Ezra Levant demands Canada ban Huawei by December 4th, citing its 5G hardware as a mass surveillance risk tied to China’s communist regime. He warns of backdoor access laws, past data theft from Nortel, and alleged hacking of the African Union, while accusing Huawei of "colonizing" Canada through political donations and pro-China appointments like Foreign Minister François-Philippe Champagne. The petition at banhuawei.com targets 100,000 signatures to pressure Public Safety Minister Bill Blair amid concerns over sovereignty, industrial espionage, and the detention of Canadians Michael Spavor and Kovrig. Levant also shifts to exposing climate conference hypocrisy in Madrid, where activists push veganism for peace while attendees rely on diesel generators and fossil fuels, diverting focus from core priorities like actual emissions cuts. [Automatically generated summary]
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right here's the podcast tonight enough is enough It's time to ban Huawei from Canada.
I'll tell you why.
It's December 4th, 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.
Have you heard of Huawei?
I bet you have.
They make cell phones that are sold throughout Canada, but they make more than just phones.
They make deep telecommunications infrastructure.
The backbone of our phone networks, our internet, which basically these days are the same thing.
And they're world leaders in what's called fifth generation or 5G internet technology that will be blazingly fast.
We'll think it's instantaneous.
Download entire movies on your phone in less than a second.
That's just what the consumer experience could be like.
But imagine all the data that could be moved that fast.
It could control anything, everything from cars to airplanes, from factories and dams to defense systems.
It's almost here.
And Huawei is a world leader in manufacturing the hardware that would run 5G.
Forget about hand phones.
That's the fun stuff.
Huawei builds the system.
Except, as you can tell, Huawei is a Chinese company, as in communist China, where every strategic company is under the control of the government, the dictatorship, and where warfare is fought increasingly online.
China's battle against the Hong Kong democracy activists, for example, it's not mainly fought with bullets.
It's fought with facial recognition software that can identify people at a glance.
It's with GPS in cell phones, so the government can tell who went to a demonstration.
Hong Kong protesters try to frustrate that technology by pointing lasers at police cameras or even by trying projections of fake faces on top of their real faces.
I'm not sure if those work, but what if your entire internet was built on Chinese systems?
Would you literally trust a political enemy, a dictatorship, to build your national infrastructure?
If you made a 911 phone call, it would go on Huawei.
Military communications, satellites, alarm systems, the systems that control the launch of weapons, even nuclear weapons.
I mean, that's just the hardware.
And in a new series of laws, the first passed just this week, the next one to be passed on January 1st, China will bring in invasive measures to have backdoor access to encrypted secrets that pass through Chinese tech companies.
There really is no dividing line between corporations and the communist government anymore.
It's fashionable in the West to hate Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook for him snooping into your privacy.
And there's a lot of justification for being wary of him, but Facebook is mainly just a place to chat with friends and share interests.
Imagine giving Mark Zuckerberg access to everything you say, every email, every text, every place your GPS says you go.
All right, Zuckerberg has probably most of that.
But then imagine if Zuckerberg were a dictator, and I mean truly a dictator, who had the power of life or death over people.
And that he built all the cell phone systems in the country so you couldn't just delete Facebook from your phone because it was the phone and the network underneath.
That's Huawei.
Don't take it from me and don't think this is a right-winger being worried.
Here's Susan Rice, Barack Obama's national security advisor, telling Canadians to beware.
It gives 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.
All the Western democracies are worried about Huawei.
Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, along with Canada, the United States.
Those are the five eyes countries.
Those are the essential allies who can trust each other to share the most confidential military and diplomatic secrets.
Well, not if China gets to see every message sent.
Now, some people say that Huawei is just a company.
Well, there's no such thing in communist China, especially such a strategic company.
Scrolling through Huawei's Twitter feed is a bit absurd.
It's hundreds of people around the world accusing Huawei of spying for the Chinese government, and it's Huawei writing back to all of them saying, no, no, that's not true.
We'd never do that.
Never, never, ever.
Yeah.
I'm not sure if a tweet is enough to convince people.
You see, a few years ago, China was kind enough to build the new headquarters for something called the African Union.
