Ezra Levant critiques Mark Carney’s dismissive "Who cares?" response to Trump amid pipeline deals worth $30B+—three times Canada’s auto exports—and his botched F-35 replacement proposal, risking $1.2B in U.S. penalties. Levant’s Twitter data exposes pro-Palestinian accounts falsely claiming Gaza origins and protests persisting after Qatar-brokered ceasefires, with heckling near Jewish neighborhoods and police hesitation fueling tensions. Paid foreign agents (700+ Iranian, Hamas-linked) and recycled activist networks may drive escalation, normalizing confrontational tactics like tractor blockades. Carney’s global buzzword diplomacy and travel obsession over domestic crises—caucus chaos, economic struggles, immigration, and Trump negotiations—suggest he lacks the grit for Canada’s top job. [Automatically generated summary]
He was asked if Donald Trump has called him lately, and he said, Oh, who cares?
Who cares?
Well, that was your central campaign promise.
I'll show you the video, and I'll show you how this is part of a pattern for Carney.
But first, let me invite you to get a subscription of what we call Rebel News Plus.
It's the video version of this podcast.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe.
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Tonight, is Mark Carney temperamentally suited to public life?
It's November 24th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious who-bug.
I saw this snippy little exchange between Prime Minister Mark Carney and a reporter.
Next question.
I'm...
Who cares?
I mean, it's a detail.
It's a detail.
I spoke to him.
I'll speak to him again when it matters.
I mean, the sort of com JD, we occupé, nus som trees occupés, avec l'avigners du Canada, nus sommette chez nous, et avec les with the new partner, and conversations with the President for Pablo Monday in the possession of cement,
but on attendees I'm always happy to sorry, I sipped into French because I anticipated the enfrançais thing.
I look forward to speaking to the president soon, but I don't have a burning issue to speak with the president about right now.
When America wants to come back and have the discussions on the trade side, we will have those discussions.
So, just in case you missed it, he was asked by a reporter if he's spoken to U.S. President Donald Trump lately, and he says, Who cares?
It's just a detail.
And then he seems to panic a little bit, so he switches to French, really just I think to shut himself up and give him a way out.
I think that's what it looked like.
And then he stops and calls that the enfrancais thing.
So, who cares that he hasn't spoken to Trump?
I mean, who cares, right?
Well, he said he cared.
That was pretty much his central campaign platform in the last election.
He was the one, the only one, he said, who could handle Donald Trump, who could protect Canada from Trump, who could out-negotiate Trump because Carney knows how the world really works, he said.
Who cares?
Real vs. Fake Pipelines00:14:47
Well, I'm guessing some folks who work in the auto industry care.
Trump has more or less said he's going to move those factories down to the United States from Canada.
Who cares?
I don't know.
There's a lot of people who do, mainly people who voted for him.
That would be like a conservative politician saying, who cares about some fundamental conservative issue like reducing the carbon tax or supporting freedom of speech?
Imagine if a conservative on a core issue said, Oh, who cares?
It reminded me in its childish petulance of Carney just a week or so ago talking about oil pipelines.
Is this pipeline going to come?
So boring.
It's not actually.
It is.
It is.
No, but it is.
It is because it's.
Look, it's, don't worry, we're on it.
We're on it.
Like, we're on it.
But there is this whole world.
Okay, hands up.
Who's working on the pipeline in this room?
Okay.
Isn't that a problem?
No.
Look at all the variety, like, Nav, like, does your, like, it's, We have.
Yeah, if there's more prosperity, they'll get more cell phone services.
But look, look.
Okay.
So, what's going to drive one of the things with, yeah, don't worry.
We're on the pipeline stuff.
Danielle's on line one.
Don't worry.
This is going to happen.
But, well, something's going to happen.
Let's put it that way.
Yeah, oil pipelines are boring.
Did you know that many things in running a government may seem boring if you're measuring it against, I don't know, jet-setting to exotic conferences at five-star hotels in places around the world like Davos and the World Economic Forum, which is pretty much what Mark Carney did full time until he became prime minister.
Sorry to bore you, but even that's not true.
You know, you could say oil pipelines are boring, but I just don't think that's accurate.
I think they're actually all their age.
Even Brookfield, the company that Carney used to chair, that company in which Carney still has hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stock, they're buying up pipelines like crazy, just not in Canada.
