Calgary Mayor Nahid Nenshi faces backlash over Rockefeller Foundation ties, including a $340K 2013 contract with anti-tar sands Pembina Institute and a 2018 Italy trip funded by the foundation, which opposes Alberta’s oil sector. Critics like William Macbeth highlight Calgary’s financial struggles—$300K/year spent on unrecycled plastic, 3%+ property tax hikes, and depleted rainy day funds—while questioning Nenshi’s refusal to cut employee pensions or salaries without provincial approval. Meanwhile, Ezra Levant covers Tommy Robinson’s UK retrial, where the Attorney General defied double jeopardy by reprosecuting him after a controversial 13-month prison sentence for live-streaming a rape trial. With Brexit’s ignored mandate and media bias against Robinson, the episode underscores systemic distrust in institutions, urging conservative municipal activism to counter perceived elite overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, the city of Medicine Hat, Alberta is boycotting a conference in Quebec.
And Calgary's Mayor, Nahid Nenshi, well, he doesn't like it one bit.
Although, is it really any wonder that a mayor who's cozied up to the Rockefeller Foundation is now looking down his smug nose at another city that's making a stand for Alberta's oil and gas jobs?
It's May 14th, 2019.
I'm Sheila Gunreed, and you're watching the Ezra Levant show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a 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.
Medicine Hat, Alberta, is a city of about 65,000 people located about three hours southwest of Calgary, but it's also located directly inside my heart this week.
Medicine Hat City Council has voted unanimously to boycott the Federation of Canadian Municipalities Conference in Quebec City to be held later on in the month on the 30th of May.
Medicine Hat Mayor Ted Klugston told Post Media, and I quote, in Medicine Hat, we just didn't feel like we could spend our taxpayers' money in a province that didn't welcome us.
We're cutting and cutting and cutting and telling our employees that they take 0% wage increases.
We're cutting how often we water the parks.
And then all of a sudden, for our citizens to see seven of us are flying to Quebec, well, the optics of that perhaps aren't the best either.
Now, this defense of the oil and gas industry by Medicine Hat should not be shocking to anyone paying attention to history or the last 150 years.
Oil and gas have been a part of Medicine Hat since before Alberta was even Alberta in 1883 when railroad crews were drilling for water near Medicine Hat.
They discovered shallow pools of natural gas just sitting barely below the surface of the soil.
When British journalist and author Rudyard Kipling, you know, the author of the jungle book, visited Medicine Hat, he noted that in some places, it seemed like natural gas was just leaking out of the ground.
And he remarked, this part of the country seems to have all hell for a basement, and the only trapdoor appears to be in Medicine Hat.
Now, that's a fun little bit of history.
But in modern times, Medicine Hat actually owns a company called Natural Gas and Petroleum Resources, which operates over 4,000 active wells.
They manage another 1,500 wells, has 18 active compressor stations and four active oil batteries.
And those are both in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
And that's just the shortlist, folks.
The city also partners in other gas projects.
These assets and business partnerships have resulted in a half a billion dollars in benefit to the city and people of Medicine Hat over the last 15 years.
If I were in Medicine Hat, I would be taking every single attack on the resource sector as an attack on my town.
But the first mayor to scold Medicine Hat for not going to this conference, even faster than the mayor of Quebec City, was the mayor of Calgary, Nahid Nenshi.
Nenshi said, and I quote, I always think a dialogue is better than taking your puck and going home.
Mayor Nenshi should really be embarrassed that a much smaller city like Medicine Hat is taking a much bolder stand for Alberta against Quebec than Calgary ever has.
One-third of the retail space in Calgary's downtown core is vacant due to the downturn in oil and gas, the carbon tax exacerbated man-made recession made even worse by the landlocking of Alberta oil and gas by our so-called partners in Confederation, those governments in British Columbia and Quebec.
But Calgary's mayor, well, he has a bit of a habit of talking down to those who are standing up for the oil and gas sector.
