Keean Bexte and Sheila Gunn Reid expose the UN Climate Conference’s hypocrisy in Madrid—Greta Thunberg’s plastic waste, luxury SUVs, and anti-Alberta bias despite oil sands’ 0.5% global emissions—while Ezra Levant links millennial LGBTQ backlash to trans activism’s push into women-only spaces, citing GLAAD’s 2016-2018 survey drop from 63% to 45%. Meanwhile, David Menzies highlights LCBO’s $77M theft problem and reader skepticism over government-run liquor stores. The episode reveals elite double standards, cultural fractures, and systemic failures in climate messaging, gender politics, and public accountability. [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.
Well, Sheila Gunnread and Kian Bexti, they're both at the UN Climate Conference in Madrid.
And if you thought previous climate conferences were cookie and full of hypocrisy, just will you hear about what's going on at this one?
Sheila and Kian will have all the incredible details.
And what's to blame for lower support for the LGBTQ community by millennials?
Would you believe the culprit is video games?
Oh boy, Ezra Levant will try to make sense of it all.
And finally, letters, we get your letters, we get your letters every minute of every day.
And I'll share some of your responses regarding my report on skyrocketing thievery at Liquor Control Board of Ontario Stores.
And why is the theft on the increase?
Well, according to the LCBO, it's all due to increased media coverage about the thievery.
No, I swear, they said that.
I'm not drunk.
Those are your rebels.
Now let's round them up.
She'll then read for Rebel News here in Madrid, Spain with my colleague Kian Beckste on the other side of my cell phone camera.
I'm going to do something that I'm not a fan of and it's going to make me really uncomfortable.
I'm not a fan of modern art and I'm not a fan of staring strangers in the eye.
But I also like to make strangers feel uncomfortable.
So there could be an upside to this for me.
Right behind me is an art installation.
It's called The Citizen is Still Present, where you sit down and stare a perfect stranger in the eyes for two minutes and somehow that's supposed to stop climate change.
I don't know.
However, what I do know is that this art installation is based on a concept by Marina Abramovich based on a project she did in 2010 and as you'll recall she was the lady behind the weird spirit cooking stuff that the Democrats were involved in.
This is going to get weird, but I'm going to do it because I'm here to fight climate change.
Well, folks, if you've been tuning in to our website recently, you know that one of those climate catastrophe conferences that the UN puts on every so often is taking place.
This one is coming from Madrid, and we have Sheila Gunread and Kian Bexi there.
And wow, I've got to tell you, folks, from the coverage I've seen, it goes from the beguiling to the bizarre.
And I'd like to welcome both Sheila and Kian to Rebel Roundup.
How's it going in Madrid, guys?
Is the climate emergency or climate crisis or whatever they're calling it?
Is it making you sweat buckets right now?
I wish.
You know what, David?
I came here with some shorts and some t-shirts thinking we are going to Spain, but you can never trust this climate that we live in.
Changes by the minute, and I wish I brought more sweaters because it is freezing cold here.
It's raining, it's windy, and it's cold.
It's just not, it's not pleasant.
We have to do most of our interviews inside, unfortunately.
We just came back from one with Naomi Zeit.
She is the anti-Greta.
She doesn't like that term, anti-Greta, but she is basically the opposite of Greta.
She's a Generation Zed who is railing against this climate alarmist narrative.
She doesn't call herself a climate denier.
She hates that term.
She calls herself a climate realist, someone who is looking at the science and coming to different conclusions than Greta is.
Obviously, Greta seems to be looking at this issue with blinders, and Naomi is advocating getting out of that climate bubble that the UN is fostering and looking at things from a different perspective.
Wow, and when you, you know, maybe we can do some very quick hints, guys, about some of the things you've uncovered.
Because Kian, when you say the anti-Greta, some in the environmental movement would consider that a slur along the lines of the anti-Christ.
And Sheila, you did a little, speaking of religion, you did a little segment where you saw something that looked like a makeshift shrine.
