Tamara Lich and Chris Barber were convicted of mischief on April 3rd after a 105-page ruling where Judge interpreted "hold the line"—a call for peaceful protest—as criminal intent, despite their acquittal on intimidation. Nine lawyers attended, yet Leach, a Métis grandma from Alberta, didn’t testify; prosecution relied on subjective witness accounts like Mr. Ayot. Critics argue Canada’s justice system unfairly targets peaceful protesters while ignoring violent pro-Hamas demonstrators chanting "from the river to the sea." The case exposes double standards, eroding public trust in legal fairness and free speech protections. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, Tamara Leach's years-long trial finally comes to an end, and I'm here to report it to you.
It's April 3rd, and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.
You're fighting for freedom!
Shame on you, you censorious bug!
Well, court is done for the day.
Let me check the time.
It's just about 4 p.m.
We started just after 10 a.m.
The judge basically read through the meat of a 105-page ruling.
There were a number of counts, a number of charges against both Tamara Leach and Chris Barber.
They were acquitted on most of them, including intimidation, obstructing police, but they were convicted on mischief.
And in the case of Chris Barber, he violated a particular court order that applied only to him.
So I suppose from one point of view, as one fella in the gallery said to me, he said, that's a great outcome.
Most of the cases were acquitted.
I don't feel it's a great outcome at all.
It's like being shot at with six bullets and only one hitting you.
That's a disaster.
I think this is a disaster for civil liberties.
And some of the language used by Chris Barber, Tamara Leach's co-accused on TikTok, the language was harsh.
And I could imagine that it would hurt a judge's ears to hear things like, we're shutting down this city, we wrecked this city, like very boastful language about doing nuisance, committing a nuisance to the city.
It would be hard to look at that without getting a feeling that Chris Barber was meaning to commit mischief, as opposed to just a peaceful protest.
But what did Tamara Leach ever say?
Literally hold the line was the worst thing that the prosecution could come up with.
And the judge, bizarrely, said that hold the line can be wonderful, like when police say it.
And she quoted on several occasions where police said hold the line.
And that was considered fun and playful and positive.
But when Tamara Leach said hold the line, well, that's proof of her mental intentions to commit a crime.
I found that unpersuasive and appalling.
And I really feel like there's two tiers of justice in Canada right now.
If you are a Hamas supporter, if you are even a foreign national in Canada supporting Hamas, you can walk down the streets and chant Indifada Revolution, which means the violent pogrom against Jews.
You can chant from the river to the sea.
You can do all that with complete impunity.
And more than that, you can block the streets.
If you've looked at the pro-Hamas protests in places like Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal, they always block the streets.
And sometimes they have a prayer in the middle of the streets.
Of course, there's 100 mosques in Toronto and Montreal.
The prayer in the streets is not a religious act.
It's a political act of domination of blocking the streets.
And that is never prosecuted.
Have you once ever seen police even ticket people if they're pro-Hamas extremists taking over the streets?
And yet that is exactly what Tamara Leach and Chris Barber were found guilty of.
Like I say, two-tier justice.
And the problem with two-tier justice is that it erodes public support for the system.
And we have this grand compact, this grand agreement in Canada that we all submit to the rules of the game and we accept the outcomes because the rules are fair enough and we trust the people who implement them enough.
But, you know, I was in the courts in Lethbridge, Alberta.
I was in the courts in Lethbridge when I saw the Coots three convicted and the Coots four were convicted.
And Arthur Pavlovsky was convicted for giving a sermon in support of the truckers.
And again and again and again, our side of the equation is criminalized and sentenced in some cases to long jail sentences, lengthy trials.
But the other side isn't.
They get a police escort.
If Tamara Leach, the gentlest grandma you'll ever meet, who the judge read some of her comments full of love and spirituality, if that is a crime, then it's like Lavrenti Beria of the NKVD said, show me the man and I'll find you a crime.
If you can hang a crime around Tamara Leach's neck, you can hang that crime around anybody.
And I am demoralized by it.
But you know what?
I'm built for fighting.
It's called Rebel News.
It's not called establishment news.
We get back up.
And I think I told you I spoke to Tamara yesterday.
And today over lunch, I briefly spoke to the lawyer Lawrence Greenspawn, and we agreed that we would crowdfund the costs of her appeal.
