Karina Gould’s push to censor Facebook and Twitter before Canada’s 2019 election—backed by Justin Trudeau’s cabinet—sparked debate over dissent suppression, with Ezra Levant citing $48M SNC Lavalin bribes and Jody Wilson-Raybould’s delayed resignation amid pressure claims. Critics dismiss Wilson-Raybould’s allegations as power-grabbing, noting her strategic appeal to Liberals, while lawyer Solomon Friedman argues SNC Lavalin’s deferred prosecution was legally dubious. Despite scandals, Trudeau’s re-election odds rise due to conservative backlash fears, with Gerald Butts’ lingering influence and attacks on journalists like Keenan further exposing partisan tensions. [Automatically generated summary]
You're listening to a free audio-only recording of my show.
It's called the Ezra Levant Show because I am Ezra Levant and it is a show.
And today I talked to you about a bizarre proposal by Karina Gould, one of Justin Trudeau's cabinet ministers, to have the government hold the media to account.
Funny, I thought it used to be the other way around.
The media would hold the government to account.
This was said in parliamentary committee, and the conservative opposition said, oh, you're not going hard enough, fast enough.
They didn't say this is a bad idea.
And I should tell you, I checked the Twitter and news feeds of every civil liberties group in the country.
Not one of them had a peep about it.
It's an outrage.
Here, listen to the show.
You'll hear my case.
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Come on, you've got to watch these things.
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All right, without further to-do, here's the show.
Tonight, Trudeau proposes emergency censorship of social media before his re-election campaign this fall.
And Andrew Scheer's response is, Trudeau doesn't go far enough.
It's February 20th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is government.
But why publish them?
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
Look at this CBC story.
I hardly need to point out that this is Trudeau's state broadcaster, but that's pretty relevant.
Minister tasked with safeguarding election calls on committee to look at regulating Facebook and Twitter.
Isn't that the opposite of safeguarding an election?
Isn't meddling in free speech, isn't censorship, isn't that actually interfering in an election?
I'll read some more.
Gould invites committee to study regulation or legislation in lead up to federal election.
Oh, so we've had free elections in this country for centuries.
I mean, obviously, Canada as an independent country is only 152 years old.
But we were British North America.
Before that, we had all sorts of elections, the local and the provincial level.
We did so with freedom back, way back in the day.
It was newspapers and leaflets and pamphlets.
And then the days of radio and TV and now the internet.
I think the internet really came into its own in the early 1990s.
So we've really had almost 30 years experience with it.
Eight federal elections, I'd say, in the age of the internet.
We've had three federal elections since Twitter was invented, since the iPhone was invented.
We've had four federal elections where YouTube was around.
We've had five federal elections with Facebook around.
I think we can handle it.
I think we can trust ourselves.
Trudeau certainly used all those technologies and more to spread his message, but that's the thing.
Now that he's in, he wants to pull up the drawbridge.
He doesn't want anyone else with other points of view to have access to the newspapers and TV stations of the 21st century.
I mean, he'll grudgingly allow the Conservative Party and the NDP in on the action.
But that's a pretty narrow bandwidth of ideas, isn't it?
All the major parties in this country are afraid to talk about, I don't know, just for an example, open-border immigration or about the Islamification of society, anything that actually challenges mainstream opinion, establishment opinion.
That's what Trudeau is afraid of.
And you know what?
So are the other parties.
Which explains their willingness to go along with this.
They want a monopoly on what you can even talk about.
Let me show you some more from the story.
Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould today called on a Commons committee to look at the possibility of the Canadian government imposing new rules on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter in the lead up to the next federal election.
Now, as you know, Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Google and the rest of them, they hardy tilt to the left.
They already censor sites based on ideology.
In the weeks before the French elections, just for an example, Facebook shut down 30,000 pages, all of which supported one of the candidates, Maureen Le Pen.
Facebook claims they're fake, but what does that mean?
Who made the decision?
Who got to verify it?
Who got to check?
Do you trust Mark Zuckerberg?
I mean, do you trust any corporation to tell you the truth, but especially a corporation run by this guy?
Do you feel like it's a backlash, or do you feel like you're violating people's privacy?
Do you feel like you're adequately portrayed as a.
Because I want to wonder about the person who actually created this thing.
Yeah, I mean, you know, a lot of stuff happened along the way.
I think, you know, there were real learning points and turning points along the way in terms of building things.
If I knew what I knew now then, then I hope I wouldn't have made those mistakes.
But I can't go back and change the past.
I can only do what we think is the right thing going forward.
So, before we move off this privacy thing, and I thought that was fascinating.
