Ezra Levant critiques Canada’s 43-day trial of Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, dismissing the Crown’s reliance on five 15-second Facebook clips and vague "conspiracy" charges like "hold the line" as flimsy. Judge Perkins McVeigh’s shift toward defense arguments signals skepticism, yet Levant warns against overreading judicial cues. The convoy protests—centered on Lich’s crowdfunding and logistics—were lawful, yet prosecutors target her under political pressure, stalling other cases. Her defense team, including Lawrence Greenspawn and Eric Granger, excels despite limited resources, framing the trial as a pivotal battle against government overreach, with helptamara.com rallying support to defend free speech and protest rights. [Automatically generated summary]
And I got to tell you, the prosecution has nothing.
It's August 20th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Ezra Levant here.
I am back in Ottawa, back at the courthouse, back for another day of the trial of Tamara Leach, the leader of the truckers and her co-accused, Chris Barber.
I think this is like day 43 or something.
It is by far the longest running mischief trial in Canadian history and indeed the entire Commonwealth.
It's not that complicated a case.
Mischief is the most minor crime in the criminal code.
It's the kind of thing typically used for vandalism where kids messing around.
Usually a judge just says, don't you do that again.
I don't want to see you in my court again.
And it's over.
But you see, it's just the pretense of a trial.
This is actually the punishment itself.
The process is the punishment.
The government is so determined to destroy the reputation of the leader of the truckers that they've thrown the book at her.
This is literally the second team of prosecutors they've deployed against her.
The first team was led by Moise Karimji, an out-of-control, vendetta-driven Liberal Party donor.
That is bad to have as a prosecutor, bad for justice, and it turned out bad for the government itself.
They replaced the prosecutor on the eve of trial because he was just so damned irritating.
Even the judge was sick of him.
So you have the B team in there now.
And when I say the B team, part of me is sympathetic because they were handed this case that just makes no sense.
You don't prosecute a mischief trial with millions of dollars of resources.
Last time I was here last week, I asked Edward, sorry, excuse me, Lawrence Greenspawn, the leader of the three defense lawyers for Tamara Leach.
I asked him to estimate how much money the government has spent going after Tamara Leach.
And between the prosecutors, the court system, and the police, he said it was between $5 and $10 million.
So obviously the decision is being made at a higher level.
No prosecutor would say, yeah, I'm going to put aside assault cases, robberies, rapes, and focus on a mischief case from two and a half years ago.
That's a political decision, not a legal decision.
And in that way, it's obviously an abuse of process.
It's a shame.
And by the way, although it was Justin Trudeau's Emergencies Act, it's Doug Ford's Provincial Attorney General that's calling the shots behind this prosecution.
So shame on them as well.
Anyhow, here's what I'm going to be doing.
I'm going to be live tweeting from the courtroom today.
I've done this before.
Other colleagues at Rebel News have done this the whole time.
We also have the Democracy Fund has a lawyer here live tweeting.
His name is Mark Joseph, Senior Counsel.
Between him and the rest of the Democracy Fund, they've been live tweeting this entire trial as well.
One of the reasons for that is the Democracy Fund, a registered civil liberties charity, is crowdfunding the legal defense.
I told you that the government is spending between $5 and $10 million going after Tamara Leach.
It won't surprise you to learn that to defend against that much resources, manpower, police, informants, etc., you need a good legal team.
And Lawrence Greenspawn and his two deputies are excellent lawyers.
Not cheap, though.
In fact, I don't think that anyone would be in a position to fight against that much government.
If you were a person of ordinary means, there's no way you could muster the half a million dollars it would take to hire a three-man top criminal defense team.
But if you were very wealthy, you wouldn't do it either.
If you spent your entire life building up a life savings of a million dollars or more, you would not blow it all on a defense of a mischief file.
You would just plead guilty, take the wrap on your knuckles.
I mean, Tamara Leach has already done 49 days in jail.
There's no way the penalty if she's convicted will be more than that.
