Ezra Levant exposes Canada’s $98B CEWS payments to Chinese state-owned firms like Air China and the Bank of China, questioning why billionaire-backed media (Bell, Rogers) and sports (Raptors) get subsidies while domestic crises—like Trudeau’s unfulfilled 2015 clean-water pledge—go ignored. In the U.S., $2.3T stimulus funnels billions to foreign aid (e.g., $169M to Vietnam) over worker relief, with few conservatives opposing lockdowns or their economic fallout. Guest Calvin Robinson highlights the UK’s tiered restrictions as de facto national lockdowns, despite evidence of failure, and notes media resistance remains weak amid financial incentives like paid "staycations." Viewer support sustains Rebel News’s fight against these systemic priorities. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I, in addition to thanking you for your support for our helprebelnews.com campaign, I got some thoughts on a new revelation of who has been cashing in on pandemic subsidies in both Canada and the United States.
It's incredible.
I think it'll shock you, but I don't think it'll surprise you.
So I'll get into that in today's podcast.
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Just go to RebelNews.com and click subscribe.
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Okay, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, have you seen who's been getting taxpayers' money during the pandemic?
It's pretty gross, but completely predictable.
It's December 22nd, 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 to the government about why I'm publishing it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Hello, my friends.
And before I get into the news today, let me just stop and say thank you to the hundreds of viewers who have been so supportive of our crowdfunding campaign to pay back the loan that's being called in abruptly.
We had hoped to renew it, but it's going well, the crowdfunding.
I don't have a total for you yet, but I haven't had a chance to thank everyone individually.
And I know so many of you have helped.
So I really appreciate that.
It's amazing.
Let me get to the news of the day, though.
I wonder if you saw who's been taking special pandemic payments from tax dollars, courtesy of Justin Trudeau, or phrased differently, did you see who Trudeau has chosen to enrich in this crisis?
You can find some of that information on the Canada Revenue Agency's own website, which is actually sort of surprising to me.
Any employer in Canada who has asked the government for a handout to pay for their staff.
Here's what it looks like on the page.
Use the CEWS employer search below to search for employers who have received or will soon receive the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy.
To protect the privacy of individuals, only corporations will be disclosed.
And you can just type in any company's name to see if they signed up for one of Trudeau's wage subsidies.
It won't tell you how much they received.
It won't tell you the names of the employees, of course, but it'll tell you if the company took the cash.
Now, before I go further, I think I should tell you, I believe that there's a fairness to these wage subsidies in this way.
If the government tells a company that they have to shut down, which I think is legally questionable to begin with.
So if the government is forcing companies to stop operating so they can't earn money, well, then they can't very well pay their staff if they can't earn revenue.
So you shut down a restaurant, for example, you're going to see massive unemployment of waiters and waitresses and cooks.
So if you don't want that to happen and you're the politician who caused this problem, I do think it's fair in many ways to subsidize those wages if you want those staff to still be on payroll.
I disagree with the lockdowns and the shutdowns, but if you're a politician who's doing them, it makes sense that you provide some sort of compensation for the wreckage that you, the politician, have caused.
The real way to help companies, of course, is to let them operate and let people choose their own risk level, not to give little trinkets and baubles and payouts to people to patch the damage you've done.
But let's take a look at this program.
Let's use the search engine on the Canada Revenue Agency website.
I'm going to type in the word, oh, I don't know, China.
If you type it in, you'll see that 132 companies with the word China in their name got these wage subsidies.
Now, a lot of them, of course, are Chinese restaurants with that word in their name.
Now, I say again, I support that.
If you're punishing restaurants, it's fair to support them.
Obviously, they're in Canada.
The word China there refers to the cuisine, not the nation.
But look there, Air China Limited is the second and the third entry.
And if you go to airchina.com, you realize what that is.
That's exactly what it sounds like.
It's one of the largest airlines in the world.
It's a Chinese airline.
Not ethnically Chinese.
It's the dictatorship of China, the People's Republic of China.
It's traded on the stock market.
It has a market capitalization of just under $100 billion.
I say again, it's based in China.
It was created by the Chinese Communist Party.
It's worth a staggering amount of money, extremely rich.
And Trudeau took your tax dollars to pay their wages during the lockdown?
What else is on the list?
Oh, look at that.
The Bank of China, one of the largest banks in the world, one of the richest banks in the world.
It's also traded on the stock market.
It's market capitalization.
That's how much all its shares are worth in the stock market.
Just under $1 trillion.
So it's almost as big as Apple, for example.
And Trudeau's paying their wages, the Bank of China.
It's owned by the Chinese government.
We're paying the wages of the Bank of China owned by the Chinese government.
They must be laughing so hard at us.
Everyone's in there.
Bell Media, enough with the Chinese companies, Bell Media.
Hey, did you know that you are bailing out Bell Media with your tax dollars?
Rogers Communications.
Every connected elite billionaire is in there at the trough.
Aren't Bell Media and Rogers Media, these are internet companies, cell phone companies, aren't they and the rest of them, aren't they actually making out like bandits in this lockdown?
Isn't it the case that basically everyone is cooped up at home and using the internet more, watching TV more, streaming shows like Netflix more than ever?
And we're paying Rogers and Bell and the Bank of China.
What on earth are we doing?
Oh, and every one of our media competitors are on there.
Torstar, that's the owner of the massive Toronto Star, largest newspaper in Canada.
They're already receiving $110,000 per week from Trudeau through the media bailout.
Well, they want more naturally.
No wonder they love the lockdown.
I just typed in random names.
I see the Toronto Raptors network is getting money.
I'm so glad.
You know, whenever I see a professional sports franchise that's owned by billionaires and whose players are millionaires, I want to make sure that we're subsidizing them with our taxpayers' money.
Pandemic Relief Spending00:02:12
So yeah, these are profiteers.
Like in any war, you have people profiting from the crisis.
That's super gross, but to get grossness on a maximum scale, I've got to say nothing tops the United States Congress.
They're just so much bigger and more creative at how they waste money.
They had their huge stimulus bill yesterday, staggeringly large.
Now they have a $600 per every American worker payment.
So let's say there's, I don't know, 100 million Americans could qualify, just rough, rough numbers.
So 100 million times 600 bucks is $60 billion.
That sounds like a lot of money.
But the total size of the bill was $2.3 trillion.
And at least $900 billion of it was called pandemic relief.
So if you're only spending $60 billion on people, where's the rest going?
Here's a story in Breitbart.com that lays out some of it.
First of all, you should know that the bill, the spending bill is 5,593 pages.
So literally no one in the world has read it, least of all the politicians who are being asked to vote on it.
You can't read a 5,500 word bill in a day.
But skimming through it, here's what Breitbart found.
$169 million to Vietnam, including $19 million to remediate dioxins.
Unspecified funds to continue support for not-for-profit institutions of higher education in Kabul, Afghanistan, that are accessible to both women and men in a co-educational environment.
$188 million to Bangladesh, including $23.5 million to support Burmese refugees and $23 million for democracy programs.
$130 million to Nepal.
Oh, look at this.
$15 million to Pakistan for democracy programs.
This is my favorite.
$10 million for gender programs in Pakistan, making sure they're using their gender phrase, he, she, Zur, sure, all that business.
It goes on, there are billions and billions and billions of dollars in there for foreign countries.
New Move in UK00:15:36
What's that got to do with pandemic relief for Americans?
We did the same, by the way.
This was a bill that supports to pay for pandemic relief in America.
We shouldn't mock them.
That's what Trudeau does, too.
He said that fixing the clean water, the drinking water on Canadian interim research was his top priority.
It's been five years.
He hasn't done it.
He prefers to give money to foreign aid.
Our numbers just aren't quite as large in absolute terms, but we've got that problem up here too.
And this is a bipartisan issue, by the way, such as Democrats in the United States.
Republicans were in on this.
I mean, point me to a single conservative politician, at least in Canada or the United Kingdom, who's opposed to the lockdown and all of its perks.
Actually, that's not fair.
There are a few British MPs who are opposed to the lockdown.
They have a little less party discipline there.
Can you name me a single member of the Canadian parliament who's opposed to lockdown?
I'll wait.
Any conservative MP that's spoken out on this?
I'll wait.
Here's the main thing to know.
The people locking you down, they're not locked down.
The people telling you to tighten your belt, they're not doing it.
The people who say they're afraid of the virus, they sure don't act like they are, but they tell you to be.
The people who are saying, we're all in this together, they're not living the way they're telling you to live.
Some people keep saying the year 2020 was awful, and it's true, but it's not the fault of the year.
And it's not going to end in 2021.
In fact, it's going to get far worse.
See, they started by telling us back in March, two weeks to flatten the curve, 15 days to flatten the curve.
That was the little lie to soften us up.
Well, we're soft now, folks.
I mean, it's been nine, 10 months.
You can't go outside.
You can't have family over inside.
You can't skate on a public ice drink.
And if you do, police will swear at you and hit you and threaten to taser you.
Get down on the bill.
Get out on the ground.
Why are you guys strapping?
You guys just need to stop.
Why are you guys crappy?
Hey, orcs, orcs, orcs.
Ocean, get on the f ⁇ ing ground.
Ocean.
Get on the ground.
Why are you writing?
Get on the f ⁇ ing ground!
Right now!
Ocean!
Ocean!
And that's our starting point now.
That's the new normal now.
They don't have to say 15 days to flatten the curve because they know you're well past that now.
The new normal, and those who are supposed to oppose this, and I know this because their name is the opposition, they don't really oppose too much now, do they?
And people who are supposed to be conservative, they don't seem to conserve too much now, do they?
And now we see a new move in the UK.
This is a new trick to declare that there's been a new variation of the virus, a new mutation, which sounds shocking, but viruses mutate all the time.
And that's the cause for a massive new lockdown because the last lockdowns didn't work.
So we need an excuse to try the same old thing again.
So how about this excuse?
2021 will not be better, my friends, unless we decide to make it better by opposing what ought to be opposed.
If you don't change the path you're on, you're going to wind up where you're headed.
Stay with us for more from the UK.
Well, of course, we're here in North America, so we focus on Canada and the increasingly strict lockdowns and increasingly abusive policing of them.
The United States is more of a checkerboard.
Different states have different approaches.
But the United Kingdom, I fear, is becoming one of the most brutal locked down jurisdictions around.
As you may know, we have a new correspondent over there, Benjamin Locknane, who has been recreating our Fight the Fines project over there.
I fear we will have quite a lot of work because I think the lockdown in the UK may be the strictest in the world right now, now that the Australian state of Victoria has taken its foot off of its incredible lockdown.
As you know, they had curfews and five kilometer rules for road checks.
So what is going on in the UK?
And what is this about a UK variation or mutation of the virus?
Well, joining us now is someone who I enjoy following on Twitter very much.
He's a commentator on a number of issues, including on a project to defund the BBC state broadcaster over there.
He's also involved with a new political party called the Reclaim Party, which is based in part on fighting against cancel culture and other wokeism.
May I introduce you to Calvin Robinson, who joins us now via Scott.
Calvin, what a pleasure to meet you on the show.
I follow you so closely on Twitter.
Thank you for being with us today.
Not at all, Ezra.
The pleasure is all mine.
Thank you for having me.
Well, it's very interesting what's going on over there.
And I see you're fighting a lot of these key battles.
Can you describe for us the nature of the lockdown?
I guess your government uses the word like tier four and tier three and things like that.
What's it like in the magnificent city of London?
Well, you've hit the nail on the head there in talking about this as a lockdown.
So what we had back in March was a national lockdown where the whole country was in what we call lockdown.
But since then, we've introduced tears.
And tears is lockdown by in a sly way.
It's another wording for lockdown.
So we have tier one through four, and each tier has different restrictions on your life.
Tier four, which is what London is in right now, means you have to stay at home.
You can't see people.
You can't invite people into your own home.
You can't go out.
Restaurants are shut.
Shops are shut.
There's no socializing whatsoever.
But the whole country is in one tier or another.
So we are essentially in a lockdown.
This is just our government's way of getting around it because politically it doesn't look good to have a lockdown for the entire year.
So what they've said is, oh, yeah, we'll introduce tears.
And you guys might go down a tier, you might not, but essentially, most places in the country have gone up tiers.
Most of the countries are now in tier three or tier four, which essentially means you're in lockdown.
It's atrocious.
And it doesn't work.
So, you know, as you know, the UK is split up into different countries and each country is handling this differently.
Wales, for example, have had far worse restrictions than we've had over here in England.
And Wales is now the biggest country in the world for cases per capita.
So the lockdowns are not working.
And we just keep doubling down on them.
I don't understand why we're doing it.
But essentially, at the moment, without incriminating myself, there's not a lot I can do without breaking the law.
Well, let me ask you about exemptions because, you know, six months ago when this virus was new, we didn't know a lot about it.
