Ezra Levant covers the Coutts 3 trial’s April 2 jury selection in Lethbridge, Alberta, where George Janssen, Marco Van Hugenboss, and Alex Van Herc—framed as grassroots protesters—chose a local panel over distant cities like Montreal or Calgary to avoid perceived judicial bias. Facing minor mischief charges after a 2022 border protest, their prolonged trial mirrors the politically charged Tamara Leach case, the longest of its kind in Canada. The defendants’ crowdfunded legal defense (via coots3.com) highlights broader tensions over police tactics and public health authority influence, with the trial set to begin April 3 at 10 a.m., underscoring jury trials’ role in challenging elite narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
Today's show is about the Coots 3 trial finally underway.
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Tonight, the trial of the Coots 3 starts with jury selection.
I'm down here in Lethbridge.
I'll have all the details.
You're watching the Es Levant show, and it's April 2nd.
Shame on you, you censorious thug.
I'm at my home, away from home.
Leftbridge, Alberta.
I've been here a dozen times because I come here for this courthouse.
This is the nearest court to the Coots border protest that happened two years ago.
All the criminal charges that were laid at the Coats border protest are being heard in this courthouse here.
And as you can tell by the large gathering behind me, today is a big day.
It's day one in the trial of the so-called Coots 3, or as the prosecutor calls them, the leadership group.
I think they were the leaders, although it was a very grassroots, organic protest, very populist, very grassroots, very different from the kind of left-wing professional protests that Canada is used to seeing.
I find the one key difference between protesters who are freedom-oriented, protesters on the right, is they're more individualistic, of course, but they actually know why they're protesting.
If you would have gone to the protest at Coots, Alberta or in Ottawa two years ago, or at the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor and Detroit, where there was another protest, and asked anyone there, why are you here?
They would have talked your ear off about freedom and the illegitimacy of the various lockdowns and mandates.
Contrast that to the kind of rent-to-mob protests you see on any given left-wing issue.
And I know this from personal experience: you can go to a left-wing protest and say, Why are you here?
They don't know why they're there.
They're honestly there either because they're actually being paid or they're just called up.
Come on, we're having another protest today.
We'll give you this sign.
And they always direct you to an official spokesperson.
I think it's very different.
And as you can see, the group behind me, very severely normal people.
These are farmers and business owners and families.
And there's actually a lot of kids here today.
Everyone here is here because they believe in the freedom fight that they saw expressed in that border protest two years ago.
You might recall that Rebel News sent lawyers to be embedded with the protests from almost the beginning.
We knew that things were going to be difficult because the police were trying all sorts of, in my opinion, unethical tricks.
But also, we wanted to make sure that these unsophisticated protesters, let me put it that way, it's an instrument of their first protest, that they didn't fall into any traps, that they weren't provoked, that there weren't, because of course, the protest, it was extremely cold out there.
And a lot of the protesters were gathered for warmth in the saloon, which is sort of like the bar, I guess, in the Star Wars movie.
Any manner of wretched folks were there, including police and undercover police trying to tempt, trick, or trap the men.
And indeed, that did happen in the case of the so-called Pete's Ford.
Today's the trial are the coup three, George Janssen, Marco Van Hugenboss, and Alex Van Hurt.
Jury Selection Stakes00:04:24
These are the three men who often liaised with the police, who gave advice to the others.
At least that's how it looks like on the inside.
It'll be interesting to see what position these men's lawyers take in court.
Today is jury selection, which is a very exciting and important thing.
Most trials in Canada do not have juries.
They're judged alone.
But by selecting a jury, these men have made this strategic calculation that they think they're more likely to get a sympathetic hearing by 12 of their neighbors than they are by a hand-appointed judge, most likely appointed by a liberal prime minister.
But even if it was appointed by a conservative, judges come from a certain socioeconomic strata.
They are, by definition, men and women of the establishment.
We've seen in other lockdown or pandemic trials that the judges tend to believe, for example, the health industrial complex.
They would never be skeptical of a Teresa Tam or another public health officer.
By making the deliberate choice to entrust their safety, future, and liberty with their neighbors, they're saying, I trust the common sense of the common people more than I trust the wisdom of an elite judge.
