Our plans for 2021 (with or without the Media Party's permission)
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Summary
Today, I talk about my exclusive interview with conservative party leader Aaron O'Toole about the China files, and why his office denies there was an interview, even though it was all done by email. It's a really weird story.
Transcript
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Hello, my rebels. Today, I talk about my exclusive email interview with Aaron O'Toole, the conservative party leader.
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I thought it was a good interview. He talked about questions I had about the China files.
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That's interesting. I think he did a good job. I'll tell you some of his answers.
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But it turned weird when his director of communications sort of denied that there was an interview,
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even though, like I say, it was all done by email, so I have the receipts, as the kids would say.
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It's a really weird story. I'll tell you about it.
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I wish you had the video version of this podcast, because I show you my email exchange,
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which is what's sort of funny about this whole thing.
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I'd like to invite you to become a video subscriber to this podcast.
00:00:41.740
Go to rebelnews.com, click subscribe. It's $8 a month, or $80 for the whole year.
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You get the visual stuff. We put a fair bit of effort into the video side of things, the images, the visuals.
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And the $8 a month helps us keep the home fires burning, because, of course, you know we don't take a dime from Trudeau.
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Tonight, an exclusive interview by email with Aaron O'Toole.
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It's January 11th, and this is The Ezra LeVant Show.
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Hey, I have a good story for you, and then a weird story for you, and then a bad story for you.
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And the thing is, it's actually all the same story.
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Hey, remember last month when I had what I called the scoop of my lifetime,
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34 pages of top-secret government documents that the government simply forgot to censor
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It detailed how the Canadian Armed Forces didn't want to have joint winter warfare exercises
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with China's People's Liberation Army after China seized two Canadian hostages,
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Well, when Justin Trudeau and his bureaucrats found out about this proposed cancellation,
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I wasn't supposed to get copies of the 34 pages of emails and memos,
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The Globe and Mail followed up with a major story on it.
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And I was invited on the number one news show in America,
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Pretty exciting, and I think I got the message out.
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Ezra LeVant is the founder of Rebel News in Canada.
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Your prime minister offered to train Chinese troops in Canada.
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That cold weather warfare that you're referring to was just one of 18 different joint projects
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the Canadian Armed Forces had with the People's Liberation Army in 2019 alone.
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Canada is training one- and two-star Chinese generals in our war colleges.
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We're training lieutenants and majors, commanders.
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We're bringing Chinese—I think they're not just soldiers.
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And I don't know a single person in this country who knew about it, but it's been happening.
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And we found out about it really by accident when the government sent me freedom of information
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Or maybe, frankly, someone inside the government wanted to blow the whistle on this incredibly upside-down relationship.
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In those same memos you're talking about, Trudeau's office was supporting China and condemning the Trump administration.
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It's seeping all the way into our bureaucracy, our diplomacy, and they're trying to get the military on side, too.
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I mean, with respect, we're Americans, so our concern is the United States.
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We have the closest relationship with Canada of any country, obviously, in the world.
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This seems like an obvious threat to American national security.
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Does the Trump administration believe that, do you think?
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Well, in fact, in these memos, you can see that the Trump administration warned Canada
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that this winter warfare training would transfer knowledge to China that could be used.
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Now, they don't explain would it be used to take on Uyghurs in Xinjiang,
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Tibetans to fight India in the Himalayas, or even to fight us.
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And when the military, the Canadian military, said our American allies or our allies are concerned about this,
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Trudeau's staff pushed back and said, is it just the Trump administration, or is anyone else worried about it?
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So there's an antipathy towards America that seeps through all these secret documents,
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and the overarching goal is to let China's president, Xi Jinping, save face.
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I want to tell you, though, Tucker, that is not the view shared by grassroots Canadians.
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Ever since China kidnapped those two civilians, two years ago today, actually,
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Canadian public opinion has hardened against China.
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And the last Pew poll I saw actually says that Canadians are more hostile to China than Americans are.
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Ezra, thank you so much, and congratulations on Rebel News.
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I know you take a lot of abuse up in Canada, but you do a great job. We appreciate it.
