Justin Trudeau and Erin O’Toole’s condemnation of Donald Trump’s tweets—calling four Democratic congresswomen "complete and total catastrophe"—backfired amid Canada’s need for U.S. leverage to free two hostages in China, echoing past diplomatic missteps like Freeland’s Saudi remarks or C-69’s $4.5B pipeline delays. Critics argue Trudeau’s "cowardly" virtue-signaling avoids addressing Trump’s alleged racism while his early cabinet lacked restraint, with Global Affairs bureaucrats reportedly cheering his arrival. Meanwhile, O’Toole plans to visit imprisoned Tommy Robinson in Belmarsh, questioning whether Canada’s moral posturing aligns with real-world consequences for its interests. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I take you through a very short but bizarre statement by Justin Trudeau where he condemns Donald Trump's tweets.
I'm not sure if that's his job.
I'm pretty sure it's not.
But he adds on a few words that aren't against Trump.
It's against you and me.
I find them very troublesome and I'll show them to you.
But before I do, can you do me a favor and go to the rebel.media slash shows.
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Okay, here's the show.
Tonight, Justin Trudeau and Andrew Scheer both condemned Donald Trump's tweets.
Do they want to be prime minister or pundits?
It's July 18th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
More than 60 million people follow Donald Trump on Twitter.
He is a master of that medium.
Trump's Squad Diplomacy00:15:23
I mean, just the other day, he tweeted to North Korea's Kim Jong-un, saying, hey, let's meet up in the DMZ.
And wouldn't you know it, it happened.
The unreal.
Who knows what that was even all about?
Was Trump worried that official lines of communication to Kim were being cut off by some factions around Kim?
Maybe even his Chinese handlers?
I don't know.
I wonder if we'll ever know, but that's a pretty incredible use of Twitter, don't you think?
Trump uses Twitter to communicate directly with his base, people who want to hear from him in his trademark, entertaining way, and mainly people who just don't trust the mainstream media to report on what he says fairly and accurately.
I'd put myself in that category.
So in a way, the same as my theory about Kim Jong-un.
Get away from, get around any filters or middlemen who are trying to obscure things.
And there's another big purpose to Donald Trump's tweets.
On occasion, he can, with 100% absolute certainty, throw the mainstream media into a one, two, three-day frenzy by pushing their buttons.
And I think they know it by now, but they just can't help it.
They're like that kitten chasing that laser pointer.
They just can't help it.
So the other day, Trump tweeted about four young radical congresswomen who were Democrats.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the only other politician who rivals Trump in her use of Twitter.
I mean, look at this masterful video.
She's got a great sense of publicity.
And then there's Ilhan Omar, somewhat less compelling.
She's a Muslim extremist.
She's a refugee from Somalia to America who seems to have committed immigration fraud, by the way, by marrying her brother in a sham marriage.
She literally mocks 9-11 and she praises al-Qaeda.
Seriously, let me show you.
Here's how she describes 9-11.
Some people did something?
Some people did something.
That's what she called 9-11.
That's a pretty quick clip, but that was the context.
That's pretty bad.
And compare that.
Some people did something for her reverence and excitement about al-Qaeda.
And so the thing that was interesting in the class was every time the professor said al-Qaeda, he sort of like his shoulders went up.
Yeah, he's in command here.
Al-Qaeda, you know, hospital.
He's an expert.
Al-Qaeda, she's so excited by Al-Qaeda.
That's really bad.
She's a congresswoman now from Minnesota.
And there are two others in their little squad, as they call themselves.
Now, Nancy Pelosi doesn't much like this squad.
She says, I mean, Pelosi, who has probably the safest district in America for a Democrat, I mean, she's in San Francisco, she knows she can't just talk to the left-wing crazies in San Francisco or Manhattan if she wants to win a majority in America.
She has to hold her nose and appeal to severely normal people in moderate places like Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, too.
And the squad doesn't really do that.
So Nancy Pelosi is a bit dismissive of them.
She likes to minimize the conflicts within her caucus between the moderates and the progressives.
