Mark Miller, Canada’s Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, defended CBC’s role in promoting "social cohesion" as a counter to disinformation during a parliamentary hearing, but critics like Rachel Thomas linked it to state suppression. CBC’s misreporting of the Little Tumbler Ridge shooter—initially calling him "Jesse Van Rootsflawer" despite family evidence—sparked accusations of bias tied to transgender activism, while CBC Kids News faced backlash for Snapchat-based drag queen content and sexual education for children. A petition demands its shutdown, and listener letters question digital vote integrity in BC’s 2024 election, weapon seizure inconsistencies, and early medical transitions’ link to violent behavior. The episode suggests CBC’s editorial choices may reflect broader political agendas, raising concerns about public trust and media independence in Canada’s polarized climate. [Automatically generated summary]
I want to take you through some footage from a parliamentary committee where Mark Miller, a holdover from Justin Trudeau's regime, talks about illegitimate versus legitimate media.
Gee, I wonder which side of that he puts Rebel News on.
That's ahead, but first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
It's the video version of this podcast.
I want you to see Mark Miller, so I want to make sure you have Rebel News Plus.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe.
It's eight bucks a month.
May not sound like a lot to you, but boy, it adds up for us.
And we need it because we don't take any money from the government and it shows.
Tonight, how do you feel about Justin Trudeau's men deciding what is a legitimate or illegitimate news source?
It's February 13th, and this is the Azure Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious thug.
Mark Miller is a Mark Carney cabinet minister who is a holdover from Justin Trudeau's time.
Frankly, so are most of them, from Melanie Jolie to François-Philippe Champagne to Anita Anand.
It's a laugh that Carney is calling his government new in any meaningful way.
And it's a laugh, especially to see them say things like, Canada is back when they've been running things for a decade.
The only thing more outrageous is their ongoing attempts to blame Stephen Harper for anything, really.
What is his theory on why Canada, after a year of his leadership, has the highest food inflation in the G7?
Why is it that single-mom seniors and small businesses are seeing grocery prices rise faster here in Canada under his leadership after he promised to stabilize them than people in any other G7 country?
I've offered my theory that it is his many taxes on farmers, fishers, food processing, and fertilizer.
So once again, if it's not all of his taxes on food production that's giving us the worst record, then what is?
The right time to find.
Mr. Speaker, one of the impacts, according to TD Bank, on food prices is the fall in the Canadian dollar caused by the obstructionism of the members opposite before this government came in place.
They're actually blaming Harper's government from 11 years ago.
Well, one of the worst holdovers in the cabinet is Mark Miller.
I'm surprised he's still in cabinet because his chief expertise was, you know, being part of Justin Trudeau's frat boy style wedding party.
You can see the others in that picture, like the awful Seamus O'Regan and Gerald Butts.
That's why Mark Miller is in power because he was the wedding buddy of Justin Trudeau.
There's no other reason.
He has no other skill set.
So he's the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture now, which is a terrifying title in itself.
I mean, he's in charge of your identity.
Of course, the Liberals don't believe we have a Canadian identity.
More than 10 years ago, they were saying Canada is a post-national country, more of a hotel than a homeland.
Mark Miller himself was in charge of immigration for a while, just shocking, massive, irresponsible immigration that did more to damage our Canadian identity than almost anything else.
Would They Lie About a Man in a Dress?00:14:32
I mean, the Liberals are the ones that tore down statues and stopped John A. McDonald from being on our $10 bill, just stripped him off the bill, rewrote our national anthem, said we're committing genocide against the Indians.
So yeah, you'll forgive me if I don't take my direction from them on national identity.
But look at what he said just the other day before a parliamentary committee.
Was asked some questions by the conservative critic Rachel Thomas.
I'll play a fair bit of this.
Here's her question that's pretty self-explanatory.
She wanted to know what he meant by a certain phrase.
You recently made a statement after becoming minister that part of the responsibility of CBC is to foster what you called, quote, social cohesion.
Can you explain for the committee what you meant by social cohesion?
The reason I ask is because experienced journalists have stated that these words, this term, is often used by the People's Republic of China to mean state control and zero tolerance for challenges.
That seems counter to the values that we hold here in Canada, and so I'm curious as to what you meant by social cohesion.
Now, I think it's a fair question.
Social cohesion is the Chinese New World Order phrase meaning obedience to the government.
