Toronto’s council unanimously renamed Young Dundas Square and the Dundas subway station to Sankofa Square, honoring Henry Dundas—a 18th-century abolitionist whose gradualist policies historians credit with ending the transatlantic slave trade over 50 years, despite critics like Olivia Chow falsely accusing him of owning slaves. Yet the name’s Ghanaian Akan roots—linked to a nation that later apologized for its own slave-trading past—spark irony, while Dundas’ legacy clashes with Toronto’s focus on modern issues like crime and infrastructure. Meanwhile, the 2023 REBBI Awards crowned David Menzies first for exposing a 50-year-old "woman" invading teen girls’ showers at the Otters Swim Club, and Drea Humphrey’s viral clip of Justin Trudeau supporters praising Hamas fueled calls for deportation. The episode underscores how Toronto’s historical revisions ignore nuance while contemporary conflicts—like Israel’s October 7th attacks—expose deeper ideological fractures. [Automatically generated summary]
Hi everybody, Ezra Levant here from our world headquarters in Toronto.
Pleasure to be with you today and my thanks to Sheila Gunrid and David Menzies who have been hosting the show on Fridays.
We've decided to move away from the daily podcast because we made a decision, I think it's the right one, that the news on the streets is where our people should be, especially mission specialist David Menzies.
And wouldn't you agree with me that he has been on fire over the last few weeks with the bizarre case of a 50-year-old man who hasn't had his twig and berries removed, who claims to be not just a woman, but a little girl, and who insists on joining the Otters Swim Club and going swimming with these girls, these teenage girls, some as young as 13 or even younger, I think.
And that's bizarre and gross and unsportsmanlike and stupid and unnatural to begin with.
But then he goes into the changing room with the girls.
He goes into the girls' changing room and with the locker room and with the showers and where, as you know, in the locker room, that's where people get naked to change in and out of their swimming suit.
And this 50-year-old man goes in there and that's the whole damn point of it.
That's why he's doing it.
He has a sexual fetish that the changing room is the essential part of the experience.
Obviously, to be with the other girls, the teenage girls, to pretend that he's one of them, to be affirmed in that psychological fantasy of his is very valuable to him.
But being let in the actual changing room is essential for him.
And our David Menzies has been on the case of that extremist.
That's what he is.
And in other eras, I mean, I don't support vigilantism, but I think that in other eras, if some 50-year-old man had decided to swim in a swim meet with 13-year-old girls, it would not have been allowed.
Had the person persisted, the dads would have gotten involved.
And had the 50-year-old not removed himself.
In fact, had a 50-year-old male been found naked in the women's change room, there probably would have been fists flying.
I want to show you a little bit of David's latest report.
David is on fire, and his videos are getting a million views each, which in this era of our channel being throttled by YouTube is quite something.
Let me play you a little bit about David's latest.
And then we're going to talk about the news of the late.
We're going to talk about this insane decision by the city of Toronto to erase 200 years of history and cancel a long-dead statesman named Henry Dundas by renaming the famous young Dundas Square and subway station, renaming Senkofa.
And I thought, well, I think there was some coffee, some instant brand of coffee called Senkoff or something.
Senka.
Senka, that's right.
And it's just, and it's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
So obviously it's a high priority for Olivia Chow, the mayor of Toronto.
But I just want to show you what David has been up to since we've liberated him from the daily requirement of doing the limestream.
Let me show you, we'll play a couple minutes of it from his latest video on this 50-year-old man who doesn't even pretend to be a woman.
His hair is long and he wears girls' swimming attire.
But other than that, he's a man-man.
Take a look at this.
50-year-old man changing with 13-year-old girls.
Do you have a record of sexual perversion?
Attacked me from these people.
By the way, you mothers, you have no problem with a 50-year-old male showering with your daughters.
No?
You're not going to answer any questions?
Would you like to talk off the record later?
I can accommodate that if you're afraid of cancel culture.
You are breaking the rules.
Now, please, can you take that out of my face?
I do not consent to be interviewed or on film.
So please exit the building.
Well, you're the star interview so far, so thank you for that.
Are you going to do anything about a 50-year-old man showering with 13-year-old girls?
That's against the law, actually.
Do young ladies have any trouble with a mature male swimming with adults?
Yeah.
No, really?
Okay.
She goes in her cheek mood.
I see her in the morning.
Oh, okay.
And she doesn't go in your cheese room?
She does.
Oh, okay.
You see, folks, this is exactly the problem.
These are mothers.
You'd think they'd be in mama bear mode, you know, a potential sexual predator.
How else can you describe a 50-year-old man changing and showering with girls as young as 13?
They don't care.
I'm going to grab your names.
Sure.
Can I ask why?
I'm an operator here that works here.
Are you a security guard or?
No, I work here.
Why are you asking us to leave?
Because you're videotaping people in the pool swimming.
We weren't videotaping before.
Camera videotaping me right now.
Right.
