Jagmeet Singh’s push for Elections Canada to probe "fake news" ads—like the $6M+ mansion claim from Attorney Cocktail—risks misusing election watchdogs to censor criticism, despite defamation lawsuits belonging in courts. His 2015 Khalistan rally ties and Trudeau’s SNC-Lavalin meetings (50+ with lobbyists amid corruption charges) expose potential conflicts between rhetoric and reality. With Wilson-Raybould’s principled dismissal and past scandals like Huawei’s $1M+ donations to Canada 2020, these moves suggest systemic influence—yet mainstream media fails to ask hard questions. Rebel Media’s crowdfunded independence highlights the broader fight against institutionalized bias and selective scrutiny. [Automatically generated summary]
The Azure Levant Show: Internet Censorship Joke00:02:12
Hello my rebels.
Hello my rebellious ones.
You're listening to a free audio only recording of my show.
It's called The Azure Levant Show.
Today I just look at a really weird campaign really.
The Tai Yi, Jagmeet Sing, the CBC.
They're super mad that Jagmeet Singh was part of like some celebrity clickbait online and it's just such a joke but they want to use that joke as a pretext to have Elections Canada monitor the internet for defamation.
Yeah, no, you just want to censor things.
I get into that pretty deep.
I hope you enjoy this show.
If you like listening to this podcast, I hope you do, you really should watch it, you know.
I mean, I show you stuff.
To watch it, you just need to be a subscriber to our premium content.
That's our long-form TV shows.
I Got One, Sheila Gott Read, Gunread, David Menzie.
So it's not just me.
And it's pretty easy to do.
You just go to the Rebel.media slash shows.
And it's eight bucks a month.
And you get two months free if you buy the whole year in advance.
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It's so easy to win.
Just go to rebel.media slash shows.
And if you want to leave a five-star rating on this podcast, that'd be great too.
Until then, let me leave you with this garate, if I may say so.
Oh, it's just so great.
This monologue.
Take a listen.
Tonight, Jagdeep Singh sees something untrue on the internet, and he thinks the government is the way to fix it.
It's February 8th, and this is the Azure Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is government.
But why I'm publishing?
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
Take a look at this cartoon.
It's really old, but I think it actually gets funnier every year.
Are you coming to bed?
I can't.
This is important.
What?
Why We Speak Up00:04:41
Someone is wrong on the internet.
Yeah, he's going to be a while, I guess.
I mean, I don't think it's possible to know with any precision, but the best estimates I can find is there are more than 5 billion pages on the internet.
And by the way, when I say page, as you know, on the internet, you can scroll down for a while.
They're so much bigger than an 8.5 by 11 page paper.
So you're probably looking at 100 billion pages worth.
And of course, that doesn't even touch all the images, the videos, the audio.
It's changing constantly, expanding.
It's like the universe.
It's like the universe.
This is all obvious and getting more obvious every day, which is why that cartoon gets funnier every day.
If you're trying to correct people who are wrong on the internet, you will never be done.
Especially now that it's so easy for each of us to be a publisher and a commenter on our own Facebook page, our own Twitter account, our own cell phone video.
So what's my point?
Well, look at this story on the CBC State Broadcaster, of course.
NDP asks elections watchdog to investigate slanderous ads targeting Singh.
My first thought was when I saw that, I mean, as a publisher, I know a bit about slander.
It's a very technical area of the law.
I'm a former lawyer myself, as you know.
I actually used to practice a little bit of defamation law.
There are a lot of defenses in defamation law, you know.
Truth, obviously.
But also fair comment.
And if the slanderer was malicious or not matters.
And of course, it matters if there were any actual damages.
Were you actually hurt by this?
There's a lot of detailed questions.
It's technical.
And defamation lawsuits, and I've been through a few, they can take years to proceed through the courts.
Both sides get to review the other side's records, for example.
You can even have a jury trial.
Did you know that?
So my first thought when I saw that headline was, how on earth could an elections watchdog handle a technical specialist legal matter like a defamation lawsuit that is really only handled in the proper courts?
And what does any of that have to do with running an election?
An election watchdog, that's sort of a funny phrase.
I mean, in Canada, you don't even need to show ID to vote anymore.
Don't tell me.
Some watchdog.
