Justice Paul Rouleau’s ruling upholds Justin Trudeau’s 2022 Emergencies Act invocation against peaceful anti-mandate protesters—despite police admitting containment and no security threat—while critics like Sheila Gunn Reid warn of potential future abuse. Barry Cooper and Marco Navarrogini’s Canada’s COVID exposes misinformation by officials, including Dina Henshaw, citing over 100 pages of evidence to argue fear-driven lockdowns harmed children’s mental health and economies, unlike Sweden’s proportional approach. Public outrage, fueling shifts like Jason Kenney’s ousting and Danielle Smith’s rise, suggests lasting political fallout from perceived overreach and lies, raising questions about accountability and future pandemic responses. [Automatically generated summary]
Justice Paul Rouleau has issued his ruling that the invocation of the Emergencies Act by the coward Justin Trudeau was justified.
Are you as unsurprised as me?
Then Barry Cooper and Marco Navarrogini join me to discuss their new book, Canada's COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic.
It's February 17th, 2023.
I'm Sheila Gunnread, and you're watching the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious whoo-bug!
After careful reflection, I have concluded that the very high threshold required for the invocation of the act was met.
In particular, for reasons that I discuss in detail in the report, I've concluded that when the decision was made to invoke the Act on February 14th, 2022, Cabinet had reasonable grounds to believe that there existed a national emergency arising from threats to the security of Canada that necessitated the taking of special temporary measures.
I do not come to this conclusion easily, as I do not consider the factual basis for it to be overwhelming.
Reasonable and informed people could reach a different conclusion than the one I've arrived at.
Well, friends, there you have it.
As unshocking as anything lately, Justin Trudeau dodges accountability one more time.
The judge tasked with examining Justin Trudeau's use of a counterterrorism law on peaceful anti-mandate protesters in the nation's capital last winter, now after hearing six weeks of evidence, has ruled in favor of the government.
Big shock.
The aforementioned counterterrorism law is the Emergencies Act, and the official examination that's built into the law is called the Public Order Emergency Commission.
Now, the Emergencies Act has never been used before, not even during 9-11, not when multiple Canadian cities burned to the ground during seasonal wildfires, not during the ice storms or the hurricanes, not when a terror cell was running amok in Toronto in the early 2000s, hatching bombing plots.
The EA, as it's called, was only ever used when Canada's working class spoke truth to power in the most peaceful of ways.
The EA was invoked when last February's bouncy castles and hot tubs and street parties and the feeding of the homeless and the cleanup of the streets and the singing of the national anthem and sometimes errant honking amounted to a national security crisis beyond which all levels of government had the tools to deal with.
You know, we get new viewers here all the time at Rebel News, so I'll give a quick backstory.
After two years of crushing COVID restrictions and after two years of Canada's truckers going back and forth across an international border without a forced vaccine mandate, being the heroes that kept our economy going while everything else was shut down, Justin Trudeau sought to bring those truckers under his thumb.
Now, despite the government's protestations that only 10% of Canada's cross-border truckers would be affected by this new unnecessary vaccine mandate, the government's own data submitted to the Public Order Emergency Commission, headed by Justice Paul Roulot, suggested that the number was actually closer to 50%, one in two cross-border trucking families.
And suddenly, like this, the nation was finally at its breaking point with the government.
People who had gone along to get along had finally said enough is enough.
And truckers and their allies and their families and their supporters started a movement of convoys and blockades and peaceful protests.
And one of those landed in Ottawa in the nation's capital in the country's public square, Justin Trudeau's workplace, because where else are you going to go to demand national change from the people in charge of the nation?
The people came by thousands to Ottawa, and those that couldn't come remained closer to home and protested in places like Windsor, Ontario, Coots, Alberta, Emerson, Manitoba, and Vancouver, BC.
And in those communities, some of them blocked the borders in protest.
And they drew support from communities on both sides of that international border, from people who had been cut off from each other for so long.
And at every single protest, the police were vastly outnumbered by the country's useful people, the builders, the makers, the drivers, the movers.
And never once, not even in the face of extreme police violence, when these people were unlawfully detained, illegally arrested, they did nothing.
They reacted with peaceful resistance.
These blue-collar protesters never acted in a way that would inspire the police violence that was used against them.
