UK’s Five-Year Jail for Nazi Symbolism sparks outrage as critics compare sentences—like Adam Thomas and Claudia Potatoes’ six-year terms—to leniency for rapists, questioning why neo-Nazi imagery (e.g., swastika pillows) is prioritized over Muslim extremist threats, despite 23,000 UK jihadi suspects. Meanwhile, Alberta’s separatist tensions rise over federal policies favoring Quebec, with protests booing Mayor Nenshi for speaking French and blaming Trudeau’s carbon tax for $40B in lost energy investments. The episode argues selective enforcement and economic mismanagement distract from real dangers, exposing a double standard in both justice and regional politics. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight is a five-year prison term appropriate for someone who made a pillowcase with a Nazi swastika on it.
I've seen rapists get less jail time.
I'll tell you the story.
It's December 18th, and this is The Ezra LeVance Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
You come here once a year with a sign, and you feel morally superior.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
I think it goes without saying that I don't like Nazis much.
I mean, just on a personal level, I'm a Jew and they'd probably want to kill me.
They tried to kill off my whole tribe and wiped out six million of us.
But put aside my own ethnicity, Nazis are totalitarian brutes.
They were dictators.
They destroyed civil liberties and life for everybody.
Anybody would hate them.
And of course, they burnt down Europe in the Second World War, killing tens of millions of people.
There's a reason why the term Nazi is the word that the left turns to when they want to demonize someone because it is so synonymous with evil, even 73 years after the Second World War ended.
It really is just another four-letter word that isn't to swear.
But I'm of the belief that there really aren't a lot of real Nazis in the world today.
Certainly not in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
Three great democracies that united on the beaches of Normandy on June 6th, 1944, to storm into France to break the Nazi hold on the continent and drive Hitler out from the west while the Red Army under General Zhukov crushed it from the east.
There is Nazism in other countries.
In particular, Hitler tried to politically colonize the Palestinians to get them to turn against the British and just as importantly to join him in his anti-Semitic Holocaust.
The Nazis recruited Muslim supporters in the Middle East and in the Balkans.
Here's the Muslim Mufti, that's the Palestinian religious leader, giving the Sieg Heil to Nazis in Europe.
Here's a whole division.
Here's Muslim SS soldiers reading a Nazi book about Jews and Muslims.
And here's a Nazi-Muslim division at prayer.
That is a lot of Nazis doing the Muslim prayer.
So I'm not here to say that there are no Nazis left in the world.
I'm just saying that in Canada, the United States, and the UK, and I'd add in Australia and New Zealand, there are no genuine organic Nazi movements.
There just aren't.
Now there are racist groups, of course, and there are Muslim immigrants who are anti-Semitic extremists who use Nazi symbology, but I just don't believe that there's a real Nazi menace in the countries that defeated Nazism.
In fact, I know this is shocking, but in Canada, this is hard to believe, but it's true.
The Canadian Jewish Congress actually helped to set up and fund the Canadian Nazi Party in the 1960s.
I know that sounds crazy, but they did.
They claimed to infiltrate it, but they just created.
Here's a story about this weirdness in the Jerusalem Post.
I actually wrote about it in my book Shakedown about a decade ago.
Same thing happened in Canada with the Heritage Front in the 1980s.
It was white supremacist.
It was set up by CISIS, as you know.
I mean, you know you're short of Nazis to police when the police become Nazis to set up Nazi groups for the police to police.
I hate Nazis, but that's almost like saying I hate unicorns.
They're so rare in real life, at least in Canada and the Five Eyes countries I've mentioned.
If someone claims to be a Nazi, unless they're a 90-year-old German who sneaked into the country after the war, or unless they are Muslim extremists too, just using the Nazi iconography, it's probably either a police informant or what's sometimes called LARPers, live-action role-playing, like furries, I think.
People just doing it to be shocking or dramatic.
They're not planning to invade Poland, people.
Usually they're losers, powerless people who know the power of the Nazi symbols and know that it offends and gets attention, so they use it like they would use the F-word.
It's powerful, it's shocking, so you use the word Nazi to hurt feelings and to have people pay attention to you.
Charles Manson wanted a symbol of evil.
He had a swastika tattoo.
I don't think he was actually a National Socialist in a meaningful way.
He just knew it was the ultimate symbol of evil.
If we were in a more religious society, he might have reached for something satanic.
But we're in a post-religious society in the main, so reaching for Hitler is the new Satanism.
I remember when I was a Jewish kid, I was in grade three or four, and I saw, for the first time in my life, another kid, non-Jewish of course, doodling a swastika, vandalizing a desk.
I was shocked.
I mean, I knew what it meant.
Was he a nine-year-old Nazi?
I think I almost cried.
Or I was scared or surprised, really.
But the boy who did it, and I still remember his name, but I won't say it now because he was just nine and he didn't know what he was doing back then.
I asked him what it was, and he didn't know.
He was scrawling a swastika on the desk.
He didn't know what it meant.
He just knew that the teachers hated it.
He wasn't a Nazi, folks.
