CBC’s Marketplace exposed Canada’s fake recycling industry, revealing Malaysian workers—mostly Bangladeshis—earning $12/day sorting toxic plastic waste without masks, much of which ends up burned or dumped, contradicting green claims. Ezra Levant accuses CBC of avoiding domestic corruption probes while praising foreign outlets like Time for uncovering Liberal scandals, like Trudeau’s blackface. Calgary’s climate protest lacked schoolchildren and establishment politicians, with radical groups like Antifa dominating, amid rising unemployment under Trudeau and Notley. Levant mocks Greta Thunberg’s activism, calling her a "child oracle" and questioning her credibility, framing protests as performative while Canada’s waste exports thrive unchecked. [Automatically generated summary]
I give credit to the CBC for showing a little bit of journalistic curiosity, for holding people to account, for challenging authority.
Trouble is they're doing it in Malaysia because they're not allowed to do it here in Canada.
Oh, it's a good one.
You know, I wish you could see this podcast.
You'll figure it out from the audio, but I want you to see it too if you have time, because I show you what these undercover CBC journalists found.
You got to see that.
To get the video version of the podcast, you've got to become a premium subscriber.
So go to premium.rebelnews.com.
It's eight bucks a month.
But you get my show every day in video form and other shows by Sheila Gunrid and David Menzies.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, the CBC exposes how the recycling industry is fake.
They just burn the stuff.
But why did they expose it in Malaysia, not Canada?
It's September 27th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is government about why I publish them.
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
I know a lot of journalists, even lots of the CBC, believe it or not.
Not every journalist is a total political activist there.
The activists are the ones who rise to the top, of course.
If Rosemary Barton hadn't shown her total obedience to Justin Trudeau, she would never have been appointed as a host of the national and a moderator of Trudeau's election debate.
Same with Althea Raj on the left here.
She's with the U.S. gossip site Huffington Post.
You can see Paul Wells there on the right, in his happier days when he was a Trudeau fanboy too.
Back then, when he was asking Trudeau for his autograph, he was allowed to interview the prince.
But ever since Wells fell out of love with Trudeau, he's been banned.
And tonight, McLean's and City TV are bringing you the first national leaders debate of the 2019 campaign.
Now with 25% fewer leaders.
We've invited the leaders of the same four parties we invited the last time you saw me here in 2015.
Three of them accepted.
Elizabeth May, the leader of the Green Party.
Andrew Scheer, leader of the Conservative Party.
And Jagmeet Singh, leader of the New Democratic Party.
We also invited Justin Trudeau, the leader of the Liberal Party.
He declined, which is absolutely his right.
We left the invitation and his podium open right up to airtime.
Why have a debate without him?
Because in Canada, we elect parliaments, not presidents.
Every major party can influence the next four years, and every party has a case to make and to defend.
And in Canada, the right to ask questions is never bestowed by some authority.
It belongs to everybody.
That's sort of sad.
They've deplatformed McLean's and Paul Wells just because Paul Wells doesn't bend the knee anymore.
It's true, though.
To be a top reporter at the CBC, you need to be ideologically liberal.
Or actually, not even ideologically.
You have to be unideological enough just to simply do exactly what Justin Trudeau wants you to do on any given day.
I mean, true liberals would have been appalled by Trudeau's blackface.
They'd be appalled at Trudeau's lack of give-a-care in regards to human rights abuses in the world.
So yeah, to be more accurate, to climb to the top of the greasy poll at the CBC, you have to be partisan even more than left-wing.
To use Trudeau's favorite word when it comes to the media, you have to be a journalist he can trust.
But there are thousands of journalists at the CBC.
In fact, it has more journalists than every other media company in Canada combined.
And most of them know they simply will not rise to the top.
Statistically speaking, they have no chance.
And although they are overwhelmingly liberal, and they all belong to journalism unions that are funding pro-Trudeau campaigns.
For example, there's a big union called the Canadian Media Guild.
Just so you know, it's not Unifor only that's a pro-Trudeau journalism union.
The Canadian Media Guild has a super PAC for Trudeau too.
But there are still some real journalists who work there.
I've got to admit it.
There are some journalists at the CBC who show journalistic traits that haven't yet been drummed out of them.
Like a basic curiosity about the world, a basic skepticism, a willingness to challenge authority.
Pretty much the opposite of Rosemary Barton.
Last book you've read or the book you're reading?
