Ezra Levant exposes Ontario’s $394,000 fines against Chatsworth’s Amish for refusing the ArriveCan app—despite their 18th-century tech-free lifestyle and religious exemption. Grant, a non-Amish neighbor, uncovered the punitive measures after customs discussions revealed liens blocking farm sales and loans. Lawyer Adam Blake Gallipo is fighting three cases, with Levant urging support via helptheamish.com to challenge violations of religious freedom and due process. The episode ties the app to alleged spyware risks and Trudeau-linked money laundering, questioning bureaucratic overreach during COVID’s "moral panic" while highlighting the Amish’s resilience against unjust digital mandates. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, a tiny Amish community in Ontario is hit with $400,000 in COVID fines.
Trouble is, no one told them about it because they don't use phones or email.
It's August 14th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
I'm here at an Amish farmhouse in the township of Chatsworth, Ontario, about a two and a half hour drive west of Toronto.
It's so nice here.
It's so gorgeous.
I'm with some horses and some cows.
They're all washing to see what the hubbub is about.
What's interesting about this place is that it is run as if it was the 18th century.
In fact, the Amish were a order that was persecuted in Europe.
They went from the Netherlands and Germany and Switzerland, and they came over to North America, including to Canada.
You may be more familiar with the Amish in Pennsylvania.
They're the subject of many Hollywood movies, including an exciting one with Harrison Ford, when he took refuge by hiding in an Amish community precisely because it was unplugged.
It was a great movie.
And many of the things in there are just the same here.
There are no telephones.
There is no internet.
People here don't spend their days surfing or Facebooking or Instagramming.
They do something that I think would terrify many people today.
They actually meet each other and talk to each other face to face.
They go to church every Sunday in a horse-drawn carriage.
There's no cars here.
And even the houses do not have electricity.
There is a small diesel engine in the workshop, which I'll show you in a minute, because they make all their own stuff and they have some need for power tools, but basically they use tools as they did hundreds of years ago.
Even the farm itself is horse-drawn vehicles.
I was just shown a brand new manure spreader and I made a joke that that was one of my nicknames.
That's not actually true, but I was trying to find some humor that would work on someone who was a farmer who didn't know pop culture references.
It's fascinating stepping onto an Amish farm.
These people are law-abiding.
They're peaceful.
They're pacifist, which is one of the reasons they've been picked on.
They don't get into fights.
They don't get into wars.
And I was talking to one of the community elders who said, if they ever break the law, they pay the price submissively.
They do not fight in court.
He gave me the example.
He said, what if a young Amish man went shooting rabbits on someone else's property who had signs do not enter?
He said, in a case such as that, and it sounds like that might have happened, they plead guilty, they pay the fine and pay the price as a community.
They are not belligerent people.
But what's so interesting is in this one case, they know in their gut something's wrong.
Close to $400,000 in fines, mainly for not using Justin Trudeau's stupid ArriveCan app.
And just think about that.
You know the ArriveCan app when you would travel back to Canada from a foreign land during COVID, you had to fill out this buggy spyware malware app that we now know was money laundering tens of millions of dollars.
Anyways, how do the Amish use an app when they don't have a phone, they don't have electricity?
And why should they use it at all, given their religious exemption from taking the COVID jab?
None of it made sense, but don't tell that to the bureaucrats enforcing the ArriveCan app on behalf of Justin Trudeau and the bureaucrats prosecuting the ArriveCan app fines, who answered to Doug Ford himself.
What's so incredible is I sat down for a meeting for about 90 minutes with the head of the community.
He showed me that in the 74 families in this community, they have $400,000 in fines.
And here's what's new.
Here's what I have never seen before in all of our stories involving the ArriveCan app.
Because these folks here are not getting emails.
They're not getting phone calls.
Collections agents, they have nowhere to phone.
So what they've done is they have attached a lien on the title deeds of these homes, a kind of legal encumbrance, without telling the folks here.
That's the crazy thing.
I was told about a young Amish farmer who went to the bank to get a bank loan to buy some cattle.
He was told by the bank officer, I can't do that.
Did you know that there is a lien on your property for thousands of dollars for the ArriveCan?
And the Amish man said, what?
So not only were they harassed into using this app that they couldn't use, not only were they persecuted because they have a religious exemption because of their religion, but I've never seen this before.
The province of Ontario went ahead and tagged homes, not this particular home, but homes in this community, stopping families from changing the title from father to son on a farm, stopping families from using the farm to get a loan to operate their farm.
I've never seen such a punitive, bureaucratic, bullying example in my life.
