Rebel News Podcast - July 24, 2026


SHEILA GUNN REID ｜ Canadians Are Being Watched： John Carpay on the Eight Laws Fueling Canada's Surveillance State


Episode Stats


Length

21 minutes

Words per minute

149.07

Word count

3,251

Sentence count

151

Harmful content

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Is Canada becoming a surveillance state? And if so, can anything be done about it?
00:00:05.040 It's July 24th, 2026. I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, but you're watching The Ezra Levant Show.
00:00:13.720 Shame on you, you sensorious bug.
00:00:17.000 the boss Ezra Levant is off trying to save the world from itself so I am filling in for him today
00:00:31.940 and a new report is out from our friends at the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms
00:00:37.340 the report details the list of legislations and regulations that is putting Canada on a path
00:00:46.440 towards a CCP China style surveillance state. The report is comprehensive and chilling. It's
00:00:56.100 written by, sorry, you can chop this in. It's written by veteran journalist and policy analyst
00:01:04.180 Nigel Hannaford. It's called Privacy Roadmap, Halting Canada's Surveillance State and Eight
00:01:10.840 steps to restoring privacy in Canada. It lists all the egregious ways that the government is
00:01:18.040 intruding into your life and monitoring you, tracking you, and surveilling you. Now, the report,
00:01:26.540 as I said, doesn't just detail how bad it's becoming. It offers solutions to the state creep,
00:01:35.600 state intrusion into our lives and we brought our friend john carpe from the justice center
00:01:43.620 for constitutional freedoms on the show to break it all down for us so here's an interview
00:01:49.040 we recorded earlier when i was obviously wearing an entirely different outfit take a listen
00:01:55.040 if you have gotten the feeling that the government is watching you well you might be right and a new
00:02:10.440 report from our friends at the justice center for constitutional freedoms details just that
00:02:16.080 problem their new report privacy roadmap halting canada's surveillance state shows us the pathway
00:02:23.120 to retrieving some of those vital rights, including our right to keep our own information
00:02:28.760 private. Joining me now is John Carpe from the Justice Centre to walk us through that report
00:02:36.220 and what the Canadian government could do, if they wanted to, to make our private lives a little bit
00:02:43.980 more our own. John, thanks for joining the show. What prompted this report? We've had the building
00:02:51.740 blocks of a surveillance state are being slowly put in place. It started three years ago with
00:02:58.140 the Online Streaming Act, which gave the CRTC, the Canadian Radio, Television and Telecommunications
00:03:04.220 Commission. It's a mouthful, but the CRTC previously had authority over the radio and
00:03:12.500 television broadcasting, and that's been extended to the internet. And they now have the power to
00:03:18.160 manipulate algorithms to push content that they deem
00:03:22.160 to be Canadian to the forefront. So that was
00:03:26.160 the start, is giving the CRTC authority over the internet.
00:03:30.000 Then we got the Online News Act, which prevented Canadians from sharing
00:03:34.020 news links on Facebook and Instagram.
00:03:38.160 Then we got C8, the Cyber Security Act,
00:03:42.140 which gives federal cabinet ministers power to kick Canadians off the internet
00:03:46.400 and gives the federal government authority to order telecom providers
00:03:51.740 and internet companies to set up their software
00:03:55.040 in a way that makes it easy for government to search.
00:03:59.740 Then we got the C9, which opens the door to religious leaders
00:04:05.100 getting prosecuted for teaching what their scriptures say
00:04:08.860 about homosexuality, gender, transgenderism, etc.
00:04:12.920 And then we got C-22, the Lawful Access Act, which actually caused some companies like Signal to announce they're leaving Canada because the government is going to order them to change their software in a way that they no longer have private confidential end-to-end encryption.
00:04:33.780 And Bill C-22 forces these companies to keep data on file for six months.
00:04:39.240 Everybody who sent phone calls and texts and where the person was when they made them,
