Ezra Levant examines whether WWIII is inevitable after the Munich Security Conference, where Zelensky warned of China-Russia escalation while NATO’s Stoltenberg and Sunak pushed for long-range weapons to Ukraine, risking direct confrontation with Russia’s nuclear arsenal. The episode also dissects Canada’s 2022 Emergencies Act misuse during the trucker protests—justified by "ideological rhetoric" despite no violence—revealing political embarrassment over Trudeau’s PMO-centric governance and global comparisons to a "banana republic." Testimony, including from Ottawa Police Chief Steve Bell, exposed minor disruptions like honking horns, while Chief Slowly’s firing for refusing compliance highlighted institutional overreach. Trudeau’s refusal to apologize, instead framing dissent as deadly "misinformation," deepens public distrust, with some turning to fringe theories like a Filipino-Canadian woman claiming sovereignty. The analysis suggests Canada’s legal and military actions may backfire, fueling instability rather than security. [Automatically generated summary]
Some heavy talk about the war in Ukraine, and then a heavy interview with Bruce Pardy, the Queen's University law professor, about that Justice Rollo Trucker Commission inquiry.
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All right, here's today's show.
Tonight, Ukraine's president says we're headed to World War III.
Is he right?
Are we doing anything about it?
It's February 21st, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
I really had never heard of it before.
It's a security conference, a military conference.
This one in Halifax, Canada, every year.
This one in Herzegovina, Israel.
And there was a big one this past week in Munich called the Munich Security Conference.
And it just started popping up on my social media because they're really advertising this military get-together.
Here's a video produced in conjunction with the conference promoting their war meeting.
Take a look.
Usually there are demonstrations against weapons during the MSC.
But this year, for the first time, there's a demonstration pro-weapons.
According to Infratest DIMAP, a German research institute, 15% of the Germans are calling for war weapons for Ukraine.
We can't win any weapons, and unfortunately not all people understand that.
But if we don't get weapons, we will just die like a people.
We need all the weapons that our allies can provide us with.
We don't ask people of Germany to fight for us, but we need the tools.
35% think the German support of Ukraine with weapons goes too far.
The anti-Ziko demo met for the first time in 2002 to protest against war and weapons.
Aus meiner Sicht sind die Waffen keine Lösung, sondern die Waffen verschlimmern die Probleme, bringen gigantische Zerstörungen.
Ich verstehe es von dem Standpunkt her, dass die angewiesen sind eben auf unsere Unterstützung.
Aber ein Aufrüstungskrieg, wo von der einen Seite immer mehr Waffen geliefert werden und die andere Seite immer mehr aufrüsten, das ist ja, das ist ein Teufelskreis.
Russia's war changed a lot.
Also, the demonstrations around the MSC.
Did you get that?
Even the protesters this year are pro-war.
Normally, the protesters at these war meetings are anti-war, but they're pro-war, I guess.
And what's so exciting about this gathering of well, they're not really soldiers, are they?
They're more politicians and business people than actual soldiers.
But they're promoting the fact that it's women's time to shine when it comes to war.
Take a look at this.
If you just start typing in Munich Security Conference into your social media, you'll get endless pictures of how the boss girls are totally in charge now that we're on the brink of World War III.
That's Kaya Kallas from Estonia.
And of course, Santa Marin is the new prime minister of Finland.
She's, as you know, a bit of a party girl, got in trouble, but just a little bit of trouble for going out dancing and having fun and doing girl stuff, you know.
Now, I'm not sure who is sponsoring what, but this, the more I read about it and looked at all the photos and who was there and who was sponsoring it, it felt like it was kind of a military-industrial complex version of the World Economic Forum.
World Economic Forum, as you can see, is about money, but the Munich Security Conference is about war.
And Munich was where all the action was at this year.
In fact, both father and son, George Soros, and his son Alex Soros were there.
Here's Alex Soros tweeting: When the goat, the greatest of all time, speaks, things happen.
Annual Davos speech moves from Davos to Munich this year as we kick off the Munich Security Conference.
Oh, I didn't know you could just sort of buy your way into those things.
I thought maybe you had to be a defense minister.
Just look through his Twitter feed.
It's actually quite incredible.
Honored to kick off our annual open society dinner at the Munich Security Conference.
War in Ukraine one year on, public opinion in the West Beyond.
Thanks to Speaker Pelosi and the heads of state, government, and policymakers that attended.
So he's basically collecting politicians, not just Democrats, though, Republicans too.
Take a look at this one here.
Cindy McCain.
You may remember her late husband, John McCain.
