Justin Trudeau’s February 4th terrorist designation of the Proud Boys—backed by no conservative pushback—ignites debate over its legitimacy, as the group lacks al-Qaeda-level attacks; only a Halifax protest (five Canadian Armed Forces members) was tied to them. Founder Gavin McInnes disavowed them, yet Trudeau’s move targets dissenters like The Line’s Lamont Daigle and Quebec’s Le Mutes, while Conservative leader Aaron O’Toole silently enables vaccine mandates and censorship despite anti-"cancel culture" rhetoric. Critics warn of Stephen Gilboe’s vague censorship agency, framing Trudeau’s actions as elite-driven suppression of democracy, with O’Toole’s failure to oppose them risking a 40-seat collapse in elections. The episode frames this as a broader assault on free speech and civil liberties by Canada’s political establishment. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, Justin Trudeau and his socialist sidekick, Jagmeet Singh, designate the Proud Boys as terrorists.
Not a single conservative raised an objection.
It's February 4th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the 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.
But why?
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
Yesterday, Justin Trudeau designated the Proud Boys, the Proud Boys, as a terrorist group.
A legal step that opens that amorphous group to severe police and counterterrorism measures, including all of the special criminal code provisions adopted by Canada after the 9-11 al-Qaeda attacks.
This is a list of every terrorist group recognized officially by the increasingly unserious government of Canada.
On this list, you can see those heavy hitters that you've all heard of before, real terrorists that were added before Justin Trudeau's time, of course, like the ones that downed the Twin Towers with a Boeing 767.
How many skyscrapers have the Proud Boys taken down with an aircraft?
Remember that time the Proud Boys killed 110 farmers in Nigeria?
In from Nigeria, where the death toll in the Boko Haram attack has now risen to 110.
Civilians were ruthlessly attacked by the Boko Haram fighters who targeted a village in northeast Nigeria.
Oh wait, that was Boko Haram, not Proud Boys.
What about the time those terrorists bombed a Somali city, killing so many?
This is Somali's 9-11, the story reads.
The man was arrested.
He's confessed.
He's proud of what he's done.
Oh, that one must have been the Proud Boys, right?
Oh, wait, no, that one was for Jihad, one official said.
I guess not.
That was Al-Shabaab, not the Proud Boys.
The Proud Boys must have done something, though, right?
Like, to make them literally worse than the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
They are the clandestine political mercenaries guilty of killing Canadian civilians and their political opponents, by the way, from Bahrain to Tehran.
Who could forget that time the IRGC fired not one, but two Tor M1 missiles to take down a plane full of Canadian citizens?
Whoops.
Justin Trudeau could, I guess.
See, that wasn't a big deal to him.
Write it off as a whoopsy-daisies LOL, he said, to Iran after bowing to them, to the literal state sponsors of terrorism themselves.
Justin Trudeau bowed to them.
One of the most dangerous financiers, the Minister of Foreign Affairs for Iran, the most dangerous financiers of deadly jihad in the world.
Bowing to Iran's foreign minister is no different than bowing to Qassam Salamali himself.
Luckily, Donald Trump had the common sense to blow that terrorist to bits, and Joe Biden can't reverse that anytime soon.
So what have the Proud Boys done that is remotely similar to anything their newfound peers on this list have done?
Well, here's one shocking bit of footage that, as far as I know, is the only political or public act that the Proud Boys have done on Canadian soil, other than to meet in pubs for a drink.
Have you seen this terrifying carnage?
And I urge you to brace yourself.
I have ancestors that died in World War I and World War II and the Korean War that died for this country that you're defacing here.
So you're disrespecting my ancestors.
Arguments are not going to be available.
It's time we can go.
You're interrupting.
I'm going to turn my back on you because you don't want to talk.
You just want to bark and you want to cheer.
I want you to learn back to the back.
I'm going to turn my back.
That's fine.
The best way for this conversation to end is for us both to just walk in different directions.
We'll go with a reasonable person.
Right, great.
Now that was clearly a domestic terrorist attack.
Didn't you see him politely disagree and turn his back on a radical anti-Canada protester?
So to be clear, in Canada, if you politely disagree with someone, you're basically ISIS.
But if you bow to a state sponsor of terrorism, well, you're just a brain-dead prime minister.
Okay, I got it.
I understand the rules, and it's important that everybody understands them.
