CANADALAND
Trump Says Canada Doesn’t Pull Its Weight in NATO—He’s Right
It feels like we’ve never been closer to another world war. If our NATO allies called us, could we answer?
This week, host Noor Azrieh, with guests David Pugliese and Stephen Saideman, explore whether NATO targets matter, what we should be spending our money on, and if we’re at the mercy of our beefed-up southern neighbours.
And, the latest on Prime Minister Trudeau’s regrets with electoral reform, Canadians choosing to stay in Lebanon and the Bloc Quebecois Pierre-pressuring the Liberals.
Host: Noor Azrieh
Credits: Aviva Lessard (Producer), Sam Konnert (Producer), Noor Azrieh (Host/Producer), Caleb Thompson (Audio Editor/Mixer), Max Collins (Production Manager) Jesse Brown (Editor), Tony Wang (Artwork)
Guests: David Pugliese, Stephen Saideman
Background reading:
- Trudeau should expect criticism at NATO summit over defence spending - Ottawa Citizen
- The Organizations Behind Canada’s Most Quoted Military Experts - The Maple
- State of Canadian Armed Forces' combat readiness growing worse, government report warns - CBC News
- Thinking the 'unthinkable': NATO wants Canada and allies to gear up for a conventional war - CBC News
- Defence industry rep says Canada on ‘hamster wheel’ of red tape as ammo contracts fail to materialize - Ottawa Citizen
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- Broadcast on:
- 08 Oct 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
(whistling) - Canada land, funded by you. (upbeat music) Hey, it's Mudazdia and today we're talking politics where the war machine keeps turning. This week, it feels like the world is on the brink of war. (upbeat music) - I'm talking about World War Three. Iran has greatly expanded its nuclear program. - No matter where you are and what you're doing, how are you contributing towards ultimately preventing World War Three? That's what winning looks like. (upbeat music) - Should Canada get involved? Could we even? - The Canadian forces is having an extreme difficulty with recruiting, training them, attracting them, and then the other issue is they're losing people. - We'll also get into the latest, Prime Minister Trudeau and his regrets with electoral reform, Canadians choosing to stay in Lebanon and the Bloc Quebecois peer pressuring the liberals. That's this episode after the break. - This episode is brought to you by Douglas. 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That's policyme, P-O-L-I-C-Y-M-E.com. Go check this out. (upbeat music) - Believe it or not, Canada once held its own in terms of its military contributions. We were allies in World War I and World War II. - After the Somme, we moved out and went by route march back up to the Beanie Ridge area. - Remember that Ben Affleck movie, Argo? That was us. - So I'm sitting in jerry's this morning, having breakfast. Waitress comes over to me. She's waving a newspaper. She says, you see what those Canadians pulled off? Why can't we do something like that? I said to her, you know what I said? - No way. - Argo fuck yourself. - We picked our battles. We stayed out of Vietnam and focused on peacekeeping. - Intervention will be important. Perhaps even essential. We're keeping the peace. - For preventing small conflicts developing into big one. - But things have changed. My impression is that the Canadian military is looking, I don't know, really questionable. - A top economic group is warning Canada could soon face diplomatic isolation if it does not step up its defense spending to meet NATO's benchmark target. - Documents from the Department of National Affairs are sounding the alarm on military readiness. It found that almost half of this country's military equipment is unavailable and unserviceable. And that just over half of this country's personnel would be able to respond if NATO called in a crisis. - If our NATO allies called us up, would we be dead weight? Are we at the mercy of our beefed up southern neighbours? This episode, I'm talking to David Puglacy. He's a journalist who's been covering the Canadian military for more than 40 years. And, Steve Sedeman. He's a political scientist at Carleton University and the Director of the Canadian Defense and Security Network. What I wanna know is are we actually unprepared for war? Let's get into it. Hi Steve, thanks for coming on the show. - My pleasure. David, thank you for making the time. - Great to be here, thank you. - I wanna start off by laying all our cards on the table in the interest of transparency. Steve, what's your relationship with the Department of Defense? - The network I run, the Canadian Defense and Security Network does receive money from the Mines Program, the Mobilizing Insights Defense and Security Program. We do accept their money, they don't tell us what to say. - And David, what about you? - My relationship with National Defense. Where to start? So I've been covering defense for since '82, different forms. Well, military police have investigated me at least once since that I know of. D&D officials have tried to get