Ezra Levant critiques Justin Trudeau’s UN visit, where he delivered a hollow speech on freedom of speech while pushing Canada’s unconstitutional Emergencies Act and Bill C-63, a censorship law. Trudeau’s $6K-per-night hotel stay and private jet use clash with his globalist rhetoric. Protesters like Jodi from CodePink linked war—especially Gaza—to climate change, accusing capitalist governments of hypocrisy. Levant questions selective focus on conflicts, dismissing climate urgency by comparing wealthy nations’ resilience to Haiti’s struggles. Trudeau’s globalist propaganda, even on Colbert’s show, reveals a leader more concerned with recycled messaging than substance, leaving Canada’s influence and domestic credibility in doubt. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm on Broadway, and behind me is the Ed Sullivan Theater.
It's almost 100 years old.
It's got a lot of history, musical history, cultural history.
From the 50s to the 70s, the Ed Sullivan Theater was home to the Ed Sullivan Show.
And Ed Sullivan, even though he was a slightly nerdy, middle-aged guy, he had access to all the new bands and cultural movements of those raucous years.
It was the Ed Sullivan show that provided the doorway for, for example, British talent, the British invasion, as it was called, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, to find a market in America.
To go to the Ed Sullivan Theater in the 60s was to have a front-row seat on the culture of the day.
Here's a little flashback of how that looked.
Richard Rodgers, who's one of America's greatest composers, wanted me to congratulate you and tell the four of you that he is one of your most rabid fans.
And that comes for me too.
I'd like to have a fine answer.
Well, after Ed Sullivan retired, there were some other shows in this iconic building.
And then the late show with David Letterman took up the space.
And whatever else you think of David Letterman, he did have some jokes.
The guy was naturally a comedian.
He wasn't as important culturally as Ed Sullivan before him.
But I'd say he was a man of the left for sure, and he had his foibles.
But he was a cultural icon himself in that after he had his show the next day at the water cooler, the next day over coffee, people were often talking about what they saw on it.
Well, fast forward to 2024, and the Ed Sullivan Theater is no longer named after Ed Sullivan, but after Stephen Colbert.
And Stephen Colbert, who picked up the mantle for the late show from David Letterman, I suppose he in his past was a comedian too, but I think it's far more accurate to say for the last 15 years, Stephen Colbert has been a political activist who sometimes tells jokes as opposed to a comedian who sometimes gets political.
Stephen Colbert's Political Prowess00:14:15
This, I think, was at its worst during the corporate COVID lockdowns.
I want to show you an extremely unfunny sketch, one of several, where Stephen Colbert, comedian, late night talk show host, just really thought, no, to heck with it, I'm going to be a Pfizer salesman.
They're paying the bills.
I'm going to do what it takes.
I'm going to dance for the cash.
Look at this outrageous video.
The vaccine.
If you think that was a one-off, it wasn't here.
Here's some more of that.
The love that Stephen Colbert showed for Anthony Fauci can only be described as fallacial.
It was so gross to watch and so obviously a corporate machine, not an organic place, a theater, a platform for new talent or humor or music.
It just wasn't any of that.
I don't know who would come to New York City, be on Broadway, where there are dozens of theaters with real shows, musicals, dramas, comedies, and say, no, I don't want to see real talent.
I want to go and watch in person a TV show that pumps out pasteurized, homogenized political talking points.
Who would come to this amazing city and say, I've got to get myself some tickets to Colbert?
I don't even know if they actually have a crowd for all their interviews.
And case in point was Justin Trudeau's visit to the Colbert show a couple of nights ago.
They never actually showed any of the crowd.
And the raucous applause by the people who were allegedly there, it sounded awfully like a laugh track and a applause track to me.
I have a theory, and I could be wrong, that when Justin Trudeau came on the Colbert show a couple of nights ago, there was actually no one else in the room.
Because had there been someone in the room, there's a good chance there would have been heckling and booing.
As you know, Justin Trudeau can't step outside in Canada anywhere in any province without being heckled and booed and jeered and sworn at by ordinary people.
He is universally detested.
One of the reasons he loves going on foreign junkets, including to New York, is to get away from Canadians.
But there are probably a quarter million Canadians in New York City.
And had they had a studio audience, I'm sure there would have been at least one heckler.
