Canada’s temporary foreign workers (TFWs) program—exploiting laborers with 2M unemployed domestically and COVID-19 outbreaks at Cargill/JBS slaughterhouses and Ontario greenhouses—mirrors "slavery light," benefiting multinationals like 3G Capital while harming both workers and jobless Canadians. Publisher Ben Dominich’s NLRB case, triggered by unrelated complaints despite employee support, parallels Canada’s hate-speech laws lacking truth defenses, signaling bureaucratic overreach. The CBC’s headline edits, Epoch Times’ defamation risks, and conservative MPs caving to "racist" labels expose a creeping censorship culture, threatening free speech in both nations. [Automatically generated summary]
Why Are We Still Bringing In Temporary Workers?00:02:00
Hello my friends.
Today I take you through a few of the measurements of slavery.
What is a slave?
I mean a slave doesn't give 100% of his labor to his slave master because he still has to have some housing and food and the odd moment of rest.
So maybe a slave has 90% of his work taken away from him and of course he is personally owned by the slave master.
What do you think the ratio is for Canada's temporary foreign workers, the universally visible minority, low-wage people brought in just to serve Canadian plantations?
Do you think they, do you think they have like, do you think they're 60% free?
I don't know.
I try and make a comparison today.
I don't want to overstate it.
No one kills a temporary foreign worker like they could kill a slave.
And at the end of the day, they do have some personal liberty.
But there's more than a few comparisons.
I'll make my case.
You tell me if I'm right or wrong.
That's today's show.
I'm just so mad at these multinational plantations.
And I'll explain why I'm using language that normally Marxists use.
Before I get to the podcast, please consider becoming a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
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You get the video version of these podcasts and it helps us stay strong.
Okay, here's today's show.
Tonight, why are we still bringing in temporary foreign workers with the virus still a problem and with unemployment at 20%?
It's April 30th 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 published is because it's my bloody right to do so.
America's Worst Mistake00:02:47
America's worst mistake, a mistake that lasted centuries, was slavery.
Now please don't get me wrong, I am in no way anti-American, and I must immediately note that slavery has existed on every continent in the world, including, I should say, here in Canada, where, for example, the Haida Indians were famous slave hunters, slave traders, slave owners.
Here's how the Canadian Museum of History puts it.
The Haida went to war to acquire objects of wealth, such as coppers and chilcat blankets that were in short supply on the islands, but primarily for slaves who enhanced their productivity or were traded to other tribes.
High-ranking captives were also the source of other property received in ransom, such as crest designs, dances, and songs.
Now that's nothing compared to the ceremonial human sacrifice of slaves by the Aztecs.
If you haven't watched Mel Gibson's movie Apocalypto, do yourself a favor and watch it.
Now of course, slavery exists in the world even today, especially in Africa and the Middle East and in Asia.
Of course, slavery, including the rape slavery of women, was an essential economic and political and religious component of the Islamic State during its terrible existence.
Here's ISIS terrorists getting excited about buying Yazidi slave girls to rape.
So I'm not picking on America when I say slavery was its worst mistake.
I'm not picking on America, but I'm not picking on America, but I'm not picking on America.
It's every country's worst mistake.
The British Empire was an incredible force for good in first banning and then eradicating slavery, deploying the mighty Royal Navy to stop slave ships.
That's something every Canadian and everyone in the Commonwealth should be proud of.
And though America got it wrong at first, it removed itself from that moral catastrophe with a military catastrophe, the Civil War, the deadliest war in America's history, 618,000 men dead.
Slavery's Global Impact00:02:56
And in fact, new research suggests it could be as high as 750,000 souls.
That was out of a population of only 31 million Americans back then.
Population-wise, America then was actually smaller than Canada is now.
Imagine losing that many men.
Can I compare Abraham Lincoln's two inaugural addresses?
Here's how he ended the first one.
He was trying to avert the Civil War, trying to resolve things.
Listen, he said, We are not enemies, but friends.
We must not be enemies.
Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.
The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature.
That's beautiful, but it didn't work.
Can I read to you from Lincoln's second inaugural address four years later?
It's downright biblical.
I'm a Canadian, so I actually didn't learn this until I visited the Lincoln Memorial just this February before the virus stopped all the travels.
This is on a huge engraving right inside the memorial.
It's terrifying to read.
