Juno News - Media control, gun laws and immigration： South America’s lessons for Canada

00:00:00.000 With conservative Flavio Bolsonaro taking the lead in Brazil's election, we're seeing more

00:00:10.060 evidence of a massive right-wing swing right across South America. Some believe it's the

00:00:15.540 result of the Trump administration cutting off funding to NGOs who are funneling cash to left-wing

00:00:21.820 groups in a host of countries. Whatever the reason, the left has taken a beating right

00:00:26.980 across the continent. In Venezuela, the country is now cutting export deals with the United States

00:00:33.240 on oil and aluminum, while its former leader and suspected drug dealer, Nicolas Maduro, faces a

00:00:39.380 host of new charges in New York, including torturing American citizens. Our guest today

00:00:45.540 is former citizen of Venezuela and now Canadian, and he's a commentator on such issues, Cesar

00:00:51.280 Guillarte. Welcome once again, Cesar. Thank you, Mark. Always a pleasure joining you.

00:00:56.980 So Maduro facing new charges in New York City.

00:01:00.860 And meantime, you've got the Americans now importing aluminum from Venezuela.

00:01:06.820 And all the while, you're seeing all these dramatic swings, political swings to the right, right across the continent.

00:01:14.080 What do you make of all of this?

00:01:15.940 Well, the economic deals between Venezuela and the U.S. are not really that surprising.

00:01:20.580 I think that was part of the deal that the Trump administration made with now the Delce Rodriguez administration in Venezuela.

00:01:26.980 I have no doubts that there were, you know, back gate negotiations between the two governments for taking Maduro and ensuring a peaceful and relatively democratic transition in Venezuela.

00:01:38.840 I think they are actually kind of low. I would have expected these deals to start getting in place the last closer to the date when Maduro was taken by the U.S., but I guess better late than ever.

00:01:49.720 In terms of what's happening in Latin America, I have to say it's not really darn surprising, although it was definitely unexpected.

00:01:59.720 I think, Mark, for the last 30 years, maybe 30 years is an exaggeration, but since the early 2000s, Latin America in general has been under control primarily of leftist parties.

00:02:12.720 And every country's situation is different, but generally you see that there's been enormous lack of fiscal discipline.

00:02:20.940 You have seen a lot of corruption. You have seen a lot of crime.

00:02:23.980 So it makes a lot of sense to me, at least, that those countries are now moving to the right.

00:02:29.160 I don't have evidence that the cut of the funding of the NGOs has something to do with that,

00:02:35.760 but there is definitely some correlation there.

00:02:39.120 And it actually started some time ago, from my perspective, with Argentina and Millay and, you know, the famous Chainsaw, and more recently Colombia with De la Espriella also winning the presidential election and Bolsonaro's victory on the first round.

00:02:56.860 Well, it's not properly a victory yet, but going into the runoff election with Lula with the majority of about two million votes, I think it's pretty telling.

00:03:05.360 I think we're seeing a wave of change that is going to be very beneficial for those countries, but also very beneficial for the region.

00:03:13.800 Yeah, I mean, we still have to wait for the final result in Brazil.

00:03:16.780 It's a few weeks away before they had their runoff.

00:03:21.120 But certainly Bolsonaro is in the lead, and he seems to have the wind at his back.

00:03:25.900 And I'm wondering, to what degree is all this due to, I mean, you mentioned Javier Millet in Argentina.

00:03:31.440 Certainly the left-wing media hates him and was rooting for him to fail.

00:03:35.360 but he's done anything but.

00:03:37.000 He's taken a country that was mired in economic doldrums,

00:03:42.960 very high inflation, I think over 200% inflation,

00:03:46.600 something crazy like that.

00:03:48.280 Their currency was depressed.

00:03:52.480 You had this incredibly bloated public service,

00:03:55.780 much like we have in Canada now,

00:03:57.920 but they had it for even longer than we did.

00:04:01.320 And he's turned it all around.

00:04:02.760 Like Argentina now is a massive magnet for foreign investment, unlike Canada.

00:04:09.260 To what degree are countries right across South America looking at what Milay did and thinking, wow, we want some of that?

00:04:16.280 Is it possible?

00:04:16.920 Absolutely.

00:04:18.520 Oh, absolutely.

00:04:20.180 I think the fact that a country like Argentina, where the left has governed for decades, because they have what they call the Peronismo.

00:04:30.300 Peronismo is sort of like the ideology that groups most of the left in Argentina, probably

00:04:37.260 excluding the really, really far left, like the communists.

00:04:40.820 Peronismo has ruled Argentina probably for the last 50 years.

00:04:44.340 There have been periods where they have changed, but generally speaking, Peronismo has ruled

00:04:49.280 Argentina in the entirety of its recent history.

