Alberta Premier Danielle Smith now opposes federal mass immigration, reversing her 2023 call to double the province’s population to 10 million by 2050, citing housing shortages and overwhelmed healthcare. She warns forced growth risks Toronto/Vancouver-style crises, while Ezra Levant highlights 750K temporary foreign workers in low-skill jobs amid 450K unemployed Canadian youth. Smith also questions Canada’s permissive refugee system (approval rates jumped from ~67% under Harper to ~96% under Trudeau) and potential security threats like Hamas infiltration, comparing it to Europe’s unrest—suggesting unchecked immigration could destabilize Canadian society. [Automatically generated summary]
Did you know that Danielle Smith recently said she wants to double the population of Alberta through immigration?
I can't believe it.
I chew this and other immigration stories over with our friend Lauren Gunter in a feature interview conversation about mass immigration.
But first, let me invite you to make sure you have what we call Rebel News Plus.
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All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, does Danielle Smith really want to double the population of Alberta through immigration?
It's August 15th, and this is the Answer Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Well, I was in Ottawa yesterday, but it was an Albertan on trial.
I'm talking about Tamara Leach.
A lot of my time these days is spent on the legal repercussions of the Freedom Convoy, even though that was two and a half years ago.
Between our coverage of the Tamara Leach trial, which I think today is day 40 or 41 of the hearings, and all the various permutations of the Coots trials, I think by far it's the number one story we've been covering in the last year, even though the lockdowns and the pandemic itself are long over.
It's interesting that an Alberta gal, a Métis grandma like Tamara Leach, can be hauled to Ottawa again and again and again in a clear abuse of process.
And what startled me yesterday from the court was how prickly the judge was becoming.
And I think that's because this is likely the longest trial she's ever had.
Forget complex corporate litigation or criminal matters of murder or terrorism.
This tiny little mischief trial has been turned into a full-year affair because I genuinely believe this is how the establishment intends to punish Tamara Leach herself.
There's no way she's going to get more jail time.
She's already served 49 days.
There's no way that, like, they can't punch.
I think she's going to actually be acquitted, but they're turning the process into the punishment.
Anyways, I tell you that because that's where I was yesterday.
I was in Ottawa, but I felt like it was an Alberta story because it was that Alberta spirit of rebellion.
It really was Albertans in many ways that helped lead the convoy.
And I say that with some longing as a former Albertan myself who is in exile in Toronto.
Well, the fact that I'm in Toronto doesn't mean I stop thinking about Alberta.
In so many ways, it is a province that shows philosophical and ideological leadership, and that sometimes manifests itself in the actual practical politics of the place.
And right now, in the person of Danielle Smith, the premier of the United Conservative Party, I think we have probably what's the closest thing to a libertarian as a provincial premier in this country.
You can certainly argue that Premier Scott Moe of Saskatchewan is a rock-ribbed conservative, although, like many from that province, he's got sort of a social generosity side that even the old NDP still reverberates with there.
But I think Danielle Smith is the most libertarian.
And sometimes, though, her ideas are-I don't know-I'm not going to say quirky because that's insulting, but they're esoteric, maybe.
They're, well, I don't know.
To help me sort of grok what's going on, including with Danielle Smith's views on immigration.
We're joined now by really one of our Sherpas in Alberta, one of the senior columnists of that province.
I'm talking about our old friend Lauren Gunter, who writes for the Edmonton Sun.
Lauren, good to see you again.
Good to see you.
I'm not sure exactly what I was doing with that meandering introduction.
I was just trying to say that although I was in Ottawa, it felt like a very Alberta thing, considering the Albertan Tamara Leach was on trial.
And I do know Danielle Smith because we were in college together, and she was always interested in ideas.
Tell me a little bit about Danielle Smith on immigration because I've seen different things from her.
I'd love to tell you more about her on immigration, but she seems to have had a major 180 in the last three or four months.
And I'm not sure it is.
It might just be a sharpening of her views, an evolution, a growing up, whatever it is.
But in March, she wrote to Prime Minister Trudeau and said, you're not letting us have enough immigrants here in Alberta.
We are going to grow this province to 10 million from 4.5 million by 2050.
And therefore, we need lots more immigrants to fill our job vacancies and start up new businesses and things.
And I am all in favor of immigrants.
