Manny Montenegrino and Ezra Levant critique Canada’s 16th press freedom ranking while exposing its contradictions—like banning reporters from events despite the Media Freedom Coalition. They link China’s 177th rank to its "new world media order," contrasting it with Canada’s lockdown failures: $8B–$10B daily economic damage, 2,000+ projected unemployment-related suicides, and ICU underuse. Early COVID-19 mortality estimates (3%–6%) were inflated by Chinese data; Alberta’s study shows 0.1% fatality rates. Lockdowns persist even in provinces with near-zero deaths, while foreign students—including up to 100,000 from China—receive taxpayer bailouts amid rising domestic joblessness. Canada’s lack of policy opposition reflects deeper systemic compliance, not just Trudeau’s minority government. [Automatically generated summary]
It's Vladimir Lenin's birthday, and it's the anniversary, the 500th day anniversary that China kidnapped two Canadians and has held them hostage ever since.
I pivot from that somehow to talk about the new world rankings of press freedom put up by Reporters Without Borders.
I'll tell you where China is and where Canada is and where America is.
You'll be surprised.
Hey, before I stop talking and get to the show, can you please become a premium subscriber?
Go to RebelNews.com.
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You get the video version of these podcasts.
You get access to shows from Sheila Gunread and David Menzies.
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Okay, here's the podcast.
Tonight, the annual press freedom rankings have been published.
I'll tell you where Canada ranks and where China does.
It's April 22nd, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is government will watch publisher.
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
Unique Identity Emerges00:02:49
Hello, my friends.
It's April 22nd, which is Vladimir Lenin's birthday.
He was truly one of the horrific killers of the 21st century.
Not as prolific as his eventual successor, Joseph Stalin, or his emulator, Mao Zedong, but he made the template.
He laid out the brutal and bloody path.
And it is no coincidence that today is also Earth Day, the day that the war against private industry and private property is rephrased as environmentalism.
It's like a watermelon, green on the outside, but red on the inside.
On this Earth Day for the umpteenth year in a row, North Korea takes the prize for lowest carbon footprint.
They're shivering in the dark, as they are every day, frankly.
Which brings me to the topic of Hong Kong, one of my favorite cities in the world, not only for the experience of being there, the energy, the excitement, the hustle, bustle, the cosmopolitan feeling of a city with hundreds of thousands of the best and brightest expats from around the world working there, including an estimated 300,000 Canadians, if you can believe it.
It's a place with fascinating history and culture of China, but also of the UK, with British civic virtues and the rule of law.
I think it's one of the best places in the world.
And over the last few years, it's developed a unique identity.
As communist China has tried to impose authoritarianism on the city, Hong Kong people have risen up almost in complete unity and redefined themselves as Democrats and freedom lovers.
And they're thinking of themselves as Hong Kong people first.
It's been amazing to watch, I imagine a city of about 8 million people, pretty much the same as New York.
Well, literally 2 million of them physically attended a democracy protest last year.
That's amazing.
I think they really are the most pro-democracy interested place in the world, certainly more than here in Canada.
I think maybe even more than in America.
In fact, the protesters often waved American flags, I think even more heartfelt, if that's possible, than many Americans do.
It was quite something, and I'm so proud that we sent two reporters, first Avi Yamini, and then a follow-up trip with Kian Bexti.
My favorite moment, of course, was when Avi met this guy.
Donald Trump don't trust China!
China is asshole!
That clip has been seen tens of millions of times in so many different platforms.
Just great stuff.
Anyways, 2019 was the year of victory for Hong Kong Democrats over Beijing tyrants.
There were city elections late last year that were seen as a proxy battle over so much more than just who would be the local politicians in charge of things like garbage pickup and pet bylaws.
It was really a referendum on China itself.
And that municipal vote went overwhelmingly towards the freedom side of things.
It was just amazing.
Well, 2020 couldn't be more different from 2019, I regret.
China's Wake-Up Call00:04:00
It's been terrible, I should say.
One silver lining is that the world, which generally ignored Hong Kong last year.
I mean, seriously, I think for a while there, we were the only Canadian journalists who had a camera in Hong Kong.
Well, now the whole world has a proper measure of China and what it's really like as a dictatorship, what it's like towards its own citizens and towards us in the West, who are the real good guys and bad guys over there.
I think we've seen it.
It's been a painful year, but like 9-11, it was a year of clarifying, a painful wake-up call, but maybe we needed a calamity of that gravity to wake up, wake some people up, to the direness of the problem of China.
In the past, I've shown you this international survey by Pew Research, asking people in different countries what they think of China.
Now, this chart is over a year out of date now.
Canadians have been angry at China for more than a year, ever since China kidnapped and held hostage.
Two Canadians, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, say, did you know that today marks the 500th day of their captivity?
500 days longer than Iran held the U.S. hostages.
A scandal that was one reason Jimmy Carter lost in the 1980 election.
500 days.
