Keean Bexte and Sheila Gunreed expose Trudeau’s broken transparency pledge, with the PMO redacting severance/severance pay for 14 employees ($237K total) despite ATIP rulings. They link Greta Thunberg’s colonialism-racism op-ed to foreign-funded leftist tactics, mocking her hypocrisy—like Indigenous-themed Tesla art—while her backers push policies like oil sands shutdowns. Meanwhile, the Samuel Opoku case highlights courts’ overuse of publication bans amid five counts each of assault and mischief, raising public safety and media accountability concerns ahead of his December 18th bail hearing. [Automatically generated summary]
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Welcome to Rebel Roundup, ladies and gentlemen, and the rest of you, in which we look back at some of the very best commentaries of the week by your favorite rebels.
I'm your host, David Menzies.
Government Secrets?00:12:35
Well, you'd think that after losing their majority status, version 2.0 of the Trudeau Liberals would, well, they behave themselves and follow the rules and procedures and finally deliver on those promises about being transparent.
No, that is clearly not the case.
Sheila Gunreed shall explain all.
And if you listen to the hysteria of the climate crusaders, we only have maybe 10 or 12 good years left before we encounter our very own extinction event.
But as if that wasn't bad enough, did you know that there's actually an element of racism when it comes to climate change?
Well, at least according to St. Greta Tunberg, Kian Bexty will try to make sense of this madness.
And finally, letters, we get your letters, we get them every minute of every day.
And I'll share some of your responses regarding my report on Toronto resident Samuel Opoku, who stands accused of dousing five innocent individuals with liquefied human feces.
But alas, I was somewhat handcuffed in providing all the details to you because you guessed it.
There's a publication ban in place.
In any event, those are your rebels.
Now let's round them up.
Someone asked the Privy Council office, now those are Justin Trudeau's chief bureaucrats, for, and I quote, documents on the number of employees in the Prime Minister's office hired after November 4th, 2015 that left by March 4th, 2019 that were paid severance, the total amount of those severance payments, the number of those employees who also received separation pay, and the total amount of separation paid for those employees.
Presumably, the filer was asking about Gerald Butts, the former principal secretary to Justin Trudeau, who, as you'll recall, left under a cloud of scandal in February, right in the middle of the SNC Lavalin ethics investigation.
The ATIP filer also may have been asking about Claude Eric Gagne, who left the Prime Minister's office the previous February after being on leave since November of 2017.
He was investigated for harassing female staffers.
Now, he denies the claims against him and left eventually on his own accord.
Now, those are the two guys I would definitely want to know about.
However, in a shock to no one paying attention to how Trudeau operates in the Prime Minister's office, his office refused to disclose the individual amounts and the individual names.
Here's what the government did disclose.
Look at that.
Everything.
All 14 names are blacked out.
The only information the government released was two line items at the bottom of the page.
The PMO paid out $118,000 in severance, $119,000 in separation pay to up to 14 people, plus, no doubt, additional vacation pay being paid out on top of it all.
Well, folks, if you thought that going from a majority government to a minority government in the last election was going to be a wake-up call for the Trudeau liberals in terms of being more transparent with the Canadian public, guess again,
to paraphrase that classic who song, meet the old boss, same as the old boss, because apparently the salaries and severances of those bureaucrats being paid by you, the taxpayer, well, those are state secrets.
And joining me now with more on this story is the host of the gun show, Sheila Gunnreed.
Welcome to Rebel Roundup, my friend.
Hey, David, thanks for having me on the show.
Well, always a pleasure.
But Sheila, first of all, the question arises: is Team Trudeau breaking any rules or guidelines by shielding this information from the public in the first place?
They absolutely are.
Self-roll rulings from the Information Commissioner and standard generalized practice based on other rulings from the Information Commissioner say that we are entitled to know at least the vague generalized ranges of these amounts.
Like they could say, well, we paid out between, you know, $10,000 and $15,000 or, you know, $100,000 to $125,000.
But so they didn't do that.
They didn't release any of that.
They just gave us totals, just a cumulative total for 14 staff.
And we don't know how much severance pay they got.
We don't know how much separation pay they got.
And we are also entitled to know their names because their names are not secret.
Their names are a matter of public record, especially when every time they leave the PMO, somebody in the mainstream media writes a glowing report about how hard they were working in the PMO to get all that severance pay and separation pay.
And they didn't do that.
And the Information Commissioners actually ruled in our favor before when we appealed and appealed and appealed because the Prime Minister's office and the Privy Council, so the chief bureaucrats around Justin Trudeau, they were withholding Gerald Butts's expenses from us because they were all personal.
