Ezra Levant exposes Alberta’s pandemic enforcement overreach as five high-powered government lawyers—including "Magic Circle" firms—block disclosure of 600–700 pages of emails mocking Whistle Stop Diner owner Chris Scott, calling him "stupid," and conspiring to revoke his liquor license. With 30 agents and seven lawyers targeting Scott (population 502 Mirror’s sole business defiant), while courts dismiss constitutional challenges like Toronto’s Smoked Meat Company, Levant frames this as a deliberate campaign to crush dissenters. Crowdfunding at savethecafe.com is critical, as Scott’s legal team—Chad Haggerty and Yoav Niamh—faces crushing costs in a fight for transparency and justice against systemic vindictiveness. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I'm on location in Red Deer, Alberta for a hearing in the case of the government versus Chris Scott.
He's the owner of the Whistle Stop Diner in the small town of Mirror, Alberta, who refused to close his shop during the pandemic.
And oh my god, did they want to make an example of him?
I'll talk to him.
I'll talk to his lawyers and I will cover the trial itself.
But first, let me invite you to go to RebelNewsPlus.com.
That's where you get a subscription to the video version of this podcast.
I'd like you to see Chris Scott.
I'd like you to see the lawyers.
And by the way, the eight bucks a month, it's not a lot.
In fact, I think we're a little underpriced.
But that eight bucks a month, it really adds up for us.
It's how we pay our bills, considering we're demonetized from YouTube.
And obviously, we'll never take government money.
So please go to RebelNewsPlus.com.
All right, here's today's show.
Tonight, I'm in Red Deer, where five highly paid government prosecutors are trying to crush Chris Scott of the Whistle Stop Diner.
It's April 13th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you sensorious bug.
You might remember the case of Chris Scott from the small town of Mirror, Alberta.
He was a restaurateur who refused to lock his doors during the pandemic.
But he's much more than a restaurateur.
For those of us who live in the big city, there's hundreds, even thousands of restaurants and stores.
And in Mirror, Alberta, though, population 502, there's basically just the whistle stop.
And it's a gas station, it's a general store, and it's a restaurant.
It's the hub of life.
If you don't find it at the whistle-stop, you got to get into a car and drive all the way down to Red Deer, Alberta, where I'm standing today, because today is a trial, not the actual trial of the various charges against Chris Scott three years later, but rather an attempt by Chris Scott's lawyers to get secret documents being deliberately hidden by the government.
What's so incredible is that, as you know, when the government comes to get you, they have to disclose their notes to you.
And there's a special obligation to disclose what's called exculpatory evidence.
They don't just have to disclose to you the things that embarrass you or that would incriminate you.
The government has a very special obligation enshrined in common law and our Charter of Rights that they have to give you anything that makes you look good and them look bad.
It's just an essential part of fairness when an ordinary citizen is fighting against the unlimited resources of the state.
And that's what's so crazy here.
Little Chris at the little whistle stop in Little Mirror, Alberta was deemed enemy number one the same way Toronto demonized Adam Skelly of the Smoked Meat Company.
You'll recall in that city, they deployed 100 police, riot horses, 50 police cars.
They were trying to make an example and it worked.
The shock and awe destruction, the personal destruction of these few dissidents was so essential to the compliance by the masses.
They needed everyone to obey.
Anyone who showed resistance could inspire others.
That's why Trudeau hated the trucker convoy so much.
So the government is hiding records from Chris Scott.
Records that Chris Scott suggests show that they were conducting illegal activity, things that would be exculpatory, things that show this is a malicious prosecution.
I'm going to live tweet the hearing.
Actually, this will air the day after the hearing.
You can see my live tweets.
We've also summarized them at savethecafe.com.
I'm going to break now, cover the trial, and we'll talk to the lawyers and Chris Scott himself.
Stay with us.
Chris Scott, you have been through hell.
I don't think you imagined back in 2020 that you would be standing here outside a courthouse three years later fighting for your freedom.
And not even on the substance of it, you're battling some side skirmish about government disclosure.
There's five government lawyers there.
If you knew three years ago what you would go through, would you have still fought for freedom?
Absolutely.
I mean, it has been a little bit of hell, but the reality is it's a lot easier to walk through hell when you've got millions of people standing beside you.
Right?
And that's what's happened.
You know, the government did these things.
Government Interference and Consequences00:04:10
They interfered in our lives.
They infringed on our rights without justification.
And some people stood up, and Canadians from all over the country and actually people all over the world stood up with us and for us.
So, yeah, absolutely.
I'd do it again.
Well, I'm glad to hear that.
