Paul Wells’ interview with Justin Trudeau exposed stenographic journalism, as the CBC/Maclean’s reporter avoided probing his evasive answers—like "word salad" on past assault allegations and dismissive chuckles about Marissa Shen’s murder by a Syrian refugee—despite $1.5M in government funding. Kian Bexte, The Rebel’s new Alberta reporter, reveals Calgary’s energy program ignores oil and gas, while Andrew Scheer’s Conservative convention was allegedly hijacked by the Dairy Lobby. Critics argue media outrage over Chinese-Canadian protests or Shen’s murder hinges on racial optics, not facts, and warn Trudeau’s decline may signal shifting mainstream bias. Ultimately, the episode underscores how institutional ties and ideological blind spots distort accountability in politics and media. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, I've got to show you two new clips of Justin Trudeau.
They're unbelievable.
It's September 18th 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 for why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
I want to show you a couple of new video clips of Justin Trudeau.
They say a lot about him.
One is the most impenetrable word salad, just truly a work of art, just a weird fog machine of language.
When he's asked about sexually assaulting a female reporter a few years back that he did in Creston, B.C.
The other clip is how he sort of chuckles at the murder of Marissa Shen.
He's not laughing in glee, but he chortles as he talks about it.
It's weird.
He brushes off the fact that he talks like this, brushes off the fact that he approved the accused murderer coming here from Syria as a refugee.
I'll show you both of these clips in a moment.
But that's not all these clips show.
Because the absolute passive subservience of the media party journalist who asked him the questions and accepted those answers is something to behold.
And I think it is the root of the problem.
And by that I mean for three years as prime minister and for a few years before that, Justin Trudeau has simply not faced anything close to a skeptical or critical or even independent media.
In the video clips I'll show you today, Justin Trudeau makes appalling answers and Paul Wells, the liberal journalist who interviews him, just lets it pass.
No follow-ups, no pressing for a clarification.
He just accepts it and expects the rest of us to accept it too.
I'm absolutely convinced that Justin Trudeau felt great about his answers because they got him out of two troublesome issues, the sexual assault against that female reporter and his lack of concern for crimes committed by his Syrian refugees.
So he got through it, but I think Trudeau thought he was convincing and maybe he's right that he was convincing because of course he was convincing to the media.
So that must mean he's correct.
I mean the media's a tough crowd, right?
Well no.
And it's this coddling and protecting of Trudeau and Trudeau's cabinet ministers that has insulated Trudeau and his team from the consequences of his mistakes.
And that has relieved him of any pressure to correct those mistakes, to correct his course when he's wrong.
Trudeau thinks he's fine because the media tells him he's fine.
So things continue awfully until a disaster happens like the disaster we've suddenly found ourselves in in the case of the NAFTA negotiations with the United States.
Because it literally has never dawned on the Canadian media party that Trudeau is anything other than a saint and a genius.
Remember this clip we showed you this journalist called Reshmi Nair.
She's on the state broadcaster, the CBC.
She wasn't angry when an American Republican professor pointed out that Christia Freeland had screwed things up with NAFTA.
She wasn't angry.
She was just stunned.
She had never heard that point of view before, ever.
She just never even thought the thought thinkable before.
Remember this?
The point of my article was, what in heaven's name were the Canadians thinking of in all of this?
I mean, they decided that really what was important here was things like gender equity and not the auto trade.
And they sent down Christia Freeland to negotiate.
And she went out of her way to convey her contempt for Trump.
And that just struck me as about the stupidest thing you could do.
Unless, of course, you would be just as happy to see the whole thing fail.
Convey her, sorry, can you give that to me again?
What example do you have of the minister expressing her views on Donald Trump?
That's my point.
The Canadian media party says Trudeau is amazing, and they think Christia Freeland is amazing.
I mean, you saw the reaction by the Fancy Pants establishment in Toronto earlier this month when Chrystia Freeland attempted a crazy anti-Trump rally.
If that's all the feedback you get, if you're surrounded by flatterers, you're not getting the real deal.
You're not getting the real news.
There's an apocryphal story, I don't know if it's actually true, that Roman emperors back in the day had a slave whose job was to whisper in their ear a reminder that they were mere mortals, not gods, to help keep them grounded.
In the royal courts of medieval times, the court fool, the court jester, wasn't just for laughs.
He had a very important duty, a duty of mocking the king, attacking the king in the guise of humor as a corrective to all the flattery that the courtiers would heap on him.
The jester had a sort of political immunity for speaking truth to power in the form of comedy.
Who does that in Canada?
Whenever anyone says a critical word about Justin Trudeau, a prime minister, a G7 leader, he should be able to take it.
The media's reaction is at this day, stop bullying him, as if he's a child.
Remember this clip from a decade ago?
Leave Brittany alone!
Please!
That was some fanboy defending Brittany spear.
Stop being mean to Brittany.
But really, how different is it from this, where Justin Trudeau's mom told me to stop bullying my baby boy?
The don't be mean to me card is played by all the token affirmative action women in Trudeau's cabinet too, especially by the serial whiner, Catherine McKenna, the carbon tax lady, who calls any criticism bullying.
