Justin Trudeau’s September 10 appointment of convicted environmental extremist Stephen Gilbo as Heritage Minister signals a push for internet censorship, targeting platforms like Facebook and Google with licensing demands. Critics warn this could deputize tech giants to suppress "mean tweets," independent conservative media (e.g., Rebel News), or even news links via Australia’s "link licensing" model, while mainstream outlets—backed by Trudeau’s CRTC ties and bailouts—gain financial leverage. Gilbo’s past proposals, like mandatory news site licensing, were abandoned after backlash, but pandemic fatigue may now enable rushed implementation. Meanwhile, WestJet’s mask-enforcement over a cheering toddler and Hollywood’s Xinjiang film deals highlight broader authoritarian trends, where dissent is silenced under regulatory guise. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello my friends, I've got two things I'm covering in today's podcast.
One is a crazy video of lockdown extremism in Spain.
And also the UK goes really far backwards.
Oh my god, I've got a story for you there.
And then I pivot somehow to topic number two, which is Justin Trudeau and Stephen Gilbo coming to censor the internet.
Again, we'll show you the tape.
Hey, when I say show you the tape, of course you'll just hear it on the podcast, but I'd love it if you could see it.
I really want you to see it.
And to do so, you have to become a Rebel News Plus member.
That gives you access to the video version of this podcast, plus weekly shows by David Menzies and Sheila Gunread.
Just go to RebelNews.com and click subscribe.
It's $8 a month, which ain't bad.
$80 for a whole year if you buy in advance.
Pretty good deal, I might say.
All right, here's today's show.
Tonight, Justin Trudeau appoints a convicted criminal to censor your internet freedom.
I wish I were kidding.
It's September 10th and this is the Angel Advance 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 walk up.
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
I'm going to tell you in a moment about how Justin Trudeau is finally making a move to regulate and perhaps snuff out voices he doesn't like on the internet.
Totally control the internet.
It was only a matter of time.
He controls TV and radio stations in Canada through the CRTC regulator.
He controls newspapers through the massive bailout that basically rents every journalist in the country.
And the journalists he can't control, he tries to ban, like banning Rebel News and True North from the election debates in his morning scrums.
Trudeau's a control freak.
He already controls 99% of the news media, but that last 1% was what keeps him up at night.
He rages against the last 1%.
And of course, as people abandon the unwatchable vanilla news that he regulates and flee to online content of their own choice, whether it's CNN or Fox News or just any website in the world that's interesting, well, now, no surprise, Trudeau's making a move to censor them.
Why wouldn't he?
Who's going to stop him?
The media?
The opposition?
We'll see if Aaron O'Toole says a peep about it, if he's opposed to Trudeau's regulations of social media.
He forgot to mention it when Trudeau introduced a raft of new measures last year that were warmly supported by the Conservative Party under Andrew Scheer.
But hopefully that doesn't reflect Aaron O'Toole's view.
We'll see.
I'll tell you about that today.
And I'll interview my dear friend Andrew Lawton, who's been studying Stephen Gilbo, the Heritage Minister, and other attempts to regulate the internet for years.
But first, I simply have to switch gears, switch subjects.
I'm going to show you a shocking video out of Spain, completely unrelated to the topic today.
Policeman's Knee on the Neck00:02:29
I just got to show this to you.
Apparently, it's a 14-year-old boy arrested, indeed, attacked, by a policeman.
Was he a criminal?
No, no, no.
He was just wearing his mask wrong.
He was wearing a mask, but not properly, you see.
Now, there really is no proper way to wear a mask.
We're not talking about airtight N95 masks, you know, the sort that a painter or a sandblaster or people in a sawmill wear, real people who are deadly serious about filtering out tiny particles of dust that would hurt their lungs.
A minor.
Those people are pretty serious about their masks, but the vast majority of masks that people around the world are being told to wear now are flimsy little masks that absolutely don't seal to your face.
The air comes from the sides and the top and the bottom, and you know this because your glasses steam up when you wear them.
I don't know what these flimsy masks are supposed to do.
I think they're just a political statement.
They're not stopping viruses that are microscopic and pass through the mask.
