00:07:34.000He's not changing their belief system.
00:07:36.000Leopards don't change their spots, as they say.
00:07:39.000And, you know, Justin Trudeau had these guys walking in lockstep with him.
00:07:43.000They were his biggest fans for a decade.
00:07:46.000They're not just going to be like, oh, yeah, now we need to get serious about the economy.
00:07:50.000Now that Mark Carney is a leader and we're going to leave all of this crazy garbage that the country hates, like the carbon tax.
00:07:56.000You know, even one of I was going to get to this if I could have asked another question.
00:08:00.000One of one of Mark Carney's candidates said yesterday that she couldn't promise that the carbon tax would never come back, meaning that, yeah, it's paused for now because it's electorally unpopular.
00:08:12.000But just you wait, give us a majority.
00:08:14.000And in year two, we're going to go back to the same old garbage that we've been doing for the last decade.
00:08:20.000There really is no difference between this liberal party and Justin Trudeau's liberal party.
00:08:24.000It's just that this guy has a new smile.
00:08:28.000So this is Kian Bexley's follow up question.
00:08:30.000You're given one question, one follow up.
00:08:32.000And here is where he details similar to what he just said.
00:08:35.000Now, the interesting thing for me, Kian, is, again, Mark Carney's reaction because he hasn't really clued into the fact that you're not part of the media guard.
00:08:42.000Like, I think he just probably assumed that any journalist ever asked him a question has been screened by the CBC.
00:08:47.000Their questions have been vetted by his campaign.
00:08:49.000So he's never going to get a new question, specifically not a big night like tonight.
00:09:18.000And yes, pay close attention to the hot mic with Kian and Carney's sort of bewilderment that someone was asking a question that he hadn't been pre-approved from him.
00:09:31.000Your entire campaign does seem to be predicated on putting you in the front and hiding the people that stood in lockstep with Justin Trudeau for the last 10 years.
00:09:40.000You're kind of hoping that Canadians won't connect the dots that the people standing behind you in your caucus walked in lockstep with them.
00:09:46.000Regardless of what you say right now, Stephen Gobeau made the carbon taxes life work.
00:09:50.000The man that moved Paul Bernardo from a maximum security prison is now your chief of staff.
00:09:55.000I'm wondering how you reconcile this and how you can trust their judgment when they thought those ideas were good ideas.
00:10:00.000I'd say a couple of things to that rather odd question.
00:10:03.000First is that the candidates in this election for the Liberal Party, I mean, you go and see when I make an announcement.
00:10:12.000I don't think I've seen you at any of them, but next time you can come and you will see a wide range of the candidates that are there presenting themselves.
00:10:21.000So, for example, with respect to our announcement on crime, we had Bill Blair, now the Minister of Defence, of course, formerly the Chief of Police in a long time in Toronto,
00:10:32.000and Natalie Provo, who is a new candidate.
00:10:36.000We're honoured to have her and someone who's dedicated their life to helping to end gun violence and violence against women.
00:10:45.000There is a very wide range of candidates that have come to the party with me.
00:10:50.000There's a lot of fresh blood. There's also a lot of experience that's there.
00:10:54.000And you need that combination of energy, new ideas, experience, and a fundamental passion for making this country better in order to serve at this crucial time.
00:11:06.000You know, this is the first time that I'm actually rewatching this.
00:11:09.000And he actually did quietly there say, next time you can come.
00:11:15.000Yeah, I know. I put it on X at the time because I said, I think he just gave you an invitation.
00:11:19.000I think you should try to use that to get in because the thing about Carney is he's trying to be likable and he's trying to be reasonable.
00:11:25.000And again, I don't think that like his staff adequately warned him that at the leaders debate, independent media are allowed to ask questions.
00:11:33.000And so he I mean, his answer is interesting, too, because he was trying to emphasize the new blood.
00:11:38.000And I think he named one candidate that was new and then also named Bill Blair and basically tried to emphasize like that he is different.
00:11:46.000And then, yeah, just in that little kind of like back and forth between you, he he seemed like friendly to the idea that you should be able to come to his events,
00:11:53.000which makes me think that to your earlier point, maybe it's not even Mark Carney that's banning you and other independent media from his events.
00:11:59.000It's like the Trudeau holdover staff that are like so ingrained in this idea that conservatives and independent journalists are the enemy and that under no circumstances can they get anywhere near a leader?
00:12:13.000Yeah, I I'm going to have to take them up on that offer and go.