00:04:45.000 who they made them to, is now information that has to be kept on file for six months.
00:04:51.440 Last but not least, and I'm sorry to rush through them, but I mean, we could spend five hours on this.
00:04:57.200 It's massive.
00:04:58.720 We have the Safe Social Media Act, which is Bill C-34, all to protect the children, of course.
00:05:06.040 And this opens the door to forcing every Canadian to have centralized digital ID whenever they use social media.
00:05:18.840 And it also creates a very powerful, frightening digital safety commission with authority over the Internet.
00:05:25.300 it's just it's mind-blowing when you when you look at these six bills together these are the
00:05:34.300 building blocks of a surveillance state and you know the way you laid it out there it appears to
00:05:40.360 me that everywhere canadians retreat from the government intruding into what they can see say
00:05:46.820 and think, the government finds a way to invade or then legislate the transparency, for lack of a
00:05:56.480 better word, of those platforms. So, you know, for example, Rebel News, we started on the internet
00:06:04.620 to avoid control of the CRTC. Now, who's there to monitor us? The CRTC. People abandon existing
00:06:12.640 social media platforms and go to more secure ones like Signal. And guess what? Who's knocking on the
00:06:17.560 door over there? The government. It's like they just follow the people where they go to escape
00:06:24.400 the government. And guess who's there waiting for you? The government with a new law.
00:06:29.320 You know, I've been extremely critical of the Supreme Court of Canada as well as Canadian
00:06:35.260 courts generally. But I will say on this privacy issue, the Supreme Court of Canada has several
00:06:40.680 very strong decisions, saying that citizens as a constitutional right,
00:06:45.880 Charter Section 8, to be secure from unreasonable search and seizure,
00:06:50.760 that this applies to all of our communications and to all of our data.
00:06:57.460 And so we have a number of court rulings that are summarized in this report.
00:07:03.700 And the Supreme Court, I would actually, I'm scared to say it,
00:07:08.060 but I would actually say that constitutional challenges to these laws actually have a reasonable chance of success
00:07:15.240 because the Supreme Court has said that government cannot access our personal data without a warrant.
00:07:23.480 And this is in keeping with centuries of common law tradition where the starting point is we have property rights, privacy rights.
00:07:29.080 However, law enforcement can violate the privacy rights and property rights of suspected criminals
00:07:36.120 by going to court and getting a warrant.
00:07:38.860 And this has been a healthy balance that has allowed police
00:07:42.080 to catch the bad guys as well as protecting the privacy rights
00:07:45.260 of Canadians by saying, yes, police can get a court order
00:07:49.220 to listen to your phone conversations, monitor your emails, etc.,
00:07:54.880 but only where it's suspected they have strong and reasonable grounds
00:07:59.360 to believe that somebody has committed a crime
00:08:02.100 or is committing a crime.
00:08:03.580 So police can legally violate the privacy rights of certain individuals and groups suspected of criminal activity.
00:08:11.840 The rest of us, if we're not doing any crime, we have a right to be free from government surveillance.
00:08:17.960 And so the Supreme Court has actually continued with that tradition to say that we have a reasonable expectation.
00:08:25.500 Even texts.
00:08:26.380 If I send you a text, I have a reasonable expectation of privacy,
00:08:32.200 even though my text is now on your phone.
00:08:34.900 And if police want to search your phone, they need to get a warrant.
00:08:38.000 They can't just arrest you and search your phone without a warrant.
00:08:44.020 So there's some hope there.
00:08:46.080 But, of course, the best thing is just to try to defeat the bad bills in the first place.
00:08:50.660 Going to court should always be plan B.
00:08:52.480 Right, except the Kearney government has now stolen a majority, which makes defeating these bills all but impossible.
00:09:03.060 I note that the author of the report is veteran journalist Nigel Hannaford.
00:09:09.980 We've all read his work over at the Western Standard, but he makes, I think, a pretty salient point in here that privacy itself is the foundation of a free society.
