Ezra Levant critiques Justin Trudeau’s 2016 Syrian refugee resettlement, exposing gaps like 21,000 migrants not from UNHCR camps and cases like Ahmad Ayyub’s threats against his daughter—serving just 71 days despite violent extremism claims—while Canadian media allegedly suppressed coverage. He links this to Silicon Valley censorship, citing Facebook/Twitter’s shadow banning of conservative voices (e.g., Tommy Robinson) and legal risks for platforms acting as publishers. Meanwhile, Bill Morneau’s vague Kinder Morgan pipeline talks, paired with Kinder Morgan’s $8B losses and investor pullback, reveal federal mismanagement over critical infrastructure, prioritizing political narratives over economic reality. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, two of Trudeau's Syrian refugees are convicted of threatening to kill their daughter for talking to Canadian boys.
So why the media blackout?
It's May 16th, and you're watching The Ezra LeVant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
You come here once a year with a sign, and you feel morally superior.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Here's a story out of Fredericton, New Brunswick.
This report is from a newspaper there called The Daily Gleaner.
I'm going to take you through it because it's fascinating and bizarre.
It's about two of Trudeau's Syrian refugees, and I say those words with air quotes, Syrian refugees, because almost none of Trudeau's Syrian refugees actually came from Syria.
They had already left Syria, in some cases many years earlier, and had already found refuge in Jordan, Turkey, or Lebanon.
So they were not actually from Syria anymore, and they were not actually refugees anymore.
But that's fine.
Justin Trudeau is for open borders and mass unvetted Muslim migration, unvetted in any meaningful way.
Not even for basic skills like speaking English or French or having any useful job skills or education or of course cultural skills, by which I mean understanding that in Canada, we don't beat our wives.
Here's the CBSA program branch vice president Martin Bolduc, basically the senior officer in charge of these refugees, testifying to Parliament a couple years back about the source of these Syrian migrants, just in case you doubt me.
Most of the 21,000 refugees that have made it to our borders were now housing in camps.
They have been living in theater for a number of years, renting apartments.
So I just want to that for the precision.
They're not housed in camps administered by the UNHCR.
Can you give me a breakdown?
How many from camps?
I wouldn't be able to tell you the 21,000, how many, but very, very few came out of camps.
Most of the people were already living in the countries where we are operating here.
So they're not really refugees.
Anyways, the mainstream media just loves, loves, loves doing stories on Trudeau's Syrian refugees to cheerlead them.
Here was a beautifully produced video about the Rafia family who were just dumped in a small town in Atlantic, Canada.
Lazy husband, that's him there, Mohamed Rafia, who just sat on the porch all day, just smoking and drinking coffee.
I mean, he looked lazy to me, but then again, he didn't speak English, and he had no marketable skills.
He knew no one.
He was clearly miserable.
He had no friends, so his wife was miserable too, of course.
She tried to make some friends.
Anyways, it was a beautiful documentary on the family, just gorgeously shot.
And that was published until, uh-oh, one day, look at this.
Mohamed Rafia, there he is, was charged and convicted with beating his wife with a hockey stick for half an hour.
And he said at court, and I'm not making this up, you can even see this in the headline there.
He said that no one had told him you can't beat your wife in Canada.
He just, no one told him.
And you know what?
I believe him because it would be Islamophobic to tell someone that.
Anyways, huge news about Mohamed Rafia when he was a soft focus sob story about a Syrian refugee in a small town in Atlantic Canada.
Not a lot of coverage when it was revealed that he beat his wife with a hockey stick for half an hour and it was covered in blood.
Yeah, that's not what hockey sticks are for.
They're for hockey.
I don't know if anyone told you that when you came to Canada.
Anyways, well, today's news out of New Brunswick is worse.
It's a mother and a father, Syrian migrants, who repeatedly threatened to murder their own daughter for various honor crimes.
Now, let me quote a bit from the story.
A Syrian refugee couple, upon learning their adult daughter was dating a non-Muslim man in Fredericton, threatened her with an honor killing, court heard Tuesday.
Oh, just that.
So they'll come to Canada.
They'll take our free stuff, our free healthcare, our free welfare, subsidized housing, halal food banks, plain old cash, but their daughter socializing with a Canadian, that's haram.
That's forbidden.
It's dirty.
It's dishonorable.
They would murder their own daughter for disgracing them for fraternizing with Canadians.
Yuck, Canadians.
Sorry, why did you come to Canada if you hate Canadian people so much?
I'll read some more from the story.
Crown prosecutor Prosecutor Claude Hashay said Bayan Ayub reported to Fredericton Police Force in mid-February that her father, Ahmad Ayyub, threatened to kill her on three occasions.
