Rupa Subramanya warns Canada’s free speech is "weak," citing Bill C-63’s authoritarian potential and Trudeau-era debanking during the Truckers protest, while criticizing Poilievre’s avoidance of diaspora tensions like Indo-Canadian vs. Sikh conflicts in Brampton. She links economic stagnation (slowed per capita GDP growth) and housing crises to excessive government intervention, fearing Trump-style regulatory policies could worsen Canada’s "brain drain." Subramanya praises Musk’s Twitter reforms for reducing censorship but notes lingering concerns over "freedom of reach," urging independent journalism like the Free Press to counter global overreach and protect national interests ahead of 2025’s political shifts. [Automatically generated summary]
Rupa Subramania is one of my favorite columnists and investigative reporters.
She's been with the National Post and True North, and now she's with Barry Weiss's Free Press.
What a pleasure to have her for the whole show today.
Let me invite you to get the video version of this podcast.
Go to RevelnewsPlus.com and click subscribe.
It's eight bucks a month, which might not sound like a lot to you, but it really adds up for us.
We get no money from big tech.
We get no money from big government.
It's just you.
Please go to RevelnewsPlus.com.
All right, here's today's podcast.
You know, nowadays it feels like censorship is creeping into every corner of our lives, whether it's the news we access, our posts on social media, or even how we choose to manage our families' wealth.
With companies like BlackRock amassing substantial voting power through passive investing, it's up to people like you to take back the power of your investments by working with a firm that shares your values.
That's why we have partnered with Rocklink investment partners.
Rocklink is independent, which means they have the freedom to invest without being influenced by the globalist agenda.
They focus on creating portfolios of excellent businesses, not on ESG and DEI or the latest woke trend.
Call them at 905-631-5462 or email them at info at rocklink.com.
That's Rocklink with a C, info at rocklink.com.
Free Press: The Contrarian Voice00:05:03
Tonight, a feature interview with Rupa Subramania, one of Canada's most independent journalists.
It's December 30th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Our next guest has a unique voice in journalism.
I started following her years ago.
I was delighted when the National Post made her a columnist, and then she started a podcast with our friends at True North.
And it didn't surprise me when she was snapped up by Barry Weiss's leading independent media company called the Free Press.
You probably can guess who I'm talking about.
It's our friend Rupa Subramania, who was our guest for the entire show.
Today, Rupa, great to see you.
Thanks for making time for us.
You're doing such amazing things.
I'd love to follow you online.
It's great to be with you once again, Ezra.
It's been a while, but I'm so glad that we're doing this today.
Well, thank you.
And first, tell me a little bit about the Free Press.
Barry Weiss, if I understand, she was an editorial writer at the New York Times, and she felt that wokeism and, frankly, a little bit of anti-Semitism was taking root in that institution.
And so she branched out on her own, started the Free Press.
It's done so well and has an interesting point of view.
And they cover different countries, not just the U.S. Give me one line about the Free Press, and because you obviously work there, you would know much better than me.
What is it and why is it important?
Oh, so the Free Press is a very exciting new media outlet in the U.S. I've been associated with them since the Truckers protest, Ezra, and I've been writing for them since.
I'm now full-time with the Free Press.
And, you know, what makes the Free Press special and sets it apart from other independent news outlets in the U.S. and Canada and elsewhere is that we're not afraid to, you know, go after subjects that other people are afraid to touch.
And we've done that consistently across the board, whether it relates to free speech or identity politics, wokeism, gender ideology, and so on and so forth.
We've done some amazing work on all of these subjects.
And our readers see us, see that for, appreciate what we have to offer.
And we're in a very exciting place right now.
We're growing really, really fast.
We're picking up a lot of subscribers.
And it's the talk of the town essentially.
And I'm incredibly proud to be associated with Barry and Nellie and the rest of the team and what we're trying to accomplish.
Well, it's exciting to watch.
And you're right.
I remember your coverage with the truckers.
You were one of the very few journalists who actually just went on the street and just talked to truckers and asked them, who are you and why are you here?
The two most simple questions.
Even, you know, frankly, a child could have asked those questions.
But the professional journalists that made up what I call the regime media, they wouldn't even ask those very basic questions.
That's sort of a rebellious thing to do, if I can use a word.
Is the free press, is it a dissident publication?
Is it contrarian?
