Ezra Levant argues Pierre Poilievre’s leadership is strong despite media attacks from CBC, CTV, and Toronto Star, citing his 44% Ontario vote share and Abacus poll showing 51% of Canadians disapprove of the country’s direction—especially on cost-of-living and healthcare. Poilievre outperforms Mark Carney on immigration (59% vs. 18% favorability), yet extremist threats like the Bondi Hanukkah attack and pro-Hamas protests in Montreal expose vulnerabilities, raising doubts about Canada’s ability to reverse decline through radical policies like mass deportations. [Automatically generated summary]
Should the Conservative Party throw him out as leader?
Of course, most of the people saying that are liberals, and I think I know why.
Let me show you the latest poll by Abacus Research.
It has the Conservatives and the Liberals in a dead heat.
You don't think the Liberals would try and get rid of Pierre Polyev if he was actually weak, do you?
I'll take you through the polls and show you what's so interesting.
And maybe a special secret way that Polyev might win the next election.
It's not very secret, I'll show you.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
It's the video version of this podcast.
I want to show you a bunch of charts and graphs.
I want you to see them, not just hear them.
So please go to RebelNewsPlus.com.
Click subscribe.
Eight bucks a month might not seem like a lot to you, but it really adds up for us.
That's rebelnewsplus.com.
Tonight, don't listen to the people who want to replace Pierre Polyev.
Here's why.
It's December 16th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
If you follow the regime media and by that, I mean the CBC, CTV, Global, the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, you'll see there's a drumbeat to get rid of Pierre Polyev, the leader of the opposition.
Normally, in healthy democracies at least, the media typically critiques power.
They critique the government.
In Canada, the media critiques the opposition.
There's endless pundit panels.
They're positively laughing at Pierre Polyev, and they're all giving their results.
They don't like him.
They typically quote liberals and unnamed party insiders.
Hey, I got a question for you.
If Pierre Polyev was weak, if he was a bad leader, would the liberals want to replace him?
Or would they want very much to keep him?
Think of how useless Jagmeet Singh was in terms of opposing the government.
He supported them every time.
He was useless, or in the liberal mind, he was very, very useful.
He gave the liberals a working majority and he gave them the pretense of opposition, but, you know, sort of toothless.
Think of why Doug Ford, the Ontario Premier, won the last election by a smaller margin.
He got just under 43% compared to Pierre Polyev's vote in Ontario, which was approximately 44%.
So Pierre Polyev actually got 1% more votes in the province of Ontario as a percentage than Doug Ford did.
So why didn't Pierre Polyev win?
Well, because provincially, the NDP and the Liberals each got almost exactly 23%.
They perfectly split the vote, enough for Doug Ford to come up the middle, compared to what Pierre Polyev faced is Kookie Jagmeet Singh getting just, I don't know, I think it was 6% of the vote in the end.
Everything coalesced around Mark Carney.
Now, Pierre Polyev was asked very recently by the CBC about his leadership failures.
Here they are asking him about the defection of Michael Ma, the Conservative MP from part of the larger Toronto area.
Asked by the CBC what it says about his leadership, I think he actually had a great answer, which surprised me at first.
I wasn't expecting this.
Take a look.
Let's start with what happened last week.
You've now lost two MPs to the Liberal Party.
Both have pointed to your leadership as issues.
Michael Ma saying that he was more interested in unity than division.
Is this a problem of your leadership at this point?
No, it's a problem of Mark Carney's leadership that after Canadians clearly rejected a liberal, a costly liberal majority because they knew it would mean higher grocery prices and higher food costs, he is trying to manipulate his way through backroom deals to get that majority.
He's allowed to do that.
Floor crossing is allowed.
You've benefited from it.
But he's trying to take a majority, a costly majority that would drive up the cost of living and enrich liberal elites, of course, but not through democratic means.
My message to Mark Carney is that if you want a costly majority government to drive up taxes and deficits, then you have to go to the Canadian people and have them vote for it, not do it by a dirty backroom deal.
I mean, I know you don't like it, and we can talk about the merits of floor crossing and whether it should be allowed, but it is allowed.
