Erin O’Toole’s Conservative support plummets to 30% nationally, trailing Liberals by 8 points, with Ontario (28%) and Atlantic Canada (25%) showing stark regional gaps. Ezra Levant blames O’Toole’s lack of clear policies beyond climate change and media avoidance, suggesting provocative stances like opposing transgender athletes or criticizing Trudeau’s immigration moves during a recession with 9.5% unemployment. Legal battles—including Trudeau’s prison hotels (federal court, April 14) and Alberta’s COVID restrictions (late April)—expose potential police overreach in churches, violating Section 1762, while Rebel News fights fines and lockdowns via 600+ cases. O’Toole’s strategy must shift from media scolding to grassroots outrage, targeting voter frustrations over pandemic policies and civil liberties abuses. [Automatically generated summary]
Instead of grumbling about Aaron O'Toole, the Conservative Party leader, I thought, you know what?
If I was trying my very, very best to give him constructive advice, good advice, helpful advice, practical advice, specific advice, what would it be?
If I had like five suggestions or even four or three, what would they be?
Well, that's today's show.
What do you think?
Do you think the ideas I'm about to share with you would help or hurt?
Would they get him closer to 24 Sussex Drive or be a disaster?
Well, listen and you tell me later.
Let me invite you to become a video subscriber, though, to what we call Rebel News Plus.
It's the video version of the podcast.
I think it's useful because we always show video clips and charts and graphs.
I show some new polling charts today, which should run a chill down your spine if you're a conservative.
Anyways, I'd love it if you subscribe.
Go to RebelNews.com, click subscribe, eight bucks a month, because we live on that money.
We pay our payroll on that money.
And I'd rather do it that way than take the media bailout.
All right.
Here's today's podcast.
Tonight, a new poll shows Aaron O'Toole falls further behind.
Instead of being negative, I'll give him the best advice I can.
It's April 2nd, 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 of the White House is because it's my bloody right to do so.
I'm disappointed in Aaron O'Toole, but really being disappointed in politicians is the norm, isn't it?
It's rare not to be disappointed in a politician.
It just usually takes a bit longer.
Here's the 60-second version, canceling Derek Sloan on trumped-up charges of racism.
Laughable given that Sloan's entire family is visible minority, demoting Pierre Polly, the party's one star, banning Pierre from speaking at the party's recent conference, flip-flopping on 4-8.
He now says he loves it.
And of course, just a couple of weeks ago, drawing a line in the sand for his own party members, telling them they have to shut up and buy into the left-wing idea of global warming or else.
As we all know, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world.
Canada has changed.
Our party has to change too.
There's been a lot of speculation about what I'm going to say about climate change in this speech.
To those who are expecting a dramatic moment, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed.
But I will say this.
From the first days of my campaign to lead our party, I've said two things consistently.
Even Trudeau doesn't bang on about global warming these days.
People who care about it are in the single digits, according to Trudeau's own polls.
Everyone's talking about the pandemic and the lockdowns and jobs and debt, except Aaron O'Toole.
So how's that working out for you?
Well, here's a new poll.
I grant that it's from Abacus, which has too many connections to the Liberal Party for my liking, but it's the same thing we've seen recently in a nanos poll and a legend poll.
Instead of getting a bump from O'Toole's recent conservative convention, O'Toole sort of tanked things.
Here's the new abacus data.
Let's take a look at it.
Liberals open up an eight-point lead over the conservatives as O'Toole's negatives keep rising.
Two weeks ago, the Liberals were ahead 33 to 29.
Now the Liberals are ahead 38 to 30.
38%, that's pretty close to majority territory for Trudeau.
Here it is by region, which I think is interesting.
In Ontario, the Liberals have a 16-point lead, 44 to 28.
That's going to be a slaughter.
I'm sorry.
I mean, BC looks pretty tied up.
31, 31, 29 of the NDP.
That's interesting.
9% for the Greens.
That's going to be one to watch.
Probably some regional differences between the BC Interior, Vancouver, Vancouver Island.
The Atlantic's going to be a wipeout when the Liberals have 51%, almost double the Tories.
Obviously, the Tories are still strong in the prairies, but seriously, 25% support for the Liberals in Alberta under Trudeau?
That's a sign that people aren't exactly enthused with O'Toole.
You might even see a few Liberals pop up in Edmonton, I hate to say it.