Let me read some of it.
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.
Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled up, piled by the bondsman's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.
As was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.
So America had slavery and got rich off it, but surely all that wealth was burned up in the Civil War.
Surely all the blood of the slaves was equaled by the blood of the soldiers.
I think that's what Lincoln was saying.
In a way, it reminds me of the story of Marseille, France, that I told you on Tuesday night, a city that got rich off trade with Asia and China, Arabia.
And the East, well, that same city of Marseille was cut in half.
Half its people were killed by a plague from China and Arabia and the East.
Of course, there's nothing inherently immoral about buying and selling spices and fabrics like Marseille did.
It's just that with the trade came the risk.
That's all.
It wasn't God's justice that half of Marseille was killed.
But I think Abraham Lincoln was implying that the brutal death toll of the Civil War was some sort of moral punishment for slavery.
And I'm not picking on America.
In fact, Lincoln's point is the opposite.
What other country has paid such a price to root out slavery from itself?
Literally every continent had or has slavery.
I can't think of any other that had to root it out through a Civil War.
Foreign Laborers' Dilemma00:13:22
I don't know.
The only comparison I can come up with is Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt out of slavery and the ten plagues wreaked on the Pharaoh, but that was God punishing Egypt, not Egypt coming to terms with itself.
And I tell you all this because I want to talk to you about our own Canadian use of cheap ethnic labor.
Now, they're not slaves, of course.
But it's sort of funny how they're all visible minorities, all of them, all from poor countries.
They're not slaves.
No, no, no, that's for sure.
Perish the thought.
But don't think for a second that our temporary foreign workers program isn't a modern woke form of slavery light.
Oh, I know no one physically owns a temporary foreign worker as property.
We don't literally have slaves stand on a stage in New Orleans and have slave owners check their teeth for health and bid for them at an auction.
I mean, they have basic civil rights, and they obviously want to do it.
It's better than life back in their home countries, I guess.
But don't you kid yourself.
It's a cheap labor economy.
It's not quite slavery.
I mean, they're paid.
They're not owned, but they're here to work for less than Canadians do.
That's the whole premise.
And this is obviously a problem because now we have two million unemployed Canadians.
So the idea of bringing in cheap foreign migrants to undercut Canadians, well, it doesn't make any sense, does it?
I mean, from our own selfish point of view, you've got 2 million citizens desperate to work who want to work, and we're literally, even in the midst of the virus, still flying in foreign migrants to work for cheaper.
Why, again?
To save some corporate employer a few bucks an hour, foreign-owned corporations mainly.
Back in Alberta, I used to know a guy who owned a bunch of Tim Hortons' restaurants.
He swore by the Temporary Foreign Workers Program.
And back then, decade ago or so, the job market was so tight in Alberta.
Unemployment was so low you literally couldn't find people to work in those kind of jobs because everyone was working in the oil patch for six figures, even unskilled workers and certainly anyone with a trade was making strong six figures.
I remember 7-Elevens were giving $500 signing bonuses to cashiers.
I remember drive-thrus had signs in the windows saying they just didn't have the staff to open them.
Please walk in instead.
Yeah, that's gone now.
Now we have mass unemployment.
So what's the excuse for the cheap imported labor again?
I mentioned my old friend who owned a bunch of Tim Hortons.
Well, that same company was bought out by a massive Brazilian hedge fund company called 3G Capital.
Did you know that?
Did you know that's who owns Tim Hortons?
Here's their website.
They're based in Brazil.
They have a New York-style website, though.
They bought out Tim Hortons, I think it was six years ago now.
So why are we letting a Brazilian multi-billion dollar hedge fund bring in cheap foreign laborers to Canada to undercut Canadians during recession?
How is that in our interest?
Again, it's so often foreign multinational corporations, why do we owe them our loyalty above loyalty to our fellow Canadians?
Why are we permitting them to bring in essentially foreign indentured workers?
Oh, I know.
They're not quite slaves, right?
They're paid a living wage, right?
Well, yeah, but to be punctilious slaves in pre-Civil War America, all slaves are paid enough to live and eat, and I suppose some time off.
I say it's immoral to have a slave class.
I say it's immoral to have an underclass.
It's beneath our unemployment laws.
If we have laws for a minimum wage, if we have laws governing things like child labor, like limited hours of work per week, like workplace safety laws, if we have those laws, it's not just for practical reasons.
