Paul Manley’s Green Party win in Nanaimo (37.3% on May 7) signals a leftist protest surge, not environmentalism—despite the city’s reliance on high-carbon industries like tourism and a paper mill. Rejected by the NDP for radicalism, including his father’s anti-Israel activism, Manley’s victory mirrors voter disillusionment with Trudeau’s handling of Indigenous issues (e.g., Jody Wilson-Raybould’s dismissal) and strained U.S./China relations, from Freeland’s blocked White House access to mocking Trump’s travel ban. Canada’s diplomatic isolation—cited by a diplomat as "now alone"—and economic stagnation (0% GDP growth vs. U.S.’s 3.2%) underscore the Greens’ anti-establishment appeal, risking long-term stability over partisan grievances. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I tell you about the not so surprising Green Party victory in Nanaimo.
It's not that surprising if you know Nanaimo, and I think I know it a little bit.
And as you know, Elizabeth May is from a few hours south on Vancouver Island.
And it's just a little bit of a weird place, but I don't think it was so much an environmentalist vote as a smash the system vote, a form of leftist Trumpism.
I make the case.
Anyways, that's ahead, but hey, can you do me a quick favor first?
Can you go to the rebel.media slash shows and become a premium subscriber?
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You get the video version.
And oh, I got this video today from the UK deputy leader of the Green Party.
You got to see the video.
You have got to see that video.
You can't do that on a podcast, can you?
You got to watch it video form.
So go to the rebel.media slash shows.
It's $8 a month.
You become a premium subscriber.
You get all the video versions of the show.
You get Sheila Gunn Reed's show.
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And you can watch that really creepy video of the UK Deputy Green Party leader, which will haunt your dreams.
All right.
Here's the podcast.
Tonight, the Green Party wins a federal by-election in British Columbia.
What does it mean?
It's May 7th, 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 it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
The Green Party of Canada won a by-election yesterday in the interesting city of Nanaimo, B.C.
I know Nanaimo pretty well.
Back five years ago, do you remember, we covered the strange politics of that unusual town.
You'll remember their dysfunctional city council banned a Christian group from renting the publicly owned convention center for a conference.
So we crowdfunded a lawyer to sue the city, and then we helped campaign against the city council that made that horrible decision.
And wouldn't you know it, the city threw out the bums.
It really was a template for the kind of action campaigns that we do here all the time at the Rebel.
It was great.
And of course we had a big barbecue at the end to celebrate.
And you know, I think at that big barbecue was the first time I met Sheila Gunn Reed.
If you can believe it, so Nanaimo, yeah, I knew it pretty well.
I go there every summer for vacation.
It's a funny mix.
You got retired people, including from Alberta, who like the weather better.
You got hippies who like Vancouver Island.
You got working class folks.
You got some rough characters, by the way.
The Hells Angels.
They hang out in Nanaimo all the time, which I find a bit creepy.
Now, I tell you all that because it's unusual, an unusual place.
It's a mix of things.
It's on an island, which means it's going to be a little bit eccentric in its identity.
It feels cut off from the main, even though the capital, Victoria, is on the same island.
But it's so quirky, as that whole city hall fight in Nanaimo taught me.
Nanaimo's Green Shift00:15:07
Anyways, I have to say, I am completely unsurprised by the result that they voted for the Green Party last night.
The Green Party won.
I am not surprised.
This guy, Paul Manley, son of a former New Democrat MP, won.
Now, he wanted to run as an NDP or once like his dad.
But he was deemed too radical for even the NDP.
He seemed to share his dad's radicalism against Israel.
His dad actually tried to run an Israeli naval blockade screening out terrorists from the port of Gaza.
I mean, if you're doing that, you're way, way, way out there.
So he found his natural home in the Green Party.
That's really no surprise.
You know, Monia Mazig, Meher Arar's wife, she ran for the NDP a few elections back.
That's pretty far out there in itself.
So radical, this guy, so radical that he was booted even from the NDP, even though his dad was an NDP there.
I can tell you, it won't surprise me one day if Omar Cotter himself runs for public office, but he'd probably choose the Green Party instead of the NDP, and he would be right at home around the world.
The Green Party has become the party for people.
It's not even about green things anymore.
It's not even about the environment anymore.
Unfortunately, it's the party for people who think the NDP isn't radical enough, isn't anti-Israel enough, or in the United Kingdom that Jeremy Corbyn isn't.
I want to show you, I played this clip a couple years back.
Here is the deputy leader of the United Kingdom Green Party, Sharar Ali is his name.
Here he is as a rally.
And I could give you a hundred examples like this, but this one gives me the chills.