Don't bully me.
Of course, that's trumped by Ikra Khalid and the rest of the Muslim extremists in Trudeau's circle who call any criticism of them Islamophobia.
My point is, we don't have any real journalistic criticism of the government, and they have no internal checks and balances.
They don't correct their own course, so they never correct course at all because they don't believe any criticism.
Justin Trudeau truly believes to this day that his dancing trip to India was a huge success.
He believes that.
Anyway, back to the news clips from Trudeau.
It's an interview with Trudeau from last night by Paul Wells.
And Wells, you know, he works for McLean's magazine.
That's him there on the bottom right.
McLean's magazine received $1.5 million last year from Trudeau.
And Paul Wells also works for the CBC, which received $1.5 billion last year from Trudeau.
So you know it's going to be a tough accountability interview.
I mean, as you saw in that picture there, Paul Wells and Althea Raj were just joking around with Trudeau.
Can you show that picture again, the three of them, just for a second?
Besides Paul Wells on the right, that's Althea Raj, who was with Huffington Post.
She's on the CBC.
That's Trudeau.
He sticks his tongue out.
What's that move?
Here's another picture of Trudeau sticking his tongue out.
I don't get it.
That's like a baby's move or something.
I think it's a man child.
You tell me.
What's with the tongue?
Anyways, so Paul Wells sat down with Trudeau and asked him some tough questions.
Paul Wells can be tough.
He really can.
Here, watch this clip of him just a couple days ago on Trudeau's state broadcaster, the CBC, talking about Maxine Bernier, the former conservative MP who was starting his own party called the People's Party.
Take a look at this.
Look, there's no part of his stance on immigration and identity that is libertarian.
He wants to lead a libertarian party and he also wants to lead an anti-immigrant party.
His supporters on Twitter seem to be that tiny Venn intersection of people who think it's great that Donald Trump is the president of the United States and people who think that Maxine Bernier would be like Donald Trump.
You cannot have been paying much attention to Max Bernier over the last 20 years to entertain that fantasy very far.
So basically, his voter base right now is the stupidest people on Twitter.
And so we'll see how far that gets him.
No comment. I called them stupid.
They're so stupid.
And he chartles at his own joke because it's quite clever and witty to call him, so stupid.
It's not even a joke.
He's just sort of laughing because he says it and he knows it's rude and shocking and he knows the CBC won't mind and he'll get paid his $500 for that eight minute appearance or whatever he gets for eight minutes on the CBC.
And you heard the CBC host.
She didn't rebut him or challenge him or even ask him if he meant it seriously, let alone say he's that inappropriate.
She just let it roll.
Do you think she would have done the same had he gone after Trudeau in a stupid, similar manner by calling him stupid?
That's the real joke.
Paul Wells would rather go after Trudeau in that manner precisely once on the CBC.
If he were to do that, if he were to go on after Trudeau in that same way, it would happen once because then he would never be fighting back on the CBC.
Do you doubt it?
Do you doubt it?
It's not just that Wells sucks up to Trudeau.
It's that he's so eager to disparage and put down conservatives, but not fancy conservatives, only the grassroots, only the little people.
I think he's got little man syndrome.
He's short.
He was born in small town Sarney, Ontario.
He never really was one of the cool kids.
And I think he's got such a weird inferiority complex in fancy circles in Ottawa.
He makes up for it by putting down anything grassroots or blue collar.
It clouds his judgment.
I mean, look at this tweet by him here.
Just so we're clear here, there's no chance Doug Ford will lead the Ontario Conservatives.
Suspense now is over whether he realizes he's so stupid.
That's like the New York Times saying Hillary Clinton had a 98% chance of winning two weeks before Donald Trump won.
It's not an observation, and it's not even a genuine prediction.
It is a hope.
It is a willful blindness.
It's more a test of his own state of mind than a measure of the public's state of mind, don't you think?
And he calls you stupid.
So that's Paul Wells.
So last night, this liberal partisan, Paul Wells, sat down with his boss, Justin Trudeau, and to his credit, he asked a real question.
He asked it timidly and vaguely, but at least he raised the subject of Trudeau sexually assaulting a female reporter in Creston, B.C. about 18 years ago.
Take a look.
Another question, following on a lot of questions, similar questions from readers about the Me Too movement.
This is a reader named Sabrina S.
She wants to know how the Prime Minister reconciles his past groping experience with his self-branding and bragging as a feminist.
Should or would one cancel out the other or can the two coexist?
I think first of all, we have to understand that there is a massive shift going on in our society and our workplaces and important conversations that are really, really long overdue.
Understanding that someone can experience an interaction very differently from another person and giving weight and credence and support to anyone who comes forward to share those stories and those experiences is extremely important.
And how we listen and how we learn and how we grow as a society is absolutely essential.
So I will always, as I did, make space for people to come forward and not seek to shut them down or contradict them, but to support them.
And it's difficult, but there's a lot of difficult conversations we have to have.
