Sheila Gunn-Reid examines the six-and-a-half-year sentence for Chris Carbert and six-year sentence for Anthony Olinik in the Coots II blockade, despite acquittals on conspiracy charges, while questioning why Crown appealed—tying it to Ottawa’s 2022 Emergencies Act justifications. She contrasts this with lighter sentences for similar nonviolent protests, like Tamara Leach’s invalid breach charge, and highlights perceived bias against political opponents under Trudeau, where figures like Randy Boissaneau face no consequences despite alleged pandemic profiteering. The episode underscores systemic inconsistencies in Canada’s justice system, revealing how legal actions disproportionately target dissenters while shielding allies. [Automatically generated summary]
What do I think happened with the sentencing of the Coots 2?
I discuss all that and more with my friend, podcaster, Sean Newman.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
As many of you know, I spent a couple of days over the last month in court in Lethbridge, Alberta.
I was covering the case of the remaining Coots II, what's left of the Coots IV.
Now, to give some context, and I do it in my interview that I'm going to show you today, four men were charged in relation to their actions adjacent to the border blockade that took place simultaneously with the Freedom Convoy in February 2022.
It was a blockade organized by farmers and truckers and Albertans, generally speaking, at the border crossing between Coots, Alberta, and Sweetgrass, Montana.
Now, that border blockade did, I think, I think most people think that way, prompt our premier at the time, Jason Kenney, to repeal the vaccine passport program, something he mysteriously called the restrictions exemption program, although it was anything but a restriction exemption program.
It was literally a restriction.
The four of them were charged with conspiracy to commit murder, weapons offenses, and of course, your standard catch-all, mischief.
They have been held, or at least the two that were recently sentenced, were held in jail since their arrest in February of 2022, and they were sentenced this past Monday in a courtroom in Lethbridge.
So my friend, podcaster Sean Newman, he's Western Canadian based.
He had me on his show to discuss my thoughts about the sentencing and, you know, a little bit more about what's happening in Western Canadian politics.
And I know that a lot of my viewers are from other parts of the country, but I think if you're in Alberta or Saskatchewan, you know who Sean Newman is.
He gets some big guests, including me.
But also, you know, he has sit-downs with the premier, leaders of the Freedom Convoy, and he has open civil discussions with people the mainstream media either maligns or completely ignores.
So I thought, I just talked to Sean Newman for close to an hour.
I think many of you would benefit from knowing who and what Sean Newman is.
And I thought, you know what?
We had a good talk.
Maybe you need to see it.
And so here it is.
My interview with podcaster Sean Newman about what went down in Lethbridge on Monday.
Take a listen.
Welcome to the Sean Newman Podcast.
I'm joined by Sheila Gunnreed from Rebel News.
Thanks for hopping on.
Oh, I'm very glad to be here.
Thanks for having me.
I think, you know, we don't have to get into all the small talk.
You know, we might as well just hop right to the big, the big news here in Alberta.
The big news being the sentencing of Tony Olanik, Chris Carbert.
I'm just going to throw it over to you and you just walk me through everything.
How far do you want to go back?
Well, hey, you go far as far as the beginning.
Roscoe's Sentence: 2005 Redux00:10:17
Well, it don't matter to me.
Like on this side, Sheila, sorry to hop in one more time and then I'm going to let her talk, folks.
Hey, on this side, you know, like we've had Tony Olanik on.
We've had different people from all different spots on this sucker on.
And probably the only person I hadn't had on was yourself, actually, when I think about it.
So, you know, you can go as far back as you like.
We got plenty of time this morning.
Well.
The thing is, rebel news journalists have been there from the very beginning, including the day or the day after the blockade started.
We had journalists there who witnessed the arrest of the Coots IV, or at least most of the Coots IV.
We were there to capture that.
And then we've had journalists in the courtroom covering this trial, pretrial motions.
Again, from the very beginning, if it wasn't Ezra, it was my colleague Robert.
It's been me very recently heading down to Lethbridge to cover this case.
But just Colesnot's version, these guys were not really part of the Coots blockade.
They were sort of adjacent to it.
And they were arrested in a major RCMP operation, including undercover operators in February of 2022.
They were initially charged with conspiracy to commit murder, multiple and differing weapons-related charges.
And of course, the standard, you've annoyed the police in a public place, mischief.
Now, they've been incarcerated, I guess, today is 940 days by the judge's calculation yesterday.
They were held without bail the entire time, which is largely unheard of in this country because the default is you qualify for bail unless you don't.
These guys, as the court heard yesterday, had multiple willing and able sureties with strong ties to the community, and yet they were not given bail.
They were two of them, Jerry Morin and Chris Lysak, they pled out to mischief and their weapons charges, and then they walked free.
They were sentenced to time served.
Anthony Olinik, Chris Carbert, they went to trial.
They were acquitted on the charge of conspiracy to commit murder, specifically against police officers.
However, they were convicted on their weapons-related offenses and, of course, mischief.
Yesterday in court, they were sentenced, felt like they were being sentenced for the crime they were actually acquitted of, if I had to be honest with you.
And I think that's why you have me here.
They were sentenced to six and six and a half years, respectively, for the weapons charges.
Chris Carbert had a previous prohibition for 10 years.
So when he was in possession of a firearm, that's a big no-no.
And another six months to be served concurrent for him, for both of them actually, on the mischief charges.
So they were sentenced to incarceration on the mischief charges.
It'll just be served concurrently.
Anthony Olenek got six years on his weapons charge and then an additional tack on consecutive for having pipe bombs, not at the protest, but at his home when his home was raided by police.