I think it's for moral reasons too, I think.
So why are we fine waiving those laws, suspending those laws for foreigners?
If the laws are wrong, then change them, but don't have an underclass beneath our laws.
How is that different from the exploitation of Mexican migrants in America, picking fruit for a sliver of what an American would get paid, except that we have normalized and legalized that exploitation of the underclass?
Now, I haven't turned into a Marxist, don't you worry.
I'm just asking why we do it again.
I know why Cargill, America's wealthiest private company that owns the slaughterhouse in High River, Alberta, I know why they like to have foreign workers.
It saves them millions of bucks a year.
Absolutely.
Here's their annual financial report.
Let me quote.
We delivered $2.82 billion in adjusted operating earnings in fiscal 2019, down 12% from last year's top performance.
Net earnings on a U.S. generally accepted accounting principles basis decreased 17% to $2.56 billion.
Revenues dipped 1% to $113.5 billion.
Okay, got it.
Sorry, Canada.
Sorry, Alberta.
We want to operate a beef factory in your country, but we just don't want to hire any Canadians, okay?
I mean, you know, we are down 1% to $113.5 billion.
Could we just hire foreign migrant workers?
Because it saves us a few bucks an hour.
So you'll sacrifice 2,000 Canadian jobs, but that's a price we're willing for you to pay because we had $113.5 billion and that dipped 1% last year and we can't have that.
I mean, why don't you just call it the Cargill plantation?
Don't call it a plant.
Call it a plantation.
So having a foreign indentured, visible minority, underpaid underclass, working for a massive global corporation, if that doesn't ring any moral alarm bells for you, well, how about look at it as a problem when we have 2 million Canadians unemployed?
But how about look at the other problems too, that these foreign migrant laborers, when they live on these temporary foreign worker plantations, when they're working for their American or Brazilian taskmasters, they live en masse because they're poor and they're trying to save money because they send money back home or they might go back.
And so they're underpaid.
They know they might well be going back to Somalia or Mexico, wherever they're from.
So they're here temporarily.
It's right there in the name, temporary foreign workers.
So they're not really investing in normal housing or putting down roots, are they?
They live in groups.
They carpool in groups.
And so it will not shock you that Cargill and the JBS slaughterhouses in Alberta.
JBS is another foreign multinational also from Brazil, weirdly, just like Tim Horton.
So Cargill and JBS are where hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of coronavirus cases have spread.
I don't know if they're at a thousand yet, but it's the biggest COVID-19 virus hotspot in all of Canada.
It's actually the reason why Alberta's curve isn't flattening.
The rest of Alberta is fine.
It could go back to work now, were it not for these massive outbreaks at these foreign migrant plantations.
But hey, feel free to foist another few billion dollars of costs on Canadian taxpayers, as long as it saves a Brazilian and American multinational corporation a few bucks, am I right?
And look at more news today.
Look at this.
It's from Ontario.
COVID-19, southwestern Ontario outbreak, puts migrant farm workers in spotlight.
With southwestern Ontario hit by its first COVID-19 outbreak, among the thousands of offshore farm workers it relies on.
The head of the province's largest agricultural group says it was only a matter of time before the coronavirus erupted in the farm belt.
But in the fallout of the outbreak on a Chatham-area greenhouse operation with dozens of foreign workers infected, activists say governments need to do better to protect such laborers from the virus.
Quote, for the past couple years, we've been trying to sound the alarm about the spread of pandemics on farms, said Chris Ramsaroop of Justice for Migrant Workers, an umbrella group that advocates for foreign laborers.
This is something that was preventable, Ramsaroop said Monday.
The temporary workers, especially prevalent in the vegetable and fruit industries in southwestern Ontario, handle jobs Ontarians won't do and often live in bunkhouses on the farms.
That communal housing, monitored by the federal government with input from local bylaw and provincial and public health authorities on standards, often means crammed and confined conditions, said Ramsaroop.
Now look, I'm no commie.
But seriously, I used the word plantation to evoke imagery of the U.S. South, the cotton and sugar plantations.
So you could call it bunk houses if you prefer.
That makes you feel better.
Do you have any moral pangs about any of this?
No?
You're happy to subsidize some big foreign corporations to save a few bucks.