me fired three times that I know of. I don't know if I'm appreciated by the institution. Let's just put it like that. - Okay, Steven, my first question is, does a country like Canada even need to be prepared to fight a war? - Well, we've made commitments to NATO, so that's step one. Conventional defense of Canada is largely taking care of by our oceans, by our geography, but the Russians do fly planes over our country from time to time, and there's a general belief that we should be sovereign over our airspace. No, we don't need an army. If we never intervene in any place else, except for, of course, domestic emergency operations, but if we want to make commitments as we've made to NATO, then we need to have an army, and we need to have an air force. - How ready are we for a potential war, Steve? - Not very. I think that estimates on how many days of ammunition we had was measured in like a couple of days. One of the big shocks, which shouldn't have been that shocking, but still shocking from the war in Ukraine as it's taught us, the intensity of warfare is much greater than you expected. There are ability to keep up on the battlefield with ammunition is very restricted. We don't have enough ammunition. We have an experienced real war at a long time where we lose multiple tanks or multiple planes or multiple ships in the course of a day or a week or a month. And so this is kind of war that we're not really ready for. - Like Germany, like other NATO allies, we have not been very good at having enough resources and enough time and enough personnel and enough spare parts to keep our equipment up. So I'm not sure exactly how many of our planes can fly, but we're not alone in that. All of our allies are not really ready for this kind of a war either. We've been fighting against countries that don't really have 21st century militaries. So we've been able to fight without having the ability to sustain a pace of operations that the Ukrainians have been doing for the past two and a half years, three years. - This is the Achilles heel for the Canadian forces. The main thing is they don't have enough people. - And it's the Achilles heel for most democracies because it requires the ability to take a beating and then continue to fight, which means generating new forces. - As the generals have said, we can't even get enough individuals in for the peacetime militaries. Overall, the Canadian forces is having an extreme difficulty with recruiting. So bringing people in, training them, attracting them. And then the other issue is they're losing people. And as the chief warrant officer said at a Zoom call that was leaked to me, he called out the toxic leadership. He said people are leaving because of toxic leaders. This is a problem. - Okay, so we have trouble with equipment. We have a really big issue with recruitment. Defense Minister Bill Blair at one point even called the recruiting crisis. - It's a death spiral for the Canadian Armed Forces. We cannot afford to continue on that pace. We've got to do something differently. - Are we doing anything right? - To be fair, there are things they are doing right. I think in terms of the effort to change the military to make it more attractive, I think they've done a fair amount of work. They've reformed things to make it more attractive to the non-traditional audiences. One of the challenges of all democratic militaries is they all went after the same people who'd always been in the military. So you end up having lots of people from rural areas who are used to hunting and fishing who like to be outside. And that tended to be white men from a particular part of whatever country you're talking about. And that's a declining asset because countries become more diverse and it means ignoring roughly 50% of the populations that doesn't include women. And another 20% of the population that doesn't include people who are not white and so forth. So they change the regulations of permanent residence so that they can apply. Now, there's other parts of the system that need to be fixed. The people I've met in the military are sincere about trying to fix it, but there's all kind of friction. Everybody has their own little way of doing things and they refuse to change things. And in various sectors of the military, it's in that way a typical bureaucracy. Less transparency the most, a bit more transparency than let's say global affairs. - Yeah, that's true. One of the issues is that the recruiting system has been broken and they've known about it for a long time. So you had, you know, Vice Admiral Topsy, the head of the Navy come out, I think a year and a half ago, perhaps with a speech and he said, you know, recruiting and we have to do better and he got kudos for being honest, not sticking to government talking points. But the interesting thing about his speech was that he said the recruiting group has not done its job for 10 years and that was buried in the speech. I found that fascinating because there are senior officers who have been in charge of the Canadian Forces