Western Standard - October 29, 2025


You Can’t Say That in Canada Anymore — Unless You’re Ben Bankas

Comedian Ben Bankas gets cancelled by the ‘Gay Eagle’ Federalists trigger Alberta independence referendum？

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

186.05

Word count

746

Sentence count

76

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Comedian and stand-up comic R. Kelly joins Jemele to discuss immigration, racism, and why he thinks people are racist because of their skin color. Plus, he gives us his thoughts on the Air Canada employee who speaks another language.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
00:00:00.000 You first came to my attention during COVID.
00:00:02.880 You know, you're fairly early on kind of calling out a lot of the absurdity of things.
00:00:07.100 You know, your routine now is, you know, pretty heavy on immigration and cultural issues.
00:00:14.820 You know, routines change over time.
00:00:16.620 You said you've been doing this for 14 years.
00:00:18.520 You know, you can't be doing the same routine for 14 years.
00:00:21.560 Some people do.
00:00:22.860 Well, okay.
00:00:23.780 You can't do it and be successful.
00:00:25.340 Yeah, no.
00:00:26.160 That's true.
00:00:27.120 You know, everyone's got kind of the themes to kind of come back to.
00:00:29.460 You can do it and be unsuccessful for sure.
00:00:31.760 Yeah.
00:00:32.220 It's easy.
00:00:33.640 You know, so I wouldn't say why, you know, of course it has changed.
00:00:37.780 If I'm going to talk about maybe, you know, why it's changed and you're able to lean so heavily into such a,
00:00:42.080 well, it wasn't until very recently such a taboo topic, especially in Canada.
00:00:45.760 Like the immigration debate wasn't, we didn't really have one until like two, three years ago.
00:00:51.000 Like it was a pretty broad consensus.
00:00:52.900 The only people who were really angry about it were kind of relegated to the cranky margins.
00:00:56.360 Because now it's like, you know, I was in the club Saturday and, you know, people.
00:01:04.440 What are you going to say?
00:01:05.560 Say it.
00:01:07.280 I mean, you called everyone a racist that they cheered because it was funny.
00:01:11.360 People are, you know, people are kind of just so like, I don't know, something has changed.
00:01:16.680 There's been a vibe shift.
00:01:17.780 But, you know, the immigration debate has been a thing in Europe for a long time.
00:01:21.720 It's been a thing in the United States for a long time.
00:01:23.420 It has not been a thing in Canada until extremely recently. 0.98
00:01:29.860 And you were saying shit that a white guy could not say on stage two years ago and not get canceled even from a pretty open place or at least not be successful doing it. 0.94
00:01:39.440 Like, what's changed? 0.99
00:01:41.120 I mean, I was saying similar stuff three years ago.
00:01:45.140 I just, you know, first of all, I mean, I'm not racist.
00:01:50.580 Like, I don't.
00:01:51.800 Where's the camera?
00:01:53.500 I am not racist.
00:01:56.000 But I am.
00:02:00.100 I am.
00:02:01.360 I'm something.
00:02:02.460 I don't know what it is.
00:02:03.580 But it's maybe I'm culturist.
00:02:06.440 I think I'm culturist.
00:02:07.680 I don't know when people are like, you know, like people, I don't I don't really care what you're like.
00:02:14.340 I don't see skin color and immediately judge someone.
00:02:16.680 But I do see an outfit and immediately judge someone.
00:02:21.120 Just you know what I'm saying?
00:02:22.300 Like, you can be any skin color.
00:02:23.780 If you're wearing your outfit.
00:02:25.700 I'm pretty I'm not worried.
00:02:27.420 I do it at Oktoberfest.
00:02:28.960 Like, I mean, maybe you go.
00:02:30.020 You see like a white guy wearing later hosen.
00:02:33.000 You could judge him and say he's drunk like that.
00:02:35.680 And that's a fair judge.
00:02:36.780 It's just I judge people on the outfits and and, you know, also, if you're trying to speak English and if I if I pass like an immigrant family and I can hear them talking to their kids in English, even if it sounds not perfect, that kind of like fills me with pride of like they're trying.
00:02:55.780 They're trying and and I and that's great.
00:02:58.540 I don't I would you know, it's like when a fat guy goes to the gym, you know, you're like, look, he's he's working on it.
00:03:05.420 But it's it's when it's when it just becomes like certain things.
00:03:11.100 And I don't know.
00:03:11.560 Tell me if I'm wrong and maybe I'm a bad person for this, but like checking into Air Canada and the people working there start talking to each other behind the desk in another language.
00:03:20.640 I don't understand.
00:03:21.500 But it's Air Canada.
00:03:22.180 If it was Air India and they were speaking another that language, I don't know what language they speak.
00:03:27.000 They have like French French.
00:03:28.580 No, they were speaking.
00:03:32.980 I asked them, I go, are you what language are you speaking?
00:03:35.500 And they go Punjab or Punjabi.
00:03:37.940 And I was like, I didn't say anything, but I just in my head, I'm like, why you speak English?
00:03:44.380 Both of you speak English.
00:03:45.520 What's what are you you're hiding something from me?
00:03:48.160 The customer.
00:03:49.380 I don't know.
00:03:50.520 Is that racist?
00:03:52.320 Somebody answer this question.
00:03:54.640 I don't even know what you asked me, but I don't have a tangent there.
00:03:58.580 Thank you.