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EZRA LEVANT | Why do governments around the world always attack farmers?
00:32:42
Tonight on The Ezra Levant Show, why do governments keep picking fights with farmers? It’s a question worth asking as massive agricultural protests sweep across Europe once again. And it’s not new. Farmer uprisings have become a recurring feature of modern politics. To understand why, it helps to look at a country whose farmers have been on the front lines for years: the Netherlands.
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- [00:01]
A
Hello, my friends. Oh boy. There was a protest in London by the farmers. The farmers were angry and boy, I love farmers protests. You know that when the farmers are protesting taking their tractors into the city center, that things have gone wrong. And we used to cover the Dutch farmer rebellion. So I got a few things to say about this British farmer rebellion. But before I show you that, I really want you to see it, not just hear it. So can you do me a favor and get the video version of this podcast? Just go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe. It's eight bucks a month, which gives you unlimited video content from us. But more importantly, from our point of view, not only do you get the good stuff, but pays the bills here because we take no government money and it shows. That's rebelnewsplus.com. You're listening to Rebel News podcast. Tonight. Why do governments around the world always attack farmers? It's November 26th and this is the Ezra Levant show you fighting for freedom. Shame on you, you censorious thug. I find farmer protests very interesting. How about you? In the past, Rebel News has covered the farmer rebellion in the Netherlands. I think we sent reporters there three different times to cover that fight. I learned a fair bit about farming in the Netherlands. Don't laugh. It's actually very interesting and very surprising. Let me start with this fact. Did you know this? The Netherlands, which is pretty small country geographically and doesn't even have 20 million people, it was the third largest exporter of food in the world behind only the United States and Brazil. Are you surprised by that? I was. I mean, you got to admit that's surprising that it's that it's such a huge producer. Huge, especially in dairy and eggs. And you probably know that there's all sorts of Dutch cheeses like Gouda. They're huge in meat and they lead the world in flowers, which is part of agriculture, even though we typically don't eat flowers. It's such a huge industry for a physically small country. But then again, we sometimes forget that the Netherlands was once a global empire. Amsterdam was their mighty ship going city. There was colonies, Dutch colonies around the world. I don't know if you remember the Dutch East India Company, the Dutch in South Africa. To this day, there's still Boer farmers there who speak a kind of Dutch called Afrikaans in the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, even in Japan and Taiwan in Indonesia. If you ever sailed on Holland America, you'll see there's Dutch captains and Indonesian staff. That's a legacy of the Dutch Empire. Even New York City. You know what it was called first? New Amsterdam, not New York. Very interesting place. Anyways, don't underestimate the Dutch, I'll tell you that. And don't mess with their farmers. I still don't quite understand the war on Dutch farmers, but from what I could glean from our reporters and just my own reading, it was driven in part by environmental extremism. The same way Canada is obsessed with the element on the periodic table called carbon. You know, the sixth element on the periodic table. Well, the Dutch, at least some of them, are obsessed with nitrogen. That's the seventh element on the periodic table. I know that sounds crazy. Would be. Well, I think a lot about hydrogen. Oh, me? I'm a helium guy. I mean, what are you doing? Those are basic building blocks of the universe. I was curious, so I checked and you know, nitrogen and carbon were officially discovered as elements in the same year, 1772. What a coincidence that is. That's almost exactly 250 years ago, by the way. And if you had told any scientists over the past 250 years, until maybe 20 years ago, that we would literally try to. I'm laughing, saying it. Decarbonize the world or denitrogenize the world, they would have said you were absolutely crazy. And you certainly were not a man of science. You were maybe some sort of a witch or something. I mean, carbon is the stuff of life. You think about the word carbohydrate. That's what we eat. Every single living thing is made from carbon. You're made from carbon. Everything we eat, every plant, every animal, our breath that you exhale is carbon dioxide. It's crazy to think we're going to get rid of carbon nitrogen, too. It's literally in our DNA. Without those two basic elements, all life on Earth would immediately cease. Imagine being a kook. Who says we have to get rid of carbon. Well, can you imagine those kooks on the carbon side? Because we know them. We've been fighting with them in Canada for 20 years. But in the Netherlands, they've been going after farmers for using fertilizer