Ezra Levant and Lawrence Greenspon examine Canada’s legal overreach during COVID, where the Democracy Fund handled 3,000 cases—90% involving ordinary people hit with $5,000 fines for minor infractions like ArriveCan app use. Greenspon highlights Tamara Leach’s 34-day trial for six mischief charges, despite her February 12 agreement with Mayor Jim Watson to relocate trucks, and criticizes the Charter’s "reasonable limits" clause enabling vaccine mandates and protest crackdowns. The Federal Court’s 2022 ruling called Trudeau’s Emergencies Act invocation illegal, yet systemic abuses persist, with Greenspon warning constitutional remedies remain inaccessible for many. Leach’s acquittal could restore faith in civil liberties, but past cases like Mark Norman’s wrongful prosecution reveal deeper flaws in Canada’s justice system. [Automatically generated summary]
I thought when I started Rebel News, it was going to be journalism, journalism, journalism.
Yeah, but to do that journalism, you often need a bodyguard called a lawyer.
We have physical bodyguards to protect us against physical threats, but what if the threat is a legal threat, censorship, or even an illegal arrest?
I've learned a lot about that.
Well, I learned a lot about it unwillingly during the lockdowns and the pandemic.
And of course, the Democracy Fund has taken 3,000 cases from coast to coast, famous cases like Pastor Arthur Pavlovsky or Tamara Leach.
And frankly, 90% of them are severely normal people whose lives were detonated by $5,000 fines for not downloading the ArriveCan app or things like that.
But I feel like the tables are turning.
The pendulum is swinging back.
For me, the key moment, an amazing moment, I was stunned by it.
I really didn't think it would happen, was when the Federal Court of Canada issued a ruling that the invocation of the Emergencies Act that Christy Freeland and Justin Trudeau and David LeMetty did two years ago, that it was illegal.
The judge used a lot more words than that.
Illegal, unreasonable, unintelligible, and most importantly, unconstitutional.
The judge went even further, saying not only was the invocation of it illegal, but the way in which it was implemented was illegal too.
It was not done with care.
It wasn't tailored to be minimally invasive of our rights.
It was fascinating to read Judge Mosley walk through the way in which entire families were punished in a case of group punishment because one of them happened to go to the trucker protest.
Entire family bank accounts were seized, frozen.
Insurance policies were ordered to be destroyed.
It was absolutely shocking.
And so for the course of the next 20 minutes, I'm delighted to be joined by one of the leading lawyers who fought back during this Civil Liberties Inferno and who is the lead lawyer representing Tamara Leach, the trucker convoy leader.
What a pleasure to see you, Lawrence Greenspawn.
We're on a bit of a break in Tamara Leach's trial.
We have a reporter covering that every single day, Robert Krachik, who's a really good ag and he's really engrossed in the matter.
He's doing an excellent job.
Well, thank you.
But for those who haven't been following, can you give us a summary of Tamara Leach's case?
Give us a reminder.
What's she charged with?
How is the trial going?
It's absurdly long.
And what's next?
I'm not asking you to say anything that would in any way prejudice the case, but just bring people up to speed who care about Tamara Leach.
Essentially, Tamara is charged with six charges.
They are essentially mischief charges in that she encouraged people to come to Ottawa and protest and that this had an impact on the city, whether it was an impact on the citizens in the core of the city or roadways were obstructed for a period of time.
This is the essence of the prosecution.
The trial, and normally a mischief trial would take, you know, a day or two.
We have now spent 34 days in trial and are scheduled to spend some more.
We're expecting a decision from Her Honor Justice Perkins McVay on an issue which is really A complicated legal issue, and we call it a Carter application, and it's whether or not things that Chris Barber said whether Chris Barber's, what he said and communicated, can be used against Tamara and vice versa.
And we'll have a ruling on that on March 7th.
We then go back to court on March the 12th for three days, where we will be bringing a motion.
The defense will be bringing a motion, and then Her Honor will need to rule on that and all of that before any decision needs to be made as to whether or not the defense will call any evidence.
