All Episodes
Nov. 9, 2019 - Rebel News
29:41
Alberta's “controversial” bill to extend pro-choice protection to doctors who refuse to assist with abortions or suicide

Ezra Levant critiques Alberta’s Bill 21, introduced by UCP MLA Dan Williams, protecting doctors’ refusal to refer for abortions or assisted suicide—despite Canada’s lack of abortion laws since the 1980s. He ties this to media bias, sex-selective abortions (e.g., BC’s Asian immigrant communities), and feminist decline, dismissing claims it’s anti-LGBTQ while comparing it to Quebec’s religious symbol ban. Meanwhile, Gordon Chang warns Huawei’s 5G dominance risks $600B in annual IP theft, from U.S. chips to military tech like the Dui Ying robot, exposing global vulnerabilities. The episode reveals how conscience protections clash with media narratives and China’s tech espionage reshapes geopolitical power. [Automatically generated summary]

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Eight Bucks Rebellion 00:01:57
Hello my rebels.
Today I talk about the war against pro-choice.
That's what the media party calls it.
But really it's the Alberta government introducing a bill to give physicians the choice to opt out of referring patients for abortions or assisted suicide.
Is it pro-choice to force a doctor to refer someone for an abortion?
I'll go through it and I'll show you how the media, they use one word to describe this bill over and over again.
I wonder if you can guess in advance what that is.
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Okay, here's the part.
Tonight, does pro-choice include whether a doctor has the choice not to help someone get an abortion or commit suicide?
I've got news from Alberta.
It's November 8th, 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 the government about why I publish them.
is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Protecting Doctor Conscience Rights 00:11:07
You know there are no abortion laws in Canada at all, right?
Literally no laws.
In the 1980s, there was a Supreme Court of Canada ruling that threw the matter back to Parliament and told them to write a law.
And then the unelected Senate killed it in a tie vote, a tie vote, in our unelected, unaccountable set.
And ever since, there has been no law at all.
You can literally abort a little baby for any reason or no reason right up until the moment of birth.
One minute before the baby's born, you can abort it.
In fact, there is an extreme procedure called a partial birth abortion, where the healthy baby is partly delivered and it's aborted during its birth.
That's legal in Canada.
A decade ago, when I published the magazine called the Western Standard, we did a study on sex-select abortions by Asian immigrants, as in Chinese and South Asian families who didn't want girls.
So they'd get pregnant, and then they would go to the doctor to find out the sex of the baby.
And if it was a boy, great, they'd proceed with the birth.
If it was a girl baby, they would get an abortion and then try again for a boy.
Our reporter, Andrea Morozek, cross-referenced the sex of new babies born in certain hospitals with the percentage of immigrants from those cultures.
It's a pretty solid correlation.
Like I say, abortion is legal for any reason or no reason from the moment of conception to the moment of birth.
In the lower mainland of BC, new immigrants don't want girls, so they're aborting them.
Do you doubt that if a gay gene were ever found, that many babies would be aborted?
Families would test, and if there was the gay gene in their babies, they would abort them and try again.
I mean, if a culture doesn't want girls, I'm going to guess they don't want gay boys either.
Now, this isn't just a right-wing story.
Here's the Toronto Star talking about the same thing seven years ago in the star, sex-select abortions.
I'm not sure if the star would be allowed to talk about it today.
It would probably be called racist or something.
For about 50 years, women were in the driver's seat politically.
What I mean by that is feminism was on the march.
It was win after win after win for women for 50 years, I think.
But I think that has pretty much come screeching to a halt in the past couple years.
Trans men are the new hot thing.
Women are being erased from the podium in women's sports, for example.
And the idea of caring about girl babies is way too pro-life for our culture in 2019.
It's very sad, I think.
But I think it's true that the opposite of pro-life eventually becomes pro-death.
That's where the anti-human environmental agenda inevitably goes.
If you think that people are a cancer on the planet, if you believe Greta Thunberg, well, the logical extension is to not have any more babies, not have any more kids at all, and then I suppose to contemplate suicide.
I think that's where we are as a culture.
And I tell you all this because there's a tiny microscopic bit of pushback going on against this culture of death right now in the province of Alberta.
No, They're not looking to ban abortion or whatever Jason Kenney's shrillest opponents want to do.
Actually, they want to bring back a little bit of pro-choice, real pro-choice.
I think that's what they're actually doing out there.