Our friend and alumnus Kian Beckstey tweeted that he had tickets.
He told me afterwards that he was just messing with Trudeau's entourage's head.
He didn't actually have a ticket to get in, but that's the kind of thing they would be terrified of.
My thesis is no one was there except for the cameraman, Stephen Colbert, and Justin Trudeau.
I want to show you some clips of it.
It was an astonishingly long interview in three chunks.
It must have been half the show.
And there was nothing particularly interesting about it.
No announcements, nothing fresh.
It was like it was the warmed over campaign stump speech that Trudeau gave in the recent losing by-elections in Canada.
Like I say, the show and the theater has fallen a lot since Ed Sullivan brought the world's most amazing artists to New York.
Here's Stephen Colbert, corporate pitch man, pitching corporate softballs to Justin Trudeau, the official globalist approved candidate.
Just listen to this opening part.
I mean, what should be the easiest question in the world, sell me on Canada.
You tell me, how did Trudeau answer this question?
Take a look.
I hear really good things about Canada.
Sell me.
Canada's the best country in the world.
I mean, you see the scenes like the beautiful mountains, the rivers, the lakes.
The Purple Mountains Majesty.
No, no, no.
No, that was that what you're trying to call it.
Actually, we go coast to coast to coast.
We have the theatrical ocean as well.
That's right.
Yeah, we're going toe-to-toe with the Ruskies over all the resources up there.
Yeah, there's a bit of a challenge there.
But the Canadian official is a bit of a challenge.
That is a Canadian understatement, if I've ever heard it, sir.
No, the thing is that everyone focuses on the land, but really Canada's about the people.
It's a range of people from every possible background who come together and a little different from the melting pot in the United States where everyone gets to be American.
We try to celebrate differences and people keep their cultures and keep their languages.
And like when the Polish prime minister came to visit, he was super amazed and pleased that so many of the members of the Polish community continued to speak Polish, even though they've been here for generations.
Whereas, yeah, everyone sort of becomes American more.
I've heard it described that America is a melting pot and Canner perceives itself as a mosaic.
More of a mosaic or a tapestry.
The differences, not just regional, because you guys have those as well, but differences in stories, differences in perspectives.
Every day you meet a Canadian, you get to hear a different, different approach to life, a different take on the values we have, on the things that we love.
It's an amazing country, and I really encourage you to come up and see more than just for the maple syrup and mountains.
Okay, so you mentioned the mountains, and that's good.
And then you say you really like the people because they're diverse threads of things.
And I actually didn't learn anything about Canada.
He didn't speak to any qualities at all.
I thought that was a post-national answer.
I don't think Trudeau actually knows why he loves Canada.
He doesn't know what's special about it because everything that is special about it is something that he's trying to reduce or forget.
He despises our history.
Morally, he says we're genocidal.
And he's trying to cancel so many aspects of it.
And his vast immigration program seeks to change the nature of the country.
I think Justin Trudeau can't answer what he loves about Canada because I don't really think there's anything he loves about Canada other than he's the boss of it.
Well, again, Colbert is speaking to his American audience, but again, he's not there to entertain.
He's there to sell.
Incredibly, the following day, Stephen Colbert had Bill Gates as a guest.
I can assure you, there was no chance that Bill Gates would be heckled by the crowd or would be asked about his countless visits to Jeffrey Epstein's island.
That's because this, again, is a corporate presentation.
It's really an ad pretending to be a comedy program.
So he asked Justin Trudeau to talk a little bit about really what he's fighting for, what he's passionate about.
And the answer was $10 daycare and some free dental work?
Take a listen to that.
But the things that we've managed to do, we've had to work really, really hard at it.
I mean, universal health care was decades of trying to bring people together and make it happen.
We've moved forward on world-leading fight against climate change with a price on pollution.
We're moving forward with dental care for low-income Canadians.
We're moving forward with $10 a day child care.
These are things that we have to fight for and that are really hard to do.
Trudeau actually mentioned that twice.
And I'm thinking, you're in New York City.
I don't know how many people watch the Colbert show.
I mean, is it hundreds of thousands?
Is it really in the millions?
There are that many people who actually want to hear it.
I don't know, but you're in New York City, you've got an international audience, and you're just reheating your talk about, well, we've got dental care for a few people and $10 a day daycare.
