Justin Trudeau’s Canada bows to China’s influence—Beijing’s security services now run visa centers, tracking approvals and suppressing dissent like Uyghur Muslims, while Ottawa groveled over a t-shirt incident, silencing media under pressure. Alberta’s Jason Kenney faces federal vaccine failures and canceled projects, including Keystone XL, yet avoids direct blame for Trudeau’s policies. Aaron O’Toole’s Conservatives lack ideological edge, fearing "cancel culture" while China tightens control, leaving Canada’s sovereignty—and media freedom—at risk. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I'm going to tell you four little China stories all in the same theme.
And two of them involving Canada groveling before China.
It's not pretty, but you got to see it.
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All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, with Trump out of the way, China flexes its muscles and Canada bows down low.
It's February 9th 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 published it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
You know, I criticize the media party, but I have to acknowledge that the Globe and Mail does an outstanding job on covering China's bad behavior.
They just do.
They're always alert to it.
They speak truth to power.
The Globe is the official newspaper of the Canadian establishment, including the business establishment that is totally hooked on China.
So it surely is not an easy thing for them to antagonize that part of their audience.
It's not like us or the good folks of the Apocalypse who specifically speak to Chinese dissidents or critics.
The Globe does it to their cost.
Anyways, a credit where credit is due.
And take a look at this story.
Canada's visa application center in Beijing run by Chinese police?
How's that even possible?
How's that not a satirical joke by a comedy website like The Onion or the Babylon Bee?
Except there's a difference between something being absurd and something being funny.
Let me read from the great story.
Chinese police own a company that collects details of people applying for visas to Canada and numerous other countries, giving Beijing security services a direct stake in the processing of private information provided by people planning travel outside China.
Beijing Shuang Xiong Foreign Service Company, which operates the Canadian Visa Application Center in the Chinese capital, is owned by the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau.
A Globe and Mail investigation has found.
And at least some of the people working inside the center are members of the Communist Party, recruited from a school that trains the next generation of party elite.
So Justin Trudeau is literally outsourcing our immigration and diplomacy consular business to Chinese Communist Party secret police.
I really would like to say I can't believe it, but I can believe it.
And it's not like he didn't warn us.
There's a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime.
Well, that basic dictatorship now knows the names and details of everyone and anyone in China who wants to come to Canada, and it controls that information.
Knowledge of what happens inside a visa center could have high-level intelligence value.
If you can see who is getting declined and who is getting approved, it gives you better chance of getting your agent through.
Mr. Potter said, Mr. Potter is a security consultant The Globe interviewed.
It could also be used to bar people from leaving China.
For some people, like the country's Muslims, even applying for a visa to get out of China is enough to get flagged as a terrorist, he said.
If you're a Uyghur and you're applying for a visa to Canada on humanitarian grounds, giving that information to the security service is really dangerous.
I wonder if Trudeau also put the Chinese police in charge of negotiating with the Chinese police to end the Chinese police detention of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig kidnapped by the Chinese police.
I mean, why not just outsource the whole thing to the Chinese police?
But rather than ripping up that contract with the Chinese police, or I don't know, issuing a statement saying they're investigating, Trudeau this week issued a strongly worded apology.
I'm not even kidding.
Someone somewhere made a t-shirt that said Wuhan clan instead of Wu-Tang clan.
Now, if you're over 50, you might not know the Wu-Tang clan.
It was a rap group in the U.S. Actually, it's about 20 years old.
They had a bit of a sense of humor.
I mean, this guy's rap name is ODB, which is more polite than his full name, Old Dirty Bastard.
I think it might be a stage name.
I think there's a chance that maybe his mama did not, in fact, give him that name.
Here's ODB.
Baby, baby, come on, baby, come on, baby, come on.
Yeah, so there's nothing remotely Chinese about the Wu-Tang clan except their funny name, and they were sort of funny rappers.
And someone thought it was funny to make a shirt saying Wuhan clan instead of Wu-Tang clan.
So they made some shirts.
And that is the end of the story.
It's not racist.
It's not mean.
It's replacing Wu-Tang with Wu-Han.
And that's about it, really.
But look at this.
This is a statement from the Embassy of Canada.
The Embassy of Canada wishes to convey our sincere regret that the private production of t-shirts for embassy staff featuring Wuhan and the logo of a popular hip-hop group has offended public sentiment in China.
These t-shirts were not produced to make any statement, political or otherwise, and we regret the offense they have caused.
I'm seriously apologized in a groveling apology.