00:12:18.000I have a feeling I know how this is going to turn out, but, you know, there's I've been I've been sort of gauging the temperature and the response.
00:12:28.000And, you know, the response from the mainstream media has just been breathless.
00:12:32.000You know, they're furious because after I did that, you know, there was about half a dozen independent journalists that asked really, really prickly questions.
00:12:41.000And I'm wondering if there's like if there's a sweet spot here where we can ask questions that are serious that our viewers want answers to that would never be asked by the mainstream media, but aren't so stinging that they'll let us back in.
00:12:59.000So we can keep doing it because it's not so much about the the stunt every four years.
00:13:05.000And if we're able to ask them in a professional way that even when the viewers see it, they say, yeah, you know, that's a fair question.
00:13:12.000And that's honestly been I mean, there's some crazy liberals that have been saying he shouldn't be allowed your microphone anywhere, which, you know, they're never going to change their mind.
00:13:20.000But these these moderates, these centerists are saying, well, you know, Keane's question actually was pretty legitimate given, you know, I could list the questions that I had prepared that I could have asked and they would have stung.
00:13:32.000But I decided that this was probably better. And I'm glad that we did, because, you know, maybe if we can build a relationship with Mark, if he wins, I will, you know, we will not survive another four years if we are not able to hold him to account.
00:13:47.000If he, you know, if he's governing this country with just him and Rosemary Barton in the room discussing what Canada needs, we're going to have a really big problem.
00:13:56.000So we need people like Juneau News putting a light on him and whatever we need to do to get into these rooms to ask him questions that our viewers and Canadians at large want answers to.
00:14:09.000Absolutely. Well, we can go through some of the others.
00:14:11.000I think that Rebel News did a fantastic job when it came to Jagmeet Singh.
00:14:15.000They were able to get two questions to him.
00:14:17.000Trey Humphrey asked a really, really strong question about anti-Christian like hatred, burning down churches.
00:14:26.000Jagmeet just made an absolute fool of himself, refusing to answer.
00:14:29.000I do want to play Alex Zoltan's clip, though, because he was able to ask two questions just like you.
00:14:35.000His questions were more prickly. They were on one of these divisive social issues.
00:14:39.000And I think your point, right, if we lived in a normal country where there was press freedom, True North and Juneau News and the Rebel counter signal, we would be able to ask questions of the leaders day in and day out.
00:14:50.000Right. And so our questions wouldn't feel so out of place and they wouldn't be so shocking to people if it was just an everyday occurrence.
00:14:58.000But because we only get one shot at this, like we're going to make sure that the questions count.
00:15:02.000So here is True North's Alex Zoltan asking Mark Carney how many genders there are and then asking if he supports women-only spaces.
00:15:20.000There, in terms of sex, there are two. Thank you.
00:15:26.000My follow-up question then, do you believe that women, biological women, have the right to their own spaces, their own sports, their own change rooms, their own prisons, their own homeless shelters?
00:15:38.000I think we, this is Canada, and that as a general objective, yes, we, but we work in where we value all Canadians for who they are and we'll continue to do so.
00:15:59.000That was without a doubt the best question of the night.
00:16:03.000That really exposed Mark Carney for who he was.
00:16:06.000I mean, I will say he eventually, at least the first one came to the right thing.
00:16:10.000He said there's two, which I imagine might be controversial to some on the far left people who support him because they believe that there are, I think someone's, didn't someone say that they, someone heckled Alex and said there's 27 genders or something?
00:16:40.000Like I, that was the question that made my phone blow up and people messaging me, friends, former colleagues, people just saying like, thank you, because that is a question that I want to know.
00:16:50.000And that is a question that is important to me as a mother, you know, with daughters and playing sports and all these kinds of things.
00:16:56.000Like the, these are issues that matter.
00:17:12.000Well, I mean, I know why, and I'll, I'll say why it's okay to ask Pierre that because it was coming from the perspective of, you must say that there's some like vague third option of, you know, non-binary two spirited queerness that you need to accept right now while I grill you with this important question.
00:17:30.000That's why that question was okay when Pierre Polyev was asked it, but when it was asked by Alex Zoltan, it was asked from a different perspective.
00:17:36.000Now that the world has sort of woken up from this weird fever dream where they think that there's 27 genders.
00:17:41.000And now it's sort of like culturally appropriate to accept biological reality and know that there is only two.
00:17:47.000And I don't know what the world was thinking for the last half decade.
