Least worst province

0:00This podcast is recorded on the traditional and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, Slayowtooth and Coquatlin peoples. British Columbia, I've seen your mountains high. Senior pretty rainbows and your blue crystal skies. Watch your winding rivers as they blow around the bend. To me you're not a stranger, you'll always be a friend. Coming to you from the West Coast, this is Politicoast today is February 27th, 2026. I'm Stratt the One of Home and I'm Ian Bushfield. On today's show, the BC Conservative Race is tightening up with candidates dropping out and MLA endorsements racking up. The NDP is under fire for policy changes. The federal government might be fine with some light for an interference and the Conservatives got an amendment to the budget past. So good for them. Go to patreon.com slash Politicoast to support the show. Get access to the Slack channel and keep up the conversation going.

1:04Let's start here in BC with the BC Conservative Leadership Race, which thankfully is not a dozen people or more anymore as two sitting MLAs have decided they don't have the juice. Specifically Steve Cooner and Sheldon Claire have both announced in the last few days that things aren't going their way and they're going to step aside and look to put their support somewhere else in this race. I'm going to be honest, I forgotten who Sheldon Claire was and that he was even running before this announcement came out. I kind of had to Google him a bit once the once the reporting started coming out that he was dropping out. Neither of these guys for front runners. Yeah, I mean, Trinor at least was the critic for Attorney General. So fairly high profile critic role. Not that that really enters that much once again outside Victoria. But there's at least a little more of an argument there for a modest profile.

2:07Yeah, but it only held that role for a hot minute since the election, I believe. So it's more than nothing but also not too high of a public profile. For his part, Sheldon Claire said, you know, he submitted the 250 signatures he needed. But the party came back and said actually a lot of these people aren't members. It's either lapsed or they never were members. And therefore you don't get to run. He took full responsibility for that. But it's a pretty big oversight to get the wrong names on the list. It's not written every now and then. A couple of these ones get struck off whatever reason, but you know, did a campaign will put in a lot more than just the bare minimum in order to make sure they're protected from that, you know, unless they can't actually get a lot more than the bare minimum, which might be a little possibility here.

3:07Yeah. So they returned to not civilian life, but just normal MLA life. And I think both are planning to make another endorsement or at least they're going to follow the race. And we'll see. But we do have five MLAs who have come forward and endorsed Peter Millibar. This is Ward Starmer, Brennan Day, Gavin Dew, Keel Giddens, and Scott McKinnis are all lined up behind former BC Liberal slash BC United and now BC conservative Peter Millibar. It's quite a few of the formal BC Liberals in that camp there. It makes that interesting. Yeah. I think Millibar is trying to line himself up as like the moderate, like the we can't go off into Looney Tunes far right land. We should try to keep touching grass with British Columbians in the lower mainland and across BC who aren't eager to vote one BC or for some of the more cultural politics that seem

4:09to be rampant in much of the right wing these days. Yeah. For his. Ward Starmer, I think it's the only one of those people that wasn't at least a BC United candidate at one point. But yeah, him and Ian Black are trying to fight you know for that, that lane of the thing. Black has fewer BC Liberal endorsements, although it does have Theresa Watt and Mike DeYoung. He's going off the Wikipedia list and a few federal conservatives batting him. But you know, your James Moore and Ed Fas types either from a prominent cultural warriors. Millibar is the former mayor of Kamloops, which he served from 2008 until 2017 when he was elected to the BC legislature as the MLA for Kamloops, North Thompson and later Kamloops Center.

5:11Yeah. We'll see what he brings forward as his platform and his focus. But I think it would be quite in line with the shape of where like Kevin Falcon was, but maybe with some something different to make it work better this time for him. Although we never saw Kevin Falcon in a general election. So who knows? Sir, any reason to believe that would have drawn well? No. I hope he's enjoying his post-politics time as what is it a car storage entrepreneur? He's still technically leader of BC United last I checked, it's going to have that party die with him. Yeah. At this point of rise, they haven't just gotten deregistered by elections BC for not doing the paperwork files because it doesn't seem like anything's going on there. But you know, maybe still putting in the forms, even if nothing's actually happening. Their website doesn't exist right now, it's just a blank page, like there's parking

6:13the URL. But why? I'm trying to like offload it to a softer team that sets up shop in BC at some point. I mean, maybe that would pay off their debts if they could sell the URL at least. I think you're vastly overestivating how much brand equity there is in a name like BC United. Well, one thing that's not super united is the provincial and federal conservatives as the federal torres are a little mad at the province or their provincial brethren for data theft. Probably one candidate who sent out a letter that was, you know, from the BC are from the federal conservative mailing list with the federal conservative brand thing on it about a campaign event. This would be Karaklin Finley. And it went out from the Vane Trooper Center conservative EDA to their list.

