Ezra Levant slams RCMP Commissioner Mike Duem’s push for laws targeting Trudeau’s critics, calling it a crackdown on dissent—existing threats and harassment statutes already cover violent acts. Levant mocks "civility" enforcement while citing Trudeau’s no-fly list and housing failures as unchecked government overreach, questioning if threats like those against MP Pam Damoff are crimes or just political backlash. He ties this to Canada’s 80 diploma mills in Brampton, foreign influence (China’s police stations, Iran’s alleged Hamas ties), and U.S. shifts like Biden’s EV subsidies and tariffs, arguing climate policies mask economic protectionism. Levant hopes Poilievre’s rise could curb Canada’s overreach but warns protests like university encampments reveal systemic political cowardice. [Automatically generated summary]
This crazy comments by Mike Duam, the new leader of the RCMP, handpicked by Justin Trudeau, just frankly makes Brenda lucky look non-partisan.
Really, really bad stuff.
I want to take you through it.
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All right, here's today's show.
Tonight, the RCMP looks at the crime wave in Canada and thinks, we need to crack down on Trudeau's political critics.
It's May 16th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious thug.
There's a massive crime wave in Canada of all sorts, especially dramatic, violent crime.
I mean, in Toronto and other big cities, car robberies aren't just car robberies anymore.
They're home invasions to get the key fobs to rob the cars.
And you remember that clip about a month or two ago of a Toronto cop saying, leave your keys near the front door so these home invaders get what they want easily.
That was his crime fighting advice.
Remember that insane clip?
To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your fobs at your front door.
Because they're breaking into your home to steal your car.
They don't want anything else.
A lot of them that they're arresting have guns on them and they're not toy guns.
They're real guns.
They're loaded.
And that's just now considered regular, normal, background crime.
You have shocking crimes like the $20 million gold ice and just every species of crime is higher.
It's almost like riding the subway in Toronto is like riding the subway in New York City now.
Very dangerous.
It's terrible in big cities.
But everywhere, I mean, what even is crime in the mind of the liberals?
And I say this because something that we regarded as a low-rung crime that would get you climbing up the ladder of criminality, namely using hard drugs, the government now has normalized and legalized that.
In fact, the disgraceful cabinet minister Yaara Sachs is basically Trudeau's drug pusher trying to get hard drugs out on the streets to the addicts.
They want to continue that, so they don't even regard that as crime.
Trudeau was very blunt when he ended Stephen Harper's mandatory minimum sentences.
And that goes to my point of I don't think Trudeau thinks crimes are crimes.
He's like those George Soros DAs in the United States that we don't hold people on bail, don't pursue charges against left-wing criminals.
And when I say left-wing criminals, there is a political crime wave too, of course.
You recently saw that the ArriveCan app, really an $80,000 app that the government was billed more than $60 million for.
Turns out the schemers behind that actually have fleeced the taxpayers for a billion dollars.
There is so much corruption.
And you can't put it all around Trudeau, but he certainly sets the moral standard.
I saw a news story the other day about 80, 80, 80 fake colleges in the city of Brampton.
Brampton is like a suburb of Toronto.
The idea that there are 80 colleges in Brampton is obviously a lie.
They're fake.
Their diploma mills, you pay them 10 grand or whatever, and they give you a fake diploma.
Why would they do that?
Who would buy that?
Well, foreign students on a student visa pay money to these fake diploma mills to get over to Canada.
That's a crime wave that both the provincial and federal governments are clearly party to.
Then there's the foreign meddling in Canada, China including its police stations, which is just so bizarre.
Iran fomenting these Hamas protests.
And I list these things for you because my question is, what's the priority for police, especially for a national police force like the RCMP?
What's the top priority?
What would you say is the top priority for fighting crime in Canada?
I have my opinions.
What's yours?
Well, let me tell you what the RCMP's priority is.
It's a story in Canadian press published by the CBC.
Here's the headline.
Politicians keep getting more threats.
The head of the RCMP says new tools might be needed to protect them.
Intelligence report says threats are becoming increasingly normalized.
Now, stop right there for a second.
What kind of threats do you think they mean?