00:17:51.000Now that he's asking the question from that perspective, it's absolutely outrageous, alt-right, crazy, outrageous that you do that.
00:17:58.000But the average viewer seeing that there's nothing that could legitimize our cause more than asking these questions in this, in this format right now, which is why the liberals are so furious on Twitter, on X, on whatever, whatever social media they're using these days.
00:18:16.000When they're coping and seething, you can tell that they are wounded by the questions that we asked because they were so effective because we had a national audience.
00:18:25.000We did our job and it shows because they're so furious.
00:18:29.000Well, let's get to some of that. So the CBC was covering the event live.
00:18:33.000You pointed out in our live stream as well, Lasse, you were out in the freezing cold because they wouldn't let you do a call, like a stand up or an interview from inside the building because the event was hosted at Radio Canada's headquarters, CBC headquarters in Montreal.
00:18:45.000And so you had to go outside. We saw the nice, beautiful tent that they had created for Rosemary Barton while you were out in the cold.
00:18:51.000So let's go inside the tent. And here is Rosemary Barton calling us a very right wing website and adding that it was the debates commission, how dare them, that let us in.
00:19:01.000Rosie, I'm curious what stood out to you, because at one point when some of those last questions came up, I just checked.
00:19:07.000Yeah, no, we're in Canada. Because these, the identity politics questions have not emerged much.
00:19:13.000This happens on the same day that the United Kingdom court ruled that women and sex refer to biological women and biological sex.
00:19:22.000True North is a very right wing website. And there have been issues in the past with who gets allowed into these scrums and who's allowed to ask questions of the leaders.
00:19:34.000The debates commission was the one who decided that these people were allowed to come in and ask these kinds of questions. So there you go.
00:19:43.000These people, remember when Don Cherry got cancelled for saying that? And there was Rosemary Barton saying it about us.
00:19:49.000The other journalists that she was talking to, Arsenal, I can't remember her name.
00:19:54.000She said that she couldn't believe that it was Canada and that these questions, these divisive social questions were being asked in Canada.
00:20:02.000And Rosemary Barton said, you know, it was just a few days ago in the UK that the Supreme Court ruled that women are women and men are men, right?
00:20:08.000So this is an important issue around the world. You mentioned that Pierre Polyev had that question asked to him.
00:20:13.000I think it was about two months ago or three months ago when President Trump signed an executive order saying men are men and women are women.
00:20:20.000And then he went on CP24, which is a Toronto news station, and the host asked him how many genders there are, right?
00:20:26.000And so that was a legitimate question. I want to take us back one year ago in February 2024.
00:20:31.000Danielle Smith in Alberta announced the ban of sex change operations for children.
00:20:37.000And the entire parliamentary press gallery ran to ask Pierre Polyev.
00:20:43.000So I'm just going to play a clip of this scrum here.
00:20:46.000They all are asking this question of Pierre Polyev just one year ago.
00:20:52.000Do you support age restrictions for puberty blockers and hormone therapies for trans kids?
00:20:58.000I think that Justin Trudeau is trying to divide and distract Canadians by spreading disinformation about the decisions that premiers and parents are making.
00:21:54.000I think that we should protect children and their ability to make adult decisions when they're adults.
00:21:59.000Okay, so I just put that clip to show you that the entire parliamentary press gallery, you could hear them all shouting.
00:22:05.000And look, I don't begrudge them for that.
00:22:06.000That is their job as journalists, to ask questions of our leaders.
00:22:09.000But my only question is, why is it okay for the entire parliamentary press gallery to be pressing Pierre Polyev like that, pushing him, trying to get him, trap him in, answering a question that you could tell he hadn't prepared an answer to?
00:22:23.000And it takes him a while, but eventually he gets there and says, no, children shouldn't have to, shouldn't be allowed to make decisions, you know, for adults, adult decisions or for adults.
00:22:32.000But my only question is, why don't they do that to Mark Carney?
00:22:35.000Like, why is it that we have to know the position when it comes to divisive social issues from the conservative leader?
00:22:41.000But even just asking any kind of question like this to Mark Carney is just absolutely unacceptable, according to these journalists.
00:23:00.000They've run the country for decades supporting Justin Trudeau by using this playbook, attack the conservatives on social issues and mask liberal insanity.
00:23:10.000As much as possible by using the tricks of the trade to launch softballs at them that are, you know, you know, what kind of shampoo do you use when you're in an airplane with the leader of a G7 country?
