Ezra Levant and Barbara Kay mock Justin Trudeau’s botched 2021 plastics ban announcement, highlighting his $35.74 "drink box water bottle" suggestion—ignoring cheaper alternatives—and reliance on a disputed statistic from a nine-year-old’s blog. They debate whether labeling missing Indigenous women as genocide is misleading, given high police clearance rates and rare non-Indigenous perpetrators, warning Trudeau’s rhetoric could invite reparations demands. Levant praises Andrew Scheer for not opposing hate speech laws but criticizes his conciliatory approach, arguing free speech support could energize conservatives, contrasting Trudeau’s authoritarian drift with Scheer’s potential to resist, though skepticism lingers about his resolve. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello my friends, we've got a fun podcast for you today.
It's Justin Trudeau talking about his love for water bottle box water paper bottle.
It sounds like a tongue twister by Dr. Seuss.
He's talking about water bottle boxes.
Have you ever heard of a water bottle box?
Trudeau apparently has.
And I think I actually found it on Google what he's talking about.
Either that or he's still coming down from just a really big marijuana bender.
I mean, remember the guy just, is it called a bender?
Remember the guy said he still smokes pots.
It's becoming an MP?
Why would you doubt him?
Anyways, I go through his explanation about water bottle boxes and I give you my thoughts on that.
Hey, before I get out of the way and let you hear that, do me a favor and become a Rebel Premium subscriber.
It's $8 a month or $80 for a year.
You get access to the video version of my show.
You got to see the video today.
We've got some clips you want to see.
And you get access to Sheila Gunrid's show and David Menzie's show.
And of course, we get the $8 a month so we can help do these fun, fun shows for you.
All right, without further ado, here is a probably stoned Justin Trudeau talking about water bottle boxes.
You're listening to a Rebel Media podcast.
Tonight, hey, would you like a nice, cool box of water to drink?
It's June 12th, and this is 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 publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Did you see Justin Trudeau the other day answering a very simple question with the most spectacular answer?
It was about reducing plastics.
A pretty simple question.
It's just amazing.
Take a look.
you and your family do to cut back on plastics we we have recently switched to drinking water bottles out of water out of when we have water bottles out of a plastic sorry away from plastic towards paper like drink box water bottles sort of thing What did he say there?
A paper-like drink box water bottle sort of thing?
Is this like Dr. Seuss or something?
I just got to show you that again, because I know that if you've been watching Trudeau's CBC State Broadcaster or most mainstream media, you didn't actually see it.
And like me, you're probably saying, what did he say?
Take a listen a second time.
Do you and your family do to cut back on plastics?
We have recently switched to drinking water bottles out of water out of when we have water bottles out of a plastic, sorry, away from plastic towards paper, like drink box water bottles sort of things.
Can we get like a breathalyzer test on that guy or something?
What exactly is a paper-like drink box water bottle sort of thing?
What's he talking about?
Is he using marijuana again?
I have been, in my past, a very rare user of marijuana.
Yeah.
I mean, that's one possible excuse.
He was stumbling around a fair bit that day.
I don't know if you caught this part.
I'm very pleased to announce that as early as 2021, Canada will barn.
I'm very happy to announce that as early as 2021, Canada will ban harmful single-use plastics from coast to coast to coast.
Did he giggle there?
He's got the munchies, maybe?
Anyway, when he mentioned the paper-like drink box water bottle sort of thing, I don't know.
I think it was, I think he was genuinely surprised by the question.
It was a pretty softball question put to him by the journalist about what he's done personally to reduce his plastic uses.
If plastic use is bad, who even thinks about that?
I think he had never thought about the question because, of course, when he's talking about taxing things or banning things or regulating things, those rules are only for the little people.
I mean, come on.
This is the guy telling us all to make smarter choices about energy use and burning gasoline in our cars while he flies around in a private jet.
I think the question was actually a surprise to him because I don't think he ever, ever in his life has ever thought about maybe I'll live a smaller life.
