EZRA LEVANT ｜ Biden remains asleep at the wheel as U.S. struggles with border invasion
Summary
Ezra LeVant went to the Mexican border to see what he could see. He didn't find much, but he did see a lot of Border Patrol. And he saw some interesting things. You'll have to watch the video version of this podcast to see them.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Oh hi everybody, I'm in Arizona where I had an interview and while I was down here I decided
00:00:05.660
to go to the U.S. Mexico border to see what I could see. I'll show you but obviously you have
00:00:11.340
to have the video version of this podcast to see it. Go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe,
00:00:17.400
it's eight bucks a month. I saw some interesting things, I'd like to show it to you.
00:00:21.400
All right, without further ado, here's today's podcast.
00:00:30.000
What am I doing in Arizona? It's March 14th and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.
00:00:50.520
Oh hi, as you can tell by these prickly bushes behind me, I am not in snowy Canada. I have zipped
00:01:07.020
down to the state of Arizona just for a day. In fact, not even a day. I woke up 21 hours ago in
00:01:14.420
Toronto, got on a plane, made my way to a town called Sierra Vista, Arizona where I was interviewing
00:01:21.920
Betty Carbert. She's the mother of Chris Carbert, one of the four accused Coutts 4 defendants from
00:01:29.680
the blockade that the truckers had there two years ago. We'll have a special show about that that's
00:01:35.760
not for today. But since Tucson, Arizona is just, I don't know, 20 miles away from the border between
00:01:43.780
Arizona and Mexico, we decided to use the rest of our day here to go and look around at the border
00:01:51.360
mess that has seen hundreds of thousands. In fact, I think it's in the millions of illegal migrants just
00:01:58.600
waltz across the border. You may know that my colleagues Lincoln Jay and Alexa Lavoie did some
00:02:04.620
excellent reporting on the subject from Texas earlier this year. You take a look at that.
00:02:09.940
We met with a retired Border Patrol agent named Louis and his nephew, Ethan, who agreed to show us
00:02:19.280
a popular spot for people to enter into Eagle Pass, Texas, illegally from Mexico. This was just miles
00:02:27.860
down the road from Shelby Park. So at one time, this, I don't know, well, you guys have researched all this
00:02:34.080
stuff. We had Title 42. Yeah. It was a COVID measure. Yeah. So that when people came across,
00:02:40.120
we just kicked it back to Mexico. So Title 42, when they did away with it, you know, the hordes of
00:02:46.520
people came across. Every morning, 700 would walk up this road. 700 aliens early morning, every morning.
00:02:53.620
Well, Lincoln and Alexa had a few days on the ground. They made local contacts and they really spent a lot
00:02:59.640
of time at the border. And wouldn't you know it, they actually encountered some illegal migrants
00:03:05.300
emerging from the bushes. Here's a reminder of how that looked.
00:03:08.680
Well, I simply didn't have the time. I had about four hours of daylight and I didn't want to go out
00:03:35.220
looking for migrants at night because, of course, the people who smuggle them are sometimes desperate
00:03:40.320
and criminal. So I had about four hours of daylight. And what I want to show you today is what I saw
00:03:47.320
during those four hours. The answer is I didn't actually see any people sneaking across the border.
00:03:53.380
I saw a lot of border police. And I want to tell you one anecdote before I throw to some video clips
00:03:59.440
that I recorded earlier today. We actually saw dozens of Border Patrol police vehicles all around
00:04:07.040
wherever we went. And there was even some sort of migrant check stops on the highway. We saw one as
00:04:13.800
we were driving down there. But we didn't stop and look at it. But on our way back to our hotel tonight,
00:04:21.520
we saw one of these migrant police check stops at the side of the highway. We slowed down the vehicle
00:04:27.500
so we could film this migrant check stop that was closed for the night. So we were driving on the
00:04:34.380
highway and we slowed down to about, I don't know, 50 kilometers an hour just so we could film this
00:04:39.940
migrant check stop. And then we sped back up. Wouldn't you know it, there were still so many border
00:04:45.820
agents all around that when they saw our vehicle slow down to take a look at the border migrant check
00:04:53.120
stop? They assumed we were smugglers or something. And they put on their flashers and they pulled us over
00:04:59.120
and we showed them who we were and they let us go. It's an enormous border. And the difference between
00:05:04.960
America and Mexico couldn't be more stark in terms of economic opportunity and freedom and frankly crime.
