About the Episode

Shannon Proudfoot quoting Pierre Poilievre in Sault St Marie where he is misinforming the audience about a waitress he knows nothing about. So nothing he says makes any working class person think the Conservative leader is any thing but a class warfare fraud. Quoting the fraudulent oppo leader. ”I don’t know her personal story, but let’s say that she has three kids,” he said. “And let’s say that she earns $60,000, 25 bucks an hour.” At this point, several people even in that extremely friendly audience made little strangled noises of surprise and confusion, the human equivalent of a record-scratch sound effect. A waitress in a blue-collar Northern Ontario city pulling down a cool $60,000 a year? The median income of everyone in Sault Ste. Marie – including the lawyers, the doctors, the teachers and all the people who work in the service industry or manufacturing jobs like Algoma Steel – was $40,800 in 2020. The average annual income of people working in the food service industry across Canada was $21,175 last year. All this is in a Shannon Proudfoot column in the Globe and Mail. The columnist is being kind, bordering on charitable to Poilievre’s knowledge deficit. As someone with Blue Collar blood coursing through every single vein and artery, every time I hear Poilievre trying to relate to working class Canadians, it’s like watching a child trying to skate for the first time.

This is Saturday August 12th. World Elephant Day. A reminder that No one in the world needs an Elephant tusk but an Elephant!

Authorities have warned it will take many years to repair the damage caused by wildfires on the island of Maui. More than 1,000 buildings have been destroyed in Lahaina alone. Official Death Toll is 80. But many more are missing and the number of dead will, like an incoming Pacific wave, get much larger.