Ezra Levant argues Canada’s woke identity erasure—like renaming Sir John A. Macdonald’s school and Trudeau’s divisive policies, such as carbon taxes and "Turtle Island" rhetoric—mirrors a broader decline under virtue-signaling leadership. Contrasting Trump’s decisive actions (e.g., Guantanamo expansion) with Trudeau’s perceived weakness, Levant praises Alberta Premier Danielle Smith for her proactive U.S. diplomacy, including border patrols and fentanyl crackdowns, while warning that Canada’s slow-motion "national suicide" demands Trump-like policy shifts to avoid tariffs and restore sovereignty. [Automatically generated summary]
Three more schools in Canada will have their names changed, including the Sir John A. McDonald's School.
It's a disgrace.
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All right, here's today's show.
Tonight, who's a greater threat to Canada's identity?
Donald Trump or those who would rename the John A. McDonald's School?
It's January 30th, and this is the Ezra LeMan Show.
I keep thinking about that poll I showed you the other day that showed that many young Canadians, especially young Canadian men, are open to taking Donald Trump's banter about becoming the 51st state.
I think there's both push and pull there.
The poll is that America is rich and about to get richer.
And Trump is a charismatic, decisive leader who is racking up wins every day.
He's not emasculated.
He's manly in that sense.
But he's winning not just for himself, but for his entire country.
I don't know if you saw it, but just yesterday, they announced they're going to turn Guantanamo Bay into a 30,000-person prison for the worst of the worst illegal migrants.
Today I'm also signing an executive order to instruct the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay.
Most people don't even know about it.
We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal, illegal aliens threatening the American people.
Some of them are so bad we don't even trust the countries to hold them because we don't want them coming back.
So we're going to send them out to Guantanamo.
This will double our capacity immediately, right?
And tough, that's a tough, that's a tough place to get out of.
Today's signings bring us one step closer to eradicating the scourge of migrant crime in our communities once and for all.
And it was just a purely, it's just an unforced error that we even have to be doing this.
Now we need Congress to provide full funding for the complete and total restoration of our sovereign borders, as well as financial support to remove record numbers of illegal aliens.
No real person disagrees with that other than some woke media.
Trump is doing 10 dramatic things like that every day.
It's unbelievable.
He is a man of action and he's a businessman at heart.
What young man wouldn't find that inspiring, more inspiring than Trudeau's weird male feminism or Mark Carney's blathering about how we need a carbon budget or whatever buzzword he's using now to describe how we have to pay taxes to change the weather.
But somehow China doesn't.
Did you see this clip?
Now, so far, carbon prices have been applied sparingly.
They've been set far too low.
single digits on average globally, well short of the estimated $8,200 a ton needed by the end of this decade to keep us on track to net zero.
Yeah, the carbon taxes are not really about changing the weather.
It's about controlling you and enriching them and about giving China a competitive advantage over the West.
I think a lot of us see that.
So the poll of joining the U.S. said Donald Trump really is making America great again.
You might not like all his plans to annex green land.
I love that some pundits are calling it red, white, and blue land.
That makes me laugh.
Or that Trump insists on retaking the Panama Canal.
America built it.
38,000 Americans died building it, in fact.
But it's decisive and bold and action-oriented, and it's about not being pushed around anymore.
I think the clearest moment was when Colombia's little socialist president refused to allow two flights of illegal migrants being repatriated back from America.
In response, Trump just detonated Colombia, canceled 1,500 visa interviews that were scheduled, announced huge tariffs, announced a ban on anyone involved in that government and even their family members from coming to America.
It was a full sanctions package.
Colombia's socialist president capitulated in less than an hour.
We told you about that the other day.
You know that Joe Biden would have just accepted that indignity and Kamala Harris too.
Again, compare that kind of leadership to Justin Trudeau or the UK's Kier Starmer or France's Emmanuel Macron.
Western civilization has been emasculated.
That's why people like Jordan Peterson are successful.
They're reminding men, especially young men, about the virtues and responsibilities of being manly.
So that's the pull.
That's the reason why people in Canada might actually want to join the U.S.
But at the same time as all that pull, there's never been more push, as in Trudeau and Carney and Freeland pushing Canadians towards the U.S. Taxes.
Oh, by the way, have you forgotten that the carbon tax is actually scheduled to go up again on April 1st?
It just never stops.
And even the so-called conservative Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, what's his great masculine way to fight back against Trump by borrowing billions of dollars to just sort of fire hose money at people?
