Ezra Levant warns Canada’s Online Harms Act (Bill C-63) could mirror Brazil’s Twitter censorship, citing a $6B global disinformation crackdown. He details Pastor Artur Pawlowski’s 2022 appeal against a conviction for inciting mischief during Alberta’s border blockade—speech alone, not violence, was criminalized—with legal arguments hinging on misinterpreted Criminal Code sections 430(7) and 429(2). The Democracy Fund, Levant’s crowdfunded defense initiative, faces resource disparities against government lawyers, who outspend them in cases like Chad Williamson’s. A 2025 Alberta Court ruling may set precedent, with potential Supreme Court delays until 2027, underscoring free speech’s fragility under expanding legal definitions of harm. [Automatically generated summary]
I was in Sao Paulo, Brazil for a day and a half, but I learned a lot about freedom and how precarious it is and how governments, in the name of justice, can silence people.
You'll remember when I was down there, a lot of people were talking about the censorship of Twitter.
More than 20 million people in Brazil use that social media app, or at least until they did, until a rogue judge just banned it, just banned it, saying there was misinformation in it.
A lot of people were talking about Elon Musk and hoping he would fight back for them, but the judge isn't bending the knee.
What does that have to do with Canada, you might ask?
Well, everything, I think.
First of all, every would-be tyrant around the world is watching what Brazil is doing and thinking if they can get away with the same thing in the name of misinformation.
That's the new way of saying things I don't like to hear.
Trudeau, as you know, has brought forward Bill C63 called the Online Harms Act that wouldn't censor Twitter as a whole, although there are huge fines in there for the company of Twitter, but would censor individual users like has been done in Brazil as well.
I think that freedom of speech is undone in similar ways, though.
It's never called censorship.
It's always called defending the peace or public health.
And that's the case today.
Arthur Pavlovsky, who we've talked about a hundred times at Rebel News, it's his appeal we're attending today.
Still Defending Peace?00:07:33
See, two and a half years ago, Arthur went down to the Coots border blockade between Alberta and the state of Montana.
It was a small town, but it had a big footprint.
It totally sealed off the border because unlike other blockades in Windsor, the Ambassador Bridge, or in Ottawa, Coutz Alberta is so far away from any large center, there's no local big police force that could sort of push it away.
No tow truck drivers were willing to tow their local community members.
And so that blockade got a lot of attention and it inspired a lot of people.
In fact, broke the back of the lockdown movement in Alberta shortly after the Coutz blockade ended.
Jason Kenney, the premier at the time, announced the end of his vaccine passport scheme, for example.
The police arrested a lot of people down there.
And as you know, the Democracy Fund is defending many of them.
But one of the people they went after was Arthur Pavlovsky, not for blocking the road, but for inspiring the men.
Arthur didn't even spend a full day down there.
He went down for a few hours.
He drove through a police checkpoint with their approval down to Coutz, and he didn't go to the blockade.
He didn't go to the road.
He didn't go to the border itself.
He went to the local saloon where the men had gathered.
That's sort of where they were hanging out and getting their food and drink.
And it was so cold down there.
That's where they stayed warm.
And Arthur got up and he gave an impromptu, I think it was a 17-minute sermon, basically telling his own story about being a freedom-fighting pastor, telling the story about the solidarity movement that was Lech Walenza's freedom-oriented trade union in the Gdańsk shipyard that really lit the fire for the freedom movement in Poland that marked the end of the Soviet bloc.
So Arthur talked about what he learned in Poland.
He talked about that general strike.
He talked about being peaceful, but freedom fighting.
He said three times in his sermon, if I recall, stay peaceful.
It's about time for Canadians to rise up and start roaring.
Let's go!
Let's go!
I'm talking about peaceful resolution.
I'm not talking about guns and swords.
You see, this image, this image right here, it was the most powerful thing I could ever do.
And it went viral all over the world because it showed simply me on my knees on a middle, in the middle of the highway, being taken by SWAT team.
Why?
For inciting people to come to church, participating in illegal church gathering, and officiating a church service?
Who are those people taking down?
But the police reviewed that 17-minute sermon and charged him, charged him with inciting mischief.
And there was a trial in Lethbridge, and we covered it closely, and he was convicted.