But my point is the man's going to lose the whole strategy behind shifting to the left and distancing himself from Sloan and Polyev and Kenny and even from us here at Rebel News.
The whole point was to ingratiate himself with former liberal voters in Ontario and to a lesser extent BC and the Atlantic, and I guess Quebec.
It's just not happening.
Those former liberal voters look like they will continue to be liberal voters.
In fact, sort of the opposite is happening under O'Toole.
I should say it looks like O'Toole is less popular in Canada than the Conservative Party itself.
If I'm understanding these different polls right, this chart shows that 33% of Canadians don't like him, whereas 19% do like him.
So the earlier chart showed us that 30% of people say they would vote conservative, but if only 19% say they like the leader, I think it suggests the problems maybe with the leader, not the party or its policies.
And I get it.
O'Aaron O'Toole is not well known.
He doesn't stand for things except bizarrely global warming.
So what should he do?
He's wasted more than half a year as leader, longer actually.
And the leadership campaign for Tory leader was an extremely long affair.
Andrew Scheer, remember him?
He announced he was quitting in December of 2019.
The party leadership vote was in August 2020.
It's now April of 2021.
That's 16 months.
What does Aaron O'Toole stand for?
Why should you vote for him?
If you don't know by now, I mean, maybe it's too late.
The answer is a week.
Scolding conservatives at your own party who are skeptical of global warming is not a good answer for who you are.
It'll make liberals feel good, but it won't make liberals vote for Aaron O'Toole.
It'll make them feel better about voting liberal or green or whatever.
Look, I don't have skin in the game.
A generation ago, I was involved.
I worked for Preston Manning and the Reform Party, then briefly for Stockwell Day and the Canadian Alliance.
And then in 2008, I campaigned in Stephen Harper's election headquarters.
That was fun.
So that's all more than a dozen years ago.
Campaigns are different.
Social media really wasn't even a thing back then.
Twitter, YouTube, Facebook were all very, very new.
They didn't shape politics.
The media party, they were liberal, but it wasn't literally on the government payroll.
A lot has changed.
I get it.
But I think I'm pretty attentive to conservatives in Canada and to others and how conservatives win here and there.
So if I was trying to be positive, this would be my, I don't know, five-point plan.
If someone were to say, Ezra, can you stop criticizing Aaron O'Toole just for a moment?
And can you actually give him some useful, constructive, friendly advice?
All right, I'll give it a shot.
Point one.
First, make the decision not to talk to the Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal Media Party.
Just try it out for the next month.
Now, I know that sounds crazy.
Isn't it bad enough that the media party ignores him?
Well, that's the point.
See, Aaron O'Toole is obviously addicted to their approval.
He craves their attention, but more than that, he wants them to like him.
It's why he bends to their every whim.
If he were to cut them off like an alcoholic stopping to drink cold turkey, it would force him not to care about what they thought and force him to use other less pejorative media.
Smaller market media, YouTubers.
I'm not saying don't talk to voters in Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal.
The opposite.
Talk to the voters, but don't talk to CBC and the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail gatekeepers.
This isn't just about getting his own stories out to the people.
It's about breaking his addiction to the media party's approval.
I think it's important.
It's a mindset change.
Second, choose controversies of his own choosing.
The Liberals will drop controversies on Aaron O'Toole during the election.
They've got them stored up, ready to go, waiting to go.
Scandals, candidates who have said things on social media that they're going to ask O'Toole, will you fire?
Whatever.
So controversies are going to come.
Putting O'Toole forward as Mr. Bland, that's not going to do it.
Do you know who this is?
Probably not.
He's no celebrity.
Just an ordinary Canadian who served his country.
Just a husband and father who stood up for workers, who works hard, with years of experience in business.
Just someone who's in it for Canada, not for headlines.
just Aaron.
Yeah, that's very nice, but that will not survive a personal attack on him.
The only way to fight and win the Liberals and the Liberal-paid media party is to choose carefully, proactively, what you want the controversies to be about, because there will be a controversy.
So ideally, you want a controversy that the media party will really, really hate, but that ordinary voters will love.
10 years ago, that would have been Omar Cotter.
Every Canadian hates that traitor terrorist.
Only the Liberal Party and the Media Party and lawyers love him.
That's a perfect example.
What's another issue like that that's current?
