Trudeau proposes censorship of social media before the election — and Scheer says the plan doesn't go far enough!
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Summary
Justin Trudeau wants the government to hold the media to account, and the opposition says it s not going hard enough, fast enough. It s an outrage to civil liberties groups across the country, but no one has a peep about it. Is this censorship, or is it something else?
Transcript
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Well, hello, Rebels. You're listening to a free audio-only recording of my show.
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It's called The Ezra Levant Show because I am Ezra Levant, and it is a show.
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And today I talked to you about a bizarre proposal by Karina Gould,
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one of Justin Trudeau's cabinet ministers, to have the government hold the media to account.
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Funny, I thought it used to be the other way around.
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The media would hold the government to account.
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And I should tell you, I checked the Twitter and news feeds of every civil liberties group in the country.
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Not one of them had a peep about it. It's an outrage.
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If you like listening to these podcasts, you would love watching it.
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Come on, you've got to watch these things. It's a video.
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All right, without further to do, here's the shoe.
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Tonight, Trudeau proposes emergency censorship of social media before his re-election campaign this fall.
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And Andrew Scheer's response is, Trudeau doesn't go far enough.
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It's February 20th, and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.
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Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
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There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
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The only thing I have to say to the government, the wire publisher, is because it's my bloody right to do so.
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I hardly need to point out that this is Trudeau's state broadcaster, but that's pretty relevant.
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Minister tasked with safeguarding election calls on committee to look at regulating Facebook and Twitter.
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Isn't that the opposite of safeguarding an election?
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Isn't meddling in free speech, isn't censorship, isn't that actually interfering in an election?
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Gould invites committee to study regulation or legislation in lead-up to federal election.
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Oh, so we've had free elections in this country for centuries.
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I mean, obviously Canada, as an independent country, is only 152 years old.
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We had all sorts of elections, the local and the provincial level.
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And then the days of radio and TV and now the Internet.
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I think the Internet really came into its own in the early 1990s.
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So we've really had almost 30 years' experience with it.
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Eight federal elections, I'd say, in the age of the Internet.
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We've had three federal elections since Twitter was invented, since the iPhone was invented.
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We've had four federal elections where YouTube was around.
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We've had five federal elections with Facebook around.
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Trudeau certainly used all those technologies and more to spread his message.
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Now that he's in, he wants to pull up the drawbridge.
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He doesn't want anyone else, with other points of view, to have access to the newspapers and TV stations of the 21st century.
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I mean, he'll grudgingly allow the Conservative Party and the NDP in on the action.
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But that's a pretty narrow bandwidth of ideas, isn't it?
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All the major parties in this country are afraid to talk about, I don't know, just for an example, open border immigration or about the Islamification of society.
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Anything that actually challenges mainstream opinion, establishment opinion.
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Which explains their willingness to go along with this.
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They want a monopoly on what you can even talk about.
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Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould today called on a Commons Committee to look at the possibility of the Canadian government imposing new rules on social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, in the lead-up to the next federal election.
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Now, as you know, Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Google and the rest of them, they already tilt to the left.
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In the weeks before the French elections, just for an example, Facebook shut down 30,000 pages, all of which supported one of the candidates, Marine Le Pen.
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I mean, do you trust any corporation, to tell you the truth, but especially a corporation run by this guy?
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Do you feel like it's a backlash, or do you feel like you're violating people's privacy?
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Do you feel like you're adequately portrayed as a...
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Because they want to wonder about the person who actually created this thing.
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Yeah, I mean, you know, a lot of stuff happened along the way.
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I think, you know, there were real learning points and turning points along the way in terms of building things.
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If I knew what I knew now, then, then I hope I wouldn't have made those mistakes.
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I can only do what we think is the right thing going forward.
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So, before we move off this privacy thing, and I thought that was a fascinating answer.
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There's a group of women in the audience that wish you would.
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We know that Twitter also deletes accounts of anyone they don't like politically, including some of our former staff here.
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Our YouTube page here at The Rebel is being demonetized, along with many other conservative YouTube sites.
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In December of 2016, we were on track to make a million dollars a year from our YouTube videos.
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But the next month, January 2017, YouTube just removed conservative sites from any ad buys.
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They just wouldn't allow mainstream ads to be put on our sites unless we were specifically requested.
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And even then, if a company requested to have an ad on our site, they put in their own machine censorship for any words like feminist or Trudeau.
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So, yeah, social media is already hard left wing.
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They had a staff meeting a few days after Trump won.
