Franz Restaurant, a Toronto diner, closed in 2021 due to pandemic lockdowns—part of 10,000+ Canadian restaurant failures—costing 55 jobs and erasing a neighborhood hub. While politicians like Brian Palister (Manitoba) and John Torrey (Toronto mayor) fled to Costa Rica or Florida, avoiding restrictions, California workers revolted demanding reopenings. The episode exposes Liberal demonization of independent media—blocking outlets like True North Initiative, Rebel News, and Postmillennial from debates while accrediting China’s People’s Daily, Russia’s Itar Tass, and Vietnam’s state agency. Courts forced inclusion after Liberal resistance, yet mainstream silence persists. Independent voices fight back via iwillopen.com and fighttheflines.com, warning of press freedom erosion as dissent is stifled under pandemic policies. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I look at a little diner in Toronto called Franz Restaurant that shut down.
I didn't go there a lot, maybe five times in my life.
I wouldn't say it was a great restaurant.
It was good enough.
It was a diner.
But I feel a small hole in me now that it's gone because a restaurant, a diner, a place in the neighborhood, it's not just a building.
It's the backdrop to your life, really.
10,000 of these places have been killed, not by the virus, but by the politicians.
I'm going to talk about that today.
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All right, here's today's show.
Tonight, a progress report on the lockdown battle.
It's December 17th, and this is the Ezra 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 is governments about why I publish them.
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
I'm watching with despair places that I know and love that are part of my life are being closed down forever because of the lockdown.
Not because of the virus.
The virus has hit seniors' homes, hit them hard, but it has left pretty much most other people unscathed.
Most provinces make it hard to find statistics like these.
You can see why.
Here's Alberta's statistics to show that literally only 20 people out of the 760 deaths in Alberta were for people who didn't have serious comorbidities.
It's a fancy way of saying they were already very, very sick with heart disease, liver disease, diabetes, dementia, whatever.
The average victim had three or more such serious diseases before the virus killed them.
Average age, 82.
I am not minimizing or downplaying the meaning of those who died at that age or with those comorbidities.
I'm just saying it is a narrow sliver of the population.
Protect them, how about?
Let the rest of the world be free, since when did we ever quarantine the healthy?
Never.
I saw this today.
Life Without Restaurants00:08:12
Franz Restaurant closes at Young and Front Streets.
I live in Toronto.
I like France.
So just a couple months ago, it's a local institution, comfort food, fairly inexpensive.
That diner feeling, they went for that old-timey feeling.
Everybody knows the place.
It's part of the landscape.
It's part of the neighborhood.
And it's gone.
Of course it is.
Can you imagine the rent they're paying downtown Toronto?
And they can't survive without letting people in.
Like there's such a large space that they're not allowed to let people in to the tables.
They're not built for takeout and delivery.
They're built for 100, 150 customers in the restaurant at a time.
They're done.
They're gone.
They're gone forever.
They survived a lot of things over the years, recessions, ups and downs.
They survived past viruses, SARS, if you remember that one.
But they actually weren't done in by the virus.
They were done in by the politicians lockdown.
55 jobs lost.
And the dreams of the owners and the neighborhood is lessened.
What is it about a city that gives it character?
The residential neighborhoods?
Sure, I guess.
But those are places where families nest with themselves.
But when people want to go out to be in the city, to feel like they are part of the larger place, the geography, They go to places with other people.
They socialize.
They make memories that are rooted to the geography.
Restaurants are a big part of that.
Your favorite place isn't necessarily the best place.
Fran's restaurant is not the best restaurant in Toronto.
Frankly, it wasn't even that good.
But it was a place that you knew and you loved because it was a symbol of where you lived and a mnemonic for all the good times you had there, all the people you went there with.
There used to be a popular radio host named Dick Clark who used to say the pretty phrase, music is the soundtrack of our lives.
I like that.
It's true.
When you hear a song that you love, often it's because of you thinking of something that happened to you, where you were when you heard it, when you heard it first, or maybe it reminds you of what happened once when you heard it.
Music's the soundtrack of our lives.
Well, a city's restaurants.
And other places like that are the set of our lives, like a movie set, where things happen to us.
It happened in a particular restaurant, in that restaurant.
That's where you lived your life.
That's where you yourself merged with the geography.
A city is not a hotel.
We're not transient tourists.
We're rooted to the ground.
Some institutions have been in a city for centuries, old churches, bridges, schools.
It's almost impossible to even imagine a France without the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame.
Imagine it without that.
That's why the torching of the Notre Dame Church felt like such a grievous wound.
It wasn't a building that was being burnt.
It was the city itself, nearly a thousand years of weddings and funerals and coronations and crusades.
A restaurant is not as grand as a church, but to the people who work there, it is just as meaningful for the neighborhood that sees it as a touchstone, a local icon, a local landmark.
It's what makes a neighborhood a neighborhood.
And to have them die, well, things live and die, but this was not a natural death or even a death from a sickness.
This was a killing.
France, not anymore, it's not.
What's your favorite restaurant?
How's it doing?
Not even your favorite one.
Just one that was the backdrop to your life.
The set upon which you lived your life that marks your place.
Look at this.
This story.
Picture life without restaurants.
Industry asks Canadians for support with more than 10,000 already closed.
10,000.
10,000 neighborhoods with a boarded up store.
Unemployed people, dashed dreams, lost life savings.
And for everyone else, what's left in the neighborhood when the places are gone?
Oh, go to a drive-thru like McDonald's.
They'll always be open.
Don't worry about them.
And Costco and Walmart, I'm sure Amazon will be in the food delivery business in the next year or so to pick up the pieces.
Just the local people are having trouble, people who live in the neighborhood too, people who build the neighborhood with you, who see your kids.
And those kids grow up into teens and they grow into adults who then have their own kids and take their own kids to their old favorite places.
How much fun is that taking your own kids to the places you loved as a kid?
That's gone in 10,000 neighborhoods.
And for what?
Here's part of that story in the paper.
A restaurant industry group is asking Canadians to imagine life without local restaurants after it says the country lost more than 10,000 eateries since the introduction of pandemic lockdowns.
In an effort to help them survive, Restaurants Canada is calling on customers to support their local food and drink establishments this holiday season by buying gift cards, ordering takeout or delivery, and dining in where possible.
Yes, sorry, that's not going to do it, Restaurants Canada.
That's not going to save them.
Only ending the political lockdown will save them.
Sorry, don't worry about it.
I mean, you're not going to make anyone sick.
People are getting sick at home or in private gatherings.
Here's the stats posted by one American restaurateur.
No one's getting sick in restaurants.
Restaurants are where young people go and families.
Yeah, some seniors too.
Okay, let them stay away if they're worried.
Waiters and waitresses and bartenders are usually young, very little risk of the virus.
Why are we punishing them again?
There's no sense to it.
How many mayors and premiers and public health officers have shut down restaurants just as a show of force, just to show that they're doing something, anything?
Let me know when the political class, the ruling class, shuts themselves down.
Without pay, I mean.
Without pay, I mean, I mean, the ruling class has had a six-month staycation, but they've been paid.
They're loving this.
Hey, do you think Brian Palister, the Premier of Manitoba, who's locked down his province, do you think he's going to spend a miserable Christmas in snowy Winnipeg with no restaurants allowed?
Or do you think he just might jet down to his Costa Rican getaway, as he has done so many times before, while he was lying about it so many times before?
Great restaurants down there, I hear.
They're not closed.
Here's the elite billionaire's gated compound in Palm Beach, Florida, where John Torrey, Toronto's mayor, has a winter home.
All the restaurants are open there.
Florida's great.
Weather's gorgeous.
John Torrey has sneaks away to his place here too in the past, not telling anyone, pretending he was up in Toronto by tweeting as if he was.
Do you really think John Torrey, the Toronto mayor, is going to stay in the miserable city he made miserable along with the rest of us?
And you think that either of those two men, just to name two of hundreds, do you think the travel quarantine rules would apply to them?
Yeah, no.
People are fed up.
Here's a restaurant workers revolt in California.
They're not asking for coupons or takeout or whatever their timid Canadian counterparts are doing.
They want to work.
They want to open.
We're helping people in Canada who want to open.
I don't know if you've been to our website, iwillopen.com, where we tell their stories, try and get them customers.
And if they get lockdown fines, we fight the fines for them at fighttheflines.com.
Today I asked our team to count up how many cases we've taken or are intaking right now.
Do you remember when I said I wanted to take 1,000 cases?
Well, between our legal cases in Canada, Australia, and the UK, we now have exactly 334 cases we've taken or are intaking.
334.
We're one-third of the way to 1,000 cases.
I think it's important.
Do not pay the fines.
Liberals' Media Control Tactics00:14:37
Do not submit.
Do not comply.
Do not go quietly.
If you're going to go, go down fighting.
We'll help you.
Don't be a victim.
Don't be a casualty.
Don't be the next Franz restaurant.
And hey, it's not just on the shoulders of the hardworking restaurateurs and waiters and waitresses and bartenders.
What about you, my friends?
What about you?
You who have lived your life in these places.
Why are you so silent?
Stay with us for a moment.
Well, I am on a lot of political party lists.
I swear I don't sign up to them.
People put me on those lists as some sort of prank, I assume.
But I actually enjoy seeing what the different political parties have to say, and especially when the Liberal Party writes to me using my first name.
It feels so personal.
But let me show you an email I received just yesterday, and it was marked far-right politics.
So I thought, oh, they got something to say.
The Conservative Party hasn't changed, Ezra.
Wow, they really know me.
In his parting words as conservative leader just four months ago, this was Andrew Shu's message to his successor: challenge the mainstream media.
Don't take the left-wing media narrative as a fact.
Please check out smart, independent, objective organizations like the Postmillennial or True North.
And I would agree with that advice.
But then look at this.
Aaron O'Toole has taken him up on that divisive call to promote far-right politics.
And then look, I'm just skipping ahead.
Just this week, O'Toole granted an exclusive end-of-year interview to the far-right True North Initiative, which now Toronto has described as an anti-immigration right-wing think take.
It goes on to rant and rave conspiracy theories and then naturally ask for your money.
And I was tempted to donate, but I already am a donor to the True North.
So no need to try and persuade me.
I'm in.
But putting aside my joking, since when do party leaders and political parties demonize and attack journalists, just, I mean, I thought that was something only the evil Donald Trump did.
And I thought the rest of the media was just mortified that he would call the media the enemy of the people.
Here we have a sitting prime minister's political party targeting his demonization on any, I'm not even going to call True North far-right.
They're not.
They're slightly to my left.
I regard myself as conservative.
I think True North are conservative.
Frankly, their views on immigration are in line with 90% of Canadians who think immigration levels are high enough.
But the demonization for profit of True North, post-millennial and of us, is something stunning to see.
And the either passive reaction or the celebration of this by the rest of the media is even more amazing.
Joining us now is the man who scored that end-of-the-year exclusive interview with Aaron O'Toole, the far-right Andrew Lotney joins me now.
Andrew, I don't think you're far right.
I think you're conservative.
You have had a storied journalistic career.
You've been with the Sun Chain.
You've been a radio host on a mainstream radio station.
You're with True North.
Like you've done a lot of journalism.
To call you far right, I don't even take that as an insult really, but to demonize you and to say you're beyond the pale, that's a little creepy coming from the government.
Yeah, and I must apologize, Ezra.
Sorry if I'm a little bit out of sorts today.
I started a drinking game when I saw that email yesterday.
I took a shot every time the email said far right, and I had passed out by like 8:32 p.m.
So I'm still sleeping off the hangover this morning from that.
It is a demonization, and you're right to point that out because what the liberals are saying here is that the audience that I have, the audience that you have, the audience that post-millennial have, they don't deserve to hear what politicians are doing.
They don't deserve to hear from political leaders.
They're saying to Aaron O'Toole, you should just ignore a portion of Canadians.
And that's very telling because that's revealing that the Liberals have decided to ignore a portion of Canadians.
We saw this during the last federal election when the Liberals had banned me from covering their press conferences and campaign stops.
At one point, police even pulled me over because I was trying to figure out where the campaign was going because they weren't sending me their press releases.
So the Liberals are now upset that the Conservatives aren't taking their approach, which is to just marginalize huge chunks of the Canadian population and say, you don't have a place in civil society.
You know, that's a very thoughtful way of looking at it.
I'm thinking, you know, who has the message?
Who is the message?
Who has the message to tell?
Aaron O'Toole.
Who's the filter, the journalist?
Who's the audience?
So you talked about this press release, this fundraiser, really, denying a huge swath of Canadians.
So that's a very good point.
But look at the other two parts to that.
The filter.
The liberals are saying Aaron O'Toole has the right to speak.
They're not yet saying he doesn't.
But he only can speak to our approved middlemen, our approved filters.
The CBC, if they'll have him, CTV Global, some mainstream newspapers, and that's it.
