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Wedding Crashers
120 Plays6 months ago
Join Tony Clement on this week's episode of "And Another Thing" as he takes the reins solo and welcomes special guest MP Rick Perkins to the show. Together, they delve into a charming anecdote from 40 years ago, reminiscing about a memorable wedding they both attended. From there, the conversation shifts gears to pressing issues impacting Nova Scotians, offering insights and perspectives on local concerns.
But the discussion doesn't stop there. Tony and Rick dive into the thorny topic of privacy and artificial intelligence, dissecting the implications of the Federal Liberals' proposed legislation. As they explore the balance between security and privacy, listeners are treated to a thought-provoking examination of the intersection between technology and civil liberties.
Lastly, Tony and Rick ponder the state of contemporary politics, asking the age-old question: is politics becoming increasingly miserable? Tune in to "And Another Thing" for a lively exchange of ideas, witty banter, and engaging discussions that will leave you both informed and entertained.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Sponsor Acknowledgment
00:00:00
Speaker
And another thing. And another thing. And another thing. And another thing. Welcome to another episode of And Another Thing podcast. I'm your co-host Tony Clementa, Jody Jenkins, of course,
00:00:25
Speaker
lot going on in his life right now with the golf tournament and many other things. He will join us, I'm sure, next time because this is episode 199. So he's got to be here for episode 200. No offense to our guests today, but 199 is a pretty good number too. Let's thank our sponsors first to get them the
00:00:50
Speaker
attention they deserve. Of course, our presenting sponsor is Municipal Solutions, John Mutton and the gang there, Ontario's leading MZO firm. That is to say, if you need help with development approvals, permit expediting,
00:01:05
Speaker
planning services with municipalities, engineering or architectural services, even things like minor variances and land severances, go to municipalsolutions.ca and John and the gang can help you out.
Guest Introduction: Rick Perkins
00:01:18
Speaker
And then our newest ongoing sponsor is KWNM Consulting. KWNM has been in the lobbying and advocacy business for over
00:01:28
Speaker
23 years, they support companies and small businesses to deal with governments and they believe in honest, ethical advice and the value of hard work. Contact Kelly Mitchell. That's the KWM Consulting. KellyMitchell at www.kwmconsulting.com or just phone Kelly. 416-728-8287.
00:01:52
Speaker
Finally, let's thank our terrestrial radio sponsor, that is to say Hunters Bay Radio at huntersbayradio.com. Every Saturday morning, Hunters Bay Radio reproduce or rebroadcast this podcast as well as many other fine podcasts.
00:02:10
Speaker
Our special guest today is Rick Perkins, the Member of Parliament.
College Story: Lessons in Frugality and Camaraderie
00:02:15
Speaker
Oh, I better get this right. St. Margaret's South Shore. Almost. Reverse that. South Shore St. Margaret's. Nova Scotia. Rick is with us coming in for this interview from Ottawa, of course, where he is based whenever the house is sitting.
00:02:33
Speaker
Now, Rick, of course, you may know him as our critic or our shadow minister for innovation, industry, science, and technology. I've known Rick for, what are we going to say, Rick, 40 years? Yeah, 40 years, God. That's incredible. You were telling me a story about our intrepid trip to get to a wedding.
00:02:59
Speaker
Yeah, a friend of ours made the decision to get married quite young. We were all on student council together at U of T, Steve Hastings. I think it was somewhere around 1982, maybe, and he was getting married in Ottawa.
00:03:16
Speaker
Uh, you and I, and I think Lynn, uh, rented a car to drive to as we're writing wedding in Ottawa and as you know, very, uh, very frugal students with not a lot of cash. Yeah. We rented a car from a company called Rent-A-Rec. I don't know if you're listening. I can't believe we did that, but apparently we did.
00:03:36
Speaker
We did. And that five hour drive, I think we had to stop every hour to put oil in the car. I think there is a transmission fluid problem. Oh my gosh. Yes. Yes. Rent, you know, memo to self, maybe Rent-A-Rec was not the wisest solution, but we got there for Steve's wedding. They were clearly appropriately branded. Yeah, exactly. They didn't, they didn't over promise. Let's put it that way, right? Yeah. Oh my word.
00:04:01
Speaker
Well, here we are now, and you're in the House of Commons, of course.
Election Journey and Carbon Tax Concerns
00:04:06
Speaker
Tell us, you know, obviously we've got a lot of listeners from across the country, but maybe a few more in Ontario than perhaps other parts of the country, since Jodi and I are Ontario-based. Tell us what you're hearing from your constituents in Nova Scotia. That I think would be interesting for our audience.
