Why are governments so obsessed with getting rid of farmers? And why do they care so much about their own food supply? In this episode, we talk about the Dutch farmer rebellion, and why they ve been fighting for their farmers for a long time.
00:00:00.280Hello, my friends. Oh, boy, there was a protest in London by the farmers. The farmers were angry. And boy, I love farmers protests. You know that when the farmers are protesting, taking their tractors into the city center, that things have gone wrong. And we used to cover the Dutch farmer rebellion. So I got a few things to say about this British farm rebellion.
00:00:21.760But before I show you that, I really want you to see it, not just hear it. So can you do me a favor and get the video version of this podcast? Just go to rebelnewsplus.com. Click subscribe. It's eight bucks a month, which gives you unlimited video content from us. But more importantly, from our point of view, not only do you get the good stuff, but pays the bills here because we take no government money and it shows. That's rebelnewsplus.com.
00:00:51.760Tonight, why do governments around the world always attack farmers? It's November 26th, and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.
00:01:21.760I find farmer protests very interesting. How about you? In the past, Rebel News has covered the farmer rebellion in the Netherlands. I think we sent reporters there three different times to cover that fight. I learned a fair bit about farming in the Netherlands. Don't laugh. It's actually very interesting and very surprising.
00:01:42.560Let me start with this fact. Did you know this? The Netherlands, which is a pretty small country geographically and doesn't even have 20 million people, it's the third largest exporter of food in the world, behind only the United States and Brazil. Are you surprised by that?
00:02:01.100I was. I mean, you've got to admit that it's surprising, that it's such a huge producer. Huge, especially in dairy and eggs. And you probably know that. There's all sorts of Dutch cheeses like Gouda.
00:02:12.680They're huge in meat. And they lead the world in flowers, which is part of agriculture, even though we typically don't eat flowers.
00:02:21.160It's such a huge industry for a physically small country. But then again, we sometimes forget that the Netherlands was once a global empire. Amsterdam was their mighty shipgoing city. There was colonies, Dutch colonies around the world. I don't know if you remember the Dutch East India Company, the Dutch and South Africa. To this day, there's still boar farmers there who speak a kind of Dutch called Afrikaans.
00:02:47.380In the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, even in Japan and Taiwan, in Indonesia. If you ever sailed on Holland America, you'll see there's Dutch captains and Indonesian staff. That's a legacy of the Dutch Empire. Even New York City. You know what it was called first? New Amsterdam, not New York. Very interesting place. Anyways, don't underestimate the Dutch, I'll tell you that. And don't mess with their farmers.
00:03:13.240I still don't quite understand the war on Dutch farmers. But from what I could glean from our reporters and just my own reading, it was driven in part by environmental extremism.
00:03:24.880The same way Canada is obsessed with the element on the periodic table called carbon, you know, the sixth element on the periodic table.
00:03:33.060Well, the Dutch, at least some of them, are obsessed with nitrogen. That's the seventh element on the periodic table. I know that sounds crazy. It would be, well, I think a lot about hydrogen. Oh, me, I'm a helium guy. I mean, what are you doing? Those are basic building blocks of the universe.
00:03:48.300I was curious. I was curious. So I checked and, you know, nitrogen and carbon were officially discovered as elements in the same year, 1772. What's what a coincidence that is. That's almost exactly 250 years ago, by the way.
00:04:04.680And if you had told any scientists over the past 250 years, until maybe 20 years ago, that we would literally try to, I'm laughing saying it, decarbonize the world or denitrogenize the world.
00:04:22.000They would have said you were absolutely crazy. And you certainly were not a man of science. You were maybe some sort of a witch or something. I mean, carbon is the stuff of life. You think about the word carbohydrate. That's what we eat.
00:04:36.160Every single living thing is made from carbon. You're made from carbon. Everything we eat, every plant, every animal, our breath that you exhale is carbon dioxide.
00:04:44.960It's crazy to think we're going to get rid of carbon. Nitrogen, too. It's literally in our DNA. Without those two basic elements, all life on Earth would immediately cease.
00:04:55.720Imagine being a kook who says, we have to get rid of carbon. Well, can you imagine those kooks on the carbon side? Because we know them. We've been fighting with them in Canada for 20 years.
00:05:07.780But in the Netherlands, they've been going after farmers for using fertilizer that includes nitrogen, that very basic element. I'm serious. It's a war against farmers.
00:05:19.040The farmers fought back, though, with these rebellions I'm telling you about and did something incredible that the Dutch parliamentary system allows.
00:05:28.060The Dutch farmers started a political party. And in the Dutch system, which is a little bit confusing, but it has an important form of proportional representation.
00:05:38.540You know what that is, right? You get a certain percentage. You get seats. It's not like a constituency system.
00:05:45.100Anyways, look at what happened. And I'm reading from the BBC here.
