Franklin Graham’s 2020 UK tour collapsed after seven venues canceled amid backlash over his calls for banning same-sex marriage and labeling Islam "evil," while Canada’s 23,000 jihadists face no restrictions. Maxime Bernier, ex-Conservative MP, left after 15 months due to free speech suppression, citing smear campaigns like Warren Kinsella’s paid racism allegations. Quebec’s Bill 21 and immigration policies—popular there despite economic socialism—show a model for conservative ideas Bernier believes will reshape Canada’s political future, now amplified through his new YouTube program. The split, though divisive, may have been inevitable to push back against mainstream media demonization and reclaim conservative discourse. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I tell you about Franklin Graham, the inheritor of the great Billy Graham Project, is effectively banned from the United Kingdom.
That's quite something.
I'll read you this story and I'll compare it to other groups that are not banned in the United Kingdom.
It's quite a puzzle, this one.
Before I do, let me invite you to become a premium subscriber to Rebel News.
That's eight bucks a month.
You go to premium.rebelnews.com and you get the video version of this podcast, plus other goodies like Sheila Gunread's show and David Menzie's show.
Okay, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, America's largest mainstream Christian pastor is effectively banned from the United Kingdom.
I'll give you the shocking details.
It's February 7th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is government.
But why?
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
Hello, my friends.
Let me start with an apology for yesterday's show.
I had flown to Montreal to interview Maxime Bernier.
I'm curious about what he's up to, what his plans are, what he thinks about the Conservative Party's leadership race, and he has a new YouTube studio of his own, so that's where we were going to do it.
I'd interview him there, and he'd interview me for his show during the same visit, except that it was the first time using their studio, and so there were so many first-time technical glitches, we didn't get the whole videotape of my interview of him in time back here at our headquarters.
We just got a part of it, and the audio wasn't great, so I apologize for yesterday's show.
Flags And Unions00:03:46
So we have the other part of that interview later today.
I hope you found it interesting.
Our team at Rebel News did great with what they had late in the day, so thanks for understanding.
Anyways, let me tell you about some news I read just today that I really think ought to be bigger news.
It's news from the United Kingdom, a place I've gone to a lot in the past couple of years because of Tommy Robinson's case.
And people sometimes say, why do you go there so often?
We have our own problems here in Canada, and I'm attentive to that, and I do try to limit my trips there.
And if I do go over, I try to do so with as little disruption to my Canadian work as possible.
But I still believe that it is relevant to Canada in this way.
The UK is further down the road than we are on several important issues.
So it serves as a premonition, a warning of what's to come here.
Like I keep saying, visiting the UK is my own personal dystopian time machine.
I can predict with vivid clarity what is going to happen next here because we're just one cycle behind them.
So for example, here in Canada, we're all shocked when statues of Sir John A. MacDonald are being taken down.
It's truly shocking.
He was also ripped off our $10 bill, by the way.
Well, I'll show you the next chapter.
In the United Kingdom, children are forbidden to fly the flag of St. George.
That's the flag of England.
At school, police treat it as a hate symbol.
And even the Union flag, sometimes called the Union Jack.
The flag of the country.
And it's called the Union Jack because it shows the Union of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
It's largely banned from polite companies.
Considered right-wing.
I didn't know how beautiful the simple geometric Union flag was until I understood it.
I just thought as a kid it was just, you know, triangles or shapes.
But it truly represents the union of three different peoples.
The original e pluribus unum, that's the American motto, from many, out of many, one.
You could say it's the original multicultural state.
The union jack is the English flag, that's this one, Cross of St. George, plus the Scottish flag, St. Andrew's Cross, plus the Irish St. Patrick's Cross, all put together over top of each other.
I'm sorry, I never actually learned that until recently.
I didn't know it was so harmonious.
I just thought, oh, that's an interesting flag.
And I learned that just in time to live in an age where the British government and the British police and British schools are pretty much banning the British flag.
So we're not there right now.
We're just at the takedown of Johnny McDonald's statue's phase.
But we're getting close.
Trudeau changed the lyrics of O Canada in such a weird way, just like his father did, I guess.