I think immigration is good for Canada, but it's not good for Canada in the numbers that the Trudeau government has been allowing.
It's crazy.
By StatsCan's estimate, last year they let in 2.3 million people.
There's no other country in the world.
No other country in the world that's said that.
No.
The Americans get that many at their southern border, but they are 10 times the size we are.
And they think of this as a problem.
The Trudeau government, if it hadn't been, if this immigration level hadn't caused all sorts of economic repercussions, they would not be thinking of it as a problem even now.
And even now, it's difficult to get an awful lot of their media friends to report on it as a problem.
But it's had a negative impact on the housing market, it's had a negative impact on the job market.
It's had a negative impact on educational institutions.
It's had a negative impact on social services.
And it's made it harder to get a doctor, for instance, because there are too many people coming in.
You can't buy a house in Canada on a single average wage anymore because there are 1 million, 1.5 million, 2 million new people flooding in every year under the Liberals.
And those people have a right to find a place to live too.
The only way you could stop that is to turn back the flow that the Liberals have had.
And Danielle Smith finally said that yesterday on a Western Standard website podcast, where she said, well, yes, this is unsustainable, what they're doing now.
But in fact, I have to think in some ways she added to the problem back in March when she wrote to the prime minister.
She said, we want more control in Alberta over who we're taking, but we want more.
And I think that you can imagine that the Trudeauites would forget the Alberta control part of that and just go to cabinet meetings and say, well, look, even the Alberta government wants more people.
So how can you say we're taking in too many?
I didn't quite phrase it right, but I mean, the thing about Danielle Smith, I think she regards herself as a very open-minded person who cares about intellectual things.
I think she reads and she studies and she looks at papers.
I think she actually loves the world of ideas.
In that way, she's completely the opposite of Justin Trudeau, who would never read a briefing note.
We learned he literally had to have someone read to him national security briefings, like a bedtime story.
Like Justin sits over there and someone reads it to him because he will not do the reading himself.
That came out during the China interference matter.
Danielle Smith, I think, is someone who is the opposite, but you can go too far the opposite.
You can go down rabbit holes and obscure and strange thinking.
Like there's this concept, there's this group called the Century Project, which wants 100 million people in this country in a matter of decades.
They're not going to live in the big Arctic.
Like you look at Canada on the map, it looks huge.
Most of it's unlivable.
No one's moving to Innevik or Tuck to Yuktuck.
They're moving to Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal.
And now they're spilling into some smaller cities, but everyone is really in certain metropolises.
It's insane.
Toronto is off the hook insane.
And here's a stat I saw the other day, Lauren.
There's about 750,000 temporary foreign workers, and many of them are working in McDonald's, Tim Hortons, like low-skill, low-paid jobs.
Those are multi-billion dollar, multinational companies.
And so they get to save a buck or two an hour.
But I have not seen a young Canadian, by that means like a teenager working in a fast food restaurant in years.
And I think back to my own youth, that was my first job.
I worked because you can't screw it up.
You get paid a little bit of dough, but you learn things about showing up on work on time and being tidy.
And you learn, you can't get your second job till you have your first job.
That's right.
I worked at a dairy queen when I was in high school.
And it was the busiest dairy queen in Western Canada that didn't have burgers.
We were just ice cream.
But the thing I learned, because the lineups would be really long on a Sunday summer evening, the thing I learned was people get cranky standing in line and you can't get cranky back.
You have to learn in customer service that you need to be nice, even to the cranky pants out there.
And so those are very important life lessons that you learn when you have those first jobs for sure.
And so it is a problem that the government's federal government in particular has to deal with.
One thing that Smith said yesterday in her podcast on the Western Standard was that, you know, this is a problem that all governments are now facing.
And we're even starting to see it creep into Alberta.
And I think what she meant by that was, for instance, last year, Calgary had the greatest increase in rents of any city in the country.
And so Calgary is becoming less affordable than it was.
Edmonton is still one of the most affordable cities in the country.
Calgary is still affordable relative to Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, lots of the other places.
But it is becoming less so.
And because of the flood, you can see over the next three to five years, lots of people, if the same levels are maintained by Ottawa, lots of people will flood into Calgary.
Lots of people will flood into Edmonton and start to do to the housing market and the job market in those cities what they've already done to the housing markets and the job markets in Toronto and Vancouver in particular.
