Ezra Levant exposes Steven Guilbeault’s $20,000 fine paid by Canadian taxpayers—not his own funds—after a federal court ruled his 2021 Twitter block of Rebel News unconstitutional, despite his personal responsibility under the consent order. The Democracy Fund’s Fight the Fines Project overwhelmed courts with 3,000+ cases against pandemic-era $5,000+ quarantine tickets, securing 90% withdrawals or acquittals while revealing systemic abuse. Guilbeault’s evasion and broader critiques of media bias underscore how legal pressure forces accountability, proving collective defiance can dismantle punitive overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
Stephen Gilbo, that deadbeat, finally paid his $20,000 fine to me, but he didn't use his own money.
I'll show you what he did.
But first, let me invite you to get the video version of this podcast.
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Here's today's podcast.
Tonight, Stephen Gilbo pays his debts with just days to spare, but he uses other people's money.
It's December 6th, and this is the Azure Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
In the spring of 2021, that's almost three years ago, Stephen Gilbeau, then the heritage minister, blocked me on Twitter.
And at the same time, Catherine McKenna, then Trudeau's Environment Minister, if I recall, she did the same thing to Sheila Gonread, our chief reporter.
Now, you may not be on Twitter, so this might not sound like anything important to you.
What's Twitter other than some time-wasting app on your phone for, it makes you stare at your phone for hours quarreling with strangers?
I mean, who cares in a way?
Fair enough.
But I saw it differently.
In politics, Twitter is the new public square.
It's the new town hall.
Every politician is on Twitter.
Announcements are often made first on Twitter.
It's so instant.
It's so huge and global.
Donald Trump, as president, was a master of Twitter.
He would send messages to other world leaders in a few sentences that cut through all the diplomatic niceties in a way the world had never seen before.
But it's a two-way street, which is what I love about it.
We don't just get to listen to leaders and newsmakers like Trump and frankly 90% of world leaders, but we get to clap back at them if we want.
And sometimes they interact with us and we can watch them interact amongst each other.
It's a dramatic theater.
Sometimes it's very funny.
Sometimes it's very sad.
In the past two months, Twitter, especially under Elon Musk's guidance to become a free speech platform, it's been a source of a lot of primary information about the war between Israel and Hamas, information about the atrocities committed by those terrorists that would have been censored in other forums.
On Twitter, you could actually watch the terrorists celebrate their barbarity.
The very first tweet I saw about the October 7th massacre was from the Ayatollah of Iran himself, incredibly.
Whereas the mainstream media won't even call Hamas a terrorist group.
So Twitter is so important for news and public affairs and to correct the establishment.
It's an alternative source of information.
I mean, before Twitter, for example, how would you know that this CTV broadcast by Omar Sachedina, how would you know it was a lie?
In Ottawa, thousands of Jewish Canadians rallied on Parliament Hill in support of the war, while inside Parliament, Palestinian Canadians made a plea for help.
Here's CTV's Judy Trin.
Bring them home.
Bring them home.
Underneath the Peace Tower, a call for the release of hostages and an end to anti-Semitism in a show of unwavering support for Israel.
That was a lie.
As you know, I was there at that rally, and it was actually a call for peace and a call for the return of the hostages.
CTV lied.
And if it weren't for social media, especially Twitter, most people in Canada would have no other choice really but to accept that lie.
How would they know any differently?
So Twitter is an essential tool for knowing about the world.
It's much bigger than just politics.
Sports and entertainment and comedy and celebrities and movies.
It's a hundred things, but it is essential for public life and politics, which brings me back to the reason we sued Stephen Gilbo and Catherine McKenna for blocking me and Sheila two and a half years ago.
To be clear, we're not talking about them blocking us on their personal Twitter accounts.
They blocked us on their government Twitter accounts, the one where they do government business, like issue press releases and make government announcements and interact with other government figures.
The government Twitter accounts owned by the government of Canada, run by staff paid for by the government of Canada.
That's what I'm talking about.
Gilbo and McKenna had no more right to ban us from their Twitter account than to ban us from visiting the government of Canada's website or phoning the government or walking into a government of Canada office.
