Ezra Levant blasts CBC’s $1.5B government funding as a trust-killer, citing blackface suppression and COVID-19 internment claims while dismissing their reforms as PR stunts. Pastor James Coates’ eight-week detention in Alberta’s Remand Center—despite open churches—exposes legal overreach, with prosecutor Karen Thorsrude hiding behind political ties to Medew and Kenney. Conservatives’ Huawei hiring and petition site purge add to accusations of hypocrisy. Levant warns: unchecked power, whether from left or right, erodes democracy when accountability vanishes. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, the CBC thinks it knows why nobody trusts them.
It's March 5th, 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 is government.
But why publish them?
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
The other day, I took you through the Edelman Canada survey that showed that half of Canadians don't trust the media.
In fact, half think the media positively lies.
That's incredible.
It's one thing to say, I think the media is biased, or I think they only present one side of the story.
But to say, no, no, they actually positively lie.
They deceive us on purpose.
That's incredible.
And half of Canadians think that.
I think it's true.
I mean, do you think the media tells the truth about Justin Trudeau?
We know they don't.
Here's one of a million examples.
Remember when Time Magazine, which as you know, is an American magazine.
Remember when they broke the news in the last Canadian election that Justin Trudeau had a long-standing fetish of dressing up in blackface?
Sounds like a pretty amazing scoop, right?
Weird that it came from an American magazine during the Canadian election, right?
But in fact, within hours after Time magazine published, other Canadian media released their own photos and even videos of Trudeau and Blackface that they obviously didn't just search for from scratch that night.
They had been sitting on their own photos and videos of Trudeau and Blackface for months, for years, who knows?
And they had no plans to publish them.
They were sitting on what were objectively, obviously, demonstrably news, and they deceived the public, all of them together, by hiding them, by covering them up for their boy, Justin Trudeau.
In fact, even more telling was the hunt for the man, private citizen, who dared to leak the photos to Time magazine.
How dare he?
Who was he?
What's his angle?
Why did he break the pact of silence?
I'm serious.
The media assigned more reporters and did more digging on who he was than they did on Trudeau himself.
They had the Trudeau dirt.
They just refused to publish it.
So yeah, people don't just think that the media is biased.
People think that the media are malicious, that they actively lie, and they're right.
One reason, if you're looking for a reason, is that the people who the media are supposed to scrutinize, the government, well, they pay off the media.
It would be like coming up on a watchdog and giving him a nice steak.
Yeah, the dog's going to be your friend.
We don't call the media payoff a payoff.
We call it a bailout or financial support or an investment, but it's obvious that the only media the government likes to give money to are those that the government describes as trustworthy.
Because of course, I mean, they mean that the media that the government themselves can trust trust to do things like hide Trudeau's blackface photos, trust to do things like hunt down the man who dared to leak those photos.
If you are the media that reports on the government and you take money from the government, like a watchdog taking a free steak from a burglar, it is reasonable that people will think you are compromised.
It would be like a hockey referee taking payments from a team he's refing.
It's fair to believe that the ref is no longer independent and that if he makes a bad call, it's actually on purpose because he's being paid.
That's our journalist, pretty basic.
The fact that they're also all left-wing adds to it.
That goes to bias, but the lying is quite something.
So what does the CBC say about this?
They who are the most compromised, they who are explicitly a state broadcaster, who receive $1.5 billion a year from Trudeau, and they who are still actively suing the Conservative Party in Canada in court to this day.
I'm serious.
So here's a tweet from the CBC about all this.
Canadian trust in journalism is wavering.
Here's what CBC News is doing about it.
And if you click that link, here's what you get.
It's an editor's note from a guy named Rodie Fenlin.
Canadian trust in journalism is wavering.
Here's what CBC News is doing about it.
Recent survey found 49% of Canadians think journalists are purposely trying to mislead.
Okay, I'm curious, what is the CBC going to do about this?
Will they sever their financial ties to Trudeau?
Of course not.
Will they maybe change their political lineup, make it a little more balanced?
I mean, their flagship panel is called At Issue, and it's hosted by Rosemary Barton.
She was one of the original CBC journalists who sued the Conservative Party in the last election.
And then there's Chantal Hibern, who is a Trudeau Foundation scholar.
And then there's Althea Raj, who was Trudeau's official biographer.
And then there's Andrew Coyne, whose cousin Susan Coyne was Pierre Trudeau's mistress and had a daughter by him.
So yeah, this is probably a photo that could appear in a dictionary next to words like incestuous or nepotistic.
