David Menzies critiques Erin O’Toole’s January 2023 essay mocking "F Trudeau" protesters, calling it a shift from opposition to appeasement amid his ousting last February over liberal-leaning policies like carbon taxes and vaccine mandates. Meanwhile, Billboard Chris exposes puberty-blocking surgeries on minors as irreversible, ideologically driven abuse, citing 80–90% desistance rates in gender dysphoria while doctors face harassment for dissent. Jim McMurtry’s suspension for debunking residential school genocide claims reveals how land acknowledgements—now mandatory in schools—foster division and performative guilt, echoing Trudeau’s careerist "white saviorism." O’Toole’s defense of Trudeau contrasts with Rebel News’ fight against Bill C-11’s censorship, exposing a broader pattern of institutionalized ideological control over truth and media. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, you'll never guess who's offended by those F Trudeau flags.
Here's a hint.
It's a former leader of the Conservative Party.
It's Tuesday, January the 3rd, 2023.
I'm David Menzies, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you sensorious bug.
Oh, joy.
Over the Christmastime break, Aaron O'Who, I mean Aaron O'Toole, a.k.a. Yesterday's Man, a.k.a. that lying loser who keeps on lying and losing.
Well, he enriched us all with an essay that was downright inexplicable.
Yes, in classic O'Toole fashion, this wannabe pithy prose was not a gift to last.
It is entitled, quote, Disordered Liberty Notions for the New Year, Part 1, end quote.
Oh my God, the worst thing about that title is that it implies there is a part two on the way.
Yikes.
Then again, this essay did serve as a Christmas gift of sorts, at least for those Canadians who might have forgotten why O'Toole is the former as opposed to the current leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.
Why 73 out of 118 Conservative MPs voted to oust this dead dog with fleas last February?
That's because O'Toole showed once again, in his own words no less, how wishy-washy and how out of touch this guy truly is.
Now, this essay was published in something called Blue Skies, but then again, given that the zombified Aaron O'Toole was the author, I began contemplating if I was reading a back issue of Tales from the Crypt.
Our story is about a man with nobler ambitions.
Yeah, too bad Aaron O'Toole's nobler ambitions were assassinated by, well, Aaron O'Toole himself.
And it's all still so hard to fathom, isn't it?
After all, the 2021 federal election campaign began with Justin Trudeau enduring two very, very bad weeks on the campaign trail.
Meanwhile, Aaron O'Toole enjoyed two very good weeks.
Suddenly, there was chatter that regime change might actually occur in Canada.
But then inexplicably, O'Toole and or his puppet masters couldn't hold back with their wishy-washy liberalism any longer.
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, O'Toole began flip-flopping on everything from carbon taxes to the gun grab to vaccine mandates.
Indeed, this cat did so many backflips in the closing days of the 2021 campaign that every time I saw his milquetoast mug, a certain pop culture marine mammal sprung to mind.
They call him Flepper, Flepper, faster than lightning.
But that was then, and this is now, so let's get back to that mystifying essay.
O'Toole's opening line is this, quote, one of the hopes I have for 2023 is to see fewer profanity-laden Trudeau flags across Canada, end quote.
And then to double down on this most curious New Year's wish, he rehashed this very statement on Twitter.
WTF indeed.
For starters, when one produces content, one must understand who comprises the target audience.
So it is that when a former conservative leader comes across as an apologist for Prime Minister Blackface McGroper, who is this essay hoping to curry favor with?
The mainstream media?
The rank and file of the Liberal Party of Canada?
Perhaps Jugmeet Singh?
Or maybe Ontario Premier Doug Ford?
Or perhaps it's all of the above, because really, can you tell the difference?
I can't see the difference.
Can you see the difference?
No, I can't see the difference.
Can you see the difference?
Let's continue, shall we?
Quote, I say this as the person who ran against Justin Trudeau in the last general election and someone who remains very critical of his record in government, end quote.
Ooh, very critical of Justin's record, you say.
Good golly, Miss Molly, you don't think that's a little bit harsh, do you, Aaron?
Ooh, critical.
It dithers on, quote, but as I told my kids during the national campaign, Mr. Trudeau was my political opponent, not my enemy.
These flags and the hyper-aggressive rhetoric that often accompanies them are slowly normalizing rage and damaging our democracy.
