Omar Khadr’s $10.5M Trudeau settlement and commercial flights—despite his al-Qaeda ties and no-fly status—sparked outrage after a Halifax confrontation revealed his unchecked influence, while media ignored risks like Air Canada’s U.S.-Tel Aviv routes. Trudeau’s rejection of Alberta’s energy projects (e.g., $21B Tech Frontier) and conditional "bribes" ($1B annually) may fuel separatism ahead of 2023 elections, despite global emissions rising if Canadian oil is replaced by dirtier alternatives. Federal delays on pipelines like Trans Mountain risk economic backlash, reshaping Canada’s political landscape. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I go over the aftermath of my encounter with Omar Cotter in Halifax's International Airport and what I saw later that night at Dalhousie University.
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Okay, here's the podcast.
Tonight, a day after my encounter with Omar Khadr, what's changed?
It's February 11th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
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The only thing I have to say to the government about why I'm publishing it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Welcome back.
I am back in Toronto.
I was in Halifax for less than 24 hours.
I went there, as you know, last night to see Omar Cotter give his first college speech.
I'm terrified at the prospect of an al-Qaeda terrorist.
And again, that's not my opinion.
He's a confessed, convicted member of al-Qaeda, a war criminal, a murderer, giving a campus speaking tour.
He was at a prestigious university.
Dalhousie, he was the honored guest of the Alumni Association and Romeo Dallaire's Foundation.
Delaire, a former liberal senator and Canadian general, actually introduced Omar Cotter as a magnificent man.
It was grotesque, especially that young college students, and there were actually high school students as well, in the audience being told that Omar Cotter was some sort of hero.
I flew there and as I told you yesterday, I was startled to see Omar Cotter himself on the airplane, just a few rows in front of me.
I didn't see him as I came in because he ducked, but I saw him as we all left to go out and I accosted him in the airport.
It's a video that's had almost 150,000 views in the 24 hours since I uploaded it.
Proud Terrorist Encounter00:08:06
Here, just refresh your memory.
Can I have a word?
Can I talk to you for a minute?
Are you going to take a selfie together?
If you want.
Can I ask you a couple questions?
How did you get on the plane?
I thought you were on the no-fly list.
This is exactly what we figured would happen.
Why don't we go ahead and move away from things that are hurtful?
But aren't you on the no-fly list?
Come on.
Is there security for me or for him?
For filming a person when that's really not an okay thing to do.
So we're trying to move.
Can I ask you guys why you won't let the widow have access to some of the money you go?
He's harassing.
He's not harassing anybody.
That's a convicted al-Qaeda terrorist right there who just flew on an airplane.
Okay, sir.
Well, he's entitled to go.
He's entitled to do what?
He's entitled to leave the airport.
Yeah, that's a good thing.
Excuse me, sir.
It's assault.
Keep your hands off.
Yeah.
Where are you?
Where are you?
Where's the stairs?
Why?
Why have you never renounced your father's terrorism?
I don't understand.
Why have you never renounced your father's terrorist?
Because we're not under Sharia law.
Let's just walk to the park.
Come on, Jason.
Where have you stashed the rest of the money?
Why don't you feel an obligation to pay money to the widow whose husband you murdered and the two children?
This is an airport.
This is a public place.
Exactly, that's why I'm filming.
Sir, she's touching you.
That's battery.
No, it's not.
Yes, it is, actually.
My hands are open.
That's a terrorist.
That's an al-Qaeda terrorist right there.
Al-Qaeda terrorist.
It's an al-Qaeda terrorist right there.
Al-Qaeda terrorist right there.
Okay, go ahead.
Just go on.
Sir?
Yes?
Sir?
Yeah?
Sir?
Yes.
Yeah?
Why are you touching me?
You're impeding someone from leaving the building.
You're impeding me from leaving the building.
What's your name and badge?
I'll keep my card, sir.
Give it to me.
I will give it to you, sir.
You're very close to being arrested.
You understand me?
And you're very close to getting a civil lawsuit for assault and battery.
Don't jaywalk, sir.
Last walk back there, okay?
Am I clear?
Don't do your walk.
What are you stepping on me for?
They're doing your job.
They're doing your job.
And what job is that?
