Juno News - The Freedom Occupation： The Movement That Fuelled a Nation

00:00:00.000 Good night.

00:00:30.000 Growing anxiety this morning about the COVID-19 trend in Canada as we take a look at the numbers.

00:00:37.120 The CDC said it is working on new guidance from mask wearing.

00:00:42.780 Before you go anywhere, you're going to need a poll.

00:00:44.620 The federal government is warning the rules may change again.

00:00:47.960 Mayor Jim Watson is declaring a state of emergency to give the city more flexibility.

00:00:52.560 Ottawa has declared a state of emergency.

00:00:54.740 The city of Ottawa has declared a state of emergency.

00:00:57.500 That's because of ongoing protests there by truck drivers and their supporters.

00:01:01.280 It's being blocked by truckers protesting vaccine rules.

00:01:04.660 But what's currently happening there is unprecedented.

00:01:09.240 So over the last two weeks have tried tactics never seen before in Canada.

00:01:14.440 People were coming out and supporting this because they knew they had to.

00:01:18.820 All Canadians must act now. 0.98

00:01:22.180 And the potential for destruction was huge.

00:01:26.200 The convoy is attracting supporters with a wide range of views.

00:01:29.500 And I thought to myself, well, they really misjudged the moment.

00:01:32.940 The folks who live in the downtown core were terrorized.

00:01:41.260 It was clear there was no justification for it.

00:01:45.140 You don't just show up with all these trucks and take over downtown.

00:01:50.160 I don't believe it became illegal until the Emergencies Act was actually put in place.

00:01:56.100 They needed to use the Emergencies Act to declare the protest illegal.

00:01:59.160 Oh, yeah.

00:02:00.160 While cattle are knocking on the streets.

00:02:01.200 I don't believe it anymore.

00:02:02.200 I'm coming back.

00:02:02.220 I'm coming back.

00:02:03.260 Yeah, I can describe what it was like pulling into Ottawa with a convoy.

00:02:30.020 It was unbelievable. The emotions were crazy busy, trying to be organized, not knowing how many trucks, cars were behind you was an awesome feeling.

00:02:42.020 The excitement level was really high for everybody. I had my son in the truck with me and yeah, he wanted the horn being honked all the time.

00:02:53.440 It was just an emotional wow in the fact that there were so many people with flags standing on the bridges.

00:03:02.940 And yeah, it brought emotions out that my wife and I will never experience again.

00:03:09.760 It was a beautiful, exciting time.

00:03:12.860 What happened to her husband?

00:03:28.720 The Freedom Convoy happened because you

00:03:58.540 had this growing segment of the population that was absolutely tired of COVID restrictions,

00:04:05.780 not just from the federal government and the provincial government, but I think a lot of

00:04:09.840 the narratives around them that we saw increasingly with the convoy even. I mean,

00:04:14.120 Justin Trudeau calling them a fringe minority, going back early in Ontario to being called a

00:04:18.960 bunch of yahoos. So people felt like they were increasingly being excluded from society. 0.99

00:04:24.040 And the convoy wasn't just a protest against the restrictions themselves, but I think also

00:04:29.180 the media's depictions of the people that were forming the convoy. I'm here because on January

00:04:35.020 26, 2022, I lost my nursing job after 12 years. Yeah, when the truckers first arrived,

00:04:43.060 it was more of a novelty. And the reason is, is I think most people were under the impression,

00:04:48.980 I wouldn't say to what extent they'd been led to believe, but they were under the impression that

00:04:53.580 this was going to last a weekend. I really didn't know if it was going to last more than a weekend

00:04:57.520 or not. From my mind, it was 50-50. There were folks who seemed a little bit less committed to

00:05:03.400 the cause, who wanted to come out and protest against vaccine mandates, in cases against vaccines,

00:05:08.560 against lockdowns, against masks, mask mandates. And it wasn't clear whether or not the majority

00:05:14.180 were folks who were more dedicated, more hardcore, more willing to sacrifice,

00:05:17.900 or whether it was folks who just wanted a big public demonstration, a protest, some civil

00:05:22.680 disobedience, but really could have gone many different directions. A lot of people are losing

00:05:26.960 their jobs and their livelihoods. That's not okay, so. I'm here because I would like to see change

00:05:31.220 happen and I want to see it done in a peaceful manner. I think this is a great way to do it.

00:05:35.120 This is democracy. This is what democracy is all about. People believe that the government has

00:05:40.660 overstepped with mandates and they're here to exercise their democratic right.

00:05:47.900 Yeah, I joined the convoy because we've been having a frustrating two years. Society has been,

00:05:55.240 COVID definitely has been tough on society and the restrictions have been tough as well.

