Ezra Levant details how Ottawa police blocked MPs and protesters from Parliament on February 18, enforcing Trudeau’s illegal Emergencies Act crackdown despite three weeks of peaceful protests—no violence, fires, or major disruptions. Convoy leaders like Tamara Lynch faced mass arrests while police deployed tear gas, pepper spray, and military gear, injuring demonstrators, including a man with a suspected heart attack. Trudeau’s pattern—ignoring court rulings (e.g., Rebel News journalists’ accreditation) and appointing corrupt officials like Bill Blair—mirrors authoritarian tactics, from bank seizures to media complicity. The truckers’ global influence, even in Israel and the U.S., contrasts with Canada’s potential slide into financial and reputational ruin under Trudeau’s overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
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It's such a visual story.
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All right, here's today's show.
Tonight, the police cancel parliament and enforce Trudeau's violent end to a peaceful protest.
It's February 18th, and this is the Esther 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 is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Today was going to be part two of my monologue from yesterday about how Trudeau had promoted Canada's most abusive, dirtiest cop, Bill Blair, who oversaw the G20 policing disaster in Toronto to enforce his crackdown on the peaceful trucker convoy in Ottawa.
I honestly thought we'd have time to do a deep dive like that, given that Parliament was still debating the Emergencies Act.
My thinking was the truckers have been there in Ottawa for three weeks.
If anything, the convoy is smaller and more mild than ever.
They've been complying with the court order not to honk their horns, for example.
They've opened up a path on every main road, including Wellington Street, which is the main road outside Parliament.
There was a passable lane there.
I thought that, well, Trudeau has invoked the Emergencies Act as his legal tool.
That requires a ratification in a parliamentary debate and vote.
That process is happening right now.
It'll be done in a couple days.
Surely he'll just wait a couple more days to go through the motions of the Emergencies Act.
I mean, if you're going to act without the Emergencies Act, why bother invoking it at all?
But I was wrong.
I should have known Trudeau doesn't actually care about the law.
He doesn't feel bound by it.
It's like when he was convicted of violating the Conflict of Interest Act.
Remember when he, for example, took $100,000 secret vacation bribe in the Bahamas from the Aga Khan?
He just shrugged it off and said it was a great learning opportunity for other Canadians.
And then he went ahead and broke the law again.
Or a more personal story, when he tried to ban our rebel news reporters from the leaders' debates and the court ruled that he had to let us in.
So we sent our reporters and Trudeau said hours after a court had ruled that we are indeed, obviously, reporters.
He simply said he couldn't care what a court said.
We are not reporters to him.
To heck with the court.
My question is the following.
Israel is one of the most vaccinated countries in the world.
They are now in their fourth vaccine report.
They do not consider that those who received two doses of vaccine are fully vaccinated.
My question is more Canadians desert a rappelle vaccine.
The privilege or personal and views the obligations of the prime minister or abolition.
J'ai partagé ma perspective sur ton organisation hier soir.
Je n'ai plus rien à dire.
Ça demande bien qui vous êtes.
Merci.
The only reason that I'm allowed to ask you this question is because today the federal court ruled that the government doesn't have the right to determine who is or is not a journalist.
This is the second election in a row that the court had to overturn your government.
Do you still insist on being able to make that decision and why?
First of all, questions around accreditation were handled by the press gallery and the consortium of networks who have strong perspectives on quality journalism and the important information that is shared with Canadians.
The reality is, organizations, organizations like yours that continue to spread misinformation and disinformation on the science around vaccines,
around how we're going to actually get through this pandemic and be there for each other and keep our kids safe, is part of why we're seeing such unfortunate anger and lack of understanding of basic science.
And quite frankly, your I won't call it a media organization, your group of individuals need to take accountability for some of the polarization that we're seeing in this country.
And I think Canadians are cluing into the fact that there is a really important decision we take about the kind of country we want to see.
And I salute all extraordinary, hardworking journalists that put science and facts at the heart of what they do and ask me tough questions every day, but make sure that they are educating and informing Canadians from a broad range of perspectives, which is the last thing that you guys do.
You see my point?
He regards himself as above the law, like his father figure, Castro.
So why would he wait until the Emergencies Act was debated and voted on?
He's a strong man now.
They fired the Ottawa police chief the other day.
No reasons given.
I think we can guess why.
He wasn't prepared to get violent against peaceful protesters.
So they found a cop dirty enough to do whatever Trudeau tells him to do.
It's not too hard.
I mean, promise a guy a promotion, promise him legal immunity from his misconduct.
