Freedom Convoy lawyer Keith Wilson, QC, details Ontario’s $1.3M seizure of trucker donations and expanded charges—including "counseling intimidation"—against activists like Tamara Lich, released after 19 days under gag bail. Banks froze accounts of designated persons (e.g., Tom Morazzo) based on media lists like CTV’s Who’s Who, diverting funds to third parties amid a $10M class action lawsuit served within hours of police threats. Despite the Emergencies Act’s legal limits on peaceful protest, Ottawa enforced blockades and ignored cease-and-desist warnings, while courts failed to challenge overreach. Wilson warns of institutional collusion—police, media, banks, regulators—and a slide toward authoritarianism, citing no-fly zone lawsuits (e.g., Brian Peford) and expert medical reports from Drs. McCullough and Bridel as key battles in preserving civil liberties. [Automatically generated summary]
Today it's with Keith Wilson, QC, the lawyer for the official trucker convoy.
He'll give us an update on so many things, the status of Tamara Lich, a new lawsuit he was just served with, and how the Canadian banks did or didn't react to the order to seize bank accounts of Trudeau's enemies.
It's an in-depth conversation.
I think you'll, I don't want to say enjoy, you will not enjoy it, but you'll think it's an important source of information.
I certainly did.
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All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, an in-depth interview with Keith Wilson, QC, lawyer to the trucker convoy.
It's March 28th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a 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'm publishing it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
The Trucker Rebellion was the most important political activity in Canada, not only during the entire two-year pandemic and lockdown, but I put it to you that it was the greatest political earthquake in Canada.
perhaps since the separatist referendum in Quebec almost 30 years ago.
It certainly was the largest Canadian news story around the world.
For the first time, the world's countries were riveted on what was happening in Canada.
A blue-collar rebellion organized by no party, supported by no one in the establishment that just grew and grew, inspiring millions of Canadians and tens of millions around the world.
There were copycat trucker rebellions, convoys, and caravans in places as far away as Australia, the Netherlands, even Israel.
To this day, there's a small convoy in Washington, D.C. inspired by the Canadians.
It had tremendous ramifications, and I believe that the Trucker Rebellion helped speed up the end of the lockdowns in many provinces when people realized that a giant had awakened, that popular opinion had coalesced not around a political party, but around these truckers.
Aaron O'Toole was the first acute political casualty of it, and for that I'll always be grateful to the truckers.
The response from the incumbent establishment, however, was atrocious.
Besides denouncing the truckers as racist and misogynist and even Nazis, Justin Trudeau trumped up excuses to bring in a form of law invoking the form of martial law, excuse me, invoking the never-before-used emergencies act to suspend our civil liberties and even seize bank accounts.
It was shocking.
One of the organizers of the trucker rebellion, Tamara Lich, was arrested and jailed for incitement to commit mischief, the most trivial of offenses being caused for jailing really political prisoners and seizing their bank accounts.
Absolutely atrocious.
The legal response by the truckers and their supporters has not met with success.
It's as if the courts, unlike in other countries ranging from New Zealand and the United States and Spain, where the courts have struck down the excesses of lockdownism, there has yet to be a court ruling in Canada that in any substantial way rebukes the governments, slows them down, and stands up for civil rights.
It's been terrible.
One of the lawyers who has been representing the truckers, not only individual truckers, but the nonprofit corporation set up for the truckers, as well as representing Brian Peckford, the former Newfoundland and Labrador premier who's fighting against the lockdowns, who works for a great many of the interests of the truckers, is Keith Wilson, QC, that stands for Queen Counsel, a senior lawyer.
I actually know Keith from law school way back in the day at the University of Alberta.
He's supported by the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms, and he's been battling the battle for the truckers for well over a month.
And I'm delighted to spend some time with him today as he joins us via Skype from Edmonton.
Keith, I hope I did you justice in my introduction and got it accurate.
I think the truckers are very important.
And you are their legal eagle.
Give us an update.
What's the latest on the truckers and the law?
Well, in the last half hour, I just was served by the legal counsel for the Attorney General of Ontario with a legal notice where the Ontario government is seeking to seize and convert for its own use approximately $1.3 million in donations that Canadians.
made for the benefit of the truckers and their freedom movement.
So that's the most immediate recent event.
Yesterday's events were that the Ottawa police have expanded the number of charges against Tamara Leach and Chris Barber from counseling mischief to now counseling intimidation and counseling obstruction of police.
So that's the most recent as of the last 20 hours.
Is Tamara Lych in custody right now?
Is Chris Barber in custody right now?
No, neither of them are in custody.
Chris was released after one day.
Political Prisoner Conditions00:11:29
Tamara was held as there's only one way to describe this and be accurate.
