00:03:11.180they had another bail hearing last week and she had another surety and apparently the judge this
00:03:18.840time around who was a different judge was more convinced by this surety and is convinced that
00:03:23.040the situation has changed the circumstances have changed and they believe that tamara leach will
00:03:28.040make good on her promise to get in the car and go home so i think when she was released she had 24
00:03:33.500hours to leave ottawa and 72 hours to leave ontario or something to that effect but basically she has
00:03:39.480to get back home. She can't fly because she, as I understand it, is not vaccinated. So at this
00:03:45.360point, at this exact moment, Tamara Leach is free. And the title of this show, Tamara Leach is out on0.72
00:03:53.940bail, but she's still a political prisoner. There are two components of that that I want to get
00:03:57.580into here. The first, I was going to say Tamara Leach is free. And then I realized a moment before
00:04:01.840we were to go to air that I can't actually make that claim. She's not free. She has still been
00:04:06.700charge, she is still likely to face trial for this protest, for her role in overseeing and
00:04:14.100fundraising for the Freedom Convoy protest. So she's not free. She's not out of the woods. She
00:04:19.740still faces prosecution by the state for presiding over a peaceful protest, a protest that right up
00:04:26.760until the end remained peaceful, at least on the part of the protesters, on the part of the
00:04:32.080demonstrators. And that, I think, is a very important point here. We are talking about a
00:04:38.140woman who has been arrested. And if you listen to the Crown talk about why she should remain behind
00:04:44.780bars, the Crown's view on this is that they wanted to throw the book at her. The judge she had at
00:04:50.580first, Judge Bourgeois, which when the Bourgeois justice or Justice Bourgeois is jailing the
00:04:58.100working-class protester. I cannot think of a better metaphor for just the absurdity of this,0.55
00:05:02.700but Justice Bourgeois was saying, oh, she's facing a lot of jail time for this. Really?
00:05:07.360She is? You're going to preemptively decide that she is going to be spending more than likely
00:05:12.820a lot of time behind bars? That was one of the reasons that Justice Bourgeois0.96
00:05:16.360denied Tamera Leach bail in the first place. Now, this judge was more measured, still had some
00:05:24.940criticisms about Tamara Leach and about the case and did have some kind things to say
00:05:30.600about Justice Bourgeois findings in some particular area. So it wasn't a complete overturning
00:05:35.900in the sense of like reversing it, but it was reversing the outcome. It was overturning the
00:05:41.200outcome. But the judge who decided Tamara Leach should be released yesterday has just released
00:05:46.600her on bail. She still has a number of conditions, a number of terms that she has to abide by.
00:05:51.400And the point that I can't stress enough is that she is not yet out of the woods.
00:05:56.460So if the Crown keeps up this rhetoric, if the Crown maintains the tone it's taken and the line it's taken to Merrill Leach in the bail hearings throughout the trial,
00:06:06.580she is going to be subjected to a very vicious and very vigorous prosecution.
00:06:12.800But the point that I wanted to spend a couple of moments on here is that there is no denying she is a political prisoner.
00:06:18.480if you wanted to have a government response to immediately deal with the situation when there
00:06:25.600were blockades i could understand i'm not saying i would agree with but i can understand government
00:06:31.480throwing the books at people in that moment and this was the whole thrust behind the emergencies
00:06:37.060act again which was wrong i'm convinced that it was an illegal invocation of the emergencies act
00:06:41.760but nonetheless it's what justin trudeau decided to do when the blockade was done everyone should
00:06:47.960have been released. When the blockade ended, people should have been released from jail.
00:06:51.380Account should have been unfrozen. The Emergency Act should have never been there. But since it
00:06:55.640was there, it should have been gone that very moment. Once police moved all the trucks off
00:06:59.900of Wellington Street, that should have been the end of it. Why is the prosecution still going on?