So if you're poor or regular, you would never be able to hire a top defense team.
And if you're wealthy, you never would choose to do so only through the phenomenon of crowdfunding, is it possible?
And that's what the Democracy Fund has done.
We have asked thousands of people who watch Rebel News to chip in $10, $100, whatever, and go to helptamera.com.
That's actually a donation to the Democracy Fund, so you get a charitable tax receipt.
And together, enough people do that, we can hire this top-notch team.
Hopefully, we'll be able to scrum the legal team either during the lunch break or after trial today.
Lawrence Greenspawn isn't just a great lawyer.
He's a natural teacher.
And one of the things I like best about this trial is how he has won over people from the media, even people, for example, at the CBC or Canadian press who would not normally be sympathetic to Tamara Leach and the truckers.
They can see in Lawrence Greenspawn one of Canada's leading criminal defense minds.
And when he says something, they know he's not saying it for partisan reasons.
I assume he's a liberal, as most people in the criminal defense bar are, but he's an honest expert.
And I think he really has won the respect not just of the gallery and the media, but of the judge as well.
When I was here last week, there was some argument between the judge and the prosecutors over a particular case from 14 years ago and what it meant.
And Lawrence Greenspawn, Tamara Leach's lawyer, piped up and said, Your Honor, that was my case that I ran as a lawyer.
So he truly is an expert.
He has a good rapport with this judge.
I think he has the respect of the judge.
Based on what I saw last week, I think the judge is losing patience with the prosecution.
But you don't want to read too much into just the judge's demeanor because, of course, in the end, they make the decision based on facts and law.
This judge, Perkins McVeigh is her name, is 15 years at the bench.
So she's a seasoned judge.
She's not a neophyte, and neither is she so old that maybe she's having Joe Biden moments.
I think she's at the top of her profession.
I'm hopeful, as I mentioned to you before, this is the same judge that presided over the trial of Vice Admiral Mark Norman, which was abandoned when the prosecution revealed it had engaged in prosecutorial misconduct, not handing over key files to the defense.
So this judge, of all the judges in Ottawa, knows that prosecutions and governments can lie, can abuse the system, and that is so useful to have in the trial of Tamara Leach.
Anyways, enough from me.
I'm going to go into the court.
I'm actually going to wait for Tamara Leach to arrive and her lawyers.
They typically come in, I don't know, about 20 minutes before the trial begins.
Then I'll be in the trial live tweeting on my Twitter feed, which is simply my name, Ezra Levant.
During the lunch break, I'll film a little video update, and I'll do so afterwards.
I'll be here all day.
I'm going to try and nab Mark Joseph for a little interview.
And same with Lawrence Greenspawn if he's available.
I would like you to help Tamara Leach, though, because it is atrocious that she has been put through this extraordinarily long prosecution.
And you can help her at helptamara.com.
Thanks.
Well, we're on a lunch break.
We're here at the trial of Tamara Leach.
I think it's day 43, closing arguments by the defense.
And joining us now to talk about what we saw today is Mark Joseph, senior litigation lawyer at the Democracy Fund, the charity that is crowdfunding the lawyers for Tamara Leach Marshall.
Mark, how you doing today?
Good, good.
Thanks for having me.
Well, of course.
And you've been here for the long haul between you and your colleague Adam Blake Gallup who I think you've covered literally every single day.
That's the first thing I want to talk about.
This is exhausting.
And you and I are just observers, let alone being the lawyers at Standing Up or Tamara Leach herself.
Give me a thought about the fact that we're, you know, such an extraordinarily long trial.
Sure.
Well, I mean, it's day 43.
I think TDF has been here every day doing live coverage.
So as you've mentioned, I don't know if there's been another Mr. Child that's gone 43 days, but certainly a significant amount of judicial resources have been devoted to this trial.
And, you know, I wonder who's making that decision, but that's not my call.
