Ezra Levant critiques Indigenous activists for adopting unpronounceable, linguist-made names like Solo Awesome (Musqueam/Fuanlum terms) for BC’s Petulo Bridge, mirroring LGBTQ2S+ overreach—e.g., a teacher using prosthetic breasts or men in women’s prisons under Trudeau’s 2017 reforms. A 2023 court case expanded Indigenous land claims beneath private homes, while JCCF’s John Carpe challenges Corrections Canada’s policies, with COSBAR leading the fight after LEAF’s retreat. Reader letters warn AI could replace human bonds, deepening isolation, as both movements risk alienating public support through performative activism over substantive rights. [Automatically generated summary]
There's a new bridge in British Columbia, and I can't really pronounce it, but it's actually impossible to spell it because it's spelled in a made-up language.
It's sort of like the English letters, but it's not really.
And all this is done in the name of Aboriginal reconciliation.
I think it's actually going to have the opposite effect.
And I think that's the point.
I'll get into it and I'll show you the video from on location, which is why I'd like you to get the video version of this podcast.
Go to RebelNewsPlus.com.
It's eight bucks a month, which may not sound like a lot of dough to you, but boy, it adds up for us.
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Tonight, the indigenous rights movement is making the same mistakes that the gay rights movement did.
Let me explain.
It's December 9th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Did you know that support for the LGBTQ2SL Plus has fallen in recent years in North America?
Fallen.
Here's a story about it in the left-wing Guardian newspaper.
Here's a story about it in the left-wing PBS publication.
It's actually the website and the broadcaster.
There's various explanations for it, but I think the most compelling is when you think of what has changed in the past 10 years.
What's been the gay rights issue in the past 10 years that's defined it?
Not gay marriage.
That's been the law in Canada for 20 years now and more than a decade in the US and the UK.
I think the problem, if I may, is that instead of declaring victory 20 years ago, the gay rights movement, sometimes called the gay pride movement, well, they kept going.
They won everything they could possibly win.
Changes in the law, parades, even affirmative action.
If you can believe it, Hollywood is disproportionately gay.
All the institutions, especially academia, Pride Month at every bank in North America feels like a full-tilt political campaign.
But instead of declaring victory, the LGB movement added a T, transgenderism.
And that fundamentally changed the movement from being about equality, about leaving people alone, letting them be themselves, about letting people be, about privacy.
It quickly became the opposite.
Transgenderism, at least as it's expressed in politics and the law these days, has become not about equality or privacy or letting people be who they are, or as we used to say, consenting adults or the privacy of your own home.
Those are all things that we said back then.
But today, the LGBT 2Q SL is about foisting extreme sexuality on other people.
It's about violating other people's privacy.
The most insane example of this is the teacher nicknamed Busty Lemieux, who wears enormous prosthetic breasts to school to teach children, turning girls and boys in his class into a captive audience, actually, in a way, participants in his bizarre fetish.
That's not gay pride.
That's not being private.
That's turning other people against their will into part of your sexual fantasy.
That's the most shocking example, but it's only slightly less shocking the transgenderism that has affected millions of people, especially in sports.
Failed male athletes suddenly declare that they're women and then compete against women, which is cheating, and they beat women.
And in the worst cases, they go into changing rooms with women.
It's actually worse in our prisons, where men who claim to be women have the right to be transferred into women's prisons, where they now have access to women who are ordered not to misgender their new fellow prisoners on pain of various punishments.
So, suddenly, gay rights isn't about letting people choose who they love, people living their own life, their own way in privacy.
It's now about forcing other people against their will to accept intrusions into their own privacy, forcing themselves into your bathroom, into your change room, even into women's shelters.
So, yeah, LGBT was hijacked by the T.
They overplayed their hands.
That's why they're falling in popularity.
Things Started to Change00:02:36
Well, I'm here to say that Canada's Indian bands are doing the same.
For a generation, there's been a near-unanimous political status quo in Canada that we can go above and beyond for Indigenous people, spending, favorite status, respect.
And it all felt good for Canadians to do so.
