Ezra Levant argues COVID-19 is now endemic like the flu, yet criticizes lingering Canadian lockdowns—Quebec’s curfew imposed without studies, Alberta’s Dr. Hinshaw falsely linking a child’s death to COVID, and mask mandates in schools while vaccine passports vanish elsewhere. He demands accountability for ventilator contracts, police crackdowns (like Ottawa’s SWAT raid on journalist Alexa LeBois), and Kenney’s 30% approval drop despite Alberta’s UCP polling at 40%. At the April 9 UCP convention, Kenney’s leadership may face removal due to pandemic backlash, though Gene’s nomination raises doubts about defeating the NDP. Levant also questions Trudeau’s policies, Bill Gates’ moral authority amid Epstein ties and climate lockdowns, and government media bias, like Rebel News’ Victoria ban, framing it as a fight for fair accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
A lot of things have to be pulled up by the root, or it's just going to come back again.
I'll show you what I mean in today's monologue.
But before I do, let me invite you to get the video version of today's monologue.
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Click subscribe.
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That's just pennies a day, as they say.
But, you know, pennies a day add up for us.
If enough people subscribe, we can really make a go of it without taking any of that Trudeau cash.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com.
Thanks.
Tonight, is the pandemic over?
Are the lockdowns over?
It's St. Patrick's Day, 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 won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I'm publishing it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
By every measure the pandemic is over.
It's endemic now.
It's just in the background like the common cold or the annual flu season.
Sometimes the flu is bad one year, sometimes it's not as bad the next.
I'm skeptical about how accurately the COVID-19 coronavirus was identified as opposed to other coronaviruses.
By the way, the common cold is often caused by a coronavirus.
That's why there were no colds last year.
They needed to put those in another category, I bet.
But there was such a political and financial incentive to identify every illness as COVID-19.
I'm not sure if we'll ever know the true statistics behind what was done to us.
Here's one example of hundreds.
I just chose Massachusetts at random.
It was the first one that popped up in my search engine.
Department of Public Health updates COVID-19 death definition.
Revised data capture more accurately the acute impact of COVID in the Commonwealth.
Yeah, so 4,000 people who they used to claim for years and died from COVID, they actually didn't.
Sorry about that.
Yeah.
Hey, sorry, old chap.
Now that's over, I guess we'll tell you the truth about it.
But hey, trust the science, right?
Mask mandates are done in many places, except for most Canadian schools.
I hate that.
I drive to work every morning and I see parents walking their children to school.
The parents have no masks, but the young kids do.
And I know why, because in a moment when the kids attended school, they'll have to put their masks on.
The schools will demand it.
That's gross.
That's unscientific.
Children are the least risk of COVID in society.
For parents to accept the masking of their own children at all was outrageous.
But now that everyone else is free except for the children, that's a disgrace.
But really no different from the past two years when NHL hockey teams, millionaire players with billionaire owners, they were allowed to play hockey, but not your neighborhood kids hockey teams.
That's science.
Disgrace upon disgrace.
And while vaccine passports are being dropped in many places in Canada, they're still in effect for many government jobs.
I hear that Air Canada also is about to fire hundreds more staff soon.
And of course, there's Trudeau's no-fly list.
He correctly won't agree to a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
That would involve Canadians shooting down Russian jets, which would start World War III with the nuclear power.
But the thing about a Canadian no-fly list is that Canadians who aren't vaccinated, if you were to declare war on them, they have no nukes to fight back.
In fact, if they even peacefully protest against Trudeau, they'll be clubbed like baby seals by Trudeau's police thugs and have their bank accounts frozen without any legal recourse.
I see that British Airways and some other major airlines over there are dropping their in-flight mask requirements.
I think that's great.
You can still wear your mask if you like.
You always could wear a mask if you wanted to, but now no one else has to match your fear level.
This will be a great relief to passengers, and I have no doubt that it will be a great relief to many flight attendants who no longer have to be mask cops constantly harassing passengers about their masks falling beneath their nose or that they laughably have to put the mask on in between bites of food or sips of water.
I heard a flight attendant said that once.
Some flight attendants will miss that bizarre power.
They like being bullies, but I think most will be glad it's done.
But again, not in Canada.
So there may be a simulation that we're free.
It'll feel almost that we're free, but we're not free.
As I said last night at a democracy fund again with Dr. Julie Panessi and Dennis Prager, sometimes things are more likely to happen a second time than they were to happen a first time.
What I mean by that is two years ago, a lockdown of innocent, healthy, law-abiding Canadian citizens was unthinkable.
It's just impossible.
And physically, how would you lock them down?
Morally, how could you justify it?
Legally, how could you enforce it?
Medically, how could you say it makes sense?
It makes no sense at all.
You'd have to be nuts to think that free Canadians would suddenly go along with being prisoners.
Yeah, well, Canadians did.
And in Quebec, they even put up with full curfews, like there were children being scolded by parents or something.
