Omar Khadr’s war crimes—including murdering U.S. soldier Christopher Speer—were downplayed by Google, which initially mislabeled him as a "Canadian soldier," sparking conservative outrage led by Manny Montenegrino and Andrew Scheer; Gerald Butts’ defense of Google revealed Trudeau’s ties to figures like Joshua Boyle (Taliban-linked) and his $10.5M settlement for Khadr. Meanwhile, Candace Malcolm exposed Quebec’s asylum seeker surge—2,445 claims in 2018’s first 10 months, up from 111 in 2016—with Toronto hotels offering taxpayer-funded luxury amenities to mostly economic migrants, amid reports of exploitation and media dismissal. The episode also critiques CanCon’s outdated quotas (27.2% Canadian films) and alleges big tech censorship, calling for legal reforms like scrapping Section 230 to challenge platforms’ biased content moderation, which prioritizes progressive narratives over conservative scrutiny. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello rebels, it's your Rebel Commander Ezra Levant here.
You are listening to a free audio-only recording of my TV show, The Ezra Levant Show.
Today, we asked the weird question, why is Gerald Butts so obsessed with the fact that Google removed a search result that inaccurately showed Omar Cotter as a Canadian soldier?
Of course, he's not a Canadian soldier.
He's a Canadian terrorist.
Why did Justin Trudeau's principal secretary make four tweets fighting against this revision?
So weird.
You got to listen to that.
And of course, we talked to Candace Malcolm, one of our favorite people, about work she's doing.
If you like listening to this podcast, then you would learn watching it, I think.
But in order to watch, you need to be a subscriber to our premium content.
This is what we call our long-form TV-style shows on The Rebel.
Subscribers get access to watching my daily show, as well as other great TV-style shows, too, including by my friends Sheila Gunreed and David Mancy.
It's only eight bucks a month to subscribe, or you can subscribe annually and get the equivalent of two months free.
And just for podcast listeners, you can save an extra 10% on new premium membership by using the coupon code Podcasts.
So that's even more savings when you subscribe.
So go to the rebel.media slash shows and sign up now.
And please leave a five-star review on this podcast and subscribe in iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Those reviews are a great way to support the Rebel without spending a dime.
And now, enjoy this free audio-only version of Michael.
Tonight, public outrage makes Google stop saying that Omer Cotter is a Canadian soldier.
But why was Trudeau's office on the side of Cotter?
It's January 30th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is government about why I publish them is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Sometimes a small story illustrates something big, like if you're walking by a picket fence and one plank is missing.
Just for a moment, as you pass by, you get a glimpse of what's going on the other side of the fence.
I think that happened yesterday in Canada.
Google's Erroneous Soldier Listing00:16:24
It was about this Google search result.
I mean, there are literally billions of Google searches every day.
I can't think of anything more trivial in theory.
But look at it for a moment.
If you type in the words, Canadian soldier, it shows various Canadian soldiers, but it also, at least until yesterday, listed Omar Cotter, the convicted confessed al-Qaeda terrorist who actually murdered a soldier, the U.S. Army Medic Christopher Speer.
And Google shows Cotter's smiling face as a Canadian soldier?
He is not a Canadian soldier.
He's a Canadian terrorist.
And frankly, though he was born in Canada, he's hardly Canadian.
He has lived much of his life either in terrorist training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan or in Guantanamo Bay.
I guess technically he's a Canadian, but he obviously was never a soldier.
He is a criminal convicted of five war crimes.
That is the opposite of a soldier.
So why was he listed in that Google search result?
Now, when I saw this yesterday morning, our friend, Manny Montenegrino, first tweeted about it.
That's how I saw it.
When I first saw it, I thought, this can't be real.
Is that Photoshopped or something?
So I took out my own phone and I immediately typed in Canadian soldier into Google.
And sure enough, it really came up that way.
Sorry, that is not an accident.
That is not an algorithm thing.
That is some policy choice.
That's Google doing what they do more and more of these days.
They're putting their finger on the scale.
Google's search results are not neutral.
Like we showed you yesterday, Google responded to a left-wing activist and changed their search algorithm to push pro-life sites way down the search rankings so that when you search for information about abortion politics, you're given pro-choice views first.
And most people, since we're busy and since we pretty much trust Google to be neutral, most people don't usually get past the first page of results on Google.
So we know that Google manipulates results for political reasons that they control.
That was exposed by Alan Bokari, who received a leak of Google's blacklist.
That's actually how Google refers to it inside the company, a blacklist.
