EZRA LEVANT ｜ Part cowboy, part rock-and-roll singer, part lawyer： an interview with Chad Williamson
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Summary
Part cowboy, part rock and roll singer, and part lawyer, a feature-length conversation with our friend Chad Williamson on the dangers of leftist activism in the legal profession in Canada, and how to deal with them.
Transcript
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tonight part cowboy part rock and roll singer and part lawyer a feature-length conversation
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with our friend chad williamson it's december 26 this is the ezra levant show
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you know i remember in law school there were people who just wanted to learn the law to get a job
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and there were some people who learned the law to crusade i suppose i was one of them but
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unfortunately a lot of the people who went into law for political reasons
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wanted to use the law as a tool to control others and grow the scope of government a tool
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of authoritarianism that was my observation in law school some 30 years ago 25 years ago but
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it's even worse in practice and now some of those leftist activist law students
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are now sitting as judges well our next guest is a freedom-oriented lawyer one of the few in canada
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to devote himself so much to the cause of individual liberty i'm talking about chad williamson he's our
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and joining me now via skype from calgary is chad williamson chad great to see you again and thanks
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for a year of outstanding lawyering you know our side of the aisle often looks skeptically on lawyers
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because lawyers are often a tool used by the bad guys but when we have a lawyer on our side fighting
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for freedom fighting against the bad guys and winning i find our people are extra affectionate
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because it's such a rare thing yeah and i mean it's uh when when when when you're up against uh the all
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powerful state and one of the only mechanisms that you have available is the judiciary to combat uh
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unconstitutional laws regulations uh and actions of the state uh sometimes lawyers can be uh your
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friend and uh if you find a reasonably uh priced lawyer uh all the better yeah i mean i just think
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that uh like so many other institutions and professions lawyering has become pretty woke um i didn't go to my
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law school reunion but i talked to someone who did he said he could barely talk to half the people there
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it really has colonized the profession and um now obviously there are it depends like uh there are
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different kinds of lawyers um in different fields but i think that the law itself has taken on a woke
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edge to it and law societies which govern the profession have been at the vanguard of that
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maybe it's different in calgary would you say that the average calgary lawyer where you're based is
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like the average calgarian or would you say they're more leftist and more progressive than the ordinary
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person in the city i i think that the angling towards the wokeism and the leftism in the legal
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profession in calgary is sadly uh similar to the ubiquity and the profession that we see across the
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country and i i mean i didn't i didn't come face to face uh necessarily with the wokeism in the legal
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profession until recently in a very peculiar circumstance i actually attended a seminar put
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on by the law society and uh about how to just manage a really stressful practice i'm a business
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owner i'm a pretty tough guy i deal with fairly complex and stressful situations every day but
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everyone can obviously use real tangible practical um you know tips to uh better manage uh you know their
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mental health their marriage uh their family their work-life balance so i uh i signed up for this
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course and i thought oh this is gonna be great maybe they're gonna have a psychiatrist on um you
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know maybe they're gonna you know uh tell me to do a little yoga or something that was kind of what i
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was expecting and to a degree i got that but what was really bizarre is there was a section i attended the
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full conference which i believe was about two days about critical race theory uh white supremacy uh
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colonialism and and i kind of i i was i was flabbergasted that i mean the the the the uh the
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course was called well-being in practice and the first thing that i thought is what the heck does this
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critical race theory stuff have to do with stress in the practice of law i don't think that um you know
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your ethnicity or your skin color or anything like that should even enter into that equation we're all
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lawyers we're all members of the bar we all get stressed out and there should be some practical tips
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uh for us to uh uh to be able to continue to do this stressful job so it was very bizarre and of course
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we've got diversity equity and inclusion uh an inclusion language now as part of some of the law
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society regulations so it's uh it's a little unnerving yeah you know and i i think you're from
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calgary originally as am i calgary has always been what i i consider to be a race blind city um anyone
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who knows the stampede knows that unlike the hollywood stereotype of cowboys and indians in fact
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uh indians are cowboys i mean uh the the stampede has had a key element of the stampede since the
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beginning has been strong relationships with indigenous people i mean they have the indian
