The UCU’s push for racial self-identification—like Ali G’s comedic "blackness"—ignores biological reality, mirroring Canada’s divisive quotas that reward identity over merit, from Elizabeth Warren’s fraudulent heritage claims to Nunavut’s welfare-linked crises. Baffinland Iron Mines’ layoffs, though painful, expose the failure of government dependency, offering 100 Inuit jobs that combat suicide and incarceration rates, while foreign powers like Russia or China eye Arctic opportunities. Canada’s borders, fluid even with Nunavut’s 20-year-old creation, demand sovereignty-driven investments—no matter the cost—over ideological scolding from Laurentian elites. [Automatically generated summary]
That was one of the characters of Sasha Barron Cohen.
He pretended he was a black sort of hip gang member in London.
I thought it was funny.
I think the humor was more built for British audiences.
But one of his lines whenever he would get into trouble was to say, is it because I is black?
And back then, I guess you could make jokes like that.
I think he would probably be prosecuted for hate speech today.
But here's the good news.
The Universities Council in the UK has announced that they think you should be able to be whatever race you choose just by self-identifying.
So I guess Ali G isn't that crazy after all.
Anyways, I take you through that today and why I think it's a great idea.
Before I let you have the podcast, let me invite you to become a premium subscriber.
It's just $8 a month.
You go to premium.rebelnews.com and you get the video version of this podcast, which I like to think has lots of value, lots of great viz.
In this case, I show you a clip from Talladega Knights.
What a great movie that was.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, a university says that you can be black if you identify as black.
I think this is a great idea, and I'll tell you why.
It's November 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.
Hey, I have a question for you.
Occupy Toronto Reminds00:03:34
Was Barack Obama the first black president?
Well, of course he was.
That's him with his dad.
But actually, he's half black.
His mom, pictured here, was white.
So is he black?
Well, sure he was.
But he's not what some black Americans, like Tariq Nasheed, would call a true black American, because Obama was not a descendant of slaves.
His dad was an exchange student from Kenya who met his white mom, and then he had to go back to Kenya because he was found to have had a second wife back home, and that's illegal in America.
To some purists, though, that means Barack Obama doesn't understand the true black experience.
Slavery, emancipation, Ben Jim Crow laws, and desegregation.
These are all complicated subjects that I don't have a natural expertise in.
Luckily, here in Canada, we avoided most of these prickly problems because the British Empire banned slavery centuries ago.
It's just not our story.
But some of the remedies proposed in the United States splash across our border too.
We simply don't have the legacy of slavery.
We just don't.
But an American lobby group called Black Lives Matter has set up a branch plant here in Toronto.
It's weird.
It's so fake.
It's so manufactured.
It's not Canadian at all.
It's got nothing to do with Canada.
It reminds me of Occupy Toronto.
Do you remember that?
A few years back, a Canadian knockoff of Occupy Wall Street, and they set up this really dirty, gross, tent city in downtown Toronto.
But it made no sense.
I mean, Occupy Wall Street was another Marxist project like Black Lives Matter that was in reaction to a particular American story.
In the United States, their big banks failed.
They had to have a massive government bailout of the financial sector.
That just didn't happen in Canada.
In the 2008 recession, we didn't have any banks fail, and we didn't have a bank bailout.
So it made no sense, this Occupy Toronto thing, other than the traditional Canadian affliction of our inferiority complex, we wanting to compete with the U.S. in every way, even weird ways that don't fit.
Now, I'm sorry for that tangent.
I'm just glad we don't have those issues up here.
But unfortunately, we have some of the solutions to their problems being applied to us here in Canada, even though we don't have the same problems.
On the banking side, that probably means more regulation that we don't need.
And on the race side, it has meant affirmative action.
And racial quotas and other reverse racism, which of course is just plain old racism, it's unjust to favor people of any race under law.
If you want to have a private group, a private club, a private religion, a private association, that's your right.
But not for the government itself.
We should be equal before the law regardless of our race.
The universal symbol of Western justice is a woman holding the scales of justice while wearing a blindfold.