So Bayan is the daughter you see there.
Both mom and dad threatened to murder her again and again.
The first time was in April 2016, just two months after the family arrived in Canada, court heard, when the father became irate when he discovered Bayan had an iPad she'd won in a contest.
He threatened to poison her food at that time, Hashe said.
Poison, eh?
That's dad of the year material right there.
That's a Trudeau refugee.
That's unvetted mass migration from a rape culture that treats women as chattel.
That's violence, that's anti-infidel bigotry.
We hear the word Islamophobia a lot, but what do you call it when a Syrian migrant hates Canadians so much that he tells his own daughter he'll poison her if she hangs out with Canadians, even chats with them on an iPad?
I don't know, what's that, Canada phobia or something?
How about just someone who doesn't belong here and doesn't deserve our charity?
Maybe he's better fit for Syria after all.
They do a lot of that over there.
But it wasn't just a heated comment in the moment.
It's something he said again and again.
Let me quote some more.
The next threat came in June and July 2017, he said, when the family learned Bayan had met a non-Muslim man and was communicating with her through social media.
Ahmad Ayyub told his daughter for his own dignity it would be better to slaughter her than to let her be in such a relationship.
The prosecutor said, yeah, sweet daughter, I'm doing this for you, I'm doing this for me, I'm doing this for our family.
I'm going to murder you because it's better to, quote, slaughter you than to have you be seen with a Canadian man.
That's how ISIS does it, by the way.
They slaughter their victims, a knife to the throat.
Sorry, is this Zag a refugee from ISIS or is he a perpetrator?
Does Justin Trudeau even know or care?
So it started back in 2016 as soon as they came here, and he kept going with the murder threats.
Here's an incident from this year, 2018, just a few months ago.
Let me quote.
The victim also told police her father threatened her on February 13, 2018, when he saw she was receiving messages on her smartphone, court heard, telling her he'd kill her if the messages were from people she'd worked with during a placement at the local food bank.
So this girl, I mean, she's an adult, but I'll call her a girl because she's a daughter.
So this young woman is actually doing something positive, getting out of the house, helping others at a food bank.
Seems nice enough.
And her putrid father threatens to murder her.
Okay, last quote from the story.
This is about the mother who was helping the father.
What kind of mother would collude in the murder or the threatened burner of her own daughter?
How does that murderous instinct trump the maternal instinct?
That's honor violence in a rape culture, which is where this thuggish family was imported from.
They would kill their own daughter, and the mother would help.
Let me quote.
Prosecutor Hashe said, Bayan Ayyub subsequently told police her father, Fatin Ayyub, called her February 27th to tell her to tell police she'd lied about the allegations she'd made about her father, that she was crazy, and to admit herself to hospital.
Her mother said if she didn't do it, she would be killed.
The prosecutor said, Fattan Ayyub made the threat in two calls court heard, the second of which was recorded.
So it sounds like there was more than three threats after all.
It sounds like at least four, maybe more.
How many other young Muslim women are threatened by their own parents to recant complaints about abuse to police, whose own parents, whose own mothers call their victimized daughters liars when they reach for help?
Well, we know that's exactly what happened in the case of the Shafia family, a quadruple homicide of three girls and one of the two polygamous wives by these murderers here.
So what's the sentence?
What's the sentence for this wonderful family in Fredericton?
Well, nothing.
Nothing.
They walked out of court that day, that minute they walked out of court free.
They were in pretrial custody for 71 days.
I acknowledge that.
So that's enough, said the judge.
I mean, it's all a big misunderstanding.
They literally walked out of court that day.
Hashe said the court, he asked, let me quote, Hashe asked the court to impose 100-day jail terms for both offenders.
But since they'd already served 71 days in custody, that means they'd already served their time once the customary remand credit is factored in.
So the prosecutor himself only asked for 100 days, which of course would have meant much less after statutory release and parole and all that.
100 days for repeatedly threatening to murder your own daughter and threatening her not to talk police to police.
Well, of course, because they're Syrian migrants.
And that's how they roll in a rape culture.
And you Squaresville Canadians have to get with it.
Here's one of the defense lawyers telling New Brunswickers that it's all just a little misunderstanding, like beating your wife with a hockey stick.
I mean, they just didn't know.
Let me quote.
This Lutz character, he's one of the defense lawyers.
Lutz noted the charges were the result of cultural differences and the ongoing effort to adjust to life in Canada.
Let me read some more.
The language used was careless.
Hey guys, you got to be careful you don't accidentally threaten to murder your daughter four times.
