Ezra Levant examines China’s zero-COVID protests—largest since Tiananmen, with 10 dead in Urumqi after lockdown delays—while accusing Justin Trudeau of hypocrisy for crushing Canadian honking protests via martial law. Quebec’s carbon tax favoritism (5+ vs. 14 cents/liter) and rising emissions in BC/Alberta despite high taxes expose policy failures, as the UN admits no scheme can halt global warming. Listener letters clash over Trudeau’s legal risks and Miller’s convoy defense, with Levant rejecting partisan loyalty, warning against weaponizing perjury charges, and pushing for public accountability over courtroom battles. [Automatically generated summary]
I've got about 20 videos from the streets of China showing what I think is the greatest uprising there since Chianan Square.
Many of them are in the Chinese language, but it's the video I want to show you.
So I will explain each clip as I go through them today on the podcast, and I'll do my best.
But really, if you're ever going to get a subscription to the video version of the podcast, now is the time.
Go to RebelNewsPlus.com.
Click subscribe.
It's eight bucks a month.
And believe me, you're going to see videos on my show today that you will not see elsewhere.
It's videos of a mass popular uprising across China.
And these are Chinese source videos.
Go to RebelNewsPlus.com.
All right, for those of you who are enjoying the audio experience, here's the podcast.
Tonight, Justin Trudeau brought in martial law in Canada, but he says he supports COVID protesters in China.
It's November 29th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
There's the greatest popular uprising in China since Tiananmen Square going on right now.
It's unbelievable.
Phrased another way, it's hard to believe given the censorship and disinformation from that regime.
They're very clamped down on the internet, but it's also true that a great number of Chinese people have cell phones with cameras on them.
And there's just so many people filming so many protests and posting them in such clever ways, it might be impossible for them to be stopped, even by the million or so official censors and thought police that work in that country.
It really is thrilling to watch and despairing, too.
Chinese Protests and Censorship00:03:45
My hopes were so high back in 2019 when freedom lovers in Hong Kong marched peacefully in the streets in defiance of Beijing's plans to bring Chinese law into that free city.
I thought maybe their people power would win.
No, they were crushed.
Stalin said that power comes from the barrel of a gun.
You could have all the peaceful protests you like, but if you're up against a brutal totalitarian regime, they just don't stop based on a conscience.
Remember, China is a basic dictatorship that doesn't need to worry about rules.
I mean, ask Trudeau.
There's a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say we need to go green as fast as we need to start investing in solar.
I mean, there is a flexibility that I know Stephen Harper must dream about of having a dictatorship that he could do everything he wanted.
Yeah, you see how he said what was on his mind and then tried to spin it.
That was Harper's talk.
But it was Trudeau who invoked martial law.
It was Trudeau who said just last week that protests calling for political change are immoral and wrong.
Oh, until he tried to correct himself, like with that China thing.
In terms of responding to their demands or legitimizing them by engaging, I'm highlighting that I'm worried about setting a precedent that a blockade on Wellington Street can lead to changing public policy.
People need to be heard, but we need to get that balance right.
And then she agreed that I need to be cautious and I don't want to set any bad precedents.
Okay, so fairly self-explanatory.
There's a willingness to discuss, but you were concerned about setting a precedent where a blockade could equal a change in public policy.
Is that fair?
Yeah, I think we have a robust functioning democracy and protests, public protests are an important part of making sure we're getting messages out there and Canadians are getting messages out there and highlighting how they feel about various issues.
But using protests to demand changes to public policy is something that I think is worrisome.
Okay.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Although, sorry, to assert.
No, no, please go on.
Protests, if you're out protesting that the government is shutting down a safe injection site or something, you are asking for changes in public policy.
But there is a difference between occupations and saying we're not going until this is changed in a way that is massively disruptive and potentially dangerous versus just saying, yeah, we're protesting because we want public policy to change and we're trying to convince people to get enough of them that politicians will listen to enough people saying, okay, I'm going to lose votes if I don't change this.
That's the usual way protests can be effective in our democracies.
I've seen different explanations for what sparked these protests in China.
A zero COVID policy where entire cities are locked down because of a handful of cases.
Remember, COVID these days is really not much more than the common cold.