That's the key point.
She's blind to irrelevant criteria like race when making a judgment on the facts.
So how's racism a good idea, especially when the victims in the past, the victims of affirmative action today rather, don't have anything to do with any grievances long ago.
Blind To Race00:07:58
And the beneficiaries being benefited today didn't suffer any harm years ago.
Why are you rewarding people today that nothing was done wrong to them?
Why are you punishing people today who did no wrong?
Again, there might be some specific claim for actual descendants of American slaves.
I don't know.
That's an American question, not a Canadian one.
But I think we can all agree that to use my earlier example, Barack Obama did not suffer harm from American slavery because his dad only came to America as a student 60 years ago.
So why should his son theoretically get any benefits or compensation?
But to my point today, here's a new story from the Daily Mail.
Anyone should be allowed to identify as black, regardless of the color of their skin or background, say university leaders.
Universities and Colleges Union has set out its stance in an ongoing gender row.
As well as gender, UCU says it also insisted people can choose their own race.
British comedian Sasha Barron-Cohen came under fire in U.S. over character Ali G. You know, I really like the Daily Mail.
They have those great headlines, and then they sum up the story in a few bullet points right away.
I mean, you pretty much got it all there, but you can understand the logic here, right?
If this guy, Jonathan Yanniv, can simply say, no, no, no, my name's Jessica or Jennifer or whatever it is, and I'm a woman, and if he can demand that female aestheticians must wax his generals, his male generals, if he can just say that he's a woman and go into women's bathrooms, if male athletes who can't beat other men,
but who then just say, oh, you know what, today I'm a girl, and then go on to crush actual girls in sports, if we have to go along with that, these are all trans athletes I'm showing you, if we have to suspend our disbelief and actually use their pronouns, if we're going to do that, why not say you're a different race and make everyone else abide it?
I mean, it's actually less crazy.
I just mentioned that Barack Obama is as much black and white.
It's just true.
He's 50% white.
But you can't be 50% female.
You either have an XY chromosome and are male, or you have an XX chromosome and you're female.
There's no halfway about it.
But there is a halfway with race.
Barack Obama.
There's a quarter way.
There's an eighth, like if one of your grandparents is a certain race.
That's why racist regimes, like U.S. slavery in the South and Nazi Germany, they had to have complicated math.
In the U.S. South, they had phrases that we hate to even hear these days.
Have you ever heard the words quadroon and octoroon?
Those are words that describe a certain percentage of blood quantum.
One-eighth, one-quarter, whatever.
In some racist measurements, they use the concept of one drop of blood from a certain race.
In the Nazi Germany, they had the same thing.
Have you ever seen this chart before?
They're called mixlings.
You see that?
Look at the chart.
The one on the right is a full-blooded Jew, four out of four grandparents.
Three out of four is a Jew.
Mixling first degree, and then mixling second degree.
I think that's the same as an octoroon.
I don't know my racial math.
If you were one-eighth or one-sixteenth Jewish, you were too Jewish to be allowed to join the SS, but not Jewish enough to be killed.
I know this sounds like crazy talk, but they had to have math.
South African apartheid relied on similar laws.
Who is black, who is colored, who is white.
In each of these jurisdictions, there were also rules against intermarriage, by the way.
But you see my point?
Sorry to show you all those gross things, but that's the point, if you're going to start measuring, because you can be both black and white, and there's lots of different combinations.
You can be many races, actually.
You know, there's a booming industry right now with companies like there's one called 23andMe.
They let you spit into like a test tube and send them your saliva, and they tell you what your genetic background is, what mix you are.
It's not perfectly accurate, but it's interesting enough.
Which proved, by the way, in case you needed any proof that Elizabeth Warren was lying when she said she was American Indian.
She said she was Cherokee.
In fact, she's at most one 1,024th Native American.
But even then, it's not actual Cherokee blood, as she had lied, but rather a Central American gene they're measuring.
Elizabeth Morin is a liar.
But she's the one who made a fuss about her race in the first place.
