Ezra Levant highlights the Federal Court’s scathing 2024 ruling that Justin Trudeau’s February 2022 Emergencies Act invocation was illegal, unreasonable, and unconstitutional—violating protesters’ Charter rights like bank account seizures. Keith Wilson revealed Ottawa police had a deal with truckers to end blockades but Trudeau blocked it, while Chad Williamson called RCMP’s rifle disclosures politically motivated. Justice Mosley’s 190-page decision deemed the nationwide measures disproportionate, targeting families based on CBC articles. Freeland’s appeal and Trudeau’s silence contrast with the court’s affirmation of civil liberties, potentially opening lawsuits against the government—Leach’s case hinges on March 7–15 rulings, with acquittal possible by May. The ruling exposes systemic overreach, from COVID-era crackdowns to ignored legal precedents, framing it as a victory for freedom over authoritarianism. [Automatically generated summary]
An enormous legal and constitutional rebuke of Justin Trudeau, Christia Freeland, and the entire thuggish liberal government in a blast of a ruling.
The Federal Court of Canada has said that the Liberal Party's invocation of the Emergencies Act some two years ago was illegal, unreasonable, unjustifiable, and finally, unconstitutional.
The Federal Court of Canada has ruled that Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party broke the law and violated our civil rights in an astonishing rebuke, speaking truth to power.
I didn't think I would see it.
You might recall that about a year ago, slightly less than a year ago, Justin Trudeau hand-picked a reliable liberal judge named Paul Rollo and hand-wrote a narrow mandate for that judge and set about a whitewashing process that he controlled.
And surprise, he exonerated himself.
And the Liberals dined out on that for a few months with every mainstream media journalist in the country clapping along like trained seals.
But today, it was an independent judge, not a hand-picked judge by Trudeau, in a real court, not a carefully scripted inquiry.
A real judge, the Honorable Richard Mosley.
Let's put him on the screen.
Not one of Trudeau's hand-picked favorites.
And he applied the rules of court, not the rules of Justin.
And he had a lengthy hearing, and he looked into the law, not just the politics.
And he found what each of us could have told you, whether or not we had a law degree.
It was an improper suspension of civil liberties.
And let me say something very important that I want to say right at the top.
And we're going to go through this together.
We're going to spend about an hour on this.
And in about half an hour, we're going to be joined by two senior lawyers, including Keith Wilson, the lawyer for the Freedom Convoy Truckers in Ottawa, and our friend Chad Williamson, the lawyer for the truckers at the Coots blockade.
We will have some serious legal firepower on this show in about half an hour.
But I want to point out a very important thing about the lawsuit.
We're going to go through it.
It wasn't just Canadians who were suing.
Court Ruling on Seized Bank Contents00:15:17
The government of Alberta, and I'll confirm this.
We'll go through the law to get with the ruling together.
The government of Alberta intervened saying we didn't need the Emergencies Act.
We were able to solve any policing problems without putting the country under martial law.
This is an astounding ruling, and the timing of it is absolutely perfect.
Coming right in the middle of a Liberal Party retreat.
They're having a lot of these retreats and summits and luxury getaways where they try and script some language to bring them back from the brink of oblivion in the polls.
And what a delight to see them scupper all their plans and put out tritchy, twitchy Freeland.
That's what I call Christia Freeland.
She's got that irritating twitch.
I don't know if it's a medical condition or if she's just someone who has is a walking poker tail of lies.
You know what a poker tail is.
It's when someone lies and they can't control something.
They have a wink or something or they make a face or their eyes look in a certain way.
I think that's what it is with Christy Freeland.
She may have a form of Tourette's, and if so, you know, it's a medical condition beyond her reach.
But I think it's a poker tail.
The woman is a non-stop liar, and I think her body can't control being such a liar.
Take a listen to Christia Freeland explaining that, no, no, no, no, just because a judge heard the case and government lawyers were there, but the judge didn't agree with them, just because, you know, what, 150 or so page ruling, page after page, her lawbreaking was exposed.
No, no, no.
You see, with all due respect, she disagrees.
And so she's going to appeal it because, of course, she is.
Because if this law, if this ruling is upheld, who's the biggest loser?
Well, Justin Trudeau, but I don't know how much long Justin Trudeau is going to be with us given the polling.
But Christy Freeland actually thought, and maybe she still thinks she can be prime minister, she was the one who seized the bank accounts.
And if her legal rationale for seizing the bank accounts is gone, then she's the one who will be sued by everyone who had their bank account seized.
Now, I don't think she'll be held personally responsible.
The government will bail out Christy Freeland for her illegal acts.
But if I was Christy Freeland, I would be saying, no, I'm innocent.
No, Also, because what she did was atrocious.
Here, listen to this wicked Twitcher, the Twitchy witch, explaining, no, no, no, this judge, don't listen to the judge.
What we did was completely legal.
Take a look at this.
So we are aware of the court decision.
We have discussed it with the Prime Minister, with cabinet colleagues, with senior federal government officials and experts.
We respect very much Canada's independent judiciary.
However, we do not agree with this decision.
And respectfully, we will be appealing it.
I would just like to take a moment to remind Canadians of how serious the situation was in our country when we took that decision.
The public safety of Canadians was under threat.
Our national security, which includes our national economic security, was under threat.
It was a hard decision to take.
We took it very seriously after a lot of hard work, after a lot of careful deliberation.
We were convinced at the time, I was convinced at the time, it was the right thing to do.
It was the necessary thing to do.
I remain, and we remain convinced of that.
And I'll now turn it over to my colleague, the Minister of Justice, and then we'll hear from my colleague, the Minister of Public Safety.
Okay, I got a question for you.
Sorry to interrupt.
Where's the coward Justin Trudeau?
I mean, I know he doesn't want to wear this.
He sent out Twitchy to say how thoughtful she was, and please don't arrest me because I seized bank accounts.
And please don't destroy my future political career just because I was the one who seized hundreds of bank accounts illegally.
Where's the coward?
Like at the end of the day, it was the prime minister who made the decision.
And he sends out Christy Freeland and some other no-name cabinet ministers.
Seriously, can you name, can you name without looking it up?
Can you name the Justice Minister?
Can you name the Public Safety Minister?
No googling.
It really is Justin Trudeau and the seven dwarves.
I mean, I think people do know Christy Freeland.
Can you name any other cabinet ministers?
Why did Trudeau send her out?
Why didn't he go out and say this in his best drama teacher voice?
He wants her to wear it.
I think they're going to try and blame a couple of cabinet ministers in the day, like Marco Mendocino, who was the public safety minister, who was later sacked by Trudeau.
They're going to probably try and put some blame on him, but it won't work.
It was Trudeau and Christy Freeland in the end who made the call.
It was Freeland who seized the bank accounts.
It was Trudeau who deployed the riot horses.
It was Trudeau who demanded that police arrest the peaceful protesters like Tamara Leach.
Isn't she looking good these days?
The Emergencies Act was illegally invoked.
For two years, Justin Trudeau and his repeaters in the regime media have said that the convoy was illegal.
In fact, the convoy was legal.
It was the crackdown that was illegal.
Tamara Leach has never been convicted of anything.
Justin Trudeau, once again, has been found to be a law breaker.
We have 1,162 people following this live stream right now on YouTube.
We have 1,875 following it on Rumble.
I'd like my friends on Rumble to feel free to make super chats to ask me your comments along the way.
We're also on Getter and Odyssey.
I like to read those super chats online.
YouTube, unfortunately, has demonetized us, probably at the behest of Justin Trudeau, though they won't tell us.
But if you give us a super chat, a live chat comment on Rumble, we'll do our best to get to them.
We are going to go through the ruling because I want you to read it with your own eyes.
And then in about 25 minutes' time, 20 minutes' time, we're going to call on Keith Wilson and Chad Williamson to walk us through it.
In some ways, this is comparable to Richard Nixon and Watergate.
And by that, I mean the entire government apparatus, every insider, everyone all the way up to the top political leader of the country, the prime minister himself, has just been declared a lawbreaker by the court.
I suppose the only difference, or the main difference, is that the Watergate break-in was done secretly, whereas the invocation of martial law under the Emergencies Act was done in plain light of day.
Every single journalist was condemned by this ruling as much as Trudeau and Freeland, because every single regime journalist cheered the lockdown, cheered the Emergencies Act, cheered martial law, cheered the arrest of Tamara Leach, cheered the seizing of the bank accounts, cheered the riot horses.
In fact, I recall crystal clear the general reaction from the parliamentary press gallery when Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act and started cracking skulls was, why won't you go harder?
Why won't you go farther?
Of course, the regime media was not named in today's court ruling, but they for two years have carried water for it.
This is as much a rebuke of the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the CBC, CTV Global, and the rest of them as it is a rebuke of Twitchy Freeland and Justin Trudeau.
You know, Trudeau told us that the country he most admires is communist China because of its basic dictatorship.
Never forget those words he added.
All right, without further ado, let's go through the ruling right now.
Want to take you through the ruling.
Now, it's a long ruling.
Let's show the cover of it right here.
Issued today by the federal court, the honorable Mr. Justice Mosley.
I already showed that to you.
Now, I'm going to spend some time on the front page just so we can understand what exactly was going on.
Scroll down a little bit.
It's between Canadian frontline nurses and Kristen Nagel and the Attorney General of Canada.