Keeping the public safe.
Whose safety was in breach there?
Everyone's safety, sir.
You're a goddamn liar, and you know it.
You're a disgrace to that badge, and you're a disgrace.
I'm proud of what I do, sir.
You're proud of defending a terrorist?
I'm proud of keeping people safe, sir.
Safe from whom?
I thought that was incredible.
Not just that Cotter was so brazen.
I mean, smiling, standing there, not a car in the world.
What did he care if I was asking him a few questions?
The guy's worth $10.5 million.
He's being invited to speak at university campuses, an honored guest being called the magnificent man.
I'm the one being hustled away by police and threatened with arrest.
Wouldn't you be smiling from ear to ear if you were him?
The irony that I was threatened with a jaywalking arrest while someone who had just murdered an American was the guest of honor, given the key to the city.
I found that quite startling.
But again, my main purpose lay ahead.
I wanted to see what Omar Cotter would say.
I went to the event at Dalhousie, and I had paid in advance for the ticket.
I had received confirmation just really hours earlier that I was indeed admitted.
I paid my money.
Of course, I paid money to fly to Halifax to buy a hotel room for the night because of the hour of the event.
And when I approached, I was immediately targeted by a whack of campus security and Halifax police who said I couldn't come in.
I had a ticket.
I had flown in.
I was banned.
No reason at all other than, I suppose, I had the wrong opinions.
I argued with them for about 15 minutes.
Here's some low lights of how that went.
Just wait and see.
If it's not a problem.
So there is a problem?
It's not a problem.
It's okay.
We'll just wait one second.
We'll just wait.
We'll have some people here come speak to you.
Well, I don't want to speak to them.
I want to go in.
Sure, not a problem.
Okay.
We've been asked to inform you that you're not welcome here tonight.
By whom?
I know the terrorist doesn't want me, but I'm not going to leave because I've done nothing wrong.
I paid for the ticket and I have not caused a disturbance.
I've not broken any rules.
And the fact that a terrorist might not want me here is not of interest to me.
I'm not a leader.
Are you refusing to leave?
Yeah.
It's not welcoming him here today.
What do you mean, the university's not welcoming him?
So I got an email from you as recently as yesterday saying it was fine.
I think you're lying.
Who told you?
You're making this up.
No, I'm not making this up.
Well, show me your authority.
You don't speak through this event.
I want your names.
What's your name?
And why won't you tell me your name?
It's a little cowardly.
Are you running this event here today?
Yes.
So these guys say I'm kicked out.
And I say I have a written confirmation that I'm not.
And I say I've done nothing wrong.
I'm well-behaved, as everyone knows.
I'm extremely polite, as everyone knows.
And I even had a shower, so I'm smelling fresh.
So why are you kicking me out?
Are you recording?
Yes, sir.
No, you shouldn't.
I'm recording a breach upon this evidence.
I'm not going to record in there.
We may have to hand you over to this attorney to do this.
I'm right here.
I couldn't be closer if he was touching me.
I mean, we're practically bosom buddies.
He's about four inches taller than me, but other than that, we're a spinning image.
I'm sort of embarrassed you wearing those medals at an event with a guy who murdered allies.
I respect the fact that you earned those medals.
I find it bizarre that you would stand on guard for a terrorist war criminal al-Qaeda murderer.
I'm interested in getting in.
I'm happy to follow the rules.
But you put me through 10 minutes of embarrassment.
So what do you want?
Would you like to go in, sir?
I would.
All right.
And will you let me in?
All right.
Thank you.
I was in transit.
I mean, really, at that point, I thought if they're really going to arrest me and handcuff me, let that happen.
Let that be the message from Dalhousie, a place that literally arrests journalists, citizens with no criminal record at all.
I hadn't done it.
I had just walked in.
I hadn't caused a disturbance or anything.
And imagine if they had actually arrested me that night while giving an evening of honors to an al-Qaeda terrorist.
I presume that's what made them change at the last minute.
They really were counting on me to be submissive and walk myself out, but I've decided I've had it with that.
I'd say, I don't like butting heads with police.
I said, I grew up in a family.
The police were regarded at the absolute top of the heap in terms of people you should respect, even people you should obey.
