Ezra Levant examines Canada’s Freedom Convoy—a 2022 trucker protest against COVID mandates—where Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, jailed organizers like Tamara Leach (49 days, including seven on a concrete slab), and weaponized courts to silence dissent, ignoring Dr. Waddell’s admission of vaccine mandate flaws and Dr. Lorenko’s confirmation of rushed approvals. Leach’s trial, dragged into 2024 with Jordan rule violations, features irrelevant testimony while she faces punitive bail conditions, financial ruin, and media attacks denying her Métis heritage. Prosecutors, pressured by politics, use her case as a "show trial" to intimidate protesters, mirroring Trudeau’s Trump-style insurrection framing—a tactic to discredit civil resistance under the guise of justice. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, a feature interview with Keith Wilson, the lawyer at the heart of the Trucker Convoy.
Shame on you, you sensorious bug.
Well, it's almost 2024, but we are still living through one of the most interesting moments of 2022.
I'm referring to the greatest populist democratic uprising in Canadian history since, oh, what?
I don't know, probably a rebellion in the 19th century.
I'm talking about the peaceful trucker convoy that after two years of lockdowns and vaccine mandates and authoritarianism, the salt of the earth, working class people said, you know what?
It's enough.
And the most independent-minded people around, namely truckers, often who own their own rig, own their own business, truckers who have a lot of time to think.
They're on the road listening to talk radio, listening to podcasts.
Truckers who in their own personal life are amongst the most isolated people around.
They're certainly not going to be disease vectors.
Imagine them being told that they must get a jab to continue their work.
The truckers who were praised during the early days of the pandemic as the people who kept society going.
And it was the truckers who inspired so many thousands and indeed millions more who had a peaceful march on protest, perhaps the peaceful mass movement, most peaceful mass movement in Canadian history.
And simply by honking their horns managed to make Justin Trudeau, first of all, I was going to say blink, but before he blinked, he freaked out.
He overreacted.
He was ashamed internationally that his own people were rising up against him.
He overreacted.
He threw the entire country into martial law, invoking the Emergencies Act, something not even done on 9-11.
And when I say we're still living through the reverberations of that, I mean, I think one of the reasons we're freer today and faster than we would have been is because of the truckers.
I think one of the reasons why Pierre Polyev is the leader of the Conservative Party instead of that demi-liberal Aaron O'Toole is because of the truckers.
O'Toole was thrown out by his own caucus for his refusal to even meet with the truckers.
But they're still trying to destroy the people behind the trucker movement.
I'll tell you one thing about Justin Trudeau.
He carries a grudge.
He's very vengeful and into personal vendettas.
He never forgets an enemy.
And the enemy he saw in the truckers, well, he saw many enemies, but the most presentable, most winning, most easy to like and easy to follow trucker leader was none other than our friend Tamara Leach.
She herself brought no truck to Ottawa, but she became sort of the poet laureate of the truckers.
Not only did she handle logistics and make organizational decisions behind the scenes, but she made very soft-focused Facebook videos that time and again encouraged people to be gentle, encouraged people to be peaceful.
And she became the lovable face of the trucker movement.
There were many angry people on the movement for sure.
I can think of a few, but she was a Métis grandma from Alberta who had just had enough.
And it was a powerful force.
And you know, Justin Trudeau, he doesn't do well with strong women, especially strong Indigenous women, ask Jodi Wilson-Raybold, if you don't mean.
So he invoked the Emergencies Act.
He arrested Tamara Leach, jailed her for 49 days, and has been prosecuting her ever since.
We're coming up on the two-year anniversary of the convoy.
The trial of Tamara Leach for a trivial matter of incitement to mischief or some related offense has gone on for weeks now, more than 30 days of hearings.
And the Democracy Fund lawyers working on the file confirmed for me my instincts that if there weren't all this political baggage and this media interest in Trudeau's personal connection, this would have been dropped by the Crown more than a year ago, as so many other so-called pandemic offenses have been.
So for the course of the next half hour, I want to talk about the reverberations of the Trucker Convoy, the Freedom Convoy.
I want to talk a little bit about Tamara Leach's trial, which bizarrely and incredibly and atrociously will continue on well into the spring.
I want to talk about what's happening with other elements of the trucker litigation and what the legacy of the truckers will be.
We have a hand in that legacy at Rebel News.
We proudly published Tamara's autobiography called Hold the Line, which was a massive bestseller and helped fix the story that was told with lies by the regime media.
And of course, our cousins at the Democracy Fund have crowdfunded Tamara's legal defense.
So we believe in Tamara Leach.
