A new Angus Reid poll reveals 60% of Albertans and 53% of Saskatchewanians would consider voting for a separatist party, surpassing Conservatives (29%) and outpacing Liberals/NDP. Ezra Levant ties this to Ottawa’s neglect—from Trudeau’s National Energy Program to $7.5B U.S. steel tariffs under Trump’s "Buy American" order—where Canada lacks USMCA exemptions Mexico secured, forcing WTO recourse. Frustration with federal parties like Scheer’s Conservatives or Singh’s NDP, and Trudeau’s optics-over-substance approach (e.g., oil sands phaseout), fuels separatist momentum, mirroring Quebec’s past leverage tactics. Meanwhile, Montenegrino critiques RCMP’s "bellhop" role in immigration enforcement and questions NATO’s relevance amid allies like Turkey’s anti-Western stance, contrasting Venezuela’s potential for redemption with failed interventions elsewhere. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, hello rebels here listening to my free audio-only recording of my show, The Ezra Levant Show.
Today we talk about an amazing poll by Angus Reid that shows that 60%, 6-0%, a majority obviously, of Albertans would support a separatist party.
I go into details with the poll and I remind people that you don't have to want actual separatism to support a separatist party.
Maybe you just like to negotiate a little tougher.
That's what Quebec's been doing for a generation.
Anyways, you got to tune in and I have a good talk with Manny Montenegrino about the trade war that Donald Trump has launched against the world called Buy American.
I hope you tune in for that.
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Tonight, a new poll shows that 60% of Albertans would consider voting for a separatist party, and 53% of Saskatchewanians would too.
It's February 6th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
I'm not surprised 60% of Albertans would favor a Western separatist movement.
That's the result of a new opinion poll by Angus Reid.
Here's their headline.
Western Rights Party Support00:15:27
Decades after reform's rise, voters open to a new Western Canada Party.
And by that, they actually meant a new federal party to run in Canadian elections for the Canadian Parliament, like the old Reform Party did, to promote a Western point of view within Canada.
I'll get to the separatism in a moment, but here's their chart about the headline.
All across the West, such a Western Canada party within Canada would immediately jump into first place with 35% of the vote.
This is in Western Canada.
The Conservatives would immediately fall to second at 29%.
The Liberals and the NDP would be in the teens.
Now, this hypothetical scenario is examined at some length by Angus Reed, including a province-by-province breakdown.
It's called vote intention.
If a Western Canada party were an option, in this chart, you can see that such a party would theoretically be in the lead in each of the four Western provinces.
It's the light blue bar in these charts.
Conservatives are the dark blue bar.
Interestingly, in second place in each of these, three-way tie in Manitoba.
I wonder if that suggests, for example, in British Columbia, that a Western rights party would draw support away from the Liberals as much as from the Conservatives.
Even draw votes from the NDP.
Now, that would not surprise me.
I was involved with the Reform Party 25 years ago, and I remember the interesting coalition that Preston Manning put together.
In Alberta, it was very much borrowing, burrowing, excuse me, right into the core of the disgraced progressive conservatives.
That's what Alberta was.
Old progressive conservatives, either upset with Brian Mulroney or just absolutely repulsed by Kim Campbell.
So that was Alberta, where I'm from.
But in British Columbia, it's a different kind of reformer.
A lot of them were New Democrats.
Not necessarily socialists, but people who wanted the party to stand up for the little guy against the elites, against the establishment.
I remember the words Preston Manning used to use that resonated.
Represent the West to Ottawa, not Ottawa to the West, not the other way around.
That the existing parties had become auto-washed.
He used that phrase a lot.
He used to say, the common sense of the common man.
That sort of thing.
That would appeal to a lot of New Democrats.
It's very different, by the way, than the latest version of Preston Manning, who, by the way, is absolutely autowashed, to the point where he's writing op-eds.
Remember this one a few years back in a Toronto newspaper about how the liberals could sell a carbon tax policy to Westerners just by avoid calling it a carbon tax, call it carbon pricing or other tricks.
How embarrassing.
I really wish he had retired before he started undoing his great legacy.
But my point is the original Preston Manning, my favorite President Manning, he understood populism.
He loved it.
He loved direct democracy.
He loved Senate reform.
He loved talking about politics from the bottom up, not the top down.
He talked about participatory democracy.
Remember that?
The ability to fire your MP through something called recall, referendums, petitions, things like that.
That's what's called populism.
Preston used the word grassroots a lot.
It's still very much alive.
In fact, I would say it's stronger than ever and around the world.
What was Brexit?
What was Trump's presidential victory other than Reform Party style rejection of the snobby, disconnected elites?
I remember back then, Jean-Cretchen and the national media called the Newborn Reform Party, they called it racist too, when of course it wasn't.
I remember Sheila Copps, the deputy prime minister under Cretchen, calling Preston Manning, who is probably the least racist person I've ever met.
She called him the David Duke of the North.
Now she knew it wasn't true, but she had a job to do, to smash her opponents.
And the media were only too happy to help by demonizing the Reform Party and indeed all Westerners as racist.
The reaction of the Reform Party actually made the discontent worse.
That was before the new accusation.
In 2019, they wouldn't say David Duke of the North.
They would accuse you of Islamophobia or maybe homophobia.