China has had the two Michaels in captivity for 792 days.
792 days.
And we're apologizing to them for a goofy t-shirt that someone made riffing on the word Wu-Tang clan.
Oh, and that's not enough.
Here's a Chinese English language propaganda newspaper called Global Times.
It's the mouthpiece for the Communist Party of China for foreign affairs matters, published in English.
It's not for Chinese people to read.
It's for the world's diplomats to read.
And their headline is, Canada should take diplomats Wuhan Bat t-shirt incident as a warning Chinese foreign minister.
Now, I'm going to read this entire story to you.
It takes about two minutes to read, but I want to show you how insane the Chinese Communist Party is, how obsessed they are with saving face, how hypersensitive and brittle they are, how fake their outrage is, and how they're so obviously complaining in bad faith.
But finally, how they are spying on everyone in the Canadian embassy who ought to know better, really.
I mean, every single word you say in China or write or text or surf on the web is being read in real time by Chinese spies.
Let me read this article.
Canada should take its diplomats' Wuhan Bat t-shirt incident as a warning to ensure similar things do not happen again, the Chinese foreign ministry said, after the Canadian Embassy in Beijing admitted the t-shirt had caused offense to the Chinese people.
Chad Hensler, a staff member of the Canadian Embassy in China, placed an order for t-shirts emblazoned with a bat-like image around the words Wuhan in May 2020, which sparked outrage among Chinese netizens when the incident was disclosed recently.
The Canadian Embassy on Sunday issued a statement saying that the embassy wanted to convey sincere regret that the incident offended public sentiment in China.
These t-shirts were not produced to make any statement political or otherwise we regret the offense they may have caused, the statement said.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at Monday's media briefing that China has noted that the Canadian Embassy in China admitted the Canadian diplomats' behavior offended Chinese people.
Canada should take it as a warning to ensure that such incidents won't happen again, Wang said.
A spokesperson for Canada's Foreign Service last week called the incident a misunderstanding, but Wang did not buy it, saying the excuse was unconvincing and Canada should provide a clear explanation to China as soon as possible.
A source close to the matter, gee, I wonder who that is, told the Global Times exclusively that the Canadian diplomat involved had deceived the Chinese t-shirt maker and deliberately planned to conceal his ill-intentioned motive since May 2020 when he placed the order.
He had sought companies that produced t-shirts with cultural symbols as early as in May.
And after he contacted one Chinese e-commerce firm, he had hesitated to provide the image to be printed on the t-shirts.
It was only in July when the Chinese company urged him to provide the image for printing that he did so, the source said.
Look at that detail there.
They're spying on him, obviously.
They're spying on every single person in the embassy, obviously.
Spying on every phone call he makes, every email he sends, every website he goes to, obviously.
Look at that.
And that doesn't get a word of objection from our embassy.
Maybe Trudeau will apologize to China again.
Here's the Chinese embassy in Ottawa now.
So this is Chinese diplomats in Canada now condemning the National Post for daring to criticize their genocide in Xinjiang province.
The spokesperson of the Chinese embassy in Canada sent a letter to the National Post refuting the unwarranted comments on Xinjiang-related issues.
Recently, the National Post published an article entitled, Why China's Actions in Xinjiang are Being Called Genocide, which ignores the facts, unscrupulously concocts and hypes up lies such as genocide and forced labor, and seriously misleads the public.
China firmly opposes this.
I would like to make the following points, blah, I'm not going to go through it all.
You can find it on their propaganda page if you're curious.
I think they're wrong.
I think they're not telling the truth.
I think they're lying, in fact.
But look, reasonable people can disagree and debate any policy issue.
It's probably legitimate diplomacy for the Embassy of China to try to rebut a criticism of China made in a national newspaper in Canada.
Sure, marshal your facts and arguments.
It's something China isn't usually good at since they're not used to a free press back in China.
But yeah, how about it?
That's fair enough.
But at the bottom, they say this.
We call on relevant Canadian media to abide by professional ethics, respect facts, distinguish right from wrong, and do more to promote China-Canadian friendship and mutual understanding between the two peoples instead of being used by anti-China forces as a platform for disseminating disinformation, attacking and slandering China.
Now, I wouldn't call that a real threat.
A threat usually ends with an or else.
I'm sure the National Post has been completely hacked by China.
I'm sure every word they say is being read in real time by the Chinese army.
I wouldn't call that a threat.
I'd say it's more of a command and instruction.
They're instructing Canadian journalists to be more submissive and more obedient, maybe a bit more like Justin Trudeau himself, or maybe a bit more like Joe Biden.
I probably spent more time with Xi Jinping, I'm told, than any world leader has because I had 24, 25 hours of private meetings with him when I was vice president, traveled 17,000 miles with him, and know him pretty well.
Command and Control00:05:24
There's a lot to talk about.
A lot to talk about.
A whole lot to talk about.
And he's very bright.
He's very tough.
He doesn't have, and I don't mean as a criticism, just a reality.
He doesn't have a Democratic small D-bone in his body.
Yeah, yeah.
Holy cow.
That U.S. election, some people dispute that Donald Trump lost it, but no one can dispute that China's Xi Jinping won it.
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Well, I think the best premier in Canada, in terms of smarts and ideological compass and work ethic, is Jason Kenney, the UCP Premier of Alberta.
But I think the province that has the most challenges, the most problems, many of them quite unfair, is also Alberta.
Alberta, which was once the prize of the country economically and in so many other ways, has for some years now had every devil bedevil it, including a war on oil and pipelines, first from Rachel Notley and then by Justin Trudeau, compounded with everything from wildfires to now a hostile U.S. president.
It is tough going there.
Joining us now via Skype from Edmonton to talk about the challenges faced by Jason Kenney, both external and the odd own goal, is our friend Lauren Gunter, senior columnist at the Edmonton Sun.
Great to see you again, Lauren.
Thank you very much for being here.
You and I have both known Jason Kenney for quite a while.
I used to be from Alberta myself.
I think he's got the brainpower and the horsepower to be the best premier, but my God, he's got a tough job, doesn't he?
Tougher than any other premier, I put it.
Yeah, no question on both of those counts.
He is, as near as I can tell, the smartest politician leading a government in the country at the moment.
And he has the government that's facing the most problems.
And a lot of the problems are beyond their control.
You know, there's only so much you can do about COVID.
There's only so much that you can do about the pandemic and the costs that it's inflicted on the economy.
But there's almost nothing they can do to revive the oil and gas sector in Alberta.
They've done everything they can do, but the impediments now are all at the federal level.
And there's nothing that they can do to move the shiny pony, as you used to like to call it, off of their anti-oil bubble.
Prime example is Keystone XL, which the Biden administration, of course, canceled on their first day in office.
And Trudeau said, oh, no, I told him in November we were still keen on Keystone.
And I was going to speak to him about that when he phoned me.
And you know, he phoned me first of all the leaders in the world.
And you know, full well, Trudeau didn't want Keystone to go.
Hey, he had no real interest in Keystone.
I'm not even sure he's going to build Trans Mountain, despite the fact his government owns it.
Canceled Energy East, canceled Northern Gateway.
He is the most anti-oil leader in a Western country.
The Norwegians, which are renowned for their environmentalism, develop far more of their oil than Trudeau is allowing Alberta to do.
So, you know, Kenny is stuck in this real hard spot where he's done everything he can.
Oil prices are slowly creeping up.
I noticed that this week, the best quality of oil has crept up over $60 US a barrel, which is great news.
But there's nothing we can do about it because we're not being allowed to ship our bitumen or our oil anywhere except by train and sometimes by truck.
Yeah.
Well, I remember when I first discovered that terrifying word used by foreign-based environmental groups, demarketing, marketing with a DE at front, demarketing.
And they said, look, if we can't stop them from producing this stuff, we can cut it off from the markets, cut off the pipelines.
And it's now a dozen years ago that that first map by the Rockefeller Brothers and the Tides Foundation and the others showed they were going to cut off, and they've had perfect success.
And all the radicals who produced that document have actually been embedded in the Liberal government in ministers' offices and the PMO itself.
Gerald Butts, of course, being the key architect.
He's gone, but he's still involved.
I find it very sad for the province that was once the mightiest of all.
It's being cut down to size, as you say, but through no fault of its own.
I want to talk a little bit about your article in the Edmonton Sun called Parks, Coal Mining Fiascos, an indication of how out of touch UCP is with the voter base.
Lightest Lockdown Touch00:02:55
Now, let's talk about that a little bit because I think the lockdown issue, I think Jason Kenney has been the lightest touch when it comes to lockdowns.
I mean, Quebec literally has curfews, like parents giving children curfews.
They have curfews.
8 p.m.
They treat innocent people like guilty people.
It's madness.
Ontario and Toronto in particular, perhaps the worst in Canada, other than the curfew lovers in Quebec.
