Mark Steyn and Anthony Feary critique Canada’s symbolic statue removals—like John A. Macdonald’s from Victoria’s City Hall on August 9th—while ignoring Indigenous issues like jobs, taxes, or pipelines. They compare Trudeau’s diplomatic concessions to Saudi Arabia over Raif Badawi’s detention to past appeasements, warning he may "kowtow" unlike Trump’s tougher stance. Meanwhile, Doug Ford’s $1 beer price cut sparks outrage from subsidized craft breweries like Bose ($354K in grants) and Flying Monkeys ($304K), exposing government hypocrisy. The episode ends with skepticism over Trudeau’s foreign policy, suggesting Canada has lost global influence while prioritizing virtue signaling over real change. [Automatically generated summary]
Calls for John A. MacDonald Statue Removal00:15:29
Tonight, the mayor of Victoria joins a mob of vandals calling for the removal of a statue of John A. MacDonald.
It's August 9th, 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.
I want to talk about the attack on our history, our national symbols, on the things that unite us as Canadians.
I've never seen it so bad as in this story, City of Victoria to remove John A. MacDonald's statue from front steps of City Hall.
John A. MacDonald, as in the founding father of Confederation, our first prime minister, the one who forged the country and then who built a railroad to make sure it stayed forged.
You might recognize him.
He's on our $10 bill.
Actually, that's not the case anymore.
Did you know that?
John A. MacDonald has been on our $10 bill for nearly 50 years.
Before that, it was the Queen, and before her, the King.
But Justin Trudeau has removed him from the $10 bill.
Did you know that?
Last year, Trudeau's government issued a $10 banknote where MacDonald was on there, but with three other people, they were prepping you to get rid of him.
And now that has happened.
This year, they just removed him altogether.
They put on this lady instead.
Do you know who she is?
Is that a picture of young Queen Elizabeth or something?
No, it is not.
It's someone named Viola Desmond.
Who's she?
She was a businesswoman in Halifax.
She was of mixed race descent.
Her mom was white and her dad was black.
She went to a theater that didn't allow blacks to sit near the front, and she needed to to see the screen better, so she bought a ticket there and she was prosecuted for that and became a human rights case.
So sounds like a good woman.
Sounds like she fought against racism.
That's great.
But it is not proportionate to have someone like that on our national currency.
King George VI was on our $10 bill.
Then Queen Elizabeth II was on our $10 bill.
Then our founding prime minister, John A. MacDonald, was on our $10 bill.
And now a community activist who fought a movie theater.
I'm sorry, that's nuts.
That's virtue signaling.
I get it.
Trudeau is all about feminism, and he'd be all about Black Lives Matter if he could.
But luckily, Canada doesn't have a history of black slavery.
In fact, we were the destination for runaway slaves, for freed slaves from the U.S. through what was called the Underground Railroad.
This is so forced.
I mean, Viola Desmond fought a political battle, a legal battle, and good for her, but she didn't build a nation.
She didn't lead the British Empire through a world war.
The symbols of our country are being shrunk if she's on the $10 bill.
I like Viola Desmond, sure, but she didn't build Canada.
But look, it's not about Viola Desmond, nice lady, good woman.
It wasn't about her.
It was about knocking down John A. MacDonald.
And of course, about knocking down the Queen.
And in an important way, about shaming Canada and making us feel like we have a racist past as opposed to the truth, which is that we have always been a light unto the nations.
More so than most countries.
Trudeau does this all the time, though.
He shames Canada.
He scolds Canada.
He says we're unworthy and immoral, and only he is the righteous one.
That's what knocking out MacDonald and putting in a small local human rights activist as our new national symbol means.
Back to the city of Victoria.
I read the headline already.
Now look at this sub-headline.
No one's erasing anything, but we have to understand the complexity of history, says Mayor Lisa Helps.
She's against the statue, too.
No one's erasing anything.
You are tearing down a statue.
You know who tears down statues?
The Taliban tears down statues.
They dynamite them.
ISIS tears down statues because they're extremists.
They are against any graven images that they don't like.
And just like Justin Trudeau is slowly erasing our history, our culture, our story, so is the mayor of Victoria.
