Ezra Levant compares Austria’s Nazi history to modern vaccine mandates and police-enforced lockdowns, like ADF-run quarantine camps in Australia’s Punjari and Rockhol. Austria’s policies—jail for non-compliance, "unclean underclass" rhetoric—mirror Nazi escalation, while Alberta’s UCP, led by Jason Kenney, reversed its stance on vaccine passports despite earlier opposition, now targeting high-risk venues where 90% of ICU patients are unvaccinated. With 83% of platform promises fulfilled and over 1,600 delegates at a hastily organized AGM, Alberta’s economic recovery hinges on compliance, raising concerns about permanent state overreach and eroding freedoms. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I show you what's going on in Austria, and I'll show you what's going on in Australia, and how there's echoes, especially in Austria, of what that country did 80 years ago.
It's almost like it's a muscle memory for authoritarianism.
I wonder how far it'll go.
I wonder if the fact that we see it in color with all sorts of nuance means we hear it differently than if we saw it in grainy black and white footage.
I wonder if our guard is down because it doesn't look old-time, and we never could have another Nazi state, could we?
I mean, that's just unthinkable, right?
I'll give you my thoughts on it.
We'll also talk to our friend Andrew Lawton about the same thing.
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Okay, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, Australia and Austria.
I'm glad I don't live in either one, and I'll show you why.
It's November 22nd, 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 don't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is government.
of a wire publisher is because it's my bloody right to do so austria and australia There's a joke about that.
Here's the opening scene from one of my favorite movies of all time called Dumb and Dumber.
Austria's Accountability Crisis00:10:49
Excuse me.
Could you tell me how to get to the medical school?
I'm supposed to be doing a lecture in about 20 minutes, and my driver is a bit lost.
You go straight ahead, and you make the left over to bridge.
That's a lovely accent you have.
New Jersey?
Austria.
Austria?
Well, then.
Good day, mate.
Let's put another shrimp on the barbecue.
Let's not.
Austria is the country where Adolf Hitler was born.
Austria knows what Nazis are like.
I mean, it learned the hard way, didn't it?
What happens when you demonize your fellow citizens when you declare an unclean underclass, Untermenschen in German.
Of all the countries in the world to bring in police searches for your papers, I think Austria feels just a little too cliché, doesn't it?
Or maybe it's precisely because they've done it before that it comes a bit too naturally, like muscle memory, like riding a bike.
You never really forget how to do it.
Have you ever heard of this book, Explaining Hitler, the Search for the Origins of His Evil?
That's a picture of baby Hitler on the cover, which is something you could think about for hours.
Was that little baby evil?
Of course not.
It was a baby.
When did Hitler become Hitler?
Was it when he was a boy, a teen, a man?
Or later?
Was it inevitable?
You perhaps heard of the thought experiment.
If he could go back in time and kill baby Hitler before he set the world on fire, would you do it?
It's a bit harder to do when you see a cute little baby like that.
I won't answer that question now, but let me quote to you something that Ron Rosenbaum, the brilliant author behind that book, said.
He wrote an update to the book more recently before Rosenbaum went crazy about Donald Trump.
He thought about modern Nazism, including Iran and its threat to the Jews.
Here's what he said.
Let me read to you from the LA Review of Books a few years back.
Before Auschwitz, Kurtes writes, Auschwitz was unimaginable.
That is no longer so today, because Auschwitz, in fact, occurred.
It has now been established in our imaginations as a firm possibility.
What we were able to imagine, especially because it once was, can be again.
That chilling last sentence tempts me into a discussion of the contentious Second Holocaust controversy, one I stirred up when I wrote an essay essentially saying what Kurtes was saying.
No matter how many times and how many Jews and non-Jews aver never again, it can happen again.
The only thing that has changed is that now we know that it can happen at all.
So that's Ron Rosenbaum.
Of course, he's right.
The unthinkable was thought.
It's no longer impossible or unimaginable.
And in fact, is it not more likely because of technology?
Let me read some more.
In fact, Rosenfeld, a far more learned figure on the subject, devotes the final section of his book to taking up and elaborating upon the necessity of confronting the potential for a second Holocaust, as has the Israeli historian Benny Morris, who mordantly observed that this time a second Holocaust would be much easier to accomplish.
A single thermonuclear weapon could kill six million Israeli Jews in six seconds on a strike on Tel Aviv rather than the six years it took Hitler.