I think that's wise.
It makes me think, if you'll permit me a tangent, a couple of years ago, when a judge, an Adam, Adam Germain was his name.
He was a liberal appointee.
When he heard a case involving Arthur Pavlovsky and Chris Scott, he said outrageous things like, we all know someone who died from COVID.
And anytime you speak contrary to the public health officials, you must read this self-denunciation that what you're saying is wrong.
It was a compelled speech ruling.
It was overturned three years ago by the Court of Appeal.
But you take my point, you had a 70-year-old liberal appointee who just wouldn't even accept that the establishment could be wrong, accepted that we all know that this pandemic is devastating and we must obey it.
Like just the mindset of a cussetted, cocooned judge high on Mount Olympus.
That's one end of the spectrum.
But ordinary men and women in Lethbridge is the other end of the spectrum.
And these defendants, in my view, are very wise for choosing that.
So jury selection, remembering from my law school days, I've never participated in a jury trial, even when I was a lawyer.
They sort for certain things.
For example, you can't be a lawyer on a jury and think about, well, why wouldn't you want a lawyer on a jury?
No, because other jurors would defer to that person too much.
Oh, he's an expert.
You wouldn't want someone who is blazingly partisan who says, I know they're guilty or I'll never convict.
You wouldn't want someone with a hard heart like that.
So there are questions that the prosecutors and the defense lawyers will have agreed on to vet jurors.
But then, again, going from memory of law school from 30 years ago, you have what's called peremptory objections.
You can say, I don't really like the cut of that person's jib, but I can't quite put my finger on it.
But I get to play a certain number of these cards.
I don't want that person on the jury.
So it's a fairly high stakes business, jury selection.
And it's going to be fascinating to see who each side objects to, et cetera.
And once that jury is impaneled, well, then the business gets underway.
You might know that I've been coming down here literally for two years to this courthouse, but most of what I've been covering over the last two years has been blanketed by a publication ban.
We've heard fascinating things, troubling things, amazing things in this court, but we couldn't tell you about it.
And the reason for that is they didn't want to taint the jury pool.
They didn't want someone who's going to be impaneled on that 12-man jury to hear snips and shards and fragments of evidence before they get in that room, because the evidence they might hear might be out of context.
It might be hearsay.
There might be legal flaws with it.
So the idea was any preliminary discussions would be only for the courtroom to know, not for the wider public.
Legal Flaws and Jury Protection00:05:14
But once the jury is impaneled and once the trial gets underway, whatever happens in that courtroom, well, the jurors will see it.
And so then we can report on the details.
Now, most of the dramatic stuff was in the other trial I mentioned briefly, the Coots for the men who have been in custody these two years.
But I think this trial, the greatest analogy for the trial that's starting today is that of Tamara Leach.
Namely, Tamara Leach was held out as her and Chris Barber as the leadership team for the protests in Ottawa.
Now, again, these protests are organic.
They're grassroots.
They were not directed by any political party.
Attempts to organize them were frustrated by the government.
For example, the Ottawa convoy raised $10 million on GoFundMe.
GoFundMe rescinded the donations.
They raised another $12 million on Give, Send, Go.
The government issued freezing orders.
My point is, the trucker convoy was as grassroots as it gets.
Sure, there were people who naturally emerged as moral leaders and made certain decisions and acted as spokesmen, but this was not a corporation.
This was not a well-oiled political machine.
These were ordinary Canadians coming together in the crisis in a like-minded thing.
And it's going to be interesting to see what they can hang around the neck of these Coots 3 and if that even amounts to a crime.
Because these three men, and if I had the chance to meet them, each, and of course, Rebel News is crowdfunding their legal defense along with the Democracy Fund.
They're just peaceful protesters.
They engaged in some civil disobedience, perhaps, but did they actually commit a crime?
And it'll be interesting to see if the prosecutors can make the case that they had.
I think that had there not been a political basis for the prosecution here, these three men would have had a half-day trial a year and a half ago, at most a slap on the wrist, what we call a conditional discharge or an absolute discharge.
And the judge would say, now, don't you do that again.
I don't want to see you in court again.
Get out of here.
