Ezra Levant critiques Justin Trudeau’s government for banning Russian TV like RT while allowing state broadcasters from China and Ukraine, calling it hypocritical censorship. Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez frames RT as propaganda, yet protesters—including those at Calgary’s Freedom Rally—demand permanent freedom from COVID mandates, vaccine coercion, and bank account freezes, comparing restrictions to authoritarian tactics. The movement, now a "civil rights crusade," clashes with counter-protests amid fears of future government overreach, exposing Canada’s fragile balance between public health and personal liberties. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I talk about an authoritarian world leader who's banning TV channels he doesn't like.
No, I'm not talking about Vladimir Putin.
I'm talking about Justin Trudeau.
I'll give you the details ahead.
But before I do, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
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All right, here's today's show.
Tonight, I thought that Vladimir Putin would be banning TV stations, but actually it's Trudeau who's doing that.
It's March 1st, and this is the Angel 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 about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
I don't think it's a healthy sign that this tweet is considered normal.
I bet even you think it's normal.
We just see it so often.
600 episodes making us laugh.
An epic milestone.
Congratulations, 22 minutes.
So we've got a Trudeau cabinet minister, Pablo Rodriguez, praising Trudeau's government comedians on Trudeau's CBC state broadcaster.
None of that is a real or authentic expression of Canada.
It's all political propaganda.
It's all bought and paid for.
You cannot actually be a government comedian unless you are a court jester in the style of William Summers.
You know who that is.
We've talked about him before.
William Summers was the official jester to Henry VIII, who was a sort of leader of the opposition before that was a thing.
His job was to mock the king to his face, to challenge him, to rebut the flatterers, to bring him back down to earth, given all the professional liars that you could imagine hung around a king.
And Will Summers was given special immunity to do so.
He said what no one else dared to say to the king's face.
Yeah, the government comedians on the government broadcaster, the CBC, they do the opposite.
They attack Trudeau's enemies for him with a laugh track.
That's not normal, by the way.
I know a lot of comedians are left-wing anyways.
I get that.
A lot of the arts are left-wing.
I get that.
But I'm here to tell you it is not normal for a government cabinet minister to promote a government comedy show on the government broadcaster.
That is not normal in a healthy democracy.
That's something you'd see in Turkey or Iran or Russia, which is why I mention it.
As far as I know, there is no ban on Western broadcasters in Russia.
At least the ones that I checked, the big ones, including state broadcasters based in the West.
For example, here's a dedicated British broadcasting channel, BBC, called BBC Russian.
It's an entire news channel published by the government of the United Kingdom, targeting Russia in Russian.
Here's the U.S. government's Russian-language broadcaster called Voice of America in Russian.
I don't think either are blocked in Russia.
And frankly, I'm not sure what that would even mean to try and block something.
It's pretty easy to get access to something on the internet that is blocked for geographical reasons.
There's something called a VPN.
Maybe you've heard of that, or you can download a VPN that gets around a geographical barrier by making it seem like your computer or your phone is located in a different country.
So I don't think Putin even tries to block BBC Russian or Voice of America Russian.
But Pablo Rodriguez, Trudeau's heritage minister, who loves the government broadcaster, he's in charge of the CBC, and he's also in charge of internet censorship, by the way.
He just banned Russian TV stations from Canada.
Now, you can still get the Trudeau CBC state broadcaster in Russia, but you can't get Russia today, Putin's state broadcaster, over here.
At least not on TV, where it had served countless thousands of Russian-speaking Canadians for years.
Now, it started with a public suggestion by Rodriguez that if Canada's heavily regulated cable companies knew what's best for them, they would delete Russia today from their cable packages.
I share the concerns of many Canadians about the presence of Russia today in our broadcasting system.
We're looking at all options.
Now, I don't like foreign government propaganda here, but there sure is a lot of it starting with the CBC's own government propaganda, but going much further than that.
I mean, Trudeau's government press gallery specifically approves applications from state broadcasters from Russia, Ukraine, Vietnam, and they just welcomed an application from China's Xinhua, that's a state broadcaster for the Chinese Communist Party.
