Ezra Levant warns Mark Carney’s revived Online Harms Act (C63)—now backed by Trudeau’s former cabinet minister Stephen Gilboe—threatens free speech with retroactive prosecution, billion-dollar fines for platforms, and extreme restrictions like house arrest and forced testing. The law’s $270K legal costs to Rebel News, paired with Carney’s $255B debt push and global carbon tax plans, signals a shift toward state-controlled media and corporate welfare over freedom. Allies like Western Standard and Epoch Times share the fight, but liberal groups remain silent as dissent faces Orwellian crackdowns. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, the Carney Liberals say they're going to reintroduce Trudeau's censorship bill, and no one in parliament bats an eye.
It's September 25th, and this is the Ezra LeMance Show.
shame on you you sensorious bug oh hi everybody Sorry, I'm in informal attire.
I'm in Calgary right now, actually at my folks' place where I stay when I come to Calgary.
They're still here.
I love to visit.
I'm in Calgary for some meetings, including an annual meeting of the Western Standard.
As you know, the Western Standard was the name of a magazine I used to publish two decades ago almost, but it has been revived into a lively and important news website focusing on Western candidates, run by our friend Derek Fildebratt.
I was delighted to be invited to speak to their team.
So that's sort of fun.
I mean, technically on paper, Rebel News is competitors with Juno and Counter Signal and Epoch Times and Western Standard.
I suppose we are, but I actually don't feel that way.
I feel like we're sort of allies.
We're little Davids fighting the big Goliath together.
And we have much more in common than we have that differentiates ourselves.
I mean, we have different niches and focuses, of course.
And I think we're all making a go of it against this big blob of regime media.
Anyways, I'm really flattered to be invited to speak to them.
That's why I'm in Calgary.
But I've been paying close attention to Ottawa and another independent news source that I really admire.
It's called Blacklocks.
They had a little tidbit that I didn't see anywhere else.
And it was about a parliamentary committee hearing.
As you know, there's the main parliament where the MPs sit and they go there to debate and to have question period.
But a lot of the work of parliament is done in committees where they call witnesses and experts and consultations.
One of the things that happens at committee is cabinet ministers come to answer questions about what they're doing and how things are moving along.
And yesterday, Stephen Gilbo came before the Heritage Committee.
Stephen Gilbo, you'll remember.
He's the convicted criminal, of course, who was a Greenpeace criminal.
He scaled the CN Tower and broke out of it, causing tens of thousands of dollars in damages.
He actually went on the roof of Ralph Klein's home.
Ralph Klein, the former premier of Alberta.
He broke into the property, went on the roof.
Ralph Klein wasn't there.
Ralph Klein was at work, but Mrs. Klein was at home terrified.
Imagine some thug literally climbing on your roof for a stunt.
He should have been imprisoned for those things, but instead he winds up.
He's just Trudeau's kind of guy.
And now he's Mark Carney's kind of guy.
So, so gross.
Anyways, he was before the Heritage Committee talking about a number of things.
And for about 30 seconds, he dropped a bit of news that Blacklock's picked up.
They are going to revive.
They're going to ex-human and rebuild Justin Trudeau's censorship bill, which was called C63, which was called the Online Harms Act.
Mark Carney is bringing it back.
Don't take it from me.
Here's Stephen Gilbeau, the convicted criminal, the Trudeau cabinet minister, who's now being reheated into a Carney cabinet minister.
We've made a commitment to combat online harms.
I have myself worked on that during my first passage at Heritage between 2019 and 2021.
Many of my colleagues have continued on that.
We tabled a bill in last parliament, C63, that was aimed not specifically at online harms, but also modernizing the criminal code.
So we will be introducing measures to address hate speech, terrorist content, and the harmful distribution of intimate images.
Yeah, do you get the feeling that the government cares about censorship more than just about anything else?
I mean, yesterday, as you know, I spent the day in court alone.
fighting against the regulation of journalists through this journalism license that again, Trudeau invented and Carney is continuing.
That lawsuit, I hate to say it, we're probably going to lose.
I mean, appeal courts are always long shots.
I bet if we had a bevy of civil liberties groups in there, journalism groups in there intervening on our behalf, it could be different.
Like, what if the Canadian Association of Journalists and Canadian Journalists for Free Expression and Penn Canada and Amnesty International?