Or is it just, I mean, like Barry Weiss is fairly much an establishment person.
I know she has the backing of some of the establishment.
Would you call them contrarians and dissidents or just critics and open-minded skeptics?
No, we're not contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, but we are very much concerned about the way the free press wouldn't be possible if not for the fact that the legacy media has gone the way it has, right?
And so there's a real need, the real desire among the public for a media outlet that can offer the truth or, you know, at the very least, you make up your own mind.
You know, we don't go around ceremonizing to our readers.
We treat them as intelligent people and we lay out the facts.
We tell them what the story is, and then it's up to you to decide.
And I think that's really the essence of journalism.
And that's what the free press does.
But having said that, we're not afraid to take positions on certain things.
Like, you know, we call out anti-Semitism, for example.
The Promise of Free Press00:06:50
We call out things that are unfair and unjust.
We call out government overreach.
So we are very clear where we stand.
We're open-minded, of course, while being very clear where we stand.
I want to ask you what you think of Bill C-63.
Jordan Peterson, when he announced he's moving from Canada to the United States, cited Bill C-63 as one of the things on his mind.
Now, I don't know if that bill will become law before the Canadian election, which seems somewhat pregnant right now.
So it may die on the order paper.
And I think if Pierre Polyev becomes the prime minister, I don't think he'll revive that bill.
But even without that bill, there are a lot of censorship apparatuses already in effect, whether it's human rights commissions and tribunals or, frankly, the media subsidy, which is another kind of corrosion of free press.
I mean, you could use a carrot of censorship or a stick of subsidies.
How big of a deal is that in Canada?
And And do you think Pierre Polyev will be any better if he becomes prime minister on the issue of free speech?
So, Bill C63, if I understand, is the online harms bill.
That's right.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah, exactly.
The one that I just, you know, hard to follow with all the numbers.
Yeah, there's so many numbers.
But yeah, it's going to be devastating.
And I cannot even believe that someone would even come up with something so preposterous and draconian when already our individual liberties and our right to free expression is under, you know, is under threat and has been, as we saw during the Truckers protest, which led to the debanking of some protesters by our former finance minister, Christio Freeland.
The point is, the state of free speech in Canada is so weak.
And then on top of that, we're imposing this legislation, this proposed legislation.
You know, this is the kind of stuff that you see in authoritarian tinpot dictatorships in the third world.
And I never imagined in my life in the nearly 30 years that I've lived in this country that the craziness, the insanity that I left behind is now here.
And it's taking root here in a way that I never even expected.
And the dissent, the opposition to this, is to me, you asked me about Pierre Polyev.
He does say that Canada should be the free.
He wants to restore Canada to being one of the freest countries in the world.
I do think that Canada at one point was a very, very free country.
I would say I've pointed this out several times.
We were at one point even more libertarian than the U.S., but things really, really changed, especially under Trudeau Sr.
And things have been going downhill since then.
And then success, governments in those intervening years, whether liberal or conservative, I don't think they took these issues very seriously, which is why we are here in this situation in the first place.
In a sense, I feel that the Canadian public has been primed to have more government in their lives.
I remember 20 years ago in grad school, I stood out as a, I was seen as a heretic.
I was seen as an oddball for talking about the things that we're talking about now, but the chickens have come home to roost.
I do wish that the Conservative Party was a little more clear on things like censorship.
I do wish that they would articulate that more clearly, so I know exactly where they stand.
It's not just good enough to say, I'm going to make Canada the freest country in the world.
What does that mean exactly?
Met another guy at the Labrat Brewery a few days ago, and you can watch the video of me talking with him.
He walked up to me, he said, I have three jobs and I can't make it.
We're renting.
We have no hope.
We've given up on ever owning a home.
We're renting.
We can barely make it.
And he said to me, I feel ashamed when I talk to my kids because they ask me why I'm never around and why we can never have a house.
And I feel like a failure.
But he didn't fail.
He has been failed.
He has been robbed of the promise of Canada.
It was a very simple promise that if you worked hard, you got a good life.
Now, it wasn't fancy or extravagant, but you got a house with a yard where you could have kids playing safely and you could have a nice dog that you could afford to feed along with the kids and your kids could play safely in the streets.
That was the promise.
Now, politicians break promises all the time.
But you know what was bad about this promise?
This promise didn't belong to this prime minister.
