Ezra Levant exposes Mark Carney's revival of Trudeau-era censorship via Bill C9, detailing Rebel News' 2019 and 2021 bans by the Debates Commission. He critiques Michelle Cormier's attempt to cancel media scrums and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh's refusal to answer questions about church arsons, which the CBC dismissed as misinformation. Levant warns that Bill C9 criminalizes quoting scripture and targets feelings rather than violent crimes, noting how Liberal-Bloc support stripped religious defenses despite opposition from major faith groups. Ultimately, the segment argues mainstream media fails to defend free speech against this legislative "bait and switch." [Automatically generated summary]
It's become a signature move of the Mark Carney Liberals censorship in one or many ways.
Unfortunately, they've revived one of the worst censorship bills from the Trudeau era to make it their own.
I'll go through it with Andrew Lawton, a conservative critic who's been fighting for free speech.
I'll also show you what happened today when the regulator of the Federal Debates Commission appeared before Parliament to answer questions.
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Now, let's get into it.
Tonight, Mark Carney picks up where Trudeau left off as a censor.
It's March 12th, and this is the Ezra Levance Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
I think there's a theme to today's show and it's freedom of speech.
Fighting the Censorship Ban00:03:42
Later on in the program, we're going to talk to our old friend, Andrew Lawton.
We got to know him as a journalist and an activist, and he was one of the few journalists who would go to Davo, Switzerland with Juneau News.
And we were there with Rebel News, and we were allies in scrumming the VBIPs who go there to be unaccountable as they become the masters of the universe and issue proclamations about the way the rest of us should live.
Andrew was great to work with as a journalist.
Now that he's an MP in the Conservative Party representing a London, Ontario area district, I'm pleased to say he's kept that same free speech spirit alive.
In fact, I should just tell you that in 2019, Andrew and True North, as it was then known, and us at Rebel News went to court together to fight against the federal government's Leadership Debate Commission attempt to ban independent journalists.
Andrew was banned and Rebel News was banned.
We were in court together as the underdogs and it really felt like a miracle.
I've had some amazing days in my life, but to go into federal court in Toronto and to try and get a judge to overturn the Trudeau regime's ban on us, I just thought that was such an uphill battle.
I remember our lawyers saying, you're not going to win.
Please pay in advance.
Hey, I don't blame them.
And we won.
And that really gave me hope.
And I don't know, maybe you don't want too many hopeful things because it's just going to set you up for a letdown.
But actually, the hope was well placed.
And we went there.
And then in 2021, the Debates Commission banned us again.
But this time they had spent two years sort of reverse engineering how to ban us by studying first court ruling.
You've probably heard me say this before.
The first court ruling said they didn't ban us legally because they didn't give us proper reasons.
They didn't have proper rules.
The wrong person banned us, etc.
So they had two years to study that and reverse engineer a way to ban us that complied with those standards, an 11-page detailed explanation of why we were banned, lots of rules, an official government.
So all the little objections made by that first judge, they fixed them.
So by the time we were banned in 2021, well, our lawyer said, Ezra, just so you know, it's hopeless.
I'm happy to do it for you, but really want your expectations to be at zero.
And they sort of were.
And then it truly was a miracle when the second time around the court says, no, you guys can get in.
I tell you all this because we have been fighting for freedom of speech since we were born 11 years ago.
And we love working with civil liberties groups.
Of course, we helped create the Democracy Fund by getting our Rebel News viewers to donate to it.
We admire other civil liberties groups like my friend John Carpe, the Justice Center.
But Rebel News itself has taken on a big burden of fighting for freedom of speech.
And yes, we are often the party involved, the plaintiff involved, but that's because we're on the front line of the freedom battle.
I mean, there's a reason why Rebel News is fighting to be accredited and more bland regime vanilla journalists aren't because they're not being banned because they're not pushing the envelope.
When we went after cabinet ministers banning conservatives from following them on Twitter, of course it happened to us.
We're the pointy edge of the spear.
We're the first one into the fray.
So it is going to happen to us disproportionately.
It's a battle I love because I enjoy reporting the news and telling the other side of the story.
But you know us.
At Rebel News, every once in a while we stop and get involved.
We don't just report as outsiders.
Media Scrums and Access00:15:50
So today, in addition to an interview with my friend Andrew Lawton about Bill C9, a censorship bill, and we'll get into that discussion with him, I want to show you an extract from our live stream that we had today when the head of the debates commission, Michelle Cormier is his name, testified before a committee in Parliament.
And I'm not going to show you all of it because it was too long.
And a lot of it was boring and frankly, I think uninteresting to our viewers.
But I want to show you some clips that were very interesting.
There were some great questions put to him by one particular conservative MP who sort of blasted Cormier in a diplomatic way for having opinions on which questions from the media were allowed or not.