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village and they have the you know the the stampede queen and the the indian stampede queen and by the
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way they use the word indian i don't know if they've finally stopped doing that but this is real like
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alberta in particular i remember there's a school near where i grew up called the john ware school named
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after a black cowboy what's a black cowboy doing in southern alberta well a lot of people in the states
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came north we were the the underground railroad and if you're just an american black uh come to canada
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and be be free and you know i i had a rivalry in college with naheed nenshi but he was the first
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muslim mayor of a major city in canada wasn't in toronto wasn't in new york it was in calgary so the
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to try and graft on to calgary which i grew up in when i went to uh country school out there in spring
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bank my sister and i were the only jews in a school of 400 people there were two black kids two
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chinese kids and you know 396 white kids i mean the idea that and it was perfect it was a great
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place the idea that that alberta needs to be schooled on racism that is completely a transplanted
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project from the states which has deep race issues including slavery i think they're the
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colonialist frankly i mean growing up in alberta as a young person you know and even at that country
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school frankly the minority kids were treated like celebrities in a way i know i'm just we're spending
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too much time talking about that i actually just wanted to talk to be a lawyering but you but you
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make a good point that even even in alberta the lawyering is about you know grievance and critical
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race let's talk about some cases because that's that's really how you started your work not just
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with rebel news but with the democracy fund i wouldn't mind talking about a couple of those
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things i think one of the most thrilling moments in rebel news was in 2021 so it's a little more than a
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year ago when for the second time justin trudeau's hand-picked election debates commission banned rebel
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news from attending the leaders debates which is outrageous and which two years earlier the federal
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court had ordered them not to do federal court in 2019 says that was illegal you didn't have any
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proper rationale you didn't decide this properly you didn't have any set rules you delegated this out
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to some other journalists this was unfair and they let us in in 2020 in 2019 for the next two years
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trudeau's debate commission studied that 2019 ruling and thought how can we plug those holes how can we
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patch this up so that when we ban rebel news in 2021 it'll be subject it will withstand the scrutiny
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of the court and you were the lawyer we hired in 2021 and i remember talking to you in advance and you
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and our other lawyers said ezra uphill battle want to prepare you we're probably going to lose and by the
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way if you counted up all the lawyers on the other side between the department of justice the debate
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commission uh i forget they were i think there was a grand total of seven lawyers including they hired
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some private sector lawyers seven lawyers there was nine inside nine nine nine nine lawyers because we
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had two from the attorney general's office in addition to a senior partner at the downtown uh branch of one
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of the magic circle firms and uh her six uh uh underlings that uh had obviously been assisting um the
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government nine well i gotta change my story because i've always said there were seven so it was nine
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to one you were the one lawyer on our side nine nine to nine to two oh yeah okay and this is an
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interesting story so before mr uh uh martin raymond who we've uh you know uh affectionately call party
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marty down here he was one of the uh lawyers that uh spent a lot of time uh down at the coots blockade
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uh representing uh people uh giving charter advice uh marty worked for another law firm and uh i'd
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essentially kind of got the call on a long weekend had to give up a really glorious labor day weekend i
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had i remember i thank you for that and i kind of thought oh they're calling me to fall on the sword
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because nobody else wants to do this and um you know what it's it was such an important fight for
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freedom of the press and the fact that this had to be it had to be fought on principle even if we were
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to lose this is one of those those cardinal cases where if the government is allowed to pick and choose
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its critics and the journalists that report on the inner workings of the government then we're starting
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that slippery slide into a third or third authoritarianism and and tyranny and i i called martin
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and said uh you know hey buddy i gotta i gotta pull in a favor can you come and spend the weekend in the
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office with me it's not going to be a lot of fun uh you know we know the law firm that is on the other
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side we know the tactics of the government they're going to clearly dump a a tranche of documents on us
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and uh martin gave up his weekend as well and funny enough out of all of us and i think a lot of the
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folks i was speaking to at rebel including yourself myself included martin was the only one who knew