The new variants are so harmless by contrast with the original.
By the way, the common cold is a coronavirus.
We've known them just by different names for years.
But these authoritarians have used COVID-0 as a way to control everything, anything.
Why TikTok Protests Baffle China00:08:25
I mean, a way to force everyone to constantly test themselves, constantly submit to being prodded, to be banned or permitted based on their personal health or at least whatever some test said.
Zero COVID.
I believe it.
And how zero COVID stopped fire trucks from stopping a particular residential fire.
I totally believe that was a reason for the uprising.
And of course, the massive Apple iPhone and computer factory, there's a company in China called Foxconn that makes Apple products.
Huge protests there.
Did you know that Apple computers, so cool, so hip, so fashionable, so progressive, so exquisitely liberal, that they use Chinese labor to put together your phones and computers to save, I don't know, $100 a phone.
And what does Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, have to do to get China to let them operate there and sell their phones there?
Well, Tim Cook has disabled Apple functionality only in China to help the police crack down on these protests.
For example, they turned off functions on iPhones.
If you have an iPhone or an Apple product, they have something called AirDrop.
It lets you share documents with people who are physically near you.
You don't need their number or email address.
It's great for sharing things during protests when you're near people.
You just type airdrop and give it to people.
Tim Cook stopped that for these Chinese protests.
He's on the side of Xi Jinping.
He's against the people.
So much for that old Apple ad from the 80s so long ago about freedom.
Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the information purification in all history.
A garden of pure ideology where each work remains low people, secure from the pests of being contradictory to force.
Our communication of force is more powerful a weapon than any fleet.
What are we on earth?
We are one people with one will, one resolve, one cause.
Our hands shall talk themselves to death, and we will fight away with their own conviction.
We shall provade.
On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh.
And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984.
Yeah, now Apple really is Big Brother.
You know, Apple is musing about banning Twitter from its app store, basically meaning that no one with an iPhone will be able to use it.
Elon Musk is talking too much about free speech, you see.
Apple has been asked by the U.S. government to ban China's social media app called TikTok from the app store.
Like I say, Apple is on China's side.
So is Google, of course.
So is Facebook, of course.
I don't know if you remember, but Mark Zuckerberg actually asked Xi Jinping to name Zuckerberg's own child.
What kind of weirdo creep does that?
Outsources naming their own child to a foreign dictator?
Xi Jinping is a murderer and a tyrant, but even he was creeped out by that request and he refused to do it for Zuckerberg.
He said no.
I've been watching these protests unfold a little bit on Twitter, but mainly on TikTok itself, which is bizarre because TikTok doesn't appear to be censoring these videos in North America.
Now, of course, it censors them like crazy in China.
I don't know, maybe it wants to see who is watching them in North America.
Remember, TikTok is a giant spy machine.
It tracks everything you do or say.
It tracks your other apps.
It tracks your gestures and your eye movements.
It spies on you.
So maybe it's a giant honey trap.
They want to see who's watching it.
Maybe.
I don't know.
I'd like to show you a lot of short videos that I downloaded from TikTok.
I shouldn't be on that app.
They're spying on me.
But I want to show you these videos.
Some of them are as short as five or 10 seconds long.
Some of them have only Chinese writing on them.
So of course, I don't know exactly what they mean.
And I couldn't speak to the veracity of these clips anyways.
I don't know who made these.
Some of these might be government propaganda.
They come from or through a government-controlled social media app, but I can't believe that China would want the world to see this kind of uprising.
I don't understand why I can see these on TikTok.
Some of these have very amateur or even childish writing on them.
That's the nature of TikTok.
That's just how they are.
That's citizen journalism in 2022, I guess, from a foreign country.
Some of these might, for all I know, be from a different city or even a different year.
So I don't know the quality of what I'm showing you, but this seems real to me, and it certainly seems more real to me than any reports you're going to get from Trudeau, CBC, or Toronto Star.
There are some interesting things in these videos.
I'll show you a bunch.
For example, some people are holding up literally blank pieces of paper, blank protest signs, and shouting, you know what I want to say, and literally being arrested for that because everyone knows what they want to say.
And that's done to get around censorship, both online and in person, I think.
They're trying to stay ahead of artificial intelligence.