Police, intelligence, threats.
Those are the words they're using.
You probably think they mean death threats or threats of violence, right?
Police, intelligence, threats.
No, no, no, no.
Because these aren't real cops you're hearing from now.
This is Trudeau's hyper-partisan RCMP.
Here's the story.
Let me show you how deceptive the headline is.
RCMP Commissioner Mike Duem says he wants the government to look at drafting a new law that would make it easier for police to pursue charges against people who threaten elected officials.
Okay.
Threatening elected public officials sounds bad.
So far, we're all in agreement.
Fortunately, we have several laws, including the following.
I'm just going to read to you from the criminal code.
Don't click away.
I want you to read this because it's important.
It's relevant to what comes later.
This is in our criminal code right now.
Section 264, it's called uttering threats.
Did you know this is in our criminal code?
I bet you did, even if you didn't know the section.
Of course, uttering threats is a crime.
Let me read it to you.
Everyone who commits an offense who, in any manner, knowingly utters, conveys, or causes any person to receive a threat to cause death or bodily harm to any person, to burn, destroy, or damage real or personal property, or to kill, poison, or injure an animal or bird that is the property of any person.
Isn't that interesting?
So that's a crime right now, uttering threats.
It's a crime, and it's pretty broad.
It even covers threats against property and critters.
Let me read the next section for you.
This is section 51 of the criminal code.
I'm almost done.
Don't click away.
Everyone who does an act of violence in order to intimidate parliament or the legislature of a province is guilty of an indictable offense and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 14 years.
So don't take on parliament.
They have a special protection.
And then here's the law that I think is probably the most applicable.
It's the law against harassment, which covers things like stalking.
I'll read it to you also.
You're getting smart on the criminal code today.
Criminal harassment, section 264.
Person shall, without lawful authority and knowing that another person is harassed or recklessly as to whether the other person is harassed, engaged in conduct referred to in subsection two that causes that other person reasonably, in all the circumstances, to fear for their safety or the safety of anyone known to them.
And here's the list of prohibited conduct.
The conduct mentioned in subsection one consists of repeatedly following from place to place, the other person or anyone known to them, repeatedly communicating with, either directly or indirectly, the other person or anyone known to them,
besetting or watching the dwelling house or place where the other person or anyone known to them resides, works, carries on business or happens to be, or engaging in threatening conduct directed at the other person or any member of their family.
That's the law against harassment.
That's pretty big, isn't it?
I'd say it's much more expansive than uttering threats or besetting a parliament.
Now, I'm going to keep reading this news story, but I wanted to show you those laws that are on the books right now.
Let me keep reading because if you were to read that CBC story, you'd be sort of worried, right?
Here, let me read.
The Mounties are seeing an increase in invective directed at politicians, including comments from the same individuals on multiple occasions, Duem said in an interview.
Hmm.
Comments, invective?
I know what comments are.
They're any chatter.
Invective is sort of negative comments.
But weren't we talking about real threats?
Weren't we talking about police stuff instead of just mean comments?
So I thought this was about violence and protecting the lives of MPs.
It's just about invective?
Let me keep reading.
However, often the behavior does not meet the criminal code threshold for laying a charge of uttering threats.
Quote, so that's sometimes a challenge, Duem said.
But are there other tools that we can use?
Is there anything else that we could add to the criminal code that can address the situation?
Hang on.
So they're not threats, not under the criminal code.
They're not crimes.
I read to you three sections, including harassment, which is pretty broad.
I mean, there's a lot of power in the laws I just read to you, but Trudeau's hand-picked top cop, he's not interested in that.
He wants something more.
And weirdly, he's lobbying Parliament for that.
Is that his job to have non-crimes added to his to-do list?
I'll keep reading.
Duem said that RCMP hopes to work with Public Safety Canada and the Department of Justice on the possibility of a new provision to address the phenomenon.
Quote, it'd be nice to see if we could look at that, he said.
Quote, people feel more free to express what they really think, which is a good thing, but it has to be done in a civil way.
Every elected official has a right to feel secure in doing their job, unquote.
But hang on, is that actually true?
Remember what Salman Rushdie said about the butt brigade?
