Chrystia Freeland’s appointment as Canada’s foreign minister amid claims of no rigorous vetting reflects a government now diplomatically isolated under Justin Trudeau, with strained ties to China (detaining Canadians, calling Ottawa hypocritical over Meng Wanzhou), the U.S. (ignoring Bolsonaro by name), and key allies like Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and India. Her past—Reuters Next’s $20M mismanaged shutdown, emotional breakdowns in trade talks, and media-focused absences during crises like Venezuela—mirrors alleged favoritism for inexperienced allies over career diplomats, while Trudeau’s foreign policy prioritizes appeasing adversaries over Western-aligned principles. Meanwhile, a Kingston terrorism case involving RCMP surveillance of 300 people and months of monitoring is dismissed as "toxic masculinity," raising questions about oversight and precedent, especially as policing tactics like Stone’s SWAT-style arrest echo authoritarian methods. Canada’s once-respected global standing now faces skepticism over competence and judgment. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, Canada's international relations have never been this chaotic.
Did anybody bother to do a background check on Christia Freeland before she was given the job?
It's January 28th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
You've got 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
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.
It really is the worst time in history for Canada's international relations.
I know that sounds crazy to say, but even during the Cold War, when we were at odds with the Soviet bloc and the two world wars, when we were at odds with various national alliances, we even fought against them militarily, but we were respected by friends and respected by enemies too, and we were reliable as both, weren't we?
And Justin Trudeau, well, he promised he would bring back such diplomatic panache to our foreign affairs, and all the permanent career diplomats seemed to agree with them.
So that's the contrast here of how bad things are to what he said would happen.
I mean, remember when the nonpartisan civil servants in the Pearson building, that's the foreign affairs headquarters, remember they literally cheered Justin Trudeau upon his arrival at their office.
Mr. Trudeau, can you talk about the phone call?
Yeah, that's your non-partisan, absolutely professional civil service folks.
Well, look, it wasn't that Harper was reckless or unprofessional.
The cheering for Trudeau there wasn't because finally a smooth operator was in charge.
It was that they disagreed with Harper on substantive policy.
They disagreed with his position on Israel.
He was more supportive of Israel than the bureaucrats.
They disagreed with him on Palestine.
He called out Islamic terrorists.
On China, Harper was wary of them, on everything from human rights to spying to buying up our strategic assets.
To the UN, Harper believed in national sovereignty, non-global schemes run by foreigners.
The fancy people, the official people, the folks cheering for Trudeau there, they mocked Harper and blamed him when Canada was not elected to the UN Security Council in 2010.
It's obvious why he wasn't and why Canada wasn't.
That Security Council election is where every country at the UN gets one vote, who gets to be a temporary member of the Security Council along with the five permanent members.
And Harper, because he was pro-American, pro-Israel, pro-NATO, et cetera, he obviously lost the votes of all the third world dictatorships, obviously.
And that's a good thing.
Justin Trudeau has been campaigning furiously to get the votes of those third world countries to win that seat in 2021.
That's why he's dumping foreign aid on every tyrant in the world.
That's why he's sending our military men and women to places like Mali, for which there is no Canadian national interest.
It's so weird.
It's such a fake achievement being on the Security Council.
It's a bragging right unmoored from what matters.
It's just for show, which is exactly why Trudeau likes it.
But my point is, look, the fancy people who love jetting to Davos and other fancy get-togethers, they think Harper was a failure in foreign affairs and they promised that Trudeau would do better in foreign affairs.
But three and a half years into Trudeau's term, is there a single thing that Trudeau hasn't made worse?
And I say this because I was jolted with the most shocking headline, most shocking report I've seen from a foreign country talking about Canada.
Something that was never said about Harper by anyone, even Vladimir Putin, who Harper famously challenged at his G20 meeting once, or even by the PLO, who Harper famously challenged.
I mean, recall that even Barack Obama, although he and Harper were at odds over so many matters, Obama still respected Harper enough that he would not actually kill the Keystone XL pipeline during Harper's term.
Maybe he was worried what Harper would do in reaction, or maybe he actually valued Harper's relationship and help enough.
But one of the first things Obama did after Trudeau was elected was to give us that bad news that he was ripping up the Keystone XL pipeline.
I think that's a sign that people around the world know that Trudeau can be pushed around, that he's just the guy with fancy socks and takes selfies.
There's not a lot of there there.
He doesn't read his briefing notes, obviously.