00:04:26
Speaker
Yeah, well, I just got elected in 2021, right? So not that long ago in the 21 election where we didn't exactly have a national trend going.
00:04:37
Speaker
and I managed to beat the cabin mister. My writing's a rural writing, so if anybody's ever been to Nova Scotia, the South Shore is places like Lunenburg and Mahon Bay and Chester, and all the way down to the southern tip of Nova Scotia with Shelburne County, and I've got 7,000 commercial fishermen. So they were pretty upset at the time in 2021 about the current, the Member of Parliament at that time, who happened to be the fisheries minister. So we ran a very localized campaign
00:05:06
Speaker
about the problems of this Liberal government and the fishery, and we're successful on that. But since then, of course, what we hear, and I have three constituency offices because it's a big rural riding, and when I'm there and my staff every day, they just hear about the cost of living issues from everybody. Yeah, they hear about the fisheries issues, but the carbon tax
00:05:31
Speaker
didn't get implemented in Nova Scotia, the federal carbon tax until July 1st last year. And I think that's really when people started to really ramp up their anger at this liberal government in Nova Scotia. Yeah. So that's interesting because obviously other parts of the country have had to live with the carbon tax for longer than that. But when it was imposed, there was a real reaction to
Impact of Carbon Tax in Nova Scotia
00:06:00
Speaker
that, right?
00:06:00
Speaker
Yeah, it was huge because we were on a sort of invisible cap and trade system. So on July 1st last year, gas at the pump went up on July 1st, 16 cents a liter because of the carbon tax.
00:06:15
Speaker
four days later, what we call the carbon tax two was imposed, which is the clean fuel standards, as the Liberals call it. And that went up another four cents. So in the space of five days, gas went up 20 cents a litre, and that started it. But on top of that is the fact that
00:06:35
Speaker
Many of us, we don't have a choice. We don't have natural gas to heat our homes in Nova Scotia. We have either electricity from Nova Scotia power, which is generated more than 50% from coal, coal that comes from Columbia, or like I did, like many Nova Scotians, home heating oil. And that oil comes from Saudi Arabia.
00:06:53
Speaker
It's not ethical oil from Western Canada. It comes in tankers to St. John, New Brunswick gets refined, and that's all we have access to. So when home heating went up that much, a massive amount for people who have been struggling in our province, my writing, the average income is only $30,000 a year. So when you get that kind of increase, it forces you to make choices between, as we've said, but it's not a trite comment between heating
00:07:20
Speaker
eating and with seniors about being able to even afford their medication. So, and then there was the big push from the Atlantic provinces to get the exemption, right? Yeah, over the summer, Nova Scotia MPs, the Liberal MPs all caught heck last year from their constituents and
00:07:42
Speaker
a fellow whose name's Cody Bloss. He's the liberal MP from King's Hance, the writing that Scott Bryson used to represent. And he thought he'd get the bright idea and convince the prime minister that all these people were complaining about their heating costs. And so to do a car vote, as it's called. So let's just exempt the Saudi Arabian oil that we all burned from the carbon tax.
Political Landscape: Conservative Opportunities in Atlantic Canada
00:08:05
Speaker
Well, of course, that is a temporary thing because they only did it
00:08:08
Speaker
For two years, which means after the election if the liberals are reelected home heating oil will actually go up 61 cents a liter after the election, so I'm not sure that anyone in my community has bought it sure they like the They like the fact that hasn't gone up but the fear for what happened two years and that caused a firestorm across this country Oh, yeah reaction. Yeah
00:08:31
Speaker
Yeah. Like, so I eat with natural gas in Ontario or I eat with natural gas out West. How come I don't get an exemption because that's a fossil fuel tool too. And so it clearly, in my view, really backfired. And as a result, you've seen some of the, you've seen the anger, you've seen the protests, acts attacks, acts attacks as a protest around, I think the cost of fuel and what it's doing to cost of food.
00:08:56
Speaker
Now, did Pierre Poliev as part of, I know he was traveling around the country, crisscrossing it with the ax, the tax message, did he do similar events in Nova Scotia?
