Justin Trudeau faced backlash for prioritizing feminist photo ops and STEM workshops over Canada’s 10% TSX crash amid oil price drops and coronavirus panic, with 237 Canadians returning from a quarantined cruise ship. Critics exposed inconsistent travel screening—flights from Iran like Tehran weren’t properly vetted—and accused the WHO of China-influenced propaganda, while climate activists pushed "degrowth" narratives, warning of potential future government overreach. Past viral scares (SARS, swine flu) and media ties to Trudeau’s funding sources fueled skepticism about official responses, suggesting opportunism over genuine crisis management. [Automatically generated summary]
Today we talk about coronavirus moving from a worry to a panic.
I think that's what happened today.
Add in the falling price of oil and Canada's stock market crashed more than it has in, well, in more than 30 years.
237 Canadians got off the coronavirus cruise ship in San Francisco.
Lots of things happening today, but where was Trudeau?
I'll tell you and I'll show you his itinerary.
But before I do, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's our premium service where you get the video version of this podcast too.
Just go to rebelnews.com and it's eight bucks a month, which I think is a heck of a deal.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, the coronavirus worry turns to a panic.
So guess how Justin Trudeau spent his day?
It's March 9th 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 to the government is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Bit of a crazy day today.
I think people have been looking out of the corner of their eye at the coronavirus situation for a few weeks now and it hasn't hit home hard in North America.
China was first, then South Korea and Iran and Italy, which seems odd, but there it was.
And now Italy has more than 10 million people under quarantine in Italy.
And now Israel is contemplating putting literally anyone who comes in from another country, everyone, under quarantine.
Today, a giant cruise ship that had a coronavirus outbreak has finally docked in Oakland near San Francisco.
Virus test kits had been delivered to the ship by helicopter.
Cruise ships are close quarters, people living and eating and breathing next to each other.
The ship finally docked today and 237 Canadians are on it.
Things seem to be speeding up.
When the stock market opened today, the TSX plunged nearly 10% right away, wiping away about a decade worth of gains.
It was the largest one-day drop since the 1980s.
I think a lot of that decline was because of the sudden drop in oil prices.
An OPEC glut.
Maybe Saudi Arabia and other oil regimes looking to put real pressure on competitors in Russia and the United States.
Maybe they're worried about the economy slowing down because of coronavirus.
Of course, that hits Canada hard too.
We still do pump oil and export it despite the lack of new pipelines to grow that production and export.
It's still our most valuable export commodity, our source of hard U.S. currency.
But I'm sure the coronavirus didn't help.
And the world's view that we're just not a good place to invest.
Warren Buffett is always ahead of the curve.
He announced he was getting out last week before the stock market.
So all in all, a very dramatic morning.
Maybe because of that San Francisco cruise news today, Canada's public safety, public health officer, excuse me, said we should all stop going on cruises.
I've asked Canadians to think twice about going on cruise ships.
Today, the Public Health Agency of Canada is recommending that Canadians avoid all cruise ship travel due to COVID-19.
Cruise ships have passengers from around the world who may be arriving from areas with known or unknown spread of the novel coronavirus.
The virus can spread quickly on board cruise ships due to the close contact between passengers.
Older people and people with a weakened immune system or underlying medical conditions are at a higher risk of developing severe disease.
Virus On Cruise Risk00:06:01
I get it.
We have a rebel news cruise scheduled for July four months from now.
We're reaching out to the cruise company to get advice.
It's hard to proceed in the face of that health advice, and we obviously don't want to endanger any of our rebel passengers.
Hopefully this health crisis will pass, or hopefully we can be scheduled to another date in the future.
If you're signed up for the cruise, we'll keep you posted.
Obviously, your health comes first and our health, too.
I don't want to get sick either, of course.
I note that while Canadians are being told not to go on cruise ships so far, foreigners aren't being stopped from coming to Canada.
Most aren't even really being screened.