China is the world leader in AI.
That's the only way to do censorship at scale, as they say.
You really couldn't censor a billion or more people all typing things together.
You would need machines to do that.
You couldn't do that with just human police.
Now, machines can learn, but maybe people are still quicker.
This is fascinating, and the fact that it's happening at the hands of Chinese people is amazing to me because it certainly has not happened because of anything Joe Biden or Justin Trudeau or Jacinda Ardern or any other pro-Chinese politicians in the West has done.
So now, in no particular order, I'm going to show you a bunch of TikTok videos.
And I'm going to give you some very quick thoughts in between.
And let me just tell you right now, these aren't in order.
Some of them are really goofy and amateur, but I think that's life online in a dystopian time, isn't it?
Here, let's run through them.
And if they get too boring, I'll cut this short.
Let's take a look at some of these videos.
There's a few I put in from Twitter, but most of them are from TikTok, which is a weird thing to do, by the way.
Here, let's take a look.
Was that honking?
I didn't see any trucks, but that's honking.
Justin Trudeau brought in martial law in Canada, deployed the riot police, seized bank accounts because of honking.
They're honking in China.
I love it.
I wonder if they knew anything about the Canadian trucker convoy.
I bet that was censored in China, but that's the only tool they have, honking their horns.
Boy, that's a feeling of freedom, isn't it?
All right, here's the next video.
That's a very short video, isn't it?
Less than five seconds long.
But imagine these head-to-toe hazmat suit thugs walking around, just shouting at people, just with sticks, just hitting things.
Now, this next video, if I understand, is a man who was banned from re-entering his apartment because his PCR test was positive.
Unarmed Protesters in Shanghai00:14:43
So he's literally sleeping at his shop.
He holds up some sort of paper in Chinese.
Obviously, I don't know what it means, but take a look at this.
I like this guy.
Let's take a look.
Now, I don't know if that is related to the protest.
I don't know if that is related to the protest.
When I was searching for Chinese protests, they came up.
It looked like there was a fence around his sham.
Maybe that's not got to do with the protests, but I certainly liked his passion.
He's a businessman trying to make a go at things.
Protected from whom?
I don't know.
Let's go to the next one.
It seems to be more on point.
Historic protests are taking place across China.
Here's what you need to know.
For the first time since the start of the pandemic, large protests have broken out in multiple Chinese cities opposing the country's zero COVID policy.
The rare and historic demonstrations were triggered by a fire in western China last week that killed at least 10 people in a residential building.
It happened in Urumqi city in Xinjiang region, which has been under lockdown since August.
Many protesters blamed COVID rules for hampering rescue efforts and preventing residents from escaping the burning building.
For the first time, some protesters have openly called for the country's leader, Xi Jinping, to step down.
Normally, saying that out loud in China could get you jailed.
In some footage, hundreds of protesters could be heard saying they want freedom, not PCR tests.
At a prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing, where President Xi studied, students called for democracy and the rule of law.
Some protesters were taken away by police.
Many others have taken up a silent but powerful form of dissent, holding up pieces of blank paper.
is a protest against China's censorship and a show of grief for those who perished in the fire.
Will China change its mind on its zero-Covid policy?
What the country's leader do next could have major public health and political consequences.
I think that was a report from Vice News, and I salute them.
I think that was a very honest and candid report.
Very tough to do journalism in China.
I don't think that reporter is actually in China.
I don't think he would be allowed to broadcast that, but he gathered that footage.
I thought that was an excellent report, and I find that credible.
Wasn't that interesting about the blank signs and still people being arrested?
He mentioned Tsinghua University, which is the Harvard of China, so they say.
The fact that they're talking about democracy is incredibly encouraging to me.
All right, let's take a look at this next one.
This is from Shanghai, which for the longest time was the most Western-oriented city, the most freedom-oriented city in China.
Take a look.
I think that was in a barber shop.
I think he was telling cops to get the heck out.
We don't need your kind here.
And by your kind, like as in you police.
That's more courage than I thought you might find in a totalitarian regime.
And the fact that it was filmed, very interesting to me.
Here's one from Chengdu, China, which is the Panda Bear capital.
Actually, it used to be part of Tibet until it was annexed by another Chinese state.