The language used was careless in the extreme and bordered on reckless.
It wasn't quite reckless, apparently.
He told the court, noting, Syrians have a different way of speaking with one another than the customs in Canada.
A Syrian could tell someone, I'll stab you, Lutz said, but they don't mean it.
Come on, guys, they don't mean it.
Don't be so negative.
You know, we're rain on the parade.
It's such a vibrant, diverse culture.
They force their women to cover up or else they condemn them as whores.
They condemn local Canadians as dirty.
Don't date them.
But it's just a slip of the tongue.
They don't mean it.
Here's my favorite line from the story.
The atmosphere outside the courtroom following the sentencing was celebratory as family members and friends embraced the couple.
You guys are the best.
You're the best.
Celebratory.
They're thrilled and they're laughing at our non-justice system.
This is the grossest story I've seen all year.
But other than the New Brunswick Daily Gleaner, from which this story comes and its sister newspaper in Moncton, I have not seen this story anywhere in Canada, have you?
And by the way, you can't even find the story online.
I had to subscribe to the paywall of the Daily Gleaner because it was behind a paywall.
You can't get this on the internet.
Try Googling it.
You won't find it.
I wonder if that's on purpose, because there's a lot of other stuff that's on the internet for free by the same company.
But the court hearing was public.
The verdict was public, which was obviously an important and newsworthy case.
But not a peep about it anywhere else that I found.
I looked exhaustively.
It's not on the CBC's New Brunswick homepage.
I searched the entire CBC website.
You can see the result here.
If you type in the words, it's not there, at least when I searched it, which was a day after the ruling.
Canada's state broadcaster is choosing not to report this story.
All the other media are choosing not to report the story.
They're choosing to unreport it, to disreport it, to anti-report it.
Just like they did when we published a story in 2016, I don't know if you remember, about how Fredericton schools are overrun by violent Syrian migrant kids.
And by kids, I mean young men as old as 21 being jammed into high schools with young Canadian girls.
The violence, the threats, the Islamic extremism right there in the schools.
Thousands of pages of documents from the schools about the problems that's causing, but the mainstream media refuse to cover it because it's against the narrative.
Syrian refugees are poor souls who need our help.
The only bad things about Syrian refugees are the Islamophobic racists.
And you don't want to be an Islamophobic racist, do you?
Shadow Banning Controversy00:14:48
So shut up.
Honor violence, wife beating, threatening daughters, calling Canadians dirty and unclean, 90% unemployment rate two years later, no English or French skills, beating a woman for half an hour with a hockey stick bloody.
That's all off the media agenda.
It's a miracle that the Daily Gleaner even covered it at all.
I'm surprised, really, but like I say, they hid it behind a paywall.
Say, if this is what they grudgingly cover, how many stories, how many bad, awful stories are there that aren't covered at all?
Stay with us for more.
The nexus of power in media has moved from New York City to Silicon Valley.
If a tech company decides they don't like your views, they don't like what you're saying, we've heard reports from whistleblowers of shadow banning where you simply tweet or post something and nobody sees it.
It just goes into the void, goes into the ether, and you are silenced magically.
Likewise, if there are views that a handful of tech companies like, they can favor those views and direct them to your feed so everything you see is the information they want you to see.
That is a level of power that is staggering, and I think it poses a real and present danger to our democratic system, particularly given the extreme left-wing bias of Silicon Valley.
What we've seen over and over again, they're acting to muzzle and silence conservative views, views they disagree with.
That's frightening.
There you have it, Senator Ted Cruz in an exclusive interview with Breitbart.com.
Very true, and actually, it shouldn't be controversial.
Mark Zuckerberg himself, when he testified before Congress, admitted that Silicon Valley, located as it is in the San Francisco area, is a very left-wing city, so they're just doing what they do naturally.
Well, joining me now via Skype to talk about this, is the senior technology correspondent for Breitbart News, our friend Alan Bukhari.
Great to see you again, Alan.
Hi, Ezra.
And yeah, I mean, hard to follow Ted Cruz.
He sort of said it all.
But he's absolutely correct.
Of course, Silicon Valley now has far more power to shape public opinion and information and news than a traditional media publication.
Imagine if all the newsstands in the world were run by just one company and they decided to only sell the New York Times and the Washington Post.
I don't think anyone would stand for that for very long, but that's what we have with Facebook.
It's like one company that is really the, along with Google, is really the only really the only game in town when it comes to distributing news and building news websites.
If you're not on Facebook, you can't really survive as a news website.
Facebook's doing it.
And I see news that Twitter is doing it too in shadow banning.
