Ezra Levant and Barbara Kay examine Canada’s surge in antisemitic crimes—arson at synagogues, stolen luxury cars with police complicity, and threats against Jewish institutions—while criticizing authorities like Ontario’s Solicitor General Michael Kirstner for symbolic gestures over enforcement. Kay contrasts this with the UK’s rapid prosecution system and warns of unvetted Gazan refugees (75% Hamas-supporting) undermining Canadian values, citing Al-Quds Day festivals where Sharia law allegiance replaces civic loyalty. Levant links high-trust societies to exploitation, comparing Canada’s crime spikes to Japan’s safety, yet both stress controlled immigration with assimilation standards to preserve Western culture, balancing hope with urgency. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, Battle of the Pessimists between me and Barbara Kaye, who despairs more for our future.
How's that for a pitch?
It's August 26th.
This is the Essela Vance Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Well, there's a crime wave going on across Canada.
We've talked about it many times.
If you are in a big city like Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, you know that one of the expressions of that crime wave is in auto thefts of any high-end automobile.
I'm not talking about Rolls-Royce's or Bentley's, so those would obviously be stolen right away, but even just a nice Acura or a nice Audi, they're stolen right off of your driveway, often with a home invasion type robbery.
Astonishingly, the Toronto Police, you'll recall, gave advice to people to leave their key fobs near the front door to make it easier for the criminals to find them without marauding through your house.
There is a crime wave.
But that obscures another crime wave, or maybe it creates a general feeling that lawlessness is allowed, that broken windows theory of James Q. Wilson, that if you allow a little bit of crime, people observe and get the message that this is a place where things are allowed and what was once unthinkable becomes normalized.
And I'm talking in specific about the anti-Semitic crime wave in this country, and I think it meets that definition.
And I'm Jewish myself, as you know, and so I sometimes check myself and say, am I interested in this anti-Semitic crime wave only because I'm Jewish or only because some of it's happening right in my own neighborhood or even in institutions that I personally frequent.
Would I be as concerned about a crime wave in this country that was, say, targeting black people?
If you had black churches with arson attacks in the dead of night, if you had people standing outside a black church wearing KKK hoods and chanting, not I'm going to kill you, something specific enough that police would arrest, but just general racist terms, slightly coded terms, and every week and blocking the streets downtown.
Would I be as upset?
And I would like to think that I would be.
I'm upset just coming up, just even saying that counterexample is so extreme and absurd.
We would never accept it for a moment.
And yet we've accepted it for almost a full year in Canada.
And that's what I mean about normalizing and accepting it.
I feel as if the perpetrators of the anti-Semitic crime wave are testing like a child, seeing if there's any limits.
And so far the answer is not really.
You see illegal trespasses on university campuses that were tolerated for months.
Police coming up with excuses for not enforcing law.
Compare that to the Emergencies Act, the riot horses deployed against completely peaceful trucker protesters.
And so I say that even though I'm Jewish and some of the guests we interview on the show are Jewish, I do believe, and I have to believe, that I would stand up for another group that was subject to such similar abuse.
So why is it being tolerated?
Joining us now to talk about this and various conundrums and to rehash some of the crazier stories of recent weeks is our friend Barbara Kaye, a columnist for the National Post and other wonderful places.
Good to see you again, Barbara.
Great to be here, Ezra.
There's something weird about this anti-Semitic crime wave.
All the authorities want to downplay it.
I mean, let me tell you from personal experience.
I heard on the news that a school bus caught fire at 5 a.m.
And I think school buses don't catch fire.
They don't spontaneously combust.
Maybe if it's driving and it overheats the engine smokes, but I just thought that doesn't sound right.
And when I heard where it was, I thought, I know exactly where that is.
I went there and it was near a synagogue.
And these were a bunch of school buses for Jewish schools parked and marked for the Jewish schools.
And I thought, why did the police and why did the media cover up the Jewish character of these buses and just say the absurd statement, a school bus caught fire at 5 a.m.
And two days later, a Jewish school not far from my house had an arson attack.
The window smashed and they said, no, just a shed in the back was attacked.