This is something that is allowed to happen.
So back to my question.
Is this a sign of a weakness in your leadership that two members of your caucus have left?
No, it's a sign of backroom dealings that will drive up the cost of living.
And don't take my word for it.
Take Mr. Ma's word.
This is what he said just a few weeks ago.
We are in a shameful situation in this country where over 2 million Canadians are visiting food banks every month.
At the end of every month, paychecks are not going far enough.
Why is that?
I'm quoting.
The liberals want to deflect and blame this solely on the trade deficit.
However, there's a simple economic fact.
When we create more units of currency and map them into the economy that is not meaningfully producing more goods and services, we get inflation.
As a case in point, in the last five years, I'll just finish up his quote.
In the last five years, grocery prices have risen more than 20%.
He blames that on Mark Carney's deficit.
And that was only a few weeks ago.
It's possible he didn't write that, though.
As we know, many of your MPs, yeah, many of your MPs are given talk to them.
They were his words.
They were his words.
Well, he was right when he said that.
Exactly.
What does it say about Mark Carney's leadership that the way he can get seats is not in a general election, but with some secret, private promise that none of us know anything about, and that the riding was not consulted about?
I think Polly was actually spot on right.
And I think this guy, Michael Ma, is a disgrace.
I don't know if you followed the news.
Literally the night before he quit, he went to a Christmas party that the Conservative Party held.
He didn't pay for his ticket, though.
He brought his whole family there.
He posed for photographs with the Conservatives mere hours before he defected.
He surely knew what he was going to do.
And funny enough, he had already put into the works a community mailing tearing a strip off the liberals, praising the conservatives.
That's how sudden his change of heart was.
There's some serious questions about a conflict by the Chinese embassy.
I understand from news reports that Michael Ma actually met with the Chinese ambassador just three days before deciding to switch.
Why was he doing that?
At whose behest was that meeting?
When did it happen?
What did they talk about?
You'll recall that this is the same controversial riding in Markham where there was a bounty on the previous candidate in the Liberal Party.
I mean, there's a lot of questions here about how Mark Carney does democracy and about how serious Mark Carney is about national security.
So Pierre Polly was actually right when he says this defection says more about Mark Carney's leadership than his own.
By the way, we've got this gorgeous billboard truck with a campaign at firema, ma.ca.
So you can see that at that website.
But let me put aside the gossip because gossip is what the CBC and CTV are really good at.
But let me show you someone who's good at math.
I don't know if I've told you lately how much I like the pollster Abacus Research, although they're chaired and owned by a liberal sympathizer.
Their chief pollster, David Coletto, is a pro, and I admire him.
I've known him actually since Sun News Days, and he is the kind of guy who's very good at what he does, and he calls it like he sees it.
And take a look at this.
This was just, I think, published yesterday.
The headline on his poll is, as parliament rises, that means as it breaks for the winter.
Did you know they're already on their holidays a couple weeks before you are?
Liberals and conservatives remain neck and neck.
You wouldn't know it from that media coverage, would you?
Especially the gossipy coverage.
Let me read a little bit from Coletto's poll.
This wave of polling captures public response to several key developments.
The Carney government's early November budget, the memorandum of understanding between Alberta and the federal government on a pipeline to the West Coast, and the intensifying trade and diplomatic tensions with the United States.
Despite these developments, the results suggest a political landscape that remains deeply competitive and stable with few signs of a major shift in momentum.
Both the liberals and conservatives remain locked in a tie.
And Canadians continue to express ambivalence about the country's direction, mixed feelings about their leaders, and sharp divides by generation, region, and policy concern.
Isn't that interesting?
Well, let me show you a little bit more.
This key question, is Canada on the right track or wrong track?
Only 35% of people, just barely a third of us, think Canada's on the right track.
51% think we're on the wrong track.
Now, you can see that Canadians also think America's on the wrong track and the rest of the world's on the wrong track.
But we don't have a vote in America or in France or in the UK.
All that matters is what Canadians think about Canada.
