Ezra Levant exposes Justin Trudeau’s $550M in foreign aid—$450M to the UN for climate projects and $100M to Haiti’s police—while 52% of Canadians face financial collapse, just $200 away from insolvency. Andy Lee reveals CCP-linked groups like the Fujian Business Association backing Trudeau and Olivia Chow’s campaigns, despite Safeguard Defenders’ warnings about illegal foreign police operations. The episode ties Trudeau’s Ukraine support to NATO’s proxy war strategy, questions unchecked foreign influence, and dismisses "speech crimes" amid rising domestic instability. [Automatically generated summary]
I don't know if you saw the headline the other day, but more than half of Canadians are $200 away from not being able to pay their bills this month.
That is terrifying, and that number is sure to go up given that they just jacked up mortgage rates again.
This is terrible.
No wonder Justin Trudeau takes every opportunity to fly to a foreign land.
That's my show today.
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Just click subscribe.
You'll get the video version.
Every weeknight I do my show.
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All right, here's the show.
Tonight, while Trudeau hands out billions of dollars to foreign countries and rich corporations, Canadians are getting poor.
It's July 13th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
I saw this story.
I'm going to read the headline and a few sentences from it.
It was in the news on different channels.
More than half of Canadians, $200 away or less from not being able to pay all of their bills.
Just stop to think about that for a second.
I hope you're not one of those people, but maybe you are.
Imagine the stress of it for anyone, but especially if you have kids.
How can this be happening in a country like ours?
Let me read a bit.
More than half of Canadians say they are $200 away or less from not being able to pay all of their bills at the end of the month, a report by insolvency firm MNP Limited said, as higher interest rates and a rising cost of living have stretched budgets.
At 52%, that's up six percentage points from the proportion of Canadians who said the same in April.
The report noted that 35% of respondents say they already don't make enough to cover the bills and debt payments, up from 30% in April and a record high for the survey.
That is terrifying.
That is sad.
No wonder the coward Justin Trudeau is booed and heckled wherever he goes.
No wonder he prefers to take his private jet at our expense to foreign countries where he can primp and preen and pretend that he's a star, except that that doesn't even really work for him anymore.
People are onto him now.
I mean, the regime media in Canada are still covering for him, but that's just because he pays them.
They actually publish things like this with the straight face.
I showed this to you the other day.
Trudeau to play a key role at NATO.
Really?
Here's how the Wall Street Journal that doesn't take money from Trudeau put it.
Canada is a military free rider in NATO.
Ottawa still spends only a pathetic 1.38% of GDP on defense.
I mean, he didn't even show up on time for the panel discussion he was supposed to chair.
Remember this?
The extraordinary panelists that we have assembled.
If I can briefly introduce Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, will be coming here momentarily.
He's going to slot.
Yes, thank you, Prime Minister.
That's the empty chair.
We have, of course, Latvian Prime Minister Christianis Kauerns.
But he just loves to get away from Canada.
And I think it's fair to say he loves to get away from his house where he is with his estranged wife.
He's just phoning it in now, isn't he?
He'll do anything to buy friends.
I mean, this story here here, the Liberals throwing $450 million to the United Nations for climate in third world countries.
I can't think of a worse waste.
How much do you think will wind up in the Swiss bank accounts of dictators and other corrupt officials?
50% of that?
90% of that?
All of it?
And how would you even know?
I mean, at least if we were building, say, a dam or a well in a country, a hospital, you could check to see if it was built.
But how do you check to see if a country really did combat climate change?
It's all pixie dust.
It's all Enron style accounting.
You literally wouldn't be able to tell if they pocketed it or spent it.
And really, what's the difference?
And I showed you the $100 million given to police in Haiti, not to police in Canada, where we have a crime wave, Haiti, just because Trudeau wants the Haitian vote in Montreal.
So we're poor at home, but Trudeau is partying overseas and throwing around our money.
But the world still mocks him.
They'll take his money, but they mock him.
But it's bad.
I mean, we love to talk about dramatic things like the war in Ukraine or global warming, but how about what ordinary people are talking about, like not being able to pay their bills?
