The Public Order Emergency Commission is hearing testimony from former Ottawa Police Chief Peter Slowly about the use of a counterterrorism law called the Emergencies Act on peaceful anti-Justin Trudeau protesters in the nation's capital. We're joined by Selene Gallas in Calgary and William Diaz in Ottawa to talk about the testimony.
00:10:19.620We're all about telling the other side of the story.
00:10:20.980We criticize the CBC for only showing one side of the story.
00:10:23.980So I think it's important to analyze it from every possible angle that you could imagine, especially a testimony like the one from Chief Slowly.
00:10:32.640And I think, you know, that's the analogy that I made.
00:10:36.060Let's say that you are a chief of police and you have a pro-abortion protest happening in your city.
00:12:00.060I'm just, again, I'll show you the clip and then we'll go to Celine and then we'll go to, we'll go to William because, uh, this is a bit much.
00:12:08.600These people need to get over themselves.
00:12:11.580I know they're federal representatives here, but the trauma impacted on federal employees, elected officials, public officials, the entire infrastructure and ecosystem that represents our nation's capital, the parliamentary district.
00:12:22.940And the, I believe Mr. Champ quoted 18 or 15,000 residents in that area.
00:14:13.900And we even asked the people there, you know, we asked the employees of all the various stores that were now at like 12, 1 PM, like lining their doors with that metal retractable screen to shut people out that they were getting told to shut down.
00:14:28.620It was being, there was calls from higher powers and it was out of their control.
00:14:32.460So, yeah, I don't, uh, I have no sympathy.
00:14:36.540And these people were also reacting, some of them to a sense of fear because they've been told for two weeks that the KKK is rolling into town.
00:14:45.340It's going to be January 6th insurrection.
00:14:47.920Windows are like, not a single window was smashed.
00:14:51.240Not a single window was smashed in Ottawa.
00:14:54.800I don't know who it was who said, that's how, you know, that it's pretty darn peaceful when thousands upon thousands of people can converge in your city and there's literally no damage to anything.
00:15:06.960It's actually cleaner than when they came.
00:15:09.020That's how, you know, it wasn't a violent mob.
00:15:12.020This is some of Celine's footage from when she was there.
00:15:14.360I remember her little H, what is that?
00:15:18.300William, what do you think about, what do you think about that, uh, that clip?
00:15:21.980Yeah, you know, I remember that H, that, that microphone, because it's the first micro, the first time I ever did an interview with the rebel news.
00:15:28.020It was Celine and Mocha there with me, um, but no, you're, you're absolutely right.
00:15:31.660And I think those people forget that the businesses were closed, not because of Freedom Convoy, but because of the authoritarian mandates that were implemented by Justin Trudeau.
00:15:39.680During the Freedom Convoy, the businesses that stayed open made 10 times more money.
00:15:44.200That's possibly an exaggeration, but I'm not even sure it is.
00:15:46.880They made a lot more money than they did prior to the convoy, because when you're a trucker there, you have to go buy yourself coffee.
00:16:26.740Inconvenience is not a reason, a valid reason to use the emergencies act.
00:16:31.140And we have that email from the Hotel Association emailing, I think it was with the city manager, Jim Kay, saying, we need their business.
00:16:44.460You know, like they're coming and we need their business.
00:16:46.760And so it's pretty clear that, you know, the service and hospitality industry in Ottawa would have benefited from thousands of people coming into town.
00:16:58.400But the city basically closed everything to everybody and forced people to live out of their trucks and then tried to snatch kids because they were forced to live in their trucks at the hands of the authorities.
00:17:11.680Let's skip ahead to clip four, because this is more rewriting history and inventing facts by police chiefs slowly.
00:17:22.180We announced on the Friday morning at a media conference, and this was specifically to address the level of ongoing disorderly, assaultive, hate-related behavior that our downtown communities and businesses were experiencing, particularly in Councillor Fleury's ward and Councillor McKinney, although I'm not sure she's in office now.
00:17:49.900But former Councillor McKinney, but former Councillor McKinney, her ward.
00:17:53.100And the overwhelming amount of community complaints, business complaints were coming from the unlawful, assaultive-type behavior in that area.
00:18:04.200And we needed to, that surge-containing in force is not for the red zone, that is for the areas outside of the red zone.
00:18:20.720If they're wandering around being blue-collar and conservative in your neighborhood and it makes you uncomfortable, that's not assaultive behavior.
00:18:29.420That's you being intolerant of other people.
00:18:59.560I think there are only five in the lead-up to the invocation of the Emergencies Act, which should be the true measure of how violent the convoy actually was.
