Ezra Levant highlights Stephen Harper’s April 8 endorsement of Pierre Poilievre at a 10,000–15,000-strong Edmonton rally, where Harper slammed Trudeau’s decade of "weakening" Canada through money printing, oil/gas restrictions, and reliance on unelected figures like Mark Carney. Fixler, a former Brookfield sustainability officer, debunks Carney’s $130T climate pledge as greenwashed ESG hype funding tech giants while ignoring China’s emissions dominance. She ties his policies—CBDCs, DEI—to authoritarianism, citing the Truckers’ Rebellion. Levant warns of government venue pressure tactics, comparing them to U.S. censorship cases, and predicts a tight York Centre race favoring Conservative Roman Baber over Liberal Yaara Sachs, framing Poilievre’s rise as a rejection of elite-driven economic mismanagement. [Automatically generated summary]
Stephen Harper came out and gave an old-fashioned campaign speech last night.
First time in about a decade.
I'll take you through it, and I'll give you my thoughts on it and what I think he would do if he were running.
That's ahead, but first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
I want you to see what Harper's speech looked like, not just hear it.
I want you to see what 10 or 12 or 15,000 conservatives at a rally look like.
Go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe.
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Tonight, Stephen Harper gives a campaign speech for the first time in 10 years.
It's April 8th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Last night, Pierre Polyev's conservatives had one of the largest political rallies in recent memory in Edmonton, Alberta.
I've seen estimates ranging from 10,000 to 15,000 people there.
Our Sheila Gunread and Angelique Toy were on the scene to cover it, and you can find their videos elsewhere on RebelNews.com.
Even if that's on the lower end of the estimate, even if it was only 10,000 people, that's an enormous number of people.
Now, it's Edmonton, which is in Alberta, and Edmonton always goes conservative.
Sometimes it goes 100% conservative, that town.
The trick, don't you think, is to get that level of support in places like the Greater Vancouver area and in Ontario, at least outside of Toronto.
That's the trick, and we'll see how that goes.
I have a little bit of hope.
But here's the latest poll by Abacus Research.
You know, I like Abacus because it's run by David Coletto, who I think is amongst the best pollsters in Canada.
And because he's a tiny bit liberal, when he has news that's encouraging for the conservatives, I believe him.
Here's his latest headline: Liberals and Conservatives remain deadlocked at 39% each.
Now, that's not particularly good news, is it?
But it tells you something.
First of all, the Conservative vote hasn't particularly fallen.
Think about it.
The absolute highest peak the Conservatives ever registered was when the Liberals were in total disarray, total mutiny in very early January, remember?
And the Conservatives briefly, just once, if my research is right, touched 47%.
And that took a total cataclysm for that to happen.
It wasn't that the Conservatives were doing anything particularly great.
It's that the Liberals were absolutely imploding.
So 47% is probably the highest possible for the Conservatives.
My point is: 39% for the Conservatives today is pretty much the Conservatives doing their best with Justin Trudeau out of the picture.
I mean, he was detested by the end of his term.
Abacus suggests that Abacus, that's David Coletto's polling company, that conservatives are the most motivated group of voters out there.
The group of voters most likely to actually turn up on election day.
I find that encouraging, don't you?
And that seems to make sense if you look at the huge rallies.
That shows motivation.
But of course, the Liberals are doing better with Trudeau gone.
Take Trudeau out, the level of hatred and disgust for the Liberals is going to subside immediately.
It would be like taking your hand off a hot stove.
It will immediately feel less awful.
Isn't it interesting that literally no one cares what Justin Trudeau thinks, what he's up to?
Just nothing.
It's as if he just evaporated like the morning fog after the sun comes up.
Justin Trudeau was an empty man in so many ways.
It's like that old joke: an empty cab pulled up and Justin Trudeau got out.
I mean, have you seen any?
No one cares what he's up to.
Isn't that telling?
I think the real story here is that the NDP has just collapsed.