Mischief, of course, is the lowest level of crime in the criminal code.
It's typically for vandalism, or even, well, I mean, shoplifting has its own offense, but it is the lowest order of crime on the books.
And I think that the reason they've been turning these grand productions with a 12-man jury and years of prosecution is because these are actually political trials.
Tamara Leach has been put through a many months long criminal trial for mischief, which I learned from one of her lawyers, Keith Wilson.
It is the longest mischief trial, not just in Canadian history, but in the history of the entire Commonwealth, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, etc.
There has never been in the recorded history anyone who has been on trial longer for the petty charge of mischief than has Tamara Leach.
And why is that?
Well, obviously, because they want to make the process the punishment.
They want to get her in the process itself, even if they can't convict her.
And I wonder if we'll see the same thing here in Alberta.
Will this prosecutor?
His name is Stephen Johnston, and he is animated by a vendetta, as far as I can tell.
He was the same prosecutor who went after Astr Arthur Pavlovsky.
He's the same prosecutor, if I'm not mistaken, that went after Chris Scott at the whistle-stop diamond red year.
This guy is not a prosecutor in the main, he is a crusader on a political mission to punish the men who dared stand up to the establishment.
And it's going to be fascinating to see if 12 men and women are in a jury agree.
I don't know if you can see, but there's a couple of cops on bicycles patrolling over there.
I see police driving around the neighborhood.
There's a police, a paddy wagon over there.
One, two, three, four, five, six cops over there, another half dozen over them.
When do they think it's going to happen?
These cops.
Do they think these school-aged children and these grandmas are going to storm the building?
I mean, it's a political expression of policing itself.
One of the things that's driven me crazy about Lethbridge, and that's why I love Lethbridge.
It's that small town values, and they're nice to the cops here.
And I don't propose that anyone be mean to someone else with no reason.
But the embrace that the Coots protesters and the Lethbridge community has had for police who came to bury them, it is all I can say is I presume it's the Christian idea of turn the other cheeks.
These police, not particularly these, not necessarily these individual officers, but the Trudeau's RCMP was given a mandate to crush the political protesters who are embarrassing Trito.
That's what caused the invocation of the Emergencies Act.
Great Vibe From Jurists00:15:25
There was no crime emergency.
There was no public safety emergency.
There was no war.
There was no insurrection.
There was only a political emergency.
And shame on the RCMP and any other cop who participated in a show prosecution and God forbid what becomes a show trial.
I hope that the jury will put this prosecution in its place the same way a federal court judge Moseley did when he ruled that the invocation of the Emergencies Act was illegal and unconstitutional.
So let me close with my remarks now.
I will come back and have more to say.
It's exciting to be here after two years of waiting.
It's a delight to see the community out in force.
Rebel News is not only going to be covering this story daily.
My colleague Robert Krachuk, who's done a great job covering Tamara Lee meets his trial, he has moved to Lethbridge for the duration of this trial.
By the way, if you want to help chip in to his modest economy class expenses, you can do that on a website we set up called truckertrials.com.
I don't know.
I'm excited that we're finally going to have our moment of justice.
And I'm sure the three men who have had the stigma of these charges against them for years are looking forward to this process getting underway.
That's it for now.
I'm going to go into the courtroom where I will be live tweeting the proceedings today, sitting next to my colleague Robert Preach, and he will be here for the duration.
I'll come back to Lethbridge when I can make the time, but you're in good hands with Robert.
That's my morning report.
I'll have him on the show later.
Very interesting date.
Today was the first day in the trial.
Although the trial itself didn't start, the jury selection did.
14 jurors were selected.
And luckily, from a journalistic point of view, the publication bans are no longer relevant because they were in place to protect the jury pool from being tainted.
So, people who would serve on the jury would hear a snippet or a fragment of evidence and maybe make up their mind in advance in a prejudicial way.
So, luckily, things are now reportable.
And it was a very interesting day for jury selection.
Standing with me now is Chad Williamson.
He's a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll.
He was the lawyer, the Rebel News, sent down to the Coots Blockade Saloon.
He was there in real time, giving advice to the truckers, talking to the police, trying to lower the temperature, letting truckers know what to do if they were arrested, reminding them not to get into shenanigans.