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Listen to these senior Google executives, especially the one saying that she was crying that they lost.
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There was no divider between her, Google, and Hillary Clinton.
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As we started to see the direction of the voting, I reached out to someone close to me who was at the Javits Center where the big celebration was supposed to occur in New York City.
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And I just sent them a note and said, you know, are you okay?
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And I got back a very sad short text that read, people are leaving.
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That was the first moment I really felt like we were going to lose.
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And it was this massive, like, kick in the gut that we were going to lose.
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And by the way, her friend in the Hillary campaign was her boss, the executive vice president, Eric Schmidt.
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Coming from Silicon Valley, that's a suburb of San Francisco, it's the most left-wing city in North America.
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Testifying before the Procedure and House Affairs Committee Tuesday, Gould suggested the committee take a closer look at the role of social media in elections.
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I would encourage this committee to do a study of the role of social media in democracy.
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If that's something you think is interesting, she said, to hold the social media companies to account.
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You know, one of the things we always say about the media, about journalism, about the free press, about freedom of speech, we say that holds government to account.
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Free press, free media holds governments to account.
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I mean, sure, the official opposition in government holds the government to account.
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But official opposition doesn't talk about everything.
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They only talk about the things that suit them and their own agenda.
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There are journalists everywhere on the whole spectrum from left to right with different points of view.
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We all have the right, as citizen journalists, really, to question our government for ourselves.
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The government now proposes to hold media companies to account.
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The government would hold the media to account.
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But that is precisely what Trudeau's cabinet minister just said about the media and elections.
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Because they're positively owned by Justin Trudeau and the federal government.
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They're run as a Trudeau message repeater right now.
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And why would they object to their private sector competitors just being regulated just like they are?
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I would welcome suggestions and feedback in terms of how to appropriately regulate or legislate that behavior.
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Because I think one of the biggest challenges, and you can see this around the world, is the path forward is not as clear.
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Why does a Trudeau liberal think she can regulate someone's behavior in a campaign?
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Especially political behavior, media behavior, the right to ask questions, the right to challenge and criticize and doubt, the right to say things.
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I mean, if things go too far, if there's a threat or a crime, well, we have a law that can handle that.
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The criminal code or defamation law in civil courts.
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It's no different than in the age of newspapers and leaflets or the age of radio or TV.
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Why would it be acceptable to demand, say, that talk radio be regulated to crack down on inappropriate behavior during elections?
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Isn't that inappropriate behavior as long as it's not a crime?
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Isn't that just a fancy way of saying people who are sick of the government and want to throw out the bums?
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I'm sure a lot of things were said about the Progressive Conservative Party in 1993 to choose a pre-internet date.
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That's just when the internet was really getting popular for the first time.
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Back in 1993, really the internet was not a factor in the campaign.
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But that mighty party was slaughtered down to just two seats.
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I'm sure a lot of things were said and done on talk radio that were regarded as inappropriate behavior by Kim Campbell and Brian Mulrooney, too, back then.
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And the people are allowed to say and do things that the ruling class has deemed inappropriate.
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However, we want to ensure that we're providing that important public space that social media provides for people to express themselves,
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but also mitigating some of the negative impacts that can also arise through social media, she said.
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And so I think that would be something very interesting for this community to work on if you choose to do that.
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Mitigating some of the negative impacts that can also arise.
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If someone were to vote Trudeau out of power or knocked him down on minority government,
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that would certainly have a negative impact for him and for Karina Gould.
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Who gets to decide what's positive and what's negative?
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I guess my favorite line was, oh, if you guys choose to do that, as if Trudeau doesn't control the agenda of these parliamentary committees on which he has a majority.
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We're reading the CBC broadcaster, reporting a speech by a government minister about a government committee, about a government proposal to censor the media.
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Imagine writing about this with any suspense of how this is going to end.
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If the committee heeds Gould's call, I wonder if they will, and looks at ways to rein in social media in the lead up to the next election, it'll have to move quickly.
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There are only 12 sitting weeks remaining in Parliament's calendar before it rises for the summer, and it may not resume sitting before the next election.
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It means, well, I'm sorry, we can't have meaningful consultations.
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We really wanted to, but we've just got to ram this through, because we're in a rush.
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We didn't know this election was coming, this problem of negative impact.
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So you can't blame us for having to shorten the debate a little bit here.
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And anyways, look, the impacts are negative, people.
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Why don't you understand that Trudeau needs to hold the media to account, especially since they've been so negative in their impacts lately.
