Ezra Levant details the Federal Court of Canada’s dismissal of their Charter challenge against COVID hotel jails, calling the three-day detentions of healthy individuals a "minor inconvenience" despite risks like outbreaks and alleged abuse—while the government’s Quarantine Act overreach goes unchecked. Derek Sloan joins to expose Facebook’s mid-stream shutdown of a Parliament Hill press conference on scientific censorship, ignored by mainstream media except for fringe outlets, revealing systemic "ghosting" of dissent. Levant warns advertisers boycotting GB News, a British channel targeted by far-left group Stop Funding Hate (SFH), face backlash from its surging audience, despite SFH’s baseless smears. The episode underscores how arbitrary power and coordinated attacks stifle free speech, with legal and media battles exposing deeper threats to democracy. [Automatically generated summary]
The Chief Justice of the Federal Court of Canada dismissed our charter challenge of the hotel COVID jails.
Well, we're not going to take that line down.
We're going to appeal.
If you want to learn more about the ruling, you can find it at nocovidjails.com.
But what comes next is about 10 minutes of me going through the ruling.
And hopefully I cover enough basis to give you a feeling for it.
If you want to see the video version of this podcast, as always, you can just go to RebelNews.com and click subscribe.
We do a TV version of it every day.
Plus, you get access to other paywalled shows I recommend.
It's just $8 a month and it helps us pay our bills.
You can do that.
And like I say, if you want more about this court ruling, you can go to nocovidjails.com.
Okay, here's today's podcast.
We lost our COVID jail charter lawsuit in the federal court.
We're going to appeal.
I'll give you the details.
It's June 18th, 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 publisher is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Terrible news.
This morning, a judge on the Federal Court of Canada ruled that Justin Trudeau's airport COVID jails are legal.
Rebel News went to court challenging that law under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
We hired two of the best constitutional lawyers in Canada.
I spoke with the lawyers this morning.
I have instructed them to appeal this ruling to the Federal Court of Appeal.
Trudeau, through the unlimited resources of the Justice Department against us, it's really a David and Goliath battle.
I hope you'll help us cover the cost of our fight.
Please go to nocovidjails.com.
If you want to help, by the way, you'll actually get a charitable tax receipt for that from the Democracy Fund so you can deduct it from your taxes.
Please help if you can.
Let me tell you a little bit about what happened, and then I'll tell you why I think we have a chance on appeal.
The judge, Chief Justice Paul Crampton, ruled that jailing healthy people, law-abiding people, citizens who have done nothing wrong, jailing them for up to three days and billing them thousands of dollars for the cost of it, is just a minor inconvenience, not an important violation of our liberties.
I'm guessing he himself hasn't had to stay in one.
And the fact that the quarantine makes no sense from a health point of view, it's no safer to send someone to a hotel for three days where they will have contact with many people as opposed to sending them straight home by themselves.
Well, the judge didn't mind.
He actually wrote that it's Canadians' duty to suffer through such indignities to save lives, even though the government provided no evidence that these costly schemes have saved lives.
In fact, there was evidence that the COVID jails are dangerous, whether it's COVID outbreaks at these COVID hotel jails or cases of alleged rape there that the judge acknowledged.
Justin Trudeau and the rest of the ruling class themselves don't have to follow these rules.
The president of the CBC, for example, flies back and forth to Canada from her home in New York City every week.
She doesn't quarantine anywhere, certainly not in an airport hotel.
Trudeau himself just got back from a week of boozy parties in Europe, violating every quarantine rule.
mask rules, social distancing rules.
And when he came back to Canada, he reportedly spent a few hours in one of these COVID airport hotels and then just left.
So yeah, rules are for the little people.
We sued the government because we had sent our then reporter, Kian Becksty, to report in Florida, and he had to come back to Canada through one of these COVID jails in Calgary.
When he was in the hotel, he came into contact with no less than 14 people, as opposed to just taking his own car home from the airport.
It's ridiculous.
Our lawyers did an excellent job.
Sarah Miller and Robert Hawkes ran circles around the government's lawyers.
