Ezra Levant warns Canada could follow the UK’s trend of policing speech, citing Surrey Police’s probe into journalist Caroline Farrow for "misgendering" tweets and a judge’s threats over his opinions. Alberta’s election hinges on oil industry collapse—$100B lost due to pipeline cancellations, carbon taxes, and corporate tax hikes—with UCP’s Jason Kenney poised to replace NDP’s Rachel Notley amid voter backlash. Derek Fildebrandt and Shannon Phillips face slim odds despite personal controversies, as Alberta prioritizes anti-NDP sentiment over ideology. Levant rejects Trudeau’s $595M media bailout, calling it censorship for outlets like The Rebel while favoring hedge-fund-backed Post Media, framing it as a threat to free press principles. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey there, you got to listen to today's podcast, and it sounds like you already are.
I talk about a crazy case in the United Kingdom where a mom, a church lady who goes on Good Morning Britain, which is a big TV show over there, to have a debate about transgenderism, whatever.
She makes a tweet where she calls someone a boy instead of a girl, and she doesn't even remember it.
But the police show up and say, yeah, you've got to come in for an interview now under legal caution because we think you have committed a hate crime by saying boy instead of girl on Twitter.
This is a true story.
And that is the subject of today's monologue.
And I hope you enjoyed it.
And by the way, can you do me a favor?
I know these podcasts are free and enjoy, but I would be grateful to you if you subscribed to our premium version of it, which includes the video anyways.
Even if you don't use it, you know why?
Because that's how we pay the bills around here.
So if you would be so kind, please take a moment and go to the rebel.media slash shows.
It's $8 a month or $80 for the whole year.
And I know you don't need it to listen to the podcast, but if you ever do want to watch the video version, especially today's show, for example, we've got a ton of video, you'll want to do that.
Just go to the rebel.media slash shows and sign up there and help keep the lights on because one of the things we talk about, we talked about it yesterday, we talked about it in the letters today, is that we will not take any money from Justin Trudeau, unlike our rivals.
So we're depending on you, my friends.
Anyhow, without further ado, here is today's monologue.
You're listening to a Rebel Media podcast.
Tonight, police in the United Kingdom are now visiting people at their homes for writing mean tweets.
It's March 21st, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Judge's Warning Against Tweeting00:02:40
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 to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Last week I told you how when I was in the United Kingdom reporting on a trial involving Tommy Robinson, the judge in that case stopped the hearing, cleared out the public from the court, and demanded to see the journalism licenses from the reporters still in the room.
That was shocking to me.
First of all, that to this judge, journalists had some sort of higher moral or legal standing to be allowed to stay in the courtroom than mere citizens.
And by the way, that same judge wouldn't let in the public, even though there were literally 23 empty chairs in the court.
The judge kept most of the public out, saying she didn't want the room to be overfull.
Keeping citizens out of the courtroom just because, and then clearing out any remaining citizens, and then demanding that those of us who identify as reporters, to use the modern phrase, demanding that we show our journalism licenses.
And the worst part of this was that the journalists in the room who did in fact have licenses, that's not something we do here in Canada or the United States, of course, the journalists so proudly whipping out their licenses that they were actually carrying on them, like in their wallet, and holding them up so proudly as proof that they were part of the fancy class.
They were part of the elite.
They weren't just the regular rabble.
And sure, that meant they had to submit to some sort of licensing, but if that's what it took to show that they were a high class, not the ordinary Joe, well, they would do it.
They really are classist over there in the UK.
But more troubling to me, they really have forgotten about freedom and the notion that the government serves the people and not the other way around.
A judge is a part of the government, by the way.
So I told you all about that last week and how the judge specifically lectured me to tell me that if I didn't stop tweeting my opinions about the trial, even from outside the courthouse, I could be held in contempt of court.
Seriously, she said that if I expressed any opinion about things, I could be held in contempt.
I asked her if there was a particular tweet that bothered her, and I swear to God, she mentioned this one, where I made a joke about how I'd be thrown in a dungeon for tweeting.
So I guess it wasn't a joke.
I wrote it as a joke, but it wasn't a joke, because if I kept joking about being thrown in a dungeon, I really would be thrown in a dungeon or jail.