00:05:13.280
Despite the fact that there's an enormous deployment of troops, the migrants are still coming.
00:05:19.280
And when they are captured by these border patrol agents, they're not just deported. Like Justin
00:05:25.200
Trudeau, he lets them stay in the country, Joe Biden. Anyways, without further ado, let me show you
00:05:30.080
some clips that we assembled from my day to day. I don't think it was as successful as Lincoln and
00:05:35.760
Alexis trip to Texas because they were there for many days and there was an enormous migration pouring
00:05:41.920
over the border. We actually couldn't get close to the border. All the roads were closed. You could not
00:05:48.960
get right up to that border fence. But I think it was sort of an interesting journey anyways. And I'd
00:05:55.280
like to show it to you because we did spend the rest of our day on it. So for better or for worse,
00:06:13.840
As you can see, I am not in Canada anymore. I'm in Naco, Mexico. Through that fence 20 feet is Naco,
00:06:22.880
Arizona. And you can see the border fence stretching for miles actually all the way to the horizon.
00:06:30.080
Um, down here, the fence has been painted in a beautiful, you know, attempt to make it a less
00:06:37.600
ugly barrier than it really is rusted steel. But down there, it's, you know, near the children's
00:06:45.040
park was interesting crossing from the American side to the Mexican side. They didn't ask for any
00:06:50.960
ID. They didn't ask for any passports. They literally didn't say anything to us. Well, they said a few
00:06:56.160
things in Spanish that I didn't understand. They did look in the car to see if we were smuggling
00:07:00.800
contraband from America into Mexico and they let us go. And immediately you can see the obvious
00:07:09.600
above us. You can hear a drone, whether it's a police drone or a military drone or a drone of
00:07:17.440
coyotes who are planning to smuggle people across the border because the county on that side of the
00:07:25.280
fence is, uh, where an enormous number of migrants cross over. And in fact, all the way down from Sierra
00:07:34.480
Vista to the border, we saw police vehicles, border patrol vehicles. I'm told that there's often a blimp
00:07:41.200
in the air. So we are in a place where an enormous number of people are smuggled
00:07:48.000
into the US side. I'm slightly alert because although it is bright out and we are, you know,
00:07:54.720
a few hundred yards from a large police presence, I also know that there's a lot of homelessness there.
00:08:01.200
Not only do the smugglers bring people over, but they bring, of course, drugs over. Well, it's five minutes
00:08:06.880
later and we're now on the US side of this border wall. You can see the, uh, US Customs and Immigration
00:08:14.800
headquarters sort of in that adobe style. Uh, this is the, this town on the Arizona side,
00:08:21.040
the American side of the border has the exact same name, Naco. Uh, and it's a little bit run down.
00:08:25.920
It's an unincorporated village, but it's markedly different in every way from the Mexican side.
00:08:32.000
It's enormous security here. I, I mentioned before we had a drone overhead and, uh, we asked the,
00:08:39.520
the border guard what he thought it was. He thought it probably was American border patrol.
00:08:44.560
You know, there's all sorts of sensors. When you come across all sorts of
00:08:48.400
inspections and investigations, you have all this, but in a way it's just for show
00:08:55.120
because when people, and I shouldn't just say Mexicans, because I don't even know if Mexicans
00:08:59.520
would be a majority of them anymore. Anyone from South and Central America, but really
00:09:03.440
everyone from around the world knows if you can make your way to Mexico, you can just march right
00:09:08.880
in and you want to be caught because you're not going to be kicked out. You'll be, well, in New York
00:09:15.120
City, you'll be given a lovely place to live. You'll be put up in a hotel. Now the mayor there wants to
00:09:19.600
give every migrant $10,000. By the way, in a lot of the countries where people come from, $10,000 US
00:09:26.800
is five years income. So it's an enormous magnet bringing hundreds of thousands, millions of people.
