Marty Gold explains Manitoba’s COVID-19 success—292 total cases, 16 active, seven deaths (all pre-existing conditions)—due to limited travel and community-focused education over enforcement. Businesses like Bernstein’s Delhi struggled, while others pivoted with delivery kits or fundraisers, contrasting Alberta’s abrupt reopening chaos. Gold then details the relaunch of thej.ca, a pro-Israel Jewish news platform with 100 writers, including Sue Anne Levy and Lauren Isaacs, who made Aliyah after COVID-19 isolation. The site rejects anti-Zionist narratives, counters anti-Semitism (e.g., neo-Nazi incidents, Linda Sarsour’s visit), and avoids ad dependency, expanding nationally to fill gaps left by progressive-leaning outlets like the Canadian Jewish News. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey Rebels, you're listening to a free audio-only recording of my weekly Wednesday night show, The Gun Show.
Tonight, my guest is independent Winnipeg journalist Marty Gold to talk about everything that's happening in Manitoba from their coronavirus lockdown to the crime that's occurring because of it, as well as the relaunch of the J.C.
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How has Manitoba managed this crazy coronavirus lockdown?
And what on earth has happened over at Jewish website thej.ca?
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Manitoba has really had almost no coronavirus cases to speak of and really a statistical rounding error of deaths.
And they've had very little real enforcement of the social distancing regulations passed by Brian Pallister's Conservative government, which of course is in stark contrast to places like Quebec and Ontario, where enforcement rather than education seems to be the path the government has chosen to deal with their much, much, much larger virus outbreaks.
Now, in other news, Canada's little Jewish news website that could, the J.C., just got a massive new rebrand and an enormous stable of incredible new journalists and writers.
How did that happen?
Well, joining me tonight is someone with a foot in Manitoba news and a foot in managing the J.C. Joining me tonight in an interview we recorded yesterday afternoon is Marty Gold from the J.ca.
Now from his home in Winnipeg is Marty Gold.
He's an independent journalist and a good friend of the show.
Marty, I wanted to have you on because Manitoba from the very beginning has been sort of going against the grain when it comes to the coronavirus.
When we saw other jurisdictions like Ontario and Quebec and to a much, much lesser extent Alberta doing coronavirus enforcement and these massive fines, Manitoba was moving towards education.
And I think you found a lot more compliance because of that.
Well, you know, the situation here was very interesting in that we, you know, I'll look at the stats as we tape today.
And just give me a second to pull up my whatever Twitter window I had this in.
Courtesy of Scott Billick, I'll make sure to mention him.
I follow Scott's, he's always at the press conferences, the provincial press conferences, and also, you know, when they've eased off on those kinds of things now that it's certain days they just put out a notice.
So here's the Manitoba stats.
We'll go off of this.
The total remaining, zero new cases, total remaining cases, 292, 16 active cases, seven deaths.
I'll go through those in a second.
There's currently zero hospitalizations and zero in intensive care, 269 recoveries.
So that's 269 recoveries and seven deaths out of 292 total cases.
They did about 400 tests on Monday, and there's been just under 40,000 tests done total.
Now, it's a very small sample size for a population of a million, but the number of total cases is ridiculously low here.
And the deaths, and Scott helpfully always reprints this, man in his 70s, woman in her 80s, two women in their 60s, and then three other men in their 50s, 60s, and 70s.
So we have no deaths under the age of 50.
I remember that a number of these cases had pre-existing conditions.
Some of these people are already in rough shape.
But we've had almost no effect in terms of casualties and the number of cases.
As I think you and I have discussed previously, this is in no small measure because we are so isolated here.
We did not have the volume of traffic, air traffic in particular, that would have come from Iran or China.
And so we didn't have the spread.
And as you mentioned, the government here was very big on education.
They essentially locked down.
I'm going to turn that off because somebody thinks I'm very popular today and I'm not interested in them for now.
The population here, you know, honestly tends to be kind of compliant with these things.
We did not know what we were dealing with, but one thing that I think a lot of Manitobans recognized was that if this wasn't kept under tight controls, we could end up with an influx, especially from places that don't have, you know, when you think of a crowded place that doesn't have access to water and hygienic living environment, it would be the numerous, especially northern Manitoba Aboriginal First Nation communities.
And so I think there was a very real and very legitimate fear, including among the Aboriginal leadership, that they could end up quickly with something that got way out of hand on them and cause a lot of tragedy.
And we were fearing that.
But Manitobans, there's been, without discussing the moral standing of these kinds of things, there's been very few fines handed out, very few shops or restaurants, or there weren't even any, there might have been like one restaurant where customers were coming onto the property that weren't allowed to access under the Manitoba emergency conditions.
Manitobans are, I think, very often a polite, compliant bunch.
But Manitoba and Saskatchewan in particular, I'm not so familiar with the numbers from the Atlantic provinces, but the numbers here have been very encouraging.
We did not have any kind of an overwhelming of the emergency rooms.
In fact, here as well as in other jurisdictions, there was a concern that people had stopped going to see doctors, stopped going to hospitals for the hypothesis was people could be having mild stroke symptoms, and Manitobans are, a number of us are often famous for, ah, it's nothing.
And sometimes it's more than nothing.
So we didn't have any strain.
There may have been strain on the staff in some of the hospitals where these cases were appearing.
But no overarching theme of a crisis in the healthcare system has emerged here.
Business-wise, we are certainly suffering casualties.
Very well-known restaurants are falling by the wayside by very accomplished chains.
A lot of the mom and pop type shops, small coffee shops are obviously struggling when they couldn't have customers in.