Since so many people that display the flags claim to be conservative, this might also be an appropriate time to tell them that these flags are the very antithesis of what it means to be conservative, end quote.
No, Mr. Aaron O'Toole, you are the very antithesis of what it means to be conservative.
Tell your kids that life lesson.
Full disclosure here, folks, I'm not a big fan of profanity.
You will rarely witness me dropping an F-bomb.
If you have a good point to be made, it can be done so without vulgarity.
Although I'll tell you, I was indeed on the cusp of uttering an F-bomber three while reading O'Toole's gibberish.
But unlike O'Toole, I do not condemn those individuals who brandish F Trudeau flags.
The problem here is that Aaron O'Toole seems to be oblivious when it comes to the concept that is known as cause and effect, which is to say, if this stately gentleman were to put down his mint julep for a second and get off his Ricota cheese candy ass and,
you know, venture out to where the protests are happening in which those F. Trudeau flags are being displayed, then maybe he would get an understanding for the lack of decorum in the public square these days.
Maybe then the ever-effeminate Aaron would discover the justified cause for the collective anger, such as people losing their businesses thanks to nonsensical COVID-19 rules,
or people losing their houses, or people being fired for not agreeing to being jabbed by an experimental vaccine, or people having their democratic rights eclipsed thanks to the federal government employing the Emergencies Act to shut down a peaceful protest.
But no, O'Toole has no empathy for these people.
Rather, he's more concerned that Justin Trudeau might suffer from hurt feelings when gazing upon those flags.
O'Toole then blathers on about the political divides that exist today in Canada.
I'll spare you that drivel, folks.
And then he states the following, quote, this is why I believe it is the duty of elected officials to try and bridge these divides as much as possible.
On the left and right, it is our duty to resist and pull towards the extremes and to try and focus the political debate on real issues and solutions.
I also believe that this public duty is greater for conservative politicians because division and disorder run contrary to the fundamental principles of modern conservatism.
End quote.
Wow, to see this closet liberal lecture grassroots conservatives on so-called modern conservatism.
That's a little rich, wouldn't you say?
And this mealy-mouthed slab of milk toast wants political debate on real issues, yet he's seemingly oblivious to the fact that Justin Trudeau is seeking to shut down debate via the internet censorship bill known as C-11.
Indeed, check out this snippet from Ezra Levin's video a few days back that shows Trudeau for what he is, namely a censorious thug who is hell-bent on shutting down the voices of Canadians.
In 2022, Rebel News had the most watched coverage in Canada of the Trucker Convoy.
So Trudeau's personal bodyguards roughed out our reporters, Drea Humphrey and David Lenzies.
And his police literally shot our reporter, Alexa Lavoie, in the leg with a riot gun, pursuing them, of course.
Trudeau did all of that and more to us, and yet Rebel News is still not dead.
In fact, 2022 was our biggest year by every measure.
We had the most reporters deployed ever.
We published the most news stories ever, and those stories were seen by the most viewers ever.
And Justin Trudeau cannot stand that.
So 2023 is the year he's coming to kill us.
Now, don't take my word for it.
It's right there in his new law called C-11, otherwise known as the Online Streaming Act.
Trudeau already owns the government journalists at the CBC State Broadcaster.
And with his media bailouts, he rents 99% of the rest of the journalists in Canada.
He controls what they say.
So he just seethes when he looks at Rebel News, one of the last independent news companies in Canada, which is why he sneaked Section 9.11E into the law.
So when the Online Streaming Act becomes law in a few months, Section 9.11E will give Trudeau the power to order internet companies like Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter to promote or hide whatever news Trudeau likes or doesn't like.
So he can order them to promote the CBC and the Toronto Star and to make it impossible to find Rebel News.
Here is the exact wording of the law.
Trudeau can, and I'm quoting here, make orders respecting the presentation of programs and programming services for selection by the public, including the showcasing and the discoverability of Canadian programs and programming services, unquote.
So let me translate.
Trudeau doesn't have to ban Rebel News anymore.
He can simply order the big internet companies, the online broadcasters, to make us disappear.
By the way, nowhere in O'Toole's awful essay is there any mention about what's really profane, and that would be the egregious behavior of Justin Trudeau, a man who claims to be all about multiculturalism, yet has donned blackface so many times that not even he can remember what the real number is.