They're not that crazy.
Oil pipelines are sexy if you care about jobs, if you care about expanding Canadian exports of our most valuable resource, which is oil.
Our oil and gas exports are more value, or triple as valuable as our entire auto exports.
Oil pipelines are a key strategy if you really do want to diversify our exports off the U.S. Because right now, almost all of our oil goes to the U.S.
And because we have one dominant customer, the U.S. Economies call that, economists call that a monopsony.
Have you ever heard that word?
It's sort of the opposite of a monopoly.
Monopoly is you have one seller, so they can jack the prices up artificially high, because what are you going to do?
In a monopsony, it's a funny word, you have a lot of sellers, but just one buyer, the United States.
So prices are artificially low.
So if we actually had a new pipeline to the Pacific coast where we could sell oil to Japan, Korea, India, Taiwan, you'll notice I didn't say communist China, even though they would surely want to buy it too.
If we sold it to all the democracies of Asia, not only would we increase exports, but it would allow Canadian oil producers to get paid at world prices rather than at a landlocked deep discount to world prices, which is what Canada gets right now.
So it would be a double win.
More oil sales at a higher price, and American destined oil would get a higher price too.
So yeah, sorry to bore you, Prime Minister.
Sort of be so boring.
We can't all be as exciting and super cool as you talking about carbon capture or other complete BS that no one would actually buy were it not for fake green subsidies or government mandates.
Pipelines are boring to Mark Carney because there's something that the real world already does.
The real world demands pipelines.
The real world supplies pipelines.
Private companies do it all.
There's no role for the government, no need for the government other than imposing red tape on it.
Whereas his schemes always seem to involve government investments, that is, subsidies like carbon capture or wind turbines.
It's all fake.
There would be no real market for any of that unless the government was involved.
Mark Carney hates oil pipelines because they don't need him.
He just gets in the way, doesn't he?
So they make him feel unimportant.
He's revealed to be an economic imposter.
You support oil pipelines?
If you do, you're boring.
Has Trump called you?
Oh, who cares?
Yeah, I think he's sort of giving it away like a poker tail.
He's easily irritated when things aren't going his way, isn't he?
He gives it away like that time he chided the CBC's Rosemary Barton, who made the grave mistake, a mistake she has never repeated, I might add, of actually once asking Mark Carney about his conflict of interest.
Remember that?
The rules say that those assets should be publicly disclosed within 120 days, which means you'll campaign in a coming federal election, most likely within the next 120 days, and are serving as prime minister now.
With Canadians not being aware of what potential conflicts of interest you saw.
What possible conflict would you have?
Stephanie, I'm complying with the rules.
I'm complying with the rules in advance.
Are you saying you are not open to any conflict of interest?
Yes.
Look inside yourself, Rosemary.
I mean, you start from a prior of conflict and ill will.
Do you see the pattern here?
Mark Carney loses his cool and gets chippy and snippy and snappy when he's frustrated, when he's asked about something he doesn't have a good answer to.
Oil pipelines, stop bothering him.
Trump, shut up.
Conflict of interest?
Look inside yourself, Rosemary.
Carney says he doesn't care that he can't get a phone call from Donald Trump.
Do you believe him?
I think he cares very much.
The entire rest of the world is lined up to meet with Donald Trump.
Just in the last week, Trump has had a state dinner for the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
He met with the new mayor of New York City.
He had a phone call with the UK's Prime Minister Kier Starmer.
He's working even today on the Ukraine-Russia peace deal.
I think Vladimir Zelensky is in Washington today, if I'm not mistaken.
Trump does occasionally travel to other countries once in a while, but most of the time people come to him.
It's the opposite for Carney.
Very few world leaders will come to Ottawa.
He's the one flying around the world non-stop for quick photo ops.
And his message is always that Canada doesn't really need the United States.
Now, I don't know who he's trying to convince of that, but if it's an attempt to use reverse psychology on the Americans, I don't think it's working.
I don't think anyone in Washington even notices.
Carney does odd things.
Like he suggests that Canada will rip up our contract that we signed with the United States two years ago to buy F-35 fighter jets.
And instead, he's considering buying less capable, much older fighter jets made in Sweden.