This is your great point about Canada.
He said that a second time when Colbert said something that I think was sort of gross, but you can count on it from the corporate media.
He accused Pierre Polyev of being part of an international wave of far-right fascists.
And then he compared Polyev to Trump.
Now, I would take being compared to Trump as a compliment, as would others in the world, like Javier Millé or Yair Bolsonaro of Argentina and Brazil.
But of course, when Stephen Colbert compares someone to Trump, they mean something completely different.
They mean someone who is extraordinarily wealthy and promiscuous and convicted of crimes and has an unpredictable wildness and a rudeness to him.
None of those things apply to Pierre Polyev.
And Pierre Polyev being a fascist, it's an outrageous slur on a Canadian.
And Trudeau just sat there, nodded along with it, and then said, oh, we're going to fight fascism by giving out $10 a day daycare.
It was the weirdest set up question and answer I've heard.
Take a look.
Here's one thing.
You know, something that I'm sure that comes, you know, quite clearly when you and the General Assembly is that the far right and flirtations with fascism at the very least is rising across the globe.
Even in Canada, your Conservative Party leader, your opponent there, has been called Canada's Trump.
And I'm sorry about that.
But I'm curious why at least some form of nativism or far-right xenophobia might grow in a country even as polite as Canada.
Why do you think this is getting a foothold even in your country?
See, that phrase, even in Canada, I mean, we're not some magical place of unicorns and rainbows all the time.
We got more than our fair share.
There's a big argument right now about whether dental care even exists.
We've delivered it to 700,000 people across the country, and my opponent is gaslighting us and saying, oh, dental care doesn't even exist yet.
And, you know, this went on for three whole segments.
It was so boring.
It was nothing that the youth of America would be interested in.
I don't even think it's a boomer's idea about what the kids would be interested in.
I think it was just a corporate assignment given to the corporate PR man, Stephen Colbert.
You are now going to interview Justin Trudeau.
He's a globalist.
He's a bit of a loser.
He's probably going to be thrown out of office, but he's part of our team.
So give him softballs for 15 minutes.
And Colbert did.
I say again, I don't believe there was actually a single person in that room other than the two of them.
Anyhow, mercifully, it was over.
I have to say, I watched the video for you so you don't have to go through it yourself.
And then I saw some pictures on the internet of Trudeau relaxing a bit after that stressful grilling.
And he was hanging out with some transgender transvestites.
I'm not sure if this is RuPaul, the trans activist who was on the show right after Justin Trudeau.
But Trudeau felt a lot more in his element.
He wasn't saying canned answers.
He wasn't flummoxed about what does he really like about Canada.
How could a prime minister of nearly 10 years not have a smooth answer to that?
And it sort of reminded me of how stressed and fake and forced it always seemed between Justin Trudeau and his wife, Sophie.
Remember when they were about to get their injections together and he took her hand and she sort of threw his hand away?
Remember that awkwardness?
Aww.
Yeah, there was always something iffy about those two.
Here's a video that I saved about five years ago because I just sort of had a feeling it was going to be deleted.
This is a video from the CBC show in Quebec called Toulamond d'Anpar, which is a really big program in Quebec.
And this is before Trudeau was prime minister.
He hadn't yet learned to be careful and he hadn't yet reined in some of his excesses.
So he's on this show along with Gian Gomeschi, the sexual predator at the CBC who was a little bit after that, he was drummed out.
So you had Gian Gomeschi, Justin Trudeau, and Sophie Trudeau right there.
And Trudeau was in a very strange way.
Here's a still image of him kissing one of the men on the program, which is a little unusual to kiss men on the lips.
I'm not saying it never happens.
I suppose those who watch The Godfather know about the baccio di tutti bacci.
But Trudeau's not Italian and he's not in the mafia.
It's a little weird to kiss a man on the lips, I think.
But look at this exchange between Sophie Trudeau, Justin Trudeau, and Jan Gameshi.
Because you're very handsome.
Thank you, Justin.
Kiss him.
I think because...
Did you catch that wink at the end?
I don't know.
There's always been something a little unusual there, but Trudeau is finally unleashed.
He's no longer pretending to be married, and Sophie Trudeau no longer has to pretend to hold his hand.
