Cosmin Dzurdza’s True North series exposes Canada’s culture wars through the military’s embrace of fake nails, tattoos, and gender-bending uniforms—policies critics link to Defense Minister-driven DEI ideology—while training now includes critical race theory targeting Christian and right-wing personnel. Ottawa Police dismissed 80% of Freedom Convoy complaints but scrutinized anti-police sentiment, raising transparency concerns. Justin Trudeau’s climate crackdowns, like the UN-backed fertilizer tax on Western farmers and a 40% oil/gas emissions cap at COP26, ignore industry data, deepening economic and security divisions. A Rebel News viewer highlights the government’s anti-science trend, from vaccine mandates to gender-identity education, proving ideology trumps evidence—undermining trust in institutions nationwide. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight we've got Cosmo Jerja from True North on the Ottawa police, the woke military, and Trudeau blaming your loaf of bread for his climate change.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
You know, I'm really proud of the work that the independent media organizations are doing in this country.
I suppose on some level, we're friendly competitors, but it's more than that.
I think we're colleagues, peers, on a single mission to fill a void left by the state-sponsored mainstream media.
And someone doing some incredible investigative reporting on the culture wars is Cosmen Gergia over at True North.
If he's not investigating the progressive madness unfolding at the school board level, he's investigating the poison of wokeness as it seeps into and infects our public institutions, particularly those tasked with keeping us safe.
He joins me tonight in an interview we recorded yesterday afternoon to discuss his investigations into how the Canadian military brass is going to make the force more inclusive.
And after seeing his report, my fear is it's going to alienate good soldiers.
We're also talking about his investigation into the Ottawa police and how they've investigated themselves and their own behavior during the convoy protest in Ottawa two months ago.
And we're talking about Trudeau's latest attacks on the West.
I know you're saying which attack, Sheila, but this is one where he blames farmers and fertilizer use for climate change.
Here's our interview.
Take a listen.
So joining me now is Cosmin Jirja from True North.
He's a journalist there and he's a senior fellow.
Cosmen, thanks for joining me.
I was just talking to you off air about just, I really pity the amount of gross things you have to look at.
And one of them is the wokeness in the military.
Uniform Policy Controversy00:14:34
Why don't we start there?
Because you have two really great stories about this drive to make the military more inclusive.
But I feel like they're appealing to people who had never joined the military anyway.
And I think it alienates good people within the military.
And they probably just quietly take early retirement and go off to do other things.
But why don't you tell us about the drive to make the military more inclusive by permitting fake nails, dyed hair on soldiers and face tattoos?
And these are not like face tattoos.
If somebody said to me, I'm Maori, it's part of my culture.
I have a face tattoo.
I'd hear that argument in the same way that I would hear the argument about a turban or a kerpen.
No, these are like teardrop tattoos and spider webs on someone's neck.
Why don't you tell us about it?
That's right, Sheila.
So what we're seeing is a top-down bureaucratic push to institute these sort of measures that are based on essentially the left-wing ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
This is coming right from the defense minister.
So it's not from the rank and file.
I've spoken to many people in the Canadian Armed Forces, including at senior levels and at just lower private levels, and they don't want it.
They want a military that's effective at securing this country.
So the report you're talking about is actually the military, the Canadian Armed Forces is undergoing a transformation to its uniform policy.
And I saw a copy of that draft of that policy, which is supposed to actually come out this month.
And it includes all the things you mentioned.
You know, soldiers will be allowed to have fake nails, dye their hair in any color they wish, have face tattoos.
Now, of course, there are some acceptable options, like if you're missing eyebrows from a condition and you need to get tattooed there, that would be fine.
But there are so many other changes, including, you know, you can wear jewelry, rings, as many earrings as you want.
Women can have beards.
Men can have braided hair, etc.
So not only does this totally fly in the face of the unity that the military uniform is supposed to promote, but additionally, it also totally discredits the military in the world's eyes, right?
So, and it also causes some safety issues.
If you're going out in the field and you have red or blue hair, you will be an easy target.
So, I really question the thinking that went into putting this together.
Yeah, it just all seems so unprofessional.
I know even when my daughter was in cadets, she would take off her nail polish before she went her dress code standards for her hair.
It had to be a certain way.
And now, this is just like anything goes.
And I think it has a lot to do with the fact that they're having a hard time getting people to enlist in the military.
And I don't think this is going to make it any better.
Absolutely.
Recruitment has been a big issue for the military for a while.
