Tensions rise as tensions rise in the final days of the Trucker Commission in the wake of Justin Trudeau's decision to delay disclosure of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents to the commission. The Liberals are on the stand, and the Liberals are lying.
00:08:47.120First of all, questions around accreditation were handled by the Press Gallery
00:08:51.820and the consortium of networks who have strong perspectives on quality journalism
00:08:58.520and the important information that is shared with Canadians.
00:09:02.440The reality is organizations like yours that continue to spread misinformation and disinformation
00:09:14.660on the science around vaccines, around how we're going to actually get through this pandemic
00:09:22.180and be there for each other and keep our kids safe is part of why we're seeing such unfortunate anger
00:09:30.880and lack of understanding of basic science.
00:09:34.920And quite frankly, your, I won't call it a media organization,
00:09:39.700your group of individuals need to take accountability for some of the polarization that we're seeing in this country.
00:09:49.920And I think Canadians are cluing into the fact that there is a really important decision we take
00:09:57.000about the kind of country we want to see.
00:09:59.360And I salute all extraordinary, hardworking journalists that put science and facts at the heart of what they do
00:10:06.940and ask me tough questions every day, but make sure that they are educating and informing Canadians
00:10:14.700from a broad range of perspectives, which is the last thing that you guys do.
00:10:19.920I mean, Justin Trudeau takes bribes from foreign lobbyists.
00:10:22.880That's the ruling by the ethics commissioner, but he doesn't give a damn.
00:10:27.200Justin Trudeau sexually assaulted Rose Knight, doesn't deny it, but says she just experienced it differently.
00:10:33.740Again, I've been reflecting on the actual interaction.
00:10:37.680And if I apologize later, then it would be because I sensed that she was not entirely comfortable with the interaction we had.
00:10:48.600Like I said, I've been working very hard to try and piece it together.
00:10:52.760And even when the original editorial came out at the time, I was fairly confident, I was very confident that I hadn't acted in a way that I felt was in any way inappropriate.
00:11:10.140But like I said, part of the lesson that we all have to learn through this is respecting that the same interactions can be felt very differently by different people going through them.
00:11:44.140No one on my team has reached out to her.
00:11:46.220We don't think that would be appropriate at all.
00:11:47.980So I'm responsible for my side of the interaction, which certainly, as I said, I don't feel was in any way untoward.
00:11:58.540But at the same time, this lesson that we are learning in, and I'll be blunt about it, often a man experiences an interaction as being benign or not inappropriate.
00:12:11.400And a woman, particularly in a professional context, can experience it differently.
00:12:20.060I mean, Trudeau is a bit of a fascist, just like his father figure, Fidel Castro, just like his favorite political party in the world, the Chinese Communist Party.
00:12:28.220There's a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say, we need to go green as fast as we need to start investing in solar.
00:12:46.160I mean, there is a flexibility that I know Stephen Harper must dream about of having a dictatorship that he could do everything he wanted.
00:12:53.160Today, Marco Mendocino, the laughable public safety minister, testified he's such a comical figure, the kind of guy who's such a klutz, he falls out of a chair.
00:13:04.440I think that's how everyone sees him in the government.
00:13:06.240Here's a pitiful text message where he's complaining that his own deputy minister drafted up a plan to deal with the truckers and circulated it widely amongst other government offices, but never bothered to show him.
00:13:17.240He only found out about it later and then asked to see it.
00:13:20.440No one in the government treats Marco Mendocino with any respect.
00:13:40.920Reports as in some reporter, some online gossip generated by the media party that was all on the government payroll.
00:13:48.260Well, anyways, they saw a report yesterday.
00:13:51.420There were documents shown of ceases talking about all the reporters who would pretty much write whatever the government told them to write.
00:13:58.640One of them works for the Globe and Mail.
00:14:00.160How can the Globe and Mail still keep her on knowing that she is basically just a repeater for whatever Trudeau tells her to say?
00:14:07.920I mean, how can how can she show her face in public as a journalist anymore?
00:14:14.780And the Globe and Mail takes more money from Justin Trudeau and the newspaper bailouts than any other newspaper in Canada other than the Toronto Star.