00:09:21.520 Canadians cannot fully exercise their freedoms of expression, association, religion, or conscience
00:09:27.100 if they believe governments or corporations, I guess as proxies of governments,
00:09:31.960 are constantly watching what they read, say, buy, or believe.
00:09:36.020 I think if you are constantly being surveilled by the state in every single aspect of your life,
00:09:41.400 and tech is in every single aspect of our lives, we start self-censoring, don't we?
00:09:47.760 Absolutely.
00:09:48.200 if now our conversation right now we both know that this is going to be posted on the internet
00:09:53.640 and that's fine because both of us have consented to that but if i'm talking on my phone to a friend
00:10:00.120 if i think that the government might be listening you know directly or indirect government agency or
00:10:05.520 police or the crtc or a human rights commission government in the broad sense of the word if i
00:10:11.760 think somebody is listening, I'm not free to speak candidly with my friend in the same way
00:10:18.780 that I would if I have reasonable confidence that I'm not being listened to. And so it's a
00:10:24.840 devastating, crippling effect. And this was in force in the communist countries for decades and
00:10:32.640 other non-communist repressive regimes, the National Socialists in Germany, dozens of examples
00:10:39.540 you can provide. And it puts a horrible sense of, you can't ever really relax if your private
00:10:49.960 conversations that you want to keep private, if they are being listened to, it's not a free country.
00:10:58.840 Right. And you should be allowed to formulate your thoughts in private before you express
00:11:03.580 them publicly. I mean, we've all worked through some crazy ideas and come to a different conclusion
00:11:08.760 at the other side of where you began.
00:11:11.920 But if all of that is attainable by the government,
00:11:16.060 people just stop thinking.
00:11:18.440 You stop thinking if you can't speak freely
00:11:20.800 because we need the free speech.
00:11:22.440 It's not only about your right to stand on a sidewalk,
00:11:26.560 you know, holding up a sign with something
00:11:28.800 that maybe 99% of people disagree with.
00:11:31.420 It's not only about being able to speak freely
00:11:33.660 on campus and at events,
00:11:35.120 but it's about being able to speak freely
00:11:37.140 in private conversations, because as you said, we, we get, we learn to think better. We get
00:11:42.720 smarter when we have the freedom to talk. You know, you may have experienced sometimes you
00:11:47.740 got this complicated problem and, and your, your thoughts are going around and around and right.
00:11:52.660 You're not finding a solution. And then you have a friend who is kind enough to listen to you go
00:11:57.280 on and on and on for half an hour. And at the end of the half hour, if you've talked and talked and
00:12:01.860 talked, all of a sudden you get this amazing clarity. And now you've, you've identified what
00:12:06.680 the problem is and what one or more solutions are but if the government's listening in but a lot of 0.99
00:12:12.320 what you say in that half hour it might be pretty stupid stuff it doesn't matter you're getting to 0.61
00:12:18.640 the solution just by talking about it and if if governments are listening in on our phones or even 0.98
00:12:25.100 emails social media then we we lose that capacity it's going to dumb us down because we're not going
00:12:33.520 have that same if we don't have the freedom to speak freely we cannot improve our own thinking
00:12:38.700 but isn't that the point john to dumb us down perhaps it is the point what is the point then 0.72
00:12:47.180 if the result is a dumber populace which is more easily controlled or a scared populace 0.94
00:12:54.800 which is more easily controlled perhaps that is the point of all of this 0.97
00:12:59.120 well it it may well be and i i think it breaks down uh i think there are some evil geniuses
00:13:06.580 who know exactly what they're doing and they have nefarious goals to enslave us and so on and so
00:13:12.620 forth at the same time you get a lot of people who support this legislation without being aware
00:13:18.160 of the darker side right uh sadly many canadians have next to zero knowledge of history they have
00:13:24.940 had government presented to them from kindergarten right on through to university the only thing they
