Ezra Levant highlights Donald Trump’s January 31, 2019 "Buy American" executive order banning Canadian steel, aluminum, and lumber—worth hundreds of billions—from U.S. infrastructure projects, including pipelines and energy sectors, while Canadian media remains silent despite its economic impact. He contrasts Stephen Harper’s proactive lobbying with Justin Trudeau’s alleged focus on feminist/environmental clauses in NAFTA, criticizing Freeland for attending an anti-Trump rally during negotiations. The episode ties this to Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s credibility crisis over a racist yearbook photo and pro-abortion extremism, suggesting the image was leaked to distract from his policies. Levant warns of free speech erosion via CBC-driven purges and praises refugee advocate Yasmeen Mohamed, framing Canada’s political-media class as complicit in both trade neglect and ideological censorship. [Automatically generated summary]
Trump's Surprising Steel Industry Announcement00:14:01
Hello my rebels.
So I'm calling you today.
You're listening to a free audio only recording of my show, The Ezra Levant Show.
I have a crazy story for you today and I'm going to spend a lot of time giving you the facts before I give you my commentary and analysis.
Normally I just briefly mention the facts because we all know them because we've all seen them reported somewhere and then I give you my thoughts.
But in this case, I think we're talking about really something that's a secret that you have not seen reported anywhere.
I really searched high and low to find news of it.
And the news is that on Thursday at 12 noon Eastern Time in the Oval Office in front of a crowd of journalists, Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring a trade war on us, not us in particular, but on everyone.
He signed an executive order enforcing Buy American.
And now the U.S. government will prefer American companies over Canadian companies as a matter of law.
Here, listen to the podcast and hear for yourself.
We'll quote Trump and I'll read from the executive order.
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Tonight, Donald Trump just banned Canadian goods and services from U.S. infrastructure projects.
So where's Justin Trudeau or Christy Freeland or the Media Party?
It's February 4th, and this is the Ezra Levance Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish them is because it's my bloody right to do so.
What I'm about to tell you is a secret in Canada.
At least I cannot find a single media outlet that reported it.
That's almost a secret, right?
Even though it was news announced at a noisy press conference by the noisiest president in a century, at precisely 12 noon on Thursday, January 31st, Donald Trump signed an executive order banning Canadian goods and services from potentially hundreds of billions of dollars worth of U.S. contracts in which the U.S. government is involved as a contractor or a funder.
It's pure trade protectionism.
It's kind of a trade war.
It's aimed at the whole world.
It doesn't specifically mention Canada by name, but of course Canada is by far the country that will be the most impacted given the size of our trading relationship with the United States and the integration of our economies and the nature of the products and services being banned under this executive order.
I know you haven't heard about this.
You probably don't even believe me when I say there's a trade war that was just launched because it's such shocking news and it's such a disaster.
But all you've heard from the media party instead is how amazing Christia Freeland, our foreign minister, is, and how she totally wrestled that Donald Trump to the ground over NAFTA renegotiations, and how she totally slam-dunked him and wore that weird t-shirt about him, and even went to an anti-Trump rally in Toronto.
Remember that?
Right in the middle of negotiations, calling Trump a tyrant?
So you know, it's all good.
You know, everything's great because the CBC says so, and McLean says so, and the rest of the bailout media say so.
You must think what I've just told you, that Donald Trump has launched a trade war against us.
You must think that's fake news.
I mean, I'll be candid.
I was skeptical when someone first told me about this a couple days ago.
It's that weird.
I had to learn about a trade war against Canada from someone personally telling me about it verbally, like we're in some old-timey world in the age of the telegraph or something.
But Donald Trump did not do this quietly.
Has he ever done anything quietly?
He had a full-blown press conference about it in the Oval Office in the White House.
The entire media was invited, including presumably CBC, CTV, Global TV, Global Mail, Toronto Star, Post Media.
They all have Washington journalists on the ground there.
And for those who couldn't attend in person or who don't have any reporters in Washington, no problem.
The White House was kind enough to put the entire 38-minute presentation on YouTube.
That's what you can see behind me now.
And if you don't like watching videos, well, no problem.
The White House was kind enough to provide a word-perfect transcript.
Everything Trump said and everyone else said, they just put the whole transcript up.
It's on the website.
It's called Remarks by President Trump at Signing of Executive Order Strengthening Buy American Preferences for Infrastructure Projects.
And you can see it's dated January 31st, and you can see it's on the White House website at whitehouse.gov.
You can find it yourself.
Like I say, it was a massive announcement with various government and industry officials there.
I'm going to just play a little bit of it for you on video because I know that no one has told you this.
No one has told you that we are in a trade war with America now.
So I need to take extra time to prove it to you or you're going to think I'm nuts.
Here, listen for yourself.
This happened at 12 noon on Thursday.
So this wasn't hidden.
This wasn't done like at midnight.
This wasn't done just minutes ago and the media are catching up.
This was Thursday at noon.