00:14:21.260It's easy for them to run Trudeau propaganda.
00:14:26.180One of the grossest things is that Mendocino, who works with soldiers and police all the time, said one of the things that he hated the most about the truckers is that there were military veterans amongst them.
00:14:37.060Stop for a moment. You and I, when we think of military veterans, we think of people who have risked their lives for us.
00:14:44.580They fought in wars as recently as Afghanistan.
00:15:34.660Thank you for your passion and your strength and being here today to share this justifiable frustration and anger with me and with all of us here.
00:15:45.640Thank you for having the courage to stand here.
00:15:48.100And thank you for listening to my answer.
00:15:49.740Thank you, sir, on a couple of elements you brought up.
00:15:53.500First of all, why are we still fighting against certain veterans groups in court?
00:16:00.160Because they are asking for more than we are able to give right now.
00:20:36.760Well, I joined the JCCF about a year ago.
00:20:40.260Prior to that, I was primarily an intellectual property lawyer, but got a little frustrated with the fact that the Copyright Act keeps getting eaten away by secret trade treaties and wanted to move into something a little more, I guess, impactful on the charter rights of Canadians.
00:20:56.860And I was lucky enough to get involved with the JCCF about a year ago.
00:21:01.600We were, as you know, on the ground in Ottawa during the protests, as I believe Democracy Fund lawyers were in Ottawa and in Windsor as well.
00:21:11.900And when the opportunity came up to apply for standing at the commission, my colleague Adam Kira and I filled out the application, you know, and went through that process.
00:21:24.520And here we find ourselves in the middle of this historic inquiry, which seems to be actually going surprisingly well as it shakes out.
00:21:34.260Yeah. Well, I think it has been so far, but I think that's because the facts are so striking.
00:21:40.760There has been, I mean, it's going well because the protests went well.
00:22:18.860What about holding government files, all of which were generated in February?
00:22:24.940Why are they being held to late November and then dumped on the commission and the lawyers mere hours or even minutes before the hearings?
00:22:34.800Well, it's hard to speculate why, or maybe it's a little easy to speculate why.
00:22:41.540But there's been a bit of an ongoing document dump.
00:22:44.580It's tough for us to talk about that in too much detail because we're bound by a fairly strict confidentiality undertaking.
00:22:52.660So anything that's not in evidence, we can't speak about too specifically.
00:22:58.740But let's just say there's been a fair amount of last-minute document review going on in the last little while.
00:23:04.320And that work has only picked up as the witnesses are getting more and more high level in government.
00:23:10.040I think just to touch on a point that you made a minute ago, you can hardly ask for a cleaner set of facts here.
00:23:18.340As it happened, I think this was a confluence of, you know, a coincidental confluence of events in a lot of ways.
00:23:27.060It just so happened that Justin Trudeau upset a group of people who drive very large and hard-to-move vehicles.
00:23:35.420And I think that was important in, you know, coincidentally making it easier for them to get entrenched in a way that made it hard to move them along.
00:23:44.780But coincidentally, too, all of the people that came together at the top of the protest movement happened to be extremely reasonable people who were doing their best to encourage nonviolence.
00:23:58.080And as we headed into an inquiry into their behavior, as well as the government's behavior, really, there's not a lot to point to that's particularly, you know, bad behavior on the part of the protesters.
00:24:12.420While the same cannot necessarily be said for our federal government, as we've been moving through the hearings, the first stage or earlier on, we were hearing from the police, who's, I guess, real dog in the race here is just to kind of pin the blame on another police force.
00:24:33.340And none of them were particularly argumentative about the idea that they had powers available to them.
00:24:45.320It kind of turned into a tow truck inquiry into a tow truck emergency at one point where basically every cross-examination we were doing was about whether and where tow trucks were obtained and how much they were available.
00:25:00.240But the testimony of the police established pretty clearly that there were plenty of powers at common law and statute law outside of the Emergencies Act to handle the protests.
00:25:13.180It just wasn't being handled properly by, you know, each police force was pointing to some other police force that mishandled it.
00:25:20.780But as we get into, so that's one of the key ingredients here is in order for the Emergencies Act to be lawfully invoked, there has to be no, the situation has to be one that couldn't be effectively controlled with existing laws and powers.