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that we would win from the day that he saw um all of those rejection letters so i've got to give this
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guy credit because i thought you know martin you're crazy this is a tough one they have nine government
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lawyers hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars and they've had two years of preparation we've got
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five days to prepare a response oh it was it was a miracle i i i was so certain we were going to lose
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but like you say i thought we just have to fight our viewers will expect us to fight even if there's
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a one in a million chance we have to take it because what one in a million times it'll come up
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lucky um i i truly thought we were going to lose when the hearing started i remember because this was
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still things were locked down so this was a hearing done over zoom or skype i can't remember where so
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if i recall you were in calgary um the government lawyers were in either toronto or ottawa if i recall
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the judge and i think this made a difference the judge was from newfoundland because the federal court
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is sort of like a one big national jurisdiction you never know what judge you're going to get if you go
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to federal court i guess so the judge was from newfoundland and i think that made a difference
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because i think newfoundlanders feel like outsiders and i think i remember that judge i think her name
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was justice heenhan and uh i think you know right from the beginning i could sort of tell she didn't
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like how she was being dealt with by these fancy toronto lawyers and it just went downhill for them
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from there it was an amazing amazing trial and i know it was open i know a lot of members of the
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public viewed it too that was perhaps our most successful day in court in the eight years of this
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company and it was extremely exciting why don't you tell a little bit of that story including
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justice heenhan one thing that was very interesting and this is this this was this had blown me away
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because this was a career first is that we asked permission at the behest of rebel news to have this
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publicized and to open um i believe it was over zoom or webex or something but to open up the room
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and they opened it up to 2500 people to watch live wow um that doesn't happen in alberta that doesn't
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happen at the court of king's bench it doesn't happen in provincial court i think it happens very
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rarely in federal court but because we prevailed upon the fact that this was uh an issue of public
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importance uh and also some urgency and of course with the federal election coming up uh we were very
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surprised that the court allowed that and it was it's my understanding i'm trying to think back now and i
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don't have the numbers but i believe that there were there was close to 2000 live viewers of that
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court session and we had prepared uh a robust uh set of pleadings which are basically the all the
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documents that lawyers rely on when they're making their submissions we had a nice brief which is kind
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of like a an argumentative law school paper to telling the judge why we think uh that you were right
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and of course they would have filed an opposing brief and really instead of relying uh or or just
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rehashing all the stuff that we'd already provided to the judge which i think was very well prepared i
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remember i spent 18 hours alone on just the saturday before with martin by the end of it we were ready to
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choke each other it was uh i mean tempers flared but we did some pretty outstanding work i really just wrote
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a grandiose soapbox speech about democracy freedom of the press uh and uh an opposition to the jackboots
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of censorship and authoritarianism and i remember that i i i didn't have justice heenahan for about the
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first five minutes i think she was a little cranky with me um she was kind of a a no bs gal um and
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i i i kind of felt that out and and and uh uh pivoted to some degree and wrapped up my submissions
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real quick uh then the government lawyers stepped in and uh i mean the rest is history they spent
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you know more than an hour two hours trying to take her through a 2 000 page document dump that they
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had given the court and given us uh only a day or two before uh and the judge just uh didn't have any of
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and granted the injunction and ordered that rebel be accredited much to the chagrin obviously of the
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liberal party and justin trudeau who was uh the uh the subject of a whole bunch of great great questions
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uh by rebel and some of the other reporters that uh that attended um to to attend the debates it was
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it was great i mean uh and i couldn't have been happier for a guy that was uh i'm not at the bar very
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long i got called in 2017 for so for a young fellow like me and a young fellow like martin to
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have such a significant victory uh and on the side of good against the forces of old and evil that was
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really a milestone in my career of which working with rebel and the democracy fund we've had a ton
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of them we're actually not bad lawyers yeah oh well that case was such an uphill battle i want to
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just show you mentioned that we got the injunction uh that ordered trudeau's debate commission to
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accredit us and we because it was still during covid mania i think only two of our people were