A number of places, I don't want to say resorted to.
That seems like that's sort of an unfair attribution.
But they tried to mitigate the damages that they were suffering, the loss they were suffering by doing various kinds of fundraisers on platforms or whatever.
I don't know what's happened so much in Alberta, but here a lot of restaurants, including chain places, created home delivery groceries.
So, for instance, there's a pizza chain that you could order ingredients to make pizzas.
They bring you the dough, they bring you the chopped up green pepper, the pepperoni, the pizza sauce.
I see from the look on your face that this isn't something you've necessarily heard about.
Pizza Hotline, which is a very big Manitoba business, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, advertiser in normal times on television, they did a fantastic job of adjusting on the fly, as have a number of Manitoba businesses.
And they put out in their regular flyer run, all of a sudden, it's like, make our pizzas at home.
And so many people now are doing that as part of family activities.
Yeah, I was going to say that sounds fun.
That sounds like something I would like to do with my kids.
Well, nothing against Chef Boy RD or any of those kinds, but this is as close to a restaurant pizza, unless not like you have a stone to put it on, you don't have a pizza oven.
But people, I think the uptake on that, and Pizza Hotline wasn't the only one to do, only ones to do this.
There's various kinds of restaurants in other fields that have tried this kind of home delivery of their product or come pick it up or to provide people the ingredients to make their own recipes.
There's been quite a bit of ingenuity that has gone on.
And now gradually with the reopening, there's rootings through some of the restaurants.
Bernstein's Delhi put rootings to get through their restaurant, but they have a retail section as well.
Public Safety Ingenuity00:15:35
And although there are casualties in the business sector, and I don't know how Premier Palliser is going to deal with the level of death that the province has taken on, he's taking a lot of heat for public sector cutbacks and layoffs and hydro layoffs and stuff.
Welcome to the real world, public sector, folks.
Well, you know, the controversy revolves around laying off people as part of a bigger ideological pursuit by the Pallister government.
That very well is possible.
I mean, Brian Palliser is no fan of big government per se, although I don't think that he's kept up to his reputation in some aspects of how the Manitoba government has run.
But here in Manitoba, the fact that there was not a big effect in the community.
Look, seven deaths is such a small ripple effect that people were cautious without being overly panicked.
You certainly see here now, the weather got nice and it got nice in a hurry and really nice, at which point the government and the public health officers, they knew that it was a chicken and egg part about opening up and encouraging people to get involved from style, get more socialized.
You see people walking around with masks on the sidewalk, it's kind of odd, you know, someone in the tank pop and shorts and wearing a mask.
It's sort of, you know, it reminds me of the rave scene a little bit in Vancouver that turns when I was there.
You know, some of the costuming is a little odd.
Generally speaking, I think Manitobans psychologically, and I can really speak more so of Winnipegers.
I don't want to be, I don't know, and we haven't had a lot of reports from rural Manitoba, the smaller communities, places like Brandon.
But in Winnipeg, I think that this has had a lot less of a scarring effect psychologically on the population than maybe in other centers.
The number of people that are part of the open-up crowd, it's comparatively small here.
I'm not deriding them.
I think there's some very good points that have been made.
And I believe there was a poll maybe yesterday that 50% of Canadians believe that we aren't being told everything the medical authorities know about this condition and how prevalent it was.
I think that's correct.
There's a point at which this was for our situation, because it wasn't a widespread condition, where it did seem kind of ridiculous.
The businesses that were weren't open, and everybody's, I'll figure out how to say this.
Everybody who is interested in fashion, beauty, and those industries, they're all dying for the nail shops to open up.
God knows that when my stylist, who's a rock and roll musician, him and his brothers, and when they open the shop or said they're going to look at opening, I contacted and said, look, I want to get in as early as possible.
And they really looked at me as a bit of a guinea pig in terms of, you know, when to sweep and when to disinfect the floors and everything.
So I was one of the first customers, which, and I was, you know, a reliable character.
I'm not going to freak out if something's a little, you know, out of pace or somebody says, oh, we should have done this or that.
And I think that we'll bloom from this pretty well socially.
How well we do economically, hard to say.
Taxi industry suffering.
The level of violence here has become disturbing.
In Winnipeg, 14 shooting reports of gunfire.
I don't want to say shootings.
I think one guy was, I think, shot.
And four stabbings over the weekend.
There was a murder on a bus, a stabbing on a bus.
In the neighborhood groups that I belong to on Facebook, whether it's River Heights or St. Boniface or what's called Scotia Heights, part of the north end of Winnipeg and the area towards Kildono Park, there's a lot of people having their cars broken into, people having their yards vandalized.
Lots and lots and lots of that.
And so you've had an acting out, I guess, of in particular people that, you know, I ran a column in my newsletter in the City Circus newsletter, I don't know if you saw it, where a longtime Winnipeg writer talked about, you know, rubbies and junkies.
And people don't like that language anymore.
I've taken heat for it.
I've used it in the past, but there is a certain subclass in every society, but in Winnipeg in particular, it's always been here, of people that are derelicts, that their life revolves around a miserable existence.
And to some extent, for some of them, it is self-inflicted, where they refuse help.
Now, how much of that goes back to mental health indicators or root causes?
I understand all that, but ultimately, the public here does not feel they're being adequately protected from a lot of those elements.
And that's a real challenge for the city police, and it's a challenge for the Attorney General as well.
This is something that's, I think more people are now aware because with less activity on the streets, the zombies are more obvious.
Yeah.
They don't blend in.