They may hate us at Rebel News, and that's their right, I suppose, but they cannot use the resources and the services of the government of Canada to block and ban and retaliate against us just because they hate us.
I know that's what authoritarian leftists want to do, but we still have some constitutional rights here in Canada, so we sued.
You can see a copy of our lawsuit at twitterlawsuit.ca.
We sued in the federal court of Canada, and the government fought back and fought back hard.
Gilbo and McKenna didn't defend themselves.
What I mean by that is they had the government of Canada defend them.
They didn't reach into their own pockets for lawyers, which immediately shows that something was a bit off.
If these really were their private Twitter accounts, which they claimed, why would the government have to defend them?
You can't really claim that they were personal Twitter accounts, but then make the government, that is taxpayers, defend you.
But they dug in for two full years.
For two years, they fought us, denying that they were government accounts, denying that we had a right to see what they were publishing, denying that we had any right to access that information at all.
They made our lawyers fly all the way to Toronto to battle them in federal court.
But then our lawyers showed the judge a very simple thing.
You see that little gray check mark next to Gilbo's name?
If you hover over it, you'll see it means government Twitter account.
That's what the gray checkmark means.
We showed that gray checkmark to the judge, and the government spent the day trying to argue that that evidence should not be admitted.
Can you believe that?
Well, the judge allowed the evidence and faced with certain defeat, Gilbo finally relented and agreed to unblock us.
Now, by this point, the case had gone on for so long, Catherine McKenna had actually quit politics.
So we dropped the lawsuit against her.
No one really cares what she has to say on her own.
It was always her government status that gave her power and relevance.
But my point is, after fighting tooth and nail for two years, Stephen Gilbo finally collapsed and admitted what we had all along known.
And so the federal court issued what's called a consent order.
Gilbo was ordered to keep me unblocked for the rest of his entire career as an MP.
And he was ordered to stop anyone else, such as staff, from blocking me.
And as a recognition of the BS that he put us through, he had to pay us $20,000 in costs.
As you can see, this order was issued on September 11th, and he was given 90 days to pay.
Now, I should tell you, $20,000 in costs is a huge cost order.
But two years of litigation, including our lawyers flying into Toronto to attend court to argue over that little gray check mark, it costs us closer to 100 grand.
But still, it was an enormous victory.
It's a small thing, Twitter, but it was a big victory.
Gilbo was ordered to unblock us forever.
It might not be a binding precedent, which going to a full trial would have been, but it was a clear sign that the court had no time for Gilbo's absurd arguments, and even Gilbo's lawyers knew it.
They knew they had run out of time.
I think they were trying to tire us out.
I think they thought we wouldn't be able to keep up.
And they knew that if they went to a full trial, they would have had the same bad results and probably would have had to pay us even more money.
And the judge would have had some very sharp things to say, and they wanted to avoid that.
Except Gilbo wouldn't pay the 20 grand.
The court order said he had to pay us $20,000 within 90 days, September 11th.
30 days went by, no check.
65 days, no check.
75 days, 80 days.
90 days after September 11th, by the way, is December 10th, which is this Sunday.
So really, he had until this Friday, just two days from now, to pay because the weekend wouldn't work.
But he didn't pay.
A few days ago, our lawyer called his lawyers to say, if Gilbo didn't pay, if he violated this court order, we would go back to the judge to ask for more relief.
And who knows what that would have looked like?
Would Gilbo have been found in contempt of court?
Would a judge let us seize his assets to pay the $20,000 debt?
That's what would happen to a private citizen who lost in court but refused to pay a debt.
Would we be able to garnish his salary?
Incredibly, Gilbo's lawyers said they mailed the check, regular mail with a regular stamp, but that it simply must have got lost in the mail.
They actually said that.
The dog ate my homework.
They had no tracking number for it.
Here's a question.
If you had to send over $20,000 to someone because of a court order, would you just put a stamp on it and drop it in a red mailbox and hope for the best?
What a clown, what a total mess he is.
But sorry, Wednesday, he has 96 hours, but he really only has 48 hours because of the weekend.
Would he really break the law again?