Like Lincoln said, every dollar, every drop of blood from slavery was repaid with the treasure and the blood spent on the Civil War.
So is the 10 cents you're saving on your pint of Ontario strawberries, is that worth shutting down your provincial economy and being imprisoned in your own house?
And sorry to bring Canadians in this again.
Why are we not letting Canadians do this work?
Is it really true that Ontarians don't want to do the work?
Really?
Is it true that there were no farms in Canada without foreign migrant workers?
Is it true that no one here knows how to farm or likes to farm or loves to farm?
Have we not been growing crops for a century in Western Canada?
For two centuries in Ontario, three centuries in Quebec and the Atlantic?
What?
Newfoundlanders don't know how to fish, maybe?
Is it too tricky for us to figure this out?
We need to bring in PhDs to do that?
Is that who these foreign laborers are?
They're really sophisticated in ways that we're not?
Well, that's the CBC's view.
Listen to the execrable Rosemary Barton, just the worst of the worst on Trudeau CBC.
Listen to her laugh out loud when a Canadian citizen actually says, yeah, he'd like to work on a farm.
You would see yourself doing in terms of volunteer work or one of the jobs that the Prime Minister was talking about?
Honestly, farming sounds quite interesting.
I do have a background in athletics, so I'm not averse to rolling up the sleeves and getting out there.
Did you hear that laugh?
But what's nuts is that even now, more foreign laborers are being flown in all the time.
Four temporary foreign workers in British Columbia test positive for COVID-19.
British Columbia's top doctor says the province has detected four cases of COVID-19 among temporary foreign workers, TFW, who entered the country in recent weeks.
All four had arrived in BC on different flights.
Oh, good, so that's four more flights that are infected.
Said provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry, the federal government has exempted TFWs from cross-border travel restrictions, citing their critical role in sectors of the economy such as agriculture.
So they just arrived.
In just the past couple weeks, you and I are in lockdown.
Schools are locked down.
Restaurants and bars are locked down.
Churches are locked down.
But let's bring in some slave-class laborers because no Canadians know how to pick fruit.
Certainly no British Columbians.
I don't know how to do that.
I love that line.
Their critical role in agriculture.
I agree.
Agriculture is critical.
disagree that no one in Canada knows how to do it.
But hey, at least we've got some more virus cases to work on now.
Henry said more than 900 such workers have entered BC in the last several weeks and are being given medical and social support as well as accommodations to ensure they remain quarantined.
It just speaks to us of how important it is to keep up these measures to support people to make sure they can do what we need them to do and to be able to identify people who have symptoms, get them tested, and be able to support them medically through getting over their COVID-19, said Henry.
900?
You brought in 900 cheap foreign laborers shipped in right at the depth of our worst great recession since the 20s and 30s?
Just in the past few weeks.
But they're actually not working yet, are they?
Because four of them have the virus and maybe more and they're all being quarantined and we're paying for that.
So they're being given our health care.
They're being given free housing.
You know, I bet someone back in Mexico or Somalia or wherever, if they were smart and they knew we are as dumb as we are, they would say, I've got the virus.
I have no health care of any repute here in my third world country.
Let me get on a plane to British Columbia as a farm laborer, but really just to use their health care.
They're going to give it to me for free.
They'll literally let me in.
Would you rather be sick in British Columbia or in Mexico?
And because of that, you heard the public health Zarina out there.
She said that's precisely why the province's lockdown remains.
Because we're bringing in our cheap, cheap foreign labor.
I'm no Marxist, but I don't like slavery.
I don't like its deodorized modern version, slavery light.
I don't like what it does to foreign laborers.
I don't like what it does to our own unemployed.
But right now, I just want you to know that hundreds, thousands more are being shipped into Canada every week, even as our own unemployment source.
Jokes and First Amendment Controversies00:15:00
And they're a big part of the reason why you still can't go back to work or to school.
Oh, don't expect the Conservative Party to mention any of this.
You see, if you don't know yet, it's racist not to like this new form of wage slavery, don't you know?
Stay with us for more.
Are you on Twitter?
Maybe you're on Facebook.
Do you make dumb jokes or funny jokes or funny jokes that other people don't find funny at all?
Well, of course you do.
That's called being a human.
And if you're talking about politics, well, someone's sure to be offended.
Even if they're not, they'll say they're offended.
