Sheila Gunn-Reed and Tom Harris of the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC), founded in 2011, faced a Competition Bureau investigation in November 2015 after EcoJustice filed complaints alleging misleading climate claims—though no charges were ever issued. The 14-month probe, led by Minister Navdeep Baines’ bureau, targeted skeptics like Dr. Patrick Moore (PhD ecology, ex-Greenpeace) for debunking CO₂ alarmism, while mainstream media amplified figures like Greta Thunberg despite her lack of scientific credentials. Gunn-Reed highlights how Canada’s left-wing climate messaging—rooted in outdated, exaggerated models—silences dissent, forces crowdfunded groups to defend baseless accusations, and risks harming public trust through school propaganda and anxiety-driven narratives. The episode reveals a pattern of suppression where skepticism is sidelined, even as global temperatures defy alarmist predictions, exposing a broader push for internet regulation under the guise of environmental protection. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm Sheila Gunreed, and you're listening to a free audio-only recording of my Wednesday night show, The Gun Show.
Tonight, my guest is Tom Harris of the International Climate Science Coalition.
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Environmentalist activists tried to censor two prominent skeptics of the climate change agenda here in Canada.
Competition Bureau's Move00:10:53
And the environmentalists used the Competition Bureau to do it.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Now I'm sure our regular viewers and listeners are well aware that my boss,
Ezra Levant, is under investigation by the elections commissioner because he wrote a best-selling book called The Libranos that detailed all the corruption of Justin Trudeau.
Now, two dozen other books were also written about Justin Trudeau in the lead up to the federal election.
However, the only one that was both highly successful and highly critical of Justin Trudeau is the only one under investigation for breaking campaign finance laws.
Ezra wisely recorded his conversation with the two former cop investigators with the Elections Commissioner, and you can see that secret recording and read the complaint against Ezra and see our plan of attack to fight back at saverebelnews.com.
But this isn't the first time a federal agency was weaponized by the left to silence their critics.
The environmentalist movement weaponized the Competition Bureau to try to shut up the International Climate Science Coalition and Friends of Science.
And today my guest is show regular Tom Harris of the International Climate Science Coalition to tell us about his harrowing tale of political persecution at the hands of the Competition Bureau and the radical left.
me now is Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition.
I wanted to have Tom on the show, first of all, because he's just an interesting guy and he's becoming a bit of a fan favorite around here, but also because Tom has faced some of the same censorship that we are facing here at Rebel News.
Albeit Tom's censorship came in the form of another federal government agency.
The outcome for Tom would have been the same, that Tom could not exercise his free speech in the form in which he saw fit.
Tom, thanks for coming on the show.
Please give us a rundown of your run-in with the federal government and how they tried to shut up your evil climate denying.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, International Climate Science Coalition was incorporated in Ontario in 2011.
We operated for four and a half years out of Ontario with no problem exercising our constitutional right to free speech and giving our opinions on climate change.
Justin Trudeau was elected prime minister, of course, in November of 2015.
And whoa, within about a month, we got a letter.
I was actually at the Paris counter conference that was being put on.
We got a letter from the Competition Bureau of Canada.
And it said that we will be, it actually said, first of all, I should tell you who the Competition Bureau are.
They're an independent law enforcement agency that, quote, has a legislative mandate to ensure Canadian consumers and businesses prosper and in a competitive and innovative marketplace.
They're actually a federal institution that's part of the Innovation, Science, and Economic Development Canada portfolio.
That's under the minister, let's see, Navdeep Baines, I guess his name is.
But, you know, it's interesting because they notified us when I was in Paris in 2015, and I called them right back and tried to find out what's going on.
Wouldn't tell me a lot.
But regardless, a group called EcoJustice, they filed a complaint with the Competition Bureau on behalf of six prominent Canadians.
And they said this.
They said that we presented, this is the International Climate Science Coalition, presented climate science misrepresentations, which promote the denier group's own business interests and promote the business interests of deep-pocketed individuals and corporations that appear to fund the denier groups.