00:04:53.680 But it's an enormous country.

00:04:55.660 It's very wealthy in natural resources.

00:04:58.080 It's very wealthy in population.

00:04:59.840 It has a massive industrial base.

00:05:02.120 So you can't really explain why they were living like they were living.

00:05:05.860 The fiscal mismanagement in Argentina is just, it's something for the books, for the economic

00:05:11.540 books.

00:05:12.580 It's just atrocious.

00:05:14.040 A country with all of those resources where people are living under such conditions of

00:05:18.240 poverty, where the currency was so, inflation was so massive that people would go to buy

00:05:25.100 groceries and they would pay them first.

00:05:27.520 And then they would put them in the carts.

00:05:29.840 because until the end of the purchase things would have been more expensive prices were changing

00:05:36.240 every 15 minutes every 30 minutes because the government was printing money uh you know um

00:05:41.520 like like drunken sailors and uh that was just unsustainable i think people got to the point

00:05:47.520 where they felt they had nothing to lose so they gave milay the opportunity and milay is definitely

00:05:52.240 turning the country around and i think that gave hope to a significant portion of the right-wing

00:05:58.000 political parties in latin america they they i think they said to themselves we we can win

00:06:02.880 elections we can be transparent we can be honest with our electorate as to what we are going to do

00:06:07.840 and and we can win elections and we can deliver for the people and that's what mille is doing

00:06:12.160 and most western media have been projecting uh defeats after defeats for mille and his party

00:06:20.240 in the regional elections in the congress elections and um he's has he's had his ups

00:06:26.320 and downs but generally speaking he has retained a significant level of political support which

00:06:32.240 tells me that the argentinian people it's it's actually valuing what he's doing it's it's

00:06:37.280 appreciative of what he's doing and and i anticipate he's going to continue winning

00:06:41.600 until the maybe the country will not be turned around in the next 10 years

00:06:45.600 you've been mismanaging a country for 50 years it's extremely difficult to turn it around

00:06:50.400 but i definitely think delay it's putting it in the right in the right path for growth

00:06:54.480 in the right path for development. And I personally hope that's going to be the same

00:06:58.400 case in Colombia with Abelardo de la Espriella and potentially Brazil with Bolsonaro's victory

00:07:06.480 on the run. I was reading, I was not that familiar with Brazil's recent history.

00:07:12.800 I knew Lula and I knew everything that happened with him and the party of the workers. And it

00:07:19.360 has never happened in the history of brazil that a candidate who came in second for a run-up election

00:07:25.360 has actually won the election so if if the future tends to be in any way similar to the past uh

00:07:32.080 bolsonaro is is set for a victory i think the run-up election is on october 25th so there's

00:07:37.760 going to be a couple weeks um but i think um i think he's going to win i actually hope he wins

00:07:45.200 um i i had my differences with with uh bolsonaro with jair bolsonaro uh who was the prior

00:07:52.560 president prior to lula i had some differences with him but i think generally he was a much

00:07:58.560 better president than anything that had happened before i hope they've learned their lessons and

00:08:03.840 now flavio bolsonaro comes with a more economic focus package of measures that he wants to

00:08:09.200 implement and brazil is another great example of a country very large very wealthy natural resources

00:08:16.720 with a very educated population but with huge problems of poverty crime and corruption and and

00:08:24.560 and you cannot just you cannot justify those things you cannot justify brazilians living the

00:08:29.040 way they are having all that wealth that they have yeah that's amazing uh now you left venezuela i

00:08:34.880 I believe it was 2015, right?

00:08:37.080 Correct.

00:08:37.580 So that was the first year of Trudeau.

00:08:39.960 And you've been here ever since.

00:08:41.640 You've raised your family here and you're proud Canadian.

00:08:45.540 But you're seeing some disturbing trends, aren't you?

00:08:48.260 Because you saw what was going on in Venezuela during the Chavez years.

00:08:53.780 And then after that, it followed by Maduro very much in the same vein.

00:08:57.400 And, of course, you couldn't get a fair election in Venezuela after Chavez got in

00:09:02.420 because of the way that they had rigged the system.

00:09:04.880 with crooked judges and they got rid of the opposition pretty much jailed people

00:09:09.400 destroyed what was left of the opposition of the media and any semblance of fair media and i just

00:09:15.960 can't help but wonder how much of that is kind of tweaking a little bit in terms of what's

00:09:21.560 happening in canada and whether i realize we're not down that far yet but we seem to be going

00:09:28.080 down that road in certain respects what what is your sense of what's happening in canada now

00:09:34.400 relative to what you saw in Venezuela?

00:09:38.500 Yeah, let me be very transparent from the get-go.