It's a very weird habit for a mayor of a city like Calgary, but once you hear what I'm about to tell you, it'll all make a bunch of sense.
While trying to show off how progressive Calgary is to the rest of Canada under his enlightened leadership, Nenshi managed to attack blue-collar people for their vehicle choices.
Just watch.
You know, yeah, people can talk about cruise shifts, people can talk about water treatment plants.
You know, look, everybody's got skeletons in their closet.
I'm not interested in having that discussion.
What I am interested in is just helping everyone in Canada understand that we here in Alberta are not a bunch of, you know, F-350 driving cavemen.
And Nenshi has been quoted by the Calgary Sun as saying that the anger and resentment in Alberta are actually making it much harder to get companies to invest here.
Hold on a second.
Nenshi thinks that our unpleasant attitudes from being mistreated by the Trudeau government and the Notley government for the past four years and then treated as the whipping boy within Confederation are not only unjustified, but it's a bit of a bad look and we should just be a little bit more dignified in our desperation and unemployment.
You know what I think?
If people aren't investing in Calgary, it might have something to do with the near-constant property tax hikes and a mayor that takes funding and favors from the Rockefeller Foundation.
If I were an oil company, that would be enough to scare me away for good.
Yeah, I know it might be hard to believe that the mayor of Canada's oil and gas capital is taking favors and funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, whose tar stands campaign has played a major part in the downturn in oil and gas here in Alberta and the landlocking of Canada's resources.
But Nenshi is.
Now at the Rebel, we know through Freedom of Information requests that we filed into the City of Calgary that the Rockefeller Foundation is providing direct funding to the City of Calgary, or at least they were for two years beginning in 2016 to fund a resiliency officer, whatever that is, as part of Calgary joining the Resilient Cities program organized and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
So we do know that the Rockefeller Foundation is funding someone to administer Rockefeller Foundation programming and ideas within the city of Calgary.
Here it is on page 28.
It's what Calgary has to do for the Rockefellers, including that Rockefeller gets a say in who Calgary will hire for their chief resiliency officer with the money Rockefeller is giving them.
They must commit to hiring a CRO, a resiliency officer at a senior level within municipal government and collaborate with the IOORC, that's Rockefeller's Resilient Cities program, around the selection of a candidate, placement within the government, and reporting structures.
Then in May 2018, it was announced that Nenshi was going to Italy to be part of the Rockefeller Foundation's City X Change Summit at the Rockefellers Bellagio Center.
It's a 50-acre property on Lake Como, just up the road from George Clooney, Madonna, Donna Tella Versace, and Richard Branson.
And according to our friends at Safe Calgary, Calgary's taxpayer watchdog organization, Nenshi admitted that the Rockefeller Foundation paid for his luxury trip to Europe.
And speaking of Rockefeller funding, in 2013, the city of Calgary contracted the Pembina Institute.
Now, that's another organization that is cited in the Rockefeller Foundation's tar sands campaign.
Pembina was paid $340,000 from taxpayer coffers for professional fees for communications and quote-unquote preparing reports.
So knowing all of that, does that put into a little better perspective of just why Nenshi was so peeved at Medicine Hat for doing the right thing for Alberta jobs?
Why Nenshi Is Jealous00:15:14
You know, I'm starting to think the only Albertan Mayor Nenshi actually likes is himself.
Stay with us.
My guest joins me up next after the break.
You know it's my opinion that, like Allison Redford, to some extent before him, and definitely Rachel Notley, I think, Mary Nenshi is happy to be in charge of Calgary.
but I don't think he particularly likes the ethos of Calgary.
And I think Calgary is one of those great, rare places where there really is no snobbery among people over the work that they do.
I think in Calgary, people understand that, you know, whether you drive a welding truck or work in an office tower, your work is no more better than the next person's.
And for a great deal of Albertans, blue-collar work earns them that upper-middle-class lifestyle.