00:25:37.300And the first stage of the emergency established that those powers existed.
00:25:41.920And as we head into the federal government witnesses, we're starting to get more into the question of whether there was a threat to the security of Canada, as that term is defined in the CSIS Act, in existence as a result of the protests.
00:25:57.700And what we're hearing so far from government witnesses, and what it looks like we'll continue hearing, is that they have conveniently expanded the definition of a threat to the security of Canada.
00:26:11.980And it means something other than what it means in the legislation, apparently, to them.
00:26:17.700And that, I think, is going to be the second piece of why the invocation turns out to be unlawful.
00:26:25.140And I think we're really getting there at this point.
00:26:27.700Yeah, it's pretty plain when every cop says, no, there was little to no danger, and no, we didn't need extra help to solve it.
00:26:38.720In fact, I forget which witness it was who was saying that the state of alert today is identical to what it was back then in terms of danger.
00:26:47.400I mean, what a lot, by the way, Ottawa is still under partial lockdown today.
00:26:51.120So I think the politicians like drama, and that's one of the interesting things, is you see these internal chats amongst politicians, and they knew they were going too far, and they talked amongst themselves, and they never thought that it would be published.
00:27:07.600They never thought that their text would be revealed about how they have to gin up narratives, how they have to whip up the January 6th insurrection theme up here, how they had to reach out to their pet reporters to get them to say that this is a dangerous...
00:27:25.600You could see that they didn't believe it was a crisis, because they were working to make it look like a crisis that they knew it wasn't.
00:27:35.040And I think that they're given away by their own internal records.
00:27:52.240I think that attempt to demonize in general has been a part of the...
00:27:58.440I mean, it was part of the election platform of the Liberal Party.
00:28:01.860It's been a part of what appears to be their political strategy since at least the election in 2021.
00:28:09.240I think to those of us who are watching these protests with an open mind, it's hard to see what was happening on the ground in the way that it was portrayed in the media, whatever the term you guys like to use, the legacy media, whatever.
00:28:27.100Certainly didn't reflect what was seen on the ground.
00:28:33.320You know, these are legitimate frustrations being aired by Canadians just like you and me who've been, you know, under the boot of their government like never before, and who've decided to come to Ottawa to protest.
00:28:45.220And the best that the government can do, because they can't admit that they've gone too far in terms of their COVID policy or in terms of the mandates that they decide to impose, the best that the government could do was to paint these people as terrorists or as violent or as racist or as misogynist or all these other things.
00:29:05.520I think that was apparent to anybody watching with an open mind, but it's really interesting to be in the seat where I'm at and watch the sausage get made a little bit.
00:29:17.380And it turns out that that's exactly what it looks like they were doing.
00:29:20.020It's hard to capture that in a specific text or a specific document, but a number of documents are in evidence already that talk about strategizing to, you know, get on a narrative of painting these people in a certain way.
00:29:39.420And there's a I can I can't talk about what what's in store, but I can say that there are a few more documents that we intend to bring out.
00:29:46.420Yeah, you know, if there's a real crime spree, you don't need to have a planning meeting to strategize on convincing reporters that it's a crime wave because the crime is the wave.
00:29:59.260You know, the horrific mass serial killer, Paul Bernardo, you didn't need strategizing to tell journalists what was going on.
00:30:13.840If you have to have meetings and call up reporters and plant ideas in their minds that these are violent people, odds are it's not violent people.
00:30:58.440I mean, she's absolutely part of the PMO talking points machine.
00:31:03.120And so here's my question to you, Rob.
00:31:06.600Those who are awake to this, the people who follow Rebel News or True North, people who are in the Trucker Convoy, see this commission as absolute vindication.
00:31:16.120But most people don't follow Rebel News.
00:31:19.240Most people don't follow the news at all.
00:31:21.600Those who do follow it, they probably get CTV or Global or just see the headline in the Toronto Star, the largest newspaper in the country.
00:31:28.840Is the truth of this commission, is it coming out through those legacy media papers, through those regime media outlets?
00:31:39.880Are ordinary people who are not really, really dialed in, like Rebel News viewers are obsessed with this, as I am.