There's nothing to blend in when there was nobody on the streets.
And notwithstanding the need for shelters and social services, I think that more people understand, even if they didn't agree with it before, I think people that didn't understand the nature of lock them up, you know, detention orders, they're starting to see that there's cause for it.
Osborne Village is having a big problem, not only with economic downturn, vacant spaces, etc., but the public safety aspect is turning people off from going down to Osborne Village at all.
And it's the most densely, I think still was 15 years ago, the most densely populated neighborhood in the country.
And there's going to be it shouldn't take, you know, a really bad, serious, violent incident in Osborne Village for the city government to wake up in particular.
But you've got the mayor and a lot of counselors that coddle these kinds of elements that bend over backwards in the realm of social justice activism.
And what we end up with is a situation that, you know, I can mention, I haven't had a chance to look too deeply into it, but over in the exchange in the East Exchange Change District, which is normally, you know, it's like four blocks from City Hall, like near downtown, there's a tent city that was taken down once, as I recall.
I think a couple of teepees were set up this winter and it was being taken down and there might have been a fire, I think, of one of them.
Well, now there's like 25 tents, and this is near a lot of the social service agencies like Salvation Army, stuff like that.
And there seems to be no supervision of it whatsoever.
And now the neighbors, there's small residential clusters, like one or two streets in South Point Douglas and over in North Point Douglas and the Disraeli Freeway, which creation 1960, like split this neighborhood by bringing people from East Kildon and from the east side of Winnipeg into the downtown.
But I'm hearing from people on both sides of the Disraeli Freeway Where this tent city is set up over here, that they're having break-ins, harassment, vandalism, and nobody's listening to them, including the city councilor.
And there's a number of city councilors that they, whenever they talk about public safety, it's like they'll twist it.
Like, we've heard it from a lot of people who are concerned about public safety, and I am also concerned about these people out in the streets.
Well, you know, they make it like it's about the people that are the perps.
Yeah.
And their concern isn't with the victims of the crime because somehow, you know, look, in Winnipeg, we've got an element that says that when you're in the middle of a 911 call and you're driving a stolen car, waving around a weapon at a domestic call, and you get shot and killed by the police, you're a victim of a police shooting.
Right.
Well, the word victim here has been twisted a little bit.
Nonetheless, I think that there's going to be some reckoning to be had with regards to the crime here.
The business side, there's no way of knowing what's going to happen.
The gold ice season is threatened.
You know, Sam Cates did a great interview on CGLB Radio with Kathy Kennedy a couple of weeks ago about it.
I mean, he'll have no revenue.
That ball team will have no revenue for like 18 or 19 months if there's no baseball season.
What's going to happen to the lease?
They're trying to renegotiate the lease for the stadium, which is a beautiful, one of the best minor league parks, best experiences around.
What happens if there's no gold ice and there's no one to lease that stadium?
Then the city's got a white elephant on its hands because you're going to take it back in a couple of years.
So a lot of complexities to this with the bombers as well.
Whether the Jets, the Jets would make the playoffs in that revamp system.
Nobody knows which direction it's going to go.
A lot of people are obviously concerned.
Winnipeg is economically wheezy at the best of times.
There are some very strong entrepreneurs that have made headway during this period.
And a lot of, I want to say there's a lot of very strong people in the first responders, healthcare workers.
A lot of businesses have moved into making masks.
And if for those that feel their immunocompromised, for those who feel it's a precaution they want to take, I'm not going to criticize that.
I know others do.
I'm not going to pick on people for doing what they think is right under these circumstances to protect themselves, even though it's obviously not a big issue in Winnipeg, but you don't want it to be a big issue for you or your family.
We've certainly seen the ingenuity of Manitobans come forward.
And the Palestinter government has tried to keep, I think, essentially a very low profile through this.
And I think Manitoba is in a lot of ways certainly better off than Ontario and Quebec and British Columbia.
I can't compare us to.
Isn't that the truth?
I mean, Ontario, I think a lot of Ontario's cases have been travel-related or next to travel-related.
And then they're all, after that, just about all of them are in nursing homes and extended care facilities.
So it's the vulnerable, it's travel-related.
It's the things that people who have been talking about closing the borders have been talking about since the very beginning.
Yeah, you know, we closed the borders here, and we only had a few.
There was one cluster of cases in a trucking company and another in a seniors' care facility.
I can't remember if it was in.
I think it was in Gimli.
And there was maybe five cases there.
We were very lucky that we did not seem to have what's gone on in Ontario.
I watched Premier Ford's press conference.
He's obviously deeply shaken by those reports.
I think in Manitoba, and we've got a number of old-timers in homes in this province.
I think we count ourselves very, very fortunate that we did not have an outbreak of any measurable, you know, of any real consequence here in Winnipeg and in the province.
Very fortunate indeed.
This is one time we're being in a small, relatively small, insulated, insular, isolated kind of place has worked in favor of Manitoba and in favor of Saskatchewan.
Yeah, and I think your business community is going to see the benefit of that in Alberta.
Like Alberta is leading the reopen, but we had to stagger our reopen, which as someone who lives in the northern part of the province, I'm glad because we weren't held accountable for what was going on in Calgary and in Brooks, where the meat plants were.
But, you know, Calgary, they got the warning that they weren't going to reopen with the rest of the province like 12 hours before the scheduled relaunch.
And so there was restaurateurs and stores that were hiring staff.
They planned to reopen.
They'd ordered supplies and they got the rug pulled right out from underneath them.
And I think you're not going to have that happen in Manitoba.