It wasn't his promise to break.
It belonged to all of us.
And our purpose is to bring home that promise for that young man, that young father, and that older female worker so that they can once again take back control of their lives, live in a safe country where their hard work earns them a good wage, where the rent and their food is affordable, and where when they go to bed at night, they know that they will be safe throughout their sleep and that they will have their car in their driveway in the morning.
A country where people are proud again to fly the flag, where they know the government is a servant and not a master, where they understand that every day, the commons, this place, works for the common people, not for the ego of one man desperate to cling on to his job.
We must remember that we are servants in this place.
We have a job to do on behalf of the people who sent us here.
Our personal dramas are not important.
The dramas that should seize all of our concern and imagination are the daily dramas of the working women and men that build this country.
We are in it for them.
Servants of the People00:15:11
We're going to give them back control of their lives in the freest country on earth, Canada.
Let's bring it home.
And so, you know, I'd like a little more clarity on those statements.
I do hope that Mr. Polyevra, you know, stays true to his word and won't take us down this path of more censorship.
You know, the problem with a lot of this legislation is that once it becomes law, once it becomes policy, it's very difficult to reverse it.
We've seen this.
It's not just unique.
It's not just unique to Canada.
I've seen this in other places as well.
Once you have something in place, it's very difficult to reverse it.
So the question is, how do we see the next government restore our rights and freedoms?
That's one of the biggest questions for me.
There are all kinds of other issues that animate me as well, but I want to see, I mean, Mr. Polyevra is going to have lots of challenges on his hand.
The economy, for one thing, our GDP growth per capita, GDP growth has stagnated.
Immigration is an issue.
And we're basically in a state of crisis right now.
And a lot of that, I think, needs to be, he's got his plate full for sure.
But I do think as well that we need a leader who is going to make us less socialized, who's going to argue for less socialism in our lives.
That is something that is very, I'm very passionate about that.
Where is Mr. Polyevra's position on supply management, for example, on the dairy industry?
Why do we have a cartel there?
Where does he stand on the cartel that exists with airlines or in the telecom industry?
Where does the Conservative Party stand on health care?
I'd like to have a private option.
Why do I have to go overseas to see a family doctor?
I've been waiting for a family doctor for 15 years.
This is unacceptable.
And these are issues that I really think we need the Conservative Party to tell us where they stand on these issues.
What are their proposals?
How do they plan on fixing these issues?
How does the Conservative Party plan on fixing the problem that I and so many other Canadians don't have access to a family doctor?
You know, hearing you list those things, supply and management, healthcare, those are age-old problems that I think a lot of freedom-oriented people just said, well, we're doomed to have those forever.
There's no way those can change.
It's like the mountains, they'll always be there.
But when I look south of the border, and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been appointed by Donald Trump to head something they call the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOE, and they're talking about hacking away entire agencies.
It's very bold.
I don't know if they'll actually be able to do it.
I mean, there's a lot of other checks and balances in the American system.
I wonder if you think, you know, I think Pierre Polyev is going to get a huge majority.
I think he's going to have a very strong mandate, but he's going to have a lot of checks and balances on him, too.
The Senate, for one thing, the courts, the civil service, and their public sector unions.
Do you think that besides tackling inflation, the deficit, immigration, the anti-Semitic crime wave, do you think he'll have enough political capital to also take on the dairy cartel?
Which irritates everyone, but there's a lot of votes in Quebec for it.
Do you think he'll have the power and the energy to take on health care?
Because even though everyone knows our health care is broken, it still has sort of a magical aura to it.
I mean, I think almost everything needs to be fixed.
What do you think should be the top priority?
Because what you've just described, those are very real issues, but would they make the top five things Polyev had to do?
Would they be that high a priority?
Yeah, so I think they're all related.
I don't think that, I don't think it should be business as usual anymore, Ezra.
I remember in grad school, we were having these discussions even back then, strengthening the border, massaging our relationship with the U.S.
These are all important priorities.
The priority right now is, you know, how do we get out of this economic mess that we're currently in?
And, you know, how do we fix the affordability crisis?
How do we fix the housing crisis?
How do we ensure that young Canadians have a shot at the Canadian dream, which is now basically stint in the toilet right now, to be honest?
And how do we fix all of those problems?
So the economy, his priority is going to be the economy and to basically stop the bleeding as quickly as possible.