00:24:04.000It is about our viewers and Canadians at large and getting them results, which means getting them answers to questions that they can't ask themselves.
00:24:14.000But they're sitting at their dinner table saying, man, you know, I wonder what Mark Carney actually thinks or what he what he would say when he was asked an unscripted question about, you know, should my daughter be able to be guided down this.
00:24:28.000Trans pipeline by the school garden guidance counselor.
00:24:32.000What does Mark Carney actually think about that?
00:24:35.000These Canadians want to know an answer to that and many other questions.
00:24:38.000And, you know, if he wins, we'll have four years to grill him on it.
00:24:41.000I just hope that he's not going to be using the same tricks that Trudeau used to keep us out, which, you know, given his track record during the campaign, I'm not so bullish on.
00:25:01.000OK, let's go to a bit more of the reaction.
00:25:03.000Here is CBC's David Cochran saying that the Debates Commission must be accountable for daring to allow us in the door.
00:25:10.000I think the Debate Commission is going to need to be accountable for what's kind of happening here.
00:25:16.000They've moved the time of the debate the day before.
00:25:18.000They kicked the Greens out the morning of.
00:25:20.000And they've opened up the scrums and the press access to a bunch of groups who sometimes are registered charities or have been defined by their owner as not actually a journalistic organization or have been ruled by the federal court to not be a journalistic organization.
00:25:34.000And in an election like this one with very, very substantive debate on very substantive issues, moderated very well and executed very well by all the leaders.
00:25:46.000This is CBC senior reporter Ashley Burke, again, saying that the post-debate scrums were dominated by right wing media groups and basically just saying, like, how dare us how dare us go and ask questions.
00:26:32.000So we had former cabinet minister for Justin Trudeau, Catherine McKenna saying, thank you, Jagmeet Singh.
00:26:39.000This is how you deal with disinformation peddling rage farming outlets.
00:26:44.000Of course, Jagmeet Singh just rather embarrassingly refused to take a very good question from the Rebel News.
00:26:51.000And to me, he just showed how like his intellectual inability to engage with issues that he doesn't understand that we don't have time to get to that as much.
00:27:01.000But he he's just he's just such a joke.
00:27:04.000Anyway, next, we have Ezra Levant, who basically took us behind the scenes a little here.
00:27:09.000And he writes that at least a dozen other journalists were literally heckling Drea as she asked her question, including Justin Ling, who wrote about Drea's question in the Toronto Star, but forgot to mention that he was shouting at her.
00:27:23.000OK, so, you know, these these legacy media journalists, you know, they're not exactly unbiased, right?
00:27:32.000I'm told that during the debate itself, they were basically laughing and cheering any time Pierre Polyev got a tough question and were like actively cheering on Mark Carney.
00:27:42.000And then the journalists took their rage from us and shifted it towards the debates commission.
00:27:47.000So here's Andrew Coyne on X saying fire every member of the debates commission.
00:28:09.000And finally, Amanda Rose, who I wasn't familiar with this person, she's an entrepreneur.
00:28:13.000She writes that watching Rebel News and True North ask bad faith questions after the debate is the best argument for public funding of the CBC.
00:28:24.000So just quickly here, Kian, like to folks that don't really understand, like, OK, so this is what happened.
00:28:30.000Prior to Justin Trudeau being prime minister, these debates during the election used to be organized by the private media companies themselves.
00:28:36.000Right. So CTV might do one. Global might do one.
00:28:39.000And basically every media company kind of like offers to organize them.
00:28:43.000And then they see which leaders agree to show up to them.
00:28:45.000Justin Trudeau, as he did for so many other issues, decided that the government needed to be in charge of this, that even though the free market was doing a perfectly fine job doing it, he wanted the government to take over.
00:28:55.000So the government took over and they use that to try to ban independent media.
00:28:59.000And so interestingly, before you and I actually worked together, we teamed up because in 2019 they banned True North Andrew Lawton.
00:29:06.000And then you were working at The Rebel that time and they banned you as well.
00:29:09.000And so we decided to sue. Ezra heard that we were suing, called me up, say, we're going to sue, too.
00:29:14.000The courts decided to hear our two cases together.
00:29:26.000And the judge, a federal judge, ruled in our favor and said the government cannot prevent citizen journalists from asking questions of their leader.
00:29:47.000And so this time around, the Debates Commission just didn't even bother trying to block us.
