David Menzies, Sheila Gunnreid, and Andrew Chapados critique Ontario’s COVID-19 lockdowns—indoor venues closed while outdoor gyms stay open—with ICU occupancy near 50 and few direct deaths, exposing reporting inconsistencies like retroactive case additions. Premier Doug Ford’s $2B+ subsidies for unions and green energy clash with his 2018 "open for business" stance, as businesses face restrictions amid claims of unelected medical advisors dictating policy. Meanwhile, Canada’s embassy in Beijing’s 50-page renovation RFP prioritizes "green" sustainability and cultural sensitivity over Uyghur human rights or Catholic persecution, despite expanding electronic immigration systems vulnerable to Chinese hacking; staff fears retaliation like the 700-day detentions of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. Ontario’s license plate bans—blocking COVID terms, profanity, "blessing," and guns—highlight bureaucratic ideological censorship, even as arbitrary rejections like "hate Bruins" persist, revealing a pattern of selective enforcement. [Automatically generated summary]
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Welcome to Rebel Roundup, ladies and gentlemen, and the rest of you, in which we look back at some of the very best commentaries of the week by your favorite rebels.
I'm your host, David Menzies.
Well, just when we thought we were out of the Wuhan virus woods, along comes more lockdowns in various regions of Ontario, ranging from sit-down restaurants and theaters to indoor gyms.
Why Doug Ford Relented?00:15:20
Yeah, because apparently outdoor gyms are all the rage as the weather gets colder here, right?
Andrew Chapadoz drops by to ponder, whatever happened to the province's allegedly conservative premier, Doug Ford.
And how do you like them, Wontons?
Apparently, the Canadian embassy in Beijing suffers from poor morale.
The federal government thinks it's due to the building not being green enough, but it's more likely due to staffers who live in fear of being targeted by the Chinese Communist Party, a la the two Michaels.
Sheila Gunreed will have all the details.
And finally, letters, we get your letters, we get your letters every minute of every day.
And I'll share some of your responses regarding my story on the thousands of Ontario personalized license plates that were this year declined by a secret star chamber of bureaucrats.
The thing is, some of those rejections make no sense whatsoever.
Then again, the personalized license plate committee is staffed by bureaucrats, after all.
Those are your rebels.
let's round them up.
Ontario saw record-high 939 cases on October 9th, meaning of course we need to shut down bars, gyms, and any other place that people go to for exercise or for fun.
Because who cares about mental health, right?
Now that might sound a little bit harsh if we didn't have all the information that we now have.
With an added 19 people in hospital for COVID in the entire province, this is apparently a monumental spike in cases, meaning shut it down now.
The cases in intensive care have barely moved and it remains around 50 for the entire province.
That's 50 people for almost 400 hospitals and about 230 patients for COVID altogether.
That means if you put one person with COVID in each hospital, you would still have more than 150 hospitals without any COVID patients at all.
Yet for some reason, Premier Doug Ford is giving more money to healthcare workers and now shutting down businesses for 28 days.
You heard it right.
After giving billions of dollars to increase hospital capacity and increasing wages significantly, Ontario hospitals are now laying off nurses citing financial challenges.
Hmm, that's a little weird.
They've stopped elective and sometimes life-saving procedures to make way for COVID patients, but there aren't enough, so now we have to give them more money to clear the backlog of people waiting for these treatments.
Funny how that works, isn't it?
Previously, we told you about how a COVID case doesn't actually mean you've tested positive.
You can just be around a place where others have.
If you're looking for a better definition from the government, well, I'm sorry to tell you there isn't one.
They just say the word outbreak and case closed.
Not literally, of course.
But now, there are new reports coming out that in addition to cases not being cases and adding deaths and cases from months ago, the death count for Ontario actually includes people who didn't actually die from COVID-19.
But you're not allowed to know how many because that would be just too honest of them.
Many people knew this already, but they were conspiracy theorists.
How dare you deny the existence of this virus?