And how about all the young people that took out mortgages because Trudeau said that mortgage rates were low and were staying low?
And they took out variable rate mortgages and young people stretched and got the biggest mortgage they could.
And now their mortgage payments have doubled.
Interest rates went up again this week, the highest in two decades.
Here's a video that Pierre Polyev tweeted.
I think it's pretty good.
You know, if you used your credit card for the first time, you're using your credit card to invest in a huge flat screen TV home theater system for your basement.
Okay.
You know, that's going to be something you're going to be paying off for a while.
But if you use your credit card to go back to school, or if you use your credit card, you go into debt to build an expansion on your house that you're then going to be able to sell your house for more, if you're making investments that are going to return, that is how you grow a strong economy.
Because quite frankly, confident economies invest in themselves.
You'll forgive me if I don't think about monetary policy.
You'll forgive me if I don't think about monetary policy.
Future governments are going to have to carry that debt.
The servicing costs on that are going to be very high.
Sorry?
The servicing costs on the debt that you're going to have to carry, that you're adding to now, right?
Interest rates are at historic close, Glenn.
Interest rates are at historic close, Glenn.
Trudeau doesn't think about monetary policy.
He doesn't think about fiscal policy.
He doesn't really think about any policy.
He's not a thinker.
And he's never even lived this life.
His whole life, he's lived off his father's trust fund set up for him.
And the problems of his life were taken care of by daddy's lawyers and daddy's accountants.
He's never had to pay a bill himself.
He's never had to worry about making a payment his entire life.
The thing about interest rate hikes is they're actually designed to slow down an economy, designed to stop people from borrowing and spending and growing.
That's the purpose of it.
It's used to cool things off, which is code for making people hurt a bit.
Business is hurt, industry's hurt, to kill demand, to make people not able to buy things or hire people.
It is explicitly designed to cause pain, which, by the way, is the express purpose of carbon taxes too, to punish people who pollute as if carbon dioxide is pollution.
And you combine higher prices with carbon taxes, with higher prices from inflation, with higher prices in your mortgage because of interest rates, and you've got a disaster for ordinary people.
Trudeau doesn't know any ordinary people.
And what exactly are we cooling down with these interest rates?
The economy is already in a recession if you were to take out the artificial growth that comes from bringing in a million new migrants a year.
Take that out, and we're shrinking.
On a per capita basis, we are shrinking.
We're in recession.
We're getting poorer on purpose, which is what kills me.
Carbon taxes, proposed farming taxes, interest rates, they are all tools to deliberately make us poorer.
Trudeau's Bank of Canada is atrocious.
They've gotten everything wrong.
How do you get things so wrong?
They said they were surprised by inflation.
That's pretty much their only job, is to not be surprised by inflation.
Oh, well, too bad, so sad.
They're the paying machine for you.
But boy, they're doing well for themselves.
They're so proud of themselves.
They gave themselves $27 million in bonuses.
And why not?
They're part of Trudeau's club, and you're not.
Know your place.
I'll say this about the Bank of Canada, though, those fat cats giving themselves millions of dollars in bonuses while they make you poor.
At least they're talking about one of the causes of price hikes, mass immigration.
I'm sorry, you cannot bring a million people a year into a country of 40 million and expect to not drive up housing costs, food costs, hospital waiting lists, schools, traffic, policing, and to drive down wages at the same time.
You can't do it.
Here's the bank being more honest than any political party in parliament.
High prices are likely to persist and boost inflation.
Two things on that.
Why do you think house prices are going to continue to rise?
And secondly, how much do increased house prices weigh in your decision-making on increasing rates or potentially keeping them at a higher level for longer?
Well, the short answer to why house prices keep going up is supply.
We've said that for a long time.
There's lots of things that go into house prices.
Certainly, housing is very sensitive to interest rates.
So when interest rates move, it affects house prices.
But one of the fundamental things that's holding up house pricing in Canada is there's just more demand than there is supply.
One of the things that's contributing to the demand for housing now is an increase in population.
