Ezra Levant and Nick Matichka—a PTSD-diagnosed Calgary officer on leave—debate pandemic policing, with Matichka condemning Ottawa’s enforcement of lockdowns as politically motivated, violating the Charter of Rights. Levant ties this to the truckers’ convoy, a spontaneous movement rejecting mandates like masks, framing it as resistance against authoritarianism. Joel Pollack highlights how U.S. conservative media amplified the protests, linking them to supply chain disruptions and Biden’s inflation policies, while Trudeau’s attacks on Sikh truckers expose hypocrisy. Matichka’s defiance risks career backlash but underscores a broader crisis: eroded public trust in police, worsened by pandemic-era overreach, demands moral accountability over blind compliance. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, I think we've all been lonely during the lockdowns and the truckers have made us feel together again.
It's February 10th and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
There is no scientific basis for the lockdowns.
There never was.
I don't even think they pretended.
It had never been done before.
Prior to 2020, lockdowns is a word usually used to describe collective punishment in prisons.
If there was a rowdiness or a riot or a fight, everyone would be punished by being locked down in their cells.
How do you lock down the whole world, healthy people and sick people?
How do you just do that?
How do you lock anyone down who's not a criminal?
And how do people who are not prisoners just go along with it?
It had never been done before en masse.
It had never been studied before, the consequences of it, the side effects of it.
I mean, physical, mental, commercial, social, any of it.
It was just ordered, not after a parliamentary debate, but by people in lab coats.
And we all obeyed.
People in lab coats, they always did their Skype in their lab coats or their doctor's scrubs, maybe with a stethoscope.
Even if they were at home, they would put on their scrubs because they were really being actors.
They had their stethoscope while visible on TV.
Were they going to listen to someone's heart live on TV?
No, it was a prop, you see.
They're actors.
There's power in a white lab coat.
I should wear one when I do my show.
It says expert.
It says official.
We learned in the Milgram experiments in the 1960s that people will do terrible things if someone in a lab coat tells them to.
If they say it's okay, say they'll take responsibility for it.
Just do it.
In the Milgram experiments, people would literally electrocute innocent people while they screamed.
If a lab coat man told them to.
I want the 180 volts.
Please continue, teacher.
Neale, you're going to get a shot.
180 volts standing up I'm not going to kill that man.
I said before, the shocks may be painful, but I'm not saying that they're hollering.
He can't stand it.
What if something happens to him?
The experiment requires that you continue, teacher.
Yeah, but I'm not going to get that man sick of that.
I mean, he's hollering in there.
You know what I mean?
I mean, whether the learner likes it or not, we must go on until he's learned all the words for it.
I'd refuse to take the responsibility of getting hurt in that.
I mean, he's under hollering.
It's absolutely essential that you continue, teacher.
There's too many left here.
And I mean, geez, he gets wrong here.
There's too many of them left.
I mean, who's going to take the responsibility if anything happens to that gentleman?
I'm responsible for anything that happens here.
Continue, please.
All right, next one.
Slow.
Wrong.
Answer his neck.
300 volts.
Of course, the screamer was an actor, but the subject of the experiment didn't know that.
So yeah, we just all went along with the Milgram experiment and we all failed it, didn't we?
Here's a major study published by Johns Hopkins University, very prestigious university.
You Ruined Everything00:08:31
Lockdowns in Europe and the United States only reduced mortality by 0.2% on average.
So you destroyed the world.
You destroyed everyone's own personal world.
You ruined families.
You ruined businesses.
You ruined schools.
You ruined churches.
You treated us all like prisoners.
You destroyed two years of our lives for a 0.2% difference.
But I dispute even that because, of course, how many people did your lockdowns kill?
How many lives were ruined by the lockdown?
Just in canceled surgeries and medical exams, just in depression, in drug use, in despair, in high schoolers never having a prom, in people having a year of their life deleted.
They didn't ask us, by the way.
They told us.
They threatened us.
Actually, they jailed those of us who dared to defy the Milgram experiment.
They didn't even vote on it.
