Sheila Gunn Reid, Keith Wilson, and Tom Marazzo argue the Public Order Emergency Commission’s findings reveal Justin Trudeau’s 2022 Emergencies Act invocation—freezing bank accounts over minor infractions like fireworks or public urination—was politically driven, not security-based. Testimony exposed Ottawa Police Service chaos under Chief Slowly and police overreach, with no evidence of sabotage or insurrection despite claims. They contrast Trudeau’s gun freeze/buyback with his reliance on bodyguards armed with banned weapons, calling it a disingenuous power grab. The episode underscores systemic distrust in government responses to protests and the weaponization of civil liberties under flimsy justifications. [Automatically generated summary]
Good afternoon, everybody, or good evening, depending on what part of the country you're in.
Sorry for the technical difficulties, including the ones that I just created out of my own negligence.
Welcome to the Rebel News daily live stream.
This show used to be at noon Eastern or 10 Mountain.
But since there's so much to talk about after the Public Order Emergency Commission wraps up for the day, we moved our live stream towards the end of the day, wherein we talk about exactly that, what happened in the Trucker Commission today.
And for those of you who don't know, the Public Order Emergency Inquiry or Commission is a result of Justin Trudeau's invocation of a never-before-used law called the Emergencies Act.
It's a rewrite of the old War Measures Act.
So you have sort of an idea of the level of incident that this thing should have been used for.
It's used for a Pearl Harbor event, a 9-11 event, an invasion of Canada, a breach of our borders, an internal catastrophic terror attack.
Justin Trudeau invoked it on bouncy castles, hot tubs, street parties, and peaceful Canadians who brought their big rigs to the nation's capital and stayed a little too long for the local residents.
And so apparently that amounted to domestic terrorism.
Justin Trudeau invoked this law, seized their bank accounts, and gave police extraordinary powers of arrest and seizure.
And so here we are now.
He did that in February.
It's October.
We're rapidly approaching November.
And we're finally investigating the government's actions and whether or not invoking the act was necessary.
So we're on, I think.
Sheila, you mentioned 9-11, but the act wasn't even used on 9-11.
This is the first time in Canadian history that we use the Emergencies Act.
And even for something as big as 9-11, the prime minister back then didn't even use it.
No, that's true.
And we've had also very almost terror attacks happen on Canadian soil.
They're sort of foiled before they got to there.
Those sort of things never rose to this level.
Justin Trudeau invoked it on a protest that was so peaceful, it caused the crime rate to go down in Ottawa.
We heard in the first weeks leading up to the invocation of the Emergencies Act, which happened on September or February 14th, from the 27th of January to the 13th of February, the crime rate in the nation's capital went down, and there were only 13 convoy-related arrests.
And that included like minor stuff, like highway traffic deck stuff, mischief, probably public urination, maybe.
I'm guessing there might be a public intoxication ticket in there too somewhere.
People were having a lot of fun.
I know it was so bad.
It was so terrifying that the worst thing Paul Champ was able to try to bring forward with the first witness today was the fact that trucks were parking in front of residential building on sidewalks and were being inconvenient to the public and that there were fireworks.
Those were the worst things Paul Champ tried to make the first witness today say that took place.
I've been to parts of the world where they do deal with terror in residential neighborhoods.
Like I've been to Israel.
I've been to the what they call settlements, which are just neighborhoods full of Jews where people think they shouldn't be.
I've been to Kurdistan, Iraq.
Those are residential communities who they deal with actual terrorism.
These people were inconvenienced and they were complaining about their Uber Eats not getting there fast enough, literally.
That's the terror in the nation's capital.
That constituted martial law in the nation's capital.
No, the real emergency was that Justin Trudeau was being absolutely embarrassed by these truckers.
And we heard testimony.
Yeah, yeah, that's how you know the situation was so bad is that Uber Eats couldn't get places.
That's how you know you have a threat to democracy to deal with on your hands.
It's crazy.
We heard testimony over the last two days, excuse me, from OPP superintendents.
And some of the things they were saying about the OPS, the Ottawa Police Service, absolutely crazy.
And I'm inclined to believe them.
They were pretty straight shooters.
I used to think that Chief Slowly, former Chief Slowly, might have been one of the good guys in this.
I thought he left the police service or was replaced as chief.
Now, I don't think he was replaced by somebody better than him or who cared more about freedom than him, but I thought that he was resistant to the crackdown on peaceful protesters.
But I don't think that's what it was.
I think that his time under pressure really showed how untenable his leadership was and how bad his leadership was in times of crisis.
We heard the OPP superintendents, multiple superintendents, testify to just the chaotic and divisive nature of Slowly's leadership.
There was one point where in a meeting with OPP senior brass who were coming into the city to help, their notes reflect that they said, look, we're here to help.
You guys come up with a plan.
We're here to act in support because you don't have enough officers to deal with this.
And there was no plan.
And Slowly basically freaked out to the point where senior members of Slowly's leadership team were texting and calling the OPP superintendents and apologizing for whatever had just happened.
He said he was abusive and out of control.
Yeah, no, it's incredible what we're seeing come out.
And I just want to inform you, I just see Keith entering our place in Ottawa.
Yeah, Keith Wilson, Tamara Alicia's lawyer, one of the lawyers representing the freedom organizers here in Ottawa.
So we're going to throw to a net and when we come back, we'll be able to have Keith on with us.
Perfect.
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Thursday in Ottawa, the Public Order Emergencies Commission kicked off.
It's an inquiry into the actions of the government, or at least it's supposed to be.
The inquiry is allegedly meant to examine whether or not the government was justified in invoking an anti-terrorism law called the Emergencies Act to euthanize peaceful anti-COVID mandate protests taking place in the nation's capital, but also in other locations across the country.
Now, the convoy to Ottawa spent nearly four weeks completely peacefully demonstrating against lockdowns and vaccine passports.
