Ezra Levant highlights former Ontario MPP Randy Hillier’s landmark victory as the Ontario Court of Appeal unanimously overturned his 2024 conviction for COVID-19 lockdown protests, ruling that total bans violated Charter freedom of peaceful assembly (Section 2C). Despite government data showing pandemic severity akin to seasonal flu, restrictions—like fines up to $750K—were harsher than those on weddings or funerals. JCCF’s John Carpe calls it Canada’s first appellate-level precedent on protest rights, forcing courts to reject emergency overreach. The ruling echoes Alberta’s Ingram case (July 2023), which collapsed prosecutions, and parallels Patty Hogg’s dropped Scottish charges. Now, courts must balance lockdown harms against benefits—a long-overdue correction to pandemic-era judicial deference. [Automatically generated summary]
Boy, it's not that often you get good news from the courts of law, but the Court of Appeal of Ontario has issued a resounding defense of the constitutional right to freedom of assembly.
I'll take you through it.
It's actually the first time any senior court has dealt with that freedom, and the result was positive.
We'll talk with John Carpe.
That's ahead.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
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Tonight, a rare win at the Court of Appeal for Freedom.
What a good news story.
It's April 9th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Let's do it.
Well, let's give it a step back.
Step back.
Let's go back up.
No, no, I'm going to disperse.
We're not going to disperse.
We're staying in the park.
How are they going to do that?
Randy's asking that we back off of it.
Let's take a step out.
Back up.
Let's take a step back.
Come after me.
Come after me.
I welcome it.
I will not back down.
I will not.
I do not fear police.
You know, I do not fear Doug Ford.
Back up.
Back up.
No, no, no, no.
That's not going to help me.
You don't be lying to me.
You'll be lying to me.
You're going to have to back up.
Nobody should fear government in a free country.
And I welcome.
I welcome Chief Callahan any day of the week to come and see me.
Or Chief Skidder or Chief Whoever.
Well, it's easy to despair.
So many of the cases that are championed for civil liberties in this country lose.
I think of Tamara Leach's conviction just a week ago.
I was quite certain that she'd be acquitted.
The trial was so abusive of her.
The judge during the trial seemed supportive.
The law seemed clear, but in the end, she and Chris Barber were both convicted of mischief.
I understand she's likely to appeal, so there is a chance it'll be overturned.
But how demoralizing did that feel?
We shouldn't be too down in the dumps, though, because every time we do win, it's an enormous step forward, not just for the legal battle itself, but for the hope that the courts can undo some of the worst of politicians.
I point, for example, to the courts declaring that the invocation of the Emergencies Act during the Trucker Convoy was illegal and unconstitutional.
I think that in most Canadians' mind, that Emergencies Act was like the mountains.
It was just there.
You couldn't argue about it.
But the federal court said, no, that whole thing was illegal.
And all the fruits from that tree were poisoned.
So, for example, the hundreds of Canadians whose bank accounts were seized, that was all put back into play when it was declared unconstitutional.
And the reason I tell you these things is because just now is a win, a win I did not expect, a win I would not have expected.
And it's an important win at an important level of court.
I'm talking about the recent unanimous decision by the Ontario Court of Appeal to overturn the conviction of former politician Randy Hillier for illegally participating in a political protest during the lockdowns.
I thought for sure he lost.
And indeed, he did lose at the lower level.
Randy Hillier is a prickly fella.
He's the kind of guy that courts like to smack down.
He lost in the first instance.
Appeals are always a long shot, but he won.
And joining us now to talk about it is the head of the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms, our friend John Carpe.
John, welcome to the show and congratulations.
Glad to be with you.
Randy Hillier's Triumph00:02:42
John, I couldn't believe it.
I mean, Randy Hillier is a handful.
I mean, I love the guy, but he's a bit much sometimes.
And I think judges, they're just flesh and bone, and sometimes they react to a party like Randy Hillier, and a little bit of politics seeps into their judgment.
Randy has always been an outsider.
He's always been, I think he would declare himself to be radical.
He leans into confrontations, you could say.