As well, Trudeau claims to be a feminist, yet he has zero tolerance for strong women, such as the ethically anchored Jody Wilson Raybolt, who refused to play illicit games with him regarding the SNC Lavillin scandal.
Also on the feminist file, Trudeau is someone who could not resist groping reporter Rose Knight, but then again, she experienced things differently, right?
This is also a prime minister of a Western country who, in his own words, has admiration for the basic dictatorship of China in terms of, you know, getting things done.
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.
Wow.
How do you get away with that whopper with cheese?
And perhaps most disturbingly, this is a man who is not beyond violence either.
Check out what happened 13 months ago in Toronto when Justin sicked his Royal Canadian mounted henchman on me.
What is this?
I'm on a sidewalk.
What is this?
You cannot crush me.
No rush in your work.
Hey!
Are you kidding?
Are you kidding?
Let's go.
What is this?
You can't.
Am I under arrest?
Because otherwise you have no right.
Trudeau's goon squad decided to physically assault a reporter simply for doing his job.
That's banana republic stuff, although we don't grow bananas in Canada, so maybe we should call our former great dominion a maple syrup republic these days.
But where was the outrage from gentleman Aaron O'Toole about this grotesque event?
Radio silence, friends.
Yep, he is far more concerned with F Trudeau flags than members of the independent press being brutalized.
Astonishing.
So the question arises, why is O'Toole going to bat for Justin Trudeau in the first place?
I mean, is he getting ready to cross the floor?
He'd be far more at home on the liberal side of the house.
Hey, at least then we'd have some truth in advertising as opposed to Aaron O'Toole claiming to be a true blue conservative.
You remember that lie for the ages?
Something that ranks right up there with the check is in the mail and we're all in this together.
Or maybe his support for Justin is due to the fact that he actually admires the prime minister's thuggish and censorious style.
Case in point, I'll never forget the day before the 2021 election when O'Toole's last campaign stop took place at an industrial park in Markham, Ontario.
Aaron O'Toole's Disrupt Tactics00:02:35
Oh, how he welcomed the mainstream media to cover the event that day.
But when he saw me and my camera woman show up, this so-called leader remained in the fetal position for almost an hour in his campaign bus, too terrified to be scrummed by rebel news.
And that was very odd, wouldn't you say, folks?
Because prior to becoming enshrined as leader of the CPC, O'Toole went out of his way to make time for rebel news reporters.
But check out this video evidence.
O'Toole actually enlisted his goons to literally banish us to the road.
Not kidding.
He put us in a dangerous position right in a live lane of traffic just so that he'd be out of earshot of our questions.
Check it out.
You disrupt our events.
I'm not going to.
We're not going to do this.
Give me a definition of disruption.
What you're doing right now.
So I'm asking.
I want to ask questions of Aaron O'Toole.
Okay.
You just, your outlet, and you also continually disrupt our events.
So I'm asking you to leave.
Isn't that my outlet?
13 months ago, Aaron O'Toole had nothing but time for us.
No, no, no, wait a minute.
Excuse me.
What changed?
What changed?
No, I'm not debating.
I'm asking a question.
What changed with Aaron O'Toole?
Does Aaron O'Toole regret moving the party further left, stiffing Rebel News, stiffing Jordan Peterson?
Does he, Corey?
We're going to ask that you leave.
Okay.
You disrupt the events.
So you're welcome to the sidewalk across the street.
I've just been standing here.
I've just been standing here.
How is that disruptive?
We have an event to start, and I'm asking you to leave.
And Aaron O'Toole is too cowardly to come out of a bus.
Happy to walk with you.
This man wants to be prime minister.
Yeah, Monday he will be.
So I'm asking you.
Oh, really?
Okay, then there should be nothing of concern then.
This is not, this is public property, the berm.
If you have the blueprint to show me, do you have the blueprint?
This is what we've been told is the property to the curb.
Who told you that, Corey?
We have the event manager.
They own the event.
This is the public property, correct?
Certainly the road is.
I close to the curb and I'd be careful there.
Corey, for the record, I think you're pathetic.
Oh, by the way, we confirmed later on that O'Toole's pathetic soy boy minion, Corey Hahn, he was lying.
