Trucker Commission Day 12 examines Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sully’s conflicting testimony, where he claimed protesters were a "Tinderbox" despite municipal reports calling it a "party-like atmosphere." Under political pressure from Trudeau and viral misinformation—like RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucky’s bouncy castle threat—Sully invoked the Emergencies Act, though no hate crimes or riots occurred. Convoy lawyer Brendan Miller called detentions "starlight tours," while Sully vaguely cited "too many laws broken." The episode questions whether police escalation, not protesters, drove violence, leaving Sully’s credibility and the government’s justification under scrutiny. [Automatically generated summary]
This is the Rebel News Daily Live stream, what we're calling Breakdown.
This show used to be at noon on Eastern Time or 10 in Alberta, where we used to talk about the news of the day, but there really is no other news of the day than to talk about what we call the Trucker Commission, the Public Order Emergency Commission that's taking place in Ottawa right now to investigate the federal government.
Well, Justin Trudeau, really, his use of a counterterrorism law called the Emergencies Act on peaceful anti-COVID protesters in the nation's capital.
The protest was entirely peaceful for nearly four weeks before it became just so embarrassing to Justin Trudeau that it became to him a national emergency, wherein the police required extra powers of search, arrest, and seizure to break up the peaceful protests.
They had their bank accounts seized.
People were taken away in handcuffs, and much, much worse, as we're hearing in the inquiry.
Today I'm joined by my two colleagues, Celine Gallas, she's in Calgary, and William Diaz.
He's actually in Ottawa, but both of them were glued to the commission today.
We're going to talk about the testimony of Ottawa police chief Slowly.
Peter Slowly, he's actually the former police chief.
He was replaced, resigned, I suppose, right in the middle of this affair.
For context, the protest began on January 27th of this past year.
And the Emergencies Act, that counterterrorism law I mentioned before, was invoked on February 14th.
And it was invoked after a deal was struck with the truckers to leave, or at least move their trucks away from the downtown core, where some few thousand busybodies were constantly complaining about the noise and the traffic and those yucky, yucky, blue-collar people from Alberta being in their very, very white-collar bureaucratic city.
That was a deal that was already in progress.
Trucks were moving when the Emergencies Act was invoked.
We've heard testimony and we've seen the receipts, as the kids say, the deals back and forth and the emails.
Guys, what's your, I'll tell you what I think.
I watched the testimony of a former police chief Slowly today.
And at the beginning of this, at the very outset, I thought he might have been a good guy because I thought he resigned because he didn't want to do the things the federal government wanted him to do to the protesters.
Because after he resigned and then his successor, who's not even his successor anymore, interim chief Steve Bell, was shuffled in, the head started getting cracked.
And the real, real bad civil liberties infractions happened.
But I'm not so sure.
The more I learn about him, the more of his emails that I read, I actually don't think he's a good guy.
A complex guy for sure, but I'm just not sure what I think.
I'll start with Celine.
You watched the whole testimony like a hawk today.
What's your one big takeaway?
that the proceedings that go on in such a grand sense, a great sense are pretty much very similar in the way that I've watched over Archer Pulowski's court proceedings.
It's a lot of the times there's just a huge shock value behind the things that are discussed and what goes on and what comes out of their mouths.
I know towards the end, again, like you said in the beginning, I felt empathy.
You know, maybe it was those initial tears within like the first hour or so of the proceedings.
They had to take a break.
He didn't ask for one, but they took a 15 minute break to regroup whatnot, right?
And then getting into it, it wasn't long before he was, again, condemning the convoy and demonizing it like everybody else from the left.
William, what's your takeaway?
I think we'll show a bunch of clips today so people can see exactly what we're talking about.
You go on this sort of emotional roller coaster with Chief Slowly.
First, you like him, then you don't like him.
Actually, I think the first clip, I don't like him, but you'll have some moments where you feel empathy and it's a pretty strange ride.
What's your big takeaway from Slowly's testimony?
And we really haven't heard him being hammered by trucker lawyers yet.
So that will come on Monday and I think that'll be pretty revealing because they're no BS.
Yeah, it'll be interesting.
First of all, I just want to say that I'm glad that your voice is better, that you're able to be back on the live stream.
It's better than last time.
Yeah, the testimony today was extremely interesting because as you just said, you go on an emotional roller coaster with Chief Slowly.
You feel empathy for him when you see him have the respect he has for the charters of rights and freedoms that we're all supposed to live by.
But then you do see him demonize the convoy.
So it'll be interesting to analyze this when we go on with the clips later on.
But I just want to go back on one thing that you said in the introduction.
You talked about a deal being struck between the protesters and the government.
And honestly, what we saw from the beginning of the week is deal, no deal, deal, no deal, emergencies act.
The OPP from Marcel Baudin, one of the peer person from the OPP, had prepared a plan that he gave to the federal government.
The federal government took one look at the plan, threw it away, invoked the Emergencies Act.
Prior to that, another deal was struck to move the trucks away from residential neighborhood.
A lot did, but other plans also failed that way.
So it's a lot of plans that we're seeing that just failed or that weren't respected or that weren't even taken into consideration, just like the one we saw by the federal government.
So just go back to Chief Slowly.
It was a very interesting day today for him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, the federal government seemed to have interjected themselves into a deal that had nothing to do with them.
The deal was always between the truckers in the city to move the trucks, to get them out of the residential area.
So we didn't have to listen to people like Matthew Fleury complaining about microaggressions anymore.
That was happening, but then the federal government intervened and screwed the whole thing up.
Once they hit the nuclear button on the Emergencies Act, the police had to be redeployed against away from moving the trucks out and directing the trucks to, I guess, tear gassing journalists.
That's what they ended up doing at the end of the day.
Efron, let's go to, by the way, we should let everybody know if you want to get involved in the conversation here, if you want to help us keep the lights on, because unlike the mainstream media, we don't take a penny from Justin Trudeau.
If you'd like to leave us a paid chat, you can do that on Rumble or on Odyssey.
On Rumble, it's called a Rumble Rant.
On Odyssey, it's called a hyper chat.