It's a major city, Chengdu.
It's very interesting to me that there's unrest there.
take a look.
No more censorship.
We want freedom.
They didn't learn that from Joe Biden or Justin Trudeau or Jacinda Ardern, did they?
Because all three of those Western leaders don't use that language.
They don't say no more freedom.
They say more censorship.
In fact, they're trying to censor Elon Musk.
Isn't that amazing?
I wonder who taught them about freedom.
I wonder if it's just innate, an innate human condition, or if they're managing to find information through the great firewall of China, as they say.
Now, this video, I don't know if this is current.
I just found it yesterday, but these huge internment camps, by the way, they were built in Canada on a much smaller scale.
We saw hotel quarantines in airports.
They had a large quarantine facility in Australia, you might know, several of them.
I don't know if this is right now or if this is footage from a year ago, but this is a Chinese internment camp for people allegedly with COVID.
Take a look.
Again, a five-second clip.
That's the nature of TikTok.
Some funny music.
I think that was the music from some sci-fi, I think, some old show.
A little sense of humor.
Is it real?
I don't know.
But do they really have COVID jails?
I don't know.
I think they might.
They have all sorts of jails in China.
Here's another video taken on the street.
Let's take a look at what this is like.
These are very different cities.
These are around the whole country, Beijing, Chengdu, Shanghai.
There's so much that it could overwhelm people.
But then again, AI is watching everything and everyone.
a look.
Now, obviously, I support these people.
It looked like that was the apartment building that had the fire.
And if I understand what was going on, they were tearing down some sort of barricade.
It's interesting to me that they were all wearing their masks, whether out of COVID compliance or to hide their identity from the ubiquitous closed-circuit TVs that have more closed-circuit TVs in China than the rest of the world combined.
I should say one thing.
I mentioned, I started this show, how Justin Trudeau's praising in some way these protesters.
Of course, he declared martial law on our own.
Those protesters, by knocking down that barricade, did more physical damage than all the trucker convoys across Canada combined.
There simply was no physical damage or vandalism or tearing things down done by the Canadian truckers.
Trudeau brought in martial law.
These Chinese freedom fighters, who I totally support, have just there gone further, and yet Trudeau pretends he's on their side.
Here's another video.
I want to go through a few more of these.
Some of them are sort of short, some are long.
And again, some of them are different quality than others.
Some have jokey words on them.
I'm just trying to get information from China.
And TikTok seems like the app to do it, even though it is a spyware app from the People's Liberation Army.
OK, let's take a look at this next clip.
Now, Foxconn, as I mentioned earlier, is the giant company that manufactures your Apple products in China, your cell phones, your laptops.
That is extremely important to China, not just economically, but strategically, that technical know-how.
So, to have a kind of strike there or protest there is a grave threat to the regime.
And by regime, I guess I could be referring either to the People's Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party or to Tim Cook and his regime.
Tim Cook isn't just against these protesters because his boss Xi Jinping wants him to be.
Tim Cook is against these protesters because they're threatening the production at his Chinese factories.
Tim Cook would crush them if he could.
Like I say, he's already removed the airdrop function so they can't communicate amongst themselves.
Here's a quarantine center, according to this TikTok video.
Again, I don't know the date on this.
I only discovered this yesterday.
Theoretically, this could be old footage, but we do know this existed either now or before in China.
look.
It's a claim that it's an enormous COVID center with tens of thousands of capacity.
Is it true?
I don't know.
Like I say, it's hard to get real information.
It's hard to get Western journalists.
We have to rely on social media.
Now, I'm going to show you a video, and I'm having trouble figuring this out.
Is this people in the cattle car, or am I seeing things incorrectly?
Take a look.
Is that people?
Is that people being treated and trucked like animals?
I'm not sure if I saw that right.
I have a terrible shock.
It almost is like Nazis putting Jews and others to be killed in cattle cars, taking them to concentration camp, a death camp, God forbid.
I don't know exactly what that was, but it looks terrifying, doesn't it?
Here's another video from another city in China.
I do not know which one.
Let's just take a look.
That's stunning.
That's the most dramatic video of the ones I've shown you so far.