And that's the official precincts of Canada's parliament.
Those folks get privileged access to Trudeau and the government and the buildings.
Rebel news was officially refused by the press gallery.
So, Trudeau's Heritage Minister told Canada's broadcasters to cancel Russia today, and they did.
And I learned this not from those companies themselves, but from the government itself.
Here's Pablo Rodriguez.
I commend Bell for removing RT.
That's Russia today.
Russia has been conducting warfare in Ukraine since 2014 and information warfare across the world.
RT is the propaganda arm of Putin's regime that spreads disinformation.
It has no place here.
I'll have more to say very soon.
Well, what do you think was going on behind the scenes?
The company's got the message.
What's the word for it when big government and big corporations make political decisions to that together closed doors?
I think that is actually a technical definition of fascism, isn't it?
Here's what the government reported: Rogers will also remove RT and replace it with a broadcast of the Ukrainian flag.
Now, that's not a business decision, then, is it?
It's a political decision just to have a flag there.
Here's another one.
Thank you to Shah for also removing RT from its network.
We must all do our part to fight back against Russia's propaganda.
Must we all do our part to fight propaganda?
I accept that Russia today engages in propaganda.
I accept that fact, just as Ukraine does through its government and its government news network, just as Trudeau and Pablo Rodriguez do, especially the CBC state broadcaster.
Is this new partnership between the government and the media to censor viewpoints is really mandatory, as Rodriguez says?
We must do all our parts.
So, do I have to do my part to censor people?
Say, are we at war?
Can I ask?
I applaud TELUS for joining Canadian broadcasters and giving RT the boot.
Canadians stand with the people of Ukraine.
I'm sure many do.
Maybe even most do.
I also know that a lot of Russians in Canada watched Russian news.
I guess they're being punished too, or they're being treated as untrustworthy, maybe, and that we have to save them from hearing things we don't want them to hear, maybe.
So Trudeau's cabinet minister says ban them, and they ban them.
I mean, would you argue with your boss if you're a cable company and don't forget that the government is their boss?
Look at the rationale.
They have disinformation.
What is disinformation, by the way?
Spin?
Is that what it means?
One man's propaganda is another man's truth.
Canadians get to make up their own minds, except when Trudeau says they can't, I guess.
This from the CBC state broadcaster.
This is not disinformation, apparently.
I do ask that because, you know, given Canada's support of Ukraine in this current crisis with Russia, I don't know if it's far-fetched to ask, but there is concern that Russian actors could be continuing to fuel things as this protest grows, but perhaps even instigating it from the outset.
Well, again, I'm going to defer to our partners in the public safety, the trained officials and experts in that area.
Can we get them banned too?
Of course, big tech is getting in on it.
Here's Google YouTube with a statement out of Europe.
They say, due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, we're blocking YouTube channels connected to RT and Sputnik, that's another Russian news agency, across Europe, effective immediately.
It'll take time for our systems to fully ramp up.
Our teams continue to monitor the situation around the clock to take swift action.
Swift action, is Google YouTube a country now?
I mean, it does have 140,000 employees.
That's as big as, you know, a dozen small countries.
But it's as big as a big country financially, and it has more power than any country when it comes to the internet, doesn't it?
I mean, they literally banned Donald Trump when he was the sitting president.
Why wouldn't they ban Vladimir Putin or any of his associates?
Here's a former British politician, Nick Clegg, who is now a senior executive at Facebook.
We have received requests from a number of governments and the European Union to take further steps in relation to Russian state-controlled media.
Given the exceptional nature of the current situation, we will be restricting access to RT and Sputnik across the EU at this time.
Here's the Globe and Mail reporting the news.
They say, Russia's RT to be removed from Canadian lineup by Bell, Rogers, Shaw, and TELUS.
The story doesn't have a word against censorship.
In fact, they quote, the Conservative Party is wanting the government to do more and harder and faster.
Conservative interim leader Candace Bergen has called on Ottawa to issue an order of general application directing the CRTC to adopt a new broadcasting policy that revokes the licenses of such outlets so that Russia today is taken off Canada's airwaves.