And if it's over five bucks, we'll do our best, time permitting, to read it live on air.
And we appreciate every little bit.
We can do any of the work that we do without the support of our friends at home.
Let's go to clip one, because this is me not liking Chief Slowly.
And I'll show you the clip and then I'll tell you why I don't like them afterwards.
What was the impact on the rest of the city?
It's a very important question.
And that was, I think, touched on at some point in testimony.
The downtown core was like clearly was the epicenter and a hyper-volatile, hyper-complex.
I won't be able to provide adjectives, so I'll just leave it at that.
But you could drive south of the 416.
Get that right, 417, into literally still downtown neighborhoods.
And you would hear honking and you'd see, unfortunately, Canada flags stuck on vehicles and behavior that was clearly anti-social, but it dropped off significantly once you got south of the 417.
You don't want to put flags in your truck.
You'll be anti-social.
Like, unfortunately, Canadian flags, why can't people protest for Canadian rights and freedoms using the Canadian flag?
It's all of our flags, regardless of politics.
And it's just so darn volatile that the crime went down.
You know, just he's, he says he can't use adjectives, but he's sure using a lot that don't make sense.
100%.
I mean, I was there in the beginning days, and that's it was actually very simple what we saw.
It was peaceful protesters that had gathered.
People were laughing, merry, cheering.
It was the first time that I had seen so many people smiling and being okay with being in close proximity, anti-social, is the biggest stretch of the truth.
I think I heard all day.
It was anything but antisocial.
And that's the point.
They were there to protest the federally mandated COVID restrictions and mandates.
No social distancing happened.
It was a point.
That is the point.
Yeah.
It was the opposite of antisocial.
It was a social gathering that these people were not permitted to have for two and a half years.
And they were saying enough is enough.
William, what's your takeaway from that crazy, crazy clip?
You know, I think, yeah, there's nothing to be said positively about that.
But I think you're going to see throughout the evening, throughout the live stream, I'll try to play the devil's advocate a little bit.
We're at Rebel News.
We're all about telling the other side of the story.
We criticize the CBC for only go showing one side of the story.
So I think it's important to analyze it from every possible angle that you could imagine, especially a testimony like the one from Chief Slowly.
And I think, you know, that's the analogy that I made.
Let's say that you are a chief of police and you have a pro-abortion protest happening in your city.
You are pro-life.
So you're not pro-abortion.
You say bad things about the protesters that are coming.
Does it inherently take away from your role and your capacities to perform your job well as a police chief?
Not necessarily.
Perhaps he did not like the convoy, but it doesn't mean he's not able to respect the charters of rights and freedoms.
Yeah, that's a good point.
That is a good point.
That he can have whatever opinion he wants about it.
My problem is that he's inventing facts that these people were behaving anti-socially, that it was volatile.
He could disagree with Convoy all day long as long as he polices fairly.
Great.
That's actually what I want in this country.
I want a diversity, a plurality of viewpoints.
100%.
And I don't want our police services to be made up of homogeneity.
If they are to police their peers in society, they should be made up of the viewpoints of the peers of the society, right?
Not just all liberals that agree with Justin Trudeau, but he is inserting reality into there that actually doesn't exist.
Let's move ahead to clip.
Sorry, let's move ahead to clip two.
Former police chief slowly addresses, oh my goodness, you know what?
I'm just, again, I'll show you the clip and then we'll go to Celine and then we'll go to, we'll go to William because this is a bit much.
Disorderly Police Practices00:15:09
These people need to get over themselves.
I know there are federal representatives here, but the trauma impacted on federal employees, elected officials, public officials, the entire infrastructure and ecosystem that represents our nation's capital, the parliamentary district.
And the, I believe Mr. Champ quoted 18 or 15,000 residents in that area.
I don't know how many businesses.
I know the Rito Center was closed.
All of that happened literally within hours.
And the relief did not come, I believe, until February 17th, 18th, or 19th.
Okay, so the most powerful people in the country were uncomfortable for a little bit.
Oh, dang.
They didn't miss a penny in wages, not even.
You know, he says, you know, the bureaucrats, so one of the most, I guess, stable job in the country, you can, they're the laptop and pajamas class.
They can go work from home.
It's not like a trucker who's not allowed to cross the border.
He all of a sudden doesn't have a job.
The politicians, they got to make all their money and walk around naked on a Zoom call sometimes.
If you're a liberal MP Amos, twice naked on a Zoom call.
You know, like, I'm sorry if these people were uncomfortable for a little about two weeks of their lives.
These people were protesting because their lives were destroyed for two years.
You know what?
Crimea River.
I don't care.
I don't care.
I really don't.
Celine, what do you think?
No, I totally agree with you.
It's these people dealt with these restrictions.
Like they're saying that the city was locked down and shut down and all these businesses were shut down.
They were told to shut down.
I remember being there the first day after arriving there on the Thursday, Friday.
I'm not sure the specific date, but it was the first day where all of the trucks started to arrive.
And we went to Rideau Mall and people were going in there, you know, to spend their money, absolutely, despite the last two years to actually encourage business because they had money to spend and they got told to shut down.
So that's not how it happened.
And we even asked the people there.
You know, we asked the employees of all the various stores that were now at like 12, 1 p.m., like lining their doors with that metal retractable screen to shut people out that they were getting told to shut down.
It was being, there was calls from higher powers and it was out of their control.
So yeah, I don't, I have no sympathy.
Yeah.
And these people were also reacting, some of them, to a sense of fear because they've been told for two weeks that the KKK is rolling into town.
It's going to be a January 6th insurrection.
Windows are like, not a single window was smashed.
Not a single window was smashed in Ottawa.
I don't know who it was who said that's how you know that it's pretty darn peaceful when thousands upon thousands of people can converge in your city and there's literally no damage to anything.
It's actually cleaner than when they came.
That's how you know it wasn't a violent mob.
This is some of Celine's footage from when she was there.
I remember her little H, what is that, H5N that you're working with there?
Willie, what do you think about, what do you think about that clip?
