Tommy Robinson, ex-Rebel Media journalist, is running for the European Parliament in Northwest England, where proportional voting could secure a seat with just 8–10% of the vote. He highlights 23,000 jihadis on UK watchlists—3,000 monitored 24/7—and ties radicalization to government failures like Chelsea Wright’s rape case and John Fletcher’s "don’t fund terrorism" sign suppression. Critics like Sadiq Khan allegedly prioritize policing "hate speech" over knife attacks while diverting officers to social media. Robinson’s campaign reflects Brexit-era disillusionment with pro-EU elites, including Theresa May, who Levant calls "the worst PM in a century," as 17.4 million Brits rejected open borders and EU influence. His rise signals a shift toward outsider voices in UK politics, challenging establishment narratives on migration and security. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello my rebels, I've got some news for you today.
A rebel alumnus named Tommy Robinson is running for public office.
He is seeking election as a member of the European Parliament to represent Northwest England in Brussels in the EU.
Now this wasn't supposed to happen because Brexit said they were supposed to leave, but Brexit didn't happen.
So Tommy wants to go in and bash up the place.
I fully support it.
And listen to my monologue and you'll hear how I think he can actually do it given the interesting lay of the land and vote counting system.
Hey folks, before I get to that podcast, please consider supporting the Rebel.
And by that, I mean becoming a premium subscriber.
If you go to the rebel.media slash shows, eight bucks a month or 80 bucks for the whole year buys you a premium membership.
Not only do you get the video version of these podcasts, but you also get Sheila Gunreed's show, David Menzies' show, and you get the moral satisfaction of helping to pay the bills for me and my friends here to put this stuff together for you every day on audio podcast.
Without further ado, listen to the news about my friend Tommy.
You're listening to a Rebel Media podcast.
Tonight, our friend Tommy Robinson runs for the European Parliament, and here's why I think he's got a chance to win.
It's April 25th, 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 about why I'm publishing that is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Tommy Robinson announced his candidacy for public office today.
He's running in northwest England.
That's Manchester and the surrounding areas.
He's running to be that region's member of the European Parliament.
He's running as an independent.
But because of the unusual voting system there, I think he's got a real chance to win.
I'm pretty sure you know Tommy.
He used to work for us here at the Rebel, and I've talked about him dozens of times.
He was a journalist for us for a year or so.
He really opened my eyes to what's going on in the United Kingdom, especially with regards to mass Muslim migration.
And at first, I couldn't believe it when I learned that there are literally 23,000 jihadis on police watch lists in that country, 3,000 of whom are tracked around the clock.
That's an army of terrorists.
And what good does it do just to track them?
So when they decide to ram pedestrians with a vehicle, police can watch it on a surveillance camera.
You can say, yeah, we knew that guy was a risk.
They're just allowed to roam free in the UK.
At best, they're just propagandizing for the jihad.
I actually bumped into one of these jihadis on the street.
Abdul Hakeem is his name.
He had come to stalk Tommy Robinson at his trial last year.
He was out and about, just on the street, free as a lark, a jihadi.
He was just talking, but sometimes these jihadis do the jihad.
Like the time right near Parliament where a terrorist rammed a bunch of pedestrians on one of London's famous bridges.
This is an Islamic jihad attack.
The man that done this would have either been radicalized in a prison or he would have been radicalized on the streets of the UK with full knowledge of our government and our security services.
They will know who he is.
Yeah, mate, I have information that shows there was four terrorist attacks last week in France.
Four in France.
There was 12 planned last year.
Driving your car like this man has done is exactly what the Inspire magazine, which is Al-Qaeda's magazine, which was downloaded by 50,000 British Muslims last year.
50,000 British Muslims downloaded a terrorist manual in our country.
50,000, not 10, not 20, 50,000 people who want to see exactly what you see there.
That's what they want.
So that was Tommy.
I hadn't actually met him by that point.
I had known about him from afar over here in Canada.
I had interviewed him a few times at Sun News Network by satellite or Skype, but I really got to know him once he started doing a lot of videos for us.
And not just videos, he did campaigns too, like we do here in Canada, like when Tommy fought for Chelsea Wright, who was raped by a gang of migrants but abandoned by police.
Or when we helped John Fletcher, you know him, the shopkeeper who was threatened by police if he didn't take down a little sign on his shop that said don't fund terrorism.
Well, that was actually a real issue in his hometown.
Other convenience stores had been raising money for terrorists, not John.
But the police actually told him to take that little sign down or they would put him out of business.
So Tommy stepped in and helped John and helped John's family fight back.
I visited the UK probably half a dozen times with Tommy.
I saw that the caricature about Tommy was false.
He wasn't a racist.