00:06:00.920 As the information comes out, we can see that they're not working. They actually are doing more

00:06:06.880 harm than good. So that's why we decided to join the convoy, thought it was a protest that we could support.

00:06:12.940 That was incredible. It's hard not to look back and just smile about that, right? There was joy, peace, kindness.

00:06:21.820 Canadians are just beauties. I mean, at the end of the day, that was like Canada Day on steroids.

00:06:28.440 This is affecting all of us. So it's a widespread thing. It's not just one community.

00:06:36.400 I think a lot of Canadians are worried about what's happening with our country and are worried

00:06:39.820 about the direction that policies are heading. Don't be controlled by the government. We are the

00:06:45.780 ones that control ourselves. Because if it's lost, you know, the next generation won't be around.

00:06:51.420 This is not what happened. These people came with very big machines. They came with huge trucks. Most

00:07:01.540 of them had big, they were transport trucks. They were big. And the potential for destruction

00:07:07.720 was huge. Like I remember thinking that if ever anything happened, if ever any of these people

00:07:14.800 decided that they were going to be violent, the damage would have been enormous. And what I mean is

00:07:20.620 if you have these trucks, they can easily be destroying buildings, destroying Parliament Hill.

00:07:25.580 They could destroy anything. Nothing will stop these trucks. And I remember walking from my car

00:07:32.140 where I was parked because obviously I couldn't come downtown. So I was parked in the market and I would

00:07:37.260 walk and I was walking. And I remember, and it didn't take very long, that it was tantamount to a war zone.

00:07:43.980 I don't know if it's fair to say that Ottawa residents were genuinely concerned for their safety

00:07:53.500 with it. I think certainly there was an uncertainty when this all started of what it was going to look

00:07:58.300 like. Because you had the media that was advancing this narrative of a January 6th style insurrection,

00:08:03.900 of some violent protest. Look at what happened in the states on January 6th. What happened?

00:08:08.860 A bunch of people decided they were going to storm, to storm Congress, which is what they did. Now,

00:08:17.660 what is the difference between that situation and ours? At first they came for the pastors,

00:08:22.380 and then the owners of the businesses, and then the frontline workers. And now they have touched

00:08:26.380 the nerve because here are the truckers. I tend to agree with CSIS's assessment, the Integrated 0.99

00:08:31.580 Terrorism Assessment Center, which is kind of an open source reporting mechanism that reports to

00:08:35.980 police, reports to domestic law enforcement agencies. It basically said there was no concrete

00:08:40.780 threat. There was nobody proposing an attack, but that the possibility of an individual going rogue,

00:08:47.580 an individual committing attack was present. At no point did I see any of the organizers, any of the

00:08:54.300 organizations at the core of this talk about any sort of direct state violence, or start putting

00:09:02.620 together the pieces that would be necessary to carry out an attack like that. Nothing I saw there led me

00:09:07.180 to believe that an attack was imminent, but the conditions were right for someone to lose it.

00:09:11.900 Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! And I remember that there were these

00:09:19.500 individuals, these individuals that were on different corners, all of a sudden they'd step

00:09:23.960 out of a car and their purpose was to intimidate me. I remember them looking at me, trying to give

00:09:31.040 the impression that they were sort of in control. To what extent did I have a right to be there?

00:09:36.880 And that was scary. It was scary because when that would happen, I was always thinking it wouldn't

00:09:42.540 take much and it wouldn't take long. And I mean that because when you look at all the violence

00:09:48.860 that has occurred, great moments of violence in the history of Canada and North America,

00:09:54.400 it all starts with a little something happening. And that little something could have happened

00:09:58.600 any time and the consequences would have been huge. Yeah, the residents of Ottawa feeling unsafe,

00:10:05.860 I just have a hard time understanding where that came from. I feel like they should have

00:10:10.120 come to the protest and seen it for themselves. They must have been listening to too much of the

00:10:17.820 legacy media because you couldn't have been there and felt there wasn't a sense of peace.

00:10:26.640 Lord, we ask that you would undertake. Father, you are able to do it, dear Father. Help her, dear God.

00:10:33.200 They should have showed up.

00:10:35.160 When I got to Ottawa, I flew into Ottawa because I just didn't know if I'd be able to drive in

00:10:40.060 or drive out. With the traffic, my taxi driver was nervous about driving downtown because he had heard,

00:10:45.880 and he was listening to CBC radio, which may have contributed, but he was nervous and said,

00:10:50.860 well, I might not be able to drive you up there. Not because of traffic, but because of safety.

00:10:54.880 So I think that people were being told to be a lot more worried than the situation warranted.