You know, I remember that H, that microphone, because it's the first micro, the first time I ever did an interview with the Rebel News, it was Celine and Mocha there with me.
But no, you're absolutely right.
I think those people forget that the businesses were closed not because of Freedom Convoy, but because of the authoritarian mandates that were implemented by Justin Trudeau.
During the Freedom Convoy, the businesses that stayed open made 10 times more money.
That's possibly an exaggeration, but I'm not even sure it is.
They made a lot more money than they did prior to the convoy.
Because when you're a trucker there, you have to go buy yourself coffee.
And when do people go to Tim Hortons?
And when the Tim Hortons that stayed open, it was always filled out with people all the time.
So it's not because of the convoyers that those businesses were closed, it's because of the fear that the business owners have there.
Yeah, exactly.
It's because of the fear that the protests that the business owners had due to reading too much mainstream media.
That's why they were closed.
And once again, just to remind everyone: inconvenience does not mean an emergencies act.
Inconvenience does not mean violence.
Inconvenience is not a reason, a valid reason to use the emergencies act.
And we have that email from the Hotel Association emailing, I think it was with the city manager, Jim Kay, saying we need their business.
You know, like they're coming and we need their business.
And so it's pretty clear that, you know, the service and hospitality industry in Ottawa would have benefited from thousands of people coming into town, but the city basically closed everything to everybody and forced people to live out of their trucks and then tried to snatch kids because they were forced to live in their trucks at the hands of the authorities.
Neat little circle they made there.
Let's skip ahead to clip four because this is more rewriting history and inventing facts by police chief slowly.
announced on the Friday morning at a media conference, and this was specifically to address the level of ongoing disorderly, assaultive, hate-related behavior that our downtown communities and businesses were experiencing.
particularly in Councillor Fleury's ward and Councillor McKenney, although I'm not sure she's in office now, but former Councilor McKenney, her ward.
She's not.
And the overwhelming amount of community complaints, business complaints were coming from the unlawful assaultive type behavior in that area.
And we needed to, that surge contained in force is not for the red zone, that is for the areas outside of the red zone.
The surge container.
We're using that word again: assaultive behavior.
That's not a thing.
It's assault or it's not assault.
If they're wandering around being blue-collar and conservative in your neighborhood and it makes you uncomfortable, that's not assaultive behavior.
That's you being intolerant of other people.
And it's the nation's capital.
It's everybody's nation's capital.
If you don't like the other Canadians might come into your town, might I suggest you live somewhere else?
But that's the nation's capital.
It's the capital for all Canadians.
But he's saying that disorderly, assaultive, and hate-related.
There are zero, zero, zero hate crimes charges stemming from the protest.
So he's totally making things up.
I think there are only five in the lead up to the invocation of the Emergencies Act, which should be the true measure of how violent the convoy actually was, because that's before the police started cracking heads.
There are five, I think, violent charges out of 16 in total in between the dates of the 27th of January and the 13th of February.
That's how disorderly this thing was.
The majority of those are mischief for bringing in firewood and stuff like that, because that's a crime now.
It's a crime, not to allow people to freeze to death in the nation's capital.
And I think two of those, as our friend Tom Morazzo, who was in the convoy, pointed out to us.
No, sorry.
It was Danny Bulford, former RCMP.
He pointed out, he pointed out to us when he was on the show that two of those, at least two of those charges, are attributed to violence against the convoy.
So it's really only three violent charges.
And I think they're mostly like disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, assaulting an officer.
I think three of those, thousands of people in the nation's capital for two weeks.
And that's the worst they could come up with.
And this guy calls it disorderly, assaultive, and hate-related.
When I say I'm surprised that there weren't more charges when the extent of the brutality that the police used against them and they still resorted to being peaceful, if I could count, if I had enough fingers to tell you how many videos I saw after that I left, because I made it my mission to make sure that I understood what was going on there every single day of peaceful protesters going up to these lines of armed, brutal,
brutally enforcing police officers with flowers or offering them warm drinks or saying, you know, we love you despite everything that's going on right now.
Like we offer you peace.
We're okay with this.
It's shocking.
It's incredible, really.
So incredible.
And you want to talk about disorderly assaultive conduct.
Assaulting isn't even a thing.
But why don't we talk about Slowly's cops rounding up peaceful protesters and taking them on starlight tours?
That's arresting them without cause, detaining them without cause.
It's kidnapping at the end of the day, as Brendan Miller, lawyer for the convoy, put it, taking them out of town with no reason to arrest them, sometimes holding them for hours before they release them in the bitter cold, no cell phone, no shelter, no telecommunications in a parking lot on the outskirts of town.
That is a crime.
And two cops went to jail for it in Saskatoon.
People started turning up dead.
It is a thing you cannot do in policing.
I would like to see at the end of this a serious investigation against the officers for that practice.
And it happened under Slowly's watch.
So if you want to talk about disorderly, anti-social conduct, taking protesters off where the potential is that they can freeze to death, that's antisocial for damn sure.
William, what do you think?
Well, I think in terms of, you know, having assaults and it's all allegations.
That's what I was trying to do on my computer.
I was trying to find the tweet that Mark Gerritine, the great liberal MP prominent secretary, wrote.
But yeah, that's what I told him.
But, you know, he wrote that he went on a mall.
I believe it was a Bay Shore Mall in Ottawa, which isn't that far away from downtown Ottawa.
And he said that he witnessed assaults, assaults happening there.
And then he complained about the target of the protesters.
Well, exactly.
So that's what I said.
You know, there's no video.
He didn't link any video.
He has his cell phone all the time.
He's on Twitter all the time.
Couldn't bother to just take it for five seconds, take a video of it.
That he called a cop.
Is there a report?
It's all hearsay.
That's what it's, that's what it's really all about.
And the only, once again, the only behavior that we've heard from the testimony so far, we've heard Zegzili, who was throwing eggs at protesters because she was mad at them.
Or her friends were.
We can't accuse her of it, but she was privy to her friends organizing to do it.
And she didn't think it was a bad idea.
She felt like it might be counseling.
Yeah.
