Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister’s approval ratings plummeted to 32% in a recent poll, despite his draconian COVID measures—like $5,000 fines for playing pool at the Corona Hotel—targeting families over high-risk seniors. Lawyer David Anber’s "Fight the Fines 1000" campaign challenges quasi-criminal laws, exposing arbitrary enforcement by unelected officials while crowdfunding legal battles nationwide. Pallister’s fear-driven restrictions, including banning Christmas gatherings and cards, reveal a disconnect between public health logic and civil liberties, raising questions about overreach and constitutional legitimacy. [Automatically generated summary]
In today's podcast, I talk about Brian Pallister, who tried being angry guy a few weeks ago, and his poll numbers plummeted to the lowest in Canada.
So now he's trying to justin Trudeau cry a little bit on camera, dramatic acting.
I'm not sure if it's working, but I'll take you through Brian Pallister's little theatrical drama.
I'll give you my thoughts on that.
Before I do, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
Just go to RebelNews.com and click subscribe.
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All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, Brian Pallister makes a promise he can't keep.
It's December 4th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Hey, did you see this story just a few days ago?
Premier Brian Pallister has the lowest approval rating in Canada.
Poll.
Let me read a bit.
Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister had the lowest approval rating of the nine premiers whose performance respondents were asked to rate, with 32% of the residents approving of the premier.
This is a 12-point drop since the last quarter.
Of those surveyed, 64% disapproved of Pallister, and 4% were not sure.
It isn't the poll that matters to me.
What matters to me is that we beat COVID, Pallister said during a press conference on Tuesday.
Basically, it tells me that people don't like COVID, and neither do I. We'll stay focused on fighting COVID.
Got it.
Except COVID wasn't on the poll.
Pallister was.
Bizarrely, Quebec's Premier François Legault, a province of less than 25% of the population in Canada, has had about 60% of the deaths and cases from the disease.
But Legault is at 64% and the poll is tied for first place.
I can't explain why.
But Pallister's explanation of people not liking the virus doesn't seem to hold up.
It also doesn't explain his 12-point drop in the last quarter.
So if Pallister's political performances aren't that strong, well, he tried for a dramatic performance.
What do you think?
Are you convinced by this dramatic thespian?
I will do what I believe is right.
And right now we need to save lives.
If you don't think that COVID's real, right now you're an idiot.
You need to understand that we're all in this together.
You cannot fail to understand this.
Stay apart.
So I'm the guy who has to tell you to stay apart at Christmas and in the holiday season you celebrate with your faith or without your faith, that you celebrate with normally, with friends and with family, that where you share memories and build memories.
I'm that guy.
And I'll say that because it will keep you safe.
I'm the guy who's stealing Christmas to keep you safe.
Because you need to do this now.
You need to do the right thing.
Because next year we'll have lots to celebrate and we'll celebrate this year if we do the right thing this year.
You don't need to like me.
I hope in years to come you might respect me for having the guts to tell you the right thing.
And here's the right thing.
Stay safe, protect each other, love each other, care for each other.
You've got so many ways to show that.
But don't get together this Christmas.
I wonder if that works.
Those crocodile tears, that dramatic acting.
I mean, I give him points for trying.
It seems to work for another substitute drama teacher level actor, Justin Trudeau, especially with women.
They seem to love it when Trudeau looks right into the camera, maybe with a wink, and uses his sexy voice to ask forgiveness for whatever he's just been caught doing.
You know, Blackface, firing Jody Wilson-Raybold, the Wii charity scandal, taking free trips to a billionaire's vacation island, what abs.
He just looks into the camera.
Will it work for Canada's most despised Premier, Brian Pallister?
I have to say, it's probably more effective than Pallister's last attempt.
Guilty Until Proven Otherwise00:11:00
Instead of being sad, remember when he was practicing being nasty?
It's clear that unfortunately some organizations and individuals just aren't getting the message.
In all, across Manitoba last week, 95 tickets had to be issued.
That's roughly 10 times the number of tickets that was handed out at the start of the month.
Looking back at last week, the combined total of fines was over $125,000.
But it's not about the money.
It's about preventing situations that hurt people.
Situations like the one I'm about to describe.
One of the tickets had to be issued to a hotel in western Manitoba that had its beverage room open and had people playing pool in it.
And that hotel was the Corona Hotel, which I have had a beer or two in in my life, and it's a nice hotel in Glenella, Manitoba.
But guys, don't do things like that.
This is disheartening.
If you break the public health rules, there's a good chance you might get your name mentioned on TV.