Back then, that wasn't that a common insult to tell people.
Now they call their enemies alt-right or whatever.
That's another borrowing from the U.S. left.
You might remember, I sure do, that in the 1990s, CSIS sent an undercover officer named Grant Bristow, an undercover agent.
I don't think he was actually formally trained as a cop.
And he founded a racist group called the Heritage Front.
Let me say that again.
For younger viewers who might not remember, the Canadian government used tax dollars and a CESIS agent to create a racist group, to co-found it, which was called the Heritage Front.
And his purpose was to give a bad name to all conservatives.
They deliberately tried to infiltrate and discredit the newborn Reform Party.
Do you believe that?
CESIS did that.
It's not a conspiracy theory.
I just showed you the article there in the Toronto Star.
You could find it anywhere.
I'm just trying to remind you of those tactics that are surely being used by the same agencies today to undermine any conservative groups, whether it's Andrew Scheer, Jason Kenney, Maxine Bernier, or more amorphous groups like the Yellow Vests or carbon tax protesters.
My point is, half the racists in Canada are undercover cops or hoaxes, always have been.
Look at this old Toronto Star photo of the anti-racists who were there to confront the racist Heritage Front.
Of course, both sides were controlled by the same people.
It was a play fight.
Anyway, sorry for the tangent.
My point is that we have police and political meddling with conservative politics in Canada going back decades.
I'm sure they did this to Quebec separatists too.
In fact, I know they did.
Half the racist incidents in this country, I truly believe, or at least the ones ascribed to the right wing, are simply government agents like Grant Bristow.
I'm not going to get into the insane story from the 1960s when the Canadian Jewish Congress actually funded the Canadian Nazi Party.
I'll tell you about that another day.
I read about it in McLean's.
It's a crazy story.
I believe most Islamophobia hoaxes these days are hoaxes, like the fake hijab hoax.
I believe they're either created by human rights activists or police agents, or in this case, you remember the schoolgirl who claimed that she was attacked on the street.
She said an Asian man.
I truly think she was coached by someone to say a Caucasian man, but 11-year-olds simply don't know what the word Caucasian was.
She probably heard the word Asian, so she blamed someone Chinese, and the whole narrative fell apart.
She's supposed to blame a white guy.
Anyways, that's not the news today.
That's just a reminder of how the establishment reacts to populist conservatives and has for my whole life, and before I was born even, insult the right, discredit, undermine, defame, infiltrate dirty tricks.
Expect to see a whole lot more of that in the months and years ahead, especially as we get into the election.
But back to today's news, the poll by Angus Reid.
He says a new pro-Western party would immediately be in first place across the West and would literally get 40% of the vote in Alberta.
Now, it could be, of course.
It would depend a lot on who the leader would be, of course.
I think a lot of Westerners are disappointed in the weak sauce of Andrew Scheer.
If the leader of a new Western movement was charismatic, it could do quite well.
The utter weakness of Jagmeet Singh and his weird dalliance with extremists is also a disappointment to prairie voters who have had a historic tie to the NDP.
Remember, it used to be called the CCF.
What a change from the Farmers and Industrial Workers Coalition that Tommy Dudvis put together.
Now the NDP is just radical activists, racial grievance groups, environmentalists, extremists.
So yeah, the NDP would give up votes to a new pro-Western party too, as they did in the 1990s to the Reform Party.
There's a lesson here, namely that Maxine Bernier, who calls himself the Albertan from Bose-Quebec, I think he actually has more of a chance than other people might think.
I don't know if he's going to punch through in any given riding and actually win seats.
He might just get 5% or 10% in a lot of places.
But this poll by Angus Reid about this hypothetical new Western party, it tells me, weirdly, what do you think of this theory?
That a Quebecer like Bernier, who clearly loves the West and says so, and isn't afraid of championing the West, he might actually pick up votes from an Andrew Scheer who takes Westerners for granted.
I'm not sure if you saw this video the other day.
I want to show you about a minute from a video, en français, in French, in Quebec, where he was asked about pipelines.
And he gave the strongest answer I've ever seen.
He said he absolutely would push through a pipeline through Quebec over the objections of even the provincial government.
Watch this.
It's just one minute long.
And you tell me, I'm not going to show you the whole thing.
It's just a minute.
You tell me, have you ever seen Andrew Scheer say something like this?
Watch the clip.
It's in French, but look at the bottom.
There's a translation of what he's saying in the bottom.
Take a look.
It's important that I vouch because the journey risk details for Quebec.
When you're a project federal project because it's provincial, the Petroleum Party, Alberta, Quebec if you can do it, you think Canada.
But Premier Man, you see, it's the privilege of the Commission.
— Mais mettons que le privé acceptait, là.
— Oui, mettons que le privé acceptait.
Il faut y aller avec ce projet-là.
Le fédéral a tous les instruments législatifs pour le faire.
— On l'impose au Québec, donc?
On l'impose, là?
— Oui, on peut imposer en utilisant la clause dans la Constitution qui fait en sorte que ce serait un projet d'intérêt national et en faisant des consultations nécessaires.
Mais en bout de ligne, il faut que ces pipelines-là...
It's more country or Canada.
Mr. Bernard, you made Alberto, but not a couple of Quebec.