And joining us now to talk about Tamara Leach, her trial, the truckers, and the future is our friend Keith Wilson, Keith, King's Counsel, and a lawyer during the crisis for the Trucker Convoy.
Keith joins us now, ViceCO.
Thanks for having me on, Ezra.
Good to see you.
Well, it's a pleasure to have you here.
Not only were you a lawyer for the Freedom Convoy, but you were a lawyer on other projects too, including, for example, if memory serves, the lawsuit involving Maxime Bernier and Brian Petford about the ban, the no-fly list for unvaccinated people on airlines.
Am I remembering correctly?
Yeah, I mean, I initially got involved.
It was my wife who was increasingly concerned with her background as a university degree, RN nurse of retired, seeing what was happening with the COVID decision-making and the mandates and the apparent rationales for them.
And of course, me seeing the civil liberties aspects and the impacts it was having on everyone that she asked me to get involved and take a case.
And I agreed to be a contract lawyer to the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms, representing former Premier Brian Petford in a representative charter challenge on behalf of 6 million unvaccinated Canadians who had had their right to travel in the second largest country by landmass in the world,
their fundamental charter right of mobility violated by these arbitrary vaccine mandates that prohibited them from flying, taking a ship, a boat, or train.
And so, yeah, I led one of the challenges there up into the federal court.
Disgracefully, that matter was not only thrown out, but the Court of Appeals said they wouldn't even hear it because it was moot because it was over.
It's funny how that was moot because it was over, but the prosecution of truckers, whether they're in the Windsor area, the Ottawa area, Couts, Alberta, or of course, Tamara Leach, that's apparently not moot.
The government will continue to prosecute the cases they want, but they don't apparently don't have to go and justify their constitutional infringements.
I think that reduces respect for the legal system.
It's incredible to me, Keith, that the Supreme Court of Canada, as far as I know, hasn't yet bothered itself with hearing any cases emanating from the lockdowns.
I mean, correct me if I've missed one, but here we are, almost four years after the beginning of the pandemic.
We had lockdown laws, vaccine laws, quarantine laws, mandatory airport quarantines in hotels.
We had every infringement imaginable.
And the Supreme Court, almost four years later, apparently has had more important things to do.
Am I right on that, that they haven't heard a pandemic case?
You are.
And it's not just at that level.
What we've seen is our courts so far have not been willing to do a thorough examination, to allow evidence to come before them, to do a thorough examination of the fundamental premises that led to this massive loss of rights, this massive overreach of government,
these incredible harms economically, socially, educationally, relationship-wise, mental health-wise for people that weren't able to be at the side of dying loved ones or special events, weddings, the educational harm to our children, and so on.
Our courts are a very important institution.
And regrettably, I believe that the courts are demeaning their own value and their own role in our society and Canadian society and democratic society when they decline to give an objective, thorough analysis of the evidence that is increasingly clear that these decisions were horrifically wrong.
Yeah.
You know, it's incredible to me that they won't even hear the case.
I mean, it would be one thing if they heard the case and ruled in favor of the authoritarian lockdowns.
That would be very disappointing.
But for them to refuse to even hear the cases, including the flights of the no-fly list case that you referred to, to me is atrocious.
You know, I think one of the worst moments, and I've mentioned this on the show before, is that early on, when vaccine mandates were still being, were still very new and were subject to looming court challenges where labor unions were forcing this on their members or refusing to grieve them, where the science was very iffy, but the government was firing people from federal institutions, including the Canadian Armed Forces, when they were banning people.
The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court himself announced publicly that he was bringing in a vaccine mandate for the Supreme Court of Canada staff itself.
So there were all these cases across Canada in labor tribunals, in courts.
It was a live issue.
They had not been adjudicated yet.
Tested facts had not yet been brought to court.
The law had not been examined.
And the Chief Justice short-circuited all of that.
He headed it all off of the past by announcing, hey, everybody, we're invoking a vaccine mandate at our office.
And yeah, I just happen to be the Chief Judge of the Supreme Court.
So anyone across this country who thinks they're going to challenge this, just read between the lines and how I'm going to vote.
Like it wasn't just an atrocious violation of civil liberties for the staff at the Supreme Court.
It was a way of telling every other judge, prosecutor, and lawyer in the country, don't even bother trying to challenge a vax mandate.
I've just shown you that not only am I going to do it, I'm going to boast about it in public.
And what are you going to do about it?
I think that was perhaps the most disgraceful moment for the Supreme Court during the entire pandemic.
What do you think?
Well, yes, and not just that court, unfortunately.