recruiting group and the question is, what have they been doing? Why wasn't this, you know, the problem was identified 10 years ago, probably even earlier? Why didn't they act on it? And now we're at a point where Bill Blair is saying we're in a death spiral. Well, maybe someone should have acted upon it a decade ago. (upbeat music) - Steve, I saw you quoted in a CBC article where you said that for the past 30 years, the Canadian government has been quite happy to not think about the military and that it's been hard to get the government to focus on these long-term military objectives. Why do you think that is? - I think there's two major reasons. One is that Canada does not have a tradition of good civilian control of the military, that they tend to give the military responsibility for handling things and then they don't really engage that much oversight. There's very few people inside the Canadian government who think their job is oversight. Step two is there's not a lot of incentives in the Canadian political system or in many political systems, really. To do that, that is that in the next election, nobody's gonna be talking about whether Trudeau adequately controlled the military. Nobody's gonna be asking Pierre Pollard how he's gonna engage in oversight over the military and people aren't gonna vote on that. And so the politicians don't really have incentives to do this. One of the most damning things in the past 10 years on this stuff is that there was well-documented sexual misconduct crisis. It had a Supreme Court justice, have a report, the Deschamps report. The Chief of the Defense Staff was given the job of handling it. He said, according to what Deputy Minister Thomas said on my podcast, was that when John Vance was asked, "How can the D&D help you out?" He says, "Stay out of it, I'll take care of it." And then I would have conversations with people about Operation Honor, which was Vance's initiative. And they'd say, "Well, that was Vance." And they would shrug their shoulders and it was like I didn't really know what that meant until the journalists revealed a pattern of systematic abuse of power in sexual misconduct by John Vance. -Retire General Jonathan Vance has become the first senior officer charged in relation to the military misconduct crisis. In court documents, military police allege Vance did willfully attempt to obstruct the course of justice in a judicial proceeding. -I would argue that it goes way before Vance. You know, in '96, '97, I was writing articles about sexual assault. And it was because of him a claims investigation. And then there's all kinds of promises the military was supposed to bring in all kinds of new things. And then, you know, we moved on. And then in 2011, I'm writing another series of articles on sexual assault. Same thing, then in 2015, we had yet another. The military was left on their own and they did not fix it. What does this mean, besides the various survivors or victims, is the taxpayer had to pay one billion dollars to the various individuals who were sexually assaulted or harassed. You'd think that would catch some attention, but it doesn't. -This episode is brought to you by Douglas. About one in five Canadians don't find their sleep refreshing. -Yo, what are you doing? Are you doom-scrolling on TikTok all night? Are you watching videos of baby hippos? Or is it the tea that you drank before bed that you didn't realize was caffeinated? Or wait, is it that old lumpy mattress that's failing you? Well, I have a Douglas and I know for a fact that it doesn't fail me or the 200,000 Canadians from coast to coast to coast that trust this thing. It's got a medium-firm feel and a cooling gel foam layer, so no more of those hot and restless nights. Try a Douglas, and don't fail your sleep. Douglas is giving our listeners a free sleep bundle with each mattress purchase. Get the sheets, pillows, mattress, and pillow protectors free with your Douglas purchase today. Visit Douglas.ca/CanadaLand to claim this offer. That's Douglas.ca/CanadaLand. -This episode is brought to you by Policy Me. If you have benefits that is fantastic, I'm glad for you, but not everyone has a job with benefits. A lot of people are self-employed. I was one of them for many years. A lot of people are retired, congratulations. On the downside, though, you may find yourself paying out of pocket for lots of medical expenses. That's why you should consider Policy Me. Policy Me's health and dental insurance offers a comprehensive solution to things like prescriptions, glasses, other extended health services like massages and chiropractors. Most of this stuff is not covered by government healthcare plans in Canada. Similar to Policy Me's term life insurance that we've told you about before on Canada Land, health and dental insurance is simple and affordable insurance. It's really easy to get started with. There are no lengthy forms, no medical exams. Coverage is guaranteed. Look, if you need to go see a dentist or you need a therapeutic massage, do not let the fear of the costs get in