They've fallen in half.
NDP's Collapse00:04:38
They were in the 20% range before.
Now Abacus says that they're at 11%.
And it's all gone to Trudeau.
Anyways, what I thought was interesting last night was that Stephen Harper showed up at Polyev's rally.
Harper doesn't do that a lot.
He doesn't make public statements a lot.
He does the odd podcast, but it's generally on a thematic thing.
It's not breaking news politics.
And he speaks on the occasional panel at a conference, but it's really never partisan, I don't think.
He spoke for about 10 minutes last night, and I found some versions of his speech on Twitter.
Let me play for you some excerpts from Harper's speech and then my comments after.
As someone who had the honor of serving as your Prime Minister, I know that being Prime Minister is a trust.
It is a trust to take this incredible country that our ancestors bequeathed us and to leave it stronger, more united, more compassionate, and more confident than we found it.
That's what we did, my friends.
But that is not the story of the past decade, and that has got to change for Canada.
Now, that's true.
Tell me one thing about Canada that is stronger, or wealthier, or happier today than a decade ago.
I'll wait.
You know, friends, I am in a unique position in this federal election.
I am the only person who can say that both of the men running to be prime minister once worked for me.
And in that regard, my choice, without hesitation, without equivocation, without a shadow of a doubt, is Pierre Polliev.
known Pierre Poitier for a quarter of a century.
Since he was a very young man, the first time I met him, I could see that he was smart, articulate, possessing tremendous passion for our country and strong convictions about sound public policy.
In 2004, during the time of my leadership, Pierre's parliamentary career began.
He went progressively from a backbench MP to a parliamentary secretary to a junior cabinet minister to a senior cabinet minister and of course to party leader.
And in all of those roles, he worked, he fought, and he learned.
Because it is not just that Pierre excelled in all of those roles.
In all of them, he grew.
he got better and better.
Friends, don't let anyone tell you that he was born to be prime minister or that he can just somehow parachute into the job fully prepared.
Political experience, elected, accountable political experience, and the capacity for growth with that political experience, that is what Pierre has demonstrated for two decades, And that is the single most important characteristic a prime minister needs.
And by the way, I say that as the guy who actually did lead Canada through the global financial crisis.
Trump's Economic Claims00:14:59
I hear there's someone else claiming it was him.
It was, of course, our government, the late, great Jim Flaherty, and our Conservative team who were responsible for the day-to-day macroeconomic management during that challenging time.
There are some zingers aimed at Mark Carney in there to say that Carney ran our economy, which is what the Liberals are trying to say these days.
It's just not the truth.
It's an attempt at resume inflation by the Liberals, and it hides the fact that their own decision as a cabinet, their decisions over the last decade under Trudeau have been disastrous.
Everything from printing money to spending and taxing and shutting down the oil and gas industry.
Here's some more.
And friends, it's no secret that our country faces today another historically challenging time in the form of the Trump administration.
There is no sugarcoating that.
But the bulk of the problems that afflict our country, falling living standards, declining employment and housing opportunities, rising crime, the growing divisions between our regions and our people, These were not created by Donald Trump.
They were created by the policies of three liberal terms, policies that the present Prime Minister supported and wants a fourth liberal term to continue.
This is why the Liberals love fighting with Donald Trump so badly.
They desperately want a trade war.
The worse the better, because they want to obscure their own disastrous decisions over the past 10 years with some of Trump's tariff uncertainty these past weeks.
They have what's called a moral hazard.
They want Trump to do damage to us so it hides the damage they themselves did.
They, Trudeau, but also the rest of their team and Carney as Trudeau's advisor, they're the ones who made the mess.
They need someone else to blame.
And of course, it's not just economics.
Pierre has consistently opposed those policies.
Policies that have put costs up, accelerated crime, left our wealth in the ground, and made our economy vulnerable and under America's thumb.
