Andrew Scheer faces backlash for banning The Rebel—while inviting left-leaning CBC, Toronto Star—at the Halifax convention (Aug 22), despite his team’s ties to it. Meanwhile, convicted al-Qaeda terrorist Omar Cotter accessed Parliament Hill unchecked, sparking security double-standard accusations. Election interference claims escalate, with conservative figures like Gavin McInnes and Alex Jones banned from social media, while liberal voices (e.g., Sarah Jeong) face no consequences. Scheer’s cautious approach risks alienating his base amid rising immigration skepticism—6% of Canadians oppose more migration—while rivals like Maxime Bernier exploit unaddressed conservative frustrations, including Trudeau’s refugee policies and corporate censorship, leaving Scheer’s leadership strategy vulnerable to irrelevance. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, the Rebel heads to the Conservative Party convention.
I've got some advice for Andrew Scheer.
It's August 22nd, 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.
As you may have heard, Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer has banned rebel reporters from attending the party convention this week in Halifax.
He's invited Trudeau's CBC though and the Toronto Star.
He's invited McLean's magazine and all the left-wing opinion sites like Vice and the Huffington Post.
The one media outlet he's banned is us, the Rebel.
Now we're going anyways.
Of course, if we stopped reporting on things just because some politician told us to stop reporting on things, we wouldn't do any reporting at all, would we?
And even if we're forced to do our reporting from outside the convention center on the street, you know it's going to be more fair and accurate than Trudeau's CBC will be.
I mean seriously, this is Rosemary Barton, the flagship political reporter for the CBC, taking a girlish selfie with Justin Trudeau, just like a teenager giggling at a Justin Bieber concert.
Imagine having a conservative convention and blocking the only media outlet that report on it straight, and imagine choosing to entrust your message to hostile filters like her.
Andrew Scheer banning us is weird and it's petty and it's counterproductive and it's confusing.
Of course, Scheer doesn't agree with everything we've ever said here at The Rebel.
I mean, we've made more than 9,700 videos and many of them are controversial.
How could you not disagree with some of them?
I disagree with some of them myself, but that implies Scheer agrees with the other media he's letting in, I think.
That's even more troubling, isn't it?
I won't talk more about that here for my full discussion of Andrew Scheer's ban.
You can go to letusreport.com, where we also have a petition to Andrew Scheer, and basically we tell him to get real and focus on his real enemies, Trudeau and the CBC.
We also ask for your help to crowdfund our trip to Halifax for the convention.
If you can help us cover the cost of our flights and rooms, that would be great.
We're sending Sheila Gunread.
I'm going, and we have two staff going also, Eitan and our videographer, Efron.
You can help us with that at letusreport.com.
Thanks.
But I want to talk to you today about something else.
I want to tell you what I told a senior Conservative Party MP who called me up this week.
I've had more phone calls and emails from senior conservatives in the last week or 10 days than I have had in the past year.
It's quite something.
And it started before we were banned from the convention.
It started when Maxime Bernier started tweeting about Trudeau's extreme multiculturalism.
I've done a whole show on Bernier's tweets, so I'm not going to go through them again, but in a nutshell, Bernier teed off of a short video from Trudeau, where Trudeau was repeating his incessant message track that diversity is our strength.
Bernier just dissected that blather, that completely empty cliché, that hollow soundbite in a way I hadn't seen done before, either in the conservative media and certainly in conservative politics.
It was a huge hit with Conservative Party members and with severely normal citizens who were just sick of Trudeau's sacrine showbiz shallowness.
And the media loved it too because it was a real fight, right?
I mean, the media were obviously on Trudeau's side in the fight, but at least it wasn't boring in the middle of summertime August.
They need something to talk about, and Bernier gave it to them.
And of course, they also used it to demonstrate how weak Andrew Scheer has been by contrast.
That's the thing.
Maxime Bernier, through a few tweets, was able to take up all the oxygen in the room, as they say.
He dominated the national conversation for days.
He set the agenda.
Yes, others were criticizing him, and by others I mainly mean the political media industrial complex, but it was a controversy of his own choosing.
And as the new Angus Reed poll shows us, the issues that Bernier were discussing, was discussing were very much in the minds of Canadians.
I mean, support for immigration is in an all-time low.
So it was great, except that when Maxime Bernier is the star, by virtue of just a few tweets, that means Andrew Scheer is the star.
No one was reading his tweets.
No one cared about what he had to say because he, as always, is bland and tepid and lukewarm.
As Donald Trump said about Jeb Bush, he's low energy.
So here's my pledge to you.
I will be a commander-in-chief that will have the back of the military.
I won't trash talk.
I won't be a divider-in-chief or an agitator-in-chief.
I won't be out there blowharden, talking a big game without backing it up.
I think the next president needs to be a lot quieter, but send a signal that we're prepared to act in the national security interests of this country to get back in the business of creating a more peaceful world.
Please clap.
Remember that?
Now, Stephen Harper wasn't particularly high energy in his style either.
I mean, he didn't holler, he didn't swear, he wasn't extreme or even that vivid.
He was no Donald Trump, but he was serious and he was clear and he didn't hide his views.
See, that's the thing.
You don't have to be high energy to be clear and principled and forceful.
Harper was succinct and to the point.
I remember when he did his first scrum after becoming prime minister a dozen years ago, I remember a Harper hater.
I forget if it was Paul Wells or Don Martin.
I mean, they're all interchangeable, aren't they?
But one of the wags on Parliament Hill noted that Harper gave the shortest public statement he'd seen from a prime minister in ages.
I mean, remember, we just came off the heels of Paul Martin.
And yet this Harper hater noted that he said so much more, so succinctly.
He said more than that waffler, Mr. Dithers, Paul Martin.
So you don't have to be Mr. Charisma to be an effective communicator.
No one would look at Stephen Harper and say, he's dashing.
He's dreamy.
Although he's respectable.
But they would say he's effective.
He's clear, wouldn't they?
They'd say he's principled, wouldn't they?