And that's my point today.
I know it's taken me some time to get to it.
That's why I like this idea of anyone and everyone just being able to say what race they are by simply declaring it, like Jonathan Yaneve declares he's a woman.
Because Elizabeth Warren didn't make up the story about her race just to be more interesting.
She did it to get benefits, real financial benefits, to steal those benefits, really, from actual Aboriginal people.
She did it because it got her a job as a professor at Harvard.
They were under pressure to hire minority professors.
She lied and said she was Cherokee.
And that was good enough to tick a few boxes and boom, both sides won.
Harvard could say they hired a minority and an otherwise insufficiently qualified woman could get a job at a top school.
Both were stealing in a way.
Harvard was stealing a reputation of being diverse, and Elizabeth Warren was stealing a Harvard professorship and all sorts of other politically correct bounty away from actual Indians.
Of course she knew it was wrong, which is why she's been so defensive about it since she was called out on it.
And she has had so many versions of the story, so many alibis.
Warren says her great-great-great-grandmother is Cherokee, but genealogists have yet to confirm that.
Warren referenced a photo of her grandfather on her mantle as part of the family lore.
My Aunt B has walked by that picture at least a thousand times, remarked that her father, my papa, had high cheekbones like all of the Indians do, because that's how she saw it.
And she said, and your mother got those same great cheekbones, and I didn't.
She thought this was the bad deal she had gotten in life.
Yeah, no, She's a liar.
And I actually think she's going to lose because of that lie, and I'm glad she will.
Because we all see what she's doing, what she tried to do.
It's not just Indians who are mad at her for stealing a position that was supposed to be for them.
It's every white person, woman or male, usually a white guy, I'd say, who realizes that she used that lie to jump ahead of them.
Anyone equally or more qualified than her, she leaped over them by lying about her race.
And of course, real minorities who realize she's a trickster stealing their loot.
That job was for a minority.
Racial Lies and Loot00:07:06
She stole it from them.
I truly believe that's, if she loses, I think she's going to lose.
That's going to be why.
Good.
But that's why I welcome this news from the United Kingdom.
Here, let me read a bit more.
Anyone should be allowed to identify as black regardless of the color of their skin or background, according to left-wing university leaders.
The Universities and Colleges Union has set out its stance in a report on the ongoing row about whether men should be able to self-identify as women and be treated as female regardless of their anatomy.
The UCU's position statement did not just stand by its support for self-identification of gender, but also insisted people can choose their own race, saying our rules commit us to ending all forms of discrimination, bigotry, and stereotyping.
UCU has a long history of enabling members to self-identify, whether that is being black, disabled, LGBT plus, or women.
Huh.
So you can self-identify as being disabled too.
Well, I'm disabled.
I'm obviously fat.
I have a receiving hairline.
I've come to terms with that.
But that's a medical condition, right?
What's the fancy word?
That's alopicia.
I think that's a medical word for slowly going bald.
There are people out there who have too much flatulence.
Look, I'm being scientific here.
I'm using medical words.
I didn't say fart.
But really, I don't need to be so factual.
You can just throw photonifoy.
I mean, Jonathan Yaniv does it.
He's not just a beautiful woman because he says so, but you see him here?
Look at him.
He claims to be disabled.
Look at him riding that mobility scooter and getting a free ride in the government subsidized handicap bus.
But look at this video.
You see him there?
Look at him, run like bull, strong like bull.
He ran like a bull when he wanted to.
And look at him here.
This is slightly less funny.
Him coming after our David Menzies with a cane.
Yeah, you don't need no mobility scooter there, do we?
Look at that.
What a wacko.
He's about as disabled as I am, but he's self-identifying as disabled to get free transportation and probably some sort of income.
What are you?
What are you, some sort of bigot?
You're denying that he's disabled?
You know, a few years ago, this would have been the stuff of comedy.
There's a British comedian.
He's Jewish and white, actually.
His name is Sasha Baron Cohn.
I think he's pretty funny.
Here he is playing a character in the great, great, great movie Talladega Nights.