There were no parliamentary debates on it.
A friend of mine objected to my support for the truckers' demands, saying that's not how governments are supposed to work.
And you know what?
He is so right.
But governments aren't really working, are they?
Who died and made Anthony Fauci or Teresa Tam the Pope?
Why a lockdown?
It had never been done before.
Why?
It devastated our economy.
So who does that help?
Qui bono in Latin.
Who benefits?
Well, online companies like Bell, they've made billions, as all online companies have.
Oh, I forgot to say Bell owns CTV News.
I wonder if that influences CTV's coverage of the lockdown.
Amazon loved the destruction of its bricks and mortar competitors, the mom and pop shops.
I wonder if that's why the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, I wonder if that's why they love the lockdowns so much.
I know why China loves them.
They have surpassed the West now, economically, militarily now, haven't they?
But let me talk about the truckers again, because they have done something emotional, spiritual even.
I don't mean any of the official organizers.
I think the truckers are actually very disorganized, leaderless even.
There's a nice lady who set up a GoFundMe account that did great until big tech stole the money from her.
She's nice.
But I doubt that one in a hundred truckers even know her name.
When I was in Ottawa, I found the whole thing rather leaderless and unscripted.
A trucker asked me to give a quick speech, so I did, but there was no actual MC, no official anything.
There was no program, no problem.
As I said in my speech, the convoy itself was the point.
And here's what I mean.
I was thinking about this a bit.
Lockdowns.
That's what they do to prisoners.
But many prisoners have a cellmate, you know, because without that, a man could go crazy, locked in a cage, without someone to talk to, to see, to interact with, someone else's presence.
You'd go mad from loneliness, from isolation, from a lack of mental stimulation.
It would be like being in a white-out snowstorm, like hearing white noise all the time.
You would go mad.
That's why so many people call solitary confinement a kind of torture.
I saw it with my own eyes in the case of Tommy Robinson, who was put in a hole for 42 days.
He came out.
You could tell immediately just by looking at him that he was damaged, that he had shell shock.
Well, they did that to all of us, to all of us.
Literally, we were locked down.
And if we were with our families, that was one thing.
But many people, especially in the big city, young people live on their own, seniors live on their own.
Young people starting their careers locked into their home now with only Bell and Amazon and Netflix as their friends, but just as long as you keep paying them.
But a TV screaming is not a friend, no matter what Mark Zuckerberg and his anti-human metaverse promise.
You know, I think of Toronto, it's the same in Vancouver, in all big cities.
Imagine being in solitary confinement for the better part of two years.
And if you lived in a small apartment, there's a lot of those in places like Toronto, New York.
If you live by yourself, well, where could you even go?
Maybe you had a balcony, but frankly, most don't.
Same in Montreal, Vancouver, wherever.
Well, go to the park, right?
Well, yeah, no.
Remember, they closed those.
And then the psychopaths made little circles on the park, Trinity Bellwoods, Big Park in downtown Toronto, where you had to sit.
If you were outside those lines, you get a ticket like a prisoner.
Gyms were closed, at least the prisoners have gyms.
So you got fatter, no problem.
Order in food.
The Zoom class had a backyard, maybe a swimming pool, maybe they had a country cottage.
Maybe they could go down to Florida to work from their laptops.
Oh, don't worry, the fancy people will do just fine.
But what did they do to the regular people, the working people?
But it's the aloneness I want to talk about just for a moment.
Like a prisoner, but a prisoner in solitary.
There were rules never followed by the politicians themselves against gathering.
Even with your families, they told you not to gather over Christmas or Easter and Thanksgiving.
They didn't follow the rules.
Here's our premier Jason Kenney having a party when it was illegal for you to go to a church, illegal for you to have a family over.
He made you lonely.
He made you alone.
And you probably followed his rules because you're a citizen and you're trusting.
Or maybe you were really scared.
Maybe you were scared of the virus.
Just as likely, maybe you were scared of the government punishing you.
Or scared of being demonized by the mob who were also scared of something.
And if you did go out, you put on a mask, a symbol of fear and apartness and obedience and isolation.