And I bet that Justin Trudeau will make a public statement marking Earth Day Lenin's birthday, but not the hostage situation.
It'll be fascinating to see those international opinions numbers now on China if Pew Research does their survey again.
I hope they do.
The Chinese government is in full PR spin mode now around the world.
They infected the world because they lied to the world.
And now they're selling the world medical gear after hoovering up all the medical gear from the world.
Oh, and they're making a big show out of giving foreign aid in the form of medical gear, which often turns out to be faulty, to be useless.
Hey, at least they're shipping faulty equipment to Europe at all.
They're not even shipping anything to Canada.
Did you see this outrageous and unbelievable story yesterday?
Canada sent two planes to China to pick up deliveries of medical gear.
And according to Trudeau and his henchmen, Chinese authorities sent the planes home empty.
I'm not kidding.
And get a load of this excuse that liberal cabinet ministers, here's Ahmed Hassan, are using.
Canada sent two planes to get equipment from China and they came home empty-handed.
Like, how does that happen?
How do we send a plane to China and then they say, sorry, that the supplies are gone?
Can you explain how that happens?
No, it wasn't a question of the supplies being gone, Evan.
The Prime Minister addressed this question in his press conference and he indicated that the problem is that, you know, China has strict requirements on how long planes can be on the ground in their airports.
So after a short period of time, our planes had to take off because the supplies were taking a long time to get to the airport.
But we will continue to follow up on those orders.
We are continuing to deliver orders to provinces.
Yeah.
Do you think that's really what happened?
Our plane was parked in a loading zone, didn't put enough quarters in the parking meter, so they only had 15 minutes before they had to move or they'd get a ticket or something.
Yeah.
So apparently we had to leave without medical gear, but it's all good.
Yeah, no problem.
We just sent a cargo jet 14 hours to China to be told to turn around and fly home 14 hours empty.
And apparently that happened twice.
And yeah, it's cool.
No biggie.
Do you actually believe that excuse?
That there was an issue with how long the plane was parked?
Do you believe that?
Yeah, no, me neither.
But then again, these are the liberals who think that the nickname Little Potato is a deep compliment from China.
They really like us, guys.
We're quite proud the prime minister has been given a fond nickname in China.
He is called Tudo, which I believe means potato.
And he is, I can't say the Chinese word, it's Xian Tudo, little potato, because his father, Pierre Elliot Tudo, was senior potato.
So we feel we are off to a great start.
China's African Colonization00:03:07
So yeah, I'd like to see those Pew numbers again on World Opinion About China.
And for Africans to have a say too, you know, China has pretty much colonized Africa.
And believe it or not, China, the land of cheap labor, it brings in cheap labor itself now from Africa to China.
But now the official Chinese line is that the Wuhan virus was caused by Africans.
It's an African thing.
They're to blame.
So anyone black is being kicked out of apartments in China, banned from restaurants and malls, even rounded up on the streets by police.
Take a look at this.
If you come from Africa country, you can go in our building.
But I live in China for 20 years and I have already got my shirt and everything.
Why can't?
I stay in China 20 years.
Or take a look at this.
They can't.
Okay.
Cher came.
Oh, my God.
I'm sorry, I can't have coffee.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, I'm thinking Africa doesn't like the new apartheid.
Here's a Chinese factory in Nigeria, apparently burned to the ground in retaliation by Nigerians against China.
I mean, I hate to say it.
Communist China can be just as bigoted as South Africa.
Check out this popular Chinese TV ad.
Hey, I wonder if all those NBA basketball players who were making pro-China comments last year during the Hong Kong protests to appease their business interests in China, to keep their endorsements for brands in China.
I wonder what they think of all this anti-black racism.
I wonder if they themselves would be allowed back in China despite their skin color.
Yeah, I think the NBA made a really bad bet on a really bad country.
But then again, so did every tech company, every industrial manufacturer, Hollywood.
Anyone who looked at China and saw only 1.5 billion customers, not 1.4 billion prisoners.
NBA Stars and Corporate China00:04:49
So forgive me all of this throat clearing.
It's just a long way of saying it's been an awful year, 2020.
But it's been a revealing year.
Today is an awful day, the 500th day of captivity for the Two Michaels.
But let me tell you something I saw as I scanned my favorite alternative news sources about China.
I mean, you obviously can't trust a word that Chinese official media say, although I read a lot of Chinese official media because I think I can work backwards to see what they're trying to accomplish with their spin.
Here's a tweet boasting about their naval exercise as a rebuke to the United States that recently had a virus outbreak on an aircraft carrier, and it's a threat to Taiwan and other democracies.
As Gordon Chang told us yesterday, China's getting more aggressive, not less aggressive.
And look at this, by way of example.
I showed you all the peaceful democracy protests in Hong Kong last year, very peaceful, culminating in democratic wins in local elections.
Yeah, so what?
As Stalin said, how many tank divisions does the Pope have?
So, you know, you can vote, so what?
As Mao said, power comes out of the barrel of a gun.