It was fascinating to learn that Google is manipulating all sorts of political things, hiding embarrassing facts about Maxine Waters.
That's one of the things they do.
Remember her?
And if you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere.
Did you know that Google hides bad news about that woman, Maxine Waters?
Did you know that Google interfered with searches during Ireland's recent referendum on abortion?
I bet you 99% of Irish citizens didn't know that.
I bet Google, which also owns YouTube, probably has the power to influence an entire election, five or 10%, through that sort of manipulation, which is never disclosed, never reported, never regulated.
I say again, this isn't some conspiracy theory like Russia rigged the American election.
That's a conspiracy that has gripped the mainstream media for two years without any evidence.
This is Google's own internal documents, their blacklists and their finger on the scale.
So yeah, Google is literally trying to whitewash the horrific crimes of an al-Qaeda terrorist named Omar Cotter.
But why should that surprise any of us?
The media party itself did that.
I think our Alberta reporter in Calgary, a new reporter there, Kian Bexti, was literally the first reporter in Canadian history to actually attend an Omar Cotter press conference and refer to Omar Cotter as what he is and what he confessed to being and what he was convicted of being a terrorist.
Even if he gets a passport, which airline in Canada will take him to Saudi Arabia?
You'd have to ask some Canadian airlines.
I doubt that they'd want to take a terrorist across the sea to Saudi Arabia.
You see, Cotter standing behind him just smirking.
The lawyer there was actually surprised.
He's used to obedience from journalists, not challenges.
Here's Kian asking Cotter himself some questions a little bit later.
Never happened before in Canada.
Omar Cotter, can you tell me, do you regret killing Christopher Speer?
Do you regret killing Christopher Spear?
Where's the money?
Where's the taxpayer-funded fortune?
Is it offshore right now?
Tell us, Omar.
Anyways, back to yesterday.
That's Omar Cotter for you.
Manny Montenegrino showed that Google was listing that terrorist there, Omar Cotter, as a Canadian soldier.
That is so gross.
So Manny made a fuss about it on Twitter.
And other conservatives joined in.
I retweeted Manny.
And here's a good one from Andrew Lawton, who said, holy crap, fix your algorithm, Google.
When one searches Canadian soldier, the first hit is Omar Cotter.
Killing a soldier doesn't make you one.
That is so true.
Good one by Andrew Lawton.
So this story spread like wildfire through normal society because normal Canadians never bought into the pro-Cotter love affair.
Our media did, our politicians did, our courts did, but not normal people.
Eventually, whoever writes Andrew Scheer's tweets these days tweeted about this.
I like Andrew Scheer's Twitter feed these days.
They're so butch compared to before Maxime Bernier broke away and started his own party.
Maxime has always been tough and charismatic and conservative on Twitter.
And I think that's a big reason why people like him.
He's not mealy-mouthed and indecisive.
So about 90 days ago, Scheer put a new Twitter writer on the file, and he is great.
I just wish Andrew Scheer was like that in real life, but I'll take what I can get.
And online, Andrew Scheer wrote this.
Omar Cotter is a convicted terrorist who murdered a medic and blinded another.
He is not a victim, nor should he be portrayed in this way alongside real Canadian heroes.
Google Canada, fix this.
That's great.
Obviously, that's not how Andrew Scheer talks in real life, but so what?
Great tweet, great point, right on the news.
And really putting it straight to Google by tagging them in that tweet.
Oh, you better believe that Google headquarters read that.
And good for them, they fixed it.
I don't know if they would have fixed it if it was just a public outcry, but with the leader of the opposition tweeting it, they fixed it.
Maybe they don't want to be embarrassed in public.
Maybe they want to keep all politicians on side.
Maybe they know that one day Trudeau will no longer be prime minister, so best hedge your bets.
Or maybe even maybe they regret making the mistake.
Whatever the reason, after a day of getting pummeled by grassroots people, by media figures, and by Andrew Scheer, Google made the change.
In fact, Google's PR boss in charge of explaining searches to the public, they've got an executive position like that, he actually responded directly to Andrew Layton.
Here's what he wrote.
His name is Danny Sullivan, and he said, our systems generate lists like this automatically and can sometimes get the wrong signals.
This has now been fixed.
All right, let's take them at their word.
I mean, we know they lie.
We know that they know, that we know, that we can never check if they're lying.
But why be quarrelsome?
Google fixed the problem.
Okay, story over, right?
I mean, big deal.
This point, it's not a big deal.
Maybe it was just an error.
Maybe it was a big nothing.
Good for some Twitter fuss, which is always fun, but nothing.