And as you know, the Democracy Fund has fought 3,000 cases, many of them on the ArriveCan issue.
It was challenging to set up today's meeting.
Like I say, we just physically showed up, but we found a friend of the community who lives, who's not Amish himself, but he does some business with the Amish.
He heard about the Democracy Fund.
He knew that the Democracy Fund would take cases of people from any background, any religion, any station in life, and he contacted us.
And through this friendly neighbor, we were able to arrange a meeting today.
Like I say, normally we interview the expert.
We interview the newsmaker.
But that was a rule we had to follow here.
We couldn't show the face or the voice of the community elder.
In fact, he asked us not even to use his name.
And we're going to respect that.
We're going to do more than respect that.
We're going to help them.
We are going to take the cases of these people.
We're starting with three cases, but I hope we can take many more.
Trouble is these things were done, like I say, Without notice to the community.
Some of these liens are two years old.
So we've got to get in there and convince a judge to crack open this case because it wasn't done fairly.
There's a concept in law.
Do you have the legal capacity to make certain decisions?
Judges always want to make sure that no one is being taken advantage of, no one is being railroaded into anything.
It's a reason why we protect, for example, children, why we protect people who don't have mental capacity.
And I'm not comparing the Amish with children or people with a mental incapacity.
But what I am saying is if you are a community that does not use email, does not use phones, does not use apps, that has a religious exemption, and you have this bureaucratic war against them where you're sending notices in ways that the community doesn't even know.
That is not a level playing field.
That is the government being a bully.
And here, the Democracy Fund is going to level the playing field.
We have set up a website called helptheamish.com.
And you can do three things at this website.
Number one, you can share this story with other people, not just in Ontario, but across Canada and North America, who are outraged at the bullying by the government against these peaceful people.
Number two, you can sign the petition.
I think that if Doug Ford, the Premier of Ontario, were to see what was being done in his name, he would say, that just ain't right.
Stop bullying them.
But number three, just in case the first two steps don't work, we're going to court.
Adam Blake Gallipo, one of the lawyers of the Democracy Fund, has spoken with these three families and he's agreed to take their case.
And hopefully he'll be able to take more.
There's other Amish communities.
You can imagine it's sort of difficult to bridge the gap.
How do you even meet with them?
How do you talk with them?
They made it clear to me that they are not fighters.
But they said if others in the broader community want to help us, we will accept the help.
I want to introduce now the friend of the Amish who agreed to sort of broker today's meeting.
Come on in.
Grant is your name.
Grant, thanks very much for setting up today's meeting.
It's sort of difficult because we couldn't phone, we couldn't email.
Even when we were running late, we really had no way to tell the Amish that we were just 10 minutes away.
They really do live that old lifestyle, don't they?
They do.
They walk the walk.
And that's what I respect about.
No matter what it is, right, they bottle their beliefs and their faiths.
And they don't stray from that at all.
So you yourself are not Amish, of course, and you have no problem using phones and cell phones.
In fact, you're somewhat familiar with the Democracy Fund.
Well, I am.
I am.
I found them on Telegram, right?
And I read up on it.
I became familiar with what they've done so far helping those people on BC.
That's what really piqued my interest.
And I didn't know that the Amish had a problem.
I've had various conversations, but they found out that I dealt with customs issues commercially.
And that's how that topic came up.
It's a matter of trust with the Amish as well, because I've known them so well for so long that they felt comfortable asking me about that.
So you reassured them, you, because you've been dealing with them on a business level, you've gotten to know them personally.
So it was your telephone that was used to connect Adam Blake Gallipo of the Democracy Fund with the head of what they call their steering committee.
So you were sort of the bridge between the old world and the new.
That's right.
That's right.
Well, you sat in the meeting, and it's sort of funny what I'm doing here now because normally I would show the leader of the community and I would have him done.
By the way, he looks wonderful.
He sounds wonderful.
It was such a heartwarming meeting, but he can't be seen on camera.
That's just not their way.
You heard my introduction here.
Is that an accurate representation of what's been happening to the families here?
Very accurate.
And, of course, Adam Blake Gallipo is dealing with the families directly.
And again, I'm not exactly sure how that's being done because, you know, fax machines, phone calls, emails, I guess you're the interlocutor.
You're like the ambassador, the diplomat.
That's right.
I show up.
We set a date and a time and I go to a certain place and then we have a meeting on the phone with Adam.
Wow.
Well, thank you very much for doing that.
It's sort of incredible that you're willing to help these people, even though you don't have your own skin in the game.
These Amish, I just feel like it was bullying.
The leader told us about one case of young Amish people crossing over to the U.S. side where there's Amish communities to give help to an ailing father.