Teresa Tam, who's still doing endless press conferences, can you believe it?
She has to fill time saying something.
So one day she came up with this doozy on what to do with masks.
She thinks she's got it figured out.
Wear them when you're having sex.
Yeah, don't foist your bizarre fetish on me, you junk science quack perv.
Sorry, that's not science.
That's not public policy.
That's just someone who enjoys the sound of their own voice and the fawning coverage of the media that's bought and paid for and wants just to talk sexy or something.
Oh my God.
Anyways, imagine a policeman actually attacking a child for wearing such a joke mask.
Just not wearing it properly, according to the doctor policeman.
take a look.
Trudeau's Pandemic Law Push00:14:57
Yeah, a knee on the neck.
I heard something about knees on necks in the George Floyd case and the riots that followed.
I was told it's very bad for a policeman to put a knee on the neck, at least for serial criminals like George Floyd, but for 14-year-old boys who are wearing a mask, just not the right mask, a knee on the neck is just what the doctor ordered.
All in the name of public health, you see.
All right, just one more vid.
Here's the daily chart of deaths from the virus in the United Kingdom.
Population there coming up on 70 million.
So it's almost double our population in Canada.
Here's the foolish health minister of the United Kingdom.
I'm very embarrassed to report that in the, he's a conservative.
You're not going to believe he's a conservative, whatever he's going to say.
In the entire United Kingdom, a total of six people passed away from the virus yesterday.
No one died in all of Scotland from it.
No one in all of Wales.
No one in Northern Ireland.
Six people in England.
Grand total of the whole UK, six people.
Now, I'm not happy about that, but that's not a pandemic.
Six people.
Six also happens to be the new number of the maximum people who are allowed to meet together in the United Kingdom.
Even if your family is larger than that, say if you have five people in your family, so two parents and three kids, if the kids' grandparents come over, well, watch this.
Because that makes a total of seven people, it's not allowed.
One grandparent has to wait outside in the car, or it's an illegal gathering.
I am not even kidding.
It doesn't make any medical sense.
It makes no health sense.
Imagine the depression and loneliness foisted on both, let alone the stupidity of the fact that the grandma's now going to go back to the car where grandpa is sitting.
But listen to this health minister who calls himself a conservative, saying, yeah, that's how it is.
I'm afraid that a family of, for a family of, say, five or six, this will bring in some significant restrictions.
I get that.
And we don't do this lightly.
So there's no exception, for example, so we're back to where we were with you can only see one grandparent in that case, for example.
In those circumstances, it will be absolutely, it will bring in more restrictions.
You know, I have three children.
We have a family of five, and so we'll be able to see one other person at a time as a whole family.
Because six people in the UK died, no children can see their grandparents if the family's too large.
Entire industries are being closed again because of the foolishness.
How would Jeremy Corbyn, the socialist, have been any worse than this?
He probably would have been more ashamed of himself and wouldn't have tried to do this.
Okay, I've told you pandemic panic.
I got a pandemic panic update, but now let me tell you what Trudeau is doing, taking advantage of the pandemic panic to get things sneaked through into law.
He's already diminished parliament.
He's already prorogued parliament to shut down the ethics inquiries into his scandals.
He's been self-hiding at home for six months and the media don't care.
They're self-hiding too.
They love it.
Permanent vacation.
Government spending, borrowing, sky-high.
Taxes will follow too, but those are for the little people to pay.
There are some people who want to go back to work.
I'm just picking an industry at random almost here.
You know, there are no movies being made in Canada.
Nowhere in the Western world, really.
I mean, who would spend $100,000, let alone $10 million making a movie when one case of the virus on a set, even if it's a false positive using a faulty made-in-China test, one person has the right to shut the whole production down.
Who would invest millions of dollars in making movies in that kind of a world?
So the industry, which is a big industry, stopped and they asked for some insurance framework to be set up by the government to let them go back to work.
They want to start spending money again.
These are businesses.
Trudeau and Gilbo keep nodding their heads.
Yeah, yeah.
Thanks, movie guys.
Yeah, we've got to get a COVID insurance framework going.
