Trudeau vs. Canada | Rex Murphy | EP 267

The people of the world who've experienced Eastern Europeans who had to live under the, uh, the dark umbrella of Communism, those who have escaped tyrannical regimes—that lady you had on from South Korea—when they come over here now and they see what we're doing with our freedoms, which is essentially turning them upside down and mocking them and under the name of political correctness or wokism, insisting, pushing, propagandizing and evangelizing these toxically stupid ideas, and perverting the education system, in their Putin and the warriors of the world, as Edward calls them, they're laughing their heads off because they know this is a form of almost collective dementia.

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Hello everyone, I'm here today with Mr. Rex Murphy, which is always a pleasure. Rex is a Canadian commentator and author, primarily on Canadian political and social matters. He was the regular host of CBC Radio 1's Cross Country Checkup, a nationwide call-in show for 21 years before stepping down in September of 2015. He is perhaps Canada's best recognized and most admired and indeed most loved journalist. Pleasure to see you, Rex. I'm glad we have a chance to talk again.

I think we should go over that bio part where you mentioned most loved.

I think there are three dogs and two cats.

Yeah, well, it's hard to believe if you're loved, but it's definitely the case.

So I wanted to talk to you today about the Trudeau government and just exactly what's going on. I thought I might give you a bit of background about exactly why I thought we should talk again. So I've been traveling through the U.S. and Europe for the last three months—40 cities in the U.S. and then 14 cities in Europe—and I've noticed I've talked with a lot of people about their attitude towards Canada and how that's changed as a consequence of Trudeau.

In the U.S., what I noticed in particular was that people, whether they were Democrats or Republicans, were very unhappy with Trudeau's treatment of the trucker convoy, and also shocked, I would say, that he blamed it on the Americans, especially on the conservatives, and also appalled that he froze bank accounts. That was not a wise move.

Then, in Europe, I would say Canada's international reputation has taken a vicious hit. People are shocked, I would say again, at what happened around the trucker convoy, specifically the freezing of the bank accounts, but also there's a fair bit of buzz about the new Bill C-11 and the internet censorship. I don't think Canadians really are aware of how vicious a hit the reputation of our country has taken under our current Prime Minister.

And so I thought I would talk to you about the peculiar times that we seem to find ourselves in in Canada. My sense is that we get a scandal every week and have for about six months that under normal circumstances would be sufficient to bring down a government.

Yeah, well, I'll pick you up on a couple of things before I go to the actual scandal point. In reference to Canada’s standing, either in the U.S. or in Europe, even within the last three days with the decision Roe versus Wade, Mr. Trudeau was in Rwanda, which is not near Quebec, when he commented on the operations of the Supreme Judiciary of the United States, and probably the most electric issue in American politics.

And here's what he had to say. I actually brought the paper with me. I'm only quoting a small bit of it. Here he is commenting on it. This is very important: he's commenting on the Supreme Court, one third of the constitutional government of the United States, an equal party to Congress and the executive. This is the Prime Minister in a separate country, and here's his first response to the decision.

The news coming out of the United States is horrific. I pause there. He's not—never mind the particular issue—he's saying that the operation, judgment, determination, and rumination of a court, of the judiciary of the United States, the constitutional balance part, he's commenting on the operation of an essential element of government and especially on the judges, and he's calling it horrific.

Number two, he goes on. Now he’s going to what he would call substance. My heart goes out to the millions of American women who are now set to lose their legal right to an abortion. The last phrase is patently false, but the biggest thing there is who was he to play the middle Clinton empathizer to the constituents of another nation?

Now, if you were telling me he's earned a bad reputation in the United States because of blaming American right-wing authorities for bringing money into the convoy, which was proven false—the majority and by far of the money that went into the convoy came from ordinary donors in Canada—but every time Trudeau has a problem in Canada, he looks to the right wing of the United States as his convenient villain.

But what do you think he's going to do now when he—when the people in the United States and in the government—Democrats should be pissed with this as well? He's saying that the United States Supreme Court is an agency of horrific decisions and implying that they're deliberately bringing great pain to American women and stirring up anger.

I'll top that off by pointing out one other thing. You've already had a night of rage. You've had people storming the private houses of the U.S. Supreme Court. You've had an institution burnt down. You've had the legislature, I think it was in Arizona, invaded so that the police said, well, you know if it were a reverse situation, words of encouragement from an outside Prime Minister saying that the decision was horrific and that it's going to cause anger on an issue this hot, that was grotesquely irresponsible.

And if we're going to blame people's actions on public words—which is a liberal thing to do—then part of the mayhem that we were going to see in the United States over this decision comes from encouragement from our dilettante Prime Minister here in Canada.

Well, I also don't understand it strategically in some real sense because it looks self-evident that the Democrats are going to face a catastrophic electoral defeat in the fall. And that means that the Trudeau government, assuming it lasts the next two or three years—that it's hypothetically likely to last—is going to be dealing with a much more conservative ally on the southern front.

And the steps taken to alienate all those people, especially after he also blamed the MAGA-type Republicans for funding the trucker convoy to destabilize Canadian democracy, just doesn’t seem like the most diplomatic or wise thing to do when you're dealing with people who are, well, crucial to us on the trading front, let's say, and not to say anything of defense.

Well, one thing you don’t look for in the pronouncements of Mr. Trudeau is wisdom. That's a ridiculous effort to begin with, and it will give you no results whatsoever. What you should look for and which is given evidence of over the last seven years is that what he might lack in intellectual sweep, he compensates by a certain instinct of cunning.

And the reason for slamming Roe versus Wade is that he thinks he's found yet another issue, even though it's in another country and even though the judicial determinations of the U.S. Supreme Court have no valence or relevance to Canadians. Nonetheless, it's the kind of, as yeah, he calls it, it's kind of raw meat, to use an expression he likes a lot when he applies it to concerns, kind of raw meat you throw out.