How is that fighting?
I'm not exactly sure.
Does that fix a problem?
I don't know.
But that's my point.
Trump isn't just a masculine style.
He has leadership and action.
He's done stuff in his life.
He's got a plan.
Everyone can see it.
You tell me if you understand the great conservative plan that Doug Ford is selling in this video.
We'll redouble our efforts to build Ontario's economy.
We will do whatever it takes to protect workers and their livelihoods.
We will invest tens of billions of dollars in new spending to keep people working.
We will work with unions and businesses to retain and reskill our hardest hit workers.
And as we do, we need to do everything possible to keep our economy competitive.
We'll keep up the fight against the job-killing liberal carbon tax.
And we're urging the federal government to join us in cutting red tape and streamlining approvals to get big things built faster.
Yeah, Trump is winning in substance, but also aesthetics.
What's out?
I mean, that was absolutely incredible.
Creating Opportunities for Citizens00:10:22
And on the other hand, you've got this guy.
Also, what it all comes down to is creating opportunities for our citizens.
People are struggling with affordability.
Who sits like that?
Or maybe this woman.
Or maybe you like this guy.
That's Mark Carney with Jeffrey Epstein's right-hand woman, Gheelane Maxwell.
It could be called unpatriotic to abandon your country for another country.
That's literally the definition of the word unpatriotic.
But what if the country you're in tells you not to be patriotic?
What if the country you're in right now, the country you're born in, tells you not to love your homeland?
That there's no purpose or essence to it, because that's actually the push.
Trump and America are pulling like a giant magnet, but that sort of always happens, the brain drain to America.
But what is Canada doing?
I've listed some of the things before.
You've heard me say it before.
I mean, the narrative that we are overseeing a genocide against Indigenous people, not just historically, but in the present day too.
That's what Trudeau says.
That's what the former Chief Justice of our Supreme Court, this Chinese agent Beverly McLaughlin, says.
That's what every land acknowledgement implicitly says.
That's what anyone who says Turtle Island means.
What people who call you and I settlers mean.
They say Canada is not legitimate, not moral, even not legal.
They say we're criminal.
They say we're racist.
Trudeau recently announced his so-called black justice strategy.
In Canada?
Canada doesn't have a major black presence during the time of slavery.
Canada was the destination of the Underground Railroad where black slaves ran away to be free.
Black slavery was not an issue here.
It was abolished by the British Empire in Canada long before Canada became a country.
And it wasn't even a fact on the ground.
There were precisely 16 black people in Toronto, according to a census, when slavery was banned in Canada.
It wasn't a thing.
Slavery in Canada was actually mainly one Indigenous band enslaving another.
Sorry to report that to you.
That's how it was.
But Trudeau's black justice strategy not only enshrines different rights based on different races and privileges black Canadians, but it calls for black reparations in Canada.
How?
Yeah, you're trying too hard to copy the worst parts of the U.S. Democratic race huckster scheme up here.
We don't have that problem.
Please don't import it or manufacture it.
We don't have the same history or problems as America.
We have problems of our own, of course.
Everyone knows that this whole Black Lives Matter thing is an American project.
Everyone can see how the government pitting us against each other and paying us to hate each other.
That is a woke project.
That's not who we are as Canadians.
And Trudeau does it on sex and on race and on religion and now on transgenderism.
He's trying to pit us against each other.
Our history is denigrated.
Sir John A. MacDonald is stripped off our money.
Any history has been stripped out of our passports, replaced by generic graphics.
Not that we're even taught history anymore.
And then there's that constant scolding about Canadians being something shameful.
It never stops.
Trudeau has never in his life apologized for something that he has done.
Not once, even when he went on the U.S. TV station to say why he was quitting.
Remember, he hit the American circuit.
He said he was going to resign as prime minister not because he did anything wrong, but because his fellow MPs were quarreling.
Nothing he did, it's always the other guy.
Remember this?
I think it's probably a bit of everything.
I mean, right now, there's a political cycle where incumbents, particularly those who steered us through COVID, I mean, Canada did extraordinarily well through COVID, you know, better than just about every other peer.
Tens of thousands, less, fewer deaths proportionately than our friends and allies around the world.
Inflation hit less hard, our economy bounced back faster.
It was good, but there is still a lingering frustration towards incumbents.
And for me, where I lean in on is all the good things we were able to do.
We've put forward policies that are going to make a difference for decades to come in Canada.