But yeah, I don't think this is going to be the solution that the military needs.
The military needs certain things like more flexibility for families that, you know, people who, for their spouses, for people who have kids, so that they can have better living conditions, better pay, things like that, not plunging the entire military into this woke circus.
Yeah, they might have better luck dealing with their declining recruitment numbers if they didn't fire all the good people who didn't want to get a vaccine, which I think is happening this week as we speak, that this will be the final termination for so many soldiers who either didn't get the COVID vaccine or declined to divulge their vaccination status.
So there's all kinds of accommodations being made for all sorts of people, except those guys.
Exactly.
It's a double-edged sword.
On one hand, people are being driven out of the military because of this woke diversity equity stuff.
And on the other hand, they were driven out during the pandemic because they wouldn't comply with that policy and they decided to make a personal health decision.
So it will be interesting to see who is left behind and what kind of people the military will cater to.
You know, I expect fully it'll be, you know, city slickers who don't want to carry that, you know, 80-pound kit in the field.
So yes, it is a huge transformation.
And as I said, it's from the top down.
I really do think this is coming from the defense minister and people in the military are going along with it, right?
We saw that people who question these policies, like those unvaccinated soldiers, get kicked to the side.
We saw that with the admiral from the Navy, Norman, who was also attacked by the Liberal government for not complying with their plans.
So I think the top senior ranks are afraid of losing their careers, and they're putting that ahead of the interest of national security.
Yeah, it worries me for who it will be remaining in 10 years.
And I see this same problem in policing where the good cops just quietly resign or they take early retirement because they are just over it.
They're done with it.
And I worry that the same thing is going to happen in the military.
And China is just going to laugh all the way to world domination.
Speaking of laughing all the way to world domination, this is not the only woke thing happening in the military.
You have this absolutely outrageous story from a couple of weeks ago.
Soldier, drag queen bingo, and critical race theory in the Canadian armed forces.
If teardrop gangland style tattoos weren't your bag, I guess, you know, you can be a drag queen, and that's fine in the military.
What has happened?
I miss MASH when Klinger was sort of like where he was the drag queen and he was trying to get out of the military because of it.
And now this is the thing now.
Yeah, it's that was an event that was held at a sort of it's like it was a private like military club where soldiers can go and attend, you know, dine out and have some drinks.
But yeah, it's like it just totally is contradictory to what you would imagine with the military, right?
The, you know, the popular images of sailors, you know, drinking together and singing.
But with the critical race theory, that was the most interesting thing for me because I had a member of the CAF tell me that in these training sessions, and there's actually lots of these diversity, equity, ethics sort of training.
There were book recommendations on white fragility and Robin DiAngelo and all of these prominent critical race theory left-wing people whose work is quite frankly grounded in Marxism and communist ideas are being pushed onto the military.
And here I thought the military is not supposed to be a political organization.
You're not supposed to have politics in it.
And they were teaching these soldiers these ethics scenarios, basically training them like, what do you do if you encounter this situation?
And all of these scenarios particularly singled out religious, most likely Christian, and people who have right-wing views.
There was a scenario where there was some false group called like Patriot Canada or something like that.
And they asked soldiers, what do you do?
You know, like, how are you supposed to approach these things?
You know, this is unacceptable.
So it's obviously very one-sided.
They're pushing a political ideological program into the military.
And we're seeing it in multiple different sectors of society, not just there.
Yeah, we've seen documents at Rebel News where they're doing this to the CBSA.
They're teaching them unconscious bias at the CBSA.
And the CBSA union, to their credit, complained because they said, this feels a little bit racist.
Like they're being told, sure, you haven't done anything racist and you've never said anything racist, but that is a sign of racism because it is internalized racism.
You're not exhibiting it, so you're hiding it, which is probably even worse.
And they were very confused about how they were supposed to apply this unconscious bias training when they were searching a sea can for contraband.
They just didn't understand why it was a thing.
And it's, I think this stuff makes Canadians far less safe.
No, absolutely.
I even saw, we did a story on the Foreign Service, Foreign Affairs.
It's also there.
It's also in the School of Public Service.
I recently did a story where they said that colorblindness is no longer acceptable.
You should no longer treat everybody the same way, actually.
You should treat people based on their skin color.
So it's all these mental gymnastics, and it's quite, like I said, widespread across government industries and the public sector.
And we see it also in the private sector as well.
Although I don't think it's as infected by it as the government sphere is, yeah.
Yeah, you know.