These days I find both of those hard to do as police become increasingly political.
Air Canada's Surprise00:13:23
I want to say that when I was on the airplane, as I told you yesterday, I talked to both the flight attendant and the co-pilot who genuinely seemed completely surprised by what I had revealed to them.
I was reached out to by Air Canada on Twitter who asked for more details and never got back to me once I sent them a quick note.
I think that Air Canada was a victim here, certainly not a perpetrator.
My theory, after talking to some others with some experience in government, is that Justin Trudeau most likely took Omar Cotter off the no-fly list as part of a secret package of gifts to him in addition to the public ones we know about.
As you recall, a couple years ago, Justin Trudeau gave Omar Cotter a $10.5 million check, a public apology.
He arranged the check to evade the family of Christopher Speer, the U.S. Army medic murdered by Cotter.
Obviously, there were other things that the public didn't learn about.
I suspect that taking Cotter off the no-fly list was one of them.
Something that I'm not sure how Air Canada feels about, either as a corporation or from a customer service point of view, or even from the safety of their own staff, pilots and flight attendants.
Would you feel comfortable being a flight attendant knowing that an al-Qaeda member, not just a timid member, but someone who actually murdered, is flying on a plane?
And we were flying from Toronto to Halifax, but I happen to know that Air Canada flies daily from Toronto to Tel Aviv.
That's a big airplane full of Jews.
That's a juicy target for an al-Qaeda terrorist.
Would Omar Cotter simply be allowed to board that flight?
Of course, in Israel, he would be turned around and sent back.
But who let him on the plane?
Justin Trudeau, that's who.
I find it troubling that that would be the case.
And I hope that Air Canada takes steps.
I can tell you that in the last day, I've been in touch with some friends that I made when I wrote my book about Omar Cotter called The Enemy Within, Terror Lies in the White Washington of Omar Cotter.
I made some friends in the Pentagon and in the United States, and in fact, a friend close to the White House who were very interested in counterterrorism.
They were startled by the story.
And I can tell you that both the counterterrorism desk at the White House as well as the Pentagon are now aware that Omar Cotter flew over U.S. airspace.
Here's a map of the route of Flight 608 that I was on with Omar Cotter yesterday.
As you can see, the geography of the border, the United States juts up.
I think that's the state of Vermont.
We flew across U.S. airspace for about an hour, by my estimate.
Not only is that against Omar Cotter's plea deal, but again, what does Al-Qaeda do on airplanes in New England?
I mean, God forbid, may it never happen.
I hate to even say the words.
But al-Qaeda, especially, their horrific macabre reputation and specialty is taking airplanes in New England and flying them into targets.
Why would Canada, and I'm not blaming Air Canada, why would Canada the country, Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister, permit Cotter to fly over U.S. airspace?
And how many times has he done so?
I mean, this is the first time I detected it, but surely it's not the first time Cotter has flown.
He's been to Toronto before.
He's been around the world, around the country before.
How many times has he flown?
I find it deeply troubling.
I want to talk a little bit about the reaction from other media to yesterday's events.
And by yesterday's events, I mean my own accosting of Cotter in the airport and the gala evening for Cotter itself.
First, in terms of the reaction by the public that Omar Cotter is flying, to me that's shocking news.
Would you like to get on a plane and sit down next to a convicted, confessed al-Qaeda terrorist?
Would you feel comfortable?
I mean, forget about just him hijacking or blowing up the plane.
Would you feel comfortable to him being on the plane at all?
Justin Trudeau doesn't have to fly with a terrorist on his plane.
He flies on private jets.
Would you feel comfortable sitting down next to Omar Cotter?
Other than a few people chirping at me on Twitter, I haven't seen a single news story in the entire Canadian media party, the entire legacy media, about the fact that Omar Cotter is now flying on commercial planes.
Have you?
Maybe I missed it, but I keep a pretty close eye on these things.
Not only do they not care, if they care, they're thrilled about it.
They know they just better not mention it because ordinary Canadians despise Omar Cotter, the murderer.
I should tell you that I've had a fair amount of interest in the United States.
Today, for example, I appeared on Glenn Beck's Blaze TV channel to talk about it, and I have another media invitation later on.