We've seen a return to immigration levels that we had pre-pandemic and quite a high surge in immigration more recently.
So those things are contributing to keep housing prices high.
Housing is a component of overall inflation, but we target inflation.
We don't target house prices and we don't target any one sector or one item within the CPI basket.
So it's all a mess.
Ordinary people are in trouble.
Look at that first headline I showed you again.
Does that not hurt you?
The headline, more than half of Canadians $200 away or less from not being able to pay all of their bills.
Are you scared you should be?
Even if you're not poor yourself, this is bad for all of us.
And surely we must care about the less fortunate.
Trudeau has the gall to say he cares about the NDP, which used to care about the poor, the working class, is now completely captured by woke radical causes.
I mean, seriously.
Chinese Canadian Politicians and Hidden Influences00:10:57
Remember this?
Jagmeed Singh is a multi-millionaire fashion horse who literally posed for elite magazines to show off his lifestyle.
He doesn't know what poor means.
And then there's our finance minister, Christian Freeland.
Hey, she's got some advice for you.
Yeah, all of you poor.
Stop being poor.
Just stop subscribing to Disney Plus.
That's all you need to do.
We need your money for Haiti and Ukraine and the Climate Corruption Fund.
Even her own staff know that she's full of it.
I don't know if you saw this.
Documents show Finance Canada says Christy Freeland's budget forecast should not be viewed as a prediction of the future, but rather considered with a high degree of uncertainty.
Did anyone think otherwise?
Hey, just look at that Wall Street Journal headline again, just for a moment.
Do you notice that these days, other than a handful of independent media like Rebel News, that you pretty much only get the truth about Trudeau from foreign media, the ones who aren't on Trudeau's payroll?
Stay with us for more.
You know, it's very dangerous to equate ethnically Chinese Canadians with the Chinese Communist Party.
And it would be a grave mistake to do so because many, I would even say most, I would even say the great majority of Chinese Canadians love Canada because it's Canada.
And although they may have legacy attachments to China, cultural, historical, family reasons, they have embraced our democracy.
And to equate Chinese Canadians with the Communist Party and the dictatorship would be wrong.
And not only would it be morally wrong to prejudge Chinese Canadians in that way, but it would give a tremendous gift to the Chinese Communist Party who could say, look, it's just racism.
It is just a prejudice against us.
Any criticism of Communist China is tantamount to criticism of being ethnically Chinese.
My point is: the simple fact that Olivia Chow, a Chinese Canadian, has won in recent weeks the mayor's position in Toronto is not in itself evidence of anything other than she has more support in Toronto than any of the other candidates.
But there is a big but.
And it's that although Chinese Canadians may not want to participate with the overseas ambitions of the Communist Party, the Communist Party is here.
It is organizing.
Rebel News was amongst the first news sources that reported on these Chinese police stations operating here in Canada.
Let me say that again.
They were Chinese police here in Canada.
Now, they weren't laying tickets and prosecuting in our courts, but they were kind of a soft power muscle to intimidate, to organize, to make sure that Chinese Canadians did what Communist China wanted.
And that includes, as we learned in various months' revelations, helping Justin Trudeau in the last two elections.
Now, here's the thing: news now comes that these same Chinese organizations that have been revealed as fronts for the Communist Party, they in fact were helping Olivia Chow.
She denied she had any involvement, but today we'll show you proof otherwise.
I want to bring your attention to an article recently published by Rebel News.
The headline is: Olivia Chow claims she was unaware that pro-Beijing groups rallied behind her mayoral claim, but we've got a video to the contrary.
Joining me now via Skype to talk about this is the author of this investigative piece, our good friend Andy Lee.
Andy, great to see you again.
Thanks for coming on the show.
Hi, thanks for having me.
You know, I had that lengthy preamble because I do not want to question the loyalty of any Canadian citizen, whether they're Italian-Canadian, whether they're Jewish, whether they're Chinese.
I deeply believe that you can be a 100% Canadian patriot, no matter your race or ethnicity.
And I believe that because I feel that I am one.
Even though I have an affection for Israel, Canada is my number one.