And you're a rare breed to stand up for freedom.
Most people are compliant.
Most people are risk-averse, conflict-averse.
They just go along to get along.
And people have something to lose.
You certainly had something to lose.
What was interesting to me is hearing in the hearing today how they tried to destroy your life, how they tried to get your liquor license taken away, tried to get your landlord to evict you, try to get your insurance revoked.
Like they went after you like Tony Soprano goes after a rival enemy.
I was shocked by that.
Did you feel that at the time?
Did you know there were literally 30 government agents working on your case?
That's the number that I just heard from your lawyers.
Wow.
Well, you know, I knew it was a possibility, and I know the farther you go in defiance of tyrannical rules, the farther they'll go in their pursuit to crush you, right?
So I'm not surprised that that happened, but I do want to point something out.
I didn't just immediately stand up and say, hey, this isn't right.
I mean, we went through a year of restrictions and lockdowns where my restaurant was just about annihilated.
And we worked really hard.
We tried to follow the rules.
And at every stage, we always tried to be as polite and respectful and compliant with what we could as we could.
You're way more polite than I would have been.
And I know that's just a knock against myself, but you were never mean.
You were never rude.
You never swore.
You never threatened.
You were friendly.
I don't know how you kept your composure when these bullies came at you every day.
You're a better man than me.
Well, there was one time I lost my composure, and that's when they put the chain on my doors of my restaurant.
I had some angry words for David Brown.
I swore a little bit.
But aside from that, I made a point of walking with the inspectors and making sure that people knew to be respectful.
That's incredible.
Yeah, because they're somebody's mom, there's someone's dad, it's someone's son, it's someone's daughter, and they're really no different than us.
Aside from they have a different job and a different opinion maybe of what they should be doing.
Well, I mean, they were happy to be cogs in the machine.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian dissident, Soviet dissident, said, I'm paraphrasing, he said, it's not up to you to fight, but at least don't let the evil flow through you.
That's what he said.
There was one more thing that I'd like to ask you about.
It came up several times again in the hearing today.
Again and again, these 30 bureaucrats who were targeting you, and by bureaucrats I'm including cops, health cops, inspectors, they didn't talk a lot about public health.
I think they knew no one was getting sick.
I think they knew instinctively people don't get sick outside or they just were as obsessed with politics.
And again and again, their memos that were read out today, they were talking about PR and social media and media coverage.
And oh, there's Chris Scott making a public statement.
I really don't think they were motivated at all by COVID, the bug.
I think they were motivated by the raw power and the fact that you refused to kneel before them.
That's all they talked about is politics and media, not about health.
Yeah, and it wasn't surprising to hear that because we were saying that right from the start.
For that first year that we complied and followed the rules, we knew that it was political.
It became glaringly obvious it was political.
There was even a, in court, Dina Hinshaw testified that her health orders, that she gave the government a buffet of ideas to do and let the government pick based on political policies.
That's on medicine.
That's politics.
It's absolutely politics.
It never had anything to do with health.
And the statistics support it.
The things that we said in the beginning were support it.
The things that you and Sheila and Rebel reported on in the beginning support our stance.
Supporting The Cafe Cause00:03:55
And I think the truth eventually is going to come out.
And then those that went along to get along are going to realize the error of their ways.
Well, I hope so.
You're a Christian man, and maybe that's the difference.
I got a more Old Testament view on things.
But, you know, I want to come back to what you said earlier, and I'll wrap up this way because I know you got a busy day.
We.
I want to go out there and get a bite of those whistle-stop burgers because I have not yet gone to your fine establishment, but I know our friend Sheila Gunread was there.
She did all that great reporting back in the day.
I want to look into the camera and say to our viewers that I'm not independently wealthy.
There's no way I could muster, and I'm not going to disclose the amount, but it's hundreds of thousands of dollars between the different court actions.
I hate to say it, but you were actually jailed for several days.
It was terrible.
Lots of court appearances.
This is certainly not the last one.
There is simply no way this would be possible were it not for hundreds and hundreds of ordinary people chipping in 50 bucks or 100 bucks or if people are able, 500 bucks.
And we are not done.
What I've learned today is that we are nowhere near done.
And the government has thrown through today alone, they threw five lawyers against you.
What do you figure that cost?
Yeah.
Oh, they got to be at the millions now for both the enforcement side and the prosecution side.
So let me look into the camera and say, folks, if you think what they tried to do to Chris was outrageous, what they did do to him was outrageous.
If you think it's important that we keep standing and that we keep sending the lawyers out to fight for him, please go to savethecafe.com.
