Eve Torres, a Quebec Solidaire candidate and Islamist activist, jokingly suggested arson at Montreal’s 1657 Basilica of Notre Dame Street after the 2019 Notre Dame fire, framing it as divine retribution for France’s burqa ban. Her 2017 Parliament testimony on Islamophobia contrasts with her ignored comments, while English media silence mirrors selective outrage over Jason Kenney’s election win—where he exposed foreign-funded groups like the Tides Foundation and David Suzuki Foundation sabotaging Alberta’s energy sector. The episode reveals double standards in media coverage and questions official narratives, exposing how extremist rhetoric against churches is downplayed while attacks on pipelines are amplified, ultimately underscoring systemic bias in reporting. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey rebels, I got a story for you today and I know you haven't heard it anywhere in Canada unless you speak French and follow certain Quebec newspapers.
It's about a Muslim activist politician in Quebec who made a stunning, staggering threat, I think it was a threat, about possibly torching a church in Montreal.
I know you're going to find it hard to believe because you haven't seen that anywhere in the media, but I prove it to you.
I prove it to you.
That's next.
Hey, by the way, before you go, can you just quickly go to the rebel.media slash shows and become a premium subscriber?
It would help us out.
We need the $8 a month to pay the freight around here.
And the benefit to you, besides knowing that you're helping us keep going, is that you get access to the video version.
And today, for example, not only do I show you the imagery of the burning cathedral in Paris, I show you the gorgeous church in Montreal that this activist threatened.
And I show you with your own eyes the Montreal media coverage and a CBC page you'll want to see.
All right, that's it for now.
Go to the rebel.media slash shows.
It's eight bucks a month.
Without further ado, here's the podcast.
You're listening to a Rebel Media podcast.
Tonight, a Quebec politician jokes about burning down a church.
Why didn't you hear about that in the English media?
It's April 17th, 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 to the government is because it's my bloody right to do so.
This week, a Muslim politician in Quebec, this woman, Eve Torres, who wears a hijab, who ran for the left-wing Quebec Solidaire Party, who is a public affairs spokesman for the Islamist National Council of Canadian Muslims.
she made a threat or a joke.
Sounded like a threat to me.
She later said it was a joke.
I'll show you what she said, and you can judge for yourself.
Now, the thing is, it's all in French.
And not a single newspaper or radio station or TV station or news wire service in English Canada, not one, has reported on this.
So you can see here that I'm reading from a French newspaper called La Presse, which you probably know is the newspaper of record in Montreal.
I wanted to show you that in its natural state because now I'm going to put that article through the Google translator, which is imperfect, but I wanted to show it to you in French first.
In English, it says, Fire of Notre Dame.
Manon Masse distances herself from Yves Torres.
Manon Massé.
So the Notre Dame fire is obvious.
That's the horrific fire that consumed so much of Paris's ancient cathedral.
Manon Massé is the leader of the Quebec Solidaire Party.
That's her there.
For whom Yves Torres was a candidate.
The controversial comments of a former Solidarity, Quebec Solidaire candidate on the fire that ravaged the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris put Quebec Solidaire in trouble on Tuesday.
Now, I'm not right now interested in the fallout that her political party.
I really don't care about that.
So let's focus on what she said.
Again, I'm using the Google translation of La Presse.
In a confused message posted and removed from her Facebook page, Torres, who has already been a political analyst invited to the show La Jout on the TVA network, suggests that the fire in Paris Monday would be the result of a divine intervention related to the prohibition of religious symbols in France.
According to Ms. Torres, banning religious signs can stoke the wrath of the imaginary friend.
And then here is the result, according to her.
I would be Prime Minister François Legaud, I would sleep firefighters at the Basilica of Notre Dame Street in Montreal, she continues.
Okay, so pretty clear, but let me be clearer, because that was a funny translation by machine.