Wow, I'll stop talking about Jews in the Holocaust, but I'll talk about the war against civil liberties and civilization in general.
The authoritarian instinct, the power of propaganda and social control.
Put aside the Jews.
Focus on the Nazism.
Do you see Rosenbaum's point and the point of others he quotes?
It was done once, so it is more likely to be done a second time than not at all, once you think the thought.
And the technology to do it now, unimaginably powerful.
A single nuclear bomb, not a six-year war.
Now apply that to the technology of oppression.
Again, put aside the Jews.
There really aren't a lot of Jews left in Austria today.
There were just under 200,000 Jews at the start of the Holocaust.
Today there are fewer than 10,000 Jews.
So what's being done to Austria isn't about Jews or anti-Semitism.
It's about power and control and authoritarianism against everyone of every religion and race.
There aren't enough Jews to hate, really, but the unvaccinated are the new Jews, the dirty people, the unclean ones, jeopardizing the rest of us.
And what's in the verse?
Who's going to stop that?
If this were said in North Korea or Iran or Venezuela or Russia a couple years ago, wouldn't there be congressional hearings about it?
Justin Trudeau, well, not him, but someone else saying they care.
I mean, the UN is fine with tyranny, but how about those in the West who still actually claim to care a bit about freedom and liberalism?
But it's tough for the West, including America, to lecture the world on lockdowns and forced medical procedures and civil liberties and factions when America and the West is home to so many of the same things.
At least in the States, there are some objectors.
In Canada, the entire national establishment is complicit.
That's Austria reverting to a caricature of itself.
I love Austria.
I've been there twice, once as a teenager and once on my way to Iraq a few years ago.
What a contrast that was.
Vienna, the centre of Western culture, opera, art, architecture, so beautiful.
And then I went on to Erbil, the city in Iraq that is a pile of terrorist rubble.
The contrast couldn't have been more stark, but isn't the real strength of the West, the freedom, the liberal values, the civilization, the humanity, isn't that the foundation upon which all the other superstructures are built?
Yeah, there's gorgeous architecture in Vienna, but that's not the foundation, is it?
I'm sad for Austria, but I see some won't take it lying down.
I see even some police are refusing to enforce the Nazi-like orders.
I'm surprised they're still left in the force two years later.
Sorry, it's not Godwin's law when police in Austria really start enforcing public hygiene against lower caste and demanding papers.
That's one of the few times and places where you really can invoke Hitler without people saying, oh, don't invoke Hitler.
Let's move from Austria to Australia.
Get a load of this guy.
As you know, last night we took an urgent action to escalate our response in these communities, immediately implementing a hard lockdown.
That means residents of Punjari and Rockhol no longer have the five reasons to leave their home.
They can only leave for medical treatment in an emergency or if required by law.
It's highly likely that more residents will be transferred to Howell Springs today, either as positive cases or close contacts.
We've already identified 38 close contacts in Punjari, and that number will go up.
Those 38 are being transferred now.
I contacted the Prime Minister last night.
We are grateful for the support of about 20 ADF personnel as well as army trucks to assist with the transfer of positive cases and close contacts and to support the communities.
Holy cow, imagine that in black and white footage in the original German.
He's talking about taking people away to government camps using the army.
The army meant to fight against, I don't know, China, most likely, but foreigners, whatever, being deployed street by street, home by home to arrest and deport citizens who are unclean, except for politicians.
They've exempted themselves.
Get a load of this.
This caught my eye.
Mandatory vaccination directions.
I understand Commonwealth employees and court staff are exempt from the mandate.
Oh, yeah, that's not a watering down.
That's specific advice, legal advice, and supported by the Solicitor General that there are constitutional and other legal protections for some of those groups that mean that a mandate was really not a recommendation for those groups.
Does that apply to MPs too?
I mean, are those state MPs in the parliament?
Yeah, I believe so.
Again, again, legal impediments or legal recommendations that MPs can't be within those mandates.
That's not to say that there aren't other mechanisms for MPs to be managed, but the Treasurer can say that.
So just to clarify, that is no longer MPs are no longer part of the public health order.
No, MPs have not been part of the mandate for legal advice around that.
But as I understand it, not required for MPs in Victoria as well.
Yeah, well, get along with this lady.
She seems nice.
You are not being discriminated against.
You choose to do something that puts other people's lives at risk.
And you will be accountable.
