Ezra Levant challenges pandemic policies by questioning why Canada locked down schools, parks, and businesses despite zero youth deaths, no outdoor transmission clusters, and hospital capacity never being overwhelmed. He exposes hypocrisy from leaders like Trudeau and Ford, who violated their own rules while mocking their "homework hero" role, and criticizes Teresa Tam’s divided loyalties between Canada and the UN—funded by China. Levant compares COVID-19’s 5,300 deaths (mostly seniors in vulnerable settings) to annual flu/pneumonia tolls of 6,000–8,500, demanding accountability for job losses tied to foreign labor "super spreaders" undercutting wages. Rebel News’s legal battles—from defeating Trudeau’s debate coverage ban to suing the PCO for press briefing exclusions—highlight systemic bias against independent media, with government spending $131K to block them while legacy outlets face no scrutiny. The episode ties these failures to broader distrust of China and its UN allies, framing pandemic governance as a test of transparency and justice. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I have a list of questions, just basic dumb questions, but I think the dumber the question, let me rephrase that, the simpler the question, the better.
Don't you think?
The simpler the question, the more basic you're getting down to brass.
I got 14 questions that remain unanswered about this pandemic.
I'll whip through them so it won't take long.
I hope you find them interesting.
Before I get out of the way and let you hear the monologue, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of the podcast.
It's $8 a month or $80 for a year.
And I do this literally every day.
And Sheila Gonrid and David Menzies do it once a week.
So that is, what's the math on that?
That's 350 shows a year for 80 bucks.
We're practically paying you.
Go to RebelNews.com and sign up.
It would be a real favor because that's how we pay the bills around here.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, I've got about a dozen questions about the pandemic.
It's May 14th and you're watching 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 is government will buy public is because it's my bloody right to do so.
I've got some questions about the pandemic.
Pandemic Lockdowns Revisited00:08:41
Question one, we were told that we had to shut down society to flatten the curve.
That didn't mean that no one would get sick.
It meant that we would slow down the rate of people getting sick so it didn't happen all at once and overwhelm hospitals.
Well, mission accomplished.
The curve is so flat, it's lower than any of the best case scenarios we were showed last month.
Hospitals are mostly empty.
So why are we still in a lockdown?
Question two.
Not a single child in Canada has died from this virus.
No one under 20 years old.
There are about 8 million Canadians under 20.
Not one has died.
So why have we shut down schools, kids' sports, and summer camps?
Question three.
Here's an interesting article in the Globe and Mail.
It says, to date, 312 detailed studies have been published about clusters of coronavirus infections.
There is not a single case of infection by casual contact outdoors, unquote.
So not a single person in Canada under 20 has died from this.
And not a single person anywhere has caught the disease while being outside.
So why have we shut down playgrounds and parks?
Question four.
Why do politicians threaten us with huge fines for visiting with friends and family when it seems like every single one of them has done so themselves?
Trudeau told us we had to stay home over Easter, but then he immediately crossed into Quebec for a family get-together over Easter.
Doug Ford had a whole family reunion and went to his cottage too.
John Torrey went on a junket to London, England, and he loves photo ops without his face mask with hospital workers.
And it sure looks like a lot of politicians have had a haircut.
It's like those jet-setting celebrities telling us about global warming.
Why should we trust a word they say when their own actions say something different?
Question five.
As you know here at Rebel News, we've offered a free lawyer to any Canadian who has received an unfair ticket for just walking outside.
And so far we've taken 11 cases.
We're not a public interest law firm, but we're doing that kind of work.
Question, how come Canada's most famous and best-funded group, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, with a seven-figure budget and full-time lawyers on staff, how come they have refused to take a single case of any Canadian whose civil liberties have been violated?
Not one.
Oh, scratch that.
They did take one.
I see that they have sued the government to get them to release all the prisoners.
Got it.
Question six.
I see that CNN has put that Swedish teenager, Greta Tunberg, on one of their expert panels about the virus.
Wow.
Is there anything that girl can't do?
How do you think that happened?
Do you think CNN said, forget about the doctors and the experts.
Let's get us a foreign high school dropout with clinical depression to lecture us.
Later on, I was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, OCD, and selective mutism.
Yikes.
Do you think CNN recruited her, or do you think her PR handlers reached out to CNN telling them that Greta had diversified her scolding into new subject matters?
How dare you?
Question seven.