Just scroll through Alex Soros' Twitter feed.
It's obvious there is money to be made in war.
That's why George Soros is there.
I mean, there's money made on the war side, selling equipment to destroy a country, and then there's selling the reconstruction of that country.
You can get paid both ways.
George Soros knows something about this.
George Soros And The War Economy00:16:07
He's been doing this sort of thing since as a teenager, he helped round up Jews for Hitler in his native Hungary.
Do you remember this interview with Steve Croft of 60 Minutes?
Hungarian Jew who escaped the Holocaust by posing as a Christian.
And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps.
I was 14 years old.
And I would say that that's when my character was made.
In what way?
That one should think ahead, one should understand and anticipate events.
And one is threatened.
It was a tremendous threat of evil.
I mean, it was a very personal experience of evil.
My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.
Yes.
Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.
That's right.
Yes.
I mean, that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years.
Was it difficult?
Not at all.
Not at all.
Maybe as a child, you don't see the connection, but it created no problem at all.
No feeling of guilt.
No.
For example, that I'm Jewish and here I am watching these people go, I could just as easily be there.
I should be there.
None of that.
Well, of course, I could be on the other side.
I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away.
But there was no sense that I shouldn't be there because that was Well, actually, funny way, it's just like in markets that if I weren't there, of course I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would be taking it away anyhow.
In other words, whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator.
The property was being taken away.
So I had no role in taking away that property.
So I had no sense of it.
Yeah, he's sort of still at it.
You know, a lot of folks are sort of stoked.
Here's some news about all the ammunition that is needed.
They're just using it all for the first time.
They've had such a major war.
Here's Jan Stoltenberg of NATO talking about how they're actually using ammunition faster than factories can make it.
Part of a race to increase the capacity of the defense industrial base.
Doug Bush is the Army's head of acquisitions.
Right now, we're meeting demand.
Of course, I would want it to be faster.
Everyone does.
But there's a time factor, a year to 18 months, is often what you're looking at.
Bush says this is the greatest ramp up in military production, possibly going back to the Korean War.
Early on, we realized we had to really put our foot all the way to the floor.
The U.S. isn't at war with Russia, but that matters little to weapons manufacturers whose products are part of the fight.
Our defense industrial base is still largely geared towards a peacetime environment and not towards a wartime or at least a quasi-wartime environment that we're now in.
What I said was that the current rate of ammunition consumption is higher, bigger than the current rate of production.
That's a factual thing.
But since we have been aware of that for some time, we have started to do something.
We're not just sitting there idle and watching this happening.
So that's the reason why we over several months have worked hard at NATO and also within the Ramstein format to ramp up production.
That's the reason why we launched this auto-circle extraordinary review of our stockpiles.
Wow, you've got the attention of George Soros.
He's an investor.
He can see supply and demand.
Everyone is so psyched up.
And did you know that this Munich Security Conference has an official page called Partners and Sponsors?
And if you look through it, as I have, you'll see there's plenty of weapons manufacturers, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, other arms manufacturers.
You can see George Soros' Open Society is there.
Bill Gates is there.
Google, Goldman Sachs, of course.
McKinsey, of course.
The Rockefeller Brothers.
Listen, folks, there is money to be made in war.
Of course, the star of the whole thing, well, I'm not sure about the star, but the mascot, at least, is Joe Biden, who arrived on time, coordinating things perhaps, in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.
Now, take a look at this video here.
Take a look.
Now, there
were sirens there, an air raid siren, the first in days, but there was no air raid.
I wonder.
I just wonder if that was just a little bit of theater for Joe Biden.
But Joe Biden wasn't going to be the only one to get the spotlight.
Rishi Sunak, the new prime minister of the UK, even though he's not faced an election yet, he was in Munich and he's so excited.
Here's the headline of this story, MENA conference.
Rishi Sunak says UK to provide Ukraine with long-range weapons, calls for a new NATO charter.
Why would you need a long-range weapon to defend in Ukraine?
Ukraine is a fair-sized country.
I call it middle-size, but a long-range weapon, does that mean you're going to attack Russia itself?
You know Russia's got nuclear weapons, right?
And is this about defending Ukraine's territorial integrity, or is this about going to war with Russia?
Here's the Russian foreign ministry that put out a tweet saying, quoting President Putin, Vladimir Putin, who gave a speech.
In fact, he's been giving a series of speeches this week.
Putin said, we know that the West has been involved in the Kiev regime's attempts to strike at our strategic air bases.
The drones used for these purposes were fitted with the assistance of Western specialists.