You will be held accountable for that choice.
It is that simple.
That's what we're talking about here.
People who don't get the vaccine are making a choice.
You have a choice.
We all have choices to make.
We all get a choice.
You're making a choice that means you're more likely to get COVID and you're more likely to spread it to someone else.
And that is your choice.
It is your right.
I want to make that clear.
And I support that choice.
I'm just kidding.
This bill says that the freedom of unvaccinated is more important than the freedom of the vaccinated.
Really?
I don't think so.
Not on my watch.
Here's the thing.
Being held accountable for your own actions isn't called discrimination.
It's called being, you wouldn't believe it, a goddamn bloody adult.
That's right as being an adult.
It's putting others before yourself.
And that's what this country is supposed to be about.
That is why they're doing it.
One Nation is the champion for the right for unvaccinated.
I don't think so.
It's not going to happen under my watch, and I doubt very much if it's going to happen under Premier Gutwin's watch.
We're not going to stand for it.
The way out of lockdowns and restrictions is vaccinations because there is nothing else on the table.
Let's be honest about that.
Hundreds of Thousands Stand Up00:15:02
It is the only weapon we have.
That's what we need to do.
Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.
This bill flies in the face of all of that, and that's why I absolutely oppose every bit of it.
These people are unhinged, but come on.
It's not going to get actually Nazi, would it?
I mean, it couldn't.
Couldn't, right?
Well, I know what Ron Rosenbaum would say.
Is there something genetically different between Australians today and Germans 80 years ago?
No.
We're the same men and women.
We probably have less liberal culture in our blood, less history, less knowledge, less philosophy now than they did 80 years ago.
I mean, we're not taught about liberal values anymore.
I think Germany in the 1930s was probably more progressive, more modern than we are now, but they succumbed.
And again, that was before the technology of today.
Just as Iran could do a Holocaust in six seconds, where it took Hitler six years, the Australian police could do a Gestapo through cell phone apps where it took the Nazis your papers to do it one step at a time.
Police had to be everywhere in Nazi Germany and the lands that the Nazis conquered.
They needed everyone to cooperate.
Now, they did have plenty of snitches and informants and collaborators wherever they went.
It's true.
But they still did need those people on the ground.
They didn't have the panopticon of our modern surveillance state.
Facial recognition software, ubiquitous closed-circuit video cameras, GPS tracking your every moves, credit card tracking, big data, AI.
They didn't have that back then.
I'm here to tell you that when Germany and Austria went Nazi, it happened in stages, in steps, and no one believed it would go all the way.
Why would they?
They just slowly conditioned themselves to the next step, and the next step year by year.
The emergency was made permanent year by year.
The extreme solutions were slowly ratcheted up from banning Jews and the Nuremberg laws, banning them from public life, to banning them from life at all, from a temporary solution to a final solution.
Don't get caught up on the Jews' part.
Just think of the ratchet effect of what you already today in 2021 take as normal now.
The losses of civil liberties that have already been accepted and even adopted by you.
Just think about that.
There is a flicker of hope.
I see it in Australia as the country gets worse than ever.
Some people are rising up, hundreds of thousands in Melbourne.
I don't think any of them believe that they have a Nazi as a premier in the state of Victoria.
They don't.
They have a communist just as authoritarian.
But they see his moves, his emergency legislation to make him a de facto dictator.
They see it.
Not everyone sees it, but hundreds of thousands now do.
Boy, I hope it's enough.
Stay with us for more on this with Andrew Lawton.
Well, these days the kids say, picks or it didn't happen.
As in, show me the proof or I don't believe you.
That's pretty easy in an era of the ubiquitous cell phone camera.
In fact, I think we have too many photos and too many videos, but it's true.
I mean, did anything even happen before the age of photography?
The Civil War in the United States was one of the first photographed wars.
It's hard to imagine what wars looked like before then.
We just have paintings and portraits and stories, and how credible are they?
And even when we think of the Second World War and the Holocaust, although there was photography and film, it wasn't called video then, it was in black and white, and it was usually grainy.
And I tell you these obvious things because when we think of tyranny in a historical setting, we don't imagine it being normal in full color.
We imagine it being grainy in black and white and probably spoken in a German accent by people in military uniforms.
But I should tell you, even if you don't know this, the Holocaust happened in full color.
With normal people, flesh and bone, it's just that our recordings of it are in black and white.
