Ezra Levant’s episode critiques globalization’s risks, exposing Canada’s 47% reliance on Chinese imports for consumer goods and vulnerabilities like virus exposure and slave labor in Xinjiang. He contrasts this with Trump’s tax/tariff policies that reshored production, arguing partial disengagement is feasible despite interconnectedness. Meanwhile, Sam Goldstein’s Law Society of Ontario slate—winning all Toronto seats and 22/57 total—defeated a divisive "Statement of Principles" mandating illiberal diversity platitudes, exposing ideological conflicts over minority rights vs. forced group-based discrimination. Goldstein warns that equity initiatives are undermining legal ethics, like presumption of innocence, while predicting backlash from opponents like Malcolm Mercer. The episode suggests globalization’s flaws and the legal profession’s ideological fractures may force reckoning with both systems’ sustainability. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I do some blue skying and brainstorming on what life would be like without globalization.
I don't mean globalism, the ideology of internationalism.
I mean the meat and potato stuff, importing, exporting, offshoring, things like that.
Be interesting in your thoughts, interesting in your thoughts on it.
Please consider subscribing to our Rebel News Plus.
Just go to RebelNews.com.
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You get the video version of this podcast as well as Sheila Gunread's show and David Menzie's show.
Okay, here's my show today.
Tonight, does the coronavirus prove that globalization was a bad idea?
It's March 10th 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 about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Hey, can I show you a quick clip from Global News the other day?
It's a public health expert.
They call him a doctor.
I'm unfamiliar with him, but he seems credible.
He's making the case that we can't just stop the coronavirus.
It's going to come here.
So we should focus on dealing with the virus rather than trying to prevent it.
Here, take a look.
It's just under one minute.
You know, it's a real misconception that we can somehow close our borders.
This has been shown over and over again in studies that you can't close borders anymore.
If we were a 16th century Europe, you could do it, but you can't do it now.
And we are so interconnected.
If you think about the goods and services and food that we have in Canada, most of it's not from here.
And so we are unable to close our borders that way.
And really, this is about risk mitigation rather than trying to like stop the risk.
And so that's why we're screening people with travel histories.
But there's also very much an assumption that viruses cross borders.
They don't need passports and they will very happily, this virus will very happily spread to every country in the world at some point.
And so we need to think beyond that and really think about what are the strategies that we can use in Canada to try to slow this down, but we're not going to stop it.
By the way, that's true about global warming.
Give me a tangent here for a second.
The Earth is warming very, very slightly, very, very slowly, but it is warming.
I think that's a good thing.
Our whole planet is still emerging from the ice ages.
You know, the North Pole used to be covered in forests.
There's evidence of that, petrified forest buried under the ice.
You can't stop the very slow emergence from that ice age, and you wouldn't want to, by the way.
People and all life, in fact, do better in warmth than in cold.
More people die in a cold snap than from any heat wave.
As my friend Dr. Patrick Moore points out, where are all the biggest cities in the world?
Where is the most diversity of plant and animal life in the world?
It's around the equator, where it's warmest.
Life is hardest and sparsest in the cold north and far south.
So if you were worried about global warming, and I say there's no reason to be, you'd be smarter to acknowledge that it is going to happen no matter what.
Has been happening for millennia.
And the best thing to do with your energies, if you're worried, is to try to mitigate, try to manage, try to deal with any downsides.
You can't stop it, so learn to live with it.
In Canada, for example, that probably means longer growing seasons, milder winters.
I call that a win.
Anyways, forgive that tangent.
I just wish we had that sort of methodological thinking on global warming instead of the insanity that thinks that by levying a carbon tax, you're going to stop the weather.
You'll just stop the entire climate by paying taxes and recycling or something.
It's not going to happen.
Like a virus, the climate does not respond to politics or tweets or speeches or taxes.
It is what it is.
It's not going to change because Greta scowls at you.
So in a way, I appreciate the honesty from that doctor.
And it's true, isn't it?
I mean, look at anything in your grocery store, especially during the winter.
How much of it is from other countries?
For food, from the United States and Mexico, but also further around the world, increasingly.
If you're eating fish, odds are it was caught in Asia.
A useless fact that I happen to know for some reason is that China produces about half of the world's apples.
They also make most of the world's apple computers too, of course, but the fruit.
It's a global economy for food and computers and everything manufactured.
Try finding something in Walmart that's not made in China.
Or try shopping on Amazon, the mighty international online shipper.
Or pharmaceuticals.
So much of our medicine comes from China.
And raw materials to make everything, like rare earth metals, like steel is made in China.
So it's true what the man said.
We are so interconnected.
If you think about the goods and services and food that we have in Canada, most of it's not from here.