When you look at Andrew Scheer, you get the sense that he's obfuscating, avoiding, just trying to avoid being pinned down on anything, just trying to survive in the hopes that Justin Trudeau will fail and the prime ministership will fall into his lap by default.
I'm not referring to his actual physical look.
I'm talking about his style and his vibe.
He's just avoiding.
So he's not doing anything or saying anything controversial, is what I mean.
Which is the real reason that Andrew Scheer is banning us from his convention.
It's not that he really disagrees with us.
As you probably know, Andrew Scheer's campaign manager, this guy, Hamish Marshall, was the co-founder of The Rebel.
And Andrew Scheer came on The Rebel during his leadership campaign.
There's him talking with me.
Talked with our other reporters too.
It's just that he's so much more risk-averse now because he already got what he wanted from our viewers, their votes.
And now that he's won the leadership, he's more concerned with other people, namely not offending the Wendy Mesleys or the Paul Wellses of the world.
Your campaign manager now, Hamish Marshall, was directly involved with building Rebel.
Why did you choose him to run the campaign?
Are you not at all worried about messages of sending out now?
I mean, that Rebel has gone so far down this white supremacist path.
Why is he working with people who were associated with rebel media and Ezra Levant?
Your campaign director Hamish Marshall was a director of the corporation until he became your campaign director.
Stephen Taylor is working on social media with you, was also associated with Rebel Media.
To what point are you taking on the baggage of rebel media when you work with folks like that?
Could you imagine submitting to that?
Anyways, so with that preamble asides, Let me give you my own thoughts on what Andrew Scheer should actually do.
Not just my criticisms or my analysis of what he's doing wrong.
That's easy.
I mean, that is helpful a little bit, I guess.
You have to diagnose the problem.
But then you've got to give a prescription.
What advice would I give Andrew Scheer if he wasn't blackballing us from his convention?
I'll tell you, because I've received more phone calls and emails and private messages on Twitter from conservative MPs and staff in the past week or so than I have in the past year, including senior allies of Scheer, including senior MPs in his shadow cabinet, and including senior party staff, frankly people who Scheer has told not to come on our TV show.
And let me say the first thing about all of this, about all these people.
None of them are mutinying.
None of them are looking to throw Scheer overboard.
This is not a Patrick Brown moment yet.
Patrick Brown did so many outrageous things and had such a huge double life.
He truly was a ticking time bomb of personal scandals.
And he was running the party so poorly, so much political corruption, so many shenanigans, even just in the nominations.
So he really had to be thrown overboard, and thank God he was.
That's not the case with Andrew Scheer.
He is not immoral.
Like Patrick Brown, he has no affairs with young girls.
Like Patrick Brown, he has no corrupt business deals.
What you see is what you get with Andrew Scheer.
He's the anti-charisma guy.
He's the anti-scandal guy.
In that way, he reminds me of Preston Manning, which is a good thing.
So there's no emergency reason to throw Andrew Scheer overboard, as there was with Patrick Brown, and there was no long-standing reason to either, like with Patrick Brown's corruption.
And more to the point, Andrew Scheer's only been the leader for 15 months, and the election is less than a year away, so he still has time to improve.
And more to the point, there is no real time to replace him unless there was a Patrick Brown-style emergency, which I don't think is going to happen.
So what's notable about every single conservative insider who has approached me is that none of them want Andrew Scheer gone.
They all just really, really want him to do better than he's doing.
But the fact that they're talking to me, an outsider, about that is unusual.
As I said to one MP, why are you talking to me about this?
He's your leader, I said.
I'm not in caucus like you.
I'm not in shadow cabinet.
And seriously, what advice would I have about internal party dynamics?
That's not my thing.
But maybe that's a symptom of a problem right there.
Maybe there aren't frank enough internal discussions in the party around the shadow cabinet table, around the caucus.
Confidential, behind-closed doors conversations, no media, no staff, just heart-to-heart conversations by these MPs and senators who would say, Andrew, you got to start firing on all cylinders.
15 months have gone by and you haven't really made your mark yet.
And that's the thing.
Many of the calls and emails I've received have been sparked by Maxime Bernier.
And these are not Bernier campaigners or loyalists.
These aren't people who want to do over, at least not before the next federal election.
It's sort of the opposite.
It's people who see the ease and skill with which Bernier is tackling issues that really connect with the conservative base and expand that base and take on the media party and dominate the national conversation and hold Trudeau to account and rev up party loyalists as in leadership that is conservative.
These people who call me want both of those things.
They want someone who leads, someone who inspires, but they want it to be done in a principled way too.
It's tough to do both things, right?
So it's a wistful complaint.
They don't want to replace Scheer with Bernier because that's logistically and temporally impossible now, other than through a crisis like Patrick Brown.
It would shake the party to its foundations to do that now.
No one wants that now.
It would look like a mess now.
So what do you do?
How do you solve a problem like Andrew Scheer?
Well, step one, talk about it internally.
If you're so desperate as an MP or a senior staffer to have a conversation about Andrew Scheer that you're calling an outsider like me, that's a bad sign that you don't have a healthy internal conversation in the party.
And if you're talking to me, I'm guessing you're also talking to other journalists too.
If I'm being included in this Ottawa gossip, you can bet that other less sympathetic journalists are being included too, especially the more gossip-driven journalists like John Iverson of Postmedia, for example.
But the second obvious point, besides the fact that Scheer is actually not cementing the support of his own caucus, I don't think he's talking to his MPs or senators often though, is that the party is riveted there, fascinated, as we all are, by Maxime Bernier.
And that's not going to stop.
As I said to everyone who called me or emailed me, Bernier isn't actually really doing anything abnormal.
He's not a shadow cabinet critic.
If he were, you'd expect him to focus all his energies on that portfolio and be quiet about other things.
I mean, he used to be, but Andrew Scheer fired him for talking about supply management.
Okay, fine.
So you fire one of your most talented MPs.
And you think he's just going to sit there like a potted plant?
Of course he's free to opine on the stories of the day.
He's not mowing any other critics' lawns in particular when he talks about Trudeau's diversity is our strength blather.
I mean, that's so general, that's so generic.
It's fair game for any MP to talk about it, don't you think?