00:13:30.020 hear about government is free health care free education roads and bridges they've never learned
00:13:36.340 that in the 20th century there were more citizens murdered by their own government than the total
00:13:42.600 number of soldiers who died on the battlefield so I'm not an anarchist I there's a proper role for
00:13:47.980 government and we ought to be teaching ourselves and our kids and our grandkids that government
00:13:54.480 is a double-edged sword.
00:13:56.840 A government can do great good.
00:13:58.360 It can also do great harm.
00:14:00.160 But you have a lot of naive people.
00:14:01.640 They're like, yeah, well, sure.
00:14:02.800 You know, it's just, yeah, if the government,
00:14:04.600 you know, I've got nothing to hide.
00:14:06.660 And if the government-
00:14:07.260 It's keeping the kids safe, John.
00:14:09.180 Keeping the kids safe.
00:14:10.540 And they don't understand.
00:14:12.720 Even a living example today, 0.94
00:14:14.420 in communist China,
00:14:15.240 we have the social credit system.
00:14:17.240 This is not the social credit political party
00:14:19.440 that used to govern Alberta and British Columbia.
00:14:22.260 But if you are a well-behaved citizen, according to the government,
00:14:27.080 you have easier access to a favorable lending rate for a mortgage.
00:14:32.420 Your kids can get to a better university.
00:14:34.640 But if you criticize the government on social media,
00:14:37.360 you will instantly be prevented from getting onto a bus or a train or a subway or an airplane.
00:14:43.400 And they have centralized digital ID.
00:14:46.280 and this legislation, Bill C-34 and the other half dozen bills
00:14:52.420 are taking us to becoming like communist China
00:14:56.320 with a social credit system.
00:14:58.680 It's chilling. It's chilling.
00:15:00.400 And then when you throw in the green agenda into all of this,
00:15:03.480 it's not just your social credit score, it's your green credit score.
00:15:08.160 And if the government has all your information,
00:15:11.680 your private thoughts, your private texts,
00:15:13.760 your private conspiracy theories about Bigfoot like me,
00:15:17.960 I mean, you are easily manipulated
00:15:21.880 when the government has all your compromise.
00:15:25.500 Well, and controlled.
00:15:26.980 It becomes, if you have central digital ID,
00:15:29.800 and God forbid, if we have a digital currency
00:15:32.540 where cash is illegal or cash is no longer recognized,
00:15:36.640 cannot be used,
00:15:37.940 you now have access to all of our transactions.
00:15:41.520 And then the government can say,
00:15:42.720 well, you've been a bad girl because you have spent over $200 on fuel for your car,
00:15:50.280 and they can actually track this because they know gas stations that you've been to.
00:15:55.560 And of course, you could bypass it a little bit if your next-door neighbor hardly ever drives her car,
00:15:59.800 and you could swing a deal and use her credit card or something.
00:16:03.340 But that's missing the whole point.
00:16:05.460 If we have central government, central digital ID,
00:16:09.640 and if we have a central bank digital currency and no cash,
00:16:12.720 it's an absolute totalitarian nightmare.
00:16:15.900 And they'll say, well, you've been a bad boy.
00:16:18.940 We'll still allow you to buy groceries,
00:16:20.940 but you're not allowed to fly
00:16:23.120 because only the good citizens
00:16:24.440 who have a small carbon footprint
00:16:25.840 or only the good citizens who are woke enough
00:16:28.280 to really understand equity, diversity, and inclusion
00:16:31.160 get to fly on airplanes
00:16:32.800 and go to Florida or Mexico in the wintertime.
00:16:36.260 This becomes actually doable
00:16:37.860 if we continue on our current track.
00:16:40.620 And I hope that more people will wake up
00:16:42.580 before we get into that nightmare.
00:16:46.560 Dystopian nightmare.
00:16:49.040 John, so there's a roadmap,
00:16:52.780 at least to strengthening Canadians' privacy.
00:16:57.340 Lay out some of that for us.
00:17:00.260 So first thing to do is stop Bill C-34 from getting through. 0.60
00:17:04.960 That's an uphill fight.
00:17:06.140 The Liberals, as you mentioned, have a majority.
00:17:08.960 However, even Liberal MPs, when they get a lot of emails and phone calls
00:17:14.860 from their own constituents and their own writing,