It's true.
If you like to get cheap apples in the winter time, you have to accept coronavirus, I guess, and try to mitigate it because coronavirus doesn't need a passport, as he said.
This isn't the 16th century when you could just put up walls, he said.
So it's settled.
If you like your Apple iPhone, if you like your Apple fruit, if you like your Walmart toys, your exotic fruits when it's minus 20, and saving a few bucks off your larger items, you've simply got to go with globalization.
And hey, don't we get rich off it too?
I mean, all the things we sell to foreigners.
Well, not really.
Actually, we pretty much just sell everything to the Americans who are like family.
It's like our own country.
Here, take a look at this chart.
This is from the World Bank.
We sell 75% of our stuff to the United States.
We sell just over 4% of our stuff to China.
They really don't buy our stuff.
Maybe they would if we ever built an oil pipeline to the coast, but we won't.
Here's what we import in terms of consumer goods.
That's everything in Walmart, for example.
47% of our consumer goods is from the States.
15% from China.
So that's a little bit more.
On the food side, we import 61% of our food from the States.
Then comes France and Italy.
China, thankfully, is just over 2%.
I guess what I'm driving at is, yeah, we buy all sorts of things from China.
Lots of junk.
Thankfully, not a lot of food.
Too much of our medicine, too much of strategic things like computers.
But as Apple computers recently demonstrated, they can make computers in the United States at a profit.
Trump has lowered taxes so much in the U.S. that all sorts of factories are reshoring to the United States.
Remember that word, offshoring?
Now they're reshoring and repatriating money from abroad back home to America.
So here's my point.
Donald Trump cut taxes, pulling U.S. companies to bring their factories back home.
And then Trump put tariffs on China, pushing American factories to relocate back home, or at least somewhere other than China.
So there was the pull of low taxes, the push of tariffs, both of which he did for his America First agenda, economic prosperity and patriotism.
Those were condemned as jingoistic, but if you were a factory owner and you took the plunge and took a hint and moved your factory back to America last year, you'd be thinking you're lucky stars right now, wouldn't you?
Globalization is built on mass-scale economies where saving a few pennies per pound of something or a few dollars per ton of something, it can add up if you're dealing with millions or billions of pounds or tons.
But there are other prices to pay besides just a few percent profit here and there.
I think we see the flip side of that argument with foreign cheap illegal workers, especially in the United States, but also here in Canada.
California is a key example.
I mean, if you're paying illegal workers a few dollars an hour less, let's say it's even $10 an hour less.
Why, that might work out to 25 cents per avocado that you're saving.
10 cents cheaper for an orange or a tomato.
Now, if you multiply that by millions or billions, that's a lot of money.
I mean, it's more efficient that way.
That's globalization.
Saves you a bit of money, but what's the cost?
That doctor, Michael Gardham, says you can't just close borders.
I think what he meant was you can't just close borders if you want to have cheap Chinese apples and cheap Chinese aspirin.
And by cheap, I mean a few pennies cheaper.
He's right.
But he's stating that as if you'd be insane to sacrifice that savings.
It reminds me a bit of Brexit, where the entire establishment was going crazy, warning you what life would be like if the UK removed itself from a political institution called the European Union.
You just wouldn't be able to get any sandwiches anymore.
But certainly there would be serious problems in terms of some of the fresh ingredients we bring in from the European Union and also from overseas, particularly if we have problems at the ports and we can't get ingredients through because they're all fresh and don't have a very long shelf life and we've got no chance of stockpiling fresh ingredients.
So I think the answer from the sandwich industry is going to be that it's going to limit the amount of choice that consumers have if we suddenly crash out Brexit in the way that it's being talked about.
Yeah, no, that's crazy.
You can get sandwiches.
And even if it were true, which of course it wasn't, was having exotic ingredients in your sandwich worth giving up political independence?
Was it really that important?
Is saving 25 cents per avocado worth having illegals in the country, displacing legal workers and illegals who don't pay taxes, who aren't registered in any way with the law, and yet who still take social services, schools, hospitals, lots of police.
Is the state of California really ahead of the game by saving 25 cents per avocado?
If you've outsourced your entire steel industry to China so that steel is a bit cheaper, let's say it's even, oh, I'm going to make up a number, $500 cheaper in your car.
Not that there's a lot of steel in cars anymore, but how often do you buy a new car?
Once every five or ten years?
So is saving 500 bucks, and it's not even that much, every five years worth shutting down your entire country's steel industry?
Is it worth having thousands of unemployed men in Hamilton, Ontario or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so your new car is $40,000 instead of $40,500?
Trump points out that this globalization always seemed to be one way.
