Ezra Levant’s guest Lauren Gunter examines Alberta Premier Daniel Smith’s diplomatic push to counter federal policies like the Impact Assessment Act and his proposed 25% tariffs on Canada, leveraging U.S. Republican ties to pressure Trudeau amid 180,000–200,000 undocumented crossings exploiting Canada’s asylum system. Smith’s border crackdowns and sports/transgender legislation—aligned with FINA’s puberty rules—face activist opposition, including federally funded groups like EGAL, while Trudeau’s expanded gun ban (324 new models) ignores smuggling, with 95% of crime guns entering from the U.S. Meanwhile, NDP and Liberal MPs interact with pro-Palestinian protesters at Parliament, contrasting the government’s harsh treatment of the Freedom Convoy, raising questions about selective enforcement. Smith’s strategy could force Ottawa to confront economic and security failures, but legal battles loom. [Automatically generated summary]
I think Premier Daniel Smith just might save Alberta from Trump's tariffs.
It's December 6th, 2024.
I am Sheila Gunnerid, but yes, you are watching the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you sensorious thug!
Well, surprise!
It's me!
If you were hoping for Ezra Levant to be hosting the show today, well, he's on a very special project.
We can't really tell you about it yet, but he needed to take the day to work on it.
And when you find out, I think you will realize it's really been worth the wait and it will be worth putting up with me hosting the show today.
And I have to quickly host the show because I have to get on a plane to go to Paris, France.
Oh, but friends, it's not going to be a vacation.
I'm going there with my friend Alexa Lavois.
I think we're only going to be on the ground for two days, which is actually more than my travel time there and back.
I think my travel time is like a day and a half there and a day and a half back.
You can see all of our reports at notredamrestored.com.
You can donate to offset the cost of our trip.
We are going there for two different reasons now.
We were initially only going there for one.
So first reason, Notre Dame Cathedral is reopening after nearly being destroyed by a super duper suspicious fire in 2019.
And we want to talk to the pilgrims and the French people about whether or not they believe the official story, which isn't really official at all.
They think it was an electrical fire.
Maybe they don't know.
Will we know the full story now that the French government has fallen and Macron may no longer be the French president?
That's where Alexa comes in with her French language skills.
So we will be filing stories in English and in French.
And again, you can offset our costs to go there and follow along with our journalism at Notre Damrestored.com.
Now, you need a show, beloved subscriber.
And Ezra's working and I've got to leave.
So I didn't have a lot of time to plan a show, but thankfully our friend from Postmedia, Lauren Gunter, will be joining me in a long form interview.
And what are we talking about?
Well, we're talking about Trudeau's latest last-minute gun grab.
We're talking about the fight for oil and gas by Premier Daniel Smith here in Alberta.
We're also talking about her relationship building efforts into the United States, not leaving that diplomatic and economic relationship in the hands of Justin Trudeau.
We're talking about Daniel Smith's recent passing of a whole slate of common sense, fairness in sports, and parents' rights pieces of legislation in the Alberta legislature.
And we're also talking about Trump's threatened tariffs, why he threatened them, how he came to the number of 25%, and how it might be, might be prompting Justin Trudeau to do the right thing.
Okay, so that's the interview.
Take a listen.
So joining me now is a good friend of the show, Lauren Gunter, post-media columnist.
And Lauren, you're a careful watcher of Alberta politics, but Alberta politics has seemed to be taking on a global perspective these days, and I couldn't be happier to see it.
I wanted to touch on, before we get into Daniel Smith's latest fight with Ottawa over the Impact Assessment Act, let's talk about Trump threatening tariffs on Canada in an effort to get Justin Trudeau to do some of the things he's supposed to do as a prime minister, and that is stop the flow of people and illegal drugs across the border.
Daniel Smith has been, I think, working with federal counterparts in the United States, but also building these relationships with Republican governors on trade issues, not leaving the relationship up to Trudeau, thank God.
What do you think the impact will be on Alberta?
Will we escape some of these Trump tariffs because of Daniel Smith's, I think, clever work with United States governors?
Building US Trade Relationships00:15:56
I think so.
I mean, first of all, the thing I always go back to when dealing with Trump or when thinking about Trump is that the title of his memoir was The Art of the Deal.
And so he is first and foremost a negotiator.
So he, I don't know whether they have 25% tariffs as an economic point from some think tank that they think that's the point at which you put enough pressure on a country that they'll, he just, I think he just throws it out.
Ah, 25% sounds good, and that'll wake them up.
And to his very great credit, it did wake up the federal government.