That there were some questions that were, what was the phrase he used, that they were, you'll see the exact phrase that Michelle Cormier used, that they were basically irrelevant or outside the mainstream.
Who the heck is he to say that?
There were other questions about what's the point of having a debates commission if you're not allowing a journalist to scrum.
Oh, that's the word that he used was peripheral, that Rebel News was asking peripheral questions.
Says who?
Are you the adjudicator of what an interesting question or not is?
Anyways, so Cormier, the head of the debates commission, was before Parliament today.
And there's strange questions from the Bloc Ébécois who were saying that rebels' presence there was a security threat.
It was a lot of weirdness, but the weirdest part of all was what everyone seemed to accept, which was that the government is in charge of these debates.
And by the way, they get paid millions to do it.
Anyway, without further ado, here are some extracts from the live stream from Parliament where I was sort of giving a bit of a running commentary.
Hey, take a look.
I want to return to something that came up for discussion the last time you were here and you made mention of it.
And that is the post-debate media scrum.
Which, you know, I think a lot of Canadians would agree with his statement that that's the best part.
Yeah.
And now, and it became.
Well, for the, Maybe not for the participants, but certainly for Canadians tuning in, because that's when they really see the rough and tumble of the media and how the prospective leaders are scrutinizing, but now you're cancelling it altogether, I understand.
Yeah, well, it seems a bit defeatist.
It's a recommendation for the next commissioner at this point.
It's not official policy now.
And yes, we are recommending that the debate that the Commission not organize scrums because we're in a media environment where you have a lot of different media actors that don't fit into any categories, and that has caused some tension and confusion in the accreditation process and the scrums afterward, in the management of the scrums.
Just so I have clarity on this, you're saying that you don't want to manage the scrum.
Does that mean that there will be no scrum, or will it still go ahead?
We will not organize the scrum.
If the parties want to actually scrum after the debates, they're free to do it.
Our position is that the campaign begins again after the debates are over.
So $3 million would be the responsibility.
And they can't have a scrum because it's confusing with these new journalists.
We feel that's the best solution to make sure that the attention is also on the debates and not on other peripheral issues.
Peripheral issues.
And it's not in the mandate of the Commission to do so.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
The scrum isn't peripheral issues.
Those are the issues that the media think are important.
Well, I think they are important issues, but I think the Commission is in a position where it's difficult to actually assure that there's an environment that actually goes well for everybody in that case.
Goes well for everybody?
What does that mean?
So we've made that recommendation, and we'll see whether the next Commissioner agrees with it or not.
What does that even mean?
Thank you so much.
I don't think these are the questions that you put to the head of the debates commission who just announced he's shutting down the scrum because he wants all the politicians to be happy with the outcome and he doesn't want confusion with peripheral questions.
Who cares about staff one or staff two?
I mean the whole thing's illegitimate to have a government agency running it.
But what a laugh to focus on this rather than the censorship.
Just to be clear, in your recommendations, there's one that states that the Commission will no longer be organizing media scrums.
But if I understood correctly, you would like for the Commission to continue accrediting journalists.
Yes, we will.
That raises a few questions.
There had been issues with the media scrum last time because five journalists from Rebel News had been accredited and that raised security concerns.
Security concerns, you weird liar.
Is this not a way of shifting blame if you're responsible for journalists' accreditations and if there are five or six from Rebel News who are accredited, well then if they want to participate in a press conference organized by somebody else with different accreditation criteria, that will lead to issues.
There are accreditation requests that are refused given the criteria set by different political parties as well.
So this raises an issue that goes beyond the Commission.
What or who makes up a journalist?
Some have told us that we don't have the authority to decide.
And so we have a very large definition of a journalist, and we include different models of journalism.
But during the last election, it created a problematic environment for a lot of journalists.
And it also raised issues with press conferences that were counterproductive.
Counterproductive.
They were not productive for anyone.
Really?
Who decides that?
How do you decide that?
So we...
Because there were questions about...
And I was a journalist for a large part of my career, so we did not do this happily.
It's not because we don't want journalists to have access to the leaders.
They'll have better quality access to the leaders if the different parties' campaigns are responsible for these scrums, or they can choose to accredit the journalists that they would like to see.
We have to accept journalists who focus on issues that impact society, and so that opens the door to actors who are not necessarily traditional journalists, and that can lead to tensions and situations that are problematic for debates.
Problematic for the debates.
Perhaps I can ask you to clarify.
During a campaign, parliamentarians can accredit journalists and choose who follows them into scrums and all of that.
And from the answers that you gave to Mr. Wilkinson, there's funding for accreditation and badges, but if journalists, after the fact, don't have access to those leaders under the Commission, why accredit journalists at all?
Exactly.
It's for the event.