The just finished The Patch, which was Chris Turner's history of the oil patch.
But I'm also about to start the new Ken Follett, the third book that is the sequel to Pillars of the Earth.
That's your nerdy side?
No, that's my nerdy side.
No, no, it's not sci-fi.
It's just a sweeping historical epic, I'm sure, but I haven't started it yet.
What kind of music are you listening to right now?
If you have time.
Or podcasts.
Podcasts?
No, I don't.
I've tried.
I run regularly and I've tried to do the podcast thing, but it hasn't really said.
I don't like people talking in my ears when I'm trying to run.
I like to sort of vibe out.
That's not an interview.
That's a date.
The trouble is the genuine journalists at the CBC are not allowed to express their curiosity, skepticism, defiance of authority here in Canada.
Plastic Scandal Exposed00:10:35
That's why it fell to a foreign magazine, Time magazine, to break the Justin Trudeau blackface story.
And another foreign newspaper, London's Daily Telegraph, to follow it up.
It's not just the CBC, of course.
Here's Don Martin, the host of a very low ratings show on CTV.
One of the reasons it has low ratings is, well, I mean, this tweet is a perfect example.
We're in the middle of a Canadian election.
It's less than a month of voting day.
Trudeau scandals are mounting.
Trudeau has been hiding for days from the media.
And the top story on Don's political show?
Coming up on CTV PowerPlay, latest on the Trump whistleblower.
Really?
So the daily anti-Trump fever dream by Democrats, already discredited.
Nothing to do with Canada in any way, by the way.
It's about Trump and Joe Biden and Ukraine.
No Canadian connection at all, not a real thing in any event, totally debunked.
But that's the lead item for Don Martin to tweet about on his CTV political show.
Because in Canada, that's how you do it.
And if you don't do it that way, maybe you won't get your TV license renewed, like Sun News Network's demise.
Which is all a lengthy preamble for my story today.
A genuine piece of accountability journalism by a CBC show.
I know, I can't even believe I'm saying those words.
The CBC actually showed some curiosity about something and some skepticism and some ingenuity and some effort.
And they challenged authority and they actually took on a sacred cow, recycling.
I know nobody tell David Suzuki or he'll fly back to Canada on a jet and scream at some CBC managers for allowing this to happen.
But it actually did happen.
We don't want to be the next cancer village.
Canada's plastic recycling dumped and burned overseas.
That's the headline.
And then the sub-headline, or a deck, as it would be called in the newspaper business, is, Canadians would be shocked, expert says, as Marketplace poses as fake company to expose illegal recycling.
And look at that.
Four reporters on the byline.
They put four reporters on the story.
That's some effort.
Now this may be the last we ever hear of these reporters.
They'll probably be reassigned to the Kaluit beat now after this, but for now let's enjoy it.
Fumes spewed from the machinery as workers wearing only t-shirts, sandals and no masks at a recycling factory in northern Malaysia manually sorted through mountains of plastic scrap.
The workers mainly from Bangladesh earned around $12 a day, sometimes toiling seven days a week.
The labor was very cheap, said one businessman as he gave a tour to undercover CBC Marketplace journalists posing as plastics brokers from a fake Canadian company.
So if you haven't figured it out yet, CBC sent a whole team to Malaysia pretending to be in the recycling business, bringing over garbage from Canada to Malaysia that was supposed to be recycled, like plastic, to a place they just burned it.
It's insane to ship garbage halfway across the world.
But it's not actually new.
As you know, it's been going on for years, many years.
Countless tons of Canadian garbage was put on ships and sent to Asia, to China, to the Philippines.
Remember that whole garbage ship business?
It's a bit like the scam of carbon credits.
Virtue signaling Western liberals say, oh, I did a noble thing.
I put my plastic bottle in the recycle bin, not the garbage bin.
I'm practically a saint.
And then they don't ask any questions about what happens to it after that.
And that plastic bottle, well, look, it makes no sense to recycle it.
In terms of net energy use, net resource use, net cost, it is more harmful to the environment.
It uses more resources to recycle it than to bury it.
And of course, plastic is inert.
You can bury it.
An empty bottle buried underground isn't going to poison the water aquifer.
So there really isn't any reason to recycle it.
But Canadian governments ship our recycling to Asia out of sight, out of mind, and we pretend we did something green at a great cost, of course.