I give you one option, Monsieur Bobby.
As a sign of humility, if you kiss me on the lips now, I will return to Paris and you will never see me again in NASCAR.
The answer is never.
Do you hear me?
Never, ever!
Well, yes or no?
That's sick.
You guys see that movie if you haven't seen it.
The legendary Ricky Bobby, Talladega Knights.
It's funny.
That's Sasha Barricone.
So he's a white guy.
But one of his characters that he plays, he's a Jewish white guy.
He pretends to be a black gangster in the UK.
And I've seen a ton of guys like this.
Keep it real.
The member for Staines will be banned from the house.
Is it because I is black?
Is it because I is black?
You know?
I don't even know if he's allowed to make that joke anymore.
But that's like his punchline.
Whenever he gets in trouble, he says, is it because I is black?
Now, he's not black, but he actually presents himself as black.
He came through America.
He met with a dozen celebrities pretending to interview them.
And I think he convinced people he was black just by how he dressed and how he spoke.
He was doing it as a joke.
Back then, he was self-identifying as black as a joke.
And I mean, that was about a decade ago.
It's not even a joke now.
It's not funny now.
You can self-identify as black.
The University Council in the UK just said so.
So did Rachel Dolezall.
You know, remember who I'm talking about?
Pretty white girl?
Who just sort of said, no, I'm black.
She actually ran a local chapter of the NAACP until she was found out.
You know, NAACP stands for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
And they fired her.
But why?
Why can't she be black?
She probably has one 1024th blackness in her.
I like this self-description thing.
Because if everyone can be any race of their choosing, it ceases to have any legal power, any legal meaning.
Once upon a time, I bet that black slaves in America or Jews in Nazi Germany or blacks and coloreds in South Africa, if they could have simply identified as white or Aryan, you know, to avoid the laws against them.
Imagine if a black man in Louisiana in the year 1800 could simply say, no, I declare that I'm white.
I say so.
So give me my full rights as a man.
It's a strange hypothetical fantasy to even express it.
But if merely identifying as something were substantial or meaningful in law, it would render racist laws inoperative, wouldn't it?
I mean, this is crazy talk, but we're in the realm of crazy here.
Back then, in the past, in this hypothetical scenario, people would have identified as white to get away from racist punishments against blacks or Jews.
Today, people could identify as black to get away from racist punishments like quotas, affirmative action, other set-asides.
I like the idea.
I think it could destroy racism today, at least in some quarters.
Now, I'm not for taking this fantasy all the way.
There are some sorts of discrimination that ought to be allowed.
Like I said before, private groups should be able to associate as they like.
I think you should be able to have a women's sports tournament that discriminates against men.
You should be able to have a black student society, a Christian club, whatever, based on your freedom of association.
I believe in that.
But I'm talking about terms of government rules about race.
I think we should get rid of them.
And maybe this insane idea from these insane professors in the UK of simply saying you are whatever race you like to be, maybe that's the best way to do it.
Quebec's Trailblazing Approach00:15:01
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Well, tomorrow and the next day, I'm going to be in my home province of Alberta.
Now, I know I've been here in Toronto for pretty much a decade now.
That makes me a Torontonian, but I guess it would be the province of my birth.
We're going to have two panel discussions on Wexit, the Western exit idea.
The first is tomorrow night, Tuesday night, November 19th, in Edmonton from 6 till 8 p.m.
And the next one is Wednesday night in Calgary, 6 to 8 p.m.
You can find out details about each at WexitDebate.com.
We're going to have Professor Barry Cooper with us tomorrow night in Edmonton.
We're having Lauren Gunter with us in both cities.
Of course, Kien Bexti, myself, and my good friend Sheila Gonreid, who joins us now for ISCAP.
Hey, Sheila.
Hey, Ezra, thanks for having me on the show.
Well, come on.
Thanks for being on the show.
And I'll see you tomorrow in Edmonton.
I got to say, we only started advertising these tickets less than a week ago.
We were a little late in getting the, I was late in getting the announcement out.
