Michelle Rempel-Garner’s June 10th apology for being "cis straight white" while framing herself as a victim of systemic oppression exposes the Conservative Party’s performative shift toward progressive identity politics, despite her past Islamophobic rhetoric like calling niqab bans "barbaric." Meanwhile, vaccine mandates and lockdowns—backed by both Canada’s major parties—disproportionately harm the poor while elites like the CBC and leftists (e.g., Kennedy Jr., Wolf) quietly oppose them, revealing a class-based double standard. Civil liberties attorney Janine Eunice highlights NCLA’s legal battles against overreach, proving resistance spans ideologies, but Trudeau’s exploitation of Muslim victimhood for political gain underscores how identity-driven narratives overshadow genuine policy debates or accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
Today, I take you through the most curious tweet by the Twitter MP for the Conservative Party.
You probably know who I'm talking about.
She's a bit of a YouTube star.
Just ask her.
Michelle Rempel Garner.
She had the most bizarre, wokest tweet yesterday.
She, I think, tried to cancel herself.
I'll read you the tweet and try and explain it.
That's up ahead.
But before we get to that, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's what we call the video version of this podcast.
It's just eight bucks a month.
Go to rebelnews.com, click subscribe, and you get my video version of this daily podcast, Sheila Gunnery, David Menzies, Andrew Chapados Weekly Video Podcast.
And importantly, you let us stay independent.
We don't take a dime from Trudeau.
We depend on you.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, let me show you what the Conservative Party of Canada has turned into.
It's June 10th, 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 government publisher is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Michelle Rempel-Garner is one of the few Conservative Party MPs who has any sort of profile.
Pierre Polyev, maybe Michael Chong.
Some people still remember Andrew Scheer.
And I think I'm almost on the list, aren't I?
Though I think it's fair to say, Michelle Rempel-Garner is famous for being famous.
I mean, it's been the biggest year for health in Canadian history, and Rempel Garner is the health critic.
Can you tell me anything of use, of importance she's said or done?
Any real points she's made, any important campaign or challenge to the liberals and their lockdowns in the past year?
Yeah, no, me neither.
Maybe she hasn't been allowed to by Aaron O'Toole, but that hasn't stopped Pierre Polyev from actually making a dent in the liberals, despite O'Toole actually demoting him.
Rempel Gardner has always been culturally leftist.
She makes a point of her feminism and her transgender activism.
I'm not sure if it really represents the Conservative Party or Calgary, but it keeps her in the good books of the media party out there in Ottawa.
She's one of the few conservatives the CBC tolerates.
I'm not sure if she's a cultural fit for her new home down in Oklahoma, where her new husband is from and where she spends so much of her time.
She just moved to Oklahoma for most of the first part of the pandemic.
I mean, I get it.
Canada has been a prison by comparison.
I think a lot of people would like to move to Oklahoma if they could, but it's a bit weird being a Canadian member of parliament when you're based in Oklahoma, don't you think?
I mean, can you imagine the reverse?
Imagine if a U.S. congressman lived in Winnipeg while still voting in Congress by Zoom or whatever.
In fact, she recently complained that she had to stay in Canada because all of a sudden politicians were getting so much scrutiny.
So I'm going to be totally upfront with you guys.
I spent Christmas alone in Calgary.
It's a really hard decision to make.
I didn't get to see my family at Christmas.
I miss my husband.
He's in Oklahoma.
But I knew if I went down to Oklahoma, I knew that I would have vulturous CBC reporters reporting on my whereabouts, saying that I was a bad example to the Canadian public.
And I knew I couldn't go.
I knew that because I knew that if the Alberta government and my constituents were being asked to sit at home, then I had to sit at home.
Because as somebody who is elected to serve the people, like, and I'm going to be straight up with you, I have permission to share this.
My mother-in-law has stage four breast cancer.
I would really like to see her.
I haven't seen her in months.
We don't know how much time she has left.
And I've been thinking like, okay, well, when can I potentially go down and see my family?
Could it be during the parliamentary recess?
And I, you know, I was thinking about this, I was going to be upfront with people about when I traveled.
But I knew when this news came out yesterday that like that took any hope for me off the table.
So I'll just be selfish and say like, thanks, Rod.
I don't get to see my mother-in-law now because there'll be a witch hunt if I go see my family, even though I'm not going, I'm going to see my mother-in-law and I'm not going to St. Bart's.
So yes, a little angry about that.
Yeah, it's really tough being an MP.
You know, they gave themselves a raise on April 1st, right?
And you know, they gave themselves another raise last April 1st, right?