Oh, I believe in free speech, but you have to be civil, but politicians can't feel bad.
Here's what Salmon Rushdie said about people who said, I believe in freedom, but take a look.
moment somebody says, yes, I believe in free speech, but I stop listening.
You know, I believe in free speech, but people should behave themselves.
I believe in free speech, but we shouldn't upset anybody.
I believe in free speech, but let's not go too far.
The point about it is the moment you limit free speech, it's not free speech.
The point about it is that it's free.
So Canada's head of the RCMP, Hanbig Padrudeau, is saying free speech, but, but you have to criticize your politicians in a civil way.
It has to be done in a non-violent way.
I agree with that.
But a civil way is in we have to be polite.
We have to have the right tone.
Is that the new rule that a cop with a gun is going to enforce?
Really?
Do Trudeau and his MPs, do they have to be civil back to us?
Because that's actually what's of a greater concern to me.
Or can they baselessly call us racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic, or whatever else they say all the time?
You're a fringe minority.
Do you even have rights?
All the things he says.
And that's just the words from Trudeau and his cronies.
What about when Trudeau actually does outrageous things to us?
Like, for example, when he set up his bigoted, unscientific no-fly list for people who weren't jabbed, it just takes away our civil liberties or just even raises our taxes in a way that destroys businesses and jobs, the crime waves unchecked, so he can actually do terrible things to us, make housing unaffordable to young people, make the country's quality of life tank.
But we have to be civil.
Is that what the top cop is saying?
Let me keep reading.
Duem's comments come amid growing concerns about the safety of politicians.
Oh, really?
We were talking about mean words and being civil.
What's that got to do with safety?
I'll read some more.
MPs have been followed on the street and subjected to death threats.
The escalation has prompted efforts to bolster protection and security measures.
Okay, followed on the street.
That could be the stalking thing we read.
And death threats, what we just read, the uttering threats part.
So those are covered by the laws that I read in detail a moment ago.
Why would we need new laws?
Those are already covered in the criminal code.
Growing Concerns About Politician Safety00:04:31
Harassment, threats.
Were the so-called cases referred to there, first of all, did they actually happen?
And second of all, were the people who did them, were they charged with crimes?
If not, why not?
Is this story just an urban legend told by a cop designed to whip up new censorship laws?
Hey, you be civil in the way you disagree with Trudeau.
You know, there's a lot of FUCK Trudeau flags out there.
I see them everywhere.
That's how people feel.
You don't think those are going to be now people arrested for them or questioned for them?
Let me read a little bit more.
Ontario Liberal MP Pam Damoff recently announced she would not run in the next election, saying the threats and misogyny she has experienced made her fearful of going out in public.
Okay, well, which is it?
A threat or misogyny?
Or is it just the fact that everyone hates the liberals, according to polls?
A threat sounds like, I'm going to kill you.
That's what a threat sounds like.
Now, obviously, we don't want that.
I don't want that.
I support our laws against that.
I assume that such a person was charged.
Misogyny means people who don't like women.
Now, that is very rude, but that's not a crime yet.
Duem said the RCMP regularly communicates with other police forces about threats to politicians.
Okay, I think that's a good idea.
In addition, the Mounties have a liaison team that keeps in touch with federal ministerial offices about daily security needs, and the force works closely with the House of Commons sergeant-at-arms concerning protection of MPs.
This is all a good idea.
The force will sometimes turn to, quote, disruption measures with officers knocking on the door of someone who has made a concerning comment to have a chat with them, DuM said.
Okay, well, concerning comment in what way?
If they're making a threat, then absolutely go visit them.
But if they're being a political critic, even rude, are the police going door to door watching what you say on Facebook or Twitter?
RCMP behavioral science specialists, oh brother, also look at incoming cases.
And the force has noticed that disturbing comments sometimes come from people known to the force from earlier incidents, he said.
Okay, but again, is it a threat?
Or is it, what did they just say?
Made a concerning comment and a disturbing comment.
I'm sure half of what I say here is considered concerning or disturbing to the liberals.
So is it a threat?
Is it criminal harassment?
Because I know what those are because I just read the law to you.