Okay, you want to take off the hoodie?
You know, I never take off the hoodie.
I know you don't.
There's a group of women in the audience that wish you would.
No, no.
Girls?
Whoa.
All right.
Sorry.
That's okay.
What a sweaty little liar, eh?
Boy, that was a great video.
He's lied and lied and lied since then.
Do you trust him?
We know that Twitter also deletes accounts of anyone they don't like politically, including some of our former staff here, from Tommy Robinson to Laura Loomer.
Now, you can disagree with those people.
Sometimes I do.
But Twitter doesn't allow disagreement.
They believe in censorship, not disagreeing.
Our YouTube page here at The Rebel is being demonetized along with many other conservative YouTube sites.
In December of 2016, we were on track to make a million dollars a year from our YouTube videos.
It would be enough to build our whole company.
But the next month, January 2017, YouTube just removed conservative sites from any ad buys.
They just wouldn't allow mainstream ads to be put on our sites unless we were specifically requested.
We weren't in the general ad pool.
And even then, if a company requests to have an ad on our site, they put in their own machine censorship for any words like feminist or Trudeau.
But you know this already.
Google, YouTube, they're censors.
So yeah, social media is already hard left wing.
Watch this video from Google's headquarters.
They also own YouTube, by the way.
They had a staff meeting a few days after Trump won.
I think it was on the Friday after Trump won.
Listen to these senior Google executives, especially the one saying that she was crying that they lost.
There was no divider between her, Google, and Hillary Clinton.
Remember this?
As we started to see the direction of the voting, I reached out to someone close to me who was at the Javits Center where the big celebration was supposed to occur in New York City.
Someone who'd been working on the campaign.
And I just sent them a note and said, you know, are you okay?
It looks like it's going the wrong way.
And I got back a very sad, short text that read, people are leaving, staff is crying, we're going to lose.
That was the first moment I really felt like we were going to lose.
And it was a massive kick in the gut that we were going to lose.
And it was really painful.
She was crying.
And by the way, her friend in the Hillary Clinton campaign was her boss, Executive Vice President, Eric Schmidt.
Yeah, it's so left-wing, social media already.
Imagine If00:12:04
It's no surprise.
Coming from Silicon Valley, that's a suburb of San Francisco.
It's the most left-wing city in North America.
So back to the story today.
Testifying before the Procedure and House Affairs Committee Tuesday, Gould suggested the committee take a closer look at the role of social media in elections.
I would encourage this committee to do a study of the role of social media in democracy.
If that's something you think is interesting, she said.
To hold the social media companies to account.
Whoa, okay, stop right there.
You know, one of the things we always say about the media, about journalism, about the free press, vote, freedom of speech, we say that holds government to account.
Reporters hold governments to account.
Free press, free media holds governments to account, holds all power to account.
And I think it's largely true.
I mean, sure, the official opposition in government holds the government to account.
But official opposition doesn't talk about everything.
They only talk about the things that suit them and their own agenda.
They don't have all the resources.
They don't have all the knowledge.
They don't have all the news tips.
There are journalists everywhere on the whole spectrum from left to right with different points of view.
We all have the right, as citizen journalists, really, to question our government for ourselves.
I love it.
But look how she inverted it.
The government now proposes to hold media companies to account.
It's not media holding Trudeau to account.
Trudeau will hold the media to account.
The government would hold the media to account.
That's not how it works in a free country.
Imagine if Stephen Harper had said that.
Imagine if Donald Trump had said that.
But that is precisely what Trudeau's cabinet minister just said about the media and elections.
And we could hear a pin drop.
No protests, no front-page stories, no national news, especially not from the CBC.
They sort of like this story because they're positively owned by Justin Trudeau and the federal government.
They're run.
It's a Trudeau message repeater right now.
They're already fully tamed.
Why would they object to their private sector competitors just being regulated just like they are?
I'll read some more.
I would welcome suggestions and feedback in terms of how to appropriately regulate or legislate that behavior, because I think one of the biggest challenges, and you can see this around the world, is the path forward is not as clear.
What?
What does she mean by regulate behavior?
What behavior?
Why does a Trudeau liberal think she can regulate someone's behavior in a campaign?
Especially political behavior, media behavior, the right to ask questions, the right to challenge and criticize and doubt, the right to say things, whatever.
I mean, if things go too far, if there's a threat or a crime, well, we have a law that can handle that, the criminal code or defamation law in civil courts, whatever.
It's no different than in the age of newspapers and leaflets or the age of radio or TV.
Why would it be acceptable to demand, say, that talk radio be regulated to crack down on inappropriate behavior during elections?