And imagine the precedent that sets.
If you can convict someone for a sermon, you could call anything a sermon, I suppose.
If someone says go and commit terrorism, I mean, you might actually have a sermon in a radical mosque saying that, but that's not what Arthur said.
You can watch the video for yourself.
It's on Facebook to this day.
If you simply say hold the line, retake your rights, be peaceful, if anyone could be convicted and jailed for that, there was a jail sentence attended to that, then we're all in trouble, including political commentators and any one of us.
That's how bad it is in Brazil.
And that's the new state of the law in Alberta.
Right now, that is the state of the law, which is why we have come here to the Court of Appeal today.
This isn't actually the normal building for the Court of Appeal, but this is where the hearing is today.
A three-judge panel will review this for two full hours.
And I am hopeful that they will overturn this conviction now that more sober-minded senior judges are looking at it and that our lawyer Sarah Miller is on the case.
It's a two-hour hearing.
There's no new evidence.
There will be no witnesses testifying.
It'll simply be lawyers on both sides showing the judge.
For example, Sarah Miller, Arthur Pavlovsky's lawyer, will show the judge where the lower court made errors and say to these three senior judges, look, you got the law wrong.
You got the facts wrong.
Let's fix it.
And the crown prosecutor is sending a lawyer saying, no, no, no, the lower judge got it right.
This was a proper conviction.
I'm hopeful if Alberta still has any of its Alberta-ness and its freedom-loving nature, that this three-person appeal panel, including former boxer Willie DeWitt, will still stand for freedom.
I can't imagine, I can't imagine a Canada where if you give, where if a pastor gives a sermon to men and repeatedly calls for peaceful protest, that that pastor is jailed.
I just, that is so abnormal.
That was the mania of the times during the lockdown, but surely in the several years since then, we've come to our senses and realized that the state had massive overreach.
I'm sorry, I do not want to live in a country where a Christian pastor is picked off and jailed for saying hold the line.
By the way, show me the last time a Muslim Imam was arrested for actually inciting violence.
Hasn't happened in Canadian history.
Anyways, this is my commentary before I go into the courts.
I will be live tweeting today.
I've spoken with Sarah Miller, Arthur's lawyer.
She's agreed to do an interview after the hearing.
If we see Arthur himself, we'll talk to him too.
This is an important battle for Rebel News viewers.
We have been supporting Arthur really since the very first day of the lockdowns.
I remember he was client number one of what we then called the Fight the Fines campaign.
He was the very first person we decided to help when he was pushed around and given a ticket for feeding the hungry homeless in the streets of Calgary.
Remember that video?
This is the video that started it all.
A Christian pastor in the cold handing out food to the indigent and police coming and saying, hey, this is an illegal gathering.
Take a look at this.
are providing necessities of life to those that you and your bosses refuse to provide.
Can you guys do respect yourself?
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
I need eight feet.
Stand back.
Okay?
Or what?
Stand back.
Hey, guys.
Do not tell him not to shut away.
Six feet away for everybody.
That's for everybody.
That video caused me to phone up Arthur and say, let me crowdfund your legal defense.
And soon we had another pastor who was prosecuted for the same thing.
And then we had 50 cases and then 100.
And then the Democracy Fund was created and to this day has helped 3,000 people.
But we're still here for client number one, who is actually in some ways being the most pesky of the clients because he just won't obey edicts.
I guess that's the Polish nature in him.
He's a contrarian.
He's a dissident.
And he doesn't shut up just because the government tells him to.
That's a tough road to follow.
Democracy Fund has gone on to defend other people too, including Tamara Leach.
I'll be in Ottawa for her trial again on Friday, if you can imagine.
So here we are years after the trucker convoy, and we're still fighting the legal battles emanating therefrom.
But I think as Martin Luther King Jr. said, the arc of the universe, the moral arc, bends towards freedom.
It just takes a very long time.
Legal Arguments Clarified00:13:40
I'll catch up with you after the hearing.
Well, the two-hour court of appeal hearing for the case of Arthur Pavlovsky's conviction for inciting mischief by giving a sermon down at the Coutts border crossing two and a half years ago is concluded.
And standing with me now to talk about it, in her finest barrister's robes, is my friend Sarah Miller, one of the two lawyers who is representing Arthur and the Democracy Fund in the court.
