Ezra Levant interviews Candice Malcolm, founder of True North (TNC.news), one of Canada’s few independent outlets rejecting Justin Trudeau’s $61M Media Baila payout. Malcolm highlights legacy media’s bias—like CBC’s delayed coverage of Trudeau’s blackface scandal—while True North grew to 15 staff in 2021, exposing issues from civil liberties to residential school misrepresentations. She criticizes Conservative leader Aaron O’Toole for purging dissenters like Marilyn Gladiou and Shannon Stubbs, comparing his leftward shift to Ron DeSantis’s successful resistance in Florida. The episode warns of Trudeau’s undemocratic internet censorship laws and predicts 2022’s focus will be on fighting pandemic overreach, where even conservative leaders failed to uphold civil liberties. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I have a special feature-length interview with Candace Malcolm, the founder of True North.
She's one of the few independent journalists in this country, doesn't take any government money.
That's today's podcast, but I'd like to encourage you to get the video version.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com, and it's eight bucks a month.
You get my daily show and weekly shows from David Menzies, Sheila Gunread, and Andrew Chapatos.
And you get the satisfaction in keeping us independent and strong.
We're one of the few people in Canada that don't take government bailouts to new media.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, a sit-down interview with Candace Malcolm, the founder of True North.
It's December 27th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carman 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, but why?
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
Well, I was stunned a few months ago to see the list of Canadian media companies that took a special $61 million pre-election payout from Justin Trudeau's Media Bella program.
1,500 names.
Names of companies.
I did not know there were 1,500 media companies in this country.
Now, to be fair, post-media, which has dozens of titles, each one of them was on the list, but that just makes it all the more shocking.
And so when I say that 99% of the Canadian media is on the take, that is not an exaggeration.
In fact, it's probably more like 99 and 44 one hundredths, as Dove used to say.
But one of the very few media outlets that, like us, doesn't take any money from Trudeau and its shows are our friends at True North.
And joining us now for a special year-end interview is our friend Candace Malcolm, the founder of True North.
And I'm sure you're a subscriber at TNC.news.
And if you're not, please go there and fix that.
Candace, great to see you again.
And congratulations on a banner year for TNC.news.
Great to see you.
Thank you so much, Ezra.
You know, it's really interesting because we have this media scenario where all of these media companies are beholden to the government and yet they're shrinking.
No one's watching them.
People aren't tuning in.
They're shedding jobs.
They're laying off journalists.
Meanwhile, independent journalists and outlets like The Rebel and True North are seeing huge success.
We had an amazing year in 2021.
We nearly doubled in size.
And it is because Canadians are choosing with their wallets.
They don't like the legacy media.
They don't like what they have to offer and they want something different.
And I think that's so evident, so obvious at this point that, you know, it's a great time to be in independent media, but it's a sad state of affairs in our country when so many journalists go hat in hand to the federal government for money.
It's such a conflict of interest.
It's so wild, Ezra.
Yeah, and you know what?
I've noticed that now that Trudeau has broken that taboo of literally paying cash to the journalists that cover him, others are saying, oh, so that's how it is in Canada, this sort of soft corruption.
Everyone's in on it, so no one talks about it.
It's sort of a cartel, and the suckers are the public, because there's no disclosure.
You know, when a media party outlet talks about Justin Trudeau, interviews Trudeau, they don't say brought to you by Trudeau.
They keep that conflict of interest, I'm not going to say a secret, although that $61 million list I talked about was kept confidential.
Imagine that, 1,500 people keeping a secret.
I didn't even know that was possible.
But others are getting into the game.
So Facebook and Google, they give millions of dollars to media companies too.
And they say, oh, it's because we're so beneficent.
No, I think it's to color the media coverage of big tech and their censorship.
And of course, China, the People's Republic of China, now buys huge infomercial-style advertorials in the Globe and Mail and other huge newspapers.
So I think that everybody knows the media in Canada is for sale.
And I just think it's terrible for our democracy.
I don't know any other country that calls itself free that lets its media be rented out like that.
Well, you're absolutely right.
And I think that the China thing is really troubling.
But you're right.
The principle is there.
Once you know that the media is for sale and they're there for hire, you know, other less sort of benevolent forces may move in.
You may think, oh, the Canadian government, you know, they're a good guy.
They're our ally.
You know, that's us.
They're our friends and we trust them.
But when it comes to countries like China and other countries, Iran as well, you know, paying, you wouldn't even know, Ezra.
You're reading the Globe and Mail thinking that you're reading news stories.
And actually, an entire page is sponsored by China and you don't even know about it.
The way that I like to think about it, and I boil it down, is it's sort of the three Bs of Canadian media, right?