So he, I don't know, let off some steam afterwards with RuPaul and friends.
I guess my report outside Broadway is that Justin Trudeau came down here.
I don't think he came to talk to Americans.
I think he came to talk to, I don't know, the 50,000 Canadians who watch the Colbert show in Canada.
But they're not actually young people.
They're old people who are curious about what a middle-aged person thinks young people care about.
Important People at Davos00:10:28
I don't think the answer is Justin Trudeau.
Anyways, I'm going to do two more things when I'm in the city.
I'm going to go to the United Nations where Justin Trudeau gave a hollow speech that was remarkably similar to what he did here today.
And I'm going to go to try and find Stephen Colbert's audience, the people who were shuffled out of the room when Justin Trudeau had his interview.
Again, I'd bet a stack of dollars that Justin Trudeau and Stephen Colbert were alone in the room, and that was just a laugh track because I do not believe in 2024 there would have been no heckling for Trudeau.
Hi, everybody.
We started the day outside of the Ed Sullivan Theater.
We went to Times Square where we did some great streeters, but most of the people we met in Times Square, I think they were tourists, either from different parts of America or even from foreign countries.
We even bumped into a few Canadians, but now we're as close as they're allowing us to get to the United Nations.
Just a couple of blocks that way, the world's leaders are gathered for that talk shop, and police won't let us go any closer without accreditation.
You can see those two big dump trucks.
They're just full of sand.
That's how they block streets from prospective suicide bombers that would come and ram through it.
You can't really ram through a big old truck like that full of sand.
It would absorb any shock in the blast for sure.
Absolutely tons of cops.
Over there, you can see some anti-Israel protesters.
There's someone accusing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of being a Nazi.
That's freedom of speech for you in a city that is hosting many world leaders that don't allow freedom of speech at home.
And one of those guys is actually our leader, Justin Trudeau.
As you know, I've been asking New Yorkers if they know who this guy is.
The vast majority just have no idea.
I think Justin Trudeau is sort of famous in his own mind.
To be fair, I don't think they would recognize Stephen Harper either.
I mean, Canada just is receding in importance around the world.
There was a time when Canada really could be in the first ranks of the world's countries.
I'll give you the example of, you know, peacekeeping 30 years ago, or Korea 80 years ago or so.
Or the Second World War, but we're just not there anymore.
We're not included in NATO exercises because we don't have the equipment.
We're not included in the new AUKUS agreement between Australia, the UK, and the United States.
We're just not players anymore.
Justin Trudeau made a decisive decision, a conscious decision to realign Canada with China and to bend the knee to China in every way, including allowing China to influence our politics.
I think the rest of the allies noticed and said, we're just going to slowly back away from you, Justin.
Anyway, I'm going to see if we can go around a little bit and get a little closer.
I don't think we'll be able to.
I am going to see if members of the UN court, as I'm calling them, the hangers-on, the lobbyists, the junior, junior, junior diplomats, all of them with diplomatic license plates.
I'm going to see if they recognize Trudeau.
I bet they will, because when you're in that milieu, when you're in that circuit, you get to know who the different players are.
From Canada.
Hey, Azra Levant, Rainey, what's your name?
My name is Avi, and I live in New York, and we are so happy that Tanya was coming to town.
Well, what do you say about some of the protesters here who don't want them to be here in town?
New Nazis.
And what about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris?
Joe Biden is going home.
Okay, well, Kamala Harris is running.
And I mean, whoever he's going to be, I believe, will be okay.
It's never as good as you think it is.
It's never as bad as you think it is.
That's a wise way of thinking the world.
Do you know who this guy is?
Yes.
Who's that?
The Canadian Prime Minister or President.
What's his name?
Do you know it?
Trudeau.
And how do you know him?
What do you think of him?
Could be better.
Yeah.
I was just in Canada.
We went to Montreblanc for the summer.
There's issues that needs to be handled in Canada.
All right, well, we'll do our best up there.
Are you trying?
He's also a good boy, but he could do better.
Thanks for stopping by to say hello.
Support Israel, my friend.
Support Israel.
All right.
Friendly New Yorkers.
I thought he knew who Rebel News was.
I think he just saw my face and wanted to say hi.
Anyways, you never know who you're going to bump into here.
We literally bumped into a Rebel News fan in Times Square out of the blue.