And I think Smith sees that now that she didn't see in March.
Calgary's Future Transit Dreams00:02:30
This idea that we could, in 25 years, double the population of the province is nuts.
It's only doable if it's done organically.
If that's what the market wants, if that's what is needed for work in the oil field, in the service industry, fine.
Because the housing will follow along with it.
But if you're talking about forcing this issue as a government, then that's not going to work.
It doesn't work when the feds do it.
It's not going to work when the province does it.
And another of her ideas that stems from this immigration population expansion thing is this idea that we should build billions of dollars of intercity trains and commuter trains all over the province.
Like, where does that come from?
Like, that's as nutty as the Calgary City Council building a $6.3 billion LRT line to nowhere because in the future we'll need it.
And it's as nutty as the federal government spending money on transit all over the country that isn't designed to do anything in particular, but make them feel more green about themselves and maybe make Greta more pleased with them.
You know what?
The Simpsons, that old cartoon, they have this con man character who comes into town.
So, oh, you wouldn't want the monorail.
That's more, you know, here in, I forget the name of the Springfield.
Springfield.
Well, it's more a Shelbyville idea.
You wouldn't want that.
No, no, no, we want it.
Like, he's a huckster.
Here's a quick clip of that just to remind people what I'm talking about.
Oh, it's not for you.
It's more of a Shelbyville idea.
Now, wait just a minute.
We're twice as smart as the people of Shelbyville.
Just tell us your idea and we'll vote for it.
All right.
I tell you what I'll do.
I'll show you my idea.
I give you the Springfield monorail.
I've sold monorails to Brockway, Audmanville, and North Haverbrook.
And by gum, it put them on the map.
Well, sir, there's nothing on earth like a genuine bona fide electrified six-car monorail.
What I say?
Monorail.
What's it called?
Monorail.
That's right.
Monorail.
Monorail.
Anyone who look at California, where they've been talking about building this high-speed rail for literally decades.
And the other day they were so proud of themselves, they tweeted like a one-kilometer stretch connected to nothing.
Why Refugees Are Temporarily Housed00:13:37
They thought this was something to be proud of.
There is so much traffic between Calgary and Edmonton by car.
There's WestJet and Air Canada.
There's Uber.
There's buses.
The idea that the government needs to come in and spend billions of dollars on a train, it infuriates me.
And that's what I mean about Danielle Smith.
She'll read a paper in a technocratic way and sort of get excited about it.
But you need sort of a base instinct of government is bad.
And I think on the immigration side, I told you half the story about 750,000 temporary foreign workers.
Here's the other half.
Lauren, there's 450,000 unemployed people in this country between age 15 and 19.
So why are you bringing in 750,000 people who I'm sure are fine people?
But why are people from foreign lands being brought in for cheap labor?
And 450,000 Canadian young people can't find work.
And they can't find work because these companies have an easy way out because we're saying that we're letting billion-dollar companies say, hey, I need to save a dollar an hour on my salary.
So can I bring in foreign laborers?
Sometimes they won't find work either.
It's easy enough in Canada to get by on what the government will hand you or what your parents are prepared to pay while you're still living at home.
And there's lots more young people living at home than there were when I left home in the 70s.
But the other side of that is too, that I don't blame any of the newcomers for being allowed in.
That's not, they're not the problem.
They didn't, you know, if somebody said to you, you're living in this decrepit developing country over here on the other side of the world, how would you like to come to Canada easy and free?
Of course you're going to say yes.
You'd be ridiculous.
You would be doing your family a disservice.
You wouldn't be the best parent you could be if you said no.
So I don't blame any of them for coming.
The problem is all with the liberals and all with their woke notions that we, you know, a little immigration is good.
So a lot must be way better.
Here's the one thing that I would, I mean, obviously, there are probably 2 billion people in the world who would come here.
Most of Africa, much of Asia, even parts of South America.
Why wouldn't you come here?
Because it is better to be the lowest rung of Canada than a middle rung in Somalia.
But here's what the one thing I would differ with you on a little bit is we have over 1 million foreign students in Canada.
There are not even 1 million Canadian students.
There's just not in universities and colleges.
And they've set up all these fake diploma mills with like a fake street address, and you pay them 10 or 20 grand and you get a student visa, but it's not really a school.
So it's a scam.
So I would think that I'm going to estimate half of the people here on a student visa.
