Rebel News journalist visits Ottawa’s Freedom Convoy amid -24°C, documenting 100,000+ diverse protesters—Indigenous, visible minorities, and flag-waving crowds—contrasting Trudeau’s racist accusations with their unity. A viral flag-draped Terry Fox statue and truckers’ anti-mandate speeches clash with Trudeau’s press conference, where he labels protests "counter-revolutionary," evokes Nazi comparisons, and dismisses vaccine hesitancy as online disinformation despite his own 2019 election rejection of 68%. The convoy’s symbolic defiance reveals cracks in Trudeau’s authoritarian narrative, exposing a democracy more threatened by his policies than parked trucks. [Automatically generated summary]
I was there with a large contingent from Rebel News.
It was so biting cold, but it was actually very warm in feeling.
I had a chance to meet people from all over the country who had come there and local people from Ottawa too.
There was a lot of people from Quebec there.
A great number of flags, including American flags.
I saw some historical flags, old flags from traditional flags in Canada and Quebec.
A lot of Aboriginal and Indigenous flags.
What was so interesting to me was to realize how much of the trucking industry is people of color, Indigenous folks.
It made it all the funnier that critics of the protest went to that liberal go-to of you're racist or whatever, when so many of the truckers and the protesters there were visible minorities and so many of the defamers were old-stock Canadians, white people like Justin Trudeau themselves.
I want to show you one of my favorite clips from the moment, from the weekend.
I think you saw this before.
We're going to talk about a lot of things today.
One of my favorite clips is when Lincoln Jay was talking to some little woke counter-protester, and in comes someone who was definitely off script.
I'll let it speak for itself.
Take a look.
What did it say, sir?
So it says, ask your white nationalist agenda.
I am not a white.
This has nothing to do about white.
This is nothing to do with truckers.
This is about freedom for all of Canadians.
You can be brown, black, white, blue, whatever color you want to be.
This is about freedom.
And Trudeau has no right to put us in this condition of mandates throughout the country.
Trudeau are not going to school.
It's a terrible thing to do.
What a good guy.
What a good egg.
And I, you know, the use of the word freedom.
I heard the word freedom said more often in the last 48 hours than I have anywhere outside the precincts of the Rebel World Headquarters in years.
And I kid you not.
I was walking down Spark Street, which is a couple blocks south of Parliament Hill.
I was just walking.
And there's two folks walking about 20 feet ahead of me.
And I swear to God, as God is my witness, they were just spontaneously singing, oh, Canada.
Spontaneous Singing in the Cold00:03:43
When was the last time you've seen that?
Just people spawned.
They weren't putting on a show.
I was about 20 feet behind them.
They didn't see me.
They were ahead of me.
There was no one else on the street there.
They were just singing it.
That's what they were thinking about.
That's how they were feeling about things.
I saw more Canadian flags there, and I saw more homemade signs.
There were a few prefab signs from our friends at the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms saying things like informed consent or fight for your rights or whatever.
I saw that.
But other than those, you know, and maybe I saw 100 of those prefab signs from the Justice Center.
But other than that, they were all homemade.
This was a protest by people, 99% of whom had never been to a protest before in their life.
I can tell you that.
And you could sort of see that because they didn't really know what to do.
Was it a celebration?
What were they going to do?
Was there going to be official speeches?
There really weren't official speeches at first.
There was no stage.
There was no program.
There was no MC for the proceedings.
I've, you know, I used to work in Parliament Hill, actually, about 20 odd years ago.
And quite often there were formal protests on the lawn with a stage and a PA system, and someone would call it to order, and there would be some dignitaries or politicians.
There was none of that.
About halfway through the day, I think it was on Saturday, someone found a PA system, pretty low-powered PA system, frankly, and put it on the back of a flatbed truck.
And it was turned into a sort of a makeshift stage at the last moment.
But they were literally inviting anybody up to talk on it, which was fun.