No surprise.
It has recently come out that there was no science behind Quebec's imposition of the curfews, just no science at all.
Quebec Public Health scrambled to justify second curfew hours before announcement.
I'm reading the CBC story here.
Emails reveal former public health director lacked scientific studies, sought help to no avail.
I'm going to read a little bit of this to you.
Actually, give me about a minute.
You know that they all did this, right?
They all lied.
They all made it up.
Look at this.
Let me read.
Hours before Quebec announced the reinstatement of a province-wide curfew in December, which began the next day.
Emails obtained by Radio Canada revealed the province's head of public health was still looking for studies to justify the decision.
Oh, I thought you do it the other way around.
I thought you have studies that justify it, and then you do it.
I didn't know you worked in reverse of that.
In an email time stamped at 10.31 a.m. on December 30th, the assistant to former public health director Dr. Horatio Aruda solicited help from the province's Public Health Institute, as well as a senior strategic medical advisor for Quebec Public Health, to rationalize the curfew to reporters at a news conference later that day.
Horatio would like you and your teams to provide him with an argument in relation to the curfew in anticipation of questions from journalists at the 5 p.m. press conference this evening, wrote Renee Levesque.
What are the studies?
What is being done elsewhere?
The email reads, adding Aruda wanted it all in a light argument.
At 2.36 p.m., less than three hours before the news conference, Eric Ligvac, Vice President of Scientific Affairs at the Institut Nationale de Santé Publique du Québec, replied that the request was impossible to fulfill.
On the SPQ side, we don't have an existing analysis that specifically addresses the curfew, and we are unfortunately unable to produce one today with such short notice, he wrote in an email.
They made it all up.
They made it all up.
There was no science behind it.
There's no medicine.
There's no epidemiology.
No studying unintended consequences.
No mental health studies, no drug use studies, no family strife studies, no economic strife, no lost opportunities.
50,000 tickets handed out by cops in Quebec over these rules.
Every single one of them should be canceled.
Every single fine that someone already paid should be refunded.
And of course, the wicked man who knew all of this, but proceeded nonetheless, Dr. Horatio Aruda, he must be prosecuted, but he won't be prosecuted for how could he be prosecuted and not all the rest of them.
So yeah, it was unthinkable that they would do to us what they did.
But they said, let's just let us do it just for two weeks, okay?
Just 15 days, okay?
That's it.
Just two weeks, just a little.
He's how they said it in America, and there's Donald Trump standing right next to it.
We're asking that same sense of community to come together and stand up against this virus.
And if everybody in America does what we ask for over the next 15 days, we will see a dramatic difference and we won't have to worry about the ventilators and we won't have to worry about the ICU bets because we won't have our elderly and our people at the greatest risk having to be hospitalized.
It's the same thing up here, two weeks to flatten the curve.
Unthinkable But Thinkable00:03:21
But wasn't it quite something how in lockstep they all were?
Every country, every state, every province, every city, as if they were all reading from a script together.
And in a way, they were from the China-controlled World Health Organization.
But really, what was the excuse for Aaron O'Toole or Jason Kenney or Doug Ford?
Cowardice, lack of conviction?
Who knows?
You know, socialists were going to abuse government power.
It's sort of a given.
But what is the excuse for so-called conservatives?
It was unthinkable that it would happen once, but we proved that it was all too thinkable.
It did happen.
So obviously it'll be easier to do a second time.
It's no longer unthinkable.
It's no longer unimaginable.
And why wouldn't it happen a second time?
Over my dead body.
Yeah, whose dead body?
What court has ever said no to them?
What political party?
What police force?
What college of physicians?
What media company?
Why wouldn't it happen again and then again?
I mean, get ready for the next one, right?
So we, you know, we'll have to prepare for the next one.
That, you know, I'd say is will get attention this time.
That's Bill Gates smiling a bit too much about the next pandemic.
It's a bit creepy.
I think he's getting creepier.
It took her a while, but his wife, Melinda Gates, finally divorced him.
And it was because of his refusal to stop visiting Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted pedophile, who ran an international child rape gang.
You know, it was also widely reported that Bill had a friendship or business or some kind of contact with Jeffrey Epstein and that you were not, that that was very upsetting to you.
Did that play a role in the divorce at all in this process?
Yeah, as I said, it's not one thing.
It was many things.
But I did not like that he'd had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, though.
And you made that clear to him.
I made that clear to him.
I also met Jeffrey Epstein exactly one time.
Did you?
Yes, because I wanted to see who this man was.
And I regretted it from the second I stepped in the door.
He was abhorrent.
He was evil personified.
I had nightmares about it afterwards.
So, you know, my heart breaks for these young women because that's how I felt.
And here I'm an older woman.
My God, I feel terrible for those young women.
It was awful.
You felt that the moment you walked in.
I didn't hear that.
It was awful.
Yeah.
And you shared that with Bill, and he still continued to spend time with him?