The United States is more interested about this.
I saw a story in an Israeli newspaper about a terrorist flying planes.
They find that madness in Israel in Canada.
Well, that's life under Trudeau.
It's one more thing I want to mention about the media.
Last night, Andrew Lawton from True North was at the same event, and it was great to have an ally there.
I sat in the mass of the audience as a regular ticket holder.
Andrew Lawton came in as a journalist, so he was in a media room.
I did not go into the media room.
He told me afterwards that there were several reporters there who said I ought to be arrested.
Andrew Lawton overheard them.
They were all in the little media room together.
He said there's about a half dozen reporters there.
I was just in the main crowd.
He didn't recognize them.
I later asked him, well, who were they?
He didn't know.
I suppose they were local Halifax journalists.
They didn't say that the terrorist Omar Cotter should be arrested or imprisoned or banned from flying.
Simply the fact that I was asking challenging questions, that was worthy of being arrested.
That's what Andrew Lawton told me.
So I sat in the crowd and there was a no-filming rule.
And there was nothing so dramatic, there was nothing hidden there that I wanted to film in contravention of the no-filming rule.
And they did announce at the top of the event that they would be recording it and publishing it.
And it'll be interesting to see if they keep their word.
I must tell you that listening to the whole event, really nothing was said of interest by Omar Cotter.
His answers were vague, sometimes cryptic, always self-serving.
But he really says very little.
And I think it's a clever tactic because anyone who asks him a loving, gushing, loaded question, loaded in a good way for him, he sort of answers in a fog that the question asker can project onto Omar Cotter whatever they want.
In fact, thinking about it, since Cotter has been out of prison, we actually haven't heard that many meaningful things from his own mouth.
One of the ways he's been rehabilitated in the court of media opinion, not public opinion, the public still hates him, but the media party, the court party, fancy society like Dalhousie University's elite, is that all these do-gooders, these social workers, these noble people, noble in their own mind, ask a question to Omar Cotter.
He gives sort of a foggy answer and they say, ah, yes, he agrees with me.
And so it's all these do-gooders projecting themselves upon Cotter.
And Cotter's saying very little.
He said really nothing of note last night.
I probably would have broken their no videoing ban had he said something spicy, but he didn't really.
The real performance art was the other people running the event who were emoting.
I want to tell you an observation I made about the crowd.
I didn't quite understand it at first, but I felt like I was on the set of The View or another daytime TV show, even though it was nighttime.
I estimate that about three quarters of the people in the room were women, white liberal women, between the ages of 35 and 55.
It was quite pronounced.
I mean, you would think that the subjects of terrorism and war and crime, justice, and foreign relations and Afghanistan, you would think that would be a masculine thing.
And indeed, there were men there, and I saw some men, Halifax being a military city, wearing their ribbons.
But most of the people there were sort of moms, wine aunts, maybe.
But it was quite gripping to watch them watch Cotter.
I know this sounds odd, but there were hundreds of people there.
And so it wasn't just one or two.
There were dozens of these moms who, I have to say, they reminded me of women who fall in love with serial killers, become their pen pals, meet them in prison, and literally marry serial killers.
who are in prison.
It's a psychological phenomenon.
You can look it up in any psychological journal.
Partly it's these women believing that they can heal a broken soul.
Oh, Charles Manson, he's just broken.
He just needs someone to love him and fix him.
Oh, Omar Cotter, he's been broken.
I can love him and fix it.
So some of it is that maternal instinct to heal and protect and fix.
I have to say with others, it clearly was a sort of romantic lust.
It was a strange, strange room to be in.
And the woman who epitomized this was the MC of the whole event, who was having an emotional moment on the stage and said so.
Said it was one of the most remarkable evenings of her life.
It was not.
But for her, it was everything.
It was her moral satisfaction.
It was pretty gross to me.
I thought it was interesting that Omar Cotter knew how to work it.
Let me close on this.
The event was officially styled as a talk about child soldiers.
That's why Romeo Delaire started off.
And I acknowledge that there is a phenomenon of child soldiers.
I'm talking about kids eight or nine years old who are sometimes put on mind-altering drugs, sent out with a rifle and told to shoot, and do so with no capacity at all, complete puppets of adults who send them into war.