Yeah, no, weirdly, bizarrely, the Liberal Party of Canada fought back.
They fought back, and I don't know why exactly.
I think it looked really, really bad on them.
They fought back, not against Cotter.
Remember, they're with Cotter.
They gave him a public apology and $10.5 million.
They fought back against people who were mad about Cotter being called a soldier.
They fought back against people asking Google to change it.
Some left-wing media did too, but the Liberals did.
That is really weird.
Check out this.
Gerald Butz, Justin Trudeau's principal secretary, he took time away from everything else he's doing these days, pushed aside everything less important to weigh in on this matter not once, not twice, not three times, but four times.
I mean, look, we've got the Chinese dictatorship taking our citizens hostage.
We've got an industrial crisis in Alberta.
We have a thousand real things this government needs to do, and it's failing at so many of them.
But Gerald Butz makes this the biggest issue of his day and he clears aside hours for it.
Yes, he did.
He wrote this.
He said, Google searches are personally optimized, not news.
When I search for Canadian soldiers, I get Canadian soldiers and Prime Minister Pearson.
Andrew Scheer gets Omar Cotter.
This IT problem is between the chair and the keyboard.
That's so clever.
But first of all, even if Butts was right.
So what?
So what?
Why would Omar Cotter show up on a list?
But he's not right, actually.
Here's that same public boss of Google search.
And he says, Personalization of results is of our results is minimal as covered below and he links to a detailed answer personalization wasn't involved here.
This was present for anyone doing the search though exact position may have changed as our results can be very dynamic So that's Google's search expert But Gerald Butts kept at this he retweeted this guy This guy who said when I say taking lessons from the alt-right, I really I mean that literally Meta Canada is the heart of the Canadian alt-right movement on Reddit This post was done four hours before Andrew Scheer's tweet.
There's no beating around the bush on this one.
So some guy I don't know who claims that an anonymous post earlier than on the day in some online billboard One of thousands of Canadians who were upset by this Cotter story.
This guy named John Wiseman, this nobody, found an anonymous site, literally a nobody that was upset about the Cotter thing too.
John Wiseman says they're alt-right, says that's why Scheer was mad about this and therefore it's bad or something.
It's not bad that Omar Cotter's listed as a soldier.
Gerald Butts didn't think that was bad.
He thought it was bad that Andrew Scheer was mentioning it.
I mean, this isn't even guilt by association here.
That's a full-blown conspiracy theory.
You see, Andrew Scheer read an anonymous thing, and it's just so weird.
And it still evades the question, why is Gerald Butts, Justin Trudeau's principal secretary, why is he defending Google's error to list Omar Cotter, the al-Qaeda terrorist, as a legit Canadian soldier?
Why is he quibbling over minutiae?
Why is he arguing over how many, you know, it's a personalized search result or not?
What difference does it make?
He's not a Canadian soldier.
It's weird that Google search engine said it was, but they fixed it fairly quickly.
Why is Butts still trying to litigate it?
Why is he following this affair at all?
Why is he weighing in four times on the side of fake news?
It's fake news.
Omar Cotter is not a Canadian soldier.
That is fake.
It's a lie.
It's the opposite of the truth.
He murdered an American soldier and partly blinded another one.
Why is Gerald Butts so mad about them correcting this?
Four times.
He wasn't done.
He started arguing with the Google search executive because Gerald Butts knows his business better.
This is what he said.
In the interest of fairness, Google has posted a long thread describing how optimization works on their platform.
They say personal search history has a minimal effect on results.
Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
So he acknowledged that Google said it was search results that everyone got.
So he acknowledged his weird theory about Andrew Scheer being the only one to see that was gone.
It wouldn't make a difference anyways because the result is the problem here.
But then Gerald Butts wasn't done.
He was still arguing.
He cooked up a theory that now it's not just Andrew Scheer who's telling a fib or something.
Google was lying about their error.
Google wasn't telling the truth.
Gerald Butts just knew it in his bones.
Let me read another one here.
But also in the interest of fairness, Google's claims about the degree to which your search is personalized are hotly debated.
How minimal is minimal?
Okay, that's got nothing to do with whether or not Omar Cotter is a soldier.
He's not.
And whether or not he should show up in a Google search as a soldier for anyone?
He shouldn't.
But Justin Trudeau's principal secretary stopped working on the Chinese hostage situation.
Stopped working on the pipeline problem.
Stop working on NAFTA.
Stop working on anything else.
He spent the better part of his afternoon haggling over this.
He was wrong.
He had this weird conspiracy theory.
It was wrong.
