Keith Wilson, lawyer for the Freedom Convoy, dissects the Public Order Emergency Commission’s testimony, where top civil servants like Janice Charette justified invoking Canada’s Emergencies Act—a wartime law—on February 14, 2022, citing "threats" despite police finding no weapons and unresolved border blockades already easing. Wilson argues the government bypassed legal constraints, suspending rights for nearly 40 million Canadians over protests that were largely peaceful, including food drives and cleanup efforts. Contradictions in official claims, such as progress on truck movement amid assertions of gridlock, and the absence of the act during terror plots like the 2006 Toronto 18, expose a pattern of overreach. The episode suggests Trudeau’s political survival hinges on narrative control, with media and MPs likely shifting blame ahead of a February report that could force an election—while public trust in institutions erodes further. [Automatically generated summary]
At Rebel News, we're not afraid to have dangerous discussions, and we want to have them with you at our upcoming Rebel Live events first in Toronto, November 19th, and again in Calgary, Saturday, November 26th.
Just go to RebelNewsLive.com to get your tickets today.
Oh, hello.
Good afternoon.
Good day, everybody.
Depending on what part of this beautiful country that you're in, welcome to the Rebel News daily live stream, something we're calling Breakdown.
I'm your host, Sheila Gunrida, and I'm surprisingly in studio in Toronto today.
And I'm joined by Keith Wilson, one of the lawyers for the Convoy.
And just to give everybody a little bit of background about what we're going to talk about today, in case you've been living under a rock or consuming a little bit too much CBC, we are covering the Public Order Emergency Commission, what we're calling here at Rebel News, the Trucker Commission, and it's the official examination of the actions of the government in invoking the Emergencies Act, a wartime law that suspends civil liberties to extinguish completely peaceful protests in our nation's capital.
Justin Trudeau did the old Hugo Chavez move on peaceful anti-regime protesters, and now he has to answer for it.
Keith, crazy day today because I think this is for the first time in a long time, we saw some political people testifying again.
We saw that at the beginning of the commission with some of the counselors, the busybody counselors, Councillor Fleury and McKinney from the city of Ottawa.
But now we're seeing political appointee bureaucrats from Justin Trudeau's closest bureaucrats, the Privy Council, they're testifying to their involvement in the decision to invoke the Emergencies Act.
We had Janice Shere.
She's the chief clerk of the Privy Council.
She is the secretary, the note-taker for cabinet.
So she's privy to a lot of things.
And, you know, I tuned into her testimony later on in the day when they were talking about the threats, the threats that necessitated the Emergencies Act.
And she said at some point, and I'm sure we have the clip, Efron will go to that in a second, but I also promised Efron that I would go to all the clips in order so I wouldn't confuse him.
But she did say that, you know, even if there weren't threats, there was sort of this general feeling of threats.
And that seemed to be enough.
Keith, what's your overall overview?
I guess your high-level macro overview of what happened today.
Well, I think what we saw today was a breakdown in the rule of law.
And what do I mean by that?
Like, we hear that expression a lot, and it has many meanings, but its most simplest meaning is what it's contrasted with, is that we used to have in the, you know, the 1400s and the 1500s and up until the Magna Carta, we used to have rule by man.
The king, the king's whims became the law and the laws changed with the whims of the king.
And we were supposed to replace that with the rule of law, which means no-no.
Government, the king, the prime minister, can only do that which the law allows him to do.
And what we heard today was that the advisors to cabinet, the advisors to the prime minister, they find that a little awkward and, you know, a little inconvenient.
So they've decided that they actually get to decide.
That's my high-level summary of the remarkable testimony today.
You know, that should bring us to our first clip because Janice Charette, she's the clerk.
She said that she recalled Trudeau government's mindset after introducing a cross-border vaccine mandate for truckers.
She told the commission that Canadians were getting a bit fed up with the restrictions and measures.
But quickly and far less patiently, the Trudeau government lost their patience with peaceful protesters in the nation's capital.
Why don't we go to clip one, Efron, please?
February the 15th.
There was a change in the public health measures related to COVID that affected truckers in the country.
It affected cross-border traffic.
And that change was for truckers that were unvaccinated coming back into the country.
They had been previously exempt and they were now going to be subject to public health measures.
And so we were monitoring very closely both the implementation of that measure as well as talking to the Trucking Association and monitoring because it was clear that at that point in time, despite the very serious record levels of COVID we were facing, that Canadians were kind of getting a bit fed up at that point in time with the restrictions and the measures and what they were having to deal with.
And so that was very much on our minds.
I don't think it was all that much on their minds because the point of the protest or the catalyst for the protest was the cross-border vaccine mandate for truckers.
So it wasn't as though people were getting just sick of the existing restrictions and the never-ending lockdowns, but it was the fact that after, you know, a couple of years of living with this, with hindsight being 2020, they were still adding more restrictions and hindering people's lives and their section six charter rights to move.
It's like these people don't talk to normal people at all.
That was our impression yesterday, too, coming out of the testimony from some of the officials yesterday is that like these guys live in an upside-down world bubble.
It's just remarkable how out of touch.
You know, one of the things I really want to say is I was watching online because I was working on things for this hearing as well as another case.
So I wasn't in the hearing room, which was a really good thing because I was shouting at my screen quite a bit, quite loudly.
And one of the things that incensed me was when the senior official yesterday, I think it was the deputy minister, one of the deputy ministers talked about that, you know, we needed to understand that when the borders were closed for a little while, that there was real people who were out of work and couldn't make mortgage payments.
I was like, are you kidding me?
What about the millions of people you harmed with these excessive lockdowns combined with the provincial governments?
What about the over 6 million Canadians who were prevented from being at the side of dying loved ones or attending weddings in the birth of their first grandchild?
The businesses that were lost, the people who were forced out of their work, the thousands and thousands of airport workers alone that the federal government put out of work.
It just blew my mind the level of insensitivity and lack of awareness of the harms that their overreach caused, which was the catalyst for the protests becoming so big and multitude.
Yeah, it was an added restriction where people said, no, enough is enough.
And yet they still can't figure out.
Like all this time.
And they still don't know why so many people left everything behind to go across the country to their nation's capital to just try to be heard.
And even still, they don't know why those people came.
It's just astounding to me.
We have got another clip.
Privy Council bureaucrat, Jacqueline Bogdan, she testified that the government began doing its homework on the Emergencies Act as a potential option on and around February 9th.
That's a day before the first incident response group meeting and before the act was invoked on February 14th.
But that's also in and around the time that you and your people started negotiating, isn't it?
So you were working to end the protest, or at least end some of the inconvenience of the protest.
And the government, our government, your government, is actively working to treat you like terrorists at the exact same time.
Correct.
And getting recommendations from their senior officials that they follow the steps that we'd started to take in terms of the leadership of the Freedom Convoy, myself and other lawyers, and Tom Morazzo, in terms of trying to negotiate a de-escalation.
And it was vetoed at cabinet.
They didn't want de-escalation.
No.
And you know what?
I think that's a theme through all of this: they keep talking about the violence, the violence, the violence, and the threats, or the potential for violence, or the discomfort of the protests.
But the convoy was met with extreme force.