Remember, he's a convicted criminal, a Greenpeace extremist who was convicted of break and enter for an environmentalist stunt before he became an MP.
Well, this morning I got a note from our lawyer.
The check finally showed up at our lawyer's office with just two days to spare.
Incredible, an incredible victory in a way, but a costly victory.
The $20,000 was a nice touch, but like I say, we were put through the paces for nearly $100,000 chasing Gilbo.
That's our side.
But remember, the government had a bevy of lawyers there for Gilbo and McKenna.
If we spent nearly $100,000, there is no way that the government spent less than a quarter million dollars of your tax money pushing the lie that Gilbo's Twitter account is not a public Twitter account.
A quarter million tax dollars only to surrender at the last moment and agree to unblock me, which he should have done in the very beginning.
What a disgrace he is.
But here's what's so crazy.
When I announced Gilbo's consent order, that punishment, and published the order online, millions of people, literally millions, viewed those tweets and videos.
And the vast majority of people celebrated our win.
I think people really hate Stephen Gilbo, and with good reason.
He's a socialist.
He's an idiot.
He's a convicted criminal.
But mainly, he wants to make their lives harder, poorer, smaller by taxing their carbon and banning their plastic straws.
All the while he's jet-setting around the world.
People hate a hypocrite.
Incredibly, despite seeing Gilbo's meltdown and the court order smacking him down, three other liberal cabinet ministers thought they would sign up for the same thing.
Seriously, after Gilbo was ordered to unblock us and pay us, three more cabinet ministers, Marcy Ian, Karina Gould, and Yaara Sachs, each of them thought it would be a really smart idea to block us on Twitter too, after Gilbo was given the consent order.
If you haven't heard of these three cabinet ministers, you're not alone.
They are women of low accomplishment.
The most famous one is Karina Gould, who made international headlines for posing with that Nazi SS officer, Yaroslav Hanka, when he came to parliament.
So gross.
And Yaera Sachs is, I think, tied with Seamus O'Regan for being the dumbest MP in parliament.
I don't know.
I go back and forth on that contest all the time.
She actually gave life to the conspiracy theory that the trucker convoy, honking their horns, that was secret code for Heil Hitler.
Honk honk meant Heil Hitler.
She really said that.
Remember this?
How much vitriol do we have to see of Hong Kong, which is an acronym for Hail Hitler?
Do we need to see by these protesters on social media?
Yeah, so we're not dealing with the sharpest knives in the drawer here.
But imagine blocking us just moments after Gilbo was named and shamed by a judge for doing the same thing.
I mean, block us before, fine, that's rolling the dice.
But Gilbo just lost and you think it's a good idea?
So, so dumb.
So what could we do but sue them too?
The thing is, it was much easier this time around.
We already had the lawsuit written.
We really just had to change a few of the details.
90% of the work was done.
So we sued those three.
I can't imagine they'll go through a two-year trial fighting us.
Hopefully they're not quite as stupid and wasteful as Stephen Gilbo was.
But you never know with liberals.
I mean, hey, it's just taxpayers' money.
But here's the thing.
I mentioned we finally got the check today, the $20,000, right at the last minute.
But look at the check.
Well, first, first, look at the lawsuit.
The lawsuit named Stephen Gilbo.
He claims it was a personal Twitter account.
That's what he said.
And he personally is bound by the court order to keep us unbanned for the rest of his career.
Him personally.
But look who paid the $20,000 for him.
Look at the check we received this morning.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
It was Gilbo who blocked us.
It was Gilbo who claimed it was his personal account, not the government account.
It was Gilbo who fought for two and a half years, foisting the cost on taxpayers for his lawyers.
It was Gilbo who was ordered to pay and ordered not to block me again for the rest of his career.
It was Gilbo.
But look at the check.
Look how the money came.
Gilbo didn't pay a cent.
You did.
Taxpayers did.
Look at that check.
Gilbo's Debt00:04:08
It's from the government of Canada.
Stephen Gilbo swore to the court that the account was his and his loan.
It was his personally.
It had nothing to do with the government.
That, of course, was a lie, which was obvious to anyone.