What if instead of just me being in there, and maybe the judges don't like me?
Maybe, oh, it's rebel news and as for LeBron, we don't like them.
Maybe if there was all these fancy pants liberals who used to care about civil liberties, like where the heck is the Canadian Civil Liberties Association?
30 years ago, I knew their director.
He loved freedom of speech, even for people he didn't like.
His name was Alan Borovoy.
He was a Jewish guy who talked about the importance of defending Nazis.
Civil liberties organization today, they would never defend someone on the right, not even a conservative.
And so they're never there in the battle.
But what would happen if they had been there?
I think it would made a difference, not just making legal arguments, but telegraphing to the judge that this isn't just about rinky-dink rebel news.
This is a bigger thing.
Alas, I was in there by myself, which was a little frustrating.
And you saw that remark by Stephen Gilbo.
It was only about 30 seconds.
He basically said, I'm bringing back the censorship law and nothing.
I searched through, I skimmed the entire hearing, and maybe I missed it, but I don't think I did.
I don't think a single MP bothered to press him on it.
They were talking about other things.
Let me give you a reminder about what this, it used to be called Bill C63.
It's the online harm side.
It's a censorship law.
It had some atrocious things that I think startled anyone who read the bill, but again, who reads a bill?
It had life in prison as a new punishment for the standalone crime of hate.
Hate, of course, is a human emotion.
It's absurd to regulate hate.
That's like regulating love.
You can't ban it any more than you can compel people to love.
The liberals hate prison.
The liberals let anyone out on bail.
This is the only thing I've ever seen the liberals call for life in prison for, for the emotion of hatred.
That's what they want to do.
There's this crazy provision in there targeting Elon Musk.
It's a 24-hour takedown provision where if anyone complains about something on social media, if the companies don't take it down within 24 hours, they face enormous fines that could reach into the billions of dollars.
Of course, how does a 24-hour takedown notice work?
Let's say someone writes something at 11 p.m. on Friday night.
And by the time someone hears about it, it's 10 a.m. Saturday morning.
So they basically have a few hours.
But my point is the companies cannot do a proper hearing, properly investigate something.
They're going to, if they have to make a decision in 24 hours, and if there's billions of dollars at stake, they could censor everything.
I mean, have you ever seen the government act on anything within 24 hours?
The only reason you would demand a 24-hour takedown is if you want the company to do it simply out of fear and out of reflex, not actually have a hearing into whether something was truly hateful.
And by the way, if something breaks a criminal law, then go arrest the guy.
But don't tell social media companies that they have to be political correctness cops.
As you know, the new provisions in C63, which sound like they're going to be revived, mean you can be charged for anything you ever said on social media, even something historical.
The wording in the law said, if you still control a Facebook account or some old thing, and you wrote a comment literally 10 years ago, you can be prosecuted today.
There's no statute of limitations like there is for, say, defamation law or most torts.
This law is so un-Canadian.
It breaks centuries of tradition in our law.
Imagine saying you have to make a decision in 24 hours.
You can be charged for anything you've ever said historically.
Hate speech, when you were a kid, if you were a teenager in 2006 and now you're in your 30s, you could be charged with a hate crime for what you did when you were teenagers.
That is literally in the law.
It criminalizes words.
It gives a bounty.
You get paid to make nuisance complaints against your enemies, unlimited.
You can make secret complaints against people like Jordan Peterson or Ezra Levant.
You can get a preemptive restraining order against someone who hasn't said anything hateful yet, but you think he will.
You can get shocking restraints on him, including house arrest, giving blood and urine samples.
That's in the law, seizing any lawful firearms, saying he can or can't go any places or contact anyone.
That's all in this law.
And of course, they have three new censorship agencies that will be hundreds of staff doing nothing but censoring.
That's C63.
And that in very casually, in 30 seconds, Stephen Gilbo said, Mark Carney is bringing back.
Now, I think the first thing to realize is that Carney may look like a boring banker, but he is no less radical than Justin Trudeau.
And why would he be?
He's got the same people around him, including Stephen Gilbo, the criminal.
I think it's a little different out there now, because when Justin Trudeau first introduced this bill several times, actually, Joe Biden was president.
