Sheila Gunn Reid examines 2018’s top exposés, starting with COP24 in Poland, where she revealed the UN’s climate change hypocrisy—private jets, diesel generators, and $50K cash benefits per Syrian migrant family under Liberal policies while demonizing skeptics. She criticized Catherine McKenna’s Paris Agreement tweet praising Syria and Nicaragua, despite their atrocities, and questioned the acquittal of Solomon Hajj Solomon, a Syrian refugee accused of assaulting six underaged girls at Edmonton’s World Water Park in 2017. Reid predicts Trudeau’s re-election via media complicity, labeling critics as racists or bigots, and warns of escalating censorship against outlets like Rebel Media, which she says operates independently through viewer donations. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, who is the most beloved rebel personality?
Well, I haven't taken a poll, but I guess it's this gal, Sheila Gunread, our Alberta Bureau Chief, for a special full-length interview.
It's December 28th, 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.
Welcome back.
Well, I am based here in our world headquarters in Toronto, but I was born in the West.
And in many ways, my heart remains there.
And I'm glad that we have such a strong representation in Alberta.
We have a new reporter in Calgary named Kian Bexti, and I think he's coming along great.
But of course, the bedrock of our Western reportage is our Alberta Bureau Chief, Sheila Gunread.
And it's a delight to talk with her today about her favorite three videos of 2018 and her look ahead for 2019.
Sheila, great to see you again.
Hey, Ezra, thanks for having me on.
Well, come on.
It's our pleasure.
And although you are our Alberta Bureau Chief, you cover stories across the country.
And in fact, you have traveled quite far for the Rebel.
In December, you went all the way to Katowice, Poland, to cover the United Nations Global Warming Conference.
Yeah, that was great.
It was really great to see Poland be very, very happy to take all those tourism dollars, but not to take the advice of the United Nations.
The whole conference was a message to the United Nations that Poland is staying with their coal reserves and they're going to use coal as long as they can.
Yeah, that was great.
You know, I'm so glad you go to those conferences.
And you go as a skeptic.
They force you, even if you weren't a skeptic, and you are, of course, but even if you weren't, they would have transformed you into one because they just won't let you inside the conferences anymore.
And they specifically say it's because you have asked questions that the Canadian delegation finds impertinent.
Yeah, there's no way that you could walk away from those climate change conferences feeling as though climate change is the most impending danger facing planet Earth right now because the people who attend those conferences sure don't act that way.
I mean, those conferences are absolutely fueled by fossil fuels and there's no way around it.
So when the UN delegates start behaving like climate change is going to kill us, maybe I might start taking them seriously.
Yeah, and you know, the more you look into it, and you've been right in the belly of the beast, I've never been to such a conference, but I read about them closely.
It's like they're their own club with their own secret handshakes and secret languages.
Even the name of the conference, they call it COP, COP24, and next year will be COP25.
That stands for Conference of the Parties.
They have this every year, so it's a perpetual motion machine.
They don't want to solve whatever the problem is they claim is the problem because then they wouldn't be a COP25, COP26.
And even the fact they say COP this, COP that, and their whole jargony language, it's deliberate.
It's the opposite of plain language because they want to create this new priesthood, this new fancy class that you don't understand what they're saying, but that's sort of the point.
So you have to rely on them and how dare you doubt them.
And only they are enlightened and sure they're jetting around, but you see it's important because they're important.
Like it is, it is.
If you went to a laboratory and said, invent for me the most sneering, out-of-touch, globalist, elite caricature, that's what they would come up with.
Yeah, and they use weird language, like you said.
Like they say things like elevating ambition to fight climate change.
What does that even mean?
And there's one thing I know we pointed it out last year in a video.
There's a lot of swag.
Like there are swag bags that are given out at these United Nations climate change conferences.
And everybody this year got a scarf and they got a water bottle.
I mean there's enormous expenses from the United Nations to make sure that all the delegates are sort of dressed in their priestly garb, their scarf, their vestments to attend these things.
And if you really cared about if that were your concern, how climate change is affecting the poor in the developing world, if you actually thought that was a thing, you wouldn't be buying fancy people scarves at the conference.
Yeah.
Well, you know, there are some absolutely true believers there.
They're ideologues, I'd call them almost cult-like.
I don't think global warming is a religion.
I think it's a superstition because there's an important difference between the two.
I think, though, just based on your reports, I mean, to see all the private jets in the airports, to see all the diesel-fired generators, to see all the luxury.