I know what those mean, but what's this cop talking about?
If we have a cop calling for new laws, it's obvious that he's not talking about the laws we have on the books.
What's a disturbing comment?
Is he the decider of that?
What's a civil comment?
Is he the decider of what's civil or uncivil?
Could you imagine this hand-picked Trudeau cop enforcing that?
An intelligence report released in March said threats against politicians had become, quote, increasingly normalized, unquote, due to extremist narratives prompted by personal grievances and fueled by misinformation or deliberate lies.
Oh my God, I'm dizzy.
What a sentence that is.
It's like you jam-packed every woke phrase in there.
Is it a threat?
Or is it an extremist narrative?
What's that?
Or is it a personal grievance?
Or is it information or a lie?
And is any of that criminal?
What an incredible sentence that is.
I mean, you really go on the whole spectrum there from I will kill you to misinformation.
Where was the Wuhan virus from?
The cop just wants the right to regulate it all.
The cops want to ban it all.
Let me read some more.
Ensuring that social media platforms are enforcing terms of service that will minimize the sense of violence is important, said Chris Danov, assistant director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia.
The recently introduced federal online harms bill is one way of helping establish standards around expectations of such platforms for addressing harassment, threats, and hate speech, he said.
Okay, now I get it.
Now I get it.
Now I understand what this is all about.
The RCMP is now lobbying for hate speech laws.
They're so excited they can taste it.
Understanding Online Harms00:03:32
That's what this is all about, isn't it?
Almost done.
Tanov added, it is important for party leaders and staff to make it clear to supporters that it's inappropriate and undemocratic for them to threaten or harass opposing political parties online.
Got it.
So a government-funded professor, oh, and he's an expert guy, just ask him, is saying that opposition parties have to tell Canadians, including their own members, to stop being rude to Justin Trudeau.
You know, the only thing more gross than this partisan police chief who wants to jail you for being uncivil is the state broadcaster who is lusting for a new era of jailing peaceful opponents.
Stay with us for more.
Well, we're focused a lot on these Hamas encampments in Canada for a lot of reasons.
They're shocking when you think about what they're saying and what they're doing and the police response and the political response, absolutely bizarre.
But that's the new normal.
I mean, how many times can a politician say, that's not who we are when it is, in fact, exactly who we are?
I don't know if you saw this out of Fredericton, New Brunswick.
A Jewish kid, 14 years old, absolutely beat up by a Muslim kid because.
And it's all caught on tape and there's grown-ups there who are just fine with it.
Folks, this is who we are.
Take a look.
That's a chicken.
That's the chicken.
I'm so shocked.
Oh yeah.
Well, this can't be within the religion guidelines, but that's not.
Oh, that's her.
I didn't know that was her.
That's right.
That's the kid getting beat.
Okay, that's enough.
That's enough.
Why you assaulted her?
Yo, give her the permission to play with me!
No, I did not.
Why'd you give yourself permission to take it?
Yeah, I mean, who cares, right?
That's just how it is.
I want to take a break from that story, even though we've been covering it intensely, because there are other things that affect our world.
And in fact, when I think of is there any light at the end of the tunnel here, I come to political answers, both in the case of Canada.
I hope that if Pierre Polyev wins the election, he'll set a moral example and a legal example to the contrary.
And I think there's some reason to expect that.
He's made a lot of very powerful statements.
And I think the greatest change, not just for America and the world, but for Canada too, would be if the United States had a change in government this November when they have their quadrennial presidential vote.
High Inflation, Low Spirits00:04:17
And so we go to our friend Joel Pollock, who, besides being an expert in the Israel war, as you know, for years, he's covered the Democratic Party, even though he himself is Republican in his leanings.
Joel joins us now via Skype from the Los Angeles area.
Joel, great to see you again.
Good to be with you again, Ezra.
Thanks.
I want to take a break from talking about Israel and Hamas encampments and college violence, even though it's very important to cover, because I want to talk about Donald Trump.
I mean, he's embroiled in lawfare litigation in New York City, but that doesn't seem to stop his popularity.
In fact, the latest series of polls show that he is dominating in the battleground states.
