Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s October 5th indoor mask mandate—despite COVID-19 deaths (8,511) matching flu fatalities and most occurring in Quebec’s seniors’ homes—ignores data, echoing federal policies like Teresa Tam’s. Critics call it authoritarian, comparing it to Melbourne’s extreme lockdowns and NYC’s school closures under Bill de Blasio, whom Toronto’s Joe Cressy admires. Post-Trump’s October 2 debate hospitalization, media conspiracy theories about his illness clash with leftist COVID-19 exploitation fears, revealing lingering political manipulation despite the pandemic’s flu-like status. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I take a look at the man who ought to be Canada's leading conservative.
I'm talking about the Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, the brother of the late Rob Ford, Ford Nation.
He's the guy who's supposed to get it.
The populism, the nationalism, the common sense.
Oh, alas.
He is the biggest booster of Justin Trudeau in the land and the biggest locker downer with the possible exception of Quebec's Francois Lego.
What is happening?
I'll go into that and look at some of the statistics in today's podcast.
Before I do, let me invite you to become a premium subscriber to Rebel News Plus is what we call it.
You get the video version of the podcast, plus access to other video shows by Sheila Gunnerid and David Menzies.
Just go to RebelNews.com and click subscribe.
All right, thanks.
here's today's podcast.
Tonight, Doug Ford wants to lock down Ontario, even though the pandemic is over.
It's October 5th and this is the Angel Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a 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 is because it's my bloody right to do so.
The pandemic is over.
You know that mathematically.
It was actually just a Quebec pandemic the whole time.
Seriously, Quebec has less than a quarter of Canada's population, but 62% of all the deaths have happened there.
The rest of the country has been pretty much unscathed.
I'm not saying zero, but so rare that if we didn't know the word coronavirus and we just called it this year's flu, we wouldn't have noticed.
I've shown you this statistic before.
It's the Statistics Canada listing of the cause of death for every Canadian who dies every year.
Cancer is number one.
Heart attacks number two.
Strokes number three.
Accidents are the fourth biggest killer of Canadians.
Lung cancer number five.
And the flu is in sixth place.
8,511 people died from the flu in the last year for which we have stats.
So just a touch less than coronavirus is here.
It's actually the same as this year if you take Quebec's anomaly out of it.
Again, 82% of all deaths were in seniors' homes.
It was an institutional issue, a do not revive assisted dying issue, especially in that pro-euthanasia province.
It's not actually a pandemic if you go by the numbers, at least not for months now.
Yes, the daily new cases statistics are up in Ontario, but that's just people who feel completely healthy getting a test that says they have it in them, but half of those are false positives, according to the public health officials of Ontario.
That's not my opinion.
Listen to the doctor.
And in fact, if you're testing in a population that doesn't have very much COVID, you'll get false positives almost half the time.
So yeah, lots of cases.
Not a lot of sick people, thankfully.
You can see the case levels are skyrocketing.
That's the blue graph there.
But that little black line at the very bottom, that's the number of people in the hospital.
It's pretty flat.
But this weird graph, daily deaths, we've been looking at that stat for weeks now.
Often not a single person dies on any given day anymore.
But then suddenly the government added more than 100 deaths to the counts just on Thursday, Friday, and made the bizarre decision just to put them on the graph on Friday, even though they died months ago.
What are you manipulating the data that way?
What are you doing that for?
Let me read from the Health Minister of Ontario.
Due to a data review at Toronto Public Health, a number of cases and deaths that occurred in the spring or summer are being reported today.
Hang on.
So they died in the spring or the summer, but they're being rolled out today and put on the graph for today to spike the graph now.
Sounds legit.
I use Ontario as the example here, but the numbers are even lower in the prairie provinces and the Atlantic, of course.
But I mentioned Ontario specifically because the so-called conservative premier here has simply stopped being conservative, if that word means anything these days.
He's become a bit of a Justin Trudeau Teresa Tam mini-me, just doing whatever the big government public health bureaucracy tells him to do.
And he's getting a really authoritarian tone about him.
He denounces pro-freedom protesters.
And look at this, also a tweet, because I guess that's how we live these days.
Look at what he tweeted on the weekend.
Effective immediately.
Face coverings are mandatory in all public indoor settings across Ontario.
Everyone must follow the public health guidelines if we're going to stop the spread and contain the second wave.
So as you might see, that was tweeted on Saturday at 1.15 in the afternoon.
So when he said effective immediately, did he mean at 1.15 p.m.?
And what did he mean by public indoor settings?
Like an office or like a restaurant?
Surely there are exemptions like there are for people who have breathing problems or for little children, right?
So what age of children actually, as you may know from our great website, maskexemption.ca, there are different rules in every jurisdiction in Canada, like the age of kids exempt.
So what are the rules in Ontario?