I'm only a Canadian citizen and I only care about Canadian interests.
And so I don't want to cast dispersions at Olivia Chow, but you dug up a video that shows she was actively participating. with these communist Chinese fronts.
It's not an accusation.
It's a proof.
You've got the video, don't you?
Yeah, so the video was found by somebody that I work with who runs a substant called Found in Translation.
They go through these kind of documents, go through rechat groups.
So these posts were first discovered earlier on in June and were reported on that she was meeting with the Fujing Business Association, which is an organization whose address has been linked to the overseas Chinese police stations.
I'm not going to say the entire thing is a front for the Chinese Communist Party, but we do know that the members who run and who are chairman of this association have gone overseas, met with state council at Xi Jinping's request.
They've been invited overseas and have actually personally met with Xi Jinping.
So, you know, not necessarily standard Canadian business when you're going overseas and meeting with, you know, the Supreme Leader of China.
So these are the people who sort of run this association.
There's more of them.
And so this is one of the resources that Olivia Chow, you know, apparently tapped, if you look at the video, and was aware that to some degree that she was working with this group.
And again, it is an important decision to make.
This doesn't make Olivia Chow a Chinese asset.
She's not a Chinese asset.
You know, I don't believe that that's the case at all.
And she has rallied, you know, behind Hong Kongers and Tiananmen Square massacre commemoration ceremonies and things like that.
But it does show a troubling pattern where politicians are increasingly using these community associations.
And a lot of them genuinely do very good work in the community.
But maybe some of the characters also have, you know, an underlying motivation and maybe to influence our politicians on behalf of the foreign government or the Chinese Communist Party, where politicians are seeking out these community groups to get their assistance to help win elections.
And it's not necessarily illegal.
It's not illegal to support the Chinese Communist Party, as a lot of these groups do.
So that's an important distinction to make as well.
You're free to support whoever you like, even if we feel that it may be the wrong position to take politically.
But they are free to do that.
It's not illegal to do that.
So it's sort of a little snapshot of a bigger problem that we have.
And Olivia Chow is by no means the first politician who's used this network.
It's a well-established network.
I'm going to say not always, but often liberal politicians have used it.
Michael Chan is one of the big figureheads.
Wang Guoning is another person who's been investigated who runs this and actually went and met Xi Jinping earlier on this year.
So yeah, so a video surfaced of Olivia Chow meeting with the directors, the executive of the Fujian Business Association.
And there was a slideshow given with campaign materials, positions that were needed, volunteers, drivers, people to help with voting registration, fundraising.
And of course, that was confirmed in a letter.
So, you know, a letter was sent by the Fishing Business Association to Olivia Chow saying that they were going to, the National Post got it a little bit wrong.
They wrote an article on this as well.
But, you know, they said that they went all out.
The letter actually said that they pledged their full support.
And that's what they did.
So there's every indication that Chow, or if not Chao, that part of her team was aware that this organization was throwing their weight behind her and pushing for her to get elected.
And again, you know, this isn't, it's not unusual.
It's happened before.
It's going to happen again.
So, but again, part of a troubling pattern and increasingly part of an influence op where we might see people with, again, you know, underlying motivators who are pushing to get certain politicians elected, not always liberal politicians or left-leaning politicians, conservative politicians as well, but in general, people who have a less hawkish view on the Chinese Communist Party in general.
All right.
Well, let's watch the video.
I haven't seen this before.
Let's watch it together and maybe you can give us some commentary afterwards.
Let's take a look.
There's actually no narration.
It's just happy scenes of Olivia Chow at a campaign organization meeting.
Much of the slideshow, the PowerPoint there is in the Chinese language.
But I guess what makes this interesting and newsworthy and controversial is who those folks were.
This was not some local Chinese language church.
This was not the Chinese Student Society.
This was the Fuqing Chamber of Commerce, if I'm not mistaken.
Door Locked, Call Unanswered00:02:43
You correct me if I'm wrong, which again is that front crew that housed the police.
I think our friend David Menzies went to the Fuqing Chamber of Commerce.