Like I say, they have the First Amendment here, which gives freedom of speech, even for offensive speech, even for speech you don't like.
Now, the question is, what happens when that speech spills over into trespass, into physical property damage, into assault and threats?
That's what we saw this summer at the various encampments, starting at Columbia University in the heart of New York City and spreading, spreading up to Canada.
It's free speech when you use your words or other expression, but how about when you trespass?
How about when you physically destroy things or threaten people?
I think that the way that U.S. universities and Canadian universities too, in the name of free speech, tolerated violence, I think, reveal that those institutions are not truly liberal anymore.
The kind of places that talked about trigger warnings and microaggressions were fine with people marching, calling for the genocide of Jews from the river to the sea.
That's what that means.
Anyways, we'll wander around a little bit and let you know what we see here about a block away from the UN.
Well, we're trying to get a little bit closer to the United Nations building, but it's very locked down.
You can imagine the security risks that having all of the world's leaders, or most of them at least, gathering in one spot.
I mean, the world's in a crazy state between Hezbollah and Hamas and Russia and Ukraine and just other risks along the way.
This really is the most guarded place in the world right now.
The UN building is the green glass one about two blocks east of us here.
Swarming the streets are hangers-on, journalists, diplomats, lobbyists.
A lot of them are wearing that United Nations 2030 pin, which I think is like a scarlet letter marking them as a globalist with their sustainable development goals.
It's basically a socialist program of global regulation.
That's really what the UN is about.
The UN and its partner, the World Economic Forum, seek to replace national sovereignty, where local citizens make decisions, with a kind of global internationalism where an elite priesthood like Klaus Schwab and the WEF make their decisions.
I mean, let me give you the most obvious example of mass migration.
When was the last time there was a vote in parliament about the number of immigrants Canada should take?
I don't know if that's been voted on in my lifetime.
It just sort of happens.
It's never an election issue.
It's just decided.
But it's weird how it's decided the same way in pretty much every country in the world.
And those handful of holdouts like Hungary and Poland are sort of browbeaten until they finally give in.
That's an example of what I mean.
But it's not just on immigration.
It's on global warming and carbon taxes and bans on plastic straws and even on bans on firearms.
These things, they want to substitute the UN and swap out local democracies.
Here's just a crazy example.
Here's Keir Starmer, the new British prime minister, saying he prefers to do things at Davos at the World Economic Forum rather than boring old Westminster, which is where their parliament is.
Here's that clip.
I'll ask you quickly.
You have to choose now between Davos or Westminster.
Davos.
Now, I'm not against politicians and leaders meeting to talk to each other.
There's nothing wrong with having a building or even a hall where people get together and a staff.
But when the UN itself becomes the main player, the central character, as opposed to just a meeting place, then we have a problem.
We shouldn't know the name of the Secretary General of the UN.
We shouldn't have famous people like Dr. Tedros of the World Health Organization.
They shouldn't be famous at all.
They should be like waiters or servants in the background waiting on and serving the democratically elected officials.
We're going to see if we can get a little bit closer to them.
I tried to ask people who this guy is, but I think these folks, the $1 to answer my question thing that I tried in Central Park, it doesn't work on these folks.
They're at much higher prices to get their attention.
And I think they're also more risk averse of being politically embarrassed.
We'll keep wandering around and see what we can find.
Well, there's about 200 countries in the world, and each one of them has a prime minister or a president, sometimes both.
They each have a foreign minister, and maybe a deputy foreign minister, and an ambassador to the UN.
They each probably have an ambassador to the United States.
And each of those very important people probably have a driver and a security guard.
But you get where I'm going with this.
Pretty soon, and you have a meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York, and they're all invited, you're going to have thousands or tens of thousands of people, all very important, all coming to the center of the action, which is just down this road.
It's a pretty serious blockade, a people blockade, and then they've set up that sort of terrorism-proof steel and concrete blockade.
They're taking things seriously.
There's all sorts of different kind of cops.
There's regular police, New York police, Secret Service, and I'm sure there's quite a few undercover police too.
And then there's foreign security agencies also.
There's a lot of important people here.
Just ask them.
But they actually really are truly important people, not just fake important.
One of the fun things we did earlier, and I'm not going to try and replicate it here, was to ask people on the street if they could identify Justin Trudeau based on this photo alone.