We're not going to let her face this by herself.
It's an enormous uphill battle.
I counted nine lawyers in the room.
That's an enormous battle force.
And of course, the government spent $10 million, Belene, between the policing and the prosecution.
The least we can do is help Tamara Leach.
And I promised her that we would crowdfund for her.
And she accepted the help, and so did Lawrence Greenspan.
So that's the thing.
You know what they say, don't get mad, get even, get ahead.
And what I want to do is help her get ahead.
I want to help cover the cost of her appeal.
Remember, this was a serious judge.
You took the case seriously.
I won't deny it.
But it is the lowest court.
And you can appeal this ruling to a higher court.
And that, too, can even be sought to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.
So it's a loss.
Absolutely, it's a loss.
But the game is not over.
Well, I'm about to go back to Toronto now.
It'll be interesting to me if any of the political candidates remark on this.
I don't think they will.
But I think this is a very important case.
This can be seen in part by the fact that there's so many mainstream media here, as well as actually so many independent citizen journalists too.
That's my report from Ottawa.
Keep watching Rebel News and keep fighting for freedom every day.
Better afternoon than morning, that's for sure.
Yes.
It was a meatloaf who said two out of three.
Five out of six ain't bad.
I can't comment on the mischief charge or any of the aspects of the judge's decision while the matter is still pending for sentence.
And that's about all I can tell you at this point.
There's definitely a similar sentence at that game.
I won't comment on that.
No.
Fantastic, sir.
Awesomely done.
It was a masterclass.
Thank you.
Good job.
Well, I mean, it's bittersweet.
We were hoping for a full acquittal.
She was, of course, convicted.
Tamara Leach was convicted for mischief and counseling mischief, but the counseling mischief was stayed at the behest of the Crown.
So really, it's one for six when you take into account the fact that she was not guilty for intimidation, counseling intimidation, obstructing police, and counseling obstruction.
So technically, it's about one for six, which some would say it's a pretty good result.
Obviously, we were hopeful for no convictions at all.
Because she read her judgment, it's often difficult to process or digest everything because it was about five hours of her reading and going through some dense case law.
She mentioned some court of appeal cases, some recent protest, freedom protest convictions.
And so obviously she's bound by precedent there.
So we're going to have to go through and look to see how that lines up with Tamara's case.
She did say that a couple recent cases expanded the notion of a mischief to include not just people who actively, physically block the road, but those who are around the event and are integrated with it sufficiently.
So that's how it seems that Ms. Leach was drawn into the conviction.
But we're going to have to review that and see whether or not the client wants to appeal and what her lawyers wants to do.
They mentioned that when Tamara said, all the line, it's had a big impact on the decision.
Tell me, can you tell me more about this?
Sure.
So that was a phrase that you heard throughout the Freedom Convoy, and it was actually used by the police.
And Justice Perkins McMaine made a point of saying that that's ambiguous, just as a plain phrase.
So you have to look at when it's said and in what context it said.
And so for the mischief charge, she looked at those words and said that contributed to the element of the offense, the mischief and the counseling mischief.
But when it came to intimidation, that phrase and obstructing police, that phrase didn't have a single meaning such that she could attribute it to the element of the offense.
So it was ambiguous in that context.
Whereas in the context of the mischief, it wasn't ambiguous.
It allowed her to draw a conclusion that they were counseling people to interfere with or obstruct the road.
So that was a key phrase, and she did mention it several times, and both the defense and the crown had pointed to that to support their own case or the defense.
As Ra mentioned, we are ready to go to court of appeal.
Do you think it's what do you think about this can be better?
Well, if you're asking me to speculate as to what the client's going to do and what the court might do, I'm not going to do that.
But I can tell you that both the Defense Council and the Crown will look at that, as they always do, and determine whether or not they're going to appeal.
They have to say what their likelihood of success is, whether or not they feel that Justice Berkman's really got the law correct, you know, what their chances are of success.
And of course, it's going to eat up more judicial resources either way.
So yeah, we can only wait.
They have 30 days.
The Crown has 30 days to make the decision, so we'll see.
I'm disappointed, obviously.
It's a lot to digest.
It's not the outcome we were hoping for.
