Ezra Levant details Rebel News’ unprecedented legal battles, including a $3,000 fine for publishing The Labranos—a book he claims Trudeau’s government targeted despite election-season exemptions—and a QCJO license denial after a secretive review by five CRA agents, who deemed only 1% of their content "original news." He contrasts past Conservative leaders like Scheer and O’Toole, seen as media-compliant, with rising figures like Pierre Polyev (7,800+ at Calgary’s Equiplex event) and Lewis, who embrace unfiltered engagement. Levant warns Trudeau’s tactics—compelling tech platforms to censor unlicensed journalists and favoring licensed media in tax law—could escalate to outright bans or financial seizures, mirroring the truckers’ protest crackdowns, while questioning whether crises like food shortages stem from genuine disruptions (Ukraine’s 10% wheat exports, China’s Shanghai port backlogs) or engineered narratives to justify "building back better" policies. [Automatically generated summary]
My good friend David Menzies was taking over for me because I was in another chair going through a court process.
As you know, we have been convicted of illegally publishing the book called The Labranos.
I was fined $3,000 for that.
Well, we're appealing that, and there were five lawyers on the other side yesterday.
I'll tell you about the hearing, and I'll tell you about the seven lawsuits we have with the federal government.
And you're probably saying, boy, that's a lot of lawsuits.
It's a lot of lawyers.
You bet it is.
And I'll tell you why I think we have to do it.
That's today's show.
Before we get to it, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
Every day I type a video.
We have lots of pictures and videos.
And I think it's a great experience.
You get a lot out of it.
But more than that, the $8 a month, well, that keeps Rebel News alive because we do not take the government dough.
We do not take the government dough.
So we rely on you.
If you can, please go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe, eight bucks a month.
Makes a lot of difference.
Thanks.
Here's today's show.
Tonight, why is Rebel News involved in so many lawsuits?
It's April 13th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
Why Rebel News Faces Lawsuits00:14:32
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.
Hey, nice to see you again.
I wasn't here yesterday.
Well, actually, I was in the office, but I spent much of the day online.
These days, a lot of court processes are done via Zoom or something like that.
And I had, for hours, I was involved in a case about the Labranos.
Remember that?
My book from the 2019 election season?
Well, if you might recall, that book was a huge bestseller.
It was actually my most popular book I've ever written.
I think it sold more copies even than Ethical Oil.
Of course, that meant it was deeply hated by Justin Trudeau himself.
And over Christmas, I received a letter from Trudeau's Elections Commission claiming that the book was illegal, that it wasn't really a book, even though it was a bestseller, that it was actually a campaign, I don't know, campaign expense, and that I had to register with Elections Canada.
They literally used those words.
They didn't like the book.
They didn't like the lawn signs.
Well, you might recall that I was summoned to Ottawa to answer questions in some sort of interrogation.
I call it an interrogation because they literally hired two 30-year veterans for the RCMP, like on their anti-terrorism and anti-drug beats, to grill me.
Here's an excerpt from that.
I went in the meeting and I recorded it because I just knew in my bones no one would believe that I was interrogated for writing a book.
I just know that everyone would say, oh, Ezra, you're exaggerating.
Yeah, no, here, take a look for yourself.
Can I see the complaint against me?
The letter that you received?
No, I presume that your investigation complaint, yeah.
Oh, this is still part of the investigation.
So we'll have to, once the investigation's been completed, the commission will have to make a decision.
And at that point, he'll have to decide if that is releasable or not.
It's not something that usually is released.
So it's a secret complaint?
It's not a secret complaint.
It's just a complaint that's part of the investigation.
And to keep the integrity of the investigation right now, you'll understand that we can't share everything that we have as well.
I don't want everything that you had.
If I'm here to meet a complaint, but you won't show me the complaint, how can I possibly meet the complaint?
How can I possibly respond to something that you won't show me?
Well, though, I think the letter was quite clear on what the infraction is alleged.
And this is where we want to clarify with you.
Well, did you generate the complaint or was it from an outside party?
No, we didn't generate the complaint.
Okay, so someone did not generate the complaint.
So someone external to your office generated the complaint?
That is usually the case.
Is that the case in this case?
Yeah.
Yeah, we did not generate the complaint.
Okay, was it the Liberal Party that generated the complaint?
I didn't claim it to that, sir.
So you won't tell me who the complaint is.
The complainant is.
That's the CEO?
Yeah, not at this point.
So at what point do you tell me who this is?
The commissioner is the ultimate responsible person for the investigation and how this decided so.
So how do I know what conduct has been complained about if you won't tell me?
I won't play you the whole thing.
You might remember that.
It was really startling.
I basically said, yes, I plead guilty to writing a book.
If you think that's against the law, let's test it out in court.
Well, they took me up on my offer and they convicted me of publishing an illegal book.
Particularly, they said that it was the promotion of the book.
You can see these lawn signs here.
It was just the cover of the book with three words, buy the book.
Now, you might say, well, Ezra, that is a pretty political book.
And he did do it in election season.
How is that not a campaign expense?
Well, the answer is the law itself realizes that people can talk about the election without having to register.
For example, every newspaper in Canada endorses or opposes a candidate.
Every blogger, every person has an opinion.
You don't have to register with the government to have an opinion.
And in fact, the law has a special exemption, as you can see here, for books and the promotion of books.
So not just was my book exempt from their rules against campaigning, but the promotion of the book.
We had a nice billboard.
We had the lawn signs.
We had websites.
We had it all.
But they convicted me nonetheless, even though there were 24 books during the same period of time about the election.
You'll notice that the law says a book is exempt if it's bought and sold for a fair market price.
I think LeBrano's was price of 15 bucks, maybe was a little high, actually, and would have been published whether or not there was an election.
I don't really know what that means.
If there was no election, we would publish it for sure.
But they claim that because I timed the book for the election, like the other 24 books, that somehow made it illegal.
They convicted me, and we are, and then they had a second hearing.
They convicted me again, and now we're appealing it to a real court.
I should tell you that on the Zoom call yesterday, there were five lawyers on the other side, all paid for by the government.
Some of them were government lawyers by definition.
Others were a hired gun-for-hire law firm called Borden Ladiner-Gervais, which seems to be getting all the censorship files from the government.
