Full Comment

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 terrorists, while persecuting liberal democracies — especially Israel. Neuer discusses the many ways Iran, China, North Korea and Russia pervert the UN’s noble ambitions and what can be done to make it live up to its noble aspirations. (Recorded September 25, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 get into what the recent Montreal byelection says about how badly Liberals are losing Quebec to the Bloc. And why the recent Winnipeg byelection shows that the Tories’ big challenge in many ridings come the next election will be winning over alienated New Democrats. (Recorded September 18, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 explains how wokeness can spread, damaging people’s ability to think rationally, in the same way that other dangerous ideologies have warped the minds of masses in the past. And he talks about how he, and others, are working hard to save society from the disease. (Recorded August 30, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 denouncing Trudeau while backing the government on confidence votes. Bélanger says the NDP leader will destroy his credibility if he keeps exuding hypocrisy. But he also stands a chance of turning around his party’s unpopularity and salvaging its fortunes for the next election. (Recorded September 6, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 addicts being created by the diversion of so-called safe supply, Zivo says these drug-policy extremists won’t stop until they make all dangerous street narcotics legal — and as easy as possible for anyone to get. (Recorded July 25, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 journalists. She joins Brian this week to talk about the shocking things she discovered while investigating the official responses to COVID; the damaging public health policies that continue to affect individuals and our society; and how we can hopefully prevent this all from happening again when the next pandemic comes. (Recorded June 27, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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-policy extremists have infiltrated myriad levels of Canadian policy-making. Ending the havoc might take more than a change in government, he predicts. It may require a new quiet revolution led by a (still-moderate) Canadian majority. (Recorded July 29, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization — when society’s elites are predominantly married with children, gaining all the benefits that come with that, even as they discredit traditional families … for everyone else. (Recorded June 27, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 leader to rebuild from the wreckage when Trudeau’s reckoning finally comes. The pickings are worse than slim, but there may be one of two with just enough brains, charm and non-radioactivity to offer the Liberals a new ruler with some real royal jelly. (Recorded July 30, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 candidate, a mediocre senator and speaker who does little to broaden Trump’s appeal. Meanwhile, Harris still has a chance to pick a strong veep — if her party’s antisemitic faction doesn’t tie her hands. (Recorded July 25, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 about Residential Schools), discusses with Brian how the country was seized with moral panic that overrode skeptical questions. Even as the facts come out now, says Flanagan, there are those in power still working to keep false narratives alive. (Recorded June 20, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 carbon taxes and censorship policies. He also discusses how brewing problems in the ageing Saskatchewan Party government (including a bizarre texting scandal) risk undermining all of it. (Recorded July 11, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Israel’s security challenges on its northern border. She discusses the dangers facing the country, and the world, as the looming threat of a wider war grows with Tehran’s mounting aggression (Recorded July 4, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 politicos gossip about when or whether Trudeau will quit, Perez says Liberals face a more existential crisis, years in the making. The party is lost. And it’s not clear how, or under whom, it can find its way again. (Recorded June 28, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 pipes — are lurking in a lot of other cities, maybe even yours, and just waiting to burst open. (Recorded June 20, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, including other immigrants, can do better than the angry protests in our streets and learn to love each other and leave intolerance behind. (Recorded April 17, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 and communicating that have devastated his opponents. The Liberals have never faced a competitor like this before. And while they’re working overtime to make Poilievre seem scary to voters, they might be more scared for themselves. (Recorded May 30, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 recount the moments in the prime minister’s political life that show why Trudeau isn’t like the rest of us. (Recorded May 31, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 of cars here that will overwhelm North American businesses and workers, all while raking in subsidies from Canadian taxpayers. A worried Washington just whacked Chinese EVs with a 100-per-cent tariff. Canada is doing nothing — something Volpe says needs to change “yesterday.” (Recorded May 17, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 sense of Canadian lawlessness — from campus invasions to killers out on bail — and Poilievre’s intriguing and unprecedented promise to use the notwithstanding clause to get tough on crime, if need be. (Recorded May 16, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 screening. And, she says, they can leverage the algorithms in TikTok, Twitter and Facebook to spread