Ezra Levant critiques Chrystia Freeland’s April 16th budget, slamming $53B in extra spending with no fiscal restraint—despite her past mismanagement at Reuters Next (e.g., $300K/month consultants) and reliance on Soros-backed Trudeau. The plan includes capital gains hikes, CBC funding, and $2.1B for foreign housing/asylum schemes, while Levant calls 4M-unit housing targets unrealistic amid labor shortages. He ties this to declining public trust, per David Coletto’s tweet, as the government distributes favors pre-election. Levant also warns of global censorship trends, like Australia’s e-safety commissioner targeting critics via social media, and Doug Ford’s failure to prosecute Hamas-linked hate crimes in Toronto, exposing double standards in media and law enforcement. [Automatically generated summary]
I think they're just throwing a lot of money around.
Really, one last hurrah before Pierre Polyev kicks him out.
That's my hope at least.
I'll take you through it, and then we'll interview Ian Maus Chong, a Rebel News contributor.
The Australian government is trying to censor him.
We'll see what's up there.
That's all ahead.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe.
Eight bucks a month, you get the video version and the satisfaction of knowing you're helping Rebel News.
We do not take a dime from Trudeau, and it shows.
Alright, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, Chrystia Freeland introduces what will hopefully be her last budget.
It's April 16th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Chrystia Freeland has always been a terrible choice for anything important in government.
She really has never had a real job.
She's a finance minister, but has no background whatsoever in financial matters.
She's not an economist or an accountant.
In fact, her real life has been a disaster.
I don't know if you know this, but she went away from Canada for a very long time.
She spent some time in the States.
And for some reason, someone at the large company, Reuters Thompson, appointed her to run their big high-tech project called Reuters Next.
Hundreds of staff, tens of millions of dollars poured into it.
It was going to be their next high-tech thing.
She ran it into the ground.
She blew millions, tens of millions of dollars.
When she was done as their leader, they just shut it down and walked away.
Let me quote to you from an incredible recap of it.
I think this was in BuzzFeed, which did a story on it.
I'm just going to read a couple paragraphs.
This is how she ran a company into the ground.
But instead of thinking of the company, think of what she's done in the department she's run.
Let me quote.
The project decided against using any internal resources.
The belief was that they were mired in bureaucracy and they were not the team to build a new vision for editorial, the current Reuters employee said.
The decision to hire outside vendors infuriated skeptical Reuters insiders, said yet another former Reuters employee who was involved with the next project.
Costs steadily rose with new hires and payments to vendors and consultants as the project dragged on and the launch date was continually postponed.
While earlier articles estimated the cost at around $5 million, sources close to the project said that actual figure was three to four times that amount of between $15 and $20 million.
Moreover, the first former Reuters employee said that the Activate, that was a consultant they'd hired, was paid $300,000 a month.
I won't go on, but you can see a few things.
Refusing to take advice from anyone who knows what they're doing, hiring outside contractors and consultants at shocking high prices, not listening to anyone.
And then, of course, she just bailed out and walked away as the whole thing crumpled.
Imagine putting that woman in charge of anything.
I mean, it's like the ArriveCan scandal.
They were sending the past was sending us a warning about the future.
Before she destroyed that project, like seriously, when she was done with Reuters Next, Reuters just walked away from that crater.
They didn't even try and pick up the pieces.
Before that, she wrote a pop culture book called Plutocrats, where she pretended to be against the super rich, but she basically fawned over billionaires.
It was sort of like lifestyles at the rich and famous.
I think that's where she met George Soros, the billionaire leftist.
And they sort of had a platonic romance.
And Christy Freeland was hired as George Soros's official biographer.
That was her title until she entered parliament.
She did not disconnect from Soros at all.
I don't know if you remember this, but Trudeau was elected in the fall of 2015.
His first World Economic Forum meeting was in January 2016.
Christy Freeland set that all up.
And that was the famous meeting with Soros and Trudeau.
And the larger version of the photo we always show you, Christy Freeland's there too.
The three of them.
That was the connection between Soros and Trudeau.
Anyways, when she came back to Canada to run for parliament, she had been away for so long.
And she bought a house in Toronto for $1.3 million.
And this made a little bit of news because it was such an expensive house.
Of course, these days, the average house in Toronto is more than a million dollars.
I didn't find it particularly shocking that a woman in her 40s, married with kids, would buy a house in Toronto that was over a million dollars.
I have to tell you, that is the average price of a house now.
What was bizarre and telling to me is that when she came back to Toronto, this is about 11 years ago, and she bought that house, and both her and her husband were working.