00:09:42.660 What I see happening in Canada, it's definitely worrying,

00:09:46.620 but it's light years away from anything that happened in Venezuela.

00:09:50.780 Having said that, there are two things that I am especially concerned about

00:09:54.820 with the liberals being in power for the last 10 years.

00:09:57.900 The first one is the way they control the media.

00:10:01.520 That is something that I'll tell you right off the bat.

00:10:03.820 It's the most worrying thing for me, having seen what the Chavez government did in Venezuela and what Maduro did after him, seeing the way the Canadian government and the liberal government, how they push for controlling the media, how they push for creating a list of verified media organizations, essentially telling the people who are the media that they can follow, what are the media, the TV channels and the radio stations and the newspapers that are trustable.

00:10:33.820 That is a very worrying trend. That creates a narrative where essentially everything that the CBC or the CTV or that whatever piece of print media puts out there, because they are flagged as trustable, it's going to be followed by the Liberal Party followers, whereas everything that is posted by any other media, including alternative media such as Juno News, Rebel News, you name it, it's something that should not be taken at face value.

00:11:00.020 I think that's very, that's for me, it's very worldly. The other thing, Mark, that I see that also worries me a lot is this push for making harder and harder legal gun ownership.

00:11:14.300 That is something that I saw happen in Venezuela. In Venezuela was very swift. They started saying that you don't need a gun, that why would you use a gun for, that you have the police and you have the National Guard and you have the army and you have every single law enforcement organization to protect you.

00:11:35.960 There is no reason for you to have a gun. Initially, they said there is no reason for you to have certain types of gun. And then they became all guns. And it was not a coincidence that the Venezuelan government started repressing their people in such a violent way, the moment that pretty much the weapons in the hands of the civilian population disappeared.

00:11:56.260 year. We've both seen the statistics. There is very little correlation between the number of

00:12:03.760 guns that Canadians own and the level of violent crime. Most of the crime is committed with illegal

00:12:09.600 guns, and there's no way any new regulation, there's no way any new legislation would have

00:12:14.600 prevented that from happening, but they are hell-bent on making it harder and harder for

00:12:20.180 regular citizens to own guns. And they are doing very, very little to prevent the flow of illegal

00:12:26.600 guns coming from the United States, the flow of guns that are sourced illegally by criminals.

00:12:32.580 And that tells me, that pretty much tells me what their concern is, regardless of how they

00:12:37.320 want to frame it. So those two things are very warmly for me. On the economic front, I am also

00:12:44.020 worried about what I see our government is doing. More importantly, I think, what the government

00:12:49.660 is not doing. The government is preventing people from unleashing their entrepreneurial power,

00:12:54.720 which would be more beneficial for society in general. The government is extremely interested

00:13:00.180 in regulating more, in making it more difficult and more expensive to own companies, to open

00:13:05.260 companies, to operate companies. And I know they made a couple announcements during the Canadian

00:13:09.640 Investment Summit a couple of weeks ago. And those announcements truly only, from my perspective,

00:13:15.620 They are beneficial, but they benefit a very small subset of companies, large, very capital intensive companies that will take a lot of advantage from being able to depreciate assets in short term.

00:13:27.520 But generally speaking, I consider myself an entrepreneur.

00:13:31.460 There is a company that I have been working on for the last six years, and every day it becomes harder and harder because the regulation essentially strangled you.

00:13:39.900 If you're not a large company, you are simply incapable of fronting the cost of complying with all those regulations.

00:13:45.860 And that's something that the administration at the south of our border, whether you like it or not, understood from the beginning.

00:13:51.400 And they have been making significant efforts in reducing the amount of regulation, in reducing the amount of red tape that a company has to go through for them to grow and for them to become profitable more quickly.

00:14:02.560 It's time to modernize Canada's rules on nicotine.

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00:14:31.520 Nicotine pouches remain banned in convenience stores across the country and current laws

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00:14:41.280 It's absolutely ridiculous.

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00:14:44.540 The tools exist.

00:14:45.820 Canadians deserve to have the freedom to know about them, to learn about them, to even just

00:14:50.500 understand them.

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00:14:54.980 So learn more about this campaign and our friends over at Unsmoke by visiting their

00:15:00.280 website, unsmoke.ca. And thank you so much to Unsmoke for sponsoring this episode.

