Justin Trudeau’s government quietly advanced a $600M media bailout and $25M activist funding, while the Broadcasting and Communications Legislative Review Panel—chaired by Liberal-connected Janet Yale—proposed internet censorship via "social harm" regulations, mirroring China’s "social credit" system. Critics argue existing laws already cover crimes like harassment and defamation, yet the panel pushes for expanded CRTC oversight, raising privacy and free speech concerns. Meanwhile, Trump’s June 28 DMZ meeting with Kim Jong-un signals a shift in North Korea-China dynamics, potentially undermining Beijing’s influence in denuclearization. Trudeau’s selective policies—censorship over expression, media subsidies over fairness—expose a pattern of prioritizing control while dismissing consistency on issues like feminism and climate tax. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey folks, today's show, I think it's an important one.
In fact, I think I might put the whole thing on YouTube, but normally I don't.
Normally the podcast is free, but we only put a short video clip out.
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All right, here's today's show.
Tonight, another day, another plan by Trudeau's government to censor the internet.
Another day, Andrew Scheer stays silent as a mouse.
It's July 3rd, and this is the Azure 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 is government.
But why publish them?
Just because it's my bloody right to do so.
It really is coming fast now.
Literally every week there is another plan or study or bill or law or proposal or spending by Trudeau and his Liberal government to censor Canadians.
I know you must think I don't follow any other sort of news.
That's not true.
I follow a wide variety of news, foreign and domestic, but I am shocked by the quickening of Trudeau's censorship plans.
I'm disturbed that it's obviously part of a larger coordinated strategy.
I'm worried that it is in league with foreign censors in illiberal regimes around the world and at the United Nations.
And mainly I'm staggered that the leader of Canada's Conservative Party, the official opposition, Andrew Scheer, has been silent on the matter.
Oh, I am no longer surprised that Canada's media party, as I call establishment journalists, I'm no longer surprised that they're silent about this or some of them are even supportive.
The days of journalists pretending they're for free speech has long passed.
They don't have to pretend anymore.
They only meant that when they were journalists holding conservatives to account like the evil Stephen Harper.
Now that the precious one, Justin Trudeau, is prime minister, the media party is all for censoring prickly journalists.
As long as Trudeau and his cronies do the censoring, if Doug Ford or Jason Kenney did any censor, well, they better not get any ideas.
But Trudeau, sure, sure.
So here's the news today.
I mean, literally, there are more stories like this every week.
I just showed you the other day how the Secretary General of the United Nations announced a global war on hate speech, which they acknowledged has no definition.
What is hate speech?
And they like that it has no definition, so they can apply it to whatever they want.
It would be like if the criminal code simply said, arrest bad guys, but didn't say who the bad guys are or what a bad thing was.
Imagine police having that unlimited vague power.
That's what the UN is doing.
Here's a special censor appointed by the UN Secretary General.
His name is Adama Djieng.
He's from an unfree country in Africa, and he's coming to censor you, and he admits they're just making up the definition.
This has not been an easy task, especially considering that hate speech is a very gray area for which no international legal definition exists.
However, UN entities in their respective mandates and programs, in one way or another, have been working to address this growing concern.
Okay, so that was last week's news.
Here's this week's news.
This is from a special censorship team hired by Trudeau's Industry Canada Department.
As you can see here, it's called the Broadcasting and Communications Legislative Review Panel.
I told you about them six months ago.
I don't know if you remember.
Let me play the clip of what I said about them back in January.
Here's about a minute.
Take a look at this.
And who is this panel of elite experts anyways?
Well, here they are.
This is the list of this legislative review panel.
They're all Ottawa insiders.
Mainly at least.
They're lawyers mainly.
And this is how you know they care about accuracy and independence and trustworthiness.
Well, you know that because they're good liberals.
You see that Janet Yale, the one who chairs this whole thing?
Well, here's from public records.
She has donated, this is a list of her political donations over the years.
She has donated thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to the Liberal Party.
Going back years.
If you look carefully at this list, you'll see she mixes it up once in a while.
Once she gave money to the provincial liberals just for diversity.
And she once even gave money to the NDP.
Now that was more than 20 years ago, so I'm sure Trudeau will forgive that one NDP act of disloyalty.
Tons of donations to the Liberals from the other expert panel too.
They're about as independent as Justin Trudeau's independent senators.
You have to be from the CBC to be gullible enough to believe that these people are independent.
Anyways, I have nothing against Janet Yale.