It evolved into a nearly month-long street party replete with bouncy castles, hot tubs, street hockey, concerts, and community outreach efforts like soup kitchens and food for the homeless.
Rebel News, as we were for the Convoy to Ottawa, will be there on the ground in Ottawa to cover the commission from the beginning to the end because you just cannot trust the mainstream media.
And in fact, that's what today's report is about.
We've rented an Airbnb in Ottawa where we're sending a rotating cast of journalists to report on the public order emergency inquiry.
Now, you can help support our efforts there at truckercommission.com.
The mainstream media's reporting about the alleged foreign nature of the convoy funding was cited as a reason the liberals invoked the Emergencies Act to arrest, detain, and seize the property, bank accounts, and assets of anti-Trudeau demonstrators.
So, joining us now is trucker lawyer Keith Wilson.
Hey, Keith, thanks for coming on the show.
I am dying to pick your brain about some of the stuff that we've heard from these OPP superintendents about the chaos and disrespect of Chief Slowly.
It sounds like at some point he started to get pretty paranoid that people in the ministry, and I don't know which ministry they're referring to, and I'm not quite sure it matters, but he said that people were basically out to get him, that they wanted him to fail.
I don't know how true that is, but I think it led to just the chaos in OPS.
And it sounds like OPP just sort of walked into a nightmare and tried their best to do their best job at policing without a plan whatsoever.
Senior Police Paranoia00:08:33
What was your experience in dealing with OPS?
Was it as chaotic as it sounds?
It was very linear and it was very black and white.
What I mean by that is I would get a phone call from the lead police liaisons every 30 minutes to every hour after the first couple of days that I was here.
And it was constant.
It would start early in the morning, as early as six or seven in the morning.
You get your last call at midnight or so.
And they were, you know, it's amazing to sit there and listen to these senior police people testify when I was on the ground with the organic leaders of the freedom movement at every moment.
And you're just sitting there going, this is outrageous.
That is not what happened at all.
So, you know, we were the typical phone call that I would get from the lead police liaison representative would be, Keith, what's the exit strategy?
That was the question they asked us all the time.
Just for fun, about every four or five times, I'd say, Sergeant, I've got great news.
The leaders have come up with an exit strategy.
And he'd say, What's that?
And I'd say, remove all mandates and they leave.
And he'd go, Oh, so it was, yeah, it was really simple.
What's remarkable, though, and we're all experiencing it.
I thought I was coming to a public inquiry, and I feel like I've tuned into a new soap rop on Netflix that I'm binge-watching.
It's just remarkable how dysfunctional the personalities and egos, the lack of organization.
Some of the leaders who are in the room in the inquiry joked today when they were talking about the police were talking about the challenges they had getting food and supplies.
And one of the leaders who I won't name whispered in my ear: she said, They should have asked us.
We would have fixed them up real quick.
I made the same joke.
I made the same joke.
I said they should ask the truckers.
They had food.
We would have had it all fixed up.
Like, what do you guys want?
What, bacon and eggs?
You know, we would have had it, you know, barbecue.
Just let us know.
So, yeah, it was amazing.
And now I understand.
We never understood while we were here, Sheila, and even subsequent why we'd hear senior government officials say that the, you know, the Freedom Convoy is extremely organized.
The leaders are organized.
And we didn't think we were that organized, but we now know what they were comparing it to: themselves.
Total chaos and dysfunction.
All things being relative, it was a nightmare.
It was a nightmare.
Like they said at one point, and maybe we can find that clip, Olivia, if you wouldn't mind.
There weren't enough food and supplies for the OPP officers that the OPS were demanding to come into town.
At one point, they wanted 400, then they wanted 800.
They didn't even have enough food and beds for the ones that they had, but they just kept demanding that they come into town.
OPP kept telling them, you got to pump the brakes.
We can't bring in all these people and not know what to do with them.
But yeah, you know, no wonder they were so shocked that the truckers had these supply chains.
They could not only get food to themselves, but then start feeding the homeless.
They had these supply chains to bring in food, fuel, and wood, and basically created a society in downtown Ottawa in the span of a couple of weeks.
And the police, they didn't even know, they couldn't even talk to each other, it sounded like.
Well, that was the problem when we were trying to do the mayor's deal when we were implementing it, is the communications were incredible.
They had no ability to communicate with themselves.
We had, in fact, police reaching out to us.
I'd get phone calls from senior, like mid-range on the ground senior police, not the guys in the HQ, saying, Keith, what's going on?
So they would say thank you.
And then they'd get on their radios and say, yeah, the truckers just told us what's happening.
Like it was remarkable how badly it's coming out that they handled this.
And but remember, let's keep our eye on the target here.
Have we received any evidence?
And I shouldn't laugh, but I only laugh because it's so ridiculous.
Have we seen one stitch of evidence, one little minuscule drop of evidence that any of the criteria required under the Emergencies Act to use the nuclear weapon of government power over Canadians' rights was justified?
And the answer is absolutely nothing.
You know, that kept coming out.
Yesterday, we heard from Deputy Chief Ferguson, who had a lot of I don't know, which was odd because I think she was the lady in charge of implementing the plan, as they say.
Steve Bell was in charge of Intel.
There wasn't a lot of intel coming from Chief Bell and going up the supply chain to slowly, it didn't sound like, but there was a lot of I don't know's from her.
But one of the most ridiculous things I thought I heard her say was when she was talking about, well, we need the Emergencies Act, she said, helped grease the wheels.
Why?
Because the police were inept.
That's not a reason to stomp on everybody's charter rights.
But she said, well, it compelled the tow trucks to come and it made it so that we didn't have to swear in all these outside police officers.
And then when she was asked, well, how much time would that save?
Oh, a couple of hours.
Well, I'm sorry.
You can push a few pencils for a couple of hours if it means that you preserve the civil liberties of everybody in the country.
But then as it turns out today, we had an OPP superintendent saying, no, we didn't need that because OPP officers can arrest under the criminal code inside the city of Ottawa and they can work under the Highway Traffic Act, which much of it was done.
