Ezra Levant and Chad Williamson expose how Canada’s legal system weaponized ideology during COVID, with Rebel News and the Democracy Fund defending over 2,100 protesters—including three Lethbridge truckers (George Jansen, Marco Van Hugenboss, Alex Van Herc) charged with mischief despite no violence—by filing Charter challenges that collapsed cases. They contrast this with the CCLA’s silence, cite potential agent provocateurs in Coutts, and compare lockdowns to the War Measures Act, framing it as a broader erosion of civil liberties. Rebel News now funds defenses through TruckerDefensefund.com while preparing 2023 legal strategies against government overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, part cowboy, part rock and roll singer, and part lawyer, a feature-length conversation with our friend Chad Williamson.
It's December 26th.
This is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious thug.
You know, I remember in law school, there were people who just wanted to learn the law to get a job.
And there were some people who learned the law to crusade on fire.
I suppose I was one of them.
But unfortunately, a lot of the people who went into law for political reasons wanted to use the law as a tool to control others and grow the scope of government, a tool of authoritarianism.
That was my observation in law school some 30 years ago, 25 years ago.
But it's even worse in practice.
And now some of those leftist activist law students are now sitting as judges.
Well, our next guest is a freedom-oriented lawyer, one of the few in Canada to devote himself so much to the cause of individual liberty.
I'm talking about Chad Williamson.
He's our special guest today.
next.
And joining me now via Skype from Calgary is Chad Williamson.
Chad, great to see you again.
And thanks for a year of outstanding lawyering.
You know, our side of the aisle often looks skeptically on lawyers because lawyers are often a tool used by the bad guys.
But when we have a lawyer on our side fighting for freedom, fighting against the bad guys and winning, I find our people are extra affectionate because it's such a rare thing.
Yeah, I mean, it's when you're up against the all-powerful state and one of the only mechanisms that you have available is the judiciary to combat unconstitutional laws, regulations, and actions of the state.
Sometimes lawyers can be your friend.
And if you find a reasonably price lawyer, all the better.
Yeah, I mean, I just think that like so many other institutions and professions, lawyering has become pretty woke.
I didn't go to my law school reunion, but I talked to someone who did.
He said he could barely talk to half the people there.
It really has colonized the profession.
And now, obviously, there are, it depends, like there are different kinds of lawyers in different fields.
But I think that law itself has taken on a woke edge to it.
And law societies, which govern the profession, have been at the vanguard of that.
Maybe it's different in Calgary.
Would you say that the average Calgary lawyer where you're based is like the average Calgarian, or you say they're more leftist and more progressive than the ordinary person in the city?
I think that the angling towards the wokeism and the leftism in the legal profession in Calgary is sadly similar to the ubiquity and the profession that we see across the country.
And I mean, I didn't come face to face necessarily with the wokeism in the legal profession until recently in a very peculiar circumstance.
I actually attended a seminar put on by the Law Society about how to just manage a really stressful practice.
I'm a business owner.
I'm a pretty tough guy.
I deal with fairly complex and stressful situations every day.
But everyone can obviously use real, tangible, practical Tips to better manage their mental health, their marriage, their family, their work-life balance.
So, I signed up for this course and I thought, oh, this is going to be great.
Maybe they're going to have a psychiatrist on.
Maybe they're going to tell me to do a little yoga or something.
That was kind of what I was expecting.
And to a degree, I got that.
But what was really bizarre is there was a section.
I attended the full conference, which I believe is about two days about critical race theory, white supremacy, colonialism.
And I kind of, I was flabbergasted that, I mean, the course was called Well-Being in Practice.
And the first thing that I thought is, what the heck does this critical race theory stuff have to do with stress in the practice of law?
I don't think that, you know, your ethnicity or your skin color or anything like that should even enter into that equation.
We're all lawyers.
We're all members of the bar.
We all get stressed out.
And there should be some practical tips for us to be able to continue to do this stressful job.
So it was very bizarre.
And of course, we've got diversity, equity, and inclusion and inclusion language now as part of some of the law society regulations.
So it's a little unnerving.
Yeah.
You know, and I think you're from Calgary originally, as am I. Calgary has always been what I consider to be a race-blind city.
Anyone who knows the Stampede knows that, unlike the Hollywood stereotype of cowboys and Indians, in fact, Indians are cowboys.
I mean, the Stampede has had a key element of the Stampede since the beginning has been strong relationships with Indigenous people.
I mean, they have the Indian village and they have the, you know, the Stampede Queen and the Indian Stampede Queen.
