Ezra Levant reveals how David Lametti, former Trudeau Justice Minister, reinstated his government Twitter account after Rebel News sued over deleted records tied to the 2022 Emergencies Act invocation—cited for $2.8M in taxpayer grants misused by Pride Toronto amid fraud and forged signatures. Lametti’s rushed move follows a Jan. 30 hearing where Justice Simon Fothergill nearly froze his account, exposing potential cover-ups. The episode underscores how political pressure distorts accountability, from judicial bias to unchecked grant spending, demanding transparency over ideology. [Automatically generated summary]
I want to give you an update on last night's court hearing in our lawsuit against David Lementi, the former Trudeau Justice Minister.
I think it's going really well.
I can't even believe how well it's going.
I thought we'd have an uphill battle, but holy cow, did we catch the guy with his hand in the cookie jar?
I want you to see what we're up to.
But first, let me invite you to get a subscription to what we call Rebel News Plus.
It's eight bucks a month.
You get the video version of this podcast, which I think is worth eight bucks.
But more than that, you're helping Rebel News stay alive.
We are doing things like this LeMetti lawsuit that no one else in the whole country is doing.
Not the official opposition, not public interest law firms, not other media.
We caught the guy sneaking out, and it's sort of amazing.
Go to RebelNewsPlus.com.
Click subscribe.
Thanks very much.
here's today's podcast.
Tonight, David Lamedi's lawyers reinstate his government Twitter account just days after being sued by Rebel News.
David LeMetti's Legal Battle00:16:25
But we're not done yet.
It's January 30th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
I've got news for you.
Yesterday, from 4 till 5 p.m., after I had taped my show yesterday, I sat in on an emergency court hearing in the matter of Rebel News versus David LeMetti, the former Trudeau justice minister.
It's a lawsuit that we filed, if you can believe it, on Saturday.
And we served it on the government on Sunday.
And we had an emergency first hearing called a case management hearing on Monday, 4 p.m.
That's moving pretty quickly, if you ask me.
I didn't even know you could file things like that on a weekend.
The judge was a pretty senior guy, Justice Simon Fothergill is his name.
He said he hadn't had the chance to read all the material that we had filed, but his purpose yesterday was limited to putting things on a schedule to manage the case, as they say.
And the main thing we were looking for was an emergency order to preserve the government records in LeMetti's possession.
I'll tell you how that went in a moment, but please let me give you a proper update on the background because it's really happened so quickly.
I want to make sure you understand why we're doing what we're doing, why it's important.
More is happening every day, it seems.
So give me just five minutes to refresh your memory about why we're doing this.
Last week was a disaster for Justin Trudeau and the Liberals in a stunning, unequivocal, devastating court ruling.
The federal court of Canada goes through the Emergencies Act and how it was invoked by Trudeau two years ago to stop the truckers and how it was used and clearly ruled that what Trudeau did was illegal.
Canada was actually not at risk of serious violence in the nature of a revolution or an invasion or something on an existential level like that, which is necessary for the invocation of martial law.
Current authorities have enough power in existing laws to deal with any problems.
And those problems were, to be clear, horn honking and some traffic and parking violations.
There was no violence.
There was no insurrection.
They didn't even really get out of their trucks.
It was no January 6th moment, though Trudeau really wished it was.
The bridge between Windsor and Detroit was blocked for, I don't know, a day.
Regular police cleared it without an incident.
The border between Coots, Alberta and Sweetgrass, Montana was blocked for a few days, but it too was ended without incident.
Both of those were resolved before the invocation of martial law, which obviously proves that martial law was not needed, which is one of the requirements for the Emergency Act.
Here, let me read to you section three of the Emergencies Act, just so you can see with your own eyes the law that Trudeau clearly broke.
I'm just going to quote the law.
It's in plain English.
National emergency.
For the purposes of this act, a national emergency is an urgent and critical situation of a temporary nature that A seriously endangers the lives, health, or safety of Canadians, and yet is of such proportions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it.
That didn't happen.
Or B, seriously threatens the ability of the government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity of Canada, and that cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada.