To talk more about what's going on with Nenshi, I mean, and there's just so much, is my friend William Macbeth from Safe Calgary and also from Canadians for Democracy and Prosperity.
Hey, William, thanks for joining me.
Oh, well, thanks for having me again, Sheila.
I wanted to talk to you first about, you know, I don't know about you, but I think recycling is one of the most expensive virtue signaling projects that I think people don't even realize just how bad it is.
And Calgary is no better.
I mean, Edmonton, they famously bought a recycling plant that then went bankrupt.
And Calgary really is no better.
I mean, from what I understand, Calgary is paying a lot of money to keep garbage safe and warm right now.
You're absolutely right, Sheila.
It's amazing.
We pay $300,000 a year, and that price is going up every month in order to keep plastic safe and warm because we can't recycle it.
And yet, we keep insisting that not only do people not just throw it out, but they put it in their blue bin.
And then instead of the city putting it in a landfill and disposing of it, we're just keeping it in perpetuity, paying a monthly rent for it so that we can, I don't know, avoid having to avoid having to deal with the problem once and for all and also to feel better about ourselves.
And that's the reason why I think a lot of city council does what it does.
It likes to feel good about itself, even if it isn't actually achieving anything.
Yeah, I mean, Calgary likes to pride itself.
And like every municipality, I'm not singling out Calgary here, but Calgary likes to pride itself on this, you know, being a green, progressive city.
But I mean, when people are paying to recycle stuff and it's not getting recycled, it's just stored like regular garbage and not even dealt with like regular garbage.
Other garbage, you know, it gets dealt with.
It gets put somewhere, it gets handled.
But this is actually just stored away somewhere like, you know, old furniture.
It's very strange.
Well, you think about it.
You pay your annual, you know, your monthly recycling fee, which comes to more than $100 a year for the average Calgary household.
And then you pay through your tax dollars again to not recycle the same garbage.
So you think to yourself, first of all, in many cities, garbage and recycling are core city responsibilities.
It's why we pay property taxes.
And in Calgary, boy, do we like to pay property taxes.
They're going up again by more than 3% this year.
And so you're paying your property taxes.
On top of that, you pay your special garbage pickup fees.
And there's multiple ones because we have a black bin, we have a green bin, we have a blue bin.
They're picked up on different days, sometimes weekly, sometimes every other week.
And if you happen to get it a bit wrong, you've put the wrong piece of garbage in the wrong bin, the city gives you a little no-no note that says you've done this wrong and refuses to pick it up.
And so after finally picking up your garbage and you've paid for it, they then take it to be stored in more than 100 trailer trucks to keep it safe and warm and not recycle it because they don't know how to recycle this plastic.
And to me, what's really offensive is we couldn't help the people of the midfield mobile home park keep their homes, but we can provide safe, affordable taxpayer-funded homes for plastic garbage.
You know, it's so, it's, it's offensive really to the sensibilities of Calgarians when they're paying money, like you say, to deal with this issue.
Now, I was reading today that Nunci's really robbing Peter to pay Paul.
He's clearing out the rainy day fund to pay for major projects.
So even as Calgary taxes are going up in Calgary, he's also sort of moving money from here to there to make it look like they're coming close to on budget for some of these major projects when really he's just basically clearing out what we would call at the provincial level, the contingency fund.
You're absolutely right.
And I think there's so many issues about this that are bothersome, I think, to taxpayers.
The first one is we actually have no idea how much money Calgary has saved up.
The city publicly admits to having a few billion dollars in savings across various funds and contingencies.
But since it's really never been audited before, and since there's no independent outside financial look at it, we really don't have any idea how much money Calgary has socked away in different funds.
Second of all, we asked, safe Calgary asked, about the possibility of reducing city employee salaries, wages, benefits, and pensions.
And we're told, point blank, in fact, one of our city councilors asked the admin, and the response back from administration was it would be virtually impossible to do any of that without the provincial government's approval.
And yet the city of Calgary has never asked the provincial government for permission for the ability to cut salaries.