I do not know what city that is in, but actually attacking, throwing things, poking with the homemade spear, I guess, at those health Nazis, those health stormtroopers.
Remind me of the white-clad stormtroopers in Star Wars, but they're much more evil here.
Don't you find it incredible that ordinary Chinese people are driving them back and that they are indeed retreating.
It won't be long.
It won't be long before they deploy the tanks Chianan Square style.
This is the most amazing uprising since Chianan Square a generation ago.
I'll just play a few more clips.
And again, I don't know what city that was in.
That could be, frankly, there's so many large cities in China.
A city the size of Toronto is common.
There's probably 100 cities or dozens of cities the size of Toronto or Vancouver throughout China.
And they all have a similar dreary look, the smog in the air, the Soviet-style apartment buildings.
They feel dystopian, but there was a whiff of freedom in the air.
take this look at this next video.
There are thousands of these videos on the internet.
Who knows who took them?
Who knows how they made it to the internet?
Do they use a VPN to get through the great firewall of China?
Here's another interesting photograph.
Again, these are unarmed people.
They don't have the Second Amendment and they don't have firearms.
Harsher Authoritarian Measures00:03:45
Mao saw to that.
The first rule of totalitarians is after the revolution, seize all the guns.
That's why the people of Hong Kong were sitting ducks.
You know, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohandas Gandhi, and his passive resistance, it only worked because the people he was resisting were British.
And although they were colonialists and imperialists and militarists, they were also, in the bottom, classical liberals.
These were the people who freed the world of the scourge of slavery.
These are the people who believed in the dignity of everything.
You cannot sacrifice yourself and have that work against a Stalin or a Mao or a Xi Jinping or a Hitler.
It only works against Queen Victoria.
And I think it's fascinating that these Chinese democracy activists are willing to stand up with nothing but a piece of white paper.
Take a look.
I remember that video.
Sorry, I introduced it improperly.
That purports to be someone quarantined in their cab, their taxi, because allegedly they're sick and can't go home to their apartment.
Literally, they put tape around him like he was like that was his house.
I'm going to show just a couple more.
Again, I don't want to put too much authority in these.
That one video en masse of people driving back the white hazmat-suited health police was actually incredible, wasn't it?
Some of these are just little vignettes, the kind of thing you see from citizen journalists who are doing a better job than the official journalists.
Let's just watch a couple more.
next one is that something out of Mad Max It looks like it's some crazy dystopian vehicle.
Actually, if I'm reading that right, that was some sort of anti-COVID spray that they were just driving down the street and spraying everybody.
I'll show you one more video and we'll watch it together and try and understand what's going on in this crazy country in this crazy time.
Final video.
What even are they doing?
So you got this guy full hazmat, and then a bunch of people not with masks sticking out their tongue and poke, in their mouth.
But what's he even doing with it?
They're leaving immediately.
Doesn't look like he can't be getting some result.
He can't be documenting things.
They're just going through this degrading form of invasion and torture.
What even is that?
I don't know, but you can imagine that that's more invasive and more punitive than anything we put up with here in the West.
It's the worst of the West, of the worst of what they did in Melbourne and Montreal and Toronto, the worst of it all.
And they've been ramping it up.
They literally have a COVID-0 approach and add on to that even harsher censorship and harsher authoritarian police than we've ever had in the West.
Quebec's Carbon Tax Conundrum00:09:34
No wonder they're rising up.
This is an incredible moment.
And I hope that they have success and I hope they are not crushed under the jack boots of the Communist Party as they were at Channel Man Square a generation ago.
That's our show for today.
Stay with us.
After the break, we'll talk to Franco Terrazzano of the Taxpayers Federation about a special sweet deal that Quebec has for the carbon tax.
and then your letters to me.
Well, I'm not sure if I'll ever believe anyone ever again when they say trust the science, because what they really mean, as Dr. Fauci showed us, is what they mean is trust me.
I am the physical corporeal representative of all science.
And to disagree with me is not just to be politically different or have a different opinion.
It's to be unscientific.
We heard a lot of that during the COVID years.
And I think the same sort of hocus-pocus science is at play with the theory of man-made global warming.
Just like there were strange rules about how COVID-well, here's an example.