Last example, there's a Jewish school again, not far from where I am, where in the morning, two masked people shot bullets at it and sped away on motorbikes.
The Toronto police detective who gave the press conference on the scene spoke for six minutes and didn't once mention the word Jewish or anti-Semitic.
He did not in any way infer that this was other than just some random kids again.
You know those kids.
And so, Barbara, it's not just that there's a crime wave.
It's that every institution is trying to downplay it, including, by the way, the Jewish community, which has downplayed this arson attack on the school.
So what do you make of this?
Is it true that there's a crime wave against Jews in Canada?
And is it true that it's being downplayed by authorities, including some official Jews?
Well, I think there is definitely a crime wave.
We've had similar incidents in Montreal, as you know.
And individuals have suffered anti-Semitic threats and harassment at the encampments.
I mean, if the police, I agree with you that the police are downplaying it, but I'm asking myself, is this a decision that was taken by the police?
Or does this directive come from higher up that they're how they're supposed to respond to the media, how they're supposed to communicate information about these incidents to the public?
It's the mayor, isn't it, who is sort of in charge of the police?
In different cities, there's police commissions.
And for example, in Ontario, and in every province, there's a cabinet minister, a position called Solicitor General, who's typically in charge of all police forces and prisons and some court processes.
The prosecution is done by the Justice Minister, the Attorney General, but the Solicitor General is in charge of policing.
I asked Ontario's Solicitor General, who happens to be an Orthodox Jewish man, I said, why aren't you laying charges?
I asked him that about four times in a row.
Here, I'll let you look at his answer.
How come there were no charges under Section 176.2 of the criminal code besetting a house of worship when all those protesters were outside the Bayat Synagogue in Thornhill?
Well, that's a question that you're going to have to ask the York Regional Police or the Attorney General.
I'm here because I'm not going to see my community intimidated.
I speak out all the time in support of our Jewish community.
I'm not afraid to wear my kippah.
I'm not afraid to go to synagogue every Sabbath, every Shabbat.
And I'm going to do everything that I can to stand up for our inherent right to live safely in our own homes and communities.
And I'm not going to stop.
Everything short of prosecuting them, though, right?
I mean, the U of T remains encamped with an illegal encampment.
You're very good on Twitter, but have you actually done any prosecutions?
Well, again, this is something that you have to speak to the Attorney General.
He's your colleague.
You're in the government.
Why shouldn't you're on the inside?
No, what I can tell you is I'm working every day that our legislation, that our regulations are adhered to.
I'm standing up with my community.
I've been 34 weeks almost every single week to the rally of Bathurst and Shepard in support of remembering the hostages who have been held against their will in captivity in Gaza, and it's not acceptable.
And that's exactly, and that's exactly what it is.
It obviously is acceptable since you're not prosecuting it.
You have condoned it.
You've created a new normal where people can engage in low-level, permanent, anti-Semitic crimes, assault, threats, mischief, because you guys don't prosecute.
But there you are on Twitter, though, so congrats for that.
It's important that the Jewish community sees a person from their own community in the Ontario legislature standing up against hate every single day, who has the support of a premier who has called it out.
Where are the other levels of government today who exercise the same voice that Premier Ford does, that we will not accept anti-Semitism and have accepted it?
Where's the prosecution?
Again, this is something you could ask Minister Varani.
You can ask the Prime Minister.
The province.
The province prosecutes.
The province prosecutes.
Better save your boss.
So I recorded that.
That was outside the Jewish school that was shot at.
And I found that very frustrating because every time I said, well, why aren't your police laying charges?
Like there's, I mentioned section 176.2 of the criminal code, which is a very specific section, Barbara, saying you cannot interrupt a religious service.
It's just, it is that simple.
You cannot disturb a gathering in a church or a synagogue.
And that must have been written for a reason.
Like I said, in the U.S. South, sometimes they would, the KKK would burn a cross on the lawn of a black church.
And they had a specific law in the Canadian Criminal Code saying you can't disturb a religious gathering.
There were enormous pro-Hamas protests outside Jewish synagogues for hours.
No charges laid.
That's what I was asking the Solicitor General.
