You're fighting for freedom! Shame on you, you censorious bug. Tonight, the carny liberals say they're going to reintroduce Trudeau's censorship bill, and no one in Parliament bats an eye? It's September 25th, and this is The Ezra LeVant Show.
00:00:49.440I'm in Calgary for some meetings, including an annual meeting of the Western Standard.
00:00:54.420As you know, the Western Standard was the name of a magazine I used to publish two decades ago almost, but it has been revived into a lively and important news website focusing on Western Canada.
00:01:07.880It's run by our friend Derek Fildebrandt.
00:01:09.760I was delighted to be invited to speak to their team, so that's sort of fun.
00:01:13.140I mean, technically on paper, Rebel News is competitors with Juno and Counter-Signal and Epoch Times and Western Standard.
00:01:21.940I suppose we are, but I actually don't feel that way.
00:01:53.740They had a little tidbit that I didn't see anywhere else.
00:01:57.300And it was about a parliamentary committee hearing.
00:02:01.480As you know, there's the main parliament where the MPs sit and they go there to debate and to have question period.
00:02:07.740But a lot of the work of parliament is done in committees where they call witnesses and experts and consultations.
00:02:14.840One of the things that happens at the committee is cabinet ministers come to answer questions about what they're doing and how things are moving along.
00:02:22.740And yesterday, Stephen Gilbeau came before the Heritage Committee.
00:03:35.740Here's Stephen Gilbeau, the convicted criminal, the Trudeau cabinet minister, who's now being reheated into a Carney cabinet minister.
00:03:43.780We've made a commitment to combat online harms.
00:03:46.340I have myself worked on that during my first passage at Heritage between 2019 and 2021.
00:03:52.180Many of my colleagues have continued on that.
00:03:54.340We tabled a bill in last parliament, C63, that was aimed not specifically at online harms, but also modernizing the criminal code.
00:04:05.560So we will be introducing measures to address hate speech, terrorist content, and the harmful distribution of intimate images.
00:04:13.340Yeah, do you get the feeling that the government cares about censorship more than just about anything else?
00:04:17.640I mean, yesterday, as you know, I spent the day in court alone fighting against the regulation of journalists through this journalism license that, again, Trudeau invented and Carney is continuing.
00:04:29.240That lawsuit, I hate to say it, we're probably going to lose.
00:04:32.520I mean, appeal courts are always long shots.
00:04:35.700I bet if we had a bevy of civil liberties groups in there, journalism groups in there intervening on our behalf, it could be different.
00:04:44.460Like, what if the Canadian Association of Journalists and Canadian Journalists for Free Expression and Penn Canada and Amnesty International, what if instead of just me being in there, and maybe the judges don't like me, maybe, oh, it's Rebel News and Ezra Levant, we don't like them.
00:04:59.200Maybe if there was all these fancy pants liberals who used to care about civil liberties, like where the heck is the Canadian Civil Liberties Association?
00:05:17.460He was a Jewish guy who talked about the importance of defending Nazis.
00:05:22.700Civil Liberties Organization today, they would never defend someone on the right, not even a conservative.
00:05:29.240And so they're never there in the battle.
00:05:32.460But what would happen if they had been there?
00:05:34.660I think it would make a difference, not just making legal arguments, but telegraphing to the judge that this isn't just about rinky-dink Rebel News.
00:06:49.840There's this crazy provision in there targeting Elon Musk.
00:06:55.840It's a 24-hour takedown provision where if anyone complains about something on social media, if the companies don't take it down within 24 hours, they face enormous fines that could reach into the billions of dollars.
00:07:12.840Of course, how does a 24-hour takedown notice work?
00:07:15.400Let's say someone writes something at 11 p.m. on Friday night, and by the time someone hears about it, it's 10 a.m. Saturday morning, so they basically have a few hours.
00:07:28.140But my point is the companies cannot do a proper hearing, properly investigate something.