At least if it's in the private sector, I don't have to pay for it.
Like, I don't have to be, I don't have to pay for this whole swath of workers to be told that they're racist, even though they didn't do anything.
And then they're also being told to be more racist.
Like the textbook definition of racism is treating people differently because of their race.
But I guess that's woke now.
Who knows?
You also have a really great report.
Speaking of people being less safe, the Ottawa police, they investigated themselves, it sounds like, and they threw out the majority of the complaints against themselves that were lodged during the Freedom Convoy protests.
Either they claimed to have not known anything about the complaints against them, for example, when they pepper sprayed and shot at close range with a pepper canister, our journalist Alexa.
But they claimed in a press conference they didn't know anything about it, even though it was viral.
But this is bizarre to me that with such international attention to what happened in Ottawa and the actions of the police there, that they are just seemingly able to just investigate themselves.
And wouldn't you know it, we were good.
This is crazy.
Right.
So that report was filed before the Ottawa City Council last week, I think.
And it essentially relates to people that we saw a 300% increase in the number of complaints that Ottawa Police Service received based on their conduct, over 80% of which was from or related to the Freedom Convoy protests.
Now, you would think with a 300% increase of complaints, you would have a similar increase of investigations, but that is not the case, actually.
They investigated just about the same amount of percentage, the same amount of cases as they did before.
And most of these cases were related to use of force or just improper conduct.
A small minority of the cases were related to, I think it was called abandonment of duty or something like that, which I would assume were from the Ottawa residents themselves who thought that the police didn't do enough to crack down on protesters.
But recently, the CBC put out an article just this weekend about that, and it totally ignored the fact that a majority of these complaints came from people, for example, who were hit in the back with weapons, who complained to the police that the police were there to actually escalate the situation.
All of those were not mentioned in this report.
They totally focused on those Ottawa residents who would have actually liked to see more police brutality, more use of violence and force and a larger militarized presence in Ottawa.
Again, we can question the so-called independent nature of this report because essentially, what the body that there's a body in the Ottawa Police Service that reviews and vets these complaints before they get forwarded to investigation.
And this body dismissed most of these complaints on various grounds, including grounds like they're not in the public interest.
So their reasonings are quite funny and arbitrary.
And I would really question those findings.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think it's in the public interest to have confidence in the independence of your police force and that when they get up to no good or allege to be up to no good, that there would be some sort of independent investigation.
I'm not sure how it works in Ottawa, but I do know in Alberta, if Calgary police are involved in some excessive use of force, Edmonton police investigates, vice versa.
Sometimes the RCMP investigates.
It's just odd that there's no sort of arrangement in Ottawa, but probably a little bit on the nose considering what we know about how they reacted during the convoy.
Now, I wanted to talk to you about this one because it's kind of near and dear to my heart.
Attack on Agriculture?00:09:19
The Trudeau government, once again, this for me, when I read this story, I'm like, ah, it's another attack on Alberta.
He is the Trudeau government, it's a report by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, which is odd because this attacks agriculture and agri-food.
In your report, it says it singles out wheat, barley, and other cereal crops as one of the worst offenders for greenhouse gas emissions.
And, you know, if the liberals aren't getting us with the oil and gas sector, that now they're attacking farming and pretty quickly they're going to come for our beef producers too.
Why not get us all?
Yeah, so just to backtrack a little bit, in 2020, the government essentially announced that they want to put a 30% emissions cap on emissions caused by fertilizer use on farms in the agriculture sector.
So Agriculture Canada released this report in March singling out cereal and wheat barley farmers for having the so-called highest emissions among export countries.
Now, I've spoken to farmers' groups and they totally dispute this.
It's based on faulty and even non-existent science because this is actually currently being studied.
There's no reliable statistics on emissions caused by fertilizer use on farms.
It's actually very difficult to track.
And farmers were rightly so outraged by this claim because the government relied on a UN report.
And as we know, you know, a lot of these reports from the UN on climate rely on modeling and sort of mathematical trickery.
And it's essentially amounts to guesstimations.
It's not based on real hard facts.
And when you actually look at the agriculture industry, Canada is a leader in reducing emissions.
We actually don't abuse fertilizer on farms.
Farmers take the greatest pains to get the most out of the least amount of fertilizer.
They won't use it when it's not necessary.
Cosmetics is so expensive.
Fertilizer is so expensive.
It's one of the most expensive inputs for a farmer.