Isn't that inappropriate behavior as long as it's not a crime?
Isn't that just a fancy way of saying people who are sick of the government and want to throw out the bums?
I'm sure a lot of things were said about the Progressive Conservative Party in 1993 to choose a pre-internet date.
That's just when the internet was really getting popular for the first time.
Back in 1993, really the Internet was not a factor in the campaign.
But that mighty party was slaughtered down to just two seats.
I'm sure a lot of things were said and done on talk radio that were regarded as inappropriate behavior by Kim Campbell and Brian Mulroney too back then.
Good, good.
Because they're not the boss.
The people are the boss.
And the people are allowed to say and do things that the ruling classes deem inappropriate.
Let me read some more.
We want to ensure that we're providing that important public space that social media provides for people to express themselves, but also mitigating some of the negative impacts that can also arise through social media, she said.
And so I think that would be something very interesting for this committee to work on.
If you choose to do that, what?
It's a liberal word salad.
Mitigating some of the negative impacts that can also arise.
Why won't she say what she means?
What's a negative impact?
Someone criticizing the precious one?
Someone disagreeing with Trudeau?
Is that what she means by negative impact?
If someone were to vote Trudeau out of power or knocked him down on minority government, that would certainly have an negative impact for him and for Karina Gould.
What does she mean by that?
Are only positive ideas allowed?
Who gets to decide what's positive and what's negative?
I guess my favorite line was: oh, if you guys choose to do that, as if Trudeau doesn't control the agenda of these parliamentary committees on which he has a majority.
I love this part in X. Remember what we're reading here.
This is the CBC government broadcaster, where we're reading the CBC broadcaster, reporting a speech by a government minister about a government committee, about a government proposal to censor the media.
Imagine writing about this with any suspense of how this is going to end.
Let me quote some more.
If the committee heeds Gould's call, I wonder if they will, and looks at ways to rein in social media in the lead-up to the next election, it'll have to move quickly.
There are only 12 sitting weeks remaining in Parliament's calendar before it rises for the summer, and it may not resume sitting before the next election.
Gee, I wonder what they're going to do.
The suspense is killing me.
And the rush, don't think it'll be accidental.
It means, I'm sorry, we can't have meaningful consultations.
We really wanted to, but we've just got to ram this through because we're in a rush.
We didn't know this election was coming.
This problem of negative impacts.
So you can't blame us for having to shorten the debate a little bit here.
And anyways, look, the impacts are negative, people.
Why don't you understand that Trudeau needs to hold the media to account, especially since they've been so negative in their impacts lately?
From that trip to India to this whole SNC Lavaland thing, the media is so negative these days, and social media is the worst because you know how citizens can be.
They can be the worst.
So we liberals need to hold you to account.
No more negative impacts, okay?
All right, so what did Andrew Schuster's conservatives say in reply?
Let me read to you the totality of it as reported in the CBC.
Gould's comments came after Conservative MP Stephanie Kusi accused her of not doing enough to protect the next election.
She said she was concerned that Gould has simply asked social media companies to do more to keep the next Canadian election safe from foreign interference and to apply lessons learned in other countries.
This is very disturbing to me that you are asking corporations out of their own goodwill to try to protect Canadians and our electoral processes again rather than taking responsibility yourself, both as the minister and the government, said Cussy.
Cussie described the elections law C-76 as weak, saying it relies on lame registries and wrist slaps to guard against foreign interference.
Okay, and she's talking about Bill C-76, and we'll have to go through that bill properly one day soon.
It's the Liberal Changes to the Elections Act.
I have my concerns about it.
Like the Democrats in the U.S., Canada's Liberals hate, for example, voter ID requirements at the polls.
They want people to be able to vote without any proofs of citizenship or any proof of ID at all, actually.
Lots of problems like that.
And the Liberals actually love third-party campaign groups because that's what helped elect Trudeau in the first place, over 100 different groups, many of them unions.
Some of these groups registering their offices, telling the elections of Canada that, yeah, we're headquartered in the U.S., but we're going to campaign against Stephen Harper in Elections Canada saying no problem.
So there's a lot to talk about there, but mainly that's about elections campaigning.
That's about political parties and political ads and political finance and stuff like that.
It's not so much regulating campaign content as regulating campaign disclosure and finances.
Now, there's lots to talk about there.
But what Karina Gould was talking about isn't campaign groups or third parties or even foreign meddling.
She's talking about you, you on Facebook, you on Twitter, you on social media.
She's not even talking about political campaigns as such.
She just wants to regulate what she says is negative on the internet, what she calls fake, what she calls inaccurate.
But you can't trust her to do that.