But more than any of that, why is he so obsessed with keeping this fake news alive?
And why was he so mad at Andrew Scheer for talking about it?
Why is he calling anonymous people on the internet alt-right or whatever?
He doesn't even know who they are.
How would he know they're all right?
I think there are a few things here going on.
First of all, I think that the Trudeau government is absolutely obsessed with Islam.
I mean, it's obvious.
We all know it.
Trudeau is obsessed with bringing in Muslim refugees.
He's obsessed with women wearing hijabs.
If he sees a woman in a hijab anywhere, he makes a beeline to them to take a selfie.
It was super weird.
He even had a weird Mother's Day card with his own mother and wife wearing, I don't know, are those hijabs?
They're not Muslim, are they?
Maybe they are.
I just think it's super weird.
And we all know that he has a soft spot for Muslim terrorists.
Omar Cotter in particular, of course, he gave a public apology and $10.5 million to Omar Cotter.
And he met with Joshua Boyle, who used to be married to Omar Cotter's sister, and then who took his next wife to Afghanistan to meet up with the Taliban, who kidnapped them.
Trudeau met with that Islamist kook too, who, as you can see in this tweet, laughed that he met Trudeau before in 2006 in Toronto over other common interests.
Ha ha.
I think Gerald Butts is absolutely terrified of people saying the obvious, that Justin Trudeau has a weird affinity, not just for Islam.
I love my Tariq Farah.
A gang guy, I want to hug the guy when I see him.
I love Muslim moderates, Muslim liberals.
I'm not talking about that.
Trudeau has a special affinity for radical Islam, extreme Islam, anti-Western Islam, violent Islam.
Trudeau never praises moderate liberal pro-Western Muslims.
He prefers the radical variety.
And I think Gerald Butts is part of that cultishness in some way.
I mean, why would Gerald Butts, the principal secretary to the Prime Minister of Canada, in this crisis moment, stop what he was working on and defend Cotter being improperly on that list?
But there are two other things afoot here, I think.
One is, look how immediately they denounce anyone who disagrees with radical Islam or even terrorism as Islamophobic and alt-right.
That's what he did.
I should tell you that 71% of Canadians opposed giving Omar Cotter an apology and money.
That's according to Angus Reid, 71%.
I bet a lot of peace-loving Muslims opposed it too.
According to the poll, even liberals opposed it.
Of course, we don't believe in terrorists.
But that's going to be the election campaign, calling anyone who opposes Trudeau a Nazi or an Islamophobe or a hater, even implying that Andrew Scheer, the tepid, timid milk toast conservative leader, is somehow a Nazi for even criticizing a terrorist.
Tech Wars and Liberals00:05:14
And the second thing that seems to drive Gerald Butts crazy is that Andrew Scheer pushed Google to make the fix, and they did.
I think Butts really hated that because that's his move.
He wants to push around the tech companies.
He wants to blacklist his enemies online.
He doesn't want anyone else muscling in to that racket.
Here's a leftist journalist named Jesse Brown who was so mad that Andrew Scheer contacted Google like the liberals always do.
What leftist journalists always do all the time.
Jesse Brown said, thanks, Danny.
That's Danny Sullivan, the search executive.
Was Scheer correct that you removed Cotter based on his request?
Do you guys do stuff like that at all?
Do you guys do stuff like that now?
Now?
No?
What do you mean, buddy?
That's all they do now.
They suppress conservative search results.
They demonetize conservatives.
They de-platform conservatives.
They kick him off Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, PayPal, Patreon.
But Jesse Bound is upset about it when it's a terrorist involved, that a terrorist wasn't allowed to be called a Canadian soldier, and that a conservative would have the temerity to complain and that Google would listen to them.
Yuck.
This wasn't just a handful of leftists.
Everyone was weighing in on this.
It was so weird.
Here's Rob Silver.
like Rob.
He's the husband of Justin Trudeau's chief of staff.
But here he is saying that opposing the fake news that Omar Khadr is a war hero or something is the fringe right.
Why are liberals even talking about Omar Khadr?
What are they doing?
Here's Zita Estravis.
And she's liking, you can see this on her like page.
She liked, she's the chief of staff to Harjit Sajjan, our defense minister.
And she liked the tweets of Gerald Butts sticking up for Google's pro-Cotter era.
Does Harjit Sajan, former soldier himself, who served with distinction in Afghanistan, where his fellow soldiers were killed by IEDs, placed perhaps even by Omar Cotter himself, does Harjit Sajjan agree with Zita Estravis' chief of staff that Omar Cotter should be listed on Google as a Canadian soldier?