Just because your God tells you to stand here does not give you the right to push us aside.
Just because you observe the niceties of Holocaust Memorial Day does not mean that you have learned the lessons of history.
Listen up, warmongers!
Just because you switch off your TV set to avoid upsetting your children does not mean that you have not killed our children.
We call for suspension of the EU Israel Trade Association.
We call for a boycott of Israeli goods.
We all understand that you cannot have peace in the Middle East without justice for the Palestinians.
Oh!
Oh!
If you tolerate this, then your children will be next.
Will be next!
Peace be upon you!
Yeah, what?
Did you think the Green Party was about planting trees or something or picking up litter?
Don't you think that guy's nuts?
That is the center of the Green Party.
Do you think I'm kidding when I say one day Omar Cotter will run for public office and will probably do so as a Green candidate?
Well, to Elizabeth May, that idea is not really that ridiculous, is it?
She actually said in public that Omar Cotter, a convicted, confessed al-Qaeda terrorist, murderer, and war criminal, is a better man than, say, Stephen Harper or any of his cabinet.
Do you guys remember the Steve song?
Welcome back.
Who knew Cotter was spelled K-H-A-D-R?
Welcome back to Omer Cotter.
It matters to say it.
Welcome back, Omar Cotter.
You're home.
Does it strike me when you?
I told you.
There's a lot unusual about your speech list, but we're going to kick off.
Omar Cotter, you got more class in the whole cabinet.
Thank you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's the Green Party.
They'll take anyone.
Well, actually, not anyone, come to think of it.
The president of the Green Party of Canada was a Jew.
This guy who was drummed out of the party for being too, you know, Jewy, too pro-Israel.
I mean, you can't have a party that stretches all the way from Paul Manley and Omer Cotter to a pro-Israel Jew.
Then it's not really a coherent party, is it?
So they chose.
Now, I think some of the hard left hippies who live in Naimo, I think they voted because they knew all this and they actually believe in this.
Like I say, it's an eco-kind of place, the Naimo.
It's part of it.
But that's not most of it.
Most of the Naimo, I think, is a hard-working town.
The port, the airport, there's tourism, there's lots of fishing, there's real estate, and the industrial jewel in the crown.
You see it when you fly in and fly.
Look at that.
Look at that gorgeous paper mill just outside the city.
I love seeing that when you come and go.
I don't think everyone in Nanaimo is a freaky lefty.
I don't think they're all eco-loonies.
You can't have a paper mill if you're an eco-loonie, can you?
And I don't actually think most people in the Naimo care that much about Israel one way or another.
I don't think there's a lot of Jews in the city.
I think they just, you know, voted green as a protest vote, which is what's so interesting here, and that's so Nanaimo.
Let's look at those election results a little bit in detail.
The Greens, you see that there, the Green Party, Paul Manley, they moved up from fourth place last time to first.
They got 37.3%, which is pretty respectable.
And if you see their voter turnout was a healthy 41%, that's pretty good for a by-election.
If that was a general election, it'd be low.
By-election, that's good.
Now, the NDP who had the seat before, well, they fell back to third place, 23.1%, edged out by the Conservatives just under 25%.
But the most incredible thing is that the Liberals, check that out, look at that.
The Trudeau Liberals, for he has branded his party that way so hard, Team Trudeau and all that.
The Trudeau Liberals came in a shocking fourth.
Fourth place with just 11%.
Here's the candidate.
She looks pretty good on paper, First Nations leader, who's a pretty big community volunteer.
She looks nice.
I bet she would have done much better in any other party, frankly.
I think running as Team Trudeau, as you can see right there on her website, I think that probably lopped her vote in half these days, don't you think?
Because I don't really think there's a lot of love for Trudeau or a lot of people believing him on Aboriginal affairs.
For example, after his atrocious treatment of Jody Wilson-Raybold these past months, she was a hero to the province in many ways.
Probably a personal hero to that liberal candidate.
I bet they knew each other.
Not that big a place, BC.
But who would vote for a candidate running under Team Trudeau, that fake feminist who threw out the most successful Aboriginal politician from BC in memory?
We've shown you how disastrous polling is for Trudeau in the city of Vancouver itself.
Well, Nanaimo is interesting.
Demographically, it's 80% white and about 10% Aboriginal.
And I tell you that, because I just don't see Aboriginal folks voting for Trudeau these days to you.
I just don't see it.
I mean, they know what Trudeau actually thinks of Aboriginal folks.
They think he thinks Aboriginal is just to be used by Trudeau for photo ops or, you know, for donations to the Liberal Party.