00:31:45.820It's the most important civil liberties issue in our generation.
00:31:48.260But for severely normal people for whom this is just interesting and not much more, are they hearing and seeing what's really going on?
00:31:55.200Or are you worried the media party is lying to them again?
00:31:57.500I think the narrative is pushing through even into those old, you know, the legacy media or the, you know, the funded, the government funded media, whatever you want to call them.
00:32:08.520But at the beginning of the hearings, you would see, you know, what appeared to be some real effort to take, you know, something that a commissioner of police said or something that whoever said and twisted in the most anti-protest way possible.
00:32:27.420These days, though, the headlines that I'm seeing in newspapers, in the Toronto Star, even, are really starting to question the legitimacy of the invocation of the Act.
00:32:39.420And I think that the narrative is really picking up.
00:32:43.180The veneer is being taken off of this a bit.
00:32:46.960And it's becoming harder and harder to defend this as a legitimate, as a lawful invocation of the Emergencies Act.
00:32:54.700And I mean, you see a lot of, I guess, what you think about, you know, the protesters on the ground seems to, up until recently, have informed, you know, the perception that a given person might have about whether the Emergencies Act was justified or not.
00:33:12.440If you don't like the horn honking, then absolutely it was justified.
00:33:16.600But the narrative is starting to cut through that now.
00:33:19.680And I think I came into this hopeful that, I guess I had sort of set a measure of success for myself.
00:33:28.400Like, I wanted to put together a record that no matter what the outcome of the hearings was,
00:33:35.400I wanted to put together a record and a set of submissions that made it clear that the resources that were needed, the powers that were needed to clear these protests existed at law outside of the Emergencies Act.
00:33:48.680And my measure of success was, regardless of how the commission comes down, regardless of the commission's, commissioner's decision and findings in all of this,
00:33:58.640I want there to be somewhere in the annals of history submissions by, you know, authored by Rob Goodridge that made it clear that, you know, the one ingredient that's necessary for the lawful invocation of the Emergencies Act,
00:34:16.400the fact that there was no, there were powers available at ordinary law, to make that clear for the purpose of history.
00:34:24.540And I thought that would be a measure of success.
00:34:27.000At this point, it's getting very hard to see how the commissioner has any option but to condemn the invocation of the Emergencies Act as unlawful.
00:34:37.160Because we're getting very clear pictures.
00:34:39.860We've already got a very clear picture from the police that powers were available.
00:34:44.360And we're starting to get an extremely clear picture that what was considered to be a threat to the security of Canada in contemplating the invocation of the Act actually was not a threat to the security of Canada,
00:34:58.900as that's defined in the CSIS Act and the Emergencies Act requires a threat under the CSIS Act definition.
00:35:06.060So it's going to be very difficult as, you know, slanted or biased as a newspaper may be.
00:35:14.960It's going to be pretty hard to report on a finding of condemnation in a way that caters to the pro-government perspective entirely.
00:35:27.160So I think the narrative is really cutting through.
00:35:29.220Well, of course, we know that Justin Trudeau, you know, water off the duck's back, he's been convicted how many times of violating the Conflict of Interest Act.
00:35:37.680Oh, well, you know, he was caught sexually assaulting Rose Knight in Creston, B.C.
00:35:41.880Oh, well, she experienced it differently.
00:35:44.460He wore blackface so many times he can't keep track.
00:35:48.440Oh, well, it's a good learning opportunity for the rest of us.
00:35:50.660You know, I think that even if he is found not to have had justification here, oh, well, well, we did what we could at the time and always do what's right for Canadians.
00:36:02.120And it's a time to reflect on civil, you know, I mean, he he in a way is a sociopath and that he he has no conscience about this stuff.
00:36:12.080It's all, you know, he admires Castro.
00:36:14.960He admires the Communist Party of China.
00:36:17.040And they, you know, they break some eggs to make some omelets and it's the ends that justify the means to him.
00:36:23.540Rob Kitteridge, it's a pleasure to talk with you and introduce you to our viewers.
00:36:27.140And I say again that the JCCF team has been absolutely indispensable.
00:36:31.900And a large reason why the commission has been as successful as you describe is because of the excellent cross-examination of the witnesses done by you and your fellow lawyers.