And if leaders can be part of modeling the path forward of being thoughtful and supportive, then all the better for it.
What did Trudeau even say there?
What did that even mean?
It's extremely important that his accuser came forward and he makes space for people to come forward and not seek to shut them down or contradict them and to support them.
What does that mean?
So he supports the woman he groped or he would support her and he's being thoughtful and supportive?
What does that mean?
And that's it.
That's all he has to say.
And Paul Wells follows up with a question about Kent Hare, another Liberal MP accused of sexual misconduct.
Here's how that went.
One of your other MPs, Kent Hare, was kicked out of cabinet over a series of allegations.
And then this earlier the summer you were campaigning for him in his writing.
How do you arbitrate between these well, I think, first of all, it's obvious that when I became leader of the Liberal Party, I didn't get a book of instructions handed down by Wilfrid Laurier on how to deal with these situations.
These are new situations that we have to go at on a case-by-case basis in a thoughtful way, in a way that really tries to adjust to the fact that people have been marginalized and taken advantage of and not heard for far too long, and we are now giving voice to those.
So we are trying to deal with them each as they come up in the most thoughtful way possible.
So people have been marginalized and taken advantage of and not heard, and we are giving voice to those by being thoughtful.
What?
So was he one of the advantage takers or he is he the that's and that's that it's over that fog that word salad that baffle gab.
George Horwold called it duck speak, saying things very earnestly that make no sense.
It cannot be deciphered.
But there was no follow-up.
There was no sharp question like, so did you grope her or not?
Or is she lying?
Or if she's lying, then why did you apologize?
Or anything.
I mean, any question.
You don't have to be a master at cross-examination.
You have to be a lawyer to pull the witness back to the real question.
You don't even have to be a journalist.
You just have to be a curious person.
You could say, what does that mean?
You could say, are you saying you are the hero in this story?
Are you saying your conduct has actually been part of the solution?
What?
Trudeau said it's difficult, but there's a lot of difficult conversations we have to have.
Great.
So why don't you have a little bit of that difficult conversation right there?
What did you do to her?
And do you think it was wrong or not?
Why Curiosity Matters00:05:23
But Wells just let it go.
He let the bizarre duck speak go about Trudeau's own molestation of a woman that he admitted to in a 2000 editorial.
And then Paul Wells just let it go with his hypocritical support for Kent Hare.
Not even, why did you kick out other MPs for less, but let Kent Hare stay?
Or something like, why did you launch an independent investigation into what your MPs did, but not one into yourself?
Well, it's obvious why, because that would make the prince uncomfortable.
And it would mean no more fun selfie moments with Trudeau, no more sit-down interviews with Trudeau for Paul Wells.
Do you understand anything Trudeau said there?
I do.
He said in 100 words, I'm not answering you.
I'm just using blather and buzzwords because I think your viewers are dumb enough to be hypnotized by that.
It's really, really sad.
And he could be right.
I mean, maybe Paul Wells' supporters could be the stupidest people on the internet, not Maxine Bernier's.
But look at this question and answer about the murdered girl in Vancouver, Marissa Shen.
This bothers me more.
Trudeau doesn't have his fog machine practiced on this one yet.
He hasn't been thinking about this one for months or even 18 years.
He's a lot colder in this one.
Take a look.
We've got a little bit of time left.
I wanted to let McLean's readers have at you because we got a lot of interest both in all the issues that I've discussed and in a few that we haven't asked about before.
And so I'm going to pass along a few questions that came from McLean's readers.
One is asking what you have to say about the arrest in British Columbia of Ibrahim Ali, who's a Syrian refugee, following the murder of a teenage girl named Marissa Shen.
Obviously, it's devastating news for her family, for her friends.
It's a terrible tragedy.
Anytime someone is murdered, it's a terrible thing.
I trust our justice system.
I trust our system to go through its processes to both apply consequences to this and to make sure that we're thinking about how we continue to keep people safe.
Where was with those little chuckles?
You know the ones?
Obviously, someone is murdered.
It's a terrible thing.
No, that's not a happy laugh.
It's a scoffing laugh.
It's obvious where we stand.
Why would you even ask such an impertinent question?
It's obvious where we stand.
That's what kind of laugh that was.
So what's his answer?
He trusts the justice system, and he will continue to keep people safe.
But our justice system did not bring the accused killer into Canada.
The immigration system did that.
The justice system can't keep people safe.
Prosecutors in prisons are only called in after someone is murdered.
They didn't keep Marissa Shen safe.
Trudeau pushed this off on anybody but himself.
Paul Wells asked a simple enough follow-up question, this one.
A lot of people say that.
Some people say that if it hadn't been for the surge in Syrian refugees after the 2015 election, guys like this guy would not be here.
I'm not one of those people who says that.
Another smirk.
I'm not one of those people.
Well, it is a simple fact that Trudeau did bring in this accused murderer, and however many other criminals lurk amongst the unvetted migrants brought in from Syria in great haste.
It's simply saying, I don't believe that.
Is that enough of an answer?
Politically, factually, emotionally, when a community is grieving?