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I tell you, Andrew Scheer should just run that clip as an ad just over and over again.
That room, that snobby, smarmy, fake feminist saying to Aboriginals who came there, they weren't there without cause.
Grassy Narrows, they have mercury poisoning in their water, and he promised to help them two years ago, and he hasn't done a thing.
And everything in that room is fake and repulsive.
That room is, if you've never been in Nanaimo, think of that room and then think of the opposite.
I'm surprised Trudeau got 11%.
I bet half of that is people just marking their ballot wrong.
So yeah, no, no.
And look at this, look at this.
A tweet from Jodi Wilson-Raybold.
Congratulations to Paul Manley on your election as MP for Nanaimo Ladysmith to all candidates who put their names forward.
Huh, isn't that funny, eh?
That's pretty friendly for her to say, I wonder if Jodi Wilson-Raybold's going to run as a green candidate in Vancouver.
If she does, I bet you a dollar she will win.
So 11% for Trudeau.
But the NDP, where were they?
I mean, they had the seat last time, right?
They were in the incumbents.
Jagnet Singh is a hard lefty.
And now he's a British Columbia MP from not that far away.
And yet, the NDP came in third.
The Conservatives have to feel pretty good about all this, about, first of all, coming in second, but also about the split in the vote, a three-way split on the left.
I really don't think it's a vote for green policies.
But of course, the entire media party, and probably Trudeau himself, will take that lesson from it.
So he'll go harder on their carbon tax, even though I checked.
And today, gas starts at $1.52 a liter for the cheap blends in Nanaimo.
I think Trudeau's going to go harder, harder on the carbon tax.
I think there's no chance they're going to build that pipeline.
Now, Trudeau will probably think he has to jack up the carbon tax even more.
Catherine McKenna will probably think she needs to shout even louder.
So let's talk about climate change for a second.
Who believes it's real?
Who believes in science?
We got a report last year that said we have 12 years to take serious climate action.
We are all in this together.
We need to act.
Yeah.
Get ready for a lot more shouting about the carbon tax.
But I put it to you, it's not about that.
It's green in the same way that guy from the UK is green.
It's not about policies even.
It's a rejection of the establishment, a rejection of the people and the systems.
I don't think it's an endorsement of Paul Manley's policies.
I bet most people in Nanaimo don't know those policies.
I bet they think his anti-Israel obsession is a bit weird.
I bet they're fine with some eco-talk, but that's all it is.
Talk.
You can't live on Vancouver Island without a high-carbon lifestyle.
You have to fly or take a ship to Nanaimo.
You can't bicycle there from Vancouver.
Being eco-friendly is a fashion statement, like wearing a little colorful lapel ribbon used to be in the 90s.
Colby Kosh made the observation the other day after the Greens formed opposition in Prince Edward Island that the Greens are doing well precisely when they are de-greenifying themselves, when green is just sort of a color of their lawn sign, not an ideology, and just say we're the alternative.
That's all there.
Green means alternative now.
We're the un-liberals.
If you're sick of smarmy, oleaginous Justin Trudeau, the fake male feminist who thinks you've just experienced things differently.
And those poll numbers, I showed you those Angus Rui poll numbers.
The number of people who dislike Trudeau is smaller than the number of people who hate him.
I've never seen that before.
Even with Harper, most anti-Harperites just didn't like him.
They didn't hate him.
Canadians hate Trudeau.
Anyways, if you think Trudeau's a fake feminist, if you think Jack meets Singh as being a failure to launch, and I think he has been, vote green to register your distaste for the whole system.
It's why Albertans voted for Rachel Lotley's NDP four years ago.
Abacus Research found that 90% of NDP voters in 2015 in Alberta said they did not vote for the NDP for their policies.
They just voted to change, to throw out the old bums.
Now, unfortunately, they got both change and the policies.
A green opposition in Prince Edward Island won't really amount to much.
And one green MP in the Naimo won't really change the world.
But I do think it is signaling to voters that there is a place, if you want to be a little bit rowdy and a little bit anti-establishment, from the left.
It's really the mirror image to Maxime Bernier's new party on the right.
Vote green if you're someone who's sick of the think-alikes, sick of the people who are all in cahoots, who go to $1,500 a pop fundraisers.
If you're sick of people on the gravy train, as Rob Ford would say on the right, that green victory in the Naimo is actually a form of Trumpism, you know.
You know, the old Reform Party won around there.
Big breakthrough in BC way back in 1993, they drew votes from the conservatives, sure, but they drew just as many from the anti-establishment NDP.
Did you know that?
That's what this Green Party is doing.