7:19Well, it's a good thing that right now the federal parties are still subject to BC privacy law because that gives members of those parties a little bit more recourse to be mad, although if certain tax bills pass the federal parliament, that will be undone. In the meantime, this is not cool. No, and the federal conservatives are entirely right to be a little pissed off about that. Because they don't want to get involved in a different party's leadership race and end up alienating some of their people and yeah, it's just a completely understandable for them to be upset over it and, you know, historically, lists have a way of getting spread around and shared and making them away from one campaign to another. So this is like not unheard of before, but usually it's more the case that someone

8:27finds out because they get an email from the campaign they haven't signed up for rather than apparently just hijacking a different party's EDA's mailing system with that author party's branding on it. It's just sloppy even from the standards of the less than ideal data management of leadership campaigns. Indeed. So good for the federal conservatives for taking action. Like I think this is, they're not the NDP, right? They don't share their lists. The other thing going on in the right wing this week in BC is Tara Armstrong decided to do another bill at first reading stunt where she's sharing the right wing outrage that Barry Newfell was slapped down by the BC human rights tribunal and her response is to abolish

9:29the human rights code entirely. Just repeal it, repeal the human rights code, get rid of the commissioner, no more tribunals. You know, you get fired for being black. You have no recourse under that idea. A little extrude. Yeah. Like, you know, the tribunals have not been without criticism. I think like 20 years ago, they were also getting criticized and usually those concerns relate to the speech aspects of the cases they take up. And some of the issues around, you know, whether or not they had the same procedural protections for defendants as, you know, cases before the courts and a bunch of others. Stuff like that, but like, nobody thinks the getting fired and like clear employment discrimination shouldn't be protected. Well, apparently Tara Armstrong does and so did the BC conservative caucus who voted for this bill to go forward at first reading.

10:32Um, yeah, it may be wonder if they actually were voting on. As well. Fun fact, at first reading, you don't have the text of the bill. So maybe, but like, I'm pretty sure it was well understood what it was going to say because she did introduce it with a speech saying this bill will repeal the human rights code. Hence why the NDP said we're not supporting that as did a number of the independence. Like I'm not going to say starko voted for against it. I wouldn't be surprised. I saw that covered. Yeah. And I know a bolt B voted against this bill. So it died with some X conservatives opposing it. But yeah, real, real stuff happening still on that like one BC and X one BC side of the legislature. The BC conservative is going for it to be known goal, though. Yeah. Although a number of their leadership candidates are well, they're choosing to, you know, grand

11:35stand a bit on this tribunal ruling. But like you said, the human rights act does much more than just the speech cases that are pretty controversial in most cases. Yeah. I could, I could understand it if they were specifically addressing the tribunal and speech related cases, there'd be much more solid ground on that, but going wide on the other hand, not really. That said, the NDP for their part is not without criticism. This week, there's a few things happening from their point of view. I want to talk about, since we're in the legislature, let's talk about that first. They have brought forward two bills this week, one on updates to the Civil Forfeiture Act. Neither of us have looked at that close enough or found any criticism of it. So I'm going to kind of skip past that to focus. They really seem to have been covered much from what we can tell and flipping through

12:36the, the tets of the bill, it's one of these, do a bunch of technical updates to the language, which you kind of need to be familiar with the act and how it actually works to have a lot of insightful things to say about whether it's a good bill or not. Yeah. Nothing might be a big overreach of a already somewhat controversial police power. The free of information stuff is similarly technical and is generating some reaction. The privacy commissioner for his part said he was consulted in advance of this and he appreciates many of the steps the government seems to be taking with this bill nine to improve efficiency and make things a little bit more clear. That said, Vaughan Palmer and the free of information and privacy protection and privacy association of BC are lambasting the government as, quote, keeping the public in the dark.