There's absolutely no excuse whatsoever for this news to be hidden, except that it is deeply, deeply embarrassing to Justin Trudeau and Christia Freeland and their desperate desire to pretend that they are competent in the world of foreign affairs and trade.
And therefore it's deeply embarrassing to the CBC state broadcaster and all the rest of the private broadcasters who are signing up for some of that $595 million bailout fund.
They want to be little state broadcasters under Trudeau's media bailout plan.
So here, let me do a bit of reporting for you.
Sorry you have to hear about this from me rather than on the state broadcaster that costs you $1.5 billion tax dollars a year.
Take a listen to Donald Trump on Thursday at 12 noon.
Today I'm taking action to build on this tremendous success by strengthening the Buy American principle for federal infrastructure and federal spending.
We want American roads, bridges, and railways and everything else to be built with American iron, American steel, American concrete, and American hands.
And if you look at what's happened with the steel industry, it's actually amazing.
The steel industry is thriving now and it was dead when I came to office.
It was dead.
It was a dead industry.
They were dumping steel all over the place.
The jobs were going.
And if any of you are in the steel industry, I think you can probably tell when you know, and aluminum too.
It's true.
And importantly, and I'll come back to this later, it's mainly China that was the problem here.
China was flooding the U.S. with deeply subsidized, artificially subsidizing low-cost steel below what it costs them to make it.
And they were doing this not to make a profit, of course, but rather to stimulate employment and industrial expansion back in China and to push American steel companies out of business by dumping that cheap steel and perhaps even put the U.S. in a strategic problem of having no more heavy industries anymore.
So it's really China.
And of course, China was trying to hide its tracks by shipping some of that subsidized steel into America via Canada.
But again, it's a China problem.
In this 38-minute press conference, Trump said the word China 28 times.
He didn't say the word Canada once.
I checked.
But we're the ones who are going to be disproportionately punished here.
And I'll get back to that in a moment.
But here's more from Trump's Thursday announcement.
Now, you know how Trump's speeches go there, the little tangents and little vignettes and little anecdotes and little jokes and there's banter.
And he talks about plenty of other things not really related to the announcement itself.
Fine.
You can watch the whole 38-minute video.
But instead, let me show you just a few clips that I think sum it up.
Okay, so here's Alexander Acosta.
That's Trump cabinet minister in charge of labor, the labor secretary.
Listen to him.
Mr. President, you know, in the past, we encouraged individuals out there to buy American.
But what you're doing is so important because you're leading by example.
You're saying the federal government will buy America.
And we've seen the impact last year with a 10-year record low in foreign purchases.
And this is going to take it to the next step.
And it will translate in more jobs for individuals just like those here today.
It's having an incredible effect.
I mean, people don't realize it yet, but they're seeing it more and more.
We are mandating even pipelines and things that were made elsewhere.
They're starting to be made here because we have a steel industry again, but it's having a tremendous impact.
Please.
Thank you, Mr. President.
I've been co-sponsoring a bill for years with Daniel Pinski.
Couldn't get it to go anywhere.
I'm honored that you're doing it today to force it into action because, as you said, these are American jobs.
It's American concrete.
It's American steel.
It's American asphalt.
Thank you for doing so.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate it.
So there's banter with administration officials.
There's congressmen there.
There's businessmen.
You can see there's some industrial workers.
There's some lobbyists.
Here's just a little bit more, just because I know you haven't seen this anywhere.
Mr. President, I'd like to thank you for this buy American push that you've got.
With federal funding for the infrastructure that's buy American, it's jobs for us.
And it puts us in a position where we can compete.
Otherwise, we tend to walk away from jobs where foreign competition is going to take our business.
We're changing that fast.
Thank you.
Big difference.
Big difference.
And then they do what they do.
They sign the executive order.
Okay, let's go.
Does anybody want this pain?
Thank you very much.
Thank you all for being here.
I appreciate it.
Okay, here you go.
That's a declaration of war, a trade war.
It's on.
Let me read a little bit of that executive order to you.
So it's sort of the opposite of the banter and blarney of the Trump press conference.
It's just the executive order, which is not particularly a law.
It's not a statute, but in some ways it's more powerful than a law because it doesn't get watered down or delayed by the legislative process, by congressmen.
It's more limited than a law under the U.S. Constitution, but the president can do what he wants to a large extent in the executive branch of the government.
That means the cabinet positions here.
Let me quote, and again, this is the opposite of secret.
It's right there on the White House website.
They're advertising.
Here's what it looks like on the website.
Executive order on strengthening by American preferences for infrastructure projects.
So I'm going to give you a little bit of legalese.
I know I'm spending way more time than normal on just giving you the facts before I then give you my commentary and analysis, but that is because the entire Canadian political media establishment has not reported this.
Not a peep anywhere that I've seen.
Neither from the government nor the opposition, neither from the state broadcaster nor any private broadcaster.
So I want you to be very well briefed on the facts because you will be the first person in your circle to know this, and I want you to really know it.
