The now legendary “firewall letter” stunned Canadian political watchers. Officially called the Alberta Agenda, it called on the province to start taking back powers from the federal government, refusing to be taken further advantage of. And for 20 years, Alberta governments largely ignored it. But as former provincial finance minister Ted Morton discusses with Brian, Alberta’s UCP government is finally changing that. He was one of the letter’s signatories, along with Stephen Harper, who later be...
Oct 07, 2024•31 min
You’d have to be a fool not to see how the UN has been taken over by malevolent dictatorships. But rather than give up on the ideals the United Nations was founded on, Hillel Neuer forces the world body to face its hypocrisy, antisemitism and despot-worship. The Montreal-born executive director of UN Watch joins Brian this week to talk about his work in Geneva, where he tirelessly torments corrupt UN bodies and delegates by revealing their complicity with the worst human-rights abusers and terro...
Sep 30, 2024•50 min
The Conservatives’ attempt to bring down Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government with a non-confidence motion was virtually DOA when the Bloc Québécois quickly said it would refuse to support it. No wonder: With no NDP deal to back the Liberals, the Bloc suddenly finds itself with significant power over the Liberals, as Brian discusses in our politics roundtable with columnist Tasha Kheiriddin and Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson, the team behind Postmedia’s Political Hack newsletter . They also g...
Sep 23, 2024•53 min
If you’ve ever wondered how some self-proclaimed feminists can defend the brutal rapists of Hamas, or how people can passionately believe men can get pregnant, Gad Saad has an explanation. As an academic researcher in behavioural science, Saad has spent his career studying how perceptions and ideas can produce biological effects. He joins Brian this week to discuss how “woke” concepts like postmodernism, moral relativism and social constructionism act like pathogens on people’s minds. He explain...
Sep 16, 2024•50 min
The leader of the federal NDP has spent two years thundering righteously against the Liberals —while propping up their minority government through a supply-and-confidence deal. Now, Jagmeet Singh has said he’s for sure, no-joking, super-duper fed up with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and he’s cancelled their bargain, which means giving up his leverage to advance NDP priorities. As former, longtime NDP power-player Karl Bélanger discusses with Brian this week, Singh is out of excuses for denounc...
Sep 09, 2024•45 min
Fast enough to make your head spin, Canada’s “harm reduction” approach to helping drug addicts went from a few safe injection sites to giving away powerful opioid drugs to addicts. As Adam Zivo, journalist and director of the Canadian Centre for Responsible Drug Policy discusses with Brian, ideologically radical public health officials now even insist that any addiction treatment other than giving addicts more free drugs is racist and colonialist. And despite overdose deaths rising and more addi...
Sep 02, 2024•50 min
We’re still learning how institutions and officials politicized science during the pandemic to justify economic lockdowns, border closures, school shutdowns and other measures that lacked supportive evidence but carried grave consequences. Vanessa Dylyn is the award-winning director of the new documentary Covid Collateral, which shows how real scientific methods and debate were sidelined, even banished, as governments faked expertise during COVID-19 with the help of compliant doctors and journal...
Aug 26, 2024•35 min
Not long ago, our practical, moderate approaches were considered exemplars that countries around the world tried to emulate. But as Postmedia’s Tristin Hopper discusses with Brian this week, in just a few years Canada went from paragon to cautionary tale. A model of how one should definitely not handle drug policy, euthanasia, housing, online censorship, gender policy, immigration, and more. Sure, some of this is the work of an activist federal government, Hopper says — but not all of it. Social...
Aug 19, 2024•44 min
The statistics are undeniable: married people tend to be happier, amass more wealth and live longer, healthier lives than unmarried people, as sociologist Brad Wilcox tells Brian this week. Marriage also reduces child poverty and makes communities safer. So why are so many so-called progressives in politics, the media and other influential spheres so invested in destroying the traditions of marriage and familyhood? There’s something bizarre afoot, notes Wilcox — author of the new book Get Marrie...
Aug 12, 2024•45 min
Chrystia Freeland talks like a patronizing schoolmarm. Mark Carney comes off like a visiting aristocrat. Yet, the federal Liberals face a reckoning sooner or later, and they’ll eventually need someone to replace Justin Trudeau. Having turned his party into a suppressive cult of personality, however, Trudeau has thwarted the rise of any real heirs or heiresses apparent. This week, Brian and former Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella feverishly scour our list of rumoured contenders for a would-be l...
