Will an oil pipeline actually be built under Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney? Ezra Lebant is a skeptic, but we'll tell you what happened today in Calgary, Alberta, to make a case for why it won't happen.
00:00:25.160Oh, hi everybody. I'm standing in the McDougal Center.
00:00:28.640That is the equivalent of the legislature, but here in Calgary.
00:00:33.160It's the provincial head office for the Premier in Calgary.
00:00:36.560I'm standing with my friend, our senior reporter, our chief reporter, Sheila Gunn-Reed.
00:00:40.640Hey Ezra, I am a skeptic of what happened here today.
00:00:44.500I think that the province, although they got a lot of wins, they did get a lot of carve-outs.
00:00:49.620I feel like we're going down the whole social license road that we went with Rachel Notley.
00:00:54.720If we concede to all these green things, that we'll get to build a pipeline.
00:00:59.620And that didn't happen in four years under Rachel Notley, and that was her plan to get pipelines built.
00:01:05.220Just to back up for a second, a couple of days ago, rumors started circulating.
00:01:09.660I think Rick Bell of the Calgary Sun was the first one with it.
00:01:12.480I think that, oh my God, was there a deal between the Alberta Premier and the notorious anti-oil extremist, Mark Carney.
00:01:18.820When I say he's an anti-oil extremist, it doesn't look like Stephen Golgo, a madman, criminal convict, scaling the CN Tower in a Greenpeace stunt.
00:01:28.500He looks actually the opposite. He always wears the $5,000 suits. I'm talking about Mark Carney.
00:01:33.300But he's actually been a far more effective anti-oil extremist.
00:01:36.500For years, he led the UN's anti-carbon agenda, and he was ahead of something called the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero,
00:02:17.700And you may recall that the U.S. Congress actually investigated GFANS, the Glasgow Financial Alliance, and they interrogated Mark Carney.
00:02:26.680I think that's something that has not been widely reported.
00:02:29.220Anyways, so here's a guy who, for more than a decade, has hated the oil patch and has done everything he could to attack the oil patch.
00:02:36.360And now suddenly he signed a memorandum of understanding that would, if the best outcome were to happen, have a one million barrel a day pipeline to the West Coast.
00:12:20.580And so I would say that the Prime Minister, maybe in the past 10 years, it looked like wind and solar and batteries were going to be the ability to power industrial economies.
00:12:30.520I think the world discovered that's not true with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with the instability in the Middle East.
00:12:36.040Everyone is having to recalibrate and rethink that.
00:12:38.700I was recently in the Middle East and the conversation around the table now was talking about natural gas as a foundational fuel, not a transition fuel.
00:12:46.920So I think that demonstrates that there is a global understanding of how important it is to have reliable electricity.
00:12:54.220And so I have to just give the Prime Minister credit for perhaps he's recalibrating his own thinking on this.
00:13:02.080It certainly seems to be in the agreement that we signed, but we will trust, but we will verify.
00:13:07.620We will make sure that he lives up to the commitments in this agreement that we had.
00:13:12.940And we have to proceed somewhere with a measure of good faith.
00:13:15.960I can tell you 100% that the former Prime Minister would never have moved this far on these issues.
00:13:55.280I think it's my role to be a skeptic because we can't all say, oh, yes, I'm totally trustworthy that this lifelong, decades-long enemy of the oil patch is suddenly our ally.
00:21:31.820I think that our side has to stay on the offensive.
00:21:38.560I think the Keystone XL pipeline, that was another 800,000-barrel-a-day pipeline that was going to go from Alberta to Saskatchewan and then into the States.
00:23:14.140It'll be interesting to see what the delegates, a lot of the people who are members of the party at the conference, are in the oil and gas industry.
00:23:21.300They hate the liberals as much as I do.
00:24:42.280As you know, from time to time, I visit the United Kingdom and even Ireland because those countries are going through things that we are going through here in Canada.
00:24:50.580And they may be further down the road.
