David Menzies and Ezra Levant dissect Toronto's alleged double standard, where police ignored pro-Hamas demonstrators chanting for genocide until recently arresting Mohammed Anas Sial for displaying an anti-Semitic sign. Menzies claims this "political theater" by Chief Myron Demkew aims to justify Liberal censorship and gun control, while also targeting independent media with a $615 ticket. Levant contrasts this with the lack of tolerance for his trucker convoy supporters, detailing Tamara Leach's conviction and criticizing Justin Trudeau's shifting stance on citizen rights amidst alleged government overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Toronto Police Shift Tactics00:09:47
Tonight, are the Toronto Police finally getting tough on terrorist supporters, or is there something else at play here?
It's Wednesday, April 8th, 2026.
I'm David Menzies, and this is the Ezra Levent Show.
Censorious fuck.
For two and a half years now, the pro Hamas reprobates have taken over the streets of Toronto.
They chant for genocide against the Jewish people.
They display swastikas.
They carry replica hand grenades.
At least let us hope those grenades are harmless replicas.
And they even cosplay a sin war, the terrorist mastermind of October 7th, 2023, as they invade Jewish neighborhoods.
But, folks, what is more gross?
The odious behavior of the Hamassholes, or the fact that law enforcement and the political class can't seem to be bothered to do anything about it.
The double standard is uncanny.
Imagine if dozens of members of the Ku Klux Klan marched into a predominantly black neighborhood in Toronto.
Would that be tolerated?
Would Mayor Olivia Chow and Police Chief Myron Demkew spout nonsense along the lines of, How we need to be, you know, reasonable in terms of accommodating diverse viewpoints.
No, a KKK demonstration would be shut down in a New York minute with the cops going into whack em and stack em mode.
Yet, for 30 months now, the police and the politicians have merely shrugged when it comes to all the Jew hatred.
They look the other way, they turn a blind eye, they hold their nose, they've even delivered coffee and Timbits to the Hamassholes.
Yeah, I guess.
Chanting genocide in January can be somewhat taxing, and we wouldn't want these Islamists to do without and go on an empty stomach now, would we?
But recently, there seems to be a change in direction in terms of law enforcement when it comes to these despicable demonstrators.
Case in point, on April 2nd, the Toronto Police Service issued a media release making the public aware of.
An arrest for public incitement of hatred at a demonstration.
Here's what the release stated verbatim.
On Sunday, March 15, 2026, at approximately 1 15 p.m., protesters and counter protesters attended a demonstration at the intersection of Bathurst Street and Shepherd Avenue West.
It is alleged that the accused attended the demonstration with other protesters.
And displayed an anti Semitic sign.
He marched with the sign toward a group of pro Israeli supporters while shouting derogatory slurs.
The accused was later identified through investigation.
On April 2, 2026, members of the hate crime unit executed a criminal code search warrant and located the accused.
Mohammed Anas Sial, 33, of Toronto, was arrested and charged with.
Public incitement of hate.
Wow, talk about the Passover miracle.
The abominable Anus was finally charged with something.
And I'm sure that must have come as a complete shock to Anus.
You see, back in January 2024, Anus was one of the recipients of coffee and Timbits delivered by law enforcement.
At the time, Anus and the other reprobate colleagues of his were occupying a bridge over Highway 401.
Near a predominantly Jewish neighborhood.
Must have been a coincidence, I suppose.
And at the time, the attitude of law enforcement was this.
Nothing to see here.
Please disperse.
But on April 2nd, handcuffs replaced Timbits for Anus.
He must still be uttering the immortal Fred Willard quotation from A Mighty Wind.
Yeah, indeed.
Hey, what happened?
As well, in recent days, the Toronto police have made their presence highly visible around town.
Heavily armed police officers resembling combat troops have been spotted at subway stations.
The Sky Dome when the Blue Jays are in town, and at certain synagogues.
Now, speculation was that law enforcement had intercepted chatter that Toronto's version of Bondi Beach was indeed a clear and present danger, and the cops weren't taking any chances.
Then again, what's that old saying, folks?
Appearances can be deceiving.
You see, I spoke with my police sources who told me that what's been playing out on the mean streets of Hogtown recently.
From the arrest of Anus to the show of force in public is really akin to the law enforcement version of street theater.
My sources say the real reason for this show of force is all about the police creating an amped up atmosphere of dread and despair.
Now, why would they want to do that, you ask?