He's more a mascot than a leader.
Now, I say all this because of the mockery that Harper faced for his foreign affairs when arguably it was very successful.
Now compare that to these days.
So let me read to you this line from this Chinese propaganda magazine that I read today.
It's called Global Times, like all media in China.
It's controlled by the Communist Party.
Global Times has been their megaphone during this whole spat between China and Canada about Meng Wanzou, you know, the CFO of that Chinese company called Huawei, who was interested, sorry, who was arrested in Vancouver and is trying to extradite her to the states.
Global Times is where the Communist Party of China speaks a bit more frankly than it does through its foreign affairs diplomats.
So look at the headline.
Resignation reveals political interference.
And let me read a couple sentences, just a couple.
As a Chinese folk saying goes, you cannot live the life of a whore and expect a monument to your chastity.
Canada is a country worthy of respect, but some Canadians must be reminded that they are now refusing to face up to the moral predicament.
They are against moral righteousness while deceiving themselves to believe they can be honored as moral models.
Hmong's case seems to be protracted.
If Canada insists on wrong practice, it must pay for it.
Okay.
And they're arresting Canadians and threatening to execute one.
Now, obviously, I do not support China's government.
They are a dictatorship.
They have illegally seized Canadian hostages.
They do not believe in the rule of law for Chinese people, let alone for foreigners.
I believe that Huawei is a security threat.
I believe China is by far the largest non-terrorist threat to Canada.
That is, they're a military threat and an espionage threat, especially industrial espionage.
Reuters Next's Demise00:15:46
But I will acknowledge the obvious.
Canada's relationship with China is the worst it's ever been.
And I don't mean that we are the most hostile to China we've ever been.
The opposite.
We suck up to China much more than we did under Stephen Harper.
We ignore security and human rights concerns much more than we did under Harper.
Harper was tougher on them, but the relationship was better.
So I'm not equating disagreements with diplomatic chaos and rage.
I mean, no one is tougher on China than Donald Trump, but they literally rolled out the red carpet and treated him like a king when he went to Beijing.
Remember this video we showed before?
They call him Donald the Strong or Uncle Donald, according to the New York Times.
That's what they call him.
I don't need to remind you what they said about our guy, Trudeau.
And this was before we got into this latest fight.
Remember this?
We're quite proud.
The Prime Minister has been given a font nickname in China.
He is called Tudo, which I believe means potato.
And he's, I can't say the Chinese word, it's Xian Tudo, little potato, because his father, Pierre Elliott Tudo, was senior potato.
So we feel we are off to a great start.
How could Christia Freeland not have known that was an insult?
How could she think that was wonderful?
Well, remember who Christia Freeland is.
She's the cabinet minister who, in a tough trade negotiation with Belgium, broke down into tears on camera.
Belgium made her cry.
Belgium.
That's like the nerdy kid in school that the bullies always used to steal his lunch money.
That nerdy kid, Belgium, made our cabinet minister cry.
a country that European, like Canada.
Hey, can I ask a question?
I mean, I'm sorry to ask it, but no one else will, so let me.
How on earth does such a disaster retain her job, let alone be voted best diplomat in the world by some think tank in Washington?
How?
How?
Well, it's the same way that Barack Obama was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize weeks after his election.
So it wasn't for anything he did.
It's what he stood for.
They were a bit disappointed in Barack Obama, the Nobel Prize secretary.
I mean, he started a whole bunch of wars.
He lit the Arab world on fire.
But they gave him the Nobel Peace Prize for having the right feelings.
And that's why Freeland won those plaudits.
She hates Donald Trump.
That's all the foreign policy establishment cares about.
She literally attended a panel discussion in Toronto that called Trump a tyrant.
It was really an anti-Trump rally, and she did this right in the middle of the NAFTA renegotiations.
And remember, she showed up in Washington with this weird homemade t-shirt with messages about the negotiations while those negotiations were ongoing.
Why isn't anyone saying, stop this woman from wrecking things?
Where are the grown-ups here?
I mean, whoever had the ability to fire John McCallum, I don't know who that was.
Can that person please relieve Freeland of her position too?
Obviously, Trudeau won't fire himself, but can we please put Christia Freeland into a job more suited to her talents, whatever those undiscovered talents may be?
Christy Freeland's job before becoming an MP was as a star journalist.
Everyone says that about her, just like they call her a star diplomat.