And by the way, they use the word Indian.
I don't know if they've finally stopped doing that, but this is real.
Like Alberta in particular, I remember there's a school near where I grew up called the John Ware School, named after a black cowboy.
What's a black cowboy doing in southern Alberta?
Well, a lot of people in the States came north.
We were the Underground Railroad.
And if you're just an American, black, come to Canada and be free.
And, you know, I had a rivalry in college with Nahid Nenshi, but he was the first Muslim mayor of a major city in Canada.
Wasn't in Toronto, wasn't in New York.
It was in Calgary.
So to try and graft on to Calgary, which I grew up in, when I went to country school out there in Springbank, my sister and I were the only Jews in a school of 400 people.
There were two black kids, two Chinese kids, and 396 white kids.
I mean, the idea that, and it was perfect, it was a great place.
The idea that Alberta needs to be schooled on racism that is completely a transplanted project from the States, which has deep race issues, including slavery.
I think they're the colonialists, frankly.
I mean, growing up in Alberta as a young person, you know, and even at that country school, frankly, the minority kids were treated like celebrities in a way.
I know.
Judge's Surprising Decision00:09:03
We're spending about too much time talking about that.
I actually just wanted to talk to you about lawyering, but you make a good point that even in Alberta, the lawyering is about grievance and critical race.
Let's talk about some cases because that's really how you started your work, not just with Rebel News, but with the Democracy Fund.
I wouldn't mind talking about a couple of those things.
I think one of the most thrilling moments in Rebel News was in 2021.
So it's a little more than a year ago, when for the second time, Justin Trudeau's hand-picked election debates commission banned Rebel News from attending the leaders' debates, which is outrageous, and which two years earlier, the federal court had ordered them not to do.
Federal court in 2019 says that was illegal.
You didn't have any proper rationale.
You didn't decide this properly.
You didn't have any set rules.
You delegated this out to some other journalists.
This was unfair.
And they let us in 2019.
For the next two years, Trudeau's Debate Commission studied that 2019 ruling and thought, how can we plug those holes?
How can we patch this up so that when we ban Rebel News in 2021, it will withstand the scrutiny of the court?
And you were the lawyer we hired in 2021.
And I remember talking to you in advance, and you and our other lawyers said, Ezra, uphill battle, want to prepare you.
We're probably going to lose.
And by the way, if you counted up all the lawyers on the other side between the Department of Justice, the Debate Commission, I forget they were, I think there was a grand total of seven lawyers, including they hired some private sector lawyers.
Seven lawyers.
On the government side.
Nine?
Nine lawyers.
There was nine lawyers because we had two from the Attorney General's office in addition to a senior partner at the downtown branch of one of the Magic Circle firms and her six underlings that had obviously been assisting the government.
Nine.
Well, I got to change my story because I've always said there were seven.
So it was nine to one.
You were the one lawyer on our side.
Nine to one.
Nine to two.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
And this is an interesting story.
So before Mr. Martin Raymond, who we've affectionately called Party Marty down here, he was one of the lawyers that spent a lot of time down at the Coots blockade representing people giving charter advice.
Marty worked for another law firm.
And I'd essentially kind of got the call on a long weekend, had to give up a really glorious Labor Day weekend I had for my own time.
I remember I paid for that.
And I kind of thought, well, they're calling me to fall on the sword because nobody else wants to do this.
And you know what?
It was such an important fight for freedom of the press.
And the fact that this had to be, it had to be fought on principle.
Even if we were to lose, this is one of those cardinal cases where if the government is allowed to pick and choose its critics and the journalists that report on the inner workings of the government, then we're starting that slippery slide into authoritarianism and tyranny.
And I called Martin and said, you know, hey, buddy, I got to pull in a favor.
Can you come and spend the weekend in the office with me?
It's not going to be a lot of fun.
You know, we know the law firm that is on the other side.
We know the tactics of the government.
They're going to clearly dump a tranche of documents on us.
And Martin gave up his weekend as well.
And funny enough, out of all of us, and I think a lot of the folks I was speaking to at Rebel, including yourself, myself included, Martin was the only one who knew that we would win from the day that he saw all of those rejection letters.
So I've got to give this guy credit because I thought, you know, Martin, you're crazy.
This is a tough one.
They have nine government lawyers, hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars, and they've had two years of preparation.
We've got five days to prepare a response.
Oh, it was a miracle.
I was so certain we were going to lose.
But like you say, I thought we just have to fight.