Even Stephen Harper, the great conservative, increased the budget for Indian affairs.
And then I think things started to change.
I don't blame Indigenous people for this one.
I think it's more white liberals and lawyers and bureaucrats and opportunists.
But soon, instead of focusing on building and being positive and creating jobs and things we can all get behind, the leading edge of Indian affairs became about race hatred, sort of imposing a U.S. Black Lives Matter narrative onto our country, but with Indigenous people instead of black people.
So Justin Trudeau called it a genocide.
He called Canadians genociders.
He said it's still going on.
He actually said that.
He took our first prime minister, Johnny MacDonald, off the $10 bill because of that reason.
Statues started coming down across Canada.
Incredibly, the head of our own Supreme Court said the same thing: genocide.
People started noticing when judges sent back violent offenders right back into their own communities without jail time or without significant jail time because they're Indigenous, which obviously forgets about the rights of the Indigenous community into which these violent men were being placed.
My point is, things started to move away from solidarity and equality and respect and friendship into rivalry and accusations and sourness.
I really think it's been politicized in a new way in the last decade.
How many events do you go to in your community where before things begin at a town hall meeting or a sports event even, you're told you're on stolen Indian land?
Remembrance Day in Toronto, they started their Remembrance Day ceremony by talking about land back and then talking about Canada's slavery history.
It's absurd, especially when where treaties have clearly extinguished any existing rights to the land.
Most of Canada is covered by such treaties, but it's a new religion, this land back acknowledgement, just like LGBTQism.
And let me show you what I mean.
And here's why I'm talking to you about this.
My friends who care about Indigenous people and goodwill, this is the time to stop.
Why It's Written Inscrutably00:07:36
This is the time to declare victory because you're now entering the overreach moment.
This is the jumping of the shark.
This is where you go too far.
This is your man-in-the-girls swimming change room moment.
Stop.
Declare victory.
Do not press on further.
You know about that bizarre court case in BC a few weeks ago where a judge just said out of the blue that Indians may still have a right to land title underneath hundreds of BC homes.
Surprise.
Did you think all those land acknowledgements were meaningless?
A judge thinks they're meaningful.
Otherwise, why would you be saying it?
So people, especially in BC, are on edge already because of this.
But look at this now: pure joy in sticking it to the man.
There was an important bridge in Greater Vancouver, almost a century old, named the Petulo Bridge, named after the former BC premier, Duff Petulo.
I didn't really know about him, I should tell you.
That bridge was replaced with a new bridge, and they've decided not to keep the old name.
The new bridge gets a new name.
And here's how to pronounce it.
All right, so this was a name that was selected by Musqueam and Fuanlum.
Solo Awesome translates to English roughly as place to view the river or river view.
And the name can be broken down into four syllables.
The first is stalled.
Stall.
As in, that's a beautiful bridge.
I hope my car doesn't stall.
Second syllable is O. O. As in, oh, that's not too hard to pronounce.
Third syllable is ah.
Ah.
In Hunt Camino, we would say ah, CEM the CA.
And the last one is some, as in some, like the sum total.
Did you get that?
Now, if you say Riverview Bridge, well, people know how to say that, how to spell that, what it means.
But look at that other word.
Look at how it's spelled.
Do you see how it's spelled there?
That's not sort of English, but it's not.
What's with the upside-down E's?
What are those apostrophes?
Now, the government put out a video on how to pronounce that word.
Here's how you pronounce that E and that W.
The next two letters together are schwa and a glottalized W, which make an O sound.
You know, I think I could remember how to say stallow awesome.
I think stall o awesome.
There's some unusual names like that across Canada.
You might be wondering why it's written in a version of our own alphabet, though.
There was no indigenous alphabet, there was no custom of writing things down.
They call it an oral tradition.
So that is a borrowed written language.
It's a kind of English made up by white linguists.
I have no beef with that, really.
But why are you imposing that weird alphabet and spelling on a bridge that not one in a thousand Vancouverites could read or pronounce or write?
How do you even do a backwards E?
Why aren't you even just using regular Canadian letters in English to write the sound of the word?
I'll tell you why.
