Justin Trudeau’s government excluded Maxime Bernier from federal election debates, despite his People’s Party meeting Liberal-set thresholds, while including Elizabeth May and the Bloc Québécois—highlighting inconsistent rules. Critics call this "creepy" overreach, comparing it to authoritarian control, as debate access should be public or host-driven, not state-imposed. Bernier’s exclusion silences conservative dissent on issues like Wroxham Road crossings, where non-refugees allegedly exploit Canadian benefits, costing taxpayers millions annually while evading UN and Safe Third Country Agreement standards. Media and parties ignore this "unmitigated crisis," favoring Liberal narratives over conservative scrutiny, yet conservatives must defend free speech even amid strategic concerns like vote-splitting. [Automatically generated summary]
Today's show is about Maxime Bernier and should he be banned from the upcoming leaders' debates?
Well the answer is of course not.
No one should be banned.
It should be up to individual debate hosts and other parties and let there be a dozen or a hundred leaders debates or none if no one wants them.
But to have the government decide that, that's where it gets creepy.
That's where it gets banana republicly.
I'll talk about that today.
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Okay, here's today's broadcast.
Tonight, Justin Trudeau had the government take over the political leaders' debates.
And surprise, he decided to kick out Maxime Bernier.
It's August 15th, 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.
Who should run the debates between the party leaders in the federal election?
In a free country, the answer is anyone.
In fact, pretty much the only wrong answer is the government.
If it helps, think about your local community voting for an alderman or a school trustee or a local politician of any sort.
Who should host a debate?
Well, that sounds very ominous and dramatic, but really it's just, you know, your local rotary club, a local church, local school.
What's the difference, really?
It's just people who care about the election, who want to hear from all sides.
Or maybe they don't want to hear from all sides.
That's their choice.
Maybe you have debates on a certain theme, a certain issue, transit, maybe, if someone cares.
Sometimes you have elections for a mayor, for example, and you can literally have sometimes 30 people on the ballot for mayor in some of the big cities.
30.
Now, a local neighborhood group shouldn't be forced to have all 30 of them if there's only a handful of real candidates who have a chance of winning.
Let things happen naturally, I say.
Let candidates choose which debates they want to go to.
Let groups choose who they want to invite.
If there's a disagreement, let the public know.
If some people are excluded, let the public know.
Maybe they'd agree with that.
Maybe they'd be angry by that.
Maybe they'd sympathize.
Maybe they'd have other debates.
I don't know.
I just think the last people who ought to control all this are the government, since it's the government that hangs in the balance here.
So you shouldn't let the incumbents make the decision.
You don't want a mayor choosing who gets to debate against him for mayor, right?
Well, surely that applies to the national level too.
Surely a mayor shouldn't be able to silence his toughest challenger.
That should apply for prime minister too, even more so.
And we've talked about this before, how the liberal government just decided one day just to take over the debates.
They just did it.
And the bailout media, they just rolled over.
They just did because they're all being rented by Trudeau now, either permanently, like the CBC, or temporarily, as with the $600 million newspaper bailout.
So they just agreed to this.
I showed you this press release, this outrageous press release, the other day where the Liberals just said, hey, we're appointing our hand-picked people to run these debates, but we're not even trusting them to make the key decisions.
Look at this line.
In the interest of time.
And as a starting point for the upcoming 2019 debates, the government has established clear criteria for participation by political party leaders.
And then they outline their liberal rules there.
Now, this press release was dated October of 2018.
Do you really think that there was no time for a debate committee to come up for rules for a debate for an election that was 12 months in the future?
The rules could be hammered out in a week, in a day if needed.
It wasn't about the interests of time.
It was about the interests of the Liberal Party.
They wrote the rules here.
The Liberals did it, and then they just announced it.
They just nationalized the debates, and they wrote the rules.
And so they're deciding which of their opponents they want there.
Now, they couldn't really avoid Andrew Scheer or Jagmeet Singh.
That would just be too high-handed to kick them out.
But what about the smaller parties?
What about Elizabeth May?
Really, she's just a me-too for the Liberals.
What about the Block Quiet Coal?
Can they participate?
The party has almost disappeared, you know.
And obviously, it's irrelevant in English Canada.
They're not even running outside Quebec.
So should they be in the debates?
What about Maxime Bernier and his People's Party?
Like I said before, those would be up to the media and debate hosts and even other parties before.
Some party might say, I'm not participating unless Elizabeth May is in.
Some party might say, I'm not participating if Elizabeth May is in.
A few elections back, when Elizabeth May, who was in the single digits in the polls, had no chance of being PM, she didn't have a full slate of candidates.
She was really just a one-person pundit.
But the media really like her, so they campaigned to get her in the debates.
And the Conservatives made the political decision to agree.
They didn't want to seem intransident or censorious, so they agreed.