You see, that first meter of land on the property stretching from the curb is actually owned by the city of Markham.
It is not private property.
Why Trans Surgery Affects Girls00:16:10
We could have stood there.
So it was that Corey Hahn, a world-class A-hole.
Oh, sorry for that offensive language, Mrs. O'Toole.
He put us in physical jeopardy by forcing us to practice journalism in a live lane of traffic.
Absolutely shameful.
And yet the Durham Doofus, that is Aaron O'Toole, he's more concerned with F Trudeau flags.
But in a way, maybe, just maybe, perhaps those F Trudeau flags are a bit passe these days.
In which case, is there a savvy entrepreneur out there who might be selling, oh, I don't know, F O'Toole flags?
I might buy one of those.
Then again, given the absolute irrelevance of Aaron O'Toole in 2023, perhaps such a flag would simply be a waste of fabric.
When you come to Boston Children's Hospital for your first visit for bottom surgery, you'll see me first.
I'm going to come in and say hi.
My name's Maria.
I'm your nurse, and I use pronoun she, her, hers.
And just sort of explain that you're going to meet a lot of folks on your visit today.
Not to be overwhelmed, not to try to remember everyone or everything.
We're just here to give you more information and to answer your questions.
After that, our social worker will come in with our physician's assistant, and they'll sit down and go over your medical history, your behavioral history, get your goals for surgery to help you figure out what type of bottom surgery would be best for you and to meet the goals that you are looking for.
After that, Dr. Genore and myself will come in to wrap up the consult, go over surgery in detail, and talk about what to expect after surgery, what kind of help you might need, how long you'll be here, and really sit down and go through your question list.
And if you don't have questions, we sort of know what patients come in asking and we just sort of give you all that information.
And then if you go home and forget everything, you can call us the next day.
You can email us.
We're very accessible and we'll just sort of help navigate the process for you because it can be a lot.
Well, folks, what if I told you that there are certain individuals out there who are cutting off the breasts of girls, some of these girls being as young as 14 years old?
Or what if I told you these very same individuals were surgically inverting the penises of boys, creating a so-called neo-vagina in the process, something that will need to be dilated for the rest of those boys' lives?
It sounds equal part savage and barbaric, but the people doing the slicing and dicing are not serial killers, but rather surgeons employed at Boston Children's Hospital.
Incredible.
And joining me now is an individual who goes by the name of Billboard Chris, someone who has for many years now taken a stand against radical transgender surgery being carried out on minors.
Welcome to the Ezra Levant Show, Chris.
Thank you so much, David.
I'm very pleased to be here.
Thank you for all you're doing in Canada to expose the radical left's agenda.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate that.
Now, Chris, this sounds beyond belief to me.
The fact that boys and girls who are too young to vote or to smoke or to even get a driver's license, they're being operated upon in such a fashion.
Chris, what's going on here exactly?
All these kids are being indoctrinated to believe that just because they don't conform to society's stereotypes, just because a girl is a tomboy, these kids are coming to believe that they're actual boys.
And half of these children that end up at these gender clinics are on the autism spectrum.
All of these kids have some underlying mental health comorbidity, like there might have been abuse or trauma or sexual abuse.
There are personality disorders.
Who knows what's going on with these kids, but they're all just struggling in life.
And instead of treating their mental health issues with therapy or whatever, they treat gender as though it's the underlying cause of all their problems.
And they're stopping puberty in children.
They're giving them the opposite sexes hormones.
And yes, they're cutting off the breasts at Boston Children's Hospital of girls as young as 14 years old.
In California, they're doing this to girls as young as 12 years old.
And we've seen about a 4,000% increase in the last 10 years.
It's absolutely exploding because they're teaching this nonsense in schools and it's all over social media.
And Chris, you're quite right.
There is a body of evidence showing that there is a disproportionate number of trans individuals who suffer from autism and Asperger's.
And I'm just struggling with the concept here from a medical perspective.
Why is it that something that is a mental issue, the solution is for, you know, sex-changing surgery?
I mean, I don't get it here.
And why does it have to be done at a young age?
Why can't we wait for this to play out past puberty?
