Ezra Levant launches the Free Speech Union of Canada, a full-time NGO crowdfunding legal battles against ideological censorship, with Lisa Bildie leading. Their first case: nurse Amy Hamm, disciplined for a billboard supporting J.K. Rowling, faces a BC Supreme Court appeal after a panel ruled her belief in two sexes as "discriminatory." Levant accuses Mark Carney of pushing Glasgow Financial Alliance’s "net zero wokeness"—tying fossil fuel divestment to progressive politics like DEI—while Brookfield Asset Management profits from oil. The Union’s fight expands globally, challenging regulatory overreach and corporate ideological compliance under laws like RICO, proving dissent demands resilience in hostile environments. [Automatically generated summary]
It's a full-time operation dedicated to freedom of speech.
We've got the Justice Center, we've got the Democracy Fund, but what a pleasure to have a new NGO.
We'll talk to Lisa Bildie, their new boss.
We'll also talk to her about a civil liberties case she has taken at the Justice Center.
And I'm going to give you a teaser about my investigative report into Mark Carney and his role of pretty much extorting companies to go green and leave the carbon in the ground.
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Tonight, a feature interview with the head of a new free speech organization in Canada.
But first, is Mark Carney in trouble for trying to extort banks?
Why Larry Fink Prioritizes Ideology00:10:57
I'll give you some details.
It's March 25th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious thug.
Oh, hi, everybody.
We've got a big show today.
We're going to talk to Lisa Bildie in a bit about two things.
She's been defending nurse Amy Hamm out of British Columbia, who's been put through a five-year ordeal because she put up a billboard that said, I heart J.K. Rowling.
Well, she was put through the grinder, including a 22-day hearing by the nursing profession because Amy's a nurse, and this had nothing to do with her nursing.
This wasn't in a hospital or anything.
It was just on the street.
But you're not allowed to have views like that.
It's a little bit like Jordan Peterson's case.
We'll talk to Lisa about that and about the fact that she, Lisa Bildie, is the new leader of the Free Speech Union of Canada.
Holy moly, do we ever need that?
But let me, before I get to that, it's a great interview.
Lisa's one of my favorite people.
Let me talk to you about a little bit of an investigative report I'm working on right now.
And I'm going to take one more day to do it right.
So I'm going to give you a little bit of a teaser here, but I'm going to really unpack it tomorrow.
There's this funny word, and I honestly hadn't heard of it or bothered to look it up until about a week ago.
You know, it's acronyms, and sometimes elites use acronyms and fancy phrases to keep things not understandable.
Like that, one of the purposes of jargon is to have like a small society that insiders know what's going on, but outsiders don't.
It's one of the reasons why lawyers love using Latin phrases is just to, you know, there's an elite guild and you're not in it.
The UN is awful for that.
They use all sorts of acronyms and short forms and weird terms.
One of them is G-Fans.
What?
G-Fans.
And I heard that Mark Carney was the co-chair of G-Fans, and I just was bored right away.
And it's just so weird.
But I Googled it and it says for Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero.
And that's just as boring and as eye-glazing.
But if you dig a little deeper, it's actually shocking.
Let me go to the homepage of G-Fans.
The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, G-Fans, is an independent, no, it's not, private sector-led, no, it's not, initiative focused on mobilizing capital, that's a euphemism, and removing barriers to investment in the global transition.
Do you understand what it is that's designed to hide meaning, not to share meaning?
But let me tell you what it means.
These are people who are shaking down big banks to get them to stop lending money or investing in oil and gas or carbon.
When they say transition, they're not talking about transgenderism, transitioning from being a boy to a girl or something.
They're talking about transition off the carbon economy, transition to shut down the oil sands.
So this is a global group of elite VIPs.
When they say it's private sector, well, that's part of it.
But of course, this was a United Nations project.
It was hatched in Glasgow at one of these UN anti-global warming conferences.
This is to kill the world's oil and gas, natural gas, fracking, oil sands, energy systems.
And Mark Carney was the co-chair of this for years.
His purpose was to pressure companies to leave it in the ground while he, of course, jetted around in private jets.
And we all know about this.
We know about ESG.