Yeah, so leave the building.
Well, I've got news for you.
There is a 50-year-old man pretending to be a 13-year-old girl showering and changing with the real biological woman.
Do you have a problem with that?
Leave the building.
Leave the building.
Okay, I don't have your name.
I don't see any ID.
You need to go.
Okay.
All right, you can get that out of my face and you can go, or the cops will come and take you out.
Really?
I've asked you to leave.
Ladies, what do you think?
I think you're mothers with orange vlader swimmers.
What's that?
Let's go.
I don't think so.
No.
All right, I'll go call the cops.
Okay, call the cops.
You know what?
I'm going to call the cops too.
That there's a 50-year-old pervert swimming with girls.
Listen, I got nothing to say about that.
You know, it goes on, and I encourage you to watch the whole thing.
It's just incredible.
I'm not sure if the URL works, but is transmadness.com working?
Yeah, it's live, transmadness.com.
We've done so many stories in this vein that we've got a vanity URL, transmadness.com.
You know, David Menzies mentioned that mother bear instinct.
It is a genetic instinct to protect your young.
We see it in nature.
I mean, God forbid you come between a mama bear and her cubs.
That's the most dangerous place to be.
Forget about the male bears, that mama bear.
When you're between her and her cubs, that's not a good place to be.
And you saw the mama bears there watching the swimming from upstairs while a man, 50 years old, with his full twig and berries, was cavorting, swimming, splashing, wearing a girl's bathing suit.
And that didn't move the needle for them.
Nothing deep inside them, no millennia-old instinct, a thousand generations of maternal concern.
Nothing just registered.
Or if they did, they managed to swallow it up and swallow it down, just keep it in.
And the dads, I mean, it looked like they were mainly mums there.
That's how it is often.
Dads are working while moms go to these things.
It's not always that way, but it looked in this case like it was that way.
Where are the dads?
I think there were some dads that David did interview.
And where the hell are they?
There's nothing in them.
They don't feel like something's odd.
There's no stranger danger.
You know, we teach kids stranger danger.
Don't talk to strangers.
Don't go into the van marked free hugs.
Don't take candy from strangers.
Don't take gifts from strangers.
Don't talk to strangers.
Were you not brought up that way?
I was.
You know, children are told to be careful.
Yeah, show this in the background while I talk.
Look at it.
So it was David who was threatened.
It was David who was told to leave.
It was David who was told that they were going to call the cops on him.
Not this man.
Now, I went to the website of the otters.
Have you been, did you know that website, Olivia?
Is it easy for you to find?
They have what they call the Swimmers Bill of Rights, which is, I'm glad to know they have a Bill of Rights for swimmers.
And I know what a right is.
It's something that's sort of a right you have as opposed to something, the right not to, or the right to.
So, for example, in our Charter of Rights, which is a real Charter of Rights, we have freedom from government meddling.
We have the right to free speech to be free from infringement.
So, okay, what would be in a swimmer's Bill of Rights?
I'm guessing the right to a fair competition, probably.
The right to safety.
Pump that one up so I can see it a little bit better.
The right to proper, oh, you know what?
I'm going to have to squint a little bit.
If you can make that just a little bit bigger.
One of their fake rights is the right to participate as a child when you are a grown-up.
But that's not a right.
The right to participate regardless of race, whatever.
We do segregate most sports into different sexes.
We just do that because that's sport.
Yeah, there it is.
Thank you very much.
So look at these.
The right to proper preparation for the participation in sport.
Okay, I guess so.
The right to be treated with dignity, sure.
The right to equal opportunity, sure.
The right to have fun through sport.
I don't know if that's a right, but look at right above that.
The right to play as a child and not as an adult.
What does that mean?
I mean, if you start at the top, the right of the opportunity to participate in sports regardless of ability level.
All right.
Well, that's not actually what sports is.
It's often a competition, and you have, you know, you're allowed to play in a certain level.
But put that back up just for one second because I wanted to read it.
Some of these are fake rights, especially that one about the right to participate as, yeah, just pump that up.
Yeah.
The right to have qualified adult leadership.
Okay, whatever.
The right to participate in the safe and healthy environment.
The right to, right above the purple line, the right to play as a child and not as an adult.
That is not a right.
You can call it a right.
You can write that down.
You can put that in your Bill of Rights, but that is not a real thing.
In fact, all of sport, if you've got kids in sports or were in sports yourself or know someone, you know that you don't have the 16-year-olds playing against the 10-year-olds in pretty much any sport because that's not fun.
That's not sport.
Sport is control certain variables to make it fair.
And then within those variables, have adder.
So the idea of participating regardless of ability level, okay, well, you can participate, but you're not going to be on the AAA team.
And you're not going to have a 16-year-old competing against a 10-year-old.
That is an absolute bizarre Orwellian, the right to play as a child and not as an adult.
That is made up BS.