He certainly wasn't an anti-Semite.
In fact, everywhere I went, people came up to him asking for a photo.
So many minorities too, especially from places where they know what radical Islam can do.
I think every single Sikh or Hindu in the United Kingdom is a Tommy Robinson fan.
I've seen it with my own eyes.
Once I was riding in a minivan on the highway with Tommy, we're going up north, and a car pulled up beside us, and the Sikh family in the car recognized Tommy.
We're driving 100 kilometers an hour.
And they started waving at him and taking pictures, car to car, on the highway.
So I saw the love people had for him, mainly the poor, the working classes, the forgotten people, working class white folks, indigenous Brits.
In other words, the UK's deplorables.
I learned just the other day that only 4% of the MPs in the United Kingdom are from so-called working class background.
It really is the same as the U.S. Congress.
All just rich lawyers and activists, the kind of people who regard the United Kingdom as small and embarrassing and love Europe as exotic and cosmopolitan.
So they love the European Union, their own little mini United Nations.
But the EU actually passes binding laws that rule in the UK.
So that fancy class, the TOFs, as they're called, they love mass migration because it drives down wages and drives up rents and they're all landlords.
They don't care about the rape gangs.
It's not going after their girls.
You know, these rape gangs in the UK have literally raped tens of thousands, probably more than 100,000 working-class British girls over the years.
And the police have covered it up out of fear of being called racist because more than 80% of the perpetrators are Pakistani Muslim men.
That's really what's motivated Tommy these past years, the rape of these young girls by Muslim men who regard infidel women, and by women, I mean children as young as nine years old, regard them as rapable.
I'm sorry to speak so bluntly, but that's what it's been about.
That's what Tommy was reporting about outside the courthouse that day in Leeds.
A rape gang of more than two dozen men had raped girls as young as 11 years old hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times.
Tommy simply named the accused men on a video who were all later convicted, by the way, and naming them he just read off the BBC government website their names.
But he was arrested, as you can see this video here, packed off to the police station, then sent to court, where he had a trial that took less than 10 minutes long, and he wasn't even allowed to speak.
And then he was immediately sent to prison for 13 months, where he was soon put in solitary confinement, and practically starved, by the way.
Look at him when he came out, look how thin he was.
He had PTSD.
He was in a box 23 and a half hours a day.
He was in solitary.
As you know, we crowdfunded Tommy's legal appeal, and we busted him out of there after 10 weeks.
The Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales himself called Tommy's arrest, his prosecution, his conviction and sentencing, called it all improper and illegal.
And the reason I tell you all these stories together, about the police just watching the 23,000 jihadis who roam the streets, about the police cracking down on a shopkeeper who says don't fund terrorism, about police who ignore young girls being raped, or in the case of Chelsea, ignore a woman being raped.
The reason I tell you about how they cracked down on Tommy, arresting him for me really reporting the facts about these things, the reason I tell you all these things is to show you what the system itself is like there now.
All the five P professionals, as Daniel Pipes calls them, the police, the prosecutors, the press, the politicians, the professors, they're all in on it.
The entire establishment.
London, the great city, is in the middle of a massive crime wave, knife attacks, and acid attacks.
That's a thing over there, but their Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, who used to be a lawyer for terrorists himself, if you can believe it, that mayor has different priorities than acid attacks or knives.
Voting for a Joke Parliament00:14:58
He has banned ads on the London subway station that aren't Sharia compliant, that no bikinis allowed.
That's far more important for him to crack down on.
Oh, and he's put 900 real police on the hate speech beat, policing Facebook and Twitter crimes, hurt feelings crimes, 900.
So yeah, do you see the problem here?
Brits were having enough of this.
And so in 2016, before the Trump wave hit America, the Brits voted for Brexit to exit the European Union.
It was really a vote against the gravy train for the fancy people, those elites.
Really a vote to get back to Britain as its own country, not as a colony of Europeans.
Britain with its own borders, not open borders like Angela Merkel was doing to Europe at that time.
And just a slap back at all the fancy people, all the five Ps, who universally supported remaining in the EU, which of course included much of the Conservative Party over there, which only called the Brexit referendum to quiet the leave rump in their party.
They thought Remain would win the referendum, so they really never meant to carry through with it.
I mean, everyone knew, everyone knew that Remain would win.
Everyone they knew was going to vote to Remain.
But the little people, on election day, have the same number of votes as the big people.
They each have won.
And so on that day, it was the largest vote in UK history.
17.4 million Brits voted to leave, and each deplorable had the same vote as the editor of the Sunday Times.
And against all the good advice from their superiors, against all the bizarre threats made by everyone from bank CEOs to airline CEOs to health officials, of all the calamities that would befall the UK if it removed itself from control by the EU, as if the UK was nothing for millennia beforehand.