13:38Well, I'm not surprised that this has gotten a little more attention if for no other reason than that. Journalists have been complaining about the information act for, for ever now, particularly since the NDP brought in their last set of changes on it. Doesn't, I mean, my reading of this, it doesn't like significantly change things, but doesn't move things in the more transparency direction either. A lot of it's on personal information requests, which fine, other than the part where the government wants to be able to ask people to give them, let them have more time to answer these, see those parts and seem fairly uncontroversial. It's the, the other parts that might be a little more questionable from the perspective of journalists and the opposition, certainly, it doesn't make it easier to get information.

14:40Yeah, one of the big things, so there's a couple of like changes that have been pulled out for criticism. One is changing the duty of public bodies to get back to applicants for information without delay to, without unreasonable delay, suggesting the government can decide for itself what's a reasonable delay or not. And you know, listening to the credits of the current system, one would certainly be left with the impression that before now they've not been particularly concerned about delays or their reasonableness. And there's also a portion in there that will allow the government or public bodies to disregard and throw out requests if, quote, responding to the request would unreasonably interfere with the operations of the government to BC or the public body, which, which, come on.

15:40What kind of request are we talking about here? This is a function of our government is, if you're part of your government is to be transparent, then, oh, transparency request can't impede that. I don't know, you could definitely have parts of governments working at trust purposes with each other. It's a hardly an unheard of thing. Oh, yeah. That said, I have trouble thinking of an actual scenario where that would come into play. Like, there's a section in that same part that says they'll reject requests that are unreasonably broad, which I guess is fair enough because when you make an FOI request, they have a duty to help you get to what you want. And so when I've made them, usually the staff are actually, you know, sincere about that and do good work. I never mean to demean them. It's the system that's the problem. And so they do try to help. They say, oh, your request is going to cost you like $4,000 or so if you put it this way.

16:44But it seems like you really just want like these three emails. Should we frame it that way? And it's like, yeah, actually, that would be great. And that's fine. But yeah, it's, the transparency stuff is always tough because governments don't deserve the benefit of the doubt with these applications, with these kinds of changes. And you know, I need to see them prove that they are committed to actually getting more documents out faster. And I'm not convinced anything in this bill does that. It feels like it's going to change the denominator rather than the numerator. Like, we will disregard, you know, discard more requests. And therefore we've made the process more efficient because fewer requests are getting returned. That's not all people are mad at them for a number of doctors clinics are upset about changes to family doctor billing. They're arguing it could limit access to primary care as clinics will no longer see some patients who are not on their

17:50roles. Yes, specifically under the recent changes to how family doctors are getting paid. A family doctor sees more than 30% of people that aren't enrolled in on their clinic, you know, drop in that sort of thing. They would get their pay cut. Also, if the family doctor is seeing too many people and have more than 2500 people on their patient roles, they'll also get their pay cut. So basically right now, the government set up to kind of penalize people who are seeing people without family doctors. If they devote too much of their practice to it, which you're trying to see that in the world where BC had an abundance of family doctors, and it was really easy to get one. But, you know, there's been some improvements, but still about 20% of British lumpians don't have a family doctor. That's one in five. That's, you know, maybe not the time when you want to be trying to penalize the doctors that do help those people out and see

18:56them. Yeah, it's a weird issue because the article that will link to highlights that, you know, there's a number of clinics that this will affect that are scrambling to try to figure out what to do before the, you know, waiver ends at March 31st. Like, do they just stop seeing so many walk-ins? Or do they have to get these people enrolled on their list? And that will cause administrative headaches, according to them, or take more bureaucracy. There are a number of other clinics they quote who are like, you know what? It's fine. It's our system works. We have all of most of our patients are enrolled and we still see some walk-ins. Like, 30% is still quite a few walk-ins for a clinic that is generally not a walking clinic. And weirdly, neither doctors of BC or BC family doctors, advocacy groups are concerned about this. BC family doctors just didn't reply for