I mean, that's just for you and me.
And I think he stammered in his water bottle, water, whatever, answer because he couldn't think of anything he's actually done ever other than a paper-like drink box, water bottle sort of thing.
That's got to be a Dr. Seuss book one day.
I mean, of course, like the rest of us, he drinks water however he bloody well pleases at the moment.
And frankly, he never thinks about water, bottle, straw, whatever, because it's weird to think about that.
If you spend a few minutes on Google, you can find dozens, probably hundreds of pictures of Trudeau drinking bottled water because he's always going to meetings and conferences.
And sure, sometimes there's a pitcher of water in glasses, but often there isn't.
And bottles are better in many cases because they're individual and they're sanitary and they're convenient and you don't need like a whole kitchen.
It is normal to drink bottled water.
It is abnormal to renounce bottled water, especially in the grand scheme of our industrial lifestyle.
It's extremely abnormal.
It's a lie, actually, for this jet-setting trust fund, pot-smoking nobody to pretend he lives a small life on anything.
In fact, our own Sheila Gunreed fairly recently received an access to information document that shows, surprise, Trudeau is a huge purchaser of bottled water on our dime, of course.
I guess we don't pay him enough money to buy his own bloody water.
Here, take a listen for a couple of minutes to this.
Now, in that exclusive access to information package, there were expensive trips to the Nespresso boutique and multiple purchases at different expensive health food stores totaling thousands of dollars.
And one expense stuck out for me back then, especially considering Trudeau once co-authored an op-ed in the Toronto Star back in 2008, titled The Case Against Bottled Water.
You see here, the Trudeau family, in just one month, according to their own expense claims, spent over $300 on bottled water.
You can see the bureaucrats have blocked out what brand they were purchasing for the Trudeau's in the submitted grocery store receipts, but they have identified these expense claims in the summary sheet as water.
That's water bottles, friends, not as Trudeau says, paper-like drink box water bottles sort of things, because that's just something Trudeau made up on the spot because he's a complete and total BS artist.
The Trudeau spent $300 a month on bottled water.
The expense forms don't lie.
And then Trudeau just announced today that you and I can't use plastic forks anymore when we picnic.
Yeah, you got to watch that whole video.
Sheila did a great job.
$300 a month on bottled water.
You know, we buy bottled water here at the office for us staff.
We don't spend $300 a month on water, and there's almost 20 of us here at our office.
How does Trudeau spend 300 bucks a month for his own household?
To buy 400 half liter bottles of water from Costco is $6.39 delivered.
That's 16 cents a bottle.
If we spend 300 bucks a month on water, it's my math right?
That's 1,800 bottles of water per month.
There's only 20 weekdays a month.
That would mean we'd go through almost 100 bottles of water a day.
We'd all have to be drinking five half liter bottles of water a day.
I don't even think that's possible.
How does Trudeau do it with his small family?
Well, that whole paper-like drink box water bottle sort of thing.
I think it actually might be a real thing.
I didn't know this.
There's something actually called boxed water.
It's actually, as you can see, called Box Water is Better.
And they sell boxes of water and they have all these glamour shots of people drinking water out of boxes.
Boxed water is better.
It's written right there on the carton.
So you can not only virtue signal to anyone around you what a thoughtful snob you are, but it's obviously targeting people like Trudeau who constantly need affirmation.
They constantly need flattery, even from an inanimate object.
It's perfect for a trust fund ne'er-do-well pot smoker like Trudeau who needs his narcissism fluffed up all the time.
Imagine actually needing to be told, buy a carton of water that you are better than others around you.
This was made in a lab just for Trudeau.
But you have to pay for that snobbery.
I showed you that 40 half liters or so 20 liters of water from Costco is $6.39 delivered.
Well, the boxed water people, look at this.
They will sell you a 12-pack of one liter bottles.
Do you see it down there at the bottom?
For $35.74 U.S.
Now, this is just water, by the way.
There's no medicine in it.
There's no vitamins.