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allowed in or something like that most of the joined by phone but we still got excellent questions
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including to draw to to trudeau himself let me just show you two questions put to trudeau by virtue
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of that win so what i'm saying is if we didn't win in court that day these next two questions i'm about
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to show you put by tamara ugolini and alexa lavoie to trudeau they would not have ever even been
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asked here take a look mr trudeau the only reason that i'm allowed to ask you this question is because
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today the federal court ruled that the government doesn't have the right to determine who is or is
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not a journalist this is the second election in a row that the court has overturned your government
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do you still insist on being able to make that decision and why first of all questions around
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accreditation were handled by the press gallery and the consortium of networks who have strong
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perspectives on quality journalism and the important information that is shared with canadians
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the reality is organizations organizations like yours that continue to spread misinformation and
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disinformation on the science around vaccines around how we're going to actually get through
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this pandemic and be there for each other and keep our kids safe is part of why we're seeing such
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um unfortunate uh anger and lack of understanding of basic science and quite frankly your i won't call
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it a media organization your group of individuals uh need to take accountability for uh some of the
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polarization that we're seeing in this country and i think canadians uh are cluing into the fact that
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uh there is a really important decision we take about the kind of country we want to see and i salute
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all extraordinary hard-working journalists that put science and facts at the heart of what they do
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and ask me tough questions every day uh but make sure that they are educating and informing canadians
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from a broad range of perspectives which is the last thing that you guys do
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hello mrs trudeau alexandre for rebel news so mrs trudeau je vais revenir rapidement sur ce qui s'est
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passé hier vous avez déabolisé l'un des rares médias qui ne reçoit pas d'argent du gouvernement vous
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avez exprimé votre opinion en disant que nous propageons la désinformation si c'était vrai et si c'était
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le cas la cour fédérale nous aurait pas permis d'être ici aujourd'hui je suis moi même scientifique et je me
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basse sur les faits ma question la suivante l'israël est l'un des pays les plus vaccinés au monde ils sont
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rendus maintenant à leur quatrième rappel de vaccin ils ne considèrent plus que ceux qui ont reçu deux
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doses de vaccin sont pleinement vaccinés ma question est plusieurs canadiens ne désirent pas avoir un rappel de
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de vaccin allez-vous leur enlever leurs privilèges reliés au passeport vaccinal et aurez-vous l'obligence de
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répondre à ma question en tant que premier ministre ou allez-vous encore diaboliser mon média j'ai
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partagé ma perspective sur ton organisation hier soir j'ai plus rien à dire ça demande bien qui vous êtes merci
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those were great questions and trudeau's answers were appalling and what gets me chad is is he said
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your organization i won't even call it the news so the ink wasn't even dry on justice he and a hand's
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ruling the federal court of appeal said yes we are journalists we must be accredited and they were
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violating our rights for not doing so trudeau literally couldn't care less what a court said
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you know the judge just said we are journalists let them in but he only uses the law fits to his
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benefit he's the same prime minister who violated the conflict of interest act again and again what
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does he care he surely abused the emergencies act there was no evidence of a national danger we saw
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that what does he care you know he does whatever he can get away with and if he's called out on it he
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doesn't care i think that not only was our win excellent but we showed that trudeau really
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doesn't give a damn about the rule of law he really is a kind of tyrant and to be fair he told us that
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he told us that communist china was the country he most admired of course ezra for a lot of the
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a lot of the um you know the government oppressive uh radical left in this country they support the
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courts obviously when the decisions run in their favor which is quite frequent given how uh the
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judges in this country are appointed um which is through a judicial uh committee and then appointed
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by the government so we've got a lot of political appointees to the bench and we've seen that uh in some
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of the other decisions most notably the uh chris scott decision and the compelled speech order but of
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course when uh in a blue moon we get a judge uh who actually renders a decision uh uh based on the
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principles of liberty fairness uh uh and and procedural and natural justice um it's it's suddenly convenient
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to uh to to disagree with those rulings well i tell you that was incredible and thanks that i really
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did not think we were going to win that and when we did it was it was so great and it was such a
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validation that just because a politician says we're not journalists doesn't mean it's true and i i note
