Justin Trudeau goes to the most polluted country in the world, but doesn t criticize them. Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer? Ezra Levant explains why Canada is about as clean as it gets, and China is not.
00:00:00.000Tonight, Canada's Environment Minister goes to the most polluted country in the world,
00:00:04.480but doesn't criticize them. She saves her scolding for you.
00:00:08.580It's November 5th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
00:00:16.740Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
00:00:20.520There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
00:00:24.260You come here once a year with a sign, and you feel morally superior.
00:00:27.240The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
00:00:37.920You know what the most polluted country in the world is. I don't even need to tell you.
00:00:42.140It's the People's Republic of China, Justin Trudeau's favorite country.
00:00:46.240I don't have to tell you. He'll tell you.
00:00:49.020The inspiration I actually have for China, because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime
00:01:01.040and say, we need to go green as fast as we need to start, you know, investing in solar.
00:01:05.040So they can move really fast on the environment, was what he liked about China's basic dictatorship.
00:01:15.460China can move fast as a basic dictatorship because they don't allow environmental groups to protest.
00:01:21.500They don't allow environmental groups to sue.
00:01:24.120They don't allow any property rights owners to sue.
00:01:26.360They really don't even review projects for environmental effects at all.
00:01:29.400It's the economy first, with the possible exception of the Chinese Communist Party officials getting their payoffs and commissions and kickbacks.
00:01:37.040But China became the left's favorite country after the fall of the Soviet Union because it was the greatest counterweight to America.
00:01:44.560It's also why the left is a soft spot for radical Islam, by the way.
00:01:47.980They'll back anyone that's a danger to their own civilization.
00:01:51.160But for environmentalists to back China is just bizarre.
00:02:50.740This is about the rivers full of junk.
00:02:52.660And it shows them in sort of a scale which river is more polluted than the other.
00:02:58.140I don't know if you can see it, but that giant dot in the middle there, in the darker color, that's the Yangtze River, which, of course, is in China.
00:03:07.220And it's pretty much as garbage-y as the next 10 rivers combined.
00:03:38.980There's not one American or European river on the list, obviously not one Canadian river.
00:03:43.500Pollution is a Chinese problem, mainly, and a problem in India and Africa, too.
00:03:48.180But we're about as clean as it gets here in Canada because, as Trudeau observed, a basic dictatorship can do what it wants,
00:03:54.780and only someone as naive as Trudeau would think that it would want to act in the interest of its people.
00:04:00.020It's pretty much a rule in the world, the freer the country, the cleaner the country.
00:04:05.860These dictatorships don't care about the people, and neither do places without property rights.
00:04:11.460No one cleans up a mess in publicly owned land, but everyone cleans up a mess in their own private property.
00:04:17.720If someone threw a beer bottle in your front lawn, you'd pick it up in a way you wouldn't pick it up on the side of a highway.
00:04:23.460I acknowledge there are some instances of altruism where some people pick up, you know, they do clean up garbage on the side of a public highway.
00:04:33.520In high-trust societies, sometimes local communities sometimes do band together to clean up other people's messes.
00:04:41.440That's pretty much just a Western civilization thing.
00:04:44.100In low-trust societies that is everywhere else in the world, you'd be called a sucker.
00:04:48.280Sure. Speaking of suckers, going back to Canada, Catherine McKenna, our environment minister, thinks the real problem in the world is that we use too many plastic straws.
00:05:00.200Yeah, sister, I don't think that was what's clogging up the Yangtze River in China.
00:05:03.720But hundreds of thousands of Canadians don't work in the straw manufacturing industry, so she declares war on them.
00:05:11.960You know, it's weird, but it's not as dangerous.
00:05:15.380She's declared war on oil and gas, where hundreds of thousands of people work.
00:05:20.420And yet we're proceeding with our plans to economically damage ourselves in the name of environmentalist virtue signaling while the world goes the other way.
00:05:27.880I mean, Donald Trump killed any chance of a U.S. carbon tax.
00:05:31.160And, of course, he pulled the United States out of the Paris-U.N. global warming scheme.
00:07:25.620Maybe it's good that she's flying to China.
00:07:27.640If you're trying to clean up the world, go to the most polluted place, right?
00:07:31.900Even if you think carbon dioxide is dirty, which it isn't, but even if you do think carbon dioxide is dirty, go to the number one emitter of CO2, right?
00:07:42.500I mean, China now emits more carbon dioxide than the United States and Europe combined.
00:08:16.680It's got nothing to do with Trump or Obama personally.
00:08:18.620It's that fracking has allowed cheap, plentiful, clean natural gas to replace other higher carbon sources of energy.
00:08:25.000So even though America is not part of the U.N. global warming scheme, they've reduced their CO2 emissions by the size of a whole Canada's worth.
00:08:33.620Whereas Canada really hasn't done anything other than jet to conferences to virtue signal.