And I tell you this, because I tell you that if tyranny were to re-emerge in the year 2021, and if it forgot to speak in a German accent and wear a Nazi uniform, would we detect it?
If tyranny came in the form of medical doctors, would our guard be down?
As I told you the other day, in the doctor's trial, some of the most horrific crimes committed by the Nazis were done not by military men, but by medical doctors.
It was those disgraceful, atrocious, shocking experiments, including those done by Dr. Joseph Mengele, the so-called angel of death, that led to the publication of the 10 principles of the Nuremberg Code.
So I say to you that if in the year 2021 tyranny came with an MD, not a four-star general, and if it came speaking English with a smile instead of German with a scowl, would we really be morally and politically, emotionally ready to defend against it?
I don't think we would.
I don't think we have.
I think we've seen the proof of that this past year and a half.
But how odd it is that the country of Austria, the country of Hitler's birth, is the country taking the most tyrannical, the most fascist approach to vaccine lockdowns, even talking about forcibly jabbing people and imprisoning them at home forever if they don't comply.
I showed you this video before.
Take a look.
That's in full color.
But if it were in black and white, and if they were asking for your papers rather than your COVID app, would it be any different?
Austria is leading the way.
Here's their chancellor saying he could go harsher.
He wants to go harsher still.
He wished he did this before.
On Monday, for maximum 20 days, there will be a statewide lockdown, which will be evaluated after 10 days.
It will end automatically at least on the 13th of December.
From this date, on the 13th of December, there will be no lockdown for infected and cured.
There will be no lockdown anymore.
To the decision, that they are now very fast, a statewide Impfpflicht will lead to the way.
This will be already on the 1. February of next year, 2022.
Well...
Well, that's just Austria.
Germany wants to get on the bandwagon.
Across the European Union, we see the dark fascism reviving.
Will it come to Canada, or is it already here?
Joining us now, Weiskei, is our friend Andrew Lawton from TNC.news.
Andrew, I know I'm sounding quite dramatic and maybe even a little sad, but the people who were in Germany in the 30s were the most educated, enlightened, rational, scientific thinkers of Europe.
Germany was the home of culture and learning and literature and poetry and music.
These were not Taliban illiterates.
These were the leaders of culture.
And they embraced, if not at first, eventually, the worst fascism known.
Is it possible that it could be happening again?
One thing that I think is so paramount, and you touched on it there, Ezra, is that you need a population that's willing to go along with this.
And we oftentimes, especially on the right, tend to look at enumerated rights and freedoms as being the be-all and end-all, the U.S. Bill of Rights, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms for all its flaws, and similar charters and constitutions around the world.
But none of these freedoms matter in the least if you don't have a culture that is committed to upholding them.
And I think you've acknowledged the biggest danger here, which is not that we have governments that are resorting to what I think are objectively tyrannical measures when it comes to the auspices of public health, but that they're doing it with a population that is not only complacent, but in many respects, encouraging and welcoming it.
You know, there are so many similarities.
The Nazi propaganda referred to Jews as dirty, as carrying disease, of untermenschen.
And here we see, and we learn from Blacklocks recently, that Justin Trudeau had polling prior to the last election that told him if he demonized the unvaccinated as unclean threats to the rest of society, that would resonate with a sizable number of voters.
I mean, one is unvaccinated, one is Jewish.
Obviously, that's a difference, but the demonization of sectors of society.
I mean, I guess it's true you can try and improve a culture over time, but at the end of the day, we're all sinners.
We all have these psychological blind spots.
There's hatred and fear in all of us.
And this is a reminder of how quickly a population can be weaponized against itself.
Indeed.
And I think that's where the comparison is an important one.
I don't go so far as to, generally speaking, in my commentary, liken anything to the Holocaust, because the final goal here is different.
We're not talking about a government agenda on extermination, but we are talking about a systematic delegitimization and segregation and denial of people's rights.
And the thing in Austria that I find so fascinating here, and I should say, I was actually just two weeks and a day ago, I got back from Austria.
I was there on a holiday, and I was sitting in a cafe, and I was chatting with my wife, and we were remarking about how normal it all felt there compared to life in Canada, life in Ontario specifically.
And it's amazing what a difference a few weeks can make.
That place that was again feeling relatively free, you had to use a vaccine passport, but you could also use a negative test or proof of acquired immunity.
Not perfect, but better than the systems that we have in place in Canadian provinces.