Just like his dad changed Canada's flag.
But there's changing it, which is questionable enough.
And then there's banning it, disparaging it.
So we're not quite there yet.
But now that I've shown you what they're doing in the UK, do you doubt me when I prophesy it will happen here?
Obviously, the same thing with censorship, which is what took me to the UK in the first place.
I've probably done 20 reports on Tommy Robinson being arrested for doing journalism outside a court.
This is when he was arrested that day.
His journalism that day, by the way, is less intrusive and less rambunctious than our own coverage, say, of Jonathan Yeneve is outside courts here.
And Tommy was, you saw him arrested, imprisoned in solitary confinement for that.
Censorship and Religious Bias00:07:51
So that could happen to David Menzies, Sheila Gunried, Kian Becksty, and myself.
So you see where I believe the UK is like a crystal ball for what the next phase will look like here.
More mass censorship, more of the surveillance state, more politicized police, more mass immigration.
Brexit was a pushback against some of that, I think.
But so much damage has been done to the UK already.
All right, so back to my story today.
Billy Graham could probably be called the most prominent, most successful, most mainstream Christian pastor of the 20th century.
That's Billy Graham there.
At least in America.
I don't know about other parts of the world.
And he passed away recently.
He lived to 99, I think.
But he was a personal advisor to actually so many presidents.
There's Lyndon Johnson there, a Democrat.
There's Richard Nixon, Republican.
Obviously, John F. Kennedy there.
Because, of course, remember, Graham lived to 99.
There's George H.W. Bush.
There's Bill Clinton.
Boy, he needed spiritual guidance, didn't he?
George W. Bush.
So Billy Graham, the dad, preached around the world to millions, many millions, in countless countries.
I'd say he was the closest thing in terms of mass reach to a Protestant Pope, if there were such a thing.
I mean, in terms of how far and wide he traveled and evangelized.
And he set up so many enduring institutions, including Samaritan's Purse, one of the best Christian charities in the world.
Now, his son, Franklin Graham, who's just a whippersnapper in his 60s, has taken over the projects that Billy Graham created.
And he's a powerful force in his own right.
He does good work, I think.
Franklin is following in his father's footsteps.
His dad lived to 99, so Franklin has a lot of work to do to catch up.
He's about 30 years behind, but he's clearly the inheritor of his dad's style, his dad's project.
And at least from my point of view, he's just as mainstream, just as ubiquitous.
I'm not Christian myself.
I don't follow very closely, but that's how it looks to me.
It looks to me that like his dad, Franklin Graham is not radical.
He's not extreme.
I actually don't even know what a radical or extreme Christian means.
I mean, by nature, Christianity is the religion of love and forgiveness.
That's the whole message of Christ.
Seems to me as an outside observer.
It's gentler in a way than, say, the Old Testament and certainly than the Koran.
But Franklin Graham has been effectively banned from the United Kingdom in 2020.
Here, look at this.
Here's a story.
Evangelist preacher Franklin Graham planned a seven-city UK tour.
All seven venues have dropped him.
Wow, now this is CNN, so approach with skepticism could be fake news, but still, let me read some more.
A planned UK tour by U.S. evangelist Franklin Graham is in question after every venue booked by the preacher canceled planned appearances following an outcry over his homophobic and Islamophobic comments.
Okay, well, what does that really mean?
I was deplatformed myself, remember, in Edmonton and Calgary when I booked a venue in each city to give a talk about my book, The Libranos.
I had a contract with the theaters.
I paid them rent in full in advance.
And then the owner caved in and breached the contract, just like it sounds like they're doing to Franklin Graham.
But did Franklin Graham really have contracts sealed the deal with the seven venues, like I had with the two venues in Alberta?
Did they all really rip up a signed contract?
Or was it not quite yet a contract?
Was it just sort of an inquiry or something?
Again, I don't know.
CNN doesn't say, I don't really trust CNN, but given how bad things are in the UK, I'm going to say this is probably true.
Let me read more.