00:11:06.760 One of the big frustrations I had is that the media's coverage of the convoy went through

00:11:11.260 different stages. At first, they just completely ignored it. And then they were speaking about it

00:11:16.140 in a way that made it clear they didn't really understand what it was about. I mean, some of the

00:11:20.440 early coverage, anti-vaccine protests, which was never the case. It was an anti-vaccine mandate

00:11:26.500 protest. And then the violent narrative.

00:11:29.940 So large sections of the mainstream media failed to cover the protests objectively.

00:11:35.280 They were pushing a narrative, an agenda, which was contrary to anything that I had experienced

00:11:42.660 for the three weeks of the protests where protesters were here. There was a dereliction of duty.

00:11:48.540 This was an important moment in this country's cultural history, and they were not covering it.

00:11:53.880 They were covering something else.

00:11:55.300 In this current crisis with Russia, I don't know if it's far-fetched to ask, but there is concern that

00:12:02.780 Russian actors could be continuing to fuel things as this protest grows, but perhaps even instigating

00:12:10.620 it from the outset.

00:12:12.580 So it was clear that they were missing the mark at every stage of it. When I started covering it

00:12:18.440 and was comparing what I was seeing on the ground with the media coverage I'd see when I went back

00:12:23.100 of my computer, I was astonished at how two people could look at the same situation and draw such

00:12:28.620 vastly different conclusions. And I think one of the biggest examples of this is the media's focus

00:12:34.120 on these little outliers that really didn't characterize the convoy story, like the Terry Fox

00:12:39.680 statue or, you know, the so-called stealing food from the homeless incident or the stuff at the war

00:12:45.340 memorial or this attempted arson in an apartment building. All of these things that either did not

00:12:50.600 happen or did not happen in the way that they were reported.

00:12:53.700 So the attempted arson story was, I think, a turning point in the protests because a few days later,

00:13:03.240 the prime minister decided to invoke the Emergencies Act because the incident spoke to the safety aspects

00:13:11.480 of the protests where residents said that they were afraid of stepping out of their homes.

00:13:17.160 And they attributed this to the protesters in very explicit terms. And very quickly, as soon as this

00:13:25.480 post became viral, the politicians, including the mayor of the city, several journalists also gave oxygen

00:13:33.440 to this allegation that the protesters were behind this attempted arson. The police hadn't even begun

00:13:40.180 their investigation at this point. It was still very early days, but already this narrative had taken hold

00:13:46.020 that residents of the city were unsafe and that the protesters were going around setting buildings

00:13:51.120 on fire. Yesterday, we learned of a horrific story that clearly demonstrates the malicious intent of

00:13:57.740 these protesters occupying our city. At 5 a.m., and this was captured on the building's video,

00:14:04.500 on Sunday morning, two young people in the lobby of the building on Lisker Street, where they proceeded to light

00:14:09.600 fire starter bricks near the elevators before taping up the door handles so residents would struggle

00:14:15.600 to get out during a fire.

00:14:17.320 When the police concluded their investigation, they said that the alleged arsonist had nothing to do

00:14:22.580 with the protesters or the truckers. So that story was effectively debunked. And I can think of several

00:14:27.960 other such stories that just, you know, were debunked in very similar ways.

00:14:33.280 There was a story early on, I think it was like the first day or the second day when the convoy had arrived in Ottawa,

00:14:38.500 that there was a report that convoy protesters had been stealing food from a homeless shelter.

00:14:45.500 And I mean, certainly it's entirely possible that a couple of people that arrived at the convoy went to a homeless shelter

00:14:51.720 and caused damage. But what was missing from that story is that as soon as convoy organizers learned

00:14:58.060 that there was a supposed incident, they flooded this shelter with food. They brought so much food that

00:15:04.640 to this and other shelters that they said, we can't accommodate all of this. And then they were firing up grills

00:15:09.600 on the street and feeding the homeless for weeks. And in some cases, even housing homeless people.

00:15:14.620 So it was a very significant misrepresentation of the atmosphere that the convoy supporters and organizers

00:15:21.160 tried to cultivate, which was one of giving, not taking.

00:15:23.920 Oh, peace and love out here. Nobody's been disrespectful at all. You got people walking around

00:15:31.140 picking up garbage that's on the ground. Everybody's had fun smiling, enjoying seeing people's faces.

00:15:37.300 Think about the Terry Fox story. What the media did with the Terry Fox story is just indescribable, really.

00:15:44.280 Somebody put a sign on him and a Canadian flag. How many times have we not seen Terry Fox dressed

00:15:50.980 in other protests? It's a bit of an unfair, yeah, I guess, description.