If you find a real Nazi, let's get him.
I'm with you.
But 99.9% of the time, it's fake.
It's a distraction from real problems, especially real anti-Semitism.
There is no SS anymore trying to round up Jews and kill them.
There is no Wehrmacht sending panzer tanks in a blitzkrieg through the world anymore.
Ethnic Germans aren't burning down synagogues in a new Kristallnacht or boycotting Jewish stores anymore.
Those things are all still being done, by the way, but usually by Muslim anti-Semites or their allies, coalition allies in the West.
Sorry to be blunt about it, that's who it is.
There are murders being planned and committed.
ISIS, Al-Qaeda, they attack Jews when they can.
They attack any infidels, really, but they really hate Jews.
The only armies that are threatening Jews with tanks are really places like Iran.
Paradoxically, a country that denies that the first Holocaust even happened, but threatens to do a second Holocaust.
And all of this is my way of saying, oh, believe me, I'm on guard for Nazis.
But when the British intelligence services say there are 23,000 Muslim jihadi suspects in the United Kingdom, 3,000 of whom are so dangerous they need to be monitored around the clock, I'm not too worried about the kids who spray paint a swastika in an alley and then run away.
I'm more worried about another 9-11 or some bomb on a double-decker bus or just someone taking a truck and ramming people on the road, as is the new ISIS play.
And anyone who says, stop, no, no, no, stop and look at this fake Nazi, I immediately think this had better be good.
Or else I think you're just trying to misdirect and confuse and avoid the real elephant in the room.
In other words, it's easy to fight fake Nazis today, who were a real threat 75 years ago, rather than fight the real threat today.
It's easy to be a brave person tackling a problem that isn't real anymore.
Which brings me to this news item I saw this morning.
It's a tweet from the Crown Prosecution Service in the United Kingdom.
I follow them because they hunt Tommy Robinson and I want to see what they're up to.
Let me read the tweet.
Six people, including a couple who were active members of a banned neo-Nazi group that glorified Hitler and the Third Reich, have been jailed today.
And then it says, photo, Adam Thomas posing with a machete and cushions found in the home he shared with Claudia Patatas.
That caught my eye.
You don't often see those words in a press release, Third Reich, you know, Nazis.
I'm pretty tuned into political shenanigans in the UK.
I've been following it pretty closely for the past two years, especially as I've gotten to know Tommy Robinson and the problems in that country.
And I have never heard of Hitler problems in the UK.
I mean, that's the land of Churchill.
That's the land of Battle Britain.
It is also these days the land of Muslim terrorism.
And, not to be ethnic about it, lots of acid attacks and knife crime.
London is now more dangerous than New York City.
I had not heard of Nazi crime, though.
But even in that tweet I showed you, there's a hint.
They glorified Hitler and the Third Reich.
So the crime was that they glorified things?
So they didn't stab anyone or throw acid in anyone's face or blow anything up.
They were just saying something inglorious was glorious.
So they're saying the wrong things about a bad thing.
They're saying a bad thing was a good thing.
Now, I believe that there should be a crime that prohibits supporting terrorist groups.
Or even supporting gangs like biker gangs or the mafia organized crime.
I think it should be illegal to recruit terrorists, to fund terrorists, to help terrorists.
And I'm pretty open to criminalizing terrorist propaganda.
But even there, we've got to be careful that we don't just make opinions themselves tantamount to crimes, right?
But there's no Nazi terrorist group.
There's no Nazi menace in the United Kingdom.
These people who were sentenced, they were not building bombs or V2 rockets or pans or tanks.
They were just, as you saw, glorifying things.
I mean, look at that image on the tweet.
This is the tweeted.
The lady who was convicted, Claudia Patatas, I think that means Claudia Potato, which is a bad name for a Nazi, I think.
Her crime, I guess, was having really, really tacky, ugly, creepy throw pillows.
I love how the police have those measuring rulers there, just so the court knows exactly how big were the offending objects, officer.
Well, it was exactly 3.2 inches, like they were measuring a crime scene.
Like, you know, they draw chalk around a dead body and take photos where all the bullet casings are.
Just how many inches were the swastika through the pillows, Miss Potato?
Now, I'm making some jokes here, but these folks got years in prison.
Let me read a bit from the press release.
So I clicked on the link in the tweet and brought me to the press release.
Six people, including a couple, have been jailed today for being members of National Action, a proscribed group that glorifies Hitler and the Third Reich.
Okay, so maybe it's not just that they glorified Nazis, but they were in a club.
They were in a group.
And to be fair, one of them did have a manual on his laptop.
Let me read more from the press release.
Adam Thomas, 22, and Claudia Potatoes, 38, from Banbury, were found guilty along with Daniel Buganovic, 27, on 12th November, following a four-week trial.
Can I see the cushions again, Your Honor?
You've seen it seven times already, ma'am.
I just want to see the cushions again.
You know, we've been at this for four weeks.
Yeah, a four-week trial at Birmingham Crown Court.
Thomas was also found guilty of having a terrorist manual on his laptop that gave advice on homemade explosives, including a soft drink can bomb.