But they haven't.
They haven't done anything because they don't actually understand how anything real works.
They've never run businesses.
They only understand giving away free money.
They're both very good at that.
Trudeau's never run a business in his life.
And Gilbo was a professional protester who actually was convicted of crime for his extremist conduct.
These guys don't know how to build.
They know how to spend other people's money, but not how to earn it.
Here's a tweet from Michael Geist.
I enjoy following him.
He writes about culture and the creative industry and copyright and things like that.
He's an independent thinker.
He writes that music industry asks for one meter social distancing rules for concerts.
Stephen Gilbo said no.
Film industry wants COVID insurance.
No government response.
Instead, he offers digital taxes, CRTC government regulation, mandated Canadian content payments, and link licensing.
Seriously.
I mean, you fly on an airplane these days, you're seated next to the person.
There's no spacing between, they don't skip seats.
You're elbow to elbow with the next person.
You have to wear a mask until the coffee and pretzels comes around.
Then you can take your mask off, literally elbow to elbow with a stranger in a small metal tube for four hours.
Take your mask off if you're having coffee.
But a concert can't have one meter spacing, even if it's an outdoors concert.
Why not?
Why not?
Do you know how many small businesses and independent people depend on the music industry?
I'm not even a big concert goer, but do you know how many jobs?
And blue-collar jobs, not just the fancy entertainer.
Trudeau's ruling class doesn't care.
He cares about big government and bureaucrats and unions, government unions, but not private sector unions, not the theatrical or musical acts that have to hustle and work hard, not promoters and producers, people who set up the stage and tear it down.
Why would Trudeau care about them?
They're the little people.
I mean, Trudeau will pose with cool musicians to get some of their cool, but he doesn't actually like the work part of the entertainment industry.
But look at what Michael Geist said in his next tweet.
Heritage Minister Stephen Gilbo just told culture groups his upcoming bill will give the CRTC the power to intervene in payments by Netflix, Amazon, Prime, Spotify, regulate online CanCon, massive internet regulation structure led by CRTC Coming.
Really?
So actual creators would like some real relief from the government regulations.
They want to be able to have a concert again.
And they're willing just to have one meter spacing, which is still sort of crazy, but they'll accept that.
No word from the government.
Can we have some guidance on resuming to work?
Trudeau and Gilbo don't know anything about that, but they know regulation and taxes.
This is weird.
Look at this.
More from Michael Geister.
Canadian Heritage Minister Stephen Gilbo says social media sites linking to news content without payment is immoral.
I'll play the video clip of him saying that a bit later.
Imagine a convicted criminal and liberal cabinet minister lecturing other people about morality and what is or isn't ethical.
Can you imagine that?
They fired the only ethical people in their cabinet, Jody Wilson-Rabel and James Philpott.
But it's really weird.
He's saying that Facebook linking to news sites is immoral.
So when you post something on Facebook to your friends, when you post something on a friend's page, a news story, how is that immoral?
How does that even work?
That weird thinking.
The kuki government of Australia is pitching that same weird thing.
Facebook says if Australia bans its ability to share news links, and by that they mean their users' ability to share links, they'll leave the country.
Because just like they're not in China, they'll leave Australia.
That shows you how radical Australia's solution is, and that's where Trudeau and Gilbo want to go.
That's their role model.
By the way, that's just going to kill the Australian news industry, which depends on Facebook links for traffic.
Let me read some more here.
The impact of a mandated link license and blocking of news sharing would do more than hurt news organizations.
69% of those surveyed said they were very or quite likely to still use Facebook and Google and read less news.
Yeah.
If normal people have to choose between Justin Trudeau and that criminal Gilbo telling them what they can or can't see versus what they like to do, they're just going to do what they like to do.
If somehow that means Facebook isn't allowed to share Globe and Mail or CBC stories anymore, consumers don't care.
They already don't read much Globe Mail or watch much CBC already.
Of course, Trudeau and Gilbo would never ban the Globe or the CBC.
Those are their mouthpieces.
They would try to ban groups like us.
People that Trudeau says are fake news, people that Trudeau says are mean.
