Ezra Levant critiques Canada’s weaponization of law against Tamara Lich (7-year jail demand) and Chris Barber (8 years, plus truck forfeiture) for the 2022 trucker convoy, citing inconsistent sentencing—no prison for prior protesters unless violence occurred—while Hamas marchers blocking ambulances faced no charges. He warns of the CNA’s 2025 Code of Ethics, which mandates Indigenous knowledge in medicine, redefines "family" to include non-legal ties, and uses vague terms like "misinformation" to trap dissenters, risking ideological enforcement over science. The pattern suggests a broader crackdown on free speech under activist legalism. [Automatically generated summary]
We see the Crown Prosecution's demands for Tamara Leach to be thrown in prison for years.
I'll take you through their court briefing and read the key paragraph to you.
You will be furious.
Tamara Leach, who, if the prosecutor had their way, would do more time in prison than a murderer.
I've got that and so much more in today's show.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to what we call Rebel News Plus.
It's the video version of this podcast.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe.
You get the video content.
We get your eight bucks, which might not sound like a lot to you, but boy, it adds up for us.
That's how we pay the bills around here.
Tonight, Tamara Leach is back in court on Wednesday, and Rebel News and the Democracy Fund will be there.
It's July 22nd, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you sensorism bug.
You know, a lot of people have tried to put it out of their minds, throw it down the memory hole, as they say in 1984.
But lockdowns were the central story of our lives in the early 2020s.
Guys Asked Them Off The Ice00:04:40
It was an attack on the people, and it was often violent, by the way.
I mean, some of the craziest examples were this young man skating outside by himself on a public skating rink that was open, and Calgary police threatening to taser him if he didn't stop skating by himself.
Remember this craziness?
Just for skating on the outdoor rig, okay?
Like, you guys asked them to get off the ice.
Keep anyway.
You guys asked them to get off the ice.
What are you guys doing?
What are you guys doing?
For what?
For skating on the ocean.
For what?
Don't teaser me.
What are you doing?
It was even crazier in other parts of the world.
Remember where our Australia correspondent, Abhiyamini, was like his second day on the job, and a cop just didn't like his style and arrested him and pummeled him for reporting on some protests.
I don't even know why, but this was normal back then.
Remember that?
It was quite peaceful until I came along.
I'm in it.
I am here.
I need that.
I've got my permit in my pocket.
My permit is in my pocket.
Of course, the craziest was in California, where they sent police in heavy SWAT team-style weaponry and garb for people sitting by themselves on the beach, just utterly nuts.
And we all went along with it.
And by the way, violence isn't just doing the violence.
It's the threat of violence.
That is a form of violence, too.
You could even say that's a kind of terrorism.
We were threatened that if we didn't wear masks, if we didn't stay six feet away from each other, if we didn't stay out of church, even in a time of a funeral, if we didn't close our businesses, we would be punished severely.
We would lose our jobs if we didn't take an experimental medicine.
That is a kind of violence.
That is a kind of terrorism, in a way, to be frank, to be forced to do something against your will on pain of violence.
The fight back did not come from the so-called checks and balances in our constitutional democracy, all of which failed.
The governor general didn't stop any of this.
The courts themselves didn't stop it.
They were full of people, aged themselves, who were scared and who, by nature, defer to authority.
The judges were of no help.
Doctors were cowed into silence.
Any doctor who gave a second opinion found himself suspended.
The media was the easiest part of them.
They were simply bought off by the government.
Oh, the grossest was the comedians.
Remember this from Stephen Colbert?
It's so cringeworthy every time I see it.
Remember this?
the vaccine yeah gee i can't understand why he's losing 40 million dollars a year for paramount maybe
Maybe it's because people are sort of sick of being lectured to politics with a laugh track is not comedy.
I think a real disappointment was the opposition parties that did not oppose.
I remember the debates in the 2021 general election.
It was unanimous agreement.
All five of the parties who were there, there was no meaningful difference between what the Green Party and the NDP would say and what the so-called conservatives under Aaron O'Toole would say.
There were no professors or scholars who would dare to question.
If they did, they were sacked as well.
You know, as Orwell wrote, I mentioned 1984 again, if there was to be any hope, it was with the proles.
That's what Orwell called the proletariat, the working class.