00:16:01.040 There was times when the coverage lacked curiosity, where you had reporters who would hear one of the

00:16:08.420 organizers say, I'm not against vaccines. And then the mainstream press would go and say, well,

00:16:13.200 the organizers aren't necessarily against vaccines. We know that's nonsense. Without fail,

00:16:18.220 every single one of the organizers, the main organizers, the main influencers in this convoy

00:16:22.480 were anti-vaccines and spread anti-vaccine misinformation. So I think in some cases,

00:16:26.960 the mainstream media was not critical enough of the convoy, the organizers, the influencers.

00:16:31.620 But there was also a ton of instances where mainstream coverage was critical to a lazy degree.

00:16:38.980 You saw this rhetoric that foreign money, that maybe Russian disinformation,

00:16:43.580 was feeding the convoy. There's virtually zero basis for that. I don't think we've identified a single

00:16:49.000 dollar of Russian money that wound up anywhere around the convoy or the occupation.

00:16:55.040 I've seen nothing since the mainstream coverage of the media to lead me to believe that what was

00:17:03.440 being covered was not true. In fact, what I've seen is I've seen more of an attempt by the organizers,

00:17:11.360 organizers, and I use the word organizers loosely, those that were the face of the protest,

00:17:17.080 trying to, in fact, change the narrative as to what was actually being said and being done

00:17:24.640 at the time the convoy was in place or was basically anchored here in Ottawa.

00:17:32.080 There was also instances where it was reported sort of without caveat that the whole movement

00:17:38.920 was leading insurrection or that the entire occupation was there to overturn the government.

00:17:44.080 There's a lot of nuance required when you introduce an idea like that, because yes,

00:17:48.160 at the core of the convoy was a document that basically sought to supplant the democratic

00:17:53.480 government of Canada. That is accurate. There are individuals who wanted to remove the government

00:17:57.940 and try them for treason. There is a running theory inside the convoy that the government was

00:18:03.680 illegitimate or undemocratic or ought to be deposed. You can report on that. But to just say writ large,

00:18:10.260 the entire aim of the movement is to overturn the government, to lead an insurrection. It's not

00:18:14.820 factually accurate. People give the government the power to act in accordance with their values.

00:18:21.680 Nobody should be forced to take an experimental treatment. And, you know, it's a matter of personal

00:18:27.180 choice. The government does not have any independent power. It is us that confer the power on the

00:18:33.880 government. And where they overstep, the people have a right to voice their opinions.

00:18:38.760 So there's a lot of questions need to be answered about public health in this country.

00:18:42.200 And the people have had enough.

00:18:43.920 What I think about the Nazi paraphernalia that came to the protest is you're going to have a bad

00:19:01.460 apple in every crew. I don't, I cannot imagine a single protest where you don't have a goofball. 0.95

00:19:09.220 Um, I have a hard time believing that it was a true protester. I, I believe it was probably a

00:19:17.120 plant. I'll never be able to prove that, but they didn't stick around long. So you have to imagine

00:19:24.720 that it was there for the photo op and carry on. They're almost under the impression, it seems to

00:19:31.300 me, and that's what they're trying to portray, that what we're looking at in this whole, in the

00:19:35.880 hearings under the emergency act is we're trying to determine whether or not what they did was

00:19:40.660 justified. That's not at all what's going on. It's clear that what they did was not justified.

00:19:45.700 The question becomes, was it sufficient what they were doing that was not justified to invoke

00:19:51.960 the emergency act? That's the question.

00:19:53.580 After discussing with cabinet and caucus, after consultation with premiers from all provinces

00:20:06.160 and territories, after speaking with opposition leaders, the federal government has invoked the

00:20:14.960 emergencies act to supplement provincial and territorial capacity to address the blockades and occupations.

00:20:27.700 So on that Friday of the last weekend, basically the last Friday of the convoy, I was quite taken by

00:20:35.800 how slowly it was moving in the morning. Obviously, police were showing up from all across the country.

00:20:41.420 They were moving themselves into formations. And starting a few blocks east of Parliament Hill,

00:20:48.280 down at the Rideau and Sussex area, police were moving forward, but it was ever so slowly.

00:20:53.380 They'd advance, you know, maybe six, eight feet every 10 to 15 minutes. And they would do this all

00:20:59.080 morning, so much so that it took hours and hours and they had barely covered any ground at all.

00:21:04.960 The people who hate you and want police defunded. And they'll Monday morning quarterback every arrest you ever make.

00:21:09.840 So looking at that, a lot of the protesters were saying, well, we've got all weekend there. I mean,

00:21:15.120 they're not going to even get to Parliament Hill this weekend, let alone break it up. Obviously,

00:21:19.640 we know that wasn't the case.

00:21:21.840 On the Friday morning, most of the interactions I saw between police and protesters were fairly normal.

00:21:38.780 Police had their line. They were moving people forward. Every now and then, you'd get a protester that didn't want to move back.