You have these wings, AOC and her group on one side.
It's like five people.
They're just five people.
Whoa.
So she's quarreling with the squad a bit.
I mean, there's a bit of a war breaking out between the hard left-wing Twitter stars of the squad and the less crazy wing of the Democrats that wants to win.
I mean, look at this Twitter tweet and look at this leaked poll.
I don't think it's an accident that Pelosi leaked an internal Democrat poll showing that the squad was deeply unpopular in middle America.
So Donald Trump is observing this and he thinks, wow, my opponents are fighting amongst themselves.
How can I pour kerosene on that fire?
Well, Twitter is how.
So here's what he wrote four days ago.
I'm going to read these three tweets to you.
So interesting to see progressive Democrat congresswomen who originally came from countries whose governments are complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt, and inept anywhere in the world, if they even have a functioning government at all, now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful nation on earth, how our government is to be run, why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came,
then come back and show us how it is done.
These places need your help badly.
You can't leave fast enough.
I'm sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements.
Boy, it's almost like he's a New York brawler who knows how to fight and provoke people.
So he's the un-Romney, the un-Jeb.
Finally, a match for the Democrats.
That's how he won in 2016.
Now, normally, the Democrats are the disciplined ones, and the Republicans are the ones quarreling amongst themselves.
Now, it was immediately obvious, to me, at least, in those tweets, he was referring to Ilhan Omar from Somalia, a failed state, no functioning government.
I think he's got to be talking about Somalia.
Maybe he also met Rashida Tlaib, whose family came from Palestine.
But the rest of the squad, they sort of go along with Ilhan Omar anyways on the bizarre anti-American propaganda, calling the U.S. government immigration detention centers concentration camps.
Here, take a look at a new Republican Party TV ad, which happens to use some footage filmed by our own Kian Becksty, who asked several members of the squad some questions.
Take a look.
The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border.
Never again something.
If this organization is as fascist as you have called it, and you have said it's fascist, then why don't you adopt the stance to eliminate it?
Your colleague who was at the border with you compared the facilities to a concentration camp.
Do you agree with that comparison?
Absolutely.
You will see the lights!
And if you don't, we will bring the fire!
A car in the parking lot was torched, and investigators say the suspect threw flares at a crotch tank, trying to make it explode.
They took down an American flag and a Colorado state flag, and instead, if you see in some of this video, they raised a Mexican flag.
We are learning new details about the man who threw explosive devices at an immigration detention center in Tacoma, Washington.
Will you condemn Antifa for attacking an ICE facility?
Will you condemn the Antifa attack in Washington over the weekend?
Will you condemn Antifa for the attack in Washington?
Yeah, it's a tough video.
And those were tough tweets by Donald Trump, but it's been four days since he tweeted, and those kittens are still chasing those laser pointers.
I swear, Donald Trump could have invaded a small country in the last four days, and the media party just wouldn't be able to pull themselves away from Twitter to report on it.
By the way, severely normal people seem to love those tweets.
Twitter is not normal people.
Twitter is journalists and pundits and people looking for a hot take, a quick overreaction, whatever.
Normal people would say, yeah, if you come here from Somalia as a refugee, maybe stop calling us racist.
I mean, after all, we took you, we saved your life.
Maybe be a little bit more humble and a bit less antagonistic.
But mission accomplished.
Sure, Donald Trump's tweets made the news, but the substance of his tweets, shining a light on the outrageous views of the squad, that's being seen by everyone in America now.
And you know who figured out the strategy here?
A Democrat named David Axelrod, Barack Obama's first campaign chairman.
Listen to him on CNN.
He wants to elevate these four young members of Congress to make them the emblem of the Democratic Party.
And he wants to be so outrageous about it that he forces all Democrats to embrace them to support the argument that they are the iconic figures in the party.
And in the bargain, he riles up his base with native Islamic.
So did you get that there?
What Trump did is he made this radical squad, that Nancy Pelosi says just five people, he made them the face of the Democrats and the left and the media and the rest of the Democrats just couldn't help themselves.