Now, I was joking around there a little bit.
I shouldn't be joking.
But from what I can see, there was no evidence that they were actually going to make a soda drink can bomb or had done so or had done anything else violent.
They had this document on their laptop.
But I'll admit that is a little more than just glorifying Nazis.
But I remind you that in a single year, 55,000 Muslims in the United Kingdom downloaded al-Qaeda's magazine called Inspire, which has all sorts of terrorist plans in it.
If merely possessing something you downloaded from the internet that talks about how to kill people is a crime, and maybe it should be a crime, I'm not quite sure.
But I think there ought to be some indication of intent to do the crime or a past track record of doing it.
If I downloaded Inspire magazine, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be committing a crime.
Well, 55,000 Muslims downloaded in one year.
That's 55,000 jihadis now, if that's our definition, not just the 23,000 they're tracking, which I think is why they went after the Nazis here.
There's just a handful of them.
And from what I can tell, they hadn't actually done anything violent.
No riots, either from them or in support of them when they were picked up.
Let me read some more.
I don't want you to think that I'm hiding some devastating fact from you.
Here's some more of what the CPS emphasized.
They said images were also found on Potato's laptop of Adam Thomas in Ku Klux Klan robes holding a machete taken at their home in Banbury.
She also had a photo on her mobile of Thomas Fletcher and others giving a Nazi salute under a crucifix outside Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral.
Well, that's just bad taste.
I mean, come on.
Like I say, it's a bit of role-playing, live-action role-playing, a bit of dress-up.
It's creepy and it's gross and they sound like weirdos, but it doesn't even make sense outside the KKK.
That's an American thing.
The KKK was a Southern Democratic Party reaction to losing the Civil War.
It wasn't a Nazi thing either.
It was a Southern Democrat thing.
And by the way, plenty of Ku Klux Klan members fought against the Nazis.
I'm not pro-KKK.
I'm not pro-Nazi.
I'm just saying that these folks in Banbury were surely racist, and they have bad taste, and they got to get their story straight because the Klan hated the Nazis.
Most of them did.
They fought against them.
I'm not for the KKK, I'm not for the Nazis.
Eight Years of Hell00:04:17
I think they're both bad.
But since when is glorifying racism and having a photo of dressing up in a Klan, when's that a crime?
Even wearing a Klan outfit is not a crime, maybe a crime against fashion, a crime against taste, a crime against politeness.
But is that a crime?
Let me read some more.
These members continued to believe in its racist neo-Nazi worldview, remained in contact on encrypted messaging apps and organized meetings to keep the group going.
They still believe in it.
And we're going to prosecute them until they stop believing.
You know what, folks, I don't think they have actually stopped believing in their racist worldview.
I don't think putting them in prison for five years each will likely change that either.
If anything, it will confirm for them that the thing is rigged against them by Jews, blacks, I don't know.
I think that, by the way, these people will probably be killed in prison from what I have learned about British prisons.
At least they're put in the majority of British prisons that seem to be controlled by Muslim gangs.
And who knows, maybe that is the desired outcome of the justice system here.
But let me read you the sentences that these people received.
Adam Thomas, total of six years and six months.
Claudia Potato, five years or two and a half years each per throw cushion.
Daniel Buganovic, six years and four months.
Darren Fletcher, total five years, which includes 20 months for breaching a criminal anti-social behavior order.
Good lord, I wonder what that is.
Nathan Prike, five years and five months.
Joel Wilmore, total of five years and ten months.
So none of them in jail for less than five years.
That's what Mrs. Potato got.
Five years for some bad costumes and those really ugly throw cushions and the wrong worldview and being part of a secret club that was so super secret.
And one of them had a manual on his laptop that had instructions for how to make a bomb and a pop can.
Hey, remember that massive Muslim rape gang that Tommy Robinson was put in jail for reporting about?
They were all convicted in the end.
They raped 15 different girls.
Let me correct that.
That's actually how many they were convicted of raping.
The actual number of girls they raped was surely much, much higher, maybe 10 times higher.
These are just the 15 that they had evidence for.
These girls were girls.
When I say girl, I don't mean young woman.
These were children as young as 11.
They were raping children as young as 11.
And please understand, they didn't just rape these girls once.
They raped them cumulatively.
Thousands of times over years.
They turned them into rape slaves.
One girl set her own house on fire so her family would have to move away.
One girl literally jumped off a balcony to hit her head on the pavement to hospitalize herself so she wouldn't have to be raped anymore every week.
That's how brutal these men were.
I would call them Nazi-like in their evil.
And some of these men in the Huddersfield rape gang that Tommy was jailed for reporting about that day in Leeds, some of them got a sentence of 15 years or so, but some of them got just eight years.
Here's one.
Irfan Ahmed, 34 years old of Ewes Hill Road, Huddersfield, guilty of one count of sexual assault and two counts of trafficking for sexual exploitation, sentenced to eight years.
Mansur Akhtar, 27 of Black Moorfoot Road, Huddersfield, guilty of two counts of rape and two counts of trafficking for sexual exploitation, sentenced to eight years.