She's the head of this review committee.
She used to be the CEO of the Canadian Cable Television Association.
So I bet she hates internet companies like us that are eroding cable TV viewership.
But even if she wasn't a former lobbyist for our competitors, even if she wasn't the largest liberal donor I've ever come across, frankly, even if she actually was interested in accuracy, independence, and trustworthiness for the news, why on earth should anyone in this country care what she thinks?
Why should anyone in this world have to defer to her taste or her politics or her aesthetic sense or her sense of humor or anything?
Or to put it more bluntly, who the hell is she?
Yeah, well, she did what we were worried she would do.
She published a report that's not about freedom.
It's not about giving Canadians more choice on the internet or maybe one day cheaper prices for the internet or cell phones.
It's about censorship.
Here, let me read to you what these liberal and NDP donors who have a lifetime of work in the legacy media companies, the establishment media, the regulated, subsidized, protected media.
Social Harm Defined00:14:01
Here's what they came up with now.
Social harm in a digital environment.
Or did you know that that's what they were hired to do, to look at social harm?
I like that phrase.
You can't say crime.
You can't even say an offense, a civil offense.
You can't say there's a problem because we already have solutions for real problems.
So you come up with the phrase social harm.
You know, they use that phrase in China now.
They call it social credit.
If you say something in China that's not friendly to the Communist Party, you lose points.
Losing points that can ban you from having a bank account or from traveling.
Social harm.
Here's what social harm looks like in China.
Dear passengers, people who travel without tickets or behave disorderly or smoke in public areas will be punished according to regulations.
And the behavior will be recorded in the individual credit information system.
To avoid an inactive record of personal credit, please follow the relevant regulations and help with the orders on the train and at the station.
So social harm, that's what we're hunting now in Canada.
Let's see what Trudeau's people have to say.
Digital platforms have created new opportunities for participation in digital society, expanded outlets for the expression of ideas and creativity, and allowed the creation and sharing of user-generated content.
However, okay, stop for a second.
You know the rule, right?
Ignore everything that someone says before the word but or however.
Sure, I like her well enough, but sure she seems nice.
However, oh, dinner was delicious.
However, you know the word however, the word but, it tells you when to start paying attention.
Ignore everything before the word but.
Okay, read some more.
However, digital platforms also create new and enhanced potential for individual and collective social harm, ranging from misinformation and fake news to inappropriate or illegal content.
They were references to the potential roles and responsibilities of digital platforms in relation to news, information, and audio-visual content that may be generated by users or alternatively to be provided or curated by the platform provider.
Yeah, look, the internet's been around for about 35 years.
It's been popular for more than 20 years.
We know about illegal content online.
We've got the same tools that we've used for decades to deal with illegal content on TV and on the radio and to deal with illegal content in books before that.
We've just applied those old principles to the new technologies.
All of those offenses existed before the internet, before the telephone, before the printing press even.
They're in hand.
The law will surely continue to develop to handle Twitter.
But this isn't really about crimes, is it?
It's about fake news.
Is that a crime?
No.
Is that a tort, as lawyers would say?
No.
Fake news.
I think two years of the media party promoting the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was a Russian agent, I think that's fake news.
I think 20, 30 years of propaganda about how we're all going to die because of global warming and there won't be any more snow and the seas will rise and swallow up Miami and New York and LA, I think that's fake news.
I don't want the government to regulate the news for me.
I'm a grown-up.
I can choose what I want of you.
I don't need a net nanny.
And if I do want one, there's literally things called NetNanny, 100 other apps you can buy to help censor the internet for you yourself.
I don't need some old TV industry lobbyist to help me censor myself.
Thank you very little.
Okay, back to their BS.
Digital platforms holding vast amounts of Canadians' personal data are able to reuse that information in ways that may cause social harm.
For this reason, some parties indicated that the digital platforms should be subject to the authority of regulators, including the CRTC, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, and the Competition Bureau.
All right, I don't know what the CBC has to do with any of that, but I am all for stopping the snooping of Facebook on us, but I actually haven't seen an ounce of effort being put into our privacy by the government of you because they don't want privacy.
They want to know just as much about you as Facebook does.
I don't see any investigations into Facebook and Google and YouTube and Twitter and other social media companies for collecting info on us and then abusing it.
And I think it's obvious why, because there has been a merger between big tech and big government.
I mean, not only does the government itself do the same thing, collect info on you, and political parties do too, by the way, but more than that, the governments are counting on Facebook and other companies like that to enforce their will for them on political censorship, for example, on implementing a Chinese-style social credit system.