So nurses who were against the Emergencies Act took the step, and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association that finally woke up after three years of hitting the snooze button and the Canadian Constitution Foundation, those are good guys.
And the Attorney General of Canada was there, and the Attorney General of Alberta, that is, the Justice Department of Alberta, intervened on behalf of the protesters, on behalf of the people.
But there's more names yet: Jeremiah Jost, Edward Cornell, Vincent Gerses, and Harold Aristow, Canadian citizens who were willing to put their names forward as the official applicants.
Thank you to them.
And you can see the list of respondents or defendants, as they're sometimes called.
Governor and Council, that means cabinet.
His Majesty in Right of Canada, the Attorney General, the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness.
So they're just naming the members of cabinet who made the decisions.
Now, if you look at this judgment, it's over 100 pages long, and so there's a table of contents.
I have not read this whole thing through.
It's only been out for about an hour or two.
Obviously, I haven't read it.
But let's look at that table of contents.
Introduction, overview.
They talk about the parties.
That is who was suing.
And then they go through, and you can see they describe who's Kristen Nagel, what's Canadian frontline nurses, who are the different groups.
So this is like a mini book, isn't it?
This judge knew that this would be very widely read and widely referenced, and he was probably quite certain it would be appealed no matter which way he went.
So I'm sure he put a lot of thought into it because no judge wants to be overturned on appeal.
The context, public health orders, protests in Ottawa, border blockades in Ottawa and other border blockades, and then invocation of the Emergencies Act.
So the first 19 pages is just setting the table for what happened.
Then decision under review.
What is this court reviewing?
Well, the answer is: whoops, I just clicked the link on my own version of it and was taken straight to the page.
The decision under review was to invoke the Emergencies Act.
And that decision is what the court was reviewing because that decision was done under the special law, the Emergencies Act.
So the proclamation, the reasons for the decision, the procedural history.
I'm going to skim forward because even the table of contents is very long.
If you go to what's called page four on the ruling, you can see some of the substantive issues.
Let's go to those.
Was the decision to issue the proclamation unreasonable?
So I'm on page four of the ruling, which is still the table of contents, if you want to put that on the screen.
Ultravirus means outside the powers of the law.
Was there a national emergency?
That's a good question.
These are just the different subjects the judge treated.
I just, there's no way we're going to cover 120 pages, but I'm just showing you some of the things the judge reviewed.
Was the threats to the security of Canada threshold met?
Was there evidence of threats or use of acts of serious violence?
Serious violence is defined in the law.
Was there any serious violence?
Pup quiz, can you name a single act of serious violence done during the Trucker convoy or blockade?
I'll wait for you.
There was not.
It was peaceful.
The only act of violence was the shooting of our reporter, Alexa Lavoie, by an out-of-controlled RCMP officer.
And that lawsuit just got more interesting, didn't it?
Letter C. I'm going to go back to the table of contents here.
Did the powers created by the economic order regulations violate sections of the charter?
And then they list the sections of the charter: freedom of thought, belief, opinion, expression, freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom of association, and other sections.
Did the regulations violate the Canadian Bill of Rights?
And then the conclusion, page 123 of the ruling.
Why don't we go straight there just to read it?
And if you, yeah, perfect.
Paragraph 370.
I'm going to read, I'm going to skip to the end of the movie.
At the outset of these proceedings, while I had not reached a decision on any of the four applications, I was leaning to the view that the decision to invoke the Emergencies Act was reasonable.
I considered the events that occurred in Ottawa and other locations in January and February 2022, went beyond legitimate protest and reflected an unacceptable breakdown of public order.
I had and continue to have considerable sympathy for those in government who were confronted with this situation.
Had I been at their tables at that time, I may have agreed that it was necessary to invoke the act.
And I acknowledge that in conducting judicial review of that decision, I'm revisiting that time with the benefit of hindsight and a more extensive record of the facts and law than that which was before the governor in council.
So he's starting off by saying, I didn't much like the trucker convoy.
Let's read a little bit more.
My preliminary view of the reasonableness of the decision to invoke martial law may have prevailed following the hearing due to excellent advocacy on the part of counsel for the Attorney General of Canada.
Martial Law Controversy00:13:00
Had I not taken the time to carefully deliberate about the evidence and submissions, particularly those of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Canadian Constitution Foundation, their participation in these proceedings has demonstrated again the value of public interest litigants, especially in presenting informed legal argument.
This case may not have turned out the way it has without their involvement, as the private interest litigants were not as capable of marshaling the evidence and argument in support of their applications.
Isn't that an interesting thing to say?
If I was with those two civil liberties groups, I'd be feeling pretty good right now.
Let's keep reading.
We're almost done.
I have concluded that the decision to issue the proclamation does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness, justification, transparency, and intelligibility, and was not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration.
In my view, there can be only one reasonable interpretation of Emergencies Act, sections 3 and 17, and the CESIS Act.
And the applicants have established that the legal constraints on the discretion of the governing council to declare a public order emergency were not satisfied.
And for those who remember, there has to be a very serious threat to the country, like a revolution or an invasion or a serious insurrection.
That's part one.
And part two, that cannot be fixed with regular law and order.
There's a two-part test to bring putting the country under martial law.
Part one, is there a revolution?
Is there a war?
Is there a general, a serious insurrection?
Is there serious violence?
Can't just be a bank robbery.
It can't just be a blockade.
It has to be a grave, existential threat to the country.
But that in itself is not enough.
Part two is, okay, so you've got an insurrection.
Okay, so you've got a war.
Okay, so you've got a terrible thing happening.
Is there any other lesser means to fix the problem?
Obviously, that test was not met.
And that's the value of Alberta's intervention.
We'll get there, because Alberta had a blockade, you might recall, at the Coots border crossing between Alberta and Montana.
And that blockade was resolved, actually, if I recall, the day before martial law was applied.
And so my point is, this judge didn't like the convoy.
This judge sympathized with the government.
But this judge read the law.
And this judge said, and I haven't read the whole thing, but I just hop to the end here.
The government did not pass that two-fold test.
Here, let's keep reading.
I'm going to go to, well, I think I read the key part.
The applicants have established that the legal constraints on the discretion of the governor in council declare public order of emergency were not satisfied.
That's sort of it right there.
Now, I was skimming the ruling before we went on the live stream.
I was skimming it.
And I want to go to paragraph 253.
Olivia, can you go to paragraph 253?
Because there was some interesting stuff there that I just want to read out.
You know what?
We're going to chew this over.
And in about 10 minutes, we're going to call in a couple of legal experts to help us.
But I want to skim, I want to go up to 253.
All right.
Let me know when you're there.
Yeah.
Due to its nature and to the broad powers it grants the federal executive, the Emergencies Act is a tool of last resort.
The government and council cannot invoke the Emergencies Act because it is convenient or because it may work better than other tools at their disposal or available to the provinces.
This does not mean that every tool has to be used and tried to determine that the situation exceeded the capacity or authority of the provinces.
And in this case, the evidence is clear that the majority of the provinces were able to deal with the situation using other federal laws such as the criminal code and their own legislation.
The Section 58 explanation concludes that the ongoing protests had, quote, created a critical, urgent, temporary situation that is national in scope and cannot effectively be dealt with under any other law of Canada.
That was the excuse the Liberals said.
And here's what the judge says in response.
While I agree that the evidence supports the conclusion that the situation was critical and required an urgent resolution by governments, the evidence, in my view, does not support the conclusion that it could not have been effectively dealt with under other laws of Canada as it was in Alberta, or that it exceeded the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it.
That was demonstrated not to be the case in Quebec and other provinces and territories, including Ontario, except in Ottawa.
For these reasons, I conclude that there was no national emergency justifying the invocation of the Emergencies Act, and the decision to do so was therefore unreasonable and ultra vides.
That's Latin for outside the power of the government.
The government can do certain things, but it can't do everything.
It can only do those things passed in law, subject to the limits of the Constitution.
So this was the government acting outside of its power, acting illegally.
Let me keep going.
The judge says, should I be found to have erred in that conclusion, I will proceed to discuss the threshold requirement that for a public order emergency to be declared, it must meet the definition set out in Section 16 of the Act.
Was the threats to the security of Canada threshold met.
I'm going to read a little bit more.
But let me pause for a second and tell you the importance of the paragraphs I just read.
Was there a problem in Canada from the government's point of view?
Yeah.
They didn't like all that hornhonking.
They didn't like parking on the side of the road.
They didn't like people laughing when they got tickets.
They didn't like the general middle finger flipping the bird to Trudeau.
And there may have even been some laws broken.
I think it really was a bunch of traffic offenses.
But what this judge is saying is that there was no need to put the country under martial law, and that is a requirement to put the country under martial law.
You can't simply do it because you want to or because you hate the other guy.
You have to put the country under martial law if there is no other way of dealing with the problem.
And the importance of that paragraph is that the province of Alberta, the province of Quebec, the province of Ontario all dealt with this same crisis without the martial law.
Trudeau invoked martial law because he wanted to, for political reasons, because he was embarrassed by the fact that the truckers were defying him.
How dare they?
And that ain't enough, boss.
Here, I'm going to read a little bit more in section 256, but you see what the judges did?
The judge said, if I'm wrong there, I got some more arguments too, because this judge knew that he was going to have his ruling appealed.