America had to import cheap foreign goods, but those same countries never seemed to import American goods.
He's been talking about this for close to 40 years.
I took out a full-page ad in major U.S. newspapers last year criticizing U.S. foreign policy.
What would you do differently, Donald?
I'd make our allies, forgetting about the enemies, the enemies you can't talk to so easily, I'd make our allies pay their fair share.
We're a debtor nation.
Something's going to happen over the next number of years with this country, because you can't keep going on losing 200 billion, and yet we let Japan come in and dump everything right into our markets and everything.
It's not free trade.
If you ever go to Japan right now and try to sell something, forget about it, Albert.
Just forget about it.
It's almost impossible.
They don't have laws against it.
They just make it impossible.
They come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs, they knock the hell out of our companies.
And hey, I have tremendous respect for the Japanese people.
I mean, you can respect somebody that's beaten the hell out of you, but they are beating the hell out of this country.
Kuwait, they live like kings.
The poorest person in Kuwait, they live like kings.
And yet they're not paying.
We make it possible for them to sell their oil.
Why aren't they paying us 25% of what they're making?
It's a joke.
It's true.
Why is globalization outsourcing American and Canadian jobs to China and importing their products?
Why is it never them importing our stuff?
I think it's important to point something out.
And you know me, I'm not an environmentalist, but China is by far the most polluted country in the world.
I'd say India is a close second.
Part of it is because they're going through their industrial revolution now, building hundreds of coal-fired power plants, electrifying their countries for the first time, building things that we built decades or even centuries ago.
They're catching up at very fast speed.
Good for them.
But first of all, we outsourced our factories to them.
And all that smoke and pollution, well, a good chunk of that is to make our stuff.
Our stuff in our Walmarts and our Apple computer stores, it's pollution, but it's over there, out of sight, out of mind for us.
So while we can criticize China and India for pollution, and I mean real pollution, not fake pollution of carbon dioxide, but real pollution, well, some of that pollution is precisely because we want them to make our stuff, and that's how they make it cheaper.
They have cheap labor over there, of course, and we've just learned that Muslim Chinese people called Uyghurs have been sent to work in slave labor factories for Western brands.
So yeah, that's going to be cheaper than American or Canadian workers.
But also, they have very few employment standards like laws against child labor or laws limiting the number of hours in the work week or laws that call for safety for workers.
And what laws they have are obviously not enforced.
So yeah, that's how you saved $100 on your $1,000 iPhone.
Congratulations to you.
Not only did you not have a high-tech job in New York or Ontario or BC or Washington State, but you had a slave or a semi-slave make it for you.
But you didn't see that part of it, so you can pretend it wasn't on you.
So what has this globalization done for us that Dr. Gardham told us about?
Unhooking From Globalization00:02:05
That's irresistible, that's unchangeable.
It's made us vulnerable to every virus in the world.
It's given us illegal labor at home and slave labor abroad.
It's exported our jobs to foreign factories to pollute.
It's given up our strategic security by putting China in charge of our steel and our pharmaceuticals and our computers and now our internet and now our data and now our cell phones.
I mean, why not use Huawei?
I hear they'll save you a few bucks a month on your internet or something.
No problem.
And that's really what's important, right?
I don't want to give up some parts of globalization.
I like it.
I like the variety of the world.
I like traveling to foreign places.
I like learning from other people.
I like other cultures.
I like other food.
I like coming home the best, though.
I like my own family and my friends and my street and my town the best.
I welcome newcomers, but not in such number that I no longer recognize my street and my town and my country.
That's not racism.
It's not about race.
That's just what it means to talk about your home.
What's the difference between a house and a home?
A home is your place.
It's not really measured by saving 25 cents on an avocado.
Maybe it's impossible to avoid coronavirus.
Maybe it's impossible to unhook from the global system of trade or the global internet that now flows increasingly through China all your data.
But I think actually we can unhook a bit.
I don't think China is the future.
I think it actually aborted its own future.
I think it killed itself, and we're about to see that.
I think the UK and other European countries will come soon, I think, will prove that you can unhook at least a bit and then more from global networks if it suits you.
And Trump himself proves that you can get along without China, economically, strategically, political.
I'd like to try a bit.
What do you think?
Stay with us for more.
Battle for 56,00000:05:21
It is tough to fight the establishment.
It's tough, especially if you're for freedom these days and slowly political correctness works its way through our establishments.
And nothing is more established than the Law Society of Upper Canada.
You can even hear it in their name.
Now they've modernized it.
Now they call themselves Ontario.
They're getting with the Times.
But this is the highest heights of the legal profession in Ontario.
It regulates all lawyers.
It elects senior lawyers to manage the affair of lawyers.