We're talking about the debates.
We're saying that parties can organize scrums and press conferences as they do during the campaign.
But they could accredit journalists.
So why would the Commission need to accredit journalists if they are not getting access to a scrum after the debates?
A lot of journalists don't follow the campaign but would want to follow the debates.
We had 60 organizations last time, media organizations, including 200 journalists.
So there's a lot of interest in participating in the debates.
Participating?
These just canceled the participating part.
For them to have use of certain elements from the debates and give them a space.
A space for what?
We're not allowed to do that.
There's something else that I don't understand.
Journalists who are on site, how do they have increased access with an accreditation?
How would their access be increased versus someone who's watching from home?
Exactly, if the debates are canceled.
If the scrums are cancelled.
What is the main benefit of having that physical access to debates?
This lady's with the Block Quibécois by the way.
Well, they can have a quality recording from these media rooms, these workrooms.
What?
A quality recording?
That's the first thing.
Journalists also have access to party staff because they are also in that debate environment.
They can do interviews for meetings.
So they have access to that environment of the debates, which is an interesting environment for journalists.
If it wasn't a very important thing, he's stretching.
Were the former accreditations given because journalists had an expectation to be able to participate in a media scrum?
In 2020, 2021, the debates were here in Ottawa.
There were very few journalists who went to the media scrums after debates because they were already working on their media reports.
And that's a fact.
And so I think that journalists are interested in covering the debates in person.
So for matters such as this, I think it's helpful to look at other countries and what they do and learn from best practices from other countries.
So I looked up what they do in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and France.
They all have elections.
They all have leaders' debates, but none of them has a government-run debates commission.
They're all run by the networks or the private sector, all at no cost to taxpayers.
So I'm wondering why does Canada need any of this?
Why don't we hand the entire matter over to the private sector and save the taxpayers $3 million?
Well, in the case of the United States, there is a commission on presidential debates that organizes the debates that is not organized by the networks.
But it's not funded by the government.
No, it's funded.
It's actually funded privately and run by the two main parties, Republicans, and the Democrats.
Other G7 countries, the ones you named, don't have a commission.
But there was a discussion after the British election that maybe a commission wouldn't be a bad idea.
And it was also considered in Australia.
So that's always a project.
It's there.
Mexico has a commission, a full-time commission, to run debates.
There are other smaller countries who do that.
But like I said, maybe you should take that question up with the minister.
I mean, I was hired to do the job.
I do the job.
And I can't opine on whether this is a good point.
He was appointed by the liberal politicians.
He didn't create his own job.
Justin Trudeau did, and Mark Carney's keeping it.
Yes, and that's fair.
If you've been hired to do the job, perhaps it's not your place to decide whether the job should exist in the first place.
But I was wondering if you've ever studied and made recommendations to the minister about what would happen if the debates commission did not exist in the first place.
Well, we haven't given a lot of thought to that because in 2015 I was organizing the debates for Radio Canada when there was no English debate, national English debate.
They were small debates.
And it was very, very unstable in terms of the environment.
That's why the Commission was created, to stabilize the environment.
And I think we've managed to do that.
I mean, debates now are expected.
There is no speculation whether they will happen or not.
They were kind of a fixture of the campaigns.
They are becoming even a more important event in the campaign because we see the ratings go up.
So we also provide the debate experience to communities that may not be touched by network-run debates because they wouldn't have access to all these languages, including indigenous communities.
I think that's very important if you want to grow democracy and access to actually political participation.
So these are maybe intangibles in your mind, but I think there are important aspects, and I think that's what drives also the Commission.
Plus, we do study the best practices.
I think we've improved on what is the best format for debates, which is not a panel of journalists, which was the tradition here.
It ends up being leaders grilled by journalists.
As to what we prefer is one moderator that actually encourages debates among the leaders, which is the nature of a political debate in the first place.
So I think that is very important.
And they provide, in this world of misinformation, of manipulation, of AI, it's one of the few, if not the only, occasion that people have to see their leaders live in an unedited fashion, where they can actually believe what they see on the screen and they see them interact.
He's been told to mention AI just to seem hip.
He's not an AI man.
There's really nothing AI about any of this.
This structure is in place and these best practices are in place.
Could this all be transitioned to a group of networks and done at no cost to the taxpayers?
Of course, that's how it was for the last hundred years.
I don't think it would be done in this format.
I mean, as you well know, media organizations have very severe financial problems, given the new environment of advertising.
Questioning Jagmeet Singh00:06:34
And even in Quebec last time, Tevea, that organizes a separate French debate, did not manage to put one on, mainly, according to them, for financial reasons.
So I don't think that I'm not sure that the financial or environment is conducive to such a transfer that you're talking about.
I think, you know, but like I say, maybe it's a question for Parliament to decide.