Well, he's here at the court where he watched this first day with me.
Chad, good to see you again.
Yeah, great to see Ezra.
It's great to be back down in southern Alberta.
I mean, the weather's nice and what a crowd earlier today.
I mean, lots of support for these guys.
Obviously, the carbon tax protests happening yesterday.
A lot's going on right now.
And jury selection today.
This is one of the most crucial aspects of the criminal justice system.
You're so right.
I was talking to some of the team back at our HQ about the drive down, and they were asking me if there was any more carbon tax protests on the streets.
Not that I saw, but it was pretty exciting yesterday.
That said, there were a ton of police out front here.
I counted at least a dozen.
And I just had to laugh because the people who are here are friends and family of the accused, children, grandchildren.
They're doing it some coffee this morning, right?
I mean, these aren't, you know, anti-faw guys lighting stuff on fire, you know, throwing things at police.
These are moms and dads that live in southern Alberta that are just, you know, wanting to support local people that contribute to the community.
Really?
I mean, I don't know who makes the decision to deploy a dozen or more police and there was police vans.
What are you going to take away some grandmas and paddy wagons or something?
There weren't grandmas here.
It wasn't just a bunch of punk kids, right?
This is full families down here.
So I thought that was very interesting.
I enjoyed the jury selection process.
It was sort of exciting to see people.
I mean, I shouldn't say this, but I thought of sort of a game show.
Come on now.
You came on down and you went through the questions and you had, and would you be accused and excused or would you be compelled?
And some people sort of tried to get out of it and didn't succeed.
Others sort of whispered something to the judge and they were let go.
It was sort of an exciting thing.
Yeah, the jury selection process, I mean, it's a little bit of a circus, right?
Because you get such a smattering of eclectic and diverse people from around the community.
And I think I said to you when we were just standing outside the court, like I looked around and I thought, this really is Lethbridge.
Like this is representative of Lethbridge.
We had, you know, some old babes in there.
We had some really young kids.
Well, there was a kid there I would have thought he was in high school.
Yeah, me too.
I mean, I actually thought that this was the gallery when I first walked in.
I thought it was the gallery for the trial.
Like I thought this was just the public watching.
And obviously when they were, you know, not letting anyone else in, but they let me in because I'm counsel.
I thought, oh, wait a sec, this is actually the jury pool.
So it's, yeah, what a crazy process this morning.
The questions, I mean, now that the publication ban has been lifted, I mean, I can say that, you know, what they call challenge for cause.
So these are the, this is the process where the court puts specific questions to a potential jurist to determine whether or not they've got a bias.
And even if they have a bias, are they still able to deal with and discharge their duty fairly?
And you get all sorts of characters, right?
This is just a big group of people from Lethbridge.
And you got guys that clearly were just trying to get out of it, right?
No excuse, but they're trying to get out of it.
You got some poor dude whose final exams were tomorrow.
He should have been studying today.
And I mean, he went up and he just said, you know, I'm in university.
We've got finals tomorrow.
And of course, he was graciously, mercifully let go by the court.
So what an interesting process.
But I remember we fought for weeks over what the questions would be, right?
So, and I mean, it went pretty quick.
This was one of the fastest jury selections I've probably ever seen.
It was only half a day.
Yeah.
And there were the 12 jurors and then two extras, I guess, in case someone got for me gets sick or has to leave for whatever reason.
That way they would still have 12 juries to make the decision.
That's right.
So, and I mean, sometimes you see this.
Some people just don't have the Constitution go three weeks or they get really sick or, you know, they're eating the government provided food and it, you know, maybe doesn't sit well or something, right?
And so you need a couple backups.
Usually, even if you get down below that, you know, that 12, they can usually keep going with, I mean, they've got, you know, as long as council agree, maybe proceed with 10, but you really do need a fairly large jury so that it's representative of the community at large and, you know, a jury of your peers, right?
So, and I think, I think there's a chance we could have got that today.
There's some jurors that I thought, you know, I kind of like them.
Some jurors I thought, eh, you know, they might not be, you know, super into what went down at Coots, but I mean, as well, if people can, and I think people take it real seriously, like they get a moment in the spotlight where now they're, they're the judge, right?