But all these other issues that I cite are very related to the fact that we are in this mess to a large extent because Canadians have, I used the word primed earlier.
We have come to accept, unlike our neighbors to the south, where they're generally skeptical of the government, we have come to love government in this country.
We love the government doing stuff for us, which is why criticizing the healthcare system or touching it, or any politician touching the healthcare system, and even proposing an alternative to what we have right now, it would be a career for suicide, essentially, because we have gotten so used to having the government do everything for us.
Our education system is socialized.
Let's talk about that.
It only survives because of large subsidies from the government and the international students who come here, who pay international student fees to subsidize the education of local Canadians.
I once was an international student many, many years ago, and that has not changed.
And because that hasn't changed, given recent announcements with respect to capping immigration in Canada and capping the number of student study permits and so on, colleges and universities are struggling because they're not forced to compete.
nobody in this country is forced to compete and actually jump into the deep end of the pool and take a risk.
You know, we're not, we're not, we're not, our, our, our, our, our, we don't think that way.
We don't, we don't, we.
We expect to always have the government to fall back on.
And that is the fundamental, there's a fundamental problem with the Canadian psyche that needs to change.
And I hope that this current crisis gets people to think about, it's not just good enough to blame Justin Trudeau.
I know he deserves a lot of the blame, but much of what is happening right now, it took root a long time ago and nobody said anything.
And that's what needs to change.
Because Pierre Poly is going to do, how much power is he really going to have to really radically bring about changes to the system, real overhaul all of the system?
I don't think that's possible.
He's going to be able to do a few things in the margin here and there.
I don't think we can ever have a doge-like situation here in Canada.
But, you know, a lot of the heavy lifting also has to be done by us.
We have to start demanding results.
We have to start asking why do we not have this competitive environment in Canada?
I work for a U.S. company and I see how hard my colleagues work.
And it's just absolutely inspirational because they believe in the American dream and they think that hard work is rewarded.
Here, hard work is not rewarded.
Canadians who tend to, successful Canadians end up moving, leaving Canada to the U.S. You know, the other day, Trump put out a very short message on social media saying any business that wants to bring a billion dollars or more to the U.S. will get expedited clearance through any regulatory approvals, including environmental.
And it seems sort of a statement out of nowhere.
Then a few days later, the president of a Japanese bank called SoftBank announces at Mar-a-Lago he's bringing $100 billion with the aim of hiring 100,000 people.
And I just thought that would never, ever, ever happen in Canada.
No one would make that kind of bet in Canada.
There's no one in Canada who would go out and hustle that.
The Canadian way is to take a bunch of tax dollars and invest it in a pre-existing company, typically a foreign company, like an international car maker, and say, here's money to build a battery plant in Canada, which is a weird investment, weird meddling in the market, but that's Canada's idea.
And my point is, it's not just Trudeau.
That's Doug Ford, the allegedly conservative premier of Ontario.
I think we have so few industrialist entrepreneurs left.
And Trump is going to accelerate that brain drain.
I mean, there's this company called Shopify.
I talk about them from time to time, a multi-billion dollar Canadian tech company.
Why would they stick around up here?
I mean, to be abused, to be lectured at by Trudeau or Freeland or whoever's next, why wouldn't they go to this amazing country that is lighting up, that's going to roar like a rocket?
I don't know.
I just think that Donald Trump isn't just a specific challenge to Canada.
He's a general challenge to every slouching economy in the world.
The UK also, the European Union, also.
Who wouldn't want to move to strong, free, rich America?
Yeah, 100%.
Look, the exodus of Canadians to the United States is not new.
That's been the case for years and years.
And for various reasons, of course, everything from there are better opportunities there.
It's a bigger market and lower taxes and so on and so forth.
But now, people leaving Canada, and I've spoken to several of these individuals who've left just in the last five or six years, some before the pandemic and some after.
And they're just tired.
They're tired of not being able to get by in this country.
You and I can just go like just 100 miles south, 80 miles south, and be able to buy a home and pay lower taxes.
And that's just how stark the contrast is.
And so people leaving now are young people, nurses.
I've spoken to nurses who are leaving when we have a nursing shortage in this country.
Why would you, you know, what we're doing right now, Ezra, is we're bringing in like low-skilled workers from India and other countries, but primarily from India.