00:08:38.980I guess the U.S. really does have the best of both worlds, right?
00:08:41.340They've got 4.2% GDP growth, and they're reducing their harmless greenhouse gases.
00:12:29.380Blow for global climate change effort as Greenpeace data shows 4% rise in the first quarter.
00:12:35.1804% rise in global warming gases in the first quarter.
00:12:39.840It's just a fact, but here's my question.
00:12:42.100Why is Catherine McKenna friendlier to a foreign government on carbon dioxide than it is to Canadian provinces?
00:12:52.760Why does Catherine McKenna not say a hard word towards China's dictators about their pollution, either real pollution, you saw that picture of the river,
00:13:01.800or about harmless CO2, but why does McKenna say she will punish, for example, Saskatchewan by withholding health and education transfers if they don't bring in her carbon tax?
00:13:12.540It says, China emits a Saskatchewan's worth of CO2 in about 15 minutes, if my math is right.
00:13:21.060So why are McKenna and Trudeau bullying Canadians but sponsoring and subsidizing our Chinese competitors?
00:13:29.920I said subsidizing because Canada still ships foreign aid to China in various ways, including this one.
00:13:36.340Now, check out these tweets from McKenna in China.
00:13:40.200It says, Canada and China recognize the environment and the economy go hand in hand, and our two countries are committed to working together.
00:13:47.660Always great seeing Minister Xie Junhua, my co-chair for the China Council executive meeting, and Art Hanson.
00:13:54.880And then it says, Canada and China at the end.
00:13:58.680The China Council had an incredibly productive discussion on taking climate action, and how the circular economy, what's that, can beat plastic pollution.
00:28:31.360Well, to take it a step back, the Tea Party was very libertarian and very focused on finance and focused on debt and spending.
00:28:42.320So it's not quite the same as the Trump movement, although a lot of people that were in the Tea Party joined the Trump movement.
00:28:48.960The Trump movement was a little bit different in terms of some of the things that they focused on.
00:28:52.920And so a lot of the people who were Tea Party, who were very focused on libertarian ideas and small government and the debt and making sure low taxes, these people were a bit skeptical and Rand Paul being one of them.
00:29:08.660And I think that Trump has delivered a lot of the things that they hoped that a president would deliver.
00:29:14.320He has managed to cut taxes, which Republicans could not deliver on until he got in there.
00:29:35.840And anybody, you know, got a look at what Trump has done and said, all right, maybe I was skeptical of him, but we're achieving what we want to achieve.
00:29:45.220And in that way, Trump has achieved what the libertarians and a lot of the Tea Party people originally their goals were to achieve.
00:30:23.640There's a lot of American values here.
00:30:26.180You know, the revolutionary spirit, the Tea Party itself, the American system, which is open to grassroots fighting.
00:30:33.980We're up here in Canada, which is, I say sort of a split in the difference between the U.S. and the U.K.
00:30:39.500We're not quite European in our thinking, but we're not quite full, red-blooded Americans.
00:30:44.460Do you think that the spirit of the Tea Party is an American phenomenon only?
00:30:50.100Or do you think, looking at Brexit, looking at Brazil the past few weeks, looking at maybe continental Europe, do you think that there's something in all humanity that could follow the Tea Party example?
00:31:01.640Well, I mean, the film, while the film obviously is focusing on the Tea Party, the film is about the angry voters, about the little guy.
00:31:12.020And I think anywhere in this world, the little guy can have the power.
00:31:17.120Now, there are a lot of countries out there where the government is all-powerful and the little guy has no power whatsoever.
00:31:24.020But I think that this film shows that the little guy can be in power.
00:31:29.700So it doesn't have to be, you know, small government and individual liberty the way that the Tea Party was about in Canada or U.K. or Brazil or anywhere else.
00:31:40.620It's about the government that I want and not the government that's imposed on me.
00:31:46.600Now, a lot of the Tea Party momentum came when social media was pretty new.
00:31:54.900I think Twitter had just been born and Facebook wasn't as big as it is.
00:32:00.540And people still live their lives in real life as opposed to so much online.
00:32:06.200In some ways, social media has made organizing and communication so much more grassroots.
00:32:12.040But in other ways, I think it's become sort of the tone police and calling people radical and calling people, I don't know, racist or whatever.
00:32:23.480Could the phenomenon be replicated now?
00:32:26.100I mean, in some senses, I think it would be easier.
00:32:28.480But if there was some sort of a grassroots Tea Party movement now, would the fancy people just kill it on Facebook, kill it on social media and defame it as a hate group now?
00:32:38.500Have things changed in the last 10 years?
00:32:40.840Well, I mean, I think that the left defamed it as a hate group then, and they would defame anything on the right as a hate group now.
00:32:49.120But if anything, social media has gotten even better at organizing.
00:32:54.200You know, coming back to the way that the left is doing it this year, I mean, it was just up in the Fresno area.