There's probably a term that some of our viewers who are not deep into social media understand.
It's basically you think you're talking to the world.
You think you're publishing your material, and indeed you are, but no one is being shown it.
So it's like being in a padded room.
You can shout all you like, but no one knows it's happening.
And you don't know it's happening.
You have not been warned.
You have not been given advice or anything.
It's just, they put you on your own little island.
Twitter has actually come out and said that's their new policy, isn't it?
In all but name, yes.
They've said that they haven't used the word shadow banning specifically.
In fact, publicly, they've denied shadow banning users.
They actually told Ted Cruz when one of their representatives went to testify before the Senate that the company does not shadow ban.
But I think they're lying.
I think they lied to the Senate because here they are admitting that they will artificially limit the reach of certain accounts and certain content that doesn't even violate their terms of service, but they'll artificially downrank it.
They'll hide it in search results.
They'll make it less visible.
So people will be restricted on Twitter if they exhibit so-called troll-like behavior and if they detract from the public conversation, these very vague Orwellian terms that are properly defined.
Yeah.
You're a conversation detractor, Alan.
You're part of the conversation, but in a detracting way, I'm going to ban you.
I mean, what on earth could that possibly mean other than whatever Twitter wants it to mean, right?
Yeah, it's crazily vague, and they haven't even defined the list of signals that they use.
They're supposed to use all these signals to determine whether an account is troll-like or detracting from public conversation or whatever they're talking about.
But they only list four of their signals.
They don't listen the whole list.
And they also admit that this will be done for content that isn't necessarily violating the terms of service.
So they're giving themselves power to downrank virtually any tweet that they like, any account that they like.
The other news today, by the way, is Facebook.
They've released this new report on content moderation on the platform in which they admit they removed 2.5 million examples of hate speech in the first quarter of 2018.
So that's in a three-month period, 2.5 million pieces of hate speech.
That includes posts and other forms of content.
And you know what?
I mean, hate speech is staggering.
I think the word hate speech in 2018 simply means speech that someone hates.
It's not hate.
I mean, it could be hateful speech.
Hate is a natural human emotion.
But I think it basically means things that Mark Zuckerberg or his team of social justice warriors in San Francisco find hateful.
Before we, I want to talk more about Facebook because there's a lot to say about that.
Can I first read, and I learned about this through your column in the Breitbart.com called Twitter Officially Admits to Shadow Banning Users and All Bat Name.
Let me just read Twitter's new policies.
I want to show our viewers that this is not just your opinion or my opinion.
This is actually posted on Twitter's website.
They call it serving healthy conversation because, Alan, you've had some unhealthy ideas, and that has to be remedied.
Let me quote from Twitter.
They say, One important issue we've been working to address is what some might refer to as trolls.
Some troll-like behavior is fun, good, and humorous.
What we're talking about today are troll-like behaviors that distort and detract from the public conversation on Twitter, particularly in communal areas like conversations and search.
Some of these accounts and tweets violate our policies, and in those cases, we take action on them.
Others don't, but are behaving in ways that distort the conversation.
Alan, it's sort of like hate speech, I suppose, or anything.
Or fake news, what someone thinks is controversial or important, someone else calls fake news.
What is a troll to one person is speaking truth to power by another?
I mean, it's so subjective.
I criticize powerful politicians all the time on Twitter.
Am I a troll or am I part of the media holding powerful people to account?
They really don't define these terms, do they, Alan?
Yeah, again and again, we see this on the left.
They love terms that can be stretched to cover almost anything they want.
So, you know, hate speech, harassment, fake news, and in this case, healthy conversations and disrupting the public conversation.
These terms can be twisted and stretched and molded to sort of fit any definition they like.
So they can say, well, the guys we like, you know, they're not distorting the public conversation because of reasons.
And the guys we don't like, like, you know, like you and me, we are.
So we're going to downrank these guys.
We're going to downrow the tweets from these guys.
And, you know, we're not even going to tell them about it.
So the really insidious thing is you don't know if your tweet has been shadow banned.
If that's the reason it's getting traffic, it was just a bad tweet.
So there's no way to know when Twitter's censoring you now.
It's a complete lack of transparency.
I want to come back to your news about Facebook admitting it's deleted 2.5 million pieces of content.
I recall after Brexit in the UK and after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Facebook didn't want a three-peat.
And so in the French elections, Zuckerberg preemptively shut down 30,000 Facebook pages that were supportive of Maureen Le Pen, claiming they were fake or I don't know.
He just did it.
And we have no idea who the 30,000 were, what they said.
We just have to take his word for it.
I thought that was a staggering number.
