Ezra Levant slams Alberta Premier Rachel Notley’s appointment of climate activist Brian Topp—who once opposed oil sands—to address Alberta’s $6B+ pipeline bottleneck, calling it a "disaster" amid 47,000 job losses since 2015. He argues Notley’s regulatory hostility and reliance on anti-industry envoys worsen the oil price gap, contrasting her with Harper’s trade pragmatism. Meanwhile, Celine Dion’s gender-neutral Selenununu line, featuring skulls and occult imagery, clashes with her past claims that children don’t belong to parents; Levant brands it "weird" and politically charged, questioning its commercial viability. The episode ties corporate activism to cultural shifts, exposing contradictions in both policy and parenting. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, Celine Dion tells us what she thinks of children, and it's a lot weirder than you think.
It's November 20th and this is 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.
Who cares what Celine Dion thinks of the world, right?
I mean, she's really good at singing in that earnest style.
That's what she's famous for.
That's what she's great at.
Why not judge her on that alone?
No need to get political.
Let a singer be a singer.
She's not particularly political as musicians go.
I think that's what kicks in sometimes when a singer starts to lose their talent or an actor starts to lose their fame and they need to get attention in some way.
Celine Dionne isn't like that.
There was this news story from a couple years ago that claimed she declined to perform at Donald Trump's inauguration, but that doesn't really say anything one way or another.
For all we know, it could have been a scheduling conflict or maybe the opposite of political.
Maybe she didn't want to do anything either for or against Trump.
I mean, what's not to like about Celine Dion?
But let's also acknowledge that she's a little bit unusual.
She started singing as a child prodigy, and when she was 12, she met her new manager, René Angelie, who was 38 years old at the time.
So he was 26 years older than her.
And when she was in her later teens, they started dating, and they got married a few years later.
It's not really normal to marry who was your father figure.
Nothing in her life has been normal.
She lives in the Las Vegas bubble.
And that's fine.
She provides a lot of joy to a lot of people, and she's very well compensated for it.
But you must admit, she leads an unusual life, always has.
And her notions of moms and dads and husbands and wives and kids are a bit different from a normal person's.
Embryo Frozen, Twins Born00:02:52
Again, no problem.
I mean, it's called Holly Weird for a reason.
But Celine Dion always had that slightly nerdy, friendly vibe, right?
She gets into some product lines, businesses like celebrities do.
She has a line of perfume.
And now she's decided to get into children's clothing.
And she has a few kids of her own now.
I suppose I should tell you a little bit about that if you don't already know.
And let me read to you from this Globe and Mail article from 18 years ago.
This is from the year 2000.
Ready?
The story is called On the Celine Dion Front, Things Get Ever Stranger.
Here's the quote.
We have a little baby in our belly and one at the lab, a beaming Miss Dion says in a coming television interview for the TVA network.
Miss Dionne, who became pregnant through in vitro fertilization earlier this year, says a second embryo has been placed in frozen storage in New York.
She hopes one day to have the other egg implanted into her for a second pregnancy and has promised her mother that she will.
Mom told me, you are going to go get him, right?
And I told her, of course, mom, I will go get him for sure.
And she did indeed go to the freezer.
Here, let me read a story from 2009, nine years later.
Celine Dionne pregnant with embryo frozen for eight years is the headline.
Celine Dionne had her embryos frozen when she went through IVF while trying to conceive her first child, Renee Charles, who was born in January 2001.
When she completed her performance run in Las Vegas in 2007, she consulted Dr. Rosenwax about trying again.
She came back to have the embryos transferred back because she wanted to have another baby, he says.
According to the fertility specialist, freezing an embryo for eight years is not necessarily a problem.
There have been embryos that have been frozen for more than 10 years and even more than 15 years that have successfully thawed and resulted in a pregnancy, says Dr. Rosenwax.
Now, life is life, and I'm glad she has three kids.
It turned out that she got twins from that other frozen embryo.
And look, some people have trouble conceiving naturally.
I don't begrudge anyone any use of technology if they're trying to have a baby.
I will say that having an embryo frozen, an embryo is a tiny baby.
