Teresa Tam’s WHO-aligned warnings now stretch COVID-19 lockdowns to "two or three more years," defying the original "two weeks" promise. Canada and Victoria’s draconian measures—$5,000 fines, military curfews, and 85%+ victim ages in aged care—target populations rather than high-risk groups, with cloth masks filtering just 30% of particles. Legal pushback grows globally, but Avi Yamini’s Melbourne reports authoritarian compliance over virus fear. Andrews’ "dictatorial" emergency powers mirror Trudeau’s influence on Ford, while skepticism mounts over China’s pandemic role and supply chain reliance, echoing past Cold War-era containment strategies. The episode questions whether prolonged restrictions reflect public health or power retention. [Automatically generated summary]
I saw an incredible clip from Teresa Tam, Trudeau's hand-picked public health officer, who actually still works for the World Health Organization.
It's so weird.
She says we have to live in this lockdown for two or three more years.
I've got the videotape to prove it.
Stay with me.
Before we do, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
You get the video version of this podcast.
I think it improves the experience, obviously, because we're showing you things.
I've got some graphs I want to show you today, too, plus an interview with my friend Ali Yamini, who is in Melbourne, Australia, which is under actual martial law because of the pandemic.
That's all I had.
But first, why not become a subscriber to our Rebel News Plus?
That's the video version.
It's $8 a month.
Go to RebelNews.com.
Boom, you're done.
$8 a month or $80 for the whole year.
Get a bit of a discount.
Okay, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, two weeks to flatten the curve, they said.
Now that's being changed to two years.
It's August 5th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Two weeks to flatten the curve.
That's what they told us when they asked us to live a little bit like prisoners, be under a form of house arrest, stop visiting other people, including our own families, give up our freedom of mobility, give up our jobs, our businesses, give up our right to visit our doctors or anyone else.
Give up the right to visit our grandparents, even if they're dying, especially if they're dying.
Tonight I'll have an interview with our friend Avi Yamini, who lives in Melbourne, Australia.
They're truly under martial law.
They literally have members of the Australian military patrolling the streets, not hunting for invading armies, but hunting for Australian citizens who dare to leave their houses.
That's what you do with the prison.
But prisoners at least have a trial first.
There's no trial here.
They're all guilty.
Two weeks to flatten the curve, they said.
Remember what that meant, though?
They didn't say two weeks to stop the disease.
That would require sealing off our entire country to outsiders.
Now, they did that pretty much in Taiwan.
They literally told tens of thousands of Taiwanese citizens that they simply could not come back home from China because of the pandemic.
And when people were allowed in, they had strict quarantines.
I tried to send a reporter from Rebel News to Taiwan to cover how they fought the pandemic, but they actually refused to let us send anyone, even if we promised to spend two weeks in a quarantine.
That's what quarantine means, actually.
You'll remember from my very long monologue the other day about medieval Mediterranean port cities during the plague, places like Venice and Marseille, that when ships would arrive from other ports known to have the plague, the arriving ships had to stay for 40 days.
Quarantagiorni, that's where the word quarantine comes from, from the Italian.
They'd have to stay at a little island off the main city for up to 40 days till they got a clean bill of health.
That's where that phrase came from.
They didn't put the entire city in a lockdown or a quarantine.
They only quarantined people arriving to the city.
They focused their efforts on risky people, on sick people, on foreign people, not on safe people, healthy people, their own people.
Trudeau did the opposite.
Canada, United States did the opposite.
Australia did the opposite.
So they've locked down the entire state of Victoria in Australia, including the mighty city of Melbourne.
They're really under martial law.
So quarantine doesn't mean what it meant.
And two weeks to flatten the curve doesn't mean what it meant.
Flatten the curve didn't mean stop people from getting sick, by the way.
It meant slow down the rate of people getting sick so that when the pandemic peaked, that highest amount of sick people at any one time would be low enough that everyone could be taken care of in our system.
Let's just slow down the spread of the virus a bit through social distancing and breaking the chain of contagion so that instead of us all getting sick at once, we spread it out.
So it's not bunched up.
So the maximum disaster is small enough for our hospitals to handle.