Those aren't real legal concepts.
We're already compliant with all laws.
That's politics, not law that he's talking about.
Trudeau hates us because we criticize him.
If Trudeau and Gilbo are coming to fight the internet, sure, they're after Facebook's money, of course.
But at the end of the gunfight, expect that the handful of independent conservative media sites like ours wind up being banned and regulated out of existence.
Stay with us for more on this with Andrew Martin.
We all are so seeing that these platforms can't regulate themselves.
We've tried that, and it's simply not working.
Now, there's a big difference between saying that we're going to regulate these hateful things and these appalling things, and we're going to put an end to free speech on the internet.
That's really not what this is about.
Just like we have free speech in our society, but people can't say everything.
You can't verbally abuse someone.
We have courts that have put measures around free speech.
Well, we're doing it in the real world.
We can do it on the virtual world as well.
And then this is something that myself, my colleague Minister Baines, obviously Justice Minister Lometi are working on, and we will be coming up with legislation in the very near future.
That is Stephen Gilbeau, the only member of Trudeau's cabinet who's actually a convicted criminal, saying he thinks it's about time that the internet was regulated and subjected to laws against abuse or crimes.
I guess no one told him that it already is.
The same laws that apply to a printing press and a TV station and a radio wave also apply to the internet when it comes to anything like uttering a death threat or defamation.
In fact, these days, most litigation about the content of news isn't against a TV station or a newspaper.
It's online.
I think that Stephen Gilbo is one of the dumber members of the cabinet, and that's fine.
I mean, you can't all be as bright as Justin Trudeau and Catherine McKenna.
They explain the hard parts to Stephen Gilbo.
But what troubles me is that I think most of the media are letting Gilbo get away with this.
He's claiming that the internet is not now regulated.
Oh, don't worry about free speech, he says.
You'll still have it when I'm done.
Well, joining us now to talk about this latest emanation from Stephen Gilbo is our friend Andrew Mutton, a grand poo bah over there at True North, along with our friend Candice Malcolm, Anthony Fury, and other great guys.
Hey, good to see you, Andrew.
Hey, I don't know if I'm the grand poobah, but I'll say I am a pooba.
You know what?
As soon as I say grand poo-ba, I better throw in Candice because she's the super grand poo bah, but you're one of the.
There we go.
Yeah, well, if she's super grand, I can just be the best.
We're her number one fans, and we sure like you too, Andrew.
Anyhow, let me put that admiration society away.
Everyone knows I'm a fan of the True North.
But let's get down to today's crazy subject, which is Stephen Gilbo.
And I was poking fun at how dopey he is, but that's not actually the first time he's sort of muddled into a half-baked plan to censor the internet, has it?
No, not at all.
And in fact, this comes just less than half a year, I think, after he walked back a comment he had made in an interview where he was talking about how he would seek to force social media companies to have a license or digital publishers to be a license.
And this got a lot of people in the media to be quite critical because it sounded like, from how he worded it, like he could be going after the media.
But then once he had said, oh, no, no, no, we're not actually talking about the media, the mainstream media really stopped covering the story and they stopped asking any further questions about who would be licensed to have the right to free speech in Stephen Gilbo's ideal world.
Yeah, we've got that clip.
It seems like a decade ago, because it was before the pandemic.
The fact that they're bringing this idea back during the pandemic suggests they'd like to pass it with a little less scrutiny, a little less parliamentary oversight.
I find it dangerous.
Here's a flashback to that utterance that you referred to from what seems like ages ago, but it's actually measured in months.
Take a look.
Yeah, but sir, to be fair, you've got an agency that wants to enhance its scope of powers to determine what's a trusted news source.
So the first question will be, who's to define that?
You've got a lot of these.
This is a recommendation event.
The CRTC hasn't decided.
Okay, but they're recommending that.
They're recommending that content providers have to register and get a license.
So how will this work?
How are you going to regulate websites?
How are you going to register all that?
Do you buy these recommendations?
Well, I mean, one of the recommendations, so you're talking about a couple of different things here.