Now, maybe it was a good thing.
I don't know.
In the end, it wasn't up to the Conservatives themselves.
They didn't have the power to just say yes or no.
They could have pouted and not participated, but that probably would have looked bad.
In the end, they went along with it.
But not now.
Now the Liberals can just sort of make these strategic decisions about who they want and who they don't want.
They can just make it so.
And there's no debating him.
They used to order it.
And so they have done.
So look at this.
This is from last year.
Last year, here's Trudeau's spokesman, an MP named Karina Gould, and she said, Bernier can join leaders' debates if people's party meets nomination threshold.
Cool.
Maybe a little bit.
Maxime Bernier would be eligible to appear in the 2019 leaders' debates if his upstart People's Party successfully nominates candidates in at least 90% of the ridings, Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould said Thursday.
By the way, Bernier has a lot more candidates nominated right now than the Liberal Party does.
I don't know if you know this, but the Liberals have dozens of unfilled seats, no candidates, just Nam Trudeau will handpick them so much for local democracy, which he loves to, or used to love to brag about.
But my point is, Bernier surely exceeds the Liberals in nominations, but he's being excluded.
It's just a fact.
The next official debates coming up, the monk debates, Bernier just isn't allowed.
And unlike last time, when there was public pressure brought to bear on the debate organizers and the other parties, it's all moot here.
What Trudeau wants, Trudeau gets.
Karina Gould looks friendly enough as a person, but she's actually a bit of a thug.
Remember, she's the one that Trudeau appointed to censor the internet.
She's the one who set up that five-man internet emergency censorship panel that the chief clerk of the Privy Council is going to be on.
They'll deploy in the election to shut down stories they don't like.
So she simply doesn't want Bernier there, so it's done.
Even if the monk debates, even the CBC, all the other parties wanted Bernier there, they can't because the government just decided, like a mayor just deciding which of his rivals can or can't have the honor and privilege of debating him.
Look, I know a lot of our viewers at the Rebel are Andrew Scheer supporters.
Not fans so much.
I've yet to actually meet someone who loves Andrew Scheer.
It's more of a loyalty thing to the Conservative Party.
It's a passive thing.
Fine.
I've met plenty of people who think Maxime Bernier is a splittist who's going to split the vote.
And you know, there's some truth in that.
So fine.
That can be the Conservative Party's point of view.
They'd prefer it if Bernier wasn't in the debates, perhaps.
But having that point of view is completely different than having Justin Trudeau, through the power of the government, simply order that a candidate is banned.
A candidate who surely has just as much right to be there as Elizabeth May.
And insanely, the leader of the Block Québécois.
I'm serious, under the Trudeau rules, the leader of the Block Québécois will be in the English language debates, even though he has no candidates in English Canada, but not Maxime Bernier, because that suits Trudeau just right.
That's weird.
Look, when even a Toronto Star columnist knows it's unfair, it's time to scratch your head.
Here's the star.
Meanwhile, the main political parties have become too clubby when it comes to leaders' debates.
The Liberals, Tories, and NDP know the debates don't have huge viewership, but work to their benefit for public exposure and winning seats.
Even though they've now let in May twice and keep including the Block Québécois, which remains controversial, focuses primarily on them.
Clubby, clubby, that's exactly the word.
How much difference is there really, really, between Justin Trudeau and Andrew Scheer on key issues like immigration, for example?
Andrew Scheer has publicly said he does not disagree with Trudeau on the number of immigrants or the demographic mix from what countries they come.
How much difference between Trudeau and Scheer on dairy cartels, on multiculturalism, on political correctness?
Scheer is even copying Justin Trudeau's phrase about diversity.
It's a really bit weird.
Listen to this.
If we want to understand what Canada is and what it can be, we need to understand where we have come from.
From the very first Indigenous peoples, to each wave of new arrivals that have come to Canada, to hopeful newcomers that are arriving even today at Pearson and other ports of entry, all are part of that shared story.
And we are all part of a grand tale still being written.
A success story of different people, humanity in all its diversity, each adding its own chapter.
One country, the true north, strong and free.
Yeah, now believe me, I want Andrew Scheer to beat Justin Trudeau in the upcoming election, of course.
But I'm not a party member of any party.
I actually care about issues.
I want conservative policies.
Scheer would obviously be better than Trudeau on many things, but I want to have a choice.
I want Canadians to have a choice, and I want Canadians to hear that there is a choice out there, and maybe Andrew Scheer can be pushed into being more conservative.
It reminds me when Doug Ford ran for the Conservative leadership in Ontario after Patrick Brown, and Ford said he was going to oppose the carbon tax.
Patrick Brown, I'm being for it.
All the other candidates were for it, more or less.
And there was great squawking in the establishment about Doug Ford, how dare you?