I mean, many of the good cops have left the force, either being fired or they removed themselves for not going along with the past two years of bullying.
So the new chief will follow orders.
He'll do whatever he needs to do.
Like canceling parliament.
Like I say, the police raids today did not wait until parliament was done debating.
They just canceled parliament.
The police told parliament not to meet.
It's not needed.
I mean, the decision-making is being done by the police now.
Parliament really is just a hood ornament.
The police canceled parliament.
Last night they started arresting trucker leaders, in this case, Tamara Lynch, the young Métis woman who got the convoy going in the first place.
So peaceful protest leaders just arrested on the streets, swooped up, picked up by police cars, and told a scram.
And then this morning, the Ottawa Police, just assuming their role as the unchecked dictators of Canada, no peaceful protesters allowed at all.
They were just arrest you on site.
Oh, and no journalists, thank you.
I mean, it's best if you just trust the police to tell you about the police.
After all, if you don't need Parliament and you don't need protesters, why do you need journalists?
Here's the police threatening our people.
Here's the police.
Here's the police.
Thanks For Looking Out00:03:16
Get those flags out of the way.
Guys, I gotta get out of here.
Thank you, bro.
You can tell who's aggressive.
Who's the one that's...
You guys are committed treason!
Look at the gas!
Appreciate you, man.
Thank you, guys.
Thank you so much.
This guy just pulled me out of there.
Thank you.
CDTV.ftl on Instagram.
I love this dude.
Thank you.
Thanks for looking out for me.
So, like
I said yesterday, Trudeau's hatchet man is the dirtiest cop in Canada.
My story today was going to be a premonition about what Bill Blair would do, but it happened before I could finish telling you the story.
I'll just give you just a little taste of it.
It made international news, Bill Blair.
Let me read a bit.
Faked Hoaxes of Violence00:12:07
Toronto police pay $16.5 million to protesters wrongfully held at the 2010 G20 summit.
This article is a few years old.
Let me read it to you.
Claimants to receive up to $24,700 in historic settlement.
Police encircled 1,100 people and carried out mass arrests.
Well, that sounds familiar.
Let me read some of it.
About 1,100 protesters who were wrongfully detained at the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto will receive compensation from the city's police force after a historic $16.5 million settlement in a class action lawsuit.
Under the settlement, which was announced late on Monday, each claimant will receive between $5,000 and $24,700.
Depending on the nature of their detention, they will also have their G20 protest-related records expunged.
Thousands of protesters traveled to downtown Toronto to protest against the convening of the G20 summit.
The causes were numerous, anti-globalization, anti-poverty, pro-environment, pro-gay rights.
And the protests leading up to the Jan 26-27 June summit were peaceful.
Okay, now can you spot the difference?
Here it is.
During the summit, however, police cars were set on fire, and a small band of masked protesters incited vandalism and violence.
In three weeks of peaceful protests in Ottawa, there has not been a single police car set on fire, has there?
No violence at all, has there been?
Of course not.
But the police responded by encircling more than a thousand people, including peaceful protesters, onlookers, and journalists, at various locations and carried out mass arrests.
At one point, hundreds were kettled in a torrential downpour and left to shiver in the cold.
Video footage at the time also showed officers using excessive force, tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets against protesters.
At the makeshift detention center, detainees were strip searched.
In 2014, Vice reported that the police trained surveillance cameras on the strip search rooms.
Ottawa court judges later found that the police's actions contravened the protesters' civil rights, specifically their charter rights to expression and peaceful assembly.
So humiliating people by strip searching them and filming it.
How could a police chief who did that ever have a job again?
Well, precisely because he did that, because a tyrant can count on such a man to do whatever needs to be done to crush Trudeau's opponents without any compunction, without any regard of law or conscience or ethics or morality.
Being a corrupt, dirty cop is exactly why Bill Blair was chosen by Trudeau to handle the truckers.
The dirtier, the more corrupt, the better.
So they're doing the same thing.
Here's one of the convoy leaders, Ben Dictor.
He said, Breaking Ottawa police, they're boxing in protesters and executing mass arrests, once again escalating the situation and not allowing people to leave in peace.
Why are you always escalating?
Of course they are.
They're going from truck to truck with heavy weapons, training violence on men, women, and children, threatening them with guns.
And the media are pushed back and really straight out of a police state.
These are technically police forces, but they have military-style uniforms, military-style weapons, armored vehicles, and what Trudeau would call assault rifles.
To be used against whom, by the way?
Now, I'm recording this in the late afternoon, which is when I record my show.
By the time it airs at 8 p.m., who knows what you'll be seeing or if you'll be seeing anything at all.
