Ezra Levant reveals Canada’s $14.2M foreign aid to China—just 4% of Canadians know—funding projects like Uyghur rights advocacy ($18K) while holding two Canadians captive for 970 days. He questions Trudeau’s subservience, citing McCallum’s "More, more, more" remark and a staged teddy bear photo op, and slams CCP abuses. Meanwhile, a class-action lawsuit targets Facebook, Google, Twitter CEOs over alleged censorship collusion with authoritarian regimes, referencing Trump’s election lawsuits and Frank Giustra’s defamation win against Twitter in Canada. The episode ties aid, espionage, and tech complicity to a broader pattern of Western appeasement toward China’s expanding influence. [Automatically generated summary]
That's one of the few independent media left in this country.
They go through Canadian foreign aid to China.
Did you even know we were sending foreign aid to China?
I'll have the details for you from them.
Before I get there, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
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All right, here's today's show.
Tonight, did you know Canada gives foreign aid to China?
That's how bad things are.
It's July 8th, 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 to the government will watch is because it's my bloody right to do so.
There aren't a lot of independent media in Canada, but a small company based in Ottawa called Blacklocks.ca is one of them.
They're not cheap, subscriptions more than $300 a year, but they just plain old cover news that others don't.
Sometimes it's with real scoops that they root out, but sometimes it's simply by reporting what everyone else is ignoring that's just lying right in plain sight.
This is one of those stories.
You can see it on their website here.
Aid to China is little known, as in foreign aid from Canada.
Did you know Canada gives foreign aid to China?
Depending on how you measure it, China is either the biggest economy in the world or the second biggest economy in the world, next only to the United States.
Input Legitimacy Conflicts00:04:39
They're an authoritarian dictatorship.
They're a cruel one-party state.
They're militaristic.
They threaten their neighbors and the world.
They abuse their own citizens, especially ethnic minorities, like the Uyghur Muslims, like Tibetans.
They are the worst espionage threat to the West in history.
Far worse than the Soviets.
Their spying isn't just military secrets, but commercial and technological secrets too.
Huawei was basically built by hacking into Canada's once-upon-a-time tech giant Nortel.
Remember them?
China is the worst country in the world, politically, militarily.
North Korea is a hermit kingdom.
It's more totalitarian, but smaller.
And it's a colony of China.
Iran is more irrational, but it sells oil to China.
Somalia and Libya are failed states, but China's 1.4 billion people.
Like the Soviet Union, most of their citizens are victims.
It's really the Chinese Communist Party that is evil.
And the victims, the first victims of the Chinese Communist Party are the Chinese people themselves.
But they hate Taiwan.
They hate India.
They're at war with India.
They threaten war against Taiwan.
Through their proxy, North Korea, they threaten war against others, South Korea, Japan.
They hate America and they seek to replace it as the world's dominant power.
But lately, the Chinese Communist Party has taken a hatred to Canada too.
Because if you can believe that, Justin Trudeau was just not obedient enough and submissive enough for their taste.
That is hard to believe.
I mean, how can you be more submissive than this?
There's a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime.
And this is Trudeau's right-hand man in the Senate who he personally appointed.
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.
I mean here's John McCallum, Trudeau's former ambassador to China, telling you his strategy for negotiating with China.
Within 24 hours of arriving in China, I was invited to present my credentials to President Xi Jinping.
And I conveyed to him a message from our Prime Minister that can be summarized in three words.
More, more, more.
Or in Mandarin, Gengdua, Gengdua, Gengdua.
Canada's Tax Dollars to China00:07:11
So how could the Chinese Communist Party possibly quarrel with such an obedient country as Canada?
Well, because Canadian police arrested the daughter of a very important man in China, the daughter of the Huawei president, in fact.
And unlike in China, here in Canada we don't just call up police and tell them to release someone because their daddy is important.
Well, actually that is how it works sometimes.
My little brother Michi died about 20 years ago in an avalanche accident.
But six months before he was driving back home from the West Coast across the country and he got in a terrible, terrible car accident and his truck tumbled and a secrets box went flying across the highway.
And when the police were helping him clean up and tow, they opened up the secrets box and there's a couple of joints inside.