Crown's Illicit Argument00:12:11
You know, there's a comment made by, I think it was Eric Granger, one of the three lawyers for Tamara Leach, who said that not a single witness for the prosecution, and there was a lot of them, had any evidence of Tamara Leach in terms of observing her, having communication with her, having any interaction with her.
I thought that was an astonishing thing to say.
There was no objection from the Crown prosecutors or the judge.
This is, you know, here we are 43 days into a trial, and there wasn't one single person who said, I saw her do something bad.
I saw her do this.
I heard her.
She told me it was caught on surveillance camera.
In fact, the only video footage they have is when she turned herself in peacefully when they were arresting her, she turned around and left them handcuffed.
I find it shocking that there's no evidence.
You have a trial of this length, and there was no evidence other than trying to divine some cryptic meanings in her Facebook posts when she says hold the line.
Right.
So it's a difficult burden that the Crown has to meet.
And they have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the requisite mensra in the act of streus, the subjective intent of the accused and the actual conduct.
And that's where the rubber hits the road on all of these charges.
And so Mr. Granger rightly pointed out that there is no evidence before the court with sufficient specificity about those legal elements.
And all of those have to be established before a conviction can be rendered.
So I think the Crown probably will return to that reply.
They have to have something to say.
You know, I was here for a day last week when the Crown prosecutors were putting their final arguments.
And it was quite noticeable to me how often the judge was interrupting the prosecutors.
Sometimes it was sort of nitpicky.
Other times it was large objections.
She was correcting them.
Sometimes she knew the case law better than them and she would say so.
And I thought, boy, she's interrupting a lot.
Maybe she's just, that's just her style.
And the answer is it seems to be, because today the judge was interrupting the defense lawyers a lot.
But here's the key difference.
When I was here last week, every interruption of the Crown was to correct, to criticize, to object, to distinguish.
But today, every interruption that I can think of was to agree, to emphasize, to add her own ammunition to it.
Like repeatedly, for example, the judge said, it's not against the law to go to Ottawa.
It's not all against the law to call for the end of COVID mandates.
It's not against the law to be on Parliament Hill.
Like the judge didn't need to say any of that, but she was chiming in, chiming in, chiming in.
I know you can't read too much into these things, but holy smokes, seemed pretty apparent, the difference to me.
Look, you're probably right, but I've tried to read the tea leaves before on judges' comments, and I've been wrong.
So I think it's a, you know, a lawyer's loath to do that.
But you could be right.
She did seem to be, she's always engaged.
First up, that's her MO.
But she seemed to agree with Mr. Granger more than perhaps she did with the Crown.
But again, I could be wrong.
It sure, I mean, I have not been here for an enormous amount of time like you have.
So these things are maybe more striking to me.
Maybe it's how the judge is an active listener.
She's always, you know, some people take notes.
The fact that she's chatting with the lawyers shows, like you say, very attentive.
But it was just remarkable to me how different she was in her interactions.
Here is something that I thought was a very illuminating moment.
And I don't want to get too technical, but what the prosecution is clearly trying to do is hang around Tamara Leach's neck and also her co-accused Chris Barber, the sins of every single person who was in Ottawa that day.
Even though clearly there was the Freedom Convoy 2022, like it was actually a legal incorporation.
They had lawyers and they had like a staff.
They were trying to hang around Tamara Leach's neck any sin committed in Ottawa.
And, you know, they were saying, well, when she said we, Tamara Leach would sometimes make a Facebook video and say, we are going to hold the line.
We, we, we hold the line.
She wants to know what my response would be if I get arrested.
What's the response?
Hold the line, hold the line.
And the prosecution is trying to stretch that to say, well, that covers everything.
The judge chimed in and said, if I say to the clerk, we're going upstairs, we can mean something very small.
Again, I think she was sort of illuminating the problem of if you don't have any direct evidence, trying to look into some hidden meaning when someone says hold the line or we this, we that.
Boy, if that's all they got, that feels weak.
Right.