I think that's a nice photo of him.
A couple of people told me that they thought he was quite handsome, but he couldn't place him.
When I gave them the hint of the blackface image, more people guessed who he was.
Important People Matter00:07:25
I'm not going to play that trick here, not because I'm curious.
I just don't think people are going to engage.
But it does come down to the real question, is Justin Trudeau as important as he thinks he is?
And I think the question is, look, the leader of Canada, a mid-sized country, will only ever be, quote, so important.
Canada is not going to be a competitor with China, Japan, Russia, America for largest economy.
It's not going to be a competitor with America, Brazil, India, China, Indonesia for population.
Our military, even if it was properly funded, wouldn't be able to cast power around the world like the more than a dozen U.S. aircraft carrier groups or the increasingly rambunctious Chinese military.
And when it comes to the moral authority of Canada, I think that's particularly being squandered under Justin Trudeau.
So I guess what I'm saying is at the best of times, Canada punches above our weight and is a proud member of the G7, even though statistically speaking, we wouldn't be in the top seven countries measured just by our GDP.
But I think under Trudeau, we've become marginalized.
And I think the country is regarded as unserious.
Stephen Harper, whether you liked him or not, was treated seriously.
There was that dramatic showdown with Vladimir Putin when Putin thought he would sort of bulldoze Harper.
And Stephen Harper said, well, I'll shake your hand, but you've got to get out of Ukraine.
That was when, after the first invasion of Ukraine.
I guess what I'm saying is Stephen Harper kept his wits about him, stayed dignified, delivered a stern message to Putin, and wasn't childish about it.
And I think that that was a lever of sobriety that Canada was known for.
Harper and President Obama, his counterpart, were at odds ideologically, aesthetically, stylistically, but they managed to work things out together.
And I note it wasn't until Stephen Harper was no longer prime minister that Obama mixed the Keystone XL pipeline.
He had too much respect or too much belief in a working relationship with Stephen Harper to kill that pipeline while Harper was prime minister.
But as soon as Harper was done, Obama had very little respect for Justin Trudeau and killed the pipeline.
Of course, Trudeau probably wanted that.
Which brings me to the comments made by Justin Trudeau.
Now, the other day I took you through his speech at the General Assembly.
It was only about five minutes long.
The place was pretty much empty.
And bizarrely, instead of talking about global matters like the Middle East or talking at depth about Ukraine-Russia, he chose to repeat his stump speech from the losing by-elections in Canada.
Here's a clip of that.
The promise that if you work hard, you can do better than the generations that preceded you.
That promise is slipping out of reach.
So as a government, we are stepping up.
The solution to anxiety and angst is not to deceive and deflect, but to take action.
We know that confident, successful countries invest in their citizens, in their workers, in their middle class.
In national $10 a day child care that saves families money while ensuring women can choose the best path for themselves.
In nutritious school meals so our kids can focus on learning and growing.
In an ambitious housing plan that will deliver good, abundant, and affordable homes.
In a national dental care program that in its first months has already delivered quality care to three quarters of a million Canadians.
In a growth and industrial strategy that creates good paying, community-building, middle-class jobs, all while fighting climate change.
These are choices that deliver on the promise of Canada for every generation.
Yeah, that's weird.
You don't go to the United Nations to talk about dental care or $10 daycare.
Did no one even bother drafting a fresh speech for him at the UN?
By the way, he gave the exact same remarks to Stephen Colbert on the late show.
I mean, take a look.
But the things that we've managed to do, we've had to work really, really hard at it.
I mean, universal health care was decades of trying to bring people together and make it happen.
We've moved forward on world-leading fight against climate change with a price on pollution.
We're moving forward with dental care for low-income Canadians.
We're moving forward with $10 a day child care.
These are things that we have to fight for and that are really hard to do.
So everyone in the world is here politically.
And Justin Trudeau has his big moment, and he recycles a stump speech from back in Canada.
That's sort of pitiful.
But after Trudeau was at some meeting feeling important, he gave a bit of a press conference, and he had the audacity to lecture other people about freedom of speech.
Take a look at that.
We know that democratic values and principles are under attack around the world from authoritarians, from far-right-wing populists, from a whole bunch of people who don't particularly want to see strong and thriving free democracies.