Of course it is.
Now, in the UK, social cohesion means something else.
It means not talking about Pakistani Muslim rape gangs because that's Islamophobic, that's divisive, you see.
So just brush it under the carpet.
That's what social cohesion means in those two places.
So what does it mean here in Canada?
An age that we're all living through of intense disinformation, there is less social cohesion as falsities are propagated through media sources, both legitimate and illegitimate, integral to a healthy democracy.
Indeed, the fourth pillar of our democracy is a healthy media ecosystem that exercises rightly its freedom of expression.
Again, integral to that is a state-financed public media that is the CBC or Khazu Canada, not state-controlled.
Indeed, the CBC's mandate is one that is ferociously independent, and we should all defend that, whether they are saying good or bad things about us.
So when there is a lack of support for a public broadcaster, I think that contributes to the spread of disinformation, and social cohesion is therefore affected.
It's not about any sort of command and control of the media system that you may see in other countries, but indeed in part of an integral to a healthy democracy.
Yeah, I don't think he made that much better.
In an age that we're all living through of intense disinformation, there is less social cohesion as falsities are propagated through media sources, both legitimate and illegitimate.
What does that mean?
What's an illegitimate media source?
And says who?
What are the rules?
Can I see them, please?
Now, I agree that we are in an age of disinformation.
You just saw a man go on a murderous shooting spree, and the police and the politicians and most of the media all said it was a woman or a woman in a dress.
They even put their emergency notification out to send to cell phones that it was a woman.
So does the minister think that the CBC, state broadcaster, which was the craziest about using the right pronouns for the murderer, and which bizarrely they kept using the murderer's first name, Jesse, Jesse, like he was a friend of theirs or something?
Now, would the minister call that disinformation?
I mean, it was a lie on purpose.
I think that's the definition of disinformation.
Or as I think he would say, that's the social cohesion part.
Covering up the truth with an attempt to calm down outrage over a transgender killer.
What's even scarier is that he says the answer to everything, the basis for everything, is a dominant CBC state broadcaster.
He's not even pretending otherwise.
He claims it's totally independent, by the way.
Yeah, sure.
On everything from global warming to their war against Trump to their propagation of transgenderism, there's not a single issue upon which they disagree with the liberals.
And Miller says he needs that state broadcaster to be as strong as possible, as in they should be the only legitimate voice, really.
Oh, and just a reminder about how independent media are when they're financed by the government.
I don't know if you've seen this.
Here's a liberal MP, Talib Noumohamed, telling a reporter for the National Post, let me quote him, your paper wouldn't be in business were it not for the subsidies that the government that you hate put in place.
The same subsidies your Trump-adjacent foreign hedge fund owners gladly take to pay your salary.
Whoa.
Yeah, that's the reality.
Not Mark Miller saying, oh, no, we're very independent.
We would never try to control the media.
Yeah, tell that to your seatmate.
Liberal MP just told the journalist to be obedient because he pays for her, not the taxpayers, not the public interest.
He does, as if it's money out of his own pocket.
This reminds me of Mark Miller's best friend, Justin Trudeau.
You know, there's the truth, which only Trudeau knows, and everybody else, why?
They're unacceptable.
Remember that?
The small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa or who are holding unacceptable views that they're expressing.
I mean, sometimes he couldn't even tolerate us at all.
Oui, on va s'en sortir de cette pandémie par la vaccination.
Puis on en connaît tous, des gens qui sont en train d'hésiter un petit peu.
On va continuer d'essayer de les convaincre.
Mais il y a aussi des gens qui sont farouchement opposés à la vaccination.
Qui sont extrémistes.
Qui croient pas dans la science, qui sont souvent misogynes, souvent racistes aussi.
C'est un petit groupe, mais qui prend de la place.
Et là, il faut faire un choix en tant que leader, en tant que pays.
Est-ce qu'on tolère?
Don't think those are just words.
They arrested people, seized hundreds of bank accounts.
That's what they did over a peaceful protest that just happened to embarrass the Liberal Party.
They put people in prison over that.
But now with their new censorship laws coming, they'll go much further.
I predict they will use the independent media's coverage of the transgender mass murder as an excuse to bring in more censorship.
Mark my words, they're going to use it as an excuse.
They'll use it to ban guns, but they'll also use it to ban words.
Stay with us for more on this subject.