In cross-examination, they were able to get some incredible admissions from the government's witnesses, and they really grilled the health bureaucrats the government sent out to defend the law.
But in the end, Crampton sided with the establishment and against the people.
I've read the ruling.
In my opinion, it's a political document designed to make this problem go away.
And fair enough, if the entire media and entire political establishment and the airline industry itself seem fine with all this and the other awful parts of the lockdown, so why would a top judge go out on a limb by himself and what?
Become a pariah at all the Ottawa cocktail parties?
Our lawyers were in court alongside lawyers from the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms.
And there were a handful of other individuals who sued on their own.
All of our cases were bundled together and heard at once.
But I note, there wasn't a single lawyer in court from a liberal civil liberties group.
There were no tourism or travel or business groups, no chambers of commerce there.
No political group, no opposition political party, nobody.
Nobody who we ought to rely on in society to protect us from authoritarian measures.
I think the government got the message loud and clear.
No one important cares about this.
Well, I care about it, and I hope you care about it too.
So we're going to appeal.
Here's what Justice Crampton said.
Like times of war and other crises, pandemics call for sacrifices to save lives and avoid broad-based suffering.
If some are unwilling to make such sacrifices and engage in behavior that poses a demonstrated risk to the health and safety of others, the principles of fundamental justice will not prevent the state from performing its essential function of protecting its citizens from that risk.
Exactly what sacrifices has anyone from the ruling class made, a judge or Trudeau himself?
Trudeau, the judges, they haven't lost a day's pay.
In fact, for Trudeau, his workload has been a lot lighter than usual, hasn't it?
I mean, the government has had a nice long staycation.
The entire ruling class has had the time of their lives.
Imagine comparing what's going on to a war.
The only comparison I see is to war profiteers, people who love the new rules and are doing just fine by them.
And what health and safety benefits exactly did the judge mean?
I read the ruling.
There's no evidence that these COVID jails have stopped anyone from getting sick.
The government doesn't even try to collect any such data.
But we know that there have been outbreaks at these very same COVID jails.
Outbreaks of the virus there, of course there are.
What's so weird is, if you land in Canada and you have the coronavirus, you are not sent to one of these hotels.
Only healthy people are sent to these quarantine hotels.
I'm serious.
The law is a joke and this government is a joke.
And this judge stood by him.
Well, we're appealing.
Section 7 of our Charter of Rights guarantees life, liberty, and the security of the person.
I think a court of appeal could be persuaded that detaining our reporter for no provable benefit deprives him of his liberty and isn't in accordance with the principles of justice.
It's arbitrary.
It's overly broad.
Section 9 of the Charter guarantees that Canadians can't be arbitrarily detained.
You're healthy.
You've done nothing wrong.
Why should the government be able to scoop you up for three days?
And then there's the law itself, the Quarantine Act.
It delegates certain powers, but Trudeau's cabinet in issuing these orders just to detain people, they've far exceeded those powers.
It's just not in there in the law to let them do what they're doing.
You can read the whole ruling for yourself at our website, nocovidjails.com.
It's over 130 pages long.
Frankly, it's a very frustrating read.
But you'll see the importance of our participation.
You know, if you read the ruling, rebel news and our arguments and our facts are mentioned more than 50 times in the ruling by the judge.
If we hadn't been there, our ideas and arguments would not have been put to court.
Some of them were made by other lawyers, to be sure, but we had unique points that we made.
And I think our lawyers were also the most effective at grilling the government's own witnesses.
There were other excellent lawyers in the room, but I think ours were the best and made the most interesting points.
So if you think we have to continue the fight to appeal, please help us.
I've already told the lawyers to start working on the appeal.
We've spent about $100,000 on this so far.
And I know that's a huge amount of money, but there was so much cross-examination, all the government experts.
It took a lot of time.
I'm sure an appeal will probably come close to $50,000 more.
This is a civil liberties case, though.
So you'll get a charitable tax credit for anything you can chip in at nocovidjails.com.
So that's a plus.
Thanks for your help.
We have to do this because everyone else in society who's supposed to be doing this, they're not doing this.
We have to fight for freedom.