They have repeatedly threatened to arrest our reporters and others too.
I have encouraged our people not to be arrested.
We don't want to be arrested, but neither will we be shooed away by some Nazi-style thugs.
Sorry if that language hurts your feelings to hear me say it.
For 50 years, I've been pro-cop.
I just can't say those words honestly anymore.
I know there are exceptions, but I saw thousands of cops using the I'm just following orders excuse today.
That excuse didn't work for the real Nazis and it shouldn't work for Trudeau's cop thugs.
I showed you the other day the definition in the CESIS Act of a threat to Canada necessary for the Emergencies Act to be operational.
Threats to the security of Canada.
I went through the four tests, but look at the end.
Does not include lawful advocacy, protest, or dissent.
There is no real threat, no espionage, no serious violence, no violence at all.
No revolution.
Those are the threats that are contemplated in the Emergencies Act.
But police are banning MPs, journalists, peaceful protesters.
Shame on the Conservative Party for rolling over so quietly, as they always do, the cowards.
I don't know how this will end.
I have been surprised a few times, always when I assume Trudeau has some sort of internal limit on how far he will go.
He has no limit.
And why should he?
No one has ever stopped him.
No one has ever limited him.
No other politician, either in government or opposition, no premier, no court, no one.
Look at this comedy here.
Trudeau tweeting his scolding to Cuba.
Apparently they need to be less heavy-handed in dealing with political dissent.
I agree with that, but imagine tweeting that literally as Canada suspends parliament and suspends the right to protest, suspends all civil liberties, but never suspends our endless reservoir of smug satisfaction with ourselves to lecture others.
Say, where are foreign leaders speaking out against our civil liberties wipeout?
I haven't seen any, but again, why should they speak out for us if we don't speak out for ourselves?
The Canadian media is almost uniformly, maybe five exceptions out of a thousand reporters, not only cheering on the paramilitaries, but they actually demanded the crackdown to begin with.
They lusted for it.
They helped wag the dog for it.
They faked it.
They faked hoaxes of violence.
They faked hoaxism, Nazism.
There's been no violence from these truckers, not from the time they arrived to this very moment.
The violence being deployed is against them by the establishment with the full support of the establishment.
Who's the Nazi now?
I don't know how it's going to end.
I know this.
Canadians no longer can claim that we are a nice place, a safer place than America, a place of civil liberties, a place of stability.
A desperate politician called a peaceful protest, a national emergency to get himself out of a political jam and build an enemies list by forcing banks to dox and seize funds of his opponents.
I think it's going to end badly.
I think it has to.
Trudeau needs it.
He needs an after-the-fact justification for why he destroyed our civil liberties.
I think he wants violence, and some cops obviously want it.
Some cops became cops just for moments like this.
So how's it going to end?
Well, the protesters are offering passive resistance.
So they're not fighting back.
They're doing it the way Muhammad McCandy did it in India.
They're just not cooperating.
They're not obeying, but they're not resisting aggressively.
They'll be charged.
They'll be abused.
They'll be given strip searches, probably.
And given how the courts have been the last two years, I'm sure this latest, most outrageous assault on our liberties will be upheld by the authorities.
And the media party will write a false history of it, too.
How Trudeau and his brave police saved the country from the bouncy castles or the popcorn machine?
Yeah, we went into a national emergency for that.
What's the point of Parliament if this was done without waiting for Parliament?
What's the point of an opposition if they agreed to run away when the police told them to?
What's the point of a media if they're cheerleaders for the regime?
What's the point of police if they don't uphold the law, if they just follow Trudeau's orders?
This is deeply demoralizing to those who believe in peace, order, and good government, ordered liberty, limited government, liberal values.
The mask has slipped off, isn't it?
We now know that Trudeau really is Fidel Castro's heir, politically, if not genetically.
But we also know that it was the truckers who gave us the freedoms back, that are now returning province by province, as politicians who are less violence-prone decide to give up at least some of their lockdown powers.
I don't know.
I know that my own self-image as a Canadian citizen has changed.
What it means to be here in a country that I can at most call partly free.
Stay with us for more.
At this point in the show, we were planning to have an interview with one of our reporters on the ground in Ottawa, probably Lincoln Jay, who's right, I mean, inches away from the police, inches away.
But he's doing that right now, and I do not want to break him away from that.
I would talk to him, I would ask him what it's like, but I can't break him away from that right now.
So what we're going to do is we're going to take clips of video that he and we might take some from Alexa that they aired today.
They were right on the scene.