So to think that we're just like out there like the fertilizer ferry, just throwing it all over the place when we don't need it, that's crazy because also farmers are price takers.
They're not price makers.
So you have to keep your control your input costs because you are going to take what the market will tell you you're going to take for your wheat.
So if you're wasting money on the inputs, that cuts into your profit at the end of the year.
It's just a typical Ottawa elitist not knowing what farmers do.
Exactly.
We're talking about primary producers here, essentially the beginning of the food supply chain, right?
The farmers can't control the price of fertilizer.
And as you mentioned, they're currently through the roof.
And that's already putting a strain on what farmers are capable of producing in this season, right?
So as you said, it is a, I mean, I'm inclined to think that it is a targeted attack on Western Canada.
We saw it with Trudeau's announcement during COP26 about the 40% emissions cap on the oil and gas sector.
We're seeing it with Agriculture Canada singling out particularly cereal and wheat farmers, right?
They're not singling out the dairy industry in Quebec, et cetera.
So it comes from Trudeau's longstanding vehement dislike of Western Canadians, their political beliefs and their sort of grassroots conservatism.
And I think it really is a trend with this liberal government, especially in their climate policy.
And it is really insulting to people.
And it should worry Canadians, especially at a time of war and the things we're seeing with inflation and economy.
We will be the ones who will be paying at the end of the day for the grocery bills while Trudeau bills taxpayers for over $2,000 for his organic grocery bills in Ottawa.
So it should worry a lot of people.
And I think Canadians need to start questioning whether this government has the best interests of this country in mind.
Because as we've discussed here, on multiple sectors, including military and agriculture, it seems like they're doing everything they can to weaken this country, to make it less secure, both in the terms of our food supply, as well as our national security in the name of ideology.
And reality is going to smack that plan right in the face if it keeps going, because that's not how the world works.
We can't create a utopia because there are some real hard facts that people are going to learn, especially with the way things are going right now.
Yeah, it seems as though across all sectors, the liberals are trying to fix something that isn't at all broke.
And if they really want to come after farmers on their fertilizer use, fine, but you're going to see lower yields, which causes a higher cost to the consumer.
There's a reason why organic food is way more expensive than regular old food.
And it has to do with the fertilizer inputs and the size of the yield after the fact.
So, I mean, if you want farmers to use less fertilizer, that's fine.
But boy, you're going to sure pay for it at the grocery till.
Cosmo, thank you so much for coming on the show today and updating us with some of your work.
Where can people find you?
Because, I mean, it seems like every day you are writing another story about something crazy the federal government is doing.
So how can they find you?
How can they support the work that you're doing?
Sure.
You can either visit true north at tnc.news or follow me on Twitter at CosmanDZS.
Great.
Thanks so much, Cosmo.
Thank you, Sheila.
So this is the newish portion of the show where I look back at some of your emails or some of your comments.
And if you want to send an email directly to me, because I know some of you don't like to leave Rumble comments or Facebook comments or YouTube comments, you can send an email directly to me, Sheila at RebelNews.com, and just put gun show letters in the headline so that I can find it easily because I get a lot of emails in a day, let alone in a week.
Today's comment comes from the Rumble comments section, and it's on my story where we discovered that the federal government has no data to support the segregation that they are imposing in Canada's airports.
We have roughly 6 million Canadians who are unvaccinated who cannot take an airplane.
And you would think that the federal government would be trying to find some data to support the segregation they're imposing on so many Canadians.
But as it turns out, they don't collect that data.
They don't know anything about whether there are COVID transmissions happening on those hermetically sealed tubes hurtling through space.
And on the Rumble Comments, somebody makes an interesting parallel between what the federal government is doing by not pursuing scientific evidence to support their policies with just the lack of regard for scientific evidence and science in general within society.
So I guess why would the feds be any different?
GivePD writes, interesting, it must be really hard to follow the science without relevant evidence.
Perhaps schools that seek to tell elementary students that they can be any gender they choose despite their genetic makeup will also explain that the scientific method now regards empirical data as irrelevant.
So boys can be girls, girls can be boys, and scientific recommendations require no evidence.
It's a new world.
Yeah, it sure is.
The government can tell you to follow the science and then not follow the science at all.
What they mean is follow the leader.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
If you'd like your letter read on the show, easiest way to get that in front of my eyeballs is to send it to Sheila at RebelNews.com.
Put gun show letters in the headline, and that's the best way for me to see it.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
Thank you to everybody in the office in Toronto and our remote editors around the world, really, for making this show happen.