Well, it was the biggest story in the country when a shooter rampaged through a school in Little Tumbler Ridge in northern British Columbia.
There were instantly rumors about the murderer claiming he was transgender, but it was hard to sort fact from fiction.
Well, our friends at Juno News managed to connect that night with a family member of the killer and learn facts and publish them before anyone else in the world, including the massive CBC state broadcaster.
In fact, not only was Juno News first, that in the hours and even days that followed, the CBC and other regime media refused to amend their wording.
They continued to say a female killer.
They continued to misstate the name of the killer, all to serve political ends.
Joining us now to talk about Juno News' success this week is our friend and Rebel News alumnus, Kian Bexti, the co-founder of Juno Keen.
Great to see you.
Congratulations.
You guys had a great week.
Thanks, Ezra.
Appreciate it.
Was an unfortunate situation, but in these like moments of human tragedy, it's important that we get it right and we get news out quick and we don't lie to our readers like the CBC does.
I think you're right to pause for a moment and reflect on the horrific tragedy, the loss that the families faced.
It wasn't just a tragedy, it was a crime.
My compliments are to you because in that moment, it's so easy to be swept away by what does the CBC say?
They must be the most authoritative.
They're up there first because they just have so much staff and so much resources.
So to pick up the phone and call, even to call the family of the suspected killer, that's an important role.
I mean, obviously, the number one part of the story is the shocking murder spree.
But I think increasingly how the government deliberately hid information and committed disinformation, that's really scary to me.
Like when they send out that message on cell phones to everybody warning them of a woman in a dress, that's the opposite of what they should have been warning about.
This is just another example of any not being able to trust anyone who gets money from the federal government with information that is critical to your life, whether it's the RCMP who lied about the woman in a dress when they could have easily said a man in a dress, which would have been super clear to every single person in that town.
They would have known exactly who the RCMP were talking about.
They would have been on the lookout for it.
Everyone in Tumblr Ridge, I used to live up in the peace region.
Everyone there is armed.
Everyone could have responded.
It could have gone in many different ways, right?
The shooter might not have killed himself in the school.
Thankfully, the RCMP responded so quickly and got that done.
But if imagine if, God forbid, the shooter went on a rampage through the town.
People would have needed to know who they were looking out for.
And the RCMP obfuscated that intentionally because they bow down to their leadership in Ottawa, not to their leadership in BC.
They face the same issue that the RCMP in Alberta have.
And then again, with the CBC, parroting those talking points, lying to people point blank, talking about the womanhood of this mass murderer was just disgusting.
And again, you just see this time and time again, even from outlets on what I would have thought to be our side refer to this person as a woman in the very first reporting that they did.
Rebel News and Juno News.
We didn't make that mistake because we tried to get to the bottom of the story before we started sensationalizing it.
You're nice to tip your hat to us.
And I do salute Drea, who did some good work.
But the prize goes to Juno for being the first with the interview.
And you got a piece of information in that very first interview.
And it was Cosmond Gierga of your team.
And he was kind enough to come on our live stream the other day.
The name of the murderer is Jesse Strang.
The RCMP insisted, and the CBC insisted in calling him Jesse Rootsler.
His biological father just yesterday said that was his legal name, but he never went by it.
I was cut out of raising my son's life.
He had nothing to do with me, and he had nothing to do with my name.
And my theory, Kian, I'd like your thought on this, is the reason the police were so insistent that this guy go by that other name that he never used in life was because if you were to search the name Jesse Strang online, you would see hundreds and hundreds of posts written by this transgender activist.
And if you went with the wrong name that the RCMP was deliberately giving out, you wouldn't find it.
I think that is textbook disinformation and misleading.
How can you trust the cops after that?
Yeah, you know, we knew we were right.
We had backed up the information that we reported multiple times from multiple different places.
And we knew we were just sort of waiting for the RCMP to confirm what we knew.
And when they came out and said, yeah, the name is Van Rootslaw, we were a little bit in shock.
You know, we got the first name right.
How could we have possibly gotten the last name wrong?
Everyone in the town knew them by the Strang family, and they knew, most importantly, the killer by the Strang family name.
And the RCMP, they couldn't have said that.
They knew that.
When they identified the body, they weren't fishing through his pockets and trusting just what was on the ID.
They were talking to family.
They were talking to friends.
They were talking to victims.
They were talking to school teachers.