Okay.
Well, very disappointing in so many ways.
I think some of the most interesting parts were Michelle Cormier admitting that the reason they have banned the after-debate scrum with the candidates is because they can't control the questions that are asked.
He called the questions asked by independent media like Rebel News, and there were more independent media there this year, last year, called those questions peripheral.
So you see the government is choosing what the topics are that you're allowed to think about or not.
It was interesting that he said some regime journalists have as many as 20 different journalists accredited for this event when there was all sorts of squawking about the fact that Rebel News had five journalists accredited, which is a fraction of what the large, I mean, the CBC probably had 100 people there, let's be honest.
The questioning by almost all the MPs was useless.
I was embarrassed for the Bloc Québécois, who you would think would be supportive of alternative or dissident voices.
No.
They actually had, I mean, I'm sure that MP had no idea what she was talking about, where she implied that Rebel News was somehow to blame, yeah, to blame for asking questions.
Let me show you one of the questions that Drea Humphrey asked of Jagmeet Singh.
If you don't remember who Jagmeet Singh is, don't worry, no one else does.
Most people didn't remember him when he was actually still the NDP leader, but it was an excellent question that an enormous number of Canadians care about.
And Jagmeet Singh said basically, no, I'm not going to answer that.
And then the CBC came into white night for Jagmeet Singh, saying that Drea was a liar.
Here, I want to play for you, Drea's question, which you'll see is an excellent question.
But this is what Michelle Cormier and the cool kids say.
No, this is a peripheral question.
And then I want to show you the freak out by the CBC.
Here's Drea Humphrey.
Take a look.
Hello, Mr. Singh.
Drea Humphrey with Rebel News.
Your party takes great pride in standing against hate, such as white supremacy, Islamophobia, and all.
Sorry, I didn't get your outlet.
Drea Humphrey with Rebel News.
Okay.
Your party.
You know where I'm going to go with this, though, right?
Can I speak?
Yeah, you can.
I'm just going to say, you know where I'm going to go with it, though.
Your party takes pride in standing against hate, such as white supremacy, Islamophobia, and online hate speech.
Yet you stay silent about ongoing attacks against Christians, even after conservative MP Jamil Giovanni's order paper question revealed that over 200 churches have been targeted by arson and vandalism since claims of remains being discovered at former residential schools swept the nation in 2021.
These claims have been disproven by bans that excavated and remain unproven by those that have not.
Will you condemn the rise in acts of hate against Christians today and explain what your party will do moving forward to keep Christians safe from hate in Canada?
Again, thank you, but I'm not going to respond to an organization that promotes misinformation and disinformation like Rebel News.
So no, I'm not going to respond to your question.
So that answer was appalling.
I mean, Jagmeet Singh is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and he didn't know how to answer the question.
So just saying, oh, that's misinformation.
I'm not going to talk to you, is his way out of answering a good question.
You couldn't hear it there because the mic didn't pick it up.
Other journalists started screaming or hollering or heckling at Dre.
I was right there.
I heard the heckling.
It was outrageous.
This was one of those peripheral questions that you're not allowed to ask.
Let me show you.
So, so gross.
The CBC was watching this too.
And they just couldn't stand the fact that Drea asked a question that they didn't approve of.
Here, take a quick look at Rosemary Barton and the other gross, gross, gross liberals who pretend to be journalists of the CBC Tickle.
Okay, so that was NDP leader Jagmeet Singh.
Up next will be conservative leader Pierre Polyev.
But I think we have to sort of address the elephant in the room.
How are these people chosen to answer these questions?
And I don't know if either one of you have an answer for that, but I think there will be people at home saying, some of these seem like odd questions.
Some of them aren't getting answered.
How come we've heard so often from this one particular outlet?
Any idea what's going on?
There's three right-wing, very right-wing media.
We can call them media websites that are present in there.
They get in line to ask a question like anybody else.
Their accreditation has been approved by the Commission of Debates.
And so they get the right to stand in line and ask a question that they choose to ask.
In this case, you saw Mr. Singh, and this has been his position for some time, to refuse to answer questions, rebel news in particular, traffics and misinformation, facts, lack of misinformation.
As you heard in that question, which was woven with some truth and some things that weren't true.
Yes, there have been burnings of Christian Catholic churches.
Yes, there have been remains of Indigenous children found in various places around the country, which she misrepresented.
We'll see if Mr. Polyev gets any questions from right-wing organizations.
I would suspect no.
Well, first of all, I personally asked a question to Pierre Polynesia.
Sorry, Sheila Gunri did.
So Rosemary Barton is a foolish liar.
But second of all, she got it wrong.
And she actually had to, the CBC had to post a correction.
Drea Humphrey had her facts right.
That Rosemary Barton was a wicked liar.