Including from the Liberals, because they wanted that issue taken off the table.
They didn't want to have to debate it.
They wanted to pocket that issue as taken for granted, win and move on to the next one.
Maxine Bernier probably doesn't have a statistical chance to become prime minister, but he is certain to put forward ideas that many Canadians share, especially ideas that are considered politically incorrect, ideas that the establishment club doesn't even want to talk about.
Sort of like Elizabeth May.
She's allowed, though.
It's so obvious what's going on here.
If the Block Québécois can be included under Trudeau's rules, if Elizabeth May can be included under Trudeau's rules, then excluding Bernier is obviously a political choice.
The Liberals think it helps them for some reason.
I bet Andrew Scheer thinks it helps him too.
But mainly it just helps the establishment.
I don't like helping the establishment because I think the establishment is wrong on so many issues, but mainly I think it's creepy and a bit banana republiky for the government to choose the rules of its own opponents, who gets to debate them or not.
Whether or not you like Bernier is not the point here, actually.
It's whether or not you think the government ought to be able to ban their challengers, and surely any conservative can be against that, even if they personally don't want Bernier in there.
And by the way, if your goal is to tamp down populist anger that's roiling the world, I'm pretty sure banning populist dissenters from a debate that they would otherwise qualify for is about the worst way to do it.
But what would I know about populist conservatism?
Stay with us.
More ahead.
Welcome back.
Well, by banning Maxine Bernier from the federal election debates, Justin Trudeau and Andrew Scheer, who's just fine with this, have managed to silence the loudest voice in Canada on certain key issues, freedom of speech, fighting against political correctness, and another one of them is immigration.
It is not particularly in the interests of any of those leaders, certainly not the NDP or the Green Party, to talk about Wroxham Road.
Wroxham Road Refugee Journey00:09:11
That's a little, well, what used to be a dead end alley, a little road in New York State across which is a little ditch, on the other side of which is Quebec.
But it's turned into a major highway for illegal fake refugees just walking up from the United States to Canada and claiming asylum.
I call them fake because legally and factually, you cannot be a refugee once you are now in the United States.
And yet Canada has taken 50,000 people through this opening.
Joining us now from Montreal is Kian Bexti, who just visited Wroxham Road today.
Great to see you, Kian.
Thanks for having me.
Well, it's a pleasure.
You're in Montreal.
You were just at Wroxham Road.
Tell us what it looks like.
We sent reporters there a couple years ago when it was still a fairly offbeat road.
There weren't any permanent structures there.
What does it look like now?
Well, the camp is completely set up and it's pretty permanent.
They have accessibility ramps built.
You can probably see here on the B-roll, very fresh wood put together so that in case any refugees are in a wheelchair, they'll make their way up into the RCMP compound so that they can be booked and then put into a bus.
You can see the bus here that then drives them down the Canadian side of Wroxham Road into a secondary facility where they're all sorted out until they are ready to go to their refugee board hearing, which from what I understand, many of them just don't show up to at all once they're in Canada.
Well, yeah, I mean, of course, those refugee board hearings, there's such a backlog.
Some of them are literally being scheduled 10 years from now.
So they're not detained.
They're not kept.
Once they're processed, they're told, okay, watch your mailbox because you'll have your hearing in one, two, three, four, five, six, ten years.
It was an incredible story in Montreal.
Someone getting a refugee board hearing for January 1st, about 10 years from now.
Of course, there are no hearings on January 1st, so that day will come and go.
Incredible.
Now, tell me about the different kinds of people you saw.
Was it police?
Was it border agents?
Was it RCMP?
What officials are not watching the border, or rather watching and doing nothing?
So I saw four different types of people.
I saw RCMP, of course.
They were standing there, very interested in me.
They were asking me a lot of questions.
Who do you work for?
What company?
Why are you here?
What's your license plate?
I'm sure they asked me more questions than they asked the refugees or refugees.
The other type of person I saw was a commissioner, someone similar to airport security, who was the bus driver, basically the chauffeur who brought the individuals, the illegal border crossers to the secondary facility, who I had quite the conversation with.
We'll go back to that in a second.
The third type of person, of course, was the illegals who crossed the border.
They were wearing very nice shoes.
You can see here in this picture on my tweet.
They're wearing Nikes.
I can't remember the exact model, but they're not cheap.
They're wearing under armor.
They have a very sleek backpack on.
They're not refugees in the sense of the word.
They're better off than most Canadians are who live on reserves, that's for sure.
And then the fourth type of person was the legal Canadian citizen who just happens to own property on Roxanne Road, the closest property to the border.
I spoke with her as I was leaving.
She was arriving home, and she was very disappointed.
She was very sad.
She told me that she didn't want to speak on camera.
I might have an audio recording of her, though, because I think it was just recording in my car while I was talking to RCMP agents.
