Ezra Levant exposes the Trucker Commission’s final week as a farce, with police witnesses denying any national emergency yet government officials—Marco Mendocino and Bill Blair—testifying otherwise while relying on manipulated media narratives. Lawyers reveal the Emergencies Act was invoked despite internal assessments calling protests non-threatening, exposing political overreach. Upcoming testimony from Trudeau’s cabinet and CESIS may further prove his administration’s disregard for legal thresholds, deepening skepticism about his judgment. The episode underscores how unchecked power reshapes democracy, leaving Canadians questioning their leaders’ motives. [Automatically generated summary]
Today we talk about the Trucker Commission of Inquiry.
It's in its final week.
Things are getting rambunctious.
The liberals are testifying now.
It's not just police.
And the police, I think, have been pretty honest over the last month.
There was no national emergency.
They didn't need martial law.
Here come the liars, though, Marco Mendocino, Bill Blair, and soon enough, Justin Trudeau himself.
We'll take you through the latest.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
It's the video version of this podcast.
Go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe, eight bucks a month.
Come on, help me out, because that's how I pay our payroll here.
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That's RebelNewsPlus.com.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, tensions rise in the final days of the Trucker Commission.
We'll have the latest.
It's November 2nd.
This is the Ezra Levant Show.
shame on you you censorious mayhem at the trucker commission in ottawa here's why It's been going on for a month already.
And it is required by law that whenever the Emergencies Act is invoked, which happened in February, so it's nine months ago now, well, we knew it was coming, but Trudeau is rigging the rules.
See, he's dumping hundreds of documents, thousands of pages, on the commission and its lawyers only now, as in like last night, like today.
There's no way that the lawyers for the commission or the lawyers for the truckers or the judge himself can read through these hundreds or thousands of documents in time.
And not just the documents are blacked out, not by the judge, not after a back and forth over whether they're confidential or disclosable.
It's just Trudeau deciding that he doesn't want his more embarrassing words or deeds to be revealed.
I said before that I believe this judge has generally done the right thing in this inquiry, but mainly it's been the police witnesses who have generally done the right thing, senior cops from the Ottawa Police Service, from the Ontario Provincial Police, from the RCMP, from other governments like Alberta and Ontario, even Saskatchewan.
Not a single police chief has said that they needed martial law to solve the problem of the protesters.
There was a big border crossing at the big bridge between Windsor and Detroit, cleared peacefully without martial law.
Same with the blockade of the Alberta-Montana border.
No cop needed martial law.
And that's an important test in the Emergencies Act.
There needs to be an extreme danger to the country.
And part two, that danger cannot be solved by any other law.
Neither of these two parts of the test were met.
And all the cops so far have been honest enough to say so.
But it's the end of the honesty part as the political liars take the stand.
Bill Blair, the disgraced ex-cop who ran the G20 Civil Liberties bonfire when he worked in Ontario that saw hundreds of innocent people being kettled and physically abused by police.
But Trudeau, being a bully, is considered a plus to him, not a minus when it comes to policing.
So the cops disclosed their records to the commission.
The cops testified more or less honestly, I think.
But now come Trudeau's liars and their late disclosure.
There are two ways to handle documents that you have to turn over, but you don't want to in a legal process.
One is to pretend that they don't exist, to just lie and to hide them or to delay.
That's usually what Trudeau does, for example, with access to information.
But that might be too obvious here since all the police forces have disclosed theirs.
So the other way is to wait, to the night before the hearing and then over-disclose, to give hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of pages, maybe in huge bankers boxes or huge PDF documents and make people try to find the needle in the haystack the night before the hearing or show them where the needle in the haystack is, but black it out.
Make it so there's no time for the judicial inquiry to consider the matter.
Here's how that meltdown went today.
Good morning, sir.
My name is Keith Wilson, counsel for the convoy organizers.
I apologize for my voice.
I'm recovering from a cold.
I have a bit of the same.
Thank you, sir.
Sir, we're not in a position to proceed with Cross at this time, and there's two reasons.
One is the federal government has disclosed over a week ago an extension volume of documents that are highly redacted.
It is obvious from the face of the documents that they don't meet the criteria for lawful redactions.