I told you some of the projects she was on.
She needed her parents to co-sign the loan for her, to co-sign the mortgage.
And I'm not making fun of anyone.
I mean, I think most people buying a house need help in Canada because houses are so extraordinarily expensive, largely because Trudeau has quadrupled immigration, and it's just supply and demand.
If you bring in 2.2 million people last year, which Trudeau did, obviously housing prices are going to go up.
So I'm not making fun of people who are having trouble paying their mortgage, but if you are in your 40s and you're working and your husband's working and you came from all these rock star jobs and you can't get a mortgage on your own, what does that say about your own credit, your own ability to save?
And this is the person who's becoming finance minister.
Anyways, let's take a quick look at the budget.
A huge increase in taxes.
I bet you didn't see that coming.
Capital gains tax.
Everyone on the left likes capital gains tax because it socks it to the capitalists.
It's a great idea until they all leave and go somewhere else where they can invest and take risks and make money and it won't be taken from them.
The carbon tax, of course, is being jacked up again.
They have an idea for a tax on vacant land.
Apparently, that's going to make people spend more money to buy houses.
I think that's the theory on it.
They say they want to help out millennials in Generation Z, so they're bringing in a vape tax.
I think most people using vapes are young kids trying to get off of cigarettes or even they're not be young kids.
They could be people of any age.
You may not like vapes.
They may not be cool.
They may not be aesthetic, but they're a way for people to get off of cigarettes taxing them.
It's only, of course, going to build up a black market.
But of course, the liberal thing is all about spending.
And this budget is nearly $53 billion more in spending than planned.
Of course, they take care of their base, increased spending on the CBC.
Of course, they're investing in anti-hate with over $1 billion in cumulative spending, a billion dollars for their anti-hate, which of course is their own form of hate.
They're already spending on the Online Harms Act, you know, Bill C-63.
It hasn't passed yet, but they're already budgeting for it.
That's how certain they are.
They're going to pass their censorship bill.
They have a billion in there for spending on students, including for housing.
That's a neat trick, given that about half of the students in this country are foreign, and they're getting help with housing.
It's sort of unusual that way.
In fact, this budget contemplates $1.1 billion for foreign asylum seekers.
We're actually going to spend $1.1 billion.
Gee, I wonder if that's going to attract even more migrants to our country.
They have a weird approach to housing.
Again, there's no one in Trudeau's cabinet who's actually ever done anything.
Trudeau is not used to working class people or even business people, let alone people with a trade.
Remember that phrase he used the other day?
I met with some overalled people.
They were wearing overalls.
A few years ago, I was in Helm in a classic steel plant.
I was meeting some of those overall folks who were proud to say that they were third and even fourth generation steel workers in Helmd.
So much for party and working people.
They don't know how housing is built.
They just know they want to do more of it.
So they announced that they're going to double the number of houses being built in this country, 4 million new houses.
How do you literally double the number of houses being built?
You can't do that.
There's not enough construction people.
That's just an insane idea.
Their aforementioned land tax.
They have this idea that they're going to turn post offices and national defense land into housing projects.
I don't think lack of land is the problem.
I really don't.
Canada is the second largest country in the world.
Now, I know a lot of that is the Arctic, but it's not land.
There's no shortage of land.
They say they're going to double housing bills, but I just don't know how.
I don't think they know how.
I think they just think if they announce it with great emphasis, it'll happen.
You know, I don't think this budget's going to move the needle on anything other than they're throwing money around for one last party for all their friends, the anti-hate industry, the CBC, foreign migrants, foreign students.
It's just really one last round of free drinks before the bar is shut down.
I don't think anyone who is hostile to them is even listening to them anymore at this point.
And it reminds me of this tweet by David Coleto, my favorite pollster.
He's with Abacus, which leans liberal, but I think David's a smart guy.
And he said this a few weeks ago.
So this was not about the budget.
He was talking about other liberal announcements.
But I think what he said applies today, too.
This is David Coletto.
He said, think about a situation in your own life when you've decided you don't like or trust someone.
How hard is it for that person to win you back?
That's what is happening with PM Trudeau at the moment.
People think a lot of the policies they are rolling out are good.
They just aren't going to vote for them again.
Now, I don't know if people think Trudeau's policies are good or bad.
I think most people aren't even listening to them.
And they're not analyzing them.
Like you're just going to wave a wand and an extra 2 million houses will magically appear because you're going to make some of them on post office land.
They're just making it up as they go.
But I think David Coletto is right.
No one likes Trudeau anymore.
No one trusts them anymore.
No one's listening to him anymore.
