Tamera Leach is back in court in Ottawa on August 13, facing a charge of mischief, a charge that carries a sentence of up to five years in prison. She has been in jail for almost a year and a half.
00:00:17.000Ezra Levant here in Ottawa. I have come to Ottawa with Sarah Stock one of our young reporters to cover the trial of Tamera Leach which is absurd to say it was two and a half years ago she was arrested.
00:00:40.000The trial itself has been in the courts spread out over almost a year, over 40 individual days of hearings, dozens of witnesses.
00:00:51.000I was in the court today, I counted there were 11 people. There was the judge, three clerks, two prosecutors and two defense teams of five lawyers total.
00:01:01.000Just an absolute shocking amount of resources deployed to prosecuting Tamera Leach and her co-defendant Chris Barber on mischief charges.
00:01:12.000Mischief which is the lowest order of crime in the criminal code, the kind of thing that you get charged with if you committed vandalism or if you broke someone's doghouse or mailbox or something.
00:01:23.000Like it's the catch-all for minor offenses. Most mischief cases the judge looks at you sternly, wags his finger and says I don't want to see you in this court again young man, you fly straight now.
00:01:34.000Like it's that. We've seen mischief cases across the country be dismissed with either the prosecution saying there's no public interest in proceeding, we're just going to stay the charges completely.
00:01:46.000I'm aware of some cases where someone who was charged with mischief just had to make like a $100 donation to charity and that was it, no criminal record.
00:01:55.000But they have thrown, according to one lawyer's estimate, five to ten million dollars worth of government resources at Tamera Leach and Chris Barber.
00:02:03.000And I think I know why. I think it's sort of obvious why.
00:02:14.000Despite being thrown into prison for 49 days, much of that in solitary confinement, she never lost her positive attitude.
00:02:21.000And others who were against her being discredited.
00:02:24.000David Lamedi, the justice minister who approved the Emergencies Act, resigned in disgrace and scurried off Parliament Hill.
00:02:32.000Justin Trudeau himself rebuked by the federal court along with Chrystia Freeland for invoking the Emergencies Act and seizing people's money.
00:02:39.000All the antagonists on the pro-censorship, pro-martial law side have been rebuked in the public eye.
00:02:47.000In fact, many people who were for the lockdowns are now trying to pretend they weren't.
00:02:52.000They have not been able to be smirched to Mara Leach.
00:02:55.000And I hope that she is acquitted in this case.
00:02:59.000And that if anything, this backfires on the state for trying to criminalize her.
00:03:04.000What's interesting, and it just sort of really came clear to me today, is yes, Trudeau invoked martial law by imposing the Emergencies Act.
00:03:12.000And yes, the RCMP. And yes, Trudeau meddled with local police forces.
00:03:15.000But for the last two and a half years, it has been the provincial government of Doug Ford, the so-called conservative premier,
00:03:22.000that has prosecuted and put so many resources into prosecuting Tamera Leach.
00:03:27.000You can't blame that on Justin Trudeau.
00:03:30.000We've been covering this trial since the very beginning.
00:03:33.000A variety of reporters for Rebel News, as well as a variety of lawyers for the Democracy Fund.
00:03:39.000Because, of course, we have crowdfunded Tamera Leach's defense, which is very important.
00:06:01.000I think just the judge and the prosecutor going back and forth.
00:06:05.000The judge was not taking anything from the prosecutor because they're reaching a lot of the time.
00:06:11.000There's a lot of mistakes in their work.
00:06:13.000They were missing details, getting information wrong.
00:06:15.000And the judge didn't let any of it slide.
00:06:18.000One of the crazy things about Ottawa is there's a lot of extremists and kooks.
00:06:23.000And there's actually a crazy lady behind us who's on a pro Hamas shtick.
00:06:30.000She's actually been banned from using a kind of sound weapon that she has put up to people's ears before with a kind of eardrum breaking sound.
00:06:42.000Anyway, I think if we speak right into our microphone, we can talk over these pro Hamas nut bars.
00:06:47.000Now, I have to go back to Toronto tonight, but I'm counting on you to continue doing the reporting here.
00:06:54.000And I think there's two ways to do that.
00:06:56.000One is a kind of stenography, like kind of court reporting that just every five minutes or so, try and describe, even in plain language, what was going on, who's on their feet.
00:07:09.000If you can read one of the slides on the wall, something like that, especially when the judge pushes back.
00:07:51.000Truckers, if they would have said armed resistance, would have immediately been arrested and prosecuted.
00:07:57.000But not so with the pro Hamas crazies.
00:08:00.000Yeah, I mean, they've pretty much taken away almost all of our gun rights in Canada.
00:08:05.000Yeah, I think, I mean, isn't half of this trial, I know the coots four, there is some evidence of there being firearms just in the bed of a truck.
00:08:16.000And that was enough evidence to prosecute those freedom protesters for a trial that lasted also forever.