But as far as the licensing is concerned, if you're a distributor of content in Canada, and obviously, you know, if you're a very small media organization, the requirement probably wouldn't be the same as if you're Facebook or Google.
So there would have to be some proportionality embedded into this.
But we would ask that they have a license.
Yes.
Just like right now, with the old system in Canada, distributors needed to go to the CRTC and to have a license.
Andrew, so that's what he said months ago, but it looks like they're coming back.
And he still believes the internet is not governed by laws, by civil lawsuits like defamation, by criminal lawsuits like prosecutions over hate crimes or uttering death threats.
I think Stephen Gilbeau, who's a lifelong environmental extremist, he was actually convicted of crimes for that.
Regulating Online Speech?00:15:05
I don't think he's much of a scholar or a lawyer or a book reader because I think he actually doesn't know that the internet is governed by the criminal law and the civil law, just like every other part of our lives is.
Yeah, this is a profound exercise in gaslighting, convincing Canadians that a problem that doesn't exist does, so that people will go along with whatever proposed remedy we hear about from the government.
And may I remind your viewers, if they aren't already aware, back when I used to work in Ottawa, for example, the Heritage Minister used to be all about arts and culture, and it was, generally speaking, a job that sure had some more contentious areas, but was really about a lot of things that were not what it is now, which is like the chief bastion of censorship in the government.
And ultimately, when Stephen Gilbo gets up there and he starts talking about licensing and regulation and all of this, this has been for the most part the only portfolio on which he has been focused since assuming the job of Heritage Minister.
So you have to listen very carefully when he starts to talk about all of these things.
He had said in that interview, quote, we can do it in the virtual world as well.
Again, trying to convince people that the law doesn't apply on the internet.
And even if certain aspects of the heritage code don't apply, for example, the CRTC isn't regulating at this point Netflix or Crave like they are television and radio stations.
That doesn't mean that these extremist rhetoric examples and other forms of hate speech and all of these things that are under the criminal code right now don't extend to the internet.
If it's illegal to say something on your front lawn, it's illegal to say it in the parking lot of a Denny's and it's illegal to say it online.
So this idea that we have this area of the world in which the law doesn't apply is just plain wrong.
But the liberals are trying to deceive Canadians to justify putting in these sweeping things that would curb speech and force big tech to curb speech.
Yeah.
You know, I've been reading a lot about what Stephen Gilbo says, and he always starts off with something no one could disagree with.
We have to crack down on terrorism recruitment.
Okay, yeah, I totally agree with that.
And actual crimes.
Yeah, I totally agree with that.
And then he immediately switches to political mean words.
So he always leads with the stuff that even a conservative would say, yeah, let's not let ISIS recruit online.
Yeah, let's crack down as if Facebook, YouTube, Google aren't actually right now trying their hardest to stop that.
I know for a fact that they are, certainly more than Justin Trudeau, who just led some back into Canada.
So he starts with the stuff we can all agree in, and then very cleverly he slips his rhetoric, his vocabulary towards mean tweets, mean comments, untrusted news sources, disinformation.
He's not talking about terrorists anymore.
He's not talking about death threats anymore.
He's talking about True North, Rebel News, or any voice he doesn't agree with.
He's a slippery fish, this Stephen Gilbo.
Yeah, and the context of this, it's coming at a time while Rebel and True North, to name two examples that you just brought up, are fighting in court for the right to cover elections.
This case from the previous election campaign is still going on against the Leaders' Debates Commission.
And that's an area where, again, for all his talk about the need to, in his words, not regulate news and media, well, his government is doing that effectively by barring certain media from having their constitutionally protected right to freedom of the press and free speech.
And the problem we have here with Gilbo is that he is using licensing and regulation as kind of a catch-all for everything.
So just last week or two weeks ago, he had said he supported what the Australian government was trying to do, which was actually forcing private social media companies to pay media for the right for people like you or I to post links to those stories online.
Something very convoluted, something that, again, impacts the right of people using social media platforms more than it affects social media platforms.
And you look further than that.
He's talked in the past about licensing digital publishers without really explaining who is supposed to be affected by that.
