The Canadian Truckers' Convoy was an idealistic, peaceful protest against the Trudeau government, and yet it was vilified by the mainstream media as a neo-Nazi protest. In this episode, retired Lt. Col. Tom Arazzo talks about what he thinks happened to the event, and why it was so badly handled by the media, and what it meant for the rest of the world. He also talks about the role of the truckers' convoy and how it was used as a propaganda tool by the government to delegitimize a peaceful protest that was actually about peace and love and justice and democracy, and how the Canadian government responded to it in a way that made it seem like it was part of a far-left, far-right, neo-Nazis' plot to bring down the government. He also explains how the media handled the event and its aftermath, and the tactics that were used to smear the event as a racist, anti-Canadian protest, and explains why the media should have been so quick to point the finger at anyone who was involved. at the trucker's convoy and not at anyone else. And he talks about how to deal with the fallout from the Prime Minister's reaction to it. This episode was produced by the Toronto Star and the media coverage of it, and his thoughts on the events leading up to it and the aftermath. and the impact it had on the world and the reaction the government's response to it and how Canada's government did to it, as well as they could have done anything they could to make the event a success. in the first place in order to make it a reality or not at all the more so at all of what happened in the world including the way they wanted it to be remembered a day after the event for the world to remember it the day it was . and what they could do to make history . of it of the day of that day what it really meant why it really was how it really meant it , and what it really looked like and why they looked like . in fact so much , and how they meant . And not just in the eyes of the whole world and their impact on the world in Canada their impact
00:00:00.000Hey everybody, welcome back and I'm really happy to have as my guest today Tom Arazzo, who is a retired Canadian military officer.
00:00:09.000He was commissioned as a combat engineer officer.
00:00:15.000He was until recently a teacher at a Georgian college in Ontario.
00:00:23.000And he is one of the organizers and logistical consultants and spokespeople for the Canadian Truckers Convoy.
00:00:32.000And I wanted to talk to you today about doing kind of a post-mortem on the convoy and what you think it meant because it had a tremendous impact obviously all over the world.
00:00:44.000I think one of the outstanding features of The event was the reaction, this very, very troubling reaction by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Canadian government and parliament to the convoy.
00:01:02.000It was clearly a peaceful demonstration.
00:01:12.000Feature of the convoy from the beginning, that it was about peace and love and justice and democracy, and yet it was successfully, as it turns out, tarred in the press.
00:01:27.000I orchestrated propaganda effort as kind of a A violent, prone demonstration that was threatening to bring down the Canadian government.
00:01:42.000Two years ago when I went to Berlin and spoke to the first great protest against the mandates, I opened up my talk by saying tomorrow in the press they're going to say this was a group of Nazis.
00:01:57.000And if you looked out on that crowd, it looked like Woodstock.
00:02:01.000It was a Huge, huge picture of Mahatma Gandhi behind me on the stage.
00:02:08.000The embassy of the event was a black Ghanian from Africa.
00:02:14.000There were religious leaders and Green Party leaders and labor leaders.
00:02:20.000And it was a diverse crowd with every color in the rainbow and religious affiliation.
00:02:28.000And there were people from every nation in Europe.
00:02:34.000I'm obviously declaimed in the global press and the German press as a kind of a neo-Nazi conspiracy.
00:02:41.000And in fact, I'm involved in a lawsuit still with the Daily Kos, which is a liberal blog in our country.
00:02:51.000It is associated, by the way, with the intelligence agencies.
00:02:56.000And the Daily Ghost said that I was in Berlin cavorting with Nazis.
00:03:08.000And, you know, I have a very, very heavy load in our country in proving defamation because I have to prove actual malice, meaning I have to prove they knew it was a lie at the time they wrote it, and they wrote it Yes.
00:03:24.000I am in that litigation now, but this is a strategy and it is a propaganda strategy that has been part of the government response from the beginning that anybody The questions of government policies has to be marginalized, vilified, denounced, and destroyed, and discredited as a right-wing racist Nazi.
00:03:54.000A video of a guy walking through the only, you know, it was all these beautiful Canadian flags and people laughing and dancing and kids drinking hot chocolate and playing on bouncy castles.