And I think, you know, that delayed relaunch in Calgary with very little notice, I think that might have killed some businesses who are just on the cusp of surviving.
Yeah, that's the whole situation in Calgary.
I only hear anecdotally.
I don't have a lot of contacts in Calgary and Edmonton, just a few, but nobody talks optimistically about those communities at this stage.
And that predates the pandemic, honestly.
I mean, when you've got Don Iveson and Nenshe leading your cities, it's very hard to be optimistic.
Add that to four years of Rachel Notley and then going on five with Justin Trudeau, and it's a perfect storm.
I just want to mention, when you bring that up, you'll remember that when that election took place in 2015, was it?
Yep.
And I said, we didn't even know each other at the time.
We knew each other through Facebook or whatever.
And I said, welcome to Manitoba Stan.
And sure enough, when the Selinger ratfinks start abandoning ship and migrating to Alberta and ruining your province, the same kind of Marxist forward thinkers that undermine Manitoba.
And it's one of the reasons why the Pallister government, Palliser comes with his own baggage, certainly.
Not so much the cabinet ministers, but Pallister rubs a lot of people the wrong way and has continued to do so.
But boy, what they were trying to overcome here in terms of what was done to undermine the economy and to undermine regulation, the way laws were set up for different industries, the mining industry.
We just had, I haven't even been able to think about this yet.
We just had an auditor's report last week about it's a quarry rehabilitation fund.
So you, you know, when And you need to, I don't know how to put it, rehabilitate.
Reclaim.
Yes, reclaim lands that have been dug up and whatever.
And it turns out that there was no contracts tendered after 2005, even though in the annual reports they referred to, we have, this year there were, you know, 80 contracts handed out, and they never differentiated between the ones that were handout sole sourced and the ones were tendered.
None have been tendered since 2005 because Shades of the City of Winnipeg, they would take a situation, a plot of land where there may be three different mining sites in an area that should have been one big project.
Reclaiming Voices00:12:09
They split it up to all be under 50 grand so it wouldn't need a tender.
And who was handing out the contracts?
The inspectors.
So in Quebec, you and I know we'd be looking for the brown envelopes.
Yeah, yeah.
This was under the NDP government, and the audit only looked to 2010.
It was the same minister responsible for mines.
Not that you'll read this in any Winnipeg media outlet, that Dave Chomiak was singularly responsible as a minister of mines from about 2006, I think, till the fall of the Sellinger government.
Paliser government comes in and they see there's something not right with the reporting, and then the otter would do Google Earth searches.
And so they've got an invoice that was paid for something to be cleaned up.
And you look on Google Earth and there's no evidence any work was done.
I barely touched the surface of that story.
And the media, there was a good report by CBC, but didn't go into what the really interesting stuff was in the report about the excuses and the slipperiness internally.
And meanwhile, the NDP was happy to, you and I can surmise that some of these sole source contracts went to people who surely would have been found as contributing to NDP campaigns in the aftermath of whether the cleanup took place or not.
Right.
A little mini-Pallister inherited.
A little mini Winnipeg-style sponsorship scandal.
And when Pallister drained the swamp of all those NDP fixers that were in government, a lot of them fled to Alberta for jobs with Rachel Notley.
And I still feel sorry for you folks there having to try to pin that mess up.
We're still getting rid of them.
Now, I wanted to talk to you because we're going on about 26 minutes here.
I wanted to talk to you about your non-secular project.
We've talked about your work with City Circus in the newsletter, and maybe you want to tell people how to sign up for that in a second.
But your work with the J.C., you guys just went through a major relaunch, and it has been incredible.
I've never seen a website relaunch and hit the ground running, and I cannot get over the caliber of writers that you have.
However, I'd like to point out that good editors make great writers.
We try.
You guys have rounded up like every single right-wing or center-and-right Jewish journalist in the entire country, and they're writing these incredible articles for you guys all of a sudden, like out of the blue.
I have to tell you that I wouldn't even really know that you're, I'm sure you're correct, but I wouldn't know because, you know, there's been some, it's interesting how people have gravitated to the platform.
What we did was, for a bit of backstory, when we rushed the J out a year ago, 13 months ago, in the midst of the Linda Sarsour incursion into Winnipeg.
And this was a major battleground for not just the Jews and the pro-Israel crowd in Winnipeg, but people that generally aren't identified with that who just felt that this was A move by Marxists to try to normalize points of view and normalize speakers who are clearly vile and reprehensible.
And so we rushed the website out originally, and pretty much with every appearance I've been on with you in the last year, we've talked about whatever stories we're covering there.
Largely, we focused on anti-Semitism, whether it's incidents of anti-Semitism or just incidents of neo-Nazis bubbling up in Alberta or Saskatchewan, and of course, coverage from Winnipeg and things in Toronto, like what went on at York University with the posters and etc.
And then Ron East, our publisher, and you know, Ron, I first met Ron, his father mentored me, as followers pretty much know.
And so I've known Ron since before his bar mitzvah, actually, since he was 12.
And so he had a vision for this that we didn't have a lot of resources to put into it.
We stayed the course, kept it established.
Then, as this came up, we were already going, how do we emerge from this?
Not knowing what was going to happen.
Knowing the Jewish community, you know, the traditional Jewish newspapers are not going to handle this well because they rely on, you know, come to our speakers' event or, you know, the Hanukkah party.
And they rely on that kind of advertising.
And with no events, there's no advertising.
We weren't reliant on advertising.
No, we didn't have any real revenue, but we weren't relying on advertising.
And so he already wanted to go to a national, a more national scope.