Jason Kenney has been the lightest touch, but I don't know.
Maybe it's because Albertans are freedom-oriented when his own MLAs and cabinet ministers sneaked away for a beach vacation, which I'm not opposed to.
But my view is if it's good enough for the rulemakers, let the grassroots do it too.
I think it was totally so wrong.
So ironically, he's been the lightest touch on the lockdowns, but I think he's faced the biggest blowback for the cheaters.
Like Doug Ford's finance minister cheated, but Doug Ford hasn't had the same blowback.
Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right.
I think Albertans were very reluctant to buy into a second lockdown.
Did the lockdown in the spring because we knew far less about the pandemic then?
We didn't know how to deal with it as well.
And so, yes, we put up with that for about six weeks.
But on the second one around, mostly affecting younger people.
The death rate was lower in the second wave, despite the number of deaths being higher.
There was far more infection.
So the rate itself of people dying from it was lower.
And people were kind of nonchalant a little bit about that.
But as soon as the caseload got pretty heavy, Albert started to say, okay, okay, okay, wear a mask when I go to the store, and I won't go to the movie theater, and I won't go to a hockey game.
Yes, okay, fine.
And it's worked really, really well.
And the big thing, of course, was Christmas.
You know, I won't get together with my family.
Long-standing tradition, as there is everywhere, of people getting together with big family groups and having a steamy, boisterous Christmas dinner inside with lots of food and lots of fun.
And we decide, okay, we'll give that up.
And should we go to Hawaii?
Should we go to Mexico?
I don't know, maybe not.
Let's decide.
And I think most people decided they wouldn't.
And then all of a sudden, you have these UCP staffers and ministers and MLAs take off.
And not only are they dumb enough to go, they're doubly stupid because they take selfies of themselves at a carnival in Mexico or on the beach in Hawaii and post it on Facebook and say, hey, look what I'm doing.
Instantly.
That's one of those things that people instantly understand.
Conservative Criticism of Federal Policies00:14:27
You can talk about whether or not someone benefited from insider trading, but sometimes it's really kind of hard to follow whether the rules were broken and you don't.
It's a little too technical and complex.
It's not complex.
With you are sitting there in your basement with nobody except your household in small town Alberta.
And here is your MLA.
That's real easy to understand.
And that's why he got that big blowback from that.
It is the freedom attitude of Albertans.
Absolutely is.
But we also sucked it up in the name of getting rid of the pandemic.
And then all of a sudden, his MLA within the letter of the rules, but certainly not in the spirit as they were understood by most people.
And so that's where he got that big blowback.
Yeah.
And I noticed that he lost a chunk of popularity, I think about 10% over that.
But interestingly, a lot of it did not go to the NDP.
It went to alternative parties on the right, the soft separatist parties.
And I think that's interesting.
And I think that, I mean, when Jason Kenney was campaigning, he had that pickup truck.
He went around the whole province.
He used to be with the Taxpayers Federation, very much a shoe leather operation out on the streets, out with the people.
I wonder if he's in Edmonton under the dome, as they call the legislature, surrounded by bureaucrats, experts, political spin doctors.
But everyone around him is part of the lockdown class.
So they're not feeling any pain.
At worst, they're working from home, which is like a snow day.
They're probably enjoying some parts of the lockdown if they had a staycation, but they got paid for it.
So it's very different.
And it's a class thing.
And it's a different, I mean, private sector versus public sector.
I think there are an awful lot of people who have a fair amount of money on both sides of this issue.
But it's whether or not you can survive the pandemic and the lockdown in particular with your paycheck still coming in.
And if you, you know, I talked to a fellow the other day who runs a restaurant in a small town in Alberta.
He has sold his house.
He's liquidated his RSP.
He has given up all of his savings.
His wife has done the same.
They're about to move into a rental property because they're starting over in their early 60s because he wanted to keep his employees paid.
How many people in the public sector have had to make those kind of sacrifices because of lockdown?
Yeah, zero.
And so all the push that there's been, there's been some push, as you know, in Canada for an Australia-style law where we lock everything down.
You're not allowed out of your house.
You can't walk your dog down the street.
If you go out, it's only for essentials.
You're not allowed to go more than five kilometers from your house.
You have to wear a mask when you're outside as well.
Crazy stuff.
And all of that push, I guarantee everybody who's in favor of that is somebody who has a paycheck coming in on a regular.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it's a mystical superstition-level belief.
I call it lockdownism.
And people hold.
I find it heartbreaking.
I think that maybe Jason Kenney is trying to straddle both worlds.
And I don't think you can.
I think you go either full lockdown, like Doug Ford, John Torrey, Quebec does, or you embrace freedom like Florida's DeSantis, South Dakota's Christian Noam.
I don't think you can have it halfway.
I mean, by the way, Ron DeSantis and Christy Noam, they still, you know, they're not anti-masks.
They're just saying we're not going to force you on these things.
I don't know.
I just, I think that even Jason Kenney himself could be overwhelmed by the public health deep state.
I think he did find a good balance.
And he was lucky too, in that his provincial officer of health, Dina Hinshaw, is also a very good Albertan.
And she understands that we're basically averse to lockdown.
So they together work pretty well at finding, I think, what was a pretty good balance.
They had to release us a little bit on February the 8th because the numbers have come down so precipitously.
In early December, when we were at the worst, our average over seven days for new infection was almost 1,900 a day.
Now it's 300 a day.
You have to release people.
You have to say, okay, okay, you can go back to restaurants a little bit.
You can go back to the gym a little bit.
You can have some more activities.
And if you can expand your church service a little bit, you can have a funeral, that sort of thing.
If things are better in three more weeks, and I think they're going to be.
In fact, I think they're going to be down to the three-week level by the end of this week.
If after three weeks they're better, we're going to expand it again and again and again so that by early May, we could be back to normal.
But there's another thing that's touching on all this that also I think has explains why a lot of the UCP support that's left the UCP has gone instead to more independence-minded parties on the right.
And that is that I don't think they've bashed the feds enough.
You know, this is all the feds' fault now.
We've done our bit as provinces in Ontario, in Quebec.
We might not like what they've been doing in those provinces.
We might not like everything we've had to do in Alberta, but the provinces have done what they can.
And the people who have completely fumbled the ball are Justin True and the federal government, but they were so late to the game in getting real vaccine that we now aren't getting it.
And you're watching the Americans inoculating about 2 million people a day.
The equivalent in Canada, of course, would be around 200,000 a day.
We're not even coming close to that.
We're not even a tenth of that because the feds can't get vaccines.
And this morning, the province has got another notice from the federal government.
Haven't seen it in the news yet saying that, well, Pfizer has decided that even its lower level of doses that it's shipping, it's now counting each vial as six doses rather than five.
The original agreement with the Fed was for five doses per vial.
And it's very important to understand that if Pfizer says you're getting the same amount per vial, but you have to get six doses out of this rather than five.
And now we're sending you a reduced number anyway, you're talking about a, say, maybe a 40% reduction from the original total.
And that means that we're going to be, you know, we're going to be the end of the year before we're talking about widespread vaccinations in Alberta.
And The Economist magazine now thinks Canada alone, among the G7, will be middle of 2022 before it's reached widespread vaccination.
And that is something I think the province has started to, Alberta has started to bash the feds about that a little bit, but I think they need to hit them harder because it's the Fed's fault that we don't have the oil activity that we should.
We are the lowest of the major oil-producing countries in the world in the return to production after the 2014 collapse.
We're the lowest of the major countries in the world.
And that's because of federal policy.
And now we're going to be stuck in lockdowns for another year because the feds were too dumb to go and get real vaccines and they put all of their eggs in the Chinese basket.
Yeah.
Hey, I got one last question for you, Lauren.
And by the way, thanks so much for taking so much time.
But you made me think, you talk about bashing the feds.
And of course, every provincial premier that's a go-to.
But in Alberta, there really are some legitimate grievances, I believe.
Every province has its grievances, but I think Albertans are most acute.
But there's one thing I can't help but notice.
And I tell you, this is not from any personal animus.
I just, I don't know if you heard the quiz I like to give people.
I say, don't Google it.
Can you tell me who the Conservative Party's health critic is?
And some people get that one.
It's Michelle Rample.
I say, can you tell me who the Conservative Party's foreign critic is?
Their defense critic, their critic for transport, you know, the flying rules.
And no one yet has got more than one of them right.
And their critic for innovation and science lives five houses down the block.
Okay, so that, you know, I asked a friend of mine who lives in Calgary Center, who's the energy critic.
Right, right, exactly.
It was his MP.
He didn't even know it.
And the point I make by that quiz is not to embarrass people, the opposite, because I asked that of people who are very savvy, follow the news very closely.
I asked that to your colleague, Laurie Goldstein of the Toronto Sun.
He got three in a row he couldn't do.