Yeah, see, there's a problem with that.
If you get a ticket for something, and you probably know this, that's what he's been doing, handing out $5,000 tickets.
The ticket is not the result of the trial.
It's an accusation that starts a process.
It's a notice of a trial to come.
When you get a traffic ticket, same sort of thing, the policeman who gives it to you, he's not the judge.
He's the accuser in a way.
You can say, all right, you got me, fair cop.
Or you can say, no, no, no.
Or you can say it's just not worth fighting.
I'll pay it.
But that's your choice to concede without a trial because on every ticket, if you ever got a ticket, it's clearly laid out how you can have a trial.
And you can make your case to the judge.
And he's the final decider.
Not that I've ever had a ticket.
I wouldn't know.
People just tell me these things.
Anyway, so people are innocent until proven guilty.
That's another way of saying you probably heard that phrase.
It's why during trials we always say the alleged murderer or the accused murderer because it hasn't been proven yet.
Until the judge rules and makes official findings of fact and law and then the appeals are exhausted.
He ain't guilty yet.
But Pallister just published to the world his list of enemies, by which I mean people that his bureaucrats have chosen to accuse of breaking his laws.
They haven't had a trial yet, but no matter, the Premier has declared them guilty, except they're not.
They're not crimes.
We don't even use the word guilty.
These are tickets.
The Premier has done so much more than convict them, hasn't he?
He's defamed them.
He's smeared them.
He's possibly killed their businesses.
$5,000 fine is bad.
But the Premier of the province denouncing you to the whole world, that?
Well, that'll bankrupt a guy.
I wonder if that is why Pallister is the most hated man in Manitoba.
Or maybe it's because he's doing this strange thing.
He's picking on Christians.
I mean, look at this, by a reporter from the Winnipeg Free Press.
Stand for this fascism that you are demonstrating today.
That's right.
This is not right.
Close down the liquor stores.
Go close down the sex shops.
The stores that sell drugs, come on, why are they being closed?
Why can't we go to church on a private property?
Exactly.
God is essential.
We need them no more than ever.
So the police are swarming the churches, finding anyone, even that same reporter from the Winnipeg Free Press.
She was threatened just for taking pictures of the police raid and sending squad cars in the dead of night to harass pastors at their home?
So what makes me different from the others that were there at church?
We don't have your identities.
Oh, okay.
You're picking on one person.
Do you realize?
So again, like Tyler said, you've got three options.
And the options are laid out on your ticket here.
Okay, your first option is that you could plead guilty and pay the fine.
The second one is that you can plead not guilty and then you can retire in court.
Your third option would be to plead guilty with an explanation where you could present your arguments to the justice or the judge and then they'll look at your information, they'll look at our information, and then they'll decide whether or not to issue the full fine, a partial fine, or the only way that completely.
Yeah, I can't put my finger on it why Brian Pallister is suddenly unpopular.
So he's trying the opposite approach now.
Guys, he's the victim, you see.
That's why he's crying or trying to.
He's the victim.
He's the one who has to tell you the hard truth.
Look, shutting down your business, going bankrupt, being harassed by the police.
That's not a hardship, you see.
Being the guy who does that to you, that's the hardship.
This is going to hurt him more than it hurts you, people.
Have you no mercy, no sympathy for Brian Pallister and all he's been through as he destroys lives in Manitoba?
I mean, sure, he has never missed a paycheck.
None of the ruling class have.
But it's been so, so hard on him, you see.
So as you shut down your business and as you lose your job and live under virtual house arrest, give a thought for poor Brian Pallister, would you?
I mean, he'll probably be on the next private jet to Costa Rica where he really likes to be.
I don't blame him.
Winnipeg is pretty cold in the winter.
And he's got this gorgeous place in Costa Rica that he really seems to prefer.
So that's how he suffers, people.
Have you no care?
You know, my main problem with Brian Pallister, though, isn't the sociopathic drama, the fake acting, the fake tears, how he is pivoted, asking you to believe that he's the victim and that you're the enemy, that he's the hero.
Just ask him.
That's not my main problem.
My main problem isn't even that he's a hypocrite.
It's that he's lying about how to stop the virus by fencing off parts of stores and banning people from shopping for, say, Christmas gifts.
That simply has nothing to do with the virus.
It will not stop it.
It just won't.
I mean, did you see this video by Kiam Becksy the other day?
Friends, I've been out there and the people, they need some holiday cheer.
Your time to shine And neither is this.
But it's Christmas.
I know, but we're not supposed to be selling it because we can find.
It's from Palette Brian Palliser.