But now Trump is president and he and his vice president, JD Vance, say that they value freedom of speech and are actually putting that into action.
The U.S. has raised the issue of censorship in Germany, in Ireland, in the UK, in the European Union in general.
And the United States has actually threatened censors around the world that if they censor, if they censor American social media platforms, if they censor Americans, the U.S. State Department might actually ban those censors from ever visiting America.
Imagine if Stephen Gilbo were to be banned from visiting the United States.
He's a communist, Stephen Gilbo.
He hates capitalism, but he loves going to the United States.
Everyone does.
Wouldn't it be delicious if Stephen Gilbo was banned from America like some sort of Putin oligarch because he's acting like a Trudeau or Carney oligarch?
That'd be something.
I think doing this while we haven't negotiated a trade deal with America is exceedingly dumb.
But I've come to the conclusion that I think Mark Carney is doing so many things to irritate Trump in particular and America in general that it can't be an accident.
I think Carney wants a trade war so he can blame the coming recession on Trump.
So bringing back censorship, which will get stuck in the craw of Marco Rubio and JD Vance and Trump and so, that sounds insane and it makes no sense until you come to the realization, well, that, hey, actually, maybe Carney wants to be able to blame Trump for our made in Canada recession.
I think it's dumb to do.
I think it's immoral to do.
I think it's un-Canadian.
And I think Rebel News has to fight it.
I think Rebel News will be one of the first people targeted by it, especially now that Jordan Peterson has relocated to the United States.
Seriously, tell me someone in Canada who would be hit by this law faster than Rebel News or myself or Dill Domenzies or our team.
I mean, I suppose there are others out there who are even more offensive to the liberals than us, but I can't name them offhand.
I think we might be fighting this ourselves.
Will we be alone?
I hope not.
I was alone yesterday in court.
I had no allies other than you, our lovely viewers who helped chip in to pay for our legal fees.
But we have to fight it.
We have to for our own existential survival.
And I think for the sake of Canada's survival, too.
Stay with us.
More ahead with our friend Franco Teresano.
Our party has been on a diplomatic flurry.
It's sort of pitiful the countries he's meeting with and making huge announcements over tiny little things, countries with a sliver of a population.
I think it was Barbados the other day.
I have nothing against Barbados.
I've had the pleasure of going there, but it's smaller than a city.
It's less than a quarter million people.
That's not exactly a replacement for a trade deal with the United States.
Neither is Mexico.
I'm afraid neither is Indonesia.
If you look up all these countries, we have tiny amounts of exports.
But this is, I think, Mark Carney trying to show that sure, he doesn't have a trade deal with Trump.
And sure, he seems to be on the wrong foot with Trump.
But you know, he's putting together a coalition of, I don't know, a Lilliputian coalition.
He may not get Snow White, but he'll get the seven dwarves.
I don't know.
I'm not sure who's buying it.
He wasn't even invited to Trump's meeting to deal with Ukraine.
Catalyzing Capital Flow00:10:53
And Canada has been one of the largest funders.
But yesterday, Carney took a break from talking about diplomatics and even trade deals and started talking about a vision for a new kind of economy.
Now, whenever a politician talks about a new kind of economy, hold on to your wallet because odds are it's not a new idea at all.
Odds are it's just a repackaged version of socialism.
And that's not really that surprising coming from the former director of the World Economic Forum, which, as we know, looks capitalist on the outside.
I mean, Larry Fink of BlackRock is on their board, but it's actually a socialist endeavor, sort of hijacking capitalism, taking it away from shareholder rights towards stakeholder rights and replacing the free market with a managed market.
So from the very beginning, you should be on guard about Mark Carney.
Here he is in New York, and I want to play three full minutes of him describing what he wants to do, not just to Canada's economy, but to the world's economy.
And when we're done watching these three minutes, I'm going to call upon Franco Terrazano from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation to help me, A, understand what the heck this means, and B, figuring out how it's going to be implemented, if at all.
Okay, enough preamble.
Take a look at this three-minute craziness from Mark Carney.
The way I'm going to organize my thoughts, three points, four points actually, around building that system, financial system for our grandkids.
Again, drawing on the intervention of the managing director and the Secretary General earlier.
First thing we need is to recognize that we need to use scarce dollars to the maximum effect.
This isn't just about bigger volumes.