Their job is to make sure the ballots are counted on time and accurately.
Their job is to make sure only citizens can vote.
They're failing on that job.
There could be some finance-related matters, too.
That's all fair game for a government regulator, I suppose.
But whether or not an ad lowered someone's reputation unfairly, that's the definition of defamation.
How on earth is that election Canada's business?
They don't have the tools to answer that.
And really, isn't that the business of every individual voter?
I mean, technically, defamation means something that would lower your reputation in the eyes of the public, which is about 85% of all political messaging.
I mean, sure, candidates sometimes talk about how great they are, and they release a policy platform, but mainly they talk about how their opponent is not great.
By definition, political candidates try to lower their opponent's reputation, and we generally don't sue each other for that.
And the law, like I say, it allows you to defame someone.
It allows you to lower their reputation if you're telling the truth.
If you're making a fair comment, an honestly held opinion about someone based on true facts, for example.
You could say that an election campaign is a massive 35-day defamation trial where every single voter is on the jury and all the politicians defame each other and we get to judge.
At the end of the trial, at the end of the campaign, we get to decide who we think is telling the truth.
We get to decide if someone was too rough and too defamatory, if we didn't like how they campaigned, if it was too mean.
Frankly, I think citizens sometimes don't mind rough and tumble campaigning because people generally dislike politicians and it's sort of nice to see them bashed around a bit.
And if you can't take the heat, we'll stay out of the kitchen.
And if you can't handle a mean brochure from your opponent or a mean TV ad, even if it's not completely true, well, you're probably not up for the job of, say, negotiating a trade deal with Donald Trump or getting our hostages back from communist China.
I mean, don't enter the arena if you don't want to take a punch.
If you can't handle a bit of defamation in a campaign, then you're not ready to handle Vladimir Putin.
So I thought it was weird right from the first headline, this story, don't you think?
But it gets weirder, what exactly was the defamation that they were talking about here?
Sikh Accusations and Million-Dollar Houses00:09:57
Why was Jagmeet Singh running to some government bureaucrat here?
Well, I'll read you some more.
Ads claim NDP leader owns a multi-million dollar mansion.
Do you see that sub-headline there?
Is that really defamation?
That he lives in a multi-million dollar mansion?
Well, first of all, how is that even defamatory?
He's so rich.
Oh, you've ruined my reputation, mate, by saying I'm a success in life.
Jagmeet Singh is running in a by-election right now in Burnaby, British Columbia.
It's a suburb of Vancouver.
It's part of the greater Vancouver area.
You know what the average price for detached houses in the Greater Vancouver area is?
Now, it's plunging.
Here's a headline a couple months ago, Vancouver housing sales fall to six-year low.
So it's actually a little bit better now than before.
Let me quote.
The market for detached houses declined to an average price last month of $1,630,323.
And that's down 9.6% from a year earlier.
The average house in-vec, average!
I said average!
For every house cheaper, there's one more expensive $1.6 million.
How do they live?
That's the average price.
that's down 10%.
So I'm sorry, how's it defamatory to say that Jagmeet Singh, he's running in the greater, or he lives in a million dollar house.
Yes, so does the paper boy, I guess.
Now, I should tell you, and you probably know this already, it's probably the only thing you know about Jagmeet Singh, that he cultivates an image of wealth and luxury.
He does glamour-style photo shoots featuring his handsome self around Canada and around the world, wearing bespoke luxury suits, traveling like a jet-setter.
He's a hell of a socialist, this guy, isn't he?
That's probably a $20,000 outfit.
Hey guys, someone on the internet says I live in a million-dollar house.
I totally need the internet police to police the internet.
Oh, hey, by the way, did I show you this picture of me shopping at Hawke Cajour's stores in Italy, and I'm so just showing off my purchases.
Yeah, this whole thing is weird before we even get into it.
But let's get into it.
Let me read some.
The NDP is asking Canada's election watchdog to immediately launch an investigation after a series of ads claiming leader Jagmeet Singh lives in a multi-million dollar mansion popped up online in the lead-up to Burnaby South by-election later this month.
Okay, that seems like a bit of a weird attack ad.
I mean, I can understand why a socialist candidate doesn't want to look like a millionaire, I guess.
But that ship has sailed a long time ago, especially in Vancouver.