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that we were alone in court chad and i mean i'm a little older than you when i grew up in the in the 80s
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and 90s had this been done to any media company all the media companies would have gone to court they
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would have pooled their resources they would have each chipped in a grand they would have hired an
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excellent media lawyer who would have gone to court and say your honor i represent these 20 newspapers
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like if you can read the court cases from the 80s and 90s they often did they called themselves the
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consortium it was basically a bunch of media companies each chipping in a little and the judge
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would take that lawyer very seriously because the judge would know that they speak for the entire
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industry in a very principled way if this were 30 years ago we would have had
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the canadian civil liberties association we would have amnesty international we would have pen canada
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and we would have other media there canadian association of journalists who would have said
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this is outrageous we may not agree with rebel news but you cannot pick on a journalist because
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of his ideology none of that we were completely alone in court not one friend and i think that speaks
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to the state of journalism in canada it's been colonized by trudeau and i think it speaks to
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the fact of freedom of speech it has been replaced by these other ideologies by hurt feelings by micro
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aggressions by trudeau's soft tyranny i that is very sad to me that the free speech culture that i grew
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up in just a generation ago is pretty much gone i think i think what's also troubling is just the fact
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um just the gleefulness in which some canadians are happy to see these fundamental human and civil
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rights uh be eroded by government legislation and regulation and censorship um the uh as you've as
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deemed them the the media party i don't think a a more accurate description uh could could be given
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i mean it's uh it's really perplexing to see um as you might know ezra i have a degree in journalism
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that i got before um i got my law degree and i got that from mount royal university here in calgary
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and i mean i might be a little younger than you but when i was in uh journalism school one of the
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main classes was called news agenda and they always taught uh and and these might have been some
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dinosaurs on the you know kind of the the the death knell of the print media business which i think
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uh you know kind of uh uh went extinct in in the early 2000s you're always supposed to get both sides
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of the story uh or at least try to and at least allow the viewer or the reader or the consumer of the
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media to uh uh take in an array of facts from uh the entire situation and come to their own conclusion
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and we just don't see that in mainstream legacy dinosaur media anymore uh the headlines are just
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politically charged um it's completely one-sided and and we only see them get experts we don't even
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know who these experts are uh you know what what who qualifies as an expert uh that definition has
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tended to slip most of these people aren't experts or they're just friends of the journalist uh and
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you know let alone trying to get uh uh the the other side of the story and try to at least uh uh approach
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uh someone else for an alternative talking point it's bizarre to see such a one-sided
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national narrative uh and and it's quite disturbing yeah uh you mentioned chris scott and he of course
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is the entrepreneur from a small place called mirror alberta i think it's less than a thousand
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people who live there and uh the whistle stop i have actually yet to visit it in person though i
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would very much like to it's sort of the everything shop in mirror alberta it's i think it's the gas
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station it's the general store it's the restaurant it's sort of the the one place that otherwise you've
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got to drive an hour or two down the road and um in mirror which is smaller than my high school
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everyone knows everybody and you know if you're sick you know and if you're not sick and so chris
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decided to keep his place open and if he didn't like it don't go in but because he was willfully
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challenging the lockdown in alberta oh my god did they come down on him like a ton of bricks
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and they padlocked his place they arrested him they put him in jail but they went further
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and you mentioned this briefly a few minutes ago the judge who heard the case adam germain a liberal
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appointee just frankly has no business being a judge he was a failed liberal candidate got appointed to
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the benches like a patriot as if that's a gift to give a like a political bauble anyways adam germain
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this liberal judge not only found chris scott guilty of contempt but ordered him whenever chris scott
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would say anything in public on facebook in the media or whatever or ordered him to immediately pull
00:27:45.220
out this little card written by adam germain where chris scott would essentially have to renounce
00:27:52.440
himself denounce himself and say what i've told you is wrong and you should believe what the government
00:27:58.840
says and by the way this identical wording was given to arthur pavlovsky and these two cases were heard
00:28:05.120
together that judgment stood for months until the alberta court of appeal mercifully overturned it but