the way of your health. Head to policyme.com and secure your health and dental coverage in just five minutes. No medical questions will be asked. That's P-O-L-I-C-Y-M-E.com, policyme.com. Go check it out. - I kinda wanna shift gears to talk about something that we mentioned earlier, NATO. Canada still hasn't met NATO's target of spending 2% of our GDP on defense, despite government promises to do so. - Canada fully expects to reach NATO's 2% of GDP spending target by 2032. - Why have we not met this target? - Well, first, the 2% metric is NATO's metric. It's not particularly a good metric for military capability because Greece has always been highly ranked by this measure, but they never show up and they spend mostly on personnel as sort of a welfare program. And so it's a flawed measure, but it's a flawed measure that has gained a lot of political traction because it's easy to measure. So we often focus on things that are easy to measure than what are necessary, but to the question of 2%, well, part of it is that our economy's been growing better than some of the European countries. And so if your denominator gets bigger than the numerator doesn't catch up, you don't get to 2%. So that's part of it. Part of it is that the government did keep most of its commitments in this last defense update in 2017. They have been making progress, but you can't cut checks if you can't make decisions and you can't cut checks if you've made decisions, but they haven't been enacted yet. So the shipbuilding program is super expensive, but we haven't spent a lot of that money because it's taking forever to actually get the designs and actually make the ships. Part of it is that successive governments, when they want to cut the budget, cut bureaucrats, they call these people bureaucrats, and they're actually civil servants who do the job of doing the contracting, of making the agreements, of keeping track of things, doing all the bureaucrats stuff that require things to get bought. We do have some success stories. We were able to buy the C-17s quickly. We've had so many procurement challenges in the past that they add layer and layer and layer on oversight, which slows down the decision-making procedures. So that's a real issue. David, what are your thoughts on NATO's 2% target? I was at the NATO 2014 conference with Harper covering that and 2% had emerged, and he essentially held a press conference saying he wasn't gonna follow it. So don't tell me about how much you're spending. Tell me about how much you're actually doing. Look at Estonia. It is held up as the NATO gold standard. They don't even have fighter jets. I've got a couple of helicopters. It's Navy is one of the smallest in the world, but on paper, it's right up there. Probably they're approaching 3% GDP. Heroes of NATO. So this just shows you how you can game the system. The Greek Air Force runs water bombers to fight forest fires, and that's procurement there, and that's those crews, and that's all contributing to the GDP numbers. So this 2% is... Okay, but does it matter if we don't meet it? It does. It does because, I mean, one of the fun things about this was the government was really trying to avoid it, and then Trudeau goes to the summit in July, the NATO summit, and on the way, he's meeting a bunch of Congressmen and senators, and he wants to talk about trade, and every trade conversation end up being, "Well, we can talk about trade, but first we gotta talk about it 2%." Because the best way to spend a lot of money is to buy a lot of submarines. Canada is taking the first step towards the procurement of up to 12 conventionally powered submarines. That means we have to buy 12 submarines, but that, by 2032, that's not gonna happen. But we are seeing them make faster steps and being more upfront about things than in previous stuffs. It matters because our allies care about it. Obviously, Trump was obsessed by it. NATO members must finally contribute their fair share and meet their financial obligations. But it wasn't just Trump. The challenge is what has happened the past 10 years in international relations, which is Canadians have made major commitments to putting troops into Latvia, and they need to have those troops have a variety of stuff to make them good allies. So that way, if push came to shove, they would be able to fight reasonably well for at least a few days before reinforcements came in. And that requires counter drones, that requires counter-error, that requires all kinds of stuff. And so the 2% becomes a motivation to get that stuff. So I think there's a real need to spend more money, but the 2% thing is a political thing. - David, what do you think? - I agree that it matters, but I don't think we'll ever be able to satisfy the Americans. Maybe it's time for some tough talk and I don't know if that talk has been going on behind the scenes. You take a look at our NATO allies and many of these smaller countries can barely field an army. Yet the Americans are putting pressure on us. Trudeau has tried to placate them a little bit. So we're buying F-35s, built in Texas. We're buying P8 surveillance aircraft built in Seattle. There's the new Canadian surface combatant, all American radars. There is a lot of Canadian money going down to supply U.S. jobs. And maybe it's time to start, you know, pushing back a little and mentioning things like this. We joined the Afghan war because of the United States. 