, heritage and va...
May 26, 2025•45 min
He won last month’s election for the Liberals promising he had a plan to protect Canada’s economy from the predations of the American president. But since returning to Ottawa, Prime Minister Mark Carney has sent alarming signals to business and scaring off badly needed capital investment, as economist and professor Ian Lee tells Brian this week. The Liberal government’s decision to avoid tabling a budget makes it seem like there actually is no plan, Lee says. Meanwhile, comments from Carney’s ca...
May 19, 2025•57 min
Torn at for nine years by the divisive Trudeau Liberals, Canadian unity is seriously frayed, with Alberta now preparing for a possible secession referendum. In this episode, Brian talks with Reform Party founder Preston Manning, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, and longtime Liberal pollster Dan Arnold to get a sense of how dire the situation has become. Manning explains that the separatist sentiment isn’t just in Alberta but spread across much of the West and even parts of the North. And all thre...
May 12, 2025•48 min
The big election surprise was that Conservatives can do so well and still lose. Leader Pierre Poilievre created a new Tory coalition, sweeping up working-class NDPers and anti-establishment People’s Party voters, as Brian discusses with Tasha Kheiriddin and Stuart Thomson from Postmedia’s Political Hack newsletter . But Poilievre now needs even more to beat the Liberals — which means building bridges with moderate conservatives he’s shunned. That likely includes people in the laptop class, like ...
May 05, 2025•56 min