Yves Torres, a hijab-wearing Muslim activist, official spokesman for a large Muslim lobby group, former candidate for an Islam-oriented left-wing political party in Quebec, said that the fire in Paris that consumed the Notre Dame was divine punishment to France for banning the Muslim burqa, which France has done, and which François Legaud, they call him the prime minister in Quebec, he's the premier.
François Legaud, their premier, is proposing to do the same thing or a similar thing in Bill 21.
That's the bill I walked you through the other day.
It doesn't actually ban the burqa in public.
It doesn't actually mention Islam or Muslims or any religion.
It just assures that the government itself is secular in Quebec, and it bans face covering for certain government jobs and religious symbols from others, any religious symbols.
Well, Yves Torres says, if I were Legau, I'd have firemen sleeping at Montreal's great cathedral.
That's what she said.
That's what she said.
Really?
So she's like those wacko Westboro Baptist church kooks, you know I'm talking about, who protest at funerals for American soldiers saying God hates gays or whatever.
Just weird macabre extremists mocking at tragedy.
They do that at funerals, which is so awful.
So this Yves Torres says that fire in Paris, that's punishment for banning Muslim burqas, and you better watch out, Montreal.
What a freak, what a kook.
But then she goes further from musing to threatening.
If I were Premier Legaugh, I would have firefighters sleep at the Basilica of Notre Dame Street.
She's talking about this mighty church in Montreal.
Perhaps the finest church in North America?
Certainly amongst them.
Gorgeous, look at that, stunning, stunning.
There has been a church on this place since the year 1657.
Now, the current church was built in 1824.
Took five years to build, so 1829.
So it's almost 200 years old, but like I say, it dates back more than 350 years, the first church there.
That's almost as important a church in Quebec as Notre Dame was in Paris, not just religion, but history and art and architecture.
But much more than that, everything that happened in that church, around the church, because of the church, all who were in that church for reasons, small or large, grand events or tiny events or even an individual's own religious reasons.
How many millions over the centuries have been through that church for some meaningful reason?
The church is like a mountain.
Except a mountain is just a thing.
This is much more meaningful.
It is nothing but meaning.
But it's always been there.
It's just there.
It's as much a part of Montreal as the river is or the island or a mountain.
And imagine saying, yeah, nice church you got there.
Nice city you got there.
Nice province you got there.
It would be a shame if anything happened to it.
You know, the wrath of Allah or whatever, or maybe some arson.
Hey, better have firemen sleep at that gorgeous, gorgeous church just in case.
Oh, I thought we weren't allowed to ask questions about the cause of the Notre Dame fire.
I thought it was Islamophobic to suggest that the fire could have theoretically been caused by arson.
There are, on average, two churches burnt every single day in France, often by arson, often by Muslim terrorists.
Sometimes it's not fire, sometimes it's a priest getting his throat slit by an ISIS terrorist.
Other times it's just vandalism.
It's often ISIS doing it, so they say, but here we have a Muslim official in Quebec, an official of the National Council of Canadian Muslims, saying these things.
Now I mentioned her political party, which is pro-Islamic and far-left.
Even they could not countenance such a thuggish threat.
That's what those La Pressse headlines were about.
Or if you give this woman the benefit of the doubt, such a thuggish, tasteless joke.
I'm not sure if I think it's a joke.
How is it a joke?
How is it a joke?
Other protesters against Bill 21 in Quebec include this guy, Adil Charkowy, who was arrested and held for years on a terrorism security certificate until he was let out.
There are plenty of terrorists in Quebec, including the ISIS terrorist who stormed into parliament and murdered Nathan Cirillo.
So yeah, if that's a joke, it's not really a funny joke.
It's more a call to arms, I think, on a plain reading.
Now, this story has had a fair bit of media coverage in Quebec.
Here's Le Devoir.
But all the coverage is in French.
I can't find anything in the Montreal Gazette, the largest English paper in that province.
But look at this.
The CBC search engine.