She was a political prisoner.
She was a political prisoner for 19 days.
And with the criminal counsel team, we have a number of teams of lawyers with the Justice Center and external counsel.
As you know, Ezra, I'm an independent boutique litigator, have my own law firm Wilson Law Office, but I'm on contract to the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms.
And so, yeah, with some of the criminal lawyer team that we have, we were able to do a bail review and get Tamara out after having spent 19 days in jail.
However, if you read the bail conditions that she's under, it would make Vladimir Putin proud.
What I mean by that is her bail conditions prevent her from things that on their surface may not seem so dramatic, but she's not allowed to use social media in any kind of way, despite the fact that she's a mother and a grandmother.
So she can't use Facebook with her grandkids and so on.
She can't, but it keeps going.
And it says she cannot do anything to publicly advocate against COVID-19 policies and restrictions, and she cannot do anything to promote or support freedom truckers and freedom.
So if she does those things, she's supposed to go back to jail.
So Valani, Putin's chief critic who's in jail, was able a couple of weeks ago to call on Russians from jail to protest in the streets of the war in Ukraine.
He was able to give lists of oligarchs to foreign governments, but Tamara Lich has been transferred from a cement jail cell to a virtual jail cell where she's completely muzzled and is completely inappropriate.
Yesterday, we announced that we had initiated the legal teams with the support of the funding support of the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms.
We launched a formal appeal and review of those bail conditions in an effort to get this gag order lifted.
You know what?
I'm shocked, but I'm no longer surprised to hear of political gag orders like that.
The Democracy Fund assists Arthur Pavlovsky, a strong-willed Christian pastor in Calgary.
And a judge named Adam Germain put similar conditions on him a few months ago, including that anytime Pastor Arthur would give a sermon, make a Facebook post, do a media interview criticizing COVID policies, he immediately had to then take out this little card written by the judge and basically read a self-denunciation and the judge's point of view.
Like that's pure Soviet, Maoist, Orwellian, you know, crime thing.
If you have the wrong thoughts, you have to renounce them.
That has been temporarily stayed in Alberta, but it sounds like that's the status quo for Tamara Lich.
Now, does that apply nationwide?
I understand she lives in Medicine Hat, Alberta.
I presume she's home by now.
So even in Medicine Hat, she's bound by some Ottawa judge, I presume, saying she can't.
Correct.
So she can't say anything in Medicine Hat to criticize COVID policy just at all.
That's somehow now, if she does, she's going back to jail.
Correct.
It's unbelievable.
And it's, you know, it's one of the more high-profile volunteers who went to Ottawa to help with the trucker protest is, and he's been on a number of programs, and you should definitely interview him if you get a chance.
He's an amazing human being and an amazing Canadian.
His name's Tom Morazzo, and he's a former captain in the Canadian Armed Forces.
And he went there once he saw, because he, in his more recent career, he was a teacher at a community college, and he ended up losing his job because he exercised his choice of bodily autonomy and informed consent and decided not to get vaccinated.
So here he is, lost his job.
He goes there to help.
And he was instrumental given his military background.
And he was one of his jobs that he took was to make sure that the emergency lanes were always open, despite the media's characterization of a blockade.
There was always free movement, except in downtown Ottawa, as you would have saw when you were there, except for the police for blocking the roads.
But he was one of the people who had his bank account frozen.
And he pointed out his crime was a thought crime.
That was it.
He was thinking the wrong thoughts, according to this government, and therefore they punished him without any due process or substantive evidence, froze his bank accounts.
And potentially, you know, for a period of time there, put his life in a very serious situation.
His wife couldn't pay for daycare.
They couldn't pay the dentist.
Others couldn't get prescriptions filled, couldn't put gas in their cars.
So we're in a very strange, dark time in our country where the rule of law is out the window.
The charter is completely ignored.
The most powerful, oppressive statutory tool of the Emergencies Act, the successors to the War Measures Act, is used on a whim.
And we really got to fight back.
Keith, you mentioned this man who not only had his bank account frozen, but obviously a lot of married people have a joint bank account with their families that they pay everything from rent to groceries to, as you mentioned, dental appointments.
Have you mentioned Tom Marazzo in particular, and I'm sure you know other people who've had their bank accounts seized or frozen.
Have they been unfrozen?
Have they been, if any money has been seized, has it been returned to them?
All the people that I've been doing work for who have had their bank accounts frozen have had the accounts unfrozen.
And with the exception of donated funds, none of them have had their money seized.
Now, I tell you, it's atrocious that the government of Ontario wants to take money donated in good faith by ordinary Canadians for the truckers.
And it was surely donated for their peaceful political protest.