00:28:13.840
again where's the outrage could you imagine compelled speech where you were forced to say words like that
00:28:22.060
that's literally we used to call that a jailhouse confession or or or something like signed under duress
00:28:28.500
like and that was issued by a judge and i say again chad where were the howls of outrage i don't remember
00:28:38.440
that no and and and and and and again and again this just this this draws along along the same lines of
00:28:46.300
uh what we've been talking about this entire time is this gleeful um almost celebration of the legacy
00:28:54.500
media and the uh you know folks who may have once at once been political centrists now slip into uh the
00:29:04.600
dark recesses of what i would consider to be the radical left who uh want the internet to be censored
00:29:11.360
we're seeing new legislation new federal legislation come out to try to censor the internet how they're
00:29:16.140
going to do that i have no idea um one one one of my one of my uh libertarian friends whenever i get
00:29:25.680
down in the doldrums about the state of uh censorship government oppression uh and and and all that's wrong
00:29:33.480
in the world and that continues to go wrong especially during the times of covid one little
00:29:38.420
aspect of comfort i get is that the government has never uh they're never able to do anything
00:29:46.940
properly so despite all this money government delivers the worst services at the highest cost
00:29:53.500
and they're incompetent so i guess we can take a little bit of solstice in the fact that you know
00:29:59.320
if you try to police the internet you might be bit biting off a little bit more than you can chew
00:30:04.560
and now that we're seeing uh you know folks like elon musk step into the arena uh with the power of
00:30:11.200
capital and with the markets to uh kind of take reins of this stuff maybe there is some hope in fighting
00:30:18.380
back against uh uh you know the course of pressure of the state it's it's going to be interesting to see
00:30:23.860
yeah um you know it's funny i went to law school in alberta and the chart of rights and freedoms was
00:30:32.160
treated as a semi-holy document um next only to the bible and of course in the law school would be
00:30:40.300
ahead of the bible it represented who we are you know if you if you asked a a liberal they were what
00:30:47.080
defines canada they would probably say health care although not anymore i don't think anyone believes
00:30:51.980
that we have the best health care in the world i just i literally haven't heard that in years
00:30:55.580
they would probably say we're we're better than the americans um and if you press them they would
00:31:01.940
say our charter of rights i think they would say that i don't think i'm mocking i don't think i'm
00:31:05.860
that's a character i think a lot of them would say the charter of rights and they certainly taught
00:31:10.800
us that in law school but to this day the charter of rights other than in the case of chris god
00:31:15.720
and arthur pavlovsky that i mentioned i have not seen the charter of rights help a single canadian
00:31:21.300
during the lockdown i have not seen a substantial case anywhere succeed of any lockdown of the
00:31:30.560
curfews in montreal of the vaccine passports about people being fired from their job for not taking the
00:31:36.240
jab of all the insane things that were done to people maybe i'm missing one but i can't think of
00:31:42.120
a single case where a judge said the charter of rights does not have a pandemic exception there's no
00:31:47.900
teresa tam exemption or bonnie henry exemption or or dina hinchaw exemption and uh you can't do that
00:31:55.920
to people i don't think it's happened once and even crazier as far as i know our supreme court of
00:32:03.200
canada hasn't even talked about the lockdown say other than the chief justice one day announcing
00:32:08.040
he's imposing vaccine mandates on the supreme court of canada building itself which is basically
00:32:14.080
issuing a kind of judgment he just said oh by the way i'm for vaccine mandates good luck at subtext
00:32:20.600
good luck anyone trying to get a fair hearing from me and hey every single lower judge in this country
00:32:27.060
that looks up to me now you know you can sort of guess how i'm going to rule on cases of vaccine
00:32:32.520
mandates because i just announced one in the supreme court building so that's the only statement we've
00:32:37.480
heard from our supreme court that i know of on the lockdowns is that is the chief saying yeah you can't
00:32:42.420
work here if you're not jabbed now try and get a fair trial on the same issue at a lower court i think
00:32:46.800
the judges in the charter are one of the largest failures the last two years
00:32:51.080
to an extent i would completely agree and i think from the uh the large you know uh double stuffed uh
00:33:00.980
leather bound furniture up in the dusty dens of the higher courts uh ruling down on us kind of from up
00:33:08.800
on high i would agree i don't think that there's been any pushback or any real consideration given
00:33:15.520
to the sanctity uh and the car of of the cardinal principles of the charter of the constitution however
00:33:22.380
down in the trenches in the fight the fines campaign which uh for those uh watching who don't
00:33:30.740
know what that is that was the civil liberties project uh uh started by rebel and the democracy fund
00:33:37.660
to defend people there i think there was more than 2 000 cases this is from masking tickets social
00:33:43.980
distancing tickets uh protesting tickets uh tickets resulting from government overbearance during the
00:33:53.140
covid uh the covid pandemic now my firm had about 157 of those bad boys we're down to five we have not
00:34:03.980
had one trial conviction now in every single one of those cases we filed what's called a charter
00:34:10.400
application which is uh basically saying hey well even if you get my guy or my gal on the evidence
00:34:17.060
uh we still feel that his chart his or her charter rights were infringed now this uh engages not just
00:34:24.660
the crown prosecutor but also the attorney general kind of making it double the work and it's part of due
00:34:30.800
process and part of procedural fairness uh in this country in the courts um it's really easy to write
00:34:39.520
tickets and you know it's real easy to from up on high to decree that uh you know this uh this this
00:34:46.240
this this destructive covid mandate power the government wields is justified uh but down in the
00:34:53.900
trenches down in the provincial courts um when people are still afforded due process and to a degree
00:35:00.380
uh despite being charged they were still afforded due process and uh in most cases the crown
00:35:06.960
prosecution service just ran out of gas um now that wouldn't have been made possible without
00:35:12.640
the generous donations of people across the country to finance what is an immense and fairly expensive
00:35:21.100
uh legal endeavor i think it's probably one of the largest civil uh liberties um projects maybe in this
00:35:28.480
country's history i'm not too sure uh but there there are huge victories there and i'm not sure what
00:35:34.740
the the other provinces and jurisdictions look like but the fact that um there there's only a couple
00:35:39.840
guys working with me there's yoav niv uh mr sean maholshan marty raymond myself uh our senior uh ken
00:35:47.100
johnson you know five guys uh 157 charges toasted all of them uh we're still running five and we still
00:35:55.440