00:04:08.000People giving truckers, giving food to the homeless, putting up garbage bags every 40 or 50 feet so that they wouldn't create a mess.
00:04:19.000It was one guy walking through the edge of the ground carrying a Confederate flag.
00:04:25.000And it was amazing how the truckers reacted to them by driving them out and telling them, you know, all of them spontaneously and individually saying, that's what this is about.
00:04:40.000A crowd who was wearing a baklava for his face.
00:05:16.000And we were always on the lookout for what we believe to be provocateurs.
00:05:22.000Because we suspected there would be many, many groups out there that would try to pull this kind of a stunt.
00:05:30.000You know, when you have thousands and thousands of people all attending a major event like that, but one person misbehaves, the entire story becomes about that one person and everybody gets painted with that same brush.
00:05:45.000And we were very, very, very aware of that.
00:05:48.000And, you know, sometimes it was a great risk to us because of some of the supporters, but sometimes we...
00:05:55.000We had to balance between, do we censor people ourselves or do we allow people to express themselves?
00:06:02.000In the middle of trying to be vigilant that there wouldn't be provocateurs within the crowd, because we knew that there would be.
00:06:14.000And that's exactly what the mainstream media attacked.
00:06:18.000And, you know, I made a joke about Justin Trudeau the first time I did any media stuff, and they twisted my words completely and went after me And so we knew that we were going to be up against these types of narrative rewriting scenarios.
00:06:37.000And so we did a really good job, I think, of blocking the mainstream media from having access to us directly.
00:06:45.000We capitalized very well, I think, on the social media or alternate media.
00:06:52.000And we were very effective at freezing them out.
00:07:15.000Really, all of Canada is, you know, the most liberal nation, probably outside of Scandinavia, in terms of, you know, the values of tolerance and kindness and justice and a functional democracy.
00:07:32.000But, you know, in the United States and in Canada, there's a lot of people Mm-hmm.
00:08:03.000But it's really people who have shut off their capacity for critical thought and are categorizing any kind of opposition as right-wing.
00:08:18.000Do you think there was any penetration of that group or did it just harden their position?
00:08:28.000From my perspective, I think the critical mistake that the Government of Canada made is They use the banks.
00:08:37.000They deputize the banks against the Canadian people without any form of due process.
00:08:43.000And even the most, I would say, hardened supporters of the COVID-19 mandates, you know, those people that are, you know, calling for heads to roll if you don't get the vaccine.
00:09:02.000You know, there is a large population in this country that fully support everything that comes out of the mainstream media in this country.
00:09:08.000But when the banks started to attack people's bank accounts and their credit scores and close their credit cards off, you know, when they attack people's means to provide for their families, that really struck a nerve with a lot of Canadians.
00:09:24.000And we're seeing more and more people wake up to the fact that you're incredibly vulnerable to having the wrong think in Canada.
00:09:34.000And what was particularly disturbing is the deputy prime minister here, Chrystia Freeland.
00:09:40.000She was bragging and almost giddy at a press conference she did when she was talking about the fact that after the emergency act is over, they really have no intention of letting go of this Fintrack system.
00:09:53.000How, you know, even though the emergency will end, they're going to hold on to these powers to attack your banking.
00:10:01.000And what's even further disturbing to this is how there was a viral video that went around talking about the Canadian Banking Association in a one-stop shop digital ID. And so we've just seen sort of evidence of a social credit score tied to law enforcement and tied to your finances and your assets.
00:10:30.000I first want to take a step back so that people who don't know what happened, you can outline what happened.
00:10:41.000Because we've been saying from the beginning of the pandemic, I've been saying and getting a deep platform for it, You know, this move towards digitalized currency is about controlling conduct and controlling behavior and destroying dissent.
00:10:58.000Once we've shifted to digitalized currency, it will give the big bank accounts and the government.
00:11:03.000Every transaction will become visible to them.
00:11:06.000And also, they have the power now to shut off your bank account.
00:11:11.000And people have ridiculed me for that.
00:11:13.000And I think for the first time we saw it happen in Canada, Yes.
00:11:21.000It's being punished by shutting down people's credit cards and bank accounts.