And there you can read all our stories on this and you can chip in.
Donations to savethecafe.com are actually through the Democracy Fund, which is a registered CRA-compliant charity.
So you'll actually get a charitable tax credit for it in Canada.
So your donation is actually, it's before tax money, not after tax money, which is a good thing.
So please consider going to save the cafe.com.
Keep up the fight, Chris.
We'll do.
It's not over yet.
All right.
there you have it.
What an atrocious waste of resources I have just witnessed.
I spent half a day in the courthouse here in Red Deer, Alberta.
Besides the judge and the clerk and the officers and everyone, there were seven lawyers inside litigating the case of Chris Scott, the businessman and restaurateur of the Whistle Stop Cafe in the tiny town of Mir, Alberta.
Population 502.
Five of the lawyers were prosecutors of different stripes.
The two lawyers standing with me are crowdfunded lawyers for freedom.
As you know, Chris Scott is a mere human being and thus cannot afford to defend himself against the unlimited resources of the state.
That's where the dream team comes in.
We've talked before to Chad Williams and Chad, nice to see you again.
Nice to see you, Ezra.
Right on.
And Yoav Niamh, you are on your feet in court today as well.
Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you too.
We've met before, but it's the first time we've interviewed you.
All right.
Well, we've just spent half a day here and we were arguing not the substance of Chris Scott's case at the whistle-stop, but a collateral matter, an application for further and better disclosure of documents.
Is that an accurate statement of what we were doing in there today?
Yeah, so this is the first part of a multi-part disclosure application.
And for any of the viewers that had remembered some of the prior proceedings, during the cross-examination of the Alberta health inspector, Mr. Ian Plischke, who was one of the central figures that was in Chris Scott's life for the four or five months preceding the charges that got dropped,
Emails Tell a Different Story00:14:23
during the cross-examination, we simply asked him if there were any internal emails, if they had had internal correspondence and discussions about Chris Scott and collecting evidence and about enforcement of Alberta health service mandates.
And he said, yeah, we were.
And we said, did you provide those to the Crown as you're required to do?
And he said, no, we didn't.
And then we said, we'd like to see those, please.
And that's what's brought us down this path today.
We did get the emails.
We got about six or seven hundred pages of them.
We think they're tremendously, they're not flattering to Alberta Health Services.
And that's what spurred the further disclosure because within those emails, they've now mentioned that there was meeting notes.
And there's a whole bunch of other materials alluded to in the emails that were not provided in that batch of emails.
So this is the first of many returns, I suppose, to the court on this particular matter.
And there were five government lawyers saying, do not show the records.
And there's a lot of layers here.
The first is this is what happens when health bureaucrats, who until this moment in time, their chief duty was checking to make sure there was no mice in the kitchen.
You're giving them quasi-police powers.
So of course they don't know about disclosure.
Of course, they were political bureaucrats.
That's another thing that shone through in the few disclosures you did get.
It's just how petty and malicious and vindictive they were.
They were mocking Chris Scott, calling him stupid.
They were conspiring to see if they could get his landlord to evict him, which is bizarre.
What health officer has that power?
There was even some offhanded remarks where during the correspondence, they had found a case of COVID at Save On Foods.
And Mr. Plischke said, can't we just tell everybody that they all have COVID?
And then another HF staffer kind of joking around said, well, I really, you know, I secretly wish that this one came from the whistle stop.
And frankly, I think that that's disgusting.
These are people who should be protecting our public health, not joking about wishing that they had discovered COVID at some public protests.
I think that that's irreprehensible for people who are on the government dime to be doing that.
And if I may also comment, it really does undermine the legitimacy of their argument that COVID is something that is such a significant public health factor.
And yet at the same time, they're wishing it upon someone else, notwithstanding the fact that it looks like they're taking it as some kind of a joke and personal vendetta against Chris Scott, where there's no evidence that any COVID cases came from that.
And in fact, Ian Plischke testified that he didn't know of any COVID-related cases from any illegal outdoor gatherings at all.
I don't even know if that happens.
I think from a scientific basis, that's just not something that happens.
I looked at, I did read through these disclosures, and there's very little talk about public health.
It's all how do we get this guy?
They were seized with collateral purposes.
What I mean by that is they were, the reason they have the money and the power they're given is to protect us from the pandemic.
But that is not what the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of memos and notes and emails and meetings were about.
It was all, how do we get this stupid guy?
How do we, they tried to get his insurance knocked out.
They try and get his alcohol license knocked out.
Nothing to do with anything.
They wanted to destroy this man.
It was like I was watching a Tony Soprano show or something.