So they didn't even need this, you know, bureaucratic jumpover that the Emergencies Act provided to them.
They didn't even need that.
It was like it's so, they just keep saying it would have made our, it made our lives easier, but we would have come to the same outcome at the end of the day.
That's what they keep saying.
All of them keep testifying to that.
I think during Craig Abrams' cross-examination by Mike Morris from Saskatchewan, he stated that, you know, the traffic was already dealt with.
The road closures and traffic diversion was already happening before the invocation of the Emergencies Act.
So I don't think the Emergencies Act was necessary into making sure that the traffic could continue to go on as usual.
The roads could be cleared as they wanted to, as they wanted the roads to be cleared.
I don't think it was necessary.
Well, if people have only a limited amount of time, and most people do because they've got more important things to do with their lives, but although this is incredibly important and let's not lose sight of that, the interesting one to watch is actually the cross-examination of the police witnesses by the government of Canada lawyers, because they're the ones that have to ask the questions to elucidate an answer that supports the invocation.
And so they'll ask things like, well, you couldn't have done X without the Emergencies Act, right?
And then the senior police officials say, oh, no, we had the ability to do that.
Well, you couldn't have done Y without the Emergencies Act, right?
Oh, no, no, we do that all the time.
That's not a problem at all.
And it's just, you know, there's been a number of times where I'm sitting at our table with the four of us lawyers and we look at one another and say, well, should we pack up our bags and go home?
Like, what more is there to do here?
We're on what day, is it day eight of day seven?
We're on day seven of 38 days of evidence.
Day seven of 38 days of evidence.
So there's a lot more coming.
Of course, we've got our case to put in, and that's going to be interesting.
We're still negotiating our witness list.
And I think people will find that interesting when they see who we ultimately have.
So it's, I think we're going to continue to be surprised.
But remember, this is a very serious matter.
This is the federal government overriding people's rights.
This is the federal government giving itself the power to intrude into provincial jurisdiction.
This is the federal government doing this because we all know why.
Federal Overreach Exposed00:13:16
A very spoilt, childlike prime minister got upset that hardworking blue-collar and other Canadians called him out for his tyrannical health mandates and the harm that he did to our families and our communities and our careers.
And he wasn't going to stand for it and man up and be accountable.
Instead, he was going to punish Canadians and beat them up and push them out of town as he did.
You know, that's one thing that I think is Sort of a thread that goes through so much of this, and that it was hardworking blue-collar Canadians.
And you see a lot of classism in all of this.
You see a lot of I call them to Eva, the laptop and pajama class, the people who get to work from home and that didn't really feel the effects of the pandemic.
Actually, their life was never better because they didn't have to go to the office, versus the people who have to go out in the world and keep the world turning so that well-kept people, like those Ottawa bureaucrats, can sit in their 22nd floor cubicle and complain about the diesel trucks below them.
You see how icky they think those people are and how their largest complaint was that their Uber Eats was too slow.
But then you also see it in how they claimed they needed to invoke this emergencies act to compel the truck, the tow truck drivers to do what they wanted them to do because the tow truck drivers were declining to become enforcers at the hands of the state.
So, what they need, you hear it all the time from these OPS officers.
Well, we needed the tow truck drivers to come.
The tow truck drivers didn't want to come.
Well, yeah, they didn't want to be the enforcement arm of the state.
They're blue-collar people, too.
They don't want to have a bad name in their community because they did something bad to their neighbor on behalf of Justin Trudeau.
So then they say, Well, we had to invoke the emergencies act because those prickly blue-clawler people weren't doing what we wanted them to do.
So we're just going to expropriate their business for a time here and make them do things against their will.
There's a lot, a whole pile of classism just running right through the middle of all of this.
There's a funny backstory here, Sheila.
And I don't know if you know it, but think back to where we were with health mandates in January and February.
And that's back when we had the rule that if you went into your workplace and someone you worked with got COVID, what were you supposed to do?
You were supposed to isolate two.
So when they phoned the tow truck companies, most of them said, Oh, one of our drivers has COVID, so the rest of us can't work.
Sorry, just following the health mandates, as ridiculous as they were.
So they were having fun back at them and just saying it's COVID.
Love to come help you and drive, get those trucks out of there.
But, you know, we're following the health protocols.
So yeah, that was a little interesting backstory we had fed to us in some of our operations centers.
Oh, that's amazing.
Now, but even their excuse about the tow trucks needing the EA because of the tow trucks doesn't hold water because they were able to find seven tow truck companies all in all of Ontario, probably outside tow truck companies.
You wouldn't want to be the local guy doing this, with 34 heavy haul tow trucks that were willing to come in the days before the EA was invoked.
Well, we've already had.
We've had two witnesses testify, police witnesses, that they had the ability to compel them under the Ontario legislation, that they didn't need the federal legislation.
So even if it was an issue of not having tow truck companies voluntarily come forward because they're having a little fun with it and saying that, oh, everybody's quarantining because of COVID, they still had the ability to compel under provincial legislation and they didn't need the federal act.
You know, Olivia, why don't we throw to this clip?
And it was, again, a testament to the organization of the truckers.
It's Craig Abrams, OPP superintendent, on what he experienced and his people experienced upon getting the convoy into the city of Ottawa.
If you want to throw to that, sorry, I kind of put her on the spot there.
But what Craig Abrams testifies to is, well, that they were dealing with logistics professionals, by the way.
When you're dealing with truckers, you know, like they know how to get in and out of places, they're very organized.
But it also busts the mainstream media narrative and the political narrative that this was just like a mayhem.
These were foreign mongrel invaders that just diverged on the city from all corners and just swamped it.
Everybody came in in an extremely orderly fashion.
Did you find that yet, Olivia?
Perfect.
In this first weekend, sort of January 29th, January 30th, can you just share with us any other observations about what was happening on the ground, what was going well, what was not going well?