And I think right now we're seeing a time in politics where emotions and social media is carrying an awful lot of weight in how people feel about things.
But I'm always going to lean back on what are the substantive things that are being done?
What are the substantive measures that make a big difference in people's lives?
And standing up for the vulnerable, supporting people who need it, building an economy that works for the middle class.
These are things that ultimately make the biggest difference in people's lives.
Oh, but Trudeau will always apologize for Canada and how racist and sexist we are.
Not him, just you and me.
So yeah, Trump polls and Trudeau and his mini-me's, Christian Freeland and Mark Carney, they push.
They're pushing people out.
They're denigrating Canada.
They're devaluing it.
Here's the latest.
Look at this.
Story in the National Post and other places.
Ryerson and McDonald's schools to be renamed in Toronto.
TDSB.
The TDSB, the largest public school board in Canada, embarked upon a proactive review of the names of all schools under his purview.
The Toronto District School Board will change the names of three public schools commemorating Henry Dundas, Egerton Ryerson, and Sir John A. MacDonald.
Says who?
By what right?
This recommendation is based on the potential impact that these names may have on students and staff, based on colonial history, anti-Indigenous racism, and their connection to systems of oppression, says a report from board staff.
I clicked on that link and I read that semi-literate report.
Here it is.
You can find it pretty quickly yourself.
It feels like it was written by a low IQ activist based off some Google searches.
Seriously.
You know, I'm not saying I'm smarter than anyone, but even I know that Sir John A. MacDonald's last name doesn't have a capital D in it.
That's not a super important thing to know.
I know that's a small thing in this conversation, but if you don't know how to spell Sir John A. MacDonald, I'm going to say that you're probably not an expert in Sir John A. McDonald.
You probably just started thinking about this last week when you got some racism grant and then you went to Wikipedia or something.
They don't know how to spell John A. MacDonald.
We're a country that destroys its own history.
At least the Taliban, when they destroy statues, they destroy the other guys' statues, the statues of their enemies, not their own.
We destroy our own, don't we?
And the worst of all is conservative Doug Ford, who has put the Sir John A. MacDonald statue at his legislature, Queen's Park, in a wooden coffin.
He lacks the courage to take it down completely, like the Toronto schools, but he also lacks the courage to stand by it.
Oh, but hey guys, he's our fighter, though.
Just ask him.
This is so gross, and it is speeding up.
Look, life is always about choices and paths.
When Donald Trump says, hey, come join us in America, the first response, the first instinct is to be shocked by the audacity of it.
But I think for a lot of Canadians, the second instinct is to consider the offer on its merits.
Trump says he'll give us a lot of free stuff.
He'll convert the dollars at par in 2025.
What does it mean to offer a young person life in Canada or life in America?
Trudeau and the army of woke politicians and bureaucrats who follow after him, they've destroyed so much of the value proposition of being Canadian.
I don't just mean money.
Of course, we're poor now.
Many young people can't afford a home now.
Crime is high now.
You have to wait in line behind 4.9 million migrants to get a doctor.
We have Hamas hate marches on our streets.
But most of all, we have had a decade of being told Canada is actually ugly and evil and shameful and embarrassing.
In a way, it took Trump to wake us up to that.
I think Mark Carney will be chosen as the next liberal leader.
He'll be chosen by 14-year-old non-citizens, many of whom aren't even real people.
They're bots run by China and Iran.
We know that because that's who interfered in the last election, according to CSIS.
So Mark Carney will rule over us as long as he can, and he'll obviously strike any deal with Jack Meet Singh.
Singh, perhaps the most promiscuous political dealmaker in Canadian history.
He'll do anything.
And the CBC will abide all of it.
They'll go to absolute war on the rest of us.
But I think Polyev will still win in October.
I think Pierre Polyev is going to win.
We should have an election now, but our political system is so much weaker than America's when it comes to checks and balances, doesn't it?
Pierre Polyev, I believe, will be our prime minister before the year is out.
And if not, then we really could be swallowed up by Trump.
If Polyev becomes our prime minister, he's got to do what Trump is doing.
He's got to stop the madness in our schools and in our bureaucracies.
He's got to issue orders that cancel funding to any institution that wants to replace Sir John A. McDonald or any other Canadian historical figure.
They've got to be told they will immediately lose any federal funds.
They'll just have it suspended.
Polyeb's got to be like Trump that way.
No debate, no pleading.
Just cut them off and let them squawk.