00:07:12.000from Alberta, whose supposed crime is getting in a truck, setting up a GoFundMe, and saying,
00:07:18.800hold the line, when the government started to close in. That's her crime. That's what put her1.00
00:07:25.340behind bars. That's what put this woman in jail. She got in a truck, she drove to Ottawa, she said,1.00
00:07:33.500hold the line, and she, by setting up a GoFundMe, raised $10 million twice for truckers. Money,
00:07:40.480which, by the way, the government is still in a way controlling. The government is still
00:07:45.780maintaining its freeze on the funds. So GoFundMe, that money was refunded by GoFundMe. The GiveSend
00:07:53.800Go money is still sitting, as I understand it, in American bank accounts because the government
00:07:58.260will not let it come into Canada without seizing it. The million dollars that GoFundMe had released
00:08:04.880already to Tamara Leach and Benjamin Dichter, that money has been frozen by the bank.
00:08:11.120And now because there's this class action lawsuit against the convoy organizers by people in
00:08:16.220downtown Ottawa, that money is still remaining frozen. So all of these measures that government
00:08:23.340is still enforcing, even in the absence of a protest. And that's why it is completely fair
00:08:30.320to say Tamera Leach is a political prisoner. Her crime is embarrassing the government because0.96
00:08:36.160that's the enduring legacy right now. Government humiliation, government embarrassment, a government1.00
00:08:40.920that has lost legitimacy, that has lost legitimacy in the minds of so many people,
00:08:47.400especially on the COVID file. And again, I've talked about all the successes, some of which
00:08:53.100can be attributed to the convoy. Others you can say may have been happening already, but vaccine
00:08:57.600passports being lifted you have much more forceful opposition from the Conservative Party of Canada
00:09:03.040which again is a big win for a lot of people that were saying the Conservative Party had been absent
00:09:07.600on a lot of these issues and I realized the PPC had been the only party speaking up about these
00:09:12.780things but again the PPC did not have anyone in the legislature so I'm talking about just the volume
00:09:18.320of political response care which has improved since the onset of the convoy. Again vaccine
00:09:24.300passports gone somewhere. We've got much firmer timelines for lifting remaining restrictions
00:09:29.060elsewhere. And every time I bring this up, I always get emails from people in British Columbia.
00:09:33.180I feel so sad, so sad for British Columbians here because BC used to be in a way the glimmer
00:09:40.140of hope. It was never perfect, but BC didn't go full lockdown like places outside of BC did,
00:09:47.960like Ontario notably did, like Quebec did. BC had always been the holdout in a way. And now we have
00:09:55.040alternatively BC being the last holdout for vaccine passports and for restrictions. And BC
00:10:02.220actually right now focusing on adding restrictions. They're still planning on proceeding with mandates
00:10:09.580for public sector workers, for some public sector workers. And I think this is the fascinating
00:10:14.580development here. So I'm going to read this because the latest has just come out in a statement,
00:10:19.320but it still is, I think, an interesting one because Bonnie Henry, I think it was last week,
00:10:25.120said even before BC had dropped restrictions that, well, you know, they're probably going
00:10:29.540to be coming back. So this was the line that we got. Basically, don't get comfortable even if we
00:10:33.560drop restrictions. But the latest development on this, and I just, the problem with doing a live
00:10:39.500show is that sometimes I have so many tabs open and I want to make sure that I get the quote right
00:10:43.440here. Here it is. It's an order that requires all healthcare practitioners to report their
00:10:48.100vaccination status to their respective colleges. The colleges will then share it with the ministry,
00:10:53.800which will verify the information against their vaccination registry. So if you have a regulatory
00:11:00.080college, you're going to have to provide them your vaccination status. They're going to check
00:11:05.020it with the government. And if the government says, oh, well, this is not a valid vaccination
00:11:10.380status or this is not a person that we have on our registry, who knows? Maybe the colleges say,
00:11:15.680all right, we're going to challenge your license. But the whole point is that while other places are
00:11:20.980getting rid of restrictions, you have BC that's doubling and tripling down and proceeding with
00:11:26.040even more of them. So no one is out of the woods yet. And this is why the convoy existed. This is
00:11:31.740why people were protesting because they were seeing, even if it appeared we were moving beyond
00:11:36.800a lot of this stuff, there were still remnants of this in existence in government policy at the
00:11:41.420federal level, at the provincial level. Just this morning, Pierre Polyev, the conservative
00:11:46.140leadership candidate, published a letter he sent to Justin Trudeau saying, drop all the federal
00:11:51.900mandates. And also what you need to do is start telling the provinces, encouraging the provinces
00:11:58.440to drop their mandates, because a lot of this is integrated. And yes, most of the restrictions are
