Ezra Levant highlights a 1,200-page access-to-information document exposing widespread opposition to Justin Trudeau’s censorship bills (C-11, C-36) from tech giants like Microsoft and Twitter, warning of overreach akin to China’s. Alberta’s "health hunter-killer" squads, led by Jason Kenney, allegedly disrupted Church in the Vine with unwarranted fines ($1M+) and privacy violations, while a secretive prosecutor ignored Charter rights. Toronto Mayor John Tory’s COVID hypocrisy—lockdowns for others but not himself—contrasts with his inaction against trespassers like Afro-Indigenous Rising. The episode frames these cases as systemic attacks on free speech and religious freedom, demanding accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I go through an encouraging document, an access to information record that was kept secret by the government until a professor got it loose.
It's 1,200 pages of feedback to Trudeau's censorship plans.
And it's incredible.
Canadians actually care about freedom.
And I guess I sort of knew it, or at least hoped it.
But now I've got 1,200 pages of proof of it.
I'll show you at least some of those pages.
That's right ahead.
But before I get there, let me invite you to become a subscriber to what we call Rebelooce Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
You get to see what I'm talking about.
It's eight bucks a month, which is nothing compared to Netflix or Disney Plus or any of those things.
I do a show every single weekday.
My friends Sheila Gunreed, David Menzies, Andrew Chaparos, and Nat and Cat have weekly shows, so that's a lot of stuff.
Just go to RebelusPlus.com, click subscribe, and we do rely on that money to keep us independent.
We don't take a dime from Trudeau.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, I'm truly surprised.
And in a good way, it's like all of Canada has risen up against Trudeau's censorship plans.
It's April 21st, and this is the Essel of Answer.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is government go by house.
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
One of the benefits of being pessimistic is that if you're surprised, it's usually a happy surprise, right?
You've already assumed things will go poorly.
You've already adjusted your attitude accordingly.
You're just doing your best to hold the line.
It's those optimists who are always in for a shock, am I right?
By the way, there's a difference between optimism and hope.
I like this definition from Arthur Brooks in the Atlantic Monthly.
He said, optimism is the belief that things will turn out all right.
Hope makes no such assumption, but is a conviction that one can act to make things better in some way.
I think that's just right.
I'm not optimistic, but I'm hopeful.
You've got to be.
I look around sometimes and I feel lonely, not as lonely now as maybe six months ago, but the loneliness was a tactic by the other side.
When cults indoctrinated new members, you know, they cut them off from their old friends and their family.
It's a tactic.
We were told not to gather together.
We were told not to go to life cycle events from weddings to funerals.
We were told we couldn't even meet with our own families or friends in our own houses.
Schools and churches were shut down, but casinos and liquor stores were kept open.
Today, you should know Jason Kenney's special enforcement team is in court in Alberta prosecuting a church that dared to stay open during the pandemic.
Our chief reporter, Sheila Gonreed, is the only reporter in the courthouse.
She's the only one documenting this outrageous prosecution, how Kenny's hitmen deliberately interrupted the church service again and again and insisted on inspecting the church right at the middle of the service, like some sort of goons in communist China smashing into a house church, or frankly, some brown shirts in Germany smashing their way through a synagogue.
If you want to be grossed out, follow Sheila's coverage of this disgraceful trial in Alberta, a trial that is proceeding on the instructions of Kenny himself.
It's his special prosecutors.
By the way, Kenny's special church prosecutor insists on having her identity kept secret.
And the court bizarrely allows it.
You know, it's like the medieval hangman, the medieval executioner wearing a mask to hide their identity, whether it's out of shame or guilt or to hide their face from any angels who might judge them too.
Imagine that in 2022, a prosecution of a church for allowing people in sorrow and loneliness to gather together in a crisis, and the government prosecutes them with a secret prosecutor.
Not that it's needed, other than Sheila, no one from the media is even in there.
Loneliness, hopelessness, they want you to feel that way.
That's why the truckers were like a miracle.
Suddenly, there was a rowdy, noisy, happy, smiling, you could see their faces gathering, and you could join in no matter who you were.
And people made new friends again for the first time in two years.
It's fun to make new friends.
And they laughed and they went out and they didn't give a damn what school said.
You know, they had fun.
They had a hot tub.
When the last time you had fun, they had fun.
They danced in the streets.
They waved flags.
They sang songs.
Even the anthem.
What a happy gathering.
What people lacked were social creatures.
The miracle of the truckers was that it woke all of us up.
It reminded us what boisterous life is like when you're not constantly being hectored by drab TV doctors telling you the sky's falling.
And suddenly millions of us didn't feel so alone after all.
Can I play for you my own one-minute speech to the truckers when I saw them in Ottawa?
I think I got it right.
The point of the truckers' convoy wasn't a particular outcome.
Trudeau would never change his course based on critics.
Bought and paid for journalists wouldn't suddenly change their beliefs.
The point of the convoy was the convoy itself.
Take a look.
Hello, everybody.
It is cold today.
It is cold today.
Almost as cold as Justin Trudeau's heart.
It's great to be here.
And on behalf of Rebel News, I salute you.
And I say, keep speaking truth to power.
But I want to tell you what excites me the most about this crowd.
I see a lot of cameras, a lot of independent journalists, because when people say, what do we do about the media?
I say you become the media.
That's what you do.
The media acts like a party, the media party.
It's a subsidiary of the Liberal Party.
So you've got to tell the story yourselves.
Everyone who is here, everyone who is along the road, has to bear witness and testify to what they saw.
Because there's two competing narratives.
The government says you're racist.
The government says you're sexist.
The government says you're violent.
In the meantime, I've never seen the most diverse group of Canadians.
In times of violence, people want to not be violated anymore.
Justin Trudeau says you're extreme, but he's the one who has violated our civil rights.
He thinks you're a fringe.