That's part of how the whole thing works.
But a few months back, a conservative online publisher, I guess that's sort of like what I am, made a joke on Twitter.
And we'll show you what the tweet said right here.
He was reacting to a union drive at a liberal website called Vox Media.
And so he wrote a tweet joking to his own staff at a website called The Federalist.
He said, for your information, FYI, Federalist, first one of you tries to unionize, I swear I'll send you back to the salt mine.
Obviously a joke.
The reason it's funny is because it's a conservative website not sympathetic to unions and it was having a good laugh at Vox's expense.
Well, so much for a Twitter laugh.
The National Labor Relations Board has convicted the Federalist and its publisher of breaking the law by being an anti-union ruffian.
Maybe I've got that wording not quite perfect.
So now we're joined by a Skype from the Washington, D.C. era by the man at the center of the Twitter tussle, Ben Dominich.
How you doing?
Nice to meet you.
I'm doing great.
And thank you for having me on.
I appreciate you taking some interest in this.
And I hope that it serves as a warning to you of what might happen if you make a joke that offends the wrong people.
Well, I mean, that's the story of my life.
Now, did I more or less accurately retell what happened?
Absolutely, you did.
And one thing that I do want to add is in terms of the perspective that I have on all of this, you know, the reality is that I did not believe that in America you would have a situation where if you make a joke and it offends someone who has never worked for you,
has never contracted for you, does not know you, lives in a different state from you, that they have the ability to, within a few minutes, file a complaint that can unleash the entire force of the federal government against you as an entity.
That's something that I learned because of this.
And what really is the case is that anyone who's offended by your joke in this instance can go to the National Labor Relations Board.
They can file against you.
And the power that they have there is immense.
They subpoenaed every email that I've ever exchanged with any of my staffers, going back through all the editorial emails and conversations, confidential ones frequently that we've had with sources and the like, going back ages.
They subpoenaed my staffers themselves, even though they were not offended by the joke, to come and testify at their own expense in a different state, to hire their own lawyers at their own expense, because if I were to pay for it, it could be viewed as being coercive.
Even though my own staffers filed affidavits saying they were not offended by this joke, they understood it as a joke.
They didn't feel threatened by it.
The administrative law judge in this case, which is basically a bureaucrat who has the power of a judge without having to actually live under the laws of the land and the Constitution, he found that it was totally irrelevant that my staffers felt this way.
That because someone, someone mentally ill, presumably, or perhaps without any sense of humor, could view my joke as being an actual threat, that that amounted to the same thing.
And I've chosen to fight this.
And I want to be clear, because I know that there are a lot of people who have gone up against the speech police in various ways, that the stakes here are much smaller than what they typically face.
The National Labor Relations Board just wants me to delete the tweet.
They want me to inform my intelligent writers what they already know, which is that they have the freedom to unionize if they so please, and move on.
And the reason that I haven't, and the reason that I've continued to fight this, is because I think it's a question that ought to go to the real courts about the power that we've enabled people to have, regardless of whether they have any standing on the issue, regardless of whether they have any relation to the companies in question.
Because I think this is the sort of thing that will happen again and happen increasingly as people become aware that they can target anybody whose jokes they disagree with with these types of ridiculous complaints, ludicrous complaints that should be laughed out of court, as opposed to have God knows how much taxpayer money spent coming after me for a joke tweet that hurt no one.
Yeah.
You know, you're just outside Washington, D.C. You tell me, and I accept that obviously none of your conservative writers took it seriously.
None of them were planning to unionize.
If they wanted to, they wouldn't have been deterred, I imagine, by a joke.
The complaints were, I'm looking at your article on the subject in the Wall Street Journal, some leftist writer, Matt Brünig, who had nothing to do with your outfit at all, and then a Massachusetts nuisance lawyer, Joel Fleming.
So these were officious intermeddlers.
They're busy bodies who just said, oh, I can file a complaint and then I can unleash the resources of the federal government.
It's not even like a nuisance lawsuit where the nuisance litigant is spending his own money.
It sounds like they just file a piece of paper and then the government with its resources and personnel runs with it.
Am I right on that?
Yes, you are.
And I mean, one other little nugget of this that I think is interesting is that Brünig, who's a former leftist policy staffer and someone who worked briefly at the NLRB as a government employee, is actually married to a writer then at the Washington Post, now at the New York Times.