So it's an interesting process.
It's hundreds and hundreds of years old.
This is what, this is the, really, the cornerstone of justice in common law jurisdictions.
Go ahead.
You're so right.
You know, the last jury trial I sat through, now that I think about it, was more than 15 years ago.
It was Conrad Black's trial in the Southern District of Illinois, Chicago.
So you have this member of the House of Lords, this gazillionaire.
And who was the jury?
Was it a jury of his peers?
It most definitely was not demographically, ethnically, economically.
I walked into that room in Chicago and I thought, he's done.
He's toast.
In fact, the prosecution used like picture book images, like big pictures, like a man.
Yeah, like a man with a bag of cash.
Because the idea, I mean, I don't know how you have a trial by your peers if you're a member of the House of Lords.
Here, I absolutely felt it was.
I looked at the 14 people chosen, and they absolutely were Lethbridge, working class people, young people, older people.
You couldn't really tell who was what just by the look of them.
But I have to say, if you're on trial for a political purpose, which is what these protests were, these protests were political in nature.
They weren't a bank robbery dressed up as something.
There was a political expression.
If you're having a political expression that is conservative and populist, do you want to throw your lot in with the elite establishment judge handpicked by a justice minister in Ottawa?
Or would you rather have your fate to 12 regular folks?
And I think it was very wise to go for a jury.
Yeah, so it depends on the nature of the offense, right?
If it's what they call a summary offense, which is punishable by at most a brief prison sentence.
I don't even think you could have a jury for that.
You can't.
So, and that's in provincial court.
And it's, it's, I mean, this is Alberta.
This is cowboy court, and they deal with a lot of really crazy stuff in provincial court.
When you move up to big boy court bench, and you've got, you know, I mean, mischief could potentially carry a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.
I don't even, frankly, think they put rapists in prison for that long or, I mean, you know, drunk drivers that mow somebody down.
I mean, you know, it's possible, but frankly, I think most of the sentences are much less than that.
You're afforded the opportunity to make a jury election.
And that's what we did on day one: we wanted to make sure, and especially down here, that they'd get a jury of their community members, not some jury from, you know, Metropolitan Calgary.
And that's where the prosecutor wanted to take this, didn't he?
He wanted this as far away from the country mindset.
If he had his way, he would have had this heard in Montreal.
Yeah, and I mean, he raised the issue a number of times.
So, what the motivations were, I mean, I guess everyone can draw their own conclusions, but you know, there was alleged safety concerns.
You know, and I knew it.
I was going to mention that the reason the cops were out here is because you've got a whiny, thin-skinned prosecutor.
His name is Stephen Johnson.
I saw him in action before.
He's the one who prosecuted Arthur Pavlovsky for giving a sermon.
But then, was he the prosecutor in Chris Scott in the Whistle Stop Cafe case?
No.
So, that was another guy, Peter McKenzie.
Okay.
I mean, he is the, if I'm not mistaken, he's the director of specialized prosecutions in Alberta.
Like, he's, it's my understanding, he's the top dog.
So, to go after Chris Scott, they brought in the best of the best.
And I'm just so delighted you won that case.
And I'm just so delighted Chris Scott showed courage.
So, really, we didn't, we didn't quite start today.
We did everything except for start.
Tomorrow, the trial starts at 10 a.m.
Am I right?
Yeah, that's right.
So, I mean, you know, I guess the Crown said, well, you know, we could give our opening address today.
And the opening address is really important because that's really your, you know, your bluster and your passion and a real, you know, distilled essence of what your case is.
What's really important is to have the defense be able to reply to that right away.
So you don't, I don't think you necessarily want to have the crown finish the day with their opening statement and then let the jury go back to Malong from the defense.
And I think the crown said they weren't ready with their witnesses either.
So I think in fairness, both sides thought jury selection would take a little longer.
Yeah, and in most cases it does, right?
Because I mean, in most cases, you got a lot of people either getting out, people expressing bias, people saying, hey, you know, well, I have surgery next month.
Or the process just usually takes a lot longer.
The jurors were, I mean, you know, they just gave the court the answers that the court wants.