00:09:33.920
And of course, these border states have sort of had it, especially Texas, which is shipping
00:09:39.680
a lot of these migrants to these, uh, Democrat sanctuary cities, uh, New York, uh, Chicago,
00:09:46.400
places like that, that virtue signaled about how open borders were a good thing when it was only these
00:09:52.000
border towns that paid the price. But now they're squawking because their own local poor and homeless
00:09:59.200
people are being pushed aside by the world's, uh, illegal immigrants. So here you can see
00:10:05.120
the border wall going off to the horizon there. It does look impressive. Although I know a little
00:10:09.840
bit about walls. Um, if you don't have people patrolling them, uh, it is true. You can have a 20
00:10:16.080
foot wall. Someone get over it with a 21 foot ladder. You can have a 30 foot wall. You get,
00:10:21.360
you can always get over a fence. The fence, um, is to delay and to detect. You need a fence
00:10:29.040
system. You need patrols. And there are some patrols, but I say again, the craziest thing,
00:10:34.480
and we saw police cars and we saw all sorts of infrastructure, but none of it is actually to
00:10:41.360
keep the migrants out. It's to catch them and then release them, which is the strangest thing I've ever heard.
00:10:55.120
What an extraordinary view behind me. This is Arizona. You can see the border barrier,
00:11:01.280
the border wall between the United States and Mexico. It stretches a great distance down that way.
00:11:07.360
We were at the town of Naco, Mexico, and there was a small Naco in Arizona. I didn't tell you that
00:11:14.720
when we were on the Naco, so the Mexico side, we were driving around and we were filming a little
00:11:19.280
bit in front of the wall. People were stopping to look at us because there's not a lot of, uh,
00:11:24.960
not a lot of tourists from the United States in Naco. There's not a lot to do or see there.
00:11:30.160
And it didn't bother me that people were stopping and staring as we did a little bit of journalism.
00:11:34.480
But one SUV without a license plate seemed to be following us and I didn't, I didn't mind much.
00:11:41.920
And, uh, as we were driving this way, it followed this way and we went that way and it went that way.
00:11:46.720
And I was focused on driving, but our videographer, Lincoln, and he saw this other car and it was
00:11:52.640
someone in that unmarked vehicle, no license plate with a walkie talkie.
00:11:56.080
We were, we didn't know who it was. Who knows? It could have been just some local person. Could
00:12:04.640
have been, could have been a cop or it could have been someone with the cartel. We didn't want to
00:12:09.120
take our chances. Even though we were a few hundred yards away from police, we thought, let's get back
00:12:14.480
to the American side, which is where we are. What's funny is there's all these signs when you head into
00:12:19.040
Mexico weapons, not allowed guns, not allowed. Sure. They're not allowed. I'm sure they're not
00:12:25.120
actually, but there's an enormous smuggling operation of armed gangs and they deal in,
00:12:31.840
they traffic in two main resources. One is people and the other is fentanyl drugs made in China,
00:12:38.400
undermining the United States. This is an absolutely gorgeous area. We drove on this windy road up here.
00:12:45.360
I think this is called the Montezuma Canyon Road. There's a great amount of history here. This is the
00:12:51.520
Coronado National Memorial and I'm not fluent enough with my Spanish American history to know who Coronado
00:12:57.760
was, although I am fascinated by it. It's enormous here. It's a very large territory and it's fairly
00:13:10.000
sparsely populated on the American side. As we drove from Sierra Vista down to Naco and then from Naco to
00:13:17.040
here, we probably saw, I'm going to say, at least 20 border patrol vehicles along the road and as well
00:13:26.640
sort of depots or base camps where you might see 10 parked and five parked. There's towers, which I
00:13:33.200
assume are some sort of observational tower. There are all sorts of warning signs about migrants in the border.