So he said, you didn't meet the test.
This was not a law of last resort.
You went to this way too early.
You didn't need to go to this at all.
Alberta cleared the blockade of coups before martial law was brought in.
I remember the Public Order Inquiry Commission, the hand-scripted judicial inquiry that Justin Trudeau chose the judge of, remember that?
We called it the Trucker Commission.
Police force after police force said they didn't need martial law.
They were fine with it.
I remember the OPP, the Ontario Provincial Police, said, yeah, we didn't ask for this.
We were fine without it.
Let me keep reading section 250, so paragraph 256, okay?
In a general sense, it was reasonable for the government to be alarmed at the impact of the blockades and the effects they were having on cross-border trade.
Those effects could be said to fall within a broader sense of threats to the security of Canada, or more generally, the concept of national security.
I'm going to skip ahead to 258.
In this court, after an extensive review of the authorities, Justice Simon Noel concluded that national security means at minimum, the preservation of the Canadian way of life, including safeguarding of the security of persons, institutions, and freedoms in Canada.
259.
A broad and flexible interpretation of the words threats to the security of Canada could encompass the concerns which led the government to issue the public order emergency declaration.
Had the meaning of those words not been limited by reference to another statute and applying a deferential standard of view, I would have found that the threshold was satisfied.
And this is the point I mentioned before.
However, the words threats to the security of Canada do not stand alone in the Act and must be interpreted with reference to the meaning of the terms as it is defined in Section 2 of the CESES Act.
And this is what I mentioned before.
Section 260.
Threats to the security of Canada in Section 2, the CESS Act, refers to four types of activities.
Only one of the four is relevant to these proceedings.
Under paragraph 2C, threats to the security of Canada means this.
All right, are you ready?
And this is, we're just going to read this slowly here.
Because you have to understand you can't push that martial law button.
You can't pull the fire alarm for the whole country and torch the chart of rights and freedoms and seize bank accounts and jail your political opponents.
You can't hit that panic button unless it's a real panic.
You can't fake it.
You can't be the boy who cries wolf.
You can't be Justin Trudeau looking for a dramatic, you know, part-time drama teacher drama move.
You need to do what the CSAs Act requires.
I'm going to read it now.
Under paragraph 2C, threats to the security of Canada means activities within or relating to Canada directed toward or in support of the threat or use of acts of serious violence against persons or property for the purpose of achieving a political, religious, or ideological objective within Canada or a foreign state.
And then the judge continues, this definition excludes lawful advocacy, protest, or dissent unless carried on in conjunction with any of the activities referred to in the Porgrant four paragraphs, including C. Paragraph 262, the proclamation that was their calling for martial law, specified five reasons to justify the declaration of a public order emergency.
The first draws directly from the language of the CESS Act.
The second, third, and fourth reasons pertain to adverse effects on the economy.
The fifth reason cites the potential for an increase in the level of unrest and violence that would further threaten the safety and security of Canadians.
That's a giveaway right there, isn't it?
It hadn't happened yet, and they were saying, well, this could get worse, boss.
I'm just going to read one more, and then we're going to call in our legal experts.
Here's one more paragraph by this judge.
The first reason specified in the proclamation cites the threat or use of serious violence against persons or property.
And here's how they describe, this is how the government describes it.
The continuing blockades by both persons and motor vehicles that is occurring at various locations throughout Canada and the continuing threats to oppose measures to remove the blockades, including by force, which blockades are being carried on in conjunction with activities that are directed toward or in support of the threat or use of acts of serious violence against persons or property, including critical infrastructure, for the purpose of achieving a political or ideological objective within Canada.
Did that happen?
It's like they're talking about some terrorist attack or something, but we all knew it was hot tubs and bouncy castles.
All right, listen, we could spend hours going through this case just reading it.
But I haven't practiced law in 20 years.
I want to go to two guys who are up to their eyeballs in this law, who have been fighting for freedom, who have been with the truckers since the convoy began.
Two Guys Fighting For Freedom00:07:11
I'm talking about Keith Wilson, lawyer for the truckers in Ottawa, and our friend Chad Williamson, lawyer for the truckers down in Coots, Alberta, both of which are referenced in this ruling.
May I introduce you the legal dream team, Chad Williamson, Keith Wilson.
Great to see you, fellas.
Thank you so much for joining this emergency live stream.
Boy, we got a lot of brain power on the show now.
Thank God you guys have come to help out.
How are you guys doing?
Chad, how are you doing down there in Calgary?
Doing awesome, Ezra.
I can't.
I mean, I'm so busy with other matters.
I had Marty, as you folks might know, is one of the guys that's worked with me on some of the crazier files that we've done, like storm into my office at 11 o'clock this morning saying, Hey, did you see the new federal court decision?
So I've just been trying to digest everything as I imagine Keith has already had the opportunity to do, being a couple hours ahead of us out in Ottawa.
But yep, doing great.
What outstanding news and just another dagger into the heart of the beast.
Yeah, well, that's incredible.
Well, thank you.
And you were down there at that border saloon in Coots, Alberta, observing the blockade firsthand, a peaceful blockade, not one of serious violence, to use the wording of the law.
Keith Wilson, I'm not sure if you're in Edmonton today or in Ottawa.
You've been between those two cities quite a lot over the last two years.
You are a lawyer, not just for Tamara Leach, but you were the interlocutor.
You were the negotiator out in Ottawa.
Tell me first your reaction to this ruling.
I'm pleasantly surprised.
I didn't think they had a hope.
I mean, so many court rulings have gone against freedom over the last two years.
I'm frankly stunned by this.
And I think the liberals were too.
Let me ask you that first.
Did you expect this or was this just a hope too far to hope?
I actually was holding out hope.
I'm here in my office in Edmonton.
And I have said many times when people were expressing dismay about the Roulau ruling from the public inquiry and the commission inquiry that Justice Rouleau led, that I was like, you know, I thought it was political theater.
It became pretty clear that's what it was near the end.
And I was holding out hope that the court would apply the facts to the law and conclude the obvious, which is the legal test for the invocation wasn't met.
The Couts border was opened on the weekend in that February of 2022.
The Windsor and all the other blockades were cleared.
On the Saturday and Sunday, the trucker leadership in Ottawa had negotiated a deal with the mayor of Ottawa to relocate the trucks out of the residential areas and consolidate them up onto Wellington in front of the prime minister's office and the parliament buildings to give the protests longer staying power.
And so there was no justification.
There was no crisis.
There was no insurrection.
There was no interference with international trade.
None of the legal tests were met.
And the court has confirmed that that is in fact the case.
The legal test wasn't met, but it went a step further.
And this is great cause for hope, is they also, the federal court has said that charter rights were violated.
So even if they met the test to invoke, which they didn't, the charter rights were violence, Section 8 in particular, your right against unlawful search and seizure, relating specifically to the outrageous tyrannical act of freezing hundreds of Canadians' bank accounts and canceling their credit cards.
You know, Christia Freeland was twitching more than she normally does when she was in front of the mic today.
And because she, as much as anyone, was the public face of the martial law.
Yeah, Marco Mendozino, but we learned from the Public Order Inquiry Commission that he was just a useful idiot.
He wasn't even fully briefed by his own staff.
It was Christia Freeland that was contacting the banks and saying, seize that account, seize this account.
I want to ask you one more thing before we go back to Chad for a second.
Keith, I know you were negotiating literally day by day, even hour by hour out there in Ottawa with the Ottawa police.
And I want you to say again what you've told me before, which is that you were in full communication, open communication with the city and with the Ottawa police managing the convoy, keeping lanes open, moving away from residential areas, moving these trucks over there and these trucks over there.
It was cooperative.
There was some tension for sure, but it was a relationship building on trust.
And you were sort of the official negotiator.
Now, I want you to say it in your own words because I don't want to get a word wrong, but I believe you've told me that there was a deal.
There was a deal between the truckers and the city of Ottawa.
And instead of ratifying that deal, Justin Trudeau pulled the trigger on martial law because he didn't want there to be a deal because he wanted that drama teacher drama move.
You and the truckers in Ottawa actually were in full compliance with everything the police wanted.
But Trudeau was worried he was going to lose his moment.
So he invoked martial law right when you guys had a deal.
Can you tell me if I got that right and fill in any gaps if I got it wrong?
Sure, that's absolutely what happened.
We had the deal on the Saturday.
It was publicly announced on the Sunday.
We implemented the deal with the cooperation of the city police.
You can see footage out there where the trucks are being escorted by police with flashing lights up onto Wellington.
And we cleared two city blocks on the Monday, moved 123 vehicles out in the residential type areas of downtown.
And I was in constant communication with the mayor's chief of staff and the city manager, Steve Canalakis.
And I still remember on the Tuesday, we got stopped due to miscommunication with the police because they had to move barricades and we're about to move trucks again.
And they apologized for it.
All of my text messages have been used in evidence both in the criminal trial for Kristen Tamara as well as in the public inquiry.
But the most crucial moment was on the Wednesday morning after the invocation of the Emergencies Act.
We were ready to move trucks again.
And I got a phone call from Steve Kay, Steve Canalakis, the city manager for the city of Ottawa.
And he confirmed what I'm about to say in his testimony before the public inquiry.
His tone was so like sorrowful and sad.