Yeah, as you can see from this graph of Toronto cases, and it's pretty much the same for every Canadian jurisdiction, we flatten the curve.
The curve itself never came close to overwhelming hospitals.
Hospitals have been shockingly empty.
Bored doctors and nurses spend their time filming little TikTok videos because there's nothing else to do.
There was no curve to flatten.
Justin Trudeau and Teresa Tam, the public health officer, they said according to their models, we'd have between 50,000 and 350,000 dead by now.
Number actually hasn't hit 9,000, thank God.
The curve peaked in mid-April, but that peak itself was nowhere near overwhelming.
It's done.
It's over.
It's finished.
I showed you the British Columbia stats the other day.
Not a single person under age 47 died from it.
Fewer than 200 people in the entire province.
A small fraction compared to other causes of death like opioid drugs, which are a real pandemic in BC.
You know, entire provinces are virus-free in Canada, have been for weeks.
Secrets Of N95 Masks00:03:41
Nova Scotia brought in its mandatory mask bylaw only after the whole place was certified virus-free.
There's no one who's got it there.
What sense does that make?
Here's our newest contributor, Tamara Ugalini.
You might recall that she's one of our clients too.
We met her through fightethefines.com.
She was thrown in a jail cell, no exaggeration, because she was walking on the beach.
A jail cell.
Well, we liked how clearly she spoke.
We liked her fighting spirit, so we asked her to make videos with us.
Here's part of her first report from yesterday.
I don't know if you saw it.
Here with Rebel News, I'm Tamara Ugalini in what is coined as the feel-good town of Colberg, Ontario.
Here locally, the medical officer of health, Lynn Noseworthy, has implemented a mask mandate for the Kawartha, Halliburton, Pine Ridge region, and seems to come as of yesterday after all cases have been declared resolved by the same health unit within Northumberland County.
Isn't that funny?
Her hometown had the virus, but it's completely cured.
Not a single person in her whole town has it now.
But now is the time they're making masks mandatory.
There's no science there.
That's not public health.
The only science there is psychology.
Keep people scared.
Keep people submissive.
Keep people obedient.
Here's one more clip from Tamara's debut video.
Someone who actually worked in the personal protection industry for nearly 30 years.
Listen to him say the obvious about mandatory masks.
Well, my name is Rob Mitchell.
I worked for OPG for close to 38 years.
And over 30 of those years, I worked in developing personal protective equipment.
I heard what was going on here and I thought I'd come down.
And if somebody wanted a little bit of different information, I might be the guy who can supply it.
I would say roughly 70% of the air that you're breathing in your lungs is not going through the mask.
30% or less is actually going through the mask.
So tell me again what is protecting you from the virus.
Because the air is going down by your nose and the two big open holes in your cheeks and a couple of holes down here.
So the virus is bypassing the mask.
That seems to be right.
I mean, I don't want to be gross, but I want to tell you a comparison I hear from time to time, and it's gross.
I'm sorry, but I think it's true, and I'm sorry in advance because it's gross.
But I saw this meme, and it's gross, but it's true.
I mean, the real answer is plastic waterproof diapers that babies wear.
It can stop everything, but not a flimsy mask.
I don't know, a flimsy mask is for obedience training, it's for conditioning.
If you want a mask that has a tight seal around your mouth like a plastic baby's diaper would, there are masks like that.
They're called N95 masks.
They cost a bit more.
They seal up to the face.
The N95 means they stop 95% of particles.
But there's a secret about these N95 masks that I only learned the other day.
They protect you, the wearer, at least more than a handkerchief or those blue cloth masks do.
But you know that little valve on them, that little circle?
That's to exhale.
It's like a tailpipe for a motor.
So the mask, the N95 mask really filters what you breathe in.
But when you breathe out, it goes through that little valve easily.
It's a one-way exit valve, and it doesn't filter anything going out.
So you're breathing out of those masks naturally and easily.
It makes the mask more comfortable.
N95 masks don't actually filter what you exhale.
Something Already Passed00:15:25
I'm not trying to get kooky or go down some rabbit hole here.
I'm just saying, look, the pandemic peaked nearly four months ago.
We flattened the curve so much, it's not even a curve.