It's the only language they understand.
And it's the only language the rest of us will understand to show that Polyeb is serious about stopping the slow national suicide our country has been subjected to.
Tariffs and Trade tensions00:15:12
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Hey, welcome back.
You know, I was in the United States.
I was in Washington, D.C. on Inauguration Day, the 20th of January.
It was very exciting.
Was there a day early because I managed to arrange an interview with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith?
Now, I want to play a short clip of that.
I don't think I've told you that my luggage had been detained, so I had to interview her in sort of my casual clothes that I wore on the plane.
I'm a little embarrassed about that.
But here's just a quick recap of some of the things she said to me when I met with her for about 20 minutes on that busy day.
We're here in Washington, D.C., back-to-back meetings.
Thanks for jamming me in.
Is there any news that you are able to communicate back home?
How is it going?
Well, I can tell you we've got a lot of friends in America.
I think that every person I've spoken with has either Canadian friends or Canadian neighbors.
There's lots of snowbirds down here.
There's a really strong awareness of Canada.
And I feel like if we build on the relationship that we have developed over not just literally decades, but over a century, I think is a good starting ground to start from.
I won't know what the tariff situation looks like until we see what the executive orders look like.
But I think we have a very strong case to make about why Canada should get a carve out.
Whatever strategy the president has with regard to tariffs of the rest of the world, Canada is unique.
We have an integrated economy.
We buy more American products than anyone else in the world.
And when you take out energy, we actually have a trade surplus.
The Americans have a trade surplus with Canada.
We buy more American goods and services from them than they buy from us.
So those are the kinds of messages that I'm bringing down here.
And I hope it has some impact.
You sound like a foreign minister or an ambassador, yet you're the premier of a province.
Can I ask you, is the federal government, is Trudeau's government, is Melanie Jolie, is Dominique LeBlanc, are they deployed here?
Is there anyone else working the rooms on behalf of Canada, or is it just you and your team?
I haven't seen any Canadians who are here from official in an official role from the federal government.
I don't know that they will tomorrow.
I'll be going to the Canadian embassy as the change to the inauguration has been moved indoors.
We'll be watching the inauguration from the embassy and I'll be able to have more conversations there.
But my view has always been: if you're going to be diplomatic, lead with diplomacy, lead with a relationship, lead with common interests, lead with talking about what the Americans benefit from their relationship with Canada.
So I've taken a bit of a departure, I think, from our federal counterparts, but I think it's the right one.
I think that this is going to be the way that we ensure that the relationship does not get damaged as the federal liberals are going through their inner party turmoil.
That's the thing I find so distressing is that they're not taking a Canada-first approach.
They're taking a Liberal Party-first approach.
They're turning the Americans and the Trump administration in particular into the bad guys so that they can campaign against them for their own personal political benefit.
And that is not good for the country.
So we're putting the country first.
We're putting the relationship first.
And we hope that we end up with a positive outcome.
It was sort of exciting to meet with her.
And I didn't describe this part of it.
We were at a hotel conference room in the heart of Washington, D.C., and she had this large conference room and all sorts of advisors.
And she was putting through meetings as fast as possible.
Like I had to get in and get out in 20 minutes.
I couldn't be late at all.
I couldn't stretch it another minute.
And she obviously went to Capitol Hill as well.
I saw her the next day on the 20th at an inaugural ball event, again, schmoozing with different political people, journalists, making the case.
She was tightly scheduled.
She was meeting many powerful people.
I have to guess that she has met more than 100 people from Secretary of State Rubio down to oil and gas lobbyists to Donald Trump himself on a brief occasion.
Can you say the same for Justin Trudeau other than his one jaunt down to Mar-a-Lago?
Where are the other premiers?
Where is our foreign minister?
She had a quick meeting with Rubio today, I think it was, or yesterday, hardly doing anything.
Danielle Smith has carried the entire diplomatic force of our country for the last two months on this issue.
And you know what?
Thank goodness she has.
Imagine if Justin Trudeau had been the irritating face of Canada in Capitol Hill these last two months.
Joining me now to talk about Danielle Smith, the looming tariffs, and Justin Trudeau's failures is our friend Lauren Gunter, senior columnist with the Edmonton Sun, who joins us now via Skype from Edmonton Lawrence.
Great to see you again.
Good to see you.
It was very exciting to see Danielle Smith just operating.
And there was James Rajot, who's sort of Alberta's ambassador.