Well, they're not personal if you are charging the taxpayer for them.
It's my business if I'm footing the bill for it.
And likewise with this, it is our business if we are footing the bill for this.
And the prime minister's office is completely disrespecting, again, more laws of the land, this time the information laws.
But Sheila, forgive me.
I mean, if they are breaking these laws, why do the overseers allow them to get away with this?
It reminds me of, if you ever watch professional wrestling, it's like a WWE referee where he says, now listen, Stone Cold, that's the seventh time I've caught you with a foreign object.
If you use it again, I'm going to warn you an eighth time not to use it.
It's like, where is the penalty?
I mean, how, I guess what I'm saying, Sheila, is how do they get away with this?
How do the Liberals get away with anything?
I suppose is the greater question.
They get away with literally everything.
But yeah, this really is sort of a toothless law.
If you read through some of the Information Commissioner's filings and her findings, she'll say, you know, yes, we did agree that such and such ministry or the prime minister's office was in violation of the information law.
We asked them to send the recipient the information.
They didn't.
So then the information commissioner writes to the prime minister directly, and then he ignores her emails and her formal requests to release the information to us.
And that's just where it ends.
That's just as far as it goes.
The only recourse we really have is that she can find in our favor, which she has, and then she writes to the prime minister's office.
And a prime minister who cared about following and respecting the rules of the land would give us that information, and he just ignores it.
In fact, she said that he has completely ignored, didn't even respond to letters she sent him, not even offering a reason why they wouldn't release information to us.
And what makes this even more of an outrage, Sheila, is that, as you stated in your commentary and going back four years ago on the campaign trail, this was to be the most open, the most transparent government in the history of Canada.
And in fact, I've never seen a more non-transparent, secretive government when it comes to giving out this kind of information.
And let's be honest, I really think that if you're being paid by the taxpayer, this should be a matter of public record.
Since the 90s, when Mike Harris got in with majority government in Ontario as a premier, we've had the so-called sunshine list.
And every year, a list with all the names and all the salaries to the penny, Sheila, are printed out, are publicly available.
And if you're somebody in the bureaucracy and go, well, you know what, I want privacy.
Well, you know what?
Don't go into the public sector.
That's where I say.
Why?
Basically, I'm making the case, Sheila, that we have a right to see who's getting paid what.
Well, of course we do.
And also we need to know how their salaries line up to what's happening in the private sector.
Particularly here in Alberta, I'll use the example here.
We've got 150,000 people who've lost their jobs in oil and gas.
So zero income.
They have zero income.
And we have our teachers' unions and our public sector health union losing their minds because the UCP government is expecting them to consider taking a 3% rollback when 150,000 people in the private sector have taken a 100% rollback.
So I think it's important for the taxpayer to realize what the public sector is making when they're being insulated from the reality on the ground in the private sector.
Oh, 100%.
And Sheila, there is no bottomless pit of taxpayer dollars.
No.
Every government's got a debt running deficits.
Just the service fees on paying the interest on those debts and deficits are in the billions of dollars.
But they're in la-la-land.
They just, their response to everything is raise taxes.
And when you look at a province like Alberta, well, you know what?
There's the goose has already been cooked and eaten.
There's no there there anymore.
So this, I think, really rubs people the wrong way that A, it's not being disclosed, and B, they can get away with the non-disclosure.
And we should also say, Sheila, that thanks to your hard work, you're the one blowing the whistle on it.
We don't get these kinds of stories like you'd expect from the media party anymore, do we?
And I know it's costly and I know it's time-consuming, but you know, you'd think they would be on this, but they're not.
You know, it's funny because this access to information request wasn't one of ours.
Sometimes they get released to the Information Commissioner's website or what, or there's another website.
It's an open government website.
So after a certain amount of time, they become public.
So, you know, they go to the recipient, the recipient gets them, then after a certain amount of time, those access to information requests become public.
And I go through those too, not just the ones that we get, but also the ones that everybody gets.
And you'd be astounded the amount of access to information requests that I find very important information in that somebody else asked for, but they never bothered to report.
And this is one of them.
So some other journalist or you know, private individual asked for this information and it came back to them redacted.
And they never either pushed forward or bothered to report the fact that the government is redacting information that they shouldn't.
And someone in the mainstream media would know that this information should be public.
And that, you know, it really tells the story of how much it's not just the questions that the mainstream media aren't bothering to ask.
It's also the questions they're asking and they're not reporting on, which was what happened here.
Well, I hate to be a cynic, but I guess these days, given what CBC gets from the federal government, given the media buyout recipients, I guess you don't want to bite the hand that feeds, I suppose, Sheila.
But we should make, you know, we got to wrap it here.
