Juno News - July 19, 2022


'Tamara Lich is an enemy of the state' (feat. Ari Goldkind)


Episode Stats

Length

43 minutes

Words per Minute

165.087

Word Count

7,182

Sentence Count

370

Misogynist Sentences

24

Hate Speech Sentences

7


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. I hope you're enjoying a great summer and hopefully
00:00:24.240 that includes watching my podcast. Today we're talking about Freedom Convoy organizer Tamara
00:00:31.060 Leach and the fact that she's back in jail after what many see as a travesty of justice
00:00:37.380 and a vindictive approach by the authorities who seem to want to make an example of her
00:00:43.160 for her having the temerity to organize a peaceful civil disobedience against government overreach
00:00:51.020 and encroachment of our civil liberties. Tamara has been charged with mischief, counseling
00:00:56.200 mischief, obstructing police, counseling to obstruct police, counseling intimidation and
00:01:02.200 intimidation by blocking and obstructing one or more highways. She was arrested in February
00:01:08.680 towards the end of the trucker's protest and was out on bail in March. In June she attended a gala
00:01:16.000 event in Toronto. She was there to receive the George Jonas Freedom Award. One of Leach's bail
00:01:22.860 conditions was not to associate with other convoy participants unless in the presence of a lawyer.
00:01:29.640 A photo of her with one fellow participant, one fellow convoy participant Tom Marazzo,
00:01:36.220 was widely shared on social media and believe it or not she was shortly re-arrested after that.
00:01:41.940 She has now been denied bail and facing the prospect of a very long time in jail while
00:01:47.320 she awaits trial. It's hard to believe that this is happening in Canada.
00:01:52.380 Today's guest will help me unravel what's been happening to the Tamara Lich case
00:01:56.460 and what it says about the legal system in Canada. Please welcome to the show well-known criminal
00:02:02.360 defense lawyer, legal expert and commentator Ari Goldkind. Ari was present during the Lich bail
00:02:08.220 hearing and had some critical comments to make about the government's handling of the case
00:02:13.500 even though he's not a supporter of the convoy. So I chat with Ari about the case and what it means
00:02:20.060 for all of us. Do tune in. It's great to have you here Ari. I'm so glad that we could make this work
00:02:26.840 and it's truly a pleasure to have you here. I've been reading some of your tweets on the Tamara Lich
00:02:34.120 bail hearing and you've been pretty vocal about your criticism in your criticism of the way that
00:02:42.440 Tamara Lich's recent bail hearings have been handled by the authorities. In particular you say that I'm
00:02:48.940 watching the Tamara Lich bail hearing. This is entering into third world stuff. Truly Kafkaesque
00:02:55.000 nonsense. It's literally that bizarre and reflects some very concerning issues about how our bail
00:03:01.460 system is not working. This is a pretty damning indictment of the system. Could you elaborate on
00:03:10.020 this please? Why do you think that the bail system is not working in the context of the Tamara Lich case?
00:03:16.380 I've been doing criminal law, Rupa, and it's great to be with you. I admire a lot of your writing a lot
00:03:22.300 of the time. Let's not keep that a secret from people. And being a criminal lawyer who's done
00:03:27.620 more bail hearings than I can count on 20 sets of feet and toes and hands, and I'm understating it,
00:03:34.260 criminal lawyers who are busy do them every day, sometimes two or three a day. Even in my own cases,
00:03:40.060 when I have clients not get out who I think should get out, I've probably never been as outraged
00:03:47.040 watching the Tamara Lich bail hearing on this Justice Centre dinner three-second breach
00:03:53.120 photographed with the wrong guy, an enemy of the state, and watching the justice of the peace
00:03:59.360 detain her, let alone what I thought were the egregious and abhorrent acts of the Crown Attorney
00:04:04.180 and the homicide detectives who had nothing better to do in Ottawa than put out a Canada-wide warrant,
00:04:10.780 which is never put out for non-violent people on breaches, by the way. Find somebody to show you
00:04:15.840 where that's happened. But they have nothing better to do than prosecute this person. That's
00:04:21.500 bad enough, because I have a great admiration for most Crown Attorneys. I would probably be a Crown
00:04:27.100 Attorney, but for certain things. I don't play well with others. I like what I make for a living. I like
00:04:32.200 being the underdog. A whole bunch of other things we don't need to get into today. But I have great
00:04:37.140 admiration for them. And when I see what this one Crown Attorney, who I won't even say his name,
00:04:42.660 has done throughout this proceeding, treating Tamara Leach as if her name is Paula Bernardo,
00:04:49.200 or pretending she's such a threat to the state that she needs to be jailed indefinitely. If Tamara
00:04:56.340 Leach is such a threat to the Crown Attorney's Office and to the Ottawa Police Service, who in my view,
00:05:01.860 both of them are exercising a political vendetta on her because she made them look terrible.
00:05:07.400 She shut down their streets. And by the way, full disclosure, I think anybody honking their horns
00:05:13.060 at night, keeping commerce from going, the blockades, I'm very much not on the convoy side.