What can you tell us about that?
People are very dissatisfied with the leadership of Joe Biden.
And inflation, while it has come down, is still high relative to where it is normally.
And increasingly, the American dream, the middle-class lifestyle, is too expensive for middle-class families to afford.
The cost of housing in particular is a constant preoccupation with American voters.
It's nice if you already own a home and you've seen the value of your home go up, but the people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who are trying to buy their first homes can't do so because the price has simply risen and the interest rates are too high to try to bring inflation back down.
So Biden is seen as unable to lead the United States out of this mess.
People remember that there was little to no inflation when Donald Trump was president.
Biden is now going around trying to claim that inflation was 9% when he took office.
It was, in fact, just over 1%, between 1% and 2%.
It only took off after Biden spent trillions of dollars in excess of what had already been spent during the pandemic.
So people have a sense that Biden doesn't know where to lead the country or how.
You have something in economics called animal spirits.
And this refers in John Keynes's explanation to the simple attitude or posture of the economy.
If people are excited about economic growth, if people are willing to take risks and invest in the future, the animal spirits are very positive and they move things in a positive direction.
And Donald Trump is very good at animating that.
He is prone to hyperbole in many areas of his political and personal life, but that hyperbole actually helps Americans think beyond the present and the difficult circumstances we may face and look toward the future.
Biden is incapable of mustering that kind of courage, that kind of confidence among the American people.
So even though unemployment is fairly low, which is usually an indicator that the economy is doing well, the persistently high levels of inflation plus the lack of leadership from the White House have convinced many Americans that the economy is very poor.
And therefore, Biden is losing to Donald Trump in almost all of the swing states that are going to be hotly contested between the two candidates in the November election.
We're watching that closely.
And of course, we have a new voting system that is now institutionalized in this country called Vote by Mail.
It's considered prone to fraud, and that's why nobody else does it in the world, really.
But we're going to see if a surge for Donald Trump and the Republicans in November can make its way through this new system or whether Democrats will be able to manipulate the system and take advantage of the system in a way that keeps Trump out of office.
Yeah, I'm worried about that.
You mentioned the cost of living.
And Joel, I'm sympathetic because we have the same problem in Canada.
I don't know if you've ever looked at the relative cost of housing in the States versus Canada.
It's actually twice as expensive in Canada.
It's twice as bad.
However bad it is in America, double that.
It's just shocking.
In fact, one of the very successful ads that our conservative opposition leader has run is comparing houses on the Canada and U.S. border, just a few miles away from each other, comparable houses.
Fetterman's Economic Appeal00:14:53
They really are half price in America.
So you can imagine how bad it is here.
The reason I tell you that is because those 20, 30, and 40-something voters you were talking about, the ones who are having trouble buying a house, starting a family, et cetera, they support the Conservative Party very strongly.
In fact, millennials are one of the strongest demographics for the conservative opposition.
I contrast that to the United Kingdom, where the youngest voters, I saw a YouGov poll, that only 1% of young Brits intend to vote conservative.
1%.
What is it like in America?
Are young Americans open to voting Republican, or is it still cool to vote for the party of AOC and radical chic?
I do think that Biden will still win the youth vote, so to speak, but he is not doing as well as a typical Democratic candidate would do among younger voters.
And here, the crisis in the Middle East has really hurt him because even though Americans support Israel over Hamas, 80% to 20%, the percentage is much narrower among younger voters.
Younger voters don't understand the history of the Middle East.
They don't understand the Holocaust.
They don't understand anti-Semitism.
They are taken up by the movement to start all these encampments and to fight for a free Palestine.
Many can't find Palestine on the map.
There are all sorts of hilarious videos of protesters being interviewed about what from the river to the sea actually means, which river and which sea, and often they don't know.
But nevertheless, they're caught up in the movement, caught up in the moment.
Just as in the George Floyd Black Lives Matter protest of 2020, it's a moment when the far left and young people are asserting their primacy within the Democratic Party.
And Biden is not responding to that pressure in anything like a constructive way or in any way that can reach out to those people and satisfy their concerns.
Maybe that has to do with the concerns they're expressing, which are anti-Semitic and genocidal.