For more details, go to NoCovidJails.com.
Welcome back.
Facebook Censors, YouTube Pushes Back00:15:05
Well, the whole point of science is to test a hypothesis, run an experiment, see if the facts are in line with your theory.
And if not, adjust your theory and test again.
If you've got it right, are you sure you've got it right?
If you're wrong, what can you learn from it?
That's the process of all progress.
And yet, all those basic principles, in fact, the very root of the word science to observe, has been thrown out during the pandemic as the science has been treated more like religion or as I would call it, superstition.
And yet the scientists have been so wrong so often on everything from masks to vaccines.
Yesterday, one MP had a little summit in Ottawa with three experts, including people who have spent their lives in various related fields like immunology, criticizing the mainstream scientific narrative, a political narrative masquerading as science.
The MP is Derek Sloan, and he had three people from the scientific medical community with him.
Derek joins us now via Skype from Ottawa.
Derek Sloan, great to see you.
Thanks for being here.
Did I accurately describe your summit yesterday of three scientific, I'm not even going to call them dissidents because they're just people asking questions, what scientists are supposed to do.
Yeah, that's a good summary of it.
It was a summit on censorship, scientific censorship.
And oddly enough, right in the middle of our live stream, which was an official parliamentary press conference that was being broadcast on CPAC, we also did a Facebook Live to capture it as well.
Facebook shut it down about halfway through, right in the middle of Dr. Breidel's presentation.
So censorship is alive and well.
And you're right, we're living in a time of sort of a medical priesthood where the people at the top, whether it's Dr. Tam or others, sort of tell us what the hidden knowledge is.
And we just have to go along with it.
But that's not how science really is.
And I was proud to host these doctors yesterday.
Yeah, I watched about half of it on YouTube live stream.
And the whole time I was thinking, because we've been through YouTube censorship before, I mean, I understand Facebook censors.
YouTube is just as bad.
They have a whole list of things you're not allowed to say on YouTube, including about other remedies like hydroxychloroquine or invermectin.
I don't, I remember, I just don't know enough about those alternative prescriptions, but they're not, they're not like wacky homemade things.
They're, you know, long-standing medicines used for other ailments.
The fact that YouTube, a bunch of woke, you know, tech leftists, are telling scientists and doctors what they can and cannot say, I find very odd.
This does not apply to any other ailment.
I can tell you, if you look at YouTube's rules, it only applies to COVID-19.
You just can't talk about the most important subject in the world in a way they don't like.
But here's the thing.
As of right now, that entire press conference you had yesterday is still available on YouTube, on CPAC's channel, and it has about 140,000 views.
So I wonder if YouTube is saying, well, maybe we're not going to censor an official press conference by a member of parliament, the Parliament of Canada.
I tell you, if that was on our channel, Derek, it would be taken down by now.
I wonder what's going on there.
And I'm not looking for them to censor it at all.
I'm just sort of stunned that they haven't because they censor so many others.
Well, I think it would be a red line for social media to actually censor a parliamentary process.
I mean, CPAC is kind of our official, I mean, it's not owned by the government, but it's our, you know, our equivalent of C-SPAN, right?
It does, it plays all official, you know, parliamentary proceedings in the House of Commons committees and otherwise.
It would be, I believe, YouTube is, you know, afraid of crossing that line.
I mean, if they're censoring democratic processes in our House of Commons, I mean, that is extreme beyond any measure.
Well, I agree with you.
However, as you just mentioned, Facebook just did it.
And I am quite certain that there will be very little, if any, concern expressed by any authority on that, whether it's the Speaker of the House or anything.
I don't know.
Maybe there's a point of privilege in there for you.
Why is Facebook censoring a, I mean, you have what's called parliamentary privilege.
I mean, I know this was not in the chamber of the House of Commons, but it was on the precincts of the House of Commons.
You have special privileges as an MP.
You can, for example, stand up in parliament and defame someone.
Not that you would, but that's legally protected.
This is an emanation from Parliament, official parliamentary event.
And Facebook, based in California, just said, nope, nope, you can't hear from Canadians.
You can't hear.