And he's like, Keith, we gave it our best shot, but the federal government doesn't want this to happen.
They're blocking any further moves.
So Trudeau had figured out what we were doing in terms of de-escalating.
The mayor's position was, he communicated to us that he said, if you move up into Wellington and consolidate up there, I don't care if you stay there for months because that's where your grievance is with the federal government.
So that was our move.
The federal government, the Trudeau liberals wanted to, I think they wanted to send a message to Canadians, Ezra, that don't you dare challenge us.
Ripple Effects of Legal Cases00:16:06
You'll regret it.
Yeah, I think you're so right now.
Chad, I want to bring you in here because you have a similar story, I think.
And again, I'm relying on you to correct me because you were the guy down there at the Coots blockade.
You and your partners sort of did rotating shifts.
And what Keith was doing out in Ottawa, you were that same liaison with the RCMP down there in Coots.
And I'm really glad you were.
First of all, I'd like you to confirm for me that there was no violence whatsoever.
And in fact, your advice to the truckers was always keep it lawful, guys, civil disobedience, nothing more rambunctious.
But suddenly, I remember it was the day before the invocation of the martial law.
You correct me if my memory's wrong, that the Mounties had a big press release.
We found some shotguns and some hunting rifles, not in the saloon, but we found them somewhere else.
And they laid them out in a beautiful photo op.
And I looked at it, I said, you know, that's probably scary to city slickers in Toronto or Vancouver or Ottawa, but that's just sort of regular for down there in Coutz.
Like that's hunting, that's duck hunting.
And frankly, it's sort of weird if you don't have a gun, if you're down in Coots.
I take what Keith just said in Ottawa and that RCMP photo op as the liberals' panicky attempt to rebrand a completely peaceful movement, both in Ottawa and in Coots, to rebrand it as, quote, serious violence.
That's the language I just quoted from the CESIS Act.
That's the language this judge was leaning on.
They needed evidence of, quote, serious violence.
They had none.
So they broke off the peace deal in Ottawa and trumped up.
Oh, we found a shotgun, guys.
That'll scare you, Toronto liberals.
Chad, what was it?
Was that the feeling you had there in Coots?
Look, Ezra, so this is going to be a little bit more difficult for me than it might be for Keith.
As you know, there's the proceedings against who are kind of collectively known as the Coots 4.
Now, these are the gents who were charged with, among other things, conspiracy to commit murder.
Obviously, they're the subject of these alleged gun charges.
That's currently before the court.
We don't represent them.
And unfortunately, my knowledge in respect of that particular case is really quite limited.
Now, as you also might know, there's three other gentlemen colloquially known as the Coots III, who are the alleged organizers of the Coots blockade.
Now, this is also coming before the courts in a three-week jury trial coming up later this spring.
And we've got another pre-trial applications to be heard close to the end of February on this.
So these issues are before the courts now.
Now, my role down in Coots, I'm okay to acknowledge that we were there to provide your standard criminal and charter advice to anybody on the ground piecemeal as they'd come.
So the way that we always looked at it is there'd be a retainer when someone came up to ask us for a question.
That retainer ended after the provision of summary advice.
And obviously, those legal services were crowdfunded.
Now, we did assist and observe some of the negotiations.
Again, that was whether that was me or whether that was Martin.
It just depends on the timing.
What I will say is everything, at least from kind of an outsider perspective, after the fact, because I was not down there at the moment when the guns were alleged to have been discovered in, I suppose, a trailer.
But it smacked to me, Ezra, that this was politically motivated.
We know that Jason Kenney was getting a lot of pushback from the grassroots conservative movement in rural Alberta.
And what we've seen, at least, and while this might be anecdotal, in other cases, and we've run a ton of these cases, whether it's the COVID kind of restaurant rebellion cases and the lockdowns, you know, looking at even Minister Gilbo blocking rebel news on Twitter, it's become very apparent to me that so many of these government decisions are almost wholly politically motivated.
And what's even more interesting is they're all getting smacked down by the court.
And I suppose that should lend a degree of confidence to kind of the freedom movement.
But for whatever reason, despite all these quite literally hundreds of victories against the forces of authoritarianism and government overreach, I'm still gobsmacked every time there's a victory in the courtroom.
What we've seen, though, is we've seen, at least in the case of the federal government, a government that has at every single turn acted politically and unconstitutionally, whether it's the plastics ban that got overturned and then have the liberals say, well, we don't really care about the court's decision or we don't agree with it, and then try to perhaps find some other mechanism to try to get at the ends, the ends that they're looking for.
Also, we've seen, you know, this robust blocking of journalists on Twitter.
We saw, you know, an RCMP member slam David Menzies head into a wall when he was just asking some questions.
If you compare that to the treatment, I suppose, of rebel news by the police in Switzerland during the WEF forum, it doesn't take a rocket scientist with more than a couple IQ points to rub together to understand that a lot of this stuff is politically motivated and perhaps a lot of this stuff is just coming from the office of the PMO.
Again, I'm a lawyer and my opinion is mostly based on evidence, not necessarily anecdotal conclusions, but it seems like the writing to me is on the wall.
By the time that the Emergency Measures Act was invocated, the blockades largely had been cleared.
I mean, you know, freezing bank accounts of single mothers for sending 20 bucks to, you know, GoFundMe or to a Bitcoin address, that smacks of Stalinism and fascism.
It's absolutely unacceptable.
And I think that the court's decision in this case really was a slap back at the government.
Obviously, the first thing that the liberals come out and say is that, well, they're going to appeal it.
So I guess my optimism needs to be tempered to some degree because we really need to see if they do, in fact, intend on appealing this decision, what an appellate panel at the federal court will rule.
It's a lengthy decision, and I think it's a guarded decision.
And one thing that I know about what they call first instance judges or justices who are basically the first court to hear something is really it's their job to try to render a robust decision that can potentially have have as limited avenues for appeal as possible.
So it'll take some creative lawyering, I think, on the part of the liberal government to try to overturn this decision.
And I can see that.
I haven't read the whole ruling yet, but I can see in certain cases this judge is writing, knowing it would be appealed either way, so trying to write a defense.
Now, Keith, I want to ask you a question.
This is the second time I've been surprised by a good news judgment.
The first was in the province of Alberta, a case, if I recall, it was called Ingram.
And it was a mixed bag, but that case challenged the legal authority for many of the public health orders.
That there was a technical flaw and therefore that the laws were outside the power, ultra-virus, the government.
So everything that was done in their name had no basis.
That was an exciting ruling in itself, but it also caused a lot of particular cases, including one that I know Chad had, to be abandoned, the case against Chris Scott, the proprietor of the Whistle-Stop Diner in Mirror, Alberta.
So a lot of other cases had reverberations from this.
Now, let me ask you, for example, Tamara Leach, and I think we're going to try and get Lawrence Greenspawn on the live stream today, but if not her, but maybe comment on other cases.
Is the invalidation of the Emergencies Act, will that change other prosecution or other litigation out there?
I would imagine that those 200 or 300 people who had their bank accounts seized would now be in a position to sue the government.
Are there people like Tamara Leach who are in defensive mode against a criminal prosecution?
Are any of their situations changed?
I know you're still digesting this law like the rest of us, but you think this will have a ripple effect in other litigation?
I do.
Oh, let me let me go to Keith first.
I'll come right back to you.
Chad, go ahead, Keith.
The first thing, let me deal with the second question first.
The Emergencies Act gave power to the federal government to use war measures against its own citizens.
And the court has ruled that two things: that the federal government, the Trudeau liberals, the Trudeau cabinet, did not follow the law and did not have the legal basis to invoke these war measures against its own citizens.
And that in addition to that, the Trudeau cabinet violated Canadians' charter rights in a way that's not saved by Section 1, not demonstratively justified in a free and democratic society.
So that means all of their actions were illegal.
And it means within the act, there's a shield that the government can raise to protect itself against being sued when it invokes these war powers against its citizens.
Because their actions have been struck down as illegal and a violation of the charter, the shield's gone too.
And that means anybody who was harmed by the actions of the federal government through the invocation of the Emergencies Act, by the freezing of their bank accounts, the canceling of their credit cards, can now sue the federal government.
But I want to issue a lawyer's caution.
There's an argument that the limitation period runs from the date of the decision, which means they have two years from today.
There's also a potential argument that it runs two years from the harm.
So anybody who's in the situation that may be in a position to sue because they suffered harm needs to get legal advice and act before February 13th of 2024.
So they've only got a couple of weeks.
Wow.
Just in case.
I think the better argument is that the two years applies later, but out of abundance of caution, you don't want to have your case struck on the basis that you're out of time, so they should act quickly.
Now, let me answer your first question.
Despite rumors, I have not found a single person who was charged for their participation in any protest in Canada under the Emergencies Act.
They were all charged under the criminal code or some municipal statute or like a bylaw or a provincial statute like the Traffic Safety Act for parking in a driving lane.
The witnesses, the officials, and police officers, we tested that theory at the public inquiry into the Emergencies Act in the fall of 2022.
And the police officials said that they never used the Emergencies Act to charge anybody.
All of the charges that were laid were under the criminal code or provincial statutes.
So unlike Ingram, the decision in Alberta where all the health mandates were struck down, people were charged with violating those specific orders.
Businesses were closed on the basis of the Ingram orders that were struck down.
So there was an immediate more than ripple.