I want to tell you about the last thing she touched as a journalist.
This was reported at the time, but it wasn't emphasized.
See, Christy Freeland lived outside of Canada for many years.
She lived in New York with her family.
She worked in New York with her family.
That's where she lived.
She came back to Toronto at the last moment, like Michael Ignatieff did, to rule over us.
She didn't live here.
She didn't even have a home here.
She worked for Thompson Reuters, one of the biggest news companies in the world, and they were starting a new venture called Reuters Next, which sounds amazing.
And that's really what Christy Freeland is good at: dropping lots of buzzwords, jargon, phrases that sound good at a TED Talk or something, but afterwards, you say, What did she say again?
Is there anything of substance?
She still does the pundits circuit and the speaking circuit for some weird reason.
The other day, I think I mentioned this when Venezuela was undergoing a street revolution, the best day in Venezuela in a generation, she was unable to make a statement about it for hours because she was busy, as her own Twitter feed showed, doing a pundits panel at a speaking gig at the Davos Forum in Switzerland.
Why?
I mean, I know she would do that when she was a journalist before she became a foreign minister, but isn't a foreign minister's job to do things about foreign affairs, you know, do diplomacy, not just talk about others who do them like a pundit does.
The fact that really no one in the world cared that Christy Freeland was on a pundit's panel instead of dealing with the miraculous crisis on the streets of Venezuela shows that no one in the world who makes actual decisions waited to hear what Freeland has to say.
Why would they care what she said?
But back to her journalism at Reuters Next.
It was a big deal.
Reuters burnt $20 million on it.
They put 150 staff on it.
It's a major project, not as major as running a government department, but a good test of does she have the ability to do things.
So how did it all work out?
I mean, isn't it a good predictor as to whether she could get anything done, whether she could work with others, manage others, manage herself?
How is she in her one big job, the one big opportunity to do things?
Can she do things or just chatter?
Well, let's look back.
Here's a story from just over five years ago.
It's from Politico.
What really happened to Reuters Next?
Let me read a bit.
On Wednesday, Thomson Reuters' new CEO, Andrew Rashbass, announced the company was canceling the ambitious new digital news project, Reuters Next.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Now, this was a very sympathetic story written in defense of Freeland.
Let me quote what Reuters Next was supposed to be.
Reuters wanted to take its massive pool of resources and journalists from across the world and turn their wire services into a digital product with seamless multimedia integration, a stream of information.
People familiar with the project had high hopes, and initial media reports gave it rave reviews.
It wasn't just a redesign.
They said it was supposed to totally change Reuters' digital product and make it the number one news organization in the world.
It sounds like how Christy Freeland talks, actually.
In fact, I bet she was the anonymous source in this story praising herself.
But my point is how jargony and buzzwordy that was.
What does any of it actually mean in real life?
High hopes, rave reviews, seamless multimedia integration, a stream of information.
What was that mean?
I work in the media, but I don't even know what that means.
If someone were to say they were going to do that for me, I'd say, okay, can you tell me what you're going to actually do?
Would you spend $20 million on someone who just kept saying cool phrases like that over and over again and say the word tipping point?
We're at a tipping point.
We're at a tipping point.
That's her favorite phrase.
That story sounds exactly like any Christy Freeland foreign policy speech, just word salad, random combinations of things that sound really futuristic and with it.
Seamless integration, multilateral, like just, do you ever say anything?
I'll never get tired of this image of Christy Freeland and her NAFTA renegotiation team.
Oh, what a laugh.
Look at them.
Oh, it's gorgeous.
The thing about foreign affairs is that I hate to say it to you, it's an old person's game.
And what I really mean is an old man's game.
I'm sorry, that's whose game it is.
Because you have to know details, history, culture, events, incidents.
You need a corporate memory.
You need to have been around in the last war and the war before that.
You need to know how things were in the last administration.
What were things like under Nixon?
And what did Pierre Trudeau try?
What was tried and what didn't work?
You need to be old.
You need to be old.
Having some super hip kids who are up to date with the latest Twitter or Instagram or TikTok really doesn't help you negotiate with China or with Trump's trade negotiator, does it?
That team of millennials looks exactly like I imagine Freeland's team at Reuters Next would have looked.
At least at Reuters, they only burnt through $20 million of private money.
They didn't cause Canadians to be kidnapped by the Chinese dictators, for example.
Here's how Reuters, sorry, here's how Forbes covered the shutdown of Christy Freeland's project.