It's not just a sperm or an egg.
That Globe and Male story said an egg frozen.
It wasn't an egg.
It was a teeny tiny baby already.
And in her case, it was twins.
I mean, here's a picture of those lovely twins right after they were born.
You could say that they were already 10 years old, though, couldn't you?
This picture is from December 2010.
Again, it's wonderful.
Why She Sells Pretty Clothes00:11:10
Life.
I'm glad she's got three kids, and I bet she's a great mum.
But there is something unusual, and I found it a bit uncomfortable, at least to me, about knowing you have a little teeny tiny baby and freezing that teeny tiny baby for years.
And I know it's unborn and it's very, very small, but you heard her talk about those kids.
Yeah, they're in the freezer.
Yeah, mom, I'll go back for them.
And actually, I'm glad 10 years later she did.
That's an odd look into the future.
It feels like a sci-fi future.
I think Celine Dion is a nice lady, but you have to admit, she has not had a normal relationship with her late husband or with her children.
Would you grant me that?
And that's fine, and I wouldn't talk about it, and it's none of my business.
And it's personal and it's private.
Other than she has just come out with a kids' clothing line for little kids, in addition to her perfume line.
And it's a bit weird.
She's selling it as gender-neutral clothing for kids.
She launched it with a big splash just a few days ago.
There's the headline in one news report, Celine Dion is a new gender-neutral clothing line for kids.
It's part of a growing trend in kids' clothes.
Now, if you have kids, or if you had kids, you will know that gender is hardwired.
It is biological.
I mean, woke parents can give their little girls train sets and dump trucks to play with, and they can give their little boys dolls to play with.
But you go to any birthday party for three-year-olds, and you will see what happens.
The boys run around like maniacs, playing some rough game, usually involving pretending to shoot things or throw things, while the girls sit around in a circle and talk about dolls.
I am not saying it's an iron law, but it is the norm.
You can try to counter it.
You can try to resist it, but it is deep and biological, like sex differences are.
I'm sorry, there are only two sexes, folks.
But Celine Dion says there are none.
That ain't right.
But that's the theme of her clothes, gender neutrality and skulls.
Skulls.
I'm not kidding.
I think that's weird.
Here's your kid's clothing line.
It's called Selenununu.
You can see that right at the top.
Scroll through it.
The clothes are as ugly as you'd think, and they just have lots of skulls, like human skulls.
That's the main image.
That's not normal.
I mean, children are a fountain of life.
They're growing.
They're vivacious.
They're lively.
They're inspiring.
They're energetic.
It's the opposite of death.
It's gross and unnatural to have children and dead men's skulls juxtapose.
That's weird.
It's also weird compared to Celine Dion's store for grown-ups.
Look at that store.
That's a normal store.
You've got women's clothes and men's clothes, but there's no skulls.
There's women's clothes marked for women, men's clothes for men.
I wonder why she sells normal clothing to adults, mainly to women, of course, pretty clothes, things that would make you feel good, like a Celine Dion song makes you feel.
But she sells ugly unisex clothes with skulls on it to children.
That's weird.
But then I watched her video launching her kids' clothing line.
I'm just going to show it to you, okay?
Watch this and listen to this.
It's about 90 seconds long.
Take a look.
It's okay.
It's okay.
I'm Celine Dion.
Our children.
They are not really our children.
As we are all just links in a never-ending chain that is life.
For us, they are everything.
But in reality, we are only a fraction of their universe.
We miss the past.
They dream of tomorrow.
We may thrust them forward into the future, but the course will always be theirs to choose.
I can't believe they call security.
I mean, oh, come on, I'm Celine Dionne.
I'm not spending the night in jail.
Holy shit!
Easy.
I'm Celine Dionne.
Yeah, girl, and I'm Beyoncé.
Now, I think that was trying to be funny in a nerdy Celine Dion sort of way.
I'm Celine Dion.
I'm Celine Dion.
That was funny enough.
But you can't miss the sheer creepiness of her saying that our children are not ours.
And by that, she really means your children are not yours.
I won't talk about her and her own kids.