Our viewers will expect us to fight.
Even if there's a one in a million chance, we have to take it because one in a million times it'll come up lucky.
I truly thought we were going to lose when the hearing started.
I remember because this was still, things were locked down.
So this was a hearing done over Zoom or Skype.
I can't remember which.
So if I recall, you were in Calgary.
The government lawyers were in either Toronto or Ottawa, if I recall.
The judge, and I think this made a difference.
The judge was from Newfoundland because the federal court is sort of like one big national jurisdiction.
You never know what judge you're going to get if you go to federal court, I guess.
So the judge was from Newfoundland, and I think that made a difference because I think Newfoundlanders feel like outsiders.
And I think I remember that judge.
I think her name was Justice Heenahan.
And I think, you know, right from the beginning, I could sort of tell she didn't like how she was being dealt with by these fancy Toronto lawyers.
And it just went downhill for them from there.
It was an amazing, amazing trial.
And I know it was open.
I know a lot of members of the public viewed it too.
That was perhaps our most successful day in court in the eight years of this company.
And it was extremely exciting.
Why don't you tell a little bit of that story, including Justice Heenahan?
One thing that was very interesting, and this had blown me away because this was a career first, is that we asked permission at the behest of Rebel News to have this publicized and to open, I believe it was over Zoom or WebEx or something, but to open up the room.
And they opened it up to 2,500 people to watch live.
Wow.
That doesn't happen in Alberta.
That doesn't happen at the Court of King's Bench.
It doesn't happen in provincial court.
I think it happens very rarely in federal court.
But because we prevailed upon the fact that this was an issue of public importance and also some urgency, and of course, with the federal election coming up, we were very surprised that the court allowed that.
And it's my understanding.
I'm trying to think back now and I don't have the numbers, but I believe that there was close to 2,000 live viewers of that court session.
And we had prepared a robust set of pleadings, which are basically all the documents that lawyers rely on when they're making their submissions.
We had a nice brief, which is kind of like an argumentative law school paper telling the judge why we think that we're right.
And of course, they would have filed an opposing brief.
And really, instead of relying or just rehashing all the stuff that we'd already provided to the judge, which I think was very well prepared, I remember I spent 18 hours alone on just the Saturday before with Martin.
By the end of it, we were ready to choke each other.
It was, I mean, tempers flared, but we did some pretty outstanding work.
I really just wrote a grandiose soapbox speech about democracy, freedom of the press, and an opposition to the jackboots of censorship and authoritarianism.
And I remember that I didn't have Justice Heenahan for about the first five minutes.
I think she was a little cranky with me.
She was kind of a no BS gal.
And I kind of felt that out and pivoted to some degree and wrapped up my submissions real quick.
Then the government lawyers stepped in and, I mean, the rest is history.
They spent more than an hour, two hours trying to take her through a 2,000-page document dump that they had given the court and given us only a day or two before.
And the judge just didn't have any of it and granted the injunction and ordered that Rebel be accredited, much to the chagrin, obviously, of the Liberal Party and Justin Trudeau, who was the subject of a whole bunch of great, great questions by Rebel and some of the other reporters that attended to attend the debates.
It was great.
I mean, and I couldn't have been happier for a guy that was, I'm not at the bar very long.
I got called in 2017.
So, for a young fellow like me and a young fellow like Martin to have such a significant victory and on the side of good against the forces of old and evil, that was really a milestone in my career, of which working with Rebel and the Democracy Fund, we've had a ton of them.
We're actually not bad lawyers.
Yeah, oh, well, that case was such an uphill battle.
I want to just show, you mentioned that we got the injunction that ordered Trudeau's Debate Commission to accredit us.
Trudeau's Law Surrender00:05:13
And we, because it was still during COVID mania, I think only two of our people were allowed in or something like that.
Most had to join by phone, but we still got excellent questions, including to Trudeau himself.
Let me just show you two questions put to Trudeau by virtue of that win.
So, what I'm saying is, if we didn't win in court that day, these next two questions I'm about to show you, put by Tamari Ugolini and Alexa Lavoie to Trudeau, they would not have ever even been asked.
Here, take a look.
Mr. Trudeau, the only reason that I'm allowed to ask you this question is because today the federal court ruled that the government doesn't have the right to determine who is or is not a journalist.
This is the second election in a row that the court has been overturning your government.
Do you still insist on being able to make that decision and why?
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 am scientifically, and I surround.
But it is the surrounding Israel and the country more vaccinated in the world.
He surrendered to their vaccine.
