The Really Big Show with Jim Csek &Iain Burns

Canada is in a technical recession. The Prime Minister was in New York telling Americans that "Canada Strong will help make America great again." And the first Chinese-made EVs under Carney's 49,000-vehicle tariff deal have arrived off the coast of Vancouver. Join Jim and Iain as they wrap up the week with the latest in Canadian news.

Real GDP has now failed to grow for 2 consecutive quarters and business capital investment has fallen for 5 consecutive quarters. The pipeline Carney and Smith announced requires more than $100 billion in total private sector commitment with no confirmed...

Beyond the Ballot with Renee Merrifield and Jim Csek

The Prime Minister's in-flight food bill for 3 trips was $195,400. It’s been confirmed that Canadians will never be told what is in the security agreement Carney signed with China. And Canada has fallen from 2nd to 19th in the U.S. News Best Countries rankings, dropping behind the United States for the first time.

The contradictions are stacking up faster than the explanations. The cost per asylum claimant now exceeds the average Canadian salary. The Senate concealed 200,000 signed postcards opposing a hate speech bill in a warehouse. And Housing Minister Gregor Robertson says he be...

Steven Guilbeault resigns from the Liberal caucus today. China's foreign minister arrives in Canada tomorrow for the first visit in 10 years. And Ottawa is announcing an LNG deal with Germany from a facility that has not yet made a final investment decision.

Join Jim Csek and Iain Burns as they make sense of it all.The Liberal coalition is fracturing over climate, the trade relationship with Washington is deteriorating while Mexico moves ahead without Canada, and a Buy Canadian policy that allows fully foreign-owned companies to qualify as Canadian suppliers is being defended without...

The Liberal coalition is cracking, the housing market is hitting a financial inflection point, and Parliament just voted to leave property rights unprotected after a court ruling that has B.C. homeowners asking whether their homes are safe. Jim Csek and Iain Burns are here to bring you the day's news.

The cracks are showing on multiple fronts simultaneously. Steven Guilbe

ault may be days away from leaving the Liberal caucus entirely. Insolvency filings are at their highest level since 2009. And the House Leader just told 44,869 Canadians who signed a petition asking...

Catherine Swift: Canada’s economy in a ‘nut’ shell

95% of Canadians are feeling financial pressure. 52% of the average household's income now goes to shelter. And 47% say the country is on the right track, the highest figure since 2017. Jim Csek and Iain Burns try to make sense of a country where the numbers tell completely different stories depending on which ones you look at.

The gap between how Canadians feel about their own lives and how they feel about the country's direction is not a contradiction. It is a portrait of a population that has learned to separate the government's narrative from their own reality. Housing is...

Martha Hall Findlay is not your typical energy commentator. She is a former Liberal MP, former chief sustainability officer at Suncor, one of the architects of the Pathways carbon capture project, and now director of the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary. She ran for the Liberal leadership on a platform of building the Northern Gateway pipeline. She spent years championing carbon capture as Canada's path forward on emissions.This May she published a piece in the Globe and Mail recommending Canada pause the entire Pathways carbon capture project. She joins Jim Csek to explain why...

The Really Big Show sat down with Conservative deputy leader Melissa Lantsman for a conversation covering the state of Canada in 2026: antisemitism on the rise, a military without backpacks, a media that serves the government, an immigration system that stopped working, and an economy strangled by ideology.We spoke about:► The Canadian military readiness crisis: 20,000 personnel short of full complement, military housing units declared unfit for habitation by the auditor general, the Snowbirds grounded until the 2030s, and a procurement system where buying a helicopter takes longer than building one.► The Online News Act and the captured media landscape: Lant...

The Canadian military flew a signals intercept aircraft over the Freedom Convoy protesters in Ottawa in 2022, lied about it when journalists asked, changed their story when the tail number was identified, and have been blocking ATIP requests ever since. Brian Isted, a former Canadian Army captain, military intelligence analyst, and founder of True Patriot Love Media, explains what he found when he went looking for answers. On recruitment: Canada has a current complement of approximately 55,000 personnel against a full complement of around 75,000. But it is not that Canadians do not want to join. Isted says six-figure numbers of Canadians...

Canada's housing market does not need to crash dramatically to destroy a generation of wealth. It just needs to stay exactly where it is. Ron Butler, founder of Angry Mortgage and one of Canada's most widely followed mortgage analysts, joins Jim Csek and Iain Burns for a conversation that covers everything the government does not want Canadians to hear about what is actually happening to their homes, their mortgages, their cities, and their country.In this exclusive interview Butler delivers a systematic and unsparing account of how Canada's housing disaster unfolded and where it is headed. Toronto is the...