We already see banks in North America, Chase Bank, refusing to do business with people who are conservative.
We already see deplatforming, the greatest deplatformers in the world, our governments, teamed up with the Facebooks of the world.
The fact that most lobbyists at the large tech companies are former political staff of the Liberal Party in Canada, former Obama staff in the U.S., that's just sort of obvious now.
Okay, back to their report.
I love how this is put in the mouths of some people.
So the censorship committee can claim, no, no, no, this wasn't our idea.
No, We just heard a lot of people calling for this.
We're just doing what people want.
Let me read.
A number of interested parties submitted that communications regulation should have a role in ensuring the provision of accurate, independent, and trusted news and information, and that legislation should include a policy objective to this end.
Some parties suggested that the quality of online journalism would be increased if standards setting models similar to those established for broadcast journalism, such as the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, were to be adopted.
Okay, slow down a second.
I say again that some people told us, because they're pretending they don't want to do this themselves.
Hey guys, we totally don't want to censor you, but you Canadians said you wanted censors, so we don't want to regulate the news, but you want us to, so fine, for you will censor the news.
Can you imagine trusting the government to tell you what reporting on the government you should trust?
Can you imagine trusting a partisan like Trudeau and his partisan appointees for independent news?
They just said that's what they hoped to do.
And the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, I remember them from the Sun News Network, which was, of course, regulated by the CRTC.
The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council made me apologize, do you remember?
For saying the fun Spanish phrase, cinga tumadre, to the head of the Chiquita Banana Company.
Do you remember that?
I don't know if you remember I do.
Chiquita Banana announced a boycott of Canadian ethical oil.
Some bizarre decision.
Who made that decision?
What's Chiquita Banana got to do?
But they announced it.
But Chiquita is one of the worst companies in the world.
It's literally the reason why the phrase Banana Republic was coined.
Chiquita Banana would go into a poor Latin American country and just corrupt the whole place.
The media bribed politicians, bribed police, sometimes even threatened to kill people just to get their banana profits.
I know that sounds crazy.
They were actually the only company to have their own CIA code name, Unifruit.
They are the most corrupt corporation in the world, with the possible exception of SNC Latilan, come to think of it.
I mean, they just recently admitted they were paying money to a Latin American terrorist group.
What are you doing?
I mean, just like recently, I'm not talking about decades ago.
They are literally criminals.
I don't even know why they're still allowed to exist as a company.
And I thought, these thugs, these terror-supporting liars, are judging the ethics of Canadian oil sand as well.
Do they prefer OPEC conflict oil?
So I did a little story about them on Sun News Network, and I was so mad.
And so I ended with a well-planned out Spanish insult, a minor swear, cinga to madre.
It's a great phrase, by the way.
And I had it approved by the whole team of the Sun News Network, including the lawyers.
I was having so much fun.
It was so much fun.
But some loser out there, I don't know, who complained to this thing called the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, which literally ordered the Sun News Network to make us apologize.
I'm serious.
To apologize to some terrorist thug CEO of Chiquita.
Now, I complied with the letter of the law, but I don't know if you remember, if you were watching back then, while I read it, I repeated insults and expanded on them.
So the apology was a disaster for them.
I just went 10 times further.
But seriously, what kind of country are we that were ordered to apologize for having a point of view?
Is this Venezuela?
Is this Iran?
Ordering a journalist to apologize to some foreign thug who paid money.
What?
You know, even our courts of law don't have that power.
You know, if you can't convince someone to apologize for something, what good is forcing them to say the words with their mouth?
I apologize.
If you don't mean it, why would you want a fake apology?
Has that any different, has that anything more than a jailhouse confession?
You know what I mean?
Sign the paper extracted by a threat.
You literally cannot order a murderer to apologize in Canada.
Of course not.
What would be the point if he didn't mean it?
But the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council ordered the Sun News Network and me to apologize for saying that glorious swear, ciña tumadre, to a terrorist financing anti-Canada group of thugs that coined the phrase Banana Republic.
Any given day, by the way, there are swears spoken in English on the CBC, for example.
Nudity, even full nudity.
I mean, obviously.
But have a political point of view that upsets someone and you'll be ordered to apologize?
Or what?
In the case of the Sun News Network, they could theoretically have lost their entire license to be a TV station.
That's been done before in Canada.
Radio stations have had their licenses revoked because they didn't apologize for having the wrong views.