Put on your mask and shut up.
We showed you articles that said that.
Ride your bike and drive in your car alone with a mask.
People are doing this.
People are dropping dead in the streets, they say.
Don't you want to save lives?
Toronto's Associate Medical Officer of Health says this.
Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not necessarily as a result of COVID-19, are all included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto.
Seems logical, doesn't it?
While gym, bar, and restaurant owners get destroyed over inflated numbers, hospitals and school boards rake in the money, your money.
You don't get to decide where your tax dollars are going anymore, and apparently, neither do the people you voted for.
Unelected regional doctors get to suggest their colleagues get more money for less work, quite literally, while people die.
For your own safety, please sign the check.
Don't worry, though, we are using this time wisely to make sure there is more diversity in government-run ads.
That's a new thing.
We've also, during a pandemic, managed to find half a billion dollars for electric car assembly.
So healthcare workers, teachers unions, and green energy sectors?
Doug Ford is basically a progressive now.
This person who ran on open for business and balancing the budget apparently has found billions and billions of dollars to spend while he shuts down other people's businesses.
Remember, he's for the people.
It's only going to get worse if we allow it.
Look at Australia.
Look at the UK.
They are testing a COVID passport, meaning if you can prove you don't have COVID, which of course will turn into proving that you've gotten a vaccine, then you will have the privilege, not the right, but the privilege, to live without a mandatory quarantine.
Thank you, overlords.
I'll hail the state.
Yes, how odd indeed.
Remember those election slogans of the Doug Ford PCs way, way back in, oh, what was it, 2018?
You know, Ontario open for business and for the people.
Given what's happened to so many Ontario businesses and the people who own them, it looks like those slogans had all the fortitude of weak old linguini.
Because increasingly, when it comes to tackling the Wuhan virus in Ontario, it would appear that the cure is far worse than the curse.
And joining me now regarding the latest coronavirus craziness is Andrew Chapato.
So Andrew, there's another slogan making the rounds these days, namely we're all in it together.
I think that might have just displaced the two other biggest lies of all time, namely the check is in the mail.
And hi, I'm from the government.
I'm here to help you.
It's been the government run by Doug Ford has certainly taken a turn, hasn't it?
I mean, I noticed today he stated that when hiring teachers, the most important things were talent and skill, along with diversity, which is one of his latest and greatest claims that we should be doing when hiring teachers.
But aside from that, the COVID fiasco, that we can all call it, not that we're denying the existence of the actual illness, but the lack of transparency and just the lack of logic around these lockdowns and restrictions has really gone off the rails.
I mean, first it was, let's get deaths and everything down.
We need to make sure the ICUs are open for people with COVID.
We need to make sure the hospitals are open.
Now the cases are out of control.
Oh, wait, the cases aren't out of control.
Let's add some from months ago.
And it seems like it never stops, David.
But you know, Andrew, here's the thing, and you make this point, I think, in your video.
It's one thing to talk about coronavirus positive cases.
It's quite another ball of wax to talk about the number of deaths.
So when you have hundreds of people daily testing positive, that doesn't translate into hundreds of deaths now, does it?
No, and that's the problem with these daily pressers Doug Ford has been giving.
There's no transparency about what a case actually is, no transparency about how many people are in ICU beds or in hospital in general.
Right now, there's as many people in hospital.
I don't even know what a number to compare it to.
Is cars being sold?
I don't know.
But if you look at the number of people in ICU, you can fit one person for every four hospitals in the province.
There's way more beds and hospital facilities than there are COVID patients in the province of Ontario, which begs the question, why are we still having these restrictions?
Now they're putting more nurses and more, I don't know if you want to call them hospital attendants.
They're hiring more to make up for the backlog that they have already caused, but it doesn't make sense because they've already laid off so many nurses previously.
So what they've gone ahead and done is they've fired nurses, but then given the hospitals more money to hire nurses.
It doesn't make much sense to me.