I mentioned that Iran was one of the worst places for the infection, and even senior Iranian politicians are getting the virus.
Some are dying.
But still, as our David Menzies reported the other day, people are flying in from Iran all the time.
Did you catch this?
I've been tipped off by the two gentlemen behind me, Nasser Pulley and Sean Zada, that many of the people on this flight are from the number two hotspot in the world for the coronavirus.
That would be Iran.
And you know what, folks?
It's worse than you think.
You are coming from Tehran right now, am I correct?
And you were in Tehran for three weeks, he told me.
And we just came to Toronto Airport.
They just checked you with the machine or whatever that they checked you on.
And they have not asked you.
Okay.
You came to Deha.
Satan.
You came to Deha from Tehran.
And from Tehran, you came to England.
In Tehran, they check us.
Okay.
In Qatar, go ahead, they check us.
Okay.
And here, no check.
No screening.
That's real reporting from David Menzies.
Real questions, real concerns.
But you're not allowed to ask about Canada's response.
A few days ago, I pointed out that even China, the source of the virus, was worried about flights from Iran evacuating their people from Iran, but Canada, not yet.
And rushing to Trudeau's political aid, responding to my tweet, was the Global Mails Mark McKinnon, who wrote this in reply to me.
He said, there are no direct flights between Iran and Canada, which is why so many Canadians were on board Ukrainian Airlines Flight 752.
But carry on.
I will carry on, Mark.
I'm not sure exactly why it's relevant that people have a quick stopover from Tehran on their way to Canada.
How does that stop the virus?
How does that rebut my point?
I'm not sure of the point.
Other than Canada's media party is exceedingly protective of their paymaster, Justin Trudeau, and it shows in weird ways.
Like I say, today started with a plunging stock market in Canada and in the United States too.
So if you're a Canadian professor or pundit, you could talk about the result that affects your own country, your own pension plan.
You could, or you could attack Trump.
Like this professor, Paul Ferry, and I'm not really picking on him, but this is what I mean.
He quoted a tweet from Donald Trump a couple months ago boasting about how well the stock market was doing then.
Do you see that at the bottom there?
And then he wrote himself, sir, can we get an update on this?
I'm curious to find out more.
I mean, that's funny, I guess.
I mean, the stock market plunging isn't funny for anyone whose pension funds are invested in them, which actually would include that professor.
But professors have a job for life, but anything to tweak Trump, orange man, bad.
But, again, I'm not picking on this guy, Paul Ferry.
I sort of like him.
It was just the first example I came across.
He's a Canadian professor.
So why is he grilling Trump instead of Trudeau about our plunging stock market?
Trump is actually ahead of Trudeau in every respect on the coronavirus.
He raised the alarm much earlier.
He spent money much earlier.
He had press conferences with public officers of health much earlier.
He brought in quarantines earlier.
Even the cruise thing, he was ahead of Trudeau.
He's ahead of Canada by days or weeks, in some cases by months, depending on what action.
I should remind you that when the first cases of coronavirus arrived in Ontario, it was the Ontario provincial government that had an emergency weekend press conference.
Doug Ford's people, Trudeau and his people were AWOL.
Trudeau's still sporting that vacation beard.
He's still on vacation, though.
So why is the instinct in Canadians in Canada's commentary class to mock Trump, but not to mock Trudeau?
Yesterday when it was announced that the 237 Canadians on that cruise ship would land in Oakland, Trudeau wasn't working.
Do you see that there?
It says personal.
He took the whole day off just for fun.
When does the prime minister of a G7 country ever take a day off for fun, let alone in the middle of a crisis or several crises?
But today's itinerary, on the day of the stock market crash, on the day of the virus, on the day the oil price tumbles, which will affect taxes and royalties and balances of trade, Trudeau is spending it doing feminist photo ops.
I'm not kidding.
Let me read from his itinerary today.
Their prime minister will participate in an armchair discussion with representatives of CEO ventures.
Get it?