I can only imagine the billions of dollars in penalties that ripping up a contract with the F-35 manufacturers would cost.
But really, the bigger cost, obviously, would be hardening Trump's heart even more in terms of trade deals and the auto industry.
So yeah, who cares?
He says, well, I don't know if Carney is temperamentally fit for the job.
I think he's failed upwards again and again in life.
Now he's being promoted to the level of his incompetence.
I don't think it's a good look.
Hey, I wanted to mention another thing today.
The first was Carney's chippy attitude, which I think gives us a little flash of what he's made inside.
The other one is a phenomenon on X, formerly known as Twitter, that I think can be fairly said to comprise the public square in Canada and the U.S. and much of the West.
I think Twitter or X is the town hall.
I mean, obviously, there are real public squares, real town hall meetings and the like, and people sometimes go to those.
When was the last time you went to a town hall?
Do you even go to one once a year?
If that.
I think the bulk of the national conversation has moved online.
And while there are other online platforms like Facebook, Twitter really does dominate Canadian conversations about politics and in America too.
If you can believe it, my own Twitter account, did you know that mine is the largest of any journalists in Canada?
Not to brag.
I have more than half a million followers.
And I only mention that because I don't get a subsidy like the aforementioned Rosemary Barton.
In fact, I have twice as many followers.
How is that even possible?
She's got the entire CBC behind her.
How do I have twice as many followers?
I don't know.
I've got triple what Andrew Coyne has.
Obviously, I tweet in my own name, but a lot of people on Twitter, as you may know, are anonymous.
Now, that's not necessarily bad.
Some people have to be anonymous to keep their identity private because their real job would forbid them from taking strong stands on public issues.
But there are a ton of anonymous Twitter accounts that sort of act like drones or swarms.
And it's pretty obvious that they're fake.
They're not real people.
They might just only have a handful of followers.
And they make pretty obviously fake criticisms.
I get a ton of them.
Whenever I say something critical of the Liberal Party or the Democratic Party in the U.S., suddenly swarms of bots, that's what they're called for robots, come and leave poorly worded critiques and disagreements on my Twitter feed.
I can tell when someone's a real critic, and some of these are fake, but some anonymous accounts, like I say, are more than just trolls.
They're thoughtful and they actually build up hundreds of thousands of followers.
So there are real anonymous critics.
I'm not saying all my critics are trolls.
You saw a lot of these emerge during the Israel-Hamas war, mainly promoting Hamas, usually claiming to be based in Gaza itself.
But here's the news I wanted to tell you about, because I think it's sort of revealing.
Over the weekend, Twitter or X added a feature or changed their rules, whichever is your perspective.
Now you can see where any particular Twitter account was signed up, where it's located, where it was bought from the App Store.
Now, this can still be tricked in some ways through something called a VPN.
I won't get into that, but given that many Twitter accounts, especially the big ones, were set up long ago when the idea that Twitter would reveal your location wasn't even a thought on anyone's radar.
I think a lot of these revelations over the weekend are really accurate.
Countless pro-Palestinian accounts that had claimed to be reporters on the ground in Gaza have been proven to be fake.
They're anywhere but Gaza.
They might be in Turkey.
They might be in Nigeria.
They might be in Pakistan, thousands of miles away.
Even though some of them claim to be journalists, but the stories were just made up.
Same thing I've noticed with some so-called America First Twitter accounts attacking Trump from the right.
Ironically, a lot of these racist accounts are run from Pakistan.
So many of these fake Twitter accounts pretending to be white or even Aryan, as they might say, are actually fake accounts run from Pakistan.
Isn't that weird?
I don't understand this part.
I mentioned Rosemary Barton.
Canadian journalists like Rosemary Barton and the CBC itself are listed as having signed up in the United States.
What?
I have no idea why they would do that.
I mean, I know that the CBC is real, and I know their head office is in Toronto.
So why did they register in America?
I don't get it.
Maybe they contracted out their Twitter contract to some American firm.
I find that very interesting.
Rebel news is obviously rooted here in Canada, and so am I. Anyway, I just found that very interesting, and I thought it was a real eye-opener at how much propaganda we hear and we see is completely fabricated and often funded by foreign dictators.
And why not?
We've known that Iran has hundreds of actual human agents operating in Canada.