You know, now the federal government, which has been backing off of its crazy, crazy open-door immigration policies for the last couple of months because they've become very unpopular with voters, now realize that they could be in charge of the biggest recession in Canada since the 90s if they don't do something about this loosey-goosey immigration.
We have been contacted, different people at post media, by longtime employees inside Immigration Canada, talking about how, look, we have warned these guys for years that you can't do what you're doing.
And, you know, one of the people said, well, you know, this Trump tariff threat was completely predictable because we had said, look, you're sending about 180 to 200,000 people a year into the United States without proper documentation because they recognize that Canada is a very easy market.
So they've decided to use Canada as a back door into the United States.
And Horan, the new border czar for Trump, he recognized this when he was with immigration control in the United States.
And, you know, sure, nothing compared to what's coming across the U.S. southern border, but it's 180 to 200,000 people a year that they don't need and who have only ever come to Canada because they saw us as a quick leap pad into the United States.
You could get into Canada claiming to be a visitor with a $7 visa and then from there decide to walk across or fly across or drive across into the United States and then become a problem for them, an asylum seeker in the United States.
So this now the liberals claim to be confronting.
I'm always dubious when it comes to immigration with these guys, because that is one of the, there are two, I think, two issues with the liberals that for them are markers for how open-minded they are.
One is immigration and race, which to them is inseparable.
And the other one is abortion.
If you want to prove your bona fides as a progressive, you have to be in favor of open immigration.
And Candace Malcolm, who works for the Toronto Sun, has done some tremendous work over the last few years on just how many people the liberals are letting in.
And two years ago, they let in 2.3 million people into a country of which at that time was about 38 million.
It's just, it's insane what they've been doing.
They let in 700 or 800,000.
The one that really bugs me is a seven or 800,000 foreign students.
Because when you and I talk about foreign students, we think about a very earnest chemistry student who's come from a third world country and he's studying now at the University of Toronto, the University of Alberta, wherever it is, and going to get a degree, maybe goes back to help out his home country or her home country.
Maybe he doesn't.
But that's the kind of student we're thinking.
Most of these people come over.
They go to a career college.
They take a six-month program on business administration, which, you know, we can look at some of the effectiveness of these programs.
Sure.
Exactly.
But while they were here until September, they were allowed to work 40 hours a week.
Now that's been cut back to 24 hours a week.
So what they were doing was they were coming, they were doing these courses at these career colleges.
But really what they were doing was coming here to work.
And then when their student visas ran out, the liberals extended them three times.
So most of these people had been here for as much as five years.
And so the Americans aren't stupid.
I mean, they're looking at this and they're saying, you have this enormous cadre of people, 5 million people whose visas will run out between now and December of 2025.
And where do you think they're going to go?
Do you have a way of getting rid of them and making sure they leave the country?
Are they just going to find a new Wroxham Road and walk across the other way from Canada into the United States?
Like we've been worried in Canada since Trump was re-elected last month that there's going to be this enormous exodus of people from the United States when he starts his mass, when he starts his mass expulsions from the United States.
But I think what they're worried about, and quite rightly, is that there's been this massive immigration drain into the United States from Canada, because that's what people who come here, lots of people who come here, that's what they were planning from the start.
And the Americans know this and Trump's people know this and they sent us a warning.
And thankfully, it kind of woke up our federal government.
The proof's in the pudding, the devil's in the details.
We can see whether they walk the walk now that they're talking the talk.
But still, you know, Trump's one threat of a 25% tariff has really rattled the Laurentian elites in central Canada over our current immigration.
Yeah, and like you, I'll believe it when I see it, because let's never forget that he said, oh, we've closed Wroxham Road.
We're really cracking down on illegal immigration and people who are making these irregular asylum claims.
But then he made it easier to just fly into Pearson and do it.
Right.
So he just changed the location of all of these things happening and then patting himself on the back for saying that.
Well, and of course The change from Roxanne to Pearson was basically a SOP to Quebec.
Quebec was getting the bulk of the Wroxham Road pedestrian crossers, and they didn't like that.
So first of all, the Fed started bussing people out of Quebec to Ontario.
And then finally, they just decided, well, we'll let them fly into Pearson and then Quebec won't be as unhappy anymore.
So all of this for the last nine years has been, I would, I hesitate to say carefully scripted, but it certainly has been deliberate.
I don't think these people carefully script anything.
I think this seriously is the most incompetent government I've ever seen, federal or provincial, in my lifetime.
And I lived through the divine government in Saskatchewan.
Oh.
Yeah, I think they're headed towards a Kim Campbell style blowout, I think, in 2025.
Fingers crossed.
Yeah, from my lips to God's ears.