So we know they're biased.
We know that journalists are left-wing.
They've always been left-wing.
They've always been in the tank for the liberals or maybe the NDP in the U.S. They're obviously Democrats.
It's so patently obvious.
So we have that one.
They're biased.
In Canada, they're beholden because how can you criticize a government, Ezra, that you're reliant upon to pay your bills?
Media is dying.
Media is shrinking.
They don't have the advertising revenues, as you mentioned.
That's all gone to Facebook and Google, and that's its own separate problem.
But because of that, the media companies, they can't really truly criticize Trudeau in a meaningful way in the way that you would expect journalists to do, Ezra.
The role of a journalist is to expose corruption, expose failed policies, expose the inner workings of the government.
How could the media expose those things when they need Justin Trudeau?
Otherwise, they're going to get laid off.
Their companies are going to go out of business.
Or with regards to the CBC, they're going to collapse.
We see every year the revenue, advertising revenue of the CBC falls.
So they're biased, they're beholden.
And the third B, which I think is the worst offense, is that they're boring.
There's so much groupthink.
There's so much just repeating the same narrative.
They basically take their talking points from the Liberal Party every morning and they push that out.
They attack the conservatives with that.
They push out their news reports on the pandemic and on the vaccines.
They don't look like news reports, Ezra.
They look like infomercials.
And it's so laughable.
But there's no contrarian attitude.
There's no pushback.
We even see in the U.S., newspapers and magazines that are on the left.
There was a long piece in The Atlantic, which is a left-wing magazine similar to McLean's, all about how the numbers with COVID were massively inflated, right?
We saw a long piece in Vanity Fair about how masking children was wrong.
And just because some doctor out there says that it might be a good idea to put masks on little children, talking about five, six years old, six-year-olds, that's not a good idea.
So you see a variety of opinions and perspectives in the U.S. media that you just wouldn't see in Canada.
In Canada, it's all groupthink.
They all have the same opinion.
They all have the same bland, boring approach to reporting the news, reporting the political news.
There's nothing interesting going on.
And so, those three B's are why I think that the media is just completely, it's a dead industry.
It's dead and dying.
I think that they don't realize it yet.
Younger people and anyone under 30 say doesn't even engage with the legacy media.
They don't even care what they're saying.
They're not even aware of what they're saying.
They've already moved on to new forms of technology and new ways of gaining information.
It's just this sort of old guard, the Laurentian elite old guard, that's clinging to their power.
And Justin Trudeau is enabling them.
But it's not going to be much longer.
Sooner or later, these media companies will die.
The fact that they're on the dole, they're reliant on Trudeau, that just shows that they're very much on their last legs here.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I think that to me, the absolute classic moment was in the 2019 federal election when it fell to a U.S. magazine to break the photos of Trudeau and Blackface.
And there's two parts of that, three parts of that story that I think are interesting.
Number one, that it was a Canadian who had these pictures, and he couldn't get a Canadian outlet to be interested, so he felt he had to go to Americans.
Number two, as soon as I think it was Time magazine, published those photos, all of a sudden the other Canadian media had their own blackface photos that they were sitting on that they said, oh, I guess the story's out, so we should roll out the photo we've been hiding.
Like within hours, the CBC and Global had their photos.
They didn't just find them within the last hour.
They had them all along.
They were holding them back because they pretended they weren't newsworthy as if, you know, if they found Jason Kenney in Blackface, as if they wouldn't roll that out.
And finally, after the dust settled, the interrogations and examinations of that BC man who leaked this leaked, who gave the story to the Americans, they did more opposition accountability journalism.
Him, who are you?
What are your motives?
Than they did on the story itself.
And to me, how can you get 1,500 journalists so trained like that?
And I've been using the phrase media party for almost a decade because it has a party discipline.
Candace, it's not just that they think alike and they're boring and they move as a herd.
I mean, some animals do that instinctively, like birds line up in a formation when they fly.
But if one bird broke away, the other birds don't discipline him.
You know, they say, oh, where's he going?
But they don't.
In Canada, there's a you know, you are ousted and punished if you dare criticize.
You're demonized and deplatformed.
Look at how the National Post tried to fire their star writer, Rex Murphy.
So it's maybe better.
I mean, it's happened to so many of them, right?
And you're right, but with the guy in Vancouver, they were camped out outside his house.
Like, you know, they were giving him more scrutiny than the Prime Minister, who was the one who was found in Blackface, thinking that, what, he was some shadowy operative or something like that.
It's like their fever dream about what's happening.
And yeah, you're absolutely right.
I think Twitter has given us a little insight into the minds of how these journalists work because they share their musings on there.
And you can absolutely see it, the way that they go after other journalists.