If you type in Eve Torres, you'll see that there are actually a few stories that show up in the CBC website.
Scroll down.
You can see a few of them.
You can see her complaining about the Burqa ban.
You can see her complaining that someone was mean to her political lawn sign when she ran for office.
You can see her complaining, which she seems to do a lot.
And that's it.
Not a word about her joke or her threat or whatever it is, claiming that if Quebec doesn't watch out, its churches will be torched too.
There's nothing to see here, folks, because it's off narrative.
So just pretend it didn't happen.
State Broadcaster says it didn't happen.
Montreal Gazette says it didn't happen.
Not a single English language newspaper or radio station says it happened.
Just run some more stories about how Jason Kenney and Andrew Scheer are neo-Nazis or whatever.
Just fill the papers with that, okay?
Eve Torres is a bigot.
We know that.
She's a bigot who complains about bigotry, though.
She's a thug who claims that she was bullied.
Here's a transcript of when she went to Ottawa in 2017 to testify before Parliament in support of a ban on Islamophobia.
I'm going to read her testimony in full, every word.
It's only a couple minutes long.
Can you bear with me?
I want you to know that I'm not cherry-picking or skipping anything.
Here's what she said to Parliament.
She said, I've been working with Muslim communities in Quebec for more than 15 years.
I've been able to see the progress of Muslim Quebecers, but I have also seen the many barriers to social acceptance that they have to overcome.
Unfortunately, for years, we have heard about Muslims being belittled and stigmatized in political speeches or public and media commentaries.
Yet Muslims in Quebec have not seen their views, challenges, and concerns taken very seriously.
In the meantime, the rise of right-wing extremist groups in Quebec has become very problematic.
The NCCM, that's her lobby group, argues, that there is a direct link between hate speech and violence against minority groups.
However, a number of Quebec politicians have acknowledged that the climate created by Islamophobic rhetoric has contributed to the emergence of violence against Quebec Muslims, which led to the terrorist act against the centre culturale Islamique de Québec.
But no concrete measures have really been taken.
The trauma caused by that attack, that's the Quebec City mosque attack, still permeates Quebec's Muslim communities.
I met with the families of the victims and the wider community, and I can say that communities are extremely concerned about their future, especially their children's future.
This type of challenge is only starting to be heard by the provincial government and some opposition parties.
I would be happy to further elaborate during time for questions.
So she threatens or jokes about terrorist arson to stop a hijab ban, but she's against hate speech, you see.
She's worried about hard words leading to violence against Muslims while she warns the province to better have some firemen sleeping at a Christian target.
She whines.
She complains about the trauma of words, but when France and the French people and Catholics and the whole Western world are all transfixed by the tragic fire in Paris, she sticks in her knife and twists it a bit.
Is she a terrorist?
I don't think so.
Did she threaten terrorism?
Rhetorically, yes.
Did she encourage terrorism?
Undoubtedly, she did.
Did she do more to divide Muslims from non-Muslims than anyone else in Quebec has since that mosque shooting in Quebec City?
You're damn right she did.
She lived down to the stereotype of Muslims hating and threatening the Canadian community that has so welcomed her.
Even the hard-left Quebec Solidaire Party knows that she has gone too far.
But the CBC and the rest of the media party, yeah, no, no, no, no, silence.
Say, if a Christian activist, or even just a guy wearing a Donald Trump MAGA Make America Great Again hat, made a threat against a mosque, better have some firefighters there, better have some security guards there.
Do you think he would get a bit of media attention?
Oh, yes, it would.
Probably actually get the RCMP SWAT team raid on that fool's home as he was arrested and charged with a hate crime too.
But a hate crime from a Muslim woman?
Yeah.
Everyone from Justin Trudeau to the CBC will just avert their eyes.
Albertans United00:13:45
As always, stay with us for more.
So tonight, tonight I send an important message to businesses everywhere.