That's the corporate version of DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
In a corporate setting, they say ESG, environmental, social, and governance.
What does that mean?
Well, environmental means only one thing.
Are you shutting down carbon?
So they detest oil and gas industries.
And what they do is they pressure companies to divest, not based on financial reasons, which is the fiduciary duty of officers and directors of a company, but based on ideology.
ExxonMobil, for example, is one of the most profitable companies in the world, has been for years.
It's involved in oil and gas.
If you're doing your fiduciary duty to your shareholders, you think, how can we maximize profits?
Not so with ESG.
They're trying to graft, force into these companies a new measurement, which is how woke are you?
How environmentalist are you?
Do you please not the shareholders, but Greta Tunberg.
We know that Mark Carney admires Greta Tunberg.
And it's one thing to pressure a company from the outside, to have a little protest outside their annual meeting or to have a scene in some spectacle like Greenpeace does.
But what these environmentalists have done is go in through the investors.
So for example, BlackRock, which is the most famous asset management company, Larry Fink, the head of BlackRock, is a woke.
I mean, he's obsessed with wokeness.
And what he does is he invests his clients' money.
It's not his own money, and puts it in this company or that company and buys an enormous number of shares.
Larry Fink is, I don't know, around $20 trillion worth of assets under management.
It's not Larry Fink's money.
He's investing it for his customers.
But he says to the companies in which he invests, I demand that you decarbonize.
I demand that you have, I mean, it would be the reason why, for example, Bud Light went fully trans.
That's one of the ESG values, is how sensible or sensitive are you, rather, to the rainbow agenda?
Where's your transgenderism?
If you're wondering why a company suddenly goes woke, odds are it's because Larry Fink or other huge asset managers have demanded that the recipients of their investment do so.
When I was in Davos this year, I bumped into Larry Fink, and one of my first questions to him was: why are you putting your ideology ahead of your fiduciary duty to shareholders?
Remember this?
Here's me asking that question of Larry Fink.
Mr. Fink, are you going to follow Donald Trump's plan and get rid of DEI and ESG in your companies?
BlackRock really is the opposite of Donald Trump in so many ways.
Are you going to change it all in light of the U.S. presidency?
How is Donald Trump, have you talked to Donald Trump since he was elected?
Is the World Economic Forum a counterpoint to Donald Trump?
Why are you running away from simple questions?
Just answer a question.
Have you talked to President Trump yet?
Why are your bodyguards pushing away journalists, Mr. Fink?
Funny enough, a couple years ago I was in Davos and I bumped into the boss of State Street, which is a huge asset management company just like BlackRock.
And their boss stopped and answered my question.
He was sort of mad at me that I dared suggest that he was doing anything other than following the fiduciary duty of his investors.
Take a look.
Can I ask you a little bit about State Street and ESG?
Are you pulling back from it the same way BlackRock is?
No.
And why don't we just set this up formally?
But no, we're not pulling back from it.
Well, what about critics like Elon Musk who say it's a kind of reverse racism?
Elon's got his opinion.
What about shareholders who say you're putting other goals ahead of your fiduciary duties?
You're putting cultural Marxism or affirmative action.
Those may be political values, but they're not designed to get a maximum rate of return.
If there's firms that are doing that, I don't know that.
That's not how we do it.
We have one focus, which is shareholder value, period.
Well, then how you just told me, though, you're sticking with ESG.
We stick with value.
It's about value, not values.
Can I ask you about state governments that are pulling their funds out of ESG firms, like the state of Florida, for example?
Are you worried that State Street will be hit by divestment from companies that are rejecting ESG?
So we only focus on creating value for our shareholders.
And if you look at our track record, that's all that we've ever done.
And what we focus on is what do long-term investors need to be thinking about?
What are the kinds of risks they need to be thinking about?
And they need to make the decision.
That's what we've always done.
What were your goals here?
What are your goals here?
I'm done.
Okay.
Yeah, why was the State Street boss so worried, but the BlackRock boss, well, he wouldn't engage?
I think one of the things that's happened over the last few years is that especially Republicans have woken up to the way the G-Fans, extortionists, I call them, operate.
They basically say, follow our political biases, do our political errands, or we will divest, which is not what they're supposed to do.