A motion was made last week for those redactions to be lifted.
The submissions closed on Thursday evening.
We still have no ruling.
A number of days have passed.
For the cross-examination and the discovery of truth process to be valid and effective, the parties require access to the documents.
We don't have that.
So we would appreciate some indication as to when the Commission is actually going to rule on that and hopefully compel the proper disclosure of the records so that cross-examinations can be effective.
I emphasize that these documents are not related to future witnesses, but present witnesses.
So we're making the process inefficient with all due respect by not allowing the parties to have access to unredacted documents.
Second reason we're not in a position to proceed with our cross-examination at this time with this witness is our lead counsel, Mr. Brendan Miller, who had prepared for the cross.
As you know, sir, has been removed from the room by you when he was raising a motion to find a way around the absence of a ruling on the redactions.
So we're just not in a position to proceed on cross sir.
Okay, well, just on your first question, it is expected that the ruling will come out during the lunch hour.
There have been a fair amount of back and forth without going into detail.
There are some, let's say, innovative type of issues that had to be dealt with.
So that should come out at lunchtime, which I'm happy to.
I will do my utmost.
It's going to come out, unfortunately, probably and not on the record the website because it won't be translated, which is one of the issues we have to deal with.
But we will, in light of what you say, we'll issue it in English only for the moment and it will become be posted when it's bilingual.
But I understand that submission.
So that should enable you so we can put off the cross-examinations till after the lunchtime.
In terms of the other problem, that's not something I can deal with.
I'm trying to deal the best I can with the situation.
And quite frankly, if the issue had been raised the way you have now, I would have given the answer I'm giving now.
So what I propose then, since this witness will be here after lunch, we simply delay till after lunch, if you could endeavor, because I see you have Mr. Wilt, you have a co-counsel, so can sort out how that can be done.
That would be appreciated.
Now, maybe it doesn't matter.
I'm pretty sure that any judge would rule on the preponderance of evidence, that there was no legal basis for martial law.
I think that's pretty well established by now.
I think all Trudeau is doing is hiding his most crass, his most abusive, his most embarrassing comments and deeds from the media.
Downtown Protesters' Perspective00:16:10
That's Trudeau.
He thinks he's above the law.
It reminds me of when the federal court ordered him to accredit Rebel News as journalist for the leaders' debates, and we showed up, and the judge had ordered that we be accredited as journalists literally hours earlier.
But to Trudeau, that court order didn't apply to him.
That's just some judge.
He's Trudeau.
He does what he wants.
First of all, questions around accreditation were handled by the press gallery and the consortium of networks who have strong perspectives on quality journalism and the important information that is shared with Canadians.
The reality is, organizations, organizations like yours, that continue to spread misinformation and disinformation on the science around vaccines,
around how we're going to actually get through this pandemic and be there for each other and keep our kids safe, is part of why we're seeing such unfortunate anger and lack of understanding of basic science.
And quite frankly, your, I won't call it a media organization, your group of individuals need to take accountability for some of the polarization that we're seeing in this country.
And I think Canadians are cluing into the fact that there is a really important decision we take about the kind of country we want to see.
And I salute all extraordinary, hardworking journalists that put science and facts at the heart of what they do and ask me tough questions every day, but make sure that they are educating and informing Canadians from a broad range of perspectives, which is the last thing that you guys do.
I mean, Justin Trudeau takes bribes from foreign lobbyists.
That's the ruling by the Ethics Commissioner, but he doesn't give a damn.
Justin Trudeau sexually assaulted Rose Knight doesn't deny it, but says she just experienced it differently.
Again, I've been reflecting on the actual interaction, and if I apologize later, then it would be because I sensed that she was not entirely comfortable with the interaction we had.
Like I said, I've been working very hard to try and piece it together.
And even when the original editorial came out at the time, I was fairly confident, I was very confident that I hadn't acted in a way that I felt was in any way inappropriate.
But like I said, part of the lesson that we all have to learn through this is respecting that the same interactions can be felt very differently by different people going through them.
And we have to respect that.
I apologize in the moment.
I certainly feel that if, again, I don't want to speak for her.
I don't want to presume how she feels now.
I haven't reached out to her.