So he was charged with possession.
When he got back home to Montreal, my dad said, okay, don't worry about it.
reached out to his friends in the legal community, got the best possible lawyer, and was very confident that we were going to be able to make those charges go away.
We were able to do that because we had resources, my dad had a couple connections, and we were confident that my little brother wasn't going to be saddled with a criminal record for life.
Frankly, it's amazing that Trudeau just hasn't done that, though I wouldn't rule out him doing it eventually.
So China is pouting and having a temper tantrum against Canada.
I've shown you things that Chinese propaganda outlets have been publishing in recent days.
Here's a shocking one, the latest really taking a run at Trudeau on Indian residential schools.
They mock him, and I think it stings him.
They're not enough to stop Trudeau from, you know, being Trudeau.
Look at this official release from the Trudeau campaign.
He was literally doing a staged photo op in an Indian cemetery.
He was posed with a teddy bear that I presume he brought with him as a prop.
He literally brought a professional campaign photographer and a teddy bear prop to do a fashion shoot, a political photo shoot on the graves of Indian children.
You know, on this issue, maybe China actually has his number.
Speaking of numbers, the number is 51.
That's the number of boil water advisories in Canada, mainly Indian reserves where you just can't drink the water.
Which brings me to the story of the day, just lying out there unreported until blacklocks got to it.
Few Canadians, only 4%, are aware Canada is still sending foreign aid to China, according to a Department of Foreign Affairs survey.
Millions in aid last year included money for local Chinese projects on empowerment and environmental justice.
I knew that we were giving money in foreign aid to China, but I didn't know the details of it, did you?
Asked, when thinking about Canada helping people in the developing countries, how does it make you feel?
35% replied, it feels good.
13% replied, we need to look after Canadians.
5% said, it depends on the country getting aid.
Those are interesting answers, and those are good questions, but I wonder if it had been phrased a bit differently, like China and its dictatorship have been holding two Canadian hostages, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, for nearly a thousand days.
Given that, how appropriate is it for Canada to send $14.2 million of your tax dollars in foreign aid to China?
I'm kidding, that would be called a push-poll.
People would be too furious to answer it in an unbiased way.
But it goes to the fact that no one actually talks about either part of that.
The two Michaels still being held in jail almost a thousand days now, and the fact that we give money to Canada, the richest to China, the richest or second richest country in the world.
I'll read more.
Federal agencies paid out a total of $6.5 billion in foreign aid worldwide last year.
According to a statistical report on international assistance, a total of 4.2 million went to China.
I wonder how many clean drinking water wells you could dig for $14.2 million on Indian reserves in Canada.
I'll read more.
Cabinet, in a separate inquiry of ministry table in the House of Commons, detailed a portion of Chinese aid, a total of $941,000 in grants awarded through a Canada Fund for Local Initiatives.
The fund provides modest funding for small-scale but high-impact projects, said the inquiry.
Spending included $37,000 to foster dialogue on the challenges of young female offenders in China.
$31,000 on empowerment to help low-income single mothers and girls grow up happily.
Is that all it takes?
$30,000 on enhancing environmental justice and ecological restoration.
$18,000 to advocate equal reproductive rights for non-married women and lesbians.
And $1,200 for increasing understanding of sanitation workers.
That's real.
That's not something from The Onion or the Babylon Bee satire sites.
Foster dialogue on the challenges of young female offenders.
Does that include China's definition of offenders, like young women in the Uyghur concentration camps?
Empowerment to help single moms and girls to grow off happily.
How about some of that happiness here in Canada, where moms and girls have been flattened for 18 months by pandemic lockdowns caused by China's virus and exacerbated by Trudeau's rules?
Advocating for lesbians in China.
Again, would that include Tibetans or people in Hong Kong?
Are you kidding me?
You know what?
You can't, I don't think we can give any more foreign aid.
I just don't think we can't.
We're too broke in Canada.
We're broker than China, that's for sure.
They actually have all the money.
I'm not kidding.
They literally have trillions with a T of dollars in foreign currency reserves.
They've got all the money.
We owe them money.
