EZRA LEVANT | Veteran reporter Joe Warmington on the decay of Toronto and Canada
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 17 minutes
Words per Minute
185.44003
Summary
A feature interview with Toronto's long-serving columnist Joe Warmington on the importance of free speech in Canada, the dangers of profiling journalists, and why it's so important to be out there on the streets with the people.
Transcript
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Tonight, a feature interview with Toronto's long-serving columnist, Joe Warmington.
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It's October 14th, and this is The Ezra LeVance Show.
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One of the things that I love about Rebel News is that we have reporters across the country.
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Drea Humphrey flying the flag out there in British Columbia.
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Very exciting things with the election coming up.
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The Conservative Party, which was nowhere a year ago, looks poised to replace the tired NDP ideologues out there.
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Of course, our heart is in Alberta, and we have reporters out there.
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Sheila Gunn-Reed, our chief reporter in northern Alberta.
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Alexa Lavoie has really added so much to Rebel News over the years, based in Montreal, doing reports in both English and French.
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And I, myself, sometimes travel outside of our country looking to learn from other examples, whether it's immigration or censorship.
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For example, I was down in Sao Paulo for a 200,000-person rally in support of free speech.
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I try to bring things back to Canada that I see in other countries.
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And although Toronto is a hobby in Canada to hate Toronto, and I think sometimes Torontonians are charter members of that club, it is an important city.
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And if Toronto goes down, if Toronto becomes a failed state, it can't help but drag down the province and perhaps the entire country with it.
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And one reporter who knows the streets of Toronto perhaps better than anyone else, because he's a real shoe-leather journalist.
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And by that, I mean he doesn't spend a lot of time sitting at a desk in an office.
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My friend Joe Warmington joins us for a feature interview today.
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I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that you sort of overlooked David Menzoid Menzies.
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I mean, there's nobody more Toronto than the Menzoid.
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And I know that because whenever I'm out there, I get the story while he's doing autographs and pictures.
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Because he's based in Toronto, I sort of left him off my list of other places.
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Just one of those oversights that I had to correct here on that.
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And in many ways, he follows the same style of journalism as you do, which is be out there.
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Yeah, I think he likes getting arrested more than I do.
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You know, and I'm always, you know, I pay attention to it.
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And obviously, I'm concerned whenever it happens to him.
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I think it's outrageous that he is arrested, especially when there's all kinds of real people
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Canada tends to, you know, arrest people that are kind of easy to arrest.
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You know, let me throw one quick comment and reply to that.
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I want to follow your lead on this conversation, but, you know, every year we send a little
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delegation to cover the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
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And the police are everywhere with serious submachine guns.
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But, Joe, I got to tell you, if you can go up to anyone there, the police do not interfere.
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And these are some of the most powerful people in the world.
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Well, I mean, you mentioned what happened to David.
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And I just wanted to tell you, Canada, we like to think of ourselves as an easygoing, free
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We have heavy-handed approaches to journalists who are irregular.
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And there's not really a lot of journalists left because of the way the industry has gone.
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So if you want to stay inside of that club, I learned this years ago.
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It's a little story about when I worked at the Sioux Star.
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They covered the briar, you know, the famous national curling championships.
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But as a reporter, my job was to watch the morning games.
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In those days, we had a deadline that was in the morning.
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And then get a story together so they could hit that first paper and get it out there.
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And I ran down the ice at the end and along the middle.
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The fact that of all the people there, the only person that was going to file a story
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on the event that they're all there to cover was actually me.
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And I've seen that through my whole career where there's this apparatus that's bigger
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And I think if I were to teach journalism, I think that I would suggest that you don't
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I don't want to pick on the sports writers, but all the names are spelled and they give
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you a nice meal and it's nice and warm and comfortable.
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And then they give you access to the people after the game.
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We're dealing with people that are going to punch you and they're going to get away with
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And if you say anything, you're going to get arrested.
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I want to talk about the kind of people we have in this country who punch journalists
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because there's a lot of them and they're not who the regime says they are.
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But I just want to follow up about one thing you said about there's peer pressure in journalism.
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If you look at a scrum, you have all these journalists who all know each other, who go
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from event to event together, and they form sort of a club.
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And if you do something that's outside of the norms, you'll be an outsider.
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And what you just described there, the fact that you ran ahead to get the story and the
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other journalists who didn't run ahead felt their feathers ruffled, that's the story of
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The peer pressure doesn't just come from the people you're reporting about.
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It's from your rival or competitor journalists.
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And if you're outside the system, they regard you as a kind of threat.
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You've sort of straddled the line because you're with a mainstream outlet, the Toronto Sun.
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But I think your whole life you've been a bit of a maverick and a bit of a lonesome actor.
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I don't consider myself a maverick at all, and I don't consider myself aligning with any
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So that does make me, I guess, a little bit of an outsider for all of it.
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You know, an example, and you may run this video when I was actually out with David and
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Efren, and I can't think of the name of the great photographer that was there that day,
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And this guy, his name is Navid Awen, and everything out of his mouth is something that I just,
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I mean, I almost want to throw up the stuff that he says, but I don't let him know that.
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And, you know, I dealt with him on other issues over the years.
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And so my approach is not to worry about how I feel, but if he will talk to me, what does
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Get as many words out of him before you tip your own head.
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And then some people say, why didn't you yell at him?
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Now, it's a little different for Rebel because, like, you know, you talked about in Davos when
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you had that guy, you know, from the Pfizer guy.
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You put him on trial, and that must have been his most uncomfortable walk of his life.
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But you were never rude, and you were tough and aggressive.
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I mean, I love that whole thing, all the things that you do in Davos.
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And I think there's times when then I can do that too.
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And the same thing with all the politicians I deal with.
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They will all call me back the next time because of that, I think.
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And your point of view, it's there, but it's not pop, bop, bop you in the nose.
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And that's how I feel about David and yourself and, you know, Alexa and Sheila, all, you know,
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and Dre, you mentioned, and I may be missing some people that have been assaulted.
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But all of that, you know, Kian Bexie, when he used to work for you, it hurts me to see them get –
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it offends me and it hurts me because I know that they're out doing journalism and that's all they're doing.
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And I don't want to get hit with a bat or anything like that.
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Now, it's a little different for newspapers, even though we do a lot of, you know, with our cameras and that now we have to.
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I don't run in there the same way that you see the TV people do.
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So sometimes I miss some of the action, but I feel that I kind of do it a little slower and then maybe that helps me too.
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You mentioned Navada One and for 99.9% of people watching won't know who that is.
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I don't know if he's a naturalized citizen here yet.
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He has been really the pointy edge of the spear for an enormous number of anti-Semitic hate events.