The chief of staff to our defense minister liked Gerald Butz's craziness there.
Does Harjit Sajjan agree?
By the way, I did a search and Gerald Butts has tweeted his defense of Omar Cotter 10 times over the years.
10 times he stood up for Omar Cotter.
But I typed in spear, that's the last name of the man murdered by Cotter.
And yeah, Gerald Butts hasn't written that word once ever.
Look, what we see here is exactly what it looks like.
A Liberal Party that truly loves Omar Carter absolutely stands by their decision to apologize to him and make him a multi-millionaire and absolutely is throwing in their lot with Muslim extremists and even Muslim terrorists and they react to any normal Canadians, the 71% who disagreed with what the Liberals did for Cotter, by calling ordinary Canadians Islamophobes and alt-right haters.
And they absolutely don't want us complaining to social media companies about their fake news.
Gerald Butts and Justin Trudeau prefer fake news in their minds.
I think they really believe Omar Cotter was a Canadian soldier.
I think they really do think some conspiracy theory about this only appearing on Andrew Scheer's Google search.
This, my friends, we all learn from one little online moment, like walking past a fence with a wooden plank missing.
We have just seen a glimpse of the 2019 election campaign and it is going to be ugly.
Get ready to be called a racist for not believing their pro-terrorist fake news.
Stay with us for more.
Well, I tell you, I can't believe how furious Gerald Butz and the whole liberal establishment were that Andrew Scheer and other conservative journalists, including Andrew Lawton from the True North Initiative, criticized Google for having Omar Cotter show up on their search results for Canadian soldiers.
And I think there's a whole bundle of issues that Justin Trudeau and Gerald Butts and the Liberal establishment are hypersensitive to.
Omar Cotter is clearly one of them.
But I think the number one issue in the 2019 election campaign that we will see pushback not just from Trudeau and Butz and Ahmed Husson and Catherine McKenna, it's not going to be the carbon tax.
It is going to be open borders, unvetted migration, particularly Muslim migration, which seems to be an obsession of Justin Trudeau.
Asylum Stories Unveiled00:13:49
That's at least how it looks to me.
Well, no one is covering this file better than our friend Candace Malcolm.
And she joins us now via Scape.
Candice, I'm so glad you're here.
Not only are you a journalist and an activist and an advocate, but you have actually in the past worked in the ministry of immigration.
So you're not just an outsider trying to figure things out.
You've seen how it works or doesn't work from the inside.
I'm really glad you're unpacking that expertise for the rest of us to follow along.
Well, thank you so much, Ezra.
I've definitely seen inside the belly of the beast, so to speak.
And I know how many problems there are with Canada's immigration system.
Most people might not think a lot about it, but the issues are kind of pouring into the mainstream all of a sudden.
And these issues and these problems have been building up for years, if not decades.
You know, I want to, we know you as the boss of the True North Initiative.
It was great to have you come over to London as one of our real reporters covering the Tommy Robinson trial.
It was really fun.
And I'm delighted to see that you have a new sort of aggregate website where you put all your investigations.
And I think a lot of our fans are already your fans, Candace.
But for those who don't know, you've got a website that you're using for all your stuff.
And it's tnc.news.
Not.com, not.media, tnc.news.
Tell me a little bit about tnc.news.
Sure, Ezra.
So as people may know, the True North Initiative has long sort of been an immigration advocacy and research organization that I started a couple years ago to help launch a conversation and have a conversation about, like we were talking about, the many problems associated with our immigration and open border system.
Well, we've expanded that.
So we're now TrueNorth Canada as well.
TrueNorthCanada.
TNC.news is our news site where we are doing investigative reports.
We have a couple of journalists that I've hired to do reporting, to do investigative journalism, to go out and really uncover some of the stories that are not being told in Canada, similar to what The Rebel does, you know, filing freedom of information requests, getting out and talking to everyday people.
So for a focus on immigration and national security specifically, folks can check out our website, tnc.news.
And there's stories every day.
There's reports, there's videos, and then there's our longer sort of investigative pieces that are going to be coming out every week.
That's great.
That's TNC.news.
I want to get to some of those news stories, so I want to get our hands dirty with some of these amazing stories.
You've got an amazing story about how many asylum claims are coming in from Mexico.
That's incredible.
You've got an amazing story about hotels here in the Toronto area that are for refugees only.
So many stories, but I just want to ask you two more quick things about TNC.news.
The first is I know the answer, but I just want to hear you say it.
TNC.news will not take any money from Justin Trudeau and his media bailout fund, will it?