00:21:44.520 And they get pushed back with a baton, at least.

00:21:50.980 But it looked fairly standard for, you know, riot policing. And I don't mean riot describing it, but just the way that police call it.

00:22:00.780 And that, by the afternoon, had changed. More people had shown up in Ottawa. There had been more tension. There was more law enforcement. It stopped looking like a standard policing operation.

00:22:12.780 And to a lot of people started looking like a military operation, just because of the formations and the uniforms and the refusal by a lot of police to even, you know, speak to protesters. There was just this stone-faced approach.

00:22:25.780 Police in Canada are too quick to use force in crowd control situations.

00:22:38.780 Police in Canada are too quick to use fire.

00:22:47.780 Police in Canada

00:22:57.780 Police in Canada

00:23:02.780 Police in Canada

00:23:05.780 Move back! 0.99

00:23:10.640 Move back! 0.99

00:23:11.560 Move back! 0.99

00:23:12.400 Move back! 0.99

00:23:13.720 Move back! 0.99

00:23:15.960 Move back! 0.99

00:23:17.740 Move back! 0.99

00:23:25.620 That way! 0.85

00:23:29.320 That way! 0.85

00:23:31.640 Move back! 0.99

00:23:33.320 Move! 1.00

00:23:33.720 I think the use of mounted units, officers on horseback, is one of the most stupid and 0.99

00:23:47.300 dangerous things a police service can do in a volatile crowd situation like this. 0.98

00:23:52.200 It was incredibly dangerous.

00:23:53.740 It was done to try and push back a crowd in a way that was completely not warranted and

00:23:59.220 it led to a woman getting injured. 0.99

00:24:00.280 Oh, come on through.

00:24:02.580 Come on through.

00:24:03.720 What is happening here?

00:24:05.700 Wow.

00:24:06.540 What is this lady doing? 1.00

00:24:07.980 Trampling.

00:24:08.900 Trampling horses.

00:24:10.420 Trampling.

00:24:11.280 Trampling.

00:24:12.220 Trampling.

00:24:13.080 One.

00:24:14.320 Oh my God.

00:24:16.120 What the hell is that?

00:24:17.280 Lockdown.

00:24:18.660 I mean, we've all seen the viral video of Candice Serro getting trampled by the horses. 0.97

00:24:24.020 She had her mobility walker knocked down and she was trampled and she sustained injuries.

00:24:28.740 My office is looking into that matter and there's more details that we have to uncover before

00:24:34.620 I can comment further.

00:24:35.620 I can tell you that the police in Ottawa, while not perfect, used force at a significantly lower

00:24:42.080 rate than I've seen most police forces in this country use force against large crowds.

00:24:46.580 I don't think peacefully protesting warrants being pepper sprayed.

00:24:50.440 I think anyone that was being violent with police, anyone that was pushing back against police

00:24:54.880 obviously is fair game for police to respond and try to de-escalate that situation.

00:25:00.280 But the reality is people who were doing their best to get out of the way were getting caught

00:25:05.560 up in this and that's the problem.

00:25:07.060 These tactics are supposed to be used when police are trying to clear a space.

00:25:11.440 If people are already moving, people are already walking back, there's no justification to deploy them.

00:25:16.300 Certainly there was police violence and people can argue about whether it was justified or unjustified, but we know from the incident of police horses trampling a woman, from protesters getting pepper sprayed, from

00:25:46.280 from tear gas being fired into the crowds, absolutely there was violence, and I know personally that you didn't need to be committing violence to be targeted by it.

00:25:56.720 It's hard to answer that question because I think the police have their training and they know how they would normally act.

00:26:03.800 But in addition to having their training and their judgment and their discretion, they also have their marching orders from the higher ranking officers.

00:26:10.720 There was virtually no, in fact, I think zero use of tear gas by the Ottawa Police Service.

00:26:19.020 In fact, there was tear gas used by the protesters against the Ottawa Police Service.

00:26:23.740 Pepper spray was used relatively limitedly.

00:26:27.420 There were instances where officers used, I believe, the butt of the rifles or batons to hit people who were not moving along the front lines.

00:26:35.580 There were some takedown and arrests.

00:26:37.980 There were some projectile, I think, bead bag rounds fired into the crowd.

00:26:41.460 I think each one of those instances should be investigated about whether or not that was an appropriate use of force because I think we should hold the Ottawa Police Service to the highest possible standard and use this event as the baseline.

00:26:51.980 This isn't about the police.

00:26:53.140 This is about the politicians.

00:26:54.440 This is about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his failure.

00:26:57.300 Not the police's failure, but his failure.

00:26:59.460 I do not believe that the government had had any right to remove protesters at all.