And they invited me to go up.
And I didn't really have a, I didn't, I didn't have anything prepared.
And I didn't want to take up too much time.
It was not my show.
I was there as a journalist, really, but also as a supporter, obviously.
Oh my God, it was cold.
I got to tell you, it was so cold.
And it was minus 22.
And the thing is, to use, I don't have gloves that work on a cell phone, you know, like, I mean, we do our work on our phones.
We film on our phones and we type.
So I had to take my glove off because I didn't have the fancy gloves that work on the phone.
I swear in like 30 seconds, you would start to get frostbite.
I was so worried.
Anyhow, so I'm not complaining.
I'm just saying the fact that there were tens of thousands of people there in minus 22 degrees Celsius.
I think it dipped down to minus 24.
When you're that cold, it may as well be minus 40, really.
That's incredible.
Like if the weather was like zero or plus 10, I don't know how many people would have been there.
Like to have that many people when it was minus 22 or whatever.
Anyway, I kept my speech mercifully brief.
You can see the steam from my mouth.
But can I play for you the speech I gave?
It's only three and a half minutes long, but I think the speech was well received.
You take a look and let me know what you think.
Here's the speech I gave from the back of a flatbed truck just on the invitation of the truckers.
I'm not a trucker myself, obviously, sort of the opposite, but take a look.
It's Cold Today00:04:16
Thank you very much.
Hello, everybody.
It is cold today.
It is cold today.
Almost as cold as Justin Trudeau's heart.
It's great to be here.
And on behalf of Rebel News, I salute you.
And I say keep speaking truth to power.
But I want to tell you what excites me the most about this crowd.
I see a lot of cameras, a lot of independent journalists, because when people say, what do we do about the media?
I say you become the media.
That's what you do.
The media acts like a party, the media party.
It's a subsidiary of the Liberal Party.
So you've got to tell the story yourselves.
Everyone who is here, everyone who was along the road has to bear witness and testify to what they saw.
Because there's two competing narratives.
The government says you're racist.
The government says you're sexist.
The government says you're violent.
In the meantime, I've never seen a more diverse group of pages.
In farms of violence, people want to not be violated anymore.
Justin Trudeau says you're extreme, but he's the one who has violated our civil rights.
He thinks you are a fringe.
Well, that's a pretty bloody big fringe.
Let me close by saying this.
Someone asked me this morning, what's the point?
What's going to happen?
Why did we all gather in Ottawa?
Is he going to listen?
Is he going to resign?
Is the governor general going to ask him to step down?
No, he'll hold on to power as hard as he can.
Let me tell you what I think the point is.
The point is the convoy itself.
To show that you're not alone.
To show that you're not the crazy one they are.
To show that you're not the only Canadian Gold War.
You already achieved your goal just by being here.
And the fact that millions of dollars came into the GoFundMe for the truckers, even if they would have canceled that, it was still a success.
Because it was a measurement of how much people cared.
You have succeeded just by being here.
You got to fight.
Congratulations to the organizers, but really, it was millions of Canadians along the way in the convoy and watching today from home.
Tell them what happened.
Tell them what you saw, because they will not hear the truth from anyone else.
You have to fight everybody who's fighting for freedom.
Well, that was pretty friendly reception.
I'm surprised at how that seemed to resonate.
I mean, I believe in those things, and I talk about them on the show, but I think people there, I mean, I really was asked that question.
What are we doing?
We're all here.
We're all freezing.
We're all having fun.
We're all singing Ocana, waving our flags.
There's a feeling of community.
When I came into the town on Friday night, it really was like going into a Stanley Cup victory parade.
The streets were packed.
People were driving around honking their horns, flying flags, cheering, sort of high-fiving strangers.
Like it really had that feeling of community moment, almost a historic moment.
And, okay, it spilled over to the next day and the next day.
And I tell you, the horns were honking the whole time.
Like I was in a hotel on Queen Street, just three blocks south of Parliament.