00:05:20.100 I thought they should all be arrested. And if you even honked your horn and woke a kid up from sleep,
00:05:25.340 or a nurse who had to go to the doctor or the hospitals at 9am the next morning,
00:05:29.320 I thought they should all be arrested. So don't let anybody listening to my answer about my outrage
00:05:34.380 think I can't walk and chew bubblegum at the same time and think one thing is wrong, it doesn't make
00:05:39.700 the other thing right. So to go back to your question about our bail system, when I watched the
00:05:44.220 bail hearing, and the amount of exaggeration, and frankly, stupid arguments that were being put
00:05:49.760 forward that she's going to potentially face 10 years in jail for the mischief, or that this is a bail
00:05:56.480 that would bring the administration of justice into disrepute, equating it to firearms kinds of
00:06:01.920 charges, or child molestation, or sexual assault. I'm sitting here going, this is such garbage,
00:06:09.420 that I hope that the justice of the peace literally sits there and goes, this is garbage.
00:06:15.840 And the first sign I had that I'm not going to carry the day in thinking this is garbage is when
00:06:20.780 the justice of the peace said, she's already waited eight or nine nights in jail for a bail hearing.
00:06:25.580 That is disgusting in this country, by the way, we'll get into the China like aspects of it in a
00:06:31.240 moment. The two Michaels where we sort of thumb our nose when we look east, and think of how they
00:06:37.040 detain people and what they do to people who smoke a little marijuana or the two Michaels. She spends
00:06:42.980 nine or 10 nights in jail. And then the justice of the peace says, I'll make her wait another three
00:06:47.900 nights from Tuesday to Friday until I give my decision. You compel this in my business and what
00:06:56.020 I do. And again, Rupa, I want to be clear, I'm not a partisan. I don't drink the Kool-Aid of one side,
00:07:02.520 I get in trouble, seriously, for often not taking the defense side where other defense lawyers will say,
00:07:09.060 how dare he have an opinion that isn't, you know, the orthodoxy of being a defense lawyer.
00:07:14.020 The justice of the peace comes into court and starts essentially ridiculing Tamara Leach's
00:07:21.740 lawyer's argument. Starts ridiculing what a previous superior court justice had said. He knew
00:07:27.800 the superior court justice that she's going to this dinner. And he made this three-second breach
00:07:33.680 seem like literally she had set off a nuclear bomb.
00:07:37.960 And he then did something that to me was the sign that this is just absolutely unbelievable,
00:07:44.300 where he said to Mr. Greenspon, well, there's no evidence her lawyers were around. You didn't call
00:07:49.920 anybody. I don't want to take up too much time, Rupa, with telling you how the sausage is made.
00:07:55.600 But at a bail hearing, you don't call evidence to disprove the allegations of the state.
00:08:01.920 You can show that the charges are ridiculous, that they're not even a breach, or that if they are a
00:08:06.560 breach, they're so minor, a three-second breach with a Facebook picture with an enemy of the state.
00:08:13.920 I couldn't get over the tone, the tenor, the mocking nature of the detention order.
00:08:20.360 And to detain her, that there's a substantial likelihood she'll go out and commit the kinds
00:08:25.060 of crimes that keep Canadians up at night. And the tertiary ground of bail, which again,
00:08:29.940 how the sausage is made, is invoked for only the most serious of cases, serious violence, gun
00:08:37.140 violence, rape, child molestation. You can hate Tamara Leach until the cows come home. You can hate her
00:08:45.960 cause. You can hate the convoy. You can call it the free dumb convoy, D-U-M-B. That doesn't mean you
00:08:54.060 have to do the kind of mental gymnastics that that justice of the peace did, and so many mouth breathers
00:09:00.380 on Twitter did. Yes, I said it, by saying that because we hate her, or disagree with her, or think Trudeau
00:09:07.620 came down from the heavens, and how anybody dares criticize him, or vax mandates, or lockdowns, that means
00:09:15.320 somebody should rot in jail for a year or two because they're my political enemy. Nothing could be more dangerous
00:09:22.340 to our democracy or our bail system when we keep people detained when they are a political prisoner
00:09:29.900 in even the loosest definition of that term. Yeah, that's, you know, one of several reasons
00:09:38.080 why I wanted to chat with you, Ari, is that you're not a partisan, and you've also, it's worth noting
00:09:45.140 again, and this is something you say on your Twitter feed, and you've said this now again,
00:09:50.620 that you're no fan of Leach or the Freedom Convoy. In fact, you say that, I don't care about the
00:09:56.820 Freedom Convoy. I thought the blockaders and the honkers should all be arrested, and you've also
00:10:03.700 said that you were aghast at the abhorrent use of the criminal justice system this week, and the
00:10:10.780 deference to state power and narrative. Yes. Why do you think that what's happened seems to show an
00:10:17.500 abuse of the criminal justice system to fit an official narrative of the state? So, first of all,
00:10:24.220 Tamara Leach is an enemy of the state. That means that the state and its weaponization of the criminal
00:10:30.640 justice system should be extremely cautious, because we cannot be a democracy, and we certainly can't call
00:10:37.520 ourselves liberal, when if you have a political opponent of the governing power, the orthodoxy,