They've for years targeted the Toronto Sun.
You used to write for The Sun.
I still do.
And there's so many articles out there of legacy media journalists just completely demonizing the Sun.
And to be completely honest, The Sun is pretty tame.
The Sun is not a right-wing publication by any imagination.
They're pretty tame, pretty mainstream.
Maybe they push back ever so gently here and there.
But the way that journalists from the Toronto Star, CBC, there is a pack of them.
And I love your term, the media party.
It really is completely accurate because most of them come from the same sort of walk of life.
They have the same lifestyle.
They have the same core values and beliefs.
And Justin Trudeau's their guy.
He's their man in office and they're going to protect him.
And so whether it's completely falling in line with any health edict that he gives and painting anyone who goes against these heavy-handed top-down orders, treating them like they're some kind of an enemy to the state.
It's really remarkable to see.
And like I said, Twitter gives us a great little window as to how it operates because you can see they're mean-spirited, they're bullies, they get really angry at other journalists who don't report the same stuff the way they treat you, the way they treat me.
Even people like Holly Doe and Holly Doane over at Black Locks is a lovely human being.
She's not right-wing by any imagination.
She just doesn't fall in line with what they do.
And she'll happily report misdeeds and misspending and corruption in the Trudeau government.
And it's like that's not allowed.
And you can see really the PAC, the PAC mentality, like you say, the media party, Ezra.
Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned Holly Doane of BlackLocks.ca.
I swear, you can count them on one hand's fingers, the number of media companies that are not on the government tool.
I want to move on to some other topics, but before we do, you mentioned that True North has doubled in size, and I can see it.
I see some of the journalism you're doing.
For some of our viewers who haven't yet signed up, and really, folks, you've got to sign up.
It's TNC.news.
I think it behooves all of us who complain about the media party to support the alternatives.
I support a number of media, just 10 bucks a month or whatever.
I'm not going crazy or anything.
Frankly, I support some media that I don't even read because I know that that sounds odd, but if I want there to be a viable competition to the media party, can I not put 10 bucks a month in?
And so, I mean, I think I'm a 10 buck a month guy to True North.
Tell me what you guys are up to.
Can you give us a bit of a year-end report?
Like, what did you guys accomplish in 2021 and what are your plans for the future?
You mentioned you doubled in size.
Just give our viewers just a little sampler of what you're up to.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, thank you for the opportunity, Ezra, and for the little plug there.
I think that's right.
I think that conservatives are really good at supporting conservative causes.
Suppressed Residential School Stories00:04:15
And you look around at sort of the infrastructure.
We have a lot of conservative free market think tanks, you know, university-adjacent programs to help young scholars.
We have the sort of economic think tank that looks through the numbers.
But when it comes to the media, there's just, you know, the landscape was pretty wide open a couple of years ago, and a new Rebel is right in there with a huge audience.
But for True North, what we try to do is we step in with the written reports.
So we try to almost compete Ezra against like the wire service, the Canadian press, writing news stories, but not from the perspective of the leftist, you know, biased, beholden, and boring legacy media.
We try to tell stories that are interesting to conservatives.
We do quite a bit of investigative journalism with ATIPs, talking to sources, trying to uncover broader themes that are being ignored by the legacy media.
So we do a lot of written work and we put out news stories every hour, all day.
And so for us, some of our core areas that we report on, things like civil liberties, things like obviously corruption within government.
Myself, I've long been interested in things like immigration, terrorist networks operating in Canada, nefarious actors and state-sponsored activities in Canada.
And so those are the sort of areas we focus on.
But of course, we touch everything.
Started getting really into this issue of critical race theory being taught in our schools, a sort of idea that everything in Canada boils down to racism, that Canada is a white supremacist country.
These are things that are being taught in our schools to our children.
And then, obviously, COVID as well, and this huge government overreach.
And so, you know, there's a variety of topics that we look at.
We also put out documentaries.
My colleague Andrew Lawton put out a full-length documentary last year looking at the issue of gun rights and legal gun owners and how the Trudeau government's really heavy-handed, clunky, awkward ban of supposed so-called assault rifles, how that impacted day-to-day people and not just people who you would imagine that are gun owners, but other people as well, like Olympians and sports shooters and those kind of people, women who want to carry a weapon in terms of self-defense.
He looked at and interviewed people from all over the country and told a really unique perspective.
So we have a lot of really fun projects on the go that we're constantly working on.
For me personally, one of the biggest issues and stories that I uncovered the past year was just looking at the issue of the supposed unmarked graves that were discovered near residential schools and how the media really manipulated that story and took the facts out of context.
They didn't do the regular due diligence of the journalism in terms of verifying information and reporting the facts.