So I suppose she was right.
It wasn't a joke after all.
It was a promise.
Imagine being jailed for tweeting.
Susie Green's Warning00:15:20
That's what they do in places like Turkey or Venezuela and the UK now too, I guess.
That's the UK.
It will shock you to learn that Tommy Robinson lost that trial.
But I got another story for you from the UK.
And to my Canadian and American friends who might be sick of hearing about the UK or about Tommy Robinson, my point is this.
How far away do you think this is from coming to our side of the Atlantic?
Thought crimes and word crimes?
We already have UK-style censorship in social media.
After all, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, PayPal, these are all the companies that have deplatformed Tommy Robinson.
They're all American companies based in San Francisco, Silicon Valley.
So of course that part of the war on free thought is already here.
In fact, it came from North America.
But what about the police part, the courts part?
Well, let me tell you a story, and let me start by showing you a cell phone video taken by someone who was mouthing off on Twitter or Facebook a bit about Brexit.
Just to remind you what Brexit is.
Back in 2016, the United Kingdom had a national referendum on whether or not the UK should leave the mini United Nations called the European Union or the EU.
Now, the EU is much worse than the UN for a number of reasons, including that it can actually write laws, and those laws are binding on its member countries.
The UN can't do that.
The EU does.
Anyways, more and more power and sovereignty was being moved from the UK and from its elected MPs towards some unaccountable anonymous bureaucrats in Brussels, Belgium.
I think my favorite EU moment when the light went on for me was this one.
It's a little video featuring Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UKIP party, the UK Independence Party.
I love this clip.
This is from back in 2010.
Can you watch this for 90 seconds?
Take a look.
You have the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk.
And the question that I want to ask, the question that I want to ask, that we're all going to ask, is, who are you?
I'd never heard of you.
Nobody in Europe had ever heard of you.
I would like to ask you, President, who voted for you?
And what mechanism?
Oh, I know democracy is not popular with you lot.
And what mechanism do the peoples of Europe have to remove it?
Is this European democracy?
Well, I sense, though, that you're competent and capable and dangerous.
And I have no doubt that it's your intention to be the quiet assassin of European democracy and of the European nation states.
You appear to have a loathing for the very concept of the existence of nation states.
Perhaps that's because you come from Belgium, which of course is pretty much a non-country.
But since you took over, we've seen Greece reduced to nothing more than a protectorate.
Sir, you have no legitimacy in this job at all.
And I can say with confidence that I can speak on behalf of the majority of the British people in saying, we don't know you, we don't want you, and the sooner you're put out to grass, the better.
I love that clip so much.
And he was right, and that was in 2010.
Now, by 2016, that guy, Nigel Farage, and his UKIP party had convinced enough Brits of his case that in the largest voter turnout in UK history, the Brexit referendum passed.
Brits wanted out.
But that was two and a half years ago, and the establishment has been trying to undermine that vote result ever since, trying to have a do-over, trying to bog down the Brexit with delays and conditions, negotiations.
It's supposed to happen next week, actually, March 29th.
But so many establishment forces are colluding to delay or even frustrate the will of voters.
They really are trying to steal the election.
We'll see if they can get away with it.
Can you imagine what that would do to faith in democracy?
It would destroy it.
I truly believe there would be violence in the streets.
I don't want that, of course.
I hate the thought of that, of course, but imagine if we had an election here and there was a clear winner, but a bunch of bankers and lawyers and journalists just refused to recognize the result.
I dare say we'd have violence on this side of the pond too.
Anyways, some Brit was musing about that possibility on Twitter.
And the police just showed up at his house.
Now, I'm going to play for you a two-minute tape of their interaction as captured on the bloke's cell phone.
Take a look.
So who sent us here then?
As you said, it's freedom of speech.
No, it's more about the content of what you've put.
So what have you got a problem with?
Some comment that you said you're going to drag somebody out of an office, an MP, you're going to drag them out of the office onto the street, quite a bit.
Based on a hypothetical situation.
Yeah, but all I'm asking, I'm not saying you can't use it or you shouldn't be using it.
I'm just asking you to be mindful about what you're putting on there.
It's deemed as inciting.