I mean, country provinces don't really have ambassadors, but he's Alberta's man down there.
It was like she wasn't just wandering around aimlessly.
She had a team just cranking these officials through.
It was sort of exciting to see that a premier from, I mean, Alberta is an important place, but it felt like I was in the presence of a world leader.
I'm just telling you how it felt aesthetically and just to be in this buzzy place.
That's how it felt.
Yeah, you know, they've been very, very professional in all of this and they've been grown up.
Like everybody else, including Doug Ford from Ontario, who you would hope would know better, but doesn't, they've said, look, the Americans have some complaints.
Let's deal with the complaints.
Let's see how far we can get by answering their concerns about illegal drugs entering their country from Canada, about illegal immigrants entering their country.
Let's do that first.
Yeah.
Before we go into this head-to-head dollar-for-dollar tariff war, we're going to get in a big fight with the Americans.
The liberals can't resist that because they have to raise their popularity in the polls.
And they also have just an innate hatred for Trump.
So he says something and they just immediately jump off.
Like this whole thing started because Trudeau went down to Mar-a-Lago and Trump kidded him about maybe becoming the 51st state.
And Trudeau threw his hands in the air.
And oh my God, they're telling them they don't recognize our sovereignty.
Oh, please.
If they had just all acted like Smith and been more grown up about this, we would not be in this mess now.
Howard Litnick, who's the Treasury Secretary nominee by Trump, said yesterday, so that would be Wednesday of this week at his hearing before the Senate that we don't want to impose tariffs on Canada.
If they sort out the border concerns that we have, we won't have to do any of these.
We might later on this year look at some tariffs if we think they're engaging in illegal or unscrupulous trade practices.
But we don't want to put tariffs on them.
So we won't if they deal with their border, which exactly proves Smith's point.
And that is if we had simply acted like grown-ups in all of this and negotiated with the Americans for a settlement on the border security, they wouldn't be as upset as they are.
And I would say Canada would be better off too.
If we upped our border security, we're going to be safer.
Yeah.
I want to play a short clip of that to Howard Luttnick.
I think he's one of the most important people in Trump's orbit.
He was the head of the transition team for Trump.
He actually led the picking of all the other guys, and then he became commerce secretary, which is, I mean, as they say, the business of America is business.
He has strong views on things.
He's a consummate businessman.
He was a CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, a major investment firm.
He was actually devastated on 9-11.
And he lost his brother on that day.
So he has a lot of views on freedom and terrorism.
And so he cares about terrorists crossing borders more than someone else would.
And anyhow, let me play a clip from Lutnick.
When he speaks, I think people should listen.
And he's speaking so plainly here.
He was talking to Michigan Senator who was worried.
And the Michigan Senator, let me play a bit of a clip, said he was worried about sanctions on the Canadian side of the auto sector.
He said, because we're so integrated.
So here you have a senator from Michigan saying, hey, Lutnick, I love you, but don't hurt the auto sector.
Watch this exchange, Lauren.
I thought it was very illuminating.
Take a look.
The short-term issue is illegal migration and worse even still, fentanyl coming into this country and killing over 100,000 Americans.
There's no war we could have that would kill 100,000 Americans.
The president is focused on ending fentanyl coming into the country.
You know that the labs in Canada are run by Mexican cartels.
So this tariff model is simply to shut their borders with respect, respect America.
If we are your biggest trading partner, show us the respect, shut your border, and end fentanyl coming into this country.
So it is not a tariff per se.
It is an action of domestic policy.
Shut your border and stop allowing fentanyl into our country, killing our people.
So this is a separate tariff to create action from Mexico and action from Canada.
And as far as I know, they are acting swiftly.
And if they execute it, there will be no tariff.
And if they don't, then there will be.
But it's an action-oriented model.
That's not the ordinary tariff.
The ordinary tariffs need to be studied and examined.
And that would start, as the EO said, in April.
So that's a separate tariff.
Correct.
After that study, what would be the timeline of that?
I think that's sort of in April.
Those studies will come out in the end of March and April, and then you'll hear about those at that time.
So big macro issues with tariff are being studied, but the micro issue is Canada and Mexico and the precursors from China, they need to end, and we need to protect our Americans from fentanyl.
And our trading partners in Canada and Mexico, they should end it and stop disrespecting us and allowing this come through our borders.
Well, I think we all agree on secure borders.
I'm with you all the way.
Being a northern border state, the ranking member on Homeland Security will want to do that.