I say it again, these men didn't rape these girls once.
They raped them week after week after week.
These were girls, these were as young as 11.
So glorify Nazism, get out in six years of prison.
Rape children three years, eight years in prison.
Immense rape.
What about merely supporting terrorism, glorifying it, to use the word?
Pipelines Controversy Explained00:16:07
Look at these.
Look at these.
What about political crimes like calling for death to infidels, calling for death to those who would defy Islam?
I don't know if that's a crime, but the UK thinks it's a crime to have some ugly throw cushions.
Well, look, the UK is not going to arrest 23,000 jihadi suspects if it's not going to arrest 55,000 British Muslims who downloaded an al-Qaeda manual.
Surely it's not going to go after the hundreds of thousands or even millions of British Muslims who believe democracy should be replaced by Sharia law.
Yeah, I don't think Mrs. Potato is a nice person.
I don't like her or her Nazi glorifier friends and their dress-up parties.
But to be honest, every minute and every dollar that the UK spends going after them Is a minute and a dollar they're not spending going after the real Nazis of today.
I am not a Nazi, even though liberals often call conservatives Nazis.
If real Nazis were a threat, I would be all about fighting them.
But today's Nazis fly a different flag, the flag of Muslim extremism.
And the press and the politicians and the police and the prosecutors and the professors, the 5P professionals, they couldn't care less.
Stay with us for more.
Pipelines have always been controversial.
It is very unfortunate that Canadians are polarized on such a vital piece of infrastructure that is so necessary for us to grow our economy and create jobs.
Unfortunately, the changes that the previous government made in 2012, gutting the environmental protection of water, environmental protection of fish, and excluding Canadians from participation in the review, limiting the participation of indigenous communities in the process and not taking action on climate change has further polarized the opposition to the pipelines.
That is called victim blaming.
That's Amarjeet Sohi, the energy minister, blaming everyone, including the inanimate objects of pipelines for being so controversial.
Pipelines are not controversial.
In fact, you could say they go back to Roman aqueducts.
And before then, pipelines are about the least controversial thing in the world.
Even to this day, pipelines retain a majority or plurality of support in every province if you append the proviso that they be done in an environmentally safe manner.
But the arrogance of that liberal today, blaming everyone but his own activist party, which campaigned against pipelines, is quite astounding.
And it's no surprise, as I showed you yesterday, that Angus Reed shows that Amarjit Sohi is the most detested cabinet minister in the entire Trudeau cabinet with a negative 36 rating.
Joining us now from Edmonton to talk about Amarjit Sohi and his announcement of $1.6 billion in corporate welfare is our friend Lauren Gunter seeing your columnist with the Edmonton Sun.
Lord, great to see you again.
Good to see you.
I find it frustrating when liberals say that pipelines are controversial or when Rachel Notley says the oil industry has a bad reputation.
No, it doesn't.
Most people don't even think about those things.
And the only people who would say those are partisan activists.
They're no more controversial than highways or any other infrastructure.
It's only this activist set that defames it as controversial and then offers up their solution, which is carbon taxes.
No one thinks of pipelines controversial other than activists.
If you only hang out with people, as you call the activist set, then you get to say, well, everybody thinks that because everybody you know thinks that.
But they don't get out very much in the liberal government or the NDP government in the province.
They surround themselves with other like-minded individuals.
They live lives in echo chambers.
And so it doesn't seem wrong for them to say, as Sohe did today, that pipelines are controversial.
Pipelines weren't really all that controversial until the liberals came along in 2015 and decided to take advantage of that in the election and really play up the schism and say, oh, you know, the Harper government has done everything it can to railroad pipelines through.
I forgive the mixed metaphors there, but everything they can to ram pipelines through.
And I think it's hilarious, absolutely hilarious, that these people have been in government more than three years now, and they still blame Harper for the fact that there is no pipeline.
Maybe they believe that, or maybe they think we'll believe that, but either way, somebody's dumb in this equation.
Yeah.
Well, the thing is, the Northern Gateway pipeline was approved by the National Energy Board under Harper's term, and Trudeau positively canceled it.
The Energy East pipeline was en route to be approved, and then Trudeau changed the rules, which made it impossible to continue.
I should say that these things did not just happen on their own.
They were pushed.
And there's that famous video, I'll just play a quick clip of it now, of Gerald Butz, just before he left to work for Justin Trudeau, saying in regards to the Northern Gateway pipeline, he wasn't for or against this route or that route.
He didn't even really care about the route.
He was against energy and fossil fuels altogether.
Here's that quick clip.
We think that the oil sands have been expanded too rapidly without a serious plan for environmental remediation in the first place.
So that's why we don't think it's up to us to decide whether there should be another route for a pipeline, because the real alternative is not an alternative route.
It's an alternative economy.
So Lauren, to pretend that these folks were not the problem is a kind of revisionist history.
Here's a question for you.
You're in the heart of the oil patch in Edmonton.
Does anyone buy it?
Which the $1.6 billion buy?
