The Court of Appeal of Ontario has issued a resounding defense of the constitutional right to freedom of assembly. It s actually the first time any senior court has dealt with that freedom, and the result was positive. We ll talk with John Carpe about it.
00:00:00.100Hello, my friends. I'm very happy about today's show. Boy, it's not that often you get good news from the courts of law, but the Court of Appeal of Ontario has issued a resounding defense of the constitutional right to freedom of assembly. I'll take you through it.
00:00:15.760But it's actually the first time any senior court has dealt with that freedom, and the result was positive. We'll talk with John Carpe. That's ahead. But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus. That's the video version of this podcast. Just go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe. It's eight bucks a month. Not only did you get the video, you help keep Rebel News strong, and we depend on you.
00:00:45.760Tonight, a rare win at the Court of Appeal for Freedom. What a good news story. It's April 9th, and this is the Ezra LeVance Show.
00:02:05.520Go back into your speech. Through you. You don't be lying to me. You don't be lying to me.
00:02:10.020You don't be lying to me. You don't be lying to me.
00:02:15.720Nobody should fear government in a free country, and I welcome, I welcome Chief Callahan any day of the week to come and see me, or Chief Skinner or Chief whoever.
00:02:30.720Well, it's easy to despair. So many of the cases that are champion for civil liberties in this country lose.
00:02:37.420I think of Tamara Leach's conviction just a week ago. I was quite certain that she'd be acquitted.
00:02:44.120The trial was so abusive of her. The judge during the trial seemed supportive. The law seemed clear, but in the end, she and Chris Barber were both convicted of mischief.
00:02:56.120I understand she's likely to appeal, so there is a chance it'll be overturned, but how demoralizing did that feel?
00:03:03.320We shouldn't be too down in the dumps, though, because every time we do win, it's an enormous step forward, not just for the legal battle itself, but for the hope that the courts can undo some of the worst of politicians.
00:03:15.960I point, for example, to the courts declaring that the invocation of the Emergencies Act during the Trucker Convoy was illegal and unconstitutional.
00:03:26.380I think that in most Canadians' mind, that Emergencies Act was like the mountains. It was just there. You couldn't argue about it.
00:03:34.540But the federal court said, no, that whole thing was illegal, and all the fruits from that tree were poisoned.
00:03:41.040So, for example, the hundreds of Canadians whose bank accounts were seized, that was all put back into play when it was declared unconstitutional.
00:03:49.020And the reason I tell you these things is because just now is a win, a win I did not expect, a win I would not have expected.
00:03:59.920And it's an important win at an important level of court.
00:04:02.540I'm talking about the recent unanimous decision by the Ontario Court of Appeal to overturn the conviction of former politician Randy Hillier for illegally participating in a political protest during the lockdowns.
00:04:19.240I thought for sure he lost, and he did lose at the lower level.
00:04:48.700I mean, I love the guy, but he's a bit much sometimes.
00:04:51.360And I think judges, they're just flesh and bone, and sometimes they react to a party like Randy Hillier, and a little bit of politics seeps into their judgment.
00:05:28.240Well, your Ontario viewers and listeners will remember in April and May of 2021, the government imposed a total ban on peaceful outdoor protests.
00:05:42.200Even two people could not get together for a political protest.
00:05:46.300The law prohibiting large gatherings for weddings and funerals and religious services was also utterly unscientific and very harsh.
00:05:58.460You could have no more than 10 people at a wedding or funeral or religious service.
00:06:02.880But for political protests, it wasn't even, not even 10 people were allowed, zero people were allowed.
00:06:09.240And so, as you mentioned, we lost at trial.
00:06:14.060But the Court of Appeal unanimously said that the total ban was an unjustified violation of the charter rights and, in particular, freedom of peaceful assembly, which is Section 2C of the charter.
00:06:32.620And this is actually the first time that an appellate-level court has talked about what the freedom means, what it entails, that it's different from freedoms of expression and association and religion and conscience.
00:06:46.460And so, we've got brand new law on this, and it was unanimous.
00:06:52.520One of the three judges had actually issued a terrible ruling against religious freedom in this other Trinity Bible Chapel decision.
00:07:02.900Unanimous panel said that the total ban on peaceful outdoor protests was an unjustified violation of the charter freedom of peaceful assembly.
00:07:42.220I bet you most Canadians, including I bet you most judges and lawyers, their first instinct would be, oh, no, we have to suspend those constitutional rights because we're in a crisis.
00:07:57.360They'd love to keep us in crises if it could suspend our civil liberties.
00:08:01.100When there's a huge difference as well, if there was some big temporary thing, maybe some huge forest fire or military uprising, if there was something that was temporary, maybe you can give governments a bit more latitude.
00:08:20.300The thing about these lockdown measures and vaccine passports is they went on for years.