And now they want to inspect our defense facilities?
That's another way of saying that Russia is suspending its participation in arms treaties.
But look at this story in the New York Post, quoting Vladimir Zelensky talking to a German paper.
Let me read the headline.
China backing Russia in Ukraine would mean World War III.
Zelensky, let me quote Zelensky himself.
This is in English.
If China allies with Russia, there will be a world war.
There will be a world war.
And I do think that China is aware of that, he said.
All right.
Well, here's China's reaction.
It is the U.S., not China, that has been pouring weapons into the battlefield in Ukraine.
The U.S. is in no position to tell China what to do.
China will never accept U.S. finger-pointing or coercion on China-Russia relations.
What's interesting about that Chinese reaction is it was addressed to the United States, not to Vladimir Zelensky, because I think the Chinese have come to the analysis that Zelensky is not the decider here.
Zelensky is the mascot.
He's the actor.
He literally was an actor and a comedian before becoming president.
He's not the decider.
The decider is the moneyman who's poured in more than $100 billion into Ukraine.
Who's overseeing that money?
Who's managing that money?
Whoever is the answer to that question is the answer to who's making the decisions for Ukraine.
And I don't think it's Vladimir Zelensky.
I think it may be Rishi Sunak and Joe Biden and what has been called the military-industrial complex.
It may be Jan Stoltenberg.
I think that Jan Stoltenberg of NATO and Rishi Sunak and Joe Biden have more say over what happens in Ukraine than Zelensky does.
But look at this, breaking.
China's president Xi Jinping plans to visit Moscow for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the spring, seeking a more active role in shaping the outcome of the Ukraine war.
That was after Zelensky's comment.
You know, one of the most important things that happened during the Cold War was Richard Nixon breaking China away from the Soviet Union and trying to orient it towards the West.
I don't know if you know that history.
Richard Nixon was known famously as an anti-communist.
He was a very hard line on the thing.
And yet he sent Henry Kissinger secretly to do shuttle diplomacy back and forth to China to convince China to break with the Soviet Union and aim himself, aim that himself, aim that country towards the West.
Because Nixon knew that if China and the Soviet Union got together, that would be an enormous military and economic force.
I think that Joe Biden is sending those mighty countries back together financially, industrially, in terms of high-tech.
Russia has been selling its energy to China for a long time, but now Russia is importing from China automobiles, high-tech things like phones and computers.
There is more Chinese money in Russian markets than ever before to fill the void left by the West's sanctions.
And as you know, we sent our own reporter to Russia a few months ago.
Doesn't feel like the Western sanctions are having a pinch in Russia, in part because Russia is so strong because of his energy wealth, but also in part because there are other forces in the world willing to fill that void.
One question I have for you is what's the end game here?
What's the plan?
What's the exit strategy?
Well, in most wars, isn't the exit strategy to defeat the enemy?
When the West got involved, when the Allies got involved in the Second World War, it wasn't to have a stalemate.
It was a total, unconditional victory over the Axis, total surrender.
Nothing given to them, no quarter given to them.
In fact, to this day, there are American military bases in Japan, Italy, and Germany, the three Axis powers.
To this day, America has a military base in all three of those countries.
Total surrender.
That's normally the plan in a war.
In other cases, it's just to reduce a threat.
What is the end game with Ukraine and Russia?
If you listen to Vladimir Zelensky, he talks constantly about retaking Crimea, which has been annexed by Russia years ago, actually.
And there's even talk about bringing the war to the Russian main country.
As you saw there, China was, sorry, Russia was referring to drone attacks within Russia.
And there's been the attacks on that key bridge in Crimea.
And of course, the underwater attack on the Nord Stream pipeline.
What is the end game?
What's the plan?
And is the plan of total victory even possible against Russia, which has a large conventional army, but more to the point, has more nuclear weapons than any other country in the world?
And even if we think that perhaps they're rusted or not working or that the operators are drunk or that even 90% of Russian nuclear weapons don't work or would fail in some way, well, that's still dozens of nuclear weapons that could, God forbid, explode in the West.
What is the plan that Rishi Sunak has for his long-range weapons?
What is the plan that Zelensky or whoever is backing him has for World War III?
And what will they do if China and Russia simply don't follow along?
Look at the jubilation at the Munich Security Council.
Look at the advertisers, the sponsors.
Look at the young women posing for the boss girl photos.
They're very excited about this war, a war that will have women and children as the victims, but as men being the cannon fodder.
I don't know what the answer is.
I'm not a peacenick.
I'm not pro-Russian.
I'm not a leftist.