They had to defend the squad and their crazy talk and their extreme politics because they all hate Trump so much.
They felt compelled like Pavlov's dog to come.
You know, you hear Trump, you have to do the opposite of what he said, that they came to the aid of the extremists.
They made that tiny fringe, four or five first-term congresswomen, the official face of the Democrats.
Now they're not.
Most Democrats don't really like them according to the poll that was leaked by the Democrats.
But look, people hate Trump more than they love their own political ambitions, I guess.
So Donald Trump managed to appoint his own opponents.
He's been laughing for four days.
Now, that same reaction that David Axelrod observed, that everyone afflicted with Trump derangement syndrome came to the aid of these radicals, that happened widespread, obviously U.S. Democrats, the U.S. media, but the media up here in Canada, too.
They find it easier to criticize Donald Trump than to criticize Justin Trudeau, perhaps because Trudeau is paying them $600 million in bailout money.
I don't know.
So just about every single Canadian news network said that Donald Trump's tweets were racist.
Now, as you know, because I read them to you, he didn't mention race at all.
He talked about foreign countries.
Ilhan Omer came from Somalia.
The others in the squad were born in America, but their families were immigrants.
And they identify with their old countries.
Rashida Tlaib doesn't stop talking about Palestine.
Was it racist what Trump did?
I'm not sure it had anything to do with race.
To me, it sounded more like telling people that old phrase, America, love it or leave it.
If you don't like the United States, there's the door, especially if you came here from Somalia.
It's tough talk, yeah, no doubt about it, but frankly, It's no tougher than what the Democrats say about him.
I mean, they call him a racist.
And really praising or at least minimizing al-Qaeda, staying silent in the face of anti-FUD terrorism, calling American detention centers concentration camps.
Yeah, no media outrage over that, just over Trump calling it out a bit roughly.
I noted that few of the media stories about Trump's tweets, saying they were racist, actually let their viewers or readers read the tweets in full, as I have done for you.
Because I think most people would read those tweets and say, yeah, that's sort of rough talk, but it's not really racist.
It's not about skin color.
It's about people bashing America, and especially people who just came here to flee their own home country.
So to uphold the narrative, the media party said, hey, guys, just believe us, the tweets were super racist.
So now let's talk about how racist Trump is.
That was the starting premise.
Viewers weren't allowed to see the actual tweets themselves to make up their own mind.
I read them to you.
So here we are four days into it.
And guess what?
Canada's patient zero for Trump Derrangement Syndrome, Justin Trudeau, he just couldn't keep a lid on it.
He actually needs Donald Trump very badly right now to help us out with a few things, but his love for the Democrats is too strong.
He loved Hillary Clinton, and he loves David Axelrod.
Remember this clip of Trudeau?
Look at it.
He's obviously drunk.
Look at him wobble.
Stumble.
Stumble.
And one more stumble to come.
Whoa.
Whoa, that's four or five stumbles there.
That was at a left-wing event in Chicago hosted for Trudeau by David Axelrod.
So Trudeau is part of that clique.
So he couldn't shut up.
He just couldn't keep quiet.
Remember how at the G20, how icy things were between Trudeau and President Xi Jinping.
That's him on the left there.
They wouldn't even make eye contact.
We need help getting our two Canadian hostages back from China, or maybe it's three hostages.
We need help.
The Chinese aren't answering Christy Freeland's phone calls.
And look at how stone-faced Xi Jinping was, sitting right next to Trudeau.
Yeah, here Bolsonaro doesn't have a lot of time for Trudeau either.
So yeah, getting Donald Trump's help to lean on China is really our only hope to rescue the two hostages, but also to get China to call off its trade war against our agriculture, presuming Trudeau actually cares about either of those things, which is not certain.
But instead of being a grown-up, Trudeau just couldn't help himself.
Look at him today.
I think the comments made were hurtful, wrong, and completely unacceptable.