It was certainly not going well.
I was getting lots of reports from my members at the NCRCC.
There were lots of dysfunction, still lots of yelling, lots of unknowns of what they were going to do.
On the 31st of January, I had a conversation with Deputy Bell where he basically said, We're planning for a protracted event and we really don't know our way out of this.
So that was the first indication to me on the 31st that we were going to be in for a long haul to assist them.
So I had to prepare my incident command team to kind of switch to say, okay, now we have to switch operations to supporting the Ottawa police.
And I'm not 100% what the numbers are going to look like yet, but it's clear through talking to Deputy Bell that it's going to be protracted.
They don't see a way out, and they're going to be relying on us and other services to help them.
I think that was the wrong clip, Olivia.
I put it in the chat there.
That's a good one.
It just shows the mayhem.
It started early on on their side.
Actually, that's a good juxtaposition.
So it shows the chaos on their side.
Now let's do the truckers.
Did you find that clip?
It's the last one in the chat, Olivia.
Oh, we need five seconds.
Great.
I thought Craig Abrams, he was really good.
You can tell by his high and tight hairstyle that he takes his job very well.
Very good.
His suit was heavily starched.
Yeah, I think he is just generally heavily starched.
Okay, she's got it.
Now, we've seen the chaos of OPS.
Now let's do the truckers.
What went well and what could have been improved upon in preparing for the arrival of the convoy?
The OPP role on the initial convoy arrival in Ottawa went very smoothly.
We had minor issues in our smaller communities with members not obeying the mass mandates.
We had some restaurants who just choose to ignore the mandates altogether.
But overall, we had no assaults.
We had no criminality.
I wasn't aware of any charges being laid.
They said what they would do.
They kept a one lane.
They entered the city of Ottawa in an orderly fashion.
We had minor issues with supporters on the roadside on the 417 getting kind of dangerously close to the side of the highway, which was a concern, but that wasn't convoy.
The convoy participants couldn't control that.
They did what they said they would do.
They didn't damage any highways.
They didn't cause any criminality.
So, from that perspective, it was a success in getting them into the city of Ottawa.
Now, that's one of the things that fascinates me the most since the beginning of the commission: how people have such different testimonies from one another.
Catherine McKenna, you're going to hear her basically talk about it just like Zegzili, how a convoy was like the purge.
The whole war was going to end in two months if we didn't have the emergencies.
And then we have this gentleman right here who says that the truckers were peaceful, that he's not aware of any charges that had been laid when entering the city.
On the contrary, you have Matthew Clear who talks about microaggressions as they're the worst things in the world, the worst than authoritarian COVID-19 mandates.
Everyone seems to have a different version of the story.
It's unbelievable how that's allowed.
Well, but there is a common theme developing, and that is anybody who's in an official salaried capacity seems to be describing things in less than dramatic terms and oftentimes with more accuracy and truth.
Whereas those who are holding political office are just filled with hyperbole and sensationalism and, you know, revealing a heavy snowflake tendency for sure.
Yeah, it's really something to see the grown-ups talking, and then you have the hysterics talking about other things.
But I'm inclined to trust the OPP on all of this.
They produced Intel reports early in January.
They provided them to the OPS.
Sounds like the OPS didn't do much with them.
They said they would provide personnel as quickly as they could.
They did.
One of the things that I thought was interesting today was sort of debunked in testimony.
You did see a sudden influx of OPP officers to Ottawa on, I think, the 16th and then subsequently, I think the 18th, 19th.
And the official narrative had been, well, that came from the Emergencies Act invocation.
But apparently not.
It was because the blockade at Windsor had resolved itself so that they could redeploy those officers because they just weren't available.
It had nothing to do with the Emergencies Act.
God help those officers when they did come.
They're probably sleeping on the floor somewhere.
But they didn't need the EA to get them in there.
They just didn't have the officers to bring in.
And all along, the official narrative has been: well, look at all these cops showed up right after the EA.
Thank God for the EA, but it wasn't necessary at all.
That's clearly the evidence.
And those of you who might recall our lead, Barrister Brandon Miller's opening statement, where he said, here's the test.
You're not going to hear any evidence about sabotage.
You're not going to hear any evidence about insurrection.
You're not going to hear any evidence about serious violence to persons and property.
And he went through the whole list.
He mimicked his opening statement in his cross-examination of the senior intelligence officer for the OPP, the guy who led Operation Hendon.
We didn't even know they had a code name for us, but now we know that.
And he repeated his opening statement, Brendan Miller did, with questions.
And with each of them, the senior intelligence officer for the OPP said, yes, there was no evidence of this.
There was no evidence of that.
You know, it's like, it's just really remarkable what's going on.
And, you know, when we were negotiating with the police and the politicians, when I was on the ground with Tom Marazzo and Eva and others, we were always, and Eva would have an expression, where are the adults in the room?
And I know you used that a minute ago, Sheila, but we actually used that expression on the ground.
And we thought the other side was chaotic.
We had no idea the level of breakdown, dysfunction, egos, backstabbing, and all of these things that are being revealed.
It's tremendously embarrassing to find out that the hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money that go into these police forces and these municipalities and these elected officials have resulted in such a dire situation.
Yeah, it was it's been really something to see just as we keep saying just the extreme level of dysfunction.
And it's seeing the only people who had their act together were the truckers.
The cops didn't know what the heck was going on.
The mayor, he doesn't seem to really know what was going on.
I mean, he's just making things up at this point.
I don't know if you saw the other day where he said that someone came from the Maritimes with a gun to shoot him and was arrested and then he just said he misspoke.
Well, that's a hell of a thing to misspeak about.
That's not like using New Brunswick instead of Nova Scotia.
That's just a complete and total fabrication.
We are going to throw to an ad because I have to sneak off set because I have to be at the UCP AGM.
I'm going to already be late.