00:13:40.240
In fact, in this beautiful park here at the picnic areas, there's warnings to be careful about migrants. They
00:13:46.800
have a lot of people dedicated to watching the border and finding migrants, but when they find them, they
00:13:54.080
release them. And I think the migrants want to be found, to be rescued. It's almost twilight, it's almost
00:14:02.000
dusk here. The sun is setting and it's getting a little bit chilly during the day. It's very hot at
00:14:06.880
night. It's cool. It's a very difficult journey. I mean, this is, you can see it's a desert. This is an arid
00:14:13.040
place. It's not fun, I imagine, to be an illegal migrant crossing over, just making sure you have enough
00:14:20.880
water alone. You want to be caught. You want to be caught and brought to a place where you can get
00:14:27.040
medical attention, where you can get food and water, and where you can perhaps get a bus ticket or a
00:14:33.200
plane ticket to New York City. Who wouldn't, I mean, you saw what it looked like in NACO, and I'm not
00:14:39.600
disparaging the place, but the average national income in NACO is a fraction of what it is in America.
00:14:46.880
It didn't feel safe there. Maybe we just were a little bit, uh, on, on pins and needles because
00:14:52.640
we were unused to it. But who wouldn't want to go from NACO, Mexico, into NACO, Arizona, be caught,
00:15:00.080
and you're not going to be sent out. In fact, if you play your cards right, you could wind up in New York
00:15:04.960
City with a $10,000, uh, gift welcome basket, uh, from, from the mayor there. We haven't seen any
00:15:12.080
migrants, but we've seen a great many signs telling us to be alert to migrants. Anyhow, I'll sign off
00:15:17.440
from the top of the mountain here, and, uh, we'll slowly make our way back down. You know, we didn't
00:15:22.720
have that moment that Lincoln and Alexa had a few months ago where, boom, jumping out of a bush was,
00:15:28.800
uh, a group of migrants. Um, it just didn't happen in the hours we had in town, but it's an enormous
00:15:36.080
factor. I've, I really have never seen this many police deployed in an area. It felt like a military
00:15:42.240
operation, which I guess it sort of is. I think it's a critical issue for the United States,
00:15:47.200
because if you don't have a border, are you really even a country?
00:15:50.800
Well, as you know, there is an enormous trial on the way in Ottawa. Tamara Leach,
00:16:06.000
the spiritual leader of the Ottawa Trucker Convoy enters her second year in prosecution. She was
00:16:12.320
jailed for 49 days before being released. And, um, the trial is a bizarre, excruciating exercise. It's so
00:16:19.520
clear to me that the process is the punishment. I think the Crown realizes they don't really have
00:16:24.320
a case against her. They'll just use the trial itself as a kind of punishment. As you know,
00:16:29.360
as well, there are trials underway in Lethbridge, Alberta. Trials for the so-called Coutts Three
00:16:35.120
and the Coutts Four, who are down to two, actually. Coutts, of course, being the name of the town,
00:16:40.480
the little village, actually, at the border between Alberta and Sweetgrass, Montana, where there was
00:16:45.520
another blockade. Those are serious trials, and they continue in the weeks ahead. But there was
00:16:51.200
a third location where the truckers had a sensational blockade that made international news.
00:16:57.600
You may recall that the city of Windsor, across the bridge from the American city of Detroit,
00:17:02.160
was blocked as well. And this got great attention in Toronto, because that bridge is an important
00:17:08.160
international hub for the auto industry. Well, many charges were laid over that. And I'm delighted
00:17:14.960
to report to you news from our cousins at the Democracy Fund. Let me read to you from a press release.