That's what happened yesterday.
Now they were given credit for 1.5 days per each that they were held in pretrial custody, which is kind of the standard.
So the judge gave them credit for 1,409 days of pretrial incarceration.
That's approaching four years.
By my calculations, quickly in the courtroom yesterday, that leaves them with 2.6 years, so two years, eight months remaining behind bars.
And by all accounts, they've been exemplary prisoners.
It feels weird to say that.
So they should qualify for parole, mandatory release, after two-thirds of that sentence.
So that's the cold notes of what went down in court yesterday.
Okay.
So does any of us believe they're going to get two-thirds sentences when none of the rest of that made just, I mean, like, I understand what you're saying, but like, and I don't, I don't know, you know, like, I don't know how much you want to comment on this, but I just, I look at it and I go, okay, the pipe bombs were nowhere near the protest.
And I've had, you know, I've had different people on talking about this and what was submitted in court and what was known outside of court.
And I'm just like, this hurts my brain, right?
How can somebody walk onto a farmer, you know, or a man's land and then find things and connect it to something that was happening nowhere near where they were situated?
You know what I mean?
And so you get all these different things.
I don't, I guess I'm, I guess, Sheila, I'm just asking your thoughts on that because you were.
I was in the courtroom.
And so I guess we have to roll back a little bit too and talk a bit about the judge.
Although I think despite his sentence, he seemed very fair with the defense.
And again, I preface that by saying, despite sentencing, because I think Anthony Olinik's lawyer, Marilyn Burns, pretty inexperienced for the high-profile case before her.
I know I do a lot of court reporting, and I'm just going to tell it to you straight.
I think the judge was really trying to help her along.
So that was evident in court.
And he was giving her a lot of opportunities to make arguments that I don't think she was aware that she should have been making.
So I guess by the grace of God, they were not convicted of the conspiracy to commit murder charges.
The Crown had been asking for nine years incarceration, which again prompted the judge at the time, the judge David LeBrenz, to ask, are you asking me to sentence these men for a firefight with police that didn't happen?
Which sort of made me hopeful during sentencing arguments because, you know, it felt like he thought the Crown was being unreasonable.
But I did some digging.
And I'm not saying that this directed the judge's his sentencing, but how could it not?
You know, we're all human beings.
He's not a judicial robot.
He was the crown prosecutor at Mayerthorpe when four Mounties were killed by James Roscoe.
James Roscoe killed himself, but he was the prosecutor who negotiated the guilty pleas with the two men who gave Roscoe the firearm used, Dennis Cheeseman and Sean Hennessy.
Sean Hennessy received 10 years for manslaughter.
Dennis Cheeseman received seven.
So I was of two minds.
I thought, okay, well, this judge is really not going to have any patience for people who are accused, although acquitted, of conspiracy to murder police officers.
And given that the Crown was offering nine years when the guys who pled guilty to manslaughter with four cops dead got 10 and seven years, it seemed too high.
And in that, in his prosecutorial experience, probably too high for David LeBrent.
But they were sentenced to Dennis Cheeseman style.
Can you walk me through the Dennis Cheeseman story just for myself and the listener?
What happened there?
So James Roscoe, he was the local madman in Mayor Thorpe.
They were, I think they were going to do a repo there.
It was sort of a repo gone wrong.
Cops were called.
James Roscoe was hiding out on his property.
And in the end, he killed four police officers.
Dennis Cheeseman and Sean Hennessy, they were accused of providing the firearm to the local madman there.
However, they didn't know, or at least that's what they say.
And I don't really have any reason to believe them, that they knew what he was going to use it for.
But four cops were dead.
And I think the community and the country, really, because it was a national tragedy, if you're old enough to remember that, people wanted closure and they wanted somebody responsible.
And James Roscoe killed himself.
So these two young men were held responsible.
Forgive me, 2005?
Am I?
I think that's about right.
Why don't I just look it up, folks?
That would be smart, you know?
Mayor Thorpe tragedy.
What?
Yes, March 2005.
Yeah.
Okay.
So forgive me.
Maybe I'm wrong here.
And you can give me some much needed sounding board from somebody who has been in and around the media and everything else that's gone on in the last little bit, 2005 to now, specifically what happened in Coots, which ties to what happens in Ottawa, in my mind.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Yep.
But you go, you know, I go back to 2005.
What the heck was going on in 2005?
2005 Media Revelations00:03:49
You know, Sean was a different guy.
That is for sure.
I'm sure Sheila could say the same thing.
Different, different woman.
But, you know, like there wasn't all the things that were making society go utterly insane.
You know, if you go to the time where all these protests are going on nationwide, you know, there's a group of people who can't leave the country, who are being told they're clogging up hospitals and that maybe there should be preferential treatment given to certain types of folk, certain headlines in Toronto newspapers calling, you know, on and on this goes.
So I look at it and I go, okay, while I understand, you know, they go back to 2005 and there's some things there.
And I just understand it's just to give, you know, like this was in his experience dealing with this.
Exactly.
I'm like, yeah, but this situation is like insanely different.
Insanely different.
Not a shot was fired.
There was a lot of talk.
And I, unlike a lot of people commenting, I did read what was called the ITO.
So that's the sworn information from the RCMP, including screenshots of text messages between the men.
I did read that.
We were unable to report on it, of course, because of the publication ban.
But unlike a lot of commenters, I've seen that.
And I've seen that from pretty well near the very beginning.
And there was a lot of bravado going back and forth.
And there was a lot of talk about.
What do you mean bravado?