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So, like I say, biggest story of my life, real, genuine, secret documents.
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Anyways, the next day, Aaron O'Toole, the conservative leader, and other conservatives asked about it in parliament.
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Mr. Speaker, months after Canadian citizens were taken hostage by the communist regime in China,
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we learned that the liberals fought hard to keep a close relationship with China.
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In fact, the deputy prime minister fought for Canada to train China's military on Canadian soil
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against the direct advice of the chief of defence staff.
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With our citizens in jail, our exports banned, and with China committing human rights abuses around the world,
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why did the deputy prime minister push hard to partner with them?
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And then I saw press releases, including one from the Conservative Party's defence critic.
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Can you guess who I'm talking about? Can you name the Conservative Party's defence critic?
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Don't Google it. Can you name him without checking?
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To be honest, I couldn't either, but I did Google it.
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And I sent him three invitations to come and talk on our show.
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Three. Two by Twitter direct message, he follows me, and one by email.
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I'm going to leave you guessing who he is, because I don't think you know either.
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Anyways, he can come on our show any time he likes, if he has something to say.
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But I guess he doesn't. Maybe he's on a beach somewhere.
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But then, Aaron O'Toole had a press conference specifically about the documents that I had received.
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So it was a press conference that you had to dial in a conference call,
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I dialed in to the conference call, but I was never picked as a journalist.
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I thought it was a bit odd, because the CBC was given two questions,
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And out of all the questions that were asked, only a couple were about China.
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They were scolding O'Toole for daring to be upset about China.
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And none of the questions in the entire press conference were about the documents,
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the China files that I had leaked, and that O'Toole had called the press conference to talk about.
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And just as a follow-up, I want to get your direct reaction to the news this morning,
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that officials in Beijing have said that Michael Coburg and Michael Spavor have already been indicted and tried.
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And then just as a follow-up to your answer there,
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don't you think that sanctions at a time like this would put them at even greater risk,
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given the situation that Coburg and Spavor are in?
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Don't you think that some of the, you know, some of what you might be advocating,
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Magnitsky sanctions, perhaps well-intentioned, you know,
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could have negative repercussions for these two Michaels?
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Because, you know, when you poke the jailer in the eye, it's not always a good idea.
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Or can you talk about that a little bit more in a little more detail, perhaps?
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So if O'Toole wanted to get the message out about the China files, I think he failed.
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Simply no reporters in the media party wanted to talk about it.
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So I sent a note to Erin O'Toole's press secretary, Chelsea Tucker,
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asking her if she actually wanted to talk about the news story of the season,
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something about which the liberals are utterly vulnerable.
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And she came up with a series of excuses for why Erin O'Toole couldn't talk to me.
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He had already talked to Rebel News months ago.
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But I can be more stubborn than just about anyone sometimes.
00:10:03.520
And finally, she agreed to do the interview with Erin O'Toole via email.
00:10:09.220
The deal was, I would send my questions to her.
00:10:11.780
She would pass them on to Erin O'Toole or, more likely, a policy advisor.
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They would write a reply and send back the answers to me.
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And I acknowledge that is how a lot of politics are done.
00:10:29.240
But by the time I heard back from her, it was almost the Christmas break.
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Seriously, more than a week of delay had gone by since we broke the scoop.
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And I was trying to get conservatives to appear on our broadcast.
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So, by the time we were in late December, it was a dead zone for journalism.
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So, I held on to the written interview until the news picked up in the new year.
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Of course, last week was just nuts with what happened in Washington.
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And Mondays are always slow news days, so today we published the email interview with Erin O'Toole before the week began.
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And I think it's a great story for Erin O'Toole.
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I mean, he can be interviewed by the CBC about, I don't know, systemic racism or global warming or Greta Thunberg or whatever the CBC wants him to talk about.
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And even if he does a very careful job and does the best he can, he's always losing because he's talking about subjects that favor the liberals.
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But if he can talk about China and national security and the military and the two Michaels, he'll always win, even if he doesn't do a great job talking about it.
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It's not even, you know, what you say in a conversation.
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What's the ballot question, election strategists might say.
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Trudeau hates it when people are talking about China and spying the military.