We should, you know, once again, make a plea to our beloved viewers that this sort of stuff, this kind of investigative journalism that you do, is very costly.
It's very time consuming.
And if they have it in their hearts, I believe the link to go to is rebelinvestigates.com.
Believe The Link?00:12:41
Is that right, Sheila?
That is, yes.
It's very time-consuming.
I think, you know, sometimes I'll get access to information requests back that are in the neighborhood of like 800 to 900 pages.
Sometimes they're 300.
And you really have to read through everything.
They're not really all that searchable.
It's very time consuming.
We do have a research helper who does help us, but it does cost a lot of money to file for these documents and then to appeal when they redact everything that they shouldn't.
And our viewers at home can go to rebelinvestigates.com to help cover the cost to do the work that we're doing that nobody else is.
Indeed.
And it's good work and it's important work.
Sheila, thank you so much again for a great piece.
Thanks, David.
Have a great weekend.
Okay, you too now.
And that was Sheila Gunread in Alberta.
Keep it here, folks.
More of Rebel Roundup to come right after this.
Over the weekend, Greta Tunberg published an article in Project Syndicate.
It's an op-ed where she opined the issues facing the world from toxic pollution to global warming.
Her regular stick.
But at the end of this article, she finally came clean.
Here's what she said: The climate crisis is not just about the environment.
Well, bingo, Greta, we already knew that.
We already knew that the Big C climate crisis trademark copyright 2019 has nothing to do with the environment.
Now, to keep going with what Greta said, keep in mind, this is straight from the horse's mouth herself.
It's about colonialism, racism, and the patriarchy.
Well, I wouldn't call this vindication per se, because Greta Tunberg is going to be in Madrid and people are going to continue taking her seriously.
Now, we got a whiff of this back when Greta Tunberg was in Edmonton, when I executed the first unauthorized interview of Greta Tunberg in the world.
I asked her a very important question, something that if you ask any climate activist, well, it kind of unravels their whole argument.
I asked her if climate change was a political issue or an issue of science.
Would Greta Tunberg settle for a technical solution to climate change?
If we could reduce all warming in the world, if we could remove CO2 from the atmosphere or quit putting it up there with some sort of technical solution, be it nuclear energy, the cleanest, most reliable fuel on the planet or something else.
Listen to how she responded to that.
Climate change is politics, is it not?
Science.
Climate.
So is science going to solve it?
Would you like a technical solution to climate change or would you like politicians to solve it?
I really appreciate it if you stop talking to us right now.
Oops.
See what happens when someone has the temerity to ask a hard aka an impolite question to St. Greta?
Well, the interview is promptly terminated.
But now the Greta Tunberg traveling sideshow circus is getting surreal because apparently when it comes to the climate crisis, it's not just a matter of CO2 emissions, but there's racism and the patriarchy.
Yeah, those have roles to play as well.
Wow.
And joining me now to hopefully connect the dots, if that's even possible, folks, is our roving reporter, Kian Bexty.
Welcome to Rebel Roundup, Kian.
Hey, David, how are you?
Very good, sir.
Glad to have you with me again.
Kian, there is now an element of racism when it comes to climate change now.
Please, please explain.
It's a bit of a long story, and you got to connect some mental dots that don't really connect very easily unless you're a rabid leftist like Greta and her handlers.
So what basically happened over the weekend is Greta Tunberg and her similar.
Here's something that a lot of people don't understand.
Greta Tunberg is not just alone by herself doing the things that she does.
She has a vast group of activists and staff behind her, but she also has counterparts in different continents, particularly one in Africa that she likes to talk with a lot.
And her and this group of gals and climate crusaders, they penned an op-ed in the Penn and op-ed over the weekend.
And in it, they lamented about global warming and toxic pollution and blah, They didn't mention China once at all, of course, as per usual.
But at the end of the article, what they did mention is that the climate is not the priority.
It's not a sole priority in the talk about climate change.
There's other priorities that come along with it that come along with dealing with global warming.
And that includes smashing the patriarchy, ending colonialism, and a few other things.
It's this mental gymnastics that could only be understood by these leftists.
But Kian, here's the thing.
Not to diminish those other mandates that they're concerned about, but one would think that if one is buying all into climate change, remember, we've been told this is a climate crisis, this is a climate emergency.
We maybe have 12 years, 18 months, depending on who you believe with in terms of how long we have as a species to survive.
Isn't that enough of a project to devote your energies to 24-7, 100% before going on off the reservation to racism and the patriarchy and colonialism?
You'd think, David, you would.
My gut feeling about this is that they are using these sort of peripheral issues to mobilize a larger leftist base to their cause.
There's lots of, there's fragments to the left just like there are to the right.
You know, people in the conservative movement could care a lot about immigration and not so much about taxes or vice versa, a whole bunch of things.
And leftists are the same way.
So by casting this broader net, I think Greta is purposefully trying to bring in these different tribes of socialists, communists, leftists in general to rally them behind her to push her agenda.
And Kian, I think you're 100% right.
And we've spoken about this before in the past, my friend, that I truly believe the green movement is just the old-fashioned red movement with a fresh coat of paint.
It is trying to popularize Marxism and socialism and communism by wrapping it around some new whiz-bang save the planet environmental movement.
And clearly, when you roll in these concepts like racism and the patriarchy and colonialism, these are the talking points that the Marxists and socialists go on about.
So I think they're kind of proving our theory, aren't they?
Yeah, it's the same thing.
When Greta came to North America, she sort of adopted this sort of aboriginal tone to everything she was doing.
You know, she had aboriginal beating and clothing done up for her that she wore quite proudly.
Even on the rearview mirror of her Tesla, as I saw it in a parking lot in Edmonton, there was Aboriginal artwork there too.
She's sort of picking up, as I said earlier, tribes.
That's no pun intended now.
She's picking up these tribes to put them under her wing so that she can gather them wherever she goes, collecting them so that she can rally them and have these larger climate rallies wherever she goes.
And you know, I think, Kian, that the fatal flaw with these so-called climate rallies, I think it's really low-hanging fruit to drop out of school for a day, gather at a public square with your friends, chant and sing hymns and whatnot.
Because what I'm getting at is that if you really think that climate change is the end of us all, what practical solutions do you bring to the table?
Now, Greta herself, she can say, well, look, I reduced my carbon footprint by sailing across the Atlantic.
Yeah, well, a lot of us don't have a half million Euro yacht that we can borrow.
And when we're driving the highways of Alberta, we don't have a benefactor that can lend us his six-figure Tesla.
What I'm getting at, Kian, is that for Joe and Jane Public to modify their behavior to save the planet, air quotes, they can't do what Greta's doing.
It is completely unfeasible.
And Greta didn't even have a low-carbon trip across the Atlantic.
Wait.
And every time someone says, you know, it was a low-carbon trip, she sailed the ocean twice.
That's not really what happened.
She, of course, yes, she did sail the ocean pretty much low carbon on the way here, but that didn't include her BBC production crew that she brought out to Alberta.
That didn't include her security detail or her father that flew out from the European continent to North America.
And then when she sailed back, her captain to pilot the half a million, was it half?
It was a large, very expensive yacht.
Half a million euros, I believe, right?
Yeah, okay, that's what it was.
Yeah.
Nikki Henderson flew from the United Kingdom to the United States so that she could pilot it back.
It would have made more sense for Greta just to fly herself.
That would have been less carbon intensive.
But the virtue signal, this isn't about Bretta.
You know, Greta's trying to make it look like she is this stunning example of climate sensitivity and stewardship.
But at the end of the day, she is worse than the average person when it comes to a carbon footprint.
She's just the biggest hypocrite in the world.
And you know, and I think to be fair, Kian, I mean, I don't want it to look like we're bullying a teenage girl that has some mental health issues.
On the other hand, I mean, I think that she might be sincere about what she's trying to do.
My contempt, Kian, is the puppet masters and the moneymen behind Greta.
And I think it is downright Machiavellian of them that they are using this girl as their puppet, if you will, as their spokesthingy, so that because of her age, her gender, her mental health issues, that deflects any kind of potential criticism because you know, Kian, if you dare say anything against this little girl, you're going to pay a price in the mainstream media, aren't you?
Well, it's, of course, by design, David.
These large backers behind her, this foreign-funded campaign that Canada has seen to shut off the Canadian oil sands.
This is part and parcel with their tactics.
They are a complex operational group that knows what they're doing.
And her age, the way she's been put on a pedestal since simply protesting outside of the Swedish parliament, moving from that to international popularity among young and old leftists, it's no accident.
It's no accident at all.
Well, Kim, we're going to have to wrap it there.
I know you and our dear friend Sheila Gunreed will be going to Madrid.
You'll be covering the whatever they call that conference.
Greta they're at.
So it's going to be interesting to see her there with Sheila.
We're going to try and get as many on-location interviews with as many people as possible, world leaders, whoever we can get close to, we're going to be interviewing there.
And if anyone wants to support what we're doing in Madrid, they can go to RebelUN.com.
That's right, folks.
If you can go to RebelUN.com, throw in a few shekels, and you can guarantee that Sheila and Kian, they're not going to be part of the Greek course of the mainstream media saying everything is fine and dandy with what these UN people are delivering.
Mr. Opoku's Bail Hearing00:06:20
They're going to get to the heart of the matter, as always.
Kian, a pleasure talking to you.
As always, my friend.
Thanks, David.
Talk to you later.
You got it.
And that was Kian Bexty somewhere in the province of Alberta.
Keep it here, folks.
More of Rebel Roundup to come right after this.
David Menzies for the Rebel News here in downtown Toronto outside the courthouse at Old City Hall.
Well, here is a case that really stinks both figuratively and literally.
I speak of the criminal proceedings against Toronto resident Samuel Opoku.
Mr. Opoku stands accused of dousing five separate people on five separate occasions with a bucket of liquefied human feces.
Now, today was to be Mr. Opoku's bail hearing.
There was a problem finding a judge, so it's been postponed until December 18th.
Yet it's certainly a case that has captivated the imagination of this city.
I mean, imagine that, folks, you're just walking down the street, minding your own business, and some complete stranger comes up to you and douses you with a bucket of human feces.
Absolutely disgusting beyond words.
In any event, I'm very much hindered in reporting the details of this case because, well, you guessed it, there is a publication ban.
Yes, once upon a time, pub bans were, they're a bit of a rarity, and now it seems that judges are handing them out like candy at Halloween.
So that limits me in terms of providing you with the nitty-gritty shitty details.
Hmm, so what is the grossest thing about this story, folks?
The fact that some disturbed individual went to the time and trouble to douse innocent people with liquefied human waste?
Or that once again a publication ban is in place preventing the media from publishing the details associated with these disgusting crimes.
Unbelievable.
In any event, here's what you had to say about Samuel Opoku, who is facing five counts of assault with a weapon and five counts of mischief for allegedly throwing feces at people he didn't even know.
Lubfician15 writes, Rebel News just moved to America where we have greater freedom of the press and then you don't have to follow those stupid publication bans.
You know, hey, Lubfician, you are preaching to the converted here when it comes to loving the First Amendment.
Yet this is the fourth, yeah, the fourth court case in a row that I have covered that was under the mandate of a publication ban.
But why?
Well, there is no reason to give because a judge doesn't have to give a reason.
It seems more and more that the courts are simply bending over backwards to protect the guilty, all the while completely being cavalier with that quaint little concept known as the public has the right to know.
Tom Fair writes, hepatitis, AIDS, strep, and a million other life-threatening diseases.
You're right, Tom, this was no harmless prank.
God forbid if any of the victims had ingested even a tiny amount of that substance being tossed about.
Imagine being infected with E. coli simply because some madman decided to douse you with liquefied human feces.
It's just beyond disgusting.
Jeff Bryan writes, oh, come on, judge, it was just a practical joke.
The accused just wanted to get a lot of hits on YouTube.
I don't know, Jeff.
We all know there are a few sickies out there that might indeed find amusement in such a prank, if you can call it that.
I just don't think there is a critical mass of people that would flock to YouTube to watch this regardless of the infamy.
Just the thought of seeing such a video makes me sick to my stomach.
Earl Greystoke writes, all five victims were Asian.
Why isn't the mainstream media reporting this as a racially motivated hate crime?
They would be shouting racism loudly if the attacker was white and his victims were black or brown.
Well, Earl, if it turns out rather that Mr. Opoku is indeed guilty, that really puts the left in a bit of a bind, doesn't it?
After all, given that the victims are all members of a visible minority group and that the alleged perpetrator is a member of a visible minority group, that really scotches that whole narrative of white privilege and white supremacy and anything else that's bad that one can think of due to whiteness.
So yeah, once the verdict is delivered, it will be most interesting to see how this case is spun.
And Joyce Aldrich writes, so it's possible Mr. Opoku is not a Canadian citizen.
He's in a shelter, so he may be one of our migrants.
And if he has a mental illness, which is not his fault, which cracks in the system did he fall through?
Like if he's a migrant or who vetted him?
Or if he's a Canadian, has he been assessed for mental illness?
And what follow-up or treatment plan does he have?
Well, you know, these are all great questions, Joyce, and hopefully when the trial proceeds, we'll finally get answers to those questions.
In the meantime, Mr. Opoku's next bail hearing is scheduled for December 18th.
I have no idea how that is going to play out, but if I were the judge, I wouldn't grant this individual freedom.
Keep him behind bars until he has his trial.
The risk to the public is simply too great.
Well, that wraps up another edition of Rebel Roundup.
Thanks so much for joining us.
See you next week.
And hey, folks, never forget, without risk, there can be no glory.