It's a none-of-the-above choice, but from the left, not from the right.
Except, except look at this.
Andrew Scheer has a problem.
Andrew Scheer is a neo-Nazi, suggests MacLean.
Grave Threats Normalized00:02:23
The Globe and Mail says we're overrun by neo-Nazis.
And they joined a private chat room where they talked to a few dozen people.
And it was the front page of the Globe and Mail.
So the media party has detected this.
And here's Christy Freeland helping them think about it.
Well, I absolutely do think that white supremacists, white supremacist movements are a very real, a very grave threat to Western liberal democracy.
I think they are a grave and real threat here in Canada, and they are a grave threat in many other countries around the world.
She has said that white supremacists and neo-Nazis are the greatest threat to Canada, greater than Islamic terrorism.
She has said that.
Now that's nuts, and it's not true, but that's the media political establishment's narrative.
That's their message track.
That's their attack plan against the conservatives and against Bernier in the next six months.
But it's just not true, of course.
And I'm not sure if it'll work.
I don't think it worked against Jason Kenney.
Although the hard left would probably say, sure, it worked.
It kept Kenny's UCP out of Edmonton altogether, with the exception of this one white nationalist, this one neo-Nazi alt-right racist, this white supremacist who sneaked through on Kenny's slate, the one UCP, MLA in Edmonton.
How did he get through?
But you know, I think it's not the right in Canada that has the Nuts, the extremists, the anti-Semites.
I think it's the parties of the left, the liberals to a degree, the NDP for sure, but the Green Party right into their DNA.
The party whose leader publicly praises Omar Cotter, the party that drums out a Jew as party president because he's not self-hating enough.
The party that says to a candidate, you're too anti-Israel, even for the NDP, you're just perfect for us.
I don't think the Green Party is going to win.
In fact, strategically speaking, mathematically speaking, I think they're going to do harm to the Liberals very, very much.
And I think it's a good thing electorally, but they're poisoning the public discourse.
They're normalizing left-wing hate and anti-Semitism, I'm afraid.
They're normalizing treating terrorists like Omar Cotter as fine citizens.
That's not good for any of us.
Minister Trudeau's Deal Diplomacy00:15:29
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Well, an incredible headline on an incredible story.
Let me read to you the version on the CBC.
The headline is, Fed Up Canada Leans on United States to help with China crisis.
And it's just full of amazing quotes.
Let me read just one of them in a sign of increasing frustration at what it sees as a lackluster U.S. response.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government is signaling it could withhold cooperation on major issues.
As in withhold cooperation from the United States, just incredible, full of passive-aggressive quotes.
Joining me now to help make sense of this is our friend Manny Montenegrino, former lawyer and senior advisor to prime ministers and the CEO of Think Sharp Consulting.
Manny, what do you make of this incredible story?
Well, everything with Justin Trudeau is incredible and everything how the media covers is incredible.
I cannot believe that everyone did not see this as foreseeable.
And let me take you through the two major parties.
We have China and we have the United States and Canada.
So China, we know that Justin Trudeau went to China, did a trade deal, and with all his, and everything that Justin does is shrouded in this arrogance, entitlement, narcissism with great ineptitude.
And that's what he's bringing to these trade talks and with relationships with other countries.
And let me explain.
You recall that he went to China.
We did.
And on the trade deal with China, he talked again about his indigenous and his unions and all his virtuous union clauses.
And he was kicked out, summarily just kicked out of China.
He was labeled the little potato.
I mean, you know, you had Christia Freeland, you know, praising that China demeaned our prime minister and called them a little potato.
Manny, let me show you that clip.
We've shown our viewers before, but it's so amazing.
Here's a quick clip of Christia Freeland boasting about what sounded to me like an insult.
We're quite proud the prime minister has been given a font nickname in China.
He is called Tu Do, which I believe means potato.
And he's, I can't say the Chinese word, it's Xiang, Tudo, Little Potato, because his father, Pierre Elliot Tudo, was senior potato.
So we feel we are off to a great start.
Well, she thought that was off to a great start being nicknamed Little Potato.
They call Donald Trump either Uncle Donald or Trump the Strong, according to the New York Times.
Right.
Those are his nicknames.
Right.
And if anybody knows, I mean, if you were not so self-absorbed as this government is, and both the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister, you'd understand that China looks at the world a little bit differently than the Canadians do.
And pay attention to what they say.
That was not a good first step.
So already we have a bit of disrespect.
And then you add to the, in the China crisis, you add the prime minister telling China that we are a rule of law country.
And now it comes out that for four months that he has been trying to obstruct justice.