And the horns didn't stop honking till, you know, the wee hours.
Ottawa's War Memorial Celebration00:15:24
But, okay, so what, right?
And there was one fella, and I told that story there.
One fella said, well, so what are we all here to do?
I didn't get into that in my speech there, but like Justin Trudeau is not going to step down because 50,000, 100,000, a million people stand on Parliament Hill.
He just wouldn't do that.
He is not a Democrat.
He is certainly not a populist.
He believes in authoritarianism, and he believes that he is special and destined to be a ruler, not a politician even, or a leader, but a ruler.
There's a difference between a leader and a ruler, isn't there?
So Trudeau would never step down.
In fact, I understand that he just, in fact, maybe in the middle of it right now, a press conference where he's denouncing the protesters with wicked lies.
Do we have any of those clips?
I understand that Mauriso has cut one or two already.
Do you have those, Andrew?
All right, let's take a look at some clips from Trudeau.
Far from saying that the protesters may have a point, far from saying that he may reconsider his policies, he's smearing them and defaming them, calling them counter-revolutionary, so to speak, as Fidel Castro might do.
Take a look.
I know you're wondering about what you saw in our capital city this weekend.
As my friend Erwin Kotler said on Saturday, freedom of expression, assembly, and association are cornerstones of democracy, but Nazi symbolism, racist imagery, and desecration of war memorials are not.
You know, the desecration of the war memorial, I don't know if you have a picture of it.
The Ottawa police tweeted in response to that.
So there was a picture of a couple of cars parked, not on the war memorial itself, but like on a larger plaza around it.
Yeah, I think that's it there.
Can you zoom in on that picture there?
So make that picture as big as possible.
So there's the war memorial.
It's that arch on the top left there.
And there's a little plaza there, and you can see there's a few cars parked, not on the war memorial, but sort of on the steps to it.
You see those two cars there?
And that's not good.
So can you see the Ottawa police response right underneath it?
Hi there.
When asked by police to move, they complied and are no longer there.
Thank you.
So those, so scroll up again to show the picture.
So you can see there's some cars on the right.
And I think I can't quite make it out.
Are there two cars that are actually on the steps of the war memorial?
Looks like two cars.
So you don't want to be parked on those, on that little entryway there, because that's, you know, don't do it.
That's a war memorial.
Now you can see it's not the actual edifice itself, which is about 50 feet over, but that's not good.
Don't do that.
And they immediately complied.
So that, what you see here is the height of the, what did Trudeau just say?
The desecration of our national war memorials.
This is from the guy who gave $10.5 million to Omar Carter, the al-Qaeda terrorist.
All of a sudden, this is a guy who told the veterans they're asking for more than we can give.
He's using his sexy voice, his first date voice.
Oh, baby.
I mean, when Trudeau puts on his first date voice, be careful because here comes the lies.
So he said that that was desecration of the war memorial.
Two cars parked on stairs, like a flat plaza, 50 feet away from the war memorial, who immediately moved them when the police asked them to.
Trudeau says, that's the desecration of our national war memorial.
You wicked liar.
He said, Nazi symbolism.
There was one Nazi flag, but not on Parliament Hill.
There were photos circulating.
It was somewhere else in the city.
Candace Malcolm or True North, I forget which, tweeted an image of that swastika flag that she identified.
She thinks it was the Chateau Laurier Hotel.
I used to live in Ottawa, and even for those of you who may have the Chateau Laurier Hotel.
It's one of the oldest hotels in Ottawa.
It's an old CP Rail hotel, so it's magnificent.
It's very close to Parliament.
It's just across the canal from Parliament Hill.
It's so prestigious.
It looks a little bit like Parliament, and it is the most expensive hotel in Ottawa.
And someone said to me that these days rooms are about 800 bucks a night, and he explained the reasons why I haven't checked.