There's no sprinkles of gold or diamonds.
It's just water.
It's not even added things.
It's not even bubbles.
It's just water in boxes.
And it's $35 U.S. for 12 liters.
That's about 46 Canadian dollars.
Oh, and shipping.
They actually ship you the water.
They ship it for miles.
They ship it.
Now, normal people get water from a tap or like from a Costco bottle of water, whatever.
It's a convenience item.
Imagine shipping.
Not just the additional cost.
I mean, shipping 12 liters.
That's what, about 25 pounds of water?
So I can only guess the cost of the shipping.
But this is supposed to be environmental or something.
You're shipping water, a little personal shipment of water.
Ding-dong, your water's here.
Oh, thanks, man.
This is $46 worth of water and $40 shipping, $100 a bottle.
Maybe that's what the Trudeau's are doing.
But let's get back to the reason we're all talking about this joke.
Because Trudeau says we have to ban what he calls single-use plastics, like bottles for bottled water.
So he was asked what he's doing personally, and he stammered a bit, and he said, well, I'm using boxes of water.
I think that's what he meant by all this.
Now, you know what a box is, right?
He's talking about a Tetra pack.
You know what that is, right?
It's ubiquitous.
It's like, oh, those are Tetra packs.
Drinking boxes for kids.
There's so many different things.
They're all made by a packaging company called Tetrapak.
The great thing about Tetrapac is you don't have to refrigerate them.
You can refrigerate them, but it's a wonderful packaging invention.
It's decades old, actually.
Have you ever ripped open a Tetrapak like a drinking box like that?
I'm sure you have.
Or even just looked at the little hole in it when you pierce it with a plastic straw.
You'll notice there's a little bit of aluminum foil in there.
You know that, right?
And you know there's plastic in the Tetrapacks, right?
I mean, if you were just to pour water in a box made of paper, you know it would leak, right?
Here, let's let the friendly people from the brilliant company TetraPack explain the miracle of their boxes.
Take a listen.
Each layer helps protect the food or drink inside the package in its own way.
The outermost layer of polymer protects the package from moisture.
The paperboard gives it strength and rigidity.
In our aseptic packages, a second layer of polymer glues the paper to the foil, which in turn acts as a barrier against light and oxygen and enables induction sealing.
Finally, the inner layers of polymer protect the package from the product inside.
Yeah, now you know that the word polymer and polyethylene, you know, just like polyester, you know that's just a very precise way of saying the word plastic, right?
You know, you know what polymer is, a plastic.
Well, here's how the snobs at the Box Water Company handle this little teeny tiny wrinkle.
They say, this is in their frequently asked questions.
They say, why do our boxes need thin aluminum and polyethylene layers?
And their answer is, the aluminum foil serves as a barrier to light, flavor, and oxygen, which enables the contents to last for months without preservatives or refrigeration.
The polyethylene acts as a watertight barrier and helps keep our boxes shape.
Hey guys, did you know that you need foil and plastic to stop your to keep your water for months?
What?
But they say right there, in case you didn't know, that you need the plastic to make it waterproof.
So Trudeau's answer that he reduced his use of plastic bottles by replacing it with his use of plastic and paper and aluminum at nearly, what was that, $4 a liter?
Now gasoline is a buck 60 and we're all shocked by that.
Imagine paying triple a buck 60 for a liter of water plus shipping.
Why are we doing all this?
Why are we talking about this?
57 Million Straws a Day00:06:24
Well, it is true that in some parts of the world, there is a problem with plastic garbage.
And all of those places are in Asia.
Most of them are in China, actually, other places like Indonesia too.
It's not straws that Trudeau wants to ban.
It's industrial-scale plastic from China where we are not.
But let me read the tweet by which Trudeau launched this whole comedy.
Look what he said.
He said, Canadians throw away 3 million tons of plastic waste every year.
15 billion plastic bags a year.
57 million straws a day.
They end up in our oceans, beaches, parks, and streets.
And this has to stop.