Listen to this insanity.
Let me quote.
The city of Victoria is planning to remove the statue of John A. McDonald, Canada's first prime minister, from the front steps of City Hall, because of what it says is his role as a leader of violence against Indigenous peoples.
No, he was the founder of our great country, but I see what they're doing there.
Besides blaming and shaming McDonald, they are attempting to blame and shame anyone who loves McDonald or who loves our history.
It's not just McDonald they're calling racist, it's anyone who doesn't agree with them about McDonald.
But they're doing one more thing.
It's a placebo.
You know what a placebo is.
It's a fake pill that doctors give patients sometimes to pretend to the patient that they're prescribing a real medicine to the patient when the problem is really just in the patient's mind.
The idea being if the patient believes he's now ingesting medicine, he'll feel better by himself.
No need for real medicine.
It's a trick.
Well, this is a placebo for doing something real about Aboriginal issues.
Oh, there are Aboriginal issues in Canada, and there is anti-Aboriginal racism in Canada.
Absolutely there is.
And I'm not scolding you.
I'm talking to you about a law we have on the books called the Indian Act that gives rights and takes rights away from Aboriginal people based on race, that treats them different from other citizens based on race.
Mainly, it treats Aboriginal people like they're children, as people not able to handle the responsibilities of modern life.
That's why Indians on a reserve aren't allowed to have property rights to their own homes.
The band owns everything communally.
The theory being Indians can't take care of their own property or they'd be, I don't know, swindled out of it by some unscrupulous buyer.
So better not let them have the right to sell any property ever.
Did you know the Indian Act even bans Indians from making a last will and testament on their own without the band's approval?
Did you know that?
Seriously.
Look at section 453 of the Indian Act.
An Indian needs to have a white man's government in Ottawa approve of his will.
You're not allowed to own your own house.
You're not allowed to get a regular mortgage.
You're not allowed to make your own will if you're an Indian.
So yeah, racism, you bet, not 150 years ago, right now, which is easier, which is we easier, I ask you, for liberal white virtue signaling politicians to do, to fix the real racism today in the Indian Act, I don't know, to get jobs for actual Indians today who suffer from high unemployment today.
Is that easier?
Fix the Indian Act, fix economic problems, or to tear down a statue as if the evil statue is the problem we have, like it's some sort of cursed idol or something that needs to be smashed.
It's a placebo, I tell you.
I have never met a real Indian in my life who has ever, not once, ever brought up John A. MacDonald as an issue.
Real Indians that I know talk about real things like jobs and taxes and oil and gas and mining and pipelines.
Those are huge Aboriginal employers in Canada.
That's what real issues are.
But these leftists in Victoria, most of them white, all of them virtue signaling, would rather talk about anything else, wouldn't they?
Now, it is true, though, that John A. MacDonald was a racist.
Of course it was true by our 2018 standards of progressive feelings.
But then again, those standards changed so quickly.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are a bunch of, I don't know, homophobes too.
By that standard, remember this?
I believe that marriage is not just a bond, but a sacred bond between a man and a woman.
Where was that?
Maybe 10 years ago.
Here's Barack Obama.
I have been very clear on this.
I have said that I am not a supporter of gay marriage.
I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.
So, are Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton a bunch of racist, sexist, Islamophobic, homophobes or something?
Should we tear down their statues too?
Not that there are a lot of statues to Clinton and Obama, but you get my point.
How about the big icon of the Canadian left?
Tommy Douglas.
Here he is.
If ever we needed in this country to adopt a new attitude to homosexuality, this is the time.
Instead of treating it as a crime and driving it underground, we ought to recognize it for what it is.
It's a mental illness.
He's so enlightened.
He doesn't want to throw gays in prison.
He just thinks they're mentally ill and they need to see a psychiatrist.
Uh-oh, is he a bigot now, too?
Should we tear down the hundred Tommy Douglas statues and rename the hundred Tommy Douglas schools and parks in Canada too?
Because that's the thing.
Tommy Douglas actually was progressive at that time.
That was open-minded at that time.
Was Canada racist 150 years ago?
Yeah, well, we are today too, unless you work hard to ignore it.
We have racial quotas.