Yeah, let's put the situation into context, right?
So based on something that may or may not happen, an action could be taken, right?
So how can you have a problem with that?
I'm not saying we've got a problem with it.
I've been asking you aware, okay, that your comments are visible online and we can...
Oh, I know that.
I've been doing it for 20 years.
Yeah.
And you've got every right to do that.
I've not got it.
So why are you here then?
Look, I'll just explain that to you.
It's the fact of what you said and that you said, I can't do this alone.
Yeah.
Who wants to join me?
Right.
So it could be a sort of inciting something to happen.
Inciting what?
Inciting something based on an outcome that hasn't yet even been visualised.
No one knows whether it's going to happen or not.
If the government betrays the people, do you really think students would be the only one?
It might say that's the only thing that's going to get into the debate or arguments to the point of view.
Well, this is what I'm getting into.
This is what I'm getting into.
Because we need to get into it.
Because if you think about it, if Brexit is denied, right, there's not just going to be isolated pockets of violence.
The whole country is going to be inflamed.
You're talking 17.4 million people.
Do you think I'm going to be the only one?
You've got your own comments and thoughts about it, haven't you?
That's fair enough.
I think a lot of people have.
And we've got the right to express it.
Yeah, of course you have.
I agree.
And you don't seem to get that.
No, I do.
Who sent you?
It's come from my inspector.
And the inspector is being ordered, is he taking it upon himself?
Who sent me?
Well, no, it's not, it's not, it's not, because you're coming around to my house, knocking on my door, asking me, you know, I should be careful and mindful of the comments I make online.
But they're perfectly with within the law.
Right.
Oh, yeah.
But I've not seen your breath floor, have I?
Otherwise I would have been dealing with it a different way.
Let me say this.
If someone positively calls for violence in a real and credible and imminent way, if someone is saying, I want someone to attack an MP, I think it's fair, like really urgently, like let's go and attack an MP right now, I think it's fair for police to stop by.
Now I haven't seen his exact post there, but what this bloke seems to have been saying based on that conversation was if the government betrays the people, if the government refuses to accept the democratic result of the referendum, there ought to be an uprising.
I think he's sort of right.
And if the people believe, sorry, if the police believe he has threatened someone, then arrest him and charge him.
Like I said, I haven't read what he actually tweeted.
If he's genuinely calling for people to be violent, to support a terrorist group, whether it's ISIS or the IRA, I don't care, then arrest him.
Charge him with something.
I don't have the original comment in front of me that he made.
I just found that video on the internet.
But police said several times there in that interaction that it did not rise to that level.
There was nothing imminent or urgent or threatening, that he was within the law.
The police said that.
They said that what he had tweeted or Facebook was not illegal.
I think they said that three times, in fact.
They claimed they weren't there to debate him, and yet they weren't there to arrest him.
Then why were they there?
Well, it's obvious, to scare him, to deter him, to let him know he's being spied on, to get into his head, to take his courage away, to put in the back of his mind that he might be arrested next time.
He might be charged with a crime next time.
There's an epidemic of real crime in the United Kingdom, by the way, knife attacks, acid attacks, rape gangs that entrap and exploit British girls as young as 11.
And of course, there are the 23,000 Muslim jihadis that the UK government is trying to track as in potential terrorists.
Now, apparently they have time to send two cops around to talk to a guy about his mean Brexit tweets.
But that's not all.
Look at this.
Now, I'm going to play you another clip.
This is from Good Morning Britain.
It's just what it sounds like.
It's like Good Morning America.
It's hosted by Piers Morgan.
Let me play a moment from their latest for you.
Because I am standing here this morning outside of police headquarters because one of our guests on the show, later on Twitter, who has a boy who was a son who was born a boy, then transitioned to a girl, they were referred to the wrong pronoun as a he or a boy.
That was the debate on Twitter.
As a result of that, Susie Green said that she found this actually distressing and spiteful, made a complaint to Surrey Police, who now tell us that they are actually investigating as a hate crime.
Hate crime have a maximum prison sentence of anything up to two years.
Really?
So calling a boy who says he's a girl a boy is a hate crime.
Misgendering someone is a hate crime that can get you two years in prison.