Just last week, we learned that Hamas itself does too.
So if Iran and Qatar have between them more than a thousand actual people on the ground in Canada spreading their ideas of violence and hatred and confusion, why would it be so hard to believe that they've created fake online accounts to do the same thing to?
And not just to argue about their favorite issues like Pakistan or Qatar or Gaza, but to sow seeds of dissension amongst us, to whip up American conservatives against Donald Trump, to whip up Canadian conservatives against Pierre Polyev, to sow demoralization and confusion.
Next time you see some bot, some obviously fake account, ask yourself who's behind it.
You don't have to guess anymore.
You can actually check.
Odds are, it's someone pretending to be someone they're not.
Stay with us for more.
Protesters and Counter-Protests00:15:37
For more than a year, there's an intersection in Toronto, not too far away from my house, that saw dueling protests.
On the one side were Jewish and pro-Israel protesters who started a weekly campaign as a free the hostages campaign.
And basically, it was in a pretty Jewish neighborhood, and they waved Israeli flags and played Israeli music and tried to be positive and keep each other's spirits high.
That's what it looked like to me.
And I would see it as I drove past.
Well, then across the street in the same neighborhood, pro-Palestinian and in some cases, pro-Hamas counter-protesters would come.
They didn't live in the neighborhood.
Many of them drove in from miles away, but every Sunday they came to counter-protest.
And some would find it distasteful that they would counter protest the first protest, which the main purpose of which was releasing the hostages.
Well, these dueling protests went on for pretty much a year, and police were deployed en masse.
Not just that, but there were a lot of arrests made, typically of people like myself or David Menzies, who got too close to the Palestinian side of the street.
I didn't know there was such a thing.
You might recall that when I was arrested, the police said that it was because my mere presence on the public sidewalk could cause a disturbance.
Here's a clip of the police telling me that and then arresting me when I didn't move.
What are you asking?
You're not asking.
You're pushing.
Okay, you can't be arrested if you don't.
For what?
Arrested for what?
For breaching the peace.
I had a peace.
I think you have.
I think you have.
I haven't breached the peace yet yet.
This is my neighborhood.
Your being here is breaching the peace.
But that means I'm an illegal person in my own country.
You're breaching the peace idea.
I haven't breached the peace.
I know.
I don't want to arrest you.
Well, a few weeks ago, a peace deal for what it's worth was signed or agreed to in the region with major regional players like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan signing on, with Israel signing on, and most importantly, through its Qatari proxies, Hamas itself signed on.
So the primary call of the pro-Palestinian protesters for a year, on the face of it, was met.
There is a ceasefire.
Obviously, if there are any breaches of the ceasefire, the other side fights back.
But generally, it could be said that the war in Gaza is over.
In fact, there's a large planning center nearby where Israeli, American, and other countries, including military, are working on the next phase of the plan, which would be to clear the rubble and start rebuilding Gaza along with a foreign UN-style police force to make sure things stay in hand.
I don't know if it has a chance of success in my mind.
Hamas is an implacable foe, but maybe Donald Trump is right.
The question is: what's going on here in Canada?
If the hostages are returned, if the ceasefire is in effect, what is the state of affairs for the protest?
Well, there's only one person to ask for that question.
Her name is Karima Saad, and she has been documenting this protest and all other street protests in the region with a series she calls Protest Mania.
What a pleasure to be joined by Karima Sadkarima.
Great to see you again.
Thanks for taking the time.
Thanks for having me.
So, I mean, you can agree or disagree with the statement: the war is over, the ceasefire is in effect.
But at the very least, things, the energy level, the kinetic level of the conflict is down massively.
I mean, there's no more waves of attacks.
It seems like there is a path to peace.
What's it like on the streets in Toronto?
Well, the protests have continued.
So, notwithstanding the ceasefire, we have continued to see demonstrations, including outside the U.S. Consulate, including at Bathurst and Shepherd and beyond, where protesters either are dissatisfied with the terms of the ceasefire or that it hasn't been adhered to, are not thrilled about the proposal to rebuild Gaza as it stands.
And generally speaking, many of the other points that they disseminate have stayed the same.
So, you wouldn't necessarily know, based on continued protest activity, that there has been a major material change in the status of the conflict.
I mean, I can understand that people aren't quite happy with it.