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I don't know if he's the boss of the huge street rallies.
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I get the feeling that's done by people higher on the organizational chart.
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But Navada One personally and some of his family members are at some of the most vicious anti-Semitic events in the city.
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He's the guy outside the synagogues shouting threats at the synagogues.
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He's the guy who blocked the street to a Jewish neighborhood, a residential neighborhood, because there were Jews living there.
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And he talks about how it's a Zionist-infested zone.
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You say you took some footage of him the other day on the anniversary of October 7th.
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Let's take a look at that now and just to show our folks who Navada One is.
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What do you think, I mean, what do I think about?
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Yeah, just about, because it is October 7th, so it seems...
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Well, a bunch of schools earlier today were walked out earlier today.
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Lots of schools around GTA and other cities also walked out today.
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So October 7th is basically, for me and for many others, it's the one-year tragic anniversary of the Palestinian genocide.
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And the continuing, and 76 years of continuing, ongoing occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people and their resilience.
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How do you square that with the attack on, you can see the Israeli side of it.
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Well, the people that are here, that are supporting, that are supporting, or counter-protesting, if you will.
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How do you square what happened to Israel and then obviously what your concern is?
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I just explained to you what a couple percent what it means to me and many others.
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It might mean different things to different people and you're allowed to feel that way.
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You know, one of the things that is so appalling to me is the inversion of words.
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So on October 7th, it was a massacre of men and women and children, including babies.
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And he flips the language and he says, October is a genocide against Palestinians.
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And the inversion of the language, the Hamas charter, which is like their bylaws, it's an
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officially, explicitly anti-Semitic organization.
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And to flip that around and to use the language against Israel, I mean, I don't think language
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But he actually commits criminal crimes, real crimes.
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He's certainly done more than any trucker protester did during the convoy.
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He's certainly done more and worse than what Tamara Leach did.
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I see him and I see someone who's come to Canada and he pretty much full time is an anti-Israel
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But I think what I showed there, what I was not necessarily trying to show, but I think
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so, is that he's celebrating and dancing on the graves of those people.
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You see people talk about it being a military attack.
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And it's still going on because there's 100 hostages that are still missing.
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And he's trying to say to me, you know, tricking me with the words or whatever it was.
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And, you know, the only thing I will say is he doesn't put on a mask because a lot of the other people were wearing masks.
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I don't know if you want to play the other clip, but you can see your own David Menzies getting harassed by a guy in a mask.
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And, you know, that's an interesting thing to show.
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How do you think the police have done here in keeping the groups sort of separated?
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Except, like, some instigators like these guys.
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Have you been following the SAG, the charges are dropped, no reasonable chance of prosecution?
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It's a terrorist style going back decades, perhaps centuries, to avoid identification and retribution.
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Until COVID-19 came about, the only people who wore masks in society were, I guess, welders.
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If it was super cold out, maybe you wore a mask skiing.
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But it was bank robbers and other bandits who wore masks.
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And so, you see it here in Toronto and Montreal and other cities.
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The worst spewers of hate and, in many cases, violence are wearing masks.
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They have a phrase, black block, which means everyone's dressed the same head to toe in black.
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Faces are covered to make it extremely hard for authorities to figure out who did what.
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And they can shed it and then fit in with the crowd and you don't know it's them.
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But a couple of observations that you'll notice from that video particularly is all the police behind there.
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They're separating the 25 or so pro-Israel kind of counter protesters run or sort of led by Mayor Weinstein from Israel now.
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But I think that the reason why I think the clip's interesting is that, and the earlier clip as well, Ezra, is that you've got to understand what this really is.
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And what it is, is them trying to satisfy whoever funds them.
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They're being funded from, and I believe from abroad, but funneled through local people.
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All of that is paid for, and they've got to show to the people that are sending those checks that they're doing this stuff.
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And that's why they're there, and that's why, you know, when they get on the rebel or whatever it was.
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You know, it's interesting because David didn't do anything different than what I did there.
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I don't have the flash, you know, with the rebel on it.
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But, you know, we have to cover it and tell the public who's out there and what they have to say.
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But I think I'm right that that money that funds all of that is not coming from here.
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Well, I think it was Global News that broke the story of 700 Iranian agents in Canada.
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Now, Iran is really the leader of these movements.
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It's, I mean, to have all the matching signs, to have the social media publications, to get the buses.
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He talked about schools having pro-Hamas walkouts.
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Now, some of the money comes from old stock Canadians like Fred Hahn of the Canadian Union of Public Employees.
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Basically, in my view, misappropriating or misdirecting funds from union dues.
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Union bosses going on political crusades with their members' money.
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But I think the bulk of the money is foreign entities.
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If Iran was flying an Iranian flag and doing it in their own name, people would reflexively reject it.
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But when they say, oh, no, I'm a new Canadian just like you, and I genuinely believe this, it's a form of an information operation.
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It's interesting to me that these characters there, those two, but there's many others, they can move around Queens Park freely.
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They're not worried about getting hurt or hit or arrested, any of that.
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Where me, Joe Warmington, 40 years as a journalist, 33 at the Toronto Sun, I can't do that freely.
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And obviously, present company accepted the rebel, people can't do that freely.
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But in my case, you know, I was down there to cover it.
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When I went over to the middle and there's a photograph that shows the shot I wanted to get.
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I'm now on a territory that, you know, I need some sort of a passport from a designated security person that protects those guys.
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With a walkie-talkie and all that, saying, who are you?
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We saw that clip with the Ottawa police saying, you can't come in here unless you're, you know, anti-Israel and pro-Palestine.
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But the truth of it is that I can go anywhere I want and I'm not bothering anybody.
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I go over and take a picture and I'll be cordial with anybody, but they're not cordial back.
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And in this thing, I mean, I've been punched by a police officer early on in this thing.
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I've been hit with those bikes because the Antifa people put the bikes across and then they swing them around.
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They hit you with a bike when you're almost 60 years old and you move out of the way from the bike.
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Or if they hit you, you end up with a cut on your leg or whatever.
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If you so much as did that to them, you would be under arrest, as you well know and your lawyers know.
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You've talked about sort of a paramilitary fake security detail where the Antifa side, the Iran side, decides who can or can't be in a place.
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They were doing that for months at the University of Toronto with their encampment.
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And they had these same encampments in Vancouver, in Montreal, at McGill.
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As soon as they put that fence up at the U of T, the first thing I said was now that they're going to have that there because they're going to breach that.
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They're going to use that fence as a walled-in city, which is exactly what they did.
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So now that the fence didn't work, why do you leave it up?