Everyone's a millionaire on paper, I guess, if they just own a home out there.
But more to the point, the NDP has not been the party of the working class in at least a generation.
Now it's the party of professors, academia.
I mean, Jack Layton was a PhD, grievance activists, identity groups.
It's the party of David Suzuki, who has five homes.
It's the party of Bernie Sanders in America, the socialist in America, who challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in the U.S.
He famously has three homes.
All your big anti-oil sands, anti-pipeline activists are millionaires, or billionaires even, like Tom Steyer out of San Francisco, or Al Gore is almost a billionaire.
It's a bad look in my mind, but it's being normalized.
The left doesn't seem to have a problem reconciling the contradiction of being millionaire socialists.
But let me keep reading more from this fake story.
As the Taiyee first reported, an ad claiming Singh owns a $5.5 million mansion ran below a story in the Vancouver Courier, a community paper.
That link took readers to an article titled, 13 Super Luxurious Celebrity Houses, They Surely Know How to Spend Their Fortune on the website Attorney Cocktail.
Okay, now we're getting somewhere.
This wasn't a political ad.
This wasn't an ad by the liberals or the Tories.
This isn't a political ad at all.
It's just some clickbait.
It's some celebrity ad that was probably made by a machine.
They probably saw that Jagmeet Singh's name is maybe ticking up in internet searches and that he is an interesting and photogenic face.
So they probably just put his name and face on a sexy mansion so people could look at a pretty house.
It's what people do online.
It wasn't a political ad, wasn't political at all.
It wasn't an attack ad.
In fact, it was a flattering ad.
He was listed amongst other celebrities.
I mean, it's probably all fake, but it's not meant for deep research.
The website, attorney cocktail, that's not a real thing.
It's got those words, there's lawyer-y words up there, but it's just a clickbait.
It pretends to be, I don't know, just really a bunch of clickable, goofy photo montages with stock imagery there.
It couldn't be less political.
It's just there to make ads at a tenth of a cent a click.
This is not a real story.
The Taiye that was just quoted by the CBC, it's a left-wing website in Vancouver, funded by the Tides Foundation, if you can believe it.
They went into a full panic about this.
But I don't think they actually succeeded in making it look like political interference.
They sort of debunk it.
You see this picture at the bottom here, Blake Shelton?
They're showing that the same house that was allegedly Jagmeet Singh's house has also been matched up with other Hollywood celebrities for similar clickbait stories.
It's not political at all.
They're just trying to get people to look at cool people next to cool houses.
I'm not saying it's true.
I'm not saying it's ethical.
I'm just saying it's the internet.
It's not political at all.
And by the way, I don't think it damages Jagmeet Singh.
I think what damages him is he really is a jet-setter multi-millionaire, but more than that, he's a know-nothing.
He's a millionaire socialist know-nothing.
And yeah, you're arguing with someone who's wrong on the internet.
Hey, I found this obscure website called Attorney Cocktail, and it's got this photo.
Okay, dude, you're totally right.
You're right, and that one in a billion websites, you found a website that was totally wrong.
Yeah, you nailed it.
And you want the government to put aside everything less important and have an immediate investigation into this.
Grow up.
Grow up.
Okay, back to this ridiculous CBC story.
It's not the first recent attempt at spreading false claims about Singh.
Late last year, another story, which has been shared more than 5,700 times on Facebook, accused Singh of having links to Sikh militants.
Yeah, that's not actually fake news, though.
He does have links to Singh militants.
Here is a Globe and Mail article from last year saying just that.
NDP leader Jagmeet Singh took part in a separatist Sikh homeland rally in San Francisco in June of 2015 that venerated a violent Sikh religious leader who was killed in the Indian Army assault on the Golden Temple in 1984.
Mr. Singh, then an NDP member of the Ontario Legislature, was invited to speak at a sovereignty rally where speakers denounced India and called for an independent Sikh state known as Khalistan.
Yeah, that ain't fake news.
Here, this is the CBC.
Maybe they might remember this interview.
Take a look at this.
Do you think that some Canadian Sikhs go too far when they honor Talvinda Singh Parma as a martyr of the Sikh nation when they put up posters of him as a Shaheed, a martyr, when he was the architect of the Air India bombing?
Do you think that's appropriate?