Okay, so that's censorship, and that's the Globe and Mail.
It's a bit weird to read of a cheering for censorship in the Globe and Mail, given that China literally publishes a propaganda section written by the Chinese embassy, but made to look like a special news report in the Globe and Mail.
It's called China Watch.
Maybe you've seen it.
China Watch makes it sound skeptical, almost hostile to China, but in fact, it's written by the Chinese embassy and paid for by the Chinese embassy, and the Globe and Mail runs it in the middle of their newspaper.
So that's fine.
And so is pretty much everything from China, whether it's the Olympics or YouTube channels for Chinese propaganda, even though YouTube itself is illegal in China.
So there's that.
We have had censorship in time of war in Canada, World War II, for example.
We have propaganda in times of war also, but Canada is not in a war.
Canada is using someone else's war as an excuse to censor a TV channel.
for Canadians.
And of course, no one speaks out.
I'm not particularly a fan of Russia today.
I'm not particularly a fan of Russia.
I probably watched a grand total of an hour of RT in my whole life.
Say, do you think censorship of Canadian TV channels will stop with RT?
Masks As Political Proxy00:06:25
Or do you think that's just the start of that?
Do you think it might just be used against Canadians who have a different point of view from Trudeau on other matters, like the truckers or freedom?
And when censorship is used against others, probably against us, do you really expect the Conservative Party to try to stop them?
Stay with us for more.
You can go to Costco, you can go to Walmart, you can go shopping, you know.
You don't know if the person has a shot beside you or not, but we also know that it doesn't matter if you have one shot or 10 shots.
You can catch COVID.
See, the Prime Minister has triple shots, and I know hundreds of people with three shots that caught COVID.
We just have to be careful.
We've got to always make sure we wash our hands and move forward.
But Colin, we can't stay in this position forever.
We've got to learn to live with this and get on with our lives.
I bet if I asked every single person in this room, do you want these damn masks or do you want them off?
They want them off.
They want to get back to normal.
They want to be able to go for dinner with their families.
And there's every single person, including myself, knows people that are unvaccinated.
You know, sure, there's the rebel rousers, and then there's just hardworking people that just don't believe in it.
And that's their choice.
This is about, again, a democracy and freedoms and liberties.
And I hate as a government telling anyone what to do.
We just got to get moving forward and get out of this and protect the jobs.
You know, I think a lot of people, Colin, probably yourself too, everyone's done with us.
Like, we are done with it.
Let's start moving on and cautiously.
And, you know, we've followed the rules, all of us, like 90% of us, for over two years.
The world's done with it.
So let's just move forward.
That was the first honest thing that Doug Ford has said in two years.
First thing that wasn't scripted for him by, I don't know, Pfizer or some chief medical officer who was enjoying their celebrity.
Of course, even there, he says no one wants masks.
Of course, all the staffers and ministers around him had their masks on.
And the funny thing is, he's acting as if he's always believed that, when, of course, he was the one who declared an emergency in Ontario.
And he's the one who fired hundreds, perhaps thousands of nurses and others from the public sector.
By the way, they're still fired, even though tonight marks the first night that unvaccinated people in Ontario can go to the restaurant.
But even that's not quite true, is it?
Because like in Alberta, he's maintaining the QR code system to have vaccine passports implemented by individual businesses.
So if they're not medically necessary anymore, why are they allowed as a tool of discrimination?
And why is the government of Ontario supporting that?
You can't trust a word these people say.
And you notice that they're talking about the damage they did in the passive third person as if someone else did the damage.
And Doug Ford's mad that he's learned about it.
Yeah, I don't buy it.
Joining me now via Skype to talk about this is our friend Andrew Lawton, the boss of the Andrew Lawton show and a reporter for the true north.
Good to see you again, my friend.
Thanks for your time.
That clip was from a few days back.
I think that's the most authentic and natural I've heard, Doug Ford, in two years.
What do you think?
Yeah, and I think it was certainly in the midst of the convoy fever where pretty much everyone was fed up with it.
And I think a lot of politicians were starting to see that the Canadian population that had been, I think, for much of the last two years, fairly complacent and actually welcoming of restrictions had started to turn.