20:00requests for information from the journalists and doctors of BC has kind of just advised doctors about these coming changes and hasn't taken a strong position that this is a problem. So it's hard for me to read how big of an issue this is. It's definitely affecting some clinics, but I can't tell if those are clinics that are just not willing to like get people signed up with a family doctor who are coming regularly, which they should be. Although the weight set up with this time, so a cap makes me just wonder if part of it is they're going to get penalized either way on that. So it doesn't necessarily make sense, particularly because once someone is on the roles, that's a harder issue to resolve than someone who showed up for a walk-in appointment. Yeah, I also have to see the changes to family doctor

21:02pay of generally. I think been pretty well received overall, mostly because doctors are getting more money and who doesn't like that? And it simplifies administrative headaches a little bit, I think, versus the previous purely fee for service model where it was like how many people can we brush through as fast as we can to just rack up the billings? And they have, like you said, increased the number of people who have access family doctors. I think I saw a headline saying BC is the most improved province on that metric. It's still a lot of great outcome, like being the least worst province on health care is not exactly something to celebrate, considering nobody's knocking it out of the park. Yeah, most improved reminds me of the awards I would get in sports as a kid. There's a consolation prizes. It's not real, not a real thing. But we'll keep tracking it.

22:05It's kind of as this whole reminder of how complex medicine is in this province. There's doctors in this article talking about how they're locums. Sometimes they're spending one or two days a week at a clinic, but they also have a full-time role working out of a hospital. Sometimes they're doing two or three other things. The doctors I see or my family sees are often in those kind of situations where sometimes they're at BC children, sometimes they're a pediatrician in private practice, and sometimes they're doing something else. And you're like, I can't imagine that life, but I guess it works for them. Let's them, you know, do lots of different things, but this model is discouraging that a little bit because the doctors have to have the family doctors have to have a minimum number of patients on their role. So, growing pains at the very least possibly bad incentives at the worst. One of the other programs with growing pains is our 10-dollar day child care program. With the new budget, there has been some pausing and stabilization. As there was a

23:12lot of talk of changing the funding model for the 10-dollar day centers, and a lot of centers were very concerned that they were not going to have enough money to pay their ECEs and staff. And so they were considering shutting down, which would be a net negative to the provincial program that is trying to put more kids in 10-dollar day. Well, now they're not. Now they're just going to keep the exact same number of kids in 10-dollar a day take care. Yeah, their solution to this was just stopped. It spanned in the program altogether, which, you know, not great if you're one of the many, many families that aren't in the 10-dollar day child care program. No, which is most of them, about 90 percent. Some families do receive subsidies through the affordable child care benefit. That's means tested. That helps get them to 10 a day. But it's the centers that have, you know, qualified for the pilot that are the like golden ticket where you just you just pay

24:14200 bucks a month and it's brilliant. I've never been in that. I knew someone who got in and loved it because that is an affordable child care amount. Katrina Chen, the former MLA and Minister of Child Care who helped set up BC's program is notably speaking out and is really frustrated by the government's delays. She's pointed out that like we had a plan to get there in 10 years and I get that delays happen, but it seems like they're just giving up or, you know, a three-year delay that they're talking about now might take all, you know, take all momentum away and it could be an entirely different government that has no interest in doing anything more with this by the time that pauses over and I get her frustration. Yeah, it's a little bit like what we talked about with the whole budget last week of just spending increasingly more to kind of stay in the same spot

25:17just seems like another example of that of yeah, we're spending a lot on child care, not expanding it at all. Just got to pause where we are and yeah, it's not necessarily going to help the next generation or the, you know, growing number of kids that needed in the province. Yeah, and like BC has brought average child care costs down, but we're still the most expensive in the country and this past week Alberta dropped its budget and the numbers are slightly different, but the story is kind of the same. Like they have a big deficit, they increased education and healthcare funding a bit. They didn't increase any new taxes because they didn't say that they said they didn't have a mandate to do that. They don't have a mandate to do a lot of other things they're doing, but whatever. And then they blamed immigrants, which was the big difference for them. Immigrants that Daniel Smith had begged the federal government for two years ago.