I can call you whatever I like.
I can call you a boy or a girl or a Martian or a turtle.
I can call you whatever I like.
I'm just using words.
And you can say the same to me.
And we can also ignore each other if we don't like each other.
If I truly defame you, I guess you could sue me.
But a hate crime that the police are involved with for calling a natural-born boy a boy, and the police are truly following it up.
Here's some more.
We're conflated.
No, we're not.
We're natural predators.
It's a row that was first sparked in our studios.
Caroline Farrow, a Catholic with conservative views, appeared alongside transgender activist Susie Green, whose daughter Jackie was born a boy.
When the camera stops rolling though, the debate soon spills onto Twitter.
I know this from my own experience.
That's fine, but trans girls are girls.
Caroline Farrow allegedly used the wrong pronoun to describe Jackie Green, referring to her perhaps as a boy.
And that, she's been told, is a possible hate crime.
And now sorry police are carrying out an investigation.
But in a statement, Caroline Farrow said, she's put my family through hell, and I don't think she should have pursued it in the first place.
We understand that Susie Green now intends to withdraw her complaint.
But at the moment, the official investigation continue.
I'm not sure if they said Surrey Police or Sorrey Police, but I think it's probably a bit of both.
I'd like to read to you how I learned about this police investigation from the woman herself who's being investigated by police.
You saw her on the screen there.
Now there are 900 hate speech police in the Metropolitan Police Force of London alone.
900 hate speech cops.
Here, let me read from the Twitter account of the woman they're chasing.
Had a message from Guildford Police tonight about my tweets following an appearance on Good Morning Britain with Susie Green and Piers Morgan.
Susie Green has reported me for misgendering her daughter, so she's not making the mistake of saying son anymore.
I have pointed out to the police that I am a Catholic journalist, commentator, and it is my religious belief that a person cannot change sex.
That we are in the middle of a national conversation about what it means to be male and what it means to be female.
Of course, it's true you can't change your sex.
You could talk about how you present and your gender, but you cannot change your sex.
That's in your DNA.
I'll keep reading.
Nonetheless, following my appearance on national television, the CPS, that's the Crown Prosecution Service, have decided I need to be interviewed under caution for misgendering Susie Green's child.
So that's the prosecutor.
They're serious about this.
They're serious about this.
They're saying that they're really investigating this woman for a crime.
A crime.
Because she called a boy a boy.
Oops, sorry.
Now I've just committed that same crime.
Here's another tweet.
I don't even remember the tweets in question.
I don't remember said tweets.
I probably said he or son or something.
Oh, and if I don't go for an interview about some tweets that allegedly misgendered, I will apparently be arrested, which is nice.
Hey, can I ask you a question?
If you were working in this store, I'm going to show you a store in a second, and this person came in, you'll see him in a second, would you call them ma'am or sir?
Excuse me, Sarah.
There's a young man in here.
Excuse me, it's ma'am.
It is ma'am.
I can call the police if you'd like me to.
You need to settle down.
You need to settle down and mind your business.
Okay.
Ma'am.
Once again, ma'am.
I said both of you.
No, you said sir.
Once again, it's ma'am.
I actually said both of you guys.
Those are the gentlemen.
Right beforehand, you f ⁇ ing said sir!
Sir?
Take it outside!
If you want to call me sir again, I will show you a f ⁇ ing sir!
I apologize.
Mother, I apologize now.
I need your corporate number because we're going to talk, call them and talk about how I was misgendered several times in this store.
I apologize for that.
I need your corporate number now.
Get it for me now.
I'm going to ask you to calm down and stop cussing.
You need a corporate number.
Well, I'm going to ask you for the fifth time to stop calling me a man because quite clearly I am not.
Yeah, that's not a ma'am or a sir.
That's someone who's mentally ill, I think.
A bully for sure.
But this nice Catholic lady in London said boy instead of girl or something.
She can't even remember doing it.
And she's being brought in for a police interrogation.
Speaking of LGBT, that's the tea part, the trans, how's that going in the UK these days?
Protest at Muslim School00:02:16
I told you the other day about a 98% Muslim school in Birmingham where the parents and the students protested against a textbook called No Outsiders that was written by a teacher at the school.