Another case where sort of young men were going to meet young women on like a date, it sounded like.
Just they crossed the border all the time.
And then suddenly every time they did that, because they didn't have an app, they were being hit $6,000 or so a time.
It really felt like bullying to me.
I was furious.
Amish Community Aid00:09:14
I told the head of the Amish that I would not be a good Amish person because I would be cursing.
And I know they don't do that.
No, no, not at all.
I'm glad I was on my best behavior.
You did very well.
I mean, I also told, I mean, I was sort of confessing to the head of the Amish.
I said, you know, I mean, these, you know, there's a Christian phrase that the Amish really, Amish really live, which is turn the other cheek.
Someone does you wrong, turn the other cheek.
They're not fighters.
I would not be a good Amish because I have an instinct in me to fight back.
And he made it very, very clear to me that they do not fight.
They sit and they he used the phrase, the government sort of puts their hand on them and they take it.
But he said, if there are others who are not Amish who want to come, he said it was almost like they were praying for help.
And this, he didn't know if this was an answer, but he sort of said God works in mysterious ways.
I think that's sort of what he meant.
Am I right?
Oh, yes, that's exactly it.
One of the things he told me, and he's quoted a few times, that scripture of the Bible, I hope I'm saying it right.
They believe they are in this world, but not of this world.
Hope I said that right.
And that's the, I think, the chief tenet.
So we went back and forth with this, and he gave the example of, you know, a young man shooting rabbits where he shouldn't.
And he said they don't fight it, they accept it.
But in this case, not only did they do nothing wrong, but it was a violation of their religious freedom to be forced to take the jab.
And they all had that.
They attested to their religious exemption.
So I think that this isn't just an attack on their economy.
Like imagine being a farmer told you can't get a loan because some bureaucrat put a Rifcat app lean.
I've never heard of that.
3,000 cases at the Democracy Fund.
I never heard of that before.
That's just wild.
But it stops everything that they want to do.
And they have no advance notice.
Well, that's the thing.
I mean, you and I live in the world of phones and emails.
And, you know, the folks here are living like it's 1800.
And you have to admire them.
They're self-sufficient.
I've never heard of an Amish person on welfare.
I've never heard of an Amish person committing, you know, getting drunk and go, getting into a bar fight.
These are special people.
And I think it behooves us to help them because they won't help themselves.
And we can disagree with the pacifism, but the constructive thing is to do something about it and to help.
I couldn't agree more.
I mean, tell me a little bit more about how you know these folks.
You buy and sell things with them.
Well, what I primarily, what I was doing was buying lumber and beams because I do.
I have a fire myself, so I have a bit of an affinity for them.
But I was, I think I started buying lumber about 20 years ago.
So I've got to know the different individuals in the community.
And even when this was going on, this COVID lockdown, the CAN pass existed, I talked to one of them, and they didn't seem to have a problem at the border, so I thought no more of it.
They got a stiff, like a good talking to at the border, but they were let go.
If it weren't for you sort of breaking the ice with them and letting them know that we're okay, I don't think they would have met with us.
And, you know, we had that long meeting, no phones out, no recording.
It was just a heart-to-heart.
And even now, the elder is standing about 100 feet away because he just doesn't want to be on camera.
That's their way.
But our way, my way, is to try to help people who need help.
And these folks, I'm not going to say they slipped through the cracks because they were hunted.
Like, you don't just whoopsies put a $6,000 lien on a farm.
That is a policy decision to punish these people.
And I challenge the Premier and the MPPs and the Justice Minister to come and meet these folks and look them in the eye and say, yeah, $6,000 lien, pay it.
Like, I just challenge them to own or disown this outrageous decision.
I'm so mad about it.
I understand that.
Here's what we're going to do.
We're going to do this report.
Because I think no one, I'd never heard of this before.
Frankly, I didn't even know that there was Amish in Canada.
I knew they were Old Order Mennonites.
I knew the Amish were in Pennsylvania.
I didn't know.
So I've learned a lot today, and it's sort of wonderful.
We need a petition.
We had a petition for an Amish fella in the States named Amos Miller who was raided by police because he was selling raw milk.
And I think we got 40,000 names on that.
I want to get 40,000 names for these Canadian Amish.
And I want to crowdfund the lawyer.
I know Adam Blake Gallipo.
He's got a big heart.
He's probably fought more ArriveCan tickets than any other lawyer in Canada.
That's really all he did for a year at the Democracy Fund.
So that's my battle plan.
And I told that to the community leader here, and he just sort of took it all in.