In fact, Alexa was shoved down and Lincoln was pushed back.
That's how close they are to the front line.
They are the front line.
So let me show you that brave work by our young citizen journalist, Alexa, very courageous.
You know her.
She fights like a tiger.
And Lincoln, who's just a young pup.
I don't know his age, but he's a pretty young guy.
He's sort of babyface guy, isn't he?
But boy, he's showing courage, the two of them.
So we're very proud of those guys and our cameraman Guillaume, who is with Alexa as well.
So let me show you some video clips, and I'll talk to you on the other side with some final thoughts.
You did not have a trailer.
British Columbia license plate.
Columbia, Lila.
You're right.
Just calm. Just calm.
Just calm.
I know.
So one side we have the police and the other side we have the veteran that's created a chain in protection.
that needs to back up on one side or the other.
Calm and Divide00:08:57
Will you bring them?
They're meant to smoke look.
Oh, oh, oh, oh.
But I come and make it land, true hatred of.
And all our sons come and With love!
It's probably 300 feet.
300 feet.
Your bodies are going to know.
We're going to go.
We're going to go with it.
Hey, you fucking cowards.
Fucking cowards.
Fing cowards.
Hold the line!
Keep the peace.
Keep the peace.
They come!
They come!
Don't get aggressive!
Don't get aggressive!
You close your trainers, I guess.
Thank you, bro.
Please don't let them take any of them.
I'm fucking serious, bro.
You don't hold the line!
Don't hold the line!
Hey!
Don't let them go!
Watch out!
Watch out! Watch out!
This is cool!
Get those flags out of the way!
Guys, I gotta get out of here.
Thank you, bro.
You can tell who's aggressive!
Who's the one that's...
Oh, cash.
You guys have committed treason!
There's my question.
Maybe this was fun.
We're gonna gas us!
Thank you, brother.
Appreciate you, man.
Thank you, guys.
Please, bro.
Thank you so much.
This guy just pulled me out of there.
Thank you.
CDTV.fdl on Instagram.
I love this dude.
Thank you.
Thanks for looking out for me.
I love you brother.
They just trampled this lady.
MEDIC! MEDIC!
You're okay.
Pepper spray is out.
Hold her, hold her.
Please stand on.
Hold my hand.
Second casualty on me.
Ask me.
let's go pepper spray is being deployed oh hey come on oh no no no no
Hold the law.
Oh my god, no.
Oh my god.
There's a man down Hope Help!
We're backing up!
Heart Attack Crisis00:03:09
And they use that as leverage to gain ground.
Yeah.
There you go!
You guys caused the heart attack!
Great on!
You heard a lot of screaming there, guys.
There was a man on the ground who is in some form of distress.
They're saying a heart attack.
Welcome back.
You know, I have a few thoughts on things.
In one sense, the huge news of the past few weeks is that the truckers have been a greater force for freedom than anything else in Canada in two years.
And even though Justin Trudeau is going full paramilitary, full banana republic on them, full Hong Kong police crushing the dissent on them, the truckers have still inspired a nation, caused vaccine mandates across the country to be taken down, changed public opinion in Canada and around the world.
I just saw today that they've launched a formal truck convoy schedule in the United States, starting in California, making its way to Washington, D.C. We've seen truckers in places as far away as Israel.
The truckers were an authentic, organic expression of resistance to the lockdowns that can never be undone.
It also politicized a million people who had never thought of themselves as political before.
It gave them courage to take on the government.
Those are all huge wins.
On the other hand, Trudeau's reaction was an absolute disaster for our country.
The worst civil liberties abuse by a government ever.
And watching all the other establishment go along with it, especially the media, especially the courts, was deeply depressing.
What he's done to our banking system will likely take decades to repair.
Now people know that Canadian banks just aren't safe.
Would you put your money in a Russian bank or a Ukrainian bank or a Venezuelan bank?
Probably not.
I think a lot of people are thinking twice about putting their money in Canada now, including Canadians.
I know that Rebel News has a special role in all of this.
We've told the story that others won't.
And we've crowdfunded civil liberties lawyers to help fill the gaps.
I think that's an important thing to do too, because the massive power of the state is coming crushing down on those who dare to oppose Trudeau.
We'll see what happens over the weekend.
We've got people there all week in Ottawa.
We've covered the truckers in other provinces too, as you know.
I want to make sure our people stay out of jail, but frankly, that's not within our power.
If Trudeau wants to jail us, if he wants to seize our bank account, how could we physically stop him?
He really is like Fidel Castro.
We should listen to him when he says so.
That's our show for the week.
Until Monday, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.