No one on my team has reached out to her.
Don't think that would be appropriate at all.
So I'm responsible for my side of the interaction, which certainly, as I said, I don't feel was in any way untoward.
But at the same time, this lesson that we are learning, and I'll be blunt about it, often a man experiences an interaction as being benign or not inappropriate, and a woman, particularly in a professional context, can experience it differently.
And we have to respect that.
Why would Trudeau be different now?
I mean, Trudeau is a bit of a fascist, just like his father figure, Fidel Castro, just like his favorite political party in the world, the Chinese Communist Party.
There's a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say we need to go green as fast as we need to start investing in solar.
I mean, there is a flexibility that I know Stephen Harper must dream about of having a dictatorship that he could do everything he wanted.
Today, Marco Mendocino, the laughable public safety minister, testified.
He's such a comical figure, the kind of guy who's such a klutz, he falls out of a chair.
That's not me being mean.
I think that's a fact.
I think that's how everyone sees him in the government.
Here's a pitiful text message where he's complaining that his own deputy minister drafted up a plan to deal with the truckers and circulated it widely amongst other government offices, but never bothered to show him.
He only found out about it later and then asked to see it.
No one in the government treats Marco Mendocino with any respect.
They laugh at him.
He's not really in charge.
Even his own staff don't report to him.
What an embarrassment.
And look at this part of his statement.
There was no violence that he saw that would make martial law necessary.
He saw none.
He only saw reports of violence, reports as in some reporter, some online gossip generated by the media party that was all on the government payroll anyways.
They saw a report.
Yesterday there were documents shown of CISAs talking about all the reporters who would pretty much write whatever the government told them to write.
One of them works for the Globe and Mail.
How can the Globe and Mail still keep her on knowing that she is basically just a repeater for whatever Trudeau tells her to say?
I mean, how can she show her face in public as a journalist anymore?
Well, that's an easy one.
The Globe and Mail takes more money from Justin Trudeau and the newspaper bailouts than any other newspaper in Canada other than the Toronto Star.
It's easy for them to run Trudeau propaganda.
He already rents them.
One of the grossest things is that Mendocino, who works with soldiers and police all the time, said one of the things that he hated the most about the truckers that there were military veterans amongst them.
Stop for a moment.
You and I, when we think of military veterans, we think of people who have risked their lives for us.
They fought in wars as recently as Afghanistan.
Maybe they were wounded.
They serve us.
They were willing to die for us.
Some of them are still injured to this day because of their war wounds.
But to Mendocino, they're a threat.
They're terrorists.
They're radicals because they actually believe in freedom and the right to protest.
It reminds me of this guy.
Because honestly, Mr. Prime Minister, I was prepared to be injured in the line of duty when I joined the military.
Nobody forced me to join the military.
I was prepared to be killed in action.
What I wasn't prepared for, Mr. Prime Minister, is Canada turning its back on me.
So which veteran was it that you were talking about?
Thank you, sir.
Thank you for your passion and your strength and being here today to share this justifiable frustration and anger with me and with all of us here.
Thank you for having the courage to stand here, and thank you for listening to my answer.
On a couple of elements you brought up.
First of all, why are we still fighting against certain veterans groups in court?
Because they're asking for more than we are able to give right now.
They are asking for more than we, well, no?
Hang on.
You're asking for honest answers.
This Trekker Commission is interesting.
We started at the margins and are working our way to the center, sort of getting closer and closer to the middle of the bullseye.
The local police forces first, then the National Police Force, then CESIS, now the cabinet.
Soon it will be the master liar himself, Justin Trudeau.
If you think the trickery and insults are thick now, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Stay with us for more on today's Ongoings.
Okay.
NES spoke with NSIA, it looks like, and Jodie Thomas, but the NSIA is a Jody Thomas.
Section 2 of the CESIS Act, violence not met.
Wonder if we need full 30 days if Ottawa cleared.
I suppose the question would be, Minister, were you aware that it had been concluded that Section 2 of the CESIS Act was not met?
Was sorry, what is the date of this note?
I'm afraid I don't know.
Well, look, leaving that aside, yes, I was.
It says it's before the speech Monday morning, which is the date that they announced the invocation.