That's sort of an African version of the United Nations.
And Huawei was kind enough to make it super high-tech with all the networking.
And they did this with another Chinese company.
But, uh-oh, here's a story from the Financial Times about how that ended.
African Union officials have accused China of hacking its headquarters computer systems every night for five years and downloading confidential data.
Beijing funded the AU's $200 million building in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, while a Chinese state-owned company built it.
So every night, China would just download every single thing from everyone in the building.
State secrets, diplomatic secrets, military secrets, industrial secrets.
That's just what they did every single night.
They knew everything that every country thought was private.
It's similar to what China did to Canada's leading high-tech company a few years back called Nortel.
They just hacked and stole all the industrial secrets, destroying the company.
But Huawei says, no, no, never.
That's absurd.
Trust them.
I mean, here in Canada, they sponsor Hockey Night in Canada.
They sure seem like Canadian patriots, unlike that Don Cherry, I guess.
And they love showering the liberals with cash.
They're smart that way.
Now, it's illegal for companies, even Canadian companies, to donate money directly to a political party.
So instead, Huawei donates it to a liberal front group called Canada 2020 that's run by Trudeau's close friend, Thomas Pitfield.
Huawei knows how Trudeau works.
And Huawei knows how money works, especially in low ethics jurisdictions like Trudeau's Canada.
So Huawei recently partnered to provide fast internet to dozens of small remote communities in Canada's far north.
Of course they did.
It's very strategic up there.
The mineral wealth, surveillance of our coastline, military exercises, emergency response.
Well, look, if we need broadband internet and fast cell phones in our north, let's build it.
Let's spend the money to defend our sovereignty, not outsource the north to a Chinese company.
But it's working.
Huawei knows our pressure points.
Just like Chinese spies know about how to corrupt a man, some men will take bribes.
Some men go for a honeypot trap.
Same with a country.
Offer free stuff, like to the African Union.
Give money to universities for research.
They'll be bought by anyone.
Slowly undermine a country.
Then you can't even get Huawei out.
You know how Huawei is lying when they say they're not political.
Because when Canada, when Canadian police arrested a Huawei executive last year on suspicion of securities fraud and violating sanctions, she was arrested lawfully by police at the request of police in the U.S.
It's a matter for the courts.
And it's a matter for Huawei, a private company, so they say.
But actually, no, immediately, China, the government of China, not the company called Huawei, the government of China seized two Canadian hostages, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, and held them as a tit-for-tat for this arrest of a Huawei executive.
And China's government also brought in trade sanctions against Canadian agriculture.
Well, hang on.
I thought Huawei just said they had nothing to do with the Chinese government.
They weren't connected at all.
Yeah, no, we're not that dumb.
Well, China's had our hostages for over a year.
And now that the Canadian election is done, Trudeau has decided to bend the knee to China.
I mean, he did say it's his favorite country.
There's a level of admiration I actually have for China because their face it dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime.
That was about five years ago.
He's kept that position ever since.
In fact, Trudeau just appointed a new foreign minister, François-Philippe Champagne, who is actually a China propagandist.
In a 2017 interview with China's state-backed China Global Television Network, this is from the Global Mail.
Mr. Champagne praised China for its stability and adherence to rules-based order.
You know, in a world of uncertainty, of unpredictability, of questioning about the rules that have been established to govern our trading relationship, Canada, and I would say China, stands out as a beacon of stability, predictability, a rule-based system, a very inclusive society.
He praised the dictatorship.
Now, they hadn't taken the hostages then, but they were crushing Tibet and Xinjiang.
He praised the dictatorship.
Trudeau's new ambassador to China, that's a foreign minister.
Trudeau's new ambassador to China, he's an active pro-China lobbyist too.
Before becoming Canada's ambassador to China in September, Dominique Barton was a staunch advocate for trade with China and headed McKinsey ⁇ Company, a consulting firm controversial for its dealings with Chinese state-owned clients.
Why don't you just appoint a Huawei executive as ambassador?
It's happening between the legal bribes from Huawei to internet our north and to give research cash to our universities.