And instead, it's either just stored, like it was in the Philippines, or it's burned, like in Malaysia.
You know, just one day, China decided we're not taking your crap anymore.
And hundreds of millions of tons of crap suddenly had nowhere to go.
We used to ship all our recycling to China.
This is not a new story.
Every city and town in Canada knows it.
China won't take our crap anymore.
Every environment minister knows it, but everyone is still pretending that if you put a plastic bottle or a plastic bag in a green bin, something magical will happen to it.
It won't.
But too many people have a stake in that goofy system, from the unionized government workers who pick up the recycling and sort the recycling and ship the recycling to the tax collectors who get paid in a dozen ways, to the biggest profiteers of all, environmental campaigners, environment ministers, who get to pretend that they have healed the world.
They're the biggest scammers of all.
So despite the fact that the world has been storing or burning or burying plastic, or more likely it's just dumped in a river in India or China, despite the fact that everyone knows that's happening, there are just too many people in power here in the West in some established perch who have a vested interest in pretending that this recycling system is still working.
And really what media would dare say otherwise?
Do you think David Suzuki would?
Call out the BS of recycling?
Well, miraculously, CBC's marketplace did.
Here's a clip from their show.
What's actually happening to our recycling?
There's already been reporting on problems within the industry.
So we needed to tell a story that hadn't been told before.
It had to be creative and original.
So we tackled the investigation in two ways.
Going undercover as plastics dealers in Malaysia to uncover any potential illegal activity and testing the supply chain.
Buying our own plastic, then using satellite tracking devices to see if our plastic really gets recycled.
To go undercover, we needed a believable backstory.
So we created a fake plastics company called Market Plastics, made business cards with fake names, and the premise, we were plastics dealers looking for new business overseas, and in this case, Malaysia.
Most importantly, we had to learn the recycling lingo.
And here we are at one of the Malaysian factories talking the talk.
It was good.
I'll admit it.
It was well planned.
It was well executed.
I bet it cost the CBC half a million bucks to do it, just the sheer manpower, all the flights and hotels.
They probably spent six months on the project.
They asked some good questions, but look at this.
What's missing here?
They were willing to break the law in some way to get it, like telling us to lie on import shipping labels.
I don't know.
But if the government knew, they would shut it down.
It's illegal.
One recycler even admitted to taking kickbacks to import plastic illegally.
They hated to do it.
Yes, okay.
A little margin.
A little margin.
But we uncovered more.
We documented an industry often willing to put profits ahead of the environment and its workers.
Cheap labor.
Cheap.
The work conditions were not good.
Employees without proper protection in potentially toxic work environments.
So they're upset that people in Malaysia are earning $12 an hour.
Yeah, me too, I guess.
But it's Malaysia and they're actually foreign workers from Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world.
That's sort of how the third world is.
And no environmental protection for those workers.
Yeah, again, that environmental protection, that's sort of a first world thing.
That's something for rich countries that can afford it.
I'm sure those CBC dandies from Toronto were shocked by how dirty it is there, but that's everywhere in the third world, everywhere that's too poor.
They can't spend money making their place clean and safe.
I'm sorry, that's just the third world.
That's not a recycling industry problem.
That's an everything problem in Malaysia, Bangladesh, China.
I don't think these CBC reporters get out much.
Maybe they will stop complaining so much about our own Alberta oil sands, the cleanest oil production in the world.
Alberta literally requires companies to report to the government the spill of a single liter of oil.
I think these CBC reporters have never been outside of the area you can see from the top of the CN Tower.
But what questions did they not ask?
They sure are looking into scandals in Malaysia, people breaking Malaysian law, but really, to be honest, why would I, as a Canadian, care about that?
In fact, why would a Canadian state broadcaster go all the way to Malaysia to do a story on Malaysian corruption or the Malaysian environment?
I really don't care.
Do you?
And the drama, their hidden cameras.
Good work, guys.
It made it fun.
But why didn't they have the hidden cameras here in Canada?
Because it is a simple fact that this happens every day here in Canada, that Canadian recycling companies do this here in Canada, break our Canadian laws, and surely, utterly, certainly, Canadian politicians know all about it and wink at it.
I mean, it was pretty cool setting up a fake plastic company and fake business cards, but how about the 100 real Canadian recycling companies that are actually doing this?
Why didn't the CBC have the courage to sting some of them and save all the cost of travel to Malaysia?