00:09:07
Speaker
Yeah, he's been to Nova Scotia three times in the last six months. And in fact, he was in Nova Scotia for two days last week. We had a one week constituency break and I accompanied Pierre throughout Picto County, which is in Sean Fraser's riding into Port Hawkesbury and Cape Breton and up to Sydney. And, you know, that's sort of in the past, it's not been
00:09:32
Speaker
a great voting ground for us as conservatives, Cape Breton. It's been a long time. But we had the usual thing. We were touring businesses and people were bringing their friends and their family out to these businesses that Pierre was visiting. The enthusiasm was huge, right even in the heart of Sydney, Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, where we haven't done too well in the last
00:09:57
Speaker
you know 20 years it was overwhelming the support for them there you know our challenge is to keep that going until there's an election and make sure we solidify that vote but it's looking really good all across Nova Scotia and I get that I was just in the weekend out in Calgary
00:10:14
Speaker
Um, and of course everybody in the events I wanted. So are you guys in Nova Scotia finally going to vote conservative or like the liberals again? Um, you know, and I understand it cause you know, it's pretty disappointing when you turn the TV on an election night and you see,
00:10:30
Speaker
Atlantic Canada voting liberal when the rest of the country isn't and they get a little frustrated. But I'm pretty much guaranteed. There's 32 seats in Atlantic Canada, as you know, Tony. My conservative, and it really is a conservative bet, is the election we're held if the Prime Minister had the guts to call a carbon tax election now, we'd have at least 24 of those seats would be conservative.
Privacy and AI Legislation Critique
00:10:53
Speaker
Right, right, right. So a majority government for Pierre Poliev, I like to say, starts in Atlantic Canada. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. No, I get that. You must get this as well, whether you're in Atlantic Canada or Western Canada. Do people come up to you and say, do we really have to wait 18 months or a year and a half to toss this guy out? I mean, do you get that a lot too?
00:11:16
Speaker
Oh man, just about everybody who says to me, when's the election? No matter where I am. And I say, you know, well, he's October 25th, you know, that's next year, another year and six months, five months, whatever month we're in when we're talking about it. And they go, no, there must be some way. Like, why don't you vote no confidence and make that election happen now?
00:11:39
Speaker
Well, we do vote no confidence in them quite a bit. We did in 30 votes in December that were held in 30 hours. Actually, it was 140 votes in 30 hours. Every one of those was a budget implementation vote, and we voted against all of them. But unfortunately, the NDP
00:11:54
Speaker
While they complain about the liberals, they keep voting for all of their spending. So we'll have more. In fact, we'll have more confidence votes coming up in the next week or two as we deal with not only last fall's economic statement, but the budget vote related to the budget delivered two weeks ago or three weeks ago now, I guess. But the NDP is committed to keep voting with the government for the foreseeable future, it looks like.
00:12:17
Speaker
Yeah, you know, they've declared that they're going to support the government yet again on the budget. I don't see what they're getting out of this because they're not getting the programs they've asked for. And when you look at it right now, the public's not reacting too well to their supporting
00:12:32
Speaker
the Liberals and keeping them in government. I think if you buy what some of the seat projectors and aggregators at the pollsters do, you're talking about the Liberals down around 40, 45 seats in the NDP, maybe down in the 20s. Right. And so, you know, I don't think that's a great bad job honour for the NDP leader to be, you know, he already halved them from what Atomal Care had. He looks like he may half them again.
00:13:00
Speaker
Hey, what are some of the issues you're dealing with in your portfolio as
AI Regulation and Government Overreach
00:13:04
Speaker
a shadow minister? What's going on in your area? Well, right now we're dealing with a bill in industry that's the complete replacement of Canada's Privacy Act and a new artificial intelligence act. Both of them are terrible bills. I mean, the bill is so bad that the government's already proposed 55 amendments in the clause by clause stage to their own bill.
00:13:24
Speaker
What was wrong with it? Well, in the case of the privacy bill, they've sided a lot with big tech. So they've put a lot of provisions in there that allow what the bill calls the legitimate interests of a company to override your express consent to use your data if they think it's in their own legitimate interest. And the artificial intelligence bill, which is important,
00:13:52
Speaker
but they didn't consult anybody, literally didn't consult anyone before they introduced it. And the community that works on that has condemned the bill universally because basically it says, we're sort of define what it is, we'll do it in regulation, we don't quite know. And once we define it, then we'll police it at the industry department. And we don't know how we'll police that, but we'll define that in regulation. And then if we think you've,
00:14:21
Speaker
broken that law on the thing we can't define, the department will investigate it. And after we've been the police, the judge, the jury, we'll actually issue you a conviction in the department. And then we'll be the final arbiter. We'll put a fine of up to $5 million.