Well, does anyone buy that the Liberals are not to blame here?
The NDP are not to blame.
Oh, and you know, so we're losing.
If you look at stats can numbers, we're losing in Canada about $40 billion a year in direct investment in the energy sector.
That's every year $40 billion.
That's because of, initially, sure, world oil price collapse had a big part to play in that in 2015 into 2016.
Since then, though, the last two years, that's all been because of the social license and the green agenda of the federal liberals and the Alberta NDP.
And so we're losing $40 billion a year, and up pops Amarjeet Sohi and Jim Carr at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in Edmonton today.
And they say, here's $1.6 billion.
We're going to spread it across the entire country.
Any oil company anywhere in Canada can try and get in on this money.
We're going to retrain workers.
Well, why would you need to retrain people unless you think they're never going to get a job again in the oil sector?
If your ultimate goal is to shut in all oil or certainly all oil sands oil in Canada, I think that's where they're at.
They're here long before they expected to be, far earlier in the process than they expected to be.
But now that it's here, maybe they're taking advantage of it.
Or one of the other things that I proposed in the column that's just gone online, maybe they're having to put $1.6 billion into Alberta because they intend to revive the GM plant in Oshawa.
And they realize you can't pump money into that unless they pump money into the energy sector first.
Or maybe they're trying to overcome the bit of a controversy that they set off a couple of weeks ago when they announced that they're going to give Quebec an extra $1.4 billion in equalization payments, which Quebec doesn't need.
And so maybe all of these things together are wrapped into this.
Or maybe they think that voters in Southern Ontario, in Quebec, in BC, in Ottawa, are starting to worry a little bit about the economy.
And while they know $1.6 billion will have no impact in Alberta, it's not going to save anybody from going bankrupt.
It's not going to put anybody back to work.
Maybe they think that they can assuage voters in Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver that they're doing something about the economy by throwing useless money at Alberta.
It's an insult, though, to Alberta.
Are we really that dumb to think that what's missing between a prosperous energy sector and where we're at now is $1.6 billion taxpayer dollars from Ottawa.
And it's an insult.
Yeah.
You raise a good point about retraining.
I mean, the leftists have always said shut down the oil sands, phase out the oil sands, oh, and maybe teach these 50-year-old oil men how to code.
And they can, you know, it's like what they would say to coal workers in West Virginia.
Another quick clip here.
Here's Justin Trudeau just quite recently saying that his goal is to phase out the entire industry.
Here, take a look at that.
I've said time and time again, and you're all tired of hearing me say it, you can't make a choice between what's good for the environment and what's good for the economy.
We can't shut down the oil sands tomorrow.
We need to phase them out.
Lauren, that's really what's going on here.
The problem is not a lack of money.
The oil industry is one of the best financed industries in the entire world.
Literally trillions of dollars.
Money can't move fast enough into new oil-producing regions in the states, for example.
North Dakota is setting new records.
Texas is setting new records.
The oil patch never asked for money.
Enbridge Pipelines, Kindermorgan Pipelines, Trans-Canada Pipelines, they weren't short of money.
They had all the money.
They just needed the government to stop blocking them.
And that fraction of a fraction of government money doesn't solve the actual problem, which is they're not allowed to build.
And that's exactly what's going on here.
So you have to assume that the Liberals announce this $1.6 billion today for political purposes, not for economic purposes.
There's no way.
I mean, what the Oil Patch wants that's different from a lot of other businesses who were happy to be bailed out, what the Oil Patch wants is simply for government to get out of its way.
It would be nice if the federal government used its constitutional might to help Trans Mountain get built.
It has control over interprovincial trade, so it could exercise some authority.
In fact, last April, when Justin Trudeau met in his office on Parliament Hill with John Horgan, the BC Premier, and Rachel Notley, the Alberta Premier, he said, I will have Parliament pass a bill this spring.
So before June of 2018, he was going to have Parliament pass a bill asserting Ottawa's constitutional authority over the pipeline.
Now, that's not going to prevent its opponents from taking the matter to court.
It's not going to be a magic wand that suddenly gets all the bulldozers and the pipelayers out and moving.
But it is something that sends a signal to opponents, to courts, to investors, that Ottawa is serious about this.
The absence of that kind of motion in Parliament sends a very opposite signal.
And so, you know, there you have Trudeau saying that, you know, he wants to phase out oil and not following through on the constitutional side with Trans Mountain.
So what are people supposed to, you know, you say, oh, well, let's please give us $7 billion to build a pipeline.
What do you think people are going to say?
Well, you've got a prime minister who's probably going to stand in the way of that.
No, we're not going to give you $7 billion.
So not only is it North Dakota and Utah and New Mexico and Colorado and Oklahoma and Texas in the United States that are going ahead with oil, but it's all sorts of countries around the world.
The latest estimate that I saw is about two months old.
There would be $300 billion worth of investment in oil and gas around the world in the next three years.
And that's better than it's been now for about five years.
$300 billion over three years.
And almost none of that was going to come to Canada.
We are going to be below our average, our normal historical average for investment.