They're called benchers.
And frankly, being elected a bencher is usually a precursor to becoming a judge.
These are the fanciest of the fancy people.
Try fighting them over a politically correct battle.
You are fighting Goliath.
But what happens if you actually win?
And joining us now in studio is a man who stood on principle for freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, freedom of expression against the benchers establishment.
And he won.
And here to explain it to us is our friend Samuel Goldstein.
Great to see you again.
Great to see you in time.
Yes, yes.
First of all, you now are a bencher of the Law Society.
I am.
That's a you.
I'm the fanciest.
That's the fanciest.
I was going to say, I don't think we've ever had someone that fancy on this show before.
You carry yourself humbly, but how many lawyers are there in Ontario?
There are, I think there are about 47,000 lawyers in Oslo.
Now, the Law Society of Ontario, as it was changed a couple years ago, also regulates paralegals as well.
So I'm just going to say legal professionals.
And there's about 56, let's say 56,000 legal professionals in Ontario.
I could be off on my numbers.
And how many benchers, as you're called, are there regulating these 56,000 people?
Right, so there are 52 or 53.
I can't remember my specific numbers.
It's not a huge number.
You're like a city hall, really, for years.
But the reason why is because there's a breakdown.
There are 40 benchers elected who are lawyers.
20 from inside Toronto, 20 from outside of Toronto.
And then there are seven lay people who the provincial government appoints.
And then there are five paralegals.
So it's 52.
All right.
Well, that's very interesting.
And really, you govern the profession.
Is that right?
Yeah, so we're a board of directors, essentially.
It's a not-for-profit, non-share-issuing organization.
But you have a lot of power, too.
You can disbar a lawyer, for example, if they misbehave.
You really regulate, instead of politicians regulating lawyers, you really have the power to regulate other lawyers.
Yes, and you just pointed out an important feature of it.
We were the first self-regulating body and we're one of the very few self-regulating bodies.
And what I mean by self-regulating bodies is of the legal profession.
So in other jurisdictions in the world, the law societies there are actually, they don't exist.
The government, as in England, actually regulates the lawyers.
In Canada and Ontario, we are still self-regulated.
And our mandate under the Law Society Act, the fundamental core terms is that we're supposed to make sure that lawyers are competent and lawyers are ethical.
And there's a disciplined tribunal.
I'm actually sit as an adjudicator on the disciplined tribunal.
So it's like you're a judge.
You're a judge who just judges lawyers.
Is that accurate?
Yeah.
That's amazing.
And we can revoke their licenses, as you pointed out.
Now, whenever there's this much power, and when you're dealing with powerful people like lawyers, who in society are, you know, wealthier, more politically connected, they're powerful people.
There will be politics, especially on the regulatory side.
Because imagine exercising control over those 56,000 legal professionals.
And that's where you came in with your fight.
Now, I don't want to misstate it.
So maybe you can tell our viewers, what was the battle about?
What was this great battle about freedom of conscience?
Because that's the kind of stuff we care about here.
And to know that there was a battle, a clash of the Titans, bencher versus bencher.
You know, you guys are the masters of the universe when it comes to law and even judges and the way court cases go and the way you can represent people.
There was a brutal battle in the law society, wasn't there?
Yeah, first of all, I thank you for your flattery about being powerful.
Well, you're the legal profession, you are.
Yeah, so I think that lawyers often inflate our own sense of role in society.
But yes, within the, so as you pointed out, we regulate the lawyers.
And what happened a number of years ago was that there was a statement of principles that was adopted by convocation.
Convocation is what's called the Assembly, like the House of Commons.
It's like the parliament of the lawyers.
Statement Principles00:15:14
Exactly.
And they voted that all lawyers would have to adopt a statement of principles.
And those statement of principles were essentially illiberal ideas.
We can get to them in a moment.
And 22 of us ran on a slate.
And in the last bencher election, which was last year, the benchers are elected every four years.
And all 22 of us got elected.
So it was like a political party running for the Parliament of Lawyers.
And 22 out of 22 of your people won.
Yes.
I find that incredible.
Yeah, look, it truly is incredible.
And the reason, and we haven't told people about the statement of principles, because you just say statement of principles.
Well, that sounds good.
But it's what those principles were.
I mean, if the principles were be honest, don't steal, you know, fight for justice, who wouldn't support that?
But it's what was jammed into the statement of principles that made it so prickly, right?
Yeah, so the statement of principles were really about these warm, fuzzy words, these motherhood issues about diversity, inclusion, and equity.
They sound great words.
Who wouldn't be in favor of those words?
But it was the meaning behind them.