And for anybody who's been paying attention to Calgary, it's been really tough in this city.
We've seen scores of layoffs and people all across the board took salary cuts.
I myself took a salary cut before being laid off.
And the reason you do that, of course, is so that you can try and keep the company going.
You have to make some tough decisions.
But why are we exempting municipal employees who get incredibly generous benefits and pensions from the same economic pain that the rest of us have had to shoulder?
So there's something else that the city hasn't taken seriously, the idea that we're spending too much money on our municipal government.
And I hope it's something that the new Kenny government and the United Conservative Party take a good hard look at the next time Calgary comes banging on their door, asking for yet another batch of taxpayer dollars.
You know, and that's you mentioned the salary and pension issue.
I mean, when the couple conservative counselors, Sean Chu and Jeremy Farkas, try to bring this issue up, they're basically accused of showboating when they're saying this is a serious issue that is really crippling the taxpayer because there really is one taxpayer.
And Nenshi just looks down his nose at them when they're advocating for their constituents.
Oh, the response from the mayor on this was truly objectionable.
I mean, first of all, Calgary city councilors get the most generous pension for any city council in the country.
In fact, the cost of pension payouts just for city of Calgary retired councillors is more than the cost to Vancouver, Edmonton, and Ottawa combined for their city councils.
No, it's a ludicrous amount of money.
And so when someone says maybe this is too generous, maybe in these tough times, giving politicians these platinum pension packages is too generous, the mayor has the nerve to say that this isn't something the council should talk about.
And he cites that there's an independent committee, a citizen committee that looks at city council compensation.
Well, this would be the very same citizen committee whose chair bitterly complained about the mayor not listening to what they were recommending for substituting their own judgment for that of this volunteer citizen committee and for even insulting them publicly on several occasions.
So which way is it, Mayor Nanshi?
Is this committee worth listening to or are they worth insulting?
Because you seem to want to have it both ways.
And I think people are starting to see that the mayor himself doesn't like to talk about pensions because of course he doesn't get just one taxpayer funded pension.
Queen and Calgary have decided to give him two taxpayer funded pensions.
So, you know, how many taxpayer-funded pensions does one mayor, you know, need or deserve?
And I think it's, you know, at least one too many, if not two too many in this case.
You know, it's so disconnected from the reality in Calgary.
I mean, I think the numbers are that one-third of the office towers are empty, like one in three office spaces are empty in Calgary.
And that takes a lot from boots on the ground guys on a drilling rig to trickle up to the people in the office.
So that just speaks to what's happening in the greater Calgary area.
But Nenshi is going out of his way with taxpayer dollars to insulate himself, counselors, and government bureaucrats from the reality everybody else in Calgary is facing.
Their employers, the reality their employers are facing every single day.
I think it's atrocious and unaccountable.
And what a good segue, because speaking of unaccountable, the Olympic report is delayed until June.
So we still will have no idea what the city of Calgary spent on Nenshi's very nearly multi-billion dollar vanity project.
Boy, that's a bullet.
I'm glad that taxpayers dodged.
Well, no, you're correct that they have delayed it once again by several months, but it wasn't just Calgary taxpayers who had to pay for this Olympic bid.
You as an Albertan put in money towards it, and you as a Canadian put in money towards this as well.
And then, of course, Mayor Nenshi and his cronies said that they didn't want to give any of the excess money back, that if there was anything left over, that that should just go back to Calgarians.
And again, despite her unenviable record, I credit our former NDP premier with being the only person who had any modicum of common sense when it came to keeping a lid on costs for this Olympic, because if it was up to the mayor, we would have blown the bank, absolutely blown the bank on it.
And even without the Olympics, we're still paying more than a 3% increase in property taxes.
You can only imagine what that increase would have been without if we had to pay for an Olympics as well.
But why they don't want to tell Calgarians how the money was spent to us is just an entire, it sums up the Olympics process perfectly.