Speaking of global warming, if this is how global experts from UN agencies with scientific models warn us about a crisis that they can't even predict correctly two weeks into the future, and while they're at it, they're crashing the economy and violating our civil liberties, why should we trust global experts with scientific models when they warn us about a crisis about global warming that they say will happen decades into the future, given that none of their models have come true over the past decades?
Question eight.
Justin Trudeau, alone amongst all the world's leaders, has chosen to stay at home during this whole crisis.
He doesn't have the virus.
He just chooses not to work.
He's so unbusy, he actually offered to help children do their homework.
Hey kids, I know we're all going through a difficult time right now, and it's not made any easier by the fact that you have to do your homework around the kitchen table.
I think parents across the country are discovering a new appreciation for the incredible work that teachers do.
Well, as a teacher, I want to help.
How can a country with any self-respect find that acceptable?
Question nine.
Why did Parliament give itself a raise on April 1st when so many of the rest of us were getting laid off?
Why did they jack up carbon taxes by 50% on that same day?
Have they no decency?
Or do they simply know we can't throw all of them out and will probably forget that they stuffed their own pockets by the time the next election rolls around?
Question 10.
Canada's chief public health officer, Teresa Tam, has kept her second job during this whole crisis.
She works for Canada, but she also has a job working for the United Nations agency, the World Health Organization.
In fact, she has missed important Canadian duties such as briefing the provinces because she's busy running errands for the UN.
In the greatest health panic in a century, why is Canada's top public health doctor moonlighting for a foreign agency, one controlled by China no less?
And when China's interests conflict with Canada's interests, which boss does she follow?
Question 11.
Approximately 5,300 people in Canada have died from the virus.
But 82% of the deaths were seniors living in seniors' homes.
They didn't die from the virus or from being old.
They died from the virus and being old in a particular deadly setting.
I'll get back to it in a moment.
So if you take those seniors' home statistics out of the equation, the entire virus death toll is about 1,000 people.
Now, every one of those is a tragedy, but in any given year, the number of deaths from the regular flu and pneumonia in Canada, it's between 6,000 and 8,500 people.
Did we just destroy 2 million jobs because of the flu?
Question 13.
One common link between many of the seniors' homes and those meat packing plants in Alberta that are the biggest virus clusters out there is that they're both operated by cheap foreign laborers brought into Canada under something called the Temporary Foreign Workers Program.
They're exempt from normal workplace laws.
They're paid a pittance, which is why large, heartless, multinational corporations love the temporary foreign workers program, like meat packing plants and institutional seniors' homes, some of which are actually owned by China.
But these foreign workers are paid so poorly, they often have to live in bunkhouse-style dwellings en masse, small rooms breathing each other's air.
And in the case of meat packing plants, they also carpool together to save every cent they can.
And in the case of those seniors' homes, temporary foreign workers often work at several places just to make a living.
So the health staff themselves became super spreaders.
So my last question is, now that we've destroyed 2 million jobs and now that we know the virus isn't as bad as experts said, can the rest of us please get back to work now?
And by that I mean Canadians going back to work.
Can unemployed Canadians have first dibs at any jobs before we continue to fly in foreign citizens to undercut Canadian wages?
Oh, yeah, I guess not.
Stay with us for more.
Aaron's Court Case Hope00:15:22
Well, we've been around for a little more than five years here at Rebel News.
If I counted up all the videos we've done, probably around 15,000 by now.
There have been many moments I've been very proud of, our journalistic coverage, our editorial stances.
But I must tell you, and I've thought about this quite a bit, that if I had to choose the one moment of sheer joy and exuberance and vindication and thrill and surprise,
the highlight of the five years here for me, it was that day in October last year, that Monday afternoon, when we rushed to the Federal Court of Canada to get an emergency injunction stopping Justin Trudeau from banning our reporters from covering the leaders debate.
And against all odds, against an army of overpaid Trudeau lawyers, five of them, we prevailed.
I was stunned.
It was the validation of everything we believed in here, telling the other side of the story, being independent journalists, and our belief that the establishment, the media party, the political media industrial complex was wrong and we were right.
Even if everyone said we were wrong, we were still right.
The Federal Court of Canada said so.
And the two men who did the heavy lifting for us that day were young lawyers that we had just retained three days earlier, Aaron Rosenberg and David Elmola, who had worked all weekend to give us that victory.
Well, since then, David and Aaron have done more work for us.
And as you may know, about a week ago, we filed another similar lawsuit against Justin Trudeau's Privy Council Office, or PCO, as it's sometimes called, for much the same as we did last year.