They're supposed to follow their shareholders' interests.
You know, they blackmail, they blacklist, and that could be seen as a crime, a cartel.
In the United States, they have a RICO statute, the racketeer influence corrupt organizations.
I think that's what RICO says.
I'll have to look it up.
It's usually used against gangs.
But what happens if you're not trying to extort some shopkeeper like the mafia, which is what RICO laws were used for?
What if you're trying to shake down companies for billions of dollars?
Mark Carney was the co-chair of G-Fans, and he went around the world by private jet, meeting with companies and demanding that they divest from oil and gas and coal.
And if they didn't, he threatened them.
This isn't my theory.
This is what the United States Congress has concluded based on their research and their interrogation of Mark Carney.
Did you know that Mark Carney was interrogated by the U.S. Congress about whether or not he was part of an extortionate cartel?
Did you know that?
I didn't know that because the mainstream media doesn't talk about it.
G-Fans is boring to me.
Friends Stand Up00:04:29
It's going to be double boring to them.
I was going to have a big presentation today, but I'm going to save it till tomorrow so I can do a proper job of it.
I will have that for you tomorrow.
But for now, enjoy my interview with our friend Lisa Bildey.
Come back tomorrow for the G-Van stuff.
Well, I remember it very clearly in March of 2020 when the world went mad and all sorts of senseless, crazy, insane policies became law.
And not just law, they became enforced as, you know, polite society, wear a mask, six feet of separation, don't meet for Christmas dinner, don't go to your own parents' funeral, don't have a wedding, don't go to school, all these insane rules with no scientific basis.
In fact, some of them, as the former head of the FDA said, no one simply knows where the six feet of separation rules came from.
It was madness.
And government, of course, is always at the vanguard of madness.
They love an emergency.
It gives them liberties to go beyond what they normally can do.
One of the problems with that is it was so difficult to find lawyers to stand up to.
There are some lawyers who are built as dissidents.
I think you quite often find them in the criminal law side of things.
I mean, think about it.
If someone is an accused rapist, an accused murderer, even an accused terrorist, it is very socially unacceptable to be seen in their company, let alone to defend them.
I mean, would you want to be known as the lawyer who defended Carla Homalka or Paul Bernardo?
So there are some lawyers who are built not to care about public fashion.
And we need them because even atrocious monsters like Homalka and Bernardo need a lawyer.
The system requires a lawyer for it to work properly.
And even monsters are guilty until proven innocent.
Excuse me, innocent until proven guilty.
My point is it was so difficult to find lawyers who were willing to dissent in the mania, the moral panic of our time.
I made so many phone calls to otherwise courageous lawyers who simply did not want to be seen, not just as taking controversial, but taking anti-social and unpolite points of view.
I tell you, in March and April of 2020, it was nearly impossible to find a lawyer to stand up for civil liberties in the face of COVID mania.
But one of the lawyers who did.
One of the first lawyers who answered the call of the Democracy Fund to fight back is our guest today.
She's our friend, Lisa Bildey, is her name.
And she joins us now via Skype from London, Ontario.
Lisa, great to see you.
Nice to see you too, Ezra.
It's very hard to be unfashionable.
We're social creatures.
We want to fit in.
We want to be polite company.
We want people to like us.
We want to get invited to Christmas parties.
We don't want people to look at us funny.
To be a dissenter on things often means you're going to be, at best, identified with your client, but at worst called, well, just shunned from society yourself.
I think it's very difficult.
You were a key lawyer fighting for freedom during the lockdowns, weren't you?
Yes, I was at the Justice Center at the time, and the whole organization just got geared up to fight those restrictions.
And I had had, I guess, a taste of it before when I battled our law society as well, over the statement of principles.
So I guess I'm used to being on the so-called wrong side of issues.
And once you kind of go through that experience and live through it, you realize it doesn't kill you.
And in fact, it probably makes you stronger.
Well, it certainly makes you resourceful.
That's a long way of introducing you, but what I want to talk about today is one of your most recent clients, a friend of ours, Amy Hamm.
She's a nurse in the Vancouver area, who a few years ago did something a little bit social media influencer-y, but it wasn't a particularly heavy-duty thing.