They're also the law firm that twice tried to kick us out of the leaders debate.
So maybe it's good to have Borden Ladiner and Gervais on the other side because they lost twice.
There were five lawyers on the call on the other side, and one of the lawyers said there were three other lawyers on the file.
That's eight lawyers that you, I apologize, Mr. Taxpayer, Mrs. Taxpayer, that you are on the hook for.
And we had one lawyer on our side, our free speech lawyer, Aaron Rosenberg.
So it was an examination on an affidavit.
I won't get into it.
It was not the trial itself.
It was sort of a preliminary thing.
But it took hours and hours.
And yesterday alone did not cost $3,000.
Our lawyer isn't as expensive as Borden Ladder as Gervais.
But you might say, Ezra, look, the fine for publishing your book, The Lobranos, was only $3,000.
You sold thousands of copies of the book.
Why not just call that a cost of doing business and just pay the fine?
Like literally, you were spending tens of thousands.
It might turn into $100,000.
But by the time we're done, why are you spending $100,000?
And it probably will be that much to fight a $3,000 fine.
That doesn't make any sense when you try to make every lawyer in the country rich.
No.
We have to fight on principle.
It's not about the $3,000.
It's since when in this country does the government interrogate authors about their books and criminalize books that are not registered with the government.
And this is done with RCMP officers, 30-year veterans of the force.
Even if it was a $1 fine, don't you think we have to appeal?
I learned yesterday that never in Canada from the lawyers on the government side that never in Canada's history has an author or a book or a promotion of a book been prosecuted in this manner.
That's what they said.
Under oath, the government's told our lawyer that this is the first time in history it was done.
And what a coinky dink.
It was me and our book on the Lobranos.
Gee, isn't that just a striking coincidence?
Do you see why I say we have to fight it?
Imagine if we let this precedent stand.
So that was what I was doing yesterday, which is different from the lawsuit we filed last week.
I did a show on it, you might recall.
You can see it for yourself at wearsuingTrudeau.com.
It's the lawsuit against the Canada Revenue Agency for banning us from getting the QCJO, Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization, news license, journalism license.
We were rejected.
We had a one-year review by five secret government agents.
I'm calling them secret agents because we don't know what they said, how they deliberated.
Our lawyer repeatedly asked to have some participation, was repeatedly rejected.
We don't know what they looked at.
We don't know who they heard from.
We don't know what advice they got.
It was a secret hearing by Trudeau's hand-picked committee that rejected us for this QCJO news license.
So we're suing the Canada Revenue Agency, which is terrifying in itself, but they're in charge of this.
Now, look at what Jonathan Goldsby, who's over at the left-wing website CanadaLand.
And as I told you the other day, Canada Land is a bunch of lefties.
But actually, on this issue of QCJO news licenses, they share our point of view.
Here's what Goldsby said.
He said, this is the seventh lawsuit the rebel has launched against the federal government and its agencies in the last year.
And you can see on there, there's the leaders' debate case.
We've done a couple of lawsuits over that.
There's this new QCJO case, and there's a Stephen Gilbo Twitter case.
And I don't know if you remember that one.
Again, it probably looks absolutely trivial.
Stephen Gilbo, when he was heritage minister, when he was in charge of coming up with these censorship ideas, he had a government Twitter account.
So, I mean, I don't know if he has a personal account.
He probably does, just like he probably has a personal Facebook page just for family photos and stuff.
But of course, everyone in government has public pages too.
You can have a political party page, but there's actually government Twitter accounts, obviously, where they publish news, where they publish official broadcasts, where they make announcements.
So it's a kind of service.
It's what in the olden days would be a news wire or a fax or a press release.
Governments have Twitter accounts, and they're run by the public sector.
I'm not talking about political party stuff, campaign, election, campaign stuff.
That's political party stuff.
I'm talking about the government of Canada, not even political offices, but just the civil servants in the Heritage Department would have run his account.
We know, for example, that Catherine McKenna had 24 staff working on her Twitter account.
These weren't her personal staff.
These were government staff.
I think that's obviously ludicrous, and she's a narcissist, and it was off the hook.
But there is a justification for having news promulgated on Twitter for the government.
I understand it makes sense.
In fact, I require it.
I'm in the news business.
I need to know news.
And the heritage minister, Stephen Gilbo, was making an announcement that applied to me personally as a Canadian and applied to me personally as a journalist and our company.
So Stephen Gilbo banned me from his Twitter account, blocked me.
Now, if he didn't want to hear me chirping at him, there's a function on Twitter called mute, where he would never have to hear or see anything I have to say.
It's like if there was a mute button on a human being and someone was chattering, chattering, you could just mute them.
It's a wonderful invention.
Instead of muting me, which many people do, he blocked me.
So he didn't just save himself from hearing what I had to say.
He banned me from the government services of his Twitter account.
He banned me from learning announcements.
He banned me, and as far as I know, only me, from hearing what the government had to say.
Again, I don't care if he bans me from his political party stuff, and I don't want to see his personal stuff.
But the ministry of the heritage department, I want to, and I demand as a taxpayer and as a citizen to see what they're saying.
Now, he's now the environment minister, but it still applies.
He has banned me from Twitter.
Now, our lawyers wrote to them and complained, and they refused to bend the knee.
And so we're in court.
And we are suing Stephen Gilbo for blocking us from getting his Twitter account.
Now, you might say again, look, this is even less than the $3,000 fine for writing the Lobranos.
I mean, you're literally suing someone because they won't let you follow their Twitter account.
Why are you wasting money?
Why are you wasting time?
Why are you enriching lawyers?
I'd have to count how many lawyers were on that file.
I don't remember.
Actually, I was cross-examined in that case a couple of weeks ago.
It was very brief.
I didn't have much to say other than he banned me.
My point is, you would think that there's no financial sense there.
Why would you spend thousands?
And who knows?
Maybe that case will cost $100,000 too.
Why would you spend $100,000 suing a politician because he blocked you on Twitter?
I mean, get a hobby.
No, Because it's not just about being blocked on Twitter.
Do we really live in a country where because of a personal bias or a personal vendetta or a grudge, a politician can say, I am not letting you, my political enemy, have access to a government service.
And you might think a Twitter account is trivial.