00:10:45.560 the, you get a shot, or else you can't get on a plane, or keep your job, or be a cop, or be a nurse,
00:10:52.080 or be a doctor, or sell widgets, okay? I'm not saying what my position on that is. That's not part of my
00:10:58.440 answer, okay? That's a whole different conversation. But when you know, as a Crown Attorney,
00:11:03.440 and as a police detective, we'll get to the detectives in a moment, you know that this is
00:11:09.680 a political person who pissed off, for lack of a better term, I won't swear on your podcast,
00:11:15.000 but that's probably an okay word, that she pissed off the entire city. And I understand that. If I
00:11:20.220 was in downtown Ottawa, and people were honking their horn and keeping me up, and my sleep is
00:11:25.080 precious to me, I'm not a nice guy. I probably would have done something that would have gotten me
00:11:29.900 in trouble, okay? So I'm no fan of this nonsense, as you pointed out. But when you know you're dealing
00:11:36.300 with a person whose politics are at the core of these ridiculous charges, mischief, counseling to
00:11:44.260 commit mischief, fail to comply release, even after you've had a bail review where the superior court judge
00:11:50.520 knows you're going to the dinner. Remember, the ultimate irony of this dinner, which people forget,
00:11:56.100 because some people don't think things through, was a dinner to specifically address the overuse and
00:12:04.140 abuse by the state of the enormous power of the state that an ordinary average member of the public
00:12:11.100 can't fight against. Your bank account frozen, the stupid emergencies act invoked by the lying Marco
00:12:17.260 Mendocino, a guy I think is a really nice guy, a former prosecutor, but couldn't prosecute that case
00:12:22.800 to a conviction if his eyes were closed. That's why everybody knows he's not transparent. Nice guy,
00:12:28.100 horrible way of being an MP. But this is dangerous stuff, because even for the people, and if you go
00:12:35.180 to my Twitter feed, which, you know, I very rarely do, I put stuff out, I don't read it. But then you'll
00:12:39.960 put, you'll see people on my, well, we don't like her. She deserves to be jailed. She's an, I'm like,
00:12:45.980 you people don't understand what democracy is. I'm not a fan of all sorts of causes that have
00:12:52.460 been popular in the last three years, that have ruined our cities, that have ruined New York,
00:12:58.040 Minneapolis, Los Angeles, New York. But do I think a protester who's been peaceful,
00:13:04.400 who isn't torching the courthouse, who isn't threatening Superior Court or Supreme Court judges,
00:13:11.020 do I think because I hate them, I hate their politics, I think they're ruining America? Do I
00:13:16.720 think the weaponization of the criminal justice system should go against them? No. So to your
00:13:21.500 question about why do I think that, is when you have a crown attorney, let me make this easier for
00:13:28.440 people who don't know how the sausage is made. You could say that Tamara Leach breached her bail by
00:13:33.540 taking that picture with Matarazzo or Morazzo or whatever the heck his name is. I don't actually care.
00:13:38.380 You can say that she breached it. But when you tell two Ottawa homicide detectives, homicide detectives
00:13:47.780 to put out a Canada-wide warrant and think this through, even if you disagree with me,
00:13:52.860 I don't care who disagrees with me, I actually welcome it. You instruct them to get on a plane
00:13:58.060 to go to Medicine Hat, Alberta and arrest her and bring her back, make her rot in jail for eight
00:14:05.820 nights. And you do that, you are literally sending a message that any Canadian who wants to dissent,
00:14:15.220 who wants to stand up, should be silenced. Now I can't prove that because the people who would
00:14:21.860 likely say something, who aren't anonymous egg-shaped avatars on Twitter, but who are me,
00:14:28.980 Ari Goldkind. You can do it because you're Rupa and that's your bread and butter. But if there's a CEO
00:14:35.560 of a company in downtown Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Prince Edward Island, Fredericton,
00:14:40.980 that wants to say these things, they know, hold on, maybe I should just zip it because I don't need
00:14:49.120 somebody looking at my frozen bank account. And if the citizens in Ottawa are okay with two homicide
00:14:55.400 detectives, taking time out from investigating, what's that you say? Homicides to go out and do
00:15:03.440 this, even if you dislike her, this is a gross abuse of our criminal justice system. And if I were
00:15:10.780 to say to you Rupa or your listeners, hold on, there's a lady who did maybe something bad and she
00:15:18.280 got arrested for it. She didn't hurt anybody. She didn't not feed a child. She didn't sexually
00:15:23.880 molest anybody. She didn't commit sexual assault in Quebec and digitally penetrate somebody and get
00:15:29.680 a conditional discharge, a story which has escaped attention. She did what she did in Ottawa. Okay.
00:15:36.260 She took a picture when she came off the stage. Somebody said, thank you, a nice speech. Okay. You want
00:15:45.520 arrest her for that and charge her muzzle to more power to you. But you could very easily have said
00:15:51.840 there's a breach. We're arresting her. We don't think she's a menace to society. We don't think
00:15:56.720 she should remain rotting in an Ottawa jail. Let's have a trial and let a judge decide that to me would
