“Believe it or not, Mark Carney found a worse person to be our governor general.”

That was how Rebel News commander Ezra Levant kicked off his nightly podcast in the wake of the news that former Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour — “the ultimate woke Ottawa insider,” according to Levant — has been tapped to replace outgoing vice-regal representative Mary Simon at Rideau Hall.

“We’re going to come to miss Mary Simon, who was merely financially profligate, aside from the odd anti-Canadian jab,” he warned.

“Other than spending $100,000 per flight on food … she really kept to herself.”

Arbour, on the other hand, is a “Third Worldist,” a “globalist,” and “doesn’t really believe in borders,”which is why she went on to become the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights — all of which makes her “the perfect Mark Carney candidate,” according to Levant.

“I predict that she will not be able to keep it court (sic), and will mouth off on everything and consider herself to be a political actor, and not a quiet member of (the) court of King Charles,” he concluded.

“Mark Carney knows exactly who he’s getting,” he noted. “It’s a reminder that as bad as things can get, they can always get worse.”

Also still very much on the Rebel radar: The Alberta independence movement — although not, it’s worth noting, the growing controversy over the Centurion Project, the pro-separatist group that allegedly used data gleaned from the official provincial voting list to set up an online database, which prompted Elections Alberta to seek a court injunction to shut down the site and is now under investigation by both the agency and the RCMP, as Canadian Press reports.

A quick scan of the site reveals no coverage of the unfolding drama over the apparent data breach, but Levant did release the results of a ”massive public opinion poll (with) a whopping 3,000-person sample size,” which was commissioned by Rebel-aligned third-party advertiser Act For Alberta, which suggests that, “If the referendum were held today, it would fail,” Levant reveals.

“Only 35 per cent of Albertans support independence — and 56 per cent oppose it. That’s an uphill battle, for sure. But it’s not impossible. Quebec’s separatists started their 1995 campaign 20 points behind and nearly won. Britain’s ‘remain’ side led almost the entire Brexit campaign, but on referendum day, Brits voted to leave. Six months is a lifetime for a political campaign.”

Even so, he acknowledges that it does raise a key question: “Why is overall support for an independence vote so weak? I think that one reason is that good people have legitimate questions, like: what about the Canada Pension Plan? What about freedom to travel to other parts of Canada? Those kinds of questions haven’t been answered. The objections haven’t been overcome — but they could be.”

Another problem, as he sees it: “The pro-Ottawa side has a lot of high-powered communicators on the payroll — the CBC, the NDP, and most of the political establishment. People like Thomas Lukaszuk, Jason Kenney and Naheed Nenshi. They’re lifelong politicians. But who has led the ‘yes’ side of the campaign? Grassroots, volunteer organizers have done a great job getting petitions signed. But they haven’t crafted a message that reaches beyond the rural, conservative political base of the province.”

Given all that, “the challenge is to persuade another 15% or 20% of people to support independence,” he concludes.

“Our new poll suggests that means different messages. And probably different messengers, too. If you talk about “independence” in abstraction, you’ll win over a third of voters. But when you remind people of all the terrible things the system has done to Albertans, all of a sudden, you remind Albertans of how unfair the system is. This referendum is nominally about independence. That’s true. But it’s also the biggest, loudest way to hit back at Ottawa in a way they’ll never forget.”

Elsewhere on the site, Alberta Rebel bureau chief Sheila Gunn Reid, who is also listed as the primary contact for Act for Alberta on the Elections Alberta registry, explains why the poll shows that the federal Conservatives may have “an Alberta problem.”

In addition to the topline numbers, the poll “shows something remarkable,” she points out.

“66 per cent of Conservative Party of Canada supporters in Alberta support independence; 51 per cent strongly support it. Another 15 per cent somewhat support it. That is not a fringe. That is not a handful of angry keyboard warriors. That is the federal Conservatives’ Western engine room looking at Confederation and saying: maybe this deal is done.”

It also “explains something important about the way Pierre Poilievre and the federal Conservatives talk about Alberta independence,” she observes.

“They are not going full Liberal-style Project Fear. They are not screaming that Albertans are stupid, racist, reckless, dangerous separatists who need to be shamed back into line. Why? Because they can read a poll. If two-thirds of your own Alberta supporters back independence, you cannot sneer at them without blowing up your own base. You cannot smear them as extremists when they are your riding presidents, your donors, your door-knockers, your sign crews, your voters.”

Gunn Reid also chatted with “constitutional lawyer and activist” Keith Wilson about the First Nations-initiated lawsuit that has “put a pause on the certification process for signatures backing the independence movement in Alberta,” which, according to Wilson, doesn’t have a “good legal, factual basis” for its central claim that Alberta independence could violate constitutionally protected treaty rights.