Minister of Small Business, Export Promotion, and International Trade, Mary Ng will be in attendance.
Oh, good.
Oh, good.
Then at 11.15, busy day, the prime minister will participate in a roundtable with representatives of Xio Ventures.
Minister of Small Business, Export Promotion, International Trade, Mary Ng will be in attendance there too.
And then he flies to Ottawa for what?
The Prime Minister will participate in an after-school STEM, that science, technology, engineering, math workshop for girls hosted by Actua.
So busy day.
I mean, he's logging five hours today.
Steps Taken Unknown00:03:37
Three photo ops in five hours.
That's a pretty good clip.
All to prove how feminist our male feminist, super feminist is, because I guess that's the most important thing going on in the country right now, isn't it?
I'm sure it's important to have girls in math, but maybe that's not actually the constitutional responsibility of the prime minister in the midst of one, two, three crises.
Look, I don't know what the whole answer is to coronavirus.
Here's something Trump tweeted this morning.
He says, so last year, 37,000 Americans died from the common flu.
It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year.
Nothing is shut down.
Life and the economy go on.
At this moment, there are 546 confirmed cases of coronavirus with 22 deaths.
Think about that.
Okay, I will think about that, but I want to know if coronavirus is going to be worse and how much worse and what we're doing about it as a country, as an individual.
What should I do about it?
I don't have those answers yet.
And viruses don't respond to political weapons, tweets, polls, campaign speeches.
They're objective.
They're inanimate.
They don't care about human politics.
The great disgrace of the World Health Organization, which ought to be leading the fight but has been co-opted and corrupted by China, is that instead of fighting the flu, they're engaging in politics.
Look at this.
They're talking about ethnicity.
They're telling people what to call the flu.
They don't want it called the Wuhan flu or the Chinese virus.
Say that's racist, even though it did in fact come from China.
I mean, German measles, Spanish flu, we say those things.
They're all named after the place they came from.
But you're racist, if you call it Wuhan flu or China flu, even though that's where it's from.
Look, I understand why China's propaganda mills are focusing on that to distract, but the World Health Organization has discredited itself.
So I'm not much interested in politics, but I'd like to see my country's leader at least pretend to be on the job and at least try to stay ahead of things instead of just taking the Chinese line.
There's nothing to worry about, so stop being so racist.
I think we'll get through it.
I hope so for myself, for my family and friends, our company, our viewers, our country, for the world.
I'd like a normal life, not a life of quarantine like Italy.
Or the life of bizarre martial law like we see leaking out of China.
What are they spraying there, by the way?
What is that?
And what's the point of spraying the street, by the way, when it's people who have the virus?
That's very, very strange, isn't it?
I hope we'll get through.
I think we'll get through it.
I hope it's not as bad as our own imaginations or what Hollywood has told us an epidemic would look like.
But I'm pretty sure if we get through it, it won't be because of anything that our vacationing photo op prime minister does.
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Well, things seem to be getting serious for coronavirus.
237 Canadians disembarking a cruise ship in Oakland, California, headed for Trenton, the military base there where they will be quarantined.
Canada's public health officer has strongly recommended that people no longer go on cruises.
And yet we haven't stopped flights coming in from countries like Iran or China.
Last time I was at the airport, they simply ask you if you've been in Wuhan and not other places, actually.
Climate Activists Exploit Coronavirus00:14:04
I don't know what steps are being taken.
I don't know what steps should be taken.
As always, Canada lags behind the United States.
Perhaps this whole thing is overblown.
Perhaps it's just social media with its endless cycles getting way ahead of itself.
I mean, Twitter certainly manages to magnify things.
Perhaps it's a panic, or perhaps it's real.
We don't quite know and we might not know till it's over.
But one thing we do know right now is that coronavirus, a virus that kills people, is being hailed as an ally of the environmental movement and a punishment for evil mankind that's not doing our bit to fight global warming as if this virus was in any way linked to it.