What are three or four or five issues like that?
Put another way, if you don't have a front page story in mind for yourself, the other side does.
Here's an example.
I'll call this my third point.
Transgenderism in sports.
Perfect example.
Here's a tweet from Aaron O'Toole.
Today we recommit to making Canada an equitable place for all people to live.
I stand with the trans community in Canada and around the world in fighting for equal treatment.
Trans Day of Visibility.
So he tweeted that, and I read it, but I was thinking, what does that mean?
Does it mean, hey, everybody, let's be nice to everyone no matter what they're like and let's not be mean to anyone and let's be kind and let's not bully anyone.
Okay, great.
I agree.
But does it mean letting people who are born male but who transition, letting them play against girls in girls sports leagues?
Because that's not about an equitable place for all people to live.
That's about destroying sports for girls.
That's about as unfeminist as possible, erasing actual women and girls, destroying their dreams.
Imagine if O'Toole said he really does want everyone to be nice to each other.
Don't be mean to trans people.
Don't pick on them.
Don't bully them.
Say all the nice things.
But then said he was going to introduce a rule protecting girls' sports, too, from advantage takers, from transgender male to female trans athletes.
And maybe he also mentioned transgender criminals getting to stay at women's prisons.
What do you think the public reaction would be if he said, I like trans people and I don't want them to be harmed, but no more trans in girls' sports, no more trans in women's prisons.
What do you think?
90% of people would support that, including from a lot of trans and gay people, by the way, and a lot of feminists, by the way, and a lot of women, by the way, and a lot of girls, by the way.
And what do you think the reaction from the media party would be?
It would be the mere opposite, absolute rage, front-page coverage, which would be a good thing given that 90% of the public would support it.
In fact, maybe he should say that he wants Omar Cotter charged for treason and to see if he can claw back the $10.5 million that Trudeau gave him.
I mean, it's a little bit of a stale issue, but what would happen?
You'd immediately get a bunch of liberal lawyers and law professors outraged, lots of front pages.
And what do you think the public would say?
Look, if you don't choose your controversies, the other guy's going to choose them for you.
Now, transgender sports and Omar Cotter are not the biggest issues on the radar of our country.
I'm just giving you examples of something that are real conservative policies that the vast majority of ordinary people would agree with.
And they would push any fake controversies from the liberals off the front pages, push global warming off the front pages, and it would reveal the media itself as partisan.
But the harder the media would rage against O'Toole, the better, right?
It would make ordinary Canadians say, I like that guy.
Oh, I'm with that guy.
As opposed to his ads, hi, I'm just Aaron.
I think there are other huge winners like that.
Roxom Road, the Liberal Party's obsession with bringing in record numbers of migrants, even during a pandemic, even during a deep recession where we have 9.5% unemployment.
Did you see what Trudeau did just the other day?
He removed the ancient rule that screens out extremely ill people from immigrating here.
People with extremely expensive and dangerous medical conditions who would immediately just go straight into our hospital system and be a burden.
Every country in the world screens for deep health problems.
It's just, why would you say we're going to be the entire world's hospital displacing our own patients?
No one does that, but Trudeau just did.
He wants all the world's sick people to apply to move here.
Why?
Why?
Now, the media loves that, except for themselves.
They'll jump to the front of the line.
They probably know someone.
But what do you think ordinary people would think of that, including new immigrants, by the way, who had to come here the proper way?
You know, pulling back on immigration during a recession, during 9.5% unemployment, when housing prices are absolutely insane in the big cities.
Sorry, that's going to resonate with, I don't know, 90% of people, including legal immigrants who are saying, how can I afford rent in Toronto or Vancouver?
Media Linearity Problem00:14:46
Don't be mean about it.
Don't be rude about it.
Be pro-Canadian.
Be pro-common sense about it.
But refer to my point one above.
Just literally don't engage with the media party.
They're not real journalists.
They're liberals with press credentials.
Ignore them and their hatred for these ideas will give them free publicity.
One thing I almost liked from O'Toole's speech the other day was when he said he wanted to reach out to organized labor.
I'm not going to sit around and wait for them to get serious.
The NDP no longer stand up for working Canadians and their families.
Private sector union workers share so many of our values of hard work, family, and community.
Like us, they are proud of what we build here in Canada.
They should be voting conservative.