Because we used to joke that when it came to BigCo, the company that we created to bid for the Olympics, their slogan was, well, that's just none of your business.
When we would ask them questions, they didn't think we should know.
And we not being safe Calgary, we being taxpayers, the people who would end up putting the bill, they didn't think that we really should know how the money was being spent, what it was being spent on.
And these are important questions because when you're dealing with the International Olympic Committee, a body who I will never be asked to serve on subsequent to these Olympics bids, these are not people who have a great track record for fiscal responsibility and using taxpayer dollars wisely.
These are people who say, I don't want to stay in the four-star hotel.
I want to stay in the five-star hotel.
If you don't have a five-star hotel, well, could you please build one before the Olympics happen?
Or when I'm greeted at the private terminal at Calgary Airport, everybody I run into on my way to the hotel has to smile at me.
That's actually one of the rules that the IOC had.
So to me, I'd like to know what exactly we spent on things like gifts for IOC members, hospitality for various bigwigs, how many parties were held using taxpayer dollars, how much alcohol and food did we end up buying for these bigwigs.
I mean, Sheila, we've talked about this before, but one of the reasons why so many elites were upset about the Olympics was because it was really a party for them.
It was, you know, a caviar and champagne for the elites, and the rest of us picked up the tab.
So to me, that's what I want to see is how much did we spend on this, you know, vanity exercise for the mayor and how much of it went to, you know, lining the pockets or buying the perks for IOC members.
I'm also curious to see just how outspent the no side was and just how effective the no side was with what little bit of money that the no side had.
Because not only on the yes side did you have the city, but you also had major people who were lined up with their hands out for government contracts from the Chamber of Commerce.
And I'm normally very, very pro-business and I like to say that I still am, but I am against crony capitalism, especially when it's on the backs of taxpayers during one of the worst recessions we've seen in recent history in Calgary.
And yet a lot of these construction firms and business associations, they were cheering for Calgary to go ahead with the Olympics because money would come directly from the taxpayer into their struggling businesses to basically put on the Olympics.
So I would like to see, I bet you, the no side was outspent at least five or six to one.
You know, it's interesting.
We may never know exactly how much money ended up being spent in support of the Olympic bid.
We'll find out what, you know, eventually, whenever they Deem it appropriate for us to read the report, uh, what the official big code spend was.
Because, of course, the same people who were giving us the choice of whether or not to have an Olympics were officially for it and were campaigning aggressively for it.
And then there was the yes committee, which had deep pockets funded by all sorts of organizations and companies and wealthy people.
But we'll never know what the spend by them was.
Focus On Municipal Politics00:10:24
That's not ever going to be released.
I can tell you, on behalf of the no side, our spending was measured in the thousands of dollars, not in the millions of dollars.
So, five to six to one, maybe 50 to 60 to one.
But, you know, I think they actually deserve a little bit of credit for having spent so much to achieve so little in their campaign.
You know, despite outspending the little no side by an unbelievable margin, they really couldn't convince Calgarians there was any merit to holding these Olympics.
And I actually think it reflects really quite well that Calgarians weren't fooled by the massive high spending tactics of either the big committee or the yes campaign because they clearly saw the dangers associated with hosting these games.
Do you think the failure of the Olympics has hurt Nenshi's popularity in Calgary?
I mean, outsider looking in, I don't understand how Nenshi keeps getting elected in Calgary.
I understand how Mayor Don Iveson keeps getting elected in Edmonton.
Edmonton is a progressive government city.
It's full of unions and people who make a living up to the government trough.
But I don't get how Nenshi stays relatively popular in Calgary.
Is it that he's that the conservative side isn't fielding great people or they don't have like a well-known person up against him?
What happened last time?
Well, I definitely think some of the shine has come off of our mayor.
If you think back to when Calgary had those devastating floods in 2013, the mayor's approval rating was above 90%.
People in this city adored him.
He was a rock star.
I don't think that's the case anymore.