Any of the questions remaining about what Bill's relationship there was, those are for Bill to answer.
Okay.
But I made it very clear how I felt about him.
How can it be that after what we know and after what his own wife says, how can Bill Gates still be accepted uncritically as not just a subject matter expert, which he is not, but a moral expert?
How?
How can people still listen to him?
His wife divorced him over what he was doing with Epstein.
Well, money, of course.
He's given away more than 300 million U.S. to his favorite media.
That's almost just and true.
No money.
So that's enough to wash away any tough questions from the media party.
But Bill Gates isn't just into vaccines.
Why Masks Fail To Protect00:15:05
He cares about global warming.
Even though he's big into private jets and that Epstein lifestyle.
Remember this story here?
He's the kook who wanted to spray tons of dust into the atmosphere, enough to actually block the sun to reduce global warming.
Just that.
Hey, do you mind if I just dim the heavens to block out the sun?
But how is that any nuttier than locking people in their own homes or forcing masks on children?
They've all learned so much from the pandemic about what they can get away with in the future.
They're all using that phrase climate lockdown now.
Look at this.
Here's a media company bankrolled by George Soros.
In this case, I'll read a bit for you.
Avoiding a climate lockdown.
The world is approaching a tipping point on climate change when protecting the future of civilization will require dramatic interventions.
Avoiding this scenario will require a green economic transformation and thus a radical overhaul of corporate governance, finance, policy, and energy systems.
Okay, got it.
Now here's the key paragraph.
Get this.
Under a climate lockdown, governments would limit private vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil fuel companies would have to stop drilling.
To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structure and do capitalism differently.
Many think of the climate crisis as distinct from the health and economic crises caused by the pandemic.
But the three crises and their solutions are interconnected.
Hello, citizens.
You do have a choice.
Give government control of your entire lives or give government total control over your lives.
But it's your choice which way.
They really won't stop talking about climate lockdowns.
They're not done yet.
They just had a massive dress rehearsal and it went swimmingly for them.
That's why I think it's important that we finish up the current pandemic and the lockdowns properly.
And here's what I mean by that.
First of all, we have to end the lockdown punishments of citizens completely, end the vaccine mandates for government jobs federally and provincially, delete and destroy the QR code database system that is still operating in Canada, permitting private vaccine passports using government data.
That has to be rooted out and not just rooted out.
It's got to be legally banned in the future.
Secondly, we need to obviously end the most atrocious vaccine lockdown, the no-fly list.
Millions of Canadians are not allowed to travel in this country by train or plane or ferry boat because they choose for whatever reason, including they already have natural immunity not to get vaxxed.
That has to end.
I don't know of any other country in the world that does that.
Same with the cross-border limitations, if you're not in fact.
But thirdly, we need deep forensic investigations into how all these decisions were made and by whom.
And by the decisions, I mean like how Quebec's unscientific curfew was brought into effect, despite the fact there was no evidence for it, and they knew that.
But every decision, was there any science behind it?
I doubt it.
I've shown you this before.
The former head of the FDA saying no one actually knows where the whole six-foot distancing rule came from.
They all just sort of started repeating it, but no one knows who said it at first.
That's atrocious.
Fourth, who got all the money for ventilators that were never used or never even made?
How were contracts awarded?
Deep forensic investigations, deep accounting investigations.
Fifthly, into hospitalized too, and COVID patients.
How many were there?
How many were there?
Like when Alberta's Dr. Dina Hinshaw lied and claimed that a child died from COVID when he actually died from cancer.
She lied and used a dead child to promote her pandemic fear-mongering to scare other children and parents.
It all needs to come out.
There has to be an audit.
There needs to be a sort of truth and reconciliation commission to let us know what really happened.
There needs to be an admission of wrongdoing.
The federal and provincial emergencies acts, for example, were so obviously abused.
They need to be amended so this just can't happen.
Again, we need a full investigation of the police, especially those who went to Ottawa SWAT team style to physically beat and even shoot protesters and journalists like our own Alexa LeBois.
We need a deep inquiry into the banks.
Whose bank accounts were seized?
Who do they spy on?
Those willing collaborators in Justin Trudeau's violation of civil liberties.
We can't just say, okay, we're done with the lockdowns.
We're through that.
Back to normal.
We have to know.
We have to show people what was done wrong and who did it.
And we need the truth to come out.
We need to make sure it'll never happen again because if we don't, it will happen again sooner than you think.
Stay with us for more.
Hey, welcome back.
Well, I saw a poll the other day that showed there is a tie for the least popular premier in all of Canada.
The most popular, to my surprise, was in British Columbia.
Quebec's premier was pretty high, but tied for dead last was the new premier in Manitoba and Jason Kenney in Alberta.
Amazing considering how popular he was in his last election, where he trounced the NDP's Rachel Notley.
Now he's tied at 30%, very low.
And two days ago, there was a by-election in Fort McMurray.