And it is absolutely obvious to me that that was done specifically to cover this 50-year-old weirdo who is doing it because he wants all these young girls to be props in his sexual psychotherapy.
It's super gross to me.
Future of Play?00:03:40
So I give credit to David Menzies.
He's a mission specialist and he's out on the missions.
And by the way, his work, I saw Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican senator today, retweeted a story in The Sun that was based off David's work.
I see Megan Kelly, the American broadcaster, went on a tear about how if she had been there.
Yeah, there's Rand Paul.
Just show the tweet.
We've entered upside down world.
That's Rand Paul.
If you click on that, you get to the story written by our friend Joe Warmington based off of what David has discovered.
Megan Kelly just, Megan Kelly says if she were in Canada, she would go into full mama bear mode and sort of become active.
And she didn't say she would punch the guy, but she would go into full mama bear mode.
Where are the, like, are we really that passive?
You know, the American motto, the pursuit of happiness and, you know, truth, justice, the American way.
Those are some of their phrases.
What's ours?
Peace, order, and good government?
Are we that mild and passive that we let a 50-year-old man into a change room with your teenage daughters, into a shower room?
Are we that meek?
I tell you, that cannot stand, that will not stand.
There's just too many things that are contrary to a thousand generations of nature in that.
You know, before this whole trans madness came about, you would read about these cults, these child sacrifice cults, where they would treat children as, you know, they would sacrifice a virgin in the volcano, you know.
And I would think, how could it be?
Isn't it innate in any life, animal life as well as human life?
Isn't our genetic programming do anything to protect the children?
I mean, and the idea is that's how you passed on your genetic code in the future.
That's how you live.
How do you live forever?
Well, Shakespeare, his sonnets, half of his sonnets are about having children.
That's how you live forever.
And so you do anything for your kids.
Honor your mother and father, sure, but the future is your kids.
What society would allow a 50-year-old predator?
And I don't know if he's a predator in terms of an assault, but I'll use the word predator in terms of he demands and gets access to these teenage girls in their locker room while they're changing into their bathing suits.
And this is desensitizing the girls.
This is normalizing men in their private places.
These girls are being taught.
They're being reshaped to believe that a man is allowed into their private places despite their surely instinctive reaction, danger, danger.
It's not just the mom and dads who are fighting their instincts here.
We are teaching young girls that they must, in fact, they are the ones who could be the criminals if they don't allow this.
It's terrifying.
All right, I've talked about that for long enough, but I just wanted to toot the horn of our mission specialist, David Menzies, and explain why it is our strategy to have him out on the streets where he does amazing work every single day.
British Empire's Abolition Bet00:14:55
I'd like to give a shout out to our whole team that's been doing amazing work across the country.
For example, the daily Hamas hate marches across this country, whether it was Alexa in Montreal or Drea in Vancouver covering it.
But I want to talk about the news of the day, which is in Toronto.
Toronto has a kind of mini Times Square.
If you've ever been to New York City, you'll know one of the most exciting places in that city, especially if you're a young person, especially if you're a tourist, is called Times Square.
There's so many theaters around there, musicals and dramas.
It's like there's so many amazing restaurants.
There's so much city life.
Food trucks, young people, there's street performers.
It is, as Morrissey says, take me out tonight.
I want to see people and I want to see life.
And that's Times Square.
It's life.
And Canada has a little version of that.
Like so many things, it's sort of a knockoff version.
Yeah, there it is right there.
Put that on the screen.
That's sort of our Times Square.
You've got the Super Jumbo billboards.
You've got a couple of Mervis theaters nearby.
You have a ton of restaurants.
It's very touristy.
You have some food trucks.
You've got buskers.
You've got street preachers.
I mean, you don't have the, listen, there's only one New York in the world.
But that's Canada's Times Square.
It's called Young Dundas Square because it's the intersection of Young Street and Dundas Street.
Who is this Dundas?
Well, his name was Henry Dundas, and he lived over 200 years ago.
He was from Scotland originally.
And he helped govern Canada before it was a country, when it was part of the British Empire.
And the most important thing to know about Dundas, besides the fact that he helped give birth to Upper Canada, which then became known as Ontario, Dundas, after whom Dundas, Ontario, Dundas Street, there's so many things named Dundas.
I think the most consequential thing he did was to help end slavery in the British Empire.
He was what they call an abolitionist.
He was early to the project, probably a generation earlier than most of the abolitionists, and that's to his credit.
And he saw the reality of slavery, which I must emphasize exists on every continent of the world.
Slavery is common to every continent.
It's ancient.
It's prehistoric.
The slaves who built the Egyptian cities and the pyramids.
Slavery in Africa.
In North America, indigenous tribes had slavery.
It was part of warfare.
It was part of economics.
Some of the slaves did better than others.
For those who know the story about the Aztecs, slaves were captured and sacrificed, their hearts beating, cut out of their bodies.
Slavery was part of colonialism and empire.
There was a large slave trade from Africa towards the Americas, not just North America, but South America.
