Ezra Levant counters Stephen Harper’s son Ben for calling his criticism of Jason Kenney’s government "unclassy," exposing Alberta’s vaccine-driven lockdowns—like jailing pastors James Coates (35 days) and Tim Stevens (two weeks post-lift)—while exempting NHL teams, Hollywood productions, and Sky Palace parties. With COVID-19 cases plummeting, Alberta demands 75% child vaccination for school reopenings, ignoring natural immunity and science, as Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff was silenced for opposing CDC policies later adopted. Lockdowns persist despite declining threats, mirroring Pfizer-sponsored "reality show" mandates, while religious freedoms face selective prosecution. The episode frames free speech defense as a critical battle against globalist overreach and eroding trust in public health. [Automatically generated summary]
Ben Harper, Stephen Harper's son, took a shot at me on Twitter, which caught my attention.
I thought I'd reply with a video.
That's today's show.
I think I'm going to pull it from outside the paywall just to have it as part of the public discourse.
But please enjoy it as part of the podcast.
And by the way, the paywall I'm referring to is for what we call Rebel News Plus.
It's the video version of the show.
And I think it's a richer experience in that it lets you use your eyes, not just your ears.
We have quotes, we have tweets, we have video clips, we have little snippets.
We put some effort into it.
So I hope you enjoy it.
And to do that, just become a Rebel News Plus subscriber.
Go to RebelNews.com and click subscribe.
It's eight bucks a month.
No big deal.
You get my show and Sheila's show and David's show and Andrew's show.
I think it's a whale of a deal.
Anyways, here's today's program.
Tonight, Stephen Harper's son says I should show more class and stop my criticisms of Jason Kenney.
Is he right?
It's June 29th 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 buy a public show is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Spontaneous Lockdowns?00:09:40
Alberta had the best government in terms of the lockdown for a very long time.
It resisted the mob mentality that the other provincial governments indulged and briefly that most U.S. states fell into.
I can imagine that must have been hard given that the public health industrial complex is inherently hierarchical and globalist and is based on a culture of obedience, not dissent.
They move in packs.
Bad ideas spread quickly.
They all just repeat each other.
I really don't know why every city and every province even bothers having their own public health officers and a deputy public health officer, literally hundreds of them in Canada, most of them earning mid-six figures.
Dina Hinshaw, the public health bureaucrat in Alberta, makes a whopping $370,000 a year.
That's exactly double what Premier Jason Kenney earns, by the way.
Isn't that weird?
But why do we need 100 of these health scolds if all they do is just read from the same talking points written by the United Nations World Health Organization or Anthony Fauci?
My point is, for the first year, it must have been hard for Alberta to avoid just following along with Teresa Tam and Fauci, especially with the media being such avid lobbyists for total lockdowns.
But Jason Kenney and Alberta held out for quite a while.
You could say they were the Florida of Canada and Jason Kenney was the Ron DeSantis of Canada until they utterly collapsed and capitulated and just handed the reins of government over to the unelected unaccountable health bureaucrats that no one ever heard of until last year.
Just completely collapsed, exhausted, went from the best to the worst.
It's funny because I know a lot of staff in Kenney's office and when I was out west last year before the capitulation, it was from one of them that I learned the term doctator as in a dictator doctor.
I thought it was funny and I thought it was great because like most good jokes, it's true.
Well the doctators had the last laugh, didn't they?
Alberta went from the lightest touch to the heaviest.
I've seen some awful lockdown policings around the world.
I've shown you this horror show before of an Australian mum having a crying child ripped out of her arms and she is thrown in the back of a police van for the non-crime of carrying a sign, dissenting, horrific child abuse.
And you see some ad hoc thuggery.
Well, pretty much everywhere, actually.
I chalk some of it up to unclear laws that aren't really laws.
They're just orders that aren't easy to understand by either citizens or the police.
They change all the time.
The whole situation's stressful.
The bizarre world of police enforcing imaginary things that aren't crimes, like six feet apart, put on your mask instead of, you know, real crimes.
But what I've just described is usually spontaneous problems in the moment that on sober second thought were often apologized for by police chiefs after a calm review.