I'd say that's maybe on the low side, even.
So, I mean, I suppose I'm not blaming them since we allow that, since these fake colleges, and by the way, some real colleges, they're getting billions.
They're basically selling immigration for 20 or 30 grand a pop.
And there's a lot of BS refugees.
You're not required by the federal government to go home when your study's in.
So most of these colleges have a six to nine or 12-month program, after which you are issued a certificate.
You are allowed under Canadian regulations, under immigration law, to continue working in Canada in a post-graduate position for, I think right now it's 36 months.
They're trying to talk about cutting it back to 18 months.
But why do you get to work here after you're done anyway?
And while you're here working towards this certificate from this college, you can work 40 hours a week.
Now, as of September 1, that goes down to 24 hours a week.
But nonetheless, I know a fellow who runs a restaurant in Toronto who said most of the people who come on bikes to pick up delivery food from his restaurant are technically foreign students.
But they're really working 40 hours a week delivering food for one of the delivery services.
And I suppose if you're doing that, I take your point.
Well, we're letting it happen, so you can't blame them.
Well, that's the insanity, is we're letting it happen.
There's students who are taking bogus studies and stick around thereafter.
There's temporary foreign workers who are indeed working instead of Canadian young people working.
And then there's refugees, many of whom are bogus.
A lot of these people coming as temporary foreign workers or students, then later claim asylum.
It's bizarre to me.
I mean, we accepted this across Wroxham Road.
No one coming from the United States by definition is not a refugee.
I see this all over the world, by the way.
I see this in Ireland.
People walk across from Northern Ireland, they take the dinghy from France to Britain, they go to Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK, walk into Ireland, the country, and say, we're refugees.
No, brother, you're not.
You just came from the UK and refugee law doesn't allow you to shop around.
It's our folly that we accept this.
Yeah, it is.
It absolutely is.
And we have, so under the liberals, say, let's go back to Harper.
Under the Harper Conservatives, the refugee appeal approval rate in Canada was about 67%.
It was about, let's say, two-thirds.
Since the liberals have taken over, the refugee appeal rate has now gone well over 90%.
And I don't have the figures for last year because they're not available yet, but it looked like they were headed towards about 95 or 96 percent.
So if you make an application to be considered an asylum seeker in Canada, there is a 95 or 96 percent chance you will be granted your wish to stay here.
And once you have been granted that, the chances of you ever being sent out of the country are minimal.
You know, it infuriates me in a way that the truck driver who ran into the junior B bus and killed all of those hockey players is being deported, despite the fact that he immediately apologized.
He made amends with the families.
He pled guilty so they wouldn't be subjected to a trial.
He's followed all of the rules that he had to in order to minimize the grief for the families as much as he could.
Nothing can bring back those young men and the adults who are their coaches.
But nonetheless, here's a fellow who has tried as hard as he can to do the right thing and stay, and he's being kicked out.
And then all these people who abuse the system and claim refugee status that they're not entitled to, they get to stay.
You know, I see this all around the world.
One of the strange things that's happening in Ireland, let me just share with you, I was there a few weeks ago, here in Canada, we put our bulk refugees in big cities or even smaller cities.
Like, for example, some hotels in Niagara Falls, many hotels in the Greater Toronto area.
They're no longer tourist hotels.
They're no longer for traveling business people.
They are urban refugee camps.
This is happening in the United States too, even in New York City.
There's dozens of hotels that are now urban refugee camps.
And so they sort of blend in, and there's no really active local community that's going to really get motivated in many of these large cities.
But here's what's crazy about Ireland: the government, for some reason, is choosing to spread out their refugee camps to the tiniest villages.
Literally today, there's this village I was at a few weeks ago called Dundrum.
Less than 200 people in the whole village, Lauren.
Like I met almost half of them just wandering around.
The local beautiful hotel, country club, and golf course signed a contract with the government to shut down as a hotel and country club and golf course and to take 280 military-aged migrant men.
Not men, women, and children, just men.
So you have a town of 200 that is now getting 280 men on top of that.
No consultation, no hearing, no planning, no consent.
And it just happened just today, I think.
And that's insane because it's so extremely visible.
And you've just destroyed centuries of, like this village of Dundrum goes back centuries.
You've just absolutely changed the course of history.
You've changed everything in the lives of this village.