Instead, they just ran away with this narrative that Canada is this evil, genocidal state and that the residential schools were like de facto death camps.
That's not what the evidence showed.
That's not what we learned from the discoveries at Techemloops and other First Nations reserves.
And so just trying to report the facts to viewers, but also uncover, pull apart the spin, decode the media spin, call out the media, call out the legacy media.
One of the other things that we do on the Candace Malcolm Show, I have a podcast called The Candace Malcolm Show.
It comes out Monday to Friday.
And every Friday we do an episode, as we're called Fake News Friday, where we just go through some of the worst examples of the week of the media either lying to viewers, misrepresenting the facts, being completely biased and in the tank for the Trudeau liberals.
So there's a lot of content, obviously.
If anything, it's hard to boil it down to the top three stories each week, but we do that every Friday.
And so there's a lot of stuff going on at True North.
We've got some great reporters, great podcast hosts.
Like I said, we're expanding.
I think we're up to 15 journalists and producers working for us now, which is, like I said, double from last year.
And yeah, we've got a big year on the horizon as well.
And we've got some exciting things planned.
So yeah, I really appreciate everyone watching who watches Rebel, also watches True North.
True North's Growth00:03:08
We sort of compliment one another.
And again, it's so important that we recognize the need to support independent media because unlike all the guys that go hat in hand with the True Government, we actually, by principle, don't accept money from the government.
We never will.
We never do.
We never have.
And we actually think it's wrong and a huge conflict of interest.
And ethically, it undermines the practice of journalism when you're accepting money from the subject of which you are reporting on and investigating, Ezra.
Well, you know, I just want to tell you, Candace, that's a great summary, but I want to tell you that I was talking to the lawyer for McLean's magazine, Howard Winkler, the other day.
And he tells me that McLean's has a staff of 14.
So you have a staff, I think you just said, of 15.
I want to let you know that in just a few years, without a dime of government money, you and your viewers and your team have built a news organization larger than McLean's, one of the oldest and most prestigious brands in legacy media.
So congratulations.
Yeah, that's, I mean, that's great.
It's kind of sad what McLean's has become because it used to be so fun and so interesting.
I remember reading it in, I guess it was the 2000s, and they had, you know, they had some really, you know, they had Mark Stein in there, Andrew Coyne used to write there.
I think Paul Wells is still there.
He's an interesting guy.
But, you know, the magazine was exciting and interesting.
And now I read it and it's just like, you know, woke, left-wing hectoring.
They hate Canada.
Every story is either about how Canada is racist and full of racist people or how our history is genocidal.
Like they've fully bought into the woke mindset.
And it's almost depressing that that's Canada's national magazine.
You read it and you just feel like these people hate Canada.
I don't even know.
I mean, they used to be the national magazine.
I'll grant them their history, but I just have never heard anyone talk about them.
You know, I was looking, I remember many years ago when I ran the Western Standard magazine out of Calgary.
And of course, we didn't take government money back then either.
But back around the same time, a magazine called The Walrus started and it had charitable status.
And so I studied, well, where are they getting their money from?
And they got it in part from the Tides Foundation, which is a left-wing Marxist group that hates oil and gas, for example.
A lot of folks have heard of the Tides Foundation.
But they're still around.
The Walrus is still around.
And because they're a registered charity, their financials are disclosed on the Canada Revenue Agency website.
I think that's a $6 million a year company, which is an enormous budget.
So they're getting all these grants.
They're getting huge government payouts.
They're getting cash injections from foreign lobby groups.
I honestly don't know what they're doing with all that money.
I think I pay attention to Canadian media more than your average bear.
And I, for the life of me, can't remember the last time anyone said, hey, did you see that article on The Walrus?
Or, whoa, the Walrus is it's just, I think you're right.
Liberals Expanding Internet Censorship00:14:30
You talked about bias and beholden and boring.
It's just when you're when you're basically hired by all these authorities to just pump out content, you're a content farm for Trudeau and the Tides Foundation.
How could you be interesting?
You're not allowed to be.
And the managers, like the business people, you're not an entrepreneur.
You're a grantrepreneur, which is a real thing.
You're just an expert at filling out forms and putting together PowerPoints of why you should get grants instead of an expert of running a company.
I find that deeply sad, actually, because I'd love it if there was a rollicking magazine that took on everyone.
I'd read it.
I'll never read The Walrus.
I just never even think about it.
It's like an empty cab pulls up and the Walrus steps out, as they say.
It's just, it's a nothing.
It's a void.
Don't mind me ranting.
I want to ask you another question.
You're the president of the Independent Press Gallery.
Give us an update on that.
Sure, yeah.