Graham, the son of preacher Billy Graham, has called Islam evil, attacked laws increasing rights for transgender people, and told his followers that the legalization of same-sex marriage was orchestrated by Satan.
Now, every venue booked by Graham as part of a lengthy summer tour of the UK has told him not to come.
There's some irony here.
I don't know if Franklin Graham said those things about those things.
I don't know if he said it about same-sex marriage.
It wasn't in quotes there.
I don't know what tone or context he said.
CNN's not going to tell you.
I'm pretty sure Franklin Graham, at the very least, is a love the sinner, hate the sin kind of Christian who doesn't turn anyone away.
I mean, he's certainly less militant than, oh, just let me pick something at random.
Britain's Muslim community who have a massive campaign against gay-friendly curricula in schools.
I've done a few shows on this one, particularly in Birmingham.
There's this one school that's massively, overwhelmingly Muslim.
Almost the entire school population is Muslim.
And they're simply not going to class where they talk positively about gay people.
They literally have rallies outside the school, even taunting the gay teacher, Mr. Moffat.
But we need to make one thing very clear.
This program is not just about telling people that other families and other types of lifestyles exist.
It's actually aggressively promoting them, giving it a positive spin, and telling people that it is okay for you to be Muslim and for you to be gay.
Mr. Moffat!
Shame, That's the United Kingdom.
By the way, that's not Pakistan or something.
That's the UK.
That's Birmingham, at least.
I don't think they're going to ban that Muslim group from the right to rent theaters, do you?
Or maybe it's the Islam comments that got Franklin Graham banned out of the gay comments.
The thing about most religions, though, I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that most religions are exclusive.
By that I mean you can't be both Jewish and Christian.
There's certain irreconcilable ideas.
You can't be both Hindu and Muslim.
They just, you've got to choose.
So you can usually find a passage in one religion that rejects or even rebukes a rival religion's theology.
I mean, there's the odd passage about killing infidels in the Quran, just for an example.
So if you're going to ban someone from speaking because he criticized a rival religion, as Franklin Graham has probably done, but again, CNN doesn't provide context, there would be no religions in the UK, really, and there most certainly are, so this is pretty selective.
Let me read more.
A petition calling for Newcastle's Utilita Arena to drop Graham has been signed more than 5,000 times.
And the venue told CNN they made their decision following talks with our partners and relevant stakeholders.
Franklin Graham's views are wholly inconsistent with our city, which is preparing to welcome huge celebrations and tens of thousands of people this summer for UK Pride.
Stay done, chair of the Northern Pride group, said on the petition site.
I guess the Northern Pride group finds it easier to battle a foreign Christian critic from America than, for example, that crowd outside the Birmingham school.
What do you think?
It's funny in the United Kingdom.
Franklin Graham is effectively banned.
Intelligence Failures in London00:03:30
I mean, I'm sure they'll let him touch down in the UK and go through customs.
I'm not 100% certain, but I'm 99% certain.
But he certainly can't do his thing there.
But funny enough, 23,000 jihadists can.
And I'm saying jihadists, not Muslims.
Let me read a little bit from this article in the Times of London.
I've shown this to you several times before.
I'll read a little bit.
Intelligence officers have identified 23,000 jihadist extremists living in Britain as potential terrorist attackers.
It emerged yesterday.
The scale of the challenge facing the police and security services was disclosed by White Hall sources after criticism that multiple opportunities to stop the Manchester bomber had been missed.
About 3,000 people from the total group are judged to pose a threat and are under investigation or active monitoring in 500 operations being run by police and intelligence services.
The 20,000 others have featured in previous inquiries and are categorized as posing a residual risk.
Oh my God.
So 3,000 people are being followed pretty much around the clock in 500 police operations.
What does that mean?
You're literally chasing someone 24 hours a day, literally waiting for them to stab someone or run their car over someone, but you won't just scoop them up and deport them or detain them.
That's exactly what this means.
And here's what that looks like.
This was just a few days ago, I think this was five days ago, in London.
One of those 23,000 jihadis, one of the 3,000 who's being tracked all the time, he went on a stabbing spree right on the street in London before police shot him.