00:16:02.680 have been okay. But to use the jail system, the detention, to look to a court to defer to this,
00:16:11.240 to have a court sort of give it the sign of the cross or the rubber stamp, people will say, well,
00:16:16.280 Ari, a justice of the peace disagrees with you. He knows more than you. You're wrong. She's dangerous.
00:16:22.120 She should rot. Okay. But the fact that somebody can say that and not get arrested for saying that
00:16:28.600 is exactly my point. Reasonable people can disagree. And if you don't think the shoe on the other foot
00:16:36.340 will happen, if there's a Pierre Polyev government, and somebody clings to a tree in Tofino,
00:16:44.420 Pierre Polyev should not have the criminal justice system. Not that I'm saying Trudeau pulled any
00:16:49.500 levers here. I don't think that at all. One crown, two cops. But if you don't think the shoe on the
00:16:56.440 other foot could come for you one day, if there's a right wing government, and you offend them,
00:17:02.300 and then you rotting in jail when you're nonviolent, and you take the wrong picture,
00:17:07.620 that to me is idiotic. And it's something that you would look east to China. If I describe that and
00:17:14.060 said, political prisoner, pissed off an entire city, went against the government, is a rabble rouser,
00:17:20.940 didn't hurt anybody, didn't commit violence. They tried to jail her, they kept her in jail,
00:17:26.340 a judge kept her in jail, two judges then let her out and kept her out, knew she was going to a dinner,
00:17:30.980 then she took a picture, now she rots in jail. If I said to you, what country is that?
00:17:36.280 There's no chance somebody would say Canada.
00:17:38.420 Canada, no. Yeah, no, we'll get to when the shoe is on the other foot in a little bit, Ari,
00:17:44.900 but you touched upon these two individuals. You've been particularly critical of the police officer
00:17:52.300 and the crown officer. And given what you've said about the misuse of the system, do you believe
00:17:57.700 that these two individuals were just merely misguided or were they acting at the behest of
00:18:03.700 the state? Your general critique seems to suggest that the way these individuals and others who've
00:18:09.480 handled this particular case, this may not merely be accidental, but perhaps there's some design behind
00:18:16.260 the way the lich case has been handled? I don't think there are the Geppetto-like strings of
00:18:24.240 anything to do with Trudeau or his office having anything to do with this. I'm not that person.
00:18:29.300 I know people want me to say it. Uh-uh. I don't. I think this is one man in Ottawa. I don't think the
00:18:36.740 rest of the crown attorney, if they were put up to polygraph tests and put under oath, do I think
00:18:42.820 other crown attorneys think what I think this one man is doing would be something they would support?
00:18:48.660 Do I think a whole bunch of Ottawa police officers or police officers throughout the country
00:18:54.260 think this is what two homicide detectives? Again, homicide detectives, not parking ticket officers.
00:19:02.500 Homicide detectives flying out on your money to Medicine Hat Alberta to get her and bring her back.
00:19:09.220 I don't think a lot of cops would support this. And again, separate out what was done to the
00:19:15.620 residents of downtown Ottawa. I don't excuse it. I don't get past it. But when you look at what her
00:19:22.900 cause is, which is businesses and people should not be shut down and canceled. By the way, small businesses,
00:19:31.300 not Jeff Bezos, not Microsoft, not the idiocy that is Twitter, but actual mom and pop bookstores,
00:19:39.940 barbecue joints, restaurants, diners, everything on Main Street that Jeff Bezos before COVID was
00:19:47.940 already destroying. These are the people she was speaking for. Or people who say, I'm very pro-vaxxed.
00:19:54.900 I've got 17 vaxes in me. My kids have 17 vaxes in me. But do I think for a shot where the science is
00:20:02.500 not yet in, look at the science right now for the vaccine with Omicron. I'm sorry. Is anybody going to
00:20:07.620 talk openly about that? Actually, yes. Because now the Toronto Star and CNN can't help having these
00:20:13.780 little columns that say, oh, well, we're in a seventh wave. Because the lordship known as Pfizer
00:20:22.500 hasn't solved this problem yet. A virus with a 99.7% survival rate. That was her point. Her point
00:20:31.940 wasn't, let's overthrow the government. Let's destroy Canada. Let's harm babies. Let's shoot animals.
00:20:41.220 Let's harm puppies. If this isn't something where you don't think, and I don't mean you, I mean the
00:20:49.060 proverbial you think, is this really a matter that she belongs stuffed into a jail cell for a year or
00:20:56.340 two? And Rupa, here's the other point about why this is so pernicious. And this may be too boring
00:21:01.940 for people watching us, but I'm not often boring, but here it comes. One of the consequences of
00:21:07.860 somebody not getting bail in Canada, and you can read this on your own. This is not me as a defense
00:21:13.220 lawyer, don't listen to me, go look on your own, is when somebody doesn't get bail who has a good
00:21:18.100 case for a trial, who has a good case for a not guilty plea, because they're going to get offered
00:21:23.940 time served, because they're told by the Crown, you plead guilty, we'll let you out. Think this through.
00:21:29.860 You're so dangerous to the country that we're going to keep you detained on bail and you can't get out.