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I mean, if you're really seriously, you go and say, look, we're going to take it down and you can't control it.
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The reality of it is the police can't win because, you know, they're damned if they do, damned if they don't.
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And obviously, they've had 100, you know, whatever, hundreds of days of protests.
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But nonetheless, if I'm going to go over there and someone's going to threaten me or threaten your people, you know, the police should come over and arrest them.
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I don't think I have to prove myself to anybody.
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I can go to Queen's Park or City Hall or anywhere in the city of Toronto, as I have for the Toronto Sun for 33 years and cover that story.
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And yet, I have to go through the security check from these kind of characters.
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I want to show you one of the times that David Menzies was falsely arrested.
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It was at the public plaza outside Toronto City Hall.
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Nathan Phillips himself was a Jew, if I'm not mistaken.
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So, Pierre Polyev and the conservatives were involved in a vigil for the Israeli hostages.
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This was a few months after the terrorist attack.
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And so, David went to cover the pro-Israel vigil.
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And Nabata-1 and some of these Iran proxies were there to heckle.
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And basically, remember that extreme, I think it was called the Westboro Baptist Church, whenever there were funerals for American soldiers, they would come to the funeral with insane signs saying, God hates fags.
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Like, they would come to these funerals of ordinary soldiers with these outrageous, it was just a shocking thing when it was the Westboro Baptist Church.
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Well, that's exactly what Nabata-1 and his Iranian thugs did.
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And so, David went to put a microphone to them and said, well, what are you doing?
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The police swept in not to protect David or not to stop these Iranian hecklers, but they arrested David.
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At a pro-Israel vigil, the police really doing the bidding of the anti-Semitic protesters.
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And I don't think the police officers should be able to cover their faces either.
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And I don't think there's any reason to arrest David there.
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That's the one where they hit his head as they put him in the police car.
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Yeah, when you hit somebody, when you take somebody into custody, normally when they're hurt, you know, like any kind of a jail cut, which is what that is because it went into the police van.
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When you get cut in jail, there's hepatitis and all these kinds of things.
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None of those measures were taken in this case.
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The SIU wouldn't be brought in unless you were badly hurt.
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But you don't know what kind of concussion somebody can get when they have their head slammed into something, which is what happened today.
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But not those officers there because we don't know who they are.
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I don't know if you can see their name badges and things like that.
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But they've gone to trouble to kind of disguise themselves much like Antifa.
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So you don't know as a member of the public exactly who they are.
00:25:37.840
They're using our police resources to, in essence, you know, kind of quell an interview or whatever.
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That spot at Nathan Phillips Square, that's our spot.
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Nathan Phillips himself was the mayor of all the people.
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And I know a little bit about the law of trespass.
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Because it is very powerful on private property.
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If you're on private property, even a mall, a shopping mall is typically private property.
00:26:09.040
Now, they invite the public in, but they can revoke that for any reason or no reason.
00:26:14.520
It's just like if you have someone over at your house.
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The law says if it's your place, it's your place.
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But being kicked off a public square, it should have a very high bar.
00:26:29.980
And just because some foreign agitators say David's bugging us, that's not enough to arrest someone, bundle them into a police van and take them to jail.
00:26:37.960
He had it happen in front of the King Edward Hotel as well.
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They're in charge to a point where the Toronto Sun reporter, which is me, can't go and take a picture.
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But I don't think that, you know, I've got a 12-year-old son.
00:27:04.480
And I don't want to have any confrontation at all.
00:27:12.260
And then Mayor Chow and all the rest of them don't give a damn about that.
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You know, I'm not talking about media credentials.
00:27:27.900
It's not just that the police aren't cracking down on these sort of paramilitary groups.
00:27:35.440
You know, that classic image of the police delivering Tim Horton's coffee to Navada Wen and his thugs
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who were blocking a residential neighborhood because there were too many Jews living there.
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Toronto Sun has been the best newspaper in Canada on this issue.
00:28:08.720
If you look at the Toronto Sun from Adrian Batchelor, the editor-in-chief, to Warren Kinsella,
00:28:17.120
But he's been really, really good on this issue.
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Brian Lilly, who you would know well here at Rebel.
00:28:22.440
They've all gone at it from the point of view that we're not going to listen to all this nonsense
00:28:41.020
In Ottawa, I mean, Ottawa, that center block of parliament, it's actually not being used right now.
00:28:49.080
So a lot of people don't know during the trucker convoy, they were protesting outside an empty building.
00:28:54.920
There was no one in any building for two years before that.
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That's the irony of all the people saying how horrible it was.
00:29:04.260
So that big lawn in front of parliament, when I was a kid, like really right out of school,
00:29:09.980
I worked for a couple of years in center block when President Manning was the leader of the reform party.
00:29:16.480
And right outside in the big lawn in front of center block, two or three times a day, I could see out my window, two or three times a day, there was a protest.
00:29:32.320
They have all the resources they need from the SWAT team to the regular police liaisons.
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It was like an unofficial opposition party every day.
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And it was right out my window when I was working there as a kid.
00:29:48.920
You have probably more legal and constitutional and historic and customary rights on that patch of grass than maybe anywhere else in the land.
00:29:58.460
Before you showed the clip, I just wanted to share a personal note similar.
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When the interest rates went to 19% when I was a teenager, I was raised by a single mom.
00:30:09.260
And we were in a position where we could lose our house.
00:30:14.320
You know, it's not quite as stark as it was back in the 80s.
00:30:18.220
But there was a big protest at Parliament Hill.
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That was the first time I ever saw a protest, my sister and I.
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I remember, you know, I saw the great columnist, I think it was Charles Lynch.
00:30:36.900
Yeah, they now named their press theater after him.
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But, you know, I kind of approached it that way.
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I remember the next day because I delivered the Ottawa Citizen.
00:30:53.700
And I remember the next day on the front page looking at the story.
00:30:57.000
And, you know, because there was the thing I was at.
00:31:03.460
I don't think my mom was really protesting either.
00:31:05.300
She went down sort of as solidarity for the people that were kind of doing it.
00:31:11.520
And, of course, the truckers thing, which the lawn issue was part of the problem as well.
00:31:18.840
No, and just about a week ago, someone who was not pro-Palestinian wanted to put his feet on that grass.
00:31:30.020
And the cops first asked him, well, which side are you on?
00:31:55.200
Yeah, that was before you admitted being against this cause.
00:32:01.120
You said he's not a supporter of Palestine and doesn't recognize Palestine as a state.
00:32:21.180
Yeah, I said I didn't accept Palestine as a state.
00:32:34.560
You told me if I were to take your shirt off, I could come in.