Well, that's a pretty bloody big fringe.
Let me close by saying this.
Someone asked me this morning, what's the point?
What's going to happen?
Why didn't we all gather in Ottawa?
Is he going to listen?
Is he going to resign?
Is the Governor General going to ask him to step down?
No, he'll hold on to power as hard as he can.
Let me tell you what I think the point is.
The point is the convoy itself.
To show that you're not alone.
To show that you're not the crazy one they are.
To show that you're not the only one in the world there.
You already achieved your goal just by being here.
And the fact that millions of dollars came into the GO funding for the truckers, even if they would have canceled that, it was still a success.
Because there was a measurement of how much people cared.
You have succeeded just by being here.
You got the fight.
It was not relations to the organizers, but really, it was millions of Canadians along the way in the convoy and watching today from home.
Tell them what happened.
Tell them what you saw.
Because they will not hear the truth from anyone else.
You have to fight everybody who fights for freedom.
Happy.
I was happy.
I was exhilarated.
They were happy.
And happy people are harder to scare than sad and lonely people.
Am I right?
It was that ash conformity test we've talked about.
As soon as you saw one other person sharing your point of view, you knew you weren't crazy and alone anymore.
So I was pessimistic.
I still am.
But I held out hope and the truckers gave us hope.
That's why I like them.
That's on the lockdowns, but there has been another opportunistic menace working more quietly in parallel these past years.
I'm talking about Trudeau's burning desire to censor us, all of us, including ordinary people, including you, on social media like Facebook or Twitter or YouTube.
No one wants it.
No one has requested this.
No one needs it.
We have other wants and needs as a country.
Did you see the new inflation stats?
Out of control.
Double-digit increases on basic necessities of life.
And don't get me started again on housing prices.
There are real issues in Canada, but the subject that Trudeau spends the most time and energy on is censorship.
But of course he does.
You may know some of his plans.
C-11, it used to be called C-10.
That's a bill that lets the government regulate the internet.
The same regulators, the CRTC, that ruined Canadian TV and radio and that are responsible for our outrageously high cell phone charges and cell phone data charges.
Those losers at the CRTC are going to be put in charge of the internet.
But that's just an appetizer.
The old bill C-36 will criminalize bad words online.
Bad words are not bad enough to be crimes.
See, crimes are already regulated and policed and prosecuted, whether you do it in person or on the telephone or on the TV or on the radio or on the internet.
A death threat is a death threat.
A fraud is a fraud.
Don't think for a second that the internet isn't regulated by the same laws that other technology is.
But C36 would go much further than lawbreaking to offensive speech.
And then there was a bundle of ideas so bad, so bizarre, so outlandish that they weren't even called a bill.
They weren't even introduced in the parliament, but they were released in the form of background discussion documents right before the last election.
It was the study of what the government called online harms.
You see, they had to use the word harms because these aren't crimes.
They're not civil torts either.
Nothing you could sue over in a real court as a private citizen.
The criminal code already covers harassment and stalking, already covers child pornography and terrorism, already covers fraud, death threats.
That's already done.
The criminal code already has that in hand.
Civil law, that's like defamation maybe, already covers the internet.
So what the online harms proposals would do couldn't be called crimes or even civil torts, just harms, so vague, so minor, so subjective, which is precisely why Trudeau wants those powers, because he's not going to go after any real crimes.
To him, crimes are political crimes.
Just look at how he took advantage of the trucker convoy.
Peaceful.
No violence at all.
No police charges touching on violence, no firearms at all.
But Trudeau and the media lied about it.
I don't know if you remember, they claimed that an attempted arson was done by the truckers.
That turned out to be a false hoax, but it was one of the few thin examples cited by Trudeau to suspend all our civil liberties and bring in a form of martial law and even seize bank accounts with no legal process.
If he'd do that for a peaceful process, imagine what he'd do to control the whole internet and online harms.
Don't take it from me.
Take it from the minister who introduced these ideas, Stephen Gilbo.
It was specifically designed to protect politicians from criticism.
We've seen too many examples of public officials retreating from public service due to the hateful online content targeted towards themselves or even their families.
Oh, and he wants the power to absolutely delete websites, the nuclear option.
Envision having blocking orders.
I mean, that's that maybe.
It's not, you know, it would likely be a last resolve nuclear bomb in a toolbox of mechanism for a regulator.
Well, here's my point.
I did an extensive show about these online harms a few months back, so I'm not going to go into the details again, but there really weren't a lot of people fighting back publicly, were there?
I mean, how could there be?
99% of the journalists in this country, the people who should have been on guard, well, they've been colonized by Trudeau.
They can't criticize the heritage minister, whoever it is in any given day, because that's the heritage minister who gives journalists their bailout money.
Would you bite the hand that feeds you?
Here's a story from Professor Michael Geist, who has first-hand information that various editorial writers criticizing Trudeau's takeover of the internet, their stories had been approved by low-level editors of Canon's newspapers, but then spiked by senior bosses at those same newspapers, of course.
Those senior bosses are the people who value collecting millions of dollars more than they value an independent media that can criticize Trudeau.
Michael Geist is a professor with an interest in things like copyright law and free speech, but he's become the leading critic in academia, at least, of Trudeau's censorship and regulatory plans.
So that's today's story.
When Trudeau and Stephen Gilbo released their online harms proposals last year, as Parliament broke before the 2021 election, they called for public submissions and consultations in response.
So they didn't have parliamentary hearings.
They just buried it in the summertime before an election.
They don't want scrutiny.
And weirdly, they didn't make public any of these public consultations.
They weren't public, were they?
Now, some organizations that sent in criticisms or comments to the government, they published their work on their own.
For example, the Independent Press Gallery, of which Rebel News is a part.
Here's the submissions by the IPG, which is obviously against government censorship.
But most of the submissions were not made public, even though they were called public consultations.