Between that and the ideological softness Trudeau shows towards China.
Huawei is coming into Canada.
They really are.
They're colonizing us.
And that's crazy.
I think we have to stop this.
All of us have to stop this.
We have to show Trudeau and the world that we won't accept this.
We won't accept the Chinese Communist Party having access to everything we say, do, think, read all of our secrets, all our 911 calls.
I don't want to be another African Union office.
We should kick them out simply because of their outrageous seizure of the two Canadian hostages.
We should keep them out because our democratic allies say it's essential for our own security.
We have to say no.
And if that means we have to pay a little bit more to help build cell phone towers in the north, let's do that.
Let's keep these authoritarian bullies out of Canada.
Let's kick them out.
Ban them.
Ban their hardware.
If it's already in, rip it out.
If it's not in, keep it out.
I'm starting a petition.
It's a non-partisan petition.
Everyone can sign it.
I want to get 100,000 signatures.
I want to present it not to the pro-China foreign minister, not to the pro-China ambassador.
I want to give it to the new Minister of Public Safety, Bill Blair.
Unlike Mr. Champagne or Mr. Barton, Bill Blair was never a China lobbyist.
He used to be a cop.
Maybe he still cares about security and freedom.
I don't know.
But it's worth a try.
And even if he ignores the petition, we need to show other Canadians that it's okay to take a stand against China and Huawei and their bullying and they're spying.
And damn it, they're kidnapping of two Canadian citizens.
Go to banhuawei.com and sign the petition and let's send them packing and get them off this hockey night in Canada too.
That's a disgrace.
Go to BanHuawei.com.
Exciting UN Climate Conference Access00:05:18
Well, hello, everybody.
I am actually out west now.
I don't know if you can see behind me.
I'm in northern Alberta.
It is cold.
It is snowy.
I'm wearing my Inovik Petroleum Show jacket.
That's how cold and northern and snowy we are.
But people still say it is global warming out there.
I'm a skeptic, but my friends Sheila Gonrid and Kim Becksi are off in a matter of days to the UN Global Warming Conference in Madrid, Spain.
It's a tradition that we do every year.
We're the only journalists who are not given credentials because we're the only journalists who ask skeptical questions.
I'm going to talk to both Sheila and Keen about this, starting with my friend Sheila.
Sheila, this is what, your fourth visit to the UN Global Warming Conference?
Right.
I've been to Morocco and then Bon Germany and then Katowice, Poland, and this will be my fourth, Madrid.
I was only ever allowed officially into the first, but there's so much journalism that happens on the outside and so much to see and do.
I'm really excited to experience all of the craziness with Keen.
Well, I mean, those sound like fun cities.
And I think that the global warming bureaucrats and diplomats think, oh, this is a free vacation.
Of course, we're going there to do accountability journalism, which is precisely why they won't let us in.
But really, if you're in, you just get hand, you know, you just get spoon-fed the official propaganda.
You get managed.
You get managed.
So when you're on the inside, you don't get to see any of the protests.
It's nice.
It's cozy.
It's air-conditioned.
But all you get is press releases.
You get to report verbatim what the politicians and bureaucrats want you to say.
You don't really get to find what's really happening.
Well, this will be your fourth time, but it'll be the first time for Kian Bexy.
Kian, great to see you.
I'm out here in Alberta, the heart of the Rebel.
There you go.
Now, in the past, we've sent Sheila with a cameraman or even a cameraman and a producer.
But we thought, well, you know, you guys are pretty handy with cameras on selfie sticks.
Why don't have you both there and both record and you can film for each other, but that's double the firepower.
I'm pretty excited that we'll release the Kraken, that we're going to release you into this pit of global warming bureaucrats, diplomats, and politicians.
Double trouble.
It's going to be good because this is the one place where we're going to be able to see it all when it comes to global warming and climate change and their whole agenda.
There's everyone from Greta Tunberg to the higher-ups from the United Nations itself are going to be there.
Now, the access that we're going to be able to get is variable.
We're not sure exactly what we're going to be able to do when we're there, but that's the fun of it.
I think that the most exciting, well, one of the exciting stories will be how they're running the conference.