have chris scott obviously on the horizon here in the new year um but there's a disconnect between
00:36:01.840
what's happening in the trenches and what's happening on high and i think that should still
00:36:05.960
provide people with some hope well that does and thank you for that and in ontario paralegals are
00:36:11.700
allowed to run provincial offense trials so we have four in-house paralegals at the democracy fund
00:36:16.920
handling 1300 cases in ontario alone and you're right i think the number was 2100 nationally that
00:36:25.300
started as a rebel news project arthur pavlovsky was client number one and very soon we had 50 clients
00:36:31.140
and then one day in the meeting i blurted out we're gonna take a thousand and everyone said you're
00:36:36.540
crazy how are you gonna pay for that well we spun off the project to a new uh cra compliant charity that
00:36:43.380
was started it's got its own board its own staff its own bank account and that's why people who
00:36:48.240
donate to fight the fines or chris scott or arthur pavlovsky get that charitable tax receipt because
00:36:53.980
we handed that off to the democracy fund which was a great project and um the justice center for
00:36:59.480
constitutional freedoms was doing this kind of work also and you got to tip your hat to them they're
00:37:03.140
great but really there was a tiny bit of work done by the canadian constitution foundation and that's
00:37:10.660
about it the canadian civil liberties association which was very strong when i was a kid they
00:37:14.920
basically went on a two-year holiday and and the work fell to it's ironic because civil liberties
00:37:20.340
used to be such a left-wing thing like i remember the old boss of the civil liberties association was
00:37:24.680
this very left-wing jewish guy in toronto named alan boravoy and he was sort of this classic berkeley
00:37:31.680
style liberty guy where were the liberals where were the the left-wing libertarians last two years
00:37:40.600
they were hiding under their bed or or they were outright saying take the jab it was sort of crazy
00:37:45.540
now listen i don't want to take up too much of your time i appreciate it and thank you for the
00:37:48.660
recollection of of your work on the fight the fines and the chris scott story
00:37:53.100
um you represent three truckers from the lethbridge area who were part of the peaceful protest at the
00:38:02.920
coots blockade that was a trucker blockade that ended peacefully there was no violence whatsoever
00:38:08.260
there was a minor fender bender there was just a bit of an accident on the highway but there was
00:38:12.620
literally no violence the three truckers who were charged committed no violence one of them in fact is a
00:38:18.200
upstanding citizen in fort mcleod he's on the city council great guy um those charges were only laid
00:38:26.280
in the dying months of jason kenney's premiership like like for months nothing happened and then they
00:38:31.720
they charged these three guys and rebel news made the promise that we would finance their defense and
00:38:38.360
you have represented these three truckers i was down there in lethbridge for a really preliminary matter
00:38:44.460
the crown is dead serious about this aren't they you bet and i i i just want to uh just briefly correct
00:38:53.460
you and while uh rebel is responsible for funding my office has been assisting with funding as well
00:39:00.080
okay i personally represent a fellow by the name of george jansen who is one of the most uh humble
00:39:07.200
compassionate uh compassionate caring um and and and and and really calm and collected fellows i think
00:39:14.480
i've ever ever met now we also uh assisted in obtaining these folks their own independent counsel
00:39:22.040
so they've all got their own lawyers okay now we've been assisting with coordination but they're all
00:39:27.000
represented by individual lawyers so um it's being handled through rebel news and williamson law
00:39:31.980
um marco uh um marco van uh hugenboss he's the uh the councillor fellow who has also been charged
00:39:39.660
with mischief he is being represented by my old friend and a fight the fines weapon uh uh we know
00:39:46.660
as yoav niv who has been working with us hand in hand for like two and a half years um so he's in great
00:39:52.780
hands and we've just appointed a new fellow by the name of michael johnson from ontario to defend
00:40:00.300
alex van hirk much to the chagrin we believe of the crown prosecution service and mr johnson has
00:40:06.760
got 12 years of the criminal bar with a family history of military service and uh excellence and
00:40:13.320
uh the guy is a criminal defense beast so we've got independent counsel for these folks uh we've got
00:40:20.640
funding handled um and we're here to put up a fight um no concessions no admissions of any kind
00:40:27.360
uh but the crown is serious uh they're uh you know the the charge of mischief over 5 000 i believe
00:40:33.440
it carries a maximum penalty of up to 10 years in prison uh which isn't something that uh they even
00:40:39.060
give to people uh often who are convicted of seriously violent crimes so it's very peculiar um
00:40:46.140
frankly we've got a presumption of innocence in this country and the crown's going to have to do their
00:40:49.980
work we've got a a crown that we believe is fairly aggressive uh but i mean we've got a we've got a
00:40:56.760
tremendous history uh between my colleagues and i uh of putting up a bristled uh and vigorous defense
00:41:03.620
on all these cases and the crown's going to have to do their work ezra when you say you have the the
00:41:08.660
money covered that's through rebel news's trucker defense fund dot com right is that right that's
00:41:13.760
correct yeah okay i just want to click because there's so many cases here you mentioned you guys
00:41:17.960
took 157 plus chris scott so i i try and stay on top of many of them obviously i can't you know
00:41:24.880
no human can know all of them um so uh and so it sounds like things are in hand now let's just talk
00:41:30.260
for a moment because there were four people who were charged with conspiracy to commit murder
00:41:36.660
if i'm recalling now you correct me if my facts are wrong now rebel news has been asked to defend
00:41:44.780
them and our rule of thumb is that we don't defend people who commit murder or or commit violence or
00:41:51.200
we defend peaceful protesters i've had a number of people say ezra you have to defend them
00:41:57.240
you have to pay for their defense and i've said to them i'm open to persuasion on that and i'm open
00:42:05.840
to learning more and if it's a trumped up charge i'm open to that but i don't think that rebel news
00:42:10.900
viewers would feel comfortable crowdfunding when we said we're crowdfunding to protect peaceful
00:42:16.480
protesters if there was a charge involving grave threats of violence like conspiracy to commit
00:42:23.020
murder so i made the choice that we would defend the peaceful protesters the mischief charges against
00:42:29.520
george marco and alex and that we would take a step back from the ones accused of conspiracy to
00:42:35.900
commit murder do you know anything about that case because i'm sympathetic to the right that everyone's
00:42:41.480
innocent until proven guilty and then i do believe that the police probably trumped things up a bit
00:42:46.480
like they were in pr mode uh the rcmp works for justin trudeau we know they're in pr mode
00:42:51.860
but um do you have any thoughts on that or i don't know if you're at liberty to talk about those cases
00:42:56.380
i can imagine how how trying and traumatic it is for their families i just as the keeper or the helper