The view of the world that declined to do it.
If you sent the population of Quebec, but represent the population, Quebec, who knows that it is more security transportation by plane, and who knows about real employment, who knows the Canadian economy, because they have remained for the petrol, the pins of March, American markets.
Put aside whether or not you think Maxime Bernier leaving the Conservatives was a good idea.
Put that aside.
I just want to ask you a question.
Have you ever seen an interview like that before?
And it went on a lot longer, by the way.
You should find the whole thing on YouTube.
I have never seen an Albertan fight so hard for Alberta in Quebec.
This monologue is not a campaign ad for Bernier, but rather just an observation.
Ingus Reid tells us there is a big appetite for a pro-Western party in Canada.
Wouldn't it be paradoxical if that pro-Western party was led by a Quebecer?
I'm just saying, I'm just saying.
Oh, hey, being a forceful advocate for Alberta and oil and industry and pipelines is a great idea.
Andrew Scheer, why did you steal that idea?
But back to the Ingus Reid poll.
It talks about this Western party that would run within the Canadian system.
And I remember being involved in Preston Manning's Reform Party and the Canadian Alliance Party that succeeded it.
And it was great, and it was passionate, and I loved it, and I grew up in it, and I made a lot of friends in it.
Really, I even briefly ran as a candidate for it for about five weeks before stepping aside in Calgary Southwest for Stephen Harper.
I don't know if you remember that story, but I do know, I do know that despite the thrill of it, the Reform Party carved off enough votes and the Black Québécois carved off enough votes that Jean-Kett Cretchen came up the middle and he won three majority governments in a row with only around 40% of the vote or even less.
I think one of his elections he had like 35.5% of the vote.
It wasn't until Stephen Harper stitched the Reform Party back together with the rump of those old progressive conservatives that he was able to win a government.
And even that was a minority government for years.
So what would a new Western party do within Canada other than perhaps guarantee Trudeau a liberal majority?
I mean, we're going to have another split.
Unless it had a coalition, an alliance with a similar party in Quebec.
That happened before in Canadian history.
Look way back to the creditistes, as they were called.
Conrad Black's a leading historian on all that.
But what about the other option?
What about the other question in this poll?
Because look, we've seen this movie before several times.
In the early 1980s, Pierre Trudeau brought in the national energy program that wrung out tens of billions of dollars a year from Alberta, killed the industry.
Massive reception, massive job losses, destroyed national harmony.
He hated the West, like his son Justin does.
And something called the Western Canada Concept Party was born, full-blown separatists.
And you know, it actually elected a provincial MLA in Alberta.
I don't know if you know that.
Here's an old UPI story from their archives from 1982 about Gordon Kessler.
In the depths of the national energy program, they won a seat, and the Western Canada Comps actually said that they thought, he's just had for that moment, that maybe they could even form the provincial government.
I mean, why not?
Separatists were forming governments in Quebec.
And maybe they could have done so.
Peter Lawheed took it as a wake-up call, got tougher with Trudeau.
Preston Manning went to work creating the Reform Party with his essential motto, the West Wants In.
If I recall, I didn't look it up, I just try to remember it.
He had a preliminary convention in 1986.
I think it was in Winnipeg.
I think it was co-hosted by Ted Byfield of the Western Report, as it was called.
And that led to the formal birth of the party next year, 1987.
So this was all happening in the mid-80s.
Preston Manning basically said, Take all of your energy and all your anger and all your sorrow and help me fix things.
The West wants in.
Let's fix it.
Let's reform it.
That's what the name meant.
So he took all the momentum out of the separatist movement.
In a way, Preston Manning probably saved Canada in that he just let all the air out of the balloon of the Western separatism movement.
The opposite of the path Quebec chose, am I right?
But in the end, I don't think it worked, did it?
I mean, I suppose Jean-Cretchen didn't particularly abuse the West.
He did approve the development and growth of the oil sands.
He did.
He didn't try and kill it.
He actually balanced the budget, which was sort of a reformish thing.
Sure, he signed the Kyoto Protocol, but he didn't mean it.
He didn't do anything.
Yeah, he was arrogant and insulting and un-Western, but he wasn't an ideological hater.
He didn't go around picking fights.
He liked to put out fires, not start fires.
He was very different from Trudeau, wasn't he?
Now, the election in 2006 of Stephen Harper obviously marked, I suppose, the real success of the Reform Party 20 years later.
Harper himself was a co-founder of the Reform Party with Manning 20 years earlier.
Its first policy boss, Harper was, an early candidate, early MP.
And Harper ran the country well.
He didn't favor the West in any particular way.
In fact, he still wrung out the rest to appease Quebec tax-wise.
Quebec never really returned the affection.
But it was symbolically nice to have a Westerner in power.
At least the West knew that he wouldn't try anything.
But that's gone.
Conservatives Win in Quebec?00:07:15
And so now what?
We now have a new national energy program called the Carbon Tax.
And its proponents, especially the irritating Catherine McKenna, are even more cult-like.
The government is infested by former environmental lobbyists.
The chief of staff to Catherine McKenna is named Marlowe Reynolds.
He used to be the boss of the anti-oil science lobby group called the Pembina Institute, the principal secretary to Justin Trudeau himself.
You know this.