The idea that some trucker with a swastika flag would be staying at the Chateau Laurier for $800 a night is so far-fetched and so absurd and so laughable.
You have to be a Trudeau liberal not to be alive to that.
I mean, these truckers, they often sleep in their cabs.
And if not, they're sleeping in a motel.
They're not spending $800 a night.
And if you have a swastika flag and you're at the Chateau Laurier, Chateau Laurier isn't just the most expensive hotel.
It's the ultimate insider establishment hotel.
There's never a moment where there isn't some cabinet minister or some lobbyist or some insider in the lobby bar there.
It's so obviously a false flag, but that's all the media talked about.
And so now Trudeau is citing it as fact.
I want to show you one more thing.
I tweeted this video.
There's a great TikTok vid I tweeted.
I think I just said on Terry Fox.
If you can grab that from my Twitter feed, Andrew.
So Terry Fox, there's a statue of Terry Fox, and I saw it when I was there.
And someone put a Canadian flag over his shoulders, and then someone else put a sign in his hands that said freedom.
That's it.
No one knocked it over.
No one painted it.
Here, take a look at this.
Take a look at this.
Here's a guy doing it and see how big he can get that.
Here's a guy I found on TikTok who had a great response.
Take a look at this.
You know, I don't remember anybody crying foul when you guys were using Terry Fox to promote your little agenda for your masks.
By the way, it's not even an N95.
Sure, Terry didn't appreciate that.
I don't remember liberals crying foul when they put a beanie on his head, yard bombing Terry.
No issues there?
No?
Respect to the LGBTQ, but I don't remember Terry Fox being part of that movement or running in any pride marathons.
Although I guess, you know, if it suits the liberal agenda again, no problem.
But if you think putting a Canadian flag on a national symbol of hope is desecration, then I bet you voted for Trudeau.
So in closing, I'm going to just quote Terry.
I do what I do for the people who believe in me, not for the jerks who don't.
And how many people ever get a chance to do something that they really believe in?
I know a lot of people that showed up yesterday, heck, that are still there today.
They believe in something.
They believe in each other.
So trolls do your worst.
And Terry, I'm pretty sure, but hope we're making you proud, bud.
I really like that guy.
But he nailed it.
I mean, I don't know if you can find an image of the desecration of the Terry Fox statue.
It wasn't desecrated.
First of all, desecration, you can see the words there.
It means to take away the sacredness of something.
So you desecrate a church.
You defile a church.
So look at that.
So they've got a flag there.
There's a flag.
And then he's holding a sign that says freedom or mandate freedom.
And that was taken down shortly thereafter.
And I mean, I don't think it does any harm.
It's not, that's not an anti-Terry Fox.
That's not painting him red.
That's not beheading him, decapitating him as Sir John A. MacDonald has had done to him, as countless other historic figures in Canada have had done to their statues.
That's not, first of all, you can't desecrate a Terry Fox statue.
He's not a saint.
He's not a church.
He's a great Canadian who did something great overcoming tremendous adversity, inspiring a nation.
I accept all that.
But he's not actually sacred.
I mean, maybe you mean that in a secular sense.
Fine.
I mean, a great Canadian for sure.
He belongs on our $10 bill.
You put a Canadian flag cape on him.
That's not desecration.
The lies being told by the media party and the Liberal Party to besmirch hundreds.
Yeah, see, that's desecration.
And by the way, at Queen's Park, which is the provincial capital in Toronto, there's a statue of John A. MacDonald they put in a giant coffin.
Like the government itself built a wooden coffin around it so you didn't have to be triggered by looking at it.
That's desecration.
Yeah, Trudeau's lying, of course.
Well, we had a great weekend.
We had a lot of folks down there.
And I'd say just walking around, it felt great.
A lot of people recognized our Rebel News teams or even just the Rebel News microphone flag.
And it felt wonderful.
Sheila hosted a live stream on the weekend.
I just checked on Rumble alone.
It got over 300,000 views.