That might assist.
Okay.
Yes, I was aware that CESIS had concluded that Section 2 under the CESIS Act was not met.
I was aware of that fact.
Well, I had the pleasure of visiting our pop-up studio in downtown Ottawa.
As you know, we've rented an Airbnb just a stone's throw from where the judicial inquiry is happening.
And we've turned it into a studio, and there's four bedrooms there.
So some of our reporters have been cycling through there.
Sheila Gunreed is there recently.
Celine Glass, Efron Monsanto has been there.
A whole crew has passed through.
I was there for one day.
I loved him.
And we're going to be there for the duration.
If you want to help us out, go to truckercommission.com.
You can see all of our work and help us cover the cost of the Airbnb and the snacks for the fellas.
It's serious business, though.
I'm joking around a bit, although it is really fun for us to have an office right downtown.
Of course, William Diaz-Berthium is our Ottawa-based reporter.
He's just really shone like a rising star, hasn't he?
But things have turned a little bit darker as we move from the police to the politicians.
I think the police were abusive on the ground in many cases.
Of course, they shot our reporter, Alexa Lavoie.
Thousands of protesters, thousands of police.
You tell me, is it a coincidence that the one person shot by police happened to be a rebel news reporter?
Is that likely to be just random chance?
We'll find out.
We're suing that police officer.
But back to the hearings, the police, I think we're fairly honest.
They don't need to carry water for Justin Trudeau.
I doubt any real police like Justin Trudeau.
Every one of them down to the last officer said, no, no, we didn't need martial law to solve these law enforcement issues.
We had plenty of power under the criminal code, under provincial offenses, and under parking tickets.
But now the liars have come and they're saying, oh, no, no, no, no, we needed this.
Bill Blair was saying one of his motivations was that there were embarrassing pictures of Ottawa in the news around the world.
Well, I think that putting the country under martial law is even more embarrassing.
What is happening in the last two days?
Well, let's call in a lawyer for the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms.
I have to say, the JCCF has really been the star of the show.
Of course, our friends at the Democracy Fund in the form of Alan Honor has been a lawyer there as well.
But I think the JCCF has had six or seven lawyers on the ground there, really making sure that the commission asks the right questions.
And joining us now via Skype from our nation's capital is Rob Gitteridge, one of the JCCF lawyers.
Nice to see you, Rob.
Nice to see you as well, Ezra.
Well, tell us a little bit first about yourself.
We've had the pleasure of talking to a number of JCCF lawyers.
I think our viewers really know the JCCF well, but they probably don't know you.
Give me a 30-second biography.
Well, I joined the JCCF about a year ago.
Prior to that, I was primarily an intellectual property lawyer, but got a little frustrated with the fact that the Copyright Act keeps getting eaten away by secret trade treaties and wanted to move into something a little more, I guess, impactful on the charter rights of Canadians.
And I was lucky enough to get involved with the JCCF about a year ago.
We were, as you know, on the ground in Ottawa during the protests, as I believe Democracy Fund lawyers were in Ottawa and in Windsor as well.
And when the opportunity came up to apply for standing at the commission, my colleague Adam Keir and I filled out the application, you know, and went through that process.
And here we find ourselves in the middle of this historic inquiry, which seems to be actually going surprisingly well as it shakes out.
Yeah.
Well, I think it has been so far.
But I think that's because the facts are so striking.
There has been, I mean, it's going well because the protests went well.
There was no violence.
The protesters were there in good faith.
They cooperated with the city to move the trucks away from residential areas to keep lanes clear.
I remember they were shoveling snow when they had downtown.
I think the reason the hearings are going well is because the truckers were so well behaved.
And every cop who's honest says, yeah, we didn't need the Emergencies Act.
But tell me how it is turning now that Bill Blair and Marco Mendocino and soon the prime minister himself.
Tell me what's going on now.
What about this document dump?
What about holding government files, all of which were generated in February?
Why are they being held to late November and then dumped on the commission and the lawyers mere hours or even minutes before the hearings?
Well, it's hard to speculate why, or maybe it's a little easy to speculate why, but there's been a bit of an ongoing document dump.