And not even, as you rightly pointed out once, not even a window was broken.
No cops were hurt.
No cops were trampled.
And the cops were outnumbered everywhere they looked.
And so if there were to be mayhem, carnage, mob violence, a riot, there could have been.
There never was, because even in spite of provocation by the state, the convoy remained peaceful.
They were not the violent radicals that they were predicted to be, not even for a second, not even when they were provoked.
The discipline of the truckers to avoid the provocations was remarkable, right down to, as you know, keeping the streets clean, shoveling the snow, feeding the homeless.
The other thing I think about Sheila is, you know, we're both from Alberta.
Some of those truckers would have gone into their trucks before they left Alberta, you know, especially guys that operate out of their homes on an acreage or a farm and taken the shotgun and put it in the safe.
Like there's just the fact that they searched every one of those trucks and found not a single gun meant.
And I'm not criticizing, there would be good reasons for some truckers to have a firearm.
And so it just showed the extent to which Canadians who participated in this were so focused on staying on message and not giving the government the excuse that it so badly wanted.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's, you have to give them credit for their savvy too.
They're media savvy, because, you know, 22 behind the seat of a grain truck, that's common.
But if that had made its way all the way to Ottawa, it would have been a real, real media catastrophe for the truckers, but it never was.
Efron, why don't you roll CLIP 2?
I called for it.
I ragged the puck a little bit so you could bring it up.
Can you roll it?
So when would the Privy Council office have started to do its homework on the Emergencies Act?
When would you or somebody in your office have first started to look at it as a potential option?
It would have probably been on or around the 9th.
Okay, so it would have been only a day before the first meeting of the incident response group when it was being discussed there.
Yep.
I think.
And no work was done on the Emergencies Act before that.
So I can't say that definitively.
You know, work would have been being done by a lot of different people on an anticipatory basis that, you know, making sure, as I said, that we've done our homework and we would be in a position to answer questions, right?
Like if the government turned to the public servants and said, what's involved with invocation of the act, you need to be able to answer all kinds of first order questions, right?
Everything from the threshold that's to be met to what's the parliamentary process, you know, what kinds of considerations do you want to be thinking about.
So I can't say definitively who was working on what.
I wasn't directing that work.
So I'm not being evasive.
I'm just trying to understand.
It was all hands on deck at that point.
And I can't speak to every part of the public service.
I feel like I'm listening to Kamala Harris say a lot of words, but actually nothing.
She spent a couple of minutes there telling me that there were a lot of people doing things and I'm not quite sure what they were doing.
And it sounds a lot like the Ottawa Police Service.
However, the ineptitude of bureaucrats and local police do not an emergency constitute.
No.
And we've seen that with the police and the governmental responses and their infighting and their disorganized lack of organization and all that nonsense.
Incompetency, I've checked the act again, Sheila.
Incompetency is not listed as a ground for invoking the Emergencies Act, stripping Canadians of their rights, giving unrestricted powers to the federal government to do whatever it wants with your bank account and your assets and interfering in provincial jurisdiction.
Incompetency is not the trigger.
This is supposed to be used for the equivalent of a war or a civil war.
And the prime minister's office decided that he would get to decide when he was going to use it.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think we can say that often enough.
This is for a 9-11 level event.
You know, this is for a Pearl Harbor style strike on the homeland.
This is not for bouncy castles and hot tubs and a little bit of too much jubilancy in the boring streets of Ottawa.
You know, that's my real takeaway from all of this is I think the people who live in Ottawa are quite boring.
They didn't like all those exciting blue-collar people from the rest of the country just mucking up their white-collar streets.
You're a lawyer, so I'm glad I have you for this next one.
We have, I guess she is now the assistant or deputy clerk of the Privy Council office, Natalie Druin.
She says that on the ground, the RCMP didn't have jurisdiction to address the situation prior to invoking the Emergencies Act.
And this is an important claim that she's making.
However, I don't think it's accurate.
And you're the lawyer, so I'll let you decide.
But that's one of the grounds for invoking the Emergencies Act is that police didn't have existing tools that they needed to deal with it.
Let's watch the clip and then you can give me your expert legal advice on whether or not this is true.
Sure.
So all the indicators were towards, it is, you know, the federal government is owning the situation.
And yet on the ground, our CMP, for example, didn't have jurisdiction on Wellington Street.
We don't have jurisdiction on routes that brings you to the bridge.
So it feels that we owned it publicly, but we didn't have jurisdiction to address the situation.
Free Movement Disputes00:13:03
Is that true?
No.
Okay.
I mean, parts of it, but I mean, welcome to Canada.
We have the division of powers, right?
Right.
And it's interesting being from Alberta, you know, here you almost never see outside of Ottawa an RCMP cruiser, whereas in Alberta, that's all we see unless you're in one of the cities, right?
So for us in Alberta and out west, BC, you know, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, the RCMP do the municipal policing, they do the provincial policing, and they do the federal policing.
Whereas here, you know, the local Ottawa police do the municipal and the provincial, and then the provincial police do the stuff outside of the, outside of the cities.
And then there's this very limited role for the RCMP.
But it's a red herring because the reality is that they have public order units with the RCMP that were on standby and ready to be deployed.
A request to deploy them was made up through the chain, and Commissioner Lucky said no, not yet.
We had the deputization process that was modified to expedite the process of deputizing police so that they could act within the city of Ottawa.
They're just red herrings.
What I noticed today was they threw these later witnesses that are really speaking from the prime minister and the cabinet office through Commissioner Lucky under the bus.
She is going to be one of their scapegoats.
And the maneuver that they used was their disappointment with her not communicating a plan, a police action plan to deal with the protesters in Ottawa.
Therefore, because of the failure of the RCMP and the other police forces to communicate a plan, they had to go and grab the small thermonuclear device and throw it, which is being the Emergencies Act.
You know, that's interesting too, because it'll take us into the next clip.
Clip four, it's again, clerk of the Privy Council, Janice Cherette, I guess, detailing how the government had been hearing about plans being developed to end the Freedom Convoy and some of the other protests.
But by the third weekend, they hadn't seen any action to end what she called the horrific, these boring people, situation in Ottawa.
But that's not true because we heard that cabinet had been informed that there were ongoing negotiations between yourself, Tamara Leach, and Mayor Watson to alleviate some of the problems plaguing the busy bodies in downtown Ottawa.
So from based on other testimony and emails presented before the commission, this just absolutely isn't true.
And this is someone whose job it is to detail the comings and goings and meetings within cabinet.
We've seen evidence that cabinet was aware that things were happening and that the truckers were operating in good faith and moving trucks out of the downtown core when she's saying this.
Well, and it's more than to be very precise about it.
You know, the negotiations started earlier in the previous week.
They had to be done quietly as normal in a delicate situation.
The full board of directors, contrary to someone who seems to have forgotten the events, a former board member who speaks out, was fully briefed at every stage of the negotiations.
There was very few things I had the luxury of doing in writing while I was there in Ottawa during the protests because of the speed of events.
There was one thing I made sure I did in writing in emails was get all of the board members to sign off on the deal with the mayor that was agreed to on the Friday night, which would have been the 11th.
The letters were exchanged on the 12th and the deal finalized the Saturday.