And no one was referring to the killer as Jesse Van Rootsflawer.
But instead of actually acknowledging all the aliases of the guy it went by, they went with the least information, the least valuable information possible, is what they delivered to people, which is just criminal.
There was such weird stuff, like using his first name.
One of the CBC presenters was calling this guy Jesse, and then Jesse did this, and Jesse did that.
I mean, Paul Bernardo, you would never hear.
And then Paul did that, and Paul did this.
They're trying to, and I played this the other day on my show, that Norm McDonald joke.
He had that joke he told in different ways: like, oh, I'm worried if there was a dirty bomb that ISIS set off over an American city, but what about the blowback against Muslims?
Well, actually, I think the dirty bomb is the bigger, but you know, you have a, and again, I'm laughing.
It's not a funny situation.
It's a very sad situation.
The obsession of the regime media and the government and the RCMP with being politically correct on pronouns and transgender stuff is, frankly, it takes away from the gravity of the situation and it takes away from the victims.
I don't know.
I think it's really gross what they did.
It's also blaming the atrocities of a nearly exclusively male crime on women and on womanhood, which is, it's just an extreme disservice to half the population to lump these criminals in with them.
You know, we, you know, I'm fine.
CBC Kids Controversy00:06:53
I know many people in my lives who identify as transgender.
Some have had surgery, some have not.
I'm polite and I give them the benefit of the doubt and I treat them courteously and I use the pronouns that they want when they are good people.
But when they are a bad person trying to, you know, killing half a dozen people and trying to, you know, I don't know if that was his intention when he went and did it, but to sully the name of all women, to be the largest female mass shooter in, I think, North American history, if this was true, that's just not, you know, we owe it to women to be more accurate with the terminology that we use when people are this deranged and this troubled.
All I can think about is if they're lying over this, what else are they lying about?
I mean, for my own good or for the good of some political goal.
I find it very strange.
Hey, let me shift gears.
I want to mention one more thing before we say goodbye.
You and I have both been following this really bizarre niche, this subculture, this little hidden attic at the CBC called CBC Kids News.
It's not CBC Kids just like they have some just kids shows, but they have a sort of a political stream to it, don't they?
Where they have these child actors really say things written by grown-up producers.
I think it's called CBC Kids News.
It's just, it's always talking about trans.
It's always talking about marijuana.
It's sort of crazy.
Tell me a little bit.
And have I got it right about CBC Kids News or CBC Kids?
Tell me if I'm, and then you've got a petition.
Why don't you tell us about it?
I want to make sure I understand that we're talking about the same thing.
Yeah, this goes all the way back to my reporting at Rebel News, actually.
I remember back when I was flying around everywhere I was in, I think it was San Francisco for some story.
And I was scrolling in the airport and I saw something on Snapchat from the CBC, which was weird.
And it was directed at children.
Snapchat is a social media that's used by predominantly young people.
CBC was targeting kids on this with a story about just really depraved sexual topics that I was really shocked by.
You can look it up on Rebel News.
It's still there.
And I was sort of bewildered.
And that was my introduction to CBC Kids.
They were targeting kids through Snapchat.
And then I realized that this went far beyond Snapchat.
It was an entire broadcast network based in the CBC headquarters that targets kids specifically, talks about nine times out of 10, how you can, you know, be a better trans ally, how you can be a better trans person, chest finding, like some really, really crazy things come out of the CBC Kids.
And I saw a post just recently talking about what the CBC, what CBC Kids was talking about the day Jesse Ben Rutslar came out as trans.
And I thought, wow, what a sickening thing to have in our society, a state-funded organization that is convincing kids that they are trans.
It was just, it is some of the most deplorable antics from the CBC.
And you know, I want to shut down the CBC more broadly.
I think a lot of people share that goal, but I want to start small.
And I think that we, you know, there's nothing better that we could do for Canadian children than getting this sick propaganda off of their screens, off their cell phones, off Snapchat, off Twitter, off wherever the CBC Kids has their tentacles.
So we have a petition, shutdowncbckids.com.
And we want to deliver that to the CBC headquarters because there is nothing more important in situations like this than protecting the children of Canada.
And when the CBC, you know, I trust adults to understand exactly how sick and deranged the people at the CBC are.
But with children, it's a little bit more complicated.
And they don't have a developed frontal cortex to understand that what the government is feeding them is sick and twisted.