If you want to benefit from what will be the lowest taxes in Canada, if you want to benefit from a government that will cut its red tape burden by one-third, if you want to benefit from Canada's most educated population and a deep culture of enterprise and innovation, help us come here, invest here, create jobs here.
We knew the Alberta Advantage here.
Wow, what a change from the last four years of socialism under Rachel Notley.
Well, you saw that last night.
I hope you joined us for at least part of our election night coverage for three and a half hours.
I was here in Rebel HQ and Kian Becky and Sheila Gunread were at Kenny's election night event in Calgary.
It was a wonderful night.
I should tell you that we had more viewers of our live stream than the CBC did for most of the night.
Tens of thousands over the course of the evening.
If you're interested, you can actually go back and see it on our YouTube page.
It was a wonderful evening.
And I thank you for watching and I thank our team here for putting it on.
What a new feeling in the province.
And of course, there are many challenges and obstacles yet to come.
In some ways, the hard work only begins now.
But as Churchill said in the North Africa campaign, he said, it's not the beginning of the end, but perhaps it's the end of the beginning.
And joining us now via Skype from Calgary is a woman who has been working so hard to get us where we are now, our friend Prem Singh, who is the founder of Canadians for Democracy and Prosperity.
You may know some of their projects, such as Save Calgary and Alberta Can't Wait.
Prem, some congratulations are due to you.
Although you were not a candidate, and I hope one day you will be, you helped shape the battlefield of ideas.
Tell me what this moment means to you and so many other entrepreneurial Albertans.
Well, I think you said it, or Winston Churchill said it very aptly.
The work is just going to begin, even though for us and for many Albertans, this began in 2016 when we started Alberta Can't Wait and went down that unity path that everybody thought was impossible.
And so I'd like to take this opportunity to congratulate all Albertans.
This has been a long time in the making and it hasn't been an easy ride for anyone.
It was an ugly campaign full of mudslinging scandal and complete with RCMP investigations.
I think we need to come together right now and rise above everything that happened.
We have to focus on what's important to all Albertans, the economy, jobs, education, health care, infrastructure, basic human rights for all Albertans.
We have to work together as Albertans, grassroots Albertans, and all be leaders.
Our elected officials now have to be held to account, and they will be, I think, more so than ever, because the province is very engaged and the province has very high expectations.
You know, Premier designate Kenny, he works for us, and we won't let him forget that.
People have such high expectations, they feel like today a light has been switched on, and all of a sudden, you know, jobs and money and prosperity are going to be just flowing through the province.
And it's going to be a difficult process to unwind a lot of the things the NDP did.
And we're happy, actually, Canadians for Democracy and Prosperity put forward two campaigns, Open for Business, which did talk about business taxes and regulatory tape.
The whole campaign was adopted by the UCP, as well as another campaign we did.
It's about youth, where we talked about having financial literacy in schools.
So we're very happy about this.
As you said, it's been a multi-stepped process.
And right now, I mean, I'm very happy.
It feels like Alberta is back to normal again, but I feel we have a mountain to climb still.
And it's going to be a mountain that I don't feel we've climbed before.
You know, that old saying from the movies, the call is coming from inside the house.
The problem was coming from inside the province.
That's removed, but you still have the problem in Ottawa, Justin Trudeau.
You still have the problem in Victoria, the blockade put on by their NDP.
So it's not like when Donald Trump became president, he sort of cleared out most of the blockages.
We are still blocked.
Alberta is still blocked politically, geographically.
Kenny does not have the ability to build a pipeline on his own, for example.
Now, that's not the only problem.
But like I say, the battle is just beginning.
Let me ask you.
Go ahead.
Yeah, and I mean, from listening to, you know, their campaign and Jason, and, you know, we are, people are angry and rightfully so.
And capitalizing on all the anger with respect to the carbon tax, Trans Mountain equalization, that's all one thing, but being actually effective in winning these self-proclaimed battles, as you just talked about, it's another thing.