You know, you get a bunch of guys hanging around um, talking about how uh, you know how they're gonna make a strong stand, they're gonna make a strong stand for the future.
There's a lot of that going around um, just so i'm clear.
Just so i'm clear because i'm kind of you know once again.
Uh, you know, I want to make sure that i'm I understand this correct.
So, you've seen these text messages, but you can't say exactly what was on them, or i'm just wondering you're hesitating.
Well, this is kind of what it said.
Are you not allowed to say that?
No uh, since these guys have been sentenced, the publication ban is over, is over.
Yeah it's, it's gone.
Um, I just want to make sure that i'm i'm speaking verbatim and not just sure.
Yeah yeah yeah yeah, two years ago right, I just see the hesitation Sheila, and i'm like, oh wait, did I?
I don't want to miss anything.
So there were, there was talk about going to war with the police.
Now, what does that mean?
The thing is and I think the the point was made very well in court by Catherine Bayek, that's Chris Carbert's lawyer.
She said there may have been talk specifically about going to war.
It may have been mentioned to the undercover operators who mysteriously don't have any records about the things that were said.
But at the end of the day, when opportunity for said war, a standoff with the police happened, they surrendered peacefully, correct they?
When came the flashpoint for war, it didn't come, they surrendered peacefully, which means that all of their talk of war was probably just guys being guys, and that's not a crime.
No, it certainly isn't.
I this you know like once upon a time, and I say this every time we talk about coups, because you know like once upon a time I saw the big picture come out in the newspapers and why that one stuck with me, you know, and I backed away and everything else.
But you know, the the more I talked about it, the more insane this story.
Like, are they guilty of some things?
Lost Without People00:09:13
Okay, but like they were.
I mean one of them invited the conviction for mischief in court.
You know at what point, if you want to restore faith in a government or in a law system, justice system, do we have to start looking at, I don't know the things that went on in our own country that maybe pushed all of its citizens to this point of like.
You know, the world was collapsing and people thought people were going to actually kick down their doors and wait they did in some cases and and like, at what point are we going to just acknowledge that there's this white elephant in the room and it's the government and maybe there's some head that heads that need to be dragged out and put in front of a court system?
There, I mean, once again, i'm bringing you into this world of my my like.
I know you can't give me an answer on that, but like I look at this claw, this case, and it makes it out to seem like well, they did some bad things, yet when the time came to do said bad things, nothing happened and they have no track record of anything happening.
And the explosives weren't there and on this goes well.
And their alleged co-conspirators who were not co-conspirators because that charge fell apart, those guys are already out.
Those guys are already out.
So it feels like these guys are being punished for taking this to trial, which is your right as a Canadian citizen But moreover, to your point about, you know, when we put this in context of what was happening in the country at the time, look around us.
There are things happening because people are still so destabilized by what we all saw during those last four years.
Like it seems like a fog when you look back.
We were banned from traveling internally within our own country.
Yeah, I didn't even bring that one up.
The cops were kicking down our doors because we were having Christmas, arresting pastors in the street, El Chapo style.
My own family, my mother died in December, the first year of the lockdowns.
I go to a Catholic church that seats 800.
It is the church of my baptism, of all my sacraments.
My mom sat faithfully in the back pew every Saturday night.
She did not miss mass.
My priest only allowed 10 people at her funeral, no matter how distant we could get.
It was remarkable the things that were happening to us that we couldn't even imagine.
Sections of the grocery store roped off.
People scolding me because I didn't follow the stupid lines on the floor because I don't believe that COVID is contagious counterclockwise.
It has set people's minds into a tizzy.
It's why you see the rise of these weird COVID cults, right?
Like that whole Queen Romana nonsense where people now will, they're so skeptical of everything that they will actually believe the craziest things.
Anthony Olinick and Chris Carbert both said they sort of fell down an internet rabbit hole because they couldn't believe what was happening in front of them.
They couldn't believe in their wildest imaginations that the Canadian government was doing the things that it was doing.
And I think there's a whole psychological part of all of this that we need to take into account.
I mean, we take into account the psychology of offenders all the time.
We talk about generational trauma with Indigenous offenders.
We have not really taken into account the psychological undoing of a lot of people through COVID when considering the sentences for certain people.
Where does that leave you after, you know, like you see the, I mean, you know, I know this saga, I don't know what to call it, folks.
I haven't and it's not even close to over.
I mean, the crown is appealing the acquittal on the conspiracy to commit murder charges.
We haven't heard about whether or not the defense is going to appeal the sentences.
I don't know how they could at this point.
Both men said that they were basically indigent.
They've lost everything.
Their families have lost a lot.
They've liquidated all of their business assets.
Chris Carbert hasn't seen his son in nearly four years, or two years, I guess, of four years, if you're calculating at 1.5 days.
And I feel like his little boy is serving this prison sentence with him.
So, this is nowhere near done.
And I just...
What I can't get over, you know, I sit and I'm watching all this play out, you know, and of course there's there's others going through their own court trials, right?
Their own court cases.
And I'm thinking specifically of like Tamara Leach and Chris Carbert, Chris Carbert and Chris Barber.
And I just, you know, my mind tries to figure out, you know, because without people like that, you know, I think the audience knows this, but I'll say it anyways.
Do we get out of the insanity we're in?
Politicians will sit there and go, oh, it was coming to an end.
Bullshit.
We all know that everything came off within like two weeks.
And I mean, heck, BC, I mean, just.
Quicker.
It was quicker without the border blockade in Alberta and the convoy rolling across the country.
I mean, Jason Kenney, he said, oh, I'll remove the restriction exemptions program in two weeks.