We owe it to our planet and to our kids.
And he's looking so thoughtful there, or stone, I'm not sure which.
Okay, did you catch it there?
Hang on a second.
He said 50 million straws a day.
You know what I mean?
Like a drinking straw.
You know, there's only like 36 million Canadian people, right?
So he's saying that we're using about two straws a day for every man, woman, and child.
Have you used two straws today and yesterday, and will you tomorrow and every single day?
No, I don't think you have.
That is crazy.
Where did that number come from?
57 million straws a day, a year.
I'd say, I'd probably use more than two a year.
A day?
Well, it turns out he's actually citing a homemade style activist report put together, as you can see by the city of Vancouver.
They've got an extreme left-wing city council.
You'll recall they declared a climate emergency, blah, blah, blah.
And if you look at this homemade report, they cite 57 million plastic straws a day.
And you see the little footnote there?
It says footnote 2.
And you see at the bottom it says, assuming the same usage rate in Canada as estimated for the U.S.
So the number 57 million is extrapolated from a U.S. number.
And you see it says the link there, eco-cycle.org, be straw-free.
Do you see that?
If you click on that, you'll come here to a website run by a kid.
By a kid.
There he is.
He's a cute kid.
He's a cute kid.
He set up this website when he was nine.
When he was nine years old.
His name is Milo Kress.
Now he's a teenager now, but he's not a scientist now.
This is a kid's story.
And this kid, who was nine when he started this, guessed that Americans use 500 million.
I'm surprised he didn't say gazillion.
He said, hey, Milo Kress, you're nine.
I got a question.
Excuse me, Milo, call on line one from the prime minister's office.
Who's that?
I'm playing soccer now.
No, put down your toy truck.
And the prime minister on the line.
Hi, Milo, you're nine.
And I'm Justin Trudeau.
I have the intellectual curiosity of a nine-year-old, so we're really going to get along.
How many straws do you think there are?
Wow, Justin, I think there's 500 gazillion.
All right, then.
Thanks, Milo.
You can go back to your toy trains now.
Now, the city of Vancouver took that number and said, well, that means Canada's proportion will be 57 million.
I showed you the footnote.
I'm not making this up.
They took it from a nine-year-old boy, and Trudeau repeated that.
It is a child's guess, uncorroborated by anything.
It is clearly false.
And Justin Trudeau has announced his plan to ban plastics because of what a child said on a blog.
I swear on a Bible, that's where the number came from.
Hey, watch this just one more time because it's so funny.
What do you and your family do to cut back on plastics?
We have recently switched to drinking water bottles out of water, out of, when we have water bottles, out of a plastic, sorry, away from plastic towards paper, like drink box water bottles sort of thing.
I think maybe Milo Kress is his new speechwriter.
Just going, I mean, Gerald Butz has left a void in the organization.
And who is the deep thinking guru who is guiding Justin Trudeau so astutely through life?
I got my money on a nine-year-old boy named Milo Kress.
I don't know, just saying.
I'm sorry, that quote there about the drink water fiddle-faddle bottle metal is not only the stupid thing I've seen, it's also the funniest thing I've ever seen.
So naturally, this hour has 22 minutes.
The official government comedians on the state broadcaster, they've done their level best not to mention anything about it.
Yeah, it's too funny.
It's perfect for mockery.
But just like CBC News won't show you the gaff, neither will the CBC's government comedians.
Some things are too funny to joke about.
If this level of stupidity came from anyone on the right, it would be front page in the newspapers, top of the broadcast on the nightly news.
If Doug Ford was quoting a nine-year-old boy for science policy, if it were Donald Trump, it would be in both the New York Times and Saturday Night Live.
But it's the world's stupidest prime minister.
And so all the journalists and comedians who work for him nod along piously and say how much they look forward to using paper straws.
What a clown country Trudeau is turning us into.
Stay with us.
Genocide and Reparations Debate00:13:17
Well, when we were kids, we used to dress up sometimes as cowboys and Indians.