As if the UK was only found and saved by France and Germany these last decades.
The Remain campaign actually nicknamed this strategy Project Fear, which I think Justin Trudeau has copied here in Canada.
But it didn't work.
I mean, even the British Sandwich Association warned that there would be no more sandwiches if Brexit were to vote to leave.
But certainly there would be serious problems in terms of some of the fresh ingredients we bring in from the European Union and also from overseas, particularly if we have problems at the ports and we can't get ingredients through because they're all fresh and don't have a very long shelf life and we've got no chance of stockpiling fresh ingredients.
So I think the answer from the sandwich industry is going to be that it's going to limit the amount of choice that consumers have if we suddenly crash out Brexit in the way that it's being talked about.
That was real.
That wasn't satire.
The sandwich man was saying, if you vote to leave the European Union, no more sandwiches for you.
He said that, I swear.
Yeah, no one bought it.
And so no one trusts the establishment anymore.
I don't even trust the British Sandwich Association anymore.
I never will again.
And so for the best thousand days, it's been a thousand days.
The establishment has tried to undo the results of that Brexit vote.
And can you believe it they did?
They just refused to leave on the legal deadline, March 29th of this year.
They just literally ignored the referendum results.
The largest vote in UK history, 7.4 million people.
The remainers just ignored, betrayed, denied, defied the Democratic result.
Imagine if here in Canada, Kathleen Wynne simply refused to step aside for Doug Ford, or in Alberta, if Rachel Notley just refused to step aside for Jason Kenny, or some judge somewhere said Donald Trump had to go despite winning the election.
That's the level of shocking anti-democratic craziness afoot in the UK right now.
And so next month, the UK will still be in the European Union when it's time to elect their little stable of European MPs.
Now, there are 750 of these MEPs members of the European Parliament.
And 73 out of the 750 come from the UK.
So you can see one of the problems here.
The UK is outvoted on everything before it even starts.
But unlike the United Nations, it's largely symbolic.
The EU's laws are actually binding in the UK.
You can see one of the problems, can't you?
Well, the Brexit referendum was supposed to pull the UK out last month, so there wouldn't be any MEPs, but they're still in.
And so next month, the election will go forward for these 73 British MEPs.
And it's for one of those seats that Tommy Robinson is running.
And I think he could win.
Now, to be candid, I don't think Tommy could win an election as an MP, a member of parliament, because like in Canada and like in the United States, that's a first past-the-post voting system for UK MPs.
That is, you simply have to get more votes in your district than anyone else.
And I'm not sure if Tommy could do that.
He has a very strong, passionate base of support, but I don't know if it would reach 35 or 40% needed in any given location.
Not when the left would be completely against him with Labour, and many on the right would vote Conservative or something else like that.
And even though Tommy is friends with Gerard Batten, the new leader of the UKIP party, Tommy himself has not been permitted to join that party or to run for it.
And neither has Nigel Farage allowed Tommy to join his new party called the Brexit Party.
Farage just launched that very recently and it's off to a strong start.
Polls show it will likely get the most votes in the upcoming MEP elections.
And Farage has come back, I think, genuinely reluctantly.
I think he thought his work was done in 2016 when he pushed Brexit through.
And then he resigned his leaders to UKIP and he sort of did a victory tour.
But now he has to go back in.
He doesn't have much time for Gerard Batten, his UKIP successor, and he's been clear he doesn't have any time for Tommy either, actually.
A lot of people are concerned that UKIP is being dragged in a direction that even you might feel uncomfortable.
Even me.
You know, when I was leader of UKIP, I was in the UK.
But it's your party.
When I was leader of UKIP, I actually forbade any former members of the EDL or the BNP to even be members of the party, because I wanted us to talk about real issues like immigration, but without anybody being able to say we were racist and actually meaning anything.
And I think UKIP is now tempted, or some people in UKIP are tempted, to let figures like Tommy Robinson into the party, and I think that would be a catastrophic mistake.
Now, I can understand why Nigel Farage has wanted to stay as a one-issue guy.
Brexit, get the UK out of the EU.
I get it.
And it has been a successful strategy for him, but there are other issues that do need to be addressed in the world as well.
And Tommy addresses them, or at least one of them very well.
And they are uncomfortable issues, and they will immediately get you branded far-right.
That's the phrase in the UK.
It says stinging there as being called alt-right is in Canada or the United States.
Farage himself is often called far-right anyways by the left, but he has avoided associating with people who are concerned about Islam.
I think he is worried that will marginalize him just too much.
Now let Nigel be Nigel.
I think he has a great fighting spirit, and he's a great British character.
I mean, take a look at his recent speech.