And if we have the courage to change our approach with organized labor, to open our tent to them, we will win their trust.
Well, that was almost right.
You don't need to reach out to the organizations themselves.
That would be like Jerry Diaz and his pro-liberal unifor super PAC.
How about reaching out actually to union workers, not their liberal bosses?
How about reaching out to truck drivers, oil and gas workers, steel workers, pipeline workers?
Don't be shy about it.
That's an economic plan in itself.
That's a jobs plan.
That's a respect for the working people plan.
People who are ignored or attacked by the left these days.
And sure, there will be some squawking from that global warming hard left, but nobody cares about that.
Go to British Columbia and the far north of Canada to show how important industries like mining and logging and trucking and oil sands are to Aboriginal communities.
Put the left on the back foot.
Why are you against jobs for the working man?
Why are you against jobs for Aboriginal people?
But the number one thing O'Toole needs to do is to talk about the number one thing on Canadians' minds, the pandemic.
And more to the point, the lockdowns.
As I showed you yesterday, 96% of pandemic victims are over age 60.
So for the vast majority of working families in Canada, the problem with the pandemic is not a health problem.
It's a lockdown problem.
A schools are shut down problem, a jobs problem, a business is a shutdown problem, a travel is shut down problem.
How about their voice?
How about speaking for them, not recklessly, but how about say a word about economic freedom and letting people earn a living?
How about letting people choose their own fear level?
How about pointing out that American states are moving on with real life, even the Democrat states, while Canada slouches backwards, you know, like Pierre Polyev did in the House the other day.
Well, Madam Speaker, I want to share some good news with the House.
The Seattle Mariners will host 9,000 fans.
They just got approval from Washington State, a very progressive and woke state south of the border whose ideological inclinations are very similar to this government.
And they have signed off on a safe plan, according to that state, to allow 9,000 fans to participate in a major sporting event in Seattle, no less.
We got simultaneously the news that our Toronto Blue Jays are not going to be able to do anything similar.
In fact, they put out a statement in which they said that though we had hoped for improvements in the public health outlook as we neared the 2021 baseball season with the ongoing Canada-U.S. border closure, we have made the difficult decision to play the first two homestands of the 2021 regular season at TD Ballpark in Florida.
That's my favorite conservative leader right there.
Alas, he's not the official leader, is he?
Boy, I wish O'Toole would talk that way.
And yeah, the media party is going to freak out if he does the things I've just listed.
as the public health deep state would and the scolding classes and the sneering public sector unions who haven't lost a day's paying.
But who cares?
They are not going to vote for O'Toole no matter what.
Why is he so scared of them?
Call for a division, as they say in Parliament.
Put a strong question out there.
Ask people to divide on your question, not on the liberal questions.
A careful, thoughtful challenge to lockdownism. and travel bans and school madness would appeal to a lot of people.
There's no science backing masks for kids.
It's the opposite, actually.
How about be skeptical?
How about say, you know what?
Let's take the masks off kids.
And you know what?
A lot of people would say, there's a common sense voice for me.
And those who would hate it, well, at least they would talk about it, instead of some made-up controversy, the Liberal war room's planning, they would make those choices by O'Toole the controversies, which would be a win for him.
Surely Donald Trump taught us that.
Those would be the controversies instead of what the Liberal War Room has planned.
Racism, sexism, whatever they'll say, that's only losing for the Conservatives.
So that's my best advice.
It's populist.
It's conservative.
It recognizes that the media party is partisan and an enemy of O'Toole, even though he's still obviously in love with him.
It's an unrequited love, Erin.
And it realizes that being an echo of Liberal Party policy, it's not working.
You can see that in the polls.
No one trusts it.
Neither conservatives nor liberals.
Right now, O'Toole is on track to be crushed in the upcoming election.
How about if he's going to lose, at least go down fighting?
But really, as Pier Polyev shows us and as Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida shows us, being a strong fighting conservative, well, he might actually win.
Stay with us for a minute.
Some governments in Canada are discussing legislation which would make COVID-19 vaccinations mandatory.
And the idea of vaccine passports to travel, shop, go to the mall, and go to movies or concerts are being discussed by global governments around the world.
Canadians are rightly concerned.
A recent poll asked more than 5,600 Canadians if they were in favor of a vaccine passport.
And 66% responded they were against the idea.