Prisoners wear a uniform too, a sign of identification, a sign that you're the property of something.
You know, when you join a cult, so I'm told, they isolate you from your friends and your family, cut you off.
You can't gather for Easter or Christmas or any time.
You can't socialize with anyone other than the cult and its leader, the leader who keeps you in a state of fear and obedience, rewards and punishment, but mainly isolation from your normal social course of life to break your spirit, to make you scared and tired, to make you susceptible to persuasion and compliance, to make you anxious.
We are social animals.
We need to see friends and family, but we also need to see strangers, people on the street.
We need to say hello.
We need to say good morning and how are you?
And see you later, and nice to see you.
We need that, not just for others' sakes, but for our own.
They turned us into prisoners.
But I say again, prisoners are only in lockdowns if they do something wrong.
But what did we do wrong?
And why did every politician ever get to avoid lockdowns?
Look at Trudeau partying like a rock star with other world leaders, no masks, while locking you down.
And that is what the convoy and the truckers were.
Proof that you were not alone.
Proof that you were not mad to question all this.
This new world that none of us were asked if we wanted to join a world that was imposed upon us simultaneously in every country and city.
How did that happen?
How did these untried methods get enacted everywhere at the same time and all with the same viciousness?
How did that happen?
To make us lonely and alone.
And the cowards who were supposed to defend us did not.
And so came the truckers, unorganized, disorganized, but a visual symbol of togetherness, driving together like a mother duck and her ducklings down the road, chattering to each other on their CB radios and on apps now too.
A feeling of community, honking horns, waving, smiling, no masks.
Everyone was together.
They would stop and have meals together.
They would fill up for gas together.
And soon other people would come out to meet them just for the togetherness, on overpasses, get outside, meet your strangers, meet your neighbors, say hello, find some common ground, talk a bit, smile maybe, a common purpose, confirm, I'm okay, you're okay, we're okay.
It's the system that's crazy, not us.
A million people did this.
A million people stopped being afraid, stopped being lonely, went out to join the convoy.
Look at this party.
Genuine love and brotherly friendship, happiness.
Canadian Truckers Convoy Impact00:13:02
They wanted us scared, not happy, but we're going to be happy.
The truckers ended our loneliness by telling us that it was okay to go out and gather.
They're having fun.
They're gathering.
They're making a community of sorts.
And Trudeau just snarls and growls and calls them Nazis.
It's the images that gave me hope.
It reminds me of when I met Anatoly Sharansky, the Soviet dissident.
He's now in Israel.
When he was in prison in the Gulag in Siberia, when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the evil empire, Sharansky told me that the KGB guard threw into his prison cell a copy of Pravda, the Soviet propaganda newspaper, page after page, denouncing Reagan for being wild and dangerous and evil, and yet buried under 10,000 words of insults.
Reagan's words were still reported.
He had called out evil by its name.
He had called the Soviet Union the evil empire, those two words.
He had seen the truth.
And whereas the KGB had expected Sharansky to be sad and dejected by reading Pravda, it was the opposite.
He told me he was elated.
And the prisoners who were all isolated, but they tapped the message to each other by tapping on their plumbing pipes in Morse code, he told me.
They tapped to each other that the President of the United States had spoken the truth and that help would come.
And indeed, it did come.
Despite 10,000 words of denunciation, the truth was still seen.
I don't care who hates the truckers, Justin Trudeau, Jason Kenney, the media, whatever.
My point is we all can see the truth of the truckers under 10,000 lies.
The same way Anatoly Sharansky could read the hate propaganda in Pravda and still know the truth that Ronald Reagan said those two words, evil empire.
The truckers have set us free.
Free from the prison of our houses, but also from the prison of our minds.
You don't have to be lonely anymore.
You can live.
Stay with us for more.
Unless something breaks between the time we're recording this and the time it airs, the trucker blockades have grown in this one way.
Although Ottawa is sort of in a stalemate and Jason Kenney's thumping his chest about the one at the Montana-Alberta border, I think the one to watch is the Ambassador Bridge that links Detroit and Windsor, because it's hard to believe it, but a quarter of all Canada-U.S. trade goes on that bridge.
It's really an essential part of the auto industry and other manufacturing.
And for trucks to block that, well, all of a sudden, this is more than a spectacle to our American friends.
It's an economic factor.
And I don't know if Joe Biden needs any more of those.
Joining us now via Skype is our friend Joel Pollack, senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com, who covers the Democrats as his B. Joel.
Great to see you again.
Before we talk about the Ambassador Bridge, tell me how the trucker rebellion, the Trucker Spring, has been covered in America.
Because normally Canada is that boring place that American media ignore, except for where the cold fronts come from and the weather maps.
You guys have been talking about Canada, haven't you?
Yes, Canada has become a big part of the political discourse here.
And I actually think that the Canadian truckers had a profound effect on American policy here.
And let me explain how that happened.
So thanks to your coverage at Rebel News and to independent citizen journalists in Canada, we picked up the story.
And we have quite a significant number of Canadian staff actually at Breitbart.
So our own Robert Kraczyk went down to the protest site in Ottawa and interviewed many of the participants.
And those videos did very well on our website.
We got a lot of traffic from those interviews.
So conservative media started picking up the story from us.
And by the early part of this week, Fox News was talking about the Canadian truckers.
You had panel discussions about the Canadian truckers, debates about the Canadian truckers.
So the story was suddenly live.
And Fox has a very, very loud megaphone.
And once Fox News is reaching half the country with a leading story about Canadian truckers in Ottawa and Justin Trudeau running away and blockades at the border, suddenly Americans were paying attention.
And what was very interesting to me was in the following day's press coverage or press conference, excuse me, at the White House on Tuesday, Press Secretary Jen Psaki led the briefing with a statement about how much Joe Biden had done for truckers.
And I don't think it was a coincidence.
She had some other groups of people in there, like veterans and so forth.
But I think the Biden administration is deeply, deeply worried, not just about cross-border trade, as you mentioned, but also about further disruptions to the supply chain in the United States.
One of the reasons that we have so many supply chain problems is that there are not enough truckers.
There weren't enough truckers before the pandemic.
Truckers started getting six-figure salaries, big signing bonuses.
The trucking companies were desperate to hire people because there was a labor shortage.
The pandemic made everything worse because truckers were in higher demand, but laborers, workers were in short supply.
So there is a lingering labor shortage in the trucking industry, and that has slowed down the traffic at our ports.
That has slowed down the delivery of goods to market.
It's responsible for empty shelves.
It's responsible for higher prices.
And the truckers, who've been a lifeline throughout the pandemic, are doing their very best.
But now that there's some hint that truckers might organize, as we've seen in Canada, the Biden administration does not want to go there.
They do not want any trucking convoys, snarling traffic, blocking trade, stopping supply routes.
They are terrified of more supply chain disruptions.
They're very worried about prices continuing to go higher.
The Consumer Price Index data is very poor right now, and it's weighing heavily on the opinion polls of the Biden administration.
They defended the truckers' freedom of speech in Canada, and they have avoided saying anything more definitive about it.
They have not backed up Justin Trudeau in his claims that they are racists and xenophobes and Islamophobes and waving swastikas.
And, you know, I saw a complaint in one of the Canadian news sources that there are Inuit students in Ottawa who are afraid to walk down the street because of the truckers.
I guess the truckers from Saskatchewan are now Inuit phobes or digiphobes or whatever you call it.
But, you know, whatever phobia you want to make up, they're not going there in the Biden administration, unusually so, because they are very quick to impute racism and racial motives to their own opponents.
So they are actually defending the truckers, although they're trying to say it's not really about vaccine mandates and so forth.
But I don't think it's a coincidence that many blue states just this week, many Democratic-run states in this country dropped their mask mandates, like California, New York, Illinois, and many other Democrats have suddenly done a complete 180-degree and about-face turn on questions like natural immunity and so forth.