So I'm going to read this executive order.
Let me get into the text of it.
By the authority vested in me as president, by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to strengthen by American principles in federal financial assistance programs, it is hereby ordered as follows.
Section one, policy.
As expressed in Executive Order 13788 of April 18th, 2017, by American and Higher American.
It is the policy of the executive branch to maximize, consistent with law, the use of goods, products, and materials produced in the United States in federal procurements and through the terms and conditions of federal financial assistance awards.
Okay, like I say, it's not a law, but it has the force and effect of a law over those matters that the U.S. President can control through his executive authority.
And he's saying anything the federal government buys, anything that the federal government spends its money on, finances, it's got to be American-made.
I'm not going to read the entire order, although it's fairly brief.
But look at the definitions of what's covered.
This is really important.
Maximizing American Goods00:15:24
I think this is the heart of it.
Section two, definitions.
As used in this order, A, produced in the United States means for iron and steel products that all manufacturing processes from the initial melting stage through the application of coatings occurred in the United States.
So there goes any Canadian steel.
Sorry, guys.
Here's some more.
C, manufactured products means items and construction materials composed in whole or in part of non-ferrous metals such as aluminum, plastics and polymer-based products such as polyphenol chloride pipe, aggregates such as concrete, glass, including optical fiber, and lumber.
So it's not just steel, it's plastic and concrete and wood and glass.
Everything made it a factory pretty much.
That's why they love Trump in the Rust Belt in those working class states.
And that's why Trump won in Ohio and Indiana and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Michigan and places that Republicans haven't won in a generation.
Because Trump didn't tell those people like the snooty liberals did for so long to just suck it up and yeah, you're out of the job of the factory.
Just learn how to code or whatever millennials do when they're not ordering $15 avocado toasts.
Trump doesn't hate working people.
I think he loves them.
Take a look.
Well, you know, Kevin, when I took over, the Rust Belt was really in trouble.
Many people were saying it's dying, it's dead, people were leaving.
And I love the Rust Belt and the Rust Belt is no longer the Rust Belt as far as I'm concerned.
It's vibrant.
It's doing so well.
You look at all of those red marks, those red marks are where it's flourishing.
Tremendous numbers.
And that's fantastic.
We're very proud.
Compare that to Justin Trudeau talking about pipelines or the oil sands or industrial scale mines.
I've said time and time again, and you're all tired of hearing me say it, you can't make a choice between what's good for the environment and what's good for the economy.
We can't shut down the oil sands tomorrow.
We need to phase them out.
We need to manage the transition off of our dependence on fossil fuels.
We need to phase them out.
Who's fighting for their workers?
Justin Trudeau is not.
Donald Trump is.
Okay, just a bit more from the executive order.
It's not actually that long.
It's just a little bit of legalese, but it's actually fairly plain, isn't it?
But here's a scary part of it.
Listen to all the projects that Canadian firms will now be shut out from.
Section D, infrastructure project, means a project to develop public or private physical assets that are designed to provide or support services to the general public in the following sectors.
Surface transportation, including roadways, bridges, railroads, and transit.
Aviation, ports, including navigational channels, water resources projects, energy production, generation and storage, including from fossil fuels, renewable, nuclear, and hydroelectric sources.
Electricity transmission, gas, oil, and propane storage and transmission, electric oil, natural gas and propane distribution systems, broadband internet, pipelines, stormwater and sewer infrastructure, drinking water infrastructure, cybersecurity, and any other sector designated through a notice published in the Federal Register by the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council.
So yeah, I'm not sure if there's anything really left out of that.
He even talks about oil and gas, even talks about renewables.
Now, I'm not a trade lawyer, but I think that means Canada won't even be able to make the Keystone Excel pipeline that Trudeau approved.
Even though it's a Canadian company that owns it, I think Americans have to build it.
I mean, now Trudeau doesn't care.
He doesn't want Canadians to build pipelines in Canada.
He can't very well demand that Canadians be allowed to build pipelines in America.
I'm not even talking about the workers.
I'm talking about the steel.
Can't even sell the steel for it.
So what do we have here?
Well, we have Donald Trump keeping a promise, a promise to the people who vote for him.
I know that they hate Donald Trump in the fancy circles in Canada.
I still can't believe that Christia Freeland was the keynote speaker at an explicitly anti-Trump rally in Toronto during the NAFTA renegotiations.
The Liberals hate Donald Trump.
Freeland and Trudeau hate Trump.
The Canadian media hates Trump.
The CBC is obsessed with Trump.
And that all makes them feel really good.
But Trump literally couldn't care less because Ontario and Quebec and British Columbia and the CBC head office, they don't have votes in the U.S. Electoral College in 2020.
Michigan does.
Ohio does.
And he's taking jobs from Canada and giving it to them.
The latest U.S. jobs report was stunning, by the way.
I don't know if you saw this.
304,000 new jobs in January alone.
Almost double predictions.
That's in America.
300,000 new jobs?