But what's so incredible to me is you can see, like 365 days a year, the regime media have access to the regime.
That's why they're called the regime media.
The CBC is literally the state broadcaster.
So 365 days a year, they lob softballs at the liberals, and they get sort of their talking points from the liberals.
The one day every four years where other journalists can ask a question, they just can't stand it.
They can't stand.
And by the way, Jack Mean Singh took the question and he answered it in whatever way he wanted to.
I think Jack Mean Singh looked stupid, which he sort of is, I think.
Pushing Back on Censorship00:08:46
But that wasn't good enough.
Rosemary Barton had to come in and white night for him and save him from the misinformation.
It's so gross, but I think Dre did a great job.
And see, we went to court in 2009 and we won when they refused to accredit us.
So they changed how they did it.
And they refused to accredit us again in 2020.
2019 was the first time they banned us.
We won in court.
2021, they tried to ban us again.
We went to court and won again.
So twice in a row, the Federal Court of Canada said you can't keep Rebel News out just because you don't like them.
And they couldn't find a way to keep Rebel out, but not others.
We're too political.
Yeah, what do you think the CBC and the Toronto Star are?
We have too many reporters there.
No, you just heard there's 20 for the CTV.
We had five.
So they really, well, what else could they possibly say?
We're Canadian.
We cover the news.
We have a large and growing viewership.
They couldn't find a principle, a rationale, a role, a rule to keep us out that also wouldn't keep the regime out.
So twice in a row, the federal court says, no, you've got to let Rebel News in.
So in 2025, last year, in the last election, we applied.
And that Michelle Cormier, who we were showing earlier, he correctly knew that if we had to take him to court a third time, that they would lose.
And by the way, if judge number one says you're wrong, you're violating their constitutional rights, and judge number two says you're wrong, you're violating their constitutional rights, and you do it a third time, you know, I have an imagination, but I cannot imagine what a third judge would do if a government agency twice broke the law and came back a third time and had to be hauled into court.
I, you know, hell hath no fury like a federal court that has been spurned three times.
So Michelle Cormier very wisely said, okay, we're going to let rebel news in without having to go to court.
And so they thought, well, how can we do this?
How can we stop rebel news from asking peripheral questions without stopping everyone?
How?
And they came up with only one idea, which was just shut down all the questions.
Hey, let me show you on the screen right now.
A weird thing happened.
I was there, and then I walked in, and all the other journalists were so excited that it turned into a little scrum.
Can you play that?
Can you go back in time 60 seconds and play this with the sound up?
There was a funny moment.
I gave a bit of a speech because everyone started swarming me.
Take a look.
And heart to heart with Mr. Cormier.
And I think we found common ground.
Well, I don't know what it is, yesterday I think the independent journalists were a little bit too independent.
And the regime journalists are too friendly with the regime.
And I've seen a full work press by region journalists over the last 24 hours to bring in limits to what independent journalists can do.
I mean, third-party advertisers, that's right.
And you talk about the $180,000 we're spending to do advertising voter contact, both through 4 Canada and into Rebel News Network Limited.
So you're wrong on that.
And that's what concerns me, is that 4 Canada is a different group that was registered.
It paid $120,000 to Rebel News Network Limited.
Is that not true?
You're getting your facts wrong, Justin.
I want to make sure you're careful.
That guy, he was heckling me.
We were actually talking.
I just forgot his name, but he was the same guy who was heckling Drea, literally trying to shout her down.
It was really gross.
We're not leaving.
The CBC were outraged that Mr. Cormier let us in.
The CBC had four questions yesterday.
Rebel News had four questions yesterday.
The CBC thinks that's normal, and it's abnormal against.
Was he talking to you about your credit centre asking questions, or was it about being the internet here?
It was about neither.
It was actually about, what's his name, the volume of the CBC?
Anyways, it was sort of fun that the Rebel News, all those regime journalists just couldn't believe that Rebel News was allowed in there, and they tried to kick us out, and they tried to stop us, and they made mean complaints about us.
And Michelle Cormier didn't block us, but he did something really weird.
He shut down the entire Q ⁇ A session for the second debate, and that's his recommendation going forward.
So you were put in charge of the leaders' debates by the government to improve them and improve access to them and improve engagement by Canadians, but you wind up shutting down the Q ⁇ A because one little media company, once every election cycle, could ask a question or two you didn't like.
And so you're going to destroy the whole thing.
In parliamentary committee today, I was disappointed in all the MPs, really, other than I think Taco Van Popta, the Conservative MP, had some good questions that he put about freedom and peripheral questions not being peripheral.
Those were the best ones.
The block was sort of embarrassing.
The Liberals were just running out the clock.
And there were a couple other Conservatives that spoke there.
Blaine Calkins was one, and I think Michael Cram was the other.
And they were weak.
Like one of them was asking, what's it like in other countries?
And one was asking financial questions.
I suppose that was technically the reason for this meeting.
But you have one of Trudeau's appointed censors whose proposal is to shut down any Q ⁇ A for the journalists at a leaders debate.
And you're not going to ask about that.
I think the Conservative Party really dropped the ball today.
And I like Blaine Calkins, but I think he failed today.
And I think Michael Cram completely failed too.
Taco Van Popta, thumbs up.
The Liberals, of course, were liberaling.
They were just running out the clock for their friend.
The idea that we're spending $739,000 a year just for the Debates Commission to hang around in non-election years, that is a rounding error in terms of the federal government, but it's actually also insane that we're paying people three-quarters of a million dollars every year to do nothing all year unless there's an election debate called and then they go into $3 million mode.
Why are we paying for having a debate that, first of all, other media companies would do?
Second of all, other media companies would make into a moneymaker.
If it was so popular on TV, and by the way, he's lying.
19 million people did not watch that on TV.
He's counting social media clips by companies like Rebel News.
Why are we paying any money at all to have the government take over our journalism and our debates?
It's sort of gross.
But I think today it's a big fail for Parliament, including for the opposition parties, who I think can do better in the future.
I don't know if they will.
Well, what do you think?
I was actually a little disappointed in a couple of the conservatives.
They didn't have sharp questions at all.
They were asking irrelevancies.
They didn't defend freedom of speech.
I felt like they were not prepared.
Maybe it's just not important to them, but I think it's important to Canadians.
We have to push back on censorship.
And a lot of bad things were done under Trudeau's administration, but they have continued on with their own inertia and momentum into Carney's administration.
I'm worried about it.
And that brings us to our next segment: my interview with my friend, MP, Andrew Lawton.
Take a look.
As I've said on more than one occasion, Justin Trudeau brought in more bills designed to regulate and censor the internet than any other subject.
More than about inflation, more than about housing, more than about the Ukraine-Russia war.
If you judge a man by what he spends his efforts to do, you would say Justin Trudeau's most important issue was censorship.
We have a new prime minister.
He's been in office for a year.
And unfortunately, he's chosen to revive Justin Trudeau's censorship and regulation agenda.
The bills have new numbers now because the old parliament was dissolved.
Trudeau's Censorship Agenda Revived00:14:04
Bill C9 is one that's particularly troublesome.
Joining us now to talk about it and analyze it is our friend and former journalist and current member of parliament for the London, Ontario area, Andrew Lawton, who's been following us closely.
Andrew, great to see you again.
Hey, thanks for having me on, Ezra.
Andrew, what I like about you is you come from a journalistic background.
And when you were a journalist, you were very sensitive to matters of censorship.
And you brought that ethical concern with you to Parliament.
So, first of all, thank you.
Tell me the latest on Bill C9.
There's so many numbers because the bills are changed and there's new ones.
Maybe tell us what the short English name of the bill is and give us a bit of a summary and then dive right into it.
Well, the Liberals call it the Combating Hate Act.
Now, at committee yesterday, I tried to amend the title to the Combating Freedom of Expression Act, but sadly, the Liberals did not accept my proposed alternative, which would have been a heck of a lot more accurate.
Now, look, you and I know very well, Ezra, that over the last two and a half years, there's been a tremendous unleashing of brazen, violent, anti-Semitic hate on streets.
We've also seen hate and attacks against Christian houses of worship, 123 churches burned or vandalized in the last five years.
But no community is going to be protected from hate by legislation that actually takes aim at their fundamental religious freedoms and all free expression rights for Canadians.
And that's what Bill C9 does.
As presented by the Liberals, it changes the definition of hate, replacing the one the Supreme Court has always held to with a definition that has a much lower bar and a lot more ambiguity behind it.
The Liberals tried to remove a critical safeguard against laying a hate speech prosecution, which was the requirement that the Attorney General consent to a charge.
We've also seen a bill that adds a new standalone hate offense that can be tacked on to any other federal law in Canada.
Is that C9 or is that a different bill?
This is Bill C9.
Oh, my.
It adds a standalone hate offense that can be tacked on to any other federal law, including non-criminal laws like the Canadian Human Rights Act, which means you could have a criminal penalty attached to a civil infraction.
So these were some of the concerns.
We were able to mitigate some of these things through the committee process.
Attorney General consent is still going to be required.
We were able to get an amendment passed yesterday that restores the definition of hate.
But a lot of the key concerns with the bill went unaddressed by the liberals, including the most egregious, which was the liberal bloc amendment to remove long-standing religious speech protections, often called the religious defense from the criminal code.