Remember when you would go into a restaurant and you could take off your mask when you were sitting down, but if you stood up, you had to put your mask on because the virus knew if you were standing or sitting.
Same thing on an airplane.
You had to wear your mask, except for if you were having peanuts or coffee or water, then the virus knew not to attack you.
Well, that same sort of fuzzy thinking is for global warming science.
Here's what I mean.
Global warming is such a menace.
Carbon dioxide is so dangerous that we have to tax you at the gas pump.
But, and this is the science part here, we have to tax you a different amount in Quebec than if you're in another province, say Alberta.
It's like those funny COVID rules.
Carbon dioxide is different in Quebec, you know, and it reacts differently to different tax rates.
If you think I'm kidding, well, our new guest, our next guest, has a press release on this subject that explains the math, not the so-called science.
I'm talking about my friend Franco Terrazano with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
Franco, I'm not sure if my analogy worked perfectly, but I think it does.
People who say the science says we have to levy this tax on you when you fill up a gas pump, oh, but that amount is different province to province.
That doesn't sound very science-y.
That sounds very political to me.
Tell me about your latest press release.
Well, you don't need to be a scientist to know that carbon taxes don't work.
And look, here is the latest proof.
that Trudeau's carbon tax was all about politics, not about the environment.
So here's what we found.
Starting next year, every single province but one will have to pay Trudeau's higher carbon tax rate.
And who is, which province is the one province that won't be paying as high of a carbon tax rate?
You guessed it.
It's Quebec.
So next year, every single province will have to pay a carbon tax that's 14 cents per liter of gasoline.
That's the Trudeau government's mandatory minimum carbon tax.
Every province but Quebec, because in Quebec, their requirement is that the carbon tax stays above 5 cents per liter of gas.
So you have Trudeau giving Quebec a special deal on carbon tax and giving taxpayers in every other part of Canada, every other province, higher gas prices and higher home heating bills.
Well, help me understand.
I mean, first of all, this is shocking, but not surprising, if you get me.
It's the audacity of it.
It's like those COVID rules that only apply, you know, when you're not drinking water or eating peanuts on the plane.
But what was the so-called explanation?
How do they finesse this?
These people are so terrified of global warming.
They think we're all going to die, but they're not terrified enough to give Quebec a break.
If they were here right now, they'd say, oh, no, no, no.
Franco, you don't understand.
The reason we're doing this for Quebec is what?
How would they fill in that blank?
How would they try and explain this favoritism?
Is carbon dioxide different in Quebec?
Would they try and make a scientific argument?
What would they say to justify this?
Ezra, the politicians haven't given any explanation.
No, no, no.
They're trying to sweep this under the rug.
I bet you they want Canadians not to know about this special deal.
So the politicians haven't given Canadians any explanation as to why Quebec is getting a special deal while everyone else is getting higher gas prices and heating bills.
But, you know, all those smart folks on Twitter, all those pundits, here's what I'm hearing from them.
They're saying, well, Franco, don't you know Quebec has a cap and trade carbon tax scheme?
Well, yes, we did know that.
But you know who else has currently a cap and trade carbon tax scheme?
Nova Scotia.
And Nova Scotia is also reducing emissions.
But that didn't matter for the Trudeau government because just last week, the Trudeau government said, it doesn't matter.
You still have to pay our higher carbon tax rate beginning next year.
So Nova Scotia has a very similar cap and trade carbon tax as Quebec, but it didn't matter for the Trudeau government.
The people in Nova Scotia are getting bullied into higher carbon taxes.
While it certainly looks like Trudeau is playing favorites with Quebec.
And I think BC has a kind of cap and trade, at least I thought they did.
And Alberta has its own industry kind of cap and trade, a special industry carbon tax.
This whole thing is hocus-pocus.
It really is the opposite of science.
And the fact that, for example, Alberta's massive force, the Canada's massive boreal forests, which are a huge carbon absorber, again, I'm playing into their hands by pretending that there's some science here, but obviously Canada's enormous number of trees absorbs so much of the world's carbon.
That pretends that there's signs here, just like the COVID crazy rules pretended that there was science there.
I don't know.
I'm excited that you discovered this.
How did you find it?
Where did you find the revelation that Quebecers will pay really one-third the amount that the rest of the country is?