But last I checked between the two cities, we have about 600 people signed up.
And it's just literally every minute another person is signing up.
I think a lot of people are really interested in the subject.
Yeah, I do too.
I think people want something more, something a little bit deeper, like a deeper analysis of the issues.
It's great to have rallies and it's great to have events, but people are really hungry for the information about what Wexit means, what that means going forward.
If Alberta does have to make some tough decisions, and I think they do, how do we go about making those decisions?
It's time to start having those discussions.
And I'm really proud to say that we are, you know, a place of discussion, a place of conversation, and a place of debate where people can ask questions, try to get some answers, and they won't be scolded or tutted by the mainstream media or our self-appointed moral and intellectual superiors in the East.
Yeah.
I have two things that are on my mind.
The first is I interviewed the fellow who had the Wexit Facebook page.
I think Peter Downing is his name, if I'm remembering right.
And I don't have a word to say against him.
He's a good guy, but he's clearly, you know, he had this cool word, Wexit.
He had the Facebook page.
And it sort of, I'm not going to say it caught him by surprise, but wow, it sort of caught him by surprise how many people signed up in the day after the election.
And he's got some bumper stickers and some hats and stuff like that.
But I don't know if he had a plan or a theory figured out.
And I didn't want to grill him too hard when he was on.
I just sort of realized that he's for it in his gut.
But my sense is, okay, that's this great starting point.
You got to have a fire in your belly, and he definitely has that.
But okay, is it a federal party?
Is it a provincial party?
Is it Alberta leaving on its own?
Is it Alberta with the other Western provinces?
Are you independent?
Or are you having some sort of affiliation with the United States?
Like, those are all real questions, and I don't even know the answer to them.
But you got to start thinking about those things if it's going to be more than just a feeling in your tummy.
You know what I mean?
Oh, yeah, I know exactly what you mean.
I was actually at our friend Danny Hozack's event over the weekend, and that was a lot of the sentiment that I got just from talking to the crowd, talking to, you know, it's a gathering of conservatives, so you feel right at home.
And, you know, people want to talk about separation or a re-examination of what it means for Alberta to be in Confederation.
But there are a whole host of other issues involved in that that I'm afraid that Mr. Downing, like you say, I appreciate his capitalist nature of being the guy with the website at the right time selling t-shirts.
Look, I love that, but there's other things at play here.
There's a whole, and like you say, what does our relationship look like with the people around us, whether it's BC, Saskatchewan, the North, the Americans to the South?
And I don't think there's really been that much in-depth examination of those issues.
So I'm excited to hear what our speakers have to say.
You know, Jason Kenney has outlined his approach, and it's clear.
He's doing the Alberta agenda, the Alberta firewall.
He's looking at getting out of the Canadian Pension Plan, the RCMP.
He's looking at doing a lot of things within the Constitution.
Nothing really that Quebec itself hasn't done.
They have their own pension plan.
They have their own police force.
So he's clearly got a plan.
It's clearly a federalist plan.
And he's the guy doing it, and he's off to a start.
You know, there's a couple of sayings that come to mind, Morton Blackwell's laws or the public policy process.
One is you can't beat a plan with no plan.
And the other is you can't beat someone with no one.
And what I mean by both of those applying here is: okay, Jason Kenney has a clear roadmap.
If there's someone else who has a different view, well, what's the plan?
What's the roadmap?
And it has to be articulated.
And again, is that Alberta only, Alberta in the West?
Is it staying the country?
Is it someone talked about having a version of the bloc Québécois, like a new party?
I don't know about that myself.
And then you can't beat someone with no one.
Jason Kenney is a well-known and popular political leader who just won six months ago.
Who would be the leader of this WEXIP movement?
It's probably not going to be Peter Downing, the fellow I talked to.
It probably can't be just a professor, although stranger things have happened.
So again, you can't just have a movement without a champion.
Brexit had a champion named Nigel Farage.
Quebec's referendums had a champion, René Levesque, Lucien Bouchard.