Well, I think it's so important that we really clarify a misconception that exists.
There has been a lot of work and seems to be creating a conflict that's between Hindus and Sikhs.
And for me, that's something that really offended me.
I grew up with a lot of close friends and dear family friends that were from the Hindu faith that told me stories of how they actually put themselves at risk to save their Sikh neighbors.
And so for me, one of my goals was to erase this false narrative of a Hindu-Sikh conflict.
And what I really believe in...
Forgive me, but you could do that right now by saying no, it isn't appropriate to put up posters of Canada's worst ever mass murderer as a mother.
Let me make sure you think that's appropriate.
Well, let me just clarify a point here.
It's so important that we get rid this notion that there's ever been a conflict between Hindus and Sikhs.
It's never been the case.
We've been living existence as neighbors.
It's a third time of asking.
It's not a hypothesis.
I'm just finished.
I'm just asking, is it appropriate to put up a story?
So I'm just going to finish my sentence.
So the community has lived together, coexisted in peace and harmony, and we need to celebrate that.
I'm not going to inflict any more of that on you.
It went on for quite some time.
But like I say, I'm not sure if it's fake news that Jagmeet Singh is chummy with Sikh extremists.
I think he himself might even be a Sikh extremist.
And by the way, so is Trudeau.
Justin Trudeau literally brought that man on the right there.
He's a convicted Sikh terrorist named Jazz Paul Outwall.
Trudeau invited him on his scandal-ridden trip to India last year.
So I'm not picking on Jagmeet Singh because he's Sikh.
Trudeau is just as bad on that issue.
But why on earth should a bureaucrat at Elections Canada be the judge of whether or not that's defamatory or fake or whatever?
How about let the voters be the judge of that?
And if Jagmeet Singh really thinks he's being defamed legally, let him sue in court.
I'll just read a little bit more from the CBC story.
The NDP sent CBC News screen capture images that show the ad that appeared in the Courier also appeared on the History Channel website and the UK-based site for the Independent newspaper.
Trudeau's Bluffing Game00:15:02
Clicking on the link brings the reader to a photo gallery of more than 145 celebrities with mansions, including Alex Rodriguez, the Obamas, and Rihanna.
Yeah, it's like you're complaining, you know, about the National Enquirer saying that Bill Clinton lives on Mars or Hillary Clinton is really Elvis Presley.
Those are entertainments.
We had them before the era of the internet at the grocery store, alien stories, quadruplet stories.
You don't sue the tabs unless you have more money than brains.
You don't get the government to censor them.
Grow up.
This wasn't a campaign ad.
It wasn't defamatory to begin with.
And, okay, it's false.
So the picture of the mansion wasn't his mansion.
So what?
You want the government to get involved?
Now, this is obviously a really dumb story.
That's the point.
They're using a really dumb complaint to ask for a really powerful remedy.
Government regulation of the internet in the name of election fairness.
It's not just Jack Meet Singh.
Obviously, it's the TIE, that's the TIDE's-backed propaganda website, and the CBC, the Trudeau-backed propaganda website.
In fact, Trudeau's candidate in Burnaby at a candidate's debate for the by-election, that's where Jackmeet Singh is running to.
Trudeau's candidate, just this week, called for the United Nations?
Not even Elections Canada.
He wants the United Nations to regulate the Internet.
Seriously, listen for yourself.
But right now, Internet is into everybody's home.
And with something like this, it's a power of a computer.
In the 70s, it's a whole university.
I mean, memories is like this.
You get one in your hand right now.
So I think the power of internet and storage, we are into a new era.
And I think the United Nations should have a body to regulate those activities.
Yeah.
I think, I think… That's why you like China Daily.
I thought the idea is that we're all… It's regulation.
Yeah.
It's regulation.
I think my time is up.
He actually got booed.
It was a left-wing event sponsored by a left-wing lobby group in a left-wing city.
But even there, people were grossed up by his idea to have the UN censor the internet.
The fancy people want to regulate the internet.
And they will, and they are.
Soon those booze you heard, they'll be eliminated by the algorithm, however.
Now, everyone knows this is stupid, but it's all a pretext, an excuse, like the Reichstag fire.
A false alarm, but an alarm nonetheless, that will be used by the CBC, by the Tides Foundation's TAIE, by the Liberals, to regulate what you and I can say and can hear in the upcoming election.