You couldn't trust any partisan to do that.
You can't trust anyone other than yourself to do that.
Because, for example, Trudeau called this whole Jody Wilson-Raybold Attorney General scandal, SNC Laval Lamb thing.
Trudeau called that a non-story.
His ministers called it the fake news.
Bill Morneau said that.
Fake is a matter of opinion, though.
Fake is what each politician calls the other politician and what each ideology calls the other ideology.
Fake is in the eye of the beholder.
That's why we have more than one political party.
That's why we have more than one newspaper.
And that's why you get to choose which one you vote for and you get to choose which one you buy if you buy a newspaper because we all have different points of view and we're all allowed to.
We want at least some of the media to have a different point of view than the government, to hold them to account, to have negative impacts.
But you heard the minister.
They want the government to hold the media to account.
Trudeau said as much in a threat to Facebook over a year ago.
Remember this huge story in the Toronto Star?
Not a single other media outlet covered it.
It was a huge story.
The star ran it and then forgot about it.
Trudeau said Facebook had better start censoring things on Facebook that Trudeau didn't like or he would force them to do that.
And I guess this is the forcing part now.
But Andrew Schuse Conservatives didn't seem to have anything to say about that.
They want more harder, stronger rules against foreign meddlers.
Okay, let's talk about keeping foreigners up, but I'm not really worried about the free speech rights of foreign nationals in our elections.
I don't think that's a big deal.
I'm worried about our free speech rights here in Canada.
That's exactly what Karina Gould is talking about.
But Stephanie Kusey, the conservative critic, and Andrew Scheer, certainly didn't make that point, at least not that I saw.
I'm going to look further.
Oh, and by the way, neither did anyone else that I can see.
Here's the newsfeed from the website of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.
Not a word about free expression.
Here's the newsfeed of the Canadian Association of Journalists.
Not a word about journalism under this proposal, but quite a bit about how they can get their hands on the $595 million in Justin Trudeau's media bailout.
And here's the news feed from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
Not a peep about this, but lots about rights of accused terrorists and criminals.
Not a word about government censorship.
Not a word about the government holding the media to account.
Say, do you think they'd all be this silent if it were Stephen Harper demanding this censorship?
By the way, the head of policy at Facebook is this guy, Kevin Chan, former staff member at the Liberal Party's leader's office.
Imagine if Stephen Harper were prime minister and he was telling a former Conservative Party staffer who just happens to be a senior executive at Facebook that he wants to shut down negative stories, wink, wink.
Yeah, there'd be a fuss, but it's not a peep now.
Not from the Liberals, of course, not from those leftist activist groups, of course, but not even from what I can see, not even from Andrew Scheer's concerns.
Why is that?
Is it because they too don't like voices on social media talking about things that maybe they don't like to talk about?
They hate talking about some issues.
They're just scared.
Scared to talk about Islam.
Scared to talk about immigration?
Because these things are embarrassing to them.
Because the CBC says don't talk about it, so they don't want to talk about it.
They don't like to talk about it.
Is that why Andrew Scheer is fine with all this?
Because frankly, he'd be fine if all the conversations in the country were kept to a little cartel of the few official parties and that's it.
Just the polite people.
You know, all those lobbyists' panels on the CBC where they're all think-alikes.
That's safe conversation.
Voices They Fear00:12:49
I don't know, but I do know one thing.
They will come for us here at the Rebel as sure as night follows day.
Stay with us for more.
Hey, Jody, why did you want to speak to Cabinet yesterday?
No solicitor client privilege there.
Why did you want to speak to Cabinet?
I wanted to make myself available if Cabinet wanted to talk to you.
Are you going to speak to caucus today?
Are you going to explain what's going on with the caucus today?
I'm going to attend caucus as I always do, and we'll see how the conversation is.
Can you explain why you quit cabinet?
Can you explain why you quit cabinet?
No.
How come?
As I've said, and I know this is frustrating for many people, I'm committed to ensuring that I know what I can and cannot say as I'm giving or getting legal advice, as I've told you, around privilege advising.
That is Jodie Wilson-Raybold, the former justice minister who was demoted to Veterans Affairs Minister and then who quit the day after Justin Trudeau boasted, well, the fact that she's in my cabinet tells you all you need to know about her support for me.
Well, she showed him who was boss.
The whole thing started to come undone a couple weeks ago when the Global Mail had a bombshell front page story alleging that Wilson-Raybold came under tremendous pressure to let a Quebec company called SNC Lavalan off the hook in a criminal prosecution.
They, of course, had been found to pay $48 million worth of bribes to get contracts in Libya.
That's against the law.