And the reason this was important is that the leadership contestant that Jason Kenney beat a couple years ago when he created the United Conservative Party, Brian Gene is his name.
Well, he was running in that by-election explicitly to get rid of Jason Kenney.
And what a great column I have here in my hands from the Edmonton Sun.
Gene's by-election win, his springboard into UCP leadership race written by our friend Lauren Gunter, senior columnist with the Edmonton Sun, who joins us now ViceCube.
Lauren, great to see you again.
I love the first line of your column, Let the Regicide Begin.
You don't see that word a lot, but it feels sort of Shakespearean.
That means killing the king, right?
That's what Brian Gene wants to do.
He does.
He's made no bones about it.
And he has even said many times since he won a by-election that on Tuesday that he's there to get rid of Jason Kenney.
going to stop the NDP from becoming the government of Alberta again, which he thinks would be disastrous.
And I think he's right.
He's going to stop the NDP by getting rid of Jason Kenney because Jason Kenney's the leader of the UCP.
He believes the NDP will win.
Well, there's a chance of it.
I mean, the polls are pretty atrocious.
I just mentioned one.
And by the way, Kenny's poll numbers are actually improved from their rock bottom low a few weeks ago.
I mean, he has taken his foot off the gas of the lockdowns.
And I know that, you know, I know that many Albertans say, hey, it was never as bad a lockdown in Alberta as it was in, let's say, Quebec, where they actually had nighttime curfews, if you can believe it.
But I don't think comparing yourself to the worst of Canadian premiers is what Albertans want.
I think, I mean, listen, I'm out here in exile in Toronto, but it seems to me that Alberta's motto is strong and free.
And Jason Kenney in particular had a reputation as someone with a light touch, not a heavy-handed authoritarian approach.
I think that while it may have been less worse than other provinces, I think he truly let down conservatives in this country.
He was supposed to be the Ron DeSantis, and he never was.
Yeah, you know, we can argue about and probably should have a discussion about what he did right and what he did wrong.
And if there's another wave or another pandemic with another disease, what Alberta should do next time or shouldn't, maybe even better, what Alberta shouldn't do next time than it did this time.
But I think Kenny's biggest single fault through the pandemic is not necessarily the individual steps that he took, but not bothering to explain them much to Albertans, not bothering to go to the people of the province and say, hey, look, I know you don't like this, but here's why we're doing this and here's how we're going to come out of this.
And, you know, he didn't spend a lot of time being the leader.
One of the people I know who is close to him said what he was trying to do was become Dr. Kenny.
He wanted to become the expert on the pandemic in Alberta.
And he already had one of those, Indina Hinshaw, who was actually fairly good, I thought.
Among all the provincial chief medical officers, she was the best.
I mean, again, we're comparing her to people who weren't that good.
But nonetheless, Alberta went through this fairly lightly.
We have a lower case fatality rate on the pandemic than Ontario and Quebec.
You're not going to hear that from very many sources because the CBC in particular and the Toronto Star love to think that Alberta was this horrible wasteland of death and disease.
And we did have one really awful wave back last fall.
But for the most part, life has gone on here fairly normally, with the exception of the vaccine mandate for an awful lot of people in their workplaces, which really rankled a lot of Albertans.
And the vaccine passport, which indirectly did its job.
The British government brought it in to encourage more people to go get vaccines.
And I have a nephew who, no, I'm not getting a vaccine.
No, no, no, that's silly.
I read online where that's just that poison they're putting in your arms.
And then he couldn't get into the bar with his friends because of the vaccine passports.
Yeah, okay, I'll get a vaccine.
So that's why the province did that.
But Kenny did not use the forum that he has to explain that.
And he just looked like he was disappeared during the pandemic.
And I think that's what's put a lot of people off.
Well, I mean, your example of a nephew who, you know, may not have had a deeply thoughtful reason for objecting.
You know, but even your example shows that it was the duress.
It was the pain, the social pain, that it was not because you're protecting the world in any particular way.
It was just, I mean, and that's what I think irked me the most, if I may.
I think every Canadian premier made a host of disastrous mistakes, but it's one thing to do something medically wrong, but it's another thing to turn your opinion into a, to weaponize it to be painful on purpose.
For example, President Macron of France said his purpose was to be a pain in the ass.
Like he would bring in as many punitive, irritating, he even challenged the notion that you were a true French citizen if you didn't comply.
So it's one thing to say, I'm making this medically based decision with my best good faith approach.
But it's another to say, you know what?
People aren't listening to me.
I'm right, they're wrong.
So now I'm going to take on the role of the punisher.
And I'm going to make life terrible for people who disagree with me.
And I'm doing it on purpose to make their lives miserable.
That is not, I mean, that shows, I think, an abusiveness that shocked me.
And I used to be quite close with Kenny.
And the thing that gets me these days, Lord, and I know you don't go all the way that I do, but his use of Trudeau style rhetoric to denounce skeptics and hesitant people.