But if you were to go to a costume party dressed as an Aboriginal person wearing a fringed leather garment and a headdress, that would be intolerable these days.
You would be accused of cultural appropriation.
I don't know.
I don't think people who call their sports team the Red Men, as my high school team was called, I don't think they called them that in a disparaging way.
No one names a sports team after something they don't admire.
But alas, that's out of fashion.
But what about when the missing and murdered Indigenous Women's Commission did some cultural appropriation of their own?
When they took the word genocide that historically has only applied to massive systematic extinguishment and ethnic cleansing, like the Jewish Holocaust in the Second World War, like the Armenian Holocaust at the hands of the Turkish Muslims.
What happens when a slow-motion crime wave of Aboriginal murders that the police say are overwhelmingly committed by men in their lives, spouses, even family members, what happens when they call that a genocide?
Is that cultural appropriation?
It's a good question.
There's a question put by our friend Barbara Kay in a recent column of the National Post, and she joins us.
Now, Barbara, great to see you again.
Thanks, Ezra.
Same here.
I want to say right off the bat that here at the Rebel, we're very sympathetic to Aboriginal people.
And I think of all the different identity groups in Canada, it's actually the one that I think I do have certain exceptions.
I mean, I generally renounce and reject all identity politics, grievance politics, but I do carve out, and I think I have an intellectual basis for doing so, a special care, even a duty of care, to use the legal phrase, for Aboriginal folks who were here first.
I don't know if that's the inner liberal in me, but it's just how I feel.
That said, this slow-motion crime wave against Aboriginal women, usually committed by, frankly, Aboriginal men committing crimes, that ain't a genocide, and calling it a genocide doesn't make it so.
That's my view.
What do you think?
Well, I think genocide is a very important word and a very heavily freighted word.
And we should be very careful about when we apply that because there's nothing worse.
Literally, there's no worse crime against humanity.
And I'm willing to stipulate that many Aboriginal peoples have been victims of genocide.
Spaniards and the Belgians wiped out entire populations, and they did it purposefully and intentionally.
And I'd argue perhaps what happened to Canadian Aboriginal people is not exactly a genocide.
But even if it were, you could argue that in the past that there was a systematic attempt to allow them to disappear or to get rid of them in one way or another.
But we're talking, I was appalled because the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls inquiry had a narrow set of parameters to work within, and that was to inquire into this, as you put it, a crime wave.
What happened to these women?
They were killed as individuals, not as members of an ethnic group.
They were killed as individuals, and it was a subject for law enforcement to discover and to investigate under the criminal code.
You know, genocide is something that happens way outside of criminal codes.
It's also not something that happens to one sex or the other.
You can say that the massacre, for example, Sbrenica is often referred to as a genocide, but I would call it a massacre because it was only men.
And there's never been a genocide that was strictly for women.
That just has never happened.
So it's a bad use of the word.
You know, that's a very interesting point.
As I mentioned on the show the other day, RCMP and other police forces have cleared 88% of the cases.
So it's not like there is a mystery.
By the way, the clearance rate for non-Aboriginal murder victims, women murder victims, is 89%.
So it's almost identical.
And I don't know.
What I thought was going on there was I thought it was political, obviously.
I thought it was rhetorical, obviously.
I thought it was cementing a grievance industry rooted in grievances.
And that's why I despair so much about it.
I believe that Aboriginal people in this country have a real problem.
The problem is economic lack of opportunity, health problems, substance abuse problems, violence.
There is a real problem there.
But by saying no, no, no, this is a genocide issue.
It's racism.
You're all victims because of it.
I think that arrests any possible progress because it shifts the locus of the problem from, okay, how can we fix alcoholism on this reserve?
How can we fix a crime problem on that reserve?
It switches the blame to, I don't even know to whom, because I don't even know who theoretically has perpetrated this genocide.
I think it's extremely unhelpful to actually solving the real problems that Aboriginal people face, Barbara.