That book No Outsiders taught about homosexuality, saying that they shouldn't be outsiders.
Here's a clip from one of the protests at the school.
But we need to make one thing very clear.
This program is not just about telling people that other families and other types of lifestyles exist.
It's actually aggressively promoting them, giving it a positive spin, and telling people that it is okay for you to be Muslim and for you to be gay.
Mr. Moffat, shame, Mr. Moffat, I did not want to make this personal, but Mr. Moffat has decided upon his own self to reinterpret our religious scriptures.
And I don't know.
I don't know where he gets his religious education from and when he became Mufti Moffat.
So how did that whole thing end up?
They were actually mocking the gay teacher in the school, the kids and the parents.
The school, what did they do?
Did they call the cops like someone did against that Brexit guy?
Did they call the cops like that trans activist did against the Catholic church lady?
Are you kidding?
What, do you want to be blown up or something?
They immediately caved.
They submitted.
That's actually what Islam means to submit.
They no longer teach about homosexuality at all in that Birmingham school or in other schools, in fact, in Birmingham.
At least not in the Muslim schools.
I'm sure they're still pushing that book hard on the Catholic schools.
Sounds like Canada about 10 minutes from now, doesn't it?
Oil Sands Economy00:04:54
Stay with us for more welcome back.
Well, there is so much going on in the world, but in my home province of my birth, Alberta, it is now day three of the provincial election, a 28-day campaign.
Joining us now to give us the latest is our friend Lauren Gunter, senior columnist with the Edmonton Sun, Lauren.
Great to see you again.
We care about Alberta for a lot of reasons.
I'm sort of an exiled Albertan in Toronto now, but I think even Torontonians can care because Alberta is such an important economic part of this country.
I think it's an ideological bellwether.
Before you get into the details, can you tell people in BC, in Ontario, even our American viewers, why they should care about an Alberta provincial election?
Well, as goes Alberta, so goes the rest of the country's economy.
Whether or not people like oil and natural gas, it's still Canada's largest export in terms of value.
And when the Alberta economy is depressed because oil is depressed, then the whole country suffers.
You know, there was numbers out from StatsCan for the fourth quarter of 2018 showed that there was virtually no economic growth in Canada for three full months.
And that was largely due to the fact that Alberta has rolled back the amount of oil that it's allowing producers to take out of the ground.
And there's just not as much being shipped to world markets or to the United States as there should be.
And so it's huge.
I mean, 90% of the pipe that goes into pipelines is milled in Ontario.
Most of the buses that take oil sands workers from the city of Fort McMurray up to the oil sands camps are built in Quebec.
It goes all the way across the country.
And a large percentage of the workforce in Fort McMurray comes from other provinces, not just from Alberta.
So it's enormous, the impact that Alberta has on the rest of the country.
So it's very important that the right government get elected in Alberta to help boost our economy, which then has this enormous ripple effect for the rest of Canada.
Yeah, and you didn't even mention the tax revenues and the equalization payments.
But yeah, I know what you're talking about, those prévo buses, those huge buses that are all made in Quebec.
And you know, we were going to talk about SNC Lavalam.
Whatever else you can say about SNC Lavalam, a ton of engineering and construction projects in Canada are oil sands related.
That's very technical production.
Like you can't just slap up an oil sands facilities.
It's a deeply engineered thing.
So I mean, I know that's old ground for.
Even conventional oil drilling is far more than most people think it is.
You know, they think you stick a drill bit down into the ground until you hit oil, and then you somehow collect that and somehow get it to market.
And so it's an enormously complex industry from figuring out who owns each layer of the earth below the surface and whose property is on top.
And how do you get, you know, I was amazed one time to take a tour of what's called a tank farm.
So you see those enormous oil and gas tanks near refineries.
I took a tour of a tank farm one time and they said, so what happens is you have this tank will have three or four different solutions, fluids in it.
And as they get ready to put it in a pipeline, they'll move the second one down to the bottom and it goes into a pipeline.
And then there's a machine in the pipeline that cleans the pipeline for that fluid, which might be very different from the one that was ahead of it and the one that was behind it.
And all of that's engineered.