As in pro-choice implies that there is a choice up to you, the individual.
So if you want to be pro-life, you can be.
And if you don't, you don't have to be.
So, for example, if you're a doctor and you don't believe in abortion, I would think that the phrase pro-choice would mean that it's up to you.
You have the choice as a doctor not to do abortions or not to counsel abortions if you don't want to.
I think that's what pro-choice means for a doctor.
I don't know.
I'm not an expert.
So recently, there has been pressure on doctors who are pro-life or Christian or other religious faiths that don't allow abortion or assisted suicide.
There's been pressure on them to comply with the culture, despite the Hippocratic oath of do no harm.
That's the essential doctor's motto going back millennia.
So one of the changes Kenny is introducing, or at least Kenny's government, at least to backbench MLA, is that doctors who are pro-life can't be forced to refer a patient for an abortion or an assisted suicide.
It's not taking away the patient's rights to do those things.
It's protecting the doctor's rights not to have to do those things.
And look at how the media party has reacted.
This is just an example.
Here's a liberal named Jason Markisoff, who writes for a liberal magazine called McLean's.
He said, Jason Kenney's party, having already rolled back LGBTQ protections, backed first reading for a bill that empowers doctors to refuse and not even refer for services like abortion or medically assisted suicide.
Hang on a second.
Did Jason Kenney also roll back LGBTQ protections?
If so, I think I missed it.
Is it no longer legal to be gay married in Alberta?
Is it now lawful for gays to be fired because they're gay or denied a bus ticket on a bus because they're gay or something?
No, of course not.
It's just that now, I think the change that Marcosov's referring to there, somewhat deceptively, it's just now that teachers, if they choose, can talk to parents about kids in gay clubs at school.
Now, under Rachel Notley's authoritarian regime, teachers were literally forbidden by law from talking to parents about their own kids and what was going on with them as adolescents.
Even if there was a problem, they were legally forbidden.
How bizarre is that to treat parents as the enemy and even teachers as the enemy?
That's what McLean calls a rollback, letting teachers choose to talk to parents about the kids that they're helping.
But here's the story he linked to.
Edmonton Journal story.
Alberta private members bill aiming for physician conscience rights moves forward.
So it's not even a Jason Kenney law.
It's a backbencher's private members bill.
Let me read a little bit from the story.
A bill that aims to protect the conscience rights of physicians passed first reading in the Alberta Legislature Thursday, cracking open a debate about the rights and responsibilities of physicians asked to assist or advise on abortions, contraception, or medically assisted deaths.
UCP backbencher MLA Dan Williams introduced the private members bill to reassert the Charter protected freedom of conscience and religion for health providers.
Healthcare providers should never have to choose between their most deeply held beliefs and their job, said Williams in a written statement released after the vote.
The bill would amend the Alberta Human Rights Act to include conscientious beliefs as a basis for protection from discrimination or refusal of employment.
In a vote split along party lines, with all 36 UCP members in attendance voting in favor and all 15 NDP opposition members in attendance voting against, the bill has been referred to a standing committee.
Okay.
So I guess it does look like, it looks like a government bill since all the UCP MLAs voted for it.
But imagine voting against adding conscientious beliefs to the Alberta human rights law.
Don't we have those conscientious beliefs rooted in law right now?
In fact, indeed we do.
Have you ever read our Charter of Rights and Freedoms?
Look at the very first freedom enumerated under the section called Fundamental Freedoms.
Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms.
A, freedom of conscience and religion.
It is the first one in the list.
How is it a controversy that that exact same wording be put into provincial laws that are bound by it anyways?
Controversy.
That's what CTV called it.
Controversial.
All the media use that same word.
Here's the Toronto Star.
It's controversial.
And apparently, according to the media, this is also somehow anti-gay.
What?
Has it anti-gay?
Anyway, so I read the bill.
It's very brief.
I just want to read a couple parts to it.
And the first part of the conscience and rights, but here.
Number two.
For greater certainty, nothing in this act derogates from a healthcare provider's or religious health care organization's obligations to their patients, which may include informing individuals of options in respect of receiving a health care service.
So this private members' bill doesn't take away any medical duties.
It just says the patient can't force the doctor to do anything contrary to his religion.
Let me quote.
If a healthcare provider, that's a fancy way of saying a doctor, or religious health care organization determines that their conscientious beliefs would be infringed by providing a specific health care service to an individual, the healthcare provider or religious health care organization is not required to provide that health care service to the individual.