Part of the explanation for the interesting demographic diversity in South America is an enormous number of slaves were taken from Africa to Brazil, to the Caribbean.
How are there almost entirely black islands like Haiti, Jamaica?
Well, those were people taken from Africa in chains, and they were slaves and by various regimes.
The French had French Caribbean places like Haiti and Martinique, where they had sugar and they had rum, and the slaves worked there, and they were often worked to death and simply replaced with more slaves.
My point in this ramble is to tell you that slavery is ubiquitous.
There is still slavery today in China, in India, in Arabia, in Africa.
But Henry Dundas was an abolitionist.
He himself did not have slaves, even though he was a wealthy man and many wealthy people in his age did.
And he wanted to repeal slavery, but he used one word that has Black Lives Matter and Olivia Chow and the Wokerati up in arms today.
He used the word gradually because he wanted to get it done.
He didn't say we're going to abolish slavery like that.
He could have said it, but what's the likelihood that's going to become law?
What's the likelihood that's going to pass Parliament and become affected?
What's the likelihood that an entire labor force behind entire industries, especially agriculture, behind entire regions, the Caribbean and the New World, would simply say, sure, someone in London voted to abolish our entire economic system.
We'll go along with that.
It wasn't going to happen.
He said, let's do it gradually.
First, let's cut off the slave trade so there's no more new slaves.
Then let's, you know, what does gradually mean?
Well, then any children born to slaves will be free.
And then eventually slaves themselves will be like the gradual phasing out of slavery.
And as I discussed in my recent conversation last night with Jennifer Dundas, a descendant of Henry Dundas, in the most dramatic and remarkable thing done since the freeing of the slaves by Moses, the British Empire, almost 200 years ago, borrowed 20 million pounds, which as a proportion of their GDP is sort of like a quarter trillion of dollars today in terms of purchasing power, GDP,
et cetera.
And they simply bought the freedom of every slave in the empire.
Instead of saying we are going to go to war against every slave owner, we're going to have a civil war, we're going to have litigation, we're going to have rebellion, we're going to simply buy the freedom of every slave in the British Empire.
We're going to borrow a quarter of a trillion dollars and pay down that debt.
And you know when that debt was finally repaid?
I think it was 2015.
For 200 years, British citizens paid interest and principal on a two-century mortgage to free the slaves.
Did you know that?
And in fact, for 50 years, the British West Africa Squadron of the Royal Navy hunted down slave ships, seized the slave ships, arrested the slavers, and freed the slaves.
Hundreds and hundreds of ships.
The Royal Navy took it upon themselves not only to abolish slavery in the British Empire, but to stop slave ships going to other empires.
Did you know that?
I say again, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French, the Dutch, they had slaves in their colonies as well.
The British not only banned slavery in their empire, they then for 50 years sailed the high seas looking for slave ships to stop them.
They were not going to America at this point.
They were not going to Canada.
They were not going to any British islands in the Caribbean.
The Royal Navy was acting like a global police force stopping slaves.
Did you know that?
Henry Dundas was part of that movement.
But because he used the word gradually, he was an abolitionist.
He did not have slaves himself.
He fought and lobbied and orchestrated the end of slavery.
He, in his connection with John Simcoe in Ontario, banished slavery fast and early, earlier than almost any other place.
But because he used the word gradually, an American corporation called Black Lives Matter, which set up a Canadian franchise.
We don't have the American history of slavery.
We were the end of the Underground Railway.
We were the free place to which blacks fled.
But Black Lives Matter was so successful as a corporation in the United States.
It set up a franchise in Canada, in Toronto, and tried to get an echo of their action up here, even though we didn't have the same history as slavery.
Like I said, we abolished it two centuries ago.
But one of them said, well, we need an enemy, because that's what critical race theory, cultural Marxism is all about.
Let us demonize great Canadian slaveholders.
Except there really weren't any.
They just, they weren't.
In fact, we were the slave abolitionists, but they said, well, he said to eliminate slavery gradually instead of immediately, because he actually wanted to get it done instead of just talked about.
It was a radical progressive idea at the time.
Today we all know instinctively, and obviously the slavery is wrong.
But 200 years ago, when huge territories were essentially run by slave labor, saying let's abolish slavery was a radical progressive idea.
Henry Dundas was a radical progressive, but he was smarter than Black Lives Matter.
He actually wanted to achieve something.
So because he used the word gradually, Olivia Chow, one of the stupidest people in the country, and I'm sorry to Seamus O'Regan for taking the title away from him, said that he was a racist.
And she actually said, do we have the clip of her actually saying that Henry Dundas himself had slaves, which is such a damnable lie.
Like you have such a low information person to say that Henry Dundas, an abolitionist, had slaves.
Like just making things up.
And so based on that, I mean, I live in Toronto.
And the best thing about Toronto is there's some wonderful people here.
And I'm almost on the list.
There's some restaurants.
