Ezra Levant examines the controversial "Trudeau for Traitor" billboard in Brantford, Ontario, comparing it to Justin Trudeau’s past blackface admissions and his critics’ use of Nazi labels. He warns that inflammatory language risks backfiring, like Omar Cotter’s case, while criticizing Trudeau’s team for weaponizing the term against opponents. Fightthefines.com reveals $292 fines for sitting in a drive-through and $298 for unmasked grocery shopping despite medical exemptions, exposing surveillance state overreach. Legal challenges loom in Canada and Australia, yet essential services stay open while businesses face selective crackdowns—highlighting how COVID policies mirror authoritarian tactics. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I'll take you to Hamilton, Ontario, or nearby Brantford, where there's a billboard saying Trudeau for Traitor or Trudeau for treason, sorry.
What do you make of that?
I'll give you my thoughts on that and I'll show you the billboard.
Now if you're listening to the podcast, you'll just have to hear me read it to you.
But if you have the time, I would like to invite you to watch these podcasts in video form.
I think they're better.
Like I'm showing you the billboard.
I'm showing you the tweets.
I'm showing you.
Today I'm going to show you a lot of costumes that Trudeau dressed up in.
I want you to see it in video form.
You can do that by subscribing to what we call Rebnews Plus.
Just go to RebelNews.com, click subscribe.
It's $8 a month.
You get a discount if you buy the whole year in advance.
It's just $80 for the whole year.
And you get the video version of the podcast.
I would love it if you did that because you'd get more value for yourself.
And, you know, we really survive based on those subscriptions.
It really means a lot to us.
We don't take any money from Trudeau.
That's why.
Okay, here's the podcast.
Tonight, on the eve of Canadian election, what are the rules for calling your opponents Nazis?
It's January 13th, 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 government will walk up just because it's my bloody right to do so.
Hey, look at this in the Hamilton Spectator newspaper.
And the story is a Brantford police investigating billboard showing Justin Trudeau in Nazi uniform.
And you can see a picture of the billboard.
Now, before you jump to conclusions, no, they're not investigating whether or not Justin Trudeau actually wore a Nazi uniform, but that's not such an outlandish thought if you were thinking it.
As you know, Justin Trudeau dressed up in blackface, which is widely regarded as racist.
He dressed up in blackface more times than he can even remember.
In three decades of his life, teens, 20s, and 30s, he dressed in blackface.
He had sort of a kit that he'd keep in like a trunk or like a drawer with other costumes.
So reading that headline, you could be forgiven for thinking that Trudeau put on a Nazi uniform and it wasn't Halloween time.
Here is Trudeau wearing a military uniform.
He was acting in this case, so he says.
Here he is in India, dressing like he's in some Bollywood movie.
But again, ironically, he says he wasn't acting in this case.
So it's tough to keep up with all of his different acts and costumes, isn't it?
But here's what the story says.
Brantford police are investigating after a billboard showing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in a Nazi uniform next to Adolf Hitler was erected in the city's downtown.
The offensive billboard seen on the side of a trailer pulled by a pickup truck at the intersection of Colborne and Alfred streets has since been taken down, police said.
It is unclear when the billboard was first erected.
Okay, so why is this being investigated by police?
I mean, I don't like the billboard.
I don't like to see Nazi uniforms or Soviet uniforms or since we're talking about it, the uniforms of the Chinese Communist Party or their People's Liberation Army, who have trained with our Canadian Armed Forces twice, including at CFP Pettawawa.
I wonder if we could get the police to investigate people in People's Liberation Army uniforms having free reign in Canada.
Can we get the cops on that?
So I accept the spectator's view that this was offensive, but can you please explain what are the police investigating?
What's the crime?
Maybe it's in bad taste, all right?
Some would say that comparing Trudeau to Hitler diminishes what Hitler did.
It trivializes Hitler's crimes.
Trudeau is an idiot and a corrupt librano and a grifter and a socialist, but he's not a murderer.
He hasn't set up death camps, so comparing Trudeau to a Nazi is offensive.