Over the past month, I've told you about how the government of Alberta under Rachel Notley is trying to regulate what we can and can't say in Alberta during the upcoming election.
They try to claim that we're not journalists.
Rather, we have to be like a political party and register and be regulated.
Obviously, that's not true.
That's unconstitutional.
That's not going to happen.
That's going to fail.
But that's the provincial government of Alberta, which does not have the same power to regulate the internet as does the federal government.
Justin Trudeau does have the constitutional authority over telecommunications.
Trudeau's CRTC has already said it wants the authority to review online news videos in Canada.
That means us.
And the other day, Arjit Sajan, the defense minister, was part of an announcement of $7 million worth of media monitors in the election.
The defense minister himself was part of this announcement, monitoring Canadian media and the defense ministers there.
They actually said they're going to have national awareness session.
Hey, I'll see you at the awareness session.
Okay, comrade.
To teach Canadians what we should or shouldn't believe.
So I guess we were smart enough as citizens to be able to vote in the last election when Trudeau won with 39% of the vote.
So that counted, that was fair.
We were smart enough to separate the defamation from the truth then when we voted for Trudeau.
But we can't be trusted to think for ourselves this year when we might throw the bum out.
And it's pretty much unanimous that we need to be censored and regulated.
The political establishment agrees.
The bailout media agrees.
We have to stop people from saying mean things on the internet or even not even mean things, but weird things like Jack Meet Singh lives in a mansion in LA or whatever.
The only thing they haven't decided on is whether it'll be run this censorship out of Ottawa or as Trudeau's candidate suggested, run out of the United Nations.
Stay with us for more.
The allegations in the Globe story this morning are false.
Neither the current nor the previous Attorney General was ever directed by me or by anyone in my office to take a decision in this matter.
The allegations reported in the story are false.
At no time did I or my office direct the current or previous Attorney General to make any particular decision in this matter.
But not necessarily direct, Prime Minister.
Was there any sort of influence whatsoever?
As I've said, at no time did we direct the Attorney General, current or previous, to take any decision whatsoever in this matter.
Yeah, you don't need to be a trial lawyer to know he's lying.
And by lying, I mean he's speaking the technical truth by saying no one, quote, directed Jody Wilson-Raybold, the former justice minister, to take a particular decision.
But as we discussed at some length yesterday, saying, oh, make this go away, Jody, or you know what to do, or I know you'll do the right thing.
You don't have to actually direct someone to take a particular decision to put pressure on them.
And as you know, more than 50 meetings that were declared to the lobbyist commissioner, that's a lot of pressure.
I can't imagine any cabinet minister being able to resist 50 lobbyist meetings.
Well, is this going to have any legs?
This would be the end of anyone else, Stephen Harper.
They almost did Stephen Harper in for, I don't know, Bev Ota's $16 orange juice or for having his chief of staff pay back money to the government under Mike Duffy.
But this, joining us now via Skype from London, Ontario, is our friend Andrew Lawton, who's a fellow with TrueNorth and the boss of AndrewLawton.ca.
Andrew, great to see you again.
Likewise.
I think this would doom any conservative, obviously.
There's a lot of journalists, including traditional liberals, who are being good journalists here, who are asking real questions.
We just saw one such real question.
But I'm pretty sure, and I'd like your thoughts on this, I'm pretty sure Trudeau's just going to bluff his way through, brazen his way through, and the media will get sick of this in about a week.
I remember at the height of the Rob Ford scandal, where we saw probably the most overzealous media we've ever seen in Canada.
They had a helicopter following him on his drive home.
I mean, this is the extent to which the media will go when a conservative is involved in something.
And we're talking about something monumentally worse than anything Stephen Harper did, Rob Ford did, any provincial premier.
We're talking about something that at the very least is political corruption, at the very worst is criminal corruption.
And I'm glad you pointed out that use of the word directed, Ezra, because this is a very specific and narrow term.
And when he repeats or any politician repeats the same thing over and over, you have to wonder what it is that they're avoiding saying.
And the thing that I find interesting here is that such clarity or lack thereof may impact how things are viewed in a technical sense in a court of law.
But to Canadians, the nuance is irrelevant.