Gender Discrimination Hearing00:15:27
She rolled out a billboard in Vancouver that just simply said I, and then the heart symbol, J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series.
It's such an innocuous thing.
I mean, there are quite scandalous billboards everywhere.
This just had a message that could be interpreted as standing by J.K. Rowling's stance, opposing transgender colonization of women's spaces, swimming pools, changing rooms, things like that.
And she was prosecuted for five years?
Tell us a story of Amy Hamm.
Well, she, yes, it was almost, it was over four years.
She put up that billboard and it immediately attracted the attention of activists who, of course, don't like you to be critical of anything to do with transgender ideology.
And so complaints were made to her college.
I guess she'd been identified by the reporter in one of the articles following the billboard as a nurse.
And so that put the word out that there was a way to get at her, and that was to file complaints with her regulator.
And a couple of people did do that.
One of them was a self-described social justice warrior and Marxist.
And he basically advised the college that they should ensure that she never works as a nurse again.
The other one was anonymous.
So the college took it upon themselves to do a complete investigation of pretty much everything that Amy Hamm said on social media, on podcasts, in various articles that she'd written on gender ideology.
She'd become a bit of a, well, it's fair to say, quite a critic of gender ideology and its impact on women's rights.
That was her focus.
So there was a lot out there.
And in fact, they pulled together a dossier of about 330 pages of things that she'd said and written online.
So, you know, not content to, I guess, shut up as maybe what was expected of her, she decided to fight it.
And with the Justice Center's help, she was able to do that.
And it turned into a marathon hearing.
We had 22 days of hearings.
That's insane.
Yeah, spread out over a year and a half.
That's more than most murder trials, to be candid.
Yeah, and it was as stressful as one probably, too, to be in the hot seat like that.
We had people from all over the world watching this case because, of course, it's a very timely issue right now.
There are a number of people around the world, especially in the UK and the United States and Canada, the Anglosphere, basically, where, you know, women who are standing up to gender ideology are being rigged over the coals and fighting legal battles.
And some of them are successful and many are not.
So there was a lot of interest in her case.
Yeah, 22 days of hearing is just insane.
Now, let me just confirm with you something I believe to be true, that there was never a single piece of evidence adduced in these hearings that suggested that Amy was anyway inappropriate in her conduct of nursing.
So in her actual profession, on the job, dealing with patients, dealing with others in hospitals or clinics or other health settings, there was never any accusation that she actually harmed or discriminated or anything like that.
This was purely an assessment of her external political views set on the street with a billboard and on Twitter.
Is that accurate?
That's absolutely accurate.
There was not a single workplace complaint.
And her evidence was that she had actually dealt with transgender patients before and showed them the utmost respect.
She told the story of working on the downtown East Side as a younger nurse and having a transgender patient who she was quite fond of.
And, you know, there was never any suggestion that she misgendered anyone.
She always made it a point to use preferred pronouns.
She took all courses on DEI-related things and on gender ideology or gender identity in order to ensure she was fully informed.
She read from all angles and her workplace conduct was respectful.
So, yeah, this was purely off-duty conduct targeted by activists.
Now, 22 days of hearings, I've been through a lengthy process before the Human Rights Commission.
That's what I'm talking about.
I observe the extraordinarily long trial of Tamara Leach for mischief, which is the lowest species of crime in the book.
And the phrase that comes to my mind is the process is the punishment.
First of all, can you even afford a lawyer to stand with you for 22 days?
Luckily, the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms assisted with that.
Second of all, who's got 22 days they can take off from work, from family?
And it's a stressful 22 days.
It's not a vacation.
You have to intensely follow the proceedings.
You have to withstand cross-examination.
It's not a part, like a 22-day trial is exhausting mentally and I'm sure physically too.
Even if she had been acquitted, I mean, I can't even believe a 22-day hearing about a gal's tweets and her billboard sign.
How many lawyers, bureaucrats, activists, complainants do you think were on the other side?
Was it one of those typical swarms?
Was it like, you know, did the other side throw, I mean, what kind of resources did they deploy against Amy?