that. That includes nitrogen, that very basic element. I'm serious. It's a war against farmers. The farmers fought back, though, with these rebellions I'm telling you about, and did something incredible that the Dutch parliamentary system allows. The Dutch farmers started a political party, and in the Dutch system, which is a little bit confusing, but it has an important form of proportional representation. You know what that is, right? You get a certain percentage, you get seats. It's not like a constituency system. Anyways, look at what happened. And I'm reading from the BBC here. Farmers protest party wins shock Dutch vote victory. They immediately became the biggest party in the Dutch Senate. Let me read a bit because it's just such a pleasure to read this. A farmer's party has stunned Dutch politics and is set to be the biggest party in the upper house of parliament after provincial elections. The Farmer Citizen Movement BBB was set up in 2019 in the wake of widespread farmers protests. But with most votes counted, they are due to win 15 of the Senate seats with almost 20% of the vote. I think in the end they actually got 16. This isn't normal, but actually it is. It's all normal citizens who voted, said leader Caroline Vanderplass. That's a wonderful little quote, isn't it? The BBB aims to fight government plans to slash nitrogen emissions harmful to biodiversity. Oh, shut up, BBC. By dramatically reducing livestock numbers and buying out thousands of farms. Look at that for a moment, eh? Shutting down farms, getting rid of animals. Does that ring a bell anywhere? I'll come back to that. Government was trying to order farmers to reduce the size of their herds in the name of environmentalism. Sounds like the ostrich farm now. It's a great story. The Dutch farmers all the more great because I was just reading from the BBC there and they hate farmers and nitrogen and carbon and they're all sorts of crazy. And the Farmer's Party is the most normal people in the entire world. I really like that quote from their leader there. Anyways, the Dutch farmers have been at it for a while. You can see the party was started in 2019, but the farmers really started to fight back a few years later, including in 2022 when they had a ton of protests. And that's when they told us that they were inspired in part by the Canadian truckers. And you can see the similarity. Get the big rigs on the road and you know, people respect truckers. They respect farmers, I think maybe even more. What a wonderful thing to hear from them. Don't mess with farmers. But I pointed out the anti farm, anti meat agenda of the Dutch government. Right. I think the idea of culling enormous numbers of animals for no good reason, when you, you know, relook at the ostriches, There are reasons to put down animals on a farm. I get it. Every farmer knows that and doing that humanely is part of being a farmer. But what outraged so many people about the ostrich situation is that the birds were all healthy. By the time they were being killed, had the Canadian Food Inspection Agency being there when the animals were actually sick a year ago, I think they would have perhaps had less opposition. But by the time they got their bureaucrats act together, the animals were all healthy. They had all gotten better from the avian flu and in fact they had herd immunity. Imagine insisting on killing every one of them. Nonetheless, it really does echo what they were trying to do in the Netherlands, doesn't it? You saw that BBC story. They want to kill the animals to save the environment, which is crazy because obviously the animals are part of the environment when you think about it. All of which is to say, look at London today. London, England. Wow. When I think of London, I do not think of farmers. It's such a huge metropolis. But an enormous protest happened today against the Labour Party. That's the government there, and their anti farm budget. Today with farmers from around the UK driving into the heart of London with their rigs. What an amazing sight. I mean London is so iconic with the parliament buildings and Trafalgar Square. To see these tractors there, oh, I tell you know, I like to go over there. I wish I was there to see it. Lots of unique Union Jacks being flown by these farmers. Yeah, not a single Hamas flag. Isn't that surprising? Farmers are the best people in the world. I mean, is there a more honest breed, self sufficient and so sufficient that one of them can feed a hundred of us, maybe a thousand of us? All of the qualities that make someone a great farmer also make them a great citizen. Patience, planning, thinking about the future, problem solving, harmony with the cycles of life. Thinking long term, caring for life, especially life that's weaker than us. Feeding people, no matter their politics, custodians of the land and water. I mean, I could go on, I suppose. Statistically, I'm sure a dishonest farmer does exist. Mathematically, I'm sure it happens. But I've never met a dishonest farmer in my life, have you? Oh, and other things. They use equipment like tractors that need fuel. They protect themselves and their herds and flocks with firearms. Well, I guess not in the UK anymore, but in the rest of