David Menzies on The Ezra Levant Show dismisses left-wing claims that Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s plan to cut Toronto City Council seats by half is "racist," citing cost-saving logic and suburban focus, while critics like Andrea Horwath and Mariana Valverde—who ignored Osma Malik’s past controversies—frame it as an attack on urban diversity. Councillor Giorgio Memoliti defends the move, arguing it reduces influence of criminals in public housing (like TCHC’s Jane Finch) and strengthens Mayor John Torrey’s agenda. Meanwhile, Ford’s push to scrap the carbon tax aligns with Ian Lee’s argument that Canada’s 2% global emissions make its policies irrelevant, especially when China’s consumption outpaces efforts. Ford’s free-market marijuana plan further sparks union backlash, but public support for privatization grows. The episode reveals how policy debates often mask deeper ideological divides. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, Doug Ford's plan to streamline Toronto City Council is finally being called racist.
Gee, what took them so long?
It's August 2nd.
I'm David Menzies, and this is the Ezra Levent 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 light of the Doug Ford PCs cutting the size of Toronto City Council by almost half, the outcry from soon-to-be unemployed career politicians and their useful idiots in the media came fast and curious.
The over-the-top pronouncements included accusations that Ford's move was undemocratic, that it was a thinly veiled personal vendetta against Mayor John Torrey, that there was no consultation, that the changes were being done way, way too fast.
Meanwhile, NDP leader Andrea Horath played the backroom deals and hidden agenda cards, which she almost always does these days.
And hey, it's getting really, really old, Andrea.
But when I initially addressed the council cutting issue in this space a few days ago, I joked that at least Ford wasn't being labeled a racist by this move.
Because when it comes to things the loony left doesn't like, well, the race card is their Trump card, and they usually play that card from the get-go.
But folks, methinks I joked too soon because yesterday in that periodical Paragon of Progressiveness, the Toronto Star ran a column entitled, Ford's Attack on Toronto is an Attack on Urban Diversity.
This wondrous piece of fish rap is penned by Mariana Valverde, who is of course a professor at the University of Toronto specializing in urban governance and law.
And as the saying goes, that column would have been twice as good if only it had been half as long.
But I'll cut to the chase.
Valverde suggests that because there's fewer council seats up for grabs, that means there are, of course, fewer opportunities for persons of color to get elected.
Therefore, I guess smaller government is racist government.
One particular excerpt stands out regarding the protests that took place at City Hall last Friday by the usual suspects.
Valverde states, one impressive speaker was Osma Malik, who in a streetcar would be just another Torontonian, but who would stand out on council because she wears a hijab.
Several black Torontonians with experience addressing violence and poverty are also running for council, such as Walid Kogali.
He also spoke, end quote.
Well, good golly, where does one even start?
Valverde seems to be suggesting that in the case of Osma Malik, she should be embraced by diversity-loving Torontonians, not necessarily for her policies, but because she proudly wears the hijab.
Wow, I can just imagine what an election sign for this candidate might state.
Vote for Malik or at least vote for her diverse Islamic headgear.
And hey, surely this is not the same Osma Malik who has a very checkered past, is it?
Such as her being involved in the rigging of a student council election when she attended the University of Toronto.
And how she spearheaded a fundraising drive for the families of the Toronto 18 terrorists.
And how in 2006 she labeled Israel's actions against the terrorist group Hezbollah as quote, state-sanctioned murder, end quote.
Oh, but come on folks, pay no attention to that Sharia suffragette behind the curtain because, well, because Malik wears a hijab.
That makes her diverse.
And if y'all got a problem with that, then you're obviously a racist.
And if the name of the second individual Valverde mentions rings a bell, Walid Kogali, that's because he's one of the founders of that racist collection of agitators known as Black Lives Matter Toronto.
He's also the brother of another Black Lives Matter Toronto head hon show, Usra Kogalli.
You might remember Usra's infamous tweet from a while back when she stated the following, quote, please, Allah, give me strength not to cuss kill these men and white folks out here today.
Please, please, please, end quote.
Usra never apologized for this racist rant and instead of condemning her, Black Lives Matter shamefully rushed to her defense.
But in addition to hating white folk, Black Lives Matter Toronto hates the police, regardless of the cops' racial background.
In fact, BLM was instrumental in getting the police punted from the Gay Pride Parade and getting the cops kicked out of Toronto schools at risk.
They also had a hand in ending carding by police, which might be one of the reasons why Toronto is experiencing another awful summer of the gun right now.