I was in Ottawa back in June of 2019 when there were ongoing hearings on the Heritage Committee, or sorry, on the Justice and Human Rights Committee about whether to bring back a supercharged version of the Section 13 provision of the Human Rights Act that you and countless others fought tooth and nail to defeat.
And that committee's report ultimately recommended that there needs to be greater protections against what they call hate speech from social media companies.
And this report didn't go anywhere because the 2019 election happened.
The reason I bring that up is because this government has actually tried to deputize social media companies to become the arbiters of what is hate speech and what is extremist speech and all of that.
And now that we hear it coming back in this context, this is very dangerous because now all of a sudden you have the government threatening social media companies, but getting the social media companies to do the actual censorship.
Right.
You know, there's more than a dozen priorities in Stephen Gilbo's mandate letter from Justin Trudeau.
That's basically the job description that the prime minister gives to the cabinet ministers.
And the second point, number two, is to bring in strong financial penalties to Facebook and other social media that don't quickly enough, within 24 hours actually, take down speech that Stephen Gilbo and Catherine McKenna and Justin Trudeau don't like.
What I'm worried about is it's bad enough if we censor through parliament, but at least we'll see it coming.
There'll be a process.
If you're the target of a censorship attack like I have been and you have been, we'll at least have a day in court.
But I'm worried that Gilbo is doing some log rolling, some horse trading with these companies and saying, well, we'll let you go on the tax side if you agree to do this censorship for us.
And because this isn't being debated in parliament, because this isn't a government law or regulation, it's just a tit for tat quid for Crow.
You guys at Facebook, if you censor our enemies, we'll go easy on you.
And none of it's on the public record.
I'm deeply afraid of censorship that we can't even see.
And I don't think this is paranoia.
As you may know, Andrew, I interviewed one of Facebook's hundreds and hundreds of censors that works around the clock in Phoenix deleting Canadian posts that they're told to delete.
Yeah, and listen, I'm one of these people that believes private companies, even large multinational tech corporations, have a right to set their own standards.
So I think, however insidious I may find it, Facebook and Twitter and Google have a right, and we can debate this at length, I'm sure.
They have a right to decide what should or shouldn't be allowed.
The problem that I have with what the Canadian government has proposed is that let's say these companies want to follow the rules set out by the Canadian government, which may or may not be the case, but let's say they do.
They may have a very broad-brushed approach, a very broad approach to censorship because they don't want to risk the ire of whatever penalties the government has put forward.
So that means that if you've got moderators that are going over content and stuff is on the line, they may, to avoid the hassle, just say, all right, well, this is gone, this is gone, this is gone.
And you could see a lot of problems.
I know you went through this with your book, China Virus, which you and I spoke about on my show when it came out.
Imagine if that was not done because a company was being a bit cowardly about it.
But imagine if that was done because we feel like this government will go after us if we don't do it, even if it doesn't violate our rules.
So let's just get rid of it.
And all of a sudden, you have mass censorship that you can't actually fight in court to protect against because it's coming from a private company, even though it is actually because of government policy.
And this is what I mean when I talk about government deputizing big tech to really be its censors.
Yeah, and what I learned from talking to the Facebook censor down in Phoenix is that more and more this is just being done by AI, by artificial intelligence.
There's not even any human decisions.
The first few million censorship actions are done by humans, and then the AI learns: oh, that word, that photo, that combination of phrases, make America great again.
Yeah, and that bar will keep getting lower and lower if the government is pushing it further and further down.
Yeah, I want to have one last clip, and this is Gilbo talking about a con, and I don't know if he's for real here, if he really does want to regulate the internet like China does, like Australia is threatening to do, or if this is a financial shakedown, quite likely with the Liberals, or if this is the quid pro quo I mentioned earlier, it's the threat that Facebook makes go away by conceding on censorship.
Take a look at Gilbo talking about some weird thing, as you mentioned, that Facebook companies would have to pay to link to a news source.
Just take a quick look.
On the news side of things, very similarly, I mean, some of these companies, Facebook, for example, makes hundreds of millions of dollars based on the media content that you and other companies in Canada, media companies in Canada develop, and you're not being fairly compensated for it.