00:33:03.820The Facebook group, a left-wing Facebook group, got a lot of people together.
00:33:08.240They bused them all from the Bay Area to go and volunteer for somebody they'd never heard of running for Congress in the Central Valley here in the Fresno area.
00:33:16.520And, you know, social media is even better at organizing and communicating than it's ever been.
00:33:22.660You know, what you're referring to, of course, is that people express some idea on Twitter and then other people go out there and just rake them over the coals and kill them for it.
00:33:33.080So that is something that certainly has evolved out there.
00:33:37.900But social media still has a ton of power, and it's an incredible way to connect people together.
00:33:44.000I am reminded of recently we had Judge Kavanaugh, now Justice Kavanaugh, on his hearings, and there were people that were rushing to his defense, and it was very easy for them to do it because there was a Facebook group with everybody who went to his high school.
00:34:00.860And so all somebody had to do was send out one little message, and everybody who went to the high school knew about it and said, hey, I can, you know, weigh in on that.
00:34:10.580So social media can be really powerful, and really there's a lot of negatives, but it just packs a big punch.
00:34:22.280I want to ask you, and maybe it's too early, maybe you need a day off or something, but do you have plans for the future?
00:34:29.260Because the phenomenon you detected and covered, the rise of the Tea Party, I think in some way, I mean, you mentioned to it some of those people became part of the Trump movement.
00:34:39.520Again, against all odds, against the establishment, Trump was outspent, outpolled, outpundited, out, you know, expert-ed by the other side, and he won.
00:35:08.300Yeah, I have ideas of something I'd like to do, but I'm going to hopefully get the film out there, get the film publicized to a lot of people and see what happens.
00:35:18.000And if people want to talk to me about doing some sort of follow-up, and perhaps that might involve with what's going on with Trump and everything, it would be certainly something that I would enjoy doing.
00:35:28.200You know, I'm not really thinking about that right now, because, you know, nobody knows about this film.
00:35:34.520I mean, until you and I are talking, the number of people that know about the film is very small, and so we want to get the word out there and get people to watch it.
00:35:42.080And if people watch it and people enjoy it, and I think they will, then we'll see what happens with me.
00:35:47.420Well, listen, I mean, we have a friendship with Phelan McAleer, who you may know, you're both Los Angelenos, who are a little bit on the politically incorrect side of things, so there can't be too many of you in L.A.
00:35:59.700And whenever Phelan's got a new project, we'd like to tell our people and email it out.
00:36:03.560So I propose to take this discussion we're having here, along with the link from thegroundupdoc.com, and send it to our people, and hopefully we can spread the word.
00:36:14.020We believe in this project enough that we want to help you push it out there.
00:36:17.300If you had one thing to say to someone who says, well, you know what, I think I know the story, or I get my fill with daily Twitter videos.
00:36:25.300If you had one thing to tell people that you thought was something special about the film that would make them go, wow, I'm really glad I watched it.
00:36:34.440What's the one thing you think makes the film unique?
00:36:36.400I watched it, and to me, it was Kelsey Grammer's beautiful narration that made me feel great, and it was the excitement of watching the history again, told after 10 years.
00:36:48.220What's the favorite thing you think about your own film?
00:36:51.700Well, the film features mostly people that you've never heard of before, that you will never hear of again.
00:37:00.400The interviewers average, everyday people who were not involved with politics, who were not famous, didn't have a lot of money, didn't have a lot of contacts, who got up off their couch and said, I'm going to change America.
00:37:13.560And these people just impressed the hell out of me, because at the time, I would have never thought, I'm going to change America.
00:37:20.040And these people just decided to do that, and every single one of them just impressed me so much, because they said, I'm going to do this.
00:37:30.000And for the ordinary people who are angry, and being able to vent that angry and direct that anger, every time I watch the film, every time I see these people, I'm just so impressed by what it is that they accomplished.
00:37:43.040And I'm glad I'm able to present that.
00:37:45.660Well, it's a little bit inspirational.
00:37:47.400I mean, I remember how it felt back then.
00:37:49.700I thought, who will fight back against this?
00:37:52.520And from that rallying cry of a tea party, the answer came.
00:37:56.880David Laston, what a pleasure to meet you.
00:37:59.500Again, our viewers, I recommend checking out from the ground up doc.com.
00:38:04.380So, I'm really glad I watched this, David, and hopefully we can catch up with you a little bit later, and hopefully this thing will be a runaway success.
00:38:13.220I think a lot of people need to see it.
00:39:35.580And a costume party is that, in a way even a simple child could understand.
00:39:40.040But you have to have a PhD in grievance studies to understand how wrong that is.
00:39:43.680On my interview with David Menzies, who was reporting from the caravan in Mexico, Ted writes,
00:39:50.400Why are the caravans all heading to the awful capitalist hellhole known as the USA instead of heading for the socialist paradise of Venezuela or Cuba?