I'm sorry, that's amazing.
Canada's jobs report for January doesn't come out for a couple more days, but for the previous month, December 2018, Canada created a grand total of 9,600 jobs, and it's actually worse than that because Canada actually lost 18,900 full-time jobs in December, but there were 28,300 new part-time jobs, so that's the only reason the number is positive at all.
So Canada created net 9,300 jobs in the last month for which we have data.
America created 304,000.
That is 32 times more than we created.
And they only have nine times our population, but 32 times as much jobs growth.
Hey, what do you think this new Buy American Hire American executive order signed on Thursday at noon?
What do you think that's going to do to these job numbers?
That executive order is now in effect.
He signed it.
You saw him.
So it starts now.
I predict we will see outright job losses in Canada, not in the January numbers that are going to come out this week, but of course, going forward, the February numbers that we'll see in a month.
Do you not think this ought to be news in Canada?
This is a trade war.
I know he was all jokey and banter, high fives and all.
Those were the Americans who were going to get the jobs.
This is a trade war just right after we were supposed to have signed up for the renewed NAFTA.
But as I write this, as I say this, not a single Canadian media outlet, at least according to Google's news search, has written about this story.
You can see Buy American executive order sorted by date.
It's not there.
There's nothing.
Here's the CBC's internal search engine.
If you go to the CBC and type in Buy American, you'll see a story from November.
You'll see a story from 2017.
There are a few hits from the past, including during the NAFTA renegotiations, but nothing about this huge news from Thursday.
Come on.
Every journalist is silent?
It's Trump.
He's so noisy.
I thought the Toronto Star had that guy, Daniel Dale, who's got this list of 7,000 fibs that Donald Trump told.
So Daniel Dale is listening to every word Trump says, and he just sort of missed this?
Well, because these reporters aren't really in the reporting business.
They're in the PR business or at least whatever it takes to get their share of Trudeau's $595 million bailout.
You tell me a more persuasive explanation.
I put it to you that they can't have missed it.
How could they have missed it?
I put it to you that they don't want to report this because this puts Trudeau and Freeland in a bad position.
Now, to be honest, it's hard to be mad at Trump for doing this.
I mean, it's going to hurt Canada.
But he's doing this for his people.
This is how national leaders are supposed to act, I think, in their own national interests.
It's hard for smaller countries with smaller economies like Canada to act that way.
America remains the world's essential economic engine, despite what the China-obsessed pundits say.
And in fact, Trump's hard line with China is really his main point here.
That's why he's doing this.
He doesn't mean to come for us.
I told you, he said China 28 times.
He didn't say Canada one time, but that's the thing.
I really believe Trump was trying to shoot at China.
But we are the collateral damage.
But because we have such a weak prime minister and a weak foreign minister, Christian Freeland, who's never negotiated anything of any size in her life, but she thought that her hip millennial Twitter squad shown here were the best people in our entire country to personally lead the NAFTA trade negotiations?
Well, look, we have no clue.
We have no relationship left with Trump down there.
We have no one on our side down there.
I wonder if Christy Freeland herself even knows about this news.
She's probably on some TV pundits panel or something, you know, posing for another magazine cover.
I scrolled through her Twitter feed and that of Foreign Affairs Department, and there's nothing about this, nothing.
She's got a tweet about a visit she made to a daycare the other day.
It's got nothing to do with the federal government.
Daycares are not the federal government's department.
It's got nothing to do with foreign affairs.
But that's how she's spending her time.
I wonder if she even knows about this executive order.
Let me read her daycare tweet.
It was great to stop by one of the many daycares in Uni Rose.
That's University of Rosedale.
That's the name of her writing.
Thank you to all the hardworking caregivers who do this essential work.
And thank you to the brilliant students who help me practice my French.
Yeah, okay, that goes in your diary, sister.
Can we get a little bit more foreign ministry stuff?
Like the trade war just declared against us.
Yeah, I am not sure if we have anyone who is looking out for our national interest to you.
So you can't blame Trump, really, for doing what he said he would do in a thousand campaign stops.
It's all he talked about, buy American, hire American.
He talked about reshoring factories.
That's the opposite of offshoring factories.
He talked about bringing industrial jobs back to America.
He said it so many times.
And I guess he meant it because he's doing it.
And I think it might even be working for him.
I wish we had his job reports, don't you?
I wish we had a leader who actually loved industry, who actually loved working men and women.
Look at this.
Justin Trudeau would never stand next to a sign saying that he loves coal or loves oil, would he?
Trump does.
And you know what?
He bloody well means it.
So I don't think you've been told the news.
Our political class is clueless or despondent or something.
Who knows?
Our media class is incurious and uninterested.
Or maybe they are actively in spin mode for Trudeau as in hide mode.
I have no idea.
I'm sorry, they just declared a trade war against Canada and no one's talking about it.
So what should Trudeau do?
What should we do?
Well, I think we should look at what Stephen Harper did exactly 10 years ago when Barack Obama did the same thing to us.