And I think that, again, there's a lot you could ask about whether that was the authentic Ford or the Ford that imposed the vaccine requirements and restrictions, or perhaps both were true.
But certainly it did go to a lot of places.
But even then, that was, I think, a couple of weeks back now.
The vaccine passport is gone in Ontario.
But as you alluded to, still some restrictions in place and still no end date for the mask mandate.
Yeah.
You know, I haven't been to a restaurant in a while.
I do.
There's a couple of restaurants in Ontario that I go to that don't ask me for a mask and don't ask me if I'm vaxed.
And if someone says, I mean, and I just, like, I just don't engage in those conversations and I know these places won't kick me out.
I don't want to name them because they'll probably get in trouble.
But I'm, you know, so tonight is theoretically, I can go to my old favorite restaurants.
But even then, I don't want to wear a mask.
I don't want to go through this public health theater.
We know it's all BS.
We know, as Doug Ford says, we're all sick of it.
But they can't quite give it up, can they?
The mask will be the last thing to go because it was the first thing to come.
Because I believe the mask is the flag of lockdownism.
It's the symbol that you're submitting.
Because you can't tell just by looking at someone if they're vaxed or not.
You can't tell if they've had it or not, but you can tell if they're wearing a mask, if they're a believer, if they're a submitter.
And that's why it's such a proxy for things.
I might go to a restaurant tonight, Andrew, for the first time in probably a year, but I'm not wearing a mask.
I'm just telling you.
Yeah, I think you're right there about the symbol of the mask.
And the one problem that I have, I have many problems, but one of the main problems I have with the masks is that they are pretend unintrusive.
The people that promote them claim they are least intrusive.
They are, well, it's just a piece of paper on your face.
It's just, it's barely anything at all.
How is that a problem?
But doctors wear these all the time.
And people try to claim that it's insignificant, but it's not.
It's not insignificant.
It's entirely abnormal to go about in society not being able to see the faces of the people you are interacting with.
I talked to someone who had started a new job recently in an actual workplace, and they said, you know, they had never actually seen their coworkers' faces except for on the odd Zoom call if they were going in from home or on Facebook or whatever.
But they had never actually in person seen these people's faces that they work with.
Canadians Condemning Government Restrictions00:02:51
And that is symbolic.
It's not something you can quantify, but it is a very real issue.
And more importantly, it is, just as it's a symbol of compliance to some people, it's also a symbol to people like me of a new normal.
You and I have both run into each other in foreign cities and in cities across the country.
And, you know, air travel is something that I fear is never going back to the way it was before.
Right now, you need to be vaccinated to get on an airplane in Canada.
And even once you're on there, you've got to keep the mask on.
And heaven forbid you take more than 30 seconds to eat your peanuts or whatever.
There's a flight lieutenant telling you to put it back on.
Stuff like that is not the way a normal functioning society operates.
Yeah.
You know, and it was the little tool that every petty little authoritarian used to trump their neighbor, not only so they could say they were more morally righteous than their neighbor, but it was a weapon to attack their neighbor.
And it really showed an authoritarian subtext or just beneath the surface.
And it reminded me of the fact that, and I'm not comparing the lockdown to the Nazi Holocaust, but I am comparing aspects of authoritarianism and how they can take root in a liberal society that sees itself as liberal and educated and cultured.
Because remember, Nazism didn't happen overnight.
Hitler came into office, I would say, in 1933.
It took him six more years to get full power in his hand.
And the height of the Holocaust was actually 10 years.
So from 33 to 43, it took 10 years for the most liberal, cultured, educated country in Europe to become fully Nazi and deathly.
And obviously we didn't go down the whole road, but boy, we sure went to the demonization part.
We went to the segregation part.
We went to the fire doctors who didn't agree with it and condemned, we sure whipped up the crowd.
And as I've said before, I think we walked several years down the road, 1935 were the Nuremberg laws, the segregationist laws.
We didn't hit 1938, which was Kristallnacht, where there was the smashing and the rioting.
But we went a few years down that path, Andrew.