I think there are people who have now seen Mayor Nai Chief for who he really is.
And that's someone who is, you know, there is no smarter person in his mind than himself.
And, you know, he isn't particularly concerned about the opinions of other people or of working together.
He just likes to tell you how smart he is or to insult you if you disagree with him.
I think the mistake that happened last time was the conservatives haven't taken municipal politics as seriously as they should.
I think they focus a lot on federal politics and I think they focus on provincial politics.
But oftentimes they've ignored municipal politics.
They've ignored school board elections and things like that to their detriment because of course this is where the left, the Democrats and others, this is their training ground for people they then bring up into the majors to contest provincial and federal elections.
Look at SoHi.
So he walks straight off Edmonton City Council and into a cabinet minister position in Trudeau's government.
It is really the farm team for the progressive movement where they cut their teeth.
Sarah Hoffman, likewise, she was on the school board, I think, school board trustee.
Does that sound right?
She was.
Anyway, yeah.
I mean, so sorry to interrupt you while you were trying to make a very poignant point there, but yeah, you are absolutely 100% right.
We're not paying close enough attention to what happens at the municipal level.
And so I think there's a few things we can do.
Of them is to really take seriously municipal politics as something that conservatives should care about.
Why should conservatives care about it?
Well, because a lot of the other orders of government have decided they can't raise taxes anymore, that they have to look for opportunities to reduce spending or to spend more wisely.
So, we've had some success in holding the line on tax increases at the provincial and federal levels.
And I have absolute confidence that under the leadership of Premier Jason Kenney, Alberta will start to get its fiscal house back in order.
So, that's good news.
Secondly, it looks like Andrew Scheer has a decent chance at unseating the less than beloved Justine Trudeau in this fall.
But where are taxes still going up year after year?
It's at the city level.
You are paying more every single year for municipal taxes.
You get terrible municipal service in return.
And you're paying a ridiculous amount of money for pensions and for benefits and for salaries for city employees.
So, step one, conservatives have to take it seriously.
I think step two is we have to find a team of great candidates who will start campaigning not two months before the election, but two years before the election in order to show Calgarians that they really do have a choice, that there is an alternative to Mayor Nengshi and to his bullying and his arrogance, that there is an alternative to people like Councillor Drew Farrell or Councillor Jean-Carlo Carrat,
people who have never seen a tax increase they haven't liked and who believe that more government is always better.
These are people who I think can be defeated, who win with less than 30% of the vote, but we just haven't gotten ourselves organized.
So, I do think that that's what it's going to take to see some real change at the municipal level: getting organized early for municipal politics now.
William, I think you guys at Safe Calgary and Canadians for Democracy and Prosperity do great work in that you, especially Save Calgary, you guys focus exclusively on municipal issues with a laser beam-like focus and through the lens of conservatives, that there are always better ways to spend money.
There's always some other answer other than a tax hike.
And I think that's really lacking across the country, to be honest with you.
There's really nothing like Safe Calgary that exists in Edmonton, and the battlefield is ripe for just somebody.
I mean, it doesn't even have to be from a conservative perspective.
Just quit wasting our money on recycling plants that go broke.
But there's really nothing like that.
And I think with the success of the Olympics, or rather, the success of the no side during the Olympic bid, I really do hope that it inspires these other pop-up groups all across the country to realize you don't need money.
You just need really political will and grassroots activism to make some change and to bring what you guys faced at the Olympic level, millions and millions and millions of dollars.
And you basically overcame that by telling taxpayers the truth.
So, I guess, after that long soliloquy, patting you on the back, how do people help you bring a little bit of accountability back to City Hall?
Well, I would love to see a save Edmonton and a save Vancouver and a save Toronto, all of these groups, because if you look at how much money is getting raised and spent, you know, it's in the tens of billions of dollars that we spend on municipal government, and it doesn't get the kind of attention and oversight that other levels of government do.