He can't really go there, but he is trying to pressure Israel.
And it's not working to persuade young voters to come back to him.
So all of the momentum is against him.
So he'll probably still win the youth vote, but he's losing a lot of them.
And interestingly, in this election, there's no Bernie Sanders-type candidate.
The past two presidential election cycles on the Democratic side have seen a left-wing candidate or candidates who are the alternatives to the mainstream candidate.
Finally, in 2020, it all coalesced around Joe Biden because he was the moderate out of a field of 20 left-wing candidates, even though he himself began to adopt more and more left-wing positions.
But this time, there's no Bernie Sanders running.
And on this crucial issue of the Middle East, the one prominent candidate to the left of Joe Biden, who's Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is actually pro-Israel.
And he's not just pro-Israel, but very articulate about why he's pro-Israel.
His father, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated by a Palestinian, and he believes that Israel has the right to defend itself.
All of those positions make it more difficult for those voters who are most energized about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to find Kennedy to be a left-wing alternative to Joe Biden.
There are left-wing candidates to the left of Kennedy, even like Cornell West and Jill Stein, who have more of the pro-Palestinian and sometimes even pro-Hamas perspective, but they're not seen as viable.
So there really is no alternative to the left.
And when that happens, when voters on the left and young voters feel that they don't have an alternative within the Democratic Party, or at least within the broad spectrum of left-of-center politics, they tend to take to the streets.
Again, the George Floyd example tells us we're experiencing something very similar with these encampments.
And so Biden is losing momentum, losing strength among a key voter bloc.
He's also losing support from black voters, Hispanic voters.
Again, these aren't voting blocks Trump will win necessarily, but Biden can't afford to lose too many of those voters if he wants to hold on to the White House.
You know, I remember when the candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, Fetterman is his name, had a stroke and he participated in debate with the aid of a computer device.
And his wife often spoke for him.
And it was stunning to me that someone who had a cognitive damage like that could beat a Republican, Dr. Oz, if I recall, was a Republican candidate.
And I was sort of shocked.
And I thought, imagine how bad the Republicans were to lose to John Fetterman.
But he apparently is regaining his, you know, has recovered from the stroke.
And astonishingly, it seems like his ideological compass has changed as he gets his cognitive abilities back.
And he's denouncing woke.
Sorry, go ahead.
As he regains brain function, he becomes more conservative.
I'm not even kidding.
I mean, he's very pro-Israel, anti-Hamas.
He denounces wokeism in blunt language that, you know, the late Rush Limbaugh might have used.
I just find, I know this is apropos of nothing because he's not running on a national ticket, but it's one of the most surprising developments, I think, of the last six months is seeing Senator John Fetterman, a man who I personally mocked, not because I was happy that he was ill, but I couldn't believe someone who was so disabled could beat in an election the leading Republican.
I just found the whole thing astonishing.
And as he has recovered, he's become conservative.
What on earth is going on there?
If you want to understand John Fetterman, you should look at the governor of Pennsylvania, the same state that Fetterman represents, Governor Josh Shapiro.
I was very critical of Josh Shapiro when he was running for governor in 2020, but he is also moving to the center, almost to the center right on some issues.
And that's because Fetterman and Shapiro have the same read of their state.
Pennsylvania is a big state.
It's got two major metropolitan areas on either side of the Appalachians, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
And it's diverse and so forth.
But it really is a swing state and it's a working class state in a big way.
And what you're seeing with both Fetterman and Shapiro is that they're reading the voters in their own state.
And Shapiro is even saying, look, I'm up for re-election.
I understand if you want to vote for Trump.
I understand where you're coming from, but you should also vote for me.
He's actually encouraging people to split their tickets.
So both Fetterman and Shapiro understand that Biden's policies are unpopular in Pennsylvania, not just on the Middle East, but also his policies against the fossil fuel industry.
Because remember, Pennsylvania has the shale oil boom, has natural gas and fracking, which New York doesn't have, even though they have the same rock formation, same geology.
But Pennsylvania allowed oil and gas exploration.
That's a big job creator in Pennsylvania.