And then it was like, at the end of the week, and then it was like, oh, at midnight tonight.
And then Scott Moe in Saskatchewan.
It was like the convoy hit the border.
And he was like, no more.
We're done with our vaccine passport system.
It happened instantly, that fast.
So yeah, without people taking a stand, being civilly but peacefully disobedient, nothing changes.
My concern is that I just watched a judge, I think, sentence two men for crimes they weren't really accused of for political reasons.
And I worry about Chris and Tamara now.
What do you mean they weren't accused of for crimes they weren't accused of?
So they were sentenced.
They should have been sentenced for firearms related charges, mischief.
Who gets six months in jail for mischief, by the way?
It's nonviolent crime.
Protesters of the COVID mandates.
That's who.
Very recently.
And never before.
If you got charged with mischief, you probably wouldn't see the inside of a jail cell until now.
Because we're sentencing these people with aggravating factors of their politics.
And, you know, gun charges are, you know, usually 18 months, two years, less a day.
It's not a six year, a six year thing, especially when you don't have a prior criminal record in the case of Anthony Olinic.
So I feel like the political motivations of the defendants resulted in a longer sentence for them.
They were not charged with terrorism-related offenses.
Terrorism-related offenses is sort of where you, the politics become involved.
They weren't charged with that, but I think they were sentenced because of their politics.
Yeah, I just come back to, you know, like I'm at a, I'm almost at a loss of, you know, like it reminds me that I got to, I got to talk to Chris and Tamara here at some point because I haven't had them on in some time.
And to remind people that's going on, I sure they don't, I don't, I'm sure most people don't need a reminder, but, you know, you sit and you look at this and I just, I just go back, like without people that went and stood there and then got picked out of the crowd.
And certainly you can, you can try and argue that Chris and Anthony and others did more than others and this and that.
But I mean, like, look at Tamara Leach and Chris Barber, right?
Duncan Kinney's Detour00:15:19
Like, I mean, I mean, come on.
I mean, at some point, you just go, I can't believe this is happening in our country.
That's where it puts me to.
Because, you know, like at this point, you go, man, they've been dragged through the mud.
I'm coming back to Chris and Anthony.
They've done what is four years of jail time because everything I've heard about remand means or it sounds like it is not a great place to be.
And instead of just being like, listen, time served, out they go.
And although people would be upset, it would come to a conclusion where you get back around family and things get to seem, I don't know, normal.
Instead, they tack on more.
Oh, and they're going to appeal the not guilty.
You're like, what is this going to go on for?
20 years?
Like, are we just going to leave these guys to rot?
Is that what's going to happen here in Alberta?
I'm having a hard time processing, I guess.
Yeah.
You know, and that's the thing.
The state has all the resources to do whatever they want to you.
Look at Tamara and Chris.
Tamara has been subject, and Chris too, alongside her, to Canada's longest mischief trial.
She spent 50 days in jail, 49, I think, on a breach, who gets breached and held for 50 days on mischief.
And then, as it turns out, her breach was not a breach at all.
And then they had to release her because she took a picture with a co-conspirator, but in a room full of her lawyers at an event organized by her lawyers.
Now, she is being represented by the Democracy Fund, which you would think, why wouldn't you just plead this out and hope that you just get time served?
But look what we just saw.
You might not get served, right?
And there's a point here that she did not do anything wrong.
It is not public mischief to go to your nation's capital, which is all of our city, and protest the government, which is headed there.
Where the hell else are you supposed to protest the government?
I'm sorry if the people in Ottawa are boring and don't like their work from home days to be interrupted by a bunch of grubby blue-collar people from the West running around, but it's not the Vatican.
It's our city.
It's our capital.
She had every right to be there.
She was nonviolent.
She's a Métis grandma with no history of criminality.
And yet, lawyers from the Democracy Fund estimate that the crown has spent millions and millions of dollars going after her.
I'm privy to the amount that the Democracy Fund has spent defending her.
And people would say it's madness, but what else can you do?
What is madness is it's our money trying her.
Yes.
Right?
Yep.
I mean, like, just that hurts my brain a little bit.
You know, you come, but you come back to come back to Alberta with me for a sec.
And you go, you have what I think Canadians look at as the freest place in Canada.
It's an energy producer.
It's raw-raw, kind of libertarian, if you would, right?
I think that would be what Premier Smith would kind of champion.
Maybe I'm a little bit off on that, but that's kind of how she speaks.
And she's been very open to any conversation anytime I've talked to her.
She's been willing to be asked any question and is quite open.
Yep.
Can she or anyone in her government, Sheila, do anything on this?
Because, you know, I've asked her that question, and then we get into some things.
And then the more people that hear it, the next thing they come up with, well, actually, I believe it's Mickey Amory, who's the justice minister.
He should have some say on there.
Where do you fall out on this?
So I would be very concerned.
I'm always careful of giving a government power that they might one day use against me if there's a different government in power, right?
And so I would be concerned if our provincial government meddled in the independence of the judiciary.
Now, there is something to be said, however, for them just saying, like, look, what is the point of pursuing the appeal here?
The appeal on the acquittal.
Because that just seems punitive.
They've already been sentenced to six and a half years of hard time.
Why do you want your pound of flesh?
Why do you want your blood from a stone?
I think the prosecution here was political from the very beginning.
I think they probably overcharged them with the conspiracy to commit murder.
Well, definitely overcharged them.
But we have to remember these charges were the impetus for the Emergencies Act, right?
All the politicians in Ottawa on the left stood on the arrests at Coots and said, look, do you see violent insurrection?
Look at all those guns.
They're plotting to kill police officers.