Reuters Next, anatomy of a multi-million dollar misfire.
Let me read the opening lines.
And you tell me if this couldn't be said word for word about Freeland's track record as foreign minister.
What kind of company spends millions of dollars developing a product it's not sure it wants or needs?
Thompson Reuters, apparently.
The backstory behind its decision to scrap two years of development work on a new version of its consumer-facing website is a classic one of corporate dysfunction, neglect, and diffusion of responsibility, according to several insiders who were close to the project.
Here's how the CBC reported it.
They said, liberal hopeful Christia Freeland oversaw loss of media jobs campaigning on platform of restoring middle class.
Freeland oversaw decision to move jobs to India.
That's a little more interesting, but as usual, journalists are obsessed with journalists.
But you know, this is interesting.
The December 2011 move put about 25 Toronto staff under Freeland's supervision out of work, including 17 permanent and five temporary unionized employees.
Now, I don't care that much.
I don't care as much about that as the CBC does because they just love journalists.
But it does go to the globalism of Freeland and Trudeau outsourcing jobs to foreign countries, importing cheap domestic, cheap foreign labor at home.
But let me tell you what BuzzFeed report.
I showed you Forbes.
I showed you Politico.
Because although BuzzFeed is partisan and leftist and has anti-Trump derangement syndrome, and I'm skeptical of them, this report on Freeland has been unchallenged by her.
How Christia Freeland hastened Reuters Next's demise.
It's a lot of interesting things.
I'm going to read it to you.
Ready?
The dynamo who left Reuters to run for a seat in Canada's parliament was both the motivating force behind the wire service's ambitious digital revamp and one of the primary reasons it was killed.
Current and former employees tell BuzzFeed, oh, is there anything we might learn, we might glean from this about how she operates as foreign minister?
It is exactly the same thing.
Let me read it.
Freeland basically tried to build this thing outside of the entire operation, says a former Reuters employee.
She had very little contact with the newsroom itself.
So Freeland started as a journalist, and then she just hired all her friends.
Let me quote.
She quickly set about remaking it in her own image.
She promoted Jim Ledbetter, then editor of Reuters.com, to edit the section, appointed longtime Reuters veteran Ken Lee to replace Ledbetter, and brought on Ryan McCarthy from the Huffington Post to be her deputy.
For her deputy, she hired Jim Mpoco, who had edited the New York Times Sunday Business section, and was then enterprise reporter at Reuters.
Freeland next went on a hiring spree, bringing in big names with big contracts to write for the section, such as former New York Times reporters David Rhode and David Cray Johnston, Larry Summers, and slate media critic Jack Schaefer.
Okay, now I know this sounds like a lot of gossip, but how you operate in an organization, how you listen to others, how you learn from other people who might know more than you, how you hire and fire, I think it's relevant to anything, including how to run a department.
Let me quote some more.
After Freeland committed to Reuters Next, she set about clearing out many existing Thomson Reuters employees to make room for her own people.
Between Reuters.com employees and people brought onto Reuters Next, around 60 people were working under Freeland, and that's not including the consultants she hired.
People who actually run things.
I'm not talking about journalists now.
I'm talking about managers, businessmen, people who know how to do things.
They were all shut out because she knew better.
Hey, let me read this.
Activate, the media consulting firm run by former McKinsey and MTV executive Michael Wolf, was hired to work on Reuters Next in 2011 and started working with vendors in January when the Reuters Next onto the eighth floor of the lavish Thompson Reuters headquarters in Times Square.
An October 2012 launch date for Reuters Next was set.
The project decided against using any internal resources.
The belief was that they were mired in bureaucracy and they were not the team to build a new vision for editorial, the current Reuters employee said.
You know, I think that's exactly what Freeland and Trudeau did at Foreign Affairs.
You saw how happy they were to meet Trudeau.
I think that Freeland and Trudeau and Gerald Butts think that they're so smart, they don't need to ask lifelong career diplomats to do things.
Instead, they have their own circles, and I'll show you this website in a second.
I mean, how do you negotiate trade deals, for example?
Maybe you talk to the experts who have done it before.
I mean, Freeland herself was the lead negotiator.
We had a grown woman who had to have her dad co-sign her mortgage when she moved back to Toronto from New York.
I'm not making fun of that.
A lot of people can't afford a mortgage on their own, but maybe she's not exactly the absolutely best person in the country negotiating the most important trade deal with a country with her dream team of hip kids.