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From that trip to India, to this whole SNC-Lavalin thing, the media is so negative these days.
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And social media is the worst, because you know how citizens can be.
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All right, so what did Andrew Scheer's Conservatives say in reply?
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Let me read to you the totality of it, as reported in the CBC.
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Gould's comments came after Conservative MP Stephanie Cousy accused her of not doing enough to protect the next election.
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She said she was concerned that Gould has simply asked social media companies to do more to keep the next Canadian election safe from foreign interference and to apply lessons learned in other countries.
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This is very disturbing to me that you are asking corporations, out of their own goodwill, to try to protect Canadians and our electoral processes again, rather than taking responsibility yourself, both as the minister and the government, said Cousy.
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Cousy described the elections law, C-76, as weak, saying it relies on lame registries and wrist slaps to guard against foreign interference.
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Okay, and she's talking about Bill C-76, and we'll have to go through that bill properly one day soon.
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I have my concerns about it, like the Democrats in the U.S., Canada's liberals hate, for example, voter ID requirements at the polls.
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They want people to be able to vote without any proof of citizenship or any proof of ID at all, actually.
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And the liberals actually love third-party campaign groups, because that's what helped elect Trudeau in the first place.
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It's over 100 different groups, many of them unions.
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Some of these groups registering their offices, telling the Elections of Canada that, yeah, we're headquartered in the U.S., but we're going to campaign against Stephen Harper in Elections Canada, saying no problem.
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So there's a lot to talk about there, but mainly that's about elections campaigning.
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That's about political parties and political ads and political finance and stuff like that.
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It's not so much regulating campaign content as regulating campaign disclosure in finances.
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But what Karina Gould was talking about isn't campaign groups or third parties or even foreign meddling.
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You on Facebook, you on Twitter, you on social media.
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She's not even talking about political campaigns as such.
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She just wants to regulate what she says is negative on the Internet, what she calls fake, what she calls inaccurate.
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You can't trust anyone other than yourself to do that.
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Because, for example, Trudeau called this whole Jody Wilson-Raybould, Attorney General scandal, SNC-Lavalin thing.
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Fake is what each politician calls the other politician.
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And what each ideology calls the other ideology.
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That's why we have more than one political party.
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And that's why you get to choose which one you vote for, and you get to choose which one you buy if you buy a newspaper.
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Because we all have different points of view, and we're all allowed to.
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We want at least some of the media to have a different point of view than the government, to hold them to account, to have negative impacts.
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They want the government to hold the media to account.
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Trudeau said as much in a threat to Facebook over a year ago.
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Trudeau said Facebook had better start censoring things on Facebook that Trudeau didn't like, or he would force them to do that.
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But Andrew Schultz conservatives didn't seem to have anything to say about that.
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They want more, harder, stronger rules against foreign medallers.
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Okay, let's talk about keeping foreigners out, but I'm not really worried about the free speech rights of foreign nationals in our elections.
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I'm worried about our free speech rights here in Canada.
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That's exactly what Karina Gould is talking about.
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But Stephanie Cousy, the conservative critic, and Andrew Scheer certainly didn't make that point, at least not that I saw.
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Oh, by the way, neither did anyone else that I can see.
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Here's the news feed from the website of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.
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Here's the news feed of the Canadian Association of Journalists.
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Not a word about journalism under this proposal, but quite a bit about how they can get their hands on that $595 million in Justin Trudeau's media bailout.
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And here's the news feed from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
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Not a peep about this, but lots about rights of accused terrorists and criminals.
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Not a word about the government holding the media to account.
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Say, do you think they'd all be this silent if it were Stephen Harper demanding this censorship?
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By the way, the head of policy at Facebook is this guy, Kevin Chan, former staff member at the Liberal Party's leader's office.
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Imagine if Stephen Harper were Prime Minister and he was telling a former Conservative Party staffer who just happens to be a senior executive at Facebook that he wants to shut down negative stories.
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Yeah, there'd be a fuss, but it's not a peep now.
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It's not from those leftist activist groups, of course, but not even, from what I can see, not even from Andrew Scheer's concerns.
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It's because they, too, don't like voices on social media talking about things that maybe they don't like to talk about.
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They're scared to talk about Islam, scared to talk about immigration, because these things are embarrassing to them, because the CBC says don't talk about it, so they don't want to talk about it.
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Is that why Andrew Scheer is fine with all this?
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Because, frankly, he'd be fine if all the conversations in the country were kept to a little cartel of the few official parties, and that's it.