Is that enough of an answer?
Well, it was enough of an answer for Paul Wells.
Look, this is a problem.
It's two problems.
The main problem is that we have a prime minister who is shallow and childish and incompetent in any court function needed to actually govern.
His only skills are skin deep, his last name, his preening for the media, his glib manner.
That remains.
And it still works, I guess.
It still charms some people, I guess.
Not everyone.
Yesterday, a Liberal MP crossed the floor to the opposition conservatives.
That's not a direction you normally see people going in parliament from the government to the opposition.
Just three years into a mandate.
That MP, Leona Alislev, doesn't seem to be enthralled by the same Trudeau charm anymore.
The angry Chinese-Canadian protesters in Vancouver with their anti-Trudeau signs, they didn't seem to be charmed anymore.
The U.S. trade negotiators are no longer charmed by Trudeau or Christy Freeland, but the media are.
That wasn't an interview by Paul Wells.
It wasn't a real interview.
It was fake news.
Lobbying softly phrased questions to the Prime Minister and then letting him skate away by saying simply, well, that's not my view.
I'm sorry, that's not an actual interview.
That's stenography.
That's PR.
And that's at least as big a problem as Trudeau's own disastrous government.
Stay with us for more.
Well, our next guest is a bit unusual in his style and in his name and in his background, but he's one of the most eloquent defenders of free speech you'll ever meet.
Count Dankula's Take00:10:37
His name is Mark Meeken, but he goes by the funny online nickname Count Dankula.
He's very alternative, even down to his tattoos and piercings.
He doesn't look like your typical political activist for freedom, or maybe he does.
I don't know these days.
A couple of years back, Meeken played a practical joke on his girlfriend.
My girlfriend is always ranting and raving about how cute and adorable her wee dog is.
And so I thought I would turn him into the least cute thing that I could think of, which is a Nazi.
Zeke Heil.
Zeke Heil.
Who's a good wee Nazi?
Well, he did just that.
Obviously, it was a joke.
A weird joke, a risque joke, a joke you can find funny or unfunny.
It's up to you.
But you have to know that was a joke.
Meeken's not a Nazi, and neither is his girlfriend's dog.
Dogs can't be Nazis, actually.
But Meeken was prosecuted for that video and convicted and sentenced to an £800 fine.
Because apparently the UK has solved the rest of its crime spree, ranging from asset attacks to outright terror bombings so they can go after goofy practical joke videos that they don't think are funny.
Well, Meeken has become a bit of a free speech crusader since then.
Here he is speaking at a Day for Freedom rally in London earlier this year.
In the aftermath of what happened, I've decided to keep fighting to protect free speech because after seeing my mother repeatedly crying at the fact that her son could get sent to prison just because he hurt some people's feelings, that was more than enough for me.
I want to make sure that what happened to me doesn't happen to anyone else.
And because I want to protect free speech, I have been branded a racist, I'd say, and a white supremacist.
And that I am part of the alt-right.
To set the record straight, I reject any notion of superiority or inferiority based on race.
I reject the idea of an ethno-state.
If you want to live here in peace and not only respect the freedom of others, but fight to protect the freedom of others, then you are welcome in this country.
Well, I saw that speech.
It was amazing.
And I saw in the news more recently that the European Union is considering banning what are called memes.
Now, memes are those little shareable, funny images with a few keywords on them and a funny picture that are fun to post on Facebook or Twitter or other social media.
They would literally ban memes, this Article 13 of the European Union's new proposals, and sharing memes in the name of copyright theft that would be banned.
Well, that couldn't be twisted for censorship reasons, could it?
And joining us now live via Skype from near Glasgow, Scotland is Mark Meeken.
Welcome to the show.
Nice to have you here.
We're fans of your free speech crusade, and it's nice to have you on the program.
Thanks very much, man.
It's good to be here.
Well, thank you for the time.
I thought you were the guy to talk to because this new proposal by the European Union called Article 13, there may be some noble public policy goal underneath it to reward content creators with the fruits of their labor.
I get that as a content creator.
I bet you do too.
But it sounds like it could be abused to go after anyone who posts a funny image.
Like it could be writ large the same malicious prosecution you underwent for your YouTube video.
That could theoretically happen to anyone who shares something on Facebook or Twitter.
Am I overstating things?
Well, at the moment, they're saying that it's going to be used for copyright, but I guarantee you in the future it's going to be used for things like speech.
That is, you know, if something is offensive and even if it's just a joke that's a little bit too edgy, then things like that, they're going to be subject to these exact same restrictions.
Right now, it's starting with copyright, but I promise you in the next few years, it's just going to be used for all kinds of speech that they don't approve of.
You know, one way of looking at it is that anyone on the internet, almost no matter what you say or do, would break this rule.
So we're all guilty under this rule.
And then it just comes down to who do they choose to charge because every one of us retweets or shares something on Facebook.
So as you say, who they go after, eventually, of course, it will be a political tool.
Of course, it will be a censorship tool, even if it doesn't start off that way, because that's a way to get anyone, isn't it?