00:27:13.060 It's a democratic society.

00:27:15.400 We have the right to protest, especially in our capital.

00:27:20.280 And the narrative that the government and the media wanted to push that businesses couldn't be open is absolutely nonsense.

00:27:28.300 There was not a business that was blocked from being open if they had a desire to be open other than the police's own concrete barriers.

00:27:42.500 Where we were at by the second week of February needed serious action.

00:27:49.500 Was that the Emergencies Act?

00:27:50.940 I think that was the thing available.

00:27:53.460 I think the way it was deployed was relatively reasonable.

00:27:56.240 I think the orders the federal government wrote to go with the act were irresponsible.

00:28:00.860 They went too far.

00:28:01.860 They allowed far too much latitude and jurisdiction for the federal government to seize and freeze assets.

00:28:07.900 It was so geographically wide that I think it gave them nearly limitless power to break up demonstration anywhere in the country.

00:28:16.100 So I think there's bad things about it.

00:28:18.000 I think at the end of the day we're going to conclude that it was the right thing to do.

00:28:20.800 I don't believe it became illegal until the Emergencies Act was actually put in place.

00:28:25.500 They needed to use the Emergencies Act to declare the protest illegal.

00:28:29.680 Because in Canada a protest is not illegal until it becomes a riot.

00:28:34.360 And that could have been covered under the Riot Act of the Criminal Code.

00:28:37.740 The fact that they couldn't use the Riot Act in the Criminal Code indicates to me that it was not an illegal protest until they invoked the Emergencies Act.

00:28:45.860 Also, it's important to note that during the protests, Ottawa police actually said that street crime had come down in Ottawa.

00:28:52.240 And that makes a lot of sense to me because you had a lot of people walking around and, you know, in the city.

00:28:57.900 And it wasn't desolate like it usually is in the dead of winter.

00:29:01.580 One of the requirements to invoke the Emergencies Act is that the existing tools, laws, enforcement agencies,

00:29:13.980 that those existing tools had to be inadequate and incapable of addressing the so-called emergency.

00:29:20.020 So there needed to be an emergency and the existing laws needed to be inadequate.

00:29:23.640 And yet every single charge that has come from the arrests laid that weekend have all been under existing laws.

00:29:32.260 And powers that the police officers used were existing powers.

00:29:36.940 Well, to me the protest was always legal in the fact that when we first got there,

00:29:44.220 it was the Ottawa police that escorted us onto these streets.

00:29:48.420 It was the Ottawa police that ensured that we kept roads open, which we did at all times.

00:29:55.540 There was always lanes open for emergency vehicles to get through.

00:29:59.440 And even on the Monday, which I believe was Valentine's Day,

00:30:04.500 I helped with a couple other of the organizers with the Ottawa police escort 15 more trucks up onto Wellington.

00:30:13.720 So that was the Monday before the Friday where they said we were illegal.

00:30:19.580 So to me, we were legal the whole time.

00:30:23.460 The issue is finished.

00:30:24.780 So we now know what happened.

00:30:26.960 Nobody knew what happened or what was going to happen when we started, when we invoked the Emergency Act.

00:30:32.920 It ended up being that finally there wasn't as much violence as might have been anticipated.

00:30:39.920 But if when we start, when they started, when the police started to basically remove the protesters,

00:30:48.880 if the protesters would have decided to put it in high gear and be as violent as they could,

00:30:56.420 all of the powers that had been given to them by the Emergency Act would have been needed.

00:31:03.240 And that's why, to me, it's clear there's no issue the government had to invoke the Emergency Act.

00:31:10.280 Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act for political purposes.

00:31:14.520 The purpose of the Emergency Act, again, is to have a tool when existing tools don't work.

00:31:20.980 And Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act basically to appear strong in the public eye.

00:31:27.420 But as you could see that a few days after he invoked it,

00:31:30.940 he didn't follow through with having the Emergencies Act ratified in the Senate

00:31:34.280 and ultimately withdrew his use of the Emergencies Act.

00:31:38.640 So clearly it was a political tool.

00:31:41.920 We were not playing a game, but it seemed like the other team was not playing within the rules.

00:31:48.500 So then there's no use anymore.

00:31:51.380 Saturday morning, the police started smashing windows on trucks and really beating people up.

00:31:56.940 And we said, we've made our point.

00:31:59.820 It's over.

00:32:00.900 There's no use more people getting hurt.

00:32:03.480 So we decided to leave and we did end up having a couple trucks stuck in

00:32:07.320 and getting towed and window smashed and everything.

00:32:10.160 I think at the time that the Prime Minister rescinded the Emergencies Act,

00:32:19.560 it was clear there was no justification for it.