Which might, it might be counseling to commit mischief, which I understand is a crime in Ottawa, saying, hey, that's going to be cool if you do that illegal thing.
Yeah, so you know, that's assault.
That's assaulted behavior, in my opinion.
When they talk about assault over here, that's assaulted behavior.
And it's not only assaulted behavior, it is assault.
But when you look at the side of the protesters, I have yet to seen one actual video or proof of assaulted behavior when Jim Watson was talking about the protesters that were taking the masks off the other person's face.
And he said, Have you seen it, Jim Watson?
No, I've read it in the media.
It's all about reading it in the media.
It's never about seeing it in person.
Yeah, I'd like to know, like, if Mark Gerritson takes to Twitter and says he saw assaults, you know what that tells me, leads me to believe about Mark Gerritson?
There's two things.
Either he's an absolute garbage person because he saw an assault and reported it to Twitter instead of the police, didn't do anything to intervene.
What a hero, or he's making it up.
But it's dealer's choice.
He can be a liar or a loser.
I mean, I'll let him choose.
I mean, you look at his Twitter account, you look at his Twitter account.
It's hard to find another option.
Yeah.
Let's move ahead to clip number five.
Efron, if you want to cue that up, because this is where a normal person, maybe a person with a less hard heart to chief slowly than me, like maybe William, maybe Celine, might have some empathy for him.
And I'm having a tough time finding it because he's a 27-year veteran of policing.
He served as a deputy police chief in Toronto.
He did two tours of policing for the UN, like in a war zone or after the war in Kosovo, helping to maintain the peace and put society back in order.
So I would expect a little bit more toughness than this.
But as William points out, we do know from other things, other testimony, and other evidence that we've seen, including emails and readouts of phone calls, that he was under extreme pressure from all angles.
And that probably made his job very difficult.
Let's roll clip five.
Do you feel that they were misunderstood?
Yes.
Can you elaborate on that?
I think I've given this testimony in parliamentary standing committees.
The level of disinformation and misinformation was off the charts.
It was crushing to the members' morale.
It was crushing to the incident command team's morale.
It was crushing to my executive team's morale.
I suspect it was crushing to the board.
It was crushing to everybody.
It was unrelenting.
It was 24 hours a day.
And I think by the end of the weekend, it had become a global story that mainstream media was following.
I'm not sure how I feel about it.
I still am scraping, scraping to find empathy because, yes, I realize there are good police officers there, but the misinformation wasn't about them.
It was about the protesters.
And I just listened to him testify that they were violent when they weren't.
I listened to CBC say they were Russian actors and they weren't.
I listened to Steve Slowly say that they were assaultive and that it was volatile.
It definitely wasn't.
So I'm not sure.
Like I get that he's in a pressure cooker for sure.
Competing Narratives Explode00:15:30
He's got the OPP telling him things.
He's got Steve Bell drafting a plan, an Intel plan, not relying on the OPP's intel that they gave him about the convoy coming.
So he's got the failure of his subordinates that, you know, if your employees aren't doing their job, it's your fault.
And he's got pressure from the crybabies like McKenney and Flurry to, I guess, bust heads.
He's got, as we've seen, pressure from directly out of the federal government from the public safety deputy minister telling them that they wanted a quick resolution to this.
And this is in a readout of a phone call to achieve the political objectives of the federal government.
So he's getting pressure from above.
His underlings are failing.
He's got political pressure from all sides and the mainstream media telling lies about the convoy, making it seem a lot worse than it was.
Meaning, if he doesn't react to how bad they say it is, then it looks like he's not doing anything.
So I guess maybe I just found that empathy that I couldn't find before.
Maybe I don't know.
Celine, what do you think?
I'm not sure that I've been convinced.
Sitting here all day, I feel better.
Yeah, no, I'm not convinced.
And I think that if you're already in that position, if you are literally the chief of police in Ottawa and you've been hearing for days leading up to this convoy coming into your city and you still can't take what narrative is presented to you to give to the public,
because that is what caused a lot of the terror and the fright is that, like you said, people assumed that it was a fringe minority of racists and terrorists and misogynists coming into their city to ransack it.
And it was anything but.
So if he had actually just deterred from presenting that narrative to people and he was honest and truthful, I think that he could have made his position a lot easier.
And he chose the latter.
So I'm not convinced.
Yeah, and as I said, I think his underlings were failing him.
Isn't it interesting how Steve Bell was the chief intel officer and he was supposed to create a plan to deal with the convoy, but he had the OPP intel, which said, you know, they're going to stay for weeks.
We don't seem to see any violence in there.
They're just coming.
They're going to plant themselves.
And he drafted a plan that maybe dealt with them through the weekend.
So he didn't rely on the intel.
And I think that sabotaged Slowly, because as soon as Slowly falls on his sword, guess who takes his job?
Steve Bell.
What do you think, William?
You seem to have more empathy than the ladies here on this one.
You know, as I said at the beginning, other side of the story, it might take a little while.
I might go on a little tangent, but I have two points that I want to talk about from this clip.
And some of them, you already started talking about it, Sheila.
You stole my talking points.
Sorry.
The joke.
I'm your boss.
I can take whatever I want.
Exactly.
Contractually.
Yeah, I'll ask Ezra to review those contracts.
So for the first one, you know, I believe, I think that the way Slowly was feeling on the stand today was the way the Canadians who are part of the Freedom Convoy felt during the convoy.
They felt like mainstream media was misrepresenting them.
They felt like mainstream media didn't understand what it was going on.
They felt that it was unrelenting 24 hours a day, seven days per week.
I believe that the way he felt, the way he was crying on the stand is the way that the protesters were feeling throughout the convoy.
And also, it is true that mainstream media did push false information about the convoyers 1000%.
But you see outlets that, such as Press Progress, such as The Star, that also put pressure on the police to be even more strict with the protesters, saying that the police wasn't doing enough.
And not only mainstream media, but counselors like, well, ex-counselors, thankfully, like Catherine McKinney, who was saying that the police, yeah, thankfully, that was saying that the police did not do enough to end the peaceful protests earlier when they were here in January.