The worst it did was the same as the annual flu season in terms of death toll.
And it's done now.
What we're seeing now is politics, not medicine.
In fact, I think it's always been politics, not medicine.
These masks are the worst example of it.
But look at this.
Look at this.
Listen to this.
I think we're in it.
We're planning as a public health community that we're going to have to manage this pandemic.
Certainly over the next year, but certainly maybe planning for the longer term of the next two to three years during which the vaccine may play a role.
But we don't know yet.
That one part, the public health community.
Is that how we make decisions as a country, as a democracy, as businesses, as families, as churches, as schools?
The public health community says, who's in that community?
Again, presumably Patty Hajdu, Trudeau's health minister, who ordered you not to go traveling.
But look at that.
She took 70 grand worth of private jet flights back and forth to her hometown because she's important.
She's a member of the public health community and you're not.
Say, since when did any federal government have jurisdiction at all over schools and hospitals and matters of local affairs?
Section 92 of our Constitution gives the provinces, not the federal health minister, and definitely not some unelected federal bureaucrat and her health community, the power to make decisions about schools and hospitals and cities.
And according to Section 9216, generally all matters of a merely local or private nature in the province.
Yeah.
So thanks, Teresa Tam.
We know that by public health community, you mean you and your other UN-obeying bureaucrats who have no democratic legitimacy.
And by the way, you've been wrong on every possible thing so far.
Yet you've called us racist for being concerned.
And even the vaccine isn't enough for these people.
The Made in China vaccine, imagine thinking that's a good idea.
Here's Tam's deputy, Howard Nju.
The bottom line, I think, is the question that was asked is that, you know, people might think that if we get a vaccine, that everything, quote, goes back to normal the way it was before.
And that's not the case.
As Dr. Tam and others have mentioned, a vaccine will not be a silver bullet.
It'll certainly be an important tool.
It'll be something that hopefully we can use to an effective purpose for a large part of the population, or certainly certain vulnerable populations.
But all of the measures we've put in place now will still have to continue with that new reality for quite some time.
So certainly I think we need to temper people's expectations, thinking that the vaccine's going to be that silver bullet that will take care of everything and everything we've done up to now won't be necessary in the future.
Oh, so the lockdown wasn't enough.
The masks aren't enough and the vaccine won't be enough.
It's never enough.
They're already moving the goalposts.
Boy, they love power over you.
They love threatening you.
They love making rules to boss you around.
Until a few months ago, no one had even heard of these little tyrants, let alone voted to give them absolute power.
Now they refuse to let go of that power.
What a disgrace they are.
But can you please tell me something?
Has anyone seen Her Majesty's loyal opposition?
A two or three year lockdown for a pandemic that never really arrived and that went away in April.
Anything, anyone, have you heard of any opposition?
Or are they too afraid to point out that the Emperor has no clothes?
Stay with us for more from Melbourne, Australia.
Well, yesterday we told you about the Marshall Law in the Australian state of Victoria, where the large city Melbourne is located.
You know, Australia, one of its many nicknames, is the lucky country.
It doesn't seem like it's having good luck.
I'm not referring to the coronavirus, which has a modest death toll in Australia.
I'm referring to the shocking and totalitarian response by some of its politicians, including the Premier of Victoria State.
Well, we have a good friend who lives in Melbourne.
It's Avi Yamini, who works with TR.news.
You'll remember, Avi went to Hong Kong as a freelancer for us last year and did some world-class journalism about the democracy protesters.
Well, now he's fighting for democracy in his own country.
Joining us now via Skype is our friend, Avi Yamini.
Avi, great to see you.
How are you keeping, my friend?
I'm good, mate.
It's 11 o'clock at night, and if I dare commit the offense of leaving my property, I shall be arrested or fined up to $5,000.
That's crazy.
The curfew kicks in at 8 p.m. till 5 a.m.
That really is how you treat children.
I don't know if it's how you treat a virus.
I don't know if the virus understands that you can't catch it at 7.59 p.m., but at 8 p.m. it becomes a public menace.
Is there any science behind any of this, or is it just an authoritarian premier having some fun?