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That's a bit of a hint about what O'Toole maybe should talk about, don't you think?
00:12:05.160
And we published it this morning pretty positively.
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You'll see that we were careful to mention that it was an email interview, which is sort of obvious because if it were a video interview, we would have the video of it.
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And we mentioned that the interview was actually done before Christmas, which it was.
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Other than that, I think it was pretty much verbatim.
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I'm just going to read one of my questions I put to him.
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The China files show that besides the winter warfare training, there were 17 other Canadian Armed Forces People's Liberation Army projects in 2019.
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Canada should not be training Chinese soldiers.
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As Prime Minister, I would cancel any training exercise coordinated with the People's Liberation Army.
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Training Chinese military personnel, why the Chinese Communist Party holds Canadians hostage and actively spies on,
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and intimidates Canadians at home, is dangerous.
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Canada needs to take a principled approach to foreign policy and stand up to China.
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I asked him four questions, and he gave four answers, and I think they were pretty good.
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And we published them without editing a single word that he said, without even changing a comma or an apostrophe.
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Now, I mention that to you, even though it's weird to mention it.
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Because, of course, it's him talking to the first person.
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I had asked to interview Aaron O'Toole via Skype.
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But since I had dealt with the press secretary as the go-between, I mean, I wasn't bugging Aaron O'Toole directly.
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I sent Chelsea, the press secretary, one last email confirming that these words, in fact, were attributable to Aaron O'Toole.
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I wasn't really interested in doing an interview with some staffer.
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I wanted to know what the leader of the party had to say.
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And you can see in this email, she said, of course, it's attributable to O'Toole.
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Yeah, so, of course, it was Aaron O'Toole's replies.
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So, today we published the story, an exclusive interview done by email about my China file scoop.
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I asked exclusive questions that I thought up in my brain.
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And O'Toole gave me answers that were sent only to me.
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I know you're thinking I'm weird for even mentioning these details, but I'm telling you that because the media party freaked out about this.
00:15:03.180
Because Andrew Coyne believes in cancel culture, and he thinks we Rebel News folks should be canceled, and we should not be allowed to ask questions of Aaron O'Toole, and he should not be allowed to talk to us.
00:15:14.240
And more than that, he believes he's in a position to tell politicians what they can or can't say and to whom they can or can't say it.
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And soon, other liberal hacks like Andrew Coyne got in on it, including liberal MPs and liberal party staff, to which my reaction would be great.
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The interview was a good one for Aaron O'Toole.
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It was on O'Toole's agenda, not Trudeau's agenda.
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So the liberals were really mad, and that's great, and he's reconnecting with the conservative base.
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Here's a pro tip, and I used to be a staffer on Parliament Hill more than 20 years ago.
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If your political opponents are really mad at you, that's a sign you're doing something right in our political system.
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Even Gerald Butts, the disgraced former aide to Justin Trudeau, who was forced to resign over his role in the dirty SNC-Lavalin corruption scandal.
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That's a sign you're over the target if even Gerald Butts is mad at you.
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I guess he wants to bring cancel culture up to Canada, too, I guess, for enemies of the liberal party, I guess.
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O'Toole reconciling with Rebel News, the biggest conservative news agency in Canada.
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O'Toole sounding pretty good on good issues, ignoring the media party.
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But then, but then O'Toole's communications staff snapped.
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Not him yet, at least when I'm recording this, but his staff.
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Look at this weirdness from Melanie Parity, his communications director.
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I wouldn't publish an interview from a staffer.
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By the way, a staffer wouldn't say, as prime minister, I would do this or that.
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It was handed to me by a staffer, but it was attributed to the leader.
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And I presume he wrote it or approved it if he's putting it out in his name.
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It was an interview by email, which is acknowledged in our story because they wouldn't do a Skype call.
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I've had the great pleasure of interviewing Aaron O'Toole in person before.
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I'd like to do it by Skype, but I'll take email from now and then.
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Why the attempt to deceive or, I don't know, distract?
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I posted to Twitter my email conversation with the press secretary confirming that it was indeed from O'Toole.