It trivialized the Holocaust.
I would take that point of view.
But can you tell me where the crime is?
Let me read some more.
Issues such as this are concerning due to their offensive and divisive nature, said police spokesperson Robin Matthews Osmond.
All right, I've already agreed that it's offensive, and I agree that it's divisive, but that's politics, that's campaigns, that's elections.
That's a good thing.
That's how parliament works.
In fact, votes in parliaments and legislatures are often described as calling for a division.
I call for the division.
As in people dividing yes or no.
Offensive and divisive things are not illegal.
In fact, they are legal.
They are actually protected in our Charter of Rights under freedom of expression and belief and all sorts of other fundamental freedoms.
Those are real rights.
The right not to be offended is a counterfeit human right.
It's not real.
Show it to me in the criminal code.
Let me read some more.
The sign depicted Trudeau performing a Nazi salute alongside the message, Trudeau for treason.
Now, I don't like that kind of language because it criminalizes political differences of opinion.
I don't think Trudeau has committed treason.
Treason is a real thing.
I think Omar Cotter has committed treason by taking up arms against our soldiers or our allies in a war by killing one of them, Sergeant Christopher Spear.
That's pretty much on the nose treason, even though he hasn't been charged with it for some reason.
But Trudeau has not done that.
Like I say, Trudeau's an idiot.
We all know that.
He's a socialist.
He's a drug addict.
He's a sexual harasser.
We know all these things.
We know he hates our military.
We know he's undoing our country in many ways.
But that is not treason, if that word has its proper meaning.
I guess it's like the word fraud.
It actually has a sharp meaning, bank fraud, insurance fraud.
You could say someone's a fraud is in there a fake.
They're not what they claim to be.
But you want to be careful that you don't use it in the sharpest meaning lightly.
It goes all the more so for treason.
I don't think Trudeau is a treasonous traitor.
And I warn anyone who uses that language.
I say, be careful what you wish for, because if a difference of opinion can be considered a crime or treason, who do you think is going to be the first to be arrested, the first up against the wall?
Conservatives, of course.
Look at the witch hunt in the United States right now, the cancel culture down there that's out of control.
You won't be arresting Trudeau for treason.
He'll be arresting you for treason if treason is stretched beyond its proper meaning to include mere political disagreements.
Trudeau is many terrible things, but he's not a Nazi and he has not committed treason, and he will not be arrested for those things.
I wish the police would investigate him for his role in the SNC Lavalan corruption scandal.
I actually think there's a prima facie case of a crime there.
And I'm not alone.
A half dozen former attorneys general have asked for an RCMP investigation, but the Nazi attack is not wise.
So there I am defending Trudeau against being called a Nazi.
But hang on, hang on, hang on.
Remember this?
Isn't calling people Nazis what the liberals do?
I mean, they call me a Nazi and I'm Jewish, for heaven's sake.
What does Trudeau's own inner circle do?
They've spent the week calling, you know, it's a coordinated attack on anyone they don't like, calling them Nazis, racists.
They just did it.
They just did.
They still are doing it.
They're going to do a lot more of it in the run-up to the campaign.
So put that story up there just again for a second.
So let me get this straight.
If you call Justin Trudeau a Nazi, the police will investigate you for being offensive.
But if Trudeau calls you a Nazi, that's just campaigning.
It really is January 13th, 1984, isn't it?
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
I want to give you a bit of an update on our very important civil liberties project.
Started in Canada called fightthefines.com, and it's been so popular.
That's a very, that's the wrong way to put it because it's not, woo, fight the fines.
No, it's a terrible thing that we're trying to fix.
We're trying to fix these abusive, unreasonable lockdown fines, but there's such a demand for it, let me phrase it that way, that we've expanded the project to Australia and the United Kingdom too.
But Canada remains the country most close to our hearts as we are Canadian and we're headquartered here.
And I should tell you that we're probably taking about five new cases a day.
In fact, we've hired a full-time professional legal paralegal arranger just to track all the paper, just to catch up.