Why Cops Were Lost00:03:01
Keith, thanks so much for being so willing to come onto the show, talk to us and give us your unique legal perspective because you were on the ground.
We're hearing a lot of people talk about this and including myself.
I wasn't there, but a lot of my team were.
And it's very unique because you were in these negotiations that a lot of people want to distance themselves from at this point.
So thanks so much, Keith.
William, hold down the fort.
Do a great job.
Sidney Fazard is going to join in my place.
We're going to roll an ad so I can, so you don't have to see me untangle myself from all the cords and run out of my office.
Thanks, guys.
You learned on February 17th about the creation of the Red Zone in Ottawa.
Yes.
Okay.
And is it your understanding that that was only made possible by the invocation of the Emergencies Act?
It was my understanding through reading Twitter accounts and media releases that Ottawa police had indicated to the public that the red zone was created as a result of the emergency act.
I did a lot of the briefings with the members to explain their authorities and I tried to explain it in as simple terms as I could to say you're all police officers.
You all understand your authorities.
So they knew they had those abilities.
If they saw something, they could act.
They didn't need the emergency act to do it.
When the emergency act was invoked and there was restrictions placed and guidelines is the wrong word, but restrictions or regulations put in place about boundaries and certain street boundaries and entry into those boundaries and that members of the public entering that area had to have three or four different excuses, either a lawful purpose, a business owner, going to a hotel.
So there were three or four different areas that they were allowed to.
So my officers were then expected to essentially do that.
So it turned from what was officers really observing traffic to once the act was invoked, I went downtown to see what our members were dealing with.
And it was essentially a 14 to 15 hour ride program.
Our members were in horrible weather, standing on the roadside, checking vehicles, going through the list.
Hey, folks, from October 13th to November 25th, we are here in Ottawa for the Emergencies Act Inquiry organized by the Public Order Emergency Commission.
But why the Emergencies Act Inquiry?
Well, because during the Freedom Convoy back in February, Justin Trudeau used a never-invoked before Emergencies Act to basically seize protesters' bank accounts, seize protesters' money, seize their assets, trample their civil liberties.
We're here this month for the next month and a half to figure out if the way the government acted was lawful and was appropriate.
So we are here to hold the government accountable, but we need your help.
Dean Blundell Agreed Go00:03:39
We are here to cover it for you because everyone else here is mainstream media.
So if you want to help us cover it, if you want to help us bring you the other side of the story, factual, actual news, go to truckercommission.com and consider making a donation.
Hey, Sydney, how are you doing?
Hey there, doing all right.
Nice to be joining both of you guys again today.
Tom, how are you?
It's good to be joining you.
Yeah.
So definitely super long data.
But before we start, I heard that you had an interesting interview earlier with a great leftist friend, Dean Blundell.
How did that happen?
Yeah, that was pretty.
It's the second time I went on Dean's show.
You know, he makes it interesting.
And the reason I agreed to go on the show, which is what I told him before I agreed to go on the show, I said, look, the reason I'm going to go on the show is this.
Justin Trudeau and many of the politicians have spent years ripping this country apart.
And I kind of felt like Dean Blundell and I, who are absolutely diametrically opposed in all of our views, had an opportunity to set a good example on two people that are so on the opposite sides of the spectrum in terms of what we believe about COVID-19, the government, and all that kind of stuff.
It was a great opportunity to set an example to have a dialogue because that's what's been missing in this country for almost three years and maybe longer than that.
But, you know, we hear these stories consistently all across Canada where, you know, because different family members had opposing views about COVID-19 and mandates and PCR tests.
And, you know, we heard people were not allowed to go to their own family members unless they showed a rapid test trying to get in for Thanksgiving dinner.
And so, you know, we have been polite.
I feel like on our side of the issue, we've been polite for quite a long time.
We've been respectful of our friends, our family, our co-workers.
And I thought, let's put our money where the mouth is.
And, you know, I agreed to go on Dean's show.
It's the second time I've gone on, but unfortunately, there was a couple of people that joined that were one of them is an Ottawa residence, pretty hostile guy, felt that it, you know, a grievance, like a pretty vicious grievance at times.
And then this lawyer, I don't know if she's a real lawyer, to be honest with you.
I'm not sure she's a real lawyer.
But she joined the panel as well.
And it was a little bit of a, I don't want to say it was an ambush because Dean told me they were going to be on it just before they were on it.
And I agreed to still go on it.
So technically I walked into a lion's den.
Yeah, that's the original Dean Blundell from September.
But today was a new one.
And, you know, as far as I'm concerned, you've got to be willing to take the tough interviews and have the tough discussions.
You can't just live in an echo chamber.
You got to be able to lead by example and say, I can have a respectful discourse.
It did devolve.
It devolved quite a bit.
And I could sense this Pauli guy's frustration.
It got out of control, but I just didn't engage in it.
Luckily for me, the internet connection was really bad.
So I didn't, a lot of what I said wasn't even really heard anyway.
But a lot of the viewers were lighting me up pretty good on the chat.
Negotiations Breakdown in Couds00:08:20
But you know what?
I still think as vicious as it was at times, it was still worth giving it an attempt.
There it is.
There it is there today, right?
Karima, yeah, right.
Yeah, so this gentleman there on the bottom left in Karima, I mean, he lives in Ottawa and he felt like he had a very strong grievance.
But the challenge for us is, like I said, is, you know, for every 10 people that Dean Blundell can find of people that were negatively affected by the convoy, I can find 10 that supported the convoy.
So what am I supposed to believe?
No, 100%.
I think, you know, you touched on the division, the politician, the media politicians aren't willing to engage.
But I think that's one of the reasons why we are where we are at right now as a society.
But let's go back to the commission now.
So you are one of the Freedom Convoy organizers.
We just got a legal perspective from Eth Wilson sitting through the commission today.
What was your main takeaway as one of the people that organized this peaceful protest back in February?