00:11:26.000The same they do in China with programmable currency.
00:11:49.000Well, they convinced GoFundMe that all of those donations from Canadians, Canadians, Americans, Europeans, they convinced GoFundMe that those were proceeds of a crime.
00:12:01.000And so GoFundMe acted and they seized that money.
00:12:05.000And then, of course, the media backlash was insane.
00:12:09.000And the last time I read, there's four U.S. governors that are asking their attorney generals to investigate that.
00:12:17.000And so we switched over to a different platform, US-based, which is called GiveSendGo.
00:12:23.000And so the premier and his attorney general actually, in a courtroom without any representation by any of us, Through our lawyers or the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, we found out about it in the news that the Ontario Attorney General had seized that money.
00:12:41.000And so it's still being frozen right now by the Ontario Premier, not even Justin Trudeau.
00:12:47.000This happened at the provincial level.
00:12:49.000And so that money is all tied up right now.
00:14:44.000At no time did I or any of the people involved in this convoy break any laws other than municipal bylaws in the way that we parked the trucks.
00:15:27.000And then finally, if they believed you had an intent to commit violence, and the only people that committed the violence were the police themselves.
00:15:38.000You know, and you can make the argue that the bridge that connects Windsor to Detroit, when they blocked that, maybe, you know, that was blocking international trade and critical infrastructure.
00:15:48.000So the Emergency Act, by the standard that was set, applied to them.
00:16:59.000But have there been any consequences for the banks in terms of the public perception?
00:17:04.000I mean, I would think that the big business interests and the large depositors would now be very, very frightened and insecure about Canadian banking.
00:17:16.000Well, we did see indications that some of the big five charter banks, they were starting to feel like they were going to have a run on their banks because it upset Canadians so much, they started pulling out money from their ATMs and closing accounts.
00:17:33.000And it's very interesting to us because we made a very important observation.
00:17:39.000The Parliament passed the, you know, after debate, the Parliament passed the use of the Emergency Act for Justin Trudeau with the help of NDP, which is typical behavior.
00:17:52.000Like, he has a minority government, but with the NDP, he really does have a majority.
00:17:56.000They prop up everything that he wants, and they behave like a Liberal Party.
00:18:00.000And so we saw that happen, but then the Senate started to debate, and they looked like they were going to vote.
00:18:05.000And then he stopped, he revoked the Emergency Act.
00:18:08.000We all thought that was very interesting, but we realized that it was the banks.
00:18:14.000And I don't have any evidence to support this, but it makes sense to me that when the banks started to see a run on their deposits, they more than likely called up the government and said, hey, you know what, you should really knock that off.
00:18:28.000Because it was a big surprise to everybody that he actually revoked the Emergency Act without the Senate completing their debate or their vote on whether to extend it.
00:18:40.000It revealed some interesting things for us, coupled that with mainstream media.
00:18:46.000So we made some really interesting observations about that particular incident.
00:18:51.000And I think they'll be important to maybe some future steps that we take as, I like to say, decentralized grassroots movements around this country.
00:19:01.000We're in a situation where people can see for themselves what's really going on.
00:19:07.000There's no one single leadership to this movement.
00:19:10.000This is Canadians who've had enough, and they're taking matters into their own actions.
00:19:14.000I don't have the power or the influence to start telling people to close their bank accounts with BMO. People just made their own observations, realized that they were in a very vulnerable position, and they take their own actions.
00:20:11.000Well, you know, once the government takes power in the history of mankind, it doesn't have to relinquish power without a demand, without a confrontation.
00:20:25.000I think a lot of people in our country were just frightened and said, well, we're not going to do these things.
00:20:32.000But if you take a long view, it's very, very dangerous to give the government.
00:20:38.000You know, we were contacted at CHD Children's Health Invest.
00:20:42.000I was contacted by a bank in this country called the Cambridge Bank in McLean, Virginia.
00:20:50.000Put us in touch with them in touch with the candidate truckers because it's a privately owned bank and they said they supported the truckers and it's run by a former United States congressman.
00:21:12.000They would never freeze people's accounts for political reasons or on orders of the government.