In every single city and every single town, including Ottawa, in which the protesters gathered, the protesters could have taken over the place in under an hour, having the means, the skills, the will, and the vehicles to do it.
But they never did because taking over, because insurrection, because overthrow of the government was never their goal.
Their goal was to get their freedoms back.
Freedoms the government is tasked with protecting, not revoking.
Now, six weeks of testimony and evidence were heard by the Public Order Emergency Commission.
Six weeks of testimony from law enforcement officials saying they did not need extraordinary powers to contain the protests, and the protests did not rise to a national security threat.
Take a listen.
So, sorry, that threat that you're speaking about is with respect to individuals, but the protest itself did not pose a Section 2 threat to the security of Canada.
What we've testified to is that we did not made a determination at the event itself.
And I think it's part of our testimony, yes.
Okay, and yet you still advised the Prime Minister to invoke the Emergencies Act?
Yes, I did.
And you did that not because you thought that the protest posed a threat to the security of Canada as defined in Section 2 of the CESIS Act, but because you were reassured that threat to the security of Canada had a different meaning under the context of the Emergencies Act.
I think my testimony was in part that, but it was also based on all of the other information that I became aware of during all of the interdepartmental meetings and cabinet meetings I participated in.
So I was provided, that opinion was provided, if you want, as a national security advisor, as opposed to the director of CESIS specifically.
Really, what it comes down to was containing a protest that was already contained.
There's no need to quell a protest.
Canadians are allowed to protest.
And even the justice, Paul Rouleau, acknowledged that.
One of the most cherished rights enjoyed by Canadians is the right to engage in political protest.
The ability of individuals and groups to publicly voice their dissent enriches and empowers our democracy.
It's hardly surprising that government health measures would cause some form of protest in response, given their impact on people's lives.
What was surprising was the size and scale of these protests and the way in which they proliferated across the country.
The majority of those who participated in the protests were animated by a genuine desire to engage in peaceful demonstrations so that their voices would be heard by leaders in government.
They wished to exercise their fundamental right to express their political views and they had a right to do so.
However, like any large group, there were a diversity of views and intentions among the participants of the Freedom Convoy.
Amongst the many who intended to protest peacefully were others who had more sinister goals or who were willing to engage in dangerous conduct to achieve their desired ends.
For reasons that I discuss in my report, what began as a massive protest evolved into something entirely unprecedented, an occupation of the core of the nation's capital.
In fact, Rouleau said today, in a roundabout way, without actually ever saying it, that it was a failure of police and the government that, according to him, necessitated giving over extraordinary powers to the police and government.
Where cabinet reasonably considered it necessary to invoke the act is regrettable, because in my view, the situation that led to its use could likely have been avoided.
As I have explained in my report, the response to the Freedom Convoy included a series of policing failures, though I have also identified sound practices employed by some police services in their response to relevant events.
Some of the missteps may have been small, but others were significant.
Taken together, they contributed to a situation that spun out of control.
The failures were not only in policing.
Preparing for and responding to situations of threat and urgency in a federal system requires governments at all levels and those who lead them to rise above politics and collaborate for the common good.
In January and February 2022, this did not always happen.
Had police forces and governments better anticipated and prepared for the extent of political and social discontent exacerbated by COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in the environment of misinformation and disinformation so prevalent today, and had they collaborated more effectively, there could have been a different response to this unprecedented situation.
It's likely that such preparation could have avoided the necessity of invoking the Emergencies Act.
Did you get that?
The government screws up.
The police screw up.
And innocent, peaceful protesters are forced to pay the price with their civil liberties.
Oh, and their bank accounts, too.
Not just people in the convoy had their bank accounts frozen by extraordinary means, but people who had donated to the convoy from afar.
But even Justice Rouleau acknowledged that much of the money never made it to the convoy.
So why did they need their bank accounts frozen?
I also found, however, that in a number of respects, these measures were deficient.
These included important aspects of the Emergency Economic Measures Order, such as the absence of any discretion related to the freezing of accounts or assets, and the failure to provide a clear way for individuals to have their assets unfrozen once they were no longer engaged in illegal conduct.
But sadly, in Canada, there will be no consequences for a government that either joked or seriously considered using tanks on my fellow Canadian citizens who were only there in Ottawa to protest the very things the government had done to them.