What do you think of that?
I mean, listen, I'm not Jewish, so I make a very deliberate point of avoiding any comparison to that episode of history because I don't feel like I've earned the right to make those comparisons.
But I do think that just more broadly on the question of authoritarianism, there is a significant part that we often view authoritarianism in terms of the actual authoritarian leaders.
But they only have legitimacy because people give them legitimacy before it gets to that point where they have the apparatus of a state and of enforcers.
Public Sentiment Shifts00:06:31
And to go back to the Canadian context here, that's been one of the biggest frustrations I've had for most of the last two years is how Canadians have actually been condemning the government for not regulating them more, condemning the government for not putting more restrictions in place.
There were businesses before Ontario had a vaccine passport that were demanding Doug Ford impose a vaccine passport on them.
And I'm like, well, hang on, if that's important to you as a business, why don't you make the decision?
The reason they didn't want to is because they knew that it would alienate their customers.
They wanted to blame someone else.
So there's a huge problem of people looking to the government to solve their problems when it comes at the expense of their own liberties and those of their countrymen.
Yeah.
You know, my life has been changed and I'm a grown man.
For children, it's been, their lives have been devastated.
But I remember how I used to be.
Our office is in sort of a light industrial park part of Toronto.
It's not in the downtown.
It's sort of an interesting neighborhood.
And there was a bakery I would always stop in the morning just for, it was an Italian bakery.
I would stop for a quick little espresso and maybe a little Italian baking or something.
And I just loved going there and seeing the workers every day and saying hi to the, like it was just a neighborhood feeling.
And I felt like I was connected to the neighbors.
And maybe they knew my name or maybe they had forgotten it.
But we always waved and said hi.
And it was a ritual.
And the places in your neighborhood are part of your ritual.
They're the backdrop to your life.
And I remember when I went in there and I had been friends with them for years and we had done thousands of dollars worth.
We would have our lunches catered from this little bakery at our office here.
So we weren't just friendly neighbors.
We were fairly serious customers.
And just put your mask on.
No, it has to be above your.
And I'm thinking, what happened?
You've just destroyed.
I'm not going to call it a friendship, but I tell you, I haven't been back there since that.
And all these little places I would go, all these folks I would say, hey, how are you?
How you doing?
It pitted us against each other.
It pitted shopkeeper against customer, neighbor against neighbor, family member against family member.
And it licensed rage instead of politeness.
And I think that long after the legal instruments for this lockdown are gone, I think the destruction of social niceties and politeness and courtesy will take a generation to regrow.
That's what I think.
Oh, I think you're right about that.
There are a lot of people that derived great purpose from these COVID restrictions, from the bylaw enforcement officers that in April of 2020 were handing out tickets for playing on closed slides and swing sets to the people now that are saying, no, no, no, you have to show that you're vaccinated and have your mask on and you've got to, you know, pin it around your nose and all of that.
There are people that have derived great purpose from the control that the pandemic has brought them.
And a lot of these people are going to retreat back into irrelevance once this is all done.
And I think that's very threatening because they've enjoyed for the last two years a sort of cultural hegemony on the narrative, which they will not have forever.
And I think fewer and fewer Canadians are accepting.
Yeah, you know what?
I mean, it's hard to even, I mean, I think some people are coming out of the haze now.
There was, I don't know if you read that case from family court in Ontario of a judge.
Yes, yes.
That was just, I think that felt like the fever broke to have that judge speak that way.
Frankly, I think that the combination of the truckers and then the Ukraine war just sort of making everything else seem trivial.
I think that snapped a lot of people out of the fever.
I saw the New Zealand High Court recently announced they were scrapping their mandates.
So I think that certain slow institutions are catching up.
But I remember in 2020 when there was literally police do not cross tape on children's playgrounds.
So that so the kids are not allowed to be outside where you don't catch the virus, kids who are the least affected by the virus, and no exercise.
Go home and watch Netflix and order fast food delivered to your house.
The anti-public health, like roping off, chaining off police tape on outdoor playgrounds.
We did that.
And I think it's important never to forget what was done because I feel like we're coming close to the end of at least some of it.