You can see the police shooting him here.
And then they backed away because they thought he had some bomb on him or something.
But if you look at the footage, police were very close by.
They were on motorbikes.
They were dressed plain clothes.
They had guns, which is not ubiquitous in the UK.
They were so close by, they shot him after he only stabbed two people.
So they weren't called from a police station.
They were following him on motorbikes with guns.
That's how much manpower was on this one 20-year-old terrorist, Sudesh Aman, armed undercover crops, just driving around town behind him.
Like he's got his own personal escort.
That's how imminent they knew his attack was, but they didn't try and stop him until after he stabbed two people.
They were that close to him.
Oh, I didn't mention, if you think that's crazy, look at this.
The same terrorist had already been convicted of multiple terrorism offenses, but was let out by the British prison system anyways.
So it's not just that the intelligence thought he was going to attack.
We're so worried they were following him.
They already knew he did attack, was convicted, was sentenced, and they just puttered along behind him until the stabbing started.
Do you know how much manpower it takes to trail someone 24 hours a day like that?
That's the luxury of being a British jihadi.
Commit terrorism, get out of jail in a year or two, be free to go wherever you like till you kill or attempt to kill again.
23,000 suspects, 3,000 of them being tracked around the clock.
Establishment Control Debate00:15:03
But Franklin Graham, go home, you bigot.
You're not welcome in the UK.
Like I say, folks, that's us in maybe five years.
Stay with us for more about our interview with Maxime Bernier that I tried to get from him yesterday.
We'll show it now.
Here you go.
Maxime Bernier, thank you very much for meeting with me in your new studio.
Thanks for letting me visit you and tell us what you've been up to since the election.
Thank you, Ezra.
I'm very, very pleased that you are here today.
And, you know, I'm very busy.
I'm not a member of parliament, as you know.
I didn't win at the last election, but I'm still fighting for what I believe and what we believe at the People's Party of Canada.
It was a tough election for us, but if you look back, I think we made history.
It took 20 years for the Green Party to have more than 1.6% of the votes.
20 years and six elections.
And we did that in one year.
We created a party in one year.
We had 92% of the writings where we had a candidate, 314 candidates on 338 writings.
And so we built that party.
And too bad that I didn't win.
But when you fight for your ideas and you don't win because you were honest with what you believe, I think it's an honorable loss.
And now I'm building the party again.
I'm speaking with our candidates.
Our goal is to have maybe 150 candidates ready at the end of this year and having the other candidates next year.
We are planning for an election in two or three years, so the party must be ready.
We don't have any deficit.
We were able to raise more than $2.7 million last year for the first year.
And we did a kind of a restructuration at our head office in Ottawa.
We have a fewer people, but it's working well.
I'm traveling a little bit across the country.
I was out west a couple of months ago.
I was a guest speaker for the Wexit movement and having a discussion with people over there on fixing Canada.
But right now, the most important for me is that new YouTube channel, the People's Party of Canada official YouTube channel.
will have some guests like I had you for the first one.
I want to thank you very much.
Thank you for having me.
Oh otherwise that was fun.
I think people will like it.
So the YouTube channel, more present on the social media.
I didn't have time during the election.
Yes, I was very active on Twitter, but people didn't see my face.
And so I would be more present on social media, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
And at the same time also, I will always fight for the ideas that we believe in.
Less government and more freedom.
Now, the Conservative Party of Canada is in another leadership race already.
And it started off slowly because it's such a high bar to get in $300,000, 3,000 signatures, and it's a pretty short time period.
But now it looks like there's a lot of people sniffing around looking at it.
Do you have any thoughts on either the, I guess, the A-list candidates or the others?
Is there anyone that you find hopeful?
Is there anyone that you think has ideas that are appealing?
That are conservatives.
Yeah.
Well, I have the same questions.
What do you make of the whole thing?
First of all, maybe before answering that, let's speak about the process.
And I think the establishment of the party didn't want any outsider.
You know, the rules are so tight, 3,000 signatures, $300,000.
It wasn't the same rule that when I was running for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada.