00:12:03.740the provincial level but it goes in both directions and that's the point of it here so we can't talk
00:12:08.460about this as though it's just a one outlier at one particular government level no a lot of these
00:12:13.660things are very much blended so uh my again my condolences to people in bc i love bc it's a
00:12:19.740beautiful province i've spent a lot of time there uh not uh not in a little while i haven't been
00:12:24.060there in maybe two years a year and a year and ten months or so but i hope i hope you get to
00:12:30.060round the corner on this quite soon. I want to turn the page here because there was a private
00:12:35.080member's bill I wanted to talk about here by Garnett Janis, the conservative MP from Sherwood
00:12:40.320Park, Fort Saskatchewan, to address political discrimination under the Federal Human Rights
00:12:46.440Act. So if you're not familiar with it, the Human Rights Act has a number of grounds of
00:12:51.580discrimination, prohibited grounds of discrimination. Notably, this was changed, I think, last in,
00:12:57.420what was it would have been 2017 when gender identity was added in but it's all of these
00:13:02.620criteria against which the government or federally regulated industries cannot discriminate garnet
00:13:09.660jenis wants to add political discrimination we'll talk about what that means right now
00:13:13.980the conservative mp for sherwood park for saskatchewan joins me garnet good to talk to
00:13:18.700you sir what are you talking about here thank you for the opportunity to share with you andrew always
00:13:23.500a pleasure to be on your show so the as you mentioned the canadian human rights act has
00:13:28.620various criteria in it uh in terms of basis on which you're not allowed to discriminate against
00:13:34.220people and i would like to add political belief and activity as prohibited grounds of discrimination so
00:13:41.340if your employer sees that you're volunteering for the ndp maybe that applies to some of your
00:13:45.980some of your listeners uh then they um then they can't be fired for doing that uh if somebody is
00:13:52.380posting commentary about political issues on their social media, and somebody wants to deny
00:13:58.140them government services or deny them equal access to something they would otherwise be
00:14:03.100entitled to on the basis of that, just as you can't be discriminated against on the basis of
00:14:07.700your race, your religious views, I would like to say as well that people shouldn't be discriminated
00:14:13.760on the basis of their political views. And on some level, it should be obvious why that is
00:14:19.720valid, that people should not face arbitrary discrimination by private companies, by service
00:14:26.040providers on the basis of their political views. It's not fair to them. But also let's talk about
00:14:30.540what creates a constructive democratic conversation. It's one in which people as individuals are free
00:14:38.860to bring their views into the conversation without worrying about intimidation that they might face
00:14:44.120from service providers who they rely on or from their employers. Corporations shouldn't be able
00:14:49.640to have an outsized role in our political debates by compelling their employees to be involved in
00:14:54.720a certain way or to be silent about certain opinions that they have. So really, this would
00:14:59.980be a good bill to put forward at any time. Obviously, I am putting it forward in a context
00:15:04.180where we're seeing a real sharpening of the political conversation and I think some efforts
00:15:09.600to punish people who have what are deemed the wrong views. So I think it's in that context that
00:15:15.040looking at addressing political discrimination is particularly important.
00:15:18.320I know that most of the human rights commissions that people hear about that are governing landlord-tenant issues or someone discriminated against on the job market, whatever the case is, are dealt with at the provincial level.
00:15:32.320So, jurisdictionally speaking, who is it that falls under the Canadian Human Rights Act?
00:15:37.780That's right. Great question. So in terms of comparing federal and provincial, I do want to say though, just kind of connected to that, is that most provinces have some degree of protection for people on the basis of their political views. There are a few provinces that don't, but most provinces and territories have that kind of protection. There is no such protection at the federal level.
00:15:59.440So in federal jurisdiction, we're talking about federally regulated commerce, so banking, interprovincial transportation, and of course the direct action of the federal government would apply as well.
00:16:15.180So it's a minority of the economy in terms of the private sector that's regulated by federal human rights legislation.
00:16:22.300um my understanding is that social media companies would fall under federal jurisdiction so that's a
00:16:28.360a significant potential area where people well i mean especially if the liberal government gets
00:16:32.460their way and and brings all of these online publishing uh avenues under the ambit of the
00:16:37.960crtc right that's right so uh this this bill would prevent the crtc from uh from from uh discriminating
00:16:47.240And in any case where you have a human rights complaint, there may be arguments back and forth about whether it was about the criteria that you are claiming it is, right?