But I think the disturbing part about this more than anything else is the fact that the standards that the general public are held to are exceptionally high.
And the politicians down the street, the standards for them are exceptionally low.
Reducing Emissions Without the Tax00:15:01
I mean, how many scandals does the Liberals have to be involved in?
And not one of them have ever been accountable for the fact that thousands and thousands of Canadians felt the need to leave their homes to travel across Canada to come here to push back the actions of the government.
And none of them have been held accountable.
But Chris and Tamara, oh, the standard is just so high for them, right?
So this is what really is disturbing and frustrating about the whole thing.
But I'm not a lawyer, but you'd have to talk to a legal expert like Eva to understand that more than I do.
What do you feel about today?
Well, I'm just going to echo what Tom had to say, and I don't think that this should be something a lawyer has to say.
But on behalf of Canadians, I think our government needs to be held account and not Canadians.
Thank you.
Hey, it's April the 1st, otherwise known as April Fool's Day.
And bizarrely, Canada's government chooses this day every year not only to raise our taxes, but to raise their own parliamentary paycheck.
It's like they're making a fool of us.
It's like they know what they're doing is a joke, but they're doing it anyways.
I find the date astonishing, and I refuse to believe it's a coincidence.
But it's a happy coincidence that our friend Franco Terrazano, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, is making today the day he tells us about the details of his new book, a book called Axing the Tax, the Rise and Fall of Canada's Carbon Tax.
And Franco joins us now.
Franco, great to see you again.
Congratulations on the new book.
Hey, thank you so much, Ezra.
I really appreciate that.
April Fool's Day, like it really is crazy that that's the one day a year that they choose to raise so many of their taxes, including alcohol taxes, MP pay, senators' pay.
I don't know.
I just can't get over the coincidence.
Maybe it's just me, but it feels like an insult added to injury.
Tell me, though, about your book, because you guys are really the number one watchdogs in Canada against tax hikes.
Take it away.
Tell me about your new book.
You can get it on Amazon.
Make the case to our rebel news viewers for why they should pick up a copy of Axing the Tax.
Well, you know, Prime Minister Mark Carney wrote a book hundreds of pages long praising the carbon tax.
Here is the book showing you why the carbon tax always was and always will be a scam for the ordinary Canadians who are forced to pay the bill.
And Ezra, as you know, as your listeners know, yes, Canadians forced the Liberal government to back down on their own consumer carbon tax.
But look, folks, the fight against carbon taxes is not over yet.
And that's one of the main reasons why I wrote this book, right?
Because you can already see the carbon tax activists trying to spin this like, oh, well, the carbon tax was a good idea.
Trudeau just bungled the policy or he messed up the communications.
But, you know, that couldn't be further from the truth.
The carbon tax is always going to make your life more expensive and it won't work to reduce emissions, especially in a place like Canada, where we are 1.4% of global emissions.
So I wrote this book for two reasons.
Number one, to show you where the carbon taxers are going to fight in the future.
They're going to relabel, repackage, and try to force hidden carbon taxes onto Canadians.
But number two, Ezra, I also wrote this book because this was really a David versus Goliath fight, right?
For years, you had the politicians, the bureaucrats, the taxpayer-funded academics, the media talking heads, even big businesses telling Canadians to sit down, be quiet, and pay your carbon tax bill.
But ordinary Canadians fought back.
They went to rallies.
They signed petitions.
They emailed politicians.
And they deserve to know that all their hard work paid off and that, you know what, if we keep fighting, we are going to end all carbon taxes in Canada.
Now, I want to point out that when Mark Carney signed his fake executive order, like he sort of copied that Trump style of signing a document in a lovely leather-bound booklet.
If you read what he actually signed, he said that he was rescinding the consumer side carbon tax, not because he disagreed with it, not because it was wrong, not because it was counterproductive.
He simply said it was divisive, divisive, that it divided us against each other, which is obviously true.
Now, I think the division is like 80, 20 people who are against it.
But the reason I mention that, Franco, is that he's not disavowing it.
He's not saying this is a bad idea.
He's just saying, I've got to get through an election.
An election, I need to get as many stones out of my shoe as I can before I start this race.
Pierre Polly has been working on the carbon tax for years.