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Why not just say the conservative party position is the same no matter who asks us a question?
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Why not say we take questions from a range of journalists?
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It's part of our job in the communications department.
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Why spend half a day dancing to the tune played by liberals?
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Would a liberal communications director take one second of his day to indulge some conservative online troll?
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Would they let the conservatives hijack the liberals for half a day to talk about things they didn't want to talk about?
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And I don't even think it's that embarrassing for Aaron O'Toole.
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And we emailed it to a lot of people in Canada.
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Probably the first time they ever heard of him talk about it because the media party didn't let him get any messages out on that.
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But for a spin doctor who's just spinning in circles, digging a hole, embarrassing for her.
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Why, though, why would a single person in the world care that Aaron O'Toole told me he wants to be tough on communist China?
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He voted NDP and he voted liberal in the last few elections.
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He's a quirky columnist who, I promise you, will never support the conservatives and does not want good things for conservatives.
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So why is Melanie Parity jumping up and down for him?
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Why try to appease him and give his cancel culture call any credence?
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You know, Aaron O'Toole has actually been pretty good on cancel culture.
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At least whoever runs his Twitter account has been good on cancel culture.
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At least back when he was running for party leader.
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I haven't heard much from him about that since.
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I mean, if you don't want to talk to me or rebel, then don't talk to me or the rebel.
00:20:17.720
Don't talk to me and then try to lie about it, especially when I got the receipts.
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I mean, it was only the biggest story in the season.
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I mean, but sure, go answer some more gotcha questions from the CBC.
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They're still suing the Conservative Party, by the way, literally suing the Conservative Party.
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But you go give them some exclusive interviews on TV, not even by email.
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We're going to keep doing our job here at Rebel News, which is telling the story with or without MPs.
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I mean, it was the largest story of the day with or without MPs.
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I mean, I haven't been on Tucker ever in my life.
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The fact that the Conservative Party's obscure defense critic wouldn't even return my three messages.
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He probably could have used some of the coverage.
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I don't think most people, even though the Conservatives, have a conservative defense critic.
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Look, we've had the best journalistic year of our lives by telling the story that others won't tell.
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And, you know, in the past year, since the pandemic started, we've done thousands of stories.
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I doubt we've talked to politicians 10 times in the last thousand stories since the pandemic began.
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Certainly not opposition MPs who won't oppose, critics who won't criticize, in a parliament that almost never sits.
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I mean, any journalist who thinks that's where you're going to get the news probably is paid by politicians, which is most of them.
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And by the way, this week we're announcing we're getting even busier.
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Thanks to our generous viewers, we've paid down our bank loan.
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We are putting up three help wanted ads for new journalists.
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One for a reporter in Montreal, one for a reporter in Ottawa, and one for a reporter to cover the China beat.
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So hopefully someone who speaks Chinese fluently is able to report on China's influence in this country and everything from politics to universities to media, talk about what's going on in Hong Kong, stuff like that.
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And, you know, we're doing it with or without the permission of the media party or the media party's financiers in the Liberal Party.
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Aaron O'Toole is welcome to come talk to us anytime if he wants to be part of that conversation.
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But if not, it really doesn't hurt my feelings because I know who I am and I know who we are, no matter what Justin Trudeau and Andrew Coyne say.
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But also how they're handling the civil liberties lockdown that we see.
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The United Kingdom is in some of its strictest lockdowns yet.
00:23:27.760
What a pleasure it is to read our friend Calvin Robinson in a publication called The Mallard.
00:23:36.020
His latest article is called The Censorship of Big Tech.
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You'll remember him as the boss of Defund BBC and a senior fellow of a policy exchange.
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I just chuckle at the name The Mallard, but it looks like a great read.
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I'd encourage our viewers to go there and read your article.
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Tell me about the case you make about big tech censorship.
00:24:03.400
What lessons can we Canadians learn from the UK, for example?
00:24:09.820
And I really, really do believe that democracy itself is at stake.
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Because as we saw with Brexit, we've had four, nearly five years now of battles after we had one of the biggest votes we've ever had in this country.
00:24:22.280
More people came out to vote to leave the European referendum than normally come out to vote for anything else.
