Rebel News Podcast - EZRA LEVANT ｜ Bruce Pardy on the state of civil liberties and property rights in Canada

00:00:00.000 You're fighting for freedom! 0.98

00:00:03.040 Shame on you, you sensorism bug!

00:00:14.920 Tonight, which is more rare, a unicorn or a freedom-loving law professor actually hired by a university in Canada?

00:00:23.200 You probably know who I'm talking about, a feature interview with Bruce Pardy.

00:00:26.620 You're watching The Ezra LeVant Show.

00:00:30.000 Well, when I was growing up, the civil liberties public interest law firm to watch in Canada was called the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

00:00:40.440 There was a minor offshoot of it in British Columbia, but the big one was in Toronto.

00:00:45.620 And it was run by a very, I don't know, progressive man who was an old-school, sort of Berkeley-style civil libertarian.

00:00:55.980 And you could tell that he deeply loved it in his bones, but that generation is long gone.

00:01:02.580 The left, I think, has chosen to walk away from its admirable legacy as a free speech movement

00:01:10.360 because the speech they don't like, they don't want to debate it anymore, they want to shut it down.

00:01:15.840 Now, obviously there are still a few civil libertarians on the left, but not too many.

00:01:20.880 And they seem to be quite selective with whose freedom they support.

00:01:24.620 I remember reading about in the 60s and 70s when they were, for example, in a very Jewish neighborhood in Chicago

00:01:32.260 when neo-Nazis and KKK members marched through Skokie, Illinois, it was called.

00:01:39.720 And the ACLU, the American version of this, would send Jewish and black lawyers to defend the Nazis. 0.81

00:01:47.160 And they sent Jews and blacks on purpose to make the point. 1.00

00:01:50.840 We hate what these guys say, but you've got to support free speech for people you despise if you want it for yourself. 0.79

00:01:58.180 Alas, that is gone.

00:02:00.920 And it has taken a little bit of time, but in the void left by the decline and fall of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and others,

00:02:11.300 other civil liberties groups have come.

00:02:13.580 The Canadian Constitution Foundation, the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms,

00:02:20.220 my favorite, the Democracy Fund, the Free Speech Union of Canada,

00:02:25.400 and a group that we haven't talked about before, that we're going to talk about today, called Rights Probe.

00:02:31.200 And right there, there's almost half a dozen new civil liberties movements that I'm not going to say they're on the right,

00:02:38.060 because I don't even know what that means sometimes.

00:02:40.140 If you were skeptical of forced vaccines, are you right wing or left wing?

00:02:45.440 If you were against lockdowns, are you right wing or left wing?

00:02:48.700 I don't know.

00:02:49.520 I just know that liberty was in the balance.

00:02:52.440 And I'm glad that a movement has arose to fill the gap left by the left.

00:02:58.980 Joining me now to talk about all these things is the leader of Rights Probe.

00:03:03.760 We've talked to him before, but not in this capacity.

00:03:05.560 His name is Dr. Bruce Pardy. He's a professor of law at Queen's University, and he joins us today via Zoom.

00:03:11.920 Great to see you again, Dr. Pardy.

00:03:14.080 Great to see you too, Ezra. Thanks for having me on.

00:03:16.380 Well, it's our pleasure. Our viewers love civil liberties.

00:03:20.380 It's one of the main themes of Rebel News, and it's what motivated us to get involved in the Democracy Fund,

00:03:26.700 which, as you know, I know you're familiar with the Democracy Fund.

00:03:29.200 We really went to battle during the lockdowns when the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, they went on leave.

00:03:35.880 I'm not even kidding.

00:03:36.940 They really just turned off their lights during the worst civil liberties inferno in a century.

00:03:42.840 Tell me about Rights Probe.

00:03:44.520 I know a little bit about it, but I'm guessing a lot of our viewers don't know anything about it.

00:03:49.480 Right. Thank you.

00:03:50.900 Thank you for asking. Rights Probe is a project of the Energy Probe Research Foundation,

00:03:56.360 and Energy Probe has been around for decades.

00:03:57.980 It's one of Canada's leading think tanks advocating for things like free markets and good policy.

00:04:07.240 But Rights Probe itself is a, I would like to describe it as a law and liberty think tank.

00:04:12.060 We're smaller than some of the other organizations that you mentioned,

00:04:15.300 but we do our best to put our two cents worth in regularly on these questions.

00:04:22.140 And I think, you know, the message that the Canadian Civil Liberties Association lived by early on,

00:04:30.760 which is more important now than ever,

00:04:34.320 was that the greatest threat to our liberties is not from without, but from within.

00:04:41.040 You know, it's not evil dictators trying to do us harm.

00:04:45.380 It's parochial bureaucrats claiming to do good.

00:04:48.820 People who have too much power inside our own governing system.

00:04:52.820 That is the greatest threat.

00:04:54.880 And it's when we ignore the enemy within that we get into real trouble.

00:05:01.580 Now, you say the enemy within,

00:05:03.160 and I think a lot of the infringements of liberties are done by appealing to other values.

00:05:12.420 Sure, free speech is important, but we have to have community cohesion.

00:05:16.680 We don't want to divide people, Jews versus Muslims versus Christians.

00:05:22.120 So don't talk about certain issues.

00:05:24.580 And so there's always another value that, like, no one typically comes in and says,

00:05:30.320 I am going to destroy your rights.

00:05:32.580 They say, no, no, we're just going to shift the balance a little bit

00:05:35.580 because we have to protect multiculturalism,

00:05:38.020 because we have to protect hurt feelings, because we have to stop hate.

00:05:41.880 How much of the infringements do you think are people who say,

00:05:45.820 no, there is too much freedom, we want to turn out the lights,

00:05:48.460 versus people who say, no, no, we just, there's other values that are more important?

00:05:52.300 What would you say the breakdown is?

00:05:53.480 Is there anyone out there who truly thinks we have too much freedom

00:05:57.480 and it's just authoritarian, or would they all have that excuse of being a do-gooder?

00:06:04.040 I think a lot of people, if you push them, if you offer up a model,

00:06:09.320 and this has happened to me, if you offer up a model that is actually free, right?

00:06:14.500 If you use this system, you would actually be free.

00:06:16.860 And some people recoil from it, in the sense that, well, we said we wanted to be free,

00:06:23.540 but not that free.

00:06:24.840 We still want our own values to be enforced.

00:06:29.840 And if you want your own values to be enforced,

00:06:32.300 then you're just playing the same game as the rest of them.

00:06:35.440 Just because, you know, your constituency is not ascendant at the moment.

00:06:40.040 I've put it this way in the past. 0.98

00:06:44.780 In a way, free speech is for losers. 0.97

00:06:49.360 And by that, I mean losers of the culture war.