And I want everyone in Canada to know that those comments are completely unacceptable and should not be allowed or encouraged in Canada.
Hang on, why is the Prime Minister commenting on this at all?
He's not a pundit.
He's not on a pundit's panel.
He's not paid for his thoughts on every fleeting political moment.
He's paid to lead our government and to promote our Canadian interests abroad.
He may have private thoughts about Donald Trump and his tweets, but to say them out loud like that, that Trump is unacceptable, that Trump's offensive and he can't say these.
He's not allowed to say these things.
How is that governing Canada?
How is that anything other than creating yet another diplomatic incident?
Why does he feel the need to comment on it at all?
How about, as Prime Minister, it's my job to work with the U.S. President to promote Canadian interests.
I'll leave the political commentary to the pundits.
How about that?
How about just shutting up?
What was he trying to accomplish there?
And seriously, I showed you the drunk clip of Trudeau with David Axelon.
Look at his bleary eyes and his slow speech.
Is he high?
That's a real question.
Seriously.
But did you catch that one part?
That one part?
I think the comments made were hurtful, wrong, and completely unacceptable.
And I want everyone in Canada to know that those comments are completely unacceptable and should not be allowed or encouraged in Canada.
So Trump's comments were wrong.
His comments about a domestic political dispute were wrong.
Is the Canadian government the arbiter of quarrels between the Democrats and the Republicans now?
Are we taking sides now against a sitting president of all things?
And we're the judge of what's acceptable and not in U.S. politics.
Would we like it if Donald Trump chose sides in some Canadian domestic political dispute that had nothing to do with America?
Ambassador's Dilemma00:15:22
Just the other day, internal, private, highly confidential memos from Britain's ambassador to the U.S., they were leaked from the British Foreign Office.
To be clear, these were the most private confidential assessments of Donald Trump by the British ambassador, meant only for the eyes of a few senior government officials back in London.
You need to be able to speak candidly to your own team about world affairs, even if it means criticizing an ally.
That's why I said in privately, the problem wasn't with what he said.
It's okay to criticize Trump, obviously.
It's that someone in the government chose to leak that, and so that ambassador simply had to resign.
He could no longer have the confidence or trust of Trump or his government.
It's not fair, but you can't have those kind of secret thoughts come public and still have a working relationship.
Trump rubbed it in, by the way, saying he would no longer have any dealings with the ambassador, which might not be fair.
Like I say, ambassadors have to be able to privately tell their bosses back home what they really think.
But once it was no longer private, you can't unsee what you've seen.
He had to resign, and he did, which was the honorable thing to do.
But the point is that the ambassador said his candidate and critical remarks about Trump, excuse me, in a top-secret memo, secret, private, just to his home country.
Justin Trudeau said the same sort of things in public for no reason.
He just said it.
He said Trump was wrong and unacceptable.
He just said it out loud.
Why?
Does he propose to go around now, country by country, denouncing world leaders for internal political disputes about which Trudeau likely knows very little?
Or is it just Trump?
Well, actually, Trudeau screwed up quite a few relationships, hasn't he?
Including China, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, just to name a few.
But that one line, you know the one I'm talking about.
Listen to it one last time.
What one line here is the worst?
Listen.
I think the comments made were hurtful, wrong, and completely unacceptable.
And I want everyone in Canada to know that those comments are completely unacceptable and should not be allowed or encouraged in Canada.
Those comments should not be allowed.
Should not be allowed in Canada.
What does he mean?
Not allowed?
Condemn them.
That's one thing.
That's bad judgment, but go ahead.
But not allowed.
So they're forbidden?
Not allowed means banned, right?
What does he mean?
Is he saying Trump committed a legal offense of sorts or should be banned?
It's hate speech or something.
What does he mean?
I bet that's what he meant.
It's plain language.
Not allowed means banned.
We know the liberals have been calling for censorship of social media like Twitter for years.
Trudeau even threatened Facebook to censor his enemies.
What does Trudeau mean by not allowed in Canada?
I think he didn't even mean Trump was not allowed because he said in Canada.