00:21:19.000I think there may be a place for institutions like that in the future that people have faith in.
00:21:27.000When it comes to money, people don't want the bank telling them that they can't get their money if they vote wrong or if they say the wrong thing.
00:21:35.000Yes, and we're seeing evidence of that.
00:21:38.000For us, it's a little bit difficult, too, because in Canada, we don't have a lot of options.
00:21:43.000You know, the one thing that people have to understand with the Emergency Act is, and I discussed this with Keith Wilson, one of my lawyers that's defending me now against this $306 million lawsuit because of the horns.
00:22:30.000Or somebody driving by and showing their support by honking.
00:22:33.000But this lawsuit has now grown into a tort case.
00:22:37.000Where they have named several of the organizers of the truck convoy.
00:22:43.000They've now named me, Danny Beaufort, and a couple of other individuals through their organizations.
00:22:49.000And the lawsuit has now grown to $306 million.
00:22:53.000And the irony of this is that I don't own a truck and I don't even own a horn.
00:22:57.000So why my name is on there, this is all tort law.
00:23:00.000And, you know, I have full confidence in my lawyers.
00:23:05.000You know, I'm not overly concerned about it, but it's really, it's almost like it's an effort to just waste our time and our energy and not focus on what's really happening out there.
00:23:16.000So that's kind of frustrating in its own right.
00:23:18.000But, you know, in terms of what options the Canadians have, where do we safely park our money?
00:23:26.000And the issue with the banks, though, is that when they got that order from the federal government, that list of 42 names, they were legally obligated to go and seize those accounts.
00:23:37.000If not, they would have been committing an offense.
00:23:40.000However, I think they have enough capital and legal means to have challenged it in court.
00:23:48.000Right away and challenged the federal government on this type of behavior.
00:23:53.000I don't think they did the moral thing by any stretch.
00:23:56.000I think they just, without thinking, did whatever they were told and they tested the waters to see how it would go.
00:24:01.000And now it's backfired on the banks and people are starting to close their bank accounts in this country, which is a good thing, but potentially it could be a disastrous thing for the Canadian economy.
00:24:14.000You know, what is the political fallout?
00:24:32.000And, you know, one of the big challenges that we've had in the last two years is that the Conservative Party in this country for the last two years have behaved nothing like the Conservative Party or their heritage.
00:24:45.000They have not behaved like Conservatives.
00:24:47.000They have just gotten in line right behind all of the COVID mandates.
00:25:33.000The challenge there is, who becomes the official opposition?
00:25:37.000So if the Conservatives become, or the government, who's going to be the opposition?
00:25:43.000There's not an election at the federal level scheduled.
00:25:46.000We have a different system where an election could be called any day in this country.
00:25:50.000It's not like in America where there's a four-year election cycle for the federal government or for the president anyway.
00:25:57.000But, like, he could call an election any time.
00:26:00.000Do you think that most Canadians oppose the emergency powers?
00:26:05.000You know, I... That's a really tough question because I'm not a big social media person.
00:26:12.000I don't have a large presence on there.
00:26:14.000I really don't have a metric to be able to answer that.
00:26:17.000Everybody in my circle, everybody that I personally know that is awake to the insanity that we have all experienced in the last two years, they are fully against the Emergency Act.
00:26:31.000But there's no really good way to quantify that.
00:26:34.000And that's very tricky because if, let's say, we called for a national referendum on COVID mandates today, you really have a hard time telling which way people would lean.
00:26:45.000You know, it's a big risk if you were to do a national referendum on COVID mandates because you could lose.
00:27:40.000And what I'm seeing overwhelmingly, you know, people said to me many, many times in Ottawa, it's the first time in two years I've been proud to be a Canadian again.
00:27:48.000And so more and more and more people are waking up.
00:27:51.000And I've had a lot of people say to me, hey, you know, my 80-year-old grandmother, who was a supporter of all these mandates, saw what you guys did, and she's actually reconsidered it and changed her position completely.
00:28:04.000So there are thousands of Canadians, and I get these messages every day, thousands of Canadians that have woken up to this finally being not about safety, but about government control and power grabs.
00:28:17.000So people really are starting to wake up to that absolute truth.