But as I said, I'm not surprised the left called Doug Ford's changes to Toronto Council an attack on urban diversity.
To show how insane the left are when it comes to race, do you recall the story last month about Michael Tobolo?
Tobolo is the newly minted community safety and correctional services minister, and he went for a late-night ride along with police in the tough neighborhood of Janin Finch.
As per protocol, he wore a bulletproof vest, and he mentioned this anecdote at Queen's Park.
Well, ho-ho, cue the outrage.
NDP leader Horbath actually said, quote, the comments he made in this house are nothing but racist.
They stigmatize the Jane Finch community, end quote.
Yeah, so in the eyes of the official leader of the opposition, bulletproof vests are racist.
And now we are led to believe that trimming city council is really an attack on diversity?
Really?
Is that truly the new narrative of the left that the race of a candidate is more important than the substance of a candidate?
If so, talk about racism 101.
In the final analysis, hopefully the progressives will come to understand that the vast majority of normal people are currently suffering from outrage fatigue, meaning that the left's constant accusations of racism is now becoming so much ambient noise that people are simply tuning out.
Because at the end of the day, if everything is racist, then nothing is racist.
Gee, I wonder if in the mind of a leftist that merely stating this truism makes me a racist.
Well, these are very interesting times indeed at Toronto City Hall.
Just last week, Ontario Premier Doug Ford decided to cut the size of City Council by almost half.
And oh, the cries of outrage from the usual suspects, they reverberated throughout the mean streets of Hogtown.
But that's not the case with my next guest, Giorgio Memoliti, the councillor for Ward 7, actually welcomes the changes.
And speaking of change, if re-elected, he has a bold new plan to bring about relief to the troubled neighborhood of Jane Finch.
Welcome to the Ezra Event Show, Giorgio.
Thank you so much for having me.
And it's going to be Ward 7 and Ward 8 after this election.
Oh, that's right.
So there's amalgamation.
Amalgamating it.
That's right.
Now, Giorgio, I think it would be, to a lot of the viewers out there, somewhat counterintuitive that anyone on council, including yourself, would support a reduction of almost 50% of council seats.
But you actually do support Premier Ford's move.
Yeah, I think it's wonderful.
I mean, if he were here right now, I'd give him a big hug.
Because at the end of the day, he's doing the right thing.
He's feeling the public out.
It's what they want.
It's saving taxpayers' dollars, not only on the council floor, but also within the bureaucracy itself, because we have less reports.
We drive the bureaucrats nuts with reports and that sort of thing.
So I think it's a good thing because it's going to save a ton of money in the end, in the long run, and we get to make decisions faster and better.
And you know what I like about this move the best, David?
The suburbs finally get represented.
Yes.
And I've been harping on this, and people have been laughing at me for so long.
But finally, we're going to have a say.
And those long-awaited transfer payments for little things like getting our parks cleaned and grass cut and that sort of thing are finally going to make their way up to the suburbs.
Indeed.
Now, Giorgio, what do you make of the outcry by the usual suspects on the left that this was undemocratic, there was no consultation, this was never talked about during Doug Ford's election campaign.
And I'm sure there's some other things.
Oh, yes, of course, a personal vendetta against Mayor Tory, who Doug Ford ran against four years ago.
Does any of that hold water?
Hogwash.
First of all, Doug, his brother, myself, a whole slew of us have been talking about this for years.
And even before they came onto the picture, guys like me after amalgamation were saying the same thing.
It's too big.
We need to cut ourselves in half because it's unmanageable.
We can't keep doing this to the taxpayer.
And so it got heard with the Fords for sure well before this.
And it's been an ongoing conversation in elections.
It's been an ongoing conversation outside of elections.
So it's not a surprise to anybody.
The people that are complaining are the same people, and I might add, a bunch of lefty New Democrats, socialists, communists, whatever you want to call them.
They're the ones that didn't have a problem cutting the police budget and police, the police by 800 officers, did they?
They didn't have that problem when they voted in cutting out those jobs or cutting out some of those manufacturing jobs because they didn't like what people manufacture, right?
They didn't hear the plight of all those families when they came to council.
They voted against those jobs.
All of a sudden, their jobs are in jeopardy, and now we're hearing a cry from them.
So this is really about the NDP power base of downtown Toronto being eroded.
And one of the latest developments at the 11th hour, you had the city planner, the former city planner, Jennifer Kiesmat, a darling of the left, throw her hat into the ring.