This budget was just about passing around the freebies before they're thrown out of office.
Stay with us.
More ahead.
Safety Commissioner's Concerns00:10:32
Question for social media companies.
What do you censor in the name of taste or obscenity or violence?
And I mentioned that because, of course, whenever there's a terrorist attack or, let's say, a mass shooter incident, on the one hand, everyone wants to know the news and they don't want to be told you can't handle the truth.
On the other hand, what is just titillating violence for its own sake?
What is something that should not be shown for reasons of age or taste or perhaps even turning a mass killer into a celebrity?
But I'll tell you where I come down on the subject.
I'm an adult and most social media apps have a minimum age cutoff.
You can't be on it if you're under 14 or 16, I suppose.
Of course, there's parental settings.
And where I come down is if I want to see the news, I want to see the news.
There is no one else I trust to see the news for me and to decide for me if I'm grown up enough to see it.
And I say this because the other day there was a stabbing attack motivated, it turns out, by Radical Islam, a stabbing attack on a Christian priest in Australia.
And of course, his religious ceremony was being live streamed.
And this is a shocking moment.
I'm going to warn you that this is a troubling sight to see, but that's what we're talking about here.
Take a look at this.
Well, that man was quickly overpowered and taken into custody.
Our contributor, Ian Miles Chong, who is very active on Twitter, was one of the people who tweeted that video out early.
And he tweeted it not to be salacious, but because it was a central piece of evidence in a story, like a prosecutor would put exhibit A to a jury.
Here's what's going on.
And that was fine under Twitter's rules, but it wasn't fine for Australia's new e-safety commissioner.
Yes, there is such a thing.
Joining us now is our friend Ian Maostrong to tell us what this e-safety commissioner did when Ian shared the news.
Ian, great to see you again.
Thanks for taking the time.
Likewise.
Thank you.
So the e-safety commissioner, her job, she's Julia Inman Grant.
She used to work for Twitter, so she has a bit of an ex grind with Elon Musk.
She doesn't like Twitter very much or X these days.
And she is claiming that X is a hotbed of extremist propaganda, disinformation, so on and so forth.
Like we see this narrative being told day after day from every single person just like her, right?
You had the Disinformation Governance Board in America.
That's been shut down.
But unfortunately, Australia has her.
And she wants me and perhaps a few other people to take down the video of the stabbing as well as the previous stabbing in Sydney that claimed the lives of six people.
Now, there's nothing in the previous video that even shows any stabbings.
It simply shows police attending to the victims.
And she wants us to take it down.
Why?
Because it goes against the narrative that Sydney's a peaceful place.
Right.
I forgot about that other stabbing as well.
Sydney and Australia has had a lot of terrorizing moments.
Now, I want to check with you because I follow you on Twitter closely, of course, but the particular tweets that this e-safety commissioner was complaining about, you just showed the original images.
You didn't lie about them.
I don't even think you had a lot of commentary.
You were just describing them like a photo caption might describe a photo.
Was there anything in particular that seemed to stick in the craw of this e-safety commissioner other than, like you say, it went against the narrative.
He was someone who apparently, it sounds like he shouted, Allah Akbar when he stabbed this priest.
And then that other stabbing incident in the mall.
I think you just described them.
Was there something in particular that bothered this lady?
I don't know because when I posted those videos, like for instance, with the stabbing the church, I didn't even catch what he said.
I have no idea what he said.
And while some people may suggest that he said Allah Akbar, I don't know for sure.
Right.
I wasn't there, obviously.
Right.
And I simply posted it as is because that's what I saw on the live stream.
That's what many people saw on the live stream.
Millions of people tune in.
It is Mar Mari Emmanuel, and he's extremely popular.
So, you know, her trying to take down these videos, it's a bit like putting the toothpaste back in the tube.
It's not going to work.
Right.
I guess this e-safety commissioner, because she came from Twitter before the Elon Musk free speech era, she's used to being your babysitter, your minder, your governess.
And if I was a child, I suppose I would have to yield to the judgment of a babysitter.
But I'm a man and I'm interested in the news and I can choose.
And maybe there's a setting on Twitter.
There is, in fact.
You can have it use AI to screen out adult images or not.
Google calls it safe search, et cetera.
All the apps have it.
It irks me that she wants to be my nanny.
I got a question for you.
Would you have heard about this complaint had Twitter not disclosed it to you?
Like you didn't receive any inquiry directly from this net nanny, did you?
None whatsoever.
This woke commissar simply lodged a complaint with Twitter, sorry, X, and claimed that I was violating the laws of Australia.