If the argument is that Canadians, Canadian recycling executives, are shipping our recycling to Malaysia, which is indisputable, of course that's happening.
Why would you have to set up a fake company to run it as a hypothetical when it's already happening for real?
Why sting poor and powerless folks in Malaysia?
Why not sting rich and powerful people here in Canada that are shipping the stuff there?
Why not see what Canadian environment ministers here know and would say on hidden camera?
Why not see what local city politicians know?
Why not go undercover and report what city bureaucrats say?
We saw someone talk about kickbacks in Malaysia, and sure, that makes me really mad about some Malaysian guy making a few hundred bucks, I guess, but I'm much more interested in knowing who paid those kickbacks from Canada, aren't you?
Was it some recycling executive?
Was it some politician trying to get rid of his crap?
Maybe even someone in our foreign ministry.
I don't know.
I'm curious.
I'm skeptical.
I want to challenge authority.
The CBC show bravely showed curiosity, skepticism, and defiance of authority towards Malaysia.
I guess it's just too much to ask that they bring that same journalistic curiosity to Canada.
The liberal government and the recycling scolds here.
Hidden Camera Climate Conversations00:07:44
Stay with us for more.
Well, it's a big day for Greta Thunberg, the mentally ill 16-year-old who has inspired, well, I won't say she's inspired the kids.
She's inspired a bunch of left-wing teachers to take their kids out of school, including in the oil capital of Canada.
Calgary.
Now, I know Edmonton would say it's the oil capital too.
Let's just split the difference and say they're both oil capitals.
And our own Kian Bexty is on the ground at that climate extinction event.
Kian, great to see you.
I have to note you're wearing a winter hat.
I understand there was some snowfall in Calgary.
Part of me thinks it's working.
Saint Greta has worked a miracle and ended global warming.
What does it take to make you a believer?
I mean, I think I'm full on the climate change train.
I mean, Greta has saved Canada.
It's snowing in September here in Calgary.
Everyone's wearing their winter coats that are made out of petroleum products.
Some are wearing raincoats who planned ahead because the snow didn't last too, too long.
It was just a little bit of a flash.
So me here, I'm in my puffy winter jacket that is now soaked to the bone, but it's certainly an entertaining climate march here today.
There's people marching in the streets wearing gas masks with bells ringing.
It's quite the affair.
Now, I know Calgary.
I'm from there original.
The population is, what, 1.2, 1 million or so people.
I don't know exactly in the greater area.
Doesn't look like a huge crowd there, but I'd say it's well over 100.
Just from what I can see behind you, it looks like most of them are grown-ups there.
I don't really see a lot of kids, but you've been amongst them.
Is it a lot of kids?
How many kids would you say are actually there?
And how many are homeless people looking for a handout and parent activists?
Yeah, so there's not many kids here that would be in elementary high school.
There's kids of the age where their parents could bring them, so kids who aren't in school.
There's some university students, some students from SATE, I just talked to them.
They weren't here to join the march.
They just wanted to observe it.
They weren't totally on board with the radical message of some of these guys.
I don't know if you can see in the background, but right near me, there's a guy with a big Antifa flag.
This crowd is made up of communists, socialists, some liberals, some Greens, some kids who don't really know what's going on, who wanted to start a mosh pit.
But not as many kids as people want to say.
Everyone wants to say it's high school students.
It's not really those like 16 to 18 year olds here.
It's people whose parents can either manipulate them or university students who can take noon off.
Well, let me ask you this, because for four years, Rachel Notley had a schizophrenic approach to the oil patch.
She would tell conservative voters, oh, I really, really like you, and I'm really trying to get more oil jobs.
But behind the scenes, she was taxing, regulating, destroying.
Ever since she was relieved of the burdens of leadership and has been thrown into well-deserved opposition, I think her honest nature has come out, and she's come across as much more hostile to oil and gas.
She doesn't have to fake it anymore.
Tell me, are there any new Democrats there?
Is Rachel Notley herself there?
What kind of people, is there anyone from the establishment or are they all, you know, radical foreign-funded groups like Greenpeace?
Well, I came here actually to speak with some politicians, but it turns out not many of them wanted to show up.
Look, we have a kid staging a dying right there.
I don't know if you can catch that.
That or he's drunk in the middle of the day.
Both are possible in downtown Calgary under Mayor Nenshi and his soft-down crime policing.
That could be a safe injection zone.