And his answers to me time and again were: well, I'm Jewish.
I go to synagogue.
I wear a yarmuka.
I'm a protester.
I'm actually, I was very frustrated at that clip, Ezra, because you were perfectly right to keep at him.
And I mean, I call that, you know, playing the keepa card.
I really don't like that.
I don't like, you know, I'm here, I'm in support.
This one supports, that one supports.
Doug Ford supports.
Everybody supports and says, but what you, and you're quite right, what they mean by support is this is terrible.
It's just like Justin Trudeau just said he was disgusted at the thought of this anonymous letter that came with a threat to 100 Jewish institutions in Canada, that they're all under threat of who knows what, of some kind of attack.
And everybody's disgusted and concerned, disgusted and concerned.
And the RCMP is supposed to be investigating.
But I don't know, I get a lot of people writing to me and saying, what do they mean by this?
What are they going to do about it?
I mean, why does it keep going on?
And nobody actually arrests these people or at least make serious attempts to.
Anyways, and I found that interview a little disconcerting because he seems clear to me that Mr. Kirstner thinks he is doing something positive and something that is actually effective in some way by coming out to these protests and coming out and stating his intention, you know, to keep living as a Jew and all that.
But these are words.
These are words.
And you're right.
I don't see a lot of action.
And I do think it's a testing of the waters.
And the fact that this threat to Jewish institutions has come out suggests to me that they can see there's not a lot of bite.
You know, there's bark, but no bite.
And there's, it's worthwhile exploring an escalation of violence to see what happens.
Yeah, I saw that email sent to a lot of Jewish institutions.
I read it.
I mean, someone sent me a copy of it right away.
It said there is a bomb in a black backpack.
And we are the name, the court.
Tell the media this.
I read it and I immediately thought, this is BS.
This is a hoax.
This is a hoax.
This is someone.
Well, and the reason I say that is Justin Trudeau weighed in.
This is disgusting.
And all the liberal MPs, this is outrageous.
Because, first of all, I think it'll be revealed to be a hoax, which will be used to say, oh, these Jews, they're overreacting.
But second of all, they don't condemn actual crimes, real stuff that's going on.
There was three days in a row a couple of weeks ago where I covered an arson a day.
There were four arson attacks in a row in three days.
And that's a real crime.
I actually don't believe that email threat for one second.
I think it, for all I know, it could be a trick for someone who has a plan to, oh, it's all a hoax.
Where are they on actual enforcement of the law?
Let me give you an example.
In the United Kingdom, they had anti-immigration riots the other day.
And Kierstarmer, the new prime minister, set up a 24-hour a day court.
So he's pounding through the prosecutions, one after another.
And some of them are rioters, but many of them are people who just tweeted sympathy.
One guy gesticulated in the wrong way.
Like it's one guy just said, you aren't Brits anymore to the cops.
Like it's so crazy.
He's making a political point.
He's taking actual people off the street and he's intimidating thousands more police forces across the UK.
It's like they're putting out sizzle reels of their, you know, they're filming themselves, arresting people, busting down doors.
It is a PR campaign.
We have the opposite in Canada.
In fact, we have the PR is we're bringing in more migrants from Gaza.
Hooray.
Welcome home.
Trudeau says that when he brings in foreigners.
Welcome home.
He's saying to people from Gaza.
They're bringing in thousands more people from Gaza.
They're not doing anything.
It's so interesting.
It's so interesting that 56, 56 Muslim Islam-dominated countries have said no to refugees from Gaza.
And Canada is welcoming them without asking, without our prime minister asking, why is no Muslim country in the world, why do they not want Gazan refugees?
Why would they hesitate?
And Trudeau has shown that he can't vet anyone.
There was a father-son tag team ISIS terror group that was charged with terrorism offenses the other day.
They actually committed terrorism overseas before Trudeau brought them to Canada.
We didn't catch them.
Zionism Under Fire00:11:17
When you're bringing people from Gaza, not only do 75% of Gazans support Hamas according to their own polls, but who selects the people who would be coming over?
If there's any bureaucrats or officials in Gaza, it's run by Hamas.