You know, if there were parking tickets or if there was anything worse, which I don't think there was much worse, there was no violence certainly anywhere.
And, you know, despite these new charges of quote counseling that you say, Chris Barber and Tamira Lichab, it seems like an awfully big stretch to seize donations from thousands and thousands of ordinary people, 20 bucks, 50 bucks, 100 bucks, that were obviously meant for peaceful protest, and to basically try and expropriate that money as a,
it's a patent political collective punishment to me.
That's, I mean, that's what I would say.
How does the Ontario government justify it?
Well, and it's not just a punishment, it's intimid, it's intimidation, right?
Like they're trying to, you know, we're not allowed to have a view contrary to the government narrative.
That appears to be the thing, which is just something that should send a shiver up every Canadian's spine that they could do this.
And you even remember when it first came out, Freeland, the deputy prime minister, finance minister, said, you know, she was giddy about how they were going to use this power against Canadians and how she talked about how they were going to looking at making it permanent.
The same time the then acting police chief of Ottawa was saying in his press conferences, look it up, you'll see it.
That you know, the zeal with which he was announcing that we're continuing to investigate and we're going to go after the donors next.
And, you know, if you contribute in any way to this illegal blockade, blah, blah, blah.
If the protesters at this point, you know, retreat and go home, are they going to be getting sort of repercussions down the road?
Are you going to be sort of actively pursuing the people that you've been sort of documenting and filming who are still out there protesting?
What are your plans after this, after the protest is over?
Thank you.
It's a great question.
And the simple answer is yes.
If you are involved in this protest, we will actively look to identify you and follow up with financial sanctions and criminal charges.
Absolutely.
This investigation will go on for months to come.
It has many, many different streams, both from a federal financial level, from a provincial licensing level, from a criminal code level, from a municipal breach of court order, breach of court injunction level.
It will be a complicated and time-consuming investigation that will go on for a period of time.
You have my commitment that that investigation will continue and we will hold people accountable for taking our streets away.
We've clearly, I don't know what more example someone needs of the fact that Canada has slipped into an authoritarian state.
And yeah, I think it's very troubling.
And the speed with which Trudeau and Freeland, in particular, have pivoted from invoking a form of martial law and seizing the bank accounts of political opponents in Canada to then pointing at Russia and criticizing Putin for the same thing is quite astonishing.
Let me ask you, how have the banks been to deal with?
On the one hand, you know, banks are heavily regulated.
They're almost in some ways quasi-crown agencies.
I mean, they're so regulated and they have certain special privileges.
I can understand why a bank would be compliant if there was an order.
But I suppose a bank could also lawyer up and object and say that this is contrary to privacy laws, contrary to the rule of law, contrary to the reputation that forms so much of a bank's credit.
Like you have to believe that the bank won't seize your money, that the bank won't fail, that the bank won't hand your money to Trudeau.
Bank Accounts and Seizures00:13:53
Have you seen what?
Or let me ask this.
Have you had any interactions with the banks themselves?
And have they expressed any reluctance or any resistance or any opposition to this?
Or are they gleeful participants?
Okay.
So I've been directly involved.
Let me just step back and illuminate some things here that you'll find both interesting and alarming.
When the financial measures order under the Emergency Act came out, it placed banks, any financial institution, and not just them, but anybody that engages in securities, such as RBC Dominion Securities or someone else that holds your RRSPs and your stocks.
insurance companies and others, it placed them under a positive legal obligation to go through their membership list or their customer list and see if anybody who was a designated person was on this list that the government created was in there.
And if a designated person was a customer of TD Bank or Scotiabank or a credit union, the bank became under a positive legal duty to no longer provide financial services.
So no bank account, no credit card, no mortgage, no line of credit, et cetera.
Okay.
So, well, how does one become a designated person?
I received the list.
It's over 100 pages long and it has the evidence.
All of my clients appear in the first 20 pages.
And it has on the left-hand side as the OPP and the RCMP logos all over it.
And I, this police officer, investigated this.
And here's what I found.
And I believe these people are all designated persons.
And it has a little picture, thumbnail picture on the left, and their date of birth and their personal information, their address, description about who they are, what they do, and any remarkable comments, which were really weird, the comments they picked.
But anyway, and then you get to the last page of part one, and it has the evidence, evidentiary source.
Okay, so where did they gather this evidence from to conclude that these people were so serious of a threat to Canada's national security that they had to invoke the war measures, the equivalent of the war measures act?
What evidence investigative activity do they gather it?
I kid you not.
It says source, CTV News, who's who in the Freedom Convoy, and it has the hyperbole.
Oh my God.
So this police investigator didn't even have to put his donut down, sat at his desk, went click, click, click, cut, paste.
