Montreal language rights lawyer, Brent Tyler, speaks with Ezra Levant about the fight against Quebec's anti-Anglo Bill 14.
This report aired on The Source May 21 2013.
Ezra Levant skewers Tom Mulcair’s oily rhetoric on his west-east pipeline flip-flop.
This report aired on The Source May 21 2013.
Test pilot for Lockheed Martin and Royal Canadian Air Force veteran, Billie Flynn, explains why the new F-35 fighter jet soars above the rest.
This report aired on The Source May 21 2013.
Thomas Mulcair, the leader of the NDP, says that in 1994 he was offered a bribe by the mayor of Laval, Que., Gilles Vaillancourt.
He says he didn't accept it.
But Mulcair then kept that secret until just two years ago, when he finally told police.
Mulcair says he knew the mayor was a crook.
He saw it.
He experienced it.
But then he kept the mayor's secret for more than
15 years.
He was part of a conspiracy of silence.
And so the mayor's alleged career of crime continued until just last fall, when he resigned in the wake of massive police raids.
(Vaillancourt has been charged, but the trial has not proceeded, and the allegations have not yet been tested in court).
By not bringing his report to police until just two years ago, and to the public just this month, Mulcair helped enable two more decades of Vaillancourt's rule.
Witnesses before Quebec's inquiry into corruption paint a picture of Vaillancourt as a Tony Soprano-style mobster - thankfully without the violence.
According to one construction boss, Lino Zambito, Vaillancourt took a 2.5% kickback from every public works project he oversaw. And he was mayor for 23 years.
Mulcair might have stopped that 19 years ago. But he didn't.
Why did he stay silent when Vaillancourt lobbied the federal and provincial governments to pour $15 billion more into Quebec construction projects?
Do the math - 2.5% of that is a colossal amount.
And when Vaillancourt was appointed to the crown jewel of Quebec crown corporations, Hydro-Quebec?
Did Mulcair not see the risk?
Where was his sense of duty, as a citizen? As an elected official, sworn to serve the province of Quebec, and then the country of Canada?
Mulcair isn't just a citizen and a public servant. He's a lawyer as well, with ethical and professional obligations.
Lawyers must sometimes keep the awful secrets of their clients.
But Vaillancourt was not a client of Mulcair. Mulcair was perhaps a victim, but certainly a witness.
Did he feel no obligation to the law?
How many more schools or hospitals would Quebec have now if not for the culture of corruption that has skimmed so much out of government coffers?
How much lower would Quebec's taxes or debts be? How much healthier would Quebec's politics and business be were it not for this ethical rot that Mulcair claims he saw but then looked away from again and again?
Now why did Mulcair stay silent?
I don't know. Was it to get ahead?
He was just 39, just starting a promising political career.
Did Mulcair do the political math: Choose between being a moral hero or a political winner?
No doubt standing up to a mayor, and a corrupt system, would be terrifying, probably career-ending.
But he didn't even tell police, in secret, until two years ago.
He didn't even give them an anonymous tip.
Did Thomas Mulcair choose his own career over law and order in Quebec?
Did put his own private interests ahead of the public interest?
As recently as 2010, when Sun Media's Brian Lilley asked Mulcair about any attempted bribe from Vaillancourt, Mulcair categorically denied it.
So he lied to keep the secret.
What other secrets is Mulcair keeping?
And is he still keeping them, because of fear?
This column was written for Sun News May 21 2013.
Bill Snape of the Center for Biological Diversity explains why killing endangered species is okay as long it's a wind turbine doing the deed.
This report aired on The Source May 20 2013.
B.C.’s NDP started the recent provincial election campaign with a 22-point lead in the polls, and ended 4% behind the Liberals. It was a surprise ending, and not every NDP activist is willing to accept defeat.
On election night, NDP strategist (and Vancouver alderman) Geoff Meggs said that if the Liberal government allowed oilsands pipelines to be built to the west coast, there could be massive acts of civil disobedience.
He invoked the Idle No More campaign of illegal road and railway blockades, and said the “War in the Woods” could return to B.C.
The War in the Woods refers to the crime wave committed by environmental extremists in the 1990s — many pouring in from outside the province — to stop logging on Vancouver Island. Some were protesters engaged in peaceful civil disobedience. But many went further, engaging in criminal acts and even violence.
Logging roads were sabotaged, putting truck drivers at risk of injury or death. A bridge was burned down. Hundreds of people were arrested for trespass and mischief. And eco-terrorists invented a new weapon: Tree-spiking.
If environmentalists couldn’t stop loggers from cutting down trees, perhaps they could do things that might have the effect of harming or even killing loggers. They would sneak into a forest and hammer an iron spike into a tree. That spike wouldn’t be noticed as the tree was harvested.
But when that log was taken to the sawmill, the iron spike would hit the power saw, shredding it, causing metal shrapnel to explode like a hand grenade. Anyone standing nearby in the sawmill would be injured or even killed, and of course the saw itself would be destroyed.
It was a perfect reflection of the morality of the eco-extremists; they put the life of a tree ahead of the lives of human beings.
When sawmills tried to detect these weapons by installing metal detectors, the eco-terrorists moved one step ahead, too.
They switched to concrete spikes, which are invisible to metal detectors. This tactic continues to this day in British Columbia.
And anti-pipeline terrorism has come to the province, with homemade bombs blowing up natural gas installations.
That’s the War in the Woods Meggs was talking about. Add in Idle No More, and you’re talking about a low-level civil war.
Was Meggs just being dramatic, speaking out of election night emotion?
Meggs wasn’t proposing this course of action. He was predicting it. He’s plugged in to the environmental movement. It’s what he thinks could happen.
That same night, other sore losers were happy to go on the record confirming their intentions to use force.