And then when the Canadian Jewish News around April the geez, it might have even been April the 2nd, I think, announced that the next week they were going to be folding after 101 years.
And immediately we were contacted by people who were fans of what we did and asking, will you, can you expand nationally?
And in particular, you know, there's some particular ideas about how to do it.
We hired Dave Gordon on as managing editor from Toronto, who is such an accomplished writer.
And I only knew Dave by name.
The internet's a weird thing where you think you know people, but you don't.
And Dave is brilliant.
He's written for so many newspapers and magazines.
And the roster that's been put together is, you know, 90% his doing.
He already knew a lot of these people, and he knew if he didn't know them how to reach out to them.
And the uptake, there's like a hundred writers.
He sent me a list today that I haven't gone through, asked me to take some directly.
And we've got a major sports writer coming on board and a correspondent from the West Coast.
But he's asked me to take on some.
He's got 100 writers still lined up that all want to contribute.
And it's funny because one of our new correspondents had posted on Twitter, whatever, and promoting her story about how we have the most diverse lineup.
And she started naming off all these, you know, the identity politics crowd.
And I suggested to Dave to, you know, explain to her, we didn't go out of our way to do that.
Yeah.
If we've got, I don't care if somebody's a lesbian.
I don't care if they're an immigrant.
I don't care if they're honestly, I don't care if they're right-wing.
And I don't really care if they're left-wing because I obviously have lots of left-wing friends.
They're left-wing Jews that are pro-Israel and pro-Zionist.
There is a dividing line on the left.
There might be one on the right, but I've never encountered it.
But there's a dividing line on the Jewish left that we've detailed between the progressives that are Marxists more so than they are pro-Israel, that attack the Israeli defense force, that Called soldiers serving the IDF baby murderers and all this other stuff that are essentially a lot of them are like anti-Netanyahu, and that bleeds over into their views and their statements about Israel.
We have two criteria: you have to favor the survival of the Jewish people, and you have to support the state of Israel as a home for the Jewish people.
And Dave Gordon has done a great job as managing editor.
Terry Pilts from Montreal came on board also, and what a great guy he is.
And he's handling our social media.
He's revamped the Twitter feed and the Facebook page, and they are flourishing.
I only assist with, you know, to some extent, if people are, you know, congratulations on the relaunch, then I'll thank them.
I'll retweet the, you know, some of the some of that stuff.
But the messaging for the stories themselves, except pretty much for mine, are coming from Terry and then Dave backing it up as well.
We've been so fortunate to be able to get the kind of writers we have.
Jacob Glogauer is great.
Egal Hech got us an interview with the new Israeli Minister of Public Security.
Holy Baba Botech, who's the daughter of Rabbi Shmueli Botech, who's got like a million followers on Facebook, and is a very influential modern Jewish thinker.
She came to us and is providing columns.
Her grandfather, who was a major businessman, property holder in Los Angeles.
You all have just passed away a couple of days ago, and we've, of course, extended our sympathies to the family.
And I was able to look up a little bit about that history.
But, you know, when Rabbi Shmuley is telling people how great our website is and, you know, this story or that story about whether it's about Israeli government or life in Israel, when you get that kind of support out there, so our growth has been exponential.
We have Abu Dhandanchi, who's a Syrian immigrant who's a brilliant writer.
I mean, if you want to talk about somebody who doesn't need any editing, there's a guy who needs no help getting his messages across and explaining the thought patterns in the Islamist world and trends in the Arab world towards our communities.
And you mentioned, but you may not have mentioned Sue Anne Levy came on board and I was so happy.
Sweet.
Love Sue Ann.
And she's already provided two columns.
One was a very touching piece about how the COVID isolations affected the Jewish traditions of sitting Shiva and going to funerals and then sitting Shiva and then the mourning period.
And Sue Anne did a really beautiful piece about that in her family and then followed up with a fantastic story that honestly I wish I'd have written about self-hating Jews, Jewish anti-Semites.
And it was a great analysis.
We have a lot of, there's various kinds of more politically oriented writers.
Doran Berger did a story about Leswyn Lewis, and I guess she did a town hall maybe in Toronto and he picked off the material that was of interest to the Jewish community and the pro-Israel crowd.
Great.
And I thought that she was a great candidate for people with those points of view.
We had a column for Yomir Yoshralayim for the day celebrating Jerusalem from Moisha Phillips of Kirut North America, who's been a tremendous friend for us.
And speaking of people from Kirut that are friends, Lauren Isaacs, who I think you've interviewed.
Love Lauren.
Lauren went to Israel just before the lockdowns hit en masse.
She was in a two-week isolation when she got to Israel.
She takes a trip there every year and makes the news most of the time.
During the course of, I guess, four days into her isolation, Lauren decided that she was going to make the big move and make Aliyah, as we say, elevate herself to becoming a citizen of Israel.
And she wrote a wonderful column about her feelings and her family's reaction.
Nobody knew her is surprised by this, but she's decided to jump in with both feet, and she will be a regular callness for us.
Great.
Leaving her post with Kheirut as director of Kirut in Toronto, but she's going to be a regular callness for us.
So we have not only her, there's others where we have Canadian voices from Israel contributing to us.
We are reaching out in Atlantic Canada.
I've got an option now for Vancouver.
We're going to try to fill in the rest of the regions.
You know, the Canadian Jewish community is so there's, look, it's like being the neighbor of the United States.
There's 390,000 Jews in the country, but 300,000 of them are between Toronto and Montreal.
Museum Voices from Canada00:02:00
So when they roll over, you kind of notice.