Some provinces are saying they won't make vaccines mandatory, but that there will be consequences for not taking the new COVID shot.
Well, there you have it.
A new video from our friends at the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedom.
That's only a snippet of it.
The full version is 18 minutes.
And who better to tell us about that video and their latest updates than their boss, John Carpe?
He joins us now via Skype.
John, great to see you again.
Even when I don't see you on our show, I read about you in the news because you are fighting for freedom in many jurisdictions, provincially, federally.
You're fighting for individuals.
You're fighting for churches.
In fact, it was your work with the Justice Center that inspired our own Fight the Fines civil liberties program, but you guys are the masters of it.
It's great to have you back here.
Give us an update.
Well, you know, the vaccines is becoming a very scary topic because more and more you hear politicians, we've got clips on our 18-minute video of the Ontario Health Minister talking about, you know, while we're not going to forcibly inject anybody with the vaccine.
However, you could be barred from shopping malls and schools and movie theaters.
And so this is scary.
And then all over the world, we hear people blithely, casually talking about, oh, sure, we'll just all get a vaccine passport and we'll all be safe.
And it's just frightening that we're very quickly moving towards a world of kind of two-tiered citizenship.
There will be the vaccinated who can travel internationally and get onto airplanes and put their kids in schools and go into any store or business of their choice, go to any, you know, holiday resort, any hotel.
And then you have these second-class non-vaccinated people that are stripped of a whole bunch of rights and freedoms that are available to everybody else.
And if I had said this three months ago or six months ago, you could say I that rightfully say that I was being paranoid.
But with so many politicians in so many countries talking about this very publicly, very openly, you've got a lot more going on with the Biden administration in the U.S. I'm sure the rebel is covering that and what they're talking about and what they're doing.
So this is a very grave, serious threat.
And it's not 20 years or 10 years down the road.
It could be months down the road.
Yeah.
Well, in fact, New York State has already rolled out its digital vaccine passport.
I note that it's being hosted by IBM, which has done work in the Chinese province of Xinjiang.
That's where the Uyghur Muslim minorities are.
According to Chinese newspapers, IBM's digital work there included public security and public health.
That is what has been called the social credit system of the surveillance state of China.
I am absolutely sure that what IBM learned by spying on the Uyghur Muslims in China, it's now deploying against New Yorkers.
And it's as plain as day, you're fighting it.
We're journalistically fighting it.
I don't know if there's a legal fight to be had yet because I don't think it's a fact in Canada yet.
But I don't see voices from the civil liberties left.
I don't see the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
I don't see disabilities activists.
I mean, all the people who would be freaking out if you had some sort of passport needed for, let's say, AIDS.
Have you taken the AIDS vaccine?
Well, here's, can I interrupt you?
Here's another great irony is that, you know, convicted rapists, convicted pedophiles, people actually found guilty of sexually molesting children, they're all entitled to privacy.
And you don't have to wear some sort of a badge or a stamp on your forehead.
You don't need to produce some kind of a document, right?
And this is justified under privacy rights.
And, you know, arguably that's the right approach.
But, you know, this is like, you know, now you haven't had your vaccine, so you can't use public transport or you can't get onto an airplane.
And I should qualify because it's important.
I am not an anti-vaxxer.
I had all four of my kids were vaccinated as babies and at other times.
And I'm glad I got the polio vaccine when I was a baby.
So this is not an anti-vax thing.
But when you have government coercion to inject people with something that is inherently unsafe, and I find it appalling and outrageous that you have chief medical officers blithely describing these vaccines as, quote, safe.
And here's the problem.
You don't know if a vaccine is safe until it can take two years, five years, 10, 15 years.
You have to see the long-term effects.
And there are so many examples in medicine of drugs, vaccines, treatments where the negative effects are not known until two, three, four, five years later.
And then you have a recall and you have all kinds of lawsuits.
And you don't need to be a doctor to know that a vaccine that has been subjected to six months of testing, well, it might not be dangerous.
I'm not making that claim.
But to declare it safe, I think is just negligent on the part of supposed medical professionals telling us that something subjected to six months of testing only is safe.
I mean, that is reckless and it's outrageous that any doctor would say that.
Yeah.
I mean, the AstraZeneca vaccine, and I'm not an expert in it, but I can see that it was called safe, then it was called unsafe, then it was called safe for only certain ages.