So if you believe that taxpayers are being poorly represented at the municipal level, and if you think maybe wouldn't it be nice to not have your property taxes go up every single year, then supporting a group like Safe Calgary or even getting active in your local community and caring about who's being elected to city council, who's being elected to your school board, these are all really great things.
I mean, Canadians for Democracy and Prosperity was started because we believe that the two things that are best for every government, every order of government, municipal, provincial, and federal, is democracy.
So, you know, choices, hard-fought elections, understanding that there are always two sides to look at on any issue, that the alternative to spending more is spending less, and that the alternative to raising taxes is to cutting taxes.
And then what do we think that leads to?
We think better choices lead to prosperity.
More jobs, more money in your pocket, less expensive, less intrusive government, all of these things that I think if you ask everyday Canadians, they really would support.
So for Safe Calgary, you can sign up to our weekly email newsletter.
You can give us a follow on Facebook.
You can follow us on Twitter, our website, safecalgary.com, for democracy and prosperity.
Again, we're online, democracyandprosperity.ca, and then through our Facebook and Twitter accounts.
But I think simply even talking to your friends, your families, your neighbors about municipal issues is a great beginning.
And I hope more people who believe in common sense and fiscal responsibility choose to take the plunge to run for municipal office.
It's, you know, lots of people want to be MLAs and lots of people want to be MPs, but a lot of the heavy lifting has to be done right here in our cities.
So I would really encourage everyone who's ever thought about running for office to look seriously at running for municipal office.
And of course, the daily commute is a lot easier than having to go to a distant city in either Edmonton or Ottawa if you're looking to run for council thing, you know, right in your backyard.
William, I want to thank you so much for being so generous with your time, as always.
And I want to thank you for fighting for taxpayers because I don't think a lot of people really know the good work that Safe Calgary is doing behind the scenes to hold the government to account.
Well, thank you so much for having us on.
I know that we've had a couple counselors say how much less fun it's been, you know, being a city councillor because they can't be the kind of counselors they once were, which I think is probably a good thing if we've made it a little bit harder to just spend taxpayer money on pet projects without any accountability at all.
So thank you very much.
And thank you for giving us, you know, the attention that municipal politics deserves on your show, Sheila.
Great.
Thanks, William.
Cheers.
Thanks.
Stay with us more up next after the break.
Hey, welcome back everyone.
Tommy Robinson's UK Retrial Update00:06:29
Now, normally this is the part of the show where Ezra reads viewer feedback, comments, congratulations, suggestions, and even his hate mail.
But since I'm running the show tonight, I think we should maybe do something just a little different.
You see, I'm running the show because Ezra is over in the UK, where Tommy Robinson is being retried for contempt of court for the dangerous crime of doing journalism.
It's something Tommy was already wrongfully imprisoned for.
Ezra is in the UK right now with several other journalists that Ezra took with him because, as you know, you just can't trust the UK media to tell us the straight truth.
So I thought we would have Ezra give our viewers tonight an update from on the ground at the courthouse here.
For the Rebel Don Media, I'm Ezra Levan.
I am standing amidst a boisterous crowd outside the Old Bailey Central Criminal Courts in central London.
I'd say there's about 500 people on the pro-Tommy side.
And looking up the street, I see about two dozen Antifa and Jeremy Corbyn laborites all with their pre-fab signs on this side, a much more organic grassroots protest.
Those are the professional protesters.
But of course, the real problem is not the banter or the debate on the streets.
I don't think it's going to get violent, although it has in the past.
Antifa's tactics is deplatforming and violence where possible.
There's a lot of police.
You can see the police in the yellow vests here.
I think there'll be excellent order.
You don't want to riot outside the central criminal courts.
I think the main problem is inside the courts itself.
Because why are we here today?
We're here because Teresa May's Attorney General has chosen to reprosecute Tommy Robinson again for the same incident for which he was held in contempt a year ago outside the county court in Leeds, UK.