And now we'll tack on a few more zeros to that.
2.5 million.
Is there any trace of this?
I mean, Ted Cruz was making the right sounds, but is there any way that Facebook would ever disclose or could be asked to disclose what it's censoring?
I don't want the government to take over Facebook, but Facebook is acting like a bullying, censoring government, and they're bigger than any government I know.
Yeah, they're frankly more powerful than any government.
I mean, think of totalitarian governments from the 20th century.
They didn't have this kind of power.
They didn't have the technology to manipulate information or control information on the scale of Facebook or Google.
So I'd say these companies have more power than almost any entity we've seen in history.
And I think they definitely need to be pushed to be more transparent.
I think if they did it voluntarily, if not some sort of government agency forced them to do so, that's great.
But I think the power they have has grown to such a point that no matter how we get it, we need to have that transparency.
So just to use this example, they released this 2.5 million figure as part of this new report, which they say is part of their push to be transparent, but they don't give a number of how many accounts and pages have been banned or suspended over hate speech or how many have been mistakenly suspended.
This happens a lot on Facebook where conservatives are always going to be the victims of enforcement errors that later corrected.
They won't miss the number of mistakes and they won't list the posts in question.
They won't subject it to third-party oversight.
So they just give this figure 2.5 million and leave us to wonder about whether all of these were legitimate or mistakes or the result of some algorithm we don't know about.
We still know barely anything about how Facebook is making these decisions.
You've been very generous with your time.
I have one last question.
I sometimes think of the analogy of a phone company.
In AT ⁇ T or Sky or Orange or whatever it is in the UK there and in Canada, TELUS and Bell.
The phone company doesn't listen to your conversations.
It doesn't stop you from saying things on the phone, even if your emotion at that moment is hate or love or if you're politically incorrect or if you're a troll.
I mean, if you break other laws, you can use a telephone to break actual laws.
You can utter a death threat or whatnot.
Or I suppose you could engage in a harassing phone call to a stranger.
But I'm talking about general content.
If the phone company started to interrupt your calls if it didn't like what you were saying or actually shut down your phone number because it didn't like what you were saying lawfully, I think there would be an uprising and I think the government would come in and say, wait a second, you're a neutral platform for everybody.
You cannot censor content.
Alan, what does it mean that Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon are now not just a stage upon which any actor can strut his stuff, but rather they are the producer, the director, the censor, the editor, And really they're taking ownership of what can and can't be on the.
How does that change their legal or political standing that they're now saying we will say, we will tell you what you can or can't say on the telephone, the 21st century version of the phone being Facebook and the internet.
Well that's, that's the real legal distinction, especially in the US, and Ted Cruz brings this up a lot.
But before I get to the legal angle, what you just said about the telephones is exactly the way we need to think about social media companies.
We need to stop buying into this this, this left wing, this idea that was born on the in the left wing media, that social media companies have some sort of moral responsibility over the content on their platforms.
They don't what.
What someone posts on a platform is their responsibility, the responsibility of the individual poster, and we uh, just as we should stop uh, asking Facebook to censor various posts because we don't like them, we also need to stop blaming Facebook for uh for, or Twitter or Google for hosting content we don't like, because it shouldn't be their responsibility.
They're job, they should be just platforms.
But, as you point out, they're now moving away from that model.
They're moving towards being publishers publishers that have an opinion that will censor certain content.
So legally, that means they should really be held, they should lose their legal protection as neutral platforms.
Because if you're legally classified as an online platform, then you're not legally liable for the content of what your users posts.
So Facebook and Twitter can't be sued for something that a user posts on their platform, whereas the user might be able to.
But if they're not a neutral platform anymore, if they're publishers with an opinion, then they should be held legally liable for the content posted on their platforms because they're editing it, they're making decisions about what's good and bad.
And if they're taking responsibility for the content, as Mark Zuckerberg has essentially admitted, then they should be legally responsible for it as well.
So that's the key legal distinction there.
But it seems like social media companies at the moment, surprise advice, they want all the rights of neutral platforms, all the legal immunities, but none of the responsibilities.
Yeah, isn't that the truth?
Well, Alan, I'm so glad you're covering this beat.
As I've told you on several occasions, I think it's the most important beat because all of a sudden, an entire point of view, key personalities can simply vanish without a trace.
I mean, our former reporter in the UK, Tommy Robinson, just one day he was gone from Twitter.
He had 400,000 fans who obviously signed up to hear from him.
And some anonymous, secretive decision was made.
I don't know by whom.
And he was gone.
and those 400,000 people had their choices taken away, and Tommy had his voice taken away, you can like it.