I see that former United Nations UN climate chief Christina Figueres says that not only will the virus cull people, but it'll mean less trade, less travel, less commerce, less emissions.
And in the prestigious Times of London newspaper, there's a headline written by Ed Conway: Coronavirus can trigger a new industrial revolution.
The disease could be the shock we need to harness new technology and new ways of working.
The environmentalist left loves this virus.
And joining us now via Skype from his home studio is our friend Mark Moreno, the CEO of Climate Depot, where I first saw the story about the UN climate chief.
Mark, great to see you again.
I've seen even crazier things on Twitter.
These are just respectable, reputable people saying this.
On Twitter, people are downright cheering the virus as a way of thinning the herd of people.
Well, think about it.
If you're part of the environmental left and the activists that started in the 1960s with Paul Ehrlich's overpopulation bomb, he wanted to put in sterilization agents in the water to affect the masses so that they couldn't reproduce.
You have people like Hans Schulenhuber, by the way, who appears in my sequel, Climate Hustle 2, coming out, an exclusive interview.
He wanted a CO2 footprint for every man, woman, and child on the planet.
And he also said the carrying capacity of the earth is roughly 1 billion people.
Now, this is a top UN advisor, the EU advisor, German climate advisor, saying that basically we should eliminate six to seven billion people that they're hurting the earth.
So it's no surprise now that when the coronavirus is hitting, you have, again, like you said, respectable, and I use quotes because they're respectable by the mainstream media.
We have Christina Figueres, as you mentioned.
We have an astrophysicist writing in his blog that essentially this is, he's celebrating the benefits of coronavirus and he calls it, quote, fantastic to the environment.
We have The Week Magazine, which is a mainstream media publication, openly talking about the coronavirus is positive for the environment and that this is going to be a significant reduction in our carbon footprint.
So these are people that are looking at the coronavirus as a wonderful thing that's an opportunity.
And they're actually, in many cases, jealous, Ezra.
They're jealous that climate activists couldn't mobilize this kind of reaction.
They're jealous of the virus.
Yeah.
You know, you and I have discussed in the past how it's simply junk science when climate extremists say there's more tornadoes, there's more hurricanes because of global warming.
It's statistically false.
It's probably unprovable in any event.
But there just simply has been less of those extreme climate events.
But at least there was some nexus between weather and weather.
I mean, you can understand how someone could theoretically say because of the climate, there is a climate anomaly.
But for them to link a virus to global warming, there's not even a scientific basis for that.
There's not even, it's not even a thing.
I think it reveals not the world, but them.
I don't think we learn anything about the world when Christina Fregueres says, and I'm quoting from your website here: if we continue to deny, delude, and delay on climate change, there'll be more coronavirus outbreaks.
That's the former chief of the UN's Global Warming Directorate.
There's no science there.
No, there's not.
In fact, this shows that there never has been.
It's a hatred for people.
No, and what it shows is that the climate activists, the UN and others, are willing to just say, hey, if it's bad, global warming is going to cause more of it.
They're not going to mention, first of all, any potential benefits, even if you buy the science of CO2 driving climate, which you shouldn't.
But even if you accept it, they're not going to ever highlight the greening of the earth, the desert shrinking, great for plants, animals, food production.
They're just never going to mention that.
But what they are is if it's bad, it's climate.
And so you're right.
Christina Figueres went off on this rant and she mentioned deng fever, malaria.
And here's the problem.
The climate science community, again, I'm using a lot of quotes here today.
The climate science community has predicted more malaria, less malaria, more deng fever, less deng fever, and a whole host of issues.
So by the way, no matter what happens, they're right.
That's number one.
But number two is they don't even know themselves.
Because especially with something like Corona, if the world were to actually warm up right now, they're saying in warmer tropics, there's not even any outbreak.
We don't even know like the southern hemisphere doesn't have any outbreak.
Warm weather is not friendly to these types of viruses.
And that's the thing.
But again, they don't really care about that.