Aug 05, 2024•46 min
As the honeymoon quickly fades for the unelected but anointed Democratic candidate, the ugly truth about Kamala Harris is emerging. As U.S. political columnist J. D. Tuccille details with Brian this week, Harris has proven herself to be alarmingly unserious and personally difficult, with a problematic record on rights. And for Americans who want change, Harris looks like Biden rebranded. Her one advantage, Tuccille says, may be that Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance as his vice-presidential candida...
Jul 29, 2024•46 min
It’s been three years since the bombshell media reports first spread claims there was a “mass grave” found at a former Kamloops residential school, and the truth has been playing catch-up ever since. But as our guest this week explains, anyone with knowledge of history should have known the grisly allegations that residential schools had been disappearing children and secretly disposing of them didn’t make sense. Tom Flanagan, co-author of Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth abou...
Jul 22, 2024•41 min
The province causing pain in Ottawa’s side these days isn’t Quebec or Alberta — it’s Saskatchewan, where Premier Scott Moe this year unilaterally declared his province would not be forced to pay carbon taxes on natural gas. So far, the courts are backing him up. John Gormley, former dean of the province’s talk radio (and former MP), joins Brian this week to explain how the onetime NDP heartland has turned rebel against the left’s centralized-control agenda, as it fights against Justin Trudeau’s ...
Jul 15, 2024•49 min
While the world fixates on the war in Gaza, Israelis in the north are under daily attack from Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Islamist group that’s a key part of Iran’s multi-front war against the Jewish state — and the entire western-led world order. Sarit Zehavi speaks to Brian from her home in the Galilee, as missiles explode in the background, and lush forests around her burn from Hezbollah’s indiscriminate bombing. Zehavi is head of the Alma Research and Education Centre, specializing in Israe...
Jul 08, 2024•42 min
A collapse of their Toronto—St. Paul fortress is just the beginning. All that remains to be seen is how extensive the Liberals’ inevitable ruin will be once Justin Trudeau’s strange, destructive experiment is over. As Liberal activist and strategist Andrew Perez tells Brian, the prime minister has made the once-mighty, centrist “natural governing” party into something unrecognizable — and likely unelectable — by driving out moderates and effectively merging with the NDP. While pundits and politi...
Jul 01, 2024•45 min
If you want the real story about why residents in one of Canada’s biggest cities have for weeks been under orders to ration their water usage, you won’t get it from Calgary’s mayor or city bureaucrats. As local veteran Postmedia journalist Don Braid tells Brian in this week’s episode, the catastrophic water-main explosion is a tale of municipal mismanagement, inferior infrastructure and wilful political blindness. And, Braid says, the same factors — including a whole lot of disintegrating water ...
Jun 24, 2024•33 min
Nav Bhatia is instantly recognizable as the turbaned, fanatically exuberant Raptors superfan courtside at every home game. As he tells Brian, he immigrated to Toronto from an India riven by ethnic conflict, to find peace and undreamed-of prosperity here. Discussing his new memoir, The Heart of a Superfan, Bhatia talks about his experience with bigotry, his rise to success, his love for the Raptors, and why he thinks Canada is still the envy of the world. And he explains why he thinks all of us, ...
Jun 17, 2024•33 min
It may be that the leader of the Conservative party has been preparing for the job of prime minister his whole life. He once entered an essay contest about “If I were prime minister,” advocating for making Canada a bastion of freedom. As Andrew Lawton, author of the new biography, Pierre Poilievre: A Political Life, discusses with Brian, the now opposition leader’s crusade hasn’t much changed since then. Along the way, as Lawton details, Poilievre has innovated new ways of campaigning, messaging...
Jun 10, 2024•48 min
He gets away with wearing blackface while calling other people racist. He spoils himself with opulent trips abroad and refuses to answer for it. As Stephen Maher, author of a new book, The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau, explains, the prime minister has always seen himself as having been born into royalty — and he’s acted like it. That lofty self-image has given Trudeau preternatural confidence and bravado, but it’s also made him capricious and vain, as Maher tells Brian, as they ...
Jun 03, 2024•59 min
They sound like a bargain: Cheap Chinese EVs selling in Canada for around $15,000 each. They’re an even better deal for the Chinese, because our government promises to pay them more than that sale price for every EV they sell here, as Flavio Volpe tells Brian this week. The president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association explains how the ultra-low price is made possible by China’s dubious business practices and its aggressive plan to dominate strategic industries, dumping boatloads ...
