Ezra Levant highlights the Federal Court of Canada’s January 23rd ruling declaring Trudeau’s February 2022 Emergencies Act invocation illegal, unreasonable, and unconstitutional—failing to meet insurrection criteria despite no violence. Lawyers Chad Williamson and Keith Wilson argue the government blocked peaceful solutions like Alberta’s Coots deal and Ottawa’s Wellington consolidation, freezing accounts of protesters (including small donations) and suppressing media like Rebel News. The ruling contrasts with Trudeau’s hand-picked commission’s exoneration, exposing his overreach as authoritarian, not justified by national security, and undermining Charter rights without precedent. [Automatically generated summary]
Federal Court Strikes Down Trudeau's Emergencies Act00:04:55
Hello, my friends.
I'm back in Canada.
Oh, it's good to be home.
And wow, what a day I chose to come back.
The court of the Federal Court of Canada has ruled that Justin Trudeau's invocation of the Emergencies Act was illegal and unconstitutional.
I'll take you through it.
Wow, is all I have to say.
Hey, can you do me a favor and get the video version of this podcast?
Go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe.
It's eight bucks a month, but you get the video version.
And more importantly, you support Rebel News because you know we don't take a dime from Trudeau and its shows.
That's just RebelNewsPlus.com.
right here's today's podcast tonight the federal court of canada strikes down trudeau's emergencies act as illegal and unconstitutional It's January 23rd, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Just incredible.
I wouldn't have expected it.
I wouldn't have thunk it.
But the Federal Court of Canada issued a ruling today declaring that the Emergencies Act invoked by Trudeau, that form of martial law, was illegal.
That Trudeau exceeded the powers granted to him by that law, that he did not meet the tests in that law required for martial law.
And second of all, even if he was wrong on that, said the judge, that the law violated Canadians' Charter of Rights.
There's no pandemic exception to the Charter.
Earlier today, I had an emergency live stream for about an hour and a half on the subject.
I thought that for today's Ezra Levant show, we would excerpt chunks of that.
It was actually a really fun live stream.
We talked to three of the smartest lawyers in the country.
Chad Williamson, who represented the truckers down in Coots, Alberta, was actually down there in the saloon during the blockade.
Keith Wilson, who was the lead lawyer for the trucker convoy in Ottawa, and the daily interface between the truckers and the government, including the city and the police in Ottawa.
And finally, with Lawrence Greenspawn, the lawyer representing Tamara Leach, the warrior princess of the truckers.
And I've got my own thoughts on things too, including I'll take you through the CBC's lying coverage of the subject, as well as that awful, awful woman, Christia Freeland.
I'll show you some of her comments today.
So without further ado, let me show you some of the highlights from the live stream today on this momentous court ruling because I think it's certainly the story of the day.
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 Moseley.
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 lot agree.
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.
Judge Exonerates Government00:15:54
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 Fred 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.
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 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 Christia Freeland.
She may have a former 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 nonstop 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 Christia 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.
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.
Please don't, 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 Leaches, and she's 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.
All right, without further ado, let's go through the ruling right now.
I 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?
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 counsel.
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.
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 government and 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 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.
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.
Threats to Canada's Security00:06:47
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 judge just 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 Ceases Act.
And this is what I mentioned before.
Section 260.
Threats to the security of Canada.
In Section 2, the Ceases 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 Charter 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 Ceases 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 poor grant for paragraphs, including C. Paragraph 262.
The proclamation that was 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 Ceases 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 the giveaway right there, isn't 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.
Ottawa Negotiation Crisis00:08:26
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.
I'm talking about Keith Wilson, lawyer for the truckers in Ottawa, and our friend Chad Williamson, lawyer for the truckers down in Coutz, 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, 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 Coots 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 Chris and 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.
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 is 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.
Mounties' Press Release Revelations00:12:22
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 Coots.
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 CSIS 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, a 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, 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 this robust blocking of journalists on Twitter.
We saw 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 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.
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 the decision.
So let's stop right there.
It's not Justin Trudeau's decision.
It's not Christian 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 the 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?
I 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.
Ultraveris 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 14, 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 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.
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.
Reduce Friction, Reduce Footprint00:06:30
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, you know, 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 whether he even realized, 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 not 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 Sr. 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.
Well, those are chunks of the live stream.
If you want more, it actually was about an hour and a half, hour and 45 minutes.
You can go on our YouTube channel or our Rumble channel and watch the whole thing if you just can't get enough.