Protectionism is a bipartisan thing in the States.
The first thing Stephen Harper did when Barack Obama brought in Buy American, I think he called it the Reinvest in America Act in 2009, the first thing Harper did was to make a fuss, not rudely, not by going to rallies calling Obama a tyrant, but by relentlessly phoning and meeting and bugging Obama to carve out an exemption for Canada.
Harper just wouldn't stop.
It was his top priority.
He wasn't rude about it.
He wasn't embarrassing.
But here, let's quote Obama.
Here's Obama basically saying, all right, all right, stop pestering me, Steve.
We'll exempt Canada.
Take a listen to Obama himself.
The Buy American provisions that were there, as I noted at the time, we made sure that they were WTO compliant.
That doesn't mean that they're not a source of irritation between the United States and Canada.
Prime Minister Harper, I want to emphasize, has brought this up with me every single time we've met.
So he's been on the job on this issue, and our teams have been working together.
It appears that there may be ways to deal with this bilaterally, but also potentially multilaterally.
Believe me, I could show you a dozen more video clips like that.
Harper made it his top priority.
Did you know he had every Canadian cabinet minister fly down to Washington to meet with their American counterparts, with Obama's cabinet secretaries?
Importantly, Harper appointed a former new Democrat premier, Gary Dewar, as our ambassador to Washington.
Why would Harper do that?
Why would he choose a new Democrat?
Harper's so right-wing.
Why did he choose a socialist?
Well, because the point of an ambassador is to assess the political landscape in the other country and to do your best to persuade other countries of your Canadian interests.
So send a friendly socialist down as an ambassador to Obama.
The friendly socialist.
Gary Dewar did a great job, by the way, regardless of his partisan stripe.
And by the way, I don't even think it's socialist to defend Canada's interest to Obama.
It's just so he would click with Obama.
They would get along.
The point is, Harper knew that Obama and Obama's people would viscerally like Dewar more than if Harper had sent some right-winger down there.
And not once in his term as prime minister did Stephen Harper himself ever badmouth Obama or his people in public.
Not once.
He bit his tongue, even when Obama slighted us.
Trudeau does not have that personal discipline.
Trudeau has done the opposite.
Trudeau has sent the most irritating liberals to interact with Trump.
There was no reason to send quirky, eccentric, irritating, narcissistic, know-nothing Christia Freeland to have been the lead negotiator on the NAFTA renegotiation.
That is a legal technical job.
I mean, put aside the fact that we got fleeced in those renegotiations, that this buy American executive order on Thursday proves that she failed to make a dent in them.
Why would you send someone who was not a trade lawyer to lawyer a trade deal?
Is she going to try surgery next?
Other than vanity and photo ops, instead of building friendships with Trump and biting his tongue the way Harper did with Obama, Justin Trudeau has gone to the United States again and again.
Justin Trudeau's Diplomatic Choices00:05:12
He's gone there about a dozen times.
But he very rarely meets Republicans.
He prefers to meet with his Democrat buddies of the most extreme variety.
Here he is meeting with Barack Obama's first campaign chairman, David Axelrod.
Axelrod has no power anymore.
I think he's with some college or some think tank.
Why are you meeting with Obama insiders now?
Obama's gone.
Obama's not in office anymore.
Why aren't you meeting with Trump insiders?
Watch this clip.
I've shown this clip before as evidence that Trudeau is obviously drunk or stoned on those flights.
As you know, he goes through thousands of dollars worth of liquor, and of course marijuana is legal now.
You can see in this video, just standing up and sitting down, Trudeau wobbles three times.
He's clearly inebriated.
That's the fun of this video, but the point is, why isn't he meeting with Republicans?
Kellyanne Conway, Mike Pence, Jared Kushner.
If he hates Trump so much, fine, meet with Trump's people.
Here, take a look.
Thank you so much.
There were four wobbles there.
Stephen Hart...
Stephen Harper didn't just meet with cabinet ministers and congressmen.
He also met with United States-based companies that were lobbying for Buy American.
But get this, one of the companies that was present at Trump's Buy American press conference on Thursday is called McWayne.
That's just the name of the company.
I never heard of it before.
They make things like iron pipes, fire hydrants, that sort of thing.
Heavy industry, right?
They love these Buy America rules.
They were part of the Obama Buy American lobby group too.
Like I say, this is bipartisan.
Now back under Obama, Gary Dewar, our ambassador, summoned McWayne to the Canadian Embassy and said, hmm, you guys sell a lot of stuff into Canada.
It'd be a shame if anything happened to your sales into Canada.
Hey, why don't we all focus on the real bad guys here, China dumping cheap steel?
And why don't you guys sign a letter, McWayne, the American company, why don't you sign a letter calling for an exemption for Canada?
Keep us out of it.
Because you wouldn't want anything to happen to your exports to Canada now, would you?
So a little bit of hardball.