So the police had pressure from both the left and the right.
The right was saying that they were playing with fire with their charters of rights and freedoms.
They were saying they were infringing on their rights and freedom while the left was saying that they weren't doing enough to infringe on those rights and freedoms.
So when you're a chief of police, you're supposed to remain apolitical, which is the reason why we do not have elective chief of police in Canada, unlike in other places in the world, because the chief of police has to owe his allegiance to the charter of rights and freedoms and to the law.
But when you have political interference from counselors, as you were talking about from Justin Trudeau, from Doug Ford, from Mayor Watson, from the left, from the right, it's extremely difficult to do your job impartially and to actually owe your allegiance to the Charter of Rights and Freedom, which is what you're supposed to do.
And I think that this whole situation became a political situation because they were trying to find the political solution to the convoy through the police.
That's not the job of the police.
The job of the police is to find policing solution to the convoy.
And there was no need for a policing solution because the convoy was peaceful.
So I think that the fact that the police had to take on a political role overwhelmed their forces.
It created the chaos that we're seeing unfold from the past week and a half.
And I think that's what really tipped off.
That's really what didn't make everything work.
And then you have Chief Slowly who leaves and you have a new one, that's Steve Bell, that comes in.
And you see that Steve Bell doesn't have any issue at all playing politics.
I think that might have been one of the reasons why he was elected.
But while he was chosen to be the new chief of police, but you see one who has trouble playing politics leave the force.
And then you see Steve Bell, who has no issue playing politics and doing Justin Trudeau's dirty work for him, enter the force as a new chief.
So I think that was a long analysis, but I think it shows why he felt overwhelmed and why he felt out of control, because he knew in his mind morally that he had to owe his allegiance to the charter of rights and freedom while at the same time being given instruction by Justin Trudeau and by all levels of politics.
So yeah, I think that's one of the reasons why he reacted that way.
Okay, fine.
I just wish that he had stopped and realized that that horrible way that he was feeling was exactly the way the people in front of him were feeling and maybe exercised a little police discretion.
Oh, 100%.
I'm not saying at all that the way the police acted was fine.
I'm not saying that at all.
I was just trying to do a big analysis of what could have went on behind the scene.
And we're not psychologists.
We're journalists.
So let's doing our best.
Let's bump ahead to clip six.
I bet you are going to have a lot to say about this, Celine, since you were there on the ground.
William too slowly said that the convoy itself was a Tinderbox waiting to explode, which I mean, I'll offer my comments after you see this.
But it's weird how it never did explode.
Never, ever, ever, ever.
Even after the crackdown and the betrayal of Justin Trudeau.
Never exploded.
Isn't that odd?
Quite the Tinderbox they had there.
Anyway, let's roll it.
So, on the one hand, we have the city being told that enforcing bylaws and any laws really was too dangerous for public safety issues, that there was the risk of violence, there was the risk of injury and death.
And I can take you to some notes where that's indicated.
But on the other hand, the city was also told, at least in this email, seems to have been told that there wasn't much in terms of a public safety risk.
And we've seen actually from some EOCCG, which is the group that manages the emergency response on a municipal level.
That group was putting out updates every day and they use language such as party-like atmosphere, it's festive.
So there seems to be these two competing narratives.
Was this a Tinderbox waiting to explode, or was this a family-friendly carnival with bouncy castles?
And so I wanted to get your perspective on those two narratives.
It was a Tinderbox waiting to explode.
It was not a family festival.
No proof whatsoever.
Nothing.
And, you know, it was completely peaceful.
Again, the police crack down on them.
And what happens?
They remain peaceful.
They get on their knees and they get arrested.
Again, they don't riot when the police is coming at them with tear gas and horses.
They sing O Canada in the face of police violence.
If it were a Tinderbox, when it's met with the match of police violence, it would have exploded.
It never did.
He's just an exaggerator.
Celine, what do you think?
A thousand percent.
And, you know, I thought that that might be the moment when I was watching this live that he would have the opportunity to turn this around.
Because if even one of them admits that this whole thing is a sham and it absolutely was completely unnecessary for this emergencies act to have been invoked in the first place, the narrative will, it'll crumble.
It falls right then and there.
I thought there was that moment where he just kind of paused and maybe wiped away like a little tear and was like, no, it was a matchbox.
It was horrible.
You know, it was not friendly for children.
It was a block party.
It was incredible.
It was a beautiful thing to be around.
Again, I've never, we take for granted being here where we are now, just months later, when we forget that at that point, it was, we were used to not seeing people's faces.
It was just this.
You saw this awkward eye contact.
People couldn't go out into the streets without being criticized for not wearing a mask.
Half of us, well, that's maybe an exaggeration, but I know I couldn't go into restaurants.
I couldn't go out to dinner with my family.
I couldn't go into movie theaters.
I couldn't do things that were normal for people to do.
I was declassed and I was treated like I was nothing.
And this was the first time that this fringe was accepting of everyone, regardless of their vaccination status, where they come from, the color of their skin, gender, it didn't matter.
People there were brought together in unity and love.
And that's what they hate.
And that's why they are trying to tear this apart.
It's why they kept us apart for so long, right?
That's the only way that this could go on for so long.
Efron, maybe it's too far down on my Twitter feed.
I maybe tweeted a little bit too much today.
But there's an email, or no, it's text messages from RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucky.
Apparently, these bouncy castles really scared the daylights out of these people because, you know, he's describing bouncy castles as a tinderbox.
And RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucky, she was on a phone call with senior cabinet ministers who are some of the most anxiety-ridden people that I've ever seen in my life.
Okay, so this is a mainstream media journalist doing this.
Sounds like a tense cabinet meeting that RCMP commissioner Brenda Lucky was on the line for.
And if he could sort of pop that open, anyway, she's on the phone with cabinet ministers and she says she's trying to calm them down.
But it's not easy when they see cranes, structures, horse castles in downtown Ottawa.
Could you imagine?
Like you're talking to the RCMP commissioner and you're having a conniption because you saw people having fun in downtown Ottawa after basically people living in misery for two years.