Like, where was that buried?
Well, you know, it's mostly just because this is something that the Canadian Taxpayers Federation is always following.
I mean, we're hammering the government about its economically painful carbon tax all the time.
And when last week, when the Trudeau government announced that it's raising its carbon tax bills in Atlantic Canada, well, it just kind of occurred to us that the only place that the Trudeau government isn't requiring to pay its higher carbon tax rate is Quebec.
But, Ezra, I'm so glad you brought up British Columbia because British Columbia has essentially been, what is it, the pace car for all the people who want to push carbon taxes.
Well, British Columbia has had the highest carbon tax in Canada for years.
And what happens with emissions?
Well, emissions in British Columbia have continued to go up and up and up.
If you look at the federal government, the first year of the federal government's carbon tax, before you had politicians locking down the economy in 2020, well, the first year of the federal government carbon tax, emissions went up there as well.
Why are emissions going up even though they bring in a carbon tax?
Because the Trudeau government is punishing necessities.
People need gasoline to get to work.
People need natural gas to heat their homes during the cold winter months.
And you know what?
Canada makes up such a minuscule percentage of global GHG emissions that even if the Trudeau government brought all of our industries to a screeching halt, which some days it seems like that's what's going on here, it would cause a ton of pain for working Canadians, for working families, but it wouldn't do like almost nothing for the global environment.
So while Canada continues to raise the tax bill on Canadians, we've also seen many other countries, including many of our peers, do the right thing and reduce gas taxes.
You know, what's so incredible is if you actually look at what the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, they actually have some scientific papers.
They acknowledge that none of this, Franco, will actually work.
None of this will actually stop the world's temperature from changing.
I mean, if you look at the language used by Trudeau, he doesn't say stop climate change.
He doesn't even say slow it down.
The verb they always use is combat climate change.
It's the action, because even they acknowledge there will be no victory over global warming, even if every car was taken off the road in every country in the world, that would not stop global warming, according to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the UN's global warming people.
To them, global warming is a wonderful perpetual excuse to extract taxes and regulations from people.
But as you've shown, except on their favored province of Quebec.
Franco, it's great to see you again.
The story on your website, which is a great website, taxpayer.com, is Trudeau giving Quebec a special deal on carbon tax.
And it has the links to the sources there.
Disputes and Disagreements00:06:31
I encourage you to check it out.
Franco, thanks for your time today, my friend.
Thanks for having me on.
All right, our pleasure.
There you have it.
Franco Terrazano of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
Stay with us.
More ahead.
Hey, welcome back.
Here's a friendly letter.
Hi, Ezra.
My wife and I have been supporters of Rebel for a long period of time.
Overall, we've been impressed with your thorough and objective coverage of events that are either distorted or ignored by any other news source.
Recently, you went on an anti-Miller tirade on air.
We were more than disappointed.
We were outraged.
Mr. Miller is a courageous, dedicated, and brilliant lawyer, and his recent dust-up with Enterprise Canada should have been dealt with in-house, not prejudged by you in a negative fashion.
It is significant that after all of his hard work fighting for freedom and the trucker convoy, he was thrown under the bus and not allowed to cross-examine a Trudeau on the last day of the hearing.
Mr. Miller deserves better than to be publicly humiliated by you on air.
In view of the fact that he has been sued for defamation of character, why not let the legal system deal with it?
If he is vindicated down the road, it will not matter.
Your public attack on his credibility will still stand.
Passion and brilliance are a rare combination in today's world.
People who care should exercise loyalty and stick together.
When I was employed by a trade union visiting logging camps, a camp took cook told me something that is worth repeating.
When you're a cook, you're only as good as your last meal.
In your book, this also applies to lawyers, I guess.
You have a lot of power and influence, and hopefully we'll exercise it more judiciously in the future.
Disappointed, but still a loyal rebel.
Marie and Nancy Kentala.
Okay, it started friendly and then it got critical.
But as you know, I wrote to you personally.
Thank you for that letter.
I disagree with the plain meaning of your letter, which is I shouldn't criticize people on our side.
But I think that's wrong.
I am a conservative.
I would only vote conservative.
That's no secret.
That's where I stand.