Forget about the fact that they're all from the Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal Triangle and that they haven't had a new idea in decades.
They are all in the tank for Trudeau, all on the Trudeau payroll in one way or another.
So yeah, are they going to fix that to get the trust back?
No, You see, the problem isn't with them.
The problem is with you.
Now, I'm going to skip to the first part of this editor's note where he outlines the lack of trust as per the Edelman Report.
I already told you that the other day.
Let me skip to their proposed solutions, or rather, who they blame.
Who's to blame?
Are we looking at the gasping canary in the coal mine of Canadian democracy?
Plenty of lame has already been dished out for the growing distrust in news media.
Some point to the elimination of the U.S. Fairness Doctrine in the late 1980s and the rise of shock talk radio, then the splintering of audiences on cable TV, then the internet and later social media and algorithmic filter bubbles that tend to reinforce one's own worldview.
Hang on.
Hang on.
It's 2021.
I checked.
And the CBC thinks that one of the reasons people don't trust the CBC, people in Canada, remember that this was a Canadian survey.
The CBC thinks the reason Canadians don't trust it in 2021, when the CBC takes $1.5 billion from Trudeau and they have all Trudeau panels about Trudeau and they cover up his blackface and his groping scandals and the sexual assault of Rose Knight in Creston BC.
The reason for this distrust is because some radio stations in the United States in the 1980s had some shock jocks.
Yeah, denial isn't just a river in Egypt, I guess.
Say, by the way, does Canada even have a shock jock?
Like even one?
Or even just a conservative that's allowed to be on the radio anymore?
Can you name one?
And if you could, is that why people don't trust the CBC in 2021?
What a laugh.
And of course there's Donald Trump.
I'm reading, this is actually their next excuse.
There's Donald Trump, the former U.S., I'm laughing.
They don't even know what they sound like.
The former U.S. president's persistent efforts to repeatedly delegitimize mainstream press as the enemy of the people and fake news shaped and hardened public attitudes.
Got it.
So people in Canada don't trust the CBC because of Donald Trump.
Now that's an Escher drawing, if ever there was one.
The CBC hates Donald Trump.
We know that.
Just like Trudeau does.
The CBC blames Trump for everything.
Now he's been gone as president for over a month.
He lost the election in November.
But the CBC still can't stop grousing about him.
It's an example of their bias and in many cases their misinformation.
They were huge promoters of the conspiracy theory that Trump was a Russian spy, completely debunked by the Mueller inquiry.
The CBC believes every anti-Trump conspiracy.
They say the Canadians don't trust them, the CBC, because of that bloody Donald Trump.
He's to blame for everything.
It's like in the book 1984, oh, Goldstein, he did that again.
Oh, the reason why the wheat harvest is down.
It's that Goldstein.
They blame him for everything.
The fact that they are saying that shows that they have Trump derangement syndrome, which is one reason people don't trust them.
They still have TDS.
They don't even realize that their explanation for why people don't trust them is proof of why people can't trust them.
I wonder if they try that when they get pulled over for speeding.
Officer, I get it.
You say I was speeding, but it's that Donald Trump.
And get this.
I'll read some more.
As trust has eroded, journalists have found themselves increasingly targeted and harassed.
The growing perils of doing journalism in the U.S. were explored in this excellent panel discussion hosted last week by the CBC's Adrian Arsenal on behalf of the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.
It's worth a watch.
And yes, we are seeing increased harassment of Canadian journalists in the field.
Hey, hang on.
Can you name a single Canadian journalist who has been harassed, assaulted, hit?
A single one in Canada?
I can.
Sheila Gunnread, David Menzies, Kian Bexty, a cameraman Mocha, and Lincoln, and Efren, and others at the Rebel.
But I cannot name a single other journalist in Canada who has been attacked in a decade, in decades.
Can you?
The CBC doesn't have to hire bodyguards to go out there like we do.
The CBC isn't assaulted either by Antifa or the cops like we are.
How on earth could any of that explain why people hate the CBC other than, look, they're lying even now?
Like with their other excuses, it actually ironically explains the reason people don't trust the CBC.
The ridiculousness of their explanations, that's the explanation itself.
The fact that they are so unaware of who they are and how crazy they sound to normal people, the fact that they are blaming Trump and U.S. talk radio and mythical people attacking CBC journalists that never happened, that actually does tell us quite a lot about why no one trusts them, doesn't it?
And how they will truly never fix the problem, because in their mind, the problem is you, or certainly anyone other than them.