Like just ridiculous.
What a joke.
How can these people even show their faces out in the real world?
You don't want to be on this call.
Not good.
Like get a life, you losers, like absolute cry babies.
But these are the people who are making the laws of the land.
No, like they're freaking out with the RCMP commissioner, the top cop in the country, because they saw a bouncy castle.
It's no wonder they invoked the Emergencies Act.
Really?
Like when you think about who you're dealing with here, I'd written something down too.
Oh, I have emails or a readout of a phone call with Slowly where he's describing the bouncy castles as an eyesore, but not dangerous.
So why is he saying one thing on a phone call with Justin Trudeau's national security advisor and then testifying to something totally different now?
Again, this is why I think some of those tears are crocodile tears.
Yeah, I think that's the reason why we're not able to find a lot of empathy for Peter Sully, even though I'm trying.
I swear I'm trying right now.
You're a better Christian than me.
You said he didn't say it was unnecessary to invoke the act, but multiple witnesses beforehand, before him in the past few days stated.
And once again, that's the line that I keep repeating every live stream because everyone says it at the end.
Helpful, but not necessary.
Yeah, exactly.
That's always what they're saying.
Every single one, and I am convinced that it is going to come up in the cross-examination with Brendan Miller.
Helpful, but not necessary.
And I mean, he did a comparison.
He stated that the Freedom Convoy was, quote unquote, a Tinderbox waiting to explode.
Bouncy Castles truly look like a Tinderbox.
You know, when I think bounce, when I think Bouncy Castle, I think of a family event.
The first option she stated, when I see jacuzzis, when I see pools, when I see hot tops, that's a family event.
It's not, it's, it's not a tinderbox waiting to explode.
Yeah, exactly.
That's a party.
You have a party for you.
It's not a tinderbox ready to explode.
So yeah.
I just want to take it back a couple more steps, if that's okay.
I just want to kind of go back to that point of bouncy castles being addressed as very dangerous.
These are the people that are supposed to be in charge of our security and our safety.
And if can you imagine if this was an actual danger, an actual insurrection movement that came into any city and they're classifying children's play toys as being dangerous, what would that look like?
Weapons.
If that was real, these are the people that are in charge of our safety.
I'm like, who is appointing you?
Let's have a talk.
No wonder these worry warts are coming to grab my guns.
They'll be coming for the pool toys next.
Like it's completely insane.
No more butter knives in the homes.
Problematic Peacekeeping00:03:41
You know what?
Have you guys paid attention to some like UK police departments?
They routinely tweet pictures of like the things that they've taken off the street to make the street a safer place.
And sometimes it's like knitting needles and like gardening tools.
And they tweet it out like you just stop and frisk somebody's grandma on the street.
You took her kneading, niddle, knitting needles.
Like it's just crazy.
But that's the path we're headed on very, very quickly.
Efron, we'll go to clip seven because it talks about misinformation.
And then if you wouldn't mind, it's something I wrote up quite late in the day, although it's published on the website now.
Nobody else is really talking about it yet, but we should talk about it because there's like a convoy tie into there.
And it's, I take a sideways jab at the CBC, which I do every chance I get.
But it's about that Russian spy that just got arrested.
If you can find it on the website, we'll talk about that as soon as we go to clip seven, please.
Officers will often have to do a fist bump or lean in for a selfie just to try to keep the temperature down and the circumstances they're in.
That is just the reality of almost any circumstance, any day, not even requiring something of this level, just in order to try to build rapport in a minute, to keep things at the right level or de-escalate things that could be escalating.
And I'll always defer to an officer on that.
In the broader sense, I could understand, and maybe that's where my comments were attributed.
In the broader sense, these photos that are being going viral on social media without proper context could be extremely problematic and were extremely problematic.
They were used extensively in the social media disinformation and misinformation campaigns and unfortunately crept into some of the mainstream media reporting as well.
First of all, they want me to believe that if a violent maniac is on the street, assaultive to use their language, that if you just whip out your camera and say, you know what, let's take a selfie together, that'll just all of a sudden calm them down.
No, you take pictures with people who are already behaving themselves because that's what you do when everybody's hanging out and having fun.
Celine and I take selfies when we're hanging out and we're working and having fun.
That's what you do.
I don't find the craziest, wildest person on the street and say, you know what, bro, get in here.
Like it's just ridiculous.
Yeah, if it was that dangerous, I don't think they would be taking the time to take some selfies with the people.
Right?
Right?
Like, that's just the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
Most specifically, I think that's a really good way, again, to debase the peacefulness because when you have police officers that are there and you can see the genuine smiles and the happiness, the convoy was, I was there when it arrived.
Okay.
The police officers, the majority that I saw, were welcoming people.
They don't want to hear that.
They don't want to be told that a lot of the police officers, whom I heard with my own ears, I saw with my own eyes, a few of them piped up to say, some behind their masks still, thank you, because we need you here for this too.
Because under all of this, this was, it was so essential.
It was so essential.
And that's perfect.
You know, paint these protesters as super crazy and super dangerous just so that they're not able to actually get forth the message that needs to be brought forward to people, to the audience that mainstream media was directing this to.
Police Officers Welcoming Protesters00:08:37
High tensions.
Like, yeah, you're not going to run up to someone that you think is dangerous as a policeman and be like, oh, yeah, this is this is normal.
Like, I'll fist bump you so that, you know, we can keep tensions low.
What is that's just, it's absolutely ridiculous.
I hope that it comes out in the cross-examination with Brendan Miller.
I think a lot of the things that we're talking about right now are going to come out in the cross-examination with the convoy lore.
So it'll be great.
Yeah.
Let's go to that piece that I just wrote.
Yeah, I just read it quickly, by the way.
It's very interesting, Sheila.
Interesting.
I thought it was kind of funny.
So This little interesting piece.
So, this Russian spy was just arrested in Norway, posing as a Brazilian researcher specializing in you guester disinformation and what they called hybrid threats.
And as it turns out, he was a volunteer for the NDP in 2015 when he was in Canada for some reason.
We had a Russian operative in Canada for some reason.