Asking For Forgiveness?00:08:17
Boy, they have a tough life.
But then I saw this on Twitter just yesterday.
I humble myself and ask forgiveness and seek to make things right.
I have privilege.
I am cis straight white, but I'm also a woman who works in a system dominated by white maleness.
But no excuses.
I will do what I can.
That is all I can do, but it is much.
Whoa, whoa.
Holy moly, I feel like I just took a wrong turn and ended up in a gender studies class at some left-wing university where they're having a meeting to talk about knocking down some John A. McDonald's statue, but first they have to get their pronouns right, sort of like this.
Guess what?
My patience is run out.
Pansexuality is not inherently biphobic.
They are both valid sexualities, both of them.
And while yes, I have seen pansexual people use that label for questionable reasons, they pretty quickly get it once you explain things to them.
They do.
And not only that, but do you know who likes to use specific or micro labels?
Neurodivergent people.
Sometimes we just have to do whatever we can to feel safe and comfortable.
And using a more specific label can be our outlet for that.
Yeah, maybe we have our new Conservative Party candidate right there.
But back to the Rempel Garner tweet.
She was writing in reply to Amira Al-Ghawabi, an activist with the liberal-funded hate group, ironically called the Canadian Anti-Hate Network.
As we showed you the other day, they literally have a six-figure contract to smear conservative critics of the Liberal Party.
The government pays them to report conservatives to whatever authority they think could do them damage.
They're like the Stasi.
They're clever to call themselves the anti-hate network because it obscures the fact that they're pretty full of hatred.
I mean, they literally go on Twitter and like messages that call for violence against their opponents.
So Rempel Garner was bantering with Al-Ghawabi about the murder in London, Ontario, a 20-year-old man charged with running down the Afsow family in his car.
Terrible tragedy.
I see in the newspapers today he had significant mental issues, was seeing a shrink, was estranged from his parents, was actually an emancipated youth, as they say, when he was just a teenager.
He had flashes of violence going back years in school.
I don't know if he was motivated by anti-Muslim hate or if he was a terrorist or just mental illness or even if it was just negligence.
I don't know yet.
I don't know if anyone knows yet.
But Rempel Garner took to Twitter to say that she would like to apologize and ask forgiveness.
Let me quote.
Yes, I humble myself and ask forgiveness and seek to make things right.
Now, I'm not sure the words humble and MP go together, but sorry.
Ask for forgiveness.
What did Rempel Garner do wrong?
She wasn't involved in the killing.
So how can she apologize?
She's not apologizing for what Veltman, the accused killer, did.
She's apologizing for just being who she is.
I have privilege.
I am cis straight white.
But I'm also a woman who works in a system dominated by white maleness.
What?
So you're apologizing for being cis.
You know what that word, that made-up word, fake word means?
It means heterosexual.
But no normal person says that.
She's apologizing for being a straight white woman.
Why are you apologizing for immutable characteristics?
She's trying to say, though, that even though she's those terrible things, straight white woman, she shouldn't be thrown out with the John A. McDonald statue because you see, she works in a system dominated by a white maleness.
Really?
You know, the last Chief Justice of the Supreme Court for the longest time was a woman, right?
You know, we've had several governors general who were women, right?
I think we've had three.
Women have held high heights in every field of endeavor, politics, business, law, whatever.
But sure, you're a poor victim because you're a woman.
Okay.
All right.
But you're also an oppressor because you're white and straight.
I'm exhausted just reading this.
But no excuses.
I will do what I can.
That is all I can do.
But it is much.
Yeah.
Sure you can do a lot.
But what on earth?
She's got no excuses for what?
Because she's white and heterosexual?
She asks for forgiveness for that?
Is she trying to ask for forgiveness for someone else's crime?
That's not her place to do.
What is she doing?
Rempel Garner also published this extended version on Islamophobia and the London attack.
Now, I think it's a good thing for people to weigh in on.
She talks about the murdered family, assuming it was a murder, assuming it was a hate crime.
It might have been.
I see news that it was mental illness.
I don't see facts to the contrary other than the victims were Muslim.
Maybe it was a hate crime.
Maybe they were targeted, though they were killed on the city street, not a mosque or a particularly Muslim location.
But I think it is good for an MP to show solidarity with a grieving family and a grieving community.
I think that's a good thing.
But what's going on here with the weird self-abnegation, the self-hatred, the self-blame?
This is therapy, not public policy.
Here's part of her longer statement.
Step two is atonement.
While I've since spoken out on it, one of my biggest regrets in my public service was being silent during the 2015 general election campaign on the wrongness of the barbaric cultural practices, tip line, and the proposed niqab ban.
Those policies were wrong to the Muslim community.
I'm deeply sorry for not fighting it then.
I can assure you I won't make the same mistake again.
Well, hang on.
Barbaric cultural practices refers to terrible things, including honor killings.
We've had some of those in Canada.
Aksa Parvez, a young woman from the Greater Toronto area, because she didn't want to wear a hijab out in public, she was murdered by her own family.
We've had other honor murders like that, including the Shafia family.
This tip line was to help young girls who were in desperate straits.
They wanted to be free, but they were living under a medieval style of honor.
What's wrong with that?
Is it the use of the word barbaric or does Michelle Rempel-Garner now think that those things aren't barbaric?
Lord knows we have enough tip lines and snitch lines for things like people not wearing masks.
Honor killings aren't important anymore.
And when she says she's no longer in favor of banning the niqab, a niqab is a full face covering, including in court.
It's not a hijab, which is like a shawl or a babushka.
Is Michelle Rempel-Gardner actually saying she wants the full niqab even in a court of law?
It's a pretty radical position.
And what does that have to do with a murder in London, Ontario?
And why is she asking for forgiveness?
What did she do?
Well, she's not really asking for forgiveness.
She's asking that she be granted her new privileges as the wokest of the woke.
What she was really writing was an application letter to the CBC to not be kicked out of the cool kids club.
She will self-denounce.
She will self-identify as a cis-white female ally, woke stir.
Please don't cancel her.
If she throws conservatives under the bus, if she throws her own constituents under the bus, can she still be polite company?
I wonder what people in her downtown Calgary riding would think of her condemning cis straight hetero white males.
Woke Woes: Naomi Wolf's Lockdown Critique00:07:44
I don't know.
Sounds a bit racist to me and a bit desperate.
Here's a prediction.
I predict that before too long, Michelle Rempel-Garner will come out as a liberal.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Welcome back.
Well, I remember last year when we sent a reporter to a massive anti-lockdown protest in Germany, and I'm talking tens of thousands, maybe 100,000 people there.
And to my surprise, the keynote speaker was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in my mind I had associated with left-wing causes, with environmentalism.
Basically, he's from the Kennedy family, as liberal as they come.
And yet there he was speaking out against lockdowns in the company of other dissidents, conservatives.
And I saw Naomi Wolf, an American liberal famous for coaching Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic nominee for the presidential election.
And Naomi Wolf, she came out as a lockdown skeptic, too.
And over the past year, I've realized that the opposition to lockdowns and vaccine passports and forced masks and experimental meds, there have been some don't tread on me conservatives and right-wingers, but there are also people of the left concerned about civil liberties and concerned about natural health.
It's rewired, I think, the political spectrum.
I think it's changed to our audience here is at Rebel News.
And I've started following people on Twitter, for example, I might not have followed before, including the aforementioned people, although Naomi Wolf is now suspended from Twitter for her lockdown skepticism.
One of the people I find very interesting is a criminal defense and civil liberties attorney with the new Civil Liberties Alliance.
And what I like about her is her nickname on Twitter is Lefty Lockdowns because she describes herself as a liberal, at least a former liberal.
And many of her tweets question why people on the left are not fighting the lockdowns, which I think ought to be a liberal position.
Janine Eunice joins us now via Skype from Washington.
What a pleasure to meet you.
I've been following you online.
Welcome to the program.
Tell me, do you consider yourself a liberal at heart or even a lefty?
And if so, why are there so few liberals fighting against lockdowns?
Thank you so much for having me, Ezra.
It's a pleasure to be here.
That's an excellent question and one I wish I had an answer for.
I've been puzzled for over a year now.
I don't understand.
To me, it was quite obvious from the beginning that lockdowns and similar measures would hurt the working class and the poor more than anybody else.
I mean, they're the people who are put out of work.
They're the ones who can't send their kids to private schools.
People in third world countries, you know, vaccine programs were ended when humanitarian workers were pulled out because of, you know, the pandemic.
It's estimated that 130 million additional people are going to face starvation because of supply chain disruptions due to lockdowns around the world.
So in my opinion, it's people who purport to care about the poor, the working class, which is supposed to be the left wing, should be horrified by this.
As for why the liberal left has, in America at least, has sort of gotten on the lockdown train.
I think it was a reaction to Donald Trump because he was a lockdown skeptic early on, or at least he sort of waffled and he indicated he thought it might be not a great idea to lock down.
So I think everyone on the liberal left hates him so much.