He made a lot of jokes mispronouncing the word Fujing, but these were the folks associated with the Chinese police stations.
Here's a quick blast from the past of David trying to track them down.
Take a look.
David Menzies for Rebel News here in Toronto.
Now, folks, we are still on the hunt to get answers as to why there are three Chinese police stations essentially operating out of the greater Toronto area.
One in the Scarborough region of Toronto and two in Markham.
Now, last week, we found the address for one of the Markham-based police detachments, if you can call it that.
It was at a Chinese business association.
You may recall we went out there to visit, not sure if they wouldn't open the door or if nobody was home, but here's how that went: the door was locked, and either nobody was answering the door or the business is closed.
Why don't we just go and make another house call and see if anyone's home?
As you can see, the door is locked.
I see a monitor on, But so far nothing.
So we still haven't heard anything from that business association.
I've left a voicemail, but nothing to report on yet.
Now, the reason why I'm here is this is a detachment for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and York Regional Police suggested I reach out to them for answers for this situation.
And the Toronto Police suggested we reach out to Interpol Canada.
I can tell you in both cases, I did.
I sent a query to the Media Relations Department of the RCMP and of Interpol Canada.
Haven't heard back, so we thought we would just make a house call because we want to know how it is that another nation's police force, and of all the nations in the world, China, is operating here in Canada.
Now, the ostensible policy reason is that they're supposedly helping the Canadian government crack down on fraudsters, but we know from a group called Safeguard Defenders, they're a human rights group, they have very serious concerns about these police officers operating on Canadian soil and in other nations.
FARA Registration Required00:07:22
Here's what they had to say in a report, quote, these operations eschew official bilateral police and judicial cooperation and violate the international rule of law and may violate the territorial integrity in third countries involved in setting up a parallel mechanism using illegal methods, end quote.
Well, that's pretty disturbing that they're not following the rules.
In fact, they might be operating here illegally.
Why are we tolerating this?
So that's who these folks were.
Am I right, Andy?
Yeah, that's correct.
She was definitely with the, again, directors and executive members of that association.
And like I said, I mean, I hate to paint an entire association with one broad brush.
You know, is this a community association that's, you know, full of spies?
No, that's not it.
And that's where we struggle, I think, on how to deal with this sort of thing.
That a lot of these, you know, these influence operations and things like that are often blended into very legitimate and often good and beneficial community associations that actually do good work.
And they're done that way on purpose.
It's a very, very intelligent way of infiltrating.
And like I said, you know, it's not a bad thing.
And it's not illegal for them to endorse her.
And, you know, when we lack, you know, something like a Foreign Agent Registration Act, a FARA Act, which the United States has had since 1938, and a FARA is just what it sounds like.
If you may be acting on behalf of foreign government, you disclose those activities and disbursements and things like that.
And if you fail to do so, you can be persecuted.
So, you know, if we don't have a FARA and these people aren't registered, then it's very, very hard to say who exactly they're acting on behalf of.
But this is one of the associations where a FARA might apply.
And some members and directors might have to, especially if they're going in personally meeting with Xi Jinping, might have to register or disclose their activities.
Now, of course, this same association, a lot of the key players in it, helped rally that protest on June 24th against Afara, a foreign agent registry, and said that it would be a racist piece of legislation.
So, I mean, and this is how it's a very, very clever way of operating.
And again, often maybe some clandestine or foreign influence activities are blended in with associations that do very, very good work.
And I do believe when CESAS talks about saying that there's a sophisticated network that's running these operations and influencing our politicians, I do believe that this is likely part of that network or a slice of it.
And like there's many, many more that they're talking about.
But again, very, very difficult.
So the United States was recently successfully prosecuted a member or somebody who is running their overseas Chinese police stations in the United States, and they did it using SARA.
So we have to have that tool in our toolkit.
And the people who might have to register are rallying pretty hard behind it, which makes you wonder.
You know, I once hired someone in Washington, D.C. to do something on behalf of Rebel News, believe it or not.
There's a regulatory matter, and we had to register with that foreign agent registry.
I forget the exact term.
We had to do that just to hire someone in Washington to help us with a problem.