And Pierre has, just as importantly, long advocated the positive alternatives for change.
to axe those taxes, build homes, bring back jobs, get our resources to the whole world, and stand up to Washington from a position of strength.
I think Harper would be leading from a position of strength, but I think Harper was a grown-up enough to have a constant, professional, friendly relationship with the U.S. President, such that things would never have spun out of control like this.
And I say that based on Harper's relationship with Barack Obama.
I don't know if the two men hated each other, but let's just say they disagreed on every possible thing you could disagree on.
But they kept it together.
They did not bicker, at least not in public.
They had a kind of working respect for each other.
Trudeau either avoided Trump or antagonized Trump.
He preferred playing to his Trump derangement syndrome base than actually fixing a problem.
Here's more of Harper.
Friends, I believe that the challenge this country faces today from the United States, as real and serious as it is, should not be another excuse for liberal failure.
Instead, it should be a historic opportunity.
That's how we've got to see it.
An opportunity to make Canada what it should be.
Internally united, internationally connected, a truly independent economy with the highest living standards in the world.
and with those benefits enjoyed not just by protected elites but by all the people of this country in every region of this country
And do bring it home, friends, because that goal, that goal does not depend on Donald Trump.
It depends on us.
But we will only get there with leadership, from a person who has an actual policy plan, from a person who has been right on all the big issues for a decade, and a person who has the energy and yes, the youth to take us forward into a better, stronger, and more united future.
That person, that person has been my colleague.
He is my friend.
He is our leader.
And he is the next Prime Minister of Canada, Pierre Polyev Hanana.
I think that if Stephen Harper were running again today, he would thump Mark Carney.
Harper's only 65 years old, but the one thing Harper has is people know he's serious.
They know he's an economist who's a master of the economics file.
They know it was him who guided Canada through the 2008 crisis better than almost any other country did, and they know he's serious.
They don't quite know that yet about Pierre Polyev because Polyev, while he's been a cabinet minister and a leader of the opposition, he has never been tested as a kind of CEO.
I think that's all people see in Carney.
He's not Trudeau.
He's got some gray hair and a resume, and he seems to know money things.
And that's enough for many Canadians, those who hated Trudeau for personal reasons and now find it easy to come back to the liberals, those who used to be for the NDP for virtue signaling reasons, but really just want to stop the conservatives and those, especially baby boomers and seniors, who just want someone who looks and sounds like Carney as opposed to a younger, more aggressive politician like Pierre Polyev.
We'll see what happens.
I mean, Doug Ford is backing Mark Carney.
Stephen Harper is backing Pierre Polyev.
We'll know in less than three weeks who the people back.
Stay with us for more to an interesting post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Canada, your crisis isn't U.S. tariffs.
It's Mark Carney.
He's lying.
He will never grow your economy.
Carney is a managerial elitist pushing the Davos agenda, net zero, central bank digital currency, DEI, and many other strangleholds on growth and freedom.
I know because I was one of them.
I traveled in Carney's WEF circles for years.
These folks don't care about ordinary people.
They're only driven by autocratic power and money.
Free your country from this authoritarian heist.
Unleash drilling, restore meritocracy, and take back your prosperity.
Dump him.
And the author of that tweet is Desiree Fixler, who joins us now via Skype from France.
Desiree, what a pleasure to meet you.
Thanks for taking the time to be with us.
Thank you for this invitation.
Well, tell me what you mean by you were in the World Economic Forum circles.
Rebel News goes to Davos every January, and we're definitely not in the circles.
We're sort of outside the moat.
They don't let us over the drawbridge into the inner sanctum.
Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you know about people like Mark Carney.
Sure.
So first of all, I'm a bit of a rebel myself.
I, you know, was in the corporate world.
I was a true believer in the whole Davos agenda, the ESG movement.
You know, in 2020, I had my dream job.
I was a chief sustainability officer like Mark Carney at Brookfield.
I was head of ESG.
And that's when I read PILD and I realized, holy shit, this is a huge marketing scam.