They are a drain, a net drain on our economy.
They're not contributing anything.
And these are the people who are here in Canada right now.
We're not bringing in the next nuclear scientists.
We're not bringing in the next Nobel laureate in physics.
We're not bringing in the next Shopify creators of Shopify and other such businesses.
You know, we're bringing in Uber drivers and people who work at Tim Hortons.
I remember when I first came to this country, it was not as easy as it is now.
I mean, there were still problems then.
I remember when I came here, I couldn't believe that it was actually a lot simpler coming here than going to the U.S.
And even back then, I was a critic of Canadian immigration policy, even as an international student.
But it's gotten a whole lot worse.
And the United States has historically brought in the best and the brightest, including many, many Canadians.
And under Trump, that's really going to skyrocket.
That's really going to be an important policy plank of his.
He's going to attract the best people to America and once again restore America to its past glory, which took a beating over the last few years.
But I think that's what Trump intends on doing.
And we should be really, really afraid.
I mean, it's not just the threat of tariffs and so on.
The 25% tariffs would be devastating on our economy.
We should also be worried about the fact that a lot of good Canadians are planning on leaving this country and moving to the U.S.
Yeah.
I saw a speech by Pierre Polyev in Parliament the other day saying people who are well off would move if they could.
When I travel across this country, I consistently meet two types of people.
One, those who are a little better off and tell me that, and I'll be very blunt about this, that if I don't win, they will leave the country.
And they are very numerous.
But you know, I don't worry about them as much.
You know who I worry about?
The ones who can't leave.
The ones who don't know, and I can just use very blunt language, who tell me, I don't know what the hell I'm going to do.
Good Canadians Leaving?00:11:17
I have no idea how I'm going to pay my way.
And I think that's part of Trump has been tweaking Justin Trudeau on social media about the 51st state and calling him governor Justin Trudeau.
And just recently, he said we should annex Canada in the 51st state.
All of that, like that's sort of silly for the leader of the free world to do, but he's a master negotiator and psychological operator.
I think he's actually getting at something that a lot of Canadians look south and say things are better there.
Even proud nationalist, patriotic Canadians have to say, well, there would be some benefits to being in a freer, richer country.
I don't know.
It's very interesting to see Trump play with Trudeau.
And you could say that Trump's original tweet about the 25% tariffs set in motion this domino effect, one thing happening after another, which led to Christia Freeland's ouster and the crisis.
I mean, it's amazing what that man can do with tweets.
But let me come back, if I made, to your points about immigration.
I think the so-called consensus about immigration was always exaggerated in the media.
I think Canadians have always been opposed to high immigration.
Just no politician was able to say it.
But it's at such a critical mass.
Apparently, there's 4.9 million people in Canada on a temporary basis whose tenure here expires at the end of 2025.
I mean, just the logistics of them going home would be 100,000 a week.
That's not going to happen.
And I think there's three things, and I'd love it if you respond to this.
First of all, the sheer number of immigrants is so shocking to people that it's now around 2 million a year by all categories.
I'm going to use the word fraud, some are fraudulent, like fake refugee claimants, but also fake students who go to these diploma mills and strip malls and say, I'm here as a student.
There's a million so-called foreign students in Canada.
There are not a million Canadian students in Canada.
And finally, there's the cultural baggage we see battles between Sikhs and Hindus, between pro-Hamas protesters and the Jewish community they're targeting.
I just, I feel like you got three big problems.
Sheer numbers, people feeling taken advantage of, Canadians saying we're being tricked and taken as fools.
And finally, something I'm very alive to, we brought in a wave of anti-Semitism and there's other foreign diaspora battles I don't even quite understand.
I think all three things are rooted in immigration.
What do you have to think?
Oh, 100%, 100%.
Look, I've always been very, very clear on immigration as an immigrant myself.
You know, as I told you when I first came here as a student, these were problems I was seeing even back then.
I remember as a grad student here in Ottawa, anti-Semitism is something that I would, you know, I speak to with some of my professors because some of these, you know, the campuses, university campuses in Canada were really like, you know, you had these student movements on these campuses, which were virulently anti-Semitic.
And this was 2007, 2008, when I was a student.
And, you know, it was just shrugged off.
And, you know, it's not a big deal.
It's not, you know, nothing to take seriously.