So, you know, he's aware of what journalism is.
And the idea that he would send an agency after us that would tell us that they don't consider us a publication.
They consider us a quote-unquote anti-union website, which is something that the prosecutor actually said in the hearing.
And they judge us from the reasons.
Frankly, as an anti-union website, we're not doing a very good job because I would say in our entire history, we've probably published maybe two dozen articles that are about unions.
And most of those just telling you why public school teachers' unions are not good.
But it's one of these situations where they have so much power thanks to just effectively an internet troll who has the capability to unleash a government agency against people.
And from my perspective, this isn't so much about me because I know a lot of lawyers and I'm friendly with them.
If you are the publisher of the Federalist, you naturally have a lot of connections with lawyers.
And there are plenty of them who would be happy to defend me.
And in this case, the new Civil Liberties Alliance defending us pro bono, going out there and trying to make this argument.
The flip side is not a lot of people are like that.
If you own a deli, if you own a small business, you don't necessarily know someone who's going to be able to come in and defend you for free against some kind of leftist troll.
Now, we have the resources and connections to do this.
And so I think that this is the opportunity that has really risen up for us to put this question again to the courts, which they haven't really dealt with since the 1970s.
Is this the kind of regime that the National Labor Relations Board was really intended to be?
Or wasn't it supposed to be about looking out for the workers themselves and what they want as opposed to what some internet troll thinks?
You know, I'm familiar with the new Civil Liberties Alliance.
I'm friends with one of its lawyers, and so I know that they are liberty-oriented.
I think they might even call themselves conservative, although I think they love that word civil liberties.
So it doesn't surprise me that they're coming to your aid because they love free speech.
But I want to ask you, for I think a generation or two, the free speech movement has claimed to be a left-wing project.
It emanated from Berkeley that was the center for free speech.
The ACLU would definitely call itself leftist, but I remember in the 70s and 80s, it would defend even neo-Nazis.
They'd make a point of sending a black lawyer or a Jewish lawyer to defend the neo-Nazi to make it clear they didn't agree with them, but they would defend them nonetheless.
Have you received any offers of assistance or even just moral attaboy, Boy, go get them.
Even a tweet of support from the ACLU or other leftists who traditionally were watching out for infringements.
Well, I will say that I haven't received anything from the ACLU, and I do agree with you in terms of your frustration expressed, underlying what you just said there about them.
Their priorities have shifted dramatically.
They are much more about advancing the trans agenda and things like that, as opposed to standing up for the civil liberties of people who say things that are particularly objectionable, a heck of a lot more objectionable than my tweet.
But I think in terms of a couple of leftists since my piece has come out, I've gotten a couple of messages from them, and I've seen a couple of tweets from commentators who basically say, you know, I hate everything the Federalists stands for, but they're actually right about this.
And I think that's an understanding of the danger that they realize this poses for any real participant in the media landscape who appreciates the value of the First Amendment.
Look, it's one thing if you can demonstrate actual harm, if there was an actual threat against people being able to organize.
And I certainly understand that.
But in this case, what has happened is you've had an empowered taxpayer-funded agency come down in a way that if we had lacked the resources or didn't have the connections to be able to fight it, could have really destroyed an entity, could have rendered them incapable of doing their jobs.
They could have eliminated the very jobs of the workers that they're pretending to want to care about and protect.
And I think that that's something that needs to be confronted.
It needs to be drawn out.
And these administrative law judges who work within courts where one day they're wearing the judicial hat and the other day they're wearing the prosecutor hat, they're essentially unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats who are capable of really wrecking the businesses and livelihoods of people at whim.
That needs to be confronted.
And that's something that I care about deeply.
It's something that the founder of the NCLA, Philip Hamburger, cares about deeply.
He's known as a First Amendment and administrative law scholar of excellent reputation.
And from my perspective, this is the kind of thing we really need to care about because it's only going to increase going forward.
And if you think about the kind of landscape that someone like Elizabeth Warren wants in America, it's one where the bureaucrats really scare you into submission.
You don't express yourself because you know that that will lead to dangers for you and your livelihood.
And that's something that I think is fundamentally un-American and needs to be confronted as such.
You know, listening to this particular case, the fact that none of your employees felt threatened by this, it wasn't a real thing.
There was no union drive.