That's all you need to know.
Pretty clear, and pretty clear Trudeau didn't mean either of those says.
Trudeau, as usual, is a coward when the crunch comes.
When the truckers came to Ottawa two years ago, Trudeau claimed he had COVID and went into hiding.
Last week, when the federal court issued its ruling, he went into hiding again, sending out Christia Freeland to take the heat for it.
She said the government was going to appeal this ruling.
Good luck with that.
But the world saw what happened.
No wonder Trudeau is at an all-time low in the polls.
No one believes him on anything anymore.
By the way, even his own base hates him.
I think he has two bases left politically.
He's got journalists and civil servants, I guess, same thing.
And then he has pro-Hamas voters.
Did you see this clip?
Apparently, this is outside a mosque in Montreal that he was visiting, of course.
And when he came out, even mosque members hate him.
No wonder he takes in as many foreign trips as he can.
By the way, the RCMP arrested and assaulted David Menzies for less than those people did to Trudeau there.
Of course, it's the prime minister's job to decide whether or not to invoke the Emergencies Act.
Such a momentous decision, really akin to declaring war on your own people, would be one of the most grave decisions a government could possibly make.
He would be advised by different people, by police, by the military, by national security advisors, but at the end of the day, it would be the prime minister's chief legal officer who would assess the law and ensure the government acted accordingly, and he would give advice to Trudeau, go or don't go.
And that advisor, that lawyer, is David LeMeni, the justice minister at the time.
He's the one who was supposed to look at the Emergencies Act and said, yeah, that horn honking is loud and those truckers are embarrassing my partisan team.
So I'm going to ring a martial law alarm that has never been rung before, not even on 9-11.
I'm going to break the glass and call 911.
It's the worst thing that has ever happened to Canada, this horn-honking.
And what's the line from the law?
Seriously threatens the ability of the government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity of Canada.
What was it, the bouncy castles that did it, or was it the hot tub that did it?
And David LeMetty said, yeah, sure, boss, no problem.
We'll just use this very special law that's never been used before.
If you recall, two years ago, LeMetty claimed he had a secret legal opinion.
He wouldn't tell us who wrote it.
that justified invoking martial law.
Sure, he does.
You bet he does.
It's secret.
He won't show us, but it's the proof that he should have done what he did.
It's like that old American joke from 100 movies and TV sitcoms.
Oh, yeah, I have a girlfriend.
You just don't know her because she goes to a different high school in Canada.
She lives in Canada.
Middle at Niagara Falls.
You know her.
Yeah, so David LeMetty is a liar.
Trudeau fired him a few months ago, even though he lied for Trudeau.
He did what Trudeau wanted.
He fired him from cabinet, but he still stuck around as an MP.
But right after the federal court ruling last week, he finally announced he was resigning, good riddance, and going to a liberal connected law firm called Fascin Martineau.
Here's what they tweeted.
Honored to welcome Mr. David LeMetty, former Justice Minister and Attorney General of Canada, to Fascin as counsel, a dedicated advocate for Indigenous reconciliation.
He's also deeply engaged in emerging technology, particularly artificial intelligence.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's so into Indigenous reconciliation.
He stole the Justice Minister's job away from the first Indigenous Justice Minister in history, Joni Wilson Rabel, because he was willing to interfere in court cases for Trudeau, but she wasn't.
But I'm glad to learn that he's interested in artificial intelligence because I don't think he's shown a lot of natural intelligence to you.
As you know, as he was skulking away, as he quit parliament, he thought he would do one last disgraceful act and destroy all of his official state records on Twitter by pressing delete on his government Twitter account.
I've been down this Twitter road before.
I'm not sure if it's something to brag about, but I think I've sued more politicians for misconduct on Twitter than anyone else in Canada.
The main lawsuit was against Stephen Gilbo, the execrable environment minister, that shifty little criminal.
He's a convicted criminal, as you know, because he blocked rebel news on Twitter, thus denying our reporters access to important government announcements, as well as our ability to interact with the minister and other Twitter followers.
And here's the key point of why I mentioned that lawsuit that ended in Gilbo's abject surrender and this consent agreement.