So it's taken an inordinate amount of time.
I'm sure we're getting close to the Guinness Book of Records for a length of time of a trial of mischief.
But there are some very fundamental freedoms that are at stake here: freedom of speech and freedom of peaceful assembly.
And the evidence so far has established a number of things: that there, one, that there was not just one freedom convoy, there were many freedom convoys.
Two, that the police invited and directed the truckers as to where to park, including on Wellington Street and the downtown core of Ottawa.
And that perhaps most importantly, that almost from the beginning, there was a willingness to work with the police to what we call reduce the footprint.
In other words, to reduce the impact on the residents in the downtown core by moving the large trucks, which I've since learned you call bobtails.
Moving those large trucks up to Wellington Street, onto the parkway and out of the residential areas.
That was something that the protesters and the evidence has shown that the protesters wanted to do that and were prepared to do that.
In fact, started doing that and were told by the head of the Ottawa Police Service.
The instructions to the police liaison team were not one inch.
Don't let them move one inch.
And that's all come out in the evidence and I think is very, very favorable for us.
One of the interesting parts that has also been established is that there was an agreement made between Tamara Leach and the mayor of Ottawa, Jim Watson, on February the 12th.
And pursuant to that agreement, again, the trucks, the big trucks, were going to be moved out of the downtown core.
It was affecting the residents in that area.
They were going to be moved up to Wellington and the parkways.
And in fact, on the morning of the 13th, there were 40 large trucks that were moved pursuant to that agreement.
But that, unfortunately, either wasn't communicated to the Prime Minister or he just chose to ignore it because on the 14th was when he invoked the Emergency Measures Act.
I don't think you have to be paranoid or a conspiracy theorist to say, hmm, perhaps Justin Trudeau wanted the feeling of crisis, wanted that January 6th moment in the U.S. that's called an insurrection.
And when the truckers started to peacefully move away, he was losing some moral leverage.
That's a theory that I've heard a lot, and I believe it, by the way.
Well, it's, you know, this was not, like Justin's father, a state of apprehended insurrection.
We're talking about the October crisis War Measures Act invocation by Justin's father.
This was not that circumstance.
This was not a case of, as what Pierre Trudeau referred to as a state of apprehended insurrection.
We didn't have cabinet ministers being killed.
We didn't have the British High Commissioner being kidnapped.
We had none of these things happening.
What we had instead were a number of demonstrators demonstrating over a period of three, four weeks peacefully.
And how it prompted the Emergency Measures Act was beyond me.
And how it was upheld by the Rulo Commission is even further beyond me.
Wow, he was handpicked by Trudeau.
That's the same thing.
Thank goodness for Mr. Justice Mosley.
Thank goodness for him and his ruling.
You saw the knee-jerk reaction of the government that, oh, yeah, we're going to appeal that.
You know, maybe read through it and think about it for a little bit, like give it 24 hours.
No, there was a knee-jerk reaction there on the part of the government to Mosley's decision, which I think is most unfortunate.
You know, I don't know the kind of thinking that Court of Appeal judges would have, but reading Mosley's ruling, he basically telegraphs that he was antipathetic towards the truckers.
He was sympathetic to those who wanted to hit him hard.
But through the trial, he learned about the violations of civil liberties.
What I liked about it, it actually felt a little bit too chatty and personable to me.
But what was interesting is he was saying, look, I actually didn't start off in the side of the truckers, guys, which I thought that was an interesting message that he was telegraphed.
Did you pick that up at all or am I reading things in?
No, I think he was being very honest and very forthright.
And you often don't see that kind of personal opinion or personal mindset.
You don't see that expressed by judges.
But Justice Mosley is a former Crown attorney.
He is a longtime federal court judge, very, very experienced.
And he was being just very forthright by saying, look, this is how I came into it.
And despite that, here's what happened.
And here's what shouldn't have happened as a reaction by the government.
Let's come back to the Tamara Leach trial.
It's one that our viewers care about a lot.
We love Tamara Leach.