I mean, it was a Trumpian deal.
He sort of leaned on Israel to get them to accept it.
He leaned on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, like he really made everyone put some water in their wine.
That's how it looked to me.
Obviously, I'm a complete outsider as much as anyone.
But, I mean, the death toll, the direction of things on the ground, it is moving on to a new chapter.
Why have the protests in Toronto not done the same?
What is their call to action if they can no longer say we demand a ceasefire?
What are they demanding?
Well, there have been evolving calls to action.
And just recently, there was a protest where the speaker says, you know, ceasefire was only ever intended to be the beginning and sort of a starting point to our demands.
And other demands include addressing war crimes or crimes against humanity, at least having some sort of adjudication on who did what, to whom, and the disarmament of Israel has been raised as another point.
So, you know, it is an evolving list of demands.
One of the things that's happened in the last few weeks, because the Jewish protest hasn't happened on the northwest side of that intersection, as has been done, it looks through your reporting, which is, I mean, I haven't been there personally, I've just seen your reporting.
It looks like some of the pro-Palestinian and sometimes pro-Hamas protesters have left that public street corner and have walked into residential neighborhoods with flags.
And they've heckled and been heckled by private residents, moms, dads, people in a resident.
Like there's no embassy there.
There's no consulate.
There's no businesses.
They're going on residential streets.
What's going on there?
What do they say when they're in those neighborhoods?
And how, I mean, does that change the focus here?
If they're really just walking through a Jewish neighborhood, getting into arguments with Jews, that feels like maybe Palestine or the war was a proxy for just an underlying anti-Semitism.
That's how it looks to me.
So as you described at the outset, you know, you had initially a group of pro-Israel supporters who were rallying to free the hostages.
They were there for about a year until counter-protesters, counter-protesters showed up.
And then that lasted for about a year.
After the ceasefire and the return of the remaining hostages, the pro-Israel rally sort of wound down and stopped showing up.
And I think that was a conscious decision in the hopes that, okay, this intersection will return to sort of a regular boring intersection.
But that's not what happened.
Pro-Palestine protesters continued to show up.
And I would say that the absence of a rally on the other side of the street sort of left them looking for something to do and kind of a way to take their message.
And so what they opted was to go down residential streets.
Now, if you were to ask them about this tactic and the propriety of it, the purpose, the utility, I think you would get a range of answers.
One person we spoke with yesterday disputed the notion of a Jewish neighborhood, saying that census data shows it's mostly Christian, mostly Filipino, and sort of she was playing with the statistics a little bit in that way and saying essentially, we're not here to intimidate, we're not here to harass, we're here to be peaceful.
Of course, the flip side to that is you have some who are quite literally cosplaying as Hamas leaders, which, you know, just the optics of that, the sight of that, is triggering, I think, especially when it's foisted upon civilians who ostensibly have no direct link to Israel.
And Toronto police, for their part, have kind of varied their approach slightly, week by week, based on the online reaction to footage that's coming out of the neighborhood.
But on the whole, have remained fairly hands-off.
And so what we saw happen just this past week was the return of some of the original rally organizers who came with their flags, who joined the march down the residential streets.
We had an inspector who kind of lost his temper, not in an overly dramatic way, but you could really see the frustration in sort of the inability to manage these competing groups.
And so we remain at an impasse here.
Enough!
Thank you.
Enough!
I've had enough!
We're going to walk together!
Please stand back!
Continue!
Be peaceful!
Stop!
Please!
That's all I'm asking.
I don't want any interaction.
I've got to keep the peace.
That's my job.
I'm trying to do that.
I'm trying to do that.
I'm just trying to keep you guys separate in order to keep public safety in their party.
That's what it is.
We're going to escalate the situation and we're going to get people harassed.
It's not.
It wasn't fine.
And I can see it starting to go.
Our whole job is to ensure that there's safety.
This interaction is not part of that.
Not good.
You know, like I say, I live in the neighborhood, and it's true that there is a Filipino population, but it's largely in apartments.
Most of them are new Canadians who were born in the Philippines and come over lately.
It's an expensive neighborhood to own a house.
I would say, just from my personal observations, and I mean, I know that it is one of the most Jewish neighborhoods in Canada.