I did actually, rather stupidly, for a moment, believe that we'd won.
But it became clear, pretty early on, really, with the so-called negotiation, that our Remainer Parliament, our Remainer Cabinet, and indeed our Remainer Prime Minister were going to do their utmost to delay, dilute, and in many cases, to actually stop and overturn Brexit.
I think he's going to do great, but at the end of the day, he's not a working class chav, as they say, from Luton.
He doesn't know the world Tommy grew up in.
He doesn't know the Chelsea rights of Sunderland, the John Fletchers.
He's part of the fancy set.
He's a former stockbroker.
He's a media star who is outstanding on Brexit, but on other matters, it's pretty much establishment, and he has no time for Tommy.
Now, I look forward to Nigel and the Brexit Party.
I hope it helps to finally get rid of the worst prime minister in a century, Theresa May.
Oh my God, May is worse than Neville Chamberlain.
I mean, Chamberlain was obviously disastrously wrong in his assessment of Hitler.
But other than that, he was a solid man, a leader, a loyal patriot.
And I don't know if you know this, but after his disgraceful misjudgment of Hitler, he in fact went on to serve as a member of Winston Churchill's war cabinet.
And from what I've read of history, very loyally and effectively very trusted by Churchill.
He made one disastrous mistake, an enormous mistake, although I don't know if Britain could stop Hitler in any event.
But the man I believe was inherently good, Neville Chamberlain.
I cannot say that about this serially incompetent deceiver, Theresa May, this disloyal placeholder.
She's destroying the Conservative Party, and I don't much care.
But maybe her party does, and hopefully the coming MEP elections will be the catalyst to throw her out.
I don't know.
But back to Tommy.
See, you have to understand the mood over there.
From what I can tell, it's not just the same mood we saw in Ontario before Doug Ford won or Alberta before Jason Kenney won or even America before Donald Trump won.
No.
This isn't really just the moment when the deplorables rose up.
See, that comparison would have worked back in 2016 when Brexit voters won.
That was the moment when that comparison fixed Brexit Trump.
That fits.
But I'm trying to convey to you the mood today, 1,000 days after Brexit passed, but it has not yet been allowed to happen.
So imagine 1,000 days after Donald Trump was elected, but he was not yet allowed to take office.
Imagine a thousand days of weaving and bobbing and deeking, a thousand days of whining and backpedaling by the entire establishment, all the 5P professionals.
And then on the day it was supposed to happen, March 29th, it did not happen.
It was betrayed.
It was undone.
I don't want to be dramatic.
But it really, you know, the idea was conceived in 2016, but it was aborted on the day it was supposed to be birthed in 2019.
Imagine the rage amongst those 17.4 million and even people of goodwill who voted to remain but said, all right, fair is fair, we lost the vote, let's leave.
So this is not just discontent.
It was discontent back in 2016.
But discontent was blocked illegally, unconstitutionally, undemocratically for sure.
So it's not discontent anymore.
It's rage now.
It's shock.
It's utter disillusionment with the entire political class, the 5P professionals.
Would you ever trust them again?
And imagine now voting for a member of the European Parliament.
Imagine voting in an European Union vote that wasn't even supposed to happen because you were supposed to be gone by now.
Imagine voting to go and be a part of a joke parliament, a joke, but a joke with the power to actually rule the UK that was supposed to now be free.
What would you do if you were a Brit?
I think if I were a Brit, I would want to find a bull and send him into a China shop, I think.
Here's a bull in a shop in China.
It's not really what you normally mean by a China shop, but I thought this was a pretty good video.
This was a bull that was about to be butchered, turned into meat, but he had other plans, didn't he?
That's a hell of a video.
That's a real video there.
Well, who is the bull to send into the European Union's China shop and just bash it up?
Tommy Robinson, I think.
Now, he's not a reckless smasher like that bull is.
Tommy has a real message.
He has a coherent message and an ideology, and he has a track record and he has a mission.
But his style, well, here's a dramatic Tommy moment that I think more than a few Brits might be happy to see him do, metaphorically speaking, to the European Union.
This was when Tommy was in Rome.
Now, he wasn't working for us then.
He was on his own, independent journalism, and he was threatened by a migrant who actually threatened to kill Tommy.
Watch this.
Yeah, that's about two seconds.
I think Tommy can do that to the EU.
I like Nigel Farage, and I think he's going to be great in the European Union.
I like Tommy even more, and I think he's going to be like a blowtorch to the political correctness in there.
He's going to smack him metaphorically.
But can he really win?
Can he win?
Well, that's the thing.
There are eight members of the European Parliament to be selected from the northwest of England.
That's around Manchester.
And it is not a first-past-the-post system.
It's sort of a mathematical way of counting votes.