There's some sports teams if you can afford the extraordinarily expensive tickets.
The traffic is atrocious.
The crime is atrocious.
The politics are atrocious.
The waiting lists for hospitals are atrocious.
The quality of the schools is atrocious.
There are a lot of things broken in this city.
Like I say, the best thing about it is that there's a lot of wonderful people here.
But the mayor who was elected, who calls herself a socialist, but is probably a communist, who was elected because she married someone famous who passed away.
She's the widow of Jack Layton, the former NDP leader.
So Olivia Chow is the mayor because there were literally more than 100 candidates running for mayor and she just simply had more votes.
Like she had nowhere near a majority.
So I hate to say she's sort of exactly what you'd expect.
She's a nepotism candidate.
She's the wife of or the widow of.
And so she's not particularly well briefed.
But boy, she loves this issue because if she can take on someone 200 years ago who's not around to defend himself, I mean, and if you defend Henry Dundas, well, then you're for slavery.
No, you're not.
He was actually an abolitionist, you fool.
Listen to her lie.
Listen, here she tells a goddamn lie accusing Henry Dundas of being a slave owner.
He was an abolitionist.
Take a look.
On the comparison to the renaming of Centennial the stadium, people have said, you know, if you're going to rename Dundas, Costly Process, because of a controversial figure like Dundas, why would you go about and name a stadium after someone with an equally controversial background?
Is that not, you know, speaking up both sides of your mouth?
Dundas delayed the cancellation and the abolition of slavery for many years.
He also promoted taking children, young girls and boys, to bring them, take them away from their parents and bring them to England, to other parts of Europe as slaves so they could multiply, pro-create, so there will be enough people, enough labor, slave labor,
in order to service the plantations.
Surely you're not comparing a slave owner.
Wow, and it's not, I don't know whether it's a slave owner or not.
Well, I don't know.
Well, but allow me to finish.
Hang on, you don't know.
So you just called him a slave owner.
Because you're the expert here.
You just called him a slave owner, and then you said, well, I don't know.
You don't know?
You said it, and then immediately you realize you were making things up.
And then you immediately said, well, you don't know, but you said it anyways.
And you're an expert.
And you know what?
And let's go to Joe Warmington's story.
And then I want to go to the True North story about this because they've got a great angle on it.
So they've decided, let me come to the chase.
I spent a lot of time talking about Henry Dundas, after whom Dundas Square is named, Young Dundas Square.
They are going to change it to Sankofa Square.
And I just keep thinking of, I knew a kid in my school, Neil Sankoff.
I think, are they naming it after him?
What did Neil do?
Or is it after Senka, the instant coffee?
Toronto City Council approves Sankofa Square as a new name for Young Dundas Square and initiates plans to rename other city assets that include the name Dundas.
You know why they, you know, that was why that was smart politics?
Because first of all, the journalists are as stupid as the politicians in this town.
So they're going to eat this stuff up.
Word Sankofa Replaced00:13:31
Second of all, do you think it's easier for Olivia Chow, who doesn't know what she's talking about, she just told a lie and immediately admitted that she lied.
Do you think it's easier for her to cut taxes, cut the police?
I mean, taxes are high.
The police are, you know, there's this defund the police movement here as there is everywhere else.
Traffic's atrocious.
They're building subways that are years behind schedule, hundreds of millions over budget.
Is it easier for her to actually do her job?
Fix crime, fix taxes, fix waiting lists, you know, the boring stuff of politics, garbage pickup.
Is that easier?
Or would she rather talk, would she rather demonize some white guy 200 years ago as a slave owner, which is a damnable lie, and have a lot of discussion about that?
And he can't fight back.
And if you side with Henry Dundas, then you're a racist.
Tell you one thing.
200 years from now, not a single human being will know anything about Olivia Chow other than maybe a tiny footnote in the history of Toronto.
Henry Dundas was such a great builder of this new country, in addition to his work abolishing slavery, that they named a whole city after him.
Along with a, you know, I was joking with Jennifer Dundas, the descendant of Henry Dundas, that, frankly, renaming a subway stop is probably good because the Toronto Transit Commission, the subway authority in Toronto, is so delayed, so crime-ridden, so dangerous.
There's stabbings on the subway.
There's wild youths running rampant on the subway.
You probably don't want anyone you love and admire to have a subway station named after them in Toronto because it's actually disreputable.
But other than the subway station, which I think should be called Olivia Chow Station in honor of the crime.
Imagine that.
And by the way, there's 4,500 businesses along Dundas Street, many of which have Dundas in their name, let alone in their addresses.
Like, this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
It's canceled culture two centuries ago.
And Stenkofa Square.
Hey, can you go to the, we'll skip over Joe Warmington's article.
Let's go to True North because our friends at True North, I think it was Andrew Lawton who did this.
What does the word Sankofa mean?
I think it's from a Ghana, a language in Ghana, G-H-A-N-A.
It's an African country.