Brian Palister.
Yes, please.
I'm talking about this.
You know what?
If you break the public health rules, there's a good chance you might get your name mentioned on TV.
I can just let you guys know that they happen in this morning.
Wow.
So they, the COVID guys.
The COVID police.
Yes.
They come in at least twice a day.
Do you think that the act of that lady removing something from Keen's cart changed the epidemiological situation, changed the health or medical situation, that Keene was at risk of getting the virus?
Stop, stop, stop.
You can't buy that Christmas card.
You get the virus.
Get that out of your card.
But how bad is it?
He's saying we have to cancel Christmas, as in we do.
I think he'll be spending Christmas on a nice beach somewhere.
But how about is it for you and me?
I mean, really?
Well, here's some graphs from Manitoba's own website.
Look at the fourth chart on this page.
It's the number of people who got sick.
That's in red.
Number of people who got better, that's in blue.
And the ones who have died are in green.
Can you see the green?
It's pretty hard to see, isn't it?
That's why you hear a lot about cases.
Not a lot of talk about hospitalizations or deaths.
Well, it's a case, by the way.
It's a positive test, including false positive tests.
I'm not saying this virus is not deadly.
It is.
Twelve people passed away in Manitoba yesterday, reportedly from the virus, if we believe that, and let's believe it.
Nine of them were in their 70s, 80s, or 90s.
In fact, five of them were in their 90s.
Now, I'm not saying that's a good thing, but I am saying it's information.
This disease targets people who are extremely old, have extremely serious underlying health conditions.
I'm not talking about minor things.
I'm talking about liver disease and kidney disease and heart attacks and dementia, that sort of thing.
Manitoba refuses to publish that comorbidity information as it's caused.
Alberta is actually one of the only jurisdictions that does it.
And the vast majority of deaths had not one, not two, but three underlying diseases.
People in their 80s and 90s with extreme health conditions.
I'm not glad they're dying.
Of course, it's a tragedy.
But I'm saying why are families with kids being told they can't have Christmas?
If you were to say, hey guys, don't invite your 90-year-old extremely sick grandma to Christmas.
I'd say, well, you have no right to separate families.
You have no right to tell families they can't be together.
That's fascist stuff.
But at least I would understand it from a medical advice point of view.
Protect 90-year-old grannies, people in their 80s and 90s, especially if they have diabetes and heart attacks and dementia.
Sure, don't invite her for Christmas dinner.
That could be good advice.
Though I note that most of these deaths of seniors are actually not just seniors, but seniors in institutional seniors' homes, not just random seniors.
So why are kids being published again?
Punished again, excuse me?
Why kids being punished?
Why are young families being punished?
That's why Brian Pallister is a fool and a dangerous fool.
Not because he's crying, but because he's lying.
Banning Christmas will not stop this disease any more than banning Christmas cards will, which he's also done.
Banning anything involving children or young families won't make any difference at all.
It's very sick seniors who are at risk.
Brian Pallister is a liar.
And judging by his acting, he's not a very good one.
Oh, and if you think that this Christmas is the last one he'll want to cancel, and that next Christmas, if he's still in office, if you think he won't be banning Christmas then too, well, then maybe you're the kind of person who actually thinks they really meant it when they said in March, two weeks to flatten the curve, and then we'd be all free.
Fighting Fines: A Lawyer's Cause00:13:55
Hey, folks, stay with us.
Up next, Sheila Gunn-Reed talks about fighting the fines.
Well, here in the city of Ottawa, David, you know, we've been now, what, on six or seven months of flattening the curve?
And I know that the city of Ottawa has been, on one hand, vigilant in terms of trying to enforce some of these new regulations, but on another hand, in many situations, they've been overzealous in terms of their enforcement and in terms of whether or not they're even giving effect to any exemptions that exist.
And there's questions as to whether or not we really need these laws anymore at this point in time.
Welcome back, everybody.
As you can see, I'm obviously not Ezra Levant, but I am filming his interview for him.
And I have somebody coming on the show today who I think is very instrumental in the fight for civil liberties in this whole country.
I want to introduce you to David Anber.
He will be our point lawyer on our very ambitious, but I think very worthy Fight the Fines 1000 campaign.
We want to take on 1,000 cases across the country.
Wherever you get a ticket, we're going to be there to fight it.
And we want to take on the first 1,000 of them and provide a free lawyer.
Now, when you hear the words free lawyer, you think you get what you pay for, but David's one of the best and we are covering the cost through crowdfunding at fightthefines.com.
David, thanks for coming on the show.
I guess my first question to you is, why on earth would a young, ambitious, up-and-coming lawyer want to take on this cause of fighting these fines?
Because, you know, people who engage in civil disobedience are not always the most well-behaved people.
They're kind of prickly by nature.
That's why they do these things.
And yet here you are stepping into the gap to take on these cases.
Well, Sheila, I, like you and like millions of other Canadians, are very concerned about the status of civil liberties in our country right now.
There's no denying that we do have a public health situation that's going on, but the reaction that we're seeing from mayors and premiers across the country, often with rules and laws that are not even voted on by a legislator, what we're seeing is this government overreach and the application of these laws involve infringing on many people's civil liberties in this country.
Now, is this something that you do every day in your normal work?
What is the normal David Anber case that you would take on?
Well, my firm is primarily a criminal defense firm, but I also do provincial offenses as well.
I'm based in Ontario, and I also do many cases in Quebec as well.
And provincial offenses are what are known as quasi-criminal offenses.
They're offenses that follow a criminal procedure, so to speak, but they're not criminal in nature.
The most common one that almost every Canadian at one point or another will have contact with is some form of driving offense, either be it a parking ticket, a speeding ticket, or some type of ticket relating to an accident.
So these fines that we're going to be fighting are fines that are issued under provincial proceedings in all of the provinces.
So they are provincial offenses and they're very similar in some ways to the provincial offenses that my firm routinely handles as well.
Now, again, you don't work for us.
You'll work for the clients, the people who receive the tickets.
So you don't really need to be specific with me.
Although, you know, we've already got cases that are rolling in.
They're already in the pipeline.
We're trying to streamline the process because it's very ambitious to take on a thousand of these.
But in the vaguest and most general terms, what's the legal strategy here to fight these tickets in court?
Well, there are going to be different strategies for each of the different cases.
I'm already aware of a few of the fight the fines cases that have been coming across my desk.
But I mean, right at the top, we're going to start by looking at the law in question.
Is that law constitutional?
We're going to be looking at the application of it because in many situations, the law just grants these broad powers to premiers or to mayors to essentially decree whatever they want.
And often these decrees are not written very properly or they're not written in a way that respects the Charter of Rights.
So we're going to be looking at that.
We're going to be looking at whether or not the people are even factually innocent.
In many cases, I've seen where clients have received tickets and they did not actually commit an offense, or at least there's a dispute in law or a dispute in fact as to whether or not an offense even occurred.
You know, that's one of the things that I think is lost in the shuffle of all of this.
Politicians, and in some instances, it's health bureaucrats who are making regulations, unaccountable unelected health bureaucrats, by the way.
They're making these regulations that seem to stomp on the Charter of Rights.
And there is no law to be made in this country that stomps on the Charter of Rights.
Right.
And I've been saying this since the beginning, Sheila.
I think we keep hearing, you know, we have to listen to the scientists, we have to listen to the epidemiologists, we have to listen to the medical experts.
And that's true.
We do have to listen to them.
But when it comes to public policy, it's our politicians that need to be making the decisions.
Those politicians need to, of course, listen to the experts on health as it pertains to the health consequences.
But they also need to listen to other voices, voices regarding civil liberties, voices regarding the economy.
And it's not up to medical health officials to say that these types of restrictions or these types of laws should be designed.
They're to provide information on the seriousness of the current health situation, on what some of the effects would be.
But ultimately, it's up to the legislators in each province to craft good public policy that balances the health concerns along with the economic concerns, along with the mental health concerns of Canadians, and along with civil liberties.
And that's not being done right now.
You know, I'm glad you brought that up: that politicians need to be the ones making these decisions and they should be balancing all considerations.
And that's a great segue into something I wanted to ask you about, because you are in the center of the universe of Ontario, and I'm out here in God's country, Alberta.
And, you know, two Conservative premiers are handling this pandemic very differently.
And In Alberta, Jason Kenny has sort of taken the advice of the unelected health bureaucrats and balanced it with the economy and mental health and business concerns.
That's not happening in Ontario.
And so you're seeing businesses in Ontario being, you know, fined for doing things that are perfectly legal in other jurisdictions with the same COVID infection rates.
So for you, you're going to be working in this patchwork quilt of regulations.
How do you plan on managing that?
Well, I think my approach is going to be the same everywhere we go, looking at the constitutionality of the law, looking at how it was applied and looking at the facts of the case.
I mean, what we're seeing, Sheila, is we're seeing essentially fear being used as a blunt object across the country.