And frankly, as someone who is a free speech advocate like yourself, it doesn't matter whether I have to say something good or if I have to say something bad.
The point is I have a charter right.
The charter right says that I don't have to say things that I don't believe in.
It also says I don't have to say things even if I do believe in.
That's a very fundamental point.
We have a right again.
We have a right for expression, and we also have a right against compelled expression.
Isn't that an interesting point?
Because you're right, the word diversity.
Well, first of all, that's a word that can mean different things to different people.
To me, intellectual diversity is important.
Other people, the only diversity they care about is racial or sexual or characteristics that I don't think we should judge each other on.
But really, it's a Trojan horse for whatever the political power of the day says you have to believe.
That's my thoughts on that.
No, it's absolutely.
And I prefer to, when we talk about diversity of ideas, I actually prefer to talk about pluralism.
Oh, that's good.
And when we're talking about diversity, because diversity is really about this intersectionality of trying to say that there is a hierarchy of people out there are victims, and it's based upon race, and we have to give priority to those people on the top of the list in terms of the victimhood Olympics, the gold medals of the Olympic victimhood races.
And I object to that.
Now, I don't see anything wrong with multiculturalism, right?
I don't see anything wrong with having different, and I don't say racialized, which we'll get to in another moment.
That's a very weird word that's used in the world.
I say, look, we've already talked about ethnic minorities and religious minorities.
I think it's important to provide protection for ethnic and religious minorities.
But that's got nothing to do with compelling someone to make certain platitudes.
Correct.
To say something.
That's what's weird.
Like telling a judge, telling a lawyer you can't be racist, you can't be discriminatory.
I think I've got time for that.
But telling a lawyer he has to testify, I am a diversity activist, or whatever the actual manifestation was, that's where it gets weird and compulsive, and compulsion.
That's the compulsion, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, put this way, there was compulsion because if you didn't sign on to these diversity principles, then they could sanction you.
Now, the law society first intimated that they would sanction people, revoke people's licenses.
Really?
Yeah.
Literally take away a man's livelihood if he didn't sign on to some...
And then they backtracked a little bit and they qualified it.
So either it actually meant something, that you actually believed in your diversity ideas, and you were going to punish people if they didn't go along with what you wanted, or you're just saying people, just tick something off, don't worry about it, in which case you don't believe.
You don't have the courage of your convictions.
You know, you're exactly right.
I mean, first of all, if you believe in diversity, isn't one species of diversity not signing on to a statement?
Like, if you actually believed in diversity, you would let someone not be like you.
Yeah.
And if you forced someone to make some statement, what's the value of a compelled, that's like a jailhouse confession where you're forced to sign something.
If a lawyer doesn't believe it, what's even the point of it?
Well, I think it highlights the intolerance of the social justice warriors and the progressives who existed on convocation.
Sam, you're using language that I use too.
It's quite something for me to see this language in a bencher and your party, I'm going to call it a party, your slave.
Well, we're called a slate.
A slate.
Stop, sop.
That's the statement of principles.
And 22 out of 22 of you won in the election.
Was there a slate against you?
Was there a social justice warrior slate against you?
Or were you sort of the dissidents against everybody?
You know, certainly when we started running, there was a lot of pushback from those people who believed in the statement of principles.
And there's still pushback, because we can get to that point.
They can believe it in their own heart.
Why do they believe it?
But they didn't run a slate against us.
And basically, people just discounted us.
People didn't think we were going to win.
People criticized us for our beliefs.
I didn't think you were going to win.
How could you venture?
Are you a member of the lawsuit?
I just don't have paid money.
No, I'm no longer a lawyer.
Please pay your fees.
You can vote for us next election.
I mean, and that's not me disparaging you.
I just thought, how can you fight the benchers?
How can you fight the law society?
Well, let me tell you something about that.
So we went around and we're looking for people to join us.
And it was very hard because people were afraid of us.
Because it's not just, you talk about the legal establishment.
It's not just the law society, but it's also the legal publications out there are very much in favor of whatever the law society is promoting at the time.
So it was very hard to be treated seriously by like the Law Times or by even other legal or the KN Lawyers magazine, right?
You're constantly publishing articles, interviewing people at then the former treasurer Paul Chabis or the now treasurer Malcolm Mercer who dismissed us.
And if you just let me give me a moment, give me a moment.
I really want to mention Michael Miniar of London, Ontario, who started the website, the Stop SOP website.
And it was initially to oppose the adoption of the Statement of Principles by convocation.
And I got, they phoned me up one day and asked if I would join the group because I had been writing for a columnist for a small legal publication called the Lawyers Daily.
And I had been writing against the SOP for a number for a period of time.
And they asked if they could use one of my articles.