He used to run the anti-oil sands lobby group called the World Wildlife Fund.
I'm talking, of course, about this guy.
We think that the oil sands have been expanded too rapidly without a serious plan for environmental remediation in the first place.
So that's why we don't think it's up to us to decide whether there should be another route for a pipeline.
Because the real alternative is not an alternative route.
It's an alternative economy.
I don't think Kretchen let haters like that, let extreme ideologues like that, have any power.
I think he let them maybe mouth off a bit, but I think he kept them on a leash.
So what's our solution today, Andrew Scheer?
Yeah, could be.
I got to tell you, though, I don't know a lot of conservatives who seriously believe that.
There's a difference between you hope Andrew Scheer is going to win and you think Andrew Scheer is going to win.
And by the way, we haven't even seen the massive campaign that is about to be unleashed on Andrew Scheer, not just by the Liberal Party itself and their U.S. Democrat Party advisors, but obviously by the bailed-out media, their allies there, and their censors at Facebook and YouTube and Google, and 100 third-party campaign groups, many using foreign money as they did last time.
Yeah, I'm not saying Justin Trudeau is going to win another majority, but I'm pretty sure he's still going to be prime minister after the next election, even if it's a minority.
That obviously isn't just my view, because look at the real question in the Angus Reed survey.
Would you be in favor or opposed to your own province joining such a Western separatist movement?
And as you can see, this chart is by Province BC on the left, Manitoba on the right.
They have strong national affections for Canada as it exists.
43% of BCers and 45% of Manitobans are strongly opposed to the idea of separatism.
Although it should be noted that 35% of BCers are open to the idea, and 36% are open to it in Manitoba, before such a party is even formed, even articulates its idea, even makes its case.
And of course, remember, simply having a Western separatist party doesn't necessarily mean you have to separate.
It might just mean you want to negotiate a bit more firmly than rolling over every time.
Quebecers have said twice in two referendums that they actually don't really want to leave Canada.
Why would they?
Their separatist parties, with the mere threat of separating, have wrung out hundreds of billions of dollars in financial concessions, in moral and symbolic concessions, everything from national bilingualism to guaranteed one-third of the seats on the Supreme Court.
So yeah, do you doubt that a viable Western separatist party would pretty quickly have Ottawa politicians, say, approving pipelines?
You don't have to separate for a separatist party to be a success, or put it another way.
I'm not sure what use the United States of America would have for an independent Quebec.
I don't think they'd like it.
It'd probably be like a little Venezuela, a little radical, a little socialist.
They speak French.
They're pretty socialist, whatever.
But I am pretty sure that Donald J. Trump would know what to do with an independent Alberta with 173 billion barrels of oil and plenty of natural gas and a generally can-do workforce.
Yeah, I think Ottawa would suddenly have to make its case to Alberta as opposed to vice versa because Alberta would have an option.
And Albertans, I think, know this.
Look at those numbers again.
Again, without even trying, without even advocating, 60%, if you look at Alberta, between those strongly in favor and moderately favor, 31 plus 29 is 60% of Albertans would immediately support such a project.
And half of those reporters are strong supporters.
Still, 25% are strongly opposed.
Yeah, I get that.
But the math right now would be 60% won out, 40% won in.
That's a landslide, folks.
Saskatchewan has similar numbers, a bit more modest.
They never had a strong separatist movement like Alberta did almost 40 years ago.
They didn't felt as targeted as Alberta did 40 years ago.
But look at how punitive Trudeau has been towards Saskatchewan.
Remember, it was the first province to oppose the carbon tax.
McKenna and Trudeau have been particularly abusive to it.
And they know that, and they're ready to go by a slight margin.
What's sad about Saskatchewan is it's where Andrew Scheer is from.
I mentioned how Preston Manning from Alberta took all the separatist energy away and transmogrified it into fixing the system.
He turned lemons into lemonade, didn't he?
It doesn't appear that voters in Saskatchewan think Andrew Scheer can do the same.
So what does this all mean?
Well, I'll tell you what I think.
I think it means that all of the existing political entities have failed the West.
Obviously, the Liberal Party, they hate the West, especially under Trudeau.
Chrisen hit it, sort of.
Trudeau revels in it.
Remember this?
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.
He's a trust fund kid, son of a trust fund kid.
The last Trudeau who worked for a living was 100 years ago, but he'll tell you your job has to be phased out.
Yeah, he's so calm about that, isn't it?
It's so obvious.
We've got to phase out those jobs.
It's just obvious.
Like this.
Quebecers are better than the rest of Canada because, you know, we're Quebecers.
That's the real Trudeau.
Yeah, we know the Liberals hate the West.
But the NDP doesn't much like the West either.
Even though the West gave birth to the NDP in the form of the CCF, remember that?
And the Conservative Party, well, the stats speak for themselves.
People prefer another party to it.
That was the first question that Angus Ree asked.
They prefer separatism to it.
That is sad.
Of course, other institutions have failed too.
The mainstream media, in many ways, is the worst.
But so are the courts.
The courts are the primary means that the left uses to attack oil patch pipelines.
I think people are fed up with it.
But I think back to the tangent I took you on in the beginning, Brian Marooney, Kim Campbell, Jean-Cretchen.