Truckers Rise to the Occasion00:15:58
And so it was that in 2022, we were saved, not by any political party, not by any newspaper, not by a judge, not by the queen or the governor general, but by truckers, trustworthy truckers.
Everyone trusts a trucker.
Everyone knows truckers work hard.
It's a lonely job, and they do it to serve us.
And the truckers decided to go to Ottawa, and it was very organic.
There was no one leader.
People sort of had the idea at the same time, and they thought, yeah, it's time to do this.
It's my estimate that 100,000 people participated in some way for some period of time.
Obviously, not all 100,000 made it to Ottawa, but many thousands did.
And there were echo convoys around the country.
My estimate is 100,000 people did something as part of the convoy and a more meaningful estimate on my part.
And if you remember what it was like along the highways, you might agree with me.
I estimate that 1 million Canadians saw the convoy with their own eyes.
And they went out.
I remember in my own neighborhood, people going out over the mighty 401 highway that cuts through Toronto.
Torontonians, in some ways, the most obedient Laurentian liberals, wanted to see with their own eyes this convoy they had heard of.
And they didn't want to learn about it through CTB or CBC or the Global Mail.
They wanted to see it directly with their own eyes, to see it for themselves, because by then they had learned not to trust the regime media.
It was the truckers that saved us.
Now, Justin Trudeau and company, they welcomed this because they thought they were much cleverer, much more clever than the truckers, and they thought they could redefine the convoy as some sort of a copy of the January 6th insurrectionists.
If you look at the videotaped from January 6th, I think my friend Gavin McInnes is more accurate when he calls it the great meandering.
Justin Trudeau and the regime media had decided that was going to be the script.
So they welcomed the truckers into the city.
In fact, you'll remember that the police escorted them in, told them where they could and couldn't park.
But the conduct of the truckers made it such that it was impossible to compare them with insurrectionists.
For one thing, they didn't go anywhere.
Parliament was actually closed for renovations.
The truckers just stayed on the lawn in front of the closed parliament and they stayed in their trucks.
It was so very cold.
I went down for a few days and I'm delighted with what I saw.
I'm glad I went there to see it for myself.
And I was inspired to say a few words.
It was very brief, but I have to say it was definitely a career highlight.
Do you remember my quick pronunciations to the truckers?
Here's a flashback of that.
Everybody recognize this guy?
Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Ezra Levant of Rebel News.
Thank you very much.
Hello, everybody.
It is cold today.
It is cold today.
Almost as cold as Justin Trudeau's heart.
It's great to be here.
And on behalf of Rebel News, I salute you.
And I say keep speaking truth to power.
But I want to tell you what excites me the most about this crowd.
I see a lot of cameras, a lot of independent journalists, because when people say, what do we do about the media?
I say you become the media.
That's what you do.
The media acts like a party, the media party.
It's a subsidiary of the Liberal Party.
So you've got to tell the story yourselves.
Everyone who is here, everyone who is along the road, has to bear witness and testify to what they saw.
Because there's two competing narratives.
The government says you're racist.
The government says you're sexist.
The government says you're violent.
In the meantime, I've never seen a more diverse group of Canadians.
In farms and violence, people want to not be violated anymore.
Justin Trudeau says you're extreme, but he's the one who has violated our civil rights.
He thinks you're a fringe.
Well, that's a pretty bloody big fringe.
Let me close by saying this.
Someone asked me this morning, what's the point?
What's going to happen?
Why didn't we all gather in Ottawa?
Is he going to listen?
Is he going to resign?
Is the governor general going to ask him to step down?
No, he'll hold on to power as hard as he can.
Let me tell you what I think the point is.
The point is the convoy itself.
To show that you're not alone.
To show that you're not the crazy one they are.
To show that you're not the only one in the world there.
You already achieved your goal just by being here.
And the fact that millions of dollars came into the GoFundMe for the truckers, even if they would have canceled that, it was still a success.
Because there was a measurement of how much people cared.
You have succeeded just by being here.
You got to fight.
Congratulations to the organizers, but really, it was millions of Canadians along the way in the convoy and watching today from home.
Tell them what happened.
Tell them what you saw.
Because they will not hear the truth from anyone else.
You have to fight everybody who fights for freedom.
Let's go!
Let's go, baby!
There was a public-mindedness to the people who were there.
These were not renta mobs.
These were not professional protesters.
And I tell you, when it gets down to minus 20s, you have to have a good reason to be there or you wouldn't be there.