Okay, so if they're not to blame for the fact that people hate them, if they're not to blame for the fact that people think they're liars, if everyone else is to blame, well, how do they propose to solve that problem?
Well, it starts by attacking their enemies list, which is basically a list of anyone that people trust more than they trust the CBC.
Because if you believe in the CBC's conspiracy theory, they are hated unfairly.
They are the victim.
Everyone else is to blame from 80s talk radio in America to Donald Trump.
So obviously their solutions to fix this problem would involve fixing other people, getting other people to change, not the CBC.
Are you crazy?
Let me read.
What CBC is doing to rebuild trust in journalism.
this is going to be good as canada's public broadcaster no no no no no you're the state broadcaster It's different.
But let me get back.
As Canada's public broadcaster, the CBC has taken a very active role on the trusted journalism file.
Here's what we are doing to try to earn and keep your trust in these skeptical times while also battling the growing scourge of disinformation.
All right.
So they're going to battle disinformation and untrustworthy people, but only disinformation and untrustworthy people outside of the CBC.
They will not fix their own untrustworthiness.
But hang on, they acknowledge that half the country hates them.
And yet the only untrustworthiness they will tackle is found in others, and they think this will make people trust them more.
I'll read some more.
CBC's News is a member of the Journalism Trust Initiative.
So you know it's good, because it's called the Journalism Trust Initiative.
An effort to establish globally recognized standards of trustworthiness in news.
Okay, so you think you'll be trustworthy if you just work on changing the definition of trustworthy.
So you don't actually have to change what you do other than just to try and change the definition of trustworthy, to bend it until you can say, yeah, that's us.
CBC Radio Canada has been a member of the Trusted News Initiative.
Oh, you got another one.
Trusted News.
That sounds really trustworthy.
Since its inception in 2019, the TNI brings together global news organizations and tech platforms to combat disinformation.
It created a real-time early warning system to flag serious disinformation that may pose a threat to life or the integrity of the electoral process.
Okay, same thing.
You know that we see you, right?
You know that we see that so far you are not addressing any of your own problems.
You're talking now about the integrity of electoral processes or some weird thing about saving lives around the world.
I don't know.
But what does it have to do with the fact that no one trusts you?
Half the people hate you, think you actively lie.
Why do you think anyone cares about what you have to think about global elections in some faraway place other than maybe if you've got some weird Trump fetish again?
Seriously, have you seen anything yet on this list that would make you change your mind from these CBC boys are liars to, I was wrong, these CBC boys aren't liars.
In fact, are you sort of detecting the opposite?
Why No One Trusts You00:07:51
They're trying to shift the blame and point fingers at literally anyone else for anything else?
I'll read some more.
CBC Radio Canada has joined with the BBC, that's another state broadcaster, the New York Times, that's owned by Mexico's richest man, and Microsoft in support of an effort to develop Project Origin, an open standard for confirming the authenticity of content from trusted sources to fight deep fake video news generated by artificial intelligence.
This is a new application of established technology to digitally verify the authenticity of our news content when it appears on other online platforms.
Got it.
So again, they're going to scrutinize other people, other people, not themselves.
Now, we talked with Alan Bukhari about this the other day.
This is Microsoft's program to track down who wrote some political criticism, some tweets, some meme to track it down to the individual person.
It's about ending privacy for political critics and political dissonance.
They would love this in Hong Kong.
That's explicitly what this project is.
Again, it has nothing to do with the CBC lying to you or spinning you.
It has everything to do with the CBC attacking its competitors.
And by that, I mean any critic, anyone who mocks the CBC, anyone who disagrees with it.
And I note all the state broadcasters who really want to hunt down people who are doing unauthorized journalism.
Again, so far, have you seen anything about the CBC's own untrustworthy untrustworthiness yet?
I mean, we're pretty deep into this editor's note.
And so far, he really isn't talking about any of his own problems, is he?
They sure want to talk about how much everyone else is lying.
But boy, they're just perfect themselves.
I'll keep going.
CBC News is part of the Trust Project.
Well, that's got to be like the fourth organization with the word trust in it, so you know it's true.
An international partnership with tech and media companies to increase transparency and accuracy in online news.
CBC policies on transparent labels, corrections, bylines, and links to our JSP on our digital pages have become a model for other partners in the project.
Okay, so they will label corrections and bylines on their own stories.
Okay.
I'm not quite sure that's enough to make people think you're not lying all the time.
Like take this story, just to pull one out of the air.
PM health officials warn Canadians against believing COVID-19 internment camps disinformation.