If you are a true believer and you go there, you will have an identity crisis.
You will say, how can these people be the saviors if they're actually the biggest carbon consumers and living large?
And how can we say reduce, reuse, recycle when these people do none of those things?
So I think cynicism is actually, it looks idealistic on the face of it, but I think it's cynical.
And I think the real operators there, and just take a minute on this, because by the way, we're going to go through your three favorite videos of the year, but I just wanted to talk about this for a second.
Canada, in the form of Catherine McKenna, our environment minister, brought with her a 126-person entourage, like she's like the princess of Azgabad or something, Agrabah.
Like who has 126 little courtiers around them?
That's like some medieval prince or something.
So many of them are lobbyists and schemers and scammers and business people though.
So you've got the idealists.
You've got the cynical idealists who are just in it for the fun of the parties and the inertia.
But then you've got all the little parasitical grant appliers, subsidy hunters, grantrepreneurs that are embedded in these things.
That's probably the number one thing that happens at these conferences is handouts are inked and special deals are cut.
I think so too.
Although you did touch on an interesting point when you said part of it is like a cult.
And I think that's probably very true.
There's always the cult leader or the cult body, people at the top who are getting rich.
And if you give them their money, they can put off the impending doomsday.
But I used to wonder why people who are in a doomsday cult never leave when the doomsday never comes.
They actually become more committed.
And that's what you see at these United Nations climate change conferences.
The true believers, those people who are back home, who are pushing the climate change agenda, who are only flushing their toilets once a day or whatever they're doing back home, the further away the climate apocalypse gets, the more those people get committed to the idea that it's coming.
They bought right in and they can't buy out.
Yeah.
You know, you just made me think of that, you know, that comedy show called The Office, the American version.
I forget the name of the character who says, I've been in a cult both as a leader and a follower.
He says it's more fun as a follower, more profitable as a leader.
It was a great line, and I just remembered that always.
And I thought, that is exactly what the global warming scheme is.
It's more fun to be, hey, hey, ho, ho, fossil fuels have gotta go.
But it's a lot more profitable to be the Jerry Butts or the Mike Crawley's just getting rich off the grants or the wind power 20-year contracts.
All right, listen, I just wanted to talk about that because that's one of the amazing things you've done around the world in Poland, in Germany, and even in Morocco.
Solomon's Testimony00:15:18
But I've asked you to choose three of the videos that you thought were most interesting in 2018.
And the first one is one that, you know, we were just joking a little bit about global warming and having a little laugh.
This next story just makes me mad and sad and frustrated.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about the trial of a quote refugee to Canada named Solomon Haj Solomon and what he was charged with.
He was a series, one of Trudeau's Syrians, and he was charged.
Well, I'll let you tell us and then we'll roll the clip.
Go ahead.
Sure.
Solomon Haj Solomon was part of Justin Trudeau's first wave of Syrian refugees, the ones that he brought in to meet an arbitrary campaign goal.
He came to Canada with his wife and his five children at the time.
He ended up with six children after the fact.
And shortly thereafter, he came to Canada.
He was charged with molesting six underaged girls at Edmonton's World Water Park at the West Edmonton Mall.
And I attended that trial in its entirety.
I sat through six full days of testimony, I believe, and then any other court proceeding I came back to.
During the entire time, I was the only reporter who was there from beginning to end.
There were reporters there on the first day and reporters who dwindled back in on the last day, but it was just me hearing the wrenching testimony of these girls who broke down on the stand while they described what Solomon Haj Solomon was alleged to have done to them.
Yeah, well, they described it from their actual first-hand testimony.
So they weren't saying, you know, this is an allegation.
They're saying, this is what he did to me.
Let's play a clip and then we'll ask you how it ended up.
Here's a clip from some of your videos on the subject.
Not guilty on all 12 charges.
That's the judge's decision today for Solomon Haj Solomon, a Syrian refugee and father of six who came to the country December 2015.
He stood accused of six counts of sexual assault and another six counts of sexual interference.
Now the charges are all stemming from just one night at West Edmonton Mall's World Water Park, February 4th, 2017.
Six girls between the ages of 13 to 15 accused Haj Solomon of sexually touching them in the wave pool.
Court heard two full weeks of testimony beginning in January.
Now both the defense and the Crown agreed that indeed an assault happened to the girls that night at the water park.
The issue before the judge was simply identification.