And it is slightly insulting as a Canadian that the decay of our infrastructure because of the burden of bringing in two plus Edmonton sized cities worth of people every single year, the burden on our health care, the burden on our housing prices, the downward effect on our wages.
None of those things were enough to get Trudeau to act on behalf of Canadians.
He needed basically a death threat to our economy from Trump to actually even consider doing anything.
Which is, I think, a terrible way to govern.
It's terrible.
It's obvious.
All the reactive stuff is just useless, especially when you don't know what the problem is in the first place.
You can throw up solutions, but if you haven't recognized what the real problem is, your solutions may or may not hit the right mark.
They're probably not going to.
But further to your list of economic woes, of course, a week ago today, StatsCan came out and said that for the sixth consecutive quarter, Canadian per capita GDP had fallen.
And there's two reasons for that.
It's the eighth out of nine quarters.
So for more than two years now, our per capita GDP has been in decline.
In the United States, where the voters are much more economically attuned than many Canadian voters, particularly Central Canadian voters, this government would be toast.
You couldn't come back from it.
It turned out that the Biden government was toast because of its poor handling of the economy, whether they added Kamala Harris and every legacy outlet in the United States fall.
It was falling all over.
You think our media is biased.
I have not seen the kind of bias for Kamala Harris that I saw in the United States.
It was revolting.
But point here, our economy is faltering for two particular reasons.
The economic policies of the liberal government, which comes as no surprise to anyone, drive away investment, particularly in the energy sector, but in all the manufacturing and mining and everything else that we're good at.
So our economy has slowed way, way down.
Our growth this year might be 0.8 or 9%, but that's not enough to really call it growth.
But at the same time, too, we're adding 100,000 newcomers every month.
And they're looking for housing and they need health care and they want jobs.
And they are eating up GDP as everyone is.
I'm not saying this is just an awful thing immigrants are doing.
But when you add 100,000 people a month, sometimes 120,000 people a month, you're just, unless you're really roaring your economy along, you're going to reduce your per capita GDP.
It's just there are more people looking for a slice of the pie and the pie is not shrinking, but it's not growing either.
And so the problem with the liberals is, as you said, they're reactive to everything.
They haven't a clue what to do.
You know, when you get into a 12-step program, the first one is recognizing you have a problem and what that problem is.
These guys can't get into a 12-step program because they refuse to recognize what the problems are, much less that they created them.
Yeah, I think one of the other steps is making amends.
I don't think we'll have received that either.
Now, let's sort of drill down a little bit to Danielle Smith, who is in the mix of all of this, because it seemed as though right after Trump got elected and now before he's even taken office, she's quickly building relationships with her counterparts in the United States.
In a way, I don't think we've ever really seen a Canadian premier do.
In fact, I think Rachel Notley did the opposite.
She recalled our envoy to Washington, Rob Merrifield, as one of her first acts of business.
What do you think?
Do you think if we see tariffs on some sectors of the economy, will Danielle Smith work with her American counterparts, insulate Albertans from some of that?
Yeah, oh, absolutely.
And as soon as gasoline in the Midwest goes up by 35, 50, 70 cents a gallon, Trump will back away from the tariffs on oil and gas because they rely on our oil and gas about 4 million barrels a day.
And there is no economic barometer that I can think of in the United States.
Inflation, maybe, but the price of gasoline is the one that people see every day when they drive up and down the roads because prices are always posted.
And they know what the economic trends are based on what they see.
And if suddenly gasoline in the Midwest, which is where most of our oil and gas goes, if suddenly gasoline goes up, as I said, 35, 50, 75% a gallon or 75 cents a gallon, Trump will probably back off.
The other thing is that the Americans, of course, think of us as the attic where they put the stuff they're not going to use all that much.
And then every once in a while, like at Christmas time, they have to go up and get the tree from there and bring it back down.
So we are not their biggest problem.
But you notice the Mexican president, she came out and she said before Trudeau even did, oh, yeah, we'll stop all of the transshipment of people through Mexico into they're not going to do that.
But she gave him a political win.
She gave Trump a political win.
And to some extent, so did Trudeau by flying down to Mar-a-Lago and having- Yeah, exactly.
You know, and so what?
You know, exactly.
You know, you got to do what you got to do.
If you have 40 million people and they have 330 million people and their economy is our one, like more than 70% of our exports go to the United States.
You got to schmooze with people.
You have probably been in jobs where there were customers or clients that the business had to host at a golf tournament or take to a hockey game or take out for dinner and you didn't really care for them, but you did it anyway because that's how you do business.
And that's what Trudeau has to learn with Trump.
Yeah, it's all about building relationships, as Trudeau actually once said.
