Ezra Levant’s June 7, 2018 episode critiques Justin Trudeau’s diplomacy, highlighting his strained relations with Trump—from leaked misrepresentations of a joke about Canada’s War of 1812 to ideological clashes like NAFTA negotiations, where Canada risks losing leverage. The show also exposes Trudeau’s military mismanagement, including returning gear despite fewer deployments, and speculates on repurposing equipment for migrants, echoing his father’s controversial legacy. Ontario’s economic decline under Liberals and NDP contrasts with Ford’s potential conservative revival, suggesting Trudeau’s policies prioritize symbolism over substance, harming both diplomacy and military readiness. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, Donald Trump comes to Canada for the G7 and Trudeau is doing his best to make his guest uncomfortable.
It's June 7th, and you're watching the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the 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 stuff.
It's pretty shocking when you think about it.
Donald Trump has been president for more than 500 days, and he hasn't come to Canada yet.
Now, he's coming for the G7 meeting, but that's really the only reason why.
The same for Emmanuel Macron, the president of France.
Why had he not been to Canada before now?
The same goes for Theresa May, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and Ingela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, etc.
Under Justin Trudeau's tenure, world leaders just don't think it's important to come here.
It's like that video clip I played for you the other day from the G20 meeting, where Justin Trudeau was walking through a meeting of literally the world's most important political leaders, and not one of them called him over.
Trudeau looked lonely, actually.
Very busy packing and unpacking his briefcase there, just trying to make it look like he wasn't friendless.
Now, you'll see he catches Donald Trump's eye.
He looks at Donald Trump.
He's going to look at him again.
Sort of hanging out by Donald Trump.
Come on, look at me, look at me, look at me.
Look at me, look at him, look at him.
Yeah, eye contact.
And then he points to him.
Donald Trump briefly chats with him and then watches.
Watch how quick he turns his back on him and he hands him off.
Okay, so he talks to him for a few minutes and Justin Trudeau says something extremely deep and engaging and Trump gives him, I don't know, count the seconds.
Word about 10 seconds, 11 seconds, 12 seconds, 13 seconds.
And Trump passes them off to some other guy.
And it's done.
Actually, I guess the passing off happened earlier.
Trump moved on.
You can imagine Trump has done that move a million times before, walk away from someone who wants to talk to him more than he wants to talk with them.
It's not that funny when it's the Prime Minister of Canada that nobody wants to talk to.
We're supposed to be the closest friend and ally and trading partner of the United States.
But it's not just the U.S., is my point.
No one of note comes to Canada under Trudeau, the bizarre three-way handshakes Lamazo with, look at this.
Remember this?
How do we shake hands three ways?
Yeah, yeah.
They were only up here when Canada was chosen to host a summit.
This is a myth that Trudeau is a smooth and suave operator.
It's the view of his psycho fans at the CBC, that's for sure, but it's not actually shared by world leaders.
I mean, Trudeau was a disaster in India, just for the most obvious example.
But Trump is finally coming to Canada, even though Trump is obviously focused on bigger things.
I've seen reports that Trump does not want to spend any more than a few hours in Canada if he can help it, because he's more focused on his upcoming meeting in Singapore with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator, in an attempt to fulfill his audacious scheme of denuclearizing that country.
He can meet with the G7 leaders anytime.
He can phone them anytime, but fixing the Korean war, it's still technically in a state of war, you know.
It's a ceasefire, a truce for more than 60 years.
That's what he cares about.
His staff can handle the regular stuff with the G7.
And Trump isn't much for a G7 kind of thing anyways.
He likes bilateral deals as in the U.S. and one other country doing a deal.
A bunch of those bilateral deals rather than a big mess of a multilateral deal where everyone gets together.
That's why Trump hates the U.N. and has for so long.
Something Trump has pitched to Trudeau in the case, the course of the NAFTA negotiations.
Trump wants a better deal for America, for sure.
That's his job description.
That's his campaign platform.
Trump says he thinks that can be done in a bilateral Canada-U.S. deal and a Mexico-U.S. deal can be separate because Canada-Mexico are so different.
I mean, I have to say that that sounds commonsensical, and even if it's not, Trump clearly has a bee in his bond about Mexico and has for years and talks about a wall with Mexico and talks about MS-13 gang members coming up from Mexico.
So even if Trump is wrong, isn't it in our Canadian interest to get out of the same deal with Mexico and get into our own deal so we're not collateral damage if Trump and Mexico have a big fight, which they surely will?
I mean, I like Mexico just fine, but I think Canada's PM should look out for us Canadians, not try to be a white knight for other countries.
Anyways, things have been falling apart between Trump and Trudeau.
Don't mind me, but I called this a while back.
My book, Trumping Trudeau, predicted a fight between the two leaders.
I actually didn't think it would take this long.
We're lucky in that Trump just doesn't care that much about Canada.
At least he doesn't think it's a priority, which I think is the best case scenario for us, don't you think?
I mean, let sleeping dogs lie, as they say.
But Trudeau, he can't help himself.
He never could.
So Trudeau and Trump were talking on the telephone the other day about NAFTA, because Trump has put steel sanctions on Canada, saying it's about national security, as in the U.S. needs its own steel industry domestically for strategic reasons in case there's a war.
They want to be able to use their own steel, make their own steel, so they're not dependent on, oh, I don't know, foreign leaders, including maybe a prime minister in Canada who gave $10.5 million to an al-Qaeda terrorist like Omar Carter.
Trump wants his own steel factories.
That's why he brings in the tariff to protect them.
Now, Trudeau made a big fuss about that the other day, pretending that Trudeau deeply cared about our military alliance with the United States.
And it was so mean for Trump to talk about national security.
I mean, this is the same Trudeau who withdrew our CF18 jets from the war against ISIS as the first act after he was elected prime minister.
But he doesn't mind pretending he's pro-military if he can use that to jab Trump.
Remember this?
Canada is a secure supplier of aluminum and steel to the U.S. defense industry, putting aluminum in American planes and steel in American tanks.
Well, the two leaders got on the phone and Trump, and Trudeau made the point in the call that Canada was a reliable ally.
And apparently Trump made a joke about Canada torching the White House in 1812.
You know the War of 1812?
Really, it was an aftershock of the U.S. Revolutionary War.
Lots of British loyalists came up to Canada who didn't want to be part of an independent America.
The fighting continued sporadically.
The Canadians raided the U.S. and gave them a bloody nose.
Now, they were Canadians, sure, but that was 55 years before Canada was even a country of its own.
It was really the British Empire.
Anyways, isn't it sort of clear that that was a joke, just hyperbole?
I mean, Trump is not still mad about the War of 1812 some 200 years later.
You know that's a joke, right?
I mean, it's actually a pretty funny joke.
That's the Trumpy style.
But Trudeau, who, if you think about it, have you ever seen Trudeau tell a joke or laugh naturally?
I don't think he has the lightheartedness or the subtlety or the self-critical nature to even tell jokes.
He either didn't get that it was a joke or he did, but he deliberately mischaracterized it and he leaked that part of the private conversation to CNN, to the most Trump-hating journalist at all of CNN.
His name is Jim Acosta, just to tweak Trump's nose.
Say, do you think Donald Trump liked that, will it help convince Donald Trump to lift the steel tariffs?
Do you think it will convince Trump to have more or fewer phone calls with Trudeau or fewer meetings if confidential things they talk about are leaked in an embarrassing manner to CNN?
I mean, CNN loved the scoop.
Trudeau and his cast of Trump haters loved it, and I bet it did well with the Liberal Party base, by which I mean the CBC.
But did it actually help our diplomacy at all?
Here's a CTV reporter who says three different, very high-level sources in the American government tell him the comment was meant as a joke and taken as a joke by Trudeau.
Trudeau's not only violating a conference but lying about it.
I hear that goes over well in foreign capitals.
And three senior sources talking to CTV means the Trump administration noticed that and doesn't like it.
Christy Freeland, the foreign minister who bizarrely is leading Canada's NAFTA file directly.
I mean, look at that crack team there.
That's Christia Freeland, a former journalist who has never negotiated anything tougher than buying a house, and her millennial hipster squad.
That looks like a really cheap Netflix movie, doesn't it?
Look at that.
That Motley crew there is up against lifelong trade lawyers and negotiators on Trump's side.
I'm not making fun of their personal appearance.
I'm making fun of that crew of millennial hipsters is about to be crushed by the top lawyers and bureaucrats and negotiators in the world.
But Christy Freeland herself chimed in, choosing to mock and deliberately misunderstand the national security part of Trump's objections too.
Trump isn't worried about Canada invading and torching the White House.
He is worried about having strategic depth to his steel industry.
And the Liberals who are starving our own military wrapped themselves in the flag.
Give me a break, give me a break.
But it's that sniping, you see.
Trudeau just can't help himself.
These personal attacks on Trump are going to backfire on the whole country.
I want to give you a little insight into how the party, the Liberal Party, truly feels about Trump.
One of the ways to know how they talk is to watch Scott Gilmore.
He's the house husband of Trudeau cabinet minister Catherine McKenna, the global warming minister.
Scott Gilmore writes for McLean's magazine, which gets $1.5 million a year from Trudeau.
So he's an unofficial liberal spokesman in that he can say what they honestly think, but since he's only married to a cabinet minister, it's unofficial.
And he keeps claiming he's a Tory.
So anyway, he just gives her.
Let's take a look at this.
Here's a tweet.
Scott Gilmore says, America's allies have used all their diplomatic tools.
Trump still keeps punching them in the nose as he dismantles the international order we've spent a century building.
It's time to try new tools.
Instead of asking, what does the U.S. want?
We need to ask, how do we hurt him?
This one, look at this.
This is from Catherine McKenna's husband.
Trump has adopted a Russian style of governance, rhetoric, and foreign policy.
With Russia, the only way to push back is to target the oligarchs at the center of power.
In the case of America, there is only one oligarch, Trump himself.
Okay, you're thinking that's his crazy Twitter feed?
McLean's actually prints that kind of stuff.
Take a look at this.
This is from McLean's.
Trade sanctions against America won't work.
Sanctioning Trump himself might.
And then I'll read this sub-headline there.
Scott Gilmore, instead of taxing American goods, Canada and the Western allies should collectively pressure the only pain point that matters to this president, his family and their assets.
Yeah, you're trying out that medicinal marijuana a little bit, just a teeny, teeny, teeny tiny bit too much.
That's McLean's for you.
That's what $1.5 million a year from Trudeau buys you.
Do you doubt that Scott Gilmore and his cabinet minister wife talk like that at home?
The liberal cabinet ministers talk like that even worse amongst themselves in private.
Here's some of what Trudeau's cabinet ministers say in public.
Just a few samples that haven't yet been scrubbed off the internet.
Now, some of these are from 2016 or before Trump was president, but so what?
That doesn't go to anything other than it shows how they truly, truly feel.
Let me quote, here's just some plain old physical mockery from Scott Bryson, Trudeau's Treasury Board boss, who says, gosh, when Trump finds out, there'll be hell to pay.
That's pretty funny.
That's funny.
I don't know if Trump thinks it's funny, but hey, it's worth getting a few cheap laughs, even if you scupper a NAFTA deal, right?
Here's Carolyn Bennett, another Trudeau cabinet minister.
She writes, Michelle Obama denounces Trump for bragging about sexually assaulting women.
So why is Canadian cabinet ministers sharing that?
Here's Carolyn Bennett again.
Jimmy Fallon delivers epic Donald Trump RNC speech.
You're a cabinet minister.
What are you doing?
What are you doing?
You're a cabinet minister.
Here's another one.
Concerning, more than 450,000 voted before anyone had seen Trump's tape.
So here she is on the eve of the U.S. election, just pounding Trump.
What are you doing?
you're a cabinet minister you can't you just can't keep your thoughts to yourself and you're not smart enough to have deleted this and you you think that you listen i i have no doubt at all that carolyn bennett feels that way but why is she doing that from her ministerial twitter account when we're trying to negotiate and that's the deal Why don't you have common sense and delete that?
Here's Gerald Butz.
Right after David Duke, the KKK leader was in the news.
He says, I wonder how many people are searching the world's databases for a picture of Trump and Duke right now.
That's the KKK leader.
That tweet is still up in public.
That's the prime minister's right-hand man comparing Donald Trump to the Klansmen.
Look, it's how they all think and talk.
I don't know if you remember this, but look, look at this one.
Literally weeks before Trump's election, the Liberal Party of Canada put out a massive email to all of their members denouncing Trump as divisive and negative and pinning neighbor against neighbor and going on and on, sort of ascribing to Trump the abusiveness of their own liberal email weeks before.
Imagine attacking one of the two leading presidential candidates just weeks before the election in a close race, not even waiting a couple weeks to make sure you weren't mocking the new incoming president.
Look, you don't have to like Trump.
I like him, but I'm pretty sure Stephen Harper didn't like Barack Obama and vice versa, but they still worked together more or less for the benefit of their respective countries.
They didn't squabble.
They didn't engage in insults.
It's true that Donald Trump has started to ratchet things up in his Trumpy way.
I mean, he called Canada spoiled.
Trudeau's Anti-Trump Posturing00:16:03
We'll get along with Mexico.
We'll get along with Canada.
But I will tell you, they have been very difficult to deal with.
They're very spoiled because nobody's done this.
That's tough talk.
But I've never actually seen Donald Trump take aim at Justin Trudeau himself, who Trump repeatedly praises and calls a friend.
My friend Justin, I like Justin Trudeau.
He says that.
But the Liberals are 100% personal in their attacks on Trump.
Trudeau, the most.
I've been very, very clear in my approach as a feminist, as someone who has stood clearly and strongly all my life around issues of sexual harassment, standing against violence against women, that I don't need to make any further comment at this time.
Yeah, I think it's better if Trump ignores Canada.
I'm sort of glad he hasn't been here in 500 days.
If Trump separates Canada from Mexico before he pummels Mexico, I think that's a good thing.
I think it's been our good luck that Trump has not visited us.
And I think it's good news that he's only going to the G7 in and out.
And he's really focused on North Korea and Iran and China instead of us, don't you think?
But one day, and I fear that day is imminent, Donald Trump will pay attention to all the insults hurled at him all the time.
And he will punch back hard.
And it won't just hit Trudeau, which would make me chuckle.
It will hit all of us.
And you know what?
I actually think Justin Trudeau wants that to happen because while it will devastate our economy, it'll make Trudeau the world's anti-Trump martyr.
And no one will love him harder than the government journalists at the CBC State Broadcaster.
I think a trade war, a personal war of words with the U.S. president, will hurt Canada badly.
But if it gives Justin Trudeau an easier enemy to campaign against in the next federal election than the Conservative Party, and if it'll make Trudeau the toast of town of the United Nations, well, it almost sounds like it was Gerald Butz's plan all along, doesn't it?
Stay with us.
We'll talk more about this with Joel Pollack of Breitbart.com.
Welcome back.
Well, we just marked the 500th day that Donald Trump has been President of the United States.
And I don't know if you remember, but right before his inauguration, I published this quick book called Trumping Trudeau, How Donald Trump Will Change Canada, even if Justin Trudeau doesn't know it yet.
And can I read the back cover to you?
It's just two sentences.
And you tell me, if I had this called 501 days ago, the Justin Trudeau era came crashing to an end on November 8th, 2016, when Donald Trump was elected President of the United States.
On everything from carbon taxes to Cuba, Canadian policy is suddenly obsolete.
Will Trudeau and his advisors realign themselves with our largest trading partner and ally?
Or will Trudeau do what his father did, play the role of anti-American gadfly to the delight of the third world, but the detriment of Canadians?
Well, I think we know the answer to that.
And joining us now via Skype from Los Angeles is our friend Joel Pollack, the senior editor-at-large of Breitbart.com, who's been following Trump and the Canadian negotiations.
Great to see you again, Joel.
Great to see you.
Maybe you can set the record straight about something.
Do Canadians joke about burning down the White House?
You know, once in a blue moon, Canadians, it's sort of a, well, the last time we fought, we beat you, haha, because we know we're one-tenth the size of Canada, and our military is a fraction, and we're the junior, in the Batman and Robin analogy, we're the Robin.
So it's not a joke.
We don't say, haha, we got you.
It's thank God we have been at peace with America for 200 years.
And then we sort of, because we know it's such an imbalance of power, that it's sort of, I wouldn't say it's a joke, Joel, but I'd say that it's something we tell ourselves to remind us, well, it's an antidote to the fact that we are not as powerful as America.
That's all it is.
You don't have to apologize for telling the joke.
I have heard the joke.
No, I don't think we tell the judges.
It's not a joke, and I'm not apologizing.
I'm just saying, I don't think Canadians say, ha ha, in your face, America, we burned down the White House.
No, it's just sort of a joke about, well, our military is pretty weak, and thank God we're not at war.
But if you really want to exhume the past 206 years ago, we did sock it to you.
Like, that's all it is.
But Canadians don't lead with that.
Most Canadians don't even know what the War of 1812 is.
All right.
Now, I know you're mentioning that.
I mentioned in my monologue today because Donald Trump clearly meant it as a joke on the phone call.
Donald Trump is a jokester all the time.
And he's a provocateur and he's an ampresario and he, I mean, we saw his campaign rallies.
I noticed that CTV's Washington correspondent said that three different senior U.S. sources told him that that comment about that Trump made to Trudeau on the phone call about the War of 1812 was said as a joke and it was taken as a joke by Trudeau.
So Trudeau later trotting that out and saying, oh, what an idiot he thinks we're going to invade, is not only a breach of the confidentiality of the call, but it's a lie because both men knew it was a joke.
And I think it's sort of a funny joke.
And the fact that three senior officials reached out to the CTV Bureau Chief tells me that Donald Trump is not amused by this.
That's my take.
What do you think?
I think it was probably leaked by the Canadians because Trudeau is trying to show that he can stand up for Canada against Trump.
And the way he chose to do so was to embarrass the president.
And you know what?
Fair is fair.
I mean, I think good for him.
He's using the power of the bully pulpit in a slightly devious way.
But we're doing the same.
And I don't think that any Canadian leader has to apologize for anything they do to defend Canada's interest the same way that we wouldn't.
And I think it's healthy for both countries to be advocating for their citizens, even if sometimes it does test the bonds that have been cultivated over centuries, as you mentioned earlier.
But I don't think this is a serious dispute.
To answer your question from earlier about Trudeau setting himself up as the anti-American, I think he is and he isn't.
I think he is in a cultural sense.
You know, he came to the United States not too long ago and delivered a commencement address where he talked about the importance of tolerance and diversity, which normally would be fighting words on an American campus, right?
Because our campuses are so overrun by the left, which hates diversity of opinion and thought.
But I think it was also a dig at the Trump administration and he was trying to preen and grandstand for the left, which, of course, outside the university campus pretends that it is the font of all diversity and tolerance and that the retrograde conservatives who currently occupy the White House and Congress are the enemies of all that's good and wonderful and fair and bright in the world.
So I think he is posturing in a cultural sense as the opposite of Trump and America.
I think in a military and geopolitical sense, that's probably not true.
I think the past 20 years have taken the United States and Canada inexorably into the same corner, like it or not, I think on the Canadians' part, because I know there's a left-right divide in Canada over how and when and where to stand with the United States.
Certainly the policy on Israel has gone back and forth between administrations.
You know, the Trump administration is very pro-Israel.
The Trudeau administration, far less so, at least far less than its predecessor.
But I think this trade issue is interesting and obviously not the first trade issue that the U.S. has had with Canada, even when NAFTA was in full swing and people were very positive about it.
There were disputes over salmon fishing and disputes over all kinds of things.
This one just happens to have happened as Trump is trying to confront Mexico and trying to confront China.
And there's a sense among the China skeptics in the United States that China is using Canada to ship cheap goods to the United States.
Now, whether that's true or not, you'd have to ask an economist.
I don't actually know because the claims and counterclaims and all these trade arguments are very hard to figure out for a non-expert.
But I think what's interesting is that the one area where there really is a strong disagreement where Trudeau is playing the role you described is cultural.
And on the trade issues, maybe it was silly of him to leak that conversation, but at the same time, I think that Canada's got to do what's in Canada's interest.
And there may be a method to that particular kind of madness.
Trump plays dirty on social media and he knows how to leak to the New York Times just as much as anybody, even though he calls it the failing New York Times.
So we'll see how this plays out.
I'm not too perturbed by it.
What's amusing to me is how the media tried to take that joke, our media anyway, tried to take that joke and turn it into a major faux pas by President Trump when clearly everybody in the room or on the phone would have understood it was a joke.
And I've heard that joke before.
And I, you know, if you've been to enough hockey matches, you've heard worse.
So.
Well, I mean, my point is that's banter.
And listen, I take your point about Canada has to do what's in Canada's interest.
But I fear, and this is, I mean, listen, Joel, you cover the United States and you cover other countries too, but you're from an American perspective.
I have been following Trudeau very closely, obviously.
He's our own prime minister, and I had been following him for years, even before he became an MP.
And I want to give you an example that literally the day after Donald Trump announced his executive order, right when he became president, restricting migration to the United States from several Muslim-majority countries that had a terrorist problem.
It was a controversial executive order, and it was shocking proof, I think, to the liberals in the world that Trump actually meant what he said about immigration.
Joel, I don't know if you know this, but Justin Trudeau literally tweeted in reaction to that that Canada's borders were open to all.
So it was a hastily personally drafted tweet that was one of the most retweeted things Trudeau ever said.
It was basically, oh yeah, oh yeah, well, if Donald Trump is closing the borders, we're opening the borders.
Everyone who's thrown away from America is welcome here.
So I'm putting it to you, Joel, and this is my theory, and I think my viewers know this, and I'm bouncing it off you as an American.
You're a casual Trudeau watcher.
We're serious Trudeau watchers.
Sometimes Trudeau does things that are in Canada's interest.
And if he's taken on Donald Trump in Canada's interest, I'm a Canadian patriot.
I'm going to back that, even though I like Trump and I don't like Trudeau.
But so many of the things Trudeau does are not in Canada's interest.
It's if Trudeau says black, I say white.
If Trudeau says on, I say off.
Trudeau saying, if Trump says black, I say right.
Trudeau saying, if Trump says close borders, I say open borders.
It's almost as if Justin Trudeau has said, I'm going to do the opposite of Trump.
And that is not in Canada's interest.
That's a personal thing.
It's an ideological thing.
That's my thesis.
And I think he wants to suck up to the United Nations to get on the Security Council.
Justin Trudeau would rather be loved at the United Nations than loved in the White House.
That is probably true.
Also true of Barack Obama, who wanted to be loved by the United Nations more than he wanted to be loved by the American people.
I think the Iran deal is a classic example, right?
He took that to the UN before he took it to Congress, and he was required by the Constitution to take it to the Senate, which he never did.
So that they have in common.
And I think that is a posture that Trudeau shares with Obama.
And to the extent that Trump is the anti-Obama, I would put it this way.
Trump is a modern president.
We don't have many of those, but he's a throwback to a modern, almost Roosevelt-era president.
And Obama was a postmodern president.
Trudeau is also a postmodern president, where the posture you take, the attitude you have, is what you want people to judge you on rather than the results you achieve.
And so I take your point.
I mean, if Trudeau is posturing in this way, he may be overlooking the real damage that a deteriorating media relationship with President Trump could have on Canada.
I somehow think that Canada is going to be okay through all of this, and the real challenge is getting everybody on board in dealing with China.
And I'm not sure that Trudeau has thought that through, because obviously Canada is a country that's important for China as a destination for exports and also as a source of raw materials.
And the problem is that having Canada with such open trade with the United States gives China a back door, according to critics at least, gives China a back door through which it can dump cheap goods in our markets and hurt our workers.
So the only answer is to have a united front.
And there's a lot that Trudeau could do in Canada's interest if he found a way to work with Trump.
Maybe he's missing out on that opportunity because he sees that posturing, that almost cultural disdain for the Trump administration and for the people who elected him.
Maybe he sees that as more important.
And if that's what's happening, then I think you're right.
This is a case of Trudeau doing what's in his own ideological or cultural interest and hurting Canada.
Well, it's funny you say that.
A clip we play many times on this show is a clip when Trudeau was running for, he was just early in his political career.
And he was asked a question he wasn't really ready for.
He said, he was asked, what is your favorite country other than Canada?
And that's a great question, isn't it?
Like, I thought it was a great question.
And he answered very candidly.
And here, we'll just play the clip.
There's a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime.
So, Joel, there's Justin Trudeau saying he loves China.
And he didn't say the language, the food, the culture, the history, the people.
He said the basic dictatorship.
That was what he liked about it.
He's such a suck up to China.
He refuses to talk about human rights.
I think that, and Justin Trudeau has talked about changing the polarity of the world.
His people talk about replacing America with China.
Hopes, Thanks, Bye00:06:33
Let me give you an example.
And I know I feel like I'm trying to persuade you or educate you about Trudeau instead of ask you about the Trump-Trudeau relationship.
But let me throw this at you.
Trump withdrew America from the Paris global warming scheme.
Not that America was following it even under Barack Obama.
But Trudeau, instead of saying, oh, we must now realign our economy with America, especially our energy economy, they're damn the torpedoes go ahead.
And they're actually talking about, well, maybe we need to be closer with China as if China is environmentally superior.
I think Trudeau genuinely would rather have a China-centric world than a Trump-centric world.
I just don't think Americans know this yet, and maybe we shouldn't tell them because they'll punish us.
Well, it's very useful information.
And look, I think that I happen to be a free trader, so I actually think that the United States would do well to have a closer economic relationship with China.
The difficulty is that it's a one-sided relationship.
And China flouts the rules to which it subscribed at the WTO.
It's breaking a lot of those rules.
You almost don't need new tariffs to punish China.
All you need to do is enforce the rules they're already breaking in order to force them to play by the same rules that everyone else has to.
That would be almost more punishment.
It would impose economic costs on China, which they should have been paying already.
So I think we've got to take it very carefully.
I do think that the NAFTA negotiations, if Canada didn't understand it before, certainly understands now.
Trump doesn't really care about NAFTA and would be just as happy to see it disappear.
So the NAFTA negotiations have hit a snag, and I think that's partly because Mexico and Canada didn't take Trump seriously.
I think they ought to, and they ought to realize that Trump is very much about keeping his promises.
He hasn't done so in some areas, but those are the areas that Congress controls.
Where he's been able to control anything in particular under his presidential powers, he's followed through.
And one of those things is foreign relations.
And the president also has a certain amount of power to set trade policy.
So I think that Trudeau ought to be careful.
If he's taking that posture into this relationship, then it could really become volatile.
But I don't see that happening.
Somehow I think this is all going to pan out, but we'll have to see.
Joel, I'm going to get emails from our viewers who say I've been talking way too much in this interview, and I've been trying to get away from the pressure.
But I do have one last question I'd like your take on.
First of all, your last remark there is very, very telling.
I am absolutely sure that Canada has underestimated Trump's resolve on this.
Trump is extremely effective on Twitter because he says in 180 characters or whatever, 140 characters, what other presidents have said only through veiled statements or diplomatic speeches that don't get noticed.
I mean, Trump immediately changed the North Korean dialogue, immediately changed the dialogue with the Palestinians in a couple of tweets.
And I feel like things are degenerating a little bit between Trump and Trudeau on a personal level.
And I wonder if we're going to see the kind of nicknaming, name-calling, Twitter sparring between Trump and Trudeau that Trump's so natural at because he's a brawler from Manhattan.
So far, Trump has actually been quite praising of Trudeau personally.
I like Trudeau, my friend Justin.
I wonder if we're going to try his patience by leaking and being, like Trump is a real tit-for-tat guy, massive retaliation guy.
Do you think this meeting in Charlevoix, Quebec for the G7 is going to make things smoother or make Trump just say, tell you what, I'm going to tweet at you and knock the Canadian dollar down 10%?
Well, to be honest, I don't think Trump cares about the meeting in Canada.
And that has less to do with Canada and more to do with North Korea.
He's got a single-minded focus on the meeting in North Korea that follows.
He doesn't particularly care for the G7.
He doesn't want to be photographed alongside all the other leaders.
He wants to be leading.
And leading is what he hopes to do in Singapore.
So I think he's almost stopping over in Canada as a formality.
He'll do his best to get along with everyone and then move on.
I will say this.
If Trump does get into a kind of Twitter contest with Trudeau, Trudeau is toast.
Not only because Trump is by far the best insult president in history, but the other thing is Trudeau is almost self-mocking.
I mean, when Trudeau went to India, the photographs he took of himself and the videos of the Bollywood dancing and all that stuff, it went viral even in the United States.
People thought it just looked completely ridiculous.
And I think that it would not take much to push Trudeau's image into a place from which it could never recover.
And I'm not saying that just because Trump is so good at this.
I think it's just not a contest Trudeau wants to enter, to be honest.
He's got these boyish good looks and so on and so forth.
But that can also be a burden and not necessarily a good thing.
His youth is going to work against him.
I think that you don't want to get in that ring with Donald Trump, and you probably don't want to get into that ring with the rest of the United States because he's just sort of self-mocking.
You know, we've kind of been nice to him because it looks like members of the Trump administration like him, including the president, but also Ivanka Trump seems to be quite warm toward him.
There have been some jokes about that.
But, you know, I think that people like him.
And also, the Trump administration, in a more strategic sense, hopes to use some kind of a deal with Canada, I think, to pressure Mexico.
So I think there may be a reason for the warmth that Trump has shown Trudeau.
But if Trudeau keeps pushing this, I think that he's basically done.
You know, some of Trump's nicknames, you forget about them, but some of them stay forever.
And Trudeau does not want a forever nickname from Donald Trump.
Yeah, it's not the truth.
Well, Joel, you've been very generous with your time.
Thank you.
I agree with you.
I hope that Trudeau just bites his tongue as Stephen Harper did so many times with Barack Obama.
Bite your tongue.
Do things in the Canadian interest.
Stand up for Canada where you need to, but don't pick unnecessary fights.
I hope Trudeau will do that.
I'm just worried there's no grown-ups in the Trudeau administration.
Trudeau's Sleeping Bag Controversy00:08:01
We'll find out pretty soon, won't we?
Great to see you, Joel.
Thanks for your time.
All right.
All right, take care.
Thanks.
Bye-bye.
That's our friend Joel Pollock.
He's the senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com.
We were talking about the G7 meeting in Charlotte Voix, Quebec.
Stay with us.
Go ahead, I'm the rebel.
Because they're asking for more than we are able to give right now.
Wow, they're asking for more than we're able to give right now.
And he uses his sexy voice because if he can distract from how outrageous what he's saying is by going full drama teacher, maybe you'll forget that he just told a veteran who was wounded, by the way, that was a wounded vet.
Well, you're just asking for more than we can give.
So Omar Cotter, to whom Trudeau gave $10.5 million in an apology, that wasn't asking for more than Trudeau could give.
Now, the reason I play for you that old clip is because there is an outrageous story anew.
And I saw this on the online bulletin board called Reddit the other day, but I had not seen it confirmed until, to their credit, CTV News followed up the story.
And Daniel Otis of CTV inquired, and it is true, the Canadian Armed Forces are asking soldiers to return rucksacks and sleeping bag kits.
And they say there's a shortfall of equipment, but they claim it's, oh, we're just doing so well.
We have so many new recruits.
That's all it's for.
I am so skeptical of this story, the official explanation of it.
And joining us now to hopefully shed some light on it is our friend Lee Humphrey.
He's the founder of Veterans for the Conservative Party of Canada.
He's the president of James International Security Consultants, and he joins us now via Skype.
Lee, whenever the government says to soldiers, we're cutting your pay or give something back, it irritates me in general because it shows to me the liberals don't care about our armed forces.
That's my fear.
But this is so specific.
Give us back your rucksacks and your sleeping bags.
I just think that I smell a rat here.
What's going on?
Well, I guess first it's always easy to tell who the government of the day is.
They make it dead simple to understand it's the liberals when they do things like this, when they penny-pinch the armed forces, when they challenge veterans in court and they tell us that they just don't have enough money.
On this specific topic, we went through this in the 90s.
We had to redistribute and share equipment.
But you have to remember in the early 90s, we had three battle groups deployed, almost 3,000, 4,000 people deployed, and another three training to replace those troops that were deployed.
It was a huge lift for the Army of the day.
Today, we barely have 1,000 people deployed with an additional couple of hundred training to go.
And the missions that are deployed, only one of them is going to be replaced.
One is being carried out by special forces who aren't affected by this.
So whether there's an ulterior motive, as you suggest, or simply over the last two years, they haven't done what is normally done in a procurement system, which is purchasing additional pieces of equipment as equipment wears out, as it gets too old.
You know, one of those two things is happening.
But either way, the idea that the army does not have enough sleeping bags when we have the fewest number of deployed troops that we've had in almost a decade, if not two, and we have fewer recruits coming in today than we've had in the last 20 years.
So it's perplexing, at the very least, if not strange.
Yeah, I find this troubling.
And here's why my spider senses are tingling.
In December, we saw a military base, the official publication of the base, I think it was a CF Borden, CFB Borden, ask soldiers to chip into the base's food bank because there were some families having trouble making ends meet.
When we raised some dough, they turned it away in a political flourish.
So I'm thinking they're really cheaping out and making ordinary soldiers bear the brunt of it.
But here's what's on my mind.
And I'm not engaging in conspiracy theories.
I'm trying to find an explanation.
I accept that it's possible the explanation is just Justin Trudeau will not buy sleeping bags for our soldiers.
But you point out that we don't have a big influx of soldiers.
So let me put to you a thesis, a hypothesis, speculation.
We know that two years ago when Justin Trudeau brought in 40 or 50,000 Syrian migrants without planning what was going to happen, without social services planning, we know that the Canadian military was ordered to be ready to house thousands of these Syrian migrants at bases in Ontario and Quebec.
We did an access to information search and we found that there were detailed plans being developed by the military to house migrants on bases, including to build Muslim mosques with Canadian taxpayers' dollars on these Canadian military bases.
There was halal food operations that were being planned for.
Now, in the end, these Muslim migrants from Syria were not put on Canadian forces basis and they've sort of flooded and saturated the rest of the social services.
Here's my speculation.
We've had tens of thousands of migrants not come from Syria, but rather walk up from the United States.
Quebec says it has no more room for them, so they're being bussed to Ontario.
John Torrey, the mayor of Toronto, says there's no more room for them.
I have a theory that's based on nothing other than a hunch that these rucksacks and sleeping bags are being commandeered to house these migrants in our community centers.
Is that me just indulging in paranoia or is that something that might happen?
It entirely might happen in the sense that what the military does and does better than just about any identifiable group in Canada is prepare and plan.
So if they were given a warning order to prepare potentially to temporarily house an additional surge group of migrants that might show up at the border this summer in temporary accommodations,
then they might as part of that planning process identify the number of, say, sleeping bags and the number of rucksacks which are used to carry them about that might be needed to support such an operation should it occur.
Therefore, they would have to draw them in now, get them cleaned, dry cleaned and washed and serviceable, make sure they knew their numbers and that they were prepared.
So it's entirely possible this is a contingency operation that's being prepared in case there's a large surge, or possibly, and again, I'm only speculating, maybe, just maybe, they intend to keep these illegal immigrants that are crossing the border in a migrant camp closer to the border for longer periods of time.
And with the potential of spring and summer weather, they need sleeping bags, they need rucksacks, they need cots, that sort of thing.
Two Types of Visits00:04:10
And the only reason I'm bruting this is because they were put on notice before.
So I absolutely accept your explanation that the Liberal government is penny-pinching when it comes to our soldiers.
We know that.
We know that they've reduced danger pay for some soldiers.
We know they've reduced pension benefits.
We know they've reduced a number of payments.
So this could just be the Trudeau Liberals being cheap.
But because they were put on notice before, that's why I'm thinking maybe we're going through that again.
I think we're going to put in an access to information request to see what we can smoke out.
Now, I got to tell you, Lee, the government delays their access to information requests by up to a year these days.
So we probably won't learn the truth about this till 2019.
Let me just ask you from a morale point of view.
I got to think if someone's joining the Canadian forces, they might be doing it for the adventure and for the spirit.
They might be doing it because they need a job.
They might be doing it for reasons of family, tradition.
There's a lot of reasons.
But I don't think anyone's doing it for the money.
I mean, I just don't think they're doing it for the money.
So these intangible benefits, pride, patriotism, loyalty, family tradition, adventure, excitement, see the world.
I can imagine that's important.
I don't know.
I've never been in the military.
And so symbolic gestures, like a visit to Afghanistan by Stephen Harper, I know that was his first visit, his first foreign trip as prime minister in 2000 and I think it was six, was to Afghanistan, not to America.
He went to Afghanistan.
It was a symbol.
I can imagine if I was a soldier, I'd say, wow, you know what?
We're not making a lot of dough here, but it's sort of neat that this guy can.
Trump really tries to, like the other day Trump stood, I think it was the Naval Academy, in the heat, Trump stood for 90 minutes and shook every single hand of every single grad.
I think he shook a thousand hands.
I think that makes a difference for a military man.
I don't know.
I'm guessing.
I think these morale things really count.
And being asked to give up a sleeping bag is probably something that a soldier thinks about quite a bit.
You tell me, though, you've lived the life.
I'm just speculating.
It does count a great deal.
You know, there's two types of visits that occur when you're deployed.
There's the type of visit that you very much look forward to.
You want to talk to these people.
You want to engage with these people because you believe that they're there truly to support you.
Prime Minister Harper was beloved by most in the military.
There's the other type of visit when you have to deal with, in my case, visits by Prime Minister Kretchan, as an example, where you realize this was a superficial visit done for a photo op and you were a prop and you had to do extra work to make it happen and you didn't appreciate it at all.
But the troops, I'll tell you, Ezra, they may join for a variety of reasons and they do.
The reason they stay is a camaraderie, a loyalty, a tradition that builds amongst them.
And they see very clearly through these political choices that are made and they know well which party supports them generally, although every party makes mistakes, and they know which party rarely supports them and rarely does it because it's a mistake, but does it because it's purposeful.
And the liberals fall into the latter category.
And as long as I've served, which goes back to Trudeau Sr., it was very clear who was in government, depending on the amount of training you were doing, depending on the equipment you were getting, and the level of support you were getting from home.
Nation At Risk00:04:16
And young Mr. Trudeau is no different than his father.
He uses the military as a prop when absolutely necessary.
Other than that, they're to be ignored and not costed.
Yeah.
What a shame.
You know, there's so many thoughts going through my mind.
You mentioned Trudeau.
I know his father, Pierre Trudeau, did not serve in the Second World War, and that's fine.
Some Quebecers did not for various reasons.
But Pierre Trudeau tooled around Montreal on a motorcycle wearing a German-style helmet, you know, that very recognizable Wehrmacht helmet.
And I think that Trudeau has his father's disdain for the military.
I was thinking the $10.5 million he gave to Cotter.
I can't imagine that every single sleeping bag in the armed forces combined would, I mean, let's say you have a super fancy sleeping bag and rucksack and a whole thing.
Let's say it's 500 bucks all in.
I don't know, maybe it's 1,000.
I can't imagine it being that expensive.
Well, $10.5 million to Omar Cotter would buy $10,500 of them if it's as expensive as $1,000.
I can't imagine.
So just one payment to Omar Cotter would cover every sleeping bag here.
I don't know.
I'm frustrated.
And I'm angry hearing about this, and I want to learn more about it because I don't think it's as simple as penny pinching.
It could be.
I think there's something else going on here and I think they're being deceptive.
I'm sorry.
We need to get more facts.
My hypothesis is not enough as it is.
Let me leave the last word to you, Lee.
Give us your thoughts on this in the larger pattern of Trudeau's treatment of the military.
Well, I think in the larger pattern, there was also a story out today in the National Post that showed that the radars that are used to guide our planes, our F-18 hornets, are completely worn out and that the government was warned the day they arrived that the previous contract that had been let in 2011 had failed and a new contract had to go out to a new provider in the United States immediately, and that was not done.
So, you know, whether it's sleeping bags, whether it's F-18s, or whether it's ships, the Canadian military is being bled yet again.
We are moving quickly into another decade of darkness.
And unless there's a change of government in 2019, and unless somehow we get past this nonsense of conservatives buy this, so liberals buy that, or they cancel it and they start again, and we move into a bipartisan error when it comes to military procurement, we're going to see this cycle live itself out over and over and over again.
And the young men and women that sign up today are at risk.
Our nation is at risk when we don't have the appropriate equipment, training, resources.
And we're about to see that in Mali, where we're sending young men and women into a terrible country, as we've talked about before, without the proper equipment and without the proper force package put together.
Yeah.
Well, Lee, thank you so much for being such a strong voice and such an expert voice in these things.
Every Remembrance Day, I do the same thing.
I've been doing it since the Sun News Days.
I read the poem by Kipling called Tommy Atkins about how soldiers are only appreciated when we desperately need them and when we're in times of trouble and the rest of the time we treat them poorly, we disparage them.
And I can never quite make it through that poem without tearing up just a little bit.
And I always say that we have to care about not just veterans, but serving soldiers on the other 364 days a year.
And I think we try to do that in a tiny way here at the Rebel journalistically.
And we've tried crowdfunding.
And I think it's an important thing for our nation, but also just out of personal moral gratitude for people who risked themselves for us.
Surely, surely, surely we can owe it to them to buy them a bloody sleeping bag.
And I find this an upsetting subject, Lee, and I'm glad you're such a strong voice of reason.
And I look forward to keeping in touch with you in the months ahead.
Doug Ford's Flaws00:01:31
Look forward to it, Ezra.
All right.
Thank you very much.
That's Lee Humphrey, who's been our in-house expert on many issues, including our interesting conversation about the proposed Mali peacekeeping expedition.
I find this a troubling story, and I do not believe this sleeping bag story is what it seems.
And we will make more inquiries and hopefully find the truth beneath it.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Welcome back.
Well, tonight is the election in Ontario.
As I say this, polls are about to close.
I think the Conservatives are going to win.
I think that's good.
I think Ontario was on a downward path.
Reminiscent of Michigan, which was the industrial heartland of America.
I mean, Motor City was the highest industrial wage in all of America until the Democrats took it and turned it into a have-not state.
They don't use that phrase down there, but we use it up here.
Deindustrialized it, socialized it.
I really think that's the path Ontario has been on for a decade.
Record debt, record taxes, record spending, record regulation, and social justice warriors and scolding replacing entrepreneurialism and a hands-off government.