It's why his lawyers fought so hard to stop us from showing that gray check mark to the judge that proves Gilbo's a liar.
But Gilbo said it was his and his alone.
It was his personally.
So why is he sticking taxpayers for the bill?
Stephen Gilbo is the one who blocked me.
He's the one who says it was him, not the government.
So why is he shirking his debt?
Why is he passing the buck to taxpayers?
Why do taxpayers have to pay for his fiasco?
Why do you have to pay for his lying and his stubbornness?
What a little weasel he is.
This is wrong.
He's the one we sued.
He should pay for it.
Don't you agree?
And don't you think that he gets away with shrugging off this debt to taxpayers?
That other MPs, like those three fools who thought it would be a good idea to copy Gilbo, Marcy Ian, Karina Gould, and Yaara Sachs, if Gilbo gets to wiggle out of this by sticking the tab to taxpayers, why wouldn't they also, why wouldn't every MP in parliament illegally block citizens?
And if they get called on it, just make taxpayers bail them out.
Whereas if Gilbo has to pay his own debt himself, maybe he'll be less likely to violate the constitutional rights of Canadian citizens in the future, and so will his stupider colleagues.
So I don't actually think this story is over, even though we got the check.
I think he has to pay the money back.
And I think I should tweet at him literally every day, as is now my right to do.
I think I should tweet to him every single day to pay the money back.
And in fact, I would ask you to join me.
I've started a petition at paythemoneyback.ca.
The petition language is very simple.
We, the undersigned, demand that Stephen Gilbo pay his own $20,000 penalty and not pass it off to taxpayers.
That's it.
I'd like to get 20,000 people to sign it.
And then I'll do my best to actually hand it to that little weasel.
I mean, seriously, I've been to court.
I win some and I lose some.
When you lose, you grumble, but you pay your debts.
Why does this little weasel think he can pass off his debts onto taxpayers?
So go to my new petition at paythemoneyback.ca.
Seriously, even in this final moment, Gilbo is being a little weasel.
I really think he needs to pay the money back.
He caused this mess.
He should clean it up.
Go to paythemoneyback.ca and I promise to tweet at him every single day until he does.
Stay with me for more.
Well, I remember the first case we took in what we would later call the Fight the Fines Project.
It actually turned out to be one of our most famous cases, that of Arthur Pavlovsky.
He was doing what he always does on the weekends, having church services on the streets for homeless people.
And he doesn't just preach, he feeds people.
And for some reason, the authorities hate that.
I don't know why.
Maybe because his charity, his help for the lowliest among society, shames them for not doing more.
This is the video that I saw.
This is very early weeks into the pandemic when cops were abusing his civil liberties and using the lockdowns and the mask rules and the anti-gathering rules as an excuse.
Do you remember this footage of the cops pushing around a pastor feeding the hungry?
This is not events.
This is not your picnic in a neighborhood for the fun of it.
We are providing necessities of life to those that you and your bosses refuse to provide.
Dockets Moving: The Flood of Cases00:11:18
You got all kinds of events happening right now.
And yet Carpenter's finest are not bothering their churches for me.
This is the hypocrisy of this city.
This is the hypocrisy of our wonderful peerless leaders.
Where is Nahatninschi?
The mayor of this city.
Can you guys hear how you respect the social taxes?
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Stand back.
Or why?
Do not tell him not to get away from it.
That's for everybody.
saw that and I was so mad and I called up Pastor Arthur and I said, let me crowdfund a lawyer for you.
And fight the fines.com was born.
And soon we had two clients and five and ten and then we had a hundred.
And I remember one day in our staff meeting, I blurted out something.
I couldn't help myself.
I said, we're going to take a thousand cases.
And everyone around said, oh, how are you going to do that?
And I didn't quite have the answer.
Well, here we are three and a half years later.
And the Fight the Fines project, which grew into the Democracy Fund, a registered Canadian charity dedicated to civil liberties, it has taken 3,000 cases, not just 1,000.
And I got to tell you, that day when I blurted out, we're going to take 1,000 cases, in the back of my mind was that voice of regret saying, you will regret this.