00:06:52.460 If you're losing the culture war, then the other side is infringing upon your speech.

00:06:57.500 Yes, that's going to happen.

00:06:58.820 But the funny thing is, what you want to do is exactly the reverse.

00:07:02.780 It's free speech until you become ascendant,

00:07:05.440 and then your kind of speech is going to be enforced.

00:07:07.540 No, that will not do.

00:07:11.020 That's exactly what I'm talking about.

00:07:12.680 I mentioned the old Canadian Civil Liberties boss.

00:07:15.180 His name was Alan Boravoy.

00:07:17.680 And when I say Berkeley, you know, students, sit-ins, that kind of thing.

00:07:22.140 And I think it's because the left felt powerless,

00:07:25.220 and free speech was a tool they used to get power.

00:07:27.860 But now that the left is not powerless,

00:07:29.960 now that it dominates the institutions,

00:07:31.900 they want to, you know, pull up the ladder so no one else can do the same move.

00:07:38.860 You know, there's nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come.

00:07:43.160 But if you can't elocute that idea, if you can't prosecute the idea,

00:07:48.380 it's not powerful at all.

00:07:49.700 I mean, I just see, it's sort of like the book Animal Farm by George Orwell,

00:07:56.260 where the pigs sort of transform into the farmer at the end.

00:07:59.560 I think that's what's happened to the left.

00:08:01.840 They have become everything that they railed against a generation or two generations ago,

00:08:06.920 and they don't care.

00:08:09.120 No question.

00:08:10.000 No question.

00:08:10.700 That has absolutely happened.

00:08:12.380 I was, am, still am, a great fan of Alan Borovoy.

00:08:16.580 And Alan Borovoy, I went to see him speak at various places,

00:08:21.260 including at Queen's, years ago.

00:08:23.040 And he was the one who said,

00:08:25.220 the greatest threat to our liberties is not from without, but from within. 0.94

00:08:29.260 But, see, this happens on both ends of the political spectrum, right?

00:08:33.100 It is the left that championed free speech for a good while,

00:08:36.020 and that's because, at the time, the left was not in power.

00:08:39.280 But you can see the same thing happening today.

00:08:41.360 I mean, a great many conservatives are now free speech people

00:08:44.880 because the speech that is being imposed upon them is from the left.

00:08:49.480 And the left has abandoned its actual, well, its claim to believe in free speech.

00:08:55.620 But if you scratch beneath the surface on the right,

00:08:59.020 there is a desire to, again, do the reverse,

00:09:02.780 to achieve the freedom for the kind of speech that they think is proper,

00:09:08.120 but to impose restrictions on speech that they think is not.

00:09:11.360 And so you go round and round and round.

00:09:14.500 You know, let me just quote Alan Borvoi one more time before we move on.

00:09:17.520 He was quite, I mean, he was, civil liberties personified in my mind.

00:09:22.020 And I remember him saying to me, I had never heard it before,

00:09:24.020 but I instantly knew it was a powerful idea.

00:09:26.940 He said, freedom of speech is a strategic freedom

00:09:30.140 upon which the other freedoms depend.

00:09:32.920 For example, what use is a public meeting?

00:09:36.560 Freedom of association, freedom of assembly.

00:09:39.380 What use is a free, you know, if you can't say an idea freely,

00:09:44.720 what use is an election?

00:09:46.540 You know, it would be like an election without campaign platforms.

00:09:49.760 And so I, you know, there were a lot of great civil liberties thinkers.

00:09:56.640 I forget who originally said, take away all my freedoms,

00:10:00.920 but leave me with freedom of speech.

00:10:02.300 And with it, I'll win back the ones that you've stolen.

00:10:05.320 It really is the linchpin of them all.

00:10:07.580 And I think that's why censorship has always been such a top priority.

00:10:12.540 And when I go to Davos every year to cover the World Economic Forum,

00:10:16.040 they're always talking about censorship.

00:10:19.220 They don't use that word, by the way.

00:10:20.480 They say misinformation, disinformation, fake news, you know, fact checkers.

00:10:25.460 They use all these euphemisms, but they are obsessed with censorship at Davos.

00:10:32.200 And they really link it.

00:10:33.740 I remember a couple of years ago, I was there.

00:10:35.740 Public enemy number one, of course, was Donald Trump.

00:10:37.620 But public enemy number two, very close behind,

00:10:39.780 was Elon Musk precisely because he bought Twitter and freed it.

00:10:43.600 I mean, they have other beefs with him too.

00:10:45.220 But they so clearly understand that free speech leads to power for people they don't like.

00:10:52.940 Sure. Well, absolutely.

00:10:55.180 And I think free speech has quite rightly been identified as the most important of the important rights and freedoms.

00:11:02.240 But on the other hand, it's also a little bit artificial.

00:11:06.160 One of the consequences of our constitutional architecture is that we think of our rights and freedoms as distinct things.

00:11:15.340 You know, there's freedom of speech here, and there's the freedom to associate here, and freedom of religion here.

00:11:21.040 Well, actually, those are just instances of a bigger single thing, which is being free.

00:11:27.580 You know, the state of being free.

00:11:28.960 Now, when are you free?

00:11:30.020 And my definition has always been that you are free when you are not subject to the coercion that is the force of other people, including the state.

00:11:41.440 And if we started to think of freedom in that singular way, instead of carving off these exceptions.

00:11:48.440 See, part of our problem is our constitutional architecture, and not just in Canada, but across the Western world, including the United States.

00:11:55.340 You have our constitutions that are designed this way.

00:11:57.920 The state has unlimited power, except, and the exceptions are, you know, the Bill of Rights or the Charter of Rights.

00:12:06.780 And one of those rights is freedom of speech.

00:12:09.020 But we need the exception because we set up the general rule.

00:12:12.460 The general rule is unlimited power on the part of the state.

00:12:16.020 Right.

00:12:16.660 And one of the ways to think about this differently is to think about how that could be reversed, as in the state can do nothing except, what are the exceptions?

00:12:26.660 What kinds of things do you want the state to do? 0.91

00:12:28.680 Right.

00:12:28.900 Right.

00:12:29.440 But then you're not carving out these small little exceptions because freedom of speech should be part of the state of being free.

00:12:36.760 And we are a long way away from that, even in the way we talk about it.

00:12:40.580 You know, I think it, I mean, I grew up in Calgary where a large number of Soviet refuseniks went in the brief period of detente, 79, 80.

00:12:50.620 I don't know if you remember that, but when Jimmy Carter warmed up diplomacy with Brezhnev, they let some people out.

00:12:57.700 So all these Russians came to Calgary and I got to know some of them.

00:13:01.860 And, you know, it was pretty clear that in the Soviet Union, if it wasn't specifically permitted, it was banned.