What's that but foreign political meddling?
Yeah, I mean, the censorship level is extreme.
And, you know, in a normal time, I'm sure I could ask for unanimous consent from the House to Censure, you know, CENSURE, you know, Facebook for what they've done.
My guess is if I tried to do that, I would not get unanimous consent.
And but listen, in normal times, there's all kinds of things we could do to address this, but instead, the liberals are bringing forward the opposite types of things like Bill C-10.
And they're talking about hate speech legislation for online regulation.
So the Liberals are doing the opposite of what needs to be done.
The censorship that we're seeing is right in front of our face, and we need to act.
Yeah, well, I think that in your case, in particular, I don't think you would find any assistance from the Liberals or even from the Conservatives who threw you out of the party on even more ridiculous grounds.
Let me ask you this: we sent a reporter, Drea Humphrey, just an outstanding young reporter from Vancouver.
We flew her to Ottawa for this, and we sent a videographer, Catherine, from Toronto.
So we went to great lengths and went, you know, literally to great lengths to be there.
Who else was there from the media?
Because you're an MP.
There's not a lot going on in Ottawa these days.
You had three qualified experts talking about the issue of our time, talking about censorship, including at the hands of the College of Physicians and Surgeons.
And I mean, again, I didn't watch the entire press conference, but from what I could see, there was a single question put on like a phone call to you.
And that's it.
I haven't seen any coverage of it.
Were there any media there?
So basically, no.
So the CPAC, of course, is operated by the big television companies.
So there were some cameramen and so on from the big companies because they have to broadcast these types of things.
No, we were ghosted.
There was a question from a reporter from iPolitics.ca.
I believe someone from the Western Standard reached out to us after the fact.
But no, there was not mainstream media coverage.
And in fact, Ezra, I'm thinking about doing a whistleblowers sort of summit for people in the media because both Dr. Bridle and myself have been reached out to from some members of the media who say, listen, we'd like to be covering more of what you guys are doing, but our editorial boards are preventing it.
I am going to be soon issuing a call to other members of the media to confidentially give me their information so we can do something similar that we did with the medical whistleblowers.
Well, the thing about medical whistleblowers, I mean, if you're, for example, you have the associate professor of immunology, he's got some protection.
In fact, he started his remarks yesterday by saying that his administration at least stood by him.
He's got tenure.
It's tough to dynamite out a tenured professor from university.
I mean, they can be mean to him, but good luck firing a professor.
Journalists are not the same.
There's no such thing as tenure for a journalist.
Journalists are sacked every day and no one cares.
So I don't know if you'll find the same courageous journalists coming forward because they'll be fired immediately.
I want to get back to what Facebook did to you.
As I noted, and I'm not trying to jinx it, CPAC, that's the cable company, the nonprofit consortium of for-profit cable companies that broadcast everything on Parliament Hill.
I think I got that right.
So they sort of broadcast anything, anyone.
That's the job.
Yes.
And YouTube hasn't shut them down.
Good.
I don't want them to.
But Facebook did.
I think you've got to do something.
And I'm not telling you what to do.
I just think you got to.
I think you've got to not let that pass.
No one else will care about it.
None of the other parties.
I think Facebook should be sensitive right now to its political meddling because the government is saying, oh, don't worry about it.
We're just going to regulate.
We're just going to regulate social media, but we'll never misuse it to silence our opposition.
Like Facebook turned off the feed of an opposition MP who is criticizing the government narrative.
And how is that acceptable?
I don't know.
I don't know what tools you have at your disposal as an ordinary MP.
But I just, I mean, I know what I could do if that was done to me.
Nothing.
But maybe you can do something by virtue of your standing as an MP.
Yeah, I really like what you're saying.
And no, I'm not going to let this go.
And I've been thinking of different ways to address it, maybe with a question and question period or some other question to the speaker.
Yeah, I think the speaker, I mean, I think the speaker should be appalled.
I mean, he's a liberal, obviously, but the speaker should be, I think, I forget the name of the new speaker, should be appalled that any one of his MPs of any party is being silenced.
The speaker represents the MPs.