00:17:21.520
The Crown Attorney has withdrawn all criminal charges against William LaFramboise,
00:17:26.720
the alleged leader of the winter protests that blocked the Ambassador Bridge
00:17:29.680
in February of 2022. The Democracy Fund litigation director, Alan Haunert, stood beside his client,
00:17:35.520
LaFramboise, as the charges were withdrawn before Justice Campbell this past Wednesday.
00:17:42.080
And here's my favorite part. While the Crown Attorney stated that there were tribal issues,
00:17:48.080
he also explained to the court that it was not in the public interest to prosecute LaFramboise,
00:17:53.280
given the evidentiary challenges of the Crown's case and other serious matters that were vying for trial time.
00:17:59.600
in a backlogged court system. In other words, there was no point in trying the case. There was really no
00:18:05.920
public interest. And there was, you know, that little thing called evidence. Well, what a delight
00:18:10.480
to have the acquittal of Mr. LaFramboise. And I understand that the Democracy Fund, in fact,
00:18:16.160
represented a third of all the people in that blockade. Joining us now in person is Alan Haunert,
00:18:22.240
the acting, sorry, the litigation director, pardon me, of the Democracy Fund. Great to see you.
00:18:29.200
Well, I think it's pitiful that they went all the way to the end before saying,
00:18:34.320
just kidding. We don't have enough evidence to try it. They didn't have any less evidence today
00:18:40.080
than they had two years ago or two months ago. They just, I think, were in a staring contest with
00:18:45.280
you and Mr. LaFramboise trying to get you guys to buckle.
00:18:49.440
Well, you know, Ezra, it's not uncommon for criminal charges to resolve right before the trial or close
00:18:56.320
to the trial. This particular trial was set for five days and it was going to be heard at the end of
00:19:02.560
April. You know, TDF came on just about two, three weeks ago and within about a week of our getting
00:19:12.160
on to represent Mr. LaFramboise, the charges were withdrawn.
00:19:15.680
I didn't know that. So for the first two years, he actually didn't have, did he have another
00:19:22.800
He was self-represented, but he was sort of a unique person. He wasn't like the other protesters.
00:19:28.880
All of the other protesters that we represented, they were all arrested on the streets at the
00:19:35.280
scene of the protest. But LaFramboise was different. He was arrested about six months later
00:19:40.160
and he was arrested because, I suppose it's the police, maybe it was the Attorney General,
00:19:47.040
decided that they needed a leader. They needed somebody who could be a bit of a scapegoat
00:19:54.560
for the blockades that happened in Windsor. And like I say, you know, it's not that uncommon
00:20:01.520
for charges to resolve prior to trial. That's when everybody's focused on them. But in this case,
00:20:09.280
you know, Mr. LaFramboise lost his opportunity to, to defend himself in trial. And you know,
00:20:15.760
a withdrawal is a favorable conviction, but it doesn't have that same satisfaction of going
00:20:21.120
before a court and being acquitted. So they waited half a year to charge him. That's weird in itself.
00:20:28.880
He, he was self-represented, which is always risky. Then Democracy Fund comes in and the Crown says,
00:20:34.480
oh, yikes, maybe this isn't going to go how we thought it was. But it's sort of funny that the,
00:20:38.800
the, the, the Crown prosecutors saying, well, it's not in the public interest. You know,
00:20:42.720
there's all this backlog. He knew that all along that there's been a backlog since the pandemic.
00:20:48.400
Courts aren't just jammed because of all these foolish pandemic lockdown tickets. They're jammed
00:20:53.680
because the courts basically went on a one-year holiday. That is not new news. We knew that in 2021,
00:21:00.800
2022, 2023, and it's only been used as the excuse now. I think that the presence of Democracy Fund lawyers
00:21:10.240
was probably the thing that tipped the balance. They thought this is not going to be a cakewalk.
00:21:14.960
Well, you know, Ezra, all lawyers would like to think that, you know, when I got on the file,
00:21:19.440
the charges were withdrawn. And you know, it's a chronological fact.