And people had their good reasons.
The conduct of the truckers was outstanding.
They shoveled the sidewalks.
They picked up the garbage.
The Ottawa police confirms that crime fell in the city core with their presence.
And even though the regime media did not come out of their office towers to meet with the grubby and dangerous truckers, citizen journalists did.
And Rebel News was at the front of that.
We covered the convoy 23 days straight.
That's where Alexa Lavoie and Lincoln Jay made their bones.
And they did a great job and have both gone on to great things.
In that time, they were the world's eyes and ears on the convoy.
I should say that for the first days of it, the police worked regularly with the truckers, arranging things, keeping lanes open downtown for emergency vehicles, moving away from residential areas into government areas.
And one of the leaders who sort of emerged, was effervesced to the top, was Tamara Leach, who in a way was a spiritual leader.
She would give moral guidance and encouragement and speak from the heart.
The truckers themselves actually worked through a lawyer to interact with police, which I thought was very wise.
The truckers, in short, were winning.
They didn't live down to Trudeau's expectations.
They lived up to their own hopes and they became an international sensation.
Suddenly, Trudeau was embarrassed by the working class no less.
For the first time in my lifetime, Canada was in the news in an impressive, exciting way.
Everyone around the world was watching.
And so Trudeau, well, he panicked.
He ordered the police to crack down.
He invoked martial law, something not even done during 9-11.
Now, you know all this.
Everything I've said to you, I've said before.
Just, hey, do me a favor and don't forget about it completely.
But let me ask you, I suppose it's called a counterfactual.
What would have happened if the truckers didn't do what they did?
Or worse, if the truckers had been led by people who were of weaker character or malicious or something else.
I mean, in a way, no one knew who these trucker leaders were.
They were not members of political parties that we had heard of.
They were not people who had shown leadership in the public realm before.
They are people who decided in a crisis that they would rise to the occasion.
And thank God, they were who they were.
Because imagine for a moment, if you will, an alternative history, a kind of historical fiction.
Sometimes those are the best novels, aren't they?
What would happen if America had lost the Second World War?
There's a whole TV series about that, wasn't there?
What would have happened in this historical fiction if, I don't know, the truckers were led by feds, by agents, provocateurs, by people who, God forbid, were violent or people who were trying to impugn conservatives or freedom fighters, if they were extremist in some way, if they had weapons with them and brandished them.
Instead, of course, they had bouncy castles and hot tubs.
That was the imagery beamed around the world.
The only extremism was the obviously false flag, swastika flag, which we now know the media don't actually care about.
There's swastika flags every day in this country at Hamas marches.
The media don't care.
But then they deeply cared because they knew they could smear the protesters with it.
But everyone knew that was a false flag.
I say again, what would have happened or what would not have happened if it was led by people of poor character or with ulterior motive?
Well, thinking of Alberta, Jason Kenney, the lockdown premier, the one who was prosecuting the churches, he blinked after the Echo convoy in Coots, Alberta.
He blinked, and soon he was replaced by his own party.
Perhaps that would not have happened.
Aaron O'Toole, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, he initially told his MPs, do not meet with the truckers.
Do not even talk to them.
Well, that was the final straw.
They defenestrated him.
By the way, that's a wonderful word.
Do you ever use that word defenestrated?
It's from the French for fenetre, for window.
It means to throw someone out a window.
Aaron O'Toole was defenestrated, and I was there for every moment of it.
How lovely.
Pierre Polyev ascended in his place.
Think about that.
Think about if Aaron O'Toole had not been thrown out.
Because think if the truckers were maligned and if Aaron Hotoole's edict had been obeyed.
Imagine going into the last election with Aaron O'Toole.
The truckers did something far more important than replace Aaron O'Toole and Jason Kenney.
They broke the psychological trance, what is sometimes called mass formation psychosis.
They broke it.
It's like we snapped out of the, snapped out of the dream, snapped out of the hypnosis.
The truckers were the turning point.
People started to wake up and shake the dust off and say, what have we been doing for two years?
Now, at first, the punishments got far worse.
Of course they did.
Martial law, beatings, riot horses, stomping on people, prison for the activists.
The system, by the way, is still vengeful.
But without Tamara Leach and without the leadership of the Trucker Convoy, do you doubt that today, I mean here in 2025, that we would be under Justin Trudeau still or a Mark Carney majority?