158 Canadians dead, 2000 wounded, tens of thousands suffering from various other ailments. Canada has been there repeatedly for the United States and it's interesting to see these American politicians crap on us in these letters. I'm surprised that there hasn't been a harder pushback from Canadian politicians. - What I understand is that you're arguing that it's not entirely about a sense of fairness, but maybe something else. - Exactly, it's about this number. I mean, I think if American politicians truly looked and we do need more, you know, we need more things, more equipment and such. But relegating Canada to this defense, what do they call us, Steve? Defense, I don't know, laggard or whatever. You know, all these terminologies. - Free rider. - Yeah, free rider, right? Free rider, where's the pushback? - Okay, but the folks who criticize the Canadian military, don't they have interests in us spending more? (laughing) - Of course, I mean, so yes. Every, all of these analysts that you see have some kind of connection to the Department of National Defense or the security infrastructure. In some respects, you know, they've done quite a good job in driving this 2% narrative. All these generals that you see being quoted or on television, this is the system they created. And now they're, you know, they're kind of complaining about it once they're out and they've got their pensions. A lot of these individuals are working for defense companies, some of them are lobbyists. So there is a real incentive to push this narrative and not maybe look at new ways for security. You know, you ask a car salesman if you need a new car, well, what is that individual gonna say, of course, yes. - The problem is that NATO is like an insurance policy. It's not whether you paid 10 years ago, it's whether you pay every year. And that's about NATO. And that's also about the American commitment to its ally is that you have to keep paying your insurance policy for the day that you need it. - You're saying that we can't stop paying, but what exactly is it that we should be spending our military budget on? - What type of military do you want as a country? Do you want a military that is to satisfy the Americans? Do you want a military that can take care of our security needs in a country that deals with forest fires, floods on an increasing level? You could take all your funds and start putting it into a climate security force, for instance, equipped with more C-17s, forest fighting equipment. You know, get to your NATO 2% level there. Would that make the Americans happy? Probably not, but it would provide security for us. - And this speaks to civilian control of the military, which is that the Canadian people, when they're polled, care most about their domestic emergency operations. If you take a look at the latest defense review, emergency operations is as listed as one of the priorities, but rather than being fourth of four, which is why it was in passenger use, it's now like seventh of eight, 'cause any time you have a list of priorities, whatever is at the bottom, is at the bottom for a reason. And so the military does not want to be doing this stuff. They constantly say we are a last responder, not a first responder. And I understand this is how they see things, but it's up to the civilians to say, what are our priorities? And if they wanted to invest more in counter-fire planes and all the rest, then that would be the decision. - Okay, it really seems to me at least, that it's unlikely that Canada would be booted out of NATO. - Hungry first, hungry first. - We also live right next to the strongest military in the world. I think my big question is, shouldn't we try to get away with spending as little as possible? - Well, I think the answer is we've been very successful at that for a long time, but the challenge is that the military gets asked to do things, and while the military has a lot of autonomy, when they're asked to do something tough, they'll say yes if there's enough pressure on them. And then they're put in places where they may not be well equipped to do it, and then that might get people killed. So for instance, in Afghanistan, Rick Hillier was given a budget line, and so he said, okay, well, if I send helicopters, that'll be very expensive, I won't send helicopters. I'll hope that I can just get our troops to get pickup rides from the British and the Americans. That's one reason we weren't kind of hard, but that meant that our guys were, and women were driving on the roads of Afghanistan, which was dangerous. So that had consequences for war effort. So that's money we spend in the military. We'll still end up asking to do things that