00:08:27.000And that's one of the things that makes it so hard for the prosecutors.
00:08:30.000What they talked about for about an hour or two today was how the trucker convoy had lawyers, had accountants, had a PR team, had like a war room organizing everything.
00:08:41.000And so how do you prosecute someone for criminal mischief if they're engaging in such compliance?
00:08:49.000How do you say what they're doing is illegal when they're daily negotiating with the police on where to park the trucks?
00:08:55.000It'll be very interesting to see what they do here.
00:08:57.000We tried to provide a lawyer on the scene in Coots, Alberta.
00:09:01.000We sent the lawyer Chad Williamson and his colleague to be there through the blockade.
00:09:06.000But it was, I don't know, I think there were trumped up charges there because there were weapons that were found.
00:09:12.000I'm going to have to go back to Toronto.
00:09:14.000I'm going to hand the torch over to you.
00:09:16.000Hopefully you won't be persecuted by the pro Hamas crazies.
00:09:21.000Maybe because you're not Jewish they'll lay off you.
00:09:23.000Although I think she's genuinely mentally ill.
00:09:27.000Hopefully people can hear our interview anyway.
00:12:59.000I can give my comments on the politics.
00:13:01.000But on the law, you've been watching some of these and so have others, and so is our guest who's just joined us right here.
00:13:10.000Welcome to the streets of Ottawa, where you make friends whether you want to or not.
00:13:14.000A lot of the evidence that was given by so-called witnesses for the prosecution, they actually didn't have any evidence touching on Chris Barber or Tamara Leach.
00:13:26.000They talked in general about the convoy, in general about what it was like to have the horn honking.
00:13:32.000And it feels to me like they're trying to graft on evidence about a political movement onto two particular scapegoats.
00:13:39.000The judge today pointed out a few times that there were a lot of trucker movements, a lot of trucker organizations.
00:13:45.000She asked the prosecutor, how is this hung around the necks of these two particular individuals who are on trial for crimes?
00:13:51.000Right, and I think that's a fair question.
00:13:54.000I mean, when you're accused of a crime, the evidence has to go to the particulars of your conduct in relation to that offense.
00:14:03.000So she was asking, okay, well, what direct evidence do you have about the mischief with relation to Ms. Barber or Mr. Leach?
00:14:11.000And so that general contextual evidence doesn't go explicitly to their individual conduct.
00:14:17.000I think that's a fair question she's asking.
00:14:19.000Today, the junior prosecutor, Siobhan Weschler, if I'm pronouncing her name right, was going through legal precedents trying to convince the judge that the facts of the Leach and Barber cases, Chris Barber being the other defendants, match other cases.
00:14:36.000One of the things that I noticed that none of the cases that were proffered were from senior levels of court that would be binding.
00:14:43.000I didn't see any court of appeal rulings.
00:14:45.000There were all minor rulings which are not binding on this judge.
00:14:49.000But this junior prosecutor, Siobhan Weschler, pointed to the case of the University of Toronto pro-Hamas encampment that was there for almost two months.
00:15:00.000And instantly I thought there's so many differences between that case and this case.
00:15:05.000The first one is no one was charged with a crime for that Hamas encampment.
00:15:10.000Second of all, they were committing actual crimes, trespass, uttering threats the whole time.
00:24:08.000And I think the judges respect a guy like that who's not wasting their time with Blather.
00:24:12.000You know, I had a chat with Lawrence Greenspan downstairs.
00:24:15.000And I presume it's okay to reveal it in public because it was just his speculation.
00:24:21.000I know how much his bill is because the Democracy Fund is crowdfunding it.
00:24:26.000And I don't think it's a secret to say it's approaching half a million dollars for him and his two co-counsel who have been working on this for a year.
00:24:33.000But I said to Lawrence, what's your estimate of how much is being spent by the police and the prosecution and the court?
00:24:40.000And I put numbers to him and I said five million.
00:24:45.000So I think he's right when you think about not just the two prosecutors, but the first team of prosecutors that was removed because they were out of control.
00:24:53.000The judge, the clerks, all the witnesses, the prep time with all the witnesses, you know, the 40 days of hearings is just the iceberg on top of the water.
00:25:02.000Seven eighths of which was preparation in advance.
00:25:05.000And 40 days of court hearings where you could have had rape trials and murder trials and real trials, all of that pushed aside.
00:25:13.000And I say again, it's Doug Ford on the hook even more than Justin Trudeau.
00:30:06.000The copycat protests in Cootes, Alberta soon caused the provincial government out there to abolish its mandates and move away from the COVID lockdown insanity.
00:30:17.000And soon around the world, other countries started following the Canadian example.
00:30:22.000We've heard people from as far away as the Netherlands, Israel and Australia say they were inspired by the Canadian truckers.
00:30:30.000There was even a modest American trucker convoy that we sent a reporter on.
00:30:35.000The Canadian truckers inspired the world because I think people inherently trust truckers.