The judge said that she could not be sure beyond a reasonable doubt that Hajj Solomon was the man who molested the girls at the water park.
The judge said there was no confirmatory evidence that the person pointed out by the girls was the person responsible for the molestations.
The judge also said there was no evidence that the person followed by mall security and lifeguards from the pool was the person responsible for the molestations.
So, so frustrating, acquitted on all charges.
And this Trudeau Syrian, he had sort of a little support group there in court cheering for him, didn't he?
He did.
The entire time after the initial reporters left, it was just me, sometimes one of the girls' moms, one of the people who works with the city police to support the girls, and then this gaggle of elderly do-gooders, white liberal do-gooders who were there to support him.
And they really seemed unmoved by the testimony of the girls, I'll be frank with you.
You know, I have a daughter who's 12, close in age to these girls, and it was very difficult to hear the trauma that these girls experienced both then and after the fact.
But these people who were old enough to be these girls' grandparents, they really didn't seem affected by any of it.
Yeah.
And in the end, if I recall, the judge said one of the reasons she refused to believe all these girls' testimony is that she imputed to them an inability to identify their assaulter because he was of a different race.
And so she, and correct me if I'm wrong, the judge essentially said, well, you probably think all Syrians look the same, so I don't trust your testimony.
Is that an accurate enough summary of what the judge said?
Yeah, I'll paraphrase.
She said something along the lines of, because he is in a different cultural background than the girls, she thought that the girls would have a difficult time picking him out from a crowd, which is, as you say, basically saying the girls must think all Syrian refugees look alike.
Now, the girls identified him from the stand, and that is after he changed his appearance from the time of the alleged assaults until trial.
He had a full beard during the time that he was charged, and when he appeared at trial, he was clean-shaven, but the girls still identified him.
Yeah.
I think, I mean, according to the law, he was acquitted.
The two opposites in court are not guilty, sorry, are guilty and not guilty.
It's not guilty and innocent.
I do not believe he was innocent.
I believe he is legally found not guilty, but I damn well believe he did it, even if the court says he is legally not guilty of doing so.
I think this judge made a political judgment to cover up for one of Trudeau's Syrians, and I think that these girls have become a sacrifice zone for Trudeau's Syrians the same way Marissa Shen in Vancouver appears to have been part of the sacrifice community for Trudeau's Syrians.
And I've learned enough about the rape gangs in the United Kingdom to know that where there are tens and hundreds, there will soon be thousands.
And I tell you this without anything but sorrow.
All right, Sheila, let's move on to the next story.
That one just gets me so mad.
Speaking of Syria and global warming, well, we can combine the two.
Take the dumbest cabinet minister in cabinet.
Well, that's not quite true because that would be Maryam Monsoff, I think.
Take Catherine McKinna, the Kim Kardashian, the climate Barbie of the cabinet, add Syria and her Twitter mania and tell us what we get.
We get a tweet of her congratulating Nicaragua and Syria for signing on to the Paris Agreement.
It was resoundingly mocked at the time that she made this tweet from her department Twitter.
So we dug a little deeper.
We wanted to know how that tweet came to be and whose hands and eyeballs it passed through and who decided it was a good idea.
So we filed an access to information request and we got all the details.
And as an interesting side note to this story, at the very same time, CDC had the same access to information documents, and they sat on them for obvious political expediency until we broke the story.
Yeah.
We'll play the clip in one second.
I just want to point out, if it wasn't obvious to our people that Syria, of course, is ruled by a dictator, he's not a Democrat, who has waged a brutal civil war.
I actually think he's better than ISIS, but that's like saying I'd rather be shot than be hanged.
And Nicaragua is one of the least free countries in the Americas.
So for her to support Syria and Nicaragua, because they signed some meaningless global warming platforms shows the shallowness and the lack of seriousness.
But let's take this look at your video story from 2018.
Remember when Catherine McKenna thought that chemical weapons are hot, but carbon dioxide is not?
She sent out a tweet last November praising Syria for signing on to the Paris Accord.
Canada salutes Nicaragua and Syria for joining on to the Paris Agreement, global climate action.
Anyway, the tweet spawned immediate backlash and international embarrassment for us Canadians.
McKenna was condemned and mocked for her misplaced priorities of carbon taxes and climate change fear-mongering over very real human rights abuses like using chemical weapons against civilians happening at the hands of the Assad regime.
McKenna said that it was clearly a mistake from her department Twitter.