This is a five-year-old kid, so I hope that's not the case.
But back to your question about Rachel Notley.
Yeah, I mean, it goes all the way back to her royalty review, right?
She took the reins of government and said, oh, yeah, we're, you know, we're on team oil sands, donning that iHeart Oil and Gas t-shirt that someone gave her.
And then the next day, she started a royalty review.
So she was never on the side of Albertans, but she's not here today either.
She's not with these climate protesters.
And I'm not sure why.
There's no local NDP MLAs.
Rachel Notley, she's from Edmonton, so it would be quite distracting.
I'm sure she's at the Edmonton one.
Maybe.
I don't know.
But there's no local NDP MLAs.
There's no liberal MPs here.
Kent Hare, I can't see him yet.
I mean, that's the reason I came here to speak to them.
But I think maybe this group full of Antifa might even be too radical for politicians.
Well, I know Calgary pretty well, although I do live in the East now.
It used to have the lowest unemployment rate in Canada.
For many years under Trudeau and Notley, it has had the highest unemployment rate west of the Atlantic, even higher than Quebec.
And I wonder, therefore, are there any out-of-work oil and gas workers who are there to counter protest or push back?
Or are they just too busy looking for work or doing something else?
They're too busy.
There's a small group of people that always show up to these kind of things, but they, I mean, they're just sort of expected.
They just show up to City Hall whenever there's a protest.
But there is nobody that's out of work here today.
And my guess is because of the rain.
It is absolutely freezing here right now.
The snow that's intermittent.
Like my hands are starting to go numb, actually.
It's not a pleasant day here in Calgary.
It's very cold.
Well, you know what?
I won't keep you longer.
I appreciate you giving us a report on the scene.
I'm sure you'll have another video that we'll put on our YouTube page.
I end as I began.
Saint Greta has blown through our country like someone from the movie Frozen, like an autistic princess from Frozen, turning us into ice crystals.
And you can doubt, but me and the other evidence-based policy wonks on the climate change bandwagon, we know she's a little bit mystical.
Or as Sarah Silverman said, if Jesus comes back, it's in Greta.
Last word to you.
Yeah, I haven't heard that Sarah Silverman quote.
She's known for her dramatic takes.
And I don't know.
You're going to go with Greta probably isn't our Jesus, but who knows?
Yeah, I'm just joking around.
Of course, she was appalling.
Sarah Silverman knows very little about anything, certainly about Jesus and Christianity and science.
Kian, thanks for being there on the ground.
And I look forward to watching your continued campaign coverage in the days and weeks ahead.
Sure.
Thanks for having me, Answer.
There you have a Kean Bexty who is live from the Climate Extinction rally in Calgary.
That looks cold.
All right, stay with us more ahead on the rebel, hey folks.
On my monologue yesterday about president Trump and Greta Tunberg, both of the UN, Robert writes, the UN has chosen to trumpet the views of an emotionally disturbed child oracle in a style that harkens back to the mysticism of the middle ages.
You're exactly right.
I mean, these are the people who claim to be policy-based science-based, but having a child of 16 who looks 12 and who's an emotional wreck, speak like she's a prophetess.
UN's Emotional Disturbed Child Oracle00:01:24
That's creepy, uh.
Liz writes.
I love that Trump ignored her when he entered the room.
It looked to me as if she was expecting a greeting so she could spit in his face.
Her facial expression was priceless.
Yes, it showed anger and frustration, but I took no joy from it because I think her whole life is anger and frustration.
I say again, I don't think she's acting when she complains, when she cries.
I think she's mentally ill.
That's not my opinion, she said so herself.
Jen writes, now that you've shown us her mother, that explains just about everything.
Yeah, you know, I watched some videos of her mom.
She is actually a fairly accomplished opera singer.
I'm not an aficionado but I think I think I would call her a professional um, but you gotta admit she's pretty, pretty weird sometimes and I think all the weirdness has deposited it on her daughter.
And I have no problem with someone who wants their daughter to succeed and be a star and a celebrity, but it's not for any talent.
Her daughter can't sing.
You heard her.
She said she's a selective mutist.
I didn't know that was a thing.
That means someone who just suddenly stops talking for great lengths of time.
That's not a talent.
That's not, you know, America's got talent.
Sweden's got talent.
No, that's a sorrow.
That's a sickness.
That's what that weirdo mom and dad and PR team are selling.