Well, I don't think that they would include us after the UN Global Migrant Compact specifically said that the government's only going to support media outlets that parrot liberal migration talking points.
So, no, Ezra, we're entirely funded by Canadians.
You know, we were founded through grassroots donations.
And Our aim is to tell the truth to Canadians, not to pander to government officials and get massive handouts from the government.
I mean, I think that that entire program is disastrous for the media.
How can you have a free and independent press when that press is also reliant on handouts from the government?
It doesn't make sense.
It contradicts a very basic element of freedom of the press.
You know, I knew in my heart that was going to be your answer, Candace, but I just had to ask, and it was such a pleasure to hear you say so.
And I feel like we're slightly less alone, you know.
I mean, I can count on one hand's fingers how many journalists remain who are not taking the payoff money from Trudeau.
And that is exactly what it is.
So it's great to, and we hope to bring your stories to our people, obviously giving you full credit for it.
Let's jump in right away.
I've got arrayed here on my desk in front of me, five different stories.
Let's just start with this one here.
It's really shocking to me that the number of asylum claims from Mexicans has jumped from 260 in 2016 almost tenfold to 2,000.
Actually, it was even lower.
It was 111 in Stephen Harper's last year as prime minister.
111.
Last year was 2,445, almost a 24-fold increase.
What's going on?
Why are we taking Mexicans?
I mean, there's no, I mean, Mexico is a free, it's not a rich country, it's got its troubles, but it's not a country from which people are refugees.
What's going on?
Well, that's right.
And before Canada had implemented a visa, we used to have a visa requirement.
So tourists coming from Mexico to Canada had to pre-apply.
Before they arrived in Canada, they had to pre-apply, get a visa.
And the reason was because we had such a problem in the past with Mexicans overstaying their visa visitor, their visitor visas, and then eventually applying for asylum.
Ezra, less than 10% of all folks who claimed asylum from Mexico were bona fide refugees were found by Canadian court systems to be real refugees.
So under the Harper government, Canada implemented a visa.
Justin Trudeau, when he was running for prime minister back in 2015, was really opposed to the visa and made it his pledge.
It was kind of odd.
Usually campaign pledges are made to Canadians.
This campaign pledge that Justin Trudeau made was to Mexicans, and he promised that they'd be able to come to Canada without getting a visa.
He implemented that in 2016.
So many people warned that there'd be a huge spike in asylum claims from Mexicans.
I was one of those people.
The writing was on the wall.
And lo and behold, the numbers come out year after year, and we're heading back in that same direction as we were before.
Just endless Mexicans coming to Canada, making asylum claims.
And interestingly, a lot of them never even show up to their court date.
They just kind of disappear.
And so we don't know whether they're working illegally in Canada, whether they've tried to slip into the U.S. undetected.
But it creates some hatred issue, not just for sort of the cost of the system and the benefits that these folks receive, the cost in the courts, but also for national security.
A lot of people from Mexico are part of these very horrific gangs.
They're dangerous criminals.
And some of these people might end up slipping into Canada undetected.
Yeah.
I mean, we'll show your chart on the screen here.
From 2000, in the year 2014, there were 80 such asylum claims.
Then it ticked up a little bit to 111 in Harper's last year.
Then it more than doubled in 2016.
And then bam, off of the races, 1,515 in 2017.
And in the first 10 months of last year, 2,445, just incredible.
Here's my point on that.
We all know they're fake.
We all know that.
And the law says that.
So by indulging that, how on earth is that helping real refugees?
How on earth is that helping support for our refugee system?
I think that Justin Trudeau and Ahmed Hassan, the immigration minister, who think they're so warm-hearted and compassionate, I don't think they realize that by cynically allowing and permitting this obvious advantage taking, they're burning up whatever genuine goodwill Canadians have.
I think Canadians have always been welcoming and open-hearted.
But when so obviously, when we allow someone so obviously to steal access to our country and Trudeau says, yeah, no problem, see you next year, I think that hardens the heart.
I think they're causing an anti-immigrant backlash by permitting such misconduct.
What do you think?
Absolutely, Ezra.
There's no question about it.
I mean, Canada had a visa and it worked.
You can see by the low numbers in the end of the Harper era there, they found a public policy solution that worked.
Look, Mexico is a corrupt country.
It is a dangerous country because of lawlessness and criminal activity.
But it isn't the government that is cracking down on individuals.
It isn't necessarily a refugee producing country.
It's actually a refugee receiving country.
It receives a lot of refugees from Central and Latin America.
And so the idea that Canada is somehow allowing people to come in, take advantage of our tourism system, essentially, and then staying.