Oh, you know, they had three lawyers on it, including in-house counsel and two external counsel that they hired.
I'm sure it wasn't cheap.
They had a couple of expectations.
I don't know what they paid for their experts.
They did have a couple of experts as well.
And it was a time-consuming affair for that organization as well.
I'm sure they spent a lot of money prosecuting her for this.
And the Justice Center, to its great credit, allowed her to have not one, but two lawyers for most of it, bringing in Karen Bastow as another lawyer who the Justice Center put on the case.
And, you know, she was able to fight and she was able to put up a strong defense.
We had some excellent experts as well who were very generous with their time.
And I thought they did a fantastic job on her behalf.
But, you know, it wasn't enough in this environment where we're fighting a very, very entrenched worldview.
That, gosh, you know, one of the things about being one of these rebel lawyers, as you say, the hard part is that you can do the best job possible, or at least you can certainly try, and you still end up losing a lot of these cases, probably more than the average.
I joke sometimes that I'm on, I walk this earth to give opposing counsel the thrill of victory because it just feels like they're all uphill battles these days.
Yeah.
You know, we have the same experience at the Democracy Fund.
We were actually very successful with the tickets and the COVID, the app, the Arrive Can app.
Most of those have been thrown out.
But on the major case, so on the minor cases, we've actually been extremely successful, over 90%, I would say.
But on those major strategic cases that set precedence, absolutely we lose most of the time.
And I think of the case that Maxine Bernie and Brian Peckford filed about being banned from traveling on airplanes during the elections.
I think of the case that we did with Kian Bexti when he flew through an airport, the sort of detention where you had to stay in the hotel as a quarantine hotel and pay over a thousand bucks.
We challenged that.
We lost all those strategic cases.
The only strategic case that I think was won over the last half decade was challenging the Emergencies Act itself.
It was a bit of a miracle that the federal court ruled that illegal.
But those were about COVID matters.
We're talking about Amy Hamm and transgenderism.
Tell me what, tell me, first of all, who were the deciders?
If this was within the nursing profession, these would not have been judges.
And I imagine they were not even lawyers.
Were they sort of senior nurses?
Who made the decision here?
So it was a panel comprised of two nurses, one of whom was a retired nurse, I believe, and one active, plus a member of the public.
So like many of these bodies, they have lay appointments to their disciplinary bodies.
And I don't know what her background was.
I don't recall.
But they had a lawyer who advised them along the way and very likely helped write the decision and walked through the analysis of the charter and so on.
But yeah, I mean, these are not people whose job it is to decide free speech issues.
There are people who are there to decide if nurses are competent, ethical, or are not stealing drugs on the side or sexually assaulting other people.
I mean, that's the normal kind of work that they would do.
So it's very weird.
I went through the same thing when I was a lawyer.
I mean, I never had a complaint from a client, not once, ever.
I mean, I didn't do law for a long time, but I had no disciplinary history at all.
All the complaints against me, and there were more than 20, were about my politics.
My newspaper columns, my videos would be shown to the Law Society, and they would have hearings about that.
Now, I mean, in the end, none of them stuck, but it was the process that was the punishment.
And I would trust a panel of a retired nurse and an active nurse.
If, like you say, how is the nursing?
How is the, you know, the scientific medical nursing?
Was there an ethical question violating the privacy of a patient?
Absolutely.
I would trust a nurse more than I would trust a lawyer.
But to weigh the freedom of Amy Ham outside the nurse's station, who the hell do they think they are?
I think it's outrageous.
I know for a fact that wouldn't live a day in America under their First Amendment, but alas, in Canada, we're not as free.
What did these two nurses and a lay member of the public in the end, what did they say?
Well, it was interesting.
I mean, of that 330-page dossier, they actually found that most of it, they would not declare it to be professional misconduct because she didn't attribute her name or her profession to it.
Whereas there were three articles that she had written and a podcast, I think, with Megan Murphy that she had been on, where she did specifically identify herself as a nurse.
So they drew that distinction.
They didn't like everything that she said on Twitter, and there were some comments in the appendix to the very lengthy decision where they talked about that.
But they did not use those as a basis for the finding of professional misconduct.