Now, of course, that's a silly charge because, first of all, they had no idea who our funders were.
But secondly, we weren't misrepresenting anything.
We were giving our opinions on a very complicated idea, and that is that humans are causing dangerous climate change with our carbon dioxide emissions, which we don't agree with.
And of course, many scientists are on our side.
Now, we got this, and I called the Bureau in Ottawa, and I tried to find out more, but it didn't really sound like they were actually going to launch the investigation because, you know, Chris Essex is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Western Ontario.
He said, well, you know, these kinds of rules are established not to control the marketplace of ideas.
They're to control things like in case a company says, oh, our toothpaste is going to solve cancer.
Or yeah, or they criticize their opponents, their competitors, by saying things that are not true.
So it didn't seem that it would be very likely that they would actually launch the investigation.
And in fact, so I didn't do anything.
I mean, some of our people had, you know, they prepared a huge rebuttal, but I was advised by people who really understood what should be happening to do nothing because, you know, basically the commissioner would decide to drop it.
Well, guess what happened?
Five months later, we got a notice that said the complaint would be in fact investigated.
Okay, it did launch an investigation and they said, referencing the complaint that, quote, we make representatives, representations to the public in promotion of a business interest that are false or misleading in a material respecting regarding climate change.
Not very good wording there, respect regarding climate change.
So they said, if the now here's the threatening part, which I'm sure Ezra is feeling right now, the Bureau warned us, and this is the exact quote from the communications, if the results of an investigation disclose evidence that, in the opinion of the Commissioner, provides the basis for a criminal prosecution, the matter may be referred to the Attorney General of Canada who determines whether prosecutions should be undertaken.
So of course, the first thing I asked the Bureau is, well, where did they think we made misleading or false statements?
I mean, if we're being charged with something, like Ezra said, tell me what we're being charged with.
And they said that they wouldn't tell us.
They cited subsection 10.3 of the Competition Act, which requires inquiries to be conducted privately.
So I was being charged with something that wasn't being identified, and the investigation began.
And it continued for 14 months.
If you can believe that, there were 14 months before, and they sent me letters on occasion saying, save all your documents and this investigation is continuing.
No more information.
Big Brother is watching.
And finally, in November of 2016, let's see, I'll just get the exact dates here.
A little later, 14 months after they launched it anyways, they decided to drop it, but they said that they could take enforcement action in respect of matters previously inquired into, including where additional information is discovered following the discontinuance of an inquiry.
So they're basically saying, you know, the investigation is discontinued, but it's revivable if they receive additional information.
And they even contacted the National Observer and said this, we invite Canadians who believe they may have additional information to contact the Competition Bureau.
So, you know, I mean, it's, you really ask the question, first of all, what are they doing investigating some group who is expressing their opinions on a science topic?
I mean, it makes no sense.
It really sounds like the organization is being politicized to apply pressure to groups that don't agree with the government.
And, you know, I have to be careful what I say because I don't want them to relaunch the investigation.
But essentially, they're saying that we can relaunch this thing anytime the commissioner feels that they have additional information or something to get us with.
But, you know, the whole concept of using the Competition Bureau to kind of clamp down on ideas that disagree with the government, I mean, you know, that doesn't sound fair or just at all.
So I really identify with Ezra and I hope he does really well in his fight because, you know, this is really kind of draconian when you see these kinds of things happening in a country that, you know, my father and grandfathers fought for to defend freedom and freedom of speech.
Now, in our case, nothing finally happened, but we had 14 months of being under the pressure of an investigation.
And that's, you know, that can intimidate a lot of people to just completely get out of the field.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think that's the point of it all.
That really is the point is just to use the fight and the process as the punishment.
I know that's what they're doing to us.
You know, we've got a lawyer up, and that costs money.
They realize we are crowdfunded.
We don't have the big pockets of the CBC.
We've basically turned some part of some part of the rebel into like a public interest law firm to deal with issues of free speech.