I'm certainly not a communist.
But what do you do when every person in the West apparently is hungry for war, either to make money or to act out some Cold War fantasy that never came true?
What do you do when the West is running to war?
Who would speak against it?
I saw this video online this weekend.
It's from a socialist named Claire Daly, a member of the European Parliament from Ireland.
She's a socialist.
I don't know if I have anything in common with her.
I don't know if I trust her.
I don't know much about her.
But I listened to a couple of minutes of this speech and I thought, I can't disagree.
Take a listen.
One year on, as the war in Ukraine continues, when voices everywhere should be calling for a ceasefire and peace, this resolution is driving us in the opposite direction.
So I proudly voted against it.
It peddles the latest slide that this is not now about defending Ukraine.
It's about Ukraine must win.
What does that even mean?
Last April, there was a deal on the table which would have seen Russia withdraw in return for Ukrainian non-NATO membership.
But Ukraine's Western friends, killer clown Boris Johnson and NATO, rocked into town and told them to keep fighting.
The result?
Six cities devastated, four provinces illegally annexed, 108 billion euros in aid, which the people of Ukraine are going to have to pay back over decades.
Global food and energy crisis.
Is this winning?
Ordinary people don't win in wars.
They're cannonbodder in the gains of others.
And ye can shout glory in here all you like, but there's no glory in the grave and only graves come out of this folly.
It's time for people and the silent majority all over Europe to take to the streets this weekend and demand peace and an end to the war.
Yeah, the problem with socialists like her is they don't have sponsors or advertisers willing to fly them to the Munich Security Conference now, do they?
Stay with us for more.
Cabinet Control Controversy00:14:57
Hey, let me read to you a newspaper article.
Actually, it's from the McDonnell Laurier Institute.
And you tell me, was this written last week or last year, Rene?
Only in a country with fragile, hysterical leadership could the trucker convoy be regarded as an emergency justifying the infringement of liberties of civil liberties.
And let me read to you just a little bit more to help you with your guessing game.
The headline itself is actually there was no emergency, but don't expect the Commission to throw the government under the trucks.
Bruce Party for inside policy.
Well, I'll take you out of your suspense.
That was written December 6th of 2022, but it nailed it.
I'm afraid to say Bruce Party called it.
And of course, last week, the government's commission of inquiry, Judicial Commission of Inquiry, whitewashed the government's handling of the whole affair and actually said that bringing in martial law was justified.
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 14, 2022, the 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, 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.
Joining us now to talk about this.
And his prophetic column in the McDonnell Laurier Institute is Bruce Party, Senior Fellow of the McDonnell Laurier Institute, who is also the executive director of Rights Probe and a professor of law at Queen's University.
Bruce, I guess if you're pessimistic and imagine the worst will come, you're never disappointed.
Your feelings are never hurt because you already accounted for the worst outcome.
I myself, despite everything, am a foolish optimist.
And I had thought that this judge would say, no, it was just, there just was not enough of a factual basis for a national emergency that could only be resolved through the Emergencies Act.
Because if I'm not mistaken, that's the two-fold test required to invoke the Emergencies Act.
Is it a grave national crisis on par with a revolution or a war?
And not or, and can it only be resolved by invoking the Emergencies Act as opposed to existing laws?
And I thought this judge seems fair enough.
The process seems fair enough.
There's no way they will meet that high hurdle.
And yet, here we are.
Right.
If you were going just by what you heard at the inquiry, the evidence that the witnesses gave, that would be an entirely legitimate conclusion.
But this is not a court.
It was never a court.
It's supposed to look like one, but it's not.
And its job is not the job of a court.
Its job is ritual, if you like.
The job is to show, to go through a process that makes it look as though there is accountability.
But that accountability is not delivered by the result.
It's delivered by the process.
So its purpose is served by going through all the trouble of hearing witnesses and having hearings and so on, because it gives the appearance of accountability.
But we've had lots of inquiries and commissions in this country's history, and some of them lead to something, but many of them do not.
And that's because they're not that kind of a process.
This commission, like others, has the job of simply putting together a report.
It's not a binding report.
It can't find liability.
The report may or may not be put on the shelf and ignored.
But it is a mistake and was a mistake from the beginning to think that this was going to be a court-like process.
There are applications outstanding challenging the invocation of the act.
And those applications hopefully will be heard in an actual courtroom.
And those courts will undergo judicial review of the decision to invoke the act.
And hopefully they will do so in a rigorous way, comparing the facts to the threshold in the act.
And we'll find out legally whether or not the threshold was met.