I believe Minister LeMetti has mentioned that that was made in just.
Second, I have already provided my comments relating to the fact that the Canadian Armed Forces is the force of last resort.
Therefore, we were not considering deploying tanks in any number.
And Minister LeMetti earlier on in testimony to this commission wrote the exchange off as a joke between friends.
Do you think this is a joke?
I take no part of my role as Minister of National Defense as something unjust.
Obviously, I am very concerned and was very concerned not only about the situation in Canada, but about the global strategic situation that we all find ourselves in.
And so I am very concerned to make sure that we are making decisions with full information.
And I know that's the case with Minister LeMetti as well as the other colleagues around the table.
This was a very difficult time, and we were all doing our very best in our respective portfolios.
But I'm not surprised by any of this, and I doubt any of you are either.
Has Justin Trudeau ever paid a consequence for any of his bad behavior, his ethics violations, his absolute mistreatment and disgust at Canadians who simply share a different worldview than him?
And we all know people who are trying to hesitate a little bit.
We're going to try to convince them.
But there are also people who are openly opposed to vaccination.
They are extremists.
Who don't believe in science, who are often misogynes, often racist as well.
It's a small group, but who takes place.
And there, we have to make a choice as a leader, as a country.
Do we tolerate?
No, I wasn't expecting Justin Trudeau to be held to account today, and I'm never expecting him to be held to account for anything he's ever done.
Groping, grifting, demeaning.
It's all just how Trudeau governs, and parts of this country excuse it.
Struck By Recommendations00:11:40
But my concerns today are for the future, because the Emergencies Act is about to get easier to invoke if the government adopts Justice Rouleau's suggestions.
Take a listen very carefully here.
I also found, however, that in a number of respects these measures were deficient.
These included important aspects of the Emergency Economic Measures Order, such as the absence of any discretion related to freezing assets and the failure to provide a clear way for individuals to have their assets unfrozen when they were no longer engaged in illegal conduct.
The report concludes with a set of 56 recommendations.
My recommendations relate to six broad areas.
Policing, federal intelligence collection and coordination, critical trade corridors and infrastructure, reforms to the Emergencies Act, other areas for further study, and follow-up and accountability following the release of my report.
I hope that these recommendations will go some way to addressing the various issues and deficiencies of a systemic nature that I identify in my report.
Did you catch that?
It's number four that should worry us all: reforms of the Emergencies Act.
Justice Rouleau is asking the Liberals to reform the Emergencies Act.
And what that means, it's not going to be more difficult to invoke in the future.
What that means is it's going to be easier the next time around, because there will be a next time around because they've gotten away with it once and it worked.
So they will do it again.
Join me up after the break as Barry Cooper and Marco Navarrogini on their new book, Canada's COVID, The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic.
It came clear to my two guests about nine months on into the pandemic that something was wrong, that what we knew already about the pandemic and about the spread of the COVID virus wasn't being reflected in government policy and reaction to the virus.
And they wrote a book.
And now, three years out, they've updated their book.
And it is, according to the copy, they gave me 530 pages, so Bible-sized.
And so I thought I would have them on the show today to discuss what has updated in the book since, what they've discovered.
Looking back in retrospect.
So joining me now are Dr. Barry Cooper and Marco Navarrogini.
Marco is the president of the Haltine Institute.
And I would like them to discuss their book.
It's called Canada's COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic.
And this is, like I said, the updated version.
Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining me on Ezra's show.
I guess we'll go back a little.
What prompted the authoring of the first book and jump in, whichever one of you wants to answer?
Marco, you go first.
Okay, I'll do it.
Hello, and thank you for having us, Sheila.
This is great to see you again.
We both have similar and at the same time differing concerns when we started looking at this.
My very own was, to tell you the truth, fear.
At the beginning, I started to see the images coming in from the Far East, from Iran, from Italy, and thought, my goodness, what's going to happen to my children?
Right?
So that was kind of my, and then so I started looking at the data, I started reading some of the medical journals and looking at mortality rates and things like that.
One of the things that struck me as absolutely fearful and at the same time, quickly I found out that it was wrong is that we were comparing it to the Spanish flu.
So that we were going to have proportions of deaths, you know, people dying on the streets like we did, you know, 100 and some years ago.