The top vote-getter wins, gets one MEP, and then that party's votes are divided by two, and then they check, and the next top vote-getter wins, and then their vote is divided by two for it.
The same party is divided by three.
I'm not going to take you through the whole system.
It's actually quite ingenious, but long story short, let me tell you how the story ends.
You can win and become a member of the European Parliament in Northwest England with less than 10% of the vote.
In the last election in 2014, 1.75 million people voted in that electoral region, and it took 160,000 votes to win one of the eight seats.
In the previous elections in 2009, 1.65 million people voted in Northwest England.
It took 132,000 votes to win.
That's 8%.
Can Tommy Robinson get 8% or 9% or 10% of the vote in Northwest England?
Well, I do believe he can.
Now it will be an uphill battle in some ways.
The entire media class is against him.
The entire political class is too.
Nigel Farage won't even touch him.
The UKIP won't even let him run for them.
And the other parties would throw him in prison.
Labor and the Conservatives would throw him in prison if they could.
In fact, the Conservatives already did.
Police will likely harass him.
It wouldn't shock me if he was charged with some trumped-up charge, some stitch-up, just to get him off the streets like he was that day in Leeds.
Why Canadians Flee for Gas00:16:17
Now, we hear the rebels support Tommy.
We always have.
But of course, we're foreigners in the UK.
I'm a Canadian.
So I can't vote.
I can't donate.
Now, if you're a Brit watching this, you can do both of those things.
And I encourage you to go to Tommy's website, votetommy.co.uk.
That's how they do it over there, .co.uk.
But there is one thing that we will be doing as a company.
We will be reporting on the campaign fairly.
And again, it's a little bit odd that a foreign media outlet has to do that.
But as I've shown you a dozen times now, the British media are perhaps the worst in the free world and worse than in many authoritarian regimes.
So we'll be covering the campaign.
We'll be covering Tommy.
We'll be covering Nigel Farage, both from here, but also by sending reporters over there in the days and weeks ahead.
In fact, I'm putting together a big roster of other reporters from Canada and the United States and Australia who will join me in the UK in May.
I'll keep you posted about that at realreporters.uk.
That's actually a way, if you want to help Tommy, but you're not a Brit.
If you're a Brit, you can donate and vote for him, but if you're not, obviously.
Well, you can chip in to help us do our media coverage.
Now, that's not a gift to Tommy.
It's a gift to us, because we'll use your contribution to pay airfare and hotel accommodation for our reporters to cover the campaign.
And we'll cover it fairly.
That's all we do.
We'll cover it like we see it.
We don't report to Tommy.
We support Tommy, but we report to you, the viewer.
Anyways, I'm pretty excited about it.
Tommy really is a bull in a china shop.
It's something both his friends and enemies would probably both agree on.
I guess it depends if you're rooting for the bull or if you're rooting for the china shop.
Me, I'm rooting for the bull.
As Tommy's election motto says, it's time to send the European Union and the entire 5P professional establishment.
It's time to send them a message they'll never forget.
Stay with us.
More Ahead on the Rebel.
But will Canadians expect to pay higher fuel prices with the carbon taxes?
I think one of the things we've seen across the country is that the incentives that come from better choices, making choices to be cleaner and greener, is exactly what we want.
That's Justin Trudeau saying, yeah, we want higher prices at the pump so you make better behavior, better choices.
And by better choices, he means stop driving.
Stop heating your house so much in the winter.
Stop cooling it in the summer.
Just stop living an industrial life.
Not for him, of course.
He, in fact, jetted out to British Columbia twice in the past week to take in some of those gnarly waves at Tofino.
I mentioned British Columbia because, of course, that is where the highest gasoline prices in the nation are right now.
The lowest gas prices are about $1.60 a liter.
And I have seen, here's the Gas Buddy website.
The lowest in Vancouver are $1.59.
And that's just a handful of them.
$1.60, $1.70 is not rare.
And if you prefer the fancier grade of gasoline, and I don't know who could possibly afford that, it's as much as $2 a liter.
Well, joining us now via Skype from Victoria, British Columbia's capital, is our friend Aaron Gunn.
He's the spokesman for BC Proud, an independent group which takes no money from the government.
That's why we can trust you, Aaron.
Like us, no one controls your strings, so you can speak the truth.
That's exactly right, Ezra.
Thanks for having me.
Well, it's a pleasure.
You guys fight hard.
I remember we had a great conversation with you when the statue of Sir John A. MacDonald was taken down and you were right on the scene.
Tell me your thoughts on the gas prices in BC.
Are they in fact the highest prices on the continent?
That's what I've heard.
They are, and it's quite frankly completely out of control.
I'm in Victoria here.