Justin Trudeau is going to hang on to what he can forever.
But I think that I think we have to remember who did this to us and in what name they did it to us.
And I think we have to remember not to be duped again.
Last word to you, my friend.
Yeah, the first couple of weeks of this, I'll admit, there was a lot of distribution of the benefit of the doubt.
We were seeing horror stories emerging from Wuhan in China.
We didn't know what we were dealing with.
And at a certain point, people were prepared to give the government and each other the benefit of the doubt.
Social distancing wasn't a state mandate.
It was something that people did because it was courteous.
You give people extra space if you're passing them in a hallway or something.
And at a certain point, the government knew and decided to willfully obstruct the truth on COVID.
And I'm not talking about this in a conspiratorial way.
I'm talking about committing to a path, committing to a narrative, committing to an approach that flies in the face of the science.
And more importantly, that opened up a whole host of other issues that still they have been unwilling to address.
The impact on children is one it will take years for us to understand the full extent of.
Yeah.
Well, I feel like the tides are turning in public sentiment.
I might go out for dinner tonight, and I can tell you I'm not wearing a mask in the lineup.
There's nothing dumber than standing up, wear a mask, sit down, take your mask off.
I'm not going to go through that again.
Let's see.
No, but the COVID has an altitude.
It goes above your head when you're sitting.
That's right.
What a world we have all lived through.
I feel like you and us here at Rebel News and a handful of others were on the right side of history, but the vast majority were not.
And that's something we're going to have to think about for a long time.
Great to see you again, my friend.
Thanks for your time today.
As always.
All right.
There you have it.
Andrew Lawton.
He's the boss of the Andrew Lawton Show.
And you can watch him at tnc.news.
That's our Friends of True North.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Hey, welcome back.
Fossil Fuels Debate00:02:41
Someone with a nickname Rebel Richards says, hey, let's not buy gas and oil from Russia.
Then Trudeau can ride his bike to work.
You know, when I wrote the book Ethical Oil about a decade ago, I had an idea for country of origin labeling for energy.
You know what I mean by that?
Literally anything you buy in a store, anything at Walmart, anything at Costco, your clothing, even your food, has country of origin labeling.
You have the right to know where it came from.
Except for oil at your gas pump.
Isn't that funny?
You could track it.
And you could be told if it was Canadian oil, American oil, Saudi oil, Russian oil.
I think we should have country of origin labeling for oil.
So people can know, well, is this Russian oil or Saudi oil or American oil?
Just so you can make a choice if you care.
I think most people wouldn't care, but some people would really care.
Chase James 2021 says Biden wants the USA a third world country with the elimination of fossil fuels.
Fossil fuel is more economical and in the long run much cleaner fuel than these electric cars everyone keeps promoting.
Yeah, and there's something called density of fuel.
Here's what I mean by that.
Like this much fuel in a car will let you go more than 100 miles.
To get that kind of energy that small, you can't do it with solar.
You can't do it with wind.
And, you know, you can't fly a plane.
You can't have a jumbo jet take off.
Let me put it this way.
You can't make wind turbines.
The factories that make wind turbines are not powered by wind turbines.
They're powered by coal-fired power plants.
Green energy, maybe one day it'll be a thing.
I don't know if you ever remember that movie Avatar, but they were looking for this mineral called unobtanium.
Unobtanium.
Yeah, that's about it.
This fantasy fuel of the future is perfect in every way, except it doesn't exist.
Maybe one day we'll find it, but we haven't yet.
And until then, we have to use fossil fuels.
Gas for your car, jet fuel for planes.
Sorry, solar doesn't work yet.
Alma Alma says, so Christy Freeland lived and studied in Ukraine and bought an apartment with her sister in Kiev, overlooking the square.
Is that the same apartment in Kiev that one of Putin's missiles pierced?
Anyone else read about the recent suicide of one of Gazprom's directors who was found dead in St. Petersburg?
I did hear the part about a gas bomb director found dead.
I didn't hear the part about Christy Freeland buying an apartment in Kiev.
I'll have to look into that because there's so many rumors out there.