There are 8,000 processes, for instance, at a typical refinery.
I mean, it's a very, very complicated business.
And so, yes, it requires lawyers, accountants, engineers, technologists, all sorts of computer people of all sorts.
And so it's not just a bunch of guys in overalls and pickup trucks who go out and stick the drill bit down the hole.
Yeah.
You know, perhaps the most high-tech thing I've ever seen was when I was allowed on a fracking job in Pennsylvania, actually.
It was all computer driven, by the way.
I mean, yeah, there's guys putting the big steel in the ground, but it was very high-tech.
Anyways, I appreciate that backgrounder.
Thank you for that.
And I know 95% of our viewers know that stuff, but it's good to remind people of this is important far beyond the borders of Alberta.
Okay, that preamble out of the way.
Unemployment Crisis Grinds NDP Teeth00:09:17
Lauren, give me the latest.
I know you've been writing about this for the past few days.
Give me the numbers, despite the ethical questions about the dark horse candidate and secret deals.
Is Jason Kenney still on track to win this thing?
Yes.
Yes, he is.
And I don't know if the polling has changed much.
There's only been one poll since this dark horse kamikaze controversy began involving Kenny.
And that shows that poll showed not a whit of change.
The UCP were still more than 20 points ahead.
But for me, it's not necessarily the poll.
If you look at different regions of the province, I simply do not see how the NDP can possibly win.
The NDP won last time because, among other things, they won 15 of 24 seats in Calgary.
Now, that has never happened before.
The most it ever had in Calgary before was one.
And there were sometimes as many as two or three Liberals as well.
But it had always been a Tory bedrock.
Last time, because a lot of voters want to get rid of the Tories, the NDP won 15 of 24 seats in Calgary.
I don't expect them to win a single seat in Calgary this time.
That is how detested they are in Calgary because of the damage they have done with their environmental regulations and their carbon tax and their higher corporate taxes.
That's the damage they have done to the business community and by extension to all the workers who work in oil in Calgary.
The only by-election we've seen in the last two years was the one that Jason Kenney ran in.
And the UCP won 71 to 16 for the NDP.
And I think you're going to see riding after riding after riding in Calgary where that's the kind of breakdown that there is.
People just cannot stand them.
And if you can't win either Edmonton or Calgary and the rest of the province, you have to win one of the major cities and the rest of the province.
You can't win a majority.
Well, so let's look out beyond Edmonton and Calgary.
And look at there's 38 ridings in the rest of the province.
The polling numbers for the NDP are even worse there.
I mean, they've angered the agricultural community with what was called Bill 6.
And I know you did an awful lot of coverage of Bill 6.
It was to basically make like union workplaces, all the farms with farm laborers in the province.
And it is so antithetical to the mentality of most farm families that it created a huge controversy.
So that's cut them off from the farm types.
All the real work in oil and gas is done outside of Edmonton and Calgary.
And that's put them off.
So I don't see them winning more than, well, I don't see them winning any seats out of the 38, but say they win three or four.
You now have, you need 44.
The UCP wins 24 in Calgary, 23 in Calgary, and it wins 35 in the rest of the province.
They've already got a majority.
They don't even have to look at Edmonton.
Well, let me ask you this.
Edmonton is not going to be monolithic for the NDP this time.
Right.
I mean, obviously there's a lot of public sector workers.
I see in your call, you had a column yesterday called The Race is On in Alberta and the Advantage is All UCP.
I'm just going to quote a little bit from your article.
You say that if you work in the public sector, there have been lots of new tax-supported jobs in Alberta in the past four years.
58,000 new public sector jobs.
The Alberta workforce was 19% public sector in 2015, but is almost 24% now.
That's unbelievable.
It is.
It's staggering.
And the net loss in private sector jobs was 48,000.
So we have about 185,000 people looking for work in Alberta right now.
We have higher unemployment in Alberta than in Nova Scotia.
And Calgary's number one.
Edmonton's number three for unemployment rates among major cities in the whole country.
It's never happened.
In my lifetime, I don't remember.
I remember writing all sorts of columns in the 1990s and the 2000s and into the teens about how Alberta had the highest labor market participation rate of any province or territory in the country, where about 75% of Albertans of working age had jobs.