And my point was, Laurie, you're smarter than your average bear.
It's not you.
It's that these critics are silent, either by strategy or by practice or something.
And so you say Jason Kenney ought to fight the Fed stronger.
I agree.
But where is the Conservative Party of Canada?
We hear Aaron O'Toole talk about vaccine bungling.
Okay, got it.
But that's more saying we would be more competent than them.
That's not a philosophical disagreement.
It's not an ideological disagreement.
It's we would be better at basic tying your shoes stuff than Trudeau.
But where are the ideological conservative disagreements on any file?
I don't see it anywhere.
I think the Conservative Party of Canada, and I have my disagreements with them personally, put that aside, where the heck are they on the battles of our era?
They're not opposing.
They're not criticizing.
Where are they?
They're afraid of cancel culture, right?
They're afraid that they're going to say something that they'll then be jumped on on social media and jumped on by the CBC and the Golden Mail.
And oh, they're racist.
But about the lockdown, surely there's no racial angle on the lockdown.
But there was.
Of course, there was.
Initially, there was.
But, you know, everybody who's anybody thinks lockdowns are the way to go.
So you've got to get over this.
I remember one time a fellow who had worked for Wacky Bennett when Bennett was the premier of BC in the 50s and 60s.
And this guy was now retired.
And I met him doing something for Alberta Report magazine back in the 90s.
And I met this guy who's long retired.
And he said, Wacky Bennett's theory was he would win any election where he got to run against the lower mainland press.
And so he would go out into Kamloops and Prince George and in the interior of BC.
And he would say, you've got to send my government back there, or all of those people in Vancouver and Victoria are going to be telling you how to run your lives.
And I think Aaron O'Toole has to do something like that too.
But you mentioned in the intro this long discussion you and I are having, the self-inflicted wounds of the UCP.
They're similar in the sense that, you know, Aaron O'Toole seems to be worried about fighting hard during the pandemic against the liberals.
The UCP too has created this problem for themselves because they think whatever they do, they don't have to explain because Albertans are just going to be along with them.
They're going to default to the UCP because they're not the NDP and the NDP were despised for the four years they were government.
And I think in both cases, the federal Conservative Party and the provincial UCP both have to start thinking about what their communication strategy is and how they hammer home ideological differences with the NDP provincially and with the liberals federally.
And I think that's exactly right.
I think you'll see there that you see that Trudeau has come down in popularity in the last couple of months, mostly over the vaccine thing.
But Aaron O'Toole has not benefited from that.
The Conservatives have not come up in the polls, neither has O'Toole.
And I think that's because, as you say, they're largely silent.
They're invisible.
I don't know what they're doing.
Yeah, very frustrating.
Well, Lauren, thank you so much for spending so much time.
I feel like we really covered a lot of bases today.
And we didn't actually have a chance to get into your article, but let me just read out the headline one more time and encourage people to find it at edmontonson.com.
The headline is parks, coal mining fiasco, an indication of how out of touch UCP is with the voter base.
So much in there, too.
Great to see you again, my friend.
Stay healthy and optimistic and upbeat and keep up the fight.
Will do, YouTube.
All right.
Here you have it.
Lauren Gunter, Edmonton Sun.
with us more.
Hey, welcome back on my show last night.
Bruce writes, I'm glad Rebel News is doing so well in spite of the snobbery of the dinosaur media.
No offense to dinosaurs.
Rebel News has grown and rocked the reporting world.
Congratulations, too, for reaching out to Quebec residents who are suffering insane regulations.
Thanks very much.
I mean, listen, we have challenges every day, but I think that the lockdown and the terrible media coverage, the media complicity in the lockdown, the media cheering leading in the lockdown, no matter the cost of civil liberties, no matter the scientific basis for it, is a time for us to shine because we specialize in telling the other side of the story.
And we are also activists.
And so when we crowdfund civil liberties lawyers, I think this is a time for which the Rebel was built.
Six Years Of Rebel News00:00:36
Gilly writes, I had the privilege of catching some of the original Rebel pieces, including the very first shows.
As the commercial goes, you've come a long way, baby.
It was fascinating to see what we were talking about six years ago.
It seems like a luxury now.
Oh, you're so right.
I call them the before times.
Ron writes, how about Rex Murphy on your advisory board?
Well, that's an amazing idea.
I don't know if he would ever consider it.
I think he wants his own independent brand, it would be my guess, but he would be so welcome, and it would be such a coup for us to have someone of his stature.