It was like a dam-bursting effect legally on the Ingram case.
This one's different because to my knowledge and the evidence that I've seen to date, no one was charged under the Emergencies Act.
All of the trials that are going on are on the basis of the criminal code and provincial statutes.
So, but yes, people have the right to sue who have been harmed.
We're talking with Keith Wilson, lawyer for the Trucker Convoy itself.
He was the interlocutor in Ottawa representing the truckers in a series of negotiations with the local police.
We're also talking with Chad Williamson, a lawyer for the Coots 3, who was down there in the saloon for days.
That was one of my favorite moves that Rebel News ever did, is dispatching a lawyer in real time to assist the truckers who I think were being taken advantage of by unscrupulous RCMP negotiators, is how it felt to me.
And Chad went into level the playing field.
Chad, I'm going to come back to you for one last comment.
Then we're going to say goodbye to this super duper legal eagle panel.
I'm going to read a little bit more from the ruling.
I'm going to start with what you mentioned, Keith.
I'm going to talk about the second part of this.
The first part was there was no national crisis.
There was no insurrection, violence, uprising, invasion under the CESIS Act definition, which I read.
But the second is what you said, the violation of our charter rights.
There is no pandemic exception in the charter.
There is no convoy exception in the charter.
And I'll take our viewers through those sections of the ruling where the judge talks about that.
But Chad, let's go to you for a final thought on the ripple effect that this may have.
Keith just said he's unaware of anyone who was prosecuted by virtue of the Emergencies Act.
But how do you, I think this changes the tone in the country.
I think this normalizes the freedom movement and it casts a shadow of doubt on the enforcers.
I think during the pandemic, there was a false consciousness of unanimity.
We all agree with this.
Everyone supports this.
95% of people are getting the jab.
All five political parties at the National Leaders Debate agree on this.
You're a rogue, contrarian, skeptical conspiracy theorist if you disagree.
I think that today's ruling changes the mood in the entire country.
And we're going to go to the CBC's coverage in a minute to see how they're handling this terrible day from their point of view.
I think that if nothing else, this changes how Canadians look at things.
And it couldn't happen in a worse time for Trudeau.
The man has rock-bottom credibility, and this just hammers at home that the guy was a wicked liar who invoked the Emergencies Act for his own purpose, not for the law.
What's your feeling about what this does to the world?
Well, again, so just to come full circle, Ezra, I mean, well, first of all, I'd just like to say how humbled I am every time I get to hear Keith expound, you know, his wisdom from up in the snowy glaciers of Edmonton, Alberta, or if he's out in Ottawa from there.
Keith has such a remarkable way of concisely wrapping complicated issues into a nice package that's digestible for a layman's audience.
And that's absolutely critical.
So Keith, big thanks there.
I echo his lawyer's concern.
What we've seen in Alberta, Ezra, is as Keith had mentioned, we saw since the Ingram decision, we've seen a deluge of civil litigation crop up against the Alberta government for subjecting people to measures that have now deemed to be unlawful.
What we saw in Ottawa with the freezing of bank accounts, especially for people who might not have a lot of money, especially when there's this disproportionality where we've got someone that contributed 20 bucks and had their bank accounts frozen for the complicity of the banks.
Deluge of Legal Challenges00:08:57
There might be liability, obviously, for the federal government for some of those maneuvers.
But what struck me the most is watching row upon row of jackbooted police using batons against peaceful protesters, trampling people with riot horses and clearing those streets in the method that they did.
Frankly, I think that there could potentially be liability there anyway.
But I think that this might add some more ammunition into the cartridge to fuel some of those potential civil claims.
Obviously, people need to seek legal advice if they think that they have a claim that arises out of the The use of the Emergency Measures Act.
The one thing that I would like to say, Ezra, and you've got some more news about another Twitter win that you might be sharing with the rebel viewership at some point.
But again, what we're seeing is Trudeau's government dragged through the mud again and again by clever counsel and by a court that may have had enough of this government's propensity to act in an unlawful, unconstitutional, unreasonable, unjustified, you know, lacking transparency in a completely unintelligible fashion to keep people under the thumb of its ambit.
And I don't know, maybe the tide is turning.
I think Trudeau's days are numbered, to be honest with you.
I'm not going to crystal ball gaze, but the distaste is, pal, is palpable.
Yeah.
Well, let me tell you, I'm very grateful to both of you guys.
You're busy lawyers with important work.
And this came out so suddenly.
It certainly caught me by surprise.
And for you guys to bring your big smarts to bear so quickly for our viewers.
Right now, we have about 8,000 people watching concurrently between the four platforms we're on.
We have about 2,300 on YouTube.
We have about 5,400 on Rumble, and we have more on Getter and Odyssey.
So a lot of people listening, your wisdom.
Of course, people will watch this on the replays also.
So I think that you guys really are talking to a big audience of Canadians and others around the world who care about freedom and are relieved that our judicial system is still capable of holding powerful people to account.
So Keith Wilson out there in Edmonton and Chad Williamson down there in the Calgary area.
Thanks to both of you.
Keep fighting for freedom.
I know you will.
And I'll take to heart your admonition that if anyone was violated during the Emergencies Act, including financially, it behooves you to get legal advice quickly because you may have only about three weeks left to file a lawsuit.
So in fact, you may even wish to contact the two lawyers on our screen now, Keith Wilson and Chad Williamson.
Thanks, fellas.
Keep up the great work.
Thank you very much.
Thanks so much.
Both to Keith and Ezra.
Thank you guys.
Thank you.
Okay, well, here's what I want to do.
We've got on standby Lawrence Greenspawn.
He is the criminal lawyer representing Tamara Leach out there in Ottawa.
As you know, the Democracy Fund is crowdfunding her legal defense.
If you want to help her, you can go to helptamera.com.
As soon as we have Lawrence, let me know, Olivia, because we'll go straight to him.
But in the meantime, I want to read part of the ruling, which I referred to earlier.
I think it's paragraph, let me just go from memory here.
I think it's paragraph 351.
And remember what Keith Wilson said: that there's sort of two ways the judge knocked down Trudeau.
The first is he said he didn't meet the test.
There had to be a national crisis, like a revolution, or a major terrorist attack, or an invasion, like something of that grave a nature to justify deploying wartime measures against your own people.
And you can't just find it convenient.
You can't just say, well, this is fun and PR savvy.
You have to use it as a last resort.
And the test is serious violence and an existential threat.
That obviously didn't happen anywhere.
So the judge says, step one, you didn't do what the law required.
But remember what Keith said?
He said, step two, you also violated people's charter rights, because even in a crisis, we still have certain rights.
And I want to read from section 351 of the ruling.
Go ahead and put it on the screen.
We're going to read this together.
I've only glanced at this, so we're going to read it together.
So conclusion on section one, justification.
So just to remind you how the Charter of Rights works, there's a list of fundamental freedoms called Section 2 of the Constitution is my favorite part.
Freedom of thought, belief, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, all the core civil liberties.
But they're not absolute.
They're subject to reasonable limitations that can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
That's almost the exact wording of section one of our Constitution.
So no one would deny that the Emergencies Act infringed on our freedoms.
You'd be crazy to say so, and the Trudeau government was not that crazy.
They would just argue that, well, it's demonstrably justifiable in a free and democratic society.
So let's read what the judge said together, okay?
Paragraph 351.
There was no real dispute between the parties that the government had a pressing and substantial objective when they enacted the measures to clear out the blockades that had formed as part of the protest.
I'm going to skip to paragraph 352.
I agree with the respondent, the government, that the objective was pressing and substantial and that there was a rational connection between freezing the accounts and the objective to stop funding the blockades.
However, the measures were not minimally impairing.
Minimal impairment requires that the measures affect the rights as little as reasonably possible.
They must be carefully tailored.
The regulations and economic order fail the minimal impairment test for two reasons.
One, they were applied throughout Canada.
And two, there were less impairing alternatives available.
Let me stop for a second.
So what the judge is saying is, okay, so you wanted to stop funding the convoy, but you used a sledgehammer instead of a more precise tool.
And the law requires you, if you're a government, you're going to violate people's civil liberties, you have to do it in the smallest way you can.
You can't just, you can't invoke martial law nationwide.
You can't hit a fly with a jackhammer.
Let's read on from paragraph 354.
The scope of the declaration and the measures could have been limited to Ontario, which faced the most intransigent situation, and possibly Alberta, although the Coot situation had been resolved when the act was invoked.
Elsewhere, the authorities were able to use existing legislative tools such as the Criminal Code and provincial public safety statutes to remove blockades and prevent new ones from being established without the threat or use of serious violence from the protesters.
The respondent, the government's position, is that it was necessary to apply the measures across Canada because the participants in the several blockades came from across the country, as did their financial support.
That may have been a compelling reason if there was evidence that the measures would not have achieved their objective if they did not have effect throughout the country, but that evidence was not part of the respondent's record.
The judge is saying the government didn't prove any of that.
Paragraph 356.
Those that were targeted by the economic order appear to have all been present at the major blockade sites, notably Ottawa.
And there's no evidence that the financial institutions would have refused to cooperate with the implementation of the measures if, for example, their account holders resided in Prince Edward Island or the territories, which had no illegal protests and had traveled to Ottawa to participate in the blockade.