I mean, the CBC smeared Bernier the other day.
Remember that?
So, of course, Bernier fired back at the CBC, and it was magnificent.
He called them fake news.
He called them despicable.
Again, there's nothing wrong with him doing that.
Any member of parliament who was attacked by the CBC can and should say that.
That's not out of line.
I suppose Bernier was touching on immigration issues a bit, but not particularly at odds with the party's official line on the subject.
He was just more clear and more powerful in his communication style than most of them are.
I see that this morning, the official critic for immigration, Michelle Rempel, had a press conference.
Bernier noted rather roughly that it was her and other colleagues who were criticizing him just a few days ago for being too aggressive.
Now they're playing catch-up to him.
I say again, he's got more energy.
He comes across as having charisma and leadership.
So as I've told any conservative who asked me, one of Scheer's challenges is, what are you going to do with Bernier?
This is not the first time in history that a prime minister or a party leader has had an ambitious rival in caucus.
What To Do With Bernier?00:10:55
In fact, it's rare that they don't.
Yesterday, Lauren Gunter and I talked about how Jean-Cretchen and Paul Martin quarreled for a decade.
Now we focused on how Jean-Cretchen finally handed over the reins of the Liberal Party to Paul Martin, but put in various poison pills to wreck it for his successor.
But the real lesson is that Jean Cretchen managed to harness Paul Martin's strengths and keep it together for a decade before it all fell apart.
He knew Paul Martin was ambitious and connected and had a strong reputation with certain constituencies, and Cretchin found a modus vivendi, a way of living together with his rival that was successful.
Isn't that in a way one of Cretchin's most significant achievements?
Only in that it allowed Cretchin to have any of his other achievements.
Imagine if instead Paul Martin would have bolted from the party or behaved in a mutinous manner.
I mean he did to some degree.
He built up a rival organization for years.
He slowly colonized all the levers of the party, but he kept his political gunpowder dry for a decade.
He didn't shoot at Jean Cretchen until the very end when he felt their agreement had expired.
Isn't that the analogy here?
Isn't Andrew Scheer's first job to unify his party behind him, to not only make himself the true leader in reality as well as in form, but to find out how to deploy Maxime Bernier's strengths to the benefit of the party itself, to Scheer's own benefit?
Yes, yes, we know they have policy differences, especially on supply management.
How odd that Andrew Scheer would let that obscure, weird issue derail party unity, especially when, what?
80% of the party knows that supply management of dairy cartels is the wrong policy.
It's weird and stubborn of Andrew Scheer.
Imagine making a deal with Bernier on that.
Imagine if Andrew Scheer made a deal with Bernier and let Bernier himself be the point man on that file.
As in, imagine if Andrew Scheer said to Bernier, okay, tough guy, you want the Conservative Party to take on the Quebec dairy industry?
Literally the sacred cows, sacred milk cows of Canada?
Fine.
Imagine Andrew Scheer saying, fine, I agree with your idea, I accept your idea, but you have to execute it.
Your job, Maxime Bernier, is to come up with the new policy and to be the salesman for it in Quebec.
Go in and do the heavy lifting yourself.
You want it?
You got it.
Would that be smart?
I think it would be.
It would take away Bernier's policy grievance.
It would give Bernier a very busy job to keep him occupied.
And it would actually use Bernier's talents and skills, his Quebec reputation, his French fluency, his confidence and knowledge in the file.
And if Andrew Scheer really thinks it's political suicide to take on the dairy cartel, why what better gift to give to his rival Bernier?
Now I'm just brainstorming here, but really, Jean-Cretchen put Bay Street Paul Martin onto the toughest file he could, selling the GST to the country after promising he'd scrap it, reducing the deficit, fixing the country's finances.
That was probably the toughest job in the government in the time.
So Cretchin not only relied on Martin's talents, but he kept him busy and gave him the tough job.
Isn't that an obvious template here?
There are other scenarios, of course.
I don't know, make Bernier the co-leader for Quebec.
Give him the title deputy leader.
Give him the job of going around Quebec and digging up the political backyards of liberals and the NDP.
Again, what a great fit, including Bernier's views on immigration and culture.
Because remember from the Angus Reed poll we saw yesterday, Quebec is the province where literally 51% of people want less immigration.
It's the highest number in Canada after Saskatchewan.
Bernier is a total fit for that file.
While the Anglo press in Canada has been savaging Bernier, the Quebec press is almost unanimous in support of him.
Great.
Send Maxime Bernier out with the mission of winning 25 seats in Quebec, 35 seats?
Why not?
Go take them from the NDP.
The Bloc Québécois is dead.
Look at how Justin Trudeau badmouths old stock Quebecois.
I think Maxime Bernier could do it.
Now that's just brainstorming.
Cut a deal with Bernier.
Use his talents.
You don't like it?
You don't want to compromise with your rival?
That's odd.
Andrew Scheer compromises on everything else.
He talks to the media who hate him.
He submits to them.
He submits to dairy farmers, whatever, but he won't compromise with the guy who won 49% of the vote last year and who has a larger public presence than he does.
You'd think compromise would be Scheer's strength.
It's what he did for a decade as the Speaker of the House.
As I told any conservatives who complains to me, there are two other options with Maxime Bernier.
You could fire him from the party.
Good luck with that.
That would cause a rift.
That would demoralize the party, de-energize it, especially in Quebec.
I mean, it's one thing for Andrew Scheer to bravely ban the grassroots rebel, but to ban Bernier, that's really telling 49% of the party to leave.
And on what basis?
Because he's cutting into the leader's celebrity action?
Because he's taking the media limelight.
Sorry, media attention is earned.
It's not given.
Andrew Scheer won't get any more media coverage if he sacks Bernier, the opposite.
Bernier will completely be unleashed.
He will not be restrained at all.
He'll be the daily go-to source for the media on anything, including to criticize Scheer.
I mean, I guess Scheer will get more pressed than he ever has before, but it'll all be about how the party is splitting up, how he's dividing the right after Stephen Harper United.
So yeah, firing Bernier probably won't work.
And Andrew Scheer's default policy has been what you'd expect, passivity, inertia, indecision, hesitation.
He's just closing his eyes and ears and hoping that all this bad stuff will go away.
That's called denial, and it's not working very well, is it?
So the first solution for Andrew Scheer is to strike a deal with Bernier like Chris Chen did with Martin.
And if he can't do that, doesn't that say something about his abilities as a political leader?
If he can't handle Bernier, how could he as a future prime minister, how could he handle bigger, tougher challenges like, oh, I don't know, John Horgan, the calcitrant premier of British Columbia, who's blocking the pipeline unconstitutionally?
Or how could he possibly handle Donald Trump in a NAFTA negotiation?
If you can't handle Bernier, you can't handle Horgan or Trump.
It's a test.
You bet it is.
I think there's still a lot of goodwill towards Andrew Scheer in the party.
I still have good will towards him too, despite how he's treated us here at the Rebel.
Of course, we want him to win over Justin Trudeau.
Of course, we don't want Bernier to split the party.
That would just give the Liberals another 10 years in power.
But Andrew Scheer, the conservative leader, has not been very conservative, and he has not shown a lot of leadership.
Politics can be a centrifugal force.
You know what I mean?
Things falling apart.
Stresses and grievances and issues can pull a party apart, can pull a caucus apart for sure, and grassroots members.
The leader, his job is to hold them together through a common sense of mission and action and through example and by inspiration.
I don't think Andrew Scheer is ticking those boxes yet.
When senior party staffers working in his office are contacting me telling me they agree with their criticism of our criticism of Andrew Scheer, that's not good.
His own inner team isn't even gelled yet.
How are you going to inspire the country if you can't inspire your own staff?
But let me end with my long-standing criticism because I think it all goes, well, I mean, it goes to all these other issues, and that's Andrew Scheer's fear of the mainstream media.
I had a phone call with a very senior member of Scheer's team.
I'm not going to say who.
And I said, why are you guys boycotting us?
Why are you banning us?
Why are you telling all your MPs not even to talk to us?
And forget about me.
I mean, I'd stop personal.
How about talk to David Menzies?
How about talk to Sheila Gunrid?
How about talk to any of our people?
And my senior, senior connection said, because if we interact with you, the rebel, that in itself becomes a media story for a whole week.
And it's true, he's right.
All those gossips on the lobbyist panels, on the TV shows, they would go nuts.
The Trudeau fangirls of the CBC would go nuts.
What my connection said to me is completely true, but it is also completely pitiful and not conservative and not leaderly.
It's an admission that Andrew Scheer and the people around him care more about what the gossip girls say than they do about their own internal compass, about what's right and wrong and how to govern, let alone their own party's base.
On any given day, we hear the Rebel have more viewers than the CBC's show The National, their flagship news show, has on TV.
So it's not even like the CBC is a real threat.
And those viewers, they're not voting conservative anyway.
So the only threat here is psychologically, emotionally, Andrew Scheer is actually being bullied, being pushed around, being peer-pressured by a small group of people who hate him.
It's a kind of battered women's syndrome, kind of Stockholm syndrome.
He keeps thinking that maybe if he just appeases the CBC and McLean's and the Toronto Star and the Huffington Post, maybe they'll really like him and be kind to him next time.
And maybe even they'll cheer for him in the next election.
No, that's not going to happen.
Other than the Toronto Sun, the Rebel will be the only media in the country who gives him and the Conservatives a fair shake.
But as long as he seeks the approval of the media party, he will be hamstrung.
He won't be able to clearly articulate conservative ideas.
He won't be able to take on sacred cows like the Quebec dairy cartel.
He'll be afraid of dealing with conservative leaders like Maxime Bernier.
And he'll continue his weird boycott of the biggest conservative media outlet in Canada.
Omar Cotter's Paradox00:09:01
That's my advice for Andrew Scheer.
I've given it to, I don't know, half a dozen of his MPs and senators and staff.
I wonder what they'll do with that.
Maybe I'm wrong.
I mean, after all, I'm just an armchair critic, right?
Easy for me to say these things.
But if I'm wrong, can you tell me a better strategy?
In fact, can you discern any strategy at all other than the old Patrick Brown ropodope?
Stay quiet, stay quiet, take the pounding from the CBC and just hope it all works out to plan.
Stay with us for more.
How would you feel if Paul Bernardo or Carla Homolka had a pleasant tour of Parliament Hill?
What if they went inside the buildings?
Would you ask what they were doing, who they met with?
Why would Paul Bernardo be allowed on Parliament Hill?
Well, that's a question I think we should be asking about another convicted, confessed, sadistic murderer named Omar Cotter.
And look at this photo.
That's Omar Cotter and his wife having a happy walk on Parliament Hill.
Joining us now to talk about this is our friend Andrew Lawton, who is a fellow with the True North Initiative and a columnist with loony politics.
Andrew, talk about loony politics.
Omar Cotter is a sort of hero to the left, and I think there's a bubble in Ottawa that actually thinks he's a good guy.
Justin Trudeau's part of that bubble.
He gave him a public apology and $10.5 million.
Do you think my analogy of Carlo Hamalca or Paul Bernardo is too much?
Or do you think that the truth is somewhere in between?
How would you characterize Omar Cotter and his visit to the parliament?
Well, quite frankly, Ezra, the comparison I would make is if, let's say in an alternate universe, Michael Z. Hoff Bebo were alive and free, a man who killed a soldier in the name of Islamic terrorism.
If Michael Zeehof Bebo were alive today and were allowed to walk on Parliament Hill, that would be reprehensible to people.
And it's not a hugely distinct scenario here that Omar Cotter, who killed a soldier, confessed to it, and on the record is convicted.
I mean, we're not even talking about one of these weird scenarios where let's say he got off.
I mean, he was convicted, and that is on the books today.
So when you're going into any secure government facility, whether it's Parliament Hill, whether it's the Toronto Courthouse, or whether it's the county clerk's office in rural Alberta, there are risks associated with letting security be so lax.
And Parliament Hill, especially after the 2014 shooting, has clamped down a lot.
