Sheila Gunn Reid and Leo Knight examine Toronto’s July 5, 2019 Danforth shooting report, questioning why a shooter’s AK-47 expertise—suggesting formal training—and possible Pakistan trip went uninvestigated while mental illness alone was blamed for radicalization. They contrast this with Anya Ayanle Hassan Ali’s 2016 attack on Canadian soldiers, labeled terrorism despite schizophrenia, and critique Bill C-71 for targeting lawful gun owners like Reid instead of addressing gangs, like the Scarborough arrest of 73 linked to organized crime. Knight demands police autonomy, stricter border enforcement, and rejecting political correctness in policing, noting bureaucratic directives fail to stop illegal weapons and drugs. Reid also defends Barbara Kay against gender ideology censorship and warns about free speech risks tied to Tommy Robinson’s trial, concluding with thanks for viewer support amid Levant’s absence covering the UK case. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, a liberal staffer would like us Westerners to just be a little more grateful for all that Trudeau is doing for us.
Then, Toronto has a terrorism problem.
Nobody wants to say the word.
And the Danforth shooting report leaves us far more questions than answers.
It's July 5th, 2019.
I'm Sheila Gunread, and you're watching the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's maybe 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.
This fella here, well, his name is Tyler Meredith.
He's a long time liberal partisan.
In fact, he's the senior policy advisor to the federal liberal caucus and the ex-advisor for economic and social policy for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
So if we think about it, if the Liberals have had a dumb or really bizarre idea or policy plan, it either came directly from this guy's brain or it passed through his brain like a fish tank filter at some point.
And in an attempt to shut up some pesky Westerners like me who are sick and tired of the abuse and mistreatment we're taking from the federal government, a federal government that blocked pipelines, wants to transition away from fossil fuels, you know, the West's best industry, scapegoats law-abiding gun owners and also takes far more than it gives us.
Meredith sent numerical evidence of Prince Trudeau's benevolence towards the serfs west of Winnipeg, he tweeted.
The neat thing about the public accounts of Canada, they're irrefutable facts.
Western economic diversification.
That's the corporate welfare arm of the feds for Western Canada, by the way.
Total funds used 2014-2015 by Harper, $162 million.
2017-2018, Trudeau, $227.1 million, a 40% increase under Trudeau, and in budget 2018, even more added.
You got that, people?
Shut up, Westerners, about your jobs.
Shut up about your business insolvencies and your out-of-control suicide rates.
Just be grateful for what we're giving you.
Meredith is a Liberal Party operative, a Liberal Party employee.
So I'm sure he knows that the Liberal government ran a $16.6 billion shortfall in 2017, the year he's bragging about Trudeau out-subsidizing Harper in the West.
Am I supposed to be happy Trudeau's giving corporate welfare to companies so that I have to pay it back eventually, or rather my kids have to pay it back someway?
And hang on here for a second.
I'm sorry, but when did we Westerners ever asked for a handout?
We only ever asked for the feds to get out of the way of what we're trying to do here.
But we'll have to excuse Meredith because as an Eastern-based liberal, he's not used to the way we do things out here.
Looks to me like the senior policy advisor to the federal liberal caucus has mistaken us out here in Alberta and in the West for, I don't know, Bombardier.
Actually, if we were Bombardier in the same year that Tyler Meredith is bragging about the Trudeau government dispersing $227 million, the government very clearly doesn't have in the first place through Western economic diversification, the Liberals were giving $150 million more than that to prop up Bombardier.
Just look at this from 2017 in the CBC of all places.
The federal government says it will provide $372.5 million in interest-free loans to Bombardier, a move that elicited criticism, even though it is far less than the transportation giant originally sought more than a year ago.
Oh yeah, I suppose the Liberals would also want us to be grateful for this handout because it's apparently far less than the $1 billion Bombardier was originally begging the government for in the first place.
But this gift to Bombardier, it isn't standalone, again from the same CBC article about that perennial welfare queen aircraft peddler.
Last year, Bombardier received a $1 billion U.S. investment for the C-Series passenger jet program from the Quebec government in exchange for a 49.5% stake.
A $1 billion U.S. investment from the Quebec government?
I wonder where Quebec got that kind of cash from.
