Full Comment Postmedia Network

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