Treble News published her autobiography, which was a real hit, even though it got zero press coverage and zero reviews by the mainstream media, which surprises me.
I mean, the Trucker Convoy was obviously the biggest story of the year in 2022, obviously.
It sparked the Emergencies Act.
Tamara Leach was the figurehead of it and the spiritual leader, as I like to say, in so many ways.
You would think they would review that book to trash it, to criticize it, even if they would review it at all, but it was as if it never happened.
I thought that was telling.
They didn't want to give her a hearing.
They didn't want her to correct the record.
That's how I felt.
That's a little aside there.
You read the book.
I learned things from it that I didn't know about her.
I didn't know how, for example, the media tried to denigrate her Metis nature, tried to claim she wasn't Aboriginal.
That's a really weird attack to do.
That's a very personal attack.
Was there anything about the book that you found interesting?
I read the book with great interest.
It gave me a real insight as to who she is and more importantly, why she is, why she's fighting, why she doesn't even own a truck.
What was she doing trying to assist the various demonstrators by getting them provisions so that they could carry out their peaceful protest?
How did she come to that point?
It's an insightful look into how a very ordinary person can be thrust into a position where they can actually try and make a difference.
And what happens to them when they try and make a difference is really a sad, it's a sad comment on where we've come.
I mean, she's already spent 50 days in jail for what is essentially a mischief charge.
Yeah, the people downtown were subject to horns blowing all kinds of, but there was an injunction within seven days that stopped that.
And the evidence has come out in our trial that it stopped after seven days.
So why?
Why go after somebody like Tamara or Chris Barber for that matter in this way and to this extent?
It really saddens me to try and think of the motivation behind this prosecution.
You know, just one more quick comment on Tamara's personality.
I learned a lot about it too.
God forbid, and may it never happen, that I'm sentenced to, that I'm put in jail for 50 days pre-trial, and the way she described what those conditions were like.
And then the trial being dragged out in the manner it has the processes, the punishment.
I almost feel like the prosecutors know it's a loser, but they're turning the trial into the sentence.
She hasn't gotten bitter.
In fact, if anything, she's nicer.
I literally don't know how that has happened.
And that's an amazing part of the story.
Don't mind me, that's a little editorial comment.
But I want to come back to the length.
Oh, go ahead.
You have something to say.
You know, on that, years ago, I had the opportunity to become friends with Ruben Hurricane Carter.
And at one point, one point he was staying downstairs in our house, and we had Joyce Milgard on the upper level.
We were running a house for the wrongfully convicted.
But the thing that impressed me the most about Ruben was just that.
Here's a man who spent 18 years in custody for a murder he didn't commit.
And yet his disposition, his approach to life, and his smile, despite all he'd been through, was really quite inspirational.
And I see at least some of that in Tamara.
I see the way she greets support.
Short makes time for anyone.
Yeah, and it's good on her.
It's really a strength of character.
If folks want to help, by the way, Rebel News crowdfunds Tamara's legal offense through the Democracy Fund.
And you can help out at helptamara.com.
At that same website, you can find her book and do other things too.
We're talking a lot about Tamara because I think she's such a consequential person.
And you're right.
She's a severely normal person, an ordinary person, without any negative connotations there, who did an extraordinary thing.
She rose to the occasion.
You mentioned the judge, Judge Perkins McVeigh, the one who's overseeing Tamara Leachistram.
I seem to recall that she was the same judge who oversaw the wrongful prosecution of Vice Admiral Malmark Norman, the senior military official that the PMO really went after.
Like it felt very political.
Why The Prosecution Stretches00:02:59
And in the end, a document that the Crown should have disclosed earlier came to light and the whole case was dropped.
And they were trying to disgrace a great military man.
And in fact, if anything, it vindicated him.
And the reason I mention that is because I think being, I can only imagine what it must have been like to be the judge in a trial that had so much gravity.
And then you find out that the federal government was a trickster, or at least didn't live up to its duty.