How will you pay for 1,000 trials?
That's, you know, even if they're just $5,000 each, that's $5 million.
How are you going to ever do it?
But behind that little voice was a voice saying, build it and they will come.
It'll work out.
In fact, the more cases you take, the more it will jam up the system.
And it's one thing for the cops to hand out a ticket, but it's another thing for a prosecutor and a judge and a clerk and a courthouse to have an actual hearing.
And will they really have 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000 trials?
And so what started off as perhaps an ambitious folly, take every case there is, turned into a strategic strength.
And here to talk about the results of that strategy some three and a half years later is the head paralegal for the Democracy Fund, Jenna Little, who joins us now via Skype from the Greater Toronto area.
Jenna, great to see you again.
And by the way, thank you for your outstanding work of saving and freeing thousands of Canadians.
Thank you, Ezra.
It's so nice to see you again as well.
And it's been our pleasure to run the Fight the Finance campaign in Ontario and assist Ontarians with dealing with their tickets.
You mentioned Ontario because in Ontario, paralegals are allowed, they're accredited by the courts to run a lot of trials, provincial offenses, which is what many of these pandemics were.
So the Democracy Fund has three full-time lawyers and you lead the team of four paralegals.
You and your fellow Democracy Fund paralegals, you have 1,300 cases in Ontario alone.
Is that accurate?
Or at least you had those because you've been disposing of many of them.
Is that an accurate count?
Yeah, I would say that's close, 1,300 to 1,500 total over the last couple of years.
That's amazing.
So I mean, I want to say thank you to you and congratulations to you and your team who are just cutting through these like a hot knife through butter because you're experts on it now.
I mean, no one in Canada has done as many of these as you and your team.
But the other day you mentioned something that I thought, boy, we've got to have Jenna Little on TV.
She's got to talk about this and let people know.
I mean, you go in and you fight each case one at a time.
You get disclosure from the police.
You go through, you run a trial if necessary.
But you mentioned that I think you said over 100 cases all at once were being dropped.
And I thought, whoa, what's that about?
How did that happen?
And it made me think of that strategic idea.
If you flood the system, that alone will break it.
Tell me about this 100 or 110 cases.
Well, we've been noticing over the past little while, starting about in the summer last year, that in Mississauga, they've been putting a lot of tickets onto withdrawal dockets.
And the Mississauga court is where all the people with quarantine act tickets from the Pearson airport, that's where they go.
So that poor court is just flooded with these quarantine act charges.
And so we've started noticing that they're putting them on these secret dockets and they don't send out a notice to the defendant.
The only reason we find out is because we check monthly to make sure that nobody slips through the cracks.
And we started noticing this trend.
Tell me, I don't mean to interrupt you, but just for our folks who might not know the jargon, what exactly is a docket?
Is it a list of court cases?
That's really what a docket is?
Yes, that's exactly what it is.
There's multiple dockets per day in each court, in each room.
And so the docket is essentially just a list of matters that are to be dealt with at a specific time.
And you just said something, and I don't mean to interrupt you, but you've just said so many interesting things in like 60 seconds.
So Pearson Airport, that's the name of Toronto's International Airport.
It's the busiest airport in the country by far.
And it would be where thousands of these quarantine act tickets were issued.
And I never thought about it.
They would all go to the nearest court.
Like they wouldn't be heard around the country because the alleged offense would have occurred there in Toronto, I presume.
So this poor court and judges and prosecutors, they were handed thousands and thousands of quarantine act tickets because those busybody health police at Pearson said so.
And they may not have wanted this to be their life's work, I guess, right?
Well, I can imagine not.
I mean, I can imagine getting into a career to deal with quasi-criminal offenses or even going to law school to work for the Ministry of Attorney General and not wanting to have to do thousands of these trials.
I can imagine that that's nobody's career aspiration except for my team and mine.
Well, listen, you're fighting for the little guy.
I mean, you at Fight the Fines, literally anyone, any religion, any background, we didn't discriminate.
Anyone was welcome.
And a lot of these people were low-income people.
Many of them were new Canadians who didn't have a familiarity with our legal system, didn't know what their rights were.