It's over $1.60 a liter everywhere.
And in Vancouver, it's not uncommon.
They've been up to around $1.70.75 a liter.
So it's completely insane.
And it's, I mean, people are, ironically, they're cutting back, but people can't cut back on driving.
So they're going to stop going out to restaurants more.
They're going to stop going to movies and things like that.
So it's really impacting people's daily lives.
Yeah, I mean, I suppose there's some driving that's elective.
But if you're a school bus, that's not something that you can choose to do or don't do.
You know, people who say ride a bike, yeah, easy to say, but not if you have a bunch of kids as an example.
Not if you're a truck that's hauling food to the grocery store.
So now you got to pay it.
But as Trudeau said, he wants people to feel the pain.
That's that behavioral modification.
I think that, what do you think of this theory, Aaron?
When people are asked, do you want to do something about global warming on the phone by a pollster?
They say, oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Because it's just some virtue signaling test that you pass just by saying, yeah.
But when you're at the gas pump paying $1.70, I can't imagine there's anyone who says, I really like this because I know I'm changing the weather.
Well, the thing is, is it's hurting families, it's hurting individual British Columbians, and it's doing nothing for climate change under any model that anybody's ever proposed.
It's having zero impact.
You know, British Columbians are paying through their nose for gas, and China's building however many new coal plants every month.
So it makes absolutely no difference under any model whatsoever on global warming.
So it just doesn't make any sense.
And the one thing I will give Trudeau and the premier here in British Columbia, John Horgan, credit for is promise kept, promise delivered.
Gas prices are higher and people are feeling the pain.
Yeah.
You know, I was reading Von Palmer in the, I think it was the Vancouver Sun, and he quotes John Horgan.
I suppose this quote was everywhere.
And Horgan is not blaming the, they have extra special taxes in Vancouver, don't they?
It's like Montreal that way.
They've got the BC carbon tax.
Like, it is a tax reason that it's so high.
But I just got to read you John Horgan's explanation.
This is the premier of BC who's against pipelines, wants to stop all the Alberta pipelines, loves the taxes.
Here's what he said.
I just got to quote this for our viewers.
He said, we don't have enough refined product for the traveling public.
We need to talk to the gas companies about why they are not refining more product.
Yeah, mate, I don't think that's the problem.
It's not like, oh my God, we're running out of gasoline.
There's a shortage.
It's not because the refineries are not refining gas.
It's taxes.
It's taxes.
And you know what?
I'll tell you something.
The politicians like John Horgan are pointing their fingers.
They're feeling the heat.
They're pointing their fingers everywhere else, and they should be taking a look in the mirror.
There's three big reasons why gas prices in BC are so high.
I mean, they're high across the country, but to put this in perspective, like between Calgary and Vancouver, the price differential is as much as 50 cents a liter, which is insane.
And, you know, it's the taxes, the highest taxes in North America.
It's the lack of supply that could be fixed with the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion, which the Trans Mountain Pipeline can actually carry refined products.
And then it's also the collapse of the Canadian dollar over the last little while, which is mainly because we can't get our oil to market and has hit our currency so hard.
So those are all self-inflicted wounds by our politicians.
And normal British Columbians and Canadians are feeling the pinch from that.
Yeah, I mean, Horgan wants it both ways.
He wants to stop Alberta oil, but then when Alberta says we might cut it off, he says, oh, no, you don't.
And then he wants to tax oil.
But then he's saying, oh, you guys, the refineries, you're making expenses.
He's got to pick a lane.
One thing I learned from Von Palmer today is that apparently there's a new bill in the legislature in BC.
Let me just quote a passage from it.
This would ban cars by the year 2040, which will be long after John Horgan's gone.
But the key provision is that on or after January 1st, 2040, so that's 19 years away, sorry, that's 20 years away.
A person must not make a consumer sale of a light-duty motor vehicle that is not a zero-emission vehicle.
So no gasoline engines allowed whatsoever.
And if you sell, if you commit this crime of selling a car with an engine in it, you could be fined up to half a million dollars and six months in prison.
If he thinks that people like paying high, you know, $1.60, $1.70 in gas, I think that that's going to be an appetizer to the provincial rage when these guys try and ban cars altogether.
Oh, and of course, the funny thing is, is he's complaining that there's not another refinery in BC.
Well, who in their right mind would build a refinery under this government?
You can't get anything built, number one.
Number two, they're talking about banning cars in less than around 20 years when you need 30 years to get your money back on a $10 billion refinery investment.
So it just doesn't make any sense on so many different levels.
And it's just kind of, it's a trend of this government to pursue ideological solutions instead of pursuing common sense results.
Well, let me ask you this.
We've seen provincial elections across Canada flip to the right.