And people, you know, your nephew may just have not wanted to, but there are people who have natural immunity who thought, I'm already immune to this.
I'm not going to take a medicine that hasn't fully been.
And that's the sort of thing that they should have been doing, right?
They should have been more subtle about this.
They should have been more nuanced, I guess is maybe a better word, about it.
And said, look, if you fall into this category, there's no real reason for you to have to have a vaccine.
So you shouldn't need to get one if you don't want one.
And the other thing that bothered a lot of Albertans, and I imagine it bothered people around the country, but particularly it bothered Albertans was the way the goalposts kept getting moved.
You remember at one point we were told that if 70% of people got one shot and I think it was 25%, Tam, Teresa Tam used to use this for the feds.
If 25% were double vaccinated, well, that would be enough.
That would slow down the infection enough that we didn't need to worry about anybody beyond that.
Well, then we got to 70-25.
Well, it couldn't be 70-25.
It had to be 70% who were double vaccinated.
And it had to be 80%.
It had to be 85%.
And they kept changing those rules.
And then no matter what people found using masks or with lockdowns.
I mean, I've seen lots and lots of studies since the, basically since the end of the Omicron wave about six weeks ago, lots of studies that said that lockdowns did nothing.
If you keep, you know, keep people from going out and going to social events, it really does very little.
And masks, well, if masks did anything, they kept you from getting the infection if you were in an enclosed public space.
But they didn't do an awful lot to protect us.
And, you know, there was that absolutely annoying motto throughout the pandemic.
My mask protects you.
Your mask protects me.
And that's why I think in Ontario right now, you have so many people who are opposed to getting rid of the mask mandate is they've bought this hole.
They've swallowed this notion from government experts that my mask protects you.
So I have to keep wearing a mask if you're scared of the pandemic because it's my mask protecting you and your mask protecting you.
No, your mask protects you.
You want to wear a mask?
Go ahead, wear a mask.
I don't care.
Wear a tinfoil hat.
That's none of my concern.
Why Masks Matter00:16:02
Right.
And listen, I think there are some people who— Those are the sorts of things that put people off.
There's a lot of people who are terrified and will go to their graves terrified.
People who will never travel again, who will never go out again, who will wear a mask the rest of their lives, who will wear a mask when they're by themselves, who will be driving around in their own cars with the windows up and a mask on.
You know, there'll be a lighthouse keeper 100 miles away from anyone else and they'll be wearing a mask.
So there are people like that.
And many of them would tend to vote NDP in Alberta, for example.
I want to slowly bring it back to Brian Gene.
Jason Kenney would never get the NDP big government vote.
He just won't.
They've hated him for too long.
They've hated him because of what he did with Stephen Harper.
They've hated him, what he did with the Taxpayers Federation.
They're never going to vote for Jason Kenney.
But in addition to alienating the entire left, he now calls people on the right who have a variety of reasons for, you know, the churches.
There was no other province in Canada that took such a punitive approach to churchmen.
It's not just angry, annoying Pastor Arthur Pavlovsky.
And I say those, that's what he's described as.
I like the guy, but I can acknowledge that he can be grating.
He's noisy.
He shouts.
Okay, fine.
But can you explain why you put Pastor James Coates in prison for 35 days?
Can you explain why you put Pastor Tim Stevens in prison?
And so part of Jason Kenney's base was Christians, conservatives, small government, libertarians.
So if you're going to, if you have no chance at getting the triple mask or quadruple vax or NDP vote, but then you demonize those on the right, he used the word extremists again just the other day.
He's sounding like Justin Trudeau really using the language of the left against his own base.
Exactly.
Well, what's there left to win with?
And I'm not suggesting that he's an equal opportunity slanderer.
I think he's gotten very, very frustrated, A, by the political position he's in, and B, by the fact that Alberta would probably be just about the hardest province in the country to handle a pandemic in a way that most people could be convinced to agree with.
Because poll after poll after poll shows that there's about 40% of Albertans who love the NDP-like way of dealing with it.
I mean, if the NDP were still the provincial government here, we'd still be wearing hazmat suits and going around with oxygen tanks.
But there's about 40% who love that, and there's about 40 to 45% who hate that.
I mean, there's no way of reconciling those two.
And I'm not saying that Jason, you should forgive him what he's saying about the right because he's also saying things about the left.
But he's being sued now by a University of Alberta law professor because he called him deranged for saying, I'm wearing a mask, even though I don't know that I really need one, just to make Jason Kenney angry.
Well, okay, stop calling people names.
Like, you're the premier of the province.
You have an opportunity to explain as the leader, take that bully pulpit you have and start explaining why you like these things or why you're not going to do the same things that Quebec is doing or the BC is doing or Ontario is doing.
Have some fun that way.
Stick a finger in the eye of the CBC and the Toronto Star.
I think that would be very enjoyable.
I remember Wacky Bennett, who was the longtime social credit premier of British Columbia, said he never enjoyed politics more than when he was fighting with the lower mainland press.