00:13:09.040 Yes.

00:13:09.580 Whereas our mindset is if it's not specifically banned, it's permitted.

00:13:12.900 And it's a totally different way of seeing the world.

00:13:16.600 I won't go into some of the anecdotes my friends told me, but even walking on a lawn at a university, you would be terrified that someone would come and make a, you know, report about you.

00:13:28.460 I won't, I'll tell those stories another day, but it's a different in mindset.

00:13:32.640 They really had a slave mentality.

00:13:34.000 Even the freedom fighters, they grew up so careful about it.

00:13:37.860 I want to, I want to talk about one more generic thing.

00:13:40.340 And then I've got four different articles here that you've recently written.

00:13:43.380 And, and there's one I really want to talk to you about, about the BC property rights case, which is so terrifying.

00:13:51.160 So, but before I do that, I want to ask you just one last question about the limits of freedom and democracy.

00:13:57.140 And I think about this when I look at Australia and what happened with the Bondi shooting.

00:14:04.780 And I look at the mass immigration there in the UK, in Canada, it's even more disproportionate.

00:14:11.580 And there comes a time, I think, demographically when people start to act in a clannish way as opposed to an individualistic way.

00:14:21.780 And Lee Kuan Yew, who was sort of the, the godfather or the grandfather of Singapore, took a very interesting approach.

00:14:29.960 Singapore is, I'm not going to call it a liberal democracy because it's really not either.

00:14:34.660 It's sort of a managed, modern, light touch, authoritarian place with, with the rule of law.

00:14:45.240 I'll give them that.

00:14:45.760 They have the rule of law.

00:14:46.780 They have property rights.

00:14:47.860 They have capitalism.

00:14:48.680 But they're limited in their civil liberties.

00:14:51.840 And Lee Kuan Yew would say that that was absolutely essential.

00:14:58.160 And one of the things I learned recently is they, even in their, even in their neighborhoods, they would ensure that the different ethnicities of Singapore were mixed.

00:15:10.220 So you couldn't just be in a Muslim neighborhood.

00:15:13.180 You couldn't just be in an ethnic Chinese neighborhood.

00:15:15.700 Lee Kuan Yew realized, or at least he said, that if left to their own devices, a multiracial, multiethnic society like that would, would, would become clannish and would, would splinter.

00:15:31.100 And I found that compelling coming from him in that part of the world.

00:15:36.100 And I wonder if we reach a point in the civil liberties loving West, that if you bring in enough people of certain cultures that don't value freedom of speech, and you give them the tools of a liberal democracy, you give them free speech, you give them electoral democracy, if you're not at a certain point slitting your throat.

00:16:00.300 Hitler used democracy, he was elected in 1933, and there was a lot of shenanigans, but if you give illiberal people the tools of liberal democracy, maybe they can take it over.

00:16:11.860 And that's, I think, one of the things that worried Lee Kuan Yew.

00:16:14.500 And I think it's something maybe we have to worry about in the West.

00:16:18.100 If you bring in an enormous number of illiberal people, do you give them the tools of liberalism?

00:16:23.680 What do you think?

00:16:24.200 Well, I wouldn't want to go down that path myself, but I want to, I mean, he has a point.

00:16:30.380 And, and let me put the point this way.

00:16:32.880 There are actually two bad choices.

00:16:36.980 Number one is to be ruled by a powerful elite that can decide, you know, what it is that you shall do and how you speak and, and, and so on in the, in the general welfare, in their judgments.

00:16:48.280 That's a bad, it's a bad situation.

00:16:50.420 The other bad situation is to be ruled by the mob, which is democracy.

00:16:57.020 Right.

00:16:57.580 And sometimes those things overlap.

00:16:59.280 So, for example, some people say, well, in order to reform our system, we should be ruled by referendum.

00:17:04.700 Every time there's an important policy question to come up, we should put that to the people.

00:17:09.380 Okay.

00:17:10.080 Well, that sounds great in theory, but it's a terrible thing in practice because imagine, for example, if you had that system in place during COVID and you put to the people the question, you know, should everybody be required to get a vaccine?

00:17:21.880 You know, and you got 75% of the people saying, well, absolutely.

00:17:25.000 Well, you end up with a, with a system of law that says you get a vaccine or you go to jail.

00:17:29.160 Yeah.

00:17:29.820 That won't do either.

00:17:30.940 Right.

00:17:31.200 So the mob is a bad idea.

00:17:32.860 Yes, I grant you that, but you don't want your elites to be so powerful to be dictating what the general welfare is either, because that's the situation that we're railing against right now.

00:17:42.440 So you've got to have a different kind of architectural system that provides every single person with the space to decide for themselves how to be as long as the bottom line for me is always, and we've come to a place in this culture where it's a very weak belief.

00:18:00.900 But the bottom line is you cannot use force or the threats of force against other people, period.

00:18:08.880 It cannot be done.

00:18:10.180 If you have that as your, as your foundational idea, then you can have a lot of freedom without trouble.

00:18:17.100 It doesn't mean everybody's going to think the same thing.

00:18:19.160 It doesn't mean people are not going to gather in tribes, but it means that you're going to have a peaceful society where people make their own way.

00:18:25.700 Right. And Singapore, you know, is full of accomplishments, but I'm not sure that I would want to reproduce their system exactly.

00:18:33.220 Yeah. You know, it's fascinating to me to look at the UK where five MPs contesting the general election last year won on an explicitly sectarian campaign.

00:18:49.700 Their slogan was lend your vote to Gaza. 0.90

00:18:52.940 They were running in Birmingham.

00:18:54.620 They were running in the UK and they elected five MPs.

00:18:57.520 Right. And, you know, to me, that's terrifying because I, I think that unlocks all sorts of new systems of rule and power and, and that I don't think the West is used to.

00:19:11.960 We'll leave that aside because there's so many things I want to talk to you about that you have issued from Rights Probe.

00:19:16.660 You're, you're not just a member of Rights Probe, you're an author and researcher and professor.

00:19:21.520 And I want to talk about something that I think is not being sufficiently covered across the country.

00:19:27.980 And I know it's really started to shock British Columbians who have been sort of woken up, who were sleepwalking past this.

00:19:35.700 Let me read the headline of a recent essay you wrote.

00:19:39.940 Courts and governments caused BC's property crisis.

00:19:46.240 They're not about to fix it.

00:19:47.860 And, and let me, I'll just read the first sentence just so people know what we're talking about.

00:19:51.800 And then I'll hand it over to you.

00:19:52.980 You said, in British Columbia, property rights are in turmoil.

00:19:56.580 The BC Supreme Court recently declared that aboriginal title exists on 800 acres of land in Richmond, a suburb of Vancouver.

