The Bill Kelly Show Podcast

Topics Include:

·        Doug Ford says health-care deal w. Trudeau is ‘very very close’

·        Smith and Trudeau meet in Ottawa

·        Calls to draft Green’s Mike Schrenier a sign of Liberal arrogance

·        And more….

GUEST: Peggy Nash, Former NDP Finance Critic, and author of Women Winning Office: An Activist’s Guide To Getting Elected, available May 2022

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Any federal attempt to unmask Chinese foreign agents must be “culturally sensitive,” Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino (Eglinton—Lawrence, ON) said last night. Legislators have sought passage of a Foreign Agents Registration Act similar to a law enacted by the United States in 1938, according to Blacklock's Reporter.

“To deal with threats to national security we need agencies to be inclusive, diverse and culturally sensitive so Canadians can have trust and confidence that as we are taking actions to mitigate against threats to national security they believe we are consistently going to act in the national interest,” said Mendicino.

GUEST: Phil Gurski, President of Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting, Distinguished Fellow with the University of Ottawa’s National Security program, and former CSIS analyst.

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Ontario’s Integrity Commissioner has cleared Premier Doug Ford of wrongdoing after developers, described as “personal friends” of the premier, attended a stag and doe party for his daughter’s wedding.

The revelation comes as the Ford government faces questions about whether developers were given advance notice about the controversial decision to remove lands from the Greenbelt, which the premier denies.

How is this appropriate and not a conflict of interest?

GUEST: Duff Conacher, Co-Founder of Democracy Watch 

GUEST: Moshe Lander, Senior Economics Lecturer with Concordia University

The Bill Kelly Show Podcast:

Canada has been talking about how to streamline access to care using queuing theory for more than 20 years. Centralized wait-lists have been proven to work. So why isn’t Canada using them in health care across the country?

GUEST: Armine Yalnizyan, Economist and Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers

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Canadian manufacturers are concerned about a promise made by U.S. president Joe Biden in his state of the union speech Tuesday evening, pledging to use only American materials in infrastructure projects.

GUEST: Jack Jedwab, President of the Association for Canadian Studies

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At the last NATO summit in Madrid, leaders of the Western military alliance ordered the conversion of battle groups in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to full combat brigades with anywhere from 4,000 to 6,000 troops each, depending on the availability of equipment.

Getting there is proving to be a struggle, according to two recent reports — one from the U.K. House of Commons, the other from a Warsaw-based international affairs think-tank.

Since that June NATO summit, journalists have been asking Canadian politicians and military officials when the Canadian-led brigade in Latvia will be created and what it will look like. Their responses have been vague.

GUEST: Thomas Hughes, Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Canadian Defence and Security Network

GUEST: Claudia Dessanti, Senior Manager of Policy with the Ontario Chamber of Commerce

The Bill Kelly Show Podcast:

The Trudeau government has offered premiers $46.2 billion in new healthcare funding. Is it enough? and will it address Ontario’s needs?

GUEST: Dr. Jason Profetto, Family Physician & Chair of Clinical Skills and MD Admissions with McMaster University

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Canadians are having a visceral reaction to the smug corporate power being projected by major supermarket chains amid today’s inflation in food prices.

GUEST: Jim Stanford, Economist and Director of the Centre for Future Work

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The CBC is looking to end its broadcasts on traditional TV and radio in favour of a digital-only strategy, but likely not any time soon. CBC President and CEO Catherine Tait told The Globe and Mail that “in order to remain relevant” CBC will have to shift its programming online at some point.

GUEST: Bill Brioux, Television critic and author

Ukraine sowed confusion on Monday about whether its Defence Minister would be replaced, creating doubts about the leadership of its war effort just as it braces for an expected Russian offensive.

The questions over Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov were the first public sign of serious disarray in Ukraine’s wartime leadership.

A day after announcing that Mr. Reznikov would be sidelined, a top ally of President Volodymyr Zelensky appeared to row back, saying no changes would be made this week.

GUEST: Elliot Tepper, Emeritus Professor of Political Science with Carleton University