Do you doubt that if we had stuck with Aaron O'Toole as the leader of the Conservative Party, and Pierre Polyev was a disgruntled backbencher, do you doubt that Aaron O'Toole would just be the happy loser and Trudeau would be starting yet another term with a majority?
Well, it didn't work out that way.
Thank goodness that historical fiction did not come to pass.
Instead, Canada came back from the abyss.
We have other abysses we're staring into, but that one we dodged, which brings us back to the Empire.
The Empire is striking back a shocking conviction of Tamara Leach.
She was convicted of mischief a few months ago.
I'm happy to say that she is appealing that conviction.
But this week will be her sentencing in Ottawa.
Rebel News will be there.
Be there personally.
We may have one or two others with me.
Tamara Leach, like I say, was the most important person in the most important story in a generation in terms of freedom.
Rebel News is delighted to be associated with her and work with her every chance we get.
We went on tour with her and her book, which we published.
I say this because the government has gone crazy against her.
You already know that.
They've been going crazy against her for three and a half years.
I was in Lethbridge, Alberta, a few months ago for the sentencing of the so-called Couts III.
Those are the three men who the government said led the Coots mini-protest at the border between Alberta and Montana that was sort of a regional echo of the convoy to Ottawa.
It was three actually local residents, Dutch Canadians, hardworking class people.
And I thought they ought to have been acquitted.
At last, they were not.
But when it came to the sentencing for mischief, I sat in that court and I listened incredibly carefully to the judge, Keith Yamauchi was his name, not only a very accomplished lawyer and now a judge, but a law professor too.
So he thinks and he has a deep reading of it.
And I watched and listens, and I live tweeted and I made videos about it, about how carefully Justice Yamauchi went through all the case law about political protests for which someone was charged with mischief.
Most of the cases, it won't surprise you to learn, were about environmental extremists who went too far, who were trying to block a pipeline or trying to block forestry.
An enormous number of the cases were from British Columbia, you can imagine, but there were Alberta cases and others as well.
And I think Justice Yamauchi must have gone through 20 or 30 cases.
And it very clear, it became very clear to me there was a commonality.
If someone had not committed a crime before, if the crime was mischief involving a political act of disobedience of some sort, in every single case where the person expressed some desire to get back to the path of lawfulness, in every single case, there was no custodial sentence, which by which in fancy language means there was no jail.
Legal Precedent and Light Sentences00:05:08
Even for people who held up entire logging or pipeline operations and inflicted enormous costs on companies, the justice system, for better or for worse, let them go with a slap on the wrist at best.
Many of them, what's called a discharge.
They were found guilty, but then it was as if their criminal record was washed away.
And I sat there and I listened to this.
And indeed, two out of the three of the Coots three got no custodial sentence whatsoever.
They walked right out of court that day for free.
The third had a different reason that he was actually sentenced to jail, but it was a complicating factor that was irrelevant here.
And my point is, I saw an excellent judge who's also a professor who had convicted, who these men were convicted by a jury, and he gave the men who were comparable to Tamara Leach no jail time, zero.
And he didn't do this as a favor to them.
He did this because that is the legal precedent.
The core tenet of our legal system in Latin is stare decisis, stand by the decision, as in follow the precedent.
That way people know what the law is.
You know, if 20 cases say if you commit mischief and in a political vein, but are not violent and show some regret, you'll be let go with a warning on your first instance with no jail.
20 cases set the precedent, and Justice Yamauchi gave it to the men in Coots.
And so I look at Tamara Leach and I understand, as you know, she's going for sentencing on Wednesday.
And the government has filed their written brief of what they think the punishment should be.
Now, I just told you that 20 cases or more involving protesters who commit mischief and all found guilty, 20 cases say there's no jail time.
But here is what the Crown prosecutors demand.
I'm going to show it on the screen here.
I just want to show you who wrote it.
Siobhan Wetcher and Tim Ratcliffe.
And who are they?
Assistant Crown attorneys at the Ottawa Crown Attorney's Office.
Let me be crystal clear.
These are not feds working for Justin Trudeau or Mark Carney.
These are provincial government employees.
These are Doug Ford's people, not Mark Carney's people.
The so-called Conservative Premier of Ontario and his Attorney General have drafted and submitted this to the court.
And I'm just going to read one paragraph.