And it pretty quickly became evident that the story that was being pedaled through the media and the actual reality were completely different.
And so part of the motivation was To square the circle in that sense, but also because it pretty quickly became evident to both of us when we sort of started talking that there were sets of people or groups of people, including police and doctors and bureaucrats who were more than willing to take advantage of the situation to increase essentially their standing and their power.
So I guess that takes me into my next question.
I'll pose it to Barry, although I think Marco answered it in part.
Why did they whip up this hysteria?
To what end?
One of the things that, one of the ways we approached this was from a French philosopher, a guy named Michelle Foucault, who's normally not associated, he's associated with sort of left-wing ways of looking at politics, post-modernism, and all that stuff.
But he developed this notion of what he called power and knowledge.
And that struck me almost immediately.
I wrote a book on Foucault years ago, and it struck me just listening to the things that the particularly the health care professionals, so-called,
in the med school here from Edmonton, Dina Henshaw in particular, the remarkably misleading statements coming out of Ottawa with Canada's chief doctor and so on.
It struck me that they must have known that they were not telling the whole truth.
So what Foucault's ways of looking at them taught us anyway, taught me, was it's all about power.
Why do people want power?
That's the question you're asking.
And this is something that political scientists have been concerned about since the beginning of political science, quite frankly.
So those are the kind of questions that we were interested in.
We had to read a lot of epidemiology and a lot of med sci stuff to make sense of the mendacious, misleading statements of our public health officials.
But these are not, it may be difficult to do medical science.
It's not difficult to understand when you read the results.
You can, you know, normal people can understand this stuff.
And there was a huge amount of controversy that was completely ignored by public health officials in order to peddle this narrative that we're all in terrible danger, we're all going to die, get vaccinated, do this, do that, lockdown.
And it just struck us both pretty quickly that this was just a ploy to ensure that they were not questioned.
Yeah, you know, we didn't ever really hear from our chief medical officers of health, particularly here in Canada, unless it was Dina Henshaw warning us about the dangers of STDs during the stampede.
Like you never heard from the woman before.
And then all of a sudden, she's the star of her own show every night on the dinner hour, warning us about, you know, death counts and infection rates.
And I think some people really got addicted to the fame of it all.
But I also think people got addicted to the money.
There were a lot of, I want to call them maybe crisis entrepreneurs, the same people who jack up the price of bottled water during a hurricane.
Those people came out of the woodwork to all of a sudden enrich themselves with government contracts, peddling, being the third person in the contract dealing PPE all of a sudden, or getting contracts to create ventilators when they had no history or expertise in the medical system.
But all of a sudden, they were stepping up to be the saviors during the pandemic.
Yeah, that was particularly true next door in BC, Where Dita Henshaw is now apparently fancy that.
And there, the chief medical officer of health had the imprudence to actually write a book about it.
And if you read the book, it's a kind of confession that I really enjoy this.
I like people doing what I tell them.
This is a quote, she called it a whole of government approach.
In other words, she was telling the government of BC what to do.
And I'm sure it went to her head.
It had to.
The same thing happened with lesser lights in the med school at the UC.
I could tell just from watching some of these guys on television, they were really enjoying it.
I mean, I don't mind going on TV, but I don't get a charge out of it anymore.
Like maybe the first time it was a big thrill, but now it's just, you know, part of your, I don't know, duty almost.
But those guys were just having a hell of a good time.
Yeah, it's evident, right, that people who work in an office, hopefully with Windows, but not all the time, suddenly have, you know, all these lights and all this attention, and they couldn't help themselves.
I like your comparison to the entrepreneurs of bottled water and toilet paper.
You remember that this whole thing started Hispanic about toilet paper and people sort of taking advantage.
And it's really no difference.
I mean, no difference.
If you look at already, we found out much later how much money Ms. Hinshaw ended up gathering from all of this.
And the entrepreneurial part is kind of set up.
And this is kind of what sort of gave it away for me: is that the doctors were already in a dispute with the premier in Alberta.
And so they took advantage of the situation to make themselves feel more needed than they normally would.
Exhibit A, for example, the government of Alberta increased enormous amount of monies allocated to increase the number of beds for intensive care units.
And that money was never put to use to increase the number of beds that was needed.