I don't understand why they would be so provocative.
In Canada and the United States, we're sort of hiding them in urban hotels.
But it's, I don't know.
I think that mass immigration is a global weapon being used against the West.
Am I wrong on that?
I think it is.
But I also think it's being foisted on the West, not by the rest of the world, but by progressive elites in the West who refuse to see that there might be a downside to all of this,
whose wokeism is so pervasive, so strong that they think, oh, if a little bit of our tolerance is good, then five times that, 10 times that, must necessarily be better.
And they refuse to see that there is a downside on the healthcare system, on the housing market, on the job market.
It's like the elites that have crafted our justice system policies where everyone gets bail, even people who have been convicted several times in the past of violent crimes, they still get bail as a default because getting people into the community is always the best way to cut down on crime.
And even when you can show statistics after statistics after statistics, that this mass immigration or these lenient bail rules or whatever the issue is, that those are not working.
You can show the proof they're not working.
The progressive elites refuse to accept that their ideas have caused any problem.
I think there's something also a little bit darker.
There is so much wokeism on the issue of race, and anti-white racism is not only accepted, it's promoted.
It's now normal to see job descriptions saying you must be a minority or another disadvantaged group.
There's all sorts of DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion training sessions, the anti-white, you know, the anti-racist baby.
Like you're told to read books basically to being white is tantamount to being an oppressor.
And what is the natural, rational, logical conclusion of this nouveau racism, but to be anti-white as a society?
And I think that that's part of mass immigration.
I think there are some progressives who say we're going to knock the white.
And by the way, I mean, I'm fine with people of all races.
But I'm saying is that this mass immigration is deliberately like in that hotel in Dundrum I just mentioned, there were some Ukrainian families there that were genuine refugees from the war.
They're being evicted to bring in people from Nigeria and Somalia.
It's really astonishing.
Let me show you a quick video clip.
I was in Marseille, France last year when there were race riots.
And I went there and I found a man who looked very integrated.
He looked very modern.
He was dressed in the Western attire.
He had a close-shaped beard.
Like he looked like a well-integrated Muslim man.
He was from Algeria.
My French was terrible, but we managed to talk to each other.
And I said, if it's so racist here in France, why are you here?
Why are so many Algerians here?
Marseille is almost half Muslim, certain parts.
Here's a clip of him saying the quiet part out loud.
He basically said, France colonized Algeria for a century.
I'm here to return the favor.
Take a look at this.
Because here in France there is a lot of racism.
Racism is in the first degree here in France.
That's all I have to say.
That's all.
Why millions of Muslims immigrate to France if France is racist?
Well, they have colonized us for 132 years.
And it's our turn to come here to...
how do you explain it?
To...
I can't find the words.
They have colonized us for 132 years.
And now we're going to colonize them to life, to death.
He later, by the way, I should tell you, that man later chased us down the street, found us about a mile away, and demanded that we delete that footage.
And we sort of pretended we did.
Peaceful Screening?00:06:42
Now, I'm not saying that he speaks for everyone.
There are many people who immigrate to Canada who love it, who want to become Canadians, who want to share our values to become patriots.
But if we're not assimilating people and indoctrinating them into our in not just our economy, everyone talks about GDB and our economy and growth and what.
How about cultural fit too?
How about keeping it safe for women to walk at night?
Safe for women.
Where's our high trust society?
The Canada I grew up in had a high trust society where the default approach with a stranger was we're all in this community together.
I believe if you bring in people too quickly who don't assimilate and find a common ground and common purpose and common culture, you're losing that high trust society.
You may get economic growth, but you're not going to get the safety and the feeling of belonging that we grew up with.
Right, right.
No, I think that I think that's absolutely fair.
I think that's absolutely true.
And you're seeing that a good example, you and I had talked about before we started this interview about Jennica Atwin, the green MP turned liberal from Fredericton, New Brunswick, who wants the federal government to stop screening refugees from Gaza and just admit as many as want to come here as quickly as possible.
For instance, she even wants to get rid of the security screening on the ground in Gaza before the people leave and come here.
And that would, I think, simply lead to two things.
First of all, it would lead to Hamas embedding its own operatives within what looks like a group of refugees because Gaza controls who comes in and who gets out of Gaza.
So of course they're going to put their own people in there.
