EZRA LEVANT: Social media censors grilled in the US, why does it never happen in Canada?

If you remember the Trump years, whenever there was some hearing about Donald Trump, some accusation about Donald Trump being impeached in process against Donald Trump, Canadian media couldn't get enough of it, even though every single one of those fusses resulted in a big nothing.

Do you remember that Mueller investigation for Russian influence? Who came up with nothing? There must have been hundreds of stories. I can't think of a single American left wing activists like Michael Avenatti, who is going to be the next president of the United States. He's in prison now. The Canadian media loved covering every jot and tittle, every trifle and trivial matter that was to embarrass Donald Trump.

But there have been hearings in Congress this past week that, as far as I know, have not been covered anywhere in the Canadian mainstream media, although they are of great substantive gravity. The hearings are for the former executives of Twitter. These hearings are happening only because the Republicans have the majority in Congress now so they can set the agenda.

And very fortuitously, because Elon Musk bought Twitter, took it private, spent 40 for billion dollars, and released some powerful secrets about what Twitter had done under the previous regime. In fact, not only did Elon Musk releases, he invited independent journalists, including many on the left, to go to Twitter headquarters, sift through hundreds or thousands of internal memos and publish their results on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1601020109807448064

There was several tranches of these Twitter files as they been called, showing political interference, especially in the last presidential election, COVID interference, including where a Pfizer executive, Scott Gottlieb, actively interfered to stop critics of Pfizer and scientists with alternative viewpoints, including that natural immunity was powerful. One of the scariest things that was revealed in these Twitter files is the FBI merger with Twitter.

It was basically used not only to capture information about people that the FBI wanted to learn about, but to shut down comments and political conversations the FBI wanted to stop. Since when was that the matter for police? But I've been saying this even before Elon Musk bought the company and revealed it. Twitter really is an information operation, a spy network where you are the product.

Anyways, what news we have is that these Twitter executives under the former regime have been called to testify in Washington DC and indeed they attended. Sometimes tech leaders simply resist or refuse to attend, but they were there. Now, I have to tell you very candidly, some of these representatives ask good questions, excellent questions even, but some of them, in my view, they didn't.

Now, I completely sympathize with them. But in the case of, for example, Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, to conservative Republican congressmen, their questions of Vijaya Gadde and your wrath were more painful complaints of how they had been censored and abused. There were more howling of the injustice, and they were lawyers doing a cross examination. You'll see that.

https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1623365073946173441

And you might not particularly be impressed by the questions, but you should be impressed by the fact that this is allowed to happen at all. And you might think to yourself, Why don't we ever ask such questions in Canada?

https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1623419189040906240

Well, like I say, Americans are lucky that they have a Congress and a political system that's more responsive than I say. I'm flummoxed and stunned every time I consider that our third branch of, you know, there's various branches of government, there's the legislature. That's easy to understand. That's your elected lawmakers, your employees at the federal level. Your employees are employees at the provincial level.

That's easy to understand. There's the executive. Those are cabinet ministers who can make decisions on everything from going to war to interest rates, things like that. Although they would claim that interest rates are independent. And then the third branch of government is the judiciary. The judges, which serve to be a check on legislators or the executive branch that gets too big for its britches, too big for the Constitution.

But alas, here in Canada, our judiciary has yet to weigh in. The Supreme Court of Canada is yet to bother itself with anything regarding the lockdown or that civil liberties bonfire. Isn't that incredible? We do not have the same active checks and balances in democracy that they have in the United States, and I'm jealous. So they had these hearings and these hearings were televised and there was a congressional record.

Well, I'm jealous of America for a number of reasons. One of them is, hey, can we have the Canadian version of Twitter files? Can we know about Justin Trudeau or Gerald Butts contacting Twitter to tell Twitter to throttle or ban or suspend their enemies? You doubt it happened? Obviously, all of this is happening at the other social media companies, too.

It's not just the Twitter followers, You know, Facebook, YouTube, Google, Instagram and the rest of them are doing this, too. It's just we found out about it because Elon Musk bought the company, took it private, and then revealed the dirt on his own company. The third thing I'd say and you heard me talk about this the other day about our lawsuit against not against Twitter itself, but against Steven Guilbeault, the environment minister, former heritage minister for blocking rebel news and our access to the government service.

I'm very excited about that lawsuit. I'm amazed at how much interest it's had nationwide. Over 100 newspapers touched on it and we are having that trial in June, which is not very far away. I'll keep you posted. In fact, I'll upload some more information to TwitterLawsuit.ca. I think we've actually got a chance. And it's not so much that really going on that source of information, that Twitter account or the Environment minister is the most important thing in the world.

It's important and we have a right to it. And I am interested in what the Environment Minister has said affects me as a citizen. I have a right to it. But it's also important that the federal government knows that it simply cannot punish people based on their political differences with us, that they simply can't ban people from getting access to government services because they disagree with us or because we disagree with them.

GUEST: Alexa Lavoie, our Quebec reporter on the latest from her trip down to the border crisis taking place at Roxham road, where she spoke with illegal immigrants entering Canada allegedly by the aide of US officials.