So they're not just marginalizing the audience.
That's a very good point you make.
But they're telling Aaron O'Toole he's only allowed to send his message to people who the liberals know will treat it a certain way.
And finally, they're in their own way trying to bully Aaron O'Toole.
This is an attack on him.
The whole purpose of this is to attack him.
So Aaron O'Toole, you can't talk to who you want to as an audience.
You have to talk to the journalists.
We tell you to.
And you cannot have your message go to conservative grassroots.
Every layer of this is illiberal, isn't it?
It is.
And you and I talked a few weeks back when the Global Conference for Media Freedom took place, the virtual version of it, about how, on one hand, the Liberals talk this big game about press freedom, but in practice, they don't actually respect the diversity of voices.
It's the only form of diversity Justin Trudeau doesn't like, diversity of opinion.
So what's happening here is the liberals, who, by the way, are still fighting Rebel and True North and me in court.
It's important to note this.
Our case against the Leaders Debates Commission is still ongoing.
They're still spending tens of thousands of dollars to deny our press freedom to cover future election debates and other events.
And what the Liberals are doing is, you're right, saying that we only regard as legitimate media the people that we've approved.
And the timing of this fundraising email from the Liberals is quite unique because this week there was actually a draft policy sent out to members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, which is this Ottawa clique that the Trudeau government has basically outsourced media accreditation to.
And this draft policy would exclude True North and Rebel and Postmillennial and other independent media outlets from covering any government events.
And what they say in this draft policy is, quote, accreditation is a privilege, not a right, unquote.
Now, what they're actually doing is limiting and curtailing press freedom in a way that the Liberal government very much approves of, because the Liberal government thinks that press freedom is something that's actually a privilege and not a right.
So it is timely that this now comes, this fundraising email from the Liberals, the same week as we are institutionalizing this very idea that certain people don't have a right to be journalists in Ottawa.
Wow, again, you nailed it.
That's exactly the point.
But it is a right.
Of course, I'm familiar with our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Section 2B, which includes freedom of expression, freedom of the press.
It was also in Diefenbaker's Bill of Rights.
And of course, the idea of free speech did not start in the 60s.
It goes back centuries to the United Kingdom, to John Milton, Areo Pagittica.
Freedom of speech has, I mean, and he wrote his great pamphlet against the licensing.
The idea in London back then was you needed a license in advance before publishing a pamphlet.
Jennifer, if I may, sorry to interrupt there, Ezra, but people need to understand that government does not grant rights.
Government can protect them.
Government can prevent against the abridgment of them, but government itself does not give these rights.
These rights are enumerated not because government has decided they're important, but they're enumerated because government has agreed to recognize that they are important.
But our government is falling short of that.
Yeah, you're right.
I was simply trying to make the point that these rights are ancient, centuries, maybe even older.
But it's funny you mentioned the parliamentary press gallery.
They get their power from the liberal speaker of the house.
So this isn't just there.
I mean, I don't care what my rivals at the Globe and Mail have to say or the CBC have to say, I do my own thing.
But their only power over me comes from the Speaker of the Parliament, of the House, who's a liberal.
But you know what I did?
Andrew, I saw your piece on this.
I saw what you guys at True North have been writing about this.
So I looked up, take a look at this.
This is the membership of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.
There's hundreds of people on here, actually.
Tons from the CBC, tons from CTB.
You can see that.
But look here.
There's the People's Daily.
That's controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
There's someone from Itar Tass.
That's controlled by Vladimir Putin.
There's the Ukrainian National News Agency, which is also state-run.
There's several reporters from Vietnam's state agency.
So the so-called keepers of journalistic ethics say you and me, independent Canadian citizens, are not allowed to go to our own parliament to report on the goings-on.
But literally, foreign government agents from Russia, China, Ukraine, and Vietnam are absolutely accredited.
Step right in.
They meet the free speech ethical standard.
That is crooked, my friend.
Yeah, and I remember you telling me a while ago that you had to, in order to cover something happening in Canada, do an end run around the Canadian accreditation regime and go through the U.S. State Department, which was part of the event that was going on.
And it's actually quite shameful that that's what this has had to come to.
It's quite shameful that when the Canadian government and the British government were doing that initial global conference for media freedom, our accreditation came from the British government.
And next year, when the Canadian government is co-hosting it with Estonia, you better believe I'm going to hope that the Estonian government accredits me because I don't have faith that the Canadian government will.