are dangerous, and then they get hurt. And I'd rather us have them be well equipped. So that way, yes, they will always get hurt, but not be hurt because of decisions that were made to under-equip them. (upbeat music) - David, give it to me straight. How likely are we going to war? - Well, I hear a lot of talk about war with China in 2027. Some American generals have talked about that. You know, war with Russia. So let's just run through a couple of scenarios. War with China. If we went to war with China, our economy would collapse. So there's all this talk, but no one seems to figure out the consequences. We are economically tied to China, whether it's pharmaceuticals. You know, we went through this in the pandemic. It's just a glitch in the supply system, and there's lineups to get toilet paper. Can you imagine what would happen to our economy if we went to war with China? The war with Russia, you know, all this talk, Russia is going to invade Poland. There are Russia's going to invade, I don't know, Latvia, or pick a country. The Russian war machine is bogged down. I mean, you know, they're fighting in Ukraine. I mean, this is a country that is right next to their border. So your supply lines, you don't have issues with that. And they're going to invade Poland and take on the 32 nations of NATO in a full-on war. I don't know, I mean, a lot of generals or retired generals seem to push these narratives around. And I think it's worth looking closer whether, you know, this is actually going to happen. Then there could be an accidental war or someone fires off a nuke or whatever. But, you know, when I see this type of talk, I just shake my head. It's irresponsible, quite frankly, in my view. This notion that war is inevitable, China is the worst thing we could be saying 'cause it'll actually make the war inevitable. International relations 101. Now, if China goes over Taiwan, our economy's going to be tanked, whether we're in it or not. I do think that the idea of military preparedness is important for avoiding war. I'm not one of these piece through strength people in general, but having troops in Latvia, in Lithuania, and Estonia, and Poland has made a difference. Russia treats NATO countries differently than non-NATO countries. And Russia is aggressive. And so the more we can do to make that threat of a response of being able to defend Latvia for even only a few days to make it appear not to be an easy fruit, a low-hanging fruit, that's important. Because Putin and the people like more opportunists. And so if you deny them opportunities, they don't attack or they go elsewhere. And we've made a commitment to those countries, and I think we should keep that commitment because we've learned that it's better to have some troops hang out in Europe for either a few years now or for what was it, 40, 50 years during the Cold War than actually fighting the Europe for a few years. - Awesome, this was a great chat. Thank you so much. - Great, well, thank you very much. - It was my pleasure, and it was a finally chance to have a chat with David. - Every Tuesday, we dive deep into one story that matters. But there's always more stories that we're keeping our eyes on. Sam Conner, our Ottawa correspondent and producer, is here to help fill us in. This is even more politics from the Hill. Sam, tell me, what are you paying attention to? - Hey, Noor. So Trudeau was on Nate Erskine Smith's podcast last week. He's an MP from Toronto, and he has his own podcast. And Nate asked him what one of his biggest regrets was, and he said... - Electoral reform. - Ah, yeah, music to my ears. - Do you say that just for me, right? - I don't say that just for you. Actually, one sense I do say it just for you, because I know in just about any other interview. - I was gonna raise it. - Any other interview, the interviewer's eyes glaze over, go, okay, yeah, but give me something real that you regret, right? I said, no, no, no, this is real. - What do you mean, interviewer's eyes would glaze over? I can think of a million journalists that would smell blood if JT brought that up. Like, it's a conversation we don't wanna have. Like, that's insane. - Yeah, no, absolutely not. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, here it is, our formal call for you to come on our show to ask you just those questions. My people will be in touch with your people, let's talk. - I'll send the email. Now, it has to be said that this is a safe space for Trudeau, just because the host is a liberal MP, and I don't know if they're friends, but they're at least friendly, they have to be. And I guess obviously the criticism that I would think is that you're still the Prime Minister. Can't you get the NDP on board? Couldn't you still make this happen? Are you giving up? - Yeah, I don't know who from his team decided this was a good idea. I mean, you're still in power, as Sam said. And I don't know, it kind of makes you look a little bit, I don't wanna say spineless, but-- - Say it. - We can say spineless. - The criticism also is that if he