26:20But, you know, they're in a different position, but like the fiscal challenges that BC face are not unique, but that doesn't like let the government watch the hook obviously for needing to find a way to solve them. Yeah, it's been a consistent problem kind of for us, can't it? There's a look federally. Yeah, maybe discount this last budget from the analysis because there is 10 change in track a bit on some stuff, but you know, you look at the last several Trudeau budgets and a lot of those were, you know, with throwing all the increasing numbers of dollars and public servants at stuff, and it's not really actually improving things for a lot of people. So it's a fairly consistent challenge that it would be really nice if someone could get a hold of and actually solve. Yeah, I see that Saskatchewan's predicting they will have a deficit coming out

27:21of Manitoba's budgets not coming till March 24th, which, cool, but they're expected a deficit of 1.6 billion as well. Like, you know, the trade, the tariffs and the trade war is definitely I think having an effect and shouldn't be negated, but it's still a slight countrywide challenge of what are we doing? And no one has come forward with a clear solution or answer, or when they do, they kind of bring forward a bill and then it gets forgotten about, or, you know, we create a major project's office and then nothing. And I get some things take a long time to build. I mean, maybe I'm just impatient. This office might be the thing that actually like points a little bit at where some of these problems are of, you know, we've just spent decades, you know, adding to systems and their complexity. And yeah, I don't love the major project's office solution of we'll just stand up a new bureaucracy that goes around the old

28:22one, but it does at least hint a bit at the problem of we've we're spending a lot of time and effort trying to do stuff, but like most of that time, and efforts navigating our own bureaucracy. I mean, the, what, the Vancouver City Council just approved the rezoning for the um, Olympic Village School two decades after nearly two decades after that got started. And, you know, there's just a lot of stuff like that where it's less that, you know, we don't have the money and then we're wasting a lot of time and effort. It's just navigating bureaucracy on a lot of this stuff. And, you know, hardly a uniquely Canadian problem. The, uh, apparently New Yorkers are a little shot that just pain people to show up and shovel snow actually get snow shoveled. Like, without having to, you know, go through a city union on, uh, trying to get that

29:26snow cleared off. So it's a general problem. I think in a lot of developed countries, but one candidate has not really taken a hard crack at probably should. Well, one person frustrated by inefficiencies is BC Premier David EB, who's looking at the Senate and saying, why are they taking so long and why are they getting, uh, which is this Bill C-12, um, specifically he says, uh, we look at the Senate for sober second thought. I have to question whether there's thought and whether there's sobriety in the Senate chamber. Um, he's mad that Bill C-12, uh, the Senate is looking at it and potentially removing the, um, provisions that would allow or that would prevent extortion suspects from claiming refugee status as a way to delay deportation allegedly. Which is, uh, you know, fair concern to the levy at it. Uh, so the article notes that, uh, of the 281 people

30:33that are, uh, being investigated in relation to the, uh, wave of extortion, 104 have claimed, uh, refugee status, which would largely indicate that the, it's the case of the system being abused to try and avoid, uh, consequences for serious criminality. The article notes that, that we don't know how many have been accepted or rejected, though 10 have been deported. Um, the solution for me and all of this stuff is just fund the system better because the refugee system is notoriously slow and backlogged and could just stand to have people actually read the documents, make a quicker determination and get on with it. Uh, the other side of this is if someone is charged with extortion, um, even if we don't deport them, we can put them at jail if they get arrest,

31:35you know, like if they are not just charged but convicted. So like, there's a element on the other side of let's fund our justice system to actually process investigations and, uh, court hearings instead of kind of leaving people in these limbo's that doesn't appease anyone. Yeah, I mean, we should definitely be doing more on the criminal justice side too. Um, but, you know, part of the problem is once you get people abusing the refugee system in order to stay, even throw an additional resources at it, it's still so backed up that, uh, each subsequent applicant who is doing it not as a legitimate refugee but as someone trying to stay in the country longer, that's still because it is so long, it creates the incentive to then apply for it in order to delay any, uh, removal proceedings. All of which means you do kind of have to have a way to clear out

32:39that, uh, large unnecessary backlog on that and going through the long process is not necessarily going to get it done as quickly. Just, you know, maybe there's a way to do like a preliminary hearing very quickly on this and get the out of the way, but the one year provision that, uh, the bill proposes also seems fairly reasonable. I mean, there's still another process if there is a, uh, legitimate, uh, fear of, um, safety upon returning to the country. Doesn't entirely foreclose that, but it, you know, does mean that people have to file timely and not use it as a way of avoiding a uh, mandated departure from the country. I think the thing that's frustrating to me in this comment is that instead of engage with the substance of the debate, the Senate is having over the bill, Ebis once again, like grandstanding and, you know, attacking the institution. And