So we are seeing, I think, a profound effect in the United States of the Canadian truckers and what they've done to shift the debate and really to demonstrate in a very visual way the strength of public opposition to these mandates.
Well, I think the visuals are part of it.
I mean, we're all used to seeing sort of the Greta Tunberg, obvious, you know, child actors types, professional protesters block a road for a bit.
And people are just sort of irritated by it because they're so used to it and it's so obviously confected.
But aesthetically, demographically, psychologically, you have these big, beautiful trucks.
Everyone sort of likes to look at big trucks.
And there's a sort of a respect for people who drive them.
And we all think that's a hard, it's like there's sort of an endemic respect for farmers.
That's a good man.
That's an honest living.
You know, so I think people are predisposed, and they don't think of them as whiners.
They don't think of them as spoiled brats, which is what you might think of a Greta Tunberg or a Greenpeace Nick.
So you have these people who maybe never in history have protest.
They protest in France, but never in North America.
They have these gorgeous vehicles that are huge, and maybe it doesn't even take that many of them to look like a huge group.
And they're independent.
And I don't know, it's just so different.
It feels so real.
And so it's a very powerful thing, but you're so right.
Trudeau took it personally because all those things I just said, you know, middle-aged guys, hardworking blue-collar burning fossil fuels, that's not Trudeau's people.
So he responded personally, thin-skinned name-calling.
So now he's painting himself in a corner because this is personal for him.
Joe Biden, if you think about it, he sort of pretends to be a macho blue-collar guy.
He likes cars.
He's got his own Mustang.
Like he's sort of, I think it's just a shtick, but he pretends to be a working-collar guy, a blue-collar guy.
So I think the fact that he didn't go for the personal insult, he can, I think he can save face and achieve something good for America by dropping the vaccine mandate.
Trudeau would immediately have to do the same thing because it doesn't make sense to have truckers be able to go one way, but not the other.
Joe Biden can save America and Canada, and it's all because of these truckers, Joel.
You're right that Joe Biden's working class persona is an act.
He once actually claimed to have been a trucker.
He claimed that he drove an 18-wheeler, and it was one of the more outrageous things he has claimed about his past.
But I think it's more than that.
I really think that the Biden administration knows that the root of opposition to their economic policy and skepticism about Biden's leadership is inflation.
And Biden has exacerbated that problem by pushing for these massive spending bills.
Americans are seeing gas prices go up at the pump.
They're seeing prices for basic commodities go up.
Everything costs more.
People have suffered a decline in real wages, even though nominal wages have been going up.
So, people are very distressed about this.
And they know that Biden has just been pressing Congress to spend more and more money.
The White House put itself in a bind by backing all these spending programs.
The last thing they want is more inflationary pressure.
And so, they're trying everything they can, pulling every other lever other than the obvious, which is to reopen the Keystone Pipeline, for example, which is an ideological commitment they made to the environmentalists, or to drop the spending proposals.
So, they're trying to do everything else they can to keep the prices down and to keep the supply chain going.
Pete Buttigieg, our Secretary of Transportation, is nowhere to be found on this, by the way.
He is absent.
He is Mr. Silent when it comes to any kind of problem, whether it's the cargo crisis at the ports, whether it's people stealing boxes of goods from freight trains in Los Angeles.
We've seen massive looting here in LA.
Whether it's this crisis at the border, he is AWOL, which is interesting.
He wants to be president one day.
It's very clear he intends to try to succeed Joe Biden or to run again at some point in the future.
He is completely missing in action.
But I think the Biden administration is just worried about the backlash.
And you're right, truckers are compelling because they work hard.
But also, in this country, I'm sure in Canada as well, trucking is an entry-level occupation.
They're always looking for truckers.
You can get into the trucking profession as long as you complete your commercial driver's license.
And it's a very, very hard job.
You are away from home for long hours, and driving is very difficult.
The regulations are very difficult.
You may get yourself into some difficult financial situations.
There are all kinds of debts and fees and all kinds of things like that that truckers have to risk.
So it is a very tough way to make a living, but it is an entry-level occupation.