And that's how I got in with them.
We lost the vote ultimately because the convocation voted to adopt it.
And after that, they were like, what should we do?
And I said, well, look, we've got about 600 names on this website, if not more.
Why don't we now turn this into a political movement and run as benchers?
You're an activist.
I love it.
Well, you know.
And so we did.
And a year later, we recruited people.
But people initially, as I said, were afraid to join us.
No one thought we were going to win.
And I remember driving up to Newmarket courthouse.
I had a case up there.
And my wife phoned me up and she said, congratulations.
And I said, you know, I said, oh, I won.
Like, I was surprised.
And I was like, I was concerned, like, who else won?
Right?
I got the fifth highest votes in Toronto.
Wow.
And then she phoned me and she said she'll look.
And then she said, everyone won.
Unbelievable.
That's like a fairy tale come true.
Yeah.
I mean, I followed it.
I thought, well, these guys, they're bravely fighting, but they're going to retreat.
They're going to be killed.
It's going to be a wipeout.
This gives me hope, Sam, because this tells me that maybe there are some people who still understand freedom and independence and the right to be a dissident, the right to be a dissenter.
It gives me a little bit of hope in the legal profession that, frankly, is a flickering flame for me right now.
Is that flame going to be blown out?
And if you came in number five in the whole city, there's a lot of lawyers in Toronto.
It's a very progressive city.
If you came in top five, I find that very encouraging.
Well, I think it also shows that the profession didn't want this.
And the profession is concerned the law society is engaging in this mission creep and going beyond what it really should be doing.
The other thing I think we should point out to your viewers is that in the end, we did defeat the statement of principles.
There was a very long convocation back last year, and I think it was in June.
I love that.
And it went on.
It was a convocation.
It sounds like almost the cardinals meeting to select a pope, like convocation, white smoke coming out of the chimney.
Are these convocations private or are they on the record or what are they like?
Well, they're publicized.
I think they're on the website of the law society.
You can watch that.
I think I've seen some clips from them, but it sounds very fancy, like the high priests getting together.
So you had this convocation, and the statement of principles was very divisive.
It was a very divisive, yeah.
And in fact, the reality is that the law society continues to be very divisive.
There's many subjects which we're discussing.
I mean, we continue to try and fight against the social justice warriors and the so-called progressivism at the Law Society.
And, you know, we're trying to reduce lawyers' fees.
We reduced them by $250 this year.
There was fight back on that.
Nima Hajodi, who's this young lawyer who is the head of the equity group at the Law Society, complained that that money should have gone towards equity issues.
And so we're getting a lot of pushback on the many different topics that we're trying to fight.
Just recently, we talked about how this equity group that has a permanent seat on the equity committee of the Law Society was tweeting all these spurious accusations against a fellow bencher, a colleague of mine who's on the slate.
And the Law Society wouldn't censure him.
So the Law Society itself is tweeting against an elected bencher of the Law Society.
Well, it's not the Law.
He's not a bencher.
He's appointed by this group called the Equity Group, which is like a Trojan horse inside the Law Society.
It has special status on one of the committees.
The rules apparently that I'm bound by a bencher code of conduct, but he's not bound by a bencher code of conduct.
And when we pointed out this anomaly to the convocation the last meeting just two weeks ago, instead of saying, oh, this is a problem, we should solve it, they ignored it and said, well, we're going to table the issue we're not going to talk about.
Because equity isn't about equality.
It's about special status.
You know, all these funny words, the more opaque the word, the more can be jammed through them.
Equity.
Diversity.
Now, you said you have 22 folks on your slate out of 57.
So of the other 35, are all of them really weaponized on this subject, or are some of them just normal folks?
You know, a good question as well.
You know, there are two paralegals who tend to see our point of view, and then there are a number of lay benchers who, despite the fact that we're appointed by the provincial government and voted against the statement of principles, so voted with us in terms of trying to defeat it, they've bought into this diversity stuff.
And it's a bit disappointing to see that.
And the thing is, diversity, I mean...
Let me just, one more, sorry to interrupt you, but you have to understand that, you know, as you know, it's very hard to take sensible positions these days because you're accused of all types of horrible things.
Accused of being racist and so on.
And no one likes to be called racist.
And I truly believe that there, and I know this to be the fact, that there is a group of benchers who didn't necessarily agree with the statement of principles and the other recommendations that this report put forward.
But they felt pressured and bullied by other people who did believe in this to go along with it.
So if you don't support these equity causes, these diversity issues, despite the fact that for very good logical reasons, you're not engaged with on any sort of reasonable basis.
It's just all ad hominem attacks.
So if I may just continue.
So Murray Klippenstein is a guy who has worked for Indigenous Canadians.