And we don't know exactly what's happening to them.
I think that that is really a clear example of confusing economic migrants with real refugees in need of protection and just sort of sloppy administration allowing people to come and go unchecked and without the proper screening and vetting that Canada really ought to have.
Yeah.
Oh, and I don't think it's just sloppiness.
I think that's a deliberate, deliberate laxity.
I wanted to talk about another story because this is something that's been bandied about in the Toronto media because it's just so interesting.
Of course, so many of the illegal, bogus refugees that have just walked across from New York State into Quebec, Quebec doesn't want them.
Quebec basically puts them on buses and sends them to Toronto.
And frankly, most of them want to go to Toronto because they don't speak French.
I mean, some of the Haitians stay in Quebec.
But the rest of them like to go to Toronto.
So they're swamping homeless shelters in Toronto.
And so there are two hotels in Toronto that have been turned into urban refugee camps for these refugees.
They still get housekeeping services and swimming pools.
And these are including for these fake migrants from New York.
Tell us about the two hotels that you've discovered, the Toronto Plaza Hotel and the Radisson Hotel in North York.
Tell us a little bit about them, what they're like, because I know most of the media in Toronto hates this story and hates anyone who even mentions it because it's obviously such a scandal.
Well, it's a good point, Ezra.
So these two hotels, specifically the Radisson, it did make the news last summer because so many people were leaving negative reviews on online websites like TripAdvisor because basically they had half the hotel housing refugees and the other half was still open to the public.
So guests were coming and that was their impression of Toronto.
It was like being in a UN refugee camp.
The media covered it at first, and then they kind of changed their tune and decided that many of the posts online might have been hoaxes or that they couldn't verify whether the people actually stayed there or not.
So they completely changed the channel and stopped covering it.
Well, we continued to cover it.
We sent folks down to, we sent a journalist down to investigate at those two hotels.
We found out that they're completely closed to the public.
They're 100% there just to house asylum seekers, recent refugees, and mostly immigrant homeless people.
So people who have come from other countries and just for whatever reason are now homeless.
And they're living in these hotels.
The hotels still offer a lot of the same services, including, we found out, like you mentioned, housekeeping.
So they have maids coming through cleaning for them.
They get to go swimming.
They get to go use the gym, all this kind of stuff on the taxpayer, of course.
And it's still the story of folks who are staying in these hotels is still a little bit lawlessness.
There's some stories of creepy men hitting on young teenage women and making them feel uncomfortable.
We talked to migrants who were actually complaining about the lack of affordable housing in Toronto.
They chose to be in Toronto.
They chose to claim asylum.
They're getting huge benefits and handouts from the taxpayers.
And yet some of these folks are still complaining.
So it was really interesting.
And we have a lot of information in that report that you mentioned.
Yeah, you know what?
I wonder if I can get housekeeping from the government of Canada in my home.
I wonder if I can get a free swimming pool and gym pass.
And I'm just a mere Canadian citizen.
One day I'll get the benefits that illegal migrants illegally crossing into Canada get.
Unbelievable.
Well, Candace, I'm thrilled that you are covering these stories.
We obviously cover them here at The Rebel too, but I have always said, I wish we weren't alone because sometimes we truly feel, I feel this way, that we're alone on so many of these issues.
So I'm delighted that you're ramping up your work.
It is so needed.
You bring to it an expertise from your own experience in the immigration department.
And I love the fact that you still have a toehold in the mainstream media.
You still do, thank God, publish columns from time to time in the Toronto Sun.
And I hope you continue to do so.
I can only imagine the pressure they're under to cut you off.
Last word to you, Candace.
Well, I wanted just to pick up on an earlier point that you made.
Legitimate Concerns and New Words00:04:18
You know, the idea that Trudeau and Gerald Butts and the liberal kind of guard make that Canadians who care about immigration and national security only care about those issues because they're racist or they're far right or they're bigoted in some ways.
I think that they just have that completely backwards.
I think that there are a lot of legitimate concerns and issues that Canadians have.
And that unless we address these issues, they're just going to get worse and the sentiment is going to get angrier and angrier.
So yeah, most mainstream media avoid this topic because they don't want to be accused of racism, like they accuse people like me and people like you of all the time.
It's so important that we ignore those voices and continue to forge ahead to tell the truth, to report to Canadians, and to remind Canadians that it is a legitimate concern to care about immigration and that when there's lawlessness and chaos like has been created under Trudeau, he deserves to be criticized.
So that's sort of the mission.
That's the idea behind TNC.news.