And that's pretty much it for the bill.
There's just some more details that you can't file a professional complaint against a doctor for conscientious beliefs.
Pretty short bill.
I double-checked it.
The word gay is not in the law.
The word trans is not in the law.
There's none of those things in the law.
I checked.
The word abortion is not in there.
I checked.
The word charter is in there eight times.
And the word rights is in there 12 times.
I don't even think the law is necessary because it's just reasserting what the charter said.
But that's where we are as a culture in 2019.
The media party is outraged that doctors who are Jewish, Christian, Sikh, Muslim, whatever, cannot be compelled to go against their religion.
How do they square that?
These are the same media who are all in a tizzy about Quebec banning religious symbols in their public service through Bill 21.
How do you square that with trying to force religious people in Alberta to do things they don't want?
Huawei, Trump, and Tech Tensions 00:12:39
How did that work?
I think Donald Trump was right.
I think the fake news media are the enemy of the people.
Stay with us for more.
The Chinese, the ability, if they choose to use it, to access all kinds of information, civilian intelligence, military, that could be very, very compromising.
So much as I disagree with the Trump administration on a number of things, on this, their concern about Huawei, I believe they're right.
As a matter of protection, would the United States have to have a slightly different security relationship?
Yes.
And that will throw the Five Eyes collaboration, which serves the security interests of every Canadian and every American, into jeopardy.
We just, it can't be done.
Can't share.
I don't see how we can share in the way we have.
It's not a joke.
It's truly serious.
Incredible.
That's Susan Rice, former National Security Advisor to Barack Obama.
I can't think of a single thing she would support Donald Trump on, but she says on the concerns for Huawei, the massive Chinese telecommunications company, Trump is right and that it is a danger that every country in the West should ward off.
Well, joining us now to talk about this issue is the author of a new essay on this subject from the Gatestone Institute entitled, Do Not Support China's Huawei, Cripple It Instead.
And the author of this piece is our good friend Gordon Chang, who is also the author of The Coming Collapse of China.
You can follow him on Twitter at Gordon G. Chang.
Gordon, great to see you again.
I was a little bit surprised to hear such a hard line from Susan Rice, a Democrat.
That suggests this is a bipartisan security issue, isn't it?
Well, it certainly is.
And China is becoming a bipartisan issue as well because there's a perception across the American political spectrum that China is a malign actor.
Now, not everyone shares that view, but many people do.
And indeed, we are starting to see consensuses form on what to do about China.
That, of course, is new as well.
I saw recently Pew Research, which regularly surveys countries around the world on China, has shown a hardening of opinions towards China, especially here in Canada.
And I link that to Huawei.
As you know, when Canada arrested a senior executive from Huawei, and they retaliated by virtually, I would say, kidnapping two Canadian civilians, it's been almost a year now.
I think Canadians were sort of shaken out of this dream that we can all have a harmonious capitalist relationship with China as if it was just, you know, the UK or France or something.
Do you think that ordinary Canadians and Americans are starting to get China's number, that they're actually faking capitalists?
They're more about stealing intellectual property, having unfair trade deals that are one-sided.
Do you think ordinary grassroots people in Canada and the United States are starting to figure out what's going on?
You know, I think so.
And that is reflected in you and the other surveys.
You know, Ezra, it's not like the Trump administration is innately hostile to China or, you know, anybody else.
What's driving this is Xi Jinping, the Chinese ruler.
And he's doing things that are forcing countries to understand the essential and hostile nature of China's brand of communism.
You know, you refer to the detention of Meng Wangzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, and what China did in response, which is the grabbing of the two Michaels and also stopping imports of Canadian canola and other commodities.
This is just serious.
And we got to understand that China poses this mortal threat, not only to Canada, not only to the United States, but to the international system as a whole.
In your essay, you say that 5G is shorthand for the fifth generation of wireless communication, but it's not just an incremental change.
This is a huge leap.
This would be similar to moving from a landline on your desk to a cell phone.
It's almost that kind of incredible jump.
What can you tell us about 5G and why should we be afraid if Huawei has all the hardware and the technical infrastructure?
Why is that a threat?
Well, 5G will have super fast speeds, maybe 2,000 times faster than 4G.
This will permit all the devices in the world to be connected through what has been now called the Internet of Things.