And the time also is so short for having these signatures and the money.
So I think at the end they will have maybe three or four candidates.
But there's no debate.
There's no debate about ideas.
The big debate that they had recently was about the leader participating in a parade parade.
and Peter McKay said he will, and Andrew Scheib didn't, so it's such important.
Those are the issues that the media party would want them to dance to.
I think that there's important issues that Conservative politicians are afraid of, whether it's standing up to the global warming thesis or free speech or open borders immigration.
I think the conservatives should be talking about real things instead of just dancing to whatever the media party tells them to do.
Is there anyone in the field that you think would resist the media party?
That's my biggest criticism of the conservatives.
They aren't showing courage on ideas.
Is there anyone?
No, I don't think so.
Their goal is to, like Andrew Shea said, now it's a centrist political party and they want to have votes from the Liberals.
So I don't think they will have a strong line on immigration.
Like, you know, for us, it's very well known.
We'd want to.
I mean, isn't that a winner in Quebec?
That's what I don't get.
Is that François Legaud and not just in his reduction of immigration numbers, but in his Bill 21 talking about the secular nature of the civil service, those are hugely popular, if I'm reading the opinion.
And I also notice that critics, even in English Canada, are pretty timid because they know that's popular and they also respect the idea that Quebec has a bit of its own identity.
So it's amazing to me that Legault is, and he's the most popular premier in the country, according to the polls.
I don't know why a conservative doesn't say, I'm going to choose that instead of the love of 100 journalists in Ottawa.
If it worked for Legault, could it work outside Quebec?
I think yes, but in Quebec, we had that debate about identity for a long time.
You know, the only francophone place in North America.
And speaking about immigration, speaking about French language, Bill 101 and all that, it's not new for Quebecers.
But I think in English Canada, speaking about immigration, it is new.
As you remember, you know, somebody who supported our work had some billboards all across the country during the campaign and said, you know, with my face and stop mass immigration.
And it was a big scandal in English Canada, not in Quebec.
So we need to have that debate.
And there's a Canadian identity and we want to promote that.
You know, one of the things that irritated me about the election is I have a friend named Salim Mansoor.
Yeah.
Very thoughtful man.
He was one of our candidates.
Well, and that's the thing is he wanted to run for the Conservatives.
I've known him for a decade.
He's a professor who worked his way up.
I think he started as a taxi driver when he came here.
He's so thoughtful.
He's such a progressive Muslim.
He believes in the separation of mosque and state.
He loves Canadian values.
In my mind, he's a star candidate.
Professor, thoughtful.
He's a Muslim immigrant who's made good.
And he was rejected by the Conservatives for being, he said to me, they called him Islamophobic.
He's Muslim.
They're not.
That's crazy.
That's crazy.
So he ran for you guys, which, but the fact that he was thrown out is crazy to me.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And for me, I was very happy because it's, like you said, he was a star candidate for us.
But I don't think that the Conservative Party will change.
I said they are morally and intellectually corrupt.
And with a new face, that would be the same thing because their goal is only to have the power.
But they don't know what to do if they're in government.
They don't believe in big changes.
If you believe in big changes, you need to speak about it during the election, before the election, after the election, all the time.
That's what I'm doing.
They're conservative.
They're supposed to want to balance the budget.
At the last election, no, no, I do share.
I'm not able to balance the budget.
On immigration, I won't do anything.
On free speech, nothing special.
On giving money to big corporations.
And it's, oh, no, we like subsidies to corporation.
We won't stop that.
So there's a lot of things that are conservative that they must run on and they must fight for it.
And they didn't do that in the past and they won't in the future.
I don't think so.
Well, I hope they will because they have the institutional structure.
They have the fundraising machine.
They have the riding associations.
They have the brand name.
They have all the assets.
But you can't put, if it was a pyramid, they have all the blocks, but the block on the top didn't show courage, didn't speak.
But the establishment, you're right.
The establishment, when I was running, I had 49% of the votes.
I had a lot of support.
I remember in that moment, this is right before the convention in Halifax.