He was one of the lawyers on the G20 suing the government at the time.
Really involved in progressive causes.
And he looked at this report by this company, Stratcom, that the Law Society hired, which laid the foundation for the statement of principles.
And he went through the analysis and it showed that the entire analysis of the Stratcom report is invalid.
And no one has actually engaged with him on any reasonable level.
No one's criticized his analysis.
They've only criticized him.
It's all these ad hominem attacks on him.
And that's basically what you're saying.
Yeah, Murray is part of our...
So if you've got a guy who's fighting...
He got the most votes in Toronto.
Really?
Yeah.
The most votes.
He got the most votes.
So Klippenstein sounds Jewish.
He's not.
He's Mennonite.
He's Mennonite.
Okay.
I'm glad I checked.
But my point is, he's fighting the G20 fight.
I'm taking it on the side of the protesters.
Yes.
Okay, so that's very, that's not even liberal.
That is liberal, but that's also left-wing, progressive, whatever.
Look, indigenous people.
He represented the Dudley George family in the Ippowah.
Wow.
He sued Mike Harris.
That's incredible.
I mean, he is right out there on the front lines of progressive public interest law.
And for him to say this diversity BS is BS, Surely that's got to make some other folks shake their head.
If this guy who's out there fighting these fights, like that's way out there, and he's against this.
And here's something else.
He's just recently done.
I mean, I love Murray.
I'm very proud of him.
I'm so glad to be his friend.
And it's very funny how this issue brought us together.
I'd say, because you're on the conservative side of this.
I'm definitely on the conservative side.
But Murray recently won a case in the Superior Court in Ontario.
He's representing a number of Indigenous communities in South Africa against a mining company.
And he's claiming that this mining company in South Africa was raping these Indigenous women.
And he just won a motion which allows him to sue this mining company in Toronto.
I think that was just in the last week or so, wasn't it?
About a month ago.
So that's an extremely prominent case that anyone who cares about minorities, racial minorities, the poor, they ought to say, well, this Klippenstein's a hero.
If he is worried about this statement of forced diversity, you've got to say he's got enough bona fides.
We can't just call him racist.
Are they calling him racist nonetheless?
Politically Charged Rights Dispute00:07:40
It's incredible.
He's probably done more for these.
If he represented Dudley George, he's done more for the downtrodden minorities, whatever, than any of his critics have done.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Look, it's funny when people call me these names because fundamentally, you know, as a classical liberal, my main concern is with the low-income earners, with the poor people, and making sure there's no discrimination.
Well, that's who your clients are.
Well, partly.
I know I'm a criminal lawyer, but I try and do some private clients, not just legal aid.
But, you know, look, I'm also a national legal advisor for Benet Brith, Canada, right?
And I always have believed and still believe that you have to prevent discrimination is wrong.
But it's discrimination based upon prohibited grounds.
It's on an individual basis.
Here, this will be very surprising to you.
Who said that the best way to protect group rights is to protect individual rights?
I don't know.
Pierre Trudeau.
Did he?
You have surprised me.
In his essay, French Canadians and Federalism and his collection of essays from La Cité, the magazine.
You know what?
He wrote that back in the 60s.
And he nailed it.
You know what?
I'm going to give you a question.
You'll have to.
I'm going to start using that.
That's the most enlightened thing I've ever heard ascribed to Trudeau.
Because you protect individual rights, and then you let those individuals decide which parts of their identity are prominent or not.
We don't tell people that they're black.
We don't tell people that they're Jewish.
They're like little blue-eyed, whatever.
That's, you know, whatever you think is important about you.
Listen, I mean, to start judging people by the color of their skin or their religion was a bad idea 50, 60, 70 years ago, and it's still a bad idea.
And you can call it what you want.
You can dress it up as you want, but it's still a bad idea.
And I will continue fighting for individual rights.
I tell you, Sam, I am so impressed with, and I've learned so much here today.
And I'm still a little, you know, I'm very proud and excited to have a venture on Rebel News.
I bet you're going to get some sort of complaint.
I bet you're going to get a complaint about it.
So you're saying that the big election was last year, and it's a four-year term.
Yes.
Do you think that there'll be a counter-revolution?
Do you think that the other side is going to regroup and try and beat you guys in the next election?
Or have they said, okay, maybe we were wrong?
You're good at this.
I don't know.
I'm just wondering.
No, no.
You know, it's a good question again.
From what I understand, I think there will be organization against us.
I think they will run their own slate.
We're always looking for donations to run the campaign for next year, the Stop the SOP.
What's your website?
You know what?
I think it's stopsop.com or Stop Sopp.
We'll check it out.