They don't consider that those who received two doses of vaccine are fully vaccinated.
My question is, many Canadians don't want to have a vaccine report.
Do you want to remove them?
The privilege relies on vaccinal penalty.
And you leave a maquiser than the Prime Minister or abolitionist moment.
J'ai partagé ma perspective sur ton organisation hier soir.
Je n'ai plus rien à dire.
Ça demande bien qui vous êtes.
Merci.
And what gets me, Chad, is he said, Your organization, I won't even call it the news.
So the ink wasn't even dry on Justice Heenahan's ruling.
The Federal Court of Appeal said, Yes, we are journalists.
We must be accredited.
And they were violating our rights for not doing so.
Trudeau literally couldn't care less what a court said.
You know, the judge just said we are journalists, let him in.
But he only uses the law if it's to his benefit.
He's the same prime minister who violated the conflict of interest act again and again.
What does he care?
He surely abused the Emergencies Act.
There was no evidence of a national danger.
We saw that.
What does he care?
You know, he does whatever he can get away with.
And if he's called out on it, he doesn't care.
I think that not only was our win excellent, but we showed that Trudeau really doesn't give a damn about the rule of law.
He really is a kind of tyrant.
And to be fair, he told us that.
He told us that Communist China was the country he most admired.
Of course, Ezra, for a lot of the government-oppressive radical left in this country, they support the courts, obviously, when the decisions run in their favor, which is quite frequent given how the judges in this country are appointed, which is through a judicial committee and then appointed by the government.
Judges And The Erosion Of Rights00:06:20
So we've got a lot of political appointees to the bench, and we've seen that in some of the other decisions, most notably the Chris Scott decision and the compelled speech order.
But of course, when in a blue moon, we get a judge who actually renders a decision based on the principles of liberty, fairness, and procedural and natural justice.
It's suddenly convenient to disagree with those rulings.
Well, I tell you, that was incredible.
And thanks that I really did not think we were going to win that.
And when we did, it was so great and it was such a validation that just because a politician says we're not journalists doesn't mean it's true.
And I note that we were alone in court, Chad.
And I mean, I'm a little older than you.
When I grew up in the 80s and 90s, had this been done to any media company, all the media companies would have gone to court.
They would have pooled their resources.
They would have each chipped in a grand.
They would have hired an excellent media lawyer who would have gone to court and said, Your Honor, I represent these 20 newspapers.
Like if you can read the court cases from the 80s and 90s, they often did it.
They called themselves the consortium.
It was basically a bunch of media companies, each chipping in a little.
And the judge would take that lawyer very seriously because the judge would know that they speak for the entire industry in a very principled way.
If this were 30 years ago, we would have had the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, we would have had Amnesty International, we would have had Penn Canada, and we would have other media there, Canadian Association of Journalists, who would have said this is outrageous.
We may not agree with Rebel News, but you cannot pick on a journalist because of his ideology.
None of that.
We were completely alone in court.
Not one friend.
And I think that speaks to the state of journalism in Canada.
It's been colonized by Trudeau.
And I think it speaks to the fact that freedom of speech, it has been replaced by these other ideologies, by hurt feelings, by microaggressions, by Trudeau's soft tyranny.
That is very sad to me, that the free speech culture that I grew up in just a generation ago is pretty much gone.
I think what's also troubling is just the fact just the gleefulness in which some Canadians are happy to see these fundamental human and civil rights be eroded by government legislation and regulation and censorship.
As you've deemed them, the media party.
I don't think a more accurate description could be given.
I mean, it's really perplexing to see, as you might know, Ezra, I have a degree in journalism that I got before I got my law degree, and I got that from Mount Royal University here in Calgary.
And I mean, I might be a little younger than you, but when I was in journalism school, one of the main classes was called News Agenda.
And they always taught, and these might have been some dinosaurs on the, you know, kind of the death knell of the print media business, which I think, you know, kind of went extinct in the early 2000s.
You were always supposed to get both sides of the story, or at least try to, and at least allow the viewer or the reader or the consumer of the media to take in an array of facts from the entire situation and come to their own conclusion.
And we just don't see that in mainstream legacy dinosaur media anymore.
The headlines are just politically charged.
It's completely one-sided.
And we only see them get experts.
We don't even know who these experts are.
Who qualifies as an expert.
That definition has tended to slip.
Most of these people aren't experts or they're just friends of the journalist.
And let alone trying to get the other side of the story and try to at least approach someone else for an alternative talking point.
It's bizarre to see such a one-sided national narrative.