It's one that Americans can do when they don't have other options and if they have good habits and they are responsible people who show up to work on time.
So it rewards the basic values and virtues of good old hard work.
And that's what makes truckers compelling.
Also, this is the working class uniting across boundaries to oppose the socialist dictates.
And the socialists are rather shocked by the fact that when workers of the world unite, they unite against them.
Media Wave Unites Canada00:04:02
But that's what's happening.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, in Canada, we have explicitly socialist parties.
One of them is called the NDP just denouncing these.
I've never seen such rage.
And the leader of Canada's Socialist Party, he happens to be a Sikh man who wears a turban.
Well, it just so happens that an enormous proportion of truckers in Canada are Sikh, Indo-Canadians.
And so it's so bizarre to see a Sikh socialist denouncing blue-collar Sikh men who are truck drivers.
And obviously, they're not going to take it to heart that they're racist.
They're Sikhs.
They have turbans and glorious beards.
And that's another thing.
Go ahead.
Socialism is great until you can't get the California tomatoes anymore in an Ottawa organic food market.
That's when Justin Trudeau is really going to be upset.
Socialism is basically a luxury good.
You have to be rich enough to be a socialist.
Well, I mean, our friend Sheila Gunreed, who's a farmer, a part-time farmer, she's got a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll, like to say about Sheila.
She says, once the avocados are shut off, so there's no more avocado toasts in Ottawa, that will bring the government to its knees.
And she's only half joking.
Well, Joe, it's very interesting.
And it's not often that Canada is talked about in America.
And I think that Canadians don't mind it that way.
It's been a great source of pride for me that our little rebel army of reporters, we were in nine different cities last weekend covering the convoys.
I'm delighted that we're part of that media wave you talk about.
I was on Tucker.
We had a young guy on Hannity.
I've done Megan Kelly's show twice.
Like it's just people are thirsty for the news.
And I think they're coming to Rebel News.
Not that many of them even know us.
It's just that we're the only people actually showing the images.
We're not just sitting in our offices punditing on it.
We're showing here's what we're seeing with our cameras.
You can't really lie about what we show.
It's been a very exciting moment for us.
And I'm glad you told me how that sort of worked.
I believe it.
Breitbart.com, the rest of the conservative movement, Fox Megaphone, and now it's everywhere.
That's a very interesting history of how this thing went.
Last word to you, Joel.
Well, I would just say you're not just part of this media wave, you really have led it.
And I think your speech at the protest in Ottawa is one you'll remember.
I think your kids, your grandkids will remember, and they'll say, Grandpa was there.
Look what he did.
It really is a very unique moment in Canadian history.
As you mentioned on social media earlier this week, it's a rare moment when Canadians are teaching Americans how to be free.
So I think it's really a watershed.
And to have been part of it, to have covered it, I think is really not just a valuable service to the rest of us, but it's to be part of an important moment in history.
Well, I feel that way too.
I mean, and thanks for having me on your Sirius XM show the other day.
I said, I really think it's the most dramatic and important, most momentous political event in, I was thinking about it, and maybe since the 1995 Quebec separation referendum that came within half a percent of voting for Quebec to leave, that perhaps that was a greater crisis.
But certainly since then, this is the biggest thing, and it's certainly realigning the country.
And I really think that Rebel News was built for this moment.
And thanks to you for, I know you've reported on our work, including my speech there.
That was nice of you and some of our other stuff.
So thanks for giving us some support.
And isn't it funny that Canada is helping to make America more free?
I never would have thought that would happen in my whole life, I got to tell you.
Well, Joel, great to see you.
Thanks for all your time, and we'll look forward to talking to you again.
Thank you, and keep it up.
Right on, we'll do it.
There you have it, Joel Pollock, senior editor-at-large at breitbart.com.
Stay with us more ahead.
Hey, welcome back.
Your feedback.
Police Officer's Perspective00:14:22
Someone with the nickname Cypress Loser says Kenny is keeping the QR code so he can reactivate it after things have calmed down.
Don't fall for his lives.