00:32:38.440
Well, that was before you changed your story to I don't support Palestine and I don't recognize Palestine as a state.
00:32:44.980
Look, I'm not wearing any of these explanations for the name of Tori.
00:32:50.580
Then at the end, right before I left, I said you are not to go on this side.
00:33:11.460
That's exactly how they do it there in North Korea and in China.
00:33:14.680
You can't do that way the police work for the government.
00:33:17.700
They don't work, you know, you mentioned in Davos how you could do all those interviews.
00:33:21.320
But, you know, that's kind of the muscle that's used there.
00:33:32.100
I mean, I'm still talking about the police trampling.
00:33:38.060
And it wasn't even up for more than half an hour when all the phone calls were going to all the executives.
00:33:46.260
And I kept looking at it going, yeah, it's a trampling.
00:33:56.480
Now, there's still one guy missing in that, too.
00:33:58.560
I've never, ever been able to find out what happened.
00:34:03.640
My old friend Ross McLean is the old cop there.
00:34:08.800
And it looks like the horse landed right center of mass there.
00:34:15.160
And there was, you know, what I'm getting at is I don't know what happened to that person.
00:34:19.720
I know there was an ambulance call around the same time.
00:34:24.040
It must have been a police officer, I figure, undercover.
00:34:28.840
And maybe they just wanted to get out of there, whether hurt or not hurt, and just kind of transition back into the real world.
00:34:39.660
Now, in this case here with this clip, I'm anxious to see what you have to say.
00:34:42.800
But I'm not comfortable with it because it's irrelevant what a police officer thinks, what I'm doing there.
00:34:50.180
I mean, you know, in my case, what happened was, you know, I was down the very, you know, it was October 8th or so.
00:35:00.280
And there's all kinds of people breaking a lot of rules.
00:35:05.480
Oh, the celebrations from the Navidad Ones and the other anti-Semites started when they saw the horrific terrorism.
00:35:14.820
Israel did not respond for days or even weeks in a substantive way.
00:35:18.860
Right. And I was taking a video of this, a young employer, and I didn't see anything, anybody.
00:35:25.260
And you'll see in the clip where somebody comes, it's a police officer, and he hits me really right here, pretty hard.
00:35:32.520
I have footage of it, which, yeah, we can show the footage of that.
00:35:35.520
And it concerned me because, I mean, I was startled by it.
00:35:40.160
Because all the police officers, a lot of them know me.
00:35:43.540
But what bothered me was that I was the guy that was getting harassed by the police.
00:35:52.040
They were putting up Roman candles, all these things.
00:35:55.880
But the one guy that was, you know, and it worked out okay.
00:36:08.840
I was for a couple of minutes because I was kind of hurt.
00:36:31.120
If you touch me again, on the sidewalk, you can do it.
00:36:39.740
You know, Joe, I have an interest in this because I've followed the Middle East for a long time, just out of interest.
00:36:46.920
I'm also Jewish, and I've been to Israel, and I'm pro-Israel.
00:36:50.880
So sometimes I think, well, am I just concerned about this because I'm a Jew?
00:36:55.280
And I think, no, I think I would be concerned if there was another group that was being targeted with weekly hate marches so thinly veiled.
00:37:05.480
Like when they say there is only one solution, intifada revolution.
00:37:13.260
And when they say from the river to the sea, Israel will be free, and there are various versions of that in English and Arabic, they're talking about ethnically cleansing every Jew from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
00:37:24.940
They try and, some of them try and disguise their language by talking about Zionists instead of Jews.
00:37:34.040
But to me, that would be like saying, oh, I don't hate Italians.
00:37:39.900
Well, Italians, like, or I don't hate the French people.
00:37:43.760
I just hate France and everything to do with France and not all French people like France.
00:37:54.080
It's sort of the ancestral home of the Jewish people.
00:38:01.180
So what would I say if there was this hatred towards another?
00:38:05.500
And I don't need to be crazy and say hatreds towards Italians.
00:38:10.160
But what if they went after blacks this way and say, oh, I don't hate black people.
00:38:17.460
I would like to think I would be on the side of the people being beat up.
00:38:20.520
But, you know, but the fact that you're Jewish and that, you know, you're sort of wrestling with that, you're allowed to feel however you want to feel.
00:38:28.600
And we're going to talk about the Mayor Chow thing in a moment.
00:38:35.720
Now, the fact that, you know, non-Jewish people are offended, whether it's myself or Warren Kinsella or Brian Lilly, et cetera, is because we are people that cover Canada.
00:38:47.720
If that was Muslims that were being treated like that, we would be there.
00:38:54.500
And if someone were just to go to their mosques and shout all day at them or go to their schools or vandalize or shoot, I went to that Jewish school, the base Chayamushka school, where mass people in the morning shot at it, where they tried to burn things down.
00:39:17.660
And then I saw your clip dealing with the Attorney General, I think there's somebody important like that.
00:39:28.480
And he's a proud Jew, he says, and I don't doubt him.
00:39:32.140
But his job as Solicitor General, he's the minister in charge of all police in Ontario, which means basically he's not going to get in and say, arrest that guy, arrest that guy.
00:39:41.680
But he can say, OK, we're going to uphold the law.
00:39:43.660
Well, by the way, there happens to be a law against harassing a church or synagogue or mosque.
00:39:51.820
I don't have the exact wording in my head, but there's a special criminal code provision against harassing churches and synagogues and mosques.
00:39:57.740
And there was like an eight hour protest outside a Jewish synagogue in North in Thornhill that had nothing to do with this war.
00:40:07.020
And so I asked Kersner, why are your police standing by?
00:40:11.920
Why don't we see some of that trucker convoy style policing?
00:40:22.500
Do you need to see it again or do you remember what he said?
00:40:24.100
So he's basically saying, oh, I'm a good Jew and I wear a yarmulke and every week I protest.
00:40:29.940
I'm looking for I would rather I don't care the race or religion of the minister in charge of police.
00:40:35.140
I just want him to have the police do some policing.
00:40:40.440
I'm scared either of a violent reaction by these Hamas mobs.
00:40:48.200
His boss saying, hey, there's a lot of Muslims in Ontario now, four times as many as there are Jews.
00:40:55.860
So just hush now and just tell everybody about your yarmulke.
00:40:59.820
How come there were no charges under Section 176 to the criminal code besetting a house of worship when all those protesters were outside the Bayad synagogue in Thornhill?
00:41:10.760
Well, that's a question that you're going to have to ask the York Regional Police or the Attorney General.
00:41:15.540
I'm here because I'm not going to see my community intimidated.
00:41:19.740
I speak out all the time in support of our Jewish community.