And that's all because of politics.
Not because there isn't oil there.
Not because the geology is wrong.
Not because we don't have a skilled workforce.
It's all because of politics.
Yeah.
Now, I got a question for, I mean, and you and I have talked about these things before.
We've talked about how the liberal government has been colonized by anti-oil lobbyists.
I showed you Gerald Butts, that's the principal secretary to Trudeau.
The chief of staff to the environment minister used to be the head of the anti-oil lobby group called Pembeda.
The chief of staff to the energy minister, the chief of staff to various personnel within the government, they were leading anti-oil lobbyists.
So that's not a surprise.
I want to ask you about the Alberta reaction, because in the last few days, we've seen huge rallies in Alberta, the likes of which I don't think have been seen in Alberta since the early 1980s.
This is imagery on the screen right now from Calgary.
Police estimate that just under 3,000 people were there in Calgary.
It's pretty impressive for Calgary, a city that's not a professional protest city.
I saw estimates of between 1,500 and 2,000 people in Grand Prairie.
That's a city of just 65,000 people.
That's right.
Proportionately, that's as large as the great 100,000-person unity rally in Montreal on the eve of Quebec referendum.
There's an anger there.
Can I show you a quick clip?
This is when Mayor Nahid Nenshi, who's always been a bit of a lefty, he tried to speak in French.
He tried to speak in French to the rally.
And I think that bugged people because Quebec has just said we want more equalization and we don't want your pipeline.
Take a quick look at this.
I've been asked by the organizers because it's important that this message carry across the whole country.
So I've been asked by the organizers to say a few words in French.
So I will do that now.
Maybe a couple more of us.
Let me give you a little bit of advice.
If you want someone to listen to you, you have to speak their language.
You know what?
That wasn't just a little bit of booing.
Everyone was booing.
And I don't think people there don't like the French language.
I don't think it's because most people there couldn't understand the French language.
And I actually understand Nenshi's point.
You know, let's send a message to Quebec.
But that just shows that people are worn out.
Booing in French00:08:44
Their patience is gone.
And it was so fresh that Quebec was getting more equalization cash and was adamant on the pipeline.
And Trudeau just gave Quebec another de facto veto.
That's the anger there.
And Nenshi obviously is not in tune with his own people.
Yeah, no, that's exactly right.
And it's kind of too bad that they didn't let Nenshi give his message in French because I think he did have a good intention.
And I don't like Nihet Nenchi.
I'm not making apologies or excuses for Nenshi.
It's too bad that the crowd didn't let him do that.
But I fully understand where they're coming from, how they feel.
You have had Francois Lagaud, the new Premier of Quebec, say that it's socially unacceptable in Quebec to have a pipeline and that it's full of dirty energy from Alberta, dirty energy from Alberta.
And interestingly, since 2015, when the Line 9 reversal was finished, and instead of bringing oil from the East to the West, Line 9 now takes oil, 9B takes oil from the West to the East.
Quebec now gets 53% of its oil from Alberta.
So they're using lots of our oil.
And they're buying SUVs at a faster pace than any other province in the country because they suddenly have some money and they're doing what everybody else does.
They're buying a bigger vehicle.
They're buying bigger houses.
They're using more of that energy to heat.
They use more oil to heat than anywhere else in the country.
And so it's hypocritical.
And I understand why people are frustrated because in Quebec, this is seen the way most people see their groceries.
It's just food that shows up in the store.
They have no thought to give no thought to the animals or the ranchers or the farmers and the produce and all of the equipment and everything that goes into producing the food.
They just want the food in the grocery store.
And so people in Quebec have the same impression of energy.
They don't care where it comes from.
They just want to know when they go to the gas pumps, there's gas there.
When they flip the switch, there's light there.
When they turn on the furnace, there's heat there.
And so they get to be hypocritical.
They get to be idealistic about, you know, oh, we don't want dirty oil.
Oh, my goodness, no.
While they're taking all sorts of oil from Saudi Arabia and the United States and everywhere else.
So it's very frustrating.
And I understand then why the crowd was buoying.
You know, I want to show you one more clip from that Calgary rally because there's a cantankerousness.
And almost 3,000 people, that is a large crowd.
I remember when we had an anti-carbon tax rally two years ago in Edmonton, and some unemployed oilmen started chanting locker up.
And it was obviously a repetition of the Hillary Clinton locker up because this was just a month after Trump had won.
It was in the air.
It was obviously a joke.
It was a blowing off steam job.
They didn't want to actually lock the Premier up in handcuffs.
It was a humorous banter.
But oh my God, how dare you?
Well, Calgary, when one of their own aldermen was trying to say, come on, guys, let's buy Quebec cheese.
I know it sounds funny, but take a look at this for a second.
This is not a time to be talking about boycotts or trade embargoes.
We want to encourage trade, not restrict it.
We should be talking about supporting autism.
Wow!
Really?
And you guys call yourselves Canadians?
Wow!
No, not buying!
So he's pitching buying Quebec cheese.
They don't like that.
And then he disparages that.