00:08:54.780And so, you know, as you said, you can't keep on declaring an emergency for things that are in place for literally for years.
00:09:05.540What I like best about the judgment was just the attitude behind it.
00:09:09.020You can feel the attitude that these three judges on this panel, in this ruling, they care about charter freedoms.
00:09:16.400And it seems to be a step towards returning to having a high standard whereby it's difficult for governments to violate charter freedoms,
00:09:25.720as opposed to what we've seen so much of in the last few years is this lowering of the bar where governments can just kind of do whatever they want,
00:09:34.920as long as they're claiming that there's some sort of an emergency out there.
00:09:38.400You know, I feel like the passage of time has brought the judiciary or at least parts of it back to sobriety.
00:09:44.600And I think that, let's be honest, some of them panicked as much as anyone else.
00:09:49.200I mean, I suppose in their defense, they're human.
00:09:51.660And the average judge is probably 60 or 70 years old, as opposed to someone who's young.
00:09:57.760So they probably would have encountered more people who did actually get really sick or die from the flu.
00:10:03.980I mean, that's what it's like to be 70.
00:10:06.180By nature, if you're a judge, you're a law follower.
00:11:22.540Well, I think the passage of time is definitely, you know, we're not getting bombarded every hour of every day by government funded media proclaiming the false message that COVID is an unusually deadly killer, when in fact it was not.
00:11:38.480It was certainly real and certainly a threat to a small minority of the population.
00:12:07.120And the media makes it out like the guy's guilty as sin.
00:12:10.100And then, you know, comes before the judge.
00:12:11.960The judge is expected to disregard all of the media coverage and look only at the evidence before the court and then either convict or acquit the accused person of the crime.
00:12:22.380And we would be outraged if the judge simply wrote the media narrative into his court ruling.
00:12:28.360And yet this is what judges did with the COVID.
00:12:31.240They wrote false media narrative speaking points into their court rulings that were not supported by evidence that was placed before the court.
00:12:44.140But we don't learn from our mistakes unless they are recognized and owned up to.
00:12:50.480You know, it's funny because judges, I think, can be extremely skeptical of government power when it's a prosecutor in a criminal setting.
00:12:58.880In fact, I think a lot of Canadians would think judges are too skeptical and too willing to throw away the government's authority.
00:13:04.960Whereas when it's a public health officer, the judges were extremely obedient, I think, to the point of being naive.
00:13:14.240It reminds me, I don't know if you know the experiments by Stanley Milgram in the 60s.
00:13:19.920The very famous experiment where someone wearing a white doctor's lab coat with a clipboard, that's so essential that they have the lab coat and the clipboard, told people to give an electric shock to someone in the adjacent room if they got questions wrong.
00:13:45.640Now, it turned out it was an actor in the other room, but in the Milgram experiment, the person in the white coat said, you have to give them the electric shock now.
00:13:56.420And the actor would scream as if they were in pain.
00:13:58.600Yeah, and turn the machine up every time they got someone wrong.
00:14:02.920So it started out with, ow, and then ow, and then screaming, and then eventually silence as if they had gone unconscious.
00:14:09.540It's a very famous experiment, and I encourage you to look it up, John, if you don't know it, because all the person in the lab coat could say, they couldn't give any rationale, couldn't explain it, couldn't say there's any consequences.
00:14:24.640Just the raw assertion of authority, you must do this.
00:14:31.160That's a very important part of the Milgram experiment, is that it's not do this or else or do this because.
00:14:38.060It's just someone in a white lab coat with a clipboard who is in a position of authority tells you to do something that you know is wrong, but they assert it so forcefully just through raw power.
00:14:49.240And the number of Americans who complied with the Milgram experiment was shockingly high.
00:14:54.980So I think the judges fell for a giant Milgram experiment because what is Canada's top doctor, British Columbia's top doctor?
00:15:05.240What are they, the top doctor in terms of patient care, in terms of bedside manner, in terms of research?
00:15:41.260That's a thesis in my book, which like yours, it's not provable, but it's kind of a guess of what's going on.
00:15:49.500They were as terrified of the virus as what most other Canadians were.
00:15:55.380The other experiment that was interesting, I'm sure, I forget the name of it, but I'm sure you're familiar with it, where there's a group of people and when there's three or four people giving an incorrect answer to, that's obviously false.
00:16:22.640And then most people, when it's their turn, they know that the other four people got it wrong, but they also say, yeah, that's correct.
00:16:28.680But if there's one other person in the room that says, no, that's false, then the percentages change drastically.
00:16:37.960So there's a group thing as well, like people and judges are human.
00:16:42.140They don't want to be the odd man out.
00:16:43.680You know, the only guy or the only gal at the judge's cafeteria that's saying, hey, these lockdowns are very harmful and they're not grounded in science and it's not possible to stop the spread of a virus.