I heard they courted Mike Layton and even David Miller to be a challenge.
What do you think of her arrival into the Mayoralty race, Georgia?
And do you think, I'm thinking Mayor Torrey must be feeling backstabbed right now because he has caved to almost every left-wing demand on council these last four years.
And now he's thrown under the bus.
So what are your observations?
Well, he didn't listen to me to a large degree because I told him right from the start, you're conservative, don't cater to a lot of things.
And he did it, I think, for primarily political reasons.
I think we can all read through that, right?
That kind of thing.
And now he's stuck because he has catered to them, anticipating that there's going to be another 47 councillors on the council floor.
And I think this is going to benefit him because now he might be able to become his real self, that right-leaning guy, that center-right-leaning guy that he always has been.
I told him the other day, I think this is actually good for him.
He's going to have more powers as the mayor.
He'll be able to perhaps talk a little more about what he wants to do in the next term.
And if he plays his cards right, he needs just a few people to support him and he'll get his agenda through.
It's better for him.
And I know we're an eternity away in political timelines, Giorgio, from October 22nd, Election Day.
But what do you see shaking down in terms of the mayoralty race?
I mean, we have Keys Matt, who is, you know, admittedly a serious contender.
Blaine Lassman as well.
I'm not sure what his political CV is all about.
But, I mean, how do you see it playing out?
Well, it's between the two of them.
I believe that.
Keys Matt and Torrey.
Keys is right.
And Tory's got to come out with his real self, I think, in this election.
And there is no red carpet for Keys Matt in the suburbs.
And so I need to make that really clear that a guy like me is not going to be supporting a very left-leaning individual who, by the way, was very instrumental in bringing this whole city through this congestion that we've been with the bicycle lanes and that whole array of mismanagement on bike lanes and how we're putting them everywhere, right?
The King Street Pilot Project, banning cars, right?
All of it.
Even the shift on subways and LRTs, you know, has a lot to do with her when she was at the helm.
So I know what she's about.
She's not good for us.
Good-looking lady, for sure.
And Tori's a good-looking man.
But at the end of the day, we're not going to vote for people that are good-looking, are we?
If that were the case, I'd be the mayor today.
I'm glad in the Me Too era, you're not playing any favourite, Georgia.
At the end of the day, look at their platform and look what they stand for.
They're not going to be good.
At least she's not going to be good for the suburbs, in my opinion.
And now, and speaking of the suburbs, if we can call Jane Finch suburbs, you know, as I said in the beginning, Georgio, you have a vision for this community.
I mean, my heart breaks when I think of Jane Finch.
There's a disproportionate amount of crime there.
You had Minister Tobolo two weeks ago do a ride-along in a police cruiser in the wee hours of the night.
He was actually condemned as a racist by Andrea Horwath, the leader of the provincial NDP, and for stigmatizing a community.
And yet this is a guy at one in the morning that was visiting her own crackhouse.
He's reacting to a problem.
Yeah, and God forbid.
You know, so a couple of things.
I know you have a plan you want to talk to about Jane Finch, but what do you make, Georgio, of this tone that everything is through a lens of racism, even a minister wearing a bulletproof vest for a ride-along?
First of all, he's reacting to an issue, which is one of the largest issues we've had in the city for a long time.
And those are the gangbangers in the city that aren't afraid of anybody and are going to kill people on the streets and anybody else around them.
So he was reacting to that.
And the policy, take it from a guy who's gone on these rides for 28 years, they will not let you go on these midnight runs, these two o'clock runs, to see the worst parts of the city unless you wear that vest.
Or even the good parts of the visit.
Evicting Problem Tenants00:03:52
You're not going to be able to go.
That's true.
So, well, you know, even Mayor Torrey said, well, I never wore a vest.
Well, yeah, but you don't need to wear a vest if you're going to go with some traffic cops, right?
Like, you know, to look at the congestion or the problems with traffic.
You are going to need a vest if you're going to go to 2 o'clock in the morning and look at some of the crack houses and how they're the part of the problem in TCHC.
So TCH, for those outside of Toronto, that's Toronto County Housing Corporation.
And of course, this is taxpayer-subsidized social housing that in addition to people that need this assistance, Giorgio, and I don't think anyone is begrudging that, it is factual that there are thugs, there are drug dealers, gangbangers living here, and they're shaking down residents there, most of them being seniors.
And yet, why can't we kick these thugs out of taxpayer-funded subsidized housing?