I found it even more annoying that here you are in Rwanda on your way to a castle in Bavaria, being hit by this RCMP scandal, and you got to jump out of your chair three minutes after the Supreme Court decision is announced to let the world know you think their deliberation was horrific to stir up the already angry hard leftists in the United States and detract from any attention being paid to issues in Canada, like inflation, gasoline prices, food prices, the closing of parliament. But I won't go on with those until we get to them.

Let's start with the issue of the strange political times that we seem to be in in Canada and perhaps touch on the collusion of the NDP and the media in producing that. Because my sense is, as I mentioned before, that over the span of my life, one of the great advantages of a parliamentary system is that when a government, especially one that doesn't have a strong majority, becomes continually scandal-ridden, that the precedent is for Parliament to dissolve and for an election to take place.

Now, I know we just had an election that was completely unnecessary, but we have a situation in Canada where the Liberals have moved radically to the left; they've supplanted the NDP, who are supporting them constantly in what is essentially a coalition government. And we have the horrible fascistic spectacle of the Canadian government radically subsidizing the legacy media in Canada in general and the CBC specifically to the tune of $1.2 billion a year to produce no audience and a set of facts that are entirely convenient to the Trudeau government.

And so we have this perfect storm, especially if you add to that the fact that Trudeau has essentially gutted Parliament for two years, partly as a consequence in principle of the COVID scandal, but they just announced this week or last week that virtual Parliament is going to continue for another year.

What is this? Every month, every week, there's something else the Trudeau government does that I find so preposterous and unbelievable that it makes me think that there's something wrong with the way that I'm looking at the news. What the hell's going on with the virtual Parliament?

Well, I’ll take the virtual problem first, but I am going to circle back to another thing that you—several of the things you’ve already mentioned. I thought for what it is worth, and insofar as I can think, I thought that even when the pandemic was fresh and we didn't have a clear understanding of its true risks or its true range, or whether the vaccines or other emoluments were going to be available, I thought that even then when at least the grocery store clerks were still on the job and at that time, by the way, so were the much-praised truckers, Mr. Trudeau himself came out to say we must thank them for bringing our food and our medicines in the beginning of this pandemic.

I thought even then that the idea that the people who had been elected to the highest office that this Federal this country can offer, the House of Commons, in a time of emergency, that's when they do meet. And even if there was some element of risk involved, that's when they do meet.

Now that was at the beginning. Now you drop down two years and the vacillating regime of COVID— it went up, it went down, they changed this, they changed that. Wear a mask, don't wear a mask. These are good; take one vaccine, take two vaccines, take two more booster shots, stay six feet apart; don’t pick.

Yep. After two whole years when they finally concede that their own mismanagement can't continue forever, the idea that as he closes down Parliament on June the 22nd of 2022—in not collusion, but in collusion, that Mr. Singh announces in advance that there’s already got it eviscerated, disemboweled Parliament of the last two years, is now going to have another full year with people sitting in their washrooms in some cases going on Zoom.

There's a side point to this that’s important to make: Just because you have the MPs talking to each other by some teleconference, that's not Parliament. The reason that Parliament stands, and the reasons that Parliament always were, they are places of assembly. The Newfoundland House, for example, actually wears the etymological force; it is the House of Assembly. And why do you talk of assembly? Canada is vast; its geography is almost its defeat. And therefore, because of its vastness, the various regions, personalities, and cultures of those regions are vastly dissonant, different, to use the Trudeau term diverse.

It's important for MPs from all over the country to be in one place for a continuous time to have interaction, response, and mutual communication, even if it's argument. They have to learn from each other the whole of the country. You don’t do that with a Zoom on your bookcase.

Well, one of the things I've been thinking about on the Putin front is that one of the consequences of the COVID lockdowns is that world leaders haven't had a chance to meet face-to-face, and now we substituted Zoom for that. And Zoom is a narrow channel. Now, I've been in Washington too, and increasingly the Congressmen in Washington don't move to Washington, and 40 percent of them sleep in their offices. They don't have apartment buildings, and so they haven't built the social communities in Washington that would enable the Democrats to talk to one another or the Democrats to talk to the Republicans across the aisle in the social interactions that you have if you generate a shared community.

And so this rush to substitute narrow channels of electronic communication merely out of convenience: we have absolutely no idea whatsoever that what that will do to the Parliament, and it could easily destroy it.

Well, I'll tell you what it already does to Parliament: Zoom Parliament is a ghost. It is the ghost of a dead Parliament. The notion, again, that the 300-plus MPs being forced by the nature of the country to be in Ottawa, to be in one huge building, to share the same chamber, to meet each other informally—that's how they informed themselves of the range and nature of the country.

Number two, as you just pointed out, the idea once you get there, you get this interaction. The fraught politics of the United States are partially because these people don’t simply meet. It’s very easy to form enemies on Twitter and Facebook and via Zoom, but if you sit down and have a meal—even with a person who wildly disagrees with you and you have to exchange the normal human courtesies—you suddenly modify this visceral response that you throw out so rudely on this ghost network of Twitter and Facebook.

Well, what you seem to see on the electronic communication front is that differences get highlighted and similarities vanish. And it is definitely the case that if you sit down with someone for a meal or if your kids are on the same baseball team, that you find out that you're really about 90 percent the same and 10 percent different.

And when the channels of communication are narrowed, that inverts and flips. And we also could add to that, Rex, the fact that, well, Parliament's a check on executive power, and we could use some checks on Trudeau's power. But when you and I were much younger, and maybe only about 20 years ago, the press was also an independent check, and now the press is in the pockets of the government.