Disinformation campaign falsely suggests Canadians will be forcibly sent to quarantine sites.
Really?
Canadians will not be forced into COVID-19 internment or containment camps.
A spokesperson for Health Minister Patty Haidu said Thursday, taking aim at a disinformation campaign that has been circulating on social media for weeks.
Oh, that's the worst, those social media types.
The claim that the federal government is preparing to forcibly intern Canadians is patently false.
The spokesperson said, you're not allowed to know who the spokesperson is, but that's for us to know, not you.
I'm not going to read the whole thing, but as you now know, it's a lie.
Like, this is one of those wicked lies that people hate the CBC for.
Or at the very least, they promoted the liberal government's lies credulously.
As we here at Rebel News have meticulously documented for months, from the Yukon to Winnipeg to all across the country, there have been government quarantine centers around the country.
And yes, they are forcing healthy, innocent people into them at great cost.
You arrive at the airport in Canada from a foreign country straight to the internment for you, even if you're a Canadian citizen, completely healthy and innocent of everything.
No trial, no hearing.
If that story by the CBC is not an outright lie, it's certainly propaganda and disinformation, and it's being proved false.
And yet, I checked, no corrections.
I thought they just said they're really good about their corrections.
So yeah, they've got the byline of the CBC propagandist who wrote the original fake story, and they have a button you can click to report an error.
But to this day, I just checked.
That story has been up on their website since October.
The CBC is propagandizing lies on behalf of their government paymasters.
But sure, other media need to catch up to the CBC's trustworthiness.
I'm not going to read the rest of the self-serving blather to you.
I promise you, it's more of the same.
Never do they grapple with the news peg here.
Half of Canadians think they're liars.
Nowhere do they even accept that they're the problem, let alone offer a solution.
Let me read how this ends.
These worthy initiatives, notwithstanding, the audience's trust will ultimately be won or lost on the day-to-day work of our journalists.
That begins with an approach to news coverage that is open-minded, fair, and genuinely curious.
Oh, no one's more curious than the CBC reporter.
It means challenging our assumptions, testing every fact, avoiding errors and admitting them quickly and transparently when they occur.
It means listening to understand: does every Canadian we serve believe we will give them and the stories they care about a fair shake?
Until the answer is yes, there's more work to be done.
As always, I trust you will let me know what else we can be doing to earn and keep your trust.
Hey, do you think the CBC is open-minded?
If you're Christian or pro-life or pro-Trump or pro-firearms or anti-Trudeau, do you think the CBC respects you and listens to you and represents you and earns your trust?
If you're a lockdown skeptic, do you think they care about you?
Do you think they've reported about the pastor in prison in Edmonton in the same way they would have done if it were, let's say, an imam from a Muslim mosque in prison?
Or let's say if it was Stephen Harper who put him in prison for some CBC's coverage of liberal cry bullies in parliament who get mean tweets from right-wingers, that's a staple of CBC journalism these days.
Do you think that's the same way they cover conservatives who were abused by leftists?
Does the CBC cover antifa and Black Lives Matter violence in the same way they cover peaceful lockdown protests?
Do you think they cover Republicans as lovingly as Democrats?
Could they possibly be more in love with China?
None of this is even on the radar.
In fact, their response is more fuel to distrust them.
They live in an alternative reality.
I'd even say it's tantamount to a conspiracy theory, certainly disinformation, fake news.
The CBC mindset, as expressed in this editor's note, it's incredible.
It's really incredible to look at the world through their eyes.
They think somehow that their inherent leftist pro-Trudeau bias is not why people distrust them.
And they think that if anyone is lying, especially about those quarantine facilities, it's you.
They think the whole reason why people don't trust them and like them, they think it's unfair.
They think it was done to them by some cosmic evil forces like Trump and the late Rush Limbaugh in the 1980s.
They don't list a single thing they're doing wrong.
They don't have a single prescription to fix their own mess.
They're signing up for three or four clubs that have the word trust in them.
Understanding Health Orders' True Cost00:15:58
Yeah.
And here's the delusion.
I think they actually believe their own spin.
I think the CBC actually believes they're the honest ones, that they're the ones telling the truth, even about the quarantine detention facilities.
Yeah, no surprise the CBC had a flagship radio show called Q because they are the ones deep, deep, deep into their own bizarre cult, aren't they?
Stay with us for more.
Well, earlier today is when the ruling was released from the Edmonton Court keeping Pastor James Coates in prison in maximum security for another two months.
We got John Carpe, the president of the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms, on my Skype call.