I know that from studying the electoral map and the in our, we had a political battle against the liberal MP in that neighborhood, Yaara Sacks.
So I delved into the demographics a bit.
It's true, there's a lot of Filipino people in the neighborhood, but in those in the detached houses, it's much more Jewish than I think the average in the neighborhood.
Anyway, I'm arguing minutia.
There have been protests in other parts of the cities too, and one caught my eye because these protests often block streets.
They used to block the bridge into the Armour Heights neighborhood where the current protests are.
Street blocking does not seem to be punished in Toronto.
And there was a protest downtown, and someone who was working a little tractor, a little Kubota mini tractor with a plow at the front, seemed, I don't know how it happened, seemed to be in the thick of it.
And I don't know if she panicked or it was just adamant, but she drove through the crowd.
No, I don't think she hit anybody.
Here, we're going to show the clip right now as I'm talking.
It shocked people.
Yeah, you can see the tractor there.
It wasn't a massive tractor and it didn't speed through.
It went through at sort of a walking pace.
Tell me what happened.
I mean, I've seen this from several angles, and we'll play several angles on the screen.
What happened?
Who was that lady?
Did anyone get hurt?
And do we know if the police are doing anything?
So, this protest was happening outside the U.S. Consulate.
And unlike other demonstrations where protesters are blocking infrastructure or roadways, this played out entirely on the sidewalk.
And to my observation, for the majority of the time, the sidewalk itself was actually clear.
If anyone's familiar with this area, it's sort of right in front of the Superior Court of Justice.
There's a very large pedestrian space.
And so the majority of protesters were actually not even on the sidewalk.
They were in this kind of plaza area.
Okay.
And the speaker was, he was in the center of the sidewalk.
And, you know, as he was going on his sort of his speech and his explanation, I could see blue lights flashing out of the corner of my eye and I could hear honking.
And so I turned, and that's where kind of our footage starts: you see this tractor and it's approaching at a pretty slow pace.
You know, you wouldn't have to necessarily run too fast to keep ahead of it.
And there was no snow, there was no ice on this particular day, but there were other tractors doing similar things downtown.
Tractor Protest: Ahead of Snowfall00:05:17
This particular tractor was accompanied by a pickup truck with a plow that was driving on the road.
And so what my understanding is they were doing the dry run ahead of snowfall.
And the beeping and the lights, rather than people getting out of the way, it seemed to have the opposite effect where because I presume because the tractor didn't really slow down,
sort of maintained the same steady pace as she approached the demonstration, rather than getting out of the way, you had protesters who actually tried to stop it and stepped in front of the tractor, were hitting it with their flags and their signs.
And again, I was there.
So my kind of initial thought in seeing a large vehicle approach and it's maintaining its steady speed, like I jumped to kind of negative thoughts about what this could be.
And, you know, are they planning to run someone over?
What's going on here?
In actual fact, she had plenty of room to drive down the sidewalk unimpeded.
That didn't actually happen because protesters took a front and started to block the vehicle.
At that point, you know, she didn't stop.
I don't really blame her for not wanting to stop in the middle of a crowd that was increasingly agitated.
And she drove past.
As she drove past, she flipped someone the bird and was grinning while doing it.
It later turns out that she has a pretty rich social media history with criticism for protests.
I think the most notable post was her commenting on an all lives splatter meme, get out of the road.
So, from that, I think some people are inferring negative intent in the initial interaction.
But, you know, what I will say is everyone was behaving perhaps a little bit below the standard we might expect in a civil society.
There was no reason for any sort of negative interaction and no reason really for her to have been impeded.
Police did stop her a couple of blocks away, took ID, I think a brief statement.
Ultimately, she continued on her work that day.
It's now turned into a bigger story with the mayor weighing in and saying that this needs to be investigated.
And I think that the situation has been both exaggerated and minimized, depending on sort of the person doing the analysis, their advantage on all of this and kind of the narrative that they want to push.
And the truth is kind of anti-climatic somewhere in the middle that this could have been a very serious incident, didn't need to be, and ultimately wasn't really.
Yeah.
You know what?
We discussed earlier the protest at that Bathurst and Shepard intersection when they didn't have a counterpoint, when they didn't have a foil, they sort of went looking for action in the neighborhoods.