Absolutely.
And their personal agenda is so powerfully reflected in those emails.
And it's not reflected in the trial transcripts.
It's as if that disclosure never existed.
When you read the trial transcripts, you say to yourself, I didn't know any of this was going on.
We were just enforcing public health.
Emails tell a different story.
And that's something that some of the five government lawyers were trying to say at the end today.
They were saying, oh, you brought this up late.
We only heard about this recently.
Well, I don't know how you would ask about something you don't know exists.
It sounds like you discovered this trove of emails because one guy blurted it out.
And he sort of said, oh, did I mention that?
That we have weekly meetings about it.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Did I mention like the only reason we're here now is because one of those guys on the other side doesn't know the code of Omerta.
You worked with Tony Soprano.
You're supposed to keep it silent.
One of these guys blabbed to you and that's caused this domino effect.
Boy, they don't want those records released.
Well, and the other aspect of it, too, is that it's pretty obvious disclosure when you think about it.
These witnesses, main witnesses in the prosecution, Plischke, Holliday, Plischke's managers, 30 different people from all these different agencies.
30 different people to hunt down.
Absolutely.
And all they're doing is they're talking about Chris Scott and they're talking about his charges and furthering his charges and getting consultation from the Crown as to how to how is that not relevant?
Obviously relevant.
You shouldn't have to ask for that.
That's information that you should get at the very beginning.
And in fact, normally, in the normal course, counsel for the defense regularly gets this type of correspondence.
Well, and that's one more thing I want to ask you about because, of course, they came at Chris Scott five different ways.
They were trying to come up.
I mean, I've never seen anything like this.
This is how Rudy Giuliani went against the mafia in New York City.
This is how they went after, you know, Al Capone.
They, you know, mail fraud.
Like you had the best and brightest minds in the country trying to stop the mafia.
And I don't think there's a single criminal investigation against a biker gang, a fentanyl, drug gang against human trafficking.
I don't think there is a single criminal matter in the province of Alberta that had more resources, more ingenuity, more people, more agencies than the war to get Chris Scott.
It is super gross.
Yeah, it's astounding.
It's astounding.
Even on a terrorism or a wiretap case, typically you have the RCMP, you have the Crown, maybe you have the Department of Justice.
We have those same actors plus plus on a ticket case.
It's a ticket case.
Well, now, Chad, you've been fighting the good fight for various Democracy Fund cases and rebel news cases.
It's funny because the underlying laws of the lockdowns, many of them are dissipated.
They're being repealed.
Some of them have been challenged and courts say, oh, that's moot now because it's not afoot.
It frustrates me when high courts say, oh, we're not going to review the constitutionality of the ArriveCan app.
We're not going to review the constitutionality of the airport hotel quarantines because that's all moot now.
Oh, but we have thousands of cases like Chris Scott, like Arthur Pavlovsky, like ticket cases, mask cases, that we're still going to hunt these people down.
There were five lawyers.
I Google a story, the CBC, and the prosecutors are complaining about how under-resourced they are.
Oh, my God, we're going to have hundreds of real crimes letting go.
They had five lawyers, and they actually, some of those lawyers were private sector lawyers, right?
Is that correct?
They've hired private sector lawyers to be for them?
I think those are all in-house.
Okay, those are all in-house.
But we're on other cases, and now they're hiring the big boys, the magic circle firms that we've got experience going after in other matters.
So no expense appears to be spared against the political opposition.
But when it comes to domestic violence, when it comes to sexual assaults, when it comes to property crimes, when it comes to the things that actually matter to Albertans, yeah, the purse strings tighten up a little bit.
Now, this judge, he didn't say a lot.
There was some banter about what the government said was your dramatic reading of the tweets.
And I thought about that and I thought, well, it's tough to read a tweet saying Chris Scott is stupid or how do we hide the political nature of that without it being dramatic.
I don't think it's a dramatic reading.
I think it's dramatic content.
I thought the judge was, he didn't show his hand, although he did refer to some drama.
I think twice he referred to the crowd.
He referred to the crowd and how full it was.
And he said something for the benefit of the audience.
I think he's keenly aware that the public is watching this.
I mean, I don't think that judge has a trial a year where every single seat is taken.
You know, we can never know what's in a judge's mind until he tells us in the end, he's going to have his answer to your application on May 9th.
Is that right?
I believe so.
And then if it's in our favor, we've got a whole nother circuit that we've got to do in order to meet the test for what is relevant and needs to be disclosed.
Once we get the disclosure, then it's likely reopening examination of witnesses with the new disclosures.