It's paragraph 11.
It sums it all up.
Quote, for this and other reasons set out below, having regard to the nature, duration, impact, and context of the offenses, as well as the circumstances of the offenders, the Crown is seeking a period of incarceration of seven years on the count of mischief for each leech and barber and one year consecutive for counseling others to disobey a court order for Barber.
In addition, the Crown also seeks a forfeiture order for a Red 2004 Kenworth truck, big red, registered to CB Trucking, a company owned by Barber.
The forfeiture order will be argued at a separate hearing yet to be scheduled.
Yeah, no, no, no, that is nuts.
That is not lawful.
That is not precedent following.
That is punitive.
That's a vendetta.
That's out of control prosecutors.
Look at that.
Seven years in prison and eight for barber and taking his tool of earning a living, taking his truck.
We are in a country, I don't know if you saw this the other day, where a 14-year-old boy murders a woman at random.
And I say that because although he hasn't been convicted yet, he went on a live stream and confessed it.
Did you see that video?
Tamara Leach already did 49 days in prison without bail for mischief.
This is an outrage.
Rebel News has covered this from the beginning.
We were there.
And we will continue to cover this travesty of a mockery of a sham, as Woody Allen would say.
And we'll continue to crowdfund for Tamara Leach as well.
And we'll crowdfund our own journalism.
As you know, we have not missed a single day of the trial.
And I'll be back in Ottawa on Wednesday and Thursday.
If you're in Ottawa, I'll see you in the court.
You know what I do.
I go into court and I live tweet as fast as my fingers can fly.
But I just wanted to show you the judicial priorities of the government of Ontario, not stopping the Hamas hate marches that block more streets than anything the truckers did.
Do you remember that video a few weeks ago of the Hamad Hamas hate march blocking an ambulance?
Here's a refresher.
You know, no charges of mischief for them, but the truckers keep lanes open and there's mischief charges.
Respect for Living Things00:14:43
There's no violent crime with the truckers.
There's violent crime every day with the Hamas protesters.
Absolutely outrageous.
We'll be there.
And if you want to support us, go to TameraTrial.com.
I've got a crazy story for you today.
It's published by True North in Juno News by Melanie Bennett.
I just got to read you this headline, and then we'll talk to Melanie in a second.
The headline is: Exclusive: New Ethics Code tells nurses to denounce white European medicine.
The Canadian Nurses Association 2025 Code of Ethics of Nurses denounces what it calls the white European-centric foundations of modern medicine.
Now, everybody knows that my health regime, which gives you this impressive physical specimen in front of you, relies on traditional methods, including a little bit of voodoo and eating my feelings.
Apparently, that is superior to Western European medicine.
I'm joking around.
Joining me now is Melanie Bennett.
Hey, great to see you.
Is this published?
Like, this isn't a draft or a discussion document, is it?
This is the real deal.
Yes, this was released mid to late last week, so it's brand new.
Probably many nurses haven't even read it yet.
It is published.
This is their document.
It's very, very activist-orientated.
When I read it, I was quite surprised because what I wanted to know is if this activist element was new for 2025 or whether it was always there, it's just a sort of a new iteration of this sort of progressive leftist language.
And I was advised that, no, it's pretty new.
You know, I made some dumb jokes about voodoo and things like that, but it is one of the great developments of civilization that we have extended life expectancy, which used to be for the vast majority of humankind.
You know, you'd be lucky to live to 30.
And I mean, just think of life without modern dentistry.
I mean, I don't care if it's Eurocentric or where it's from.
There is an objective scientific medicine.
Now, I think that was stressed out during the pandemic when we were given politicized medicine.
But I think on the whole, everyone would acknowledge that scientific medicine is what we want.
And the race of any researcher who discovered penicillin or the race of people who discovered insulin, it's irrelevant.
But the nurses think that's quite important, don't they?
Well, certainly the Canadian Nurses Association think it's very important.
They specifically call or point to truth and reconciliation as the reason that they're taking this approach.
So they have, the document has values, you know, a certain set of sections called values.
And one of those sections is called promoting social justice.
And another whole section is about Indigenous ways of knowing and so on and so forth.
And my understanding is that this is new in 2025.
So I'll give you an example furthering this Indigenous ways of knowing.
In another section, it says that systemic changes to health institutions on the importance of integrating Indigenous knowledge into clinical practice.