It's tough for us to talk about that in too much detail because we're bound by fairly strict confidentiality undertaking.
So anything that's not in evidence, we can't speak about too specifically.
But let's just say there's been a fair amount of last minute document review going on in the last little while.
And that work has only picked up as the witnesses are getting more and more high level in government.
I think just to touch on a point that you made a minute ago, you could hardly ask for a cleaner set of facts here.
As it happened, I think this was a confluence of, you know, a coincidental confluence of events in a lot of ways.
It just so happened that Justin Trudeau upset a group of people who drive very large and hard to move vehicles.
And I think that was important in, You know, coincidentally making it easier for them to get entrenched in a way that made it hard to move them along.
But coincidentally, too, all of the people that came together at the top of the protest movement happened to be extremely reasonable people who were doing their best to encourage nonviolence.
And as we headed into an inquiry into their behavior as well as the government's behavior, really, there's not a lot to point to that's particularly bad behavior on the part of the protesters.
While the same cannot necessarily be said for our federal government, as we've been moving through the hearings, the first stage or earlier on, we were hearing from the police, who's, I guess, real dog in the race here is just to kind of pin the blame on another police force.
Narrative Control Matters00:11:38
And none of them were particularly argumentative about the idea that they had powers available to them.
They had tow trucks available.
They arranged for tow trucks.
It turned kind of turned into a tow truck inquiry into a tow truck emergency at one point, where basically every cross-examination we were doing was about whether and where tow trucks were obtained and how much they were available.
But the testimony of the police established pretty clearly that there were plenty of powers at common law and statute law outside of the Emergencies Act to handle the protests.
It just wasn't being handled properly by, you know, each police force was pointing to some other police force that mishandled it.
But as we get into, so that's one of the key ingredients here is in order for the Emergencies Act to be lawfully invoked, there has to be no, the situation has to be one that couldn't be effectively controlled with existing laws and powers.
And the first stage of the emergency established that those powers existed.
And as we head into the federal government witnesses, we're starting to get more into the question of whether there was a threat to the security of Canada, as that term is defined in the CESIS Act, in existence as a result of the protests.
And what we're hearing so far from government witnesses, and what it looks like we'll continue hearing, is that they've conveniently expanded the definition of a threat to the security of Canada.
And it means something other than what it means in the legislation, apparently, to them.
And that, I think, is going to be the second piece of why the invocation turns out to be unlawful.
And I think we're really getting there at this point.
Yeah, it's pretty plain when every cop says, no, there was little to no danger.
And no, we didn't need extra help to solve it.
In fact, I forget which witness it was who was saying that the state of alert today is identical to what it was back then in terms of danger.
I mean, what a laugh, by the way, Ottawa is still under partial lockdown today.
So I think the politicians like drama.
And that's one of the interesting things is you see these internal chats amongst politicians.
And they knew they were going too far and they talked amongst themselves and they never thought that it would be published.
They never thought that their texts would be revealed about how they have to gin up narratives, how they have to whip up the January 6th insurrection theme up here, how they had to reach out to their pet reporters to get them to say that this is a dangerous.
You could see that they didn't believe it.
They didn't believe it was a crisis because they were working to make it look like a crisis that they knew it wasn't.
And I think that they're given away by their own internal records.
It wasn't bad.
They knew it wasn't bad.
They wanted it to be bad so they could demonize their opponents as violent.
They wanted to.
Go ahead.
I think that attempt to demonize to demonize in general has been a part of the, I mean, it was part of the election platform of the Liberal Party.
It's been a part of their, what appears to be their political strategy since at least the election in 2021.
I think to those of us who are watching these protests with an open mind, it's hard to see what was happening on the ground in the way that it was portrayed in the media, whatever the term you guys like to use, the legacy media, whatever, certainly didn't reflect what was seen on the ground.
These are legitimate frustrations being aired by Canadians just like you and me who've been under the boot of their government like never before and who've decided to come to Ottawa to protest.
And the best that the government can do, because they can't admit that they've gone too far in terms of their COVID policy or in terms of the mandates that they decide to impose, the best that the government could do was to paint these people as terrorists or as violent or as racist or as misogynist or all these other things.