Okay.
So the fact that some reporter or somebody at CTV News saw you on a stage at the freedom protest or saw you talking to a trucker or saw you in a news conference that they put on was enough for you to appear in that list and enough to have your finances frozen.
You know what?
Senior representative.
I spoke on that trucker stage.
I don't know if you recall.
I got up there and gave like a three-minute salutation.
I guess I'm like checking the list on CTV's hit list or I myself would have had my bank account frozen.
Isn't it remarkable?
Like I'm Ezra, I'm happy to share with you in confidence the document so you can verify what I've just said and you'll be blown away.
Because there's other aspects.
I would very much like to see that.
Is that am I able to publish that or is that does that come with some limits to its publication?
Because that, I mean, I wouldn't want to embarrass the people on that document.
Yeah, that's my concern.
Yeah, no, I'm happy to share it, but I don't want to share it in a way that can be led to some left-wing nut bar Antifas doxing my clients, if you know what I mean.
If you send me that, I promise not to reveal the identities of anyone on there, but to if I will obscure the identity, I will show the absurdness of the document as if it's as you describe it, which I'm sure it is.
That's shocking to me.
So basically, some cop reads a CTV story and puts all those names on a list.
And then before you know it, banks are seizing their bank accounts.
It's just shocking to me.
And what does it mean to not provide a financial service for a mortgage?
Does that mean they call in the mortgage?
Like, what does that even mean?
So you can pay the mortgage.
Yeah.
And not only that, which was interesting.
If you read, again, read the economic measures proclamation that was issued by the cabinet when they issued the emergency declaration under the Emergencies Act.
And you will see that it also extends to insurance companies.
I did see that.
Are we aware of anyone who's had, I mean, does that apply to like life insurance?
Well, that's a good question.
And our legal team, we said that.
Does this mean they can cancel your life insurance policy?
So I think what happened there was unlike the banks that said, okay, sure, Trudeau, we'll go help you.
We'll be your financial goons against Canadians to help save you and your political power.
I got to think the insurance company said, we can't do this because they didn't.
I have no instance where they did that.
So even though if you read it, you will see with crystal clarity that it's there.
Now, hang on.
So the bankers were asked to testify before the House of Commons Committee on Finance, and they were also testifying before the House of Commons Committee on public safety and something related to that.
I forget its fancy full name, but anybody can go and go online, go to these committee meetings where recorded.
There's transcripts and you can see what I'm saying.
The senior representative for the Canadian Bankers Association testified that if, because one of the questions from one of the MPs is what long-lasting effects?
Because they confirmed that they had at that point lifted all the freezes.
What long-lasting effect?
And the banker confirmed that these customers would be marked for life.
Yeah.
Well, that's that was their testimony, not mine.
So, you know, we've really, we've really transitioned into a free from a free country into one of authoritarianism where you can be ruined at the whim of the political masters and through their agents.
Now, I remember reviewing that emergency order, and it applied to foreign banks that were registered to do business in Canada too.
So, for example, a lot of big American banks.
Are you aware that any American banks follow this?
Because I got to believe that if you're an American bank and you're told to freeze the account of an American trucker who drives up from the States, you're thinking, well, do I follow the Banana Republic edict of Justin Trudeau and comply with his emergency law, but put myself at odds with American laws, not just privacy and other banking laws, but the First Amendment?
Because this so clearly violates political freedom and free speech.
I have no, I have not seen evidence that any American bank complied, and I'm really glad of that, but maybe they did.
Are you aware of anything like that?
I'm not.
That's a good question.
I'm not aware either way.
So, I don't know whether they refused to comply or whether they did comply.
But here's what I do know.
When this was happening and the freezes were occurring, and the police chief was talking about going after the donors, people who donated, keep in mind that's over 133,000 Canadians donated.
And the average donation to give Sengo that hit as much as $12.7 million, $12.7 million in donations.
The average donation was $75.
So what happened was, and this was confirmed last week by the president of the Canadian Credit Union Association and testimony to the Finance Committee.
Sorry, it was earlier this week that that was confirmed, that there was a run on the banks.
People got concerned that if they'd made a donation, that their accounts would be frozen.
I even sent my wife down to the bank and said, hey, go take out some money.
Like we're going to have to live if they freeze our accounts.
So she took a bunch of cash out.
And she said there was a big lineup and there was lots of people leaving with bags.
In the testimony to the House committee this week, her name's Martha Burden, D-U-R-D-I-N, president-CEO of the credit unions.
She said that their members experienced a cash run with many customers taking out tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, and in some instances, millions.
That was her testimony.
If you research, there's a I saw a tweet where there's an actual site that monitors cash flow in and out of banks.
And you look at it, it's spiked.