But that was first and foremost not the mandate of the commission, both in black and white, but also in reality.
Well, I was fooled.
And maybe it was my hope, maybe it was my romantic belief that part of our system isn't broken, that not every, in fact, there were some police chiefs who testified, not all of them, but most of them were.
And you even had the attorneys general of other provinces testifying before this commission saying, look, we did not need this martial law.
We did not ask for it.
Many of the blockades were resolved before it was invoked, for example, at the Coots border crossing or at the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor and Detroit.
And again, time after time, cop after cop said, we didn't need it.
Sure, it gave us extra tools, but we were fine handling this on our own with some tow trucks.
And, you know, I mean, they cleared the Ambassador Bridge without incident in two days.
I'm just astonished and I'm a little heartbroken.
And here's what I think, here's what I'm most worried about, Bruce, is that people like me who are laboring to still believe in the system will become disenchanted.
I still believe in the system because I don't know what I would do if I didn't believe in the system.
I don't know how I would handle that.
I still believe in nonviolent solutions to problems.
I still believe that our system may get it wrong at first, but eventually gets it right.
I believe that the checks and balances, you know, the pendulum will swing back.
I believe those things, but it gets harder to believe those things.
This felt like an inside job, felt like a stitch-up.
Well, yes.
I mean, I know it feels that way.
And you may have an argument there, but what I'm suggesting is that that's not really what it was designed for in the first place.
So I'm, for example, I'm not accusing this judge of doing something he didn't believe was true.
Now, you could disagree with it, and I do.
I completely disagree with the conclusion.
But that's not because necessarily the judge was biased in the way that we might say that.
What I'm saying is this process, as imagined in the act itself and as put in place by the government, was not one that would logically lead to the kind of outcome that a lot of people were hoping for.
And as you say, if you had taken the trouble to watch the testimony over those weeks, there were some really interesting moments and some very good testimony, including by some of the police officers and officials that appeared.
I was quite impressed with some of them, and they made the point that you referred to.
And in particular, some of them were very specific about the fact that they, in their opinion, there was not the kind of violence that the government alleged that there was that justified the invocation of the act.
There was one OPP officer in particular who said that in the context of the Ottawa convoy, he said that he found the lack of violence shocking.
You know, in that kind of situation, he would have expected violence, but there wasn't any.
And so in that respect, and in the testimony of so many others, the justification based upon the use or threats of serious violence, which was one of the causes that the government itself cites in its invocation of the act, for my money, the evidence was simply not there.
There were lots of references to violence.
And one of the best, I think, was the acting Ottawa police chief, Steve Bell, who testified of violence experienced by the local community during the convoy.
But Brendan Miller, who was acting for the convoy, cross-examined him and asked him, well, what he meant.
What do you mean?
What do you mean by the violence felt by the local community?
And the interim police chief said, well, I don't mean actual violence.
I don't mean violence as defined in the criminal code.
I mean the violence that people felt from the culmination of actions that the occupiers engaged in like honking horns.
Let's take a listen to that outrageous clip.
Take a look.
So is it fair to say that when you use the phrase violence, you're not actually describing any form of physical assaults, are you?
I'm well, physical assaults do contribute to what I'm describing.
I was specifically describing the violence that our community felt as a result of the culmination of actions that the occupiers engaged in.
So the violence that they felt, not actual violence.
Is that what you're saying?
That is correct.
Not the criminal code definition of violence, but the violence that they felt by having an obsessive horns blared.
Right.
And having trucks run 24-7 a day.
Right.
By having people intimidate them and follow them and by having people rip masks off their head, by feeling sheltered in their homes.
Thank you.
I understand what you mean.
But you're not talking about violence under Section 2 of the CESIS Act, are you?
No, I'm not.
Thanks.
You know, that's not a real cop.
That's a political activist wearing a badge.
There was one government official that was sacked during this whole affair.
And that was Chief Bell's predecessor, Chief Slowly, who, if I'm not mistaken, was the first black police chief in Ottawa, which generally is regarded as a progressive milestone.
Like President Obama being the first Black president was something that a lot of people took a lot of pride and joy in.
The city of Ottawa celebrated when they had that milestone, which they thought was a sign of progress and inclusion.
Chief Slowly was not willing to take the hard line against hot tubs and bouncy castles and horn honking that Chief Bell was.
It reminds me a little bit of Jodie Wilson Raybel, the first Indigenous justice minister who refused to bend the knee to Justin Trudeau.
So he fired her and replaced her with David LeMetti, who would literally do anything.
Chief Slowly was fired because he wouldn't do the, in fact, we saw testimony that Parliament was interfering with this city police chief.