Well, the theory goes that if you let these children's sex-based characteristics develop, if you let a girl's breasts grow, or if you let a boy's penis grow, which puberty blockers stop, that that would heighten their gender dysphoria.
So experimentally, with no long-term studies ever having been done, they stop these kids' bodies from developing.
But if they have already developed to a certain degree, they'll just cut their body parts off.
We know historically that 80 to 90% of the time, kids with severe gender dysphoria from a very young age, not these kids who suddenly feel it in adolescence, like this craze we have going on, especially with girls today.
But we know historically 80 to 90% just grow out of it.
And a lot of them grew up to be gay.
So another part of this, which doesn't get talked about enough, is this is a deeply homophobic movement that is harming kids who as adults would grow up to be gay.
But now we end up with these boys as eunuchs and these girls already in menopause in their teens or early 20s because they've stopped their puberty.
They've cut out their uterus.
They perform gender affirming hysterectomies at these children's hospitals.
The whole thing is one big Megelian experiment, and we have to put a stop to it because it's total and complete madness.
And Chris, forgive me for being such a cynic, but when it comes to any story, I subscribe to the mantra of follow the money.
And I would assume that at these hospitals, such as the one in Boston, there are big bucks to be made here by this kind of gender reassigning surgery.
Am I on the right track here?
Yes, this is a multi-billion dollar a year industry.
Double mastectomy might cost $10,000, but what they call bottom surgeries, which are the euphemistic terms for castrations or phalloplasties, where they carve out the forearm of a girl and fashion it into a neophallus, these might cost about $40,000, could be more.
There's always complications as well.
So then you're adding on to the tab there.
And just these drugs alone, like these puberty-blocking drugs, some of these kids will get an implant.
And that implant for a year costs about $40,000.
So over the course of their lifetime, because these kids are being turned into lifelong medical patients, forever reliant on pharmaceuticals, it might cost upwards of a million dollars to change the, well, to attempt to change the sex of a child.
Of course, you can't actually change the sex of a child.
All they're doing is destroying the future sexual function of these kids, reducing their dating pool to zero, eliminating their chance of having a family.
And what we see from all previous studies with adults who transitioned, suicide rates actually peaked seven to 10 years after the fact.
So none of this is helping anything.
It might help some of these kids in the very immediate term feel better because they finally got what they've been obsessing about.
But this is just child abuse, pure and simple.
So Chris, it would seem to me that the almighty buck is trumping ethics.
It's trumping morals.
The Hippocratic Oath means to do no harm.
It seems from what you've just said, this is doing a hell of a lot of harm.
Are there any doctors in the medical community that are saying, no, this is wrong, this shouldn't be done?
Or I guess, are they silenced?
Because I would imagine there might be an environment, given that you said this is a multi-billion dollar industry, that you better not rock the boat because this kind of trans surgery is pretty good for the bottom line of the hospital.
There are some doctors speaking out, but like many people in all walks of life with this ideologically crazy world, people are at risk of losing their jobs if they speak up against this.
So most doctors are silent.
A lot of them don't even know what's going on because you've got just a few doctors in these gender clinics performing all these ghoulish experiments on kids.
And most doctors are just busy doing their own thing.
But I went to the American Academy of Pediatrics Convention back in October down in Anaheim.
I talked to a couple hundred doctors while I was out on the street there.
90% of them agree with me, but they're all afraid to speak up.
And the American Academy of Pediatrics is rejecting calls from doctors within their own body to conduct a systematic review of this because they know that if they actually look at the evidence, this whole thing falls to pieces.
And we do have countries like Sweden, England, Finland, and now Florida where their medical boards have reviewed all the evidence, found there is none to support it, and they've done away with this practice.
But in the United States and in Canada, especially, having them look at actual science, we know from COVID and other things as well, is not going to happen right now because these people are all ideologically driven.
No, I see what you're saying, Chris.
And I mean, and to even say, let's put this under review, I know some of the people in the LGBT, the radicalized arm of that community, they would be the first to scream, this is transphobia.
So maybe that's part of the silencing process.
Very quickly, your nickname, of course, is Billboard Chris.
That's from you wearing billboards and demonstrating against this kind of surgery.
Chris, it's come at some harm to you, I understand.
Yeah, I travel around North America wearing signs.
I have a sign that says children cannot consent to puberty blockers.