I don't think he knew exactly what I meant on some of these things, but I think he was supportive.
Well, we're going to walk around a little bit more.
We're going to take a look in the shop just because it's sort of wonderful.
It's like, you know, people talk about the trad life, the traditional life, getting back to nature.
These folks here are living a clean living, healthy living.
Yes, it's all organic.
It's all natural.
Well, yeah, it was sort of interesting to see sort of hand drills and stuff like that.
I asked the leader, did anyone here get sick during COVID?
And he said, of course not.
I'm guessing if you're in the country eating like farm to fork, if you're doing manual labor all day, you are probably in the top 5% healthy, maybe top 1%, clean living, go to church, no messing around.
The fact that Teresa Tam or whoever from the big city was telling these folks to download the app and punishing them if they didn't is so insane.
We should all be so healthy as these Amish.
And it's amazing what they can do.
I was looking at one of the sleighs they were doing for horses.
And that's the thing.
They go on horse and buggy around town, and we saw that driving in.
I can't thank you enough for being the bridge.
How would I have heard about this?
I would never have heard about this were it not for you.
And we could never have made contact were it not for you.
So thank you.
Boy, you're very welcome.
I think it's a good thing for them to have this exposure.
They wouldn't have had it otherwise if it wasn't for you.
Well, and the funny thing is, in a way, I don't think they'll ever know what we're doing because I get the feeling they don't watch videos.
So you'll just have to tell them that it happened.
It's sort of funny because we're going to be doing all this stuff in their name and to help them, but they won't see any of it.
That, in a way, that's a wonderful way to help someone as you're doing it.
Even though they won't know what you've done for them, maybe we'll have some success here.
I am hopeful because this is such an egregious case.
Oh, it totally is.
But what I'll do is I'll print off a newsletter.
At least they can read that.
Right, right.
That's a great idea.
In fact, the leader of the community asked me, Well, will this be in the newspaper?
And I sort of explained that, well, we're not really on paper, but that's a good idea to print it off.
They do read things, and it's very interesting.
Well, listen, I thank you for being the connection.
We're going to go into the shop and look around there.
And hopefully, I can return here.
And hopefully, we have some good news.
I know that Adam Blake Gallipo of the Democracy Fund is eager to fight this case.
And it just feels like if enough members of the public, and frankly, if Premier Doug Ford himself saw this, I've got to think that someone would say, This is wrong.
We have to have a reset here.
This happened under the radar because these folks couldn't complain.
Any other community would have been squawking.
These folks lowered their heads and took the abuse.
All right, let's go take a look inside that shop.
Well, I'm inside the shop of one of the community leaders of the Amish group in Chatsworth in Southwest Ontario.
This is the room where I had about an hour and a half meeting with the head of the Amish community, but I couldn't put any of it on tape.
The Amish tradition is not to show their face or even use their voice on camera.
So I had the entire conversation just man-to-man with our friend Lincoln, our videographer, and a community friend named Grant who arranged the meetings because there's no electricity here.
There's no telephones.
There's no internet.
There's no TV.
How do you interact with a community that, for all intents and purposes, is living as they lived 200 years ago?
Wood-Burning Stoves and Drills00:02:41
I'm in the shop, and it's such an interesting place.
I want to show you around.
The community leader explained things to me, but of course I couldn't film him doing that.
So I'm going to do my best to repeat it.
And I'll have some observations on my own.
The first is what I see right above the door here, share the road because they have no cars.
They literally have horses and buggies, as other Amish communities do.
They don't have buttons in their clothing.
They have eyes and hooks.
Here are drills in the shop.
Those are hand-powered drills.
You might see those in some sort of pioneer village somewhere, but here they actually use them.
Here are actual lamps they used, oil lamps to work when it's dark.
There are no light bulbs in this whole shop.
There's no electricity other than, I should say, one small diesel generator that's used to operate some of the serious equipment here.
There is some equipment, and the head of the community showed us how this one diesel generator in that room is connected to so many different things, like this that looks like a jigsaw or some sort of saw here.
So there is some powerful equipment, and this is a shop where they make incredible things.
They make furniture.
They even make some heavier equipment, like that horse sleigh outside.
They said they made 12 of those in one year.
For heat, they have this wood-burning stove.
And he said when they run out of wood here, they'd chop some more from the back.
These are heavier equipment items that are also run off that one generator, a metal bender.
Very serious equipment.
It looks old-fashioned, doesn't it?
It has that old look to it.
This whole place, no electricity at all.
We arranged this meeting by the friend of the community who has a telephone.
They say that if there is some sort of emergency, they go to a neighbor and they do make phone calls, but they don't drive.