It's about using scarce public dollars to maximum effect.
And that is catalyzing financial instruments using risk mitigation tools to better allocate risk between the public and private sector.
I will just refer for speed to the agenda of the Private Sector Investment Lab and what the World Bank has been doing on risk management.
The second point is crowding in institutional capital through originate to distribute models.
There's a lot of words there.
What it basically means is recycling the balance sheets of our international financial institutions.
So they are there catalyzing the new lending.
Once it matures, it's parked off to other holders that can hold it for the long term.
And it's all about action, new action at the MDBs.
The third point is strengthening the structures, processes, governance of the institutions.
To put it into plain words, the shareholders should be looking at key performance indicators that are directly tied, of course, to the sustainable development goals, but also absolute volumes of capital that are moving.
And in some cases, it's not about lending.
It's actually about technical assistance.
It's making capital flow possible.
So all of those activities that catalyze in flows towards the SDGs.
I will reference the work that has been done and needs to be completed on a cross-border carbon market, which could close one-third of the climate finance gap between now and 2035.
And I will also just associate myself with the framework that President Ramaposa did outline for the G20, which is more comprehensive than what I've just said.
Last point I'll make is that at the G7, there were a few instruments that were launched that build on some of the general points that I just made.
Billions of dollars in new financing through the IADB and the Caribbean Development Bank, and a structure where a number of countries came together called SCALE, which is scaling capital for sustainable development.
The point of this, it's measured in billions, but really the point is it's a template.
It's a template for putting in place those general points that I made.
It has, as the name suggests, an ability to scale.
And if I may close on this, Chair, there is an enormous gap.
We know that.
But the gap in terms of financial technology and the solutions has closed.
The question is whether we're going to deploy them and scale.
I understood four words of that.
He said cross-border carbon market.
That's another way of saying a carbon tax.
The rest of that was fog, was what George Orwell would call duck speaking.
I'm so frustrated.
That's the third or fourth time I've watched that now.
Let me bring in our dear friend Franco Terrazetto from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
Franco, be honest, did you understand that?
Or tell me, did you understand any of it?
And you're a smart guy.
All you do is look at budgets and government spending.
I don't think you're a PhD, but literally all day, this is what you study.
What in God's green earth did he say for three minutes?
Yeah, no, I don't.
I'm having a hard time really breaking down what he said.
And Ezra, you know, before I came on the show, I watched this clip a number of times trying to figure this out.
I mean, the most concerning thing to me is a couple of things, okay?
I'm going to give you two things right off the bat.
So, number one is why are politicians, bureaucrats, even kind of discussing what could be, I don't know if the right term is remake, but of the financial system, right?
To go back to your introduction off the top here, Ezra, there's really only two ways that an economy operates with freedom or with force, right?
And this is the tale as old as time.
Okay, that has been the fight throughout the millennia, throughout the centuries, right?
It's either freedom or it's force.
It's either individuals in the marketplace deciding where to buy things and produce things, or it's through government dictate and government fiat.
So, that's number one.
It's just the big alarm bells ringing there.
But, number two, as you mentioned, Ezra, what was it?
The cross-border carbon market.
I flag in the exact same thing you're flagging, Ezra.
And look, we already know that the global, you know, international organizations, whatever you want to call them, we know the United Nations has mused about forms of global carbon taxes.
We know the IMF has mused about forms of global carbon taxes.
And we also know the World Economic Forum has mused about different types of global carbon taxes.
You know, before he became prime minister, he had several jobs.
He was the chairman of Brookfield Asset Management.
He was also the UN Ambassador for Climate Change, if I'm not mistaken.
Correct me if I'm wrong on that, but I know for sure he was also the head of G-Fance, the Global Financial Alliance for Net Zero.
I'm here, and he was also the director of the World Economic Forum.
I'm hearing World Economic Forum.
I'm hearing G-Fans.
I'm hearing someone who wants to socialize the economy, who wants to, you know, make carbon pricing in everything.
I'm not hearing a Canadian prime minister.
I'm hearing someone who still thinks his job is to transform capitalism into, like you say, a managed economy.
And he was so fluent with that BS.
That's BS.
I mean, he used, you know what word he's, I know what his favorite word is now.
Catalyze.
Yeah.
Catalyze is a real word.