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Just the polite people, you know, all those lobbyists' panels on the CBC where they're all think-alikes.
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They will come for us here at the Rebel as sure as night follows day.
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Hey, Judy, why did you want to speak to Cabinet yesterday?
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I wanted to make myself available if Cabinet wanted to talk to me.
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Are you going to explain what's going on with the Caucus today?
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I'm going to attend Caucus, as I always do, and we'll see how the conversation's going.
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Ms. Wilson-Rain, can you explain why you quit Cabinet?
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As I've said, and I know this is frustrating for many people,
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I'm committed to ensuring that I know what I can and cannot say
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as I'm giving or getting legal advice, as I've told you, around privilege.
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That is Jody Wilson-Raybould, the former Justice Minister
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and then who quit the day after Justin Trudeau boasted,
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well, the fact that she's in my Cabinet tells you all you need to know about her support for me.
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The whole thing started to come undone a couple of weeks ago when the Globe and Mail had a bombshell front page story
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alleging that Wilson-Raybould came under tremendous pressure to let a Quebec company called SNC-Lavalin off the hook in a criminal prosecution.
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They, of course, had been found to pay $48 million worth of bribes to get contracts in Libya.
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So they lobbied the Prime Minister's office and everyone else they could find more than 50 times to try and get the charges dropped.
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Today we learn in the Globe and Mail that after Jody Wilson-Raybould and the Justice Department decided, in fact,
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to continue to prosecute after they made the decision,
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even after that, Justin Trudeau summoned Jody Wilson-Raybould to discuss the matter.
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Joining us now to talk about these ongoing shenanigans is our friend Lauren Gunter,
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I have to tell you, I'm a little bit confused by a few things.
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Jody Wilson-Raybould says she can't say a word because she doesn't know what her legal rights are.
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But she's been in this position for days and days.
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She has a top advisor, namely a former Supreme Court Justice, Thomas Cromwell, who's an able lawyer.
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It doesn't take that long to get legal advice on what she can and can't say.
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And I'm starting to think she's playing a bit of games because, of course, Gerald Butts,
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the principal secretary to Trudeau, resigned on Monday, and she shows up at cabinet yesterday.
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I think there's a little bit of games playing here.
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Oh, yeah, I think that's all that's being done right now.
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I worked as an executive assistant to a cabinet minister.
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I'd never heard this argument that the solicitor general, the attorney general, has a solicitor
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I mean, cabinet ministers are bound by cabinet confidentiality.
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Yes, it's limited in what they can and cannot say.
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And they often speak about what went on in cabinet in general terms.
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They don't say, well, we discussed this and we said that and so-and-so said this.
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That's supposed to be all confidential so that ministers will speak freely.
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But this idea that somehow when the prime minister pressures you to, if the allegations
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are true, if the prime minister pressured her after the director of prosecutions for the
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federal government had decided not to give Lavalin a deferred prosecution agreement and go
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ahead with criminal prosecutions, if the prime minister had pressured her to do, to lean
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on the director of federal prosecutions, then that is a political move.
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It is not covered by lawyer client or solicitor client confidentiality in my understanding.
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And there are a number of legal experts who've said this.
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And even if it was, you know, she's had this lawyer, I don't know the exact, I don't know
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how many days we're into this story now, but she says, well, I'm still trying to figure
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No, it doesn't take that long to research one narrow area of law and get an opinion.
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I was very sympathetic to her because I believe that the Quebec Liberal Party is the most corrupt
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Virtually every single mayor in Quebec has been arrested and charged with something in the
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It's the province of, well, it's the province of the Trudeaus.
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So it was absolutely believable to me that these Quebec old boys thought they could just
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pressure this cabinet minister from Vancouver to go along with it.
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But she actually stood on a point in principle.
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Now, Gerald Butts is gone on Monday and she's back in caucus on Tuesday.
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And I think, yeah, I mean, I think Butts's head was handed to her so that she'll play along.
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She was, I think, prepared to blab and to say that the PM leaned on her after the chief
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of prosecutions, a bureaucrat in the Justice Department, had chosen not to give Lavalin
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She's waiting for the most effective time in order to do this.
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But I think also at the same time, too, she is being a semi-loyal liberal.
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She wants to run again in October as a liberal.
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And so she's playing a sort of minefield game here.
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She's being careful where she steps because she doesn't want to blow up the party's chances.