They're just trying to scare you.
They're trying to sell you on their solution.
And that's ultimately when you learn that fact, then that's the key line.
They're trying to sell you a solution like a salesman would.
Then all the science claims and all the other solution claims all fall into place.
You realize this is just one big sales pitch, and the salesman's willing to say and do anything to get the sale.
Yeah, I just want to read a little bit from this Times article.
It just shows you what they're thinking.
This is from Ed Conway.
He says, Don't take this the wrong way, but if you were a young hardline environmentalist looking for the ultimate weapon against climate change, you could hardly design anything better than coronavirus, unlike most other such diseases.
It kills mostly the old, who, let's face it, are more likely to be climate skeptics.
He is erotic about this.
He is, these are all the things that, I mean, he says, oh, I'm not saying this, but let me just say it and pretend someone else is saying that's his lead sentence in the Times.
These guys are excited.
They are.
Again, it reduces population, it lowers carbon footprint, it reduces travel.
And here's the key thing: it increases government intrusion.
I mean, imagine this: quarantines, shutting down of industries, keeping kids home from school, shutting an entire sporting events down.
They're looking at a complete, you know, essentially a dictatorial style response to this in many governments.
Now, I happen to believe this is, again, if you, you know, there's a lot of serious people looking at this, and people like Michael Fimento actually has a great column in the New York Post on the coronavirus.
But I think, as Roosevelt said at the beginning of World War II for FDR, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
So, the greatest threat we face is the government and media counterreaction to this virus.
But it's really a chilling effect.
And it should be an eye-opener to anyone willing to investigate what the climate activists, what the media, what the UN officials have to say about this.
And they are just drooling at the prospect of this government expansion, the government power that's going to happen because of coronavirus fears.
And they want to apply that.
They want those powers for climate.
And they want the public to get used to this way of living.
They want the public to get used to the travel restrictions, to get used to quarantine, to get used to, you know, the UK power chief said, get used to electricity only when it's available.
They want people to get used to living the life they want only when it's government approved and okayed by your health official, et cetera.
So this is the vision.
Living under a quarantined viral virus hysteria is how the climate activists envision the future living under a climate emergency hysteria.
So it's a real eye-opener.
If you like life under coronavirus fears and government action, then you'll love life under the climate agenda.
Yeah, you know, on the one hand, I recall the Y2K panic that didn't come through and various other panics along the way.
On the other hand, I see what's happening in China, I think, but I actually don't know what's happening in China.
I see videotapes mainly of government brutality, not actually of the health situation.
I think part of the problem is we don't know what the real facts are.
I find it odd that Italy has put more than 10 million people under quarantine because Italy has a pretty free press and a fairly liberal democracy.
I don't know what to make of that.
I mean, on the one hand, I don't want to be foolish.
I remember when we interviewed a statistical hydrologist about the likelihood of once in a century floods and how it makes sense to have insurance and how it makes sense to spend some money on an unlikely outcome.
His advice was just have an M16 and a bucket full of bullets in your attic.
That's probably enough.
But how perhaps you want to have some food anyway stored away?
Like he was making the statistical case for being a prepper.
That's sort of a different approach than give all the power to the government.
It's sort of the opposite approach.
It's prepare for anarchy.
I feel like I'm somewhere in between.
I don't want to be reckless.
Maybe I should make some prudent adjustments to my life, but I certainly don't want to hand things over to the government or these climate opportunists.
Last word to you, Mark.
I mean, I'm trying to figure things out here.
I don't want to be blind to the facts, but I don't know what facts to believe.
Well, you know, exactly.
And I think they're still sorting all that out.
It's hard when a virus started in China and they have a poor healthcare system to begin with, poor statistical reporting.
So I think what's happened here is as this virus unfolds in the next few weeks, we will get a very clear picture.
And I think it's always sensible to do the normal things like washing your hands and avoiding contact with someone who has it.
But I think ultimately government cannot stop the virus.