00:41:25.280
I'm not afraid to go to synagogue every Sabbath, every Shabbat.
00:41:30.060
And I'm going to do everything that I can to stand up for our inherent right to live safely in our own homes and communities.
00:41:38.280
Everything's short of prosecuting them, though, right?
00:41:40.260
I mean, the U of T remains encamped with an illegal encampment.
00:41:48.760
Well, again, this is something that you have to speak to the Attorney General.
00:41:55.320
No, what I can tell you is I'm working every day.
00:41:59.440
That our legislation, that our regulations are adhered to.
00:42:05.660
I've been 34 weeks, almost every single week, to the rally of Bathurst and Shepherd in support of remembering the hostages who have been held against their will in captivity in Gaza.
00:42:21.440
It obviously is acceptable since you're not prosecuting it.
00:42:25.220
You've created a new normal where people can engage in low-level, permanent, anti-Semitic crimes, assault, threats, mischief, because you guys don't prosecute.
00:42:36.280
But there you are on Twitter, though, so congrats for that.
00:42:38.600
It's important that the Jewish community sees a person from their own community in the Ontario legislature standing up against hate every single day, who has the support of a premier who has called it out.
00:42:51.920
Where are the other levels of government today who exercise the same voice that Premier Ford does, that we will not accept anti-Semitism?
00:43:05.160
Again, this is something you could ask Minister Verrani.
00:43:16.300
That's what I was going to say, was that he's doing the political calculation, but the job of Solicitor General belongs to us.
00:43:22.920
And we've given him, you know, the province, the freedom has given him that job.
00:43:26.720
It's a daunting task because he's supposed to keep us safe.
00:43:31.960
No, I give him credit for at least hanging in there and doing the interview with you.
00:43:40.640
And, you know, but I do agree with you that because it's not just that one incident.
00:43:48.040
You know, there would be a lot of rules put in place if it was something else.
00:43:53.480
I mean, and so, you know, you called him out on it.
00:43:56.880
I think the style of journalism that you do kind of is what we talked about originally when I was at the briar, which is it's not controlled when you go straight at the people.
00:44:08.000
There's no media people in the middle, no appointments.
00:44:12.480
He's just got to think on his feet and you put him on the spot and you do that well.
00:44:21.120
And sometimes it's important to remember that, to not forget that, that it is difficult and to sort of win the point, win the argument as opposed to scoring the point.
00:44:38.320
And I'm not suggesting you didn't win the argument or not score a point.
00:44:42.680
But you want to get it so that things are done properly and the pressure they've, you know, I learned this from Bob McDonald and Peter Worthington as I worked at the Toronto Sun so long.
00:44:52.700
Those guys were the legends that started the paper.
00:44:55.560
And they both told me that nothing is more powerful than putting heat on a politician.
00:45:01.800
When they feel the heat, and that's what you were bringing there, and from that is change.
00:45:10.420
They put the heat on and say, look, like a guy like Mohammed Fakir, you know, is a good example.
00:45:16.380
You know, like he's all Trudeau all the time, and now he's turned on Trudeau.
00:45:24.260
You know, I think, let me give you two counterexamples of policing.
00:45:30.840
About a couple months ago in the U.K., there were some riots with a racial tinge to them.
00:45:37.180
And the prime minister there, Sir Keir Starmer, who used to be the chief prosecutor for all of the U.K., he said, if you tweeted anything, you're going to jail.
00:45:50.600
And he set up 24-hour, like he just immediately set up 24-hour-a-day courts where they just put the cases through by the hundred.
00:46:02.580
Even like, and they boasted about who they were jailing.
00:46:07.060
And for the most insane things, someone was jailed for gesticulating.
00:46:11.740
Someone was jailed for shouting at a police dog.
00:46:17.880
Hundreds of people, just for sharing images of it, one guy said to the cops, you're not even British anymore.
00:46:36.480
But that's what was done to blunt a political movement that burst into riot here and there.
00:46:43.380
And I think back at two generations ago when black students were being integrated in the school system in the U.S. South.
00:46:51.240
And the National Guard literally escorted those black kids to school.
00:46:56.180
So there have been times when the authorities said, we're not going to be deterred by street toughs.
00:47:05.320
And you can agree or disagree with either of those examples.
00:47:09.320
That could be – that's how they do it in Dubai.
00:47:14.580
Some guy shouted some pro-Hamas thing at a graduation, kicked out of the country or jailed.
00:47:20.380
Like, Dubai is more friendly – it's safer for Jews in Dubai than in Toronto.
00:47:35.540
It's – I think it's a lack of political will because everyone's afraid.
00:47:40.020
And every single day, thousands more migrants come to Canada.
00:47:44.940
We've had two million people come to Canada in the last year.
00:47:50.060
There's one million people here on student visas for those fake diploma mills.
00:48:02.360
And don't forget the Rocks and Road, which you covered.
00:48:09.600
And are 15 or 20% of them from countries that are inherently endemically anti-Semitic?
00:48:18.980
When you go to the voting booth, they don't ask you for Canadian citizenship.
00:48:24.860
So there's an opportunity just to go, if you're on the list, to vote.
00:48:31.820
And I think that we'll have to keep an eye on that because a lot of people think that Pierre
00:48:39.420
It's going to be easy because the polls say that.
00:48:41.400
But if it's two million, like you say, a year, and we still got a year and even more than
00:48:46.960
that, if they want to, they can stretch this to 2026.
00:49:02.620
I mean, obviously, when you see what we're seeing here now, when people actually celebrate
00:49:16.400
You don't see the Japanese out celebrating Pearl Harbor.
00:49:19.040
And if you did, there would be people upset about it.
00:49:24.760
And it's interesting that the Solicitor General and all the law enforcement and most of the
00:49:33.460
I mean, I want to pay you a compliment because I think that, you know, whether it's the truckers
00:49:40.020
thing or all the different things you do, the public knows you're going to be there.
00:49:44.700
They know you're going to travel to wherever it is, whether it's the Tommy Robinson stuff
00:49:50.980
And that's why you have, I don't know what your subscriptions are like, but it's double
00:49:54.940
what a lot of the media is because they've kind of washed their hands of it.
00:50:01.060
And you've picked up that vibe and they've stopped you.
00:50:05.060
I mean, if it wasn't for all that monetization on YouTube and all that stuff, you would have
00:50:11.160
You know, YouTube cutting us off, cut off a million dollars a year.
00:50:15.800
You can hire a lot of staff for a million bucks.
00:50:19.080
Hey, I want to talk about just a few days ago, the anniversary of October 7th.
00:50:24.940
There was this large Jewish community in Toronto, probably about 200,000.