the world. But still, every quality and characteristic about farmers, you can see why left wing governments hate them, right? I don't know any farmers who are on welfare, do you? Now, the farmers in the UK are motivated by a number of things. But the biggest one, if I am reading it right, is a new plan hatched by the Labour government in the UK that family farms would now have to pay a 20% tax on assets if they were to be passed down from father to son. So basically it would destroy family farms to the advantage of corporate farms because, say a farm is nominally worth a million pounds, okay, that's on paper, obviously. That's the land and the equipment and the farmhouse and the cattle. It's not cash sitting around. How on earth could a family with a farm just scraped together £200,000 to pay a tax to the government to allow the farm to continue to operate in the family? Why are they doing that? Well, the same reason the Canadian government and the Dutch government use they. You know, they probably wouldn't admit it, but they sort of hate farmers. They won't deny that they hate farming. Environmental reasons, cultural reasons, globalist reasons. The elites want expensive energy and expensive food. They'd rather have cloned meat or machine, you know, printed meat. Gross diabolical things like that. They don't want farmers in touch with nature. They want you to be poor. By the way, expensive energy, expensive food. You know the World Economic Forum slogan, you'll own nothing and be happy. Now, Donald Trump's strategy is the opposite on those two key measures. He wants cheaper food, cheaper gas, and he talks about that a fair bit. And he's actually accomplished those things in less than a year. The price of food and fuel is coming down. You know, that's not just a blessing to all Americans. That disproportionately helps low income people. But just look at those protesters in the uk. Orderly, polite, patriotic. But look at this. Just in the last day, London's atrocious police announced that all farm vehicles were suddenly going to be banned from the center of the city. Just spraying that condition on the farmers in ambush. But they ignored it. And to their peril, though, here's one farmer being arrested for daring to bring his tractor with him.
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Being arrested just by Trafalgar Square. It's absolutely outrageous. This is the place of the public, the public and farmers being arrested on a section dispersal because the police decide to say that they're not going to be allowed.
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A
I've asked you several times to follow the conditions. Say if you've been following us, you know that there are constant, huge pro Hamas protests in London that shut down the downtown in the city, the city center. I've covered some of these protests, so has Alexa Lavois. There have been other protests in London too, including a major one just a couple days ago targeting a Jewish synagogue. Seriously, just pro Hamas protesters swarming an individual synagogue and any Jews going there it's got nothing to do with the Israeli embassy or with. It's just ordinary Jews in their residential area. That same metropolitan police force let that protest against the Jews happen, no problem. But if you're a farmer with a tractor, peaceful, patriotic, it's illegal to bring your vehicle to Parliament, say the police, even though Parliament is actually the proper place to protest the government. Don't you think? Yeah. I don't know about you, but I'm on the side of the farmers. Stay with us for more. It sure feels like there's more and more people in the cart as opposed to those who are outside the cart pushing it. And if it feels that way, it's because that is a fact. According to a study by the Fraser Institute, since Justin Trudeau took office in 2015 until now under Mark Carney, basically a decade of Liberal rule, 950,000 new government jobs have been created that is have been plowed with taxpayers money and have taken root. Now, not all of those are federal jobs. That includes provincial governments too, but it's just a staggering number. And here to talk to us about it is our friend Chris Sims, the Alberta Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Chris, how you doing?
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C
Wonderful, Ezra. Thanks so much for the invite.
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It's such a huge number, just a shade under a million people. And, you know, the growth of the population doesn't warrant it. The. Yeah, just there's no excuse for it other than it's. I don't know, it feels like it's a kind of, I don't know, gestating monster, like in the movie Aliens, where you have a creature inside you feeding off of you. I'm not trying to dehumanize these bureaucrats. I'm just saying they so clearly live off the avails of the productive class. I just find this such a frustrating story. Tell me what the Fraser Institute has reported.
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C
Yeah. Ayn Rand would have called it the looters versus the producers. Franco calls it the makers versus the takers.
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Right.
