EZRA LEVANT ｜ Canada should be cherished, not cancelled for its imperfect past
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Summary
Is it possible to put up a statue of a dead white male like Sir Winston Churchill? We ll talk to someone who s fighting back against cancel culture, and who s involved with the putting up of a new statue. That s ahead.
Transcript
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Hello, my friends. Is it possible to put up a statue of a dead white male like Sir Winston
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Churchill? I mean, they're tearing those sorts of things down. We'll talk to someone who's
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fighting back against cancel culture and who's involved with the putting up of a new statue.
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That's ahead. But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to what we call Rebel News
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Plus. That's the video version of this podcast. Just go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe.
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It's eight bucks a month, and we need the money because we don't take a dime from Trudeau,
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and it shows. All right, here's today's podcast.
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Tonight, what should we do about people tearing down statues of John A. MacDonald?
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It's May 23rd, and this is The Ezra LeVant Show.
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Hey, look at this video that my friend Joe Warmington of the Toronto Sun took over the weekend.
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It was in something called Belleville House, which I don't know anything about it, but it
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almost doesn't matter where it is because it was the home of our founding prime minister,
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Sir John A. MacDonald, the man who cobbled this country together and then led it as our first prime
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minister. I should tell you that John A. MacDonald has fallen out of favor in the last few years,
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particularly under the Trudeau regime. He was stripped off of our $10 bill, you might recall.
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And it's not just on Trudeau. That would be unfair and partisan of me to blame him.
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I note, for example, that at Queen's Park, which is the provincial parliament of Ontario,
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under the leadership of allegedly conservative Doug Ford, there is a statue of Sir John A. MacDonald
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that has a coffin built around it. That's the only way to describe it. You could use a fancy word like
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sarcophagus. They have built a coffin around the statue of Sir John A. MacDonald in which he has
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been imprisoned for years. So don't let me get away with saying that it's merely a liberal thing.
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Let me play for you now the video that Joe Warmington filmed. There's a liberal MP in the
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background. This is a Parks Canada reintroduction of this home of Sir John A. MacDonald. And look who
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they got there to basically denounce the man. This was the liberal compromise. Sure, they were
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going to grudgingly open Sir John A. MacDonald's home to the public, but not before denouncing him
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And it was also a time when many people of African descent were coming to Canada via the Underground
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Railroad and through other ways, not only to escape enslavement, but to live freely,
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create communities, and just live in peace with their families. However, upon arriving in Canada,
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people of African descent quickly came to realize that they were not welcome and that Canada, like
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the United States, was steeped in racism, colonialism, white supremacy, and other legacies of enslavement.
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I believe there are widespread myths and misconceptions, views, and ideas that some Canadians have that we are
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somehow better than the United States, that the United States had enslavement and we here in Canada did
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not, that we here in Canada are immune to racism, and that we welcomed and still welcome people of African
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descent with open arms. However, these inaccurate views and ideas are traced back to not knowing our
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Canadian history, and that these histories were not and are still not in many cases being taught in
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classrooms across the country. Many people still do not know that Canada had enslavement for over 200 years,
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from the early 1600s, all the way to when it was abolished in 1834 across the British Empire. Now, it first was
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under the French, Canada was then known as New France, and then it was under the British, and Canada was known as
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British North America. That's actually a lie. Slavery did not start in Canada under the French. It started
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centuries before that. The Indian tribes that covered this country had slavery as an integral part of
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warfare and economics. Not just the Mohawks in the Ontario and Quebec areas, but in the West, the Haida.
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Slavery, of course, existed on every continent in the world other than Antarctica. Slavery has touched every society, but it was
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the British North American land that when the British Empire declared slavery to be illegal, Canada abolished it as well.