You have to have someone who can articulate the message and get people dreaming about what it could be.
Without that, it's just going to be a Facebook page and a lot of chatter.
Well, and besides having a charismatic leader, a Nigel Farage type, that Nigel Farage type also has to have a lot of really smart people around him advising him on these big issues.
That, you know, there's so many issues that require so much expertise.
There's no possible way you can be an expert in all of them.
And so I'm not seeing that team existing around Peter Downing.
Maybe it will.
Maybe it'll coalesce.
And I think if it is going to, it should happen fast while the momentum is still there.
not seeing it and I think again talking to some of the people at Danny Hozak's event over the weekend a lot of people are very they're open-minded very open minded
They're open to all any and all suggestions, but they are very suspicious of Jason Kenney, not in that they don't trust him, but in that a lot of them felt as though Jason Kenney is doing his best to contain Western separatism for the sake of the federal party and the chances of the federal conservative party to ever hold government again.
A lot of them are very skeptical that there are a lot of bold ideas and tough decisions that Alberta needs to make.
And I don't think a lot of people trust our current political establishment to be willing to do those things to really save Alberta from the rest of the country.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, as we've talked about before, if you take out the 30-odd seats from Alberta, they're all conservative MPs except for one.
So you take those out of the game.
And I think my math is correct in saying all of a sudden Justin Trudeau has a majority government because out of the seats that are left, you just took out the hardest core conservative parts.
He'd have a majority.
It would be like America without Texas.
It's going to go Democrat forever.
So I think that Jason Kenney is keeping an iron in the fire for a possible federal move himself four or eight years down the road.
But there is one thing that I'm going to try and dig it out of my library or my library, my box is full of books that I haven't unpacked in a while.
Almost 20 years ago, maybe it was 20 years ago now that I think about it, it was.
When I worked on Parliament Hill way back in the day for Preston Manning, whose motto was the West Wants In, that was 20 years ago, I made a friend, my counterpart, in the Bloc Québécois.
And actually, we've kept in touch since then.
He's a great guy.
And the Bloc and the Parti Québécois, the provincial government, the provincial side, they started doing their homework getting ready for separatism.
And they had scholarly papers.
What will we do about currency?
What will we do about embassies?
What will we do about passports?
What will we do about free trade?
How will we handle the military?
What about the existing military bases?
They just started asking probably 50 practical questions.
And they had a policy paper or a research report.
And it was like a five-volume how-to-separate book.
And it was to start figuring out the minutiae in case they actually get there.
This would be sort of the default plan.
I think that that could actually, a lot of the questions in there could benefit Alberta because the province of Quebec has blazed a trail on this stuff for 40 years.
Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that I think is Alberta is fortunate to have Quebec around for is that they've done a lot of their legwork on this, right down to the Clarity Act.
So we even know the sorts of questions that need to be asked.
And Quebec has figured out a lot of the answers already.
You know, for Quebec, not being in the country, they sort of have to figure out how to pay for all to run themselves.
Alberta won't have to figure those sorts of things out.
I remember reading, and I forget who wrote it, but should Alberta leave and join the United States, we would be the richest state in the Union.
You know, we'd be far better off than North Dakota, then Oklahoma, then Texas.
So, you know, there's a lot of reasons for Alberta to leave.
And on the flip side, I'm hearing just a lot of nostalgia for why we should stay.
Yeah, it's very interesting.
You know, I did say that I'm born in Alberta, but I've been in exile here in Toronto for a decade.
And the Rebel itself is bigger than Alberta.
We have a lot of supporters in Ontario, and we have supporters around the world.
I mean, I was just in the UK last Thursday for a Tommy Robinson event.
We've got supporters there.
We have supporters in the United States who enjoy our work on issues that are international in scope, free speech, open borders migration, the threat of radical Islam.
I think that the most important thing the Rebel can do in the short term here is to be a good faith house of debate.
And when I say that, I mean in contraposition to so many absolutely awful things being said in the Toronto Star by the CBC, the Globe and Mail.
Most of them start with, dear Alberta, we really like you.