“There’s no threat to the treaties,” he notes. “The 1930 Natural Resources Transfer Agreement demonstrates that another level of government can step in and take over treaty responsibilities.”

WIlson also “condemned Energy Minister Tim Hodgson’s announcement last week that Canada will use Alberta’s energy sector as ‘leverage’ in further negotiations with the Trump administration,” according to the written recap of the show.

“My head exploded,” Wilson recalled.

“I tweeted about this, the irony. They’re saying, ‘Oh Alberta can’t separate because you’ll be so vulnerable to the United States you’ll have no leverage in your negotiations.’ Canada’s now looking for negotiations as a nation, and they can’t find any leverage but for Alberta’s wealth.”

Gunn Reid also highlighted what happened at a recent round of  ‘Ask a Trans Person,’ a “taxpayer-funded” event that took place in Okotoks, Alta., last week.

“Open dialogue. Community conversation. Welcome to all. Except… not really,” Gunn Reid revealed.

“Because when former Mount Royal University professor Francis Widdowson showed up — a real academic, someone capable of asking an unscripted, inconvenient question — she was removed.”

Meanwhile, Toronto-based mission specialist David Menzies made the trek to Cambridge, Ont., for a rally against “Mark Carney’s gun-grabbing Liberals” that brought out “hundreds of vocal gun owners (and their non-gun owning allies” — including Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who “dropped by to deliver a speech to loud applause and boisterous cheers,” he reports.

“In addition to Poilievre, several Conservative MPs were on hand including, Blaine Calkins, Connie Cody, Kelly DeRidder, and Matt Straus.”

Rounding out the Rebel News roster, West Coast correspondent Drea Humphrey got an on-camera update from Lara Yates, the “Sechelt, B.C. mother of four” at the centre of an “ongoing legal battle against land acknowledgement rituals in public schools,” she notes.

“Since December 2025, Yates has been banned from attending her children’s school, Chatelech Secondary, after she publicly opposed a land acknowledgment she was subjected to ahead of her child’s performance. Her children were also temporarily barred, but the fallout didn’t stop there,” as Yates’ daughter was allegedly “singled out by staff … causing her to be bullied and distressed,” and, according to Yates, “reported to protective services.”

An internal investigation followed, and was “quickly closed with no concerns,” but “some of the damage was already done, leaving Yates’ children feeling unwelcome at the town’s only high school, especially when their own mother couldn’t set foot on the property,” she notes.

“To defend free speech, parental rights, and seek a fair resolution for her and her children, Yates reached out to the Free Speech Union,” which “has since taken on her case,” and is preparing to represent her as she takes her fight to the B.C. Supreme Court.

Over at Juno News, Cosmin Dzsurdzsa and Clayton DeMaine teamed up to flag past comments by Canada’s incoming governor general in which she “derided Canadian soldiers as ‘white boys who like guns and don’t like women’ while overseeing an inquiry into the Canadian Armed Forces in 2022,” they report.

In an interview with Maclean’s, Arbour “argued Canada’s military risks perpetuating a restrictive internal culture if it continues recruiting what she described as ‘white boys.’ She said the Armed Forces should rely more on external institutions, including human rights bodies and academia, to advance diversity within the ranks,” adding: ““If you just recruit white boys who like guns but don’t like women or anybody who doesn’t look like them, you’ll perpetuate that culture.”

Rounding out the roster, Juno contributor Melanie Bennett calls out a McMaster University union that “shared Marxist Jihadi propaganda from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a designated terrorist entity in Canada” in a social media post to mark May Day. “The image featured a stylized figure holding a hammer, sickle, and rifle alongside the PFLP logo,” she noted.

Trending on the progressive-left side of the Canadian activist mediaverse:

• Alberta-based Rabble blogger David Climenhaga wonders “who will take the fall” for the apparent leak of Alberta’s voter list, and asks, “in light ofl the data breach, can the signatures on the separatist petition be trusted?”
• In a joint essay published on The Breach, a group of Canadian academics make the case that Canada’s “FIFA exclusion of Palestinians and Iranians reveals a lethal double standard,” and warns that “we cannot celebrate the beautiful game while the ink on our visas remains a tool of colonial management and control.”
• Press Progress Ontario reporter Eric Wickham talks to the organizers behind the ‘Fight Ford’ protest movement “spreading across Ontario.”
• The Maple’s Adam D.K. King goes through the fine print of a new report from Teamsters Canada that suggests the surge in Temporary Foreign Worker permits “are destroying trucking” as the industry “has settled into a business model dependent on workers whose legal status in Canada renders them vulnerable to exploitation and employer control.”