Hamas has a military wing, but it also does the machinery of the state.
If you're choosing 3,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 people to go to Canada, who's doing the choosing?
The government, I presume.
And what remains of the government in Gaza is Hamas.
We're literally letting a terrorist group choose who's coming to Canada.
Of course, there are terrorists embedded.
And even if there aren't, three quarters of them are anti-Semitic by their own polls.
Yes.
I think that's a big mistake.
And I hope we're not going to see the kind of evidence that I'm worried about that will prove that it's a big mistake.
But that's our prime minister.
It's prime minister, but I see every single premier in this country is shy also.
I was recently talking, I won't say which politician, but they said, please don't ask me about foreign affairs.
I mean, every single politician in this country is aware of the fact that demographically in the last 20 years, we have quadrupled the Muslim population, many of whom are wonderful people who hate Sharia law and hate the old ways, and they really want to be free Canadians.
But many more of them bring with them anti-Semitism and ancient hatreds, anti-Christian bigotry.
And we just haven't vetted.
And so it's not just the prime minister.
I mean, you saw there, I think that Michael Kirzner's role is to be a placebo, to say to the Jewish community, oh, not only do we have Jews in government, he's literally the solicitor general, the minister in charge of police.
So you guys are okay.
But as a kind of a placebo for not doing anything, Yaara Sachs, the Jewish MP from York Center Ontario, flies to the Middle East to shake hands with Mahmoud Abbas.
I think she was sent as a kind of human shield to buy space for Melanie Jolie.
Our foreign minister was meeting with a terrorism leader, and Trudeau was brilliant.
He said, have a Jewish MP go there just so it koshires the whole event.
So no one's going to say, what are you doing meeting with terrorists?
I think that let's talk about union leaders.
I mean, we could talk about university presidents, many of whom in university leadership are Jewish, but they abide anti-Semitism on their campus.
And what about Fred Hahn, the head of the public sector workers in Ontario?
The guy is a caricature.
He's a clownish figure, but he's practically a Hamas spokesman.
No, he is really an awful character, and he's been tolerated for quite some time.
It's very good to see that it looks like his tenure has come to.
But he just carrying on a tradition in QP.
You know, you may remember Sid Ryan, who was head of QP Ontario from the early 1990s to almost 2010.
He is a big anti-Semite.
He has a bad social media.
If you look at his social media history, it's just as bad as Fred's.
And he was tolerated for almost 20 years.
I don't understand how these guys stay in for so long.
And as you say, if it was any other group, if they were anti-Muslim, if they were anti-Black, if they were anti-anything, homophobic, anybody else but Jews, they would not have lasted 10 minutes.
But, you know, this normalization of Of anti-Semitism or a certain level of anti-Semitism, as long as it's, well, it's tweets, well, it's this.
Well, they don't really mean it well.
He apologized.
They don't really apologize.
They apologize that people were offended, you know, if people were offended or that they're sorry about the reaction.
They're not sorry that they, you know, or this Sarah Jama who's calling for the global intifada.
The whole, I mean, it's basically the left wing in Canada, NDP, NDP, both federally and provincially, unions.
These institutions are deeply infiltrated by truly hardcore anti-Semites, and they are tolerated.
And they do tend to rise to positions of influence within these institutions.
It's a serious problem.
It is.
And it's not addressed because just not seen, or it's seen, but not really seen as, well, it's just not seen as a serious problem.
You know, one of the things that's so telling is the lengths that the left is willing to go to make excuses for not being offended by insane chants and signs.
And by the way, I'm pretty much a free speech purist, but for the people who lecture us on microaggressions, the people who say, oh my God, you didn't use my proper pronouns.
You deadnamed me.
You misgendered me.
The people who have a thin skin on that will put themselves into pretzels to excuse the phrase, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, which means exterminate every Jew in Israel between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Globalize the intifada.
There is only one solution intifada revolution.
Intifada means an anti-Semitic riot, a pogrom.
They use the triangle symbol.
That's the symbol Hamas uses for a target for a gun or a missile.
Even they say, oh, we don't hate Jews.