And funny enough, the Trudeau government refused to disclose them.
That's weird, right?
24-Hour Takedown Requirements00:08:50
Isn't that weird?
I think it's weird.
Well, Professor Geist filed an access to information request, and he received the results today, a 1,200-page compendium of public remarks, overwhelmingly critical of the government.
No wonder the liberals tried to keep it a secret.
Countless people from across the political spectrum opposing the censorship proposals.
People on the right, people on the left, minority groups, civil liberties groups.
People were shocked at how far Trudeau was proposing to go.
I started to look through the 1,200 pages today.
Obviously, I couldn't get through it all.
We've posted a link to the whole document on the website below this video.
And it's all thanks to Professor Geist for doing this access to information request and posting the results on his website, making it public.
If you're interested, work through it.
I'm still going through it.
I'm fascinated by it.
But more than that, I'm deeply encouraged by it.
I'm hopeful, not optimistic yet.
Trudeau doesn't care what people say.
He does what he wants.
Comparing him to Communist China, as some of his critics do, is a compliment to him, remember?
There's a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say we need to go green as fast as we need to start investing in solar.
I mean, there is a flexibility that I know Stephen Harford must dream about of having a dictatorship that he could do everything he wanted.
But it's what I said earlier about the truckers.
You didn't know how many friends you had.
You didn't know how many other people out there were concerned.
They were hidden until they stood up.
That's why Trudeau hated the truckers.
And that's why Trudeau tried to keep these public consultations not public.
I'm going to show you just a few excerpts.
Check out this extract from Microsoft's submission.
Let me read it.
The online harms proposal requires regulated service providers to take all reasonable measures, which could include the use of automated systems to identify harmful content that is communicated on its service and make that content inaccessible to persons in Canada.
In addition, regulated service providers will be required to independently adjudicate complaints and remove illegal or harmful content within 24 hours from the content being flagged.
A failure to comply with these requirements would trigger significant administrative monetary damages.
Both of these obligations impinge on fundamental freedoms enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and international human rights law to the extent that this approach may risk being perceived as a government censorship regime that is outsourced to private companies.
Requiring service providers to proactively monitor all user content and to assess the legality or harmfulness of user content is problematic.
First, this requirement may have a disproportionate effect on user privacy and may undermine necessary cybersecurity efforts by effectively eliminating the ability to leverage encryption for certain communications.
The extraordinary policy implications merit greater public debate.
There's a little bit of jargon in there, but I think it's pretty clear.
Microsoft is saying, what are you doing?
There's no free place in the world that does this.
Let me just read a little bit more from Microsoft.
I know it's some detail, but aren't you surprised?
I mean, I think of Microsoft, I think of the detestable Bill Gates, but I guess Microsoft's free speech lawyers really thought this was a problem.
Let me read just one more excerpt from their quote.
Requiring service providers to adjudicate the legality or harmfulness of content also fails to take into account that service providers are not equipped to make content decisions that require applying legal standards or assessing intent, context, and cultural subjectivities.
Making judgments on online speech is often a complex process, requiring subject matter expertise and a careful balancing of rights.
Is it now appropriate for service providers to make these decisions?
And the challenges, sorry, it is not appropriate.
And the challenges are exacerbated when legislation requires removal within a short fixed time period.
Legally mandated adjudication and takedown rules incentivize service providers to adopt a conservative approach to content removal, which could lead to the disproportionate removal of legitimate content.
This in turn could have unintended negative consequences for freedom of expression and risks creating a chilling effect on online speech, free and open public discourse, and civil society participation.
Can you even believe it?
Big tech is arguing against the criminalization of speech, saying it doesn't want Trudeau to outsource censorship to them.
Here's an extract.
I'm just picking because there's so many in there.
Pinterest, you know that, have you heard of that website, Pinterest?
It's like little fun pictures that you like pin to the bullets.
I'm just going to read a little bit from Pinterest.
They got something to say.
Let me quote a little bit.
Pinterest is not a place for politics, and we are not focused on fostering free expression.
However, several provisions of the proposed law may have implications for the rights and interests of law-abiding internet users, which we think deserves more discussion.
The requirement to take down unlawful content on 24 hours' notice, for example, will provide many small or medium-sized platforms with little time to assess potentially complex legal claims.
The strong incentive will be to simply take down any content that is alleged to violate the law in order to avoid legal risk.
Platform companies of all sizes regularly receive abusive or mistaken demands to remove lawful and even societally important content.
At Pinterest, we do our best to identify and resist such improper requests, but the largest companies will be uniquely positioned to carry out the kind of rapid yet accurate legal analysis in the proposed law suggests.
Similarly, the requirement that platforms take all reasonable measures, which can include the use of automated systems to identify harmful content, may, in practice, incentivize smaller platforms to rely on imprecise filtering tools.
Legal mandates to adopt poorly defined or understood automated systems create serious risk of harm to users.
I hope I'm not boring you with these.
I'm trying to show you that these companies that actually have to apply the censorship see a lot of practical problems and moral problems too.
Now, there's a ton like that.
Let me close with Twitter's official statement.
I'm a Twitter user.
I think Twitter is what Trudeau really hates the most.
Issue, 24-hour takedown requirements.
Twitter opposes the recommendation of a time limit on addressing any content flagged by any person in Canada as harmful content.
The proposed time limit does not allow for judicious, thoughtful analysis in a manner that balances the right to freedom of expression in Canada with the right to freedom from discrimination and prejudice.
According to existing research and analyses, the proposed system has a high probability of negatively impacting marginalized, racialized, and intersectional groups.
More information from Professor Susie Dunn at Dalhousie University can be found here.
The 24-hour proposal should be abandoned.
Content should be addressed as quickly as possible.
And within the scope of existing Canadian jurisprudence, terms of service and rules by the online communication service providers.