And you know, going back to those 2018 promises, Andrew, you know, for the people and Ontario open for business, you would think that Doug Ford of 2018 in 2020 would embrace, oh, I don't know, the Swedish model of dealing with the Wuhan virus.
They didn't decimate their economy.
They didn't go for this huge shutdown.
And for good reason, what have we seen here?
We have seen spikes in depression, in suicides, in spousal abuse.
And I think one of the worst things of all, relatively young healthy people dying on elective surgery lists because they can't get their procedure done in hospital.
Well, they're doing the same thing with businesses now.
We're going to have to close a lot of you guys down.
We're going to have to say no indoor dining and gyms can't operate or anything, but you can eat outside.
Go get more takeout, please.
But at the same time, we're going to give you more money.
So we're going to stop you from making money, but we're going to give you money from people's tax dollars.
Again, it doesn't make any sense.
He's just writing checks left, right, and center.
Here you are, nurses union.
Here you are, teachers union.
Here you are, business loans.
And what's the end game here?
Doug Ford ran on leveling the debt out and being open for business.
And now we're closing businesses and creating astronomical debt that nobody can account for.
Andrew, who is controlling Doug Ford?
Because even with this latest rollback to stage two that Peel Region, Ottawa, and Toronto went into starting Friday midnight of last week, We had Doug just 48 hours earlier saying he didn't want to, I'm paraphrasing, but he didn't want to decimate restaurants and gyms, you know, many of which are just hanging on, you know, by their fingernails.
And then without any kind of new scientific breakthrough, unless I miss something, 48 hours later said, yep, stage two for Peel Region, Ottawa, Toronto.
So what I'm saying is that with a lack of scientific breakthrough, what made him flip-flop in the space of two days?
Well, they claim it's the numbers going up in those regions, but it's not, they put them over the limit of what they normally would have been.
But they also did that by adding numbers from previous months when they added the mask mandate.
So a lot of times they don't set a marker down or an asterisk next to the statistic that says they've added people.
And then they don't mention any time, like I mentioned in their press conferences, they don't say, hey, this is how many people are in ICU.
This is how many hospital beds we have available.
These are the amount of people who are actually dying.
As for who's controlling him, I think what's happened here is he's seen that he gets positive feedback from a more liberal or left-leaning voter base when he does things like say, everyone's going to die, you're killing people.
And he likes that.
And Justin Trudeau says, hey, you know, we can maybe help you out with some more stuff if you keep going like this.
So let's get together and build this electric car facility or enhance it so that they can assemble the products there.
After, you know, years of them having this voucher or whatever you want to call it, this benefit for people buying electric cars in Ontario.
And guess what happened?
Nobody bought electric cars.
So I'm not sure what the plan is here when they build these cars, but Doug Ford seems to be liking the attention he's getting from a left-leaning voter base and he's running with it.
Oh yeah, and the way he is so buddy-buddy with members of the mainstream media who made his late great brother's life a living hell, Rob Ford, it's really something unbelievable to see, at least personally for me.
But you know, Andrew, I mean, I really, my heart goes out, especially when you look at sectors like the restaurant industry.
I can tell you, I believe the stat is within the first three years, 80% of new startup restaurants go out of business.
That's in a roaring economy, right?
So goodness knows how many of these restaurants aren't coming back in this quasi-depression, if we can call it that.
And fitness facilities too.
My son just joined a martial arts place a couple of days ago last night.
He said something to me, and it just felt heartbreaking to me.
He said, after the class, you know, the master, the teacher, you know, this.
I believe it's a sense idea.
It is.
Sensei, yes, you can tell I'm not hanging out at a martial arts class.
But he said, and here's this incredible black belt super athlete, and he was saying to everybody, please, you know, don't quit.
You know, I really want to see you all come back.
And this is a gym in York region, which is under the closure, but is still hanging on by its fingernails.
I don't understand why Doug Ford couldn't resist whoever this mysterious the team is that's directing him and say, no, darn it, I said open for business, and I mean open for business.
And by business, I don't mean the moving vans clearing out yet another bankrupt enterprise.
Well, personally, I think some of these businesses need to stand up for themselves more.
I mean, I get emails, as I'm sure a lot of you guys do at home, from wherever you get your haircut or your gym or what have you, and they say, oh, please come, make sure you're not exhibiting any symptoms.
Please wear a mask and all this.
You're basically anyone who disagrees with this whole charade, let's call it, which is probably about half of people, to be fair, they're going to be turned off from that.
They're going to be turned off by you just kowtowing to all this stuff.
Having said that, I realize that these people need to do whatever they can to stay open.
As for the mysterious veil of Doug Ford's advisors, how come we're not allowed to know who any of these doctors are?
How come we're not allowed to see them?
He won't even say how many there are.
He says it's more than one.
It's possibly even hundreds.
Yeah, Doug Ford's got a giant room of a big black circle or a big black table of people sitting around it conspiring, telling you, like, it's probably a few doctors who he trusts and thinks are great, probably not much more than the ones that come out into the press conferences.
But the point is that we didn't vote for these people.
So Doug Ford's writing checks to everybody, and everybody who wasn't elected gets to make the decisions on whether people get to run their lives.
I don't understand it.
And Joe, Andrew, one last thing is the fact that when he'll say things at press conferences like, you know, I want businesses to succeed.
You know, I really feel for the little guy, the mom, pa.
But health trumps economy.
We've got to go health first.
Why can we still buy cigarettes in Ontario then if that's the case?
I mean, if used as directed, this is a product that will likely end your life sooner or make you ill with cancer.
So why are those things still on the shelf if it's all about health and not about the economic well-being of the province?
Well, it's obviously the tax revenue that stuff like that brings in, but it's akin to the morbidly obese woman in Dollarama who's telling people to put on their masks.
China's Embassy Hack Vulnerability00:13:00
Don't you care about other people's health, David Menzies?
I'm standing here eating a six-foot sub, but you're not wearing a mask.
Who's killing more people?
I don't know.
Well, next time you have a six-foot sub, invite me over.
That sounds like a little too much money for a single survey.
But Andrew was a great commentary, and I think what Andrew said too: if a critical mass of businesses and gyms in these areas just opened their doors, really, what do you have to lose?
If everybody opened up for business, it reminds me of what's happening with the Yahoo Nation protests.
Those are illegal.
You can't have an outdoor gathering of more than 25.
There hasn't been a single fine for those people or the organizers.
In fact, law enforcement has given them escorts to march right down Young Street.
So I think maybe that is the option to go with.
Strength in numbers, just defy the men anyways.
And hey, like I said, if you're about to go out of business, how can you lose anyways?
What do you have to lose?
Maybe we should update that name from Yahoo Nation now.
MySpace Nation, MSN Messenger Nation, maybe?
With an emoji?
We'll take it under advisement.
Andrew, thanks so much, and keep it here.
More of Rebel Roundup to come right after this.
Canada's NC in Beijing requires a master plan to sketch out expensive embassy campus upgrades.
And these upgrades have to please environmentalists, encourage staff retention, and maximize capacity for new electronic immigration processing.
It's all right here on the government of Canada's buyandsell.gc.ca website.
Our country's Beijing mission is experiencing, quote, major growth over the last 10 years.
Yeah, I bet it is.
And as such, it now requires renovation and redevelopment.
And friends, it better be green.
A 50-page request for an architectural and engineering proposal was uploaded by Minister François-Philippe Champagne's Global Affairs Canada.
It identifies the need for, quote, space optimization to be conducted over the next 20 years at the compound.
Or, as the request frames it, the ministry seeks to enhance its presence through excellence in its missions abroad.
Requirements for the master plan are basically to not run afoul of the communists in China and to virtue signal to the green movement who seem to care more about carbon emissions than they do about human rights.
Look at this.
Be respectful of the urban landscape and cultural and social fabric.
Create a low to nil energy footprint by implementing measures to reduce consumption of all utilities, water, gas, electricity, if possible, and proven, demonstrate Canadian innovations in sustainability.
Implement opportunities to green overall operations.
Weird flex, but okay, given that China is still the world's largest consumer of coal.
Now, aside from practical considerations like physical renovations, these documents are full-on, nonsensical design jargon.
Look at this.
The master plan should be a product of pragmatic creativity, balancing functionality and site constraints and opportunities with design elements that will appeal to investors, stewards, environmentalists, employees, visitors, and the host country alike.
Now, the master plan also shows just how scared the liberals are of annoying the communist Chinese government.
Look at this.
The master plan will incorporate a diverse environmental, social, cultural, economic, and political considerations, including but not limited to heritage, existing and future context, land use, government priorities, community amenities, accessibility, security, cultural, and regional realities.
So, friends, is that a yes to Uyghur slave labor to put in the solar panels or no?
Because I can't really tell here.
So, Canada's embassy in Beijing has staffing issues.
Golly, it must be the design of the building, you know, not being green enough and not being culturally sensitive enough, right?
Or maybe staff retention has more to do with, oh, perhaps Canadian staffers living in fear of the Chinese communist government potentially coming after them.
And then there's the added fear of the Justin Trudeau liberals turning a blind eye to that sort of vendetta.
A la the two Michaels, who have been incarcerated now for almost 700 days.
Shameful.
And joining me now with more on this depressing and maddening story is Sheila Gunnreid.
Welcome to the Rebel Roundup, my friend.
Hey, David, thanks for having me on the show.
Always a pleasure.
Well, Sheila, first of all, my hat goes off to you for going through all of that bureaucratic baffle gab that was in that RFP.
Now, I know you live up in farm country, but have you ever come across such an excess of BS in such a small footprint ever before?
It was bureaucraties and SJW nonsense, just shoehorned into 50 pages of virtually unreadable garbage.
And, you know, the priorities of this government are laid bare in this RFP, this request for, you know, an architectural master plan about how they're going to upgrade the embassy because nobody wants to work there.
And for some reason, the liberals can't figure out why.
And really, when our largest trading partner in the United States is disengaging from China and taking steps to sort of move back from China, we are just going all in and saying, you know what, we need to do more, be more.
We need to make sure we're on the ground and we need to make sure that we are green and culturally and politically sensitive to what's going on in China.
It's very strange.
You know, that's especially concerning to me, and you alluded to it in your piece, Sheila.
When you're talking about culturally and politically sensitive to China, what does that even mean?
Does that mean turning a blind eye, as you mentioned, to the Uyghurs?
Does that mean not saying anything about the two Michaels that are being incarcerated for almost 700 days now and perhaps even being tortured?
What is your take on what that statement really means?
What we know from this 50 pages in the RFP is that there will be no focus on the stuff that normal people care about and that the liberals claim to care about, by the way, and that's human rights.
The RFP, and I'll read directly from it, says that we must be respectful of the urban landscape.
What is that?
The smog in Beijing and the cultural and social fabric.
So I guess be respectful of communist authoritarianism and then to create a low to nil energy footprint by implementing measures to reduce consumption of all utilities, if possible, and prove and demonstrate Canadian innovations in sustainable sustainability and implement opportunities to green overall operations.
So those are the focuses here, but nothing on human rights, nothing on religious freedom.
As we speak right now, the Chinese communist government is cracking down on Catholics.
And Cardinal Zen, he's a cardinal of Hong Kong, and he's trying to raise the alarm bells.
We've heard nothing from Justin Trudeau's liberals about that.
The Uyghurs are imprisoned by the millions in concentration camps.
They're being re-educated.
None of that stuff is a focus here by the liberals.