I do a live stream every day at 12 noon Eastern, so that was 10 a.m. Mountain time.
We had John Carpe on right as that ruling was fresh issued from the court.
And so I interviewed him then.
I really want to show you the whole thing.
So this is about 20 minutes of my live conversation with John Carpe right when the news was out.
By the way, I know that 12 noon Eastern, 10 a.m. Mountain is sort of a strange time, especially for people who are busy working.
But if you are free anytime during the weekdays at noon Eastern, I'd encourage you to tune in.
I cover the live stream Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
Sheila Gunried, David Menzies do it Tuesday, Thursday.
Sometimes we mix it up, have other staff there.
I really think it's a fun show.
And if you want to interact with us in real time, that's the way to do it through the chat function on YouTube.
Anyway, so that's where this clip is from.
And I really thought, well, it was a good interview.
Let me play it in full for you now.
So here's what I said.
And here's what John Carpe said to me earlier today.
We have John Carpe, so I'm going to come back to the super chats later.
Hey, John, I see you crystal clear via Skype.
Thanks for joining us.
Appreciate that.
You're in Alberta right now.
We introduced you already, president of the Justice Center.
You're the lawyer.
You're a firm, your public interest law firm charity works for James Coates.
Can you give me an update?
We were just talking to Sheila, who was on the calls yesterday and today.
But is there any news you have for us today?
Well, Pastor Coates sadly is going to be staying in the Edmonton Reman Center for the next eight weeks.
We are contemplating an appeal to the Alberta Court of Appeal.
So there's still a possibility if we proceed with that.
And if we're successful, we would like to get him out of jail sooner.
So that's under consideration right now.
Otherwise, this is a pastor who's been in jail since February the 16th, already more than two weeks, and now for another eight weeks in jail for not being willing to comply with unscientific and unconstitutional health orders in respect of which the Alberta government has put forward no evidence that the health orders are serving the interests of public safety.
This is an assumption that the judge was operating on this morning.
And I'm not making the claim that he was incorrect in law, but certainly very sad when you've got governments that are not providing science or evidence to back up these health orders and they're engaging in fearmongering.
And then now we've got a pastor in jail for not being in full compliance with the unconstitutional health orders.
All right, I've got a few questions for you.
I'm going to try and run through them.
I know your time is limited.
You have a lot of things to do today.
He's still at the Edmonton Reman Center.
I think we have some visuals of that.
It's a maximum security facility, typically used when violent criminals are arrested and they're held before bail.
It's also a longer-term facility, but the visuals I've seen of it, I was in the old Reman Center as a lawyer once.
I haven't been in the new Remand Center, but it visually reminds me of another maximum security prison I was in.
It is a terrible place to be in.
You're with murderers, drug dealers, rapists.
Is it your understanding That Pastor Coates will remain in this horrible facility for the next eight weeks?
That's my understanding, yes.
In maximum security, I've never heard of such a thing before.
Like, there's surely minimum security.
You know, heck, put them in one of these quarantine hotels that Trudeau has set up.
I've never heard of a nonviolent pastor eight weeks in maximum security with murderers.
I've never heard of that.
Well, this is the ideology of Jason Kenny's government right now in the UCP: is that if you violate one of these unconstitutional health orders, that you are just as much of a threat to society as a murderer or a rapist.
That is the ideology of the government right now.
And Pastor Coates is paying the price for that ideology.
The silver lining on the cloud is that we do have a trial date, May 3rd to May 5th.
And for the first time ever, the Alberta government, after violating our charter rights and freedoms for almost 12 months now, for the first time, the government's going to have to show the public some evidence.
They're going to have to prove before the court that COVID is an unusually deadly killer, which is something they've been telling us.
But I mean, Statistics Canada tells us that the death rates in Canada in 2020 were very much in line with the death rates in 2019, 2018, 2017.
The government's going to have to put forward evidence to support its theory that healthy asymptomatic people are significant spreaders of the virus.
They're going to have to show us the science.
They can't just claim that.
The government's going to have to show us the science on the PCR tests, which are unreliable, which were never intended to diagnose COVID and which have false positive rates as high as 90%.
The government's going to have to justify in court why they are choosing to rely on these PCR tests.
The government's going to have to show in court that the lockdowns have actually achieved some good.
Now, that's easy to claim.
You hear politicians all the time telling us, well, if it wasn't for these lockdowns, way more people would have died.
Well, I'm sorry.
That's speculation.
That's just an assertion.
They're going to have to back up that assertion in court.