Canada basically said, if you don't ask Obama to exempt us, you just might find yourself having some problems in our markets, especially given some of the legal and ethical problems that McWayne was having at the time.
That's a little bit of Trump-style negotiating, isn't it?
Ten years ago by Harper and Dewar.
And would you look at that?
McWayne, the folks who were literally standing next to Trump on Thursday, back a decade ago, they wrote a letter to the, well, in this case, they wrote it to a congressman, but he was the protectionist congressman.
Basically, they wrote a letter to Obama saying, hey, guys, we really like this Buy American stuff, but we don't mind if Canada is allowed to sell into the U.S. also.
Can you believe that?
That's what Harper and his diplomats did.
Harper and his team met with all sorts of American companies that had operations on both sides of the border.
And they made the case to these Americans that the problem is not Canada.
You know, we have balanced trade with America.
We buy as much from them as they buy from us.
That's fair dealing.
The problem is obviously China and their tariffs and their dumping.
So it was so persuasive.
Harper got the exemptions Canada needed by making it his top priority, by not being rude, by sending an ambassador that clicked with Obama, by being a little bit tough with companies, but just making the case.
Stephen Harper spent his political capital serving our national interest.
He didn't spend his political capital as Trudeau and Freeland did over the past year demanding bizarre things like feminist or environmentalist clauses in the NAFTA deal.
What is that about climate change in the NAFTA deal?
Gender in the NAFTA deal?
Stephen Harper spent his political capital defending Canadian jobs.
Justin Trudeau.
Well, to be frank, he doesn't really like industrial jobs.
He thinks they should be phased out.
You heard him.
He's canceling them anyways.
And he really does prefer Democrats, even if they don't control the White House.
Trudeau just can't stomach playing nice with Trump, even if it's what diplomacy calls for, even if it's literally what diplomacy means.
We are in a trade war as bad as anything we faced in a decade.
Justin's Elvis Impersonation00:07:07
That's dangerous.
But just as dangerous and more inexplicable is a media party and a political establishment, including Andrew Schuerce, conservatives, I might add, who haven't said a word about this.
How bizarre.
I took responsibility for content that appeared on my page in the Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook that was clearly racist and offensive.
I am not and will not excuse the content of the photo.
It was offensive, racist, and despicable.
When my staff showed me the photo in question yesterday, I was seeing it for the first time.
I did not purchase the EVMS yearbook, and I was unaware of what was on my page.
When I was confronted with the images yesterday, I was appalled that they appeared on my page.
But I believe then and now that I am not either of the people in that photo.
So he never saw his own yearbook.
It was on his page.
He's apologizing for it, but he's also saying it wasn't him.
Sounds legit.
That's the Democratic governor for Virginia.
For now, joining us now via Skype is our friend Pardes Saleh, a reporter with MediaIte.
What was a spectacular press conference?
Pardes, nice to see you again.
Welcome back.
Hi.
Good to see you too.
It was quite a spectacle.
I mean, what can you do?
Let's put the image up here right now to show people what all the fuss was about.
This is a Democrat.
And this wasn't a high school yearbook.
So this is not a teenager.
He was in medical school.
And that image on the right there.
Yeah.
Oh, that's old-timey Virginia.
What do you think of that, Pardes?
Yeah, I think it's the thing that comes to mind is actually how much Brett Kavanaugh was thrilled over his high school nickname.
He had some little nickname that wasn't even significant, something to do with his beer stuff and his affection for beer and how much the Democrats grilled him over that.
And now a literal photo of on Ralph Northern's page with KKK robe and blackface shows up and it's not getting the same outrage.
Well, I mean, it is getting a lot of Democrats distancing themselves from him, but he's still there.
He doesn't seem like he wants to resign.
He's claiming it wasn't him.
Although I don't believe that.
First of all, his yearbook says his nickname, I don't even want to say this word, but it's his nickname that was on the yearbook.
So this is not how I talk.
I've never said this word before.
But his official nickname was Koon Man.
And that is rooted in a derogatory term for black people.
I'm just saying it because I don't believe for a second this guy's excuse that he never saw it before.
I just don't buy that.
What do you think?
Is he credible?
Does anyone believe him, first of all, Pardes?
Probably has to say that it wasn't him because this is, he has to stay in office.
Like Democrats need him to stay in office.
And I think a lot of people on his political side are very upset about the photo and they're probably very, very, very angry at him.
But at the same time, they need to keep him in office.
So if he says that it wasn't him, they're going to say, okay, it wasn't him.
He said it.
I want to show you some other excerpts from his press conference.
I'm not sure if they want him in office because I think I don't know the U.S. constitutional system, but I think that the lieutenant governor, who's also a Democrat, I think, would take over.
I don't know.
I think he just has nothing to lose by staying in.
His career is over.
Why not stick around?
I don't know.
It'll be interesting.
But let me show you a few more tidbits from that press conference.
Because it was quite something.
He says, no, no, no, that's not me and Blackface.