They should have, there was no obligation on part for the court to release private medical information of its staff and its judges.
There are privacy considerations here, and they should have been respected in my view.
But there's another one.
Let me give a little vignette of what it felt like to be one of those lawyers in these courtrooms.
Of course, not the Supreme Court because we never got there, but the other ones.
And it was the masking.
So you're going into court and you know, we all visualize when you go into a courtroom, there's this huge distance between you and the judge and they're above you, right?
That's how all courtrooms are set up.
Yeah.
So first of all, you got distancing.
So why am I even have to put a mask on?
But you've got a box of masks in front of you.
And on the end of the box in big bold letters, it says, warning, this mask will not protect against respiratory virus, the spread of respiratory viruses, including COVID-19.
And you're sitting there waiting to prepare, and this box is sitting at you and you're going, this is theater.
This is theater.
And oh my goodness, the court's playing along with the theater.
So it's been a deeply, another senior lawyer said to me on a call when I was dealing with a file unrelated recently that he believes that history will see this as a very dark period of for our judiciary and jurisprudence in general.
I think so too.
Judicial Overreachuestioned00:08:58
You know, and there's something about judges as a group.
I mean, obviously they're at the height of their legal profession.
By definition, almost judges are older.
You don't have judges in their 20s or even very often in their 30s.
Judges are in their, at earliest, they're in their 40s, really, at least senior judges, more likely 50s and 60s.
And some of the greatest justices are in their early 70s.
And the reason I mention that is they're forces of the establishment.
They're forces of authority.
So they're naturally respectful of authority because that's their team.
But more than that, they were the ones who were statistically more at risk from the virus.
And because judges aren't going out to bars or to gyms or to nightclubs, that's not an important part of their life.
They just, they're sort of cocooning at home.
It was easy for them to shut down bars and restaurants and gyms and schools because there was no skin off their nose.
And at the same time, they probably knew some people who were old and then got sick and perhaps even died.
I think of Adam Germain, the atrocious liberal appointee judge in Alberta who first ruled in the case of Arthur Pavlovsky.
It was the absurd ruling that Arthur Pavlovsky, the pastor in Calgary, had to read out a self-denunciation anytime he gave a public interview or a Facebook post or a sermon questioning government lockdown policy.
Arthur Pavlovsky was ordered by Adam Germain to immediately read out something that Adam Germain wrote about what I've just said was not considered accurate by the guy.
Like it was struck down by the Court of Appeal.
But in his ruling, Adam Germain said, every one of us knows someone who has died from COVID.
And I thought, no, no, we don't.
I don't.
Maybe you're an old, scared judge who hasn't left the house other than to go to the country club in a year, but you are living in fear and that's fine because you're never going to miss a paycheck because you're a judge and everyone does what you say because you're a judge.
There was perhaps no force in no demographic group in the country worse to be the imposers of the lockdown than old scared people who never go out to bars or restaurants or clubs or gyms and who happen to be the worst hit demographic group of the virus.
I think we were let down by the gerontocracy.
What do you think of that?
I see it a little bit different.
I take your point.
What I see is this.
You know, the decisions were made, we know, in each province at the provincial level by The public health authorities and/or the cabinet, some combination of them.
At the federal level, it was the federal cabinet, you know, and at the school board level, some decisions were made by school boards and some municipalities as well.
But what I saw consistently, and the case law is clear, is that no judge was prepared to even examine the evidentiary foundation of those mandate decisions,
of those restrictions, closing gyms and bars, closing schools, universities, forcing people to be vaccinated to work in the military or the police or the RCMP or to be a contractor at an airport and so on.
And what I mean by that is you'll see these decisions where the judge will say, Well, you know, clearly the vaccine is safe and effective, so it's really not that bad.
They'll say two things: the vaccine is safe and effective, so it makes sense that people are being expected to take it.
And number two, this is such a serious situation with so many people dying, we have to do it.
Well, what evidence is there that it's safe and effective, right?
Or the deference, the relying on the government's experts.
Well, Ezra, you may remember it was breaking news by Rebel News when you interviewed me and when I was in the middle of cross-examinations on the Peford case, in particular, Dr. Waddell, who's the head epidemiologist for Public Health Agency Canada.
And I got her to admit under cross-examination that she and the Public Health Agency of Canada had not recommended vaccination as a mitigation strategy for travelers.
So it wasn't them.
And she also went on to say there was no scientific basis that it'd be effective.
So that never got in front of a judge.
But let me give another example.