He agreed never to block us again for the rest of his career.
He agreed to pay us $20,000 in court costs, even though he forced taxpayers to pay that for him.
But here's the key point.
For two years, Stephen Gilbo and the government of Canada's lawyers argued that Gilbeau could block whomever he wanted from his government Twitter account because it was actually his own private personal property, they claimed.
That's what they argued for two years, even though his Twitter account had that official grade check mark that comes from being a verified government account.
And more obviously, it was run by two dozen civil servants using taxpayers' resources.
So if that was the government's position for two full years, argued loudly and proudly in court, how on earth could we possibly trust David LeMetti not to destroy government records pertaining to his role as justice minister, especially and importantly, right as the federal court ruled that the Emergencies Act invocation was illegal, and thus opening up the government and LeMetty to hundreds of lawsuits from people who had their bank accounts frozen.
So we had this hearing yesterday at 4 p.m. Eastern Time, as I mentioned in my emergency live stream yesterday, a couple hours before that.
LeMetti had reinstated his Twitter account in response to our lawsuit, which is incredible when you think about it.
He didn't fight.
He didn't defend what he did.
We just caught him with his hand in the cookie jar.
He said, oh, you got me.
Before he even spoke to us, he reinstated it, which is pretty incredible when you think about it, how hard Gilbo fought for two years.
But like I say, who could trust a liberal politician?
Would you trust David LeMetti for anything?
If he said it was raining, I would go outside to check.
I wouldn't believe him.
Especially a liberal slippery as LeMetti, who was willing to sell out the whole country.
We need a court order ensuring that he doesn't take it down again tomorrow or next week or next year and to make sure that he doesn't go and selectively delete anything, including private direct messages to other cabinet ministers that we haven't even been allowed to see yet.
Those private messages may well come out during the lawsuits that are bound to be filed against LeMetti.
So the hearing yesterday was almost an hour long, and it was interesting because it was only about whether or not the court would move on an emergency basis to grant a temporary order freezing the Twitter account until we have time to have a proper legal battle in court on the substance of it.
And the judge yesterday was certainly open to the idea.
At least that's how it seemed to me.
He said, though, that he wanted to give LeMetti a few more days to hire a personal lawyer, not just the government lawyer who was standing in yesterday, but if you've seen our lawsuit at stopthecoverup.com, you know that the two plaintiffs are me and Rebel News, and the two defendants are LeMetti himself and LeMetti as the representative of the government of Canada.
So he needs a personal lawyer too.
So LeMetti says he hasn't had a chance to get a personal lawyer yet.
So the judge is giving him until Friday at 4 p.m., at which time we'll have another case management hearing.
This is, you know, how lawyers, this is, welcome to lawyering.
The government lawyer tried to argue that no interim injunction is necessary now, no special court order freezing things, because look, they've already complied voluntarily already.
And I suppose in one sense it's true, but of course, that could change in a heartbeat.
I don't trust the liberals, and I don't think you do either.
I don't think many people do.
But it was exciting, and it was encouraging, and it was affirming to know a few things.
Here, I made a short list.
Number one, we made LeMetti blink.
We made him reinstate his Twitter account, or at least it looks that way.
Number two, we made a judge take this seriously enough that he's having case management hearings about it, including scheduling another one quickly for Friday.
Number three, it really looks like either through a trial and a judgment or what's called a consent order where the bad guys just agree to a kind of plea bargain, looks like LeMetty actually might just agree to everything we're asking for in regards to his Twitter account.
I mean, we caught him red-handed.
Now, there are some other things we're asking for in the lawsuit, but the Twitter thing was the main thing.
The thing that got us going, of course, all this is important.
Number four, because no politician should be allowed to destroy public records.
You'd hope they would follow the law because the public ought to be able to see the public records of a cabinet minister and because anyone who needs access to those records for lawsuits or other reasons ought to be able to get them in the future through the normal processes, including the hundreds of pending lawsuits.
It's wrong for someone to destroy records.
It's against the law, too, by the way.
So we'll see how this all goes.
I'm full of confidence.