She tweeted that the liberals have made it clear that the murderous Assad regime must end attacks against its people.
I dug a little deeper into this mess.
I can tell you that Catherine McKenna wasn't exactly forthright when she denied knowledge of the tweet and at the rebel, we now have the exclusive documents from within McKenna's own ministry to prove it.
Yeah, she had a gaffe and then she threw one of her staff under the bus and blamed it on them.
That's the gross part.
I mean, she loves to take the credit, whatever credit there is, from her staff, but she will not take any blame, will she?
No, we saw that that tweet went, its final approval actually came from Catherine McKenna's office.
So when she said it was, you know, just a department error, that's completely and totally untrue.
Her people, her office, were the last people to sign off on it.
I want to talk about the third story.
And the funny thing is, you're our, I started off by saying you're our Alberta Bureau chief.
You help us cover the Western Flank of this country.
We talked about your trip to the three different global warming conferences.
You've also been on journeys with us even to Israel.
So we cover the world, but it's interesting that the three stories we're talking about today all have something in common, namely open borders, globalist migration.
Isn't it interesting?
Because I think that's something the whole country affects the whole country.
And this next story, again, an access to information exclusive that you dug up, there's a lot of gossip on the internet.
And I see lots of memes on Facebook about how much money these illegal migrants to Canada get just for showing up.
And you see it on Facebook and you think, is that real?
Is that fake news?
The only way to know is to get the actual government documents.
And you did, and I tell you, the actual number is far higher than anything I've seen on Facebook.
Why don't you tell us a story?
Sure.
We wanted to know exactly how much cash money the liberals are giving to Syrian migrants as they come into the country.
And so we filed an access to information request and we found not only that the Liberals are handing out up to $50,000 just in cash benefits.
Those aren't the additional additional benefits.
Those aren't language supports.
That's not food banks.
That's just cash money to Syrian migrant families.
But we also found in that same document package that the bureaucrats were trying to make it so that nobody actually found out that number.
They were trying to find different ways to word their replies to people who are sending inquiries like those at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
They were actively workshopping the best way to provide a non-answer about the number of cash benefits that were going to the Syrian migrants.
Yeah, when you have plans to keep the truth about something away from the public, that's sort of a tip-off that you know you're doing something that's unethical or unacceptable.
Here's a clip from that report you did.
We have received a secret memo where bureaucrats are discussing how best to handle a media inquiry about the yearly cash financial support that Canadians would be providing to this new influx of Syrians.
Here's the email chain.
Thanks, Nancy.
We have a table approved and past responses with breakdowns.
Can we try to dig that up and include it here?
I think the reporter is looking for numbers.
We know that 50K is the new startup cost, but we haven't used that yet.
If we do, can we get mino approval?
Earlier this week, we opted to go with the individual cost response for the Canadian Federation of Taxpayers.
But in this instance, the reporter is talking about families, so it may be okay to use.
And I just want to say we set up a little micro website with this story and the full access to information documents.
A very easy to remember website.
It's just 50,00050000.ca.
500s.
How many zeros is that?
That's four zeros.
That's a lot of zeros.
That's a lot of zeros.
50,000.ca.
People can see the whole document.
They were scheming and scamming and planning.
How can we hide this fact?
And I should tell you, we just talked about how the CBC, once you broke the Catherine McKenna tweet story, the CBC grudgingly followed it, which they had been sitting on.
I haven't seen any mainstream media follow up on your scoop backed up with primary documents that is 50 grand a pop.
Have you seen any mainstream media follow your story?
No.
In fact, actually, I was sort of suspecting that the Canadian Federation of Taxpayers might follow up on it because they're involved in this story, although just peripherally.
But they haven't yet either.
And, you know, we publish these documents.
We publish them for everybody so that not only our viewers can see what they've helped me fundraise to pay, because we do have to fundraise to pay for these documents.
They're very expensive.
But because we don't want to have a monopoly on the truth.
I want these stories to end up in the mainstream media.
I want them to steal my work, although properly attributed.
And they're just not.
There's a cone of seclusion and a cone of silence around all of this.
Yeah, and I think it's only going to get worse as the $595 million Trudeau bailout slush fund is rolled out in the campaign year.
I mean, I think that the media was contracting anyways because of economic and technology reasons.
The CBC was an unfair competitor, larger than all of the news media combined.
They obviously do the bidding of their paymaster, but I think that's just going to accelerate in 2019.