Like, I don't know if you're aware, but Peter Zeehan, that geopolitical author, he already stated so starkly that we're going to lose.
And I believe that Alberta is going through an existential crisis, and our difference from the rest of the country was made fully transparent with the NDP government.
Our country's population is maturing.
Alberta's is still the youngest across the board.
And the weight on Alberta's shoulders is going to increase as opposed to decrease.
So, whether or not the methods that this new government chooses to take are successful or not, I guess that remains to be seen.
Can I ask you some questions?
But I do feel that we as Albertans have to figure out how we fit in Confederation and in Canada.
Declaring war on all these Rockefellers and all the foundations that he mentioned, that's great.
And it's a long time needed.
But we also need to realize we need to get out of our own bubble.
And I feel that Canadians and Albertans, especially in our energy sector, we've lived in our own bubble for so long.
We don't realize that it's the same money that targeted the Canadian energy sector and our pipelines.
That's the same money that's recruiting and funding all the candidates down south, like Alexandria Cortez, with the new Green Deal.
There's a globalist effort to shut down the fossil fuel sector altogether.
Well, there was one line, I think it got the loudest applause last night in Kenny's victory speech when he said he put on notice and he named names.
He said the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, the Tides Foundation out of San Francisco.
I think he mentioned the Suzuki Foundation, and there may have been one other here.
Let me play a moment of that.
It's the first time I've seen a senior leader speak so bluntly.
Here, take a listen to that.
And now, friends, I have a message, another message.
A message to those foreign-funded special interests who have been leading a campaign of economic sabotage against this great province.
To the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, to the Tides Foundation, to lead now, to the David Suzuki Foundation, and to all of the others.
Your days of pushing around Albertans with impunity just ended.
Albertans are patient and we're fair-minded.
But we've had enough of your campaign of defamation and double standards.
So today, today with this election, we begin to stand up for ourselves, for our jobs, and for our future.
Today, we Albertans begin to fight back.
From this day forward, whenever you lie about how we produce energy, we will tell the truth assertively.
And we will use every means at our disposal to hold you to account.
When multinational companies like HSBC boycott Alberta, we'll boycott them.
We will launch a public inquiry into the foreign source of funds behind the campaign to landlock Alberta's energy.
And we will ban foreign money from our politics and use every legal tool at our disposal to defend the working women and men of Alberta.
I do think that in the previous Harper government, Joe Oliver did try to speak out about such things, but he was declared a radical at the time.
It's only because things have gotten so bad that we've at least people have started to learn and become educated on the realities of all of the foreign influence on not just our energy sector, frankly, it's on a lot of different sectors.
You're so right.
I'm so glad you reminded me of Joe Oliver.
I remember when he wrote that impressive op-ed, and boy, did they pounce on him.
And instead of doubling down, it was almost like Stephen Harper and team said, oh, let's back off a bit.
If they would have pressed on, they would have had some success, I think.
And that's why I found that encouraging, because Jason Kenney, on his key moment, he'd already won.
Instead of backing down or softening, I think he sharpened.
I hope he carries through with that.
Let me ask you a specific question about a candidate.
Sonia Savage was a successful candidate for Kenny in Calgary.
I knew her when she worked at a pipeline company.
I think it was Enbridge, if I recall.
Enbridge, yes.
So she knows the pipeline file inside out.
She knows the frustration.
She knows its enemies.
She knows the regulatory problems.
I sure hope that she is given an energy portfolio, or if not Minister of Energy itself, leading the anti-anti-pipeline crusade, if you know what I mean.
Do you have any right in making that guess?
I would assume she would be at the top of the list for the energy portfolio.
I do believe there's some key Calgary, obviously, players like Tyler Chandrow, Mike Ellis, they will all be, you know, cabinet material, Rick McIver.
And the fellow that won out of Edmonton, I believe his background is a lawyer.