We just hate Zionists.
Oh, no, no, we're not anti-Semitic.
We just hate Zionist Zionism, of course.
The Mount Zionists is the central feature.
It's the focus of Judaism.
And to excuse all these things with pretzel logic would be like if someone said, well, I'm not against, I don't hate Christians.
I just hate people who follow Jesus.
No, no, no, I got nothing against Christians.
Just people who follow.
Like, it's so the madness.
And again, I'm not calling for censorship of words, but the people who claim they do, the people who claim they're for tolerance and for anti-bullying, they have tolerated insanity.
And much of it comes from foreign people.
I don't know why.
I think that's why we're afraid to call it out.
Is these are newcomers to this country and we're just too polite to say, you guys are bigots.
Get the hell out.
We are.
We have been tolerating it.
They've tolerated it in Europe.
They're tolerating it throughout the entire West.
You and Mark Stein go back 25 years were warning and openly stating we've got a problem here.
You know, demographics is destiny.
But you got to admit that they, propaganda-wise, they have been extremely successful in kind of tarring Zionism, which 75 years ago when Israel began, Zionism was perceived as what it was, the movement for self-determination for the Jewish people.
And at that time, self-determination as a nation was the litmus test for every other nation that was created.
were 50, 60, 70, I don't know how many nations all were created around the same time because national self liberation, the liberation movement was determined.
Self-determination was the big thing.
So how only Zionism of all these nations, you know, the same time that Israel was created by the UN, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, these were not nations before the 1940s.
They all had the same timeframe in terms of becoming nations.
You have in Syria, for example, a country that is so dysfunctional.
You've had a half a million people killed in civil wars.
You have a ruler who has used chemical weapons against his own people.
Nobody has ever said Syria is an illegitimate nation or Arab self-determination is a bad thing.
It's a terrible thing.
It's a racist thing, even though all Arab countries were founded as nations that were Uden Rhein, that had to be Yuden Rhein in order to self-determine.
Only Israel is multicultural and has Arabs, Christians flourishing, but it's considered the evil one.
But their propaganda machine, MIL, it's an industry.
That's the only thing that they, you know, they have not been terrific at building healthy nations, but they have been very successful with their industry of lies about Israel.
And they are now, those lies are accepted.
And so to say, I don't want Zionism, I don't want Zionists in my restaurant or in my bookstore or in, I will not publish a Zionist, and everybody knows it means Jews.
This is now accepted in the same way that, you know, say the gender ideologues got everybody to believe that gender and sex were interchangeable so that everybody's very confused when you say, well, you know, a person can become the other gender or the other sex.
They don't distinguish between the two.
So I have to, in a way, admit defeat that we have been defeated.
The Jews are very clever, but they've been defeated in the propaganda wars.
And no matter how much rational stuff we put out and how defensive we get, we have not, we're losing every day on that front.
Social media, universities.
You know, you've got schools now that are starting programs in anti-Palestinian racism.
Explain to me what anti-Pal or celebration of commemoration of Nakba Day.
What is Nakba Day?
It's, you know, why is it being commemorated?
If you ask them, it's just lobbying.
They're instituting them in order to, these programs are going to be condemnations of Zionism and of Israel, nothing else.
I saw just yesterday that the government of Canada has signed a contract with the Globe and Mail to put on a conference.
And one of the things they're going to study, the Globe and Mail has taken money to do this, is to study anti-Palestinian racism.
I didn't know Palestinian was a race.
Why Palestinian Isn't an Ethnicity00:03:22
Yeah, I didn't know that either.
I didn't even know that.
I didn't even know that Canadians were able to distinguish between Palestinian Muslims and other Muslims in Canada.
Islam is a religion.
How would you know?
Arabic is a language and Arabs are an ethnicity, but Palestinian is none of those things.
It's not a language.
It's not a racist ethnicity, but it is an official thing.
And I know this because the government of Canada is putting on a conference with the Globe and Mail to that effect.
I'll let you know how it goes because I've signed up.
Hey, you know, about 20 plus years ago, maybe it was even longer, Sasha Baron Cohen, who's a British comedian, he's hilarious, although his shtick is a little tired now.
