A tiny Amish community in Ontario is hit with $400,000 in COID fines. Trouble is, no one told them about it because they don t use phones or email. It's August 14th, and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.
00:00:47.040I'm here at an Amish farmhouse in the township of Chatsworth, Ontario, about a two and a half hour drive west of Toronto.
00:00:55.840It's so nice here, it's so gorgeous, and with some horses and some cows, they're all washing to see what the hubbub is about.
00:01:02.900What's interesting about this place is that it is run as if it was the 18th century.
00:01:09.220In fact, the Amish were a order that was persecuted in Europe.
00:01:14.340They went from the Netherlands and Germany and Switzerland, and they came over to North America, including to Canada.
00:01:21.240You might be more familiar with the Amish in Pennsylvania.
00:01:25.200They're the subject of many Hollywood movies, including an exciting one with Harrison Ford when he took refuge by hiding in an Amish community precisely because it was unplugged.
00:01:37.020It was a great movie, and many of the things in there are just the same here.
00:01:44.340People here don't spend their days surfing or Facebooking or Instagramming.
00:01:49.020They do something that I think would terrify many people today.
00:01:52.080They actually meet each other and talk to each other face to face.
00:01:55.180They go to church every Sunday in a horse-drawn carriage.
00:01:59.300There's no cars here, and even the houses do not have electricity.
00:02:04.720There is a small diesel engine in the workshop, which I'll show you in a minute, because they make all their own stuff, and they have some need for power tools.
00:02:14.640But basically, they use tools as they did hundreds of years ago.
00:02:19.400Even the farm itself is horse-drawn vehicles.
00:02:23.300I was just shown a brand-new manure spreader, and I made a joke that that was one of my nicknames.
00:02:29.820That's not actually true, but I was trying to find some humor that would work on someone who was a farmer who didn't know pop culture references.
00:02:40.560It's fascinating stepping onto an Amish farm.
00:03:43.640You know the Arrive Can app when you would travel back to Canada from a foreign land during COVID, you had to fill out this buggy spyware malware app that we now know was money laundering tens of millions of dollars.
00:03:57.540Anyways, how do the Amish use an app when they don't have a phone, they don't have electricity?
00:04:05.080And why should they use it at all, given their religious exemption from taking the COVID jab?
00:04:12.140None of it made sense, but don't tell that to the bureaucrats enforcing the Arrive Can app on behalf of Justin Trudeau and the bureaucrats prosecuting the Arrive Can app fines, who answered to Doug Ford himself.
00:04:27.800What's so incredible is I sat down for a meeting for about 90 minutes with the head of the community.
00:04:33.440He showed me that in the 74 families in this community, they have $400,000 in fines.
00:04:43.380Here's what I have never seen before in all of our stories involving the Arrive Can app.
00:04:48.300Because these folks here are not getting emails, they're not getting phone calls, collections agents, they have nowhere to phone.
00:04:56.720So what they've done is they have attached a lien on the title deeds of these homes, a kind of legal encumbrance, without telling the folks here.
00:05:30.440So not only were they harassed into using this app that they couldn't use, not only were they persecuted because they have a religious exemption because of their religion,
00:05:42.860The province of Ontario went ahead and tagged homes, not this particular home, but homes in this community, stopping families from changing the title from father to son on a farm.
00:05:55.360Stopping families from using the farm to get a loan to operate their farm.
00:06:00.720I've never seen such a punitive, bureaucratic, bullying example in my life.
00:06:06.820And as you know, the Democracy Fund has fought 3,000 cases.
00:06:13.400It was challenging to set up today's meeting.
00:06:16.040Like I say, we just physically showed up, but we found a friend of the community who lives, who's not Amish himself, but he does some business with the Amish.
00:07:21.600Do you have the legal capacity to make certain decisions?
00:07:24.900Judges always want to make sure that no one is being taken advantage of.
00:07:28.500No one is being railroaded into anything.
00:07:31.240It's a reason why we protect, for example, children, why we protect people who don't have mental capacity.
00:07:37.360And I'm not comparing the Amish with children or people with a mental incapacity.
00:07:41.700But what I am saying is if you were a community that does not use email, does not use phones, does not use apps, that has a religious exemption, and you have this bureaucratic war against them where you're sending notices in ways that the community doesn't even know, that is not a level playing field.