So they lobbied the Prime Minister's office and everyone else they could find more than 50 times to try and get the charges dropped.
Today we learn in the Globe and Mail that after Jodi Wilson-Raybold and the Justice Department decided, in fact, to continue to prosecute, after they made the decision, even after that, Justin Trudeau summoned Jodi Wilson-Raybold to discuss the matter.
He claims, however, he put no pressure on her.
Joining us now to talk about these ongoing shenanigans is our friend Lauren Gunter, senior columnist for the Edmonton Sun.
Lauren, great to see you again.
Good to see you.
I have to tell you, I'm a little bit confused by a few things.
Jody Wilson-Raybold says she can't say a word because she doesn't know what her legal rights are, but she's been in this position for days and days.
She has a top advisor, namely a former Supreme Court Justice Thomas Cromwell, who's an able lawyer.
It doesn't take that long to get legal advice on what you can and can't say.
And I'm starting to think she's playing a bit of games because, of course, Gerald Butts, the principal secretary to Trudeau, resigned on Monday, and she shows up at cabinet yesterday.
I think there's a little bit of games playing here.
What do you think?
Oh, I think that's all that's being done right now.
There's no question in my mind.
I mean, I worked on the Hill for two years.
I worked as an executive assistant to a cabinet minister.
I'd never heard this argument that the solicitor general, the attorney general, has a solicitor-client relationship with cabinet.
I mean, cabinet ministers are bound by cabinet confidentiality.
Yes, it's limited in what they can and cannot say.
And they often speak about what went on in cabinet in general terms.
They don't say, well, we discussed this and we said that and so-and-so said this.
And that's supposed to be all confidential so that ministers will speak freely.
And I understand that.
I respect that.
But this idea that somehow when the prime minister pressures you to, if the allegations are true, if the prime minister pressured her after the director of prosecutions for the federal government had decided not to give Lavillin a deferred prosecution agreement and go ahead with criminal prosecutions,
if the prime minister had pressured her to do, to lean on the director of federal prosecutions, then that is a political move.
It is not covered by lawyer client or solicitor-client confidentiality, in my understanding.
And there are a number of legal experts who've said this.
I think.
And even if it was, you know, she's had this lawyer.
I don't know the exact, I don't know how many days we're into this story now, but she says, well, I'm still trying to figure it out.
No, it doesn't take that long to research one narrow area of law and get an opinion.
I was very sympathetic to her because I believe that the Quebec Liberal Party is the most corrupt in Canadian history.
Virtually every single mayor in Quebec has been arrested and charged with something in the last 10 years.
That's the province of AD scam.
It's the province of, well, it's a province of the Trudeau's.
So it was absolutely believable to me that these Quebec old boys thought they could just pressure this cabinet minister from Vancouver to go along with it, but she actually stood on a point of principle.
I believe that narrative.
Now, Gerald Butts is gone on Monday and she's back in caucus on Tuesday.
It looks like there's some horse trading here.
And I think, yeah, I mean, I think Butts's head was handed to her so that she'll play along.
She was, I think, prepared to blab and to say that the PM leaned on her after the chief of prosecutions, a bureaucrat in the Justice Department, had chosen not to give Lavillin a plea deal and that she knows it's political.
I think she's biding her time.
She's waiting for the most effective time in order to do this.
But I think also at the same time, too, she is being a semi-loyal liberal.
She wants the liberals to win again.
She wants to run again in October as a liberal.
And so she's playing a sort of minefield game here.
She's being careful where she steps because she doesn't want to blow up the party's chances.
But I think, I mean, the only explanation that makes sense to me, this is pure speculation on my part, but the only explanation that makes sense to me is why Gerald Butts would leave his dream job when there's no evidence suggesting he was involved directly is that she threatened to divulge what had been said and what the pressure that had been put on her unless something was done.
And Butts' head was the something.
Yeah.
You know, I want to show you a clip that I saw on CBC the other day.
It's an old clip decades, a generation ago, when Jody Wilson Raybold's dad was an Aboriginal activist and he was face to face with Pierre Trudeau.
Right.
He butted heads with Pierre Trudeau several times.
Yeah, let me show you this quick exchange.
It's not substantive.
He talks about his daughters wanting to be lawyers and how one of them wants to be prime minister.
Here, take a quick look at that.
I have two children in Vancouver Island, both of whom, for some misguided reason, say they want to be a lawyer.
Both of whom want to be the prime minister.
Both of whom, Mr. Prime Minister, are women.
You know what, Lauren?
This is, Jodi Wilson-Raybold is not some naive gal.
I mean, she might be a bit of an idealist.