That's my main message.
And I just have conversations with people.
I've had about 10,000 conversations.
I go to wherever it's busy.
Sometimes I have protests, but really, I'm just out there to provoke conversation.
And yes, the left, the radical left, loses its mind.
Antifa hate me.
I've had my arm broken in Montreal.
I've been assaulted more than 20 times.
I've been mobbed by 200 counterprotesters in Ottawa while police just watched as I was punched in the head, stat on, painted on.
Had my car keyed and my signs destroyed.
I've been arrested twice after getting assaulted and charged with causing a disturbance simply for walking peacefully in a public square in Vancouver.
So yeah, it's totally insane.
I do get more support from police down in the States.
And this weekend, I'm going to be, or next weekend, about 10 days from now, I'll be at Boston at the Children's Hospital there with about 200 counterprotesters, but 50 police officers out there to keep me safe.
So it'll be fine down there.
Well, I'm glad to hear that.
I mean, that is absolutely egregious.
A, the violence, and B, you being charged as the instigator.
I mean, this world is just upside down.
Well, Chris, I think you're doing great work speaking out against this kind of, I don't know what to call it.
I don't call it gender reassignment surgery.
I call it, you know, a form of manipulation, maybe desecration of a child's body.
And the fact that they can't wait for this child to reach the benchmark of being an adult.
We have benchmarks for everything from smoking liquor, buying lottery tickets, voting, you name it.
But this has to be rushed for some sort of reason.
I'm not buying it.
I think it's disgraceful.
And good luck to you in getting the word out.
Maybe after the Boston protest is over, we can have you back on this show.
Last word goes to you, Chris.
Thank you, David.
This is the greatest child abuse scandal in modern medicine history.
And 100 and 200 years from now, people will look back at this time.
And during this era, they will be talking about what's going on in this arena of child transition because this is the craziest thing we've ever seen.
So thank you for having me on and I look forward to coming on again.
It's a pleasure.
And I hope you're right about that prediction.
Thank you so much, my friend.
Thank you.
And that was Billboard Chris in Vancouver.
Keep it here, folks.
More of the Ezra Levin show to come right after this.
Well, folks, lots of feedback to Ezra Levin's interview with Viva Frey and Manny Montenegro.
This comes in from Peter J. Hi, Ezra.
Your show, the last two nights, have been gems with Manny tonight and Viva Frey last night.
They have been the most eye-opening ever.
Viva moving to Florida due to restrictions and Manny's horror to what the Trudeau government has done to sabotage our human rights.
It's breathtaking.
Yet, Trudeau continues to strut around like the anointed one.
What these two interviews did for me was to confirm that what I had been thinking about, that the lockdowns and mandates were wrong and our civil rights were abused.
What will be equally egregious is that those who committed those violations will not be held to account for it.
Why?
Well, like Daniel Pipes has said to you in your interviews with him years ago, the government controls the five Ps.
And if you say something loud enough and often enough, as the liberals say, people will listen to you.
That's where you come in.
Godspeed Ezra and great work.
Well, you know what, folks?
I agree.
Those were wonderful interviews indeed.
And in 2023, make no mistake, Rebel News and other independent media outlets, we are facing the fight of our lives with Trudeau coming at us with Bill C-11.
That's his grandiose scheme to censor the internet to get rid of critical voices.
Funny that, isn't it?
We could have been, I guess, a media outlet like CTV or Global or CBC and take the carrot and exist on government funding.
Instead, we maintained our independence and we maintained our critical look, not just at the Justin Trudeau liberals, but at all political parties.
So now here comes Prime Minister Blackface McGroper with the stick, not the carrot.
But we are not giving up without a fight.
Like I said, it's the fight of our lives and it's only just begun.
Well, folks, thank you so much for tuning in tonight.
I will be back in this space tomorrow.
Then my colleague, Sheila Gunread, she'll be here for the Thursday and Friday shows.
And then the big boss man, Ezra Levant himself, he'll be back next Monday.
As always, stay safe and stay sane.
Before we get started, I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the fact that we are on the traditional territories of the Huron, the Wendat, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe, the Mississaugas of the Credit, and that we as Canadians are experiencing tremendous wealth and universal health care because we broke our treaty promises.
Land Acknowledgements Matter00:10:52
We committed a genocide against the people.