I think the Virgin Mary was wearing a gas mask.
I don't think you covered anything with the Prophet Muhammad doing something in terms of the environmental movement.
I guess that's still off limits with these guys.
But I found that bizarre because a lot of people who are critical of this whole climate catastrophe movement liken it to a form of religion or at least a cult.
What did you make of that display?
Well, that was exactly it.
I don't even know what the display was all about.
It was part of some sort of art installation.
And it did.
It was rife with religious symbolism.
And these people tell me it's not a religion.
It's based in science, but it's filled with religious imagery and it's really a belief system.
They had images of the Virgin Mary with a gas mask, as you point out.
There were tarot cards, other Hindu symbolism, some beads.
They had offerings on an I mean, it really wasn't.
They were smudging like the burning incense.
Yeah, they were burning incense.
It was on an altar.
So, you know, people tell me I'm being a conspiracy theorist when I say that these people are just another doomsday cult.
And as it gets closer to the doomsday prediction, more and more people are getting off the ride before they have to put on their white pajamas and wait for a comet to take them all away.
But really, a lot of what we're seeing here are people who really are true believers.
Kian did a really great video, just a phenomenal video, where he showed people the climate crimes of Greta Tunberg.
And they would not believe it, even though Kian had video evidence.
And Kian is the guy, firsthand video evidence.
He took the video, and they would not believe that that messy, disgusting, plastic-filled car was Greta's.
And it's because it is truly a belief system and not really something based in evidence or science.
Yeah, yeah, Kian, that was an amazing video.
You showed with your photography, plastic water bottles, plastic bags, all the stuff all those peons are supposed to avoid.
You've also shown that the amount of recyclables put in the regular trash bins that are overflowing, I should note, also points to the hypocrisy.
And for the trifecta, Kian, you went to the electric plug-in parking lot, and oh my goodness, acres of spaces there.
It looks like all these climate crusaders prefer V8-driven luxury limousines and SUVs.
Do they not wary of the hypocrisy that they're conveying?
Or are they just confident that those in the media party that observe this too simply aren't going to report this?
The hypocrisy, David, is right here.
It's rife with hypocrisy.
From the empty charging stations to the lineup of taxi cabs that are all idling to the diesel generators that they go out of their way to hide because they are not on brand.
Hypocrisy is the takeaway from this.
This is my first climate conference, and it's just everywhere, David.
These people don't really want to practice what they preach.
You know, one interesting thing that we saw here was we, Sheila and I, are not allowed in the main policy hall.
That's where the bureaucrats, the politicians, the celebrities go-Harrison Ford, Greta Tunberg, the UN delegates.
They're all in this main hall.
And in this main hall, there is a Burger King that is selling Angus patties.
And right beside that Burger King, talking about how we need to stop eating meat.
We need to ban meat in some cases because of the water consumption that it takes to make these patties.
Well, guess what?
When you go to the green hall, which is where Sheila and I are relegated to, they have soy burgers made from bean protein and chemicals.
And regret.
They're made of regret.
They're made of regret.
They smell like cleaning agents, is what I tried one.
It was the biggest regret of this conference.
But the takeaway message is: all of these plebs that are in this green hall who are there to see what the UN is all about, they're locals mainly, and some real enthusiasts who came out with their dad.
A lot of high school students came with their dads to check out this conference, and they're in the green hall.
And in the green hall, they get these soy patties and these vegan non-meat burgers because that's what the UN says we need.
But when you actually go into where these elites are, it's real Angus meat that they're selling.
You know, guys, that reminds me of that old saying: socialism isn't for the socialists, and it looks like environmentalism isn't for the environmentalists.
I mean, it's just staggering.
Another thing that I found it was kind of off-putting in a way.
You visited these pollution pods that to me came across as futuristic gas chambers.
And this is to, if anyone, for those amongst our audience that hasn't seen this, this is to replicate certain environmental conditions around the world, excluding North America, which tends to have cleaner air, yet we're the ones under the gun to impose things like carbon taxes and whatnot.