And by the way, the fines were atrociously large, like 5,000 bucks plus per person.
So you have a family of, let's say, four coming into the country.
That's $20,000 worth of fines.
That's going to destroy a normal family.
Absolutely.
I mean, even with the surcharge, which is 25%, one of those tickets comes to $6,250 each.
And we've had people who have had six kids, eight members of the family total, and each person gets a ticket.
That's a life savings wiped out.
That's their entire home equity wiped out.
Yeah, absolutely.
Even one person can't afford a $6,000 fine.
Now, I interrupted.
Jenna, you were on a chair there, and I apologize for interrupting, but I just wanted to unpack those two little things to clarify what a docket was.
And just to think about all these, every single one of these tickets being heard in the same court.
Okay, so you discovered that there was a secret list as in they didn't publicize it.
It was a withdrawal docket, a withdrawal list.
And what did that mean?
And what did you discover?
Well, when it first started happening, we would get in touch with the court directly to make sure that this wasn't some sort of error or maybe it just was input incorrectly into the system.
But we started noticing the trend where it would be tens, scores of clients on each docket.
And up until yesterday, these dockets were happening probably monthly, I would say.
And yesterday we had a docket with about 60 clients on it.
All of them were withdrawn.
We've got another docket coming.
Yep, another docket coming up on Monday with about 50, 60 more people.
So these are fight the fines cases.
These are people who came through our videos or our emails, went to fightthefines.com, filled out the form.
You and your team got on them.
So when you're saying 50 or 60 a day are being withdrawn, those are 50 or 60 people that you've been helping, that Democracy Fund's been helping.
Yes, those are 50 or 60 of our clients.
That's not including members of the public who are representing themselves and they just don't know this is happening.
Can I ask you, is there any reason given?
I mean, I can guess a reason.
The court is full.
They have more important things to do, like go after real bad guys.
Maybe they don't think they're going to win them all.
Maybe they just can't.
I mean, some of these trials might be half a day or a full day.
Imagine taking up months of court time for this.
That's my theory.
Has anyone from the government, from the prosecutors or from the courts, given you their explanation for these?
And you mentioned they're not publicized, these lists, these withdrawal dockets.
What do they say is going on?
Do they have an explanation?
They don't really, but I think we can infer that it comes down to a couple of variables.
One being court resources and the cost that it takes to prosecute and have trials for things like this.
And two, being the fact that only a small percentage of these public health officers are actually showing up to trial.
So if they were to have a trial and these people don't show up, it has to be withdrawn.
And then that's a huge waste of resources.
Now, let me stop you there again.
I'm learning so many things from you, Jenna.
That's incredible.
I just want to go there again.
So these public health officers, so those would have been the people at the airport issuing the tickets, I take it.
And I'm guessing a lot of them are not still employed doing that.
I think, like, or maybe they are.
So when you're saying they're not bothering to show up, is that because they were like a temporary health cop and now they've moved on to something else?
And so when it's trial time, two years later, three years later, whatever, they've moved on and they couldn't care less.
Help me understand why a public health officer would not show up at court.
I think that you've hit the nail on the head that the majority of these people, if not all, were just temporary public health officers to help deal with this project, you could call it, and to issue these tickets as some sort of a deterrence.
And now, fast forward to three years later, some of these people are nurses.
Some of them are former police officers.
Some of them are security guards.
They're just random people who just happen to qualify to be an officer.
And especially the people who are nurses, you know, they've all moved on with their lives and they've got jobs and they're not going to take hours out of every week to attend court for something that maybe they don't even believe in anymore.
Yeah.
Isn't that amazing?
And, you know, again, that's using the sluggish system against itself.
I think back to that moment, Jenna, that moment I blurred.
Have you ever done that?
Have you ever blurted something out and then immediately thought, why did I say that out loud?
That's how I felt in our staff meeting when I said we're going to take a thousand cases.
And everyone said, how?
Success Stories Amid Stress00:09:48
What?
And I was worried.
But I think that the strategy of Go Big is actually, I mean, if instead of having 1,300 cases or 1,500, as you and your colleagues have had, if you had 15, then the system probably would have gone after all of them because it could have handled that.