Sarah, great to see you.
Thank you, Ezra.
Nice to see you as well.
I sat in different courts around the country and indeed around the world, and different judges have different styles.
The three Court of Appeal judges today were very interactive.
I'd almost call it a banter.
You came ready to make presentations, but I think most of your time was just spent answering questions, wasn't it?
Yeah, that's right.
And usually that's what counsel prefer.
Lots of questions from the bench means we get to answer what they want to talk about and engage with them rather than, you know, reread our submissions.
Right.
I mean, especially at this level of court, when you're dealing with senior, serious people, they will have read your written submissions before.
And they don't need you just to read them like a bedtime story.
So they've been thinking of quarrels and you want to hear that.
You want to address that.
That's right.
Yeah, exactly.
So you were there with your colleague, Evan Best.
Tell me the essential, but first, before I get into the arguments, just for our viewers who may not have a legal background, an appeal is not a retrial.
A peer isn't a do-over.
Appeal isn't a do-over.
It's saying to senior judges, the lower judge got this wrong based on what was in front of him.
Tell me exactly what an appeal is.
I know that sounds like a basic question, but we should just get that right before we proceed.
Yeah, so exactly as you said, it's not a retrial, but it's on the appellant to identify where there was errors.
Usually in law, that's the most common or the easiest to present.
There can be errors of fact, but those are very difficult to have overturned or mixed fact and law.
But the appeal is to identify specific errors that can be overturned.
There's a case at a Supreme Court of Canada, Houston, and Nick Layson, that set out when errors can be overturned and on what basis they can be overturned.
And so there really has to be an error that is appealable and can be overturned by the Court of Appeal in order to proceed on an appeal.
And I want to make one more clarification.
You tell me if I'm wrong.
I haven't practiced law in a long time, so my memory may be fuzzy on this.
A judge is allowed to get things wrong to a certain degree.
All the judges don't have to agree.
There's different standards of review, right?
Some are, you know, was it, was a judge patently wrong, like just absurd, which is a very, he has to get it super duper wrong.
Others is sort of, what would the standard be for overturning a judge?
Because you don't want to, you want to allow judges to have different points of view.
And there is some gray area when you have clashing values.
What would be the legal standard to overturn a trial judge who heard the whole case?
What would these three appeal judges have to find?
How bad would the lower court have had to get it?
So based on the arguments that we were presenting, we argued that specifically a section of the criminal code was misinterpreted and misapplied by the lower court or sections of the criminal code, I should say.
And so that interpretive exercise, according to Elisa Court and Dooling, which is one of the cases we cited, is on the basis of correctness, that you have to interpret Section 430 sub 7 correctly.
So there's no wiggle room on that one.
Right.
No wiggle room on that one.
There are other standards.
They wouldn't have been applicable in our case because we're arguing a statutory interpretation exercise only.
So that exercise has to be done correctly.
There were some very detailed, specific legal arguments.
I found it almost difficult to keep up.
But you were talking about a couple of sections in the criminal code, section 429.2 and section 430 sub 7.
Now, already I can feel through the TV lens people's eyes glazing over, but those are built in defenses right there in the criminal code.
Tell me what they say.
I think they were mentioned enough that I could probably do it, but tell me, what was 430 and 429 sections of the criminal code, and how do they apply to Arthur's case?
So Section 430 sub 7 says that if you've committed mischief by way of solely communicating information at a place, by attending on a place and communicating information, then that's what Section 430 sub 7 says, is that that would not be mischief because communication of information would be exempt or that would provide a defense or the essential elements would not be made out because you have to show something more than communicating information.
So that's Section 430 sub 7.
Section 429 sub 2 says that if you act with legal justification, then you are not guilty of committing mischief.
So Section 429 sub 2, legal justification has been interpreted by the courts, but not in the way that we've suggested.
It's a bit of a new issue.
So Section 429 sub 2, we say a legal justification is the exercise of your charter rights.
Now, it's interesting because I think I heard you mention the case, Tromblay.
And I was in Ottawa recently for the trial of Tamara Leach for something very similar here, inciting mischief in the Ottawa Convoy.
And the lead lawyer that the Democracy Fund has retained there is Lawrence Greenswan, very senior counsel.