So I think one of the problems for the crown, just from outside looking in, is the crown doesn't have the smoking gun here about what Miss Leach was thinking or was doing.
So she wasn't, I don't think, around physically the protest much.
She wasn't actually blocked, physically blocked.
She didn't have her truck, for example.
How could she block a road?
She did not have a truck.
That's right.
That was a point that Mr. Granger made.
So there's no big moment where Miss Leach necessarily physically interfered or even counseled a lot of violent or obstructing conduct.
So what the Crown has to do then is build their case circumstantially.
So they have to revert to little pieces of evidence.
And one of those pieces of evidence they refer to is the use of pronouns, we.
They say that connects her with the actions of the protesters.
And there was some pushback from the court, I think, and Mr. Granger pointed out that there's different interpretation for the use of we.
That's an obvious point to make.
And I think the Crown's going to have to do more than that in their reply to address it, for sure.
There's one more thing I want to mention.
I was in Lethbridge, Alberta, for a few days of the hearings in the Couts III case and the Coots IV case.
These are the truckers and farmers who blocked the road between Alberta and Montana.
And they're facing charges in the case of the Coots IV, some very serious charges, conspiracy to commit murder.
Now, the jury has acquitted on that most senior charge.
But conspiracy just means a plan to commit murder is the awful crime.
So it's unlawful.
It's a crime to have a conspiracy to commit a crime.
But here's what they chatted about just before the lunch break today is conspiracy to come to Ottawa, conspiracy to have trucks in Ottawa, conspiracy to protest, conspiracy to stay on Parliament Hill.
Conspiracy, yeah, means a plan that they're trying to organize, but none of those underlying things were a crime.
And so the judge asked the defense lawyer, Lawyer, are you aware of any other case where someone is charged with an offense like this, where the means of doing something was the crime, but the actual purpose itself was not.
As in, is it even a crime if you conspire together to do something lawful?
And no one could think of such a case before.
I just thought that was such a clever point.
And again, the judge is chiming in.
What do you think at that moment?
I don't know if I explained it very well, but basically, the word was, if you have a secret plan to do something totally legal, what are we doing here in court?
Right.
No, I think you've done a great job explaining it, Ezra.
The problem for the Crown is that the common, the purpose here wasn't unlawful.
It was to get together to pressure the government to end the mandates.
Usually in a conspiracy case, as the judge noted, it's like murder or sort of a mob drug conspiracy or something like that.
So obviously the purpose there is unlawful, and then the means follow that unlawful purpose.
The problem, as you say, is the purpose was perfectly fine.
You can petition your government to do things all you like as long as you protest peacefully and lawfully.
So I think the shocking part for me was when the court just asked straight out, is there any case law on this point?
And the answer from Mr. Granger was, I've not been able to find any.
And certainly the Crown, they would have led with that case if it existed.
So I never like to be in a position as a lawyer where I don't have case law that helps my case.
That's always a problem because then you're making new law and making new law is very difficult, as you probably know.
Yeah, judges want to follow the precedent.
That's really the basis of our system.
There's one last thing I want to run by you, and it's related.
During the convoy itself, you sometimes heard politicians like Trudeau did this a lot and what I call the regime media calling it an illegal convoy, an illegal protest, an illegal occupation.
They always said the word illegal.
Families, small businesses have been enduring illegal obstruction of their neighborhoods.
But those things are not illegal just because someone says they are.
They have to be determined illegal through a court, or I suppose under the Riot Act, a police can determine a certain manifestation illegal for that moment if you don't skedaddle.
I think there might be some extreme cases where a policeman can declare some, like a riot, an unlawful gathering.
That didn't happen here.
My point is, every single time you hear Trudeau or the CBC saying illegal occupation, illegal protests, illegal convoy, that's just not true.
And my theory is this, and again, I'm just engaging in some speculation.
If you've got the political and media class, the CBC liberal industrial complex, calling this trucker gathering illegal a million times, and then you say to the prosecutors, hey, guys, go prosecute them for their illegal stuff.