He's lost two senior ministers.
The world knows this.
It made the Simpsons cartoon.
So the world knows that he lied on that.
And China doesn't like to be insulted or ridiculed.
And they see this as an insult and ridicule.
Now that's where China is.
Anybody who studies this knows that China is extremely upset with Canada.
But the question is, will China act?
And the answer is they are and they have been and they will do because they know that Trudeau has, Prime Minister Trudeau has de-linked Canada from the United States.
He knows, China knows that it's safe to attack Canada in many, many ways.
And you see now four or five different ways.
We have two Canadian men in jail, two Canadian men that will be sent to death.
These Canadians have not seen the light of day.
These Canadians have not had access to legal counsel.
They've been there five months.
And to that, they've added a series of trade stoppages and trade battles with Canada.
And it will accelerate.
Why is China doing this?
Because China knows that it can.
Why does China know it can?
Because Trudeau has de-linked Canada from the greatest, strongest nation in the world, and that is the United States of America.
And Ezra, let me go through what everybody knows and why our country and our media doesn't say this was foreseeable is beyond me.
Let's start.
Well before President Trump was elected, you might recall that there was a state dinner for lame duck Obama.
Now that was the second, and this is late in the term.
There's no reason, and this was during the election.
When I first saw that, I said, wow, what a big mistake.
Canada should not be getting involved in a U.S. election.
But he had a state dinner.
And at that time, you know, and everyone knows, Barack Obama was campaigning very, very hard for Hillary Clinton.
Well, what happened?
Donald Trump became president.
Donald Trump knows that Canada, Prime Minister Trudeau, was having a great state dinner for the fellow that tried to get him out of office.
So there's mistake number one.
Now go further.
Right after the president, President Obama got inaugurated, have we had an invite?
Has Canada, has Prime Minister Trudeau invited the president to a state dinner?
We are now in the third year.
Every prime minister has asked the president to come to Canada because we want to build that relationship.
It's his first trip always.
Prime Minister Harper, within a month, Ezra had Barack Obama in Canada.
We have not had a state dinner for the president.
Trudeau didn't have that.
Well, what does that mean?
Well, it means you're not building any bond or any credibility with the United States.
Ezra, another fact.
It took the longest period of time to appoint an ambassador to Canada by the United States.
We don't have an ambassador today.
She has now been moved to the United Nations.
That tells you that the United States doesn't see Canada as its number one friend, number one trading partner.
And what it means is there's something wrong in the relationship.
Manny, I want to point out that especially when Gerald Butts was really running the show in the PMO, he and those around him talked about reorienting Canada and replacing our United States focus with a China focus.
And that's why you saw the obsession with getting a Chinese trade deal, even though that's very difficult.
They don't respect the rule of law or property rights.
You saw criticism of America for not being part of the Paris global warming scheme and all sorts of love for China.
Like it was an explicit statement, we don't need America.
China is our new America.
It was shockingly bold.
And I think both countries sized that up.
Donald Trump says, all right, good luck with China.
And China said, ah, we have a pushover.
And it was the worst of all worlds.
Even Stephen Harper, who was quite critical of China on human rights, was never abused this way.
They didn't shut down canola imports.
They didn't shut down pork imports.
Those are things that have only happened under Trudeau.
They respected Harper even if they disagree with them.
Right.
And there's more to that.
It isn't just a, it isn't that Prime Minister Trudeau and all around him have delinked Canada.
They took it one step further, Ezra.
They took a personal attack on the president of the United States.
You might recall that absolutely juvenile tweet, the Welcome to Canada tweet to Justin Trudeau, that was in a direct slap to President Trump's campaign promise for travel bans and to secure America.
He basically said, look, fool, I'm going to open up my country.
Look at the damage it's done to Canada.
We now have billions of dollars lost.
He's reversed his position.
We have opened borders.
And that was just to make a slap in the face of your best friend, your best protector, Donald Trump, United States of America.
And so there's many insults.
And I have, Ezra, I could take hours.
I've listed the number of insults, personal insults.
You might recall Christoph Freeland attending during the middle of the NAFTA discussions, a seminar on tyrants and linking President Trump as a tyrant.
Now, so like, look, and you know the results of this was Christian Freeland, our foreign minister, is not allowed in the White House.
Yeah, that's crazy.
Yeah, well, there's this one, let me finish on those two little points.
And we finished, Mexico completed the USMCA without Canada.
So there's a lot of personal attacks on the president.
Go ahead, that's right.
You know, I remember your point about Christia Freeland being kicked out at the same time, Mexico's key negotiator.
I forget the exact number off the top of my head.