It's sort of, it sort of means like alchemy, like to bring something together and create a change.
It's sort of his go-to word to make things seem fancy and new and shiny, but he doesn't really know the answer.
Oh, we'll catalyze the change.
And he must have said that half a dozen times there.
I've got a question for you, Franco.
Is he a flim flam man?
Is he a BSer or is there actual meaning underneath it?
Because by the way, you can be a BSer to sneak something through, or you can be a BSer just because, you know, you're an imposter.
You don't know what you're talking about.
You just, you know, fake it till you make it.
Is this fake it till you make it?
Or is this sneaking in bad ideas under a fog of words?
Ezra, I just have to be honest with you.
I don't know because the first time I watched it, I told you I watched it a number of times before coming on with you here.
It almost reminded me because I did economics in undergrad and through my master's as well, right?
So I've also taken business courses and stuff like that.
And on the one hand, I recognize terminology that we do have to be on the lookout for, right?
I recognize expert terminology in there.
We already mentioned the cross-border carbon mechanism, right?
Like that is legitimate expert terminology.
And it's just bureaucrats speak for global carbon taxes, right?
So on the one hand, you recognize terminology of what an expert would say.
But on the other hand, it kind of reminded me of like third year business school, my buddy who went out all weekend, who didn't actually prepare for his presentation and then just using mumbo jumbo jargon to try to like, you know, get through the 10 minute presentation.
So Ezra, I don't know.
I honestly don't know which one it is.
You know, I just Googled the word catalyze.
I mean, I know what it means, but let me tell you what the Oxford dictionary says, to cause or accelerate a reaction by acting as a catalyst.
And then they give you the example, the enzyme catalyzes the oxidation of acetaldehyde.
So that's what I, it's like, it's a fancy way of saying transform and improve.
So he used that word so often.
I think that's a fake word, a fudge word, a word when he, he just, it's sort of like that old Homer Simpson joke, you know, step one, open a lemonade stem.
It's his stopgap for when he doesn't know what to say.
Oh, we'll catalyze that.
Well, yeah, I mean, you're using a cool word that no one else uses, but maybe you're hiding that you don't have a bloody clue.
There's one more thing he said, and I bet you know what these initials mean.
He said the letters S D G.
I don't know if you caught that, Franco.
Worried About SDGs00:10:26
I know what that means because I follow the United Nations and their plans.
Those are called the sustainable development goals.
You know, he's got this jargon so secondhand.
He's so used to talking to people at the UN or the World Economic Forum.
That is a UN agenda.
That's not a Canadian agenda.
I don't think he's fully absorbed what it means to be Canada's prime minister.
I think he still thinks he's a master of the universe who answers to the whole world.
That's what the World Economic Forum is like.
That's what the UN is like.
If you're talking about SDGs, you're talking like you're a UN bureaucrat.
You're not talking like you care about people in Barrie, Ontario, Cape Breton, Red Deer, Victoria.
You sound like someone who is in Geneva or New York.
You know, Ezra, you've been kind of to some of these conferences before, right?
I've watched you do the interviews where you're walking and talking with people.
So you would know more about this than I do.
But like one of the issues is that these international bureaucrats, these international government bodies, one of the real issues is that they do have a ton of influence over, let's call it public policy back here in places like Canada or in other countries.
But the accountability piece, is there any, Ezra?
Like, is there any accountability over these international bureaucrats?
Like, if there is, I don't really see it.
Where there is some semblance of accountability left is with our own politicians, right?
Or members of parliament.
So even when they're talking to these international groups of elites, bureaucrats, businesses, they then have to come back here in Canada and try to implement these policies and at least try or at least show that they're kind of taking steps through the democratic process here.
And that's where we fight it.
Now, if there is a little bit of optimism here, Ezra, because look, I understand there's a lot of reasons for us to be pessimistic.
But if there is some optimism, I think that's where we kind of have to fight these things, right?
Is on the domestic front.
There's a lack of accountability when you talk about these international organizations and bureaucracies where there is some accountability left is right here back home.
So during the House of Commons parliamentary sessions.
And why I say there is some optimism is because Mr. Carney still has to play the democratic game, right?
He still has to worry about getting elected.
He still has to go to caucus meetings every Wednesday morning.