She's certainly a leftist.
She certainly has a point of view on the law that is to the left of mine.
She's an Aboriginal rights radical in some ways, and I think she'd agree with that.
Like her dad.
She brought in the new drunk driving laws, which completely obliterate all sorts of century-old protections against self-incrimination.
So she is a radical.
There's no question of that.
And so maybe she had more principle in her than to go along with these old boys, these old McGill boys, who said, oh, come on, you're just a gender and race quota token.
Go along with the big boys.
And she said, yeah, no, on this one, I'm going to stand firm.
I think that there was a poetic moment when the Aboriginal, the first Aboriginal justice minister in Canadian history, looked at the trust fund boys from Montreal and said, not on my watch.
I think there was a moment like that.
But I think she's cannier than just an idealistic die on this hill kind of gal.
I think she's got a bit of her dad in her.
And I think she, look, she just knocked out Gerald Butts.
No one else in the party had the ability to do that.
By the way, I don't think Gerald Butts is gone.
I read in the Global Mill.
He was going to take a leave of absence anyways to run the campaign.
So he's just stepping down a month or two early.
I think there's a lot of BS here.
Yeah.
I think there is too.
And maybe there's collusion between Trudeau and Wilson Raybold to handle all this, although I don't think that's true.
I think where you are angling is a possibility that she has always wanted to be the leader of the Liberal Party, always wanted to be prime minister.
And she sees a way now, if not to push Trudeau out at this point, at least to position herself as a darling of the left of center wing of the Liberal Party when Trudeau eventually does decide to go.
And, you know, it's been funny.
The fun thing for me in this, though, is watching both Trudeau and Wilson Raybold try to position themselves as the victims here.
I mean, Trudeau said, well, you know, of course, if she had only said to me that she felt pressure, I certainly would have.
My feminist side would have rushed out to her defense.
And oh my goodness, I just feel she's the one who didn't do her duty, though.
I feel so badly that I wasn't told.
Give me a break.
I don't think anyone believed that.
It was a reminder of how he answered, you know, in the year 2000, when he was a younger man, but still an adult, he went to a beer party in Creston, British Columbia, and he sexually groped, according to the New York Times, a young reporter named Rose Knight.
And then he later said, oh, I didn't know you were an important reporter with the National Post.
He actually apologized, sort of, by saying, oh, I didn't know you were an important person.
If I had known you were just a little town reporter, I thought you were just a little town reporter.
It would have been okay.
But I didn't know you were reporting.
So, but, you know, when he was asked about that last year, he said, oh, well, she might have experienced it differently.
And I respect her right to experience it.
It felt like that.
It felt like, oh, well, Jodi Wilson Raybold experienced it as pressure.
Well, she has that right as a woman to feel that way.
But come on, cuckoo.
She's, you know, she's a little hysterical.
Like, it came across as that same male feminist, passive-aggressive.
I totally respect her right to think I pressured her, but come on, guys.
We all know.
I mean, come on, you're going to believe her?
That's how it came across.
You know, before this happened, before this happened, it was well known on Parliament Hill that Wilson Raybold was difficult to work with.
She'd gone through several chiefs of staff or executive assistants.
She was known as a very prickly person.
And you remember, too, as soon as this became an issue, there were several people from the senior liberal ranks who were whispering to reporters, oh, you know, Jodi's very hard to deal with.
She's got a big ego.
You have to be careful.
And, you know, that's the same sort of thing, right?
I mean, it's just into this passive-aggressive stuff.
And they're feminists until it suits their purposes.
And then they're smearing a woman because she's a feminist.
This has been fun to watch because we still don't know what's going on.
We still have weeks of this to trickle out.
It may not be every day as it is now, but over the next few months, new things are going to arise.
And it's fun to watch because here are these smug, sanctimonious liberals who've been telling all the rest of us that they and they alone know what's right and what's moral and what's politically correct these days.
And they abandon all of that as soon as any hot water touches their backside.
Yeah.
Rcmp Scandals Unveiled00:09:54
Just a quick thing on her leadership ambitions.
I don't think she has strong French.
And I think that would be a barrier for her to go further.
I think she just wants to play for a powerful role within the party.
And Justin Trudeau is the most lightweight person in cabinet.
Well, maybe not worse than some of his quota hires like Miriam Monsef.
So I should take that back.
But if Jodi Wilson-Raybold has a real ideological agenda, and if she's pushed Gerald Butts out of the way, she'll be the big dog in cabinet.
I mean, Justin Trudeau doesn't have any strong views on anything.
He just does what Butz tells him.