And then on the Sunday, we agreed to let the mayor go first and release it to the media.
And then on the Sunday night when the cabinet met, as you've just noted, the senior security advisor who testified yesterday had reported to the cabinet that there was a breakthrough agreement.
That was the phraseology they used with the truckers to relocate out of downtown and concentrate on Wellington with the rest going out to Van Cleeth and the other areas.
And despite that, and despite the fact that all of the borders were now reopened and that's been confirmed with the municipal officials from the different jurisdictions, with the police officials, with the Canadian Border Service in the last week, that all the borders reopened didn't matter.
Only thing that was left was Ottawa.
I think the prime minister was angry that the non-laptop class had risen up against him and he was going to show them who really has the authoritarian power here.
Yeah, no, that's exactly it.
And it's funny because these people are testifying.
And I don't know if, again, do they live in a bubble?
Are they watching the other testimony?
Are they being briefed on the documents that are already in front of the Public Order Commission?
Like, I don't understand how they can just walk in there and testify to completely different reality from what we have a paper trail to prove.
Well, they're hoping that their paid media, the legacy media that's now on the government payroll, you know, and I feel sorry for a lot of those reporters because I'm sure that some of them don't sleep very well at night because they can't report the truth anymore like they used to.
They have to say, all right, if this story goes out, well, you know, we're not going to get our $100 and whatever million dollars from the government.
And that means we might not make payroll and we can't make payroll.
I'm not going to get a paycheck.
And then what am I going to tell my wife or my spouse about the mortgage?
So I think what they're hoping is their sound bites that they're doing right now.
And you saw it really in spades this afternoon, this Friday afternoon, with the cabinet level people speaking in terms of staff, that their sound bites will get out and then that will become the narrative.
And the narrative will be two parts.
One is that the police failed to act.
So the prime minister had to to keep Canadians safe.
And number two will be that when you look at the totality of the circumstances, despite the fact that CISIS said the legal test wasn't met, the OPP intelligence officer said the test wasn't met.
Every official that's testified said the legal test to invoke wasn't met.
They're just going to say, well, we're the cabinet.
I'm the prime minister.
You know, poo-poo to this rule of law stuff.
We like it better the way it was in the 1400s when the king gets to decide.
Yeah, they spent the last two and a half years telling me to listen to the experts and then the policing experts testify and they tell me, no, no, Sheila, don't believe those people agree with these political appointees appointed by the liberals.
Those are the people you need to listen to.
Good point.
Yeah.
Clip six, Efron, the one that I jumped out of my chair and ran across the room to you to clip when it was happening live.
I was much like you, Keith, in that I was sitting at this desk because there's no other desk for me to work at in HQ.
And every time I heard something crazy, I ran into the control room and said, Efron, we have to clip this.
Because in clip six, to justify the use of the Emergencies Act, the chief clerk of the Privy Council finally said something that I agree with, but she didn't realize that she was probably agreeing with the truckers when she said this too.
She said that economic security is directly correlated with the ability to maintain and operate secure borders.
I can't wait till somebody tells this lady about Wroxham Road or the vaccine mandates that caused the truckers to begin this protest in the first place.
Yeah, we do care about operating secure borders and the ability to engage in trade across them.
Let's roll this clip.
Again, just completely lacking in self-awareness.
So the economic risk, particularly at a time, and I think I tried to set the seed for this when I was talking about the fact that we were just starting budget deliberations as this was all happening.
I think Mr. Sebia spoke of other relevant considerations related to United States potential legislation that was being deliberated at the time, which had big impacts on Canada, our competitiveness, our ability to continue to attract investment.
So when I think about national interest, our economic security is absolutely part of that.
And that is about the ability to maintain and operate secure borders, to see to the free movement of people, goods, and services across our borders.
We do $2 billion of trade a day between Canada and the United States, the single most integrated, I think, economy in the world.
What does that lady think the truckers were there protesting for?
That's exactly what they were there protesting for.
The ability to engage in cross-border trade because that was their job.
The free movement of people and goods across the largest undefended border in the world.
That's why they were there.
She and the cabinet were the problem.
I just, that just blew my mind, but I was like, yeah, I actually agree with you there.
Well, and this is what causes me to react strongly is that, okay, I think we agree that what she said is important about the free movement of goods across the border, the free movement of people she talked about across the border.
And let's think Canadians are people traveling lawfully.
They're just completely tone deaf because look at the economic harm they caused by the border closures, by the travel restrictions, by just even the, you know, when we lost the knowledgeable people in the trucker industry tell me that it was about 35% of the drivers were lost for cross-border movement at a time when we already had we have logistics problems and we have supply chain issues.
So a lot of the trade I'm told from different people I know outside of my normal legal spheres, which I like to have a lot of people around me in that way so that I keep my eyes open to things, that they started shipping in goods and products by air.
Well, what did they do to the airports?
There was over 10,000 airport workers of various kinds that lost their jobs because they were exercised their choice not to get vaccinated.
The tourism industry, who was going to take a trip to Canada if you had to quarantine for 14 days?
You know, like, come on.
So just the tourism sector alone impacts is in the billions of dollars.
So if they really care about these things, they would not have been the exception of G7 countries.
A lot of Canadians don't realize that we had more restrictions in place than any other G7 country, and we had them in longer than any other G7 country.
So the hypocrisy of these people, their lack of self-awareness, as you put it, I think is bang on the market spectacular.
And you wouldn't want those truckers traveling across the border, just a couple of hours across the border and seeing people living normally and then coming back to Canada and saying, you know what?
Things are normal in Florida or South Dakota, which is so close to the border.
You wouldn't want people coming home with a new benchmark for normal because then, you know what?
They just might rise up and protest you in the nation's capital.
And looky here, we've got another national emergency on our hands.
Indeed.
Yeah, it's, well, and even I think that's, you know, I'm counsel to former Premier Peckford on the Travel Mandate Challenge.
And I think one of the reasons they took it down when they did or suspended it in June of this year, June 15th, was because enough people had started to travel through Europe and through England and everywhere else.
And they're like, wow, COVID's over over here.
And then all of a sudden they get on the plane and they're told they got to put a mask on as soon as they get close to Canada.
And then they arrive in this, you know, public health officials in gowns and face shields everywhere and channeling them into booths to be prodded and tested.
And so I think it was a wake-up call for a lot of people.
Yeah, when uptight, progressive Europe goes back to normal before you do.
Houston, we have many months.
Many months before.
Wake-Up Call for Canada00:03:32
Exactly.
When I traveled to Geneva to deliver our human rights complaint to the UN there, you could tell where the Air Canada gates were at the airport because everything was normal until you got to the Air Canada gate.
Everything was just oppressive.
And everybody was in a mask.
And, you know, the flight attendants looked like they were going into brain surgery.
And that was, you know, just a few months ago that we were still doing this sort of madness.
Keith, I want to ask you your predictions before I let you go for next week.
Next week, we're going to start to see even more political people, members of the cabinet are going to testify.
What do you expect to hear from that?
More gaslighting and a rewriting of history?
Or are we going to see some truth?
I think you're going to see a replay.
I think this afternoon was the test of the messaging.
Yeah.
They sent in their, they were highly rehearsed.