And so we need to give police extraordinary tools of search, seizure, and arrest that we reserve for wartime, for 9-11 level events, Pearl Harbor level events.
We need to do that now to stop these terror cells from popping up all across the country and overwhelming us.
And so there is, I think, political motivation to continue on with this from the left.
We know, again, prosecutors are people too.
They have their own political motivations.
I just don't know how the premier, Mickey American, intervened in this while not meddling in the independence of the legal system, because God help us one day if Nahib Menshe gets in power.
I don't want the government to be able to do that.
So if you're the premier, let's just Sheila Gunray, Premier, for a day.
Let's just, let's just play around with this idea.
Is there anything you can do?
You sit there, you know, like, is just talking about it enough?
Just bring it up.
I don't know if everybody, you know, like, is that enough?
Is there anything you can do from that standpoint?
I'm not saying influence.
I'm not saying walk in, give them acquittals.
I'm not saying anything like that.
Is there any way, you know, because when you look at this, I think rightfully so there has been a lot of distance from a lot of media companies on this court case, right?
There's just been, you know, there hasn't been much.
I haven't seen them there.
Like there's usually one or two, sometimes three, if there's like a local meeting, local media is there.
You might get somebody from post media, maybe CBC if they've got nothing better to do.
But by and large, Media Row is completely empty, save for a few.
Yesterday, the rubber kneckers staring at the car crash were there in full force.
Go ahead.
Well, I just, I go back to Sean Buckley, right?
Sean Buckley was on the podcast.
Talking to me about years and years ago, I forget what year it was, but it was people were trying to get the media's attention on, I think it was supplements and health products because there was laws trying to come through to outlaw certain things.
And so they had a dinner.
I forget, you know, people have to go back and listen to Sean Buckley tell the story, but a dinner in Vancouver outside, I want to say parliament.
They all got dressed up real fancy and they didn't say what they were doing, but it just made such a spectacle.
Eventually, media started to go talk to them.
And once they started talking to them and realized what they're about, they'd already made, you know, they'd already gotten into this.
Well, now we're talking about it.
And Sean was like, once they started talking about it, they had to keep talking about it.
It was very clever.
And he said, you know, today's world, we need more of that.
We need this, you know, creativity to come back where you can bring people into these discussions.
And I'm not suggesting that Daniel Smith needs to be more creative.
I'm just wondering if there isn't a creative way to just bring up this court case or bring up the situation in Alberta where maybe more people start to pay attention.
I don't know.
Just a random thought.
I think I communicate professionally for a living.
If I worked for Premier Smith's communications team right now, I would be using what happened in Coots to hammer the liberals on other issues.
For example, and the problems with the justice system so that the smart consumer of what she was saying would put together what she was saying without actually saying it.
Tell me why a cop can rape somebody, get convicted of it, and then get five years.
These guys are getting more.
Tell me why you can be charged with manslaughter, convicted of manslaughter, get four years.
Tell me why you can be found with thousands, tens of thousands of fentanyl pills.
27,000.
Yeah, enough to kill a small city.
And the dog didn't sit right.
And the dog didn't sit right and these guys walk.
But six and a half years in Coots.
I would be using it to point out an overall problem with the Canadian justice system right now: that there are no, there's no real will to go after the really, really bad guys in this country.
And the liberals are making it easier and easier to be a really bad guy.
They removed a whole host of mandatory minimum sentences for gang-related offenses.
Why?
Systemic racism.
I don't know.
Because minority people can't behave themselves, according to the racist liberals who believe in the bigotry of low expectations.
It's never been more dangerous to be a Canadian.
Crime is skyrocketing because of lenient sentences for the real bad guys.
And yet, when you oppose the government in Ottawa, they'll put you under the jail.
I don't know if I got much else to say on that.
On the rebel news side of things.
What, I mean, obviously we've been talking coups this morning.
Is there anything else that, you know, like, obviously, I think most people know where to find Yasheila, but in saying that, is there something that you're like paying attention to that you think Canadians, Albertans, or a larger audience should be paying attention to?
So right now in the background, I mean, we're always engaged in active litigation in the advance of free speech.
We're constantly suing some police force somewhere for hassling our journalists and more likely David Menzies, that man is a walking heat score.
So there's always that happening in the background at Rebel News because it's not just about our journalists.
We want to make sure that all journalists, including the mainstream media, in fact, including those on the left, are able to do their jobs and hold the government to account.
I'll tell you a little story, if you allow me a detour on this.
It was back in the Jason Kenney days.
There was a left-wing journalist named Duncan Kinney who was not allowed into the legislature to report.
Duncan Kinney is a vicious critic of rebel news.
Vicious.
But you have to believe in human rights for people with whom you disagree.
It's what separates the right from the left on this issue.
You see, the left only believes that the left can protest.
We believe everybody can protest.
So Duncan Kinney was not permitted to be a journalist in the legislature.
And Rachel Notley had thrown me out of the legislature and not permitted me to report from there when she was in power.
And it prompted a whole inquiry, a Boyd report, it was called.
And we had all this legal material that we had drafted, constitutional examinations about what the government's role is in determining who a journalist is.
The answer is it doesn't have one.
So we provided this to Duncan Kinney's lawyers free of charge.
We spent thousands of dollars on what did he say?
Didn't even say thank you.
Still runs his yap about us.
And you know what?
Whatever.
I don't care.
But we did that for him because we thought it was important in the interest of journalistic freedom that everybody, even people we disagree with, should be free to be journalists.
What have you thought about Canada?
Mark Gerritson.