So Chinese police just plain old arrested en masse the democracy leaders last week, including very senior pro-democracy politicians, and the West barely noticed, so focused are we on the Chinese virus.
And even Hong Kong people, well, what luck for China that 2 million Hong Kong people can't jam the streets in protest anymore because of that same Chinese virus.
Funny how it works out that way.
So I saw this just in China Seeks New World Media Order, says Watchdog, as Hong Kong plunges to 80th in Press Freedom Index.
And I believe it.
Hong Kong has a rollicking free press, but it is very much under attack.
Communist thugs literally broke in and damaged the printing presses of democracy-oriented newspapers, trashed the place.
There they are going after the EPOC Times.
They've arrested people, as we've just mentioned.
Here, I'll click on the study they refer to, though.
China Seeks New World Media Order, says Watchdog, as Hong Kong plunges to 80th in press freedom.
I'm going to read a bit.
This is from the Hong Kong Free Press.
Hong Kong has plunged seven places in the 2020 World Press Freedom Index, quote, because of its treatment of journalists during pro-democracy and demonstrations, Reporters Without Borders, RSF says.
China, meanwhile, was ranked 177th as it sought a new world media order, according to the French journalism watchdog.
Hong Kong was ranked 73rd in 2019.
Its new ranking marks a significant drop from 18th, where the city stood when the index was created in 2002.
The press freedom rating is released annually to highlight the media freedom situation in 180 countries and regions and measures pluralism, the independence of the media, quality of legislative frameworks, and the safety of journalists, unquote.
Now, far be it from me to object, but I know for a fact that our very scrappy reporters, Avi Amini and Kien Becksy, were unbothered by police as they covered the protests.
It's just a fact.
They weren't bothered at all.
And I don't want to be dramatic, but on any given day here in Canada, our reporter David Menzies is hassled more by police than Kien and Avi were in Hong Kong, including when David was thrown to the ground for peacefully asking some polite questions of Don Cherry's Judas, a man named Ron McClain.
So I don't want to take anything away from what has happened in Hong Kong in the last six months.
China itself has zero press freedom, and if they could, they'd have it that way in Hong Kong itself.
And maybe things have gotten much worse since Avi and Kien were there a few months ago.
And the arrests suggest they might, but I think there might be a little bit of drama in this Reporters Without Borders report on purpose, and that's okay.
So here's the Reporters Without Borders rankings for Hong Kong.
I'm going to read a big chunk.
This is actually now from that think tank that was quoted in the Hong Kong Free Press.
So this is Reporters Without Borders.
They say, Hong Kong saw many cases of violence against the media, mainly by the police and pro-Beijing criminal gangs, during the pro-democracy demonstrations in the summer and autumn of 2019.
The territory is supposed to enjoy separate status as a special administrative region of the People's Republic of China until 2047, but press freedom is already in retreat as a result of pressure from Beijing.
The most notable recent incident was the expulsion of Financial Times Asia editor Victor Mallet in October 2018.
As vice president of the Foreign Correspondence Club of Hong Kong, Mallet had chaired an event that wasn't to Beijing's liking.
The Chinese Communist Party liaison office in Hong Kong controls, partly or entirely, several media outlets in the territory, including two daily newspapers, Tao Kung Pao and Wen Wei Po.
Nonetheless, there is resistance.
It is being led by a handful of independent online media, such as Stan News, Citizen News, The Initium, Hong Kong Free Press, and InMedia.
Okay, so it's getting bad, and there was real violence.
There was an expulsion of a foreign journalist.
I'm frankly not sure if Avi or Kim would be allowed back in Hong Kong today.
Expulsion of Journalists00:08:13
I don't know.
But there still is a free press there.
And along the bottom of that page on Reporters with Borders, you can see there have been no journalists killed in Hong Kong.
Believe it or not, that's a measure they use suggests that they need that measure in some countries.
To be honest, I think this report is more a warning of what is to come rather than what is happening right now.
I just don't believe that it's worse to be a journalist in Hong Kong than many of the 79 countries they put higher than Hong Kong on the rankings.
I mean, East Timor, Malawi, just to pick a couple.
I just don't believe that Japan is at number 66 that low.
Japan is great.
It's free.
It's liberal.
It's safe.
Let me just tell you what they wrote about Japan.
Not connected to Hong Kong.
Let me just show you.
They say the world's third biggest economic power, Japan, is a parliamentary monarchy that, in general, respects the principles of media pluralism.
But journalists find it hard put to fully play their role as democracy's watchdog because of the influence of tradition and business interests.
Journalists have been complaining of a climate of mistrust towards them ever since Shinzo Abe became prime minister again in 2012.
Yeah, sorry, that's got nothing to do with press freedom.
Don't tell me they're number 66 in the world.
It's Japan.
It's free.
I mean, people don't trust journalists.
That's nothing to do with press freedom.
And the United States of America, with its amazing First Amendment, ranked 45.
I'm sorry, I don't believe it.
Let me read some about America.