Because it's about pushing you around.
That's the whole point here.
This is not about reconciliation anymore.
It's not about equality.
This is designed to push you back, to push you around.
There's no chance this would ever be named Petulo.
Of course not.
We're long past that.
But even naming it stallow awesome isn't enough.
It has to be written in a made-up scientific language that actually not a single indigenous person learned in school because it was made up by white linguists.
But that's all the better.
You can't pronounce it because it's not yours.
Your own language isn't yours, let alone the land.
Oh, by the way, the bridge was made with Chinese steel.
Of course it was, which caused a lot of construction problems.
Here's the story in the Vancouver Sun.
Chinese steel contributed to delays in construction of Petulo Bridge Replacement, says Advocate.
Welding problems and steel from overseas can create headaches for local workers and increase expenses, says Canadian Institute of Steel Construction CEO.
But when someone tried to ask about boring things like, uh-oh, is the bridge built okay with foreign steel, they were told to shut up.
You see, you can't ask any questions.
That's some white man's tradition.
Just shut up and get with the program.
Here's a video clip of that.
My question is about the materials that went into making the bridge.
There has been some controversy about the steel in particular that went into making the bridge.
Some people have alleged that it caused delays or more added costs, took away jobs from British Columbia workers.
Can you please just wait on that?
Sorry, again.
Chief Maryland Fearbrook, Kwantman First Nation.
I thank you all for coming out, celebrating with our nations, the Muslim and the Kwaman people.
We're here to celebrate for our people.
This is a first bridge named from our beautiful dear elder, Larry Grant.
Kwantlen has the utmost respect for you and the Kwaman people.
I always, it hurts me.
I have to tell you, it hurts me.
You have them all day.
Please keep those questions for a side press conference.
We're here to celebrate.
Please don't take that beautiful, beautiful, this beautiful day away from us.
So yeah, don't ask any questions.
Certainly not about the steel.
Don't ask why it's written in a weird, made-up English language that no one knows how to spell or type or read.
No typewriter or computer can type that.
Don't ask why Duff Petulo was thrown into history's garbage can.
Don't ask.
Don't ask why the government bought steel from China instead of from Canada.
And don't you know that your role is simply to pay for all of this and to nod along and to call yourself a settler and a colonizer and a racist and a genocider?
You know, it's almost, but not quite as stupid as Toronto renaming their version of Times Square.
It used to be called Young Dundas Square.
Now the government calls it Sankofa Square after the allegation that Mr. Dundas was somehow pro-slavery, which he wasn't.
And the laugh is that Sankofa, which has no connection to Canada or Toronto, is the place of African tribes who actually practice slavery.
But at least they'll spell Sankofa in English letters for you to abase yourself when you say it.
I say again, there's a lot of goodwill in Canada towards Indigenous people.
And I'm not against renaming certain things after Indigenous things.
I come from Calgary, where the famous streets have names like Crow Child Trail and Deerfoot Trail and Crowfoot and all these beautiful names.
Think of the city Medicine Hat.
That's an English translation of an Aboriginal word.
I'm not even against renaming certain things using traditional languages, although I'll never stop calling it Deerfoot Trail.
Female Prison Case Update00:15:40
I'm not 100% opposed to renaming things, but the deliberate choice to make it absolutely inscrutable or impenetrable to anyone other than some government-paid activists and to do so with a hubris.
My friends, I tell you, we are well past reconciliation now.
We're in the danger zone now because the activists have flipped the script.
They're becoming the supremacists now in their own way.
Don't do it.
Don't rub it in.
Don't go on the offensive.
That's not reconciliation.
Like the gay pride movement, declare victory.
Don't spike the football in the face of the people who pay your bills.
Just don't.
Stay with us for more.
Well, my favorite civil liberties public interest law firm is, of course, the Democracy Fund.
But a very close second place are my friends at the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedom.
And frankly, they've been doing it for more than a decade.
They really wrote the book.
Joining us now to talk to us about two of the most interesting cases that they've recently taken is our friend John Carpe, the boss of the Justice Center.
John, great to see you again.