I remember watching Sheila's video before I was even at the Rebel.
I was watching Sheila's video cataloging all of the diesel generators that these hypocrites had running the show.
And also stories about bureaucrats wasting taxpayers' money.
Because at the end of the day, this is taxpayers' money.
The UN isn't this thing that generates its own funds.
It's paid for by Canadian taxpayers and American taxpayers.
And all of these bureaucrats are going to these high-end restaurants to spend your money on steak and fish fillets.
And it's going to be, and just cataloging that and showing that to the world is going to be great because there's no other news agency that is willing to do that, that is willing to risk their press credentials.
So I'm excited.
You know what?
I mean, you guys won't be allowed in the actual convention center, but so what?
The delegates at night will pour out into the streets and them being United Nations delegates, they're going to buy up all the prostitutes.
That's going to be the first thing that's bought.
If there's any casinos, they're going to pack the casinos.
But once those are all taken, you're going to have the lower-level bureaucrats just going to the restaurants.
And the reason I tell you that is because I think you guys could have very candid conversations with some of these UN delegates from other places who would say things that maybe they're not supposed to say, but get two or three or four or five or six drinks in them that they'll be using taxpayers' dollars to buy.
I think they might say things they're not supposed to say.
And of course, other journalists would just forget about those and leave them on the cutting room floor.
I think you guys can actually get as many interviews with delegates outside the conference room and in a more conducive setting.
So that's my hope that you guys do some great accountability journalism.
Last word to you, Kian.
Again, I'm excited.
And if anyone wants to help us do what we're doing, because of course nobody's paying us to go to the United Nations to, the United Nations doesn't want us.
They're not giving us any dough to go there.
If anyone wants to help us do that, they can go to RebelUN.com and pitch in a few bucks if they can, because we're going to need taxis.
We have a pretty modest Airbnb and the cheapest flights we could possibly find from Calgary and Edmonton to Madrid.
Right.
My jokes about the crazy spending was that's how UN bureaucrats roll.
We all know that.
Let me close by Sheila, some highlights of your visits to UN conventions passed.
And hopefully this will be an inspiration for our viewers because we do not get any government money.
If you want to help us with the flights, go to RebelUN.com.
Here's some flashbacks from Sheila's Global Warming Conference has passed.
Myself and the rest of my rebel team are out front in front of the temporary complex that houses the UN COP22 Climate Change Conference in Marrakesh, Morocco.
UN Climate Change Conference Highlights00:05:24
Actually, I'm on the middle of the street.
And the first thing we noticed about Marrakech when we landed here was the traffic.
It is insane.
There are cars and people and bikes literally everywhere.
But down at the conference, the first thing I noticed was the hypocrisy.
How did you get here?
I flew here.
With a shuttle.
But from Tunisia.
Ah, by plane.
How are you getting home?
By plane as well.
How are you getting home?
I'm using Wish Herring Car to get up.
What does the car run on?
I think the car runs on gas.
And how are you getting home?
Plane, train, bike.
Fossil fuels, right?
And then we'll head over here and we'll look at all the idling buses that have been idling since this morning.
So it's good that they're carpooling, but their buses have been idling since this morning.
We got here at shortly before 10 and it's late afternoon and the buses are still idling and there's an entire fleet of idling buses that goes the length of this parking lot here.
We're here at the Central Square in Katowice, Poland.
We're covering the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
It's the 24th annual being held in this Polish city.
Now right behind me is one of the public displays around the city.
There's not a lot of them here.
And there's a man inside giving a lecture to about five to ten people who I only suspect are in there trying to warm up because it is unforgivingly cold here in Poland.
But it looks tropical, right?
There's tropical plants growing on the wall.
They want you to believe that you can survive in a winter climate here and be comfortable with just some tarping and another form of insulation that I'll show you just around the corner here.
It's very familiar to me as a farmer, so come on.
So just around the corner here is the sort of insulation you might use in your barn or your doghouse.
If your animal spends any time outside, it's straw.
They want you to believe that you can survive in a Polish climate and survive comfortably with plastic tarping and straw, eco-friendly straw.