And I think the worst abuses in the lockdowns were from clueless cops enforcing vague rules and maybe getting carried away.
They were rogue incidents, even though there were a lot of them.
But that does not apply to Alberta.
I mean, yeah, no shortage of thugs with badges like this Calgary cop who bizarrely wasn't immediately sacked.
Get down and watch me.
Why are you on the ground?
Why are you guys dropping?
You guys just need to go.
Why are you guys dropping?
Hey, orcs, orcs, orcs.
Ocean, get on the f ⁇ ing ground.
Get on the ground!
Why are you making it?
Get on the f ⁇ ing ground!
Right now!
Ocean!
Get on the ground!
Ocean!
Completely unprofessional, swearing, out of control, emotional, physically weak, abusive, poor judgment, threatening violence on a kid for skating outdoors on a city rink.
I mean, atrocious, a disgrace, but it wasn't planned, right?
What we've seen from the government of Alberta in the past six months of their doctatorship isn't rogue spontaneous abuse.
It's methodical, planned, the result of high-level meetings, approvals.
It's official.
It's sanctioned.
That's what the Alberta government wants.
It's who they are.
It's the revenge of the nerds.
The public health bullies who were ignored for most of a year now have their way.
So when Pastor Arthur Pavlovsky was arrested after church, it was planned.
Police had been tracking him for weeks.
They knew where his church was, where his home was, but in the end, they chose to swarm him with a massive SWAT team operation.
They pulled him over on the highway for some reason, extracted him from his vehicle, forced him to walk into the middle of the highway, forced him to kneel on his knees, cars whizzing by.
What?
That was not a spontaneous thing.
The Grace Life Church in Edmonton, they never had an outbreak of the disease at all.
But police physically raided the church at dawn, expropriated the building, put latrines on the church property as close to the entrance as they could just to defile the place.
They put up tarps to hide whatever other indiscretions were happening.
And they turned the whole facility into an armed garrison for literally months.
That was not spontaneous.
That was not rogue officers or inexperienced cops making the wrong call.
These are master plans approved at the highest political levels.
Arrests, jail, 35 days in prison for Pastor James Coates in Edmonton.
That was an accident.
Sorry, but that was not an accident.
That was asked for by the government specifically.
He didn't just land in jail for 35 days.
Government lawyers representing the Alberta government taking direction from the health department and Deana Hinshaw asked for him to be jailed for 35 days.
Pastor Coates, Pastor Tim Stevens.
And then Tim Stevens was arrested a second time.
Do you remember this footage?
This is from June 14th, more than two weeks ago.
He's still in prison today.
We're gonna move, okay?
Not too close, not too close.
Okay, guys, step back, please.
Hi, Dad.
I love you very much, okay?
Build this church.
So he's still in prison, and he'll be there for two more weeks, actually.
He will be in prison a month for an offense that does not itself contemplate any jail time.
And more than that, Alberta is boasting that it will finally lift the last of the lockdown rules on Thursday, on Canada Day.
But Alberta government lawyers specifically asked that Tim Stevens, that dad, and pastor, be jailed until his hearing two weeks from now.
What?
What's the public health rationale for that?
Churches, which had special penalties under Alberta lockdown law, by the way, companies like Costco and Walmart were allowed to operate at a certain percentage of their fire code capacity.
So like 15% or 20%, but churches, no matter how large they are, the largest cathedral, one of the mega churches, like there's some churches that hold 2,000 people, they were only allowed a maximum number of 15 people in the church, no matter how large the facility, 15 people.
Oh, unless it was a funeral, in which case it would be 10 people.
Unless the funeral was outdoors, in which case it would be five people.
What?
There's no data or science behind that.
That's just bigotry.
And it was enforced brutally against Christian churches only.
For some reason, NHL teams had full exemptions for them and their entire entourage.
They were even allowed to go to restaurants that you and I weren't.
Hollywood celebrities too.
They were welcome to come to Alberta to film huge productions, hundreds of people, but Canadian pastors in church off to jail.
Even though the lockdown will be lifted in Alberta on Thursday on Canada Day, Pastor Tim Stevens remains in jail and he will remain in jail for two more weeks because shut up.
That's why.
You want an answer?