Well, I noticed that there wasn't any link on his tweet that said, I went to the law in question on the legislature website and I went to the law's regulations and there was nothing there at all.
I checked at 4 p.m. on Saturday, three hours after his effective immediately tweet.
The regulations hadn't been updated for days.
So hang on, does a premier tweeting constitute an enforceable law?
So nothing debated in the legislature, nothing voted on, nothing that the public has even seen other than a tweet, nothing that the police have.
Just a short, vague tweet, but one that is effective immediately.
If you're a police officer, would you enforce that?
And is it the job of police to enforce the mask law at all?
Is that a crime or something?
Is that something they normally do?
Is it the job of a bylaw officer maybe?
Is it the job of a shopkeeper?
You and what army, as they say.
Finally, today I see that the website with the regulations has finally been updated, finally caught up, and it has plenty of rules on it.
You can see all the shading in gray.
I note they have similar exemptions to the City of Toronto's masks bylaw.
So you can be exempt if you say you're exempt.
And look at this part.
You can be exempt for reasons covered by the Human Rights Commission, which includes it goes against your belief to wear a mask.
So if your belief system is against masks, you don't have to wear a mask.
And this is the strongest part.
I like this about the Toronto bylaw.
Quote, for greater certainty, it is not necessary for a person to present evidence to the person responsible for a business or place that they are entitled to any of the exceptions.
So you don't have to prove you're exempt to a shopkeeper.
In fact, they can't ask you about it.
It would be like asking someone in a wheelchair to prove they can't walk.
You know how to do that.
But it is still a law, you know.
It's a medically baseless law.
It's a statistically baseless law.
It's a ridiculous showboating law.
The pandemic peaked in Canada in mid-April, not in mid-October.
It's a law designed to ratchet up fear, to justify ongoing meddling, to make the crisis permanent.
We've all seen shocking footage from Melbourne, Australia, the most locked-down city in the world.
Statistically Baseless Law00:02:50
Curfews at night for everyone.
Illegal to go, illegal to go further than five kilometers from your own home.
Permits needed to go out of your zone.
No weddings or funerals.
Police brutality, just nuts.
And New York City, the greatest city in the world by many measures, just being devastated first by the riots and now from the mayor who's shutting it down.
The city of New York has presented a plan to the state on how we address these clusters.
We've gone over the plan with the state.
I spoke with the governor earlier today.
We've laid out the foundation for how to stop this spread dead in its tracks.
And it is part of learning from what worked before and applying it in a very pinpoint manner.
Now, the state has agreed on the need to close public and non-public schools in the nine highest risk zip codes.
So that will happen effective now tomorrow morning.
That's an update now.
The state determined they would rather have the schools closed tomorrow morning.
So at the end of the school day today, those schools will be closed, public and non-public, in the nine zip codes.
Just destroying it.
The mayor there, he's literally a communist.
He went to Central America to help the communists.
He quotes Karl Marx in media interviews.
He wants to abolish the police.
And now he's destroying one of the best things about New York, the restaurants.
It took Rudy Giuliani 10 years to turn New York around.
De Blasio is destroying it in 10 months.
And who thinks these two cities are a role model, an example for us to follow?
Why, a Toronto City Councilor, another communist actually named Joe Cressy.
He literally chose New York and Melbourne as his two role models.
This is madness, but you'd expect it from Teresa Tam and Justin Trudeau.
But from Doug Ford, Ford Nation, Rob Ford's brother.
And the media is silent.
And the law professors are silent.
Hey, you know, today's the 50th anniversary of the FLQ crisis in Quebec when Pierre Trudeau put martial law on the place, locked it down.
It was regarded as Canada's worst civil liberties fiasco since the internment of Japanese Canadians in World War II.
And yet, where's a peep today from the law professors, from the civil libertarians, from opposition politicians, from anyone?
Anyone, anyone, please stay with us for more.
Trump's Illness & Media Reaction00:12:38
What an amazing week.
I can't even believe how much news has happened.
In Canada a little bit, but in the United States, it's just unbelievable.
It's hard to believe that the leaders' debate, the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, was less than a week ago.
Since that time, so many things, including Donald Trump being admitted to the Walter Reed Medical Center as a patient catching the Wuhan flu.
Oh my God, there were so many conspiracy theories that instantly bloomed online.
Leftists didn't know what to make of it.
Was it a fake designed to get him sympathy or was it karma?
He deserving what he got, death.
It wasn't just in the United States.
Jonathan Kaye said that it would be poetically just for Trump to die from it.
That's the compassionate left for you.
But to the grave disappointment of so many blue checkmark liberals, blue check mark as they say, the verified commenters on Twitter, Donald Trump seemed to be doing remarkably well.
In fact, look at this video released by Trump from the hospital.
I got to say, he looks more vigorous with COVID-19 than Joe Biden looks healthy.