I think that was apparent to anybody watching with an open mind, but it's really interesting to be in the seat where I'm at and watch the sausage get made a little bit.
And it turns out that that's exactly what it looks like they were doing.
It's hard to capture that in a specific text or a specific document, but a number of documents are in evidence already that talk about strategizing to get on a narrative of painting these people in a certain way.
And there's a, I can't talk about what's in store, but I can say that there are a few more documents that we intend to bring out.
Yeah, you know, if there's a real crime spree, you don't need to have a planning meeting to strategize on convincing reporters that it's a crime wave because the crime is the wave.
You know, the horrific mass serial killer, Paul Bernardo, you didn't need strategizing to tell journalists what was going on.
They could see it was horrific.
Here's a pro tip: if you have to have meetings and call up reporters and plant ideas in their minds that these are violent people, odds are it's not violent people.
That's how it was back in February, but here we are in November.
And I'm watching either directly or through Sheila Gunrid's Twitter feed what's going on in the commission.
And I see how we're covering it every day at TruckerCommission.com.
I see how some other independent media like True North are covering it, Rupa Subramania at National Post, and a handful of others.
But I also see those same propagandists that the government was orchestrating in February.
I see they're still orchestrating it today.
Rachel Gilmore, the TikTok gal for Global, for example.
It's like she's still being directed.
I mean, she's absolutely part of the PMO talking points machine.
And so here's my question to you, Rob.
Those who are awake to this, the people who follow Rebel News or True North, people who are in the Trucker Convoy, see this commission as absolute vindication.
But most people don't follow Rebel News.
Most people don't follow the news at all.
Those who do follow it, they probably get CTV or Global or just see the headline in the Toronto Star, the largest newspaper in the country.
Is the truth of this commission coming out through those legacy media papers, through those regime media outlets are ordinary people who are not really, really dialed in.
Like rebel news viewers are obsessed with this, as I am.
It's the most important civil liberties issue in our generation.
But for severely normal people, for whom this is just interesting and not much more, are they hearing and seeing what's really going on?
Or are you worried that the media party is lying to them again?
I think the narrative is pushing through even into those old, you know, the legacy media or the, you know, the funded, the government-funded media, whatever you want to call them.
But at the beginning of the hearings, you would see, you know, what appeared to be some real effort to take, you know, something that a commissioner of police said or something that whoever said and twist it in the most anti-protest way possible.
These days, though, the headlines that I'm seeing in newspapers, in the Toronto Star even, are really starting to question the legitimacy of the invocation of the act.
And I think that the narrative is really picking up.
The veneer is being taken off of this a bit, and it's becoming harder and harder to defend this as a legitimate, as a lawful invocation of the Emergencies Act.
And I mean, you see a lot of, I guess what you think about, you know, the protesters on the ground seems to, up until recently, have informed the perception that a given person might have about whether the Emergencies Act was justified or not.
If you don't like the hornhonking, then absolutely it was justified.
But the narrative is starting to cut through that now.
And I think I came into this hopeful that I guess I had sort of set a measure of success for myself.
Like I wanted to put together a record that no matter what the outcome of the hearings was, I wanted to put together a record and a set of submissions that made it clear that the resources that were needed, the powers that were needed to clear these protests existed at law outside of the Emergencies Act.
And my measure of success was, regardless of how the commission comes down, regardless of the commissioner's decision and findings in all of this, I want there to be somewhere in the annals of history submissions by, you know, authored by Rob Kittridge that made it clear that the one ingredient that's necessary for the lawful invocation of the Emergencies Act, the fact that there was no,
there were powers available at ordinary law to make that clear for the purpose of history.
And I thought that would be a measure of success.
At this point, it's getting very hard to see how the commissioner has any option but to condemn the invocation of the emergencies act as unlawful, because we're getting very clear pictures.
We've already got a very clear picture from the police that powers were available.
And we're starting to get an extremely clear picture that what was considered to be a threat to the security of Canada in contemplating the invocation of the Act actually was not a threat to the security of Canada, as that's defined in the CESIS Act.
And the Emergencies Act requires a threat under the CESIS Act definition.