I acknowledge that that phenomenon exists.
And there was one other guest last night, Ishmael Beya, who probably fits that definition.
And I understand that that is a particular problem, especially in places like Africa.
Child soldiers, and it's a particular phenomenon.
And if a child is of tender years, eight, nine, ten years old, if they're hepped up on drugs and they're sent in almost like suicide killers, I understand that that child is a victim as well as a murderer.
Omar Cotter was not eight, nine, ten years old.
He was a few weeks shy of his 16th birthday.
He was completely mature and knew what he was doing.
I should remind you that when Omar Cotter was finally captured, he was in a bunker in Afghanistan and the Americans and their Afghan translators and the local allies called to the bunker and said, we are going to attack the bunker now.
All women and children can go free.
And indeed, the women and children fled the bunker.
Not Omar Cotter.
He chose to stay with the men because he was a man.
A few weeks shy of 16 is a man by any and every legal definition.
Omar Cotter has gamed the system.
There was so much love and affection and healing femininity in that room, properly targeted at genuine child soldiers like Ishmael Beyond, that Omar Cotter has simply conned and gamed the same way he has gamed the legal system, gamed Trudeau's naivete and Islamophilia, and pocketed $10.5 million, and even gamed the system at the airport.
I'm being harassed.
Officer, he's harassing me.
He knew what buttons to push.
What I saw yesterday troubled me deeply.
The reaction to it troubled me even more.
The fact that the media wanted me arrested, not Cotter.
The fact that the entire media party is silent on the fact that Cotter is flying passenger planes.
And as usual, if anything's going to stop it, it'll probably be our American allies.
I know why Omar Cotter was smiling from ear to ear yesterday.
Don't you?
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Reducing Emissions, Increasing Risk00:15:40
Well, Justin Trudeau is already on his third trip or vacation for 2020.
That's quite a feat.
He's in Africa hanging out with the president of the Toronto Raptors and Ahmed Hassan, his Somali-Canadian cabinet minister.
He's making no bones about it.
He's on a bribery tour, giving millions of dollars in foreign aid to some of the most corrupt dictators in the world in return for their vote at the United Nations.
Canada is running for a seat on the United Nations Security Council.
This is very important to a narcissist like Justin Trudeau.
Less important to Trudeau are things like, oh, managing the coronavirus outbreak or dealing with real issues like pipeline construction.
And in Alberta, the tech oil sands mine, a $21 billion project of private sector money that has already received every environmental and aboriginal approval necessary.
It's just waiting for his own pen.
And let me connect the two.
Scroll for a second through Justin Trudeau's Twitter feed.
There he meets with the head of Somalia, there with the head of Cabo Verde.
Have you ever heard of Cape Verde?
It's also called?
I looked it up.
Canada and Cape Verde have annual bilateral trade of $2.5 million.
That's it for the whole year.
Trudeau's trip there alone probably boosted that by 20%.
Imagine spending time and effort trying to grow a $2.5 million year trade relationship to what, $2.6 million?
That would be a success.
Instead of saying yes to a $21 billion private sector jobs project.
And more than that, look at his absolute warm smiles and handshakes with every tinpod dictator in Africa.
When was the last time you saw Justin Trudeau express such genuine affection towards the premiers of Alberta or Saskatchewan?
He won't even meet with them and shake a hand in a photo like that, let alone say we must increase trade.
I show you all that because it's a good way to introduce our next guest, our friend Lauren Gunter, senior columnist with the Edmonton Sun, who has a new column out, and I recommend that you read it.
It's called Ottawa Faction Appears to be readying green jobs retraining rather than improve frontier mine.
And Lauren Gunter joins us now.
Lauren Trudeau's celebrating an extra $100,000 worth of trade here and there on a trip that costs more than that, while he looks ready to kill the tech frontier oil sands mine.
I'm not sure they're ready yet, but they would really like to if they think they could.
There are, I'm told, two factions within the cabinet.
About two-thirds of the cabinet, most of them coming from Ontario and some from Quebec, would like to kill tech.
Others realize that, A, the federal government needs the money that's going to come out of the taxes on tech, but also if they reject tech, there's no predicting what Albertin's reaction is going to be.