Casey Medoo, that very, very exciting win up there against a CBC journalist who turned NDP spokesmodel.
He was crushed by.
Well, not crushed, but he was beaten by Casey Madhu.
Very excited about that.
Yes.
I also think that there's going to be, besides all of the governing that they need to do, they're going to have to do a lot of outreach, not only to conservatives, because the foundation, let's be honest, is weak.
During the campaign, there were rumors and pretty strong rumors, actually, that there was going to be another party coming out and Brian Gene was coming back.
And, you know, so I think it's going to be important that they reach out to their own members and they reach out to all Albertans.
So because right now, everyone is very polarized.
Very interesting stuff, Prem Singh.
It's great to see you again.
And congratulations.
Alberta's just a little bit freer today.
All right.
Thanks.
Thanks, Ezra.
Right on.
That's our friend Prem Singh.
She's the boss of Canadians for Democracy and Prosperity.
And she's joined us today via Skype from Calgary.
Stay with us.
ahead on The Rebel.
Wolf Theory Suggested00:02:48
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about the Notre Dame Cathedral fire.
Carol writes, The Notre Dame Cathedral burning broke my heart.
The investigators have said they are not excluding a criminal act.
Well, we've seen so many different reports.
Immediately they ruled out terrorism.
How could they?
When the flames hadn't even consumed the place yet.
Then they said it was a construction crew, but I saw on TV the construction companies saying they didn't have anyone there.
We need more answers.
I don't want to jump to conclusions, but neither do I want to be left hanging for a year wondering what happened, like all of us are about that mass shooting in Las Vegas.
Remember that one?
We still have nothing explaining it.
Deborah writes, I'm going with arson because the authorities said it wasn't way too quickly in my opinion.
Well, that's the thing.
It's the reverse of the boy who cries wolf, right?
If the authorities immediately said, it wasn't a wolf, before they could possibly even know.
Yeah, that suggests maybe it was a wolf.
And that's the problem when you lie, when you obscure instead of clarify, as Macron obviously does in France, he's despised.
But the whole 5P professionals, the police, the politicians, the press, the professors, forgetting a P right now, but you know what I'm talking about.
Andy writes, I would not trust the Macron-controlled media to tell me if it's raining or not.
Yeah, I mean, that's my point.
Look, what happened is a tragedy.
It's terrible.
But it would be a lot worse in the hypothetical I put forward yesterday if someone who was known to Quebec police, perhaps had been released on bail or something, were the one to have committed an arson.
Again, I don't know if anyone did commit arson, but you can imagine the lengths Macron would go to to avoid that fact coming out.
I say again, we don't know the facts yet, but I don't trust Macron either, do you?
On my interview with Andrew Lawton, Bruce writes, the world isn't destroying itself like they claim these people truly have pulled the alarm too many times, and every time the date passes, nothing happens.
Yeah, you know, I just think global warming is one of those things that when a pollster calls you up, you know exactly what you're supposed to say.
And I suppose if you go to one of those garbage cans that has like the three or four or five different bins, if you're not in a rush, you'll say, okay, which one does this go in?
But other than those trite, trivial actions, does anyone really, does anyone really say, yes, I will, I believe in this so deeply that I'm going to pay more, that I'm going to change my lifestyle?
Look, if Katherine McKenna and Justin Trudeau don't do that, why would you?
If Al Gore and David Suzuki don't change their lifestyle, why would you?
Lifestyle Changes Matter00:00:28
They're not acting like they mean it.
As I always say, at least PETA activists, people for the ethical treatment of animals, at least they don't eat meat while lecturing you.
Catherine McKenna always tweets from her latest Jet set.
It's tough to take her seriously.
Folks, that's the show for today.
I hope you enjoyed watching our live stream yesterday on the Alberta election.
If you did, we had a ton of viewers.
We were on air for three and a half hours.
It was really great.
And I hope we do that again for the federal election.