And, you know, she was just very tired.
She said that the property that she owned was very quiet many years ago, and now it's busy with RCMP traffic and this bus that drives up and down the road about 20 times a day.
She's very upset.
She's upset that journalists keep knocking on her door because obviously it's a sensitive area.
She just wanted this retirement property and now it's very, very busy.
So those are the four type of people I spoke with.
And we might want to cut to this clip.
I'm sure you'll be interested to hear what this commissioner bus driver had to say.
Listen to this.
Yeah, it's hard to say when they come in.
It depends on when planes come in, you know?
Planes.
What do you mean?
Planes?
If they come in at Plattsburgh, at the airport.
They fly to the closest airport to them.
Yeah, Plattsburgh is the closest airport to the border, so.
Wow.
They get off there and they take the cab over here.
That's interesting.
I wouldn't have thought that they had the money to buy a plane ticket.
You'd be surprised.
Some of them spend their money on the other side before crossing over because they know when they cross over, they're going to end up with a check in their hands, you know.
Wow.
Yeah, well, we know from access to information requests that the average migrant group or average migrant that comes across the border gets $50,000 in their first year.
In fact, we have a website, 50000.ca, if you're curious to see the proof of that claim.
It's just astounding.
It's such a large number.
You mentioned that we treat these fake, bogus refugees better than we do any Canadian on-reserve.
That's obvious.
But I would say we treat them better than any Canadian off-reserve, any Canadian citizen who's down on his luck.
You know, I was in downtown Toronto the other day and I walked by an enormous urban refugee camp, this big heated tent that's for refugees while homeless people, Canadians, are on the street.
It's really an inverted morality.
Let me ask you an obvious question.
Why has this issue dropped off the radar screen as we're now, what, 75 days away from the federal election?
Is anyone even talking about it?
Are the Conservatives talking about it federally or have they sort of hushed on this one?
Of course, Conservatives, nobody really wants to talk about this because if the Conservatives talk about it, they know that if the Conservatives bring this into the debate, they know that Maxime Bernier will chime in with what Canadians really want to hear, which is shut it down.
Stop this from happening.
And there just doesn't seem to be that kind of interest from the Conservative Party, at least from what I've seen.
I'd like to be proved wrong.
Now, I had a conversation, it was a shouting conversation across the border.
There are some Americans from a university, from New York State University, who were doing research on that side of the border, kind of documenting what was happening.
And I had a conversation with them, and they were also wondering the same thing.
Why isn't the media covering this when, and I don't know the exact numbers, but I believe in 2018, there was more illegals crossing the border than there had been in any other previous year.
This problem is only getting worse and worse and worse.
It's an unmitigated crisis, is what it is.
It seems that the media is more concerned with talking about concentration camps on the southern end of the United States, on the southern United States border concentration camps.
Of course, in quotations, that's not what they are at all, but that's what CBC and CTV and Global News want to talk about because that fits their narrative a lot better.
What doesn't fit their narrative is showing these very wealthy non-American, non-Canadian people who are illegally crossing the border with their Air Jordans and their flights.
They didn't just appear on this border.
They flew to it.
They're not poor people, but they are certainly taking Canadians for everything that they're worth.
Of course, even if they were poor, that's not the definition of a refugee.
A refugee is someone who is in imminent danger based on an inherent characteristic, their race, religion, or whatnot.
Simply being from Africa and wanting free welfare does not make you a refugee, even under the strict United Nations definition.
And of course, under the Safe Third Party Agreement, no one in America can ever be a refugee in Canada and vice versa.
The whole thing's a scam.
Well, I'm glad you're down there, Keene.
We'll have to do more work at that Wroxham Road border in the weeks ahead.
And thanks for sharing your footage with us today.
No problem.
Thanks for having me.
What a pleasure.
There you have it.
Kean Bexy, our intrepid reporter, reporting to us from Montreal after having visited the Wroxham Road illegal border crossing.
Stay with us.
more head on the road.
Hello my friends.
Conservatives And Free Speech00:00:59
What do you think about today's show?
Look, not everyone who watches The Rebels supports Bernier politically.
I think most rebels support him ideologically.
They're just worried he's going to split the vote on the right.
I've always said that he should have stayed within the Conservative Party.
I believe that.
I've said it to him directly and I've said it publicly.
But now that he's out of the party, I think he does have a role to push Andrew Scheer to the right, to say things to ensure the Conservatives actually are Conservative.
And he's doing that on issues from free speech to radical Islam to immigration, issues that I think Canadians care about, but that the Liberals and the official conservatives don't really want to talk about.
And my point is, I think we ought to be able to talk about them in an election of all places and to shut those voices out.
I think that's just going to cause more anger and dissent.
And by the way, conservatives are supposed to be for free speech.
All right, that's the show for today.
Let me know what you think.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.