No details were given.
X is, you know, they're extremely transparent and they didn't provide me any details of this.
So she simply took, you know, action and tried to take these videos down.
Now, keep in mind, I'm not a citizen of Australia.
She has no jurisdiction over me, nor does she have any jurisdiction over X for that matter.
And yet she somehow sees fit to try to remove a bit of news that is not to her liking.
And now keep in mind, the video, when it was posted, it was like I personally flagged it as sensitive.
So you do have to toggle the safety thing to turn it off and actually see it.
So you yourself took steps to telegraph to viewers, this is sensitive.
So you actually did give a sort of viewers guidance, viewer discretion advice.
I didn't know you did that.
Well, that shows that you were being very thoughtful about it.
You know, you mentioned a moment ago that this sensor does not have jurisdiction over you.
I think that's true.
But you said she doesn't have jurisdiction over Twitter or X.
I don't know if that's true because, of course, every jurisdiction Twitter operates, X operates, I keep saying Twitter because it'll take me another five years to get the new terminology.
They have to abide by the laws in which they're active.
We've recently seen how Brazil has tried to twist their arm to get them to censor political enemies of the regime or something.
It's quite shocking.
Theoretically, if this censor had legal authority, she could put some sort of ban on Twitter, a fine on Twitter, even do what Brazil looks like it might do, which is ban Twitter.
Um, but that raises another question: what exactly are her powers?
What exactly is the law?
And frankly, how dare she have a sneak attack on you without even reaching out to you?
Those are questions I think that we should probably try and find answers to in the days ahead.
Like, is she just a complainer?
Does she have any bite as well as the bark?
I don't know, but I don't know.
I think she has the ability to make suggestions to the government to take action, but I don't think she has any direct powers.
You know, it would be interesting to see who.
I wonder what one of the things that gets me about this, Ian, is it was a sneak attack on you, if you know what I mean.
You didn't hear about it from her, you didn't get a copy of it from her, you heard about it because Twitter disclosed it to you.
How many other complaints has she filed?
Are they always disclosed?
Who does she choose to go after?
Is she partisan and biased?
I bet she is.
I bet she leans one way, as most of these censors do.
It just, I find it irritating that you have these sneaky, secret censors, and you only heard about it because Twitter told you about it.
I find this troubling because who knows?
We don't know what we don't know, right?
It's like the dog.
Like what in Brazil?
Right in Brazil, they are censoring users without telling them, and they're even threatening X over there to, if you know, if they were to disclose to their users why they were censored, X could get in trouble for that.
So that's a major issue.
And, you know, that's just one country.
I mean, is this going on in Australia?
What about other countries as well?
We have no idea.
We have no way of knowing, at least not yet.
And I think we need to be asking these questions directly to these people.
I think the E-Safety Commissioner has been in Australia for a while.
New Zealand, hopefully, it's been put on hold since Jacinda Ardern's party was turfed.
But all these countries seem to be doing it once.
My theory is that they're doing it in 2024 because a big, important U.S. election is coming.
So they want to put the screws on all the social media companies.
When I was in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum, the two names I heard the most were Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
They want to stop Trump, and Elon Musk is one of their problems because he's not playing along with their censorship plans.
I think this wave of censorship, although it was targeting you this week, I think their larger target is the U.S. election.
Wave Of Censorship00:08:13
Yeah, I think you may be right.
Donald Trump represents a threat to all of their interests.
The moment he's elected, and I hope he will be, we are going to see the rise of nationalism worldwide.
I mean, we've seen this with Argentina, we see it with El Salvador, with Hungary, and a few other countries.
And they don't want this to happen.
I mean, there have been many exposés recently showing that members of the European Union have been using their intelligence agencies to suppress other political parties, particularly the AFD in Germany, for example.
They used it against them.
Right.
Well, this is very interesting.
Listen, keep us posted.
And of course, you're a rebel contributor, and we like to defend the free speech of our journalists.
So right now, I would say this is, they didn't have a direct hit on you.
In fact, it was like a warning shot.
Twitter's the one that gave you the warning.
If this gets darker or worse, let us know because we do have a great lawyer in Australia.
We've gotten to know him because he's defended our guy down there, Abi Yamini, so many times.
So keep us posted.
And for now, take it as a feather in your hat that you irritated a censor.
That's got to be a good sign.
Yes, it is.
It means I'm over the target.
I'm doing the right thing.
And I'm going to keep doing the right thing.
They can't silence me.
Right on.
Ian, great to see you.
Thanks for taking the time.
Absolutely.