Maybe we shouldn't be giving them foreign aid.
Maybe they should be giving us foreign aid.
No more foreign aid.
It only gets siphoned off by local bosses.
Do you really think that sanitation worker understanding grant wasn't just put in the pocket of some local Chinese Communist Party boss?
How about let's help Canadians?
And you know what?
I'm for treating people the same regardless of their race or, you know, whether they're lesbians or sanitation workers or whatever.
That said, I'd be happy to agree to spend it on getting clean water to Indian reserves first.
Let's do that first.
Something Trudeau said was his top priority five years ago, but as the Chinese propaganda accurately says, that's just another lie.
Stay with us for more.
Section 230 Controversy00:12:42
Today, in conjunction with the America First Policy Institute, I'm filing as the lead class representative a major class action lawsuit against the big tech giants.
including Facebook, Google, and Twitter, as well as their CEOs, Mark Zuckerberg, Sunder Boche, and Jack Dorsey.
Three real nice guys.
That's a clip of Donald Trump announcing that he is suing the big social media companies, the big tech companies.
He made that announcement this week.
And joining us now to talk about it is our friend Alan Bokhari, the senior tech editor at Breitbart.com, who wrote an article called Donald Trump to Sue Masters of the Universe.
Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg.
Alan, great to see you again.
I look forward to talking about this.
Whenever I think of this, I can't help but think he had four years as president where he controlled at least one branch of the government.
For a period he controlled two branches of the government, you might say.
He didn't need to sue.
He could have done something, and now he has no more power than you and me.
He's just going to court.
I find it, I look at this and I think, okay, I'm glad he's suing, but what a missed opportunity.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's good that he's suing and something may come of it.
I mean, you know, we talked earlier this year about Clarence Thomas coming out and saying that the Supreme Court might need to make a ruling on tech censorship at some point, which is really, you know, says a lot because the Supreme Court rarely does that.
And conservative justices especially rarely do that, saying they're going to have to make a ruling on this issue that hasn't been decided by legislators yet.
And that, you know, speaks to the fact that this has been going on for five years now, big tech just obliterating the First Amendment rights of Americans.
And both the Trump administration and Republicans and Congress failed to do anything about it when they could have done.
So hopefully the lawsuit does well.
It's going to be difficult with Section 230 still on the books, of course, but it's also possible that it gets to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court just says, okay, enough is enough.
You guys haven't fixed this, so we will.
Yeah.
Well, I want to look at who the lawsuit is emanating from.
And I'm not sure if the lawsuit itself has been filed or if it's just an announcement.
Your story says the lawsuit will be spearheaded by the America First Policy Institute, a group founded by Trump administration alumni, Brooke Rollins and Lyndon McMahon.
So I'm not sure if it's been filed yet.
Do you know if the document has actually been lodged to the court?
That I don't know.
I haven't seen the document yet.
I do know that it makes an argument which is slightly different to previous lawsuits against the tech companies, most previous lawsuits, that is, which is that the tech companies colluded with the state because they were taking advice from public health officials, which obviously takes it beyond the realm of a private company.
And it's more a case of the state and private companies colluding.
And that makes it more of a First Amendment issue.
So that's an interesting argument, and we'll see where that goes.
Yeah.
The reason I ask about the law firm is that I know that a lot of Donald Trump's challenges to elections issues.
Now, you got to take critics with a grain of salt because there's a lot of bad faith critics when Trump is involved.
But I'm not sure if he had the finest legal minds in America behind those challenges to election irregularities.
Maybe he did, but I'm unfamiliar with the America First Policy Institute.
Maybe they are the best and they have the best arguments.
But if you're going to take on the mightiest, richest corporations in America, Twitter, Facebook, who have unlimited funds to hire not just the best lawyers, but to hire all the best lawyers, you'd better be going in there with the sharpest knives in the drawer.
Maybe the America First Policy Institute has those, but without knowing more, I'm nervous because I saw, you know, I think of some of the more colorful legal claims that were made between November and January by Trump's team, and a lot of them fell apart under scrutiny.
Yes, and, you know, the America First Policy Institute, Brooke Rollins, they're primarily known as one as good fundraisers, which I suppose is good if you're going up against the tech giants.