Press freedom in the United States continued to suffer during President Donald Trump's third year in office.
Arrests, physical assaults, public denigration, and the harassment of journalists continued in 2019, though the numbers of journalists arrested and assaulted were slightly lower than the year prior.
Much of that ire has come from President Trump and his associates in the federal government who have demonstrated the United States is no longer a champion of press freedom at home or abroad.
This dangerous anti-press sentiment has trickled down to local government institutions and the American public.
In March 2019, a leaked document revealed the U.S. government was using a secret database, tracking journalists, activists, and others who border authorities believed should be stopped for questioning when crossing certain checkpoints along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Is that all you got?
Trump was denigrating some journalists in this Mexico thing.
I looked up that border story, and it's true some journalists were pulled aside and asked some secondary questions before being allowed to go right through the border.
I don't know, maybe I should be more concerned about that, but that happens to me, I'd say, once a month when I used to travel.
I mean, yeah, pulled aside for some questions.
Sometimes I don't understand the reasons, but after 10 wasted minutes, I'm on my way.
I'm sorry, that and Donald Trump sparring with Jim Acosta from CNN day after day.
That doesn't make America a bad place for freedom of the press.
This is very partisan.
If America were a bad place for the press, Jim Acosta would not be back in the White House briefing room every single day, delighting in the sparring matches as the president's foil.
He's loving it, and when the White House took away his privilege to attend for one day, he sued and was immediately let back in.
Trump chooses Acosta and other liberal haters almost every day because he likes to spar.
I'm sorry, that doesn't make America a hater of free speech.
This is a political survey.
You know, compare Trump loving to spar with reporters to, say, me and Rebel News.
Kian Becksty, David Menzies, are reporters who are routinely denied access to Trudeau's briefings.
denied access to his briefings every single day right now.
In fact, today we had a legal cross-examination on an affidavit in our continuing lawsuit against Trudeau over that very thing when they banned us from the debates.
And yet Canada is ranked 16th on the press freedom list.
Here, let me read their excuse.
Canada illustrated its growing commitment to international press protections this year when it launched, alongside the United Kingdom, the Media Freedom Coalition in July 2019, creating an international alliance between nations that pledged to champion and defend press freedom.
Oh my God, I know that conference.
I was there.
I was there with Sheila Gunn Reed.
That was the one where literally at the conference called Press Freedom, Media Freedom.
Christia Freeland, our deputy prime minister, then the foreign minister, tried to ban our reporter, Sheila Gunn Reed, at a press freedom conference.
Remember this?
So, Rubber Mail, Global, CTD, Altaxera, CDC, and the National Economic Team.
What about the rest?
The rest of us?
No, no, no.
We know.
That's nonsense.
No, no, no, no.
That is nonsense.
That's...
Let's take us to the room and we can see if we can...
No, we're not going for New York.
We're just not.
We're all going.
This is a media freedom conference.
Yeah, this is ridiculous.
Please don't do that.
So that fake Potemkin conference on free press is why Canada is doing so great because they gave money to a conference.
That's like that Joni Mitchell song.
They took all the trees and put them in the tree museum.
That's the only place Canada believes in free speech at a conference about free speech.
But they couldn't even keep up that pretense for the duration about the conference itself before kicking Sheila out.
No mention of the corrosive effects of Trudeau bailing out 99% of the newspapers and thus controlling them with money.
No mention of Stephen Gilbo's plan to license websites.
What we are saying is that we will not ask news organizations to have license.
And I refer people to the report, which does make an independent panel that makes a recommendation that on the issue of discoverability, media organization would need to have a license.
But that would not, and media can be confusing.
I recognize that because the report talks about media, but not necessarily in the sense necessarily of news agencies.
And maybe the confusion comes from there.
Thank you very much.
And no mention of Dominique LeBon's brainwave to make it illegal to have the wrong opinions about the virus.
That's what China did.
And China is ranked 177 out of 180.
Now, I agree with that.
North Korea is last, by the way.
I agree with that.
But look, it's hardwired right into the mandate letter that Trudeau sent Gilbo, the heritage minister.
Trudeau has commanded him to come up with a plan to censor social media companies, make them delete things the government doesn't like in 24 hours, or face huge penalties.
I tell you what, they don't do that in Hong Kong.
Look, I'm sure Reporters Without Borders means well, and I'm glad they're standing up to China, one of the few international NGOs to do so.
And they're standing up for Hong Kong.
Again, I'm very glad.
But when they say that Trump's insults to lippy CNN reporters is a reason why America isn't free, they lose credibility.
They come across as just partisans who simply don't like Donald Trump.
And when they give Canada a pass because of some fake media freedom conference, but ignore all of Trudeau's censorship plans, it hurts their credibility too.
Ironically, giving China a bad report, it's not going to make a spot of difference.
China doesn't care.
I mean, these are the people who mowed down thousands of democracy protesters with tanks at Shannon Square, and they don't care.
They just pretend it never even happened.