The phase, you know, I got Dr. Lorenko to admit in cross-examinations, and she's the head person at Health Canada who paragraph one of her affidavit says, I am the government official who approved the COVID-19 vaccines.
So she's like the head of the FDA and the U.S. equivalent in Canada.
And she, I got her to confirm that every other vaccine that they've approved for general use in the population had to go through the animal trial, the phase one clinical human, phase two clinical human trial, and then the phase three.
And it was only after all the effects were known, both in terms of effectiveness and adverse health events, after the phase three trial, that they would approve it for safe use on the general population.
And she confirmed that for the COVID vaccines, the clinical, it was approved before the phase threes were completed.
The phase threes were ongoing, expected to complete in December of this year, and others not to be completed until 2024.
So on what basis could a judge have said, well, they're safe and effective.
There was no evidence to support that.
And if proper evidence was put before the court, they would realize that they can't actually make that conclusion because the phase threes are going on.
And not only that, it would become apparent that tens of millions of Canadians took this injection without anybody telling them they were signing up for an experiment, a clinical phase three trial.
Every other person who's been involved in a phase three trial for other vaccines, whether it's pneumonia or shingles or something, you had to be sat down and sign a big, long series of legal forms consenting to the risks and that you're part of an experiment.
No Canadian of the tens of millions who took that shot were given that warning.
They didn't give proper informed consent.
And just one other point.
When I cross-examined the head of Stats Canada responsible for collecting death data, one of the things that came out of his testimony was they were following, they adopted a World Health Organization format and coding system.
And that coding system was if someone died and they did not have a negative COVID test.
So they haven't been tested for COVID and they die.
You put it down as a COVID death.
Okay.
So you, and other jurisdictions have discovered the same thing.
So we have this hugely inflated number of COVID deaths that were actually not COVID deaths.
So the premise that the pandemic was so severe it warranted overriding similarities is based on something that was never tested evidentially in a court, which is the fundamental role of a court.
The assumption that what's the big deal, forcing people to get vaccinated, it's safe and effective, was never tested.
We were so close to testing it.
We were ready for trial in the federal court.
And you know what happened?
They struck us out on mootness.
You know, the whole thing was so large, a few lines come to mind like too big to fail.
Like too many people were invested in it.
Too many people had bet their future and their reputation on it.
No one wanted to be the one saying the emperor has no clothes here.
We don't know if this thing works.
And you pointed out that the statistics were juiced to, I mean, I remember that incredible case of someone who fell off a ladder and that was described as a COVID death because they were tested and they had COVID.
And apparently that made them weak and felt like it was just such an absurd, that was the most absurd case.
But anything to plump up the number of COVID deaths, but on the contrary, anyone who had a reaction to the vaccine, they took the opposite point of view and were extremely strict in what could be called a vaccine injury.
Listen, we're talking about some of the things that we really went into in 2022 and 2023, but I want to talk about one, and this is good to remind ourselves of the atrocious junk science and groupthink that we all lived through.
Absurd Charges Debate00:10:34
And I'm proud of the role of Rebel News, and I'm sure that you're proud of your role with the Trucker Convoy.
But here we are on the eve of 2024, and the most public dissidents are still facing prosecution.
And I think of our mutual friend, Tamar Leach.
And I have never heard of a mischief trial take this long.
There was one mischief trial trial some decades ago of a guy who blew up power lines in Quebec.
So a violent, I think you could even probably call that terrorism because there was a political motivation, if I'm not mistaken.
Now, he was apparently charged with mischief.
That's quite some mischief.
And it put tens of thousands of people to cut off power to them.
So there was, that's the worst mischief case I know of in Canadian history.
But other than that, I think that my knowledge, I mean, you're a practicing lawyer.
I haven't practiced law in almost 20 years.
But mischief is what you charge someone, it's sort of a catch-all from minor, like some kids who take a baseball bat and smash a mailbox.
That would be mischief.
Graffiti, that would be mischief.
Vandalism, doing something stupid, like egging a house on Halloween and toilet papering.
You wouldn't even face a mischief charge.
Cops wouldn't even file it.
But if they did, you'd get a mischief charge.
You'd go to court.
The judge would have a stern lecture, point his finger at you, make you say you're sorry, and either give you an absolute discharge or say, all right, you've got to spend the weekend cleaning up the house you spray painted.
Like that's mischief to me.
Yep.
You charge Tamara Leach with mischief and you put a prosecution team on it.
And we're coming up on two years now.
We've had 30 plus days of trial.
The process is the punishment.
This is abusive process.
This does not make sense legally.
I sat in court and I heard one bureaucrat talk all day about his feelings about the lockdown.