Imagine, yeah, I think we're probably close to 500 cases between the three jurisdictions.
So it really is the size of a law firm and it's increasingly important work.
And the chief fighter of fines and fighter of lockdowns on our team is my friend Sheila Gunreed, who's also our chief reporter.
She's also done the most widely viewed video in our Fight the Fines campaign, namely that of a fellow in Hampton, New Brunswick, who, Walter is his name, who simply went through a drive-through, sat in the parking lot with his coffee, and a local cop gave him a $292 fine for that.
That case went super viral and was our first, one of our first victories as well, when the police simply dropped the case rather than have the embarrassment of taking that to trial.
We've had about half a dozen such victories before even going to court, but we have so many cases, and I want to bring Sheila in right now via Skype from her base in Edmonton.
Sheila, thank you so much for taking these cases, not just in Alberta, but you've been taking them in other provinces too, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, our friend Walter Matheson in New Brunswick even.
You're doing a great job.
Thank you.
Well, I think it's so important that we fight for the normal people that are out there because these are not always all that high profile and they're not always that outrageous.
But for me, what's outrageous is that these are normal people just doing completely normal things that were completely legal 10 short months ago.
I mean, I'm dealing with fines for people who celebrated a socially distant 18th birthday in a machine shop.
So far apart from everybody, I'm dealing with tickets from that.
I've got tickets for people who were singing in a public park after Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister closed the churches there.
I'm dealing with tickets for a guy who just bought groceries without a mask on and then the grocery store used his loyalty card to match it up to the surveillance footage to send the cops to his house and give them a $300 ticket.
I've got elderly couples who are going to the grocery store to buy medication for the very thing that makes the wife mask exempt and the whole affair ends in handcuffs.
I've even got a car of young people, I say young people because they're probably half my age, from Winkler, Manitoba, which I think is one of these like the toughest lockdown jurisdictions in the entire country.
The amount of fines coming from Winkler per capita has to be the highest in the entire country.
A car full of young people get pulled over, not because they were breaking any traffic violations, but because the police in town are now stopping cars to check to it's, I guess, sort of like a drunk driving check stop, but now they're checking to see if everybody in the car has the same address.
And if they don't, $1,200 fines.
It's crazy, Ezra.
That is crazy.
That's sort of like a checkpoint Charlie in East Berlin kind of thing.
You know, I remember when I first started seeing those check stops on the roads in the state of Victoria, Australia that Avi Yamini talked about.
And that tells me that one of the advantages we have by having a reporter in the UK and having a reporter in Australia is we can see the tactics that are next because I think we're in some sort of awful arms race.
Politicians look around and say, oh, look what they did in the state of Victoria, Australia.
Look what they did in New South Wales.
Look what they did in London.
Look what they did.
So every policy just happened in Canada.
Quebec was the first jurisdiction to bring in a curfew.
So now Ontario, well, we have to keep up with the Joneses.
So now they're bringing in a form of curfew here.
So I think that the fact that our Fight Defiance project is not just Canada-wide, but also in the UK and Australia has given us a sense of how bad things could go.
In Australia, they actually had soldiers in camouflage and helmets manning checkpoints and just awful cases there.
You've got with you a few videos.
I want to just go through some of them.
Defying Lockdown Curfews00:06:42
The first is actually, if I'm not mistaken, the niece of former Alberta Premier Ralph Klein.
Is that right?
Give us one minute and then we'll throw to the clip.
Sure.
So in Innisvale, Alberta, which again, it's a very rebel place.
They are fighting the good fight for freedom out there.
In Innisfail, Alberta, there's a little local barber shop and it has decided fines be damned, survival is more important, freedom's more important.
We're opening the doors.
And so the community has rallied around this little barbershop.
And as it turns out, this barber shop is owned and operated by former Premier of Alberta, someone of whom I'm a great big fan, Ralph Klein's niece.
So I headed out to Innisfail yesterday morning because I wanted to be there to see this little barbershop defy the law and I wanted to see what happened next.
All right, take a look.
So Natalie, why are you making this stand today?
Well, I've decided to make this stand for all small businesses in Alberta.
The government has responded to all of us saying, I know this is hard.
We understand.
They don't understand.
Until they have to take their families to the food bank to get food, they don't understand what it's like to own a business that you can't have any customers in.
It's devastating.
And I decided to make a stand because my uncle, former Premier of Alberta, Ralph Klein, would have wanted me to do this.
He was a man for the people.
And somebody has to stand up and say, no, this isn't right anymore.
How can Kenny take a whack-a-mole approach to which businesses get to stay open and which don't?
And it's always the big money maker box stores that get to stay open.
So at this point, we all have to come together and send a message to our government saying enough is enough.
There's been no support.
There's been no government grants issued.
I'm still waiting.
So at this point, it's a do or die.
There hasn't been one known transmission of COVID in this industry.
So it makes no sense to me why we're shut down when we can have a client in and out in 15 minutes in my specific barber shop.
It's a very quick service.
And if you can go get your dog's haircut, I'm pretty sure you can come in here for 15 minutes and get your kids' hair cut or yourself a haircut.
Now, your salon is spotless.
And you rightly point out that there have been no instances of transmission associated to your industry.
I see that you have signs saying that you will ask if your customers would like to wear a mask.
So you're not against any of the measures taken to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
No, exactly.
I do believe it's a real virus.
My dad, for instance, former superintendent of BC Ambulance and historian, caught COVID-19 before Christmas.
He has since recovered and he fully supports this decision.
He thinks that this needs to change.
Open all non-essential businesses or close everything.
Don't, like, who is picking and choosing?
And it's not right.
I think we're all misinformed of these numbers.
And I've had a lot of people come and message me on Facebook saying, you know, what if we open and cause a spread?
I don't think so.
In the height of the numbers being as high as they were back in September, there was still not one known transmission case in this industry.
So for those people to come to me and say that, they need to go back and look at the facts.
All right, well, Sheila, thank you for doing that and going out there in person.
I want to say that not only do I think that these people feel relieved that they have some financial help to fight the fine, so they don't have to worry about, oh my god, I got to pay the fine or I've got to pay a lawyer.
I think that just having someone sane to talk to also counts.
I think that knowing they're not mad, you know, I think it was Freud who I don't often quote.
He said that even if the entire world says you're wrong, you can know that you're right.
That's a very hard thing to do, though.
It's very, very hard.
And if we're surrounded by compliant people, submissive people, obedient people, people who are scolding and snitching and informing, just to know that you can still be right, I'm sure that is a great mental relief to the people you talk to.
Well, some of our I will open cases, that's at iwillopen.com.
That's our special portal for businesses who are willing to defy the lockdown measures.
And we like to come by and showcase and tell everybody about this freedom-minded company that's going to open.
But some of our I will open cases are sort of forming a little community around each other.
So Tracy Walker was a hairdresser that we featured through iwillopen.com and Red Deer.
And she drove out yesterday morning, pre-dawn hours, to support Natalie Klein, Ralph Klein's niece, who owns the barber shop.
And, you know, we're finding that they're starting to network with each other and they're seeing the immediate impacts of telling their story to us.
So Tracy Walker, she was in foreclosure.
Now she's out of foreclosure.
She's busy and she's able to now patronize some of the other I will open businesses.
It's fantastic, what's sparking around these stories.
Mask Violations and Co-ops00:03:46
You know, I did not know that.
That is a positive unintended consequence, a secondary effect that I didn't even think of.
That's wonderful.
Here, let's play one more clip of you mentioned the fella who was shopping without a mask.
And by the way, there are mask exemptions in every single jurisdiction in this country.
I know that because I am the publisher of maskexemption.ca.
And we'll have to make sure that's up to date because the laws change every now and then.
But pretty much every district jurisdiction has some sort of exemption.
I find that most shopkeepers don't know that.
But if you're calm and happy and tell them that they back off.
But here's a crazy case of, you know, almost like facial recognition software, China style, to the police to go track a guy down.
Take a look.