And then you go forward a couple of weeks, and we're talking about mandatory vaccination.
Legitimately, the threat of jail time, the threat of jail time, according to The Guardian, for people who, by February, are not vaccinated.
This is the only country in the world, apart from Turkmenistan, which is generally not the company in which I like to find myself for matters of public policy, the only Western, supposedly democratic country in the world to go this far.
And as we know with Europe, it's typically a case of them moving in packs.
Germany is already acknowledging that it is not going to take anything off the table, which is not exactly a comforting line from a German official for obvious reasons.
And numerous other countries as well that are seeing a demand from the WHO to increase, to ramp up their measures.
And yesterday's conspiracy theory is today's public policy.
I said that on your show a couple of months ago, and here we are with a vaccine mandate in place in a Western nation.
I find it depressing.
I find it too on the nose that Austria is one of the places where this public health fascism is returning.
But on the other hand, I see in Australia, which has gone nuts also, now they're actually using the Australian Defense Force, their army, to literally round up people and take them to quarantine.
I mean, it's like you say, Alex Jones of InfoWars, come back, all is forgiven.
Literally, I mean, is there a single prediction he made that hasn't come true on this stuff?
But on the other hand, in Melbourne, there were protests that the police themselves counted in the hundreds of thousands of people.
And I don't know my Australian domestic political history very well, but it's got to have been a long time since hundreds of thousands of people mobilized.
And that made me think of other historical examples.
Let's put aside the Nazis for a bit.
The Soviet Union, the fall of the Eastern Bloc in Poland, where you had mass protests, not that big, but you had a million people here, the Pope.
And you had the Solidarity Shipbuilding Union movement.
And you did have people take to the streets and say enough is enough.
I don't know.
Maybe they had an anonymity back then because they weren't tracked on their apps and there weren't facial recognition software.
They had their other spies.
I wonder what's going to happen if you have hundreds of thousands of people standing up in Melbourne saying we don't accept this tyranny.
Is it enough to stop it?
I don't know.
And will they be punished?
Will they be more compliant than the solidarity protesters in Poland some 30 years ago?
Well, I think it's an interesting question because one of the challenges in Austria, which has a relatively low vaccination rate compared to other countries, especially in Europe, is that it has a political party that, unlike in most countries you and I have been exploring, is actually standing up for freedom.
They have, I believe it's called the Austrian Freedom Party or the Freedom Party of Austria.
It's the third largest party in the Austrian legislature.
And they have actually been standing up and standing firm against these mandates.
So in Austria, you actually do have represented in the political system some of these views and values that are being expressed in protests.
Whether that will be enough to resist this, I don't yet know.
But I do think that we have the power of the ballot box.
And whatever we are annoyed with when it comes to governments and democratically elected governments that then use their mandate to do any number of things that were not even on the table when people went to the polls, you still have to hope that it's possible to get rid of these people and replace them with someone that's going to take a much better view of these things.
And the challenge is that in Australia, and just actually, I'll back up and talk about Canada.
Austria's Freedom-Oriented Parties00:06:38
Justin Trudeau has done things that you and I have talked about at great length, and Canadians voted him back in.
The problem is that a lot of these people in the streets, I fear, are not actually a majority.
Yeah, not just that, but you're right to point out in Austria, at least they had this seed crystal of an official political party on their side, showing them that they weren't alone in Canada.
All 10 provinces, both the governments and the oppositions, are in lockstep.
All five major parties in parliament in complete agreement on the essentials of the lockdown and the mandated vaccines.
So I think it's harder to break the conformity.
By the way, Solidarity in Polish 40 years ago, I said 30.
I'm worried about, I don't know much about Austrian politics, but I've heard of some of these freedom-oriented parties there and in Germany, alternative for Deutschland, same sort of thing.
They're a minority party, that's for sure, but they do, they're sort of like the People's Party of Canada, but if they had elected some seats.
And I think that there's a real chance that those political parties may be criminalized for what they're saying.
And we've seen this.
I saw the president of Pfizer say that false criticisms of his vaccine should be criminalized.
That's not too far away from what most governments in the West are talking about doing on the internet.
Catherine McKenna, the disgraced former cabinet minister, is tweeting about how you should be banned from saying certain things on Twitter that she disagrees with.
We know that Twitter bans ordinary people, but I think that they're going to, here's my prediction, Andrew.