He had a character called Borat.
Yes.
Borat Sagdiev, who was from Kazakhstan or one of the stands.
And he came to America and he would do cringy things and see how far he could go.
He would sing a song, he'd go to a bar and start singing, throw the Jew down the whale, throw the Jews down the whale.
And pretty soon everybody would be like singing along with like in that in that case they sang along.
In other cases, like I like he would go, he went to a very fancy dinner party and he did something unspeakable.
I won't even say what it is.
Just he would see how far he could go, how sexist he could be, how racist he could be, how anti-Semitic he could be, how vulgar without the Americans losing.
Yeah.
And I just want to play, I mean, he, I remember a scene when he was talking about dating, because he was extraordinarily sexist.
Obviously, this is a character he was playing.
And I think Sasha Baron Cohen was doing this to mock Americans, to show how simple and dull-witted they are.
But I think it had the opposite effect.
It made me think Sasha Baron Cohen was dirty and bigoted.
Like, listen, I thought they were hilarious, by the way.
But what it showed to me was the goodness, the tolerance, the patience of ordinary middle-class folks in America who, instead of saying, you bigot, get the hell out of our country, would sort of keep their straight face and explain to them why what he was doing wasn't the American way.
Here's just a clip, just to throw away an example of what I mean.
Let me come right back and explain why I'm referring to Borat in this conversation.
In US and A, if you want to marry a girl, you cannot just go to her father's house and swap her for 15 gallons of insecticide.
Before American woman will allow you in her vagine, you must do something called dating.
My name is Jenny.
Pleased to meet you.
Hello, Jenna.
Nice to meet you.
Thank you for coming in today to see if Great Expectations is right for you.
Yes.
What would you like to see happen if you met your ideal woman?
I will love her.
Crushing Values00:06:47
We will be as one.
I will give her television, remote control, a red dress.
I hope we'll have to.
So you're saying you have a good life and back home you can provide for her a good life and that's what she'd like to do.
But if she cheats on me, why you laugh?
I think that's sweet.
Keep going.
But if she cheats on me, I will crush her.
You will crush her.
Well, honey, that's not going to qualify you with our membership.
If you're prepared to crush a woman, you can break up with her and divorce her, but you cannot crush.
No crushing.
I would say maybe 200 years earlier in the United Kingdom, they would have run that guy out of town.
But in our modern age, we're tolerant and welcoming.
And I think the Borad effect is what we're seeing.
All these Borats have come over, racist, sexist, anti-gay, anti-Semitic, outrageous, and doing many other things that are un-Canadian.
But we're too goofy, friendly, smiley, tolerant, passive, conflict-diverse.
So we accept that.
We've been trained up in multiculturalism.
Like when you're told from the day you're born in this country that we are a welcoming country and we are a country of many cultures, in fact, we don't even have a culture of our own because we are a community of cultures.
And that every culture is the same or the same value, has the same value.
They do things differently, but that's diversity and diversity is our strength.
So if you are told that again and again and again and again, you train yourself not to notice the differences that you find, wait a minute, that's, whoa, that's not, you know, that's not proper or that's not right or that's not good.
That's not what I believe or that, you know, that's not what I was brought up to.
It's unkind.
It's like all of those things, you're not allowed to judge if it's another culture because that's their culture.
So we are not just wanting to be nice.
We are wanting to be nice out of fear, out of fear of crossing that red line of being ourselves racist or in this most cases, Islamophobic or whatever it is, because that's considered a kind of litmus test for being a true Canadian.
You are a multiculturalist.
And by the way, 10 years ago, it was European leaders were able to say, you know what, multiculturalism has been a failure.
Angela Merkel said, with the migrant situation, she says, multiculturalism has not been a success.
And there were several, there was a Scandinavian leader, a couple of other leaders said, multiculturalism is not what we thought it was going to be and it's not working.
But you can't say that now.
Now you can't say that.
You know, when I was watching a black Caribbean podcast, I think it was called Toronto Tings, and it was in a lovely Caribbean accent.
And, you know, I consume all sorts of media.