But there's something else that I noticed that is again very familiar to me as a Westerner, as someone from Alberta.
Keep walking.
It's our old friend, the Frost Fighter Heater.
This is pumping hot air inside this little meeting shack and it's plugged in.
There's the power cord you can see and it's plugged into an outlet that runs along the ground and this thing is pumping hot air.
Now you are actually inside the belly of the beast.
Is it as weird inside there as I remember?
It's so weird.
You know, it's so weird.
And I've been coming to these things for 10 years now, you know, Copenhagen, Paris, Rio, doesn't matter.
I'm always there trying to get there.
And it's always weird.
This one is even weirder because there's this kind of dour mood among, you know, usually when you come to these, there's at least some fun.
The activists are dressed up in polar bear suits and doing silly stunts.
Here they're like angry and bitter.
And I think they're really mad for a few reasons.
The first one is that Donald Trump has kind of pooped on the parade, to use a metaphor, saying, you know, climate change is a hoax, sending some fossil fuel promotion panel to kind of troll the summit.
It's brilliant.
Well, the vegans are out here and they want us to make peace by being vegan.
And that is a definite hard no from me.
We also met somebody named Sustainable Claws and he's here, I guess, to teach children about climate change.
And he had some stuffed animals with him.
And upon further investigation, we found out that he's a Canadian who's living in China, which happens to be the most polluted country in the world.
And last year he went to the top of Mount Everest.
One of the other crazy things that I saw were fake Indians.
They were Germans playing dress up as Aboriginals.
They were playing the drums and they were weaving something called good wishes for Greenland.
I don't know how you weave a good wish.
I don't know what that's supposed to do.
And I'm not clear on why they're doing that for Greenland, but they were really super passionate about it.
And then one of my favorite things that I saw here was the good old-fashioned Herman Nelson Frost fighter heater that was powering one of the UN climate action domes.
And it, of course, is diesel.
It's something that they use from time to time in the oil patch.
So it was really quite funny to see that attached to a climate action dome.
Also attached to one of the inflatable domes, it's a globe that they have on site here.
They listed some of the priorities of the climate change conference.
And climate change wasn't one or two or three.
It was actually number 13 of 17.
Everything else was a whole host of social justice causes, a whole hodgepodge of causes and ideas that really had nothing to do with climate change at all.
Well, folks, I am wrapping up the show from out west.
Two Faced Trudeau00:02:27
I recorded the banhuawei.com video from back in the studio.
I think we've got to stop those guys before they get inserted into the body of Canadian telecom, and then you'll just never, never get it out.
It really is like spyware or malware.
It's like putting a computer virus into your computer on purpose.
So please go to banhuawei.com and I promise that we're going to continue to fight back against these guys because really who else is?
I mean, Hockey Night in Canada is sponsored by Huawei.
That tells you how deep their roots already are.
Let me close by showing you just some very bad behavior from Justin Trudeau.
I showed you yesterday how Donald Trump grilled Trudeau about his lack of spending on military.
Well, after Trump grilled Trudeau, Trudeau, I don't know, maybe he was feeling humiliated, maybe he was upset, maybe he just needed to vent.
So he was caught on an open mic mocking Donald Trump with some other leaders who weren't paying their full share.
Here, take a look.
Isn't Trudeau always that way?
He's so submissive with Donald Trump in person, but as soon as Trump's away, he totally is tough and bad-mouthed some.
Well, Trump saw that, and he said what we all know.
Here, let me let Trump himself say it for you.
Well, he's two-faced.
Do you think that Germany is 290?
And honestly, with Trudeau, he's a nice guy.
I find him to be a very nice guy.
But, you know, the truth is that I called him out on the fact that he's not paying 2%.
And I guess he's not very happy about it.
I mean, you were there, a couple of you were there, and he's not paying 2%, and he should be paying 2%.
It's Canada.
They have money.
And they should be paying 2%.
So I called him out on that, and I'm sure he wasn't happy about it.
But that's the way it is.
Look, I'm representing the U.S. and he should be paying more than he's paying, and he understands it.
So I can imagine he's not that happy, but that's the way it is.