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C
And what this is is basically far too many people have now joined the ranks of government. Charlie Kirk said it best when he said big government sucks. It does. And one of the reasons why it sucks is because it sucks money out of our wallets. This report was hard to read, frankly, by the Fraser Institute. I don't know if you saw, Ezra, how much it's grown. The percentage of people who are working for various levels of government between 2015, up until now. In 2015, it was around 17ish percent. Now it's well over 21%. Almost 22%. What that means, folks, is that nearly a quarter of Canadians are working for government. They're employed by the government. This isn't just about the cost, because the cost is astonishing to taxpayers. I think last year federally alone, ezra, we spent $70 billion just on the federal bureaucracy. But it's also, and I think more spiritually to your show, it's such a drain for all those people that go and join the ranks of the faceless government. That's an entrepreneur gone, that's a business person gone, that's an inventor gone, a creator. The person that actually generates wealth in this country has now just joined the cogs. And it's really upsetting.
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A
You know, when I was young and naive, I would laugh at certain disciplines in university. Women's studies, conflict studies, peace studies, vegetarian studies, I'm making up some of those, but not many. And I would think you're never gonna get a job. With that said, I, well, was I ever wrong? All of those people are getting the great jobs, the HR jobs, the DEI jobs, the wackier the better. They're getting all the people with degrees in sustainable this and that. You would think, where on earth is there a natural demand for that? Well, there isn't, but they're all. And by the way, a lot of these jobs are six figure jobs. I mean, there's some jurisdictions where you have what's called the sunshine list, where you can actually see it. And yeah, you know, I think the average income for a federal civil servant has got to be more than $100,000. When that hundred thousand dollars was chosen, it was all, that's so high. There'll be very few people now. It's almost everybody, including, I don't know, it's just, you start to feel like a sucker if you try and make it, make a go of it on your own.
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C
I think you do. And this is what. Remember when Mark Stein back in the day of Sun News Network was warning about young kids in France wanting to grow up, to become a bureaucrat? You're sitting there laying awake at night dreaming about becoming some government employee. Well, unfortunately, we're kind of going there right now in Canada and to your point exactly, Ezra, yes. The average salary for federal bureaucrats is now well over $100,000. Also, if you take a look at the stats that the Fraser Institute put out here, is that you could try to, you know, at least I try to comfort myself saying, oh, well, you know, we need really courageous men and women in the Coast Guard out there saving people who Fall off of boats. But no, the bulk of the growth, unfortunately, has been in administrative government.
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Right.
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It's not the ones out there saving your life. It is administrative government growth that seems to be the fastest growing and the biggest problem.
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Yeah. Now, of course, the population has grown since 2015, but that doesn't explain it. I mean, one of the. You mentioned the percent of Canadians who work for the public sector. It was 19.7%. It is now 21 and a half. What that means is even as a proportion to population, it has grown faster than population growth. That's the real giveaway. Because if Canada had doubled in size but had only gone up a fraction of that in civil service, you could say, oh, that's actually quite economical. But it's the opposite. The growth of government has far outpaced the growth of population. I find it frustrating, but it's not just the feds. And we like to poke fun at the feds. But. But I'm looking at the graph here. It's British Columbia, I think, if I'm not mistaken, is actually the single worst in terms of the growth of the government class. Is that correct? That B.C. is the worst?
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Correct. B.C. is the worst. And if you go take a look at British Columbia's debt level and how much its spending has gone crazy and out of control, it's enough to make you sick, Ezra. Because British Columbia. I'm a British Columbian originally. It has no business going into debt. It has no business blowing money on hiring a ton of big bureaucrats. It's literally sitting on a gold mine. I mean, one could argue, oh, if you're a tiny little landlocked province and you don't have any natural resources under your feet, well, you know, government's going to be the biggest game in town. No, B.C. has got a blessing of riches underneath its feet. And you're right, it saw the fastest and highest amount of government growth, followed closely, I will point out, by Prince Edward Island. And this is a problem. I have family out in Atlantic Canada. I lived out there for a time. Okay. This is a problem in Atlantic Canada, to be frank, about 1 in 3. Around 1/3 of people who are employed in Atlantic Canada now are employed by various levels of government. A third.