00:14:43
Speaker
or 5% of your global revenue or five years in jail. So we're not going to, it's totally usurping parliament on something they can't define. It's not been over two years. So this is an important bill, but it needs to be done right. On the AI side, obviously, we're finally getting into a world where we do want to see some oversight on AI. Is there, what's the Conservative Party position on that generally?
00:15:08
Speaker
Well, we believe there needs to be a law as well that balances the need to allow us to develop that in every aspect of our business without being overreaching. So initially, the bill only targeted something called high impact system, something that would deal with you as an individual very
00:15:30
Speaker
specifically. So for example, if AI was making a decision on its own about whether or not you could get a mortgage, that's a high impact system and that there would be regulations and oversight that the government had done. But through their amendments, they've actually extended it to something called general purpose. So basically any AI, so I've got a company in my riding and this is true that's developed
00:15:54
Speaker
AI independent of the internet to be able to determine the difference between a scallop and a clam on a conveyor belt and a robotic arm turn it in a direction and open it up. But that's AI. It wasn't regulated by the government before. It will be regulated by the government now all by one super department in Ottawa.
00:16:14
Speaker
Like a new department or? No, it'd be the industry department because of course they wouldn't want to give up their power to anyone else. No. The way the United States and Britain are going on this is basically, look, AI is going to be a part of every type of business and thing that we do. It already is becoming that. So if AI is being used in transportation, then the provincial transportation department should regulate that.
00:16:37
Speaker
That's what whether the world in the US is going. It's not where Canada is going. This bill puts all the power in one department to try and oversee all AI in Canada. There seems to be a trend with this government. Every solution ends up being government oversight and interference.
00:16:58
Speaker
Well, and the most disturbing thing, it's absolutely true about what they've done in the amendment to their own bill on this. In defining high impact, which they've done now, which they didn't before, they have a list and a schedule. And in that schedule, and it includes the ability for the industry department of the federal government to look, if you operate a business in Canada, to demand to see the algorithms of any artificial intelligence
00:17:24
Speaker
that you're operating anywhere in the world if they think it has a bias in it, and then allow them to use that investigation to moderate the content online on the internet. So it's actually a much broader provision than we saw in the censorship bill in C11 on social media.
00:17:42
Speaker
That was really restricted to culture and whether or not Canadian culture would be up your search engine.
Free Speech and Political Perceptions
00:17:48
Speaker
This one allows the federal government to look at anything for what they perceive to be biased or, as the deputy minister said in a speech in December, harmful speech, harmful things that they think the bureaucrats think are harmful. And I had the deputy minister in committee just an hour and a half ago and asked him to define that and he wouldn't define it about what they meant.
00:18:11
Speaker
You see, this is the thing. They're always going after speech. I don't know if you saw this research poll that was done, I think it was last week, whether Canadians were concerned about freedom of speech being constricted. It was very clear
00:18:29
Speaker
that liberal voters, for whatever reason, don't think that there's a problem with government restricting free speech, whereas conservative voters do think that that is a harmful trend, right? Well, you know, that's a typical sort of conservative versus socialist view, right?
00:18:50
Speaker
But that the government has to protect you from yourself is the Trudeau liberal socialist view, this statist capitalism that they follow where they've decided to pick winners and losers using your taxpayer money, or that
00:19:05
Speaker
They know best what you need to be protected from from the internet. We'll have a government regulator do that because somehow you might suffer something where we say, you know what? People are adults.
Political History and Cross-party Friendships
00:19:14
Speaker
They can figure out what they want to see and not see or listen to on the internet and the government shouldn't have anything to do with that. It's a pretty fundamental freedom principle and a big difference between us and Trudeau You know, you've been you've been
00:19:28
Speaker
a political actor, like somebody involved in the conservative movement for as long as I have, going back 40 plus years now. In fact, you convinced me to become a Tory. Come on. Yeah. Well, you and Alan McEachen, when we were at university together and on student council, I hadn't quite made up my mind. I wasn't much of a fan of Joe Clark.
00:19:50
Speaker
right that way. And so I found it hard to be a member of the party. And when the leadership came in, and you were a strong supporter of Brian Mulroney, I can remember you and Nigel Wright saying, Okay, Rick, it's now it's time for you to do what you know you need to do is come and join the party. And, and you were a big part of me becoming becoming and joining the party back then you may not have known that's first
00:20:11
Speaker
I did not recall that, but I'm glad I did. Let's put it that way. Thank you for that story. This will not be edited out of the podcast, I can assure you. The point is, you've seen a lot in Canadian politics over four decades plus.