Phil, what were you doing when you got the ticket?
I was shopping for groceries.
And so what were the circumstances around getting groceries?
There was nothing special going on.
I think Jenny, my wife, called me and said, hey, can you pick up something on your way through town?
I was like, sure, I'll pop in.
So we've had numerous discussions with the management at our local co-op and talking about mask exemptions and all of this type of stuff.
And he was good with it.
He said, yeah, I mean, you got to shop for your family, food.
I mean, this is necessities.
And so, yeah, we ended up.
I popped in and I'm assuming somebody called it in, whether it was from store management staff or the bystanders.
Because, I mean, you walk through a store nowadays without a mask on and you definitely get some interesting looks.
And so, yeah.
And so then I was on camera.
And so that was kind of interesting.
And I guess the store decided to help out when the cop showed up after I'd already left.
And so they pulled surveillance footage of you like you were a shoplifter or a common criminal and gave it to the police.
And then I guess so the police came to your house after the fact and ticketed you.
Yep.
So then it was 10 o'clock on the 27th of November and we were just finishing up reading Bible and just about to put the kids in bed.
And so we, yeah, saw these two cop cars come.
I say whipping onto the yard because I mean, our yard, we've got cats and different things.
We're in acreage.
And so then, yeah, they came up to the door and knocked.
And I even went and I was like, oh, I don't know if I feel comfortable answering the door, you know, with all the stuff going on.
And they looked at me or looked at me through the door and was like, you just want to chat.
You know, it's okay.
And so I, whatever.
I put my slippers on and my sweater and I went and took a very timid position down the steps from them, sat there and discussed this mask violation.
And they were like, oh, you've been in the store twice.
And so I'm assuming, I don't know if you're familiar with the co-op grocery stores and different things, but they have a number that they issue you, right?
And so these, this number, I'm assuming they pulled it just to see, you know, oh, yeah, he was in earlier and that was still code red.
And so then they felt, you know, two violations must have been enough to warrant coming out and visiting me.
Invasion of Privacy00:02:54
And so.
I was wondering how they knew it was you and how they knew it was you twice and it was your co-op number.
Wow.
So what was the amount of your ticket?
It's it's $298 even.
And so, yeah, which again isn't the money isn't the biggest issue.
It was, you know, I know people that don't don't do anything.
They're just completely confined to their houses because of this.
And I was like, I mean, I work construction.
I'm always out and about doing things.
And sometimes you just can't comply to the nth degree.
And so I was like, yeah, we'll just keep talking to our local management.
And as long as they're okay with everything, then, you know, just continue on.
And so I guess at this point, whoever was running the camera, they decided to help the police out.
I don't know if there was a warrant involved or, you know, different things of that nature.
Sheila, that's the thing.
I think that we're in a surveillance state.
Really, we have been for years.
Cell phones in our pockets now makes us trackable, listenable.
Everything we say on the phone, everything we write everywhere we go, it's trackable.
This was sort of an invasion.
This was an invasion of our privacy when the only downside was, well, commercial.
Now the companies, you know, sell us ads because they were listening in or watching our emails.
But it's absolutely sinister when the state, when police start accessing that private data about you.
And in this case, identifying your face.
I'm really worried that we have the infrastructure in place for a police state that the Soviet KGB or the Nazi Gestapo or the East German Stasi could have only dreamed about.
The technology has made the police state almost turnkey.
Well, and what did Phil actually do wrong there?
What did he actually do wrong?
Who did he harm?
He bought groceries and then went home.
He paid for his groceries.
Why did the local grocery store have to step in and turn over his private information to the police?
He didn't steal anything from them.
He didn't really do anything wrong.
There was no harm done to the grocery store, except he didn't wear a mask and he doesn't have to.
He's medically exempt and it's none of the grocery store's business.
And, you know, when we are signing up for these loyalty cards, like Phil did many, many years ago, did we ever imagine that it could be used against us to enforce a ridiculous health code violation that has never gone before a legislature?
Medical Exemptions Controversy00:04:51
It's through the stroke of a pen of an unelected health bureaucrat.
That's the tyranny of all of this.
Yeah.
Loyalty card.
What a laugh.
They certainly weren't loyal to him.
Well, listen, congratulations.
You are leading the charge.
You have taken more Fight the Fines cases than anyone, although I must give credit to our Australian team, which has taken a great number of them en masse.
They were all given a huge ticket for being part of a political protest.
So we're doing a massive constitutional challenge, which encompasses a great number.
But in terms of individual cases, Sheila, you have more cases than anyone else on our team.
I thank you for that.
And speaking of constitutional challenges, just before I hopped on the Skype call with you here, I was talking with our lawyers, finalizing the documents.
We are imminently, and I know I've been saying this for weeks now, but we really are imminently going to file a constitutional challenge in one of Canada's provinces.
And by imminently, I mean for sure by this time next week.
So we will be doing constitutional challenges in Canada too.
Sheila, keep up the great work.
I know you've got a show tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern, the Gun Show.
Give us 10 seconds on that.
Well, you may know Glenn Carrot from United We Roll.
We know him as an advocate for the oil and gas industry.
He's also an advocate for his town because he is, well, until a couple of days ago, a town councilor in Innisfail, Alberta.
But he has resigned in protest because he has stood in solidarity with local businesses who are defying the lockdown order.
So I've got an exclusive interview with him right after his resignation.
And I guess as he kicks off his campaign for mayor there.
Well, that's amazing.
We'll probably want to unlock that one from behind the paywall and put it out there.
I know Glenn from his great work, and we've documented a lot of it.
I certainly hope he wins and replaces that outrageous town council in Innisfail.
I know Innisfail fairly well.
It's one of the strongest places for rebel viewers in the country.
And I know that he has the spirit of that place.
And I hope he does well.
Great to see you, Sheila.
You've got a lot of good spirit, too.
Well, thanks, boss.
We've got a big fight ahead of us for civil liberties, but we've got great supporters who are helping us along at fightthefines.com.
All right.
Well, thank you for doing the heavy duty work.
Stay with us, folks.
On my show last night, Billy writes, it's unfortunate in that there's really no good choices when voting.
Not voting conservatively means your vote is rendered into another division while the liberals benefit.
The PPC, at least, is led by a man who was so fed up with the Conservative Party that he quit it.
He was pressing to do so, and I am feeling the same way.
I'll tell you who I'm going to vote for in the next election.
Aaron O'Toole's candidate.
Do I like Aaron O'Toole?
I don't know.
I think he showed some weakness this week.
Do I know who the candidate is in my neighborhood?
No.
Doesn't matter.
No.
But look, Justin Trudeau's awful, and he needs to be stopped.
But I am not such a partisan hack that I'm going to say, hey, Aaron O'Toole, great tactic there, both in terms of principle and pragmatism, to disavow the rebel that just gave you a great interview and we published it verbatim.
You didn't even explain what you're doing other than the obvious.
You just, you know, fall like a cheap suit at the first puff of opposition.
You're not going to survive an election campaign if you're that way.
I want to tell him that now, so maybe he can find a backbone somewhere.
I really thought as a military man, he'd be tougher.
Suzanne writes, you are so right, Ezra.
How can we mobilize to remove Trudeau, Freeland, Tam, et cetera?
Well, look, I know my job is to do journalism, opinion journalism, reporting journalism, and activism in the case of our civil liberties work.
This is what I'm doing.
Lydia writes, you mentioned the deaths of COVID.
Deaths should have stopped accumulating in April or sooner.
We've been in a new flu season for a few months now.
So I will argue.
No, it's not two times more than the typical flu season.
The 17,000 that was mentioned would be combining two flu seniors.
Yes, a very good point.
It's a good point.
The flu season is the wintertime.
Thank you for that.
You know, there's a lot of statistics in games with statistics, as I pointed out.
There's no flu anymore.
It's all being called COVID.
I think this whole thing is being hyped up.
The thing is, if you say that on YouTube, they'll ban your account.