Here's an interesting one.
Any standard applied in the digital world should also be applied in real life.
For example, law enforcement should be required to both launch an investigation within 24 hours of flagging, as well as remove any hateful content, graffiti on a statue, for example, that appears within 24 hours across the country.
That's amazing.
It's a great point.
Why should a private company have to jump into action within 24 hours?
When's the last time police responded to a graffiti within 24 hours?
That's a great point.
Is Twitter actually comparing Trudeau's proposal to how China operates?
Issue, website blocking.
The proposal by the government of Canada to allow the Digital Safety Commissioner, I love that title, to block websites is drastic.
People around the world are being blocked from accessing Twitter and other services in a similar manner as the one proposed by Canada by multiple authoritarian governments, China, North Korea, and Iran, for example, under the false guise of online safety, impeding people's rights to access information online.
Look, I've just started to skim this 1,200-page access to information that Professor Geist received.
The entire world sees Trudeau for who he is, a wannabe dictator.
The only difference amongst the serious criticisms that I've shown you is how diplomatic they are at describing him.
Health Inspectors and Church Controversy00:15:38
The battle is still on.
Trudeau hates independent media.
He hates the fact that you're allowed to disagree with him.
He thinks if you have a different point of view, you're engaging in discrimination or disinformation, if not a crime.
Remember what he said to our reporter, Tamari Ugalini.
I'm pessimistic, but I'm hopeful.
There are more of us than I thought who care about freedom.
stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Well, I have been riveted to Sheila Gunread's Twitter stream.
She is live tweeting a trial in Alberta, the trial of a church.
Now, what has the church done?
Has it violated the criminal code?
Has it engaged in any form of violence?
No, it has not.
The church engaged in the crime of opening its doors during the lockdown.
Now, the lockdown is long over, and Alberta boasts that it's back and it's free.
And yet, Jason Kenney's handpick special church prosecutors are in court right now, going after the church, asking, seeking over a million dollars in fines for the fact that they dared open.
The trial is in its second day today.
Sheila Gunread joins us now via Skype from Empton.
Sheila, great to see you again.
So, today is, I think, day two of the trial.
Is that right?
This is day three.
So, the first day they made the case to hear whether or not the judge would hear charter arguments.
The second day, the judge rejected the fact that there were any charter violations taking place here, and they moved right into the trial proper.
So, today was, I guess, the second official day of trial testimony, and it wrapped up just at lunchtime today.
So, I raced back home so I could be with you.
Thank you.
And so, you were physically in the courthouse.
A lot of trials over the last two years have been conducted online, either by Zoom or some other system like that.
So, you're saying that was not the case.
This was an in-person trial in Edmonton.
Is that right?
This is an in-person trial in Edmonton, and it's limited to just 10 people inside of the courtroom.
Not that that would matter because I'm the only media there, but because of the restrictions on the number of people that can go into the courtroom, the supporters of Church in the Vine have to wait outside.
The Edmonton courthouse still requires masks.
There's still barriers everywhere.
I even noticed a little sign on the elevator that if you go in the elevator, you have to face the wall.
Oh, my God.
It's so crazy.
It's so crazy.
It's like COVID is still the most deadly thing ever at the Edmonton courthouse.
Well, and you know what?
We're laughing about it.
You have to face the walls in an elevator.
I guess there's lots of science-y thinking behind that.
One seriously, I wonder who came up with that.
I've actually never heard that before.
I wonder if some cockamame judge came up with that.
And the reason I say that is that these people are scientifically unreasonable.
There is no special attribute to the coronavirus that makes it attack people in a courtroom as opposed to a liquor store or a grocery store or a bus or whatever.
It's a reflection of the mania or the phobia of the judges themselves.
We saw this in the case of Justice Adam Germain with his bizarre and unfactual assertions in the case of Pastor Arthur Pavlovsky, where he said, Everyone in Alberta knows someone who has died from this virus.
And we are engraved in.
Well, actually, no, boss, not everyone.
It's extremely rare to die from it.
The average age of death is around 80.
These are people who are extremely sick to begin with.
They could likely have died from the flu.
In fact, many of the flu cases were counted as coronavirus.
We see cases across the world being revised downwards.
I think these judges are typically in their 60s and 70s.
They're freighty cats.
They don't get out much.
They're not hanging out at the bar.
They're not going out to party.
So they live extremely cloistered lives.
By nature, they're rule followers.
So they're terrified.
And it's the fact that they're still living like the Japanese soldiers who were found in the Philippines in the 50s, still fighting against the Americans a decade after Japan surrendered.
That's what these judges are like.
And these are the people who are sitting in judgment of a pandemic lockdown case.
He's got no chance.
This church has no chance.
No, I knew that the second the judge made James Kitchen, the lawyer, the Fight the Fines lawyer, working on behalf of Church in the Vine and Pastor Tracy Fortin.
The judge makes the documents come to the judge on a dinner tray, like a cafeteria tray.
So you give them to the court clerk who puts them on a cafeteria tray, and then this magical cafeteria tray somehow disinfects the documents and then they're given to the judge.
The clerk cannot hand the documents directly to the judge.
They have to go on this magical cafeteria tray.
So that should tell us exactly where we're going with this judge.
And that's there's a lot of the same faces that we are seeing involved in this.
For example, it's the same hunter-killer prosecutor that argued for the continued incarceration of James Coates, who is tasked with prosecuting Church in the Vine and the nice pastor's wife, Tracy Fortin.
Really, they are not on trial here for violations of the public health order.
They've never been accused of that.
They are in trouble for obstructing a health inspector from coming into the church to continue to disrupt the church.
They tried to make arrangements with this health inspector to come into the church at a time when no one was praying or worshiping.
But the health inspector stood them up.
There was, I found out, there was a joint task force, like a JTF-style task force of city bylaw officers, city cops, and Alberta Health Services whose duty was to go around and check churches for COVID compliance.