Maybe it's from the $13 billion in equalization payments Quebec will get this year alone.
I mean, with $13 billion extra dollars in equalization payments and a balanced budget on the backs of all that extra cash, surely Quebec could have afforded the $1.3 billion the federal government has just committed to a Montreal subway project.
According to Statistics Canada in 2016, right in the middle of Alberta's oil industry getting just absolutely hammered by a confluence of NDP and liberal policies causing a capital evacuation and a pipeline bottleneck, Albertans sent $48 billion worth of taxes to Ottawa but only received $27.2 billion back in the form of federal spending.
This is a gap of $21 billion.
And 2017 wasn't any better.
We couldn't get a pipeline approved if our lives depended on it and you know they really do.
And yet Albertans sent $50.3 billion to the federal government and received back about $28.5 billion amounting to a spending inequity of nearly $22 billion.
So yeah, thanks for that $227 million worth of our own money dished out to us again, Tyler Meredith, after being cycled through the hands of a thousand bureaucrats.
Oh, and about the feds getting out of the way of what we do best out here so they don't have to brag about the handouts they give back to us.
The Alberta government, under the NDP, of all people, estimated that Alberta was losing $80 million per day through the lack of pipeline access.
Ironic that the NDP would come up with such an idea as a running tally of these sorts of things given their long and storied history of being the reason pipelines get blocked.
But anyway, a little quick math tells me that just three days with the appropriate amount of pipeline access would have paid for Justin Trudeau's Western Economic Diversification Handout in 2017.
This great article by Toronto Sun's Laurie Goldstein quotes a Fraser Institute report that shows nearly $21 billion in GDP has evaporated from the Canadian economy because of a lack of pipeline access.
Well, that's weird because that's almost the exact same amount as the equalization spending gap that Albertans experienced back in 2016.
Discussing The Danforth Shooting Report00:15:38
You know, funny that.
So I guess my question for Mr. Meredith remains is, where do I send the thank you card?
Stay with us more up next after the break.
discuss the Danforth shooting report with our special guest.
Toronto has a couple of things happening right now that look and feel a lot like terrorism, actually more than a couple of things, as my guest today will point out.
Nobody really wants to say the word terrorism, though.
Instead, Toronto leadership seems more concerned with blaming the law-abiding for their ever-increasing crime problem on the ground.
Now, joining me to make sense of all these crime and security stories from the center of the universe in Toronto is Leo Knight joining me from his home in British Columbia.
Leo is a former Canadian police officer.
He's a security expert and a frequent media commentator.
And he's also a research and journalism fellow at True North Canada.
Hey, Leo, thanks for joining me.
There's just so much going on in Toronto, but it really is a problem all across the country.
I wanted to have you on first and foremost because you did an incredible analysis of the police report on the Danforth shooting.
You really went through this with a police officer's skepticism and an investigator's eye, and you laid out all the answers that aren't there, really.
Yeah, I laid out a bunch of questions that I have.
Yeah.
Which, which, you know, in a strange sort of way, I spent many years instructing.
And one of the things when you're teaching report writing is that the reader should not have any questions at the end of the report.
But after I read that 23-page report from the Toronto Police Service into the Danforth shooting, I had a number of questions, as you've noted.
Yeah, I mean, you went through and said, you know, that there are, there's weapons missing.
And you went through and said, okay, well, great.
They found a magazine clip for an AK-47.
Where's the gun?
Loaded.
It was just a magazine clip.
Yeah, it was just a series of unanswered questions that the report doesn't seem to address.
Maybe you can go through some of those for us.
Well, there was a number of things.
Following the shooting, when they identified the shooter, he took his own life, as you recall, when police arrived on the scene.
They identified him and they went to his residence, an apartment he shared in the Raincliffe area of Toronto with his parents.
And they searched the apartment and they came up with a bunch of ammunition and a gun case.
The gun case, I'm led to believe, was for the actual handgun that he used in the shooting.
But they also found a magazine clip loaded for an AK-47.
And they found another magazine for a Ruger and various types of ammunition.
There's no indication in the report, you know, what efforts were ever put into finding those weapons.
And indeed, did they ever find them?
In fact, I believe that they did not.
And if he had a magazine clip for an AK, then that AK has got to be around somewhere.