He's so reviled that they thought, well, if Donald Trump says X, it must be, you know, negative X.
That doesn't really explain other countries because, you know, for instance, in the UK, Boris Johnson is a conservative, and that's the party that's really implementing these terrible, harsh lockdown measures.
Yeah, I mean, we follow the UK, we follow Australia, which has some of the most extreme lockdowns.
We have a little civil liberties project of our own up here, Janine.
We call it fightthefines.com.
And we've actually taken over 1,000 cases of people who have been hit with massive tickets, typically over $1,000 for something trivial like not wearing a mask.
And one of our civil liberties lawyers said to me the other day that after seeing so many of these cases, he detects a pattern.
They're working class people.
They're disproportionately, frankly, he says, single moms.
And he detects this class element.
And I'm a right-winger.
I don't buy into Marxism.
But, you know, who are getting the tickets?
And by the way, $1,000 or a $1,500 ticket, if you're working class, that can destroy your entire life.
That can break rent.
That can break up a family.
If you're rich, okay, fine.
It's a burden, but it's not devastating.
I really think there is a lockdown class that is snobby, that is supporting the lockdowns as a sign of class.
And it gives them a moral authority to sneer at others, to snitch at others.
They wear the mask as a flag to identify themselves.
Even after they get a vaccine, they still love the mask because they don't want people to think they're free-facing.
I mean, I just think that it is the new identity.
I'm not going to call it a religion.
I'll call it a superstition.
And either you're with the cool kids or you're not.
I think a lot of it is snobbery and classism.
And look at me, I'm sounding like a commie now.
I mean, I couldn't agree more.
I think that's absolutely what it is.
You know, papers like the New York Times that cater to the sort of liberal elite, the Zoom class, the people who can do their jobs from their living room without missing a paycheck.
The New York Times has been fully on board with lockdowns from day one.
They keep misconstruing the science in order to perpetuate support for lockdowns.
It's just, and they run these pieces about actually why working from home is better and how it's.
I mean, what about the people who've been put out of work?
What about the restaurant workers?
What about the single moms you talk about who can't send their kids to school because the public schools are closed?
Well, the private ones are open as they are in New York City.
I mean, it's despicable.
And, you know, I tweeted about this actually today.
I was in a restaurant in D.C. the other last night and I was sitting at the bar and everyone's standing at the bar.
No one's wearing masks, but the servers are wearing masks because they have to, at least according to that restaurant's policy.
And it's like creating this surf class who has to be masked.
And I'm really, I cannot believe that liberal elites are okay with this.
I mean, it suggests to me they've been hypocrites all along, frankly.
Yeah, I mean, it is the, quote, little people who've been hit with this.
I mean, lawyers, fancy people, they can work, like you say, the Zoom class.
They can work from wherever.
They're enjoying their larger homes with their backyards.
Some of them have pools.
Some of them have a country cottage.
If you are a working-class person in a small apartment with no balcony, you're locked.
I mean, in Toronto, the most locked-down city in the world, according to the BBC, there's a lot of people living in small apartments downtown, and yet they close the parks.
So if you don't have a balcony, you're not allowed to go to the parks.
What on earth do you do?
And the gyms are closed unless you're rich enough to have a gym in your house.
Personal Choices Matter00:03:20
I think it's very classic.
But here's what scares me now.
I think that, at least in America, you're moving beyond the harshest lockdowns.
The mask mandates are coming off, except for, as you point out, for the servant class.
But I feel like so many things are pointing to vaccines now, that you're having de facto vaccine passports.
In Canada, they're talking about removing the travel quarantine if you got your two shots.
Everyone else has to have a two-week quarantine.
So again, you'd have to be fabulously wealthy to be able to afford two weeks of lingering.
And here's my question for liberals, and maybe you call yourself a former liberal now.
I think the absolute essential liberal issue for a generation was abortion, pro-choice, personal choice, keep your hands off my body, keep your rosaries off my ovaries.
All this personal autonomy, and doctors can't tell me what to do, and politicians.
And now they're saying take an injection of a med that isn't even fully through its experimental trials yet, that for many people is statistically more dangerous than the virus would be, young, healthy people.
And my God, can you not see these gigantic billion-dollar pharmaceutical companies just licking their lips?
You would think that would get every liberal up off their seats.
These forced injections.
Am I going crazy?
Where are all the liberals?
I wish I had a better answer for you.
It's crazy to me, too.
I mean, this should be, I have very strong opinions about this.
This should absolutely be a personal choice.
People have all sorts of reasons they don't want to get the vaccine.
For instance, I have a friend who has anaphylaxis, and she also has a history of blood clots.
So she did quite a bit of research, spoke to medical professionals, said that both the Pfizer and the Moderna, you know, were risky for her because of the anaphylaxis.
The JNJ is risky for women of her age with the blood clots.
So she doesn't want to get them.
But she lives in New York City where they have a vaccine passport program.
And she also wants to go to France and they're only letting in vaccinated people, apparently.
So she may get it.
And she really doesn't want to.
Another thing is there's quite an evolving body of evidence showing that people who've had COVID, if they get the vaccine, they can have a worse reaction.
In fact, a lot of the episodes of myocarditis and young people are tied to having had COVID before.
So the fact that just this indiscriminate, everybody should get the vaccine, everybody should get the vaccine.
No, we have personal choices for a reason because people are in the best position to evaluate their circumstances themselves and to make this choice themselves.
And I would also, you know, I want to point out because in the United States, at least we have the Supreme Court case called Jacobson, where the Supreme Court said that local authorities could force people, could fine people for not getting the smallpox vaccine.
I mean, smallpox is a very different disease.
It kills approximately 30% of people.
It infects.
It disfigures the rest.
It also doesn't discriminate based on age.
So it presents a risk to everybody.
Whereas COVID really only presents a significant risk if you're over, you know, 70.
So you're forcing people to get a vaccine that, as you noted, is in the experimental stages for something that doesn't even present a risk to them.
Yeah.
I find it very troubling.
Civil Liberties Under Threat00:04:05
At least you have some jurisdictions in the states that are pushing back, in particular, Florida, Texas to a degree.
In Canada, there is not a single jurisdiction, nor either party on the left or the right that is opposed to lockdowns or these authoritarian measures.
It's truly bizarre.
We have a political monoculture up here.
Let me ask you one last question.
You're with the new Civil Liberties Alliance, and we've talked to some of your colleagues there before about other projects.
Basically, you're doing civil liberties work to fight against the overweening power of the state.
Have you guys, can you tell me one or two things you guys are doing to fight the good fight in America?
Yes.
So I actually joined the new Civil Liberties Alliance in order to fight against some of this pandemic-related government overreach.
So I'm working on some interesting things.
I think I'll be more public about that soon.
But we have a number of very interesting cases.
For instance, they've been fighting, some of my colleagues have been fighting the eviction moratoriums, which have been horrible for landlords.
We have other interesting cases against, we have a particularly interesting case against Cornell University that fired a professor or denied him tenure based on sexual assault allegations that he wasn't even permitted any due process.
He wasn't allowed to present evidence that he didn't, you know, and there was substantial evidence he didn't actually do what he was accused of.
So we have quite a few very interesting cases that are geared towards, aimed towards defending people's civil liberties.
And you can learn more about the new Civil Liberties Alliance on our website.
NCLALegal.org.
I know it.
I got this screen open here.
Listen, it's great to talk to you.
It's great to meet you.
I feel like some cranky conservatives, dissidents, people who have that little rattlesnake, don't tread on me flag.
I feel like those kind of ornery people who say, just leave me alone, that idea is no longer just for conservatives anymore.
I think that I enjoy talking to and working with and following people on the left or who used to be on the left who are concerned about these things.
And maybe you're one of them.
And I look forward to following what you do at the NCLA.
And I'm really grateful for your time today.
Thank you so much.
Well, it's so nice to meet you.
There you go.
Janine Eunice from the NCLA, their website again, ncla legal.org.
She's a civil liberties lawyer, and you can follow her on Twitter at leftylockdowns1.
All right, stay with us.
more ahead.
Hey, welcome back on my show last night.
Perry writes, Trudeau again jumps to his conclusions.
Well, listen, he never lets a crisis go to waste.
There is never a murder or a crime involving a Muslim victim that he doesn't immediately weaponize.
And sometimes even hoaxes, like the hijab hoax, you'll remember in Toronto when a schoolgirl said an Asian man was coming up to her and snipping it with scissors.
Turned out to be a hoax, but Trudeau milked it for all it was worth.
Listen, I'm absolutely against violence against Muslim people.
I'm against violence against any people.
But Trudeau seems to love it a little too much for political purposes.
Stephen writes, a tragic story for sure.
I wish for peace among everyone too, but people should wait until the investigation is done and the evidence is in before shooting off their mouths.
I agree, too late for that.
But as I said today, the weirdest is when conservatives have used this moment to say, I renounce everything I am, including who I am genetically and gender-wise and heterosexually.