Now, at Reuters, all they burned up was money, and I don't care because I don't care about Reuters, but imagine this woman working with tax dollars.
Let me quote a bit, but throw that website back up for a second, the last one there.
Canada 2020 was the in this one here.
This is the private think tank of Trudeau and Gerald Butts.
It's called Canada 2020, and they even boast it's where all the real policy in Canada are made.
I put it to you that Christian Freeland and Justin Trudeau and Gerald Butts have their own friends and pals and experts making the decisions and all those happy clappers at Foreign Affairs were shut out and they are saying, what are you doing?
That's my theory.
Okay, let me quote a little bit more from BuzzFeed.
Ready?
Costs steadily rose with new hires and payments to vendors and consultants as the project dragged on and the launch date was continually postponed.
While earlier articles estimated the cost of around $5 million, sources close to the project said that actual figure was three to four times that amount or between $15 and $20 million.
Moreover, the first former Reuters employee said that Activate itself was paid $300,000 a month.
Okay, now here, read all this, and instead of managers, replace it with people who actually know something about China, India, Saudi Arabia, trade negotiations with Trump or anyone else.
Ready?
Listen to this.
John McCallum's Departure00:10:32
Further, of the new employees brought in on the editorial and technical side, none had been at Reuters long enough to know what the experience of being a Reuters journalist was like.
They had all quit or gotten fired.
So it's said.
Okay, now I've read too much, but let me just close with this.
When the preview and beta of Reuters Next launched earlier this year, after multiple delays, the front end was admirably slick, delivering on the promise of a stream of content based around one story that brings a material form, all of Reuters and outside sources.
It impressed the Reuters board and outside critics like Lehman Lab, but the improvements were a little more than a digital mirage.
Behind the scenes, none of it worked.
We ended up working on a system that was even worse than the legacy system, the Reuters Insider said, adding that to the board and the rest of the world, it looked like a functioning website.
Why am I telling you about that?
Because Christia Freeland doesn't actually know how to do anything, how to run anything, how to fix anything, how to listen to people who know more than her, how to work with a team, how to tap into expertise.
Christia Freeland doesn't know how to do anything except be a chatterbox, go on pundits panels on TV, preen for the cameras.
She loves going on TV talk shows.
She even still goes on some of them.
Now that she's a foreign minister, like this show that she did, she was already a liberal back in Canada.
She was about to run for office.
Just a quick clip.
I mean, here's your foreign minister really showing that diplomatic edge.
Take a look.
Okay, I mean the problem with Islam.
You spent most of your show pointing out the dumbness of Americans.
Yeah, not very diplomatic, not very grown up, but hey, she's got pep and spunk, and she's a feminist.
Well, you know what?
Reuters Next was a $20 million disaster.
Hundreds of people lost their jobs because of her.
A company's strategic plan was cratered.
It was a blunder.
Normally, an executive responsible for such a meltdown would go into the wilderness for a bit, maybe do some reflecting, maybe just go away like Kim Campbell did for a while.
Not Christy Freeland.
She failed upward the Trudeau way.
Justin Trudeau liked the cut of her jib and put her in charge of one of the most important files in our country.
And she has gone about wrecking everything, one country at a time, just like get Reuters, except at Reuters, they had a stop loss.
$20 million in it.
Someone stepped in and said, enough.
We're not throwing good money after bad.
Here we are with China taking our citizens hostage.
Trudeau unwelcome in India.
Saudi Arabia on the warpath.
Donald Trump eating our lunch with tariffs and trade restrictions.
Trudeau alienating the new president of Brazil, Yair Bolsonaro, refusing to even congratulate him on his historic win.
Country after country.
And you have to ask, just how far will she be allowed to wreck our foreign relations before we fire her?
Is there any limit?
Stay with us for more on this with Ellen Gunter.
I think she has quite good arguments on her side.
One, political involvement by comments from Donald Trump in her case.
Two, there's an extraterritorial aspect to her case.
And three, there's the issue of Iran sanctions, which are involved in her case, and Canada does not sign on to these Iran sanctions.
So I think she has some strong arguments that she can make before a judge.
That is John McCallum until a few days ago, Canada's ambassador to China at a very special Chinese media only press conference last week, a 40-minute press conference, and only mainland Chinese media and Canadian Chinese media were invited.