Well, great question.
Apparently, this would give the Mark Carney liberals.
A convenient excuse to justify their various censorship bills.
This would also give the Liberals an excuse to further justify that gross gun grab.
The messaging would be thus You see, folks, there's just way too much hatred out there.
There's just way too much danger.
And we must enforce our Liberal legislation in order to make Canada safe again.
I know this sounds preposterous, but really, in this day and age, Is it?
And consider back when Justin Trudeau was Prime Minister, we know he had at least one confidential meeting with Chief Demq.
But why?
The Chief doesn't take his orders from the Prime Minister.
What was said in that meeting?
Well, we reached out to the cop shop, and basically, the response from police headquarters was this.
I'm not kidding, folks.
We even filed an access to information request pertaining to this meeting, and the cops rejected our FOI.
But again, why?
What was so secretive about that meeting?
I guess we're never going to know.
But I think it's clear that under Chief Demkew, the Toronto cops serve as puppets for the federal Liberal government.
Meanwhile, when it comes to certain independent media outlets, the Toronto police are still in vendetta mode.
I was arrested five times by police in 2024 for simply practicing journalism in a public place.
Three of those arrests came via the Toronto Police Service.
And get this, folks, last Sunday they still targeted me.
As chants for genocide filled the air at Bathurst and Shepherd, I was given a $615 ticket for filming the police from my vehicle.
You need your driver's license and.
Why is that, officer?
Because you had your handheld communication device in your hand.
But I had my vehicle in park.
I was just filming.
You're driving there, sir.
You can argue this in court.
I need your driver's license.
Wait, so wait a minute.
You're allowing people to chant for genocide?
I need your.
No, it's not.
You are purposely targeting me.
Are you going to give me your driver's license?
Unbelievable.
Here's the skinny.
I was in a left turn lane.
The light was red.
My vehicle was in park.
Other motorists were also filming.
But along came Officer Ian Gillespie.
Who is allegedly a good friend of the infamous Officer Bubbles?
Oh, by the way, he was also there that day to give me a Highway Traffic Act ticket.
Yes, that was the real crime occurring at Bathurst and Shepherd on Sunday.
An alleged traffic violation, not calls for genocide.
Pathetic.
Or do you think that maybe this was yet another example of a personal vendetta against yours truly and Rebel News?
Well, I'll let you be the judge.
But in the meantime, the Toronto Police want you to think they're getting tough on anti Semitism.
Nice try.
Nice try, because the scuttlebutt is that the Toronto Police brass are just so many minions carrying out a Liberal Party of Canada objective.
So much for to serve and protect.
Rebel News Origins00:04:15
That's because the politicized Toronto Police Service brass and the Mark Carney Liberals.
Both subscribe to that old political chestnut.
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
Me?
Oh, great to have you here.
Ezra Levance, my name.
I'm the president of Rebel News.
And it's great to have you here.
You know, I am overwhelmed by the feeling of nostalgia and nervous sickness from being back in this room.
It was in this very room that I was taught calculus.
I was taught it, which is very different than me learning it.
And it was so I have scars from more than 30 years ago.
So much of you see is the same as when I was here.
And, you know, although I'm filled and overwhelmed with dread now, I also remember with great fondness the crucible for freedom and political activism that it was, and where I met so many other interesting people, some of whom have gone on to be rivals.
Nahid Nenshi was my classmate and my debating partner, Danielle Smith, who I was the head of the Young Reformers, she was the head of the Young Conservatives.
There was so many, so it wasn't just school that we did here.
It was preparing for a life of ideas.
And I was very lucky to have had some professors like Dr. Tom Flanagan who allowed that to flourish.
And our host tonight, I'm not sure if Dr. Barry Cooper is here in the room.
I haven't seen him.
Is Dr. Cooper in the room?
No?
Well, he is certainly one of the freedom oriented professors.
If he comes in, we'll have to give him a recognition.
He's certainly one of the freedom professors who has been fighting for freedom and has made U of C that kind of place since I was here many years ago.
So it's not just full of a student's dread for not having done his homework, it's actually full of fond memories too.
And I think that Calgary, the U of C, of course, it's got its wokeness, but it is as free compared to other universities as Calgary is.
To other cities.
So it's a great place and a very fitting place for our guest speaker tonight, who I'm about to introduce.
I didn't meet Tamara Leach until after the trucker convoy was over.
I was only in Ottawa for a couple of days.
Our team was on the ground filming everything that moved.
I remember our young reporters, Alexa Laval and Lincoln Jay, were there 23 days straight.
And really, they just turned their cameras on and just pointed and narrated what they saw.
And the world was so hungry for that honest information.
It was incredible to me that amateur citizen journalists like Alexa and Lincoln got so much attention, and so many foreign networks from Germany and Australia and the UK, and of course from the US, wanted to talk to our kids, but they were really young greenhorns because they knew we were on the street and trustworthy.
And it was interesting which foreign networks chose instead.
To talk to the CBC, people who were afraid to go out even amongst the truckers.
And let me just brag for 30 seconds.
In the month of February 2022, which was the month of the trucker, our little website, our little citizen website, got over 400 million views and impressions.
Whereas the CBC, their own promotional material says on an average month they get 360 million.
So, I mean, they may have been larger that month too, but our little ragtag ban, no government subsidies, just telling the other side of the story, just follow the facts, point the camera, was larger than the regime media, which gets a billion and a half dollars a year because people simply wanted the truth.
Taking Action on Problems00:02:42
And Rebel News, you know, we're famous for telling the other side of the story.
That's our official motto.
But we do something that I think is pretty unique.
Every once in a while, we don't just talk about a problem, we're not just voyeurs to a problem.
Every once in a while, we stop and say, Well, we got to do something about this problem.
And that's what makes us a little unusual, a little bit of a hybrid operation, because every once in a while, we do something like the project that was started right here in Calgary.
We call it Fight the Fines.
Has anyone heard of Fight the Fines?
Remember that?
And client number one was Arthur Pavlosky, that street pastor who was feeding the homeless.
And if you remember the video, the police went up to him and pushed him around, literally.
And said, This is an illegal gathering.
He said, It's not a gathering.
I'm feeding the homeless.
And these were the lowest, the lowliest of the low.
These were the people who might get kicked out of a homeless shelter because they had certain problems.
They were nobody's nothings, as Morrissey might say.
And for Arthur, they were his mission.
And we took his case.
We called him client number one.
Client number two was Derek Reimer, also of this city, also a pastor.
And before you knew it, we had 50 people.
And I just blurted out in the office one day, we're going to take 1,000.
And everyone said, oh, good, you're going to bankrupt the company.
How are you going to run 1,000 cases?
Well, I didn't know the answer, but I knew we had to do it.
And over the course of the duration of the whole pandemic, we actually wound up taking 3,000 cases.
And the foolishness of saying, we'll take them all, we literally took every case.
The only case I can recall we turned away was a Hells Angels biker gang that wanted us to represent them, and I just thought I'm not going to raise money from rebel viewers to spend on a biker gang.
Not that I'm against them having civil liberties, but that was the only case we turned away.
We didn't ask any other questions of anyone.
And the folly of fighting 3,000 cases as opposed to taking, say, 30 strategic cases, the folly actually became the wisdom of it, in that put yourself in the shoes of the prosecutors.
You're going to run 3,000 cases?
Really?
You got 3,000 prosecutors, you got 3,000 courtrooms, you got 3,000 judges.
You better start building some new courtrooms if you're going to do that.
And by the way, so it jammed up the system.
And so we had so many cases being dropped.
The Folly of Fighting All Cases00:15:19
But the government wanted to make an example out of some people because they hate being defied, don't they?
In Toronto, you might remember that there was Adamson's BBQ.
Adam Skelly refused to shut down his little barbecue place.
The police sent more than 100 officers, a dozen Horseback troops, because they wanted to encourage les autres, as they'd say in Quebec, to make an example.
Don't you dare defy us or we'll stomp on you.
And when, if I thought nothing, Grandma from the prairies led the truckers with such a spiritually positive message of love and positivity and became a symbol, they wanted this symbol to be an angry, militant, off putting person, but instead, The nicest, kindest Canadian was the face.
And instead of rambunctiousness, and they wanted a January 6th narrative, instead they got bouncy castles and hot tubs.
They got people shoveling the snow.
They got crime in Ottawa actually falling because everyone was doing good things.
There was no parliament that was stormed.
Parliament was closed.
They were renovating and there was nothing to storm.
And so they knew they had to destroy the woman who became the symbol of the peaceful, positive protest.
They knew they had to do that.
And so they went after Tamara Leach in a way that is beyond understanding if you think the justice system is rational and designed to have a positive public outcome.
They put Tamara Leach through the longest mischief trial in Canadian history.
And I checked with your lawyer, and as far as we both know, it was the longest mischief trial.
In the history of the Commonwealth, the UK, Australia, the longest.
Mischief is the lowest species of crime in the criminal code.
Mischief is the kind of thing, if there was some graffiti or if you shoplifted, you'll get a mischief charge and the judge will look at you and say, I don't want to see you in this courtroom again.
Now go out and fly straight.
That's what mischief is, the lowest crime there is.
But they had, that was over two years.
And they had so many prosecutorial resources.
And just even having the judge and the courtroom and the clerks.
And I couldn't help but think how many serious crimes, violent crimes, home invasions, rapes, were let free because they didn't have a speedy trial because all the resources were being put on Tamara Leach.
And I watched the trial, and there was nothing there.
There was no there, there.
Not a single witness actually interacted with Tamara Leach.
There was no one that testified that said, oh, she said this, I heard it, or she told me that, or she took, not one.
And there was one day, I didn't quite understand it at first.
They showed five little video clips where Tamerlee just like standing in the corner.
It's like, where's Waldo?
And I'm thinking, this is the prosecutor, I think.
And I was thinking, I forget which team put these, I think they're five videos.
And I was thinking, what's that?
Like, she doesn't even say anything.
She's sort of standing, like you can bear it.
That was the totality of anyone who even saw her.
No speaking.
They had bureaucrat after bureaucrat sort of give a dear diary.
Here's how I felt when I saw the trucker.
It wasn't evidence.
There was a therapy session, and the judge allowed it.
And I was there in the courtroom, and I was certain that Tamara would have been acquitted, but alas, she was not.
I was shocked.
And the Rebel News crowd through our friends at the Democracy Fund, and I'm sure people in this room helped chip in.
We paid for actually an outstanding legal team.
The lawyer, the lead lawyer, Lawrence Greenspan, was universally respected.
It was amazing to me even to see the CBC stop and listen to him when he spoke, because he spoke with such authority about freedom.
In fact, he had litigated some of the key cases.
I was shocked, as was the legal team, when Tamara was convicted, and I was in the court.
When they gave her a sentence, and remember, she had spent a month and a half in prison already pre trial, much of it in solitary confinement, which is outrageous, under the pretext of COVID safety.
Already a month and a half in prison, and imagine giving her a sentence on top of that.
But I was in court when the judge said, and I thought, oh my God, what's she gonna say?
A year in house arrest?
Now, my first reaction was, okay, good, I'm glad it's not actual prison time.
But imagine a year locked in your house.
I mean, you might love your house, but part of the reason you love your house is you know you can leave.
If you're compelled to stay within your house and you only have minor exemptions, five hours a week for groceries and other necessities, doctor or appointment or legal appointment, you can go to church and that's about it for a year.
And clearly, not only designed to break someone's spirit, but to shut them up and stop them from going out and about.
But I remember something from my law school days.
I remembered that there was another exemption too.
And that exemption, believe it or not, is for work.
So I called up my friend Tamara and I said, You've worked with Rebel News before, not as an official employee, but you've done a book with us, this book, which I really recommend if you haven't read it.
It's a great book.
And you went on tour and you did this.
And so I said, Can I offer you a job?
And we ran it by you, and we ran it by your lawyer.
And then I took my mean pills.
And I called up your probation officer.
And I went through it line by line, including the expectation that you would be expected to travel as often as once a week.
And wouldn't you know it, the law's the law.
What a delight that the newest rebel is our friend Tamara Leach.
We busted her out, it was a jailbreak.
Tell him that story.
But mainly, it's my sense of pride and admiration because I didn't actually meet you until after you were released.
And I got to know you a little bit during the trial.
And I thought I knew you until I read the book and I learned so much more about you.
And I'm delighted to say, by the way, I don't want to, but Tamara is doing a sequel because this book does not take us up to the present day.
This book does not include the conviction.
Am I right?
So, volume two is coming out.
And this was such a bestseller, it's going to be amazing.
But I am so proud that in the couple of months that Tamara has been a rebel, she has lived up to all that we aim to be.
She's been a journalist telling the other side of the story.
She's crisscrossed not only Alberta, but other provinces too.
We even had her out there in Toronto in Young Dundas Square, one of the busiest places in the country, talking about freedom of speech.
That was a very interesting visit.
So she too is living up to the rebel way of telling the other side of the story.
Giving a voice to people who are otherwise ignored, going and platforming people that the regime media would ignore.
And I think her personal example of fighting for freedom.
You know, I'm not, I don't have a strong background in theology, but I know enough that when someone sacrifices their own self, when someone with great dignity agrees to go to prison defiantly, but with their head held up high.
When she does that for us, there's something almost, I don't want to say holy, I don't want to overstep, but there's something so deeply admirable and moving about someone who would sacrifice her personal self to force the freedom agenda in this country.
And of course, such a person could only work with Rebel News.
And what a delight.
May I, would you please join with me in welcoming my friend, Tamara Leach?
Thank you.
Thank you, Ezra.
Thank you.
Thank you everybody.
You guys know how to make a girl blush.
Can you hear me okay?
All right.
Thank you for that lovely introduction, Ezra.
Ezra Levant.
He flew in from Toronto today just to be here for this, so thank you so much for that, Ezra.
And of course, Sheila made it this evening.
Sheila Gunnery.
And I don't believe Dr. Cooper's here yet, but I obviously want to say a huge thank you to Dr. Is he?
Oh, great.
Where is he?
Dr. Cooper.
Oh, there he is.
Thank you, Dr. Cooper.
I mean, with the state of some of the universities in Canada today, and we're seeing Dr. Francis Widdowson having some issues, this gentleman sort of went out on a limb to help us organize this event here tonight.
So, thank you so much, Dr. Cooper, for being so brave.
I also have to thank my producer, Tasha, who flew in from BC this morning or this afternoon, who helped put this presentation together.
And my final thank you is to my husband, Dwayne Leach.
He is the manager of all this mischief.
And make sure I get where I need to be.
So, tonight, I want to talk to you a little bit about democracy, and I want to talk to you a little bit about how grassroots movements work, at least in my experience.
Before, I think we can pretty much all agree in this room what the current state of democracy is like in Canada.
And I think if you look at myself and Chris Barber and a lot of the other truckers and supporters that have been persecuted, it's very telling where we're at in this country, especially when you're looking at different cases being thrown out, charges being dropped for more serious and violent crimes than mischief.
I had six charges total.
Two of them were intimidation, which is hilarious because, as people have noted here, I'm clearly not very intimidating.
But obviously, we were both acquitted on our intimidation charges.
And thankfully, the judge said intimidation usually includes threats of violence.
As you saw, if you watched any of my videos throughout the whole convoy period, not once were we advocating for violence.
As a matter of fact, we were encouraging people to call the police if they had any indication of that type of behavior because that is not what we were going to do.
We simply wanted to go and have a conversation with our elected officials who are supposed to be giving us a voice.
In the House of Commons.
So, I want to give you a little bit of background about me because grassroots movements typically start with people that aren't activists or advocates.
They're not really political in any way.
I'm just going to try and turn this down a little bit.
I hear a bit of an echo.
See if that's okay.
So there's me as a baby.
I was born September 19th, 1972, to a young single Metis woman from Cold Lake.
Her family was from Cold Lake.
She was going to the university in Saskatoon.
And she wanted me to have a good life with a loving two parent family.
And so she gave me up for adoption, much to the sadness I found out much later from my grandparents.
My grandmother was a Cree lady, my grandfather was Metis.
I've never met my birth father.
He was a Scottish gentleman who was in the Canadian military, and when she told him she was pregnant, he never called her again.
But that's okay.
I ended up in a great family with, well, actually, my mother and father adopted me.
They were told they would never have children of their own.
So my mother had three miscarriages.
They adopted me, and then they had five more children.
So I think I'm a bit of a good luck charm.
At least that's what I try to tell myself, anyways.
I grew up in Saskatchewan, all across the southern part of Saskatchewan.
My dad worked for the Week Pool.
He had a trucking company for a while.
Then he worked in the oil patch.
So, pretty much every little teeny dinky town in southern Saskatchewan I have lived in, we lived in towns where when my family moved in, the population doubled.
One place we moved in in Horizon, Saskatchewan, didn't even have any plumbing.
So, that was interesting.
It was a two bedroom house with a family of six.
So, my career has primarily been in oil and gas.
Since I moved to Alberta in the late 90s.
And that's sort of where my journey here sort of started.
It was during 2019, I believe it was, when C69 and C48 came in.