I think it was like 55 hero meetings.
I got to tell you, Manny, as I joked at the time, that's more meetings than most husbands and wives have before they get married.
You go on 50 dates.
It's time to put a ring on it.
I mean, talk about a different approach.
But can I get back to the CBC story just for a second?
I want to read three short quotes because they're all off the record by senior liberal sources.
So I don't know who that is.
But Reuters, which wrote the story, let me just quote three lines, because this doesn't sound like a government that knows what it's doing.
It sounds like a whining government.
Here's three lines.
It's also not clear who we should be targeting, since you never know who is up and who is down in the administration at any given point, said the source who requested anonymity.
Here's one more quote.
At the political level, the administration doesn't like us very much, said a second well-placed source.
Third quote, we're completely in the dark.
Now, I tell you, Donald Trump is still the president.
Mike Pence is still the vice president.
They've only had two secretaries of state.
I think that if we had a healthy relationship country to country, these things could be dealt with.
This sounds like some whiny kids who don't know what they're doing, who have an entitled complaint.
They're whiners, they're complainers.
And I don't know.
It doesn't sound like winners or a government.
It sounds like a party that should be in opposition.
You're absolutely correct, Ezra.
But it also sounds like the United States of America are being very, very polite.
They're not telling the truth.
And because what our Canada is saying, our liberal government is saying, oh, we're having a hard time with them.
They're being polite.
Because at the beginning, if you read the situation right and you didn't have the arrogant narcissist prime minister that we have now that only wanted to create a Trump war in order to get votes in Canada.
But the President of the United States, the very first thing he did was sign the pipeline deal.
Right.
So that was the very first act he did.
That was a signal to Canada.
We're your friends.
We are going to make the very second thing he said to Canada is Canada is not a problem in the NAFTA discussions.
We will do a deal with them alone.
So here you have a president that's reaching out to Canada in two very big acts saying your pipeline, your Trans-Canada pipeline, I approve.
Very first act he did, he thought of Canada.
And the very second thing on negotiations of NAFTA, he said, Canada is not a problem.
We have no problem with Canada.
We will do a bilateral.
And what was our reaction?
Our reaction by our government said no, no, no.
And now where are we?
We have two Canadians in jail that in one phone call, Donald Trump could have stopped it.
And Donald Trump will not stop it because he has been insulted.
And what bothers me most about this, Ezra, if you follow me on Twitter, I have called this two, three years ago.
I have seen this happen.
Canadians are, we have a great country and we have a great neighbor.
And our great neighbor provides us 25% of our GDP, our wealth.
You don't screw around.
And they've asked very little of us.
And what I'm worried about, Ezra, is the next shoe to fall.
And that is if this government, hopefully this government doesn't see many more months, but if this government continues to be what I'll call aggressive towards America, there is another shoe to fall, and that is NATO.
Trump basically has said, President Trump has said, Canada is not paying its way.
And there's a $25 billion tab that basically, if one does a number, America is paying for Canada.
And if Trudeau screws that up, Prime Minister Trudeau screws that up, we're in the hole of $25 billion.
Well, listen, Manny, I think you diagnose the problem very well.
I follow you closely on Twitter, and I encourage everyone else to do so.
We'll put your Twitter handle up on the screen.
I would like to ask for your prescription.
As you say, it's only six months till the next election, and who knows if Trudeau will be around after there.
And maybe he wants to, maybe he's so obsessed with that election now, he's not thinking of foreign policy.
He's not thinking of anything other than his own reelection.
But what would your advice be to Justin Trudeau?
And I know that sounds insane that you would give him advice, but if he phoned you up and said, Manny, we're on opposite sides of the spectrum, but I respect your advice, and I'm ready to take your, as a Canadian, I'm calling on you to put our partisan difference aside.
What should I do, Manny?
If Justin Trudeau actually made that phone call to you as a loyal Canadian, what advice would you give Trudeau?
Three things he could do to fix this problem.
Three Steps For Trudeau00:08:58
Well, there's the first thing he should do.
I truly believe that President Trump is a fair man and a decent guy.
I mean, I think that once he's attacked, he will attack twice as hard.
But if you don't attack him, I think you could be a good friend of his.
And I think what I would advise, and there's so much at stake here.
We have our GDP.
We have our relations with China.
We have two men that are in jail for five months, two men that are going to die.
I would, and this could not happen, but my advice to the Prime Minister is phone him up directly, apologize for being wrong.
Say it was political.
Say, you know what, I did all that because in Canada I could get votes.
I'm wrong.
I owe a duty to Canada.