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And when that happened, there were more Aboriginal slaves and slaveholders than there were of any other sort. In fact, I recall
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looking up a census at the time, around 200 years ago, the black population of Toronto
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was 16, not 1,600 or 16,000, 16 people. So to portray Canada as a racist place, as a place of slavery,
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and to imply that it only started when the Europeans came here, is a lie. Now, I had never heard of that
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person before. Shanyan Oyeniran is her name, and I've Googled her. And she has a degree in slavery
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studies from a British university. I can only imagine what that's like. But before that, she was,
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for seven years, an administrator and understaffer at an old folks' home. So she's certainly well-schooled
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in book learning. She's a damn liar, but the world is full of liars. She might say,
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I'm a liar. But her lies were paid for by the government of Canada. This was their
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reintroduction of our founding father, our founding prime minister, to hurl accusations at him, but
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much more importantly, at Canada, to imply we weren't the safe haven for black people. Joining us
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now to talk about this outrage and what he might do about it is our friend, Dr. Mark Mielke, the boss
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of a rather new civil liberties-oriented charity in Canada called the Aristotle Foundation. And he
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joins us now via Skype from Calgary. Great to see you again, Mark.
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Thanks for having me on, Ezra. It's great to be here.
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Can you imagine that? I mean, they reintroduce Sir John A. MacDonald and his home. I guess we should
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give them some marks for not boarding it up like the statue at Queen's Park. But they reintroduce them
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to denounce them. I haven't heard the liberal government denounce, oh, let's say, the terrorist
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government of Iran in the vitriolic language that they say for our founding prime minister.
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Well, it's maddening. And the clip you just showed of the lady there that talked to this,
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you know, revisionist kind of approach to John A. MacDonald's home and her claim that blacks
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weren't welcome in Canada. Look, I think it's a mistake to romanticize history either way,
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to see that Canada was somehow this, you know, pluralistic, liberal in the best classical liberal
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sense place in the mid-19th century that there was no racism. I mean, that would be a denial of
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the facts as well. But to say that blacks were not welcome when she, you know, when she herself
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mentions the Underground Railroad. Let me give you another example that I pointed out in one of my
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books a couple of years ago, The Victim Cult. And we also touch on this a little bit in the first
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book for the Aristotle Foundation, the 1867 Project, Why Canada Should Be Cherished, Not Cancelled.
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There's a story of how, you know, a cohort of black Americans came from California to Victoria in
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1858. And they wrote home to their relatives and friends in California to do what a lot of people in
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Victoria do, not only to brag about the flowers, presumably, but to say this is a really tolerant place
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compared to California, which was pretty racist, anti-black, of course, and anti-Asian at the time
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in 1858. And this cohort of black Americans that had arrived in Victoria found that they were welcomed
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by the governor, by the Anglican Archbishop, that they could become citizens and vote after two years
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and run in the school board elections, you know, in the local municipal elections, so on and so forth.
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Now, these black Americans did encounter prejudice over the next few years,
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in part, from some indigenous tribes, the Cowichan up north of up island from Victoria,
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and also white Americans who increasingly also moved to British Columbia, the colony at that point,
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from the United States. So it's not like Canada was a place free of racism. But ironically,
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I mean, black Americans, and at one point, there was several hundred black Americans in Victoria,
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apparently, that had moved up there to escape the racism of the United States. So
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that speaker that, you know, opened or christened, I guess, this new tour at the Johnny McDonald house
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there in Kingston, you know, lacks facts, lacks nuance, lacks a bit of understanding of the age
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people lived in, and the progress that had already been made by 1858.
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You know, Canada, of course, only came into existence in 1867 in its own legal entity. Before
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that, of course, it was part of the British Empire, the same British Empire, that for 50 years,
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dispatched the West Africa Squadron, as part of the Royal Navy, that sole mission was intercepting
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black slave ships, capturing the ships, arresting the slave traders, and returning the slaves back
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to Africa. They captured well over a thousand such ships. It was an enormous effort. And we've talked
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before on the show, about the British Empire borrowing, in today's money, a quarter of a trillion
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dollars to pay for the emancipation of slaves throughout the British Empire. China didn't do
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that. Africa didn't do that. India didn't do that. It's astonishing that she would seek, she would learn
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in her slavery studies degree, that she wouldn't learn that Canada, I mean, look, like you, Mark,
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I won't deny it. It's so one-sided. Yeah, I mean, was there racial tension? Sure, there was for
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everyone. If you were Irish, if you were Italian, if you were Jewish. But to see that Canada is
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inherently, it's so, so gross to me. Hey, I want to play the video that you guys made at the
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Aristotle Foundation. I want to stop talking for a moment about this disgrace over the weekend that
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Joe Warmington filmed. I'm so glad he was there with his camera. Let's talk about what you guys are
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doing, but I think you guys have put together a video. Let's take a look at it now.