So what happened was there was a run on the banks because Canadians got concerned that because they donated $10 or $20 or $100, that their accounts were going to be frozen.
The other thing that I'm told and have good information on is that many people opened up alternative bank accounts.
So what started to happen was I'm hoping the banks sort of went, uh-oh, wait a minute, maybe we overreacted here because they've really damaged their brand.
Yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
So here we thought a bank would be there to protect me, the customer, and that's not what they did.
Yeah.
Keith, I want to ask you a question about whose bank accounts were seized.
You mentioned the case of an organizer or activist, Tom Arazzo, and of course, we know Tamara Lich and some others.
Those were people like you say that CTV did a story about.
So they would have been on location.
They would have been truckers or trucker organizers.
Were any people who were just donors, are you aware of any of them having their bank accounts seized or was it just the activists?
Like did any givers or gift givers were they seized either?
From what I've been able to ascertain and the information that comes across my inbox and those that I interact with on the ground and the various legal teams we have working, no, I have not seen an instance where someone donated money and just because of that, their bank account was frozen.
So if there was some retired veteran in Lethbridge, Alberta that donated $25, I have not seen that type of a person had their bank account frozen.
But, you know, there's nothing to stop them from doing that.
That's what's so disturbing.
This is disturbing on so many levels.
The order was rescinded when Trudeau saw that it might not make it through the Senate.
But as you say, Christia Freeland has said some of the powers that they exercise during that state of emergency, they would like to make them permanent ongoing.
Is it is it possible for this seizing or freezing to happen right now?
As far as you're aware, could we ever see a case where a cop reads this a media story, tells a bank to seize the money, and it happens without a legal process, without a hearing, without like, is that a live legal possibility right now?
Yes, yes, how, yes, under what?
Well, I just got, I, you know, we opened the interview by you asking me for the most recent, and I've informed you that over an hour ago, I just got served with a civil forfeiture notification from the Attorney General of Ontario under the criminal code, where they're treating donations and money as proceeds of crime and alleging that they were used for illegal activity.
So they have demonstrated the government's demonstrated that they will use their broad powers under various tools and use mere allegation as a means of seizing bank accounts and monies.
Now, I remember when first there was GoFundMe and they were pressured into reneging and canceling.
First, they wanted to give it to recipients of their choice, but then under pressure from Americans, really, they just refunded the donations.
So then the truckers went to Give Send Go, which is a smaller crowdfunder.
I don't think they were, well, I mean, in one way, I know that they were not as secure because a hacker hacked the donation list.
And I want to play you a clip from one of the most terrifying people I've ever seen, a self-described hacker who, in his videos, shows compelling proof that it really was him who hacked it.
Not just that he claimed responsibility for you, but he shows some screenshots that suggest he really did do it.
Take a look at this Canadian hacker who says he hacked it with the green light of Canadian law.
Take a look.
Nothing scares me.
Nothing.
Yes, I doxed the truckers.
I did it.
It was me.
I hacked Give Send Go, baby.
in!
I did it.
I did it.
Come at me.
What are you going to do?
What are you gonna do to me?
Epic hosting!
I hacked Barler.
I hacked Gab.
I hacked Truth Social.
I hacked Go Gibson Go.
Don't care.
I'm you can literally put my name into the news tab on Google and you can find everything I've done I am literally in every mainstream media publication for the things that I do.
I'm not an unknown actor.
I'm literally a famous fucking cyber terrorist.
And you think that you can scare me?
See, they always default to the pedophile accusations.
They always default to that because they have nothing else.
It's actually some projection.
That guy, I want to see his browser history.
That guy loves little girls.
I've hunted pedophiles.
I've outed pedophile rings online.
I've gotten pedophiles arrested, buddy.
You have no idea who the hell I am.
There isn't proof of shit, you fucking lying little cunt.
Die!
I'm going to restart this live.
Come back.
Honeypots, how do they work?
Keith, I've never seen such a bone-chilling moment.
Not that I haven't seen madness or evil before, but what was scary about this guy is not that he hacked something.
There's always hackers, there's always criminals, but that he said he has done this with the approval, if not the direction, of Canadian authorities.
And the timing of this hack was perfect.
It coincided with the Emergencies Act.
It coincided with the media calling everyone on the list.
Like the way this list was hacked, then published, made public, and handed to the media for their direct political action.
I've never seen such an operation like that.
And to see this madman who claimed credibly that he did it, and then claimed, I don't know how credibly, that he was given permission by the cops.
Collusion Crisis00:05:39
And he has not yet been arrested for this.
It rings true.
What do you think of that?
Well, and his identity is well known.
So it's not like they don't know who it is.