And most Canadians think our country is on the wrong track.
Let me say that in another way.
Far more Canadians think we're going in the wrong direction than merely voted for the Conservatives.
Let me show you another finding from Abacus Research.
Alberta, as you can see, has the lowest number who say right track, just 28%, barely more than a quarter.
So you stop any four random people on the street in Alberta.
Three of them are going to say the country's going on the wrong track.
That is not good for the country.
And if there actually is an independence referendum next year, that's a pretty shocking statistic.
Now, I was surprised the women are more pessimistic than men about the country.
And the most pessimistic generation are 30 to 44-year-olds.
Again, their 28% think right track.
30 to 44, that's the age where people get married, have kids, build a life, start doing serious things.
They're not a student anymore.
They're not a kid anymore.
They're not a retiree yet.
That is the thick of life.
And only 28% of those people think the country's on the right track.
Low-income and rural people are pretty low too.
Now, there's no cross tabs that I could find, but imagine what a 30-year-old man in rural Alberta must think.
I can only imagine how few of them think this country's on the right track.
Now, another question that Coletto asked through Abacus was, what are your top three priorities?
So that's why the statistics here don't add up to 100% because they asked, what are your top three?
You can see by far the number one issue is the cost of living.
So no wonder seniors are fine.
They already paid for their homes.
They don't have to worry about housing costs.
They own their homes.
They probably, in fact, got a big capital gain from their homes.
They have a pension.
And although the price of groceries is up, they're not buying groceries for a bunch of kids or paying for sports or whatever.
They're really living a calm life in a house that they long ago paid off.
Now, 40% of people say the healthcare system, or as I call it, the wait in line for hours at the emergency room until you finally give up without getting a healthcare system.
I think that's how it is, especially in big cities.
Next two items are really the same as the first one: jobs, ownership.
It's all this home ownership.
It's all the same thing.
No one can afford to live or to get ahead.
And I think this next one, I don't know, I was surprised it was so low in this poll: immigration.
In my view, immigration feeds all of these other issues, including crime and wokeness.
You'll notice that Donald Trump doesn't come up until the sixth issue, even though the media class is obsessed with him.
I'm not saying he's irrelevant.
It's just he's not the number one, two, three, four, or five issue for Canadians.
The last comparison I'd like to show is the net favorability of Mark Carney, the prime minister.
45% of people like him.
35% dislike him.
I don't think he really has had a honeymoon, has he?
So he's got a net positive of 10%.
That's his lowest number, actually, since March.
Like, he's not doing well if you're just going by the numbers.
You wouldn't know it from the media tongue baths now, would you?
Here's the same stats for Pierre Polyev.
Now, he's underwater by 5%.
More people dislike him than like him.
But it's closer than you'd believe if your only source of info was the CBC.
Carney up five, Polyev down up 10, Polyev down five.
It's not a huge gap in terms of likability.
Just the media hates Polyev.
Now, here's the question that matters most.
Who would you vote for?
Isn't that really what it comes down to?
The liberals and the conservatives are exactly tied at 41%.
But look at that NDP vote, just 9%.
If that doesn't go up, Carney's going to win again.
I think that's the number one issue for conservatives.
This is the one that just gets me, though.
No one likes Carney except people who are retired.
Young people do not like him.
People trying to build a life start a family, they hate him.
How long is that sustainable where the younger a person is, the more they hate Mark Carney?
Okay, let me show you just one last slide.
This one, I think, points the way.
This shows what issues Polyev does the best at and which issues Carney does the best at and which they each do the worst at.
Carney wins if the question is, what's Canada's place in the world?
So if looking good at the United Nations or the World Economic Forum, if that's important to you, more important than can you afford a house or getting a job, because you already have a house and you've retired from your job, then yeah, Mark Carney's your man.
How do we look to the world?
What do dictators in the third world think of us?
You can see that dealing with the U.S. is also Carney's winner, even though he's failed abjectly so far.
Choose Controversy Wisely00:02:57
So yeah, the virtue signaling class isn't the luxury beliefs.
I want the New York Times to say nice things about us.