And it's quite disturbing.
Yeah.
You mentioned Chris Scott, and he, of course, is the entrepreneur from a small place called Mirror, Alberta.
I think it's less than a thousand people who live there.
And the whistle-stop, I have actually yet to visit it in person, though I would very much like to.
It's sort of the everything shop in Mirror, Alberta.
I think it's the gas station.
It's the general store.
It's the restaurant.
It's sort of the one place that otherwise you've got to drive an hour or two down the road.
And in Mirror, which is smaller than my high school, everyone knows everybody.
And, you know, if you're sick, you know, and if you're not sick.
And so Chris decided to keep his place open.
And if he didn't like it, don't go in.
But because he was willfully challenging the lockdown in Alberta, oh my God, did they come down on him like a ton of bricks?
And they padlocked his place.
They arrested him.
They put him in jail.
But they went further, and you mentioned this briefly a few minutes ago.
The judge who heard the case, Adam Germain, a liberal appointee, just frankly has no business being a judge.
He was a failed liberal candidate, got appointed to the bench as like a patriot, as if that's a gift to give a like a political bauble.
Anyways, Adam Germain, this liberal judge, not only found Chris Scott guilty of contempt, but ordered him, whenever Chris Scott would say anything in public on Facebook, in the media, or whatever, ordered him to immediately pull out this little card written by Adam Germain, where Chris Scott would essentially have to renounce himself, denounce himself, and say, what I've told you is wrong,
Crown's Aggressive Defense00:14:39
and you should believe what the government says.
And by the way, this identical wording was given to Arthur Pavlovsky, and these two cases were heard together.
That judgment stood for months until the Alberta Court of Appeal mercifully overturned it.
But again, where's the outrage?
Could you imagine compelled speech where you are forced to say words like that?
That's literally, we used to call that a jailhouse confession or something like signed under duress.
And that was issued by a judge.
And I say again, Chad, where were the howls of outrage?
I don't remember them.
No, and again, this draws along the same lines of what we've been talking about this entire time is this gleeful almost celebration of the legacy media and the,
you know, folks who may have once been political centrists now slip into the dark recesses of what I would consider to be the radical left who want the internet to be censored.
We're seeing new federal legislation come out to try to censor the internet.
How they're going to do that, I have no idea.
One of my libertarian friends, whenever I get down in the doldrums about the state of censorship, government oppression, and all that's wrong in the world and that continues to go wrong, especially during the times of COVID, one little aspect of comfort I get is that the government is never, they're never able to do anything properly.
So despite all this money, government delivers the worst services at the highest cost, and they're incompetent.
So I guess we can take a little bit of solstice in the fact that, you know, if you try to police the internet, you might be biting off a little bit more than you can chew.
And now that we're seeing, you know, folks like Elon Musk step into the arena with the power of capital and with the markets to kind of take reins of this stuff, maybe there is some hope in fighting back against, you know, the coercive pressure of the state.
It's going to be interesting to see.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny.
I went to law school in Alberta and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was treated as a semi-holy document next only to the Bible.
And of course, in the law school, it would be ahead of the Bible.
It represented who we are.
You know, if you asked a liberal, what defines Canada?
They would probably say healthcare, although not anymore.
I don't think anyone believes that we have the best healthcare in the world.
I just, I literally haven't heard that in years.
They would probably say we're better than the Americans.
And if you press them, they would say, our charter of rights.
I think they would say that.
I don't think I'm mocking.
I don't think that's a character.
I think a lot of them would say the charter of rights.
And they certainly taught us that in law school.
But to this day, the Charter of Rights, other than in the case of Chris Goddard and Arthur Pavlovsky, that I mentioned, I have not seen the Charter of Rights help a single Canadian during the lockdown.
I have not seen a substantial case anywhere succeed of any lockdown, of the curfews in Montreal, of the vaccine passports, about people being fired from their job for not taking the jab, of all the insane things that were done to people.
Maybe I'm missing one, but I can't think of a single case where a judge said the Charter of Rights does not have a pandemic exception.
There's no Teresa Tam exemption or Bonnie Henry exemption or Dina Hinshaw exemption.
And you can't do that to people.
I don't think it's happened once.
And even crazier, as far as I know, our Supreme Court of Canada hasn't even talked about the lockdowns, other than the Chief Justice one day announcing he's imposing vaccine mandates on the Supreme Court of Canada building itself, which is basically issuing a kind of judgment.
He just said, oh, by the way, I'm for vaccine mandates.