But it's been very gratifying for us that the Toronto crowd and the Montreal crowd have been very, there's been some stories that raised eyebrows.
For instance, Dave Gordon, and I apologize, I don't remember the co-author just now.
I haven't had the chance to speak with the gentleman, but they had written a story and hadn't had any place to put it yet about the $72 million Jewish Community Center.
And this column strongly questioned whether this was a good idea compared to the level of poverty in Toronto, which I understand for senior citizens approaches 25% in that city.
And, you know, in Winnipeg, as you'll remember, as you will know, when the Canadian Museum for Human Rights came up and all of a sudden they started panhandling, you know, the world's richest panhandlers started asking the federal government to bail them out.
I was on Kick FM Radio, along with various other commentators and bloggers in Winnipeg, very critical of this.
And the Doer government handed over $20 million in two different years to keep bailing the museum out without a vote in the legislature.
And, you know, there would be visitors to Winnipeg, important visitors, including people from the diplomatic sector.
And I would be asked to give them a tour of Winnipeg and show them what's going on.
They want to know what's really going on, not just go to cocktail parties.
If you hit the lights right, in three minutes, you're in neighborhoods from the museum, like down one street, down another street, just keep driving and then go on to the residential side streets where there's abject poverty, miserable conditions.
And I tell them, when you wonder why not everybody loves the museum, it's because the Doar government was more interested in what Gary Dewar was interested in, sucking up to the upper class, because Gary loved doing that.
And yet, here's the level of poverty, a five-minute drive.
How do we justify by private donations?
Ottawa Mosque Controversy00:12:16
Fine.
Now, the museum also badly affected the non-for-profit sector here in Winnipeg.
And Osborne House, where I ended up working for a while as managing as operations manager and other charities, they suffered because there's a lot of high-pressure arm twisting by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the friends who are doing it.
And it hurt a lot of charities and a lot of nonprofits in this city to this very day.
Well, in Toronto, apparently, they've never had this kind of open discussion.
They've never had anybody come up and really question whether this falls too much into the category of empire building and monuments to philanthropy as opposed to service to the community.
And I was very surprised.
Was a lot of heated comments criticizing that story, which to me was a perfectly normal thing to question.
Millions of dollars of spending within the community on one priority as opposed to another priority.
But it got people paying attention and it got us feedback and it got us people saying, We want to write an op-ed for you.
And so it served that purpose.
The one story that I was able to generate, because I'm very occupied with back-of-the-book stuff now, and we're still really working on the business side and some of the looking towards scheduling future stories, different ideas and topics and whatever that we want to start being able to find writers and assigning them to.
But I was able to put together some news about our dear friend, Firaz al-Najim, who we've talked about before.
And he, of course, made headlines in Toronto.
This would now be two weekends ago, that dragged in an MPP in Toronto after he stood outside of a mosque under terms of the exemption of the noise by law for the call to prayer.
And he proceeded to politicize the religious call to prayer for devout Muslims with various statements about the criminal Zionist regime and blah, And the mosque in question, Jafari Mosque, said that they didn't know this individual and this wasn't authorized, except that they supported a letter he sent to Prime Minister Trudeau protesting something or other a year or two ago.
And he spoke in support of a zoning variance or something that they were seeking at Toronto City Council.
So the mosque definitely knew Faraz.
Faraz definitely knew the mosque.
The denial and criticism of the MPP for questioning whether we had anything to do with this or supported it.
You know, they lectured the MPP on it.
She then got dumped on by minute by people in the Jewish community for backing down.
And lo and behold, what none of them knew was Toronto wasn't the first time he had done this, that Faraz had, at the end of April and then the first week of May, gone to Ottawa, pulled the same stunt.
The mayor of Ottawa, Jim Watson, got a complaint.
He then got a second complaint when Firaz did the replay the following Friday.
Maybe it was a Thursday night, actually, that he did it again.
Now Mayor Watson sent it to the city lawyer, the city solicitor, who referred it to the police, who blew off the complainant in a manner that I thought really betrayed, you know, in January, we're reviving the hate crimes unit.
There's too much in Ottawa.
And then they get a complaint, saying, well, thank you.
And if you have anything else to tell us, let us know.
What about the part where they say we will meet with people, we will offer them counseling, we will talk with them.
None of that.
However, it did wake up Jim Watson, who I don't know from a hole in the ground, the mayor of Ottawa.
I'm always happy to rattle a mayor's cage anywhere in this country.
But it woke him up.
And so when we revealed that Toronto, that Ottawa was like the trial balloon, that he tested this out in Ottawa first, I guess, to see if the cops are going to come apprehend him with truncheons or I don't know what.
To see whether the Jewish community, whether the Jewish Federation, would rise up and say something.
Of course, in Ottawa, they said nothing, as federations often don't in this country, Jewish federations.
So I ran that story.
I was able to put those details together from the emails.
And this shocked people that he was able to do this in Ottawa.
The Toronto, in particular, media was following up on the complaints about what's the MPP's name?
Marlowe, I think.
Gino Marlowe, I think is her name.
That they were following up on this, but none of them knew that he'd already been gallivanting elsewhere in Ontario, pulling this.
And he's just done the same thing in Niagara Falls.
If my information is correct, I haven't checked it yet.
And so, you know, we are able, I'm able to still, in this role as the editor of this expanded national edition, I'm going to continue to focus on these kinds of stories about anti-Semitic activity, the reaction, you know, the political, Canadian political end, the domestic end, and the police center responses to this.
But as I said, Dave and Tevi have put together a fantastic, just a fantastic lineup.