That's Ian Miles Chong, a Rebel News contributor.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Hey, instead of letters today, let me show you a strange thing that happened not too far from our Rebel World Headquarters.
I don't know, maybe it's not that important, but I think it's a sign of the times that racist graffiti and vandalism is just standard fare.
Take a look at this video I filmed earlier today.
Ezra Levant here for Rebel News.
I'm standing in Toronto on Dufferin Street.
It's an interesting neighborhood.
Lots of Italian and Portuguese people, but also the Jewish community to the east of here.
The local member of the provincial parliament is Robin Martin, MPP.
You can see her address here on Dufferin Street.
You can also see some police.
One, two, three police cars.
I think there's been about four police here because Robin Martin's office has been vandalized, graffitied, and otherwise attacked by the Hamas street gangs.
Here, let's take a look around.
Officer, excuse me, officer, how you doing?
I'm Ezra Levant from Rebel News, and I heard that there was some anti-Semitic vandalism.
Can you tell us when this was discovered?
The complainant found it this morning.
And do you think it happened overnight?
Well, so we're still investigating that this time we don't have a lot of information.
Fair enough.
And may I, I don't want to get in your way, but I wouldn't mind knocking on the door to see if I could talk to someone.
Is that okay?
Right now, this part is a crime scene, but please don't go inside.
Okay, I won't go inside.
So what we just heard is that it's an active crime scene, according to that officer.
You can see the word killed by Israel and a lot of pictures in the style of the posters that the Jewish community has put up of the kidnapped victims of Hamas.
You can see that red paint, I presume symbolizing blood, is splashed out front.
Shame on Robin, genocide supporter.
She has a very low profile, as frankly, all MPPs have.
The officer just telling me it's an active crime scene.
They don't have any tape up, but that it's still being investigated.
I'm sure that's true.
I'm not sure what they could find.
Perhaps there is fingerprints on it.
I'm not sure.
There may be some surveillance cameras.
I see that there is a ring door buzzer surveillance system at the door there.
Perhaps if you know the ring system, it's motion detected as well as doorbell activated.
So it looks like there's at least one surveillance camera that may have caught the perpetrator.
As I was saying before, the officer came up to me.
Robin Martin, like all of Doug Ford's MPPs, has kept a very low profile during the last six months of Hamas hate marches, anti-Semitism, hate speech, etc.
Oh, it looks like the cops are going.
Let's turn our camera around.
Looks like some more officers have arrived.
I think we're pretty fresh here on the scene, which is slightly confusing to me because it's about 12.30 in the afternoon.
And I guess the politician's office doesn't really start at the crack of dawn if police were only notified now.
As I was saying before I interrupted myself, the provincial government has a police force, the OPP, the Ontario Provincial Police, and as well, they master the prosecutors in Ontario.
You have the Toronto Police, you have the Ontario Provincial Police, you have the RCMP.
But typically, when they charge someone with a crime, it's the provincial prosecutors who report to the Ontario Attorney General who prosecute them.
And so the lenience we've seen towards the Hamas hate marches, the ubiquity of the vandalism, the mischief, the graffiti, the anti-Semitic chants, the targeting of Jewish MPPs, the targeting of Jewish schools and synagogues.
The person who has been declining to prosecute is Doug Ford.
And ironically, Robin Martin, MPP, who has not said a word about the hate marches, who won't lift a finger to stop them, is now a victim of them.
There's some poetry there, although it's dark poetry.
Every single day in Doug Ford's Ontario, laws are being broken.
People chant their support for terrorist groups against the criminal code.
People fly the flags of terrorist groups against the criminal code.
People beset Jewish synagogues and disturb them against Section 1762 of the criminal code.
We've seen people blocking streets, blocking entire Jewish neighborhoods against the criminal code.
The police have typically been ordered to stand down.
That's a decision by Toronto's communist mayor, Olivia Chow.
But the decision not to prosecute these Hamas hate marches, that's 100% on Doug Ford.
And Robin Martin's office, which is vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti, don't expect her to raise a finger.
If she didn't care for you, do you think she'll care for herself?
I doubt it.
On the streets of Toronto, this is Ezra Levant.
Yeah, I think that if this were anti-black racism against a black MPP, it would be the top of the news.
But it's just anti-Semitic racism.
And we know we're not supposed to criticize those folks because they're Trudeau's voter base.
So I don't think that'll make even the Toronto Star basic news.
I think it's the new normal in Canada now is pro-Hamas hate marches, anti-Semitic graffiti and vandalism.
The police don't care.
I mean, they show up and write up a few reports, but there won't be any arrests.