I'm unaware of any other thing that the Proud Boys have actually done in Canada, for good or for evil.
Now, I acknowledge that the Proud Boys have gotten in brawls in the street with Antifa, who I know Justin Trudeau didn't designate as terrorists.
And in one dramatic case, they were sent to prison for years.
Now, that's when the founder, Gavin McInnes, disavowed himself from them, and he quit the Proud Boys.
Now, I'm not familiar with their activity since then, but I haven't seen anything in Canada.
Have you?
So on what basis were they possibly added to a list that includes al-Qaeda and ISIS?
Now, something that is truly terrifying, Trudeau is deploying counter-terrorism tactics and laws against groups he considers to be politically offensive.
That's terrifying.
This is part of a trend.
Once you are labeled a terrorist, there is no hope for you.
No hope at all.
What?
Are your allies going to come and stand up for you and say, no, this is wrong?
Of course not.
There's nobody in parliament with the stones to do that.
Aaron O'Toole ran to be leader of the Conservatives on an anti-cancel culture platform.
Those Proud Boys in Halifax, in that video I just showed you, they were gathering to protest the removal of a statue.
They were standing up against cancel culture, exactly what Aaron O'Toole supposedly is doing.
They were actually protesting the knocking down of a statue of Edward Cornwallis, the founder of the city of Halifax.
They were actually members of the Canadian Armed Forces, true patriots, and much more diverse than their critics, including an Indigenous man and a gay soldier, hardly racists or white supremacists, but they're all collateral damage for Aaron O'Toole, who couldn't care less that his voters are being labeled terrorists, the ultimate form of cancel culture.
New Censorship Agency00:02:30
It won't be long before every member of O'Toole's voter base are labeled as such, terrorists.
Justin Trudeau got away with this once, so what's going to stop him from doing it to everyone?
What's going to stop him from doing it the next time?
we have Ezra Levant on the line to talk about exactly that.
All right Ezra, how are you doing?
Well, pretty good.
You know, there's so much going on.
I'm worried about the state of free speech in Canada.
Stephen Gilbo, the heritage minister, has announced a new agency.
He hasn't given any details.
He hasn't given the name of the agency, hasn't said who's going to appoint to the agency.
But it is a new government agency in charge of censorship.
And I'm not talking about censoring child pornography or censoring criminal offenses, which can happen online.
He specifically talks about things that are offensive or things that disrupt social cohesion.
I've seen those words used in the United Kingdom, especially social cohesion.
That basically means anything politically incorrect.
And the fact that he needs to have new laws and a new regulator tells us something very interesting: that he plans to do censoring beyond that which the law now contemplates.
The law applies to the internet and social media companies just as much as it applies to talk radio or television or radio, you know, CB radio or smoke signals.
The law of defamation, for example, the law of fraud, the law of uttering threats, those are centuries old and they've just been tweaked when a new technology comes along.
The fact that Gilbo wants new laws and a new regulator tells us he's going much farther than anything else contemplated.
And it dovetails with the story about the Proud Boys, because the Proud Boys, I mean, I don't know everything they're up to, obviously.
I don't know the American side of that story very well.
But I think I know the Canadian side.
And as you pointed out in your monologue, the only public manifestation I've ever seen in the Proud Boys is those five guys in Halifax who are Canadian Armed Forces Patriots who are saying don't take down the statue of Cornwallis.
Why Call Proud Boys Terrorists?00:10:47
They weren't violent.
They were just sort of like a debating society.
So to call those lads terrorists twists the term beyond recognition.
But there was not a peep of opposition.
That's what I'm worried about.
Unprecedented censorship and actually labeling a non-terrorist group a terrorist group.
Trudeau is, I think it's safe to say that there's more dangerous people on that list than the Proud Boys.
We list off ISIS and al-Shabaab.
Who do you think Justin Trudeau is coming for next when it comes to maybe not labeling as a terrorist organization or maybe that?
I mean, but who is he going after next to censor?
Well, I don't actually know if they would have put the Proud Boys on the terrorist list because that's quite a dramatic thing.
It's not just like a list, like a Santa Claus list of who's naughty and nice.
Being on that list triggers all sorts of police powers.
The criminal code has special provisions to deal with terrorists that were brought in after 9-11.
Even to try to support a terrorist group, to fundraise to visit a terrorist group, to promote a terrorist group.
These are all things that were criminalized after 9-11.
Makes sense, right?
I mean, you don't know exactly what terrorists do in Iraq or wherever, so you have to catch people trying to help, trying to go over there.
Now, all those laws will be applied to what was really a rowdy fraternity that's dangerous.
I don't think the Liberals would have tried to put them on a terrorist list had they not seen that every single conservative MP in the House approved of this in Jagmeet Singh's toothless motion about 10 days ago.
So Jagmeet Singh broke the ice on this subject, saw that not a single conservative would say, hey, wait a minute.
I don't know a lot about the Proud Boys, but we need to know more before we call them a terrorist group.
Aaron O'Toole, all the way down, not a single one of them objected, even on principled civil liberties grounds.
I don't think any conservative would say, well, I'm a proud boy, so don't do that to me.
But you might have expected them to say, I'm worried about the civil liberties trend here.
Or, why don't we put a real terrorist group like the Islamic Revolutionary Guard on there that, frankly, has been accused of assassinating someone in Toronto just in the last few weeks.
So knowing that the Conservatives were not on guard, the Liberals, I think, went further than they ever would.
And now they see, well, the Civil Liberties Associations don't really have much to say either.
So who's next?
And again, I don't know every group in Canada.
There's a group in Quebec called Le Mutes.
I don't know anything about them, but they've been right-wing opponents of open borders, for example.
There's a lot of anti-lockdown activists.
And in Quebec also, the largest anti-lockdown protests in Canada being in Quebec.
So again, I don't know the groups there, but absolutely Trudeau would call them terrorist groups if he could.
I've been very critical of a group in Toronto called The Line, which is an anti-lockdown group, because their leader says stupid things occasionally.
Lamont Daigle is his name.
He talks, he daydreams about violence, and I say, don't you dare do that.
Don't you taint the anti-lockdown movement that way.
I think he's actually probably a narc or some undercover officer because his behavior has no other rational explanation in my mind.
But Trudeau would look for any excuse he could to label the anti-lockdown protesters terrorists.
I don't know if he would get away with calling us Rebel News terrorists.
I think for that he would use his censorship rules, the new regulator that Stephen Gilbo is going to make.
I don't think he's crazy enough to call us terrorists.
But it's all part of the same thing.
Marginalize, demonize, delegitimize your enemy.
Censor him if you can.
And if you can, call them criminals.
It is a terrifying place we're in right now.
Do you think that this is a political gift to Joe Biden?
Would they have done this if Donald Trump had won?
I mean, this is basically the ultimate cancel culture.
This is criminalizing, calling someone a terrorist, the political opponents of Joe Biden and of Justin Trudeau.
Do you think that we're going to see this follow-up?
Oh, it's absolutely.
And you just know that Trudeau and Bill Blair were on the phone to their, Bill Blair to his American counterpart.
I don't think Trudeau gets a lot of FaceTime with Joe Biden.
But if he did, he would surely boast about this, saying, I got your back.
I'm your little, you're Batman, I'm Robin.
I'm your little sidekick up here.
Now, I don't think that they would be able to label the Proud Boys as a terrorist group in the United States simply for First Amendment reasons.
And I think they probably still have some sort of standards of proof to get on that list.
I mean, getting on that list is, I mean, it would be the secular American version of getting a fatwa.
I mean, if you were on that list, you are anathematized.
You are beyond the pale.
You're an outcast.
And criminal law, normal criminal laws, and now terrorist laws apply to you.
If you're on that list, it is really a death list.
And I think that Trudeau's partisan RCMP are just crazy enough to try and enforce it.
I mean, I don't know where those five Halifax lads are now, but it wouldn't surprise me if every one of them is being drummed out of the military.
And it wouldn't surprise me if every one of them is getting a visit from the RCMP now.
I mean, there's literally no one else in Canada who has done anything proud boys-ish.
But I think that Trudeau wants to hold up some scalps and say, look, look at this.
I caught myself some real-life Nazis.
And to basically show it to every conservative, say, Aaron O'Toole, I'm coming for you unless you join my mob.
That's what's really happened here.
The mob said, we're going to go after this group, that group, this group, that group.
We're going to go after Derek Sloan.
So Aaron O'Toole said, no, no, no, I'm not going to defend Sloan.
I'll throw him under the bus.