They're mad that Joe Biden is clamping down on the fossil fuel industry.
They're upset about the southern border, which is sending migrants to these big cities in Pennsylvania before locals have had their key needs addressed.
So they're reading the room and they're saying, you know what?
These progressive ideologies and policies, they're not what our voters want to hear.
So Fetterman and Shapiro are reflecting the electorate in a very skillful way.
They're both skilled politicians.
And, you know, we joke about it.
Perhaps we shouldn't, but it is true that Fetterman has recovered his mental abilities for the most part.
He still has some difficulty speaking, but you can see that he's very sure about what he's saying.
And he has been adamantly pro-Israel and pro-border security as well.
Those are two issues on which the center and the right have clearly distinguished themselves from the far left, which is running the country.
It really is astonishing.
I want to ask you about one more thing, and you brought it up.
I've had the pleasure of visiting Washington County, Pennsylvania several times, and that really is the fracking miracle.
All these jobs that were going away as the steel and the coal jobs left, fracking shale, gas in particular, some oil too.
It was a miracle that replaced a quarter million jobs and just in the nick of time.
And that Washington County was really what tipped things for Trump in 2016.
It had been a deeply blue county two elections before, and people didn't want to mess with fracking.
It's where the job, great jobs came from, and what they called mailbox money, because of course in the United States, it's supposed to be in Canada.
Here in Canada, the king owns your subsurface rights.
So an oil or gas company drilling for oil doesn't have to negotiate with the landowner.
In Pennsylvania, you have to negotiate with them and cut them a check.
So it was just such a mere economic miracle.
And I can understand why neither party wants to kill the goose that lays a golden egg.
But here in Canada, Trudeau and his environment minister are obsessed with the carbon tax, which they keep raising every year.
Now they have a registry on plastics that they're talking about.
They've gone absolutely nuts on the eco-side.
Has any of that global warming, climate change, Kyoto Protocol, Paris Agreement stuff, is that even talked about in America anymore?
I remember there was this dramatic moment when Biden and Trump were debating in 2020, and Biden admitted he was going to really beat up the oil and gas industry.
And Trump sort of said, uh-huh, there it is.
I got you.
Did Biden do that?
And is he going into 2024 campaigning against oil and gas and for global warming?
Biden has done that to some extent, but he needs the energy boom in the United States to keep unemployment low and to keep economic growth high.
So they've taken their foot off the accelerator as far as that goes.
And what they've done instead is they've tried to subsidize the electric vehicle industry, which is failing in many regards.
Rental car companies are dumping the electric vehicle fleets that they bought with the encouragement of the administration because consumers don't want to drive them.
And there's a huge amount of range anxiety.
You know, when you get into an electric vehicle for the first time, you start to panic about finding somewhere to charge it and how it works.
Some of that is just a learning curve, and it would take some additional infrastructure to build out and people would feel better about it.
But because unlike Trump, who's a builder who cuts through red tape to get things done, Biden has delegated all of the planning around this electric vehicle charging network he's supposed to be building with the money from the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.
He's delegated all of that to local governments and they're putting it through all their environmental assessments.
All the red tape has come back.
So they've only built a few of these things in two years after billions of dollars were allocated.
And so you just don't have the system.
So people don't want these electric vehicles.
So Biden is now reduced to Trump's policy of tariffs on China to keep out the Chinese cheap electric vehicles that are about to be produced in China and possibly in Mexico and simply driven across the border on the backs of trucks, probably not electric trucks, by the way.
This is where Biden's putting his energy.
Climate change is also talked about as an excuse.
And my favorite recent example was a reporter asked my governor, California's own Gavin Newsom, how the state had gone in the space of two years from a $100 billion federal surplus, or not federal state surplus with some money from the federal government, but how we had a $100 billion budget surplus and now we have an almost $30 billion deficit.
How did that happen in two years?
And he blamed climate change.
And what he said was there were some really bad winter storms that resulted in people paying their taxes late.
And while we were waiting for the tax revenue to come in, we spent money that we thought we'd have the ability to pay for, but it turned out we spent more than we had and the taxes only came in late.
So this is climate change's fault.
It's climate change.