00:21:36.020 But if you plead guilty and admit it, we'll open the jail door for you.
00:21:39.860 What not having bail does is it makes a significant number of Canadians say, you know what,
00:21:45.620 do I want to wait three, four, six, 12, 15 months for my trial? Or do I want to plead guilty,
00:21:53.380 get time served, go home and lick my wounds? That's another pernicious danger of the bail
00:21:59.460 system failing, and it hasn't been talked about enough. Well, that segues nicely into my next
00:22:05.860 question, which is, you know, some of the aberrations that you've noted in this particular case.
00:22:11.540 Do you think this is just a one off? Or do you think this is opening up the door to future abuses?
00:22:16.340 We've talked about the fact that, you know, or you mentioned this, that, you know,
00:22:20.980 when the shoe is on the other foot, when a future conservative government uses similar
00:22:27.380 strong arm tactics to go after someone, say, on the left, do you think we're kind of at this
00:22:33.860 dangerous tipping point here in Canada? I've personally seen this kind of ping pong play out
00:22:40.020 in some third world countries, where different when different parties are in power, you know,
00:22:49.780 they'll go after their opponents. And I never thought this kind of thing would ever come to Canada.
00:22:56.020 And you've actually used the word, the term third world to refer to what has been happening here.
00:23:01.540 I wonder we're at that dangerous tipping point here.
00:23:04.180 What makes Canada not be on the precipice of third world? What happens when gas goes up to
00:23:10.820 $3 a litre? What happens when food becomes so expensive that ordinary average people can't
00:23:16.500 afford it? Everybody thinks that day will never come. But nobody thought two years ago,
00:23:21.620 when the Trudeau government was printing money hand over fist, that we would ever get to the
00:23:26.340 point where gas was $2.15 or $2.20 a litre. Nobody thought that raspberries or lettuce would go from
00:23:32.660 $0.99 to $3.99. So this idea that they're over there across an ocean, they're over there,
00:23:40.180 is one that, you know, you start having energy slowdowns here, you start having energy failures
00:23:46.580 here, you start having ransomware attacks, like nobody will say the Rogers outage was,
00:23:51.540 I don't know what it was. But this idea that it was a router down because they did some upgrading,
00:23:56.660 I'm sorry, am I going to trust Mr. Champagne or whatever his name is,
00:24:00.740 or our public safety minister to be transparent with me. This is a government that is completely
00:24:06.020 not transparent. And I'm not a fan of government per se, this is not anti Trudeau. Okay, these are
00:24:11.060 people that want to keep their jobs, they'll never tell the public the truth. And to me, that's sickening.
00:24:15.940 But when we use the term third world, think again, this through and let me give you Rupa,
00:24:22.100 the argument that I saw on my Twitter feed for one week for all the people that say I'm wrong,
00:24:27.940 okay, which is fine. Their argument is literally this simple. She was on bail. She breached her bail.
00:24:37.780 It doesn't matter how she breached it, or how little she breached her that it was three seconds.
00:24:42.660 If you can't follow your bail, you should rot in jail. It's almost like the OJ, if it doesn't fit,
00:24:48.020 you must acquit. Now I'm being serious, somebody can go to anti social media group, I never call it
00:24:53.140 social media. Somebody can go to anti social media and look at their strongest arguments
00:24:57.860 for why she rots in jail. She's an enemy of the state, or she had a bail paper, but she went to
00:25:04.740 the dinner and she shouldn't have taken that picture. Here's a news flash to mouth breeders.
00:25:10.740 I can sit here right now and give you 1000 examples of people on bail for guns,
00:25:16.580 sex assault, beating women, drinking and driving, abusing children, causing death, driving dangerously,
00:25:29.060 who not only are never detained the way she was by her first bail hearing months ago,
00:25:35.940 they never spend a night in jail. And if they spend a night in jail on a breach, they're on house arrest,
00:25:42.660 but they're found at Swiss chalet, they're at house arrest, they're found with their co accused,
00:25:48.020 they're released on bail the next day. So anybody who thinks the answer that in Canada,
00:25:55.140 once you get a bail paper, and you breach it, that means you should remain in jail,
00:26:02.740 come to bail court with me for one day in Toronto, one day, and watch how many people charged with fail
00:26:11.060 to complies, that aren't three second pictures with a bad enemy of the state at a dinner where the
00:26:17.460 irony is so thick, that it's the dinner to celebrate freedoms and abusive power. You come watch how many
00:26:24.740 people on serious charges are accused of serious breaches of their bail, contacting the woman that
00:26:31.780 they're just charged with beating up, and watch how many people are released. Only then
00:26:37.540 will your argument hit yourself in your own head about how truly stupid it is.
00:26:43.380 Yeah. Did you did you manage to convince anyone that you were interacting with?
00:26:47.620 I don't interact on anti social media. To be very clear, I don't interact, I don't respond,
00:26:53.940 I don't reply, life's too short, I don't go down the rabbit hole. I think what I think, if it changes