And we've already seen that some pressure, they have already started to backtrack, whether that's the consumer carbon tax, right?
Now, I'm sure they're going to continue to try to put in sneaky carbon tax, but we have seen some backtracking.
We've seen at least a delay for a year on the gas and diesel vehicle sale ban by 2035.
So there's still hope for Canadians to fight back against some of these costly regulations and taxes.
You know, all of us can fall into using jargon.
Just, I was just earlier talking about Bill C63.
I know what that is.
That was the name of an old bill for censorship, but most people don't know what Bill C63 or Bill 3, you know, because they're not following this stuff super closely.
So sometimes when you use jargon, it's just because you're more familiar with it and you're being precise.
But there's another reason to use jargon, and that's to sort of say, I'm part of an elite priesthood and we have a code.
And if you don't use precisely the right words, you're not in the in-group.
And so it's a way of making yourself look high and mighty and smarter than everybody.
And I don't know if he is.
And it's also a way of impressing people.
You know who eats that stuff up?
Journalists.
Oh, wow.
He's so smart.
Did you see how he talked about catalyzing the SDGs and improving cross-border capital in the billions and the cross-border carbon market?
Oh, wow.
I mean, it's baffle gab.
And I think journalists, for all their talk about watch out for disinformation, I think they are the easiest to bamboozle.
You throw a few SDGs and catalyzes at them and they're, oh, we finally have someone who knows how the world works.
That's how Carney is sold to us.
He knows how the world works.
It works by catalyzing SDGs.
And if you don't even know what that is, you're not smart enough to criticize him.
I think that that's why he uses jargon.
But I got a question for you.
What's his budget going to look like?
What's his budget deficit going to look like?
It's going to be higher or lower than Justin Trudeau's because Trudeau was sort of a dummy in some ways, but he had, you know, the kids would say he had Riz.
He had a high social IQ.
I don't know.
I find Mark Carney is a cold fish by comparison.
But the real test is: can he balance a budget?
And we know he's not going to.
Is the budget going to have a higher or lower deficit compared to Trudeau?
Ezra, I can't believe I'm going to do this, but let me just put off the deficit conversation for one time.
Breaking news, right?
CTF for one second isn't going to talk about the deficit.
I want to say one more thing because it's not just signaling, right?
One is to signal and to signal to different types of people.
But the second one is it makes it easier to sneak stuff through, right?
When you use jargon.
It's not just signaling.
It makes it easier to signal stuff through, right?
If you call something an output-based pricing system, what is that?
Yeah.
Oh, that's an industrial carbon tax.
That is a carbon tax on Canadian fertilizer plants that makes it more expensive for farmers to grow food and makes it more expensive for everyone to buy food.
Okay.
So it's not just signaling, right?
Not just, you know, look fancy and to signal to certain elites.
No, it's also a way to use cover to bring in policies, taxes, regulations that drive up people's cost of living, make things more expensive, right?
So it's more than just the signaling, but onto the deficit, onto the budget.
Look, I'm really worried about this, Ezra.
I'm actually, I don't know if I've ever been really this worried about the state of our finances than I am right now.
And I'm actually very, very worried.
Okay.
So we got this PBO report.
It shows that the deficit is going to be like $70 billion this year, $70 billion.
And that's just a baseline because that's without any new measures or any new spending announcements, right?
And we just had an election chock full of massive spending promises in the liberal platform.
So I think $70 billion is the baseline.
Ezra, interest charges on the debt more than what the federal government sends to the provinces in healthcare transfers.
By 2030, interest charges on the debt, $82 billion.
Like, I'm actually very worried.
You asked me the Trudeau comparison.
Carney plans to borrow $255 billion over the next four years.
That's about $100 billion more than what even Trudeau was planning, right?
So the banker is supposed to be better with the numbers and the drama teacher, yet the banker is planning to add about $100 billion more debt over the next four years than what even Trudeau was planning to do.
You know, it's irrelevant, but it just popped into my mind.
The quarter of it, so you say a quarter of a trillion.
That's what you're saying.
Yeah, that's from the PDO.
The other day, I was doing some historical research into when the British Empire redeemed all the slaves in the empire with a few exceptions.
I don't know if you know the history, Franco, but the United Kingdom, the Great Britain, the British Empire borrowed a quarter of a trillion dollars in today's worth to buy the freedom of every slave in the empire.