And, you know, Jason hasn't adopted that similar sort of tactic.
And it's a shame.
And that's one of the reasons he finds himself in such a mess right now.
But I had in that comment that you've been quoting the inside political poll numbers that all the parties subscribe to from the Calgary pollster, Janet Brown.
And Brown got in trouble back, you'll remember, in December, because she participated in a CBC poll where they asked other Canadians how much they hated Alberta.
They didn't ask the attitudes of other Canadians towards other provinces.
They singled out Alberta and they went after Alberta.
So I have had some issues with Janet Brown, but her political polling tends to be about as accurate as anybody in Alberta.
And she says now that the UCP are slightly ahead of the NDP.
In the last three months, since the restrictions have come off, UCP's popularity has gone back up a bit.
They're at 40% to 36% for the NDP.
Kenny is still well below Notley in terms of personal popularity.
But outside of Edmonton and Calgary, the UCP is 20 points ahead of the NDP.
So that kind of also minimizes Brian Gene's view that the UCP can't win against the NDP next time, so long as Jason Kenney is the leader.
Well, you say, wouldn't it be nice if Jason Kenney became a conservative again and started talking like one?
Well, he's had a year or two to do that, but in three weeks' time, or April 9th, to be precise, his party is having a convention, and one of the agenda items is to give whether or not to give him the boot.
And that's why the election of Brian Gene, his former and future rival, to the legislature two days ago, was so interesting.
Now, Brian Gene, if I'm going from memory accurately, got 63%.
How much of that was him?
How much of that was the party?
I don't know.
The NDP was down under 20%, which is interesting.
There were two, not one, but two separatist parties on the ballot.
And one got significant votes.
Yeah.
So it's very interesting to me.
And I don't know.
I mean, I think that Jason Kenney, one of his problems, if I may say, is that the whole time out of the corner of eye, he's been looking at Ottawa and he's been thinking, well, I want to run Alberta successfully, but in a manner that I can one day go back and live out my ambition to become prime minister.
So I don't want to say anything too pro-Westerner.
I don't want to say anything too wexity.
I want to be polite company on the vaccine mandate.
So I'm not going to do what Ron DeSantis has done.
I'm not going to do what the Brits have done and give natural immunity legal status.
I want to get through this in good shape so that in five or 10 years I can become prime minister.
I think a lot of what he did made sense if you understand that his lifelong ambition was the prime minister.
Yeah, you know, whether or not he wants to go back and become prime minister, he was in Ottawa long enough that he still plays a kind of an Ottawa game.
And I have been saying now in print for at least three years that he really, really, really needs to hit Justin Trudeau harder.
He not only needs to hit Trudeau harder because Trudeau deserves to be hit as hard as he possibly can, as often and as enthusiastically as you can do it, but he also needs to hit him because it's good politics.
I think one of the things that he gets dinged for is, you know, if he had done almost all the same things that he did on the pandemic, but at the same time was hammering Trudeau on a regular basis over Trudeau's destruction of the oil and gas industry, he wouldn't be as unpopular on the pandemic stuff as he is.
I don't think he has gone hard enough on Ottawa often enough.
He has started to do it a bit.
But, you know, is it too little too late?
I mean, is the good news about the UCP coming back now that the pandemic restrictions are over?
Is that too little too late?
Three weeks is not a very long time in politics to turn around a giant ship that's also taking on water in a hurry.
Yeah.
Well, I got to tell you, I won't keep my cards to my chest.
I believe that Jason Kenney should be replaced.
And I say this as someone who's been friends with Jason Kenney for pretty much 30 years.
I think that he has done things that violate any precept of conservatism and violate his own life's lifetime's worth of promises and beliefs.
I can't look the guy in the eye anymore.
You and I would disagree on that.
But my big concern about replacing Jason Kenney is sort of a practical one.
It's a pragmatic and political one.
I don't know who else you'd replace him with.
Brian Gene's not going to beat the NDP anymore likely than Jason Kenny.
Jason Kenney's much more likely to beat the NDP than Brian Gene is.
And we've seen that before.
So if your principal concern is, as Brian Gene says his is, to keep the NDP from becoming the government in Alberta again, then we wouldn't vote Jason Kenney out, I don't think, because I don't think there's time or another obvious candidate to replace him.
One of the other big problems I've had with the UCP is they do not have what I would call a Class A cabinet.
There are a few people in the cabinet who are pretty good, but there aren't a lot of obvious choices to replace Kenny or anybody else as the leader of the UCP.
And interesting, Brian Gene, for all of his squawking about Jason Kenney can't beat the NDP, blah, When he was asked recently what he would have done differently in the pandemic, one of the things he said is he would have brought Rachel Notley into cabinet.
So we got a clip of that.
And it's a little, it's a quirky answer.
It's a quirky idea.
I don't even think it makes sense in our parliamentary system.
Here's a clip of that.
I know exactly what you mean.
Take a look.