We attempted through the mayor, Mayor Torrey, just a couple years ago, actually, to try and get to the Wynne government to change the legislation to allow TCHC to be able to evict problem tenants.
Yes.
They said no.
They said they're not going to do it.
And so what we've learned, which is factual.
And what was the ostensible policy reason on that?
That's what I don't understand.
Let's get to that because 1%.
Now, first of all, let me say it this way.
4% of TCHC tenants make up the population of Toronto.
They're in every part of the city of Toronto, these units.
1% of their population are a big problem to not only the residents in TCHC, but the much larger communities.
What I say by that is they're harboring, literally, all of these killers.
They're harboring the drug dealers.
They know they are, and they can't do anything about it because the courts won't let them evict.
They call it the last place for these people to go.
So if they evict, there's nowhere else for these people to go.
I see it like spraying down a building full of cockroaches.
The cockroaches are just going to scatter.
So start evicting them.
Let them scatter because their particular strength is when they're all together in a community like Jane and Finch.
So my approach is going to be scatter them, evict them, get them out of Jane and Finch completely.
And I also have a further one, David.
I think we need to knock the buildings down completely and build into a mix.
It's not fair to those residents to be segregated.
They have been for the last 60 years.
It's no wonder our little kids in those communities are growing up angry and killing people.
We need them to mingle with the rest of society.
So I want to knock down all of the social housing in Jane and Finch, put a plan in place.
And by the way, I've already done it.
I'm the guy who came up with the Affordable Housing Plan at City of Toronto that started the Regent Park movement.
Right, which is considered a great success where it was a similar, you know, you call it ghetto-ized area of the city, but it was raised and now it's a mixed housing development.
We're bringing in the private sector.
So the private sector helped us build it.
TCHC became the developer, but it was a good mix, changing the community.
I'm doing it right now at Firgrove.
We've already knocked down half of the units of Firgrove.
And the residents in the back, those ratepayers that have always had concerns about the crime that comes out of the social problems, are saying, you've gotten rid of a lot of our problems here now.
So I want to do it with Driftwood.
I want to do it on Shepherd Avenue.
I want to do it on Islington Corps, where we just got a number of shootings lately.
Duncan Woods, Saturday, all those little pockets.
I want to knock them down, rebuild them as a mix, and get rid of the problem once and for all by being able to evict these bad people.
Why Canada's Carbon Tax Matters00:12:36
Well, Georgia, we're almost at a racetrack.
I'll give you the last word.
You've got an election slogan, I understand, that you're going to be using.
I've always kept it real.
Always.
And that's gotten me into trouble because sometimes when you keep things real, people don't want to hear it.
This election is going to be about keeping it real.
And that's what I plan on using.
Well, Georgia, thank you so much for dropping by the Ezra Levant Show.
And there we have it, folks.
Listen, the province went right in June.
Maybe in October, the city of Toronto is going to take a right-hand turn.
Time will tell.
Keep it here.
More of the Ezreal event show to come right after this.
Earlier today, Ontario Attorney General Carolyn Marooney and Environment Minister Rod Phillips made it official.
They have urged the Trudeau Liberals to completely back off on implementing any sort of carbon tax.
And if Ottawa doesn't reverse course, they vow that the province of Ontario will fight this cash grab in a court of law.
Now, yesterday, I spoke with Ian Lee, a professor at the Sprat School of Business at Carleton University in Ottawa, regarding those supposedly new and improved changes to the federal carbon tax, changes that are clearly not winning over any of the detractors.
Here's our conversation.
Welcome to the Ezra Levent Show, my friend.
Good afternoon.
Now, Professor Lee, for starters, can you tell us what's so radically different about this new carbon tax scheme and whether or not it is likely to win over any of the detractors out there?
Right.
I mean, what they're doing today is, in one sense, it's very momentous.
It's very important because it represents, I wouldn't say a full-fledged repudiation of their signature issue, the environment that they campaigned on, but it certainly is a major rollback in terms of the commitments that they made.
I'll get to whether this is good or not, or to preempt myself, if this is a good thing, I'm going to argue, but I'm just dealing with what they did today.
They are walking back on the issue on which they backed the farm, the issue that they said was the defining issue of this government when they, or this party, when they ran to form the next government in 2015.
And of course, they became the government.
And why it was so critical then and now was that this government and Mr. Trudeau and the other leaders, his supporters, who became, many of whom became or a number of them became cabinet ministers, said that they were evidence-based and that they were going to not rule by emotion or rule by the seat of the pants.