They didn't really fix the problem of Western alienation.
Rather, they set about to slander Westerners, to defame them.
Obviously, with the cooperation of the media, and as the Grant-Bristow Infiltration and the Heritage Front shows, CESIS literally paying an agent to create a racist front group and then mark that as a conservative thing and paid him to infiltrate the Newborn Reform Party.
They called Preston Manning a bigot for standing up for the West.
30 years later, that playbook still seems to work.
Get ready for it again.
Stay with us for more.
Okay, let's go.
Does anybody want this pen?
Because I have one.
Thank you very much.
Thank you all for being here.
I appreciate it.
Okay, here you go.
That is U.S. President Donald Trump at a signing ceremony for an executive order last Thursday at the White House.
As you can see, there were men and women there wearing hard hats.
Those are industrial workers who have been lobbying Donald Trump to bring in protectionist measures.
And so we did.
That executive order called for a buy American scheme whereby the U.S. government, through its contracts and finances, would favor American manufacturers over all foreigners, including Canadians.
Let me quote just a little bit from the order.
Infrastructure projects include public or private physical assets that are designed to provide or support services, including surface transportation, railways, bridges, transit, aviation ports, including navigational channels, water resources, energy production, generation storage, fossil fuels, just about anything you could possibly imagine.
From broadband, internet to pipelines and everything in between.
Every single thing the U.S. government buys, it will now be biased against foreigners, biased towards Americans.
This is a trade war.
At least that's my view.
But joining us now to give us his view is our old friend Manny Montenegrino, who has a great experience in both legal matters and political matters.
He used to be the lawyer for the Conservative Party, including for Stephen Harper, and he is a strategist in Ottawa.
Manny, great to see you again.
Welcome back.
We really enjoyed your comments through the renegotiation of NAFTA.
What do you think about this executive order?
I think it's like a trade war.
Am I overreacting?
You are yes and no.
First of all, it's great that you've brought it up.
I haven't seen it anywhere in the media.
And it isn't necessarily a trade war.
It's a continuation of what Donald Trump has been saying since 2015 campaigning.
And that is basically make America great, get manufacturing, get steel back into America.
And this is just one of the steps.
And Ezra, when you look at that, I've looked at that executive order, and it deals with basically, roughly, infrastructure projects by the American government only.
Now, when I say only, what does that mean?
Trump has been saying, President Trump has been saying that he wants to build the infrastructure of America.
He talks about the airports and the road structures and how superior they are in China, airports around the world.
So that number could be huge.
My estimate, it could be in the trillions of dollars over a long period of time.
And that means it is a sizable amount that the world would want to bid on.
And Canada, being the closest neighbor and probably the biggest supplier, certainly has to pay attention.
Now, Ezra, that executive order does have a general position, Section 6.
If you read it, it says, and I went to it because I'm saying, well, how could this make sense?
How could you do a new US-MCA deal and now sign this executive order?
And I look at the executive order and it says, nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect sub-III existing rights and obligations under international agreements.
So I felt good.
I said, well, that's good.
This order will not affect the UM, a U.S. MCA deal because it's exempted from this order.
But Ezra, if you look at the deal that we signed, here's what the deal says.
The deal, the new deal, and you might recall this, and hopefully your viewers do recall this.
It was negotiated for a year and a half.
Canada was kicked to the curb by both Mexico and the United States in the negotiations because they were being juvenile.
They were asking for silly city clauses dealing with gender.
So they were out of the negotiations.
And Mexico negotiated with United States alone.
And they signed the deal.
And then we, at the last minute, signed the deal, the Mexican deal.
I'm not even going to call it the American deal, the Mexican negotiated deal.
And if you look very carefully in that deal, it says that it exempts Mexico from government procurement.
So basically, any procurement between governments of Mexico and governments of the United States are exempted.
So that means you can bid.
They can bid on them.
Can I just say that?
Yeah, sure, sure.
I'm really glad you went back to the USMCA.
That's the new name for the renegotiated NAFTA.
When you say that U.S. government procurement is exempted, does that mean it's exempted from having to follow free trade rules?
So if the U.S. government is exempted in its own purchases, doesn't that mean that the USMCA allows, Allows by American?
But it only allows as between the you the agreement only allows as between Mexico and the USA.
I didn't quite mean exempt.
I'm saying exempted from the order.
So basically, see that, so maybe I'm going a little bit ahead of myself.
But basically what it's saying is that the new USMCA deals with government procurement, but only as it relates to Mexico and U.S. and Canada is not part of it.
Canada signed the Mexican deal.
So what that means, if you were giving advice to a manufacturer, that would mean try to find a subcontractor from Mexico to get in through the U.S. MCA to get around the executive order.
So are you saying that Mexico has certain privileges that Canada doesn't?
Yes.
Are you serious?
Mexico has a better deal than we do?
Yes.
Yes.
I mean, now, Ezra, this is as far as I got going through it because it's very complicated.
Very complicated.
Very complicated.
But I'm going to tell you, Ezra, no one has written on this.
Holy hell.
I didn't know that, Manny, until you just said that.
Yeah.
So what happens now is that you default into Canada defaults into the World Trade Organization deal.
That's where they will find the relief.
So if they want to complain about U.S. action and we'll say this executive order, they'll have to go under the WTO.