00:24:56.820You can't just hop there overnight on a plane like you can to the UK or Ireland.
00:25:00.980But we have a base of operations in the Australian city of Melbourne, which is the capital city of Victoria, which is one of the major states down there.
00:25:16.580Of course, he did incredible coverage for us during the COVID lockdowns.
00:25:21.340Melbourne was really the most locked down city, not only in Australia, but probably the free world, maybe in competition with Canada's Montreal for that.
00:26:19.960And she's been the leader of the One Nation Party for decades.
00:26:24.020And although the mainstream media hates her, well, the parliamentary system allows her to win in her Senate seat.
00:26:30.420Joining us now to talk about Pauline Hanson and her latest activities, which have got a lot of attention in Australia and around the world, is our friend Avi Amini.
00:26:38.900Avi, did I properly introduce everything there?
00:26:41.300Did I explain how the Senate works okay?
00:26:44.280I think you've done a pretty good job quickly there.
00:26:47.460Although I've got to criticize your bringing up my PTSD about COVID so early in the morning.
00:28:25.040Like I said, she was a fish and chip owner, a fish and chip shop owner, and, you know, she was polling back then at about 3% to 4%, which is still a lot.
00:28:38.820That means one in, what is that, five Aussies that actually support her message.
00:28:44.320And I think the reason why so many Aussies are supporting her today is firstly, you know, obviously the cost of living and the way that Australia has gone, the failures of the conservative movement here.
00:28:57.540She's picked up a lot of their votes and just the Labor Party, the direction that they've taken Australia.
00:29:03.220But most importantly, I think because of how consistent she's been the whole time, no matter whether on, you know, no matter how much the left and the establishment media have tried to demonize her over the years.
00:29:17.160But also the fact that she's, even on her own side, when they've gone, like we've seen in the last couple of years, they've gone kind of kooky on the right.
00:29:32.620She's been, she's had this moral clarity as to what the threat to Australia is.
00:29:38.260And it's, it's shown it's cutting through and Aussies are supporting her and, and, and agreeing with her.
00:29:44.940And what we saw her latest kind of stunt shows it.
00:29:48.600We'll, we'll get to that video in a second, but I want to expand on your point, how she's been consistent for decades and some of the most successful populist conservatives in the world, you know, for years, they toil away in relative obscurity.
00:30:02.840And then suddenly the world wakes up and says, holy smokes, that guy was right.
00:30:08.320I mean, you and I are friends with Tommy Robinson.
00:30:10.220He's been fighting this battle for more than a decade and it's only been in the last year that people have sort of said, wow, he was right.
00:30:17.940Keert Wilders in the Netherlands for years, he was considered fringe.
00:30:22.400He was, he got the most seats, if I'm not mistaken, in the recent vote.
00:30:26.640Nigel Farage, same sort of thing, battling away on Brexit.
00:30:30.080He doesn't quite have the courage on immigration yet, but he's finding him.
00:30:33.260And even the Le Pen family in France, I think that people after 20 years, you know, however much people are opposed to, let's say, Pauline Hanson or Nigel Farage, that number is really not going to change.
00:30:49.600I mean, you're not going to convince someone today that Nigel Farage is bad or Thomas Robinson is bad because they've been attacked for 20 years.
00:30:56.560And if they're still standing, you know, I think there's something to showing that you're firm for 20 years.
00:31:03.800But Pauline Hanson, I remember even in Canada hearing about her 20 years ago.
00:31:08.440Tell me her latest move, because this goes to the Islamification of the public square, which is a big factor in Australia, just like it is in Canada.
00:31:16.580Take it away. Tell me the story of Pauline Hanson.
00:31:19.600So I think what she did was actually quite clever.
00:31:21.580And it's not the first time she's done this specific stunt.
00:32:40.380Rookshan, my friend who works sometimes with us at Rebel, he's there in Parliament.
00:32:46.960And he's saying when they cut it is when you heard the most outrageous, hateful kind of condemnation from the most extreme people like Lydia Thorpe and Maureen Faruqi.