You call yourself, so between Nenshi, being furious that they didn't want to hear French, and that guy, I think his name is Paul DeMong or Peter DeMong, I forget.
You don't want Quebec cheese?
And you call yourselves Canadian?
He's speaking to his own electorate there, Lauren.
Exactly.
And what about the people in Quebec who don't want our oil?
Does he go down to Montreal and say, oh, you call yourselves Canadians for not wanting Albert oil?
No, he doesn't do that.
So this is the mentality we get into every time this sort of thing comes up.
And that is you have these progressive elites from the West and from Central Canada who disparage anyone who doesn't accept their view of what's tolerant and what's acceptable.
And so there's no reason that people in Quebec or in Calgary need to buy a lot of Quebec cheese.
I don't want a boycott of Quebec merchandise because I don't think that the entrepreneurs in Quebec are the ones who are driving the anti-oil mentality.
And so they shouldn't be the ones necessarily who need to be punished.
But what you see here is a version of social license.
Well, let's be really nice to Quebec.
And in turn, I'm sure they'll turn around and be really nice to us.
No, they're not going to change their minds.
And they are given all sorts of, you want to talk about license.
They're given all sorts of license by the federal government and their own provincial government and by politicians like those two in Calgary.
They're given all sorts of license to be sneering and snotty about Alberta oil because we rush to appease them every time it happens.
So no, I fully understand why the crowd was as frustrated as they were in Calgary.
The other one, though, and you mentioned it briefly, is the one in Grand Prairie and how large it was relative to the size of the town.
The other thing that happened right after that rally broke up was they had a caravan of oil service vehicles, mostly large trucks, that drove through town.
It took 90 minutes for it to process through, and the police estimate there were 600 vehicles there.
I mean, that's the depth of the frustration.
That's the depth of the discouragement that there is.
And at the same time, too, the depth of the passion people have for the energy industry.
Yeah.
Those trucks, unlike the oil sands itself, which can't be moved, those trucks cannot move down to Texas or North Dakota.
And that's where the jobs are.
Here's my last question.
I mean, I was too young in the early 80s to follow the separatist movement.
But I know that Doug...
Where's this going, Ezra?
Well, here's my question.
I know Doug Christie followed the, you know filled the Jubilee Auditorium with separatists.
They actually elected a separatist provincially.
When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I saw another wave of Western alienation.
Preston Manning came along and said, the West wants in, not out.
Vote for me and we'll fix things.
He didn't fix things.
In fact, he split the right, but Harper finally fulfilled the province and the promise and the West was in.
Here's my question to you, is you've got these losers like Nenshi and DeMong there saying, come on, guys, let's speak French and buy French cheese, and that'll do it.
If the carbon tax won't, buying Quebec cheese will.
So you've got an anger there.
I think Jason Kenney's certain victory next year will ease the pressure, but the problem is coming from BC's John Horgan and Justin Trudeau federally.
And I want to know how is this going to end?
Because when you have 2,700 people in Calgary and almost 2,000 in Grand Prairie, and these are angry people and they won't listen to the centrists, if you'll call Nenshi and DeMong that, where's this going to go?
Yeah, I don't know.
And could it lead to a revival of Western separatist viewpoint?
Yeah, sure, it could.
It certainly has led to a revival of alienation.
Not entirely different emotions, but one is more extreme than the other.
And you start to hear people say now, they're starting to use the S-word again, which they hadn't used in a long, long time.
And the very fact that there was a prime minister from Calgary deflated a lot of that.
I mean, Preston did deflate that anger when he said the West wants in, whatever the outcome of that was, ultimately.
But he stepped in and stopped a large-scale separatist movement from forming in the West.
But now there's another Trudeau.
Now there's another anti-Alberta, anti-Western government in Ottawa, one that is once again favoring Quebec every time we turn around.
And I can't say that the sentiment you saw on the ground in Calgary, in Fort McMurray, in Grand Prairie, to a lesser extent in Edmonton, I can't say that that won't morph itself into separatism.
Another Trudeau, Another Problem00:05:02
Yeah.
You know, I've kept you so long here today, Lauren.
Thank you for your time.
You've made me think of a question.
I'm going to get Kian Bexti, our new Calgary reporter, to do some streeters, if you know what I mean, just going out on the street, do some Vox populi.
And you've made me think of a question, and that is, who would treat Alberta's oil patch better?
Justin Trudeau as the Prime Minister of Canada?
Or if Alberta joined the United States, Donald Trump?
Because Trump's the guy who said Bill Keystone excelled.
Trump the guy who said drill, baby, drill.
Trump's the guy who said frack, drill, and export.
I bet that Albertans, while they do have a sentimental, historical, and inertial love for Canada, know that the practical answer is Donald Trump would be a better friend to Alberta than Justin Trudeau.
I just, you know, put aside loyalty and patriotism, the factual answer there, there is only one answer.
Trump would be better for Alberta practically.
Now, that doesn't deal with emotion and history.
I'm going to ask him to do some streeters on that.
What do you think?
Yeah, I don't think it will be much of a surprise what the answer will be.
