Article by Rebel News staff.

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Last week, Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand announced a new ambassador to UNESCO. Almost nobody noticed. On Tuesday's Ezra Levant Show, Ezra Levant said the résumé is the story.

Noémie Dansereau-Lavoie has never been a diplomat. She spent nearly a decade at CBC/Radio-Canada, worked for the Quebec government, and was Montreal's French-language commissioner, a job Ezra described as enforcing language laws. From 2019 to 2021, she was a senior adviser in the Canadian Heritage minister's office.

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That minister was Steven Guilbeault, whom Ezra called "the convicted criminal who climbed the CN Tower for Greenpeace." He pleaded guilty to public mischief over the 2001 stunt and received a conditional discharge.

At a spring 2021 Canada 2020 event, Guilbeault cast politicians as the victims of online abuse and floated blocking orders as "a nuclear bomb in a toolbox of mechanisms for a regulator." Blocking entire websites, Ezra noted, is what China, North Korea and Iran do.

She wasn't getting coffee, he said. Rebel News obtained 1,800 pages of Heritage emails from that spring through access to information. They show her as the minister's office contact on a UNESCO project called "Diversity of Content Online."

The project, as Ezra described it, was Guilbeault's deal with France, Germany, Finland, Australia, Google, Netflix and Deezer on what the internet should show you. The published principles say recommendation algorithms "should promote content reflecting different sources, perspectives, ideas and genres," and call for fostering public service media and public information on media ownership and funding.

Ezra's reading: the government is telling YouTube what to promote, the CBC is on the list and Rebel News is not, and the ownership rule targets viewer-funded independents rather than a CBC funded in the federal budget. The commitments section still reads "TBD."

UNESCO has since written its own rule book. Then-director-general Audrey Azoulay said in 2023 that platforms must be regulated "without delay," while adding that free expression must be protected.

Canada, Ezra argued, is all in. It endorsed a UNESCO-backed climate information integrity initiative at COP30, which he took to mean you're not allowed to be a climate denier. In February, Culture Minister Marc Miller announced $300,000 over two years for UNESCO's digital work. In Ezra's telling, Canada also voted to start writing a binding protocol extending the 2005 culture treaty to the internet. Miller's release says Canada sees a protocol as a legitimate option if partners agree.

At home, Carney reconvened Guilbeault's old expert panel for another online harms bill. One member is a UNESCO chair.

By Ezra's count, Trudeau and Guilbeault failed three times to pass internet censorship laws, so they took the plan to the UN, where nobody voted for it and nobody can vote it out.

The United States is leaving UNESCO on December 31, citing "divisive social and cultural causes." Meanwhile, Canada is walking in with a cheque and a vote, he said.

Carney is Guilbeault, just more effective. Guilbeault said the quiet part out loud and it blew up in his face. Carney makes the appointment on a Tuesday with a press release nobody reads.

"Same plan, same people," Ezra said. "They couldn't pass it with your vote. So now they're doing it without a vote, and they're counting on you not to know this."