My concern, though, is what's going to happen in the April timeframe as to what could that mean in terms of increased costs to Americans, if not properly implemented or properly thought through.
What sort of assurances can you give us that we will not see that when that second set of tariffs get implemented or if they get implemented, but it sounds as if that's your plan.
Well, we are going to study those, the actions and the economy of America and how it works.
But if you think about it, we need to grow domestic manufacturing.
As you said, Michigan is one of the great places where we build things.
And the car manufacturing went to Canada, it went to Mexico.
It is important that that come back to Michigan and come back to Ohio and come back to the great states of America that can build.
And so I think a thoughtful tariff policy that drives domestic manufacturing, I think, is fundamental to the American workers, especially to the workers in Michigan.
Now, the thing about that is Lutnik's a businessman.
He's got a bit of a flair, but he's a businessman first and foremost.
He doesn't enrage liberals the same way Trump does.
I think Trump has a way of just making people go cuckoo.
And so you're seeing everyone from Trudeau to Doug Ford go cuckoo.
Instead of Lutnik speaking and saying, look, guys, we don't want to put tariffs on you.
Just seal your border.
And it goes away.
But everyone wants that fight for their own personal reasons.
Well, you know, Marco Rubio, who's the incoming Secretary of State and was a senior senator from Florida, a very, very smart guy.
He had said when he was a senator, hey, I'm really worried about these 5,000 Gazans that the Canadians are letting in.
And this is since the October 7th, 2023 attacks against Israel, because they're going to let in these Gazans because they feel really sad for them and it's a really bad situation.
And, you know, of course, the federal liberal government can't stop calling the Israelis occupiers and criminals.
They're letting in 5,000 Gazans, but they're not doing proper security screening on them.
So we know we can assume that there'll be a fair number of Hamas operatives in with this 5,000.
And then they're in Canada.
They're right across the border from us.
What do you think the chances are some of them are going to sneak into the United States and commit terror acts?
So, you know, we may not be worried about that as a country.
Officially, that would make us look racist, but Rubio was worried.
The Americans all know that this is taking place.
I'm sure the CIA is aware of it as well.
I'm sure that Homeland Security knows the National Security Agency in the United States.
And so they know that we have a problem with our border.
And the liberals have been very unwilling to deal with it for a number of reasons.
First of all, it's not a woke issue.
Americans Know About Border Issues00:05:08
And they love to do virtue signaling rather than real policy.
But also, they would have to admit that their criminal justice policies are wrong, that their immigration policies are wrong.
And when you consider that there is a big involvement in drug smuggling in particular that involves First Nations that straddle the border between Canada and the United States, you'd have to take your reconciliation policy and rejig it.
And they don't want to do any of those things.
So they have not for years dealt with any of the Americans' concerns.
And now Trump comes along.
I don't think Trump really means he wants to put 25% tariffs on it.
He's a blowhard, right?
That's how he negotiates.
He gets you out of the table.
You want to sell him 840 marble countertops for the bathrooms in his newest hotel.
And so he's going to jerk you around and frighten you and make you think that you're not going to get the deal until you cut him 15% off the top.
And then he says, oh, yeah, we can do business with that.
And I think that's where he's at with us.
He doesn't want to put tariffs on.
He does like tariffs.
And I don't understand that myself, but he does like tariffs.
But I think really he said, well, let's just pick a number out of the air that'll scare the Canadians and the Mexicans.
25% seems like a good number.
We'll just say we're going to put 25% tariffs on everything until they do what we tell them to do or do what we want them to do.
And I think that's exactly where we're at.
And I think, as you said early on in our interview here, Danielle Smith is the only one of the leaders in Canada who has recognized that that's what this is all about.
And so let's deal with the core of his concerns.
And if he still imposes tariffs, that's fine.
Then, you know, I'm okay with us bashing back at the Americans.
We have some things that they really need.
We have some rare earth materials that they want for defense construction and for electric vehicles.
We have a quarter of all of their oil and gas that they import.
No, sorry.
Not that they import.
A quarter of all their oil and gas is imported from Canada.
4 million barrels.
It's not a quarter of their imports.
It's a quarter of all of their imports.
That's almost half their imports, yeah.
We're a big supplier.
And so we do have some leverage, but let's not start doing that from day one.
And let's not make Alberta the punching bag, which is what the others want to do.
Exactly.
Let me show you.
I was very inspired by these photos that Danielle Smith put up on our Twitter feed.