He was working for a volunteer, I believe, for Sean Devine for the NDP.
And Mr. Devine, wouldn't you know it was recently elected to Ottawa City Council?
And Mr. Devine was one of the most ferocious opponents to the convoy.
So, when they are saying that, oh, you know, the convoy is a bunch of Russian operatives.
I don't know.
I've never seen a Russian operative identified within the convoy, but they did have one working for the other side.
So, I think the phone call might be coming from inside the house.
But, of course, the mainstream media is not going to talk about the Russian spy that the Ottawa City Councilor had working on his campaign.
The convoyers are Russian operatives.
Good luck.
It's crazy.
It's so perfect.
It's a lot of Russian operatives.
Yeah.
On the other side.
Yeah, well, that's the issue.
You know, the NDP and the people that follow that ideological line of thinking all claim that the convoy was foreign-funded, Russian-funded.
There were weapons coming to Ottawa.
And now we see that's actually their own party that welcomes those Russian spies that we're talking about.
Now, very, very interesting.
Tell that to the Canadians' bank accounts who were frozen for donating.
Yeah, lots of Russians, right?
For sure.
Yeah.
Let's freeze Sean Devine's bank account until we figure out if he's still in communication with a literal Russian spy.
Again, I say the phone call from the Kremlin.
It's coming from inside the house a little bit.
Before we get to some of these chats, let's throw to something we are called, we are calling a rebel reality check.
Our friend and chief documentarian Kian Simoni, every day he watches the convoy diligently.
And then he goes through our archival records because we have hundreds and hundreds of hours of archival footage from when we were actually embedded in the convoy.
Celine too.
Excuse me, there's a mosquito in here or something.
Anywho, so Kian puts to he takes the testimony of the people who are selling you a bunch of bologna at the commission, and then he reality checks it.
So let's throw to the first rebel reality check.
I think the like when you look at how professional the officers were that did public order, right?
Like no one was running in.
I think that it wasn't heavy-handed in any way.
It wasn't an ability to respond to the numbers in front of them.
We're literally running the horses through the crowd.
I understand it's like a tactic that they use to try and split up the crowd, but there's just so many people there.
I just don't think that that was the right move.
And when you look at it, I don't think it was heavy-handed.
I think it was very professionally done from a policing tactical perspective.
took his gun of tear gas and he actually shoot me directly in my legs.
I think that like when you look at how professional the officers were that did public order.
It's like these people were testifying from another planet or something.
Like, how could they not know that their officers were involved in these things?
Were the officers just doing them and not filing reports?
You know, you have to file a report if you use force on somebody.
Were they not?
I don't know.
I'd like to see if those records are ever produced before the inquiry.
I'm not sure.
We are already at seven o'clock for William.
He's been at it all day.
Celine, you've been at it all day.
You were watching the commission starting at 7.30, and it is very, very taxing to sit there because you have to listen and then type, but then you have to listen while they're talking and you're typing things they already just said.
And it's a lot.
It's very late.
It's very taxing on your brain.
And I think you did a great job today.
Celine, why don't you tell everybody your Twitter handle if they want to go back and check out your tweets?
Yeah, guys, go check it out.
It's Celine C-X-L-I-V.
My name starts with an S. I'll spell it for you.
So it's not Celine like Dion.
S-E-L-E-N-E, Celine C-X-L-I-V.
Go check it out from the beginning to the very end.
I have all of the juiciest updates from today's events.
Yeah, check them out.
And we also have her tweets embedded on our special website for covering the convoy commission at truckercommission.com.
You'll see all of our coverage there and William's scrums and his daily wrap-ups too, as well.
And these live streams.
Just before we move on to the chess, there's one clip that I want to make sure that we look at.
It took place yesterday night in the evening at between 6.30 and 9.30.
There was a parliamentary hearing happening in West Block where Mayor Jim Watson and other people were testifying in front of a committee made of politicians.
And there's one clip between Yezer Nagvi and Jim Watson where they spoke about the fact that Pierre Polyev took pictures with participants in the Freedom Convoy.
Let's take a look at that.
Or seen anything like that, what you described.
How did you feel when you saw some members of parliament, including now the leader of the opposition, going out there buying coffee and taking photos with people who were disturbing the lives of the community and shut down the city?
The best way to describe that behavior is disrespectful, disrespectful to the people of Ottawa, particularly since the now leader of the opposition is an MP from Ottawa.
So a lot of his constituents would have been individuals who lived in his ward and worked downtown, and much of downtown was shut down.
We just got out of the lockdown as a result of COVID-19.
And then the stores are finally starting to open.
The restaurants are starting to open.
And then there's another lockdown caused by the convoy.
So it was not helpful at all to be mugging with selfie sticks and taking pictures with the convoy.
Our city was hurting, and we needed some empathy and sympathy and not these kind of tactics.
Thank you.
So ridiculous.
So talking with your consideration.
By the way, I think Jim Watson wasn't up to date with his political vocabulary.
In the federal government, you call it writings.
It's not words.
It's a writing of Carlton.
It's not a ward of Carlton.
But, you know, talking with your constituents, talking with protesters is literally your mandate as a politician.
That's your job.
And Jim Watson, alongside Nyazir Nagvi and all the other NDP MPs that were in the room at that time, were trying to vilify Wal Yev for having spoken with the people who are part of the Peaceful Freedom Convoy.
Yeah, you know what?
Church in the Vine Screening00:02:28
That's all anybody ever wanted.
The convoy, all they wanted was somebody to talk to them, to speak to them, to listen to them, to hear them.
That's all they wanted.
You can actually see that in the back and forth of the emails when the deputy public safety minister gets involved.
They're saying, we just will move, but we'd like to talk to somebody if that would be fine.
And the feds dropped the hammer before they had to fulfill their end of that bargain.
Let's get to some chats here.
We've got A-T-O-M-O-T-T.
I think this is Adam Ottawa.
If it's not, I'm sure someone will let me know, but I'm pretty sure this is him.
Gives us five bucks and says, thanks for having these feeds available all day.