00:43:04.140
to crowdfund i feel like i also have an obligation to our viewers that if we said these are for peaceful
00:43:10.200
protesters and then out of the blue there's this conspiracy to commit murder charge that that just
00:43:14.900
doesn't fit the mandate of our fight the fines do you have anything you can say i don't want to put
00:43:19.240
you in a pickle if you have a particular position on this yeah so i'm not at liberty to uh to go into
00:43:25.580
any great detail um but i i i was one of the individuals that was responsible for conveying to
00:43:32.900
uh a a great a great number of people um over the last two years what the scope of the crowdfunding
00:43:41.620
would cover and that was for peaceful uh uh any any any any regulatory charges uh that would come out of
00:43:50.420
uh involvement in peaceful demonstrations um i mean criminal matters are completely different now
00:43:59.280
the mischief charges are criminal and they're not regulatory but initially the scope was uh
00:44:05.180
of my office was essentially to uh just provide people with uh their their uh their charter rights
00:44:12.840
and charter protections and uh uh you know information on what they were to do and what their rights were
00:44:19.100
if they were arrested um and that was really the scope of uh uh of any involvement uh of my office
00:44:26.500
going way back to um the protests in downtown calgary protesting uh vaccine mandates we were
00:44:32.580
kind of protest lawyers uh you know basically uh telling people that they had a right to remain
00:44:38.600
silent an immediate right to retain and instruct counsel um and just warn people that anything that
00:44:44.820
obviously they say to the authorities even if it seems quite benign can turn up in disclosure and be
00:44:50.520
used as evidence against them later now that scope was expanded to assist with a lot of the
00:44:56.400
tickets that were given to people who had equipment out on the highway and we're actually running um
00:45:02.600
i've got in numbers here we're currently running 35 cases under the ambit of the democracy fund
00:45:08.560
defending uh folks who uh were alleged to have uh violated the traffic safety act and traffic
00:45:16.440
regulations by purportedly having equipment out on the highway and we're still running those uh that's
00:45:22.020
being covered um in terms of uh these folks that were charged with conspiracy to commit murder charges
00:45:29.940
obviously there is a presumption of innocence in this country and i would uh uh you know i would be
00:45:36.660
reserved to come to draw any conclusions about what really happened whether uh this was a false flag
00:45:42.840
by the government which may be the case or uh whether these charges uh uh whether the allegations
00:45:49.240
will in fact be proven later i frankly just don't know because i haven't seen the evidence
00:45:54.540
um i suppose i'll come out in the watch the mayor coots by the way who testified at the public uh
00:46:00.380
inquiry says he thinks that it may have been a setup by uh by agents provocateurs that's quite something
00:46:06.200
for him to say because he wasn't very friendly to the truckers well listen i'm going to keep my eyes
00:46:10.080
and ears open on that because of course i'm sympathetic to the possibility that this is a trumped up
00:46:14.900
political charge on the other hand i i think i have a duty to our donors we certainly did not raise the
00:46:20.500
money in the name of defending people who were accused of conspiracy to commit murder um so i'm going
00:46:26.160
to keep my eyes and ears open on that um listen we just came out of the worst civil liberties bonfire
00:46:31.920
in this country's history and i i think that the war measures crisis the october crisis of 1970
00:46:39.800
of course they actually had soldiers on the street but then again it was time limited it was
00:46:44.340
geography limited and they really were murdering people bombs you know kidnappings and it really
00:46:50.560
was a foreign associated terrorist group the flq that had ties to cuba like it really was a kind
00:46:56.580
of insurrection even they overdid it but and then of course japanese internment which was a a racist
00:47:03.780
law that was brought in and for years japanese people were under lockdown both of those are atrocious
00:47:08.560
but by any measure both scope or depth or duration or geography the lockdowns of the pandemic were worse
00:47:16.420
i'm i'm not diminishing what happened in the war measures crisis or the japanese internment i'm not
00:47:22.780
and by the way the way we treat people under the indian act is atrocious too there are elements
00:47:27.280
there but what happened to millions of people over the last two years was the worst civil liberties
00:47:33.560
bonfire and rebel news and lawyers like you and the democracy fund and a handful of others fought
00:47:39.680
it while the rest of the people were silent and compliant chad it's great to catch up with you i know
00:47:45.800
that 2023 will still be a busy year because freedom can never let its guard down justin trudeau is relentless
00:47:53.020
and it's not just trudeau listen where was erin o'toole the so-called conservative leader for two years
00:47:58.720
so i think that we're going to continue to need freedom oriented lawyers and as long as rebel news
00:48:04.440
viewers believe in the court cases that we're taking we will be able to have that part of our
00:48:09.700
project it's what sets us apart from say true north or western standard both of which we admire
00:48:14.540
but at the end of the day rebel news doesn't just report the news sometimes we get involved and try and
00:48:19.440
fix things and you've helped us do that chad so thanks for your great work over these past few years
00:48:24.420
good luck in the projects you still have and i know that 2023 will bring more battles to come
00:48:29.440
we have a whole bunch of tricks up our sleeves uh some very exciting things coming down the pipe in 2023
00:48:36.600
uh some strategies that we've yet to deploy that i think are going to uh alter the legal landscape in
00:48:43.840
favor of freedom we've got uh as your viewers might know we've got a uh a big case against the rcmp that
00:48:51.100
we're still finishing up for the destruction of those excavators down the coots we've got another
00:48:56.600
big claim about alberta health services uh essentially firing somebody for uh whistleblowing
00:49:02.840
on rebel news so there's allegations that that's a wrongful termination and that could be a big case
00:49:07.980
we've seen that there there there are internal emails that they're hiding from us and that being
00:49:13.560
alberta health services so we've got some cross examinations on some fairly disturbing emails that
00:49:19.180
we're we're in receipt of from alberta health services coming up in the new year as well so
00:49:23.080
the fight's not over yet there will be a reckoning and the information will come out right on well for
00:49:29.680
those who want to help i recommend truckerdefensefund.com that's the largest project of the ones chad
00:49:36.040
outlined chad good luck and thanks again for your time thanks a million ezra all right there you have
00:49:41.920
it chad williamson one of the freedom lawyers frankly we had dozens of lawyers across the country now the
00:49:48.480
democracy fund has four lawyers in-house and four paralegals but still we rely on talented lawyers
00:49:54.040
like chad around the country to fight the battles in every nook and cranny well that's our show for
00:49:59.240
today until tomorrow on behalf of all of us here at rebel world headquarters to you at home good night