The government's going to be having to answer for all of the lockdown harms in court.
All they're doing now is, you know, kind of making some cooing, sympathetic noises about how hard this must be for people that have lost their jobs.
But the government's going to have to show in court that the lockdowns are doing more good than harm.
So the silver lining on the cloud is that because of the suffering of Pastor Coates, the government's going to be forced to show the public the science and the evidence for the first time ever, because all we've had in the last 12 months is fear-mongering and speculation and assertions.
And the government doesn't have the evidence, and they're going to have to scramble hard in the next two months to come up with it.
Yeah.
You know, sometimes I wonder if I would have the toughness and the courage to go to jail for something I believe in.
I mean, I've never done a criminal thing in my life.
I wouldn't go to jail as a criminal.
I would go to jail for some political crime.
And I mean, I've never been arrested at all.
But occasionally, I think, would I have the courage and would my family support me and my friends and my, I mean, would our business continue?
And in my mind, I've always thought, okay, I'm in jail overnight or something.
I can't imagine 10, 11 weeks in that place.
I just can't imagine.
That's Pastor Coates.
This is tremendous courage.
I asked myself the same question, you know, because I think it's highly unlikely that I would ever be in jail for committing a criminal offense.
But I do sometimes ask myself the question, would I be willing to go to jail for exercising my charter freedoms of speech and expression and religion and conscience and association and peaceful assembly?
I would hope that I would have the same courage that Pastor Coates is currently displaying and that he's displaying every day.
He can get out of jail on a moment's notice if he's willing to violate his conscience and comply with unscientific and unconstitutional health orders.
I would only hope that I would have the courage that he is displaying currently, if ever it came to that for myself.
I would only hope that I would have that level of courage.
It's extremely rare.
And yet, it may be the thing that turns the tide for us.
Let me speed up with my questions.
And I know I'm asking you some philosophical questions and you're answering very thoughtfully.
Now, when I was talking to Sheila Gunread a moment ago, I put something to her and she agreed with me, but I want to check with you because you're a lawyer closely working on this case.
It's my understanding that the charges or the offenses against this pastor are basically public health orders for which the penalty could be a fine, but not a criminal conviction, certainly, and not jail time.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, because the point I take from that is he's serving 10 weeks hard time in a maximum security prison for an offense that's akin to a speeding ticket.
You're not going to go to jail for it even if you're convicted.
So we're holding a guy in prison until his trial.
And even if he loses his trial in the worst way possible, he wouldn't be going to prison then.
Am I right or have I mistaken the law there?
My understanding is that Pastor Coates would not go to prison unless he was found in contempt of court.
And so if the Alberta government sought a specific injunction against Grace Life Church in Edmonton, then and was successful.
And if there was a specific court injunction against that church, and if Pastor Coates or other members of that church then defied the injunction, they could be found to be in contempt of court.
But the actual health offense does not.
The actual health offense, my understanding is there's no jail time for that.
So he's doing 10 weeks in maximum security, being held for a trial, that on the substance, he couldn't be jailed for one day.
That seems to be the case.
Yeah, no, and if I hear otherwise, I'll get back to you.
That's my understanding, is that there's no jail time as penalty for violating these unscientific and unconstitutional public health orders.
Let me ask you about something that Sheila and I were talking about.
It's been a long time since I practiced law, but the law of bail is not that complicated.
Basically, there's two grounds.
I mean, you practice law every day.
The first is, are you flight risk?
Are you going to show up for your trial?
So a pastor with roots in the community with a family, he's not flying off to Venezuela.
So there's no flight risk.
This guy's going to show up, obviously.
And he's fully committed.
He's fully committed to showing up for it.
The Crown is not even alleging that there's any chance that he's not going to show up for his trial.
So the second ground is danger to the community.
And that typically means danger of violence.
So that's why you would keep a terrorist or a murderer or a rapist in jail because you're actually worried that they'll do something violent.
Obviously, there's no violence from this man.
It would be a stretch to say the danger is, you know, public because he's not infected himself.
He's not like Typhoid Mary.
And here's the kicker.
His church is opening without him.
In fact, his church is opening in solidarity with him.
We've had Sheila Gunn Reed there the last couple of weekends documenting it.
Church is packed.
So whether he's released or not, that church is packed.
It's not correlated to whether or not he's released.
In fact, it might even be a reverse correlation there there because he's in jail.
So what exactly is the danger?
So on the first grounds, flight risk, there is none.
And you're saying the Crown Karen Thorsrude doesn't even say there's a risk.
On the second grounds, danger.