00:21:24.960
You know, maybe there's some truth to that. But I think, you know, I don't think the facts were there
00:21:31.200
to convict Lafrembois. The facts weren't there to convict a lot of these people who were arrested
00:21:38.560
in connection to these protests. Now, one of the, the interesting things that happened when I was in
00:21:44.080
court with Mr. Lafrembois, he said that the Crown Attorney came in with a prepared statement. It was
00:21:50.400
about two pages long. And I knew he was going to come in with a statement because he had to say
00:21:55.520
something to the judge. He had to explain to the judge why he was withdrawing these charges
00:22:03.200
quite close to the trial date. Judges don't always like that because we have this back
00:22:08.000
court system. And if you, you know, if you resolve something too close to trial, the judge will ask,
00:22:13.200
well, why didn't you do it sooner? I can find somebody else.
00:22:15.680
Yeah. Because they've got this judge now, a week of his life is freed up and he, he's not going to
00:22:20.480
take a vacation, but how can he fill that with real work? We will work it on short notice. So it's,
00:22:26.560
it's a discombobulation to him. It's a discombobulation to the entire legal system.
00:22:30.720
That's right. And as you say, there's a backlog in the court system that existed before COVID,
00:22:34.960
but COVID made it so much worse. Right. And, and so the, the, the Crown Attorney comes in and he makes
00:22:40.560
these comments, which I think are very fair. He admits that the evidence isn't as strong,
00:22:45.200
I guess, Mr. LaFranbois as the Crown would like it to be. So there are real trial issues here.
00:22:50.720
He also mentions the backlog in the court. And one of the things that's happening in the Ontario
00:22:55.040
Court of Justice right now is that the courts are stacking trials.
00:22:58.160
Exactly. Because it means that if you go to court for your trial date, there are going to be other
00:23:03.680
people who are scheduled to have their trials in that same courtroom on that same date. And they're
00:23:09.120
doing this to make sure they're trying to... Like double booking, like double overselling an airline
00:23:13.680
by five seats. So what happens if you show up, your lawyers show up and they say, sorry, we're out of
00:23:18.640
time? Well, that, that, that can happen, right? So you might, it's not, and it's not just a question of
00:23:23.600
being double booked. It can be triple booked, quadruple booked. And the more serious cases
00:23:29.040
are going to be tried before the less serious cases, right? Because we have this backlog and
00:23:33.840
there's some pushback, um, about cases, serious cases, sexual assault cases, um, being stayed because
00:23:42.560
the, the Crown can't get to them in time. You know, um, this is something I've said a lot.
00:23:48.240
There, we, we, we admire the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms. They've done a lot of
00:23:52.640
great fighting during the lockdowns. The CCF, the Canadian Constitutional Foundation,
00:23:57.760
has taken a small number of cases. And the Canadian Civil Liberties Association has been sleeping.
00:24:02.880
But the Democracy Fund has a different approach. Three thousand clients.
00:24:07.920
Really no discrimination, just anyone, any race and religion, every background, almost any fact
00:24:14.080
pattern. Three thousand, not three hundred, not thirty strategic cases. And why? Because to jam the system,
00:24:23.920
to make this exact, to make the judges and the prosecutors actually think, is it worth a thousand
00:24:32.080
man hours to go after these hundred clients? A hundred, uh, suspects who didn't wear their mask?
00:24:38.640
Is that more important than the bank robber or the rapist? And it's precisely because three thousand
00:24:43.680
people stood up and said, I'm going to fight that the three thousand, that so many of them were saved.
00:24:48.160
I think Mr. LaFramboise was saved, not just by himself, but by the fact that so many others stood
00:24:54.560
up and fought. If only a handful of people would have fought, they would have been steamrolled.
00:24:58.560
Jam the system, I say. Well, you know, if any area of law, if it's civil law, if it's criminal law,
00:25:05.760
if the other side, whether it be another lawyer or the Crown Attorney, knows you're going to take
00:25:09.920
something to trial, if you have a reputation for doing that, then they'll take you far more seriously.
