What’s Up in Canada, Eh?

Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I‘m sure all readers of the Libertarian Enterprise are at least somewhat familiar with last winter’s fifty mile-long cross-country trucker convoy and “occupation” of central Ottawa over Covid restrictions, so let’s start with the fallout of that. You probably all remember that, after calling them a lot of names and declaring their views were “not acceptable” to him, he ended the occupation by invoking the Emergencies Act to engage in a large number of constitutional violations to clear them out. Not to mention arrest some, have mounted cops ride over little old ladies in their wheelchairs, try to steal the money that had been donated to them through crowd-funding organizations (I laughed when the US-based organizations told him to fuck off…), and even seize the bank accounts of people who had donated.

There has been vigorous debate in Parliament over this, with him and his ministers repeatedly claiming that the Ottawa police, in particular, were overwhelmed with the “violence” that was occurring (all those bouncy castles, you know – really threatening to the public) and had requested it so they could get control of these horrible rioters. Now it has come out that NO police organization requested the use of the Act and he was lying. He doesn’t care and is just continuing on as though the Conservative opposition made this all up. Neither he nor his ministers will forthrightly answer questions about it, even when pressed in Question Period.

This is just the most widely-known example of the growing totalitarianism that Justin the Groper and his liberal cronies are imposing on Canada.

We should have seen (and some of us did) see this coming during the 2015 election, when he, as the newly-anointed Leader of the Liberal Party, defeated the semi-passable Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper. That was the election where, during a campaign appearance in Ontario, he expressed his admiration for the “basic dictatorship” of the Chinese Communist Party government – because it allowed them to really “get things done”. He revealed himself for what he truly was and the “mainstream” media, acting the same way they constantly had for his father, didn’t really bother mentioning it.

Some words about Canada’s media

You have observed how your “lamestream” media (WaPo, CNN, NYT, etc.) all push the same agenda as the Democratic Party and won’t even cover anything that reflects badly on them. They, at least, are paying a heavy financial price for it as their ratings, subscriber numbers, etc., plummet into the basement. In Canada, that same wing of the media (Toronto Star, Montreal Gazette, Edmonton Journal, Maclean’s Magazine, non-CBC broadcasters, etc) with a few notable exceptions – Toronto and Calgary Suns, National Post, Financial Times, which at least gave tolerable coverage to conservative viewpoints and activities – do not face any financial consequences for treating their readers and the general public that way. That is because almost as soon as Justin got power they pressed for, and have received hundred of millions of dollars of Canadian tax money because they’re “so important” to the Canadian economy and employment levels.

Now, I haven’t mentioned the CBC – Canada’s equivalent of the BBC – which I’m also sure you’ve heard of, not because it doesn’t leech off taxpayers, but because it’s in a whole other dimension from all the others combined. In 2021 it received C$1.4 BILLION, and that’s just the base. In January they’re already topping it up with an extra C$150,000,000. CBC statistics, on the other hand, are even worse than CNN’s. It has 27 stations coast to coast to coast (as we apparently say here) and their total country audience for the supper hour newscast was 329,000 people last year (in a country of 36 million). By contrast, just 1 CTV station, in Toronto alone – population 2.7 million – gets 1.4 million viewers. (These numbers are from CBC’s most recent annual report, so who knows if they’ve inflated their viewership…)

So you can see that our lamestream media is totally owned by the federal Liberal party – sorry, I mean federal government – in a way that yours can only drool over. However, like the US, Canada has developed a robust and growing independent media to which more and more people are paying more and more attention. The oldest entry in this field is Rebel Media, founded in 2015 by former Sun News Network broadcaster Ezra Levant. To give you an idea of how the establishment views it, this is how it is described by Wikipedia: “…a Canadian far-right political and social commentary media website…” (I’m sure they’re “quoting” themselves here but just won’t admit it) “It has been described as a ‘global platform’ for the anti-Muslim ideology known as counter-jihad.” Funny how I’ve never heard that last term anywhere else but Wiki… Anyway, they have correspondents in BC, Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec, covering both provincial and federal politics, in the US, the UK, and even in Australia (he’s been very busy covering the extremely brutal pandemic activities by their State governments) and Hong Kong. Mr. Levant has personally spent considerable time in the UK covering that government’s cracking down on free speech of anyone who disagrees with them. They have given extensive coverage to both federal and provincial pandemic outrages. They have been barred from the Press Gallery in Ottawa, and for a while in Edmonton, and they have been threatened and persecuted by federal liberal government’s and the former Alberta NDP government’s election regulatory bodies for daring to express editorial opinions that did not favour the party in power. They also engage in ongoing crowd-funding activities to help support victims of all levels of government’s constitutional excesses.

To take a look for yourself, go to https://www.rebelnews.com. You can also enter Rebel News or Rebel Media into YouTube to see some of their videos, as well as links to other web media they’re on, and to many of their crowd-funding sites.