But he says he's done that sort of thing before because, you know, he's a big fan of Michael Jackson.
Here, take a look.
That same year, I did participate in a dance contest in San Antonio in which I darkened my face as part of a Michael Jackson costume.
I look back now and regret that I did not understand the harmful legacy of an action like that.
It is because my memory of that episode is so vivid that I truly do not believe I am in the picture in my yearbook.
That's just a weird excuse.
And I don't know why he won't say blackface.
Darken my face.
He's just, it's weird that he's rolling that out.
I wonder what else he's scared of that he's just trying to get it all out in this one moment.
What do you think of that Michael Jackson impersonator thing?
He looks more like an Elvis impersonator to me.
I wish he did the moonwalk.
That would have been so epic.
That would have made my day if you just moonwalked.
It's funny you say that because it was specifically asked that.
That's our next clip.
A reporter there had the presence of mind to say, really, Michael Jackson?
And take a look at this exchange.
You said that the competition in San Antonio was the dance conference.
Yes.
It was that you danced the moonwalk.
That's right.
Are you still able to moonwalk?
Inappropriate circumstances.
My wife says, inappropriate circumstances.
Pardez, I think he really was going to prove that he could moonwalk until his wife said, yeah, don't do that, Ralph.
I think he, in his mind, would think, if I can show that I can moonwalk, that will so show my love for Michael Jackson, people will forgive me for dressing up either in blackface or as the Klansman.
Because, look, I like you people.
I even can break dance like Michael Jackson, and you can call me my racist nickname because I meant it affectionately.
I think I've never seen anyone so stunned in my life.
Was he serious?
Was he seriously going to moonwalk there?
Probably.
I mean, the whole thing sounds like he sounds a little bit oblivious in the moment, so maybe.
Look, it's too much fun.
It's too much fun because all of this feels like payback for the way the Democrats treated Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump's nominee for the Justice Department.
Northam's Infanticide Controversy00:07:48
Sorry, for the Supreme Court.
But it's actually, I think, obscures a far more egregious statement that the same governor, Ralph Northam, made a couple days earlier.
And look, we're having a lot of fun.
We're laughing about the fact that he says he can do a Michael Jackson impression.
We're laughing about his goofy excuse.
I didn't dress in blackface then.
I did then, so it's okay then and not then.
But let me play for you his comments about live birth abortion.
I know that's such a crazy phrase.
People are saying, what are you talking about?
A bill going through Virginia that would allow a baby to actually be born and then aborted when it is actually alive and outside of the month.
It's not a fetus anymore.
That's a fully born baby.
Here, don't take it from me.
Listen to this Michael Jackson impersonator talk about how it would go down.
Take a look.
You're no exception.
There was a very contentious committee hearing yesterday when Fairfax County delegate Kathy Tran made her case for lifting restrictions on third trimester abortions as well as other restrictions now in place.
And she was pressed by a Republican delegate about whether her bill would permit an abortion even as a woman is essentially dilating, ready to give birth.
And she answered that it would permit an abortion at that stage of labor.
Do you support her measure?
And explain her answer.
Yeah, and I wasn't there, Julie, and I certainly can't speak for Delegate Tran, but I will tell you one, first thing I would say, this is why decisions such as this should be made by providers, physicians, and the mothers and fathers that are involved.
There are, you know, when we talk about third trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of obviously the mother, with the consent of the physicians, more than one physician, by the way.
And it's done in cases where there may be severe deformities.
There may be a fetus that's non-viable.
So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen.
The infant would be delivered.
The infant would be kept comfortable.
The infant would be resuscitated if that's what the mother and the family desired.
And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mothers.
But as I got to tell you, I was having a good laugh at this idiot talking about breakdancing and offering to do a moonwalk and how he wasn't in blackface here, but he was there.
That's all just, that's just all entertainment.
But what he's talking about, for a governor of a serious state and a serious party, to be totally calm about, I'm sorry, that's killing a baby.
That's not pro-choice anymore.
That's not even an abortion anymore.
To me, that is far more shocking than his goofy college yearbook photo.
Well, you want to know what I heard on Twitter?
Because Twitter is where everything happens.
Someone said, and this is going to sound crazy, but someone wrote that it could be that Northam's own people had that photo sent out in order to distract from his infanticide comment, from his statement.
I mean, it's being noted as infanticide.
His statement basically endorsing partial birth abortion, which is like killing a baby as the baby is already coming out.
I saw that same speculation on Twitter, and you know what?
I do give it credit, and here's why.
Because if the Republicans were the ones who had that blackface Klan yearbook photo, why didn't they use it during the campaign?
That would have been a kill shot.
So obviously the Republicans didn't have it.
Someone had it.
And those comments were so egregious about infanticide, and they were getting such wide coverage, I think they decided to abort his political candidates, his political career, to distract, not only to cover up the news of his disastrous infanticide comments, but to take him out so he's no longer a legitimate face of the Democrats.
I have to say, that is actually the most logical explanation, because if the Republicans had it, they would have used it before.