I predict that Maxime Bernier himself will be prosecuted in Canada for some sort of thought crime.
And then in Europe, in these countries you refer to, I predict that there will be an attempt to criminalize these freedom-oriented parties.
It's just a speculative prediction, but I fear we're getting worse.
One of the dangers here that I would point out, and I actually mentioned this in a column this morning, is that we're talking about a country that has, by virtue of making vaccines mandatory.
And I don't mean mandatory to go to a restaurant or mandatory to get on a plane, but mandatory to exist as a citizen of Austria, a country that has made vaccination something over which you no longer have the right to choose.
When a country has done that, they've already accepted that you as an individual do not have rights unless the state gives them to you.
They've already accepted that the state has authority over you.
Once that fundamental premise is overcome, everything else is just a matter of degrees.
I think you're so right.
You know what?
You mentioned you were in Austria enjoying a lovely afternoon, and then all of a sudden things got a lot worse.
I think that that's what's happened for the last two years.
It's been a yo-yo.
It's been obedience conditioning.
Like when you're training a new puppy, give them a little freedom, take it away, give it away.
Practice conditioning them to be obedient.
And All the different waves, the different variations of this virus, the different lockdowns.
I think they're demoralizing people.
They're trying to destabilize people, make them dejected, make them tired, make them forget that this whole thing was supposed to be a temporary emergency.
I think that it will never end until people decide for it to end.
I think relying on the political and bureaucratic public health deep state to end it is unrealistic.
Here's a clip of Fauci saying, get used to taking boosters a couple times a year for the rest of your life.
Here's a clip of that.
We would hope, and this is something that we're looking at very carefully, that that dirt shot with the mRNA not only boosts you way up, but increases the durability so that you will not necessarily need it every six months or a year.
We're hoping it pushes it out more.
If it doesn't, and the data show we do need it more often, then we'll do it.
I really think that if we don't have a leader like Aron DeSantis of Florida, we will never be out of this.
If you had to, and I know it's unfair to ask you this, but Andrew, if you had to predict, do you think that this public health emergency will become permanent?
I think elements of it will be.
You know, for example, I don't think that maskless air travel is ever coming back or not in the foreseeable future.
And I do think that to some extent, if we have people tracking the severity of various annual flus, I could see flu shots becoming subject to a vaccine passport.
Because as I said, once you've already overcome the hurdle that this is a normal way to run society, everything else is just a matter of how far you want to take it or how you want to specifically apply it.
So the idea of saying, but you can't do that because we reject that, we've already gotten rid of that.
This is no longer an encroachment of rights.
It's an obliteration of them.
So I do think that aspects of this are here to stay.
And I do think that the danger of it is that because that trend you just mentioned of people feeling so demoralized and dejected has become such a force, people will take whatever crumbs of liberty they're thrown.
If I put out a poll question on Twitter, an informal question last week about maskless air travel.
And I had people saying you shouldn't complain.
You know, that's just, you know, fine.
That's just the price of getting back to normal now.
And people that do not like masks, they don't love wearing them.
They don't love being told they have to, but they're just so demoralized that it can get any better that they'll take whatever they're given.
Well, I like you very much, Andrew, but you've made me very sad today.
Likewise, Ezra.
It was a doom to fail from the beginning, I think.
Well, it's great to see you.
I keep encouraging our people to follow your stuff at tnc.news and all our friends at True North, and of course on the Andrew Lawton show.
Great to see you, my friend.
Thanks for coming on the show.
Thank you.
All right, there you have it.
Hey, welcome back.
Your viewer feedback.
Alberta Patriot One says, just like the Legion, the Salvation Army have abandoned all their morals and have joined the globalist clowns in their evil agendas.
Delivering on Commitments00:06:49
Neither one will get my nickel from my family ever.
Get woke and go broke.
Yeah, I am sure that these organizations are overwhelmingly staffed with great people, but there's a few woke executives at the top who have made these terrible decisions.
I've seen it in the Legion.
I've seen politically correct people in the head office of the Legion bring in absurd policies that surely don't represent the membership.
I think that's the same thing going on here in the Salvation Army.
And I hope they get a course correction.
Someone with the friendly nickname Our Leaders Lie says, wow, this Christmas is going to be great.
I won't be supporting any business that asks anything personal about my medical info and any business who pushes it on their staff.
Talk with your money and don't give it to drug pushers.
Well, that's going to be tough.