Well, the way that they're doing it as well is it's not going to be the end user, like me.
It's not going to be the user.
It's going to be the platforms that get punished.
So basically, even if we get angry about our content being removed, we're going to be screaming and screeching at the platforms when it's not actually their fault.
They just have to comply with this legislation.
So basically, it's the EU that have done it, but it's the platforms themselves that are going to get the brunt of the blame.
When you say the platforms, you're referring to YouTube and Twitter and Facebook, the places, these electronic digital town squares, as I've heard others refer to them.
That's a phrase that Jack Dorsey of Twitter uses.
I think, though, you're right.
It's the government behind it.
But I think that the companies are only too happy to do the bidding of governments.
I think there's a lot of log rolling, a lot of favors exchanged.
YouTube, Facebook, Twitter do a favor for the government, and in return, the government maybe goes easy on them for their tax structures, for other things.
I mean, I sense that while these companies claim to be independent, they actually love doing business with governments, especially authoritarian governments.
Oh, it's absolutely like, see, see, the EU itself, the legislation that gets proposed to the EU comes from big tech, big corporations, and lobbying groups that are sponsored by them.
Basically, if any of these big corporations want legislation to get put through, then they can go forward and propose it and it will get put through.
And I think that big tech obviously may end up needing to pay fines.
They're going to need to adopt algorithms and spend some money to police their platforms better.
But in the long term, they win because small companies aren't subject to the legislation.
But when they reach a certain size, then they are subject to the legislation, which means that they'll either, you know, they need to adopt algorithms.
There literally is no way to hire enough staff to monitor the sheer amount of content that gets posted online.
So all that happens is small companies need to stay small so they're not subject to the regulations because they simply can't afford to abide by them or they try and end up just getting completely buried financially, which means that the big tech that are at the top, their place is now secure.
You know, they'll take a little bit of a hit monetarily, but in the long run, they benefit because no one's going to be able to compete with them now.
That's a very thoughtful point of view.
The incumbents will set up barriers to entry for future competitors.
They'll be happy to have this restriction.
And as we see with Google doing business with China, I was reading about Sergei Brin, the founder of Google, who left this former Soviet Union when he was a young child with his family.
They left in the 70s, which was very rare, very hard to do.
And his family took him out of the Soviet Union because it was authoritarian.
They wanted to be free.
And that instinct of freedom is what made Google pull back from China the first time around.
But he's overcome that.
I guess maybe $50 billion in the bank and the thought of colonizing China overcame any pangs in his conscience.
So Google is going back into China.
They're working with the Chinese dictatorship on a search engine.
I bet, and I'd like your thought on this, Mark, I bet some of the technology, the censorship technology, the detection technology that Google and others are developing to comply with China's censorship is going to be deployed in what we used to call the free West.
So instead of our freedom being a virus that infects their statist authoritarian system, it's the other way.
Their authoritarian surveillance state will be the virus that infects us.
Is that an accurate description of what's happening?
I believe it would be.
I think Google have done it because they've just basically, where is a place where we can test this out where we're not going to get yelled at too much because it's considered the norm?
China.
The best place for them to test this out.
So yeah, I would believe that.
I reckon that they'll basically go over to China to adopt the same policies as China.
And they're going to go, oh, no, we need to comply with the national laws.
You know, we don't agree with it, but we need to comply.
It's a test.
They're testing their software so that they can apply it to the West.
Yeah.
You know, I can't remember which Soviet dissident it was, if it was Solzhenitsyn or someone who said that the capitalists in the West will sell the rope by which they are hanged.
As in, I'd have to look up the exact quote, but I think you've probably heard that one before, Mark, which is, you know, these multi-billion, in some cases, trillion-dollar companies in Silicon Valley, which is in California, the freest place in the world.
Their lust for that Chinese market, their lust to get along with the governments of the EU, in a way, is planting the seeds of censorship that would strangle the industry itself.
I mean, tech and communications technology and social media is only possible with freedom of speech and freedom of thought, really.
But these companies would sell their own hangman, the noose by which they're hung.
That was true in the Soviet era.
I think it's true in the Chinese communist era too, don't you think?
Yeah, it's not a shocker to me.
I used to be surprised by such things, but see how people like this basically putting morals before money, or money before morals, should I say?
And then it's a case of they don't understand the destructive path that they are going down.
All they can see is the dollar signs.
That's all they can see.
Fighting EU Censorship Laws00:02:56
Like even in the EU Parliament when Article 13 got voted in, the people we spoke to, they didn't even know what they were voting for.
We were just sort of like, do you have any idea what you've just done?
And when we explained some of the ramifications of it, they seemed shocked.
Even Axel Voss himself said that he was surprised by what was in the legislation that he proposed.
Yeah.
It's just like these are people that have no understanding or grasp of the internet, but they want to seek to control it above all else.
Even though they don't understand its culture.
Well, it's incredible that two years after Brexit, the EU is still promulgating laws that'll touch you in the United Kingdom.
Can I ask you about your own case?
I mean, you fought a bizarre application of a censorship law.