So I think that I think Jodi Wilson-Raybold is just trying to get some power, maybe getting some things for her and her dad and her people.
Maybe this is the end of a 40-year campaign by her family to right some historic wrongs in her mind.
I mean, I don't give it that much detail, right?
I think she sees an opening.
She's pushing it as hard as she can and will discover how far this takes her.
Does this play into a greater ambition of hers to perhaps someday be prime minister?
I mean, you say her French isn't very good, but she checks an awful lot of other boxes.
She's a woman.
She's indigenous.
I mean, there's all sorts of, she's from the West Coast.
There's all sorts of reasons why she's a very attractive potential for the Liberal Party.
I don't say she's attractive for the country as PM, but among liberals, she's very attractive for a lot of these reasons.
And so I just think she sees an opportunity and she's going to push it as far as she can without having an end point in mind.
Yeah.
I don't know if you saw it, but Solomon Friedman, who's a very, very smart criminal lawyer in Ottawa.
I mean, he's a whiz kid.
He's co-authored books with judges.
Like he's an unbelievably smart guy.
I used to know him a little bit better when I was at Sun News.
I saw him on Don Martin's show.
And I'm just going to play a quick clip of this.
And this is my last question for you, because Solomon, unlike most pundits, actually read the law and how it would, the law regarding these remediation agreements or these deferred prosecution agreements.
That's a fancy way of saying, okay, we won't actually prosecute you for your crimes if you just say your story and make amends.
Here, take a quick look of Solomon Friedman talking to Don Martin on CTV.
Take a look.
Well, one of the reasons that all of this smells so much is that, I mean, first of all, the deferred prosecution regime in and of itself smells.
But if you look at it and you look at what does it take to qualify, you start going through there are a list of factors.
So one of the things is, has the company or its representatives been convicted in the past?
Guess what?
They have.
How high up in terms of the company hierarchy does the corruption go?
Well, in the case of SNC Lavalin, to the very top.
How serious are these allegations or previous convictions?
Well, they're bribing officials to get the Montreal Hospital Project, right?
So when you look at this list of factors, have reparations been made, really?
Have the people of Libya been made whole for the hundreds of millions of dollars that were stolen from the citizens to enrich the Qaddafis?
Of course not.
So SNC Lavalin would never qualify for one of these arrangements by the letter of the law.
Huh.
So it would take friends in high places to make that happen?
Maybe a little undue influence, maybe some pressure, maybe some directing, all those things that we're hearing about.
It's not a surprise when you look at the law.
This is not a law that a company like SNC Lavalin, given their past track record, could ever qualify for.
That was very illuminating to me.
And it was the first time I had heard in this whole saga an actual criminal law expert talk about the deferred prosecution agreement.
And here's my point, and that's why I wanted to show that clip.
Lauren, I believe this matter will all go away because both Jody Wilson-Raybold and Justin Trudeau will find an optimal outcome where they both are mutually better by cooperating than one stabbing the other to death.
And I believe that they will find a way, log rolling, back scratching, whatever you want to say, unless the RCMP get involved.
I believe it was the RCMP that undid Stephen Harper or the police with their prosecution of Mike Duffy, which he was acquitted, but it turned into a two-year saga.
I think that the media fatigue is setting in and Wilson-Raybold and Trudeau will work this out.
But if there was a criminal charge, I think it's all bets are off, and I think Trudeau will lose the election.
Do you think that that's a possibility?
Do you think that the RCMP is even independent enough to start asking questions?
We saw David Lehmanni, the new attorney general, say, oh, I didn't even talk to Trudeau.
I just saw things in the media.
That's enough for me.
No need for me to investigate.
It's all set by me.
Do you think a cop's going to take a different point of view?
Or do you think the new RCMP commissioner will say, no, no, no, Trudeau appointed me and I'm returning the favor?
Yeah, I asked a couple of former senior Mounties who I know whether or not this is something that the RCMP is likely to get into.
And both of them said, you know, they're not afraid to come in.
It's not that they picked on the Harper Duffy thing and wouldn't pick on a Trudeau Wilson-Raybold item in the same way.
It's just that they didn't think either one of them thought that this rose to the level of criminal behavior on the part of the PMO.
And so they didn't expect, and I don't either, that the RCMP will get involved, but not because they like the liberals, they like Trudeau, not because of that.
It's just because it doesn't meet their standard.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, in his defense, SNC Lavalan, they registered more than 50 lobbying meetings.
They weren't exactly hiding it.
They weren't exactly, I mean, unlike Libya, their schemes and scams here were published for all to see.
Very likely, money would have had to change hands.