The respondent acknowledges that the suspension of bank accounts and credit cards affected joint account holders and credit cards issued on the accounts to other family members and suggests that it was unavoidable.
Indeed, the JOST applicants, those are some of the citizens, submitted evidence of that happening to one of them.
Thus, someone who had nothing to do with the protests could find themselves without the means to access necessaries for household and other family purposes while the accounts were suspended.
There appears to have been no effort made to find a solution to that problem while the measures were in effect.
I mean, what married couple doesn't have a joint bank account, doesn't have a joint credit card.
And so, if a husband or a wife or a son or whatever, is it the protest the whole family has their bank account seized?
Good luck buying food, groceries, rent.
The judge says that was not a minimal impairment.
What are you doing punishing a wife or a son or a husband when they're not the ones involved?
Government Plans Appeal Decision00:06:39
Let me keep reading.
Paragraph 358.
A particular concern from a Section 1 justification perspective is that there was no standard applied to determine whether someone should be the target of the measures or process to allow them to question that determination.
As described by Superintendent Beauduin in cross-examination, it was all informal and ad hoc.
In fact, I remember reading a news story that it was basically they gathered up CBC articles and anyone named in the CBC article had their accounts banned.
There was no process.
It truly was the state broadcaster hunting down enemies of the state.
Paragraph 359.
Having found that the infringements of charter sections 2B and 8 were not minimally impairing, I find that they were not justified under Section 1.
So there you have it.
I wanted to read those sections to you because they were that second part of the story that Keith Wilson referred to.
Namely, the government did not follow the law.
There was not a serious violence.
There was not an insurrection.
There was not a war.
There was not a revolution.
The government lied about that.
They did not act within the law.
They exceeded their powers.
And number two, the way they used the law was illegal as well.
They violated the charter.
Now, how are we doing in connecting with Lawrence Greenspawn?
Pardon me?
Okay, we need a little bit more time.
Let's take that time.
Are there any super chats or rumble chats, rumble rants that we can read?
Are there any of those?
No.
Okay, if folks want me to read their comments, feel free to make a rumble rant or rumble chat.
I want to see how the CBC is handling this.
This must be a very dark day for them.
Can you go to the CBC and can you let's read it together?
I'm laughing in advance.
I'm laughing in advance.
Federal government's decision to invoke Emergencies Act against convoy protests was unreasonable, court rules.
Government says it plans to appeal to the decision.
So let's stop right there.
It's not Justin Trudeau's decision.
It's not Christy Freeland's decision.
Here's how it works at the CBC.
If there's good news, Trudeau did this.
Freeland did that.
If it's good news, it's very personal.
Or liberals do this.
But if it's bad news, you'll never see the word Trudeau or liberal.
It's the federal government.
Decision to invoke Emergencies Act against convoy protests was unreasonable.
Well, it did say that, but it said a lot more than that, didn't it?
It said it was illegal, unjustifiable, and unconstitutional.
Isn't it funny that the CBC says it was just unreasonable?
Yeah, it wasn't reasonable, guys.
No, it was breaking the law.
You government hacks.
You paid for propagandists.
I have to tell you again that if you need an adjective next to the word journalist, you're not a journalist.
So these government journalists of the CBC state broadcaster are wicked liars.
Never trust the CBC.
They were the number one haters during the convoy.
They were the ones who compiled the enemies list that was blacklisted and had their credit.
The CBC were the running dogs, the stalking horses.
They were the ones that rounded up the truckers by publishing their names that then went to have their bank accounts seized.
Can you put that CBC news story up again?
Want to read it.
Let's scroll down a little bit.
I haven't read this yet, but I know it's going to be good.
A federal judge says the liberal government's use of the Emergencies Act in early 2022 to clear convoy protesters was unreasonable and infringed on protesters' charter rights.
I concluded there was no national emergency justifying the invocation of the Emergencies Act, and the decision to do so was therefore unreasonable and ultraveris.
Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley wrote in a Tuesday decision.
Ultra virus is a Latin term used by courts to refer to actions beyond the scope of the law.
Deputy Prime Minister Christy Freeland told reporters at a cabinet retreat in Montreal that the government plans to appeal the decision.
Where is Trudeau?
Where is that little man coward?
Why is he not owning this?
I know why.
He wants to push it off on Twitchy.
And he wants headlines like the federal government did something wrong.
So far, I haven't seen Justin Trudeau's name in this report yet, have you?
Let's keep reading.
The federal court case was brought by two national groups, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Canadian Constitution Foundation, and two people whose bank accounts were frozen.
They argued Ottawa did not meet the legal threshold when it invoked the legislation, which had never been used before.
That's a good point to remember right there.
Not even during 9-11 was this used.
Trudeau thought that this was the worst crisis Canada has had in a generation.
Was it really?
Some hot tubs and bouncy castles.
Thousands of protesters, angry with the government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including vaccine requirements, descended on Ottawa in January of 2022 and blocked border points elsewhere.
The protesters parked large vehicles on key arteries in the capital city for nearly a month and honked their horns incessantly for days.
You okay?
Guys, okay?
You heard some horns honking?
I hope you're okay.
The government invoked the Emergencies Act on February 14th, 2022.
It gave law enforcement extraordinary powers to remove and arrest protesters and gave the government the power to freeze the finances of those connected to the protests.
What does that mean connected to?
The temporary emergency powers also gave authorities the ability to commandeer tow trucks to remove protesters' vehicles from the streets of the capital.
By the way, let me tell you that the criminal code gives police that power too.
I don't know if you know that.
You don't need an emergencies act to commandeer a vehicle.
Police can commandeer a vehicle of yours right now under the criminal code.
So that's the CBC showing their lack of knowledge.
I see on our series of monitors that one of my favorite lawyers in the country is now on standby.
I've gotten to know Tamara Leach over the last year.
I really didn't know her.
I hadn't met her or even spoken with her before she was arrested.
But over the course of the last year, I've gotten to know her fairly well.
I've gone on tour with her.
We've published her book, which is a national bestseller, just outstanding.
And over the course of the last six months or so, I've had the pleasure to meet with and speak to Lawrence Greenspawn, who's a leading criminal lawyer in the city of Ottawa, who has taken what we all thought would be a case for a couple of weeks.
Meeting Lawrence Greenspawn00:14:59
It's now stretching on the better part of a year.
And I'm absolutely delighted to bring him on the show now.
A man, I truly, you know, God forbid I ever get charged with the crime myself, and may it never happen, and it never has.
But God forbid, if it does, Lawrence, I hope you would take me as a client because I've been so impressed with your work for Tamara Leach, and thank God you're there for her.
And by the way, thanks for taking some time to appear on our live stream.
We have about 8,000 people watching concurrently right now.
Give me your reaction to this astonishing ruling by the federal court, which caught me by surprise.
Maybe you thought it was coming, but boy, I'm surprised.
Give me your reaction.
Well, first off, thanks for the very kind words, Ezra.
You don't want to need me, but if you ever do, I'm there for you, okay?
Thank you.
This is what we've been saying all along.
Those of the various organizations that appeared before the RULO Commission were saying just this.
This was an unnecessary overreaction to what was certainly in Ottawa a peaceful protest.
And what Mr. Justice Mosley, who, by the way, is a very experienced federal court judge and has been there for 30 years.
He's a former Crown attorney.
And he knows of what he speaks.
He's found that these temporary and incredibly powerful measures were unconstitutional.
And of course, the knee-jerk reaction of the government is: oh, yeah, we're going to appeal.
But before they appeal, this judgment from its 190 pages, it's thorough, it's damning.
And they come to the conclusion that we've been saying all along, which is that these emergency measures were completely unnecessary.
I had a quick skim of the judgment.
I don't even think that there was the kind of evidence that we've heard in the Tamara Leach Chris Barber trial about all of the efforts by the demonstrators to try and reduce the footprint.
I mean, those were ongoing pursuant to an agreement, as you know, which was reached with the mayor of Ottawa on February the 12th.
And Chris Barber and many others had already taken all kinds of steps trying to reduce the footprint of the impact of the demonstrators on the downtown core and the residents of the downtown core.
I don't even see any mention of that in the Mosley decision.
But when you look at that and you look at what was going on almost from the start of the demonstration, the efforts to try and reduce the footprint, there was absolutely no need for Trudeau to do what he did.
And not only that, there was some question about did he even realize, did anybody actually tell him about what was going on in the streets right in front of parliament?
Because, you know, there was a genuine effort on a daily basis.
They had actually already moved 40 of the big rigs had been moved.
And this was part of the agreement that had been struck with the mayor.
There was absolutely no need for the Emergencies Act and every reason not to use these kinds of very powerful measures.
Yeah, we spoke earlier with Keith Wilson, who was a lawyer negotiator for the Truckers, who was in daily, in fact, you could even say hourly communication with city officials, police officials, mayor's office to proactively, you're using the phrase, reduce the footprint.
I would say reduce the temperature, reduce the friction.
And you said, well, it sounds like Trudeau didn't know about it.
A darker interpretation, which I would choose, is that Trudeau absolutely did know about it.
And that's why he pulled the trigger on February 14th, because he didn't want this peace deal that the truckers had negotiated with the city coming into effect.
I think he realized, whoa, I'd better, if I'm going to use the Emergencies Act, I better do it now because everything is getting calm and calm.
Remember, the Coots blockade had ended in advance of this.