They can't go under the U.S. MCA.
Mexico can go under the U.S. MCA deal because it's a modern deal.
It's a new deal, and it's the most current deal.
So we are now forced as Canada, not having negotiated the deal and taken the Mexican deal.
We now have to find legal relief from the WTO agreement, not from the new agreement.
Whereas Mexico can run to the new agreement and say, here's what we signed.
This executive order shouldn't apply to us, and they'll probably win.
Manny, you know, I watched the press conference and then I read the transcript and the White House really was, they were being as noisy about this as they could because in their mind, this was Donald Trump keeping a promise to the American industrial heartland, which it was.
He said the word China, I counted.
He said it 28 times in his 38-minute press conference.
He didn't say the word Canada once.
And it makes sense because he's in this big negotiation with President Xi.
And of course, he's been mad about China for decades, and he's mad about China because of Korea.
So China's on his mind.
I think we were collateral damage.
I don't really think Trump dislikes Canada.
He's got a couple of hotels here, I think.
I don't think that Trump thinks about Justin Trudeau as much as the reverse is true.
So I think we were an accidental casualty.
So I wouldn't put that that way.
Here's what Trump, Trump is a superior strategist.
And I'm going to tell you something.
He's the most transparent person you could negotiate with.
He's been very clear what he wants.
He just wants it.
We're ignoring what he wants.
And what exactly does he want?
What exactly does he want?
On this deal.
Well, he wants manufacturing back to the Rust Belt.
He wants to make America great.
He wants jobs.
These are things.
Now, Ezra, why is he doing this on January 31st executive order?
Two reasons, in my opinion.
Number one, there is no deal with China.
Therefore, they don't get the exemption under 6III, i.e. there are no obligations or international agreements.
So he's saying to China, I've just signed an executive order.
You're out of America forever unless you sign the deal.
If there's an international deal, this doesn't bite you.
That's why it's fine.
So it's actually about, it really is about China.
Well, let me- Yeah, now hold on.
Let me add one more thing.
As you know, the USMCA has not received, it has not gone through Congress.
This is also saying to the Democrats who control Congress, I've got a good deal with Canada.
If you don't sign, they will be totally outside of it.
So it's also a small message to Canada.
And so that's, he's a complete strategist.
It's brilliant what he's doing.
He's threatening China.
And China, you're absolutely right.
China is a main goal.
If you don't sign a deal with us, you are out.
And that's it.
So this document does two things.
It kind of tells the Democrats, wake up.
It tells Canada, you're out.
You got to go to the old WTO.
And by the way, the steel industry is growing in America.
And Ezra, let me add, as you know, there have been tariffs put on the Canadian steel.
From what I've read, the U.S. is, that tariff equals $7.5 billion.
So Canadian steel going into America is added with $7.5 billion.
And I say steel, I mean aluminum as well and all the other products.
But $7.5 billion.
That makes purchasers in America say, let's keep our steel industry going.
We'll buy locally.
And that's happened.
Now, in Canada, we did a kit-for-tat trade, a tit-for-dat tariffs, but it wasn't focused.
It wasn't on anything.
It was a revenue generator.
We got it on whiskey.
We got it on mustard and all things that really doesn't matter.
So let me conclude by saying this.
The tariff that Trump put on was specific to grow the industry in America, the steel industry, and it's very successful.
Steel jobs are coming back.
The tariffs in Canada was to give the government, the Liberal government, Justin Trudeau, $7.5 billion more to spend foolishly.
And that's why the tariffs both exist.
That's why neither party is getting rid of the tariffs.
Trump loves it because it forces manufacturing into America.
Trudeau loves it because Canadians are paying $7.5 billion more in taxes and he gets to spend it, which wasn't in his budget a year ago.
You know, it's interesting you say that.
I think you're right.
Trump is transparent.
I think he really is a blue-collar-minded billionaire, even though that's like an oxymoron.
I think he likes working people.
He likes the trades.
He likes photographs with guys with hard hats, whereas our guy talks about phasing out the oil sands.
Our guy bans pipelines.
Right.
In fact, come to think of it, Trudeau really doesn't do a lot of photo ops with working class people.
It's not cool enough for him.
But let me ask you this, because I was reminded of when Barack Obama brought in Buy American, because it's a bipartisan thing.
Yes.
And Stephen Harper was tenacious, and I think he worked for Stephen Harper at the time.
I don't know if you're at liberty to share us any of the behind the scenes, but from what I can tell on the outside, it looked like Stephen Harper said this is almost an economically existential threat to Canada, given our trade.
So he, it was his top file.
He was always down in Washington.
He had his cabinet meet with Obama's cabinet.
He got U.S. companies to agree to lobby for exemptions.
And in fact, Obama, I showed a clip on Monday.
Obama said, all right, enough, enough.
He was almost wearing down Obama, but not rudely.
He wasn't rude.
He hired a new Democrat as an ambassador, which I thought was brilliant, Gary Dewar, just to make Obama comfy.
It would be like Trudeau hiring a right-wing developer as an ambassador just to make Trump feel good.
And that's part of it.
I guess what I'm asking, sorry for the long preamble.
Has Trudeau, in your detection, done anything to mitigate the damages to our economy the way Harper did 10 years ago?