Good luck at subtext.
Good luck anyone trying to get a fair hearing from me.
And hey, every single lower judge in this country that looks up to me, now you know, you can sort of guess how I'm going to rule on cases of vaccine mandates because I just announced one in the Supreme Court building.
So that's the only statement we've heard from our Supreme Court that I know of on the lockdowns is the chief saying, yeah, you can't work here if you're not jabbed.
Now try and get a fair trial on the same issue at a lower court.
I think the judges in the charter are one of the largest failures the last two years.
To an extent, I would completely agree.
And I think from the large, you know, double-stuffed leather-bound furniture up in the dusty dens of the higher courts ruling down on us kind of from up on high, I would agree.
I don't think that there's been any pushback or any real consideration given to the sanctity of the cardinal principles of the charter or the constitution.
However, down in the trenches in the fight the fines campaign, which for those watching who don't know what that is, that was the civil liberties project started by Rebel and the Democracy Fund to defend people.
I think there was more than 2,000 cases.
This is from masking tickets, social distancing tickets, protesting tickets, tickets resulting from government overbearance during the COVID, the COVID pandemic.
Now, my firm had about 157 of those bad boys.
We're down to five.
We have not had one trial conviction.
Now, in every single one of those cases, we filed what's called a charter application, which is basically saying, hey, well, even if you get my guy or my gal on the evidence, we still feel that his or her charter rights were infringed.
Now, this engages not just the Crown Prosecutor, but also the Attorney General, kind of making it double the work.
And it's part of due process and part of procedural fairness in this country in the courts.
It's really easy to write tickets and, you know, it's real easy to, from up on high, to decree that, you know, this destructive COVID mandate power that the government wields is justified.
But down in the trenches, down in the provincial courts, when people are still afforded due process, and to a degree, despite being charged, they were still afforded due process.
And in most cases, the Crown Prosecution Service just ran out of gas.
Now, that wouldn't have been made possible without the generous donations of people across the country to finance what is an immense and fairly expensive legal endeavor.
I think it's probably one of the largest civil liberties projects maybe in this country's history.
I'm not too sure.
But there are huge victories there.
And I'm not sure what the other provinces and jurisdictions look like, but the fact that there's only a couple guys working with me.
There's Yoav Niv, Mr. Sean Maholshan, Marty Raymond, myself, our senior Ken Johnson, you know, five guys, 157 charges, toasted all of them.
We're still running five, and we still have Chris Scott obviously on the horizon here in the new year.
But there's a disconnect between what's happening in the trenches and what's happening on high, and I think that should still provide people with some hope.
Well, that does, and thank you for that.
And in Ontario, paralegals are allowed to run provincial offense trials.
So we have four in-house paralegals at the Democracy Fund handling 1,300 cases in Ontario alone.
And you're right.
I think the number was 2,100 nationally.
That started as a Rebel News project.
Arthur Pavlovsky was client number one.
And very soon we had 50 clients.
And then one day in the meeting, I blurted out, we're going to take a thousand.
And everyone said, you're crazy.
How are you going to pay for that?
Well, we spun off the project to a new CRA-compliant charity that was started.
It's got its own board, its own staff, its own bank account.
And that's why people who donate to Fight the Fines or Chris Scott or Arthur Pavlovsky get that charitable tax receipt because we handed that off to the Democracy Fund, which was a great project.
And the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms was doing this kind of work also, and you got to tip your hat to them.
They're great.
But really, there was a tiny bit of work done by the Canadian Constitution Foundation, and that's about it.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, which was very strong when I was a kid, they basically went on a two-year holiday.
And the work fell to, it's ironic because civil liberties used to be such a left-wing thing.
Like, I remember the old boss of the Civil Liberties Association was this very left-wing Jewish guy in Toronto named Alan Boravoy, and he was sort of this classic Berkeley-style liberty guy.
Where were the liberals?
Where were the left-wing libertarians last two years?
They were hiding under their bed, or they were outright saying, take the jab.
It was sort of crazy.
Now, listen, I don't want to take up too much of your time.
I appreciate it.
And thank you for the recollection of your work on the Fight the Fines and the Chris Scott story.
You represent three truckers from the Lethbridge area who were part of the peaceful protest at the Coutts blockade.
That was a trucker blockade that ended peacefully.
There was no violence whatsoever.
There was a minor fender bender.
There was just a bit of an accident on the highway, but there was literally no violence.
The three truckers who were charged committed no violence.
One of them, in fact, is an upstanding citizen in Fort McLeod.