So they were essentially choking the supply to make themselves feel better and more needed.
Now, you've also talked about the collateral damage of the lockdowns.
It's chapter four in your book.
So we know about the financial followed, I think, on a small scale.
But do we have, and you know, like you've seen, you drive through any neighborhood and you see the retail spaces that have closed, the restaurants that didn't survive the lockdowns, the bars and the gyms that didn't survive the lockdown.
But there's also a knock-on effect to this stuff because we have a closed business now.
You see these empty strip malls.
That's property tax not being paid to the municipality that, you know, it has a knock-on effect for homeowners.
Effects on Children00:02:49
And that is rippling throughout the economy.
Do we have any grasp of just how bad this is going to be 18 months, 24 months from now?
In addition to the economic consequences, the consequences for children, I think, has been underemphasized.
The amount of damage that was done to kids during the lockdown, certainly, I mean, I had to teach courses on Zoom.
And the kids that took those courses did not get a rebate in terms of their education fees.
I think they were gypped.
But, you know, you have to do what you have to do, I guess.
But there has not been yet much by way of studying of what the effects of on little kids would be.
But I think it's something that we will have to deal with in probably for the next decade, maybe longer.
A lot of children, I'm pretty sure, were traumatized by having to stay at home, not see their kids wearing masks.
I mean, give me a break.
One of the things that the way children learn is to see the faces of other human beings.
And when they're masked, they can't do that.
So there's a huge bunch of deprivation that nobody knows exactly what the consequences will be.
But my gosh, we're going to find out soon enough, I'd say.
Yeah, you know, I was thinking the other day about little kids who are starting school this year, you know, five and six year olds.
Their earliest memories are of everybody in masks.
And that's imprinted on them.
And I don't know how we undo that as a society.
And the fear of the other, right?
You know, people would not be allowed to sort of get close to one another.
Little children who were not allowed to approach their grandparents.
And that's the thing that stays with you.
If you are today, say, seven years old and sort of to sort of see the world beyond your little self, well, you spend half of your life, more than half of your conscious life in that sort of panic-stricken bubble.
And that has an effect on children.
The economic effects, as you were pointing out, we will also be counting for years to come.
A couple of my friends who don't really know much about politics and economics, and they think that I crystal ball because a couple of years back I kept talking about you wait for the inflationary effect that handing out billions and billions and billions of dollars for free to people is going to cause.
Lessons From Sweden00:13:04
And they sort of said, well, how do you know that?
And said, well, we know this from experience, that only because it's not just theoretical.
And here we are.
The economic damage that is being caused, not just to the businesses that have already closed, but the fact is that there is a new tax called inflation on all of us.
And these taxes hurt disproportionately more the poor, the single mothers, and the people who don't have greater economic capacity.
The bureaucrats and the people who stayed home and working from home and continue to have races every year, they're doing fine.
And, you know, hence what happened a year ago yesterday, right?
It's not a surprise.
I mean, I'm sure we'll probably talk more about that, that it was the blue collar workers, the people who had to go and do things with their hands, who could not stay home behind a computer like the rest of us could, who suffer the most.
Yeah, those are people whose jobs are not indexed to inflation, the way government workers have their salaries indexed to inflation.
But I'm happy that you broached the subject of the invocation of the.
I'm sure they were, but they were touted by the government as being the heroes.
They weren't treated that way a year and a half later.
But initially, that was a kind of praise, I suppose you might say.
I'm glad you brought up the invocation of the Emergencies Act, because I think that is some of the political fallout that has stemmed and flowed from the government's overreaction to the pandemic for whatever reason for a power grab Or to, I guess, to institute their political philosophy.
So we've seen some political fallout, at least happening here in Alberta, where Jason Kenney is no longer the premier.
And I think that's in large part due to his crackdown on civil liberties here in Alberta during the pandemic.
And Danielle Smith, our new premier, seems to have been elected on a focus of undoing the civil liberties damage done by the former government.
But will we ever see any consequences for this federal government for anything, but especially this?
Well, it's perhaps a little bit early to tell.
I mean, we've certainly seen already some of the consequences.
Everywhere the prime minister goes, there are large groups of people.
They're not as large as the number of people who are following and go and see the leader of the opposition these days, which is also the flip-flop of this.