Glad to be with you and with your viewers and listeners.
Well, you're doing such interesting work.
I want to talk to you about two cases.
The first is Frances Widdowson, who is the professor who was illegally drummed out of her position at Mount Royal University in Calgary for being a skeptic of the wild claim that, amongst others, there are 215 dead children buried outside a former residential school in Kamloops, BC.
No such thing has been proven.
And she keeps raising inconvenient questions.
She recently went to the University of Victoria to challenge the unchallengeable to become what the left is calling a denier.
Let me just show you a little bit of footage about that shocking day because that's very relevant to what we're going to talk about.
Here, take a look.
This is Victoria a few days ago.
I will not leave on my own.
Yeah, okay.
So right now you are arrested.
Okay, so you're going to arrest me and you're going to take me into the downtown.
And then we'll go from there.
Back off this role, all of you over there.
Fucking Nazi Osborne!
What DC has done!
What are your words for the public watching?
This is what we've come to at academic institutions these days.
You're not allowed to explore ideas on campus, and if you do, you will be arrested.
Well, not the people coming to harass Frances Widison, but Frances Wittison herself was ordered off the property under threat of a trespass prosecution.
She declined to go.
She is being prosecuted.
And John Carpain and the Justice Center are representing her in court.
John, great to see you again.
Tell me a little bit more about the case.
Is it just a simple trespass ticket, or is there more behind it?
What are they doing to Frances Widison?
Well, right now it's just a trespassing ticket.
And I must say, I find the double standard rather disgusting.
When people are building tent cities, that's outside of, you know, universities can impose reasonable rules that regulate the freedom of expression on campus.
That's okay.
So, for example, no tent cities, no overnight displays.
There's reasonable rules that the university can create and can enforce.
But this is somebody going on campus to speak.
This is a taxpayer-funded institution.
The BC government itself says that it's carrying out a governmental purpose.
And it's just a double standard because she is pointing out that there's just no evidence to substantiate the claim that there's 215 children buried at the former Kamloops Indian residential school.
So right now it's trespassing charges that we're going to be fighting back against as hard as we can in court.
On principle, you know, it's not, I mean, the fine is up to $2,000.
That's not really the issue.
I'm sure generous Canadians would kick in for the $2,000.
But this is a very important point on principle.
Yeah.
Now, are you aware, were any of the thugs, and I call them thugs because they came to get physical and more importantly to threaten.
The police stood by as that happened.
Our own reporter, Drea Humphrey, who was on the scene, I'm not going to say she was assaulted, but there was some very aggressive conduct.
Were any other people, to your knowledge, charged for their misbehavior?
Or was it only the victim, Francis Widdowson, who was charged?
It's a victim.
And it's a pattern I've seen for decades.
In particular, pro-life groups on campus who are putting out an unpopular message.
And they get harassed and intimidated and bullied and sometimes physically assaulted.
And police just stand by and pretend that somehow it's the fault of these students peacefully expressing their opinions, that they are the problem, that they are the threat to safety.
And then they get censored because they're supposedly a threat to security.
And it's just, it's very, very twisted thinking because, yeah, there is a threat to safety.
There is a threat to security.
It's coming from people who are thugs who don't want to engage in debate.
They don't want to listen to an opposing point of view.
And it's high time for provincial politicians to read the Riot Act to the universities and tell them to clean up your act or else you're not going to get the taxpayer funding.
Yeah, speaking of the Riot Act, I mean, you point out that there were pro-Hamas encampments across Canada for weeks or even months, no trespass tickets there.
But a slightly elderly female professor standing politely, well, better put the police on her.
That's pretty gross.
University of Victoria has always been a bit of a censorship leftist place, I regret, and they lived down to their reputation.
I want to talk about another case that you guys are taking on because I think it involves a friend of Rebel News named Heather Mason.
She's a former prisoner who has very bravely talked about what it's like in women's prisons in 2025.
And actually for several years now, Justin Trudeau, in one of his first reforms to Corrections Canada, allowed anyone to simply declare that they're a woman.
They don't even have to be, you know, appearing as a woman.
They don't have to express as a woman.