One of your earlier points when you're talking about Danielle Smith, she has made really good inroads with the Western governors.
So much so that they've invited her to their next meeting to sit in as an observer and a participant.
Apparently, she's going to make some remarks there.
Very few premiers have worked that angle that well.
And she is also filling a very important void until Pierre Polyev, fingers crossed, gets to be prime minister.
He cannot, as the leader of the opposition, be making bold foreign forays on behalf of the country.
He has no authority to do that.
He has no justification for doing that.
So she has filled in that sort of, she's kind of the leader of the opposition to Trudeau on economic issues and foreign affairs.
And I think she's been doing a very, very good job.
You know, it looked like Doug Ford was going to be that for a little while.
And then, of course, he just was happy to take any kind of federal subsidy that came Ontario's way.
And, you know, he's backed off.
Like, I'm sure you have seen the annoying commercials that Ontario runs nationally about, you know, Ontario is this great place where we're matching up northern mining with southern manufacturing might, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Impressed By Alberta's Opposition00:03:24
And where there's already been $44 billion of investment in EV manufacturing and batteries.
Investment.
Exactly.
I felt the investment being sucked out of my wallet the other day.
That's the kind of investment it is.
So Ford has been Ford has not been as forceful against the liberals as we initially thought he might be.
But Danielle Smith has stepped in.
She has not backed off once.
And I have to say, I'm so impressed by the Impact Assessment Act that, you know, the No More Pipelines Bill, her dealing with that on the legal side, her dealings on the emissions cap for the oil and gas industry, the ads that they've run saying, hey, look, this affects every Canadian.
Your prices are going to go up because we don't have the oil and gas industry anymore.
And she's been equally good on a number of other confrontations with Ottawa.
Ralph Klein got to be really, really well liked in Alberta, partly because he said, you know, the Eastern SOBs could freeze in the dark and he was tough rhetorically, but he was not as tough even as Smith has been legally and in an intergovernmental affairs way.
So I've been very impressed with the way she's handled.
Sure.
It feels as though she's the government in waiting envoy to the United States.
But also, I mean, because she is the elected premier of Alberta, she's really leading the opposition to many of Justin Trudeau's outrageous bad policies.
And she's winning.
Like, it's not Jason Kenney's strongly worded letters to the prime minister anymore.
This is real efforts to preserve the Canadian economy.
I mean, I never thought I'd see the day when an Alberta premier would say, we can put sheriffs on the border to try and stem the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States from Alberta.
Yeah.
You know, I wouldn't even, I've been doing this for 30-some years.
I didn't, it didn't even occur to me that they would have the constitutional authority to do that.
And they may not.
Somebody might challenge it and they may get shot down, but she's not afraid to try these things.
And that impressed me when she said, hey, we can make our border solid.
We can we can shut down any kind of illegal immigration into the United States from Alberta.
It's not huge.
Most of it goes through Ontario.
But yeah, I thought, good for you.
Yeah.
Yeah, she's thinking of creative ways of dealing with Justin Trudeau's bad policies, including expanding the roles of sheriffs to include, you know, watching people who are out on bail.
If Justin Trudeau is going to keep releasing them on bail, at least we can better monitor them in Alberta.
She's thinking outside the bun, as they say.
Speaking of Justin Trudeau, you know what?
I was going to segue into Justin Trudeau's latest bad idea, which is the gun grab, but we'll talk about that in a second.
It's still on Danielle Smith taking on these contentious issues, which I actually don't think this one is all that contentious if you talk to normal people and not activists.
And that is her latest swath of what they're calling transgender, anti-transgender legislation.
Transgender Rights in Sports00:09:29
I don't think it is.
It's about fairness in sport.
It's about parents' rights.
And it's about preserving the integrity of a child's body until they're old enough to make these decisions, like tattoos and piercings.
And I think that latter point is the real key to this, is that the Canadian Pediatric Association has said, no, no, no, we must have affirmation therapy treatment for any child about 11 or older who claims to be transgender.
No, pediatricians are supposed to rush to help them get puberty blockers and reassignment surgery.
It's ludicrous.
I mean, the Brits and the Europeans have looked at this extensively and said, no, people at 12 years old do not have the mental capacity to make these decisions.
And unfortunately, you know, I would be prepared in some cases to say, okay, well, let their parents and doctors decide.
But there are now so many activist doctors and progressive parents who would just rush to get this affirmation treatment done that I think they had to step in and do what they did.
And on the sports side, I mean, of all the talking I've done on this subject, the one that gets the most positive response is this idea that transgender women and girls should not compete in female sports.
And the people on the transgender rights side say it's unfair.