And the next highest was Saskatchewan at about 69%.
We like to work here.
And despite the fact that there are so many people actively in the labor market, we still had the lowest unemployment rate year after year after decade after decade.
And now we have the NDP and we have one of the highest unemployment rates in the country.
And the thing that really grinds my teeth with the NDP is that they keep talking about how they have made sure that in their four years that the benefits have reached every working Albertan, how they're so good for working families.
They care and the conservatives don't.
We have unemployment that we have never seen before.
Not since the 30s, not since the 3030s.
I mentioned before I was on a frack site in Pennsylvania of all places.
You know, I follow some of these really booming American oil and gas jurisdictions.
The Bakken geological formation, that's North Dakota, and it goes into Saskatchewan too, lucky them.
The Permian Basin in West Texas.
There's all these new places where they're fracking for oil, fracking for gas, and U.S. oil production has never been higher.
Never been high.
It's the record.
They're actually energy self-sufficient now.
They're exporting.
North Dakota, 1.4 million barrels of oil per day in a state that's, what, 750,000 people?
So the idea, and their unemployment rate is so low, the idea that this is world oil prices or some foreign problem, tell that to North Dakota, West Texas, Pennsylvania.
That's what they've seen.
Absolutely.
In the last two years, investment in oil and gas in the United States has gone up by 50%.
Yeah, that's amazing.
And in Canada, it has fallen by 76%.
And that is all federal and provincial policy.
It has nothing to do with the world price of oil.
It's the fact that the federal government will not use its constitutional authority to get a pipeline built.
It colluded with Quebec politicians to prevent Energy East from being built.
It hasn't pushed Trans Mountain.
It canceled Northern Gateway.
It's done everything it can to landlock Alberta's oil and gas.
You and I have talked before about how people like Gerald Butz, who was the former principal secretary to the prime minister, were all part of a demarketing scheme where, you know, you can pump as much oil as you'd like, but we're going to make sure you get no markets for it.
And all of that, plus the carbon tax, plus the huge corporate tax increases that we've had in Alberta, which surprisingly, not surprising, haven't raised as much money as was being raised under the lower rate.
All of that together has scared away about $100 billion in private sector investment in oil and gas in the last two years alone.
That's a huge chunk out of the Alberta and out of the national economy.
And that is why the NDP are not going to win, because instinctively, Albertans understand how damaging they've been to the economy.
What makes me sad is that even replacing Rachel Nolly with Jason Kenney, you still have two major problems, John Horgan, the Premier of BC, and Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada.
But at least you'll have someone in Edmonton that finally is putting Alberta and the oil patch first.
I've got two more quick questions for you, if you would indulge me.
You mentioned the rural parts.
I'd like to ask you about one rural MLA and one small-town MLA.
I'm referring to Derek Fildebrandt, who used to be quite a prominent MLA.
He was very prominent in the Wild Rose Party.
Then he fell out of good standing with Jason and had some troubles.
And now he started his own one-man party, really, called the Freedom Conservative Party.
Maybe he's got another MLA.
I don't think so.
Does he have any chance or is he going to be steamrolled by the UCP?
And then I'm going to ask you about Shannon Phillips, the environment minister who's from Lethbridge.
What do you think about those two?
I don't think Fildebrandt's going to win.
If you get outside of Edmonton, anybody or any party that seems to be getting in the way of getting rid of the NDP is going to get pushed aside.
So I think most voters are going to say, can Derek Fildebrand beat the NDP?
Voters vs. NDP00:06:24
No.
Okay, so I'm voting UCP.
I could be wrong about that.
It's not clear to me that he's particularly personally popular in his riding.
He has a new riding that he's running into.
So that makes it even trickier for him to win.
So my thinking is Fildebrand is not going to win.
And then Shannon Phillips, I don't think is going to win either.
Her riding, which is Lethbridge West, includes the University of Lethbridge, and it has been liberal or NDP more than it's been conservative for the last 30 years.
She might still hold on to that.
But the last polling I saw that went into any detail at all in her writing had her 24 points down to the UCP.
So I think she will not survive either.
Yeah, I think you're right on both those predictions, but I'm 2,000 kilometers away, so I'm not as good at detecting things from out here.