00:19:08.180Because that's before the police started cracking heads.
00:19:12.940There are five, I think, violent charges out of 16 in total in between the dates of the 27th of January and the 13th of February.
00:19:48.620He pointed out to us when he was on the show that two of those, at least two of those charges, are attributed to violence against the convoy.
00:19:59.820So it's really only three violent charges.
00:20:03.600And I think they're mostly like disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, assaulting an officer.
00:20:07.900I think three of those, thousands of people in the nation's capital for two weeks.
00:20:12.800And that's the worst they could come up with.
00:20:14.600And this guy calls it disorderly assaultive and hate-related.
00:20:17.620Again, goose egg on the hate crimes charges.
00:20:28.780When I say I'm surprised that there weren't more charges, when the extent of the brutality that the police used against them, and they still resorted to being peaceful.
00:20:39.320If I could count, if I had enough fingers to tell you how many videos I saw after that I left, because I made it my mission to make sure that I understood what was going on there every single day.
00:20:51.040Of peaceful protesters going up to these lines of armed, brutally enforcing police officers with flowers, or offering them warm drinks, or saying, you know, we love you, despite everything that's going on right now.
00:21:31.480It's kidnapping at the end of the day, as Brendan Miller, lawyer for the convoy, put it.
00:21:35.920Taking them out of town with no reason to arrest them.
00:21:39.000Sometimes holding them for hours before they release them in the bitter cold, no cell phone, no shelter, no telecommunications, in a parking lot on the outskirts of town.
00:22:07.440So if you want to talk about disorderly, antisocial conduct, taking protesters off where the potential is that they can freeze to death, that's antisocial for damn sure.
00:22:34.480But, you know, he wrote that he went on a mall, I believe it was a Bayshore mall in Ottawa, which isn't that far away from downtown Ottawa.
00:22:42.220And he said that he witnessed assaults happening there.
00:22:47.760And then he complained about the fact that the protesters.
00:23:03.140That's what it's that's what it's really all about.
00:23:05.820And the only once again, the only behavior we've heard from the testimony so far, we've heard Zexy Lee, who was throwing eggs at protesters because she was mad at them.
00:23:18.960But she was privy to her friends organizing to do it.
00:23:22.580And she didn't think it was a bad idea.
00:23:24.260It might be counseling to commit mischief, which I understand is a crime in Ottawa, saying, hey, that's going to be cool if you do that illegal thing.
00:23:43.620But when you look at the side of the protesters, I have yet to see one actual video or proof of assaultive behavior when Jim Watson was talking about the protesters that were taking the masks off the other person's face.
00:23:56.800And he said, have you seen it, Jim Watson?
00:24:04.820Yeah, I'd like to know, like, if Mark Gerritsen takes to Twitter and says he saw assaults, you know what that tells me, leads me to believe about Mark Gerritsen?
00:24:17.080Either he's an absolute garbage person because he saw an assault and reported it to Twitter instead of the police, didn't do anything to intervene.
00:24:44.600Efron, if you want to cue that up, because this is where a normal person, maybe a person with a less hard heart to achieve slowly than me, like maybe William, maybe Celine might have some empathy for him.
00:25:00.000And I'm having a tough time finding it because he's a 27-year veteran of policing.
00:25:07.260He served as a deputy police chief in Toronto.
00:25:09.820He did two tours of policing for the UN, like in a war zone or after the war in Kosovo, helping to maintain the peace and put society back in order.
00:25:22.520So, I would expect a little bit more toughness than this.
00:25:27.040But as William points out, we do know from other things, other testimony and other evidence that we've seen, including emails and readouts of phone calls, that he was under extreme pressure from all angles.
00:25:41.620And that probably made his job very difficult.
00:27:20.960He's got Steve Bell drafting a plan, an intel plan, not relying on the OPP's intel that they gave him about the convoy coming.
00:27:30.340So he's got the failure of his subordinates that, you know, if your employees aren't doing their job, it's your fault.
00:27:41.180And he's got pressure from the crybabies like McKinney and Fleury to, I guess, bust heads.
00:27:50.620He's got, as we've seen, pressure from directly out of the federal government, from the public safety deputy minister, telling them that they wanted a quick resolution to this.
00:28:04.340And this is in a readout of a phone call to achieve the political objectives of the federal government.
00:28:41.520And, uh, and I think that if you're already in that position, if you are literally the chief of police in Ottawa, and you've been hearing for days leading up to this convoy coming into your city, and you still can't take what narrative is presented to you to give to the public, because that is what caused a lot of the terror.