There's going to be a lot of incentive for their own operators to get into those refugee groups because the Israelis are closing in.
And a lot of those people, if they don't get out, are going to get dead.
And so certainly there'll be a lot of people in those Gazan refugee groups who would be Hamas.
But also you have to remember that during the October 7th massacre of Jews by Hamas, that was very widely and wildly popular with ordinary Palestinians.
People keep talking about, oh, Israel is going after Gaza, but they're killing all these poor Palestinians.
First of all, under international law, if you started the war and now you're hiding behind civilians, their deaths are on your head, not on the head of the people who are defending themselves.
But second, what you've got there is this crazy passion for Hamas among a lot of Palestinians, maybe even three quarters, as many as three quarters.
And so if you're admitting an awful lot of people to Canada who are passionately anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, and pro-Palestinian in large numbers, are they going to integrate into Canada and live by the peaceful code that we have here?
Are they going to express their views in a non-violent way?
Are they simply going to start jumping on hotel or hospital entranceways in Toronto again and lighting off firebombs and having violent protests and calling for the death of Jews and maybe starting to attack Canadian government sites because they don't think the Canadian government is pure enough in its support for Palestine?
We are simply inviting a ton of trouble.
And that goes directly to what you're saying about when you allow in so many people with so many different views without doing any kind of screening.
And at this end, getting rid of any kind of cultural training for Canadian values, then you're asking for trouble.
Yeah.
Well, let me close on this.
In the United Kingdom, our former alumnus, Tommy Robinson, who's a controversial person to the world, I like him and I trust him actually.
He held a very large, very peaceful rally, the first on June 1st, the second on July 27th.
We covered it very peaceful.
It was patriotic.
It was multi-racial, but it had a central message, which is stop mass immigration.
So two huge peaceful rallies.
But in the last week or so, there have been actual violent riots and counter riots in the UK and a lot of arrests of what I call indigenous British people.
They're the First Nations there.
So, I mean, where does a Brit go if he wants to go back to his homeland?
Well, there's really nowhere else to go.
So there's been riots and prosecutions.
So there was a poll done after the riots.
That's my point.
After the riots, after the prosecutions and jailing of hundreds and hundreds of rioters, primarily Indigenous Brits, more than a third of Brits say that violence is a solution to mass immigration.
That is a shocking and terrifying number.
A third say, according to a poll that was just released, I think yesterday.
And obviously we're against violence.
But when you say to people, you're not allowed to protest, you're not allowed, like they're arresting people for memes, for social media statements.
For one person in Northern Ireland was jailed for simply watching the riot, not participating, not hollering, not heckling, just he was a curious observer, which, by the way, is a definition of a journalist, too.
I fear that by that I think the UK and France are way further down this road than us, but I wish that we would learn from their bad example and not go that crazy.
And the talk of a 10 million person Alberta and a 100 million person Canada, we will, God forbid, may it never happen.
We will be at the place where there are riots too.
And the fact that more than a third of Brits say, yeah, rioting is the only way the establishment will listen to us, that is terrifyingly.
Because not only will the establishment not listen, they will arrest you for speaking out.
That's what this new online harms bill is all about in Canada, is the ability of the CRTC as an agent of the government to take down posts that might say something unkind about mass immigration.
Online Harms and Riots00:04:26
I noticed the other day Facebook deleted a, I don't know what you call it, an account, I guess, that was put double X.
And that's 2X chromosome.
And it was to make comments on the International Olympic Committee statement that gender now scientifically is not determined by chromosome.
Scientifically, it is.
This is one of those preposterous elite statements that ends with people honking their horns in downtown Ottawa for three weeks because they have no other idea what they can do when the smartest people, the people with the most education in society, start spouting absolutely preposterous nonsense.
And there was a very good piece in the National Review in the United States last week on the advent of the profoundly wrong expert.
And I think we're seeing that in all manner of issues now, that the people who are directing government policy, the people who are being consulted by governments and by elites to give them ideas for solving problems are profoundly wrong.
But they won't admit it.
The people who are paying them to give them ideas won't admit it.
And if you start to say, hey, you're profoundly wrong, well, then you'll get your social media account deleted.
You might end up being arrested if you're in Britain.
And it's a topsy-turvy world.
You see, and you and I differ very much on Donald Trump.
I am not a big fan at all of Donald Trump, but I understand the Trump phenomenon.