And he actually was a lawyer who litigated Tromblay.
And it was a goofy story.
He told me about it afterwards.
He said there was a quarrel between two neighbors.
And one neighbor wrote on his own truck, don't blame me for your housing problems and parked it right.
And that sort of created a problem for the other homeowner who was trying to sell his house.
Like, it was a real feud between two neighbors.
But weirdly, the police charged the neighbor with sort of the homemade sign.
And incredibly, he was convicted before going to appeal.
So, first of all, that's a crazy story.
But second of all, that, you know, how it's a crime to merely communicate something, as Greenspawn said in Ottawa, everything we say is communicated for a purpose other than maybe our own diary.
So surely going to Couts to talk about religion and politics and freedom and things like that, surely that is permissible communication.
That's what Greenspawn was arguing in Ottawa, and it looked like the judges had a lot of time for it.
How do these arguments go over today?
Well, we don't know.
They reserved a decision, so we'll see.
You know, we did have a lot of questions about how this analytical framework should go.
And we're operating in a situation where there has been no court of appeal to tell us how inciting mischief should be interpreted, what the essential elements are, whether these defenses apply to inciting mischief.
And we'll see what the court does with it.
They have time now to sit with it and decide what to do with it.
I got a real kick out of seeing Willie DeWitt on the bench.
I'm old enough to remember when he was a boxing champ.
And then I was at U of A Law School when he started to attend there.
And it was sort of funny to see this big guy going around in law school because we all thought of him as a boxer.
And here he is on the Court of Appeal, which is a very senior position.
I got a kick out of that.
Now, the Crown Prosecution who was there to say, no, no, don't overturn this judge, he got it right.
He said, if we exempt communication from crime, then you'll never be.
He tried to give the example of, I think, a bank robber saying, hand over your money.
Now, the judges quickly swatted that down.
But what do you make of his larger point?
That if every communication is exempt by reason of the Charter of Rights, that's going to wipe out a whole bunch of criminal law.
Now, maybe a libertarian would say, good.
But what do you make?
That was a point that the prosecution tried to make several times, is warning, judge, do not allow free speech to become a defense or that's going to wipe out a lot of criminal sections in the code.
I thought that was an interesting point, probably a predictable point.
What do you have to say to that?
So Section 430 sub-7 only applies to Section 430.
And I did make this point in court is that it's got a very narrow application.
It's not going to wipe out a whole swack of activity that we would otherwise consider criminal.
It's only going to wipe out that very small and narrow amount where we're talking about mischiefs, right?
Whether you're a party or a principal of mischief, you're causing mischief, you're inciting mischief.
It's only going to capture that mischief.
It's not going to capture everything else.
Now, with respect to Section 429, sub 2, legal justification, again, it's got a fairly narrow application, broader than Section 430, sub-7, but a narrower application.
And so what this court is going to have to really deal with, and I think this is what the court was having a hard time with today, is figuring out what that analytical framework looks like.
And that's not an easy task for this court to come up with.
And by analytical framework, you mean how does the court, how does a judge handle this confusing problem?
Here's a guy saying, no, no, this is my expressive right, but he was encouraging perhaps people to do mischief.
I mean, this is something I see on our streets every day.
I think it goes far beyond mischief.
I see trespass.
I see uttering threats.
talking about the pro-Hamas street protests.
I'm shocked by some of the things I say.
I haven't seen prosecutions of them or jailings of them the way I see it for this Christian pastor here.
You know, it feels like a two-tier justice, but maybe you're right.
Maybe the judges need a rule of thumb, like a, here's a five-step test to follow if someone is claiming that their mischief was political expression.
Is that what you're saying by legal analytical framework?
Yes, that's exactly it.
Like, how do you look at this section and how do you apply it?
And what are the parameters about it, right?
What are the limits?
How far does it take us?
And just because I'm here, you know, not everybody, you know, it's the some of what you suggested was, well, there's not other charges being laid against other people who might be engaged in similar behavior.
I do just want to warn about that, taking that analysis too far, because it's the same analysis as, well, if I speed on Deerfoot and get caught, but somebody else is speeding on Deerfoot and they weren't caught, like, should I have less moral culpability?
And that's not what this is about.