This is a multi-trillion dollar marketing scam that seeks to tell the public we're saving the planet and the people.
We're doing good.
And you guys can do well by investing in us in these investment products, ESG.
When all the while it was a scheme to overcharge and under deliver.
So I was part of the G-Fance movement.
Mark Carney was head of that, the Global Financial Alliance on net zero.
And not only did Mark Carney issue false statements, it actually led to tremendous societal harm.
So you're talking about the effect like net zero and this whole ESG agenda has contributed to the affordability crisis.
I would even say it's one of the driving factors for the Ukrainian war and then its subcomponent DEI has led to tremendous censorship and a council culture.
Wow.
Well, let's break that down because you've said a lot of things in a short period of time.
When you say false statements, do you mean false political statements or false financial statements?
I want to understand what you mean.
Both.
So first of all, you know, after Mark Carney left as governor of Bank of England, he, of course, took his position at Brookfield.
He also led GFAMPS and made claims that net zero, the drive for the race to zero, like net zero, was going to lead to tremendous productivity increases and GDP growth, as well as transitioning economies globally, leading to more jobs and lower energy costs.
Just the opposite happened.
And in fact, he made claims that $130 trillion over $130 trillion was committed to climate action, that the corporate world was unified in believing that there was a climate emergency and all this money was going to rebuild growth economies.
That wasn't true.
The $130 trillion was just the members' aggregate assets under management.
It wasn't a commitment to climate action.
False statement.
So that would be assets that BlackRock and State Street and Brookfield had under management.
Is that what you're saying?
Correct.
But didn't those companies implement ESG?
In a way, wasn't that what Carney was doing?
Is pressuring those fund managers to green the companies in which they invested to say, you know, to force ESG into their bloodstream?
So in a way, wasn't it true?
Like he was actually trying to convert those huge asset managers into green champions.
I'm just trying to use his language of the left.
Sure.
I would use the language of Milton Friedman and say, you know, it's very dangerous to judge policies on intentions.
You have to judge policies on results.
I'm paraphrasing it.
Yeah.
No, I don't disagree with you.
I'm just saying.
Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.
You keep going.
So, yes, Mark Carney maybe had the right intentions.
Oh, I'm not saying he did.
Sorry, go ahead.
Maybe he had the right aspirations, but the results are in.
And by 2021 and 2022, you knew ESG was a marketing scam, and you knew that net zero was leading to higher energy costs and actually a degrowth, like the shrinking of the economy.
You know, economies need to grow with access to affordable energy.
The other point I'm going to make is this.
These are existential policies.
People have to vote on them.
You know, not some unelected official, you know, at a Davos, you know, committee in a committee room, like at a conference, right?
You know, misleading the public, not presenting the true cost-benefit analysis, right?
People have to decide what urgent or key issues are, and they have to decide what to do with their own country's natural resources.
Unelected officials should not be driving important policy.
And that's what happened.
And you knew you had economic data and market data coming in.
You knew that there was tremendous greenwashing.
It was pervasive on Wall Street.
You knew that ESG was largely the trillions that were mobilized into ESG investments were actually investments in like U.S. tech stocks.
They were investments into Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA.
China's Influence on Investments00:07:18
That's not going to save the planet or the people.
It might make you money, but like these aren't net zero investments.
It's obvious it's a carbon-light industry.
So those, you know, you knew that, you know, the BlackRocks, you know, the other, you know, banks and asset managers were overcharging for regular way investments that were actually underperforming the main index, the SP 500.
In addition, right, renewable energy is more expensive than fossil fuel energy, and it was driving up costs.
It's also leading to, just look at Europe, look at Germany, productivity decline, GDP shrinkage per capita.
And that's the issue I have with Mark Carney.
Maybe he had good intentions, but when the results came in, he denied them, dismissed them, couldn't care less about ordinary, the strife, the issues, right?
The crisis among ordinary people, right?