Just for posting a fact.
Kinder Morgan's Deadline00:12:03
Sorry, go ahead.
Just for posting a fact as well.
Like, nothing he said was like an attack on anyone.
It was simply a fact.
Right.
And I find that troubling.
And I know they would desperately love to take Breitbart down.
And in Canada, we're, I think, enemy number one.
And they don't need to debate our side anymore because they can just push the delete button.
I find that terrifying.
I'm so glad you're shining a light of scrutiny on it.
Hopefully it'll make a difference.
Keep it up.
Thanks, Ezra.
All right.
There you have it.
Alan Bokari is the senior technology correspondent with Breitbart News.
We were chatting to him via Skype from London, England.
Stay with us.
We're ahead on the Rebel.
We believe that it's in the best interests of Canada and Canadians to get this project built.
It means thousands of good, well-paying jobs for Canadians.
It means greater investor confidence and a fair price for our natural resources.
And it's clear that we have the jurisdictional authority to ensure that it's completed.
That's why we're working diligently to remove the investment risks, the politically motivated investment risks, so that this project can go ahead as planned.
Hey, welcome back.
That was a press conference this morning at 9 a.m. in Ottawa.
It was hailed as the most important announcement coming from Bill Morneau on the Kinder Morgan pipeline.
The House media of the Liberal Party, that is the state broadcaster, the CBC, hailed it as an important announcement.
I did not detect anything substantial whatsoever.
Nothing you could pin down like a watermelon seed.
You squish it from the right, it moves left.
You squish it from the left, it moves right.
There was nothing new there.
And the reason that's an issue is that Kinder Morgan has announced that if they do not have a resolution to the political impasse that's blocking their $7.4 billion pipeline, well, if they don't have a resolution by the end of May, they're out of here.
They'll write off the billion they've spent and they'll just go invest someplace less crazy.
Joining us now to talk about this press conference is our friend Sheila Gunread, who is also our Alberta Bureau Chief from the heart of oil country.
Sheila, great to see you again.
Hey, Ezra, thanks for having me.
Well, thanks for taking the time.
I thought maybe there would be some scheme or some law or some order.
I mean, a month ago, the Liberals said they were going to bring in legislation.
They haven't done so.
Maybe they would get tough on BC.
Who's kidding whom?
They're not going to get tough on BC.
They need the votes and seats in that province.
They're just going to wait out the clock and blame Kinder Morgan when they leave in two weeks.
I think so.
And I think that there was nothing that Bill Morneau said there that couldn't have been said for Energy East or the Northern Gateway pipeline.
He said, you know, this will amount to thousands of good paying jobs and a fair value for our resource.
Well, yeah, all those other pipelines that they didn't fight for would have done all those things too.
So, you know, really, what's the point except, like you say, to kick the ball down the road and then point the finger at Kinder Morgan when they finally had enough of Justin Trudeau and his liberal procrastination.
Yeah.
You know, it was so vague.
It was so vague.
I remember about a month ago when Jim Carr, the Invisible Energy Minister, did a little scrum on Parliament Hill and said, all options are on the table, which I think he meant to sound really tough.
And some journalists said, well, can you name one?
And he said, oh, all options are on the table.
Well, can you give us an example?
No, all of them.
I think when you're talking that way, it's pretty clear that you have no options on the table because you don't even know what the options are because you haven't spent a minute thinking about it because you don't care.
And you think it's done anyways and you don't care about votes in Alberta because there are burdens.
Well, they say all options are on the table, but the only option they ever propose is just throwing money in the air and hoping some company stops to pick it up.
I mean, they haven't proposed anything real.
They proposed this new legislation that would help get the pipeline done.
But the deadline is two weeks away.
And that hasn't even been remotely close to tabled yet.
Yeah.
You know, I want to jump to our clip two, Hannah.
I want to show this clip two because there's a little dose of unreality here that you got to pay attention to.
It's just, can you play clip two?
Look at this, Sheila.
Second, if Kinder Morgan at some stage decides not to proceed with the Trans Mountain expansion project, the indemnity against financial loss would still be in place for another party who might wish to take over the project.
Say what?
Does Bill Morneau think that if, and I'm going to say when, Kinder Morgan leaves in two weeks, having burnt a billion dollars, having been killed by social license and lawlessness on the ground, and a liberal government that won't lift a finger, he'll punish Saskatchewan for not accepting an unconstitutional carbon tax, but won't touch British Columbia for its unconstitutional.
Does Bill Mourneau think that there's some other investor who says, yeah, I got $7.4 billion and I'd like to take Kinder Morgan's seat in this ordeal?
I think, I don't know if he believes that.
Does he believe that?
Does he even know the words he's saying?
Who are these companies?
I mean, I kind of keep my ear to the ground on these sorts of things.
And if Bill Mourneau can't say, you know, there's this other interested company, if no other companies are even whispering about this, I mean, TransCanada has had it with Canada.
Billions and billions and billions of dollars have already evacuated the Canadian oil patch, Stat Oil, for example, ConocoPhillips.
They've had it with us.
There are no companies who are going to take this over.
And Bill Morneau knows that.
I just, I don't know why he doesn't think that we don't know it also.
Yeah.
You know what I know and you know, but I'm not even sure if Bill Morneau knows.
The Trans Mountain pipeline, I think he said expansion project, like it exists.
I've seen its terminus with my own eyes.
It's been pumping away quietly for pretty much since the Second World War.
It was an engineering miracle to take oil through the Rocky Mountains.
That's why it's called the Transmountain Pipeline.
And it hundreds of thousands of barrels a day.
This is just an expansion project.
So they've got the pipe.
It's been on this route for 70 years.
When BC's population was tiny, everyone's grown up around it.
It supplies oil to BC.
So to expand that, how can another company expand Kinder Morgan's pipeline?
That's like if someone wanted to renovate their house and they said, ah, forget it.
I'm not renovating this house.
And someone said, well, someone might want to come and renovate your house.
So, you know, it's not just you, Mr. Well, it sort of is, I think.
Well, yeah, I mean, this pipeline, most of it is going to be built in the existing pipeline easement.
So the land that Kinder Morgan has already allocated for the pipeline expansion, that's where this is going to go.
It's not, you know, and that's another point in all of this.
It is so crazy.
This pipeline has been a no-brainer from the very beginning.
It should have been the easiest energy infrastructure project in the country's history to get done.
And that's just twinning a pipeline in the land the pipeline company already has allocated.
And the mismanagement of the federal liberals, coupled with, you know, the opposition of an unelected NDP government in BC has just had this thing turn into a complete runaway to the point where a company is just going to say, you know what?
No, no, $8 billion will cut our losses.
It's insane.
I want to play just one more clip.
This is the last clip.
And you can see he's sort of preparing the ground to blame Storm, to say it's Kinder Morgan's fault that they're not willing to stick around.
Here, let's play the last clip.
And third, any support that Canada provides to ensure that the project proceeds must be sound and fair and beneficial to Canadians.
We understand that a private sector company would want to maximize their profit.
Likewise, we have a responsibility to act in the best interests of all Canadians.
I think that's some sort of way of saying we're not going to be ruled by Kinder Morgan.
Kinder Morgan has never asked for a dollar, has never asked for anything other than the law of the land be followed, which it is not.
It's really weird, that passive aggressive, well, Kinder Morgan ought to know we're going to stand up for Canada's interests, and we're not going to be rolled by the profit motive.
They're not asking for money.
They just, they are bringing the money.
It's their money.
They're not asking for money.
That was Bill Mourneau and Rachel Naulle's Kakamami idea.
I think you can start to hear that bitter, passive-aggressive, well, it's their fault.
This is done.
Stick a fork in it.
It's done.
Well, if you don't want to be ruled by profit motive of a private company, don't offer to get into business with them to get around the opposition that the federal liberals have spent so long fomenting.
I mean, you're not serious about getting pipelines done if you have somebody like Gerald Butts of the World Wildlife Fund and Zoe Karen on the government payroll.
I mean, you don't legitimize the anti-oil voices by sticking them in government.
You marginalize them if you're serious about getting a pipeline done.
But the Liberals just keep hiring these people and then wondering why pipeline companies don't want to have anything to do with us.
Yeah.
You know, it's, I think, accepted wisdom that Gerald Butts is the de facto Prime Minister of Canada.
I mentioned Justin Trudeau on his 56th world trip.
Gerald Butz never takes a vacation.
He's always running the show.
Trudeau has told his caucus, if you get a memo from Gerald Butts, take it as if it's me.
Trudeau told the ethics commissioner, oh, I couldn't have lobbied the Aga Khan because when I attend meetings, I don't actually get into the substance.
I just come in, make sure the relationship's good.
I leave and others handle it.
I mean, this is what he said.
So it's not that the Liberals have hired Gerald Butts.
The Liberals are Gerald Butz, and he has placed all of his allies in key ministries.
He's put the head of the Sierra Club, the head of the Pembina Institute, the Tides Foundation staff.
He's seated, put them, embedded them within all the departments that matter here.
So it's not even why did the government hire Gerald Butz.
Gerald Butts is, more than any other backroom chief, he is the de facto prime minister.
Of course, this pipeline will not get built.
Of course, Bill Mourneau hasn't wasted his time coming up with a plan because there is no, no, no chance any plan will be enacted.
I'm sorry I'm ranting here, Sheila.
Last word to you.
I mean, it's pretty clear that Trudeau doesn't want to be the prime minister of no.
So he wants to be the prime minister of, well, we tried, but the evil capitalist companies just were a little too greedy for us.
So he doesn't want to deal with the political hot potato that's going to be left with, that he's going to be left with when he sees another pipeline leave Canada.
But for all those reasons that Bill Mourneau said that they will stick up for Kinder Morgan, those are all the reasons that they should have been sticking up for every single other energy infrastructure project up and including now.
Trudeau's Political Hot Potato00:04:30
Yeah.
A final word.
I said I would give you the last word.
I never mean that when I say it.
I always mean it when I say it, but I can never give you promise.
This reminds me of the show I did a few weeks ago about the little rock quarry company that wanted to invest in Digby Neck, Nova Scotia.
They were frustrated by environmentalists.
They just won a half billion dollar NAFTA ruling against Canada.
It would not surprise me if five years from now we're paying $10 billion to Kinder Morgan because we did not let them invest their own money here.
It wouldn't shock me.
Sheila, great to see you again.
Thanks for having me, Ezra.
All right, nice to see you.
I have so much to say on this.
So of course, it's not that I don't want my guests to have the last word.
It's just that I keep coming up with more words to add to the last word.
And we're joking around, but of course, this is a terrible story.
Billions wasted, and of course, tens of thousands of jobs indirectly as opposed to the thousands of jobs directly.
Stay with us.
We're ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about a false accusation of racism after a routine speeding ticket.
Keith and Helen, right?
I thought the cop was actually quite courteous, and he was professional and firm in his approach, but he certainly didn't come off anywhere near racist.
I think in this incident, it's clear who the racist is.
Yeah, I mean, the words race, black, white, did not come up at all in the traffic stop.
I mean, it was a very brief interaction, wasn't it?
I mean, they were only talking for less than four minutes.
He spent more time just literally riding the ticket.
She immediately went straight to race when she got in her car and did her Facebook Live video.
I do not dispute that in a country as large as the United States, which is more than 300 million people, there are racist incidents.
And I don't dispute that there are some racist cops.
But what we have in the form of these body cams is an instant lie detector that's, you know, you can see with your own eyes what happened here.
I believe there is such a dearth of actual institutional racism in America.
There's so little of it.
But there's such a huge demand for it.
Well, demand, high demand, low supply.
It draws people into the market to fake it because there's a reward.
That woman got hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of views, and she was a hero.
Even now that the truth has come up, I think she's still probably treated like a hero because really, the lie already ran around the world twice before the truth got its boosts laced up.
Lee writes, yikes, no such thing as a distracted driving ticket in Virginia.
Yeah, I don't know what the rules are about doing a live stream video from your car.
On my interview with Tiffany Gabai, Tammy writes, Nikki Haley had an important message to deliver to the heavily biased UN.
She had to remind them of reality.
Great interview with Tiffany Gabai.
Well, I'm glad you think so.
Tiffany's great.
She's been with us as our managing editor since last fall.
And it was great to have her on screen because, of course, she does so much work behind the scenes, but I think this was an issue close to her heart.
Well, that's the show for today.
What do you think about a 71-day custodial sentence for a husband and wife who repeatedly, repeatedly, and repeatedly and aggressively threatened to murder their own daughter?
And I think actually in some ways the worst part of the story is when the daughter went to police, the mother said to her, you immediately recant.
Call yourself a liar.
Say you're crazy.
Check yourself into a hospital or we will murder you.
In some ways, I think that's the worst part.
And for the lawyer just to say, oh, you know, it's just, they didn't mean it.
I mean, come on.
Come on.
Who doesn't threaten their daughter with murder?
It's just a manner of speech.
And the judge bought it.
And the judge bought it.
More than that, the media, they just said, well, let's pretend this didn't happen.
Well, that's why the rebel's here.
We'll tell you what happened.
I give credit to the Daily Gleaner and their Moncton City newspaper.
They did, in fact, do this story.
You got to pay for it behind the paywall.
Fair enough.
But if it weren't for that, this story would have been reported nowhere, nowhere.
If these had been alt-right white supremacists threatening people with murder, I think it would have been the lead story on the national.
But because it's true to Syrian migrants, let's just pretend it never happened.