But one of the things that happens in the sort of prescription of the theory of moral panic, the lens that we use to look at these things, is that people are panicked and their fear sort of leads them to want to accept a whole bunch of lies that would make them feel comfortable in the face of panic.
But when people realize they have been lied to, you know, it's a normal human reaction.
People become angry.
And we already see the manifestation of that sort of across the board.
And, you know, the left-wing press, for the most part, is trying to tar Canadians as the angry crowd that is following the other guy and that sort of thing.
But that's a direct consequence of what's going on.
So it is entirely unclear that should we have an election today, that the federal government would survive.
And the polls keep sort of tilting deeper and deeper against the government in power and some of these governments.
What this also tells us, though, is that there are different levels of tolerance for these things.
Alberta is indeed a distinct society in many ways.
When people got sick of the lies rather quickly here, and the guy who was in power is not in power.
Whereas in Ontario, not to pick on Ontario, but it's so easy to sometimes, they've returned the premier to office.
So in different places, in different areas of the country, the reaction is playing in different ways.
Yeah, just to add to something that Marco said with the mainstream media, I think we can anticipate that anybody who criticizes the Governor of Canada's COVID response will be marginalized, will be considered a conspiracy, not something like that.
I fully expect that if anybody say in the Globe and Mail reads our book, they will say nothing nice about it.
We're just bringing up old stories.
We're crazy right-wingers from Alberta.
The problem is that eventually, I mean, it sometimes takes longer than we'd like, eventually people get the truth and they actually figure it out for themselves.
People are not as stupid very often as governments think they are.
And they haven't lost the ability to think.
So they will see these kinds of controversies.
They'll say, well, there's nothing new from these government-subsidized media saying these things in favor of the government.
And they'll draw the, I would say, probably in most cases, the correct conclusions.
You know, I've seen that myself.
I think we probably all have Facebook friends who started off the pandemic absolutely engulfed in COVID fear.
They were the maskers.
They were the scolders in the grocery store, the get your vaccines as quickly as possible, then get your booster, then get your second booster and your third booster.
And then they got COVID.
And pretty quickly, they figured out that they have been lied to too.
And some of those people, it's almost like, and I just compare this to sort of what I see, but almost like converts to Catholicism.
They are the most fervent people in the church.
And that's what I'm seeing with some people who started off the pandemic, very true believers, having realized they've been lied to, and their reflex is to be furious.
We see this in all kinds of different circumstances in life, right?
People tend to sometimes flee away from certain things and pretend that it's not happening, but whether it's for ideological reasons or what have you.
But one thing is for certain is that reality has a way of turning around and kicking you in the rear end.
And it always does.
And so you can pretend that the vaccine will save your life, but when 20 minutes later you get the disease, as they tend to call it, you start questioning things, right?
I think one of the things, as well, that Marker and I wanted to do in this book is basically document the series of lies and stupidities and imprudent statements and all of the rest of it that authorities, whether they're governmental, media, or bureaucratic, made during the period after the end of the summer of 2020.
That's when the first, we stopped work on the first version of this about then.
It came out in November of 2020.
But so much happened after that from starting in September of 2020, and it just kept going and going and going.
And part of our job was simply to provide documentation that these people who said these things, who knew perfectly well that what they were saying wasn't true, someday will be called to account.
Maybe not by us.
It depends whether people read the book and do anything about it, but they really ought to be ashamed of themselves.
But a lot of people are shameless and they may not be.
But nevertheless, there's lots of evidence there that they really messed things up badly and they did it knowingly.
And that's the thing that personally I find particularly irritating.
You can make mistakes.
These weren't mistakes.
These were deliberate deceptions.
Yeah, you know, in shameless plug here is the book.
There are over 100 pages of annotations and footnotes and end notes, rather.
Not because we want to show off that we read all this stuff, but because we wanted to make sure that we providing the evidence and the examples so that people can go and see for themselves, right?
So in part, this is, as Barry says, a record for posterity.
One, yeah, we name people who need to be named and they should be ashamed.
And also because, you know, viruses come and go and more will come.
And so when more will come, it is absolutely, absolutely imperative that we learn all the bad lessons, all the lessons, really good and bad, but particularly the bad ones about this one and how we handled it so that A,
we don't do worse for the next one, but also because human nature being what human nature is, if there is actually a worse virus coming down the line and we have scared people into a kind of obliviousness about these things, we might actually end up causing more harm than good, right?