Well, and you also posed some pretty serious questions about the shooter's skills with the weapons that he used.
I'm a frequent shooter.
I don't know if I could have done what he did.
So you posed some questions about where he received that training, given that he's, for all intents and purposes, had no official training with a firearm because he's not a licensed firearms owner.
So we know his guns were illegally obtained.
He didn't have to go through the same course as I did.
So he's got some acumen with firearms, and there were really no questions or really no answers given for where he received that or any follow-up that you could see done on his foreign travel where maybe he did receive some firearms training.
In the wake of the shooting, there were various media reports that said he had traveled to Pakistan.
It didn't tell us, the reports didn't tell us exactly when he went there or for how long.
The police report, the Toronto Police Report is silent on the matter entirely.
The other thing, as you noted, when he went, there were numerous video clips that were out in the internet after the fact.
And you can see him walking down the street emptying a magazine with a handgun, which was a Smith Wesson 40 cal semi-automatic pistol.
He'd emptied a magazine, eject it, and quickly ram another one in rack around and then keep shooting as he was walking up the street.
I'm no firearms expert, although I've carried a gun in the service of my country.
But I do know that to do that requires a certain amount of skill, at the very least, practice with some instruction.
I talked to a friend I know who is a firearms expert.
In fact, he was instrumental with our air marshals program and training those police officers.
And he looked at a couple of the video clips and he said definitely that the guy's been trained.
So I'm not just talking off the top of my head here.
There's no question he had some level of training.
What that was, I don't know.
And certainly the Toronto Police Report is silent on the subject as well.
There has been some evidence that he was dealing in drugs also.
Again, a lot of unanswered questions with that, as well as indications that, of course, as is always the case with these people who commit these sort of crimes, it seems like there's a tendency to lay this sort of radicalized behavior and really, quite frankly, terrorism on the feet of mental illness.
But you point out that he didn't really seem to have any problems with mental illness since about 2012.
Yeah, the report goes through some of the earlier contact he had with the mental health system, either through the school he was attending or through social social workers.
And certainly there were issues.
The report says he was diagnosed with antisocial behavior.
Well, I think that's clear.
I mean, nobody walks down the street with Toronto shooting indiscriminately and can be called any sort of social.
He's clearly got some sort of antisocial personality disorder.
But, you know, as against that, what exactly does that mean?
I've done a little bit of looking to try and figure that out.
And it means essentially somebody who doesn't like to be around people.
Well, that covers a lot of territory.
And I like dogs better than people.
So do I have anti-social personality disorder?
Yeah, I mean, I like to work alone in my basement as I am right now.
But I don't think that's an excuse for committing a terrorist act on the streets of Toronto.
And I think that's a good segue into the next thing that I wanted to talk to you about.
And it's how Crown prosecutors want to have a man who attacked Canadian soldiers back in 2016 at a North York recruitment center labeled as a terrorist.
This is actually quite refreshing to see that there is this push to have him labeled as a terrorist because the man whose name I'm going to butcher right now, Anya Ayanle Hassan Ali, he's currently in a Hamilton St. Joseph's healthcare facility where he's being treated for schizophrenia.
So again, the two I don't think are mutually exclusive.
You can be mentally ill and still be a terrorist.
And it's good to see the crown prosecutors pursuing this.
Well, I mean, I would argue that if you're going to be a terrorist, you have a certain amount of mental illness already.
You're not talking about anything that can be even remotely called normal behavior.
That guy approached two soldiers at a recruitment center and suddenly whipped out a knife and started attacking them.
What triggered that?
The prosecutors you refer to say he has been radicalized.
The police are saying, well, yes, but he was also mentally ill.
They apply the mentally ill thing to the Danforth shooter as well.
It was also applied to a previous attack in Edmonton a little over a year ago where a guy stabbed a police officer working traffic point at Commonwealth Stadium.
He then went on a rampage with a rental vehicle down Jasper Avenue trying to hit pedestrians and whatnot before he was finally stopped.
He had an ISIS flag in the vehicle.
I don't know how you call that anything else, yet there were elements of discussion at the time that he had mental issues and he was on some sort of meds and so on and so forth.
There just seems to be this tendency to not just call a spade a shovel.