And I suppose in the scheme of things, it is, although I need to learn what the government is doing about the world, about the country, and about my business.
And remember when we filed this suit, he was the heritage minister, the censorship minister, who was passing rules that affected our company.
But if a whimsical, capricious, grudge-driven politician can simply ban you from accessing public services, why couldn't that carry on to other things?
Why couldn't that carry on to your personal taxes?
Why can't it carry on into your access to hospitals?
Government Vetting Journalists00:15:09
Wow, that would never happen.
Well, of course, it wouldn't happen at once, but if you can set the precedent, the politicians can have an enemies list.
Well, it won't stop there, will it?
And I tell you that the reason we have seven lawsuits against the federal government, of course, we're suing various police forces for roughing off our staff.
We have a lot of litigation, and that's why I was yesterday.
I'm grateful for my friend David Menzies taking over from me.
We are suing because no one else is fighting these battles for freedom.
I shouldn't say no one else.
There's the great folks at the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms and there's a handful of others.
But there used to be a civil society that would stand up against abusive governments of any stripe.
What's interesting is that we were banned from this QCJO.
We were denied this government journalism license.
And I should tell you, of course, that Canadaland talked about that, even if it was just on Twitter.
But I haven't seen any other coverage in any other Canadian media.
So a news organization, Rebel News, which has published 30,000 news stories, which has dozens of journalists on staff, which publishes 10 news stories a day, was denied the government news license on the most absurd grounds.
They're saying 99% of what we do is not news.
And not even a blip, not even a ripple, nothing other than I think Canada Land.
I don't know if anyone else treated the story.
Except for the largest news broadcaster in North America, except for he's not a Canadian.
He's based in the United States.
His name is Tucker Carlson.
And when he heard about it, he was so worried he called me up or had his staff contact me and invited me on his show with his 5 million or so viewers to talk about it.
Let me play for you my four-minute appearance.
Four minutes goes by pretty quickly on TV.
It's very brief, but when you have 5 million people watching, it packs a wallop.
Here's my appearance on Tucker Carlson's show last night.
The reality is, organizations, organizations like yours that continue to spread misinformation and disinformation on the science around vaccines,
around how we're going to actually get through this pandemic and be there for each other and keep our kids safe, is part of why we're seeing such unfortunate anger and lack of understanding of basic science.
And quite frankly, you're, I won't call it a media organization.
So you criticize me, therefore you shouldn't be able to talk.
That guy's a fascist, just to be totally clear.
Ezra Levant is not.
He founded Rebel News.
He joins us today.
Ezra, thanks so much for coming on.
This is one of those stories, it's just hard to believe reading it as a longtime fan of your country that this could be allowed to happen.
Have we overstated it?
Well, it's not yet illegal to do journalism without that license.
It's a government license called the Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization License.
A government panel reviews you.
They spent one year reviewing Rebel News, looking through more than 100 of our stories, a panel of five people in secret.
We don't even know what they said or did or what they looked at.
And they claim that only 1% of our stories are news.
So we don't get the license.
Now, we're not outlawed, but there's all sorts of sticks and carrots that come with it.
For example, just last week, Trudeau announced that he is going to compel Facebook and Google to downrank non-licensed journalists like us and boost his trusted, friendly journalists.
So we're going to be hidden and he's going to compel the internet giants to punish us.
He's also changing the Income Tax Act to punish us.
If you have a government license, your subscribers can write off their subscription at tax time.
If you're an independent journalist like us, no dice.
Of course, there are hundreds of millions of dollars that he is hosing with a fire hose at his trusted licensed journalists, and he's now compelling Google and Facebook to fund journalists too.
So now you've got literally 99% of Canadian media companies that are dependent on Justin Trudeau and soon Google and Facebook for a huge chunk of their revenues.
There's no way those journalists can be free and independent.
We're not banned yet, although we are banned from government events, as you said earlier.
But I'm worried that he's done all this in two years.
The worst is yet to come.
He may well ban us yet.
Well, if he's forcing the tech monopolies to downgrade your content, I mean, it's a distinction without a difference.
You're banned from reaching readers.
So my question is, what about the rest of Canadian media?
They're going along with this?
Has anyone at the CBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, stood up to defend you?
Any of your newspapers to defend you?
1,500 Canadian news media companies are on the take.
Now, they don't all have these journalism licenses yet, but they're all taking money from Trudeau.
He made a special $61 million payment to them right before the election.
None of them reported that.
1,500 news media companies cut up a $61 million gift.
None of them reported that.
So the thing is, since they're in on it, they can't very well report it, and they certainly can't very well object to it.
It used to be that the liberals of Canada were for civil rights and free speech and separation of government and the media.
Those days are done.
You can really count on one hand's fingers the independent media left in the country.
And Trudeau hates them.
We were the ones who covered the Trucker Rebellion, as you know.
And Trudeau hated the Truckers because they were the one group that opposed him.
He hates us for the same reason.
He seized the bank accounts of truckers without legal process.
I'm worried that if he's gone this far in two years, by the time he finishes his term three years from now, I'm worried that he's going to start to treat us like the truckers.
I don't know.
Will he seize our bank accounts?
Will he ask Google and Facebook to delist us altogether?
I know that sounds paranoid, but so far he's done everything he threatened he would do.
It's China, and they're so fragile.
You're one little news organization, and they can't stand any scrutiny.
It really tells you a lot.
Ezra, thank you so much for coming on saying, Godspeed, we are rooting for you for sure.
Did you catch his last question?
There was only two questions to me.
It's where are the Canadians?
Where is the CBC?
Well, that's the thing.
They've all been bought off.
They've all been co-opted.
How can you object if you're on the system, if you're in the system?
Now, I should say today, just before I came into the studio, I saw that my old friend Laurie Goldstein, the former comment editor at the Toronto Sun, who's now semi-retired, he made a few tweets about it.
Let me read them for you.
He links to that rejection letter.
Remember the rejection letter, the one that had the absurd report that they reviewed 276 Rebel News articles and only 1% of them were news.
So you can see he links to that and he said, this is the CRA's rejection of Rebel News' application to be designated as a qualified journalism organization.
It is literally like something you would expect to find in Georgia Orwell's dystopian vision of the future, 1984, see below.
And he links to it.