Well, I think towards the end, the comments there were a little bit unsettling from the last witness today talking about the fact that, you know, communications between us had broken down and he basically blamed us for the lack of communications with them.
And like, I respectfully, vehemently disagree with that.
I mean, all of us made public statements.
I had begged the Ottawa Police Services liaison teams to give us a higher ranking police officer to talk to.
And in fact, there was a situation where I thought I was going into a meeting with at least an inspector.
I told them, I said, the next person I talk to on OPS better be an inspector minimum.
And not the two that I was dealing with.
And so I attended this meeting with the expectation that I was actually going to be meeting with an inspector.
And I sat and I said, there's a caveat.
I want to be in that room.
I want to meet this person for 10 minutes alone, not your team, not my team.
I just want to get to know this person, see if we can build a working relationship.
That was really the intent.
And I went to the room early and I was expecting that I would be meeting with an inspector.
And I was sitting in the room alone, waiting for this person to come in.
And I heard the liaison team saying, there's no way we're going to send our guy in there alone to meet with any of you.
That's never going to happen.
So I just simply got up from my chair and I walked out of the meeting.
Like there was nobody that even came into the room, but they were all out in the hallway.
And I just walked away and I went back to work.
And it was like, listen, I know that the police liaison teams didn't have decision-making authority of any substance.
They were a go-between.
They were trying to negotiate.
Negotiate is a very terrible word.
They were not trying to negotiate.
They were just trying to communicate their demands of us.
They weren't trying to give back anything.
They were just there to make demands.
And so I said, I'm done talking with you guys.
And that is the only instance of any situation where I, that I know of, that any communications broke down.
The breakdown was: I thought I was going into a meeting with a higher ranking Ottawa police officer and they reneged on the deal.
So when I realized I was being kind of led astray, I just left the meeting.
I didn't say anything.
I didn't yell at them.
I didn't argue.
I just left.
Right.
So to say that they wanted to have a dialogue and we broke down on our end is just categorically false.
Yeah.
And I think this this situation plus the city of Ottawa plus the federal government plus the OPP plus Doug Ford plus everything that's been happening shows a lack of trust, destroys the trust that Canadians have in our authorities.
And I think that Eva Chipiuk, one of the other lawyers for the Freedom Convoy, summed it up well in one of her tweets.
I don't know if you can show it on the screen, but she said basically loss of trust might be the most significant finding in the PA Public Order Emergency Commission.
Loss of trust on elected officials, loss of trust on our police authorities.
Even when trust was lost, the protesters didn't react or retaliate.
They kept their head up high and stayed peaceful.
I guess we can start with Cindy because you had the Coups blockades, you re-experienced the way that protesters were feeling.
Did you feel that was a factor in Couds?
Sorry, what specifically was a factor?
The loss of trust.
Do you think that that was something that had an impact on the protesters?
Kind of.
Like it was mentioned in terms of negotiations and the failure of that one meeting that went through.
It was kind of like that with negotiators in Couds, where there were multiple times where they were bringing up the same request, and then the truckers would kind of come together and make their request back to the negotiators.
And then the negotiators would receive the request, go back to the people they needed to talk to, and then they would come back to the truckers and basically say the exact same thing they'd said.
They would try and pretend as though they were giving more than they were actually.
So it's unfortunate.
But in terms of that one meeting and their inspector's not going to come, well, maybe I should say don't take it personally.
It seems like this was happening in their own house as well.
They just couldn't keep anything together, it really seemed like.
And it kind of feels this way to me.
And maybe you guys can chime in on this: it feels like they're playing hot potato right now.
It's who's going to take the responsibility.
And it's on the front of communication breakdowns, and it's also on the front of the actual Emergencies Act.
Like, is it the bridge, the ambassador bridge?
Is it the blockade in Couds?
Is it the convoy in Ottawa?
It comes up every once in a while.
They're trying to look in the right direction to pin the blame on the Emergencies Act.
But really, it may be the unsung hero here is the, what do you call them, the tow truck operators.
And it seems like it was a matter of their lack of wanting to, or I should say, maybe how often they were getting COVID was the issue at hand.
And that's why Shurto called in the Emergencies Act because all the tow truckers were getting COVID.
Yeah, I mean, the tow truckers didn't want to risk losing business as well.
You know, at the time of the Ottawa convoy, they didn't want to go anywhere near it because they viewed truck drivers as kind of a, you know, sort of a brethren there, right?
I mean, they both drive big giant vehicles that move things.
And I don't think the tow truck drivers wanted to have any part of it.
Like they didn't want to feel like they were going against, you know, loosely their brotherhood there.
So I don't think there was a big, deep will of the truck drivers to get involved either.
Same thing in Couds with the tow trucks, there's a bit of that cooperation failure between tow truck drivers, operators, and the RCMP for very, very similar reasonings.
And I can't pull up an article or anything on this at the moment, but I remember that one of the things that happened was as soon as it was announced that, you know, Joe trucking or sorry, Joe Towing was going to be assisting the RCMP, it was like all of Southern Alberta immediately went to Google Reviews and gave them a one star.
It's like, okay, you're going to cooperate.
Well, we're going to show you what that means.
Yeah.
I think something like that probably happened here in Ottawa as well with the ratings and stuff like that.
And I think I heard testimony of that, but I could never really confirm it.
And really, at the time, it wasn't really a big concern of mine.
But yeah, like to hear that testimony, though, that, you know, to be again blamed for it.
And I remember being upset with the police liaison team when we didn't get that meeting.
But always in the back of my mind, I always questioned how much support they were getting from their own chain of command.
And it's kind of nice to hear, like over the last couple of days, that testimony, you realize they weren't really getting a lot of support.
And, you know, they too were getting the runaround quite a bit.
Bias in Legal Testimony00:04:26
And that was because of all the infighting that was happening behind the scenes that we crossed.
Yes, yes.
And I can tell you, go ahead.
Go ahead.
Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off.
I was just going to say, I can add the as you guys or as the convoy, I should say, was traveling through Ontario to get to Ottawa.