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But I think, I mean, the only explanation that makes sense to me, this is pure speculation
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on my part, but the only explanation that makes sense to me is why Gerald Butts would
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leave his dream job when there's no evidence suggesting he was involved directly, is that
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she threatened to divulge what had been said and what the pressure that had been put on
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her unless something was done and Butts's head was the something.
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Yeah. You know, I want to show you a clip that I saw on CBC the other day.
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It's an old clip decades, a generation ago, when Jody Wilson-Raybould's dad was an Aboriginal
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activist and he was face-to-face with Pierre Trudeau.
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Right. He butted heads with Pierre Trudeau several times.
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Yeah. Let me show you this quick exchange. It's not substantive.
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He talks about his daughters wanting to be lawyers and how one of them wants to be prime
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I have two children in Vancouver Island, both of whom, for some misguided reason, say they
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want to be a lawyer, both of whom want to be the prime minister, both of whom, Mr. Prime
00:29:13.620
I mean, she might be a bit of an idealist. She's certainly a leftist. She certainly has
00:29:19.300
a point of view on the law that is to the left of mine. She's an Aboriginal rights radical
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in some ways, and I think she'd agree with that. Like her dad.
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She brought in the new drunk driving laws, which completely obliterate all sorts of century-old
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protections against self-incrimination. So she is a radical. There's no question.
00:29:37.720
Yeah. And so maybe she had more principle in her than to go along with these old boys,
00:29:43.740
these old McGill boys, who said, oh, come on, you're just a gender and race quota token.
00:29:50.060
Go along with the big boys. And she said, yeah, no, on this one, I'm going to stand firm.
00:29:53.940
I think that there was a poetic moment when the first Aboriginal justice minister in Canadian
00:29:59.820
history looked at the trust fund boys from Montreal and said, not on my watch. I think there
00:30:05.000
was a moment like that. But I think she's cannier than just an idealistic die on this hill kind of
00:30:11.320
gal. I think she's got a bit of her dad in her. And I think she, look, she just knocked out Gerald
0.99
00:30:16.660
Butts. No one else in the party had the ability to do that. By the way, I don't think Gerald Butts
00:30:21.340
is gone. I read in the Globe and Mail that he was going to take a leave of absence anyways to run
00:30:26.620
the campaign. So he's just stepping down a month or two early. I think there's a lot of BS here.
00:30:31.560
Yeah. I think there is too. And maybe there's collusion between Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould
00:30:38.780
to handle all this, although I don't think that's true. I think where you are angling
00:30:43.340
is a possibility that she has always wanted to be the leader of the Liberal Party, always wanted to
00:30:51.100
be prime minister. And she sees a way now, if not to push Trudeau out at this point, at least to
00:30:58.200
position herself as a darling of the left of center wing of the Liberal Party when Trudeau
00:31:07.560
eventually does decide to go. And, you know, it's been funny. The fun thing for me in this,
00:31:13.880
though, is watching both Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould try to position themselves as the victims here.
00:31:19.660
I mean, Trudeau said, well, you know, of course, if she had only said to me that she felt pressure,
00:31:27.580
I certainly would have. My feminist side would have rushed out to her defense. And, oh, my goodness,
1.00
00:31:34.180
I just feel she's the one who didn't do her duty, though. I feel so badly that I wasn't told. Like,
00:31:41.480
I don't think anyone believed that. It was a reminder of how he answered, you know,
00:31:45.600
in the year 2000, when he was a younger man, but still an adult. He went to a beer party in
00:31:51.900
Creston, British Columbia, and he sexually groped, according to the New York Times, a young
00:31:57.040
reporter named Rose Knight. And then he later said, oh, I didn't know you were an important reporter
00:32:02.160
with the National Post. He actually apologized, sort of, by saying, oh, I didn't know you were an
00:32:07.180
important person. If I had known you were just a little town reporter, I thought you were just a
00:32:13.960
little town reporter. It would have been OK, but I didn't know you were reporting.
00:32:17.740
So, but, you know, when he was asked about that last year, he said, oh, well,
00:32:21.020
she might have experienced it differently, and I respect her right to experience it. It felt like
00:32:25.460
that. It felt like, oh, well, Jody Wilson-Raybould experienced this pressure. Well, she has that right
00:32:31.020
as a woman to feel that way. But come on, cuckoo. She's, you know, she's a little hysterical.