It saves me from having to stream it from Rogers-owned outlets.
Have a wicked weekend, Rebels.
We will.
And by the way, Celine, I think you're going to be there on Sunday, aren't you?
I'll be there on the 2nd November.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
This Sunday, are you going to be at our showing of the Alberta documentary at Church in the Vine?
Absolutely.
Oh, yeah.
Yes.
That's on Sunday.
For those of you in the Edmonton area, Celine and I, we are going to have a great weekend because we are going to spend it together with probably four or five hundred of friends we haven't met yet and some that we are remeeting at Church in the Vine where we're showing Kian Simoni's new documentary.
It's called Ungovernable, Alberta's Quest for Independence.
And there are still tickets available.
I have to run out and grab refreshments for everybody tonight.
I'm not sure how I'm going to fit drinks for four or five hundred in my Jeep.
Maybe I'll take the pickup.
We're going to, I'm going to find out the hard way if I can do it.
So if you want tickets, it's at albertadocumentary.com and it's great, family-friendly price point.
It's $12 a person, includes popcorn and the drinks that I have to run out and pick up tonight.
So we hope to see you there.
There's still a few tickets available and hopefully we can pack the place.
Church in the Vine has been a good friend to the rebel and we've done our very best to help them as they struggle against these administrative penalties with the Alberta government for refusing to have their church invaded by COVID inspectors while services were in progress.
So that's where we'll be, Celine.
I can't wait to see you.
It's going to be fun.
Let's keep going.
We've got Towscape gives us five bucks.
Why is there no talk of Ottawa zoning and planning?
Decision And Wi-Fi Minutes00:04:35
Why are residents allowed to live so close to ground zero of political action in Canada and able to be used as human shields by the government?
You know what?
I don't know.
It's just people live downtown.
Yeah, I don't see it.
People live downtown.
It's the same everywhere.
I don't think there should be necessarily a distance between the federal government buildings and the city.
When you live in Ottawa, you know that you're going to live in a place where there is going to be protests.
You need to go with your decision.
Just like if you're going to live in the wood, you know there's probably going to be Wi-Fi issues.
So, I mean, the people that live in Ottawa made the decision to live in downtown Ottawa.
They made that decision for themselves.
So they should have expected protests.
I don't think should be a regulation imposed by the government that you're not allowed to go live next to the parliament.
Yeah, you choose where you live and you deal with the circumstances of where you live.
For example, thank you, Elon Musk, for helping my Wi-Fi with Starlink because it used to be terrible, but that's just how it is where I live.
You know, there's, I don't even have landlines.
It's the middle of nowhere.
Anyway, let's keep going.
We've got one from Annalisa, 1964.
Anna Lisa, long time, no chat.
She's a regular viewer of the noon live streams, and she's got David Menzies in the bloodstream with that woman.
He's floating around in there like a COVID vaccine clot.
Um, anyways, she gives us 20 bucks.
Hi, everyone.
Am I a bad person for laughing when buddy started to cry?
Anyway, keep up the amazing work.
Um, I don't know.
I'm not gonna judge you.
I just like I said, I'm scraping the bottle, bottom of the barrel to find any sort of empathy for him.
I just wish he had those same empathy we're trying to have for him for the peaceful protesters in his city because I didn't see it.
Oh, Kiroka, and one more from Utibercy.
Uh, five bucks.
If these guys were to give testimonials in a real court, they would never get away with these half-truths, probably.
Also, yeah, that's one of the things that we're hearing a lot.
You know, one of the things that I was talking about to Keith Wilson, the lawyer for Tamara-Leash, is the level of hearsay that we're hearing.
And what's going to be powerful is to see the difference between their testimony and the cross-examination.
And if the judge sees that they seem less truthful in their original testimony, he's going to believe that person less.
So, it's all about public opinion and you know, being able to convince the judge, the commissioner, Commissioner Wulo, who's also a judge, that's why I call him a judge, and showing him that you know, when you give your lying hearsay testimony, it is a lot less credible than when you're being pressed on and you're not able to actually answer the questions.
Yeah, yeah.
And the convoy lawyers are only given five minutes.
You know, the government gets all the time, the commission gets all the time, and then everybody else has to split their time between people who are sympathetic to the crackdown and people who care about civil liberties.
And they just get five minutes apiece, and it's you know, they do amazing, they do amazing with what they have.
Yeah, yeah, it depends because let's say the commission's taking four hours.
Well, they're going to have to split the four hours within 10 councils, 10 parties.
Whereas if the commission is taking two hours, they're going to have to split it within you know all of those people.
So, sometimes you're going to only be having five minutes, and other times you might see them have a little bit more time.
Great.
Well, I think we're all caught up.
I think I was having sound connection issues, Wi-Fi issues, when I was talking about Wi-Fi issues, which is strange anyway.
Uh, guys, great work this week covering the Trucker Commission.
If anybody would like to see their work, go to truckercommission.ca if you'd like to support their work from on the ground in Ottawa, but also.com.
From I think.ca works.
Does it work?
Possibly.
Yeah, I'm sure it does.
Um, if you'd like to support their work from on the ground in Ottawa, where William is, and we also have a rotating team there.
We've got Kian Simone in from Calgary, although he's out now because he's got to do his documentary and then he's going to fly back.
And Celine's headed there next week.
So, if you'd like to support their work so that you can see truly, truly, the other side of the story, a skeptic's version of what's happening here, but also through the lens of people like Celine, who is actually on the ground, just go to truckercommission.com or dot CA.
I think both work, but yeah, I just accepted.
Yeah, it works.
Okay, well, everybody, have a great weekend.
Supporting On-Ground Perspectives00:00:33
Um, and you know what?
I'll just say it as David Menzies always says, stay sane.
Um, and you testified that by the 29th on the Saturday, I thought I heard you say this morning that the demonstration was an unlawful demonstration.
Is that right?
By virtue of the first law broken in and around it.
Okay, and so what did you mean by that?
What were the laws broken?
Too many to list.
Can you give me a sense?
Like, are we talking criminal code violations about provincial offenses act, criminal code, federal statutes?