They just have to identify as a woman.
They can have a beard.
They can have a baritone voice.
And they immediately get treated as a woman.
For example, any body searches, and of course there are searches in prison all the time, must then be done by a female.
If a male prisoner says, I'm a gal now, now the guards who search him have to be female.
Many of the people who suddenly declare that they're women are actually sex convicts who committed some sexual offense and who know that they would be targeted by other, let me say, more moral prisoners.
There's even a moral hierarchy in prison where if someone is a child molester, very often they have to be segregated because the regular prisoners would kill them.
Believe it or not, there are some ethics that even murderers and robbers have.
So if you're a sex predator, convicted and sent to prison, why on earth wouldn't you immediately declare that you're a woman?
You get out of the more dangerous men's prison.
Get to go to a women's prison.
And if you happen to be a sexual pervert yourself, well, what a delight to be engaging with your victims who are forced to deal with you.
Imagine being a female prison guard being forced to deal with a man in an intimate way, such as a search.
And one thing I learned from Heather Mason, before I'm coming to you, John, in a second, I'm just telling you the stories I know, is that in at least one prison in Canada, female prisoners who are new mothers can keep their children with them until I think they're age four or something.
So you have prisons that are more like a kind of a dorm where moms and their babies are in prison together, which sort of makes sense.
Imagine a man being allowed into a women's prison.
Well, John, tell me a little bit about the case because I have a press release from your organization here called Women's Rights Group seeks court approval to challenge policy allowing biological males in women's prisons.
So tell me a little bit about that, because that's been going on now for pretty much a decade.
But who cares, right?
No one stands up for a female prisoner and they're not allowed to stand up for themselves.
Heather Mason also told me that if you speak out against this in prison, you get your rights taken away.
You're punished.
If you don't call these men ma'am, if you don't use their new names, if you don't say, you know, if you don't, if you misgender them, you'll be punished by the prison.
So you're not even allowed to act in your own defense if you're a female in prison.
What are you doing?
Tell me what the JCCF plans to do.
Well, it's not just whether or not you get punished, but it's also a fear of jeopardizing your chance for parole for early release.
If you are deemed to be transphobic, that does not reflect well on you.
So there's kind of a self-censorship component to it as well, where the female prisoners are not going to speak out.
As you described, the policy was changed in 2017, and this was the bill that added gender identity and gender expression to the criminal code and to the Canadian Human Rights Code.
And not long thereafter, the federal prisoners to comply with Trudeau's legislation, it became instantaneous that if you were in male prison and you declare that you identify as a woman, that declaration by itself is enough to get you transferred.
The way it used to be prior to 2017, there were transfers, but only serious men who were quite serious about their transition, who had the surgery, no longer had their male parts, they were allowed to transfer into women's prisons.
And that did not pose a threat to other, to the women in women's prisons because these guys took their transgender surgery journey very seriously and they were not a threat.
But starting in 2017, so it's been going on for eight years.
And the federal government so far is not backing down.
They could get rid of the court action simply by changing the policy and they would succeed in having the court action declared moot and it would be moot.
But they're not budging.
So the Justice Center is providing lawyers for a women's group to, we filed our papers and what's coming up next in March is a hearing to confirm that it can be the women's group that moves forward and that we will not be required to have individual female applicants because that's it's a lot harder and it's a big privacy violation.
Got it.
And that group, again, Rebel News who are familiar with them, Canadian Women's Sex-Based Rights COSBAR, sort of hard to remember acronym.
Well, I hope they're successful.
What is your argument?
What is your cause of action?
Is it a charter complaint saying that women's rights are being violated?
What are you trying to tell the court that the government got wrong?
So we argue that the policy should be struck down because it violates the Charter Section 7 right to life, liberty, and security of the person.
You still have these rights in prison.
I mean, being sentenced to a jail term obviously impacts your liberty rights, but it's justified if there's been a fair trial and you've been fairly convicted.
But you still have a right to life, liberty, and security of the person, in particular, the security of the person.
You have that in prison.
So women should not be subjected to what is going on, sexual harassment, kind of keeping Tom's men hanging around the change rooms and bathrooms and showers and so on.