What do you think of that?
They would have.
Definitely Ed Gillespie, his former challenger, would have, his people would have, his research team would have used it for sure.
And people are saying that, wow, it's crazy that this infanticide endorsement didn't end his career and the blackface did or whatever.
But it could be that that did end his career.
And this is just a distraction in the end.
Yeah, it's the mop-up team.
Of course, there weren't a lot of journalists who were appalled by the infanticide comment.
I think it was more Republicans, conservative commentators.
I think that is actually fairly close to the norm in the media.
I mean, in Canada, what's shocking in the States, we have no abortion law in Canada whatsoever.
It's literally until the moment of birth.
Abortion is lawful in Canada and, in fact, paid for by taxpayers.
So I think that is considered the political norm amongst the media class.
But some more thoughtful Democrat probably said, we've got to switch the channel.
What do you think is going to happen?
You say the Democrats don't want him out.
I actually think they do.
I mean, I don't know the Virginia system, but I would imagine that they would replace him with, I think the lieutenant governor is a Democrat also.
But why would he step down other than the abuse?
Like, he's got no political future anymore, I don't think.
Everyone's jumping on him from across the party.
Do you think he's going to try and weather it out, or will he just be too impotent because no one will want to deal with him?
Well, last night, I keep going back and forth, too, by the way.
But last night, he put out a, I think, I don't know if it was him that put out a statement.
Someone put out a statement saying that he was considering resigning.
I don't know if it means that he will, but it means that it could be a very big chance of happening.
Well, we'll see it anyways.
I certainly enjoyed going through the crazy press conference with you.
And although that was fun and crazy, his infanticide comments, I think, are by former service.
Pardes, great to see you.
We look forward to talking to you next week.
You too.
Thank you.
All right.
There you have it.
Pardes a reporter with Mediaite.com.
She joins us via Skype from Washington, D.C. Stay with us.
more ahead on the Rebel.
Hey, welcome back.
I'm a monologue Friday about the CBC trying to get a refugee advocate fired over a two-year-old Facebook post.
Henry writes, social workers are heroes.
They're underpaid and do a lot of hard work that doesn't get a lot of recognition.
It's sad that people are attacking social workers for political reasons.
Well, we all work hard.
I'm not sure if social workers work harder than any of us.
You know, I'm not going to fight you over that, but I don't think that's the center of the issue here.
I think the center of the issue is the fact that he's a social worker, shows that he is your soft-hearted friend to all, who surely works overwhelmingly with minorities, Muslims, foreigners, obviously.
Social Worker's Role Defamed00:02:03
And to say that he's a bigot because he wants these people to integrate into Canadian values, that's appalling.
And that the CBC whips up a campaign to have him essentially fired.
To me, the key line in that report was that the CBC, when they called up the government to tattle on him, this is the first government heard of it.
No one thought this was an issue until the CBC became a tattletale.
I guess the lesson here is if they can do this to him, they can do it to you.
Susannah writes, we have entered the era where you can't trust your coworkers, neighbors, and even family members to not report you to the authorities.
That's exactly what this government and their minions want, for people to be afraid to speak up.
You're so right.
And that snitch culture, that informant culture is really the lifeblood of an authoritarian regime.
We've talked about it before.
We'll continue to talk about it as the time is right.
Pavlik Morozov, the young boy from Ukraine who reported his parents, Kulak farmers, to Stalin's KGB secret police because he overheard his parents talking over dinner how they disagreed with Stalin's forced collectivization.
His parents were sent off to the gulag.
And Pavlik Morozov was given a national honor.
He was given the title Informant Number One as a good thing.
Like, I mean, in popular culture, oh, you're a rat, you're an informant.
It's a disparaging term.
In the Soviet Union, this little boy, Pavel Morozov, who put Stalin ahead of his own parents, who sent his parents to prison because they said something bad about Stalin in the privacy of their home, he was made a national hero.
He was called informant number one.
And every Boy Scout in the Soviet Union, it was called the Young Pioneers, had to wear a little pin with Pavel Morozov's picture on it as a symbol that they too would put the state ahead of their own parents.
That is the lifeblood of an authoritarian totalitarian regime.
Informant Number One00:00:56
And I don't think we're there yet, of course.
But there are drops of it, aren't there?
And this Twitter mob culture is certainly of a piece with it.
My interview with Yasmeen Mohamed, Paul writes, virtue signaling takes cowardice.
Putting yourself in potential danger to save others is heroism.
Yasmin Mohammed is a hero to many.
Yeah, I really like talking with her.
And you know, she said she was finally getting some attention from the mainstream media.
And sure enough, I did see her in other media.
And that is great.
I mean, we love to discover these people, these thoughtful thinkers who are marginalized by the mainstream.
So we feel some sort of connection to them.
We try and boost their signal.
To see them break into the mainstream is a thrilling feeling because it's a sign that maybe, maybe we're having a little temporary victory in a small battle in the larger war.