Oh, you're exactly right.
I mean, it's the database, it's the surveillance system, it's the infrastructure for the biomedical security state.
I wonder how many people he convinced.
I think, I can't believe that he was once considered a leading force for freedom in Canada.
Here's one from someone named 1984 Today referring to Christine, the member of the European Parliament, who talked to us from Brussels.
She said she's trying to talk to the convoy from across the ocean, but Canadian politicians can't talk to the truckers from across the street.
What a shame.
Yeah, isn't that true?
I got to tell you, even in the last few hours, I've seen movement.
Jab meet Sing, who was just brutal and vicious and smearing in the convoy is now saying, We need an exit plan.
We need to, these truckers are moving mountains.
Someone with a nickname Twin Monk says, Nope, QR is the linchpin.
QR codes have to go.
That's the path of slavery, the social credit score, like Communist China.
Oh, exactly right.
And for Kenny to so happily say, Yes, I will furnish that data, that surveillance system, to any private business.
It's up to them.
It's a private business, really.
So it's okay if a private business says no blacks allowed, no, no gays allowed.
Is that okay by Jason Kenny?
That's not what the law says.
That's not what Jason Kenny believed two years ago.
Let me leave you with our video of the day, as we like to do these days.
Our friend Sheila Gunnread interviewed a cop who just couldn't abide it anymore.
I'll let you watch that.
But before I do, I'll say goodbye.
And on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night and keep fighting for freedom.
Are you going to be in trouble for this?
I believe I will be for sure.
And so, just for some context, the reason why I even made that video last night was to, that message was directed to other police officers who feel the same way that I do or questioning what's going on.
And so I posted it in a chat and it got shared outside of that.
So I don't know what the repercussions are going to be or what my future looks like.
But honestly, there's no other issue that's as important as this.
Over the past two years of the pandemic, we've seen some really horrible examples of policing, arrests of peaceful protesters, police breaking up outdoor birthday parties, parents arrested in front of their children for the crime of being in the public park.
But in amongst the stories of all the atrocious examples of bad policing, there are some really good police officers making strong moral stands, standing up for their own profession.
But in those acts of integrity, those are often the things that might ultimately end a good cop's career, either through disciplinary action or just plain old demoralization.
So joining me right now is the Calgary police officer who made that video, Nick Matichka.
Nick, first, I want to thank you for being one of those cops who got into policing for exactly the right reason and for being guided by your moral compass.
And I can tell that you are not a very public person.
You can see it in your demeanor, in your video.
So I want to ask you, why was this so important to you?
What you saw happening in Ottawa that you just had to go public?
Yeah, so I mean, like everyone else, I've been watching what's been happening over the entire basically the last two years.
And for me, yesterday was the straw that broke the camel's back.
I just, I saw the Ottawa police service members and I'm sure other members of the RCMP and other police services out there going out and exerting what is 100% political, politically influenced.
They are going out and exerting that political will on peaceful protesters that are doing what we're allowed to do under the charter that is guaranteed to every citizen in this country in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
And for me, that scene yesterday, it was, like I said, it was just the straw that broke the camel's back for me.
And I just, I've been following along and watching various news feeds, you guys mostly.
And it just, I couldn't stay on the sidelines any longer.
And honestly, it took me, I don't know, I probably wrote that in about 15 minutes last night after my kids went to bed.
And then I just had this calling just to put it on video.
And then I posted it in a private police member group that basically then it got shared from there and it became what it is.
And I'm I knew when I made it that it was not going to stay within that group, and I've come to basically accept that because I feel like this message is so important to get out there to not only other police officers,
but to members of the public, just so they know that there are guys and girls like myself who are appalled by what we're seeing from our governments and we're just not going to sit on the sidelines any longer.
And we're going to speak up and we're going to do what we need to do to get that message out.
Now, without, you know, I don't need names or anything, but what are you hearing from your, I guess, colleagues in policing?
Are they supportive of the stand that you're taking?
And so, Chila, just to, I guess, put it all in context.
So, I am a member of the Calgary Police Service.