They came after you in a malicious application.
And I think that, I mean, that's why you're so good to talk about this, because you have been there when a law that maybe looked reasonable on the books was animated by radical social justice warriors and inflicted on you.
Now, I think you were kept whole by crowdfunding, and it turned you into a bit of a warrior.
I don't think you had a big profile before.
I mean, you had a profile, but it wasn't big like it is now.
Can I ask you if you've continued your free speech fight, and if so, how since your own trial ended?
It's basically spread the awareness in regards to these laws.
Obviously, the part I was convicted under was section 127 of the 2003 Communications Act, and it was the section that says an online or public posting that is grossly offensive.
And what someone might find grossly offensive is completely subjective.
You know, it's down to the individual.
But apparently, the courts decided that grossly offensive now has a matter-of-fact set definition when it absolutely doesn't.
And I was still convicted under it.
But another few things that I'm doing as well is I went to the EU recently in the EU Parliament to speak about the dangers of Article 13.
It basically is baby steps towards authoritarianism.
You know, China didn't happen overnight.
And also, I've joined UKIP, the UK Independence Party, because out of all the political parties in Britain that have any kind of clue, UKIP is the only one that cares about freedom of speech.
All the other parties are seeking to restrict it.
UKIP are the only party that are seeking to protect it.
Very interesting.
Well, listen, it's a pleasure to talk with you.
I could listen to that beautiful Scottish brogue all day long.
I'm only half joking.
And as I've told our viewers, your speech of the day for freedom was so powerful and such a clarion call for free speech.
It truly struck me.
It's nice to meet you, and I hope that you're part of the successful pushback against Article 13.
But I remain a pessimist in this war for freedom against the tech companies.
Conservative Voices from Campus00:04:49
It's just a handful of small guys like us versus these titans of industry.
Let me ask you in closing, are you an optimist or a pessimist?
I'm a pessimist.
What are you?
I'm trying my best to maintain that we're going to get the same ending as David versus Goliath.
You know, we just need a good stone.
Yeah.
Well, from your mouth to God's ears, I like your attitude.
I like that you've still got lots of fight in you.
Nice to meet you, Mark.
Good to have you on the show today.
You too, man.
Thanks very much.
All right.
There you have it.
Mark Meeken joining us via Skype from his home near Glasgow, Scotland.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Welcome back.
Well, I am delighted to let you know that we are expanding the team at the Rebel.
We are having a new staffer join us, a reporter, troublemaker, and all-around conservative.
His name is Kian Bexte, and he joins us now in studio.
Keen, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
Well, welcome to the company, is what I should say.
Yeah, for sure.
Nice to be here.
You know, you're a very mild-mannered fella, very shy.
But you're not really shy at all.
You're a bit of a troublemaker, aren't you?
I get into some trouble.
I dabble, I would say.
You're a trouble-dabbler.
Yeah.
You dabble in trouble.
Absolutely.
Well, tell us a little bit about yourself.
You live in Vulcan, Alberta, which is a farming community outside the city.
You just graduated from the University of Calgary.
What was your degree in again?
I was a Bachelor of Science in Energy Sciences and Energy Economics.
Sounds like ethical oils, what you're talking about.
Yep, absolutely.
But surprisingly, the university did not offer a single class on petroleum extraction or anything like that.
It was all wind farms, solar panels, and dams.
No.
The University of Calgary itself did not talk about oil and gas, it talked about wind and solar.
On the science side of things.
And on the econ side of things, there was a few courses on petroleum economics, which were excellent courses.
The prof teaching that one was amazing.
The econ department is actually quite great at the UFC, but the science side of it, not a word of oil was mentioned.
That is embarrassing to a university headquartered in Calgary.
I'm embarrassed.
I'm an alumnus.
I haven't been involved in alumnus, but I'm deeply embarrassed.
All right, let's put aside that embarrassment.
I can imagine that what's, I can only imagine, I went to UFC myself way back in the 20th century.
Is UFC conservative at all, or is it more politically correct than ever?
You know, I'd say compared to the rest of the country, we, at least we're fighting back.
The campus conservative movement there is one of the largest in the country's.
But, you know, there is an, as is typical in universities, there's an overwhelming voice of social justice warriors on campus that are louder than everyone else regardless of their size because they're given a microphone by the faculty and by the university.
It's hard to be a conservative on campus these days.
What's the state of free speech at U of C?
I don't know any instances of there being any attacks on it.
Far better at the UFC than anywhere else.
Okay, well that's good to hear.
Now, that's a little bit of background.
I think folks would be curious about that.
I saw you most recently in Halifax at the Conservative Conference.
Of course, we at the Rebel were not permitted in the inner sanctum.
We wouldn't want to muck it up.
Only approved journalists like the CBC and the Globe and Mail were allowed in there.
You had an interesting journalistic moment.
I don't know if it, I don't think you probably planned to, but you managed to get your hands on a copy of a secret briefing book by the Dairy Lobby, which was the key lobby group that was really controlling that convention.
Tell us a bit about that.