And there's something very insidious about this, which is that on one hand, people are saying, well, you know, the government's not denying you the right to say whatever you want.
They're denying you access to certain things.
But the whole point is that the government can't use the idea of a free and independent press as being a counterbalance against bad government if they're going to themselves restrict access to covering that government.
You know, when we went through the ordeal at the Leaders Debates Commission, it wasn't that we expected to be moderators.
It wasn't we expected to have our own questions asked in the debate.
We wanted a chance to stand there with our colleagues across the industry, get in line and ask a question or two.
And we did, but it took a court order to make that happen.
And I don't want to rehash something that's older because this is still ongoing.
And that's why I think it's very much still relevant.
When the liberals are fundraising and trying to score a few bucks off, saying, you know, how dare Aaron O'Toole talk to the far-right, true north, or whatever the case may be, what this is actually a symptom of is a longer-standing process of delegitimizing anyone that doesn't view the world the way the liberals do.
And they do this not just through maligning people, but actually trying to close off the walls of government.
Yeah.
Well, they're trying to unperson you and me.
Instead of saying, I disagree with you, or we have journalists from a different perspective, they're saying, no, no, no, no.
You're not even a journalist.
You're barely a citizen.
In fact, propagandists who are not citizens have more rights than you.
It's deeply disturbing.
The worst part of it is no one in the establishment seems to care other than that federal court judge, that federal court judge that ordered you and David Menzies and Kiam Becksy into that leader's debate.
By the way, there was no other interveners in the room that day.
There was no Civil Liberties Association in the room.
There was no, you know, no lawyer from the CBC or CTV or Globe and Mail.
It was your lawyers and our lawyers.
Silence from all the people who normally claim to stand up for civil liberties.
That's the depressing part.
It's not that the liberals are behaving like liberals.
We know that.
Where's everybody else?
Last point to you.
Yeah, and just when I talked about this parliamentary press gallery draft policy going around, it's important to know that this policy, which says media accreditation is a privilege and not a right, this isn't written by bureaucrats.
This isn't written by the Trudeau government.
This is written by journalists who are in the club and want to lock the door behind them.
There is a protectionism that's taking place here, which is why a lot of mainstream media journalists, I think, aren't standing up because they don't want to share the space in line.
They don't want to allow competitors in the room to lose their comparative advantage.
Yeah.
Well, we'll keep up the fight.
I know you will too.
Hopefully we'll have more victories.
It's embarrassing to Canada that we need to go to court to get a judge to tell our government that freedom of speech is the law.
But if necessary, we'll keep going back.
Great to see my friend keep up the fight.
And you too.
Merry Christmas to all of your listeners.
Thank you.
And to you too.
There you have it.
Andrew Lawton, one of the good guys, that's for sure.
He got a year-end interview with Aaron O'Toole, and the liberals say he should not have had that opportunity.
I don't think Trump ever said such a thing.
Keep Up the Fight00:02:04
And if he did, he would have been excoriated.
Trudeau does it?
Yeah, no problem.
Stay with us more.
Hey, welcome back on my show last night.
Bruce writes: Real journalism only happens in rebel news, and the few outlets haven't sold their soul to Trudeau.
CBC is also boring, so fewer people listen or watch it.
Well, that's the thing.
I've always said my main criticism of the CBC and the media party in general is not even that it's liberal, it's the sameness of it all.
You know, you're literally flipping global CTV, Toronto Star.
And is there any different?
It's all the same message track.
No diversity of opinion, diversity of every race and sexuality and gender and all that.
But is there any diversity of thought?
Gilly writes, trust the CBC to take a story that would make a great thriller and turn it into a nothing burger.
The China files should be the headline, and the MSM has a chronic case of willful ignorance.
Shameful.
Yeah, and I'm not even looking for credit.
I mean, we know we broke the story, our viewers know it, and the other journalists writing about it know it.
What was funny there, first of all, the appalling interview by Vashi Kapalos, who let her boss, Francois-Philips Champagne, get away with a bunch of fibs.
But the tweet that says it was broken first by the Global Mail, not by the Global Mail and others, that they claimed that the Global Mail was first.
They knew that's a lie.
And my main takeaway was we can see they're lying.
We know they're lying.
And so what else are they lying about?
You have to assume that they're lying about everything, since whenever we catch them, they show no compunction.
That's our stories for today, our show for tonight.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters DVU at home, good night.