Cases of sexual assault, we're familiar with one instance where there was a support group of survivors of sexual abuse, childhood sexual abuse.
So a women's survivor group, and this is pretty much 100% the perpetrator was male.
They have to put up with a trans-identifying male to come in to their support group for women recovering from childhood sexual abuse.
They've got to have a guy sitting there pretending to be a woman.
It's just outrageous.
So we're seeking to have the policy struck down.
There's also a Charter Section 15 equality rights argument that women are not getting the same level of safety that men are getting in men's prisons.
But I think that the strongest one is the security of the person argument.
Well, I think this is a very important case.
Do you have a date yet for the hearing or is it still too preliminary?
It's going to be in the hearing is going to be in March.
So this is a preliminary hearing to confirm that the action can move ahead with the plaintiff being the COSBAR, the women's group advocating for sex-based rights, meaning biological reality sex-based rights.
That's going to be heard in March, and then we'll see what happens and go from there.
Well, it's a very important case.
And it's the kind of case you would think feminists would take, the traditional civil liberties groups would take.
And the fact that shows how outdated I am.
Anything to say about that.
You're not going to have the LEAF, the Women's Legal Education Action Fund, this feminist group that was at the forefront of all kinds of issues, abortion and defense and divorce, abortion laws, divorce laws, custody and access.
They've been these leading feminists.
And now they are not opposed to men transferring into a women's prison simply by declaring themselves to be women.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's sort of pitiful how the traditional feminists have absolutely abandoned real women with this onslaught of trans extremism.
John, keep up the good fight.
Robots And Elon Musk00:03:15
Folks, if you want to learn more about these two cases or other cases taken by John and his Justice Center, go to jccf.ca.
Thanks a lot, John.
We'll talk to you again soon.
Have a good evening.
You too.
Cheers.
Oh, hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me.
Some of them are about my rambling rant about robots.
Oswald J.H. says, not to worry, since AI is a human invention, it will do what humans do best.
Fail.
Well, maybe.
If you think of it as a super smart chess-playing computer, I mean, we're at the point where I think a computer can beat even the best chess master.
And that was years ago.
I think computing is so much faster now.
I don't know.
I just see evidence that it's smarter than people.
It knows more than people.
I'm not saying people can't beat it, but I just think expecting it to fail on its own, I just, I don't think that's likely to happen.
And there's competing AIs too.
There's the North American ones, but then there's Chinese AI.
I'm worried about that.
Next letter from SunSun108 says, AI isn't causing the collapse.
It's exposing it.
People yell at robots because they've lost trust in institutions and lost control over their lives.
Robot girlfriends and sex dolls aren't a tech trend.
They're a symptom of loneliness, social decay, and people retreating from a world that no longer makes sense to them.
The tech isn't fucked up, excuse me.
The state of society is.
Oh, I'm not denying any of that.
In fact, that's part of my point, is that this tech solution, this replacement for people, is coming at a time when we've been atomized worse than ever.
I'm agreeing with you in a way.
The fact that young people are so insular, they're addicted to their phones, that COVID taught us to stay isolated.
Yes, of course, I agree all that.
That's why we're particularly susceptible now and enter into that robots who already right now can be great conversationalists, who never run out of patience for you, and then add in the physical touch element.
I'm very worried.
Janice ZG says, a thief will only rob you.
A politician will even rob your unborn grandchildren, enriching themselves.
None of them deserve even a penny.
Well, you know, there's some government control of AI, but there's also corporations with control of AI.
I really like Elon Musk, but I mean, he and some of these other gazillionaires, they're operating on levels that we don't sometimes even understand.
What I like about Elon Musk is he's fighting for freedom of speech through Twitter.
I think he's been a good force for fighting against government waste and corruption.
I think he's an important voice against mass immigration that is culturally misfit.
I don't understand some of his projects.
I don't know the final state of affairs with robots or Neuralink.
I know that the future is coming faster than ever, and I'm not sure if we're ready to handle it.
I know that's not a very decisive and conclusive thing to say.