I think people were quite scared.
I mean, all of us, it's something new.
We hear the worst.
And so I think there was a public goodwill towards a lockdown, especially if it was phrased two weeks to flatten the curve or 15 days to flatten the curve.
Those were some of the slogans we had over here.
And I think a lot of people said, okay, I can handle that, not knowing it would turn into nine months or more.
But I think one of the things that broke the public feeling of solidarity was when high-profile political bosses were caught breaking the rules that they had just announced, whether it's the health minister in Scotland or an advisor to British PM Boris Johnson.
And they all come up with their excuses, but I think people quickly saw, oh, this isn't a we're all in this together thing.
It's the ruling class that has exempted itself versus the ruled class.
And in the States, you see this with Nancy Pelosi getting her hair done and Gavin Newsome, the governor of California, going out to a fancy restaurant.
Would you say that the public acceptance and goodwill towards the lockdown this time around has been smashed?
Some people support it still, but others now see it as a political power play.
I wish that was the case, Ezra.
I really do.
I'm hoping and praying that people are going to wake up and start fighting back.
But at the moment, people are just willing to give their liberties away.
I don't know why.
71% of the British public are in favor of another national lockdown.
People just don't seem to care about their freedoms anymore over here.
You know, this has been a country, this is one of the first free countries in the world.
This is part of our history.
Civil law is what our country is founded on.
But for some reason, we're happy to give these up.
And people keep saying, yeah, it's because we need to save lives.
We need to save lives.
But what they don't understand is that lockdown actually kills more people than it saves.
People over here are dying from not having cancer treatment, from not having diabetes treatment, from having missed diagnoses because doctors aren't seeing people because everything's locked down.
Mental health crises are on the increase.
Suicides are on the up.
People are dying because of lockdown.
Yet we're obsessed with saving every single life from COVID.
And I get it.
Saving lives is important.
Nobody wants to see loved ones die.
But at the same time, we can't save everybody's life.
It is normal for people to die.
And we need to come to terms with that and accept it.
But we're not.
So to answer your question, no, I don't think people have kind of broken down from this yet.
We are still succumbing to this.
We are still capitulating to the government's edicts.
There are some exceptions, but not many.
People are waking up very, very slowly.
I don't know what to do.
I don't know how to fight back.
The public aren't on our side yet.
Well, I find that depressing.
I think I saw that poll you referred to.
I wonder, let me just, I mean, like you, I'm worried about that.
But let me throw three things at you.
Number one, I think some people might be telling the pollsters what they think the pollster wants to hear.
I mean, that's wishful thinking on my part, but perhaps they're sort of shy skeptics who don't tell pollsters that.
Another answer I might have to explain the 71% is that in the UK, there's a fairly large public sector, and even if they're, quote, locked down, they haven't lost a day's pay.
So it's what we might call a staycation.
You get paid, but you're at home, watch some Netflix.
So I'm, I, and then the, and then the last glimmer of hope, I'm trying to play devil's advocate here for a second, is that I know some media are starting to break ranks.
The Daily Mail, which is a fairly popular tabloid, if I'm not mistaken, they've been pretty skeptical of late.
And so I'm trying to find a silver lining to the statistic you just said, that 71% of Brits are just fine with this.
I wonder if they'll be fine if this thing drags on.
I don't know.
I find it very depressing, Calvin.
Yeah, I think you're right in a lot of what you've just said.
The Daily Mail and the Telegraph in particular have been fighting back, which is great.
It's because for the longest time, we didn't have any mainstream media fighting.
Talk radio is a station that's been fighting, but other than that, no one has been.
So it's good to see that.
But also, what you mentioned, staycation.
And we have at the moment in the UK more people on state employment, more people getting handouts from the government, essentially taxpayer money, to stay at home than we've ever had in our history.
So, you know, it's in people's best interest to stay at home because they're getting paid to do nothing.
That is a problem.
We have got a massive welfare state system at the moment.
And encouraging people back into work is going to be difficult, especially since we're killing the economy.
You know, the high street is essentially dead at this point.
We've closed all of the retail shops this close to Christmas, which is the key time for them to make up all of those lost revenues from the summer, et cetera.
I think a lot of independent retail will be dead permanently.
A lot of pubs will be dead.
We will see a lot of high street chains, big chains will die too.
In fact, we have seen that over the summer, coming into the winter as well.
So while people are comfortable staying at home, getting paid by the state to do so, they might not have anything to return to when this all ends.
And when the checks stop coming from the government and people have to return to work, but there is no work left, that might be the time where people rise up and think, actually, yes, this government has destroyed our economy, destroyed our livelihoods, and lost lives at the same time.
What are we going to do about it?
But by then, it might be too late.
I don't know how to wake people up.
Wow.
Well, listen, I thank you for this briefing from the UK.
I understand that Canada has banned flights from the UK, which depresses me for a number of reasons.
Calvin, I continue to follow you on Twitter.
I'd like to invite all of our viewers to follow you.
It's simply at Calvin Robinson.
We'll put your Twitter handle on the screen.
I hope I can talk to you again in the future, not just about the lockdown, but I know you're active in the D-Fund BBC project.
We probably could learn a lot from you here in Canada about our CBC and how to check its power.
So maybe in the future, we could talk to you about those and even your work in the education ministry in the UK.
I hope we can continue this conversation in the weeks and months ahead.
Absolutely.
I would love to.
It's been a pleasure talking to you, Ezra.
Well, thank you likewise.
There you have it.
Calvin Robinson, a political commentator, joined us by Skype from.
Stay with us more.
Hello, my friends.
On the show last night, Dewey writes, donation sent.
Thank you very much.
I can't tell you how much I appreciate this.
Janet writes, I just bought two hoodies.
Hope that helps.
It sure does.
By the way, I haven't mentioned our store enough.
If you go to RebelNews.com and click on store, you'll see it's totally revised, totally new stuff.
I think it's pretty cool.
Maddie writes, I hope you get $0.
Well, Maddie, you don't have to give any.
That's the beauty of the internet, is that people who want to give give and people who don't want to give don't.
And that's the beauty of our approach.
See, if I was with the CBC and you said, I hope you get $0, I'd say, I'm taking your tax money, Maddie, and there's nothing you can do about it.
But here at Rebel News, I can't ring people out.
I can't use tax dollars.
I have to ask people to help us voluntarily.
And sometimes people say, Ezra, we're sick of you asking for money.
That's fine.
Don't give.
You know, 99.9% of our total viewers in the world, they don't give.
And it doesn't really make me sad because I'm glad they're just watching our stuff.
But those who like us like us a lot.
And if you believe in keeping us going, please go to helprebelnews.com.
I know so many of you have, and I thank you for that.
I feel great about our support, and I feel that we've earned it.
And I sort of wish every other media did the same thing.
I know in the United States, PBS has their telethons where they try and raise money, and I respect that.
They have to give viewers what they like.
I think it would be a good thing for the CBC, CTV, Global, the Toronto Star to have to, well, beg is the wrong word, but have to convince people one at a time to chip in.
Great Year-End Videos00:01:51
Instead, they just get the bailout from Trudeau directly.
So I thank you for your generosity.
I thank you for your patience.
I thank you for your support.
I feel like we did a lot of good work in 2020, and by we, I mean mainly our reporters.
So thanks for helping keep us strong and to help us pay off this loan that was called in rather suddenly.
All right, that's the show for today.
I should tell you that over the course of the next week or two, Rebel News is going to gear down a little bit, give our staff some well-deserved time with their families.
We're going to play a lot of great shows, the best of, the best of our China coverage, the best of rebels getting arrested.
We've got a lot of great year-end in review videos.
I'll still be reading your emails and I might pop up with the odd live stream.
But I think we're going to give our staff who've been going, really, some of them may be going seven days a week almost the entire pandemic.
I mean, David Mancy, I don't even think he's taken a day off since March.
So we're going to let our folks have some days off, get refreshed, and we're going to be back in January in a big way.
But please keep watching the Ezra Levant show in the days ahead.
Some of these compilations of year-in review.
It's amazing how much we've done.
On December 23rd, Avi Yamini, the best of Avi.
On December 24th, the best of our Fight the Find series.
On Christmas Day, our I Will Open series.
Freedom rallies, Rebels Arrested, China coverage.
On December 31st, we'll have the top three videos of 2020.
Are you curious what they were?
And then on New Year's Day, the best of our U.S. coverage.
You know, we have done thousands of videos, and you might not have seen them all because, I mean, we put up 10, 15 a day.
I don't even have time to watch them all myself.
So there's a lot of great TV coming your way.
Thank you again for your support.
On behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, the UN Home, good night.