But look at the number one winner for Pierre Polyev.
It's not even jobs or government spending or debt.
Even though Polyev does really well on all those, the number one thing where Pierre Polyev is preferred by 59% of voters compared to Carney for just 18% is immigration.
Carney's position is a fringe position.
It's an extremist position.
I say that objectively.
It's the most out-of-control immigration system in the world, which is precisely why the regime media calls Polyev's position fringe and extreme and racist or whatever they say.
Here's my question.
Will Pierre Polyev say what so many Canadians are saying quietly to each other, that immigration is out of control and it needs to be stopped?
And in fact, not just stop, but many people who are here now have to re-migrate home.
Or will he continue the unfortunate conservative tradition of being scared of his own shadow on this?
Look, any election has a controversy.
That's an election by nature.
It's divisive.
Votes in parliament are called calling for a division.
There will be division.
Polyev can let the media choose the controversy, choose the fault line.
For example, who is the best Trump fighter?
Yay, we all hate Trump.
Or Polyev can choose the controversy that suits him best by outlining a very strong immigration policy of kicking out the frauds, deporting those who have no right to be here anymore, imposing cultural values tests on foreign extremists, letting Canadians get entry-level jobs instead of temporary foreign workers.
The media would freak out at all of that.
And by doing so, their freakout would actually be an ad for Pierre Polyev.
It would give Polyev $100 million worth of free advertising, spreading the word that Polyev means deportations.
The CBC pundits panelists would gnash their teeth.
Oh, they would hate it.
Imagine Chantali Bear or Rosemary Barton, but no one normal has even heard of them, certainly not anyone under 50.
This poll shows us two things.
Don't dump Polyev just because the Liberals don't like him.
I mean, you know what they say.
You can't replace someone with no one.
Would you really dump Pierre Polyev just because Andrew Coyne and Althea Raj don't like him?
The second thing it shows is Polyev should come back with a vengeance on immigration and link it to everything from crime to healthcare waiting lines to overspending to traffic.
That's one policy the Liberals will never co-opt.
Memorial At Bondi00:10:05
Stay with us for more.
Canada and Australia are similar in various ways.
We're both large countries with rather small populations that have been overwhelmed by mass immigration in recent years.
In Australia, that led to a horrific terrorist attack, as you saw.
Our friend Abhiyamini, our Australia Bureau Chief, is based in Melbourne, but he's gone to Sydney where this massacre happened.
Here's a special report that he put together for us.
Yes, thanks for having us on.
Look, Benji and I, we arrived here about 16 hours after the horrific Islamic terror attack in Bondi.
This is the Jewish community and it's super close to home.
Just to give you an idea of how close to home it is, last night we ate dinner at my sister's house and my niece, who's clearly in shock and traumatized, is telling us how her friend from school, her classmate, is in hospital with, who's been shot in the leg with a bullet in the leg.
And her other friend, their father has been killed.
The whole community here, everyone knows everyone.
I know a few people personally who were affected, you know, because some of them were from Melbourne.
It's a shocking incident and you are seeing the community gathering around in Bondi at the memorial.
We've seen all sorts of people coming and going.
Some trying to make political gain off it inappropriately.
There are the Greens deputy leader who has been, who many in this community blame for the current climate we're in, which has allowed this attack to happen.
She decided to come to Virtue Signal.
We hadn't arrived by that point.
It was actually early in the morning, but a friend of mine from Sky News, Shari Markson, actually, and I messaged her after, it seemed like she pulled her Avi Yamini out of her internal thing because I know that if I'd seen somebody like that, I don't know if I could have been as composed.
Are you surprised?
You can't possibly be surprised that your actions have been among those that have led to this.
Would you like to apologise to the Jewish community?
I am here to provide support to the Jewish communities and everyone else.
Would you like to apologise?
Who has suffered what has happened here yesterday?
That's what I'm here for.
Hey, what's ridiculous?
The day is a day for grieving, not good politic.
We shouldn't be grieving.
We shouldn't be grieving.
You have stood at pro-Palestinian protests where there have been calls for death to the people.