So they're saying we need to start incorporating Indigenous knowledge into the clinical care that you would receive from a nurse.
Like that would be their ethical duty to do that.
And also to integrate it into research, what they call Indigenous perspectives within research.
So I don't know, they don't really provide a lot of detail.
They're just saying that this has to be done for truth and reconciliation.
Yeah, I don't even understand it.
I have your essay here, and I would encourage anyone to go to junonews.com to check it out.
You show an image from the actual guide.
Let me just read paragraph 5.3.4.
Sounds like there's hundreds of little political nudges.
This one says that nurses promote planetary health.
You know, I'm more interested in my own health than planetary health.
Thank you very little.
As essential to the global health and well-being of all living and non-living elements of nature, how can you have health for non-living elements?
I don't know if that, I think health sort of, we use the phrase biological sciences to mean life.
I don't know how you, like, what is the well-being of it?
Curiously, I didn't see all that much about gender and gender identity in there other than saying that you must affirm and respect gender identity.
But there was a lot about this planetary health, this interconnectedness of things.
And what really struck me, like you just mentioned, is the respect for living or the respect of the interconnectedness of living and non-living things.
Because if I'm going to a nurse, maybe I have cancer treatment.
I don't know that I want nurses to be thinking about the ecology of rock formations while they're caring for me.
So that was a bit of a concern to me as to what does this actually mean?
How are they going to, you know, there's also a call in the code of ethics to report people who are not following ethics.
So this then begs the question, are nurses going to be reported for not advocating for climate change enough or for non-living things.
Yeah.
That non-living things is what gets me.
It feels sort of like a pagan or animist.
Like I was joking about voodoo and whatnot, but really that's no joke.
That's exactly the kind of thing they're talking about here.
Let me just finish that line.
You stop me at a perfect point because it's crazy that we care about non-living elements of nature.
I just need, I don't know, I got a rash.
I need some ointment or I have a sore throat.
I need cough medicine.
I'm not interested in the health and well-being of rock formations.
But here, 5.3.4, learning about indigenous governance, knowledge, practices, and ways of knowing in the protection of land, air, water, and ice.
Never seen ice put in a list before.
Plants and animals.
I mean, I feel like this wants to be some new age Bible replacement.
You know, I would trust an indigenous, like a racially First Nations person to give me a cough medicine.
I would trust a white person, a black person, any race.
It's the objective, scientifically proven meds I want.
I'm not interested in Indigenous governance, which I don't even know if the Nurse Association knows.
This is, you know, who approved this?
And are people seriously, I don't know, maybe they're counting on no one reading it.
I did try to reach out to the Canadian Nurses Association.
I did also try to reach out to some nurses' unions, and I was unsuccessful in that.
I did manage to speak off the record to a nurse, and she explained to me that this is normal for nurses to be advocates for certain things.
And I found that curious because I agree that if you're a nurse, you want to be compassionate to many things.
But what I find curious about this document, it seems to be saying that political activism is part of the moral code of a nurse.
It's not saying you can do this in your own spare time, but that you must do this as part of your job.
Like I said, there's a whole section on social justice or advocating for social justice or promoting social justice activism rather.
And that includes climate change.
It includes reporting people for microaggressions.
It includes a commitment to DEI, all of the things that you might think about when you think about promoting social justice.
And it concerns me that that is now seen as a code of ethics for people in the medical professions.
You know, I think of our friend, the nurse, Amy Ham, who had never had a complaint against her by all reports of her colleagues, was an excellent nurse.
And then one day she made a comment about J.K. Rowling, and it was simply I heart J.K. Rowling was a billboard out there in Vancouver.
And she has been persecuted and prosecuted and convicted and drummed out of the profession precisely by nurses referring to codes of conduct like this.
Again, touches on absolutely nothing she has to do.
So I think it's this.
I think it's, you know, where the more corrupt the society, the more the laws.
Or as Lavrentiberia used to say, show me the man, I'll find you the crime.
Here's what I mean by that, Melanie.
I think this document makes everybody guilty because everybody's guilty of something because this is so vague and weird.
Like you now have to, quote, adopt a planetary health lens informed by Indigenous knowledge of the interconnectedness of people with the natural world.
I don't know what that means.
You have to be informed about the disproportionate impact that climate change and other environmental changes have on distinct populations, such as Indigenous communities, women, people with like it's Melanie.