So if everything is connected, it's all on Huawei equipment, and Huawei certainly is a leader in providing 5G equipment around the world, then what's going to happen is that China will have access to all the data in the world.
But also, there's another side to this, and that is as devices are connected in the Internet of Things, China very well be able to manipulate them.
So for instance, as I point out in the piece, you know, they could drive your car off the cliff because it'll be a self-driving car.
They could turn off your pacemaker.
They could do all sorts of things with control of 5G.
And that's why this is so critical.
Now, I like the headline of your piece.
Do not support China's Huawei.
Okay, that's step one.
That's, I guess, what Susan Rice would be saying.
Cripple it instead.
Now, that's a new angle.
How could the West cripple what is a mighty company?
I'd say it's almost on par with an Apple or a Samsung or a Google.
In fact, it might even be ahead of a couple of those.
How are you going to take on such a mighty company?
Well, you know, first of all, it is a mighty company.
It's the world's largest telecom equipment provider.
It's the world's largest maker of smartphones.
But it's dependent on technology from other countries, especially the United States.
So for instance, its cell phones, you know, it relies on Google's Android system and it relies on the Play Store.
Now, Huawei cannot offer that.
So while it can sell phones in China, because cell phones in China don't have access to the Google Play Store, it's absolutely essential everywhere else in the world.
Also, it depends on chips from around the world, not only American chips, but Japanese, South Korean, Taiwan-made chips.
And if the United States is able to get countries to not sell those chips, Huawei is in trouble because although China is developing its own chipsets, it is far behind.
Some of the criticisms of Google and Facebook and companies like that is that they're so big, they pose a political or economic risk.
And so there's some talk in Washington about trust busting or breaking up those huge, huge companies.
Is there anything that could be done legally like that to Huawei?
Or does it come down to banning the technology?
I mean, you say it's the largest company in the world.
Are there other creative tools that Congress could use to take a run at it?
Or are there creative tools that the Justice Department in the U.S. can use?
So for instance, you know, finding Meng Wangzhou in Vancouver and issuing a request for extradition.
This is really going to hurt Huawei because she's the CFO.
She is, some people think, supposed to be the next chairman of Huawei.
So, you know, there's a lot that the U.S. can do.
And of course, as I mentioned, Huawei equipment, Huawei itself and many of its subsidiaries are on the U.S. Commerce Department's entity list.
That prevents U.S. companies from selling or licensing technology to Huawei without approval, a prior approval from the Commerce Department.
These are basically death sentences if they're enforced.
Now, what I talked about is that right now, the Commerce Department is thinking of granting waivers for sales and licenses to Huawei.
That would be a big mistake.
Yeah.
Well, in some ways, Donald Trump is not afraid of getting very brutal on sanctions.
He's actually, despite the narrative that he's a Russian pawn, he's strengthened sanctions against Russia beyond anything Obama did.
He is very blunt in his threats to Turkey lately.
So simply putting trades with Huawei, selling chips to Huawei on a banned list would seem almost anticlimactic after his other sanctions.
Who is the lobby in America on Huawei's side?
Is it just companies who think, wow, that's a huge market?
Let us sell to them.
We'll get rid of it.
As Vladimir Lenin said, the capitalists can be counted on to sell us the noose we hang them.
Is that who the counterweight here?
It's just people looking to make a buck?
Yeah, absolutely.
So for instance, you have the chip companies that want to sell to Huawei.
And what they've been doing is they've been trying to figure out a way around these entity list restrictions.
So for instance, they think that chips made by U.S. companies abroad are not covered by the entity list.
So they've been making sales to Huawei.
There's all sorts of things that they're doing.
But they are the parties that have asked for exemptions.
Google, you mentioned, has also asked for a waiver from the entity list restrictions.
Commerce Department has received 260 requests for waivers from the entity list rules.
And so you can see that there are a lot of companies out there that are the lobby for Huawei.
Let me ask you one last question.
I saw just today a video from Xinhua News, one of their propaganda outlets, of robots, Chinese robots that look like little dogs or something.
And it's terrifying.
They call it the Dui Ying robot.
It weighs just under 100 pounds.
And my immediate thought was, I've seen that robot before in the United States from a company called Boston Dynamics.
And it's the same thing when I look at the latest Chinese fighter planes.
I think I've seen that before.
That's called an F-35 or an F-22.
It's so clearly stolen or espionage, the blueprints.