And I called that fascist earlier, and I meant that. What we're seeing worldwide is a fascist enterprise, weirdly enough on the left side, that involves a collusion between media, technology, and government. And fascism, the root of the word fascism, means to bind together because central right—exactly. The central element of a fascist state is collusion of the elites, let’s say, and the eradication of any checks and balances.

That sort of thing is reminiscent, to me, of the desirability of that is reminiscent to me of Trudeau’s expressed admiration for the Chinese Communist Party and its efficiency in moving forward, let’s say, on the environmental front, something that he’s expressed explicit admiration for. And so, and I would also say that's hurting Canada's international reputation in ways that Canadians just don't seem to realize, including among moderate liberal types.

Well, let's go first with the media and the fact that the media—the main media in this country, legacy Kalama—you will have accepted the devil's handshake. It simply cannot be otherwise said that the press, the media, the instruments of inquiry, skepticism, and test can be directly subsidized by the one major institution—the whole government—which in many ways they're charged by their very nature to investigate, to be skeptical about, to inquire, to collide with, to contest.

And the idea that in this soft environment, you accept huge sums of money and, by the way, the traffic between the news media and the political media—how many journalists end up as aides to the ministers? Well, Mr. Trudeau's chief aide, Ben Chin, began on the Toronto media station. The crossover between journalism and politics—that's one thing.

Now, by the way, in addition to the money—that's a really big thing, and it should be a shock to any journalist. Here’s another thing that gives you an even deeper and, I think in certain ways, a more worrisome collusion, and that is that the mindset of the majority—and I'm not one of these conspiracy people about the press, but I know it enough from 25 or 26 years in it—that the mindset, the mentality, the tendency, the major media offices of parliamentary energy are already in tune with the agenda of the government.

They are constantly either indirectly, subtly, or not so subtly actually supporting the government and making themselves the opposition to the opposition. It is really quite remarkable. With the RCMP scandals, with the Emergency Act, with truckers, with inflation, with oil, that Pierre Poilievre, who was still an outsider looking in, gets a lot of hits. He’s going to tear a property apart.

Whereas this good giant media, it’s because they share the agenda, they share the social identities, they certainly share the diversity thing and the obsession with racialist politics and, of course, the absorption entirely on the idea of sexual agenda, the Improv, in other words, all of the social justice issues—the press and the Parliament are in the same place.

So yeah, being paid for his fascism. And finally, I truly, with the China, I think that’s very good. When he was not yet leader and when he felt he could relax so easily and talk about these things—that's what we call the Kinsey gaffe. You say the thing you really mean. And in his case, you know, if we were China, I could turn the environment around on a dime.

The real thing there is not so much the dictatorship of China; it shows that he has a fondness for the ability to merely operate by fiat. And if you study the last five and six years, and in particular the period from COVID on, COVID was a continuous fiat that completely gutted the civil rights, the Charter of Rights.

He has people fired; he has people—and then when the convoy comes, he calls them racist, homophobes, misogynists, a fringe minority that should not—note this word—that should not be tolerated. His empathy for China basically constitutes one element of the personality. He does, does not like opposition. He guts Parliament to make sure that there isn’t any and he makes a deal—he makes the deal with his co-signer, Mr. Singh, so that there will never be a confidence motion.

And if he wants to have Parliament Zoom for another year, Mr. Singh is there with the ready salute and the genuine affliction to give it to him.

Yeah, well, the certainty of compulsion, let's say, that drives Trudeau forward seems to be rooted in his false moral sense that because he's concerned, like the other members of the Davos, World Economic Forum, etc., with the long-term health of the planet—whatever that means—that nothing that gets in his way could possibly be regarded as ethical or moral.

And so, and the press, who’s now more than ever made up of political globalist utopian wannabes, do everything they possibly can to collude and to move that agenda forward. And then we could add to that, Rex, I went through this new Bill C-11 because I’m one of the people whom it will hypothetically affect, although I have a number of maneuvers up my sleeve, so to speak, to bypass that entirely.

And I know Canadians don’t understand this, but let’s say that the new media, which is the internet itself, was capable of producing some of the opposition to the globalists and Trudeau that the legacy media have abandoned. I’m thinking of people like, say, Russell Brand, who’s on the left and not just mentioned, you know, any of the conservative commentators in the United States.

But now what the Canadian—what the Bill C-11 has done is basically—and this is unbelievable, I can't believe I read it correctly—they’ve basically defined all internet content of any sort as subject to the same CRTC—Canadian Radio and Television—what is it? Corporation. I don't remember the last word; that doesn’t really matter. No, it doesn’t matter.

They've defined them as broadcasters that are equivalent, let’s say, to CBC or CTV. Now, the reason that those broadcasters are different was because the government had to parse up the airwaves because the airwaves were actually a scarce resource. Now, and the internet is not a scarce resource.

And now, as far as I can tell, reading Bill C-11, which is an unbelievably vague document, if an internet service provider—a private one, so a small business person like me, let’s say—doesn't broadcast in French and English and in Indigenous languages and to any diverse range of people with disabilities and highlight Canadian content, then the government can do what it needs to do to deprioritize their distribution.

And they’ll do that by putting pressure on the search engine providers like YouTube and Google or just stopping them altogether. And I read this bill, and all of it, again, Rex, too—the bill is couched in all this diversity, inclusivity, and equity terminology, which it's the same solution to every problem.

And so not only do we have this massive press collusion with the government that's absolutely unconscionable in a western democracy, but we also have now the government clamping down more viciously than in any other developed country on the freedom for Canadians to get access to all of the information on the internet—not just that produced by Canadians.