I remember thinking, and I think I might have even said it to you, just grit your teeth, stick with it.
And if Shear fails, which a lot of people thought he would, you would immediately be the heir apparent.
Everyone would say he should have won last time.
Finally, he, too bad we didn't do it last time.
I, and maybe you don't want to talk about this.
No, no, no.
I thought that you could have stayed within the party, been the charismatic communicator, been the keeper of the flame.
And if Shear would have won, you would be in the tent.
And if he would have lost, which he did, everyone would have said, okay, it's Maxime.
Let's do this right.
Why did you feel the need to leave?
Because all the problems we're talking about right now, the party's not strong, the party's not principled.
And you're talking about the successes you had with the PPC.
Okay, but you're comparing yourself to the Green Party instead of the CPC.
Why did you leave?
Okay, so first of all, after the leadership race, I didn't win with 49% of the vote.
But remember, I had only five MPs on 99 MPs who supported me, including myself and so forth.
And after that, I worked for 15 months with the establishment of the party.
I didn't win with 49% of the votes.
So our platform was very popular, balancing the budget, and all our platform was very popular.
So I tried to push the establishment to take some of our ideas for the next platform, for the next campaign.
And Andrew Scheele and the establishment were very clear about that.
Maxime, all your ideas are extreme.
We won't take it and blah, blah, blah.
And they tried to do to you what they did to Salim Mansour.
Yeah, absolutely.
And when Andrew Scheele said publicly, Maxim Bernie is not speaking for the Conservative Party anymore.
He's speaking for himself.
After 15 months, I said, I cannot do anything in that party.
So I left, I created the People's Party.
And during the election, they didn't take any of the strong conservative ideas.
And they were centrists and leftists.
And I think right now the establishment is controlling that party.
And that would be the same ideas because they're doing politics based on survey and polling and focus group.
So when did you leave exactly?
In August.
The election for the Conservative Party of Canada was in May 2017.
And I left a year 15 months after that in August.
Boy, I wish you would.
In 19, 19.
I wish you would have stuck around.
I'm just saying, that's my personal view.
I think a lot of bridges were burned both ways.
Is there any chance that you would throw your hat in the ring now?
You say there's no candidate for the Conservatives that is up to the ideological and the courage that I think you've shown.
I'm a fan of yours.
Like if you're saying that the establishment isn't good and if the candidates aren't good by your checklist, you wouldn't try.
Like you could raise $300,000, you have, like you could do, I'm just, is it possible to have a reconciliation?
I didn't come here to lobby you for that, but I'm just thinking, I agree with you that the candidates who are running so far are not that inspirational.
You have a profile.
You came in an extremely close second last time.
There's been a lot of water under the bridge in the last couple of years, but you wouldn't even consider it.
No, no, absolutely not.
Because you could make it in your own image then.
Yeah, but they don't want me, and I don't want to go there also.
It's past.
I've turned the page.
And I know inside, I know what they're doing.
I suppose you have 100 MPs.
I'll give you an example.
I spoke about the abolition of the cartel in daily poultry and milk, the supply management.
Oh, I don't understand Andrew Scheer's obsession with the dairy cartel.
Yeah, yeah, but you know, the MPs.
I had a lot of people that were telling me, Maxima, I like you when I was running for the leadership.
I like your ideas, but you know, I have a lot of dairy producer in my writing.
I cannot support you.
I had other members of parliament who said, Maxim, I like your ideas, but cutting corporate welfare, you know, I have GM in my writing, I cannot support you.
So I didn't have the support of the MPs, and that's impossible.
You cannot, if you don't have the support of the MPs, and I didn't have that with 49% of support from the members.
So I don't want, for me, I've turned the page, the MPs and the establishment, they're just there to look at the poll and try to win without speaking about the real issues.
And that's why, you know, I'm very happy with what I'm doing right now.
It's a big work.
It's a lot of work.
I need to be back in government as soon as possible.
But I like fighting for the real ideas.
I've traveled to Europe in recent years and I've seen the rise of populist, nationalist, democratic parties that focus a little bit on free speech, controlling borders.