It's unfair.
Yes, it's unfair that I wasn't big enough to play in the NFL, but life is like that.
Life throws us certain unfair things that we cannot.
The government simply cannot overcome.
There's no way that, okay, it's unfortunate if you were trapped in the wrong body and you need to transition.
That has got to be a huge mental burden.
It's got to be enormously painful physically and mentally to have to go through that.
We can be there for you as an adult to make that transition possible, but we cannot as individuals, as governments, as taxpayers, overcome those things.
We can't compensate you for the fact that that's unfair.
And is it unfair that I'd love to play soccer, but because I was born in the wrong body, I'm now prevented from playing at the highest level as a woman?
I guess it is, but life has unfairness in it.
And it's not the government's job to make everybody else suffer so that you feel you're being dealt with fairly.
And that to me, I think, has the most popularity of any of the three things that the UCP did.
And that was to say transitioning girls and women cannot play in female sport.
Yeah, I mean, this is an issue that hits home for me because I have a varsity athlete in my family, my daughter, who is playing on a scholarship.
And she would have lost her scholarship if a boy or a biological male identifying as a girl stepped into her position.
And it's just a danger in the, especially in the contact sports.
My wife and I have a very good friend who is the head of Swim Canada.
And as a member of FINA, which is the International Aquatic Sports Federation, they decided two years ago that as soon as you hit puberty, the unfairness becomes so obvious that once you've hit puberty, you cannot then compete if you transition.
You can't compete as a female if you transition.
And so, of course, the activists have said, well, that's why we need puberty blockers.
We need it to make it fair so that when these kids finally get to transition, they will be able.
Nothing says you get to play at a high level of sports.
Our daughter was a professional soccer player.
She played at high levels all the way through school.
She went to university on scholarships, much as your child has, and then went to Europe for two years and played professional soccer.
And as open and accepting as she was of transgendered individuals, she said it just wouldn't be fair.
If these people who have male physiques are suddenly able to play with their level of testosterone and their level of musculature, it just would not be fair.
And okay, so there's your problem with fairness versus the transgender problem with fairness.
How do we reconcile that?
And I think the UCP government's done the right thing.
Now, here's my concern with this latest slate of legislation.
There are three pieces there.
It's not that I think that the legislation is bad.
I think it actually is fair and it balances rights as best as they could on a difficult issue.
My problem is they didn't shroud it in the notwithstanding clause when they invoked it, because we saw it nearly immediately in Saskatchewan on their parents' rights legislation.
The vultures of the activists descended to challenge that legislation, even though it was protected using the notwithstanding clause, because I think that it's an end run around professional punishments for teachers who don't follow the law is if they can get a declaration of the law being unconstitutional, yet operational, which is what they're seeking in court.
And there's another sort of side story happening in all of this.
A lot of the lawyers that are involved in these legal challenges are funded by EGAL.
EGAL is funded nearly exclusively by the federal government.
So in another end run, it looks like Justin Trudeau is meddling in provincial politics by funding the activist groups.
And you can be absolutely certain that that's what's happening, is that at Justice Canada, they have looked at this and said we have to stop this.
And they decided that their flunkies over at EGAL are the best way to handle that rather than the federal Justice Department taking on Alberta directly.
They just give more money to EGAL to go and do this.
And so, yeah, you can certainly be assured that that's what's going on.
I go back to a story that I covered in the 90s.
I start to sound like my walker is just off camera.
And that was the eugenics case.
There were about 4,000 cases in Alberta of people who had suffered eugenics back in the 40s and 50s.
They'd been sterilized by the government and they were seeking some sort of redress.
And when the initial legislation was determined, when it looked like it was going to go to court and be declared unconstitutional, the provincial government brought it back in and added the notwithstanding clause to it and then sent it back.
And the courts left it alone.
So it's as simple as that from a legal standpoint.
From a political standpoint, it may be more contentious.
It might create more headaches for the government.
But they could add the notwithstanding clause with an amendment in an afternoon session in the legislature.
I'm not too worried about that.
I'm a little concerned that Smith won't say that's what she'll do.
But, you know, let's see what happens with this.
I mean, they've gone as far as any provincial government has.
I think they've done a really good job on this.
They've done a very fair and balanced job, as you were saying.
And yeah, could they improve it with the notwithstanding clause?
Yeah, for sure they could.
Yeah, I mean, I just would hate for them to have gone through the media and activist hellstorm that they have had to get this piece of legislation done to just hand the activists a win by getting the court to strike down portions of the legislation.
I would just say that.
Well, at least you could get a court that says, you could get a court that says, okay, this is unconstitutional, but because they've invoked the notwithstanding clause, it is operational.