And the prosecutors said, well, well, yeah, you've been saying they're illegal, but as we've just discussed, it's not illegal to protest.
It's not even illegal to honk.
I think that the rhetoric of the politicians was so overheated, and these prosecutors were given the unhappy task of catching up to the overheated rhetoric, but there's nothing there.
I think these prosecutors, I don't know them at all, obviously, but I got to think that they would rather be doing something else, something that's more in the public interest, something that gives them a greater likelihood of conviction.
There are some very serious crimes that are being let go because of delay, because court resources are limited.
I think that Trudeau sort of tried to speak into effect, this is an illegal gathering.
And what we're finding out in this hearing is, no, it ain't.
Even if you say it is, you got to prove it's illegal, and that hasn't happened.
Right.
Look, it's hard for me to speculate as to the motives behind the prosecution or what the Crown would rather do.
I do agree that some cases should be prioritized over others.
This is more serious stuff like sex assaults, aggravate assaults and murders obviously should be at the top of that hierarchy.
But I will say that the narrative spin that politicians put on something is different than the words used by the Crown in a criminal trial.
And I think there was some pushback early on in this case where the Crown started to use words like illegal occupation, illegal protest, and the defense rightly pushed back on that and said, there's been no evidence of that before the court at this point.
And we're here to prove or defend against specific charges.
That language isn't appropriate.
I think if I can recall, Justice Perkins McBay admonished the Crown that they're not to use inflammatory language, and they haven't.
Well, I don't want to let my hopes get too high.
I don't want to read too much into the tea leaves about, you know, Kremlinology.
Oh, the judge said this.
Feeling Optimistic But Realistic00:02:57
The judge smiled here.
The judge frowned there.
You don't want to get too caught up in that.
It's what the law says.
It's how the judge weighs the evidence, puts it into all the boxes in the law.
This is a very senior judge, 15 years a judge.
So I think she's at the top of her profession.
Clearly smart, manages to keep her attention up despite the fact it's going on so long.
I don't want to let my hopes get too high because whenever I do, I wind up in disappointed.
But I feel good about this.
I feel great about the legal team.
I love to see them in action.
I feel like Lawrence Greenspawn and I think Granger, I think his first name is Ed Granger.
I'm not sure his first name.
The number two, and then there's a third.
I feel like they're really good criminal lawyers.
And I just have a good feeling.
Even if there's an acquittal, though, boy, they turned the process into the punishment.
I bet you Tamara Leach is just looking forward to having this whole thing in the rearview mirror.
Yeah, look, I think everyone involved in the process is a bit tired.
And like you, I remain optimistic.
She has an excellent legal team, Eric Granger, Lawrence Greenspawn, and their clerks and their support staff have been on the ball.
No point has been missed.
They've made relevant submissions.
So I can say I'm optimistic, but we have to be realistic that the Crown has unlimited resources and they've thrown everything at this case.
We're day 43.
Hopefully we'll be finished soon, but you never know.
So yeah, we'll see.
Yeah, thanks very much.
I think it's Eric Granger, the name of the number two.
I just forgot it for a moment.
Well, there you have it, Mark Joseph, the senior litigation lawyer at the Democracy Fund, who has been live tweeting and observing this trial since the beginning, trading off with Adam Blake Gallipo, another lawyer for the Democracy Fund.
By the way, Adam is the lawyer covering the Amish case, which I mentioned the other day on Rebel News.
And I encourage you to check that out at helptheamish.com.
But for today, we're here to talk about Tamara Leach.
And if you want to help cover the three wonderful lawyers for Tamara, you can go to helptamara.com.
I say again, over the last few years, I've gotten to know literally dozens of lawyers in this country from coast to coast.
As you know, through the Democracy Fund and Rebel News, we've hired so many lawyers, whether it's Arthur Pavlovsky or the Coots 4, the Coots, or the Coots 3 rather.
Churches across the country, we have dealt with so many lawyers.
