Juno News - April 18, 2025


Trudeau Replaced Debates with Gov’t-Run System That Tried to Ban Independent Media

Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Andrew Lawton Ezra
Most Canadians support cutting immigration to Harper-era levels Have the Liberals absorbed the NDP？

Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

225.06

Word count

388

Sentence count

14


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I sit down with Ezra Levant to talk about the debate debates and how the government is trying to ban independent media in Canada. We talk about what happened when the government tried to ban the debates, how the courts stepped in, and why we won.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Folks that don't really understand, like, okay, so this is what happened. Prior to Justin Trudeau
00:00:04.980 being prime minister, these debates during the election used to be organized by the private
00:00:08.660 media companies themselves, right? So CTV might do one, Global might do one, McLean's might do one.
00:00:13.100 And basically every media company kind of like offers to organize them and then they see which
00:00:16.860 leaders agree to show up to them. Justin Trudeau, as he did for so many other issues, decided that
00:00:22.000 the government needed to be in charge of this, that even though the free market was doing a
00:00:25.780 perfectly fine job doing it, he wanted the government to take over. So the government
00:00:28.660 took over and they use that to try to ban independent media and so interestingly before
00:00:33.940 you and I actually worked together we teamed up because in 2019 they banned True Norse Andrew
00:00:38.920 Lawton and then you were working at the rebel that time and they banned you as well and so
00:00:43.300 we decided to sue Ezra heard that we were suing called me up say we're going to sue too the courts
00:00:48.940 decided to hear our two cases together and so we went to Toronto we had our case heard before a
00:00:54.320 federal judge the day of the debates, right? And it was happening on a Monday. We were in court that
00:00:59.360 day. And the judge, a federal judge, ruled in our favor and said, the government cannot prevent
00:01:05.760 citizen journalists from asking questions of their leader. So we got that court order. We used that
00:01:10.740 to get Andrew Lawton into the debate, to get you into the debate. In 2021, they actually let True
00:01:16.000 North in, so we didn't have to sue. Rebel was not allowed in. They sued again. They got in. And so
00:01:21.120 this time around the Debates Commission just didn't even bother trying to block
00:01:24.720 us they knew they saw the writing on the wall that the courts the judges as much
00:01:28.660 as I often disagree with what happens in courts in Canada this time they got the
00:01:33.220 right they got it right they made the right decision saying in a free society
00:01:35.760 Canada still free society is still a democracy we do have freedom the press
00:01:38.760 these are journalists you must let them in