Yeah, Mark Gerritson coming out and accusing her of being a Russian government or being funded by the Russian government.
I don't know if you saw Ezra's legal breakdown because Ezra is trained as a lawyer.
He doesn't practice law anymore because he's got that awful journalism habit.
But he did break it down and say that Mark Gerritson's in real big trouble, real big trouble for accusing her of being a paid Russian operative.
Now, I see he's deleted that tweet and sort of walked it back, but he didn't walk it back because he's basically admitting to doing something entirely different than actually accusing her of being a paid Russian operative, which he did do.
Now, Ezra did a very long, long post about this, but basically it comes down to you're allowed to hold an opinion and talk about your opinion, but your opinion really can't be if you're publishing it based on absolute nonsense.
Like I could say Sean Newman is an absolute jerk.
Malice And Counterbalance00:14:41
Okay, that's an opinion.
But I can't say Sean Newman is a Nazi unless I've got evidence that you are a Nazi.
An academic in Edmonton once called me a Nazi and we sent him a cease and desist and he had to have his pinned tweet for a very long time saying that he was wrong about me.
But Mark Gerritson, one of the he thinks that he is protected by parliamentary privilege, which basically means whatever you say inside the House of Commons might be untrue, but it's protected inside the House of Commons.
That doesn't follow you to Twitter or X or whatever we're calling it these days.
And if you have an opinion, it has to be based in fact.
You can come to that opinion however you want.
It can be wrong, but it has to be based in fact.
And you are subject to responsible communication, which means he probably should have sent Kat a text that said or reached out to her on Twitter.
He knows how to find her.
He's responding to her on Twitter and said, hey, Kat, are you paid by Russia?
She would say no.
Now he doesn't have to believe her.
but he would have to have reached out to her and included that in his commentary.
He didn't.
And it sounds like there's some malice there.
And it's also pretty rich that within his cabinet, we know that there are, I think in the double digits now, MPs who are on the take from foreigners.
That's what makes this.
This is what makes this just like, I'm like, we live on a different planet.
Like an MP comes out accusing her of being funded by the Russian government.
Meanwhile, in their government, their government, 11 or more.
Or more.
Yeah.
Well, we both can see, I can speculate.
I'm like, well, if there's 11, there's more, right?
It just is.
So they got 11 MPs that they will not announce who they are who are still working their jobs.
Yep.
Then being a part of a government that accuses others of being, I'm just like, you can't make this up.
Right.
It just goes, yes.
And these people are the ones that they think they should be the arbiters of mis and disinformation.
Right.
Oh, my God.
You know, Mark Gerrickson is one of the dumbest people in the House of Commons, and that bar is real, real low, real low.
Yara Sachs is in there, but he is one of the absolute stupidest.
And I can't believe they still let that man control his X account because he like all he does is get kicked around on X. He's like a punching bag for conservatives on X because the man is an absolute idiot.
But this, I think he's in real, real trouble.
I do.
And it couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
Well, here's one thing I do know about the Canadian government, probably all governments in the world, where I think something will happen.
They will find a way to weasel their way out and nothing will happen.
Just look at the headlines me and Tuz talk about every week on the mashup.
And you just go like, it doesn't matter how bad they get caught.
It was Finkelstein, the ethics commissioner, who said, you know, we just, it's just exposure.
That's, that's what we do.
You know, that's the punishment.
And so unless Sheila is going to tell me something different here and give me some hope, I look at it and I go, it's great.
You know, they just keep running their mouths.
They keep screwing us all over.
They keep doing all these things.
And once you're part of government, it's like this, you know, it kind of reminds me of, I don't know why I'm thinking of this, but dumb and dumber, you know, Harry or Lloyd comes running up and the guy's like, whoa, whoa, wait.
And he's like, it's okay.
I'm a limo driver.
Like they got, you know, a license to do anything.
Now, at least in that, Lloyd falls off the platform onto, you know, the airport cement and you kind of get a chuckle.
Here, they can be that dumb.
And it's like, instead of them falling, you know, and you know what should happen because if it was one of us who did all these stupid things, the book would be thrown at us.
That brings me back to Coots.
When it comes to government, they just get to slide on by.
Like there's no big deal and no big deal is ever going to come befall them.
And that is probably the most frustrating thing of this morning altogether is I'm like, when is the government stay in court?
When is people in public office that do stupid things?
They're not all stupid.
I get that.
But there's a lot of people sinister.
Right.
And it's playing out in front of our eyes.
And it's just, it's, it's almost like they don't realize how like people are dumb.
Like, I just assume they think everybody's a moron.
They'll never catch on to this.
And we're watching a play on you.
Like, I can't, I can't fathom the stupidity to say something like that while your government is being investigated for foreign interference.
And oh, wait, there's 11 of them plus, plus probably.
And we're not going to release them.
We're going to keep you.
Like, I could just regurgitate this over and over.
And I'm just running in a circle here because I'm just so frustrated with our Canadian government.
Can I give you some hope?
And this sort of ties back to the Cat Canada stuff.
Sure.
So I don't know if you know, but in September, we won a lawsuit against Stephen Gilbo.
Stephen Gilbo also thought Canadians were as stupid as he is and that they would quietly abide him using his government-funded X account with the gray check mark.
That's how we know it's a government-affiliated account, which means there are staffers staffing it, using government resources.
Mark Gerritson has that same one, which means that it is a government-affiliated account.
It is operated using government read taxpayer-funded resources.
We sued him for blocking us in September of 2023.
We won.
He has to unblock us.
Then we called it the great unblocking because we noticed that a lot of government accounts were all of a sudden unblocking us because we would just send them letters and saying, unblock us or we will see you in court.