They really wanted to tie it to the fact that she had identified herself as a nurse, which is kind of funny because, you know, it's pretty hard to have, just imagine like LinkedIn, people have almost their entire resume on their page.
Does that mean that every professional would have to not identify themselves as being a professional in order to have a conversation in the public square on matters of social policy?
But this is obviously one-sided.
I can guarantee you that if I were to go on LinkedIn or Twitter or any other social media platform, I could find countless examples of nurses in support of transgenderism, of doctors in support of transgenderism.
So you have a live political issue that's basically being created from whole cloth in the last 20 years.
20 years ago, this wasn't a thing.
Now, I would say it's a debate with two sides.
In fact, I would say that the Amy Hamm side has 80% public support.
But even if you say, well, it's 50-50, why should only one side of this debate be censored?
I can guarantee you that the nurses of British Columbia have never prosecuted a nurse for being pro-transgenderism.
I think that they are doing what was done to Jordan Peterson, the Ontario College of Psychologists.
They're injecting politics right into the bloodstream profession and essentially expelling anyone who's not politically correct.
Tell me what the ruling said.
Well, that was essentially it.
I mean, they found that she was discriminatory and derogatory against transgender people.
That, you know, having an opinion, how is that even discriminating?
Well, I argued that point.
I said, you know, that you're importing a concept here into a human rights concept into this that isn't appropriate here.
There is no suggestion that she denied anyone service, that she, that there's not even a complainant except for people from, you know, the public who aren't transgender.
So where's this discrimination?
But it didn't matter.
That was the language that was imported from an old case called Kempling, and they used it here.
And, you know, actually, the BC human rights legislation, just to point this out, actually does have a prohibition against publication, discriminatory publication.
So, you know, it's kind of out there that it isn't just a denial of service anymore.
But anyway, that's what they found, that she was discriminatory and derogatory because she insisted on there only being two sexes.
And they felt that, and that was one of the things.
Two sexes or two genders?
Two sexes.
Well, now, don't tell me they're saying there's more than two sexes now.
Are saying that they bought the, they preferred, let's just put it that way, they preferred the evidence of the college's expert, Dr. Greta Bauer, whose testimony was that sex is multi-dimensional, multi-dimensional.
And that is the new way to look at sex.
I don't think that this is scientifically, you know, unimpeachable.
I mean, I'm sure that if we really had a debate about this, which we really not have been allowed to have to date, that the vast majority of professionals would not agree that it's multi-dimensional.
But that was what they found.
And as a result, saying that there are only two sexes is exclusionary and erases transgender women or transgender women.
But you know what?
I think the word gender is BS.
And as Billboard Chris always says, please define gender.
And people have a tough time with that.
Gender is sort of a made-up word that I think refers to how people express themselves.
I think it's another way of saying your personality in terms of sexual issues.
But there is no doubt that there's an X chromosome and a Y chromosome.
We're talking about sex.
I thought that was why the left moved away from sex to gender so they could get to all these blurry things like they, them, g g.
And that's all gender gobbly gook.
I thought that's why they moved away from the word sex because sex is obviously boy or girl, male or female.
I didn't know that in British Columbia, I mean, if a nurse cannot determine what's a boy or a girl, but nurse doesn't know what a boy or girl is, maybe this goes to a core, you know, a core competency of being a nurse.
I'm Glad to Hear You're Considering Appealing00:08:16
If you're delivering a baby, what do you say?
It's a baby, they, them.
Like, I don't know.
It's sort of crazy.
What was the penalty?
What was the punishment they gave to Amy for not agreeing that sex is multi-dimensional?
Well, they haven't yet.
So it's a bifurcated proceeding.
We have a finding now that she is, that she, the panel has determined that some of her posts were professional misconduct.
So now we have to go back for a hearing on penalties.
And now, Amy is intending to appeal this, and the Justice Center is going to continue to support that.
I have to work out what the grounds are.
I think there'll be some, and we have another couple of weeks to get that filed.
So, but I expect that we will be proceeding with an appeal, and then we'll have an argument about whether we can have to stay the penalty part of it until we get an appellate court ruling on the finding of professional misconduct.
Sounds to me like the BC nurses are spending hundreds of thousands.