This is basically to go back to what Mark Miller has said on record: the government wants the ability to criminally charge you for quoting certain verses of scripture, whether it's the Bible or the Torah, if the government views it as hateful.
And this is why so many people of faith across the country rose up, and the liberals didn't want to hear from them.
They didn't want to hear what they had to say.
So they censored debate on the censorship bill.
This week used parliamentary tricks to force this bill through committee, which happened yesterday.
And it will be coming back to the House of Commons for a very abbreviated, quote-unquote, debate that will last just a couple of days before the bill gets pushed through to the Senate.
Isn't that interesting?
Because Justin Trudeau, I'm not going to say he slow walked the bills.
Maybe he was just personally lazy.
Maybe his government moved more slowly.
But Trudeau was in office for about 10 years and he didn't manage to get out his, I think he called it C63, the online harms bill, which had some of the elements here.
It looks like Mark Carney is moving faster and using parliamentary tactics to hustle things along.
Can I ask you how have the NDP and Block Quebecois responded?
Because I recall when Trudeau was bringing in censorship, they were totally supportive.
I assume that's the case now also.
So it depends on what you mean.
So on Bill C9, at the beginning, every party but the liberals were against it.
The conservatives were against it.
The NDP were against it.
The Block of Bécois were against it.
The Greens were, well, sorry, the Green was against it.
And that was, I think, very important.
And that was why the Liberals made this unholy alliance with the Block of Ecois to remove religious freedoms in exchange for the Bloc support of the bill.
Block of Ecois has long sought to push this very radical secularization of society.
The NDP has said they are against Bill C9 still.
So has the Green MP, Elizabeth May.
But the Liberal and the Bloc combined have enough.
Now, this is just on C9.
The Liberals have said that the Online Harms Act, which was C63 in the previous parliament, is going to be coming back.
We don't know in what form it will take.
We don't know if it's just going to be a cut and paste of what they tried before or if they're going to acknowledge some of the freedom of speech concerns there.
And that's an incredibly harmful piece of legislation as well.
And you're right.
The NDP previously was in lockstep with the liberals on that.
You know, I see in Toronto, there's been several synagogues that have been shot up in the last week.
The U.S. consulate shot up a couple of days later.
I think it looks like it's more than a coincidence.
It wouldn't surprise me that these are connected.
There have been Jewish schools and other places that have been shot and vandalized, etc.
And the liberals seem to keep on saying our answer is C9.
Our answer is to criminalize the feeling of hate as opposed to going after the expression of hate through crime.
Like there's been an anti-Semitic crime wave, and I'm not talking about feelings or that.
I'm talking about assault and trespass and harassment and vandalism and shooting and stalking of synagogues.
All these things are already on the books.
It seems to me that the liberals don't want to actually stop the actions of crime.
They won't deport the doers of crime.
They won't deport the 700 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iranian terrorists.
They just want to go after feelings.
And I don't think that they mean to target anti-Semitic haters.
I think they actually mean to go after people like me and you, like truckers, like, you know, peaceful critics, people who, like, I think that they intend to go after street preachers on the corner.
I don't think they plan to use this to go after any Semites.
By the way, they haven't even found those gunmen.
So I think that this is a bait and switch.
I think this is a misdirection.
That's my feeling about it.
It'll do not only do nothing to stop this real crime wave, but it'll give them the power in this.
They're using the emergency of synagogues being shot up to ram through a bill that will allow them to go after their political enemies.
That's my hunch.
Call me a skeptic or even paranoid, but that's what I think.
What do you think?
Well, I think that we already have, as you've indicated there, issues with selective enforcement of existing laws.
So if existing laws are not being enforced fairly or effectively, then new laws are not going to solve this underlying problem.
And it was quite despicable for the Liberals to get up in the House of Commons and try to use these synagogue shootings this week as justification to pass Bill C9.
Not a single liberal or anyone else for that matter could point to a single line in Bill C9 that if it were part of law now, would do anything about these acts and these brazen attacks.
And moreover, the people who are calling for violence, the people who are threatening violence, the people who are inciting and calling for genocide, already subject to criminal code prohibitions and not saved by the religious defense.
The religious defense only applies to hate speech.
None of the sections dealing with violence.
But the liberals are trying to hide behind their own inaction and failure to lead and failure to unite the country in the midst of this hate.
And they're using that as justification to go after lawful and what should be free expression.
Yeah, I find it very troublesome.
And I think that their answer is: here's a few million dollars more for bulletproof glass.
I think that signals that they're not doing anything proactively.
They're just saying, oh, you got to brace yourselves.
You will be shot in the future.
Hopefully, this will just stop the glass from shattering.
It's not proactive.
It's certainly not deporting foreign national agents, provocateurs, like the 700 terrorists I mentioned earlier.
I'm very worried about this.
Let me ask you: do we have any allies?
Are there any civil liberties groups?
Sometimes the left-leaning civil liberties groups actually do speak up on these things.
Are there any other sources of political power?
Is there anyone in the Senate that cares?
The Senate is generally a creature of the Kearney Liberals, but not always.
Is there anyone fighting against this, Andrew, besides you?
Well, look, I think I've obviously been, and the Conservative Party has been the most vocal critic of it, but I've actually been quite heartened by how much opposition to Bill C-9 there has been from left and right.
It's been denounced by the Canadian Constitution Foundation, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and among faith communities.
Pretty much every denomination and every religion in Canada is represented in the list of those who have, at least in whole or in part, condemned Bill C9.
And that includes Christian organizations from the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops to the United Church, which has been more aligned on the progressive side.
It's the Rabbinical Council of Toronto, the Orthodox Jewish Community.
And then you also had 350 Muslim organizations this week come out against Bill C9.
And there have even been a couple of liberal MPs that have been feeling a lot of pressure from their Muslim constituents and their Christian constituents alike.
Whether they'll be allowed to vote freely, I don't know.
A couple of them broke ranks with their party on a bill this week to do with an arms arms exports to the U.S. because of their Israel concerns.
So I don't know if Mark Carney will allow them to vote freely on Bill C9.
But as I said, every single party was against Bill C9 until the liberals made this deal to remove long-standing religious freedom protections.
And I think for some in their caucus, it might have been for political expediency.
But when you hear the comments from Mark Miller back in October, a lot of liberals fundamentally believe that you should be arrested and charged if you dare to vote verses of scripture they disagree with.
I appreciate you spending so much time with us.
My last question is, how about the media?
I think by nature, independent journalists are more free speech oriented.
But the big, slow-moving ancient battleships like the Globe and Mail comes to mind, they typically support Mark Carney.
In fact, they're a little bit radical, I think, in that.
But every once in a while, they do the right thing.
It's funny, Ezra.
I mean, just to give a long answer for a moment, I remember back in the trenches of the fight against Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which you would know all too well.
You were personally at the forefront of that.
And that was repealed, I think it was in 2013.
So 13 years ago.
And at the time, there was, I remember, a great deal of support from people in the mainstream media.
There were some principled, liberal, small L-liberal voices, even some big L-liberal voices.
I remember notably the Senator Jerry Grafstein, as well as some others that stood up for free speech because free speech was not a conservative value or a right-wing value.
It was a Canadian value.
And my goodness, in the 10 years between that and the Online Harms Act, it was so discouraging to see how many of those people withered away.
These principled voices that even would be in the pages of the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail on CBC defending freedom of expression from the left were gone.
The chorus of liberal members of parliament that at one point would have stood up for freedom of expression, but no longer are there.
This is, I think, incredibly concerning.
Free speech is something that should be a value that all Canadians hold to, but that sadly isn't the case.
There might be a couple of outliers here and there, but they are in the minority.
So I think it is important.
I will continue.
I said in my maiden speech that I came to Ottawa and I came to politics because I wanted to make Canada a freer place.
And Bill C9 has been obviously an example of the liberals trying to call my bluff on that pledge.
But we are going to continue to stand up for religious freedom.
And I will seek allies from wherever I can get on there.
So as far as senators are concerned, you know, I think there may be some that have some objections to C9 from the left.
I hope they are able to use their independence in the Senate that we often hear of and actually hold the government to account on this.
Give me just 30 more seconds.
Do you see in the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the CBC, or other traditionally liberal media, has there been a pundit, a commentator, someone who says, I love Mark Carney, but this is wrong?
Like, are there any liberal libertarians left in the media?
You know, there's been some reporting.
The National Post has done a little bit to its credit.
So has CBC.
As far as columnists go, though, I just haven't seen it.
I haven't seen this rise to the level.
I haven't seen the pundit class weighing in on this.
And I'm not expecting it at this point.
But I think independent media has done a bang up job.
I know MPs' offices have been getting besieged by well over 100,000 calls and even many more emails.
So Canadians are engaged on this.
Faith communities are engaged and will continue to fight for freedom.
Andrew, great to catch up with you.
What's the best way for people to follow you online or in other ways?
Look, I've been following this closely and I've been sharing updates and my clips from committee in the House of Commons on social media.
So if people want to follow me on X, I'm at Andrew Lawton.
And if they want to follow me on Facebook, you can find me at Andrew Lawton there.
Thank you, my friend.
Canadians Engaged in Fight00:00:26
Hope to keep in touch.
So glad you're fighting this fight.
Thank you.
There is Andrew Lawton, member of parliament from the London area.
Used to be a journalist and he's keeping the spirit of free speech alive.
Stay with us.
More ahead.
Well, that's our show for the day.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night and keep fighting For freedom.