00:07:33.640They're going to, if they have to make a decision in 24 hours, and if there's billions of dollars at stake, they could censor everything.
00:07:41.500It's a, I mean, have you ever seen the government act on anything within 24 hours?
00:07:46.800The only reason you would demand a 24-hour takedown is if you want the company to do it simply out of fear and out of reflex, not actually have a hearing into whether something was truly hateful.
00:07:58.500And by the way, if something breaks a criminal law, then go arrest the guy.
00:08:04.820But don't tell social media companies that they have to be political correctness cops.
00:08:09.180As you know, the new provisions in C-63, which sound like they're going to be revived, mean you could be charged for anything you ever said on social media, even something historical.
00:08:21.780The wording in the law said, if you still control a Facebook account or some old thing, and you wrote a comment literally 10 years ago, you can be prosecuted today.
00:08:32.760There's no statute of limitations like there is for, say, defamation law or most torts.
00:08:37.880This law is so un-Canadian, it breaks centuries of tradition in our law.
00:08:43.040Imagine saying you have to make a decision in 24 hours.
00:08:45.720You can be charged for anything you've ever said historically.
00:08:49.520Hate speech, when you were a kid, if you were a teenager in 2006, and now you're in your 30s, you could be charged with a hate crime for what you did when you were teenagers.
00:09:08.980You get paid to make nuisance complaints against your enemies, unlimited.
00:09:14.300You can make secret complaints against people like Jordan Peterson or Ezra Levant.
00:09:20.060You can get a preemptive restraining order against someone who hasn't said anything hateful yet, but you think he will.
00:09:29.560You can get shocking restraints on him, including house arrest, giving blood and urine samples, that's in the law, seizing any lawful firearms, saying he can or can't go any places or contact anyone.
00:10:14.940He's got the same people around him, including Stephen Gilboa, the criminal.
00:10:17.660I think it's a little different out there now, because when Justin Trudeau first introduced this bill several times, actually, Joe Biden was president.
00:10:27.700But now Trump is president, and he and his vice president, J.D. Vance, say that they value freedom of speech, and they're actually putting that into action.
00:10:36.520The U.S. has raised the issue of censorship in Germany, in Ireland, in the U.K., in the European Union in general.
00:10:45.460And the United States has actually threatened censors around the world that if they censor, if they censor American social media platforms, if they censor Americans, the U.S. State Department might actually ban those censors from ever visiting America.
00:11:03.900Imagine if Stephen Gilboa were to be banned from visiting the United States.
00:11:15.460Wouldn't it be delicious if Stephen Gilboa was banned from America like some sort of Putin oligarch, because he's acting like a Trudeau or Carney oligarch?
00:11:27.260I think doing this, while we haven't negotiated a trade deal with America, is exceedingly dumb.
00:11:32.580But I've come to the conclusion that I think Mark Carney is doing so many things to irritate Trump in particular, and America in general, that it can't be an accident.
00:11:41.580I think Carney wants a trade war so he can blame the coming recession on Trump.
00:11:46.860So bringing back censorship, which will get stuck in the craw of Marco Rubio and Janie Vance and Trump himself, that sounds insane, and it makes no sense until you come to the realization, well, that, hey, actually, maybe Carney wants to be able to blame Trump for our made-in-Canada recession.
00:12:12.020And I think Rebel News has to fight it.
00:12:14.540I think Rebel News will want to be one of the first people targeted by it, especially now that Jordan Peterson has relocated to the United States.
00:12:21.220Seriously, tell me someone in Canada who would be hit by this law faster than Rebel News or myself or David Menzies or our team.
00:12:31.960I mean, I suppose there are others out there who are even more offensive to the liberals than us, but I can't name them offhand.
00:12:38.400I think we might be fighting this ourselves.
00:14:03.240He wasn't even invited to Trump's meeting to deal with Ukraine.
00:14:08.020And Canada has been one of the largest funders.