Shut up is the answer.
Really?
As Oscar Wilde would say, to jail one Christian pastor may be regarded as a misfortune.
To jail two looks like carelessness.
But three pastors jailed now?
Two of them for a month?
And no other jurisdiction in the world has jailed a pastor even once in a lockdown.
Well, some people might start to think that maybe you've got yourself a bit of a bigotry problem.
And indeed, people are asking that very thing.
Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, a rising Republican voice, he wrote a letter to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom asking them to put Canada on their watch list.
So did Scott Walker, the former governor of Wisconsin.
I have personally received an invitation to speak to a group of congressmen in Washington about this.
Can you believe it?
I know that the Canadian political class doesn't care about any of this.
Not one conservative MP has said a word, not one conservative senator, even though they are beyond reprisal from their party leader, let alone any other party.
But the rest of the world thinks we're getting a bit careless with our pastors.
Hell's Carnage00:02:57
Last night, Alberta's health minister, health bureaucrat, it's hard to tell the difference, she was milking the last few days of her unchecked power.
Her dream come true to be a tyrant will be over for her in two days.
She'll go back to being a nobody, a $370,000 a year nobody.
But she was ringing up the last few days.
She tweeted this.
The pandemic is over.
There are a grand total of 39 people in intensive care in the entire province of 4.5 million people.
That's fewer than 1 in 100,000.
And they, as always, have many comorbidities.
They're sick to begin with.
Look, this thing is over.
The party is over.
And yet the province is still under a lockdown today.
Why not lift it right now?
Why not lift it now?
They said they would, by the way, if certain yardsticks were met, they were.
Why not lift it a month ago, three months ago, actually?
I mean, the death toll plummeted really after Christmas.
It was over.
Why didn't she end up before?
She's the boss, and she loves being the boss too much.
That's why.
Here's what I wrote in reply to her tweet, her last 48 hours of power.
I said, your policies have caused far more death than they have saved.
You sentenced hundreds of Albertans to death through depression, suicide, and drug overdoses.
You destroyed thousands of businesses, ruined thousands of marriages.
You are a wicked woman who is going to hell.
Now, I admit that last sentence is a bit of a flourish.
I'm not sure what it means theologically, but I do know the wreckage she has caused to countless lives, countless families.
I know a bit of what Dante thinks hell looks like, but for someone like Dina Hinshaw or Anthony Fauci or Teresa Tam, I imagine that hell would be having to listen to the crying children of Tim Stevens bid their father farewell for eternity, just listening to this.
Bye guys, okay?
Move, okay?
Goodbye.
Not too close, not too close.
Hey, guys, step back, please.
build his church.
I would think that being forced to listen to that and knowing that you caused that and knowing the other pain you caused, the families that were not allowed to be together for a funeral, families that were not allowed to have weddings.
kids that were not allowed to have graduations, children who were not allowed to go to school.
Ben Harper's Critique00:11:18
I imagine that hell for a public health bureaucrat is having to face their own carnage and knowing that they did that.
But who knows?
Maybe Dina Hinshaw would get an enjoyment out of that.
Maybe that is what she gets her kicks from.
After all, she was one who ordered that that be done to Tim Stevens.
She hasn't disowned it.
Why would she find it hellish to listen to that or watch that for eternity?
Maybe that's like her highlight reel of career successes.
We've had a Jumbotron truck driving around Calgary with footage on it of Pastor Tim Stevens being taken away and his crying children, juxtaposed with the image of Alberta's health minister at that Sky Palace party, violating the same lockdown laws that Tim Stevens was being jailed for.
We took the truck with that Jumbotron to the health minister's office.
Oh, he hated it.
He sent security to tell us to leave.
After we deployed that truck and after the U.S. politicians started to write about the pastors in Alberta being jailed, I started getting private messages from old friends who were in the Alberta Premier's office and its wider circle asking us here at Rebel News to call it off, telling us to pipe down now.
I'm not going to name them because their notes were private and they're friends.
But the thing is, it's not over now.
It's not over, is it?
A dad is in jail and he will be for two more weeks.
I didn't do that.
No one else in the world did that.
Why would I stop criticizing that?