We just want the rule of law and we want the Court of Appeal to tell us how this, how this should be interpreted and where we should go from here.
And to help counsel who are representing accused at trials and help trial judges to figure out what does section 429 sub 2 mean?
What does section 430 sub 7 mean?
What are its parameters?
How do you apply it?
When do you consider it?
And that's what we're asking the court to do.
You know, all this started crazily based on, I think it was a 17-minute video that Arthur himself must have taken because he posted it to his own Facebook page.
It was a typical Arthur sermon.
Rambunctious, energetic, a little bit over the top, talking about freedom in Poland where he's from originally, using colorful language that is bracing, no doubt about it.
The idea that a guy goes to give a sermon in a saloon, he drives in, gives a sermon, and he drives.
He didn't blockade.
He didn't stay down there.
There was no place to stay.
The idea that that can be a crime prosecuted.
And he got a jail sentence out of it too.
He got time served.
But I find that a little bit scary because what's the difference between a sermon?
It's about time for Canadians to rise up and start roaring.
Let's go.
Let's go.
I'm talking about peaceful resolution.
I'm not talking about guns and swords.
You see, this image, this image right here, it was the most powerful thing I could ever do.
And it went viral all over the world because it showed simply me on my knees on a middle, in the middle of the highway, being taken by SWAT team.
Why?
For inciting people to come to church, participating in illegal church gathering and officiating a church service?
Who are those people taking down?
Versus, let's say, a political commentary that I do on Twitter or video.
Like, if you could, if anyone who's saying, go get him, guys, hold the line.
If that is a crime, you know, as Lavrenti Beria of the former Soviet secret police said, show me the man and I'll find you the crime.
Because if that's the crime, I can get anyone.
It's just a matter of who I choose.
Challenging Free Speech Limits00:13:20
That's a little nerve-wracking to me.
Yeah, and that was the very initial part of our submissions was, you know, these words in their context can give a lot of other meanings, right?
And doesn't need to require inciting mischief.
Like, that's not the default analysis when you watch that 19-minute video.
You know, when I watched it, I thought, well, this is, you know, just calling for a gathering of people, calling for people not to work.
It's not obviously the trial judge saw it differently, but ultimately, even if it is inciting mischief, Section 430 sub-7, Section 429-Sub 2 should hopefully provide some parameters to that to say, okay, well, maybe that is, strictly speaking, inciting mischief, but you're expressing yourself.
You're not doing anything physically to interfere with the property, physically to interfere with the highway in this case.
So, so you have that defense available to you.
And that's what we're hoping the Court of Appeal will say eventually.
You know, it's September 2024.
These events happened in February 2022.
So we're two and a half years into it, and we're not even done.
Like, it wouldn't surprise me if these, I mean, maybe they'll get their ruling out before Christmas, but this is a heavy matter that they're obviously engaged in, and they could be drafting this new analytical framework, as you call it.
And that will affect many cases.
And given that this is the Court of Appeal, it'll be binding in Alberta and persuasive in other provinces.
There's a chance it could be appealed to the Supreme Court.
So this is heavy stuff.
I think it's going to take them a while.
I mean, it's a fool's errand to try and guess when we'll know the result.
Do you think we'll get it before the new year?
I mean, of course, I really want the decision to come before the new year.
I'm very interested from a rule of law perspective as to what the Court of Appeal is going to say about these issues.
It really, I think it will really inform how police, how prosecutors, how trial counsel, how trial courts interpret a lot of important case law on protesting and mischief.
But that's why the Court of Appeal has to take their time and do it right.
So of course I want it to come before Christmas.
You know, I would be great to know what they're doing.
I don't know the backlog in the Court of Appeal in Alberta is all I'm saying.
I don't know how long it typically takes them.
Yeah, sometimes you get decisions quite quickly.
Sometimes it takes them a while.
And in this case, they need to do it right and they don't have a lot of other cases kind of guiding them.
So I think it's going to take some time.
It must be scary to be a court of appeal judge trying to come up with new rules of interpretation because a lot hangs on it.
It's not just a heavy thing.
I'm going to go ahead and predict that the ruling from this court won't be out until 2025, which will mark nearly three years.
And like I say, that's not necessarily the end of it.