Part of the targets of attacks on democracies is on a free, independent media, is on the work that professional journalists do to hold governments and people in power to account and inform Canadians and inform citizens about what's going on in their democracies.
I, as you well know, have often disagreed with some of the conclusions that media has been opining on from time to time.
But in the conveying of facts, in the challenging people in positions of authority or who seek positions of authority, it's absolutely essential that we always defend the freedom and independence of the media.
Hang on, was this the same Justin Trudeau that invoked the Emergencies Act form of martial law because peaceful protesters were criticizing him and embarrassing him, the invocation of which was later found to be unconstitutional?
Is this the same Justin Trudeau that handpicks censors to keep media he doesn't like out of the leaders debate?
The same Justin Trudeau who just this week is pushing through Parliament Bill C-63, the Online Harms Censorship Act.
It's quite something to see Trudeau pontificate in New York about freedom when back home he's doing everything in his power to undermine it.
That's why Trudeau likes to travel to New York.
He gets away from prying eyes, sort of.
He has fun.
He flies on his private jet, stays at a $6,000 a night hotel, and generally feels important.
But he also gets to say things without accountability.
If Justin Trudeau were to give a speech like that in Canada about freedom of speech, I think people would laugh at him.
Here in New York, he can get away with it.
Five Feet Away00:03:18
Stay with us for more.
Can I ask you a question?
So you're protesting here because the United Nations is meeting over there?
Yes.
So there's a lot of world leaders and you want them to hear this message?
And they're lying about the Gaza Wars, the gas and oil war.
Well, now, five feet behind you, there's a guy on the street.
I'm guessing he's an American.
Maybe he's a migrant.
I don't know.
But, you know, I believe in caring about things around the world too.
But you got some problems literally five feet away from you.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
What are you going to do for him?
The cops will walk right by him.
I'll give him a sandwich when he wakes up.
Will you, really?
Yeah, I got an extra sandwich.
Because, you know, it's sort of weird protesting about this very complex international thing you're talking about, where five feet away from you is a man.
Listen, I'm born and raised in New York City.
It's just part of being here.
You can't feed him, you can't feed everybody.
Tell me a little bit about CodePink, and what are you here to say?
Well, hi, I'm Jodi.
I'm from CodePink.
I'm one of the co-founders.
And we're here, you know, smack in the middle of where UN visitors are walking because there's not really a conversation about Gaza.
And this is UN week, you know, UN Climate Week, but war is the greatest contributor to climate change, and we're not hearing it on any of the stages.
So we're here to bring the message, to disrupt in certain audiences, to be out in front of the UN saying war is not green.
Where's that conversation happening here?
All you hear about are like capitalist solutions to climate change, which is so hypocritical because it's capitalism and it's violence and it's greed that is driving this destruction of the planet.
You seem very charming, but I want to ask you some tough questions.
Is that okay?
Are you sure?
I'm sure.
What do you think of Dick Cheney endorsing Kamala Harris?
Well, I think it shows who Kamala Harris is.
She's the war-mongering president, you know.
You know, it's horrible.
To see her embrace war and then watch women talk to her is very hard to watch as a feminist.
Very hard to watch as a feminist.
And not only that, the fact that she's the vice president and hasn't done anything about a genocide, isn't even speaking out, isn't speaking against Biden around a genocide.
She doesn't understand that that would galvanize people to her.
Instead, if she just looks, well, she's, you know, the Manchurian candidate.
I have one last question for you, and you've been very generous with your time.
A skeptic would say, even if you look at the worst case for the numbers of civilian casualties in Gaza, that although tragic, every civilian life loss is tragic, just in sheer numbers, it's smaller than other wars going on in the world right now, and that wars that have gone on for years, and yet where has Code Pink been on that?
example, Turkey versus the Kurds.
And and I just feel like that, but But where's your signs about that and the Turks are here, but here's what we do.
I think you focused on the Jews.
Crisis of Misunderstanding00:05:19
No.
Oh, my God.
Well, you're not focusing on the Turks.
You're not focusing on the Libyans.
You're not focusing on the Iranians.
You're not focusing on the Saudis or the Yemenites.
We're going to focus on our government.
What do you think about some of the mottos I've heard chanted at Columbia and in Canada?