He's on the city council.
Great guy.
Those charges were only laid in the dying months of Jason Kenney's premiership.
Like for months, nothing happened.
And then they charged these three guys.
And Rebel News made the promise that we would finance their defense.
And you have represented these three truckers.
I was down there in Lethbridge for a really preliminary matter.
The Crown is dead serious about this, aren't they?
You bet.
And I just want to just briefly correct you.
And while Rebel is responsible for funding, my office has been assisting with funding as well.
Personally, I represent a fellow by the name of George Jansen, who is one of the most humble, compassionate, caring, and really calm and collected fellows I think I've ever, ever met.
Now, we also assisted in obtaining these folks their own independent counsel.
So they've all got their own lawyers.
Now, we've been assisting with coordination, but they're all represented by individual lawyers.
So it's being handled through Rebel News and Williamson Law.
Marco Van Hugenboss, he's the counselor fellow who has also been charged with mischief.
He is being represented by my old friend and a fight the finds weapon.
We know as Joav Nib, who has been working with us hand in hand for like two and a half years.
So he's in great hands.
And we've just appointed a new fellow by the name of Michael Johnson from Ontario to defend Alex Van Herc, much to the chagrin, we believe, of the Crown Prosecution Service.
And Mr. Johnson has got 12 years at the criminal bar with a family history of military service and excellence.
And the guy is a criminal defense beast.
So we've got independent counsel for these folks.
We've got funding handled.
And we're here to put up a fight.
No concessions, no admissions of any kind.
But the Crown is serious.
The charge of mischief over 5,000, I believe it carries a maximum penalty of up to 10 years in prison, which isn't something that they even give to people often who are convicted of seriously violent crimes.
So it's very peculiar.
Frankly, we've got a presumption of innocence in this country, and the Crown's going to have to do their work.
We've got a Crown that we believe is fairly aggressive.
But I mean, we've got a tremendous history between my colleagues and I of putting up a bristled and vigorous defense on all these cases.
And the Crown's going to have to do their work, Ezra.
When you say you have the money covered, that's through Rebel News' TruckerDefensefund.com, right?
Is that right?
That's correct.
Yes.
Okay.
Because there's so many cases here.
You mentioned you guys took 157 plus Chris Scott.
So I try and stay on top of many of them.
Obviously, I can't, you know, no human can know all of them.
So it sounds like things are in hand.
Now, let's just talk for a moment, because there were four people who were charged with conspiracy to commit murder.
If I'm recalling, now you correct me if my facts are wrong.
Now, Rebel News has been asked to defend them.
And our rule of thumb is that we don't defend people who commit murder or commit violence.
We defend peaceful protesters.
And I've had a number of people say, Ezra, you have to defend them.
You have to pay for their defense.
And I've said to them, I'm open to persuasion on that, and I'm open to learning more.
And if it's a trumped up charge, I'm open to that.
But I don't think that Rebel News viewers would feel comfortable crowdfunding when we said we're crowdfunding to protect peaceful protesters if there was a charge involving grave threats of violence, like conspiracy to commit murder.
So I made the choice that we would defend the peaceful protesters, the mischief charges against George, Marco, and Alex, and that we would take a step back from the ones accused of conspiracy to commit murder.
Why We Questioned Involvement00:07:22
Do you know anything about that case?
Because I'm sympathetic to the right that everyone's innocent until proven guilty.
And then I do believe that the police probably trumped things up a bit, like they were in PR mode.
The RCMP works for Justin Trudeau.
We know they're in PR mode.
But do you have any thoughts on that?
Or I don't know if you're at liberty to talk about those cases.
I can imagine how trying and traumatic it is for their families.
I just, as the keeper or the helper to crowdfund, I feel like I also have an obligation to our viewers that if we said these were for peaceful protesters and then out of the blue there's this conspiracy to commit murder charge, that that just doesn't fit the mandate of our fight the fines.
Do you have anything you can say?
I don't want to put you in a pickle if you have a particular position on this.
Yeah, so I'm not at liberty to go into any great detail, but I was one of the individuals that was responsible for conveying to a great number of people over the last two years what the scope of the crowdfunding would cover.
And that was for peaceful any regulatory charges that would come out of involvement in peaceful demonstrations.
I mean, criminal matters are completely different.
Now, the mischief charges are criminal and they're not regulatory.
But initially, the scope was of my office was essentially to just provide people with their charter rights and charter protections and information on what they were to do and what their rights were if they were arrested.