So it's going to be very difficult as slanted or biased as a newspaper may be, it's going to be pretty hard to report on a finding of condemnation in a way that caters to the pro-government perspective entirely.
So I think the narrative is really cutting through.
Well, of course, we know that Justin Trudeau, you know, water off a duck's back.
He's been convicted how many times of violating the Conflict of Interest Act.
Oh, well, you know, he was caught sexually assaulting Rose Knight in Creston, B.C.
Oh, well, she experienced it differently.
He wore blackface so many times he can't keep track.
Oh, well, it's a good learning opportunity for the rest of us.
You know, I think that even if he is found not to have had justification here, oh, well, well, we did what we could at the time, and we'll always do what's right for Canadians.
And it's a time to reflect on civil, you know, it, I mean, he, in a way, is a sociopath in that he, he has no conscience about this stuff.
Data Is the Weapon00:02:31
It's all, you know, he admires Castro.
He admires the Communist Party of China, and they, you know, they break some eggs to make some omelets, and it's the ends that justify the means to him.
That's my personal view.
Rob Kitteridge, it's a pleasure to talk with you and introduce you to our viewers.
And I say again that the JCCF team has been absolutely indispensable.
And a large reason why the commission has been as successful as you describe is because of the excellent cross-examination of the witnesses done by you and your fellow lawyers.
I really don't know what would have happened if you guys weren't there.
You really.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me.
Someone with the nickname Healing Man said, has everyone forgot Elon is creating NeuroLink?
The internet is a great way for him to collect data for NeuroLink.
Data is the preferred weapon of today.
Simple use of your God-given common sense tells you this.
That's something that James Lindsey referred to yesterday.
He said that Elon Musk sort of gets ahead of things the government is thinking about.
Neuralink is, I don't know that much about it, but it's what would be called transhumanism, connecting machines to our bodies and then even to our minds.
And it is terrifying.
I think it's the thing I'm most worried about with Elon Musk, in fact, that and his exposure to China.
Someone named Awaiting the King says any news outlet who keeps on posting articles and talking about Musk only gives him more power.
Anyone with an ounce of intelligence and integrity and a voice for a news website would not keep doing this.
Well, Twitter is the digital public square.
As there are right-wing echo chambers like Gab is one.
There are left-wing echo chambers.
But the thing about Twitter is everyone's there.
The right and the left and entertainers and politicians and sports people.
So that is the place to go to engage, to build a following.
If you already have a following, you can do like Trump has done.
Truth Social.
There are no liberals in Truth Social other than some hecklers.
For Trump to win and to expand, he needs something like Facebook or Twitter where there are undecided or independents.
That's why Twitter is so important, is there really are people in the middle.
And they are there to learn and watch and listen.
And they are a prize to be won in terms of hearts and minds.
JP Roscoe says, astute assessment, in my opinion.
James is a key critical thinker.
Military Style Response00:09:04
Thanks, Ezra and Rebel.
I love talking to James.
And even when we only schedule it for 10 minutes, it turns into half an hour.
I think we even went longer yesterday.
He's a smart cookie.
Well, that's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.
And keep fighting for freedom.
Hey, everyone, William Jess here with Rebel News once again here in Ottawa.
And today we'll take a look at what went on during the 26th Devi Emergencies Act inquiry, which took place on November 18, 2022.
There's only one week left until the inquiry is over.
Yeah, the inquiry, let's remember, is taking place because back in February, Justin Chudo used a never-seen-before anti-terrorism law called the Emergencies Act on peaceful protesters who are part of the Freedom Convoy here in Ottawa, a movement that protested government overreach and the federal COVID-19 mandates.
Now, on November 18, we heard from four witnesses in total.
We heard four from Deputy Secretary of Emergency Preparedness and COVID-19 recovery, Jacqueline Bogdan, Jeff Hutchison, Senior Advisor of Emergency Preparedness, Jacine Sharette, the clerk of the Privy Council, and Nathalie Drouain, the Deputy Minister of the Department of Justice.
Now, Bogdan and Hutchison both testified together on the first panel of the day, while Sherette testified alongside Druid later on in the afternoon.
Let's first take a look at the opening testimony of the day.
Obviously, PCO plays, you know, as it does in many different situations, helps to coordinate the federal government response to any given situation.