00:14:11.420But yesterday, Carney took a break from talking about diplomatics and even trade deals and started talking about a vision for a new kind of economy.
00:14:24.140Now, whenever a politician talks about a new kind of economy, hold on to your wallet because odds are it's not a new idea at all.
00:14:30.880Odds are it's just a repackaged version of socialism.
00:14:34.860And that's not really that surprising coming from the former director of the World Economic Forum, which, as we know, looks capitalist on the outside.
00:14:43.340I mean, Larry Fink of BlackRock is on their board.
00:14:46.720But it's actually a socialist endeavor, sort of hijacking capitalism, taking it away from shareholder rights towards stakeholder rights and replacing the free market with a managed market.
00:15:00.440So, from the very beginning, you should be on guard about Mark Carney.
00:15:06.720And I want to play three full minutes of him describing what he wants to do, not just to Canada's economy, but to the world's economy.
00:15:15.700And when we're done watching these three minutes, I'm going to call upon Franco Teresano from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation to help me, A, understand what the heck this means, and B, figuring out how it's going to be implemented, if at all.
00:15:32.180Take a look at this three-minute craziness from Mark Carney.
00:15:36.200The way I'm going to organize my thoughts, three points, four points actually, around building that system, financial system for our grandkids.
00:15:44.480Again, drawing on the intervention of the managing director and the secretary general earlier.
00:15:51.520First thing we need is to recognize that we need to use scarce dollars to the maximum effect.
00:19:27.400I'm having a hard time really breaking down what he said.
00:19:30.500And Ezra, you know, before I came on the show, I watched this clip a number of times trying to figure this out.
00:19:35.320I mean, the most concerning thing to me is a couple things, okay?
00:19:38.580I'm going to give you two things right off the bat.
00:19:40.160So number one is why are politicians, bureaucrats even kind of discussing what could be, I don't know if the right term is remake, but of the financial system, right?
00:19:52.380To go back to your introduction off the top here, Ezra, there's really only two ways that an economy operates, with freedom or with force, right?
00:20:02.240And this is the tale as old as time, okay?
00:20:05.700That has been the fight throughout the millennia, throughout the centuries, right?
00:20:12.000It's either individuals in the marketplace deciding where to buy things and produce things, or it's through government dictate and government fiat.
00:20:29.680I flagging the exact same thing you're flagging, Ezra.
00:20:32.460And look, we already know that the global, you know, international organizations, whatever you want to call them, we know the United Nations has mused about forms of global carbon taxes.
00:20:43.800We know the IMF has mused about forms of global carbon taxes.
00:20:48.360And we also know the World Economic Forum has mused about different types of global carbon taxes.
00:20:56.780You know, before he became prime minister, he had several jobs.
00:21:02.340He was the chairman of Brookfield Asset Management.
00:21:04.100He was also the UN ambassador for climate change, if I'm not mistaken.
00:23:01.160Because, you know, the first time I watched it, I told you I watched it a number of times before coming on with you here.
00:23:06.360It almost reminded me, because I did economics in undergrad and through my master's as well, right?
00:23:12.220So I've also taken business courses and stuff like that, and on the one hand, I recognize terminology that we do have to be on the lookout for, right?
00:23:21.360I recognize expert terminology in there.
00:23:23.660We already mentioned the cross-border carbon mechanism, right?
00:23:26.980Like, that is legitimate expert terminology, and it's just bureaucrats speak for global carbon taxes, right?
00:23:33.620So on the one hand, you recognize terminology of what an expert would say.
00:23:38.220But on the other hand, it kind of reminded me of, like, third-year business school, my buddy who went out all weekend, who didn't actually prepare for his presentation, and then just using mumbo-jumbo jargon to try to, like, you know, get through the 10-minute presentation.
00:24:24.800I think that's a fake word, a fudge word, a word when he – he just – it's sort of like that old Homer Simpson joke, you know, step one, open a lemonade stem.