Ezra, we had, when I was on the ground with the team of lawyers and working directly with the volunteers and the organizers and, you know, the freedom fighters truckers, the instances that we experienced where there was collaboration to the point of collusion as between the media, the government, the police, and other players was astounding.
I can just give you a couple of really quick examples.
So it was information that the city of Ottawa and the Ottawa City Police gave to GoFundMe that caused them to pull the pin on the $10 million of donations that GoFundMe had received and to announce that they were going to give it to some other group.
And we all knew that that meant Antifa or BLM or something.
And the evidence that GoFundMe received was from the media and the police repeating media stories and the media repeating police talking about media stories at that same time as so there was one Friday.
It was just let me look at my calendar here real quick to get my head back to this, but it was the one, the Friday when they announced that they were pulling the GoFundMe, a whole series of orchestrated events occurred.
And it was Friday the 4th, February 4th.
And here's what happened.
So first the police chief called a press conference at about two o'clock and he announced that they had tripled the number, significantly increased the number of police on the ground, that they were going to change their tactics, that they'd been using physical and electronic intelligence in collaboration with CSIS, other intelligence agencies, the intelligence branches of the OPP, the RCMP, and their own police force.
And he talked in very aggressive language.
I think you even covered it at the time about how there was going to be this huge crackdown, and it wasn't sounding good.
He was angry, and it was not the type of language you would expect from a police official in Canada.
It's what you would expect in a tinpot dictatorship.
I came from one hotel meeting to another, and when I went in, the difference in police presence on the ground from when I went into that meeting and came out was unbelievable.
We knew something looked like it was about to happen.
Then, within the hour, GoFundMe, even though we had been in direct discussions and correspondence with their lawyers and their most senior executives the day prior, showing them that this was a completely legitimate charity.
All of the proper banking and other corporate law arrangements were fully in place.
Everything was subject to audit, due process, and we had an accountant working on things, as well as five lawyers.
They announced not to us, but to the world, that they were canceling the donation platform for the freedom truckers and going to divert the monies to a third party.
And then, within the next hour, I was served with a $10 million class action lawsuit from a personal injury lawyer.
And it was based on information and made references to work in collaboration with the police.
And within that class action lawsuit, legal service documents, I was served with an emergency injunction application, which was going to be heard the next day, Saturday at one o'clock.
And you know how hard it is to get those.
And when I went to defend that injunction application the next day, the lawyer made application or indicated that the lawyer for the police wanted to participate in the hearing, even though they weren't a party because they'd been heavily involved and they'd been collaborating with the police on how this injunction was going to be enforced.
So that's just one little snippet.
And it happened throughout the 19 days that I was on the ground and it continues to happen to this day with this order that I was just served with, or this notice of application I was just served with in the last couple of hours.
So what you've just described there was the media, the police, private lawyers of fortune, and even the courts agreeing to a rare emergency Saturday hearing, all in collusion.
That, you know what?
That really is terrifying.
I really do feel I've used this analogy before, like a net.
The great thing about a net when you're using a net for fishing or whatever is if one knot in the net breaks, that's fine.
All the rest of the knots hold and the net does what it does.
You can even have a few, maybe even half the knots in the net.
But if all of the knots break at once, all of the checks and balances in society, if they all fail at the same time, if the lawyers and the judges and the police and the media and, I don't know, the College of Physicians and Surgeons and the banks and the bank regulators and if the entire establishment, if all those knots break at the same time, then everything breaks.
Knots of Society00:09:15
The whole system breaks and it truly becomes a tyranny.
And you have cops.
I remember that police chief's bellicose statement.
I've never seen a policeman talk like that before.
And to see Trudeau demonize people and the lust that they had.
I mean, that truly was a flicker of a banana republic.
I won't say that Canada is unfree, but I'll say that we're only partly free.
And that's very sad to me.
Well, I'd say that we're definitely only partly free.
And I would say that our freedoms are evaporating before our eyes with these authoritarian activities.
I mean, the number of instances I witnessed of government overreach was remarkable.
Can I give you another example?
Yes, of course.
So when the prime minister announced the Emergencies Act, you know, the War Measures Act, that the previous instances of it being instigated were things like world wars and the FLQ crisis, where there were bombings and kidnappings of elected officials and terrible activities occurring.
And of course, you know, did the truckers err and go too far in bringing jumpy castles?
Maybe that was the, you know, or was it the hot tubs?
Or was it the spontaneous road hockey games?
Or maybe it was the Quebecer with the Quebec flag draped over him, like a cape, hugging the Albertan with an Alberta flag.
Maybe that was the threat.
I don't know.
I've never seen such unity in Canadian pride.