They were going to be evidence-based.
And yet, they didn't subject it, in my view, to serious empirical econometric scrutiny.
And in fact, just to point this out and get this out there, the Minister of the Environment repeatedly said for the past two years, not only was a carbon tax not going to hurt the economy, it was going to be good for the economy.
It was going to be good, not just for the environment, she said.
It was going to help firms and help them be even more competitive.
And she said this over and over.
Over the last two years, as more and more people studied it, as companies came forward with their own analysis showing the negative impact of this on their own companies' balance sheet and income and success.
And I would suggest to you, after Finance Canada, the bureaucrats crunched the numbers, it became increasingly clear that Catherine McKenna, the administrative environment, was simply wrong, that it was going to be deleterious.
It was going to be damaging to the environment, principally because our major competitor, the United States of America, has categorically said repeatedly, they are not going to do a carbon tax.
So just to quickly summarize, this is a huge walk back on their, I think, their most important issue, their signature issue of the environment.
And it's good for us because it has had such a negative impact.
But you are right, because they didn't roll it back to zero, because they're not shutting it down, they're just mitigating it.
They're making it less aggressive.
is so that the impact on big emitters is not as significant.
They're walking back on the carbon tax.
But as I said, they're not canceling the carbon tax.
And Professor Lee, I mean, that begs the question, why not just put this dog out of its misery?
I mean, especially when you have Saskatchewan, they're going to challenge this in court.
Premier Doug Ford, he ran his entire campaign.
That was one of the things, first and foremost, we will go to court against the federal government in terms of a carbon tax because Ontario is, or at least was, a manufacturing province.
And to have something uncompetitive as a carbon tax placed on manufacturers that are still in this province simply does not compute.
So wouldn't there be, I don't know, wouldn't there be more, I guess, sympathy or understanding if the Liberals just came clean and said, you know what, we've crunched the numbers.
It doesn't make sense.
We are withdrawing this.
In a rational sense, I agree with you completely that that would be the optimal solution.
But there's two points I want to make on this.
The first is, is I think that because they committed so deeply, it became existential for them, their very inner being.
You know, this is who we are.
We're going to be different from everybody else.
We're going to save the planet.
We're going to save the environment.
And I think that they invested so deeply in terms of their own interior values and their own commitment, not to mention the political commitment, that they have decided that either they're not willing to do it from a value, you know, their own values point of view, or more likely, they think that the damage would be too great politically.
But you know, David, the thing I want to bring out, because I realize there's not a lot of academics who criticize carbon tax.
I'm one of them.
Jack Mintz is.
And not because I don't understand the logic of carbon tax.
Of course I do.
Of course Jack Mintz does.
Make something more expensive.
You use less of it.
But what they don't tell you in this ongoing debate is that there's a couple of hidden assumptions or caveats that they never reveal.
And one of them is that there is an alternative or a substitute source that is cheaper than the fossil fuel source called natural gas or oil.
And the dark and dirty secret that they will not disclose is that natural gas is the cheapest source of energy in North America per kilowatt hour.
That's not some opinion.
The Department of Energy in the United States produces a chart once a year pricing all the energy sources and they factor in and crunch all the numbers in terms of the cost of each energy source, nuclear, geothermal, wind, solar, coal, natural gas, and they convert it into a cost per kilowatt hour.
Solar and wind are still not close to natural gas.
And so as a consequence, we are not switching en masse in Canada, the States, to alternative energies because they're still uncompetitive.
And that's why oil and natural gas still dominate, in fact, the world at about 80%.
They provide about 80% of all the energy.
So this was always a pipe dream.
What I'm trying to say is that what they were saying is we're going to change Canada.
We're going to get us all off of natural gas and oil was not credible in an evidence-based world because the substitutes, meaning alternative energies using wind and solar, are still not economically competitive with natural gas and oil.
That's why we continue to use it.
And the second final point I want to make, David, is they've never, they always bring up European countries with high densities.
Canada is the second largest country on the planet Earth, and we are the second coldest country in the world.
We consume more energy and produce more GHG because not because we squander or are wasteful, but because we're the second largest country with the lowest density in the world, four people per square kilometer, versus Europe with 250 to 500 people per square kilometer.
So my point is their whole vision was based on, call it green ideology, almost a green religion.
It wasn't evidence-based in the sense that we could cause large numbers of Canadians to switch almost all of their energy used in Canada from natural gas and oil to alternatives.