33:45that's become his kind of go-to these days, but like a number of people point out in the article, like given his background as a human rights lawyer and, um, litigant, you think he would, you would expect better, perhaps. Like, you could say, oh, he doesn't engage with the argument fundamentally. He just says that, you know, the bill was perfect and we should have passed it. And it's like, well, clearly they did give it second thought and didn't agree with your thought. I know that it has to be perfect to necessarily want a thing that would address the problem quickly to pass rather than being blocked. Like, you know, legislation doesn't should be good, but it doesn't have to be perfect. And sometimes getting a problem solved timely is more beneficial than taking years to get to the absolute perfect bit of legislation. Because you can't always come back with future legislation to address whatever gets missed on

34:51this one. And, you know, maybe there's a spot for that sort of thing and the Senate isn't necessarily getting the balance right on it. If he doesn't think the Senate has a role to review legislation, you should just say the Senate shouldn't exist. I could respect that position. What's the person that is using that is the NDP's position. But one person we're not hearing from enough on immigration issues is the Immigration Minister herself. Lena Diabb is apparently not being seen much by community groups around the country. Which might have something to do with the fact that she apparently doesn't actually know her file all that well because whenever she's appeared at committee, she's generally being unable to answer questions or actually not just even committee, just caucus meetings when the liberal caucus had questions about the immigration file. There's a lot of

35:58falling back on the civil servants that were company her and not showing the usual didrea familiarity. One would inspect a minister to have with their portfolio, especially because she's been in the job for what about a year now, 10 months, something like that. The best part of this article is that Diabb declined radio candidates request for an interview and instead sent a statement saying she's met with provincial and territorial counterparts many times in the past nine months. Yeah, this notably contrasts to work miller who any of the passable immigration ministers just haven't kind of, you know, been up job on the file as evidenced by the fact that they oversaw the collapse of the public consensus on immigration through mismanagement. But you know, at least they were regularly meeting with state holders. The only one that the CBC journalists were able to track down

37:05was that she had a single meeting with a group representing Ukrainians who have fled the war and are seeking a direct path to permanent residency in Canada. That was the only one they found and mentioned in this. Several of them did not have their attempts to schedule a meeting be returned. They also did get 10 liberal MPs on background saying they don't have confidence in her, which is quite the tell. Yeah. Might be time for a shake up in our county's cabinet. Maybe he'll get through the round of bi-elections that's upcoming. I think we're up to, what are we up to? Three and Alexander Boularise of the NDP is apparently mulling jumping to Quebec solid air, which would open up a probably a pretty contested seat in

38:09Quebec where he's strongly held it for the NDP for a few elections, but I'm sure the liberals would be eager to get in there so at the block. Yeah, Carter really should think of doing a cabinet shuffle, generally being fairly impressed with him. The cabinet I cannot say the same for. There's a few, quite a few duds in notable positions there that really should be changed out with people who are going to be more competent in their files and know them when they show up to committee or not tell their constituents that one of their major initiatives is just a political stunt that they don't expect to actually work, but will cost hundreds of millions of

39:12dollars. Yeah. Well, speaking of competence in their files, Canada's positioning against India has gotten, I guess, simplified this past week. We went from, you know, India is one of the primary concerns in foreign interference, particularly after the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijar here in BC to, no, it's all fine. We're going on a trade mission and we're not worried about them anymore according to one unnamed official. I think the specific quote was, we wouldn't be going on a trade mission if we had worries about them. This is one of those cases where I really wish we would actually just name these people. There's a real bad habit that the Ottawa Press Bureau's have of just quoting people anonymously when it does not actually need to be anonymous. Yeah,

40:15this feels like it was kind of allowed to go out because that's how a lot of things aren't like, yeah, actual leaks. They're like, you know, stories not fed by Mark Carney, but like someone says what exactly what we want India to hear as we go to India. Yeah, I really hate the anonymous sources for everyday statements that is a standard operating procedure in the Canadian media ecosystem. But yeah, the thing is India was not the only people that heard that and pretty much everyone in Canada was like, what? What are you talking about on this? This, this doesn't seem right. Not, not after everything we've seen and heard. And you know, it wasn't all that long ago. We had a prime minister standing up laying out some pretty harsh accusations on this particular file. And it is beyond naive to think that that would all go away so quickly.