Absolutely.
Yeah, no, you know what?
I think there's, I mean, listen, this is a very big issue.
If all of Parliament wanted to do something about this, they could.
You know, with respect to the speaker, I'm going to look at some of my options.
My guess is that they would say that Facebook is outside of the ambit of the House of Commons.
So, you know, if, you know, the privilege, as he would see it, is related to me being able to speak in the House of Commons.
Whether or not social media transmits that would be outside of that immediate scope.
But I will think about this and I will see what I can do to raise awareness on this issue because you're right, it's really appalling.
And it's not the first time we've seen this.
I remember they censored a meeting that Governor DeSantis had, but it wasn't in the legislature.
It was a meeting of elected officials and appointed individuals discussing official business.
But this was something on Parliament Hill that was an official press conference that was covered by CPAC.
And Facebook shut it down halfway through.
Now, it still is actually up in Facebook on two parts, but you're right.
I've never had that happen before where they just, you know, we had thousands of people watching live and it just, the numbers just started going down and then it was zero and then it was off.
So very bizarre.
Never had that happen before.
And I will do whatever I can to continue raising awareness and get some answers on this.
You know, I mean, Facebook, they're odious.
Mark Zuckerberg is a God complex.
You know, all these tech giants, these oligarchs, they are what they are.
But the fact that, I mean, you mentioned someone from iPolitics called and I called in to ask a question.
I heard that we had our people there.
I find that more troubling because at least in America, when you have a right-wing or a left-wing or a dissident or an unusual political character, they're covered by the media.
The media might mock them.
The media might attack them.
But I think that the, you used the word ghosting, you know, the absolute pretending you don't exist.
It's not like they're busy.
There's nothing going on in Ottawa.
They've had the laziest 18 months of their life.
They could have called in, they could have watched it on YouTube and called in.
None of them did it.
I think it's a form of deplatforming you.
Just like when Maxime Bernier was arrested, there was either silence on that or cheering.
I think there's something deeply wrong with our media party, that they are acting like liberal partisans and that they can't restrain their hatred towards conservative populist dissidents like you and Maxime Bernier.
So they think, well, I could either attack him, but that gives him more oxygen.
I'm just going to pretend he doesn't exist.
I think that's a really, really broken media system that won't.
I mean, forget about you.
You had three of the most interesting speakers I've heard on the pandemic completely cut off.
Yeah, no, you're totally right.
And yeah, I mean, listen, the media is supposed to, you know, air, you know, the non-mainstream views, right?
Like, I mean, they're not supposed to just be a mouthpiece for the government.
That's, I mean, that's a communist country, right?
If the media is just a mouthpiece for the government and not actually, you know, holding them to account or airing things that are being brought up by people who are dissenting, I mean, they're not doing their job.
And it's clear that they're complicit.
You know, I believe a lot of rank and file in media are starting to get frustrated by this.
And hopefully, when I open my whistleblowers forum for them, we can find a way to address this more broadly.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I'm glad you did what you did yesterday.
And I'm glad we sent our reporter from halfway across the world to come and be there.
That's the length we went to cover it.
The rest of the media party couldn't bother walking down the street.
Derek Sloan, great to see you.
Thanks for your time today.
Absolutely.
Talk to you soon.
Right on.
There you have it.
Derek Sloan.
By the way, at least until it's taken down, we will have the entire press conference embedded on our website from CPAC's own YouTube channel.
I'm quite certain that if we were to upload it to our own YouTube channel, we would get what's called a strike.
We would be suspended for two weeks.
But we can embed on our website, CPAC's channel.
And if they're shut down, it'll just leave a little hole on our website, but we won't be hurt.
So check out the whole thing there.
Stay with us, Boyd.
Night's News Battle00:05:23
Hey, welcome back.
I'm disappointed that we lost in federal court today.
I really thought we had a chance.
The way the hearing went, the government had so many terrible admissions.
They really were on the back foot the whole time.
I think this is a very political decision.
Hopefully, the federal court of appeal will apply the law as I think it ought to be, strengthening our right to due process, strengthening our right to be free from arbitrary detention.