And part of me thinks, I wonder if the lessons of Vice Admiral Mark Norman's trial, if she can see in this prosecution of Tamara Leach shenanigans turning a two-day matter into a 50-day matter, over like this is not a proper apportionment of prosecutorial resources.
There's a huge backlog in the courts of serious matters, and they're throwing everything at Tamara Leach.
It feels like a second round of a political stitch-up.
You know, I can't comment.
I wouldn't even, you know, begin to know what's going through the mind of the trial judge.
She's an experienced trial judge.
She has presided over this with great interest.
And if she's had any questions at all at any point along the way, she hasn't been hesitant to get involved, to make shame.
And all the while, she's been saying, you know, let's move forward.
Let's move forward on it.
And let's get back on track.
And it's not been an easy job for her, for sure.
I think I sat there for one day and then I said, Robert Crates, a Q takeover.
I can't take any more of this.
The day I sat there was with some city bureaucrat who very early in his testimony said he had never met, spoken with, communicated, or had any observation whatsoever of anything Tamara Leach had done.
And now let me talk for eight hours about my feelings about the lockdown, about my feelings about the convoy.
Like it was a therapy session for a government bureaucrat.
It was not a legitimate witness.
And something you said very quickly at the beginning of our conversation, which is actually stunning, you say you haven't decided whether or not to mount a defense, as in every single minute of this trial so far has been the prosecution's case.
You have not actually made a case yet.
You've challenged and you've objected and you've cross-examined, but Tamara Leach has not testified yet.
And from what I understand, you're saying she may never testify.
There may never be anything.
You may, in the end, just stand up and say, Judge, nothing here.
We have nothing to say.
I call you to make a ruling at this moment.
That's possible.
Certainly possible.
To this point, the only evidence for the defense has come through cross-examination of the Crown's witnesses.
Checks and Balances Broken00:08:27
It's incredible.
Listen, you've been very generous with your time.
I'd like to broaden the scope just a little bit.
It's a slightly political question, but it's also a legal question.
It's a public sphere question, but I think you straddle those things.
I mean, even just mentioning the Milgard case and the Rubin Hurricane Carter case, these are political cases that touch on public policy.
It's not just criminal law.
And the law seeps into everything.
I think it's good to know the law, even as a layman, to study the law, even as an amateur layman, because it affects everything we do.
And it's my view that whatever you thought of the vaccine, put that aside.
For a period of time, our entire system failed.
The opposition parties didn't really oppose.
The media ceased being skeptical and critical and in many ways became hired propagandists.
And I don't say that's an insult.
I say that as an observation.
They took funds both from Pfizer and from the government.
University professors who normally are canaries in the coal mine for violated rights, they never stopped writing letters for Omar Cotter, were silent when we had charter violations en masse.
Doctors at the College of Physicians and Surgeons silenced doctors who had a second opinion.
The checks and balances broke.
And we hurtled at shocking speed down the road to authoritarianism.
And in three short years, we lurched back to some of the, I'm going to say totalitarian.
When someone says, I have the right to know who's in your house.
I have the right to tell you how many people can come to your place for a Christmas dinner.
I have the right to tell me who can come to your wedding and your funeral.
I can shut down a church but keep Costco open across the street.
I feel like our country shed a century's worth of civil liberties gains in three years.
And you know who else was silent?
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, which hit the snooze button for three years.
And all the civil liberties champions, where were they?
You're one of those few civil liberties champions who stood up.
I say that we lost ground medically, we lost ground economically, but the biggest ground we lost was in terms of our civil liberties.
We were set back a generation.
What do you think?
Two things.
One, most Canadians don't appreciate that our constitutional rights, our charter rights, our fundamental freedoms, have only been protected since 1981.
Diefenbaker Bill of Rights was a paper tiger, and people know that.
It's only since 1981 that we have a constitutional protection of civil liberties, fundamental freedoms.
Look at the way our Constitution starts.
It starts with, it doesn't start with, we hold these truths to be self-evident.
That's in the United States.
That's a clear statement.
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
It's so clear that these are fundamental freedoms that it's self-evident.