That's my gut feel here: is that when this Kubota trailer came with its lights and on the sidewalk, oh, this is an opportunity to have some excitement.
We're just standing around talking to ourselves.
This gives us a point of conflict, even though I think it was a Greek lady, if I'm identifying her name correctly.
And she may, like you say, have had a political disposition against them.
But I think they wanted some action.
I think they wanted to stop the truck.
And I could understand if you're a five-foot-something woman driving a little tractor and you're surrounded by a bunch of tough guys, some of whom are masked up, some of whom are shouting, and it's nighttime.
I can understand why you want to get the heck out of there.
We've seen in some other instances in other countries when cars are swarmed, the driver makes a split-second decision: if I don't get out of here, I'm going to be killed.
And I don't think it came close to that level, although they sort of smacked the trailer with their placards as it drove away.
But I don't know.
You're probably too young to remember it.
But there were riots in Los Angeles when I was a kid, and the truck driver, Reginald Denny, was pulled out of his truck and just absolutely beaten.
I can't remember if Reginald, I don't think he died, but it was a grave assault pulled out of his truck.
I don't know.
I had mixed feelings about it.
I don't want to see someone run over in a tractor, of course.
But if someone in a tractor is swarmed, I can understand them wanting to get out.
Anyway, we'll see what happens.
When the mayor says, I want an investigation, I'm worried that the police say, oh, we've been instructed to make an arrest.
So we'll see how that goes.
I don't think it's going to ever stop.
Paid Protesters00:06:44
My point of view is that many of these protesters are, I believe they're paid and instructed to do this.
We've seen reports in Global News that there's 700 Iranian agents in Canada.
We've seen another report in Global that there's hundreds of Hamas agents in Canada.
And I've got to think that, you know, if there's a core of people who show up every single week, it wouldn't surprise me if they're funded and directed.
I don't know.
I just, maybe that's Canada today, or maybe that's the long arm of some foreign interest.
Do you have any factual information about the nature of these protests?
Some of them certainly seem to be professional protesters.
That said, the Jews typically came out every Sunday for an hour, and I don't think they were paid.
I mean, I know some of them.
I think they just went there because they felt like they had to do something.
What's your view on that?
So I'm not privy to anyone's bank accounts, but my instinct is that the majority of people who show up at the majority of demonstrations aren't doing so for any sort of financial incentive and are generally well-intentioned, whatever their intentions may be.
Now, there is a discernible core group of organizers, a relatively small number of people who are the directing minds behind a disproportionately large number of protests.
And whether they receive funding through NGOs, some of which are government funded, through indirect sort of means, through mutual aid channels, through crowdsourcing and funding, through union or political office slush funds, that is an investigation that's worth undertaking.
It's beyond the scope of what I can do.
It wouldn't really surprise me if, in fact, there were individuals who had sort of an incentive beyond simply the community aspect of protests, the sort of social change aspect of it.
And, you know, for a number of people, and we kind of alluded to this at the outset, activism provides good cover for antisocial behavior.
If you're there with a righteous cause under a righteous banner, all sorts of unacceptable behavior somehow becomes normalized.
And so I do think that that's a driving force here.
Also worth noting that some of you know the some of these organizers before October 7 were out in the streets on a regular basis for other issues and will continue to do so after you know this after after this circuit of protests changes or winds down or becomes something else.
So there is an astroturfed element to demonstrations in Canada, no doubt about it in my mind.
That's true to some degree across the political spectrum.
A lot of my attention has been focused on sort of the Omni cause, broadly speaking, left.
But neither of those are really fair descriptors.
But yeah, there's more than meets the eye, but I think we should really resist the simplistic explanation of, well, they're only here because they get a paycheck.
I don't think that's true for the majority of people.
Yeah, I think you're right.
In Toronto and Montreal, and I think Ottawa as well, there is a cadre of people who, if it weren't Palestine, it might be oil.
These may have been the, you know, Occupy Toronto, Occupy Wall Street folks, Black Lives Matter.
There is a group.
And I remember when I first came to Toronto 15 years ago for Sun News, I would start to recognize the same faces at event after event.
Even though they were completely separate subjects, you would see people.
And some of them did tell me they worked for unions.
I remember at the Occupy Toronto, which was sort of an anti-banker, anti-capitalist movement, there were people there who said they were paid by unions.