He said, you know, better decisions, make different decisions.
Can you give even one example that maybe of a decision that was made that you don't agree with that you would like to see that you would have done differently?
Absolutely.
First thing about leadership and the most important thing about leadership is that you bring other people with you along for the ride.
You make sure that they're empowered with you and be part of it.
And one of those people that I think would have been very important on this particular venture that we've had with COVID is Rachel Notley as the leader of the opposition.
I think she should have been brought into the cabinet table.
She should have been brought into this decision making so that Albertans could have trusted the UCP and could have trusted, you know, Jason Kenney.
And they don't, but that would have been one way.
Yeah, I mean, listen, I like Brian Gene.
He is a little quirky.
But I have to say I would tolerate quirkiness over, I just feel like too many things have been nuked, too many bridges burned.
And I just can't get over the fact that even as we're talking, Lauren, I happen to know that there's a Christian pastor in prison.
And he's been in, I don't know, is he in his second straight?
He's violating court orders.
He's got to stop violating court orders.
That's the problem.
I saw Kenny refer to that and saying, oh, it's just regular rule of law stuff.
And he incited violence.
I watched Arthur Pavlovsky's entire 19-minute sermon pep talk speech to the truckers.
Never once did he incite violence.
In fact, three times he said, peaceful, always peaceful.
I've just never seen a guy be so hounded before.
And after a certain while, you know, I mean, he's been arrested or ticketed or accosted by police over 100 times.
It doesn't feel like the Jason Kenny I knew who went to China and scolded them on their treatment of pastors, who scolded places in the Middle East for their treatment of Christians.
And put aside Arthur Pavlovsky, the other Christian pastors, it just makes me bloody uncomfortable.
And why just Alberta?
I don't know.
I don't want to crack that open here.
I mean, I've talked about that at great length with our viewers.
Let me ask you the key question.
And I want to get back to your column.
And I really recommend it.
It's called Gene's by-election when his springboard into UCP leadership race, Edmonton's son.
Okay, fast forward to April 9th.
Conservative polls are slowly ticking up as people renormalize.
Kenny maybe is engaging in some last-minute show-off-y bashing of Trudeau.
Takes your advice, Lauren.
What's going to happen?
He needs 50% plus one to hang on.
Do you think the UCP is going to kick him out, or do you think they're going to say, well, we're mad at you, but we think you can beat Rachel Notley again?
Well, if they do say the latter, and I vacillate right now, I get a sense some days that they're going to kick him out.
I get the sense the next days that he's going to squeak by.
It's really hard to know.
Call me in two weeks, just before the campaign.
I'll give you a better prediction.
But say he does get 53%, 55%, 56%.
Ralph Klein felt he had to resign in 2004 because he only got 55% approval and he had won four consecutive majority elections.
So, you know, Jason has said he'll stick around if he's at 50% plus one.
Do you really want to be in charge of a club where half the people want you out?
I think it has to be more overwhelming than that, and I don't think it's going to be.
Yeah.
Well, I note that Kenny's team tried to beat Brian Gene in the nomination in Fort McMurray, and they were not successful.
Listen, Lauren, this is very interesting.
And I find it noteworthy that the first political casualty of the Truckers Rebellion was Aaron O'Toole, a conservative who wasn't very conservative.
Wouldn't it be interesting if the next political casualty, not of the Truckers, but of the sort of reaction to the over-lockdownism, was Jason Kenny?
It would make it.
And you know, the people who are motivated to get rid of him are much more energized than the people who are motivated to keep him.
And since you have to drive from all over the province, you know, six hours from Fort McMurray, six hours from Grand Prairie, four hours from Madison Hat, three and a half from Lethbridge, in order to vote, and you may have to stand in line for several hours.
That the enthusiasm gap between the anti-Kenny and the pro-Kenny side makes me lean towards the anti-Kenny side as a prediction.
But like I said, I can't get a handle on it fully just yet.
Yeah.
Well, very interesting times.
And I know that not everyone who watches the show is Alberton, but I think this is a very interesting battle.
I remember in the early days, and I'll close on this, when Kenny was the Ron DeSantis of Canada, if not rhetorically, he was just the least punitive.
And by that, I don't mean like a threat of violence, but maybe Trudeau said, if you let natural immunity be an exemption, we're going to clobber you in this constitutional way, or we're going to...
When you get under the dome too much, and you can't get out during the pandemic the way you should as a leader, when you get under the dome at the Alberta legislature too much, you start to listen to what the people under the dome are saying.
Anti-Russia Propaganda Debate00:02:49
And that's the press gallery and the opposition and the bureaucrats and the experts.
And it's very, very hard then to stand up and say, wait, I know you're all saying this.
I'm doing something else.
Yeah, you're right.
Lauren Gunter, senior columnist, Edmund ⁇ Son, great to see you again.
Thanks for your time.
You bet.
All right.
There you have it.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Hey, welcome back.
Your viewer mail.