He spoke for 40 minutes, making the case against Canada, and certainly the case against America very clearly.
He later said he misspoke, as apparently one does for 40 minutes, and then he misspoke again and Trudeau finally sacked him.
What is the state of Canada-Chinese relations?
China, the country that Justin Trudeau once said was his favorite regime.
Well, let me reach you from Global Times, an official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party.
Here's their very undiplomatic language, and you're going to be shocked by this, but I want to tell you how far things have sunk.
This is in yesterday's Global Times.
They said, as the Chinese folk saying goes, you cannot live the life of a whore and expect a monument to your chastity.
Just incredible.
The diplomatic incident here, as Charles Burton, former diplomat, says the lowest point in Canada-Chinese relations ever.
And joining us now to talk about the disaster is our friend Lauren Gunter, senior columnist with the Edmonton Sun.
Great to see you again, Lauren.
Good to see you.
I wish I could get away with lines like that in my column.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, and Global Times really has been the official mouthpiece for the Communist Party.
So this isn't just some op-ed writer and who cares.
This is really China speaking bluntly to us.
Yeah, and there was another semi-official Chinese outlet this past week that said this incident had caused Canadians to be in revolt against their stupid government.
I only wish that were true.
But they are obviously very enraged about all of this.
And McCallum's ill-advised use of all of these statements has only made things worse.
I mean, Trudeau did have to let him go.
Whether or not you think John McCallum's right that Ming Wanzhou has a good case against the expedition to the United States, I don't think she does.
But say you agree with him.
Even that, he still had to be let go because he clearly had compromised his usefulness as Canada's representative to China.
And he was looking far more like China's representative to Canada.
In the clip that you showed there from the 40-minute Chinese language only press conference, he also refers to himself by his Chinese name.
His wife is Chinese, and that's immaterial to this, except that it's very clear, I think, that McCallum, adopting a Chinese name, saying that he's proud that he's visited nearly every province of China.
He's nearly fluent now in Mandarin.
I think there were these cases back in the 19th century where the British would send out some Earl's second son to be the governor of territory in the empire that no one really cared about.
And they'd be there for years without much contact with the foreign office in London or with the Royal Navy or anything like that.
And when someone would finally show up, they'd send back a dispatch that so-and-so had gone native.
And I think that John McCallum had gone native.
He's far more interested in China's argument than the American argument or the Canadian argument.
And as a result, I don't see where Trudeau had any option but to let him go.
Yeah.
You know, there's a tradition amongst modern diplomatic corps to rotate people through offices precisely to avoid that going native because diplomats are humans too, and they want to be loved and they want to be respected and well received.
And so you start to take the side of the local population and that you want to be friendly, but at the end of the day, you are the agent for Canada there.
You're the lawyer for Canada, so to speak.
You can't start to say, well, I see the other side of the story.
That's the time to rotate you.
Lauren, I've got nothing against the guy who's really trying to ingratiate, but that ingratiation has to be to promote Canada's interests.
Let me show you a clip.
I've shown this before.
This is when McCallum appeared before a parliamentary committee.
And this was about, this was before these troubled times when Trudeau and McCallum were trying to start negotiating a trade deal.
And basically, McCallum was asked, what is your negotiating position?
And this is what he said here.
Take a quick look at this.
Within 24 hours of arriving in China, I was invited to present my credentials to President Xi Jinping.
And I conveyed to him a message from our prime minister that can be summarized in three words.
More, more, more.
Or in Mandarin, yeah, you know, the Chinese have been negotiating for 5,000 years.
They are masters of diplomacy.
And I'm guessing, Lauren, I mean, I'm not the master of the art of the deal, but I'm guessing starting out by saying to your negotiating opponent, whatever you want, the answer is yes and more.
I'm guessing that's not going to work against folks who have been negotiating since the time of Sun Tzu.
Well, you know what?
I don't doubt that we were sending signals to Beijing that we were happy to help them handle the troubles they were having with the White House, for instance.
And now all of a sudden, the Justice Department asks us to arrest this Chinese executive on suspicion of fraud and trying to get around America's sanctions against Iran and Iran's nuclear program.
And they're suddenly incensed.
They think that their little sock puppet in Ottawa is rebelling.
And so they're very angry about that.
It's a really puzzling thing, though, for me, because I think this gets at a broader issue with the Trudeau government.
