Canada is being failed by poor leadership

Canada is in a recession its own government refuses to acknowledge. The Prime Minister skipped Question Period for the 4th consecutive day to wear a hard hat at a photo opportunity. And China's intelligence-linked state newspaper is celebrating Carney's pivot away from the United States in language nearly identical to his New York speech. Jim and Iain make sense of it all today on The Really Big Show.While the Bank of Canada tells Canadians not to put too much weight on the recession data and the Foreign Affairs Minister claims Canada will be the fastest growing G7 economy hours after the recession was confirmed, Guangming Daily, identified by intelligence experts as the preferred newspaper of China's Ministry of State Security, published a glowing essay praising Carney's push for Canadian autonomy from Washington. It follows a 2025 CCP influence operation that ran covert WeChat campaigns casting Carney as the ideal Canadian leader to stand up to Trump. The question of who benefits from Canada's current direction is not rhetorical.Today's show covers:►Carney skipped Question Period for the 4th consecutive day since the recession was confirmed, taking a 15-minute photo opportunity at a construction site in his riding wearing a hard hat, as Poilievre called him "the only G7 leader to cause a recession" who refuses to answer a single question from Parliament or media►Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand claimed Canada will be the fastest growing economy in the G7 this year, hours after Statistics Canada confirmed the country had entered a technical recession, as the Bank of Canada Deputy Governor told Canadians Canada is "not really" in a recession despite meeting the standard textbook definition►Statistics Canada reports Canada's national poverty rate stands at 11%, affecting 4.5 million Canadians, up from 7% in 2020, with 1 in 5 Canadians experiencing food insecurity and Nunavut recording the highest rate at 31.7%►Liberals voted 193 to 134 against blocking the CRTC's tripling of the streaming levy to 15%, confirming cabinet has the power under the Broadcasting Act to reject the order but chose not to use it, directly contradicting their earlier claim of powerlessness►CBC was flooded with viewer outrage after former host Travis Dhanraj testified managers explicitly blocked Conservatives from air, threatened to pull him off for booking a Conservative MP, and eventually forced him out, with CBC's editor in chief responding the network aims for balance "over time, not in every story"►Guangming Daily, identified by intelligence experts as the preferred newspaper of China's Ministry of State Security, published a glowing essay celebrating Carney's turn away from the United States in language nearly identical to Carney's own, following a 2025 CCP influence operation that ran covert WeChat campaigns casting Carney as the ideal Canadian leader to stand up to Trump►A Senate human rights committee voted 7 to 1 to criminalize public statements that "condone, deny or downplay" the Indian Residential School system, with offenders facing up to 2 years in prison under an amendment to Bill C-9, as the full bill returns to the Commons if the Senate adopts the amendments►Federal managers told a Commons committee they never authorized a $10 million charge by Indigenous Languages Commissioner Ronald Ignace for a 4-day Ottawa conference, admitting the internal audit only began after anonymous whistleblower complaints and that the department had given the office "a blank cheque"►Canadian judges in Ontario and Quebec have publicly criticized a two-tier justice system in which non-citizens convicted of serious crimes receive reduced sentences specifically to avoid triggering deportation, as Liberals voted down a Conservative bill in March that would have prevented the practice►The Parliamentary Budget Office projects Bill C-3 will create 115,000 new Canadian citizens abroad through grandchild citizenship rights, far exceeding the immigration minister's estimate of fewer than 5,000 per year, as Conservative MP Brad Redekopp was told criminal background checks on adults claiming distant ancestry citizenship amount to "anybody can claim anything"►The Temporary Foreign Worker program cost taxpayers a net $509 million over 5 years to administer, as Canada issued 126,000 TFW permits for skilled trades in 2025, nearly identical to the number of unemployed skilled trades workers that year, while 442,000 Canadian youth remain unemployed►Canada formally notifies the U.S. and Mexico it wants to renew CUSMA ahead of the July 1 review deadline, with energy integration at the centre of its negotiating strategy►Vancouver Coastal Health confirms mosquitoes carrying a group of viruses that can cause brain-swelling encephalitis and meningitis have been detected in specimens between Squamish and Pemberton, B.C.Let us kno