Take a look at this.
I came here, wasn't feeling so well.
I feel much better now.
We're working hard to get me all the way back.
I have to be back because we still have to make America great again.
We've done an awfully good job of that, but we still have steps to go and we have to finish that job.
Well, if that wasn't enough, Trump went out and greeted the fans that had mobbed the hospital doing a little victory lap in his bulletproof SUV.
Well, that got the official press gallery even more furious.
The Washington Correspondents Association put out a statement that they were outraged that Trump didn't tell them about it.
Well, joining us now to talk about not only Trump's illness, which thankfully seems to be fairly mild, and more importantly, the media reaction or overreaction to it, is our friend Andrew Lawton, the boss of the Andrew Lawton Show, which you can get at AndrewLawtonshow.com.
Andrew, great to see you.
Hey, always a pleasure, Ezra.
You know, I've seen so many conspiracy theories in the last few days.
Democrat activists, liberal journalists who said, oh, Trump is faking this for sympathy.
Some people said, oh, the doctor's reports are obviously false.
It's much worse than they say.
And then short minutes later, Trump comes out looking pretty fit for a 74-year-old man with the Wuhan flu.
I think it's been the worst moment of the campaign yet for media credibility and impartiality.
What do you think?
Oh, yeah, the conspiracy keeps deepening.
At first, it's, okay, Trump's lying.
And then, oh, Trump's press secretary is lying.
And then, okay, maybe the doctor is.
Maybe the hospital is.
Maybe this whole thing is a conspiracy.
Maybe it goes right back to a lab in Wuhan and this whole thing was just an elaborate head fake so that Donald Trump at this particular moment in the campaign could say he had COVID.
There is no COVID.
It's all just been an elaborate ruse to get to this moment.
I mean, we're not far off from the media saying that.
Although I must admit, Ezra, I think Trump is playing this all wrong.
I get that he wants to show he's strong and get out there and see people and thank everyone for their prayers.
I think he should be live tweeting that this is the most agonizing thing, the most painful thing he's ever gone through, because then the media would inevitably say, oh, it's not that bad.
COVID's not that bad.
It's nothing.
It's just like a little cold.
You know, it's funny you say that, but it's so true.
I remember earlier during the pandemic where Trump was obviously briefed on a malaria medicine that is in common use in places like India and other tropical places called hydroxychloroquine.
It's a medicine that's being used for more than half a century, very low side effects, very cheap too.
That drug in combination with azithromycin and zinc and whatnot.
Look, I'm not a doctor.
I'm just trying to remember what he said.
Trump said that those medicines gave hope.
And immediately the media decided, oh, if Trump likes those medicines, we hate those medicines.
And they started denouncing those medicines, mocking, they tried to claim someone who had like fish tank cleaner, which had some hydroxy something, something that sounded similar.
Oh, you see, you can get poisoned.
They went on this crazy defamation campaign against this medicine.
Some Democratic politicians banned the prescription of this medicine, all because Trump said he thought it was promising.
I think you're right.
If Trump would have said, oh, this is the worst thing in the world, maybe the Democrats would have said, no, it's not.
I think you're so right.
Whatever he says, they say the opposite.
Yeah, and this is, again, the whole point about the media claiming that, oh, Trump should have given them a heads up.
If Trump had given them a heads up, then they would have said, oh, they were endangering us, trying to get us out when he had COVID.
And same as Jim Acosta.
I don't know if you saw this on Twitter the other day, tweeted somewhat snarkily that Donald Trump didn't go over to the reporters to take questions on his way to Marine One when he was going to Walter Reed.
Where if he did go, then he would be told, oh, well, now he's endangering all the reporters by it.
So I mean, it is really empowering for Trump because what the president can do now is whatever he wants because there is no correct answer.
So every other politician gets held up by, oh, what's the right thing to do?
What's going to reflect well in the polls?
What's going to make the media like me?
Whereas Trump, I think, is well aware of the fact that they're going to hate everything he does and anything he does.
So he might as well just stick to what he wants to do.
And in this case, he wanted to go and take a little bit of a joyride around Walter Reed.
You know, I think there are legitimate questions you could be asking about, okay, what was done to make sure that the people in the car with him were safe and protected.
But ultimately, the media would have hated it no matter what.
They would have hated it if he retreated and holed away.
And when we saw this on Twitter, he went dark on Twitter for a period of time.
And everyone was said, oh, what does it mean that he's not saying anything?
And then I think very deliberately, he's been tweeting mostly today, like every hour or something.
And now they're saying, oh, this is a sign of instability.
So there's no winning.
Yeah, you're right.
You know, I understand that Trump's press secretary who hosts the briefings in the White House, I understand that she herself has tested positive.
And let me tell you what that presents us with.
You know, as you say yesterday when the media saw Trump doing the victory lap in that bulletproof SUV, his Secret Service inside the car had the face-sealed masks and whatnot.