I wasn't following Prince Edward Island closely, I admit, but when they went conservative, I thought, well, that's interesting.
And we saw, well, I mean, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec has sort of a conservative government.
New Brunswick is interesting to me.
Part of that is just, you know, people want to change.
Part of that, I think, might be a reaction to Trudeau.
I don't know.
How is John Horgan doing in the polls?
Because I know the environment movement in BC is very strong, very well-funded.
Are severely normal British Columbians starting to get sick of it now, or are they still with him on all this green stuff?
Well, I think the gas prices might kind of be the first.
He's kind of had a little, as most politicians do, a honeymoon period through the first two years.
And I think gas prices is kind of the first kind of little mini crisis that he's facing right now.
He does poll a lot higher than the NDP in general and their policies.
So he's more of a likable person.
But the policies of the NDP are not very popular here.
The cost of living in British Columbia is just completely out of control.
The inflation's higher than any other province in the country.
There's a whole bunch of other things that's contributing to that, like auto insurance and things like that.
And I think kind of like Trudeau, where after maybe it was around year two or year three, that everything kind of started to change.
And I think that's going to happen with Horgan here once people have a whole summer of filling up at over $1.60, $1.70 a liter.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think Jodi Wilson-Raybold, I think BC, I could be wrong here, sort of see her as the hometown champion.
And I'm, look, I'm not there on the ground like you are, but I think that that hasn't helped Trudeau on the ground in BC at all because she, you know, whatever you think of her ideology, she comes across as a pretty straight shooter.
And I think, you know, you add the gas prices and that, that's not looking good for the liberals.
Let me ask you one last thing.
I mean, I spent some time in Vancouver and on the island, and Vancouver is so close to the U.S. border, but there's actually towns and cities all the way to the border.
You've got Surrey, you've got White Rock.
It's so close to the border, and it's a pretty good border crossing.
And if you have the Nexus Pass, you just fly right through.
And I once went to the little town of Bellingham, Washington, which is closer to the border than Vancouver is to the border.
So all these British Columbians from White Rock, South Surrey, they just drive 45 minutes down to Bellingham.
They go to the Costco there.
They fill up their tank with gas at, what, half the price?
While they're down there, they get milk and cheese and other things that are not part of the dairy cartel.
When I was in that Bellingham, Costco, a couple years back, 90% of the license plates were Canadian.
It's like it was a place where Canadians ran away from John Horgan's taxes.
Horgan wasn't the Premier back then, but I think that a lot of Canadians are literally going to a foreign country to get gas and milk, by the way, to escape this carbon tax.
What do you make of that crazy phenomenon?
Oh, it's insane.
And the funny thing is, is some commentators have said the BC carbon tax have helped lower gasoline consumption in British Columbia over the past 10 years, but that's not taking into account all the people that are living across the border that just don't fill up in Canada anymore.
They'll go down to the make their weekly trip down to the States and fill up on gas.
And then, like you said, milk, cheese, and a variety of other goods that are less expensive.
So, I mean, when you can save 30, 40 cents a liter by just driving 15 minutes away and then also get a discount on other things, why wouldn't you?
You'd be stupid not to.
Yeah, it's pretty sad.
I hope that BC joins this trend of reaction to the hard left, but BC's got a mind of its own.
It really is a distinct society as much as Quebec, Newfoundland, or Alberta is.
Aaron, I sure like talking to you, and I think we should talk to you more.
Can you tell our viewers where we can get more Aaron Gunn and where we can get more BC Proud?
Do you have a website or is it mainly your Facebook page?
We do have a website, but Facebook is where you're going to find all the content.
You go to facebook.com slash BC Proud or facebook.com/slash aarongunn.ca, and you can pretty much see all our original videos and graphics and all that good stuff.
All right.
Well, BC Proud, that's the easy one for me to remember.
And we love what you're doing out there.
I know it's 100 to 1.
You're fighting the odds, but if I know you, you're going to win it.
So thanks for being one of the good guys.
Thanks for having me, Ezra.
All right, what a pleasure.
Well, there you have it.
Aaron Gunn, the spokesman for BC Proud.
You can find them at facebook.com slash BC Proud.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
On my monologue yesterday about Justin Trudeau's plan for a new plastic tax, Hyacinth writes, With all these new taxes that the liberals keep dreaming up, I have one question.
What will the new taxes be wasted on?
So far, billions have been wasted, and the vast majority of it has not been spent on Canadians.
Well, if you knew how big the budget was, you would know that, in fact, the vast majority of it has been wasted on Canadians, but that still leaves billions that he throws around the world for a moment's worth of PR.
I think he truly wants to be some sort of globalist mascot, like his dad sort of was, but at least his dad was interested in domestic things too, not Trudeau.