And I don't know why that is, other than it's politically expedient for, say, the federal liberals who are trying to repatriate former ISIS fighters.
And they're bringing in a lot of Syrian refugees without the ability to vet them or check their backgrounds.
And I think if truth be told, they don't want that discussion out there.
No, I think you're right.
I mean, the Parliament Hill shooter, after the fact, he was also, you know, a lot of people on the left who, like you say, don't want to have these discussions were pointing out that he had a history of mental illness.
I don't know how the two are incompatible.
I mean, the attempted stabber of those soldiers, the paramedics who arrived on the scene heard him say that Allah had sent him to kill people.
He also said that he had a license to kill.
Just because some of these folks do have a history of mental illness does not mean that they are not radicalized either online or through other ways to harm and dismantle Canadian culture.
Absolutely.
I mean, as I said, Sheila, it seems to me that if you're going to do these types of things, then you probably have some sort of mental disorder in the first place because rational people don't do that.
No, that's a great point.
And that actually brings me to another great article that you have up right now on TNC News.
And it's about, again, the government scapegoating the wrong people.
I think with the problem with not calling terrorism terrorism, they end up actually scapegoating the people with mental illness problems instead of addressing the terrorism problem.
And you have a great article up right now about how the government has basically placed the entire wrong focus on with their new gun legislation, Bill C-71, scapegoating the wrong people, the lawful law-abiding gun owners like me, instead of investigating organized crime and drug-dealing gangs.
Right.
Well, I also used the example of a project that was taken down in Toronto last week.
They had a press conference on Friday where they had arrested 73 people and charged them with over 500 offenses.
And they seize a lot of guns, none of them illegal weapons.
A lot of those people are charged with various firearm offenses, possessing an illegal weapon, careless storage, and a whole lot of other things.
But in order to attack the urban gun problem in our cities, you need to actually attack the problem.
And that means that the police have got to be given the ability to go after organized crime and the street gangs.
And that was a really good project that was done by the Toronto Police Service over the course of eight months.
And they made all those arrests.
But that was just against one East End street gang in Scarborough.
I mean, there's so many more out there.
There's so much more going on across this country.
And none of those people who use guns, if there's a shooting by a gangster in Vancouver, you know, or in Jane Finch in Toronto or on 97th Street in Edmonton, those guns are not legal.
They were obtained otherwise.
Whether they were smuggled into this country or bought in the illegal black market or stolen from a private residence is really immaterial.
If you want to focus on gun crime, you need to go after what the real problem is.
And like anything else, even the other subject we were talking about, Sheila, you can't fix a problem if you won't call it what it is.
No, and you and I have talked about this before.
Toronto has taken away one of the best intelligence gathering tools that police were using to combat gang violence, and that was carding.
You know, the whole practice of carding was accused of being racist because it unfairly, so-called, unfairly targeted minority communities.
But in fact, carding was used to keep minority communities safer.
Those are the communities right now being overrun by gangs.
Well, we have the same problem in Vancouver where the anti-poverty groups, such as they are, I call them the poverty pimps, are trying to stop Vancouver police from doing street checks because they say it unfairly attacks the indigenous community.
They had the same issue in New York City where NYPD used to use a tactic they called stop and frisk, which essentially was the same thing.
Every police department in North America uses some form of that tactic where they stop somebody who appears to be suspicious.
They identify them.
They say, where are you going?
And they identify who they're with.
And if they see anything suspicious, if they're reacting or acting suspicious in any way, then they search them to see if there's any weapons.
I mean, it's police work 101.
Leo, you're an expert in security and policing.
Let's pretend you're one of those high-paid consultants that municipal governments love to waste tax dollars on.
Border Policing Challenges00:03:10
If you could give three pieces of advice to Mayor John Torrey to get control back of his city from the gangs, what would you say?
Stop being politically correct would be the first one.
You know, he needs to get out of the way of the police service doing their job.
As soon as politicians start messing around with things, it makes it harder for police to do their job.
Look at the situation from last week in Portland when that journalist was attacked by the Antifa mob.
You know, the police union have since said that they were told to stand down.
You know, that's just political interference.
And John Torrey does that to a fairy will.
Okay, that's your first one.
Stop being politically correct.
Second one.