Then he says the advisory board found that rebel news produces content which is of general interest, including coverage of democratic institutions and processes, and not primarily focused on a particular topic.
Okay, that's true.
However, the advisory board's assessment is that rebel news does not produce original news content on the basis that the content was found to be largely opinion-based and focused on the promotion of one particular perspective.
I'll just read some more.
This is, I'm just going through law.
I just want to give Laurie credit because he's, other than Canada, and I think he's the only guy who's spoken out.
He says the term original news content is not specifically defined in the legislation.
And then Laurie says this is utterly bizarre and, in my opinion, dangerous in a democracy.
The advisory board's reasoning for rejecting rebel news could just as easily be applied to the Toronto Sun and the Toronto Star.
He's so right on that.
I mean, let me show you again.
The Toronto Star, I don't know if you know this.
I mean, we've talked about it before.
They have welded into their company a set of ideological missions.
Like it's actually part of their corporate structure, these Atkinson principles named after one of their early publishers, editors.
And they're truly socialists.
They're actually, I think I would call them communists.
It's about, you know, nationalizing the means of production.
Like it really is the kind of thing that communists talk about.
And that's not my cup of tea.
And it's laughable how anti-worker the Toronto Star is when it comes to issues like letting workers keep their money, tax time, or most importantly, letting workers resist forced vaccination, firing union members en masse if they won't get jabbed, et cetera.
I don't believe the Toronto Star is pro-worker, but they claim they are.
They're extremely ideological in practice.
They have a constitution that says they must be ideological.
As Laurie points out, everything used to deny us that status could be the same for the star.
And Laurie's self-aware enough to say it would apply to the Toronto Sun, too.
The Toronto Sun is more my cup of tea.
I like their populist style, their conservative style.
I don't agree with everything they do.
But surely if rebel news can be called prospective journalism or opinion journalism, so can the sun and the star and pretty much every single thing in this country, even the weather channel.
They don't shut up about the theory of man-made global warming.
So we've got Tucker Carlos in the United States.
We've got Canada land on left.
We've got Laurie Goldstein doing some tweets.
Where's everybody else?
A journalism license?
That's what I called it last night.
And, you know, I think Tucker, you know, his first question implied that he thought that maybe it was illegal to do journalism in Canada anymore.
It's not there yet.
But if the government has their way and Google and Facebook are forced to de-boost rebel news and boost our competitors, it is de facto banning us.
So I was thinking about my appearance on America's leading show and wondering, well, why is no Canadian even talking about it?
And I know that I jab the media party all the time, and so they don't want to be friends with me.
That's fine.
But don't they see that a government licensing journalism is un-Canadian?
That a government sitting in judgment of journalists is upside down?
Journalists, and indeed every citizen, whether you're a journalist or just a regular person, it's for us to judge the government.
We're the one who takes their measure.
The government is taking our measure.
The government is vetting journalists.
That's upside down.
And I thought, where's the Canadian Association of Journalists?
I'll tell you where they are.
They were the lead lobbyists for this.
You think they're going to speak out against it?
This is what they wanted.
It's a guild.
Keep out their competitors and get the dough.
And where's the CJFE, the Canadian journalist for free expression?
Boy, that's a case of false advertising.
ever there is one.
I went to their website today to see if they had anything to say about this.
And they claim to speak truth to power.
Really?
Wow, that's a pretty bold claim.
They're pretty much defunct.
I saw this.
A CBC government reporter named Carol McNeil.
I'm proud to be elected to the board for CJFE, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, which has a long history of defending free speech and helping to protect journalists in distress wherever they are.
The Ukraine-Russia war proves once again this work is never finished.
Well, I'm sure I'm glad that the Canadian journalists for free expression are sticking up for Ukrainian reporters, except for they're not really, because Vladimir Zelensky himself is the one who's banned any reporters who are critical of him.
Maybe I can get the Ukraine journalists for free expression to care about us because the Canadian journalists for free expression don't.
But how could she?
Carol McNeil is a government journalist.
She is employed by Trudeau's state broadcaster.
How could she possibly criticize the QCJO news license when she works for Trudeau?
It used to be just the government news, the TVO in Ontario, which is a provincially owned state broadcaster in the CBC, were in the bag for the government.
But now that every other website and newspaper is on the take, who is left?
So yesterday I was frustrated that I was spending hours in this court case.
And it was one of, as you can see, seven on the federal level alone.
And we have many others suing police around the world.
And I thought, why are we doing this?
Why are we spending so much money?
Why are we spending $100,000 to fight a $3,000 fine for publishing a book?
Why are we spending $100,000 to fight some politician blocking us on Twitter?
Why are we going to spend $100,000 fighting this news licensing?
Well, that one, probably a matter of life and death for us.
Well, we have to sue and fight because really no one else is, not on these issues.
You know, when I was growing up, I remember I was in law school reading about the consortium.
What's that?
Well, it was a nickname that the media industry gave themselves.
Whenever there was a case affecting free speech in the country, all the newspapers and TV stations would chip in, I don't know, maybe $5,000.
And together they would hire a top, top media lawyer who would go to court to fight some censorship, some press ban, some act by government that was so egregious that it might not have affected any of them directly.
It might have only perhaps affected one of the media companies directly.
But all their competitors, the entire industry knew that they had to stick together all for one and one for all on free speech stuff.
Otherwise, they'd be picked off one by one.
And the benefit of the consortium, that's what they called themselves, was that they could hire truly top-notch lawyers, and each newspaper would only have to chip in maybe $5,000.
If you had a bunch of newspaper and TV and radio stations each chipping in $5,000, you could hire a pretty top-gun lawyer to go and defend them.
And more than that, when that lawyer shows up in court and says, Your Honor, I'm here to represent the consortium, CTV, CBC, Global, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Toronto Sun, the judge says, oh, wow.
So this is a heavy, it's almost like you had a good faith public intervener.
Where's the consortium now?
Media Consortium Defense00:15:27
Where are all these companies chipping in together?
Well, the consortium is hard at work lobbying the government for bailouts and to shut out their competitors.
That's where the consortium is.
You want to know who's fighting for freedom in the courts every day?
Terrible news.
Stay with us for a moment.
It is the hardworking trucker who delivered the goods and services that we needed.
Well, that is the scene as it was last night in Calgary.