My theory is that this would convict anyone because it's such a vague, meaningless stew of clichés.
So it sits out there like a trap.
And then anyone the nurses, the official nurses want to get rid of, they just say, oh, we got 10 or 20 things that everyone has violated.
So everyone's guilty.
It's just who's prosecuted.
Everyone's guilty.
It's just who's ejected.
I've never seen such a loosey-goosey mishmash as this.
And none of it has anything to do with nursing.
Well, you mentioned Amy Ham, and within the social justice section, it does say that they have to refrain from acting in a way that would cause harm.
But as we know, the causing harm is ill-defined.
And so I think you would be right on that.
And another section says it's a nurse's ethical duty to not engage in misinformation and disinformation, but also report on these things.
But again, we've seen over time what is considered misinformation and disinformation and how many nurses, you know, during COVID, maybe were participating in that.
Maybe that would be seen differently depending on how what side of the debate that you fall on.
And so it does provide, it does create a trap, especially when you have a duty to report on ethical violations.
You know, I've studied the word misinformation and disinformation for a long time, and I have concluded that it has a very simple meaning.
You don't have to get a fancy Oxford dictionary definition.
Misinformation and disinformation is simply what you call ideas you disagree with.
It's a fancy, fake, scholarly, pseudo-science way of saying, oh, that person has a different set of opinions.
Instead of debating it or arguing it or reconciling it, I'm going to swallow it all up by saying that's disinformation motivated by malice.
Of course, I don't have to debate disinformation.
That's a pack of lies.
Misinformation and disinformation is simply what you call someone else's ideas you don't like.
And they might say the same about you.
There's no real meaning to it other than thought crime.
That's what it is.
No, I completely agree.
I felt reading this document that it was so loosely, these things were so loosely defined.
I mean, they do provide a glossary, but it's kind of loosely defined.
I mean, speaking of defining things, they even change the meaning of family again.
So we see another, you know, redefinition of family that because some people who happen to be gay, for example, or part of the LGBT community may have had difficulties with their own families at some point in their lives.
And then the whole family, the whole idea of family, has to be redefined as in just anyone that's close to an individual.
And these things do concern me.
It does concern me that that is being imposed upon professionals through these bodies.
And it'd be curious to see if anyone brings any challenges forward to these sorts of things.
You know, I just want to quote one paragraph from your essay in which you cite this new definition of the family.
And again, what this has to do with nursing, I don't know.
I think that a nurse would probably meet anyone of any race, any sexuality, and treat them.
Like, I think that's part of the ethics of the medical profession: you take a patient, you don't ask what their politics are, you don't ask about it.
And yet, the opposite is happening here.
You're being forced to focus on that.
Let me cite what you report: family.
Any person who plays a significant role in an individual's life, including people not legally related to the individual.
Well, that's just simply not true.
That's just not true.
Members of the family include parents, siblings, spouses, domestic partners, and both different sex and same-sex significant others.
Again, I'm not sure exactly what they mean.
The term domestic partners, blah, blah, blah.
But I think the key here is they're basically saying it means anything, even if you have no legal tenure.
And that actually can be, you know, you can see some bad ideas that might stow away in there.
Who gets to make end-of-life decisions?
If someone's in a coma, who makes life or death decisions?
Decisions about certain operations if the person in question is incapacitated.
You know, to give that to someone who's simply an important part of your life, that is upending centuries of custom and tradition.
This is crazy.
Who wrote it?
Other than that it was the Canadian Nurses Association.
I couldn't tell you who wrote it.
It does feel like it was written with some activists with the CNA in conjuncture with.
But speaking of that family, further down, it talks about kin, right?
So it does elaborate on basically it does kind of mean just anybody who's close to the individual.
But when I read it, I did also think, like you do, who is this actually, who do they mean?
MAID and End-of-Life Decisions00:03:32
And what are the legal consequences or ramifications of expanding that definition?
You know, maybe we're talking about minors, maybe we're talking about mature minors, for example, or like you say, end-of-life care, maybe who's signing the documents.
And none of this is really discussed.
And maybe they don't discuss it in a document like this code, but it certainly does raise a lot of questions.
And I think if you're a nurse and you haven't read your code of ethics, I think you should go have a read and possibly post and tell us what you think about it.
Yeah.