I mean, my prediction is that separatist sentiment in the province will skyrocket.
Tech is tech's frontier mine is, as you said, $21 billion.
It's 7,000 jobs.
It's $12 billion a year to the Alberta economy.
It's $8 billion, $8 billion with a B to private incomes in, you know, to family incomes in Alberta.
And then there's this huge ripple effect.
About 20% of the amount that will be generated in jobs and income will be outside of Alberta.
And it's long-lasting.
It's a 40-year project.
And those jobs in Ontario making pipe and in BC supplying electronics, those will all last for the duration that the mine is open.
So it's a good deal for the entire country.
Not only that, I mean, the entire country should be worried if the Liberals turn it down because people outside the energy sector, international investors in other sectors are going to say, gee, I don't know if I really want to put my money into Quebec, into New Brunswick,
into Nova Scotia, when the federal government in Canada is prepared to ignore all of the expert advice, ignore all of its regulators' decisions on whether or not to license developments like this and just go based solely on its own political benefits to whether or not they will license this.
It's just so capricious.
It's so transient that a lot of international investors outside the energy sector are simply going to say, it's not worth risking it in Canada.
Yeah.
I mean, this is $21 billion of private sector money.
It's not from the government.
A lot of it will actually flow to the government.
So it's not even Trudeau's money.
And as I mentioned at the outset, it's already met every possible environmental safety Aboriginal approval to kill it out of pure political spite.
I noticed that the new heritage minister, the guy who's talking about licensing and registering websites, he said to reporters today that he's so embarrassed that they're even considering Tech Frontier.
He's not even going to talk about it in public.
Obviously, he's one of the ones fomenting against it.
It's just incredible the lengths that Justin Trudeau would go to break the law.
Remember, he was convicted of breaking the law, the Conflict of Interest Act, over SNC Lavland, which nominally was to save some engineering jobs in Quebec.
Those jobs haven't gone away, by the way.
The whole thing was a fib.
But he would go to great lengths for 9,000 jobs in Quebec that were not in jeopardy.
But he would whimsically and capriciously kill 7,000 direct jobs, countless indirect jobs, just to be cool with Gerald Butts and the rest of his environmental finance friends.
And to get Greta to, and get Greta to send him a nice card at Christmastime or something.
I've come to call the liberal cabinet the Greta cult.
Yeah.
Because they seem to pay far more attention to what a 16-year-old Swedish activist thinks than what Canadians think or what they're so caught up in what they call the settled science of climate change that they don't look at any other alternative.
And we have become, I think, the only country in the world that is really trying hard to beggar its own economy, to slow its own economy in the name of meeting our Paris Climate Accord emissions targets.
The Norwegians aren't doing that with their North Sea oil.
The Danes who have wind turbines everywhere on their west coast, they're not doing that.
Nobody's trying to shut down parts of their economy just to make Greta happy or to make the activists happy.
And we are.
And this is the sort of thing that we did with Kyoto, too.
When the Kyoto Accord was signed in 1997, the first really big international climate change accord, there were 38 countries that were signatories to the emissions controls.
Most of the developing world was exempted.
Of those 38 countries, it ended up we were the only country that was prepared to submit itself to legal challenges of its emissions laws by its own citizens and by foreign citizens.
We have done this Boy Scout Act again and again and again, and it's beginning to really hurt economically in Canada.
And I think the tech resources rejection, if it comes, will be probably the final straw.
I have to give Jean Cretchen credit.
He signed an insane reduction number at the Kyoto Protocol, but he actually never really acted on that.
In fact, I think it's fair to say that his government helped put the regulatory regime in place to allow the growth and acceleration of the oil sands.
It's very unlike me to praise a liberal, especially at the time I was working with Preston Manning.
We were fighting against Jean-Cretchen every day.
But if I look back at it, how can I say anything other than far from opposing the oil sands, Kretchen, I'd almost say encouraged them.
I mean, I don't want to go too far on that, but he didn't slap a carbon tax on them.
He didn't badmouth them.
He didn't demonize them.
No.
And the thing about Kretchen and the economic ministers, like the finance minister, industry minister, natural resources minister in his cabinet was they were grown-ups.