And I'm not saying these things in a negative light.
I suppose I have some of those instincts too.
Tell us a little bit about the story, because I still can't believe it.
But I sat down, I started to read the Court of Appeal ruling, and I was just amazed.
Give us the background, if you would.
Well, your Ontario viewers and listeners will remember in April and May of 2021, the government imposed a total ban on peaceful outdoor protests.
Total ban.
It was illegal.
Even two people could not get together for a political protest.
The law prohibiting large gatherings for weddings and funerals and religious services was also utterly unscientific and very harsh.
You could have no more than 10 people at a wedding or funeral or religious service.
But for political protests, it wasn't even, not even 10 people were allowed, zero people were allowed.
And so, as you mentioned, we lost at trial, but the Court of Appeal unanimously said that the total ban was an unjustified violation of the charter rights and in particular, freedom of peaceful assembly, which is Section 2C of the Charter.
And this is actually the first time that an appellate-level court has talked about what the freedom means, what it entails, that it's different from freedoms of expression and association and religion and conscience.
And so we've got brand new law on this, and it was unanimous.
One of the three judges had actually issued a terrible ruling against religious freedom in this other Trinity Bible Chapel decision, and yet she was on this panel.
Unanimous panel said that the total ban on peaceful outdoor protests was an unjustified violation of the charter freedom of peaceful assembly.
Yeah, you know what?
I read it and I found it bracing this one line I'm quoting from memory that the judges say, even in an emergency, the charter does not fade from view.
I'm paraphrasing, which is encouraging because I think a lot of Canadians said, oh, it's emergency.
Judges And Groupthink00:12:35
It's a pandemic.
It's the Emergencies Act.
The Charter of Rights doesn't apply.
That's not true.
There's no pandemic exception to the Charter.
There's no emergencies exception to the Charter.
It applies in every instance.
I bet you most Canadians, including, I bet you most judges and lawyers, their first instinct would be, oh, no, we have to suspend those constitutional rights because we're in a crisis.
We're in a COVID crisis.
We're in a tariff crisis.
We're in a climate crisis.
They'd love to keep us in crises if it could suspend our civil liberties.
Well, there's a huge difference as well.
If there was some big temporary thing, maybe some huge forest fire or military uprising, if there was something that was temporary, maybe you can give governments a bit more latitude.
The thing about these lockdown measures and vaccine passports is they went on for years.
We're talking April and May of 2021.
The government's own data has made it abundantly clear to anybody who bothers to look at it that COVID is not an unusually deadly killer.
We're all entitled to our own opinions.
We're not entitled to our own facts.
And the government's data show that COVID was a bad annual flu.
And yet we still have all this fear-mongering.
And here we are in April and May of 2021.
So we're 13 months in.
And so, you know, as you said, you can't keep on declaring an emergency for things that are in place for literally for years.
What I like best about the judgment was just the attitude behind it.
You can feel the attitude that these three judges on this panel in this ruling, they care about charter freedoms, and it seems to be a step towards returning to having a high standard whereby it's difficult for governments to violate charter freedoms, as opposed to what we've seen so much of in the last few years is this lowering of the bar where governments can just kind of do whatever they want as long as they're claiming that there's some sort of an emergency out there.
You know, I feel like the passage of time has brought the judiciary, or at least parts of it, back to sobriety.
I think that, let's be honest, some of them panicked as much as anyone else.
I mean, I suppose in their defense, they're human.
And the average judge is probably 60 or 70 years old, as opposed to someone who's young.
So they probably would have encountered more people who did actually get really sick or die from the flu.
I mean, that's what it's like to be 70.
By nature, if you're a judge, you're a law follower.
You're an authority believer.
There's not a lot of deep skeptics on the bench.
By nature, you are a cog in the machine.
And I think in those early months and years, there was almost nothing the authorities couldn't do that a judge wouldn't rubber stamp.
But for this ruling to come out now, in April, four years after the events in question, I think the judges have had a chance to maybe, you know, get out of the mania of it.
It was a mass mania.
What was the phrase?
A mass formation.
Mass psychosis.
Yeah.