00:26:59.620 a mind or educate somebody great. But I do not engage with people on Twitter, particularly when you can take
00:27:06.100 one look at their bio on Twitter, and see the usual nonsense in their bio where they say future
00:27:11.940 candidate for prime minister, or they have all these things that have become in vogue about how
00:27:16.660 to describe themselves, or they're anonymous. I'm sorry, that's a rabbit hole that I don't have time
00:27:22.660 or interest to go down. So Ari, you've also said that, referring to the day that Leach was denied bail,
00:27:31.780 you said this is a really bad day for speech, dissent, and being non-violently opposed to
00:27:37.460 government power in Canada. If you didn't think the Emergencies Act, the jailing of dissidents,
00:27:42.820 the freezing of bank accounts did the trick. Today's three second breach, bail denial is the cherry on top.
00:27:49.380 Now, we can all agree that we've gone through an unprecedented few months in Canada. I was here
00:27:55.460 in Ottawa on the ground as the police were pushing back the protesters, they were breaking up the freedom
00:28:01.140 convoy. And I was stopped by a police officer right here in the market where I live. And he asked me
00:28:08.660 where I was going and what I was up to. And, and that, you know, there were consequences for me,
00:28:14.660 to me, if I were to go beyond a certain point. Again, this is the kind of thing I've experienced
00:28:20.900 elsewhere, mostly in the third world, but I'd never thought I'd experienced it here in Canada.
00:28:26.900 And it seems to me that you share some of these concerns as well. Where do you think we're headed
00:28:32.260 in Canada? Are we going down the slippery slope of becoming increasingly authoritarian?
00:28:38.340 Well, I say he's going to be prime minister for as long as he wants. I've always said that this is
00:28:42.980 Prime Minister Silver Spoon. That's just, to me, a fact. I mean, Patrick Brown is out of the race,
00:28:48.740 thank God. He's as milquetoast as the day is long. The more Pierre Polyev continues down this road,
00:28:54.820 I think he's either going to be prime minister if he says stuff out loud that you're not supposed to
00:28:59.700 say. The more he waters it down, the more he won't. I'm not saying I like them or don't. I
00:29:04.180 don't actually know him. I didn't even know how to pronounce his name until two months ago, quite frankly.
00:29:08.820 But everybody seems to pretend that this is an authoritarian state because Trudeau is the prime
00:29:13.300 minister. 31% of Canadians, of the 60-something percent that voted, voted for him. Aaron O'Toole
00:29:21.620 got more votes. We need to get this stupid idea out of our system that 31% of 67% means that this is a
00:29:32.260 far-left country. We need to get this stupid idea out of our head that if you're an immigrant,
00:29:38.340 if you're a black person, if you're Indian, Muslim, Sikh, Chinese, Jewish, whatever it is,
00:29:44.340 that you must automatically like Trudeau because he's your guy. So because I do believe that he will
00:29:51.140 be prime minister for as long as he wants because he's aided and abetted by the discourse in our country,
00:29:57.220 you know you're an outlier, Rupa, in being able to write and keep your job by actually being critical
00:30:03.860 of the state. To me, this is a tipping point because we are at the point where there was an
00:30:10.420 emergencies act involved. We don't talk about that enough because it's yesterday's news. Today,
00:30:16.660 we're on to Pete Davidson and Kim Kardashian and him manscaping. That's the way our attention span is
00:30:22.500 in this world, okay? And you had a government that with no cause shut down not only people's bank
00:30:29.780 accounts. Think that through. We're not a third world. They shut down people's bank accounts,
00:30:36.100 but money launderers, drug traffickers, organized crime never have their bank accounts touched unless
00:30:42.820 they're due process. You have to go to court. There are injunctions. We know who money launders. We know
00:30:49.060 how who owns half the real estate in Vancouver and Toronto. You think the rise in interest rates
00:30:54.820 that are going to cripple so many people listening to you and I right now, ordinary average people
00:30:59.700 throughout Canada, who are going to be crippled by the interest rate hike that will have nothing
00:31:04.420 to do with inflation, particularly if you believe the crap that it's Biden's price,
00:31:10.100 Putin's price hike. Think that through. You don't have any bank accounts frozen of any of the people
00:31:17.300 in Canada that are nefarious, but if you're some person in Yellowknife who wanted to send 25 bucks
00:31:23.220 to a cause that goes against, you're never going to do it again because you don't want to be on the
00:31:28.100 RCMP radar. It's not worth the headache, but if you can't have a hundred thousand people sending 20 bucks
00:31:36.420 to a cause they believe in, you have stifled dissent. I can't prove this, but when you get give,
00:31:44.100 send go or go fund me saying we're going to take this down, your name will go to the government,
00:31:51.140 to the RCMP and your accounts will be frozen without any due process. And then they come into
00:31:58.260 the House of Commons and lie about it. That to me again is the precipice of something disastrous.
00:32:05.860 So just because it's July, whatever today is, the sun is shining, there's still food on the table.
00:32:12.180 Look at Sri Lanka, look at the Netherlands, look at all of these examples of countries that were once