But I believe I have a special duty to call out conservatives when they're not being conservative, when they get it wrong.
Not in a gotcha way, not to exaggerate anything, but our principled opposition to Jason Kenney, the Conservative Premier in Alberta, Doug Ford, the Conservative Premier in Ontario, Aaron O'Toole, the Conservative leader of Canada.
It was principled, and it was because they weren't real conservatives.
You wouldn't really trust me if I abided what Jason Kenney did to Pastor Arthur Pavlovsky and said, oh, let's ignore it because he's on our side.
What's my side?
I'm actually not a party member of any party, haven't been for over a decade.
My side is my conscience and my duty to our viewers to tell them what I think is going on.
And I think we were actually instrumental in removing Jason Kenney and to a degree, Aaron O'Toole, who were disastrous during the pandemic.
I think we're trusted because we're in no one's pocket.
We're certainly not in the liberal pocket, but we're also not in any other party's pocket.
There's people we clearly like, but we are beholden to no one.
That's part of our crowdfunding model.
There's no boss out there who can simply call me up and say, stop criticizing him or fire that.
There's just no one.
It's a mass support.
That's what gives us our freedom.
In the case of Brendan Miller, you say I went on a tirade.
I don't think I did.
In fact, I spent as much time praising Brendan Miller and saying he was the MVP of the whole commission than criticizing him.
And my criticism was, I think, gentle.
And it said, look, this guy has been going full tilt for a month.
He's obviously stressed out, sleep deprived, and he got it wrong.
And he wanted to get it right, like we all did, but we got to call it out, and he's got to correct it.
I know what it's like to be falsely called terrible names, like Nazi.
It's a terrible name.
I can, I suppose, brush it off more easily because I'm Jewish, but imagine calling some guy, even if you never met him before, just some guy you picked out of the internet, calling him a Nazi.
That's not fair.
And we know that because when it's done to us, it hurts.
So I think Brendan Miller made a mistake there, and I think it behooves me to call it like I see it.
So I disagree with you.
I'm not a party man.
I used to be way back when.
But I have a different job now.
It's to call it like I see it.
Occasionally, you might even hear me praise a liberal.
It's possible if they do the right thing.
Here's another letter.
Hey, Ezra, I could be wrong, but from all the news clips I've seen, JT never actually uses the word unvaccinated when insulting our people.
He used the word unvaxed.
I know there is a lot of talk out there about perjury in his commission testimony, but I wonder if in a court of law, not that any judge would let it get that far, if his legal team would simply say there's a difference between the two terms, they might say that one can be unvaccinated, but not an anti-vaxxer, and vice versa.
I know from general context, we infer these reference the unvaccinated, and it's probably accurate, but if it's enough to find him guilty of perjury in a court of law is another question.
Unless we have that silver bullet where he uses the phrase unvaccinated, then we would likely lose at a court of law, even if we win in the court of popular opinion, which we may not once you factor in the people unsupportive of our views.
Anyways, that's just some of my thoughts.
Calvin from St. Catharines.
Calvin, thanks for writing.
I don't think you're going to beat Justin Trudeau by criminalizing him.
And I think he lied, but he does say anti-vaxxers.
He says, oh, I don't hate unvaccinated.
I hate anti-vaxxers.
He's pretending there's an important difference.
It's like people who say, oh, I don't hate the Jews.
No, no, no, no.
I don't hate the Jews.
I just hate Israel and Zionists.
I'm fine with the Jews.
Oh, really?
It's maybe a distinction without a difference.
You're not going to get Trudeau on a legal technicality in a court of law.
And we wouldn't want it that way anyways.
Because don't think what comes around doesn't go around.
If you can get Justin Trudeau fired by criminalizing his political talk, you can get any conservative fired for the same.
And don't think it wouldn't be disproportionately used against conservatives.
That's why I'm against all these ideas of a private prosecution of Trudeau or Trudeau, the traitor, charge him with treachery.
It's not going to work.
There's no silver bullet.
You've got to go out there and do the hard work of democracy, knocking on doors, campaigning, fighting in the court of public opinion.
You're not going to dislodge Justin Trudeau through a trick.
And we wouldn't want it that way because don't think those tricks wouldn't be used against us tenfold.