Pierre Polyev, one of the leadership contestants for the Conservative Party of Canada, a massive event.
I dare say that it's not only the largest event to date in the Conservative leadership race.
I put it to you that with that many folks, more than 5,000, it was larger than any general election event by any of the parties in the 2021 campaign.
Now, you might say, well, that's because there were still some COVID restrictions, and there's some truth to it.
But getting that number of people out, that's got to be that just a sign of something.
Here to tell us what it's a sign of is our friend Adam Sos, our Calgary-based reporter, who had a very busy day yesterday.
Adam, great to see you again.
I want to get to your question to West Virginia Democrat Senator Joe Manchin, who was in town.
That's an interesting story.
We'll put that aside for a second.
Tell me about that Polyev event.
Where was it?
How many folks were there?
And what was it like in the room?
Yeah, you know, you said it's a sign of something, and it's a sign that this is an entirely different animal altogether.
I think past elections were very much sort of, I guess this is the guy who might do the best, but I'm not really excited about it.
Whether it be Leslie Lewis or Pierre Polyev or some of these other candidates, I think now people are actually torn between who they want to support.
So this event took place in South Calgary at Spruce Meadows, a well-known equestrian sort of facility, a giant building called the Equiplex.
And apparently, 7,800 people registered.
And it got to the point they actually delayed the start of the event because traffic was backed up in Calgary for quite some distance.
Even Keen came quite early and he got stuck in the traffic and just made it there in time for us to record.
But it was an absolutely packed house.
I'm hearing at a certain point that they simply stopped sort of verifying registration, which they were kind of just letting people in anyways.
But they're saying it might even be beyond the registrant count.
But 5,000 are the most conservative estimates I've seen.
I've seen other people saying 8,000.
I would have guessed 6,000 to 7,000 people at the very least were on location.
And very much, like you said, it is a sign that there is something different happening here for the first time in quite some time.
There's actually some excitement within the conservative movement, whether that be provincially, whether that be federally, for a leader.
People actually want their guy.
They want their gal.
They're rooting for somebody actively, not just settling on somebody.
And that's why we see these massive crowds.
Yeah, there was never anything called Aaron O'Toole mania.
It was sort of, oh, fine.
And I think Andrew Scheer was the same thing.
It was sort of, oh, fine.
And so I think there's a, you know, there's an actual energy there, a positive energy.
But I think there's something more than that.
It's just not just personality-based.
I think it's the last two leaders in the Conservative Party were sort of self-hating conservatives.
And I know people would say, no, that's not true.
They're solid conservatives.
Well, maybe in their hearts they were, or in the privacy of a one-on-one conversation, they could be really butch.
But as soon as they were exposed to the glare of CBC camera lights, they would turn meek and into conservatives in name only.
And my beef with Aaron O'Toole and Andrew Scheer, I mean, I had some quarrels with them on policy issues.
Both of them were too cowardly on global warming, etc.
Aaron O'Toole was absolutely useless on the pandemic.
But they were just absolutely terrified of and compliant to, submissive to, the media party.
And so you couldn't count on them for everything.
And I think people could detect that.
And people almost felt let down in advance.
I think there's a hope that maybe Pierre Polyev actually means it when he says these conservative things.
Yeah, and I think that is very much the case for some of these candidates.
They come into a room, they tell you what they're thinking, regardless of what you may think about that.
Keep in mind, the nights before last week, we had two events for Dr. Leslie Lewis, three, 400 people at the first one, over a thousand at the second one.
So people are coming out en masse and they're attracted to these candidates that aren't compromising.
I think they can also detect, there's a bit of a trend of some folks out there who are quiet during the protests, during the trucker convoy, throughout all this.
Now they're trying to sort of cash in and say they were always a part of that.
I think Dr. Leslie Lewis and Pierre Polyev, to an extent, were a little bit stronger in their support of that forthright.
But there is a certain element of integrity, unwillingness to fold, and this is where I stand.
Take me or leave me.
Not just a windsock going wherever they feel the political current takes them.
People want to know who they're voting for.
They want to know who's representing them.
Now they want representation.
They don't want an ideologue who's going to tell them what to do and how to do, but they at the very least want to know where someone they're voting for stands on important issues.
Yeah, I saw a poll today by Abacus Research.
Of course, they're owned and run by a liberal partisan, Bruce Anderson, but I still put some stock in their polls.
When they had this one slide, and I'll show it now.
Obviously, Conservative Party supporters are supportive of Pierre Polyev, but just as much so are PPC supporters.
So what Abacus did is they said they surveyed the public and then they broke it down by who these different survey respondents said they supported.
I think Pierre, if you're going from memory, I think Pierre Polyev was actually more popular amongst PPCers than CPCers, which tells me that he has caught the freedom, resist the lockdown, stand with the truckers vibe that previously had been owned by Maxine Bernier.
I mean, I will give Pierre Polyev and Leslie Lewis credit.
They were amongst the first conservatives to stand with the truckers as opposed to Aaron O'Toole.
But they were pretty quiet for a pretty long time on the lockdowns.
There was an atrocious bonfires, bonfire of our civil liberties for years.
And they said nothing.
So, I mean, late they come, but still they come.
And I suppose better late than never.
But there was a year and a half there where they were silent as mice.
Yeah, and it's extremely unfortunate.
You know, for the first couple of weeks of this, I even know sort of constitutional lawyers who are like, well, a week or two, we don't know what's happening.
If this is as bad as they say, the Spanish flu, some measures are sort of sensible.
Even staunch constitutional lawyers said there are places in place, but at a certain point, these health bureaucrats, health officials have to answer in court, have to justify it.
That's where we completely lost things.
I would understand and even forgive a politician for a month or two until the facts started to become clear.
But there has to be some accountability and there has to be questions asked, tough questions, on why they were so quiet for so long.
And now, and we said this, I said this possibly on your show, I said on the live stream, certainly.
Politicians can't suddenly, after two years, pretend that they were on the other side the whole time.
That's not how it works.
You don't get to pretend the past didn't happen.
But if they're willing to take active steps, if they're willing to, let's say, advocate for policy that mitigates further trampling on our constitutional freedoms, that's sort of how they can make up and make amends for some of the missteps in the past.
I noticed that last night Pierre Polyev referred in particular to the truckers.