But early in his testimony, he admitted he had never had any interaction whatsoever with Tamara Leach, never observed her, never talked to her, never heard anything.
He had no evidence whatsoever to give on the matter at hand, but he wanted to talk for an hour at the court's time and the public's time at the prosecutor's time, the clerk's time, and Tamara Leach's time about his feelings about the trucker convoy.
Sorry, I said lockdown earlier.
What even is this trial?
And is the judge running a gong show?
Well, the judge has got to deal with the case that's brought before her.
She's got to ensure that the process is fair to both sides.
And from what I've been able to glean, I think she's done an exemplary job at that within the high-profile nature of the case.
But, you know, let's be clear here.
It's just not the number of days of trial.
And I know you understand this, but I want to make clear for your viewers.
The days in between trial are just as painful and sometimes more so than the actual days of trial.
So this trial started on September 5th in the year 2023.
The Crown closed its case in December and they've been arguing a motion, a technical motion about what type of evidence can be admitted and attributed to parties.
The ruling on that is expected in January, mid-January.
And then the parties will come back.
So the Crown's closed its case in a motion phase.
And then the defense will put its case in if necessary, closing arguments and then ruling.
So they're going to come back in March for a number of days for the defense to argue, basically for the charges to be thrown out for a directed verdict that the Crown hasn't met its burden and that there's no reasonable prospect of a conviction.
It will probably take the judge some time.
It's possible she could issue a bench ruling given she has now had an ample opportunity, perhaps, given her other obligations, because that court is a very, very busy courthouse, to issue a bench ruling in March and throw this out.
That'd be a small possibility of that.
But she's more likely to reserve her decision.
And so she may release a decision in June as to whether the charges are going to be stayed.
If they're not, and some of them or all of them are proceeding, and then we'd be into July and August of 2024 for the defense's case to go in and probably into September and October for close.
So this trial will last, has the prospect to go on for more than a year.
It's clearly, it's long since passed the mark of getting the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest mischief trial in the history of law, let alone Canada.
That's clearly an award that one doesn't want to achieve, but has been met.
And when we look at the strain on our court systems, when we look at the cases that are being thrown out because they're the delays in them being heard, there's this Jordan rule that the Supreme Court can't laid down that a case has to be heard in a reasonable time.
And if it's not, the charges have to go.
There's examples that we know of that are public where sexual assault charges have had to been dropped.
Other serious offenses have had to been dropped because the courts have not been able to process the case in a reasonable time.
And in the meantime, the Crown Prosecution Service is forcing the courts and the defendants, the accused, Ms. Leach, Mr. Barber, through this incredibly harsh process that to any reasonable observer makes no sense.
You just, it is very difficult to rationalize that this is anything other than a form of political persecution because it makes no sense by any historic standard, by any normal standard of our justice system.
They're using Ms. Leach, Mr. Barber to put the convoy on trial, which is improper in my view.
That's clearly by looking at what's had been happening in the trial that they're trying to criminalize the entirety of the largest, most peaceful protest in Canadian history.
You know, I used a phrase some 15 years ago when I was put through the Alberta Human Rights Commission hate speech prosecution for publishing the Danish cartoons.
I remember that.
And it was so long and so slow and so expensive and so abusive that I'm sure others have said the phrase before, but the process was the punishment.
Absolutely.
And, you know, the amount of money that they wanted me to pay was minor.
It wasn't the money.
They wanted to rub my nose in it.
They wanted me to submit.
They wanted to conquer my mind and make me bend the knee.
And because I wouldn't, they said, you know, it's not even about the money.
We're going to put you through a three-year process.
It was 900 days.
And whereas if you just plead guilty, you're out of there that same day.
And the process is the punishment here.
Now, they had an insane out-of-control prosecutor, major liberal donor, if I'm getting his name right, Moise Kashimji, if I got that right.
Karimji.
Karimji, thank you very much.
Karimji, thank you for correcting me.
Moise Karimji, who was such a hothead and so angry, it was unbecoming.
And he was pulled off the prosecution team almost the last moment.
I mean, a few months before trial.
But if you're preparing for a trial for a year, that really is a late change.
And so they pulled Karimji off the case and they handed it to a couple other prosecutors.
And I saw them when I was in court.
And it really felt to me like this next team were sort of saddled with the case that they had.
And they were saddled with the instructions.
You must go all the way.
You must do what you can.
And my hunch, and this is just speculation.
I don't know what's in their mind.
But this B team that was put in to replace the out-of-control angry guy said, well, there's just no chance.
There's nothing here.