The United States, for the first time in over 50 years this year, has become a net exporter of oil again.
Yeah, it's incredible.
Lauren, thanks for your time.
I know I kept you a long time.
These things are just, there's a heavy moment going on in Alberta right now.
And the Ottawa media doesn't care.
And I think most politicians don't care.
I'm glad you care.
I'm glad you do too.
All right.
Thanks, my friend.
Take care.
We'll talk to you soon.
You bet.
All right, that's Lauren Gunter, senior columnist with the Edmonton Sun.
So interesting, so troubling.
I truly, in my 46 years, do not recall anything like this, with the possible exception of the separatist movement when I was just nine or ten, which I did not fully experience at the time.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about a poll that rated the performance of Trudeau's cabinet.
Timmy writes, The only Canadians that support Trudeau and his cabinet are those who have no idea what's going on with their government, let alone their own personal lives.
You know, I just watched a fun little clip from my friend David Menzies.
And he does this thing where he goes downtown late at night when the bar is empty and he talks to the drunks.
And that sounds like a great way to pass the time.
And David's a friend to all.
And you just meet a different side of the world, eh?
If you want to be depressed for a bit, watch some of Menzies.
Can I play a clip?
So I just want to show you this.
So he set up a Justin Trudeau doll.
There is such a thing.
I'm pretty sure Rosemary Barton has one.
And then he got something called a Trumpy Bear, which is a teddy bear with some yellow Trump-style hair.
It's a thing.
He put them on a chair and he asked people, which would you like for Christmas, the Trumpy Bear or the Trudeau doll?
And here's just a snippet of the Trudeau love that's out there.
Take a look.
You're obviously an informed gentleman.
So who would you pick for your Christmas gift?
Is it Trumpy Bear or the Justin Trudeau doll?
I'll say Justin Trudeau because he looks good.
That's it, to be honest.
I thought for sure you were going to go with Trumpy Bear.
No, Trumpy Bear, he's cute, but like, I can't take him home.
Like, if I were to, like, I'm pretty sure I could take Justin Trudeau home right now.
Oh, I would agree.
The Justin Trudeau doll?
I've heard that.
I thought teddy bears are so cuddly.
I thought the hair.
No, no, no.
He's giving me Trump vibes, so I'm going to have to say Justin Trudeau.
Trump vibe a bad vibe?
Very bad vibe.
Yeah.
Can I just say one thing?
I am so glad that the voting turnout rate for millennials is like 20%.
Maybe we should raise the age to vote to like 40.
All right.
On my interview with Pierre De Rocher on his book, Population Bombed, Bruce writes, Suzuki doesn't care about accuracy, but the narrative that we're a bacterial infection on the face of the earth.
You know what?
He's a dehumanizer.
He really is.
And maybe it's because he used to be a geneticist, so he studied fruit flies.
That's what geneticists do.
So maybe he thinks of everything in that way.
Maybe like when all you got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
When you're a fruit fly scientist, everything looks like a bug.
But I always find it dehumanizing when someone compares people to cockroaches, vermin, rats.
Premium Subscriber's Nausea00:02:10
Listen, I dish out insults every day, let's be candid.
But I try not to do the dehumanizing.
When I call someone an idiot, I obviously mean an idiot person, not like an idiot animal.
And when David Suzuki compares us to maggots and bacteria, it makes me wretch.
Of course, he's a little bit anti-human.
And what's so funny is he's such a leftist, and he's against immigration to Canada for that reason.
He thinks there's too many people in the world, as you saw in his test tube video.
But he's got five kids himself.
Brett writes, I've been a viewer since your Sun TV days and often check out your clips on YouTube.
I finally got off my area and subscribed to Premium last week.
My only complaint is that you don't do a daily two or three hour show.
On one hand, watching your show makes me sick every time I'm reminded of Justin's stupidity, but on the other, you provide incisive analysis and commentary and a few good laughs as a tonic for the nausea.
Anyhow, thanks and keep it up.
Well, Brett, that is such a friendly letter.
Thank you very much.
It's nice to hear that.
And thanks for being a premium subscriber.
Thanks to everybody, because at eight bucks a month, it really adds up.
And as you know, almost exactly two years ago, YouTube demonetized us.
They demonetized every conservative commentary site online.
That YouTube money probably could have paid for the whole company.
It was starting to be a very significant sum.
And then YouTube just said, no, stop, you're right wing.
We're going to take you out of the Ad Buy pool and we're going to demonetize anything with the words feminism, Trudeau, or ISIS in the headlines.
That's what happens to us.
My point is your premium subscription keeps us afloat and the occasional crowdfunding that we do.
So thanks.
I'm glad you like it.
And you know what?
I love doing the content.
I love doing the interviews.
I love doing the monologues.
It's tricky because I have other duties here at the Rebel as well, trying to help manage things, trying to help grow things.
So yeah, I mean, it would be wonderful if I could just do what some of the other online guys do, which is just content all day.
But I got to do other things too, but I'm glad you like what you see.
That's our show for today.
On behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.