Lauren, there's 25 days left to go.
Anything can happen in 25 days.
But I agree with you.
You know, it reminds me of what people, I think Donald Trump said of himself.
He said, I could shoot a guy in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and my supporters would still like me.
I think he said something like that.
And there's a truth to it.
And he said this with all the media, oh, he said the P word.
He said this word.
He was mean.
Like people don't care.
They just wanted Trump to fight, you know, drain the swamp, beat Hillary.
They literally did not care about any rudeness.
I think that's how it is with Kenny.
I think people are disappointed with these shenanigans, but they don't even, what does that stand up next to 200,000 unemployed people?
Last word to you, Lauren.
You remember the movie Braveheart?
A guy comes from Ireland to join William Wallace and the Scots to fight the British.
And he says, do we get the Kelda English?
They're talking about strategy.
They're talking about the morality of it all.
And he's the only question is, do we get the Kelda English?
And when Wallace says yes, that's good enough for him.
And so people are going to say, well, do we get rid of the NDP?
Okay, fine.
You know, you can have pictures of the UCP caucus at a satanic cult ritual with disemboweled goats.
And I don't think it would make any difference.
You know what?
I got to tell you, you're right.
I'd rather, yeah, that's a funny way of y'all.
We'll end on that note.
Lauren Gutta, it's great to see you again.
Thanks for keeping us posted.
You bet.
All right, there you have it.
Our friend Lauren Gunter, senior columnist with the Edmund.
I think he's right.
I think people are so desperate there they would vote for anyone to get rid of Rachel Notley and the NDP.
By the way, I recommend to you our short book on the subject published this week by Sheila Gunread.
It's called Stop Notley.
very much to the point and you can get it at stopnotly.com.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about new details released in the budget of Trudeau's $595 million media bailout.
And by the way, I'm sorry we had technical problems last night, but you can see that show now.
Mark writes, Ezra hit the nail right on the head, the prostitute does what it is paid to do.
I know that is really rough language, but I think there is all the difference in the world between someone who loves you for who you are and someone who loves you because you pay them cash.
I'm sure it's fine that some journalists genuinely support Justin Trudeau.
A lot of Canada is liberal, I think, is fair.
But if that journalist is paid by Trudeau, then how do you know if it's a genuine editorial view or if it's just pay-for-play?
If it's just a PR man, a prostitute.
Sorry, that's what it is.
I mean, they're haggling over the amount of the fee, but that doesn't change what they are.
Billy writes, the Rebel should fight for QCJO status to prevent Justin from refusing access and answering questions from rebel reporters.
The monetary benefit can be directed towards a charity.
QCJO stands for Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization.
That's the journalism license that Trudeau invented in the budget this week.
Just incredible.
Funny thing is I read very carefully the registration requirements and The Rebel meets the test much better than many other media, by the way.
I mean, for example, Post Media, which has the National Post, most of the dailies in Canada, Calgary Herald, Calgary, Sun, Edmonton, Journal, Edmonton, Sun, Vancouver, Sun, Vancouver Province, Montreal Gazette, need I go on.
They're all owned by Post Media.
Post Media, their big owner is a New Jersey hedge fund, hundreds of millions of dollars.
They're owned by Americans.
They're going to get the lion's share of the bailout.
So I'm just saying that the rules don't bar us.
I just don't want to be a prostitute.
You saying take the money and do something else with it.
Well, I understand the suggestion of applying just to show them up.
But at the end of the day, it's essential that we not take the money.
That's just absolutely essential to who we are.
It's like kryptonite to us.
Linda writes, there's only one reason Trudeau et al. are gunning for you.
You are a serious threat to Twinkletoes' re-election.
I am one of your ilk and proud to stand with you.
Yeah, ilk.
That was, I think, the phrase used by the APTN reporter and approved of by the Ottawa Citizen reporter.
I mean, could these guys be any more transparent?
If they were smart, they would just shut up and not mention the obvious political test.
But they can't help themselves because they know that's what this is.
This is about the fancy people getting a subsidy and the bad people like you and me being shut out and eventually censored.
That's a fact.
Well, folks, that's the show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, good night.