The one thing that they are focusing on trying to do is move to greater immigration processing out of the Beijing embassy and to do it paperless, which makes us vulnerable to Chinese hacking.
Well, you know, a couple of things unpacked there, Sheila.
First of all, if they're talking about being respectful of the urban landscape, shouldn't that mean that this embassy should be getting its energy from burning coal?
Because that would fit in with those images in your video of what Beijing looks like.
It looks like the fog coming into San Francisco Bay, for goodness sakes, it's so thick.
And that little line, that throwaway low to no energy, I mean, Sheila, can you operate any office of any size with no energy?
What are they talking about?
They are increasing the size of their embassy in Beijing.
And China, on a good day, uses more coal than the entire rest of the world combined.
Do they really think that greening the Canadian embassy, which will be an outrageous expense that we as a nation cannot afford, do they really think that's going to make a difference?
Or is it just going to be one of those like, look at us?
We're so green.
Look what a bunch of good people we are.
Just ignore those concentration camps because have you seen our low-flow shower heads?
And Sheila, how much of a, I guess, a clear and present danger is it to work as a diplomat, as an ambassador, what have you, in a country like China?
One of the Michaels, of course, is a former diplomat.
That didn't seem to carry any weight in terms of the treatment he's received without outrageous incarceration.
Is that indeed really one of the pressing fears that if I say or do something wrong, or if the Chinese government needs a scapegoat to do a quid pro quo on one of their citizens being arrested in Canada, they might come after me and, oh, wow, Justin Trudeau, he sure got my back, really, doesn't he?
Yeah, I mean, the ministry, the Foreign Affairs Ministry has said, oh, we're having a tough time getting people to work there because of the smog in China.
That could be true to a certain extent, but I think it's more fear of being kidnapped and then having a completely inept and useless government that will allow you to languish for nearly 700 days with no hope and no end in sight, as is the case with the two Michaels, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.
And Spavor himself is a former diplomat.
So if we think that the Chinese government would not target Canadian diplomats, well, they already have.
And they're using Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig as political hostages.
That's really all they are.
It was a kidnapping.
It wasn't really an arrest.
And if people want to help us raise the profile of the plight of those two men, we're taking it all the way to the United Nations.
They can help us and see the complaint we've drafted at free thetomichaels.com.
So I guess wrapping it up then, Sheila, if you want to have a job in this embassy in Beijing, ignore the smog.
Be like the three monkeys.
Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil when it comes to the human rights sewer that is China these days.
But rest assured, you'll be going to work nine to five in a green office environment with a low to no energy profile.
It sounds like madness to me.
It's crazy that they think that they could like these are low six figure jobs, but I wouldn't take a low six figure job if Justin Trudeau was the guy in charge of getting me home if I was kidnapped by an authoritarian regime.
And that's really what this comes down to.
No, well said, Sheila.
Another great piece from you.
And again, thank you ever so much for going through all that bureaucratic manure.
Just from the lines you exerted, my eyes were glazing over.
I can't imagine reading the whole document.
But that's why you're the best in Canada when it comes to these FOI requests.
So thanks again, Sheila, and you have a great weekend.
You too, David.
Thank you.
And that was Sheila Gunn Reed, somewhere in the hinterland of northern Alberta.
Keep it here, folks.
Vanity Plates and Discrimination00:06:26
More of Rebel Roundup to come right after this.
So say you have $310 burning a hole in your pocket.
Maybe you want to buy a vanity plate, you know, one of those custom jobs to state what you like or don't like and drive around the province with that on your vehicle.
Well, you would probably come to a Service Ontario outlet like the one in this mall, but you knew I was at a Service Ontario outlet, didn't you, folks?
Because this lineup is stretching all the way from the parking lot to the sidewalk, reminiscent of breadlines in Moscow in the Soviet Union days.
But I digress.
Here's the deal.
The province recently released its list of rejected personalized plates.
And wow, what a list it is.
24 pages long.
You can have your plate rejected for a number of reasons pertaining to several different categories.