00:32:23.320 And not that there had ever been a justification, but certainly days later,

00:32:27.120 the supposed blockades that were in place to justify the Emergencies Act had been disbanded.

00:32:32.960 The crisis was gone.

00:32:34.500 The money ceased to be an issue.

00:32:36.400 And I think he was very worried about what the Senate was going to do,

00:32:40.460 which hadn't voted on it at the time, and also what Canadians were going to do.

00:32:43.920 Because it's one thing if you concoct an emergency to justify all sorts of measures that the government put forward.

00:32:49.460 It's another thing when you indefinitely keep that in place, when there's nothing that even resembles a crisis.

00:32:55.820 More and more often, I'm coming to the conclusion that the evidence that the government used to justify invoking the Act

00:33:02.040 is news reports from the public sphere that are public information.

00:33:07.620 And if they didn't have some sort of smoking gun evidence to justify the use of this Act,

00:33:12.320 and we're basing it completely off of news articles, many of which have had to be retracted since we found new evidence

00:33:19.280 that indicates that it was false information, false allegations,

00:33:23.440 I think that's going to be a big problem for the government if that's the evidence that they relied upon.

00:33:27.140 I think it certainly was upsetting in a country like Canada where, you know, we have a lot of freedoms

00:33:47.320 to see police, you know, pushing protesters out on the streets.

00:33:53.160 And I think what a lot of Canadians, certainly what I think, is how could we have let this get to this point in the first place?

00:33:59.640 Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!

00:34:06.420 There was a point where I think a lot of people, myself included, were hopeful that the government would look at the truckers 1.00

00:34:11.260 and say, maybe we miscalculated, maybe we misjudged this.

00:34:15.080 But the federal government doubled down.

00:34:16.920 Some of these people are living in a fantasy land of constructed conspiracies.

00:34:25.780 And I don't know if I had hoped that maybe they had broken out of some of those between the end of the convoy and today,

00:34:31.420 but they certainly haven't.

00:34:37.700 Yeah, how did I feel driving home?

00:34:39.520 To be honest, at that time, you're tired. You want to go home.

00:34:46.980 It didn't feel like the job was done.

00:34:50.380 Yes, we did accomplish something.

00:34:52.340 We woke up the world, first of all, and it actually still was giving people hope

00:34:59.220 that something would change, that things would get better.

00:35:02.340 But then the reception that we got in Niagara was unbelievable.

00:35:12.960 Yeah, the support that we got from the community meant an awful lot.

00:35:18.640 Oh, sorry. I can't think about that enough.

00:35:21.440 And having all these people on the side of the road, standing there, waving the flags again,

00:35:31.360 saying thank you for doing what you did, gave me a little bit of closure,

00:35:35.120 but you still wish that things would have gone different.

00:35:42.240 Yeah, I do feel like the convoy accomplished actually more than what we set out for.

00:35:47.680 Obviously, the mandates, the federal mandates are still there,

00:35:51.700 but the community, at least here in Niagara region, is super unified.

00:35:58.160 The support is amazing.

00:36:02.320 I believe the mandates were there to try to disunify our country and keep people apart,

00:36:07.840 and it's done the exact opposite with the convoy.

00:36:10.760 We'll be right back.

00:36:40.760 It's deeply concerning that we have a significant number of people in this country

00:36:46.200 who have detached from reality, but again, I get why people wind up there.

00:36:53.320 They lost friends to suicide, they lost family members to illnesses,

00:36:56.580 and they couldn't go visit them in the hospital.

00:36:58.620 They couldn't go to their family member's funeral, their friend's funeral,

00:37:01.280 and that was really tough on them, and I get that.

00:37:03.440 I've been there too. I think a lot of us have been there,

00:37:05.460 and they've been looking for explanations for how we got here.

00:37:09.820 And they look at somewhere like the federal government,

00:37:11.820 where the prime minister frequently attacks his critics as being conspiracy theorists

00:37:19.500 and frequently belittles and demonizes people who are not settled on the science,

00:37:24.340 and I think they tend to pull back.

00:37:32.000 Our media, the health experts, they're not interested in what's good for every Canadian.

00:37:39.560 They're just interested in what's good for their narrative,

00:37:42.220 and there's a lot of things going on that we as Canadians need to realize.

00:37:49.040 You can't trust the media, let alone your own government anymore.

00:37:53.880 What's up, guys?

00:37:55.160 What's up?

00:37:56.320 Come on, come on. 0.99

00:37:57.680 Move on! Move on!

00:37:59.960 Move on! Move on!

00:38:01.520 Move on!

00:38:02.280 Move on!

00:38:03.260 Move on!

00:38:04.260 Move on!

00:38:04.340 Move on!

00:38:05.260 Move on!