I reckon Rebel News is risking getting banned here for rebelling against the official health recommendations that the virus comes out at night.
It only comes out at night.
That's why we need to stay home at night.
It doesn't make any sense.
Tell us a little bit of what it's like.
I mean, you can't set foot outside your home at night.
If I was reading the regulations correctly, you're only allowed outside for one hour period during the day, less than five kilometers from your own home for exercise.
This reminds me of when our mutual friend Tommy Robinson was in Belmarsh prison in solitary confinement.
He was allowed one hour of exercise within five kilometers of his cell daily.
So sounds like you're in prison, mate.
It pretty much is.
That's what it is.
And it seems like basically our government here lost control of the virus whilst the rest of the country seemed to pretty much quell it.
Now, that came down to hotel quarantine issues, which at the same time, he allowed a Black Lives Matter rally, which all these little clusters started between there and then there was the towers, the commission flats, and the Cedar Meets, all connected.
It was going undetected.
And the way to respond to it, in the last, we've been in lockdown now, the second lockdown, only in the state of Victoria.
Everyone else had one lockdown and we'd had near to no cases around the country.
And then it started to pop up here in Victoria.
And four weeks ago, four weeks ago now, we went back into lockdown.
It was a six-week lockdown again to flatten the curve.
And it didn't do anything because it already got out of hand.
It had already passed that point.
And about two weeks ago, they made masks mandatory.
And now this week, it's gone into a stage four lockdown, which is, like you said, some of those regulations you've given, which includes a curfew and only very minimal amount of essential workers allowed out.
It's very confusing as well.
But besides that, it just reminds you of, you know, I'm sure you, you as a Jew would know Holocaust survivors and heard their stories.
And some of the regulations and some of the restrictions just very much remind me of those stories that we were told as children of what they went through then, obviously, without some of the, you know, not the Holocaust, but the actual regulations and the laws about movement just remind.
And I never thought I'd ever live through something where I'd witness it myself, let alone here in Australia.
You know, maybe in Hong Kong when we were doing the reporting there, but not here in Melbourne, Australia.
And it's bizarre.
And I know some viewers will think you're exaggerating or using hyperbole, but I read through the rules and you have to carry papers on you and furnish them.
Hundreds of soldiers will be in the streets.
There's military now patrolling the streets with police, enforcing these restrictions and these rules.
There's no exaggeration.
Businesses that breach some of these draconian laws, they're fined up to $100,000.
Think about that for a small business.
$100,000 to breach those laws.
So it's no exaggeration.
It is what it is.
Now, it's all in the name of fighting this virus and beating this virus.
But as we've seen in some parts of the world, look, if you look at New Zealand, New Zealand managed to do it for now.
Nobody knows where it's going, where it's going to go.
But they've essentially, they're on an island and they've managed to eradicate it from the island.
They went in early and they did that.
And no one can go in there.
And if you go in, there's very, very strict quarantine restrictions.
Here we almost did something similar besides for our one state.
And even in the first lockdown, we were far harsher than any other state.
You know, when everyone was opening up, we were still locked down because our Premier really wanted to make sure he was going to beat this virus.
But in the one place where it mattered, in the one place that they should have been really focusing their energy and still should focus their energy, which was stopping the import of the virus internationally, the hotel quarantine, that's where he failed us.
And that's where this came and spread.
As it was spreading, he allowed a Black Lives Matter rally here in Melbourne.
And there's a bunch of connected clusters to that.
So right now, we're being, as a society, punished, you know, as a healthy person, I'm being forced into lockdown instead of just locking up the sick, I guess.
You know, if you're going to quarantine anyone, you quarantine the sick or people come from it overseas.
But we're not seeing that here.
Here we're seeing everybody is locked down.
They say it's six weeks.
If you believe six weeks is going to be the lockdown, then I think you're delusional.
Yeah.
Well, I was reading that there were 11 deaths, I think it was yesterday, but all 11 were in seniors' centers or old folks' homes as they're sometimes called.
And that sounds like the same pattern in the United States and in Canada.
In fact, in Canada, there was a headline I saw in the Toronto Star that more than 80% of all the victims live in certain institutional seniors' homes.