You don't get to use government resources to block Canadians.
And so I guess, and by the way, he had to pay us our costs, which is really the only government check we've ever cashed at Rebel News.
But the thing is, while you can win against the government in some venues, especially on X, I have high hopes for Kat.
Stephen Gilbo, while arguing that that was his personal account, even though it has a government check mark, he used public resources, government lawyers to fight against us.
Once again, we're funding the fight against our journalists, you know?
And so Mark Gerritson can run his yap and embarrass himself and lie about innocent Canadian women, but taxpayers will be on the hook for what he said.
Because if Kat sues him, and I hope she does, because it'll scare a bunch of these people straight, taxpayers are still going to be on the hook because they are going to fund his fight against her for his lies about her.
One final, one final thing before I let you out of here.
UCP, AGM is coming up, leadership review, all that stuff.
Are you going to be there?
Juan.
I'm going to try.
I'm going to try.
You know, we are a very small shop.
So it's hard for me to be all the places that I would like to be, but I'm going to do my best.
You mean you can't be in two places at once, Sheila?
I have a 12-hour round trip to Lethbridge.
Okay.
But I am going to try.
I think it's important.
I think we are going to see if the opposition to Daniel Smith is as large as it seems on social media, because you and I started talking before we started recording that sometimes social media makes things seem outsized.
So we'll see if those people who are opposed to Daniel Smith's leadership actually turn up at the AGM and pose a significant challenge.
I'm interested to see if that is actually real or astroturfed.
I don't know if this is possible for me to ask of you, but if you put Sheila Gunread, Rebel News Media, over here for a second, and you guys put on Sheila Gunread Alberton, where do you sit on Daniel Smith as the leader of Alberta?
I don't know if that's a fair question or not.
I would put it in the context of who we had before and who might replace her.
I think in all politics, you're actively choosing the least worst.
And Daniel Smith has not kept her word on some things, but she has made great strides in certain aspects of the culture war, which creates, I think, new conservatives.
I think we are underestimating the value of her opposition to medical transition of minors and women playing against men who claim to be women in their sports and advocating against secrecy in the classroom.
I mean, that has flipped places in the United States.
Glenn Yunkin is governor because of his stand against that in a Democratic stronghold.
He's the Republican governor.
So I think we are underestimating.
I think as people who, and in the conservative ecosphere, we sort of underestimate what the normals think about stuff sometimes.
And that might be enough to bring people into the conservative fold.
She is slow on her tax cuts.
I know I was talking to my friend Chris Sims actually over the weekend.
And, you know, that has been something that she has supported Daniel Smith in the past for doing.
And then Daniel Smith sort of was slow to do it.
I think that is a betrayal of a lot of people who thought that they were voting for someone who would give them an immediate tax cut.
She's not perfect.
She's not perfect.
She's a hell of a lot better than Jason Kenney.
She's not afraid to take on contentious issues when the media and the liberals, but I should not make a distinction there, are up against her.
She fights with Ottawa instead of just sending strongly worded letters to the prime minister like Jason Kenney.
But I don't think she's perfect.
I think it's my job as a journalist, and you asked me to take off my journalist hat, but I just can't do that.
It's my job to be a critic of her from the right, a good faith critic of her from the right, because all the forces of the universe are pulling her to the left.
The media, the unions, just the culture are pulling her to the left.
Somebody has to be pulling her back to the right.
And I think that's my duty as a conservative journalist.
And it is impossible to write off my criticism of her as bad faith.
You would see this all the time from Jason Kenney.
He would say, oh, that's just CBC saying that they hate conservatives.
Yeah, but if I'm saying something bad about you, you kind of have to listen because I feel like I'm speaking on behalf of just like dinner table people.
So she's a flawed leader for sure.
She has not done some of the things that she said she would do, but who's the replacement?
You just said something that I don't know why I like so much, but I guess it makes sense, I guess.
And that being, you know, all the forces of the universe are trying to pull her left.
Yeah.
You go back to when she first got in and she apologized to the unvaccinated, and then you saw the absolute insanity ensue.
And then she walked back and everybody was upset.
Why are you apologizing?
Yeah.
It's because all the forces of the universe are trying to yank her further and further left.
And that's a, I don't know why that hit me so good this morning.
But hey, our job.
That's our job is to be the counterbalance to that.
The good faith critics on the other side.
Well, I appreciate you hopping on this morning, Sheila.
And, well, I'm sure it won't be the last time.
I hope not.
It comes sporadically.
Well, I've been trying to, you know, for the listener, I've been trying to work.
You mentioned Chris Sims.
And obviously on this side, I have a ton of time for Chris as well.
She's spoken at several of my events and I've been harassing her because, you know, last time I had Danielle Smith on or Premier Smith, you know, I didn't ask one of the questions I was going to ask.
And I, because me and Chris have been talking, she's like, oh, no, she's going to do it.
And then the last time Chris was on, she's like, you're right.
I fumbled that one.
I fumbled that one.
Right.
And I, and so I track.
And so I've been in the background, I'm trying to work on this idea of bringing not only Chris, but yourself and a couple others together to kind of have a little independent media roundtable, if you would,
because I think there's there's there's some things that I would love to have different voices comment on to just kind of help not only myself, but probably with the public and trying to hear about because there's there's so much information these days and trying to disseminate that and find out what is actually going on and what the important things to stare at are.
And certainly yourself and others do a pretty good job of doing that.
And at times, I think we're all flawed in our approaches to all of this, but appreciate you coming on.
And hopefully we'll try and line that up.