00:20:05.800 Aboriginal title said the court is, quote, senior and prior, unquote, to fee simple interest.

00:20:12.880 In the shadow of the decision, given the implications, aboriginal title claims are receiving more attention.

00:20:18.620 Kamloops and Sun Peaks Ski Resort are targets in one such claim.

00:20:23.520 Meanwhile, the BC government has been conferring aboriginal title across the province, too.

00:20:27.580 It continues to make agreements, such as on Haida Gwaii, to transfer control over land use in the province.

00:20:34.040 That has totally spooked people.

00:20:36.680 Richmond, by the way, demographically, there's a lot of new Canadians.

00:20:40.940 There are a lot of Chinese-speaking Canadians.

00:20:43.280 And, and this is an, I, it was very interesting to me to see new political fault lines there.

00:20:49.900 People are shocked that the house they worked their whole, well, for a lot of people, their house is their total life savings.

00:20:55.720 And now they're being told, well, you don't even own the land under it.

00:21:00.000 Terrifying.

00:21:00.660 Take it away, professor.

00:21:01.680 Right.

00:21:03.000 But you see, this, this is a consequence of bad ideas, bad ideas that have been with us for a while.

00:21:09.600 They're, they're coming home to roost now and people are surprised because they weren't at the surface before.

00:21:15.060 But they really shouldn't have been surprised if they've been paying attention.

00:21:18.900 One of those bad ideas is that the law should be different for people of different, different races and backgrounds and cultures and lineage.

00:21:26.960 Right.

00:21:27.440 That's a bad idea.

00:21:28.420 And the second bad idea, and there are lots of them, but the second bad idea is that, that governments and courts have the power to decide what's proper with respect to your property.

00:21:38.700 Your property in Canada has never been secure.

00:21:41.160 It's more, it's more, more insecure now than it's ever been, but, but our property have always, has always been held subject to the crown.

00:21:50.080 The crown, our governments have always had the power to expropriate property and to compensate you.

00:21:56.720 Well, our, our statutes say they must compensate you, but, but they were, they have always been able to legislate your property away if they have chosen to do so.

00:22:05.600 They've just mostly chosen not to do so, but we are now in an era where the, the, the idea that Aboriginal groups have essentially the right to claim any territory that, that they've ever occupied or use,

00:22:22.400 or can show through oral evidence that they have a claim to, and that is undermining the security of property, especially in BC, because BC is largely unseeded, so, so to speak, without, without, without treaties, but is, but is not the only area by any means.

00:22:39.120 There are lots of land claims around in, in Ontario and New Brunswick and, in Quebec and, and so on.

00:22:45.280 So people should not be, um, satisfied by the claim that this is a BC problem.

00:22:53.560 It's, it's not, but it's especially acute in BC.

00:22:56.280 And as you alluded to this, this decision, the Coachan decision, uh, relating to Richmond has declared Aboriginal title to be senior and prior to fee simple interest.

00:23:06.660 Now, the New Brunswick court of appeal recently in, in, with respect to a New Brunswick land claim, basically came out and said, well, not quite so fast.

00:23:18.280 Aboriginal title is not able to, to, to supplant fee simple interest, but a claim for compensation can be made against the crown, which is better, but it's still not a full answer.

00:23:29.780 Because any claim against the crown for a huge swath of land, of course, is going to be paid for by, by tax dollars, meaning the, the residents will pay one way or the other.

00:23:38.700 Right.

00:23:39.200 So the, the, the, the, the, the foundational problem is this idea that if you have a certain kind of descent, then you are a different cat legal category than everybody else.

00:23:50.780 And, and, and that is the idea that in this country we have to do away with.

00:23:56.000 You know, um, I go to the UK quite a bit cause I'm riveted by their debates over immigration.

00:24:01.600 And, um, one of the things that the establishment always says is we can't stop the boats because, oh, because why?

00:24:10.740 Because of the European convention on human rights, even though the UK left the European union in a Brexit vote a dozen years ago, 10 years ago, um, they still stayed in this legal, you know, superficial, like infrastructure, superstructure riveted on top of, you've got centuries of British law, which many would say is the finest source of liberty of any legal system.

00:24:40.180 I mean, I, that's what we inherited.

00:24:42.040 That's what the Americans inherited. 0.87

00:24:43.760 Um, I mean, they've got their problems, but they've been thinking about freedom since the Magna Carta.

00:24:48.420 They've riveted onto that, this European law.

00:24:51.100 And they say, oh, what can we do?

00:24:52.660 It's a foreign law and we have to abide by it because we're part of the convention.

00:24:56.240 Well, get out of it is the short answer.

00:24:58.880 I think there's something similar here in Canada, but we never were in it as officially as like everyone in the UK knows they were in the European union.

00:25:07.520 In Canada, we have something called UNDRIP, which immediately puts everyone to sleep because what's that?

00:25:14.080 It sounds like some, a leaky faucet or something.

00:25:17.040 The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

00:25:23.040 And even that, it's so foggy and like, you know, I'm worried people are turning off our show right now because they're so bored by it.

00:25:30.520 But that's the trouble with it.

00:25:32.220 We've signed on to this treaty that was not drafted by Canadians in our parliament.

00:25:38.180 We agreed to something that bureaucrats cooked up at the UN.

00:25:43.220 I bet you not one in a thousand Canadians has read it.

00:25:47.040 Let me change that.

00:25:47.900 Not one in a hundred thousand Canadians.

00:25:49.740 Not one in a hundred journalists.

00:25:51.200 You think there's more than one in a hundred MPs who have read it?

00:25:56.240 And yet, that is the fountain of so much of this communist property rights destroying ideas.

00:26:02.960 Why don't you talk about UNDRIP?

00:26:04.800 What is it?

00:26:05.520 Where did it come from?

00:26:06.220 How do we get out of it?

00:26:07.040 What does it say?

00:26:09.360 I think it's like this eternal excuse in the UK.

00:26:14.980 Sorry, we can't do anything about it because we're part of this foreign treaty.

00:26:19.380 Right.

00:26:19.560 So, I'll go into UNDRIP, but let me just observe first that these are all tools.

00:26:28.300 You know, the European Convention on Human Rights, UNDRIP, all kinds of other things are tools.

00:26:32.900 And part of the thing that we are doing, those of us who oppose all of this, are playing a bit of whack-a-mole.

00:26:42.760 I mean, there's this and there's that and there's the next thing.

00:26:44.820 And we're quite right to point out all these issues that arise coming down the pike like never before, but they're all of a piece. 0.74

00:26:51.700 Right.

00:26:52.380 So, UNDRIP is part of the piece.

00:26:54.700 And UNDRIP is a UN General Assembly resolution that lists pages and pages and pages of rights and entitlements for indigenous groups.