And that's really not what we want to do.
We want to spend those resources doing the news and doing investigations and telling the other side of the story.
But it's, you know, it's an attempt to bleed you dry by these thousand different cuts and maybe sort of bully you out of that space.
Thank God you guys kept doing what you were doing.
They did the same thing at the same time to friends of science as they did to you, just for their billboards.
I mean, and then they go about crowdsourcing more complaints.
It's outrageous.
I know.
And they're supposed to be fostering competition.
So it's kind of ironic that they would actually, you know, investigate competition.
The whole thing is silly.
And it's, but it's also kind of scary because they have this power to charge you or to recommend that you be charged with a criminal offense.
I mean, good grief, that sounds like North Korea.
Fighting Climate Scare Propaganda00:15:30
Yeah.
You know, and it's a lot of the outrage to what's happening to Ezra can't, it's coming from our American friends who can't even believe that that's the state of affairs in Canada.
And there's very little outrage from authors, journalists, the mainstream Canada.
They're basically silent.
So you know exactly just how risque their own work is because they know that they're never going to be threatened with these sorts of things.
Well, of course, what they're trying to do in some parts of the U.S. is actually make climate change denial, as they call it.
And of course, we don't deny climate change.
We say that it happens all the time.
Otherwise, we'd be under two feet, two kilometers of ice right now.
But they're trying to make our point of view actually illegal to express.
And this is pretty draconian.
And, you know, it really kind of violates what the left say they hold dear.
I mean, historically, there have been times when the left have been open to alternative points of view, but not now, that's for sure.
Yeah, they keep talking about diversity, but they mean diversity of color and gender, but they really don't mean the most basic diversity.
And that's our freedom to think differently from the people beside us, which is a great segue into the next thing I wanted to talk to you about because Dr. Patrick Moore is under attack by the left.
They've crowdsourced a mob again.
He was hired by the city of Regina to speak at a sustainability conference in May 2020.
And on paper, if you want to talk about sustainability, one of the founders of Greenpeace International, former president of Greenpeace Canada, a PhD in ecology, and someone who describes himself as a practical environmentalist who does like tangible things every single day to make the world a cleaner place.
He's the guy you want speaking as a keynote speaker at your sustainability conference.
The problem is Dr. Patrick Moore doesn't believe that CO2 is the thermostat for global temperatures that the left says it is.
And so now they're putting pressure on the city of Regina to cancel him.
What do you think about this?
Well, you know, it's not surprising that they are putting pressure because what Patrick Moore says, if people believe him, and certainly I do, and I think any intelligent person does when you follow the chain of arguments, is that carbon dioxide growth in the atmosphere has been a real blessing.
Okay, we've seen an increase in crop yield and you know more dense forests and things like that.
And of course, as CO2 rises, they find in experiments that plants can grow in areas that are otherwise too dry for plants to grow and lower CO2.
And it's interesting because in our presentations in Montreal and Toronto, where Patrick was also speaking, he showed a graph, which I'm sure it must have really upset the extremists in the climate movement.
He showed carbon dioxide as it was plotted against time over millions of years.
And what he demonstrated was that CO2 was on its way down to 150 parts per million.
It's now around 400, if we had not intervened and started to inject CO2 into the atmosphere.
And at 150 parts per million, plants start to die.
So Patrick's point is that were nature just left to do what it would do, we would see CO2 naturally go down to a level that life would actually die on Earth and we wouldn't indeed see the end of life.
So his point is that our injection of CO2 is not only a good thing, it's an essential thing because it's actually saving life on Earth.
And you know, I want to read you a little bit of a quote from the Global News article about Patrick Moore's situation, in which they're quoting a university professor, assisting University of Regina professor, biology professor, Britt Hall.
And it really shows you how silly this debate has become.
She says, We're past the point in our history as a society that we can legitimize the idea that climate change is not human-induced.
So we're past the point in society where we can't debate a science topic.