I bet that's more views than the number of people who watched the National on CBC that night because no one trusts the CBC.
I see that Trudeau said, do we have any more clips?
I see that Trudeau has said he refuses to meet with the truckers.
And the reason he gives for that is he disagrees with them.
Apparently, he'll only meet with people who agree with him.
That's going to be tricky given that he only got 32% of the vote in Canada, implying that 68% of Canadians don't agree with him.
And that was in 2019.
I think he's gone downhill since then.
I'd be surprised if I haven't looked at the latest polls, but let's say 70% of Canadians disagree with them.
Is he not even going to talk to the 70% of people who disagree with him?
That's a tyrant for you.
Take a listen.
Oh, well, I think we got it live.
Go ahead, play what you can live.
It's totally queer, the same principle sentence, content measures to protect historians.
Operator, next question?
Thank you.
May I see the next question from Sandamc Charles, Tefantos?
Please go ahead.
Yes, Prime Minister, you said that Aaron O'Toole has to think carefully, but he did meet with some truckers on Friday.
Do you think that was an inappropriate gesture of support to truckers?
Or speak specifically about anyone else in terms of his caucus and to McNemi's participation As part of our job as politicians,
every single day we make decisions about who to meet with, who to respond to, how to respond to them, who to engage with, how not just our engagements but our example impacts on public discourse.
If we choose to put up with and tacitly support conspiracy theorists and folks peddling disinformation, that's a reflection on what we choose to do as politicians and who we are as leaders.
Obviously, I'm going to trust in Canadians' understanding of the kind of responsible leadership that is needed right now.
And I'm sure Canadians are watching what all politicians are doing right now and remembering who is choosing to stand up for what and for whom and what choices they are making as leaders.
I think turn down the mic just for a volume on him just for a second, Andrew.
You know, what's fascinating about what we just saw there is it's a question for Justin Trudeau, about Justin Trudeau.
But even when you have Trudeau besieged by 100,000 truckers or whatever it is, you notice that question from the media party?
It's an attempt to hold Aeronautool to account.
Aeronautoul is a pitiful lame duck opposition leader.
But even in a Trudeau press conference, the media party tries to hold the opposition leader to account.
What a sick thing our media is.
Turn up the volume again.
Let's hear more.
There is a right to make your voices heard loudly and clearly.
There is not a right to shut down our democracy or our democratic processes.
There is not a right to abuse, intimidate, and harass your fellow citizens who are trying to go about their business, trying to live their lives and not necessarily in agreement with what you are doing.
Opératrice, prochaine question.
Thank you.
Merci.
La prochaine question, Raphaël Pirot, Agence QMI.
La parole est à vous.
Voices Heard, Actions Questioned00:07:52
Oui, bonjour, M. Trudeau.
Je voulais savoir, donc, le ministre des Transports avait dit récemment...
All right.
There's some irony there.
I don't think...
I don't know if there's a translation on this feed, but so the question for him was about the truckers, and he says, We've got to get back to work.
You've got to stop shutting down business.
Businesses have to get back to work.
Parliament has to get back to work.
You're shutting down democracy.
No, actually, they haven't shut down democracy.
The Parliament has met less often than it ever has in its history.
That was at Trudeau's direction.
The lockdowns across Canada have happened for two years, not for two days.
The chutzpah of Trudeau saying that these truckers are what shut down, locked down the economy or parliament is such a big lie.
Only a media party journalist could believe it.
All right, let's hear what he says.
Can you find a feed that's in English or translated so we can hear the French part too?
Let's read some super chats in the meantime while we find a feed that has some English in it.
Harper will always be my PM.
Says, laugh out loud, Justin Trudeau following rules for the first time, eh?
I do not think he knows how to follow rules in the first place.
Harper, again, at three bucks.
That brainwashed mask character holding the FU sign should really mask up.
One is not enough.
Kameda, 20 bucks.
Thank you.