I'm not just, I was just watching Toronto Tings.
And so this is the Caribbean community talking about mass immigration and how it's destroying Canada.
And I just, so it's not just right-wing old stock Canadians.
Toronto Tings was saying, what are we doing?
And he started off with, I'm not a racist, you know, don't jump on me, but let's talk for 20 minutes about how insane this country has become.
I find that hopeful in its own way.
I believe that people from different backgrounds can come to be Canadian.
I don't believe it's a racial or a bloodline thing.
I think there's a set of values.
I'm a civic nationalist.
Charles de Gaulle, perhaps the most chauvinist man.
He was a perfect Frenchman that way.
He was asked, can a foreigner become French?
Wow.
That's a good question to ask Charles de Gaulle.
And he said yes, gradually and in small numbers.
Yes.
Because you have to inculcate.
You have to learn.
You have to learn the language, the culture, the history.
Once you allow so many people at the same time to come, they're going to form, and they do.
It's very natural.
I would too.
If I didn't speak the language of the new country and I didn't understand the customs, I'd want to also be with people that I was familiar with.
But if you have whole communities and they're constantly reinforcing the old culture and the old country, and they're not really making a serious attempt to integrate, and nobody is even saying they have to.
And nobody says, we want you here, but these are the rules.
These are our values.
And if you're going to become Canadian, these are the kind of values we're going to expect you to accommodate and to express and to rear your children in.
And here they are.
So I believe in the assimilation model.
It worked for my grandparents.
I wasn't brought up speaking Yiddish.
I don't mind.
I think you do.
Immigrants should pay a price for moving to another country.
And one of the prices is that you adapt to the customs, language, values of the new country, and you learn the history of the new country and you become a productive member of that community.
You don't set yourself in opposition to it.
You don't say, we're here, but we don't like your values.
In fact, give us some time and we're going to make sure that you not only accommodate our ability, our capacity to run our own communities the way we see fit, even if they don't adapt, if they're not like your values, we don't care.
But we're going to make sure that you also, you know, in time, it's our expressed wish that our values and our way of life and our belief system dominate this country.
High Trust Society00:08:25
And that's what some of the leaders, political activists amongst these big crowds of people are saying very openly.
You see it, you know, certainly in England and Europe.
You have people screaming in the streets.
That's exactly what they want to do.
And you can't blame people for being frightened by it.
I'm frightened.
Well, I mean, you're frightened.
You're being frightened.
That's literally the Greek phobia.
Being frightened is now a crime.
You're phobic.
Hey, let me close by showing you a clip.
This clip is probably the single most viewed video that we have ever recorded.
Now, my walking scrum with Albert Pfizer of Moderna, excuse me, Albert Burla, the CEO of Pfizer, when Abiyamini and I caught him on the streets of Davos, that was seen about 40 million times.
But there is a video clip that I estimate has been seen up to 100 million times.
I encountered all the time on social media because it's clipped and bootlegged by other people because it's so viral.
Most of the time, our logo is sort of cropped out, but you can see it on the microphone flash.
It's our dear friend David the Menzoid Menzies encountering an immigrant to Canada at the Al-Quds Day anti-Semitic festival that the government of Iran would sponsor at Queen's Park every year.
And it's a man.
You said, we have to let people know the rules.
We have to let newcomers know the rules.
This man knew the rules.
And he went to a citizenship ceremony and he was silent when he was told to say an oath.
And here, take a listen to him laugh at us saying, it was up to you to make sure I said the oath.
And I didn't.
I have met several Muslims who left Islamic nations and have horror and are horrified and are horrified to see those elements of those countries following them over to Canada and the United States.
What would you say to them?
You know, Muslims that want to live a secular lifestyle.
You should go to your queen and tell her to change the laws.
Change the laws to what, sir?
To Sharia law?
No, change the laws to not allow any more Muslims to come to Canada.
Like if you if you are bothered by Muslims, because we owe our allegiance and our loyalty first and foremost to our religion, not to the queen, to be honest.
When I went for my so-called oat, I was silent.
I didn't say anything.
It was your responsibility to make sure you got it out of me.