There's even a couple of times where the witness would go, let me see if I can remember the words.
And she wasn't lying.
Yeah, she wasn't talking about the words from an act.
It was the words they practiced over and over again.
So I think today was the test.
I think they're kind of okay with how it went.
So I think you're going to see the same messaging from the ministers.
But that means we just have to figure out how to crack that nut this weekend and give them a little surprise come Monday, Tuesday.
So that's what we'll do.
Well, I'm very, very excited.
And I'll be in Ottawa on Monday and Tuesday to see it firsthand for myself.
So I'm very excited about that.
Keith, I guess maybe I'll see you Monday or Tuesday.
Absolutely.
In person.
It'll be wonderful.
Great.
Efron, let's roll an ad so that Keith can make a graceful exit.
Freedom in 2022 is certainly about being able to make free choices for ourselves and for our family, who we believe are the best.
We have seen so much suffering over the last two years.
People who die alone in terrible conditions.
People losing dream jobs, polarized families, and a society that insults and yell at each other for making a different medical choice.
But people have risen, and it will be through them that the future will have an important meaning for all of you, but especially for the next generation.
Rebecca News has been present at every step of this great challenge.
But so many other pioneers whom you could meet and hear at our great conference about freedom for our beautiful country, which is Canada.
This conference, which will be held in Calgary and Toronto, will show you the faces of the influence of freedom that you have seen over the past two years.
You don't want to miss this.
So get your ticket now at RibenNewsLive.com.
And it would be a pleasure to see you there and meet you in large numbers.
It's time to drop these masks and let the truth shine.
Frustrating Back and Forth00:15:26
Oh, hi.
Welcome back, everybody.
I should tell you, and I should have done this right off the top of the show, but you know what?
It's I'm a little rusty.
I haven't hosted the live stream in maybe 10 days.
But if you want to engage with us on the show here, one of the best ways to do that is to leave a paid chat because it also supports the work that we do here completely willingly.
You can do that on Rumble through what they call their paid chat.
It's a Rumble Rant.
On Odyssey, it's called a hyper chat.
And so now joining me are my two very hardworking young colleagues, the hardest-working young journalists in the business, I think, Celine Gallus and William Diaz from our Ottawa satellite studio just up the road from the Trucker Commission.
Guys, how's it going?
Weird day, right?
The weirdest of days.
Yeah, no, honestly, I'm just not even sure what we're listening to anymore at this point.
It's just, it's so well rehearsed that you know it's bad, right?
Like when you start hearing the same things, the same words, when they look to their lawyers and they proclaim outwardly, can I say this?
Or I should be really careful about how I say this, or I don't know if I should say this.
It's getting ridiculous.
What do you think, William?
Well, I think it might have been weird.
I think it was also a long day, but I you look tired.
You do.
Yeah, I am very tired, but I think that we've got some good stuff out today, especially during Brandon Muir's cross-examination of the deputy clerk of the Privy Council.
So even though it was a little bit of a weird day, we still got some good stuff out.
That was good.
Yeah, Natalie Druin, Druin, is deputy clerk of the Privy Council.
And it was, what's her name?
Janice Charette, I think.
She's the Privy Council clerk.
Just completely clueless.
When she was, like I was saying to Keith, when she was talking about, you know what, we have to protect the free exchange of goods across the border, and we can't prevent people from traveling across the border.
I'm like, what did that lady think that the truckers were protesting?
That's why they went is because you were going to force them to get a vaccine they didn't want so that they could do their job or lose their job.
That's why they went.
And so she's saying, no, we need to invoke the Emergencies Act to break up the border blockades, which, by the way, had already resolved by the time they used the Emergencies Act.
So she doesn't, her fake little timeline doesn't even hold together upon examination because people could cross the border if you were vaccinated, I suppose, by the time that they hit the nuclear button of the Emergencies Act.
I want to go, Efron, to clip five because we've got Janice again.
And she said that the Freedom Convoy and other protests amounted to a national emergency.
I'm not sure why.
Canadians didn't like Justin Trudeau, I guess.
And that it was urgent, urgent, again, because Justin Trudeau was being embarrassed internationally, I guess.
Let's roll clip five, please, and then we'll talk about it.
The view that I came to was that whether there were still authorities that had not been fully used, that the situation overall was a national emergency.
It was urgent.
It was critical.
There was the threat of serious violence that put at risk the lives, the health and safety, the security of Canadians, our economic fortunes, and that taken together, that was beyond the capacity of any individual province or territory to deal with.
We were seeing this on a national scale, breakouts or incidents from coast to coast to coast, including cross-border traffic, even between, I think it was Alberta and one of the territories.
This was a situation which had been escalating.
I think we were on day 18 of what was happening in Ottawa.
This was a scale.
This was an escalation.
This was a series of volatility.
It didn't seem that there was any province or territory that had the power to deal with this uniquely on their own.
But there may have been individual agencies that could have dealt with a piece of it.
There were individual sites that could have been dealt with through specific tools.
There were potentially individual threats that could have been dealt with by one agency or actor or another.
But if you look at the totality of it all, that's what lies behind this advice.
What on earth is that lady talking about?
What on earth is she talking about?
She says, you know, there were these things happening across the country, but she admits, she prefaces her statement by saying whether or not there were tools, like law enforcement tools, remaining to deal with these things.
Well, that's the whole point of the Emergencies Act.
It has to be if there are no law enforcement tools left.
And that clearly wasn't the case because Alberta had resolved.
Emerson, Manitoba had been resolved.
Windsor had been resolved.
BC had been resolved.
All these things had been resolved with existing tools.
The ineptitude of the OPS and Justin Trudeau's feelings do not constitute a national emergency.
That's just the facts of it all.
These problems were resolved and were being resolved without the suspension of the civil liberties of all nearly 40 million Canadians, because when they hit the Emergencies Act nuclear button, that's what happened to the rest of us.
They could have done anything they wanted to all of us.
I think they just didn't have the time to do what they wanted to do.
Yeah, I agree with you.
Once again, I think if I hear one person mention Section 2 of the CSIS Act after this long inquiry is done, I'm going to walk away.
Section 2 of the CSIS Act defines what a threat's national security is.
And for the Emergencies Act to be invoked, Section 2 of the CISIC, the threshold of Section 2 of the CIS Act has to be met in regards to whether or not we are seeing a threat to the national security of our country.
And it has to be the only option, which means that it has to be necessary.
And CSIS itself and documents that keep being presented at the Commission.
It's fine to look at the questions and answers of the witnesses and the lawyers, but it's also super crucial and important to look at the documents.
Because the documents are presented by Alan Honor from the Democracy Fund.
The documents are presented by Brendan Miller from Freedom Corp.
Those are irrelevant documents that show exactly what CSIS was thinking at the time of the Emergencies Act, prior to the Emergencies Act.
And CISIS said that they did not see the convoy in Ottawa as a national security issue.
So all this person was saying, in my opinion, was nonsense and was just partisan politics.
That's how I see it.
I guess I'll try and get something in there, but I agree with William, obviously.
I think, again, like when you break down the fact that you, I personally have, I've just taken to it very naturally.
I have a thing for seeing patterns, for recognizing those things.