00:08:00.580And here the Democracy Fund is going to level the playing field.
00:08:03.660We have set up a website called helptheamish.com.
00:08:09.340And you can do three things at this website.
00:08:11.380Number one, you can share this story with other people, not just in Ontario, but across Canada and North America, who are outraged at the bullying by the government against these peaceful people.
00:08:23.000Number two, you can sign the petition.
00:08:25.360I think that if Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, were to see what was being done in his name, he would say, that just ain't right.
00:08:35.980But number three, just in case the first two steps don't work, we're going to court.
00:08:40.560And Adam Blake Gallupo, one of the lawyers of the Democracy Fund, has spoken with these three families, and he's agreed to take their case, and hopefully he'll be able to take more.
00:09:49.740I found them on Telegram, and I read up on it.
00:09:53.820I became familiar with what they've done so far, helping those people in B.C.
00:09:57.800That's what really piqued my interest, and I didn't know that the Amish had a problem.
00:10:03.020I've had various conversations, but they found out that I dealt with customs issues commercially, and that's how that topic came up.
00:10:10.660It's a matter of trust with the Amish as well, because I've known them so well for so long that they felt comfortable asking me about that.
00:10:19.860So you reassured them, because you've been dealing with them on a business level, you've gone to know them personally.
00:10:28.400So it was your telephone that was used to connect Adam Blake Gallup of the Democracy Fund with the head of what they call their steering committee.
00:10:37.420So you were sort of the bridge between the old world and the new.
00:10:40.900Well, you sat in the meeting, and it's sort of funny what I'm doing here now, because normally I would show the leader of the community, and I would have him done.
00:11:04.280And, of course, Adam Blake Gallup is dealing with the families directly, and again, I'm not exactly sure how that's being done, because, you know, fax machines, phone calls, emails.
00:11:28.440Well, thank you very much for doing that.
00:11:30.020It's sort of incredible that you're willing to help these people, even though you don't have your own skin in the game.
00:11:37.120These Amish, I just feel like it was bullying.
00:11:41.920The leader told us about one case of young Amish people crossing over to the U.S. side where there's Amish communities to give help to an ailing father.
00:11:50.900Another case where sort of young men were going to meet young women on, like, a date, it sounded like.
00:11:56.040Like, just they crossed the border all the time.
00:11:58.420And then suddenly, every time they did that, because they didn't have an app, they were being hit $6,000 or so a time.
00:15:36.340And, but our way, my way is to, to try to help people who need help.
00:15:44.140And these folks, I'm not going to say they slipped through the cracks because they were hunted.
00:15:48.040Like you don't just whoopsies, put a $6,000 lien on a farm.
00:15:52.920That is a, that is a policy decision to punish these people.
00:15:57.640And I challenged the premier and the MPPs and the justice minister to come and meet these folks and look them in the eye and say, yeah, $6,000 lien, pay it.
00:16:08.500Like I, I just challenged them to own or disown this outrageous decision.
00:17:41.800I'm guessing if, if you're in the country eating like farm to fork, if you're doing manual labor all day, you are probably in the top 5% healthy, maybe top 1%, clean living, go to church, no messing around.
00:17:58.080The fact that Teresa Tam or whoever from the big city was telling these folks to download the app and punishing them if they didn't is so insane.
00:18:08.100They're saying, we should all be so healthy as these Amish.
00:18:11.440And, uh, it's, uh, it's amazing what they can do.
00:18:13.840I was, I was looking at one of the, um, sleighs they were doing for horses and that's the thing.
00:18:18.220They go on horse and buggy to do around town.
00:19:17.120I, in fact, the leader of the community asked me, well, will this be in the newspaper?
00:19:20.960And I sort of explained that, well, we're not really on, on paper, but that's a good idea to print it off.
00:19:26.620They, they do read things and, and it's very interesting.
00:19:30.320Well, listen, I, thank you for being the connection.
00:19:33.240We're going to go into the shop and look around there and, and, and hopefully I can return here and hopefully we have some good news.
00:19:41.660I know that Adam Blake Gallupo of the Democracy Fund is eager to fight this case.
00:19:46.380And it just feels like if enough members of the public, and frankly, if Premier Doug Ford himself saw this, I've got to think that someone would, would say, this is wrong.
00:20:50.000The Amish tradition is not to show their face or even use their voice on camera.