So the purpose behind the Independent Press Gallery, as you know, is that there were so many independent outlets.
As we mentioned, there's a huge void on the political right when it comes to journalism and ideas.
And so a lot of actors have jumped in and we sort of realized like, hey, you know, we're all being discriminated against when it comes to access to press conferences, being able to cover elections.
You know, we're stronger if we're together.
So the Independent Press Gallery is an organization that allows, not just on the right, any independent outlet, any media company that doesn't take money from the government to come together to kind of use our collective strength to sort of borrow an idea from unions and collective bargaining.
But the idea is that if one of us is treated in an unfair way, we can all sort of come together and speak out.
If we need access to something, again, we can come together and speak out.
And so it's great.
It's sort of a forum, a social club, a way for us to put our heads together sometimes when we need to.
And we basically have two requirements for any journalists.
One, you need to sign our declaration vowing to follow journalism ethics, basic ethics that the journalists must follow.
And then, second, which really is part of the first, you must pledge that you do not take money from the government.
And that's so important.
It's so important to journalists all over the world.
It's wild that that would even be something that we would have to make a requirement for as read Canada.
But as you mentioned, and as we all know, so many journalists take money from the government.
And so, you know, most legacy media journalists wouldn't be able to join the Independent Press Gallery simply because they're not truly independent.
They do take money from the government, and so they have that conflict of interest.
One of the things the Independent Press Gallery did under your watch was rise to the occasion of the absolutely un-Canadian proposal to regulate the internet that the Trudeau Liberals put forward in the last parliament.
And because Parliament broke for the election, those bills died on the order paper.
They won't continue.
They have to be reintroduced.
But the Liberals after the election two months ago said they're going to do it.
They intend to regulate the Internet in a way that has never been seen in Canada or the United States or the UK or Australia.
Germany has some pretty crazy censorship laws.
I think that's a legacy of their Nazi era.
But really, it goes further than anything they have.
It really feels like something that Turkey, like a semi-free authoritarian country like them or Russia would do.
Can you give us a bit of a summary of what you're worried about is coming for internet censorship?
Because I think that while we're all focused on the civil liberties bonfire of the pandemic, as well we should be, there's a monster that's slouching forward.
And I think they're dead serious about it, by the way.
But why don't you go ahead and tell us your thoughts on that?
Yeah, absolutely, Ezra.
We definitely got a sneak peek of it under Stéphane Gilbeau, the former heritage minister, and some of the just absolutely, like you said, undemocratic, illiberal bills that they want to put forth to censor the internet.
I mean, it's chilling, it's terrifying.
And again, just from the perspective of your average Canadian who thinks, okay, no one's in support of hate speech.
No one wants bullying and these kind of things online.
Trudeau liberals are taking advantage of that sentiment and going further than anything we've ever seen before.
And I think this is going to be one of, if not the most important issues of the next five years, that we need to, you know, the internet was created, Ezra, as sort of a bastion of freedom.
As much as we sort of bemoan big tech and the growth and the concentration of power, the idea initially and up until recently was that libertarians sort of built the internet and this idea that you can be free, you can express yourself, you can say what you want.
And people can choose what we know.
You can choose.
You can turn off one app, you can open up another one.
You don't have to expose yourself to this.
But the idea that the Trudeau liberals would come in and try to sanitize that, try to create rules.
I mean, it's completely the antithesis of free speech in a free society.
And I think one of the things that's equally troubling Ezra is a total lack of opposition against it.
We barely heard a peep about this in the federal election, just like so many other important issues of the day, because Aaron Orchild doesn't actually oppose Justin Trudeau.
He agrees with Justin Trudeau on most of these issues.
And so he didn't want to come out opposing these bills.
I don't know what the new ones will be called.
But he doesn't want to come out and oppose them because he actually agrees with them and wants them, and he doesn't want to be painted as someone who's enabling extremism online.
But we've seen so much of this as even with, you know, to go back to the criticism of the media.
First of all, the media, the legacy media, has been silent on this.
We've barely heard any kind of criticism, any kind of alarm bells being rung in the newspapers, on TV stations, on radio stations, about this massive breach into our freedoms online.
But also, they've sort of been pre-spinning in support of Trudeau by creating this sort of boogeyman idea that there's this sort of legion of extremists lurking online and that it somehow poses a threat to Canadian society and that the sort of real terrorists are so-called right-wing extremists online.
You see these kind of stories being pushed out on CBC and Toronto Star and other legacy media, Justin Trudeau networks.
And what they're doing is they're building up fear and anticipation so that Trudeau can sweep in with these really sweeping pieces of legislation.
So certainly that's one of the things that the Independent Press Gallery is going to be keeping an eye on.