So he's not shying away from that.
I noticed that a lot of the pundits at the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star and the CBC said, oh my God, he's with the truckers.
And even Jean Sharais is saying that disqualifies Pierre Polyev.
But here's Piev, Bob Polyev, last night invoking the truckers.
So he's not shying away from that.
Again, that's what Andrew Scheer or Aaron O'Toole would do.
They would say, oh, Gary Mason of the Globe and Mail doesn't like the truckers.
No one in the real world has heard of Gary Mason, but I have, and I'm scared of him.
So let me backtrack.
Pierre Polyev did, and here he is throwing out a shout out to the truckers last night.
Whether it is the hard-working trucker who delivered the goods and services that we needed.
Who delivered goods and services across the border every single day without a vaccine for two years.
And suddenly, Justin Trudeau suggested that he was going to spread a virus, even though that same trucker is all alone all by himself in the cal of his truck all day long.
He feels like he's lost control of his life.
And when he stood up and spoke out and raised his voice in peaceful and democratic protest, he was called a criminal by people like Justin Trudeau and Jean Shara.
Well, you know, it's a contrast not just between Polyev and the other leadership candidates and Polyev and the past two Tory leaders, but it's also a contrast between Polyev and Jason Kenney, his former caucus colleague who is now the premier of the province, who is a disaster policy-wise, opinion poll-wise.
He's fighting for his life within the party.
And again, it's the same people.
Like Jason Kenney could not pull a crowd of five, six, seven thousand cheering supporters anywhere in Alberta.
Part of it's the novelty of Pierre Polyev running as a candidate, and part of it is people just kicking the tires.
But I think that the main difference is that Pierre Polyev actually is using the language and the ideology and the belief of freedom.
And he's not, he hasn't, you know, abandoned those things for the sake of power.
I'm excited by it.
It's not just Calgary.
Polyev has had large events throughout Canada, including in pretty small towns.
Yeah.
You know, it's incredible.
Last night at the end of the event, there was a lineup of probably 4,000 people waiting to shake Pierre Polyev's hand to take a picture with him.
And they told me that this was by far the biggest lineup they'd seen, but they told me that there was a lineup of probably two-thirds, a third of the size of this one.
And Pierre Polyev stayed there until 1 a.m. shaking hands.
I have no doubt that last night he stayed there until 2, 3 a.m.
We were actually supposed to have an exclusive with him, but then when the lineup went around the block effectively, they said, we're going to schedule something outside of an event before he comes next time.
But Justin Trudeau couldn't draw a crowd like this.
Aaron O'Toole, if he'd won, couldn't draw a crowd like this.
No one can draw a crowd like this.
It's a different animal altogether.
And on the plus side, at least hopefully there's some hope that Jason Kenney sees, hey, I can actually advocate for freedom.
And if there's a small percentage of whether it be the liberal mainstream media or NDP activists who want to badmouth me, let them go ahead.
They're not going to vote for me anyways.
I'm not too hopeful.
Jason Kenney tends to not be making really good decisions right now, obviously, as we know, but maybe he'll take some influence from Pierre Polyevra and from the new direction of the Conservative Party in Canada and open his mind and enforce some freedoms, Alberta strong and free.
You know, I'm doing an interview with another MP today.
Sheila Gunnery did an interview with an MP the other day.
The age of Aaron O'Toole and this apologetic, self-hating conservativism is over.
And it seems very much like Pierre Polyev is at the vanguard of a new era of sort of proud and strong conservatism in this country.
Yeah, well, you know, you mentioned that you had a rebel exclusive with Polyev that was derailed because he had four hours of handshaking, to do fair enough.
But it is worth noting.
I talked before about how both Shear and O'Toole were afraid of their own shadows, would do whatever the CBC said.
And it's not just Pierre Polyev.
I mean, Leslie Lewis.
In fact, I think all of the leadership candidates except for Jean Charay have talked with us.
I mean, some are slightly more shy than others.
Leslie Lewis made one of her first campaign stops right here in our studio in Toronto.
But this is what I mean about an unapologetic, because, and here's my thinking on that.
I mean, of course, I have my personal interest in that.
I am part of Rebel News.
I love our reporters.
And when people say I'm not going to talk to a Rebel News reporter, I feel it personally as a sort of slight.
I mean, we've survived a lot better than Aaron O'Toole and Andrew Scheer did.
We'll outlive them.
But it wasn't the personal slight.
I mean, I don't care.
Other than it was a proxy for about 10 other things.
Because if you are a so-called conservative leader and you won't meet with Rebel News, unless you have a very specific reason, and I've never heard of one, what you're saying is I don't have the courage of my convictions.
I know that I'm going to be jumped on by the mean girls of the media party.
And so I will let them govern my actions, these mean girls of the media party, the CBC.
And if I can't stand up to that now, I mean, imagine what else you would cave into.
If talking to a journalist from a conservative outlet is anathema, is something you can't do, you can't do anything because you've got a tough job.
I'm pretty sure you're not going to defund the CBC.
I'm pretty sure you're not going to rein in the public sector.
I'm pretty sure you're not going to take on the public health deep state that keeps calling for lockdowns.
I'm pretty sure you're going to be a weakling in foreign affairs, whether it's dealing with Biden or Putin.
Like, if you can't handle the mean girls of the CBC because you're talking to the Rebel News, that tells me pretty much everything I need to know about your courage.
Go ahead.
I was going to say, it speaks to the fact that we're there, a number of other media outlets.
Unfortunately, virtually no media outlets covered Dr. Leslie Lewis's event.
We were the only ones there.
Someone showed up for five minutes.
There were quite a few media outlets here.
And at a conservative leadership event, that is the base that you're trying to pull.
A thousand or so of the people came up to me, talked to me, shook my hand, thanked Rebel News for what they were doing, what we're doing.
One lady was crying and shook my hand and thanked us for being the only ones telling the truth.
If you want to win the conservative leadership, you have to talk to conservative media.
That's a plain fact.
And you have to talk to conservative media that asks questions that people are interested in.
That's the only way you're going to win this race.
And we're going to be there covering the story as always, the leadership reports.ca, getting those reports out and actually having feet on the ground, not leaving a campaign after five minutes.
Yeah, well, I mean, listen, you're doing great journalism.
