On Tuesday’s episode of The Ezra Levant Show, Tracey Wilson of the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights (CCFR) joined Ezra via Zoom to react to a Globe and Mail opinion piece urging Canadians to “think about nonviolent resistance” in the event of a hypothetical American invasion.
Ezra said the piece, written by Richard Sandbrook, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Toronto and vice president of Science for Peace, treats an invasion as a real possibility. He called it “fantasy on top of fantasy on top of fantasy.” He also pointed out that Prime Minister Mark Carney was the one who started talking about the Canadian Armed Forces making plans for such an eventuality, and that Carney told the New York Times before he told Canadians.
Tracey did not mince words. “It’s pure liberal boomer fear porn. That’s what it is. And it’s actually embarrassing,” she said.
Tracey pointed to a National Post piece in which retired Vice Admiral Mark Norman said the Canadian Armed Forces have basically been left to rot. “And he’s not overstating that,” she said, adding that suggesting Canada could defend itself against an American invasion “is ridiculous. Thankfully, that is not going to happen.”
She said Carney began his campaign with “a lot of fear porn about the Americans and an invasion,” encouraging Canadians to hate their neighbours to the south despite a long friendship and partnership. “It’s unhelpful. It’s unhealthy. Trump won’t be there forever,” she said. “And at some point, he’s going to have to stand on his own two legs and tell us why he’s created this kind of division in this country.”
Ezra also read the Globe and Mail’s own description of nonviolent defence as “a strategy of deterrence and resistance in which unarmed civilians play a major role, either alone or in coordination with the armed forces.” He noted that the article never actually explains what that would look like in practice.
For Tracey, the contradiction is the point. “This is the same government that is spending billions of your tax dollars confiscating legally acquired firearms from licensed, vetted, RCMP-tested and trained gun owners and not investing that money in our military,” she said. “You can’t disarm your population. And at the same time, you use fear porn about an American invasion that is literally a fantasy in the minds of the liberal talking heads in Ottawa.”
Ezra and Tracey also discussed the state of the military. Ezra said Canada’s forces are underfunded, under-equipped, demoralized and underpaid, and that the aging CF-18s would be like “a Datsun driving alongside a Ferrari” next to an F-35. He said Canada’s participation in the Maple Flag exercise in northern Alberta has been cancelled.
The conversation then turned to the attempted attack on a synagogue in Belleville, Ontario, on Yom Kippur. Ezra said the gunman, Sean Ward, turned out to be a Canadian military veteran who arrived with enough guns and ammunition to kill everyone inside, and that a police officer outside was wounded in a shootout but stopped what could have been a massacre. Ezra cited a Globe and Mail headline reporting that the shooter did not have a gun licence.
Tracey said that detail proves the Liberal approach is aimed at the wrong people. “He completely evaded any detection because he just simply didn’t go get a firearms license. He acquired his guns illegally, like many other madmen in our country,” she said. She added that none of the measures brought in since 2015 would have stopped that crime, and gave credit to law enforcement for saving lives that day. “It just goes to show we are 100% focusing on the wrong people.”
She said the Liberals’ 11-year record on public safety has been “a tragic and bloody failure,” and that it will continue until Carney changes course. She also tied the issue to the 2020 Nova Scotia mass shooting, which she said was the catalyst for the Trudeau-era gun bans even though the killer worked completely outside the licensing system.
Ezra brought up U.S. scholar Dr. John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, who argues from a purely pragmatic standpoint that mass shooters are generally only stopped when someone with a firearm arrives. Ezra said that is why he sees an argument for private firearms ownership, noting that in Israel and the United States armed bystanders have stopped attackers before police arrived.
Tracey agreed, pointing to chat records that came out last week involving the Tumbler Ridge shooter. She said the killer indicated that the only things he worried might stop him were law enforcement or someone else with a firearm. “You can live in a unicorn and rainbow world where you say, no guns, never,” she said. “You can’t put that genie back in the bottle.”
“It’s my opinion that the best thing we can do is give people the means, the opportunity and the training to protect themselves and those that they care about,” Tracey concluded.