I'm sure Chris will be listening to this laughing and going, yes, we need to get that happening.
Either way, I'll be the guy to continue to light the fire under people's feets and see if we can't make it happen.
Sheila, thanks for hopping on this side and all the best here in the coming months.
Thanks.
Talk to you soon, I guess.
Randy's Courthouse Case00:06:49
Wow.
We get your viewer feedback every single day, just about every single hour of every single day.
And it is overwhelming, but in a good way, because it means that you care about the work that we do here at Rebel News.
You're engaged in the stories that we do, and the people that we cover matter to you.
And it's a reason I give out my email address right now.
I want to hear from you more.
So my email address is Sheila at RebelNews.com.
If you've got a comment about my interview with Sean Newman, whom I suggest you follow on whatever podcast platform you might listen to, send me an email.
Put gun show letters in the subject line so I know why you are reaching out to me.
And who knows?
You might just have your comment read on air right now in this portion of the show, which is something I normally do in the closing portion of the show.
I turn the show over to you.
But maybe you don't want to send me an email.
Maybe you just want to leave a comment for the world to see and you're doing it on Rumble or YouTube on any of the stories that we do or on, you know, a clip, a free clip of the show.
Do that because I do read those looking for your viewer feedback.
And today's viewer feedback, it comes from YouTube, but it doesn't actually come specifically from the show, but it comes from the topic of the show today.
So it comes on my video from the Lethbridge Courthouse on the verdict for Anthony Olinick and Chris Carbert.
And I say verdict, but what I mean is the sentencing.
So they received basically six and a half years all in for their role at Coots.
Let's get to it.
Bonobo, 3D, writes, thanks to Rebel News for covering this case thoroughly and from the start.
Indeed, we did.
If it wasn't Robert there, it was Ezra that was there.
I've been there.
It's a 12-hour round trip for me to go to Lethbridge in a car.
But this is a case of national significance, and Rebel News has been there from the very beginning of the Couts situation when truckers and farmers got an inkling that they should do something in civil disobedience to Jason Kenney and Justin Trudeau's COVID restrictions.
We had reporters on the ground.
We even made a documentary about it.
My friend Kian Simoni and our journalist, Sid Fizard, they were there, embedded in the blockade from the very beginning.
So how could we not see it through to the end?
And it is not even close to over yet, as I said in my video.
The Crown is appealing the acquittal of the conspiracy to commit murder charges, and we don't know yet if Anthony O'Linoch and Chris Carbert are appealing their sentences.
I'm not sure how they could.
The two are basically indigent.
They really have nothing left.
Their assets were liquidated over these past few years.
Anyway, let's keep going.
The good people interviewed here outside the courthouse speak for many of us, expressing disappointment, disgust, and outrage at the corrupt Canadian justice system.
I think the men were probably sentenced, as I said in my interview with Sean Newman, that I think they were sentenced for crimes they were not convicted of and probably not even charged with.
But so it goes.
And it worries me for Tamara Leach and Chris Barber because they are currently on trial for mischief.
But I worry if they're found guilty, they might be sentenced for something that they were not charged with.
I mean, they've been called terrorists, so who knows?
We've got another one from the same video also on YouTube.
Darren C9607 writes, under Trudeau's basic dictatorship, there are two basic rules.
For his friends, anything goes, isn't that the truth?
For his political opponents' lawfare.
Yeah, we've seen this time and time again.
Tamara Leach, Chris Barber, Jordan Peterson, us at Rebel News.
Anybody who's a critic of Justin Trudeau, they will use the full force of the government and the judicial system to censor you, imprison you, stop you from doing your job, stop you from holding a sincerely held opinion on the state of your own country.
But if you are Justin Trudeau's buddies, you might be lucky if you get a slap on the wrist at all.
I mean, look at Randy Boissaneau, the liberal MP for an Edmonton riding, who will undoubtedly and justly lose his seat in the next election in October 2025.
Yes, I have begun a countdown.
The man was voting for lockdown restrictions and then, it would appear, intimately involved in the running of a PPE company where he was a 50% owner, where his company would benefit from those same lockdown restrictions.
So voting for the lockdown restrictions, which would benefit your PPE import company.
And wouldn't you know it, now news just breaks that his PPE company was getting government contracts during that time.
And even though text messages between him and his alien looking partner I'm sorry, alleged text messages with the alien looking partner show that communications between the partner and Randy, then they say there's another Randy and then they've said it was auto-correct.
And we're just supposed to believe that he never corrected himself once.
And communications with this other autocorrect Randy happened at the same time that Randy Boissino was in Vancouver for a caucus retreat and the other Randy was also in Vancouver.
Government Abuse Exposed00:01:14
I mean, come on.
It's just, it's absolute garbage.
It's the stuff that if you were in the United States, you'd be in jail for.
And nothing, nothing happens here.
It's just free and easy.
As long as you're Justin Trudeau's friend, you can milk the taxpayer for everything that we've got.
But if you speak up against government, God help you.
God help you.
You give a trucker a coffee.
You might just have your bank account frozen.
Or much worse.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
By the way, if you want to see more of our coverage from Lethbridge, maybe you missed something.
You want to bring yourself up to speed.
But not just Lethbridge, all of the Convoy-related trials, you can go to truckertrials.com and there you can support our independent journalism because as you know, I say it all the time, we'll never take a penny from Justin Trudeau to hold him to account because how could you?
Every one of your stories becomes a grant application for a bailout.
As I was attempting to say, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
Thanks to everybody who works behind the scenes at Rebel News to put the show together for you so that it's there when you want to watch it.