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Why are some people trying to cancel Canada's history?
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It's unfair to expect people in history to be perfect when some Canadians can't achieve that standard today.
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We demand historical figures, hold 21st century views, but based on that standard,
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We focus on all of the bad and none of the good.
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instrumental in ending slavery by appointing an anti-slavery governor.
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fought for more funding for indigenous Canadians to fight famine and smallpox,
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and who opposed anti-Chinese racism in British Columbia.
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and sign our petition to stop canceling Canada's history.
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aristotelfoundation.org is where you can learn more about that,
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Those are great arguments for why we don't tear down statues,
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I fear that you missed the real purpose of tearing down statues.
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I think the purpose of tearing down statues is the tearing down.
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So I think your counter-argument to cancel culture makes sense to me,
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how do you deal with historical figures that aren't perfect by today's prism?
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But I don't think you'll ever convince a terror downer to stop tearing down.
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Part of the goal of the Aristotle Foundation is to start telling the truth,
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But one of the arguments we make in the 1867 project,
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and I'll make it in the introduction to the book,
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They were dead wrong about economics and how to,
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but at least you could argue the Marxists were looking forward to create a
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40 million Canadians agree on everything today,
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But our goal at the Aristotle Foundation is to start telling the truth,
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I think as actually the majority of Canadians would agree with you and I,
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skipping other facts and history is also a mistake.
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that talked to that Johnny McDonald kind of revisionist ceremony there at
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you're unlikely to see Parks Canada offer a tour in the near future of how
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indigenous communities in British Columbia held slaves until the late
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19th century over the objections of the British,
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British Columbia was a backwater at that point.
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There's no way to enforce anti-slavery legislation of British Empire in what
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would become British Columbia when it joined the Federation and before when it
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Not because we want to pick on indigenous Canadians,
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And it makes no sense to demonize Johnny McDonald and then to romanticize
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indigenous peoples as if they come from some sort of what?
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that's simply nonsensical from the Haida to the Aztecs,
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to the wars in Ontario among indigenous peoples before and after settlers got
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what we're trying to do with the Aristotle Foundation is of course,
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The first is the concept of the noble savage to use a term from history and
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And the key thing is to get people to unite around good ideas.
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You're trashing the ideas that helped build modern day Canada.
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where do people think that the notion of the individual came from,
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that liberalism came from in the classical sense,
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but the classical sense for people value property rights,
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When John Diefenbaker made the case that native Canadians should have the vote,
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restored when even Johnny McDonald in the 19th century was advocating for the
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They didn't come from Germany and they didn't come from indigenous
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that's part of the fact-based analysis that needs to occur in this country.
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And apparently it needs to occur at Parks Canada and within a lot of
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bureaucratic and educational departments across the country.
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I think about certain things often that maybe I should move on from,
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who's a very interesting character and a very political character,
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I think was the Aztec empire right before Columbus would have arrived.
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And I don't want to give away the spoiler scene at the end,
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that sort of unlocks the meaning of the whole previous 90 minutes to me.
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Why would Mel Gibson make this very strange movie?
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And I think it was to demonstrate what life was like pre conquistador,
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And of course there was violence and abuses with,
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but I think Mel Gibson's point was there was something much more horrific
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that those conquistadors found when they landed the endless human sacrifice of
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Chris Champion does a nice job in the 1867 project of pointing this out.
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besides Johnny McDonald being instructed by the British colonial office to
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sign treaties wherever possible and not engage in a genocide,
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So what did the British empire ever do for people?
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the problem when people look at history is they think that somehow,
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Miraculously much of human history is a tragedy in terms of the blood and you know,
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starting with the Magna Carta or starting with other influences,
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Western history that have now spread around the world.