00:25:15.760
And the Democracy Fund runs trials all the time. We do run trials all the time. I remember I flew out to
00:25:21.040
the island of Ganges. That's in British Columbia. Where's that? I didn't, I don't, that sounds like it's in
00:25:26.960
India. Look, Ezra, you have to take a plane to Vancouver, you have to take a ferry to Victoria,
00:25:34.400
then you have to take another ferry to this island called Ganges, drive up to a very small
00:25:39.120
port, smaller than this room we're in right now. I'm sure this wasn't a trick or a practical joke.
00:25:44.480
We, we, we, we fought that trial. We brought a, a charter application that resulted in a 40 page
00:25:50.720
decision. We were partially successful, partially not. There were more rounds of submissions,
00:25:55.200
more rounds of submissions. This was a $600 ticket. We're still fighting it. They know that we're going
00:26:00.960
to fight. You know what? And that's the thing, because so, I think of your ride can app,
00:26:05.440
over $5,000 in fines, plus GSD or whatever it was. It was about, it was almost 6,000 bucks a pop.
00:26:13.440
And you'd have a family of three, four, five landing at, at the airport. They'd all get the
00:26:18.320
fine. So that could be a $30,000 hit. Thing is, most people just ignored it, bad idea, or paid it,
00:26:25.600
worse idea. But hundreds chose to fight it. And there is no way that the, and it was, I think in, in the,
00:26:32.160
in the Toronto Pearson airport, they'd all went to the little court in Mississauga.
00:26:36.320
They were dumped with all these because it happens to be where the airport is.
00:26:39.760
Do you think any judge there said, yeah, I'd like to spend the next two years of my life
00:26:44.080
talking about a ride can app? Or do you think the prosecutor said, yeah, I went to law school
00:26:48.880
so I can day after day prosecute people because they didn't want to fill out a glitchy app on their
00:26:54.560
phone. I think the very fact that people stood up is what saved their freedom. Well, you know, you're,
00:27:00.960
you're probably right. And that goes back to what you were saying earlier about, uh, clogging the
00:27:04.880
court system. Now I'm not saying that we were trying to do that, but if you fight every single
00:27:09.120
ticket, um, the, the court system managed that right. And when you get that reputation, um, those,
00:27:15.600
those charges are going away as most of them did. You know, I think there's a lesson there.
00:27:19.680
It, it reminds me of that old movie, I'm Spartacus. No, I'm Spartacus. No, I'm Spartacus.
00:27:24.320
You can't take them all. And I remember the opposite happening in the case of restaurants.
00:27:29.040
You had in Toronto, you had Adam Skelly's barbecue, Adam's barbecue, just one guy really,
00:27:36.160
who stood up it, you know, without papers, pizza, you had like one restaurant per city.
00:27:42.000
And so the entire police force could be taught. Like they had a hundred police raid Adam Skelly's
00:27:48.240
barbecue place. They had riot horses there. That's what happens when one restauranteur,
00:27:52.640
if there had been 10 restaurants, it would have been a challenge for the Toronto police.
00:27:56.800
If there had, this is a city of, there's probably 3000 restaurants in Toronto. I'm just guessing,
00:28:02.320
maybe 5000 restaurants in the greater Toronto area. If a hundred of them said, we're not closing,
00:28:09.520
there would not have been enough police resources to go after them. And because only a handful of
00:28:15.360
martyrs stood up, they were crushed. And I think that the, where the restaurants failed,
00:28:21.200
these individual people succeed. Yeah, no, you're, you're right. I mean,
00:28:25.120
some of the restaurants were fine, uh, to some extent, right. They fought back without papers,
00:28:29.920
pizza, um, which will stop in Alberta, but that was an extremely costly trial.
00:28:36.560
Ezra, I've looked at the lease of legal bills. That was a very costly trial, but again, it's part of
00:28:42.240
you need to spend money to fight back sometimes, but you know, it's, it's really interesting. You
00:28:46.720
mentioned Adamson barbecue. Look at that response. Like, I mean, it's, it's just, it's disproportionate,
00:28:53.920
the amount of police you get in. And that's what it was like.
00:28:56.320
It was a real, that was not policing. That was theater.
00:29:00.240
It was shocking on. Well, so I understand that's the last of the pending cases from the
00:29:06.560
Well, it's, it's the last of the cases that TDF is representing. I mean, I'm talking about
00:29:11.600
protesters who have trials. We have one under appeal. You know, the majority of our clients had their
00:29:16.480
charges withdrawn. We do have one conviction, but we're fighting that in the appellate courts.
00:29:21.920
Uh, but you know what, one thing that really interested me when I was last in, uh,
00:29:26.080
Windsor with Mr. Lafrembois and the, the, the Crown was giving his speech, uh, to the judge and
00:29:32.080
to the courtroom. And he said, well, you know, we've, we've had 44 trials or 44 matters, 44 people
00:29:37.600
who were arrested in Windsor, and here's how they resolved. And you know, that the thrust of his,
00:29:43.840
his speech was to say, well, look, we've achieved a general, uh, objective of deterrence.
00:29:50.480
But what he didn't say is, he didn't say that a lot of these people who were arrested in Windsor
00:29:57.040
were arrested on the sidewalk or were arrested on private property. Those people had their
00:30:02.960
charges withdrawn. And, you know, maybe they, maybe they were expected to quietly go away,
00:30:08.800
but that's not happening because I know that at least five of those people have launched civil
00:30:14.480
lawsuits. Those lawsuits have been served on the opposing police forces. And four of those, uh,
00:30:21.200
those people who have launched lawsuits against the Windsor police and other police forces are
00:30:25.520
actually former TDF points. Yeah. Well, I'm glad to hear it. And, uh, I think putting the police on
00:30:31.120
the back foot is an important thing to do. I think the police very obviously engaged in politics. They
00:30:36.880
were used, like I said, for theater in the case of Adamson's barbecue. I think that, um,
00:30:44.320
so much of the COVID enforcement was terrified to terrified people, to make things so, uh, scary to
00:30:50.960
normal Canadians that normal Canadians would voluntarily not fly, not leave their house,
00:30:55.200
not go to restaurants. Like the, the absurdity of the airport quarantine hotels, I think on purpose,
00:31:00.800
they were made awful. So just the word of mouth, people would say, oh, I don't want to go through
00:31:04.880
that. So I think the police should answer for their brazen partisanship. I'll never look at
00:31:09.360
police the same way again. I mean, I was starting to have my doubts about them because the politicization
00:31:14.400
before 2020, but from 2020 onwards, I realized that they were too many police were happy to be, uh,
00:31:22.080
instruments of politicians as opposed to law enforcement officers. Well, listen, congratulations.
00:31:27.600
Congratulations to William LaFramboise. It sounds like he pronounces it a little bit differently
00:31:32.560
than I'm doing here. Uh, folks, you can help the Democracy Fund at thedemocracyfund.ca,
00:31:40.560
where the battle continues. I mentioned three important battles, the Coutts 2, the Coutts 3,
00:31:45.680
the Coutts 4, Tamara Leach, and actually Arthur Pawlowski is having his appeal heard later this year
00:31:51.840
in Alberta. All those cases funded by the Democracy Fund. Stay with us. More ahead.
00:32:05.280
Well, that's our show for today. You know, we didn't have that moment that Lincoln and Alexa had a few
00:32:10.480
months ago where, boom, jumping out of a bush was, uh, a group of migrants. Um, it just didn't happen in
00:32:17.840
the hours we had in town, but it's an enormous factor. I really have never seen this many police
00:32:24.560
deployed in an area. It felt like a military operation, which I guess it sort of is. I think
00:32:31.440
it's a critical issue for the United States because if you don't have a border, are you really even a