We exploited the resources that took thousands of years of Indigenous stewardship to create.
We murdered hundreds of thousands of their children in the name of our religion and don't really do anything about that.
We're now creating climate change because we don't care for the land as well as they did.
And we should probably give them their land back at this time before we face even more death and destruction.
I'm Canadian, you know, and I would say the longer I live in America, the more I feel that like one of the biggest differences between Canada and America, at least where I'm from, is like the institutionalized racism and the fact that there is no societal acknowledgement of it.
Like a small thing.
I was in Canada recently for a comedy show.
And before the show, it was in a big theater.
A voice comes on and says, we would just like to acknowledge that we were on the land of Indigenous people.
This is not our land.
The audience needs to take a moment and acknowledge it.
And now the comedy show.
And just those little things are acknowledgement.
That's amazing.
And I think acknowledgement is, and that's why reparations, be it significant or symbolic, is an acknowledgement.
And I think without acknowledging a problem, you could never move past it.
What does it mean to state a land acknowledgement?
Are people doing so because they stand for truth and reconciliation?
Or because everyone else is doing it?
Or because it's become almost close to mandatory these days.
In this report, we hear from a longtime award-winning teacher who says that land acknowledgements have become close to programming.
Dre Humphrey here with Rebel News, and in recent weeks, I brought you a story of great public interest.
It was an interview with a Mr. Jim McMurtry, a teacher of over 30 years who found himself in hot water, canceled, if you will, suspended for matters that include get this teaching kids, students, the truth about the leading cause of death during the times that residential schools were in operation.
Now, if you follow your history, you would know that's illness, things like tuberculosis.
But in a country that still predominantly claims that there were 215 children's remains found in an unmarked grave at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, you can see why such facts might come across as offensive.
Now, if you want to know more about the truth to that claim, which is that there's not been a single body discovered yet to date, you can watch our documentary at Kamloopsdocumentary.com.
Mr. McMurtry's story got picked up after you saw it here at Rebel News by the National Post, Western Standard.
But today I have another interview with Mr. McMurtry.
He's still not out of hot water.
But in this one, he talks about whether or not we need to consider the constant encouragement or even sometimes being told to do land acknowledgements, especially when it comes to students.
Before I jump to that, I just want to play an example of what that could mean to some people.
For most of us, it just means we're acknowledging we want truth and reconciliation and that we recognize some horrible things took place to First Nation people.
But you'll see here that this activist that I met when covering some reports at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, well, when it comes to truth and reconciliation, she has something else in mind.
It is time that Canada realizes that they are on stolen land.
And it's time that Canada gives it back.
So how much land and where would that land be when you say it should be given back?
All of this land.
So the whole country, the whole country.
I'm not thinking about other Canadians.
I'm thinking about children.
But what about the children who don't have Indigenous heritage?
I'm thinking about our own.
This is our land.
This is our home.
Everybody's just a visitor.
Now, that is just one extreme opinion, but I'm sure it's shared by some.
And it makes you wonder whether the land acknowledgements we're seeing in emails or by politicians or being encouraged for students to participate in should be further explained or explored.
Here's what Mr. McMurtry had to say.
Some people think that I probably don't really have a right to even or an opinion worth listening to as an older white person.
But I'm a teacher and one of the advantages of teaching for four decades is you've seen what other teachers have done over a long period of time.
And one thing that we haven't done before is land acknowledgements.
And I know it sounds maybe to many people, land acknowledgement sounds like a pretty harmless thing.
Just like much of the new ideology that's being indoctrinated in school sounds nice, diversity, equity, inclusion, and so forth.
If it were that, but it's not.
That's very Orwellian as, you know, war is peace.
Again, I'm just thinking right now, what's a kid thinking when there's a land acknowledgement at my school in Abbotsford?
We had it every day and it's almost two minutes long.
And so the first thing that I think a child's thinking, certainly I'm thinking as a teacher who's got only so much time to get material across to students before the quarters or the semester's over or whatever, is that it's repetitive.
The kids get it.
Kids are smart.
I don't think I ever make students that aren't smarter than I am.
The idea of repeating the same thing daily just is not just a waste of time, but I think it's a form of torture.
And I've been seeing more and more land acknowledgements in my life.