00:50:34.720
So Toronto has really been one of the toughest battlegrounds.
00:50:40.220
Jews were so comfy here, Jewish mayors, Jewish leaders of industry.
00:50:46.900
This vigil on Monday at the anniversary, yes, it was mainly about Israel, but it was also
00:50:55.540
And Premier Doug Ford, to his credit, showed up.
00:50:59.200
There's an independent MP from Toronto named Kevin Vuong, who I understand is ethnically
00:51:05.180
And he's been against this anti-Semitic crime wave.
00:51:14.220
In fact, his writing has got a lot of Muslim vote.
00:51:16.880
He's probably going to lose his writing just for that alone.
00:51:19.600
If he's an independent, it would be already an uphill battle.
00:51:22.400
But he didn't do that calculus that we mentioned before.
00:51:25.840
Oh, by the way, I don't know if you saw this the other day, Melanie Jolie, in a private
00:51:30.560
conversation with, I think it was Thomas Mulcair, said, have you looked at the demographics
00:51:37.060
Like, basically, the foreign minister for all of Canada was suggesting she makes her
00:51:41.200
decisions not based on Canada's interests, but what some little neighborhoods in her own
00:51:47.920
So, Monday was this anniversary, and I think there were 10,000 to 20,000 people there.
00:51:56.260
I think I heard a lot of people came and left, and then more people came, because I was a
00:52:03.440
I saw people leaving, and then waves of people.
00:52:12.660
Yeah, I've got some pictures of that, which we'll show.
00:52:15.980
We've got police drones, police helicopters, sniffer dogs, metal detectors.
00:52:22.080
We couldn't even bring in a selfie stick, and that's what it's like to be a Jew in Toronto
00:52:32.400
I can understand now why the prime minister wasn't there, because he was in another event
00:52:48.260
Her city is not just part of a regular crime wave, but an anti-Semitic crime wave.
00:52:54.680
She goes to every community thing, because she's not really focused on policy and ideas.
00:53:06.800
She dresses up like the people, like the carabana.
00:53:15.840
So it's like getting to events is not her issue, except for this one.
00:53:22.520
You were there, and thank God they had no political speeches.
00:53:28.540
But you could see who the politicians were, Kevin Wong and the premier.
00:53:39.380
I was actually watching your live feed on my phone, and you had mentioned that Trudeau wasn't there,
00:53:47.620
and you had mentioned that you hadn't seen Olivia Chow.
00:53:50.040
That doesn't mean that she's not there, but it was certainly something that entered my mind,
00:53:57.280
And I don't cover Trudeau unless it's some reason to.
00:54:10.280
I'm doing my job to the mayor's office and said, were you there?
00:54:13.860
If not, I didn't see you there, and I've talked to some people.
00:54:20.040
That's at 10 o'clock on the night of the 7th, still on the 7th.
00:54:24.500
7 a.m., I now know she wasn't there because I reached out to James Pasternak,
00:54:29.140
the tremendous counselor for a long time, and he's Jewish himself,
00:54:33.420
and Brad Bradford, another outstanding counselor, ran for mayor against Chow.
00:54:40.300
As far as they know, they don't think she was there.
00:54:42.360
And Pasternak told me that he had asked her if she was going to go there,
00:54:47.900
I mention this because it's important for what happens later.
00:54:57.820
It was up there for many hours about how she wasn't there and the reaction to it
00:55:02.560
and the concerns that people had with it and my own concerns with it.
00:55:12.640
I get a call on the 8th, around 3 in the afternoon,
00:55:17.960
from somebody named Ariane Robinson, who's her media person.
00:55:23.680
That's who I deal with when I need things from the mayor.
00:55:30.160
And her first reaction was, this is hours after.
00:55:35.740
I don't know if she knew my piece was published or not,
00:55:41.180
And I said, okay, you didn't get an invitation.
00:55:44.580
And what she was trying to say was the mayor wasn't invited.
00:55:52.160
Yeah, United Jewish Appeal Federation and SEJA, which is Center for...
00:56:00.160
We deal with them as reporters and deal with B'nai B'rith and all that stuff.
00:56:04.980
The last year, I've got to know everybody dealing with all that.
00:56:18.020
So the mayor's spokesman is saying it's a big story that we were snubbed.
00:56:22.500
It's a big story that they didn't want the mayor living in jail.
00:56:27.060
So right away, as soon as I get off, as I said, do you want me to go into that story right now?
00:56:33.360
And I'll put in that the mayor was actually the one snubbed.
00:56:37.400
Send me over the information of what you have on that.
00:56:41.760
Get a quote from the mayor saying that in writing, not just us talking.
00:56:49.580
Well, and I said, right away, when you hear the well, I said, well, you go to work and you do that.
00:56:57.500
And I talked to someone over there named Michelle Stock.
00:57:00.260
I remember the name from she works in, you know, she's been around a while.
00:57:05.160
And I said, the mayor's office says that you did not invite the mayor to this thing.
00:57:24.740
I'm glad I said it right away because she'd sent it to me.
00:57:30.060
But, you know, sometimes organizations, I don't know what they're going to do.
00:57:35.520
They might just say, look, let's not stir this up.
00:57:40.800
No, no, she sent me that, and I have it, and it's right to the scheduler for the mayor,
00:57:46.420
And it says, we haven't heard from you on three other occasions.
00:58:01.840
And claiming she's the victim, that she's the one being snubbed.
00:58:04.340
This would be like someone refusing to go to a 9-11 memorial and blaming the families
00:58:11.940
Let me ask you a question, and I'll answer the question that I'm going to ask as well.
00:58:21.680
You kind of thought that they might have that, and you thought, I'm going to go to that event.
00:58:26.400
I went there out of support for the Jewish community, and the last year, all the people
00:58:31.840
I've got to know because of this, and I also went to cover it.
00:58:51.800
Because he cares about it, and that's why everybody was there.
00:58:54.900
I mean, Marco Mendicino was there, and I think Melissa Lansman was there.
00:59:02.340
She probably was at the one in Ottawa because she's a deputy leader.
00:59:09.140
She has a very large Muslim population, by the way, but she came to this event.
00:59:13.560
So then, you know, I go back, and when she called me back, Arianne called me back, and
00:59:20.940
she's saying, they're going for this, that there was a computer malfunction of some kind,
00:59:27.860
And I said to her, well, James Pasternak told me that he told the mayor.
00:59:32.740
And I'm almost like, are you sure you want to do this?
00:59:35.580
Because I'm almost trying to help her, because I'm surprised by this thing.
00:59:42.300
And she says, well, did you have that in the story?
00:59:46.540
So I quickly looked, and I said, it's in the story that he said it.
