A few Alberta men remove an illegal railroad blockade that the RCMP wouldn t, and the media goes nuts. It's February 20th, and this is the Ezra LeVant Show. Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer?
00:20:03.680Like, pull the camera back to 30,000 feet, calmly assess everything.
00:20:07.680And one of my favorite guys who has an uncanny ability to do that,
00:20:12.680whether we're talking about Canada-U.S. relations, intergovernmental affairs in Canada,
00:20:18.680is a fellow who I think got his savvy both by working as a businessman, a lawyer, and a senior advisor to former Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
00:20:27.680You know who I'm talking about, our friend Manny Montenegrino, CEO of ThinkSharp.
00:20:32.680And he joins us now via Skype from his Ottawa office.
00:21:28.680The blockades are a great example of it.
00:21:31.680I mean, as of the short history, this pipeline got approval by the National Energy Board some five or six years ago.
00:21:42.680And from that, there was 157 really strong binding conditions.
00:21:48.680So the National Energy Board, with a robust law that we have in Canada, almost crippled the project.
00:21:54.680But there was 157 conditions that then got appealed to the federal court, seven court federal court challenges for indigenous First Nations challenges.
00:22:04.680And that took a while to wind through the courts.
00:22:07.680And it finally got through the courts.
00:22:09.680And it took so long that the prime minister bought the the the the pipeline for four point five billion dollars.
00:22:17.680That's now estimated to be it's going to cost around twelve billion dollars.
00:24:21.680But as we showed when we sent a reporter out to the protest, they don't know what they're protesting.
00:24:26.680They're just against oil and gas and pipelines and anything industrial.
00:24:31.680It's so blurry in the minds of the public.
00:24:33.680And that's why I think this whole coastal gas link protest extravaganza is a precursor.
00:24:40.680I think it's basically the environmental extremists test drive their, you know, try out their tactics and see how the government responds on coastal gas link because their real big battle is to kill that trans mountain oil pipeline.
00:25:01.680And the public is getting fatigued by this.
00:25:04.680The public is getting stressed by this chaos and anarchy.
00:25:08.680My question to you, Manny, is will a stressed out public seeing lawlessness and blockades and barriers and canceled trains, will they say, ah, the heck with it, give these protesters what they want?
00:25:21.680Or will they say, the heck with this, crack down on these lawbreakers?
00:25:26.680Well, I think, you know, I think there's a lot of confusion in Canadians.
00:25:32.680Canadians are a very fair minded people, a very kind people.
00:25:37.680And here, Ezra, what I don't understand is why there hasn't been a complete overlook of what's happened in the last five years or six years.
00:25:46.680In the last few years, we had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
00:25:51.680And they it was a very expensive in the tens of millions of dollars.
00:25:56.680And they came up with ninety four recommendations.
00:25:58.680Some of them were, I would think, a way reaching recommendation.
00:26:04.680This government, Canada, every Canadian through their government accepted all the recommendations.
00:28:40.680Well, one of the weirdest things is that the individual people with whom the RCMP and Mark Miller, the Indigenous Affairs Minister, are meeting with directly.
00:28:51.680They didn't meet with the 20 Wet'suwet'en First Nations who approved this coastal gasoline pipeline.
00:28:58.680They met with individual status Indians, just an ordinary guy who was stabbed in a blockade.
00:29:06.680And in one case in Ontario, they met with a guy who was charged by the Aboriginal police themselves as an illegal drug dealer.
00:29:14.680So I find it absurd that just literally any, I'm going to use the word thug because if you're just someone who's like a drug dealer on an Indian band and the Indian police themselves arrest you, for you to have hours of one-on-one time with the Indian minister is so shocking to me.
00:29:36.680I find it so strange, and the only explanation is that Trudeau does not regard these lawbreakers as adverse parties.
00:29:45.680He doesn't regard himself in a conflict with them, but rather he regards them as his street teams, his stalking horses, the people getting the result he wants.
00:29:56.680I think Trudeau knows he couldn't himself cancel yet more pipelines, but if he can create a fuss in the courts or on the streets or with blockades, then he can throw up his hand and say, well, I tried, but we don't want another OCA, so guys, what can I do?
00:30:28.680And whether it's an intentional collusion or it's just manna from heaven for Butts and for the prime ministers to stop anything related to oil and gas, whatever the results are the same.
00:31:28.680Now, we've heard about the layoffs at TN.
00:31:31.680We've heard about, you know, there's a few thousand people, but there's a lot of people that are staying at home, whether they be farmers.
00:31:38.680They're kind of self unemployed right now until this ends.
00:31:41.680Or whether they work in the propane business or any other business that works with rail, they're not working on it.
00:31:47.680And that's about, and I've calculated, it's about 1% of Canada's workforce that has now been put out of work.
00:31:54.6801% of Canada's workforce is 200,000 people.
00:31:58.680And we only had growth of about 1% in recent quarters.