But this kind of report by Reporters Without Borders is actually the kind of thing that Trudeau and Christy Freeland care about.
They love to go to international cocktail parties and jet around to places like Davos and the UN.
So if Reporters Without Borders mentioned any one of Canada's censorship plans that I've just mentioned above, I guarantee you there would be an emergency meeting in the Liberal government because they, for whatever reason, care more about the opinion of fancy foreign pundits than they do about Canadian civil rights.
So if anyone from Reporters Without Borders is watching this, hey, thanks for sticking up for Hong Kong.
I don't even mind the hyperbole.
We need all the help we can get.
But could you please say a word about Trudeau's plan to turn every Canadian reporter into one of only two species allowed, either a reporter that Trudeau pays or a reporter that Trudeau bans.
Neither are good for the country, and Reporters Without Borders should say so and stop whitewashing Trudeau's authoritarian mean streak.
Prime Minister's Pandemic Fumble00:04:27
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Well, as I said in my monologue, today is the 500th day that two Canadian hostages have been held by the government of China.
I just moments ago scrolled through the Prime Minister's online announcements for this day.
I see he has a childlike post about it being Earth Day today, but not a word about Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor kidnapped by China.
Not a word about that.
Well, our next guest has quite a few words to say about that.
He's been researching the subject and has a lot to say.
Let's get straight to it.
You know, I'm talking about my friend Manny Montenegrino, a former senior lawyer, former lawyer to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, now the boss of Think Sharp.
He joins us, Vice Guide from Ottawa.
Manny, great to see you again.
Thank you, Ezra.
Nice to be with you, as always.
Well, you're a fan favorite.
You go deep into things.
I know you've been working on this subject for a while.
Let me just let you get straight to it.
What are your thoughts on this 500th day of the kidnapping of the two Michaels?
Ezra, as I keep saying with you, my heart goes out to these two young men daily.
They have been forgotten by the Prime Minister.
The Prime Minister is simply only interested in doing the easiest tasks of all, and he simply completely forgets.
I understand that the President of the United States, even in this pandemic, dealt with other Americans that were caught hostages and got them released.
This is a perfect time to be helping these two Michaels.
We have a pandemic that began in China that was either intentional, gross negligent, or whatever you want, that has killed hundreds of Canadians and tens of thousands in the world.
This would be an easy time for the Prime Minister to say, look, those two men shouldn't be there.
Those Canadians, send them home.
This is not the time.
They haven't even been charged with anything.
I mean, can you imagine 500 days and not being charged with anything?
So it's a perfect time to do it.
But the Prime Minister, I'm sure they're the furthest thing from his mind.
He is focused on this pandemic and, in my opinion, managing it terribly.
And I also say that of Ontario.
The Premier's managing it not properly.
And it all begins with false assumptions at the beginning.
You know, it's funny because Justin Trudeau never spared a moment to call for the repatriation to Canada of Omar Cotter, who was tried, convicted, and given a 40-year sentence by a jury in Guantanamo Bay.
Justin Trudeau pressed and pressed for him to be brought home to Canada.
Even that, even to say to China, we'll put them in a Canadian prison, which of course would be outrageous.
They'd be released immediately.
But he hasn't.
And part of me thought, Manny, well, maybe Trudeau is trying to play nice because he's got some sensitive negotiations with China.
Maybe he's trying to acquire, to buy back the masks and personal protective equipment that he shipped to China in February.
But we see that Canada sent two cargo jets to China and they returned empty.
And the excuse by Trudeau and his cabinet is that they didn't have enough time that they could park at the airport, some made-up excuse that I see the Chinese embassy has thrown out.
So my point is, it's not like being soft and meek and submissive and appeasement-oriented is getting Canada anything from China.
So China's disrespecting and abusing us anyways.
Why not at least speak truth to power?
Well, absolutely.
And, you know, Ezra, right now, the pandemic, the COVID pandemic is now occupying every politician's mind.
And it seems to me, if you examine it carefully, as I have, and very carefully, that the more the actual evidence comes in, the farther the politicians are away from science and the truth of the matter.
And let me start from the beginning.
Evidence Discrepancies00:15:11
When we heard about the coronavirus back in January, the early estimation was the mortality rate was about 8%, 6%, 3%.
That is significant.
If you look at the ordinary mortality rate of the ordinary flus that exist that kill tens of thousands in the United States and thousands in Canada, a mortality rate of 0.1%.
So, of course, governments should be concerned.
But that was bad information, Ezra.
What our governments did was we took the information from China, which I, of course, I would never accept any data coming from China because they are not borthrite.
And China's mortality rate was around 8%.
That would alarm you.
Then they went to Italy.
And Ezra, when they say Italy, they don't mean Italy.
Italy's a big country.
I was born in Calabria.
They mean Bergamo, Lombardy, which is a small city which had a disproportionate amount of Chinese immigrants working in the fashion industry.
And there, Berngamo is about a size of Kingston, Ontario, about 125,000, 30,000 people.