So adults need to step in here and shut down the depravity that's happening at CBC Kids.
So you can see the whole petition at shutdowncbckids.com.
Yeah.
Here, let me just play a minute of a particular trans video on that.
I mean, this is a kids' channel aimed at kids.
It's called for kids.
It's not something that kids might accidentally watch, like a grown-up show if they're staying up late.
a quick look at this.
I'm a 12-year-old hyper queen, meaning a 12-year-old female drag queen.
My drag name is also my real name.
Simple.
I'm Jason Kerr.
And my drag name is Susan Lee Anthony.
My name is Nemes.
My drag name is Lactatia.
I'm Stefan.
And my drag name is Laddie Gaga.
Yeah, just absolutely nuts.
I have to say, even as the United States pulls back from transgender extremism in things like sports and washrooms, even as the UK pulls back from some of the gender reassignment surgery, I think Canada is one of the regimes that's going full tilt on this stuff.
Well, congrats again to you and your team, Kian, on your coverage of this.
And for the third time, I'll say it's obviously a very heavy and sorrowful thing, but that should not stop us from being aggressive in our journalism.
And you guys absolutely did a great job, a world-beating job.
And I salute you for that.
By the way, I don't want to tease people, but next week, Rebel News and Juno News are going to have a surprise announcement of a collab, as the kids say.
I don't want to give anything away till next week.
But for those who like Rebel and Juno News, have we got something for you?
And I'm sorry to tease you.
We'll release all the info next week.
Kian, congrats to the team.
Pass on my best regards to Juno News and keep it up.
We'll do.
Thank you very much, Ezra.
All right.
There he is.
Kean Becksti, alumnus of Rebel News and co-founder of Juno News.
Stay with us.
letters to me next.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me on the trans shooter.
Votes Counted Digitally00:02:33
K.H. Walker has a long letter.
He says, British Columbia has had two mass casualty events with 20 people dead in the last 10 months since the soft on crime evil NDP David Eby were re-elected on October 19th, 2024.
That was the first BC provincial election in Canadian history where ballots and votes were counted digitally by scanning into a computer scanner instead of being counted by human witnesses with human scrutineers watching.
We need a free and fair election where ballot and votes are counted in the old-fashioned way with human counters and scrutineers and not scanned into computers.
In Washington State, since there are only mail-in votes counted by computer scanning, no conservative government has been elected or even come close.
If you don't have a nonviolent mechanism to throw the bums out, it's not a democracy.
There is a lot of truth there.
I didn't know about that new method of counting votes, but absolutely, for me, it's pen and paper, pencil and paper.
You know, I was in the UK for one of their by-elections, actually, the one where Nigel Farage was elected to parliament.
And all the voting boxes are brought into one place from all over the constituency.
They're all brought to one place where they're in a room and they're sorted and counted and sorted and counted again.
Everything's by hand.
They actually don't finish up till like two or three in the morning, but everyone is there.
And by the way, all the different candidates are there too, which I thought was sort of fun.
They might be lingering over dinner at their different head offices, but they all come together to the same counting room to find out the result.
I thought it was pretty cool.
Holy smokes, were they ever up late?
But what I took away from it was you can actually trust the count there.
I'm not sure if we could say that in other places, and you make a good case for BC's problems.
Pete says, should we as a society not be asking questions after a mass shooting?
If the shooter was known to police and had weapons seized, why were they seized?
And on what basis did a judge or tribunal decide to return the guns?
Yeah, I'm worried that they did it out of political correctness.
They didn't want to get into a political tussle with a transgender activist.
Cyberdex says, it seems most of the trans shooters, even the trans men in the U.S., were on blockers at an early age and all are early 20s.
Perhaps the blockers are not as wonderful as it's claimed.
You start pumping people with hormones and other drugs, and you are just, you're, look, I'm not a doctor, but it seems like it's self-evidence that you're going to magnify or accelerate any Overenthusiasm, shall we say?
Focus On Fixing Things00:00:37
You drive people crazy.
These kids are hormonal to begin with.
They're going through puberty.
They're trying to figure things out.
This killer in BC apparently started to transition at age 12.
Oh my God.
I don't know.
Just a heartbreak everywhere.
But you can't just be focused on the sorrow and the heartbreak.
You have to be focused on fixing things.
And there is some real politics to blame here.
Heavy day.
That's our show for the day.
Until next week, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.