Well, I agree, and that was the point of my column: to say that if you keep deflecting, I mean, I think the fix was in for this inquiry to begin with.
You know, there were several chairs of the report who quit.
And I think one of the reasons they probably quit is because they were being told, this is how we're going to frame this.
I think the result was known before the inquiry was done.
That was how it was going to be framed, was that this is an example of an ongoing, that was the word they used.
This is an example of an ongoing genocide.
That's like saying that what's happening in Germany today, the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany today, is part of an ongoing genocide.
It just isn't.
Racism does not mean genocide.
A higher crime rate from the general population does not mean a genocide.
None of these things means a genocide, but the word is being used to, as you say, to really pour on the blame to deflect any blame from within.
And as you say, most of these crimes were committed by members of their own communities, male members of their own communities.
So how can a genocide, it makes no sense whatsoever.
And I think that it was an overreach because many people reacted the same way I did.
And they went, hey, come on.
You know, you want reconciliation.
This is not the way to get it.
Yeah.
You know, I really am interested in the fact that right at the top you mentioned some of the conquistadors.
I mean, I read the diary of Bernal Diaz and how he conquered so many Mesoamerican Aboriginals.
Perhaps that could have been called a genocide.
Maybe the extinction of the Beotuk, if I have my history right there.
Maybe that was a genocide.
I don't know.
I frankly don't know enough.
Well, they don't call it that.
They call it a displacement.
Well, I don't know enough to make a judgment, but it would be one thing to say a particular discrete event that resulted in the ethnic cleanse.
I would be open to a conversation about that, though I would say, how does that help us move forward in 2019?
But I think you're right when you're saying what makes this unique is that Trudeau said it is ongoing.
Trudeau is a specialist at apologizing for things in the past, especially the far past, because it's not really an apology.
It's his way of saying, hey, guys, I want to show you how much better I am than other people.
So it's not an ironic apology, but it's saying, by apologizing for someone else, I show you how morally superior I am.
So I don't even take them as apologies.
I take them as virtue signals.
I think this marks a strategic departure for Trudeau because it's the first time I can ever recall that, at least rhetorically, he includes himself as one of the blameworthy parties.
That's what happens when he says it's an ongoing genocide.
He's implying that he's part of it.
I guess he is.
To me, these are such empty words because what did he do?
What has he done personally?
You know, other genocides, you can point to the people in power and say, hey, look, Kristallnacht, that was endorsed by the government.
That was carried out by the police.
So when he says it's an ongoing genocide, who's he talking about?
Are the RCMP laying waste to wholesale to communities?
It just, it doesn't make any sense.
And by the way, the real stupidity in saying that is that it's going to have international consequences.
Now everybody in the world is like, well, Canada, how can you talk about human rights anywhere else in the world?
Aren't you guilty of an ongoing genocide of your own indigenous communities?
This is going to have repercussions, not to mention the word reparations will soon be very much in the news because when you have a genocide, then you have reparations, right?
You know, that is a great point that I had not even contemplated.
I mean, there was talk about reparations in the United States for slavery.
And again, you could theoretically say, all right, if someone was deprived of their freedom as a slave, maybe there is some compensation and reparations for their heirs.
I mean, I could see the legal case, even if it's practically or politically inappropriate.
There was a wrong done.
That was not a genocide, by the way, in the United States.
No, of course not.
And by the way, Germany paid out huge reparations, but they paid them to the survivors.
They didn't pay them to send it.
That's right.
And it was not generic.
You will absolutely see the call for reparations.
And again, I think that's hobbling the Aboriginal community because it's much easier and lazier to say, give me reparations, rather than to say, all right, how do we build a sustainable economy on a reserve?
I want to touch on something, though, the international fact, because right now Canada is in a quarrel with China.
We're in a quarrel with Saudi Arabia.
We're going to quarrel with everybody under Trudeau and Freeland, but how can we ever again raise our finger and wag it at China over Tibet over the Uyghurs?
The Uyghurs, they say the Uyghurs.