And he was sacked and they put in Chief Bell, who would literally do or say anything.
The only guy who was fired for this whole thing was the only honest cop around.
I find that heartbreaking.
Yes, well, there was so much testimony about what was going on behind the scenes, which was very interesting.
But it gave the impression of a comedy of errors and failure to coordinate and failure to administrate.
And what you ended up with were a lot of big trucks parked in downtown Ottawa that weren't going anywhere.
And through the whole thing, one of the inescapable facts basically was this.
There was an illegal act going on.
That act was parking.
The trucks were illegally parked.
And yet nobody saw fit to do anything about it, or perhaps they weren't able.
But that was pretty much the extent of the illegality.
At one point, a private group of citizens brought an injunction to the court to stop the trucks from honking.
And the court issued an injunction against the honking, and the trucks stopped.
So at the time the Emergencies Act was invoked, the only illegal act that was actually happening was illegal parking.
And if you put it that way, you can see how absurd this is, that we would invoke a National Emergencies Act because somebody has illegally parked.
That was the bottom line.
And the rest of it is simply sort of making stuff up about what might have happened if they didn't take action that they should have been able to take without invoking the act.
In a sense, one of the messages that Rouleau delivers, maybe somewhat between the lines in his report, is this emergency situation, even if you want to call it that, occurred because of the failure of all these agencies together to act and coordinate and to administer properly, to do their job.
In other words, if there was an emergency, it was created by the incompetence of those bodies.
And lo and behold, if you create a situation of an emergency, I'm not accepting that it was one, but if you accept that it was, then that will serve now as a justification for invoking this act.
Trudeau's own incompetence, his own inability to govern.
I mean, he chooses his cabinet so obviously based on, you know, TV metrics, who's, you know, women, minorities, he's about everything other than substance and experience.
I think that so much of the cabinet is actually controlled by the PMO that when in this case, you had to have a defense minister doing defense things and a public safety minister doing public safety things.
In the case of Marco Mendocino, I remember there's testimony that his own staff wasn't even briefing him on because they knew he wasn't actually the de facto public safety minister.
Truth vs. Free Speech00:13:47
There were serious plans and briefings being circulated, and they knew why bother showing it to the cabinet minister.
He's just a joke.
But I don't know.
I find it so frustrating.
But what you're saying is exactly right.
Their own incompetence, their own inability to deal with the parking crisis turned it into a civil liberties bonfire.
But there was one moment, there was one fascinating moment for me in February, right around the time that the act was being invoked, just afterwards, when Mendocino was doing a scrum, I believe, or a press conference.
And he was asked by a reporter what the reason was that they were invoking the act.
And, you know, I believe the reporter said, you know, do you have intelligence reports that there are weapons in the truck?
And Mendocino said, well, no, no, it's not that.
He said, the cause is rhetoric of an ideological position.
Now, I think in that moment, he's probably telling the truth.
Yeah.
That was actually the real cause of the emergency.
And it was an emergency, a political emergency for the government.
Because what you had was a coming together of people of all different kinds who were together in their resolve that government policy was wrong.
And that represented an ideological or political emergency for the government.
Now, of course, that is not the kind of thing that the Emergencies Act is designed to respond to.
So what they had to do instead is try and fit the round peg into the square hole.
But just imagine the implications.
You've got an emergency act being invoked essentially on the basis of what people have said.
In other words, on the basis of their speech.
There's no violence.
There's no threat of violence.
Everything is fine except for the parking.
But it is the rhetoric.
The free speech of people is essentially, Mendocino was suggesting, the cause that constitutes the emergency.
You know, there was also testimony that, of course, Trudeau was embarrassed abroad.
The diplomats were remarking on how this was being covered around the world.
And we know that this was one of the first times that Canada had the riveted attention of the world.
Sure.
Right.
Right.
And Christian Friedman testified about receiving a note from her American counterpart at one point worrying that Canada sort of looked like a banana republic.
There was no question the government was embarrassed.
No question.
But again, the trick was in translating that embarrassment into what would constitute a national emergency under the act.
And of course, based upon the evidence that I heard, and I didn't hear every single minute of the testimony during those weeks, but I heard a lot of it.
And I heard nothing that would, in my mind, have justified invoking the act.
Yeah.
Here's what I think is going to happen.
I think I meet a lot of people in person, and I meet even more people through emails and online social media.
And I meet a lot of people who are acting in good faith, who want to do the right thing, want to be good citizens and do what's right, that they believe their whole life was right, but they no longer see a country that makes sense to them.