I think he means you and I will be censored.
I think that's what he means.
But let me leave you with something almost as depressing.
This guy.
I think it's, I don't think there's any place in our study for an intolerance or that kind of divisive, those kinds of divisive comments.
And I've always thought that people should be able to advocate for their views.
They should be able to criticize their government.
They should be able to advocate for their own ideas without having their background or their personal identity or where their family might come from questioned or in any way taken into account.
So he didn't call for a ban on mean words.
But he condemned Donald Trump all the same.
He made it clear that Trump's a racist in his mind.
He didn't say it quite as forcefully, Andrew Scheer is milquetoast even when he's trying to be tough.
He's half-hearted about everything and anything.
Who knows what he even believes?
It's all so wishy-washy.
But isn't that all the more reason to shut up if you're not really revved up by something?
Does Andrew Scheer really believe it's his role now as the leader of the opposition, or if he wins the election and becomes prime minister, is it really his role to be a running commentator on foreign affairs?
To be a pundit.
Not just foreign affairs.
There might be a place for that actually, but on domestic affairs in other countries.
This was a squabble between Trump and some Democrats.
Why did Andrew Scheer feel the need to denounce Trump?
Why not just say, I'm going to have a different approach to foreign affairs than Justin Trudeau?
A little more professional, a little bit less personal slights.
Or even just what I said before, our foreign affairs will be guided by promoting Canada's interests, not by virtue signaling about political leaders in other countries.
I'll leave that to the pundits.
Or whatever, or whatever.
How about just saying that's a question I'll leave to the media?
That's a question I'll leave to Americans.
My views are well known.
I'm just even just letting it pass.
I think I know why.
In fact, I'm sure I know why.
It's because Andrew Scheer is afraid of the media.
He's afraid of what the media will say about him if he doesn't denounce Trump or whoever else that the media happens to hate that day, including us here at the Rebel, of course.
As you know, Andrew Scheer's senior staff have told me personally, that's the only reason he won't give us interviews anymore.
Andrew Scheer is worried that the mean girls of the media party will criticize him if he even talks to us.
In a way, that's even more pitiful than Justin Trudeau's Trump bashing.
At least Trudeau means it.
Scheer is just copying the cool kids, so they're not mean to him.
You know, one day Donald Trump and the giant elephant of the United States will notice the little mouse squeaking at them again and again.
And that elephant will swat back at Trudeau, but he'll hit all of us too.
If I worked in one of the few remaining automobile factories in Canada, I'd be worried about that.
I really would.
Stay with us for more on this with One Country.
That is not how we do things in Canada.
A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian, and the diversity of our country is actually one of our greatest strengths and a source of tremendous resilience and pride for Canadians, and we will continue to defend that.
Well, that was Justin Trudeau earlier today, as you saw in my monologue.
He went much further saying that Donald Trump's comments were unacceptable, offensive, and not allowed in Canada.
I'm not quite sure what that means, but I do know that trying to weigh into a domestic partisan political dispute is the job of pundits like me, but not the jobs of prime ministers.
And it made me think of this column by Lorne Gunter in the Edmonton Sun.
The headline is, liberals have no clue how to avoid conflicts, solve crises they've created.
And I think this is a perfect example of that.
Joining us now to talk about the column is its author, Lorne Gunter with the Edmonton Sun.
Lorne, great to see you again.
It's like you were prescient, because I think you wrote this yesterday, and then today, Trudeau doubled down on his earlier remarks, basically calling Trump a racist.
Yeah, and you know, there's no prescience on my part.
You just write something like that about Trudeau, and within seven to ten days, he's going to do something stupid to prove you're right.
Now, in this case, it took less than 24 hours, but nonetheless, this is just what they do.
They step in cow pies of their own devising over and over and over again.
These comments are something he has no business referring to or passing judgment on because they're completely domestic.
They're entirely internal.
They are American politics, one side fighting another.
I think that what Trump said was racist.
I think it was stupid.
But I am not the prime minister, and I don't have the benefits of his office.