00:20:56.460So I had the entire conversation just man to man with our friend Lincoln, our videographer, and a community friend named Grant who arranged the meetings because there's no electricity here.
00:21:55.100You might see those in some sort of pioneer village somewhere, but here, they actually use them.
00:22:01.720Here are actual lamps they used, oil lamps, to work when it's dark.
00:22:07.540There are no light bulbs in this whole shop.
00:22:10.440There's no electricity, other than, I should say, one small diesel generator that's used to operate some of the serious equipment here.
00:22:21.120There is some equipment, and the head of the community showed us how this one diesel generator in that room is connected to so many different things, like this looks like a jigsaw or some sort of saw here.
00:22:37.420So there is some powerful equipment, and this is a shop where they make incredible things.
00:22:42.460They make furniture, they even make some heavier equipment, like that horse sleigh outside.
00:22:51.480They said they made 12 of those in one year.
00:22:55.160For heat, they have this wood-burning stove.
00:23:02.040And he said when they run out of wood here, they'd chop some more from the back.
00:23:05.220These are heavier equipment items that are also run off that one generator, a metal bender, some very serious equipment.
00:24:25.260If you didn't check the news at all during the COVID crisis, if you didn't have a phone, if you didn't have Anthony Fauci or Teresa Tam chirping in your ear that you're going to die,
00:24:37.580if all you had to go by were your own eyes and ears living life, not the propaganda, but just what you observed,
00:24:44.040would you have believed we were in a pandemic?
00:24:47.040I asked the leader of this community if anyone here got seriously sick or died, God forbid, from COVID.
00:25:03.180And I put it to you that everyone on this farm eating naturally, food they grow, food they make, not, you know, refined seed oils or preservatives.
00:25:14.360The people here are much healthier than the city folks who shut themselves off from exercise and from the world and panic during the pandemic.
00:26:03.860Imagine crossing the border again and again because there's an Amish community on the other side of the border, going back and forth, and every time getting a $5,000 or $6,000 fine from the government because the Amish didn't download an app.
00:26:19.980Only the government could be so stupid.
00:26:31.700I feel like the Amish have never heard of Flea.
00:26:34.380In fact, that's one of the reasons why they've been persecuted over the centuries is because they're pacifists.
00:26:39.840They're the kind of people who, if you punch them, they will not punch you back.
00:26:44.260But what happens when the government punches them, when the government treats them unfairly, when the government takes advantage of them, when the government is so stupid that the government says you must download the Arrive Can app on your cell phone, when these folks don't use cell phones, they don't use email or the internet.
00:27:00.980In fact, they don't even use telephones.
00:27:02.240There is no electricity on this property other than that one generator to operate the machine in the mill.
00:27:10.140Well, what happens is the community that turns the other cheek does so for years.
00:27:14.500And before you know it, there's almost $400,000 in fines just because they're going back and forth across to the states to visit the Amish communities there for family reasons, for health reasons, to go on dates with other Amish we heard.
00:27:35.640But what they've done is they put liens on the property.
00:27:39.880None of the farmhouses or farms that are associated with people who didn't download the app can be bought or sold.
00:27:48.600None of them can be transferred from father to son.
00:27:51.660The government of Ontario, using the excuse of the government of Canada's Arrive Can app, has frozen this community.
00:27:59.120And we've heard that there are other Amish communities around Ontario who have had the same thing done to them.
00:28:05.700For all we know, there are hundreds of Amish farmers who cannot buy or sell their property, cannot get a mortgage or a loan against it because of this stupid Arrive Can app that we now know was full of malware and spyware and was really just a way of shoveling tens of millions of dollars to Trudeau's friends.
00:28:48.000Sign our petition to stop this madness.
00:28:50.880We'll deliver it to Doug Ford and help us fight legally.
00:28:53.840I don't know what Doug Ford is going to say when he sees this.
00:28:57.000Maybe he's so committed to bullying anyone who made a COVID action he didn't like that he says, we're going to go after the Amish and teach them a lesson.
00:29:08.820Yeah, what lesson is that other than how angry and punitive and foolish the government can be?
00:29:14.560Believe me, the Amish are already known.
00:29:16.600Sign our petition at helptheamish.com and chip in to Adam Blake Gallupo.
00:29:20.960By the way, all donations go to the Democracy Fund, a registered Canadian charity, so you'll actually get a charitable tax receipt for it.