Graham French says, I didn't expect so much anti-Russia propaganda on the Rebel.
I actually really don't think we're engaged in anti-Russia propaganda.
In fact, I think we've spoken out against anti-Russian propaganda.
I know I have and others too.
But it's not anti-Russian propaganda to point out that Vladimir Putin was a KGB boss and that he's authoritarian and that he's imperialistic and that he's invading another country.
Now, I have done several shows on the facts that Ukraine and the West are making mistakes also, bringing NATO right to the border of Russia, doing a lot of things that I think Russia would find crowding.
I've compared it to when Cuba put missiles, sorry, when the Soviet Union put missiles in Cuba right on America's doorstep.
That caused America to put an embargo around Cuba, and there was even the failed pay of pigs invasion.
So I'm not unsympathetic to certain geographical security issues that Russia has, but I don't, I, that's, that doesn't mean I'm going to whitewash Vladimir Putin and a brutal war that's costing lives.
But I think that we have been very propaganda-free.
In fact, we've condemned the censorship of Russian media like Russia today.
Trobin 2021 says, I really wish a news organization would investigate the government agency of Impact Canada.
Why are behavioral scientists advising our government on how to nudge our thinking?
This is an agenda that comes from the World Economic Forum.
Is Canada now part of the World Economic Forum?
Social Engineering Program.
Well, thank you for bringing this to my attention.
I was not familiar with that subject.
I'll look into it.
But I have to say that of all the countries in the world, Canada is one of the most submissive to the World Economic Forum.
And I think you know, because I've said it probably half a dozen times, is that Christy Freeland actually serves on the board of governors of the World Economic Forum.
How is that even an ethical thing to have two masters?
I mean, either you're serving Klaus Schwab in the World Economic Forum, or you're serving Canada and the Constitution and your oath of loyalty here.
Judge's Inference Against Party00:04:22
I don't even know how that happens.
And the fact that that is so utterly ignored by the mainstream media is shocking to me.
That's our show for the day.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rubber World Headquarters, let me leave you with a video of the day from our friend Avi Yamini down under.
He was in the Supreme Court of the state of Victoria suing for his right to be a reporter.
They banned him from the parliament in a manner we've been banned up here.
He was in trial for a couple of years.
Here's how that went.
I'll see you tomorrow.
Bye-bye.
If you remember last year when I attended Daniel Andrews' press conference and I was kicked out and banned from the parliament precinct for seven days.
So you're not permitted to return here for seven days.
At the request of Daniel Andrews, the Premier's personal assistant.
The Premier's PA doesn't want him here at the conferences.
We can go up the road and report.
So from now, for seven days, Rebel News is not allowed anywhere here.
That's correct.
Representing us on this important case was probably Australia's most well-known media lawyer, Justin Quill, with counsel Will Horton QC.
They say the only thing worse than representing yourself in such cases, especially up against the government, is having a bad lawyer.
And that's why at Rebel News we choose the best.
And Will Horton QC from the Owen Dixon Chambers across the road is the best.
And it was clear by the end of the hearing as to what makes him the best.
You saw that the government's council were struggling, fighting with every last breath because it really felt at the end that the judge was seeing this case for what it is.
In summary, for those that haven't been following the last few days, I know most of the world has been watching what's happening, but for those that haven't, what's happened here?
Well, there's two steps to this.
The first is they're claiming that decisions made about the parliamentary precinct by parliament can't be considered or reviewed by this court.
So if we get over that hurdle, we get into the second step, that is, was the process that was undertaken appropriate?
You know, did they afford you natural justice?
So they're the two hurdles.
If we lose on the first point, we don't get to the second.
If we win on the first, then the judge will look at the decision-making process and whether that was appropriate.
So this entire case was really about the idea that Daniel Andrews and the government can pre-select who is going to hold him accountable, especially in an election year like this year, in the Parliament of Victoria, in the corridors of power.
We say that new media, like Rebel News, even though we don't necessarily support many of the government's positions, we believe we have the right to hold them accountable.
If anything, we're probably going to hold him more accountable than his friends, those that he controls, the ones he allows in parliament.
After two long days, I believe we've had a pretty fair trial.
The judge has reserved his decision and, well, once we get that answer, once he comes back with his ruling, you'll be the first to know.
I feel pretty good about it.
This is a really smart judge.
He was really engaged.
He followed everything and it'll be really interesting to see whether he agrees with our arguments.
I hope he does, of course.
I think it's interesting.
We still don't know.
After two days of hearing and a whole lot of documents back and forth, we still don't know who the decision maker was because the speaker, who is the only person we say can make this decision, did not give any evidence, didn't put on an affidavit.
And we're told he didn't do that in part because that he didn't want to be subject to cross-examination.
So we say that allows the judge to draw an inference against the other party.
If his honour does that, that puts us in a better position.
But anyway, there are some other really interesting parts of this case, like this question of exclusive cognizance.
Can this court consider the decision of Parliament?