And I hope people will enjoy the reports that we're bringing to them.
Well, that's great.
We consider you a friend and an ally, and we wish you all the best with it.
Thanks, my friend.
Great.
Thanks, Ezra.
All right, there you have it.
Candace Malcolm with the True North Initiative and the boss of TNC.news.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about a new tax proposal for CanCon.
Cal writes, you have a point about CanCon, emphasis on con.
Yeah, it just felt so golden-olies to even use that word again.
I mean, the last time anyone even thought about CanCon in a real way, I mean, did anyone even think about it outside the elites?
That's got to be 20 years ago.
I mean, the internet really started kicking it off in the mid-90s.
By the time the new millennium rolled around, everyone was online.
And smartphones are more than, I mean, the iPhone celebrated its 10-year anniversary, right?
Blackberries and things like that.
Everyone's online in Canada.
I don't know the percentage.
It's got to be over 90%.
So the idea that we would reach back to the pre-internet era, even before the profusion of cable outlets, and go to CanCon, well, you need 22.3% of your music has to be by Canadians and 27.2% of your movies.
And Brian Adams is only 23% Canadian.
I mean, what are you doing?
You're crazy.
Yeah, they're crazy.
But crazy with a purpose, crazy like a fox.
They want to control you and tax you.
John writes, if you have to have regulations to force your culture on your citizens, it does not say much about your culture.
You're so right.
You're so right.
I mean, who coins a word?
You ever think about that?
Do you need a license to make a new word?
If the government says there's a new word, do you have to agree?
No, language is so fascinating.
I think about it a lot.
Sometimes words start, sometimes we make new words out of old words, astro, not, you know, television, and they just seem right.
The government can't say, here's a word.
And language is the blood of a culture.
Ask anyone in Quebec.
The idea that you would say, stop using those words, start using this words, because I'm in the government, that's not how it works.
And I really believe that's the analogy.
Stop watching those movies that you like.
Stop watching those TV shows that you like.
Stop listening to those songs that you like.
And please watch these official ones instead.
That is not how culture works.
That is called propaganda.
Betty writes, entertainment is a goal in its own right.
Cancon is just more political interference.
The liberal government has to insert politics into every aspect of our lives.
They can't even leave entertainment alone.
Well, you know, it's funny to say that because, of course, so much of Hollywood is politics.
You can't go to a Hollywood show other than maybe the one in 100 that maybe Clint Eastwood or Mel Gibson are involved with without getting a heavy dose of global warming and open borders and just even Annie Trump Paul.
Why Culture Isn't Propaganda00:02:36
I mean, I can't watch Saturday Night Live anymore.
I used to like it.
I used to laugh.
Now it's not even non-funny.
I feel like I'm getting my weekly dose.
Take your medicine.
It's not even funny.
We get enough politics as it is from Hollywood.
We don't need an extra dose from Ottawa.
My interview with Alan Bukhari, Peter writes, the only way to stop the big tech companies such as YouTube and Google from changing the search results by filtering out right-wing content is by affecting their income.
Money is really the only thing to which they respond.
Well, yeah, that's true, but I think the obvious observation is they are so rich and so huge that, you know, the few percent of people who would self-identify as active conservatives who might maybe switch their Google search elsewhere won't even bother them.
They don't care.
I mean, they could shut us down in a second, and they would lose.
I mean, we do still get some monetization on some videos.
Google might lose some tens of thousands of dollars a year, or even let's say hundreds of thousands of dollars a year if they shut us down.
What do they care?
I don't know, their net worth, it's probably more, their market capitalization is surely more than $100 billion.
What would they care?
What would they care about?
getting rid they didn't care about getting rid of Alex Jones.
He was double our size on YouTube.
They don't care about getting rid of any conservative voices.
It's not even a drop in the bucket.
And by the way, they would happily spend that as a sign of their good taste.
No, I think the only way to stop it is with trust-busting legislation such as was used against, oh, the telecom companies, Standard Oil.
And as I've discussed before with Alan Bukhari, removing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
That's what lets platforms be immune from content lawsuits.
It's why you don't sue the phone booth company if you hear something really mean on the phone, because the phone booth says, we had nothing to do with it.
We just provided a little wire.
Well, if you start censoring, I approve that message, I don't approve that message, you're not a neutral platform anymore.
You are a publisher.
And that's how YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter, all these companies are acting right now.
They should no longer have the immunity for their publications since they're making those decisions.
That's a theory I believe in.
If you're not going to be neutral like a phone booth, you don't get to be immune to the bad behavior of the people who are communicating on your platform.