Let me take his issue away from him.
And I'm not going to say I'm against it.
I'm just going to say for now it's divisive.
So I think even the way he signed that fake order should chill us to the bone.
Because the moment he's not worried about division anymore, I think he's going to spring it back in.
And that's the thing.
He didn't repeal the underlying legislation.
Parliament has not reconvened.
He's just, I don't even know if he has the power to do it.
He's just said, I'm not going to collect it for a while.
Well, Ezra, you're very right to pick up on that and to keep an eye on it, right?
So like, first of all, up until what, six minutes ago, the Liberal government was bragging about the carbon tax, right?
They were telling you if you care about the environment, you got to pay the carbon tax.
The carbon tax will make you richer somehow.
So all but six minutes ago, those same politicians were praising the carbon tax.
And Ezra, you are very right in your analysis, right?
So what Carney did is he set the consumer carbon tax rates to zero.
But the legislation is still on the books, which means that after the election, technically, politicians could come back to the House of Commons and crank up that carbon tax again.
And remember, folks, Kearney, he's not scrapping carbon taxes.
He made it very clear during his liberal leadership campaign that he wants to change the carbon tax, right?
Relabel, repackage, hide the carbon tax.
So what Kearney wants to do is he wants to hammer Canadian businesses with huge hidden carbon taxes, and he hopes you won't notice when they pass those costs on to you through higher prices.
And again, in this book, Axing the Tax, The Rise and Fall of Canada's Carbon Tax, why I think your readers will like it so much, it's not just about the history of the carbon tax or the politics of the carbon tax, but it shows your viewers what they need to look out for as politicians try to relabel and hide carbon taxes, as academics try to do the same thing, but also as international organizations try to force carbon taxes on the global citizenry, okay?
All of that is in this book.
You know, I'm so glad you mentioned international organizations because Mark Carney is the NGO VIP.
He was on the board of the World Economic Forum.
He has not one, not two, but three passports.
He calls himself European at a recent World Economic Forum panel.
Last year, he told the U.S. Congress he lives in the U.K.
And I think he's being honest.
I think he thinks of himself as a man bigger than any one country, but not just that he's big, that like Gulliver in Lilliput, you know, voters are those little pesky creatures trying to tie him down.
And he's bigger than that.
So it's not just that he thinks of himself as bigger than Canada.
It's that he doesn't believe in the little people, the peasants, being able to steer.
Like he would rather listen to policy wonks at the World Economic Forum in Davos than to listen to what Joe Average has to say on the factory floor in any given town in Canada.
There's, I'm not going to call it snobbery, but it's sort of a vision of the elite governing sort of like a council of high priests versus the populist conservative referendum style of government that is popular, let's say, in Alberta.
Well, you know, a couple things let me touch on, okay, because you know, there's other media organizations, these big, important people in the media who actually let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, okay?
And we reference this right in the book where they say, well, maybe it is time to go to a hidden carbon tax because then at least the Rubes won't be all up and frustrated about the carbon tax that they can see directly on their home heating bill, right?
So look, they aren't for ending carbon taxes.
They just don't want you to know that you're paying carbon taxes, right, folks?
And it's not just politicians or media in Canada.
It's also the international media league.
You have organizations like the WEF, the United Nations, the IMF pushing for these types of global carbon taxes.
And I think there's a lot of ammunition in this book to help you do two things.
Number one, fight back against any claim that the problem with the carbon tax was Trudeau.
That is false.
The problem with the carbon tax is the carbon tax.
It makes the necessities of life more expensive.
And it doesn't do anything to reduce global emissions.
It just makes Canadians' lives more expensive.
But number two, it allows you to see where the next fight is going to be and how to be prepared for it.
We're talking about axing the tax.
The new books by Franco Terrazano of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
Now, you mentioned reducing emissions.
And earlier, I think you said combating climate change, or you might have said something to that effect.
And that's really the big rationale for the carbon tax.
Is it's designed to modify your behavior to get you to use less energy and reduce carbon emissions.
So turn down your thermostat in the winter, drive less, have a smaller house, lower carbon footprint.
They're even trying to get cows to fart less because there's methane in there.
But that's all based on the theory that if we reduce man-made carbon emissions, that's going to change the temperature of the world.