So when I didn't say anything, I'm not liable to anything.
There we have it.
We're suckers.
We're a high-trust society.
They come from a low-trust society.
They can't believe it.
I've encountered this one time myself in my life, Barbara.
I recently had the pleasure of a lifetime to visit Japan, which is an advanced civilization in just about every way.
I know they have their problems, but when I went there, I felt like I was a barbarian and a brute.
And they are an extremely high-trust society.
Their crime rate is negligible.
I was there for two weeks.
I saw one homeless person the whole time.
I saw one drunk person the whole time.
Tokyo, the world's largest city, I don't think I heard a horn honk.
The politeness, the respect for others, the care taken not to embarrass others, the cleanliness, the safety.
It was an astonishing place.
And I loved it.
But I know occasionally people go to Japan because they take advantage of it.
There's some live streamers who go there to flick people in the nose and punch people in the nose and steal their people.
Do they really?
Oh, that's terrible.
No, they absolutely do.
And they live stream it because Japan, you think we're a high-trust society here in Canada.
Japan, because it's like one big ethnic family, they would never do that to each other.
So they trust anyone.
It's like, I mean, do they lock their doors?
I'm sure some of them do.
But it is such a high-trust society.
I loved every minute of it.
And I love the people more than anything.
But not everyone who goes to a high-trust society says, wow, this is wonderful.
I'm going to enjoy it.
Some people say, this is a country of suckers.
I'm going to take advantage of them.
Boy, I'm going to cut through this place like a hot knife through butter.
And we, one of the things I love best about Canada and the United States and the United Kingdom and Western Europe is that we are a high trust society and it took us millennia to get that way.
It took us, how many generations did it take to build up a level of trust where a young woman can go to the bar, get a little tipsy, and then get a cab and have the cab take her home without the cab driver raping her.
And I know that sounds like a harsh and brutal and shocking thing to say, but you find out when suddenly, like in the city of Halifax, you have a lot of Syrian and other foreign migrants now driving cabs that they don't take those drunk women home.
They sexually assault them, one after the other, after the other, after the other.
You find out that you'll slip back to medieval times.
It'll take you a million, it'll take you a thousand years to build up a high trust society, and it'll take you one generation to lose it.
On that unusual and sad note, Barbara, I want to wrap up.
Last word to you.
Well, this has been a kind of depressing conversation, hasn't it?
It always is.
I'm sorry.
When I talk to you, it makes me reflect on how bad things are.
I know there's good things out there too, but I know.
Well, listen, I think I should end on the note that there's nothing wrong with immigration.
There's nothing wrong with legal immigration, but there have to be standards for immigration.
And as you say, high trust societies are based in the knowledge that the people you meet when you walk down the street, if you smile at them, they're going to smile back because you want to reinforce the idea that we are a community.
We're all pulling together for the same end.
In order to inculcate that spirit, people have to, remember, we used to take civics.
I think people, kids used to take civics lessons to understand how you're supposed to act in a civil society.
And I would love to see that kind of attitude and spirit come back.
And I think that if enough of us spoke out about the necessity for that, maybe we would see something like that happen.
But it won't be soon.
The only thing I'm going to disagree with you on is when you say immigration is not a problem.
I'm sure at some numbers it's not a problem.
No, no, no.
As I say, not in these numbers and not with this rapidity.
There's one million foreigners in this country.
No, no, no.
Way too much.
Way too much.
Okay, I'm glad we agree on that.
In principle, it's good to have people.
We're going to have to.
Our fertility rate right now is 1.4.
That is extremely low and it is not replacement level.
So unless we start having more babies, immigration is our future.
So we have to make sure that the immigrants that do come that we have civics or that they have certain expectations and that there will be criteria to meet in terms of adapting to our culture.
We have to agree that we created a culture.
And as you say, it took millennia.
It's in danger.
So I think it's worth preserving.
There you have it.
Barbara Kaye, one of our favorite people.
And it's true.
Whenever we talk, I get myself all whipped up and pessimistic, but you got to keep hope alive.
As John Paul II would say, where there's life, there's hope.
That's our show for today.
Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.