Let's end on that note.
What do you think 2019 is going to look like?
Let me start by giving you what I think is going to happen.
Media Under Siege00:03:06
You've got an election year provincially in Alberta, Rachel Notley, doomed, but she's going to go down firing every shot she can.
And then Justin Trudeau, re-election campaign, I've seen a couple of bad polls for him in a row.
I think he will win because the media will just haul his carcass across the finish line.
And I think Andrew Scheer lacks a fighting spirit and a charisma.
I'm sorry, I just think that's the fact.
And I regret that Maxine Bernier is going to shave a few votes off the conservatives in key writings.
So I think Trudeau is going to win again, but I think he's going to win ugly.
And I think he's going to call everyone who disagrees with him a racist, a bigot, an Islamophobe, a transphobe.
I think they're going to try and censor.
I really think they're going to come for the rebel in some way.
And I know that sounds like a speculative conspiracy theory.
They've condemned us by name in parliament.
I think 2019 is going to be the hardest year of our existence and the worst year for Canadians in terms of accurate news.
That's my super pessimistic prediction.
What's yours?
I completely agree with you.
I was just going to say that based on the rhetoric coming out of the House of Commons, calling us out by name, the Liberals, it's really their campaign strategy to attack their largest critic.
They punch as much at us as they do the federal conservatives.
And then here in Alberta, Rachel Notley, she knows she's done.
She's doomed.
But I've seen her communications director come out and attack me personally.
She's the woman who signaled to the sheriff at the legislature to remove me from the legislature from reporting.
I saw her do it.
She's come out and attacked me personally, saying that she would throw me out again because she says that I am hateful, homophobic, Islamophobic, and anti-Semitic.
I mean, just all of them.
She's just throwing everything at me.
Oh, my God.
You know what?
And the fact that that outrageous statement by her that she would throw you out as if she has the legal authority, as if she has the moral authority, as if she has the organizational authority, like it's an absurd, embarrassing, petulant tantrum statement.
But the fact that not a single journalist in Alberta said, yeah, you're getting creepy, the fact that they all said, yeah, we're either fine with that, or if we're not, we're going to shut up because we're all thinking that we need some sort of bailout or maybe we're going to get a job or something.
That super gross statement by Rachel Notley's press aide, had that been made by Kenny's press aid or Harper's press aid or Scheer's press aid or Bernier's press aid, it would be top of the news for a week.
Oh my God, they called us enemy of the people.
The way they go after Donald Trump, when he criticizes CNN, Trump doesn't say I'll throw any one of you out of the building.
I mean, he did revoke Jim Acosta's press pass for one day because Acosta wouldn't let go of the mic and he was being rambunctious.
Thank You, Asia00:01:49
But Cheryl Oates of Alberta said she'd kick you out on site.
Sorry, sister, that's illegal.
Not a word from the media.
Last word to you, Sheila.
Yeah, of course there's no word from the media because I break the stories that they won't.
I ask the questions they refuse to.
So why wouldn't they want me kicked out?
I'm their competition.
I'm eating their lunch every day from my basement out here in the middle of Nowhere'sville, Alberta.
Well, we love you out there in the middle of Nowhere'sville, Alberta.
And of course, we know it is Somewhere'sville.
And you are everywhere'sville.
You have covered the news for us from several continents, from North America, from Africa, from Asia and Europe.
That is a fact.
And by Asia, I'm referring to Israel.
So you've been to Asia, Europe, Africa, and North America on behalf of the rebel.
That's quite something.
And I think it's been a hoot.
And I thank you for your great work at the Rebel for these past three years or so.
And we're coming up on our fourth anniversary in February, and we're still living.
We're still kicking and screaming.
Yeah, you know, Ezra, I just want to thank you for taking a chance on me, and I want to thank everybody at home for helping me get to all those places and for trusting me to tell the other side of the story.
Well, that's a great way to end it because, of course, all those trips, they cost money.
We don't have it.
It comes from our viewers.
We spend it very parsimoniously flying economy class.
And you're very, very gentle on the expenses, I can testify to our viewers.
So thank goodness to our viewers for supporting us.
Sheila, thanks very much, and all the best to you in 2019.
Great to see you.
Thank you and everybody at the office.
Right on.
I'll pass on your thanks.
Well, there you have it.
Thanks.
Our star, Sheila Gunrid, our Alberta Bureau Chief, with a lot of stories in 2018, and I think 2019 will be even better.