I guess that's a private thing for her, even though she's certainly posed for enough magazines with them and told everyone the details.
But she means your kids are not yours.
If it wasn't clear enough, she was sneaking into a hospital nursery and degendering children, taking them out of their pretty kids' clothes for boys and for girls, and putting them in her weird black and white trans clothes.
Is that weird?
I think it's weird.
I think it's a little bit political too.
But if that's all there was, that wouldn't be much.
I guess, I mean, I think her clothing line will fail.
It feels like a bit of a stunt, maybe a trans activism gimmick.
The moment she shuts down her pretty clothing line for grown-ups, you know, with pink things and women's things, the moment she starts dressing in gender-neutral sacks herself, or even like Hillary Clinton in those big form-obscuring smocks.
When she starts dressing like that, I'll believe that Celine Dion doesn't believe in boys' things and girls' things.
She loves being girly and feminine.
She's lying about what's cool.
Skulls are not cool for beautiful children.
It's going to flop commercially.
But let me go one notch deeper, okay?
Her clothing line, as you saw there, it's called Selene Nunu Nu, which is weird, but it's actually a partnership with an existing kids' clothing line called Nu Nu Nu.
That's what it's called.
And they've been around for a little while, and I thought the clothes were really ugly.
And I thought the politics were dark.
The whole thing was even in black and white, wasn't it?
Now they're activists, Nunu Nu, as much as clothiers.
And so I went to their Instagram page.
This is Celine Dion's partner company and her gender-neutral clothing line.
And let me show you some of the pictures I just found poking around on their public Instagram page.
You could find them yourself on Instagram pretty quickly.
Now, some of these are gross.
So if you don't want to see gross things and uncomfortable things, take a two-minute break now, okay?
Take a look at this one.
What do you think of that?
What do you take a look at that?
What do you think of that?
That's on a kids' clothing company Instagram page.
The company's called Nu Nunu.
They're making Celine Dion's transgender clothes for kids, but they're not your kids, you see.
That was demonic, literally.
And what about this one?
A woman looking through the skull of a horse.
And if you see at the top there, they call it skull inspiration.
Sorry, that's really gross.
I showed you the weirdness that Celine Dion's kids' clothes obsesses over death and skulls.
Here's another Nu Nunu image.
And in the comments, they call it skull inspiration, they say.
I don't know if that's an adult or a teen that's not a child's hand, but what's with the death and skulls?
Here, look at the next one.
This one is a child.
This is a disturbing image, maybe the most disturbing of them all.
Is that blood on her clothes?
Why is she in a dirty alleyway with a bag over her head holding onto a teddy bear like that?
And look at what they call it.
Look right at the top there.
Nunu Nu inspiration.
This is their inspiration.
Now, I swear this next one is wheel.
You're not going to believe me.
Look at this next one.
That's a young girl holding a children's book, wearing a goat's head mask, like the occult satanic deity Buffomet.
That's Celine Dion's partner company.
Here's one more, one more image for you.
Look at that.
Death, not life.
It's shocking because children are about life, well, not for this company.
And what's that behind him?
Is that spattered blood?
I don't know.
It's in black and white, like everything they do.
Who knows?
All I know is that I wouldn't want my children anywhere within a mile of these people.
Not wearing their clothes, not even going into their stores, not alone with them.
They are farreques.
What is going on here with lovely Celine Dion, who we all know?
I am not indulging in some weird conspiracy theory.
I am not connecting dots here.
I simply went through the official Instagram page of her kids' clothing company with whom she has partnered in her weird project.
She says your kids are not your kids.
She says boys shouldn't be boys and girls shouldn't be girls.
Maybe they should be demons or skeletons.
This is bad.
I think Celine Dion is a bit screwed up.
Her life, while very glamorous, has always been lived in a gilded cage, wouldn't you say?
Since she was a child, her manager came in and took over her life.
He was 26 years older than her.
She was just 12.
Why Topp Can't Talk to Executives00:15:55
And then he surely planned to become her husband and made it happen.
And as if she even had a chance otherwise, she surely has not had a moment of real normal life since she was a kid herself.
Her own experience of having children was the most antiseptic and dehumanized story I've ever heard.