00:27:05.340 Now, as a UN General Assembly resolution that is not binding, it's not a treaty, it's certainly not a law.

00:27:13.100 It's a declaration.

00:27:13.720 It's like a press release.

00:27:16.140 It's a press release.

00:27:16.580 It's like a press release.

00:27:17.760 It's an aspirational document put together largely by countries that don't have, quote, Aboriginal peoples in the first place.

00:27:25.840 But what happened after that is important.

00:27:29.700 So, at the time that UNDRIP appeared, the Stephen Harper government voted no, along with the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and so on.

00:27:38.900 And that position was reversed when the Trudeau Liberals came into power.

00:27:45.500 But that still wouldn't have changed anything except for the fact that, in 2019, the B.C. legislature passed a statute saying that the B.C. government was responsible for making sure that B.C. laws were consistent with the declaration.

00:28:01.120 And so, one of the things that the declaration says is, essentially, that Aboriginal peoples have the right to the territory that they ever occupied or used.

00:28:10.720 It says that in black and white.

00:28:12.020 And so, what's happened since then is that the B.C. government, the N.D.P. government, has taken that as a literal mandate to go ahead and make agreements with various groups for various territories, either acknowledging Aboriginal title or handing over management rights.

00:28:28.220 And also, recently, what has happened is the B.C. Court of Appeal has said, actually, yes, that's what it means.

00:28:33.580 This means, this means, this statute, DRIPA, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, the B.C. statute, the effect of that statute is to incorporate UNDRIP into British Columbian law.

00:28:47.340 And it means that the government has an obligation to do these things.

00:28:50.080 So, this is, this is a self-made problem.

00:28:54.200 It's a self-inflicted problem.

00:28:55.600 It's part of the, you know, sort of the cultural suicide of the West. 0.89

00:29:01.500 It's, this happens to be a British Columbia instance, but you mentioned what was happening in Great Britain.

00:29:06.540 It's happening all over the place.

00:29:07.980 And it is a function of the fact that our leaders have the power to make decisions, make policy decisions in the general welfare to do things that they shouldn't have the power to do.

00:29:19.680 So, a lot of people, the angle that they're taking in all these problems is the wrong people are in power.

00:29:28.920 We have the wrong rulers.

00:29:30.320 If we had better rulers, then we'd be in a better situation.

00:29:33.720 And so, our task is to replace these people with those people.

00:29:38.180 And I think that is entirely wrong.

00:29:40.260 Now, I grant you, we have a lot, we have a lot of bad rulers.

00:29:44.000 No question about that.

00:29:45.940 But if you'd simply substitute some people for other people, you're going to get the same kinds of problems because the problem is the power, right?

00:29:53.520 People want to have policy discussions about whether this policy is right or wrong.

00:29:58.160 That's not the point.

00:29:59.460 The point is that the government has the power to make policy about these things.

00:30:04.120 That power shouldn't exist.

00:30:06.780 And that requires a serious rethink of the way we are governed.

00:30:10.760 Yeah.

00:30:11.300 Well, you know, I'm glad you clarified for me that it's not a treaty.

00:30:14.300 I should have known better.

00:30:15.600 But thank you for the refresher.

00:30:17.620 And a simple act of the B.C. legislature, it sounds like it's almost a constitutional amendment if it impacts every other law in such a massive way.

00:30:26.300 I think of the United States where, yes, the executive can sign a treaty with anyone in the world, but it has to be ratified in the U.S. Senate, if I understand their law correctly.

00:30:37.220 So there's a least of – go ahead.

00:30:39.340 Well, that's true.

00:30:39.980 But it's a very interesting way this is happening.

00:30:42.040 And this is happening incrementally like so many of our other problems.

00:30:45.520 This is happening incrementally, bit by bit by bit by bit, right?

00:30:50.320 So you're right.

00:30:52.020 This DRIPA thing sounds like a fundamental change to all the laws in B.C. 1.00

00:30:56.780 And this is what the B.C. Court of Appeal has said that it is.

00:30:59.520 But on the other hand, it is just a statute.

00:31:02.980 And a statute can be amended or repealed.

00:31:04.880 So if a new government got into power, they could come along and say, this hasn't worked out.

00:31:09.240 Let's get rid of it.

00:31:10.100 OK.

00:31:10.660 But what has happened in the meantime is that the B.C., the NDP B.C. government has been making these agreements with various Aboriginal groups, like, for example, over Haida Gwai.

00:31:21.980 They made an agreement with the Haida Council to acknowledge Aboriginal title over Haida Gwai in spite of the fact that a whole lot of private individuals own fee-simple property on Haida Gwai.

00:31:32.240 OK.

00:31:32.760 That's still just an agreement.

00:31:34.620 You could – if you get a new government in power, you could change the agreement.

00:31:38.380 You could – well, you could certainly legislate a change to the agreement.

00:31:42.000 You could legislate change or repeal of DRIPA.

00:31:45.160 But what happened is that the Haida Council and the B.C. government and the federal government went together to the B.C. Supreme Court to ask for a consent order, a consent declaration, saying that the Aboriginal title as acknowledged by the Haida Gwai agreement was now a Section 35 protected constitutional right.

00:32:11.120 And the court granted the request so that no future government can now go back and fix it.

00:32:19.020 So what is happening intermentally is constitutional change in an indirect way.

00:32:23.540 It's crazy, and it shows how bad ideas, when repeated, can become the Overton window, and they just – it's almost like they're spoken into reality.

00:32:36.360 I'm in Toronto, and everywhere I go, I hear land acknowledgments in places, by the way, where if you read any treaty – and I've read several of the treaties with Indians a century and a half ago or so – they use language like surrender.

00:32:56.160 I mean, these treaties could not be clearer what they are.

00:32:59.540 It's like when the Japanese surrendered to the U.S. Pacific Fleet in 1945.

00:33:07.340 It was an unconditional surrender.

00:33:10.460 I mean, maybe they had some – they mentioned, you know, an Indian reserve, and there were certain things that they would be granted.

00:33:16.300 But there was – it was extinguishing the title.

00:33:19.900 At least that's my read of these documents.

00:33:22.060 But every single public assembly at a school, every sports event, every government function starts with a land acknowledgment, even in place – it's – and people have started to treat that as like some holy sacrament.

00:33:40.740 I mean, we used to say the Lord's Prayer, opening an event, or the anthem.

00:33:47.100 And in Toronto now, on Remembrance Day, not only did they have a land acknowledgment, but then they had an acknowledgment about black slavery. 0.54

00:33:55.580 There's never been slavery in Canada.

00:33:57.960 I, you know, I did some research on this the other day.

00:34:02.180 When slavery was abolished, the sale of slaves, the slave trade, there was a grand total of 16 – one, six – 16 black people in Toronto, according to the census.