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these are developments in Western civilization that have spread around the world.
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there's things I would take from other civilizations that I would apply to Western civilization.
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this is part of what people need to understand.
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And it's one of the reasons that the Aristotle Foundation say we champion peace and democracy and civilization.
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But I can tell you what civilization looks like when it's destroyed.
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It looks like what happens in other wars when civilization breaks down.
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It happens when you revert to a tribal notion of what humanity should operate like on a government level,
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individuals should be seen as equal with rights and law and policy.
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And we shouldn't be trashing really the oak tree that is Canada that's been built over the last two centuries.
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We should remember our history and understand that the oak tree that is Canada,
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the shelters that now shelters 40 million people,
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came about as a result of conscious choices by British North Americans,
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and later by Canadian founders and Canadian politicians,
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and all of us and all of our ancestors who built this place,
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we want a free flourishing country based on equality under the law,
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there's a saying that every generation has 18 years to civilize the next generation.
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you've got 18 years to take a baby from a barbarian that would smash everything in sight
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You have to impart to them the memory of civilization,
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of all the bad and hard lessons we've learned over time.
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That's why the written language is so important.
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And we have to learn from what happened before us.
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And I look at Mao's revolution and their cultural revolution.
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And really the vanguard of that was what he called the red guard,
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Why did Mao lean on the students to be the most radical,
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Not someone who's in middle age or a senior who understands the value of them,
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Young people are wonderful and they're energetic,
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You acquire some land and there's a fence across the road and you don't know why.
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You don't know what danger that fence was meant to keep out.
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the woke young college kids who have learned the least,
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who still are in this life of youthful privilege being paid for by someone else,
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that's why Mao used them to smash the four olds.
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And I think we should place a lot of the blame,
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talking about the closing of the American mind,
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it's hard to blame kids to ask them to know what they don't know,
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when they were propagandized in schools for K to 12,
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gives a great example of how fishing fleets around the world,
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And to make the mistake of thinking that racism is why the Swiss went in the industry,
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Same thing with this notion that everything today is due to racism,
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or somehow everyone in the past didn't think about racist issues.
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a pretty discriminatory society against Catholics and Jews.
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in terms of getting rid of discriminatory practices and laws,
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and making it illegal to discriminate against people,
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people still think we're institutionally racist,
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or that we're still some sort of systematically racist society.
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And it's dangerous to be revolutionary about such things,
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then you chop down the oak tree that's protecting all of us,
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pointed this out on his book in the late 1700s,
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is you want to modify its institutions organically.
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You don't want to upset or uproot everything that's been in the tradition of the country.
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And it led to the deaths of tens of millions of people,
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So the revolutionary sentiment is incredibly dangerous.
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we see it in a variety of ways in Canada today.
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I'm thinking you're so right to focus on the education system.
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The reason that historian was allowed to spout that disinformation
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is because she's actually made a good living with a slavery studies degree.
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It's so crazy to pay someone to ignore parts of history,
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She makes tens of thousands of dollars for seminars and sessions,
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coaching you not to be racist when she's so clearly obsessed with race.
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your audience needs to know that so much of what they're seeing in terms of
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is funded by the federal government and sometimes provincial governments and
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But everything from research grants that go through the federal government
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to departments in the government that promote DEI,
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we should look back and feel guilty as opposed to proud that Canada got rid of
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So there's governments across the partisan landscape that are funding what I
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think is an egregious attack on Canadian history.
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They're literally pouring poison on the roots of an oak tree that is Canada.
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really citizens should be aware that it's their money funding a lot of this
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as opposed to an organic approach is the best way to describe it,
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where like we acknowledge the flaws in Canada's past,
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but I don't think anybody has never not acknowledged that.
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And this is why we changed the laws of the 1950s,
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stop discriminating against black Canadians and accommodation.
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you've got a crew today that just looks at everything through the lens of
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Do you want to give us a word about what that is?
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which I'm volunteer president of with the great grandson of Winston
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where we're going to honor and commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day.