Like that's why they're doing it.
So when they say get your emissions down, that's not actually the goal.
That's the secondary thing, the primary goal is reduce the world's temperature.
But none of these taxes do that.
In fact, if you listen to the United Nations, if every single human in the world stopped emitting all carbon, if we just shut down and went back to a Stone Age economy, even that would not cause the Earth to cool.
Because for more than 10,000 years, the Earth has slowly been emerging from the last ice age.
And that's why I think the left uses words like combating climate change or climate action.
They don't talk about an actual result.
They just want to see the busy work that justifies their tax.
What do you make of that?
Like, that's a first principles attack saying, what are we even doing this for?
You're saying we're doing this to cool the earth, but it will not even do that if even we all did it.
Well, Ezra, there's actually another reason.
And look, if these big-brained economists were honest with you, they would agree or at least have to acknowledge this basic principle, and it's called inelastic demand.
Okay, essentially, what that means is that you can't tax away people's necessities.
Okay, so when you tax their ability to get to work, when you tax their ability to heat their homes, when you tax their ability to afford groceries, you're not reducing emissions.
You're reducing the amount of money that people have in their budgets.
Okay?
And look, look, even if you just take them at their claims, right?
The BC government, they brought in the first economy-wide carbon tax all the way back in 2008.
They said, look, we're going to reduce emissions big time.
In fact, they brought in legislation that the carbon tax would reduce emissions by a third by 2020.
Yet the BC government's own data shows that emissions have gone up.
So even if you take them at their words, it's very clear that the carbon tax makes people's lives more expensive and it doesn't work.
But Ezra, let me just flip to one other element here, because we all know of the consumer carbon tax.
Now the issues around this hidden carbon tax on businesses, the industrial carbon tax, is coming to light.
But you know, there's many of these environmental policies and regulations that also use carbon taxes, okay?
The oil and gas cap, right?
The production cap on the oil and gas sector, that uses the tool of a carbon tax.
You've probably heard of the clean fuel regulations, the so-called clean fuel regulations, Trudeau's term, that uses the carbon tax as its main tool.
So not only is it important to push back against the consumer carbon tax, the one we all know about, but there's many of these different hidden carbon taxes and all these different environment or energy regulations that governments are forcing on the people.
You know, I was thinking about the United Kingdom because I saw a crazy headline.
Did you know that there's only one last steel mill in the United Kingdom?
It's owned by British Steel, but British Steel isn't even British anymore.
It's owned by a Chinese company.
It's the last blast furnace in the UK that can create what they call virgin steel.
There's a few others that sort of melt down scrap and reform things, but it's the last, because to make steel from scratch, you need a heat so hot only a coal-fired steel mill will work.
You can't do it through electricity.
And now, because of their obsession with what they call net zero over there, this the last steel mill in the UK may be shut down.
Not that it's inefficient, not that it would fail on its own, but because they just can't make a steel mill without coal.
And it's sort of crazy to me, Franco, that the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution is also the gravesite of the Industrial Revolution.
Are you worried that this carbon tax could do the same to our steel industry?
And the aluminum industry needs an enormous amount of energy.
Also, are you worried about the last of the hearty manufacturing in this country moving probably to the United States where they have cheaper power?
Worries About Canada's Future00:11:33
Well, of course I'm worried about the carbon taxes driving away jobs in manufacturing in Canada.
And I'm glad you brought this up because this really shows why Kearney's hidden carbon tax on business is the worst of all worlds, right?
It'll mean higher prices for you as refineries, utilities, fertilizer plants pass on costs to consumers at the end of the day.
But what it also means is this carbon tax on Canadian business will push businesses to cut production in Canada and set up shops south of the border.
Why is that?
Well, number one, it doesn't matter who occupies the White House, whether it's a Democrat administration or Republican one, they're not imposing national carbon taxes in the United States.
So like we've heard Trump say many times, right, let's get manufacturing into the United States, more American jobs, more investment in the U.S.
Well, guess what?
Kearney's carbon tax on Canadian businesses are going to help Trump do just that, right?
It punishes Canadian businesses.
And of course, it'll lead to fewer production in Canada, more production in the United States.
And that means less job opportunities for Canadians right here at home.
The man is Franco Terrazano.
