The Really Big Show with Jim Csek &Iain Burns

Canada sits on the world's third largest oil reserves, runs a supply-managed dairy system to protect domestic food security, and has enough agricultural land to feed a continent. Grocery prices are up 30% since 2019, food banks are at record levels, and a Crown corporation with 13 vice presidents is spending $1.6 million advertising a train that does not exist. The groceries benefit being deposite...

Every failure in today's show has a price tag and Canadians are the ones paying it. The per capita recession nobody told them about. The infant formula plant their tax dollars built that ships 85% of its product to China. The groceries benefit that is just a renamed tax credit. Development charges averaging $195,300 per new home in Toronto. And a national AI strategy unveiled the same week the...

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 Real...

The day before Statistics Canada confirmed Canada had entered a technical recession, Mark Carney told New York business leaders Canada would have the second-fastest growth in the G7 this year. Carney has yet to comment on the recession data. Poilievre is calling for an emergency parliamentary debate. And Canada's food banks are asking Ottawa to modernize an Employment Insurance system built fo...

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...

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 as...

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...

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...

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 t...

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 carbo...

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 com...

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...

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 t...

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 wi...

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.

The Really Big Show: The thinking Canadian's daily briefing, independent and informed.🔴 Live every weekday at 9AM PST 📍 Independent. Unapologetic. Canadian. 👉 Support the show: https://thereallybigshow.ca Subscribe | Share | Comment — help us grow independent Canadian media.#canadiannews #canadapolitics #canada #thereallybigshow #albertapipeline #billc22 #canadiandefence

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 te...

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 bo...

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 bo...

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