So proportionality is important.
And so we're trying to get people to see that the overreaction was so far and so wide and so deceptive that there are some hard lessons that we need to take from them.
Yeah, there are a lot of people out there who want the general public to be very hard of remembering going forward.
Before I let you go, guys, you did something else that I thought the mainstream media absolutely refuses to do.
And that is that you looked at other jurisdictions that did something completely different than what we did here in Canada.
Which one of you wants to sort of tell us what you found when you looked at places like Sweden, Florida?
Marco does.
I'll jump in because I wrote probably a good portion of that, but Barry knows it just as well.
It's important to look at what other people did because a lot of the times we were presented with this notion that the entire world was following the same playbook.
I remember, for example, seeing the cover of Time magazine with the world, the entire planet locked down.
And that was kind of the message that they were trying to send.
And that what they were doing was reasonable because so many other people were doing it.
But the reality is that there were as many different approaches as there were countries.
And some of them were more successful than others.
The ones that were more successful were the countries that stuck to their plan and didn't throw their emergency plan out the window like most jurisdictions, all jurisdictions in Canada did.
The jurisdictions that did not succumb to fear, who relied on the wit of their citizens to follow basic rules about washing their hands and keeping distance and all that stuff, that did not close all the businesses, did not close all the schools.
Certainly the elementary schools kept running, even though they went remote for some universities and higher learning schools.
Sweden is the model in part because they were so radically different from everybody else, but also because Canadians specifically and the government of Alberta originally put out a paper sort of condemning Sweden.
They were trying to make themselves look good by condemning the Swedes and also by letting us know that, you know, within a matter of weeks, all Swedes were going to be dead.
But the reality is Sweden go figure is still there.
And in terms of epidemiological health, they are doing far better than we are.
And economically, they're doing far better than we are.
The damage that we cause to ourselves doesn't compare.
And so it was important for us to look at other places and make sure that that distinction was established.
Looking Beyond Borders00:05:19
Now, I know that, Barry, you need to get back and teach a class, but where can people find the book?
Where can they support the work that you're doing to, as you say, create this historical record of what was done to the public and who did it?
It'll be available chiefly on Amazon, but it'll be available in Calgary bookstores as well because we've done some contact with mainly independent bookstores and they seem to be interested in taking it too.
So I'd suggest Amazon as your first go-to place because that's where everybody goes.
Well, thanks so much, gentlemen.
And thanks so much for the hard work that you're doing to, as I said, make the historical record, make sure that they cannot whitewash what they've done to everybody and just carry on with their lives with their big fat paychecks in British Columbia, Dina Hinshaw.
Thanks, very much, Sheila.
Thanks, gentlemen.
Stay with us, everybody.
more of your letters to Ezra read by me up after the break.
Stay with us in the coming days and weeks.
We're going to be doing our best to get through the decision of Justice Paul Rulot and the Public Order Emergency Commission to excuse the extreme and irrational, tyrannical behavior of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in using a wartime law against peaceful protesters whose only real crimes were to speak truth to power and embarrass Justin Trudeau on an international scale and ultimately inspire a global movement of convoys.
How embarrassing for Justin Trudeau, but also how embarrassing for Paul Roule.
We will do our best to examine the lies that Rouleau either bought or the half-truths he's trying to sell to the public about what occurred in that public order emergency commission room.
Now, we had reporters embedded in the convoy from the very beginning.
You can see all of their reports at convoyreports.com, but we also had journalists in the convoy commission room.
You can see all of their reports at truckercommission.com.
And from their time in six weeks in Ottawa, we have created, we, I mean, our head documentarian Kian Simoni, he created an incredible documentary called Trudeau on Trial.
So to get details, please go to trudeauontrial.com.
It's all the commission testimony that Paul Rouleau would love for you to ignore.
Now, we should get to our letters.
Our first letter comes from Chop T. Pete, and it's on my interview with Lauren Gunter the other day, a columnist with the Edmonton Sun, great guy.
And he wrote an article about how the NDP is failing to be an opposition party at all.
And, you know, we have some theories for that.
And when are the NDP membership ever going to get tired of their leader just being the socialist arm of the Liberal Party of Canada?