Now, I'm not condemning in vitro fertilization.
And if it's tough to have a baby, do whatever it takes to get that baby.
But you must agree with me that her comments about keeping kids in the freezer till it's convenient, that's odd.
Now, I still like the sound of her voice.
I still like her songs.
I'm sure her concerts are great.
And I'm sure there's not a lot of skulls and demons in them.
But someone needs to get her off this bizarre project she's on.
She obviously doesn't need the money.
She's not doing it for that.
So what exactly is she doing it for?
And at whose advice here?
And with her husband, Rene, gone, is there even anyone around her to tell her to stop?
Stay with us for more.
Today I'm announcing the appointment of three special envoys.
Their task is to work with the energy industry and CEOs to develop short and medium-term solutions to close the oil price differential as much as is possible with the tools that we have available.
The envoys are Dr. Robert Skinner from the University of Calgary School of Public Policy, Colleen Volk, Alberta's Deputy Minister of Energy, and Brian Topp, my former chief of staff and a well-regarded policy consultant.
And Brian Topp has a long history as a negotiator and public policy practitioner, including working very closely with Alberta industry leaders on the climate leadership plan and the royalty review program that we put in place over two years ago.
Yeah, let me translate.
She's hiring Brian Topp, her former chief of staff, who brought the carbon tax into Alberta.
He's this whiz kid now who, along with these two other appointees, are going to find some way to solve the oil demarketing.
These three wise men will, let me quote actually from exactly what she said.
It's just incredible.
The idea here is for them to do work to dig in in a more systematic way with industry players to determine what kind of short-term solutions can be brought to the table.
So she has no clue.
And they have no clue.
And smart people have been thinking about this for many years and hiring a Toronto-based union organizer to figure it out.
I'm not sure if that's going to work.
Just a reminder of Brian Top.
Here's some clips of him when he ran for the leadership of the NDP a few years back.
Here's Brian Topp.
We want a clear approach on climate change and I quite like what they're doing in Europe and it's worth studying it carefully as we think about Canadian policy.
Hard cap on emissions, to price carbon, a home and industrial retrofit program, getting out of coal, getting an urban mass transit program, and getting fossil-fueled cars out of our cities.
The comprehensive approach like that, we can tackle climate change, and it's got to be at the heart of our next government.
He's so extreme, the NDP recoiled from him.
Imagine the man who says, get fossil-fueled cars out of the city.
Well, he was the guy who was brought into bringing the carbon tax.
And now Rachel Notley is asking him to help get Alberta's oil to market.
Joining us now to talk about the likelihood of success is our friend Lauren Gunter, a columnist with the Eminence DeSan.
Lauren, great to see you again.
We're in good hands because no one knows more about oil and gas than a Toronto union boss like Brian Topp.
Don't you think that three years, three and a half years into your term as Premier is a little late to start realizing you don't know anything about the energy industry and really send some people over to find out what's going on?
One of the things that Notley said that I also want to add in, I mean, I think all of those clips that you've played on top and the things you've said about Brian Topp are exactly right.
But one of the other things I want to add in is she said Brian Topp, my former chief of staff, who has a history of negotiating with oil executives on our climate leadership plan.
Well, you remember back in November of 2015 when she announced her carbon tax and the rest of the climate leadership plan, there were four executives standing on the stage with her, nodding in agreement, saying this is a marvelous idea.
We're all for it.
And those four, three of whose companies are still involved in the oil sands, one who sold out, all of those chief executives are now gone.
And they were the ones that are seen by a lot of others in the industry as collaborators or as traders for having gone in secretly with the NDP, not asking the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, not asking other CEOs of other major companies, cutting a side deal with the NDP themselves.
That's what Topp put together.
When she says he has a history of negotiating with oil executives, that's what she's talking about.
She's talking about getting those four standing on the stage with her during a climate leadership.
It was a disaster.
It's a disaster now.
And that's what she's boasting about.
So if she thinks that qualifies Brian Topp to go out now and talk to oil executives about what needs to be done about the big price gap between West Texas Intermediate of the world price of crude oil and the Canadian price, she's sadly mistaken.