I owe a duty to those two young men and those two others facing death sentences.
I'm not going to put myself first.
I'm going to put Canada first.
I'm going to put those Canadians first.
I'm going to put canola farmers first.
I apologize.
I really need your help.
I mismanaged this great 150-year relationship that every prime minister and every president worked on.
I screwed up.
Help me out, please.
That's the first thing I would do.
You know what?
And I think Donald Trump, he's quick to anger, but I think he's quick to forgive.
I remember when Carlos Sleem, the owner of the New York Times, flew up to meet Trump.
Trump was sort of impressed that this, the world's richest man, as I think he then was, flew up to meet Trump in Trump's turf.
I think Trump's, in fact, Flump tweeted out something friendly.
I think Trump, like you say, someone attacks him, he punches back five times.
But someone comes and says, hey, boss, can we reconcile?
I think he loves that, actually.
I think that would work out.
And he's done it for 40 years.
I mean, I liken it to be in trial with another lawyer.
I mean, when I'm in trial, we are battling.
But the day after, we're okay.
We talk to each other, and it's fine.
We understand the battle.
Trump understands the battles that he has, the trade and so on.
But if you make it personal, as the prime minister has, and as the foreign minister has, and as many other Canadians, you have the ex-prime minister of Canada, Kim Campbell, sending these very terrible, terrible tweets.
And while Canadians are suffering in jail, I mean, everyone is having a feast on the Trump hate narrative.
But the price to it is our GDP.
The price to it is China gets bigger.
I mean, let me give you another, and it's not just America or China.
The same thing happened.
And if we pay attention, Ezra, the same thing happened with Saudi Arabia and India.
Saudi Arabia, the prime minister did it again, his arrogant little tweak, trying to say that we are and trying to scroll the Saudis.
Well, what happened?
If you Google and find out what happened, we were alone in the world.
There's one CBC article where a diplomat said, Canada must learn that it is now alone in the world.
We were the country that was never alone.
So this has nothing to do with Trump or China, it was Saudi Arabia.
And the same thing with India.
When he tried to blame the Indian prime minister for his choosing a terrorist to come and visit India, they blamed it on India.
These are very dangerous people in our government.
And what has happened in a short time, Canada's alone in the world.
You have, I mean, Ezra, the last thing is you have Philippines declaring war on Canada.
Well, you know, you raise a good point because I think Trudeau really dislikes Trump because that's what the cool kids say.
Right.
But China, Saudi Arabia, India, Philippines, he's also snubbed the Japanese.
He's snubbed the Australians.
So I think maybe the brain trust in the PMO isn't quite as brainy as they think.
Last question, Manny.
I think that Christia Freeland was ill-suited to be foreign minister.
She was a pop business journalist.
She is good with the buzzwords and chatty.
She reminds me in some ways of Catherine McKenna, someone who has more confidence than wisdom.
And if you had that hypothetical phone call from Justin Trudeau, your first piece of advice would be go in and patch things up personally with Trump.
Would you choose a different person to be the foreign minister?
And based on that liberal caucus or cabinet, is there any name that comes to mind, someone who would be a better face for Canada to Donald Trump?
Well, you make a very good point.
Of course I would choose a different foreign minister.
When I'm told that she is not allowed in the White House, and when I'm told that Canada's out of the free trade discussions, that's enough to replace the minister long, long time ago.
I'm a big fan of Mark Garneau.
I think he's an incredible minister.
I think he's a great Canadian.
And unfortunately, it pains me to see this great man having under cabinet solidarity to become one of those juvenile.
I am so proud of James Philipot and Jody Wilson-Raybold.
They stood up and they said, I can't take it anymore.
I'm surprised Mark hasn't, but he's the guy that I would pick.
He's a decent human being and a decent Canadian.
You know what?
I was hoping, it was in the back of my mind, I was thinking exactly of him.
He's worked with the Americans before, of course, with NASA.
So he's very familiar with them.
And he obviously, there's a trust relationship.
The fact that he's former military, there's not a lot of those in Trudeau's cabinet.
I think that would cut some ice.
The fact that he just carries himself with a bit of dignity and he's a grown-up.
I mean, obviously we have a partisan difference, you and I, with him.
But I think you're right.
He's larger than partisan politics.
And he's got a Canadian-ness to him by virtue of his career.
I agree with you completely.
And I think he's being underutilized by Trudeau, probably out of some sort of rivalry or inferiority climbax.
Trudeau knows that Garneau is superior to him in every way.
Yeah, and now, Ezra, I'm going to leave with this frightening prospect.
Because obviously I do a lot of thinking on this.