And that's immoral to me, and it's unacceptable.
And we want to change that.
There are a couple of countries in the world that are moving in that direction: France, Australia, and we're looking closely and, in fact, talking with them, looking at what model they're doing and how we could go about doing it in Canada as well.
You know, again, he lied.
He said that multinational media companies working in Canada, quote, have none.
When he's talking about Canadian companies have regulatory burdens, multinationals have none.
That's simply not true.
He's just, maybe he thinks it's true.
Maybe he hasn't read any briefing notes.
Maybe he hasn't done any homework.
But of course, they have to obey the law.
And there are some countries where those comp where, like, for example, Twitter, it doesn't operate in China because it refuses to follow the local law, so it just doesn't operate there.
Australia is threatening Facebook, so Facebook says if you do those weird things, we won't operate there.
Of course, Facebook follows the law where it operates.
I don't want to call Gilbo dumb because that looks like I'm just name-calling, but I can't believe he doesn't know that.
And it's quite audacious that he tells reporters things that are flat-out lies and they don't call him on it.
There was something really subtle in that answer that I picked up on, and I don't know if I'm the only one, but he was talking about it and he said you're not being fairly compensated.
He stopped talking about the media as an it, as a they, and he started talking to the reporter who had asked him the question as a you.
And that I think is very revealing because that's his audience right now.
He's trying to win over the press.
The media has already given, been given a huge amount of money by the Trudeau government, and now they're trying to give them even more money.
But instead of the government having to pay for it, they're trying to get Facebook and Twitter and Google to pay them.
But he was speaking to an audience of the mainstream media there.
And I think that's very important, that that's what this strategy is all about.
You've cracked the code.
You've done it.
That's exactly what's going on.
Trudeau will bail out the newspapers as he is.
He's going to try and get Facebook and the others to kick cash to the media.
You know, he's complaining about links.
Maybe I'm doing Rebel News wrong, but if a major website links to Rebel News, we celebrate that because it brings a lot more people to our website.
We don't really make a lot of money off ads, but people watch our stuff.
They sign up.
We love it when we get links.
We try to get links.
We try to get things to go viral on Facebook.
I've just never heard anyone before saying that it's a bad thing that Facebook links to you.
When it happens to us, we celebrate because we can pay our bills.
Maybe I'm looking at it wrong.
But I think Rebel and True North and a lot of independent media are in a bit of a different boat here because the mainstream media's money traditionally comes from ads and it's not newspaper ads anymore.
It has to be digital ads.
And the challenge with that is that I would say the mainstream media, which is having an ongoing decline of newspaper subscriptions, for example, is gaining a lot more from people linking to their content on Facebook than it's losing.
So this is very much a be careful what you wish for situation because if all of a sudden people are no longer able to share a link to the National Post or the Toronto Star on Facebook, well, it's going to be not that much longer before these platforms, which have massive, massive shares of their actual clicks, are no longer getting them.
You've been very generous with your time.
You're one of my favorite guests.
You're a real fan favorite.
And I think you really won over people with how you managed the debate in the conservative leadership contest.
I mean, you already had everyone on your team, but I saw a new side of you that day, I want to let you know, that deeply, deeply impressed me.
And you're one of our fan favorites as far as you're certainly one of my favorites.
Well, it's returned.
Thanks.
And I don't know why.
I just feel like gushing when you're on the show.
I'm just sort of excited to take it.
Hey, no, bring it on.
I'll take it.
Well, you're a good ally.
I tell you that.
Whether it's going to the UK to report on freedom of speech there or fighting Justin Trudeau's ban on us in the federal election debate, you're fighting in the trenches.
I do have one last question for you.
And that is, Stephen Gilbo trotted this out before the pandemic, and he was sort of beaten back by a number of, I'd say, the more idealistic media party types.
Evan Solomon of CTV, who I genuinely respect.
I think he's one, he actually cares about media freedom a little bit.
He's one of my favorite media party guys, if I had to choose.
And there was some mockery of Gilbo.
I haven't really seen that this time.
And I'm worried that what was sort of laughed out of parliament before the pandemic now will just be rushed through without scrutiny, without opposition.