The book is called Axing the Tax, The Rise and Fall of Canada's Carbon Tax.
I wish you good luck.
I am very worried.
As it stands right now, I mean, I feel like the carbon tax net zero man himself might win.
I'm talking about Mark Carney.
I mean, he literally was the co-chair of a global net zero alliance.
I think your book is more urgent than ever, and I'd like to encourage our viewers to find it at amazon.ca, anywhere else that they can get it.
Can they get it at the Taxpayers Federation website, too?
No, the best place to pick up this book, folks, Axing the Tax, the Rise and Fall of Canada's Carbon Tax, is at Amazon.ca.
You can order it, buy it right now.
Well, we absolutely must.
Franco, great to spend some time with you.
Thanks very much.
Hey, I really appreciate this, Ezra.
Thank you.
All right, there he is, the man who is fighting with his team.
And what I like about them is they don't take any money from the government.
That's the only reason you can trust them.
Because anyone else who takes government money, well, they're just, you know, if you pay Peter, if Peter pays Paul, you know how the saying goes.
Ezra Levant reporting for Rebel News.
I'm standing outside the Ottawa courthouse.
I'm surprised.
For months, I had thought that Tamara Leach would be acquitted.
She, of course, was the spiritual leader of the trucker convoy in January and February of 2022 that so gripped the nation, gripped the nation because of how unique it was.
A peaceful protest by ordinary working class Canadians.
It wasn't supported by any political party or any lobby group.
It wasn't funded by anyone.
In fact, its crowdfunding was shut down twice.
It was ordinary Canadians who said enough of the pandemic lockdowns, enough of the bullying people who didn't want to be jabbed, enough of the no-fly list, enough of the curfew, enough.
And it caught not only the attention of Canadians, but around the world.
For one beautiful moment, the entire world looked at Canada and thought they are an inspiration for freedom.
And I can tell you, in my travels around the world, everyone refers to the Trucker Convoy to this day.
And one of the reasons it was so peaceful is because of Tamara Leach.
She's not a trucker herself, but she joined the truckers and she was in charge of logistics and she helped with crowdfunding.
But mainly, she would make these beautiful statements in writing, in video, telling people to keep their hopes up and their spirits up and insisting that they stay peaceful.
And you know what?
They did.
She was part of the Freedom Convoy Corporation.
They actually incorporated a company.
I'm not sure why.
But they dealt directly with the police and the city of Ottawa on a daily basis.
And what I mean by that is they would help move trucks around, move them out of residential areas and into business areas where they wouldn't upset people who were living.
There are a lot of people who live in apartments in downtown Ottawa, typically bureaucrats who work in the civil service.
They worked with police in the city to move the trucks to Wellington Street, which is the big road next to Parliament where no one lives.
And frankly, no one worked.
Of course, civil servants in Ottawa still haven't gone back to work.
There's a lot of work from home, even though it's 2025.
But my point is that they had a daily collaboration with the police, not daily, hourly.
And they, in fact, when truckers came into Ottawa, they were given directions by the Ottawa police of where to go, what streets to go to, and which streets not.
There was a honking issue, but there was a civil injunction issued by another judge, and it was obeyed immediately.
It was not an illegal movement.
From time to time you hear critics saying the illegal trucker convoy, it was never deemed illegal in any legal manner other than by, I don't know, politicians.
It wasn't a riot.
The Emergencies Act did not ban peaceful protests and the Emergencies Act itself, the invocation of it, was deemed to be illegal and unconstitutional by the federal court.
So supporting people whose really only offense was parking infractions, keeping it that peaceful was an astonishing achievement.
And I saw the nearly 50-day trial.
I'm not going to call it a sham trial, but I suppose it was, because Tamara Leach never took the stand.
You might recall that in criminal law, the burden is with the prosecution.
They have to prove you're guilty.
You don't have to prove you're innocent.
So Tamara Leach didn't take the stand because she was confident that the government couldn't prove she did anything.
And indeed, she didn't.
She didn't drive a truck.
She didn't block anything with a truck.
She didn't encourage violence, the opposite.
She encouraged peace.
And her co-defendant helped organize the truckers to be more in, to conform with what the police wanted.