That's rubbish from a court, frankly, because the notwithstanding clause is a constitutional clause.
So therefore, it must be constitutional to use it.
And Quebec uses it all the time.
Constantly.
None of these people who are these high, mighty progressive, none of them ever complained that Quebec used it.
Quebec used it all the time.
Quebec used it on Bill 20, which was the no religious symbols in public for public servants, including teachers, nurses.
They used that.
Banned Firearms Models00:09:14
I didn't hear many.
There were a few.
That was a special case where there were a few progressive media outlets that complained about the use of notwithstanding.
But because it was Quebec doing it, they basically just shrug it off.
They use it on language issues constantly.
All the time.
At one point, they were adding it to every piece of legislation that they were passing in the National Assembly.
So I can't remember what the example was, but it was something as innocuous as renewal of license plate tags or something.
They put the notwithstanding clause on it.
You know, it's just not.
No, you mentioned that the two, I think, cornerstone issues to count yourself as a progressive in this country are abortion and open borders policies.
But I think there's a third one, and that's gun control.
And I think in a last minute Hail Mary to prove that he, I don't know, is still a progressive, as though that were ever in doubt, Justin Trudeau has just decided, again, sort of outside of the work of parliament, to add another 324 new models to the ever-growing ban list from that ordering council back in 2020.
So I think we're up to 1,500, maybe even more.
More than that, it's closer to 1,800.
Yeah, just models being banned just frankly because they kind of look cool, which is not a good way to be banning firearms.
I mean, the most ridiculous part of this, there's so many ridiculous parts we get into, but to me, the most ridiculous part is for every one of these models that's been banned because it looks scary.
Yes.
There is usually a hunting variant, which doesn't look scary, doesn't look like a machine gun, doesn't look like it'd be carried by a soldier.
It looks like it's being carried by a hunter.
Same mechanisms, same muzzle velocity, same firing power.
Everything is identical, but it looks different.
So we're not going to ban those.
Do you think anybody who is truly serious about a mass killing is going to, oh, I can't do that because I like the way this one, this mass killer looked.
But this other one, it's for WIMPs.
It's just for hunters.
I don't, I don't like camel.
You know, it's insane.
But their obsession with it with the liberals, this goes back to Cretian and Alan Rock back in the 90s.
Their obsession with going after law-abiding gun owners to try and solve gun crime is insane.
So there have been the Edmonton Police Service yesterday said that gun crime in Edmonton is way down.
But we know from the Ontario police services that it's way up.
It's up by over 60% in Peel, in the Peel region, which is the area around Toronto.
It's up by almost 60% in Hamilton.
It's up by 45 or 46% in Toronto.
So they're having a problem.
But they will tell you, the police officers in particular, but also sometimes the chiefs will tell you this is a problem with smuggled guns.
85 to 90% of the guns that they seize at crime scenes have been smuggled from the United States.
And it's probably higher than that because, for instance, one of the guys I know who really understands guns.
And for me, guns are only a political issue.
I've never fired one.
I'm not interested in them from a hunting standpoint or target shooting.
This is purely political for me.
I do not trust any government who doesn't trust my law-abiding neighbor to own a gun.
It's political for me.
But guys I know who know this situation inside out say, if police recover a gun that has had the serial number removed, that's considered a domestic gun.
He said, but most of these ones come from the states too.
And they just remove the serial number.
So when they say 85 to 90% are guns from the United States, it's probably closer to 95% are guns from the United States.
And so that's what you should be going after.
But what did the liberals do?
One of the very first things they did when they became government in 2016 or 2017 was get rid of the mandatory minimum sentences for smuggling guns from the United States.
Yes.
And the reason they gave for that goes back to my immigration racism marker for them.
They said, well, it disproportionately affects Indigenous and black Canadians.
So therefore, we're going to get rid of what who cares what color the person is who's smuggling guns in and selling them to criminals.
I don't care.
You could tell me they're all white.
I'm not going to say, oh, that's unfair to white people.
So let's not have that law.
They're nuts about this.
And the 324, it's hard yet to determine of the 324 models banned yesterday, how many guns that means.
But it's probably a few tens of thousands of guns.
The initial ones were much more popular.
That's now I, the latest estimate I saw, which I trust is up to about 170 or 180,000 guns were banned in 2020 in the first round of this, if they know.
But the preposterous thing about that is they have spent over $70 million on the 2020 confiscation.
They banned a whole bunch of guns.
You had to turn them in by 2022, then 2023, then 2024, and then they moved it to 2025.
They've spent over $70 million at the federal level administering this gun buyback, and they have not collected one gun.