Glad Kinsella's Populist Rise00:10:30
Immigration, yeah.
Yeah, I've seen it in all across Europe.
Sometimes they actually win.
Sometimes they come in second.
But they're very viable.
Like even like Italy, right now there's a real populist movement with Salvini.
And there's a place in Canada for us.
Well, I mean, Brexit won.
Trump won.
I thought maybe you would be that force.
And I know from the success of Rebel News that there are a lot of people who want to talk about those issues I've just mentioned.
Why institutionally have we not been able to copy Brexit, Trump, Salvini, Geert Wilderss in Holland, even Le Pen in France?
Some people object to her, but just the populist nationalists, let's get out of the UN or get out of the EU.
Why haven't we been able to, is it the media?
Is it the culture?
Why can't we do that here?
Well, first of all, we didn't have a populist leader before, and I think I'm the first one.
But I think we will.
That's our future at the People's Party.
The more we are there, the more we speak about our ideas, the better it will be for us.
Maybe the immigration crisis in Europe was a little bit bigger than in Canada.
Right now, we still have illegal migrants that are crossing the border in Quebec.
It's still, you know, it's not sustainable.
But they don't speak about that in Ottawa right now.
The Conservatives' Party doesn't speak about that right now.
What are they afraid of?
Like, what are they really afraid of?
The CBC already hates them.
They can't double hate them.
But they're afraid to be people who say, oh maybe you're racist.
You know what happened to me at the last election?
Kinsella with the Conservative Party of Canada.
The Conservative paid Kinsella to discretal party.
I heard you're suing him.
And I'm suing him.
Yeah, I'm suing him.
Absolutely.
It's my reputation.
It's our reputation.
But they're afraid of that.
They're afraid of the mainstream media.
But you need to do the fight.
And people know that we are doing that fight for a better country.
Well, let me ask you about that.
Because, I mean, in Germany, for example, the alternative for Deutschland, the AFD party, it's been around for 10 years or so.
I'm not sure exactly.
And it's starting, people are getting used to them, they're comfortable with them, and they're a fact of life, and they're not going to go away.
And they've managed to resist the cancel culture.
Let me ask you this.
You don't have the seat in parliament now.
You have professional, dirty tricksters like Warren Kinsella smearing you as a racist.
You were telling me earlier that you were speaking somewhere in Quebec and someone tried to have you banned, which never would have happened in the past.
Are you worried that you will be canceled?
You will be de-platformed.
You're a pretty big fish to be deplatformed, but they de-platformed big people in the US and the UK.
I'm glad you're starting your YouTube channel and I'm glad you want to keep working, but are you worried you will be shut out, banned from the CBC, banned from newspapers other than far-right Maxime Bernier?
Are you worried that you're going to be demonized?
I hope it won't happen, but that's a risk.
And if that happened, that would be huge.
Because, you know, former minister, you know, member of parliament for 30 years, look at my past, you know, look at my videos that I did a couple of years ago.
It's always about the same ideas.
So they cannot say that Bernie is an extreme right-wing radical.
They cannot, if they look at what I said the last 30 years as an active politician.
And so I don't think it will happen.
But that's a risk.
And I hope in Canada it won't happen.
I was at the Coulise du Pouvoir in French a couple of weeks ago.
What does that mean?
Les Coulise du Pouvoir, it's the daily, not daily, weekly show in French CBC, Radiu Canada, speaking about politics, like the Hubs.
It's in French in Quebec.
And so what for the country?
And I was there and I explained to them what I was doing.
And so I hope I will still have some chance to be at the Radio Canada or CBC.
But it's a big challenge for us.
One phone call from the Prime Minister's office and that'll stop.
It can happen.
Let me ask you one last question.
You've been very generous with your time.
I think about Quebec.
And in, I mean, I don't know, I don't speak French very well at all.
So what I hear is filtered through the Anglo-media, which I know I'm getting a distorted view.
But Lego and the CAC party started from scratch not too long ago, replaced both the red and the blue team, replaced both the Parti Québécois and the Liberals.
Absolutely.