But the sheer fact, you know, that old movie Spartacus, where they say, who's Sparta?
I'm Spartacus.
I'm Spartan.
And like everyone stood up and said, No, I'm Spartacus.
And so the Romans didn't know who to go after.
I think that's what happened here.
It didn't happen on other lockdown cases.
So the odd restaurant that would defy the law, for example, Adam Skelly's Adamson Barbecue in Toronto, they were almost alone.
So you had 100 police swarm the place.
In Red Deer, outside Red Deer in Mirror, Alberta, you had the Whistle Stop Diner.
In Calgary, you had Without Papers Pizza.
So you had like one brave person in each of those cities.
Trouble is, then the entire police prosecutor court system can come down on them like a ton of bricks.
But if you would have had 100 restaurateurs in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Montreal, 100 saying, no, we're not part of this, it would have broken the system the same way I think we broke the system.
I think our strategy of take every single person and worry about how to pay for it later, I think that's what broke the system here, Jenna.
And I just think it's a miracle.
And it shows what a tiny bit of courage and a tiny bit of nonconformity and a tiny bit of defiance can do.
I mean, that's my theory.
You're dealing with this every day.
You're in the belly of the beast.
But I think that it was the sheer mass of it that broke the system.
What do you think?
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, I completely agree with you.
I mean, they've done this to themselves by creating a project of giving out these huge tickets to so many people, tens of thousands of people in the province and elsewhere.
But they didn't really think about it.
And we essentially just took that rope that they made and used it.
You know, I remember talking to a senior lawyer about how abusive these public health officers often were at the airports.
And I couldn't understand it.
But this senior lawyer, who's older and wiser than me, he said, that's the point of it, Ezra.
That's not a bug.
That's a feature.
These public health officers want people to go home, so appalled that they tell 10 of their friends how awful it was to get people not to travel like these.
Hotel quarantines was another thing.
I don't know if you remember they forced you to stay in a quarantine hotel at your own expense and I thought, how can?
It's, so abusive, so stupid.
And this senior lawyer said, no Ezra, that's the point.
They want to scare people into staying home, scare people into not complain, into not going out, scare people into complying and and the sheer abusiveness was the point they didn't really think all the way down the line, two years to when there'd be a prosecution, because they almost didn't care.
They just wanted to terrify people, terrify and terrorize people.
Jenna, you know who I feel bad for are the thousands of people who probably sold their you know retirement funds, mortgaged their house to comply and to pay.
You're telling me a wonderful success story of the 1500 people 1300 to 1500 people you represent and those who are self-represented, but there are probably thousands of people who, under terror and shame and stress, ponied up the six thousand dollars for the fines.
There definitely are, and I do have to mention that not every ticket is getting withdrawn, they are actually still prosecuting a lot of tickets.
So we have several hundred people waiting for court days or we're going to be going to court days and having trials, et cetera, across the province.
Um, and it is unfortunate because we've had a lot of people who have ended up having to pay fines because we've had a trial with no defense and the prosecution wants to proceed, and that's just where we're at right now is some people are getting off and some people aren't, but a lot are.
Yeah well, I I like to say that, even in the cases where we don't have the full success, our clients are no further behind if they would.
I mean, first of all, if they have to pay the fine, if they were going to pay the fine and if they were going to increase, like.
I guess what i'm saying is our best efforts, even if they don't succeed, are better for these folks because, first of all, at least they had a friend and an ally and someone helping them out, someone bearing some of the stress, someone showing them the ropes.
Out of the 1300 or 1500 I don't know the exact number of cases that you and your team have taken, how many have come to a conclusion, would you estimate?
Probably close to 800.
wow that's great and again just an estimate here i know you haven't looked into the numbers fresh how many of those do you think have either been withdrawn acquitted or just have a token payment of like a hundred bucks I would say most of them, like maybe 90%.
And that includes people who might have a $500 fine or a $300 fine or no fine, just a suspended sentence.
It's really only a handful of people who have gotten these $1,000 plus fines.
And they're not out of Pearson generally.