At sporting events, before meetings, at schools.
It feels like the thing to do.
But more importantly than that is the fact that I find classrooms are becoming just more diverse, and the fact that more kids coming from other countries.
And I think it's hard for many of them.
I have kids from the Syrian war, I'm sure now from Ukraine, many from coming from very difficult situations and places like the Middle East and Africa and so forth.
So in some ways, I'm saying they're escaping or running away, but in some cases that's true.
And they come to Canada and they want to have a sense of belonging.
And that's what we do as teachers to make them feel as though you have a place here.
And this just isn't boring to anybody else in the classroom.
And then they're hearing that they're not on their land.
They're hearing that they're committing injustice.
We.
It's never, never some people.
It's never the government.
It's never the people in the past.
It's we.
We are doing all these bad things to Indigenous people.
And I think it's unfair, not only because these are people that are pretty new and they don't really think they're guilty of anything, but more importantly, they're threatened with the idea that maybe the house that their family has worked hard to buy or apartment or whatever might be taken away from them.
Before we begin this evening's performance, we would like to acknowledge that this theater stands on territory of the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Huron-Wendat and the Patoon First Nations.
We are also mindful of broken covenants and the need to make right with all our relations.
Ah, sorry.
Hello?
Excuse me.
Should we go?
Excuse me?
Oh, no, no, I just mean if we're on someone else's land, shouldn't we leave?
Oh, no, no, no.
The theater is here now.
We just like to acknowledge whose land it is.
I'm sorry, I'm so confused.
So if we're on someone else's land, shouldn't we do something about that?
So I think land acknowledgements to some people might seem innocuous, but to me as a teacher, I think they're incredibly dangerous.
A lot of teachers fought for a long time not to have the national anthem at all in schools.
And in most schools right now, it's in front of a big event, an assembly, or maybe once a week in some schools.
And a lot of people go, okay, as long as it's no more than that.
But that's something that involves all of us.
It's consensual and it's inclusive.
But to have a land acknowledgement where you talk about the harm that's been done to one group long ago and what we need to do for one group today and tomorrow, it just seems to me so exclusive of the kids that aren't part of that group.
And for those that are part of it, who are indigenous, I would think it'd be very embarrassing.
Again, it's the bigotry of low expectations that there's something wrong with them.
So is there a right or wrong way to do land acknowledgements?
Or is it enough to just do them?
It's not enough, I think, for people to just say, hello, I'm so-and-so.
I acknowledge that I'm on this land.
Anyway, continuing on.
I'm an educator, I said, and forget everything I just said.
Forget everything you said.
I think there are better things to talk to kids about.
I think you should talk about things that you haven't talked about.
So if you're a history teacher and yesterday you talked about the history of India, why don't we talk today about the history of China or talk about what happened in the moving west or anything that they don't know about?
We just think it's a really poor use of time and it's also insidious.
It's insidious because no teacher is going, let's have land acknowledgements every day.
And no student is going, we want land acknowledgements.
And I think it comes from very few people at the top of our society who are trying to find ways to promote themselves.
How can I build my career?
How can I, oh, look, I'll pretend that I'm the savior, that I'm the leader for all those people who can't manage on their own.
And I'm going to make things better for them.
I'm going to rewrite.
I'm going to recreate history.
Look at me.
What do you think a white savior is?
Look how great I am.
Here I am in Africa doing a great job.
It's almost like they want to come to the rescue of the black man, but it's disingenuous because they're only doing it because they want the recognition.
And it's like, no one asked you to do that.
You go anywhere else and do it.
It's not for education.
It's not even for that.
Nobody wants it.
It's just people like Trudeau.
And that's what I found is extraordinary that Trudeau's transforming your country for him.
He gets to dance around.
He gets to travel the world, you know, on his, you know, fossil fuel, you know, churning private jet to just look at me.
I'm Mr. Woke.
I'm saving people who in the past, you know, didn't have me around.
Because I, you know, 100 years ago, if I went back in time, I would have given my hard-earned money so there'd be better residential schools.
Mr. Woke's Warning00:00:41
I would have fought for gay marriage.
I would have been telling the early sellers, you know, as they're worrying about bears and wolves and when their next meals, I would have been saying to them, but what are your pronouns?
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