1.00
00:32:36.120
Like, it came across as that same male feminist, passive-aggressive. I totally respect her right
0.99
00:32:42.740
to think I pressured her. But come on, guys, we all know. I mean, come on, you're going to believe
00:32:47.420
her? That's how it came across. You know, before this happened, before this happened, it was well
00:32:51.580
known on Parliament Hill that Wilson-Raybould was difficult to work with. She'd gone through several
00:32:56.780
chiefs of staff or executive assistants. She was known as a very prickly person. And you remember,
00:33:05.020
too, as soon as this became an issue, there were several people from the senior liberal ranks who
00:33:10.980
were whispering to reporters, oh, you know, Jody's very hard to deal with. She's got a big ego. You
1.00
00:33:16.860
have to be careful. And, you know, that's the same sort of thing, right? I mean, it's just into this
00:33:22.600
passive-aggressive stuff. And they're feminists until it suits their purposes. And then they're
1.00
00:33:27.880
smearing a woman because she's a feminist. This has been fun to watch. Because we still don't know
0.83
00:33:36.240
what's going on. We still have weeks of this to trickle. It may not be every day as it is now.
00:33:41.640
But over the next few months, new things are going to arise. And it's fun to watch because here are
00:33:47.940
these smug, sanctimonious liberals who've been telling all the rest of us that they and they
00:33:53.640
alone know what's right and what's moral and what's politically correct these days.
00:33:59.320
And they abandon all of that as soon as any hot water touches their backside.
00:34:05.080
Yeah. Just a quick thing on her leadership ambitions. I don't think she has strong French.
0.99
00:34:10.980
And I think that would be a barrier for her to go further. I think she just wants to play for a
0.56
00:34:16.120
powerful role within the party. And Justin Trudeau is the most lightweight person in cabinet.
00:34:22.480
Well, maybe not worse than some of his quota hires like Miriam Monsef. So I should take that back. But
0.98
00:34:29.420
if Jody Wilson-Raybould has a real ideological agenda, and if she's pushed General Butts out of
1.00
00:34:36.320
the way, she'll be the big dog in cabinet. I mean, Justin Trudeau doesn't have any strong views on
00:34:40.540
anything. He just does what Butts tells him. So I think that I think Jody Wilson-Raybould is just
00:34:44.680
trying to get some power, maybe getting some things for her and her dad and her people.
0.70
00:34:49.240
Maybe this is the end of a 40-year campaign by her family to right some historic wrongs in her mind.
00:34:55.240
I mean, I don't give it that much detail, right? I think she sees an opening. She's pushing it as
00:35:01.200
hard as she can and will discover how far this takes her. Does this play into a greater ambition
00:35:08.000
of hers to perhaps someday be prime minister? I mean, you say her French isn't very good,
00:35:12.400
but she checks an awful lot of other boxes. She's a woman. She's indigenous. I mean, there's all
00:35:17.740
sorts of she's from the West Coast. There's all sorts of reasons why she's a very attractive
1.00
00:35:22.440
potential for the liberal party. I don't say she's attractive for the country as PM, but among liberals,
0.65
00:35:28.480
she's very attractive for a lot of these reasons. And so I just think she sees an opportunity and she's
00:35:33.760
going to push it as far as she can without having an end point in mind.
00:35:38.700
Yeah. I don't know if you saw it, but Solomon Friedman, who's a very, very smart criminal lawyer
00:35:44.380
in Ottawa. I mean, he's a whiz kid. He's co-authored books with judges. He's an unbelievably
00:35:50.340
smart guy. I used to know him a little bit better when I was at Sun News. I saw him on Don Martin's
00:35:56.900
show. And I'm just going to play a quick clip of this. And this is my last question for you,
00:36:01.120
because Solomon, unlike most pundits, actually read the law and how it would the law regarding
00:36:07.760
these remediation agreements or these deferred prosecution agreements. That's a fancy way of
00:36:13.380
saying, OK, we won't actually prosecute you for your crimes if you just say you're sorry and make
00:36:19.200
amends. Here, take a quick look of Solomon Friedman talking to Don Martin on CTV. Take a look.
00:36:26.100
Well, one of the reasons that all of this smells so much is that, I mean, first of all, the deferred
00:36:31.020
prosecution regime in and of itself smells. But if you look at it and you look at what does it take
00:36:36.160
to qualify, you start going through, there are a list of factors. So one of the things is, has the
00:36:40.440
company or its representatives been convicted in the past? Guess what? They have. How high up in terms
00:36:47.180
of the company hierarchy does the corruption go? Well, in the case of SNC-Lavalin, to the very top.