And as your best friend, we're here to give you some advice.
The advice invariably includes, hey guys, stop denying climate change and will you just shut down the oil industry already, Kay?
I mean, it's like they're made by a kaleidoscope.
The same stupid comments every time.
They all start with, as a friend, I really like you.
I've never been to the West and I don't even know anyone there and I don't really like you.
But as your friend, can I give you some advice?
I know you're angry.
I mean, I read them and I think my first reflex is how mad I am.
And my second is, are you secretly trying to push Alberta out?
Because that's what's going to happen.
Yeah, you know, there's nothing Albertans appreciate more than scolding from Laurentian elites.
Yeah, those articles, I mean, it's a constant flow of article too, and they all have the same sort of thesis in them.
It's like, like you say, dear Alberta, we really, really like you, but you need to quit denying climate science.
You need to get off the oil sands.
You need to diversify your economy, which also means get off the oil sands.
And it finishes up with quit whining.
And that's all it ever is.
It's like one of those backhanded comments, like when you tell your, I don't know about you, but I have some frenemies and I'll say, oh, you look really great in those jeans.
Have you lost weight?
And it means that I used to think you were fat.
You know what I mean?
Well, you know, for all these op-ed writers who say, hey, you should get off oil, I think the obvious answer is you should get off oil.
Hey, writer from Toronto.
Hey, writer from St. John's.
Hey, writer from Montreal.
Why are you saying we should get off oil?
We just make this stuff.
You're the one who's buying the stuff.
When you stop importing Saudi and Kazakh or Azer, sorry, Azeri oil, when Quebec stops importing oil from Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan, I'll be ready to listen to them talking about quitting oil.
They don't want to quit oil.
They want to quit Canadian oil.
Anyway, I'm getting off topic, but for those of our viewers who are in Alberta, please go to WexitDebate.com.
There are still some tickets left in both cities, but we're filling up.
I'm really pleased with the turnout.
Tickets are 15 bucks each.
If you're with the CBC, we have a special rate.
Tickets are $40.
And I think that's fair.
And I guess that's it.
Baffinland Mines and Nunavut Sovereignty00:07:44
I'll see you tomorrow in Edmonton.
I will have a full show on tomorrow night, but I will physically be out west.
Last word to you, Sheila.
Well, I'm excited to hear from normal people what they have to say.
I don't want to hear what some Eastern elite wants Albertans to think.
I'm here to listen to Albertans, and I want them to have the opportunity to have their opinions heard and to hear from some really smart people without being told that they're a bunch of bigots and sexists and homophobes and climate deniers.
I want that, like you said, we are going to deal fairly with this issue, and we're going to make sure that all sides are heard.
All righty, we'll see you tomorrow.
Okay, you're right on Boston.
As our friend Sheila Gunreed, chief reporter, bureau chief, she's got a lot of things coming up this fall.
I don't know.
We haven't announced it officially yet.
She's going to the global warming conference the UN is hosting in Madrid.
So she's covered every single global warming conference since the, well, I think that's three in a row or four in a row now.
I'm losing count.
So Sheila's got a very busy fall before Christmas.
And I'll see her in Edmonton tomorrow and Calgary the next day.
Stay with us.
Your letters are next.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue Friday about Baffinland iron mines laying off nearly 600 people in Nunavut.
Colin writes, Nunavut has the world's highest male youth suicide and almost the world's highest incarceration rates.
I didn't know that, but it wouldn't surprise me.
And when you have such a small population, it only takes a few tragedies to make that reality.
I have never been to Nunavut.
I've been to the Northwest Territories.
I've been to the Yukon.
I've visited Tuck and Inavik, but not for very long, and just once.
But from what I've learned about the oil sands, and especially how they give meaningful jobs to people who live in faraway places, who are often Aboriginal, I have to think that this mine, I mean, I said it on Friday.
I said it wasn't just a financial benefit.
I said moral and spiritual, I think I even said.
And I mean that.
How could an iron mine be something moral or spiritual?
Because you're giving people meaning.