I don't think they would be as chatty with me in 2025 as they were 15 years ago.
Karima, it's great to catch up with you.
Thank you.
What's the best way for people to follow your work and to help chip in?
Because like Rebel News, you are independent.
And if folks want to help you crowdfund, what's the way that they can do that?
So my stuff gets posted first on Twitter.
If you just Google Sad Lawyer Toronto, you will find my Twitter account, Karima Rules.
I also have a YouTube page, and those are the best ways to find me.
Right on.
Well, thank you so much.
And we really rely on your on-the-ground video.
We like to do it too, but you just seem to be able to detect these things in advance.
And you cover them so well.
And we really rely on your footage.
I know a lot of other media do, including some more mainstream media.
They're always taking screenshots of your videos.
So that shows you're on the spot when the news is breaking.
Great to have you.
Thanks for coming on the show today.
Thank you.
Take care.
Well, there you have it.
Karima Sad protest mania is what she calls her coverage.
And it's just great on-the-scene reporting.
Stay with us.
Your letters to me next.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me.
On Danielle Smith's use of the notwithstanding clause in Alberta.
Tammy Emkritz says the notwithstanding is the ultimate barrier against federal government judicial tyranny.
In that sense, it's the most important thing in the Constitution.
Smith is using it exactly as it was meant.
That's the thing.
Don't forget that the Charter of Rights would not have been passed into law unless that notwithstanding clause was put in there.
The Premier said that gives way too much power to the courts.
We need to be able to say no to the courts from time to time.
By the way, you invoke the notwithstanding clause.
It only lasts for five years.
You have to renew it in five years.
So there's lots of checks and balances on it.
If I were Premier, I'd use the Notwithstanding Clause every day just to normalize it.
Excitement of News Adventures00:03:15
Next letter is on Mark Carney's buzzwords.
Oh, he uses so many of them, isn't he?
Denise Crana says, knew this from day one.
A degree gives you no experience, just the ability to talk a word solid over and over.
Yeah, you know, there are some ideas that are so full of it, only a PhD could believe them.
I mean, sometimes there's a need for terminological exactitude.
Like if you're a specialist doctor, sure, you're going to use certain precise jargon to describe, let's say, a medical illness.
Yeah, I accept the fact that certain areas of expertise have a complex technical vocabulary.
Of course, that's true.
I mean, think of math, sine, cosine, tangent.
Those are technical words that you can't get around.
But I think politics is not such a profession.
Politics, when you have a politician using Baffle Gab like that, it's not that he's a master of some obscure scientific area.
It's that he's trying to come across as a certain way, but obscure information.
Anyone who tries to hide information rather than reveal information is someone you should be skeptical of.
Last letter from Vernice K. Gardner.
Mark Carney travels all the time to avoid Polyab in the house.
He's a weak man.
Yeah, I really can't believe how much Mark Carney is traveling.
And I think a lot of it is he just loves to travel.
And you know me, I fly around a lot in Canada and every once in a while I go to the UK and Ireland.
I go, I don't know, almost once a month, I'd say.
And I'm excited when I go because it's a whole new world and I'm going to be doing something new.
And there's a feeling of I'm going somewhere that's more exciting than my everyday life.
I get that.
I won't lie.
I get a certain excitement of going on these news adventures.
Now, I always come back as quick as possible.
They're not tourism.
We're working full tilt.
Mark Carney, I think it's the same way.
I think he says, I'm excited about what I'm going to in the G20 in South Africa, in the NATO meeting, in the trip to the UAE.
But I think it's not just that he's excited to go there.
I think he's relieved to get away from the tough stuff here at home.
I don't think he's used to handling a caucus of 150, 160 MPs, each of them making demands on him.
He didn't have to meet with 150 people all wanting a piece of his time when he ran Brookfield, did he?
He didn't have the terrible economic situation, the meltdown in our immigration situation.
He never had negotiating troubles like he has with Donald Trump.
When Mark Carney is in Ottawa, he is unhappy.
That's not his normal place.
Frankly, Canada is not his normal happy place.
He still has a home in the UK.
When he travels abroad, he can feel free again, unencumbered by the burdens of Canadian political duty.
As I said in my monologue, I don't think that Mark Carney is temperamentally suited to being prime minister.