And I have to say, I actually told this to Lawrence Greenspawn.
I said, if I'm ever arrested, God forbid, I want him to be my lawyer.
He's that good.
Of all the lawyers I met, I would want him on the file.
He's on Tamara Leach's case.
I'm optimistic.
If you can help us out, go to helptamara.com.
I'll have more for you.
I'll be back live tweeting the afternoon.
Five Controversial Social Clips00:04:31
Well, it's 4.30 and the court is done for the day.
It's such a long trial that it actually interferes with other trials.
So there's going to be a two-day hiatus.
Everyone will be back here on Friday.
That's when Lawrence Greenspawn, the senior of the three defense counsel for Tamara Leach, is expected to make his presentation.
But I have to say, the judge herself said she is still holding open some dates in September for possibly extending the trial then if time is needed.
Just astonishing.
But I suppose nothing should be surprising anymore.
There was an interesting moment there.
I mean, I have not been here every day.
We've had other rebels covering it every day, but the prosecution played five short social media clips in which Tamara Leach was present.
In some of them, she was only present for 15 seconds or so.
And they were all very banal.
In fact, I didn't quite understand the point of them until the defense counsel who played them summed it up.
Like it was just her standing amongst other people saying it was like Canada Day on steroids, I think.
And then another time someone said hold the line and she said hold the line.
I was thinking, why are they playing these five video clips?
And the answer is, that is the totality of evidence this trial has seen about what Tamara Leach actually did during the time of the convoy.
She had some video comments that she made on social media calling for people to be peaceful and calling for donations.
She would have those famous viral Facebook videos, but they were often filmed in a nondescript location.
The only evidence before the court about what Tamara Leach actually did in this city through the whole period of time were those five little clips, not even taken by her.
They were just, she shows up in the background of another clip.
And it was a nothing burger.
There was nothing there.
All of her work that was in the name of the convoy was crowdfunding.
And of course, she did that very well.
She did some logistics work.
She talked about staying peaceful, none of which is a crime in any way.
And that was a point that the defense hammered home, is that there's no evidence of any wrongdoing.
And simply saying, hold the line is so far from a crime that it's such an obvious stretch.
And I think that's the obvious point here.
There's no evidence on Tamara Leach.
They've had months of trials.
They have no evidence.
They had five little social media clips.
They have no evidence.
And yet they pursued it nonetheless.
There's no way that makes sense from a legal point of view.
It's not in the public interest.
I do not believe that there will be a likelihood of conviction.
This is purely a punishment tactic to punish her for daring to defy the establishment and to defame her and through her to defame the trucker convoy.
They thought there would be such a mania in Ottawa that all the judges would go along with convictions.
You know what?
Maybe that would have happened back in 2022.
But it's almost 2025 and I think people have sobered up from the madness of the lockdowns.
And we're starting to see the insanity that was done over the years during the lockdowns and realizing that the government got carried away.
But the prosecutors in this case are still getting carried away.
They're still insisting on going through this.
I just simply don't understand how they can put away so many more important legal matters, criminal matters, aggravated assault, sexual assault.
So many other cases are taking a back seat while these prosecutors and this judge rake over what little there is about Tamara Leach.
I find it astonishing.
Anyways, unfortunately, I can't be back here on Friday for that day, so we'll try and get another rebel here.
Of course, our friend Mark Joseph from the Democracy Fund.
He or others from the Democracy Fund are live tweeting it too.
So we are covering this because we really have a lot at stake here, too.
We have crowdfunded the legal defense for Tamara Leach.
We published her book.
We're fans of hers.
We even went on tour with her.
And we believe that she is important for the same reason that Justin Trudeau thinks she's important.
She personified the best of Canada.
She was the chief newsmaker in the chief news moment of the year of 2022, and I dare say of the generation, calling millions of Canadians to rally peacefully against a tyrannical government.
Sort of amazing, which is why Trudeau wants to knock her out and why we want to protect her.