And the same would be true in this case.
And so, what we're trying to do in coordinating that response, we'll convene departments and agencies together.
We're trying to develop a common understanding, a common kind of up-to-date understanding of the situation and assess that situation.
We're determining, you know, what are the actions that the federal government needs to take in response to the situation or might need to take.
Alan Honor from the Democracy Fund was the first lawyer to cross-examine the two witnesses, and he was then followed by Brendan Miller, counsel for Freedom Corp, the organization that represents key leaders of the Freedom Convoy.
Both pressed the witnesses very well on different topics, and the witnesses did not appear super keen to answer every question they were asked.
Take a look.
The situation in BC, and was that the situation with the truck, which apparently broke through the blockades?
Yeah, it was a military-style, that's my recollection.
It was a military-style vehicle that had tried to break through the blockade.
And I believe that made it into the Section 58 explanation that there was a military-style vehicle that broke through the blockades.
That may be.
You could verify that.
And you are aware that by military-style vehicle, they meant a vehicle that was painted in camouflage.
Yeah, that may be.
Thank you very much.
Those are my questions.
Can you agree in this circumstance, you're aware that the Emergencies Act requires for its invocation for there to be a finding that there to be a threat to the security of Canada?
I'm aware of that, yes.
Okay.
And can you agree with me that a threat to the security of Canada in the Emergencies Act, from your understanding, has the same meaning as it does in Section 2 of the CESIS Act?
I'm going to decline to answer this question.
I'm sorry.
I don't feel that in my current responsibilities and my knowledge and understanding that I can answer that question for you.
The Council for the Government of Saskatchewan then cross-examined the witnesses as well.
And it was fairly interesting.
We learned during his cross-examination that the government allegedly only began discussing the use of the Emergencies Act a few days prior to its invocation on February 9th.
Okay, 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.
Following their testimonies, Nathalie Drew and Janice Charette took the stand and began testifying.
Take a look at what they had to say.
This was all happening in Ottawa, a lot of it on Wellington Street.
If you're looking at the coverage in the media, you were seeing the parliament buildings behind it.
So there was a lot of questions being asked of federal ministers.
What are you doing?
And so certainly we had the sense coming out of the meeting on the 8th.
They were impatient to know what they could do.
And that was my direction to the town at this meeting.
We owned it publicly, but we didn't have jurisdiction to address the situation.
So asking ourselves, what can we do to have jurisdiction and really to support on top of supporting municipalities, supporting provinces?
But that was also the type of questions we were asking ourselves.
These two witnesses were also some of the only ones through the whole inquiry that actually said the Freedom Convoy was a national security emergency.
It was origin, it was critical, she said.
Take a look.
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.
Finally, another interesting moment from their testimony arose during a tense exchange between the Council for the Canadian Constitution Federation while he was cross-examining the witnesses.
Monsieur Vigneau learned that the Emergencies Act referenced the threat definition set out in Section 2 of the CSAS Act once the federal government began to seriously consider invoking the EA between February 10th and 13th.
He requested that the service prepare a threat assessment on the risks associated with the invocation of the Emergencies Act.
He felt an obligation to clearly convey the service's position that there did not exist a threat to the security of Canada as defined in the service's legal mandate.
Breakdown In The Rule Of Law00:02:06
And then further on, in the bottom paragraph, so that's pardon me, yes, the paragraph that begins, Monsieur Vignot discussed.
He said he discussed this threat assessment at the IRG on February 13th.
And then he says the document was also available for distribution for the cabinet meeting, but he does not know if it was distributed by the PCO.
So can you please answer, was this threat assessment distributed to the cabinet, yes or no?
I believe I've said earlier that it was.
It was.
After they ended, we invited Keith Wilson, a lawyer for the Freedom Corps, to join us on our live stream to help analyze the events of the day.
Wilson spoke with our editor-in-chief, Shiloh Gun Reid.
Here's what he had to say.
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.
Well, there you have it, folks.
Here's everything you need to know about what went on on November 18th, 2022, during the Emergencies Act inquiry, which there's only one week left.
And we're going to see the Liberal ministers, the Liberal cabinet, and CISIS testified this week.