I’m inclined to believe that this idea that these intellectuals—it's mainly a shallow cabinet, I don’t care how condescending that sounds—what it mainly is that they somehow or other have been given Vatican-like infallibility to judge what is correct and what is not correct to make decisions that will hold back. By the way, the whole idea of disinformation and misinformation coming out of the mouths of this government—I mean, they are the greatest purveyor of confusion and evasion in the law.

The idea that they then are going to be the kind of grandmas or Mrs. Grundy, as it used to be called in the 19th century, and protect the tender sensibilities of minds that are better than their own. Yeah, I’m tired of people, and I'm sure you are too, because it's getting so clichéd to bring up George Orwell— but because he put the stamp on it and gave the template, the idea that a central authority runs thought and speech and makes judgments on what is and what is not, and under the banner of diversity, inclusion, and equity, which is really a hidden ideology pumped up my vast self-righteousness and granting pseudo-infallibility to those who are sensitive.

We know this is not the case. Mr. Trudeau got rid of his only Aboriginal female Minister. There’s equity; there’s diversity. They confuse this—a big point too—they confuse either Advos, which you referenced, or any other high meeting with saying that your virtues is the same thing as being it.

And there's a hidden—not a hidden—there's a blatant arrogance attached to any government that thinks that in the modern communication system that it should have any business outside of the exact things that are defined by law as incitement and real rabid hate. They will call hate something they simply don’t like.

It’s not an easy emotion to define. C-11, as Michael Geist—I know you follow him—Michael Geist is the professor of communication who most articulately and most deeply is warning over and over to give this bunch that can’t issue a passport—that have a pay system for their own civil servants that’s three or four years malfunctioning—that can’t let passengers walk out of piers in the airport within less than 24 hours, should suddenly have the government on the thoughts and reactions and speeches and positions and films and talks like this, like yours.

It’s absurd, but it’s more than that. This is truly the right thing. I mean, what is this gulping for more power than you need? Well, it’s the imposition of an ideology. And go back to your China point: here’s the reason that he may really admire China, because China—it happens to be communism in that case—China is fired, only as was Russia, by an ideology; by a set of narrow ideas from which no deviation, no criticism under penalty of exile or death is allowed—not as hard over here, but die is an ideology.

An ideology makes those claims and fills those who hold it with a completely and completely unacceptable level of moral certitude. Not certainty, Bill C-11 is a disaster. And one more quick point: it is shameful, it is shameful to the essence that the main Canadian press are not as one voice and a one intense voice saying, we’re not having this.

We are simply not having this. You are not going to rule on what is information and not information. You are not going to rule on the presence of citizens on the new channels of communication. Seeing you’ve already fouled the official or legacy means to some serious degree, we’re certainly not going to allow you to put a pillow over the mouth of the only possible new exchanges that we have. It's a terrible idea.

An idea apart from arrogance, righteousness, and the belief in his own infallibility, I can’t see the wise—but why aren’t the MPs, even in his own party, saying, Justin, you’re dreaming, you’re out of touch, we don't want to go there?

We're not following you on this. Where's the courage in any of these caucuses? They hand wave about diversity, inclusivity, equity, the environment, and then in Bill C-11, they add the protection of the Canadian culture to that, which sounds something taken out of, like, 1979 or 1980. It’s such an outdated idea.

And one of the other terrifying things about Bill C-11 is that we won’t, in Canada, if this is actually enforced, with the collusion, let’s say, of Google and YouTube and so forth and the forced collusion, in some sense, because those companies are not going to break the law, Canadians won’t even know what information is being hidden from them because the laws will take the form of invisible algorithms that merely deprioritize at the listing of content that doesn’t meet the impossible criteria that have been laid down.

And Bill C-11 is basically written in a way that allows the government to interfere with the promulgation of any information that they deem unacceptable for any reason because there are so many restrictions on what you are allowed to do now that there’s no possible way that any member of the alternative media can meet the criteria. It’s just not possible.

And it won't just be YouTube broadcasters and podcasters. It's going to be people who provide all sorts of services online because the bill is written in such a vast manner that the provision of any services on the internet—and we're talking about the internet here, right, which is something people really depend on—that'll all fall under the invisible auspices of a tiny coterie of ideologically adult bureaucrats and algorithms.

There are so many points to make in this; as long as this is 2022, I haven't got the year exactly right, but 1637, 1640, or somewhere near that—it was when Milton wrote "Areopagitica" which is when Parliament of Great Britain was deciding that, you know, squirrels pamphlets, usually of a religious orientation, had to be prohibited, had to be censored.

And of all the great speeches about free expression, the value of books, the value of publication, of all the defenses of real free speech and real free thought, the "Areopagitica" is classic. And as Milton says, you know, whoever knew truth to be defeated in an open contest?

Now, that's 1637. This is 2022. And how it can come to pass that a government with military power, with the ability to imprison—we're making fun of or scared by the big tech companies—Google slanting its search machine—Twitter deciding who should be banned and who should not be banned, who should be suspended and who should not be suspended. We didn’t like it when the private enterprise operators did it. They make deals with China. How does Google and Facebook and Twitter work in those?

We said, “My Lord, a couple of guys from the tech valley ruling which thoughts can get on platforms and which cannot.” We thought that was pretty all right. It still is pretty bad. But now you have, as Michael Geist said, this is an alarming thing because Geist is a very calm individual. He’s a solid intellectual and on this subject in particular, he knows what he’s saying.

We have the only legislation in this arena that parallels—get ready for it—North Korea. You part all this out. And by the way, there’s another reason why that’s a new first for Canada.

Yeah, but must tie this together—why do you think he thought it was very useful to have a Zoom Parliament for another year? Because the gathering together of all the people who might wake up to this and who might, because of personal interactions across the lines, might see that this is not a step too far, this is a gigantic leap between mountain peaks too far.