They're not on TV.
They're not on the internet.
They don't have cell phones.
There's no electricity.
The heating is by chopping wood and burning it.
There are children playing out back.
I'm not going to show them because we promised not to show any of the people here, especially the kids.
But I can imagine it's a wonderful but unusual life growing up in 21st century Ontario, living like it's the 18th century.
But that is the problem.
Amish Fines and Fine Living00:05:51
Because what happens when you have a public crisis, a kind of madness, as we had in Canada during the COVID pandemic, when so much of it was a moral panic pumped into us from our cell phones?
Let me ask you a question.
If you didn't check the news at all during the COVID crisis, if you didn't have a phone, if you didn't have Anthony Fauci or Teresa Tam chirping in your ear that you're going to die, if all you had to go by were your own eyes and ears living life, not the propaganda, but just what you observed, would you have believed we were in a pandemic?
I asked the leader of this community if anyone here got seriously sick or died, God forbid, from COVID.
And he said, not one of them.
They didn't get jabbed either.
It's against their religious beliefs.
They weren't wearing masks.
They lived normally.
And I put it to you that everyone on this farm eating naturally, food they grow, food they make, not refined seed oils or preservatives.
The people here are much healthier than the city folks who shut themselves off from exercise and from the world and panic during the pandemic.
People here are fit.
They're working all the time.
They're in nature.
They're in the outdoors.
They talk about farm to fork.
It's the same place.
And yet, this is the community that has been slapped with $394,000 in fines for what?
For not using the ArriveCan app when they cross the border.
The ArriveCan app, which you put on your smartphone.
But they don't have smartphones.
They don't have cell phones.
They don't have cars.
They don't have electricity.
They don't have telephones.
They have nothing to download an app to.
They don't know what apps are.
Imagine crossing the border again and again because there's an Amish community on the other side of the border going back and forth and every time getting a $5,000 or $6,000 fine from the government because the Amish didn't download an app.
Only the government could be so stupid.
Here, let's go inside.
I feel like the Amish have never heard a flea.
In fact, that's one of the reasons why they've been persecuted over the centuries is because they're pacifists.
They're the kind of people who, if you punch them, they will not punch you back.
But what happens when the government punches them, when the government treats them unfairly, when the government takes advantage of them, when the government is so stupid that the government says you must download the ArriveCan app on your cell phone when these folks don't use cell phones, they don't use email or the internet.
In fact, they don't even use telephones.
There is no electricity on this property other than that one generator to operate the machine in the mill.
Well, what happens is the community that turns the other cheek does so for years.
And before you know it, there's almost $400,000 in fines just because they're going back and forth across to the States to visit the Amish communities there for family reasons, for health reasons, to go on dates with other Amish, we heard.
Now, try collecting on these folks.
The collections agencies usually make telephone calls.
It doesn't work here.
But what they've done is they put liens on the property.
None of the farm houses or farms that are associated with people who didn't download the app can be bought or sold.
None of them can be transferred from father to son.
The government of Ontario, using the excuse of the government of Canada's ArriveCan app, has frozen this community.
And we heard that there are other Amish communities around Ontario who have had the same thing done to them.
For all we know, there are hundreds of Amish farmers who cannot buy or sell their property, cannot get a mortgage or a loan against it because of this stupid ArriveCan app that we now know was full of malware and spyware and was really just a way of shoveling tens of millions of dollars to Trudeau's friends.
I need your help to fix this.
And what's so strange is I cannot stand beside any of the Amish on whose behalf I'm asking because they will not appear on camera.
So on their behalf, I would ask you to do three things.
Go to the website, helptheamish.com, A-M-I-S-H, that's how you spell Amish.
Sign our petition to stop this madness.
We'll deliver it to Doug Ford and help us fight legally.
I don't know what Doug Ford is going to say when he sees this.
Maybe he's so committed to bullying anyone who made a COVID action he didn't like that he says, we're going to go after the Amish and teach them a lesson.
Yeah, what lesson is that other than how angry and punitive and foolish the government can be?
Believe me, the Amish already know.
Sign our petition at helptheamish.com and chip in to Adam Blake Gallipo.
By the way, all donations go to the Democracy Fund, a registered Canadian charity, so you'll actually get a charitable tax receipt for it.
Go to helptheamish.com.
We're going to start fighting back for these folks.
Now, it's going to be difficult because this omelet is already scrambled.
They have been convicted because they didn't go to court.
They have had the liens put on their farms because no one told them.
So we have to get a judge to undo a lot of terrible wrongs.
It's going to be a difficult battle, but if we don't do it, who will?