Absolutely not.
I can tell you, Stephen Harper is probably the most brilliant strategist that I know.
Prime Minister's Diplomatic Strategy00:07:44
He plays the long game and understands each and every element of it.
That's why he was successful with Obama to stand down and give a Canadian exemption on the America-only clause that he put in 10 years ago.
Barack Obama was more interested in kind of the optics of everything, whereas Harper understood the consequences.
Now we reversed it.
Now we have Trump who understands clearly it's a plan.
I have seen this from 2015.
I mean, if only somebody was paying attention.
Everything that Trump was done was signaled and easy, and he's on it.
He's like the person building a business.
And I see our prime minister like a guy filling in on the shift for one day.
And that's his commitment.
He gets the photo up, the shift.
He was at work.
Everybody's happy.
And this guy, Trump, is grinding.
And he is getting steel and manufacturing.
If you saw the State of the Union address, manufacturing jobs are back in America.
Steel jobs are back in America.
That was an impossibility.
And how did it happen?
He strategizes.
And our prime minister doesn't.
I mean, to think of it.
Canada signed a trade agreement, our biggest trade agreement, USMCA, that Mexico negotiated completely with U.S. and we signed on on the last minute.
That tells you everything.
Yeah.
Manny, I want to ask you a question, and maybe I'm asking you to be a mind reader, but I mean, you have a lot of experience in Ottawa, with the media, with politics.
So you're the best guy to read minds if anyone can.
The Canadian media really followed the NAFTA or the US-MCA negotiations closely, partly because they really like Christia Freeland.
And although she's not an experienced negotiator, she really was hands-on there.
I think she was taken for a ride.
I think Trump just really got everything he wanted and more.
So the media, I mean, I remember the CBC went down there.
They camped out outside.
They were very dramatic.
They covered every jot and tittle, as they say.
Why hasn't there been any coverage?
I haven't seen any coverage, let alone huge coverage, of what I think is a big setback for trade.
I haven't seen it in our state broadcaster.
I haven't seen it in the private sector media.
I haven't even seen it really in the business pages.
And I'm sort of thinking, Manny, am I crazy for thinking this is a matter of trouble?
I think this is a big story.
I think this is part of the bigger story.
And the bigger story is that Trump has a plan and he's going to continue it.
If he gets another four years and he continues with his plan, each one of his implementations is going to hurt Canada.
Because he is going to make America great.
And he has.
So you're not wrong.
I think the answer to your question is, and I'm telling you, it's pretty simple.
Most people don't like really hardworking guys.
And they like the peripheral of a person because most people aren't.
When I managed a big law firm, I knew who were the hardworking lawyers and who weren't.
And so it's easier to be part of that whole group that does it.
This is very difficult stuff to understand.
I read through it all and it's hard for me to understand.
How do you dissect that as a media and put it to your viewers?
It's better to talk about a T-shirt that the minister wore.
It's better to talk about how, you know, the prime minister wears a certain garb and how he's how.
And this is what we've gone to a country where the prime minister, with all the terrible things that are happening, detainees in China, trade wars with countries.
We go to town halls because everyone understands the simplicity.
I mean, what is the prime minister doing in town halls, receiving questions and not answering questions?
But everyone feels happy.
This is hard stuff, Ezra.
Very important stuff.
And it's going to cost Canadians a lot over the future.
Prime Minister Harper understood it.
He was there in the corners and nobody understood what he did.
Nobody understood the bullets that we dodged.
So it's hard.
And I think most of the media to explain this, I mean, why do that when you could take a clip and show something, somebody, you know, Chris Freeland at a grade school talking to grade school children?
That's easier.
Yeah.
I just, I mean, I don't want to be obsessed with the journalistic aspect of it.
But here, yeah, let me add another point, Ezra.
Another point is it makes Donald Trump look good.
And Trudeau and Freeland looked like they didn't really have the great success that they said.
Right now, I can prove almost without a doubt that the narrative in Canada is if you make Trump look terrible by comparison are really not so good, probably mostly inept prime minister looks good.
That's the narrative.
And when that's the narrative, you can't get off that narrative.
You can't say Trump did spectacular things.
You can't report on what he did because then we say, hey, how come we don't have somebody as good as that?
So there's two elements.
Number one, it's complicated to talk about.
It's complicated for people to understand.
And people are now, it's easier to give them what I'll call that type of media, the inquirer-type media that people are used to.
But also, it makes Trump look good.
Trump is working his butt off to get America.
I mean, the numbers coming out of America, it is amazing.
I mean, I'll just give you some quick ones.
You know, wages are up in America.
Wages are down in Canada.
Our GDP is 1.7%, and they keep changing it lower.
There's just 3.5.
I mean, America, it has, America also has, there's a stat that people don't look at, and it's called the participation rate.
How many people in your economy are working?
America's is going up.
Ours is going down.
You know, we talk about our employment rate.
It really means nothing.
Our participation rate is going down.
So on every measure, but we don't get to see this because it makes Trump look good.
And we don't want that.
Yeah.
You know, permit me a 60-second person.
Yeah, sure, sorry.
I was at a party once and I met a Coptic Christian from Egypt who served in their army.
And he was telling me what it was like in the Egyptian army.