No, he wants Parliament closed down—or, as I said, emasculated so that he can bring in in his life—this is his last term, I’ll make that a declarative statement—whatever big moves he wishes to make.

But again, in this particular case, we've had it. As I said, we go back to further Milton: even you don’t let power determine information, thought, and speech. I mean, if Donald Trump were president and decided to regulate the internet, nine tenths of the world would fly up. Justin can go on about how horrific the justice system of the Supreme Court is while up here he plays a game halfway between Animal Farm and 1984.

By the way, he's making, as you pointed out, there are so many scandals that one gulps and swallows the other—they he has a scandal management that’s better than any other,—have a fresh scandal and then we'll kill the previous one. It's hard to follow him.

Yeah, well, exactly. Well, you asked a little earlier what scandal we should perhaps focus on most intently. And it is very difficult to do that when they’re coming at you at a mile a minute, when you have like 15 things that have been done in the last six months that should have caused the collapse of the government.

But I would say the worst thing that Trudeau did is a hybrid between invoking and then rescinding the Emergencies Act for no reason whatsoever. Then he relied on the information provided to him deceitfully by CBC, who retracted it. And then, worst of all, freezing the bank accounts and interfering with the Bitcoin exchanges.

Because Trudeau established a precedent now that should terrify Canadians of any political engagement whatsoever, which is that if you happen to be peripherally involved with a demonstration, no matter how legal the demonstration is at the moment, and you donate money—that first of all you’ll be tracked, and that's bad enough—like that's terrifying enough—but not only tracked, but that all your ability to interact with the entire economic system, because it's not just freezing your bank accounts, right? It’s freezing your mortgage; it’s freezing your Visa; it’s making it impossible for you to withdraw any cash; it’s putting your family at risk.

To compare this to what the Chinese are doing with the social credit system is no leap, and that's a terrible conspiratorial thing to say, but it also reflects a deep underlying reality. I can’t tell you how many people have expressed shock and dismay to me throughout the United States and through Europe about the fact that Trudeau well implemented the Emergencies Act and suspended civil liberties and then froze the bank accounts, especially because Canada has had a great reputation on the financial front for 150 years.

The integrity of our financial system, including our banks, has been one thing that Canada really got right. And now, what would you think if you were a foreign investor or anyone seriously considering doing business with Canada when you know now that if you're a Republican, ah, and heaven forbid a Trump supporter, but a Republican even, that your views are now deemed so extreme that it’s neat and just to declare them an emergency and to steal all your money with no trial, with no due process of law, completely arbitrarily and behind the scenes.

No Scotiabank apologized about two weeks ago. I don't know if any of the other big banks—they said they did it under duress. Well, that's because they're bloody cowards, and they're foolish as well, because they've taken a catastrophic hit to their international reputation.

Well, let’s start at the again go back to where you began yourself: the imposition of revocation before ratification of the Emergencies Act that had about seven to eight days of life. We have not had yet—we didn’t have it then, that’s for sure—we have not had yet the list of circumstances that justified—that’s a really big word that justified the action that justified the imposition of the equivalent of the War Measures Act.

Because that’s what it was: it was to completely suspend the Charter of Rights. On a philosophic basis alone, he basically nullified the entire civil liberties of the entire population of this entire country because some trucks were parked on an Ottawa street. That's only the first part. You mentioned the CBC reports that have been dismissed, and that he relied on them.

I’m not sure that's entirely the case. He may have had some of his own spin masters pass the stories on the CBC in the first place. I have no idea if that was true or not, but we had other instances where you had an arson attempt in a building in Ottawa, which was dramatically enhanced by news coverage, and Mendicino or whatever his name is said they were going to burn down buildings and lock the doors if people can’t get out.

We need an Emergencies Act. You had all sorts of fabricated faults or totally misleading assertions during a pseudo-crisis. And then you had the capstone that these people who drove 2500 miles in February across the northern landscape to protest a given government issue actually were there and had to be paid attention to because they wanted to overthrow the Canadian government.

That statement is so extreme that it is beyond laughable. And so when he calls it back before the Senate gets a chance to ratify it, the legislation says you must have an inquiry when you call out the highest, the most lethal, the thermonuclear legislation of any government. He can’t avoid having a committee set up, and I think it was last week or 10 days ago that Christia Freeland, who was the Deputy Prime Minister, because Jagmeet Singh is the official Deputy, he’s finally before a parliamentary committee.

And when they asked her questions either about the RCMP or about this or about the scorn and righteousness and smugness of response, the idea that the greatest invasion of civil liberties has been passed with some mellow a response—and that gives you that gives them the appetite. Then if I could call up the Emergencies Act and call a group of savvy, common-sense citizens fringe minority racists, if I can set one part of the community against the other and that division—there’s where the appetite comes from.

Bill C-11 got away with the Emergencies Act. Well, obviously I can bring in legislation that is even more toxic. Oh yes, I can interfere with RCMP investigations because it seems when I went to the Agricon and violated all the ethics provision, the RCMP then said, well that might be criminal, but we're not considering criminal charges. Jagmeet Singh is at the center of a lot of this, and that’s the point that eventually we will get to, I’m sure, but the Emergencies Act, I think, because it’s not justified, because it was for political convenience, because he extemporized a narrative that these were villains and Americans and were being funded by dark right-wing forces from outside the country, that’s the worst because it confounds so many issues together.

It’s also a stunning accusation, yeah? It is levied against 50 percent of the population of our greatest ally to the South. People in principle that he has to work with, certainly is going to have to work with when the fall comes, and so that’s just, well, that’s just another example of his stunning lack of wisdom and his carelessness with his actions.