We'll put it on the next screen with that.
But yes, I do think there'll be pushback.
I think, you know, when we won, the Malcolm Mercer at Treasurer and other people sort of dismissed us as some sort of fluke in the electoral system.
And they said, oh, you don't really represent the majority of people.
I mean, you just told me Klippenstein got more votes than anyone else in Toronto.
Yeah, and interesting enough, Malcolm Mercer, you know, remember there are 20 lawyers from Toronto.
Malcolm Mercer came in 20th.
Oh, and he's telling you and your team, you came in fifth, your buddy came in first, and he's criticizing your credibility.
Yeah, top five people in Toronto were all stops, were all slates.
All five of the top five.
Yeah, as a matter of fact, all 10, I believe.
And he's calling that a fluke.
Yeah.
There's a Jewish word for that.
It's called chutzpah.
In any case, I suspect that there will be, they may very well try and organize against us and run their own slate, but bring it on because I think there is a silent majority out there.
Well, and at least call it what it is, rival political ideas.
And I would rather have them in a slate defined by who they are than sort of sneak it through like they were doing before.
Yeah, well, you know, I will admit that I'm a little, I mean, I think it's sad, really, that convocation is going to be, is becoming politicized the way it is.
I actually don't think that's good for the profession in the long run, but I think it's the reality.
Disagreement with you is I would say it was politicized.
Only now is it politically accountable.
Well, that's look, it was certainly politicized and was politicized.
We didn't start it.
They started it.
Yeah.
Right?
And I agree with you there.
And our slate is a reaction.
It's a response to what they've done.
But going forward, I think we're going to, it will continue to be politicized.
And I hope our goal, my goal, is to be able to win all seats, all 40 seats at the next convocation.
And you're not imposing your ideology on people, the opposite.
You're 40 people to say, we don't want an imposition of politics on us.
Let's just go practice law.
Yeah, because the law, you know, there's a misconception and what's happened through this politicization of it and through Malcolm Mercer trying to argue that there's an expanded mandate for the Law Society is you've been able to incorporate all these politics into all this sort of illiberal ideology.
But the reality is it's a regulatory body.
If you want to go out and change the world, then run for office, run for public office.
The law side, as I said before, its fundamental core mandate is to make sure that lawyers are competent and lawyers are ethical.
And that's all there is to it.
Yeah, it's not a political, it's not a political platform.
No.
Very interesting.
Well, I've learned so much here today, and the number one thing I've learned is that sometimes you can hope, sometimes you can beat City Hall, or in this case, something much fancier than City Hall, the Law Society.
Listen, it's great to have you here.
Was there anything else you wanted to tell us?
Because I know you got some notes and you were reviewing them.
Did we cover the waterfront?
You covered the basics.
Look, there's more to talk, but I think fundamentally these diversity ideology is bad for the law.
It's eroding the presumption of innocence.
But maybe that's a conversation for another time.
Well, let me give you a standing invitation to help us understand the law.
And I think you elocute it very well.
I think our people are interested in the law.
We do some law in our own way here at Rebel News.
I believe in some ways we're transforming into a public interest law firm.
We're fighting for free speech.
We're standing up for people that we think are neglected.
In fact, our legal expense is our second largest expense here at Rebel News.
And I don't even mind because I think we're fighting the good fight.
Well, Ezra, I said off camera that I think a great loss for the legal profession is that you became a journalist and not a lawyer.
You're a very bright guy.
You're very eloquent.
You would have made a great litigator.
You would have made a great member of our slate and a bencher.
Thank you.
Well, it's very nice of you to say those things in our own way.
I think we are practicing some of the ideas that you've outlined there.
But invite me back.
I'll talk about the law.
Listen, standing invitation, we should make this a regular thing.
Our viewers are interested in the law, and especially from your point of view.
Great to have you here.
Thank you very much.
All right.
Cheers.
Well, there you have it.
Sam Goldstein, the leading force behind Stop Sop, and a bencher of the Law Society of Ontario.
And I learned that his freedom slate just swept it.
Isn't that amazing?
All right, stay tuned.
Morehead.
Globalization Mechanics Discussed00:00:41
What do you think of my thoughts on globalization?
That's just the mechanics of it.
I didn't even talk about globalism, which I absolutely reject.
That sort of one world government.
It's the ideology behind globalization.
It's the United Nations.
It's the European Union.
It's these supranational organizations that don't have to answer to anybody.
I think most of us are agreed that globalism is wrong, but globalization of trade and travel, maybe it's not quite all it's cracked up to be either.
I'm interested in your thoughts.
I was blue skying and brainstorming there, but send me your thoughts to Ezra at RebelNews.com.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, good night.