00:05:50.320Farmers protest party wins shock Dutch vote victory.
00:05:55.560They immediately became the biggest party in the Dutch Senate.
00:06:01.620Let me read a bit because it's just such a pleasure to read this.
00:06:05.020A farmers party has stunned Dutch politics and is set to be the biggest party in the upper house of parliament after provincial elections.
00:06:12.420The farmer citizen movement, BBB, was only set up in 2019 in the wake of widespread farmers protests.
00:06:18.780But with most votes counted, they are due to win 15 of the Senate seats with almost 20 percent of the vote.
00:06:24.820I think in the end they actually got 16.
00:06:27.260This isn't normal, but actually it is.
00:06:30.040It's all normal citizens who voted, said leader Caroline Vander Plast.
00:06:34.320That's a that's a wonderful little quote, isn't it?
00:06:36.660The BBB aims to fight government plans to slash nitrogen emissions harmful to biodiversity.
00:07:09.900The Dutch farmers, all the more great because I was just reading from the BBC there and they hate farmers and nitrogen and carbon and they're all sorts of crazy.
00:07:19.920And the Farmers Party is the most normal people in the entire world.
00:07:22.940I really like that quote from their leader there.
00:07:24.840Anyways, the Dutch farmers have been at it for a while.
00:07:27.240You can see the party was started in 2019, but the farmers really started to fight back a few years later, including in 2022 when they had a ton of protests.
00:07:37.900And that's when they told us that they were inspired in part by the Canadian truckers.
00:07:56.580But I pointed out the anti-farm, anti-meat agenda of the Dutch government, right?
00:08:01.560I think the idea of culling enormous numbers of animals for no good reason when you, you know, re-look at the ostriches, there are reasons to put down animals on a farm.
00:08:15.740And doing that humanely is part of being a farmer.
00:08:18.580But what outraged so many people about the ostrich situation is that the birds were all healthy by the time they were being killed.
00:08:25.900Had the Canadian Food Inspection Agency been there when the animals were actually sick a year ago, I think they would have perhaps had less opposition.
00:08:34.560But by the time they got their bureaucrats act together, the animals were all healthy.
00:08:39.500They had all gotten better from the avian flu.
00:08:52.180They want to kill the animals to save the environment, which is crazy because obviously the animals are part of the environment when you think about it.
00:09:00.060All of which is to say, look at London today.
00:09:09.280But an enormous protest happened today against the Labour Party.
00:09:13.140That's the government there and their anti-farm budget today with farmers from around the UK driving into the heart of London with their rigs.
00:09:46.640Self-sufficient and so sufficient that one of them can feed a hundred of us, maybe a thousand of us.
00:09:52.860All of the qualities that make someone a great farmer also make them a great citizen.
00:09:58.020Patience, planning, thinking about the future, problem solving, harmony with the cycles of life, thinking long term, caring for life, especially life that's weaker than us.
00:10:08.620Feeding people no matter their politics.
00:10:48.060Now, the farmers in the UK are motivated by a number of things.
00:10:50.560But the biggest one, if I am reading it right, is a new plan hatched by the labor government in the UK that family farms would now have to pay a 20% tax on assets if they were to be passed down from father to son.
00:11:05.440So, basically, it would destroy family farms to the advantage of corporate farms.
00:11:12.440Because say a farm is nominally worth a million pounds.
00:11:24.920How on earth could a family with a farm just scrape together 200,000 pounds to pay a tax to the government to allow the farm to continue to operate in the family?
00:12:48.340Just in the last day, London's atrocious police announced that all farm vehicles were suddenly going to be banned from the center of the city.
00:12:58.400Just spraying that condition on the farmers.
00:13:03.600And to their peril, though, here's one farmer being arrested for daring to bring his tractor with him.
00:13:09.700Being arrested just by Trafalgar Square is absolutely outrageous.
00:13:15.920This is the place of the public, the public and farmers being arrested on the section 14 dispersal because the police the day before decides to say that they're not going to be allowed in the process.
00:13:29.340Say, if you've been following us, you know that there are constant, huge, pro-Hamas protests in London that shut down the downtown of the city, the city center.
00:13:46.820There have been other protests in London, too, including a major one just a couple of days ago, targeting a Jewish synagogue.
00:13:53.900Seriously, just pro-Hamas protesters swarming an individual synagogue and any Jews going.
00:14:02.700There's got nothing to do with the Israeli embassy or with it's just ordinary Jews in their residential area.
00:14:08.520That same metropolitan police force, let that protest against the Jews happen, no problem.
00:14:16.300But if you're a farmer with a tractor, peaceful, patriotic, it's illegal to bring your vehicle to parliament, say the police, even though parliament is actually the proper place to protest the government, don't you think?
00:14:30.080Yeah, I don't know about you, but I'm on the side of the farmers.