00:20:32
Speaker
There's a lot that's going on now that is unprecedented. I don't know whether it's the impact of social media or whether just things have gotten nastier or whatever it is, but we had the situation in the House of Commons recently where
00:20:50
Speaker
Pierre Poliev was kicked out for saying WACO and not, but meanwhile the Prime Minister called him a bunch of names in the previous exchange. No one seemed to care about that. And EIP used the word WACO eight times since the 2021 election in the House. There was a stat in there somewhere. So just maybe just describe, how do you sort of keep a focus when there's a lot of negativity
00:21:18
Speaker
in politics and in the House of Commons these days.
00:21:22
Speaker
Well, maybe I could just take a step back because like you said, I was privileged to be a staffer up here for eight years in the Mulroney government and spent a lot of those years actually in the House of Commons during question period with my boss then and committees. And I think it's very Pollyannish that people somehow think that somehow it's nasty. I can tell you it was nasty back then with the rat pack. I saw Sheila Cops physically trying to climb over a table to assault the cabinet minister in a committee.
00:21:51
Speaker
I remember. We've seen these things that the Rat Pack weren't pleasant. This has never been a sort of a genteel tea party business, not even going back to John A days. So it's perhaps that people are noticing it more because of social media. But the fact is, if you were here and you saw it and participated, and I know you spent a lot of time at Queens Park, that was no picnic. I mean, it's always, it's a tough environment. Parliamentary democracy is an adversarial,
00:22:20
Speaker
And that's why it works so well. I actually think it's a better system than the system they have in the US. Because our minister and our government are accountable every day in the House of Commons. That doesn't happen in the US. The government, the executive branch doesn't have to answer to anyone unless they do a press conference. So here there's that scrutiny and it's very important. And yeah, it gets heated because we have big disagreements. But you were a minister in the House, both in Ontario and in Ottawa.
00:22:49
Speaker
I don't think it's any worse now than then in terms of the way people communicate. I mean, on a scale of one to 10, like WACO, really? Is that such a horrible word? That's a good point. Yeah, yeah. And upon reflection, I think I just wanted to get a reaction from you because I've gone on record myself saying, look, you know,
00:23:08
Speaker
It's always been adversarial because people are passionate. You are passionate in government. You are passionate in opposition. You believe that you're right and the other guys are wrong. Otherwise, why are you there? People don't see it, but I'm sure when you were in the House and when you were in the Ontario Legislature, I got lots of friends on all sides.
Pierre Polievre's Social Media Strategy
00:23:31
Speaker
I worked together with people in communities. I had a drink with the Liberal MP last night.
00:23:37
Speaker
You fight hard, you believe in your beliefs, and most people are up here. It doesn't matter what side they're on for the right reason, even if you fundamentally disagree. I'll give you the example of a fellow University of Toronto alumni guy that you may remember, Dominic LeBlanc, who was at U of T the same time we were.
00:24:00
Speaker
When I was in government, he was in opposition. Every six months we would go to a steakhouse and have a dinner together. He'd tell me a few lies. I'd tell him a few lies. We had some fun, right? We had some jokes to tell and just to live the experience.
00:24:16
Speaker
That's the side of it that a lot of people don't see. The other thing that's interesting that is different, I would say, is the media used to have a hammer lock on how the House of Commons and the government were perceived.
00:24:37
Speaker
And that's just not the case anymore. And Pierre Poliev, you may want to speak to this because he's such a master communicator, is able to go sort of over the media that still exists, which is not a lot compared to what it was 20, 30, 40 years ago and direct his message directly to the public.
00:24:55
Speaker
Yeah, you know, in the later morning days, you know, we all just waited before there was even 24-hour news to watch the, you know, the 10 and 11 o'clock news to see what was happening, how the media, obviously it became instantaneous as soon as we went into the world of 24-hour news channels. But as you know, even that was a fairly focused and small group of folks until the last few years. I can remember when you were in the Harper government that, you know, there was controversy because the party and that would have
00:25:25
Speaker
their own content and try and push it out on the internet and how dare you do that going out there we do that exactly yeah that was that was seen as somehow untoward.
00:25:36
Speaker
incredible opinion media and sub-stack blogs where politicians, former politicians, journalist entrepreneurs like Jen Gerson and all these people who've become great entrepreneurs have found a way to adapt to the new world and make money. Paul Wells, Jen Gerson, they're doing it. Even though the traditional old style media hasn't, is dying, they can't figure out how to do it.