What did you guys make of that pollution pod tour?
It looked kind of disgusting in a way.
It was disgusting.
Actually, after we left, like the scent lingers on you.
It was in my hair.
It was on Kean's clothes.
Like it really stunk.
Some of it felt really exaggerated.
For example, the London pod.
I've been to London, David.
I'm sure you've been Kean has been to London.
Sure, I'm sure the smog can get really bad sometimes, but this was really thick.
Like you could hardly see across the pod for what they think we think London should look like.
And another great irony of these pods was that it was an art installation by the World Health Organization, and it was the one and only criticism of China that we'd seen here at all.
One of the major cities depicted in these pods was Beijing.
And it was stinky.
It smelled sort of sulfurous.
Vinegary, vinegary almost.
And it was just thick.
And I suppose it's to replicate the burning of dirty coal, not beautiful clean Alberta coal, in China for electricity.
And nowhere in the rest of the conference in which we're allowed have we seen any criticism of China.
Nobody's talking about it.
Criticism of Canada, Not China00:02:40
Everybody's attacking Canada.
Everybody is attacking America, specifically Donald Trump.
But we have, I would say, two of the cleanest countries on the face of the earth.
And what Sheila, it wasn't just Canada and the United States that they're attacking.
It's Alberta specifically, which I was stunned.
I didn't think that the name Alberta really was recognized around the world.
But I've stumbled upon two special, like press conferences, because there's little cubby press conferences throughout this green hall that we're in.
And both of them were referencing the tar sands and Alberta.
Yeah.
It just completely coincidentally that I came across.
You look at the entire world of emissions.
Alberta accounts for less than half a percent.
Don't quote me on that number.
But when it comes to Beijing being the leading emitter in the world and the second place emitter isn't even half what Beijing, what China is emitting, well, I think priorities really aren't in line.
Well, and you know, we really don't even have to go that far from home to see the hypocrisy.
Fort McMurray on any given day has a lot cleaner air than downtown Vancouver, where a lot of the criticism of Fort McMurray is coming from.
We saw two Canadians participate in a protest against a Canadian oil sands mine.
Inconsequential Green Party leader Elizabeth May and Sappora Berman, who was on the payroll of the Alberta government, participated in a major protest allegedly led by Indigenous leaders against tech, their frontier oil sands mine.
It's a $21 billion project.
And this protest was allegedly led by First Nations leaders because there are a lot of people here who are willing to use their Indigenous identity to claim that they speak for all Indigenous peoples, in particular those in and around Fort McMurray.
This protest against Tech's frontier mine completely disregards the fact that tech has signed agreements with the 14 indigenous communities affected by it.
It gives them right of first refusal for contracts for construction.
It will employ 7,500 people in the construction phase and 2,500 people after the fact.
And the agreement signed with the Indigenous communities affected protects the indigenous traditional land use rights.
And yet, there are people who are willing to fly to the other side of the world to protest Indigenous jobs back at home in the name of protecting Indigenous rights.
Why Some Gays Reject Trans Rights00:14:50
It's discussion.
Sheila, it's absolutely incredible.
And I bet you there's no Saudi nationals there speaking out against the Saudi Arabian oil industry.
Guys, we have to wrap it here.
Great reporting.
I think the PUBAs did you a favor by banning you from the conferences to listen to endless boring virtue signaling from climate Cassandra bureaucrats around the world because you're uncovering the real story that's happening in Madrid.
Thank you so much for joining me, guys, and I know you got some more reports to file.
And keep it here, folks.
from Moro Rebel Roundup to come right after this.
Look at the number of millennials who describe themselves as LGBT allies.
That's the phrase that's in popular use.
So just to explain these charts, you can see there's three bars together.
The top very dark line is 2016.
The middle line is 2017.
And the bottom line in each case, in light blue, is 2018.
So look at that.
The number of 18 to 34 year olds, those are millennials, who are allies.
So start at the top.
In 2016, 63% of millennials said, I'm an LGBT ally.
Now it's 45%.
That's a plunge.
It was almost two-thirds.
Now it's not even half.
It's fallen for young millennial women from 65% to 52%.
And for young men, it's almost fallen in half.
From 62% of young men in 2016 to 40% the next year to just 35% now.
That is almost falling in half.
What's going on?
I mean, I'm curious.
I'm surprised.
See, support for LGBT hasn't plunged like this for all groups.
It's just young people.
Middle-aged people, senior citizens, they haven't suddenly fallen out with LGBT politics.
Senior citizens, who you might think would be less pro-LGBT because they were born and raised in a more traditional era, their support hasn't fallen in half.
What's going on?
Why do millennials support LGBT rights less than their own grandparents?
Well, here's what the president of GLAAD says.
With the knowledge that erosion in acceptance was primarily happening among younger males, GLAAD launched a program dedicated to working with the video game industry on LGBTQ inclusion to bring LGBTQ characters and stories to a world where male audiences were consuming content.
Really?
So you think it's video games?
You're seriously blaming video games.
Wow, who'd have thunk it?
Allegedly, one of the reasons why millennials are less accepting of those in the LGBTQ community is due to video games?
Gracious, does this now mean that in addition to Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man and Junior Pac-Man, we will soon be witnessing the rollout of Trans Pac-Man, or I mean Pac-Person?
Well, joining me now to try and make sense of it all is our very own Rebel Commander Ezra Levant.
So, Ezra, welcome to Rebel Roundup.
But what gives?
Yeah, I don't believe it for a second.
It was a major survey conducted by a reputable pollster called Harris, and they were hired by a group called GLAD, which is a gay and lesbian advocacy group.
And the title of the survey was Advancing Acceptance.
So this is about getting gay rights normalized and pushed in America.
And they do an annual survey to see how the trend is going.
And the reason I tell you all this is to let you know that this is a pro-gay group that commissioned the survey.
So they found that support for the number of millennials who call themselves LGBT allies has fallen from 60-something percent to, in the case of millennial men, to like 30-something percent.
It's fallen almost in half.
Huge drop.
In just two years.
And the reason I told you it was commissioned by GLAAD is so that you know that this is a pro-gay group that's detecting this.
This isn't like an anti-gay or a conservative group that may have an interest in showing the numbers go down.
So GLAAD tried to explain this, and they came up with two of the dumbest explanations I can think of.
One is video games, because apparently there were no video games before 2017.
It doesn't even make sense.
My understanding, I mean, I honestly don't play a lot of video games.
So maybe they are really anti-gay video games out there.
It just doesn't seem to, I've just never heard of them.
Maybe the video game world is anti-gay.
I just don't think so.
And certainly not in the last two years.
And is that really going to change an entire generation's view on gay rights?
Because I don't know.
It could be.
They also blame Donald Trump.
I don't believe it.
Donald Trump really doesn't talk a lot about gay this or gay that.
He just, it's not a big deal for him.
He's all about jobs and trade and China and NATO and Israel and stuff like that.
So I found those two explanations completely unpersuasive.
I think they were just guesses and I think they were loaded because I have a counter theory.
Okay.
And it's not the L or the G or the B.
It's the T.
And because that's what's new.
Because gay rights, that's been around for a generation now.
And really, a lot of those battles have been won by the GLAD gay rights side of things.
I mean, and most importantly in the popular culture, you know, gay bashing or gay criticism isn't conventional anymore.
It's marginalized.
So what would make gay allies precipitate from 65 to 30 something in just two years?
Because gay rights, it's not like gay rights was just invented two years ago.
Gay rights has been around for a generation.
Trans is what's new.
Trans is the last couple of years.
And trans isn't just about, hey, leave that guy alone.
Hey, don't pick on that guy.
Hey, stop bullying that guy.
Because I think that would be, I think a lot of people of any age group would say, leave him alone.
Leave him alone.
But trans is not about leave him alone.
Trans is, I'm coming to you.
I'm coming to your changing room.
I'm coming to your dressing room.
I'm coming to your girls' soccer team.
I'm coming to your girls' track meet.
I'm coming to your girls' wrestling.
And it's not about you leaving me alone, it's me not leaving you alone.
And if you dare speak up about the fact you've got this six-foot-something 200-pound guy who hasn't even got his twig and berries cut off, but he says, I'm a girl.
And you literally go so far as to say that you're a girl if you merely say you're a girl.
You don't even have to present as a girl.
You just have to identify as a girl.
And that's just expresso, presto-chenjo, I'm a girl.
I'll go one step further than what you just said.
I don't think it's just a matter of the allies.
I think it is members of the L and the B and the G community saying, I don't want anything to do with the trans community, because I've spoken to gay men, I've spoken to some of the lesbians that I know.
They resent the fact that they're lumped in with this group.
As a matter of fact, I think it was earlier this year or last year, Martina Navratilova, the former tennis great who is lesbian, spoke out about men passing themselves off as females to get an advantage in sports.
And within 24 hours, she had to dial back those comments.
What do you make of that?
Well, that's exactly right.
Feminists are on the retreat because of men.
Men who say they're women.
Men who push aside women.
Men who say, you say I'm a woman.
Say I'm a woman.
That's really what the trans agenda is.
It's not, leave me alone.
I'm saying I'm a woman.
It's you say I'm a woman.
You affirm me, even though I'm so obviously not.
I will push aside, I will push myself into women's places, a change room, a swimming pool, even rape shelters.
There's a famous rape shelter in Vancouver called Vancouver Rape Relief.
It's where women flee if they've had this horrific crime committed against them.
And there are literally trans men who demand and insist to be given access to that safe place, that's a real safe place.
But these trans men insist on getting in there because that's the final ultimate proof that they're accepted as a woman if they can go into this most discriminating place only for women.
It must be only for women.
So if I can get in there, I must truly be a woman after all, since you'd have to be crazy to let a man in there.
And so you're letting me in, so I obviously that proves I'm a woman.
So feminists are being ground into powder by trans men.
And in fact, trans men have an epithet against such women.
They're called TERFs, trans exclusionary radical feminists.
Yeah, no, no.
They're just women who want to go to the bathroom and not have guys in there.
And so you're right.
It's against any feminist.
It's against lesbians.
And it's against gays.
Joel Pollack made an interesting point on the show.
He said, you know, if you're a young teen or whatever and you're confused about your sexuality, maybe you're just gay.
These trans activists will say, no, cut it off.
You're not gay.
You're a woman.
Cut it off.
And not all gays think that's the way.
And these are all subjects outside of my expertise.
But I'm sure of one thing.
The politics is utterly different.
The politics of gender, of sex and race, sex and race are immutable.
You have the chromosomes or you don't, you have the genetics or you don't.
Homosexuality itself, there has been a debate how much of it is an orientation, how much of it is choice, how much of it is hardwired.
So that's a debate.
And I think society has generally said treat them as the same non-discriminating category as someone who's born with this race or born with that sex.
And I think that's the political consensus.
But trans?
Trans is an activity.
I am changing from this to that, and I'm changing my mindset.
I'm changing how I talk about things.
And now I'm going to change your mindset and how you talk about things and where I get to go.
That is not analogous to race and sex or even sexual orientation, which the law generally, I think the legal consensus is that it is an innate orientation.
I'm not here to debate that.
I'm here to say whatever it is, it's different from trans, which is an activity.
And Ezra, do you think maybe this is at the root of millennials and perhaps others saying that, you know what, we're being less accepting of it because we are seeing individuals gaming the system.
Sports federations around the world say, hey, if he identifies as she, we have to accept it.
And as a result, trans athletes are cleaning up in the competitions.
I mean, it's a reason why traditionally sports has been divided in male and female with the exception of equestrian and auto racing.
And yet here we have, as you said, a guy with a full wedding tackle, all the advantages that are inherent to a man, such as muscle mass, oxygen capacity, stamina, competing against naturally born females and winning.
And maybe people are finally saying, look, I'm not accepting this.
I'm tuning out because it's a matter of fairness.
Yeah, in politics, there's a phrase soccer moms.
And I guess in Canada you could say hockey moms.
That's a demographic that is considered winnable by either side.
There's certain policies that appeal to a soccer mom, a hockey mom.
They're worried about their kids, so they're worried about drugs.
They're worried about crime.
They're worried about good schools and hospitals.
So that's a but soccer moms, hockey moms are sort of normal.
Women tend to be a little more liberal than men, but these are women with very conservative concerns.
I want to protect my kids.
I want a good education.
So they're a very interesting political group that can be up for grabs.
And I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but it wouldn't surprise me if hockey moms voted for Trudeau at least as much as they voted for Andrew Scheer.
Just a guess.
I have no data in front of me for that.
But you want to radicalize hockey moms or soccer moms?
Let's talk about soccer.
So you've got the boys leagues, you've got the girls' leagues.
The boys and girls separate, but it's still a physical sport.
There's still some contact, some jostling.
So let's say you've got a big field, a bunch of soccer fields, a little tournament.
You've got maybe 50 moms and a few hundred girls, and it's a Sunday afternoon, and they're all playing, and everyone's having a great time.
They're getting exercise.
The girls can do it, competitive, keeps them out of bad behavior, gives them something to focus on, team building, no boys to distract.
It's a great thing.
It's a building block of community.
And all of a sudden, in come the guys.
And you said, no, no, the guys are, we are guys.
We're girls.
And if you quarrel, you're a bigot.
I'll hit you with a human rights complaint, as Jonathan Yaneve did in BC.
And, oh, I want to go to the changing room.
Oh, and we had best sport or most goals.
Public Right to Know00:08:32
And guess what?
All three of the winners are trans.
First place, second place, third.
So all of a sudden, you've turned this beautiful community building, sisterhood, moms and daughters, exercise, good clean fun, don't get messed up with drugs, don't always focus on boys, this is a girl's place, and you've just destroyed it.
Well, what have you done to every mom there and their daughter?
You have unnecessarily provocatively, gratuitously turned them into a reactionary against your insane politics.
That is my theory for why GLAAD, a pro-gay group.
And the number of people who call themselves an LGBT ally has fallen in half.
I don't know if it was just lesbian or gay.
I would be surprised if those numbers moved.
But let me say this.
This trans insanity, it can only go so far before something big breaks.
And Jonathan Yaneve is starting to break and crack things open.
And I think there's going to be a moment when the whole, when 80, 90% of people stand up and say, you are doing something to the rest of us.
And we mean you no harm and you go in peace and if you want to do that, you do that.
But you were trying to change everything.
And our answer to that is simply, hell no.
Well, Ezra, we have to wrap it here.
I hope you're right.
And I hope part of the backlash comes from those brave enough in the gay and lesbian community to say, hey, this is not my bag.
And by basically speaking the truth, that doesn't make us transphobic.
It makes us a realist.
So great commentary, my friend.
And please, folks, check out the entire Esmeral commentary on this very important subject online.
Keep it here.
Maura Brub.
We'll round up the come.
Is it true that the increase in theft, the increase in theft is because of increased media coverage?
Well, we're not going to turn it off.
Okay, that's fine.
So you'll call the police on the media, but you won't call the police on thieves.
How does that work?
You will let people...
You can talk to your proper communications at the head office.
I'm glad you said that, sir.
We just came from there.
Nobody will come out and talk to us.
Why is that?
I'll walk you over.
Okay.
Are you here to buy liquor, sir?
I hope.
Okay.
What do you make of this, sir?
They are kicking us out of the store for reporting the news, but they allow thieves with alcohol just to waltz out.
What do you think of that, sir?
It's ridiculous.
I see it every day, all over Toronto.
Toronto is going...
Well, lots of reaction to our update regarding skyrocketing theft at Liquor Control Board of Ontario Stores.
And is it any wonder, folks, the policy at LCBO stores is to simply turn a blind eye and not get involved when customers decide to brazenly utilize the good old five-finger discount.
But while the provincial liquor mandarins take a laissez-faire attitude when it comes to thievery, they just hate being exposed in the media.
Indeed, in a recent media release, the LCBO stated that the reason thievery is skyrocketing is due to increased media exposure about the theft problem.
Wow.
Talk about shooting the messenger.
In any event, here's what some of you had to say.
Rod Bathgate writes, what in blazes is the government doing selling liquor?
Sounds like a nice Christmas party for the CEOs at the taxpayer's expense every week of the year.
If the supposed $77 million, perhaps a gross underestimation, is lost due to theft, the government would obviously write this off as a massive tax loss, again, at the taxpayer's expense.
I'd say what you have here is a tidy little liquor racket going on.
Is there no independent trade practices, ombudsmen, that can cover this kind of corruption?
Well, indeed, Rod, why is the government selling liquor in the first place?
The role of government is to tax and regulate liquor, not retail it.
The union has pegged the theft at a staggering $77 million a year.
The LCBO disputes this, but they won't provide hard numbers to back up their claims.
But why?
Doesn't the public have the right to know?
After all, it is the public that ultimately owns this entity.
And Troy Casta writes, dude, I saw about six violations of your rights there.
One, security touch your camera, that's assault and battery, and that security guard can lose his job.
Two, that property is owned by the taxpayers, which is deemed public property, which means they cannot make you leave as this is a public space.
And three, photography is not a crime, which means they cannot block your camera like that.
Well, Troy, I can tell you I've been roughed up far worse than that, but wouldn't it be great if those security guards got that revved up when it comes to thieves brazenly waltzing out the store with unpaid merchandise?
I mean, isn't that why they're there in the first place?
But folks, not everyone was critical of the LCBO.
In fact, a few are apologists for the provincial booze monopoly.
For example, Mark Pelchier writes, the LCBO is correct.
Media attention does in fact inspire copycats.
I've said for years how the media is complicit in mass shootings as well.
And time and time again, research backs that up.
In 1933, a Japanese girl committed suicide by jumping into a volcano.
That year, hundreds of people followed suit.
Until that point, no one had killed themselves at this particular volcano.
If you report that thieves can walk in, take what they want, and just walk out, what do you think is going to happen?
Theft will increase.
Well, Mark, with all due respect, it sounds like you'd make a superb censor.
I certainly don't want to live in a world where seldom is heard a discouraging word because reporting bad news might lead to, oh, I don't know, more bad news.
I don't know about your Japanese volcano story, but when it comes to liquor theft, of course there are indeed solutions to ensuring the taxpayer who ultimately owns the LCBO isn't being ripped off on a daily basis.
This garbage wouldn't be tolerated in the private sector, but the LCBO is a government-run liquor monopoly.
It simply doesn't care if some $77 million of unpaid merchandise is flying out the door.
After all, they can make up the shortfall the following year simply by raising prices, which further penalizes their honest customers.
That's what you can do when you're a state-sanctioned liquor monopoly.
And finally, Andrew Roy writes, you don't ask the individual store, you moron.
Go to head office.
Sensationalize it all you want.
Theft is everywhere.
You stole my precious time.
Andrew, did you watch the entire video?
It began with us visiting the LCBO head office, which is across the parking lot from the store we went into.
Even though the LCBO has an entire team of media spokes thingies, they cower under their desks when anyone in the media seeks answers to hard questions.
What's more, we have put in a Freedom of Information request to find out what the real theft amount is.
The LCBO is fighting that request, stating that providing such data wouldn't be in the economic interests of Ontario.
I think a more honest answer is that such data wouldn't be in the economic interests of incompetent and overpaid LCBO booze bureaucrats.
So thanks for stealing our precious time.
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.