And as you said, sometimes we're the only people there.
But we've been the only people there during the entire pandemic.
We've been really the media.
And you in particular have championed the case of Arthur Pavlovsky, which is perhaps the most important case, most important storyline we've covered over the last two years.
Administration's Role Questioned00:09:24
And people trust us.
You know what?
I mean, Jason Kenney and I used to be quite close, I should have you know.
And I wasn't quite close with Doug Ford, the Premier of Ontario, but I was chummy enough with him and his late brother.
And the fact that we hold their feet to the fire, despite these personal and quote, partisan connections.
I'm a member of no political party, but you would think, oh, Rebel News, you're going to be, in fact, just some left-wing reporter asked me yesterday, oh, you're in the tank with the conservatives.
I said, really?
Tell that to Jason Kenney.
We've got a big billboard on the side of the highway targeting him for his treatment of Arthur Pavlovsky.
Part of the reason Rebel News is successful is that people know, we'll call it like we see it, even if it means holding conservatives to account.
In fact, that may be our most valuable trait, is that, like, it's very easy to criticize Justin Trudeau.
Well, not for the media party that are on the payroll, but that's not courage of your conviction stuff.
But can you criticize Jason Kenney or Doug Ford when they pull a mini Trudeau?
Can you criticize them when they put in a lockdown?
Will you criticize Jason Kenney as vigorously for jailing a pastor as you would criticize Justin Trudeau or Rachel Notley?
Have they done the same thing?
And I think that actually it's when we take on conservatives in a principled way that we earn our credibility with the base.
And so like you say, Rebel News, if you want to talk to conservative party members and voters in this country, how you handle Rebel News is really seen as a litmus test for things.
So I think you're doing great work.
I'm glad that the conservative leadership candidates have abandoned that bizarre and self-destructive strategy of Harin O'Toole and the other guy whose name I've just temporarily forgotten and I don't think I'll ever look up again, Andrew Scheer.
Let's take a break from the leadership contest and thank you for your work there.
You had a busy day yesterday.
Not only were you at the Pierre Polyev event with up to 7,800 people, you started the day by talking to a U.S. senator.
I mean, in Canada, our Senate's a bit of a joke.
But in the United States, senators are incredibly powerful people.
Even senators of a small state, even senator, and one of the reasons that makes them powerful is that they can be independent-minded.
So there's a Democrat from the state of West Virginia.
His name is Joe Manchin, but he thinks for himself.
And he often, given how tight it is in the Senate, is the voice that stops Joe Biden from doing bad things.
He stops, I remember one of his first campaign ads was a picture of him shooting a gun and using the Kyoto protocol as a target.
I'm Joe Manchin.
I approve this ad because I'll always defend West Virginia.
As your senator, I'll protect our Second Amendment rights.
That's why the NRA endorsed me.
I'll take on Washington and this administration to get the federal government off of our backs and out of our pockets.
I'll cut federal spending and I'll repeal the bad parts of Obamacare.
I sue DPA and I'll take dead aim at the cap and trade bill.
So there's a guy who stands with fossil fuels, of course, lots of coal in West Virginia.
Tell me a little bit about what Joe Manchin, who's a Democrat, was doing in Calgary, and then we'll play the clip of your exchange with him.
You know, so he is actually very much an advocate for energy resources, particularly in light of Russia's invasion of the Ukraine.
The United States facing a deficit.
He said 500,000 barrels.
I think it's actually 700,000 barrels they used to take in daily from Russia.
Keystone XL is on the brink of being done.
It would bring 830,000 barrels a day into the United States, offsetting that and then some also further barrels to help with the supply issues that they're having in the United States.
So he has been asking Biden to reinstate Keystone XL.
I believe even with some other bills that he's the swing vote on, he's been sort of posturing that maybe Keystone's one of the things he wants incorporated, but very much an advocate.
He has a long history of bipartisanship, despite being a Democrat on issues like energy, abortion, immigration, gun control.
So it's extremely interesting because some of his talking points sound very liberal and environmental, very Democrat.
And then other things sound very sort of Trump conservative Republican.
It was so interesting to be there with him and to have him advocating for this.
But it's interesting because he is very much right.
He's saying the most ethical environmental thing we can do is instead of tanking oil from these countries that are human rights violators that have no environmental restrictions in place whatsoever, we should be working with our long-term allies.
And that means exporting between Canada and the United States, solidifying and unifying that relationship.
So he and Jason Kenney were touring Alberta and discussing energy security broadly.
Yeah, well, that's the ethical oil argument.
Here's your question to Senator Manchin.
Dak, I'm so here for a rebel news a question for Senator Manchin.
In your opinion, what is driving the resistance within the Democratic Party and the Biden administration against importing ethical, readily available, and more environmentally responsible Canadian oil sply growing demands?
And why is the United States increasing oil imports from undemocratic serial human rights violators like Venezuela and Iran instead?
I asked the same question.
I think it's a lack of knowledge, lack of understanding.
You know, how many people have come up, how many senators have been up, how many people from the administration have been to Canada to understand how valuable Canada is to the United States of America and vice versa.
We're all one.
It's North America.
And North America could be the energy, the energy leaders of the world.
It really could be.
Of the cleanest energy production in the world.
I'm doing everything I can.
I intend to have Premier and the delegation come down to the United States, to the Capitol and my committee, and basically testify on what you do, how you do it, and how well you do it, and how much we need each other and how we depend on each other.
Not only the oil now, when you start thinking about all of the critical minerals, just take uranium.
And I said this: my history tells me that the Manhattan Project that we used to end the World War II and save the world from fascism and totalitarian type of regimes, that came from right here.
It came from you all.
In Saskatchewan, I think, in this part of the world, you had the richest uranium that we used.
And so we've been connected that longer than people know, they just don't realize.
So maybe my administration doesn't realize how well you do what you do.
Well, good stuff.
I tell you, you're doing a great job, Adam.
And I hope you continue to cover all the candidates.
I know that Jean Charé was in Calgary, and I'm not sure if Roman Baber has been out there.
But, you know, Calgary is a stop.
Of course, all of them will have to make because it is such a conservative city.
Look forward to the rest of your reports.
And that's at lockdownreports.ca.
That's where, sorry, pardon me.
That's a different website.