Like when you hear the same quotes, the same phrases that they use, it just reminds me that the longer that we see this prolonged period of examination for this emergency inquiry, the more that I start to see how much of a sham it is.
Because I just can't possibly comprehend how no one, these, again, the higher you go in the liberal cabinet, the less questions are answered.
Someone explained that to me.
Someone tell me how that's in any way, shape, or form appropriate.
It doesn't make any sense to me, Sheila.
I was saying to Keith, you know, when we were listening to the experts, as the liberals have told me to do for the last two years, so I did, I listened to policing experts and CSIS said no threat, didn't need the EA.
RCMP, no real threats, didn't need the EA.
OPP, no real threats, didn't need the EA.
OPS even, even in their disarray and mayhem and confusion and chaos in that department, they said that you didn't need the EA.
And, you know, despite people calling hurt feelings violence, Peter Slowy and Steve Bell, despite that, they also said they didn't need the Emergencies Act.
They said it was helpful.
I imagine it was if you don't care about civil liberties and you can just run roughshod over people to do your jobs, you know, without any guardrails or bumpers on the wall.
You can do a lot of things to a lot of people, cut a lot of corners, which basically is what they admitted that the EA helped them do.
We got to cut some corners.
But there's, I guess.
You just mentioned the Ottawa Police Services, and I don't know if you've been following it closely.
There are cross-examinations of witnesses, but there's something very interesting that happened either yesterday or the day before with the Council for the Ottawa Police Services.
The Council for the Ottawa Police Services was cross-examining one of the witnesses from the federal government and criticized the witness, criticized the government for not speaking with a protester.
He literally, his last question, that was very interesting to witness because I think the lawyers are starting to change their tune.
They're seeing that they cannot go along with their original narrative.
They're seeing the actual evidence being presented.
And this lawyer, his last question was, well, there was an option.
The federal government could have talked to the protesters and not a single one of them has.
Why is that?
And then he walked away.
That was very interesting to see.
You know, I think there's, I don't know if the lawyers for the other side, I guess, are changing their tunes or if they're seeing which way the wind is blowing.
They're sort of trying to get out in front of it.
They don't want to get burned down with Justin Trudeau.
But the point I was trying to make before I drifted off into just nonsense was that the policing experts, and if you can call the OPS experts on anything except disorder, but the policing experts all said we didn't need this.
It's only the people who are not experts on anything except politics.
They're the ones who are saying this was needed.
These two ladies today from the Privy Council said that the Emergencies Act was necessary.
Now, they also said all policing resources had not been exhausted.
They also said that, but they said this was needed.
And they don't have any expertise in that outside of being appointed by Justin Trudeau for their jobs.
Yeah.
Well, you can feel it was needed, but if you admit right after that all the options hadn't been utilized, even if you say that it was needed, it wasn't needed.
You have no proof that it was needed because not all the options were utilized.
I mean, it just discredits your whole credibility.
I mean, but that's not anything new that we've been seeing.
If there is any way that this federal government remains as is after this, I think I might move to Costa Rica.
And I was joking with you about this the other day, Sheila, but my goodness, this is crazy.
This is not the country that I grew up in.
And I know that so many Canadians feel that.
They feel that.
It's very frustrating to watch this because the back and forth, they're even just blatantly sarcastic, giving attitude to the lawyers and just flat out not answering questions.
How is that allowed?
Where's the standard that we're setting?
Like, what's the precedence for this even?
Like, you know, I'll answer everything that I'm instructed to answer and anything else you will not get an answer for.
This is not the way that anything should be happening.
We've seen this from all the political people.
So the police were very forthcoming.
Even if I disagreed with them, at least they did their best to answer their questions.
Again, even if the answers were nonsensical, Peter, slowly.
But it's the political operatives here like Matthew Fleury, like Catherine McKinney, who they don't really care about what's right and what's wrong.
They care about political expediency, what's going to get me elected, what's going to make the people who voted for me happy.
They really don't care about the other people who live there and the rights of the other people.
And, you know, these two from the Privy Council, you know, like just absolutely no self-awareness.
They keep talking about the economic carnage caused by, you know, a week's worth of border blocking.
Well, what about the economic carnage of two years of lockdowns?
And then these people finally go back to work and you say, uh-uh-uh.
But you can't go across the border now, even though you have for two years.
And now your business is ruined.
You don't care about those people.
You care about the people who are dealing with phantom honking, which I can't even believe is a real thing, but it was.
And that's a new part of their narrative as well.
The first time I heard that was yesterday when Deputy Minister Michael Sabias was testifying and he interrupted his train of thought to point out supposedly very empathetically that there was real human impacts of that border blockade at Windsor for the, what, two to three days that it was there, that there was a handful of people there.
What happened the last two years?
These people seriously live under a rock and it's shocking.
It's shocking as much as it is disturbing to me.
Yeah, it's like Keith Wilson says, these are the laptop class.
The people on the screen that we're looking at right now, they've got to go to work.
These are productive people that bring you the things that you need so you can sit in your apartment in your pajamas and work on your laptop.
And it might bother the people of Ottawa that they had to look at them for three weeks, but I don't care.
Useful people wanted to go to work because there's dignity in work.
There's dignity in providing for your family.
There's dignity in surviving and not taking from the government.
And that's all that these people wanted.
And they've been vilified for it, criminalized for it.
They've been terrorized for it.
Look at this.
See, this is exactly what I'm talking about when they say the convoy was violent.
If they wanted to be violent, they could have rioted against those cops and there's not a damn thing those cops could have done except open fire on them.
But they didn't.
They didn't.
The cops were way outnumbered every step of the way, no matter where they were dealing with protesters.
And the protesters never once, in the face of provocation and violence, turned on the cops.
And that's a testament to the kind of people they are.
And that's why it irritates me so much to see these horrible people like we listen to today say, oh, there was a potential for violence.
Question Period Debate00:05:49
Sure, where was it?
I saw cops trampling people and beating people.
I heard about threats of violence from unions who were going to go down there and push people into the river at Windsor.
I heard about that.
I heard about eggs being thrown from high-rise apartments at truckers.
I heard about that.
I heard about a guy that drove his Jeep into a convoy protest in Winnipeg and drove over people.
Nobody was seriously hurt, but that's an act of God that nobody was seriously hurt.
I heard about all those things, but all I hear about from the other side of this is that honking was violence and that there was a feeling that they didn't like in the air.
Yeah, well, I mean, there's always an opportunity for danger.
There's always a threat for danger.
You know, just walking, going on a walk outside, who knows if someone's going to stab you?
Who knows if there's a car that's going to run over you?
Who knows if you're going to fall in front of you and just hit your head and die on the spot?
There's always a threat of something happening.
There's a point that you made earlier, and I think it was a very good point about the government, about how rotten our government here in Ottawa is.
And I had a very interesting conversation with Brendan Murray yesterday, Freedom of Convoy lawyer.
And our government truly has an issue.
If you look at question period, and that's what we're talking about, what's the point of, well, Sheila and then Celine, what's the point of question period?
What's the point of having question period in our government?
It's the opportunity for the opposition to hold the government to account on behalf of the people.
They're there to oppose the government.