That's something that True North will be reporting and keeping an eye on.
I know Rebel do a great job of keeping us up to date with what the latest movement is towards these bills that we know Trudeau is dead set on imposing.
You know, I want to play a quick clip for you from Parliament.
Now, this was a few months back, and Alain Reyes is no longer Aaron O'Toole's critic.
I should point that out.
But here is the official conservative critic under Aaron O'Toole at the time giving the official party's response, the Conservative Party's response to the proposed internet censorship.
And the fact that he's no longer the critic right now and the fact that the bill has changed somewhat is irrelevant.
I want you to hear what the Conservative Party under Aaron O'Toole has said in Parliament about Internet censorship.
I'll sum it up for you.
They want more censorship faster.
Take a look.
But we don't see it in the bill.
There's nothing in this bill that allows for the regulation of social media or platforms like YouTube.
And it's clear we would have liked to have seen this in the bill.
The minister even says we have to find a way of preventing hate speech, conspiracy theories, and fake news that's shared.
But right now in the bill, unfortunately, we won't even be able to amend it in that aspect because it's simply absent from the bill.
I just don't believe that the party means it when they say they're opposed to it.
Because I mean, Aaron O'Toole is sort of an expert of saying one thing to his party base when he wanted their vote to become leader.
And I mean, I tell you, I wish the guys who write the Conservative Party fundraising emails, I wish they were the MPs, because the Conservative Party fundraising machine actually knows what Conservative Party members want.
And so they give them that red meat when they're asking for money.
Trouble is the MPs in Parliament and the leader himself don't believe any of that stuff.
I mean, a few of them might, but they've been absolutely subordinated.
They've been shut up.
Marilyn Gladieu talked about a little freedom caucus.
She was frog-marched out to apologize for it.
Anyone who issues any sort of statement contrary to the leader, even by one inch, fired or threatened or demoted.
Leslie Lewis, an interesting conservative, I mean, maybe not everyone's first choice, but absolutely sentenced to the backbenches in Siberia because she's not an Aaron O'Toole lookalike.
I am worried that the Conservative Party of Canada actually does not oppose this internet censorship.
Well, it doesn't sound like it from that clip that you played, but you're right, Ezra.
I don't understand Aaron O'Toole.
I don't understand why he's still the leader of this party.
He had a dismal performance in the last election.
He took a bet, he took a chance by swinging the party to the left, saying, okay, all of the criticisms that the media has had about my party over the past five years, I will either apologize for those or I will purge the elements of those parties, whether it's Derek Sloan, like you said, Marilyn Gladioux, push those elements as far away.
The thing that he was most passionate about Ezra on the campaign trail was declaring his left-wing bona fides.
His eyes would light up when he would talk about how he was pro-choice, pro-abortion.
He doesn't want anything to do with the sort of base of the Conservative Party.
He threw them under the bus.
And the bet was that that was going to get him elected.
And then perhaps maybe he would come back and govern a little bit more from the right.
Well, he didn't.
He failed.
He lost seats.
He lost votes.
His plan didn't work.
His plan failed.
And in the meantime, he not only duped conservatives, but he completely insulted them.
He degraded their ideas.
And he has no business leading the party anymore.
But instead, everyone's giving him a pass.
The MPs don't really want to, I guess, go into another leadership debate.
And now we see this sort of angry man that's just completely lashing out over anyone who has a dissenting opinion, like you mentioned, with Marilyn Gladiou.
But also, Denise Batters, who's a really popular senator from Saskatchewan, she put forth a petition just simply saying, let's have a leadership review.
It's common after an election that we lost to have a leadership review.
And if Aaron O'Toole really feels that he has the support of the party, then he'll have a stronger mandate going into the next election.
And we're not going to be stuck in a situation where we have a leadership review in 2023.
And then Trudeau could spark an election immediately after that with the Conservative party in shambles.
And so she was making a very reasonable point.
What does he do?
He kicks her out of the party.
He expels her from the Conservative Party.
Shannon Stubbs, another one, a popular MP out in the prairies out in sort of northeast Alberta.
She made a couple of comments about Aaron O'Toole criticizing some things that he had said on election night.
And suddenly his office is investigating her and there's this really awful story about her, a hit piece in the Globe and Mail, filled with anonymous accusations from anonymous staffers saying that she was mean and that she worked too hard or whatever.
It's like, we know where this is coming from.
It's coming from Aaron O'Toole and his inner circle.
And they're bullying people.
They're pushing out strong female voices from the party, strong Western Canadian voices from the party.
Instead, they're trying to sanitize the party.
They're trying to create a party That's more media friendly, that's more palatable to left-wing voters and more similar to Justin Trudeau.