It's got nothing to do with antisemitism at all.
But then we did, we have spoken to leaders, we've spoken to the opposition leader at the memorial.
We've spoken to Pauline Hanson, who I wasn't actually sure the kind of reception she was going to get.
And it was huge.
It was cheering and clapping from the community.
I really did not know what to expect.
And it was heartwarming to see that finally I think the Jewish community, the people, not really the leadership like we see around the world, but the community, just like we see in England with Tommy Robertson, here the community has really warmed up and opened and realised that Pauline Hansen was right.
She's owed an apology by so many.
Pauline, why do you think you're the only politician that I've witnessed in the hours that I've been here welcomed by a round of applause?
That's up to the people to say.
I've only ever been myself.
I've always ever spoken from my heart and I believe in my country and trying to work with my fellow Australians to give them a better way of life.
Don't let them divert this to guns.
Susan Layonet.
I've already put out a message.
It's not about the guns, it's the person behind the guns.
They didn't have the guns, they had bombs in their cars as well.
Whichever way they could inflict death and pain and suffering on the people, that's what it's about.
When I challenged Susan Leonard, she said it's not about the guns, it's anti-Semitism, but she won't actually pinpoint which breed of anti-Semitism.
Why do you think she's scared to do that?
Because they don't want to say, and what the Prime Minister didn't say, this is Islamic terrorist.
Okay?
This is who's created this.
And we've allowed the hate preachers on our streets preaching their hate, and that should not be allowed.
Those Palestinian marches should have been stopped, should not have been allowed.
And I blame the Prime Minister and I blame the Premiers for allowing that to go on.
It should have been stopped.
What would you say to me?
No, I'm sorry, no other flag.
Palestinian flag should not have been flown in this country, preaching their hatred.
Now, we've spoken to a lot of victims.
The viewers can see everything at protectthejews.com.au.
You can follow our reports there and also sign and share that petition on that page.
And we're doing live streams from the Bondi Memorial.
And we've spoken in those live streams.
You'll see we've spoken.
We're doing also reports.
We're producing reports from that.
But Hours after hours were there at the memorial and we've spoken to a number of survivors of the actual attack.
People who have protected their own kids and there are reoccurring things where people say that the police, there were police and this story is shocking.
The police that were there, that were actually there through most of the attack, refused to shoot back.
And I believe that they were, you know, just uniform officers, as I would say.
Like, sorry, to put it this way, many of them will be DEI hires.
And in the situation, they were terrified.
They had the pistols.
In Australia, we have super strict gun laws.
No one had guns.
The people with the guns were too scared.
And it went on for at least 10 to 15 minutes before other police came in who were willing to engage and fight back.
And of course, the hero that tackled down one of the gunmen and himself got shot.
So that's one of the things that I think over time is going to become a central part of this broader conversation.
What really happened?
A lot of people being frustrated that police are being given so much credit when they failed them in the urgent 10 minutes of the actual attack.
When they were there, they were hiding, they were cowering.
It is scary guys.
Somebody who's been shot at even with a firearm, in the army, it is a scary thing.
But if that's your job, if we're putting people to that task, you would expect them to do it and not let two crazed Islamist gunmen go hunting for little kids, women and just Jews who are out to celebrate Hanukkah.
The other thing is that we're seeing, and this report's going to come out later today, is the pivot and the distraction that the government's trying to put forth.
There's a concerted effort within the government and the media to make this about guns.
And for anyone that knows about Australia's gun laws, you will realise how insane that is because we have some of the toughest gun laws in the world.
The government is prepared to take whatever action is necessary.
Included in that is the need for tougher gun laws.
Father was a licensed gun owner.
He had six firearms, even though his son was on the ASIO watch list.
So he was on the terrorist watch list.
And just to give you an idea, in Australia, if you have an intervention order out against you, so if somebody, and generally it's ex-partners, say that you're a threat to them and they want to keep you away, they go in and they file for a restraining order.
If you have a restraining order on you, you cannot have firearms.
But it turns out, and if somebody in the house has a restraining order against them, there cannot be firearms in the house.