And at one point, there was testimony that the health inspector admitted to her and the bylaw officers were running around the church like these biomedical police state lemmings.
They were everywhere and taking pictures of people as they were actively engaged in worship and prayer.
They were in the children's room, like the little Sunday school for the little ones.
They were in there.
The bylaw officers were in there milling around.
This is a church where, I mean, it's a big church, but everybody knows who everybody is.
And there was testimony today that when they barged into the church, the congregants reacted with horror.
They ran to Pastor Tracy and said, oh my goodness, it looks like the cops are here in the middle of our church.
And yet, The crown is asserting that none of this was disruptive to the ongoing services.
At one point, the health inspector tried to talk to Pastor Rodney, the lead pastor of the church, while he was giving services.
I mean, it's just absolutely insane what the testimony that I heard.
Do you think for one second, you use the word church a lot.
Of course, we live in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society.
I know for a fact Edmonton has Sikh temples, Jewish synagogues, Muslim mosques.
Do you know at all if this hunter-killer task force set up by Jason Kenney, if it went to any other religious groups and their houses of worship, or if it was, as you described, simply targeting the Christian churches?
I only heard evidence today that they were targeting Christian churches.
And, you know, the health inspector sort of bragged that, you know, there are other churches, including my own, that had no problem following these restrictions.
There's no allegation that Church in the Vine wasn't following the restrictions.
They just didn't want the state running loose, running amok inside their church while they are actively praying.
Yeah, and you know what?
And I happen to know that disrupting a religious gathering actually is a crime in the criminal code.
If some hobo, some vandal, some troublemaker, some mischief maker, someone with a grudge were to enter a church during a service and disrupt it, that is actually a criminal code offense.
And if, as you say, Jason Kenney's hand-picked team barges into a church, goes to the kids' room and takes photos, I would shout, pedophile alert, stranger danger.
Who is the perv coming in to take photos of children not their own, uninvited without a warrant?
That is seriously gross stuff.
And to do that in the mid and to talk to a clergyman in the middle of a sermon or a prayer.
You know what?
I bet they, you know what?
We know that people who like groping people sign up for the TSA.
I'm not saying everyone in the TSA is a groper, but imagine if you're a groper, what an amazing job.
You literally get paid to grope people all day.
And if they resist, you get to make them miss a flight.
I wonder if in the same gross, gross way, if Jason Kenney said, all right, I don't want any Christians on this hunter-killer squad because you're going to have some compunction about this.
You're not going to feel great about disrupting religious services.
I want all the Christian haters.
I want everyone who's got a grudge against the church.
Maybe you're a Satanist.
Maybe you just, I don't know.
Maybe you hate the church.
I want to recruit the church haters because you're going to have to do some extremely immoral, unethical, and gross things.
I don't want you blinking.
I want you to go into that church nursery, barge in, scare the devil out of people, take photos of their minor children.
And if anyone says, get out, I want you to threaten them.
That's a special kind of person.
In my mind, that's a person who should never work with any power or authority ever.
But it sounds like that's who was specifically recruited by Jason Kenney.
And the fact that we're literally having this trial in 2022 shows me that he shares this grudge.
You know, the health inspector did allude to the fact that she attends her own church.
And there was some irony there that I think she missed.
But my Catholic light bulb went off when she said, I'm Anglican, but I go to this other Catholic church that actually follows the rules.
And then she said the name of the Catholic Church, and it was St. Thomas More.
And the irony there is St. Thomas More was martyred because he refused to concede that the king of England was the head of his church.
And yet, this woman is tasked with making sure that churches all kneel before the state and the state gets to run around inside the church while services are actively going on.
I think maybe she needs to brush up on her catechism a little bit.
But we also heard testimony that it wasn't just the state that Church and the Vine kept out.
When CBC found them as some sort of COVID scoff law and started publicizing this, then they had Satanists and ne'er-do-wells trying to get access to the church.
So then they had to enhance security protocols.
They were getting threats.
They were screaming and interviewing people that they didn't know as they were coming into the church.
And so they said they had to escort five people off the property, which goes to their argument that this is a private place, privately owned, and the requirement for entry during services is that you are there to worship God.
You don't get to come and inspect it.
And so, you know, the province is arguing that this is a public place.
And because it's a public place, we get to enter and inspect at all times without getting a warrant.
So you're saying they didn't have a warrant.
So these, so you're saying that Jason Kenney's cops, and I'm not even going to call them cops because I think they were like health hunter killers, like they weren't actual police.
Am I right?
Bylaw officers.
So these health bylaw officers who do not have training as police would barge into this church without a warrant, barge into the nursery without a warrant.
What a bunch of freaks.
What a gross, gross freak show.
Yeah, because the state is arguing that this is accessible to the public, so we can just come in and inspect it as though it's a grocery store.
And, you know, the church is saying it's not.
It's a private place where the requirement for membership and entry is that you are there to worship God.
And they did their best to accommodate the health inspectors.
Come back when we're not actively praying, but that wasn't good enough for the province of Alberta.
And now, if they get the maximum, this church that has done nothing wrong except protect the sanctity of their sanctuary during worship, they could see between Pastor Tracy and the church itself $1.3 million in fines.
What is the public benefit of any of that?
Yeah.
Well, to destroy the church and put Christians in their place and show them who's boss, and how dare they embarrass Jason Kenny and how dare they defy the one true God, Teresa Tam.
Now, let's talk for a minute about the secret prosecutor.
Earlier in the show, I referred to the medieval custom of executioners or hangmen wearing a black hood over their own face.
I mean, typically a black hood is over, a hood is put over the face of someone being executed, someone being hanged, not always.
Of course, hangings don't happen in Western countries these days, but they have in the past.
And it was to hide the contortion of their face and give them, I suppose, some sort of privacy in their last moments.