So let's talk a little bit about a bit more about the interference with the RCMP. I’d like you to make some comments about that, if you would.

Well, that again, people who know Canadian politics—and I want to apologize, but I’ll simply say I regret that it’s not so fascinating that the people who listen— the range of viewers that you have—would—may not be as intimate with it as we would. We should—I don’t know about wishing on them—but nonetheless, well, it’s a good example of fascist collusion, though I would say, and well, that’s a threat to everyone in the West.

Yeah, but it also has a great precedent, the biggest scandal in terms of principle, in terms of something fundamental, something that reaches to the rule of law came a couple of years back when he had an attorney general—I mentioned her already, the Indigenous lady from BC, are getting your name fooled up in my head for just a second.

She took a stand that SNC-Lavalin should not get special provisions, and she was rebel. She was the attorney general. And yet people from his PMO office, himself, the highest civil service chapter ministers, kept pressing, kept pressing her to change her mind.

She warned the Prime Minister, if you are attempting to influence an attorney general who is a singular position in any cabinet, if you are attempting to—this is terrible. So for eight or nine months, she resisted. She said no. The rule of law can’t be politically interfered with.

Now, this was a Prime Minister on his office and aides and ministers attempting to bend the operation of justice in Canada. And eventually, Mr. Raybould gets fired or basically leaves herself and another fine female cabinet minister went with her. But after a bit of a flutter, even though he denied any influence, he said in the Globe & Mail, the story is false; it was proven to be true.

Jump ahead two years, and now you find out that after the worst bascally of that kind in Canada—the murder of 22 people in Nova Scotia—that the Prime Minister’s office and his political aides are pressuring or asking or telling the head of the RCMP, Brenda Lucki, to get information from the investigators in Halifax because they were bringing in gun control legislation next week.

In other words, they wanted to absorb some of the emotional context and the high sensitivity of a singular tragedy so they could advance a political agenda and didn’t mind pushing. And she didn’t mind agreeing to put pressure on a Halifax investigation.

Now you hear back that Mr. LeBlanc and the relevant cabinet ministers, oh no, Mr. Trudeau had to really find the thing; we put no undue influence on the RCMP. The only one word in that sentence you have to pay attention to—it’s undue.

Exactly. Yeah, and so Rex, this is all a pattern as far as I’m concerned. I’m speaking as a clinician here, although I hesitate to do so, but I’ve been watching Trudeau for a long time. I found it appalling. I found what he was doing appalling right from the beginning because Trudeau was enticed into running for leadership as a consequence of what I would describe as a successful appeal to his overweening narcissism.

He had none of the education or ability or experience necessary to do something as complex as lead a modern country, and it was obvious to all. And it should have been obvious to him that this single reason that he was picked by the utterly cynical Liberals who chose him was, first of all, his pleasant personal appearance, and perhaps not first and foremost, but first and foremost, his name—Trudeau, the dynastic name, the fact that he already had broad-scale marketing and sales appeal.

And that was enough for him to justify to himself becoming Prime Minister. And then, you know, maybe you don’t want to damn someone for that because just because he was pure Trudeau’s son doesn’t mean he doesn’t have ability. And so it would be possible that someone like that could take the humble approach and decide that, well, better him than some evil Conservative, let’s say, and that he could carefully learn to be competent and to do a good job.

But instead, he leapt into the fray immediately, appointing 50 percent of his cabinet as women even though they were only 25 percent of the MPs, and thereby perhaps fatally impairing the qualifications and competence of the cabinet, and then doubling down on his idiot ideology, D-I-E, let’s say—diversity, inclusivity, and equity plus a bit of environmentalism on the side and a hatred for the energy industry—and he’s been fiddling that fiddle ever since.

And this theme of narcissism, which I think is apt, permeates everything that he does—the admiration for China, the dismissiveness that he manifests when he’s ever asked questions, the overweening legislation like Bill C-11 that he passes without a second's consideration for the fact that maybe we could use some checks and balances in the governmental system on the off chance we might not be 100 percent right about all our ideological presuppositions—the fact that he basically ignores Parliament.

And now that he’s made it virtual—and then we could add to that is another one, Rex, which I think is very interesting: the fact that he denied unvaccinated Canadians—about six million of them—the right to travel, which is a big deal in a country like Canada and a big deal in other countries as well.

But not only did he do that, but then when every country in the world virtually had released people from the COVID mandates and relaxed the impositions they put on the rights, he did not release Canadians from that travel ban until months after there was every bit of evidence that it should have been done.

And all I can say about that was that that was sheer bloody narcissistic malevolence. There was zero excuse for that! And the mere fact that he didn’t rescind that policy months ago, that in itself should have been enough for the government to fall.

And if Jagmeet Singh had an ounce of spine or sense—and he has neither—he would not be supporting this government in the manner that he does, especially given the putative NDP, what would you say, affiliation for the common working man, which is a complete bloody bunch of rubbish. Those days are long gone. All the union guys are out of the NDP. We have an elite set of utopians whose presuppositions make the liberal idiocy look like, well, look almost like nothing in contrast, and the self-righteousness and moralizing that goes along with that.

And so, what, Rex? Why do you think Canadians have found themselves in this position, and why isn't there more broad-scale outrage, if not rioting in the streets, about what's happening at the federal government level?

Well, there are two or three things that I could say that I think are fairly relevant in this context. The first thing is that when he first came in, by the way—whether it’s narcissism or not—that being as it is a clinical as well as poetic term, I don't think there's much doubt of it if you're using it in just a conventional lay language—why you would install as the leader of the country.

Well, it came also because the Liberals have been so ill-advised when they picked up, for example, Mr. Dion, or the traveling political salesman, Mr. Ignatieff, who left his enemy within hours of losing and never even said goodbye. Sometimes the appetite for novelty triumphs over any prudence or consideration of forethought.