May 27, 2024•52 min
Polls suggest the Tories are just too far ahead for Liberals to avoid a decimation in next year’s election. The prime minister seems defiantly bound to leading his party into 2025, even as his attacks against Tory Leader Pierre Poilievre grow more incoherent, as Chris Selley discusses with Brian this week. The big problem, Chris suspects, is that the Liberals have no better option — no obvious candidate who could outdo Trudeau. Chris and Brian also talk about the Liberals’ denial of a growing se...
May 20, 2024•44 min
Praising terrorist “martyrs,” open praise for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, and inciting violence toward Jews: social media platforms have been flooded since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, with alarming and disturbing content that American online platforms seem unable to control. Tal-Or Cohen Montmayor, whose organization CyberWell deploys open-source monitoring of antisemitism on social media, joins Brian this week to explain how Hamas and its backers exploit weaknesses in online content...
May 13, 2024•45 min
fIt wasn’t just that funding for the out-of-control opioid crisis flowed to those promoting radical, unproven policies. Advocates leading the charge to B.C.’s doomed drug decriminalization experiment were personally investing in businesses to supply opioids to addicts, profiting off the back of a massive social crisis, as Vancouver psychologist Dr. Julian Somers tells Brian this week. Meanwhile, leaders promoting ever more “safe supply” grew too friendly with pharmaceutical producers. Somers, an...
May 06, 2024•50 min
Don’t expect the foreign interference inquiry to do much to impede Beijing’s stunningly successful capture of Canada’s critical institutions, says Jonathan Manthorpe, author of Claws of the Panda. China’s most insidious infiltration isn’t happening at the ballot box but in our universities, corporations, the political class — and, perhaps most corrosively, our mindset. We been fooled into believing we need China: for trade, for friendship, for influence. But we don’t, and never have, says Mantho...
Apr 29, 2024•48 min
The recent budget’s tax hikes won’t be enough to get us out of the fiscal mess the Trudeau Liberals have made with unrestrained spending and endless deficits, as Robert Asselin tells Brian. Asselin once advised Liberal finance minister Bill Morneau and is now with the Business Council of Canada. He says that with deficits becoming structural and interest on the debt now eating up massive amounts of revenue, the imbalance between spending and revenues is so out of whack that economic growth alone...
Apr 22, 2024•42 min
The Canadian Victoria Cross has never been awarded in its 31 years of existence. Gen. Rick Hillier aims to change that, and he joins Brian to discuss the new “Heroes Among Us” project launching with Postmedia — and his worries about the general state of our military, and our nation, today. Hillier lays out in stark detail how Canada’s world stature has sunk from its former greatness, why we’re a “parasite on defence,” why the army is “essentially broken,” and why Ottawa’s new defence policy does...
Apr 15, 2024•52 min
Islamist extremism is on the march, as Hamas, ISIS, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis and al Shabab unleash attacks against the West. Highly organized support for radicalized violence parades openly on our city streets. What connects them all is money, as Haras Rafiq tells Brian this week. And he says Canada has become a critical nexus of funding from Qatar, Iran and other sponsors connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. Rafiq is at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism...
Apr 08, 2024•46 min
All she did was tell the truth. Before she knew it, Selina Robinson was being hounded out of B.C.’s cabinet for saying the UN had allotted Jews a “crappy piece of land” in 1948, with anti-Israel activists accusing her of insulting Muslims. Robinson joins Brian this week to recount how she was first targeted weeks prior by a “vicious” mob who wanted revenge after the then post-secondary education minister criticized an overtly pro-terrorist college instructor. Robinson recounts how B.C. Premier D...
Apr 01, 2024•41 min
New Democrats and even other Liberals are now fighting Justin Trudeau’s carbon-tax scheme. This, as the prime minister’s abandonment of Israel has lost him a significant segment of long-time supporters. Postmedia’s Lorne Gunter joins Brian Lilley this week to unpack the chaos that appears to be consuming the Liberal party right now. They get into how the NDP threw the government into disarray with its Palestinian statehood motion, while the Conservatives seemingly have Liberals cornered on envir...
Mar 25, 2024•49 min
The Trudeau government didn’t just fight for years to hide the embarrassing truth about two scientists caught leaking secrets from Canada’s highest-risk pathology laboratory to China — including for bioweapons research. As former CSIS analyst Phil Gurski and Conservative MP Michael Chong discuss with Brian this week, the Liberals tried painting concerns about Beijing’s interference as bigoted, just as they have whenever warnings have been raised about Chinese infiltration. As Chong and Gurski di...
Mar 18, 2024•56 min