00:59:52.140
And so now I'm kind of offended, because I'm thinking, you know, I'm not really big on
00:59:57.040
putting lies that I know are wrong, that I know are spent.
01:00:00.520
But I guess what I was supposed to do was just take her at her word and put it in there.
01:00:07.680
The reason I mentioned all that is because the next day, it's still happening, where now
01:00:13.960
The mayor finally, under all those pressures, said, she's sorry.
01:00:17.780
But she's not sorry to the, you know, for missing it, you know, sorry to the Jewish community
01:00:25.200
She's sorry that she couldn't get there because of the communications issues, and that she's
01:00:30.720
worked that out with CJ and UGA, and they'll be a little bit better at it next time.
01:00:39.200
And I said to people that I work with, it's the same strategy that they use the first time,
01:00:51.620
And if you look at the Sun's front page, it, you know, it covers it.
01:01:00.080
You know, I was there, and I didn't really report on anything from the stage because there
01:01:09.400
There's a pregnant lady who was caught in this October 7th attack.
01:01:14.660
Her testimony was shocking, and her husband was wounded, and he thought he was going to
01:01:20.160
die, and they're communicating, don't you die on me.
01:01:24.640
But I didn't cover those because I was there for the political angle.
01:01:27.360
So what I did is I did what we call streeters, just talking to random people.
01:01:32.900
And to me, there's only one possible way to stop us from getting worse.
01:01:38.560
You're not going to change the mind of that mob, Navadawan, the paid provocateurs, or people
01:01:46.940
who aren't really that active, but they come from a place where hating Jews is normal.
01:01:54.460
To me, the only way to stop us from getting worse.
01:02:02.160
I mean, you can have a Holocaust education day in school.
01:02:06.900
In fact, all they'll do is say, yeah, and now the Jews are doing that to the Muslims.
01:02:10.600
The only way to stop this, in my view, is to stop out-of-control immigration from people
01:02:17.240
who have un-Canadian ideas like anti-Semitism, hate, violent solutions to problems.
01:02:24.240
If you don't turn off the tap, the fear that has stopped the police is fear of the violent
01:02:30.680
mob, but mainly fear of their political bosses.
01:02:33.740
Michael Kirshner knows that he is sleeping at the switch, and he's doing it because if he
01:02:39.560
were to enforce the law, there would be a thousand Mohammed Fakis saying, this is Islamophobia.
01:02:48.260
I think the only way to save Canada is to keep it Canadian and not whatever this is on
01:02:54.000
And it's not Canadian because they're burning Canadian flags.
01:02:56.340
Well, I wanted to, you know, since we're going, talking about this, I think there's
01:03:07.640
And there's a gentleman there that is talking to a Jewish person.
01:03:31.980
Turns out this guy is a customer of that store and he hangs out there.
01:03:42.220
Well, this guy lives in Kersers, Ontario and Chow's, Toronto.
01:03:47.700
...fake f***ing Jew, you have the right to f***ing partner and I don't.
01:03:52.260
F*** you and f*** your mother and your grandmother and your great-grandmother, you f***ing fake Jew.
01:03:56.940
I said, I said, Hitler should have wiped every f***ing one of you off the planet.
01:04:26.900
What I was going to say is that if, you know, you can see that David and all your people get arrested.
01:04:33.700
You know, I was pushed around different things.
01:04:36.600
You would think that this guy, I mean, it's not like we don't know who he is.
01:04:40.520
In fact, he laid a complaint against the police in an earlier incident.
01:04:46.800
And, you know, I don't know the real story, whether he just hangs around there or whether he's involved with ownership of the building there or whatever it is.
01:05:01.760
When, you know, I hear how you are called all kinds of names, Islamophobic and that kind of thing.
01:05:06.620
But that guy, you know, allegedly is somebody that you would think that would get the interest of the hate crimes unit.
01:05:18.060
And if that's free speech, if they say that's free speech, then all what we do here is free speech.
01:05:25.220
You know, something Mayor Weinstein said to me that day.
01:05:27.760
I covered that story and I think I broke that story, is that he said something that he and that's when I first ran into it.
01:05:38.640
That's how long I've been doing this kind of thing.
01:05:41.220
You know, Ernst Zandl would never say something like that.
01:05:46.000
He would do his scrum and then he would talk to like Lauren Honigman and people like that.
01:05:54.220
And Mayor Weinstein was one of the younger, he was young at that time and he wasn't as big as he is now.
01:06:00.720
But they would talk about things because it was never personal.
01:06:05.500
It was not, there was a cordial, it was strange.
01:06:10.160
And Mayor said, you know, Zandl never said anything like that.
01:06:16.060
And yet there's a whole history of Ernst Zandl being prosecuted for hate speech and things he shouldn't say.
01:06:26.240
And he's considered somebody that's, you know, like a horrific criminal in Canada and never used that language that we just heard here.
01:06:38.120
I mean, if we're going to tolerate that, if that's, you know, OK.
01:06:43.060
And, you know, according to Ontario and to Toronto so far, there's no charge for it.
01:06:50.780
You know, Rudyard Kipling, I think, is an outstanding poet and author.
01:06:57.220
He wrote the poem If, which is sort of a very famous one.
01:07:03.960
He condemned Medicine Hat when they were going to change the name of their city to Gasperg or something.
01:07:09.900
He wrote a letter convincing the city elders not to change the name.
01:07:17.860
Every Remembrance Day, I read his poem, Tommy, about like G.I. Joe.
01:07:27.020
He wrote a couple of poems that I don't know if they would be allowed today.
01:07:29.800
One was called White Man's Burden, where he basically said, go out into the world and help, you know, lift up civilization.
01:07:38.720
He wrote a shocking one called When the English Began to Hate.
01:07:43.740
But I want to read a line from another poem that goes to what you've just talked about.
01:07:57.480
But there was, and I'm not here to defend him, there was a grain of commonality between him and Honigman and Weinstein.
01:08:06.660
There were some civilizational things that were agreed upon.
01:08:12.180
Let me read to you just a line from Kipling's poem, written more than a hundred years ago.
01:08:18.340
The stranger within my gate, he may be true or kind, but he does not talk my talk.
01:08:25.880
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth, but not the soul behind.
01:08:31.140
The men of my own stock, they may do ill or well, but they tell the lies I am wanted to.
01:08:39.740
And we do not need interpreters when we go to buy and sell.
01:08:43.760
The stranger within my gates, he may be evil or good, but I cannot tell what powers control, what reasons sway his mood.
01:08:50.440
Nor when the gods of his far off land shall repossess his blood.