Either side could theoretically appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Then they have to decide whether or not they even hear it.
And then they have to schedule that hearing.
This could theoretically stretch into 2026.
What do you think?
Oh, absolutely.
If there is a split bench, so meaning two to one on the Court of Appeal, I imagine that whether that goes in favor of Crown or defense, that it will be appealed.
That the counsel on either side of that losing equation would appeal.
So if that's the circumstance and we're going to Supreme Court of Canada and then we have to wait for a hearing of Supreme Court of Canada, we could be into 2027 before this is finally determined and over.
Five years.
And, you know, it's been a labor of love.
Rebel News has crowdfunded a lot of litigation, not just Arthur, but out east, we're crowdfunding Tamara Leach's trial.
I'm going back out there on Friday for the last, that's like 44, 45 days of hearings now.
And I'm sure the Crown out there will appeal if they lose.
Like you say, either side will.
The reason I say that is these are the spectacular cases, Arthur's case, Tamara Leach's case.
There's been a few other nationally famous cases, but 99.5% of the cases the Democracy Fund has taken are just severely normal people.
$6,000 in Narrive Can find times four family members, 24 grand.
There's no way a normal human could pay for that.
And as I say about these massive cases, a poor person couldn't, and a rich person wouldn't.
A rich person wouldn't take their life savings and spend it on lawyers to fight for freedom.
A rich person would cut their losses.
They would do the math and say, all right, I'm going to pay a fine.
I'm going to cut my losses, and I'm going to live a subdued, humble life of privacy now.
It's only through the unique combination of motivated litigants and crowdfunded dollars that this is possible.
On the one hand, that's a wonderful innovation because I don't think that was really around before the age of the internet.
On the other hand, it's deeply sad to me that the financing of legal liberty in this country is done in $50 and $100 chunks by, frankly, rebel news viewers.
And the great institutions that in the past we've relied on to protect our freedoms have been silent.
That's how I feel about it.
I mean, I love the fact that you guys are in there fighting like hell.
I love the fact that Lawrence Greenspawn's out there with his team in Ottawa, but it makes me a little bit depressed because it shouldn't feel this lonely to fight for freedom.
Yeah, so the Tromblé case that Greenspawn did in the Ontario Court of Appeal, the man with the van on the side of his property, that did have CCLA intervene.
That was 2010.
CCLA did intervene.
It's the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
Yes, they did intervene on the Pavlowski matter the last time we were on Court of Appeal.
Oh, that's good to hear.
I didn't remember that.
Yeah, so they did apply to intervene.
So they're there.
I think there's a real funding issue with respect to civil liberties groups.
I think the Democracy Fund has done an amazing job to make sure that these cases are progressed and that they're dealt with by competent counsel.
And it's an amazing, I've said this to you before, I've said it on different interviews.
It's an amazing initiative for access to justice.
And the reality is that some people are going to take issue with me saying that to say, well, these people are rebel rousers and they're awful and they say bad things.
But that is where we have to be pushing things to the limit to understand where those limits are.
That's where we get the interesting case law.
That's where we get the definitive case law that tells us how to interpret things.
It's where we're pushed to the limit.
Not when you're walking across the street and blocking a car for 10 minutes for an ongoing little march protest, right?
Most of the time, those innocuous things are going to be ignored by police.
But it's these types of cases that allow us to interpret the law and then know how to apply it to the smaller individuals.
Well, almost by definition, mild speech is not censored.
It's the prickly stuff.
And I alluded to it before.
Arthur Pavlovsky is a prickly pear.
I mean, I like the fella, but he can be hot to handle.
And Tamara Leach is just an absolute sweetheart.
I can't find a single critical thing to say about her.
But I think of myself and the trouble I've gotten into over the years.
I think of Mark Stein.
I think of the case that was mentioned today, Bill Watcott, who's an anti-gay activist who hands out flyers.
He's very prickly, and a lot of people are more than just annoyed by him.
My point of saying this is if you are going to defend free speech, almost by definition, you will be defending people who are sometimes impolite or make people uncomfortable.
But those, that's the front line.
It's not going to be the boring weatherman who gets prosecuted.
It's going to be the political commentator.
And, you know, I remember the late Alan Borvoy, who really embodied the spirit of free speech when he was an early leader of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
He said this, and I'll never forget it.