Back then, our journalists were banned from attending the leaders' debates.
Now, our journalists are banned from asking questions of Justin Trudeau at his daily press scrum.
Well, we have some updates, a small update on the case.
And joining us now via Skype is our friend and lawyer, Aaron Rosenberg.
Aaron, great to see you again.
Oh, so nice to see you.
Thank you so much for having me.
Well, come on.
I mean, you were, you and your legal partner, David Elmilla, were the architects of our greatest victory.
And so I know this is also a long-shot case.
I won't deny that.
But the case you filed a week ago gives me some hope that we can bust down more of Trudeau's censorship.
Why don't you give our viewers a one-minute recap of what that lawsuit says?
That's right.
So, you know, this is a very, very interesting, unique application to the federal court where on behalf of Rebel News, we're asking for the court to review the decisions or lack thereof by the Privy Council in their management of Trudeau's morning show.
That's the daily COVID-19 press briefings that are made every day by the Prime Minister.
So what we're trying to do is we're trying to get the court to say, you know, this process is unaccountable.
It's not transparent.
And media outlets like Rebel that are not members of the elite press gallery are being denied access to the prime minister during an unprecedented time when Canadians need to be informed by their federal leaders about what's happening with this problematic pandemic.
And so, you know, Rebel really has no choice.
They're not being offered the opportunity to ask these questions, just like in the leaders' debate where access was completely denied.
In this case, Rebel folks can call in, but they're not being asked any question.
They're not able to ask any questions, and thus there really is no access for Rebel and for other like institutions.
Yeah, it's incredible.
You know, in our last lawsuit, the one where you and David were victorious in October for us, we were joined in court by our friends at True North, Andrew Lawton, Candace Malcolm, Anthony Fury, good folks over there.
Andrew wound up getting in along with us.
They're not even trying anymore.
Blacklocks, another independent news agency in Ottawa, doesn't even try.
Even our alumnus, Brian Lilly, doesn't even try.
There's so many conservative-leaning journalists who don't even bother to call in because they're never put through.
We have called more than 20 times, never put through once, but other journalists get on almost every day.
That's right.
That's not random, and it's not a process that's basically blackballing anyone who might ask a tough question.
And by the way, Aaron, I want to let you know that I don't believe any court should command Justin Trudeau to have to talk to me, but I ought to be able to put a question that he could ignore or swat away.
You know, I'm not looking for a court to say be Ezra's best friend or be the Rebel's best friend.
But if this is a bureaucracy, a nonpartisan civil service that is handling this phone thing, they should be neutral as opposed to opposed to partisan.
They should not discriminate between left-wing reporters, right-wing reporters, Toronto reporters, Vancouver reporters.
That's what irks me is that Trudeau looks like he's making the civil service into a wing of the Liberal Party.
You know what?
And you raised such an important point, is that not only is this the bureaucracy, the Privy Council office and the clerk, it's part of its mandate.
Its guiding principle is to be nonpartisan, to provide nonpartisan advice and administrative assistance to the prime minister.
And so that's exactly correct, is that this type of nonpartisan agency should be held accountable for the manner in which they're administering this type of process.
This is a critical process right now.
And yet, all indications point to this being an arbitrary, capricious process that is by no means nonpartisan.
And thankfully, we have groups like Rebel that are willing to step up, and we're certainly delighted to be of assistance in this process.
Well, thank you for that.
Now, we filed the lawsuit about a week and a half ago.
And if I recall, the government had one week in which to reply.
Now, I think we did get a reply.
I haven't looked through it carefully, so I'm sort of hearing this from you at the same time you're telling all our viewers, which is good, because we crowdfund your legal fees.
So I want our viewers to know pretty much as much as I know.
What document has the federal government filed with the court in response to our lawsuit last week?
So they've filed what they're required to file, which is a notice of appearance.
That document is very short.
It says that they are responding to this application.
They recognize they've been served with Rebel's notice of application that commences, it's the originating process, that commences this proceeding.
They've seen it, they recognize it, and they will be responding to it.
And now the ball is in our court.
So we can talk about those steps next.
So serving the government, that's basically when you tag them.
Tag, you're it, we're suing you.
That's the starter pistol for litigation.
That's tough in a time of a pandemic, but they acknowledged that we did tag them.
I think you sent it to about five different email addresses and sent it electronically, and you did all sorts of things.
So you got through, and they said, all right, all right, you tagged us.