The Trump phenomenon comes out of these profoundly wrong experts who on every issue not only are wrong, but they want to micromanage the lives of the people who aren't wrong.
And I think that's what we're headed for.
Let me close with this because we're talking a little bit about censorship now.
The other day, Elon Musk interviewed Donald Trump on the Twitter platform, which is now called X.
And it was very long and interviewing.
Some people have their thoughts on the substance of it and the style of it.
But according to Twitter, and they may be exaggerating, but they claim that it was listened to or watched or came to the attention of 1 billion people.
Now, I don't know how that can be, given that there's not even a billion people on Twitter, but it was pretty big.
But the day before, the head of the European Union, Tierry, I think I'm pronouncing his right, his last name, sent a big letter on European Union stationery to Elon Musk, basically warning him not to say certain things, not to incite hatred.
Basically, so a letter from a European bureaucrat who himself is not elected, he's the head of the EU, writing to an American citizen, Elon Musk, telling him that he can't say certain things in his interview with a presidential candidate.
The chutzpah, the condescension, the audacity.
But that is absolutely all of them, Lauren.
When I was in Davos at the World Economic Forum last year, the two names they hated the most was Donald Trump, because they think he'll smash their international architecture.
But they hate is a very close second, Elon Musk, for enabling people to see and hear and say things that they weren't allowed to before then.
I am just as worried about an assassination attempt, God forbid, against Elon Musk, as I think we should be worried about one against Trump.
The chutzpah of some European Belgian bureaucrat to write a letter to Elon Musk in America and say, you're not allowed to say certain things in your interview with Donald Trump in an election, it's so appalling, but it's so normal.
And that letter did indeed go out.
It is.
It's normal in those circles.
They really do believe that the world is becoming a darker, more sinister place, and they are the only lights that are keeping it civilized.
And so therefore, they can do whatever they choose in order to protect what they see as civilization.
A Neighbor's Message00:06:56
They're just full of it.
Yeah.
Lauren, it's great to catch up with you.
I meant to talk a lot more about Alberta things, but we talked mainly about immigration.
But I have to tell you, all around the world, that is a key issue.
In places like Hungary and Poland, they have made a very starkly different choice.
And I have to tell you, there's no pro-Hamas marches in Hungary and Poland.
There's no stabbing attacks in the street of Hungary and Poland.
There's no, I was in Hungary at the large Jewish synagogue in Budapest.
They don't even have a security guard.
There's no anti-Semitic graffiti in Hungary.
It was actually declared by the World Jewish Congress to be the safest European city in which to be a Jew.
I have to tell you, my friend, there is a connection.
There absolutely is a connection, however politically incorrect it is to say so.
It's something that's going to be, I think, the issue of our times.
Thank you for talking with me about it.
It's better to talk about these things than to brush them under the carpet, which I think a lot of the mainstream you do.
All right, there you have it.
Lauren Gunter, one of our favorite guys.
He's a senior columnist for the Edmonton Sun.
Take care, my friend.
I was gonna read some letters, but let me share with you some thoughts about other things as well.
My colleague Sarah Stock is in Ottawa reporting on Tamara Leach's trial.
It really is astonishing that the largest trial in Canada, the largest trial in Canada for years, I can't remember any longer-running trial with more government resources.
It is not for terrorism.
We saw about the two terrorists from ISIS that were brought into this country even after they had committed terrorism overseas.
Their trial will not be as long as Tamara Leach's.
There will be no trial of, for example, the great bank heist where they stole all that gold from Toronto Pearson Airport.
That won't be as long.
There are atrocious terrorist acts, atrocious crimes, drug gangs, car theft rings.
If you're in the greater Toronto area, you know that cars are stolen literally every day.
People break in, get the key fobs, and drive away with luxury cars, put them on a ship and send them to the Middle East or Africa.
It's an astonishing crime wave.
None of those get the police crackdown, the prosecutorial resources, and the time of our courts like Tamara Leach.
And I just turn that over in my head and I realize what backwards and upside-down morality we have in our justice system.
That Tamara Leach, who had never done a crime in her life, never arrested in her life, never actually did anything other than be sort of the spiritual leader of the convoy, has the largest mischief trial in not just Canadian history, but anywhere in the Commonwealth.
And my time yesterday was confirmed that.