It's sort of like deciding that you're not going to buy things from China.
It really does limit it.
Thing is, I mean, there was a restaurant I walked into.
They wouldn't let me in.
And the staffer, who I presume was a minimum wage waiter, said, look, it's not me, it's my boss.
And if I had talked to the boss, he'd probably say, it's not me, it's the police.
I think you have to go to the root of the problem, but it's also terrible that there's such total compliance amongst the masses.
And anyone who shows any independence, the state crushes them into powder.
That's what that show of force against Adam Skelly and his barbecue last year was all about.
Well, that's the show for tonight.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you and home, good night and keep fighting for freedom.
And let me leave you with an interview from Alberta's provincial Conservative Party's conference over the weekend, where our Adam Sos and other teammates were reporting on the inside, asking questions of a government that we generally criticize.
But unlike other governments, they actually let us into their party.
I'll leave you with that.
Until tomorrow.
Bye-bye.
Well, good afternoon.
It's great to be here as we wrap up the United Conservative Party's 2021 AGM.
Alberta is back.
It's on a roll.
Alberta's on the rise.
And that is certainly the spirit that I felt from the 1,600 delegates here this weekend.
With that, I'm happy to take your questions.
Good afternoon, Premier.
Adam Soss from Rebel News.
I think it's fair to say that there is potentially a bit of a trust issue among perhaps the more civic libertarian-minded people in Alberta.
At the Calgary Stampede breakfast, you boasted about reverting a 100-year-old mandatory vaccine law.
You also said that vax passports would violate health privacy laws.
Months later, despite commitments to oppose these vaccine passports, they were implemented.
Minister Lagrange has now called that there would be no vaccine passports for those aged five through 11.
How can we know that that commitment will be upheld?
Adam Sos here for Rebel News, and this is the final day of the United Conservative Party annual general meeting.
This is a much shorter day.
Policies and motions will not be debated.
This is largely election preparation and socialization for some people, but there will be a media scrum today, and that is ultimately what we're here for.
We're hoping to bring some tough questions.
Well, good afternoon.
It's great to be here as we wrap up the United Conservative Party's 2021 AGM.
We didn't even think we would be able to have an in-person AGM not long ago.
In fact, the decision to hold this meeting wasn't made until about a month ago.
So we put together this incredibly successful gathering of grassroots conservatives in just four weeks' time with over 1,600 registered delegates.
That's the largest AGM that we've had since our founding convention as a party back in 2017.
Just the spirit of positivity in the halls.
I've had a chance to speak to hundreds of delegates from all across the province and was so profoundly encouraged by them about the performance of the government and delivering on our commitments to Albertans, the 83% of our platform commitments that we've delivered on, the huge economic renewal.
As I said in my speech yesterday, it's clear that while we still have a way to go to be careful on COVID, that Alberta's economy is recovering, leading the country in economic recovery.
Rick Bell Calgary, son, you seem very, very happy today, and that's obvious.
You talked about how you felt about gathering with people and the reaction you had.
What is your plan, apart from COVID?
What is your plan to win back the hearts and minds of Albertans, as opposed to just the party members that were here today?
Well, the plan is to focus on the priorities of Albertans, which I believe obviously is getting through what's left of COVID safely and then seeing real strong economic recovery.
This government was elected on a platform to have jobs, economy, and pipelines.
And we have seen the completion of one pipeline.
We're on progress for the completion of a second.
We've seen Alberta nearly leading the country in job growth, 90,000 net new jobs this year.
And on the economy, obviously, there is incredibly good news and much more to come.
Many of the investment announcements that we have made over the past few months actually go into the ground in 2022 and 2023, which means that as we approach the next election, Albertans are going to see tangible proof everywhere they go about an economy that is moving on all cylinders.
So I think that, as is usually the case, the key issue in the next election will be who best can continue that economic growth and recovery.
And I think it will be evident that the policies of the Conservative government have put us in that position.
So we will continue to focus on Albertans' priorities.
And that means job number one, jobs in the economy, but it also means continuing to stand up for this province, continue the fight for a fair deal, and of course, the broader theme of making life better for Albertans.
But I think we will be judged in the spring of 2023 based on how we performed on the commitments that we made.
I'm confident that we will, by that time, have delivered on well over 90% of our election commitments from 2019.
And the most important being that I think we will be far exceeding, far exceeding our commitments in terms of economic and job growth.