That's the Muslim province, East Turkestan, or West Turkestan or something.
Yeah, who are actually in concentration camps, like real concentration camps, millions of them.
And nobody over here, I think, is making as big a deal about that as we should, perhaps.
You know, I remember during the Soviet Union, before the Berlin Wall fell, there were standard Soviet talking points.
Whenever the West would criticize the Soviet Union, Soviet propagandists would say, well, look at your treatment of American blacks and look at your treatment.
And, you know, it would sting a little bit because it would, there was a grain of truth underneath it.
But of course, it was propaganda to divert from the Soviet Union's own malice.
I see that happening for a generation now because when you confess to a genocide, there's no doubt left anymore.
You confess to it.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Let me ask you, I saw there was some, I think it was the Organization of American States, PUBA, who actually said he was now going to investigate Canada.
And Trudeau and Carolyn Bennett implied they're fine with that and they'll cooperate.
That's a whole other level when you've got foreign troublemakers coming here to poke around.
They won't go to North Korea.
They won't go to Iran.
They won't go to Venezuela.
But now they're going to come poke around here and basically try and prosecute us.
Didn't the UN come just a few years ago and they were touring somebody, or was it an NGO touring around the North and saying, oh, you know, people are starving.
Yeah, food security.
They had service.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, food security.
And that was a made-up thing that everybody laughed at.
And it was so stupid.
Canada's such a large food exporter.
But when we confess to genocide, we, our prime minister, how can we not allow foreign observers to come in and investigate?
How can we not?
Well, I just wonder if he was aware of all the implications.
He must have been, because surely he had some advice on the legal implications of using that work.
I can't believe that he did not.
And he took that gamble for what's the real reason behind it?
Something, one of my readers wrote to me and says, oh, this is, he did this to discredit Jodi Wilson Raybold with the Indigenous communities.
And I'm like, gee, what kind of a trade-off is that?
I see the argument.
I wouldn't say to discredit, but take the energy away to say, no, no, no, I am so pro-Aboriginal.
I'll go so crazy far for you.
No one else would say such a crazy thing.
Andrew Scheer's Free Speech Gambit00:06:57
So you can still love me, even though I fired the first Aboriginal Attorney General of Canadian history and humiliated her, and she was right and I was wrong.
It's not going to work.
I don't think it's going to work at all.
It's not going to make the Grassy Narrows protesters any happier.
By the way, I think Jody Wilson-Raybold has a real chance of winning as an independent in Vancouver-Granville, and I hope she does.
Yeah, I do too.
Well, listen, Barbara, it's always a pleasure to talk with you.
You are one of the bravest columnists in the—I'm going to call the National Post the mainstream media because it is a large newspaper with a mainstream audience.
And I congratulate you.
You continue to write things that I'm just so glad you do.
And I hope you continue to have the ability to publish them widely because you are one of the few people to say things that are politically incorrect and speak when the emperor has no clothes.
And I am just so grateful that you have that power.
Thank you.
I'm grateful that they keep letting me publish this stuff.
Yeah, credit to them.
Credit to them.
Yes.
Well, thank you, my friend.
And let me just give them a shout out for those who want to read Barbara's article.
I highly recommend it.
It's in the National Post.
The headline is, genocide appropriation makes reconciliation harder.
And it's just an outstanding read.
Great to see you, and we'll keep in touch.
Thanks, Barbara.
Thank you, Ezra.
All right.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back to my monologue yesterday about Trudeau bringing back the hate speech law and Andrew Scheer letting it happen.
Don writes, Andrew should be fighting tooth and nail to protect free speech.
Absolutely imperative.
Don, you're so right.
And I got to say, I mean, as you know, I was part of this battle in 2013.
I don't know if I ever mentioned it to you.
I actually met with Stephen Harper privately about this matter to try and convince him.
He had some very specific questions for me.
I did my best to answer them, and maybe I convinced him because he did proceed to repeal Section 13.