This is leadershipreports.ca, right?
That's right.
Yeah, you got it.
And that's where, you know what, we do have a lockdown reports one.
That was for covering the lockdown.
But this is leadershipreports.ca, and that's where you'll find all our coverage of the conservative race.
All right, Adam, keep it up.
We'll do, thanks.
Appreciate it.
Okay, cheers.
Take care.
That's Adam Sos in Calgary.
Stay with us more ahead.
Hey, welcome back.
Your feedback to me, Drift Racer B talking about criminalizing Holocaust denial, said, I hold the opinion that anything you are not allowed to discuss freely and explore opposing opinions and facts is most likely the thing that should be discussed the most.
The fact that this cannot be denied or even questioned is a big red flag as to the claims made about it, and this applies to any subject, not just the Holocaust from World War II.
Well, that's the thing.
You know, I'm 50 years old.
That is so old now.
So I was born in 1972, which was only 27 years after the Holocaust.
So from the Holocaust to when I was in, you know, grade one was about 30 years.
And it's been 40 plus years since I was in grade one.
Do you see what I mean?
So that was still, the Holocaust was a historical thing, but there were still survivors, and you would learn about it.
And there was this motto: never forget, or never again, excuse me, never again.
Well, the amount of time from the Holocaust to when I learned about it, and they were still saying never again.
And from that moment when I learned about it to now, it's greater now, the passage of time.
Everyone doesn't know these things.
You have to teach them again, and you have to let people ask questions, even skeptical questions, even hard questions, because you have to convince people who have never heard it before.
And if you become defensive and clam up and blame people and attack people for asking questions, and I grant that some questions are asked in bad faith, but if you make it illegal to even ask questions, you're just begging people to defy you.
You're pricking their contrarian streak, their skeptical streak.
You want to build a conspiracy theory?
Tell people they're not allowed to talk about something.
Someone with the nickname I Still Have Hope says the truth does not need protection.
Sanctions and Scarcity00:06:23
Set it free.
It will defend itself.
Only lies need laws to protect it.
That is an ancient truth.
I mean, the lie may get a head start in a race.
There's no doubt about it.
Lies often have a head start.
But let truth and falsehood grapple.
That's the way, and people will learn.
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.
And let me leave you with our video today from our friend Lewis in the UK.
He's talking about the truth about global supply chains.
This is an interesting one.
All right, see you tomorrow.
So the official narrative is as follows.
The war in Ukraine, Russia sanctions, and of course COVID.
They are all to blame for the global supply chain crisis, which means people like me and you have to pay more at the shops and at the pumps.
But in this video, I'm going to lay out what we know so far.
So our political masters from around the world, who, by the way, are definitely not in cahoots with each other, have been warning of this impending food and supply crisis for a while now.
Joe Biden has declared that food shortages are going to be real across the globe and blames the war in, of course, Ukraine.
Now, of course, we know that the West has been putting in sanctions on Russia as a form of punishment for its actions in Ukraine.
Well, I'm not sure the temporary removal of Starbucks, McDonald's and Pornhub really has had a devastating effect.
But some of the other sanctions have had negative consequences for life of Russian people.
We know that the sanctions against Russia were just returned in kind by the Russian President Vladimir Putin, and now the West is in a fuel crisis.
On all sides of the political spectrum, politicians are clamoring to say we should not be dependent on Russian oil.
Well, perhaps we should have thought about that decades ago, and not now when the world is so globally interconnected, and parts of Europe are already dependent on Russian oil.
Germany.
The joke of it all is that somehow it's morally repugnant to buy oil from Big Bab Putin, but it's okay to give your money to Islamic extremists over in Saudi Arabia.
Now, sorry, mate, I don't get my oil from the Russian aggressor.
I prefer my oil from the Saudi religious radicals who have public executions, criminalize normal behaviors, and fund proxy wars around the world.
Anyway, there may be a grain of truth in that sanctions could cause food prices to rise.
Ukraine is one of the world's largest wheat-producing nations.
Back when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, it was known as the breadbasket of the Soviet Union.
And as a country, Ukraine nowadays produces around 10% of the world's wheat.
As it stands with the ongoing situation in Ukraine, the harvests will be negatively affected.
And there will be much less wheat being produced.
Now if there is a shortage, let's be honest, will the manufacturers take the financial hit or pass the price raise to the customers?
I think we all know the answer to that.
Limitless profits at the expense of everyday people.
But it's not just oil and wheat prices that are being affected by the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia.
Russia itself is a large exporter of fertiliser around the world.
The sanctions and the restrictions have meant that the Russian fertiliser which helps cultivate British, American and European fields isn't getting through to the farmers.
So the farmers will have to pay more to produce the food and again the knock-on effect trickles down to the public in the form of inflated food prices and scarcity of produce.
But hold on, aren't we meant to be building back better after the COVID crisis?
Wasn't that the mantra from our political masters?
Build back better for us or is it them?
Or is it that the COVID crisis hasn't even finished yet according to them?
Now looking to the east we have China.
Currently the CCP are turning Shanghai into what looks like a dystopian nightmare.
Residents are locked inside their homes, there is a scarcity of food, everyone is controlled by the social credit system, and if you dare to sing on your balcony, a drone will come out and yell at you in Chinese.
The Chinese have decided to pursue the zero COVID approach which we know from New Zealand's policies is absolutely impossible.
Shanghai has the world's largest port and as we speak the containers are stacking up.
The port has created a huge backlog which will in turn drive up container prices and again trickle down to the consumer level in the form of price rises.
So much is shipped through Shanghai that it's hard to express in words roughly 10% of the world's shipping containers pass through Shanghai.
A good example of this is just behind me.
Many of the containers you see would have passed through Shanghai within the last 12 months.
Absolutely everything is being affected by what's happening in the world today.
The war in Ukraine, the sanctions on Russia and the never-ending COVID crisis.
The question is, how much of this is actually just by design and how much of this is just a coincidence that everything is wonderfully blending into a never-ending crisis?
We've gone straight from COVID to war and famine in the blink of an eye.
One moment it was the unvaccinated who are being hounded as the enemy and now it's the everyday Russian people who are the target of being cancelled simply for just being Russian.
So let's be honest, if we really are on the path to building back better, then what on earth is better going to look like?