And what a grown-up's attitude would be towards Canadian energy is that we produce energy more environmentally efficiently than any other large producer.
There's a group at Yale University that looks at the environmental records of all the countries in the world.
And of the top 10 oil producers, Canada has the number one environmental record.
So we are good at producing oil and gas in environmentally intelligent ways.
And that means then that when we sell our oil or gas to other countries, we're probably bringing down emissions because we produce fewer emissions to get that energy out of the ground and down pipelines and across the ocean than any other major producer.
And that's just on the environmental side.
I remember when I wrote my book, Ethical Oil, I did the math.
It was a really grotesque calculation, but I wanted to make the point.
I don't know if you know, but Sudan is quite an oil producer.
In fact, it's pretty much all run by state oil companies now because of sanctions and whatnot.
But there was a point in time when a Canadian company called Talisman Energy had a big stake in there.
They were sort of driven out by boycotts.
And funny enough, the boycott stopped once the only Western company left.
One of the reasons Sudan is under sanctions and whatnot is they had a genocide in a region called Darfur.
So here's what I did.
And I don't mean to be gross, Lauren, but you talked about carbon dioxide and environment.
What about blood oil?
There really is blood oil out there, blood for oil.
What I did is I took the number of people murdered in the genocide of Darfur.
I know that's gross.
Calculated the amount of blood per human body times, I think it was 400,000 people killed, divided into the number of barrels of oil produced by Sudan over that period of time.
And you could get a measurement, and I know this is gross, of human blood per barrel of oil.
And it worked out to about a lipstick tube full of human oil per barrel if you were into gross math.
And my point about saying that gross calculation, which is unthinkable and grotesque, is that's how it is in the oil dictatorships of the world.
And so, yeah, our oil has a few puffs of CO2 less than Venezuelan oil, let's say, but we also have less blood in our oil and less, you know, terrorism and less stoning of gays and things.
That's the whole thesis of ethical oil.
But I don't think the liberals actually care about that.
As my point is, here's Justin Trudeau traipsing through the dictatorships of Africa.
He's not wagging his finger at them.
No, no.
But the point I was making is that, you know, say it's 10 units of whatever per barrel of our oil and the worldwide average is 14 units.
If you shutter, if you keep in the ground a barrel of Canadian oil, it's going to be sold to another country by yet a different producer.
So instead of 10 units of emissions, now that other country is buying oil that had 14 units of emission.
And if your whole purpose, as the liberals say, is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, by shuttering Canadian oil, you're actually increasing the number of emissions.
Right.
Because the oil in other countries is going to come from less environmentally efficient sources.
It is such preposterously juvenile thing.
The federal cabinet must be an awful lot like a sophomore political science seminar where you sit around a table and you discuss the high-minded ideological ideas that you've been reading about in your textbooks and you just sigh a lot and you put your hand to the back of your back of your hand to your forehead and you swoon and tweet.
And it's just such a juvenile mentality.
You know, I can imagine it being like a meeting full of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is everyone saying, well, I remember I read an article once in Vox about this, or as a woman of color, my view is this, like it's just a woke Olympics and no one's ever had a job, no one's ever done anything.
I think, I mean, I get your point, absolutely.
Every barrel of ethical oil produced displaces one barrel of conflict oil.
That's exactly, I think we were making the same point.
But the bigger point is Northern Gateway also had Aboriginal and environmental approval.
Trudeau killed it.
Energy East, he rigged the rules and he killed it.
Trans Mountain, he killed it.
He claims it's alive, but it's on life support.
It's not being built.
I don't think it ever will be.
You throw in one more thing that's already approved and no one's going to believe you anymore.
And then I think you're going to see a capital flight.
And I think politically, people are saying, well, we're done.
I think you're exactly right.
The only question is, will Jason Kenney still keep writing his letters to Jean-Cretta to Justin Trudeau saying, please stop being so mean to us?
There has to be an or else, or those letters don't go anywhere.
Well, and as I said in the column that you prefaced at the beginning, we are being thrown crumbs in Alberta.
There was a story last week came out from Reuters, and there have been follow-up stories in other outlets where it's clear the liberals are raising a couple of flags to see if we will salute them.