Two, for being in the orbit of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.
And, you know, that's not exactly a compliment in MAGA circles, but you can certainly say that the crowd is maybe a little bit more competent than some of the people who were involved in the election challenges.
I do know that there are some pretty decent legal minds who have advised the case, people who know their stuck on this issue.
So hopefully it won't be a whole clown show.
But even if it's like even if it's a really solid case with really solid lawyers behind it, it's still going to run into this Section 230 issue.
And it didn't need to be that way because Trump being a Florida citizen could have taken advantage of some Florida law against tech censorship.
There was a Florida law against tech censorship, but one, it didn't regulate the tech companies as common carriers or places of public accommodation, as Clarence Thomas advised.
And it was, you know, as a result of that, it was, you know, knocked down by a federal judge.
He was a Clinton-appointed judge, and, you know, he would have tried the same thing if it was a common carrier bill or a public accommodation bill.
But I think it would have been hard of him to do that if it were the case.
Now, just I'm a former lawyer myself, but I'm not an expert in what common carrier means.
That's basically when, for example, there's a freight train going or a phone company.
They have to let you on for the same fee you pay everyone else.
It's basically a way to stop monopolies from...
If I had to guess without looking it up, it's probably the kind of thing that was brought in after the oligopolies.
The great robber barons said, well, I own this rail line and I'm not letting you put your coal on my rail line because I'm trying to bankrupt you.
It might, that's...
If I had to guess, that's where common carrier law probably has some of its policy roots.
So basically, am I right in understanding common carrier means if you've got a standard?
Yeah, that is correct.
If an airline's fallen with this category as well, it's a type of business that's expected to provide its services to all customers on reasonable, non-discriminatory grounds.
Yeah.
Well, I tell you, I sure hope someone does something because every day the censorship gets more and more brutal.
And just, I mean, we've talked about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which when it was passed decades ago, was designed to protect internet companies from legal liability for things they didn't know about.
And basically, you brought something to their attention if it was obscenity, really.
I mean, you could see it writing there in the name of the law, the Communications Decency Act.
If there was obscenity on their system, you brought it to their attention.
They could take it down and be immune from liability both for putting it up in the first place and, second of all, for taking it down.
That's a very reasonable thing to do.
But the fact that that is being used to justify censorship in 2021 is so far from the original intent of that section.
I can't be.
And it also justifies defamation.
I mean, Wikipedia uses this law as well.
If there's one company that I think should be liable for defamation, it's Wikipedia.
Arguably the most powerful publisher in the world, yet it's still claiming to be a platform under this law.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
Let me just throw something at you.
I don't know if you know this, but there is a Canadian mining magnate who's actually in the orbit of the Clintons.
His name is Frank Giustra.
And he's a pretty wealthy guy, and he donated a ton of dough to the Clinton foundations.
I don't know that much about him, but I know that he's a donor to the Clintons.
That tells me a lot.
He was defamed on Twitter repeatedly.
And he sued Twitter in Vancouver, Canada for defamation.
And they argued Section 230.
And the judge said, you're not in Kansas anymore, Toto, or really, you're not in America.
Section 230 is an American law.
We're in Canada.
You defame this man in Vancouver.
He has the right to sue in Vancouver for the damages done to him in Vancouver.
Doesn't have to go down to California and have the where you get the benefit of the First Amendment or you have the benefit of Section 230.
I'm sure that that will be appealed all the way to our Supreme Court because imagine what would happen to Twitter, YouTube, Google, Facebook if this caught on and you could sue in non-free speech jurisdictions.
I believe in free speech, by the way, Alan, but the absolutely unrestricted partisan bias of these companies.
I'm not a Frank Juster fan, but I think that's an important win for accountability against these tech giants.
Arguably so, yes.
I mean, I think there's a case to be made for social media platforms to have some sort of liability shield for hosting content.
I think in the case of Wikipedia, it's completely different because Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.
That's how it brands itself.
It publishes things and it still hides behind section.
And it's, you know, the biggest defamer on the internet, in my view.
Its results appear right at the top of Google, Google results.