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And the metropolitan liberal elite, the establishment, the uppity people who run things were not happy with the results.
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We've had two prime ministers since then who struggled to get this done.
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But the whole of parliament, the whole of our political system was against us leaving the European Union.
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And when more people have voted for it than for anything else, and the establishment are against it, we've got a loggerhead.
00:25:01.300
We saw, you know, when Donald Trump got elected, it was not in my name or not my president.
00:25:06.820
And now that Biden's been elected, we're seeing the reverse.
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Trump is saying, you know, this wasn't a legit election result.
00:25:14.560
So no one seems to want to concede ground anymore.
00:25:17.560
And you can't have democracy unless the losers concede.
00:25:21.800
Now, one of the things that I love about freedom of speech, and I've been in my own free speech battles over here, is that free speech is a safety valve.
00:25:30.060
If you're frustrated, if you feel a grievance, if you feel hard done by, you can shout it to the wind.
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And if you are allowed to do that, you feel like at least you had your day in court, so to speak.
00:25:43.100
And I think that's part of accepting a loss in a game.
00:25:48.160
If you agree to the rules of the game and you play and you lose, accepting it, that's a healing thing.
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But if you are now banned from expressing your grievance, banned from expressing your point of view, that doesn't stop you from feeling it.
00:26:06.160
I'm just saying it's empowering, isn't it, to have a moan, to have a rant.
00:26:09.960
It's quite British, actually, just to be unhappy about something and put it out there.
00:26:13.780
And people can argue against it or join in with you.
00:26:17.020
But if you're shut down because you have the wrong opinion and you're not subscribing to the approved narrative, that's very dangerous because that sends your opinion underground.
00:26:24.580
And we all know what happens, according to history, if opinions get shoved into the underground.
00:26:32.340
And we've seen that across the world and across time.
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This is a global issue in that big tech has become too powerful.
00:26:40.740
When big tech can collude and work together, and I'm talking about Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, they're all working together now.
00:26:51.520
But they're working together to shut down debate.
00:26:54.500
And they silenced the most powerful man in the world.
00:26:57.100
They silenced the leader of the free world and said, actually, you're not allowed a platform anymore.
00:27:01.300
And people are saying, you know what, these are free to do whatever they like.
00:27:05.380
Yes, they are private companies, but they're also a monopoly.
00:27:08.140
And they control our communications infrastructure.
00:27:13.300
They are the platform that we've come to expect to get news and information from.
00:27:20.260
You know, it wasn't the platform it was when he joined.
00:27:23.160
And he's made it the in thing for politicians to kind of put their news and their information out there.
00:27:28.560
And so to remove him, to remove a sitting president of the United States from being able to express himself and put news out there is,
00:27:39.320
And big tech have flexed their muscles and said, we are more powerful than the president of the United States.
00:27:47.560
They silenced a load of high profile conservative voices.
00:27:50.700
I've had hundreds of followers disappearing from my following list.
00:27:54.240
I'm sure you've had the same over the last few days.
00:27:56.360
People who think like us or don't think like, you know, Jack Dorsey of Twitter or Zuckerberg from Facebook, people who think differently are being erased and silenced.
00:28:10.760
And these big companies are orchestrating it together.
00:28:13.320
You know, people say, well, it's a private company.
00:28:17.600
First of all, when it was the case of the little baker being ordered to bake a cake for a gay wedding, people said, no, no, bake the cake, you bigot.
00:28:27.100
Well, these tech companies don't want to bake the cake for Trump.
00:28:29.560
But when a bunch of conservatives and Trump supporters went to a startup called Parler, P-A-R-L-E-R, well, they shut that down, too.
00:28:46.160
Twelve different companies, you know, it was, they shut down the startup.
00:28:51.260
So it's not just that you can't use the monopoly sites that have 99.9% of the traffic.
00:28:56.540
If you think, OK, I'll make a go of it on this tiny little island, they'll flatten that without a blink.
00:29:02.180
That's what's scary to me is it's a juggernaut that crushes anything in its path.
00:29:06.940
I'm a little worried here myself because we rely on Google, YouTube and servers.