If Justin Trudeau did that, would I not be criticizing him too?
Of course I would.
And then I got this tweet from Ben Harper, Stephen Harper's son.
He's grown up now.
He works for Jason Kenney now in the Premier's office.
I haven't seen Ben in a long time since he was a student.
I was surprised that he went to work for Jason Kenney as a political staffer.
I had thought he was on a business path after school to do something more productive in life, but I'm afraid young Ben has become a partisan political pro.
And I suppose the shame on Chandro Jumbotron, plus the U.S. Republican scoldings, plus the incredible plunging opinion polls are probably getting to them.
And so Ben felt compelled to respond to my mean tweet, which is worse, jailing a pastor and father, or my mean tweet about it.
I guess they're both pretty bad, eh?
Anyways, here's what Ben Harper said to me.
In China, Christians who worship outside government-approved boundaries are driven underground, and their leaders are arrested and detained.
While Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, and Falun Gong practitioners are subject to repression and intimidation.
Under our government, Canada has spoken out consistently and emphatically without fear or favor.
Canada defends human rights around the world.
And we have not only spoken out, we have also taken action.
As Canadians, as citizens of a free country, we have a solemn duty.
As Sir Wilford Laurier once said, and I quote, we should always remember this.
Le Canada et Libre et la liberté et nationalité.
Canada is free and freedom is its nationality.
Oh, sorry, that's not what Ben Harper said.
They mean that's what Stephen Harper said about religious freedom when he was prime minister.
Sorry, here's what Ben Harper tweeted to me.
Sorry, my mistake.
That's what Jason Kenney tweeted about churches being bullied by police.
Here, let me find the Ben Harper one.
Okay, here it is.
Just like the perpetual lockdown crowd, no data to back up ridiculous, unhinged claims, show some class.
Albertans were well served by Dina Hinshaw's data-driven approach.
Glad clickbait-driven extremists on both sides were ignored.
Well, yeah, no, Ben, there is a lot of data about how lockdowns kill.
They kill through suicides.
They kill through drug addiction and overdoses.
They kill through mortality and morbidity of poverty.
As in, once you're poor, everything gets worse.
Regular health is worse.
Cancer surgeries are canceled.
The stabilities of marriages fall apart under lockdown.
Depression.
This is not my opinion.
As I showed on the program the other day, Statistics Canada made it clear for the first few months of the pandemic, according to Statistics Canada, excess deaths, as they called it, were amongst senior citizens dying from COVID.
It's true, for the first part of the year, but then the excess deaths were the young people dying from the lockdowns.
That's your data, Ben.
But I'm open to data.
Open to science.
I'd like to know what science or medicine or data says.
NHL teams can meet with their whole entourage, but not churches.
That Walmarts and Costco's have a percentage of their capacity, say 30% of their fire code, but the churches can only have an absolute number of 15 people, no matter how large they are, 10 people for a funeral and 5 if it's outdoors.
Where's the math for that, Ben?
Where's the data for that, Ben?
The government was asked.
St. Dina Hinshaw was asked.
In the course of their prosecution of that Emton pastor James Coates, they were asked to justify their data.
And a year after the lockdowns, Hinshaw's official position to the judge was that she needed more time to get the data together to show why Coates had to be jailed.
So yeah, we're all waiting to learn what that data is, Ben.
What's the data behind jailing Tim Stevens even now after the lockdown is being lifted, Ben?
But that's not what really bugs me.
I sort of like the fact that Ben Harper is showing some political loyalty to his boss, Jason Kenny.
Loyalty is a good thing generally.
I wish he'd attack the left as vigorously as he attacks the right and calls us extreme.
But it's tough to say where being a lockdownist puts you on a political spectrum anymore, doesn't it?
Is that right-wing?
Is that left-wing?
But what bugged me was this line, show some class.
Show some class.
And he called me an extremist.
Really, Ben?
Am I not classy enough?
I'm too low-class for you, Ben.
I'm not high-class.
I'm not fancy.
I'm not part of the establishment.
I think you're right.
I'm not part of the NHL class that's exempt.
I'm not a millionaire hockey player, a billionaire hockey owner.
I'm not part of the Hollywood movies that for some reason had a data-driven exemption from Dina Hinshaw, the politicians, the lobbyists, the bureaucrats who have these Sky Palace parties with $50 bottles of booze.
It is true I'm not classy enough for that, Ben.
It is true.
I'm what the Brits would call middle class.
I'm not working class.
I'm not high class.
My dad was a doctor.
I've got a law degree.
But I went to a public high school, a normal university.
I work for a living.
I'm not high class, that's for sure.
I use the wrong fork most of the time.
But you know, I'm old enough, Ben, and I come from Calgary.
So I actually know your parents, Ben.
I knew them each before they were married to each other.
Did you know that?
Lorene Teske and Stephen Harper, and I know them a bit.
And they're not high class either.
Your mom, Lorene, is pretty plain spoken.
She likes being outdoors, motorbikes, guns.
I remember she had a party for a book launch for me at 24 Sussex Drive.
It was a pizza party.
Seriously.
24 Sussex Drive, a pizza party, not catered hors d'oeuvres.
Stephen Harper, is he high-class Ben?
He fired a cabinet minister who ordered a $16 orange juice from a hotel mini bar.
Your mom and dad were not elitists.
They were the opposite.
They were attacked mercilessly as being low-class hillbillies, cowboys, unsophisticated, grubby populists.
They were called extremists too.
It's just weird hearing those insults from their son, the same insults that were used against them for years, extremists, low-class.
But it's funny.
When I was a kid, I was 21, when I knew Lorene and Stephen separately, when the old Mulrooney Tories and then the Kim Campbell Tories were in their final death throes, 1993, that's how old I am.
And they still had power those final months.
They still had donors.
And back then, corporations could make huge donations.
So the federal PC party was actually very rich and powerful, or so it seemed, right before they lost every seat except two.
But it was all just the Palace Guard, the loyalists who had nothing to offer in terms of policy or ideas, but they had connections and money for the remaining time.
That's how this all feels to me.
Don't criticize the United Conservative Party.
That's low class and extremist.
Yeah, I guess it is.
I wasn't invited up to the Sky Palace to have a shot of $50 booze and look down on the ants below scurrying around and order up the police chief to round up some pastors to deter the others.
It's true, Ben, I'm low class, certainly lower than you think you are, but I know where you come from, Ben, even if you've forgotten.
I looked at who liked and retweeted young Ben.
I was curious and I was struck by something, how much that list was dominated by lobbyists.
I'm serious.
There were no grassroots conservatives, at least not many.
No party workers, the type of folks who door knock a thousand doors, who spend a hundred hours putting up lawn signs, people who work out of love and belief in policy, not money, not lobbyists.
Not a lot of grassroots conservatives, but an awful lot of those hangers on.
The ones who will milk the system to the last moment.
The folks who were there from Mulroney and Kim Campbell, right to the end in 1993.
Lobbyists, lobbyists, lobbyists, lobbyists, people who know that Jason Kenney and his lockdownists aren't conservative anymore.
People who know getting re-elected will be a challenge, if it's even possible.
People who know they've lost their ideological way, but these lobbyists can still make a buck off their connections for at least another year or two.
And so they want to signal to Ben, who works for Kenny, that they're on his side here.
And they're not low class either.
They're high class like you, Ben.
So can he please answer their emails and return their phone calls about some scheme they're trying to sell or some procurement contract they're trying to land or some appointment they're trying to finagle.
I don't know.
I actually like Ben Harper, even if you can't tell.
Or at least I like the young student he was when I last spoke with him years ago.
But his dad stood for something and stood against something.
Stephen Harper was a real conservative and he hated the political media industrial complex, the permanent bureaucracy.
I don't think he would be white-knighting for public health officials who violate liberty with a smile.
Who knows?
Maybe Stephen Harper has become a swamp creature in his retirement too.
Vaccines, Politics, and Skepticism00:14:56
I don't think so, but maybe.
I just have a tough time believing that the great conservative prime minister who set up an office for religious freedom would also send police to arrest pastors again and again and again and jail them for months and pass rules that specifically punish churches.
I don't believe it.
And again, I wouldn't have believed it that Jason Kenney would either.
stay with us for more.
Well, the pandemic, or more precisely, the political response to it, the authoritarianism of the lockdowns, has rearranged, I think, some political coalitions.
People who I think would call themselves the civil liberties left or the civil liberties liberals have found that they're not really in sync with many of the lockdownist politicians who call themselves liberal or democrat or in Canada, every single political party.
And so I'm paying attention to voices that, frankly, I didn't listen to before or I didn't even know about before.
And one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter is Janine Yunus.
She's a lawyer with the new Civil Liberties Alliance.
Let me just read to you three of her tweets in a row.
Tweets are very short, but I think she says a lot here.
I long considered vaccines among humanity's greatest achievements.
I look forward to the COVID vax and I assumed I would get it.
Before I became eligible, I got COVID, so I decided not to.
Based on events that transpired, I have since become profoundly skeptical because of one, the complete disregard for natural immunity.
Two, the push to vaccinate everyone, even children to whom the virus poses almost no risk and upon whom the vax hasn't been adequately tested.
Three, the media and Centers for Disease Control's rush to depict negative events from the vax as outliers and mild, which is the polar opposite of the approach both the media and the CDC took with respect to COVID deaths.
And four, mandating vaccines in order to participate in society, attend university, go to work, etc.
Call me crazy.
I don't think I am.
Well, I don't think she is either.
Janine Eunice joins us now via Skype from the Washington, D.C. Arika Jean, great to see you again.
I'm really enjoying your tweets.
Have you always grappled with...
Tell us a little bit more about you.
We've interviewed you once before.
Do you come from a political background?
Are you a liberal activist?
Were you always a civil libertarian on the left?
Where did you come from?
Thank you so much for having me back, Esir.
It's a pleasure to be here.
I considered myself a leftist for a long time, although I've always had a pretty strong civil liberties streak.
So I found myself clashing over the years with some of my fellow leftists on free speech issues, especially free speech on campus.
I didn't agree with a lot of the people who were taken down during the Me Too movement.
Not that I don't think the Me Too movement had some good aspects and beneficial aspects, but I didn't like the way that people's careers were being destroyed a lot of times without thinking in a more nuanced fashion.
So I would call myself a leftist civil libertarian, I guess, or something like that.
You know, I've been introduced to a lot of true liberal thinkers in the last year.
I think I mentioned in our last conversation, whether it's Naomi Wolf or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., people, frankly, I didn't pay attention to before.
And I find it very heartening that there are people on the left who are truly concerned.
Let me give you an example.
For a generation, for two generations, my body, my choice, you know, my healthcare privacy, it's between me, my doctor, and God.
These are some frays.
Keep your rosaries off my ovaries.
These are some of the slogans of the left, the cultural left, when it came to medical questions or public interest in abortion rights.
And yet I see this zeal, not just to get everyone jabbed, but to know about that most private health moment, to demand people to answer questions about it, to prove it, and that their status in life will depend on it.
What happened to the My Body, My Choice people?
I don't know.
That's certainly not what's going on now.
And I do want to clarify when I say when I said I was skeptical in that tweet, I'm not skeptical of vaccines generally.
And I'm not, it seems to me that evidence shows that this is a good vaccine.
It helps a lot of vulnerable people.
What I'm skeptical of is the media's depiction of it and the CDCs.
I don't think we're getting an accurate picture.
And that has made me look for information outside of those sources.
So, you know, this is, at least in America, the vaccine is only approved for under an emergency use authorization.
It's sort of what's, you know, it's used in emergencies.
It doesn't go through the full clinical trial testing.
And, you know, we're seeing these incidents in children, especially of myocarditis.
And they just haven't, there's just this sort of rush to dismiss them and to say, oh, but everyone should still get the vaccine.
Everyone should still get the vaccine.
It should be a personal choice one makes with one's doctor.
Everybody has different circumstances.
For instance, having had COVID was one of mine that led me to decide not to get the vaccine.
Yeah.
And, you know, allergies, I was reading the World Health Organization's statement on vaccines and kids just last week.
And they changed it overnight.
At first, they said they weren't recommended for kids.
And then they changed it without a note, without a clarification, without an explanation, to say that it was recommended for kids sort of in some cases.
And then they had some strange language about if supplies warrant and if other people get it first.
I don't know what supplies or other people getting it first has to do with whether or not it's safe.
But I just don't think that the World Health Organization or the CDC are apolitical anymore.
I don't know if they ever were now that I think about it.
But they seem so political that their politics is tied to their medicine is tied to their politics.
Exactly.
And I mean, I'm concerned about what this will do in terms of trust in public health establishment going forward.
I mean, people aren't stupid.
People know that if you say everyone must get the vaccine right now, you know, indiscriminately, they know that's not true.
We know there are some people who shouldn't get the vaccine.
It seems, you know, with children, they face almost no risk of a severe outcome from COVID.
So there should be more assessment going on.
And I think this is creating more vaccine skepticism and may lead to really bad outcomes with diseases where we really want people to get vaccinated, like measles.
So I don't think this is wise from a public health perspective at all, taking a long view.
Yeah, Canada is being really weird on this.
I mean, Justin Trudeau's first instinct was to sign a deal with the Chinese vaccine manufacturer, which is just crazy, but that's a classic Trudeau move.
So Canada was so far behind other countries in getting a Western produced supply.
And then supplies were so limited.
So you can see a lot of their rules.
It just so obviously the science has followed the politics.
For example, the amount of time between a first and second dose.
Canada just expanded it.
It was so obvious that was to cover up for the fact there wasn't enough supply.
And then mixing and matching first, second, and maybe here come third vaccines, one from each maker, they're turning that into a plus in Canada.
And I just, I mean, I feel like I see through it, and you say it's building doubt in public health institutions.
I think it's madness to have doctors say whatever politicians want them to say, but it's happening.
And I don't know.
I just, I'm concerned by how blindly people are following advice that looks on the face of it to be absurd.
Like it's good to mix and match vaccines.
How could that, I mean, listen, I'm not a doctor or a virologist or immunologist, but that's pretty clearly what you say when you've run out of vaccine number one and have a lot of vaccine number two.
That's just what it looks like to me.
Yeah, that definitely seems to be the case.
And another disturbing thing that's happening is that dissenting voices are really being silenced.
For instance, one major example is Martin Kuldorf, who is a friend of mine and is one of the best vaccine safety specialists and epidemiologists in the world.
He's of Harvard.
He's at Harvard.
And he was kicked off of a working committee of the CDC because he thought actually that the Johnson ⁇ Johnson vaccine shouldn't be suspended.
So just because he voiced a dissenting opinion, which the CDC then adopted a few days later, they let him go.
And I think we're just seeing a real silencing of people who dissent on these issues.
And it's really disturbing.
So we're not really getting real information.
And I don't feel at this point like I know where to get real information.
Yeah.
I mean, I understand being concerned about things that are dangerous.
How many people are in intensive care?
how many people are dying from the virus if we can trust the measurements because how you label a death a COVID death is subject to politics too.
But let's say we accept the definitions.
In the Canadian province of Quebec, I see that cases, and again, that's something else altogether, are at a 10-month low.
And across Canada, the cases are plummeting, deaths are plummeting.
And so the new standard by which politicians are saying we'll only let you get back to normal is not who's sick.
It's not who's very sick in ICU.
And it's certainly not who's dying.
Their new standard is completely unmoored from health outcomes.
It's now, will you take the vaccine or not?
So it's unrelated to the problem we were supposed to be solving.
And now it's just we need to get 75%.
Quebec, for example, they just sent a letter out to all kids in the province saying if we don't get 75% of kids 12 to 17 getting double doses, there'll be masks in schools and no extracurricular activities.
Got nothing to do with kids' health outcomes, everything to do with kids taking a jab.
I feel like I'm in a reality show sponsored by Pfizer.
I feel like everything I hear is a drug ad as opposed to fixing a problem.
Yeah, that's absolutely.
And it was very similar in New York too where, you know, it was, well, we can get back to normal when 70% of people are vaccinated.
I've been saying something similar.
Like, I feel like I've been in a Black Mirror episode for the past 15 months.
I just, I don't understand what's happening.
And yeah, this, I mean, this idea that it's tied to case, the whole case issue, you know, should never have been a thing.
It should have been about hospital capacity.
And if we really had to lock down for a short time for hospital capacity, that could be up for debate.
But this idea, you know, what Britain is doing, Australia going back into lockdown, I mean, just constantly, it's crazy.
It's crazy that we've forgotten what life is about, in my opinion.
Yeah, I'm worried about it.
I see Israel, which boasted about having the highest vax rate.
Now they have a zero COVID prime minister.
They're going, they're talking about lockdowns again.
I just, I'm worried about things.
But I'm worried about the fact that as the disease recedes in terms of its actual danger, governments, at least in some places like Canada, are getting more and more extreme in their demands.
It's almost like they're trying to offset the banality or the normalcy of real life with increased stringency politically just to keep the lockdowns going.
What gets me is how many people are buying into this as if it's just proof of their virtue.
I don't know.
What is it about people who want the lockdowns to continue just morally and aesthetically and politically and stylistically, not for any health reasons?
They just love this lockdown life.
Who the heck are they?
Well, I think a lot of introverts, maybe.
And then I think a lot of people actually really liked it.
I mean, if you're a middle class, upper middle class professional, you can do your job from your computer.
A lot of people really just don't want to be in the office, actually.
So I think, you know, we've created this associating morality with supporting lockdowns and staying home and blah, blah.
And I think a lot of people are like, well, that's what I want to do anyway.
And now I can see moral while doing it and shame other people for wanting to live their lives.
You know, it's a very bizarre thing that's happened.
I wish I could understand it.
I really don't.
Yeah, I don't get it.
I see the strangest masks in the strangest places and people, I don't know.
I just, I think that we are seeing a new division, a new camps emerge.
I don't think it's traditional left-wing and right-wing, but I think this is rearranging politics along a psychological line.
I mean, there's class issues too.
You talked about middle-class people who are just loving it, who haven't lost a day's pay.
Maybe they haven't even worked and they're still getting paid.
I find we're entering into a worse era now.
It's not even about a virus anymore.
It's about lockdownism.
I hope we can talk to you some more.
I like reading your point of view.
I follow you on Twitter.
Lefty Lockdowns One is your Twitter account.
And I hope we can talk to you more in the days and weeks and months ahead.
Thank you so much, Ezra.
All right, great to see you again.
There's Janine Eunice from the new Civil Liberties Alliance.
She joined us via Skype from Washington, D.C. Stay with us.
Moorhead.
Welcome back on my show last night.
Bruce writes, Climate Barbie is proof that politically driven affirmative action is a terrible idea.
You're so right.
Listen, I just want to show you one quick thing.
This is from the Toronto Star.
They had this loving goodbye to her.
And they had this tweet I just want to show you.
Climate Barbie's Green Lie00:01:45
It was promoted by Twitter.
How she boasted about fighting against Trump on climate.
And that was one of her proudest moments.
But I checked.
Here's the greenhouse gas emissions inventory, as they call it, for Canada and the United States.
The last data is 2018-2019.
Canada increased its global warming emissions 2018-2019.
America reduced it.
Donald Trump is better on climate change than Trudeau and McKenna, even though he never bragged about it or made it a priority.
Isn't that weird?
It's almost like you can't trust the media.
James writes, we stand behind all our pastors standing for religious freedom, God before government always.
Well, I just find it really odd that the churches weren't just prosecuted.
They were prosecuted in a punitive way, that the rules were specifically worse for churches than for Costco's.
And even now that Alberta is lifting the last lockdown rules, Pastor Tim Stevens will rot in jail for two more weeks.
Why?
Isn't it over?
Why is he in jail?
Why are you locking him up still?
JT writes, sad, Canada is no longer a free country.
They will make up laws to shut up any word they deem they don't like.
Well, you know, I think the words themselves, the last tool we have, you know, the saying, take away all my freedoms, but leave me with freedom of speech, and with it, I'll win back the others.
I've heard that said before, and I think it's true.
It's a strategic freedom upon which all the others are based, which is why they're coming for it.
Well, we'll do our best to fight.
I hope you go to stopc36.com.
Last I checked, we had over 20,000 people signing that petition.