This is some of the new sheriffs, the new special border patrol that is being deployed on the Alberta-Montana border.
Now, the funny thing is, and we were just saying this before the interview, that Alberta-Montana border is not a hotspot for fentanyl and illegals.
That's more the BC, Washington border, and New York and near the big cities, near Toronto, near Montreal, near Vancouver.
But it looks awesome.
And that is a visual language that Trump speaks, that Trump's border and immigration czars.
They will see those strong men in tactical gear with dogs, with drones, and say, ah, those are my kind of guys.
Like it's a visual communication of, oh, yeah, okay, good.
That's secure because that's what Americans want to see.
And so Danielle Smith knows what she's doing.
And sending Melanie Jolie, who is perhaps the weakest cabinet minister.
And this is a real contest in the liberals who's the weakest cabinet minister.
And by the way, I remember Marco Rubio had harsh comments when Justin Trudeau praised Fidel Castro upon his death.
It was particularly offensive to Marco Rubio, who represents the Cuban community.
Who is a Cuban American?
Yeah.
So very interesting days.
Hey, you know, when you were talking about how Trump negotiates, I think we all know that.
And I have started to reread Art of the Deal.
I bought it again because it's good to remember how Trump operates.
He's pretty plain about it.
And here's a phrase that I've used before, and I bet you have too.
Take Trump seriously, but not necessarily literally.
Correct.
And if you do that, then you don't get hung up on the little flashy things.
You just say, well, what does he actually want here?
And can we?
And progressives, progressives take him literally, but not seriously.
And that is their mistake.
Like, you know, we're talking about, and I think it's, I'd like to just get these points out here on Alberta.
So so far this year, and this is for 2024 statistics.
This past year, 2024, the U.S. Border Patrol interdicted 2.87 pounds of fentanyl coming from Alberta.
So under three pounds.
You take three bricks of butter.
Fentanyl's Desolate Journey00:02:45
Less fentanyl than that went to the United States through Alberta.
Whereas back in November, the RCMP discovered and broke up the largest fentanyl super lab ever found in Canada.
It was in a place called Falkland, BC, which is an absolutely gorgeous location.
It's on a bench between Kamloops and Vernon.
It's surrounded by peaks.
It is gorgeous in there.
But that lab had enough pre-material in it to manufacture 95 million doses of fentanyl.
95 million dollars.
Dave Eebe, by the way, the Premier BC, he's the hard drug pusher guy anyways.
So this would be a repudiation of his software drugs priority.
And so, yes, I'm glad that the RCMP sent one of its two Blackhawk helicopters to fly back and forth on the 300-kilometer border between Alberta and Montana.
But, you know, yeah, but it's one of those, there's that song that used to be the theme song for Corner Gas, the great Canadian comedy show, where it says, I can tell you my dog ran away.
I can tell you that it took three days because it's so flat in Saskatchewan.
You can see anybody coming or going for three days if they're on foot.
Well, it's the same at the Montana-Alberta border.
If you're coming up through sweetgrass, which is the American side of the Coutz border crossing, and you were on foot, seriously, it would take you at least a week out in the open.
Everyone would see where you're at.
I remember when the pandemic began, we were in California with my wife's father and mother-in-law, and they were talking about how they should get back.
And my father-in-law said, well, I'm told that if we take our car, we have to leave it at the border and somebody has to come to the border from the Canadian side and pick us up.
And I said to him, your car doesn't have COVID.
They're not worried about that.
But by the way, where would they park all those cars?
Because there's 20,000 cars a day go through that border crossing.
So where would they park all those cars?
And then I thought about it and I, well, yeah, yeah, there's miles and miles and miles of nothing in northern Montana.
I guess they could park a few hundred thousand vehicles in there.
But that's what makes it so difficult for the smugglers and the drug traffickers, the illegal immigrants who want to jump the border to go through any of the prairie provinces because it's so desolate that you can be seen anywhere.
Sensitive Protest Votes00:06:07
And so this helicopter flying back and forth is going to see people who are trying to jump the border.
You know, it's funny because the three prairie, I saw Wab Canoe actually spoke very nicely about strengthening the border.
And he has exceeded my very low expectations.
And let me throw one last thing at you because again, we're Canada.
So whenever we're mentioned by an American, we get all excited and it's the center of our lives.
I think it's always been thus.
You know, there was a sort of a saying that you could be very famous in Canada, but until you're famous in the States, people think, I mean, in music, in comedy, many of our cultural celebrities, we didn't respect them until they made it big in the States.