00:16:53.860They don't want to be the odd man out to say these things.
00:16:56.400You know, I love studying that ASH conformity test.
00:17:00.780And during the lockdowns, by the way, we played, let me show you, I won't play too much.
00:17:05.480Here's a two minute video of sort of a reenactment of the ASH conformity test that shows the power of wanting to fit in and peer pressure.
00:19:24.620In this case, the subject knows he is right, but goes along to avoid the discomfort of disagreeing with the group.
00:19:30.300The reason we played that video is the point you made at the end there, John, is conformity was about 30, 35%.
00:19:36.660But when there was one other truth teller in the group, conformity fell to, I think, 5%.
00:19:42.340As in, you knew you weren't alone, so it gave you courage.
00:19:46.000And during the worst of the pandemic, during the worst of the lockdowns, I felt like the role of Rebel News was to let people know they weren't alone, to let them know they weren't crazy, let them know that although they were subject to tremendous peer pressure, there were others in the resistance.
00:20:02.180And I think to study the Milgram experiment and the Ash conformity test are two extremely important things.
00:20:36.040So the fact that Randy Hillier lost at trial, which would have seemed devastating, I imagine, but he won in the Court of Appeal was actually a blessing in disguise because now the good news is in effect across the entire province, I guess, until the Supreme Court were to overturn it, which I don't think they will.
00:20:58.720So it was actually fortuitous, even if you didn't know it at the time, that you lost in the first round, right?
00:21:03.540Yeah, it's a very strong message that governments cannot place a total ban.
00:21:09.260Now, what's interesting, and I don't want to kind of rain on our parade today, but if the government had limited outdoor protests to only 10 people, you know, on par with weddings and funerals and religious ceremonies and said, you can have a political protest with up to 10 people outdoors, probably and sadly, because that's utterly unscientific.
00:21:31.540I mean, COVID wasn't the threat that the government-funded media made it out to be in the first place.
00:21:36.780So that already means that all of these measures were not justified because the threat itself was not the threat that the media exaggerated it to be.
00:21:47.100But if the Ontario government had said, look, 10-person limit on political protests, if Randy Hillier had challenged that, and I would venture a guess that the protests that he organized and at which he spoke were more than 10 people, he probably would have lost.
00:22:04.720But it's still nice to see a court, you know, especially a pellet-level court, it's just nice to see a court recognize the importance of a charter freedom and actually take it seriously and elaborate on it, what it means and what the nature of it is, why it's important.
00:22:23.420Interesting point here, the court said that social media and Zoom meetings and virtual gatherings are not an adequate or satisfactory substitute for in-person gatherings.
00:22:38.080And that it's very important for people to be able to protest together in person and to have that sense of awareness and presence of each other.
00:22:46.840So this is a very thoughtful analysis on freedom of peaceful assembly, which in the last 42 years of the charter's history, beyond a passing sentence here or there, no court has actually issued a substantive ruling about what this freedom means.
00:23:04.940In contrast to the other ones, you know, association, you know, lengthy, lengthy judgments, this is the first judgment that kind of illuminates what freedom of peaceful assembly is all about.
00:23:18.660And so that's very valuable as well to finally get that on the books.
00:23:22.700Wow, that's great. I didn't know it had never been reviewed by judges before.
00:23:26.380This makes me think of a case that, you know, Rebel News took a lot of cases, civil liberties cases during the pandemic in Canada.
00:23:34.940But we also did a few in Australia and in the United Kingdom.
00:23:39.520And there was one, I just got to tell you about it, John, where a city councilor near Glasgow, so he was on city council himself, but he so objected to his fellow councillors' lockdownism that he had a little protest outside his own city hall.
00:23:55.880Like, what a character. His name was Paddy Hogg.
00:24:01.820So not only did they charge him with breaking the lockdown rule, they charged him with reckless endangerment, saying that he could have effectively murdered someone if they got the Rona.
00:24:15.760And they hired experts and they were trying to put Paddy Hogg away for years.
00:24:22.420Like, reckless endangerment, our Scottish lawyer said, would be like if, God forbid, you went over an overpass on a highway and dropped a rock on a car below, the kind of thing that could literally kill someone, like an extremely serious charge.
00:24:35.440That's what they were trying to shoehorn Paddy Hogg into because he had a peaceful protest outside his own city council.
00:25:53.100It's been said that the reasonable people, they go along to get along or get along to go along, however that saying goes.
00:26:01.780But reasonable people go with the flow and they accommodate themselves to fit in with reality.
00:26:09.240Unreasonable people do not go with the flow and they're the ones who change the world.
00:26:14.240Now, you can get unreasonable people that can be for good or for evil.
00:26:17.240You can change the world for good or for evil, but it's important that you have people like Randy Hillier.
00:26:24.080And likewise, I don't know him very well.