Not one.
They haven't seized a single gun, not from a dealer or from an individual.
And yet they say, oh, this move yesterday with 324 more models of guns is going to, it's going to add to the safety that's been in there from our first.
How can they be safer if they're all in exactly the same hands?
We were told these guns were so dangerous that ordinary people couldn't be trusted to own them.
And yet, five years, almost five years later, every single person who had a gun that was banned in 2020 still has that gun.
I likened it one time to the ridiculous things that when you used to go on an airplane and they say you have to put your phone into airplane mode because it might affect the navigation system.
If the phones were that dangerous, they'd take them from us at the door and they wouldn't let us have them back.
This is just horse hockey thinking.
And this government is full of it.
And you can tell that this is purely political because they said they were going to ban 324 models immediately, but they didn't put the list out till several hours later.
It's on the eve of the École Polytechnique shooting for which they'd been getting harassment from victims groups and from anti-gun organizations.
And, you know, the person, one of the two ministers there was Ducla, who is not related to the gun issue at all, but he's the chief political minister for Quebec.
So it's all political.
It's completely political.
And, you know, just going back to your point of, you know, this is costing, you know, we're approaching $100 million.
They don't even have a clue how many of these firearms are in Canada because they're moving them directly from non-restricted to Prohib.
So these, many of these guns were never ever registered.
So they're just spitballing how many of these firearms are in Canada.
Like they banned the Mini 14 ranch rifle because it looks cool.
I wouldn't use that thing to, I mean, it's not to hunt a deer.
It's more for varmint control.
And this is what the liberals are doing.
And this is the thing that really got me yesterday, because the irony here is just chef's kiss liberal perfection.
Talks are currently underway with the Ukrainian government to hand over the seized firearms to their military to use against Russia, said Defense Minister Bill Blair.
So I could not defend myself using these firearms against a burglar who's attacking me and I'm 30 minutes from the nearest municipality, but they're perfectly fine for the Ukrainians to defend themselves back.
You know, that is one of those, that's one of those pledges that they were sitting around a committee and somebody said, hey, if we say we'll send these guns to Ukraine, people will think that's really great, that we're killing two birds with one stone, to use an analogy that probably shouldn't be used in the gun debate.
Freedom Convoy Fiasco00:09:53
You know, they'll say, oh, oh, Pierre, that's such a fabulous idea that you've come up with there from Justice Canada.
Oh, that'll be a big winner.
It's the same mentality that thought taking GST off of things for a couple of months would be a big winner, right?
Nobody's going to buy this.
You might win a few votes back that you lost in Montreal, maybe a couple that you lost in Toronto, but this is purely a political exercise.
And I think, like everything else the liberals are doing these days, it's not going to work.
Yeah, they think they're going to send my mini 14 to Cleveland.
It's just crazy.
Lauren, thanks so much for taking the time today.
How do people find your work at Post Media?
Yep.
You can, the easiest, directest way is Edmontonson.com.
Great.
Thanks, Lauren.
This is Ezra's show.
So I'm sure he'll have you back on again very soon.
Very good.
Thanks, Sheila.
Stay with us.
Your letters to Ezra read by me up after the break.
Well, welcome back.
You know, it feels like every single minute of every single day, we're getting some form of viewer feedback.
And I know it sounds like I'm complaining, but I'm definitely not, because it means that you are engaged in our content.
It means that you care about the work that we're doing here at Rebel News for better or for worse.
I should tell you, I really don't care if politicians like us here at Rebel News.
In fact, I hope they're slightly scared of us in a healthy sort of way because it's our job to hold them to account on behalf of the people.
It's the people who matter to me, because without the people, there is no rebel news, because we'll never take a penny from Justin Trudeau to do the work that we do.
So if we lose the people, we lose rebel news.
And it's why I open up the end of my weekly gun show to our viewers.
Ezra opens up the end of his show for viewer feedback.
And that's what we're going to deal with right now: your viewer feedback.
And this comes to us by way of Ezra's show a couple of days ago, wherein a pro-Hamas mob, I don't know how to describe it.
I think that's probably the best way to describe it.
A pro-Hamas astroturf mob stormed the parliament buildings.
And in the before times, the left would describe this as an insurrection.
However, their friends are doing the insurrectioning.
So it's just a peaceful protest.
And, you know, imagine if the Truckers had done this.
And that's what some of you noted.
Let's get into the comments.
Mystery Cheese writes: don't forget that two NDP MPs joined that protest and are actively working more for Palestine than Canada.
Now, I don't know if they're actively working more for Palestine than Canada, but I think it was more than two NDP MPs.
I think it might have been three.