00:36:52.660
How serious are these allegations or previous convictions? Well, they're bribing officials
00:36:57.740
to get the Montreal Hospital project, right? So when you look at this list of factors, have
00:37:03.120
reparations been made, really? Have the people of Libya been made whole for the hundreds of
00:37:07.280
millions of dollars that were stolen from the citizens to enrich the Gaddafis? Of course not.
0.87
00:37:11.660
So SNC-Lavalin would never qualify for one of these arrangements by the letter of the law.
00:37:18.680
Huh. So it would take friends in high places to make that happen?
00:37:21.880
Maybe a little undue influence, maybe some pressure, maybe some directing, all those things
00:37:25.620
that we're hearing about. It's not a surprise when you look at the law. This is not a law
00:37:29.220
that a company like SNC-Lavalin, given their past track record, could ever qualify for.
00:37:35.420
That was very illuminating to me. And it was the first time I had heard in this whole saga
00:37:40.080
an actual criminal law expert talk about the deferred prosecution agreement. And here's my point,
00:37:47.740
that's why I wanted to show that clip. Lauren, I believe this matter will all go away because both
00:37:53.980
Jody Wilson-Raybould and Justin Trudeau will find an optimal outcome where they both are
00:37:59.580
mutually better by cooperating than one stabbing the other to death. And I believe that they will
00:38:07.340
find a way, log rolling, back scratching, whatever you want to say, unless the RCMP get involved.
00:38:13.020
I believe it was the RCMP that undid Stephen Harper or the police with their prosecution of
00:38:20.120
Mike Duffy, which he was acquitted, but it turned into a two-year saga. I think that the media fatigue
00:38:27.480
is setting in and Wilson-Raybould and Trudeau will work this out. But if there was a criminal charge,
00:38:32.920
I think it's all bets are off. And I think Trudeau will lose the election. Do you think that that's
00:38:39.080
a possibility? Do you think that the RCMP is even independent enough to start asking questions? We
00:38:45.220
saw David Lamenti, the new attorney general say, Oh, I didn't even talk to Trudeau. I just saw things
00:38:49.780
in the media. That's enough for me. No need for me to investigate. It's all set by me. Do you think
00:38:54.820
a cop's going to take a different point of view? Or do you think the new RCMP commissioner will say,
00:38:58.100
no, no, no. Trudeau appointed me and I'm returning the favor?
00:39:01.640
Yeah. I asked a couple of former senior Mounties who I know whether or not this is something that
00:39:09.500
the RCMP is likely to get into. And both of them said, you know, they're not afraid to come in.
00:39:16.120
It's not that they picked on the Harper-Duffy thing and wouldn't pick on a Trudeau-Wilson-Raybould
00:39:23.220
item in the same way. It's just that they didn't think either one of them thought that this rose
00:39:27.820
to the level of criminal behavior on the part of the PMO. And so they didn't expect, and I don't
00:39:35.840
either, that the RCMP will get involved. But not because they like the liberals, they like Trudeau,
00:39:41.860
not because of that. It's just because it doesn't meet their standard.
00:39:44.800
Yeah. Well, I mean, in his defense, SNC-Lavalin, they registered more than 50 lobbying meetings.
00:39:52.260
They weren't exactly hiding it. They weren't exactly. I mean, unlike Libya, their schemes and
0.97
00:40:02.400
Very likely money would have had to change hands. You remember in the case with Duffy that
00:40:08.120
that Stephen Harper's chief of staff at the time paid Duffy's expenses. That sort of set
00:40:18.620
off alarm bells, apparently, with the Mounties, who then started to investigate. Found no criminal
00:40:22.800
behavior, but that's what set off their investigation. There's no sense that Lavalin has given the
00:40:28.680
liberals money this time. Not that it hasn't happened in the past, but this time. And so I
00:40:34.380
think we probably will not see the Mounties get involved. Yeah. Well, I mean, you can hear it
00:40:38.880
here first. I hereby then predict, based on what you assess as the low risk of a criminal prosecution,
00:40:45.400
I hereby predict Justin Trudeau will be reelected with at least a minority government in the fall of
00:40:50.340
2020. I do too. It's disturbing for me to have to say this. And the polls now are trending downward
00:40:56.260
for the liberals. But I think when push comes to shove in an election in October, that there are just
00:41:01.500
enough sycophantic liberals in liberal voters in the country that they'll say, Oh, my goodness,
00:41:07.500
we can't risk having a Doug Ford, a Jason Kenney, Donald Trump running our country. We must elect
00:41:15.320
reelect that wonderful Sonny Ways man. Yeah, I think you're right. All right,
00:41:19.620
Lauren, great to talk to you. Thanks for your time today. You bet. Okay, there you have it.