They might be able to slow it a little, but I think coronavirus is here the same way SARS is here and the swine flu, all the previous viral scares that we've had.
The question remains, you have to let it play out and see how bad it's going to be.
But I think the larger issue again here, and one point I wanted to make, Ezra, is them talking about the economic slowdown and how good that's going to be for the climate from coronavirus, the economic slowdown and the emissions.
Goes back to the climate activists.
And these are all the UN conferences.
These are the climate activists like Kevin Anderson and other degrowth activists in the climate community.
And they actually call for planned recessions to fight global warming.
Well, this is the answer to them.
They've been calling for this for years.
And it's in my movie, Climate Hustle 2.
They actually go through and we talk about the whole degrowth movement.
Well, what is the coronavirus reaction but a planned recession and a degrowth movement?
What is the Green New Deal but a planned recession?
So this is one of the greatest things to fall into the laps of the climate activists in a long time because they're getting people used to the idea of government essentially shutting down the economy when faced with an emergency.
And what, and in this case, it's viral, but in the case of the activists, they want us to believe in the climate emergency and they are just lusting for the powers, the strings that can manipulate the government powers to enforce this climate emergency reaction upon the public.
So watch closely how this is handled.
I think you're right.
We don't have all the facts about the virus yet, but one thing we do know with perfect certainty is that the global warming activists are using it as an opportunity.
It's only a matter of time before Saint Greta starts blessing us to rid us of this evil.
I'm sure that's just moments away.
Mark Morano, boss of Climate Depot, great to see you as always.
Thank you, Ezra.
And by the way, the website's climatehustle2.com, the movie coming out April 21st.
And is that number two or T-W-O?
Either one, actually.
And we actually put T-O-O, and you can spell two any way you want.
Climathustle2.com.
All right.
Well, we'll put that website on the screen.
And I know I bumped into you briefly the other day.
And as I told you before, we're happy to help promote Climate Hustle 2 up here in Canada.
Canada has more extreme climate activists than proportionately than America because we have them embedded right in our cabinets.
So we'll stay in touch with you on that, my friend.
All right.
Thanks a lot, Ezra.
Appreciate it.
All right.
There you have it.
Mark Morano with climatepot.com and climatehustle2.com.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Police And Media Bias00:02:11
Hey, welcome back on my monologue Friday about the police announcing they will not investigate train derailments and CBC slanted coverage of the story.
Paul writes, this will escalate because these Tides terrorists know they won't face any consequences.
Eventually there will be death.
This is on their hands.
It could be.
I think that there's a lot of hands making this disaster.
I think the Tides Foundation has absolutely funded radical and extremist groups.
I think that the media has not scrutinized them effectively and has turned a blind eye to their misconduct because they support them.
I think Justin Trudeau and his senior staff are in league with them.
We know that.
Gerald Butz was once the head of the World Wildlife Foundation in Canada.
So many senior staff are.
At the end of the day, police, though, are supposed to be different.
And if the police refuse to arrest, I think the direct blame would fall on them.
That's my thoughts.
What are yours?
Chris writes, the real scary part is these tree huggers want to derail a train not knowing what it is carrying.
Yeah, well, I mean, listen, what?
Do you think they're actually environmentalists?
They're just anarchists.
They're paid to protest or they're protesting for a shakedown.
They don't actually care about the environment.
Peter writes, when a news agency is cherry-picking its reporting based on a political affiliation, they become nothing more than propaganda.
Mainstream free press in Canada is a joke.
I think that every media has their bias.
We certainly have ours.
But when you literally take cash from the central news figure in the country, Justin Trudeau, everything you report on is tainted.
We may have some affection for conservative politicians, the conservative view on things, but if we literally were taking $600 million from someone, which the newspapers are taking from Trudeau, or $1.5 billion from someone, which is the CBC taking from Trudeau, how can you possibly report on the person paying you objectively?
You can't.
Well, that's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, good night.