They have a hospital, but maybe with a dozen ICU beds.
They were inundated with a bunch of cases.
And in the hundreds, and then you'll see in the thousands, that literally died not because of the coronavirus, because they were not ready for the surge of cases.
So people were left to die that would otherwise have lived.
Well, we in Canada said, well, let's avoid that.
And they call it, let's flatten the curve, which makes pretty good sense.
So off we did.
We flattened the curve.
And we stayed in isolation for two weeks.
And the data is in now.
And I'm just shocked that they're not listening to the data that's there.
The data back in Italy, in Calabria, where I was born, there are 2 million people there.
And they have only 76 deaths.
This is not an Italy problem.
It was a surge in a particular town, a particular northern part of Italy.
So here we are, Ezra, two weeks after being in isolation in March.
We now have data from Ontario and Ottawa.
And let me give you the Ontario numbers.
We bumped up our ICU units from 687 up to 1,497.
The Ontario Health Commissioner gave a report, and he said only 270 of those IC units are being used.
I mean, we're well below the surge capacity.
So we flattened the curve.
The evidence is now that we're never going to experience an Italy situation, northern Italy, Bergamo situation, where you have people walking in and not being medically attended to.
That is not going to happen in Ottawa.
That's not going to happen in Ontario.
It's certainly we have enough units.
I even drilled down to my city of Ottawa.
We have about 100 ICU units, and only 10 are being used today for the COVID-19 cases.
Only 35 beds out of 1,200 plus 1,600 beds on Ottawa are being used for the COVID cases.
So today, as I look at the evidence, we were fearful that this virus was going to be a three or five or six or seven percent killer.
We were fearful of the surge.
And so we did everything we can.
We slammed the curve.
I'll use, we didn't flatten the curve.
We slammed the curve.
And we are in our best case scenario imaginable.
And we're still extending this till mid-May.
It's just, it is ludicrous.
Yeah.
Well, Manny, I don't know if you've seen what we've been doing.
I'm now more worried, not just about the economic devastation that the lockdown will have.
And I just, just earlier today, I discovered a study from Alberta that for every 1% that the unemployment rate went up, 16 people committed suicide on average.
So you extrapolate that for Canada and the amount of unemployment growth we've had over the last month.
You're looking at more than 2,000 more suicides that could be expected because of bankruptcies and depression and things like that.
So the economic cost is huge.
The social costs of the recession are huge.
And I'm worried about the civil liberties.
I'm worried about, I mean, you mentioned Ottawa.
I know they're giving out tickets just for sitting in park benches in Ottawa.
Yeah, no, it's worried about the madness.
Sir, go ahead.
Yeah, no, absolute madness.
And Ezra, let's take it down to where we began.
The world was alarmed because we thought the mortality rate was 3% to 6% to 8%.
I would be alarmed too.
I was very alarmed, but I knew that the data was wrong.
And I've cross-examined hundreds of experts knowing that bad data in, you know, garbage in, garbage out.
And I knew, I was a little suspicious.
So I went into it.
Today, or a few days ago, the Ottawa Public Health Officer admitted that she believes that 11 to 33,000 Ottawans are infected.
We have a mortality of 25 people.
That is less than 0.1%, which is very equivalent to a flu.
And so I'm not as worried as I was at the beginning.
So if you look at the catalytic of it, they're changing the goalposts on Canadians.
We started by saying, hey, look, we have to flatten the curve.
We can't let people that would otherwise live that couldn't get medical attention die.
That makes sense.
Now, hold on, Ezra.
I'm very upset at my governments.
I'm going to set it the Ontario government.
I'm a Senate, the Canadian government, I'm a SAT at the New York Cuomo's government, where they all received expert reports saying after 2003, SARS, after 2012, MERS, after 2009, H1N1, they all have thick reports.
Dr. Tam prepared a report where she said, here's what you must do to prepare.
Governments did not prepare because they were focused on, unilaterally focused on changing their weather, unilaterally focused on global warming.
That's all we heard in the last election.
The word healthcare didn't even come up.
So they could have been prepared, but they weren't.
And I say, okay, that's fine.
You're not prepared.
We will go into two weeks isolation to give the hospitals time.
The hospitals are virtually half empty.
The best evidence of that is the Ontario government is asking nurses to leave the hospital posts and help in the old age homes.
Where are these nurses coming from?
I mean, when I heard Premier Ford say that, that's an admission that we have excess capacity in our hospitals because they're sending them to old age homes.
And so that wasn't the whole reason we did this.
Well, Manny, and I love the social media.
So every day I see 10 new videos made by nurses, doctors, orderlies in a hospital somewhere doing some karaoke performance.
And I'm not mad at them.
They're bored.
They have nothing to do.
The hospitals are empty.
So they're just joking around and having fun on TikTok or whatever.
But again, there's a cost to that if someone was going to have a hip replacement, if someone was going to have a cataract surgery, if someone had to have some, you know, anything other than an emergency surgery has been postponed, there's a cost to maintaining this emergency.