Yes, it exists, but, you know, let's move on, you know, and that was the end of the matter.
But it's, you know, and I remember tweeting about this when Trudeau announced that he was bringing in a whole bunch of Syrian refugees a few years ago.
And I was saying, well, you know, this is going to result in some serious problems in Canada.
And I was called a racist and a bigot for pointing that out.
So these problems, look, you know, diaspora politics, I've criticized that.
You know, my first column in the National Post in 2020 was about, my inaugural column was about diaspora politics.
Why are we bringing this nonsense into this country?
And, but we, and, you know, like, look, I mean, Trudeau deserves a lot of the blame when he says, you know, Canada is a post-national state and so on.
But the roots of this predate Trudeau.
You know, once again, we can't just, you know, it's convenient to keep blaming him for everything.
But, you know, we've also, many of us have been sleeping behind the wheel when these things were set in motion, multiculturalism.
You know, I, when I came as an immigrant, as an international student, and I just didn't understand what this multiculturalism thing was all about.
There's no multiculturalism in the U.S. You're American first and then everything else after.
You know, you're American first and then you want to pray at a Hindu temple, you want to go to the synagogue, you want to go to a mosque, wear your ethnic outfit on a certain occasion.
By all means, do that.
But you're American first.
That was really never the case in Canada, at least in the 30 years that I've been here, where you're allowed to, in fact, you're encouraged to take on all of these other identities before you become Canadian.
And that is the fundamental problem in this country when it comes to how we deal with immigrants.
Where's their desire to integrate?
What exactly are they integrating into when they're not, you know, they're just allowed to just, you know, yeah, you know, you're Sikh first.
You know, why are Sikhs in this country advocating for a separate homeland in India?
You know, I just don't understand that.
Why are Hindus and Sikhs in this country battling it out on the streets of Brampton?
And Indians, Hindus are carrying Indian flags.
What is the relevance of the Indian flag in Brampton?
I just don't understand that.
But this is what we've encouraged.
Politicians of all stripes have encouraged this kind of behavior, liberal, conservative.
And, you know, to be honest, I am a little concerned.
You know, where is the Conservative Party on this?
Right.
When Pierre Polyev announces an Air India flight to Amritsar.
Why Amritsar?
And we will bring a direct flight to Amritsar.
We will rebuild the Canada that we know and love, a Canada where it doesn't matter if your name is Martin or Mohammed, Singh or Smith, Polyev or Patel.
What is the relevance of Amritsar?
I don't get it.
We used to have a non-stop flight to Mumbai, where I used to live part-time, and that got canceled because it was just not financially viable.
So why Amritsar?
You know, we've got to stop doing this.
Trump won as big as he did without wearing a single turban.
Amritsar is, of course, the Sikh holy city.
Am I right in that?
You know, what about my holy city?
You know, what about the holy city of Canada?
Yeah, I was just explaining what Amritsar was to folks who I don't remember.
I just don't, I just don't, it's infuriating and it makes me so angry because this is, you know, these are things that we should just be putting an end to this right now, right?
And immigrants, I still believe that most people who come here are coming in good faith and they want a better outcome for them and their families.
And they, you know, they're going to work hard and they're not going to take advantage of the system.
That's historically, that's been my position for a very, very long time.
But I'm not starting to question that.
You know, I'm starting to question, well, who are these people?
You know, why are they bringing in all their grievances here?
You know, what is going on here?
Why are you carrying the flag of a foreign country on the streets of Canada?
What does that have to do with me?
I think there's a lot of ethnic internal sort of passionate battles, but I think there's also foreign manipulation.
I mean, we've seen reports of Iran has a lot of operatives here.
We know communists.
It's not just Iran.
It's not just Iran, Ezra.
I would even say it's even India.
India is a wily actor in all of this.
And it gets away with a lot because it's the fifth largest economy in the world.
And it's the world's fastest growing economy.
It's the world's largest democracy.
But I think Modi is a wily politician and he knows how to play Canada.
He knows that we are a divided country.
He knows that we are the way we are.
He knows that people can go around Brampton carrying the Indian flag.
And this plays really, really well for him back in India.
And we are just sitting by and watching all of this unfold when our politicians should stop going to temples, they should stop going to Gurdwaras, they should stop doing all of these things, they should stop placating diaspora groups, whoever they are, and put Canada first.