Justin Trudeau himself has gender quotas for cabinet.
He pretty clearly has a bias against white males other than himself, the enlightened one.
The Indian Act, though, whew, that's a racist document.
But seriously, were we bigoted in Canada back in the 1860s?
Was John A. MacDonald bigoted?
Well, we were the world's refuge for runaway slaves.
We were part of the British Empire whose navy eradicated the slave trade.
There was slavery on every single continent in the world, by the way.
In North America, in Canada, the Haida Indians of BC, they kept slaves.
They were famous for it.
If you read the stories of the conquistadors, they encountered murderous slavers in Central America.
Africa still has slavery.
Asia has slavery.
Every place in the world had slavery.
Every traditional religion in the world has been or is hostile to homosexuality.
Every culture, other than the mythical Amazons, I suppose, has been sexist in a way, or at least believed in gender roles.
To pretend that we were evil then is a laugh.
It's like a placebo to distract from our real challenges now.
But it's really just a way to attack Canada and to pull us down, isn't it?
It's the same as Trudeau changing our national anthem.
It's the same as liberals opposing the Lord's Prayer.
It's the same.
It's them hating Canada.
Not themselves.
Oh, they don't hate themselves.
They just hate you.
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Well, yesterday we had a very interesting talk with one of my favorite guys, Manny Montenegrino, who brings a lawyer's eye to Justin Trudeau's foreign affairs.
He's done great commentary about the NAFTA deal.
And the Saudi thing, though, I could sense with Manny, and I feel it myself, I'm of two minds.
On the one hand, I know that Saudi Arabia is one of the worst countries in the world.
It is an Islamic theocracy that has no civil rights as we know them.
In fact, the Quran is the basis of their constitution.
They are very illiberal, and they literally execute people for moral offenses that we would not even regard as an offense.
And so the spat between Justin Trudeau and Saudi Arabia, obviously, out of national pride, we would stand with our prime minister, even if he's a liberal.
But by the same token, the operational way, the tactical way, the foolish, childish way in which Canada brought about this diplomatic spat feels like it's worth criticizing.
How do we do that?
How do we criticize the amateurish conduct of our foreign affairs, but also stand with Canada against Saudi Arabia's dictatorship?
This is a tough one to thread the needle.
And joining us now is someone who I think can help us figure it out.
His name is Anthony Feary.
You know him well.
He's a columnist with the Toronto Sun.
And he wrote in the paper, Saudi Arabia, his column's called Saudi Arabia Wants to Nix All Human Rights Criticism.
And there's no way we can agree to that.
He joins us now via Skype.
Anthony, great to see you again.
Hey, Ezra, great to be here.
Well, thanks for your column.
You know, I've been an enemy of Saudi Arabia for a long time, ever since I wrote the book Ethical Oil.
And I'm not just saying that to boast.
I don't know if you remember, Anthony.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia actually retained the law firm called Norton Rose to threaten me with legal action if I kept insulting their ethical quality of their oil.
I don't know if you ever heard that story.
I got a demand letter from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to shut up.
As you can see, I have not shut up.
So I regard myself as an enemy of Saudi Arabia with great pride.
I'm happy that Justin Trudeau's in that camp now, but I think he sort of mangled this one in a bit too.
What's your take?
Am I wrong on that?
Help me figure this out.
He did and he didn't.
I mean, I really appreciate what you said in the tee-up.
And it's important to preface all of these conversations with reminding people the truth about Saudi Arabia and what goes on there and the whole basis of them having the vast majority of the 9-11 hijackers be part of their nationality and also some of them being connected to individuals in the government.
They're exporting of Wahhabi extremism such that when you hear about them calling back their medical residence students, some of them you go, okay, maybe they were just regular folk.
Others, perhaps they were, these extremist ilk.
It really changes a lot of it.
And I think the coverage out there, particularly for young people who are perhaps not familiar with the history of Saudi Arabia, we need to know that.
That needs to be the part of the conversation.
And the way I'm putting it, I have another column coming out shortly on this, that these concerns about Justin Trudeau and how he has, shall I put it mildly, perhaps a rather skewed perspective of global affairs and perhaps a not very good way of dealing with international relations and a very inconsistent one.