Canada Backlash?00:03:53
You remember when right after, I think within the first five days of Trudeau being elected in 2015, he announced to the world that Canada was back and we were going to engage again as the honest broker and we weren't going to be like Harper and be the Americans toady and we weren't going to engage in wars around the world.
Canada was going to be what it had always been.
Well, what it had been since his father.
And that was the Blue Beret and the aid group and the NGO and Canada was back.
I can't name a single country that we have relations with where the relations are better now than they were when Trudeau took over.
He's messed up China.
He's messed up the United States.
He's messed up Saudi Arabia.
He's messed up everything with Brazil.
Oh, yeah.
It just goes on and on and on.
On the foreign policy side, you remember during the North America Free Trade Agreement negotiations last fall, most of the media fell all over Christia Freeland.
Oh my goodness.
She brings us popsicles when it's hot and we're in Washington.
And she's so smart and she's so witty.
I think we got taken.
And I don't think that Freeland is all that good as a foreign affairs minister.
And for sure, Justin Trudeau is not very good on foreign relations.
Yeah, you know, you're right.
And let me throw in India into the mix.
I mean, so China, most populous country in the world, soon to be the biggest economy in the world if it's not already.
India, most biggest democracy, probably soon to overtake China in that regard.
And it's part of the British Commonwealth.
And there's a lot of India expats here.
I mean, people who moved here.
America, Brazil, Trudeau wouldn't even send out a congratulations letter to Yair Bolsonaro mentioning him by name.
When he was just elected as president recently, Trudeau would not even say his name because he so hates him.
It's so weird that these pro.
And listen, the fact that Christia Freeland is banned from traveling to Russia, I'm not blaming her for that.
I would blame Putin for that.
But that goes to the point.
Where's this Canada's back business?
We're at the back.
Canada's at the back.
You're so right.
And I don't know anyone.
Even North Korea, I would joke that at least Cuba, North Korea, Iran, but even they are not doing anything for us given Trudeau's subservience.
Give you an example of why this is practically a problem in a practical sense.
So we have a Canadian businessman and a Canadian diplomat on leave, both of whom were taken by the Chinese after we arrested Beng.
And we arrested Beng on behalf of the United States.
Our relations with the Americans are so bad.
We have to go bank around the world for other countries to come to the defense of our citizens who've been taken China.
That's how isolated. and remote we are in the diplomatic community.
That's an outstanding point and as Lauren mentioned to me a moment ago, it's ironic that we have to ask every country around the world to go to bat for us with China.
We can't do it ourselves and for some reason other countries don't feel that compelled to help us out and buy us out.
I mean Justin Trudeau.
Well that's our friend Lauren Gunter from the Edmonton Sun, a great advisor to us on so many issues.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Diplomatic Isolation00:02:04
Hey, welcome back to my monologue Friday about the Kingston youth that was charged with terrorism.
Paul writes, no, it wasn't terrorism related.
It was clearly toxic masculinity.
Yeah, I don't know what's going on there.
I mean, is there a charge or not?
It's weird, released.
I do know one thing.
The RCMP said 300 different people were involved in the investigation.
They had a plane flying overhead for months.
Yeah, I think there's a little bit more there than our liberal bosses will tell us.
Robert says, I'm surprised the Bounties found enough time to arrest this guy, seeing how they spend so much of their time as border bellhops.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's the thing.
You will need a wall of some sort.
You will need a lock on a door somewhere.
You'll need bars somewhere.
Either you have it surrounding your country and within it is safety, or you'll need it around your house, your school, your office.
But you can never be totally safe if you don't have, if you have a country without borders.
I think that's a very, very keen observation.
My interview with Joe Pollock about the arrest of Roger Stone, Bruce writes, I agree with you, Ezra, about Roger Stone being arrested with such theatrics.
That's the sort of thing third world dictatorships do.
Look, citizens, this could be you if you don't be good boys and girls.
Yeah, Roger Stone is a real character.
And he, I think, reveled in the attention.
And he did sort of his Nixon, I am not a crook, kind of, like he really hammed it up.
Remember, Roger Stone is such an interesting and strange character.
He's got a huge tattoo of Nixon on his back.
I think he loves being the center of attention.
He's a very unusual man that way.
But for the rest of us, I think we should be terrified.
I don't think we have that kind of spectacular SWAT-style, paramilitary-style policing in Canada that frequently.
I think it's only a matter of time, especially as Rachel Notley and Justin Trudeau decide to weaponize their hatred for their opponents too, God forbid.