Because the Canadian national put Canada's national interest first above everything.
It'll be interesting to see if Pierre Polyev uses, if not that language, that idea.
And I think you see that same spirit in Nigel Farage and Brexit, in Georgia Maloney, in Hungary's Viktor Orban, people who are saying, well, we have to put our own country first.
They say that often in regards to foreign immigration.
It'll be interesting to see if Pierre Polyev, how far he goes down that way.
I think so far he's been successful mainly by talking about financial issues, the carbon tax, crime.
I think that he has avoided some of these ethnic issues because he says things are going so well for me.
Why would I step into that trouble?
Not going to be able to get away from that for far too long because issues are, you know, I think they're coming to a head now, and he's going to have to address it at some point.
And I hope he does.
You know, and if I were writing for the National Post, I would actually be writing this, urging him to pay attention to these issues and really put an end to stop playing diaspora politics because putting Canada first, as he rightly says, is the most important thing right now.
It's not about putting Indo-Canadians first or Sikh Canadians first.
It's about putting Canadians first.
Yeah.
Well, Ruby, it's great to catch up with you.
Cautiously Optimistic00:04:51
And we love your work in all the different platforms you've been in.
I'm excited that you're going full-time for the free press.
We've talked about some heavy things and some of them a little bit depressing, but actually, I am entering 2025 with some hope inside of me.
I feel there's a hope for peace between Russia and Ukraine and in the Middle East, largely because I think Donald Trump has a track record of brokering peace, including the Abraham Accords.
I feel hopeful for Canada.
I know that removing Trudeau won't solve all the problems, but it'll get us in the right direction.
I feel like even though we're in a battle with the U.S. over tariffs right now, I think those are just opening skirmishes and that as America gets stronger, some of that will probably wash over us too.
Well, it'll have to, we'll have to compete.
So I'm actually feeling more hopeful about 2025 than I have felt in many years.
Last thing, and then I'd love you to respond.
If you would have asked me three years ago what scares me the most, it would have been how social media and big tech was seeping into every single part of our lives with its woke agenda.
And I remember when Parag Agarwal, who was an executive at Twitter, said, You don't have free, you have freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.
And he thought that was pretty clever because it rhymed.
What he meant was, you can say what you want, but we will make it so no one else hears you.
You can type all the mean things you want, but and you'll think that you're talking to the world, but you'll be shouting into the wind.
And that scared me so much because that was like corporate censorship outsourced from government, hidden.
You don't even know you're being sent.
Like, I thought that is the dark future.
And then Elon Musk comes along and fires all the woke censors and turns Twitter into this rampunctious free place again that's that I think was partly responsible for Trump winning.
And so I thought I was so blackpilled, as the kids say, I was so despondent.
I saw these censorship laws and a bit of a miracle happened.
So I'm heading into 2025 feeling optimistic.
How do you feel about 2025?
What are you watching for?
What do you think might come true in the year ahead?
I, I'm, yeah, I, I think I'm, I'm a bit optimistic.
I'm cautiously optimistic about 2025.
I do think that finally in the U.S., we have someone who's going to get some results.
And we've seen Trump 1.0 and we know there's a track record there.
So we know what he's going to do.
And I'm hopeful that we get through this present crisis here in Canada very quickly because this kind of political turmoil is not good for the economy.
It's not good for this Canadian psyche.
It's not good for anything.
I'm cautiously optimistic, Ezra.
I've seen this kind of thing so many times.
I have had my hopes up high and then had come crashing to the ground.
A lot of things do concern me, especially with political change in this country.
When is that going to happen?
How is that going to happen?
These are questions I never thought that I would even have to ask these questions, but yet here we are.
So, there's still a lot that needs to be done before I can sit back and pop open the champagne and have a drink.
But I think until then, I'm cautiously optimistic about what's going to happen in 2025.
Yeah, me too.
Listen, it's great to see you.
We're going to keep following your work at the free press.
I love what you're doing.
And you're right.
You have the freedom to take on a range of subjects, not just about Canada, but thematically that apply to the whole world.
So you guys keep it up.
We love independent journalists.
We regard ourselves as that.
And we think that we're helping to shape the national and international conversation as much as any old regime media.
And I think that it's interesting that you were at the National Post, which is a mainstream media, and you have gone from there to the free press.
That sort of shows where the world is going towards independent media.