And he doesn't have the benefits of our jobs where we can comment on things like this.
He has to have some form of diplomacy.
And if you want to know a practical, real-world reason why this little teacher guy shouldn't be speaking out like this, it's what's happening in China right now.
We have two Canadians who are in prison, and I would say have been imprisoned illegally by the Chinese dictatorship.
And they are, we need the Americans' help to get them out.
Now, they are there in part because we did what the Americans asked us to do in arresting the Huawei executive who's now under house arrest in Vancouver.
In retaliation for us doing that, at the behest of the Americans, the Chinese arrested a Canadian diplomat and a Canadian businessman.
We need the Americans to say quietly or forcefully in public, look, you got to let those Canadians out.
This fight is between you and us.
They're just doing what we asked them to do according to an international treaty of which they are a part.
Leave their people out of this.
That's what we need the Americans to do.
They're not doing that, though, because about every six months, Trudeau can't keep his mouth shut and he says something that offends Donald Trump.
I don't care what you think of Trump.
I don't care whether you like him or not, whether you think he's a hothead, whether you think he should have thicker skin than to be offended by stuff Trudeau says.
The point is, we need his help.
Trudeau knows we need his help, and he can't stop virtue signaling no matter what.
Those two guys are languishing in a Chinese prison because Trudeau can't keep his yap shut.
Yeah.
You know, you made me think about Stephen Harper and Barack Obama, whose terms in office overlapped for a great period of time.
In every possible way, those men were opposites, intellectually, aesthetically, historically, ideologically, of course.
And you never heard a single hard word from Harper towards Obama.
And you know that there were a lot of troubling issues.
And ironically, both Vladimir Putin and China's presidents against whom Harper was tougher than Trudeau, they both treated Canada with more respect too.
And last point about Obama, it's true we didn't get the Keystone XL approved, but Obama felt like he owed Harper enough deference that he didn't actually kill the deal until shortly after Trudeau took office.
If Stephen Harper can bite his tongue for nine years or eight years, Trudeau could maybe practice that for six months.
Yeah, absolutely.
He could try.
And you know what?
He was, of course, as we all know, a drama teacher.
He was an actor.
All he needs to do is be an actor.
He needs to act like a prime minister.
But he can't do that.
His operating methods are so based on virtue signaling.
He doesn't understand policy in particular.
He's not a deep thinker.
What he is is somebody who goes around and just virtue signals.
Oh, I'm going to show you that I care about gender equity.
I'm going to say things that make you think that I care about indigenous reconciliation.
I'm going to say things because you say Donald Trump is a racist and I think he is one too.
I'm just going to say things so that you know that I'm not like that.
I'm tolerant.
I'm understanding.
I, I, I, superior, superior, superior.
It's egotism in a sort of passive aggressive way.
And it's just infuriating.
Yeah.
You know what?
A lot of the people in Trudeau's cabinet come from the same circuit.
They all do the TED talks, which is shallow clichés but haven't really done things.
Christia Freeland, the foreign minister, is a classic case of that.
You know, in the middle of the USMCA, the NAFTA renegotiations, she went to a rally in Toronto called, you know, Standing Up to the Tyrant.
The word tyrant was in the title.
And the opening video clip was about Donald Trump.
And she was on stage.
She's going to anti-Trump rallies in Toronto while she's negotiating with Trump.
And so many of them just think their job is being a pundit or a spokesman because that's all they ever did before they were in office.
None of them actually had to run things other than run their mouth, which they're still doing.
Yeah, absolutely.
And as I said, the real world consequences of that are obvious in this case, because we have two Canadians who are facing indefinite imprisonment in China under probably fairly strenuous conditions.
I wouldn't say they're being tortured.
I wouldn't say they're not.
I don't think they are, but they're not in a nice, clean, comfortable prison where they're watching CNN International and other English language services and have contact with the outside world and get to use their iPads.
They're in basically solitary confinement, apparently in rooms where the lights are never turned off.
You don't know whether it's day or night.