And, you know, there's the mob mentality.
And I think that I wouldn't call the judges a mob mentality, but there was a group panic.
There was a group.
There was a moral panic.
And I think four years later, the judges are sort of shaking themselves awake and saying, whoa, did that all just happen?
I don't know.
I guess I'm trying to explain why this good news comes so late.
And I think the lateness is one of the reasons it's good news.
What do you think?
Well, I think the passage of time is definitely, you know, we're not getting bombarded every hour of every day by government-funded media proclaiming the false message that COVID is an unusually deadly killer, when in fact it was not.
It was certainly real and certainly a threat to a small minority of the population, but the media propaganda was false.
And I agree with your analysis.
If you're older and you tend to be more law-abiding, you know, the judges would be in the demographic.
That said, there's just no excuse for writing a media narrative into your court ruling when it's not supported by the evidence.
We would not put up with that for, let's say, a murder trial.
Somebody's accused of murder, and the media makes it out like the guy's guilty of sin and then comes before the judge.
The judge is expected to disregard all of the media coverage and look only at the evidence before the court and then either convict or acquit the accused person of the crime.
And we would be outraged if the judge simply wrote the media narrative into his court ruling.
And yet, this is what judges did with the COVID.
They wrote false media narrative speaking points into their court rulings that were not supported by evidence that was placed before the court.
So, you know, we're all human, we all make mistakes, but we don't learn from our mistakes unless they are recognized and owned up to.
You know, it's funny because judges, I think, can be extremely skeptical of government power when it's a prosecutor in a criminal setting.
In fact, I think a lot of Canadians would think judges are too skeptical and too willing to throw away the government's authority.
Whereas when it's a public health officer, the judges were extremely obedient, I think, to the point of being naive.
It reminds me, I don't know if you know the experiments by Stanley Milgram in the 60s.
The very famous experiment where someone wearing a white doctor's lab coat with a clipboard, that's so essential that they have the lab coat and the clipboard, told people to give an electric shock to someone in the adjacent room if they got questions wrong.
Now, it turned out it was an actor in the other room, but in the Milgram experiment, the person in the white coat said you have to give them the electric shock now.
And the actor would scream as if they were in pain.
Yeah, and turn the machine up every time they got someone wrong.
So start out with ow and then ow and then screaming and then eventually silence as if they had gone unconscious.
A very famous experiment, and I encourage you to look it up, John, if you don't know it, because all the person in the lab coat could say, they couldn't give any rationale, couldn't explain it, couldn't say there's any consequences, just the raw assertion of authority.
You must do this.
You have no choice.
You have to do that.
That's a very important part of the Milgram experiment: that it's not do this or else or do this because.
It's just someone in a white lab coat with a clipboard who is in a position of authority tells you to do something that you know is wrong, but they assert it so forcefully just through raw power.
And the number of Americans who complied with the Milgram experiment was shockingly high.
So I think the judges fell for a giant Milgram experiment.
Because what is Canada's top doctor?
British Columbia's top doctor.
What are they the top doctor in terms of patient care, in terms of bedside manner, in terms of research?
No, they're not top doctors.
They're just government doctors who probably haven't seen a patient in years.
I don't know if Teresa Tam has ever seen a patient.
Top doctors say.
So they come in with a white lab coat and a clipboard and tell you to do something.
The Milgram experiment says many people will go along with it.
I think the judges fell for a massive case of the Milgram experiment.
That's a good theory, and it's plausible.
Corrupted by fear is similar.
That's the thesis in my book, which, like yours, it's not provable, but it's kind of a guess what's going on.
They were as terrified of the virus as what most other Canadians were.
The other experiment that was interesting, I'm sure, I forget the name of it, but I'm sure you're familiar with it, where there's a group of people, and when there's three or four people giving an incorrect answer to that's obviously false.
The ash conformity test.
That's a two test.
Yeah, two plus two equals five, right?
And you know it's false, but then there's everybody, you know, is that the correct answer?
And it's like, yes, And then most people, when it's their turn, they know that the other four people got it wrong, but they also say, Yeah, that's correct.