Well, it was kind of the second one, too, which is get out of the way of the police department.
Let them do their job.
They're the professionals.
They know who they're dealing with.
They know they have the raw intelligence from the communities.
They know who the bad guys are.
Let them go get them.
And the third thing is that in Toronto, you've got a situation there where the police are not allowed to charge for what they call lower level offenses.
As Giuliani proved in New York when he cleaned up Times Square in the 90s, he used the broken windows theory.
And that theory says that whenever you get them doing anything wrong, you charge them.
No matter how small you charge and you put in front of a judge, sooner or later he has massed enough offenses that a judge will put him away.
And one thing I know for certain that a criminal doesn't commit crimes when they're in jail.
You know, it's a great point.
I would throw in a fourth one, and that is implore the federal government to tighten up the border.
That's where the guns are coming from.
That's where a lot of the criminals are coming across.
That's where a lot of the social problems are coming across the border, flooding Toronto, and just overwhelming Toronto services.
And when you overwhelm Toronto services, crime happens after the fact.
Leo, I want to thank you.
Sorry, go ahead.
I was just going to say I agree with you, but part of the problem there is politicians as well.
Canadian Border Service, if you try to cross a border at a point of entry, you will speak to a border officer, a customs official.
If you go 50 yards to the west or east of a border entry and illegally cross the border, that same customs official can't go and stop you.
He has to call the local police organization who will try and respond and then find what you're doing.
It's so easy to smuggle weapons and drugs into Canada.
It's unbelievable.
And the politicians, the bureaucratic directive is preventing the Border Patrol from doing their job.
Yeah, that's a great, great, great point.
I mean, Canadian safety and Canadian public safety is really hamstrung by politics, as you so rightly point out.
Canadian Safety Under Threat00:03:28
Leo, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show today.
People can find you at TNC News, but where else can they also find you?
My website is primetimecrime.com, and it's updated on a daily basis.
And pretty much anything I write or broadcast is clipped there as well.
Great, Leo.
Thank you so much for your time.
And we'll talk again.
All right.
Thanks, Sheila.
Stay with us more up next after the break.
This is the part of the show where we look back at some of your viewer comments and your feedback that you've left on some of our videos.
On Ezra's interview with the fabulous Barbara Kay about parents objecting to confusing gender ideology being taught to their children in school, Liza Rosie writes, Good interview with Barbara Kay.
She is absolutely right, and I appreciate her dedication and honesty.
We need people who are not afraid to question the manufactured narrative being pushed on society by misguided, weaponized minorities.
Barbara Kay is a national treasure, and like Canada's grandma, she takes on these complex and contentious social issues with common sense, thoughtfulness, and especially compassion.
Kay takes a lot of heat for speaking up, and a lot of people are trying to silence her.
But she keeps speaking up for what's right.
You know, some days, I'm actually quite surprised that she even still has a job at the National Post.
I'm a big, big fan of Barbara Kay, as you can tell.
As you know, I'm filling in for Ezra today because he's over in the UK covering the Tommy Robinson trial.
And before they went to court yesterday, Ezra did a quick interview with Tommy.
On that interview, Karen McLeod wrote, Tommy Robinson is going to die for free speech in 2019.
The United Kingdom.
Let that sink in.
Death.
He is most likely going to die in jail where he can be tortured and starved to death.
If this doesn't make you cry, nothing will.
You know, Karen, it is my concern that you could be right.
I think it's a real possibility in Tommy Robinson's future that he dies in jail.
Either he will die behind bars for doing journalism or he will die in the street as a result of one of the frequent death threats he receives against himself and his family.
And I think this persecution of him for speaking up against rape crimes and rape gangs, it's not going to end because him speaking up embarrasses the state for their inaction for so many years while so many young girls were victimized right under their noses.
I hope you're wrong, Karen, for freedom's sake, for Tommy's sake, and for the sake of his young family, but I suspect you could be right.
Well, everybody, on that dark and gloomy note, I want to thank everybody for tuning in.
I want to thank the office in Toronto for bearing with me on the show today.
I want to thank Ezra for trusting me to be in the driver's seat one more time while he does the job the UK media just refuses to do over in the UK.
Happy late Independence Day greetings to our American friends, viewers, and allies.