Western Standard - August 05, 2025


Montreal Firebombing： Why Won’t Canada Protect Christian Artists？ ｜ The Pipeline

Mentioned
Corey Chris Rock Chris Wallace David Eby
Jessica Yaniv, Sydney Sweeney & the War on Beauty ｜ The Pipeline Alberta’s success paints a target on its back

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

179.74

Word count

1,059

Sentence count

73

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we discuss the recent fire bombing of a Christian rock concert in Montreal, Canada, and the government's response to it. We also talk about the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing the Supreme Court to strike down the ban on hate speech at concerts.

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 .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 His concert in Montreal was firebombed, and the police stood there.
00:00:04.120 The Montreal police stood there and watched these perpetrators, these violent criminals, endanger not only Sean's life, the singer's life, but the young people that were in the concert.
00:00:16.960 And I just do not understand how this country has gotten to this point.
00:00:20.400 There is an obvious violation of our laws, whereas there's obvious violent crime, and then their main focus is trying to get this guy off stage.
00:00:28.260 And this went back and forth for several hours before the concert, immediately within sort of the early part of the concert.
00:00:35.820 And then the firebombing happened, and they were still debating on whether they could actually rip him off the stage.
00:00:42.040 I don't know what country I'm sitting in anymore, because that to me is just stomach-churning, to be honest.
00:00:49.540 If I was a parent of somebody that was at that concert, I would be looking at civil litigation at this point.
00:00:54.840 So, as I said, I hadn't heard of this guy.
00:00:59.400 Christian Rock, for the most part, doesn't float my boat.
00:01:02.080 I don't think there's been a good Christian Rock group since Creed.
00:01:05.320 Yeah, you can make fun of me for liking Creed.
00:01:07.540 Creed was a bear. It was good stuff.
00:01:09.580 But, like, for the most part, eh, it's a little too on-the-nose.
00:01:12.860 It's not my thing.
00:01:14.080 But, um, it doesn't matter, right?
00:01:17.800 Like, uh, so the excuses used, like, they just denied them permits everywhere, to begin with, because they were going to do just regular outdoor concerts, that kind of thing.
00:01:27.760 It started with Parks Canada, somewhere out east, coming from a CBC story.
00:01:31.980 And the CBC story was playing into all the tropes, you know, they're racist, they're mega, they're American.
00:01:37.500 You know, like, you know, all these things.
00:01:39.180 And so the federal government revoked it under the premise, and they were a little smarter in the city of Montreal, they don't have the premise that, oh, we can't guarantee safety.
00:01:47.200 And, well, you know what, it's your job to guarantee the safety of Canadians.
00:01:50.140 And if, I mean, you're, you know, there's a Music Act, they're responsible for security, within reasonable limits.
00:01:56.720 But if it's not reasonable, you're facing potential political violence from Antifa or something, that's the job of government, then, to step in and provide additional security.
00:02:05.600 You don't just cancel it.
00:02:06.640 But we know that it wasn't actually a security issue, it was just an excuse for it.
00:02:11.680 Most of the municipalities that denied permits, they did it under a similar guise.
00:02:17.460 City of Montreal and Quebec City, they didn't even pretend.
00:02:21.680 They just said, this is not compatible with Quebec values, and these are, you know, right-wing Christian people, they shouldn't be allowed here. 1.00
00:02:30.860 You know, then you had creepy Senator Chris Wells.
00:02:34.920 As soon as I said creepy Senator, you already know who I'm talking about.
00:02:39.960 You know, he was saying, you know, hate groups shouldn't be allowed in.
00:02:42.720 And the guy who posted images about, you know, Christians are all Christians or Nazis, that kind of stuff from this guy.
00:02:48.280 A guy who's actually spread legitimate hate.
00:02:50.820 The mask is off.
00:02:54.180 Same with David Eby.
00:02:55.360 They shouldn't be allowed here because we disagree with them.
00:02:57.980 I disagree with their politics.
00:02:59.240 I disagree with their message, their faith.
00:03:01.560 They shouldn't be allowed here.
00:03:03.300 The left has dropped even the pretense, Corey, that, you know, of the language that Parks Canada was using.
00:03:10.380 They're just saying, we disagree with them.
00:03:12.180 They shouldn't be allowed here. 0.96
00:03:13.100 Yeah, and it's an indication of how ass-backwards our country is. 0.81
00:03:16.600 I mean, that should never even have come into question.
00:03:18.520 If we, you know, the charter keeps coming up lately and there's really, it's deviated in its interpretation grossly away from what it was supposed to be.
00:03:27.480 And being used now as a hammer to shut people down rather than to protect people's rights.
00:03:35.280 The insecurity of the left.
00:03:36.920 Again, I used that term earlier and it applies here.
00:03:40.160 You're fearful of differing messages.
00:03:42.500 Not hate messages, differing messages.
00:03:45.300 And rather than debate them, rather than apply discourse or rather than just leave it the hell alone, they insist on trying to shut it down.
00:03:52.720 And it's a sickness and it's problematic and people should be paying attention.
00:03:56.280 You don't have to like this guy, but you better understand how significant this swarm of government officials and ground activists, everybody in between trying to shut him down, how dangerous this is if we allow this to be unchecked like this.
00:04:09.440 Yeah, I absolutely agree with you, Corey.
00:04:12.080 I mean, I think there's a certain amount of monkey see, monkey do going on here as well because they do it in, well, can we be the next one to cancel this guy and get our headlines in?
00:04:21.140 Yeah.
00:04:21.340 I'm sure that happens.
00:04:22.460 But, you know, this business of values, you were saying that they were shut down initially in New Brunswick because of the security, I see, and that's certainly true.
00:04:34.420 That was an excuse.
00:04:34.920 But they also said that this performance should not take place on Parks Canada property because it was inconsistent with Parks Canada values.
00:04:48.700 So back to the internet we go and we look to see what Parks Canada values are as they perceive them.
00:04:55.120 And it's about creating safe places and fostering diversity.
00:05:02.280 Biodiversity, I could see, but the hell does a park have to do with diversity?
00:05:06.640 Well, you know, you've got to go onto the internet and see if you can make any sense of it because it just sounded like the classic way this liberal government works is that it has a set of ideas about how people should act and think and do.
00:05:23.740 And through various means of legislation, selective granting to agencies, they are trying to bring that about.
00:05:32.820 And this fellow walked into it.
00:05:34.780 It's done in nothing but good, by the way.
00:05:36.720 I mean, his whole file in the United States is suddenly elevated because, you know, up there in a heathen camp.
00:05:42.520 Well, they martyred him.
00:05:43.580 Martyr, absolutely.
00:05:44.940 And make your money while you do it.
00:05:46.360 It's as martyred him goes.
00:05:47.620 It's the kind you want.
00:05:48.440 But it is, unfortunately, as Corey says, it sets a terrible picture of Canada.