But if there's one other person in the room that says, no, that's false, then the percentages change drastically.
So there's a groupthink as well.
Like people, and judges are human.
They don't want to be the odd man out.
You know, the only guy or the only gal at the judge's cafeteria that's saying, hey, these lockdowns are very harmful and they're not grounded in science and it's not possible to stop the spread of a virus.
They don't want to be the odd man out to say these things.
You know, I love studying that ash conformity test.
And during the lockdowns, by the way, we played.
Let me show you.
I won't play too much.
Here's a two-minute video of sort of a reenactment of the ash conformity test that shows the power of wanting to fit in and peer pressure.
Take a quick look at this.
This video, John, we must have played this at our Rebel News headquarters 10 times during the pandemic.
And I'll tell you why in a second.
Take a look.
But an experiment is not a public opinion poll.
It examines behavior under the pressure of social forces, as the experiment of Solomon Ashe reveals.
The experiment you'll be taking part in today involves the perception of lengths of lines.
As you can see here, I have a number of cards, and on each card, there are several lines.
Your task is a very simple one.
You're to look at the line on the left and determine which of the three lines on the right is equal to it in length.
All right, we'll proceed in this order.
You'll give your answer.
Only one of the people in the group is a real subject, the fifth person with the white t-shirt.
The others are confederates of the experimenter and have been told to give wrong answers on some of the trials.
The experiment begins uneventfully as subjects give their judgments.
Two, three, But on the third trial, something happens.
The subject denies the evidence of his own eyes and yields to group influence.
Ash found subjects went along with the group on 37% of the critical trials.
But he found through interviews that they went along with the group for different reasons.
One.
One.
They must be right.
There are four of them, and one of me?
One.
This subject's yielding is based on a distortion of his judgment.
He genuinely believes that the group is correct.
One.
Two.
One.
Two. Two. Two.
I know they're wrong, but why should I make waves?
Two.
In this case, the subject knows he is right, but goes along to avoid the discomfort of disagreeing with the group.
The reason we played that video is the point you made at the end there, John, is conformity was about 30, 35%.
But when there was one other truth teller in the group, conformity fell to, I think, 5%.
As in, you knew you weren't alone, so it gave you courage.
And during the worst of the pandemic, during the worst of the lockdowns, I felt like the role of Rebel News was to let people know they weren't alone, to let them know they weren't crazy, let them know that although they were subject to tremendous peer pressure, there were others in the resistance.
Supreme Court Precedent Binding00:12:43
And I think to study the Milgram experiment and the ASH conformity test are two extremely important things.
All right, thank you for letting me go down that little tangent.
Those are actually some of my favorite things in the world to talk about because I think they explain so much.
Back to the court ruling.
So this was a ruling by the three-person panel of the Ontario Court of Appeal.
And because it's at that level, that means every trial court, every trial judge in the province is bound by this precedent.
It's not just persuasive, it is binding.
So the fact that Randy Hillier lost at trial, which would have seemed devastating, I imagine, but he won in the Court of Appeal was actually a blessing in disguise because now the good news is in effect across the entire province, I guess, until a Supreme Court were to overturn it, which I don't think they will.
So it was actually fortuitous, even if you didn't know it at the time, that you lost in the first round, right?
Yeah, it's a very strong message that governments cannot place a total ban.
Now, what's interesting, and I don't want to kind of rein on our parade today, but if the government had limited outdoor protests to only 10 people, you know, on par with weddings and funerals and religious ceremonies and said you can have a political protest with up to 10 people outdoors, probably and sadly, because that's utterly unscientific.
I mean, COVID wasn't the threat that the government-funded media made it out to be in the first place.
So that already means that all of these measures were not justified because the threat itself was not the threat that the media exaggerated it to be.
But if the Ontario government had said, look, 10% limit on political protests, if Randy Hillier had challenged that, and I would venture a guess that the protests that he organized and at which he spoke were more than 10 people, he probably would have lost.
But it's still nice to see a court, you know, especially a pellet-level court, it's just nice to see a court recognize the importance of a charter freedom and actually take it seriously and elaborate on it, what it means and what the nature of it is, why it's important.