Anyways, Chop T. Pete writes, you guys are so out of touch.
Oh, am I?
I think I've written two books on the NDP.
So I don't know.
I'll hear your argument.
Not even in the realm of understanding the big picture.
Okay.
All mainstream parties are globalists taking different roads to a one-world government.
The CPC are not who they pretend to be.
Mulroney and Harper sold us down the river long ago and they signed us up to the Paris Accord and sustainability goals of the UN.
Well, I'm just going to stop you right here because Mulroney and Harper were not in power when Canada signed the Paris Accord.
That was the Liberals.
And Harper was instrumental in fighting Kyoto.
Mulroney, he was more of an environmentalist.
However, practical, though, he was more seemingly concerned about acid rain, which we don't really have anymore.
But Harper fought Kyoto, which died, never was signed on to by Canada.
And the Paris Accord was brought in in 2015 by the Liberals.
And then you mentioned the sustainability goals of the UN.
Don't take my word for it.
Look it up.
17 goals of sustainability.
CPC put them into law.
Trudeau is just acting on them.
Even if that were true, what are you going to do?
You're just going to check out of the system?
You're just not going to hold Justin Trudeau to account?
You're not going to put pressure on the new leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Pierre Polyev, to do something different.
I think Pierre Polyev is trying to do something different with the party after the failures of Aaron O'Toole and Andrew Scheer.
Seems like he's trying to do something different.
He's leaning into grassroots conservatism.
So why didn't you put pressure on him?
Like, what are you going to do?
Just check out of the system?
I'm not sure that that's going to be good for you or anybody.
They may all be globalists, but does that prevent you from holding them to account in our parliamentary system?
I don't know.
It's kind of my job to hold people to account on, to hold the government to account on behalf of the people.
Anyway, let's keep going.
Pierre Polyev's Grassroots Shift00:02:32
On Menzies' mono about the wackiest climate change ideas, like substituting certain menstruation products, cutting coffee, and using less anesthesia on patients.
Smart EAM writes, women should be able to freely choose whatever menstrual products they like, guilt-free.
I can't believe this is a comment on one of David Menzies' videos, but actually I can.
Also, menstrual cups aren't gross, David.
I don't know.
I'm going to side with David on this, and I'm a lady, so I think we're, we might be two to one on you.
If one can afford it, though, best to use eco-friendly, non-toxic products down there, where there is very sensitive, very porous human tissue.
The amount of chemicals in female hygiene products is shocking.
You know what?
I can't even believe we're having this conversation.
Use whatever you want.
Put chemicals on your body.
Don't put chemicals on your body.
Do it in the name of your health and not in climate change.
How's that?
Paul says, I love the statement.
Four researchers said that's it just for it.
You know what?
There's a hashtag on Twitter.
It's called Studies Say or Experts Say.
And you can find some crazy things over there.
All it takes is one expert.
And often those experts are self-described for a journalist to write an article about absolutely insane things.
Studies say, researchers say.
Anastasia Girl writes, let's talk about how long the electric vehicle batteries take to decompose.
Waiting, waiting.
Yeah.
Electric vehicle batteries, solar panels, and not just the batteries and panels to decompose and then the hazardous chemicals to leach into the groundwater or the panels to fry birds as they fly above, but also the environmental devastation of the mining of the components of batteries and solar panels is revolting.
And it's done in countries where there is no law requiring mitigation plans and reclamation plans to be drafted ahead of the project, which is how it is in Canada.
Before you can move a shovel of dirt, you have to have a plan to reclaim it as best you can to its mostly natural state.
And sometimes even better when you look at Fort McMurray, which in some aspects is the world's largest oil spill cleanup up there.
The land is reclaimed and buffaloes graze bison, I guess they are up there.
Anyway, thanks for the letters, guys.
Fallout for Trudeau?00:00:32
And please stay tuned as we continue to provide you some coverage of the Public Order Emergency Commission.
And I suppose the fallout, if any, there will be for Justin Trudeau and maybe for the credibility of Paul Roulette.
Who knows?
Well, friends, that's the show for tonight.
Have a great weekend.
We're off around here on Monday.
At least we are here in Alberta.
It's family day here.
So don't expect a live stream, is what I'm saying.