That's a fact.
And that's what's being proposed now for journalists on the internet that the government doesn't like.
But what does that mean?
They would, what, take away my computer or something, take away my cell phone?
They'd stop us from having the opinions we have on the internet.
What would that even look like to have a Canadian Broadcast Standards Council-style censorship panel for the Internet?
Just one more quote from this report that goes to the merger between big government and big tech for Trudeau to outsource the worst of his censorship to the private sector where it won't be subject to scrutiny or accountability.
Let me read.
Some parties noted, oh, it's not us guys, it's some parties noted that digital platforms have considerable power regarding what information is presented to Canadians as news and fact.
Through their algorithms, digital platforms provide a curation function that is driven by user preferences and the application of processes that are not transparent.
These can lead to the removal of credible sources of news and the rapid dissemination of misinformation.
Consequently, some interested parties, definitely not us, asked that digital platforms be subject to regulatory oversight.
Providers of digital platforms disagreed, stating they were committed to the free flow of information, but were also taking steps to stem the flow of misinformation online.
So the first thing that they said there was digital platforms have considerable power.
You say the words considerable power in Ottawa or near-liberal, and they start to salivate.
Considerable power.
What they mean is Google, YouTube, Facebook, they have power to censor things, to shape things, to promote certain things and hide other things.
We saw that the other day when Google admitted to hiding pro-life results in Ireland in the week before the referendum there on abortion.
So yeah, considerable power.
And that power would be exercised in secret on the beck and call of Justin Trudeau.
No committee hearings about censorship.
No question period accountability.
No transcript, no records.
Just outsource the censorship to Facebook, Google, YouTube.
That's what the industry lobbyists are calling for.
And by industry lobbyists, I mean the people who wrote this report.
Now, the only place I've seen this story on so far is the independent news website called Blacklocks Reporter.
I haven't seen this on the CBC.
Maybe they'll get around to it.
But I don't think so.
You're not going to see this in the bailout media.
They don't mind it one bit.
I mean, look, they're going to get their $600 million in the next little while from Trudeau.
If he and his lobbyist friends have to shut up a few loud mouths on the internet, well, look, they should have been shut up anyways before, right?
I mean, it's just a small price to pay for social order and to remove, what's that phrase?
Social harm.
One day, my friends, you'll wake up and we will just be gone.
Remember us, will you?
Trump's Bold Move00:07:19
Has meant so much to so many people and I want to thank you.
It's been great.
What an incredible spectacle what, what a historic moment, Donald Trump visiting the DMZ, the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea and actually steps onto North Korean soil the first U.S. President to do so and walks back across with the supreme leader, the dictator of the North.
The whole thing seemed to come about quickly and unconventionally.
Let me read to you a tweet published by Donald Trump on June 28th.
He just said, after some very important meetings, including my meeting with President Xi of China, I will be leaving Japan for South Korea with President Moon.
While there, if Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the border DMZ just to shake his hand and say hello.
What an unusual communication.
And joining us now to help decrypt it is our friend, an expert on many matters, including China and North Korea, Gordon Chang, who has written a fascinating article in the National Interest called Trump's Visit to North Korea.
Is an alarming message to China.
Gordon, thanks so much for joining us.
Why is it an alarming message to China?
Because President Trump is cutting the Chinese out of the denuclearization process.
Beijing looks at the Korean Peninsula as its own that the Koreans are vassals and it doesn't want the vassals to interact with the United States, except on the instructions of the Chinese.
Well, here is Kim Jong-un interacting with President Trump, and I think that what the United States is trying to do here is to wean North Korea away from the Chinese.
So in Beijing, this is not viewed, this meeting is not viewed, with a lot of optimism.
Now they call North Korea the hermit kingdom.
I can imagine the paranoia, three generations of tyrants always on the lookout for someone trying to undermine them or disinform them, let alone assassinate them.
One theory I saw brooded and I wonder what you think of this is that by tweeting so publicly, Donald Trump was assured that the message could get to Kim himself and possibly not be intercepted by any Chinese agents or handlers around him.
If it was a secret message, a diplomatic message, that might get intercepted, but a public tweet well, he'd hear about that.
Yeah well, President Trump is used to talking to people directly, bypassing the media and bypassing elites in the United States.
So we shouldn't be surprised if that's true.
There are some discussions between Steve Began, who is President Trump's North Korea envoy, and between Beegan and his counterparts in the North.
But that's very possible.