But the reason the executioner or the hangman wore a mask was a little bit different.
So they could hide who they were, so that they themselves wouldn't be a target of retribution, perhaps.
I'm not so much sure it was out of shame, but maybe to hide from the evil they're about to do, killing someone.
Maybe it was metaphorical to hide themselves from the presence of God as they commit a killing.
I don't know why.
I suppose every hangman or executioner had their own reason for hiding their face.
Why and how does the prosecutor hide?
Who is it?
Do you know the name of the prosecutor?
Absolutely.
Karen Thorsrude's Anonymous Prosecution00:12:51
It's Karen Thorsrude.
She's the same prosecutor who argued for the continued incarceration of Pastor James Coates, and she did it quite passionately.
35 days was not good enough for James Coates, according to Karen Thorsrude.
And in that trial, the judge allowed her to remain anonymous.
This is not a gangland trial.
She's not prosecuting a cartel.
She's locking up pastors and seizing their churches and fining other pastors.
Karen Thorsrude.
All right, well, let's say her name.
And I think she's right to be ashamed of herself.
And that shame should redound to the health minister and the justice minister and the premier as well.
That shame should redound to the judge who allows a secret prosecutor, Karen Thorsrude, to hide her name.
What a disgrace, very un-Canadian.
But you said something earlier that we glossed over, and I want to come back to it.
That, I mean, clearly a church has fundamental freedoms, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of thought, conscience, belief.
It really touches on a great number of freedoms, religion, freedom of religion being the most obvious one, and the right to gather, that would be called freedom of assembly.
And if these things were being infringed by the government, that is exactly what the Charter of Rights was written for.
And these freedoms are so important.
The Charter of Rights is a fairly long document, but right near the top, Section 2, they have a special paragraph called Fundamental Freedoms.
So these are more important than the others.
So, for example, the right to vote is not in there.
Mobility rights, the right to move around, that's not in there.
But freedom of speech, thought, religion, conscience, freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, those are the fundamental freedoms.
And you're telling me that this judge, who's such a hypochondriac that the judge wants papers handed to her on a silver tray or something, so they don't have cooties or something.
I mean, this judge, I don't think she's fit to try a case on the pandemic.
She obviously has some phobia about it.
She's a germaphobe.
But you're saying she won't even hear the charter arguments.
I just want to understand that, because how can a judge say I won't even hear them?
Well, that was the thing.
It was kind of, it sort of caught the defense lawyer flat-footed.
I mean, he was prepared to move directly into the trial.
But it was shocking to hear that these issues that touch on a church, you would think that cautiously you would agree to hear charter arguments around freedom of religion and freedom of assembly.
But she just refused to hear them.
She said that either the charter violations were non-existent or so minuscule that they would have no effect on the case.
And yet, Pastor Tracy Fortin said, I blocked the door so that there was not a further violation of the rights of my congregation to worship uninterrupted by the state.
That's the whole crux of the case.
She doesn't deny that she obstructed the state from coming into the church.
She's trying to explain why she did it and the fact that there was no warrant for them to come in to a private building anyway.
But the whole explanation is they were coming in to violate our right to assemble and practice our religion uninterrupted by the state.
That is why I did not allow her in.
And yet the judge wouldn't hear any of that.
You know, it's been a while since I've been in law school and I haven't practiced law in over a decade, but I do know a little bit about the Charter of Rights.
And the first burden is on the individual citizen to say, here's how my rights were infringed.
And that's almost always easy to show because almost everything infringes your rights in some way, every government action.
The hard part, the meat of it, the main part is the second step, which is, all right, so your freedoms were violated by the government, but those can be saved if the violation was rationally connected to some important goal and your rights were minimally impaired.
And, you know, so you have to demonstrably justify them.
So to simply say your rights were not violated when you've got these jackboots coming in and pushing their way in, it's absurd.
What you do in a charter analysis, you say, okay, there was a violation, but was it rationally connected to a goal?
Was it minimal impairment?
Was it proportionate?
I think those are the tests called the Oak test.
So you're saying this judge did not engage in that analysis.
The judge just said, I'm not even going to spend time on it.
Did the judge engage in that balancing, that Oaks test?
It's named after the famous Oak case called Oaks.
And that's the test that's been used for almost 40 years.
You're saying the judge did not even go through the motions of the Oaks test?
There was maybe five minutes of explanation, but she came to the conclusion that the violation of their charter rights was non-existent or so minimal that it would be of no consequence in the case.
You know, I think we got ourselves a candidate for the high court of Beijing here.
I mean, if Beverly McLaughlin ever steps down from her perch working for the Chinese judiciary, maybe this judge will fit right in.
You've got a germaphobe judge who wants documents handed to her on a silver plate.
She probably sprays them with Windex before she reads them.
If you're in the elevators of her courthouse, you've got to stare at the wall because that's what science would say.
She gives less than five minutes treatment to charter arguments, and she allows a prosecutor, Karen Thorsrude, to have the executioner's mask on her to keep herself secret.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, Sheila, and say just a hunch here that this church is going to be convicted.
I don't know.
I feel it in my bones.
I do too.
Just based on everything that I saw in the courtroom, I mean, there was things that the prosecutor said that the judges sort of let slip by, calling the congregants at the church followers of Pastor Tracy and Pastor Rodney, as though they were, you know, cult leaders as opposed to just regular old pastors.
It's very been a very strange couple of days.
Odd to see a pastor interrogated on how cinnamon rolls and coffee are distributed in the church because that violated public health orders and to hear testimony that people were shaking hands as though it were evidence presented at a murder trial.
Very odd time to be alive, but we'll find out the verdict in the case next Friday.
I'll be there in person because this is an in-person trial.
There's no WebEx link.
So I'll be there in person to get reaction from the lawyer and from Pastor Rodney and Tracy.