Basically, the proposition that he had in the last election is: we're just exactly the same as the Liberal Party, but we're less, what, we're less damaged by five years in government.
And so, they're saying that they'll basically just step in and be better managers of the government.
Well, Canadians want something different.
They want an opposition party that opposes the Liberals.
They want a conservative party that promotes and stands up for conservative values.
And the freedom of speech issue, the regulating of the internet, is just one of about a dozen issues that Aaron Tools abandoned.
That Aaron Tool said, I'm going to just go wherever Trudeau goes, hoping that that will make him more palatable again to left-wing voters and the legacy media, that they'll finally change their mind and go with O'Toole as opposed to Trudeau, which, as we both know, is never going to happen.
So, I have a lot of criticism for the Conservative Party, and again, I just don't understand why Aaron O'Toole is still the leader of that party.
Yeah, you know, and I should say to our viewers, I know for a fact that you and your team at True North have given him every benefit of the doubt.
I recall that Andrew Lawton, your great colleague who we admire and have on the show from time to time, he had a great sit-down interview with Aaron O'Toole during the leadership race.
So, you guys have given him every respect.
You're not hostile to him.
So, it's not, I mean, we have a bit of a, I mean, they poke at us and we poke back.
So, people could say, oh, you guys are in a quarrel.
You guys don't have a quarrel with him on a personal or relationship level.
Doug Ford's Heavy-Handedness00:08:49
Your objection to him, at least it looks to me, is purely on the fact that he, a policy level, and the fact that he's flip-flopped.
So, I mean, I think the fact that you guys who traveled on his campaign plane, if I recall.
Yeah, we had Andrew embedded on the conservative campaign for a week during the 2021 election.
Yeah, so you guys, I mean, it's not like you guys went in there thinking we're going to give this.
I mean, I think you went in there with an open mind and he just disappointed you if I'm summing things up.
What gets me is that I look at 10 Canadian provinces, three territories, the federal government, and every single governing party and every single official opposition has the identical policies on the core issues of our day: the lockdowns, civil liberties, vaccine mandates, quarantines, travel bans.
Like, really, is there even a millimeter of difference between any of them?
And I think to myself, other than a few stragglers, like in Ontario, there's a few MPPs like Randy Hillier and Belinda Karajalios and Roman Baber who are chucked out of the government so they can speak clearly.
And you've got Maxine Bernier, who doesn't have a seat.
Other than these, you know, little atoms, these free atoms flying around, in our entire political system, you don't have any diversity of thought on those key issues.
And I keep thinking, what if someone were to try?
And I look to Ron DeSantis in Florida.
I remember when he first decided to buck the sameness.
And he had about two terrible weeks where the media just tried to destroy him, but he didn't blink.
He didn't, you know, adjust his thinking to theirs.
And not only did it work as a policy, but he's a real leader.
He led his state.
He's a role model for other American conservatives who are catching up to him.
Like I think Texas is playing catch up to him.
And I look at this and I think, why couldn't we even, we don't even have to be that quote right wing.
I just wish that Aaron O'Toole and frankly Doug Ford and Jason Kenney would just try breaking from the PAC.
Just like there's a media party, there's now a pandemic lockdown party.
They're all lockdownists and you're not allowed to deviate.
I don't know.
I mean, your comments about Aaron O'Toole make me wish if he just tried being conservative, he couldn't do any worse than he's doing as a copycat liberal.
You're right.
Yeah.
And thanks for clarifying that because we did take Aaron O'Toole with an open mind.
I tried to hold my criticism of him during the election because, like I said, you know, he had a strategy and I wanted to see whether it was going to work.
It didn't work.
And now I think that there needs to be a reckoning.
But, you know, True North is open to fair coverage of the Conservatives in a way that I don't think many other media companies in the country are.
We don't instinctively demonize and go after the Conservatives.
I have many of the MPs as guests on my podcast.
I have someone on almost weekly.
And I definitely, overall, we have a good relationship with the Conservative Party.
It's just this leader.
I don't understand the direction.
And you're absolutely right about Ron DeSantos.
I mean, the media tried to get Ron DeSantos to stick.
They started calling him Ron DeSantos, and it didn't stick because the numbers didn't bear out.
They tried to paint it as if, oh, look, this crazy governor, they're having a Super Bowl party.
Just wait for the huge spike.
And the huge spike never came, right?
They opened Disney World when Disneyland was still completely shut.
Oh, there's going to be a huge spike.
No spike.
Ron DeSantos has done a tremendous job.
And I think he is a role model to all North American Conservatives.
You're right.
It's too bad that we don't have our own Canadian iteration of that.
And I think that a major reason for that, Ezra, is because of our healthcare system.