The OPP officer mentioned, you know, I was like, they weren't breaking laws, they weren't being criminal, they weren't making a mess.
Everything was according to plan.
Everything was proper.
And the facilitation of the convoy's entry into the city was all done appropriately.
Well, nobody complained.
Everything was good.
It's only a matter of when all these other officials and agencies were starting to amalgamate and, I guess, work side by side, if you can call it that, is when the failures started to erode the situation.
And, you know, there's some terminology that keeps coming up.
And it depends on which witness that goes up onto the stand.
And I find it a little bit immediately gives one the impression that the witness on the stand is actually biased towards a certain outcome.
And I know this because every time I hear a witness say, refer to the convoy as the freedom convoy, I know they're at least empathetic.
But when they say illegal convoy or illegal occupation, that's when you know that that particular witness is going to be at least biased against the convoy.
And hopefully they won't be biased in favor of the implementation of the Emergency Act.
So this terminology does kind of reveal the direction of the thinking of the particular individual.
And when I hear a witness get up there and say illegal this or illegal that, my question that I would like to answer is: at what point did what we were doing actually become illegal?
And that's the question that I haven't heard an answer to yet.
No one has said anything.
Nobody has said anything.
So it's great.
You say it's illegal, but when did it become peaceful, legal?
Now all of a sudden it's illegal.
So this is where I have problems with when the people get on the stand and they say illegal.
I know that they're going to be a biased witness against us.
Whereas what we saw with, I think, Superintendent Morris the other day, you know, I think he used that terminology, but strangely enough, he stuck to the facts.
So you're seeing a very diverse sort of witness list of people coming in with very different points of view.
And it's always interesting every time you get a new witness, kind of your first impressions versus how they actually end up.
Right.
Yeah.
So that's definitely interesting.
And on top of that, as well, one thing that's important to note, especially for those who are watching, I guess, larger portions of this, is just as important as it is who is being asked the questions is the person asking the questions.
A lot of these individuals are the lawyers, the legal counsel, they have an agenda.
They have specific things they're looking for and listening in for.
And that is something to be accounted for as well.
There are parties that are, I guess you could say, maybe not in opposition to each other, but their legal teams are certainly looking for every inch they get when it comes to a lot of these government organizations.
And, you know, where is the blame going to fall?
And that's a big fight that's kind of silently going on right now between those teams.
And there was a bit of frustration, I believe, from, I forget exactly which individual it was, but one of the legal representatives in asking his questions, you can tell he was getting, you know, heated.
He was jumping on the question.
He was cutting the witness off.
So you're starting to see those organizational, pardon me, organizational interests at hand.
Yeah, and I believe the lawyer you're referring to could be Peter Slowly's lawyer.
Because a couple of times the justice had said, be fair to the witness, because he kept asking questions and then cutting them off.
You know, and I think the trick with the lawyers is never ask a question unless you already know the answer.
Right.
The first rules.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, you see examples of this kind of going on there.
Maybe they're getting frustrated because they're not getting the answer they were expecting to get.
So they have to pivot to a different tactic.
Open Carry Debate00:09:53
Yeah.
100%.
Go for it, William.
Sorry.
No, I was just going to say we're running out of time, but you can say what you were saying.
Well, yeah.
And that kind of alludes to the two kinds of questions that the legal representatives are going to ask.
It's the question they expect the answer to.
And, you know, they read the question, the witness answers, and they say, great, yeah, next question.
And then there's the question they ask, and the witness says something, and they go, wait, hold on a second.
All right.
We've got to reorient the perspective here.
So it's kind of the two legal counsel questions I see being asked right now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, just before, just before we get off, I see we have seven minutes left.
I wanted to show a clip of Justin Trudeau, an announcement that Justin Trudeau made today with Marco Medicino.
I guess we can start by the announcement that Marco Medicino made about the handgun freeze in Canada just that was just announced today.
If you had took order today, can we show that?
Well, as we're pulling that up, I can just say in hearing the commission, that was one of the, or how it was expressed by one of the OPP officers, I believe it was, is that the grievances conveyed by the convey, there was a multitude of grievances, including, you know, the price of oil, the gun confiscations, or the gun bans and stuff like that.
And this was all on top of, of course, the vaccine mandates and COVID restrictions that had been in place.
So it's funny he's making this announcement today on the handgun situation where he's, I don't know if you could say going after the same group of people, but it's just such a wide group that maybe no matter what Trudeau does now, he's going to be targeting more and more of the population.
Yeah, and here we have the clip so we can show it on the screen.
We need to pass that law.
We need to make sure that we make good on our commitment to implement the buyback program on a national ban for assault style rifles because those guns have no place in any community.
They were designed for one purpose and that is to kill people using maximum lethal force in the shortest period of time.
These guns have no place in our community, but Justin Joe has absolutely no issue whatsoever hanging around four people everywhere he walks that have two of those in their pockets because he knows that's how he defend himself.
And if you make them illegal, only the bad guys are going to have that.
That's the issue.
I know in Canada, we're not living in a culture, in the east part of in the East Coast, that he's used to living with guns.
But when you rethink about it, if someone comes in a bank and has a gun and wants to steal the bank, wants to shoot people in the bank, if he comes in bank, he's the only one with a gun.
Everyone's going to submit to what he's saying.
If he comes in a bank, he gets a gun out and you live in somewhere like Texas where everyone has guns.
You go in the bank, you get your gun, you've got 50 guns pointing at you around you.
You're not going to do any damage.
But it's unbelievable.
They're not realizing their own hypocrisy, saying that guns have absolutely no purpose in our life when they're walking with people that have some in their pockets every day.
That's what the liberal government is.
I mean, at the end of the day, what we do know is that I think the Association of Police Chiefs have, or in other police chiefs out there across Canada, have come out and publicly said, Look, this weapon ban is irrelevant because the crimes, the vast majority of the crimes, are not being collated.
