Full Comment Postmedia Network

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)
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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)
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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)

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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)
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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)
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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)
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