Really, it really is sad.
You know, it's sad.
It's pitiful that it's being taken at face value.
I mean, but even if she hired, I don't know, T. Boone Pickens, a guy who's even if J.D. Rockefeller himself came back from the grave, there is no solution to this other than building a pipeline.
There is, I mean, there are halfway solutions, having trains.
There's even some oil sands companies moving their oils.
Oh, yeah, this isn't even a halfway solution.
That's not even a halfway solution.
Trans Mountain by itself, when you twin it, will take 900,000 barrels a day of Alberta crude and bitumen to the West Coast, 900,000.
We were told in July by the National Energy Board that for the first time ever, oil by rail was 200,000 barrels in the month of July.
So 200,000 barrels a day.
So Transmountain by itself, if you added in Energy East and Keystone X Allen and others, it would be many, many, many times what rail is.
So it's not even halfway.
All the solutions that are left to Notley. are optics.
She has announced this morning that the provincial government is going to cede about $2.1 billion in petrochemical plants around the province, and that should lead to 15,000 jobs in construction and $60 billion in private investment.
It may or it may not, and it's nice if it does, but this is too little, too late.
This is a government that has, for three and a half years, done everything it possibly can to appease environmentalists by adding more and more burdens on the backs of oil companies until there are 47,000 Albertans still without jobs who lost them in 2014, 2015 in the private sector.
There's slow rates of growth in the whole province.
I think we're heading into another negative year, perhaps next year.
It looks just awful.
And the only reason she's doing this now in November of 2018 is because in May of 2019, she has to go back to the voters and try and win re-election.
And that is simply not going to happen.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I don't think the problem is we don't know how to get rid of this price differential.
It's the simple laws of supply and demand.
There is a lot of oil in Alberta, and a very small amount of it can get out because it's being bottlenecked.
This was a deliberate strategy called demarketing.
The real problems are there's no pipelines.
You have courts that are stopping the pipelines in the case of the federal court of appeal.
You have environmental activists.
You have her brother, New Democrat premier in Victoria, BC.
So we don't need to send out some mission into space to find out what could possibly be happening.
We all know what's happening.
No, we don't have to send up a Voyager satellite to get soil samples from Mars to figure out what is going on.
Yesterday, Notley said in one of her press releases, I didn't hear it in a speech that she gave, but I did see it in one of her press releases.
She said, the reason this is a problem is the bottleneck, the backlog.
We can't get our oil out to market.
And the reason for that is that Canada hasn't built any pipelines in a decade.
When she was in opposition, she was opposed, I think, to every pipeline.
She's certainly opposed to most of them.
Since she's been the premier, she opposed Northern Gateway.
She was iffy on Keystone.
She said, we don't want to be able to get it.
Oh, she was against it.
She said she didn't want to ship raw bitumen.
Yeah, I mean, that's their argument against it is that they don't want to send raw bitumen or crude to Texas to be refined, refined it in Alberta.
That's not a bad argument, but that means you're not in favor of the pipeline, really.
And when Energy East was canceled because of Trudeau trickery a little more than a year ago, the only thing that Notley said was that's quote unquote unfortunate.
Please don't blame Ottawa and Quebec for this.
It's not their fault.
It's the industry and the prices at the moment.
She has been almost as bad on pipelines as Justin Trudeau has.
And now she says, oh, I don't understand this.
We don't have any pipelines.
How can that be?
Well, she's done almost as much as any leader in the country to stop pipeline.
Yeah.
We just showed on the screen Rachel Notley in opposition at a protest.
She wasn't the lady holding the sign.
But put that up just for one more second.
I'll just, you know, there was never an anti-oil sands protest in Edmonton she didn't attend.
No tar sands, no tankers, no pipeline, no problem.
And she was at this rally.
Let me show you a tweet that touches on me, because as you may recall, I wrote a book a few years ago called Ethical Oil, The Case for Canada's Oil Sands.
And here's what Rachel Notley wrote at the time.
She said Topp's modest proposal, like the original, is tongue-in-cheek.
He wrote some anti-oil sand screed.