Alberta is holding a referendum on whether to hold a referendum on independence. Fourteen of Carney's own MPs say he is tearing apart the environmental legacy that held the Liberal coalition together. And the pipeline he is offering Alberta comes with conditions his own industry analysts say cannot work. That pipeline's $16.5 billion carbon capture requirement is not economically viable without permanent government subsidy, which means the cost will land somewhere, and that somewhere is almost certainly the public. The defence relationship with Washington is fraying over vague commitments and a fighter jet purchase Ottawa still will not confirm. And...

Nearly half of Canadians distrust their own federal government. Only 1 in 4 trust politicians. And the Privy Council's own research confirms it. Today Jim Csek and Iain Burns ask how a government governs when it has lost the consent of the governed.

The BC Conservatives pick a new leader on May 30th. Jim and Iain had Peter Milobar on tos discuss why he thinks he is right to lead the Conservatives into forming the next govt of BC.

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Beyond the ballot: Does the Government know best?

A pipeline deal that may cost more than it delivers, a $25 billion fund with no legislation, no governance and no disclosed borrowing costs, and a Buy Canadian policy with no enforcement deadline and no Canadian ownership requirement. B.C. is furious it was cut out of the Alberta pipeline negotiations entirely. The Liberals' own caucus is in revolt over climate concessions. And while Carney tells Canadians to prepare for sacrifices, the Department of Foreign Affairs spent $32.5 million on an iceberg pavilion in Osaka, including $164,000 to ask visitors about their gender identity.Jim Csek and Iain Burns discuss it all...

Canada's oldest military partnership with the United States has been quietly suspended. The UN has walked back its worst-case climate scenario. And Alberta has a signed pipeline agreement with a construction date.

Jim Csek and Iain Burns work through the latest developments in a Canada-U.S. relationship that is deteriorating in real time, from the suspension of the oldest bilateral military body on the continent to Washington's formal trade investigation into Canadian broadcasting law.

They also put the Alberta-Ottawa pipeline agreement under the microscope. Is this a genuine commitment...

Canada's oldest military partnership with the United States has been quietly suspended. The UN has walked back its worst-case climate scenario. And Alberta has a signed pipeline agreement with a construction date.

Jim Csek and Iain Burns work through the latest developments in a Canada-U.S. relationship that is deteriorating in real time, from the suspension of the oldest bilateral military body on the continent to Washington's formal trade investigation into Canadian broadcasting law.

They also put the Alberta-Ottawa pipeline agreement under the microscope. Is this a genuine commitment...

On this episode of The Really Big Show, Jim Csek and Iain Burns break down the high cost of being "slow" in a fast-moving world. We look at the massive housing deficit—where Canada needed 82,000 homes just for new arrivals—and the alarming tech exodus as companies like Apple and Meta warn that Bill C-22 will turn their devices into government surveillance tools.

Beyond the Ballot with Renee Merrifield and Jim Csek

On this episode of The Really Big Show, Jim Csek and Iain Burns analyze the potential "deal with the devil" between Danielle Smith and Mark Carney regarding the Pacific pipeline. Is the promised infrastructure worth the $130 per tonne industrial carbon tax that industry warns will kill the sector anyway? We dive into Adrian Dix's wind power gamble in B.C., the slow-motion death of the Canadian auto sector, and the shocking claims that the feds are actively nudging Canadians toward Chinese e-commerce despite massive security warnings.

We also look across the pond where Nigel Farage is drawing...

The Really Big Show

Trump is sitting across from Xi. Reform UK just wiped out Labour in Wales. And Canada's biggest energy opportunity in a generation is stalled over a carbon tax negotiation. The world is moving. Today on The Really Big Show, Jim Csek and Iain Burns ask why Canada isn't.

Not every story today is a scandal. Canada's skilled trades sector is positioned for a decade of demand, Canadian-owned lumber companies have quietly outflanked U.S. tariffs by producing American lumber on American soil, and Ottawa says regulatory reform is coming. The bright spots are real. The question is...

On this episode of The Really Big Show, Jim Csek and Iain Burns tackle the absurdity of a "Buy Canada" policy that allows the Bank of China to qualify as a local supplier while actual Canadian energy firms "build big" in the U.S. to escape domestic gridlock.

We look at the "poop show" of European diplomacy versus the reality of Musk and Rubio heading to China with Trump, and ask why the Carney government is still obsessing over plastic straws while Canada Post returns to the begging bowl for more taxpayer billions.

The pipeline may be moving, the Chinese Communist Party is making bomb threats in Canadian cities, the Prime Minister had a closed-door dinner with Barack Obama and Alex Soros, and Ottawa is blacklisting journalists it doesn't like. The gap between what this government is saying and what Canadians are actually living has never been wider. A lot happened this weekend, Jim Csek and Iain Burns are here to break it down.Today on The Really Big Show:

- Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says a pipeline deal is now a matter of "when" not "if" after a direct...

2.2 million Canadians visited a food bank in a single month. 112,000 jobs gone in four months. Youth unemployment at 14.3%. Jim Csek and Iain Burns ask how much worse it has to get before Ottawa admits the truth.

The data is in and it tells a story the government refuses to acknowledge. While Liberals point to polls and promise deals that never arrive, Canadians are lining up for food, losing full-time work and watching the cost of a new home climb past what any government fee schedule can justify. This is not a transition. This is a decline.

A decade of broken promises, quietly corrupted institutions and policies designed for everyone but ordinary Canadians has left the country hollowed out and its people on their knees.

Jim Csek and Iain Burns are not letting it slide.The bills are in. The committees are closed. The contracts went to the connected and the man promising fiscal restraint just opened an embassy in Fiji.

Today's show is about the full weight of what a decade of Liberal governance has actually cost this country.

Today's...

Canada is losing investments it never built, stalling pipelines it promised, and writing surveillance laws that could turn every connected device in your home into a listening post. Jim Csek and Iain Burns cut through the noise today on The Really Big Show.

From a $15 billion Honda plant going dark to a surveillance bill that could turn your smart fridge into a listening device, from Jasper's preventable inferno to a mental health system being asked to greenlight assisted dying, the stories today are not unrelated. They are a pattern. And Canadians are paying the...

Canada’s economy in charts (and it ain’t pretty) | With Richard Diashttps://www.youtube.com/@IceCapAssetManagement

https://www.jccf.ca/

Canada is being sold a pipeline that doesn't exist, Chinese EVs built by forced labour, and a sovereign wealth fund that does nothing the stock market doesn't already do. Jim Csek and Iain Burns get into all of it today on The Really Big Show.

Today's show covers:

-Politico reports it was Joly's threats to sue Stellantis, not Ontario's Reagan ad, that killed U.S.-Canada trade talks in October 2025, with a deal nearly done on oil, steel, aluminum and uranium before talks collapsed

-The Oil Sands Alliance warns Ottawa...

Beyond the Ballot: Why do we continue to squander our natural riches?

Canada is hemorrhaging sovereignty, cash, and credibility and the Carney government is writing cheques it can't explain.

Today's show covers:

-Carney becomes the first non-European leader at the European Political Community summit in -Armenia, pledging ~$270M to Ukraine and raising Canada's total support to $25.8B

-Canada's deficit sits at $66.9B for 2025-26, down from $78.3B, not due to fiscal discipline but an oil --revenue windfall, with $37.5B in new spending added and deficits forecast above $53B through 2030

-Wealthy Canadians and corporations have stashed $682B in offshore tax havens...

Is the house of cards finally starting to cave in on the Liberals? From committees going dark to partisan slogans in taxpayer-funded ads, this week a pattern of concealment is meeting a pattern of exposure and Canadians are watching.

Today on The Really Big Show:

- Four parliamentary committees shut behind closed doors in under a week as Liberals use new majority to block public scrutiny

- Canada Strong Fund accused of being a sovereign debt scheme with direct overlap to Carney's Brookfield holdings

- Ethics committee recommended Carney divest his...

Today on The Really Big Show with Jim Csek and Iain Burns, we examine a troubling pattern emerging in Canada: more control, less transparency, and growing questions about who is actually being held accountable.

At the centre of the discussion is the federal government’s push to introduce a new online harms framework, with Ottawa arguing it must catch up to Europe in regulating the internet. But as previous legislation failed in Parliament, questions remain about where the line is between protecting Canadians and expanding government control over speech and digital platforms.

Today on The Really Big Show with Jim Csek and Iain Burns, we tackle a difficult but increasingly unavoidable question: is Canada’s biggest challenge external… or is it self-inflicted?

In this exclusive interview with Joseph Barbuto we dissect Canada's economic forecast. We discuss how current market trends, inflation, and debt are shaping the economy. We also examine the real estate bubble, and Joseph explains the buyer-to-seller ratio from 1850 to projected 2050.

This economic analysis offers crucial insights into Canada's potential for future economic growth.

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In this episode of The Really Big Show, Jim Csek and Ian Burns break down what they see as a growing erosion of democratic principles in Canada. From allegations of backroom deals and MP recruitment to questions around media silence and accountability, this conversation digs into whether power is being pursued at the expense of the public will.

We revisit a powerful Stephen Harper clip on democratic mandates and compare it to what’s happening today. Are voters being respected, or bypassed? Why isn’t mainstream media covering these stories with urgency? And what does...

Beyond the Ballot with Jim Csek and Renee Merrifield