When Trudeau says, no, my office didn't direct this, Canadians here know nothing happened.
And if anything comes out that proves opposite, Trudeau is done.
But in order for that to happen, we need people that are going to be on this, and we need people that are going to blow the whistle.
Whether that's Jodi Wilson-Raybold, whether it's someone in her office, someone in the PMO, we need someone to ultimately reveal specifically what was said.
Yeah.
Let me give you an example in how journalists cover things on the left versus things on the right.
If there is a conservative politician in any jurisdiction, the United States or Canada, if there's a conservative who does something embarrassing, the media immediately shops it around to every other conservative and say, do you reject him?
Will you renounce him and disavow him?
For example, like they just immediately flood the zone on the story.
Let me give you an example of how that is not happening here.
And I'd like your thoughts on this.
Let me just throw this at you.
As you know, SNC Lavalan had dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of high-level lobbying meetings in Ottawa specifically to get dropped from this criminal prosecution.
In fact, we have, we've shown some of those meetings.
They were happening several times a week.
And some of them were, as you can see here, senior advisor to the PM, chief of staff to Bill Mourneau, director of policy, and so much, even the ambassador McNaughton, weirdly was lobbied again and again.
So if this shoe were on the other foot, Andrew, and I'm almost done my preamble, thank you for your patience.
The media would be calling each and every one of these people who were lobbied and would say, what did they say?
And what did you do?
And did you just ignore him?
Or did you press Jody Wilson-Raybold?
Like, for example, Bill Mourneau, they met with his chief of staff.
They met with Mourneau himself.
The ambassador met with him several times.
Well, that's obviously suggesting a follow-up, right?
If you meet with someone and then you meet with them again, you're checking on their progress.
I have not seen any journalists follow up with these 50 states.
Now, maybe the staff won't return calls, but don't tell me that a cabinet minister, Bill Mourneau, or Christia Freeland, whose office was called here, did Christia Freeland twist the arm of Jodi Wilson-Raybold?
Otherwise, why would they have bothered lobbying her office?
Did Bill Mourneau twist the arm of Jodi Wilson-Raybold?
Otherwise, why would they bother meeting Bill Mourneau so many times?
So what do you take of that angle and the fact that it's not being covered by our mainstream media?
Well, frankly, as far as definitive proof goes that something's happened, the lobbying registry is really the smoking gun here.
And there are a couple of reasons for this.
If this company, which does massive construction contracts in Canada and abroad, were lobbying the public works minister, the environment minister, the minister of infrastructure, I'd say these are fairly standard things for a company of this business to be doing.
For this organization to be lobbying on justice and law enforcement, when I've looked through the SNC Lavali website, there is no justice or law enforcement mandate.
This can only be one thing, and that is due to the company's legal trials.
And what I find fascinating here, Ezra, this is not one of these conjectured examples of a company that might have some murky ties if you really dig deep.
We're talking about a company that has been demonstrably proven to be corrupt and to be complicit and directly active in bribing.
We know they've bribed Libyan officials, including $160 million to Muammar Gaddafi's son, Saadi Gaddafi.
We know that a former vice president was convicted.
He pleaded guilty to illegally funneling $110,000 of donations to the Liberals over a period of several years.
We know that the former CEO was just convicted for the super hospital scam in Montreal, where again, bribing public officials.
It was about five and a half years ago that the World Bank, a nonpartisan group, found that Canada led the world when it came to corporate corruption because we had 117 companies on the list of 250 that were supposed to be corrupt.
But of those 117, 115 of them, so almost all, were affiliates of SNC Lavalin or SNC Lavalin Corporate itself.
So the reason I say that, Ezra, is because this company should not have had an audience with anyone in the government for optics reasons alone.
You had NDP member of parliament Charlie Angus before the story of the PMO broke saying that this company should be barred from having any federal government contracts because of its track record.
And Charlie Angus and I disagree with each other on a lot of things, but I happen to agree.
A company that is demonstrably corrupt should not be allowed to bid on federal government contracts.
And by extension, the prime minister should not be giving these organizations an audience in general when you add into it the fact that there is an ongoing prosecution that involves The government, if for optics reasons alone, this should not have happened, let alone the potential for what we're hearing about in the globe this week happening.
Yeah.