And then she said, if only one could say the same of Levant's silly ethical oil argument.
And that's six years ago.
You can see that.
Listen, it doesn't hurt my feelings.
I don't care what she thinks of my book.
The book speaks for itself.
My point is, she was so against Alberta oil, she thought pointing out that it's ethically superior to Saudi Arabia, Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela, pointing out the facts that Albertans are better in terms of democracy and treating minorities in those other countries.
She called that silly.
That speaks to her, not to my book.
And Top.
And Topp, who she has now appointed as her new, one of her new oil envoys to go and talk to CEOs, wrote in the Golden Mail when he was running for the federal NDP leadership that the idea of ethical oil was as ridiculous as the idea of ethical landmine.
I mean, you're still going to be just as dead.
You're still going to be just as polluted.
It doesn't matter that it comes from an ethical country.
It's the oil itself that's evil.
And so these are the people that she surrounds herself with, and she hopes that they're going to get her good advice.
Now, I know Brian Topp is a Machiavellian political operator, that he probably does or does not believe what he says half the time.
If it's to his political advantage, he'll mouth it.
If it's not, I don't know that he will.
Maybe he's a grown-up now, and he'll go and he'll find some solutions from oil executives.
But the point is, as you made this point very early in our conversation, this is something the Premier of Alberta should know already.
She doesn't need to find three people she can send out to survey the oil industry and find out what it is that they need.
She should know this stuff already.
And the other thing that she's done in all of this is that she's adding, she said, they will go and see oil industry experts.
Now, you and I think that an oil industry expert is somebody who knows how to run an oil company or how to run an oil market.
But I remember when she was running in 2015, she said, we are going to be better at developing oil and protecting the environment at the same time because we will bring in experts to do it.
And I said there, you know, the people who work for the Alberta government already are experts at this.
I mean, they've been doing it for years.
They know how to royalties and how to make permits and how to set off the land leases and all this.
I mean, they do understand what they're doing.
And she said, no, I'm talking about experts, scientists who've looked at this and really know how things are going.
So when she says she wants to send people to see oil experts, they're going to go see the Pembed Institute.
I guarantee you they are going to go see environmentalists.
They're going to go see people who don't really believe in development, who have these ideas of still these wacky ideas that we're going to be able to somehow decarbonize our economy overnight.
They'll just wave a magic wand and we will suddenly be carbon free, but we'll all still have high-paying, prosperous jobs.
That's the kind of expert I think she's talking about.
You know, if she really wanted to get this problem solved, she would hire some former NDP Premier of British Columbia, someone like Glenn Clark or Ujil Destange, and send him as her ambassador to the current NDP Premier of BC.
She would hire the head, former head of the Assembly of First Nations, I don't know, Matthew Kuhncom or someone like that, Phil Fontaine, I don't know, to lobby the Indian bands along the route.
And she would go to where the blockade is.
You don't need to ask oil executives, hey guys, what's the problem?
We know what the problem is.
It's not the oil executives.
The problem is the courts, the politicians, and the Tides Foundation-funded Indian bands.
And that is exactly what she is not doing.
She's hired a Toronto union boss to, you know, to bill his $1,000 a day rate to give some deep thinking about how we need to decarbonize.
It's a disgrace.
Harper Unplugged: Friends and Rebels00:05:51
That's where it to you, Lauren.
Well, I think there are two things that need to be done in order to get this backlog cleared up.
One is the federal government has to assert its constitutional authority over interprovincial trade and say this pipeline is going to be built.
If the courts get in the way, they can say, look, we'll change the law so that you can't examine all of the things in there because this has already been examined by the experts at the National Energy Board who said it's okay.
That's thing one.
Thing two is at the provincial and federal level, you get rid of the carbon tax, you take away all the new regulations that have come in since 2015 on oil companies that have just added burden on burden on burden.
And you just say, hey, guys, we trust you to run the oil industry.
We know you know how to do it.
We're going to back out of your way.
We're going to take away the financial impediments that we've put in your way.
And we'll see what happens.
It'll happen exactly as it has in North Dakota, in Utah, in Texas, in Oklahoma, with the American government getting out of the way of the oil industry.