00:34:12.940 And I don't think they were slaves.

00:34:14.240 But it was – this was not – this was not a thing.

00:34:16.940 But if you repeat it often enough, if you say it often enough, you speak it into existence because the – you know, a high school student today is a law school student tomorrow, is a judge the next day.

00:34:29.160 And I think we are speaking our way into an insanity.

00:34:34.220 I agree.

00:34:34.920 I agree.

00:34:35.320 It's a kind of social psychosis.

00:34:38.500 I don't know how else to describe it.

00:34:41.420 I'm not a, you know, psychologist.

00:34:42.940 But there is something strange going on that way. 0.95

00:34:46.520 And it is, of course, these land acknowledgments are the height of hypocrisy.

00:34:52.340 You know, it's when the people – I'm sure some of the people in B.C. who are now concerned about their property interests were the ones declaring these land acknowledgments and then turning around and thinking, oh, my goodness, you're taking my fee simple title away.

00:35:08.060 I mean, how can you do that?

00:35:08.880 Well, because you've been saying so for the past little while.

00:35:11.580 Why now are you concerned?

00:35:13.420 Did you not know what you were saying?

00:35:15.180 You know, what did you mean?

00:35:17.260 Which version of things did you mean?

00:35:18.940 Did you mean you were actually on aboriginal land?

00:35:20.960 Or do you mean that you own fee simple title?

00:35:22.920 I mean, pick one.

00:35:24.760 And people are not able to think through the implications of what it is that they think and believe.

00:35:30.900 You know, it reminds me of global warming ideology.

00:35:33.980 I mean, if you really do say and bend the knee to carbon dioxide is evil and bad, you know, you say that long enough.

00:35:41.880 And when oil companies started saying it to greenwash themselves, thinking, oh, I'll just, you know, spend 1% of our revenues on some distractions to appease the left.

00:35:53.440 You haven't – you know, it's like that line in Hamlet.

00:35:58.380 But, you know, the appetite is grown by the eating.

00:36:02.660 It's not a word-for-word quote.

00:36:04.520 But these groups don't get full when you feed them.

00:36:07.900 They get hungrier.

00:36:08.780 And when you make concessions to them about global warming, sooner or later they're going to say, well, we thought you meant it.

00:36:15.800 You've said it 100 times.

00:36:17.200 And so time to turn off gasoline cars.

00:36:20.580 Time to put carbon taxes on everything.

00:36:22.800 Time to shut down farms, as they try to do in the Netherlands and how they're doing in France today.

00:36:30.260 You know, people repeat these pieties of the left.

00:36:34.160 Sooner or later someone's going to hold them to it.

00:36:35.800 But this is exactly the story with UNDRIP.

00:36:40.180 I mean, the story about UNDRIP was always, you know, this is an aspirational document.

00:36:45.320 You know, they can't be serious.

00:36:47.140 If you read the document, the reaction that you probably have is you can't – well, you can't be serious.

00:36:53.160 And then they passed UNDRIP – sorry, DRIPA in the statute in B.C.

00:36:57.380 And, by the way, in 2019, that statute was passed unanimously in the B.C.

00:37:02.460 Legislature, by all the MLAs who were there, of every party.

00:37:06.580 I suppose on the theory that, well, you can't be serious.

00:37:10.560 This is just a symbolic kind of thing.

00:37:11.740 And you can't be against it because only a racist would be against it.

00:37:15.900 Right, right.

00:37:16.620 But the thing is, these things are all serious.

00:37:20.260 Like, take them literally.

00:37:21.200 People are – the powers that be are telling you what they intend.

00:37:25.520 Yeah.

00:37:25.960 And you are going along on the basis that they're not really serious.

00:37:28.940 They are serious.

00:37:30.500 And if you don't believe what it is that you're reading, then think again.

00:37:34.500 You know what?

00:37:35.200 I shouldn't say it, but Lee Kuan Yew wouldn't let that happen.

00:37:40.260 Well, maybe so.

00:37:41.200 But the problem is that he won't be in power forever.

00:37:43.720 And once you get somebody you don't like in power, then they have all the power.

00:37:46.840 Like a Nicolas Maduro.

00:37:48.520 You're right.

00:37:49.020 I'm just making a wry comment.

00:37:51.900 Hey, I want to just touch on a couple of other of your publications.

00:37:54.940 And I really appreciate you bringing me up to speed on UNDRIP and DRIPA.

00:37:59.160 And thanks for the clarification.

00:38:01.000 This is such an important issue.

00:38:02.220 And our BC reporter, Drea Humphrey, is really – she went to a town hall meeting that was completely packed.

00:38:09.280 I don't know if you saw any of that.

00:38:10.680 I did.

00:38:11.260 I did, yeah.

00:38:12.060 And that told me, holy smokes, regular people, people who didn't do anything bad to anyone,

00:38:18.000 are now being asked to compensate people who nothing bad has happened to.

00:38:22.820 So this is a transaction in 2025 that takes from some people that did nothing wrong and gives to other people who have not been wronged.

00:38:32.320 Right.

00:38:32.460 And I tell you, there's something – there's a giant waking up in BC, and it crosses ethnic lines, and it crosses all other boundaries.

00:38:41.820 Because when you start messing with someone's house, that's their home.

00:38:46.940 That's their castle.

00:38:47.760 That's their future.

00:38:48.600 That's where – that's everything to them.

00:38:50.640 And I think that – I think that is going to be a huge issue in 2026.

00:38:54.580 Let me quickly go through some of your other posts on Rights Probe, if you don't mind.

00:38:58.680 And maybe just give me a word on each of them.

00:39:00.000 I've got three more here.

00:39:02.040 Then we have – this is something I've talked about a little bit.

00:39:06.160 C9, which is a bill in Parliament that would declare a standalone hate crime,

00:39:13.100 and would also remove the defense of religious belief for hate speech.

00:39:18.460 Let me read a little bit from this.

00:39:20.120 And this is a reference to FSU, the Free Speech Union, that I referred to at the beginning of our conversation.

00:39:28.060 What Bills C8 and C9 mean for your freedom of expression, which is of interest to me.

00:39:34.360 A panel discussion held by Free Speech Union of Canada on November 4th

00:39:39.020 with directors Bruce Pardy, Lisa Bildy, and Hannah Park Roche.

00:39:43.780 On the table, Bill C9 and its potential to create a thought police scenario

00:39:47.440 where citizens mired in a legal minefield run the risk of severe consequences

00:39:51.320 for what used to be considered civil liberties in the fabric of Canadian democracy.

00:39:55.400 At stake is our freedom to think, say, and believe as we choose.

00:39:59.040 Yes, even the right to hate.

00:40:01.900 Let me pause there.