It's like holding your breath.
You can hold your breath for a couple minutes, but after that, you know, holding your breath becomes as deadly as what you're trying to avoid.
Yeah, I know, exactly.
Ezra, on your point of what does it cost?
So, first of all, I started by saying, you know, what is the real problem?
I mean, obviously, everything you do in problem solving, you identify the problem, and then you match it with the cost and do a cost-benefit analysis.
At the beginning, clearly we were afraid.
We were afraid that this is a mortality rate of 6%.
And if you assume that 10 million Canadians get it, well, that's 600,000 or in America.
That could be 6 million Americans.
That's a huge number you worry about.
But as the evidence comes in, there are reports in Los Angeles County of 400,000 people that have it.
And the mortality rate is closer to the 0.1% than it was anywhere near the 3%.
So that should, that new evidence should make politicians say, hey, hey, let's hold on.
Let's look at this.
It's not as bad as we thought.
Second of all, who's it killing?
Now, Ezra, I mean, you know, I'm caring for my 93-year-old father-in-law daily.
I understand, and we're taking care of him.
But I understand by the evidence that's coming in.
There was one, and it's hard to get this evidence.
They're hiding it from you, Ezra.
But the evidence that's coming in is that 82% in Quebec, I saw one piece of data, 82% were in old age homes.
So these are people at the end of their lives in any event.
So the deaths aren't killing young kids as they did with H1N1 or younger people.
It's predominantly, and if you look at the statistics in BC and Ontario, it's upwards about 75% are in their last years of lives.
They're completely vulnerable with a lot of pre-existing conditions.
That makes me think, well, wait a minute, I have to think about these facts and what do I do to apply it.
And here's what we're doing, Ezra.
And you made a great point.
It's costing, I estimated it's costing about $8 billion a day every time we delay this.
And that's hard cost.
I'm not talking about, as a lawyer, you know what damages are when someone does something.
If someone dies, you sue for the death of the person or you sue for the damage you sustain.
The people that are having damages, and there are many close to my family that are anxiety driven.
And even as I share the information to them, the facts, they are still very anxious because the media is selling a certain death narrative.
But we have about 5 million Canadians that suffer from anxiety issues.
I watch the Bell Let's Talk moment.
I see all the experts talk about how they care about mental health and how it's important and how we have to now give it the same respect as we do give physical health.
Well, Ezra, the answer is we don't, we don't, and we don't.
And it's an absolute joke because no one is concerned about the mental health of Canadians, what this lockdown is doing to people, whether they're unemployed, whether they're caged, and people are becoming ill and becoming hurt.
And we're talking damages of at least, if you double that, $8 to $10 billion a day.
It's just absurd what our governments are doing.
Yeah, I believe it.
Well, let me turn our eyes south of the border.
You mentioned New York.
One of the amazing ingredients in the United States is it really is 50 states that come together.
And there's a lot of rights that an individual governor has to make decisions.
And states fight with the feds all the time, even more than in Canada.
And I think the deference is to the states.
And my point for saying that is some U.S. states that never had a lot of infections, that, you know, they're coming down the other side of the bell curve, they're deciding to get back to work almost immediately, including big states like Georgia, like Texas, states that are very sparse, that didn't have densely collected people, so they didn't have a lot of sharing.
I guess what I'm saying is in those 50 United States, I estimate that you're going to be almost back to normal in probably five to ten of them for sure within a week.
And I think that's going to create a domino effect that neighboring states will say, hey, if Texas can go back to work, I'm in Oklahoma.
Why can't I go back to work?
Or I'll just drive across the border to Texas.
And I think you're going to have pressure people saying, hey, can I go to work?
How come my neighbor 100 miles down the road can?
Do you think there will be that same momentum in Canada where places like Saskatchewan or Prince Edward Island that have largely been spared will say, all right, you boys in Quebec, you want to stay in lockdown, makes sense, but we're ready to get back to work here in Saskatoon or Charlottetown or something like that.
Yeah, I mean, it has to happen.
You know, what infuriates me, and yes, Ezra, you're absolutely right, and it will happen.
What infuriates me is that everyone keeps talking, I will be driven by the science.
Well, the science is yelling loud and clear.
It's not what you thought it was two months ago.
It's a lot better.
When the Ontario Health Minister says, we're well below our best case scenario.
And when you talk about other provinces, I mean, I looked into this.
Ezra, four people have died in Saskatchewan.
You know, six people in Manitoba.
Nobody in New Brunswick.
Nobody in PEI.
61 in Alberta.
BC, 87.
And I recall BC had a whole bunch.
And I don't know the number because I don't know why they don't produce the number.
It's science.
But I think more than half, maybe even was in one old age home.
So you're talking about minimal deaths of people that would otherwise have, because the biggest killer of the aged people in old age homes, and there's a lot of legal cases on it, is infections and pneumonia and things that they didn't do that was there before COVID.