Matthew Green, Lee Gazin, no surprise there, and Edmonton's own Heather McPherson.
They were seen supporting the pro-Palestinian mob that took over the parliament buildings today.
And at least one liberal MP, no surprise there, chronic house flipper, Talib Noor Mohammed, was seen schmoozing with the group.
And that was after they were all forcibly removed from the parliament buildings.
Go figure.
Now, remember, remember how the media was completely outraged at the prospect that Members of the Conservative Party were, I think, kind.
I don't even think kind is the right word.
I was going to say kind enough to meet with some members of the Freedom Convoy, but just had the decency to go outside in Ottawa, where they all work, to meet with this thousands-strong human rights protests that had taken the time to drive all the way across the country to have their voices heard.
The media lost their marbles.
The liberals said, How dare you meet with these seditious insurrectionists?
And look at this.
The truckers never stormed the House of Commons.
Canada Rye writes, So the Freedom Convoy was labeled as terrorists, but this is okay in Canada, right?
Exactly.
Exactly.
The Freedom Convoy, they never went anywhere near storming the House of Commons.
They left the place cleaner than when they got there.
The crime rate actually went down in Ottawa while the truckers were there.
And yet, they were not just labeled as terrorists.
The feds used a counter-terrorism law on them.
They used martial law, the Emergencies Act, that's what it is.
It's to give the police unique and extraordinary tools to deal with, I don't want to say an extinction-level event, but a Pearl Harbor-level event on Canadian soil.
That's how the liberals treated the Freedom Convoy.
And they didn't storm anything.
They were a little bit too fun-loving for the boring people in Ottawa.
Not all of you, but there's a lot of boring bureaucrats in Ottawa who just didn't like all that blue-collar merry-making out on their boring gray Soviet-style streets.
Okay, I'll stop.
Harry Tinder, 5093, writes: Never mind the comparison with the trucker protest.
Compare this with the January 6th invasion of the U.S. Capitol building that was labeled an insurrection.
People were jailed for ridiculously long sentences.
You know, great point.
You know, the police just forcibly removed these people and then said, All right, off you go.
But Tamara Leach right now is in, well, nearing the end, I believe, of the longest mischief trial in the history of the Commonwealth.
And what did she do?
She was, I guess, the spiritual and possibly a bit of a logistics head of the Freedom Convoy.
But she called for peace over and over again.
She didn't trespass.
I'm still trying to figure out what exactly her mischief even was.
And yet, the feds are pursuing her with everything they've got, including a multi-million dollar prosecution for what?
For a crime that she was convicted of, she would never see the inside of a jail cell.
And that is to say, she spent nearly 50 days in jail on a breach of her conditions, which was never a breach at all.
After that, they should have just washed their hands of this mess, but the feds are still pursuing this for political reasons.
And as you rightly point out, in the United States, those insurrectionists, the people who wandered through the Capitol building, Might goofballs a little bit, but I mean, these are not insurrectionists, these are not seditionists, they're just minor trespassers.
They're in jail for years and years and years.
And in Canada, if you are a supporter of the Hamas rapes, murders, and kidnappings, and apologists for those things, and you storm the House of Commons, parliament buildings, and trespass, you will have support of at least one government MP and three opposition MPs.
Well, I don't want to say opposition, three NDP MPs who are technically not in the government, but thanks to a coalition with their leader Jagmeet Singh, they may as well be.
So, let's just say four government MPs, three in government by proxy, supported these Yahoos.
And where are the police?
Where are the mischief charges?
Where are the frozen bank accounts?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Wouldn't you want to know how much money is flowing from Iran to these pro-Hamas terrorist supporters to help them organize their weekly protests?
Because you know, these people don't do anything for free.
So, have we bothered tracking?
I don't know.
But if you were a trucker, you got your bank account frozen.
If you were a grandma who gave money to the Freedom Convoy, you got your bank account frozen.
If you were a farmer who showed social media support for a trucker, you got your financing denied by Farm Credit Canada, the federal government's bank for farmers, and they never told you why.
You just had the wrong politics to be financed for that combine or those 40 head of cattle.
It's despicable.
This reign of terror by Justin Trudeau, it cannot come soon enough.
Reign of Tyranny00:00:35
And I don't want to exaggerate and say reign of terror.
Let's call it reign of tyranny.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thanks so much for tuning with me as I subbed in for the boss while he's working on a very, very special assignment that we cannot wait to tell you about.
I think he's back in the driver's seat on Monday.
I've got to go catch a plane to Paris for the opening of the Notre Dame Cathedral.
And you can follow all of our reports from there at Notre Dame or Notre Damerestored.com.