If there weren't the politics, we would withdraw the case like hundreds of other cases have been withdrawn.
But there's so much political pressure here.
We're just going to throw the kitchen sink at it.
We're just going to stretch it out for months.
We're going to bring irrelevant witnesses like the one guy I saw who talked about his feelings all day.
And at the end of the day, they're going to lose, but they're going to have taught everyone a lesson because they're going to have cost to Mary Leach hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Thank God the donors are picking that up.
And I remember from my days as a lawyer, you proceed with the prosecution if there's a reasonable conviction of success, reasonable chance of conviction, excuse me, and it's in the public interest.
And neither of those are here.
This is absolutely.
There's one more.
Yeah.
At no time is the crown to conduct him or herself in a way that will bring the administration of justice into disrepute.
And Karimchi absolutely did.
And I think that they know that the cupboard is bare.
They don't have anything on her.
Their witnesses are all political pundits or therapy sessions.
They even had that witness that Zexie Lee who's got the ambulance chasing lawsuit for 100 million bucks or more against the truckers.
Like it really was like a high school talent show, everyone coming just to do their song and dance just to fill the time.
And I think they're going to lose.
They'll probably appeal anyways, just because of the political instructions to do so.
But even as they lose, they'll have won because they'll have punished Tamara Leach and the truckers and the lawyers and put the whole movement through it.
I think this is how this is what we would describe in another country: a show trial, a sham trial, a political trial, absolutely a political prisoner.
Symbolic Arrest, Political Prisoner00:03:41
And I take your point that the judge is doing her best.
But by God, the prosecutors here, they're the ones who have brought the administration of justice into disrepute.
It's so infuriating.
The only saving grace, Keith, is that Tamara Leach maintains her good attitude.
I mean, I saw her perform with her husband some great musical numbers at Rebel News Live a few months ago in Calgary.
And I know she had that big concert in Niagara on the lake about a month ago.
And she's happy, normal, positive, you know, happy warrior.
I think it's sort of a miracle that she herself has not become soured and jaded by this.
I think that's how she's going to win by being positive while these angry government prosecutors flail about trying to hurt her.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm reaching, but I think that the only reason I would call this a success so far is because of Tamara Leach's own demeanor.
Well, there's three things I'd say on that, Ezra.
One is ask yourself, why is it?
So you remember, I was on the ground, the convoy arrived on a Friday, the end of January, and then I arrived on the Wednesday and was there till the end with Tamara and others, trying to ensure that it was peaceful and lawful.
But why is it on the Thursday, almost three weeks later, before the police did the mass beating of lawful protesting Canadians and arrests that started on the Friday and into the Saturday?
Why is it on the Thursday that they arrested Chris Barber about four o'clock and then Tamara Leach at about seven o'clock?
It was because, in my view, that they were trying to send a message.
Like, why just arrest those two?
Right?
They were trying to scare the other protesters into leaving.
Why is this trial going on for a year?
Yeah, they're trying to scare other Canadians from protesting and challenging government.
There was symbolism.
Their decision to arrest the two when they did was a symbolic step.
The decision to run the trial is symbolic.
Now, but let me just, I have to give some color and detail to what they've done to Tamara and Chris, but largely Tamara is you talk about the process being the punishment.
And yes, Tamara puts on a brave face, but she's suffering.
She can't work.
She can't get a job.
Right.
How can you go and try and get a job and say, oh, I might have to go off to Ottawa again for three more weeks?
That's right.
Yeah.
She, you know, she pays just the toll alone of her and Dwayne, her husband driving across the country the number of times they have miling out their pickup truck.
Right.
Trying to get them.
They drive all the way to Ottawa, eh?
Yeah.
And sometimes they're so eager to get home.
The last two times they drove straight through, did it in 35 hours, team driving.
Didn't get a hotel, nothing.
You know what?
I feel like crowdfunding some flights for them.
So they don't, maybe they want to have their car in Ottawa.
Maybe that's why.
Well, and it's expensive for them to stay and eat and so on.
Now, and on top of that, though, remember that she was in jail for 49 days.
Crowdfunding Flights for Greenspawn00:07:24
And I was, I don't know how it came up, but her and I were talking the other day.
And she, I don't know what we were talking about, but it caused her to tell me about the condition she was in for a number of those days.
She was in a cell for I think it was a total of seven days at different points where there wasn't even a bunk.
There wasn't a mattress.
It was a concrete slab with cold air coming in.
She had nothing.
Right.
Yeah.
She didn't have it.
She tried to do it in her book.
Yeah.
