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 continues adding enormous immigration inflows to a strained economy. Canada, Robson says, is “going down a very strange path” — and Ottawa seems not to care. (Recorded November 24, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Mother Corp.’s decision-makers as it does for government policy-makers. As Stursberg discusses with host Brian Lilley this week, there remains a distinct lack of vision for the CBC, save Conservative Leader Pierre Polievre’s plan to defund it. (Recorded November 9, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 publicized by Hamas are inflated, and how politicians and journalists malign Israeli soldiers. While average westerners remain on the side of Israel, she says, elites in media and academia are working overtime to manufacture hatred against it. (Recorded November 9, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 saviour waiting in the wings to come to the rescue. (Recorded November 2, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 “decolonization” ideology that dehumanizes the people it targets. And, Shapiro says, Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau are already weakening in confronting it. (Recorded October 26, 2023)   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 'Galicia' Division and Its Legacy, joins Brian this week to discuss the unsettled history of the controversial unit, and why the story doesn’t lend itself to easy narratives. (Recorded October 12, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 genocidal regime, Pipes explains. Now is the time for Israel to eradicate Hamas in Gaza so it can replace it with Palestinians it can work with. (Recorded October 12, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 wildly inflated rents. And he explains how the massive capital reallocation away from productive businesses into housing speculation could wreak havoc in the Canadian economy for many years to come. (Recorded September 28, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 are excelling and parents are delighted. Birbalsingh discusses what she thinks educators in Canada are getting very wrong — and why the ones paying most dearly for it are disadvantaged children. (Recorded September 28, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 allegations, Indian diaspora politics, and how Ottawa has undermined Canada’s global reputation with its shallow approach to the significance of India and the issue of Khalistan separatists in Canada. (Recorded September 21, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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-liberal societies are being cowed into self-censorship, rightly fearing that the wrong opinions will get us denounced, ostracized and possibly even arrested. (Recorded August 15, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 is the new political home for the proletariat in Canada, the U.S. and U.K., as workers feel abandoned and betrayed on economics and culture by liberals and the left. (Recorded September 8, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 how Poilievre finds the right balance between staying true to his diehard conservative base while trying to keep the Liberals and the media from painting his party as scary bigots. (Recorded August 30, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 to share some never-before-told stories behind the incredible saga that carries on today in Canada and around the world. (Recorded August 10, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 them. He joins host Brian Lilley this week to discuss what our viral vocabulary says about who we are. And how the pandemic has indelibly changed us all in the “after times.” (Recorded July 25, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mike Ramsay was friends with former Toronto principal Richard Bilkszto, whose suicide after allegedly enduring false bigotry accusations in an anti-racism session has shocked Canadians. And Ramsay says he’s experienced similar vilification. He’s been called a “white supremacist.” He’s been suspended as a school trustee in Waterloo, Ont. He says it’s because he fights to keep schools focused on learning and achievement, not identity politics and radical race theory. He also happens to be Black. Ramsay joins Brian this week to discuss how Canadians can take school boards back from the extremists who want to teach political indoctrination over skills, and won’t stop until they’ve silenced all dissent. (Recorded August 8, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Formerly one of Canada’s top crime reporters, Tamara Cherry witnessed gruesome violence and terrible trauma. What she says she didn’t realize was how the way she and others covered the crime beat was worsening pain for survivors, responders and reporters themselves. Cherry, author of the new book The Trauma Beat: A Case for Re-Thinking the Business of Bad News, joins host Brian Lilley, himself no stranger to crime reporting. Cherry explains how she came to discover the damaging psychological toll crime reporting was taking on her, the victims and even the public, and the new approach she wants the media to take when it comes to covering everyone’s worst nightmares. (Recorded July 21, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The economics of the music business have been turned upside down in recent years. For artists and fans alike, concerts now are king. Legendary publicist, writer and music maven Eric Alper joins Brian this week to discuss why this summer’s concert season in particular is making history, why some concert tickets now cost more than plane tickets, and the most obvious reasons why Taylor Swift left Canada off of her latest tour. (And when she’s likely to finally come.) (Recorded July 19, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s where we should be building up capabilities against Russia’s hypersonic missiles and Chinese spy aircraft coming over the North Pole. But news the Liberal government is closing the Canadian International Arctic Centre is the latest indication Ottawa doesn’t get the importance of the North. After the Harper government made the Arctic a bigger priority, the last eight years have revealed Ottawa’s lack of ambition and enthusiasm for the region, says Heather Exner-Pirot, one of Canada’s most prominent authorities on the Arctic. As Exner-Pirot discusses with host Brian Lilley, we’ve left behind a northern vacuum — and other countries are filling it. (Recorded July 6, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Food inflation is showing no signs of letting up soon, as guest Sylvain Charlebois tells Brian Lilley this week. But grandstanding politicians yelling about “greedflation” by allegedly avaricious grocers are looking in the wrong place, says Charlebois, professor of food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University. The recent guilty plea by Canada Bread, admitting to years of bakery price-fixing; allegations that Maple Leaf Foods may have done the same with meat; and revelations of “blackout” periods of fixed supplier prices all point to a bigger problem than inflation — and possibly a much dirtier one. (Recorded July 6, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices