Ezra Levant critiques Justin Trudeau’s 2000 apology for groping a reporter at the Kokane Summit Festival, questioning his zero-tolerance stance on sexual misconduct while avoiding accountability. The episode highlights Trudeau’s environmental hypocrisy—exporting 11M metric tons of U.S. coal tax-free via West Shore Terminal while blocking Alberta oil pipelines—and ties it to broader political attacks on Alberta’s economy. His policies, like carbon taxes and open borders, are framed as "globalist" concessions, contrasting with Doug Ford’s pushback, while a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on union dues sparks hope for defunding climate activism in Canada. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, turns out male feminist Justin Trudeau is just as handsy as Bill Clinton was.
It's July 6th, 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.
In the year 2000, when Justin Trudeau was a grown man of 28 years, he groped a female reporter who was trying to interview him when he was in the town of Creston, British Columbia.
He groped her.
To use her words, he handled her.
And he apologized only when he realized that she wasn't just a small-town reporter.
She also worked for big newspapers like the National Post.
His excuse, his explanation was that, well, he didn't know that she was important.
Had he known that she was someone important, or more accurately, someone who could embarrass him by exposing him as a sexual predator, he wouldn't have groped her.
He'd have groped someone else, someone less powerful.
Now, we know about this because the Creston Advance newspaper wrote about it, likely written by the woman herself.
Here it is in the newspaper.
Editorial, open eyes.
I'm sorry if I had known you were reporting for a national paper, I never would have been so forward.
Those were the words that were spoken to an advance reporter by Justin Trudeau, son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, August 4th.
Trudeau, who was in Creston to celebrate the Kokane Summit Festival put on by the Columbia Brewery, apologized a day late for inappropriately handling the reporter while she was on assignment, not only for the Advance, but also for the National Post and Vancouver Sun.
If I had known you were reporting for a national paper.
It's not a rare incident to have a young reporter, especially a female who is working for a small community newspaper, be considered an underling to their more predominant associates and blatantly disrespected because of it.
But shouldn't the son of a former prime minister be aware of the rights and wrongs that go along with public socializing?
Didn't he learn through his vast experiences in public life that groping a strange young woman isn't in the handbook of proper etiquette, regardless of who she is, what her business is, or where they are?
And what makes the fact that she was working for the post of any relevance?
Big stories break first in community papers after all.
It may not have been an earth-shattering find, but one thing could have been learned from the experience, like father likes son.
So that was the editorial written 18 years ago.
Trudeau was 28 years old at the time, which for many people is when they're getting serious about life, starting a family, getting their career going, whatever.
But Trudeau was acting like a frat boy.
Frat boys are usually in college, so they're usually aged 18, 19, 20.
Trudeau was 10 years older than that.
There's a picture of him at that Kokeny Festival.
He was a frat boy well into his 30s, wouldn't you say?
That's a picture of him in Creston.
I think that's what kids these days call a douche.
Just a party bro, super gross, 10 years too old to be doing it.
I'm not sure if you can see it, but look at that shirt he's wearing.
It's like a dragon shirt, which sort of makes me laugh.
And hey, why not?
Why not be a party boy frat boy?
I mean, famous last name, multi-million dollar trust fund, pretty face.
Nothing earned, everything just came easy, even down to his million-dollar supercar inherited by his father.
And look at him just sitting on there like a douche.
He partied like that deep into his 30s, and even after he was elected as an MP, he continued to party.
He's notorious for skipping work.
He's missed 17 personal days so far in 2018.
Trudeau's Apology Dilemma00:15:33
He admits he continued to smoke marijuana even after being elected.
His flights, he's taken, what, 56 or 57 foreign trips.
He hates work, and when he travels, he's often drunk.
I'm sorry, that's not an insult.
That's an observation based on the thousands of dollars of liquor that are consumed on his private flights.
And sometimes he just doesn't stop drinking even into meetings.
Look at how wobbly he is here, meeting with David Axelrod in this Chicago meeting earlier this year.
Look at how many times he wobbles.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, but the media love him, so they ignore it.
They turned a blind eye.
Except this Creston groping incident is pretty specific.
He didn't just say suggestive words to the young reporter.
He handled her.
He groped her.
What did he do?
Where did he touch her?
What are the details?
And the fact that he felt compelled to apologize, that not only suggests the gravity of the situation, but importantly, it shows that he acknowledged that he did these things.
There's no he said, she said.
He agrees it happened.
And now he's just trying to cover it up with a, sorry, I didn't know who you were, non-apology.
Actually, that was his non-apology back then.
Now, while I'll get into what he's saying now, that's the kind of thing that would sink another politician, don't you think?
Even another liberal.
In fact, Trudeau himself has fired a number of liberal MPs from his caucus for much less, including MPs who had consensual affairs, MPs who never really got to learn the details of the accusations against them.
Trudeau was clear.
You just have to accept the word of the accused.
Obviously, as I've said many times throughout this week, it's really important to believe and support any woman who comes forward with allegations of sexual harassment or sexual assault.
And that's exactly what my government and myself, we do.
I don't need to remind anyone of the positions I've taken from the very beginning of my leadership on issues surrounding this.
I am unequivocal in my support for women who step forward with allegations of this nature.
And that continues.
Yeah, so what about Trudeau himself?
It's not even just an accusation.
It's an accusation that he accepted as valid, valid enough to acknowledge and semi-apologize.
Except not now, right?
I mean, at first, Trudeau thought he could just stuff this off, as usual.
His aide, Matt Pescuso, made this statement a month ago, and it was good enough for the CBC.
As the PM has said before, he has always been very careful to treat everyone with respect.
His first experiences with activism were on the issue of sexual assault at McGill, and he knows the importance of being thoughtful and respectful.
He remembers being in Creston for the Avalanche Foundation, but doesn't think he had any negative interactions there.
⁇ That last part really sounds like Bill Clinton wrote it, doesn't it?
The legalistic use of words.
I want you to listen to me.
I'm going to say this again.
I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.
Yeah, that and negative interactions.
Now, that worked for the Canadian Media Party.
They're largely owned by Trudeau as it is.
The CBC didn't touch the allegations.
All the corporate media looking for handouts didn't touch it.
And as if to make a point, Gerald Butts, Trudeau's principal secretary, and Trudeau cabinet ministers began demanding that Twitter literally delete accounts from vocal critics of the Liberal Party.
And Twitter complied.
That was enough to shut up most Canadian reporters, but not the foreign press.
They don't answer to Gerald Butts and Justin Trudeau.
Not just conservative media like Fox News or the UK's Daily Mail, but left-wing media abroad like the CNN, the UK State Broadcaster, the BBC, the Washington Post, Time Magazine.
I mean, it's not just that Trudeau is a groper in the age of me too.
It's that Trudeau is such a self-righteous, pompous prat about being a male feminist.
It's what he talks about incessantly, especially on the Foreign Circuit.
I mean, he went to the World Economic Forum in Davos, and instead of talking about how he was going to deal with NAFTA or counter America's tax cuts, he gave a speech about feminism, just like he always does.
But you need to take as much effort to talk to your sons, my eight-year-old boy and my two-year-old, still a little young still, about how he treats women and how he is going to be growing up to be a feminist just like dad.
How could you, as a reporter, not find this to be a delicious story, the male feminist caught in a grope?
So slowly, as the foreign press ate the Canadian Media Party's lunch on this, as they have so many times with Trudeau, a few Canadian reporters summoned the courage to put a question to their precious leader.
But it was just stranger and stranger.
Here's someone putting a question to Trudeau while Ralph Goodale, the only grown-up in the party, strains to listen.
I remember that day in Creston well.
It was an Avalanche Foundation event to support Avalanche safety.
I had a good day that day.
I don't remember any negative interactions that day at all.
No negative interactions.
He's using that computer line again, eh?
At least none that he can remember.
Well, then why did he apologize at the time if there was no negative interactions?
But the story kept going.
And yesterday, Trudeau was asked about it again, and he changed his story again.
Not good.
Here, take a look.
You have had a zero tolerance policy when it comes to allegations of sexual misconduct within your party.
There are serious allegations against you right now.
Why not call an independent investigation and put the story to rest?
All right, good question.
Fair question.
Trudeau has had investigations of his other staff and MPs, so why not for himself?
Here's the answer, but it's a non-answer.
Obviously, this is a situation that has been very much on my mind over the past few weeks.
It's an issue that I have been deeply engaged with, not just as a leader, but all my life since my early 20s in university, active on issues around sexual assault and behaviors.
Hang on, is that true?
Has Justin Trudeau actually done anything about sexual assault in his whole life?
I mean, I'm sure he gives little video clips about it, but do you really believe that Justin Trudeau has actually done anything on the file in his life?
I'm not talking about foolish little things like this.
There's lots of things you can do to be a better feminist as a man, but here's a simple one.
Don't interrupt women.
I really think that's what Trudeau is thinking about when he says he's been an activist against sexual violence, truly.
Of course, he doesn't mean it.
Maternal love is the love that's going to change the future of mankind.
So we'd like you to look.
We like to say people-kind, not necessarily man-kind.
Anyway, back to his ramble yesterday.
I've been reflecting very carefully on what I remember from that incident almost 20 years ago.
And again, I feel I am confident that I did not act inappropriately.
Well, if you didn't act inappropriately, why did you apologize?
The woman in question said she was handled by Trudeau as in touched, groped, man-handled, people-handled, as Trudeau might say.
It wasn't just words like, hey, baby, did I mention Pierre Trudeau is my father and I'm rich?
It was handsy, groping, molesting, and he conceded that point in an apology.
But look at this classic Trudeau move, to blame the rest of us, to scold the rest of us, because he's never wrong, personally.
But part of this awakening that we're having as a society, a long-awaited realization, is that it's not just one side of the story that matters.
that the same interactions could be experienced very differently from one person to the next.
And I am not going to speak for the woman in question.
I would never presume to speak for her.
But I know that there is an awful lot of reflection to be had as we move forward as a society on how people perceive different interactions.
Hang on, we, the rest of us, as a society, have to come to terms with things.
He said he never presumed to speak for his victim, but then he did.
He said she's wrong.
It didn't happen that way.
Crazy woman's wrong.
It never happens.
She needs to reflect more.
She needs to.
Listen.
Like I said, I do not feel that I acted inappropriately in any way, but I respect the fact that someone else might have experienced that differently.
And this is part of the reflections that we have to go through.
That's exactly what most of the other men have said who have been accused of being gropers, from Harvey Weinstein to Charlie Rose to Matt Lauer, all of them impeccable liberals too, all very sensitive men, proud male feminists.
But the thing about all of them was they could be fired.
All of them, even Harvey Weinstein, as the boss of the Weinstein Company, he could be fired by his board of directors, by his investors.
The rest of all the Me Too names worked for massive companies that could be fired because the public saw enough they were predators.
But who can fire a prime minister?
His MPs could, theoretically, in our Canadian system, MPs can fire a prime minister, but they're not going to.
They don't want to go into an election wounded by this admission with an unknown, unpopular leader.
They're not going to do it.
The CBC, the state broadcaster, they're not going to lead the charge.
They're owned by Trudeau.
Here's the CBC's lead political correspondent taking a lovey-dovey selfie with Justin Trudeau.
Yeah, she's not going to lead the charge.
She won't get any more selfies like that.
Who knows?
Maybe he groped her.
I wonder where his right hand is there.
I don't know.
I doubt it.
She's not his type.
I don't know.
Maybe Althea Raj or Paul Wells will lead the charge here.
I'm kidding.
I'm kidding.
Of course they won't.
They won't get any more selfies with Trudeau.
So who's going to lead the charge?
Maybe an independent inquiry.
That was the first question asked yesterday, wasn't it?
And Trudeau managed to ignore it so far, hasn't he?
Mrs. Prime Minister, the question was, why not call an independent investigation if there are questions?
And she says that you apologized to her.
Again, I've been reflecting on the actual interaction.
And if I apologized later, then it would be because I sensed that she was not entirely comfortable with the interaction we had.
Oh, hang on.
He sensed something was wrong, so he apologized.
But remember, he apologized a day later.
Remember, that's what the editorial said.
So how did he sense it?
How did he find her again?
What really happened there?
What made him sense things?
I think he's lying or hiding things, don't you?
But also, didn't he tell us there were no negative interactions?
So which is it?
He sensed things were wrong, a negative interaction, or there were no negative interactions, which one of those two alibis is it?
But you see what he's doing too.
He's switching this from about him to about all of us as society.
We are wrong.
We need to reflect.
And that's all you need to do.
Just reflect, guys.
And oh, society does.
He's scolding us again.
He always does.
He never makes an apology on his own behalf.
Whatever he makes in the public apology, whether it's Omar Cotter or whatever, it's always someone else who has to reflect on things, someone else who's done something wrong.
Trudeau is the saint who is enlightening us.
Not sure that's working here from Hansie McGroper.
So let's keep watching his video from yesterday.
Like I said, I've been working very hard to try and piece it together.
And even when the original editorial came out at the time, I was fairly confident.
I was very confident that I hadn't acted in a way that I felt was in any way inappropriate.
So he hadn't acted in a way that he thought was inappropriate.
Well, then why did he apologize?
But to the point, is the woman lying here?
She said he put his hands on her.
Did he?
When he says he's judging himself and he judges that he didn't think he did anything wrong, well, I'm sure Harvey Weinstein could say the same thing, but what did he actually do, objectively speaking?
And if it was nothing, then why did he apologize?
And did he really tell the young woman that he apologized because he didn't realize she was someone who had a bit of power or the power of the press?
But like I said, part of the lesson that we all have to learn through this is respecting that the same interactions can be felt very differently by different people going through them.
And we have to respect that.
And that's exactly what we're having to come to grips with as a society.
And it's certainly something I'm continuing to reflect on.
So he's really playing up the he said, she said.
He's saying, he said it.
We have to respect that different people have different views on what happened.
So guys, come on.
I mean, you've got to respect Trudeau saying he doesn't remember doing anything wrong.
You have to respect him saying that, guys.
You have to.
He says so.
Trudeau says, you have to respect his point of view.
He fired liberal MPs for much less, for no proof, for no confessions.
He said you have to believe the accuser then.
But people, that was when he, it wasn't when he was the groper.
Now, you have to respect him.
No, buddy, I don't.
A reporter asks if he would apologize now.
Do you apologize now?
I apologize in the moment.
I certainly feel that if… again, I don't want to speak for her.
I don't want to presume how she feels now.
I haven't reached out to her.
No one on my team has reached out to her.
We don't think that would be appropriate at all.
So I'm responsible for my side of the interaction, which certainly, as I said, I don't feel was in any way untoward.
But at the same time, this lesson that we are learning in, and I'll be blunt about it, often a man experiences an interaction as being benign or not inappropriate, and a woman, particularly in a professional context, can experience it differently.
And we have to respect that and reflect on that.
So he says he doesn't feel it was in any way untoward, and he's reflected on it, people.
So that's enough, isn't it?
He's thought about it.
Say, did this whole speech he gave make it clearer or less clear?
Is he sorry for what he did or not?
Is he calling her a liar or not?
Is he saying there were no negative interactions or just not from his point of view?
We still don't know what he actually did to her, do we?
He won't say.
He never did answer the question about an independent inquiry, did he?
He said he never contacted the woman.
I wonder if that's true.
I wonder if she was contacted maybe by his campaign chair or something back when Trudeau was first running for office.
I wonder if his team, I don't know, offered a sum of money in a non-disclosure agreement.
I wonder, our media had a field day when Donald Trump paid a porn star for a non-disclosure agreement over an alleged consensual affair more than a decade ago.
Trudeau's Me Too Moment00:12:51
I bet the name Stormy Daniels has been on the CBC a thousand times.
Trump denies the affair.
The porn star says it happened, but either version, it was consensual.
But Trudeau and this reporter was not consensual.
This was an assault, says the woman, but the CBC isn't really that interested, is it?
Justin Trudeau is a groper.
He admitted it 18 years ago.
He apologized if saying, sorry, I didn't know you were important can be taken as an apology.
Trudeau is gross, like most male feminists are gross, but even grosser is the media party that has enabled this and still is doing everything they can to keep their handsy groper in power because, like Bill Clinton, what's a few sexual assaults if it's our guy in power, right?
Stay with us for more on this subject with Prem Singh.
It was a foundation, Avalanche Foundation event to support Avalanche safety.
I had a good day that day.
I don't remember any negative interactions that day at all.
No negative interactions.
That sounds so weird and lawyerly.
No human talks that way.
It really reminds me of the legal petty foggery of Bill Clinton when he said, I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.
There were no negative interactions.
I mean, did anyone outside of his own inner circle buy that?
Of course there was a negative interaction.
Why else would he have apologized and explained, oh, I thought you were someone, I didn't know you were someone important.
So weird.
Well, will he get away with it?
Joining us now via Skype is our friend Prem Singh, a conservative and a political pundit from Calgary, Alberta.
Prem, great to see you again.
Thanks, Ezra.
You're being a bit flattering by calling me a pundit from any means.
But as far as the negative interactions go, it seems to be the motto of this liberal government.
Anytime they don't know how to deal with something, they create a new term.
Just like we have irregular migrants instead of illegal immigrants.
Negative interactions.
There obviously was a negative interaction that this woman chose to write a piece in the paper that was never refuted at that time.
And now he's chosen to use this new terminology that's, you know, trendy or it's his new buzzword about negative interactions and how men and women might interpret them differently.
And then he chooses to again further say that I think it was yesterday where he said professional women might interpret things different than I guess any other woman would.
Like a lot of this doesn't make any sense and he is digging himself so far deep and he's already set precedents with other people in his party, with Darshan Kang, with Kent Hare, and with others.
So, you know, is he going to get away with it?
Well, in Trudeau's speak, yes.
But should he?
No.
I mean, the rest of the world has picked up on this story and it keeps tumbleweeding the way Trudeau in India did.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a very good point that the foreign media was much more effective than the well-trained Canadian housepet media.
Now, you mentioned Trudeau saying men and women can see things differently.
By the way, I think there's some truth to that.
I mean, any two people in a personal, emotional, sexual setting can have a different understanding of what's going on.
But I would point out two things.
First of all, every single male who has been accused of a Me Too moment uses that same excuse.
And including the horrific cases, the cases where it happens again and again and again.
So first of all, I don't think that we should buy that excuse because Harvey Weinstein, who's guilty of so many of those, who's being accused of so many of those, it's just a pat excuse that no one buys.
But more importantly, Prem, Trudeau himself did not buy that excuse when he sacked a whole raft of his own MPs and staff for much less, much lower standards of evidence.
And so while it may be the case that in his mind he didn't do anything wrong, he already admitted that he went too far.
He already apologized 18 years ago.
And even if that wasn't the case, hasn't he set the standard for himself?
Well, he has, and that's where he's now in a pickle.
And he's using all this lawyer's legalese language now to talk himself out of it, which he can't.
The onus is on him.
He's already apologized.
So we know something did happen.
And now he has selective memory saying, well, he doesn't recall anything untoward.
And then he also further exclaims that, you know, men and women look at these things differently and we need to be aware of them.
And that's it.
End of story.
Well, no, it's not the end of story.
And, you know, like you said, it's Bill Clinton all over again.
And it'll be interesting to see what Gerald Butts and Katie Telford, how they choose to spin this because it's not going away.
And as Canadians, I mean, we've demanded a lot of answers from our prime minister and get none.
But this is an issue that he's made in the forefront with his gender equality cabinet and all of it, bringing gender equality into NAFTA and everywhere around the world.
So he has to talk the talk, walk the walk.
Sorry.
And so he's going to have to deal with himself.
And I also find it very interesting who originally brought this story up recently.
And I know he did say on the radio yesterday, Mr. Kinsella said that he wants to be a better man.
And so, you know, he was bringing light to this story because he thinks men need to be better men.
Well, one has to also wonder if there is a very strong threat that the Liberal Party is facing in the upcoming election where they feel, you know, let's look at this from a long game perspective.
Are they feeling that they might lose the election because of Justin Trudeau himself?
So if so, does it make more sense to bring him down now so they can have a leadership review and have a new leader and try to maintain government?
I mean, you have to look at why these things are happening.
That's a very interesting point.
Why didn't it come out before?
You remind me of, sorry, go ahead, Pam.
Sorry, all those women in his cabinet, they're all hypocrites.
I mean, why are they not speaking out?
I mean, it's as a woman, if I was one of them, well, it would be hard to stomach being part of that government, but they, you know, they're all hypocrites and they're, you know, talking about being feminists.
And, you know, it's ridiculous.
And it's offensive as a woman to watch them stand there and say nothing.
You know, between gender equity and global warming, I think that's about two-thirds of what Justin Trudeau and his cabinet even talk about.
So all his foreign speeches are about feminism, his NAFTA negotiations about feminism.
His whole repertoire has just been cut almost in half.
I mean, I can't imagine him speaking on feminism at the World Trade Organization or, sorry, the World Economic Forum like he did this year.
He would just be laughed at.
But here's the thing, Prem, you remind me of Patrick Brown, the former Ontario PC leader, who was taken out by a bit of a mutiny.
I mean, the media was part of it, but 48 hours, right?
But the thing is, his own senior staff and MPPs threw him out the window within hours.
What we haven't seen here, Prem, and you refer to it, is the women in his cabinet.
There's no staff, no MPs I can see of any, even backpenchers or cabinet ministers.
Not one of them is willing to stand on principle or even as a rival.
Patrick Brown, the knives were out either for personal reasons or they thought this guy's dead man walking.
Why hasn't a single Liberal, the party of male feminists, why hasn't any of them spoken out against the boss?
That's a good question.
And one would think that they should be concerned about being re-elected in their own writings, having said nothing.
You know, this government has gone around the world and across our country talking nothing but, you know, racism or gender and diversity and equality, but they're hypocritical on all of it.
I mean, I've never seen, I think I tweeted this the other day, but I've never seen in my 40 plus years governments, both provincially and federally, that have been so divisive and have promoted racism and hatred and discord amongst Canadians.
It's crazy.
And our politicians, I feel they are lacking the principles.
You know, we're concerned more about what's in between people's legs than what's in their brains or what the color of their skin is as opposed to what's inside of it.
It's like enough.
Why can't we just talk, like, see the truth?
Enough of this political speak and rhetoric and trying to appease the media, appease this group, appease that group.
How about just being real people for once?
Because that's what we have to do on an everyday basis.
Yeah.
Well said.
I mean, it's amazing.
The king of the selfies was done in by his selfies in India.
Now the king of male feminism is being undone by his own Me Too moment.
It's a little bit of karma and it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
I got to tell you, Prem, I'm not optimistic that anyone in the Liberal Party will do the right thing.
I think they're so beholden to Trudeau.
They're so afraid of going into an election without his brand name.
And I don't think they ever really meant the male feminism.
I think it was just a way to put the opposition on the back foot.
I think that between our media party going soft on him and the Liberal Party closing ranks with him, I think Trudeau will survive this because the Liberals feel terrified without him.
Last word to you, Prem.
Well, I agree with you in that I think he will survive this, but it's up to us to keep bringing it to the table because look how long it took for the Canadian media to actually write about it.
So it's up to us as the grassroots everyday people to demand answers and to demand that he hold himself to the same precedent that he's created for everybody else.
You're right.
And I hope that my prediction is wrong.
I hope that he is given the bums rush and a deserved early retirement.
just am not confident enough of the health of the Liberal Party or our Canadian media.
Exactly, and especially sorry to interrupt you, but look what they've done with all the parody accounts and they're upset that, you know, everyday Canadians can make fun of them or mock them in a humorous manner.
Well, when things are so bad, all we can do is laugh at ourselves.
And they're trying to even shut that down.
You're so right.
I wonder what the censoring they're doing of this behind the scenes that we don't see in public.
Prem saying, it's great to see you again.
Keep fighting for freedom as you always do.
All right.
Thank you.
Bye.
We'll stay in touch on this one.
I'm sure the story is not going away.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Export Debates Heating Up00:11:51
Welcome back.
Well, maybe it's because I spent a little bit of time visiting family in Vancouver and on Vancouver Island that I see with my own eyes a mighty industrial site right off of Vancouver.
It is a coal export terminal that is so huge.
It's just, it's as big as like a major dam or something.
It's a special marine terminal just for coal, not with the other marine terminals for every other species of import and export.
And I also hang out a little bit in Whistler, B.C., and every half hour, every hour, a mighty train rolls through this beautiful little tourist town of White Rock, and it has only one thing on it, coal.
And it's Warren Buffett's trains.
I always note them.
I say, oh, there's Warren Buffett.
And it's bringing coal from America to export through Canada.
But there was something I did not know about that mighty marine terminal and these mighty trains and the coal they're in until I read Lauren Gunter's column in the Edmonton Sun.
And he joins us now to talk about it.
Lauren, thanks for being here.
Can I read your headline?
I want you to dig into it.
Trade war reveals environmental hypocrisy.
I know those trains well, and it's fun to show kids trains, and I always fly around.
And I know about the coal, but I didn't know the fact you divined about them.
Tell us about it.
Well, and anybody who's ridden the ferry that goes out of Sawasan to Vancouver Island knows that terminal because it's just north of where you board the, you drive your car on the ferry.
The next place north is this enormous coal harbor, a coal port that used to be called Roberts Bank.
They now call it West Shore Terminal.
And what happens there is it's the largest coal terminal on the West Coast, Canada or the United States.
It's enormous.
It ships more than 30 metric tons, 30 million metric tons a year of coal, mostly destined for China.
And what I didn't realize until I started digging around is that almost a third of that coal, so about 11 million metric tons a year, comes from mostly Wyoming and Montana.
It's American coal.
A third of the coal that goes out of West Shore is American coal.
It comes from Wyoming and Montana for the most part.
And it ships through the Port of Vancouver, making Vancouver the largest export terminal for American coal on the West Coast.
It beats out any American terminal there is.
More American coal, one-third, the entire American export of coal goes out of Vancouver, and not a single lump of it is subject to the carbon tax.
Well, that is the amazing part.
I mean, I'm against carbon tax.
I know you're against the carbon tax too, but I think the point here, the incredible point here is Alberta is not allowed to export its oil.
But America is allowed to export its coal, which is even more carbon intensive.
And God bless it.
I'm a pro-coal guy.
But you don't hear a peep from Catherine McKenna or John Horgan or Justin Trudeau about carbon taxing that coal import and export.
Not a peep.
How come?
I am delighted that Vancouver is the biggest export terminal for American coal on the West Coast.
I think that's great.
It's good business.
Think of the number of jobs in the lower mainland that are dependent on the fact that we have this 11 million metric tons of U.S. coal going through one of our ports.
And think about the leverage that gives us when we have a trade war.
I'm not big on the trade war.
I don't want to have a trade war with the United States.
I understand some of their concerns about supply-managed agriculture and why they would like us to change that.
I got a whole bunch of different views on the trade war.
But I do like the fact that when things are going well, we are a big exporter of American coal.
But why is it that Alberta oil, every ounce of it, has to be subject to this carbon tax?
Every ounce of it has to be delayed because of the BC government's green agenda.
And yet the BC government allows 11 million metric tons of U.S. coal to be shipped out of Vancouver.
It takes its taxes off the terminal and earns a fair amount of money off of it, but doesn't subject it to BC's carbon tax and doesn't have any protest, any qualms or reservations.
They're not going to court to stop the American coal from coming through the way they're going to court to stop Alberta bitumen and oil from coming through.
The hypocrisy of it just staggered me.
Yeah.
You know, when you have little kids, trains are fun.
You can show the trains.
But I don't know if you know White Rock, and we'll show an image of the main street here.
White Rock is such a pretty little town, and you have all these little fish and chip shops and ice cream parlors, and it's right on this gorgeous.
And then every half hour hour, this thundering train comes through, and everything sort of stops and the trains come through.
And again, I'm not against that, and I'm pro-coal, I'm pro-rail, but I know for a fact that pipelines are underground.
They're completely silent.
They never derail.
No one, God forbid, has ever been run over by a train, sorry, by a pipeline on a pipeline.
And again, I'm not against this coal, but for British Columbians who worry about noise pollution, the pollution from the emissions of the train, derailments, carbon, and I'm pro-training, pro-coal, all that.
But it takes an enormous effort to pretend a silent underground safe pipeline is more offensive in any way to an American coal train owned by Warren Buffett blazing through it 10 times a day.
This is PAC mentality, though, right?
You get all these people together on Twitter and other social media platforms, and they get all twisted out of shape about oil and how bad it is and how awful for the environment.
None of the stuff that they're achieving.
Let's say they stop every pipe, every new pipeline from being built out of Canada to anywhere on the coast, from Alberta to anywhere, New Brunswick, Vancouver, the Yukon.
Who cares?
I mean, they stop all of them.
Somebody else will get that oil or replace it with oil from somewhere else.
And the same amount of oil, perhaps with more emissions, certainly with no fewer emissions, will get used anyway.
They are not.
That's the other thing about this coal tidbit that I found that strikes me.
So, you know, we could stop all of our oil shipments.
We're still shipping coal.
Coal is still going to be used.
We can stop all our coal shipments.
We're still going to let somebody else mine the coal.
The market will be satisfied whether we're satisfying it or not.
And the emissions will be produced, whether we're producing them or contributing to the production or not.
And so, what we're doing is beggaring ourselves just for the moral superiority it gives us, not for any environmental benefit whatsoever, but simply so we can smugly say, look how good we are.
Yeah, Lauren, you've been generous with your time, but I want to throw one more thing at you because you remind me of what finally killed the Energy East pipeline.
Energy East was proposed by TransCanada.
It was my favorite pipeline of them all.
I'll be honest.
I mean, I like all pipelines, but I liked it because it had a national unity feeling.
You know, Alberta will supply New Brunswick and Quebec and lots of jobs and $15.7 billion in construction.
I just felt great about it.
And Trudeau killed it by adding a new condition halfway through the application, which was that TransCanada now had to be responsible for the carbon emissions of the oil that would be carried within the pipeline.
Just a bizarre thing.
And I remember talking to someone from TransCanada who pointed out oil that's coming to that same New Brunswick refinery now, St. John, New Brunswick, the largest refinery in all of Canada.
It's not Alberta, folks.
It's in New Brunswick.
Coming from Saudi and other places, it would not be subject to emissions reviews by Trudeau.
So this is a true apples-to-apples comparison because coal and oil, they're different.
But this was an exact comparison, Lauren.
You had proposed oil from Alberta through an Canadian pipeline versus oil from Saudi Arabia through a tanker, both going to the same customer, the St. John, New Brunswick refinery.
Only the Energy East pipeline would be subject to that stringent criticism and inspection.
No OPEC oil.
To me, that was the utter proof of the moral bankruptcy of Trudeau's views on energy.
What do you think?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
You know, the other thing that bothered me about the Energy East cancellation was Quebec said, well, we're not going to stand for this because there will be no, there'll be too few Quebec jobs produced.
Well, they could have had much of the oil in that pipeline in Quebec to refine or deal with however they wanted to.
But they said, no, no, no, we're not going to do that.
And then they said, well, it's not going to produce any jobs here.
Well, you guys had just canceled the chance you had to produce jobs.
It was their own decision not to have jobs from the oil in that pipeline.
And then they used that as the excuse to cancel the pipeline.
That's a great point.
There was going to be a facility at Kakauna, if I'm pronouncing it right.
And they said, oh, but the belugas, the beluga whales, of course, they dumped billions of liters of untreated oil.
Well, it's killing all those right whales out there with something.
I don't know what it is that they're doing, but they're certainly not environmentally conscious.
Yeah, this is so frustrating.
Well, Lauren, I'm really glad you wrote that article because sometimes I feel like I know the facts in this file, but there's always something extra to learn.
Yeah, there are always something different.
And I'm really glad to know that that's just another proof point that this is not actually about saving the earth or anything.
This is political bigotry against Alberta and against Alberta oil.
And I appreciate you shining a light on it.
Yeah, you bet.
All right, there's our friend Lauren Contra.
Great to see you again, my friend.
The article, for those who haven't read it, it's in the Edmonton Sun.
It's called Trade War Reveals Environmental Hypocrisy.
Give it a read.
Very interesting.
All right, stay with us.
more ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back on my interview yesterday with Mark Morano from Climate Depot.
Paul writes, they've been spinning the same man-made global warming, cooling, climate change doomsday scenarios since at least the 1970s.
They just keep redating them and recycling them over and over again.
Their solutions never line up with the problems they're supposed to be dealing with, but always cost a fortune.
Yeah, and it's so funny how the people involved with these regulations and policies always seem to be connected pretty closely to the folks getting the massive subsidies.
I'll never forget the fact that the president of the Federal and Ontario Liberal Parties just happened to be the president of a major wind turbine company.
It's a coincidence, I'm sure.
Billy writes, I just hope Ford has the stones to stand up for the MSM and the globalist cabal behind them when they start attacking him and his family.
Oh, you're exactly right.
There's so many things that Doug Ford is challenging.
He's challenging the open borders policy of Justin Trudeau.
He's challenging cap and trade and global warming and carbon taxes.
Doug Ford's Challenges00:01:28
Those are the two favorite things for the globalists.
I mean, that's, I don't think Doug Ford uses the language globalist or United Nations, but he's taking them on, isn't he?
Bruce writes, we conservatives give up too quickly.
How did the climate pushers get so much power?
They just kept on pushing.
Well, that's the thing.
I mean, the left is absolutely relentless.
They call it the long march through the institutions.
Conservatives are too busy living normal lives, doing unpolitical things, working.
Whereas the left has this perpetual activist class, much of its subsidizers.
Now, the news out of the United States last week was very interesting.
There was a Supreme Court case that said workers can no longer be compelled to make contributions to a union that uses their money politically.
I think that's going to massively defund the left, because whether it was the subsidy of taxpayers subsidizing the professor class, or the subsidies of private sector workers or government sector workers forced to subsidize union bosses, a lot of the leftist support is artificially sponsored by severely normal taxpayers.
In the States, that just took a hit.
Wouldn't it be nice if Canadians had that same freedom of choice?
Well, that's our show for today.
It's great to be back in Canada.
We were away for 10 days with the Rebel Israel.
A great trip.
I'm sure that you've had a chance to see some of the clips that we played over the last week.
I look forward to being here for a little while.
That's enough travel for me.
Until we return on Monday, please enjoy our YouTube videos.