But having seen them for the first term and having seen the glorious appetite for display and for the gesture—whether it’s, you know, doing some yoga, standing on a bench, or making sure that you show up in the right mood at a certain event, or attending the Pride parade—there’s no single symbolic gestural action that he ever avoided. He signaled, he signaled, time into it, it is in the early days especially—it was a government of signals.

That he was also a semi-celebrity. Vogue magazine did a thing on him, and the Canadian press had a wonderful faith. I never understood how supine they could be so quickly. They talked about when we were having some dissatisfactions with the US that he was on a charm offensive, and that a charm offensive would disarm either Mr. Trump or whomever it was that he was dealing.

Now, you asked a deeper question. In the early days, yes, you could put it up. Why are Canadians not more resistant? Well, like two or three reasons; they’re quite solid, especially as these things have accelerated and intensified. Meaning the invasions of government into areas where it should not be long.

There was this two years of the regime that more than any other provincial and federal governments imposed—you had an economy knocked to bits. We do not have an inventory of the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of independent and small businesses that gasp for air, that waited for the next in-breath merely to see if they could make another day.

In the last two years, you had relatives unable to see their elder parents or elder relatives. You had social, economic, psychological, and medical obsessions and anxieties that went from the primary, from the intimate exchange of mother, father, daughter, son, to the broad scale.

And during that particular period, I think everyone was somewhat off balance. And once again, the news media were not doing their job. They were all online. We well must close everything down. And you could have an announcement in the beginning of the pandemic, as I’ve already referenced, that masks are bad—they actually— that came from time, and two months later that you must wear them.

And no one in the media wanted to collide those two contradictions and say, well, are you really as expert as you say? That’s the first reason. COVID took away a lot of the energies that might have been invested in the public sphere and paying attention to politics because so many other strains that are much more intimate and close were at play.

Secondly, and I think this is really, really telling, that in the present five and six months when this thing really has come to new levels, whatever was the deal that the NDP, which traditionally is really the oppositional—not the Conservatives; the NDP are the ones that really put the bite on the Liberals.

Remember the War Measures Act was the forerunner of the Emergencies Act. What was the name of the man who, even in a dire genuine crisis, you could make a case that they apprehended insurrection of the War Measures Act could just say–I said make a case—and it was popular especially in English Canada at that time.

Who stood up against it? Who took the flack? Who took the bad public relations? It was Tommy Douglas, the leader of the New Democratic Party, saying it went too far. Mr. Trudeau the elder should not have that power in a new world where you didn’t have a genuine crisis.

And when the War—when the Emergencies Act was invoked in my judgment for spite and Parkinson reasons, Jagmeet Singh had already guaranteed Justin Trudeau would have no parliamentary interference. I don’t know what to do; they talk about dental plans and a few things the NDP won, but I don’t know the internalities—what was the discussion? What went on between Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Singh that he would oblige that—a meaning Singh—for the next three years and preserve them from criticism?

This is the time! Well, it’s quite stunning, isn’t it, that the NDP can enter into a pact with the devil, let’s say, and none of us even know why. What’s in it for you, Jagmeet? Oh, nothing.

Well, nothing doesn’t seem like a very good bargain, so what the hell is going on behind the scenes? Where are the—this is a really good question—the NDP does have some fairly vigorous and occasionally aggressive MPs. They certainly can take on the Tories when they want—and they’re, by the way, they love taking on the Tories.

That’s a big—[__] is more relatively speaking. Where are they in the—because the NDP does have that moral kind of aura, and people who join the NDP like to believe at least that there is a morality driving them that is of a different scale or of a pure value than the other parties. Why are they letting Mr. Singh so desecrate the central image of the entire—why aren’t some of the MPs in the party talking about it?

And I also ask when it comes to the RCMP thing or the Emergencies Act: why aren’t Liberals, Liberal MPs—even some Ministers? Wilson-Raybould did it. Why is it that we’re not hearing from individual MPs? They’ve been elected by a constituency. They do have autonomy if they want to use it. They said talk about caucus discipline; there’s only discipline in the caucus if you accept it.

And if you think the Prime Minister or a cabinet minister has stepped over the line or the leader of your party is traducing the reputation of your party, then an MP in the NDP, or an MPs in the Liberal caucus will say, “Hey, Mr. Trudeau is going too far with the information legislation. He went far too far with the Emergencies Act and his attempt to put the vision especially against the working class of Canadians during the trucker protest—that was most unseemly.”

We don’t have opposition from the media in the main, and obviously, with Mr. Singh guaranteeing Mr. Trudeau—that’s how Mr. Trudeau could cancel Parliament for next year. This is the central dynamic of our entire political moment of our time, and I have not seen one major interview from one major—one major interview from one major presence on the Canadian media scene sit Jagmeet Singh down 30 minutes, and let’s have the story. You have not seen it.

Yeah, well, that’s unbelievable. Well, maybe it’s partly the fragmentation of Parliament, and so all the MPs feel isolated. And I know from talking to Conservative MPs who didn’t exactly distinguish themselves in terms of their courage over the last four years either, that as individuals, they’re all terrified.

They’re being isolated and mobbed. And the fact that Parliament is fragmented and that the media and the new media, for that matter, is more than capable and willing to mob—we could use the former Attorney General as a case in point—means that people on the MP side, the backbenchers, are cowed in a way that I think is unparalleled.

So let’s turn, Rex, because it’s very difficult to cover all the scandals, and we haven’t even touched on another one that’s major beyond belief, which is that Trudeau has run up more debt in his short time in office than every single Prime Minister in Canada managed in total since the founding of the state.