So it was almost too good to be true when we opened the binder and looked and saw the blue logo of the Dairy Farmers of Canada.
We thought it was a joke at the start because it was just such a coincidence that the folks who found it were no friends of the cartel.
But when we found the binder, we just kind of laughed, chuckled a little bit, and then we went to dinner later.
And you can see in the picture that's been circulated widely, there's the appetizer menu of what we were ordering at the time.
And then we went through it and we saw that, well, we sort of service scanned it and then had dinner.
And then we went back and looked at it.
And we found that line that said that Andrew Scheer had been in fact manipulated by the cartel to predetermine the outcome of the convention.
Dairy Farmers Revelation00:11:23
It made the entire convention a complete waste of money.
I don't understand how the CBC is going to be able to ask donors for money when so much donor money was spent on putting that convention on and flying people from Victoria to Halifax when at the end of the day the only thing the only reason we went there was to watch a fireside chat with Andrew Scheer.
No substantial votes, no votes were substantial at all.
Well you keep talking like that they'll ban you from the next convention too.
Well you'll be based in Calgary and Sheila Gunread our Alberta Bureau chief is in the north.
You'll cover the south and you're going to move around a bit.
So if there's things that need doing in other parts whether it's Saskatchewan and BC you'll go on out there now you won't just be doing journalism.
You'll be doing the kind of activism that we like to do petitions the troublemaking part whether it's a protest or a billboard that's the kind of stuff you'll be doing ain't absolutely I'm excited to see what kind of rabble we can rouse and then and we'll go from there.
It's not just rabble rousing for its own sake.
There are a lot of big problems in Alberta.
We talked about the anti-oil bias.
The fact that you're telling me it's actually in the University of Calgary itself is deeply disturbing.
There are two massive jobs in Alberta in the next election.
Extirpating the Alberta NDP is job one.
And removing the handful of liberals in that province.
And more important than either the NDP or the Liberals is the media party because the media party gives strength to all those others.
The media party that's cowardly on the carbon tax, that's cowardly on any controversial issue, that sucks up to Jason Kennedy, excuse me, to sucks up to Justin Trudeau.
It's a Freudian slip there.
I think that fighting against the media and showing how they're in league with Trudeau is actually the most important job of any journalist in Alberta.
What do you think?
Absolutely.
And it's not just Trudeau, it's every single left-wing politician.
The media sticks to them like flies, like flies on honey.
From Calgary City Council to the Alberta NDP and even in the more left-leaning parties in surrounding jurisdictions to Alberta that just the media just can't get enough of sucking up to them and making sure that they don't report the facts.
They report what makes the left-wing parties more electable.
I think you're right.
And you know what?
Just hearing you talk about Calgary City Council, I think there's a couple of journalists in Calgary that sometimes hold Naheed Nenshi and the council to account, but very rarely.
These days, my view is most journalists either suck up to the powerful people to get leaks as exclusives.
It makes their job easier than actually working for it.
Or they're just polishing their resumes for when they think they'll be laid off from the Herald or the Sun or whatever.
So they want to go to work for the communications department of some politicians.
Yeah, what I like about you is there's no chance in a million years you could ever get hired by Justin Trudeau or the CBC.
So I know you're not going to be tailoring your work to appeal to them.
You can count on that.
Yeah, sure.
Well, listen, welcome aboard.
Thanks for coming out here to our world headquarters to get your official badge.
Actually, we've got to get you a badge.
We're going to get you some gear and stuff.
Great to see you, Keith.
Thanks.
There you have it.
Kean Bexty is our new Southern Alberta reporter, and he's going to be making some trouble.
I think you can detect that.
Stay with us.
More Head on the Rebel.
Hey, welcome back.
On my monologue yesterday about the mainstream media calling a Chinese-Canadian protest or the murder of 13-year-old Marissa Shen unexpected.
Glenn writes, as for the Global Reporter finding the response unexpected, what did she expect exactly?
If it had been a 13-year-old Aboriginal girl, what would she expect?
Well, there's a good point there.
I think that Justin Trudeau has a different point of view depending on who the victim is and who the perpetrator is race-wise.
I remember in Saskatchewan a couple months back, remember there was a farm invasion, home invasion attack, and a farmer killed an Aboriginal man who was coming for him and his wife, and he was acquitted by a jury.
Oh my God, Justin Trudeau and the justice minister wouldn't stop talking about it.
They were outraged.
Aboriginal victim, white killer, not a murderer, a killer.
Flip it around, though, Syrian accused murderer, Chinese Canadian girl.
He doesn't have much to say.
I think Justin Trudeau values people, at least politically, based on their race and other identity attributes.
Robert writes, you really have to feel for the left-stream media.
It is really hard to dismiss a group of Chinese Canadians as just another bunch of white supremacists.
Hey, don't laugh.
I see every day Muslim people like Rahil Raza called white supremacists.
I don't know if you know Dinesh D'Souza.
He's from India.
He's called a white supremacist.
Candace Owens, the black activist from Turning Point USA, she's called a white supremacist.
It's just an insult.
It doesn't make any sense.