And I think the latest is if you're between the ages of 55 and 64, which is a very odd and precise range, it's considered safe.
And what about someone who just took it like a few weeks ago?
I mean, the science is changing so quickly.
Earlier in the show, I read through Pfizer's big announcement yesterday about their first trial on children, which I found terrifying.
And children, if you go to Teresa Tam's website, represent 0.0% of COVID deaths.
It is like 0.02 or so.
Like it's such a tiny, tiny number.
It shows up as 0.0 on a chart.
They say that the first round of testing on kids is just fine, but they're going to monitor those kids for the next two years, they say, but they want to use it for school children this fall.
So Pfizer is saying they're not going to be done testing this on kids for two more years, but they want it used this school year.
How can you reconcile that?
There is no, COVID poses no threat to children.
That is now well established.
We are into our 13th month of lockdowns and there's no excuse to have public policies and laws that are based on the fears of March of 2020 as opposed to the facts of April 2013.
There's no excuse for it.
Kids are not threatened by this.
Kids are not spreaders.
The Justice Center is also, we've got a new report coming out in the weeks ahead going through some of this COVID data.
99.98% Survive Annual Flu00:03:55
And a sneak preview on just one small point.
The annual flu leaves 99.98% of Canadians alive each year.
So every year the annual flu takes 0.0002 of Canada's population.
COVID, in slight contrast, leaves alive 99.96% of the Canadian population.
So COVID is taking 0.0004 of Canada's population.
So you could truthfully say that COVID is twice as deadly as the annual flu.
That might be true.
But when you really look at it, you're looking at a survival rate of 99.96% versus 99.98%.
This is the virus that we're dealing with, and it does not warrant any measures that are destroying our economy and destroying society.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I agree with you on these vaccines.
know you will be keeping a keen eye out for vaccine passports.
I mean, one thing that would bother me is, so you've got to disclose a personal and private health data point about yourself just to any bouncer, anyone on the street.
You've got to tell them an answer to a question that's very personal.
By the way, you might have, like in the same Pfizer press release I read today, it said if you are immunocompromised or immunosuppressed, and there are people who should not take it.
The drug companies say don't take it.
So they can't get on a plane now.
I mean, there's so many bizarre things.
Let me put that aside for a second, though.
Can you give our viewers a roundup of some of the, give me the three most interesting cases you're working on?
I know there's a ton and folks can go to jccf.ca.
That's the Justice Center's website.
You can check it out there.
They are a CRA compliant charity.
So don't be shy about chipping in a few bucks to them if you want to help their good work.
John, give me your three most interesting new cases.
Okay, the big three, April the 14th, we are in federal court challenging Trudeau's prison hotel policy or hotel prison policy, whichever way.
That's going to be very interesting.
We're applying for an injunction on April the 14th is when that application will be heard.
The week thereafter, we're in court in Manitoba, the last 10 days of April, challenging lockdown policies in Manitoba.
We look forward to cross-examining the chief medical officer of Manitoba.
And then shortly thereafter, we're in court in Alberta.
We look forward to cross-examining Alberta's chief medical officer, Dina Henshaw, in court at the trial of Pastor James Coates.
And it's just exciting that these chief medical officers, after 13 months of getting easy softball media questions tossed at them, they're going to have to be asked, they will be asked some very tough questions in court.
And so those are the big three coming up in the next month.
That's extremely exciting.
You're correct.
They have never been asked tough questions.
The media are stenographers or cheerleaders, not skeptics and critics.
So many of their models have proven false over time.
So many of their predictions have been proven false.
Many of them have confessed that it's not based on science or medicine, but rather just on public opinion.
I can hardly wait for those.
And I hope that at least part of those will be viewable by the public because we would certainly like to cover those journalistically.
As you know, we've sent reporters every weekend to the Grace Life Church of Pastor Coates.
And Sheila Gunnry has done a great job there.
Churches Under Surveillance00:04:49
Let me ask you one last question because I know you're representing a few churches.
We are too.
We got a church in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.
But I think you're really carrying the heaviest load.
Let me put this to you.
At Grace Life Church, I don't know if you saw Sheila's video, some Alberta health officers and some cops demanded entry to the church on the weekend.
And the church elders said, no, you can't disturb us.
You don't have a search warrant.
You're not welcome.