00:25:59
Speaker
the people that used to work for them are. So everybody's got multiple sources for news now and different ways to consume what's going on. And Pierre is masterful at it. I mean, who would have thought that a leader of a party could do a 15 minute video on tax brackets or on interest rates or mortgage rates in the history of the government's debt and get millions and millions of views.
00:26:26
Speaker
Right. Like this is an incredible channel. And in a lot of ways, it's more democratic. Right.
Conservative Policies on Economy and Social Issues
00:26:32
Speaker
Because the politician can speak directly to the voter without having to go through the biased filter of the media. Right. Yeah, no, I totally get it. And of course, what we're doing right now is a podcast, of course, and podcasting is its own ecosystem now with news and views and entertainment and all the things that, again, used to be great sponsors like yours that allow this to happen.
00:26:56
Speaker
Here, here. There we go. I love that. Thanks for the plug. We always try to love our sponsors, that's for sure. Rick, just one final question, perhaps, and maybe just give us a sense of where you think things are going for the rest of the year and what the plan is for the Conservative Caucus and the party going forward.
00:27:18
Speaker
Well, we're talking on a Wednesday, and that's, you know, we had caucus this morning, and obviously there's all the issues of the day that most people in Ottawa care deeply about and get a little bit of notice out there. But, you know, we're going to be single-minded focused. Pierre is single-minded focused. It's still driving the message that the policies of this Trudeau government are the cause of the economic hardship people are feeling.
00:27:41
Speaker
the economic hardship, but also the tragedies that are happening on things around the opioid crisis. All of those things are caused by policies. It's not some outside force or just Europe or the dog ate my homework that's caused. This caused the living crisis. We have a housing crisis where it takes 108% of your salary in Vancouver gross.
00:28:05
Speaker
before any taxes, food or anything, to afford the average mortgage. That doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. That's not Europe's fault. That's the fault of this government. The decision to give out free opioid drugs to opioid addicts in British Columbia and see an increase in the deaths
00:28:26
Speaker
That's a, that's a position that Pierre Poliev was mocked for saying it isn't going to work. He did a video in Vancouver and all the liberal elites said, Oh, look, you're such an insensitive conservative. Guess what? The NDP government has now asked the liberals to stop doing it because it's killing people. And I take some comfort in that too, because 20 years ago or 18 anyway, I was saying the same thing as federal minister of health. And I was, I was mocked for daring to want to treat people rather than give them free drugs.
00:28:54
Speaker
Right, exactly. How does giving somebody more drugs stop them from ending up with the ultimate issue of an overdose? It doesn't, right? But that's not how you help a person. You don't help them by giving them more drugs. You help them by treatment. And so we're going to keep prosecuting these just common sense things that most people
00:29:16
Speaker
in the community. I know you like common sense from 1995, Harris election. I love it from what we're doing now and it works and it works because nobody in the government, no, this is liberal government seems to be talking common sense when you say giving away drugs to drug addicts is going to help them. It doesn't.
Closing Remarks and Episode 200 Teaser
00:29:32
Speaker
When you say spending $40 billion and never ever planning
00:29:36
Speaker
in a debt and never planning to balance the budget somehow isn't going to lead to economic disaster. We are worried. I am personally worried that we're at a transformation point on our economy. And if we don't change the direction dramatically, we're going to end up like Argentina. And that's a real, that's a real problem with where we are with our debt and we're going to be worse in Argentina because Argentina
00:29:59
Speaker
is now getting a balanced budget and their inflation is dropping to single digits. So there you go. Listen, Rick, we're out of time. Thanks for popping on. I know it's a very busy week in Ottawa. We appreciate it. And it's been great having you as guest number one. Anytime I listen to it every week and I have a lot of fun, especially when you're talking about all the concerts you're going to, I'm living vicariously through you, Tony.
00:30:24
Speaker
Well, you know, you've got to do something when you're not in parliament. That's all I can say. Let me just thank our sponsors. One more time, municipalsolutions.ca. John Mutton and the gang are there for you. KWM Consulting. You can reach them at kwmconsulting.com. And finally,
00:30:42
Speaker
Hunters Bay Radio, huntersbayradio.com every Saturday morning. They've got this and many other fine podcasts. We will see and hear and be part of your life again in just a few days. Episode 200 is coming up. And I know Jody and I have something very special planned. We will then have you with our little community here once again. So stay tuned for that until next time.