It didn't make any sense against most white people.
Why should it have to make sense against visible minorities?
On my interview with Joel Pollack from Breitbart about Democrats trying everything to stop Brett Kavanaugh from being confirmed, Paul writes, this just in, someone from Kavanaugh's grade two class said he was a big doo-doo head.
CNN will stay with his big story 24-7.
Yeah, that's not too far from it.
I mean, this case happened in high school.
And I'm not saying crimes cannot be committed in high school, but there was no crime here, at least none that was reported for 36 years.
And the complainant did not go to the FBI or any other police.
She went to a politician.
And even now, I see the news today, the Senate has invited her to come and speak and testify, and she refuses to do so.
She refuses even to take a phone call.
So I don't think you can call it a crime.
I think you can call it a false allegation.
I think if Donald Trump blinks on this, I think it will demoralize the base, not because his base are misogynistic, but because everyone can see this is a stitch-up.
On my interview with Derek Philibrand last week, Trevor writes, I am an Ontarian but deeply interested in conservative politics across the country.
I believe you were far too soft in your interview.
The Freedom Conservative Party has been historically committed to breaking up our Confederation.
I understand you to be a Canadian nationalist and find it odd that you did not comment on this aspect.
I also find it very confusing about your talk about a united conservative movement and yet seem to buy into this idea of centrist Red Tories being liberal light.
Red Tories are more aptly progressive conservatism as a philosophy and one that was embraced by Sir John A. is a uniquely Canadian brand of conservatism.
Red Tories included great men such as Peter Laheed.
In any event, it was an interesting interview as I normally don't watch rebel media.
Fair enough, Trevor.
I appreciate that.
I put it to you that if John A. MacDonald is called a Red Tory, then the term Red Tory has changed itself over the last 150 years because as you know, they're tearing down Johnny McDonald's statues in Victoria, stripping him off our $10 bill nationwide because he was a monstrous genocidal maniac or something.
So I don't know if he passed by the phrase Red Tory today.
My point about the PCs and the Wild Rose merging to the United Conservative Party is just that it merged with all the Red Tories.
They were not left in the wilderness.
They were incorporated into the new party.
And so by definition, it is more to the left than the Wild Rose Party that I think would have won the next election.
I would like to have Jason Kenney as a conservative premier with a right-wing opposition to him.
Why should the opposition in Alberta always be on the left of the winning party?
That makes no sense.
Finally, Abran writes, have you noticed, or at least does it seem to you, as it does to me, that the mainstream media, while they still cling to their anti-business, anti-constitutional narrative, are turning against Justin Trudeau.
I think they are beginning to understand that his clumsy ineptitude is actually hurting the media party's agenda.
He's now the oldest of the three big party leaders, but the most childish.
Well, I'd say they're, in some quarters, less slavishly in love with him, but I wouldn't overstate it.
Every week, a scandal erupts that would result in a cabinet minister being fired, were it under Stephen Harper.
There was another ethics law-breaking incident convicted against Dominic LeBlanc last week.
It barely, I'm sure, didn't even make the front pages.
There were no ethics convictions during Harper's nine and a half years.
The biggest ethical breach was Nigel Wright putting in $90,000 of his own money to pay the government back on some iffy expenses.
They're not taking money out.
Imagine, what is that now, five or is that six convictions of the Conflict of Interest Act, four from Trudeau himself, and that's just, that's no big deal.
$16 glass of orange juice got Bevoda fired from cabinet.
We have Catherine McKenna racking up $10,000, $20,000 for vanity fashion photo shoots.
No one cares.
All the things that caused the media to squawk and squeal under Trudeau are under Harper just normal now.
So I'm going to politely disagree with you.
The media party is just as slavish as they ever were.
I think that maybe a few pinprick independent-minded columnists are more sober-minded.
And increasingly, we get our news from outside Canada about Canada.
Like I say about this Marissa Shen case, if you want to know what's really going on, don't read the Vancouver-Sun-Vancouver Province of the CBC.
Read the South China Morning Post.
It's free online out of Hong Kong.
You'll learn more there because they're not trying to suck up to Justin Trudeau.
Speaking of which, we have a petition about Marissa Shen.
I did a video and I had it subtitled in Chinese.
And I want to see how that petition goes because we have a lot of interest from Chinese Canadians in our coverage because it's us and the South China Morning Post.
And I think I just finished going through the whole list of media who are covering this murder without a crazy noticeable pro-Syrian migrant agenda.
Why are you even talking about, why are you even interviewing immigration experts?
It's a tragic murder, horrific crime, and you're trying to defend your, like, it's just so gross.
And I think I showed you yesterday, my one little Twitter tweet got 1.4 million impressions.
That tells me there is a shocking demand for facts on Marissa Shen, and no one's buying the government BS.
We'll see how this poll goes, this petition rather.
You can listen to me talk in English.
Obviously, I don't try and speak Chinese.
If you're curious, you can go to apologizeenow.com and let me know what you think of what that means.
But go to ApologizeNow if you want to see that video.
That's it for today.
until tomorrow on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters.