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Jan. 20, 2023 - Viva & Barnes
01:32:24
Live with Keith Wilson - Public Emergencies Act Commission POST MORTEM! Viva Frei Live!
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But in terms of criminal charges and probable cause, Seth, that's one where I have a big question mark, but it does depend on...
What's going on here?
Come on, man.
Settings?
Is my mic on?
Audio?
There you go.
Speaker?
Speaker?
Mike?
Speaker?
Mac?
What's the problem here?
Oh, that's because this isn't it.
No, hold on.
Let me try this again, people.
We haven't had a beginning problem in a while.
What?
Depend on the evidence.
There you go.
That's me.
Okay.
Let's just pretend that never happened.
But in terms of criminal charges and probable cause, Seth Kenney, that's one where I have a big question mark, but it does depend on the evidence that they have in terms of what was delivered, what was ordered, what was delivered.
But criminally?
I would be hard-pressed to not think, and we're talking like, you know, involuntary manslaughter in this case, where the negligence comes in under New Mexico law, under my cursory understanding from what I've looked up or heard as well from others.
The negligence comes in with involuntary manslaughter.
Baldwin, it should be a no-brainer in terms of the most obvious charge.
I like this guy.
The armorer.
The AD, you know.
Potentially.
I mean, this is all contributive to a death.
So involuntary manslaughter.
I'd go with four and possibly five.
But my biggest caveat is with Seth Kenny.
I don't see how they cannot charge anybody.
At the end of the day, someone got killed through an accident.
It's not up for the prosecutors to say, you know, people feel bad and let's move on.
Someone died.
There was clearly negligence somewhere.
And it might just have to come out through the evidence.
Who bears what portion of the responsibility?
But yeah, four or five charges seem realistic and probable at this point in time.
I don't know if I get to pretend being smart for having made that prediction.
I think it was pretty obvious.
But people, Alec Baldwin, charged with involuntary manslaughter.
And there's a very big holy potential Shi 'at to that.
Involuntary manslaughter, and what are they called?
Not aggravating factors, but enhancements, is involuntary manslaughter involving a firearm carries an enhancement, which itself carries a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in jail.
This just went real serious, real fast.
I need to flip my mic.
It's...
Hold on, we'll get to that in a second.
This just got real serious, real fast for Alec Baldwin.
The assistant director, Hull, pleaded to some lesser charge, which he will get a suspended sentence or something.
No time served.
Pleaded guilty to reckless handling of a firearm.
Baldwin, conceivably, and I don't know how one gets around it based on the evidence, facing a five-year minimum sentence.
And I don't care what you think of Baldwin and anybody in general.
I'd have to hear arguments for why mandatory minimum sentences are a good thing.
I don't think I like them.
I can't think of an argument, a good argument, in support of mandatory...
Minimum sentences.
Hold on.
I just got an email text from Keith.
Says he needs the link.
So give me one second.
We're not done on this either.
Who's crowded out?
Who's Daily Wire crowded out?
I am.
Hold on.
What am I trying to do here?
I'm trying to send Keith the link.
Give me two seconds, people, while we do this.
Keith Wilson.
Convo lawyer coming on.
Well, I'm an idiot because I sent him the link, but I actually just sent it to myself in reply to an email.
That's not the right link.
Guys, give me two seconds here.
Sorry.
I think I might have sent it either to myself by accident.
I need to enter the studio.
Enter studio.
Give me two minutes.
Enter, allow.
Allow.
Okay, let's go here.
We're going to get the link.
Oh, for the sweet, merciful goodness.
Copy, new message.
I'm not going to say what it is.
Hold on, people.
Link.
Okay, there.
Send.
Now I'll go here and give it to him.
By text as well.
Copy link.
Sorry.
All right.
Good.
Now he has it.
We're at a point where Baldwin's seriously facing five years in jail, and I don't know how he gets around it based on the evidence.
It was involuntary manslaughter with the enhancement of being committed with a firearm by definition.
Involuntary manslaughter committed in the performance of a lawful act.
I don't know how he gets around it, but...
That's where it's at.
I'm going to talk about this, by the way.
You'll notice there's a redirect at the end of this stream to Freeform Friday with Eric Hunley, Mark Robert.
I'm not sure if Barnes is going to be there, but I'm going to be there, and I think Barnes is going to be there.
So I'm not going to go into any more detail about this.
We're going to talk about it on Freeform Friday.
I don't know if we're going to touch on the Crowder stuff.
That whole thing has made me very, very unhappy as to how tribalism exists everywhere.
People draw their tribal lines, and then they cannot even fathom or contemplate the arguments on the other side.
5.30, follow the redirect over there.
But I'll just share one thing, because when they say The View is toxic, brain-melting, brain-damaging, brain-damaging rubbish, listen to Joy Behar, what she has to say.
About all of this.
Alec Baldwin, the man who had to have pulled the trigger, admitted to having shot the gun.
He said he shot the gun in two interviews.
In various interviews, talked about having, you know, he pulled the hammer back, you know, at the instructions of Helena Hutchins.
According to Joe Behar, he might be the target.
Of Republicans.
You know, the DA who is indicting him, or whatever the legal term is right now, she's a big Republican.
I'm only saying this because Alec Baldwin is a target for Republicans.
They cannot stand him.
I'm not saying anything more than that.
The fact that he was handling the gun.
And let's not also forget what George Clooney had to say.
He was on a podcast and he talked about what he does when he has a gun in his hand.
How he opens it.
How he shows that there's not any ammunition in the gun.
And Alec Baldwin was actually confronted with that statement and his response in that George Stephanopoulos interview was, well, good for him.
Good for him.
And so I think that there's some blame here.
Alex is, of course, saying that he doesn't have any blame.
And the investigation so far supports that there's enough evidence to...
Forget that.
Can you just appreciate what Joy Behar, if we adopt the time-tested principle of confession through projection, what Joy Behar is saying here?
She's basically saying, that's how I think.
He's a target, so they're going to prosecute him, suggesting it somehow maliciously.
They're going to prosecute...
Alec Baldwin, maliciously, which is exactly what they seem to be doing in real life.
All right, are we live on Rumble?
Let's just make sure we're live on Rumble.
We're live on Rumble.
We're live on YouTube.
Keith is coming in in a few minutes.
Before Keith gets here, everybody, it is now we've done the intro.
It wasn't so much of a rant.
We're avoiding...
The divisive talk of the day.
I don't think there's any new facts, new legal analysis to offer to any of this.
People have chimed in.
It's the talk of the town.
Today, we're going to take a break from Stephen Crowder, the Daily Wire.
And we're going to get into the post-mortem of the convoy out of Ottawa.
Keith Wilson, for those of you who don't know, Viva the View is disgusting.
Sorry, that wasn't it.
It was Viva the View is disgusting, and you're right.
For those who don't know, Keith Wilson was the attorney for the Freedom Convoy, doing the Lord's work in terms of standing up to mandates, representing Brian Peckford in his charter challenge that was dismissed for mootness after the government rescinded, suspended, paused the allegedly unconstitutional violations of human dignity.
Keith Wilson is doing the Lord's work.
I've had him on a few times now, and he's fantastic.
He was there from day one to the end of the Public Order Emergencies Commission as counsel, representing one of the parties, and we're going to talk about it.
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Now I see Keith in the background.
Let's bring him in.
Keith, three, two, one.
Keith, sir, how goes the battle?
Goes well.
Now I'm not giving the intro no 30,000 foot overview.
If people don't know who you are, my goodness, they're new to the channel.
Where are you?
What's going on?
We've been talking about doing this for a while.
Happy New Year, first of all.
And to you, too.
Have you recovered from the convoy commission?
Finally.
It was tough, man.
We were there on the ground for the inquiry for just about two months.
And it's a long time to be away from your family, but it was a grind every day.
There was so much going on behind the scenes.
The workflows and the amount of late disclosures of documents and surprise disclosures of documents from the federal government.
It was a remarkable experience and all of us were absolutely exhausted.
It took every ounce of juice to keep us going to the end.
And of course, the end was the grand finale of the Prime Minister and stuff.
And I'm happy to share with you.
Some of what we were up to and why we might have done some things that people were wondering why we did them.
Keith, I cannot pretend that I'm not going to ask you about your testimony and the testimony heard around the world and it set off a firestorm of conspiracy theorizing or theorizing as to why you would have said one thing in particular.
We'll get there in a bit.
Starting from the beginning.
You're representing Freedom Corp, the convoy.
Who were you representing in terms of actual parties in the context of the commission?
I was representing sort of the core group of originals and not all of them, as is normal.
You know, I've represented lots of not-for-profit boards with far less profiling and not being at the center of an international movement.
You know, in time...
People start to have disagreements, just like in families.
So, you know, there's dissension out there for sure.
But the people that I was representing would be the not-for-profit corporation that was set up by Tamara Leach and others to administer and handle the, well, $12 million that was donated ultimately through Give, Send, Go.
And deal with all the lawsuits, injunctions, litigation, and so on.
So I represent that entity then and now.
And I represent Tamara Leach, Chris Barber, Danny Bulford.
He's the former RCMP officer, former Army Captain Juan Marazzo.
And then several individuals who are on the board.
All of the people I've just listed, in addition to being...
Participating in the public inquiry into the Emergencies Act are also on the receiving end of the personal injury lawsuit from the personal injury lawyer, which is in the process of being amended to go up to $400 million they're being sued for.
And by the way, ordinarily I would go exclusive to Rumble, but for this stream, we'll keep it entirely on both platforms because there's not a lot of time and I don't want to break it up.
And there's a bunch of super chats and questions that I'm going to take from the crowd and from our vivabarneslaw.locals.com page for those who have them.
So you're representing a number of people in this.
Leading up to the convoy, typically we say a day of trial, a day of prep.
Other than the two months, or how long was the convoy?
The convoy was two months.
Was it a day of prep for a day of trial, or was the prep a little different because disclosures only happened at the time of the hearing?
You said convoy.
I think you mean the inquiry?
Inquiry.
I'm sorry.
Yes, the commission.
No, we started prepping.
Well, I'll tell you exactly when we started prepping.
I started prepping in my head, and I brought Ava Chipiak, my wingman lawyer, in on it.
We started prepping for the inquiry actually probably about the Thursday before February 14th when the Emergencies Act was invoked, because that's when we first started hearing very solid rumors.
This is back while we were in Ottawa, when you were in Ottawa, during the protest.
And the reason was we were hearing these strong rumors that the federal government was looking at invoking the Emergencies Act.
So, we studied the Emergencies Act, you know, in amongst all our spare time in Ottawa, dealing with everything we were on the ground during the protest.
And one of the things that caught my eye was Section 63 that said within a year of the revocation of the invocation, so once the Emergencies Act invoked and then they say, okay, we're revoking it now, everything's under control, within one year, a commissioner must be appointed and they must hold a public inquiry.
And I was like to Ev, I said, you know what?
If they invoke the Emergencies Act, I don't know how this situation is going to end that we were in at the time, but we're coming back to Ottawa.
So that was our first putting our mind to it.
And some of my last instructions to the clients in terms of advice to them before, as some of them were getting arrested and we were starting to disperse from Ottawa during the protest, was I need you to start sending me stuff from your phones, your photographs, your emails, everything, because there's going to be an inquiry and we're going to be in it.
So we started preparing back then.
I got contacted by lead counsel for the inquiry in, I believe it was late June of this past year.
And they inquired as to whether I was still representing the Freedom Convoy and the original leaders and indicated that they intended to subpoena.
A number of them as witnesses and wanted to open up a line of dialogue with respect to the inquiry process and how it would work.
So from there we had open communications with key counsel from the inquiry and we really started to prepare intently.
Tamara was still in jail for the second time.
And she got released at the very end of July.
So I organized a retreat with all of the key players, myself and Eva Chipiuk, where we started doing a very intensive preparation session.
We ended up using my lake.
Because anywhere we would try to go, you know, the fans would show up.
We couldn't have privacy or somebody would be taking a picture and sending it to the Crown Prosecutor and saying she should be in jail.
So we needed a very discreet, safe location.
And I took them to school.
I held class and put up the act.
Yeah.
You say like when they declare, when Justin Trudeau invokes the Emergencies Act.
Are you familiar enough with the law to know that by law there will be a commission in short order?
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah, we knew that.
I mean, it's not a really complex piece of legislation, right?
In some respects, you can kind of jump from, well, it's probably going to be a public order emergency because there's different types of emergencies they can declare.
And then you go into that and you see that there's going to be an inquiry.
So yes, we were alive to it.
The potential, or the requirement, rather, and the likelihood that we would be involved in an inquiry before the Emergencies Act was even invoked.
Okay.
And so you're prepping, you're getting everything ready, like preserving evidence well before this is even declared, before most people understand that there's going to be this commission by law leading up to the actual commission itself?
That's right.
Okay.
Okay, so I think unless there's something...
Relevant in there that I didn't know to ask before the commission.
Commission itself happens.
It starts.
And you go down to Ottawa.
You leave your wife.
I think you have a lot of kids.
There's five of them, if I'm not mistaken.
Four.
Four.
You leave your wife and four kids.
You go to Ottawa.
You're there for two months straight.
There's no going home on the weekends type thing because it's a long flight or a long drive?
Correct.
And we had so much work to do.
We worked through the weekends.
We typically took We tried to take Friday night off and blow off steam and have some fun and build the team.
But no, we worked Saturday, Saturday night, Sunday, Sunday night.
You've got to explain this process to everybody.
There's a number of interested parties.
And now people, well, I guess at one point, I wanted to go.
It was a question of trying to see if I could get in on somebody's witness list.
But how did it work?
We wanted you, I hope you don't mind me saying this.
I wasn't going to say it if you didn't say it.
Are you okay with me talking about it?
Yeah, for sure.
I just want people to know.
We were trying very hard to get you to be a witness.
And there was a couple of reasons we wanted you to be a witness.
You checked a number of boxes.
One of the boxes you checked was, the biggest box you checked was they wanted to understand, they were supposed to, one of the express mandates of the commission was to look into Misinformation and disinformation and the role that it played in the protest.
And I thought, well, who better than Viva Frye, who was there, live-streamed, and has your whole evolution has been to fill the void of misinformation and disinformation from government and legacy media.
So we really like that and the fact that you were there and some of the things that you witnessed and we could back up your testimony with video.
We submitted a list of 26 people we wanted to have as witnesses and ultimately I think we ended up with five or six.
People didn't understand.
It wasn't a question of just saying I want to go and willy-nilly there was more than enough room.
Too many people wanted to go.
As it was, I don't know how many dozens or hundreds of witnesses didn't get heard viva voce.
I wasn't keeping secrets at the time, but it's strategy.
I knew you wanted to do it.
I didn't want to set expectations.
I wanted to go more than anything.
I would have flown down overnight to do it.
I went down only to document only because I was told we're being lied to.
The media is out here saying it's all Nazis and desecrating monuments.
Then I get down there and it's, lo and behold, much different.
So what is the procedure for this commission?
Because people don't understand it.
I sort of understand it, but don't understand how it's possible.
There was no prior disclosure until certain short timeframes before a witness was called.
What was the procedure for disclosing witnesses, disclosing evidence for the purposes of those witnesses?
Sure.
It's highly unusual.
I fortunately have done a public inquiry in my past.
I was representing families that had health impacts from heavy oil production.
So I was in an inquiry as representing a key party.
And it's not a normal litigation at all.
And many of the litigators were like, we're doing what?
So let me illuminate it.
So first of all, the expectation was that over the summer, all of the parties would disclose the documents that they have.
The documents went into this massive database.
It was only after a document was introduced as evidence at the inquiry that the rest of you were allowed to see it.
So I would estimate about 15 or 20% of the documents that were actually in the database ever made it to the public eye.
So at times, we would ask to cross on documents and bring documents in, not because we wanted to ask the witness about them, just because we wanted the public to see them.
So we had that element of the chessboard.
So everybody had to file their documents.
Everybody got to review the documents.
Let me stop you there just for one second.
So people understand this.
It's not because they were uploaded to the database that they were public for public disclosure.
Yeah, we all had to sign.
Even the lawyers and our paralegals.
And our witnesses.
Anybody we gave access to the database to had to sign a confidentiality undertaking.
And we would have been potentially in contempt had we disclosed publicly what we were reading.
And we're reading some stuff from notes from the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff to Mendocino or the Prime Minister himself or the...
The head of the Privy Council.
And we're like, oh boy, we got to get this into the public record.
So, okay.
So the communication of documents over the summer, not all of it, I presume.
You get the schedule.
How does the scheduling work for the actual commission?
So what they did was, let's break this into two parts.
Let's first deal with the witnesses, and then we'll go to documents.
So they indicated very early on, the commission did, Who, from the Freedom Convoy, they had identified as, they would like to have as a witness.
And so we had this short list of people, Tamara Leach, Chris Barber, Danny Bulford, Tom Marazzo, and Bridget Belton, B.J. Dichter, Pat King, James Bowder, some of the people from Coots, you know, things like that, the Coots border protest.
So, but...
The actual witness, and they did that in July, but we would not get an actual witness list until we were at the inquiry and we'd get it about the Thursday for the next week.
So we didn't know until about the Thursday or Friday, sometimes the Wednesday, as to who even the witnesses were for next week, as to which police witnesses were going to be and so on.
But let's pause for a minute.
Okay, why was I a witness?
You know, a lot of people have said, wow, that's weird.
It is weird.
But nothing about what's gone on in the world in the last two and a half years isn't weird.
So how did that come about?
Well, first of all, this is an inquiry.
So it's not a judicial adversarial process where someone's either going to jail or being acquitted or someone's being awarded a sum of damages in a dispute or not.
It's an inquisitorial process where they're supposed to be seeking out the truth.
Let me stop you there just for one second, actually, though.
It's an inquisitorial process.
It's not a legal process.
But does the same principle of potential conflict of interest work?
Not in terms of conflict of interest of the witness, but rather testifying in your own case?
That obviously doesn't apply?
No.
Well, it still applies.
It's still a complex and sensitive point.
And I'm going to really...
Pull back the curtain and shine the lights on all the corners of it for you.
So very early on, I had a dilemma, my clients had a dilemma, and the commission had a dilemma.
And for example, you know, the main question is whether or not the invocation was justified.
And, well, if the borders were all reopened on the weekend of the 12th and 13th of February, 2022, which they were.
And we had reached, Tamara Leach had reached the deal with the city to de-escalate, consolidate trucks on the Wellington and move the rest out to the base camps.
Then why bring in the Emergencies Act?
Well, then there was this, oh, well, the deal never went through.
Well, why didn't the deal go through?
Well, there was two people from each side on a couple of different phone calls that know why the deal didn't get through.
Go through.
And Steve Kay, as he's known, the city manager for Ottawa, phoned me.
And Serge Apron, the Mayor Watson's chief of staff, phoned me.
So if neither of them tell the truth or disclose what happened on those phone calls, and I'm not a witness, then the truth doesn't come out.
So very early on, and in fact, July...
The client group, Tamara Leach and Chris Barber and Danny and Tom and others said, Keith, we need you to testify.
And, you know, I was torn because I really wanted to cross-examine the Prime Minister and do some of the other things that I do normally as a litigator.
But I realized it was more important that I be available to be a witness if that's what the clients wanted.
What we did was we adopted the British model.
As you may know, Viva, that in Britain, you know, in Canada here, I'm a barrister and solicitor.
That's what it says on the bottom of my letters and on my business cards.
Well, you don't do that in England.
You're either a solicitor.
Or a barrister.
You're never both, right?
So the solicitor gets the case ready, does all the client interaction, everything, and then hands the case over to the barrister who goes into the hearing room or the courtroom and argues the case.
So that's where Brendan Miller and Bathsheba Vandenberg come in.
So I searched them out and brought them on as barristers.
Eva Chipiak and I went into the role of solicitors to preserve our ability to be witnesses.
Then what happened was the commission...
Issued subpoenas to Tamara Leach, Chris Barber, Tom Marazzo, Danny Bulford, and me.
So I got served with a subpoena compelling me to travel to Ottawa and remain in Ottawa for the duration of the inquiry.
So I was required by law to be in Ottawa for the duration of the inquiry, and I was required by law to testify.
Now, I could have, if the clients wanted me to, Every time they asked the question, like Lamenti did, our federal justice minister, I could say I declined to answer that question because it's solicitor-client privilege.
But Tamara Leach and my other clients expressly instructed me to waive solicitor-client privilege and to answer everything fully and truthfully for the period of time of X of when the convoy started to whatever date.
Ended in July or when it ended in February.
And then they followed that up by doing it in writing, formal instructions to solicitor-client waiver waivers, which were filed in the thing.
So I was there under subpoena at the instruction of my clients.
And then on top of that, we invoked the Charter Remedy Against Self-Incrimination.
We invoked Section 4 of the Canada Evidence Act Against Self-Incrimination.
Every parallel section of every Provincial Evidence Act.
And so every question was deemed at law to be objected to when I was asked it.
But the commission was like, holy smokes, if Mr. Miller has to stand up every time Mr. Wilson's asked the question and say, I object, and then the commissioner go, objection noted, this answer is protected because it's compelled, Mr. Wilson, please answer.
It would have taken an astronomical amount of time, so it was agreed.
Early on in a procedural phase, if anybody saw it, there was this lawyers talking mumbo-jumbo.
That's what we were talking about.
The commissioner agreed that every question that I was asked and every question that Tamara and Chris and others were asked were deemed to have been objected to.
So we ensured that they were fully protected at law and everything I did was under the instruction of the clients because at the end of the day, they had nothing to hide.
You know, they were easy to prep.
I said, just tell the truth.
They didn't do anything wrong.
The commission subpoenaed, they subpoenaed Dictor Tamar Leach.
That's understandable.
They subpoenaed you.
Yeah.
And you could have, first of all, I presume you could have also organized on the first day, look, here's my subpoena.
I show up or tell me when I have to come back.
I don't have to stay here for two months.
I presume there would have been ways of working around that if you weren't already an attorney in this file.
They subpoenaed you to testify and you had to get the waivers from your clients.
Okay.
And they gave the waivers and there's only so much I presume you could have even testified to that could be incriminating on your clients unless they're asking for solicitor-client communications.
I guess where I'm going to go with this is there was one aspect of your testimony which was heard around the world afterwards where when you were asked if this convoy attracted bizarre people or Eccentric people?
I forget what the word was.
And then you said like moths to a flame.
And that was snipped and clipped to suggest that you were sabotaging the convoy, the protest by suggesting that bad players were in fact brought to Ottawa, which might have in theory justified Justin Trudeau's invocation of the act.
Well, I mean, I guess I say that It was in the context of them talking about Queen Digilo.
Remember?
Do you know who I'm talking about?
I saw some eccentric characters there, but I don't know who Queen Digilo is.
Oh, you've got to look her up.
She's fascinatingly bizarre.
They were burning flags and doing...
And then there was all the witches doing seances.
And then there was the Sovereign Citizens.
It's normal for a very high-profile event to draw in people with a strong range of views, including those who are on the edge.
It was something that was constantly being managed, because some of these people were trying to take over the convoy in whatever message they had.
We saw it with Canada Unity initially, with the MOU, the Memorandum of Understanding, which they had developed way before the convoy even started, and they were an organization that had been in existence for a year or two before the convoy started.
They saw it as an opportunity to advance the goals of their organization.
So that's what I was referring to, is that there was all these different I don't know how many hours I testified for.
At any given moment, I could have given an answer that would have been devastating, you know, or just because we're human.
We all make mistakes.
In the specific context of that comment about moths to the flame, and in fact, part of the reason I use that expression, not as an excuse, but to give it some clarity, is that was an expression we always used in Ottawa, in the operations centre, in the logistics rooms, when we'd hear that...
You know, Queen Digilo's people have just come and they've announced that the UN's coming tomorrow to arrest.
They kept saying the UN's coming tomorrow to arrest the Prime Minister.
And we're like, yeah, no, I don't think so.
So it was a joke, joking phrase amongst us where we'd always say moths to a flame.
Well, I'll say this.
I could offer a defense for you.
I don't think anybody needs to.
But if anybody thinks that that...
First of all, I was there.
Yes, there were eccentric groups there.
And there were some that were trying to co-opt the protest and co-opt it for not good reasons.
Co-opt it that required the actual organizers, Tamara Leach and the Freedom Convoy, to make public statements to dissociate them from that.
People don't understand.
You're under oath.
You have to testify honestly.
And if anybody thinks that that could be the basis of justifying invoking the Emergencies Act for Justin Trudeau, well, that's going to be it then.
The idea that there were eccentric groups who always are attracted to large events so they can co-opt them goes without saying.
It's not because I like you, but I like you.
It's not because I respect you, but I respect you.
I didn't see anything devastating about that.
It's just people looking to place the blame where it's easy to place and say, oh, I would have testified so much better.
You're under oath.
You have to answer honestly.
Yeah, and if we look at it technically as lawyers, what's the legal test?
The legal test is not eccentric people gathering in a city for the invocation of the Emergencies Act.
I mean, then that would mean, okay, I might get into trouble for this, but I'm going to risk it.
Does that mean they're going to invoke it at a gay pride parade?
Well, I was going to be pretty eccentric people that go to that stuff from what I see on clips.
You know, like, that's not the test.
The test is whether or not there was evidence of sabotage, if there was evidence of ideologically motivated violent extremists that were going to engage and did engage in violence against personal properties, whether or not, you know, like the list goes on.
The Emergencies Act.
It has a very, very high threshold.
And an expression, a description by a witness of moths to a flame doesn't even get close to even entering the page in terms of the legal definition.
And anyhow, it is also just very easy for everyone sitting at home to say, this is what you have to say it this way and whatever.
So I made no hay of it.
But I'll be remiss if I don't ask it, because I know people...
Sure.
And I'm happy to answer the hard questions, and I'm happy to receive criticism, too.
So don't hold back.
Well, forget it.
There's nothing...
I'm not criticizing anybody in this.
I won't even criticize the government in terms of the presentation.
It's very easy to look at this and say what they would have done.
I would have grilled Trudeau even harder than you guys grilled him.
Whatever.
But that explains, then, because you testified, you could not also cross-examine?
Correct.
I was a fact witness, so I could not act in the role of barrister and do objections or cross-examine or deal with procedural motions or do closing argument.
I'll ask one question from the crowd for now.
We'll come back to more because someone said good question, Keith, and I had to see what it was.
Why was the PM not reprimanded for the false statement regarding...
In regard to defaming the convoy Canadian public with his rhetoric.
Okay, that's argumentative.
Nobody's reprimanding anybody for their testimony.
It's a political process.
It's not a judicial process.
Well, it is a judicial process.
It's just not an adversarial one, right?
What I mean to say is that there's going to be no sanctions.
I guess there could be perjury charges.
So you could commit perjury.
But that is when someone commits perjury, the police investigate.
So the RCMP, Brenda Luckey, could investigate the Prime Minister for lying under oath in the public inquiry.
I recommend we not wait for that.
Let's not have a drink of water until that happens.
I think we'll look like dehydrated prunes here if we did that.
That ain't happening.
I made up a joke.
I stole it from somebody.
And I said to someone, I said, yeah, I got a chance to talk to the Prime Minister while I was there just after he testified.
No way.
What did he say?
I said, yeah, I asked him a question.
I said, Mr. Prime Minister, what's your favorite lie?
And he said, I don't lie.
And I said, yeah, that's my favorite too.
So I stole that from some people and cobbled it together.
But my point is, were any of us surprised?
It was kind of nice, though, because it was such a blatant lie.
And just to refresh everybody's memory, this was in context of Eva Chipiak cross-examining him on why he called 6 million unvaccinated Canadians, racist, misogynist, said they're taking up space and asked, how do we deal with these people?
But those weren't insults, Keith.
He didn't call them names.
He was just asking questions.
I say it's too subjective.
Everybody thinks it's a categorical, perjurious lie.
It's not.
It's too subjective, and you can wheeze a lot of it in too many ways.
I was ultimately disappointed just because I waited for that culmination, and I dare say his testimony came off better than...
Christa Freeland.
Her testimony was more unhinged than true.
Well, I was fascinated to learn about electric vehicles.
What about you?
This is a public inquiry into the invocation of the Emergencies Act in response to the most historic, peaceful...
protests by hopeful Canadians concerned about government overreach.
And the Deputy Prime Minister is consuming all of our time by babbling on, twitching away about electric vehicle production.
Let me ask you the obvious question.
I think I know the answer, but people were...
I was swearing at the computer screen because the commission had the witnesses for the bulk of like 80% of whatever testimony time they had.
And it wasn't like...
It was like back massage.
I think I know the answer, but why was the commission so bloody docile with witnesses that needed to be prodded a little more for the truth and not abetted a little more in promoting a narrative?
Well, I mean, as time went on and the more senior government officials came in, you could really see how the commission council were coddling them.
And that was deeply troubling.
So here's what's another unusual thing about the process.
So I mentioned how the witnesses were formulated.
So we didn't get to decide who the witnesses were.
We got to put names forward and explain why we wanted them as a witness and why we thought they would provide value to the commission process.
And ultimately, the commissioner decided.
And as I've just explained, we had a list of 26 and only a few made it in.
Normally, as you know, Viva, when you have a witness go up and it's your witness, I do, or counsel for that witness, does examination in chief, and then the other parties do cross-examination, and then I get to do what's called redirect.
Well, in this case, the commission lawyers do the examination in chief.
And then, that's why Brendan Miller, on me...
When I was a witness, he does a modified form of cross.
You're allowed to do a re-exam with a little bit of cross, but not too much.
It was this funny line, and the odd time lawyers would cross it.
And just to explain to everybody else, in cross, you can ask leading questions, but Brendan Miller asking Keith a question.
A leading question would be a very favorable thing, so they couldn't allow the cross of related parties to be...
It's adversarial in that you can ask leading questions to get the answers, you know, more specific answers.
So it was a hybrid thing.
It was very bizarre.
I just couldn't get over it.
Coddling is an understatement.
It was like the commission was seeking the truth, but it looked like they were just giving every opportunity for the government officials to promote their dishonest narrative.
Yeah, and then there was other things, too, that caused us great concern.
So that's how The Witnesses came about.
Now...
I mentioned that the witnesses, we wouldn't, later in a week, we would get the list of the witnesses for the next week.
So for a witness that was appearing, let's say on a Wednesday, we had to identify three days before at 5.30, usually while we're still in the hearing room dealing with the current witness, at 5.30pm we had to identify three days ahead of time.
The topics we were going to cross that witness on, the types of questions, like the subject matter, and how much time we wanted.
So we would say, in a normal litigation, we would have said, we want them for two days or a day and a half, right?
And so we realized we weren't getting that kind of time, obviously, so we would ask for an hour and a half.
Then a ruling would come out the next day.
The allocations would come out and it'd say, okay, Freedom Convoy organizers, you get 15 minutes or you get 20 minutes.
And we often got the most amount of time.
So we would get 20 minutes quite a bit.
Most commonly, we got 15 minutes.
Sometimes we got 10 and sometimes we got five.
Okay.
And so then two days before that.
Two days before that, same witness is going to testify.
So we've already said how much time we want.
We've said the topics we're going to question them on.
We had to identify every document in the record, OPS 7830492-8, you know, like list every document in the record that we're going to put to them in cross.
For me, there was 142 documents that they said they were going to cross me on between the 14 different groups of lawyers.
And mine wasn't too bad.
So anyway, so we're doing...
So on any given day, think about the number of things we're dealing with.
We're dealing with the here and now in the hearing room.
We're thinking about prepping tonight for the witness we're dealing with tomorrow.
We're having to get our head into the witness who's three days out, who we just found out who it is yesterday, and think about what we're going to ask them and how much time we need.
And then we're also working on the documents for the guy who's two days out.
Like, your head is just exploding.
Normally, each one of these things that we're stacked up and doing concurrently, you would do in a single process in a normal litigation, right?
So we were just, like, so mentally exhausted at the end.
And then, so on top of that, do you remember the fights about disclosure and Brendan Miller getting removed and all that stuff?
Well, here's what happened.
So we know that they haven't disclosed everything, the federal government.
They were supposed to disclose in July.
And we would get, like I remember the last week, and this happened all the time, but on the last week on the Tuesday at about 7 p.m., we got another document dump.
And it was about 2,500 pages.
And so we're in their Ford operating base.
We called it the FOB.
2004, and the tower we were in, and this long-stay apartment hotel rental place.
And that's where we always met and worked in the evenings, in the mornings.
And so I divided it up with the team, and we each took a big chunk, and we sat there.
I was laying on the couch, going through on my laptop.
Eva's over.
You know, okay, got something, you know, and we're just powering through these documents till 1.32 in the morning.
We get a little bit of sleep.
We get up, and we do it all over again.
So they would do these late document dumps.
And of those 2,500 pages, there'd be three or four, five, six pages of gold buried in this stuff, hoping we didn't find it.
So that was one problem.
The other problem was they would be half blacked out.
All these redactions.
Remember the redactions?
It was like all the memes on Twitter.
They redacted something relevant on the basis of not relevant.
I remember drawing attention to it.
I think it was in terms of the necessity to invoke the act to remove the trucks because they didn't have tow trucks, but they had redacted as not relevant that U.S. tow truck companies had offered support or offered help to tow the trucks.
I remember that being one of the redactions on the basis of relevance, which seemed to me to be mighty relevant because had...
American tow truck companies offered help, then it would have undermined one of the bases for invoking the Emergencies Act.
Let me add some really fascinating colour, two fascinating aspects to that.
That disclosure occurred on the last day at 10.30am.
So at 9.30am, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took the stand.
He's testifying.
And at 10.30am we got another document dump.
While he's on the stand.
And the documents that we just received were relevant to the last three weeks worth of witnesses.
You know, the Commissioner Luckey, Cabinet Ministers, Assistant Deputy Ministers, Chiefs of Staff, all of these people, CSIS.
And here we're getting it on the last day while the guy's still on the stand.
And we got the redacted version of it.
And the sentence, the way they presented it, because the way they took out the middle part, made it seem, they characterized it as evidence of the level of concern of the White House and Washington, the U.S. government, about what was happening with the trucker protest.
And when you remove the redaction, it was not them expressing concern, it was them offering tow trucks to help.
And one of the reasons they said they invoked the Emergencies Act is because they couldn't get tow trucks.
So it was alarming on so many levels.
It was extremely damaging evidence for the government.
And they redacted it to conceal the truth to protect themselves.
It is tough not to be blackpilled when you discover that.
Because it's not like...
And they redacted it.
I believe the reason was relevance.
And they redacted a document to conceal...
Material evidence.
So tell us what happened with the Brendan Miller, the first go.
We started getting all these redactions.
Well, they were always redacted.
And we're like, how can you redact this much stuff?
You're claiming parliamentary privilege on communications between staff that aren't parliamentarians and they're nothing to do with the parliament.
They were claiming solicitor-client privilege.
So I send an email to a client as a lawyer and That's solicitor-client privilege.
I can waive it.
Or they can instruct me to waive it.
They can waive it.
But if two clients send an email to one another, that's not privileged.
And so we made this motion in writing as we're required to under the rules and said, look.
Look at all these different redactions.
Neither of these people are lawyers.
It's not to or from a lawyer.
It's not CC'd to a lawyer.
It can't be solicitor-client privilege.
And we did that over and over again, pointed out how all of these redactions were glaringly on their face, not properly made, and there's no basis for them.
And we asked for a ruling.
And we put together a formal motion.
We supported it with all the required documents.
It's a substantive thing.
It's thick.
And we're doing that on top of everything else we're doing.
So that's a late night through the night kind of process.
And we wait and we wait.
And then we ask, are we going to get a ruling?
We're like, no answer.
And then we ask the night before.
We're over a week into this and we still don't have a ruling.
And the witnesses are cycling through that we need the unredacted document to cross them on.
So, you know, the inquiry is not achieving its mandate right now.
And we're getting frustrated and more and more frustrated, getting suspicious about the impartiality of the commissioner.
We sent an email one night saying, look, this is getting ridiculous.
It's affecting the credibility of the process.
We can't do our job.
We need a ruling.
Like, it's not like he's waiting for something.
Like, why don't we have a ruling?
All the parties have made their comments.
So we get a response and it said, you'll get a ruling when you get a ruling.
In other words, F off, right?
It's like, oh yeah.
Verbatim, Keith?
You will get a ruling when you get a ruling.
This is from the Commissioner Rulo.
This is from the staff, from his council.
And they acknowledged later that that was terse.
And they're exhausted too, right?
Well, that's what I was going to say.
Just to give Rouleau a little bit of the benefit of the doubt.
Rouleau, I've never seen a judge work that hard, that long, day in and day out.
A meticulous pause is like in court when the judge says, you know, 15 minutes, come back at 11.15, everyone's back by 11.30.
This judge, he was good.
So I don't want to give him that much of a hard time because in addition to 10 to 12 hours a day of testimony, after that or during lunch or wherever, he's got to...
Issue an order on your motion, on your request.
But he's not doing it.
Brendan Miller's getting pissed because you made two written requests.
He says, what did he say?
He said, I'm making a verbal request now.
Yeah, so we talked about it.
And so, because it was getting really crucial, I can't remember who the witness was.
It was Mendocino.
Mendocino was up.
And we really needed this.
He's a key player.
We know he lied.
We know that he made all these statements.
Some of the police told me to do it.
Every police...
Official of seniority commissioner, chief inspector, superintendent?
Nope.
We never asked for it.
So what happened was he rose at a break and made a verbal motion.
The commissioner said, well, you got to do it in writing.
And he's like, I did, sir.
You know, I did late last week.
The process was completed late last week.
We've been waiting and we have no decision and we need a decision and we can't carry on.
So we went outside and I know Brendan is fine with me talking about this because we always huddled and I was kind of like the coach on the bench because I couldn't go skate.
And we were talking about it and he's like, This is nuts.
And I'm like, I know.
We can't do our job without this ruling.
So what we agreed was when we would go back in and during the break, even though he wasn't the lawyer up next, he'd go stand at the podium.
You're only supposed to go to stand at the podium if you knew with certainty you were up next.
Normally you didn't go to the podium unless he called you, right?
So Rouleau is going to come through the curtain and he's going to see Miller standing there.
And you know Rouleau's going to go, oh shit, right?
And sure enough.
And we didn't plan.
The plan was not to have Brendan thrown out.
But we realized that that was a possibility.
But we just had to take a stand.
He's not following his own rules.
We've tried and tried and tried.
We've done everything properly.
And he's not ruling.
And it's causing extreme prejudice.
So, what we decided to do was that he would stand there and request an oral ruling.
And of course, it didn't go so well.
And Rouleau got extremely unhappy and ordered security to physically remove him from the hearing room.
And the hearing proceeded.
And then there was a negotiation that I facilitated with counsel for the commission to...
Arrange for his return.
But it worked because at 7 o 'clock that night, we got the ruling and the federal government was ordered to unredact hundreds and hundreds of pages by 10.30 p.m.
They were given like two and a half hours or three hours to do it.
And sure enough, they started trickling in at 10.30 and through till midnight, till 1, 2, 3 in the morning.
We're now starting to get all the curtains being pulled back.
And it's like, oh, wow.
That's amazing.
Was there anything other than the tow trucks?
I mean, what incriminating stuff was revealed subsequent to the redaction of the redactions, the removal of the redactions?
Oh, there was lots.
There was lots.
The communications with the banks on the bank freezes.
There was a lot in there about that.
Like they, the chartered banks just came to the aid of the government, like, you know, fire truck speed, man.
It was interesting because the banks just seemed to be so keen to jump in and freeze everybody's bank accounts and cut off their credit cards and shut them down financially.
But the insurance companies, they didn't cancel any insurance policies.
The securities firms, the investments, right?
Because they were all under the same order.
They all had to cease providing services, all three entities, the banks, the insurance companies, and then anybody who held your RRSP or your stocks or any kind of investments you had.
They were supposed to terminate those.
And the other two were like, what?
We're going to cancel someone's life insurance policy?
You know, like, what is this all about?
They held off.
They didn't do it.
The banks just rushed in.
And you could really see in some of the notes between Freeland and the banks.
And I know there was, I picked up this morning, I was checking my feed on Twitter, and there's some people asking which of the five chartered banks did not freeze bank accounts?
They all did.
They all did.
And I represent...
A large number of people that had their bank accounts frozen, and I can confirm that each one of the five chartered banks all froze bank accounts and cancelled credit cards.
Five chartered banks: TD, RBC, Banque Nationale, Banque de Montréal.
There's RBC, Scotiabank, TD, Bank of Montreal, and CIBC.
And Keith, I mean, we're familiar with the cornerstone Supreme Court decision, Banque Nationale contre Sousis in Quebec, where the bank liquidated because they contractually even had the right to do it, called a loan, liquidated assets to pay the loan with like 24 hours notice.
And the court came to the conclusion that Supreme Court, even if you had the right to do it, you exercise that right in an intempestive, whatever, you know what I'm saying, like in a capricious, Manner, are any of the banks getting sued for what they did by freezing the accounts and causing the heartache to any of those who had the bank accounts frozen?
Anybody suing the banks?
Not yet.
Okay.
And let me explain that.
So under the Emergencies Act, once the proclamation is made and a party, let me be more precise, once a proclamation is validly made, Lawfully made under the Emergencies Act, and their party is required to do something, they have immunity for doing it.
So on its face, the banks have legal immunity.
But there are currently three, possibly four, judicial review applications in the federal court that were commenced in February and March of last year, alleging that the federal government did not meet the legal test to invoke the Emergencies Act,
and that Well,
my argument from the beginning, and I appreciate I've never worked with the Emergencies Act, but my It's one thing for Trudeau to invoke the act.
It's got to get ratified by the House of Commons and the Senate.
And it got through the House of Commons but never got ratified by the Senate.
Then it was rescinded.
The question is, in law, would there not be an argument to say that the immunity issued under the Emergencies Act itself was never ratified and therefore any bank that acted on the Emergencies Act declaration before it could have ever gotten ratified by the Senate?
never got conferred that immunity?
Or is it just by virtue of Trudeau having invoked it and issued the directives that the immunity stands and unless it gets reversed, the immunity stands, even though it never got past the Senate?
So I'm very familiar with that argument, and I had to address that many times when I was on the ground in Ottawa during the protests.
So the way the statute's written, it's very carefully drafted, that the federal cabinet, the governor general and council, their fancy name.
So the federal cabinet.
Gets to invoke it, but they had a set number of days, I think it was 10 days or something, that they have to ratify it.
So it becomes validly enforced the moment the cabinet invokes it.
But unless they go through the processes with the House of Commons and the Senate and others and complete that process and ratify it, then it dissolves.
So they don't need the ratification of the House of Commons and Senate to invoke it.
But they have to get that ratification within a period of time.
And that kind of makes sense because it's supposed to be used in an emergency.
Okay, so that's very interesting.
Well, there goes my theorizing and it makes sense.
So it applies until it is ratified or not within an emergency timeframe.
And they rescinded it before that.
Before it was voted on by the Senate.
Yeah, when it was going to the Senate.
Well, then hopefully it gets overturned and the banks get sued for egregious...
I think it's a strong case because the court's got to say, you know, when you look at the definitions, especially the evidence of CSIS confirming that...
The Section 2 of the CSIS Act, which is the prerequisite to invoking, wasn't met.
And then we had the head of intelligence for the OPP.
Their inspectors say, no, they found no evidence of terrorist activity.
They found no evidence of sabotage.
They found no evidence of this, that, the other thing, and agreed that the elements under Section 2 weren't present.
Commissioner Lucky said it.
The police chief said it.
The Ottawa guy, not slowly.
I forget who it was.
The one who was arguing that there weren't tens of thousands of people, there were maybe several thousand.
Well, if that was the argument, then you never met the threshold.
When they were saying that there were hundreds of thousands, oh, it was Pat King, I think, said there were millions of people there and someone said maybe thousands.
At one point, I forget when, but...
They were arguing to minimize the number of participants to make it look like it was not as big of a protest as I guess would have needed to be to invoke the Emergencies Act.
Keith, we're going to run out of time eventually, but most memorable moment of the commission?
The ones that I enjoyed the most were what we ended up calling Miller Time.
When Brendan was really on a go and he'd get up there and cross.
And if you watch any of them or were watching and he'd be like three quarters away or 80% through his cross and he'd ask a question and then he'd do this.
And as soon as he did that, he had that person, like, use a cattle analogy, in a shoot, and they were going in the pen, man.
It didn't matter what they did.
They were done.
So I just loved watching Brendan get up there and do his thing.
And then one of the best examples of, well, and the other thing he would do, he did it with Inspector Boudouin.
I probably mispronounced his name wrong.
Boudouin, I think.
Boudouin, thank you.
Great guy.
He's the head of the OPP's liaison program, and he developed a stakeholder engagement plan.
And it was very similar to what we ended up doing with the mayor, which Tamara Leach's agreement with the mayor.
And so what happened was Baudouin had developed this plan, and it was a really good plan.
And we had no idea.
Like, if we would have known, oh, my God, if we could have had that guy in a room, oh, it would have just been a completely different outcome and a more favorable one for the protesters.
Anyhow, so Miller goes, walks him through his plan, and, you know, and he does it in a way to cause the guy to be kind of proud of it, right, and as he should have been.
And then he goes, you do realize that, you know, your plan went to Commissioner Luckey.
And was approved by Commissioner Lucky.
He's like, yeah, I knew.
And sir, your plan, did you know that your plan was presented to the IRC, which was the Emergency Subcommittee of Cabinet and the Prime Minister, on the Sunday evening?
And he could tell, he's like, no.
And your plan was presented to the Cabinet and the Prime Minister on Sunday evening?
And it was rejected, right?
And Miller says it was rejected just as he's closing his laptop and walking off.
And you see the facial expression of the inspector and it's just...
You could tell he was like, oh my God, like it got that far and it was good to go.
And then they are the ones that, you know, killed his baby, so to speak.
So that was a fascinating moment.
Killed it right before they decided to invoke the emergencies act.
Yeah, in the same meeting.
If they had done it, they wouldn't have had the basis to invoke the Emergencies Act.
I'm going to get to Miller defamation in a second.
Let me just read two Rumble rants from Rumble.
One says, it's from BGKripped, or BGCrypt, says, Redacted has become the blanket favorable tool for hiding relevant.
This needs to change.
There's absolutely no question about that.
And then there was Privacy Please 23 says, This is a question I was going to ask.
Has it ever been established if the hacker, you know, the guy who claims to have hacked the give, send, go, the hacker who illegally attaped donor's info, was he hired by the government?
Keith, you heard the story, you heard the rumors that the guy who says...
Yeah, I saw his video too.
That guy's weird, man.
Wow.
He claimed to have been hired by or worked with the government.
As far as you know...
You have no knowledge.
All I know is it's remarkable how the government and the police forces were quite happy he'll utilize it.
They didn't have any concerns about how it was obtained and outed so many Canadians for their support for freedom and the rule of law and the charter.
Do you think Rouleau is going to get it right or do you think he's going to not get it right?
I was encouraged by Rouleau during the hearing, during the evidentiary hearing.
And then I was listening to it during the policy debate the week later, and I'm like, holy shit, there's not a chance in hell he's going to ratify this.
How do you think it's going to go?
Unfortunately, I think it's going to be, well, I think the best.
I just can't see him.
I understand he's a commissioner, and I understand that he's a sitting justice on the Court of Appeal in Ontario.
He formally was Chief of Staff to, was it John Turner, when he was Prime Minister?
And you just look at the jobs he's had in his past.
He's deeply embedded.
There's family ties between his family and the Trudeau family, and that's not really in dispute.
I really thought he was objective and neutral.
We really started to get suspicious about halfway through, and then near the end, we're like, okay, this guy's not on our side.
I flagged the comment before.
I didn't know of the...
What's the family relation?
Through marriage?
The detail is I think it's Rouleau's sister is married to a Trudeau, is what I've been told in fact.
How is that not a...
Sorry, I just banged my...
I banged my geode on the table and it shook the camera.
That's atrocious.
I thought I created a disturbance in the force there.
No, no, no.
I banged the damn table.
Okay, so that's...
I did not know.
But to answer your question specifically, I think what his report is going to say, and I have no inside knowledge.
You're just asking me to...
You were there?
You got an assessment?
I was there for the protests.
I was there for the negotiations on behalf of Tamara with the mayor, all those things, the police, etc.
Then I was there for the inquiry and everything in between.
And since.
So I think my best guess is what he's going to rule or his report's going to say.
Is that those who felt that the invocation wasn't justified, felt it wasn't justified because the police said that Section 2 of the CSIS Act wasn't met and that there was no evidence of violent insurrection and there was no evidence of this and no evidence of that.
And then he's going to say that the Prime Minister and his cabinet that invoked the Emergencies Act...
Felt that it was justified because of what they perceived to be the threat to the economy and to safety and security of Canadians.
The end.
In other words, the federal government is going to be able to go, see, Rouleau said this is why we brought it in.
And those of us that think that it was a massive, dangerous overreach by government will point to our parts.
I think that's the thing.
It is possible that he'll come out, you know, because it was fascinating, the pivot in the inquiry, because we had legal checkboxes, right?
We need to get this witness from the government or from this police force to confirm that there was no violent insurrection, that there was no attempt to overthrow the government, that there was no this, there was no that.
And we kept checking that box.
And the box was so full of check marks that the box was black.
We just were surprised at how many of the witnesses we were able to get that out of.
So then it was the head, Thomas, the head of the National Security Advisor to the Cabinet, to the Privy Council.
And then she floated this different approach, which is...
Oh, we read the CSIS Act differently than CSIS.
We read the CSIS Act differently than the RCMP.
We read the CSIS Act differently than the OPP and the police and everybody else.
It's like, what?
So, I just can't.
If Rouleau goes there, man, the rule of law is toast.
Like, the wording is so clear in the CSIS Act, and it just wasn't met.
If he goes there, we're in trouble.
But the problem is, my feeling is, if it's not a harsh enough reprimand, we're in trouble.
By the way, in real time, I'm just Googling that detail, and it looks like in Wikipedia, it looks like his brother Pierre Rouleau was married to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's aunt and former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's sister.
There you go.
Wow.
Okay, well, that's going to be black-filled.
But hold on, hold on.
Let me get through some of the super chats and get to some of the questions.
To Viva Keith as a Boots OTG.
On the ground.
On the ground.
At the Ambassador Bridge, the more time has passed, it looks like a CSIS RCMP op.
Any consideration to this?
I mean, Keith, you were there.
CSIS said, we know by invoking this, it's going to make people even more extreme.
Let's do it.
I mean, was the plan to trigger the response that they were purporting to respond to?
Yeah, and that was one of the surprising pieces of evidence that came out, right?
That CSIS and some of the other police officials were concerned that by invoking...
I just got a text message from my wife correcting me on the relationship with Rouleau.
That's so cute.
Thanks, honey.
You know, what the relationship is doesn't matter.
It exists to some extent or another.
Absolutely.
And I didn't know this.
I just heard this for the first time now.
And apparently they went after that guy tweeted that back in the day, they updated the Wikipedia page like 52 minutes later.
But who knows?
So what were we talking about?
Oh, yeah, no, I got it.
So, you know, CSIS was concerned that invoking the Emergencies Act, as were some of the police, would actually provoke.
The protesters to get violent.
Not only did they think it wasn't met, not only did they think it wasn't necessary to invoke the Emergencies Act, they saw a downside to it, a potential downside.
And of course it didn't at no time.
I mean, you know there was a tremendous amount of violence in Ottawa caused by the police and no one else.
No one else.
I have countless...
Hours of footage where I asked the cops any violence, any property damage, and one cop said, yeah, there's a broken window over there.
I was like, oh, okay, let's go see it.
And then he said, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, nothing to do with the convoy.
There wasn't even a single broken window.
You know, the other thing, Viva, I don't know if you and I have talked about this before, but one of the things that I noticed, do you remember how there were signs everywhere?
Like people would come with their signs and even if they just came in for a day, you know, from Kingston or something with mom and dad and some kids, they would leave the signs.
There wasn't a single sign on the Prime Minister's building.
And for those of you who haven't been in Ottawa, right across from the Parliament grounds, the Parliament building on Wellington, as you move more towards the War Memorial and the Senate and the Chateau Laurier and the Canal, there's this big brown stone building that's the Prime Minister's office.
It's a building, a big building.
It's like, I don't know, eight, ten stories at least.
And it says...
Prime Minister of Canada's office and a big plaque right on these big fancy doors.
There wasn't a single sign put on that building.
There was no window broken.
There was no graffiti.
And it wasn't like Tamara Leach and Chris Barber said, don't do anything.
It's just everybody there, or so many of the protesters, the truckers and others, understood with clarity why they were there.
They were there because the government had gone too far interfering with people's lives and causing harm.
Ignoring the rule of law, ignoring charter rights, othering Canadians, creating division, tearing our country apart, and they wanted it to stop.
And they just all knew.
You know, the streets were clean.
Remember the garbage bags everywhere?
The signs were in garbages.
They were salting the sidewalks.
They were shoveling the snow.
I remember one time in the Ops Centre, someone came in and said, we need like 600 snow shovels.
And so off...
A group of them went to every Canadian Tire, Home Depot, Lowe's, whatever, Walmart, and they cleared them out of snow shovels, and they started distributing snow shovels to all the truckers.
We had a garbage collection system.
Like, they were running that place better than the darn city was.
Keith, I'm going to bring this one up just to answer it.
Hey, Viva, are you personally concerned about the $400 million class action lawsuit?
I am not personally concerned.
I think that lawsuit...
Well, that's why people are saying, well, you donated to the Convoy.
You donated to the Give, Send, Go.
I'm not afraid.
It's the donor class, yeah.
It's the donor class.
It's the most frivolous lawsuit conceivable, and it will be dispatched appropriately, depending on the defendant.
So the answer to that is no.
There's a hearing next week, by the way.
I'll cover that.
Keith, the lawyer, we don't need to mention his name, the guy who collapsed, and they said he was going to come back.
He never came back.
No, he came back.
To the commission?
Yep.
He joined the team.
He just didn't see them.
There was 14 parties.
There was well over 50 lawyers.
Each team, the average number for a team was probably two to five lawyers.
That's a lot of lawyers in one spot.
You never saw the commission lawyers at one time because they couldn't fit them in the table.
So they had back rooms where they were working and they would rotate who would be in the hearing room.
But he came back.
Interestingly, though, guess who the very first person to go to his side and render aid was?
When he collapsed and hit the ground, the very first person to be at his side and render aid, and I'm talking like two seconds time, was...
Someone sitting right behind me, a Freedom Protester supporter, who had been in Ottawa, who is unemployed because she's an unvaccinated nurse.
She was an emergency room nurse, and she just ran and started immediately rendering aid and helping this guy.
And we don't know, above and beyond what anybody said, we don't know what happened to him.
The reports were that he was dehydrated and tired, but...
It was also very obvious on Twitter that he'd been heavily vaccinated.
We're going to find out fairly soon, I think, whether or not all these people we're watching fall over who are vaccinated are falling over just out of coincidence or whether it's because they've been vaccinated.
It's going to be impossible to conceal the truth in the coming months.
Vaxxed to the max, I believe, was the hashtag that he used.
And I'm the asshole for asking the obvious questions.
Keith, speaking of obvious questions, Brendan Miller getting sued for defamation.
Before we get into this, before we get into the defamation suit, I mean, there's not, I don't know if it's been filed or, you know, we know what the idea is.
What was going on that day when Brendan was seen running down the corridor, looking to the guy, asking the person if he wanted to testify?
Are you able to tell us what was happening there?
Well, I mean, Brendan was exhausted.
He's going for a number of days without sleep, but he's a full-on litigator, and he doesn't just rely on briefings.
He's got to see it himself.
That's how I do it when I'm in litigation mode as well.
I don't do memos well.
I've got to see the cases, and I've got to go through the evidence myself.
I can't rely on summaries.
I've tried really hard to do what other senior lawyers do and just rely on briefings, and I just can't do it.
I just feel that I'm...
Got too many blind spots.
So Brendan's that way.
So he'd been working really hard and he was pursuing a lead and it didn't work out in terms of that particular individual.
But, you know, and he has been sued in defamation and that's been reported in the media and he is defending that lawsuit and taking the appropriate steps to have that proceed so that...
The truth comes out.
You know, one of the things that was remarkable, and we crossed a number of the police officials, and particularly the head of CSIS on this, was they investigated people to the extent of knowing everything about their involvement in the convoy.
Anytime there was, you know, anything about anybody that could have been important to establish that they were terrorists and so on.
They pursued.
That was the evidence that came out.
They knew about everybody who donated and all these sorts of things.
Well, why is it that they were concerned, CSIS and some of the police, that there might have been ideologically motivated violent extremists?
So that's a term that CSIS uses.
It's in the statute.
Ideologically motivated violent extremists.
And we'd say IMVE or whatever the acronym was.
And they'd say, oh, because of the Confederate and Nazi flags.
And we're like, okay.
So that was what caused you to be concerned that there was an ideologically motivated violent extremist, right?
Yeah.
And so you investigated who had the flags, right?
Yeah.
Who had the flag?
And remember what his answer was?
I can't answer that.
That's subject to classified information.
I answered that in the closed session.
So CSIS requested early on in the inquiry process to have a private secret meeting with the commissioner.
And the commissioner agreed to it because they made a motion for it.
He said, I will.
And if I determine that anything is relevant that I learn in that private session.
And I don't think that it puts national security at risk.
I will require that evidence to be presented publicly when they appear in the public session.
Well, we heard nothing about what he heard in the private session.
But we did have them indicate that they answered that question in the private session.
So it's remarkable to me.
They know who had the flag.
Why would they not bring it out?
They've tried to out everybody and characterize them in negative ways whenever they can, whether it's Jeremy McKenzie or Pat King or Tamara Leach or whoever.
So it's highly suspicious.
You know, the one guy carrying the flag that had the truck on it and the Confederate thing.
He looked like he just left Mark's warehouse, man.
Like his car hard still...
I was expecting to see the price tag thing still hanging off it.
And then he had that full face mask that just had his mouth and a little bit for his eyes.
And then a guy who looks like the Prime Minister's photographer happens to be in the background.
There was so many things.
It's like, come on, you guys.
And not only that, before the convoy even arrived...
Staffers were communicating on what the narrative was going to be, that we're going to characterize them as extremists, as Nazis and all this stuff.
And that's exact.
So it's like, oh, well, we better get the flags down.
So I really wish the truth would have come out on that, because I do think when you put all the pieces together, it points to people within the government.
Sabotaging the image of the convoy.
And you even saw the protesters around that guy.
Like, what are you doing here?
Get out of here.
At least the one with the Nazi flag.
I know the guy who told him to get away.
It's Daniel Tyree from the PPC.
He says, get out of here.
Nobody wants to see that.
I remember with the Confederate flag, freshly folded.
The image was right out of the bag.
Question about...
So Miller's looking.
He says he thinks the guy might be somebody else.
I replied to a tweet from Glenn McGregor of Global or CTV or whatever.
My reply to his tweet got me blocked from him, but I called him a name because he's judging this lawyer.
I get one less source of propaganda, I guess.
But he's judging this lawyer.
I said, you're criticizing a lawyer for trying something in real time that he thinks is necessary on his feet and he might admit, well, you're an idiot.
I didn't say those words.
But Miller's getting sued now for defamation for suggesting that the guy was Brian Fox who worked for this company, Enterprise.
It looks like it wasn't Brian Fox or whoever the person was because that person was in Toronto on the day of that photo.
Whatever.
We'll see what evidence comes out.
For my own edification, The Bar Society assumes his defense, right?
Like, this is why lawyers have insurance and the Bar Society is going to assume his defense.
And if they determine he's not coverable because of the act performed in the context of his practice, they'll figure that out afterwards.
But it's not like he has to pay his own lawyers and assume his own defense here.
That's right.
You're correct.
Good.
So there's that for everybody out there.
It's like, we have bar insurance.
It covers our conduct during the practice and that's why you pay for it.
So they'll assume his defense and we'll see where it goes.
Keith, question here on the other side.
I'll say it just so I'm not ignoring it.
JDavid21 says, please clear up Dichter Morazzo Beef.
Both played major roles.
I don't want to get into it.
I don't know what's going on.
I don't know why there seems to be an internal conflict above and beyond people maybe being angry at your testimony wording for that one sentence of the hours that you testified.
I don't want to get into that.
That can be fought out on Twitter.
Unless you have something to add, Keith, but I won't push that.
BJ Crypt says, was there a component of the police troops during the convoy that were foreign?
That's a good question because I heard the same rumors.
We believe that we had foreign in ours here during protests in Australia.
And then it says, is that what the Emergencies Act enables?
Keith, you remember there was a picture and people were saying it's UN forces.
Do you know anything about that?
Yeah, we've thoroughly, thoroughly investigated that.
And all of our sources from the military, from...
From the various police forces have all confirmed that there's just no truth to it.
There is a photograph of a UN plane, but UN planes appear at various places.
They'll go to Ottawa, they do different training, or sorry, to Winnipeg, and they train there.
So you'll see a UN plane sitting on the tarmac at the Winnipeg airport.
There was a couple of things I wanted to share.
One was...
You got three minutes, Keith.
Not to cut, I got another.
Thank you.
Some people wondered why we put Eva up to do the cross on the Prime Minister and put her up for close.
The reason we did that, as we always did, we collaborated as a team and I always took everybody's input when I would step in to make the decisions as I had to from time to time.
And there was a couple things.
First of all, we realized that the Prime Minister was going to squirm out.
He was going to be like squeezing an ice cube, right?
He's just going to always pop out.
And the other thing we realized...
Was they would have prepped him for Miller, really prepped him for Miller.
So if we can switch at the last minute, it's going to throw him right off.
The other thing we realized was he cannot stand strong women.
And so Eva really wanted to do it.
And I said, what are you going to wear?
She said, I'm wearing my pink blazer, right?
Just to mess with this guy and her blonde hair.
And so we knew it would throw him.
We realized his answers wouldn't matter.
So we'd already, remember I said we got the legal check marks black, like we had it.
We didn't need the Prime Minister to say anything legally to establish what we'd already established.
And we knew he probably wasn't anyway.
So we wanted to make our questions the important thing.
And we wanted to give voice to Canadians.
We wanted to give voice to the thousands of protesters, the tens of thousands that lined the highways in terrible cold conditions and overpasses, that talked about the heartaches and the suicides and the job losses and the despair and the family disruptions and the social setbacks and the loss of educational opportunities and so on.
So we intentionally, we did it, we designed it so that...
Prime Minister's answers didn't matter.
And I wrote most of the cross.
And then Eva at the end said, I want to ask him why he's so afraid of Canadians.
And I thought about it for a minute.
I said, do it.
And that was her walk off right at the end.
Mr. Prime Minister, why are you so afraid of Canadians?
Close thing.
Walk in.
He was just like, he didn't know how to handle that one.
So that was why.
And if you go back and watch, if you watch how he responded to a male cross-examination versus a female, you will see a radical change.
He cannot stand strong women.
So that was why we made that decision.
It would never have been within my thought process to criticize that decision.
She did well throughout.
And bottom line, weasel's going to weasel.
And I want to say this, by the way, we're at 2,200.
We were at 7,000 people, Keith, watching this with an hour notice.
And it's fantastic that people have now gotten to see behind the curtains of this hearing.
And after this, everybody, go mosey on over to Freeform Friday.
The link is in the redirect, so we'll get there.
But Keith, thank you.
It's very easy afterwards.
Everybody plays Monday morning quarterback.
This is what should have been done.
This is what you could have done.
This is what you should have said, yada, yada.
My black pill is, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what.
The writing is on the wall, and I don't like the way it's starting to look, but we'll see.
Maybe we'll be surprised by a harsh order coming down from Rouleau reprimanding verbally Trudeau for having desecrated our charter of rights, desecrated our rule of law, violently suppressed the most peaceful protest.
Canada's ever seen, there was a chat before that said, this was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
I did not have any idea how monumental this was when I was down there.
The Freedom Board and others are calling on Canadians on Saturday the 29th of January to commemorate the protest by flying a flag on their vehicle, by...
If you want to stand on that overpass and hold your flag for an hour and let some people honk at you.
We're encouraging people to do on that Saturday something.
If they feel they want to commemorate the anniversary, the first anniversary of the convoy, to go on Saturday, the 29th of January, which corresponds with when the convoy arrived in Ottawa, and do something individual.
There's no plan to organize a new convoy or a new big protest somewhere.
These other groups trying to do that kind of thing, and they keep collapsing.
They're just encouraging Canadians to take that Saturday to reflect on how these Canadians came together to create so much hope that was so desperately needed.
Apparently, Eva Chipiak is in the chat.
Eva, welcome.
I don't know how long you've been here for, so I hope it's not welcome and now we're leaving, but thank you.
Keith, we'll do this again.
Thanks, Eva.
We'll do this again.
I'm going to try to get Brendan Miller on for a stream.
Maybe I'll ask you if you can hook me up with him afterwards.
Keith, thank you for everything.
Seriously, full stop.
It's amazing.
Keep on keeping on.
I guess we'll get some news within the next year, I guess.
How long does the commissioner have to write the report?
It's got to come out in February.
February?
This year?
Yeah, yeah.
Oh yeah, it has to be.
By law.
Okay, I thought we were going to wait like 10 months.
We're just a number of weeks away.
So I'd be happy to come back.
And I know Tom wanted to come on and share some of his perspectives as well.
Absolutely.
We'll do that.
And Tom is not only welcome on, he will come back on sooner than later.
For sure.
Keith, stay around.
We'll say our proper goodbyes afterwards.
Everybody, follow that redirect.
Barnes, Gruber.
Han Lee and myself very shortly.
Everyone out there, peace.
Thanks for being here.
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