Ezra, I think this time around, that is a sidebar issue.
I think the front and center issue, and it's gotten worse since I wrote that column you allude to, is that what Saudi Arabia is clearly trying to do is make us submit to them.
They are trying to bring us down to heel, and there is absolutely no way that we should tolerate that.
Yeah, that's a good point.
And I felt that, I mean, I really admire Manny, and I look up to him so much.
And I felt yesterday, both of us were trying to square this circle because we both know that Saudi Arabia would be hot.
I mean, I don't even think I'd be allowed in there.
I'm Jewish, and they're very restrictive of non-Muslims.
There are entire cities like Mecca where infidels are simply not permitted to travel.
I think that by any moral measure, they are a failed state propped up only by oil money.
And as you say, they want Justin Trudeau to bend the knee.
I think the reason they chose, what do you think of this?
This is a theory that I've seen bandied about a lot.
Saudi Arabia's Weakness Play00:09:31
One of the theories of why Saudi Arabia has gone so mental over a tweet is because they sense Trudeau is weak and they can get him to roll over in a way that maybe Theresa May and certainly Donald Trump and maybe Angela Merkel would not.
As in, they see he's wobbly.
They see he's all thumbs.
They see Christia Freeland as sort of shallow and goofy.
They saw the fiasco in India.
They saw the fiasco in Australia.
They see all these things and they say, you know what?
If we're going to pick a fight, let's pick a fight with Trudeau because we know he'll roll over and that will maybe set a precedent for these tougher countries.
That's a theory I heard.
What do you make of it?
Yeah, I see a little bit of that there.
I also think they picked a fight with us because they don't particularly care about our relationship.
I mean, they don't get that much out of it.
They export some oil to us.
But 80,000 barrels a day, it sounds like a lot.
But we actually export over 3 million barrels of oil a day to the U.S. Your great book, Ethical Oil, talks about how we can supplant all of that, get the Saudis out of the equation.
Their population is actually a number of million less than us, something like 27 million people.
The land mass is smaller.
I mean, look, Ezra, if they didn't have oil, no one would be able to find them on a map.
Like how there's a number of Central African countries that high school students have probably never heard of before.
I think that would be the same case with Saudi Arabia.
So it's about the oil that we're indulging their entire hissy fit.
My problem with this, I think they have chosen to go crazy over this.
This was not a visceral, honest reaction.
And it kind of reminds me a lot of 1989 when they went after Salman Rushdie for the satanic verses.
I know Iran and the Ayatollah were kind of the headline grabbers for it, but Saudi Arabia did it too.
They never read that book.
It's like 700 pages long.
And Ezra, when I finally read it, it's actually an incredibly boring novel.
It's not his best work, I would say.
And they didn't read the book, but they said, you know what?
We're going to make an example out of this guy.
We're all going to go nuts about this guy.
And our goal of this is to change the entire barometer of offense so nobody tries to do this anymore.
No one criticizes Islam.
And I think what they're doing here is they're trying to go, well, look what we did to that Trudeau guy.
So if any of you even try and talk like this to us again, we're going to do the same thing to you.
And I think the world can even call their bluff on it because they feel like they're calculating the oil money and the student residence and everything.
Yeah, we don't really care if for some reason Trudeau calls our bluff, who cares if we lose all of that?
But they weren't going to try it on another country because that relationship matters.
So I think it's a test case to see just how ballsy they can get as they are kind of something of a growing power.
And then to, I don't want to say to their credit, a vaguely developing power.
Oh, women can drive now if their father says it's okay.
Oh, good for you, Mohammed bin Salman.
You're now pretty much, you know, a left-wing liberal.
But they're trying here.
They're pushing.
And we got to say no.
Yeah.
You know, that's a very interesting observation you make.
You immediately made me think of the Danish cartoon crisis, kerfuffle fiasco in late 2005, early 2006.
Just like the Salman Rashti book, just like this tweet, no one really read it.
It was just a fig leaf.
It was an excuse for what they wanted to do.
In the case of Denmark, it was the Danish cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad.