00:29:12.260
We rely on everything to be in the public square in 2021.
00:29:16.040
Ezra, it's like you're suggesting that the left have double standards.
00:29:22.940
And Parler or Parlay, however it's pronounced, made their own app.
00:29:28.800
And not only that, the entire servers have been closed down.
00:29:31.900
This is what I mean by collusion of Amazon, Google, Facebook.
00:29:38.880
Trump was the only political figure I can think of that would stand up to big tech.
00:29:42.860
And now that he's on his way out, I'm very worried about what's going to happen next.
00:29:46.900
Because if I want to make an app that promotes free speech, I've got to make my own operating
00:29:57.040
Will the airwaves, the networks, will they be shutting people down next?
00:30:03.040
When they control the infrastructure, the information highway, they control the messaging.
00:30:07.740
And they need to decide whether they are a platform or a publisher.
00:30:11.380
Because if they're going to curate content, and they're going to censor people, they're
00:30:15.640
Therefore, they need to abide by the regulations that publications do, which are much more stringent.
00:30:22.420
But right now, they're saying they're platforms.
00:30:27.100
Like, if I don't agree with Twitter or Facebook or their policies, I don't agree with their
00:30:35.820
How do I get someone else in that I do agree with?
00:30:41.380
One of the characters I follow online is Nigel Farage.
00:30:45.320
Obviously, he's a consequential British politician.
00:30:52.040
He was a very visible supporter of Donald Trump, campaigning with Trump in both 2016 and
00:31:01.260
You don't obviously have Brit coming over to America to campaign quite closely associated
00:31:08.120
And in the UK, Farage is talking about the kind of populist, nationalist things that Trump
00:31:18.380
But there's these dinghies coming across the English Channel with refugees.
00:31:22.960
I think that Nigel Farage is next on the list of national, populist, conservative troublemakers.
00:31:31.760
I think that there's a real chance Nigel Farage will be deplatformed.
00:31:43.800
I think people like Nigel Farage will be deplatformed next.
00:31:47.280
He's saying things that the establishment don't want said or that the metropolitan liberal elite
00:31:54.780
What he's actually saying is, why do we have illegal immigrants coming over to the UK from
00:32:00.760
You can't get to the UK without passing through a safe country.
00:32:07.120
Why are they swinging across the Channel to the UK?
00:32:11.440
And just by raising that, he's sticking his head above the parapet and he's ostracizing himself.
00:32:21.960
But they forget that one day they'll say he'll do something that people don't appreciate
00:32:26.660
So we have to all stand up and say, no, it's not OK.
00:32:30.420
And we want to fight for free speech because otherwise it'll be too late when it's already
00:32:36.040
You know, the one glimmer of hope I see in the Western world fighting for free speech,
00:32:41.680
I see more and more people like Toby Young of Free Speech Union.
00:32:50.900
I don't see that as much in America and I don't see it at all in Canada.
00:32:54.800
So although you were sort of an early example of what America could expect, your Brexit
00:32:59.540
experience, maybe you're an early example of people fighting back.
00:33:05.060
Thanks for taking the time with us today, Calvin.
00:33:09.060
And let's hope that people do start to stand up for freedom of expression.
00:33:14.020
Calvin Robinson, you can see his new article in the Mallard.
00:33:38.360
People trying to live a normal life is now the biggest crime that police are trying to
00:33:46.680
I'm really worried they're going to bring the curfew to Ontario.
00:33:49.460
But the thing is, you've been trained, you've been conditioned for that by forcing you to
00:33:54.480
So they've already got you thinking like a prisoner.
00:33:59.980
And now you can only go out when they say what's left, really.
00:34:04.340
Tanya writes, can't do journalism if you're kicked off a platform.
00:34:07.880
Do you have what you need ready when they come for you?
00:34:10.320
Well, we have some backup plans, and I think we probably need other backup plans.
00:34:17.340
And the thing is, Parler, which was the conservative Twitter replacement, they thought they were
00:34:28.540
Even if we think we're OK now, we have to ask the what if, what if, what if questions and
00:34:41.600
Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home,