The Dogwood Initiative is one of more than 200 lobby groups that registered to campaign in the election, which allowed them to spend up to $150,000 to promote the NDP.
Dogwood’s key objective was to stop oil pipelines to the coast — especially the proposed Enbridge pipeline to the port of Kitimat. Which is why they backed the NDP, which called for a moratorium on new pipeline construction.
That extremist NDP platform, announced mid-way in the campaign, is widely believed to have been a turning point. It was when ordinary British Columbians started to worry about job losses under the NDP. It’s what put the Liberals back in office.
But instead of accepting the democratic will of the people, here’s what Dogwood’s campaigns director, Eric Swanson, wrote in a press release:
“We are hopeful the next government will stand up for B.C. and say no to Enbridge, in line with the wishes of the B.C. public. If they don’t, citizens will rise up once again to force the government to take action.”
It takes great chutzpah, on the very night of the election, to claim that British Columbians want the opposite of what they just voted for.
But it moves from audacity to menace to warn that if the democratic government does not obey Swanson’s demands, radicals will “rise up once again to force” them?
Force? Rise up? Again — as in, like last time?
We know what environmental extremists are going to do. What will we do in response?
This column was written for Sun News May 19 2013.
Former US ambassador to Canada, David Wilkins, joins Ezra Levant to discuss the pipeline push in America.
This report aired on The Source May 17 2013.
Ezra Levant says Mulcair was part of a conspiracy of silence when he failed to speak out about a bribe offered to him by a corrupt official.
This report aired on The Source May 17 2013.
Eric Duhaime tells Ezra about the CBC’s war against private broadcasters in Quebec.
This report aired on The Source May 17 2013.
Unions and eco-radicals poured big money into the BC election in an attempt to get Adrian Dix and the NDP elected; they were rejected by the voters of British Columbia.
This report aired on The Source May 16 2013.
The CBC is using taxpayer’s dollars to shut down private sector journalism, and they are rubbing it in on twitter.
This report aired on The Source May 16 2013.
Monte Solberg joins Ezra Levant to discuss Quebec’s backwards fracking ban.
This report aired on The Source May 16 2013.
Scottie Hughes of the Tea Party News Network isn't surprised the IRS under the Obama administration is targeting conservatives.
This report aired on The Source May 14 2013.
Will US donors tip the balance of the BC election, and install an NDP government?
The list of "advertising sponsors" who have registered with Elections BC suggests they will.
The BC Liberal Party will likely out-fundraise the NDP when it comes to direct contributions. But the list of third party campaigners shows countless other bank accounts at work, most of them going to bat for the NDP.
Dozens of unions are campaigning. Teachers unions, nurses unions, government bureaucrats unions, student unions, as well as unions of unions like the Canadian Labour Congress and the B.C. Federation of Labour.
Each of them is allowed to spend up to $150,000 on the election. Which is precisely why there are so many groups. A $150,000 limit for teachers unions doesn't mean much when every union local can register on its own.
There are a handful of pro-business campaigns - the coal association is registered, for example. But they're outnumbered 10 to one.
With 200-plus campaign groups registered, it's conceivable the NDP could receive $20 million or more in advertising support from these lobby groups.
For comparison, the mighty federal Conservative Party was permitted to spend only
$21 million in the last election, across the entire country.
There is a democratic problem when union bosses extract forced union dues from their members to spend on one side of an election. But at least those unions are Canadian. What about foreign money sloshing into the race?
The campaign list is rife with front groups for American anti-oilsands lobbyists.
Take Forest Ethics, the San Francisco-based environmental extremist group. Last April, they announced they were opening a Canadian branch plant, called Forest Ethics Advocacy, to "strike back" at Canadian government policy. Anyone interested in this all-Canadian venture was invited to call the San Francisco office for more info.
They're registered in the B.C. election and can spend up to $150,000.
So can Greenpeace Canada, the local affiliate of the multinational corporation headquartered in Amsterdam. In 2011, Amsterdam sent $612,000 to Canada for local operations. How much of that will end up in B.C.'s campaign?
The Dogwood Initiative named themselves after B.C.'s official flower. But they've received hundreds of thousands of dollars from U.S. foundations for the explicit purpose of political campaigns. They have too many sugar-daddies to list: From Seattle alone they're funded by the Bullitt Foundation, the Wilburforce Foundation and the Brainerd Foundation.
Dogwood's director, Eric Swanson, once boasted that he'd "take duffel bags of money delivered from Martians from outer space" if he could.
Other U.S.-funded lobby groups in the B.C. election include Ecojustice, West Coast Environmental Law, Raincoast Conservation Society and Tides Canada Initiatives Society. That's an affiliate of Tides Canada and the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation, which have poured tens of millions of dollars into at least 44 different anti-oilsands groups in B.C. Their mission is to stop Canadian oil from getting to market.
Tides' specialty is secret donations. A foreign billionaire can tell Tides to put his money against the oilsands, and Tides will simply call it an "anonymous" gift.
It's incredible that U.S.-funded groups are allowed to campaign in a Canadian election. Even more incredible is that so many of these groups have charitable status with the Canada Revenue Agency.
At least one OPEC oil company, Venezuela's CITGO, has lobbied Canadian regulators to block a B.C. oilsands pipeline. Given B.C.'s lax election laws, why wouldn't OPEC fund a third party campaign, too?
This column was written for Sun News May 13 2013.
The Source remembers Toronto Sun co-founder Peter Worthington.
This report aired on The Source May 13 2013.
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney joins to discuss the 26 year battle to deport a convicted terrorist from Canada.
This report aired on The Source May 13 2013.
Ezra Levant questions the influence of US donors going to bat for the NDP in the BC provincial election.
This report aired on The Source May 13 2013.
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