So he was running out of justification.
I think he pulled the trigger because he wanted to be dramatic like his father had been during the FLQ crisis some 50 years ago.
And I think that, and that was, you know, a lot of people had their doubts about that from a civil liberties point of view, but Trudeau didn't even follow the law.
We were just going through the law.
It had to have a serious violence in the order of a revolution or a war or a true insurrection.
Lawrence, was there any violence whatsoever in Ottawa that you know of during the entire time the convoy was there?
I don't know of any violence.
On the contrary, I mean, if there had been, the Crown, as you know, has now closed their case in the Lich Barber trial.
They've closed their case.
You can be sure that if there was any violence, it would have been front and center in the trial.
There wasn't any.
I mean, really, what the problem was with the demonstrators, at least in Ottawa, was, and most Canadians will say this.
Oh, yeah, I'm all in favor of the freedom of expression and right to peaceful assembly.
They're all in favor of that.
But then, unfortunately, most Canadians will say, yeah, but it lasted too long.
It was annoying.
It was inconvenient.
Well, you know, constitutional, I don't have to tell you that constitutional rights, there's no time limit on them.
And there's a reason that they're called fundamental freedoms and they're enshrined in our constitution.
And they shouldn't be messed with because the prime minister of the day thinks it, well, I'm going to look good if I come out tough like my dad.
Well, when Trudeau, the senior said, you know, in answer to the question, what would you do in response to what's going on?
And he turned on his heel and said, just watch me.
Canadians across the country were going, wow, that's great.
He's a tough guy and he's going to deal with this situation.
That was not the scenario in February of 2022.
It just, it was a completely different nonviolent scenario.
There are no cabinet ministers that were being kidnapped or killed.
Far from it.
And what this judgment does is it basically says, look, this was crushing a peanut with a sledgehammer when the peanut was just lying there.
There was no violence.
Yeah.
You know, there's a zeitgeist, that's German for the spirit of the times.
And a couple of years ago, the Zeitgeist in Canada was conformity.
I remember when the Democracy Fund got started, there was a tremendous time finding lawyers who were willing to fight against pandemic prosecutions or the lawyers themselves, and many lawyers are contrarian and like being dissenters, especially in the criminal bar.
It was very hard to find lawyers who were willing to take on this juggernaut.
And I think that conformity was part of the power of it.
Oh, you're not an anti-vaxxer, are you?
You're not a conspiracy theorist, are you?
And I think the Trucker Convoy sort of broke that fake unanimity.
But in the legal, in the courts, it still was overwhelmingly the courts sort of upheld a lot of these rules.
I feel that today, today's ruling sort of grants permission to other judges and lawyers to say, okay, wait a minute.
Maybe we went too far.
Maybe the pendulum swung too far.
And here we have a sober-minded judge going through it and saying, yeah, it just wasn't enough to justify it.
And some of the mania that was here two years ago wasn't justifiable.
Like I think back to how Montreal literally had a curfew from 10 p.m. till 5 a.m., whether you were jabbed or not.
And people went along with that.
That's a kind of madness of crowds.
I feel like this ruling is sort of puncturing that balloon and changes this feeling in the air.
And hopefully that'll redound to the benefit of Tamara Leach in your trial.
I don't know, maybe that's too feelings-ish of a thing to say, but I feel like the national temperament has just changed today.
What do you think?
Well, I think that as long as this ruling gets upheld, and I'm quite confident it will be, the matter is going to be taken up the line.
And I think the irony is that the very Charter of Rights and Freedoms that Dad brought back to Canada is now being has now been successfully used as a way of undermining the son, Justin, his actions in declaring an emergency.
And the irony is certainly not lost.
But I mean, you know, of course, the government is going to appeal this and make their arguments.
I just don't see how it is that with this kind of a ruling, you know, you look back at the RULO Commission, you say, how was it that at the end of the day there, it was concluded that this was a national emergency that warranted this kind of emergency powers.
And this judgment certainly goes the other way.
And in the time that I've had to review it, it seems to be extremely well reasoned and it's thorough.
And my hope is that it'll be properly upheld as it moves up to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Well, listen, it's great to connect with you.
It's nice to see you.
Before we say goodbye, can you give us a one-minute update on what happens next in the case against Tamara Leach?
I mean, I would have thought that this case, I mean, I don't even think it should have gone to court at all, but I would have thought it would have been over very quickly.
It's now stretching well into its second calendar year.
What are the next milestones that supporters of Tamara Leach can look forward to in this court case against her?
We expect to receive a decision from the trial judge on March the 7th.
That'll deal with the evidentiary matters of whether the evidence of conversations that Chris Barber had can be used against Tamara Leach and vice versa.
This is so-called conspiracy type of motion that the Crown has brought.
There'll be a decision by the trial judge on that.
And then March 13 to 15, we'll be bringing a motion in order to deal with the charges.
And then the judge will need some time to rule on that.
So we'll stretch into April, May before there's any decision that needs to be made as to whether or not we're going to call any evidence.
Wow.
This thing really is, as they say, the process is the punishment.
And I was in court briefly, but we've had a rebel news reporter in court every single day of the hearing.
And our friends at the Democracy Fund have been there too, because we think it's a very important trial for many people in the country.
And it's important that they get the kind of reports that we're doing.
I just want to say one last thing while we have Lawrence on the line.
We need to crowdfund Tamara Leach's case.
And Lawrence and his two deputy lawyers are on this.
They have been on this case.
Like I say, it's going to stretch close to a year.
And we didn't expect that.
And so we've got a crowdfund for them to continue on the file.
And I would like viewers who love Tamara Leach to go to helptamera.com.
That's a special website.
If you make a donation there, you actually get a charitable tax receipt because it's going through the Democracy Fund, which is a registered civil liberties public interest law firm.
So I just wanted to say that.
We've got about 9,000 folks watching this right now.
And if those folks haven't yet had a chance to help Tamara, I really believe a lot turns on that case, Lawrence, because they want to convict her and thereby denormalize the whole political movement behind her.
Whereas if she's acquitted, which I think there's a very good chance, that will vindicate her in the whole political movement.
So that will be as important a case as the federal court ruling today.
So I just wanted to mention: if folks are as impressed with Lawrence as I am and they want Tamara to win as much as I do, please go to helptamara.com and you will get a charitable tax receipt.
So that money comes out of Trudeau's Revenue Canada.
So it's a win-win.
Last word to you, Lawrence.
Well, let's see how this unfolds.
But you're quite right.
It's taken way longer than anybody could have anticipated.
But it's not the first time that the fight for freedoms has been on the back of what is a relatively minor criminal charge.
We're going to keep fighting.
And thanks for your support.
Right on.
Well, we will support you.
And no regular person could bear this cost on their own, not even a millionaire.
A millionaire would plead guilty.
Millionaires are smart.
They would say, this is nuts.
I'm not going to spend my entire life savings on this.
I'm just going to plead guilty and walk away.
But Tamara Leach is a principled person, but she's not a gazillionaire.
The only way this works is if thousands of ordinary people chip in 10 bucks or 20 bucks or 50 bucks, which is what we're going to do.
We'll say goodbye to Lawrence right now with our best wishes.
Thanks for joining us on short notice, Lawrence.
Well, there you have it.
Very interesting.
We've talked with three very smart lawyers in the freedom movement today.
Each one of them in the heart of the battle.
Chad Williamson, one of my favorite guys, was down there at the saloon at the Couts border crossing between Alberta and Montana.
Keith Wilson was a lawyer for the Trucker Convoy who was their negotiator with the police and the city who got a deal done.
Dominique LeBlanc at the Wedding00:08:11
And it's my belief that that's why Trudeau pulled the trigger.
And then, of course, our friend Lawrence Greenspawn there, who is representing Tamara Leach, which I believe will be as momentous a case as the one we're looking at today.
Now, I did call for super chats and chit chats and rumble rants.
Annalise in 1964, great to hear from you again.
Chipped in 20 bucks.
Says, great coverage, Ezra.
Well, thanks very much.
Medic Deb has 10 bucks, says, God bless Rebel News.
Well, that was very nice for you.
Thank you.
Bedrock, five bucks.
What would be required for Trudeau Freeland to be held personally accountable for these decisions if it is confirmed to be illegal?
Well, what they did was done, it wasn't done secretly, it wasn't done outside the processes of the government.
So I don't think that they would be personally accountable unless there was some proof of malicious prosecution or abuse of office, which I don't think yet has been proved or met.
But I think the proper punishment for them is political disgrace.
And I would encourage people to go to our website.
Trudeau must resign.
Of course, he won't resign, but he should.
Fraser McBurney, our old friend, chips in five smackers and says, Welcome back, Ezra.
Great reports from the World Economic Forum in London.
Well, thanks very much.
I'm glad to be back in Toronto.
I'm a tiny bit jet lagged, I will not lie, but it's good to be here.
Just a bot says, five bucks.
We, the public and you, the media, have let Judge Rollo off the hook too easy for betraying the people of Canada.
Someone needs to hold his feet to the fire.
Yeah, that was a bit of a stitch-up, as the Brits would say.
A hand-picked liberal judge with a handwritten mandate from Trudeau himself as opposed to a real judge, who spoke today.
Acabella, 03, 20, says, I credit the popularity of Polyev for increasing the will of the court to uphold the law.