Weeks Of Protest00:10:41
I think we have to be on guard in case that's one of them.
But I have no doubt.
I mean, Christy Freeland has been an anti-Russian activist her whole life.
And in many ways, I think I have too.
I remember even when I was in high school during the Cold War, that's how old I am.
I was one of the few people in my class who were vocally against communists, even in my book, Ethical Oil.
And my book, Shakedown, sorry, my book, pardon me, Groundswell, The Case for Fracking.
I go on at great length about the dangers of Russia and Putin.
But I think that Christia Freeland has an obsession that is very deep.
And as you probably know, her grandfather published a Nazi newspaper, and she covered that up for him for years.
I think Christia Freeland is really iffy.
I think she's ethically iffy.
I think her family history, although I would never put the sins of the grandfather on the granddaughter, I would like to know more about what the grandpa, the Nazi, taught Christy Freeland.
And I think most relevant is I'm worried about her being on the board of directors of the World Economic Forum.
I think Christia Freeland is actually probably more dangerous than Justin Trudeau in many ways.
And I am a critic of Vladimir Putin and have been for 20 years.
But it makes me nervous that Christia Freeland is leading the charge.
I think she's a diplomatic risk, let me put it that way.
That's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.
And keep fighting for freedom.
Let me leave you with our video today from Adam in Calgary, who did a story about protesters continuing their demonstrations against government overreach.
I should tell you, Jason Kenney is trying to rehabilitate his image on Twitter by saying how much he's against those damaging policies that he himself brought in for the lockdown, but he still is banning unvaxed people from working in large swaths of the public sector.
He's still jailing Pastor Arthur Pavlovsky.
And I think he's just caught between nervousness that he's going to lose his party leadership convention in a month or so, and also his commitment to being a lockdownist.
It's really bizarre to see.
I'll leave you with that video.
I'll see you later.
I'm Sos here for Rebel News, and we are once again at the Calgary Freedom Rally here in Central Memorial Park, where hundreds are once again gathered.
I want to take just a moment to pause and reflect on the fact that week after week, hundreds and indeed thousands of people have been standing in solidarity together in what is very likely one of the largest civil rights movements in Canadian history.
We have never seen so many cities standing so many weekends week after week for their freedom, standing in unity and standing for each other.
These people are protesting, demanding a permanent end to mandates and an end to all the restrictions from COVID-19 that have done so much harm to society.
And this is my warning to these COPA leaders.
Leave our children alone.
So there is a pretty clear sentiment among the people here that temporary lifts of mandates and restrictions aren't enough.
There's always this threat that they will return those half promises.
What is the impression you're gathering from people here?
What do they want for these protests to come to an end?
We need to be sure that this can never happen again.
We need our elected officials to vote into law restrictions on their abilities to impose these non-pharmaceutical interventions.
I can't speak for the rest of these people.
I can only speak for myself.
I want freedom.
I want this stand.
I want it never to be reinstigated again because I'm free and they have no right to tell me what to do.
Total freedom.
No government controls, no vaccine mandates.
No government controlling bank accounts for trying to keep the country free.
It's all about freedom.
Freedom.
It's not about the vaccine.
People here, we all believe science.
We all trust science.
It's not about that.
We're against Trudeau.
We're against tyranny.
We want to be free.
It's our bodies.
It's our choice.
That term doesn't get to change just because the narrative changes.
You still have to get a vaccine in order to have to go to work and able to travel.
There's still a lot of pressure for people who aren't convinced about why that's important.
So you know what?
Although on the surface it feels like we're kind of free and we are, there's still several people or groups, if you want to call them, that are still getting pressured to do that.
And I don't think that's fair because they just want to have a conversation about it.
They want some more information before they do it.
But so many people got forced after Christmas, if they were in health care or if they were in travel industries or if they worked for the government to get vaccinated without question.
And I don't think that's right.
I don't think that's fair.
That's why we're here.
Well, I don't think anybody's going to want to end the protest until everything guaranteed that it's not going to reopen.
Like even in Alberta, we don't trust the premier.
We want our freedom.
We want our right to choose.