And Ron East has also recruited a few writers as well.
Agnes Imami, I want to mention her because she came to us.
She felt kind of helpless about the rise of anti-Semitism in this country and started a Facebook group, Jews Against Anti-Semitism Canada.
And then she was the creator of the anti-Semitism toolbox series, speaker series.
And, you know, these are quality people that are coming forward, looking for something that can replace the Canadian Jewish news.
We don't have a Gestettner.
There's no plan yet to put out a physical print edition, but we are looking at putting out a PDF version because we know that a lot of Babas and Zetas and a lot of rabbis and Rebbitson, they like to print out these kinds of things and then they can read them on Chavis and on Jewish holidays and whatever.
So we're looking towards a PDF version.
I am personally very happy, entirely happy with the look, with the reception we've gotten, with the social media growth, and the fact that this isn't only, what they want to make clear, it's not only, you know, although you've identified that we've corralled a lot of the reading, the leading writers and thinkers and that they do want to be part of what we're doing, we don't exclude, listen, I'm the editor of a national platform now that has, as I'm told by one of our writers, three lesbian writers.
Who knew?
But I don't care what I don't care.
And I think there's a lot of people who have been really people that thought we went looking for that.
We didn't go looking for it.
It came to us because of the credibility that Ron East has been able to generate for the J.C.A. not only in what we've produced in terms of the content, my writing, and some of the other contributors we've had, but the credibility that he brings when he's talked to Jewish leadership, with Jewish organizations.
Sometimes his style has rubbed people the wrong way because he believes that our community and our friends, we need to stand up.
We need to raise our voices.
We need to challenge those who would endanger us.
We need to challenge policies that marginalize the state of Israel and that unfairly demonize or criticize Israeli government practices or policies of the IDF.
But all these people have willingly come under our tent.
And I never imagined I would have this kind of a staff and this kind of a roster.
And we're adding more and more columns and features in the next week, two weeks.
We'll have the newest.
We're putting out stories tonight, Wednesday night, three more stories.
One other thing I forgot to mention, please indulge me.
The Jewish News Syndicate came to, basically was brought to us, and we have an exchange deal with them now.
So we are able to run JNS stories from Jewish life, sciences, political stuff from around the world.
And they will be able to run our stories from Canada and give those issues a worldwide audience as well on a very respected, a very respected platform.
So I can't take credit.
We have a webmaster who's a genius.
And Ron worked with him, has worked with him, and Tevi also directly for, I mean, nobody's been sleeping for about two weeks.
I'm hoping that that eases off.
And we welcome people to go to the J.C.A. You can sign up for the newsletter for the newsletter, which will generally alert you that the new stories are being posted on our Facebook page.
There's alerts also when news stories are posted.
We'll try to get up a couple of JNS stories every day, as well as some domestic content, then a mini-push every pretty much Wednesday, depending on Jewish holidays fall.
And the new addition will come out from the looks of it on our schedule every Sunday evening for the foreseeable future through the summer.
I would think we'll stick to that schedule.
I'm very lucky, right place, right time, honestly, that this need emerged.
There was already a need for something other than the Canadian Jewish news, which is great for archival content, but it had swung very far to the left under the editorial direction the last few years.
I'm told that the board wasn't really as cognizant of that, didn't really understand that that's what was going on.
If it wasn't for that, the J.T.A. probably wouldn't have had nearly the traction it did, especially among Israeli Canadians.
But I'm right place, right time, runs a fantastic leader.
And Dave and Tevi have worked miracles in Eastern Canada, pulling together the content, the writers, doing the majority of the editing and working with us.
We're trying to find, you know, we were trying to figure out what are we going to provide.
It turns out we're providing everything.
We've got beauty columns, you've got dating columns, parenting columns.
There will be the more expected rabbinical stuff, you know, the stuff that relates back to living a Jewish life, as well as the political analysis both of the United States, Canada, the EU, and of course the state of Israel.
It's like going, how do I put this?
It's like going to a carnival and there's all these great rides and all these great things to taste, all these different columns and ideas to taste and to try out.
And I couldn't be prouder.
You know, this I don't talk about this stuff publicly and I decided not to write a column about it, but I will mention it to you as we tape this.
This is the anniversary on the Hebrew calendar of the death of my father.
It's his Yort Seik.
And in the Jewish tradition, the days are days, calendar days, start the night before.
So Tuesday night is Wednesday She for us, the third day of the week.
The days don't have names except for Shabbat, except for the Sabbath.
And so as you and I talk, this is the anniversary on the Hebrew calendar of my father's death.
And he died at age 44, and life was a struggle for my parents.
The family business in which he worked folded in 1970, the pop business.
And I don't know that my father had ever contemplated working outside the family business.
And he tried some other ventures, went to Red River College, and graduated from the Creative Communications class.
He loved advertising.
So he graduated from Crecon before they even called it Crecom.
And I had my own involvement with the Crecom department through Kick FM.
Pride in Legacy00:03:07
And I know that there would be a great deal of pride seeing a kid who was pretty happy and full of ideas, who wanted to be a sports writer essentially.
But I was yearbook editor and I wrote for the high school newspaper.
But he never saw, you know, I never did anything that he was alive to see.
Even my first work in radio, I started three days before he died at the University of Manitoba radio station.
So he never even heard any of my broadcasts on radio.
And it's not redemption because I don't think I need to be redeemed from anything.
But I would never have been able to follow this path of speaking out on behalf of the Jewish community, speaking out on behalf of even behalf of Jews that are not at the forefront compared to sometimes the big shots that like to steamroll the rest of the community.