One of the things I recall telling Harper back then is how unanimous not just conservatives, but I think the broader Canadian community is for free speech.
I think that 99% of conservatives in Canada support free speech.
Like there's no, it's not like even the carbon tax where you have a few weirdos like Michael Chong and Patrick Brown and Preston Manning who support the carbon tax.
Like I can't even name three conservatives in Canada who support censorship, can you?
And even the broader community.
Yeah, they've got a bunch of grievance huckster lobbyists coming to Parliament saying censor, censor.
But even still, most normal Canadians and even liberals of good faith and even not hyper-partisan journalists, everyone knows free speech is the way.
It's the Canadian way.
It's our Canadian values.
It's Section 1 of our Bill of Rights, Section 2 of our Charter of Rights.
This isn't hard.
This is a way that Andrew Scheer could unite the Conservative Party, throw some red meat to the base, and by the base I mean 99% of the party, and show he's not going to get pushed around by the censors.
I can't believe that he's scared away from this because what some liberal losers are saying.
Let the liberals own censorship.
They will hurt themselves on it.
Matt writes, I'm disappointed so far in Andrew Scheer, like Mr. Rogers.
He tries to be nice to everyone, and it will not succeed.
Listen, I know there's a difference between elective politics and punditry.
I'm not worried if I don't persuade 50% of the people because I'm not going to lose an election.
So I don't have the same mission as a politician, which is to get elected.
And I believe that there are some, sometimes you have to choose your battles.
But my God, this is a battle to choose.
As I just said a moment ago, this is unifying not only for the conservative base, it's energizing for the conservative base.
It takes on a real concern amongst conservatives these days that our side is being censored.
And you really think that outside the echo chamber of Parliament's Justice Committee, do you really think that Canadians, even new Canadians who are allegedly represented by these censor lobbies, do you really think most people who came to Canada from the third world where they have censorship are saying, yeah, I'm totally for eroding the freedoms that make Canada great?
Woo!
I love the government making decisions for me.
No, and you know, I should tell you that in fact there are some immigrant communities to Canada for whom the pain of censorship is especially acute because the memory is especially fresh.
I know this from any people I know from the former Soviet bloc.
That's why to this day Eastern Europe is much more vigorous about defending its freedom than the lazy Western Europe because we're complacent in North America and Western Europe.
I put it to you that anyone who came to this country from, say, Cambodia, Vietnam, Venezuela, do you think they like the idea of government censorship?
So I think Andrew Scheer thinks, oh, all the cool kids are for censorship.
Yeah, no, just some journalistic and lobbyist losers.
I think he goes with free speech.
He makes it actually a leading point in the campaign.
I think you're going to pick up 5%.
And more than that, put Trudeau on the back foot.
Mr. Sonny Ways wants to censor his opponents.
No surprise there.
We saw him censor Joni Wilson-Rabold.
Liza writes, if the petition is big enough, Andrew Scheer might start doing his job.
I have my doubts, but of course I signed.
Somebody has got to do something.
Well, that is part of our role here federally with Andrew Scheer, especially if he becomes prime minister.
And this is what I said about Jason Kenney.
Jason Kenney is Premier of Alberta now, just like Doug Ford is Premier of Ontario.
Both of their oppositions are to their left.
The judiciary is to their left.
The universities are to the left.
The media is to the left.
Every single force in Canada is pulling Jason Kenney, Rob Ford, and every other Conservative politician to the left.
Is not it appropriate, therefore, that our role is to pull them back to the right, to help them walk a straight line, and to hold them to account where they are happy to go to the left?
No, no, no.
Part of our role is to stand up for conservative values.
And just as Andrew Scheer used to whip his party to support the Paris Global Warming Scheme, we opposed that and he finally recanted.
It is our job to say uncomfortable things to Andrew Scheer when he is becoming a carbon copy of Trudeau.
And we'll do that.
If he were smart, he'd grab onto Section 13 and fight for it, fight to keep the repeal.
That's my view.
Well, folks, that's the show for today, until tomorrow.