And when I reached out to the ministry, I was told that all personalized license plates are subject to review by the designated non-partisan staffers who comprise the personalized license plate review committee.
Almost sounds Orwellian, doesn't it?
This organization will not tolerate failure.
And why would your vanity plate be rejected?
Oh, there are so many, many reasons.
For example, abusive, obscene language, and derogatory slang.
Now, I guess since these plates are technically property of the province, you don't want F-bombs driving around the road.
But still, one of the words, one of the plates that was rejected that stands out for me is the seven word.
Is that, I suppose, in reference to the late, great George Carlin, the comedian who once did a great riff on the seven words you can't say on radio or TV.
I mean, there are a lot of words you can say whenever you want, you know?
Pneumonia!
Nobody gives you a lot of.
All right, you can't yell at the hospital a great deal, but what the hell?
Now, my favorite category for banning personalized license plates is human rights discrimination.
Essentially, because folks, it makes no sense whatsoever.
For example, any reference to COVID-19, such as COVID, COVID-19, COVID-20, COVID number, COVID with a K-19, that was banned under the proviso of human rights discrimination.
How is referring to this pandemic crippling the planet as somehow running afoul of human rights discrimination is the Doug Ford government worried about offending the Mandarins in Beijing?
Who knew that the government had a secret star chamber of nameless bureaucrats acting as censors for personalized vanity plates?
Oh, I get it.
Having something profane on a plate such as the full F-bombs belt out, that could be over the line.
But how does a plate stating hate Bruins get rejected on the proviso of human rights discrimination?
I mean, a Bruin is a bear after all, or is this a matter of protecting the feelings of Boston Bruins fans?
It's just insane.
Gee, I wonder if getting insane on a plate would be approved.
That's the perfect descriptor for 2020, I should think.
In any event, here's what you had to say about Ontario's over-the-top license plate censorship.
Jeff Taylor writes, when leftist public sector employees are making decisions on personalized license plates, of course they're going to judge submissions from the general public through the lens of left good, right bad.
Of course, leftists would disapprove of the plate reading a blessing.
You know, I think you nailed it, Jeff.
And yes, folks, a blessing was actually one of the rejected plates under the religious category.
But who would be offended by that plate?
Wiccans, Satanists?
Give me a break already.
Brandon M. writes, since Ontario only allows eight characters at most on a plate, I would put no gun ban on mine.
Oh, no, you wouldn't, Brandon.
Alas, gun references are under the ban when it comes to Ontario plates too, because the mindset is if you own a gun, you are obviously a very bad person, don't you know?
Dr. McGillicuddy writes, when it takes less time to get on a roller coaster at Canada's Wonderland than it does to get a license plate at Service Ontario, you know you got a problem.
Yeah, that is problematic to be sure.
And you know something else that's problematic?
That redesign of the plates that occurred last year, they might look whiz-bang groovy in the daytime, but come nightfall, they are invisible.
Total fail.
Hey, maybe Doug Ford can put those two words on a vanity plate for his SUV.
Reed Green writes, What are the chances MAGA is allowed?
Oh, Reed Green, I would say the odds of anything MAGA being approved for an Ontario plate would make even the most reckless gambler cringe.
And mostly peaceful protest writes, idiocy.
Bureaucrats love arbitrary rules.
They can never be wrong.
Forget vanity plates anyway.
No need to fork over extra revenue to the state.
Besides, it's probably smarter not to have a memorable license plate for many practical reasons.
You know, you're probably right, mostly peaceful protest.
Besides, why not save that $310 and simply get a bumper sticker made for your vehicle at a fraction of the price?
You can use more than eight characters and you can embrace automotive freedom of speech without a bureaucrat giving you the thumbs down.
Well, at least you can for now.
Well, that wraps up another edition of Rebel Roundup.
Thanks so much for joining us.
See you next week.
And hey, folks, never forget, without risk, there can be no glory.