Whether or not we get a response is another thing.
Exactly.
do you agree with that i agree with that but i i understand like the premise of what you're asking because when you see what's going on what is actually i mean what's what's the point of a question period I think it is fair to serious holding the government to account.
Exactly.
I'm trying to say that what's the point of this when I'm not sure who's going to hold who into account at the end of this?
And there are no consequences at the end.
So, you know, you've got question period who's televised every day for government to be held to account.
And how many times are questions actually answered during question period?
Almost never.
Almost never.
It's why order paper questions are my favorite thing that happened in the House of Commons.
Exactly.
So, you know, we've got this huge thing who's supposed to be there that people watch every single day.
They go on CPAC, they go on YouTube to watch the government being held to account.
And they go there and they expect it.
And that's not what happens.
There's some things to the legislative level at the level of our government that have to change.
For instance, question period, that's one place that something could change.
What about a law that would force a minister to actually answer questions?
What about a law that would give the person, the house speaker, the power to decide, okay, well, you asked the question, so you're going to answer the question that you were just asked.
What if that was the case?
How beneficial it would be for our system?
But we don't have that right now.
And that's just one example of how rotten our government in Ottawa is.
I think what's missing there, though, is the or what in all of this.
It's the same problem with the Public Order Emergency Commission.
If Trudeau is found to have abused the civil liberties of Canadians by acting like a tyrant, pulling the old Ahmudinejad on peaceful protesters in the town square, what happens to him?
Nothing.
He has the bought and paid for store-bought media who will run cover for him.
He won't even, there's not even an option to give the man a $300 fine, like when he has his ethics violations.
He could be found culpable in suspending the civil liberties of 39 million Canadians for matters of ego, and nothing will happen to him at the end of the day.
So, yeah, it goes without saying that things definitely need to change because who holds their politicians accountable?
The people do.
And if the people don't actually have the power to do that, then what power do they have at all?
Yes.
Efron, can we go to an ad before poor William falls asleep on camera?
He's had such a long week.
TJ TJ or TGIF for William.
Thank God it's Friday.
And I think you're headed in to join us at Rebel Live tomorrow in Whitby, are you not?
No, I won't.
No, I won't be.
I won't be at a Rebel News Live in Whidby tomorrow, unfortunately.
But Celine, you're coming, right?
Celine's going to be there.
Jim and I will be on the way as soon as this live stream is done.
Okay, well, let's let you guys go.
William, hopefully, you can sleep in tomorrow.
Sleep in tomorrow, turn the alarm clock off, get some rest.
Promise I will.
Okay, great.
Let's throw to an ad so that these two can, like Keith Wilson, leave gracefully.
Freedom in 2022 is not sitting idly by while health diktats with no skin in the game make up all the rules.
If you're like me and want to play an active role in upholding civil liberties and freedoms for all Canadians, for our children, and eventually our grandchildren, then come out to our Rebel Live event and get to know us in person.
We'll hear from some of the most influential leaders in the freedom movement.
We have events in Toronto on November the 19th and in Calgary on Saturday, November 26th.
Tickets are on sale now at RebelNewsLive.com.
Why People Are Surprised00:15:20
Come out, have lunch, get some Rebel swag, meet the Rebels, and more.
You don't want to miss this event.
check it out rebelnewslive.com so now that my two colleagues have left the set i'm joined now by a convoy member tom marazzo
Tom, I don't know how you want to describe yourself, but actually, you know what?
We get some people asking for a little bit more context about who some of our guests are.
So Tom, why don't you explain your role during the convoy?
I'll let you explain it instead of me trying to fuddle my way through it.
Sure.
So I came originally at the probably two days after the convoy rolled into Ottawa.
And then once I got here, I kind of was here just to help out with some of the logistics.
And then as time went on, my role started to evolve.
Once Keith and Eva arrived, then I started to work a lot with Keith and Evra.
Eva, but all throughout the time I spent working with the police liaison teams and trying to make sure that everything was very safe and responsible with the truck convoy members that were in the streets, but also working with the police.
And then as time went on, like the situation was evolving.
So that's when Keith, myself, and Eva started to kind of try to get the ball rolling with other members of the leadership within the convoy and try to get some traction going.
And so that's why if anyone saw in the testimony for this public inquiry or the commission, I had spoken about my role.
or it was told to the public that I was in meetings with the city manager, Keith and Eva.
But it was just something that I never had an opportunity to discuss.
So a lot of people seemed to be surprised about it when I testified.
But the reality is it wasn't a secret.
It was just those were meetings that I participated in.
Right.
During the convoy.
Yeah.
I mean, and why would you?
Yeah.
Why would it come up a conversation?
Like, why would that be a thing that you needed to go around telling people?
I just, I don't know.
I understand why people would get uptight about that, but whatever.
Oh, well, well, you know, it's just been, it's been constant.
I'm just getting hit from all sides over my testimony from various groups that are allegedly on our side.
I'm just getting hit from all sides because, you know, they saw the testimony and it was things that they had never heard in probably the 50 or 60 interviews that I've given since the convoy because, you know, it was just never important to bring those details up.
But it seemed to surprise people.
And the latest rumors that I heard, this is a good one.
Ready for this?
I work for Doug Ford.
Even though I campaigned against Doug Ford in the last Ontario election and I did several videos denouncing everything about Doug Ford, the latest rumor is that I work directly for Doug Ford.
And that, you know, my favorite one is controlled opposition.
I've also heard CIA, CSIS, FBI, RCMP, Ottawa Police.
And my latest one is that I work for Doug Ford personally.
You know what?
You seem far too organized to work for the OPS.
I'll tell you that.
Yeah.
Isn't that the truth?
Isn't that the truth?
You know, I get those like, you're controlled opposition emails because I don't talk about the pet cause that they want to talk about because I'm too busy talking about something else.
And I just reply.
I don't often reply because like, who cares?
But sometimes I just reply, like, do I seem like somebody who's easily controlled?
You should ask my husband.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
You can't put out the rumors, but I don't even care to at this point.
People say, like, I could explain it a thousand times.
Yeah.
And people will still come up with a new creative way to make me answer the same question.
So I don't even care anymore.
You know, I just don't.
I'm tired of it.
You can't.
You can't.
Let's throw to clip seven, Efron, because as you can tell, viewers at home, Tom's obviously just a wild man, hard to control and incredibly out of control.
He just has zero composure whatsoever.
That is, of course, if you listen to these two crones who work for the Privy Council.
Those are my words, not Tom's.
Janice Charette, she's the chief clerk of the Privy Council.
So like the chief bureaucrat really of the country.
And she explains that there were layers of threats from the Freedom Convoy.
And she noted the, quote, incredibly violent rhetoric posted online by people that God only knows if they're even in the convoy or they're just saying stuff on Facebook.
You know, you could do that, right?
Like you could just comment on Facebook.
Someone should tell these, like they look old enough so that they just probably just live on Facebook.
So I don't understand why they don't know how Facebook doesn't look, but she said that also the convoy was very well financed.
Well, that's what people do when they care about a cause.
If they can't throw their activity behind it, they'll throw their money behind it.
That's how it works.
Well, we got to remember there was also a travel ban for unvaccinated people.