They gave affidavits saying they support you.
That was all irrelevant because, you know, in your Wall Street Journal article, you quote Section 8A1 of the Wagner Act that it's just, you know, in a way, an extremist reading of the law would say, well, it doesn't matter what they say, you did make the threat.
And it reminds me, if I may, of my own freedom of speech case a dozen years ago, I published the Danish cartoons of Mohammed in Canada in, I'm trying to remember now, like 2006.
So that's 14 years ago.
Let me just, and I'm going to tell you from memory the section of the law I was charged under.
And I don't mean to tell you my own tale here other than it's eerily similar.
It was against the law in Alberta, still is, to publish anything, quote, likely to expose a person to hatred or contempt.
So maybe, maybe not.
Truth is not a defense.
There are no damages.
It's just this might have, what you wrote might have caused someone to be exposed to contempt.
So there's no defense to that.
And indeed, at the moment I had been charged, no one had ever been successfully acquitted because there's no defense.
Now, in Canada, we live with this, we fought with this, but we don't have a First Amendment.
It sounds like you're going through this same exercise.
Instead of the Human Rights Commission, it's the National Labor Relations Board.
Instead of about Muslim cartoons, it's about a tweet.
But my Canadian viewers, of whom we have many, are probably thinking, Ezra, what about the First Amendment?
Those Americans are supposed to be free of this kind of infringement.
This sounds like a Canadian-style censorship.
What's going on?
Well, I have to say, you know, in recent years, and I've paid attention, I remember your case, but I also, you know, have paid attention to some of the lawsuits involving dead naming your own child within the context of a lawsuit about the trans rights of teenagers and things of that nature.
Certainly, I'm concerned that we're seeing these types of speech codes gradually being exported into America.
And I certainly think that there's a good degree of overlap there.
I would much prefer for Canadian exports to be letter-Kenny and comedians.
But when it comes to this sort of thing, I don't think that we should be resembling the way that Canada has approached it.
And I think that the First Amendment is of the utmost importance.
In this day and age, you're going to offend people constantly.
And I mean, I'm not a comedian.
I like a lot of comedians and I listen to a lot of comedians, but I'm not particularly funny.
I don't even think my joke was particularly funny.
It was just a snarky Twitter comment.
But it's one of these things where the fact that it was a joke that triggered them is another reminder that comedy is typically the canaries in the coal mine.
You know, it's the parody joke.
It's the parody art in your case that tends to rile people up the most.
Fighting for Free Speech00:02:38
And when you start to go after that, when you start to shut it down, when you start to use the government to do that, then you run into a very dangerous direction very quickly.
Yeah.
Andy Levy says, you don't have to think it's funny, but you do have to acknowledge that it was meant as a joke.
And I think that's a good point here.
Everyone knows that's a joke.
The fact that they're pretending it wasn't shows that there's an inherent malice here.
Well, it's fascinating, and it shows that the cancel culture finds the soft spots in our legal system, in our judicial system, because it's one thing to try and convince Twitter to ban a guy.
But if you can unleash the machinery of the state, I can only imagine how much your defense would be costing you if you didn't have a public interest law firm on your side.
I mean, just the idea of schlepping all your staff at their own expense to testify in New York is very crazy.
This would destroy a company if they didn't have a guardian angel like the new Civil Liberties Alliance.
Is there any chance of reform of this?
I mean, I presume that this is all happening under the watchful eye of a Trump cabinet secretary of some sort.
Is there any move to strengthen freedom of speech or even to deal with the NLRB directly?
I think that we'll see going forward what this looks like.
I mean, we'll see what circuit we end up with.
We'll see how the case advances.
It's interesting.
One of the key questions that was put to Justice Gorsuch when he was going through his approval in the Senate was related to administrative law and the concern that he was someone who was generally a skeptic of it.
He navigated that himself, obviously, ended up on the court.
But that also raises a number of questions, I think, now about the way that this bureaucrat-empowered area of law has been considered for the past century, really going back to Woodrow Wilson.
And to me, this is a new question in this reality where people can just reach out from anywhere, where they can be aware of your Facebook posts or Twitter posts without having known you.
Speech takes on a different nature and it takes on a different nature in the context, I think, of what should be the threshold for starting one of these things at taxpayer expense.