00:29:02.680And the fright is that, like you said, people assume that it was a fringe minority of racists and terrorists and misogynists coming into their city to ransack it.
00:29:12.140And it was anything but so if he had actually just, um, deterred from presenting that narrative to people, and he was honest and truthful, I think that he could have made his position a lot easier.
00:30:39.060Um, yeah, I'll ask Ezra to review those contracts.
00:30:42.440So for the first one, um, you know, I believe, I think that the way slowly was feeling on the stand today was the way the Canadians who are part of the Freedom Convoy felt during the convoy.
00:30:56.080They felt like mainstream media was misrepresenting them.
00:31:00.260They felt like mainstream media didn't understand what it was going on.
00:31:04.540They felt that it was unrelenting 24 hours a day, seven days per week.
00:31:09.540I believe that the way he felt the way he was crying on the stand is the way that the protesters were feeling throughout the convoy.
00:31:14.680Um, and, and also it is true that mainstream media did push false information about the convoyers 1000%, but you see outlets that such as press progress, such as the star that also put pressure on the police to be even more strict with the protesters saying that the police wasn't doing enough.
00:31:35.320And not only mainstream media, but counselors like, well, ex-counselors, thankfully, like Catherine McKinney, who was saying that the police, yeah, thankfully that was saying that the police did not do enough to end the, the, the, the, the peaceful protests earlier when they were here in January.
00:31:53.540So the police had pressure from both the left and the right, the right was saying that they were playing with fire with their charters of rights and freedoms.
00:32:01.460They were saying that they were infringing on their rights and freedom while the left was saying that they weren't doing enough to infringe on those rights and freedoms.
00:32:09.740So when you're chief of police, you're supposed to remain apolitical, which is the reason why we do not have elective chief chief of police in Canada, unlike in other places in the world, because the chief of police has to owe his allegiance to the charter of rights.
00:32:23.440And freedoms and freedoms and freedoms and freedoms and freedoms, but when you have political interference from counselors, as you were talking about from Justin Trudeau, from Doug Ford, from mayor Watson, from the left, from the right, it's extremely difficult to do, to do your job, you know, impartially and to actually owe your allegiance to the charter of rights and freedom, which is what you're supposed to do.
00:32:43.280And I think that this whole situation became a political situation because they were trying to find a political solution to the convoy through the police.
00:32:53.640The job of the police is to find policing solution to the convoy.
00:32:57.020And there was no need for a policing solution because the convoy was peaceful.
00:33:01.560So I think that the fact that the police had to take on a political role overwhelmed their forces.
00:33:08.280It created the chaos that we're seeing unfold from the past week and a half.
00:33:12.260And I think that's what really tipped off.
00:33:15.000That's really what didn't make everything work.
00:33:17.320And then you have chief slowly who leaves and you have a new one that Steve Bell that comes in.
00:33:22.380And you see that Steve Bell doesn't have any issue at all playing politics.
00:33:26.580I think that might have been one of the reasons why he was elected while he was chosen to be the new chief of police.
00:33:32.320But you see one who has trouble playing politics leave the force.
00:33:36.800And then you see Steve Bell, who has no issue playing politics and doing Justin Trudeau's dirty work for him, enter the force as the new chief.
00:33:45.720So I think that was a long analysis, but I think it shows why he felt overwhelmed and why he felt out of control because he knew in his mind morally that he had to owe his allegiance to the charge of rights and freedom while at the same time being given instruction by Justin Trudeau and by all levels of politics.
00:34:04.240So, yeah, I think that's one of the reasons why he reacted that way.
00:34:11.420I just wish that he had stopped and realized that that horrible way that he was feeling was exactly the way the people in front of him were feeling and maybe exercised a little police discretion.
00:34:45.260I bet you are going to have a lot to say about this, Celine, since you were there on the ground.
00:34:49.740And William, too, slowly said that the convoy itself was a tinderbox waiting to explode, which, I mean, I'll offer my comments after you see this, but it's weird how it never did explode.
00:35:08.840Never, ever, ever, ever, even after the crackdown and the betrayal of Justin Trudeau never exploded.
00:35:20.960So on the one hand, we have the city being told that, you know, enforcing bylaws and any laws really was too dangerous for public safety issues, that there was the risk of violence, there was the risk of injury and death.
00:35:34.520And I can take you to some notes where that's indicated.
00:35:36.580But on the other hand, the city was also told, at least in this email, seems to have been told, that there wasn't much in terms of a public safety risk.