00:41:23.440
Lauren Gunter, the senior columnist for the Edmonton Sun. By the way, he's written two very
00:41:28.320
interesting editorials about this one's called Don't Expect Butts Signature Policies to Leave
00:41:32.960
with the Man. I absolutely agree with that. And another one called Butts is Out, which only fuels
00:41:37.340
further speculation. I encourage you to read those at edmontonsun.com. Stay with us. More ahead on the
00:41:42.780
rebel. Hey, welcome back to my monologue yesterday about the resignation of Gerald Butts. James
00:41:58.480
writes, Butts was the mastermind behind Alton McGinty, too, that also ended in scandal. Corruption
00:42:04.460
follows this guy around. I truly believe that. And I worked very briefly a long time ago as an
00:42:14.700
assistant to Preston Manning. So we were in the opposition. We had no power whatsoever. But I can
00:42:19.140
tell you the way that leader of the party acted, everyone looks to the leader. How does the leader
00:42:25.000
act? How does his chief of staff act? Everyone watches. And if the leader flies economy class in the
00:42:31.660
airplane, if the leader has a lean expense account, everyone says, okay, that's how we roll around
00:42:38.400
here. It would be awkward if the leader of your party is sitting in the economy class of the airplane
00:42:45.060
and the staffer were to fly in first class, right? And that's the thing. Preston Manning, just like his
00:42:50.380
father, Ernest Manning, set a personal moral example. Justin Trudeau and Gerald Butts have both
00:42:58.500
pigged out. I give you the example of Butts spending $127,000 moving from Toronto to Ottawa.
00:43:06.200
How do you even do that? So everyone watches and says, oh, he's putting two nannies on the payroll.
00:43:11.920
Oh, he's taking a secret trip on Billionaire Island. Oh, he's getting away with what he can. Oh,
00:43:17.060
he was caught for convictions under the Conflict of Interest Act, but no big deal. That's the lesson
00:43:22.920
Gerald Butts taught. Paul writes, as long as Butts is in Ottawa in any capacity, he'll be running the
00:43:30.120
show. Oh, yeah. I mean, or Toronto. Like I say, he was in Toronto until a few years ago. He can work
00:43:36.000
the phones and by email from anywhere, Skype from anywhere. And I say again, the Globe and Mail is
00:43:41.960
literally the day after Butts quit. The Globe said, oh, yeah, he was going to take a leave of absence
00:43:48.180
anyways. And they certainly haven't ruled out him running the campaign. Do you think for a second
00:43:52.900
that he's still not running things? Bruce writes, some media folks think Butts is out of the game,
00:43:59.760
but we know better. As for Kean being attacked, I hope and pray the anti-fascist will be found.
00:44:05.460
Apparently they didn't get the memo from Dion Buse. Well, thanks very much, Bruce. We are, in fact,
00:44:10.840
I should try and get a video out on this tomorrow. We are looking through footage and photographs
00:44:15.820
to try to identify the guy who hit Kean. Now, obviously Kean wasn't hurt in the same way that
00:44:21.280
David Menzies and our cameraman Ephraim were not hurt a few weeks ago when they were punched by the
00:44:26.280
guy at the Radisson Toronto East. But that's not the point. The test for not being punched is, well,
00:44:32.220
he didn't hurt you. He didn't hurt you. That's not the test. The test is you're not allowed to punch
00:44:36.840
people in Canada, even if you disagree with them. So it is my plan, and I'll outline this in a video.
00:44:41.400
Hopefully I'll get it up tomorrow. First of all, we're going to have a bounty.
00:44:45.820
To find the name of this guy who punched Kean. And we'll pay cash. I'm thinking 500 bucks.
00:44:53.620
And second of all, we're going to sue him to kingdom come. And not out of vengeance,
00:45:00.320
because if we win, he'll get a slap on the wrist, obviously. But to make the point that you cannot
00:45:06.480
punch a journalist with impunity. Out of self-respect, we have to sue. Out of justice,
00:45:14.660
we have to sue. To set a precedent and a deterrent, we have to sue. We cannot let it be that someone
00:45:20.560
can punch a rebel, Kean, Sheila, David, Ephraim, whoever. You cannot do that in this country.
00:45:28.280
And hopefully we'll get the police involved, but if they decline, we will sue in civil court.
00:45:32.660
That's a promise. Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters,
00:45:38.200
see you at home. Good night. And keep fighting for freedom.