00:36:42.240I really don't know what would have happened if you guys weren't there.
00:36:53.420Someone with the nickname Healing Man said, has everyone forgot Elon is creating Neuralink?
00:36:59.800The Internet is a great way for him to collect data for Neuralink.
00:37:02.840Data is the preferred weapon of today.
00:37:05.260Simple use of your God-given common sense tells you this.
00:37:09.380That's something that James Lindsay referred to yesterday.
00:37:11.520He said that Elon Musk sort of gets ahead of things the government is thinking about.
00:37:15.420Neuralink is, I don't know that much about it, but it's what would be called transhumanism, connecting machines to our bodies and then even to our minds.
00:39:14.640The inquiry, let's remember, is taking place because back in February, Justin Trudeau used a never-seen-before anti-terrorism law called the Emergency Act on peaceful protesters who were part of the Freedom Convoy here in Ottawa.
00:39:25.300A movement that protested government overreach and the federal COVID-19 mandates.
00:39:30.440Now, on November 18, we heard from four witnesses in total.
00:39:33.700We heard four from Deputy Secretary of Emergency Preparedness and COVID-19 Recovery Jacqueline Bogdan, Jeff Hutchison, Senior Advisor of Emergency Preparedness, Jacine Charette, the Clerk of the Privy Council, and Nathalie Drouin, the Deputy Minister of the Department of Justice.
00:39:48.180Now, Bogdan and Hutchison both testified together on the first panel of the day, while Charette testified alongside Drouin later on in the afternoon.
00:39:56.460Let's first take a look at the opening testimony of the day.
00:39:59.160Obviously, PCO plays, you know, as it does in many different situations, helps to coordinate the federal government response to any given situation.
00:40:09.600And the same would be true in this case.
00:40:13.060And so what we're trying to do in coordinating that response, we'll convene departments and agencies together.
00:40:21.500We're trying to develop a common understanding, a common kind of up-to-date understanding of the situation and assess that situation.
00:40:29.520We're determining, you know, what are the actions that the federal government needs to take in response to the situation or might need to take.
00:40:39.720Alan Honor from the Democracy Fund was the first lawyer to cross-examine the two witnesses, and he was then followed by Brendan Miller, counsel for Freedom Corp., the organization that represents the key leaders of the Freedom Convoy.
00:40:52.500Both pressed the witnesses very well on different topics, and the witnesses did not appear super keen to answer every question they were asked.
00:41:35.580Thank you very much. Those are my questions.
00:41:36.880Can you agree in this circumstance, you're aware that the Emergencies Act requires for its invocation, for there to be a finding, that there to be a threat to the security of Canada?
00:41:59.600Okay. And can you agree with me that a threat to the security of Canada in the Emergencies Act, from your understanding, has the same meaning as it does in Section 2 of the CSIS Act?
00:42:13.880I'm going to decline to answer this question, I'm sorry.
00:42:17.820I don't feel that in my current responsibilities and my knowledge and understanding that I can answer that question for you.
00:42:27.220The Council for the Government of Saskatchewan then cross-examined the witnesses as well, and it was fairly interesting.
00:42:33.260We learned during his cross-examination that the government allegedly only began discussing the use of the Emergencies Act a few days prior to its invocation, on February 9th.
00:42:43.380Okay, so when would the Privy Council Office have started to do its homework on the Emergencies Act?
00:42:49.080When would you or somebody in your office have first started to look at it as a potential option?
00:42:57.220It would have probably been on or around the 9th.
00:43:09.080Okay, so it would have been only a day before the first meeting of the Incident Response Group when it was being discussed there?
00:43:30.600You know, work would have been being done by a lot of different people on an anticipatory basis that, you know, making sure, as I said, that we've done our homework and we would be in a position to answer questions, right?
00:43:43.220Like, if the government turned to the public servants and said, what's involved with invocation of the Act, you need to be able to answer all kinds of first-order questions, right?
00:43:53.720Everything from the threshold that's to be met to what's the parliamentary process, you know, what kinds of considerations do you want to be thinking about?
00:44:02.260So I can't say definitively who was working on what.