So now it looks like we're going to be in this virus lockdown and Trudeau's going to be in his pretend quarantine, his self-hiding, probably for another month.
I want to get in there with our reporters, Kian Becksty, David Menzie, Sheila Gunrid.
I might even throw a few questions in myself.
So I want this to happen fairly quickly.
Is there a process?
I don't want a hearing in 90 days or six months when we're all done.
I remember during the debates thing, we went really quickly.
Is there a way we can get some ruling or some hearing before the pandemic rules of hiding Trudeau from reporters are done?
Well, you know, certainly that's something we've been discussing and happy to have those conversations offline.
But all I can say is that there is an opportunity.
There are mechanisms to bring this matter forward on an expeditious, urgent basis.
That's something we can do.
Whether the court will allow it, that's a different story.
But certainly, you know, this is something that we can pursue and we can try to bring it before the court so that the court can make, have the opportunity at least. to decide whether they're going to make a ruling on this fairly quickly.
That's a very diplomatic way of saying, Ezra, ask me these questions privately where we're not tipping the government off to our strategy.
You're so right.
I just want to share the update with our viewers that we did tag them.
The government acknowledges we've been tagged and now the fight is on.
Well, listen, very well answered, my friend.
And I feel like we're in good hands with you.
And I think we're also putting the government on notice that their era of getting away with little indignities towards independent press, little petty censorships, that era is over.
For four years, not a single journalist stood up to Trudeau and his high-handed, why would they?
They're all on the take from the $600 million media bailout.
But you and your colleague David showed last October that we can actually fight and win.
So I will have that private conversation with you.
And I promise our viewers that we will continue to hold Trudeau government and every government of every stripe to account.
And if you want to read our originating notice, our application that Aaron mentioned, you can find it at letusreport.com.
And by the way, if you want to help chip in to cover our legal fees, you can do that at letusreport.com too.
Last word to you, Aaron.
I think that in Canada, free speech is being rolled back slowly but surely.
And the normal voices that would sound the alarm, they're silent.
It's like the watchdog was given like a nice juicy bone to nibble on by a robber so he wouldn't bark at a home invasion.
I mean, my analogy is all the media watchdog groups that would normally be squawky, well, they're all on the take from Trudeau now.
So it's pretty hard to squawk when, you know, Trudeau's giving you, in the case of post-media, $140,000 a week, for example.
Pretty tough to bite the hand that feeds.
CBC won't do it.
I think it falls to us and True North and a few other independents.
Well, you know, I think what your organization has done a really great job at is lifting the veil on the challenges here in Canada with respect to the independence of our press.
And organizations, you know, news networks like yourselves and others ask tough questions.
That's what we should do.
That's what, you know, we need a robust press.
And yet what we're seeing is we're seeing a prime minister that's being coddled, that's being protected.
And, you know, you're right to be asking these questions.
We must be asking these questions and we must continue to do so.
And if that means resorting to the courts, that's fine.
Let's fight it out.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I'm glad that you and your colleague are on our side.
And I just want to point out for our viewers that a couple months ago, there was a budget lockup in the province of Alberta, which of course has the Conservative Premier Jason Kinney.
And they wanted to keep out a group called Progress Alberta, which is not a real journalistic group.
They're a union front group.
Like they're not genuine journalists.
They're press release writers.
But still, in my view, they ought to be able to go into a budget lockup as long as they follow the rules.
And the government of Alberta refused to let them in.
So I instructed our Edmonton lawyers to share our legal research with Progress Alberta to help them make an emergency application to get into the budget, lock it up there.
Now, obviously, Progress Alberta, as the name implies, is a left-wing front group.
They don't like me, I don't like them.
But I like them having freedom of speech, because the thing about freedom of speech and freedom of the press is It's the gift you've got to give your opponent if you want it for yourself.
And at Progress Alberta, who I disrespect ideologically, if they have a win for open government and more free press, that sets a legal precedent that I then can benefit from.
Now, they were extremely ungrateful, and they were as bad as you would expect.
I don't even care because we helped increase the wiggle room for freedom just a tiny bit there.
And I say that, Aaron, because this is not just a Trudeau thing.
This is a everyone, we're all in this together.
We all need freedom of speech.
And you don't know what you got till it's gone, by the way.
And I don't want to lose that.
Last word to you, Aaron.
Yeah, well, isn't it that old great thing where I don't like anything you have to say, but I will fight to the death to protect it.
And I see that's what you guys are doing.
I live by that principle, and I just think that's so important.
That is a fundamental.