00:32:19.060 civilized, probably with people as civilized, if not more than us, South America, Latin America.
00:32:25.940 I'm sorry. It doesn't take 10 years for us to descend into something worse. So when you have a message
00:32:33.700 rubber stamped by a court with no analysis, no depth, okay, maybe she breached. We'll set it for
00:32:41.620 trial, but I'll release her. She's learned her lesson. She won't go to more gala fundraisers.
00:32:47.300 When you send the message that a court rubber stamps this and uses terms like ridiculous
00:32:55.460 and uses terms that are just so beyond the pale, you are sending a message to Canadians who may be
00:33:03.300 wanting to oppose the government. Hold on. Can't lose my job. Can't get canceled. Can't lose my ability
00:33:12.180 to feed my family. And that is much stronger of an incarnation than anything called cancel culture,
00:33:19.700 where you put a mean tweet out and then your Twitter account is closed.
00:33:24.020 No, I absolutely agree with you, Ari, that for things to change, I mean, things can change
00:33:29.220 quite rapidly. And as you mentioned, Sri Lanka and the Netherlands. And for some reason here,
00:33:35.300 we seem to think that we're immune from all of these things, but, hey, but did anybody even think
00:33:40.820 that you would have one of the biggest protest movements this country has ever seen?
00:33:48.980 And would have been bigger, Rupa. It would have been bigger, but the PR exercise of the Emergencies
00:33:54.180 Act, the PR exercise of freezing bank accounts, the whole point of that, Rupa, just to be clear,
00:34:00.340 was not to freeze the bank accounts, but was to the silencing of millions of people
00:34:06.260 that might've said, okay, I want to send 20 bucks to a cause that fights a government shutting down
00:34:13.620 Main Street, ordinary average taxpayers who don't hide money in their mattress, who don't launder
00:34:20.020 money, who don't bring in money from overseas. It's not that the bank accounts were frozen that I'm
00:34:25.940 as concerned with. I am. But it's sending the message to the millions who have no voice,
00:34:30.980 nobody representing them, no politician who speaks truth about crime, immigration, inflation, gas,
00:34:39.140 groceries. Those millions of people are like, I'm not taking this chance. And that to me is
00:34:46.580 antithetical to people's participation in a liberal democratic society.
00:34:52.340 Exactly. So going forward, Ari, how do you think things will play out for Leach? Is she likely to
00:34:58.820 remain in jail until this goes to trial? Do you think the trial itself will be a continuation of
00:35:06.020 what you see, what you've called as a vendetta against her?
00:35:08.900 There is no chance that that failed to comply. If she even waits to trial, I don't think she'll
00:35:15.300 ever be convicted. I think a judge or a jury, because the Crown's proceeding by indictment,
00:35:19.380 believe it or not, that's a conversation that's so stupid, I can't even tell you that the Crown is
00:35:23.860 proceeding by indictment versus summary. What that means for people who don't know,
00:35:27.380 like the United States, they use terms like felony and misdemeanor. The Crown's treating
00:35:32.100 the three second picture like a felony, if that makes sense. There's no chance she'll be convicted
00:35:36.740 on that. A first year law student could defend that, let alone her excellent legal team.
00:35:42.420 But the worry I have, Rupa, is that because a justice of the peace didn't tear the Crown's
00:35:49.140 presentation apart. Deferred to it, agreed with it, rubber-stamped it, provided no in-depth analysis
00:35:57.300 of its ludicracy. Started talking about the tertiary ground as if she's Paula Bernardo, as I said.
00:36:04.100 Started talking about her propensity to commit crimes as if she's a ticking time bomb, dangerous offender,
00:36:10.180 with no perspective, no humility, no backing forward and saying, okay, maybe she's odious,
00:36:16.740 but she shouldn't be rotting in an Ottawa jail cell. My worry, Rupa, to your question of where it goes
00:36:21.780 from here is, she'll either get a superior court judge at the bail review, which will come in the
00:36:27.220 next few weeks, that will tear the justice of peace apart, but in judicial terms, in judicious terms,
00:36:34.340 in terms that are all deferential, the way our system works. I actually think it shouldn't work
00:36:38.820 that way sometimes. I think things should be called out. I hate when a judge hears a cop
00:36:44.500 lying through their teeth, but the judge will say, I prefer the evidence of Mr. So-and-so
00:36:52.500 over the officer. Well, if you think the officer is a lying sack of you-know-what, call it that. You
00:36:59.460 don't need to bend over backwards. Because I assure you, Rupa, when the judge thinks that the accused
00:37:05.460 person is a liar, the judge is going to say, I find accused person X to be a liar. But they defer to
00:37:13.060 the police too often. No, I think police should be deferred to. I'm pro-police. I'm not defund the
00:37:18.580 police. I'll take the police over anybody any day. I'd rather live in a gated community surrounded by cops
00:37:24.100 than surrounded by anybody else. So don't mistake me. But my worry is that now a superior court judge
00:37:30.100 will get their hands on this justice of the peace decision. And because we live in a precedential
00:37:35.700 deferential system, which is arguably good, but I say arguably not so good sometimes,