I am on leave right now.
I have been diagnosed with PTSD.
So, I'm currently off work, but am still, I guess, employed by the Calgary Police Service.
So, I in no way speak for the Calgary Police Service or on behalf of the Calgary Police Service.
This is my own personal, how I feel about what's going on in the world, and has nothing to do with the police service.
And so, being that I'm off work, I'm pretty disconnected from my fellow police officers in Calgary.
But this morning, it's been pretty overwhelming the number of messages of support that I've received from people all over the world, it feels like.
Now, I want to ask you: what do you think the pandemic has done to the community's relationship with police?
I feel like for me, that's one of the things that will be the hardest to repair.
We used to trust our police officers to defend our rights, and we're not seeing that.
We're seeing police officers violate the rights of citizens when citizens are peacefully resisting their own government.
So, I guess, what's the state of that relationship?
And is there any way that we can repair it?
Yeah, that's a great question.
There's no doubt in my mind that the vast majority of police officers out there are so they signed up to do this job for the right reasons.
And for myself personally, it was a struggle to try and remember that, those good intentions, because you do, you get jaded over the years.
And for me, in my own journey, when George Floyd was murdered last year, that was a real turning point for me where the public did really turn on my profession through something that happened a country away.
And it was, don't get me wrong, it was a terrible, terrible thing.
And I 100% agree with everything that's happened in court since then to convict that police officer.
But what I saw was the public was so quick to turn on policing in general after that.
And that was really disheartening for me personally because I signed up to do this job to help people.
And that just seemed to really get lost in that.
And then just the darkness of how people treated police members after that incident.
And then through the whole defund the police movement and all of that, it was really difficult.
And so, but I understand where the public is coming from with some of their views here, and specifically against what the police have been involved in with enforcing these mandates.
I do believe that the majority of police officers are doing it, doing the job for the right reasons.
But that can be taken too far in terms of just following orders.
And that's kind of where I see where things are at right now is up until now, I can see how you would just move through certain things.
You're being asked to do things, and you can justify it.
But now, with all of the information coming out about the science of what's happening with the virus, it's at a point for me where I just, I can't,
I just can't see how you can justify what the enforcement measures that are being taken, sorry, and now taking those enforcement measures against peaceful protesters who are in our nation's capital doing nothing more than making their voices heard and they're just being ignored by the federal government.
So, sorry, to answer your question, I don't know how that relationship can be repaired other than just the guys and girls that are doing the job for the right reasons just to stand up and just move forward and hope that the public will see that and understand and just move forward.
Now, I guess that's your message for police officers still in uniform.
Do you have like a further message for them?
What if there are police officers out there who are feeling the same way that you do?
What's your message for them?
I mean, I'm not going to encourage anyone to do anything that's against what they feel in their heart.
I just, I feel like if you're questioning the order that you're being given and it doesn't resonate with you and your own morals and your own integrity, then you need to question that and you need to take action to not be part of that.
And I just, I think the excuse that I was just following orders at this point is just, it's not good enough.
Nick, what's next for you?
Are you going to be in trouble for this?
I believe I will be for sure.
And so just for some context, the reason why I even made that video last night was to, that message was directed to other police officers who feel the same way that I do or questioning what's going on.
And so I posted it in a chat and it got shared outside of that.
So I don't know what the repercussions are going to be or what my future looks like.
But honestly, there's no other issue that's as important as this.
This is it.
So whatever happens to me because of this, I'm completely at peace with.
And I just want to be a voice that stood up and said enough is enough.
And whatever happens to me is kind of inconsequential at this point.
This is way more important than the kind of trivial things that may or may not happen to me because of it.
And at the end of the day, all I'm doing is just speaking my truth, my own personal views on this situation.
And whatever happens to me is what happens to me.
Well, Nick, I want to thank you for taking that stand and reminding those officers that are still in uniform that they aren't alone if they feel as though they are doing the wrong thing by enforcing some of these more draconian and political measures.
Nick, can you let us know if you need some help?
Because we'd love to help a good cop who stood up and did the right thing.