00:40:02.700 And I always say this.

00:40:04.720 Hate is a human emotion.

00:40:07.380 And it often comes from a feeling of grievance.

00:40:10.440 And someone who feels aggrieved is going to be hateful.

00:40:13.540 Now, you can try and fix the underlying grievance.

00:40:15.960 You can try and logically convince them they're wrong.

00:40:19.820 That works sometimes.

00:40:21.060 It's like telling your spouse, don't be mad.

00:40:23.580 It usually doesn't work.

00:40:25.560 It makes them mad, I think.

00:40:26.680 If all it took to turn off the human emotion of hate was a law,

00:40:32.900 we would have passed the Love Each Other Act a long time ago, and it would be done.

00:40:36.500 But you can't turn off love.

00:40:37.800 You can't turn off hate.

00:40:39.440 These are emotions.

00:40:40.700 You have to deal with the facts that cause it.

00:40:42.580 And by the way, it would be weird to have a person who never felt hate in their heart.

00:40:47.680 There's certain things that you see in life that if you don't feel hate, what's wrong with you?

00:40:52.640 If you don't feel sorrow, what's wrong with you?

00:40:54.420 If you don't feel love, what's wrong with you?

00:40:56.860 I mean, to have this range of human emotions.

00:40:59.800 In a civilized democracy, we don't want people to act out on hate in a violent way.

00:41:04.560 But you can transmogrify that hate into something positive.

00:41:07.840 Don't tell me that people who build enormous positive movements aren't motivated occasionally by the hate for the lack of what they're calling for.

00:41:17.160 Don't tell me that Martin Luther King didn't hate, you know, racial discrimination.

00:41:21.300 He probably wouldn't use that word.

00:41:23.120 He transformed it into something positive.

00:41:24.840 All right, that's my intro.

00:41:25.980 Professor, take it away.

00:41:26.860 Tell me about C8.

00:41:27.720 I know a bit about C9, and we've talked to our people about it.

00:41:31.240 Touch on C9, but help me with C8 because I haven't read it yet.

00:41:34.880 Well, C8 is a very different kind of bill.

00:41:36.580 It basically gives the power to the minister to require Internet service providers to stop providing you with service.

00:41:44.160 And even if you haven't committed a criminal offense or the like.

00:41:47.840 So it's a bureaucratic kind of bill that gives too much power to the administrative state to do whatever it thinks is right without justification.

00:41:55.580 And an order can be issued under that statute whose existence and details can be hidden from you.

00:42:06.140 So you could theoretically lose your Internet order by the government without knowing what the heck happened.

00:42:12.360 All right, so it is, you know, very different bill from C9, which is the hate bill.

00:42:20.560 And the C9 is very explicit in terms of the criminal code offenses it's creating and so on.

00:42:25.640 Now, C8 is, if you like, more insidious because it's giving power that can be exercised without explanation, without transparency.

00:42:33.280 And if anything, maybe that one is the one that will end up proving to be a more serious violation or potential violation of civil liberties.

00:42:42.320 But C9, as you have been alluding to, is a bill that is essentially, and this is not the first step down this road, but is essentially criminalizing the emotion and emotion of hate.

00:42:56.400 It's extinguishing between criminal offenses that are equally violent and saying one is worse than the other because the first one was done with hate and the other one was done with indifference or the like or with greed or whatever the case may be.

00:43:18.040 Right. So it is getting away from the idea that a criminal offense should consist of an act, the actus reas, and intent, the mens rea.

00:43:26.480 This is going further and saying we're going to punish an emotion, an emotion.

00:43:31.080 If you're in a free country, you're allowed to feel whatever you feel.

00:43:35.360 And if you have free speech, you're allowed to express what you feel.

00:43:39.080 That doesn't mean you're allowed to use violence.

00:43:41.760 That's the line in the sand.

00:43:43.300 But we've gotten away from that and now words are violence and hate is an emotion that is criminal in nature and so on.

00:43:50.100 We're completely lost.

00:43:51.940 You know, I live in Toronto near an intersection called Bathurst and Shepard, which is a very Jewish neighborhood.

00:43:59.220 And yet every week for about a year, pro-Hamas, and I say pro-Hamas because they're not just pro-Palestinian.

00:44:04.640 They support Hamas. 0.93

00:44:05.760 They say so.

00:44:06.300 They drive in from miles away to come into the heart of the Jewish neighborhood.

00:44:12.320 They have amplification and they shout hateful things at Jewish residents.

00:44:18.240 Like there's no embassy there.

00:44:19.480 There's no consulate.

00:44:20.540 There's no military factory. 0.72

00:44:23.060 It's just Jews. 1.00

00:44:24.600 And they've been abused every week for a year.

00:44:27.380 Now, I'm for free speech and so I have a different objection.

00:44:30.940 I think they're harassing people, they're uttering threats, there's assaults, traffic violations that would get any trucker locked up.

00:44:40.920 So I have my quarrel with real laws.

00:44:44.040 Section 176.2 of the Criminal Code says you cannot disturb a synagogue or a church.

00:44:49.060 And there have been protests outside the synagogue.

00:44:50.880 So these are all on the books.

00:44:52.280 But I've never seen more hate in Canada in my 53 years of life than I have every Sunday at that intersection.

00:45:00.720 So don't tell me the government is interested in legislating against hate because they're not enforcing any of the existing laws.

00:45:09.160 We've had more hatred shown in this country than certainly in my lifetime.

00:45:13.780 I mean, I wasn't in Canada in the 30s and 40s.

00:45:16.220 There's probably some roiling debates then.

00:45:18.700 But I do not believe that this law is about tackling hate because they don't.

00:45:23.920 This law is about opportunistically using the discomfort of the Jews to say, oh, so you don't like things. 0.78

00:45:31.040 Well, we'll bring in a new law. 0.74

00:45:32.640 And who do you think the law is going to be used against?

00:45:34.960 As far as I know, there hasn't been a single hate crime prosecution of any of these Hamas activists.

00:45:40.560 After two years of the most outrageous – at Bathurst and Shepard, they literally built some sort of reenactment of the last moments of the terrorist leader, Yaya Sinmar.

00:45:51.600 I was arrested when I went to take a picture of it.

00:45:55.300 The people who made that were not arrested.

00:45:57.620 Don't tell me they need more laws.

00:45:59.740 They need more laws, and they're going to use them against people like me.

00:46:02.460 Yeah, and this is a message that I try to persuade people about.

00:46:08.940 Every time you see something that you don't like, if you say, well, there ought to be a law,

00:46:13.340 what you're doing is you're creating tools for the powers that be to choose between laws and between situations and between people.

00:46:20.760 You are empowering unequal application of the law.

00:46:27.860 You're encouraging or facilitating two-tier justice.