I'm just astonished that she was already jailed for 49 days, and then the trial itself had almost 50 days worth of hearings.
This whole thing's been going on for three years.
And I thought, surely the judge will see that this is not in the public interest, that this is an abuse of the law, that this is turning the process into the punishment, that allowing this endless series of witnesses who had no direct contact with Tamara Leach.
What was astonishing to me as I listened to the hearing in the days I attended was that the people the Crown called had never met Tamara Leach, never seen her, never talked to her, never emailed back and forth with her.
How are you a witness in her trial if you never even met her before?
Like, aren't witnesses supposed to give evidence about what they saw or heard?
Instead, it was witnesses giving evidence about how they felt.
There was this one civic official, I think his name was Mr. Ayot.
I watched him testify.
He just would talk about how he went for a walk and he would hear horn honking or sea trucks.
He didn't take notes.
He didn't take videos.
He just sort of had a dear diary.
Today I saw a big bad truck.
And I listened to almost a day of his testimony and I was astonished that this was even allowed.
I thought to myself, and I said, the judge is only allowing this mockery of a trial so that the Crown doesn't have grounds to appeal.
The judge is deferring to the prosecution in every aspect so they can't later complain that it was an unfair trial.
But the joke's on me.
The judge was with the prosecution.
Now there's still about 30 pages left for the judge to read in her ruling today, but we know that she's being convicted on the first count.
She'll surely be convicted on others.
And it really doesn't matter.
Convicted on any of them is a scandal.
Last night I talked to Tamara Leach about the possibility that she would be convicted and she agreed to accept the help from the Democracy Fund to help crowdfund her legal defense.
As you may know, our partners at the Democracy Fund who have been defending Tamara Leach at great expense.
It's an enormous trial.
There's Edward Greenspawn, the top lawyer in Ottawa, and two deputy lawyers.
So there was three lawyers the Democracy Fund was paying for.
And by the way, there were nine lawyers in the court.
It's been an astonishing waste of resources.
But look what the government can say.
They can say Tamara Leach is a criminal.
I know in my bones that's not true.
And I found the explanations of the judge astonishing, frankly.
I just can't get over that one thing the judge said.
Because Tamara Leach was helping de-escalate the situation.
That's what the judge said.
Because Tamara Leach was helping to put in a better plan for truckers that didn't interfere so much with people, because she was helping de-escalate, said the judge, that proved that she knew there was a crime afoot.
That proved she knew there was mischief afoot.
So even though she was helping to lower the temperature, even though she was helping to fix the problem, well, that just shows she knew there was a problem and thus she should be convicted of mischief.
I am frankly astonished, and I want to be really honest with you.
I spend a lot of time in the courts, both as a journalist reporting on what I see and actually as someone in courtroom battles.
As you know, Rebel News goes to court quite often to fight for freedoms and sometimes we're sued ourselves.
This is what a real dent in my belief of the administration of justice is fair and balanced in this country.
I now feel, and I have to be honest with you, I feel like there are two tiers of justice in this country.
I feel like if you're an actual criminal, say in my city of Toronto, the police, their response to home invasion robberies is literally to tell citizens, leave your keys near the front door so the home invasion robbers can find them more easily and don't ransack your house.
That's literally the advice that the Toronto Police Service gives to homeowners in that city for violent criminals.
I mentioned already, if you're a foreign national promoting Hamas riots, the police will actually give you an escort.
But if you're a peaceful Métis grandma from Alberta who says, hold the line, police and the courts will interpret that as a call to violence or a call to lawbreaking at least, and you'll be convicted of mischief.
I'm astonished today, and I'm worried.
I'm worried about Canada's future as a place for free speech for certain people.
It'll remain a free place for criminals and for foreign nationals coming here as part of the anti-Semitic crime wave.
I don't know, I'm disappointed.
But I do know this.
We're going to keep fighting.
Where there's life, there's hope.
If you want to help me crowdfund the appeal of her conviction to try and get an acquittal in appeal court, help us out at helptamera.com.
As you know, all the money goes to the Democracy Fund.
You'll get a charitable tax receipt.
That said, it's always an uphill battle to appeal a court ruling.
And this is a ruling of over 100 pages long.
It's quite likely that the judge has written it in sort of a legally bulletproof way.