By the way, Ghana and Canada have very little in common.
I just checked, and according to the census, there are about 35,000 people in all of Canada who are from the country of Ghana.
And I got no beef with Ghana.
I'm sure they're nice people.
But that's 0.1% of Canadians are from Ghana.
And most of them have just arrived in the last generation, of course.
So what's the connection?
Why should the center of Toronto be named after something in Ghana that has nothing to do with Canada?
Where did that come from?
Did they like Google it or something?
Is that the depth of research?
So here's an article by our friends over at True North.
Toronto used word from slave trading African tribe to replace Dundas.
Oh, this is just too much.
Here, let's read through that together a little bit.
Toronto City Council voted unanimously.
Not a single person thought, no, we're not going to tear down our monuments and rename.
Why don't they rename the whole city?
Toronto City Council voted unanimously on Thursday to change the name of Toronto's world-famous Young Dundas Square to St. Cofa Square.
Do you think anyone's going to say that?
If you renamed Times Square, do you think people would, if you called it Obama Square, do you think anyone would call it that?
To distance it from Henry Dundas' purported connection to the transatlantic slavery.
Connection?
Connection?
That's like saying Winston Churchill was connected to the German Luftwaffe.
Connected to it?
He fought against it.
The word used by the city of Toronto, True North has learned, originated from a tribe known for its role in the slave trade.
While Dundas was, in fact, an abolitionist, the Akan people of Ghana, from whom the word sankofa comes, were active participants in the slave trade and imported slaves to develop their own economy.
As scholar A. Norman Klein, reviewing the work of renowned Ghana historian Ivor Wilkes, wrote, the Akan, quote, exchanged their gold for these slaves who rewarded their Akan masters by creating an agricultural revolution during the 15th and 16th centuries.
And then there's an excerpt from a scholarly paper by our friend Andrew Lawton.
The Akan people imported slaves to help clear their forests where they searched for gold and also sold slaves to Europeans, fueling the transatlantic slave trade.
In 2006, Ghana apologized to descendants of slaves for its role in the slave trade.
This is what I said earlier.
Slavery's been on every continent.
And who do you think caught the slaves in Africa?
It was often other African or Arab groups, including the folks who came up with the word Sankofa.
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow said the name change is part of the city's commitment to confronting anti-black racism, advancing truth.
Really?
She just admitted that she smeared, she actually said Henry Dundas had slaves.
You heard her say it.
Part of the city's reconciliation and justice and building a more inclusive and equitable city.
How about fixing the streets?
How about getting taxes down?
How about cracking in on crime?
The city of Toronto is committed to acknowledging the impact of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery while focusing on mitigating costs and impacts in residents or businesses.
Chow said, adopting the name Sankofa Square recognizes the need to reflect on and reclaim teachings, reclaim teachings from the past, and enable us to move forward together.
What does that mean to reclaim teachings from the past?
I won't go on too much longer.
Historians, even those on the political left, tend to agree that Dundas was a supporter of the abolition of slavery.
Controversy around him stems from an amendment he proposed to an abolition motion from William Wilberforce to make it more gradual.
But he said in doing so it was because he thought that was the most effective way to end slavery, given it took more than 50 years from that point for the transatlantic slave trade to end.
He was likely right.
Dundas also called on African leaders to stop their complicity in the slave trade, which they didn't do at the time.
So is this one of the truths we're going to rediscover?
The concept of senkofa, that is, you know what?
It feels like they just grabbed a word like Hakuna Matata.
It feels like they grabbed an exotic word so Olivia Chow would practice saying it and it would be the new Hakuna Matata.
We're going to call it Hakuna Matata Square.
You didn't check who invented the word Sankofa, that they were slave traders, so much so that they apologized to a black African country, Ghana.
I didn't know this.
I just read it together with you.
A black African country apologizing for the slave trade is unusual, don't you think?
You know, there's one more tweet I want to show, and it was just by chance.
I was reading this and about the amount of slavery around the world.
And when we think of slavery, we obviously think of the United States.
And there's a reason for that, because they had slavery and they fought a civil war over it in part.
And it was in English and it had a lot of connections.
So, Yeah, there's a good reason for us to think about American slavery.
But American slavery was much less.
I'm going to find, I'm just a moment ago because I have a tweet here that he that, you know, I'm not finding it fast enough and I don't want to do this in real time.
All right, I'm going to give up.
I was looking for the stats on slavery in different countries, including different empires at the time.
I'm not saying that British slavery was better than French or Portuguese or Spanish slavery, although I think, frankly, the numbers were far fewer.
And here it is.
I found it.
I'm going to send you a link.
I'm going to put it in the live stream script.
Just go here for a second.
And I want to say that all slavery is bad, whether it was the Egyptian slavery of the Hebrews, the Israelites, thousands of years ago, or modern slavery in China, which still exists.
Yeah, pump this up as big as you can.
So I saw this the other day, and I thought it was interesting.