But I know that you have said that the Democracy Fund would go ahead and appeal this in the event of a conviction because this is just so outrageous.
I can't even believe this is Alberta, but we do lock out more pastors than China here.
So I should say that's the first time.
Yeah, it's outrageous.
And we do have that billboard.
If people want to see the billboard, they can go to rebelbillboards.com.
And I know you unveiled that.
It really is true.
I'm not saying that Alberta has locked up more Christians than China has in total, but I don't think that China used the pandemic as an excuse to lock up pastors.
I think this is the fifth or sixth pastor in Alberta.
There's something broken there.
And I don't know if there's some internal psychological torment going on inside Jason Kenney, the man who was once the Canadian cabinet minister in charge of religious freedom around the world, the guy who set up the Office of Religious Freedom, the guy who went to China and stood up for the dissidents, the guy who tweeted his support for Chinese underground churches,
for him to now be the chief prosecutor of the Alberta Inquisition is so bizarre and gross.
I don't know what kind of psychology is going on there.
And I think the judges are absolutely off their rockers.
Judge Germain, who gave Arthur Bablovsky this little card to read about denouncing himself whenever he criticized the government.
Like that's China stuff.
That really is China stuff.
You've got a China-style secret prosecutor, a China-style judiciary that's telling people to renounce themselves in some struggle session, a China-style secret prosecutor wearing a mask over their face, a China-style premier who says this is all just normal while he dines in the Sky Palace.
No prosecution of him.
There is something really, really broken in Alberta.
And frankly, Jason Kenney should lose his job over this alone.
Karen Thorsrude, her name should be a disgrace for all eternity.
And I don't want to prejudge what this judge is going to do, but I'm pretty sure I know what this judge is going to do.
Alberta has anti-Christian bigotry like a rot, like a rust.
And I don't know where it came from because I do not think that is in keeping with the temperament or the character of the province as a whole.
Motto strong and free.
These people are out of line.
And I'm glad you're in there, Sheila.
And shame on the other media for not being in there.
Yeah, you know, it's an international story.
It's drawing the attention of the Americans.
Josh Hawley, Senator Josh Hawley, even suggested that Alberta should be on some sort of human rights religious freedom watch list.
And he's not wrong.
But it's interesting to see that the rest of the media, they don't seem to care because they are fully in support of persecuting these pastors.
They whipped up some of the problems happening at this church with the Satanists and the weirdos coming in to disrupt it.
They were part and parcel of the government's ongoing persecution of them.
Yeah.
Well, there's a lot of weirdos going around here.
Just really, really incredible.
I'm glad you're in there, Sheila.
Thanks very much.
And folks, if you're not on Twitter, it's really easy to get on there.
And Sheila Gunnread's email address is simply her full name, Sheila Gunnread, her Twitter address, rather.
And if you want to chip in the Democracy Fund, we'll give you a charitable tax receipt if you want, because the Democracy Fund is covering the legal bills.
Is that right?
Yes, this is a democracy fund case.
If people want to donate to cover the legal costs, the ballooning legal costs as this church stares down $1.3 million in fines, you can make a donation at fightthefines.com.
And because of that partnership with the Democracy Fund, all donations qualify for that charitable tax receipt.
And boy, do they ever need the help because they're headed towards an appeal.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's crazy.
All right, Sheila, thanks very much.
You got it, boss.
There you have it.
Our chief reporter reporting like a chief.
Boy, I'm glad she's in there, aren't you?
would not know of this if it weren't for Sheila Gunread in Rebel News.
Stay with us more ahead.
Hey, welcome back.
Your notes to me.
Warden Zoel says, it's a pretty sad state of affairs when we have to rely on an eccentric billionaire to bring back freedom of speech to the internet.
Isn't that the truth?
I mean, it's supposed to be all our jobs, supposed to be the jobs of lawyers and law professors and judges and political leaders too.
Canuck has something to say on immigration.
The plan is to break the system by any means necessary.
Same thing is happening in America, only on a larger scale.
I'm going to disagree with you on that.
Of course, the number of immigrants to the United States is larger in absolute terms, but remember that America is almost 10 times bigger than Canada.
Canada has about double the immigration the U.S. has proportionately.
LoaWorks31 says, I had to wait three years to be processed and came into Canada at a time when it was limited to 150,000 immigrants per year.
Mayor John Tory's COVID Case00:10:08
We shouldn't let in so many immigrants per year when we can't keep up with the demands on housing.
Isn't fair on natural-born Canadians or new immigrants if no one could afford to rent or buy a house.
I think you're right.
And when Christian Freeland boasts that the GDP is going up, well, yeah, and prices are going up and it's harder to live.
And when you're pouring in, you know, close to half a million, like 400, 400,000 plus new immigrants a year, just, and most of them are going to Toronto and Vancouver.
What that does to housing is it's more important what that does to people's ability to buy a house than, woo, property values are up.
Property values up is great if you own property, but what if you can't get in?
What if you can't get ownership?
I'm worried about that.
That's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters to you at home, good night.
Keep fighting for freedom.
And let me leave you with our video of the day from our friend David Menzies.
Toronto's mayor got COVID, even though he's fully vaxed and forces others to get the jab too.
Here, take a look at this.
Talk to you later.
In the meantime, as I said earlier, I wish John Torrey a speedy recovery as he gets over this bout of COVID-19 in his luxury condo.
Let's give him three cheers, shall we?
Hip, hip, hypocrite.
David Menzies for Rebel News here at Toronto City Hall.
Well, what's the story, Mr. Torrey?
Alas, there shall be no answer to that query today because John Torrey, he's not in the office.
He is at home recuperating.
On the eve of Good Friday, we were told that Mayor John Tory has indeed a case of COVID-19.
And as we await for his resurrection in the days, weeks, or perhaps months ahead, we must ponder the question, how can this be?