And I was seeing people that I cared about and people that were working in my industry losing their jobs and losing their homes.
And, you know, men were coming into my office handing me their resume with tears in their eyes because they were going to lose their house or they didn't know what they were going to do.
And now, of course, Being in the Alberta oil patch, I know that we have one of the safest, most environmentally friendly, and efficient oil and gas industries in the world.
And I couldn't figure out for the life of me why we were being punished for it.
I couldn't figure out for the life of me why all of our politicians weren't traveling all over the world shouting this from the rooftops and trying to sell our products around the world.
And instead, we were being vilified and shamed for it.
So I joined a little group.
I sought out a little group in Medicine Hat.
And we became the Yellow Vesters.
And we went to 13th Avenue by Tim Hortons and held signs up once a week.
Yes, I joined a little local group in town.
We called ourselves the Yellow Vesters, and we went out and protested on 13th Avenue every week, holding signs.
Questioning Political Tolerance00:10:50
Sometimes we'd get honks.
Sometimes people would join us.
Sometimes we'd get the old Trudeau salute, and that's okay.
I mean, everybody is entitled to their opinion.
We're all about free speech.
So that was sort of my journey in beginning this whole thing and starting to follow politics a little bit more and a little bit more.
It was about the time of the sponsorship scandal when I personally woke up to some of the stuff that was going on in our country because I didn't care until then.
I mean, politics is boring, I thought.
It was hard to understand.
And I just didn't care.
I just assumed that the government was there to look after me and my family, like I was brought up to believe they were.
And of course, the fallout of the sponsorship scandal was sort of really eye opening for me because nobody has gone to jail yet.
And they won't.
We've also watched the Trudeau government go through scandal after scandal after scandal with absolutely zero accountability.
So I have to put that picture of Jason Kenney in there.
He's going to hate that one day when he sees it.
And it was also in 2019, during our provincial election, when I decided to stop complaining and do something about it and get involved.
So I joined my local MLA's campaign team and I went door knocking and helped out in the office where I could.
And obviously, that was also supporting Jason Kenney.
And I didn't really know what to think of Jason Kenney.
Personally, I thought it was really strange that this MP from Ottawa was just going to give up everything and race back here and save Alberta from Rachel Notley.
And I mean, I make this joke a lot, but we literally could have ran a cardboard box in that election and it would have won because we needed to get rid of Rachel Notley.
But, anyways, I thought that was a little bit suspect.
But you know, as time went on and I was working on a campaign, I wanted to believe him.
He came to Medicine Hat, I met him, he shook my hand, and I listened to what he had to say.
And I wanted to believe him so badly that he was going to fight for Albertans finally and put his foot down.
I just didn't know that that meant harshly worded letters every other week to the Prime Minister with absolutely little to no action.
And then, of course, we saw how that all turned out in the end, also.
So, what is democracy?
It is a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.
Governments by the people, for the people, representing the people.
We elect the person that we think best represents our values, and we expect that they're going to go to Ottawa and that they're going to give us a voice and voice our concerns and make sure that our rights are protected.
Now, I am concerned, obviously, about the state of democracy in Canada because, from what I'm seeing every day, There's not a lot left of it.
I don't feel like I'm represented personally.
I mean, there's not too many people in Ottawa, and there was some, and we found out even since the convoy that there were some MPs advocating for us behind closed doors.
But they sure weren't racing up to talk to us on the street.
And I will give my MP, Glenn Motts, a lot of credit.
He visited me at my home before the convoy started.
He came over a couple of times, brought me coffee, and he worked really hard once we got there to try and organize meetings with Omar El Gabra, who was the transport minister.
And some of the other ministers, Marco Mendicino.
Yeah, I'd love to meet that guy one day if I'm being honest.
But they just refused.
And here again is the system that I believed in.
Why wouldn't they come and talk to us?
I mean, literally, they were treating us like suspects or the enemy before we even got there.
And all of us were just regular Canadian citizens.
And I just want to add to that.
You know, Ezra introduces me, and it's the sweetest thing, but it wasn't just me.
This was truckers, supporters, and we would never have been as wildly successful as I believe we were if it wasn't for you guys, if it wasn't for the Canadians that came out and supported us.
So, yes.
You made that happen.
So, what is a grassroots movement?
A grassroots movement is a locally driven, bottom up effort where community members organize to influence social or political change, typically focusing on issues affecting their immediate lives.