messages that promote terror, spread misinformation and fuel the hatred seen at protests gripping our cities and our university campuses. (Recorded May 2, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 addictions specialist, explains how this complete abandonment of harm-reduction principles, including any focus on recovery, created the catastrophe that has B.C. now desperately reversing course — even as other Canadian governments plan to repeat its mistakes. (Recorded May 2, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Manthorpe, who’s releasing an updated edition of his influential book in May. But, as he tells Brian, China does need Canada — to manipulate and exploit. And we’ve played right into its hands. (Recorded April 19, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 can’t save us. The only way out of disaster will be doing what the Liberals have tried to avoid: Whacking middle-class workers with higher taxes. (Recorded April 17, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 doesn’t reassure him in the least. He also talks about why he thinks Canada is being divided by leaders whose job it should be to unite us. (Recorded April 12, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 and Policy and served as anti-extremism adviser to top U.K. ministers. He explains how Islamists exploit Canada’s system to launder billions here and spread money globally to promote their ideology of destroying Israel and spreading shariah law worldwide. (Recorded March 27, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 David Eby and her former colleagues in the NDP turned betrayed her, and why she quit the party over its blindness to the antisemitism in its midst. (Recorded March 27, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 environmental policy. The upshot is that Trudeau’s one-time big tent party looks to be collapsing into a few rapidly shrinking slivers of special interests. (Recorded March 21, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 discuss, it points to an alarmingly blithe attitude about national security, which has demoralized our intelligence agencies and unnerved our allies, who wonder whether Canada can still be trusted. (Recorded March 14, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 supposedly harmful ideas that are so prone to abuse they can only encourage platforms to pre-emptively block Canadians’ speech — including yours. (Recorded March 6, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 have. As Gallant explains, all these “net-zero” plans being forced on us by Ottawa look like they could well be ruinously costly — while driving us in the wrong direction. (Recorded February 21, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 already begun campaigning for his next election by beating up on Alberta. In that case, she says to him, “let’s just do it”: call an election and let Canadians decide whether they prefer federal -provincial confrontation or co-operation. (Recorded February 22, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 so far in smashing Hamas is driving the hysteria around the plan to take Rafah — the terror group’s last remaining stronghold. (Recorded February 11, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 completely unreasonable, even if she disagrees with certain elements. And why she believes there are no easy answers in this issue, so we all need to dial back the hysteria and talk it out like adults. (Recorded February 8, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 in the Liberal party and certain media, despite his cringey opinions and debatable morality. They also look at how much weirder the Liberals have become since the man stepped down. (Recorded January 18, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 the Trudeau government’s inexplicable appeasement of a brutal dictatorship that represses women, sponsors global terror and has the blood of hundreds of Canadians on its hands. (Recorded January 11, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 more importantly, Peterson says that if Canada’s speech police can come for a famous psychologist and bestselling author like him, they can certainly come for anyone — including you. (Recorded January 20, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 they are opposed to his own principles. (Recorded January 11, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 wine a much bigger part of our export economy. That is, if only Canadian policies and governments would get out of the way. (Recorded November 2, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 streets, where they’re often sold cheaply for cash, or harder drugs. And she discusses how she’s seen first-hand how the diversion of inexpensive “safe supply” opioids is creating new addicts, and overdoses — including, horrifyingly, among schoolkids. (Recorded May 23, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 results? The students at Michaela Community School are excelling and parents are delighted. Birbalsingh explains what she thinks educators in Canada are getting so wrong. (Recorded September 28, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 politics roiling Canadian schools. And Poilievre tells Rex what he thinks about Trudeau’s latest position on Israel, and why he’s accusing the prime minister of going easy on Hamas and its sponsors in Iran. (Recorded December 15, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 well as the big political comeback stories of 2023: from Danielle Smith’s election victory in Alberta to Doug Ford’s fall and rise over the greenbelt in Ontario. (Recorded December 8, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 RCMP, Clement explains how the neglect and dysfunction of the storied police force has left Canada utterly unprepared to combat the sophistication of today’s transnational criminals. (Recorded November 16, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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