But the actual proclamation has wording in it that says that nothing in the emergency proclamation makes unlawful public assembly for political dissent, advocacy, and some other term that's not off the tip of my tongue.
But then the actual order itself, and just bear with me for a second here, this will become clear, says, describes who was not allowed to go to downtown Ottawa, describes who was this just before they started beating up Canadians and arresting them, describes who was not allowed to be there.
Okay, if you don't meet the criteria I'm about to describe, the order said, the emergency order from the federal government said that you were allowed to be there.
And where I'm going with this is what the police were saying publicly and the politicians is not what the actual legal order said.
The writers of this knew they couldn't do what the politicians were saying and they didn't put it into law.
So here's what it says.
It says you can't go to downtown Ottawa and engage in a public assembly.
And if you do, it's an illegal assembly.
If you're going to cause a serious disruption, there's three things, a serious disruption of the movement of persons or goods or a serious interference with trade.
So if you're going to interfere with trade and those things, you can't go to downtown Ottawa.
And if you do, it's an illegal, an illegal protest.
Well, no one was doing that in downtown Ottawa.
You can't interfere with the functioning of critical infrastructure.
No one was doing that.
And thirdly, get this, the support of the threat or the use of acts of serious violence against persons or property.
Support, threat, or use of acts of serious violence against persons or property.
So if you're going there to engage.
At all.
Why did they put the word serious in there?
So minor acts of violence are okay.
Like, anyhow, the important point is, is that in order for the assembly to be unlawful, you had to be interfering with trade, interfering with infrastructure, or engaging in violence against people or person.
If you were not doing any of those things, you were allowed to be in downtown Ottawa.
And what you were doing was not unlegal.
So when the interim police chief, the second one, announced the crackdown and said that everybody who goes into downtown Ottawa will be participating in a legal protest.
Me and five other lawyers that examined this and all the other emergency orders that were in place at the time and the injunction said that's not legally accurate.
Canadians still have the right of assembly.
Preamble to the order even says they still have the right of assembling and political dissent.
So, and then they created this red zone and they put up a hundred blockades or into downtown so that Canadians couldn't flood into downtown to support the truckers.
That was on the Thursday, Friday, as the in the end where they got where the government got violent.
And so we issued a cease and desist letter to the police chief, the interim police chief, pointing out that he needed to get immediate legal advice, that his public statements were inaccurate, that the emergency order was absolutely clear, that Canadians had the right to continue to go downtown.
The truckers continued to have the right to be there.
And the only instance they didn't is if they were going to breach one of these three things, which nobody was planning on doing.
But it didn't matter.
So we've entered a realm where, you know, the rule of law seems to be out the window.
The rhetoric of politicians and government officials prevails.
And a whole bunch of Canadians got beat up and assaulted by police officers while they were in full compliance with their charter rights and not even in breach of the emergency order.
One of those people who was beat up was our own reporter, Alexa Lavoie, who was actually shot in the leg.
And I think, I mean, we're suing the RCMP and the Ottawa police over that.
But based on what you've described to me today, I should expect that the judges will defeat and dismiss our lawsuits because it has not escaped my notice that in two years of the pandemic and the lockdown, I cannot point to a single important or substantive legal case in any jurisdiction that has in any way limited the scope of government.
There was one family law case in Ontario that had some nice things to say about people who are vaccine hesitant, but that, you know, was a lower court case dealing with one particular family going through a divorce.
I haven't seen any lockdown, any gag order, any health order, the curfew in Quebec, the no-fly zone, the quarantine hotels.
I haven't seen a single important element of the authoritarianism stopped by a court.
Am I missing something?
Have you seen a court win out there at all?
There is the one in Ontario you mentioned, and there are some from the U.S. and some.
Oh, the U.S. has shut down.
And New Zealand and Spain.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, other countries, sure.
But in Canada, I haven't seen a single court act as a check and balance.
That's a pretty big knot in the net to fail.
Well, and I agree, but I haven't given up.
You know me well enough to know that I don't do that very well.
And I really for your case with Brian Peford, the no-fly zone case is a wonderful lawsuit.
And I think you've got a real chance there.
But I'm just saying so far, our judges may as well have been on vacation.
Well, the charter certainly doesn't seem to be worth anything either, does it?
And that's very distressing.
I mean, I made a joke that I was going to sue my law school, I guess our old law school, because when I took constitutional law, they misled me into believing that it was a substantive document of rights that meant something.
And clearly they were wrong.
I'm being sarcastic in a cynical way.
But it's important that we continue to fight for civil liberties and freedoms, obviously, and that we continue to do it in every lawful and respectful and peaceful forum that we have.
And one of those is the courts.
I'm really pleased with the legal team that I'm working with at the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms.
We have phenomenal medical experts.