And so I see the growth of alternative worldviews, alternative explanations for things.
I see people reaching out for obscure legal theories.
Yes.
Yes, that don't actually have a bait.
Like there's just even this, there's this lady, I've forgotten her name.
She's a Filipino-Canadian lady who calls herself the Queen.
I've just forgotten her name right now.
Who's saying, I'm an I've heard of this.
I'm the true queen of Canada.
I have the legal authority.
And like there's all sorts of, I would call them bizarre, alternative, conspiratorial.
I don't want to use that word a lot because that's a word that liberals use to denounce anything that they don't like.
But I see good people giving up on the courts, giving up on the police, giving up on political parties, giving up on every single establishment system that has proven them wrong, giving up on doctors who they once trusted above all else, giving up on the courts who they thought, well, at least they've got my back when it comes to civil liberties.
I see the worst, you're right, this Judge Rollo.
It was just sort of like at the airport, you have security theater, and the masks were public health theater.
It was for show, not for and this judge was accountability theater.
We'll go through the process.
You'll expiate your emotions.
Everyone will have their say and testify and we'll have a lot of attention.
But at the end of the day, it's a foregone conclusion.
And it's not really, as you say, it's not really a court case.
But the problem is, I think that people were hoping that there would be some reaction, some correction.
And they're going to say, well, what is the point?
And who can be trusted and what can be trusted?
And some people will just retreat into non-political lives.
Some people will become sort of sullen, I think.
But others will actively try and find an alternative explanation for this mad world we're in.
And by the way, this madness of invoking martial law comes at the same time we've had other madnesses in this country.
Lockdowns, curfews in Quebec.
What's going on with World War III?
Is that coming?
What's going on with the World Economic Forum?
What's going on with the economy?
I mean, all of a sudden, you have this confluence of chaos and the things we could rely on, we can't anymore.
That's the worst part about this Judge Rulo to me, is that he just helped bring the administration of justice into disrepute.
And he probably didn't convince any trucker that the martial law was fine.
He didn't convince a single skeptic that what Trudeau did was right.
What he did is he confirmed for them the belief that the entire establishment is wrong.
That's my view.
Right, right.
Right.
Well, this is both the downside and the silver lining, right?
So the downside of all of this, all of this COVID stuff, including the process afterwards, the downside is that people's faith in our institutions will crumble because of what they perceive, as you described.
That's also the silver lining because they will be able to see in a way they've never seen before how it actually works.
Because how things are working now, They may seem more extreme and more strange and more inexplicable than they ever have.
And there's certainly truth to that.
But on the other hand, we've been going down this road a long time and people just haven't been paying attention.
It's simply that they haven't seen what's going on.
It's not that that wasn't happening.
It's that they haven't seen it.
And so we are now in a period, I think, especially with respect to COVID, where the authorities have reached too far.
And it's apparent that they've reached too far.
And people can see it now.
And that, that is a good thing.
Well, I hope you're right, because I tell you, Justin Trudeau certainly looks like a man who feels vindicated.
Let me play you a clip when he was asked if he regretted talking about fringe minority.
For about five seconds, it looks like he's going to say, yes, I regret it.
But then watch this, Bruce.
He then immediately rephrases it to say it again.
To say, oh, there's a small group of people who, and his accusation is quite telling.
He says they're spreading misinformation and disinformation.
Again, ideas, rhetoric, peaceful words.
So his justification is not violent acts, but their ideas are wrong.
But then he says that they're wrong deliberately.
Now, I think Justin Trudeau's wrong most of the time, but I don't think he's deliberately wrong.
I think once in a while he lies and does something deceptive, but most of the time it's just an ideology or a worldview that I think is wrong.
But I'm not going to stand here and say most of the time Justin Trudeau is wrong and knows it and lies on.
I'm just not going to say that because I don't believe that.
I think he does lie sometimes, most politicians do.
But Trudeau, when asked if he is sorry, obviously doesn't say I'm sorry or I apologize, rephrases the insult a second time and actually accuses his opponents of knowingly and willfully lying to kill people here.
Watch this clip.
Following today's report, do you have any regrets about calling Ottawa protesters a fringe minority?
Yeah, I wish I had said that differently.
As I look back on that and as I've reflected on it over the past months, not just freshly from this commissioner's report, I wish I had phrased it differently.
The fact is, there is a very small number of people in this country who deliberately spread misinformation and disinformation that led to Canadians' deaths, that led to excessive hardship in people who believed them.
I continue to be very, very firm against those individuals.