So it's not a problem of the youth.
It's not a problem of people outdoors.
It's not a problem of schools or people of working age.
The average age of the death in our province of British Columbia was 85 years old.
And don't mistake me, not for a second.
Am I saying that's good, but I'm saying that information is useful.
Focus 99% of your efforts on either the airport where people are coming into the country or the seniors' homes.
I think it's the same pattern in Australia, if I'm reading the stats.
It absolutely is.
So some of the major clusters and the ones where we're having the fatalities are in the old age, the aged care facilities.
And a lot of it has been mishandled and mismanaged.
You have, you know, a lot of it came from staff who were working at multiple locations and they spread it through all of them.
But you're right.
We should be protecting those facilities.
We should be protecting the quarantine system properly.
Today, for example, I think there was 15 cases.
There's one case today specifically where there was a younger fatality.
I think it was in his 30s, but they don't tell us anything else.
I highly doubt that it was a strong, healthy 30-something year old.
I'm assuming that there's underlying issues there.
But the majority of the by far in Australia have been.
I would say it's going to be something similar to your average age of 85 or 80, somewhere around there.
It's definitely over 70s.
We're seeing almost all the cases.
Avi, I know it's so late in Melbourne because of the time zone.
So let me just ask you one last question.
And thanks so much for staying up so late for us.
It's great to see you.
And I tell you, so many Canadians were inspired by your work in Hong Kong.
And it must have been so wonderful to be there in those freedom-fighting moments.
And just seeing you again and remembering that there was a sense of freedom in Hong Kong that's being snuffed out makes me a little bit sad.
But let's get back to what's going on in Melbourne.
Mind you, I feel like those days were freer than now.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it really is.
In different jurisdictions, we see people fighting back.
Harmeet Dylan, the civil liberties lawyer in California, is suing everything that moves.
Across America, you have little lawsuits, little rebellions.
Here in Canada, Rebel News is doing a very small-scale civil liberties project, helping individual people who have been fined.
I just read a major lawsuit in the United Kingdom against the lockdown.
So I see little green shoots of civil liberties resistance, often in the courts, sometimes more physically.
There was a case of a gym in New Jersey where the gym owner just said, I'm staying open.
You've got to throw me in prison.
I don't care.
How about Australia?
Because there is that independent streak in the Australian character, a little bit of defiance, a little bit of a sense of humor.
Has there been any political or legal resistance to what can only be called martial law?
Honestly, I think there's two groups of people in Australia at the moment.
There's those that are really scared of the virus because of the media.
But I think also there's the majority of people are less scared of the actual virus and more scared of the consequences of breaking it, as in the government crackdowns and the lockdown.
Australians Grapple With Lockdowns00:06:27
So people just want this to be over with.
So I think most Australians are not too happy when they see these rebels or as they call them, Karens, that are fighting back.
And I think I support when people do it in the courts and do it properly, especially when it comes to economic fighting back for the economy and to fight for business to reopen.
I think Australians would be a lot more open to it.
We're seeing some here and there protesting the masks or whatever.
That's what we're really seeing.
I know there is a mass protest planned.
I have seen online a mass protest planned and they have about 2,500 people who say they're interested.
It'll be interesting to see if Facebook pulls this down or not.
But 2,500 people marching onto parliament coming up.
So we're going to have to watch that closely because there hasn't been anything like that yet.
It has been single people here, a few little protests, but they're generally, they tend to be, you know, anti-vaxxers and into all sorts of other mass conspiracy theories.
And I'm not talking about specifically around the virus and where it came from.
A lot of these people deny that there even is a virus.
And I don't think many Aussies have time for that.
And that's why I'm hoping that there are groups that kind of pop up that fight for the civil liberties without taking on some of the other parts of the protest, which makes them kind of loses the argument because I think most Australians are sensible and they use common sense.
And they're happy.
A lot of Aussies here are also happy.
They might not think the mask works much.
Whatever, but they're happy to do it if it is potentially going to help someone.
And as long as they can continue to go to work and go do their day-to-day activities here right now, we have to go to the supermarket.
One person in the family can go visit a supermarket once a day.
These are the kind of rules we're living under.