And, you know, I'm not shy about what we were doing.
I'm proud of what we were doing.
But it does shine a light of scrutiny on what's going on.
It doesn't ban anything.
It doesn't ban foreign agents.
It just says we've got to know what you're up to.
And how is sunlight a bad thing?
Like you say, it wouldn't make anything here illegal.
I'm not sure if there was anything illegal, but we need to know who was behind it.
We need to know what direction, what money was coming in from communist China.
And it's not just China.
I happen to know that every year the Al-Quds rally in Toronto, a massive anti-Semitic, just horror show on the streets of the city is absolutely financed and organized by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
So it's China, it's Iran.
I'm sure people would want Ukraine and Russia to be registered to know who's doing what, because this is our country.
I am so convinced, Andy, that we need a foreign agent's registry in this country too.
And let Olivia Chow defend herself.
Let her explain why she was happy to take this help.
I think she's sort of denying it, but a foreign agent registry would make it impossible to deny.
Last word to you.
Do you think that Olivia Chow is pro-Beijing?
You mentioned that in the past she has stood for Hong Kong and Tananman Square activists, which suggests she might have actually been a critic of Beijing.
Do we know where she stands on these issues today?
Not that it really has anything to do with running a city.
That's potholes and police and garbage pickup and parks.
But do we know if Olivia Chow has an opinion on communist China in 2023?
Yeah, I can't say.
It might be good for her to come forward and clarify this, especially in light of the fact that, again, after this story came out, her staff came out and said that they had not tapped this network.
Obviously, video shows otherwise.
They did tap this network.
So I mean, it's very, very difficult to deny that.
And it's very, very difficult for her to say that she was unaware.
So I don't know what her, again, I wouldn't say that she's necessarily pro-Beijing, having done this.
And I think, again, it's just a resource and maybe a little bit an undesirable resource.
And she knows that for having denied it, met with them.
So she's aware.
Andy, it's great to see.
I'm so proud of your work, not only on Twitter, but I'm so grateful that you are doing the China Affairs beat for Rebel News.
And of course, I referred to your story called Olivia Chow claims she was unaware that probation groups rallied behind her mayoral claim.
And you can see that at Rebel News.
Keep up the good work, Andy.
Thank you.
All right.
Talk to you soon.
There she is, and she calls herself the Rebel Special Rapporteur on Twitter, and I get a kick out of that every time.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me.
W. Hogan68 says, funny how they cancel the Russian culture from the event.
Why not the Chinese culture as well?
The so-called diversity inclusion speak is dumped because it doesn't work for the propaganda.
I think it's crazy.
I think that statement by the Ukrainian ambassador that I read out yesterday literally meets the test of a hate crime under the criminal code.
Why Speech Crimes Matter00:01:36
I'm not a believer in speech crimes, hate crimes, thought crimes, but the government is what that Ukrainian ambassador said about the Russian ethnicity, that they're born, the culture is a born raping, pillaging culture.
That's hate speech.
Hey, I don't make the rules.
Political Foolishness 7491 says, when politicians negotiate bad deals, I believe 99.9% of the time there are kickbacks to their foundations, friends, and family members.
Oh, I don't disagree.
That's that whole Hunter Biden thing, isn't it?
Heather Jones, 97 to 73, says, not only are they running out of money and weapons, but people are not signing up to fight for the countries either.
I'm wondering when both countries will announce conscription.
Well, both countries have a kind of conscription, both Russia and Ukraine do.
But Russia has a much larger population.
A great number of Ukrainians have fled the country as refugees.
I think it's a terrible war that's going on.
All wars are terrible.
But what's particularly terrible about this one is that it's a proxy war.
If you listen to the NATO spokesman, they desire this war to grind down Vladimir Putin's military.
And some of them come outright and say they want regime change.
But they're not putting in Western troops.
They're fighting to the last Ukrainian.
There are some foreign mercenaries there.
But this death toll in Ukraine is not being borne by NATO.
It's being borne by Ukraine.
And if you truly cared about Ukraine, that would factor into your decisions too.