There's no windows to the outside.
And that is a direct result, not entirely of Trudeau running his mouth off.
But we are not any closer to getting them out as a result of the fact that Prime Minister can't keep his yap shut.
Yeah.
Yeah, you just made me think of a quote, and I just called it up on my phone here for one second.
But 400 years ago, a British diplomat said this, and it's the truth.
What can you say?
Sir Henry Watton said, an ambassador is an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.
Now, there's a play on words there, lie abroad.
That's how they used to, battleships would turn sideways and all the cannons.
So lie abroad.
There was a double entendre there.
Oh, a battleship turning its guns.
Also, you're going abroad to lie.
So it was a British pun, but it was true that your job as a diplomat, your job as an ambassador, your job with foreign countries is to do whatever it takes to get your country's interests ahead.
Who was it who said countries don't have permanent allies, only permanent interests?
And with America, we have interests.
Get those two lads home from China.
Get things fixed with India.
Get Things Fixed With Saudis00:07:08
Get things back on track, whatever that is, with the Saudis.
Everything, Brazil, Brazil, you know what?
When the new president of Brazil, Yair Bolsonaro, won a stunning victory a few months ago, Justin Trudeau's press release was so snide and curt, it refused to even mention the president by name, let alone congratulate him.
It was, you know, the very first day he's president, Trudeau's insulting him.
Why?
Why?
You're not a pundit on Twitter.
How about just lie abroad?
How about just be, like you say, be an actor for five minutes.
And when you're offline, you can vent to your staff in private.
You know, there's a very good example of when you can be a public virtue signaler with Venezuela at the moment.
Because our allies in the Western Hemisphere are also prepared to say publicly that the regime in Venezuela has no legitimacy anymore and should step aside, we can join in on that.
But if we're just going to sit in Ottawa and tweet, as Christia Freeland did about the Saudis last summer and annoy them, what have we accomplished?
Freeland had tried to, well, I shouldn't say tried.
Freeland tweeted about the Saudis arresting human rights activists when they arrested a woman who has connections to Canada.
And what did that get us?
Did that get her any closer to freedom?
She is probably deeper into the Saudi penal system now than she ever was before we started mouthing off.
And there's sometimes you get to mouth off.
Sometimes as a leader, you get to take the hard stand.
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
I mean, that's a very good example of it.
But you don't get to run around and just say, well, Donald Trump, he's a racist.
We all know that.
And to do it in a kind of cowardly, juvenile, passive-aggressive kind of way.
Well, everyone knows where I stand on this.
And that's not the way we do it in Canada.
He wouldn't actually come out and say, no, I think Trump said racist things.
That would be too bold.
So he just does that demure.
Well, no, I'm not going to say what we all know to be true.
I know I wouldn't do that.
And you know I wouldn't do that.
And isn't that what makes me better?
Yeah.
You know, I think that for the first few years of his administration, I mean, Trudeau is surrounded by yes men, absolutely.
There's no older hand there.
Like there's no one in cabinet.
There's no one in his PMO who is an old gray-haired man who says, you know what, boss, we got to fix this one.
The closest thing he had to that was his age mate and personal friend since college, Gerald Butz, who's gone now.
So there's no one who's been through this for 40 years that can say, oh, we had this case back in.
does have Ralph Goodale.
But I don't know why Ralph isn't more influential on these stories.
Well, I mean, if that's the best you got, but I'm talking about someone in the PMO who's looking at 10 files.
And the reason I say that is because without that internal critic and without media criticism for three years until Jody Wilson Rabel broke the fever, the media was so loving that I think Justin Trudeau never got negative feedback.
So he assumed all this was great.
So he would do that virtue signaling and the media would clap.
I remember stories at the CBC on his socks, story after story on his socks.
And so he'd say, oh, this is really working.
And there's that gorgeous image of him at NATO showing Angela Merkel his socks and Angela Merkel's looking for a second and she must be thinking, like whatever else you think about her, she is a grave woman with serious thoughts.
I don't like her one bit, but she's not a child.