00:14:38.520It sure feels like there's more and more people in the cart as opposed to those who are outside the cart pushing it.
00:14:52.220And if it feels that way, it's because that is a fact.
00:14:54.800According to a study by the Fraser Institute, since Justin Trudeau took office in 2015 until now under Mark Carney,
00:15:02.660basically a decade of liberal rule, 950,000 new government jobs have been created, that is, have been plowed with taxpayers' money and have taken root.
00:15:18.720Now, not all of those are federal jobs.
00:15:20.560That includes provincial governments too.
00:15:36.020I'm almost, just, just a shade under a million people.
00:15:39.920And, you know, the growth of the population doesn't warrant it.
00:15:44.800The, yeah, I just, there's no excuse for it other than it's, I don't know, it feels like it's a kind of, I don't know, gestating monster like in the movie Aliens, where you have a creature inside you feeding off of you.
00:16:01.240I'm not trying to dehumanize these bureaucrats.
00:16:03.160I'm just saying they so clearly live off the avails of the productive class.
00:16:08.040I just find this such a frustrating story.
00:16:10.740Tell me what the Fraser Institute has reported.
00:16:34.560And one of the reasons why it sucks is because it sucks money out of our wallets.
00:16:38.620This report was hard to read, frankly, by the Fraser Institute.
00:16:43.220I don't know if you saw, Ezra, how much it's grown, the percentage of people who are working for various levels of government between 2015 up until now.
00:16:54.240In 2015, it was around 17-ish percent.
00:16:59.440Now it's well over 21 percent, almost 22 percent.
00:17:03.260What that means, folks, is that nearly a quarter of Canadians are working for government.
00:17:12.020This isn't just about the cost because the cost is astonishing to taxpayers.
00:17:17.180I think last year, federally alone, Ezra, we spent $70 billion just on the federal bureaucracy.
00:17:27.160But it's also, and I think more spiritually to your show, it's such a drain for all those people that go and join the ranks of the faceless government.
00:17:44.200The person that actually generates wealth in this country has now just joined the cogs, and it's really upsetting.
00:17:51.200You know, when I was young and naive, I would laugh at certain disciplines in university, women's studies, conflict studies, peace studies, vegetarian studies.
00:18:01.640I'm making up some of those, but not many.
00:18:03.920And I would think, you're never going to get a job with that, said I.
00:18:47.760Now it's almost everybody, including, I don't know, it's just, you start to feel like a sucker if you try and make it, make a go of it on your own, I think.
00:18:58.600And this is what, remember when Mark Stein, back in the day of Sun News Network, was warning about young kids in France wanting to grow up to become a bureaucrat?
00:19:08.420You're sitting there laying awake at night dreaming about becoming some government employee.
00:19:12.760Well, unfortunately, we're kind of going there right now in Canada.
00:19:16.900And to your point exactly, Ezra, yes, the average salary for federal bureaucrats is now well over $100,000.
00:19:26.640Also, if you take a look at the stats that the Fraser Institute put out here, is that you could try to, you know, at least I try to comfort myself saying, oh, well, you know, we need really courageous men and women in the Coast Guard out there saving people who fall off of boats.
00:19:41.920But no, the bulk of the growth, unfortunately, has been an administrative government.
00:19:48.640It's not the ones out there saving your life.
00:19:51.220It is administrative government growth that seems to be the fastest growing and the biggest problem.
00:20:20.700Because if Canada had doubled in size but had only gone up a fraction of that in civil service, you could say, oh, that's actually quite economical.
00:20:59.560And if you go take a look at British Columbia's debt level and how much its spending has gone crazy and out of control, it's enough to make you sick, Ezra.
00:21:07.920Because British Columbia, I'm a British Columbian originally, it has no business going into debt.
00:21:13.620It has no business blowing money on hiring a ton of big bureaucrats.
00:21:17.080It's literally sitting on a gold mine.
00:21:19.580I mean, one could argue, oh, if you're a tiny little landlocked province and you don't have any natural resources under your feet, well, you know, government's going to be the biggest game in town.
00:23:23.380And isn't that fascinating where you can see the province, the population of the province go like this, but the population of government workers go like that.
00:23:30.640It goes up in Newfoundland and Labrador.
00:23:32.440If I can philosophize for a moment to build on your point, that could be because the young, kickstarter, upstarty type, hardworking people in Newfoundland and Labrador, too many of them moved away.
00:23:46.840And they probably came to my province, in your home province here in Alberta.
00:23:50.300They're probably working in something like natural resources, the oil sands specifically.
00:23:54.320The population of Fort Mac has gained a lot of Newfoundland and Labradorians.
00:23:58.460But again, when you do that, that means that that person, who is clearly a very hardworking person, is no longer opening that business, innovating that company, starting something new in their home province.
00:24:13.340And therefore, there are fewer jobs for those younger people.