And Saudi Arabia and the Organization of Islamic Countries, that's a lot of over 50 Muslim countries, they said this is our Reichstag fire.
This is our excuse to play victim, to go on the offensive, and to really scare the hell out of Europe on anything Islamophobic.
And they did.
And they really tantamount to declaring war on Denmark because it was a small country they felt they could push around.
I think you're right.
I think we are the Denmark of a dozen years later.
Can they push Canada around?
Can they make us blink?
Is this, as they would say, pour uncourgé les otres, to scare and encourage the others to behave better?
I think you nailed it with that.
I think that's right.
But your example is a really good one.
I hadn't thought of that one before, but I always thought the reaction of that is to go, well, you guys are clearly trying to lower the barometer of offense.
Ezra, I'm not a religious person.
There are all these rules out there where people say I can and can't do this and that.
Live your life how you want.
You don't want to draw the cartoons.
You don't have to draw the cartoons.
You're telling me and my cartoonists we can't draw this?
Give me a break.
And the answer to that is not to indulge their infantilism, but for us just all to draw the cartoons and go, here you are.
You know, you can't kill all of us.
And I think from that regard, we can talk, we should be talking more about Saudi Arabia's regressive policies.
Now, I take the note that there's a lot of dreadful countries out there doing repressive things, and we got to have trade deals, we got to work with them, and we also just can't tell everyone else how to live their lives.
I get all of that.
But this was just a couple tweets, and it was not Trudeau.
It's not the same as him doing hashtag welcome to Canada, which had really, really boneheaded consequences.
It's not that sort of, it's not the similar virtue signaling.
Christy Freeland was kind of repeating stuff.
John Baird did a somewhat similar tweet, and the UN is always saying these things about Saudi Arabia.
The bottom line is, did she do a little screw up?
Yeah, I'm going to say Christy Freeland screwed up 1.5 out of 10.
They're trying to tell us it's an 11 out of 10.
And that's the disconnect.
You know, I really appreciate you reminding us that we're dealing with a bad faith country on the other side.
This is a country looking for offense, looking to play the victim and looking for this is some move on their part.
It's interesting.
I am worried that Justin Trudeau will bend the knee.
I see in English Canada, a lot of the headlines are Trudeau stands firm.
But I saw in a Quebec newspaper today, the headline translated into English was Trudeau looks to build bridges.
I think that Trudeau, I mean, he very rarely apologizes for himself.
He apologizes for what other Canadians have done.
He throws other Canadians under the bus.
He scolds us all the time.
I've never actually seen him make a genuine heartfelt apology for anything.
But he might do that here because I think in some ways he's sort of weak and is pushed around.
I think he's a terrible negotiator.
Do you think Justin Trudeau is going to hold the line here or do you think he's going to kowtow and supplicate himself?
It's hard to say.
I watched that press conference yesterday with great interest and he did reiterate, oh no, we're going to stand up for human rights.
But then he did say that line where he said, well, Saudi Arabia has made great strides recently and we acknowledge that.
So there's this idea that Mohammed bin Salman is really sensitive to all of that and says we're doing it on our own time, on our own terms.
Don't judge us.
So if you acknowledge the progress publicly, so maybe Trudeau did actually give them a little bit of an inch.
And since it was an unnoticeable one, maybe that's okay.
But I think if we need to back channel and we can apologize for the fact that I guess these tweets said, you must immediately release them, whereas the John Baird tweet I was referring to just said, you know, we do not support the flogging of Raif Badawi or we condemn it or whatnot.
He wasn't actually telling them what to do.
He was saying he disagreed with what they're doing.
And that's the finer points of all of this.
But we know it's a tweet and we know they're choosing to get crazy about it to get us to submit.
So if they want to do some back channel thing where they say, yeah, guys, we screwed up with saying the immediate release thing.
We get it's your affair.
We're not trying to run your judicial system.
I'm okay if we have that talk or even if Freeland kind of says it pseudo-publicly, I'm okay.
But Trudeau, to your point, he better not offer any.
That knee better not bend at all.
Not at all.
Especially, you know, no NFL anthem games right here on this turf.
I'll tell you that.