She's not a childish girl.
But you know what?
It's not just the media.
And I want to go back to an incident that happened, I think, two days after Trudeau was sworn in as prime minister in November 2015.
He goes to the Pearson block, which is the headquarters for foreign affairs or global affairs Canada.
And there's an atrium there, and there are people lined around the rim of this on every floor.
And he walks in.
These are bureaucrats.
Their job is to dispassionately and unbiased, in an unbiased way, perform what the government of the day asks them to do on foreign affairs.
And they erupt into cheering.
It is so obvious that they think, oh, thank God the Harper years are over.
Now we get to go back to those great, wonderful Trudeau days.
And they are so biased and so clearly in his pocket.
And that's another group that never told him no.
And that's a group that should have said to you, should have said to him, Mr. Prime Minister, you cannot anger the U.S. president at the very time that we need him to lean on the Chinese to get our two Canadians out of prison.
But they don't, I think, even go after him because they are so enamored of the Trudeau mystique that they're not even giving him good advice.
Yeah.
You know, it's, and that whole India debacle, no one would dare say, hey, boss, maybe don't dress up like you're going to an Indian wedding because Indians don't dress up like they're going to an Indian wedding unless they're at the Bollywood star.
That was so embarrassing.
And they should have told him and didn't.
They just couldn't.
No one was there to say the emperor has too much clothes.
The emperor has the wrong clothes.
And so now it's all coming out.
I tell you, Lauren, it's a great column in the Edmonton Sun folks.
I encourage you to pick up the Edmonton Sun and read Lauren every day, but this is a really good one.
Well, one day Donald Trump is going to poke us back.
And I worry about that day.
And you know, the other thing that they have to keep in mind in Ottawa, especially among the liberals, is that I would say at this point, Donald Trump is the odds-on favorite to win the 2020 presidential election.
And they might have to deal with him for another four years.
So they had better not be smug about that.
Yeah.
Lauren, great to see you.
Thanks for giving us so much time.
You bet.
All right.
Nice to see you, my friend.
Well, there you have it, Lauren Gunter of the Edmonton Sun.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about Trudeau's new anti-pipeline law.
Eliza writes.
We all know that there will be no pipeline with a Trudeau in power.
Yeah, I mean, it's construction season.
It's the summertime.
Now is when you build.
And there ain't no building going on.
Someone Answer Tommy's Question00:02:07
It was a $4.5 billion payment to kick the can down the road.
There's not going to be any pipelines.
Bob writes, another way to look at how horrible C-69 was conceived and written was the huge number of amendments required to make it somewhat viable.
Instead, the apologists focus on the number accepted as some kind of validation of the Senate.
You're exactly right, Bob.
But as I showed you, they were trivial and incidental amendments.
The heart of it remains the Commission must use insane criteria to approve pipelines now, like sexuality and gender identity and other grievances and others.
It's right in the law.
On the imprisonment of Tommy Robinson, Stan writes, No one is answering the question that I'm sure must be on all his supporters' minds.
Is Tommy getting enough safe food to eat?
You have contacts.
Can you get someone to answer this question?
Thank you, Stan.
I can find someone to answer the question.
And really, there's very, very few people I trust to ask the question and get it answered.
And in fact, I'm the only one I trust because I want to see with my own eyes, and I want to ask him if he's getting enough food, if he's being tortured in any way, if he's getting death threats, if he, I want to ask him, and I want to see him with my own eyes.
And so, in fact, on Tuesday, I am going to Belmarsh Prison in the United Kingdom, and I am scheduled to meet him in the prison.
I haven't been to a prison since I was a young law student.
I worked on a small criminal matter, and I did not like going to prison, and that was a very mild prison in Edmonton.
Belmarsh Prison is where the terrorists and mass murderers are.
That's insane in itself that Tommy's being held there.
So, I will give you a personal report, and I will let you know how it goes, and I will tell you the truth.
And whatever it is, if he's well treated, if he's poorly treated, I can't believe he's well-treated.