After all, on this very site, Nathan Phillips Square, this is where pop-up vaccine clinics appeared, even those appealing to children.
Get the jabs and you'll get a free Harvey's hamburger, ice cream, or a balloon.
And we were continually told that that was all we had to do to protect ourselves, namely, get those jabs of the experimental vaccine.
And John Torrey, well, he led by example, didn't he, folks?
He has been double jabbed.
He has the booster.
And next month, he is eligible for the second booster.
And yet, there is John Torrey resting right now and recuperating.
and I hope he makes a full recovery with the coronavirus.
So what indeed is the story?
Could it be that the coronavirus vaccine does not come as advertised?
And how odd, folks.
I mean, I would love to query John Torrey.
He is an allegedly conservative mayor.
But in the past two years of the COVID-19 lockdowns, he has embraced the tactics of, yes, a dictator.
Case in point, do you remember in November 2020 when John Torrey literally sent in all the king's horses and all the king's men to shut down Adamson Barbecue?
Check it out.
And how's this for perverse irony?
After Adam Skelly was arrested and incarcerated, he was later sent a bill for the policing cost, almost $200,000.
Absolutely shameful.
Oh, and folks, speaking of eating, do you remember when Mayor John Torrey advocated that if you are going out to have a bite, you should mask in between bites?
Yeah, check this out.
A little more stringent about when people have to wear a mask, which is aside from the fact when you're taking a sip or when you're taking a bite, you have the mask on.
So while you're waiting for your food, while you're looking at the menu, all those times you keep it on.
Brilliant.
Well, no, not really.
It's ridiculous.
Oh, and by the way, that's how Mayor John Torrey wants the people, the great unwashed masses of Hogtown to eat.
That rule doesn't apply to him or any of the other political elites.
Do you remember when John Torrey last year was caught on a Yorkville patio with his wife Barbara?
No sign of masking between bites.
In fact, no sign of a mask either.
Check it out.
Destroyed every small business.
Don't you feel guilty?
Actually.
Being here in public, knowing that all these people here have been affected by your draconian measures.
Do you have anything to say about it?
Yeah, so yet again, another example of do as I say, not as I do.
One law for thee and one law for me.
And speaking of double standards, you know, we're being told by all the authorities these days, especially if you're unvaxed and you can't get on a plane and you can't get on a train, to embrace the staycation, they call it.
You know, travel within your region, explore our great dominion as opposed to going off to some far-flung destination.
But check out this from a few weeks ago.
Our friend Sue Ann Levy, she took these photos.
It's Mayor John Torrey at Pearson International Airport getting on a plane to, yeah, Florida.
And just think of the irony there, folks.
Ontario was perhaps the most locked down province on the entire continent.
And yet there's Mayor Torrey buggering off to Florida, perhaps the most free jurisdiction on the continent.
Absolutely incredible, the chutzpah that this man displays.
And you know, there were so many other examples of misery that was inflicted upon the citizens of Toronto thanks to Mayor John Torrey's obsessiveness in terms of clamping down and locking down.
Do you remember at Trinity Bellwoods Park, just a few kilometers away from Nathan Phillips Square, that perversity of social distancing circles?
Yeah, that's right.
Limit yourself to a handful of people in your circle.
don't dare emerge from your circle.
But that rule didn't apply to John Torrey, not when there was a chance to do a photo op with some nurses on University Avenue.
And how about High Park fenced off during the spring because God forbid the citizens of Hogtown should converge and smell the cherry blossoms.
I mean those fences, it was like right out of East Berlin circa 1946.
We paid a visit then.
It was unbelievable.
We did, yes, sir.
It says Mr. Mayor, tear down this wall like Ronald Reagan said back in 1987 in East Berlin.
Isn't that beautiful?
We're standing up for our freedom officer.
I'm just going to have to take down the sign, okay?
Can you tell me that?
And then there was that group of thugs known as Afro-Indigenous Rising in the summer of 2020.
They occupied this very square, breaking 11 sections of the Trespass Act.
But that was no problem for John Torrey and his little police service, the security guards here.
They didn't see anything problematic with this filthy occupation.
Rather, they went after journalists for covering the occupation.
CHECK IT OUT.
Don't run away from love.
I just want one quick minute, sir.
Yeah.
What are you?
What's your purpose here?
I'm a cameraman.
Can I stop?
Are you going to stop me instead of them trying to block you?
I'm asking you.
I don't have to provide you anything.
Okay, well, just like they don't have to provide anything to you.
I'm not harassing them.
They're bothering me.
Oh, this is their space.
Can you please stop?
No.
However, there was zero tolerance given to protesters that were part of the anti-lockdown movement in January of last year, waving a Canadian flag.
That was deemed to be a crime against the state.
And you would be violently arrested.
Check out this video, folks.
Wow.
Sir, why are they arresting you?
And then just weeks after that was shot, who appeared at Young Dundas Square?
Well, it was the supporters of the Tamil Tigers terrorist group.
You know, the people that Patrick Brown, the wannabe conservative leader, wants to take off the terrorist list.
Yeah, they got to march on Young Dundas Square.
Do you see any law enforcement here?
So there you have it, folks.
These were just some examples of the misery Torontonians have endured these past two years.
In the meantime, as I said earlier, I wish John Tory a speedy recovery as he gets over this bout of COVID-19 in his luxury condo.
Let's give him three cheers, shall we?
Hip, hip, hypocrite.
Summer Ready Merchandise00:00:32
For Rebel News, I'm David the Menzoid Menzies.
Hey, folks, before you know it, summer is going to be here, so get ready to have fun in the sun by wearing some of the newest Rebel News merchandise.
We've got new t-shirts, sweatshirts, caps, you name it.
Wear your politics on your sleeve when it comes to supporting Rebel News and looking quite fashionably as you do so.