So it was a pipe dream from the very beginning.
Indeed, and from what you're saying, Professor Lee, like two things come to mind.
First, I'm with the camp that looks upon this as just really so much virtue signaling at the expense of the facts and the reality on the ground.
And secondly, Professor Lee, tell me if I've got this right.
If Canada in a utopian world, I don't know, maybe we invented the lithium crystals and made our carbon footprint zero, and the rest of the world went on business as usual, that wouldn't make a lick of difference in terms of the overall total carbon output that the world produces, correct?
I will put it, I agree with you completely.
I'll use slightly different language to say the same thing because it's language I'm familiar with that I'm comfortable with being in a business school.
Canada is not a market maker.
We are 2% of the world's GHG.
There's a couple of countries in the world that are market makers.
That is to say, they can move markets.
We know who they are.
One is the United States of America, and the second is the People's Republic of China.
Why?
Because they're the first and second largest economies in the world.
They both have large populations, the U.S., a third of a billion people.
And of course, China with 1.3 billion.
And secondly, they have these enormous GDPs.
They can move markets because they're so huge.
They have such a huge footprint on the world.
The idea that a country that is smaller than one of 50 states in the U.S., Canada is smaller than California.
The totality of all of Canada is smaller than the state of California in terms of population and GDP.
The idea that one country with 37 million people could cause the world to change its behavior or change the footprint of GHG around the world is just preposterous to anybody who has any understanding of basic arithmetic and the numbers involved.
We are 2% of the world's emissions of GHG.
So the idea, even if we eliminated every last molecule of GHG in Canada, it would make no difference on the world because over the next 35 years, the IEA, the International Energy Authority, is forecasting the equivalent of two more Chinas coming on stream in terms of consumption of oil and gas.
In other words, the consumption today of China is going to be, it's going to go up again over the next 30 years, 35 years, by the equivalent of two Chinas.
So 2% Canada's contribution is literally irrelevant to the global conversation.
Well, Professor, I got to tell you, the way you frame it, it just makes this whole issue all the more frustrating.
I'm afraid we have to wrap it here.
But again, we are dealing with a government whose prime minister once infamously said the budget will balance itself.
So maybe the carbon will balance itself too when it comes to environmental stewardship.
Public Sector's Grubby Hands00:02:46
But Professor Lee, I want to thank you kindly for weighing in on this very important matter.
Thank you.
My pleasure, David.
Thank you.
All right.
And that was Professor Ian Lee, folks.
And keep it here.
More of the Ezra Levin show to come right after this.
On my monologue yesterday about Doug Ford's free market marijuana plan, giving public sector unions a severe case of reefer madness, Paul writes, Although I do not approve of illegal drugs being sold to the masses, I do support Doug Ford in his efforts to break the government's monopoly on selling dope and booze.
Well, Paul, as I'm no fan of the wacky tobacco either, and I've never actually imbibed, but since this is going to be a legal commodity, government needs to know its role, which is to regulate and tax this stuff, not warehouse and retail it.
Liza writes, the control of boo sales and gambling is something these guys want to keep their grubby hands on.
Suggesting a free market for pot sales threatens that grasp.
The phrase from my or their dead cold hands comes to mind.
So glad Ford is shaking things up.
Well, you know something, just about everyone I've ever met wants the government out of the booze and betting businesses too.
I say just about everyone because the only people I've ever heard trumpeting the merits of the bloated liquor control board of Ontario and the scandal-plagued Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation are the bureaucrats who work there and of course the unionized staff.
These fat cats have a lucrative racket going and they don't want to give it up even though we all know the private sector would run things so much better.
And Shannon writes, keep those lefties crying, Doug.
You know for every embittered lefty, there are a hundred happier taxpayers being treated fairly.
You know, you're banging on, Shannon.
They say you're supposed to give the squeaky wheel the grease.
My advice to Premier Ford would be to ignore the whiners in the public sector who see their fiefdoms being eroded.
Sure, public sector unions are really good at raising a ruckus, but all that should really matter is the will of the people and the silent majority wants less government involvement in their lives, not more.
Well, that's it for tonight's edition of the Ezra Levant Show.
It's been a pleasure guest hosting this past week.
The big boss man, he's back tomorrow, and I'm sure he'll have plenty to say about the Tommy Robinson case that Ezra was covering in the UK these past few days.
Thanks so much for tuning in.
And hey folks, never forget, without risk, there can be no glory.