... 40 years in Liberal politics, and your signature program is a breakfast program for children, and you've never looked around the rest of the world to say, "How do people help down-and-out people who need help with food?" Then you're, you're just not clued in.

Absolutely.

So, like, she is completely clueless.

It is an American thing.

We know that.

But come on, folks.

Anyone who's watched television in the last 50 years has heard the term food stamps from American television.

So what i- what's your impression as a citizen here in the city of th- th- the state of Toronto?

And it seems to me, here we are again only a few years later, "Let's just throw money at the problem." Like, y- you know, is there a point at where we could just bankrupt ourselves?

Yeah, absolutely.

And look, I, I do feel for the people of Stelco, and the people of Ford, and the small businesses that support them, even the lunch counters that pay, that, uh, that take the workers in, uh, for lunches.

Look, this is a huge ordeal for us.

The automotive industry alone is 400,000 jobs in Ontario alone, never mind the steel industry, and that's workers and support workers.

Four...

We cannot afford 400,000 people leaving.

Yeah, yeah

What's your thought on all of that?

Yeah.

Look, I, I always think lower taxes attracts more business.

Like, it obviously does.

You, you lower the taxes, the businesses go to the lower tax jurisdictions.

That means we have more jobs, uh, for individuals here, and more people working means less people on the unemployment rolls or on, on welfare or social assistance of any type.

So always good.

He gets away with it.

a portfolio piece.

It's probably so old it's new, right? Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, so from there, just grew it and realized that development, like coding was something I could do.

It's definitely, in the terms of working genius, was in my frustration, not in my joy or genius or anything like that.

So learned that I love people.

I love sales.

I love design.

What, on the video side of things, what does that look like?

What is the ideal customer look like for RightWork right now at this stage of the company? Like, who are the people you're trying to connect with at the shows? How many locations? What do they look like?

Yeah, so we've kind of found our sweet spot thus far in the kind of middle market brand size that are scaling.

So you can think of like anywhere from five to kind of 50 locations and upward right now.

Because those are the types of companies that are actively growing and needing to have confidence in the fact that they are continuing to open these stores and need them to be profitable and need to have a consistent playbook that they can kind of install and give to a manager and a district manager to help them.

give them the visibility and the confidence that they are going to be operating those locations consistently and providing a consistent experience for the employees as well as for the customers.

Amazing.

Do you have anything to announce at the show? Yeah, one of the exciting newest features that we announced was our operations assistant.

Is there anything you want people to know about RightWork that I didn't ask you?

And, you know, I'm not even necessarily saying that's the worst thing, but they love him there.

Yeah, there doesn't seem to be much focus coming from this government.

I think that's part of the challenge.

John alluded to it earlier.

We have to get things done, right? There's been a lot of communications.

And I do like the fact that the communications have changed.

The communications are now about business and investment and getting oil to tidewater.

Will, what do you think?

They didn't get married

...

I saw at, at Calgary Stampede.

And Ford did have on his big Ford Nation belt buckle at the event, uh, where I ran into him and Smith, and Tony Wakeham too, speaking about oil, uh, oil and gas jurisdiction down in Newfoundland and Labrador.

But I do think it will happen.

And this, this is important right now.

And, you know, I read the critics today.

I've been to rodeos, but I've never been to the Stampede.

Are you shocked by that?

I, I'm not shocked by it, but I'm, am quite happy that we've got a different way to look at these things.

We've been told for years by, uh, elected officials that it's somehow safer to be in Canada than it is the United States, and I think by and large it is.

There's just not the amount of guns here that there are in the United States.

But having said that, you know, I do feel like the city has changed.

Other cities have changed.

Ottawa's changed for sure.

In Montreal, the wrinkle there is this manifesto that the, uh, alleged shooter put out, and now a headline says, "Police warn of copycats after the officer, civilian, and suspect died in the Montreal shooting." And I look at that and go, "Okay, they're worried about copycats." Does that mean, Will, that we shouldn't talk about it on the radio?

So Will, I'm curious for your thoughts on the politics of all of this, and how that will impact, uh, ultimately whether we move forward or not.

Yeah, the politics of this are, are very challenging.

I, I think the citizens are all on side with it.

I think that, you know, I think most people, f- frankly, I think every Torontonian has an opin- opinion on the Island Airport.

I'm actually a little bit shocked that the prime minister has said that he doesn't have an opinion on this after, what, 25 years of debating the future of the Island Airport, uh, at this point? Um, look, I'm, I'm ...

Uh, I'll declare my bias here.

I think there should be jets at the airport.

... again, I don't usually fall into the camp of government doing parenting for me, but I do think there are circumstances like that, where if we banned energy drinks for under 16, it would be a smart thing.

Uh, but I always worry that this just means that somewhere along the line the politicians gave away the farm.

Well, yeah.

And you look at some of the, the reporting that we did see back and forth before this, uh, agreement was, uh, was signed.

And you know, the ... what the TTC was saying was it's just unaffordable for customers as well as the city and its taxpayers.

And then all of a sudden we've got, uh, approval.

Um, you know, the, the ...

Last week the TTC simply said it would cost an additional $40 million over the turn of the ... term of the agreement.

... not have been predicted a decade or so ago and they would instead be saying, "We're retiring the old jets, the CT-114 Tutor jets, and here's what we're bringing in to replace them"?

So from that standpoint, it seems to make sense to me.

Yeah, it seems to make sense to me, too, and I think this is what we were missing from the TDSB, frankly, before there was a, a supervisor in place, is an actual explanation as to what's going on.

'Cause what we always hear from is the unions about cuts, and we hear from the NDP about cuts.

The reality is, folks, th- there's less money because there's less students.

I think there's something like 360,000 students in the, uh, in the, in the city of Toronto, within the city of Toronto.

Um, you know, that's not a lot anymore.

And, you know, we're seeing a lot of data that suggests that a lot of families are moving out of downtown Toronto because it's no longer a good place to raise a family.

I don't know what the cure is for it.

[laughs]

We don't have any wealth, right? We have deficits here.

The way sovereign wealth funds are supposed to work, the way they've worked in, in Asia, the way they've worked in the Middle East, the way they've worked in Nordic countries, is they take the, the money that they make from oil, and they reinvest it into other entities so that when the oil runs out, they've got still a massive economy.

What are we doing? No.

We're taking more money from taxpayers in an affordability crisis while we leave the oil in the ground.

This is the most boneheaded idea we could possibly have.

It's right up there with the Canada Infrastructure Bank, the Canada Growth Fund, the Venture Capital Catalyst Initiative, which is now called the Venture and Growth Capital Catalyst Initiative, or the Strategic Innovation Fund, plus the Atlantic Opportunities Department, the Northern Ontario Economic Development Department, the Prairie Economic Development Department.

And by the way, in order to do that, we are going to take a whole bunch of people from these other departments and move them over there, so at least at this point it's cost neutral."