But it turns out that if Asia has you on the watch list, you can have firearm.
But this concerted effort in trying to make it about guns is obviously a way to avoid the elephant in the room.
Radical Islam, Islamic Jihad that hunted those Jews in Bondi just two days ago and that will continue to do so if we make this about guns.
We've got a report in which we actually confront some of those pushing that agenda or at least not standing against it and obviously some that are pushing back.
We've got so much more to do.
I don't know how long we're going to be here on the ground.
Sorry, I'm very tired because we've barely slept as we've been here.
We've been working since the moment we got here literally from the taxi and then straight to the memorial.
There's a funeral coming up later in a few hours.
But there's so many stories to actually hunt down.
There's so many victims.
We'll bring you everything at protectthedjews.com.au and yeah, not sure how long we're going to be here.
Confronting The Agenda00:04:17
We've got a one-way ticket for now.
But you can follow all the reporting there at protectthejews.com.au.
Just go with that.
I want shalom.
I want a hug.
Give me a hug, my son.
And I pray for today.
I leave until I see you together with us.
But I leave today, my second.
Why?
I'm Jewish, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I want to do with all the Arabs in my life.
And I love everybody.
We are with you.
We stand here with you.
51 years, I am here.
My God, all my children, Aussie, I'm 51 years.
They all don't understand.
Let's go with all.
I am 11.
Great children.
Married, they have seven great children and four children, 22.
They don't understand.
I'm a Holocaust survivor.
My mother, Holocaust.
You are the God.
What child is God?
Let me see.
I guess the question is in your community, are you involved in your community?
How are they feeling about what happened here?
Just like I do, they feel bad.
Our grand Mufti, they came out and they said that it's barbaric, it's terrorism.
We don't like these things in Australia.
No way on earth.
We want this.
And I think so we have to tighten our border security.
Make sure that no shady people come here.
It doesn't matter what their religion or background is.
We don't want these people here.
We don't want divide in us.
We don't like it.
Are you concerned about within the Islamic community that there is an extremist element that is rising?
Again, no, there's not Islamic community.
They always came from outside.
Yes, they are.
They're from where?
Outside, not from Australia.
No, no, they're not.
From outside.
They come here.
They try to.
But they're part of the Islamic community.
But they came from outside and they try to disorientiate our kids.
But they're not successful.
But this time I don't know why.
What's up?
And I see myself.
It's unbelievable.
You'll like this kind of thing, sir.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me about this terrorist attack.
Growing his life said there was a pro-Hamash protest that disrupted a Christmas market in Montreal later that day.
Oh, I'm not surprised.
By the way, in Toronto, Montreal, every Canadian city, there are plenty of mosques.
But there's a tactic, it's a political domination tactic that Muslim extremists insist on praying in the public street to shut down the whole neighborhood.
That's not allowed in Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, by the way.
It's not a thing.
It's not prayer at all.
It's weaponizing prayer to assert geographical territory marking.
And it's a shame that we allow that in Canada.
Frank QC says, in Europe, they use knives, cars, trucks to hurt people.
They always find a way.
We need more background checks, not guns confiscation.
Well, you're exactly right.
I mentioned the horrific attack in Nice, France, where an Islamic terrorist got behind the wheel of a very large and heavy truck, and it went down the street, ramming and ramming and ramming people.
I think 83 were killed before the truck was immobilized.
If it's not guns, it'll be knives, it'll be something else.
The problem is not the tool.
It's the terrorist wielding it and how they got into the country.
Muddy Tears says, I'm sorry.
Canada is a lost cause for any type of free and open democracy.
Independent Canadians confused complacency with being polite, not the same as nice, and allowed the country to be degraded past the point of no return.
Are We Past the Point of No Return?00:00:28
Well, that's the debating question, isn't it?
Are we past the point of no return?
I think it's necessary to have remigration.
I think Canada could be saved.
Do we have the political will to do so?
Donald Trump is remigrating people.
He uses that word.
In the United Kingdom, Nigel Farage uses the word, or at least talks about mass deportations.