00:16:58.460Someone might get fired and say they were discriminating against me because of my religion, and the employer might say, no, it had nothing to do with that.
00:17:06.280It was because he wasn't doing a good job or whatever it was, and then there would be this back and forth.
00:17:12.800And the same question could apply in the case of political discrimination.
00:17:16.420But either way, it does open the door to say that, you know, if someone is being fired from their job, denied service, if they're being censored, if they're facing denial of service on the basis of or what seems to be the basis of their political views, that that is analogous to other areas where we prohibit discrimination.
00:17:35.160the nation. Yeah, I mean, obviously, we were talking about the convoy earlier in the show,
00:17:39.320and the banks were following a federal regulation, and not one that I defend, and I know not one that
00:17:45.260you defend in the Emergencies Act, but theoretically, if a bank were to say, you know what, we don't
00:17:49.300like this protest that your bank accounts are tied to, you could conceivably file a complaint under
00:17:54.560your bill if this passed. Yeah, so it would be possible for someone who felt they'd been
00:18:00.980discriminated against on their political views by their bank. Let's say you had a clear-cut case
00:18:06.740where certain not-for-profits were being given accounts by a bank, and then they were being
00:18:13.200denied to other not-for-profits that had a different kind of political persuasion.
00:18:19.940And certainly if individuals were facing denial of service as a result of their political views
00:18:25.540or political activism. And I will say outright that while I had begun working on this legislation
00:18:33.220prior to the convoy movement and the use of the Emergencies Act, some of the things that
00:18:38.160happened in the context of that debate really spurred me on and I know have led a lot of people
00:18:43.400to connect the dots in terms of why this is so important. Because, look, people shouldn't break
00:18:49.040the law for any reason, but people were being treated very differently who were connected with
00:18:53.580one kind of protest versus other kinds of protests. That's very clear. There was a
00:19:01.100differential application of approach by the government that reflected the different politics
00:19:07.820of those who were involved in these things, and that's something that we shouldn't be seeing in
00:19:12.460Canada. People who donate to a political cause, especially having donated before any blockading
00:19:19.340had even started uh the fact that they had to fear for possible action against their bank accounts
00:19:24.940uh was was not right and speaks to the need for greater protection against discrimination on the
00:19:29.820basis of people's political views again i'm not a firm believer in cancel culture but let me just
00:19:35.340play the devil's advocate here does a bill like this protect people who have beliefs that again
00:19:41.740an employer or a service provider might have good reason to not want to associate with yeah so let
00:19:48.060Let me address that in a few different ways.
00:19:50.480Number one, it's important to put in the caveat that section 15 of the Human Rights Act has an exclusion for what are called bona fide occupational qualifications.
00:20:00.120That is, if you need to make a distinction within employment on the basis of some of the criteria because of the nature of the job, then you're allowed to do it.
00:20:12.300Some CBC reporter couldn't be like, yes, I want to be a raging political activist on my off time.
00:20:17.420so that could be carved out right so so um yeah i mean i was going to say in in the existing
00:20:23.380criteria you can't discriminate on the basis of religion but if you're hiring someone for your
00:20:28.720local church you might say we're hiring people that share the worldview of of of the church right
00:20:35.020and similar for political views uh for for mp's offices for uh for uh not-for-profit organizations
00:20:42.120Like, you know, if if you or I, Andrew, put in an application to work at the David Suzuki Foundation, we would probably be disqualified on the basis of our political views.
00:20:51.320And and I'm OK with that. Right. I think I think a not for profit organization that's involved in activism should be able to say you line up with what we're what we're doing or not.
00:21:00.340And similarly, you mentioned there's some jobs that might require political neutrality, like if you're working for Elections Canada or if you're going to be a judge, political activity could be a barrier,
00:21:09.080not because they're looking for people that are one way or the other but because you've got to be
00:21:12.360you've got to be neutral so uh so there's lots of areas where that might apply it might apply
00:21:17.400in government relations where a company's saying we're looking for to hire you know a mix of people
00:21:22.040who have different political persuasions so so those things could be worked out i think what
00:21:26.040we're really talking about is if um if somebody is uh is a working in a non-political workplace
00:21:32.760or they're just trying to access government services uh they shouldn't be fired on the
00:21:36.440basis of their political views. The other thing is this bill would not change hate speech laws.