We have Dr. McCullough, Dr. Bridel, that have prepared incredible expert medical reports in support of challenging the rationale for saying that unvaccinated people can't fly in Canada and can't leave the country.
You're a Canadian and you're trapped in your own country.
There's no other country in the world that is restricting its citizens from getting on airplanes due to vaccination status, let alone the country with the second largest landmass.
Incredible Medical Reports00:05:57
Yeah, just incredible.
Well, I got one last question for you, Keith.
I mean, I agree with you.
I think you have to try.
You have to go to court.
You have to exhaust that.
I guess one last question is: where are all the liberals?
And I don't mean capital L liberal like the Liberal Party.
I mean people who thought, well, I'm not for police violence, or I'm not for, you know, people who might have said, my body, my choice.
I don't, you know, want the government to force me to do something with my own body, or people who are skeptical of big pharma, or in the cases we've just been discussing for the last hour, people who are skeptical of police.
Where are the liberals who have always been skeptical of police and police brutality and over-policing?
I guess, you know, I saw a liberal the other day complain that the truckers have appropriated the Canadian flag as their symbol, and you would think that they would love that.
Where are the good liberals?
I mean, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association woke up from its two-year slumber to say they didn't like the Emergencies Act, and then they went right back to bed.
Where are all the people who, for my whole life, have pretended to care about privacy and civil rights and limited, you know, the rule of law and reigning in police?
Where are all those people?
Did they ever even mean it?
Well, they're clearly bathing in a delusion of virtuousness.
They've concluded that they are so right about how the world should work and how individuals should conduct their lives.
There's nothing to debate.
You just shall do what they say.
And if you have an issue with it and think that actually some of the things they're advocating are harmful, discriminatory, unfair, unjust, well, they won't stand for it because they are the virtuous ones and we are not.
So we've really descended into a very dark, dangerous place.
And I think it's very important that all Canadians have to take an interest in this and assert the importance of civil liberties and compassion and understanding and diversity of views.
And we've got to try and regain the thing that I found meeting so many of the truckers in Ottawa and the other incredible people who came there to volunteer and help was they were all there for the same reason.
All these people met in Ottawa.
They didn't know one another in January.
They didn't know one another last year.
They all just met because they looked at the future for their children, for their families, for their communities, and for their province and their country.
And they became very concerned that we're going in a dangerous wrong direction.
They saw the energy and the hope that the truckers ignited in their convoy across the country.
And they were there to try and make whatever difference they could to reverse the trend, to move us, to shift us from this dissent into authoritarianism and to get us back on track of freedom and civil liberties.
So we've just got to keep doing that.
We know that there's a growing number of Canadians who share this view, and we've just got to keep working.
And I'm going to keep working hard on my legal cases through the Justice Center.
And I've been very pleased to be working collaboratively with the lawyers at the Democracy Fund, an incredible group of lawyers there.
And between all of our efforts, we've got to turn the tide here.
Well, Keith Wilson, it's great to see you.
You've been a fighter for freedom ever since I met you decades ago at the U of A Law School.
What a delight to see you on this important file.
We love the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms.
We always talk about your cases.
For folks who want to learn more, go to jccf.ca.
They could always use a few bucks if you got them to help fight the good fights.
Well, I hope you'll keep in touch with us.
And we're very interested in your work.
And I know you were the lawyer who helped draft Brian Peford's no-fly zone lawsuit, which we went in great detail with, with Premier Peckford.
So I'm very pleased with what you're doing.
I'm a little bit depressed having learned what you've told me today about the additional charges against some of the truckers, about the new Ontario lawsuit, learning about how the banks did things and the police.
I won't lie, it's put me, it's made me a little afraid.
But I know that we have to fight back, fight back peacefully, legally, politically, in our case, journalistically.
And I'm glad you're fighting for freedom too.
So thanks for spending the time with us.
Great to see you, Ezra, and thank you for having me on.
All right, our pleasure.
There you have it.
Keith Wilson, QC, lawyer for the Truckers.
Stay with us.
My final thoughts are next.
Well, what do you think of Keith Wilson?
He's promised to keep in touch with us.
It looks like things are escalating.
They're actually bringing more charges against Tamara Licha grandma.
And the Ontario government is going to definance its political opponents.
That's the worst part of what's happened.
They're trying to terrify people, and I think they've succeeded to a degree.
Well, we'll keep following that.
And I was pleased to hear that the JCCF is doing so well.
And it was nice to hear Keith Wilson say nice things about the Democracy Fund lawyers, too.
There's a lot of people trying to fight this ties so far with a mixed success.
But Keith says we have to keep fighting, and I think he's right.
Well, that's our show for today.
Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.