So the only way you could get to Ottawa was to be if you drove.
And I drove across the country from Ontario to Alberta this summer.
It took me two and a half days.
And I only stopped for five hours each night.
And I drove straight through.
And so, you know, it's hard to drive across this country and especially in the winter.
I did it in the summertime.
So this is an interesting point because I laughed when I heard the testimony where they said, oh, well, we thought they just come for the weekend.
It's like, okay, so you're going to drive across Canada between five and seven days in snow in winter and stay for two days and then turn around and go back.
Like, who comes up with the logic to this?
Government workers.
Government workers.
As I watched this, I was like, I get exactly why these two were appointed by Justin Trudeau because they are just perfect true believers.
They will just take whatever you tell them and then say it.
And you could tell in their testimony, they were so scripted.
They had notes.
They were like, as Keith said, like calling for their line.
Like, what's the line?
Script.
You know, there was a bit of that here, but let's roll clip seven, if you wouldn't mind.
We had had reported to us that there were IMVE and ideologically motivated extreme violent extremists, individuals who were seen amongst the protest activities, that there was the risk that they or lone actors inspired by them could, there was the threat from them that they could move to serious violence.
We had evidence through both what was being said and an online of incredibly violent rhetoric of hate speech, anti-Semitic, anti-gay, transphobia, and misogynistic death threats, death threats to elected officials, to senior officials, some of which we didn't even know at the time.
We found out afterwards were even worse than we had known at the time of this note being written.
We had the threat of weapons, which we had heard about before the 14th, and then we'd seen at Coots and the size of that cache of weapons and ammunition.
We'd heard that there were kids and vulnerable people in some of the trucks that perhaps were being used to try and keep law enforcement away.
All of that.
And we had a sense that this wasn't a single-headed hydra.
This was a, there was a sense that there was organization, there was coordination, there was a degree of coordination, I think, amongst this set of activities that was very well financed.
What is this woman talking about?
She's talking about Justin Trudeau.
Well, that's, you know, when I was talking, when I was, I wrote that down, when she's like threats to people, that's Justin Trudeau.
And there was a lot of coulda, mighta, shoulda, coulda, maybe in her testimony there where she's like, it could happen.
They could do this.
They could do that.
I'm in Toronto right now.
I could die of hating this city.
No offense to Torontonians.
I've lived there twice.
I get it.
But, you know, like there, if there was hate speech, show me the hate speech charges.
There's provisions under the law to charge people with hate speech.
If you saw that, where's the charges?
If there's charges, fine.
But again, there are tools under the law to deal with hate speech online.
We already have that.
If there's violent rhetoric, if we're saying like a threat to cause bodily harm, that's a criminal code problem.
Charge that person.
You don't need. more policing tools to deal with any of the things that she just said.
Yes.
And you know what's an important thing to I was fully expecting that the intelligence people would come out and say, hey, we have a threat that is so serious that we can't tell you because we have to do it behind closed doors.
That was kind of my expectation.
But here's my issue with that whole argument.
If you have a serious threat of that nature, that you can only talk to the judge in the commission council behind closed doors, then that tells me that whatever that threat is, you need to have enhanced people in law enforcement like the true team for the OPP or the ERT team for the RCMP,
or even a military special operations like people that do that stuff for a living, take down the specific individuals that are a direct threat that you can't share the intelligence about.
What you don't do is you say, hey, there's a crime down the street in my neighborhood.
So we're going to have the police sweep through the entire neighborhood.
You can't go after everybody with the broad brush if there's one specific concern that you have.
And yet, we'll hear more from the director of the CSIS on Monday, I believe he's up.
But this is my prediction.
My prediction is that the director of CSIS is going to come on there, Vino, on Monday and actually back up his report.
I don't think he's going to contradict his own report.
My guess is he's going to go on there and basically make the rest of them look like the fools that they are.
Okay.
I really do.
That's my prediction.
I'm willing to be wrong because after all, we're dealing with the federal government and the entire intelligence community that on one side of their face is that actually, yeah, we weren't really worried about section two of the CSIS Act, but yeah, it was an illegal occupation and there was violent thoughts.
Right.
So the contradictions continuously pile up inside the same sentences.
And I want to warn the viewers of all of this.
If you thought that the last two days were really hard to watch, wait until Monday to Friday.
Your blood is going to boil.
And my prediction is by Friday, you're going to be willing, you're going to be ready to burst.
So don't watch TV if you have a projectile in your hand because you're going to lose your TV.
Sitting in the audience, and I mean, William Selin can confirm this.
It's very, very difficult to sit and to listen to this perpetual reel.
It's like B-roll of lies over and over and over.
And it's like, it's already been proven.
I don't know how many times in the last five, six weeks we've been at this, that what you're saying is a lie and you're just regurgitating the talking points from last February.
Yeah.
It's in their own emails.
They contradict their own emails.
The clerk of the Privy Council said that there had been no movement on dealing with the truckers, but we've seen emails and correspondence, text messages saying that they had been in communication with you and Tom or you and Keith and Tamara on moving the trucks and that progress had already been made in that you had been moving trucks.
Yes.
And yet she's saying by week three, we'd seen nothing, but communications with cabinet show that they know.
So it's, as you say, it's a b-roll of lies.
It's gaslighting.
The evidence is sitting there for the public to read if they want to read it.
I don't know what they're counting on.
Are they counting on the mainstream media or the laziness and disinterest of the general public?
Well, you're starting to see the mainstream media start to kind of change their story, which is interesting to me.
You know, I think that the mainstream media smells a little bit of blood in the water.
Yeah.
And they're hedging their bets because my guess is when this commission comes back and says that the EA was not warranted, you didn't have the right to do it, when it comes back and it's, you know, in the public's favor, not the government's, I think the government, my, again, I'm hesitant to make a prediction, but why not?
What have I got to lose, really?
I think that the government is going to, it's going to force an election in the new year.
It won't happen before the report comes out, but I really think that this is going to be just too big of a body blow for the liberal government to withstand.
One more monumental scandal like this.
I don't think he's going to be able to survive.
And how that mechanism happens, I don't know.
I don't know if it's going to be his party ousts him or if it's going to be a vote in on confidence, because you're seeing that there's evidence that the NDP are starting to flip on him.
They're asking for a public inquiry about COVID.
So things are starting to fall apart.
And I've heard rumors that in Ottawa right now, amongst the leadership of the federal liberal party, that it's turning into a survivor after the merge.
When they go into individual immunity or tribal council, somebody's going to get voted off.
Parliament's Survival Game00:02:51
And we see that Christia Freeland is already being pre-positioned to take over as the head of NATO, which is a terrifying thought.
Oh, I'm terrified of that thought for the entire planet, not just for Canada.
And so we're seeing all these things move around, these shifts, right?
And I think honestly, this is my prediction.
And I really don't care if I'm wrong, but my prediction is the report comes back in February.
His government legally falls through mechanisms of parliament.
And we go into an election.
And so I think the media is starting to see that narrative and they're hedging their bets.
Like, okay, I better start supporting the next government.
And we think that's going to be the conservatives.
I'm hoping.
I don't know.
But it's going to be a new government.
And we better hedge our bets and figure out how we can get this crap off of us that we've had for all these years.