And he said that it wasn't until he came to Canada that he learned that Egypt and the other Arab countries lost the Six-Day War in 1967.
It was one of the most lopsided military victories in history.
But he said in Egypt, they were all taught it was a great victory for Egypt and so proud.
And I just sort of laughed.
I thought, oh my God, you lived in an alternative universe.
And you just made me think that I think in Canada, our political media industrial complex wants, craves, needs the narrative that Justin Trudeau and Christy Freeland totally won the trade war with Donald Trump and totally got a great deal in the USMCA.
And I think that's why this news of this Buy American and the other things you're pointing out, they just like the Egyptian army.
No, no, no, no, it was a great victory.
It's like Baghdad Bob.
We've got them on the run now.
And I just, I think it's self-delusion, but for unemployed Canadians, it's not going to help them pay the bills.
Logistical Elections00:02:30
Last word to you, Manny.
Yeah, no, and the problem with it is everything that the media wants to look at has to be an immediate effect, therefore they can understand it.
And so this will take years.
If America does a $1 trillion, $2 trillion infrastructure over 10 years, these are jobs over 10 years that really doesn't affect this election cycle.
What affects this election cycle is how can we make, I mean, I mean, there's no question that the prime minister is failing on almost every file.
And so how do you save him?
You got to keep the Trump is terrible narrative going or he's got nothing.
That's what it is.
Well, another great conversation, Manny.
Thank you so much for doing that research.
I am going to check the text of the USMCA because I was not aware of that session.
Very interesting.
Great to have you.
Thanks for being so generous with your time.
No problem.
Take care of it.
All right, there you have it.
Manny Montenegrino.
He's the boss of Think Sharp Consultants in Ottawa, a former national partner at a national law firm, and used to be Stephen Harper's lawyer.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back.
My monologue yesterday about three news stories regarding Trudeau's immigration policy.
Reid writes, do we not have police in Canada or are they just bellhops now?
Well, you know, a bellhop, it's like a journalist.
People can say you are a journalist or aren't a journalist, but it's really the activity of journalism decides if you are right.
It's not like a doctor.
A doctor that's a professional standard.
So what is a bellhop?
What is a bellhop?
A bellhop is someone who brings luggage, carries luggage for you, usually at a hotel.
When the RCMP is specifically instructed to carry the luggage of illegal immigrants across an illegal border entry, I know they may call themselves police, and I know their badge says police, but you are what you do, and you are a bellhop.
I don't think they want to be bellhops.
I'm just saying that's what they are.
I'm not insulting them.
It's what they're doing that's insulting to them.
Bruce writes, we sure do need a Canadian leader who will put Canada first.
The trouble is that Andrew Scheer is firm as foam rubber.
Why Send Troops?00:03:06
Yeah, listen, we've said this before.
He spent a decade as the Speaker of the House of Commons, which means he was, by definition, nonpartisan.
He had to be non-partisan.
If there was a conflict, he had to smooth it over.
Now, now, they're there.
Let's compromise.
He ran something called the Board of Internal Economy, which is basically the private group of MPs from all the parties that would meet together and run the parliament itself.
So some of it was just, you know, logistical who gets what office.
But some of it was, oh, this MP from the Liberal Party was sued for sexual harassment.
We'll cover his legal expense if we cover the Conservatives legal.
So it's a lot of log rolling and deal making.
For 10 years, that's what he did, his formative years in life.
He was not a real businessman beforehand.
He wasn't in the army beforehand.
He didn't have a profession beforehand.
Andrew Scheer's profession is being a schmoozer, paperer-overer, log roller.
So are you surprised that he's not a killer instinct guy now?
I'm not.
On my interview with Dr. Daniel Pipes about Venezuela, Paul writes, China doesn't want Venezuela to change governments.
They like to lend all sorts of money to countries, and then when they default, they move in and take over their resource industry.
Russia is happy to have a major energy competitor out of the way.
Iran views them as their foothold to South America.
Turkey has become anti-West and anti-America.
I really don't see why they're still in NATO.
Yeah, it's so weird.
It's such a weird thing going on.
It's about the same size as Canada, population-wise.
What I said before, I mean, listen, we have this little compilation page.
We had a friend, an acquaintance of ours, Dan in Caracas.
She did some videos at rebelvenezuela.com.
They're just short videos, so you can see that.
I'm really interested in Venezuela.
I get the feeling that not all our viewers are.
But here's my point.
How much blood and treasure has the West spent in unredeemable places like Afghanistan?
Yeah, it is absolutely unredeemable.
Afghanistan has always been that way, and it will always be that way.
When we are living on moon colonies, when we are living in space stations, Afghanistan will still be the wretched place it is.
Why do we think we could master it when the Soviet Union couldn't?
Why do we think we could master Sudan when the British Empire couldn't?
Yeah, there's some places in the world that are absolutely wretched, and the best thing for us to do is seal them off, maybe.
Why do we think we can reform them?
Whereas Venezuela was once the fourth richest place in the world, a prosperous Western, Christian country, educated, industrialized.
Surely we should lift a finger to free those people and redeem that country.
I'm not saying send troops there.
But neither should we send troops to Mali.
What the hell are we doing there?
Oh my God.
On that despondent note, I'll end today's show.
I thank you for watching.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.