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Yeah.
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And it shows. It does. I'm sorry, but it shows, because then you become complacent. You want to then agree with daddy and Mommy guy. Government all the time. You don't want to rock the boat. You don't want to say cut taxes. You don't want to say balance the Budget, because that's where your meal is coming from. This is a big problem.
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Yeah, yeah, you're right. You know, it's funny you mentioned the Atlantic. I see that Newfoundland in that 10 year period actually had a shrinkage of population, which is a bit of a surprise. I thought even immigration had splashed over there. According to the Fraser Institute, in the ten year period studied, the population of Newfoundland declined just barely by 0.2%. But that didn't stop the growth of government by 2.1%. So there are fewer people in Newfoundland than there were 10 years ago, but there are thousands more bureaucrats attending to them. It really, I don't know. And the thing I think what you just pointed out there is your identity is no longer that of I'm a hard working private sector person. You become part of the Blob, part of the Borg, and you start to think of yourself as a defender of all government things. I would imagine psychologically, you start to identify with the government instead of with the people. That's what I think is the attitudinal shift that comes with this.
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C
Yeah, big time. And isn't that fascinating where you can see the province, the population of the province go like this, but the population of government workers go like that. It goes up in Newfoundland and Labrador. If I can philosophize for a moment to build on your point. Yeah, that could be because the young, Kickstarter upstarty type, hard working people in Newfoundland and Labrador, too many of them moved away and they probably came to my province. In your home province here in Alberta, they're probably working in something like natural resources, the oil sands, specifically the population of Fort Mac, has gained a lot of Newfoundland and Labradorians. But again, when you do that, that means that that person who's clearly a very hardworking person, is no longer opening that business, innovating that company, starting something new in their home province. And therefore there are fewer jobs for those younger people. And therefore, what do you do? You go apply for the government job. See, this is a terrible. It's like the warm Moro boros, right? It's the snake eating its own tail and we're unfortunately paying for it. Ezra, I don't know if you saw just how much we're actually spending at the federal level, because it kind of dovetails. The public accounts came out with their numbers and Franco went through them. The amount of money, Ezra, on the bureaucracy last year, $70 billion with a B. But with the outsourcing for all their little lobbyists and contractors and all that Crap, it's still more than 20 billion. It's close to 100 billion for the Blob just at the federal level. And then you dig down into this granular data from the Fraser Institute, which shows basically all levels of government absorbing more and more fellow Canadians, costing us more and more dollars. Like it's a serious problem.
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A
Yeah, you know, I'm genuinely worried about the brain drain for a while there. I remember under Stephen Harper's last couple of years, it was quite an interesting story. I think even the New York Times picked it up that for a moment there, Canada's middle class was on a per capita basis wealthier than America's. Like I almost couldn't believe it. And now that I'm saying it, I think, could that possibly have been true? I remember it was true. And our economy was strong for all sorts of folks. And the idea of a brain drain was a far off dream. But then a few things happened. I think Canada's brutal COVID lockdowns shook a lot of people who could move. They went to Florida and I don't know if a lot of them are coming back. I think we were in a recession on a per capita basis in Canada. I don't know what Trump's tariffs will do in the long term, but I know a lot of people personally who say that they have to move some of their operations from Canada to the States to continue selling into that market. That's what Trump wants. I think we could be starting to see a real downward trend. And the thing is picking up steam. If, by the way, if the federal government continues to block the single best hope of economic growth, namely an oil pipeline, if they continue to spook other investors like this Nutrien potash mill, sorry, port, that's now going to be in like. If you start to get a reputation as a not friendly place, these things will just compound. I hate to say it. There's this amazing company in Canada called Shopify. It's actually the largest tech company in Canada. It's an incredible success. I remember a decade ago Justin Trudeau liked to hang out with their CEOs and CFOs and stuff. They become spokesman for the free market. I see Toby Lutke and others from that company. I don't know how long they're going to hang on. If you were the head of a global app, Shopify basically does the store for every website you go to. Why are they even in Canada? Well, for reasons of history and inertia. But I hate to say it, if these trends keep Going, it would not surprise me if one day Shopify said, you know what, we love Canada very much, but it just doesn't make sense for business people. We're moving to Florida, we're moving to Austin, Texas. We're going to where the others who are going. And we'll let Mark Carney have the managed capitalism, the stakeholder capitalism that he's been talking about at the World Economic Forum for a decade.