How, interesting point here, the court said that social media and Zoom meetings and virtual gatherings are not an adequate or satisfactory substitute for in-person gatherings, and that it's very important for people to be able to protest together in person and to have that sense of awareness and presence of each other.
So this is a very thoughtful analysis on freedom of peaceful assembly, which in the last 42 years of the Charter's history, beyond a passing sentence here or there, no court has actually issued a substantive ruling about what this freedom means in contrast to the other ones, you know, association, religion, expression, you got lengthy, lengthy judgments.
This is the first judgment that kind of illuminates what freedom of peaceful assembly is all about.
And so that's very valuable as well to finally get that on the books.
Wow, that's great.
I didn't know it had never been reviewed by judges before.
This makes me think of a case that, you know, Rebel News took a lot of cases, civil liberties cases during the pandemic in Canada.
But we also did a few in Australia and in the United Kingdom.
And there was one, I just got to tell you about it, John, where a city councillor near Glasgow, so he was on city council himself, but he so objected to his fellow counselors' lockdownism that he had a little protest outside his own city hall.
Like, what a character.
His name was Patty Hogg.
And, oh, they did not like that.
So not only did they charge him with breaking the lockdown rule, they charged him with reckless endangerment, saying that he could have effectively murdered someone if they got the Rona.
And they hired experts, and they were trying to put Patty Hogg away for years.
Like reckless endangerment, our Scottish lawyer said, would be like if, God forbid, you went over an overpass on a highway and dropped a rock on a car below, the kind of thing that could literally kill someone, like an extremely serious charge.
That's what they were trying to shoehorn Patty Hogg into because he had a peaceful protest outside his own city council.
They dropped it on the eve of trial.
But it just goes to show how, you know, in the crisis, politicians will go to extreme lengths.
And it wasn't just the politicians, it was prosecutors and police.
And I don't know.
It's very worrisome.
I've seen this same outcome in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom.
Not a lot in the United States.
They didn't have it as badly there.
But there was some deep demonic thing that came out during the pandemic.
And it fell to cranky, prickly porcupines like Randy Hillier to push back.
I mean, Randy is a rough around the edges kind of guy.
I have an admiration for him, but he's prickly.
And I think sometimes we don't realize how much we need those prickly people because they're the canaries in the coal mine.
They're the ones who get in trouble first.
But they're, you know, as they say, it's better to fight in the first ditch than the last.
In a way, Randy Hillier was fighting for all of us, wasn't he?
Oh, absolutely he was.
It's been said that the reasonable people, they go along to get along or get along to go along, however that saying goes.
But reasonable people go with the flow and they accommodate themselves to fit in with reality.
Unreasonable people do not go with the flow and they're the ones who change the world.
Now, you can get unreasonable people that can be for good or for evil.
You can change the world for good or for evil.
But it's important that you have people like Randy Hillier.
And likewise, I don't know him very well.
We've met a number of times over the years.
I happened to be in Ontario speaking at a landowner's property rights conference or event when he announced that he was running for the provincial Progressive Conservative nomination.
So I admire him and I appreciate him and whatever faults he has.
It's people like Randy Hillier, and I would say people like Ezra Levant and perhaps John Carpe.
You have to be unreasonable when you're facing tyranny and injustice and when you're facing laws that are based on lies rather than being based on truth and reality and science, we have to be unreasonable.
So I'm very grateful.
And Randy's taken a great personal risk here because he's charged with organizing outdoor protests in Kemptville and Cornwall.
That's two.
Plus, participating in protests in Smiths Falls, Belleville, Peterborough, Stratford, Kitchener, and Chatham.
So he, with up to $100,000 in fines, I mean, he could have been, this is a practical benefit.
I anticipate that the Crown prosecutors are going to drop their charges because this health order has now been found to be an unjustified violation of the Charter of Freedom of Peaceful Assembly.
But Randy Hillier risked a half a million, three quarters of a million dollars in fines.
And that takes courage.
So there were other matters pending in the same vein as what you're saying.