Obviously, he's not a danger of violence.
The only danger I could possibly think of is they would say he would make a health danger by having the full church.
But that doesn't turn on whether or not he's released because they're open anyways.
How does that make mistakes?
How does that make sense?
You know, Ezra, I cannot disagree with your reasoning.
I mean, if this was really, so we've got two things at play.
One is we've got the ideology of Jason Kenney, as well as Rachel Motley.
I mean, the UCP and the NDP, they're both pro-lockdown parties.
So we've got an ideology here that says that a full church is as much of a threat to the public as murderers that are on the loose.
But then we also have what, and I don't want to tempt the powers that be, but you've got an inconsistent application of that ideology insofar as, you know, if Sheila Gunread has been at the church and the church is packed, then logically, you know, the government should send in a thousand police officers and just arrest everybody there.
And, you know, I don't know if Jason Kenney's willing to go that far, but there's certainly an inconsistency here that, you know, I haven't been at the church.
I'm in Calgary a three-hour drive away.
But, you know, if you tell me that Sheila Gunread has been there and it's packed, and I take that to be true, then you've got, you know, supposedly this big public health risk that is continuing.
So it's just disgraceful.
This is the consequence of people blindly accepting whatever politicians tell them and just blindly grasping for this illusion of safety when the hard data, the Alberta Health Services data, Statistics Canada data tells us that COVID is not an unusually deadly killer and it's not something that everybody should be afraid of.
Contrary To Public Interest00:06:53
And it would just make far more sense to protect the vulnerable, which is, you know, if you're 82 years old and you're sick and you're elderly and you're in a nursing home and you already have, you know, cancer, emphysema, heart disease, what have you, then those are the people that we should be protecting.
But to violate our human dignity and our human rights and our fundamental freedoms by not being allowed to have your parents over for Christmas dinner, it's just appalling.
And things will get worse as long as the public is complacent and continues to buy into this fear-mongering that is just not grounded on facts.
Yeah.
I know you've got to go at the top of the hour, so we only have a, is that right?
You've got to go, you've got a hard exit.
I've gotten until 11.
Yeah.
Okay, so we've got about five minutes, and I'll be judicious with our time.
Sheila and I talked about the disgrace of Karen Thorsrude, the prosecutor, trying to hide her name from the public yesterday, pretending that she's been under threat by these little lambs at the church.
I think that's patently absurd on the face of it.
If it is in fact true, we'll then send those threats to the police.
They certainly seem to be eager to enforce them brutally.
Maybe Pastor Coates will have some roommates.
I don't believe it for a second.
I think that you have a prosecutor who realizes she's doing something contrary to the public interest.
And as I said earlier, bringing the administration of justice into disrepute.
And so naturally she wants to hide her name.
And she also wants to play the victim because the whole world sees that she's actually the persecutor.
So the fact that Karen Thorsrude wants to hide her name is contrary to our nature in law.
And I'm going to shout her name to the rafters.
But I also must note, John, that we do not have independent prosecutor advocate one-man shows.
Some European jurisdictions have strange sort of independent roving prosecutors with no checks and balances on them.
You could even say the American special prosecutor system allows that.
But Karen Thorsrude has a boss, and her boss has a boss, Casey Medew, the justice minister, Jason Kenney, the premier.
I believe that cabinet and caucus both discussed this matter.
At what point do they say, drop this?
Can they say drop this?
Do they have the legal power to say drop this?
This is contrary to law, contrary to the Constitution.
How can we get what is clearly a political prosecution to be stopped?
You know, it's a good question, and I dearly want to see Pastor Coates released from jail as soon as possible.
And he should never have been jailed in the first place.
It is a thorny and challenging question that you ask, because one of the aspects of the rule of law is that politicians, politically elected people, do not interfere in prosecutions.
And the whole country was looking at this issue a year, year and a half ago with Prime Minister Trudeau interfering with Jody Raymond Wilson.
I'm sorry if I'm not sure.
Jody Wilson-Rabel in the SNC Lavalan matter.
You bet Trudeau was trying to get his friends off the hook.
Clearly corrupt, but he was doing it.
This is the opposite.
This is a public interest, and it would be a public explanation.
This wouldn't be, hey, pst, let my rich friends at SNC Lavalan go from their corruption case.
This is a public statement.
Whoa, this is contrary to public.
It's the same question of political interference, but that was interfering to let a genuine confessed criminal organization go.
I mean, SNC Lavalan confessed to crimes.
The question was, do they get a plea bargain or not?