But that is a small subset of people who were just hurting and worried and wanting to be heard.
And as much as I tried to emphasize throughout the time that of course we're always going to stand up for freedom of speech and freedom to protest peacefully, I wish I hadn't said something that was able to be spread larger.
If I had chosen my words a bit careful, a bit more specific, I think things might have been a bit easier.
Look at how slippery he is.
He has never apologized.
The only apologies Justin Trudeau has made in eight years as prime minister is to apologize for what other people have done, to apologize for the genocide committed by other people, to apologize for things Stephen Harper did.
When he himself commits a mistake, it's a learning opportunity for you, but certainly not an apology moment for him.
He's quite something.
I think there's a skill there.
I might diagnose it as a sociopathy, but there it is.
Sure.
Well, no, listen, Justin Trudeau is very good at what he does.
He was one of the best witnesses at the commission.
He's very, very smooth, very practiced at whatever it is he's peddling, he's peddling it well.
But look, there is a real problem, as people probably are aware, with this idea of misinformation.
And unfortunately, this is a term I believe that shows up in the report as well, which is even more concerning.
But we are also sort of playing this game too.
Look, here's the idea, as far as I'm concerned.
In a free country, you're not entitled to the truth.
The truth is your business to work out.
The fact that somebody says something that's not true is going to happen if they have free speech.
That's the way free speech works.
So when we accuse other people or when they accuse us of disinformation, that's not saying anything.
You're allowed to say things that are not true in a free country.
Politicians lie all the time.
And, you know, nobody likes it.
I don't like it, but I wouldn't expect otherwise.
If you're a citizen in a free country, your job is to hear what everybody's saying, to assume that they are maybe not telling you the truth, and then to work out the truth for yourself.
You cannot blame people, whoever it happens to be, for saying something that might not be true.
That's not the obligation.
You're allowed to say what you think, not because they're true, but because that's what you think.
And so I think I would like to shift the framework of this truth-telling idea.
And I would like these two words, misinformation and disinformation, to be expelled from our public discourse because they don't make sense if we are pretending to live in a free country.
Well, I think you're going to see those words.
Those are the words of the year for 2023.
But in C11 and C18 and other proposed bills, the old C36, the Online Harms Act, which hasn't even been introduced yet, those are four pieces of legislation that Trudeau has lined up.
And that's exactly what I mean.
This is the path we're on.
We are on the path of trying to enforce a government.
The government is trying to enforce the idea that your obligation is to tell the truth, according to their definition, of course.
But even that first notion that you are obliged to be truthful is incorrect if we are living in a free country.
Yeah.
Path to Enforced Truth00:02:26
Interesting.
Bruce, it's great to catch up with you.
As always, we've been talking to Professor Bruce Party.
He's the executive director of Rights Probe.
Of course, he's a senior fellow with the McDonald Laurier Institute, where he wrote his prophetic piece in December.
And he's a professor of law at Queens University.
Great to see you again.
Thanks, Ezra.
All right.
There you have it.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Hey, welcome back.
Well, I don't mean to be depressing, but I think both of our main topics today were depressing.
Listen, I think military equipment is cool and neat.
I mean, the teenage boy within me still finds it amazing to look at fighter jets scorching through the sky and to look at the technology and sheer explosive power of weaponry.
I think for all time, since the time we were hunters, people have found weapons interesting.
Men and boys used to, and as you can see from the Munich Security Conference, apparently a lot of girls think it's pretty cool now, too.
That said, what are we doing escalating, having a brinksmanship game with Vladimir Putin and now Xi Jinping?
Xi Jinping, who's going to Moscow to formalize an alliance, undoing one of the greatest successes of the Cold War, whatever else you think about it, breaking China away from Russia was probably one of the reasons the Cold War ended when it did, rather than lingering on for decades more.
Now, other things came about that, including China's economic prowess.
But what are we doing pushing those two enormous powers back together?
And what are we doing talking about long-range weapons to attack Russia in World War III?
What are we doing?
Shouldn't there at least be a parallel track for diplomacy?
And is it too much to ask, what does the end of this story look like?
Do you really think Russia is going to be defeated without using its nukes or Chinese conventional weapons?
I literally do not know who is in charge, but maybe the answer was that list of sponsors and advertisers.
This is the worst of times.
Don't get me started about how depressing our friend Bruce Party was.
I'm sure he's right on everything, which is what makes me so sad about it.
But listen, we can't run away from these facts.
We keep on fighting.
We'll do our best.
We'll shine a light of scrutiny on these issues.
And that's why the rebel is here, to tell the other side of the story.