You remember in the case with Duffy that Stephen Harper's chief of staff at the time paid Duffy's expenses.
That sort of set off alarm bells apparently with the Mounties who then started to investigate, found no criminal behavior, but that's what set off their investigation.
There's no sense that Lavalin has given the liberals money this time.
Not that it hasn't happened in the past, but this time.
And so I think we probably will not see the Mounties get involved.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you can hear it here first.
I hereby then predict based on what you assess as the low risk of a criminal prosecution.
I hereby predict Justin Trudeau will be re-elected with at least a minority government in the fall of 2006.
I do too.
It's disturbing for me to have to say this.
And the polls now are trending downwards for the liberals.
But I think when push comes to shove in an election in October, that there are just enough sycophantic liberals, liberal voters in the country that they'll say, oh my goodness, we can't risk having a Doug Ford, a Jason Kenney, Donald Trump running our country.
We must re-elect that wonderful Sonny Waze man.
Yeah, I think you're right.
All right, Lauren, great to talk to you.
Thanks for your time today.
You bet.
Okay, there you have it.
Lauren Gunter, the senior columnist for the Edmonton Sun.
By the way, he's written two very interesting editorials about this.
One's called Don't Expect Butts Signature Policies to Leave with the Man.
I absolutely agree with that.
And another one called Butz is Out, which only fuels further speculation.
I encourage you to read those at Edmontonson.com.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back to my monologue yesterday about the resignation of Gerald Botts.
James writes, Butts was the mastermind behind the Alton McGuinty II that also ended in scandal.
Corruption follows this guy around.
I truly believe that.
And I worked very briefly a long time ago as an assistant to Preston Manning.
So we were in the opposition.
We had no power whatsoever.
But I can tell you, the way that leader of the party acted, everyone looks to the leader.
How does the leader act?
How does his chief of staff act?
Everyone watches.
And if the leader flies economy class in the airplane, if the leader has a lean expense account, everyone says, okay, that's how we roll around here.
It would be awkward if the leader of your party is sitting in the economy class of the airplane and a staffer were to fly in first class, right?
And that's the thing.
Preston Manning, just like his father, Ernest Manning, set a personal moral example.
Justin Trudeau and Gerald Butts have both pigged out.
I give you the example of Butts spending $127,000 moving from Toronto to Ottawa.
How do you even do that?
So everyone watches and says, oh, he's putting two nannies on the payroll.
Oh, he's taking a secret trip on Billionaire Island.
Oh, he's getting away with what he can.
Oh, he was caught for convictions under the Conflict of Interest Act, but no big deal.
That's the lesson Gerald Butz taught.
Paul writes, as long as Butts is in Ottawa in any capacity, he'll be running the show.
Oh, yeah, I mean, or Toronto.
Like I say, he was in Toronto until a few years ago.
He can work the phones and build from anywhere, Skype from anywhere.
And I say again, the Globe and Mail is literally the day after Butts quit, the Globe said, oh, yeah, he was going to take a leave of absence anyways, and they certainly haven't ruled out him running the campaign.
Do you think for a second that he's still not running things?
Bruce writes, some media folks think Butz is out of the game, but we know better.
Sue Him to Kingdom Come00:01:37
As for Keenan being attacked, I hope and pray the anti-fascist will be found.
Apparently, they didn't get the memo from Dion Bewes.
Well, thanks very much, Bruce.
We are, in fact, I should try and get a video out on this tomorrow.
We are looking through footage and photographs to try to identify the guy who hit Kean.
Now, obviously, Keenan wasn't hurt in the same way that David Menzies and our cameraman Ephraim were not hurt a few weeks ago when they were punched by the guy at the Radisson Toronto East.
But that's not the point.
The test for not being punched is, well, he didn't hurt you.
He didn't hurt you.
That's not the test.
The test is you're not allowed to punch people in Canada, even if you disagree with them.
So it is my plan, and I'll outline this in a video.
Hopefully I'll get it up tomorrow.
That first of all, we're going to have a bounty to find the name of this guy who punched Keen.
And we'll pay cash, I'm thinking 500 bucks.
And second of all, we're going to sue him to Kingdom Come.
And not out of vengeance, because if we win, he'll get a slap on the wrist, obviously.
But to make the point that you cannot punch a journalist with impunity.
Out of self-respect, we have to sue.
Out of justice, we have to sue.
To set a precedent and a deterrent, we have to sue.
We cannot let it be that someone can punch a rebel, Kian, Sheila, David, Ephraim, whoever.
You cannot do that in this country.
And hopefully, we'll get the police involved, but if they decline, we will sue in civil court.
That's a promise.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters to you at home, good night.