Not the fact that we overcommitted ourselves to spending on just about anything you can name, not that we promised free health care to illegal migrants, not that, et cetera, et cetera.
So, climate change has basically become an excuse for politicians who are failing to do their jobs.
But you aren't hearing Biden talk about it so much anymore because Americans are sick of it.
They know that it means higher energy costs.
They know that they're being forced to purchase electric vehicles that they can't charge for part of their day because the electricity doesn't come out of the grid in certain times of the year at the necessary rates.
Here in California, we're trying to develop batteries to get us over some of the times of peak demand where we have typically had brownouts and blackouts and so forth.
But the long and the short of it is politicians are realizing that it's a loser.
They're trying to use it to some extent to appeal to young voters.
I heard Karine Jean-Pierre at the White House briefing this week talk about how voters who are under a certain age are very interested and energized by climate change, and that's why they'll choose Joe Biden.
But it's really not working for most voters.
And again, it comes back to: do you trust Joe Biden to solve the very complicated problems that are going to come up with an economy that is built around reducing emissions?
Because you're going to have a whole bunch of trade-offs that require a great deal of skill to negotiate.
It's not that it's impossible.
You could have a carbon tax, for example, but then you're going to have to cut other taxes.
Can you get that done?
Or is the carbon tax, such as the one you have in Canada, simply going to be subject to repeated hikes so that it becomes just one more way of extracting wealth from the population?
People don't trust Biden on that, and they don't trust his own ability to run anything.
He's just not seen as a competent manager anymore.
Whether that's because of age or just the experience, I think the disastrous pullout of Afghanistan had a lot to do with it.
People believed at least that the team Biden had around him were capable of managing something like that.
And when the Afghanistan pullout was a disaster, confidence in the administration collapsed and has never returned.
By the way, I want to tell you that I myself believe deeply in climate change, and I use it whenever I can.
When I'm pulled over for speeding, I blame climate change.
When my wife asks why I haven't taken out the garbage yet, I blame climate change.
And so I'm deeply committed to climate change.
Mayor's Hope for America00:02:45
I don't know what it means, but it seems to work for me, Joel.
I'm joking around this.
It's great to catch up with you.
You have no idea how bad it is.
However bad it is in America, Joel, add a zero to it, and that's Canada.
I am hoping for the best in America because your presidential election will likely have, well, I think our election for prime minister will have an enormous impact because I think we'll finally get rid of Trudeau.
But the election, if it happens, of Donald Trump, will be an enormous change, not just for Canada, but for the world.
And I think it'll change so many things.
And it'll change.
You used the phrase earlier about an animating spirit and getting the world excited about a certain path and the moral charisma of that.
And I think it'll make a big change here.
So we're rooting for you down there.
And hopefully America will get back on track.
Thanks so much, Eshma.
Great to see you.
There's Joel Pollack Sr. editor at large at Breitbart.com.
And by the way, I have not actually tried my climate change excuse when I'm pulled over for speeding, but I intend to.
Stay with us.
More ahead.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me.
Franz Anton Mesmer says, this will not burn itself out.
This is an ongoing operation.
You're talking about these university encampments.
You're exactly right.
All of these are organized.
All of these are funded.
All of these have legal advice.
All of these are timed.
They're coordinated.
We know from earlier reporting by Global News and others that there are 700 agents in Canada working for Iran.
And they were doing this kind of stuff before October 7th.
And they've just gone full tilt since then.
I think we could have put out these fires very quickly, like at the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary.
But you simply have most politicians who count the number from our supporters and say, well, that's who we are now, so we're not going to crack down on these lawbreakers.
William Innes says the West is not a thing in modern times.
Well, it is a thing, but it's being steamrolled over because people aren't standing up.
Robert Croteau says, don't forget the mayor of Montreal called Joe Biden and congratulations to him on the election.
Not good.
Oh, absolutely.
I don't know.
I didn't know that, but it's sort of weird to take a call from a mayor if you're the president of the United States.
But I think across Canada, we have really weak leadership on this.
Hopefully things will change different when Pierre Pollier becomes prime minister, but that's at least a year away, isn't it?