does it right now, if he chooses to do it, then everyone's gonna say he's doing it just to kind of secure his vote in the next election, it looks good for the liberals. But the thing is, if he did it eight years ago, people would say the exact same thing, it'd be the same criticisms. - Yup, I hear you. Sam, I wanna tell you about a story that I've been keeping my eye on. - Hit me. - Global Affairs Canada says it has now helped more than a thousand people leave Lebanon, but so many seats on the flights out of the country are empty. But yeah, it also seems like some people want to leave, but can't. I know CBC's The Current had a piece where they interviewed someone that couldn't leave. - She was urging Canadians to take those seats. How is that working? If you're trying to get up, but then there are seats that are still available. What's going on there as you understand it? - Sir, for me, that doesn't make any sense. One, because I tried to book the only functioning airlines right now is the Middle East Airlines, which is our national airlines that the Canadian government is working with. I tried to book with that airlines, and it's as fully booked for so many days. So that's me trying to book with them directly. Number two, if they want us to book on these flights, they need to be contacting us in a way or form. I haven't been getting any calls or texts whatsoever. - No, I know that you have family in Lebanon. Maybe paint a picture for me about what people are thinking with these evacuations. - There's this really sad, but accurate meme that's circulating in Lebanese circles right now. It's a picture of a Middle East Airlines flight taking off on a runway with like bombs and destruction kind of going off in the background. And to be real, I think it paints a fairly accurate picture. That suburb that Israel says it's targeting Dahe in Beirut, it's right next to the airport. So I don't know, I mean, let's be real. Would you get on a plane while you could watch bombs drop from your plane window? I don't know, I don't know how I would feel about that. So I get the tension there. But I think the second thing is, asking someone to leave their home is a really difficult demand. In 2006, during the Israel-Lebanon war, most of my family fled and that includes me, but my grandparents refused, like even after the begging and the pleading. And I think it's because, you know, this has been their home for decades. It's more than just like a place, you know, where their belongings are stored. It's their life. And telling someone that they have to walk away and abandon everything that they've built is really no small ask. So I think we should just all be thinking about that when we are hearing about these numbers and asking ourselves, why is it that there aren't that many people leaving, even if they are given an option to? - Newer, there's one more thing that I think's worth noting from recently. And that's that the block capiquas sort of saying my way or the highway to the liberals. The liberals do not give us what we demand on behalf of four million Canadians and one million Quebecers and supply management. We will start discussing with a position in order to have this government fall. - Sam, what do they want? - Without getting into much detail, the broad strokes are that they want more money for a portion of the senior population and trade protections for dairy and poultry. Last week, the liberals could have supported the bill for seniors and the government declined. So the block is sort of turning up pressure. Now they're saying that the liberals have a limited amount of time to show that they're making progress on their demands or they'll start the process of triggering an election. - Damn. - So they're kind of stuck between the block and a hard place right now. - Ha, nice one. - Yeah. - I think you could even say they're being peer pressured. - Nice, nice. - Thanks, Sam. - Thanks, Nor. (upbeat music) - That's been this week in Canadian politics. I'll see you next Tuesday. Look, I read the things you send us. So tell me, what do you pissed off about? What are you watching closely? And what do you want us to talk about on the show? You can email me directly at noor@canadeland.com. This episode was written back check and produced by Aviva Lazard, Sam Conner and I. Mixing and mastering is by Caleb Thompson. Max Collins is our production manager. Canada Land's editor and publisher is Jesse Brown. Theme music is by Nathan Burley. This episode is brought to you by Canada Land supporters. Sabrina Naderajan, Paul Cozen and Reena Cabanilla. If you value this podcast, support us. You'll get access to all of our shows ad-free, including early releases and bonus content. And honestly, more than anything, you'll be a part of the solution to Canada's journalism crisis. You'll keep our work free and accessible to everyone. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music, included with Prime. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting us. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING]