Ezra Levant exposes Justin Trudeau’s pro-China Senate leadership, with Liberal-aligned Senator Yuan Pao Wu pushing Beijing’s "output legitimacy" narrative while undermining Western democratic values. Wu’s speech mirrors Chinese state rhetoric, and his role in hostage diplomacy—Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor—highlights Canada’s compliance risks. Levant criticizes China’s WTO obstruction on canola seeds, Hong Kong crackdowns, and Confucius Institutes in universities, while condemning Canada’s erasure of history, like Sir John A.’s statue removal and $10 bill defacement. The episode ties Trudeau’s silence to systemic weakness, warning that appeasement and cancel culture erode national identity and strength. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello my rebels, I've got a crazy story for you today, but I'm going to start with a question and it's, I'm not going to call it a trivia question because it's not a trivial thing.
Can you name the leader of Canada's majority in the Senate, our version of Chuck Schumer?
You probably know who Chuck Schumer is.
Do you know who Trudeau's leader in the Senate is?
Do you know?
And if you don't know, why not?
And isn't that odd?
I'll tell you who he is, and I'll tell you what he's saying, and it's not good.
Before I get to that, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
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All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, it has been 933 days since China kidnapped two Canadian citizens, and Justin Trudeau is more pro-China than ever.
It's June 30th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is government a lot of households is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Do you know who the leader of the Canadian Senate is?
It's a weird question to ask Canadians.
I think it would be like asking Canadians to name judges on the Supreme Court, as in these people have real power over us, the courts especially, and yet I'm quite sure we know more about the U.S. counterparts than our own Canadian institutions.
You probably know that Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House in Congress.
Can you name the Speaker of the House of Commons in Canada?
You've probably heard of Chuck Schumer, the majority leader of the Senate.
I bet you've heard of Clarence Thomas, the U.S. Supreme Court judge.
Can you name their Canadian counterparts?
Why not?
Are they not more important to your own life?
Now, I don't blame you.
I have to Google it too.
I think the answer is we don't have the same political accountability that they do in the U.S. Every Supreme Court judge down there is subjected to tremendous scrutiny before they're confirmed.
And by the way, they're not all confirmed, which is incredible that the president can have his choice said no to.
In Canada, it's a fait accompli.
It's a phone call by the prime minister, and whoever makes that decision is probably not Trudeau, probably someone besides Trudeau.
We'll never know.
It's just a phone call.
It's done.
And the Senate, same thing.
They're appointed for life in Canada to age 75.
They don't have as much power as an MP in Canada, but they do have some power.
They can amend bills, introduce bills, slow bills down, really gum things up.
And this is something I discovered.
Canadian senators are actually treated like a big deal in other countries that don't know how much of a joke our own Senate can be, especially the United States.
You're a U.S. Senator.
There are only 100 of you in a country of about a third of a billion people.
Only two per state, right?
It's a very powerful office.
Huge Senate staff, huge power.
A senator speaks, people listen.
Joe Biden came from the Senate.
Carla Harris came from the Senate.
Bernie Sanders, I'd have to check, but I don't think a Canadian prime minister ever came from our Senate.
It's a joke by comparison, isn't it?
But Americans don't know that.
So some political boob from Canada shows up in the States with a business card that says Senator on it and it's real, and they get treated like a somebody.
I'm trying to remember which Canadian senator told me about that, but he really chuckled about the red carpet treatment he got more in the U.S. than in Canada itself, where we know who our senators are.
But I blame the media, mainly, for not properly scrutinizing our Supreme Court and our Senate.
They don't criticize the Senate for the same reason they don't criticize anything in the government.
Most journalists are bought by Trudeau through the CBC or rented through the newspaper bailout.
So they can't really criticize the government.
And of course, prime ministers have a habit of making occasional Senate appointments from the media.
All you have to do is appoint one journalist every few years, and that's enough to keep another 100 journalists well-trained, aiming to please you, looking for that lifelong patronage gig for themselves.
Not a thankless task, it's a taskless thanks.
And on the Supreme Court side, because judges are appointed without scrutiny, we miss an opportunity to look into them, to get to know them.
And because Canadian judges are so uniformly leftist and radically activist, why would journalists want to scrutinize them anyways?
They simply do through court rulings that which elected politicians are too squeamish to do or loath to do for political reasons.
The worst decisions in Canada are made by the courts, precisely because the elected politicians hand those problems over to judges.
Investigation Into Wuhan Virus Origin00:05:24
Remember, it was a judge, Beverly McLaughlin, who first denounced Canada as a genocidal nation.
Just one of a string of atrocious things from Beverly McLaughlin.
I should point out that she retired from our Supreme Court, but she's taken a job, if you can believe it, on Hong Kong's high court.
And she remains on it to this day, despite China turning Hong Kong into a little outpost of its dictatorship, arresting Democratic opposition leaders, arresting newspaper editors, shutting down media outlets.
Beverly McLaughlin condemned Canada as genocidal, but she hasn't said as much about China itself.
Either what they did in Xinjiang to the Muslim Uyghur minority or what they're doing in real time in Hong Kong.
Is she really that compromised?
Or is she just like her friend Justin Trudeau?
Is communist China just a place she really admires?
The level of admiration I actually have for China.
So gross.
But my point is, McLaughlin said it, and then Trudeau said it.
He says we're actually still committing a genocide, present tense.
And the thing is, once your own country's leaders, the top judge, the prime minister, denounce your own country as a genocidal regime, how can you really object when other countries throw that back in your face?
Like this.
Canada has been shifting the blame since the remains of 215 Indigenous children were found at the site of a former residential school.
When will investigation begin?
When will compensation be paid?
When will systemic measures against racism be adopted?
That's China here.
Listen to their official message from Beijing.
Not long ago, the remains of 250 Indigenous Canadian children were discovered at the site of a former residential school.
We noted that despite calling the discovery heartbreaking and shameful, the Canadian government tried to shirk its responsibility, citing that relevant investigations are rejected by the Catholic Church and said it hopes the church will assume the responsibility.
Such crocodile tears expose the hypocrisy of the Canadian government and lack of sincerity and courage in the face of its own notorious human rights record.
Now, we'd like to ask the Canadian side, when will it start an investigation?
When will it make compensations?
When will it rule out systemic measures to end racial discrimination?
If Justin Trudeau regularly says Canada is racist, Canadians are racist, Sir John A. MacDonald was racist, that Canada committed a racist genocide.
He says all these things are ongoing too, by the way.
In fact, they're so bad we need to censor our internet because Canadians are so racist they can't be trusted.
Can you really blame a foreign dictator for throwing that back in our face?
But back to my point.
Do you know who the leader of our Senate is?
Our version of Chuck Schumer, the leader of the majority in the Canadian Senate.
Well, it's this guy, Senator Yuan Pao Wu, appointed by Justin Trudeau to the Senate.
So of course he's a Trudeau man through and through, but you know what Trudeau did in the Senate, right?
He renamed his senators the Independent Senators Group.
So they don't call themselves liberals, but they are not independent.
They are liberal.
They vote Trudeau's party line.
They were appointed by Trudeau.
The fact that Canada's media report them as independent shows how weak the media is, how untrustworthy.
But did you know that Senator Yuan Paw Wu is the head of the biggest party in the Senate, the Liberals?
They call themselves the Independent Senate Group, but it's the Liberals.
Did you know he's the head of it?
He's our Chuck Schumer.
I don't think one in a thousand Canadians know that.
They don't even know who he is, let alone that he's a boss.
But they should, because he's quite something.
And he's on a real tear lately.
You know, I checked, and it's been 933 days as of today that China kidnapped two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spaefor.
933 days.
China's a dictatorship.
It's a rogue country.
I think we can stop pretending that the Wuhan virus was naturally occurring now.
I mean, now that Trump is gone, even Hollywood liberals are stating the obvious.
There's a chance that this was created in a lab.
There's an investigation.
A chance?
Oh my God, there's evidence I'd love to hear.
There's a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China.
What do we do?
Oh, you know who we could ask?
The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab.
The disease is the same name as the lab.
Yeah, it's a tough question.
Is China worse in how it treats its own people, or is it worse in how it treats the rest of the world?
That's a tough question.
No matter what your measure is, China is atrocious.
Corruption, military threats, environmental pollution, civil liberties being crushed, racism, whatever.
It's tough to say what the worst part of it is.
Input Democracy Legitimacy00:06:58
But here's what Senator Yuan Pao Wu said in the Senate very recently.
He is our majority leader in our Senate.
Here is Trudeau's man in the Senate.
Listen to him.
Well, as political theorists will remind us, there are two kinds of state legitimacy.
There's input legitimacy and there's output legitimacy.
In the West, we tend to place much more emphasis on input legitimacy, which is essentially about how we select our representatives.
Hence, our focus, rightly so, on free and fair elections.
But in practice, citizens also confer legitimacy to the governments based on the results that are produced by that government.
That is to say, on outputs.
Now, like most of you, I was brought up in the orthodoxy that input democracy through free and fair elections will in the long run outperform because citizens can always vote out a government that has not performed and in that way seek to improve outputs by changing the inputs.
But we are learning the hard way.
The democratic elections and changes in government over decades have not consistently produced better outcomes for citizens in many industrialized economies.
Sure, there has been economic growth, but income and wealth inequality have increased with stagnating median incomes and growing societal tension.
That is the reason for what is now widely observed to be the problem of a democratic deficit in some Western industrialized economies and the rise of populist leaders who have illiberal instincts but nevertheless command much support through democratic elections.
Let me be clear.
I much prefer the vagaries of democratic choice to the certainty of authoritarian rule.
But we cannot be smug about our preference for input legitimacy as the only way to validate state power.
And we cannot deny that the Chinese state has its own claim to a kind of legitimacy, even if we don't like it.
And that was just a short excerpt.
Was that speech actually written in Beijing?
I mean, that's exactly what Beijing itself says.
It's just weird hearing it in stereo from this year, from Beijing, and this year from the Canadian Senate.
That's Trudeau's majority leader in Canada's Senate.
He has some interesting views.
I mean, look at this in the Globe Mail.
Senator warns China might not free Spavor and Covrig in Hmong Deal if Canada does not, and Canada not part of EFR.
So he's warning us, we have to do what China says, we have to pay the political ransom.
I mean, look at this.
Mr. Wu has previously played a role in back-channel diplomacy between Canada and China and says he wants to do what he can to help bring about the release of Mr. Covrig and Mr. Spavor.
I am plugged into the discussions around these issues.
He said there is a risk a future U.S. deal to free Ms. Hmong could be misinterpreted on the Chinese side as a problem that was resolved purely by DC in Beijing without Canada.
The resolution of the Hmong Wanzo issue may not, I am really sad to say, may not facilitate a resolution of the Spavor-Kovrig issue, Mr. Wu told a Carleton University webinar last week.
So hang on, he's not an ambassador.
He's not with the foreign ministry.
He's not a diplomat.
He gives Beijing speeches almost verbatim in the Canadian Senate.
And he's doing back-channel diplomacy with China about the hostages, back-channel diplomacy.
Can I ask whose side he's representing?
I'm not joking, you just heard whose side.
He's telling us what China is going to do to us if we don't capitulate.
This is an editorial cartoon published by Xinhua.
Xinhua is in China.
It's a propaganda agency.
Their focus is on Chinese things.
They publish in Chinese.
Who told them that it would be politically useful for them to do a cartoon in English targeting Trudeau on the Indian residential school issue right now?
I guess I'm wondering which came first, Senator Wu or Xinhua.
Who was following whom?
How can this man be in the Canadian Senate at all?
That's baffling to me.
But how is that he is Trudeau's majority leader in the Senate?
Trudeau's main man, and the man all the other liberal senators follow.
Even the CBC state broadcaster thinks maybe he's just a bit over the top.
Oh, just a teeny bit.
In a provocative speech in the upper house on Monday, Independent Senators Group leader Senator Yuan Pao Wu said Canada should avoid criticizing China for its human rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims because our country has mistreated indigenous peoples.
Echoing an argument made by Chinese officials at the UN last week, Wu said China's policy toward the Muslim minority in Xinjiang province is similar to the colonialism directed at Indigenous peoples in this country and that condemning the Asian country in harsh terms would be gratuitous and simply an exercise in labeling.
Yeah guys, when the CBC says you're a bit too into Beijing, it's time to rethink things a bit.
Pull back a little.
Real question, why do we even have diplomatic relations with China?
Are we succeeding diplomatically in any way?
Not with Covrig and Spay War, but with anything?
Here's a story from Hong Kong.
China blocks Canadian move to set up World Trade Organization probe into serious negative canola seed restrictions.
China suspended imports of canola seeds from two firms in March 2019 while also making shipments from other Canadian firms subject to enhanced inspections.
But at Monday's meeting of the World Trade Organization Dispute Settlement Body, China blocked Canada's first request to establish a panel to investigate the restrictions.
Oh, okay.
So total diplomatic failure there.
Hong Kong is shutting down the last vestiges of freedom for media and politicians.
So total failure on the human rights front.
Oh, not just Hong Kong, elsewhere too.
Chinese censorship founded Australian University Rights Group.
High numbers of Chinese students at Australian universities have created an environment of self-censorship with lecturers avoiding criticism of Beijing and Chinese students staying silent in fear of harassment, Human Rights Watch said.
Concerns About Historical Erasure00:13:20
We know that happens in Canada too.
We've spoken to some of the victims.
And look at this from Canada, as published in the Apocaly Times.
Chinese Communist Party agents had access to private information to New Brunswick students through Confucius Institutes.
Confucius Institutes, if you don't know them, are Chinese propaganda ministries on campuses around the world answering to Beijing.
They're in Canadian universities to recruit kids, propagandized students.
Why haven't they all been kicked out?
I mean, those two Michaels have been kept hostage for 933 days.
Why weren't these Confucius Institutes kicked out 932 days ago?
All these ambassadors and diplomats and military assays and spies, attachés and spies, why weren't they kicked out like 931 days ago?
Why Chinese nationals in our institutions like that virus lab in Winnipeg?
Why are the liberals covering up the facts about that?
Why?
Are you kidding?
Why?
Because the level of admiration I actually have for China.
Why?
That's why.
Stay with us for more.
Well, I tell you, sometimes avalanches come quite quickly from a single flake of snow.
I remember it wasn't long ago when the city of Victoria had a sneaky decision to remove the statue of Sir John A. MacDonald from their town.
The decision was done in a sneaky way and the attempt to remove it without anyone seeing was done in a sneaky way.
But our friend Aaron Gunn found out about it and he brought this shocking video coverage to the world when it happened.
Today is a sad day for Victoria.
It's a sad day for British Columbia.
And it's a sad day for Canada.
Right behind me, a statue of our first Prime Minister, Sir John A. MacDonald, is being torn down.
This follows the order given by Mayor Lisa Helps and her cronies on City Council to tear down this piece of our history without public consultation and without public debate.
And they're doing it early in the morning, purposely denying supporters of Canada's founding father the opportunity to gather in his defense later today.
Is this the kind of society we want to live in?
One that tears down our past instead of building our future?
One that uses our history to divide us rather than bring us together?
And where does it end?
Does the city of Victoria, named after Britain's imperial queen, have to be renamed?
How about the province of British Columbia?
Must we judge all our historical figures based solely on their faults and not their accomplishments?
Viewing their actions and beliefs through the lens of our century and not their own.
The architect of Confederation and visionary behind Canada's National Railway, Sir John A. certainly was not a perfect prime minister, but he was probably our most important and is ranked consistently by historians as one of Canada's greatest leaders.
His statue is a tribute not only to him, but to the nation of which he helped give birth.
A nation that would serve the world for the next 150 years, however imperfectly, as a force for good, as a force for tolerance, and a force for freedom.
But this is not the end of our fight.
It is just the beginning.
This October, there are municipal elections here in Victoria.
It's time to elect a new mayor and council that respects Victoria's past, Canada's history, and our nation's tomorrow.
That was shocking back then, but now a week doesn't go by when some statue is taken down, some Canadian icon is smashed.
I don't quite know yet what will replace it, but Canada is being cancelled.
And the man who recorded that first incident of a Sir John A. statue being taken down, Aaron Gunn, joined us now via Skype.
Aaron, you're an independent journalist and I commend you for ringing the alarm bell early.
I don't think enough people took it seriously.
Now, entire schools are being named.
They're talking about renaming streets in Toronto.
They've already purged Sir John A. MacDonald from the $10 bill.
I'm worried they're literally canceling Canada, our history, and frankly, a lot of our people.
Yeah, thank you for having me, Ezra.
I think you hit the nail on the head.
I think the floodgates have been opened.
You saw it, or at least I saw it coming a couple years ago.
And it's the kind of thing where something that would have been satire five years ago is now our new reality that we're forced to live in.
We have a prime minister who slanders and degrades his own country.
We have a premier here in BC that does the same thing.
And I think Canadians need to wake up to the fact that this is happening and that it's dangerous.
Because if we start tearing down our shared history and our shared culture, that's what really holds us together as a country.
Well, and you can't judge the past through the morality of the present.
Otherwise, every culture in society will fail.
Even Jesus, even Moses.
I mean, we are built on the past.
And that's not to say we can't get better.
And by the way, imagine a generation from now what they'll say about certain things that we do now.
It's just not a way to live.
Let me show you a short-term consequence of this.
I mean, it went very quick from Chief Justice Beverly McLaughlin saying that Canada was a genocide state to Trudeau saying that to guess what?
Now the Chinese government is saying that about us when we raise concerns about their real concentration camps and labor camps and internment camps in the Xinjiang region of China, they're clapping back at us saying, hey, you yourself say you've committed genocide.
Fix your own problems first.
It's being thrown back in our face.
It's removed our moral authority.
I think, frankly, Trudeau put that on himself and he put it on the rest of us.
He's undermined Canada's moral authority.
Yeah, I don't think it'd be hard-pressed to find another case in world history where a country has so viciously attacked itself with these repeated rounds of self-flagellation than what's been happening here in Canada.
You're right, it's undermined our moral authority abroad.
China's laughing at us.
We continue to draw bizarrely false equivalencies with some of the mistakes we made in our past with the truly horrific things that have happened in world history.
You know, talked about the Cultural Revolution in China, the Holocaust, all these other real genocides that have happened.
So I think you're exactly right.
And look, here in British Columbia and again in Edmonton today, they're lighting churches on fire.
They've burned down five churches to the ground, and there's been barely a word from our politicians.
You think it's maybe time that we acknowledge and point out the obvious that we have a serious problem with the radical left in this country.
Yeah.
Well, that's a great point.
You know, the irony there, we were talking about it on the show the other day.
Trudeau has introduced an anti-hate speech bill that's really targeting social media.
Like it says right in there, it's focused on the internet.
And we've heard from Stephen Gilbo, he's going to focus on Facebook and YouTube.
But we have real hate crimes, real arson against real property.
And these are the center of a lot of these communities.
The church is not just a religious place.
It's a community center.
It's for life cycle events.
You've got this crime wave across the country of real crime.
Not a peep from the federal government, but they're going after mean tweets on Facebook.
It's shocking to me.