00:33:03.300Some of these characters who have done, you know, the craziest stunts within Parliament.
00:33:46.220And I think people are getting a little sick of face coverings.
00:33:49.180I mean, people tolerated the unusual step during COVID.
00:33:52.420But I think a lot of people are tired because the Hamas types, the Antifa types, they wear masks for duplicitous reasons.
00:33:59.140And I cannot believe that any Muslim woman in Australia likes to have their face hidden from the sun.
00:34:06.780Well, it's quite funny because one of the loudest voices against her in parliament at the moment is Senator Payman, who is a refugee from Afghanistan, escaped the Taliban.
00:34:20.160One of the reasons so many refugees got into Australia from Afghanistan was based on women's rights.
00:34:28.540And one of the first things that happened when the Taliban fell back then, when they were escaping here to Australia was before one of the was women's rights.
00:34:40.860And one of the laws that they had was the forced wearing of these face coverings.
00:34:45.860And then you fast forward to today and you're seeing payment in parliament condemning Pauline Hanson for making a mockery of wanting to ban the exact clothing that kind of gave her the reason to be here in Australia.
00:35:03.820The force wearing of this. And you see, you know, if you look at Afghanistan today, as soon as the Taliban came back up, you know, when the Taliban fell, everybody was, you know, the majority of the country was women were pulling off these face coverings.
00:35:18.440Probably the only ones left wearing it was the ones where their husbands were extremists, forcing them to still wear it.
00:35:24.500And then as soon as the Taliban took control again, these face coverings became law once again.
00:35:30.920And here you have in the safety of Australia, where we welcomed her in because of the abuse to women by that same terrorist organization.
00:35:40.040Now she is in parliament condemning a woman for standing up.
00:35:45.580You know, one of the reasons which Pauline Hanson says she's standing up against it is obviously the security.
00:35:51.140We don't want face coverings here in Australia, whether it's the burqa or, you know, balaclavas or, you know, the Hamas people rallying on our streets.
00:35:58.660But also because she believes in women's rights and she knows that most of the women wearing this are not doing it because they want to.
00:36:07.560It's not a personal choice. And she says those that have the personal choice that want to do it, go ahead and do it in your home.
00:36:12.640If you want to do it on our streets, then go do it in an Islamic country.
00:36:16.500But to see payment kind of fighting her on that point is ludicrous. It's crazy.
00:36:22.280Yeah. Well, it sounds like the the arrivals in the Senate were able to shut her up, shut her down, shut off the mics, shut down debate.
00:36:32.760But tell me how it's been in the wider country.
00:36:36.640How have the media treated it? How have grassroots?
00:36:40.360How have Muslim groups? Is she threatened with any human rights lawsuits?
00:36:45.140What has been the reverberations of what she did?
00:36:48.900Well, if you're following the mainstream media, you'll believe that she's being widely condemned by the entire country as a racist.
00:36:55.200But if you look online, for example, and you just look at any post, even the mainstream media's own reporting on it and look at all the comments, the vast majority is in support of her.
00:37:07.480And those those same senators that have stood up and condemned the loudest voices against her, their own posts, many of the comments are, again, with Pauline Hanson.
00:38:59.300And then if you end up doing the thing you wanted to ban, you see, like if they just debated it and they banned it, it would have been illegal for her to enter the chamber wearing it.
00:39:10.720And that's why I think it was so masterful and so clever by it and so simple.
00:39:14.580You know, like, yes, she has done it before because it is so effective.
00:39:18.480And it got the whole country talking about the issue that they didn't want anyone to talk about.
00:39:46.240And I'm just grateful, especially in these times that we have sensible voices still on the right that don't flip flop on issues that are consistent and are willing to take one for the team.
00:39:59.840Well, you're making me jealous the way you describe her.
00:40:02.180Thanks very much, Avi, for fighting the good fight down under and for giving us an update.