00:35:45.980And we've seen, actually, from some EOCCG, which is the group that manages the emergency response on a municipal level, that group was putting out updates every day.
00:35:57.120And they use language such as party-like atmosphere, it's festive.
00:36:01.700So there seems to be these two competing narratives.
00:36:03.740Was this a tinderbox waiting to explode or was this a family-friendly carnival with bouncy castles?
00:36:13.040And so I wanted to get your perspective on those two narratives.
00:36:15.620It was a tinderbox waiting to explode.
00:36:59.460And, you know, I thought that that might be the moment when I was watching this live, that he would have the opportunity to turn this around.
00:37:06.040Because if even one of them admits that this whole thing is a sham and it absolutely was completely unnecessary for this emergencies act to have been invoked in the first place, the narrative will, it'll crumble.
00:37:20.440I thought there was that moment where he just kind of paused and maybe wiped away like a little tear and was like, you know, it was a matchbox.
00:37:38.160It was a beautiful thing to be around.
00:37:40.100Again, I've never we take for granted being here where we are now just months later when we forget that at that point it was we were used to not seeing people's faces.
00:38:07.740I couldn't do things that were normal for people to do.
00:38:11.500I was declassed and I was treated like I was nothing.
00:38:14.540And this was the first time that this fringe was accepting of everyone, regardless of their vaccination status, where they come from, the color of their skin, gender.
00:38:35.680That's the only way that this could go on for so long.
00:38:39.260Efron, maybe maybe it's too far down on my Twitter feed.
00:38:42.600I maybe tweeted a little bit too much today.
00:38:45.460But there's an email or no, it's text messages from RCMP Commissioner Brenda Luckey.
00:38:52.020Apparently, these bouncy castles really scared the daylights out of these people because, you know, he's describing bouncy castles as a tinderbox.
00:39:00.620And RCMP Commissioner Brenda Luckey, she was on a phone call with senior cabinet ministers where some of the most anxiety riddled people that I've ever seen in my life.
00:39:10.520Okay, so this is a mainstream media journalist doing this.
00:39:16.120Sounds like a tense cabinet meeting that RCMP Commissioner Brenda Luckey was on the line for.
00:39:21.440And if you could sort of pop that open.
00:39:24.740Anyway, she's on the phone with cabinet ministers and she says she's trying to calm them down.
00:39:30.540But it's not easy when they see cranes, structures, horses, town castles in downtown Ottawa.
00:39:40.660Like, you're talking to the RCMP Commissioner and you're having a conniption because you saw people having fun in downtown Ottawa after basically people living in misery for two years.
00:40:22.740Like, when you think about who you're dealing with here, I'd written something down, too.
00:40:27.760Oh, I have emails or a readout of a phone call with Slowly where he's describing the bouncy castles as an eyesore but not dangerous.
00:40:39.400So, why is he saying one thing on a phone call with Justin Trudeau's National Security Advisor and then testifying to something totally different now?
00:40:49.240Again, this is why I think some of those tears are crocodile tears.
00:40:52.900Yeah, I think that's the reason why we're not able to find a lot of empathy for Peter Stoll, even though I'm trying.
00:41:00.780I know, because you're a better Christian than me.
00:41:05.440Celine, you said he didn't say it was unnecessary to invoke the act, but multiple witnesses beforehand, before him in the past few days stated.
00:41:14.240And once again, that's the line that I keep repeating every live stream because everyone says it at the end.
00:42:04.140I just want to take it back a couple more steps, if that's okay.
00:42:07.100I just want to kind of go back to that point of bouncy castles being addressed as very dangerous.
00:42:12.020These are the people that are supposed to be in charge of our security and our safety.
00:42:15.280And can you imagine if this was an actual danger, an actual insurrection movement that came into any city, and they're classifying children's play toys as being dangerous?
00:42:27.860What would that look like if that was real?
00:42:30.320These are the people that are in charge of our safety.
00:43:13.780But that's the path we're headed on very, very quickly.
00:43:16.040Um, Efron, we'll go to clip seven because it talks about misinformation.
00:43:21.660And then, um, I, if you wouldn't mind, it's something I wrote up quite late in the day, although it's published on the website now.
00:43:30.920Um, nobody else is really talking about it yet, but we should talk about it because there's, like, a convoy tie into there.
00:43:37.020And it's, I take a sideways jab at the CBC, which I do every chance I get.
00:43:41.700But, um, it's about, um, that Russian spy that just got arrested.