00:37:42.340 that a superior court judge won't say, this is the most ridiculous load of poppycock. That's
00:37:49.380 Lawrence Greenspawn's word in court, not mine. This is the most ridiculous bunch of hooey horse manure
00:37:55.140 I've ever seen, but rather will say it was a balancing act. The justice of the peace is entitled
00:38:01.620 to difference. I don't see. That's my worry. And I hope that there's one brave superior court judge
00:38:08.740 who doesn't mince his or her words and comes out and says it. And, you know, people say to me,
00:38:13.860 should this even be heard in Ottawa because passions are so high in Ottawa? Can she get a
00:38:19.380 fair shake in Ottawa? That's a really interesting question when the judge who kept her detained
00:38:24.900 the first time actually said out loud, this convoy screwed up my day. I'm paraphrasing.
00:38:31.860 That raises really interesting questions because usually we think of juries as being potentially
00:38:37.060 biased. Juries being biased because they see Twitter or read about Johnny Depp or Bill Cosby
00:38:43.540 or Harvey Weinstein. There is something very insidious to me happening in Ottawa,
00:38:49.060 where I'm not sure people have looked at this with dispassionate, nonpartisan heads. Again,
00:38:56.260 in the political arena, Rupa, I wouldn't care if this was a battle of op-eds and tweets,
00:39:02.340 but when you have somebody's liberty taken away, you better damn have a good reason. And we have
00:39:09.940 no good reason here. And the whole thing to me is not only odious, but in my opinion, it's dangerous.
00:39:16.980 And to use a term in my business, I think it brings the administration of justice into disrepute.
00:39:23.220 And with millions of Canadians, threatens the public's confidence in why does our bail system
00:39:29.700 do this to Tamara Leach. But if you're charged with possessing three loaded firearms or firing them
00:39:36.660 off or sexually assaulting somebody, you get bail and the next week you went out and killed somebody.
00:39:43.220 That's not a strong argument on your side.
00:39:45.220 Yeah. And speaking of civil liberties, how worried are you about the future of civil liberties and
00:39:52.260 the right of peaceful protest and civil disobedience in Canada?
00:39:55.620 I'm more worried about freedom of speech and dissent than I am about who gets to collect
00:40:03.060 themselves in Ottawa and honk their stupid horns. I'm more concerned about who gets de-platformed.
00:40:09.860 I'm more concerned with who doesn't get to speak. I'm more concerned with a government directing
00:40:15.540 Twitter what to do or what's misinformation. There's a great clip out there, Rupa. I don't know if you've
00:40:22.820 seen it, but I invite people to go watch it. It's Carl Sagan about 30, 40 years ago talking about the
00:40:30.180 dangers of science and technology. And you should find it. And I don't mean you, I mean anybody listening
00:40:35.140 to us because I'm not going to plagiarize it. It's him. And what he says is science and technology will
00:40:41.540 be great. But what he's worried about are the people who control the science and technology,
00:40:47.460 who know nothing about it and use that science and technology to silence people who disagree with
00:40:55.140 it or have a concern about it. And what we're finding now, which is what Carl Sagan talked about,
00:41:01.380 is that the people in charge to keep their positions in power will shut down all questions
00:41:07.860 about the science. And science isn't science unless it's constantly challenged, constantly tested,
00:41:16.500 constantly criticized. So if the Trudeau government or the government du jour, the Biden government is so
00:41:23.540 great, it should withstand and be able to stand up to scrutiny, even by the insane tin hat people,
00:41:32.180 who with every passing month, their tin hat conspiracies become a lot less tin hatty. So my
00:41:38.580 concern is not who gets trucks together in Ottawa to drive residents nuts, I thought they should all be
00:41:44.180 taken out and put in a field 1000 miles away from anybody. But what we're experiencing now is that if
00:41:50.820 you don't think what's allowed, you are going to lose not only your speech, but your job, your mortgage,
00:41:59.460 and everything like that, and that to me, is so antithetical to what Canada is, that the idea that
00:42:06.900 people who call themselves Democrats, capital D, or small d, or who are liberal Rupa, are people who are
00:42:15.300 saying less speech, not more tells me, and this is my bottom line, that they know their ideas are
00:42:24.580 absolutely terrible, and will not stand up to scrutiny.
00:42:30.100 Well, as you say, Ari, I mean, this is not Canada, this is completely bonkers, this is insane, it just
00:42:37.060 makes no sense anymore. I'm afraid we're gonna have to leave it there. But you know, I really appreciate
00:42:44.420 you coming on the show and sharing your views and your opinions on the case. And it's been an incredibly
00:42:51.060 fascinating conversation with you. And, and I really hope that we can pick this up at a future
00:42:58.340 point. I guess tomorrow is going to be, there's going to be another hearing coming up shortly. And
00:43:04.260 hopefully we can reconnect again at that point. It's always great to talk to you, Rupa, to read
00:43:09.380 your work. And it's nice that you asked me to come chat with you. Okay, perfect. Thanks, Ari. And
00:43:13.940 thank you again for making the time and hope to see you soon. Thank you. Okay, take care.