We've beaten four other cabinet ministers in our Twitter lawsuits already.
I'm happy to fight a fifth.
I think we've got a winning team of lawyers, and we've got an open-minded judge.
I feel like we're actually really doing things in the public interest, things that should be done, but no one else thought to do it.
And if they thought to do it, they didn't quite know how to do it.
And even if they knew how to do it, they couldn't do it for whatever reason.
We had the idea.
We had the lawyers led by Chad Williamson.
We had the viewers to support the campaign through crowdfunding.
I feel like we made a real difference.
Let me show you this tweet by Ryan O'Connor, a freedom-oriented lawyer in the greater Toronto area.
He says, Fascinating to return to former Attorney General David LeMetty's posts about the Emergencies Act from 2022, during which he insisted that his invocation of the act respected the charter after the federal court held last week that some emergency orders were unconstitutional.
And you can see that he has a thread of tweets.
Ryan O'Connor is a good guy.
He goes through LeMetty's statements from two years ago about the Emergencies Act and compares them immediately with the lawsuit.
Don't you think that's an important exercise to compare what LeMetti said to what the court said?
And look at O'Connor's last tweet in that interesting thread.
This made me feel good.
He said, postscript, you'll note that David LeMetty's Twitter account has been resurrected.
This was a direct response to an urgent lawsuit which Rebel News brought last weekend in Rebel versus LeMetti and is an important temporary win for government transparency.
Exactly.
It is an important temporary win.
And we're looking to make it a permanent win, either in a plea deal with LeMetti called a consent order or by smashing away at him in the court for two years, which I sort of want to do, which is what we did with Stephen Gilbo.
I'm just not sure that David LeMetti, who wants to skulk away to a private law firm and be done with Parliament, I'm just not sure he wants a two-year legal battle hanging over him.
I think there's a real chance he'll just sign the plea bargain, take a consent order like his fellow Twitter lawbreakers and move on and never show his face in public again.
Why Pride Lost Money00:12:44
What a disgraceful way for a disgraceful minister to end a disgraceful public career.
I have to wonder if it was worth it for him.
I'm proud that Rebel News, with the support of our viewers, was able to make a difference.
I think we really did.
Hey, can you imagine?
We haven't even got the legal bill for the lawsuit yet.
And it's not going to be light.
Three of our lawyers worked on it all weekend.
If you want to help us out, because we're not done yet, by the way, we got this hearing on Friday, please go to stopthecoverup.com because that's exactly what we're doing.
Stay with us for more.
Well, it seems to be a bit of a pattern.
Three-quarters of the money spent, taxpayers' dollars, by the federal government on the ArriveCan app.
No one can see where the money went.
Boy, they billed by the tens of millions, but the work simply wasn't done.
It was pocketed.
We see a lot of that going on.
Laith Maroof, the viciously anti-Semitic and racist activist who was hired by Trudeau to do anti-racism workshops.
Well, he still has not disgorged the hundreds of thousands of dollars that he pocketed.
And here is the latest.
Unbelievable.
The Toronto Gay Pride Parade, which has taken millions of dollars in taxpayer money.
Well, surprise, they didn't do the things that they took the money to do.
But instead of prosecuting them for theft, the government's just begging, Prince, please, can we have our money back that you took from us under fraudulent conditions?
It must be nice to be a liberal.
If you get away with it, you're home free.
And if you're caught, well, maybe they'll ask politely for it back.
And whether or not you give it back is sort of up to you.
Joining us now is the reporter who first broke the lid on this story years ago by talking about malfeasance at Pride Toronto.
And she writes for True North.
Her latest essay is called Pride Toronto Cashed Grant Checks Without Delivering Honors Provinces.
Sue Ann Levy, great to see you again.
Hi there, Ezra.
It's great to see you.
Well, you know, you were way ahead of your time on this because you called out financial shenanigans in Pride Toronto years ago, and they just called you names.
They called you, you know, and that's typical of the woke left.
Give us the facts.
What happened at Pride Toronto?
What kind of an organization is it?
What did they get the money for?
And what did they do or not do?