00:17:18.200 so the Justice Centre on our website, we have a letter-writing campaign
00:17:22.460 where you can type in your name and address and email and so on,
00:17:28.300 and if you don't know who your MP is,
00:17:30.580 this is going to direct an email to your own member of Parliament.
00:17:34.720 So they're getting emails from their own constituents,
00:17:38.960 which they do care about.
00:17:40.920 So we saw the government back down on Bill C-2.
00:17:44.200 They had provisions in there to allow Canada Post to open our mail,
00:17:47.880 to make it illegal to use cash in amounts greater than $10,000.
00:17:53.400 Even for legal purposes, buying a car, giving to charity,
00:17:56.980 cash in amounts over $10,000 would become illegal.
00:18:00.120 The government actually backed down on C-2
00:18:02.280 because there was this immense public outcry from Canadians.
00:18:05.600 And if we can see the same thing happening on C-34,
00:18:08.120 then we can, you know, we have to give them that pushback
00:18:14.660 because the Liberal MPs will go to their leader, Mr. Carney,
00:18:18.480 and say, I can't support this bill in its current form.
00:18:21.940 It's causing a lot of people upset in my riding.
00:18:24.820 So that's something Canadians can do practically.
00:18:27.940 The other bills need to be repealed or amended.
00:18:32.200 C-22 should just be, it's a disaster.
00:18:35.160 It should just be revoked.
00:18:37.260 I hope all of the opposition parties make that part of their platform whenever the next election is.
00:18:44.600 Now, John, I know that you raise these issues through advocacy, through these sorts of policy reports, but also through legal battles with the federal government.
00:18:57.300 How do people support the good work that the Justice Centre is doing on behalf of Canadians, protecting our rights, not just privacy rights, but civil liberties in general?
00:19:07.500 Well, like the rebel, we are funded 100% by grassroots Canadians who believe in what we're doing.
00:19:13.520 We're in a slightly different position because we're a registered charity.
00:19:16.940 We can issue an official tax receipt.
00:19:19.320 But I would encourage people, whether you donate or not, go to our website, www.jccf.ca.
00:19:25.660 That's Justice Centre Constitutional Freedoms, jccf.ca.
00:19:29.640 Sign up for our email newsletter and you can see our different cases.
00:19:33.720 And you can also read the paper that we've been discussing today,
00:19:38.160 The Roadmap to Restoring Privacy in Canada and Stopping the Surveillance State.
00:19:43.100 The paper is deliberately, it's written for non-lawyers.
00:19:46.840 It's not written for experts in technology.
00:19:49.140 It's written for the general public.
00:19:50.720 So I would encourage people to read the paper and go from there.
00:19:56.120 Great.
00:19:56.800 I hope everybody supports the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms while they still can,
00:20:01.060 while it doesn't affect their future social credit score.
00:20:04.680 John, thanks so much for coming on the show.
00:20:06.760 And we'll talk to you very soon.
00:20:08.920 Thank you.
00:20:09.840 Thanks.
00:20:10.140 Your letters to Ezra read by him up after the break.
00:20:23.180 Well, letters, letters, letters.
00:20:25.180 it feels like we get some form of viewer feedback every minute of every single day because I think
00:20:32.980 we have one of if not the most engaged viewership of our work in all of Canada and yesterday was
00:20:43.360 no different and frankly we better listen to you out there when you tell us what you think about
00:20:48.460 our work because without you there is no rebel news you know we'll never take any money from
00:20:53.340 the government to do the work that we do and I think it shows in our independence don't you
00:20:59.000 now yesterday's viewer feedback comes from rebel news plus subscribers on a crazy story out of
00:21:08.280 Toronto you see the rebel news billboard truck had been rented by an organization called Canadian
00:21:15.520 women's sex-based rights. Now, they advocate for single-sex spaces and against the erasure
00:21:23.600 of women in the public square by radical trans activists and their crazy progressive allies. 0.91
00:21:32.580 The truck was stopped by Toronto police and informed, or at least our driver was, 0.71
00:21:39.700 that they were investigating a hate crime you see the graphics