Well, it's great to have you on the team.
Thanks so much for your time, and we'll continue our legal strategizing off camera so Trudeau doesn't get wind of it.
Thank you so much, Ezra.
All right, you take care.
Well, that's our legal eagle, Aaron Rosenberg, who was one of the two lawyers who got us into the leaders' debate last October.
I will continue my conversation with him out of earshot of the Prime Minister's office and the Privy Clerk's office.
Please go to letusreport.com.
I want you to read what Aaron and his colleague drafted.
It's a very interesting lawsuit.
It's only, I think, 10 pages or so, and it's in fairly plain English.
And if you want to help us pay for this, I mean, I don't know if you saw the news, but when we fought that first round in October, our legal bill was $18,000.
The federal government put five lawyers on it.
Seven Times More00:05:07
They billed taxpayers $131,000.
They spent, what, seven times more.
And we still beat them.
But I do need your help.
So go to letusreport.com.
All right.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about an Angus Reid poll showing support for China plunging to a new low.
Norbert writes, perhaps Canadians are beginning to wake up.
We have to turn our backs on China.
Well, I'm trying to remind myself of how I felt about the Soviet Union.
Of course, I was just a teenager when the Berlin Wall came down.
I knew enough Russians because in the brief period of detente in the late 70s, some Russians left Russia and came to Calgary, and some of those kids went in my school in my class.
Russia let out some tens of thousands of dissidents, mainly Jews, actually.
And so there was these Russian kids in my class.
So I knew that it was not just easy, but it was proper to love Russians, but hate the Soviet Union.
Do you see the difference?
And that's what we've got to keep in mind.
The first victims of the Chinese Communist Party are the Chinese people.
When Mao Zedong killed some estimates, say, up to 85 million people, they were Chinese people.
So love the Chinese people, hate the Chinese Communist Party, be inspired by democracy activists in places like Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Stand firm with them against the Communist Party.
That's the mindset I will try to take.
And remind yourself that even in Canada, ethnically Chinese people like Cindy Gu, the publisher of the Epoch Times, are still being bullied by the communists even here.
That would be the equivalent of these Russian dissident kids in my school being picked on by, I don't know, the Soviet ambassador of the day.
So that still happens.
Bill writes, just remember, China didn't destroy and shut down our own economy.
Our own government did that.
You're right.
And take a look at this graph.
This is almost a perfect bell curve.
I got this from the New York City COVID-19 website, which is excellent in terms of statistics.
It's over.
Flatten the curve.
The curve is done.
Similar stats all across the West.
So why are we still banned from going to work?
Those New York stats, which are amazing to me, 2 million New Yorkers under the age 20, not one single one of them has died from the virus.
23 or 24 were in hospital, but were recovered and are let go.
So that would, I mean, just extrapolate those numbers for your city or town across Canada.
I don't think a single young person in Canada has died from the virus, and there's been no evidence of any spread of the virus through casual outdoor contact.
So why are the schools shut down, the playgrounds shut down, summer camps shut down, kids' sports shut down?
That's correct.
That was done by us to us.
You're right.
On my interview with Spencer Fernando, Paul writes, great to see Spencer Fernando on the show.
I've been a fan of his work for years.
People need to support independent news media, or we'll soon have nothing but fake news media and whatever little we can get from foreign media.
That is exactly my point of view.
In some ways, Spencer Fernando is a competitor to us, right?
He has his own website.
He crowdfunds things.
He has a PayPal or Patreon.
I can't remember which.
So he takes donations, but I don't regard him as a competitor.
I regard him as an ally, even though we're not officially allied.
We're both independent media.
We're both competing against the legacy media that's bought in paid for by Justin Trudeau.
And I got to say, I really enjoy following Spencer on Twitter, and I get his emails too.
So it was a real pleasure to have him on the show.
And I wrote back to him and I said, hey, come on, anytime you have something to talk about.
So I hope he takes us up on that.
I feel the same way towards True North, as you know, Candice Malcolm, Anthony Fury, Andrew Lawton, guys and gals like that, and the post-millennial.
And so there's a little alternative press gallery forming, don't you think?
And I think that we've done more credible news journalism, if I may, over the last two months than the legacy media.
I just, I mean, you be the judge of that.
You're the judge.
But I think the CBC has disgraced itself.
They've done hit jobs against the enemies of the communist China.
Their piece against the Epoch Times was one of the worst things I've ever seen on that network.
Anyways, it was great to have Spencer on the show.
That's it for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.