00:32:04.680That's enough to tip the entire country in a recession.
00:32:07.680If you've got 1% of the economy being idled, and we were only growing at about 1% a year, that is literally enough to put us into a recession.
00:32:17.680Well, it's, that's the big picture, but I'm going to, when you created the case, is the prime minister doing this intentionally?
00:32:26.680I'm, you know, what I'm amazed about is how we seem to get up in the morning and forget everything that's happened the last couple of years.
00:32:36.680I watched what I saw, what I thought as a lawyer, and I read the obstruction of justice section of the criminal code.
00:32:44.680And in my opinion, as well as five attorney generals in Canada, one liberal attorney general, the prime minister broke the law.
00:32:51.680He broke the law with SNC Lavalin and with, and he stood strongly and told Canadians right through the election that, and this included the firing of attorney general,
00:33:04.680which would have got any president impeached, but this, he stood up and he almost proudly said,
00:33:12.680I broke the law because I was working for jobs.
00:33:18.680I helped the corrupt, corrupt SNC Lavalin because there are 6,000 jobs.
00:33:24.680Now we heard even the SNC CEO say, well, no jobs involved, but even if we give them benefit of the doubt,
00:33:29.680there are maybe a few hundred jobs or a few thousand jobs that would have been lost, let's give him that.
00:33:34.680He stood up and was prepared to break the law to do it for a few hundred jobs or a few thousand jobs,
00:33:41.680but he's not prepared to enforce the law for about 200,000 jobs.
00:33:46.680It just, you know, Ezra, when I look at that, you know, I, I, you know, maybe people forgot what happened a few months ago during the election.
00:33:55.680Maybe people forgot what happened about a year ago right now, when the attorney general, the liberal attorney general said,
00:34:00.680there is so much pressure. I see obstruction of justice. And we saw her getting fired.
00:34:05.680Maybe we forget all that. But when I look at the totality of it, it clearly says, wait a minute, what happened to jobs?
00:34:11.680Jobs was so important that you were prepared to break the law. Jobs were so important.
00:34:17.680You, you know, you were prepared to do something and you didn't do it.
00:34:21.680So it tells me that screams to me that it is his real modus operandi is to kill anything.
00:34:28.680It particularly from the West, but anything, anything that's oil and gas, because, you know, where are these 200,000 jobs?
00:34:37.680And, you know, that's about 30 or 40 times more than SNC-Lavalin that are being affected for the next month.
00:34:43.680Where, where is the cry? Where is the media's protection with respect to that statement?
00:34:49.680I tell you, Manny, it boggles my mind.
00:34:52.680Pierre Trudeau, Justin's father, was against the oil patch, but he didn't actually want to shut it down.
00:34:58.680He just wanted to take the money from it. The national energy program, it's, it had taxes and it, and it was clearly designed to stop the movement of capital from Quebec and Ontario to Alberta.
00:35:11.680But I don't think Trudeau actually wanted to shut down the industry.
00:35:15.680Like any good communist, he wanted to own the means of production.
00:35:19.680I mean, he created Petro-Canada because he wanted to nationalize it.
00:35:24.680That's different than shutting it down.
00:35:25.680I'm boggled by the fact that Trudeau truly wants to block things, shut them down.
00:35:30.680He doesn't want the means of production to be owned by the proletariat.
00:35:33.680He doesn't want any means of production.
00:35:37.680And the fact that he, yesterday, or two days ago, said he would exclude Andrew Scheer, the leader of the Conservatives, from a high-level meeting of party leaders to solve this.
00:36:49.680And with the greatest respect, the Bloc want to create mischief in Canada.
00:36:54.680Because if there's mischief and there's seeds of dissent, whether it be Alberta's separation, this helps the Bloc on their ultimate path, which is separation.
00:37:03.680You know, I saw a picture on the internet that was tweeted by the minister.
00:37:09.680And I saw that the Bloc, the leader of the Bloc party was sitting at the right hand side of Justin Trudeau in his meeting with the rest of the people that are disinterested in the West and disinterested in oil and gas.
00:37:27.680If you want to solve, like, you know, when I had problems and I wanted to solve things, I didn't have people in the room that said the same thing as me.
00:37:34.680I had people that had different ideas.
00:37:36.680And the different idea, the majority of people through the different idea is through the Conservative Party.
00:37:42.680And not to have that person in the room, not to have the leader.
00:37:46.680You know, Andrew Scheer of the Conservative Party in that room tells me that you want one outcome alone, and that is to keep killing oil and gas.
00:38:03.680Very sad to say that our side is losing, but at least we will document it more honestly, perhaps, than some of the state-run or state-rented media.
00:38:13.680Manny, it's always great to catch up with you.
00:38:15.680Thank you very much for your time today.
00:38:19.680By the way, if you want to spend some time with Manny and me and our other Rebel personalities, may I invite you to sign up for our summertime cruise.