Yeah, you know, Donald Trump can tweet the most dramatic, outrageous, provocative things because he also happens to be the commander-in-chief of the largest military in the world, the most important diplomatic corps in the world, the most important economy in the world.
So he can back it up.
I think maybe Christia Freeland and Justin Trudeau, they're used to sort of more selfie tweets and domestic consumption sort of soft soap tweets.
I think if you're going to be tweeting tough talk to another country, if they don't perceive you as terrifying and mighty like Donald Trump, maybe that kind of trash talking on Twitter only works for the biggest guy around.
I don't have very interesting times.
I look forward to your call.
You say you got a new column on this coming out tomorrow.
Is that what you said?
Yeah, because I think they've just read, I mean, they're trying to get us to do total submission right now since I wrote the first column.
It's gotten worse the past couple days, and I think we've got to get even more cautious on how they're trying to use us as some sort of a pawn here.
All right.
Well, we'll keep an eye peeled for that.
That'll be in the Toronto Sun.
That'll probably be posted online tonight.
Is that correct?
Yep.
Okay, well, we'll keep an eye peeled for it.
I very much look forward to reading what you have to say.
Hey, thanks for taking the time to join us today.
Great.
Thanks.
Have a good one.
Right on.
There you have it.
Anthony Fury.
He wrote about this already in The Sun.
The column you can find online right now is called Saudi Arabia Wants to Nix All Human Rights Criticism, and There's No Way We Can Agree to That.
And as you just heard, he has another column in tomorrow's paper, which should be online tonight.
I find this a very interesting issue.
Do you?
All right, stay with us.
more ahead on The Rebel.
The day you've been waiting for is finally here.
Buck Beer Returns00:09:57
We're bringing back a buck of beer to Ontario.
Well, that is Doug Ford talking about the populist touch.
He's the new Premier of Ontario, and he's promising buck a beer.
Doesn't get more down home than that.
I know all the right people are furious about that.
Why wouldn't you be furious about a buck of beer?
That sounds like a good deal to me.
But what does it mean?
Does it mean government beer, like a state-subsidized beer like the CBC?
Well, here to explain it, is our friend David Menzie.
Dave, great to see you again.
Great to be here, Ezra.
Yeah, you have your finger on the policy of fordination, unlike almost any other journalist in Ontario.
I think you and Joe Warmington are like the spirit animals of fordination.
And I'm guessing that you know all about buck of beer.
And I'd like you to explain it, especially to our viewers from outside of Ontario.
What is it?
Well, Ezra, I think what it really is, is a small baby step, at least when it comes to the beverage alcohol system in Ontario, of Ford getting government out of our lives.
I mean, just think about that.
There is what they call the non-discriminatory reference price.
Only a bureaucrat could invent that.
Yeah, I can't even remember what you just said.
That means a minimum floor price.
Why do you call it a minimum floor price?
Why would there be a minimum floor price for beer?
You know what?
I'm going to tell you right now.
This actually goes back to 1992.
And what happened, there was a great entrepreneur since passed on, Gabe Magnotta, was able to acquire off-site licenses.
And he found a way to have a competing force with wine shops against the LCBO running little wine shops out of industrial parks.
His cheapest bottle was $3.95 in 1992.
You know, that's less than, I mean, in 1992 money, it's a little bit more, but that's less than the Starbucks Frappuccino.
Yeah, that's a good point.
So what happened?
The LCBO saw Magnota as a threat.
So they came out with this thing called the non-discriminatory reference price, meaning a minimum floor price, which meant that you cannot charge, your cheapest bottle cannot be cheaper than the cheapest bottle of the LCBO, which in 1992 was $5.15.
So Magnotta was forced to raise this price up there.
Now, to show you the hypocrisy and to show you how government doesn't play by the rules, Ezra, the LCBO launched a pilot project at its Weston and 401 store in which they were going after the U-Vint people who they also saw as a threat.
U-Vint, does that mean like homebrew?
Yeah.
So they came up with their own version of U-vinting and selling them at a dozen bottles per purchase.
And Magnata did the math, and he found out that the cheapest bottle that the LCBO was now selling was $4.58.
So he wrote to them and said, I will now be reducing my cheapest bottle from $5.15 to $4.58.