Just a quick reminder, Tommy was live streaming from his phone on Facebook about a rape gang trial of more than two dozen men.
The jury had finished their deliberations.
It was Judgment Day.
Tommy was outside the court, didn't talk about any details inside the court.
All he did was read the names of the accused and he read them from the BBC state broadcaster website.
But for that offense or some other offense, we're not quite sure.
A squad of police swooped him.
You've seen the footage, grabbed him, put him in the back of the truck, took him to a police station, took him to court in a less than 10-minute trial in which Tommy himself didn't have a word to speak.
He was sentenced to 13 months in prison, packed off to prison that day, and was shortly thereafter transferred to a high-risk prison dominated by Muslim gangs itself.
Tommy had to be put in solitary confinement for his own safety, said the warden of the prison, where he was starved because, of course, the Muslim gangs also ran the kitchens.
As you know, rebel viewers crowdfunded the legal appeal.
The court of appeal, led by no one less than the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales himself, issued a scathing rebuke of that decision to imprison Tommy, and he was freed thanks to rebel viewers.
You would think that that would be enough.
You would think that that would have humiliated the establishment enough to have been exposed as be so abusive, but no.
Jeffrey Cox, Theresa May's new attorney general, has made the positive decision to reprosecute Tommy for that original offense.
Now, my American friends must be saying, what are you talking about?
That's called Double Jeopardy.
Well, welcome to the United Kingdom 2019.
It should be called 1984, I think.
So we'll be going inside the court to give you a report.
Now, of course, I can't take my cameras inside the court, so I'll be live tweeting if you know what I mean by that.
If you go to twitter.com/slash Ezra Levant, you can get my minute-by-minute updates inside there.
And then when the court is on break, we'll come out here.
There's another thing I should point out.
You can't really see it here because it's off, but there's a billboard truck behind me.
That's from Tommy's campaign.
He's running to be a member of the European Parliament.
Of course, the United Kingdom was not supposed to be in the EU anymore.
It was supposed to have left after the Brexit referendum was supposed to kick in on March 29th.
That was also scuppered by the same Teresa May.
So there's an enomie.
There's a restlessness here that is higher than anything I think we know in Canada or the United States.
Imagine a referendum, the largest voter turnout in history.
17.4 million Brits say, let's get out of here.
And Teresa May says, yeah, we're just going to ignore that.
Add that to all the problems in this country.
And you get a feeling for the sense of betrayal here.
I think the prosecution in the court is just a piece of that.
Anyway, Tommy is running to be a member of the European Parliament in Northwest England.
And giving the unique vote counting system, he could win one of the eight seats there with as few as 10% of the votes.
So that's coming up on May 23rd today.
May 14th is Tommy's trial.
It's a mess over here, but I'm delighted to represent the Rebel.
We have a student journalist with us, Jessica, and we've helped crowdfund other journalists to be here today.
Abhiyamini from Melbourne, Australia, Andrew Lawton from London, Ontario, Canada, Cassandra Fairbanks and Pardes Solaire from Washington, D.C., Jordan James, we brought him down from Manchester.
Two cameramen.
So we have a total of nine real reporters.
And the reason I call them real reporters is because unlike the British media, they're not Tommy haters.
I find the media in this country to be appalling.
That's why we had to bring in foreigners like myself.
You can hear a Tommy chant in the background.
On that note, I'll bid you adieu for now.
I'll have more reports from after the court's hearings.
Until then, on behalf of all of us here at the Rebel, we'll keep you updated at realreporters.uk.
Now, to see all of Ezra's reports, go to realreporters.uk.
And if you are so inclined, if you feel like Ezra and his hand-selected team of real journalists who are neither censored nor self-censored are doing valuable work, you can help cover the cost to send them to the UK at realreporters.uk.
Well, everybody, that's the show tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in as I hold down the fort here in Alberta while our team produces the show in Toronto while Ezra is reporting from the UK.
Yes, the Rebel is really a transcontinental operation tonight.