00:38:06.380 Move on!

00:38:06.740 Move on!

00:38:07.200 Move on!

00:38:07.340 Move on!

00:38:08.300 Move on!

00:38:08.740 Move on!

00:38:09.300 Move on!

00:38:09.340 Move on!

00:38:10.340 Move on!

00:38:11.300 I mean, Trudeau, anytime someone has thought that he was just done

00:38:33.480 and going to lose the election, he's won.

00:38:35.420 So people shouldn't underestimate Justin Trudeau.

00:38:37.740 He may not have the massive, massive Trudeau mania 2.0 popularity he had in 2015,

00:38:44.140 but he's still resonating with voters.

00:38:46.260 And even if you look at the 2021 election,

00:38:49.360 a big part of what he was offering Canadians was more restrictions on the unvaccinated.

00:38:54.920 He campaigned on firing public servants if they didn't get the COVID vaccine.

00:38:59.080 He campaigned on banning unvaccinated Canadians from air and rail travel.

00:39:04.200 So he's been quite transparent about what it is that he wanted to do and Canadians rewarded that.

00:39:10.100 Now, you can talk about whether this is because the Conservatives didn't put up their best and brightest,

00:39:14.440 but clearly the scandal and frustration that a lot of people see in Trudeau

00:39:20.740 isn't necessarily representative of how Canadians as a whole have seen him up until the last election.

00:39:26.600 Now, whether that's changed since then is a different story.

00:39:29.040 You know, that's a good question.

00:39:34.180 And I think a lot of it is going to ride upon the inquiry and the parliamentary review.

00:39:40.180 And I think if it can be proven that the government inappropriately used the Emergencies Act,

00:39:45.040 I think it's going to be remembered as a time when the government overreached on Canadians' rights.

00:39:50.880 And it's going to look very bad on the current Liberal government.

00:39:54.320 I think the Freedom Convoy is going to be fairly divisive for a lot of people in how they remember it.

00:40:01.440 Certainly, I've talked to a lot of people in my own work on this that think it was just the greatest moment of their lives.

00:40:06.500 It was this time when, you know, the peasants took over the castle in a way 0.68

00:40:10.340 and ordinary people stood up and said, we're not going to take it anymore.

00:40:13.820 But still, the narratives that were being passed off by the government, by the media are still baked into a lot of people's perceptions of the convoy.

00:40:23.680 And those people, as we've seen in a number of other stories that have come up since,

00:40:28.560 are still very committed to this idea that it was a violent protest, that it was a lawless rebellion,

00:40:34.380 which just wasn't the case.

00:40:36.100 And the facts don't support that.

00:40:37.680 But the stubbornness has persisted among some.

00:40:40.760 I think the convoy is going to be remembered very negatively.

00:40:44.600 You know, I think it will be seen as an outgrowth of the intense frustration and alienation

00:40:51.960 that we all experienced during the pandemic, right?

00:40:54.680 I don't think this will be our January 6th, right?

00:40:58.580 I think that will be remembered very particularly in the U.S.

00:41:00.900 I think this is going to be remembered as the sort of culmination of a kind of, you know, intense anger

00:41:11.820 and disenchantment and disaffection that, you know, came to a head in 2022.

00:41:21.260 And that in some cases is understandable, in some cases is really out to lunch.

00:41:25.480 But I don't think it's going to be remembered particularly well.

00:41:29.320 I think the freedom convoy will be remembered by most Canadians as a very important moment in this country's history.

00:41:39.900 But it also depends on who you speak to.

00:41:42.560 The people who obviously supported the protest will romanticize the protest.

00:41:47.260 And the people who oppose the protest will try to delegitimize it and denigrate it.

00:41:51.400 But I hope that there's a mass of people in the center who will objectively sift through the facts and make up their own minds.

00:42:00.740 And I personally think that it was an important moment in the fight for individual liberty and freedoms.

00:42:06.140 That's what it was all about in the end.

00:42:08.340 And we've lost a bit of that during the two years of the pandemic.

00:42:13.300 And we've lost a bit of that during the two years of the pandemic.

00:42:43.280 And we've lost a bit of that during the two years of the pandemic.

00:43:13.280 We've lost a bit of that during the three years of the pandemic.

00:43:16.160 We've lost a bit of hope in 2019.

00:43:18.580 We've lost a bit of thebelial niveau for the pandemic.

00:43:21.280 We've lost a bit of that in 2019.

00:43:31.780 And we've lost a bit of the pandemic.

00:43:36.560 And we've lost an infinite number of the pandemic.

00:43:39.000 Thank you.

00:44:09.000 Thank you.

Juno News - February 24, 2023

The Freedom Occupation： The Movement That Fuelled a Nation

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