It's ridiculous that he even has to talk to the government about this.
Oh, but here's the thing, Ezra.
Legal counsel from the LCBO writes back to Gabe Magnota and says, we are exempting ourselves from our own policy.
It's what I think guys like you, lawyers would call abuse of regulatory authority.
These are rules for you, but not us in this particular case.
And it's crazy because if they set the floor price, then surely that's the floor price.
That's so dumb.
Yeah.
And of course bureaucrats would love that and of course lawyers would love that.
So you're talking about wine, but it obviously was applied to beer too.
Right.
And so up until maybe about 10 years ago in Ontario, you could have a buck of beer.
I think Laker, Laker Brewery out there.
It's going to be the fanciest beer, but you know, fancy people, it's just, you know, some people want a hamburger, some people want a steak.
Some people want a BMW, some people want a little, you know, little beater.
Whatever you like.
Let the market flourish.
Well, and Ezra, this is the point.
Why is it that we lose our minds with beverage alcohol, especially in this province?
This is a regulated minimum floor price.
Well, why don't we have that for bottled water?
Why don't we have that for gasoline?
Well, you know, and some might even refer to the fact that the Liberals and now I guess the province of Ontario under Doug Ford are legalizing marijuana.
You're legalizing marijuana.
Get ready for a marijuana epidemic, seriously.
But oh my God, if we sold 4% beer, 5% alcohol beer for a buck as opposed to like $2, we're going to have, oh my God.
Now here's what gets me, and it's very interesting history, and I appreciate you telling me that.
But what grinds my gears is the fancy brewery.
And I got nothing against fancy breweries.
It's a cool thing.
It's like a snob thing.
It's like people who smoke pipes.
Yes.
You know, they look down at the cigarette smokers.
Fine, you want a pipe?
Do that pipe thing.
Just, you know, I don't care if that makes you feel good.
All these craft breweries, these little fancy pants breweries, and that's fine.
I've got nothing against it.
Weirdly, they have come out furious, blazing against this bucket beer.
But it doesn't affect them.
They can charge whatever.
They can charge a buck.
They can charge 10 bucks a beer.
No one's forcing them to do anything.
It's just allowing the Mr. Magnotas of the world and his followers, so to speak.
Why are these fancy-pants breweries so furious at Buckabier?
Well, what they're saying is...
I've got a list here.
Oh, yeah, and it's really a false argument.
But what they're saying is that we use the finest quality malt, hops, barley, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah, we can't make a go of it at a buck of beer.
That's okay.
The government is not saying in your portfolio, you must have $1 beer.
Surely they understood that from the get-go because they're in the business.
And surely if they didn't understand that, they would have found that out in about a minute.
It would be like if there was a minimum price for a car and Doug Ford said there's no more minimum price anymore, you can buy a car for $5,000.
And BMW is saying, well, we will not sell our car for $5,000.
No one was asking you to sell your BMW for $5,000, buddy.
Stop being so snooty about it.
And Ezra, why?
I mean, as much as I applaud the minimum floor price being reduced from $1.25 to $1, well, is that what it is?
It's a quarter.
It's a quarter of a million.
I can't believe all this hullabaloo over $0.25.
It's just crazy.
Go ahead.
But why not another nickel or a dime?
Can't we have 95 cent beer, 90 cents?
Why is there floor price at all?
Well, I would argue this.
One is the more you increase the base price, the more taxation revenue you're going to get.
And also, it ties into this murky concept which liquor boards in Canada justify their very existence, Ezra, which is social responsibility.
And what that means is that alcohol is a potentially deadly substance if misused.
So we can't have the private sector.
They just care about money.
Government answers to a higher authority.
And that's why we need a minimum price because if it's too cheap, people are going to take time off their work.
They're going to get drunk.
They're going to get behind the wheel.
Yada, yada, yada.
Completely does not play out in the real world, by the way, but it is their way of justifying their monopoly.
So $1.25 beer, society is safe.
A dollar beer.
Maybe.
You get that $20.
Mayhem.
Listen, I want to tell you why I have this list in my hand.
This is from the OBN.
That's what the Ontario Brewers, the fancy, the Ontario Beverage Network.