They're not being completed or executed by legal gun owners.
Exactly.
So, why are you targeting the wrong people and taking legal registered PAL licensed firearms?
You know, it doesn't even address the issue of gun smuggling at the border.
I interviewed an NDP MP last summer in June, and I asked him, you know, how is this policy going to affect the gun smuggling?
How is it going to have an impact on the issue of gun smuggling at the border?
And he admitted it won't do nothing.
It won't do anything.
It'll keep guns away from the good guys.
It'll make it easier for bad guys to do bad things with guns because they're going to be the only ones that have guns in their hands.
It's unbelievable that the liberal government is even thinking about policies as atrocious and ridiculous as I personally think they should have just left it alone because we have the PAL course for both restricted and non-restricted weapons.
And we have a lot of safety mechanisms in place to guarantee, well, not to guarantee, but ensure that a legal firearm owner has it in a vault with trigger guards, separate ammo.
We have all these precautions in place.
So why are you targeting the most compliant gun owners in the entire equation?
And we're not focusing our effort exactly on the borders.
We knew, I called it the summer of the gun a couple of years ago in Toronto.
It seemed like every two, three days, somebody was getting shot.
The summer before that, because I lived in the GTA in North York, everybody was getting stabbed.
Then we transitioned to the gun the next summer.
And now all of a sudden, we're focusing on the wrong kind of gun issue altogether.
We're targeting legal gun owners that are acting safe and responsibly, and we're not addressing the issue at the border.
Maybe you should dedicate more resources at the border.
Yeah, look at the safest states in the United States.
The safest states, the most dangerous states, the most dangerous cities are the ones with the strictest gun laws in the country.
If you look at New York and California, Los Angeles, all the cities of Chicago, and you don't understand that strict gun policies that the leftist, idiotic politicians want to implement both in Canada and the United States, don't work.
There's an issue you're just not analyzing well what's happening.
Sid, what do you have to say to that announcement?
Well, drugs are illegal, right?
We still have heroin problems.
We still have an opioid crisis, right?
You know, this isn't going to solve any of the issues.
And, you know, yes, there's legal gun owners.
There's the issue of bringing firearms across the border.
There's also 3D printing of guns.
Like, realistically, there's no way to stop somebody who's compelled to the nth degree to acquire a firearm illegally.
You can't prevent that.
At least it's very difficult.
Whereas if you have people who are registered, people who've done the training, people who actually know how to operate those, I guess you could call them dangerous devices, but that all depends on whose hands they're in.
Well, then you're the better for it because you have these people with the experience to facilitate, as you mentioned, you know, like you're in Texas.
I'm in Alberta, so we're doing a little better off than Ontario.
But the more people with guns who are responsibly using them, the better.
And it is unfortunate to see this grab.
And a lot of the times, well, let me put it this way: there's a gun and there's mass shootings.
There's also mass stabbings.
And there's people who, if they feel so compelled, they'll take their car for the wrong kind of ride and they'll hit somebody or multiple people.
We've seen these kinds of incidents.
If somebody is looking to commit an act of violence against somebody else, they're not going to stop themselves when they say, oh, I can't get a gun.
I guess I'm just not going to commit the crime.
No, that's just not how it works.
Yeah, they'll find an alternative method if they have made the decision to commit the crime.
And, you know, let's take this one step even further, too.
We're not talking about open carry laws or issues in Canada at all.
We've gone in the opposite direction to open carry.
But if you look at Texas and Florida, they're both open carry states.
And I was down, I did my Krav McGahn instructor course in 2015 in Florida, and everybody I was with was carrying a weapon.
You know, multiple weapons in the vehicle, all completely legal.
But what struck me, which was semi-terrifying, was the fact that every single morning before we would train, I would wake up in the morning, I'd watch the news, and there'd be a minimum of three homicides by gun violence in Florida.
And I was just outside of Orlando.
And it struck me because everybody I was with was carrying a gun, except for the Canadian guy, right?
And when you look at the escalation of force, for example, William and I, we start getting into a fistfight.
William is winning and I've got an open carry weapon to save and defend my own life.
I'm going to employ the weapon and I'm probably going to shoot him to protect my own life and maybe vice versa.
If you don't have the firearms as an open carry as an option, then you're not going to escalate that use of force.
And so in Canada, we're not even talking about use of force.
What we're talking about is legal firearms ownership where it's got a trigger guard and it's in a vault and it's secure and you have rules about transporting it.
I mean, I think our rules around gun ownership are incredibly safe and really match the culture of gun ownership in this country.
And why we're focusing on something that is utterly useless is just, it's another, you look, I could go down some rabbit holes, but as far as I'm concerned, this is purely about disarming the public.
I'll be satisfied when the police are also disarmed as well.
Yeah, well, if we are to disarm the public, then we disarm the public.
Let's disarm.
If these are such like effective laws, we disarm the public, then we disarm the police too.
Yeah, if that's the logic they're going with.
But we know that that's a fallacy.
And I don't advocate for disarming the police.
I'm just saying that's the ridiculousness of the argument.
Disarming Fallacies00:00:58
Yeah, I think that's how you do it.
Yeah, you're right.
And I think it's just another authoritarian virtue signal policy.
And it's the same type of policy that got us in the situation we're in right now where the government was able to invoke the Emergencies Act and where it got the support of a big amount of the population.
Listen, it's already 7702.
Thank you so much for joining us at State Tomorrow once again.
Just around the corner.
Yeah, exactly.
Thank you as well, Sid from Alberta, right?
Yep, absolutely.
It's a pleasure, guys.
But he's from Toronto, and we won't hold it against him.
That's right.
Toronto, Alberta.
Yeah, we've got a couple of people that did it as well.
I'm from Niagara Falls.
Yeah.
Yeah, definitely an interesting day, and we'll be able to bring you even more next week as well.
Thank you.
Thank you, everyone.
Have a great evening.
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