Okay, we're going to go after the proud boys.
No, no, no, I'll join with you.
And that's how the mob works.
The mob comes to your house with torches and says, are you with us against your neighbor, or do we torch you first and then go get the neighbor on our own?
You've got 30 seconds to decide.
Are you with the mob or do we mob you?
So it's a shakedown move.
Aaron O'Toole proves that he'll go along with the mob.
He'll join the cancel culture.
Direct contradiction of his campaign promises.
You know, I asked the other day on Twitter, can you name a single key policy of Justin Trudeau's over the last year that the O'Toole Conservatives have vigorously opposed?
Like, can you name a single key policy?
The one thing I've heard from them is they disagree with how Trudeau is handling the vaccines.
They would have handled it better.
Okay, but that's all that is is haggling over tactics or we'll be better at what you're doing than you are.
There has not been a single substantial disagreement between O'Toole and Trudeau on anything.
Both were tepid on the Keystone Excel.
O'Toole is silent on censorship, silent on the lockdowns.
He supports the Paris Accords and a zero-carbon future.
He's been silent on Western alienation.
I don't think that Aaron O'Toole actually disagrees with the liberals because he wants to be safe from their criticism.
He thinks that the next election will simply fall into his lap if he doesn't say or do anything.
I think he's deadly wrong.
I think if the election were held now, despite the vaccine fiasco, I think Aaron O'Toole would lose 40 seats.
That's how bad I think it is.
Who on earth would vote for him?
Not a true conservative, and certainly not a liberal.
Who's left?
Just people who vote Tory out of habit?
Well, I suppose so.
And even that constituency is dwindling.
What would you say is his victory condition then?
What does he have to do?
What could he possibly do to win?
Or is it too late at this point?
Well, look, I don't know how soon the election is coming.
I would have thought it was coming up really soon, but maybe the vaccine bungle is too severe.
But I mean, if he just took rational, common sense, conservative approaches, talk about free speech, talk about cancel culture, talk about bringing back a balance between civil liberties and the lockdowns.
Talk about getting kids back in schools.
Why won't he say that?
Talk about foreign affairs.
Talk about trans in sports.
Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau are allied on that.
I think that's a sleeper issue.
You can be respectful of anyone's identity and say, you know what, we don't want to eliminate girl sports.
There's small issues like the trans sports thing.
And then there's big issues like free speech and cancel culture.
And then there's huge issues like civil liberties and the lockdown.
I think you can put together a new coalition.
It would include working class people, people who have suffered under the lockdown.
The lockdown has changed the class structure of Canada.
It's no longer, you know, the left would say the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
Now it's the new lines are different.
If you're a small business person or a worker who's been locked down, you are suffering from the lockdown.
But if you are the government class, the political class, the bureaucratic class, the teachers' union class, you're loving this lockdown like never before.
If you're a restaurant owner, a gym owner, a retail owner, it's the worst thing that ever happened to you.
I think it's realigned the world.
And that's a real opportunity for the Conservative Party.
You know, there's a book we've talked about on the show before called The Republican Workers' Party.
I think a conservative workers' party that stands up for guys in hard hats who want to build Keystone Excel, stands up for mom-and-pomp shops like the WhistleStop Cafe in Mirror, Alberta, stands up for moms who want their kids to go to school again, stands up for regular people who don't want to watch their pronouns and regular folks who want to send their girls to sports.
I know that I mentioned that, but I think that's a sleeper issue.
I think you put together this new coalition of working people with conservative values and against versus Trudeau and his elites, his insider profiteers who are loving this lockdown, I think you've got yourself a new coalition.
Thanks, But Never Forget00:00:59
And I don't think O'Till's going to get it.
Now, it's not about him.
I mean, he is forfeited by default being the leader of the opposition in this country.
He isn't opposing anything.
So it falls to other institutions to do that, including to us, I put it to you.
Yeah, for sure.
Well, Ezra, thanks so much for joining me on your own show, actually, while you're in Toronto.
And we're going to be back with more after this.
Well, thanks very much, Keenan, and thanks for holding the fort while I'm trying to get this book done.
I appreciate you taking the work of doing the show.
No problem.
Never forget, Justin Trudeau hates you.
He hates you.
He hates everyone that doesn't vote for him.
And he's willing to label you a terrorist to prove it.
This is not what a functioning democracy looks like.