They may be, in fact, into the millions now, going after Amy Hamm for a billboard.
It's sort of gross.
I'm glad to hear you're considering appealing.
First of all, the misconduct side, and I'm sure the penalty side.
I'm impressed that Amy Hamm, I mean, she's a met her a couple times, and she's a really normal person.
By that, I mean she's like, she's not someone who is a conflict-oriented, you know, she like she's as normal as you get.
I mean, she's got opinions, but she's not.
I mean, I'm sort of impressed that she didn't collapse under the weight of the whole system.
And I'm so glad you were there, and the Justice Center was there to give her support because I think that was essential for her.
I just want to say, Ezra, on that point, I have found, and I found this a lot through COVID too.
There is a certain kind of person who has an extremely strong conscience, and they cannot act against it.
It is painful to them to act against their conscience.
And I would say Amy is that kind of person.
She cannot just speak something that she does not believe to be true.
And she'll suffer.
I mean, it's hard, but she will suffer the consequences in order to abide by her conscience.
And we need people like that, but boy, we don't make it easy for people like that.
Yeah.
Well, that's our kind of girl over here.
I mean, boy, that's what we admire about her.
Well, listen, I hope you keep it.
So the next step is, like you say, the penalty portion.
You're going to appeal the misconduct finding.
And I presume you would appeal the penalty portion if it's anything significant as well.
And what's the rough timing on those two things?
Yeah, I'm not really sure, actually.
You know, we're going to be entering into the court system now to appeal the finding.
We're going to the BC Supreme Court.
Now, fortunately, it's a statutory appeal, which means that we do have a standard of review that's a little bit more robust.
On legal issues, the panel has to be correct and not just reasonable.
So unlike, say, the Jordan Peterson case, where the standard was pretty deferential to what the panel had decided, we do have a little bit more of an argument here.
So I don't know how long the, I don't know what the court system is like in BC at the moment in terms of backlog, but I suspect, you know, it'll be another year or so down the road before we have all of this ironed out.
Yeah, like I say, the processes and punishment.
Well, listen, give our best regards to Amy.
We're fans of hers, and I'm glad you were there to fight for her.
I want to shift gears for a second while I've got you here.
For a few years now, I've been a member of something in the United Kingdom called the Free Speech Union.
And in my view, it is the world's leading free speech organization.
It's run by Toby Young, who was recently knighted.
He's Sir Toby Young, which is sort of cool.
I was sort of amazed that he was given that standing, given that he's such a troublemaker fighting for free speech for quite a number, like for thousands of people.
And the Free Speech Union in the UK has grown quite a bit.
And I'm really glad that they're there.
I really think they're one of the most important civil rights groups in the UK.
I don't really think we have something so dedicated to free speech in Canada.
The Justice Center does touch on free speech.
Of course, the Democracy Fund does too, but we don't have anything called the Free Speech Union.
I mean, I say again, there are dabblers in that, but I was delighted when Toby said he was going to set up versions of the Free Speech Union in New Zealand, in Australia, in South Africa, and in Canada.
And I am delighted to learn that you are the founding executive director, or what's your title, president of the Free Speech Union Canada.
Tell us a little bit about it.
Yeah, so, I mean, Toby sort of put out the call for anybody in Canada who was concerned about this and wanting to set up an organization.
And a number of people responded, including myself.
And we met over a number of times and, you know, people had various skills.
This is an area where I'm, you know, I've been obviously working quite a lot.
And I felt it was really important that we continue and add more organizations that can help fight these cases.
Because as you said earlier, Ezra, the cost of fighting these battles is massive.
And the average person, even like the well-off person, can't afford to have a 20-day hearing.
It's just, you know, I did this at a reduced rate and Justice Center was very generous in covering it.
But even then, most people can't swing it.
And so then what happens?
Well, they end up, you know, probably if they're a professional signing some undertaking with their regulator that they'll take their account private.
They'll be more discreet.
They won't say the bad thing, whatever it is they're being called out for.
And we never hear their opinions again.
And I just don't think that's right.
And so I like the idea of there being another way to help crowdfund.
And so this is a mass membership organization.