It's a lot more secure there than when I worked there almost a decade ago.
And the fact that anyone with a murder conviction, especially Omar Cotter, should be allowed to just waltz in there, should concern Canadians.
Yeah.
Well, I want to show you three images in a row.
The first one is Jazz Paul Atwall.
He is a convicted terrorist.
That's what the judge called him.
He was convicted of attempting to assassinate a cabinet minister from India who happened to be on vacation in Canada.
So that's terrorist number one.
Here's another image of Joshua Boyle, who was married at one point to Omar Cotter's sister and took his subsequent wife to Afghanistan where they were captured or met up with the Taliban.
And he's currently being charged with a variety of serious criminal offenses in Ottawa.
So that's the second person affiliated with terrorism that Justin Trudeau has met with.
And now we have Omar Cotter on Parliament Hill.
I think it raises the real question, Andrew, who did he meet there?
Because it's possible to tour Parliament and just look at it like a building.
I mean, you could walk through it, you could look at the view.
But let me quote to you from the Globe and Mail story on this subject, because I find this distressing.
This is an official quote from the Prime Minister's office.
The Prime Minister did not meet with Omar Cotter, nor did any senior ministers, PMO Prime Minister's Office spokeswoman Eleanor Catanaro said.
It's shocking, Andrew, that we actually need confirmation that Trudeau didn't meet with a terrorist murderer, but everyone knows he very well could have, given his affection for terrorists.
But what struck me, and put that up just for one more second, what struck me is look at the use of the lawyerly wiggle words.
No senior ministers met with him.
Doesn't that immediately ask the question, well, did any junior ministers meet with him?
Did anybody get together?
When you need to start defining and when you need to start qualifying, I would say if I were Justin Trudeau, he didn't meet with anyone connected to our party, anyone connected to our government at all.
And that would be certainly what I'd hope was the case.
But as you mentioned earlier, Ezra, Omar Cotter has cemented himself as somewhat of a folk hero among Canada's left.
And despite Justin Trudeau's proclamation that the $10.5 million was just this regrettable inevitability, it was something that he chose to do.
They chose to go to bat for Omar Cotter.
And if he has any type of audience with a representative of the federal government or even a backbench MP, that is something that at the very least Canadians should know about.
And if he and his wife were just deciding to take a stroll on Parliament Hill just out of a civic pride or something like that, I don't know if he has any, then that's one thing, but it's quite another that him getting into the building had no checks and balances or the worst case scenario, which is that it did get reviewed and someone said, yes, he's good to enter.
And that would happen if there was a meeting on the Hill.
Yeah.
What I'm curious about also is Omar Cotter, I think, lives in Edmonton.
I'm not sure.
I know that's where he went to school.
That's where some of his legal cases were.
So to get from Edmonton to Ottawa, there's different ways to do it.
You can drive, but most people would fly.
I'm curious if Omar Cotter is on Canada's no-fly list.
He's a convicted, confessed al-Qaeda terrorist.
I don't know what the risk of him reoffending is.
I know it's not zero.
I wonder if he flew on WestJet or Air Canada.
And I wonder what the other passengers felt like being on an airplane, if he did indeed fly, with an al-Qaeda terrorist.
I just, the fact that he can go into our House of Parliament, and I suspect he did fly, shows the moral inversion of our world today.
What do you think?
Yeah, and I would be very careful for a lot of people weighing in here.
This is not me saying that I think Omar Cotter is posing a risk on Parliament or posing a risk on an airline.
But as I mentioned earlier, he is on the record.
He is on the record a convicted felon, a convicted murderer and a convicted murderer of a terror-related offense.
That should mean something when it comes to security.
And the thing about Parliament Hill in particular and airline security is that the people that truly suffer from all of these bizarre and absurd measures are typically people that cause no harm to anyone else.
When little old ladies have to take off their shoes and people get patted down and groped and all that and at Parliament Hill where you can sometimes be waiting hours to get through.
So the fact that all of these measures are there for everyone, but someone who is a confessed murderer can just waltz right in there is exactly the problem.
And again, this is not me saying that Cotter poses a threat, but if that is where the bar is set, that even being convicted of a terror-related offense doesn't keep you on the front lawn instead of inside Parliament, there is a big security discussion we need to have here.
Yeah.
Well, I find it troubling.
And I know that if the shoe were on the other foot, if let's say a neo-Nazi, not even a violent terrorist, because the phenomenon of white terrorism, I can't even think of it.
I mean, I suppose you could talk about the IRA in Northern Ireland back in the day or the mafia or something, the Red Brigades.
But if some right-wing white supremacist like Richard Spencer came to Ottawa and was photographed on Parliament Hill, you know that the Globe and Mail would literally phone every single MP's office and say, did you meet with him?
Did you meet with him?
Even though Richard Spencer, although he's a racist, he's not a terrorist.
There is no such curiosity here.
I wonder if Ikra Khaled or Omar Al Jabra or other lower-level MPs or staff met with Omar Cotter.
There's no such curiosity at the Globe and Mail.
The Big Question00:02:31
Last word to you, Andrew, what do you think?
Yeah, and I think that's the big question here.
I mean, what the security procedures are, what it actually takes to get banned from entering is a big question here.
I would also direct people to the language used by Dennis Edney, the former lawyer of Omar Carter, who said that anyone who raises an issue with this, so you and I right now, Ezra and the Conservative senator Leo Husakus, anyone who takes issue with this is doing it from a place of Islamophobia.
So we didn't know one of the unintended consequences of M103 is even terrorists should be allowed to waltz into parliament.
That's the true Canadian dream there.
Yeah, and if you complain about terrorism, well, you're obviously just racist.
Well, Andrew, it's great to have you back on the show.
You keep up the fight.
Likewise.
All right, there you have it.
Andrew Lawton, he's a fellow with the True North Initiative, along with our friend Candace Malcolm, and he's a columnist with Looney Politics.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
What does election interference look like in the age of high tech?
Well, if you listen to liberals, it looks like Russian trolls brainwashing the state of Wisconsin not to vote for Hillary Clinton or something like that.
That's the theory, at least.
And of course, Robert Mueller has been investigating this Russian collusion for more than a year and a half and has found nothing other than some minor cases of tax evasion unrelated to the election.
But I think we can take a guess at what actual election meddling through technology looks like because it's happening before our very eyes every day.
And I bring your attention to a new article on Breitbart.com written by our friend Alan Bokari.
Let me tell you the title of it.
It's called This is What Election Interference Actually Looks Like.
And let me read to you the first sentence of it.
The purge of the right on social media was once a slow trickle with high-profile bans happening only occasionally and then subsiding with just three months until the midterm elections.
The masters of the universe in Silicon Valley have turned online censorship into a cascade.
And joining us now via Skype from the United Kingdom is our friend Alan Bokhari, who's the senior technology correspondent for Breitbart.com.
Alan, you've really brought together a lot of strings and threads that we've been talking about for months, haven't you?
They're really picking up the tempo as we get closer to the November elections.
They absolutely are.
Russian Influence Tactics00:05:24
And this whole thing we've been hearing from the Democrats over the past year about election interference, even anti-Trump political psychologists admit that the fake news and propaganda put out by Russian bots had virtually no impact on the election because the small amount of ads they were putting out through Facebook, it was a tiny amount.
They were only reaching voters.
They were only reaching partisan voters, voters who had already made up their mind.
So it wasn't actually reaching undecided voters.
The main, I think the best theory with regards to Russia is that the reason they make these sort of very small investments in Facebook ads around election time is to is to create sort of panic and discord among polit in U.S. politics rather than influence voters directly.
And in terms of creating panic, we know Russia succeeded, but largely thanks to the Democrats, they didn't actually impact voters with propaganda.
There's one famous case on Facebook, and this comes from the vice president of advertising himself, who reviewed all the Russian ads, and he gave an example, I think it was in Texas, of Russian Facebook ads promoting literally both sides of a street rally.
So you had two street rallies competing against each other, and only a few dozen people attended.
Russia paid for both sides.
It was a trivial little bump in the road.
And it was in Texas, which of course is as red a state as it gets.
It's weird, but to say that that influenced a $2 billion election campaign is a joke.
Yeah, it misses the point.
The reason they fund both sides is to create uncertainty and panic in political culture.
So if Russia's funding both sides of a rally, then both sides of the rally will sort of not treat each other in good faith, to accuse each other of being paid off by the Russians.
Democrats and Republicans will both start to doubt their own movements and wonder if their movements are legitimate.
So it has all these other effects, but it doesn't really affect voters.
It isn't really designed to favor one side of an election.
That sort of misses the point.
Well, what is designed to sign up to what does seem to be designed to favor one side of an election is what Facebook and Twitter and all these other social platforms are doing on their own.
These mass suspensions of conservatives.
Well, I mean, our former colleague, Gavin McInnes, who's gone on to CRTV, and we still keep in touch with him.
I mean, he's hilarious, he's crazy, he's a gonzo journalist, he's a comedian, but he's also, underneath it all, a conservative folk philosopher.
And I mean, he's an interesting character, but I would say he's similar to liberal late-night comedy hosts who they've got a shtick, they have some talents, but underneath it all, they have an ideology.
And, you know, they go too far, they get crazy, I mean, they do things that are rude, but underneath it, they have a liberal point of view.
I see that as Gavin on the right, but he was deleted, and he had more than about a quarter million followers.
And all of his followers who call themselves the Proud Boys, they had all of their accounts deleted at once.
No notice, no warning, no appeal, no explanation.
Millions of followers amongst all of his Proud Boys combined.
That level of censorship, when you're in the million censorship mark, that has more effect than anything the Russians did.
That's my view.
And that's just one guy.
That doesn't even talk about other voices on the right.
I mean, Alex Jones, perhaps the biggest censorship target of them all.
He had 2.4 million YouTube subscribers.
Alan, we've been working here at the Rebel for three and a half years.
We're very proud that we just hit the million subscriber mark on YouTube.
Alex Jones had 2.4 million.
And I'm not here to endorse all his messages.
I think he's an entertainer also.
There's a whole level of humor and showbiz and shtick there too.
But again, underneath it, he has the ideology of skepticism and dissent and being distrustful of big government.
And I think there's some value there.
Poof.
Gone.
2.4 million followers gone.
That's bigger than anything Russia ever did.
Yeah, and these Silicon Valley giants, these masters of the universe, have no respect for alternative media and alternative journalists.
They even banned one of our graphics artists who does work for it at Breitbart, who actually designed the header image on that article.
And as he said, what this really does before an election is severely hamper, almost cripple the right's ability to organize online.
I mean, the digital space is where sort of grassroots movements are now sort of incubated and built.
And as you said, they didn't just ban Gavin McInnes, they banned his relationship that he founded, the Crowdboys.
You know, this is a pro-Western organization, and they banned it for ridiculous reasons.
They said it supports violence.
It completely disavows violence.
There have actually been many instances where the Crowd Boys have been attacked by Antifa, by far-left activists, and have had to defend themselves, but they certainly don't advocate violence themselves.
Reasons for Banning Journalism00:09:33
Yeah.
Sort of like the Guardian Angels that would go in New York subways in the 80s.
They would be to stand against the muggers.
It would be shocking to have the guardian angels arrested, but not the muggers.
I want to ask you a question.
Have you, I mean, you study this more than anyone else I know.
Have you, in all of your travels, in all of your research, in all of your surfing the net, come across a liberal or leftist who has been censored?
Let's show the image from your story here.
I mean, we know some of these faces.
We see Tommy Robinson, one of our alumni.
We see Lauren Southern.
I mean, it's funny how many rebels or rebel alumni have been censored.
We see the rebel reunion party.
That's right.
We see Robert Spencer in the top there.
So lots of conservative figures.
Have you ever encountered a liberal figure who has been censored from social media?
Even one.
Can you name even one?
Well, it's an interesting question because it depends how we define liberal and left-wing.
So you look at someone like Sarah Jeong, who's been embraced by the liberal establishment, you know, given a cushy job at the New York Times.