It's a touch of an inferiority complex, I think, in our country.
But I mean, the whole world is riveted by Donald Trump, and he has been president for not even 10 days.
And he has done hundreds of executive orders.
He has spoken with dozens of world leaders.
He's trying to negotiate peace between Russia and Ukraine.
He's trying to negotiate a peace, an Abraham Accords part two in the Middle East.
He's trying to deal with Panama Canal.
He's like, he's got so much going on.
I hate to say it, but Canada is not his number one thing.
No.
So he said this thing.
He loves the reaction he gets.
Our country is thrown into a tizzy.
And is it on his mind?
Yeah, a little bit.
But Donald Trump is not cackling about this all week long.
He's doing a hundred other crisis things.
And we just got to calm down, listen clearly.
What does he want?
And what he's asking for us to do is not against our interests.
It's in our interests.
Last word to you, Lauren.
Yeah, no, that's absolutely true.
The liberals would have to understand that having opened our borders to any foreigner who wanted to come for the last four years, and we now have over 5 million people who've been added in the last four years to our population.
We're going to have baddies in there.
But if you opened your borders to immigration because you felt this was your moral obligation to the developing world or something of that sort, and you're so huge on multiculturalism, you can't believe that there are any bad people in that group of 5 million people, then you're naive.
But the Americans aren't naive because the Americans have real security issues.
Everybody in the world wants to take a shot at them.
And so, you know, I think the only country in the world that has more security issues in the United States is Israel because everybody in their neighborhood wants them gone.
So the Israelis are very sensitive about this.
The Americans are very sensitive about this.
And we've not been sensitive at all.
And now all those chickens are coming home to roost.
Yeah.
Well, it's very interesting.
And, you know, Trump said by January 20th.
And then he said, by February 1st.
And boy, everyone's, he's throwing a cat amongst some pigeons.
We'll see what actually happens.
But it's interesting to watch.
And I'm proud of Alberta.
I think Alberta, if anyone's going to save Canada, it'll be Alberta.
And I don't think Danielle Smith will give the thanks that she deserves.
Lauren, great to catch up with you.
Likewise.
There you have it, Lauren Cunter, Senior Columnist of the Edmonton Sun.
Stay with us.
Your letters to me next.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me.
001 Dark Cycle said, if disinformation is the greatest threat, then we need more extreme transparency in government, not censorship laws bound with loose language that can be interpreted as a limit on free speech.
Our Canadian government is unfit to govern.
That word misinformation or fake news, it's so loosey-goosey.
Who gets to decide what's true or not?
Who gets to decide whether opinion is too far or not?
The government would seek to be the arbiter of truth.
It's a very dangerous thing.
And by the way, they often get it wrong.
Happy Days says, sure, there is no foreign interference in the government because the entire government is at the behest of foreign interests.
So to them, it's not interference at all unless Canadians complain.
That's the thing.
Justin Trudeau knew what was happening.
The liberals knew what was happening.
The Trudeau Foundation had this special event where a Chinese Communist Party donor gave him, I think it was a quarter million dollar check.
This wasn't done secretly.
This was done boldly, but Trudeau was fine with it because he was the chief beneficiary of it.
72 PUPSIC says, I'm voting for a new Blue Party of Ontario.
They are much more common sense conservative.
Doug Ford is more of a liberal.
He has to go.
Well, I am aware of smaller, more freedom-oriented parties, Derek Sloan, Randy Hillier.
And like on the federal scene where you have the People's Party of Canada, there's a lot to commend the ideology, the ideological purity of these smaller parties.
The trouble is there is no way at all they're going to win.
The only choices for winning provincially are conservative, liberal, or NDP.
I mean, maybe it's worth a protest vote to go for a smaller, more pure party.
Maybe that's the right thing to do to show your disgust with Doug Ford.
But I'm afraid, just like the PPC, it's a protest vote and it's an ideological vote.
But I don't think mathematically it has a chance.
I like Maxime Bernier and I like Derek Sloan.
I don't have a strong relationship with Randy Hilliard, but I know he stood for freedom in the past.
I just think that in our system, you can have a small party that comes in second or third in a number of ridings and you get nothing.
Only in countries where they have proportional representation does coming in second or third actually yield political power.
Protest Votes and Freedom00:00:36
Well, that's our show for today.
Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters to you at home, good night and keep fighting for freedom.
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