I don't know what kind of landscape awaits us in this, but I do think this is a fight worth having and a conversation worth having, especially because I believe it will only increase, like I said, going forward for people who don't necessarily have the means, the resources, or the friendships in order to fight this battle.
Yeah, well, and if it's happening there, it's obviously going to happen here in Canada and in the UK too, two jurisdictions that are less free than America.
Speech In The Digital Age00:04:28
Well, Ben Dominich, it's a pleasure to talk with you.
Even though the subject matter is unhappy, it sounds like you're taking the principled course and will fight this to the end, hopefully, to reform or amend the law or its interpretation.
I wish you so much luck.
I see so many similarities between our experience at the Western Standard 14 years ago and what you're going through.
So I will watch this keenly and give my best regards to your civil liberties lawyers who are doing important work.
Thank you so much, Ezra.
It's a pleasure to be with you.
And I do love a fight.
All right, tell me your website URL.
Is it thefederalist.org?
Yes, it is thefederalist.com.
And I hope folks will go and check out the content there.
Thefederalist.com.
Super.
All right.
Thanks for your time.
Good luck out there.
Thank you.
There you have it.
Ben Dominich is the publisher of thefederalist.com.
I think we have some of his writers on our show from time to time.
Good people.
All right.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Hey, welcome back to my monologue yesterday about the CBC smear of the Epoch Times.
Lou writes, shame on the CBC for their smear and biased article against the Epoch Times.
I trust the reliability and editorial integrity of the Epoch Times, never the CBC.
Well, Lou, I got to tell you that today the CBC has already made two factual corrections to that story.
But here's the thing, they changed their headline.
They took the word racist out of the headline, but they have no editorial note, editor's note explaining why they do that.
I hope and I wish that the Epoch Times would sue them for defamation, but I know people from the Falun Gong too well.
I know them, but they're too gentle.
They're meek and gentle with those CBC butchers.
Gerald writes, thank you for today's show.
I followed the Epoch Times online for two years and subscribed for one year in print.
Hey, I'm glad to hear that.
You know what?
I don't know if you, every day at 12 noon during this interesting time, we're having a live stream, 12 noon Eastern Time.
I do it Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
And Sheila and David Menzies do it Tuesday, Thursday.
So yesterday, I did my whole noon hour show about it.
And I wrote a letter to Cindy Gu, the publisher of the Epoch Times, and I got an email back from right when I was doing the show.
I mean, a computer was right here.
So I followed up with her, and I said, well, we'd like to help.
We don't want to just write about it.
We want to help.
And so we're going to do a promotion for the Epoch Times.
We're going to try and sell some subscriptions for them.
I think we're going to get like a discount code or something like that because I'm so angry at the CBC.
And I love those Epoch Times guys so much.
They've got such good hearts.
They're independent.
Many of them were actually tortured or abused by China.
Like they're the best people.
And for them to be devoured by the CBC, I just, it pricks me.
And so my goal, I just tell you my goal right now, and I will have a formal announcement in the days ahead.
We're going to launch a little campaign, not for us, but for the Epoch Times.
And my goal is to sell 1,000 subscriptions for them.
So I'll let you know, go ahead and subscribe now.
Yeah, go ahead.
But I hope to have the terms of our deal with them in the next day or so.
And it might give you a little discount or something, but frankly, go ahead and subscribe at full rate.
I mean, give them the support, right?
I did.
So thanks for your note.
Linda writes, great reporting on the CBC's bias.
As we're the only organization lower than that creepy mailman are the conservative MPs who want Derek Sloan to apologize to Dr. Tam.
I saw that.
That made me so mad.
And you know what?
Those conservative MPs.
You know what?
They're doing Trudeau's work for them.
They're absorbing the mindset and the vocabulary of the left, denouncing people as racist instead of just saying, well, I disagree with you.
But I don't even think those conservative MPs would disagree with Derek Sloan.
I think they're just so terrified of being called racist.
I think the Conservative Party of Canada is pitiful.
I'm sorry to say that.
I've been a conservative my entire life.
My entire life.
I think they're pitiful.
David Wright's just subscribed to the Epoch Times.
Hoo-ah.
Hey, I'm so glad to hear that.
Well, I'm just delighted to hear that.
And again, I'm glad you did.
We'd better get our offer out quickly because I want as many people to sign up as possible.
All right, that's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.