I know that to compare just a little bit of Ontario and Alberta, my last look about a week ago at the statistics is that in Ottawa, for example, about three-tenths of one-tenth of one percent of the population of Ottawa were out and about with COVID.
Now, I appreciate in Toronto, for example, the numbers closer to about 1%.
In Calgary, I believe it's one quarter of 1%.
So we do have different situations across the country, but we're still dealing with relatively microscopic numbers, which can often be dealt with by less intrusive measures than we're seeing right now.
When I talk about fear, obviously we're well aware that the mainstream media have been using fear to get people all worked up about the possibility of getting COVID and what that means.
But we're actually seeing fear as being a bigger problem with regards to the premiers.
Premiers are fearful as to how they're going to look if they don't one-up each other with the measures that are being taken.
We saw that in the United States, this preposterous idea that Donald Trump was responsible for all of the 200,000 or 300,000 deaths.
And then here in Canada, we're seeing some premiers who are acting either in Quebec or Ontario and other provinces, Manitoba, with this fear in their eye that if they don't overreach and if they don't use overkill in the manner in which they pursue this,
that they feel that they're going to be hung up to dry in the media or somehow they're going to be falsely held responsible for what is turning out to be not as serious of a public health crisis as we originally thought.
You know, I'm so glad that you brought up Manitoba because, again, Brian Pallister claims to be a conservative premier, someone who, you know, you would think would be on the spectrum of caring about civil liberties.
And yet they issued more than $180,000 in tickets in one week to people accused of breaking their coronavirus regulations.
There were 100 tickets issued and nearly half were for not following various public health orders.
According to the CBC, take that for what you will, but I mean, they're reporting the raw numbers here.
In total, 20% of the tickets were related to gatherings of larger than five people.
So this could be a family get-together.
And yet that's basically been outlawed in Brian Pallister's Manitoba.
How do we fight this?
I guess the idea is to take on as many cases as we can and just overwhelm them with our ability to fight back and maybe they'll just stop charging people and ticketing them?
Well, I think again, Sheila, it comes back to the issue of fear is that lots of people, citizens, are so fearful that when they either hear of these tickets being issued or even receiving them themselves, they kind of just say, they capitulate and say, well, I guess, you know, it's something that's necessary because we have such an important health situation.
But I think we just need to look at these tickets one at a time, whether they come to us through Fight the Fines or anyone who's representing themselves or who has other lawyers.
They need to be looked at and see if there's any real connection between, first of all, health concerns and the laws that are in place.
And if not, there can be an attack on that in terms of the constitutionality of it.
And then we need to look to see if people are actually breaking the law.
We see bylaw enforcement officers.
I have one case here in Ottawa where a bylaw officer assaulted my client as he was leaving a park following an instruction to leave a park very early in the pandemic.
And he was assaulted by the bylaw officer.
The bylaw officer has since lost his job, but the charges remain and we're fighting that.
So each one of these charges, if they're fought and if they're challenged and if people don't just simply capitulate, I think we'll see a bit of a different shift in focus from both the government and the prosecution branch of the government as to what extent this needs to be pursued.
Now, one last question.
In some instances, I think a lot of these gatherings of larger than five people, particularly in Manitoba, end up being church services, Christian church services.
And I think there's some legal question around the ability of police and bylaw enforcement officers to disrupt a church service that's taking place.
And we've seen some video footage of that, particularly with the Mennonite church near Steinbach.
How do we fight that?
How do we help that?
Well, at this point, Sheila, I'm not able to say that I've seen a considerable amount of evidence that churches are being targeted or that freedom of religion is being targeted.
But they do make an easy target, so to speak, for bylaw enforcement officers, is that where these laws, and we're seeing this across the country, have basically resulted in normal society as we're used to.
You know, walking to the store, being able to leave your house, being able to see the faces of the people in your community.
Normal life has been changed.
And for many people, worship is a very important part of normal life.
And so where people want to keep experiencing normal life, that's where we're seeing the friction between some of these overreaching government policies.
Well, David, I'm so glad that you are working on these Fight the Fines cases with us.
I know that you and I have been working on one in particular that I hope everybody at home stays tuned because that'll be coming out shortly.
If anybody would like to support the work that David is doing to help people fight these fines, they can go to fightthefines.com and donate today and see some of our prior cases and of course some of our successes that are already starting to trickle in.
David, thanks for joining me.
Fighting the Fines00:00:44
We'll talk very, very soon.
Thank you, Sheila.
Stay with us.
up from Ezra right after the break.
What a busy week.
I had so many projects I was working on on the side, so I feel like I didn't do enough videos myself.