Done with the COVID-19 health emergency hoax.
Then remember to laugh.
The virus may be real, but the emergency is not.
Truck-on truckers.
Yeah.
How many years does a permanent emergency still call it an emergency?
Or that's just a new authoritarian way of living.
Private property, $10.
Viva Fry is live right now on the streets of Ottawa, and he said you were awesome, Ezra.
That's nice of him to say.
Shauna Marie, $10.
Can you air and comment on the live Justin Trudeau now, Ezra?
Yeah, we'll get back to that in 30 seconds.
I just want to read a super duper contribution from David Bird for $100.
Hope to see a local convoy head to Tofino, where it's believed he's hiding out.
If he has COVID, then why is he traveling?
Well, as we see, he's actually, I think he's in Ottawa.
So let's go back to that live feed now.
Sorry, I'm trying to mute my phone.
I'm just trying to follow up on some of your responses about the protesters.
I understand the concerns around many of the actions for many of the protesters, but I'm wondering if you, as the prime minister, need to engage with the fears and the concerns that others in the crowd raised about the vaccine.
There seems to be a real concern for many of them about the safety of that vaccine.
And I'm wondering if you are avoiding addressing that by only focusing on the much more hateful and nefarious elements of the protest this weekend.
Marika, anyone who thinks that I haven't been talking about how safe vaccines are has been listening to everything I've been saying over the past two years.
Vaccines are safe and effective.
The way we get through, the way we get through this public health crisis, get back to the things we love, is by trusting science, by trusting the facts, by being there for each other, by stepping up for each other.
We have been hearing people hesitant about getting vaccinated for well over a year now.
And we have been reaching out to them community by community, individual by individual, at the highest level, but also in interpersonal contacts to reassure people that vaccines are safe and effective and that they are the way to get through this pandemic.
So, yes, the concerns expressed by a few people gathered in Ottawa right now are not new, not surprising, are heard, but are a continuation of what we've unfortunately seen in disinformation and misinformation online, conspiracy theorists about microchips, about God knows what else that go with the tinfoil hats.
We have been clear every step of the way that the work our frontline health workers, the work our scientists and researchers are doing, the people at Health County.
You know, I was there, Andrew, and I saw hundreds of signs.
I saw thousands of people's.
I didn't see a single person talk about microchips.
screen coming through there on the shot folks sorry we've uh we've lost some power on on the on the on the video Why don't we put Justin Trudeau back on?
...historique sur la colline du Parlement et envisagez-vous d'une quelconque façon ajuster votre politique?
Je pense que ce qu'on a vu, c'est que, oui, il y a des gens qui hésitent encore à se faire vacciner, mais en même temps, dans la réaction des Canadiens d'un bout à l'autre...
not only in the expressions of intolerance that we allow manifesting, but also in the message of libertarians of choice, Canadians are in my libertaries.
It's the return of things that I do and the liberty is to do vaccine.
My choice, it's the older, because it's like that we create this country, it's in the older, we definitely Canadian.
So marginalized minority, respect, manifested vast majority of Canadians are continuing to be the older, when you work on all ages.
We finished with this pandemic, but the great majority of Canadians know great that the fashion we finished.
It is manifest when the pandemic is a vaccine.
Les abords du Parlement sont-ils sécuritaires et les policiers devraient-ils évacuer le secteur?
J'ai énormément confiance dans nos services de sécurité publique qui font un travail remarquable dans des situations extrêmement difficiles.
Je veux remercier.
The police of Tawa, the GRC, the Parliamentary Parliament, and all those who work with this minimized and intimidation when we see Ottawa.
Cycl Canadians Through Country00:00:28
It's not finished, but we continue to do their job and I cycl Canadians through the country to have confidence in those who choose to serve the public.
Operator, would it be possible to put Marika Walsh on the line if she didn't get her follow-up?
Perfect.
Thank you.
And we don't have Marika Wosh in the queue anymore.