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C
Yeah, Shopify is super important. I used to talk to Harley quite frequently, one of the guys there at Shopify, when we'd get him on our show there in Ottawa on talk radio. And to your point, I also spoke to Ian Lee. I know that you've spoken with him many times, an economist out of the Carleton University School. And he keeps ringing this alarm bell. E keeps saying that Canada is increasingly telling all the investors around the world, don't come here, we don't want your money, don't put your money here, don't employ our people. No, no, no. We've become the country of no. And to your point, I know this is kind of painful to think about, but under Harper, remember for a time when our dollar was even over par for a little while. Yeah, Wild. And like, I talked to some of my younger colleagues now and I sound like, you know, Grandpa Simpson telling stories from days of yore. But it is possible to do this. I wanted to stress the pipeline is one thing. We absolutely need that, but we also need to get rid of this production cap. It's this stranglehold that Ottawa has stuck over top of our energy sector. And that means that any one of those companies we just mentioned looks at Canada and says, I'm not putting my money there, we're not doing this. And to your point, on lockdowns, I will point out the fiscal element of that too. Trudeau did two terrible things at the same time there during lockdowns. A, he fired up the money printer. He printed more than $300 billion out of thin air. Click of a keyboard. Poof. There is inflation. At the same time, he locked down the widget making industries. So we have all this paper money flowing around without the stuff being made to absorb said paper money. And we have an inflation crisis, which is why stuff is unaffordable in Canada. So there's just been 10 years of economic bad decisions being made here, which is, again, I really hope, I truly hope, Ezra, that regular people, including in the mainstream media, read this report from the Fraser Institute, realizes that we can't afford this and we're going in the wrong direction.
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Well, we're going in the wrong direction in a bunch of ways. I think tomorrow is actually a really critical day. Mark Carney has been hinting to Alberta, oh, we'll let you have a pipeline with certain conditions. But he has been saying the opposite to Alberta's enemies, including the premier of B.C. and environmental extremists, many of whom are in his own cabinet. I think tomorrow is a very fateful day and we'll see which way it goes. Chris, thanks for joining us today.
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C
Thank you, Ezra.
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A
Oh, hi, everybody. You know, I'm in Toronto right now. That's where our head office is and our studio. But I'm gonna be hopping on a plane tonight to go to Calgary overnight. So I'm there very early in the morning because I understand there may be a joint press conference between the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, and the Premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith. And the subject, if this does indeed go ahead, could be a sort of agreement between the two of them about an oil pipeline. Now, when I heard this first a few days ago, reported by Rick Bell of Post Media Newspapers, I thought, Rick is pretty accurate about things. And I actually allowed myself for about a moment to be hopeful and think, wow, wouldn't that be amazing if a pipeline was actually approved from Alberta to the West Coast? Sell some oil, not just to new markets like India, Taiwan, Korea, Japan. I know Mark Carney will want to sell the Communist China, but there's a lot of other customers out there who are not dictatorships. Not only is it new markets and new sales, but it would allow Canada to get world prices for oil as opposed to the less than world prices we're getting because we have all our sales going to Americans, pretty much. I was excited and I thought maybe Mark Carney is different. But then over the last two days, I see him saying, including in Parliament, that it has to get the approval of the premier of B.C. and it has to get the approval of Indian bands who apparently Mark Carney thinks have a veto. Our constitution gives a veto neither to Indian bands nor to other provinces. And so I don't understand what's going to happen. That's all the more reason to go tomorrow. So that's where I'm going to be in the day and hopefully I'll have a chance to put a question to both the Premier and the Prime Minister. I can imagine there's going to be a ton of journalists there. We'll see how it goes. So I'll be on the scene trying to do some on the ground reporting, and that's where I'll be. And wish me luck. But more importantly, wish the country luck. That's our show for today. Until next time, on behalf of all of us at Rebel World headquarters, to you at home, good night and keep fighting for freedom.