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Juneau Beach and other allies who started the fight back in,
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which people can come to if they register pretty quickly in the next few
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Do we have enough democratic practices in this country to push back against bad
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after October the 7th on our university campuses in Canada to other issues.
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We better think through the kind of Canada we want.
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We prefer that Canadians unite around laudable ideas like the rights of the
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that people be able to exercise their rights under the constitution instead of
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That's the kind of country we should unite around,
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And that's what aerosol foundation is working towards in part by educating
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I'm excited about the fact that you're putting up with the traditional society,
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that's going to be a real litmus test because it's going to attract bad guys.
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and what you're referencing is we at the Churchill society,
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and I put on my volunteer president out of that society.
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There is a Churchill statue about to be erected.
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It's an incredible gift really to the province of Alberta.
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It would be put up in Calgary on June 6th as well,
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that this cancel culture has gotten past this notion.
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They should be attacking inanimate objects as if they're the Taliban attacking Buddhist statues.
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Churchill came to Southern Alberta in 1929 as part of a North American turnip, loved the place, painted some paintings in the Rockies,
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was very supportive of the oil industry, actually, ironically back then, and, you know, was fascinated and loved Western Canada.
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So, we're honoring that and his legacy and his, you know, his pushback against, you know, fascism in World War II, but also his time in Southern Alberta.
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So, look, I'm hoping, frankly, that, you know, on D-Day, the 80th anniversary of the landings at Juneau Beach by Canadians and others, that there will be no nonsense surrounding any statue in Canada anywhere.
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We should honor, again, those who fought in the World War II generation and where millions of people died in the cause of freedom.
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Listen, I don't think any protesters would be foolish enough to attend on the day of the unveiling.
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I'm just saying, I know that in the United Kingdom, there's a, right there in Parliament Square, outside the Palace of Westminster, there's a mighty statue of Churchill that's defaced all the time.
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And, by the way, citizens go and clean it up all the time.
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And I'm hoping, and I guess what I'm saying is, to put up a statue of Churchill in 2024 is a statement of reclaiming our past and defying the statue topplers.
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I'm coming all the way to Calgary for that statue unveiling.
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I want to brag about it, that Calgary's got it.
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I want others to put up statues and not have the denunciation like we saw at the beginning of our segment where a quack historian was asked to lie about our past.
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And I pity the fool who would take a run at that statue.
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And I tell you, God forbid if they do, I hope they're prosecuted to the hilt.
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I don't mean to be so dramatic, but I think it is a dramatic thing to put up a statue of Churchill.
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AristotleFoundation.org is the way to check it out.
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Your letters to me about Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum announcing he's going to retire.
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I'm only in the sense that the World Economic Forum has grown so huge and has such a permanent
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staff and permanent bureaucracy and other smart, capable people that he can be replaced.
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He's like a human Rolodex, if you remember that old-fashioned thing, which would have like a bunch of business cards in it.
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I mean, he knows probably more powerful people in different spheres of life, business, politics, academia, philanthropy.
00:35:22.080
He probably knows more powerful people than maybe anyone else in the world other than George Soros.
00:35:27.680
So I think he is actually much more than a figurehead.
00:35:30.960
But I agree with you only in the sense that he can and will be replaced.
00:35:36.200
Lynn Castro Trudeau says with his family already installed within the organization, nothing will change other than possibly getting even worse.
00:35:45.000
As I mentioned the other day, his daughter is, of course, involved.
00:35:51.480
She has some—she's had some modest roles to play.
00:35:54.600
I think she will stay there as a kind of nepotistic favor to the family.
00:35:59.860
But she doesn't have the charisma, the vision, the intelligence, the authority of her father.
00:36:06.580
I would be very surprised if she takes over that position.
00:36:10.460
No doubt she'll stay on—in the organization like a barnacle on a ship.
00:36:15.000
But I think they want someone who has the kind of global vision and name of a John Kerry.
00:36:24.320
I don't think he would stick around for even five years.
00:36:40.040
But I think they would go for someone around 50 because they would want to get 20 years of leadership out of that someone.
00:36:49.260
That's why I mentioned there could be a long shot someone like Leo Varadkar.
00:37:15.560
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.