Is that an angle that America can take steps on?
Because I saw that little robot dog and I thought that is exactly, I mean, I guess theoretically it could have been developed at the same time, but I don't believe that.
I think it was stolen.
And Google probably have half its invention stolen too.
Is this just speculation on my part or is there anything tangible here?
And can we do anything about it?
No, it's certainly tangible, Ezra.
The U.S. believes that somewhere between, let's say, $150 to $600 billion a year of U.S. innovation is stolen by the Chinese.
That's from the Commission on the Theft of U.S. Intellectual Property, otherwise known as the Blair-Huntsman Report.
It's also derived from estimates that the U.S. Trade Representative put together and issued in its report in 2018.
And both of those have been updated this year.
So there's a lot of investigation that has gone into those conclusions.
And the one thing that the Trump administration has done is impose tariffs under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 as a remedy for the theft of U.S. IP.
And, you know, it's not just USIP, it's Canadian IP and IP from Europe and elsewhere.
So China has been just stealing all this stuff.
And you mentioned the F-35.
Well, China has a J-20, which looks just like our F-35 and which is built by Americans basically because it's our technology.
Incredible.
And of course, there's a story of Nortel, which was once the Canadian telecom champion, just absolutely undone by Chinese hespion.
Chinese Threat in Canada 00:03:57
Gordon, you always give us so much to think about.
I highly recommend your essay.
Let me just read out the headline of it again.
It's called Do Not Support China's Huawei Cripolet.
Instead, it was published by our friends at the Gatestone Institute.
I'm always grateful for your time because I see you on such high-profile programs around the world.
And it's just a delight to steal you for 10 or 15 minutes for the rebel.
Thank you again, my friend, and keep up the fight.
No, well, thank you so much, Ezra.
I really appreciate being on your show.
Right on.
Well, there you have it.
Our friend Gordon Chang, you can follow him on Twitter at Gordon G. Chang.
He's also the author of The Coming Collapse of China.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about Chinese police patrolling the streets in Italy.
Steve writes, how long until Trudeau allows them to patrol Canadian streets?
Well, I don't know if you saw my monologue the other day, that there are Chinese People's Liberation Army legions forming in Canada, marching in Canada.
Now, they're not patrolling on the streets, but that's like five minutes from now, isn't it?
On my interview with Peter Downing from Wexit, Alberta, Maurice writes, I'm just glad to see that someone has taken on the separatist mantle and is already actively moving the process forward.
Hey, Peter, don't forget to take the BC Interior with you when you go.
Listen, I was glad to meet Peter.
I'm glad he came on the show, and I think he's a good egg.
I want to be very candid, though, and I wasn't trying to grill him.
I was trying to get some answers to what the plan is.
Are you trying to fix Canada from within?
Did you want Jason Kenney to fix Canada?
Did you want Jason Kenney to leave with Alberta, leave with all the West?
I don't think those are unfair questions, and maybe he hasn't figured out all those angles yet, but I think those are pretty important details.
I don't know.
I can't fault the guy for jumping in to this interesting conversation, though.
On the climate letter that 11,000 so-called scientists signed, Lorraine writes, this story about the climate and the 11,000 scientists had me really scared.
I found it hard to sleep at night.
I'm a 68-year-old woman.
I now feel a little better after listening to the Rebel.
The CBC told such a lie.
Such a lie is dangerous for people, especially children and older people.
Do you think they could be sued for putting so much fear in people?
It really had me worried.
Well, I'm very sad to receive your letter.
And, you know, I debate this stuff every day, and my BS detector is like turned up to 10, so I'm a skeptic of so many things.
And so I'm not easily persuaded by journalists, especially one of such low station as Suhanna Murharshan.
But I don't think most people are walking around as defensively as I am with regards to the media they consume.
And like I say, this story was everywhere.
I'm sure it was on CBC Kids News that propaganda challenged the kids.
And it causes people to be terrified.
That's what I hate about Greta Tunberg, is she is infecting other children with paranoia and depression, and God forbid, in some cases, suicidal thought.
I mean, and you say you're a 68-year-old woman.
I think that people of all ages are susceptible to this stress and paranoia.
For the state broadcaster to engage in it is extra gross because we have to pay for it.
That's our show for the day.
Thanks for joining us.
Until Monday, when we'll have our Remembrance Day special.
On behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.
Good night.
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