When I saw Philippines declare war, it seems to, and obviously it's a joke, but obviously it's very serious.
But what it tells me is the world knows today that Canada is de-linked from America.
And that means you can take, there's no damn way any country could take a shot at Canada if it knows that U.S. is by its side.
So you have now five or six countries.
China knows it can do anything to Canada.
And Philippines, I mean, you think for a chance.
So what I'm worried about is, and Ezra, this frightens me.
Has the delinking happened forever?
And here's what I mean.
Mexico is now America's number one trading partner.
It's no longer Canada.
It's actually outpaced Canada.
And if this relationship, and I'll call what the prime minister did with America and not, and every prime minister, no matter how opposite their ideals were of the president, they kept the relationship strong.
Now that it's broken, we haven't had a state dinner.
Now that we've delinked Canada, how bad will it be?
Can Canada, like for instance, Canada's in the G7.
We're not a G7 country.
We're 10th.
But we're there because wink wink, America wants its best friend there.
How much worse, like will the next president and the next prime minister basically have a hurt relationship and will it always be diminished for what happened the last year?
That frightens me because Canada does very well.
I mean America, I'll leave with one, just some statistical stuff.
America's having a 3.2% GDP boom.
Canada in the last six months, 0%.
America's had 3.2% wage growth.
Canada, 0.
We have never been delinked from America's economy.
I'm worried we're going to be linked, delinked from economy and de-linked politically.
And that is not good for my kids, my grandkids, and the future of Canada.
Concerns About Linkage00:03:07
Well, always learning so much from me, my friend.
Always depressing and scary, but we need to know the truth.
And we often hear from the media party.
Thank you so much for that.
No problem.
What a pleasure.
That's our friend Manny Montenegrino.
He's the CEO of Think Sharp.
He joined us today via Skype from Ottawa.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about the Edmonton Journal fighting against free speech.
Liza writes, Strong and free is our birthright.
Ford and Kenny must stand their ground.
We are counting on all good men to stand up for our long-held, hard-won rights and freedoms.
Don't make us go to war again to protect them.
Well, that's the thing.
In the past, it was an external enemy, Hitler, the communist Soviets, maybe even the Communist Chinese that we worried about taking our freedoms away from us.
But what happens when it's whiz kids or social justice warriors in Silicon Valley?
And when they take them away, not through war or even legislation, but just pushing a button on a keyboard.
How do you fight that?
On my occasional use of profanity during the show, Betty writes, I've seen people who talk with every second word on their mouths being a swear word.
It is because they don't have proper vocabularies and they're just plain rude people.
I've also seen people who are highly educated who will use profanity to emphasize a point on occasion.
It's too bad that Scott is so easily offended, but he is attempting to impose his own brand of censorship.
Betty, I don't think that's what Scott was saying.
I think what Scott was saying, he wants to be able to have this show on without young kids who hear swears.
Now, this is an adult show.
I don't show my own kids this.
They'd be bored, but it's adult content.
Sometimes we talk about terrorism.
We showed the assassin on one of my Friday noon hour shows, we showed the assassination of someone.
That's heavy stuff.
So it's not really kids' content, but I take the point.
I probably don't need to swear even once in a while.
I just don't need to.
Bruce writes, I hope you won't make a habit of using profanity on your shows.
We hear so much from reprobate leftists, so we don't need any on your show.
I highly recommend that you brush up on terms which accurately describe the miscreants, churlish oaths, and other reprobate people, to wish you prefer.
Swearing just makes your show unpleasant to view.
Even if a person is a four-letter word, there's no reason to sink to the gutter when chastising them.
Well, I'm not going to repeat the particular swears I used.
I think they were just menacing enhancers.
I don't even think it was name-calling.
But I take your point.
I mean, listen, my little anecdote yesterday about the man with the largest vocabulary in the world, Rex Murphy, who uses swearing, not because of his lack of words, just because of punctuation.
I'll keep that elsewhere.
But listen, my goal is to give you the facts, give you the arguments, and maybe even rev you up a bit.
And I don't want to unrev you by cussing.
Live Tweeting Mark Norman00:00:45
That's our show for today.
You know, I'm going to be in Ottawa tomorrow for the trial of Vice Admiral Mark Norman.
I'm going to be live tweeting it, and I'm going to be doing little video updates from outside the court.
So I'm going on a very small one-day adventure, but I will still have a show.
So come for the show, and also check my Twitter feed, which is just twitter.com slash Ezra Levant.
And my goal is to tweet Episturum in the court.
I fly all the way to London to live tweet Tommy Robinson's trials.
At least I should do is do it in my own capital city.