00:24:25.780And we're unfortunately paying for it.
00:24:28.920Ezra, I don't know if you saw just how much we're actually spending at the federal level, because it kind of dovetails.
00:24:35.560The public accounts came out with their numbers, and Franco went through them.
00:24:40.380The amount of money, Ezra, on the bureaucracy last year, $70 billion with a B.
00:24:47.240But with the outsourcing for all their little lobbyists and contractors and all that crap, it's still more than $20 billion.
00:24:56.140It's close to $100 billion for the blob just at the federal level.
00:25:01.060And then you dig down into this granular data from the Fraser Institute, which shows basically all levels of government absorbing more and more fellow Canadians, costing us more and more dollars.
00:25:14.340You know, I'm genuinely worried about the brain drain.
00:25:16.620For a while, I remember under Stephen Harper's last couple of years, it was quite an interesting story.
00:25:21.440I think even the New York Times picked it up, that for a moment there, Canada's middle class was, on a per capita basis, wealthier than America's.
00:25:32.060Like, I almost couldn't believe it, and now that I'm saying it, I think, could that possibly have been true?
00:25:54.540And I don't know if a lot of them are coming back.
00:25:56.700I think we were in a recession on a per capita basis in Canada.
00:26:04.380I don't know what Trump's tariffs will do in the long term, but I know a lot of people, personally, who say that they have to move some of their operations from Canada to the States to continue selling into that market.
00:26:23.920If, by the way, if the federal government continues to block the single best hope of economic growth, namely an oil pipeline, if they continue to spook other investors, like this nutrient potash mill, sorry, port that's now going to be in water.
00:26:43.320Like, if you start to get a reputation as a not-friendly place, these things will just compound.
00:27:41.320We're going where the others who are going.
00:27:44.600And we'll let Mark Carney have the managed capitalism, the stakeholder capitalism that he's been talking about at the World Economic Forum for a decade.
00:28:26.480And to your point, I know this is kind of painful to think about, but under Harper, remember for a time when our dollar was even over par for a little while?
00:29:25.200At the same time, he locked down the widget-making industries.
00:29:30.840So we have all this paper money flowing around without the stuff being made to absorb said paper money.
00:29:37.320And we have an inflation crisis, which is why stuff is unaffordable in Canada.
00:29:41.280So there's just been 10 years of economic bad decisions being made here, which is, again, I really hope, I truly hope, Ezra, that regular people, including in the mainstream media, read this report from the Fraser Institute.
00:29:55.200He realizes that we can't afford this, and we're going in the wrong direction.
00:29:59.580Well, we're going in the wrong direction in a bunch of ways.
00:30:01.640I think tomorrow is actually a really critical day.
00:30:04.600Mark Carney has been hinting to Alberta, oh, we'll let you have a pipeline with certain conditions.
00:30:09.360But he has been saying the opposite to Alberta's enemies, including the premier of BC and environmental extremists, many of whom are in his own cabinet.
00:30:20.160I think tomorrow is a very fateful day, and we'll see which way it goes.
00:30:38.160That's where our head office is in our studio.
00:30:40.460But I'm going to be hopping on a plane tonight to go to Calgary overnight.
00:30:44.180So I'm there very early in the morning because I understand there may be a joint press conference between the prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney, and the premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith.
00:30:53.300And the subject, if this does indeed go ahead, could be a sort of agreement between the two of them about an oil pipeline.
00:31:00.180Now, when I heard this first a few days ago, reported by Rick Bell of Post Media Newspapers, I thought, Rick is pretty accurate about things.
00:31:08.440And I actually allowed myself for about a moment to be hopeful and think, wow, wouldn't that be amazing if a pipeline was actually approved?
00:31:15.260From Alberta to the West Coast, sell some oil, not just to new markets like India, Taiwan, Korea, Japan.
00:31:24.540I know Mark Carney will want to sell to communist China, but there's a lot of other customers out there who are not dictatorships.
00:31:30.700Not only is it new markets and new sales, but it would allow Canada to get world prices for oil as opposed to the less than world prices we're getting because we have all our sales going to Americans, pretty much.
00:31:44.240I was excited and I thought maybe Mark Carney is different.
00:31:47.840But then over the last two days, I see him saying, including in parliament, that it has to get the approval of the premier of BC.
00:31:54.220And it has to get the approval of Indian bans who apparently Mark Carney thinks of a veto.
00:31:59.940Our constitution gives a veto neither to Indian bans nor to other provinces.
00:32:05.660And so I don't understand what's going to happen.
00:32:07.560That's all the more reason to go tomorrow.
00:32:09.900So that's where I'm going to be in the day.
00:32:12.220And hopefully I'll have a chance to put a question to both the premier and the prime minister.
00:32:16.100I can imagine there's going to be a ton of journalists there.