Well, Pride Toronto was a train wreck years ago, and it really started, Ezra, when in 2016, you remember Black Lives Matter sat down at the intersection of Young and Gerard and refused to go any further unless Pride met their demands.
From that day forward, the police were banned from the parade.
They lost a ton, a ton of money.
And I remember showing up at meetings and being called all kinds of names, even though I'm gay too, but evidently you can't be an accountable gay.
You just have to go along with flow.
So I knew it was an accident waiting to happen.
And the last I left them was in, I guess, in 2020, just a year before I retired from the sun.
And they had this outrageous AGM.
And I had written about allegations of improprieties.
They had this outrageous AGM where certain board members installed themselves on the board, just put themselves on like they're, you know, kings and queens for the day.
You should pardon the expression.
And Michael Erickson, who owns Glad J bookshop, headed up this meeting where they wouldn't answer any questions.
They screamed and yelled at people.
They said that my articles were full of trash and they wouldn't address the improprieties.
They let the clock run out.
And lo and behold, here we find out that they took $2.8 million in grants just from the feds.
Okay.
This is not the province.
This is not the city because the city gives them a sizable cash gift every year of about 200,000.
They took this money.
They promised all kinds of deliverables.
And guess what?
They didn't deliver probably anything.
Because they had lost money, and I'm trying to connect the dots myself, because they had lost so much money when they banned the police from the parade, they used the grant money to pay staff salaries and to pay contractors to keep them as a going concern, which is just fraudulent, absolutely fraudulent.
It is fraud.
I mean, if you and I did that, we would not just be asked nicely to return the money.
We most likely would be prosecuted for fraud.
Here, let me quote from your article.
There were three separate grants, $1 million from Public Safety Canada to develop better relations with the police.
But then you say the $1 million grant came with the agreement to allow police back into the parade.
But in January of 2019, Pride members voted 163 to 161 to renege on the agreement and uphold the ban.
All right, but they kept the money.
That's sort of the thing.
They kept the money.
Yeah.
And their excuse was, well, I was at that meeting, actually, and I thought, they're crazy.
These people are crazy.
And they had all these radical, lefty, queer people, you know, saying no police.
And it was around the time that Douglas MacArthur had been found out in the serial killings.
And they used that as an excuse not to establish relations with the police.
And remember, John Torrey was mayor, and I think he did a piss-poor job, a very weak job of trying to bring everybody together.
And so it continued.
The police were banned, and they have been banned to this day.
Yeah.
You know, there was a time when I think police forces were inherently adverse to gay people.
I mean, the vice squads that would raid the bathhouses and whatnot.
And I suppose it was the same with other minority groups in the past.
But I would think that in the 2020s, having police, especially police in uniform, attend gay pride parades is something that gay activists would want,
not only to make contacts in the police department in case they need help with something, but to show if I was a gay activist, I would want to show the normalization of the gay community and how that in 2020 they're allied with the police and the police will help them if necessary to turn against the police.
I don't know how that helps.
Like, I just don't get how that helps the gay community.
And I think what it is, is it's putting other agendas ahead of the gay agenda.
I mean, listen, I'm not part of the gay community.
They were perfectly hypocritical.
This is the thing that drove me crazy.
They were perfectly fine with having the police do the security for the parade so they could stand outside the actual parade march.
And again, I was there covering it.
And they were perfectly fine with that, giving free policing.
And it amounted to a sizable amount.
We don't even talk about that grant.
That was donations in kind, which would have been about a million and a half for that one day.
They're okay with that.
But gay officers, lesbian officers couldn't march in the parade.
That's crazy.
I mean, that's discrimination.
I mean, that's anti-inclusion.
Let me read another paragraph from your essay.
By the way, folks can find it at tnc.news, where we love True North.
I recently spent some time at the World Economic Forum with your colleague, Andrew Lawton.
He's a really good egg.
Let me read this.
He's a sweetie.
He is.
Let me read this line.
I thought this was very interesting.
Another $1 million grant from the Federal Economic Development Agency.
If you told me they were created to give grants to Pride Parades, I wouldn't have believed you.