This is the Fancy Pants Brewery.
So this here, so all these Fancy Pants Brewers, there's one called Bose All Natural Brewing Company.
Sounds delicious.
Yes.
And then there's Flying Monkeys Craft Brewery.
I mean, all these fancy things.
I got nothing against it.
I got nothing against it.
In fact, it sounds great.
But all these folks are sneering and getting snooty.
What I have in my hand here is government subsidies to this snob.
Like, Bose All-Natural Brewing got $354,000 in grants from the government.
Flying Monkeys Craft Brewery got $304,000 of those.
So all these snobby artisan fancy pants, man-bun, waxed mustache, smoke-a-pipe types.
Not that there's anything wrong with it.
They're looking down their nose at the bucket beer types.
But the thing is, their fancy pants is subsidized by those bucket beer people.
So Joe Lunchbucket on the assembly line, he has to pay taxes so Mr. Beauregard or whatever his name is can make a fancy fruity beer.
That is the final drop of chutzpah on top of all this.
You know, and probably the worst province this exists in, Ezra, is Alberta, believe it or not.
Really?
Minhas Craft Brewery, which is not a craft brewery.
I mean, my personal opinion is a mass-produced cheap plonk.
They have been getting millions of dollars.
I don't know what, at least until a few years ago, I'm not sure what the current situation is now with the Notley NDP government, but they were getting millions of dollars in subsidies to brew beer, supposed craft beer, but the brewing was taking place in Wisconsin and was being shipped by rail into Alberta.
So in other words, Ezra, what the Alberta government was doing was providing Americans with jobs brewing so-called Alberta craft beer at the expense of the real craft beer brewers in Alberta that were getting a pittance.
You know, it is such a messed up system.
It's a racket.
It is.
You know what?
I'm so glad that, I mean, this is a time, I mean, you really couldn't take a tinier step from 25 of your to bucket beer, and all you've done is slow the floor.
It's such a nothing story, and watching the utter freak out on the left tells me we need a lot more of this plain talk.
David, it's fun to talk with you about this crazy story.
Thanks for being here today.
Yeah, let's grab a beer tonight, Ezra, and celebrate.
Cuba And Craft Beer00:02:38
All right.
I'll bring the tunies.
We'll have two.
That's right.
All right, David, great to see you again.
Well, there you have it, folks.
A bucket beer.
Now it's explained.
Now you know.
And now you know it's dark roots.
All right.
Stay with us.
more ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about major media posting their next targets to be purged from the internet like Alex Jones and their targets, including two former rebels.
Space Moose writes, I say that by early next year rebel media will be kicked off all those places, probably at the hands of Justin Trudeau preparing for the election.
I wish I could say you're wrong.
I think there is a real possibility of that.
Peter writes, We're not going to be depersoned.
Alex Jones isn't going away.
They just proved his point and brought it to light.
Don't let up.
Peter, we won't let up, but one day if you don't see us, well, we won't have let up, but others will have let us up.
On my interview with Manny Monta de Greeno about Trudeau's disastrous diplomatic spat with Saudi Arabia, Elizabeth writes, Justin, unfortunately for Canada, is an easy target.
It's not a good look on the world stage, not a good look at all.
Yeah, that's the thing.
I mean, as I said today to Anthony Fury, and I think I said it even yesterday to Manny, I'm no fan of Saudi Arabia.
Well, when the feeling's mutual.
I forgot yesterday that the kingdom of Saudi Arabia itself had retained one of the world's largest law firms to threaten me with a lawsuit over my book, Ethical Oil.
Can you believe that?
I should show you that letter again.
So yeah, I don't like Saudi Arabia much.
I wouldn't want to live there.
I wouldn't want to be even a Muslim there if I was a woman or if I was liberal in any way.
It's not a nice place.
So yeah, I like the fact we're holding them to account, but perhaps we could be a bit diplomatically smarter and perhaps we could be less bullyable.
And I think Justin Trudeau has had a disaster in foreign affairs.
Is there a single country with which we are friendlier and have a more meaningful relationship now than we did two years ago?
I'm not talking about Justin Trudeau flying in and dumping billions of dollars in foreign aid on a country.