41:21Yeah, people who are upset include Moninda Singh, who's head of the Sikh Federation of Canada, who was told by Vancouver police last Sunday that there are credible threats to his life that he believes are connected to the government of India for his, you know, presumably, or their presumably view that he is a, you know, Calistani separatist as they view pretty much all six in Canada, I think. Other MPs in his own office or in the liberal caucus were also upset. Sook Dalewal. Sook Dalewal is who I try to remember. Yeah, the MP that represents the riding where the previous assassination took place. So the government for their part kind of walked it back a little bit. They had their public safety minister Gary Ananda Sagari come out and

42:24say there's a lot of work to do with India, which is the most vague way he could have, I guess, addressed it. Which, you know, is at least a important thing to be working on and not a political stunt. He was the one I was referring to earlier with the comments to his constituent. But yeah, addition to that, Ananda said some, you know, vaguely knowledge-middle things about that, you know, they're trying to be talking about the issue, obviously, when they meet to discuss security concerns with the Indian government. So all in all the stone from, you know, foot in mouth to vague government boilerplate on things they clearly don't want to really talk about. Which is, you know, not great. And at the end of the day, there's a real dilemma

43:32Canada is in here. And they are going to have to kind of multi-track the relationship with India because it is just such an important economy and global power that you can't make the relationship entirely about foreign interference and state-sponsored violence in Canada. You can't have so not deal with that. And, you know, the drone up adult way to deal with this, that, you know, serious governments do is they acknowledge both and work on balancing that in a responsible way. And I kind of get the sense that's what turn you think it's about this, but you would not know it from what the the government overall is trying to communicate. And this really particularly the anonymous staffer really feels like a case of a government

44:34by calm staffer where everything needs to be reduced like a simple talking point that has no room for two thoughts that can be intention with each other. It's like you just can't do elbows up protecting Canadian sovereignty if you don't protect Canadian sovereignty at any point. Trade isn't important. No one's like don't trade, but like making sure Canadian citizens aren't murdered by foreign countries should be a priority of a government that is worthy of the word, you know, sovereign government. And I think Canadians can be mature enough to have that nuance conversation like we can have with China where we say, look, we have our concerns,

45:35but we think that it's important to make sure that we can trade our products because it would be mutually beneficial. And there's value to doing that to reducing tensions between countries. That's the whole theory of the late 20th century, which I guess doesn't exist anymore. It was all wrong or doesn't work when, you know, a desperate gets elected. But you could still try. You could still try to at least have that mature conversation where we don't just like go and deny what we know is happening. Yeah, and it would also be helpful if the government, as part of this, was doing more on just building up an effective national security apparatus that is better equipped to handle these threats. And so far, there hasn't been a lot of signs of that. One thing about the intelligence that came with the, as I mentioned, was that a lot of that came for

46:47the Americans because they have the foreign intelligence collection capabilities and we don't. That really should be something that Canada is working on a lot harder to develop sovereign capabilities on as well as modernize in the CSIS Act and how they worked as well as rolling out a foreign agents registry that the government has been slow walking under two separate prime ministers now. Scott, foreign interference stuff is so 2023. You're acting like there should be some giant report with a list of recommendations that the government could just go step by step. Yeah, that's true. You know, maybe be useful when a potential sovereignty referendum gets supported by a foreign power. Yeah, just throwing that out of there. Well, one person navigating controversies on that side has been Pierre Pollyyev and he decided to

47:49try to stake some ground and stand up for Canada only about 12 months too late. But at least he came around to say Canada should remain free. Well, he, that particular bit is not new, but yeah, he's definitely had a problem over the last year of even very clearly uncomfortable talking about the broader issues around Canadian sovereignty, how to deal with the American administration and a whole bunch of stuff around that and you know, maybe it's the falling poll numbers that finally convinced him to turn around. Maybe it's realizing finally that the election loss last year might have not gone this way if he'd taken a different path. But yeah, it came out this week with the speech trying to basically