You know, the good news there, and there is a little bit of good news, is that severely normal Canadians aren't buying it.
I see in a poll, most Canadians don't want to cancel Canada Day.
We talk to people all the time, we call them streeters, who just do man on the street interviews.
I find that new immigrants to Canada, they love Canada.
That's why they came here.
They just came here from somewhere presumably not as good.
So they're not into this disparage Canada thing.
So I think the hope, as Orwell would say, is with the proles.
The hope is with ordinary people.
It's the luxury class that has the time and money to sit around and engage in these abstract debates about a perfect utopia.
And of course, we don't match up.
I think they're the ones who hate Canada the most.
I think severely normal people realize we're in one of the best countries.
I don't think you could ask any of these critics, so where would you rather live?
I don't think any of them actually know of a place they'd rather go.
Utopia means impossible place.
There is no perfect place.
Yeah, I don't know if there's another place they would rather go in the world or at another point in history.
We really do it pretty well in Canada.
This is a country that we can all be proud of, that we should all be flying the flag proudly on Canada Day.
But I think it is important to note that there are some of these people that you mentioned, Ezra, that have all this time on their hands that are completely diluted with reality and jumping on this bandwagon.
But I think there is another group of people, an even smaller group of people, that know exactly what they're doing that are purposely undermining the history and institutions and the stories we tell ourselves in this country because they want to almost soften the ground before they make their push to really radically transform and tear down our institutions.
And I think that is a political motivation.
And I think they know what they're doing.
They know they're spreading misinformation.
They know they're taking things out of context, but they're doing so with a political purpose.
And I think that makes them all the more dangerous.
I think you're very, very right on that.
Let me ask you one more thing.
I remember when I was a younger man, how the Liberal Party co-opted the symbols of patriotism.
I mean, you can go back two generations to when the flag, the country's flag, they called it the Pearson pennant because it so resembled the liberal colors.
And under the Cretchin administration, the flag was sort of proof of liberal largesse.
The sponsorship scandal in Quebec was basically the federal government flooding money into the province to buy the hearts and minds of Quebecers, so they didn't vote to separate.
It was sort of a panic move.
And where you saw a Canadian flag, you saw money vote liberal.
You know, as a right-winger growing up in Alberta, I resented the fact they were co-opting the symbols of patriotism, but it was, you got to admit, it's pretty smart.
Here we are, not too many years later, and Justin Trudeau is commanding that the federal, you know, the flag on the peace tower of parliament fly at half-mast.
He's ripping John A. McDonnell off the $10 bill.
The Liberal Party itself sounds like it's rejecting at least the symbols of Canada, if not Canada itself.
I just find it remarkable because when I was growing up, it irked me as a conservative: hey, why do the liberals always get the symbols of the country?
I'm a patriot too.
I'm conservative, though.
Now the liberals are just saying, no, no, you can have that stupid maple leaf flag.
You can have your Canada.
I find that incredible.
I wonder what Pierre Trudeau himself would say about it.
Yeah, they're trying, they're seemingly content with branding themselves as the un-Canadian party.
I think this is a big opening for someone else or the Conservative Party to step up and offer an alternative, which they really need to do.
But yeah, I think there's, look, there's a group of people within the Liberal Party, a large group of people, and in the political left more generally, that basically want the country's history to start in 1970 or whenever Pierre Trudeau was first elected, and think everything else before that has to be recanted and apologized for.
And I think that's outrageous because, I mean, this country, this is a country that was formed in the battlefields of Bemi Ridge on the beaches of Juneau that came together in Confederation through a process of negotiation and compromise, unlike probably any other country in the world, that has always been at the forefront of the PAC.
Did it act in the 1800s like a country in the 1800s?
Of course.
But I think this attempt, as you said, to continue to undermine this country and its symbols is dangerous.
And there should be political consequences and backlash to it.
If no one else is stepping up at the plate and offering alternative, there won't be, unfortunately.
Ben Harper's Stand00:04:59
Yeah, good point.