And so that's how that started, obviously.
The pandemic was affecting everybody's life, the mandates were affecting everybody's life, the vaccine passports were affecting everybody's life.
And it was very dark times.
And, you know, I remember my prime minister on an interview questioning whether people like me should even be tolerated.
And he never did finish that.
I would really like to know what comes after that.
Because that was probably one of the most concerning, disappointing, shocking things I've ever heard a political leader say, at least in Canada.
Grassroots movements are organized locally just by everyday people like me.
Who are not typically activists.
They're not politically involved.
They don't normally do this stuff.
They leave protesting up to other people until it actually affects you personally.
Anyone that was expressing concern during that period of time was canceled.
They were smeared.
Some of them lost their jobs, as these ladies in the front were just telling me here.
20 years.
She lost her job for 20 years, of 20 years, because obviously she made a choice.
I've met doctors, nurses, lawyers, waitresses, mechanics, lots of people who have lost their jobs over that.
And you know, there's still no accountability.
There's absolutely no accountability happening.
And so, also remember during this time period, there were some other movements that were happening.
I wouldn't necessarily call them grassroots, they were highly organized and very well funded.
Which we were not.
Like Black Lives Matter, for example, or the Coastal Gas Link Pipeline, Wet'suwet'en protests that were happening, where there was actual criminal activity and violence occurring.
And what did our prime minister say?
It's important to maintain dialogue.
We need to keep talking to these people.
We're not going to arrest them, we're just going to listen to what they have to say.
They were burning railway tires and causing vandalism to rail lines.
The coastal gas link pipeline was actually even worse.
And here we have a photo of our prime minister, you know, taking a knee in the middle of the pandemic when we weren't supposed to be gathering.
It was okay for them to gather for Black Lives Matter, not okay for everyday Canadian citizens to gather to protest the removal of their charter rights and freedoms.
And that is how they positioned themselves.
They were not willing to talk to anybody that had a differing opinion than them.
They belittled us.
They called us misogynistic.
They called us racists.
They called us people that didn't believe in science.
And then again, it was the should we tolerate these people?
Should we tolerate these people?
So for me, during the pandemic, my husband and I actually, at the very early onset, we both were laid off of our jobs on the same day.
And we'd planned a trip out to Manitoba to go see my daughter, who we got there and found out she was pregnant.
So we spent most of the pandemic out in Manitoba because we weren't going to sit in the middle of Medicine Hat and do nothing.
At least on the farm, we could go be productive.
We helped on the farm.
Obviously, I helped with my grandchildren, I helped my daughter.
And we lived there primarily through most of the pandemic until we were offered our jobs back in October of 2021.
We both were offered our jobs back, and we made this decision to come back to Alberta.
And it's funny because we, that's literally what we did.
We moved back at the beginning of November, I think lived with my parents for a few weeks, moved into our house a week before Christmas, and then the convoy started two weeks later.
So even when I got home from the convoy, my house still looked like two college kids had just moved in and dropped all their boxes and left them all over the place.
We hadn't even got settled in yet.
But I got back to work and started back at Step Energy, which is where I was working prior to all of this.
Throughout this whole thing, you know, this was the problem.
People couldn't talk openly about it.
I mean, you could only know how other people felt if you read their body language or if you were very close with them.
I mean, we know that this tore families apart, it tore relationships apart, friendships apart.
So we had to be very careful during this time, feeling people out as to who we could talk to and who we couldn't talk to about this, you know, about how we really felt about it.
I know I worked in an office that was very vaccine friendly and, and, uh, Actually, very vaccine friendly.
The lady that was my co worker was very much a CBC watching lady that believed all of that stuff.
And I remember the CEO or the CAO and the Reeve came in one day because I was very honest.
I try to always be respectful, but I was very honest about my stance on what was going to happen.
And the CAO and the Reeve came in one day and Jason said, So, Tamara, about that vaccine?
And I said, I'm not getting it.
And he said, Well, that's okay.
Look, at this time they were talking about mandating them for all the municipalities in Manitoba.
And he said, Well, that's okay.
You can probably just do a test.
And I said, I ain't doing that either, because I'm not sick.
And the CAO, assistant CAO, laughed and she's like, Are you going to quit?
Does that mean you'll quit?
And I said, No, you're going to have to fire me.
I was not playing that game.
Absolutely not.
And my husband and I decided very early on that we were not participating in that program.