And the consequence of that has been an incredible inflation, asset inflation especially in the housing market, and an unparalleled level of inflation. And you can add to that the consequences of his idiot energy policies, which have emboldened Putin and which have also produced an unparalleled increase in energy prices across Canada.

And so we were also—and then that's not enough; that's not enough, no. So in the past year, I have tried to buy, for what it's worth, a new car—a couple of small boats, just fun boats—and I know that's a luxury item, but that's not the point. A snowmobile, I tried to make a vinyl record, and I've tried to get Penguin Random House to put out a double edition of my book.

Penguin couldn’t do it because there’s a cardboard and paper shortage. The vinyl record industry has an 8 to 12 month delay. You can’t get a snowmobile; you can’t get a small boat; and no one can buy a car. And the reason for that is the supply chains are so disrupted that it's cataclysmic.

One in five container ships are trapped in ports at the moment because the ports can't keep up with the demand. We have no idea how badly fragmented the supply chains are, and that's going to produce a catastrophic outcome, especially come fall, because we’re going to have a very difficult time moving enough food around the world, to say nothing of enough goods.

And so we have a massive debt; we have an inflation that's starting to get out of control; we have a housing bubble that’s no joke; and we have supply chain disruptions the magnitude of which have never been seen before, at least not in the last 30 years, and that pose a threat to the integrity of the entire world economic system.

And so that’s also seems to be a bit of a problem that Trudeau has had a major hand in producing. And that’s—and that’s—that's, along with his stated disinterest in financial matters, because he said that explicitly he has no real interest in economic matters—you'd never guess that in 2015 he said, I could almost quote, “I'm looking you straight in the eye now, and I'm speaking to you honestly, as I always do.”

This is when he was going to have $10 billion deficits per year that by 2019 we will return to a balance, by 2019. Now, again, pretty COVID, we can understand spending of a considerable magnitude beyond any promise during the regime of COVID.

But the extent to which this government wildly—and we never did seek because again he was operating from the cottage. He was walking down the steps of the Rideau Hall cottage rather than going to Parliament, all alone in a little covey of media people under a canvas tent, and he was throwing out billions this way and billions that way.

If you do not think that the billions upon billions upon billions that were flushed out without scrutiny—the Auditor General did not have adequate means to survey them—and they said that, and they asked for other people—we're going to have a harvest of scandals in years to come.

But that’s not the main point; the point that you’re making, that the spending levels of debt and deficit, were well over a trillion dollars. And the banks of the Bank of Canada has already jacked up the interest rate twice. I talked to a financial man just yesterday. It’s going to be worse and worse and worse.

We have had a holiday from economic reason during this period, and he has overspent. Stephen Harper was correct. The spending during COVID may have been necessary, but this was overkill. I would say overkill with Magnum, and it was not governed.

They’re even now trying to get back Serb payments from one million Canadians, when the interest rates rise and people who have houses and mortgages start to learn what it is like to be in previously normal times.

Inflation hits at the worst possible moment—two full years of economic devastation because of COVID—because of the regime—they closed down things that didn’t have to be closed; they killed businesses. We’re going to see tremendous devastation across.

And then the de-jihad against Alberta oil—that is the most— that is criminally Cupid! We are depriving not only Alberta but the Canadian treasure during the now-return prices of natural oil and gas highest almost ever.

And we have made them—we’re sorry, Mr. Trudeau, Mr. Singh, Elizabeth May, and the capital of professional environmentalists have made poor Alberta out of Saskatchewan’s oil and gas industry a demonic presence.

How do you reach the level of political insanity that you kill a primary resource of your own country? You—you’re strange and anger justifiably angered—they are justifiably angry, a whole province or two.

And at the same time, when Mr. Putin, who scorns the Green philosophy and on that one he’s actually right, uses the general flexion to greenism of Europe and Canada to amass the power to use his gas—his oil—as a leverage to control Germany and to influence the operations of Europe.

He couldn’t be in Ukraine today if the green fantasy—right? And now to threaten the UK with nuclear destruction—that was—and then let’s also point out, shall we, that one of the consequences of the sanctions so, so heroically placed on Putin by the idiot West is that the ruble is at its highest level ever.

And because oil prices have shot through the roof, Russia is actually, arguably, in some ways, in better economic shape after the sanctions than they were before.

Yeah, so that’s just bloody brilliant as well. And this issue about what’s happened on the Russian front: is anybody with any sense, looking at this, up to say 10 years ago, knew perfectly well that by dampening down oil and gas exploration in North America and in Europe that we were playing into the hands of the worst impulses of the Russians?

If you had to have your head buried in the sand or somewhere else to not notice that absolutely explicitly and to hand wave about idiot environmentalism while at the same time producing this potentially fatal dependence on Russian largesse?

And goodwill is an abdication of political responsibility that you’d have to look at history a long time to find an example that would supersede. I wish—and I wish with utter futility—then again the guardians of our public discourse, the official and powerful press, would now forsake their deep and intimate marriage with the Green movement that they've had for 20-25 years.

If you watch TVO Ontario, you’ve seen An Inconvenient Truth, which was Al Gore’s flush on the topic about a hundred times. CBC is officially, if it hasn't said so out loud, is officially a Greenpeace activist Network.

I would like to see now then say, okay, this embrace of this virtue signaling hollow ideology has empowered the most dangerous dictator on the earth, the one with nuclear weapons.

It has impoverished part of the reason for the inflation in our food at the present moment is because of the energy crisis brought on by the by the fatuous pursuit of energy sources that can't work, don't work, aren't yet developed, and don't have the structure or infrastructure even if they were.

If you want to hear the rest of my conversation with Rex Murphy, please go to dailywiredplus.com and become a member today.