00:26:27.360We've met a number of times over the years.
00:26:29.760I happen to be in Ontario speaking at a landowner's property rights conference or event when he announced that he was running for the provincial progressive conservative nomination.
00:26:42.780So, I admire him and I appreciate him and, you know, whatever faults he has.
00:26:49.780It's people like Randy Hillier and I would say people like Ezra Levant and perhaps John Carpe.
00:26:54.700You know, you have to be unreasonable when you're facing tyranny and injustice and when you're facing laws that are based on lies rather than being based on truth and reality and science.
00:27:07.660You know, you know, we have to be unreasonable.
00:27:12.580And Randy's taken a great personal risk here because he was charged with organizing outdoor protests in Kemptville and Cornwall.
00:27:22.020That's two plus participating in protests in Smiths Falls, Belleville, Peterborough, Stratford, Kitchener and Chatham.
00:27:29.640So, he, with up to $100,000 in fines, I mean, he could have been, this is a practical benefit.
00:27:37.560I anticipate that the Crown prosecutors are going to drop their charges because this health order has now been found to be an unjustified violation of the Charter Freedom of Peaceful Assembly.
00:27:50.360But Randy Hillier risked a half a million, three quarters of a million dollars in fines.
00:27:58.140Ah, so, so there were other matters pending in the same vein is what you're saying.
00:28:04.200Yeah, what, what the, what the Justice Center's lawyers did, there were all these charges all over the place.
00:28:08.960And rather than, you know, raising the constitutional issue in, in seven or 27 different cases, we filed one notice of application for one ruling.
00:28:20.380And then with the idea that that's going to apply to all of the charges that Randy Hillier was facing.
00:28:26.380And I hope it will benefit other people in Ontario as well.
00:28:29.580I hope it'll be a repeat, like in, in Alberta, where the Justice Center's lawyers secured a court ruling, the Ingram ruling in July of 2023,
00:28:38.760whereby the court ruled that Alberta's lockdown measures were illegal and struck them down.
00:28:44.120And after that, the Crown prosecutors stopped prosecuting good people like Pastor Tim Stevens and Fairview Baptist Church and No More Lockdowns, Rodeo, et cetera, et cetera.
00:28:56.700So I hope that'll be the case in Ontario as well, that we're going to see the prosecutors back off.
00:29:01.840Yeah, I suppose it's possible that the prosecutors seek leave from the Supreme Court of Canada to appeal.
00:29:12.760Now, this, you don't have a right to command the Supreme Court to hear your appeal.
00:29:18.320And they only take about, I think, about 10% of cases, if I'm, you correct me if I'm wrong on that, John.
00:29:24.400They only take cases where they think there's a real compelling public interest, or maybe the court of appeal of one province says something, the court of appeal of another province says something else.
00:29:34.500And they're basically asked to rationalize these two different diverging paths.
00:29:38.800I would imagine it's very unlikely that this will be appealed to the Supreme Court.
00:29:45.000I would, I try not to make guesses and predictions, but I'll stick my neck out and say, if the Ontario government appeals this to the Supreme Court of Canada, I think the Supreme Court would refuse to hear it.
00:29:58.440It's a fairly clear, simple, direct, straightforward ruling.
00:30:44.100And the court wrote in the ruling in one passage, and it's not an exact quote, but, you know, we cannot tolerate having a government completely ignore a fundamental freedom.
00:30:59.780That's just not acceptable to completely ignore it.
00:31:02.080So in other words, the Ontario government did consider religious freedom when they placed restrictions on religious freedom.
00:31:09.660They did consider, but when it came to the freedom of peaceful assembly, they gave no consideration to it at all.
00:31:17.400And so the Ontario Court of Appeals said, this is just not acceptable for a government to have no regard.
00:31:25.640So it's just really positive to get a win.
00:31:29.200At the same time, our work is cut out for us, because I can tell you if peaceful protests for up to 10 people had been permitted by the Ontario government,
00:31:39.780and it's hypothetical, obviously, but I don't think Randy Hillier would have won his case.
00:31:47.000So we still have a lot of work to do in the courts to secure recognition that the judiciary has really let us down in the last few years
00:31:56.860by writing the media narrative into their court rulings and by failing to consider the abundant evidence placed before courts
00:32:05.820about all the harms that lockdowns were doing.
00:32:08.160There's not a single court ruling yet in Canada where the judge has actually thoroughly gone through all of the lockdown harms
00:32:16.260and then thoroughly looked at whether there are, in fact, benefits, and then balanced the two
00:32:22.320and then said, you know what, the lockdown benefits exceed lockdown harms.
00:32:27.820No judge has yet made such an analysis in any Canadian court ruling.
00:32:32.940So we certainly have our work cut out for us when you have courts that are not doing their job by measuring harms and benefits as they're required to do.