I don't think Aussies would mind if they can move freely and wear a mask.
So I think we are going to see over the next few weeks a bit of pushback.
And hopefully it's pushback that doesn't turn Australians against it and brings people together.
Well, thank you, my friend, and keep your spirits high.
And maybe we can check back with you in a few weeks.
Fear that once governments exert such power and control over citizens, they're not quick to relent and give that power back.
And looking at your premier in the Australian state of Victoria, he looks like he.
I mean, he's the same one who who was trying to cut deals with communist China personally, I think.
Well, he signed up the Boat, Road And Belt Initiative, Belt And Road Initiative yeah, so he's.
He's certainly in bed with the CCP and he look he loves yeah, who in government gains power and then wants to just give it back.
He's just escalated this from a, you know, declaring a state of emergency to now a state of disaster.
All that does is give him even more powers to basically do whatever he wants they can.
They can literally walk into your house now to make sure you're complying, without a warrant, without anything.
They have all the power in the world.
And that is a very, very scary thought.
Yeah, because we know what comes with that and it may I don't think it's come with the best of intentions right now um, but even if it had, it did come with the best of intentions uh i'd, i'd be nervous.
Yeah, that really is worse than how it was when you were in Hong Kong.
Abhiyamini, great to see you.
Stay safe, my friend.
Thanks for having me, mate.
All right there, you have it, Abhiyamini.
You can watch all his videos at Tr.news and we'll have his youtube channel and his twitter handle beneath this video.
Stay with us more ahead.
Hey, welcome back.
My monologue last night.
Bruce writes, premier Dan Andrews sure is a little dictator.
He's treating free people like criminals in a prison camp.
People of his ilk need to be voted out.
Citizens in Victoria must remember this whenever the next election happens.
There's a paradox here, the more you scare people, the more they crave strong, authoritative leadership.
So the worse his decisions become and the more barbaric he becomes in his treatment of his own people.
Some people would say no no no, I need this tough love.
I even heard a tiny drop of that from our friend Avi um.
I think when people are afraid and uh a sea, they look to a strong captain.
But in the case of Victoria Australia, and in Justin Trudeau uh, the strong captains are headed straight to the iceberg.
Sherry writes, I had a bad feeling that when this China virus started and authorities started their lockdowns, that some governments would be reluctant to give back people's freedoms.
Well, even here in Ontario, where Doug Ford man of the People FORD Nation is premier.
He and his party passed a law to give them the right to act without renewing the state of emergency.
The emergency powers laws in Canada have some checks and bounces.
I don't know if you know, if you remember my early conversation with Sam Goldstein about that a few months ago.
Um every, I think it was 30 days or 60 days parliament had to meet again and say, are we really still an emergency?
Are we really still an emergency?
Doug Ford said, oh, that's way too much accountability.
Let's get rid of that.
He actually borrowed the move from Justin Trudeau.
So like I said in my monologue, where are the conservatives?
On my interview with Gordon Chang, Dave writes, the rest of the world needs to immediately put serious efforts into cutting off all reliance on Chinese goods and labor.
Keanu says, it's easier said than done, right?
I mean, just go through your clothing, go through any little retail items, anything plastic, anything, your cutlery, your appliances in your kitchen, even your computer, your fancy cell phone.
Cutting Ties with China00:01:11
So much of it's made in China.
So if you say I'm going China-free, you're not going to make it.
It would be like saying, I'm going to go on a starvation diet.
You're not going to make it.
But if you cut back on your China stuff, one item a week, one item a day, slowly, slowly wean yourself, I think that's the way.
And yeah, it might mean switching away from your TikTok app to an Instagram app.
And you might miss a little bit here and there, but you know what?
We have to unhook from these people.
And by these people, I mean the Communist Party of China.
One day will come where the Chinese people will be free, just like the Soviet Union fell and the Russian people became free, or at least freer.
I hope that day comes when Hong Kong is once again free, free as Taiwan, and the Chinese mainland is that free.
I don't see that happening in the immediate future.
So until then, we have to unhook from them, as I argue in my book, the same way we unhooked from apartheid South Africa, the same way the world contained Soviet Russia.