00:28:21.000And they're waking up to it all around the world.
00:28:24.000And what I'm really happy to see is that Australia, Australia is the only Commonwealth country in the world that doesn't have a charter of rights and freedoms, which is why their government has been so brutal with their law enforcement and military against its own people.
00:28:40.000And so they have been, I think, inspired by the Canadian truckers and same with France, same with New Zealand.
00:28:47.000Look at the convoy on its way to D.C. right now, right?
00:28:51.000The truckers gave everybody a voice and an opportunity to feel like they were not alone and that they could start speaking out and speaking freely about how they feel.
00:29:01.000And the fact that the government of Canada now wants to censor you or criminalize your thinking, you know, that is waking even more people up that were fully in the past.
00:29:12.000So I would say it's an overwhelming positive.
00:29:15.000How did the truckers inherit the male of leadership in this movement?
00:29:20.000I mean, I think 95 or 96% of them were fully vaccinated.
00:29:32.000Well, you know, that's a great question.
00:29:34.000And we've often asked, like, how is it that the truckers were able to do it?
00:29:38.000And if you really consider the small number, like we had hundreds of trucks, but it's very, very small in comparison to the overall number of trucks in Canada and the trucks that go back and forth between the US-Canada border.
00:29:54.000But when they can take their big giant truck and physically park it, literally at the footsteps of Justin Trudeau, it's hard to ignore.
00:30:03.000You can't just close your curtains and pretend like you don't hear the horns or see the big trucks or recognize that the city of Ottawa has all of these people there, you know, which is different than a protest on foot.
00:30:16.000Because a protest on foot in the wintertime, people are going to protest and then they're going to go home at the end of the day.
00:30:22.000The truckers were there, and they stayed.
00:30:24.000And they had every intention of staying for weeks on end.
00:30:28.000So without the big giant metal objects with wheels, they wouldn't have been able to accomplish what they did.
00:30:34.000I think the trip wire for the truckers was the vaccine passport that they need back and forth from the U.S. to Canada.
00:30:44.000What would have happened if Justin Trudeau had said to the truckers, come to Ottawa, Let's meet.
00:31:02.000And that was, you know, I personally, in some of the media stuff that I did, I personally, I almost begged for him to just come and talk to us and sit at a table.
00:31:11.000And we thought that he would be receptive to that because he was...
00:31:15.000He sent a delegation to talk to the protesters in the pipeline out west.
00:31:20.000He was encouraging or, you know, admonishing the Indian government for not talking to the farmers in India who were protesting for over a year.
00:31:29.000So we had a lot of evidence to suggest that he would actually sit in and talk because publicly many times he stated, go and talk to people.
00:31:40.000He outright refused to come and talk to us.
00:31:43.000And instead, he went into hiding, but didn't send a delegation, didn't send his deputy prime minister, didn't send any representative of the Liberal government.
00:31:52.000Instead, he just closed his curtains, went into hiding, and pretended like we weren't there.
00:31:58.000Because we started off as a fringe minority with unacceptable views, and three weeks later, he was invoking the Emergencies Act.
00:32:39.000So Tamara Lynch is one of the original organizers of the Freedom Convoy, you know, the trucker convoy that arrived in Ottawa.
00:32:49.000And her, with Chris Barber, started the whole movement and were the original organizers of the truck convoy.
00:32:58.000And unfortunately, on the Thursday before the police attacked, she was arrested and denied bail on charges of mischief and conspiracy to commit mischief.
00:33:10.000And so she is now still being held in custody and she has a bail hearing with a different judge and we're expecting that she'll be released.
00:33:47.000The honor is mine and Thank you for your courage and your leadership.
00:33:54.000And how can our listeners follow you or support you on social media?
00:34:00.000I'm on Twitter under Tom Marazzo, and I'm also on LinkedIn and Instagram, but I'm not a huge social media presence because I kind of felt like what you've experienced, I would just be banned or censored by social media for my unacceptable views.
00:34:21.000Is there any website or is there any place that people can go to to support the truckers?
00:34:27.000Yes, the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms, their website, and I believe they're crowdfunding for legal defenses for the truckers.