I don't even know if Aaron O'Toole's going to oppose this.
Do you think this is going to sneak through this time where it was stopped last time?
I think it will, because where the mainstream media reporters were actually, I think, frustrated in February was when it was going after them potentially.
When all of a sudden, anyone who publishes a news website was the way he had worded that initial answer, going to have to be licensed and regulated.
And once he made it clear after that interview, oh, no, no, no, news won't be eligible for this.
News won't have to do this.
The mainstream media backed off.
And I think there was a bit of self-preservation there.
So now they're not as invested in this story because they know that they're safe.
Air Rage Predictions00:04:15
And if anything, more than safe, as we talked about a little while ago, with getting a bit of money out of the social media companies.
So I don't think there is going to be that scrutiny or, as you'd say, mockery this time around from the mainstream press.
Yeah.
Let me close with one last thing.
I was reading on True North today, a great little story by your cause, a colleague, Cosmen Gerja, who added up the number of times the CBC wrote about Justin Trudeau's hair and socks, which is a very funny project, and compared it to the CBC's coverage of various liberal scandals.
Like, for example, a liberal MP who was being charged with sexual harassment, or sorry, criminal harassment, and worse.
It was a very funny comparison of what the CBC loves to talk about, how cool the liberals are, with what the CBC hates to talk about.
Liberals in trouble.
It's very eye-opening.
I'm going to make a prediction.
You and I and other independent non-bailout media will talk more about this censorship gambit by Stephen Gilbo than the media party will.
So it's another calculation of where's your value?
Where's your emphasis?
You and I will fight harder for freedom of the press and deregulation of the media than the media party will.
That's my prediction, if you want to count the number of stories that we're going to see in the next six months.
That's my prediction.
Yeah, we'll add this into the next round of sock and hair comparisons.
And I feel like it may be a pretty small number of times that the media has covered this.
So all the more reason for us to.
Andrew Lawton, great to see you.
Thanks for spending so much time with us.
Happy to.
All right, there you have it.
Andrew Lawton is over at True North.
Great website.
I'm sure you're familiar with it.
If not, please go check them out.
They're one of the few voices fighting independently to report in this country.
Stay with us, more ahead.
Hey, welcome back to my monologue about WestJet.
London writes, everyone should boycott WestJet.
Well, I don't know about that.
I mean, sometimes you have to travel.
It's just really, really weird.
I mean, we hear about air rage and road rage.
I've seen air rage with my own eyes.
Sometimes I feel a little bit of rage at the frustration of flying in this modern era.
I've just never seen air rage by the airline that literally punished the entire plane for sort of cheering for the 19-month-old girl who didn't want to wear a mask.
The staff punished the entire plane of customers by canceling the flight.
I've never seen air rage by the airline before.
So, so weird.
Frederick writes, call the Victoria Police from Australia.
They'd happily cough and frog march out that 19-month-old threat to society.
I believe you're right.
I mean, I showed you that 14-year-old boy.
Why wouldn't they go after a 19-year-old baby?
On my interview with Gordon Chang, Bruce writes, I hope people boycott the show in support of Uyghur prisoners.
Well, that's the thing.
I mean, little girls who are the target market of the Mulan movie, they don't know what the word Uyghur means.
They don't really know much about China.
They've never been there.
They don't follow politics.
They don't really know what a concentration camp is.
The target market for the Mulan movie, I'd say, are girls between the age of seven and 14.
Not very political.
I think any remedy has to come at a higher level, putting sanctions on companies to do business in Xinjiang.
Just like you wouldn't allow Hollywood to make a movie in a gulag in North Korea or during the Soviet years in the gulag in Siberia, or God forbid, in the Nazi years at a concentration camp, why should the world permit filmmaking in Xinjiang as if it's nothing?
And literally thanking the secret police there in their credits.
I think that's a way.
I think you can't rely on boycotts because I'm guessing if you're watching my show, you're more likely a 50-year-old man than a 15-year-old girl.
You weren't going to watch Mulan anyways.
I think the grown-ups have to take on China, don't you?