And by the way, the criminal code actually bans disturbing a religious assemblage, you know, a church.
You can't disturb or interrupt a church.
So those church elders in Grace Life held the line, and I'm really glad they did, and it was a pleasure to see.
But there are other churches in Canada, including a Baptist church in Calgary, that either don't know how or don't or that don't win the staring contest.
And I see armed police walking right into churches in the middle of services, guns in their holsters, taking photos.
And I'm screaming out, you and what search warrant?
And I know Section 1762 of the Criminal Code, do not interrupt or disturb any religious assemblage.
That's a crime.
John, I mean, maybe I'm putting you on the spot here, but when I see that I want those officers charged with the, if I did that, I'd be charged with the crime.
And maybe I'm putting you on the spot with a surprise question.
It just came to my mind.
What can we do about cops and health bullies barging into churches, synagogues, mosques, whatever they're doing, and disrupting?
I know they're doing this to Jewish synagogues in Montreal, too.
Well, as a bare minimum, those churches could file formal police complaints against those officers.
That's a bare minimum.
I don't have enough criminal law background to be able to answer whether, you know, to what extent, if any, are police in some situations entitled to break the law while they are pursuing law enforcement.
An experienced criminal defense lawyer with specialty in that field would know the answer.
I mean, certainly police are allowed to break speed limits when necessary for carrying out their duty.
You know, would that same principle apply to police disrupting a religious service, which you correctly point out, it is a criminal code offense to disrupt a religious service.
And my first thought is, you know, is this necessary for law enforcement?
I mean, is it necessary for the police to disrupt a church service by walking in there with their guns?
Or could they carry out their law enforcement duties without doing that?
And my guess would be that they would be quite capable of, you know, if they really wanted to, issuing tickets to people after they leave the church.
But the starting point definitely would be to file a formal complaint against the officers that are engaging in that criminal behavior of disrupting a church service.
Yeah.
You know, I think if I were to try and defend the cops, they probably never in a million years would have imagined they would be dispatched to give a health order to a church.
That's not what they learned when they went to the police academy.
They thought they were going to fight crime.
So they're being asked to do bizarre things.
They're following orders and obeying.
They're probably in uncharted territory themselves.
They probably don't know what they're doing.
Their chief is probably under enormous political pressure by authoritarian mayors.
So if I were to defend the cops and I don't really want to, I would say they probably have no bloody clue what they're doing.
And they're probably being ordered to do so for political reasons, which is all the more reason I think that any cop and any health officer who steps into a church or synagogue should be slapped with some sort of action, complaint, private prosecution, because they need to, like a splash of cold water to be shaken out of and say, what are you doing?
Don't you see what you're doing?
And I think only the law will do that.
So it's just an idea.
And I know we're talking live here and I didn't give you this in background, but I hope it's something you keep in the back of your mind because it burns me up when I see cops with guns walking into churches.
And in Calgary, they had some guy go in with a huge backpack that an ex-cop said that's probably a surveillance equipment in the backpack that IDs every cell phone in the church.
Cops and Churches00:01:43
So they probably went in with this huge electronics backpack to surreptitiously just bam, make a list of all 100 people in the church for later prosecution.
I don't know if that's a warrantless search, but there's a lot of creepy things being done to churches by a lot of creepy police chiefs and creepy politicians and creepy public health officers.
And you are on the front lines there.
So I wish you much strength and good luck.
Kim, good speaking with you, Ezra.
Thanks for having me on your show.
Well, it's a pleasure.
Can I just give your website out one more time?
jccf.ca.
You got to go there.
You got to read it.
You got to sign up.
If you got a few extra bucks, chip in.
John, keep it up.
Have a great day.
See you, Ezra.
There you have it.
John Carpe, one of the good guys, that's for sure.
Stay with us, Mark.
Well, another busy week here at Rebel News.
I believe that we're doing journalism no one else is.
We're covering things that the media party ignores or cheers on.
They cheer the lockdown.
They cheer the civil liberties violations.
But we don't just report, as you know, we fight for the little guy.
We have over 600 cases in our fightthefines.com project, and we're doing constitutional challenges across the country too.
I think it's quite important, and it's actually grown to become just as large as our journalism work.
Thank you for being a part of it.
Every month, your $8 for being part of Rebel News Plus helps cover our bills, because as you know, we don't take a dime from Trudeau and never will.