Like, I thought science was all about skepticism and debate.
And then she goes on to say that these natural variations that we see in climate are not something to be concerned about.
Well, yes, of course they are.
And that's why we should help people adapt.
So that sentence actually with a comma in the middle doesn't actually make any sense because, of course, climate changes all the time.
Patrick doesn't deny that.
And we should help people adapt to climate change.
But the idea that we can control it and the idea that it's not even legitimate to discuss whether it's human-induced, I mean, you know, this is really sad.
Yeah, like some of the people who are critical of Patrick Moore are mad because he called climate change a cult religion, but they're treating him like an apostate.
Like, if you don't want to be called a cult religion, maybe don't act like a cult religion.
One of the, you know, one of the people who is sort of leading this charge to have Patrick Moore unpersoned and canceled is this woman called Shannon Zakidniak.
She's the founder of a local environmental organization called Enviro Collective, two of my least favorite things, environmentalism and collectivism.
And she said that she would like to see a better balance of keynote speakers balance, one side of the debate, and those who have scientific credentials and represent progressive values.
So I think Patrick Moore certainly has the credentials.
Yeah, I mean, these are the same people, though, which takes me nicely to our next topic.
These are the very same people who hold up a 16-year-old, deeply troubled, truant child actor as an expert in climate science, but disregard someone like Patrick Moore, who is a PhD.
I should be referring to him as Dr. Patrick Moore every time I say his name, because he is one.
He earned it.
He went to school.
And yet, we're nominating somebody like Greta Tunberg, who's really done nothing more than skip school and tour the world.
She's been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in climate activism.
Yeah, it's very weird, actually.
Read the definition of the Nobel Peace Prize, it's supposed to be going to those who, quote, have done the most or best work for fraternity between nations for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.
Huh.
I don't recall her ever saying anything about that.
I guess the purpose of the Nobel Prize has been pretty politicized since the days it started in 1901.
But yeah, I mean, you know, it's interesting because the person you've interviewed, Naomi Sait, on the other side, she's not anti-Greta.
She just thinks that Greta is really being used as a puppet to support adults' point of view on that side of the debate.
And it is interesting that Greta does seem to have to have her points scripted for her.
And I was reading recently that her father was doing some of her tweets.
So, you know, I mean, it's fine for her to have that point of view, but we shouldn't be holding her up as someone to follow, someone who hasn't even finished high school.
I mean, it's a bit silly.
Well, yeah, and I mean, like you rightly point out, the Nobel Peace Prize has become very politicized.
It's now just a left-wing goodie bag, really.
Obama got it while he was fighting three wars.
Obama got it.
Obama got it before he even became president, didn't he?
I think he hadn't actually done anything yet.
It was kind of like an aspirational Nobel Peace Prize.
Yeah, I mean, they'll give it to anybody who espouses left-wing values at this point.
Didn't Al Gore get it?
Yeah, he shared it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
But you know, Sheila, one of the things that's really crazy about this is that the climate scare should not be left-wing.
I mean, if you follow the climate scare to its logical conclusion, what you have is extremely expensive energy.
You have lots of wind turbines bothering people and killing millions of birds and bats.
I mean, the people I know on the left wing of the spectrum actually care about huge costs for the poor.
They care about birds and bats.
I mean, there are species of bats that are going to be driven to extinction if this keeps up.
And, you know, it's interesting because with 300,000 industrial wind turbines around the world, we're getting still just as much power from fossil fuels as we were about 30 years ago.
So they really aren't contributing much, but they certainly are costing a lot.
And they're, you know, doing a huge amount of damage to our ecology and our economy.
And that will hurt the poor and, of course, wildlife more than anything.
So why would the left support the climate scare?
I mean, I think they should kick them off the stage so they can focus on issues that really matter.
Yeah.
You know, something I wanted to ask you about is your opinion column with Dr. Jay Lair that you wrote.
I found it in What's Up With That.
And it sort of stuck out for me because the criticism being leveled at Dr. Patrick Moore are that he needs to be silenced for balance, which, you know, what a strange thing to say.
It's like they don't even know what that word means.
But your article says that climate alarmists are winning the war of words despite evidence that nothing unusual is happening.
So they are really sort of rewriting how we use the language to push their agenda and they're winning.
Oh, yeah, exactly.
And there's all kinds of examples.
I mean, they call carbon dioxide emissions carbon pollution.
Yeah.
The government calls it that all the time.
I mean, people should just laugh and correct them right away.
It's not carbon.
Carbon is solid.
It's like soot or diamonds.
And it's not pollution.
So, I mean, they're doubly wrong.
But there's all kinds of things that even people on the right use without actually thinking.
For example, green energy.
I mean, is it green to reduce the CO2?
No, actually, that would be the opposite of green because CO2 promotes plant growth.
So, indeed, I mean, things like coal, for example, are green energy.
And of course, they're natural.
It comes from the ground, comes from the, you know, what used to be plants.
So, we have to be careful on the right that we don't actually use the language of our opponents because the bottom line is they have, well, what they've done is they've incorporated the appendix from 1984 into the debate.
And people should look it up on the web.
Search for George Orwell's book, 1984, and read the appendix, which is all about Newspeak.
It's 10 pages, and boy, it describes the climate debate right now.
Even people on our side of the argument are often using these stupid terms, you know, like green energy and climate denier.
Like, no, we're not denying climate change.
That's ridiculous.
So, I mean, we can't allow them to choose the debate or choose the words because it makes people think in the way they want them to think.
And, of course, that was the whole point of NewSpeak: they created language and they chose words so that people would stop thinking, you know, in a critical way about anything the government said.
So, yeah, we have to be careful about that too.
Last thing on our agenda that I wanted to talk to you about is that it sounds like the climate scare is dying.
The benchmark that they're using for all the climate change rhetoric, it's not very useful anymore now, is it?
Well, yeah, what's happened is a few years ago, they provided various emissions scenarios that climate scientists would then use with their models to forecast what kind of climate change would happen.
And one particular model was actually a very extreme example of what could happen if the amount of coal used increased by something like 500%.
And of course, the people who made up the scenario admitted that this was exceptionally unlikely.
I think they put a number of something like 3% chance of this happening.
But unfortunately, many climate scientists have taken this scenario, this emissions scenario, and they've used it as the baseline in more than 2,000 research papers, often presenting it as mankind's future if we don't engage with additional mitigation policies to reduce greenhouse gases.
And of course, the media almost invariably takes these science papers and exaggerates even further, which of course leads to things like the, oh, we got 12 years left to save the planet.
Well, even the BBC last week admitted, uh-oh, something's wrong here.
This was an extremely unlikely scenario, and now is virtually impossible because the forecast is that coal usage will actually plateau around the middle of this century and will not increase by 500%.
So they're saying, oh, well, yeah, in fact, well, maybe that the whole thing in which all these scientific research papers are based on is an exaggeration that simply will not happen and isn't even remotely feasible.
And it's kind of interesting because BBC still tried to say, oh, yeah, but it's going to be a big crisis anyways.
So this, you know, Anthony Watts from What's Up With That? People can look it up.
He's probably the world's leading site on climate change information.
He pointed out that this is the biggest blow to the climate movement since ClimateGate.
Because if indeed the origin of all these big headlines in the media were scientific papers that were based on an emissions scenario that is now essentially impossible, then yeah, all those headlines are ridiculous.
They don't make any sense at all.
So this is a big advance for us.
And hopefully what it will do is encourage the public to be a lot more skeptical.
And remember, Y2K was not a disaster.
There's lots of things that are lots of headlines that are generated, including climate scare and climate alarmism, that if you dig in deeper, you find are just nonsense.
Yeah, I've already lived through the hole in the ozone acid rain, Y2K, and the Mayan apocalypse of 2012.
And I'm still on the right side of the dirt.
Killer bees, they were coming to Canada.
Africanized killer bees.
That's right.
They were on their way to get us, even though it gets to this winter minus 48.
I don't know how well killer bees do.
I was very happy to hear President Trump in Davos at the big economic forum.
He was saying this is a good time and people should be optimistic about the future.
And, you know, when I tell friends of mine that what their kids are hearing in school about, you know, coming climate catastrophe, it's all wrong.
People are saying, whoa, you know, that's good.
We should tell our kids that.
We shouldn't depress them and make them have suicidal thoughts and things like that.
Apparently, the first suicide in Europe attributed to climate change for a teenager happened just recently.
So, I mean, you know, this kind of negative anticipation about the future, this is really unhealthy.
And we should really take a leaf out of President Trump's book, where he said point blank, let's be optimistic.
There's good things happening in the world.
Optimism And Climate Realism00:02:57
And, you know, you know, me, I'm a promoter of the space program.
And man, we're on our way back into space.
This is exciting times for all kinds of reasons.
Yep, you know what?
That is right.
It is a great time to be alive.
It's a great time to be a human being.
Probably the best time in human existence as far as science, as far as knowledge, and as far as our access to information.
Tom, I wanted to ask you, what's next for the International Climate Science Coalition?
What else do you have on your agenda?
And also, how can people support the work that you do?
Because you, like us, you're under attack from the government from time to time, and people would just love to censor you.
So how do people go around that to see what you're up to?
Well, people should pay attention to our website, which is climatesscienceinternational.org, because in the near future, they're going to see something up there about climate realism Canada.
It's not officially announced at this point, but we're working on it in the background.
And you're going to see a pushback against a lot of these policies.
So, you know, stay tuned.
There's more coming in the future.
Is there a place where people can donate to your work?
I know that the federal government would love to believe that you have these dark money, big pocketed, you know, coal companies donating to you, but I think it's just normal people like me.
Well, you know, it's interesting when Tim Patterson, one of the scientists who's worked with us for years, when he said that when people criticized him as being funded by big oil, his question was, where do we apply?
I wish.
If you have an idea how we can get funding from big oil, I'd love to hear from them.
But yeah, donate through PayPal.
There's a donate button, and we keep people then up to date on everything that we're doing.
And, you know, we write articles and we're trying to get into the Canadian media more and more.
It's tough to do.
Thanks to you, we are able to do it.
But our main publishing at this point is in the United States, which fortunately has a broader diversity of opinion allowed than in the Canadian press.
I mean, it's interesting.
In Canadian media, about 10 years ago, we got published from coast to coast.
And, you know, people would listen to us and they hear both sides.
They could make up their own mind.
But the door, unfortunately, has been totally closed on climate realism in practically all Canadian media with the exception of your outlet, you know, fantastic work that you're doing and also Canada Free Press.
Aside from that, there's almost no one in Canada who's publicizing both sides of the debate.
It's almost like they consider us a bunch of children that have to be only told that Santa Claus is real and not hear any alternative.
So yeah, I really compliment the rebel and I wish good luck with Ezra's battle.
Thank you.
And thanks, Tom, for coming on the show.
As long as I have an opportunity to tell the other side of the story, you're welcome on the show.
And I think our people really appreciate the chance to be exposed to those alternative ideas.
Thank Goodness for the Internet00:00:57
So, Tom, great.
We'll have you back on the show very soon.
We shouldn't wait as long in between appearances as we have been.
Okay, well, thank you very much.
See you later.
Thanks, Tom.
Isn't it a shame that someone like Tom Harris, a good Canadian like Tom Harris, has to publish his articles in the United States and then Canadians like me have to source their news in the United States to hear what Tom has to say?
to hear the other side of the story of the climate change debate?
How is that the diversity that the liberals keep prattling on about?
Thank goodness for the internet, because the old media is no longer the gatekeepers of our information.
And that is probably why the liberals want to regulate the internet.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week.