Get up and work.
We're depending on you.
Be an example.
You know, and one of the issues they have in these remote communities, people are bored.
They start using drugs or alcohol.
No, you've got to show up on time, sober, ready to work.
It's a whole way of approaching the world that you don't get when the government is the sole provider through welfare or handouts.
I think that just like the oil sands is the best thing that happened to so many communities in Northern Alberta.
This Nunavut mine surely is one of the best things, the best thing ever to happen to Nunavut.
Now, I grant that hundreds of those people laid off are not locals, they're contractors, but at least, you know, I think they said about 100 of the laid-off folks were local Inuit, and there are many more who aren't laid off yet.
This mine is the best thing.
It's the best thing up there.
And I think you can have all your anti-alcoholism, anti-drug abuse, anti-suicide social workers in the world.
But there's nothing like giving someone a job to give them order and meaning and direction and a sense of satisfaction.
You know, I learned how to operate heavy equipment.
I did something today that made a difference.
Instead of sitting around waiting for a government check, I love this mine, even though I've never been there.
Douglas writes, as one of the many workers laid off, it's great to see a national outlet like the Rebel giving it coverage as everyone else is busy licking the liberals' boots.
It shows you folks are head and shoulders above the propagandists in the usual pool of ineptitude.
Well, thank you very much, Douglas.
I don't want to overstate my knowledge of the case.
I really just read a few stories in the Nazi Act news, and I also went online and poked around and read some old reports, and of course that amazing video from the mine itself.
I would like to learn more and maybe even one day visit up there just to see with my own eyes.
What an astounding thing.
It's so incredibly difficult to get up there.
In fact, I don't really think you can even get up there in a normal way.
I wouldn't even know how to get up there.
I don't know how the locals do it.
Obviously, the mine itself has its own flights.
It's so close to the Arctic.
Look at it on a map.
Look at it on a map.
It's just unbelievable.
And that makes it all the more a miraculous achievement.
And I say, you know, when I went to Tukti Yuktuk a few years back, about 1,000 people live in Tuck.
And they built a road from Inuvik to Tuktayuktuk.
There's 1,000 people at the end of the road.
Let me tell this story.
You know how much money was spent on this road?
A quarter of a billion dollars.
There's only a thousand people.
Let's call that 250 families.
So there's 250 families, and they spent 250 million just on a road.
That's a million bucks a family just for a road.
And everything has to be flown in.
Why?
Why are we doing it?
Why would we spend, like, it's insane.
Well, the answer is not an economic one.
It's a strategic one.
It's a sovereignty one.
It's a military one.
It's a national pride one.
It's a nationalist one.
If you want the North to be Canadian, then you must support that.
If you want the Danish and the Americans and the Russians and maybe even other, I don't even know who else is up there, to plant their flag and have their towns and the military bases and their mines.
You don't think the Russians want that iron mine?
You don't think the Chinese do?
So if you want Arctic sovereignty, it's going to cost you a few bucks because it makes no economic sense to live up there.
And thank God the Inuit like to live up there.
That's where it's their home.
So good, support them.
And it's not an affirmative action thing.
It's not a pity thing.
It's not even a welfare thing.
If you want the North to be Canadian, you're going to have to pay for it.
And if you don't, no problem on it.
You save a few bucks.
Don't be surprised if you see the Russian flag or the Chinese flag flying in places like Baffin Island if we choose to retreat.
So I love this mine.
It's amazing to me that a mine would help us.
It's actually helping with our sovereignty.
That's my view.
On my interview with Gerard Lucitian, Liz writes, I finished reading the short paper by Gerard Lusitian.
It's a good read and would be an eye-opener for a lot of Canadians.
It makes me want to look into our history further.
We need to reconsider what we are constantly being told we can and cannot do.
Yeah, you know what?
The different shapes on the map.
And it wasn't that long ago.
It wasn't that long ago.
To think that our map is unchangeable is simply wrong.
I mean, it was only 20 years ago that Nunavut itself was carved out of the north.
Well, that's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.