They've had booms there in the oil industry for the last two years.
And they would have the same thing here if those two things would happen.
Yeah.
You know, the other day I was looking at North Dakota.
They just produced a record production, about 1.2, 1.3 million barrels a day in a state that has 750,000 people.
That is more oil than all the conventional oil production in Alberta and the rest of the country combined.
Lauren, it's good to talk to you, even if it's about a depressing matter.
I guess we're done in six months with this absolutely devastating government and hopefully we're chilling the champagne now.
Yeah.
All right, great to see you again.
Thanks for being here.
Okay.
All right.
That's our friend Lauren Gunter.
Calm us with the Edmonton Sun.
We're talking about Rachel Notley hiring three wise men to figure out what the problem is.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
On my monologue yesterday about former Prime Minister Stephen Harper's interview with Ben Shapiro, Liza writes, I really enjoyed listening to Harper Unplugged.
It was the fastest hour I've spent in a long time.
At least Americans will be reminded that we didn't used to be a laughing stock.
Harper has more than once made me proud to be Canadian.
And that's exactly what I thought, too.
I mean, I thought, oh, brother, I don't have an hour.
Who's got an hour?
I wanted to hear what he said next.
And it was great.
And although I chided Ben Shapiro yesterday for disagreeing with a few things, so what?
We're allowed to disagree.
And Ben Shapiro let the man talk, which is something the Canadian media party wouldn't.
Norbert writes, great show, Ezra.
I've read Harper's new book and found it to give an excellent account of present and future political analysis.
In the excerpts of the interview with Shapiro, Harper expands on his comments in the book and underlines them in expert fashion.
It is a book not just for Canada, but the world at large.
All right, well, I haven't read it yet, but that interview made me want to read it.
And I'm sure if I read it, which I hope to, I want to talk to him about it.
Now, I don't know if he's going to come on the Rebel, because, you know, the tepid conservatives in name only in this country are a bit scared of us.
Although I should say, we were certainly out in force at the Ontario PC convention on the weekend.
Hopefully Harper doesn't care what the media party says.
I'll reach out to him.
I have some friends in his office.
Billy writes, can you imagine if it was Harper who renegotiated NAFTA?
Harper should accept your interview offer.
If he's paying any attention to the current story lineups of the Rebel, he would know that pillaring by the leftist MSM is undeserved.
Well, thanks, Billy.
I think you're right.
And I think that we treated the NAFTA renegotiations more seriously than probably any other media in the country with the exception of the Financial Post.
Would you agree with me on that?
We had some very interesting guests we interviewed.
I really enjoyed our three or four interviews with Manny Montenegrino.
Wasn't he thoughtful?
And we had that Professor Buckley, I believe is his name, the Canadian-American who wrote the Republican Workers' Party.
That was his book.
I thought that was very interesting.
And yeah, I think we treated it more seriously.
We weren't cheering.
We wanted the deal.
We were cheering for a deal, not for the disastrous diplomat.
To call Christia Freeland a diplomat is to torture the meaning of the word beyond what the word can hold.
Yeah, imagine if we had Harper.
He would have done that deal in one month, quietly, a year ago, bilateral deal, keep Mexico out of it, friends, friends, friends.
And it would have been, that's exactly what would have happened.
And in fact, Harper and Trump, even though they're stylistically couldn't be more different, I'm sure they would have found a lot of common ground, whether it's on human rights, Israel, China, trade, industry, whatever.
I really regret that the two men did not overlap in office, because I think it would have been, you know, it's a pity in a way.
You had Jean-Cretchen matched up against George W. Bush, and they didn't really get along.
And then you had Stephen Harper up against Barack Obama, and they didn't really get along.
Keystone XL Pipeline, the biggest problem of that.
And now you've got Trudeau and Trump.
If only we were in harmony, in cycle with America, I think that would be to our advantage because America is just so massive.
It's got such a gravitational pull.
I mean, I don't know.
Maybe it makes sense that we're pulling away from them all the time.
But I think economically at least that's hurt us.
Well, that's the show for today on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters to you at home.