Majority, we already talked, he's the most popular premier in the country based on polls.
The most important in Quebec is very, very popular.
And I mean, I don't know how important the immigration comments and the secular, you know, no burk is in the workplace.
I don't know how important they are.
I think people care about that.
And I think in Quebec they maybe care extra much because they've been talking about identity and they're worried.
Quebecers are worried that they'll lose their hundreds of years of history and they'll be washed away like a drop in the sea.
So I'm a Western boy originally from Calgary and I'm in Toronto now and I'm right-wing Reform Party Preston Manning.
But maybe the hope comes from Quebec.
I always thought of Quebec as a socialist place and economically it probably is.
But culturally, maybe by some definitions it's a conservative place.
And maybe Quebec can be an example for the rest of us.
And that good news can come from Quebec and a role model can come from Quebec, maybe not on economics, but on culture.
And not on pipelines.
Those are big things.
On immigration, I think you have a point there.
How can we get that to spread to Anglo-Canada?
Yeah, but I try to do that.
But on immigration, identity, Quebec use and still fight for their identity, francophone in North America.
And I think in English Canada, they know what's happening right now in Europe.
And they're looking at it and they say, you know, we must do like we did in the past, being able to select our immigrants.
And it's a privilege to be Canadians and not these people who are crossing illegally our borders right now.
So that debate on immigration, I think we can have, I hope at the next election, I will be able to have a debate on that subject.
I was not able to, you know, I was shut down and by Kinsella and the Conservative Party, you're a racist.
So I hope that.
And that did not happen in Quebec.
In the media and Quebec, people know Maxine Bernie and they're used to that debate.
Nobody said in Quebec that I was a racist and Kinsella was not credible in Quebec.
But in English Canada, you know, people say, what's that language about immigration?
They were not used to that.
But the more you speak about that, the better it will be.
So there's a nice, I think there's a future for a populist party in this country.
That's why I'm fighting for that.
All right, very interesting.
We spoke yesterday.
You told me you were having a new show, a weekly show.
That's why I'm here.
And I said, well, if I go on your story, can you come on mine?
Tell us a little bit about your plans for the weekly show.
I'm glad you're coming on YouTube.
I hope you're not deplatformed on YouTube.
Tell me, without giving away, you know, I don't want to steal your thunder, but tell us what you can about your new program and the kind of things you want to do.
Yeah, first of all, I will comment the news for sure.
I will have an interview every week with a different person.
And I'm very pleased that you are the first one speaking about free speech.
And we'll have a discussion about the deficit and monetary policy with a statistician and an economist.
A couple of shows from now.
We'll have university professors having some discussion.
So the goal is to have debates and to engage a discussion.
And I'm open also to have some leftists that want to debate something with me at my show.
I'm open for that.
And the goal for me personally is to use the social media and YouTube to promote our ideas because we think that we have the best ideas based on freedom, personal responsibility, respect, fairness.
So that's why it was important and it is important for me to start that YouTube channel.
Well, we'll sure be watching it.
And if it's on YouTube, we'll be able to embed your Tube video, your YouTube videos right on our website so people will find it and we'll be sure to keep an eye for you.
Yeah, that's the official People's Party of Canada YouTube channel.
Perfect.
We'll have a link to it on the show.
Great to see you.
I'm glad you're in high spirits.
I'm glad you've got big plans.
And I hope that some of your ideas will find purchase in the Canadian political culture because we sure need it.
Thank you for having me here, sir.
Thanks.
Well, what do you think of my interview with Maxime Bernier on?
I know that he's a divisive force amongst our viewers.
Some passionately like him.
Some think he was a terrible splitter, a splittist.
And it is true that he did split some of the vote, but not enough to cost Andrew Scheer the election when Andrew Scheer gets full credit for that himself.
In my interview with him, I expressed my own personal view, as I have before, that I wish he never split from the Conservative Party.
And had he managed to stay in that party, not only could he have helped it, I believe, in the last election, but even if he couldn't have saved it, he would obviously be the heir apparent right now.
I don't know.
He certainly seems resolved to stay outside of it, didn't he?