00:46:32.180 Those laws will be turned against you.

00:46:35.060 If the powers that be have so many laws on the shelf and the discretion to decide when and where to enforce those laws,

00:46:43.180 that means you do not have the rule of law.

00:46:46.060 That means you have the rule of discretion.

00:46:47.660 And that means that the power is held by individual people, which is exactly the opposite of what the rule of law was supposed to be.

00:46:55.540 If you are in a situation where you cannot depend upon the law being enforced in a neutral, even-handed way,

00:47:01.780 then creating more laws does not fix anything.

00:47:04.460 In fact, it sends you in the wrong direction.

00:47:06.620 Yeah.

00:47:07.080 You know, there's so many examples of authoritarian regimes where it's actually impossible to live without violating some law.

00:47:15.160 And so all the authorities have to do is to choose to enforce against you because you've already done it.

00:47:21.780 I mean, Lavrenti Beria used to say, show me the man, I'll find you the crime, which is, I got something on everyone.

00:47:28.060 Just tell me who the bad guy is today.

00:47:29.560 That's right.

00:47:30.220 That's right.

00:47:30.800 That's right.

00:47:31.040 And you get into a situation that has been called, and I like the term, it's called anarcho-tyranny.

00:47:37.720 Anarcho-tyranny, what they mean is, they mean the tyranny of the small rule imposed against law-abiding people,

00:47:44.800 you know, where the authorities have lots of tools at their disposal to decide on a particular moment

00:47:48.960 whether they're going to come, you know, and attack or prosecute, punish someone for a small, you know, minor violation of some minor rule.

00:48:00.020 At the same, that's the tyranny part.

00:48:02.340 The anarchy part is, in the meantime, violent crimes and political corruption and foreign interference all go untouched

00:48:10.880 because the powers that be don't want to touch it.

00:48:12.640 Anarcho-tyranny, anarchy alongside tyranny, the tyranny of the petty bureaucrat alongside the anarchy of the non-policing of serious matters.

00:48:23.900 Yeah.

00:48:24.660 You know, I'm thinking, you made me think of China's richest man and Russia's richest man.

00:48:31.660 Russia's richest man, I don't think he has that title anymore, was named Mikhail Khorakovsky.

00:48:36.000 And he was very Western-oriented, and he was in charge of Yukos, which was a huge oil and gas company.

00:48:45.940 And then one day, his private jet landed in Siberia, was stormed by Russian special forces, and he was taken to jail on some,

00:48:52.520 I mean, listen, I'm sure he had some dodgy dealings, you can't succeed in Russia without it,

00:48:58.120 but it was, like you say, a minute, and he was thrown straight in jail for years.

00:49:04.160 And they basically nationalized Yukos and took all his money because he was getting a little too liberal in his thinking.

00:49:10.780 Same thing with Jack Ma, the richest man in China, sort of a pro-Western face to China, arrested, disappeared, literally disappeared from the world.

00:49:21.660 Who knows?

00:49:22.280 And again, I'm not saying that these men were lily white in their conduct,

00:49:25.980 but I think they actually were some of the cleanest operators in their countries.

00:49:30.380 They had Western accounting and audits.

00:49:33.400 I'm not here to vouch for them, but I'm just here to say they got too powerful,

00:49:37.540 and so the powers that be said, get them on something, I don't care, whatever.

00:49:41.100 And, you know, they tried that against Trump in their own way, but Trump, the system in America,

00:49:47.120 Trump actually beat it, or is in the process of beating it.

00:49:50.500 But you can see that impulse is there in Russia, in China.

00:49:54.020 I guess that goes to your earlier point, is whatever powerful laws there are, imagine your enemy wielding that same law.

00:50:02.660 How do you feel about that?

00:50:03.820 And one of my favorite things to do is whenever there's some media regulation in Canada,

00:50:09.100 whether it's grants to journalists or censorships or this or that,

00:50:14.440 my favorite is when people say, if the conservatives win, how would you feel about Ezra Levant being appointed the chair of the CBC?

00:50:21.140 I mean, the point is being made, if you're fine with your partisan there, you should accept the opposite partisan.

00:50:29.620 By the way, I would have a lot of things I would do with the CBC, just in case anyone ever does want to appoint me to chair there.

00:50:35.260 Listen, Professor, it's great to catch up with you.

00:50:37.780 We don't have time to dig into your other essays, but they are available at rightsprobe.org, rightsprobe.org.

00:50:48.100 Before we go, though, what are you looking at 2026 for?

00:50:53.180 Is there some thing that you – is there some moment, some court case, some election, some bubbling issue that's going to spill over?

00:51:03.660 When you look ahead to next year, what's flashing on your radar screen?

00:51:09.080 Well, there are lots, but let's mention two.

00:51:12.360 The first one is this aboriginal title versus fee simple property problem, especially in B.C., but not just.

00:51:19.420 And the other one for 2026, of course, is Alberta independence.

00:51:22.720 Right.

00:51:23.660 Because the situation is now cleared away in the sense that the APP, the Alberta Prosperity Project,

00:51:30.400 is now collecting signatures for a new question, the court obstacle has been cleared away.

00:51:36.880 And there are people who are hopeful that there might be, indeed, a referendum, possibly before the end of 2026.

00:51:44.560 So there's going to be a lot of bumps in that road, a lot of risks, a lot of dangers.

00:51:49.140 But who knows?

00:51:50.700 Let's cross our fingers and see what happens.

00:51:53.680 Yeah.

00:51:53.820 Well, it's really great to catch up with you.

00:51:55.800 You do so many things.

00:51:56.720 You teach law to students at school.

00:51:59.560 You're on the board of the Free Speech Union.

00:52:02.060 You're with Rights Probe.

00:52:04.860 And you're just really fighting for civil liberties all the time.

00:52:08.080 It's great to see.

00:52:09.260 Thank you for your public service.

00:52:11.160 And have a great Christmas break.

00:52:13.680 Hopefully, you can get a bit of a break.

00:52:15.100 And we'll see you in the new year.

00:52:16.800 Great to talk to you, Ezra.

00:52:17.800 Thanks for having me on.

00:52:18.720 Likewise.

00:52:19.600 Well, there you have it.

00:52:20.500 One of Canada's top freedom fighters.

00:52:22.900 Until next time.

00:52:23.820 On behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.

00:52:28.560 And keep fighting for freedom.

00:52:30.460 Keep fighting for freedom! 0.83

00:52:33.500 Shame on you, you sensorism bug!

00:52:36.540 Good night, relax.

00:52:52.900 Verse 1 and I'll see you next time.

00:52:59.240 lid

Rebel News Podcast - December 30, 2025

EZRA LEVANT ｜ Bruce Pardy on the state of civil liberties and property rights in Canada

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