And it took more than a century to pay down that debt in current dollars of about a quarter trillion dollars.
So the most monumental moral historical change, one of the greatest changes in history, one of the greatest acts of humanity cost a quarter trillion dollars.
That's what they got for their quarter trillion.
What are we going to get for our quarter trillion?
Like what stupid cross-border carbon market SDGs catalyzing are like you could do a lot with a quarter trillion dollars, like free every slave in the British Empire.
What's Carney's plan for a quarter trillion?
Yeah, I mean, great question.
Look, I'm actually so mad.
And this kind of ties into our previous conversation about, you know, freedom versus force, voluntary economic exchange versus top-down corporate welfare, big government, big business.
This is what I'm so worried about, right?
Because you already know that Carney says he's going to split out the budgets into two, right?
Operating spending, capital spending, right?
All that.
And, you know, we've heard from the major projects office where he's talking about all these, you know, it's really a handful of these government-approved projects that are going to go forward.
And I'm just extremely worried that they're just going to rack up massive amounts of debt, give, you know, take money from hardworking Canadian taxpayers and small businesses, and then hand it to select multinational corporations, perhaps, or maybe just any other corporation to build these projects that the government deems to be in the national interest, right?
So it goes more than just corporate welfare.
It's the complete wrong way to grow the economy.
And it really goes back to that dichotomy of, you know, how do you want your economy and country to be?
What foundational principles do you want our country to be?
Is it freedom or is it force?
And I'm worried that we're getting bigger government, bigger debt, worse services, and a whole bunch of corporate welfare coming our way.
Franco Terrazano from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, great to catch up with you.
Thanks for your commentary.
We'll keep in close touch in the weeks ahead.
Hey, thanks, Ezra.
Sorry for being a bit of a rain cloud today.
No, I apologize.
It's good to hear.
Thank you very much.
Stay with us.
More ahead.
Your letters to me.
These are comments from the Let Us Report campaign update yesterday, which I gave from downtown Toronto at the courthouse.
Bruce Acheson says the government does because they can.
We Fight and Win Anyways00:02:40
It's why we must keep opposing their tyrannical tendencies.
I've supported Rebel for nine years, and I won't stop now.
Bruce, thank you very much for that.
I just asked our lawyers how much we've spent on this legal battle since the beginning, and I'm going to tell you the answer.
Maybe it's unwise to give this away, but we have spent or are about to be billed a grand total of $270,000.
And I know that sounds shocking, but we've actually had four hearings: the first one by the CRA, then a do-over at the CRA, then the federal court, and now the federal court of appeal.
Four hearings.
And I think we're going to need a fifth.
I know that's a shocking number, but if we don't do it, who will?
Bernhard Jatzik says, I'm reminded of something someone posted on a wall at an office I worked in a few months.
I got my BSC.
Rule number one: the boss is never wrong.
Rule number two, when the boss is wrong, see rule number one.
And that's the way it is here in Western Oceania, formerly known as Canada.
You're referring to Oceana as a reference, of course, to Orwell and his book 1984.
By the way, Rebel News, as you may know, has republished the original manuscript of 1984 that's beautifully illustrated.
And I encourage you to check it out on our website.
Yeah, I mean, we simply are not going to stop being free.
And the number one way to be free is to just exercise your freedom all the time.
If it means we have to fundraise to go to court, we'll do that.
And as I mentioned a moment ago, it probably will fall to us to fight the new Online Harms Act.
I mean, maybe others will help too.
I think there will be a few other allies out there.
I think it'll be conspicuous which liberal civil liberties groups are not there.
Fran G says, Good luck, Rebel.
We all need the truth you bring out.
There is a stronger energy in good than evil.
You will win.
I appreciate the optimism.
And listen, sometimes we win.
Sometimes I think it's a super long shot, but we fight and win anyways.
That case back in 2019, when the leaders' debate tried to keep us out, and the lawyers were so pessimistic, they said we need to be paid in full in advance.
I mean, that's how sure they were we were going to lose, but we won.
So you got to be a happy warrior.
You got to do it.
I mean, I know our whole team at Rebel loves to fight, our whole team.
And that's our role.
We're journalists, but every once in a while we stop and try and fix the world too.