And you've probably seen how it talks about Rebel News, Breitbart News, any conservative, just, you know, all these articles just laden with smears.
So I think it should be liable for that.
It's interesting, you mentioned that the judge in Vancouver said you're not going to be covered by Section 230 because one of the provisions of USMCA is a Section 230, essentially a clone of Section 230.
It's in the USMCA trade agreement.
And, you know, I published a lot of articles criticizing that at the time because, of course, the Trump administration that got USMCA through.
So we'll see if that gets brought into proceedings at higher courts.
Yeah, very interesting.
Well, I tell you, Wikipedia is just the most politically malicious site on the internet.
And it is powerful precisely because it has this patina of authority.
Oh, it's an encyclopedia.
This must be true.
I've actually attended events by friends and allies where they read my Wikipedia page as my introduction or parts of it.
I thought, oh, my God, you're reading the absolute worst smears of me.
And because they think, well, it's just normal.
That's Wikipedia.
Very interesting.
Well, listen, Alam, great to talk to you again.
I know you're the guy to follow on this.
Let me just mention that the twinkle of hope, and you throw to this in the end of your article, is Florida, where you have a Trumpian governor who is maybe a little bit more organized and maybe a little bit more systemic.
And he is using the levers of power.
He's not wasting time.
I'm talking about Governor Ron DeSantis.
It may be that that first law regulating tech company has had flaws in it.
But if I am reading Ron DeSantis correctly, he is tenacious enough to redo it and to make a run at the tech companies.
And if you have enough states doing it, Florida, Texas, et cetera, you might even get some progress.
You know, in a way, we're relying on Ron DeSantis as a little junior president right now.
Governor Ron DeSantis' Tech Regulation Push00:03:14
Last word to you, Alam.
Yeah, I agree with that.
Republicans should look to their states, look to their state representatives to get this problem fixed because it certainly won't happen from the federal government in the next four years.
Yeah.
Well, Alam, great to see you again, folks.
You can check out the article on Breitbart.com.
It's called Donald Trump to Sue Masters of the Universe, Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg.
And isn't that the truth?
Alam, take care.
Thanks again.
All right.
Cheers.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
On my show last night, John writes, hey Ezra, why don't you hire Wendy?
That way she can learn what real journalism is about.
Well, I'm not going to hire a serial racist like that.
I'm not going to hire someone who goes around dropping the N-word.
I might get in trouble.
And the next Wendy Mensley would ask me questions about why I'm hiring some alt-right, you know, foul-mouthed N-word dropper.
You know, I was talking to our producer editor, Justin, earlier in the day, and I was remarking on my own late grandfather, who was from the silent generation, the generation that, you know, World War II.
And I'm thinking back a generation now, but he would say the word Japs.
And I was sort of, oh, tense every time he said it, because you don't say that.
But you know what?
For the generation that grew up in World War II, that was the disparaging word for the Japanese.
And it's not a nice word, but that's the entire culture said that.
It was part of, you know, Allied propaganda against Japan.
And you wouldn't judge someone who grew up in the war and those were the language and he fought.
I mean, for those who fought.
Wendy Mesley is not much older than me, and she grew up in the most progressive liberal place, 40 years at the CBC.
So she doesn't have the excuse of someone, you know, born in the 1910s kind of thing.
She has no excuse for dropping the N-bomb repeatedly in the year 2020 in the CBC.
I mean, I'm not disparaging my late grandfather at all.
I'm just remarking what generational terms are different.
I mean, what's Wendy Mesley's excuse for dropping the N-word in the year 2020 as a progressive activist at the CBC?
There's no excuse for it.
Chris writes, Wendy was bitten by her own snake.
Oh, exactly.
I have no sympathy for her.
Her entire existence at the CBC, besides some payoff to Peter Mansbridge, some pension for his ex, was to smear conservatives as racists.
So to see her taken down by that, I'm sorry, I have no sympathy left.
But more to the point, even in her goodbye letter yesterday, she was refusing to call herself an anti-canceler.
She said her life was about canceling injustice.
That's sort of weird.
How do you say that's your life's goal and then complain when you yourself are canceled?