And that was really the scope of any involvement of my office going way back to the protests in downtown Calgary, protesting vaccine mandates.
We were kind of protest lawyers, basically telling people that they had a right to remain silent, an immediate right to retain and instruct counsel, and just warn people that anything that obviously they say to the authorities, even if it seems quite benign, can turn up in disclosure and be used as evidence against them later.
Now, that scope was expanded to assist with a lot of the tickets that were given to people who had equipment out on the highway.
And we're actually running, I've got numbers here.
We're currently running 35 cases under the ambit of the Democracy Fund defending folks who were alleged to have violated the Traffic Safety Act and traffic regulations by purportedly having equipment out on the highway.
And we're still running those.
That's being covered.
In terms of these folks that were charged with conspiracy to commit murder charges, obviously there is a presumption of innocence in this country.
And I would, you know, I would be reserved to come to draw any conclusions about what really happened, whether this was a false flag by the government, which may be the case, or whether these charges, whether the allegations will in fact be proven later.
I frankly just don't know because I haven't seen the evidence.
I suppose that'll come out in the watch.
The mayor Coutz, by the way, who testified at the public inquiry, says he thinks that it may have been a setup by agents provocateurs.
That's quite something for him to say because he wasn't very friendly to the truckers.
Well, listen, I got to keep my eyes and ears open on that because, of course, I'm sympathetic to the possibility that this is a trumped-up political charge.
On the other hand, I think I have a duty to our donors.
We certainly did not raise the money in the name of defending people who were accused of conspiracy to commit murder.
So I'm going to keep my eyes and ears open on that.
Listen, we just came out of the worst civil liberties bonfire in this country's history.
And I think that the war measures crisis, the October crisis of 1970, of course, they actually had soldiers on the street.
But then again, it was time-limited, it was geography-limited, and they really were murdering people, bombs, kidnappings, and it really was a foreign-associated terrorist group, the FLQ, that had ties to Cuba.
It really was a kind of insurrection.
Even they overdid it.
And then, of course, Japanese internment, which was a racist law that was brought in.
And for years, Japanese people were under lockdown.
Both of those are atrocious, but by any measure, both scope or depth or duration or geography, the lockdowns of the pandemic were worse.
I'm not diminishing what happened in the war measures crisis or the Japanese internment.
I'm not.
And by the way, the way we treat people under the Indian Act is atrocious too.
There are elements there.
But what happened to millions of people over the last two years was the worst civil liberties bonfire.
And Rebel News and lawyers like you and the Democracy Fund and a handful of others fought it while the rest of the people were silent and compliant.
Chad, it's great to catch up with you.
I know that 2023 will still be a busy year because freedom can never let its guard down.
Justin Trudeau is relentless.
And it's not just Trudeau.
Listen, where was Aaron O'Toole, the so-called conservative leader for two years?
So I think that we're going to continue to need freedom-oriented lawyers.
And as long as Rebel News viewers believe in the court cases that we're taking, we will be able to have that part of our project.
It's what sets us apart from, say, True North or Western Standard, both of which we admire.
But at the end of the day, Rebel News doesn't just report the news.
Sometimes we get involved and try and fix things.
And you've helped us do that, Chad.
So thanks for your great work over these past few years.
Good luck in the projects you still have.
And I know that 2023 will bring more battles to come.
We have a whole bunch of tricks up our sleeves, some very exciting things coming down the pipe in 2023, some strategies that we've yet to deploy that I think are going to alter the legal landscape in favor of freedom.
We've got, as your viewers might know, we've got a big case against the RCMP that we're still finishing up for the destruction of those excavators down at Coots.
We've got another big claim about Alberta Health Services essentially firing somebody for whistleblowing on rebel news.
So there's allegations that that's a wrongful termination, and that could be a big case.
We've seen that there are internal emails that they're hiding from us, and that being Alberta Health Services.
So we've got some cross-examinations on some fairly disturbing emails that we're in receipt of from Alberta Health Services coming up in the new year as well.
So the fight's not over yet.
There will be a reckoning and the information will come out.
Right on.
Well, for those who want to help, I recommend truckerdefensefund.com.
That's the largest project of the ones Chad outlined.
Chad, good luck and thanks again for your time.
Thanks, Million Ezra.
All right, there you have it.
Chad Williamson, one of the freedom lawyers.
Frankly, we had dozens of lawyers across the country.
Now the Democracy Fund has four lawyers in-house and four paralegals, but still we rely on talented lawyers like Chad around the country to fight the battles in every nook and cranny.