Our healthcare system is state-run, centrally planned, and we don't have the same capacity as the free and competitive system in the U.S. where there are multiple hospitals in the same region where there's three or four times as many beds in ICU capacity.
And so when Canada gets into a situation where there is a wave or a spike, our hospitals are completely inundated and overrun.
And now would have been a great opportunity for a conservative leader to step up and really articulate the reason why we need more choice, more competition, more private money going into our healthcare system.
And instead, we didn't see Aaron O'Toole able to articulate that and sell that vision during the election.
We don't see Doug Ford or Jason Kenney here and there.
They make a comment.
They both initially oppose vaccine mandates, saying that we don't want to split society, saying that they go against our charter and our health act.
And then a few weeks later, I guess they got convinced by the health bureaucrats in their system to go the other way.
But we don't see them standing their ground.
We don't see them standing up to the lies in the legacy media.
We don't see them pushing back against the heavy-handedness.
And it's so disappointing, in fact, the examples that you gave with Doug Ford Ontario and Jason Kenny in Alberta, some of the worst civil liberties offenses in the country.
I think that probably the worst thing that happened during the pandemic was the announcement by Doug Ford's Auditor General, sorry, Attorney General, saying that they were going to have police stop people on the street, stop cars on the road, saying that they were going to ask for a reason as to why they're out.
One of the best moments of the pandemic was when those police forces stood up and said, no, we're not doing that.
We're not doing that.
And defying that order until the Ford government retreated and came back and said that they weren't going to do that anymore.
That was one of the worst and one of the best moments of the pandemic.
And in Alberta, your coverage of the pastors being arrested, I mean, it's absolutely incomprehensible that that would be happening in a province run by conservative Premier Jason Kenney.
And I think that those instances, those absolutely despicable trampling of human rights in Canada, is something that conservatives won't soon forget, Ezra.
I have my thoughts on this, but I'd love to hear what do you think the big battle or the big story of 2022 will be.
Is it a censorship fight?
Is it something to do with lockdowns and the fifth booster?
What do you think the big, is it going to be a Chinese invasion of Taiwan or Russia and Ukraine?
What's the big thing you're worried about or waiting for in 2022?
Well, you know, I'm worried about a lot of things.
That's why I'm worried about inflation and the risk of hyperinflation with the way that we have been printing money.
I think that we're coming towards a fiscal clip.
It's something that we haven't experienced in a very long time.
So I'm very worried about the fiscal shape, not just in Canada.
The Canadian government is in a scary enough situation, but globally as well, the way that the countries, Western countries have been printing money.
That's a concern for me.
I think that pretty much everything you mentioned, but the idea that at some point we have to get back to normal.
We have to live our lives.
We have to live with COVID.
I think that what we've seen throughout history is that when a government expands, when a government takes on a new role, it's very reluctant to remove that, remove itself from that aspect of our society.
So I think that when it comes to, you know, with the Omicron variant, Ezra, what we've seen so far is that it's very viral, it spreads very fast, but the impact is very insignificant compared to previous waves.
So what it seems like with the mutations of COVID is that it's getting more viral and less deadly, which is what you want.
And so eventually, we're going to have to learn to live with it.
And I think that that's going to be a huge battle for Canadians to say, no, we don't want to be mandated by our government to get a vaccine that may or may not be effective.
No, we don't want to have to take a COVID test every time we want to travel, including intra-provincial travel.
I think that Canadians need to say enough is enough at some point and get on with our lives.
And, you know, seeing how Canadians have been pretty subservient and pretty complacent during the pandemic was a little unsettling for me.
I want Canadians to stand up for themselves and stand up for their way of life and their freedoms in a way that we haven't seen.
I mean, we've seen glimpses of it with the anti-lockdown protests, but we also see how those people get demonized and scapegoated by the legacy media.
So I think for me personally, the fight for civil liberties and getting back to normal will be the biggest story that impacts our lives in Canada, I think.
Fight for Civil Liberties00:00:45
Yeah, well, it's going to be an interesting year, Candice Malcolm.
Great to spend some time with you folks.
The website, again, is tnc.news.
I find, I have to tell you, if Rebel News did not exist, I would apply to work for TNC.news.
I don't know if I would make the cut, but I would certainly want to be part of your great team of happy warriors telling the truth, not taking a dime from the government.
And I think you guys tell the other side of the story too, which is our motto.
But it should be every journalist's motto, and I think you guys do it.
Thanks for all the work you do at the Independent Press Gallery.
I think it's going to be a big year ahead for that organization because of what's coming.
And good luck to you and Happy New Year.
All right, Ezra.
Thanks.
Same to you.
And I hope your viewers have a great New Year's as well.