Yeah, what the Justice Center's lawyers did, there were all these charges all over the place.
And rather than raising the constitutional issue in seven or 27 different cases, we filed one notice of application for one ruling, and then with the idea that that's going to apply to all of the charges that Randy Hillier was facing.
And I hope it will benefit other people in Ontario as well.
I hope it'll be a repeat, like in Alberta, where the Justice Center's lawyers secured a court ruling, the Ingram ruling, in July of 2023, whereby the court ruled that Alberta's lockdown measures were illegal and struck them down.
And after that, the Crown Prosecutor stopped prosecuting good people like Pastor Tim Stevens and Fairview Baptist Church and No More Lockdowns, Rodeo, et cetera, et cetera.
So I hope that'll be the case in Ontario as well, that we're going to see the prosecutors back off.
Yeah.
I suppose it's possible that the prosecutors seek leave from the Supreme Court of Canada to appeal.
Now, you don't have a right to command the Supreme Court to hear your appeal.
You have to ask them.
And they only take about, I think, about 10% of cases.
You correct me if I'm wrong on that, John.
They only take cases where they think there's a real compelling public interest, or maybe the Court of Appeal of one province says something, the Court of Appeal of another province says something else.
And they're basically asked to rationalize these two different diverging paths.
I would imagine it's very unlikely that this will be appealed to the Supreme Court.
What do you think?
I would, I try not to make guesses and predictions, but I'll stick my neck out and say if the Ontario government appeals this to the Supreme Court of Canada, I think the Supreme Court would refuse to hear it.
It's a fairly clear, simple, direct, straightforward ruling.
And it's unanimous, too.
That's all.
And it's unanimous.
Like if there was a very strong dissenting opinion, maybe the Supreme Court would have more interest.
But it's locked down.
Sorry, that's a bad choice of words.
But really, it's quite something, you know, the point you made earlier that there was no room whatsoever.
You couldn't even have one other person with you is so absurd.
And I think that's why it failed, as you pointed out, because it was so extreme.
And had they allowed 10 people, a judge might have said, well, there was enough wiggle room to let you have your freedom.
So the obstinacy of the government is what undid them, I guess.
Indeed.
And the court wrote in the ruling in one passage, and it's not an exact quote, but we cannot tolerate having a government completely ignore a fundamental freedom.
That's just not acceptable to completely ignore it.
So in other words, the Ontario government did consider religious freedom when they placed restrictions on religious freedom.
They did consider, but when it came to the freedom of peaceful assembly, they gave no consideration to it at all.
And so the Ontario Court of Appeals said, this is just not acceptable for a government to have no regard.
So it's just really positive to get a win.
At the same time, our work is cut out for us because I can tell you, if peaceful protests for up to 10 people had been permitted by the Ontario government, it's hypothetical, obviously, but I don't think Randy Hillier would have won his case.
So we still have a lot of work to do in the courts to secure recognition that the judiciary has really let us down in the last few years by writing the media narrative into their court rulings and by failing to consider the abundant evidence placed before courts about all the harms that lockdowns were doing.
There's not a single court ruling yet in Canada where the judge has actually thoroughly gone through all of the lockdown harms and then thoroughly looked at whether there are, in fact, benefits and then balanced the two and then said, you know what, the benefits, lockdown benefits exceed lockdown harms.
No judge has yet made such an analysis in any Canadian court ruling.
So we certainly have our work cut out for us when you have courts that are not doing their job by measuring harms and benefits as they're required to do.
Lockdown Harms and Benefits00:00:50
Yeah.
Well, John, I'm really glad that the JCCF is out there fighting for freedom.
And you were the first guys out there in the public interest law space fighting for freedom.
And thank goodness you've been doing that.
And congratulations to you on this win.
And thanks for spending the last half hour with us walking us through it.
And I didn't read through the entire case.
I got through about half it before I had to put it aside.
But I really enjoyed reading those judges talk about how you can't ignore the Constitution in a crisis.
That made me feel better to read it.
It gave me a tiny bit more hope in our country, and I sure needed that, John.