This is from Kenny Akers, who obviously is a black man.
And he, you know, he's, I would call him sort of a citizen scholar.
I'm going to read a little bit of this to you if I may.
During the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved Africans were transported to various regions around the world.
Here's a list of some of the major destinations and the estimated number of people that were transported to each.
Brazil.
Approximately 4.9 million enslaved people were transported to Brazil.
Did you know that?
That's, by the way, that's 10 times more than to the United States.
10 times more.
Caribbean islands, including Jamaica, Cuba, and Haiti.
Around 5 million enslaved people were transported to the Caribbean.
And some of those countries are now almost completely black.
Then look at this next one.
The worst people in the world, United States.
An estimated 400,000 enslaved people were brought to the United States.
Now, those are 400,000 tragedies.
By the way, from those 400,000 black slaves, there are now 30 million descendants.
American blacks are about 12% of the U.S. population.
So thank God they were not killed in the same way that many other slave regimes literally worked their slaves to death, which is just atrocious.
I mean, any slavery is atrocious, but I think there are degrees.
British North America, so Canada, approximately 12,000 enslaved people were transported to British North America.
That was abolished earlier in Canada than I think almost anywhere in the world.
And Henry Dundas was in part took credit for that.
Spanish America, including Mexico and Colombia, 1.3 million.
French Caribbean, including Guadeloupe and Martinique, 1.4 million.
Those are tiny islands.
Dutch Caribbean, 550,000.
Portuguese, 3.9 million were enslaved and brought from Angola.
Mozambique, 1.8 million.
Indian Ocean Islands, including Mauritius and Réunion, half a million.
Grand total, the total number of Africans transported during the transatlantic slave trade is estimated to be between 12.5 and 15 million people.
And you can see the size of those arrows roughly shows the number of people.
Most slaves, apparently, went to Central and South America and the Caribbean.
Apparently, 12,000 went to British North America, where they were amongst the earliest who were freed.
Now, of course, that's just the black African slave trade.
Of course, there were slavers in Arabia, Muslim pirates, really, who would raid Europe and get white slaves and over a million white slaves, including the entire town of Baltimore, Ireland.
Baltimore is not just the name of a city in Maryland.
It's the name of a city in Ireland.
The entire town was captured and taken as slaves, white slaves, for Arabia.
What I'm saying is a complicated history.
And when Olivia Chow says we're trying to reclaim the teachings of the past, she is absolutely not.
Because if she were, she would be aware that Ghana was a slave-trading country.
And there's really no connection between Ghana and Canada at all.
And Ghana was so implicit, implicated in the slave trade that it actually issued an apology for slavery.
Awards Ceremony Highlights00:07:48
And to condemn Henry Dundas as a slavekeeper, which he was not, and to strip his name off something and put the name of a Ghanaian tribe that dealt with slaves is so atrocious.
But how perfect for Olivia Chow.
I'm spending a lot of time talking about that, I know.
I just can't believe that it was unanimous.
It was unanimous in city council, but why not?
What an easy way to seem virtue signal.
I hope that every single business and family that lives on Dundas Street, if they imagine telling 4,500 businesses, got to change your business card, got to change, you know, Dundas Diner, Dundas this.
You've got to change.
There's an entire city called Dundas, Ontario.
How many people live in Dundas, Ontario?
I don't know.
It's not.
It's probably a town.
Dundas, Ontario.
There's Dundas County, Ontario.
And about 20,000 people there.
Imagine telling them, are they going to tell every person in Dundas, Ontario, that they're going to change the name of the town?
I'd like to see a poll on that.
Frankly, I'd like to see a poll on that in Toronto because there's no way that that kind of bizarre cultural cancel.
They're trying to do to Dundas what they did to John A. McDonald.
They took him off the $10 bill and they put the statue of him in a coffin on Queen's Park.
Just atrocious.
Well, I took a little bit longer on this than I meant to, but it's making me really mad.
I'm just checking if there's any super chats or anything like that.
I don't think I see any.
Well, we're going to have one more live stream, I think, before the Christmas break.
That'll be next week.
And then Rebel News is going.
We traditionally take a week off over Christmas, and then we rejoin the world in January, give our people a well-deserved break.
I should tell you before we go, we have a couple minutes to go, that we had the REBBI Awards.
And the Rebbe Awards are voted on by you, by people on our team, people who, viewers.
And do we have the Rebbe Awards finalists?
I can look for them on the other graphic?
Sure.
I was going to look for it within our system.
But we have people vote.
So those are the, I was going to go through six, five, four, three, and two because some of the numbers were so extremely close.
I don't have those numbers in my fingertips, but we at our Christmas party, we announced not just the top three, but we announced the top six because a couple of our contenders, you got that?
I want to show how close it was.
You know, the old saying, come on, your vote counts, every vote counts.
What if it was just one vote apart?
I tell you, the difference between some of our people was less than 1% going from memory.
We're just getting the exact stats right now.