They're not out of the Mississauga court.
It's a different thing where there's less people being charged.
So they have the resources.
Right.
So 90% success rate and the Mississauga area, because they were supporting all the Pearson airport charges, is the one that's overwhelmed.
You know, there are so many lessons to be learned in that.
And I think one of them is strength in numbers.
And to make the other guy go through the paces, don't make it easy on them.
Wow, this is a great news story.
This is the best case scenario.
I remember blurting it out.
Well, they're 1,000.
And the idea of jamming the system was the secret hope.
And that has come true.
And I love the fact that the health officers who were going to provide the condemning testimony that they couldn't even be bothered to show up two, three years later.
To me, that's the icing on the cake.
Well, Jenna, please take my thanks to yourself and to your teammates.
For those who still want to help, sounds like we have hundreds more cases still going in Ontario alone.
I know that we have cases in Windsor, in British Columbia.
I don't know all the cases off the top of my hand.
When I say we, the Fight the Fines project then transformed into the Democracy Fund, which is an independent CRA-registered charity, by the way.
So if you chip into it, you can get a charitable tax receipt, which I would encourage you to do.
But it sounds like you guys have learned the system.
You're using the system.
You've had a 90% success rate.
And you've really put the government to the test.
I'm thrilled.
And I want as many of the donors to the Fight the Fines project as possible to see this video because I want them to know of the success of you and your team.
Last word to you, Jenna.
Well, I have to say that even for people who did end up having to pay some sort of a fine, I love to tell them that they've made their point by simply fighting the ticket, having us on and going through the system.
They've made their point and they've also contributed.
So even if they didn't completely get off their ticket, they've actually still helped everybody else en masse get rid of theirs.
Yeah, I think that's wise.
And I can just imagine how lonely it would have felt.
I mean, I'm a former lawyer myself, and I, you know, I think about these things and I'm not a stranger to court.
I bet you for a lot of people, this was the first time in their lives they've received a ticket for anything other than like a parking offense.
I bet you this is the first time in their lives that they were threatened with thousands of dollars.
I bet they were scared.
And just to have you and your team just to say, it's okay, it's going to be okay.
We'll walk you through it.
We'll be there with you.
I can imagine the psychological value of that to reduce the stress on these people.
That itself is incalculable.
You can calculate the fines that we have saved these people.
You can do the math.
But I don't know if we'll ever be able to calculate the moral salve, the moral help and encouragement that you gave them.
So I thank you and your team.
Jenna, great to see you.
Keep it up for folks who are interested.
They can go to thedemocracyfund.ca.
By the way, we have other famous clients like Tamara Leach, who's currently fighting in an Ottawa court, and we are still doing an appeal for Arthur Pavlovsky in the Lethbridge court.
But the bulk of the cases are not famous.
They're not famous cases.
They're your friends and neighbors who had the $5,000 fines that Jenna is fighting and winning.
Jenna, thanks so much, and congratulations again.
You're welcome.
Thank you so much for having me and thank you for your kind words.
Right on.
Well, it's true.
I mean, you guys have done a miracle.
There you have it.
Stay with us.
Hey, welcome back.
What do you think of, there's so much going on, isn't there?
First of all, congrats to Jenna Little and her team for having such a high success rate.
I'm thrilled about that.
And shame on Stephen Gilbo, who's sort of the opposite in character to Jenna Little.
I mean, Stephen Gilbo is such a mooch, such a shyster, such a socialist weasel.
He's so embarrassing.
But did you see that clip I played of Omar Sachedina saying the Jews were warmongers while it was Palestinians inside who called for peace?
You just can't trust the media party anymore, can you?
Free Speech Hope00:00:33
That's why Twitter is so important.
That's why we have to stop people from blocking us or banning us on Twitter, because that is where, under Elon Musk, at least, free speech has a chance.
Under the old regime, it was like Google, YouTube, Instagram, all the others.
They were censors.
I think there's a twinkle of hope in Twitter that can be a free speech place.
I don't want to get my hopes too high because they'll be dashed.
But for now, Elon Musk is championing freedom in a way that no national leader I know of is.
That's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.