She made dozens upon dozens of tweets that would clearly violate Twitter's hate speech rules if they were said about any other group.
But she said that she made these comments about white people.
So not only is she allowed to keep her account on Twitter, she's actually verified and not even asked to delete tweets where she says things like, you know, white people are groveling goblins.
Their opinions are like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.
She says she feels joy when being cruel to old white men.
Twitter hasn't even asked her to delete these tweets and they've verified her account now.
So that's a perfect example of Twitter's double standards.
However, there actually was an example a few days ago, just right after I published this article, of let's see if I can find her name.
It's Sarah Johnston, Caitlin Johnston.
It was an anti-war left-wing journalist.
Not a very big name.
The name actually escapes me.
But they were anti-war.
They said something unkind about John McCain.
I don't think it qualified as hate speech.
And I think they were then submitted to a mass flagging campaign.
So this is like an anti-war, anti-establishment journalist, anti-Hillary Clinton, I would say, sort of in the mold of Glenn Greenwald, but a little bit less high profile.
And she had her account banned on Twitter for a few days, eventually reversed thanks to press coverage.
But there have certainly been some examples.
But I think it's mainly happening to the anti-establishment left rather than the mainstream.
Right, that's a very good point.
I want to ask you, because Donald Trump has finally weighed in.
He had a series of tweets the other day and we showed them on the screen.
I thought they were very thoughtful.
He said that he would rather abide the fake news of CNN than to enter into a world of censorship because he said he takes CNN with a grain of salt or he doesn't watch it at all.
He would prefer that world than the world of censorship.
But he clearly was criticizing the censorship by the social media companies.
I'm glad that Donald Trump has finally weighed in on the subject, but so far he's just outlined his philosophy and his sort of sentiments or feelings.
He has not announced any legislation, any executive orders, any prosecutions, any commissions.
He's just mused, and he's a great Twitter muser, and a lot happens sometimes from his musings.
It's his musings, I think, that led to the détente with North Korea.
So let's not poo-poo his musings, but do you think that his musings will be followed up with any action, especially given how imminent the midterm elections are?
Well, a lot of people who know more about what's going on in the White House than me say there's going to be some sort of action.
Some are even saying there might be an executive order.
It's impossible to know that for sure unless you're in Trump's head.
Certainly he'll be having some pushback from sort of free market advocates to say you should just leave these companies alone, they're private companies, which would be a huge mistake, in my opinion, for Republicans if they want to actually survive the midterms and indeed future elections, because the amount of power these companies have to swing elections is vast and we're already seeing it deployed.
I think actually what Donald Trump said yesterday's rally was quite smart.
He spoke of how the internet has sort of turned everyone into journalists.
His specific words were everyone sort of their own newspaper now.
And that's absolutely correct.
And actually liberal news organizations like CNN and The Guardian before 2015 and 2016 used to celebrate the fact that the web had unlocked this era of citizen journalism where anyone with a Twitter account could report the news.
Of course, now they've turned on that idea and they want to reinstall themselves as the gatekeepers of these social media platforms where they're favored and where other users have their content downranked and given a low trustworthiness ranking.
But Donald Trump was actually making a point that these news organizations themselves used to make, which is that the internet has turned everyone into a citizen journalist.
And Trump's point is that if everyone's a citizen journalist, then everyone should have the same free speech rights.
CNN should not have more rights to propagate their message than an average Joe.
I saw that comment by him.
It was very thoughtful.
And what it did is it captured some of the only free speech energy in the media is for they themselves.
They don't care.
The legacy media deeply cares about free speech for them.
And that's where it ends.
So Trump was very thoughtful.
He said, well, we're all have the same status as you legacy media types.
Anyone with a cell phone camera?
That was very clever.
He's a smart man.
I hope he takes action soon.
I want to leave with one last question.
I think it was one of your colleagues from the UK, in fact, Tomlinson, if I'm not mistaken, I'm sorry, I forget his name right now, or Montgomery, who had their Airbnb account cancelled for political reasons.
Does this ring a bell?
Do you know what I'm talking about?
I think it's a fellow Breitbart journalist.
And forgive me, Jack Montgomery, that's who it was.
Just Airbnb, which for our viewers who don't know, you can rent out a spare room in your house for $100.
And it's basically like Uber, but for spare rooms.
And you can rent someone else's room.
So it's a cheap alternative to hotels.
And it allows people to make money.
So Jack Montgomery had his Airbnb account suspended for political reasons.
He raised a fuss and they backed off.
But what scares me, Alan, is not just the political censorship, but when they start going after your things that are unrelated to politics whatsoever, Airbnb, they went after Robert Spencer's MasterCard account.
That's terrifying because that destroys your ability to live a normal life.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I think the social media actually feeds into a much wider, more serious problem, which is the political segregation of the entire economy.
What's happening is that we have far-left radicals who are pressuring big corporations to essentially make conservatives and Trump supporters second-class citizens who can't access basic services like bank accounts and spare rooms and social media.
Even restaurants, we had Red Hen, that restaurant in Virginia, kicking out Sarah Sanders because she worked for the Trump administration.
I've actually heard the other day of a comic book store kicking out a guy who supports Comics Gate, which is sort of like this gaming eight-star movement around comic books.
So there's a real, the partisan divide in America is extremely strong at the moment, and it's now being outsourced into the economy because, you know, America has a First Amendment.
You aren't allowed to take control of the government and just censor people.
And in any case, the left doesn't have control of the government.
So what they're doing is they're trying to take over these huge corporations instead, which now have so much control over our lives and aren't really bound by any rules which say they can't discriminate on the basis of politics.
So I think this is one of the reasons why the James DeMore case is so important because it's about political discrimination.
It's about whether a company can fire you for political reasons.
I think there needs to also be a conversation about whether companies can just deny you service for political reasons, whether that's a social media company or MasterCard or Airbnb.
Very interesting.
And of course, you're talking about James DeMore.
He's the former Google employee who was fired for daring to criticize their obscure gender theories.
Political Discrimination Debate00:04:48
Alan, it's great to catch up with you.