Now, some people said, Ezra, I don't want to vote for my best favorite rebel.
That's like asking me to choose who my favorite child is.
And I understand that, but I think that there's also a healthy competitive spirit that comes about by voting.
I myself don't put my name down because if I were to, I don't know how I would do, but I don't want to put my finger on the scale by being the boss.
Maybe I'm afraid of losing.
We videoed some of it here.
Let me show a little bit.
Yeah, let's just show a little bit from the awards.
Do you have that video handy?
So we'll just show a little bit of it.
We had a Christmas get together.
You can see on the screen behind me is Avi in Melbourne, Australia, joining by Zoom.
And you can see some of the staff in our world headquarters industrial style office.
We'll just play a little bit of this while I try and get the actual rankings and final vote count.
So watch for a minute from our Christmas party where we announce the results.
And in the meantime, I'll try and get you the exact vote count.
To build up the name and face of the talent, because you don't want to pay them an extra dollar.
You don't want them to have extra value.
Frankly, you want AI to be sure enough to crank up the content just to get the clips.
We have a different belief.
We believe that if people come to love and trust and get excited by or recognize our talent, then they are more likely to support them when we ask for support, which we do every day.
So with that explication, I will now read the top six finalists in the 2023 Viewers' Choice Award show.
In sixth place, with 621 votes, mademoiselle alexa de Bois, with 766 votes, to marry the lead.
with 808 votes, Sheila Gunn-Reed.
In third place, with 950 votes, Drea Humphrey.
In second place, with 999 votes, a multi-Rebbe Award winner, I'll be Amini with 1,189 votes.
In sixth place, Alexa Lavois.
Fifth place, Tamera Ugolini.
Fourth place, Sheila Gunrid.
Third place, Drea Humphrey.
First time in the top three.
David Menzies in second and Avi Yamini, I think this is third or fourth Rebbe for viewers' choice, and he does an amazing job.
He does do an amazing job.
He also has all of Australia backing him.
And I've heard complaints from our Canadian team: hey, Canada, but we're split between five talent here, and Avi's got all Australia to himself.
Well, no, Abby's support is global, and for a good reason, he does a great job.
And he goes very courageously to places like his coverage of the Hamas-Israel war has been excellent.
But it is nice to see David in second place, recognized for his excellent mission specialist, Drea.
I'm pleased to see she campaigned in part for her vote, which is absolutely kosher, and she did great.
And it's nice to see Tamara Ugalini on the list too.
She won a Rebbe Award for health advocate.
We had, you saw those little trophies I was handing out, besides some on-air talent, we had sort of behind-the-scenes trophies as well for people who helped build the company on commercial basis, people who help.
You know, we have an up-and-comer award for a young staffer.
So it was really fun, and we had sort of a low-key Christmas party.
October 7th Incident00:02:19
I should say that during the lockdowns, during the pandemic, we had some very exciting Christmas parties because there was sort of a danger to them because we were meeting illegally.
We had a Christmas party when the government said, No, you're not allowed to do so, but we did so anyways.
Well, listen, I spent a lot of time talking about Henry Dundas and a lot of time talking about the 50-year-old man swimming with the teenagers, but I think those are important stories on my mind, and maybe they're important to you as well.
I thank you for letting me chat with you today.
I don't think I saw any super chats, but maybe I wasn't keeping my eyes peeled.
And I'm going to leave you with a video filmed by our Drea Humphrey outside Justin Trudeau's event.
He was having another cash for access fundraiser in Vancouver.
And Drea, I'll leave you with this clip, talked to someone who said, Absolutely, Hamas is top-notch stuff, to which I say deport immediately.
I'll leave you with the new face of the politics on the streets of Canada, including Vancouver, which I used to think was a pretty groovy town.
Here's Vancouver today.
Take a look.
I'll see you later, everybody.
What does a ceasefire look like?
Should Hamas lay down their arms at all or return the hostages?
How come?
No, because 40 since 1948, it's been 70 years.
They've been killing.
This is not new.
This is something not new.
This didn't just happen right now.
It's been happening for years.
Israel has to go.
What would happen to the people who live in Israel now?
Where would they go?
They will stay there.
Just their government.
We're not talking about the people.
We're talking about the government, right?
So do you think October 7th was warranted?
October 7th?
Do you think it was warranted what Hamas did then on October 7th?
As of October 7th, a lot of stuff happened for the.
I'm not surprised.
I've seen many other conflicts like that.
This is not the first time.
But this one was a very strong hit for Israel.
They fucking banged them.
Excuse my language.
But they really banged them.
Like right now they're banging them, they're banging all their, thank God for this.
Thank God for Hamas.
Thank God for Hezbollah.
They freed.
I'm from Lebanon.
They freed Lebanon.
And then Palestine is next.
They're going to free Palestine.
Just like we freed, just like we freed southern Lebanon.
Hassan Nasrullah, he's going to come and free Palestinians.