Good afternoon, Premier Adam Sos from Rebel News.
I think it's fair to say that there is potentially a bit of a trust issue among perhaps the more civic libertarian-minded people in Alberta.
Vax Passports Controversy00:04:56
At the Calgary Stampede breakfast, you boasted about reverting a 100-year-old mandatory vaccine law.
You also said that vax passports would violate health privacy laws.
Months later, despite commitments to oppose these vaccine passports, they were implemented.
Minister Lagrange has now called that there would be no vaccine passports for those aged five through 11.
How can we know that that commitment will be upheld?
Well, first of all, Adam, thank you for the question.
We did amend the Public Health Act this spring following the advice of a legislature committee to remove the power of mandatory inoculation that had been in that law since 1910.
So Alberta no longer has the legal power to compel somebody to be vaccinated.
And we did that precisely to underscore that at the end of the day, people will choose whether or not they get vaccinated.
We obviously strongly encourage them to do so.
The restriction exemption program in no way constitutes a mandatory vaccination.
It applies to discretionary activities, activities that are not necessary for basic, the exercise of basic life.
This is things like going to nightclubs and casinos, hockey games and concerts where the chance of viral transmission is extremely high.
We know that 90% of people in ICUs have been unvaccinated, and we know that we were very close to completely exceeding the maximum capacity of critical care in our hospital system.
So we had to do something, and it was either that or revert to brutally tough, widespread shutdowns of businesses, potentially schools, places of worship.
So I think we did what was necessary to allow society to continue to function openly while limiting spread and protecting our health care system.
In terms of the school, this children between the ages of five and 11.
As you know, Health Canada has now authorized the use of the Pfizer pediatric vaccine for kids in that age range.
And we encourage parents to look carefully at the scientific evidence about the safety and efficacy of those vaccines, while at the same time recognizing that children in that age are at a much lower risk than adults of severe outcomes.
And because of that, we don't think it's necessary.
In fact, I think it would be wrong to effectively punish little kids in doing things like sports activities and basic activities because their parents have chosen not to get them vaccinated.
The choice is not the children's choice.
The choice is their parents' choice.
And so I don't think we, there's not a compelling public health need there because children in that age range, with almost no exceptions, they don't end up in hospital.
We've had zero deaths in COVID under the age of 18.
Typically at most, we might have one person under the age of 18 in an ICU.
So there is no compelling public health need to do that.
And furthermore, our polling indicates that roughly 50% of parents of children in that age range do not intend to have their 5 to 11 year olds vaccinated.
So again, we wouldn't want to create a situation where six-year-olds can't go to a birthday party at a restaurant because their parents didn't get them vaccinated.
And a quick follow-up.
When on the horizon can we expect vaccine mandates to dissipate?
There is a percentage of the population who will not be vaccinated.
Can they expect to live like this forever?
What's the prospectus?
So we will maintain the restriction exemption program through the winter because of the prospect of seasonal headwinds, of cold weather, forcing more people indoors, of potential waning of immunity both from prior infection and from vaccines.
We need to be careful through the winter months.
So we've said that we'll maintain the program at least into the first quarter of next year.
I very much hope, I very much hope that by that time we will see with higher vaccine rates, hopefully by that time, by next spring, we'll be over 90% first dose coverage.
We'll have had wider rollout of booster shots.
We'll have seen the pediatric vaccines for those who want them.
And so I'm very hopeful that by towards the end of the first quarter of next year, we can end the restriction exemption program.
The idea is not to have this as a permanent feature of our society.
And I said in my speech yesterday that we must move forward to manage risk, the risk of COVID, while getting on with our lives.
And so we are focused on increasing ICU capacity in wider use of rapid tests and wider use of therapeutics like monoclonal antibody therapies as a strategy going forward to manage risk.
The Other Side of the Story00:00:43
Well, there you have it, folks.
That is a wrap on our coverage of the 2021 United Conservative Party AGM.
Jason Kenney certainly saw the event through rose-colored glasses.
For the rest of us present here, despite more support than we likely expected for Jason Kinney, there are still seeds of division here.
We were happy to be here and we thank you for your support in helping us be here to cover this event and to cover the other side of the story.
As always, I want to thank you for tuning in for Rebel News.
I'm Adam Sos.
As always, we are out here telling the other side of the story, asking the questions that you want answers to.
If you want to help us bring you this side of the story, you can chip in at realreporters.ca.