00:21:41.560It wouldn't change laws around ideologically motivated crime. So if somebody is
00:21:51.720involved in prosecutable hate speech, they're not going to enjoy protection under this law.
00:21:59.960And you can have the separate debate about where the lines should be in terms of hate speech.
00:22:04.040Now, generally, I don't think that private sector employers are the ones to be enforcing those kinds of hate speech laws.
00:22:11.040I mean, I think we would want those to be enforced neutrally by civil authorities.
00:22:14.540We want to decide, you know, what is the speech that we agree democratically isn't allowed?
00:22:20.040And it shouldn't be up to someone's employer to have to or be expected to make those determinations.
00:22:25.480So there's the area of bona fide occupational qualifications.
00:22:28.420There's the area of hate speech that's already established.
00:22:31.520So I think those are just some important clarifications in terms of how this would work.
00:22:36.060The libertarian in me comes out here, though, and has to ask, how is this not just expanding the power of this bureaucracy, the Canadian Human Rights Commission?
00:22:44.080Well, I think in the context where we provide protection against all kinds of other forms of discrimination, it is logical to see political views as protected, as being sort of analogous to some of the other grounds that are there.
00:23:03.060But Andrew, I'd say as well that, again, from a libertarian perspective, this is protecting liberty, right? It's protecting the liberty of people to not be punished on the job or in terms of their access to government services for being involved in expressing their political views.
00:23:19.960I don't think anybody wants the kind of democracy where big corporations can shape the conversation.
00:23:28.320And I think we need to be wise to the fact that there's this phenomenon, and there's an author in the U.S. who wrote a great book called Woke Inc.
00:23:36.360His name is Vivek Ramaswamy. I'd recommend that book to your viewers.
00:23:41.320And he talks about this phenomenon of woke capitalism where large corporations have a close relationship with government.
00:23:49.220Sometimes they're directly pressured by government to take these sort of woke social justice positions that advance certain causes, and then they use their market power, their corporate position, to push those ideas onto their employees and onto the wider public.
00:24:05.720And it's not democratic. It's not consistent with the principles of individual liberty at all. So we have to recognize the steps that are required to protect the space for democracy and liberty.
00:24:20.820And that means protecting the right of employees, the right of those who rely on government and other services to go out and express their views, to speak truth to power, to challenge governments and corporations with ideas that may not be popular with them.
00:24:36.580I think that's consistent with a substantive commitment to liberty, not just saying liberty means doing nothing.
00:24:44.160No, liberty means having that substantive commitment to providing protection for liberty against the threats that exist to it.
00:24:49.780Yeah, that's fair. And I will add on that, looking at the case law from the Supreme Court of Canada on speech issues, on freedom of expression, they've been pretty consistent that political speech is the most worthy of protection. It deserves a very high level of protection because of the importance of political speech.
00:25:06.720So you are right to point out it's a curious gap if we do have this legislation that exists, a bureaucracy and an infrastructure that already exists to protect people against discrimination that is not included there.
00:25:18.340That bill is C-257, a private member's bill from Garnet Jenis, the Conservative MP for Sherwood Park, Fort Saskatchewan.
00:25:26.360Garnet, always a pleasure, Sher. Thank you.
00:25:28.300Thank you so much for the opportunity. Take care.
00:25:30.460All right. Thank you. Yeah, I actually I wrote a column the other day and I was, again, talking more about provincial human rights commissions.
00:25:36.320I was talking about the idea of whether provincial business or not provincial businesses, but
00:25:41.680businesses should be allowed under provincial law to decide for themselves they want to
00:25:47.080allow vaccination proof of requirement or proof of vaccination as a requirement.
00:25:51.800The words all get jumbled in every single provincial legislation.
00:25:54.980So now I'm doing the fun jumbling on my own.
00:25:57.640But and again, the position I took was the libertarian position on that, which is, yes,
00:26:02.200we should allow businesses to make these decisions for themselves.
00:26:05.260But I put the caveat there that the barrier to that in other cases is these provincial