We were little guys in the Jewish community, but we were very respected from my family's involvement with Mizrahi, with the Canadian Zionist Federation, with the Pioneer Women.
And so to some extent, I've kind of come home with this.
And my brother, my brother messaged me last night about this.
And I know that my father, my mother died four years after, I know my father would be very proud that my friendship with the Mizrahi family, who ended up moving in 12 houses down the block from my grandparents' house, and with Ron East, that we've been able to ride this out and develop this baby and now give the Jews of Canada and the support of the Jewish community and the support of the state of Israel in this country something that is robust,
something that has quality, something that will always stand up for what's right and that will always speak truth to power.
I know my father would be very proud of that.
You're making me a little verklumped here, if I'm using that word properly.
Yeah, I did.
You know what?
I wasn't expecting it either.
But I want to mention that.
I know from my own background and the difficulties my brother and sister have had in their lives, how difficult it is to lose a parent, especially when you still need them.
My dad died when he was 44 and my mom when she was 48.
And that's already 40 years ago.
And it's affected me.
It's affected my children and my grandchildren in very adverse ways.
But ultimately, the way I was raised and the values I was raised with, I am able to express and to promote and to promulgate through the J.C.A. And if for as long as this part of the ride lasts, if this is my legacy, I'm proud of it.
A Great Place to End00:05:42
Marty, I want to, that's a great place to end the interview.
I just want to give you a chance before we wrap up to let people know where they can find some of the other work that you do, how they can sign up for your city circus newsletter, because you are doing work in Winnipeg that I don't really think is being done, at least in Edmonton.
I know in Calgary, they do have Safe Calgary, who does some of the municipal accountability work, but you really are kind of the only guy on the block in Winnipeg doing it.
And how do people sign up for that?
What happened was that in April, right around the time we got the call about, you know, from outside interest suggesting that we expand the J, around the same time I had realized that there was a serious gap in Winnipeg reporting.
There's always a gap in Winnipeg reporting.
It was getting more serious because so many reporters were being assigned to COVID stories that there was, again, what was going on with the police shootings that I was interviewed by you about, they weren't looking into the background of the people that were getting involved with police because their behavior was resulting in 911 calls and the public was feeling endangered.
And so I thought the best route was to put out a newsletter.
It's not like putting out something every day.
I try to put out once a week.
And so there'll be three or four stories.
I've got guest columns from people that provide submissions.
I create an ad to promote a particular restaurant in Winnipeg business that's trying to overcome their lockdown problems or whatever.
And, of course, promote independent journalism.
And I thank those that have put a little something forward to the hard drive and monitor fund, because that's what any of those contributions go for: equipment upgrades at this stage.
City Circus, I only put out the subscribers, though, and on.
I should have asked you about this, but people are thinking I should start just putting the URLs out there so it gets a more general distribution.
If people want to subscribe to City Circus and get an inside look at some of the nonsense that goes on involving city councilors and city policies, crying police, and I'm going to start touching on provincial stuff too, since Winnipeg is essentially Manitoba.
If you get a copy of it, there is a subscribe button on the newsletter at the bottom.
But otherwise, if people want to email me, martygoldlive at gmail.com, send me a note.
I'll add you to the subscription list or get a hold of me on Twitter at TGCTS.
I may have to change that handle one day because I don't know the Great Canadian Talk Show is going to be coming back because I'm so busy with other things.
Or you can contact me through the J.C. and you can subscribe not only that newsletter, but we'll get you subscribed to City Circus as well.
It's just a different way of covering Winnipeg, different kinds of stories.
And when the city councilors are subscribing to your newsletter, you know, you're getting in there on their radar and you know that you're making a difference.
And so far, I've had a very good response to it.
And I'm going to try to continue the reporting I've done for the community at large for now.
It's over 15 years in Winnipeg, as well as providing national coverage of Israel and Jewish affairs with the J.C. Terrific.
I'm plenty busy now, all of a sudden.
And Sheila, I want to thank you, and I want to thank Ezra because you have always been very generous with your time.
You've allowed me to become the window for rebel media into Winnipeg and Manitoba.
And I take that responsibility very seriously.
And it means a lot to me that your viewers have been so kind and so nice and have been supportive of these appearances.
And when I've had different stories that have been mentioned where they've gone into whether it was my blogs previously or the J.C. and they've recirculated them and they've backed our play, so to speak.
And I know that this is on the political right, though there are obviously differences.
I know that we have much more in common than we don't.
And those that stand for the safety of the Jewish community and for the inclusion of Jews in all walks of Canadian life, including the halls of politics and the halls of power, I'm very gratified to have had this opportunity and to continue to have the opportunity to be able to have an audience with these people.
And if any of you have any story ideas, any of you want to write, whatever, just jump on the pile and I'll get through it.
And we're going to continue to expand this base and make sure that these voices are heard and that these stories are told.
What a great place to end the interview.
Marty, thanks for doing what you do to tell the other side of the story, both in Winnipeg and for the Canadian Jewish community.
Thank you so much.
And anytime I look forward to appearing again in a month or so and catching up on all things Winnipeg and all things the J.C. Great.
Thank you.
You know, Marty's kind of a rebel.
He tells...
tells the other side of the story with his municipal accountability work, but he's also telling the other side of the story about the Jewish community here in Canada, that they are not all downtown Toronto progressives.
I encourage you to check out the work that's happening over at the J.C.A. Some of the most interesting journalists in Canada are now writing at the J.C.
It's kind of surprising, but kind of great.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week.