I mean, I learned a lot of terrifying things about her time in jail.
Her book's amazing.
You know what?
I'm so glad that she wrote that.
And as you know, we had the lawyer go through it before we published it because we didn't want that insane prosecutor to try and prosecute her for the book for contempt of court.
It's a great book.
I thought I knew the story, but there's so many details, including the abuse she took from the media.
Normally, you have a Métis woman leading a righteous civil liberties protest.
She's going to be, you know, the hero of the year.
She's going to be honorary professor.
She's going to win every award.
But they even tried to deny her Indigenous heritage because they were trying to destroy.
And by they, I mean the regime media.
You know, you're so right.
And it reminds me of Trudeau's first reaction to the trucker convoy.
He was trying, he was delighted by it.
He thought, oh, good.
This is our January 6th, Donald Trump-style insurrection.
We're going to paint them as Trump-style racists.
I don't know.
He threw in what xenophobes and homophobes.
It was just such a bizarre thing.
And he would have gotten away with it, too, if he could have controlled the narrative.
But I was very proud Rebel News really deployed it to the streets.
We, along with other independent journalists, too, really was the independent journalist, whether it was Rupa Subramania or I think True North had someone on the ground.
Of course, Rebel News just flooded the zone.
He wanted to have that January 6th moment.
And he wanted to throw it.
And we knew that.
You want to throw them all in.
And look at how, you know, and that was, we were completely, when I arrived there, we were so alive to that.
Not just me, so many of the protesters and the truckers and those who were volunteering to try and keep it orderly.
That's why when I remember when someone came into one of the operations centers and said, you know, we need to take some of these donations and go down and buy, you know, 500 snow shovels approved.
So off they went to buy all these snow shovels, cleaned out every Walmart, Home Depot, Canadian tire.
Why?
Because the truckers were going to make the sidewalks the cleanest they've ever been in the history of Ottawa.
There was garbage bags everywhere.
We had a garbage collection system.
It was like, what are all of the things the prime minister is going to want these guys to do to vilify them?
And they were going to do the opposite.
Hence this brilliant idea that some came up with for the bouncy castles and so on.
But, you know, and I just want to go circle back to Tamara for one thing because a lot of people don't realize what I'm about to say.
And it's very important that they do, which is she is still under her bail conditions.
Right.
Right.
She cannot use social media.
And in our world today, you know, depriving someone of being able to utilize social media is actually a very serious punishment.
It's like 50 years ago saying to someone, you can't use a telephone.
Yeah.
And you can't read a newspaper.
You can't use a telephone and you can't read a newspaper or listen to the radio news, right?
Because that's what social media has become, all three of those.
She has people on her non-contact list, some of which we're still not even sure who they are, what they look like.
It was just random people.
So she has to be careful wherever she goes that one of these people don't happen to come up and say, hey, can I have a picture with you?
She doesn't realize who is there and then, bam, she's off to jail again.
Her conditions are such that she's enduring a sentence right now.
And this is remarkable.
So the fact that she's being deprived of seeking employment, the fact that she's incurring all these expenses, the fact that she can't use social media, these are all punishments.
And you mentioned the process is the punishment for sure.
It's not just the courts.
It's just not the risk of the legal fees.
It's really, unfortunately, feels so badly like the government, the ruling liberals are trying to scare other Canadians from exercising their constitutional rights and challenging government decisions.
You know what?
A senior lawyer told me very early in the game when we were talking about what a disaster these airport quarantine hotels were.
Remember, you had to stay in an airport hotel for thousands of dollars for three days upon returning to the country.
And I thought, this can't possibly be, it's so absurdly abusive and punitive and stupid.
And the senior lawyer said, yeah, that's the point, is so that each person who goes through with it tells 100 people how awful it was to scare those hundred from traveling, that it was abusive on purpose.
And that's exactly what they're doing to Tamara.
And I'd like to remind people if they want to help Tamara, I can think of three ways to do it.
One is to help with the legal defense.
As you know, the Democracy Fund is crowdfunding the legal defense.
And I don't want to tell you how much money we've spent so far, but it is six figures, obviously.
And you can do that at helptamera.com.
Just go to helptamara.com.
And by the way, you'll get a charitable tax receipt because that's a civil liberties court case that's covered by that charity.
And if you want to help on the Rebel News side, as you know, we've had a reporter there every single day, Robert Krachik.
You can help him at tamaratrial.com.
We've got a few websites.
And if you haven't read Tamara's book, she gets a royalty from those books.
So if you want to help Tamara personally, I would encourage you to get a book.
I think it's an excellent book.