I don't say it just to flatter you.
I truly believe that your journalism on this subject is not only the best journalism in its field, but this field of journalism.
Studying how Silicon Valley has become politically radicalized and weaponized, I believe it is the leading issue of our day because through social media we perceive the world and react to the world.
And that is why it's the choke point for those who seek to cut us off and affect our politics.
I'm really glad that you do what you do.
And it's always a pleasure to have 15 minutes of your time on the show.
Thanks for being here today.
Thanks, Ezra.
Great to be on.
All right.
There you have it.
Alan Bokari.
He is the senior technology correspondent for Breitbart.com.
And I encourage you to read his latest article on Breitbart.
It's called, This is What Election Interference Actually Looks Like.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back.
On the direction of the Conservative Party under Andrew Scheer, Peter writes, the worst thing right-leaning voters can do this coming federal election is to not vote.
The Conservative Party of Canada is the one that can boot the current narcissistic fool out of the office, and the CPC needs all the votes they can get.
We have to get rid of Trudeau 2.0.
You are correct, Peter.
And what I really think is going on is that Andrew Scheer says, all right, I've got the right wingers.
I've got the rebel.
First of all, I had them when I needed them to win the leadership.
And now, really, where are they going to go?
They got no one else to vote for.
That's the Patrick Brown strategy.
Win the party leadership by tacking to the right, and then go back to the left and try and win the approval of the CBC and the star.
Yeah, I think the problem with that is, first of all, Maxine Bernier is actually better known and better liked in the party than Andrew Scheer, who's still a relative unknown.
And second of all, you could just flip off the energy enthusiasm, volunteering another commitment from the party base.
And maybe you have lower voter turnout.
And maybe people just don't put in the energy to convince people.
I love this Andrew Scheer at parties, over coffee, at the office.
Maybe you just flick off the lights in 100,000 warriors who would have been volunteer ambassadors for the party.
So demoralizing your base, it's not a good idea, especially when you're starting behind 5% to 10% in the polls, as Andrew Scheer is.
Let me throw that at you.
Doug Ford just won the election in Ontario.
Why isn't Andrew Scheer leading in Ontario?
Jason Kenney is about to crush it in Alberta.
Well, of course, Scheer's leading in Alberta.
But how about in Quebec, where you have a provincial party that's going hardline against immigration?
If Andrew Scheer is not going to lead after all of Justin Trudeau's gaffes and these successes on the provincial level, do you think he's going to be in the lead in the polls when the Liberals finally rev up their campaign?
He's got to get a better strategy than he has now.
Liza writes, the conversation with Lauren was very good.
Wishing isn't going to make Bernier leader as much as I wanted to be so.
But Scheer is walking a very thin line with his base and should start paying attention.
Banning the rebel is going to be the last straw for a lot of conservatives.
You could be right.
You could be right.
And look, we're not a political party and I'm not a political leader and I don't have to make the decisions with the responsibilities of Andrew Scheer.
I laid out some strategies in my monologue today.
I said, number one, you're obviously not talking to your MPs, senators, and staff enough if they're calling me.
And if they're calling me, they're gossiping to other people too.
Number two, if you can't deal with Maxime Bernier the same way that Cretchen dealt with Paul Martin, then you're not quite ready to be prime minister.
Because dealing with rivals and challenges is what prime ministers do every day.
Cretchen managed to deploy Paul Martin to the benefit of Jean Cretchen and to the benefit of the country for a decade.
Surely, a man with Maxime Bernier's talents and geographical support and popular support can be put to a use that he accepts and that's good for the party and that's good for the country.
And so far Andrew Scheer's just avoiding all that.
And my third piece of advice, and you know it, is he's got to stop caring about what the CBC and the star says because it's hampering his ability to think clearly.
That's my advice.
And I don't think it's self-serving advice.
I think that's genuine advice and it's frankly what I told these Tories who called me up.
On my monologue yesterday about that new Angus Reid poll revealing that only 6% of Canadians want more immigration, Paul writes, no more fake refugees.
Japan's Refugee Camp Efforts00:02:31
There are people being slaughtered in the Middle East who are being denied refugee status.
Yeah, I think you're talking about Christian Arabs and I think you're talking about Yazidis.
Weirdly, Justin Trudeau takes anyone from the region without sorting them between the lambs and the wolves.
He takes as many wolves as lambs.
In fact, he sort of has a ban on taking lambs, at least under Stephen Harper.
They focused on at-risk minorities, mainly Christians, and Trudeau wiped that away.
But I think the real answer is to find a solution in the region.
It makes much more sense for Syrian migrants to be repatriated to Syria, where they speak Arabic and everything from the climate to the food to the job skills to the traditions, it's their place.
It's their home.
And by the way, if you worry about economics, as anyone who pays taxes should, a dollar goes a lot further there than it does over here.
I think the answer is not to bring the Middle East's problems here or anywhere else around the world.
It's to, if we can, help out a little bit over there.
Japan, when I was in northern Iraq, I saw the government of Japan was sponsoring a refugee camp for Christians.
I saw it with my own eyes.
I saw the government of Japan logo.
Japan ain't taking Iraqis.
I think the total number of refugees that Iraq, sorry, that Japan took in the whole year was under 50.
But they'll help in Iraq.
Don't you think that's something we should consider too?
I think we need to spend some more time absorbing the million migrants we've taken in over the last three years.
Well, very interesting times.
I will be in Halifax tomorrow.
My friend David Menzies will be covering the show tomorrow.
I'll be doing a show from Halifax on Friday.
And of course, we will be putting YouTube videos up.
I don't know if Andrew Scheer is going to let us in.
I don't think he will.
I think he is much more aggressive and stubborn towards us than he is towards Justin Trudeau.
And that's just a shame.
I mean, grow up, big guy, and focus on the real prize, quarreling with the rebel.
I don't know.
I mean, maybe the cool kids like Wendy Masley and Paul Martin give you a thumbs up, but I don't think that's going to move you any closer to becoming prime minister.
Take on the big game, Justin Trudeau.
Take on the real problems, and that's your only way to win.