Sad to see our judiciary cowing to political winds.
We need separation of the government and judiciary.
I'm not sure if I'm going to credit Pierre Polyev on that.
I'd have to check the dates of the hearing.
In fact, maybe I'll do that right away.
Because I don't think that this was happening at the time.
I think your timing is a little bit wrong.
I think this appeal happens.
Well, actually, I don't remember the timing, but I don't think you're right on that.
And I don't think this judge is someone who has his finger on the pulse of partisan politics.
It just doesn't feel that way.
You could be right, but I'm a skeptic.
All right, well, listen, it's 342.
We've been giving her for an hour and a half, and I feel like we've covered some good ground.
I'm going to look at our internal chat here to make sure there's nothing I should have covered that I haven't.
Is there anything, Olivia, you think that we should cover that we haven't done yet?
I think we've covered most of it.
We had Keith Wilson, Chad Williamson, and Christy Freeland.
I saw Dominique LeBlanc out of the corner of my eye make a statement.
Is he the new public safety minister?
Is that why?
Let's take a look at that.
I doubt he said anything interesting.
Again, he's just going out there to block for his leader, Justin Trudeau.
What a coward Trudeau is.
He puts Christia Freeland and Dominique LeBlanc out there.
Let's take a look at what LeBlanc had to say.
I doubt it's interesting, but let's give it a listen.
I think it's important to remember the context almost two years ago, today, those weeks in late January and February, two years ago, the public safety and the national security context.
I was in Ottawa during those weeks, as were my colleagues.
I participated in the cabinet discussions.
We were updated by senior officials about the risks of copycat incidents at other border crossings.
I spoke to premiers from British Columbia to Nova Scotia about risks to their community safety.
We saw border crossings and the damage to the Canadian economy, thousands of jobs put at risk.
We spoke with the Premier of Ontario and the government of Ontario that supported the invocation of the Emergencies Act two years ago.
I think that's an important moment.
I think it's also important to consider the government was given information with respect to the disruption at the border crossing in Coots, Alberta.
It's not banal when the security services tell you that they found two pipe bombs and 36,000 rounds of munition and ended up laying criminal charges as serious as conspiracy to commit murder and assaulting peace officers.
So the context is important.
I think it's also important to note that the House of Commons ratified the decision to invoke.
But as my colleague said, the judicial system also includes appeal mechanisms, and the government's made that decision.
But I certainly, as a minister who participated in those discussions and who spoke to premiers across the country, am very satisfied that we made a reasonable decision and will now let the appeal courts consider the filings from my colleagues.
What a crooked little liar.
I love how he's trying to scapegoat.
Well, you know, the Premier of Ontario said he was fine with what we did.
And, you know, the House of Commons, you know, the Liberals and the NDP voted for this man.
So, you know, sure, a judge laid out in 150 pages of detail why what we did was illegal, but you know, like, like I voted for it, and like Doug Ford said he was fine.
So can I go now?
You know what?
I tell you, I cannot remember a less impressive cabinet than Trudeau has assembled.
Dominique LeBlanc, I think, was part of his wedding party.
You know that old picture of Trudeau's wedding party?
They're all drunk and Seamus O'Regan's there and Mark Miller's there.
Do you have that picture?
Can you Google Trudeau wedding party?
I think Dominique LeBlanc was there.
And the thing is, yeah, that's it there, the one on the left, if you can pump it up as big as possible.
Oh, no, it's sorry.
That is not, sorry, that's not the one.
Trudeau best man or something here.
It's the one where he and his friends are all sort of, yeah, Trudeau best man picture.
Yeah, that one's not bad.
I'm going to try and find it.
It's the one where they're all sort of drunk and staggering around a bit.
Seamus O'Regan, Mark Miller.
I'm trying to remember who else.
Half of Trudeau's core cabinet are his drunk college buddies.
There's got to be a better way to choose a cabinet than who you drank your head off with at McGill 30 years ago.
Like, there's just got to be a better way.
And if you can't, it's when they're lifting up Trudeau.
You know the picture they're sort of lifting up Trudeau and Seamus O'Regan's making that funny face.
If you can't find it, don't worry about it.
Anyways, that's Dominique LeBlanc.
I'm very unimpressed with him.
But I think, in fairness, the dumbest cabinet minister in all of Ottawa is Seamus O'Regan with a close second to Ya'ara Sachs.
Why don't we end with Yaara Sachs and her famous Honk Honk comment?
There was a lot of stupid things said and a lot of stupid things done during the trucker convoy by the government.
They thought they could flip it around and make it Canada's January 6th moment of violent insurrection, but there was no violence.
And I put that to Lawrence Greenspot and you'll remember that he said, if there was a single violent incident, you can bet it would have been mentioned by the prosecutor against Tamira Leech.
Dumbest Cabinet Minister00:03:50
There wasn't one.
And indeed, that's true.
Now, the government journalists, the government journalists were going to paint that picture without even talking to the truckers.
They were scared of them.
So they certainly wouldn't go interview them.
But those pesky kids with their cell phone cameras, the citizen journalists at Rebel News, 23 days straight, our reporters, Alexa Lavoie and Lincoln Jay, and for weeks straight in other places, including down in Coots, Alberta, we showed the world what was really going on.
And it was not violent.
And it was not a serious violent insurrection.
And so the Liberals didn't know what to do.
If you go to my Twitter feed, okay, this is my MP who I just finished saying Seamus O'Regan is the stupidest cabinet minister.
It's actually a tie with this woman.
Her name is Yaara Sachs.
She looks like, who's that frumpy gal from, was it not Third Planet?
What's that?
What's that comedy with the super smart physics kids?
Big Bang Theory, that's right.
Give me one second.
You know, I've never watched Big Bang Theory.
Who is that actress who's just so Maya?
That's right.
What's her last name?
Maya Bialik.
Maya Bialik.
Nerdy, unlikable.
Yeah, put a picture on the screen.
So that's Maya Bialik, a nerdy, unlikable actress, and that's the role she played.
Whiny.
That's what I think of when I see my MP, Yaara Sachs, a little bit on the spectrum, a little bit stupid, extremely socially awkward.
And unlike Maya Bialik, who played a genius, Yaara Sachs plays, is as stupid as a Seamus O'Regan.
Here, listen.
How much vitriol do we have to see of Hong Kong, which is an acronym for Hale Hitler, do we need to see by these protesters on social media?
So how much honk-honk do we have to see on social media?
So because you saw someone honking on social media and you think Hong Kong stands for Hal Hitler, you want to invoke the Emergencies Act?
That is my MP.
I guess it would be like the Oscars.
You have best actress and best actor.
So in this Trudeau cabinet, you have dumbest cabinet minister male, Seamus O'Regan, dumbest cabinet minister, female, Yaara Sachs.
Would you agree with me that that is perhaps the stupidest thing ever uttered in Parliament?
Trudeau must resign.
He's a disgrace.
He's a serial lawbreaker.
He's a serial violator of our Constitution.
He's got to go.
It's 3.52 Eastern Time.
I want to play one last clip before we go.
I Don't Want To Minimize Gravity00:02:49
It's Christia Freeland justifying the seizure of bank accounts, seizing bank accounts, freezing bank accounts, shutting down credit cards, stopping people from accessing joint family accounts.
So if the husband is there, the wife can't buy food and medicine for the child.
Christia Freeland, the granddaughter of a Nazi, did that.
And not surprisingly, she defended herself because what's an alternative to admit that she destroyed families illegally?
What else can she do?
Do we have that clip handy?
Here's Christia Freeland boasting of seizing families' bank accounts without legal process and to hell with the wives and the children if the husband was out protesting.
Take a look.
Decision seems to single out some of your choices on freezing bank accounts and credit cards as being part of a reason where it's unreasonable in terms of the measures taken by the government.
You defended those when you announced them at the time.
Do you have any regrets on taking that measure in the light of this decision?
Would you have done it differently based on what we've seen from the federal court today?
As I said in my opening remarks, we faced, as a country and as a government, an incredibly serious threat, a threat to the public safety of many Canadians, a threat to our national security, including our national economic security.
We acted to secure and protect Canada and to secure and protect the national interest.
It was not an easy time.
These were not easy decisions.
In making our decisions and choosing to act, we worked very, very hard with all levels of government.
And we were very mindful of acting in such a way that the safety, the physical safety of all Canadians involved would be preserved.
I don't want to minimize the gravity of the actions we took.
Neither do I want to minimize the gravity of the threat Canada faced.
And to your question, I was certain after a lot of deliberation with colleagues and many others that we took the right decision.
I was certain at the time.
I was certain when I testified before Rouleau.
And I remain certain today.
Emergency Broadcast Good00:00:55
Thank you.
She is morally unfit to govern.
In 150 or so page ruling today was detailed meticulously why she's a lawbreaker, why what she did was illegal, why what she did was illegal under the terms of the Emergencies Act itself, and why, even if it was valid under the Emergencies Act, it was a violation of the Charter of Rights on top of that.
And yet she is defiant because what is her alternative to admit that she was a lawbreaker, to admit that she stomped on civil liberties, to admit that Pierre Trudeau may have brought in the Charter of Rights, but Justin Trudeau destroyed it.
That's our show for today.
Thanks for joining this emergency broadcast.
It's a good day for freedom.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, goodbye.