Canada, on the other hand, starts with all rights and freedoms contained in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms are subject to such reasonable limits as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
What an opening.
What a piss-poor opening.
We're going to give you some rights, but before we do that, you've got to realize every one of them is limited.
The other Canadian constitutional mindset that we are burdened with is, and this goes back to the Diefenbaker Bill of Rights, is the importance of peace, order, and good government.
We in Canada, for the most part, cherish peace, order, and good government.
So when you have a situation where people are peacefully demonstrating, but they're staying there too long, or why don't they go and demonstrate across the street where it won't be as much of an annoyance to us?
It's a psyche.
And the government was able to take advantage of that psyche with surprising and disappointing ease during COVID.
It's the average Canadian will think so-and-so is charged.
They will assume guilt, as opposed to the United States, where you have the former president running for president again, and he's charged, and I've lost count how many jurisdictions.
Presumption of innocence is real, if anything, to the other extreme in the United States.
In Canada, the presumption of innocence is worth nothing.
People charged in Canada with a sexual assault, it's over.
It's over.
Their lives, their reputation, it's over because presumption of innocence, practical sense, doesn't exist in our country.
So all that to say that when the government brought in all of these COVID mandates and the various regulations and rules, there wasn't a peep, hardly a peep.
almost in the in the Martin Nemoller type of, you know, first they came for the trade unionists, that type of thinking.
And nobody, nobody, hardly anyone stood up and said, wait a second, you know, what I do in my home and what I do at my daughter's wedding or my mom's funeral, that's my business, not yours.
I don't know if we've gone back a generation or we've just exposed what is very much an unfortunate Canadian psyche when it comes to Canadian civil liberties.
I think there's some truth to them.
Well, I'm glad you're representing Tamara Leach.
And I look forward to the result there.
It's very dangerous to allow yourself to be hopeful, but you have to be.
I mean, you have to.
I think that this pendulum is swinging back, and I think hope is being redeemed.
And I think, God willing, she's acquitted.
That will vindicate not only her personally, but it will vindicate the peaceful protests that she was the moral leader of.
And I'm very hopeful from what I've seen personally of the case and from what I've seen through our journalists.
Can you leave me with something hopeful?
Is there something whether or not it's in Canada or the United States or around the world?
I used to look at the democracy protests in Hong Kong about five years ago.
I said, those guys won't give up their freedom easily.
And they didn't give it up easily.
They were just unarmed and China rolled in and it was over.
Is there anything around the world, whether it's in Canada, the States, or a foreign country, that you say those guys get it?
That's proof that freedom's on the march.
Is there any hope out there?
Oh, there's, I mean, I go to work every day with the hope that a very basic hope, which is that where a person's rights and freedoms have been violated, thank goodness in Canada, we have a constitutional mechanism to try and deal with it.
Now, in many instances, it's not affordable.
It doesn't make good economic sense.
That is unfortunately part of it.
But at least there is a constitutional mechanism under Section 24 of the Charter where a person's rights have been violated, denied, or infringed.
There is the ability for the appropriate court to afford a remedy which is appropriate and just in the circumstances.
They don't have that provision in England.
They have a similar provision in the United States, and much of our language in our Constitution has come from the United States.
But that ability to weigh what's an appropriate and just remedy in the hands of judges who I have had just four decades of experience and judges that I trust, I'd much prefer to have them doing the weighing of what's an appropriate and just remedy than the people who are running for political office.
Great Confidence in the System00:00:53
And that's where the problem was, that the people making the decision regarding vaccinations were in political office.
They were not our judges who are independent and open to affording a remedy that's appropriate in just the circumstances.
So I still continue, despite all that I've said, to have great confidence in the Canadian constitutional system and just keep trying to make it better on a case-by-case basis.
All right, well, we'll leave it there.
Lawrence Greenspawn, a great civil liberties lawyer, who is the lead lawyer defending Tamara Leach.
To learn more about her case, of course, go to helptamara.com.
That's the show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us at Rebel, around the world and at your home, good night and keep fighting for freedom.