You know, one of the things we've been focused on over the last year is the new euphemism for doctor-assisted suicide called MAID Medical Assistance in Dying, which is every few years they come up with a new term because the other ones have been, well, blemished with what they're real.
So they have to keep on throwing it off and adopting a new nickname until that one's lost its appeal as well.
If you are allowing non-family members to make decisions, let me read that kinship thing you mentioned.
Kinship or the extended family network are terms that are important to Indigenous peoples as they go beyond the traditional definition of family.
Kinship systems help to maintain traditional ways of life, assure the care and responsibility for the elderly and young, and determine the sharing of work and the distribution of food.
What are we talking about here again?
But I think this is the MAID aspect.
Oh, I'm not a family member.
I have no legal standing here, but I'm part of the family network, you see.
And according to the nurse's guide, I help to determine, assure the care of the elderly.
And they call MAID care these days.
I think that only trouble can come for vagueness.
You know, there's a saying in the law that a contract can be void for vagueness, or that, you know, there's an variety of legal maxims about poorly drafted laws, poorly drafted contracts.
They can be void because of the uncertainty.
This builds uncertainty.
No one knows what the heck it means because, frankly, it can mean whatever they want it to mean.
And that is a useful tool for tyranny and totalitarianism.
That is not a useful tool for nurses to read and say, okay, now I know what to do.
This is terrible.
And I'm so glad you wrote about it.
Well, I will say this: that you mentioned MAID.
I was relieved to see that actually they do provide a mechanism for maybe nurses that have a moral objection to MAID.
They're aware that some people don't agree with it, and they've created a system that you can effectively recuse yourself from the care.
You just have to keep providing care until the point that you're replaced with somebody else.
So there's a system in place to report that, okay, I'm not really comfortable with this, and you need to find someone else.
But it doesn't seem that there's any kind of similar process for much of the other activist framings in this document.
Like, if you don't believe in indigenous ways of knowing, there's no way out of that.
Or if you don't believe in this concept of microaggressions or some of the theoretical framework around, say, critical race theory, for example, like you can't recuse yourself out of that.
That is seen as a moral duty and that you must carry on doing that anyway to be a nurse.
But at least with MAID, they have created a pathway for people to be able to say, I'm not comfortable with this.
Conscientious Objectors' Dilemma00:02:46
I'm very glad you told me that.
And that's of some relief to me.
You know, we've seen cases recently of public officials being censured or suspended for not saying a land declaration, for not shaking the hands of a drag queen who was brought in to a workplace.
So there are many conscientious objectors who would be opposed to a great variety of the political orders commanded here.
And we saw how that happens.
We saw that during the pandemic.
The people who, for religious reasons, didn't want to get the shot, they were road roughshod over.
Well, I'm so glad you published this, and it's a pleasure to meet you, Melanie.
And I hope when you have other exciting and concerning news like this, you'll bring it to us and we can talk about it with you to our viewers.
I would love to.
Thank you for having me.
Right on.
Our pleasure.
There you have it.
Melanie Bennett with True North and Juneau News.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me.
On the show this past Friday, Bonnie Swan commented: How about giving Canadians that can't afford health care the care they need?
You know, yesterday, we had a bit of a medical worry.
I looked up the waiting time at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto.
Do it for your own hospital anywhere in the country.
Seven hours and 45-minute waiting time in the emergency room.
Seven hours and 45 minutes.
I laugh about that.
Not seven hours and 30 minutes.
Not eight hours.
They're so precise, aren't they?
That's the state of healthcare.
And now Mark Carney wants to bring in thousands of other people's grandparents to get in line, too, not to help pay the bills, but to get the fruits of people who've been paying the bills their whole lives.
Peter Renshoe commented, the liberals under Mark Carney are the Lucys who once again yanked the football from under the Canadian people.
Yeah, every once in a while you see a headline that the liberals are going to crack down on immigration.
And maybe for a second you believe it.
Never believe it.
Listen, this is how they plan to have a long-term perpetual victory, immigration.
Finally, Anthony Salati commented, we're foxtrot uniform Charlie Keyload.
Well, I know enough about the NATO alphabet to know what that spells.
You're right.
But listen, the best time to fix this was 10 years ago.
The second best time is right now.
Let's try and keep fighting for freedom.
That's our show for today.
Until next time, on behalf of everyone here at Rebel News, to you at home, good night.