We want our lives back.
This is a free country.
What we're doing is beyond wrong.
We want freedom.
Freedom to live our lives the way that we see fit.
Well, we're fighting for bodily autonomy and we know these things are going to come back.
Like they're not done with them and these governments got to go, all of them.
You know, there's not one premier, there's not one federal government that's on our side.
And we need to keep fighting for that.
Get them all out.
Well, folks here are speaking about this as a great awakening.
The people here not simply being placated by the fact that some mandates and restrictions are being dropped.
They want assurances that these restrictions and mandates are gone for good.
They're also calling for an end to the keeping of political prisoners like Pastor Archer Pavlowski who are being held simply for questioning their narrative.
So you're you are you attending the protest or just stumble upon it?
We are waiting for a friend down the line.
We've been here one week before and now we're back again.
So what is it that you want?
What are you fighting for?
What are you protesting?
Well, we are both musicians and have lost a lot of work over the past year to do these mandates.
And we have a seven-month-old baby.
I was pregnant when the vaccine came out.
And we just basically want people to have control over their medical choices again.
So, that's what we're here for.
For the first time in effectively the two years that these protests have been taking place, we're seeing a significant counter-protest here.
Police have effectively set up a barricade, preventing the protesters from interacting.
I'm going to try and speak with some of the counter-protesters, see what their perspective is.
Would you guys like to stay at all?
Are you counter-protesting or what you're standing for?
Sure.
So what exactly is it that you're counter-protesting here?
I support the right to protest.
That is at the heart of any democracy.
That being said, we need to keep our society safe.
Public health measures are a means of doing that.
Are you attacking prison?
Yes. Sorry.
Thank you.
Did you want to say something?
No.
Does anyone want to say why you're, we're happy to include your perspective.
We're happy to include your perspective.
We're saying, just a sign?
We have to care about freedom.
We wouldn't march for the flag.
So it's incredibly interesting.
The last few weeks we've attended these protests, we have seen the public opinion on the sides of streets shift.
People have been clapping and cheering in roadside cafes and bars.
This week it's interesting.
It's almost as though while society begins to shift, while the perspectives begin to change, the more radical people out there, some of the activists, some of the counter-protesters, can sense that there's a shift taking place.
And so they, for the first time today, are out in numbers counter protesting.
As society begins to open up, as society begins to become more free, they want us locked down once again.
And what do you make of for the first time really?
And sometime we're seeing counter protesters seemingly wanting things locked down.
What do you make of them?
I think they're paid.
I mean, they're not.
Who can be anti-freedom?
Honestly, like, to me, I don't really care how you want to live your life, whether, you know.
However you want to live your life is your right to choose.
Honestly, I don't think that they, I think they're just paid to be here, paid to slander us.
I mean, this is a peaceful group.
Everybody's happy.
We're singing.
We're having a great time.
Last week we spoke with your family.
You were in Ottawa with the convoy.
You are now back here.
What was the experience like?
Like nothing I've ever been a part of in my life.
Just the energy, the unity, the love, just the way everybody was coming together.
And we needed it for the longest time.
It was unbelievable.
I was riding that high for days after I got home.
And we've seen the Emergencies Act drop, some of these other measures dropped, but lots of it, there's sort of ifs and buts languages that suggest it might come back.
What do you think of that?
Well, what I've been hearing is they dropped it, but they only dropped specific portions of it.
So the fact, it might be dropped, yeah.
But the fact is they can still freeze our bank accounts and all that stuff.
So it doesn't really make a difference.
We're seeing week after week thousands and thousands of people coming, standing in solidarity.
In your lifetime, have you ever seen a movement like this for civil liberties, a movement where so many people have come together in Canada?
Never.
No, never.
And I started coming here about a year ago and it's grown like crazy.
We love you.
We love you.
Well, the Emergencies Act for the time being has been revoked.
Mandates and restrictions are also being revoked, but people continue to demand their freedoms long term.
And these people are not going to desist in their protests until those freedoms are guaranteed for the long term.
These people will continue to march for their freedoms.
As always, I want to thank you all so much for tuning in for Rebel News.