They said that they could discharge their duty fairly and honestly.
And I feel like they might be able to.
I got a pretty good vibe from most of the jurists.
You know, whether you agree with the Coots blockade or anything like that, I mean, you know, a true Canadian citizen should be able to discharge their duty, put all that aside, weigh the evidence on its merits, and then render a finding as the trier of fact in this case.
And really, what's interesting is normally in provincial court or what you've just got a case that's decided by a judge, he gets to rule on the facts and the law.
So you got kind of one guy or gal doing everything, and they're usually senior lawyers or kind of part of the judicial bureaucracy.
What's really neat when you have a jury, and this is just a century-old tried-and-true method.
You've got a jury of your peers giving a decision on the facts, and then you've got the judge there to kind of play referee whenever there's legal issues that arise and people want to get in dust-ups over that.
So it's nice to bifurcate those two important aspects of a criminal case.
And I think we're going to see that throughout this entire trial.
You know, the founder of the National Review magazine, I remember he once said he'd rather have the country run by the first hundred names in the Boston phone directory than the faculty of Harvard.
And I thought there's some wisdom there because there is a common sense with the common people.
And I'm excited about it.
I am going back to our HQ tonight, but we have our reporter, Robert Krachik, who's going to be covering every single day of the trial.
I'll try and come back if I can for some of it.
Robert's also going to cover the trial of the Coots 4.
And when the trial of Tamara Leach restarts, if it does, Robert will be there too.
So he really is our go-to expert.
And I just want to say, and this is for the viewers, because I mean, people go, ah, you know, he's the rebel lawyer and all this sort of stuff.
But I actually started this whole journey as just a rebel viewer, a premium subscriber, which I thought was funny.
And I've been following Robert's work covering, of course, the Tamara Leach trial.
And what's been so apparent to me, and I've actually told him this off-camera, so he already knows is no surprise.
But I am so impressed with his understanding of very, very complex legal issues and his ability to convey those in a meaningful, clear, and understandable way to rebel viewers.
I really think that there's no one better suited to be the boots on the ground here to really report on these very important trials.
Two Ways to Help Cover Trials00:02:26
I think you're right, and he's making friends.
I can tell he's already made friends around the courthouse.
I told him he should move to Alberta.
We're always looking for cooler people, awesome people to move out here.
And so if I can convince him, I mean, there might not be any rebels left at Ontario.
It's funny to see that our last Ottawa-based reporter, William D.S. Bethiel, said he wanted to move to Alberta because of the freedom.
And I absolutely support that on a personal level, but he deprived us of our man on the street in Ottawa.
And of course, Robert should seek freedom, but it would also be a loss.
I mean, no one wants to work in Ottawa, it sounds like.
I mean, listen, it's a good experience, but I understand.
All right, listen, thank you so much for watching this.
I want to conclude with the two ways you can get involved if you want to.
As you know, Rebel News is doing the crowdfunding through the Democracy Fund for all three of the men charged today.
Their names are Marco Van Hugenboss, Alex Van Herc, and George Janssen.
I've had the chance to get to know all three of them.
In fact, Sidney Fazard did a beautiful biographical documentary of the men.
It's about 40 minutes long.
You can find that on our website.
If you want to chip in to hire to pay for their lawyers, and their lawyers were very active in court today, and I think we've got a legal dream team.
You can do that at coots3.com.
So if you go to coots3.com, you can make a contribution.
You'll actually get a charitable tax receipt from the Democracy Fund for that.
Now, also, Robert Krachik, as we've just discussed, we're talking about him.
He's filming this video.
So he's just 10 feet away from me.
He flew in from Ottawa, flew to Calgary, drove down.
So he's staying here.
Economy, class, accommodations.
It's fairly cheap to be in Latin Bridge, it's not like New York City, but still, it is going to ultimately cost us thousands of dollars for the airfare, the automobile, the rent, the food to have a guy based out here the whole time.
And if you think that's important journalism, because you don't trust the CBC State Broadcaster, please go to truckertrial.com, truckertrial.com, and that donation will go to our journalism.
So there's two ways to help.
Go to coots3.com to help cover the lawyers for the men or go to truckertrial.com to cover Robert's expenses.