They're just like too little.
And that is the hypocrisy, the duplicity.
Because if you fearmonger, if you create crises, you get to stay in power.
You get to control the population.
You get to regulate more.
People don't have a choice about what they're going to drive, how they're going to heat their house, what their access to the country's natural resources are.
You also move from, let's also look at the social agenda.
You also look at controlling the demographics of your country, who you're letting in, how many, who's in the workforce.
Society becomes less of a meritocracy.
And just look at Carney's response to the Truckers Rebellion, tremendous censorship and financial control.
Hey, let me ask you a question about China, because Brookfield and Mark Carney in particular seem to have strong connections to China's Xi Jinping and the Communist Party.
They lent him a quarter of a billion dollars to Brookfield.
He's met with them.
And I don't know how this squares with Carney's professed dedication to net zero, because China is by far the largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
And Brookfield invests in fossil fuel projects in other countries, but Carney says he's against them in Canada.
He would support C69, a bill that really regulates pipelines and tankers and things of that sort.
Tell me a little bit about your thoughts on Carney's relationship with China.
What are you worried about?
If anything, what should we be looking for?
No, look, I don't, the truth is, I don't have insights into that.
I can just say It would be dangerous to be in the hands of China, to be dependent on the offtake of China or the financing from China.
I can say this: that China offers a lot of investment opportunity that can be lucrative for an asset manager.
I can say that, look, I have no problem in somebody's access or ability to earn a lot of money.
I have no problem with Mark Carney taking a position at Brookfield that both plays the fossil fuel industry as well as renewable energy.
The problem I have with Carney is when he states that the policies he's pushing and everything he stands for is to help people, right?
That's not the case.
You don't take on and support and promote net zero policy and take on advisory positions at Brookfield, Bloomberg, Stripe.
He was in charge of G-Fance, the UN, PIMCO, academics, board seats at Harvard, Oxford, World Economic Forum, and other think tanks.
The other thing is, remember, he is on the global stage pretty much at so many seminal financial conferences, earning, I believe, six-digit speaking fees.
Some, of course, he does pro bono, right, to enhance his presence on the global stage.
And others, he's getting a sizable speaking fee.
He is there promoting his own power and his own money generating ability, but cloaking it in moral superiority.
This is somebody who hasn't been elected.
He's been appointed and he's had corporate seats.
Where can you point to where he's helped ordinary people?
As a governor of the Bank of England, priming the pump for tremendous inflation and more focus on climate risk and DEI than financial stability.
Like what happened, look at the UK, lackluster growth.
So I just, I believe he should be championing democratic values and giving the people of Canada the choice on what they want to do with their own policy and their natural resources.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me.
I was on Tim Poole's broadcast last night.
I actually zipped down to Washington and back overnight so fast he didn't even miss me.
And I talked about a lot of things.
I mean, it was a two and a half hour broadcast.
I am going said, this was at a great show last night.
Everyone performed amazingly.
I was really grateful to be on it.
And he's got a really smart team, Tim Poole does.
Sam Hyan says, this exact situation happened at a Tucker Carlson event talking about the government trying to block an event.
Live Nation ended up pulling the venue away 24 hours before the contract closed.
This was in the USA.
If we didn't have an alternative venue, the entire event would have been canceled.
Well, that's interesting because in our case here in Canada, we had a great contract with the venue operator who was fairly brave, I guess.
Contract Cancellations Crisis00:00:38
He just didn't know that he would be fighting against the government.
He thought he would be fighting against some antifa threateners or something.
Yeah, but we had a rock-solid contract that the government tried to induce a breach of.
Barry Petit says, so the Masra, how does someone like Yaara Sachs get elected?
Are the people in her riding out to lunch?
Well, believe it or not, I live in her riding.
And I don't know.
I mean, it's a really close election in this whole country.
I think the riding of York Center, where I live, it's going to be close.
But if I had to bet, I would bet on the conservative Roman Baber.