I read it.
I thought, I know everything here.
I don't need to read this book.
I read the book, and not only did I really like, it was a fun, fun, I don't know if fun is right, whatever.
It's an interesting read, but I learned things about her that I didn't know.
And I thought I knew a lot about her.
I think I doubled how much I knew about her by reading the book.
So those are three things you can do if you want to help the fight back.
It's incredible to me that this is going to be continuing into the spring.
I'm glad to be a small part of the large team of Canadians, including you, Keith, including her excellent lawyer in Ottawa, Lawrence Greenspawn, who I have really grown to like and admire.
And by the way, I should say, Keith, and maybe you have a thought on this, I think that the other journalists who are in the court on a daily basis, there's a CBC journalist there every day, and there's a CP, there's a few other news agencies covering it every day.
I think they've been won over by Lawrence Greenspawn.
Like there's no way they're going to be pro-Tamara elites journalists, but I think Lawrence Greenspawn, his demeanor, his tone, his command of the law, his sense of humor, he just feels like a great lawyer and a bit of a, you know, some lawyers are naturally teachers, I think, and he's a great communicator.
I think that Lawrence Greenspawn is excellent and is sort of, I'm not going to say winning the CBC over because that's impossible.
But the reporters there treat him with respect and they listen to what he says because he's so obviously competent.
Reporters And Ownership00:02:59
That made me feel really good to see that with my own eyes when I was there.
Last word to you.
How are you feeling about the trial so far?
I understand there's a chance you may be called as a witness yourself.
So you want to be very careful about what you say here.
But is there anything you feel comfortable saying about the trial so far?
I mean, you've already given us some thoughts, but do you want to, is there something?
Yeah, well, I would say that I think what I believe might have happened here, because I have noticed a softening from the legacy media and a more of a balanced approach to some of their reporting, not all.
It's hit and miss, is that I think it's not only the advocacy and the tremendous skill that Lawrence Greenspoon and his team, as well as Diane Magus, Mr. Barber's lawyer, have demonstrated as criminal lawyers.
It's also the poor quality of the evidence that has been put forward and the truth that's come out through that.
But I also think that by sitting in the room and watching Tamara and seeing her outside of the courtroom and they've really gotten to know who she is as a true, incredibly representative, good Canadian.
And let me just close with one little vignette.
It was in the first week of trial.
And you'll know, because the Rebel News does this as well, as Tamara and her husband and Mr. Greenspoon and others, the legal team, are getting close in the morning as they're walking to the courthouse and they come around the corner and all the cameras come on.
And as she's walking, there was one morning where, you know, and all the reports you don't see is all the reporters and cameramen with their cameras, they're running backwards, right?
And they usually have someone with a hand on them so they don't trip.
Well, a bunch of the reporters, Global and others, I think, there was a fellow, might have looked like a homeless guy, with his bike.
And they tripped over his bike, knocked his bike over, knocked and broke the cigarette out that was in the guy's hand.
Tamara immediately spotted this, zigged over herself, picked up his bike, and checked to see if he was okay.
Dwayne, her husband, hung back and gave the guy a smoke.
Like that was Tamara right there.
She saw a problem.
She realized she had something to do with it because if she had not been walking, even though it was the reporters being clumsy and not being concerned about who was around them, she took ownership for it.
She decided what she needed to do and she immediately acted to make it right.
And the reporters would have all saw that.
And they probably would have thought of every other time that's happened, because it will happen many times as people are walking backwards, trying to stay in focus with their camera in the shot.
They probably don't remember a single time whether they were following a politician or someone else of profile, and that person stopped immediately and felt that helping that person out who had been harmed was the most important thing they could do at that moment.
Great Catch, Realization Still00:01:02
So that's Tamara Leach right there.
That's a great vignette.
I appreciate you sharing that.
Well, listen, Keith, it's great to catch up with you.
And it was a bit of a reminder of the darkest days of the pandemic, but also a realization that we are still going through the process as a punishment.
And the pain that they're putting Tamara Leach through now is meant as a warning to the rest of us.
How dare you speak truth to power?
And I think it's incumbent upon each of us to realize that's what they're doing and to rededicate ourselves to freedom and to the right to be non-conformist, especially in the face of an authoritarian government.
So great to catch up with you, Keith, and we'll stay in touch if you are called as a witness in the trial.
We'll certainly cover that as we cover every other day.
I say again, for those who want to help Tamara Leach with her legal defense fund, they can do so and get a charitable tax receipt by going to helptamara.com and that website resolves at the Democracy Fund page, which is a charity for civil liberties.