Right.
So I think that's the motivation for the media to start turning on the liberals a little bit.
They're hedging their bet.
I don't think they do anything for virtuous.
I'm going to push back.
I don't know if they're going to turn on the liberals.
I think they'll turn on Justin Trudeau and realize that they have hitched their cart to a dead horse.
And they want us all to suddenly be hard of remembering about how they vilified the convoy, lied about the convoy, spread fake news about the convoy, published fake news about the convoy, believe the government verbatim.
I think they're all of a sudden going to want us to forget about that.
And they're going to be like, oh, no, we thought this was a bad idea all along.
Watch who they start favoring within the liberal cabinet.
I think Trista Freeland might be too deep involved in this to come up with a lot of people.
She's not palatable.
Yeah.
Yeah.
She's like, just in suffering.
Basically.
Yeah.
And I, and I, and I think that's a, even better, I'm willing to accept your assessment over mine.
I think that's a better version of this.
You know, people forget that during when he invoked the Emergency Act, three days in a row, there were liberal members of parliament, three days back to back in a row that resigned from his own parliament or his own party resigned.
And so I think that there's going to be an appetite for his own party to turn on him.
Yeah.
He's too toxic.
I was thinking about it earlier today about the things that they have not invoked the Emergencies Act for.
Do you remember the Toronto 18 way back in 2006?
I do.
Two separate terror plots, one to bomb the Toronto Stock Exchange.
It was basically an al-Qaeda type attack that they broke up.
Protesters and Counter-Protesters00:06:10
And then I forget the second part of it, but anyway.
There was one in London.
They had one in London.
There was one in London.
That's right.
Yeah, a doctor.
And the police had the existing tools to deal with that, to deal with an al-Qaeda-style terror plot to bomb the Toronto Stock Exchange.
They had the tools to deal with that.
And Justin Trudeau invoked a wartime law on bounty castles and saunas or whirlpools.
Sorry.
Doug Ford doing an advertisement for Whirlpool.
Anyway, it's just ridiculous.
We've got one more clip, Efron, before we let Tom go.
And I know that Celine and William, they're there until we sign off on the string.
So unless William's already asleep on the couch over there.
Anyway, let's go to clip eight.
You're half right.
I know, I know.
Clip eight, counter protesters and Ottawa busy bodies were seeking injunctions against the Freedom Convoy, and those became the two reasons the Emergencies Act was invoked, said the deputy clerk for the Privy Council, Natalie Druin or Druann, I'm not sure how you say it.
Let's roll that clip and we'll talk about it and then we'll sign off so that the kids can go home.
So one of the reasons why it was an important factor.
So first of all, we were seeing citizens, you know, doing some counter protests, asking the court for an injunction.
So when you see the population trying to surround justice because they are not comfortable that law enforcement or government will do, that is for us like a beginning of a sanctum that something worse can happen.
We know what's going on in countries when the populations do not have confidence in our public institutions.
That brings some energy and a lot of uncivilities.
So this is why it was an important element for us, taking into account the erosion in public institutions and making sure that we can address that as soon as possible to avoid the worst, if I may say.
Do these people hear themselves?
Yeah, and my question is, if you're going to talk about counter-protest being a thermometer or the temperature of the public, let's talk about Antifa across this country.
You guys covered, I watched it when you guys were covering out in Calgary.
There was protests out front of a hospital and there was Antifa there literally physically assaulting protesters, peaceful protesters in front of Calgary police.
And Calgary police did nothing.
And had it been reversed, you know that those police would have actually arrested the first group of protesters who were peacefully protesting with signs.
We watched the physical assaults and nothing happened.
It was catch and release of Antifa.
So let's be serious when we're going to talk about protest versus counter protest, because there was a counter protest when James Topp arrived here in the nation's capital, when he walked 4,300 kilometers over 131 days and got to the tomb of the unknown soldier right there before his last footsteps was a counter protest.
Is that the temperature of this country?
We have a counter protest against a five-time deployed combat veteran for this country.
But should we invoke the Emergency Act because the temperature of the citizens of Ottawa was so upsetting that we should invoke the Emergency Act again because of veterans here.
Like these people don't listen to themselves.
I don't think they do.
I mean, she's saying that, you know, we have to invoke the Emergencies Act because people need confidence in our institutions.
They are there protesting because they don't have confidence in the institutions because the institutions have abused them and failed them the last two years.
The police, the medical system, the justice system, the government, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms all failed these people.
That's why they went to Ottawa.
They are protesting the lack of confidence that they have in the institutions.
That's already gone.
By the way, the potential for counter protesters to get violent, arrest the counter protesters when they do get violent.
But you don't punish everybody.
You don't take away everybody's civil liberties because some poorly behaved antifa show up.
You deal with Antifa and you move along, but you don't take away everybody's free speech because some guy is going to show up and punch you in the face.
You take away the guy after he punches you in the face.
There was friends of mine that were from Peterborough that were here delivering food and their truck was completely surrounded by a group of counter protesters.
And they were for the first time actually legitimately fearful for their safety.
And they were stuck in that truck surrounded by people shaking their truck for hours.
There was no police presence to come in and pull them out or save them.
And none of the counter protesters got arrested, did they?
But, you know, to go back to an earlier point about the confidence of institutions, the first time I ever spoke at a public gathering after the convoy, my message was very clear in what my statements were.
I said, right across this country, this convoy was brought about, was manifest by the fact that under the federal and the provincial governments right across this country and the municipal governments, that they disrupted and deliberately harmed the reputations of every institution within our society.
We can no longer call ourselves a civilized society anymore because every society turned its back on the Charter of Rights and it turned its back on the citizens who actually pay their salaries.
Every single institution from religion to banking to education, policing, courts, medicine, law, every society, every institution in society turned its back on common sense.
Why The Truckers Went00:01:43
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that's why the truckers went.
That's why they went is because, you know what, that's what blue-collar people do.
When they see a problem, they don't wait on somebody else to fix it.
They fix it for themselves as best they can.
And that's why they went all the way to Ottawa.
They had no confidence that the politicians would do what they said they would do.
So they went there to have their voices heard.
Tom, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show.
You're always so generous with your time.
I want to preface an earlier statement that I made about Toronto and dying from being in Toronto because I dislike the city so much.
I love the people of Toronto.
Do not send me emails.
I find your city claustrophobic and domineering.
And I'm not used to it because I'm a small town Alberta girl, but I love the people here.
Hopefully we'll have you back on again next week, Tom, as things get a little bit more insane.
We're going to have all the political people trying to save their political skins next week and say that they did this all for the health and safety of Canadians.
Boy, that's a line I've heard a lot these last two years.
I'm going to be sitting in the audience with like acupuncture needles in my face and doing some Zen stuff to try to keep calm in that audience because, you know, our favorite, no, I won't use that word because I'll get into trouble, but, you know, I just want to warn everybody, it's going to be very challenging to keep your composure, even if you're in your own living room.
Yeah.
Well, I'm there two days next week, Tom.
So I might be right off the rev limiter.
All right.
Awesome.
I want to thank everybody in studio for helping us get through the day and to special thanks to Will and Celine for the very long, arduous week they put in.