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
What do you think of that chant?
I think that is the dream that the Israelis will become Jewish and practice their religion and that everyone in the land of Palestine will be free.
I don't think that's what it means.
I think it means to remove the Jews from Israel.
I don't think that's what it means.
And how about there is only one solution, Intifada Revolution.
What do you think that means?
I don't know what Intifada.
You don't know what Intifada means?
You're a peace activist.
You're here protesting against Israel.
Do you know what Intifada means in the sense in Islam?
And what does it mean?
It's an internal practice.
I don't think it is.
I think you're confusing that with jihad.
Am I a Muslim here?
No.
I really feel like this guy's not a person.
Okay, I'm more schooled in being Jewish than being Muslim, so I'm not, I can't really talk about it.
How has the climate crisis affected you and your people?
I don't know.
I haven't noticed a crisis.
What is critical that I should be noticing?
Have you watched the news?
Okay, so you're talking about the news, but so it's a news-generated thing.
Partly, or it could be what about the weather even in this.
Seems very lovely today.
Yeah, but we've had some incredible heat.
I think we had the hottest August on record all over the world.
So that's summertime.
It's hot in the summer, right?
Super hot.
Well, in terms of climate disasters, I mean, the more people get wealthy, they can mitigate against that.
Like in a poor country, if there's a hurricane or a flood, a lot of people get hurt.
But the richer the country, the more they can prepare.
Even massive hurricanes don't kill tens of thousands of Americans.
They might kill a few dozen.
Doesn't freedom and industry and economy overcome, don't we master the climate by being wealthy?
I don't think so how come people are fabulously wealthy They may be able to escape it for a while.
But lots of us are not fabulously wealthy and we can't escape it.
Well, compare how a hurricane hits Florida with a hurricane hitting Haiti.
Haiti is devastated.
Florida, it's a week of inconvenience.
Well, it's more than a week of inconvenience.
I mean, think about New Orleans.
It took them 10 years to recover from Katrina.
So it's not a week at all.
But tens of thousands of people didn't die, is my point.
Climate mastery means we're no longer at the whim of Mother Nature.
No, I think we can protect ourselves better.
We have a little more resiliency in this country.
We cannot protect ourselves.
It's going to get worse and worse in this country.
Well, I just came down to New York City for the day.
I came because I had a cheap flight that I and my cameraman Mauricio could take.
And I thought, let's just go down there for the day.
We don't even get a hotel room.
Let's go around and sort of retrace Justin Trudeau's steps.
We started with by far the most important thing he did was go on the late show with Stephen Colbert.
It was an embarrassment.
It was a nothing burger.
It was so bland.
It was a corporate PR move.
And I'm quite certain there wasn't anyone in the studio audience that probably was a Trudeau condition to make sure there were no hecklers.
I really enjoyed going to Times Square and scrumming people on the street.
What we call streeters, I would just hold up a dollar bill and say, tell me who this is and I'll give you a buck.
And people were sort of surprised by that.
And I counted up afterwards and I gave away $13.
So I think that that was a great little project and it was a lot of fun.
Some people like Trudeau, including some Canadians, but others did not have any time for him.
I can guarantee you that.
And it's sort of fun to bump into some Rebel News fans in the wild.
We actually bumped into some folks while we were running around town.
Here at the UN, it's really not a lot we can do because it's an ultra-high secure facility, given that 200 of the world's leaders are here.
This has got to be the most secure place in the world.
We talked with a few protesters who haven't yet got alert to the cancel culture approach of the Canadian left who know us.
I spoke at some length with the lady from Code Pink, and she didn't like it when I pointed out she's really only protesting against the Jewish war against Hamas.
I haven't seen Code Pink really say a lot about other wars.
She took some umbrage to that, but sort of walked away at the end.
And some of these ladies talking about climate crises, I don't know, I thought it was very telling when the first thing they said were, I said, what crises?
They said, don't you follow the news.
The news is the crisis manufacturer.
They're the misinformation spreader.
Anyway, it's an interesting day.
I'm going to go back up to Canada now.
There's a lot cooking up there.
But one thing is for sure.
The world can get along without Justin Trudeau.
They don't notice him.
They don't include him.
And random people on the street in our closest neighbor and ally, they never heard of him even when I offered him a buck to tell me his name.