That means that when people join as members, they're helping to fight these battles themselves.
They're taking an actual role in it themselves as members, and they will help their fellow Canadians stand up against this.
Because the problem is, is if we just all kind of let it wash over us like a steamroller, mixing my metaphors, but you know, the censorship beast just continues to grow and grow and grow.
So even if we don't win all the cases, we have to stand up and fight where it's appropriate to do so.
And so I'm really excited that the Free Speech Union has launched now.
It's a lot of work for me right now, just trying to balance where two hacks, but I think eventually I'll move more into just the free speech union role.
And we're going to be building up a network of lawyers that will help us with cases.
We have our first case already, which I'm excited to, I'll probably come back sometime and tell you about it.
And yeah, we're going to do some great things.
And because it is just free speech that we're focused on, I think we'll fill some gaps that the other groups, as great as they are, are maybe not focused on.
We're not a charity.
We're going to be able to work in employment situations, in universities, in places where the charter doesn't necessarily apply, and try to help people navigate cancel culture, you know, censorship and regulatory proceedings like poor Amy's gone through.
Well, I'm really glad to hear it.
And I'm proud that the Democracy Fund has chipped in a little bit to help get things going.
And we would love to talk to you about that first case when you're ready to talk about it.
What's the website where people can connect with you?
It's fsucanada.ca.
There you have it, fsucanada.ca.
Lisa, it's great to hear your battles.
I'm so glad you're there with Amy Hamm.
I'm disappointed, but not surprised that the wokeness won.
I mean, it is British Columbia after all, but hopefully the courts will help sort it out.
Thanks for spending so much time with us today.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me on, Ezra.
Oh, our pleasure.
There you have it.
Lisa Buildy, stay with us.
More ahead.
Lisa Buildy's Battles00:02:59
Well, it's great to catch up with Leasability.
I got some letters here.
O'Neill Creighton says, drive your truck around Nepean all day, every day.
You're talking about our beautiful billboard truck.
That truck is Givener.
I'm so excited about that.
I never thought that I would set up a, it's basically a Canadian version of a super PAC.
I'm talking about forCanada.ca, our third-party campaign group.
I never thought of it.
I've been out of politics for 20 plus years.
You may know when I was a kid, when I was 29 or something, I ran for parliament.
That was really fun.
But that's long ago.
I did not want to register as a political group.
But if I didn't, I know in my bones they would have charged me for that billboard truck and they probably would have hit me with a six-figure fine because they only fined me, I think, $3,000 for the Labranos book, if I recall.
But absolutely, they would come at me.
So I'm registering.
But that has opened up this whole new world to me of fun stuff we can do in the campaign.
Anyways, we're just going to keep the accounting separate.
We're very careful about that.
But we're going to have a lot of fun.
If you haven't checked it out, go to forcanada.ca.
Not a lot to see there now, but more to come, I can promise you.
Ad Salo says, Mark Carney's role as a high-profile advocate for net zero commitments is undermined by Brookfield Asset Management's heavily fossil fuel inclined investment strategy.
Carney stepped down from Brookfield in January after four and a half years.
He's allowed to enrich himself, though, through fossil fuel investments, but not Canada or Canadians got it.
You're so right.
I mean, that's the thing about ESG.
It never applies to China or the developing world.
John Anderson, 1245 says, 100 million immigrants policy would draw nobody but the poor, unskilled, undereducated, and impoverished, who would do nothing but consume resources, both natural and economic.
That's just plain nuts.
It is.
It makes no sense other than, you know, if you're in certain industries, it's going to lower wages, drive up housing.
I suppose if you're a bank, it's more customers.
If you're a cell phone company, it's more customers.
There are certain businesses that would be doing super duper if we had 100 million people in this country because everyone's got to have a phone, everyone's got to have a home, but it's at the expense of the rest of you.
You simply cannot, you cannot save the third world by putting 40 million people in Canada or 100 million in the United States.
You can't do that.
You'll wreck, you're not going to wind up saving their home countries, and you're going to absolutely economically and culturally destroy the target countries, the sacrifice zones.
Well, that's our show for today.
Come back tomorrow.
I'm going to have more on this G-Fan stuff.
Until then, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.