You know, the excuses this company's offering up, well, it would hurt our reputation.
Some people might lose their work.
Yeah, I guess Enron could have said that.
I guess Brix could have said that.
Don't prosecute us.
Yeah, Bernie Madoff.
I think he lost it.
Yeah, Bernie Madoff.
I mean, yeah, that's what happens to you when you break the law.
And it's incredible.
I mean, the World Bank, they do some business in the nastiest places of the world.
I mean, theoretically, the World Bank is the kind of place that will help finance a project in the third world, like build a power plant in the Congo or something.
So they are dealing in some of the most corrupt places in the world.
If SNC Lavalan is too corrupt for the World Bank, Andrew, and yet the government of Canada still refuses to write them off, that's super gross.
I mean, the World Bank is in the nastiest reaches.
And if they say, oh, ooh, we're not going to deal with SNC Lavalon.
We'll work in the Congo.
We'll work in the worst places, but not with SNC Lavaland.
SNC Lavalin Controversy00:08:18
That's embarrassing for Canada.
But that is all Justin Trudeau.
Yeah, you know, he prides himself that Canada's back.
I mean, this isn't the ranking we want to be on the top of here, but you are very much correct.
And when you look at the number of executives, and I'm not talking about some low-level janitor at SNC's offshoot company, but CEOs, vice presidents, former CEOs, and former vice presidents that have been convicted of corruption, there is a huge question mark as to why there was any lobbying on justice.
And this is something that when we go back to Trudeau's use of the word directed, whether it was directed, implied, requested, doesn't matter.
If we're talking about interference and we are seeing a proven track record of private meetings, look, I've been trying to get an interview with Justin Trudeau since he became prime minister, and I haven't been able to get anywhere on it.
Yet somehow this company that has a great many convicts among its former ranks is able to get there every month.
Well, yeah, I mean, Trudeau seems to meet with the strangest people.
He gave $10.5 million to Omar Cotter.
He's had at least two meetings with Joshua Boyle, Cotter's former brother-in-law, who went to join the Taliban.
So I guess you just have the wrong ideology, Andrew.
Here's a question that hit me immediately when I saw this headline yesterday.
It was the first thing I thought.
Jodi Wilson-Raybould, who I didn't really have much time for, I'll be honest, I have a new respect for her because to stand up to the man who appointed you and to lose your high position as justice minister over a point of principal and to bear that quietly, that's quite a sign of character.
I didn't see it coming.
And I salute her now and I have a respect for her I did not have before.
By the way, her dad, I mean, she's not saying anything.
She says he's bound by solicitor client privilege.
Her father made a Facebook post yesterday, which basically said, now we know why my daughter was fired.
And I think it's a good proxy for what she herself would say.
But my first thought, Andrew, was if Gerald Butts and Katie Telford and Justin Trudeau and half the cabinet and all their advisors were part of this big swarm, like 50 people were swarming Jodi Wilson-Raybold here, and she resisted them.
Was this really the first time they went to bat for a corporate friend of Trudeau?
I mean, do they do the same thing with Bombardier, another company that has criminal prosecutions around the world for corruption?
Do they do the thing for Huawei, which as we know, was a huge donor to the Trudeau think tank called Canada 2020.
So it immediately got me thinking, Andrew, we found out about this because of some luck and some good reporting by the Globe and Mail, given credit.
What else is there six-sevenths of the iceberg that remains underwater and unseen?
Well, that's a big question.
And as is true of this case, we don't know until we know.
But I do think that it's relevant to look at what happened with John McCallum in China and Huawei just a few short weeks ago as an illustration that a lot of the times these things are hidden in plain sight.
And we know that John McCallum was ultimately fired.
The big question mark still is whether he was fired for what he said or because there needed to be a scapegoat once he got caught.
And I know that case has been covered in a fair bit of detail now, but it stands to reason that you don't expect a senior cabinet minister or a senior ambassador who's been in cabinet to go rogue and to speak in such specifics without having direction.
And again, I don't want to implicate someone in a conspiracy that might not exist because I am not the conspiratorial type, contrary to popular belief.
But you have to look at the evidence.
And in the last month, we have now two big examples of a high-ranking figure being linked to a company that has a lot questionable going on in it.
Yeah, I tell you, it's the Libranos, as we used to call them during the ad scam days.