So it's the same thing that are killing people in old age home.
There just happened to be a different name to it.
So, yeah, I mean, when you look at all of Canada and you sit there and say all these provinces with, and if you strip out the people that were very ill with strong cober morbidity illnesses, you might be talking about a few deaths in these provinces such as Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
How do you shut down your whole province for a few deaths when the science is clear?
And Ezra, what drives me is not anything but the science.
I've been waiting for the science and I have every science professional telling me it's so much better than it was.
Bringing In More People Will Make It Worse00:05:55
And the same is true in America.
You look at, I have a brother that lives in Arizona.
They have very few mortalities there.
And what you have in America is a problem in New York.
I have doctor friends who tell me that downtown New York, especially in the poorer sections, the hospital system, hospitals really don't work that well and are at the capacity.
The deaths are more related to that than it is to COVID, because if you swing across the nation and you go to California, 40 million people, 10 million more than New York, the death rate, the death rate there is less than Canada.
And we have 37 million people.
So people have to be driven by the facts, the science, and the numbers.
The big problem that we had with the deaths are two factors.
One is hospitals were not ready.
Bergamo, Italy, and New York.
Those are the two prime examples.
And number two, deaths are happening of people over 80 years old in real frail and dying condition.
That's the vast majority.
That tells me that government should not be, Ezra, we're spending $8 billion a day every day that we wait.
And I'm going to tell you something.
The big difference between Northern Italy and Germany in the death rate was the number of IC units.
Germany had much less death per capita because they have 38 IC units per 100,000.
Northern Italy had six or eight, I believe.
Well, as we're spending money foolishly, crazily, recklessly by not opening up our economies and dealing with the issues that we've dealt with professionally, we are just adding debt.
And I tell you, when my kids are my age, we are going to have a northern Italy problem.
We are not going to have the ICUs.
We're not going to have the health care.
We're not going to have, because this is simply way too much money to be funded in future.
Well, Manny, I tell you, it's always good to catch up.
And I tell you, you've been obviously going through a lot of research and looking at things.
And I'm glad to have the new information about Bergamo Italy.
I knew some of that, but not all of that.
And I appreciate you bringing us that info.
Yeah, one more point there, Ezra.
I do not understand why the government in Canada has not done 10,000 random testing.
And let me, and this is science.
I mean, certainly if I had one of these scientists, ability to cross-examine, if we, you know, Ezra, when we do a poll, a political poll, we test 1,000 people and we kind of get the sense where the nation is.
Statistically, all you need is about 1,000 people.
Bump that up to 10,000 and randomly test Canadians.
You will find what the Ottawa Health Public Officer said.
And that is, and what they say, some experts say, about 10 to 20% already infected.
And if that's the case, then our mortality rate is less or equal to that of the flu.
And we should not be destroying the nation.
We should not be destroying people that suffer anxiety.
We should not be letting people commit suicide because they're lost jobs.
We should be worrying about the rest of society because this is the science is telling me this is not the problem that the politicians are telling me it is.
Well, Manny, so much to think about.
It's great to see you, and we look forward to having you back on soon, my friend.
No problem.
Thank you, Ezra.
All right, there you have it.
Manny Montenegrino.
He's the CEO of Think Sharp, and he joins us today via Skype from Ottawa.
Stay with us.
more ahead on the road.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about Trump's moratorium on immigration while Canada keeps importing more people.
Brandon writes, Canadian citizens should be prioritized over foreign nationals.
You know what I heard today is that almost three-quarters of a million foreign students in Canada will be getting huge bailout checks.
They're not workers.
They're not Canadians.
They're here to go to school here.
In the case of the 100,000 or so Chinese foreign students, they're not even real Chinese folks.
They're usually the sons and daughters of privilege, of oligarchs, of Communist Party officials.
So the privileged elite in China sends their kids to school in Canada, 100,000 of them.
They're not working.
And Trudeau's going to give them checks on the expense of Canadian taxpayers.
What is wrong with him?
Darcy writes, we have mass unemployment.
Bringing in more people will make it worse.
You know, my noontime show today, I saw a statistic that in Alberta, a study showed for every 1% the unemployment rate went up, there were 16 more suicides in the province.
So if you extrapolate that nationwide, Alberta is about 10% of the population of Canada.
For every percent the unemployment rate goes up, you'll have 150 or 160 suicides nationwide.
Well, our unemployment rate has jumped about 15% in the last month or two.
Just statistically speaking, the stress, the depression, people who are already on the brink, people losing their jobs, people whose families are cracking up from financial stress.
You're going to have more than 2,000 suicides because of the economy.
By the way, that's more than the number of people who have died from the virus.
Elaine writes, with Justin Trudeau in power, does it really matter what Canadians want?
Well, the thing is, he's not really in power.
He's got a minority government, but the Block Québécois and the NDP and the Green Party, they are with him every step of the way.
So they have approved this.
And of course, the media party is cheering him along.
There's not a lot of opposition left in Canada, is there?