00:43:46.360If you can find it on the website, we'll, we'll talk about that as soon as we go to clip seven, please.
00:43:55.720Uh, officers will often have to do a fist bump or lean in for a selfie just to try to keep the temperature down and the circumstances they're in.
00:44:03.880Um, that is just the, the, the, the, the reality of almost any circumstance, any day, not even requiring something of this level, just in order to try to build rapport in a minute.
00:44:16.080So to keep things at the right level or deescalate things that could be escalating.
00:44:19.880And I'll always defer to an officer on that.
00:44:22.080In the broader sense, I could understand, and maybe that's where my comments were attributed in the broader sense, these photos that are being, going viral on social media without proper context.
00:44:33.880Could be extremely problematic and were extremely problematic.
00:44:37.700They were used extensively in the social media disinformation and misinformation campaigns, and unfortunately, cracked into some of the mainstream media reporting as well.
00:44:46.120First of all, they want me to believe that if a violent maniac is on the street, assaultive to use their language, that if you just whip out your camera and say, you know what, let's take a selfie together, that that'll just all of a sudden calm them down.
00:45:04.760No, you take pictures with people who are already behaving themselves, because that's what you do when everybody's hanging out and having fun.
00:45:13.000Selene and I take selfies when we're hanging out and we're working and having fun.
00:45:30.000Like, that's just the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
00:45:33.460Most specifically, I think that's a really good way, again, to debase the peacefulness, because when you have police officers that are there and you can see the genuine smiles and the happiness, the convoy was, I was there when it arrived.
00:45:54.040They don't want to be told that a lot of the police officers, whom I heard with my own ears, I saw with my own eyes, a few of them piped up to say, some behind their masks still, thank you, because we need you here for this, too.
00:46:08.500Because under all of this, this was, it was so essential.
00:46:13.900And that's perfect, you know, paint, paint these protesters as super crazy and super dangerous, just so that they're not able to actually, like, get forth the message that needs to be brought forward to people, to the audience that mainstream media was directing this to.
00:47:14.500So this Russian spy was just arrested in Norway, posing as a Brazilian researcher specializing in, you guessed, or disinformation and what they called hybrid threats.
00:47:29.500And as it turns out, he was a volunteer for the NDP in 2015 when he was in Canada for some reason.
00:47:37.000We had a Russian operative in Canada for some reason.
00:47:38.940He was working for a volunteer, I believe, for Sean Devine for the NDP.
00:47:49.500And Mr. Devine, wouldn't you know it, was recently elected to Ottawa City Council.
00:48:00.600And Mr. Devine was one of the, like, most ferocious opponents to the convoy.
00:48:10.980So when they are saying that, oh, you know, the convoy's a bunch of Russian operatives, I don't know.
00:48:17.760I've never seen a Russian operative identified within the convoy, but they did have one working for the other side.
00:48:22.960So I think the phone call might be coming from inside the house.
00:48:27.040But, of course, the mainstream media is not going to talk about the Russian spy that the Ottawa City Councilor had working on his campaign.
00:48:48.220You know, the NDP and the people that follow that ideological line of thinking all claim that the convoy was foreign-funded, Russian-funded.
00:49:12.360Let's freeze Sean Devine's bank account until we figure out if he's still in communication with a literal Russian spy.
00:49:19.480Again, I see the phone call from the Kremlin.
00:49:22.120It's coming from inside the house a little bit.
00:49:24.000Before we get to some of these chats, let's throw to something we are calling a rebel reality check.
00:49:35.540Our friend and chief documentarian, Kian Simone, every day he watches the convoy diligently.
00:49:43.960And then he goes through our archival records because we have hundreds and hundreds of hours of archival footage from when we were actually embedded in the convoy.
00:49:54.680So, Kian, he takes the testimony of the people who are selling you a bunch of baloney at the commission, and then he reality checks it.
00:50:13.680So, let's throw to the first rebel reality check.
00:50:16.120I think the, like, when you look at how professional the officers were that did public order, right, like, no one was running in.
00:50:29.160I think that it wasn't heavy-handed in any way.
00:50:31.320It wasn't an ability to respond to the numbers in front of them.
00:50:35.880We're literally running the horses through the crowd.
00:50:38.180I understand it's like a tactic that they use to try and split up the crowd, but there's just so many people there.
00:50:42.940I just do not think that that was the right move.
00:50:45.520And when you look at it, I don't think it was heavy-handed.
00:50:47.880I think it was very professionally done from a pleasing tactical perspective.
00:50:52.320And he took his gun off tear gas, and he actually shoot me directly in my legs.