He just wants to be sort of a glad handy guy.
He prefers being out of Ottawa to in Ottawa.
He prefers being out of Canada to in Canada.
I think he's taken 41 foreign trips since he's been prime minister.
I'd have to check that.
I think I read that in the Globe the other day.
He just doesn't like doing work.
He loves going to India for an eight-day trip, one day of work, seven days of vacation.
So yeah, he does spend billions overseas, but it's not the majority.
Harley writes, we could use all the plastic we have in road asphalt.
I saw a documentary on the test section of Highway.
The mix actually performed better than standard asphalt.
Crowdfunding and Subscriptions00:03:12
You know, I'll take your word for it.
Asphalt, of course, is another hydrocarbon.
It's one of the many miracles that we get by using things inside the earth and not just, you know, plants or whatever.
My understanding, which is rather shallow, but which was strengthened by reading that report yesterday, is that it usually just doesn't pay to recycle plastic.
It just takes, like, here's my point.
If it takes a certain amount of energy to make plastic, and it takes more energy to recycle plastic, how is that helping the earth?
On my interview with Kian Bexte, Paul writes, one province after another has fallen.
Trudeau has soured the liberal brand.
If I were one of the few liberal provinces left, I'd be distancing myself as much as possible from my federal counterparts.
Yeah, well, I think there's only two liberal provinces left, and they're in the Atlantic.
I mean, I suppose they could distance themselves from Trudeau.
I don't even know how they would do that.
What's interesting to me, we talked about this with Aaron Gunn, is can we liberate British Columbia, I wonder.
How writes, your message to Canadians is of the greatest importance.
It needs to get out to all the world, especially Canada.
At my request of every premium subscriber, would they mind if the Rebel was not behind a paywall?
I think that's a truncated version of your letter, and I think I wrote back to you directly.
But my answer, and I'll share with the rest of the viewers, is, first of all, I'm flattered that you think more people ought to hear my message, and obviously I would love that too.
But we also have to pay the bills.
And look, not everybody who pays $8 a month renews.
So that tells me that not everyone is just here, here, take the money, because we actually need the premium subscription dough to pay the bills.
It's what pays the bills for all the other stuff, because YouTube has demonetized us.
So I'm sure there would be some amazing super supporters like you who would chip in eight bucks a month anyways, just gratuitously.
And thank you.
I know you would.
But I just would be terrified that our support, our actual financial support would fall in half.
And people would say, oh, I don't need to, but why am I paying eight bucks a month?
I get it for free anyways.
I just think it's the only sort of guaranteed money we have because if people pay an $80 annual subscription, well, now we know we have it for a year.
We don't have to keep crowdfunding it.
I just, you know, the only answer to doing videos like this, when I look around, when I look at CR-TV in the United States, when I look at Ben Shapiro, the Daily Wire, when I look at all the other similar competitors, they either have an extremely wealthy patron, as CR-TV has, as Breitbart.com had in the Mercer family, as Daily Wire has in their billionaire, or they're government-funded in some way.
Or they're not demonetized, like the young Turks on the left.
They're not demonetized.
Since those other options are either not available to us or we would never, we wouldn't survive.
Like, there's no way we could take government money.
I actually believe that if I said, hey, Justin Trudeau, give me $2 million a year and you can have editorial control here, which is basically the deal.
Andrew Scheer's Punditry Threat00:01:22
I bet he'd probably take it just to shut us up.
But then we're not the rebel anymore and I'm not me anymore.
So I think the only method left to us is crowdfunding and subscriptions and the trickle of ads that YouTube lets through.
If there's another fancy way out there, let me know.
And if there's a patron out there who would be hands-off, let me know.
But I don't even know if such a thing exists.
Bob Wrights, twice in as many days, you have said that Andrew Scheer has said nothing about axing the CBC.
When he was a candidate for leader, he said that if he were to become PM, he would axe the news division, which I'm assuming would be the punditry as well.
You know what?
I take your word for it.
I don't remember him saying that.
And maybe it's because he's never repeated it since his leadership vote.
You know, he's changed quite a few things since his leadership.
And I just don't think he has the courage to follow through with that.
I'm sorry.
I grant you that he probably put it in some talking point three years ago, but I haven't heard a peep about it since.
I'm just not going to give a lot of credence to it.
He certainly acts like he bends the knee to them.
And I say again, if Stephen Harper, who was quite strong-willed, didn't defund the CBC.
I don't believe Andrew Scheer, who I see as much more compliant.
I just don't think he's going to.
I mean, listen, do I hope I'm wrong?
I hope I'm wrong.
I don't think I'm wrong.
Well, folks, that's the show for today until tomorrow.
On behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, good night.