00:15:07.140 Right. The other thing I would mention, and I appreciate you talking about those two worrying

00:15:12.500 trends in Canada, but I think somewhere between eight and nine million refugees left Venezuela,

00:15:18.320 I believe, during the Maduro regime. Now, Canada is seeing the exodus of young Canadians,

00:15:25.140 somewhere around 10,000 a month, youngish, maybe some not so young, but many who basically have

00:15:31.280 given up hope on Canada. And instead, what the government is doing is trying to open the door

00:15:38.000 to even more immigrants. So Trudeau brought in something like 5 million people. We're seeing

00:15:42.980 the effects of that in terms of the housing crisis, an explosion in crime. We're seeing

00:15:48.260 many of our social services starting to crumble under the weight of the added numbers to deal

00:15:55.100 with. To what degree is that an issue, the weaponization of immigration to essentially

00:16:02.280 replace outgoing malcontents with new people that you can control, manipulate through giveaways?

00:16:11.400 You know, is that an area of concern for you? It is. It is. And it's an area very close to my

00:16:17.360 heart because I'm an immigrant myself. And let me tell you something. When I came,

00:16:22.120 it was a different country, the Canada that I came to in 2015.

00:16:26.000 I was here for the last few months of the government of Stephen Harper.

00:16:30.060 And that was the country that my wife and I decided to come in 2013

00:16:33.780 when we started making plans for leaving Venezuela.

00:16:36.900 And if I had to leave Venezuela right now,

00:16:40.120 and I were taking a look at Canada and the way it stands today,

00:16:44.640 Canada probably wouldn't be in the top five of the most desirable countries for me.

00:16:49.260 Yeah. And immigration is a portion of it. But I think the main issue behind that, Mark, and it's something that we don't talk about enough, is that by bringing that such a massive number of immigrants, we are annihilating the productivity of our labor force. 0.97

00:17:06.320 Yeah. And and that's what I think it's making. It's creating the bigger issue. Obviously, the infrastructure has not catch up. Health care, education, basic infrastructure like roads and highways. 1.00

00:17:19.440 Definitely, those are affected in the short term. But I think the reasoning behind the massive levels of immigration where if you bring a lot of people and all those people can insert in the labor force and they can start producing and they can start paying taxes.

00:17:33.180 eventually it's going to pay for itself the problem is that that's not what what has happened

00:17:38.440 what has happened is that you have brought a ton of very cheap labor and those people are taking

00:17:44.500 the jobs that are at the bottom of the pyramid because those are the jobs that they can effectively

00:17:49.140 perform and they are depleting the productivity of our labor and the taxes that the government

00:17:55.020 was counting on those people paying are not getting paid and the productivity that the

00:17:59.160 government was thinking these people were going to bring because they were going to demand a lot

00:18:02.600 products and services it's just not there and and i think that's the true problem or or i think

00:18:07.960 that's the most relevant problem because infrastructure education health care those

00:18:11.640 are short-term um issues that the provinces could relatively quickly solve if there were a will to

00:18:18.520 do it but um but that's a different discussion i think from from from the standpoint of the federal

00:18:23.720 government um they are bringing a lot of people because yes they are in my opinion they are

00:18:28.760 importing voters yeah they are they are trying to import a basis of supporters that three or

00:18:34.520 five years from now will vote liberal no matter what because they will feel they owe something to

00:18:38.840 the liberal government um i have i have been a conservative pretty much most of my life

00:18:45.480 and i've had enormous differences with the conservative party but i don't feel

00:18:49.000 and i don't feel i owe them my my loyalty even though i came under a conservative government

00:18:54.120 and the reason why we came to canada is because the conservative government of stephen harper

00:18:58.760 made Canadian immigration a process that was doable, that was immigrant-friendly,

00:19:03.220 and that's why we decided to come to Canada. Our initial plans were to go to Australia,

00:19:07.420 and what the Liberals have done with it since 2015 is just atrocious. Canada used to have

00:19:13.120 an immigration process that was the envy of the West, and now it's just a sad story.

00:19:19.220 Sure, it's been politicized to help the Liberal Party. They know they've got an aging demographic

00:19:24.440 of people who are voting for them, the boomers. 0.99

00:19:28.240 And so they have to replace those with a brand new crop. 0.99

00:19:31.520 And they don't seem to mind that younger Canadians are leaving

00:19:34.940 because many of them have given up on these people.

00:19:38.040 Cesar, thank you so much for coming on the show.

00:19:39.960 We really appreciate it.

00:19:41.020 Thank you.

00:19:41.800 Thank you, Mark.

00:19:42.840 Cesar Guillarte.

00:19:44.240 Well, if you enjoyed the show and appreciate great independent journalism,

00:19:47.740 please consider becoming a premier member of Juno News

00:19:50.560 by going to junonews.com backslash straight up.

00:19:54.440 It helps us do what we do here.

00:19:56.060 Thank you so much for tuning in.

00:19:57.280 We'll see you next time.

Juno News - October 10, 2026

Media control, gun laws and immigration： South America’s lessons for Canada

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