But in any event, what's occurring here is that Trump, through an act of will and on very short notice, arranged an historic meeting.
And this truly was a stunning event.
Well, it's certainly a high-stakes thing.
I mean, often there's a political tactic of doing the deal first and then announcing we're going to try to get the deal when you know in advance that you're good.
It's like taking a shot.
You could take a shot in basketball from the three-point line, but you already secretly knew how it would go.
You could be a lot more confident about that.
To put that tweet out there, part of me thought, well, he's got this thing already signed.
That's a big risk to take if he didn't actually have this meeting in advance set up.
Yeah, certainly.
I mean, the conversation right now would be about how Trump was humiliated by the North Koreans because Kim Jong-un did not show up at the DMZ.
This is Trump being Trump and just taking diplomatic convention and breaking it.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
In this particular time, it works spectacularly.
Now, this is not to say that the North Koreans are going to do what Trump wants them to do, but nonetheless, this is giving them the opportunity.
Trump at the Ottawa G7, which preceded the historic summit Singapore, the Singapore summit in June of last year, you know, Trump at the Ottawa G7 said this is what he's going to do.
He was going to give Kim a, quote-unquote, one-time shot to disarm.
And I think what Trump was trying to do in a broader sense is to make the North Korean feel secure enough in such a favorable environment that he would believe that it was safe to give up his most destructive weapons.
This is really bold on the part of President Trump.
It might not work, but nonetheless, it's giving the North Koreans the opportunity to do that.
And for that, he gets credit for trying.
Now, you have been one of the toughest critics of North Korea.
And for years, your prescription has been tough love, not just on North Korea, but on China.
And I think Donald Trump is certainly following that path on the trade side.
He doesn't have sanctions.
I know you and I have talked about the possibility of sanctions on major Chinese banks.
He's doing it in the form of tariffs on China.
But I've seen other commentators take umbrage with the, I'm going to use the phrase obsequious praise that Trump is heaping on Kim, who's obviously a brutal dictator.
My thought is when a crazy man has his finger on the trigger, it's like a police hostage negotiator.
You say and do whatever it takes to get that person to put down the trigger.
That's my analogy here.
I think that because things are so far gone there, Trump has to say things that he might not even mean or believe just to get a deal.
That's my explanation for why he's being so chummy with Kim.
Is that your understanding as well?
Yeah, I don't know why President Trump is using that flattery to that extent.
I mean, if I were advising the president, I would say don't do that.
But, you know, there's a number of different ways to get to the end.
The thing that people are concerned about, Ezra, is a legitimization of Kim.
And if Kim feels that he is legitimized, then he might be emboldened to resist the international community on disarmament efforts.
That's the risk there.
But, you know, I don't know what our president is trying to do, but I think that essentially he's giving Kim that opportunity to actually come in from the cold.
And if Kim doesn't take advantage of it, and so far he hasn't, you know, Trump can always go back to those policies that made him successful before the Singapore summit, which was really vigorously enforcing sanctions and cutting off the money flows.
Apparently, the United States had cut the flows of international cash to the regime by about 50%.
That was before the Singapore summit.
Since then, we've let our foot off the gas, and I think that money is flowing to Kim a bit more.
But, you know, Trump can always change that and go back to that maximum enforcement.
Well, it's very interesting times, and we're so grateful for your expertise.
Trump Can Always Go Back00:01:33
Gordon, thanks so much.
And let me just one more time tell our viewers if they're interested in your take on things in the more extended version, they can see your article in the national interest called Trump's Visit to North Korea is an alarming message to China.
Thank you, my friend, for sharing your wisdom as you always do.
Oh, well, thank you, Ezra.
I really appreciate being on your show.
Well, it's our great pleasure, and we learn so much from you.
Thanks, Gordon.
All right.
Well, stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
I should tell you, in the time between when I wrote that script and recorded it and now, I just received an email that the government of Canada has literally rolled out about $25 million in their war on fake news.
They're basically bribing a lot of activist groups to repeat Trudeau's messages and to attack voices they don't like.
25 million bucks.
I don't even have time to revise the script.
I'll get back to it another day.
I said at the beginning of today's show that there's a new censorship platform every week.
It's almost every day.
I think it's more than anything else what Justin Trudeau cares about.
No one believes him when he talks about feminism anymore.
The carbon tax is a meltdown for him.
The one thing he truly cares about, he's truly fighting for, is censorship.
That's our show for today.
Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at World Headquarters for the Rebel, good night.