00:29:52.000They saw the writing on the wall that the courts, the judges, as much as I often disagree with what happens in courts in Canada, this time they got it right.
00:30:01.000They made the right decision, saying in a free society, Canada is still a free society.
00:30:09.000And this, you know, 364 days a year, we don't get in.
00:30:13.000The one day a year, and it's not even per year because it's every four years or every two years whenever there's an election, we have a court-ordered paper saying that we are accredited journalists.
00:30:23.000And last night, it was actually wonderful to see.
00:30:25.000You know, the debate itself was kind of predictable.
00:30:28.000They spent like half the time talking about the environment.
00:30:30.000They spent a full 10 minutes, by the way, talking about abortion, right?
00:30:33.000So here they are saying that in Canada, we shouldn't have to talk about social issues during a campaign.
00:30:39.000And yet they're happily taking 10 minutes above the debate to talk about an issue that, you know, much to my disappointment, all of the parties have the exact same view and no one's going to change any law.
00:30:49.000It shouldn't even be an election issue.
00:30:51.000But anyway, there were a lot of independent reporters.
00:30:54.000There were a lot of independent journalists there, not just from the Rebel, True North and Juno News.
00:30:59.000There were a couple of other ones, French language ones, groups on the left that I hadn't heard of before, and they were actually the best questions.
00:31:05.000The questions that the legacy media were asking were literally the same things that were covered in the debate.
00:31:10.000They were just asking the questions again for some reason, whereas the independent media brought new ideas, fresh energy, a different perspective.
00:31:18.000Again, to me, this is this is like what the purpose of the media is.
00:31:25.000Yeah, that one person said that this is the death of the Debates Commission.
00:31:29.000You know, I don't think that the liberals are going to be happy with this.
00:31:33.000But I think that it's kind of missing the point here.
00:31:36.000I think this is the death of the legacy media or at least the beginning of it, because our our viewership is huge.
00:31:44.000Our engagement is high and our questions are great.
00:31:48.000The what we did was more effective at getting answers for Canadians than anything Rosemary Barton did all day, all week, probably the whole campaign.
00:31:57.000Nothing received more traction than what we just did.
00:32:00.000And, you know, I think that it might be topped by tonight.
00:32:26.000I think that it is going to show again that the mainstream media can't be trusted with the truth.
00:32:32.000They can't be trusted to hold leaders accountable because they are built to be machines that siphon grant money away from the federal government.
00:32:59.000They're not going to be let in the question line because only one outlet, like every outlet only gets one question except for Rebel, which has an exemption.
00:33:07.000I don't think any tough questions are going to be asked by the legacy media, by the mainstream media.
00:34:14.000You know, frankly, some people saying that we didn't move the needle at all.
00:34:17.000It's it's they're they're kind of telling on themselves a little bit in the mainstream media that they think that the media's job is to move the dial.
00:34:25.000And is to convince people that, you know, orange man bad, blue man good or red man good.
00:36:00.000Like we have a totally broken immigration system that has been destroyed and pillaged from 10 years of Justin Trudeau.
00:36:04.000That is the root cause of so many other social problems that we have and economic problems in our country.
00:36:09.000And yet the way that CBC debate framed it was literally can people from Haiti who don't feel safe in the United States under President Trump come to Canada.
00:36:18.000It did give Pierre Polyev an opportunity to shine and to point out Mark Carney's radical position with the Century Initiative and 100 million.
00:36:26.000I don't know that many Canadians had heard that before.
00:36:28.000But interestingly, Kian, they've announced that they have removed immigration from the English debate tonight.
00:36:33.000So French Canadians and Quebecers are allowed to talk about immigration.
00:36:39.000And so, you know, this is the thing about these government debates is what they omit is just as important as what they don't,
00:36:45.000which means all the more likely that the independent media asking questions are going to want to go there because the mainstream media censors it and they don't allow these questions to take place.
00:36:54.000So we will be back tonight, folks, 6.30 p.m.
00:37:00.000The English debate starts at 7 p.m. Eastern, and then it will be two hours.
00:37:04.000So the post-debate scrums, that's the part you're going to want to grab your popcorn and tune in to see what kind of questions get put to the leaders.
00:37:13.000I wonder if they'll pull some shenanigans, Kian, to try to prevent the independent press from asking questions of the leader.
00:37:20.000I don't know that they can, but I feel like they're going to try.
00:37:23.000So we're going to want to watch that part and then we'll be back after all of that with more post-debate analysis.