Well, it's great to see you again, Andrew.
Thanks very much for your point of view.
I look forward to watching this in the days ahead.
I hope it doesn't peter out.
But the fact that some of the follow-up journalism I just talked about 10 minutes ago, about asking those other ministers, asking those other people, well, what was your role?
What did you do?
What did you talk about?
The fact that that journalism, from what I can tell, hasn't happened yet, tells me the mainstream media is just about done here.
And they did their annual prove we're independent business and that tomorrow they're going to get right back to applying for their $595 million bailout fund.
That's my fear.
Last word to you, Andrew.
Look, I think that we are right to be skeptical of the mainstream media, but ultimately there are a lot of journalists that I know would absolutely love to have a piece of this story.
So I want to hope that if it's there, they'll follow it.
And we have to hope that there is someone that has, either within the government or within SNC Lavalam, a willingness to play ball and bring some transparency here because certainly sunlight is needed.
And I think Justin Trudeau's absence from question period yesterday, where he would have been caught very handily just giving that same scripted answer over again, speaks volumes.
Yeah, he's probably off to that billionaire's island in the Bahamas right now.
Great to see you again, Andrew.
Thanks for your time.
Thank you.
All right, there you have it.
Andrew Lawton, a fellow with True North.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about Trudeau pressuring the Justice Minister to stop prosecuting SNC-Lavalin.
Peter writes, I am not surprised that Justin Trudeau and his liberals are more corrupt than Cretchin's liberals or his father's liberals.
I won't be surprised when liberals vote for him in Quebec, regardless or because of the corruption.
Well, look, obviously there are great people in Quebec and we want to treat each other as individuals and judge us based on our own character and merits.
But I think it is safe to say the political culture in Quebec is more in tune with the continental European culture as opposed to the Anglo-American culture.
You know, the Squaresville accountants, the Scots, that's the Scots-Irish, that's the Anglo-American way of thinking.
It's not the kickback bribery, corruption.
Of course, that's how we work, way of operating as they do in, I'm sorry to say, in Latin America and Europe and Quebec.
When you vote for a political mafia, not a mafia mafia, when you vote for a political mafia from Montreal, don't be surprised that's what you get.
Ron writes, didn't Pierre Trudeau have one of his son's criminal records for drug possession removed?
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
You know, it does ring a bell.
I'll have to do a little bit more research on that.
I know that I think he intervened to even stop a charge.
Let me look into that because I don't want to go from memory.
Stephen Wrights, eight more months to go, and Trudeau is hammering a nail in his own coffin every month.
Looks like he is a four-year prime minister.
Well, I'll believe it when I see it.
I'll believe it when I see it, because not only do you have the Liberal Party campaigning, you're going to have 100 of these so-called third-party campaign groups.
You're going to have the entire media, both the state broadcaster and the $595 million bailout media, and all the institutional power of the Liberals.
And up against that is Andrew Scheer, who looks always to me like a little lamb in the headlights.
Who knows?
Could happen.
On my interview with Joe Pollock, Liza writes, I wish Americans would get updated on Canada's immigration policies.
We do not have an orderly or skills-based immigration system anymore.
It is a shambles here.
Yeah, and I didn't want to spend too much time on the show sort of correcting Joel on that, because there are some things about Canada's immigration policy on paper that aren't bad.
And that's probably the result of almost 10 years of Stephen Harper in government.
Four Years Strong00:01:05
But that's being undone.
And I should probably send Joel a private note just for his own info, just for his own work at breitbart.com so he doesn't praise Canada as a great system to be emulated.
Well, that is our show for the week.
And I hope you enjoyed watching it.
We've got so much going on here at the Rebel all the time.
And we've got new talents coming aboard.
I think I've mentioned some of those new people to you.
Make sure you check the rest of our website.
I'm sort of excited.
I feel like we've got a, oh, you know what?
I didn't mention this.
You know, in seven days, did you know it's our fourth anniversary?
If memory serves, we were born on February 15th, 2015.
I think, I think I have the date right on that.
I can't believe it.
Four years, and we're still alive.
I don't even think you'd call a four-year-old a toddler anymore.
A toddler is like two or three.
Four years old is a young person almost in kindergarten.
We are kindergartners, and it shows.
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Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.