But all of a sudden, the media that is against police said, oh my God, are those Secret Service, those Secret Service agents, they're being abused by the president.
By the way, you're a fit 30-year-old Secret Service agent.
I think you've got like one in a billion chance of being hurt by this virus.
And by the way, you signed up willing to take a bullet.
I think you'll be in the car with the president who has a bit of a cough.
You have to be anyways.
So they were extremely concerned.
And I saw tweets about, well, how come they're not contract tracing every single person the president got into contacted with?
Well, if the president's press secretary has fallen ill, and I don't know if she's ill, she just has a positive.
Theoretically, every single journalist, Jim Acosta, all the others in that room, Andrew, well, now they should quarantine.
I think we're about to see if the liberals mean any of it, because all those media party journalists, if they really meant the, oh, my God, you got to quarantine and don't spread it, they would take the next two weeks off.
I don't think they mean a word of it.
No, and actually, it's funny.
Our friend Mark Stein had pointed something out this morning that I thought was glorious.
We've just seen several months of defund the police, abolish police.
Police are terrible.
Law enforcement are terrible.
And now all of a sudden the entire left is, oh my goodness, those poor Secret Service agents.
We have to make sure they're okay.
Yeah.
You know, a couple of famous journalists who got COVID went out and about without a mask on.
Chris Cuomo, the brother of the New York governor, George Stephanopoulos, the ABC journalist, also former Clinton staffer.
There's photos of them going out and about without a mask, but they're deeply, deeply concerned that the president has done so too.
I wonder what the net effect of all this will be.
I think it's a positive for Trump.
I think he comes out and I think he reduces the stress level in the country.
Because people say if an overweight 74-year-old man can get through this with just a flicker of trouble, but he's back and he's strong, maybe we don't all have to be hiding under our beds.
And I don't know.
I think it's a net positive, if anything.
I think it revealed the media one more time to be diabolically biased.
But I also know that in this crazy election season, within a week, all this will be forgotten.
What do you think?
Yeah, I'm not sure I would view it as necessarily a net positive.
We have about a month left in the campaign, and this has basically sidelined Donald Trump in some ways for half of what's left in the campaign.
And it calls into question whether there can be debates again.
It calls into question any sort of events that would happen.
And it gives, in fact, Joe Biden a bit of an out for debate saying, oh, well, you know, he's got COVID, so we can't.
And all of his people have it.
And it could take, you know, all these weeks for them to come around.
And I think in that sense, Trump's greatest selling point has been the strongman view next to the sort of dotty senility of Joe Biden.
That's the narrative that Donald Trump has put forward.
So if Donald Trump is locked down and quarantined in some way and Joe Biden's not, that in and of itself upsets that balance just a bit.
And that's why I think there is a value politically in him doing the videos and tweeting and taking the rides out, the victory laps, as you call it.
But I also think that Trump needs to get out there.
You can only to a point campaign from a hospital and from quarantine.
And I feel that's going to be the big challenge here.
Remember, he was still doing rallies.
And now those are at least on hold for the next couple of weeks.
That's a good point.
You know what?
I think you're right.
You've convinced me.
Trump likes going out and about.
He's great at the big rallies.
And this absolutely gives Joe Biden an excuse for not to go to any more debates.
And I think Biden- Yeah, because Trump's now doing the Joe Biden campaign schedule, which is don't go anywhere.
Yeah, yeah, you're right.
Well, Andrew, great to talk with you as usual.
And I love following you on Twitter.
And let me recommend one more time, AndrewLawtonshow.com.
Great to see you, my friend.
Likewise, thank you.
All right, stay with us.
More ahead on Rebel News.
Hey, welcome back.
You know, I remember when this whole pandemic really started to lock in in March and April, I actually believed them when they said two weeks to flatten the curve.
And I was actually worried at first.
I mean, no one knew anything.
Maybe it was really, like Chernobyl, much, much, much worse than the Soviets, or in this case, the Chinese communists led on.
But it turns out that although it's bad if you're a senior in a senior's home, thankfully, it really doesn't touch people under the age of 50.
Really, no one under the age of 20.
Well, here we are more than half a year into it.
It's not two weeks to flatten the curve.
It's going to be a permanent thing.
I think that this is the cause of our age.
This is not a temporary thing.
It's what the left always wanted global warming to be, to change every aspect of our lives, to make us live in fear, total control of the economy.
Climate never worked because people were not afraid of climate.
It just didn't scare them.
They faked it for pollsters, but they didn't mean it.
They kept on driving.
But I think for a large swath of society, they really are afraid of the pandemic, even though it peaked back in April, even though it's now on par with the regular flu season.
I'm afraid that enough Canadians are happy to wear a mask and stay at home, happy to have checkpoints and lockdowns.