We in Alberta will salute them.
The idea is that, well, you know, if we were to reject Tech Frontier, Tech's Frontier Mine, but we were going to give you $1 billion a year for equalization, job training, and business startups, green business startup.
What Makes Sense00:04:32
Would that satisfy you?
And I am just absolutely, I think I hope I'm fairly typical of Albertans.
I absolutely enraged and insulted by them.
Just get out of the way.
Just let us do what we do well.
We will do it as environmentally friendly as possible.
And we will bring in a lot of money for the entire country.
This is not rocket surgery.
You do not have to have several degrees in order to figure this out.
It's quite straightforward.
We don't want bribes.
We don't want buyouts.
We don't want payoffs.
We simply want the federal government to do what makes sense.
And what makes sense is to allow Tech Frontier and Trans Mountain and Energy East and a lot of those others to go ahead.
Yeah.
You know, there's got to be some grown-up somewhere in the government.
I mean, whoever had the wisdom to move Catherine McKenna out of the environment, that's a sign of some maturity somewhere.
Jonathan Wilkinson, the new environment minister, is less rhetorically crazy, but he is equally intellectually bad.
I was researching him a bit today, and at least he has some business experience.
Road scholars, so he's not as stupid as Catherine McKenna.
Ran a business for some years, so he's not as inexperienced.
I have a flicker of hope with him, but I've got to think that there is a grown-up.
And the grown-ups, I don't know who it is.
It's certainly not Justin Trudeau.
It's not Gerald Butz who despises Alberta.
I don't know who this mystery grown-up is.
Maybe I'm just wishing that such a person existed.
But I think one of two things is going to happen.
Either they're going to approve this mine and do the right thing, and it'll be a tremendous relief to Alberta and the markets, or they're going to deliberately kill it.
And not just for Greta reasons, but because they want an angry separatist Alberta as a political foil.
Justin Trudeau almost lost the last election.
The conservatives were sort of a disgruntled Western rump.
They got some seats in Ontario, but not that many.
Wouldn't Trudeau like to run in the year 2023 against angry separatists in the West who he would never get their votes anyways?
And he could be the green savior saying, I reject their extremism and their separatism, sort of like Pierre Trudeau loved fighting with Quebec separatists and stoked the separatism that he then presented himself as a solution to.
Maybe the diabolical strategy by the grown-up here, Lorne, is to demonize and bait the Alberta bear on purpose.
So maybe it's not just a goofy Greta, oh, Thee, this is good for the environment.
Maybe it's diabolical that they want an Alberta separatist movement to run against in 2023.
Yeah, I'm not sure that they're that clever, but I think that doesn't bother them.
I mean, I'm sure that That scenario has been put to them by some of their strategists, by some of the cabinet ministers, and the response has been, yeah, so.
I think they would be quite happy to have that happen.
I'm not quite sure that they're clever enough to make that their goal.
But that's certainly, I think we're getting set up for an announcement sometime, maybe not soon, but maybe this year sometime, that Transmountain won't go ahead.
You notice that the feds let it be known that the price of the pipeline has almost doubled since they bought it, largely because of all of the delays that they have allowed to happen.
And I think they're going to say to voters in the lower mainland in BC, Quebec, and Ontario, where they don't really care about pipelines anyway, well, we don't want you as taxpayers to be on the hook for this very expensive project.
And so to save you, we're going to kill it.
At which point, you know, you're going to have to redraw the map of Canada.
I really do think that that's a serious, serious possibility.
Well, these are dangerous days, that's for sure.
Terrorist Threats Tomorrow00:00:54
Lauren Kunter, it's great to have you, as always, on the show.
Thanks very much for your time.
You bet.
All right, there you have it.
Lauren's column in the Emmettson Sun is called Ottawa Faction Appears to be readying green jobs retraining rather than approved frontier mind.
A terrifying moon.
Stay with us.
More ahead on the devil.
Well, tomorrow I'll get back to regular shows.
I just, my head is still reeling by the absurd and bizarre encounter I had yesterday.
I was flying to Halifax, thinking I would see Omar Cotter on the stage only, not thinking he would be on the same plane as me, just a few rows ahead.
I probably could have predicted that the media party would completely ignore it.