And of course, saying to the government, the Quarantine Act just simply doesn't allow you to do this, to imprison healthy people for three days just because it just doesn't let you do that.
So if you want to help us, go to nocovidjilles.com.
Now, yesterday, I talked at length about Andrew Neal.
He's the excellent journalist at GBnews.uk.
That's that new British news site.
And I was talking about how he was fighting back against cancel culture.
And I was sort of leading up to it.
But last night, he did a five-minute monologue on his response.
He's so smart.
Instead of describing it to you, let me show it to you in full.
So I'm going to say goodbye now, but don't go away.
Here's five minutes of Andrew Neal explaining how he's fighting against cancel culture.
Good night. Welcome back.
Tonight, a media watch special.
We ask companies boycotting GV News for peddling hate.
What on earth are you talking about?
Now, since GV News launched on Sunday night, our young and diverse team of reporters across the country have covered Nissan's plans to invest more in Sunderland, regeneration of Skegness, whiskey production in Hoik, pressures on the hospitality sector in Newcastle, the pollution charge in Birmingham, house building and brick house, flooding in Bedfordshire, Scotland's fan zone in Glasgow, the struggles of the wedding industry in Ipswich,
COVID infection rates in Bolton, that's a hotspot, vaccinations in Abergavenny, the debate over Irish language lessons in Belfast, and of course, Wales' wonderful Euros win in Cardiff.
Now some of these stories you won't see on other news channels.
All of them are important to the communities involved and not a scintilla of hate in any of them.
We've interviewed the Chancellor of the Exchequer, reported on growing anti-Semitism in London and covered the country's many mental health problems.
Again, not an iota of hate in sight.
Indeed, the only hate this channel has broadcast was when we showed film of a BBC Newsnight reporter being attacked by a baying anti-lockdown mob.
And we condemned that unreservedly.
Yet a number of companies, some of them well-known brands, have decided to stop advertising on GB News.
They've vouched a pressure from a fringe group called Stop Funding Hate, a misnomer if ever there was one.
It's quite remarkable that serious, important executives in well-established companies can be so easily cowed.
They've all taken the knee to stop funding hate.
It's important that they and you realize to whom they are in thrall.
SFH doesn't stand for a liberal inclusive society.
It's dominated by far-left agitators and cranks that push for advertiser boycotts of any media organization with which it disagrees.
Its default position is to smear anything it takes against as a peddler of hate.
In GB News' case, SFH started rounding up the lynch mob four months before we'd even started broadcasting.
So I don't think we're talking open minds here.
If advertisers want to see real hate, they should have a look at the social media postings of SFH supporters.
They smear and threaten businesses and people who won't do their bidding with words like vile, scum, toxic, and many more words that we can't repeat here tonight.
Yet through fear or ignorance, some companies do as SFH bids.
Woke nonsense has reached the boardroom and corporate capitalism is becoming the useful idiot of bigots bent on censorship.
Now I understand that in some cases it was not the bosses of the brands that pulled their ads but their advertising agencies.
Fair enough.
There's still time for you to have a word with your agencies who work for you after all and risk doing you huge harm.
But all these brands should understand that this boycott business can play both ways.
GB News viewers are incensed with advertisers who've taken against us for no reason.
Many have written to these advertisers to tell them so.
And our numbers, our viewers are growing for three nights in a row.
This show has been the number one rated show in its time slot on any news channel available in the UK.
And if you add our audiences, our friends, our allies, our sympathisers, together we can muster millions of supporters on social media.
It's not a good idea to be on the wrong end of them.
We will not go there.
Standing Invitation Open00:00:45
We have more important work to do.
We want to provide a high-quality news channel which reputable advertisers are proud to use and which delivers great results for them.
So far, not a single example of hate has been given in evidence to justify the boycott of this channel.
But this programme issues a standing invitation to the bosses of any company or agency that thinks to the contrary to come on air.
We'll look at your examples if you have them.
We'll discuss them together.
Our studio door is open because you're in the politics business now and that's where you are when you succumb to political pressure.
And then, like politicians, you have to be held to account.