He said, free speech is the gift you have to give to your opponents if you want it for yourself.
And always think if the roles were switched.
Always think, is the precedent you're arguing for, would you be okay with it if it was your speech or your opponent's speech on the other side?
And I don't know.
I feel like what you're doing in there is important.
I want to thank you.
Sarah, you've been the lawyer for Arthur really since the very, he was client number one of the Democracy Fund, by the way.
He was the very first case we took.
Yes, yeah, and it's been great.
I think you were scared of him back then, to be honest.
I've gotten used to him now.
But yeah, I really appreciate everything the Democracy Fund has done.
It's like for Arter, for Arter's rights, and for the rule of law, because this is where it's getting decided at the Court of Appeal today.
I mean, it is for Arthur's rights, but the precedent will be binding on every Alberton in this case and what we do in other provinces.
You've said some kind words about the Democracy Fund, so let me close on that note.
As you know, when we started defending people during the pandemic, the Democracy Fund wasn't a thing.
We took one case, then we took a second pastor in this city, and they were arrested for feeding the homeless.
That was called an illegal gathering.
Before you knew it, we had 25 cases, then 50, and then 100.
And we said, oh my God, what have we gotten ourselves into?
But then we created at arm's length.
I mean, it's not run by rebels.
It has its own board of directors and its own accounting.
The Democracy Fund to take all these cases off our hands with the added bonus of issuing charitable tax receipts, which Rebel News cannot do.
And over the course of the last three and a half years, the Democracy Fund, as I mentioned, has taken 3,000 cases and literally raised millions of dollars.
And it's been an amazing project that has been one of the most, I don't know, most important or meaningful things I've done with my life.
And you've been an important part of that.
You've taken a lot of cases and your firm is taking cases.
I believe in hiring lawyers, not pro bono lawyers.
Pro bono is the Latin phrase for someone who does it for the public good.
And I admire anyone who would volunteer, but typically a volunteer isn't a subject matter expert.
And the thing about volunteers is they're very emotionally passionate in the first round, but will they be there 500 hours of work later?
Or will they say, I've just got to earn a living.
I've got other things more pressing.
So the Democracy Fund has always paid its lawyers.
It's ever had volunteers.
And I actually think that's been an important thing because we need excellent lawyers, not just available lawyers.
God bless the pro bono lawyers of this world, but I would rather win and have to crowdfund it than lose, but lose for free.
And the government lawyers who are on the opposite side doing good work themselves, but they're not working for free either.
So, you know, it's an unfortunate circumstance of the situation, but everybody needs to get paid to make their living, and those government lawyers are getting paid as well.
That's what's so frustrating here.
I mean, sometimes we do access to information requests about legal battles we're in, and the government outspends us five to one.
There was a case, you know, my friend Chad Williamson, your colleague down in a different firm.
We fought the government on the Election Debates Commission, which kept out rebel news.
I think they had seven lawyers on the other side.
And I can't remember the bills.
So the government has unlimited funds.
They don't have to crowdfund.
They don't have to look into the camera and say, please go to savearthur.com.
They just don't.
But I love that David and Goliath feeling.
I wouldn't have it any other way.
Sarah Miller and JSS Barristers, give our thanks to Evan Best, your colleague in court today.
We'll talk to you when the results of this are known.
I think that's going to be in 2025.
And we just keep fighting.
It's in our blood because if we don't, what is there?
As you know, I was in Sao Paulo on the weekend for a rally of about 200,000 Brazilians who were rallying because a judge there shut down all of Twitter.
You cannot get on Twitter in Brazil.
If you try to by using a VPN to get around it, which is what I did, you're liable for up to a $9,000 fine.
I just want to put a plug in for our VPN.
I've never really used one before, but I downloaded it on my phone.
Anyhow, I won't talk about it.
But it was sort of fun to get around the government censorship.
But that's how far things are in Brazil.
And I hope they don't go that far here.
Let's call it quits for now.
Thanks to Sarah.
If you want to help Arthur, go to savearthur.com.
You'll get a charitable tax receipt.
And we'll keep following the story to the end.
We're committed to it.
Until then, on behalf of all of us at Rebel News, to you at home, goodbye.