Except for the one witness who passed away, who, and I'm sorry to say it's a tragedy, the chief cop on this took his own life.
And the biggest issue, obviously, with the utmost heartfelt and deepest condolences to his family because the circumstances, I understand, were quite tragic.
But in terms of the prejudice that Chris Scott now faces, having had late disclosure, which is, I mean, this is on the record.
They didn't provide disclosure.
We made a request.
Now they provided us all these emails.
This deceased witness is in those emails.
Our cross-examination of him, which was already done, would have been way different if we had this email bundle.
You know, I was talking to Chris a bit and I've talked to other clients that we've crowdfunded for.
No regular human can pay these legal bills.
No poor person, for sure.
No small business person that's insane.
And by the way, no rich person would either.
A rich person would just take the loss, pay a fine, and get on with their life.
A rich person's not going to burn up a half a million bucks fighting a ticket.
But only through crowdfunding is that possible.
I love that phrase, an army of Davids to take out a Goliath.
One David is not enough to take on the Goliath of government.
And Chris Scott's wife told me that that deceased cop, Sergeant Halliday, Holiday was his name.
He said to Chris, he looked Chris in the eye and said, you're not going to win this.
You're not going to beat the system.
You know, you can't fund City Hall.
And that he's right because he knew the insane resource.
They were going to smash this guy to make a lesson out of him.
And I think the five government lawyers in here today did not expect that you guys would be standing with Chris Scott and that you would still be fighting.
Well, and it was very telling when the Alberta Health Services lawyer said, what they're asking for is impossible.
Oh, yeah.
You only have 100,000 employees.
And they complained that this, one of them had to work for three days on disclosure.
And judge, that's unfair.
She literally said it was unfair that they would have to go through their records.
I couldn't believe my ears.
It's absolutely crazy when my office has a handful of excellent lawyers.
We're family run.
We're Albertan.
And we, I mean, these are important cases to the people in my office because we live here and we're affected by them.
And without the crowdfunding efforts, I mean, we're reasonably priced lawyers for the value that we bring to files.
No one could afford this.
I'm asked all the time.
They're saying, hey, well, you know, I've got a COVID masking case, you know, and I can't find a charity to help me.
You know, how much is it going to cost?
And we're reasonably priced, but we're still lawyers.
You know, I'm really proud of the Democracy Fund, which has 2,500 clients, and Chris Scott is a Democracy Fund client.
Rebel News has some clients directly, but it all comes down to the same view.
I'm going to let these fellas go, have a well-earned lunch.
They were fighting like hell today.
I love it when we fight the long odds.
Chad, sorry, pardon me, Chad, Chad Haggerty, another one of our lawyers inside.
But Chad Williams, so we got two Chads in the house today.
There's a lot of stuff to give back while I have lawyers for freedom.
I love it.
Today, he's a really nice guy.
And I mean, he's got some great jokes.
He's really witty.
And I mean, it's the kind of crew of lawyers that the Rebel and Democracy Fund have kind of brought together to fight these important constitutional issues are some of the best lawyers I've ever seen.
And I'm routinely up against people at the Magic Circle firms who just kind of time punch cards.
They've got underlings that they just delegate work to.
The crowdfunding money that is going to Democracy Fund, it's really getting into the hands of excellent counsel that are doing great work.
Well, I agree.
And you're one of them.
And you had that long shot victory for Rebel News, 701.
The lawyers, seven government lawyers versus yourself, or I think there was maybe even more lawyers on the back, nine.
And we beat Justin Trudeau.
So even the uphill battles can win.
You have great to talk with you on camera, Chad.
Great to see you again.
Another Chad, Freedom Lawyer in the house.
I will have some final thoughts next.
Stay with us.
All right, there you have it.
It's a delight to be in Alberta.
What a sunny day.
I was sitting next to my friend Sheila Gonrid, our chief reporter.
We were live tweeting away.
I'm pleased to say there was a local reporter there from the Red Deer Advocate.
I don't know what his coverage will be like, but I think it's a good sign that he understood this was an important case.
I look forward to reading his coverage.
As you heard from the lawyers, this is not a cheap prospect, and we are in the middle of the battle.
The government doesn't want those records.
I think we have to continue to stand up to them.
They thought that Chris Scott would be crushed by now.
They thought that he wouldn't be able to stand back up.
And he wouldn't be if it weren't for you.
So consider going to savethecafe.com and chipping in a few bucks to help his legal dream team.
I really enjoyed watching them in action today.
That's it from beautiful sunny Red Deer, Alberta.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us, to you at home, goodbye and keep fighting for freedom.