This is a man who has been charged with no crime and has been persecuted in a manner no one's ever heard of before.
I think it's the same issue, but opposite sides of the spectrum of right and wrong.
Well, you know, I'm totally sympathetic to what you're saying.
And like I said, I'd like to see him get out of jail.
But we do have to ask ourselves, do we want a country or a province in this case where the elected officials are interfering with who gets prosecuted, who does not get prosecuted, who gets put in jail, who does not get put in jail.
So it's kind of scary territory.
I will say about Karen Thorsrude, though, that perhaps she believes sincerely that she is doing the right thing.
I try to not go into people's hearts and minds.
And I assume that people are, they have good motives.
They're doing what they believe to be right.
But what I think is incredibly slimy is for her to pretend that somehow her safety is at risk.
And I would love it if she, you know, if that is the case, she should put an affidavit in the court and she should have transcripts of the death threats, if any, or she should have, you know, the threatening emails or notes or this or that.
Because Pastor Coates is 100% peaceful, 100% nonviolent.
The members of his congregation are peaceful and nonviolent.
His wife was interviewed last night by Danielle Smith, and she said that she's very sad and heartbroken by being separated from her husband.
And at the same time, she accepts that this is reality.
So this is not a biker gang or some criminal operation.
And it's interesting because when you do get trials before the court where there's a prosecutor who's going after a biker gang or some criminal activity, in those scenarios, the prosecutor wears it as a badge of honor that his or her name is publicly known.
So for Karen Thorsrude to be wanting her name not mentioned on court documents, to me, it seems very slimy unless she did in fact get, unless there is in fact a real threat to her danger and to her life or to her safety, in which case she should swear to an affidavit and file the affidavit with the courts and she should report matters to police.
But just to insinuate, this is a slur against James Coates, what she did in court yesterday, I think.
Yeah.
Well, I know you got to go, but I have reviewed that version of the section of the criminal code that allows any justice system participant to be secret.
Karen Thorsrude's Controversy00:03:21
And you have to have a written application.
You have to, there's about 10 conditions.
The judge has to balance the public interest of society and other measures to protect.
What happened yesterday wasn't just slimy innately, but the process of it was clearly contrary to the law.
I think Karen Thorsrude knows deep down inside that what she is doing is contrary to the nature of Canada and Canadians.
And you know what?
You're a public person prosecuting in the name of the queen.
You own it.
And if you don't like it, quit and be rid of your disgraceful job.
No one's forcing her to put pastors in jail.
Anyways, John, it's great to have you.
Thank you for joining us.
I know you've got to go right now, so we'll say goodbye.
I want to give a shout out to your website, jccf.ca.
Stands for Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms, jccf.ca.
Folks can chip in.
You actually get a charity tax credit because these guys are a registered civil liberties public interest law firm.
So feel free to chip in if you want to help John and his team fight for Pastor Coates.
That's what the website looks like.
There, you get tax receipts.
It's the whole meal deal.
John, great to see you again.
Good luck out there.
Good to see you.
On my show last night, Gilly writes, Aaron O'Toole proves once again that he is not as advertised.
Yeah.
That's what they said about Justin Trudeau, not as advertised.
Well, they said not quite ready.
Aaron O'Toole.
You know what?
On the show yesterday, I told you how Aaron O'Toole hired Huawei's vice president.
That's shocking to me.
But after I recorded that, I discovered something even crazier.
The Conservative Party has their own version of banhuawei.com.
That's our petition site.
The Conservative Party had their own website, their own petition to ban Huawei, and they just took it down.
Now, was that a direct order from this Mr. Enright, the Huawei VP?
I don't know.
But already their policy is changing.
I wouldn't trust Aaron O'Toole as far as I can throw him.
Clive writes, what happens when you reach a point when there is nobody you can trust to lead your country?
Yeah, you know, it really is choosing the lesser of two evils, isn't it?
Jay writes, the pastor James Injustice makes me feel like we are all frogs in the boiling pot of water.
Our rights and freedoms are slowly being boiled away.
It's a terrible analogy, but I know exactly what you mean by that.
We are gradually accepting things that if it would have happened all at once, would have been shocking.
Oh, just two weeks to flatten the curve.
Oh, just one more month.
Oh, just another one.
Oh, we'll let you out soon.
Yeah, we're coming up on a year now.
I think the idea to hold the pastor in prison for 10 weeks, as much as some truly violent criminals are, I hope that makes people wake up.
We'll find out, won't we?
That's our show for today.
Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters and you at home, good night.