Was not studied by KPMG, but is thoroughly documented in an independent review by Pride Toronto member and York University ethics professor, Tom Hooper.
Hooper put together his extremely comprehensive review at pridegrants.ca.
He alleged fraud and forgery.
I mean, so again, he's a member of the gay community.
He's an out-and-about gay man.
He's a professor.
He's an ethics professor.
He's part of the Pride Movement.
And he's saying this, you know, just because you're a gay right, you don't have to be anti-police.
And he's alleged, I mean, forgery in a financial context is a crime.
Well, they forged, I mean, it was outrageous.
They forged signatures from the Toronto District School Board, the Peel District School Board, the Assembly of First Nations saying that, you know, these people were going after grants and that they supported the grants.
I mean, I couldn't be that creative.
It was just, I guess they were just so desperate for money and so desperate to keep going as a going concern.
You know, Ezra, when I covered Pride and I did it fairly extensively and covered their financials, there were so many people who said they should be cut off from government funding.
It's just a recipe for disaster.
And as we see, it has become one.
Well, any organization that gets money from government does a few things.
First of all, they ignore their real constituents and pay attention on the grant giver.
In a journalistic context, that would mean you would ignore your readers and viewers and you would pay attention to what the politicians want.
That's a terrible thing for a journalistic organization.
And it would be a terrible thing for an advocacy group because you would do all sorts of strange things.
And you would bend all sorts of rules.
I don't know.
It's just a really bad thing.
But I can't help but think if instead of being a gay pride group, if this were a Christian organization or something that was less politically correct, and forgery and fraud and grants taken for one purpose but used for another, this would be big news.
And it wouldn't fall to just independent journalists like yourself.
This would be front page.
Like I could just imagine if some, I don't know, Canadian Council of Bishops or something was found to have stolen money.
That would be front page of the Globe and Mail.
But this, well, you know, we don't want to make a fuss.
Can you please, pretty, please just give the money back or at least some of it.
Like, I can't believe they're only asking for half a million dollars back when the whole million dollars was to get a deal with police.
This is crazy.
And there's so many levels here.
It's the financial waste.
It's the lack of give a damn by auditors or police.
And of course, it's the wokeness of it all.
Last word to you, Sue Anne.
Well, you know, the professor, Tom Hooper, went so far as to say on his website, and I urge your listeners and your viewers to go on his website because he was very thorough.
He said that KPMG or anyone else did not study the fraud or forgery or investigate.
And to me, that is the real issue that this organization has been allowed to do all these things, as you say.
And the government's saying, oh, pretty, please give us a few dollars back.
Yeah, unbelievable.
Well, Sue Ann, we like your journalism.
We like True North.
Great to see you again.
Keep up the fight.
And we look forward to talking to you again.
Thank you.
All right.
There you have it.
Sue Ann Levy from our friends at True North.
Stay with us.
Your letters to me next.
Welcome back.
Your letters to me about my interview with Robert Kraitschick at the beginning of the sort of politically rigged inquiry into foreign influence.
Mary Ottoman says, the judge must be independent and chosen by Canadian taxpayers.
Well, this is just like what Trudeau did with Judge Rollo, who did this sort of half-real, half-fake cover-up inquiry a year ago and said, Trudeau is a okay.
Well, then we had a real judge last week, said no, he's not.
A Stitch Up00:00:56
Same sort of stitch up here.
Roxalt says, Trudeau has figured what many Ontarians already know when making inquiries about accessing their healthcare system.
If you don't get the answer you want, call back the next day.
Chances are you'll get a different person with a different answer.
It looks like politicians have the same approach when looking for a judge.
Yeah.
I mean, and this judge is off to a terrible start, granting full intervenor status to people like Han Dong, who've been accused of being in league with foreign governments, but only giving limited intervener status to the official opposition.
It's, as they say in the UK, a stitch up.
Well, that's the show for today.
I'm sort of excited how this whole LeMedi suit is going.
I don't know what you think of it, but I think we caught the guy driving the getaway car.
I think we really did.
He was trying to make a hasty exit and no one was stopping him.