Hey, it's great to catch up with you, and I love following you on Twitter, for example.
You're really fighting the fight, for example, on this crime wave of churches being burnt.
Let me ask you, don't give anything away confidential.
I know you're a man with your own timing and things like that.
But what projects are you working on?
What are you up to next?
I just love seeing you do your independent journalism.
It was you who caught that Sir John A. statue coming down.
What should we be looking for from Aaron Gunn in the rest of the year?
Yeah, we got we're just wrapping up filming on season two of Politics Explained, which is the online show that I produce.
So that'll be released over the course of the summer.
And of course, there are still people encouraging me to jump into politics here provincially for the leadership of the confusingly named BC Liberal Party.
It's the right right-leaning party here in British Columbia.
And that is a decision.
We're going to have a little announcement on it on Canada Day, but we're going to make a final decision over the course of the summer on that front as well.
Well, that's very exciting.
I can hardly wait to see what you do next.
Whatever it is, I'm sure we'll want to cover it.
You have a rare courage and independent streak, which, my God, we need that in Canada more than ever.
Take care, my friend, and please stay in touch.
Thanks, Ezra.
You too.
All right, there you have it.
Aaron Gunn, independent journalist, and he says he's got an announcement coming up as soon as tomorrow.
We'll be careful to watch for that.
Stay with us.
More ahead.
Hey, welcome back on my show last night.
Dave writes, Ben, another up-and-coming liberal light.
I don't know.
I mean, I think he's probably just in a bunker mentality.
The Conservative Party, the UCP of Alberta, is behind in the polls.
How is that even possible?
It's behind Rachel Notley, the socialist destroyer.
How is that even possible?
They can't believe it.
They were so good on the lockdown for like the first half, and now they're terrible.
So they've lost both the left and the right.
They don't know what's going on.
Nothing's working for them.
So they've just, I think they've gone into a bunker mentality.
They were in denial.
But I think once those American Republicans, the senator and the former governor, wait in, I think they're sort of panicking.
They have a year or two before the next election.
If an election were held now, they would lose.
And that's pretty incredible.
So I think they're sort of in panic mode.
Jeff writes, Ben Harper, young man, you've just shown the rest of us low-class Canadians what you're made of.
You know, I think that's what bugged me about him.
I knew Stephen Harper when I was a kid.
Like literally, I was a teenager when I met him.
And his wife, too, Lorene Harper.
In fact, I still call her Lorene Teske sometimes, her maiden name.
I knew both Stephen Harper and Lorene before they were married.
Individually, I knew them both.
And they were sort of this young couple in the Reform Party.
And I'm a few years younger than them both, but not too much younger.
And I remember what was said about them.
They called Stephen Harper an extremist, obviously, always have, always, always will.
The mean left, the attacky left.
And they called his mom.
They didn't talk about her too much, but they called her plain and a yokel.
And I don't know if they used the word low class, but that's what they meant.
She was a country girl and she shot a gun and she rode a motorcycle and she was a little bit of a tomboy, even I'd say.
And I say that in a good way.
But she wasn't like a fancy pants, you know, urban lefty progressive.
So to have Ben Harper use the language that was used against his own parents, extremist, low class, who the hell are you?
You think you're going to get some pass from the fancy people if you denounce me?
You think suddenly they're going to call you classy?
You think suddenly they're going to let you get a cool kids club pass?
That's what bugged me about.
I mean, I don't care that he disagrees with me.
I disagree with him.
Well, can we, we disagree all the time.
But it was his choice of epithets that were super gross.
Richard writes, right on Azure, I really enjoyed this show.
Good stuff.
Yeah, well, listen, I just, it irked me because I have a family tie there.
I mean, not my family.
I knew, I haven't talked to Stephen Harper in a while.
And once in a while, I chat with Lorene on Twitter.
But I don't know, just sort of there was something there that didn't feel disloyal to me and felt disloyal to his own family, if you get my meaning.
That's the show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, good night.