Now, I was happy to say that I was certainly left with the impression that Tamara Leach will be acquitted and that the prosecutors were just phoning it in.
They had some of the most embarrassingly stupid arguments I'd ever seen.
But what else are you going to do?
If you're instructed by the Attorney General to prosecute Tamara Leach at all costs and you've got nothing, you sort of try and make something out of nothing.
Maybe the prosecutors were just filling time, but they certainly did it in a punitive way.
I'm excited that Rebel News is not just the publisher of Tamara Leach's autobiography, but that we're working with the Democracy Fund to crowdfund Tamara Leach's legal fees.
If you can help, please do go to helptamera.com.
I saw the lawyers in action and there was this wonderful moment, if I can just share it with you, that one of the leading cases in mischief as a criminal offense was discussed yesterday.
I forget the name of the case, so I don't want to get it wrong.
The prosecution was referring to that case.
It was a high court, it was an appeal court decision about a neighbor who parked his truck near his neighbor and had a message on the truck, something like, I'm not responsible for the flood in your basement.
That's like some squabble between the two.
So it was on neighbor number one's truck on neighbor number one's property next to neighbor number two.
Neighbor number two somehow managed to get not just some civil suit, small claim suit, but managed to get a mischief prosecution and conviction of a crime of his neighbor.
So the guy, neighbor number one, who put up this weird sign on his truck that didn't have any swears, didn't have any threats.
It was just sort of a nuisance, convicted of a crime.
Well, that case was appealed and neighbor number one was acquitted.
It was overturned on appeal.
And the weight of that court case, the importance of it, was that if you have expression, if you have political expression or you have some meaning, that can be a defense to mischief.
So you can see why this is an important case when Tamara Leach, the head of the truckers, is on trial for mischief.
Anyway, so that's the case.
The prosecution brought up the case and was trying somehow to make the point that this benefited the prosecution.
The judge waited and said, yeah, no, I'm not sure if you quite understand that case.
And they were bantering back and forth.
The judge was really pushing back against the prosecutor.
And I said, well, I assume the judge is right.
She's a very senior judge.
And then it was my favorite moment yesterday.
Lawrence Greenspawn, the senior lawyer, the head of three lawyers defending Tamara Leach, pipes up in a very gentle way and says, Your Honor, I was the lawyer who took that case to the Court of Appeal 14 years ago, and I won.
And so literally, Tamara Leach's lawyer is the expert lawyer who fought the case and won in the Court of Appeal 14 years ago, setting the precedent for freedom of speech, even in the case of mischief, being a source of acquittal.
And it was sort of funny to me because here's some prosecutor trying to say, I know what this case means.
Your honor, let me tell you, this case really helps us because of blah, blah, blah.
And the judge said, no, I don't, I don't really think so.
And then sitting over there with a big smile on his face is the lawyer who actually took that case and won that case and argued that case and knows that case probably better than anyone else in the world.
Lawrence Greenspawn, Tamara Leach's lawyer.
And in that moment, and by the way, the way Lawrence Greenspawn mentioned this and brought it up sort of in a self-deprecating way, oh, I'm so old kind of thing.
It was very funny, very lighthearted.
And it was an amazing moment.
And I thought, boy, having a great lawyer can make all the difference.
And not only is Lawrence Greenspawn, in my personal view, a great lawyer, and I say that, I probably know 50 lawyers, watching him in that moment, being the man of the hour, knowing that case of mischief when there's political expression, I felt pretty good about it.
Trudeau's Vindication?00:00:52
Look, I don't know how the Tamara Leach case is going to end.
I just don't know.
How do I know?
Only the judge herself knows.
But I'm fairly optimistic.
And I think what the prosecution started is an attempt to not just criminalize Tamara Leach and punish her personally, but to sort of retroactively criminalize the entire convoy.
I think it's going to backfire on the government.
I think it's going to be an acquittal and thereby a vindication of the entire convoy.
Yes, it was Trudeau who threw the country under martial law.
And yes, it was Trudeau who did atrocious things and made atrocious statements.
But at the end of the day, it's the Ontario government, the provincial government, Doug Ford's government that instructs, pays, directs, and chooses to go after Tamara Leach with the prosecutors.
Those are Ontario prosecutors, not federal prosecutors.
Anyways, Sarah Stock continues to cover that story for us.