01:08:54.540
The men of my own stock, bitter bad they may be, but at least they hear the things I hear and see the things I see.
01:09:04.280
And whenever I think of them and their likes, they think of the likes of me.
01:09:08.020
This is my father's belief and this is also mine.
01:09:10.800
Let the corn be all one sheaf and the grapes be all one vine.
01:09:14.640
And our children's teeth are set on edge by bitter bread and wine.
01:09:18.900
I believe that people can come to Canada from any place in the world and be great Canadians.
01:09:30.480
You have to know the customs and the language and the history and the values.
01:09:37.540
A post-national state, a hotel room, an airport terminal.
01:09:42.760
And people who come here from a village in Pakistan where they have no commonality here.
01:09:50.260
By the way, one of my favorite Canadians is from Pakistan, Raheel Raza, who lives Canadian values.
01:09:56.720
But if we bring people here from Stone Age villages where they have ancient hatreds and no one ever told them, you can't bring that with you.
01:10:07.360
And we bring people in such numbers that they never integrate.
01:10:09.840
But I go back, because I've been doing this so long and I remember, you know, when I was a kid, we had a lot of immigration from India, places like that, and everybody fit in great.
01:10:21.640
In those days, it was an unwritten rule that you became Canadian and you were proud of it.
01:10:25.780
You know, you think of the 72 hockey series, all those names, Mahavlich and Esposito and all that stuff.
01:10:32.080
In my own home, there's an Asian feel to it because I'm the only sort of, you know, my son, his mom's from Asia.
01:10:44.440
I mean, we're watching the Leaf game and all that stuff.
01:10:46.420
And all the way back to the 2010 Olympics watching Sidney Crosby.
01:10:52.700
I wear this today and I asked about it if it's, I thought it was appropriate to wear it today because we're getting close to Remembrance Day.
01:11:01.540
But every day is Remembrance Day for a lot of us.
01:11:05.260
And, you know, I think it's really important that we don't forget those hostages.
01:11:09.360
I know this doesn't represent those hostages, but it does in terms of freedom.
01:11:13.260
And also all the things about Don Cherry that we, you know, because everything we've talked about here today.
01:11:24.760
He's never mentioned on Hockey Night in Canada.
01:11:27.420
And he did not say any of these things that that guy said.
01:11:31.580
All he said, and it was my column about how people don't wear the poppies.
01:11:37.180
And he said everything that he said to me, but he, we talked over 20 minutes.
01:11:53.760
And we throw him under the bus and he's not part of it.
01:11:57.000
He's, you know, no order of Canada, no nothing.
01:12:02.260
But the reality is that this is a great country, but it has to be, you know, it has to be fought for.
01:12:10.320
The freedoms have to be, obviously we saw that in the pandemic.
01:12:14.340
I remember all the time, you know, in the pandemic, every time I would see you in the mall and you would retweet it.
01:12:22.080
And I showed how you had to have a passport to get into the food court.
01:12:26.000
But you can stay on this side, even if you're full of disease, but you can't stay on that side.
01:12:33.220
I remember taking my son to the hockey arena and they had an airport style security.
01:12:39.140
The very first time my son said, well, because he was a little younger and he's like, oh, what's this all about?
01:12:45.100
Are the police going to arrest us or what's the, you know, he didn't know.
01:12:47.740
I said, no, but they're asking for passports and stuff about that.
01:12:51.640
And my mom is in her 80s and that we're not showing a passport to go into the hockey arena that belongs to us.
01:13:00.740
But you're in there, you're wondering, are they going to call the police?
01:13:03.120
Because there's those kinds of stories and that kind of thing.
01:13:11.120
Sean Hartman, the young hockey player that died.
01:13:14.020
Nobody has covered the story outside of, you know, I did a little bit,
01:13:17.080
not as much as I should have or would like to have.
01:13:20.420
But there's a lot of people that died because of the vaccines.
01:13:23.660
More than 400 Canadians that they admit to died.
01:13:29.780
But Canadians, when they were given the test of how they're going to handle having their freedoms taken away,
01:13:36.480
And so I don't know if I have a lot of faith in it because I think that people are afraid.
01:13:42.320
Michael Kirzner, the guy that's in charge of the police, he's afraid.
01:13:45.740
The mayor is, you know, openly, I mean, you know, didn't go to the most important event in this city this year.
01:13:54.980
Even if you don't agree with it, you have to be there.
01:13:58.260
We don't have her there to decide that she doesn't go to those events.
01:14:09.220
I would like to think that if black Canadians or another ethnicity were being vilified,
01:14:17.340
attacked, physically attacked, threatened, hate marches, I would like to think I would be there.
01:14:23.400
Well, you would be there because I've seen you there.
01:14:27.340
I mean, these things do come up and we're the first.
01:14:29.520
And in a way, the COVID battle was one such battle.
01:14:39.940
But I believe that we stood up for people who were a minority that was picked on and the police were involved there.
01:14:48.080
I mean, I was at this Jewish event, this UJA event.
01:14:51.160
People were talking to me about leaving the country.
01:14:56.260
That sounds like something out of medieval times or out of the Second World War.
01:15:02.480
I think you're the best street, smart, shoe leather reporter around.
01:15:08.400
We try and emulate you to a degree at Rebel News.
01:15:15.560
It's been a while since we've been here and we've seen each other.
01:15:21.940
I mean, you break a lot of stories or you inspire them and I follow them up.
01:15:25.780
And I know sometimes I do the same and you follow them up.
01:15:31.700
You don't remember meeting me, but I remember I was a columnist for a year and a half at the Calgary Sun.
01:15:39.060
I went there from the Toronto Sun in 2000 or sorry, in 1997.
01:15:47.740
That was the time when Preston Manning won the 66 seats.
01:15:52.160
And at that time, the Calgary Sun supported Jean Charest.
01:16:01.140
But I remember you coming in and kind of quitting on principle and I was there for that.
01:16:06.620
And I thought, this guy has such integrity because he's giving up a spot in the paper, which is not an easy thing to do.
01:16:22.520
And you were prepared to stand up for what you believed in.
01:16:24.980
You were upset that the Sun at that time didn't support Preston Manning.
01:16:29.260
All the columnists did, Rick Bell, Linda Slobodian, those are two legendary viewers in Alberta know who they are.
01:16:38.900
And I was an Ontario guy out there covering it.
01:16:41.260
But we all supported Preston Manning at that time.
01:16:48.200
So I just want to say that it's always an honor.
01:16:51.100
Ever since then, I followed your career, Western Standard, all the things you do.
01:17:00.660
Our friend Joe Warmington spending the last hour plus with us.
01:17:08.760
From all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters to you at home, good night.