48:50reset the conservatives positioning on all of this and it was a fairly good speech. I think you know, you can definitely criticize a couple of parts here. I think they're definitely the how optimistic he was about the ability to get a truce burying adotiation that is going to be terror free. Certainly a thing that can be criticized, but yeah, overall decent speech. But the real politically interesting thing here is definitely that it is coming far too late and it's going to be interesting to see whether or not this new tack can be maintained because Paulie has not a person that generally has shown himself to be able to maintain discipline on this stuff and often will kind of revert after a little while. Yeah, it's quite easy to go to the

49:52economic club of Canada in Toronto and say tariffs are bad and shouldn't be done. And we need to stand up for Canada in the face of that and free trade should be our future. Whether he does the same in rural Alberta in a few months or whenever he's next around there and in other corners, like you say, remains to be seen. I think there's still some interesting things in here where it distinguishes him from the liberals and the conservative vision. He kept coming back to the emphasis that America is our second largest customer. America is very important. Things are challenging. Can't get around geography. Yeah, those kind of angles, whereas Karni, I don't think would deny that, but talks about it less because I don't think

50:56his base is very eager to work with Donald Trump right now and just kind of lost faith in the ability of America to self-correct after they re-elected him. Yeah, so there are a couple of interesting themes and like lay in the groundwork for future criticisms of the liberals. Definitely doing some stage setting for, you know, Karni's just not getting the job done. It's been a year. You know, nothing's actually happened, which, yeah, as a criticism, this podcast has made several times. There was a discussion of how that, for all the talk to go abroad to secure new trade deals, Canada has trade deals with most developed countries and the gains from that are probably not going to be all that high relative to

52:02unlocking the ability inside of Canada to get more stuff built here and get it to market quicker. So you're doing a see, I think, a little more emphasis on that stuff going forward, you know, presuming you can stick with it, but they've at least are starting to sketch out a critical version of what they can, or a version of what they can be, critical of the liberals approach that is also still very raw raw Canada. But yeah, whether he can keep that focus, or if he gets lost on speaking to the audiences in front of, lost on culture war issues, or Bitcoin, or whatever the next, you know, digital fat is, we'll see. We do know that the liberals and conservatives were eager to get parliament to work this past week as well as the liberals, except a number of conservative amendments to the most controversial part of their

53:07budget, the little bit buried in there for the regulatory sandbox as it was been referred to, which was basically the government wanted the ability for ministers to exempt corporations from the laws if they felt like it. The idea being sometimes the law gets in the way of innovation and screw those laws. In the end, the conservative amendments require some guardrails to that, so they'll have to consult with Canadians for first before providing those exemptions, report back to parliament, and the approval of such exemptions will require sign off by a cabinet minister and the president of Treasury Board. And also, we can't exempt corporations from the conflict of interest act and the access to information acts. So an improvement. Yeah, of those, I think the one that's going to be most significant is the having to report or have to consult Canadians first, because that's going to be the thing that will

54:12draw eyes on it and make it controversial if it's a bad choice on which one to extend. A president of Treasury Board is already a cabinet minister, so not exactly a tough cell to convince them of the cabinet has signed off on it. At least it prevents rogue ministers a little bit more, but that's about it. Maybe, yeah. And I suppose you could get to the situation where if the Treasury Board President was against it, then you would need them. You know, if he's one of the people voting against it at cabinet, then that should potentially scuttle it. And yeah, putting it a couple of clear laws where it can't get around. I also made sense the ones that are more accountability oriented are good. So overall seems like decent amendments on it.

55:17Like, I think the big thing is it lets the conservatives claim a win. It lets the liberals get them on side to move the budget ahead. And it did, right? They got the budget to pass on division. So there was no recorded vote because I guess the block also didn't call for recorded vote. Elizabeth May wanted to have a standing vote, but CBC notes that only MPs from a recognized party can request one, which also excludes the NDP for now. But yeah, that's a confidence vote coming gone for the for the liberals, even as they are technically under a majority right now as the numbers have gone back and forth. But smooth sailing for a few more weeks or months for Mark Carney as he looks to his bio elections coming up. And that has been Politicoast.

56:18Finally, everything we talked about at Politicoast.ca support the show and get access to our exclusive stock channel at patreon.com slash Politicoast. Our intro music is beautiful British Columbia by Serge Plotnikov. Politicoast is a production of leg and boot media. Audio editing provided by Jesse Woodward at listener supported CHLY 101.7 FM in the NIMO. Learn more at CHLY.ca.