Shaun Newman Podcast - #893 - John Carpay

Episode Date: August 12, 2025

John Carpay is a Canadian lawyer and the founder and president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), a Calgary-based non-profit organization established in 2010 that focuses on defending constitutional rights through litigation and education.To watch the Full Cornerstone Forum: https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcastGet your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500Silver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]Bow Valley Credit UnionWebsite: www.BowValleycu.comEmail: [e-mail] Use the code “SNP” on all ordersProphet River Links:Website: store.prophetriver.com/Email: [e-mail]

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This is Tammy Peterson. This is Danielle Smith. This is James Lindsay. Hey, this is Brett Kessel, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Tuesday. How's everybody doing today? Canada, always doing strange things, you know?

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It's interesting to me. You know, this was talked about, oh man, like probably a couple hundred episodes ago. People were talking about the next thing to come would be climate lockdowns, right? well, what is not allowing hiking? Yeah, you might argue that's climate lockdown. Pretty close anyways.

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or you can go check them out, planetcom.ca. And take a look at all the things they can do for you. Substack. It's free to subscribe to. Yeah, I know. People are, people are like, I don't know. Like, Sean, you're back. It's time to get on the substack thing. I know. We had a four-day camping trip planned with the high school friends, as I pointed out. And I'm got this, I'm slowly working on this next substack post, and I've just got like pictures and stuff in there because we've been, it has been awesome. I got no complaints. I'm not about to, lay on you guys any complaints. It's been a great summer and we've been seeing some people visiting some different places, got to run in some listeners, some former podcast guests like all the things and look forward to bringing you all up to speed on it and it's been super cool. And yes, substack is returning here very shortly and it's going to have a giant post on it. Anyways, it's free to subscribe to. You can get all that. You can also become a paid member, support the podcast

and get a few behind the scenes things and access to all the Cornerstone forums and everything else. So if you're wanting to do that, that's down the show notes. We have the new studio being worked on as we speak, and, you know, we're hoping here in the very near future we're going to have our first podcast out of there and then probably a huge series of podcasts out of there. We're loaded up for some blue-collar roundtables

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If you're listening or watching on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, RumbleX, make sure to subscribe. Make sure to leave a review. And, yeah, just share with a friend. Help us get out past the algorithms and everything else that's probably, shadow banning us at this point. All right, let's get on to that tale of the tape. Today's guest is a Canadian lawyer and the founder and president of the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms. I'm talking about John Carpe. So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by John Carpe. Sir, thank you for hopping on.

Glad to be with you, Sean. Now, you know, when I had the opportunity to have you on, I'm like, That is one lawyer I haven't had on that I probably should have had on, you know, six months ago, but, you know, so be it. Here is the time. You being the first time you've been on the podcast, maybe tell the audience a little bit about yourself. I don't think you need much of an introduction because I've seen your work all over the place. But for this audience, maybe just a bit of your background and, I don't know, how you got to where, you know, where you're at today. So myself personally, I live in Calgary. I'm married. My wife and I have four kids, ages 14 to 21. And I've been, was called to the bar. I've been a lawyer in Alberta since 1999. And I started the Justice Center 15 years ago to fight for the freedoms of expression, association, conscience, religion, peaceful assembly. movement, travel, mobility.

And we were fighting in the trenches for about a decade, fighting for including the right of parents to raise and educate their own children as parents team best, not as political activists might want kids to be indoctrinated. And we were involved in the Trinity Western litigation for their right to have a law school, which we ended up losing in the Supreme Court of Canada. And when lockdowns were imposed in March of 2020, we were the only organization in Canada that called for an end to lockdowns. Other civil liberties groups were against some of the rules as being too extreme. But fundamentally, they accepted and they embraced the media narrative that lockdowns were necessary and so on.

We took the view that lockdowns did more harm than good. And so from 2020 to 2021, over the course of the next year and a half, our membership, the size of our organization grew. We tripled in size. And, you know, since lockdowns have been, are no longer in force, the revenues have shrunk a little bit, but we're still going strong. And I would say the Justice Center is the leading defender of constitutional rights. and freedoms in Canada today. Well, I feel like you have no shortage of things the Canadian government is doing. I think we can all agree on that.

Like I've got a list of things since I came back in the Canada. I'm like, I can't believe this is happening. But before we get to anything going on today, one of the, you know, like I started this podcast 2019, but I didn't start talking to lawyers, professors, politicians, on and on. the list goes until roughly middle of 2021. So when you say the Trinity Western case where you lost it for them to have a law school, I'm just curious. I love understanding maybe parts of the history of Canada that I wasn't paying attention to back then.

Could you walk me through Trinity Western? Sure. So it's a private Christian university based in Langley and British Columbia. It is an accredited university. They have a teaching program, nursing program, all these other programs. And so they wanted to start a law school. And they got the approval of the Canadian Federation of Law Societies, which is sort of an umbrella group, umbrella organization because the law societies are all provincial. And these law societies approved Trinity Western's law program as being academically sound, that it had, you know, it was, it was, it was,

objective, it was solid, it was going to give the students a good education in contracts and torts and criminal law, constitutional law, so and so forth. So it was an academically sound program. And then there were three law societies in BC, Ontario, and Nova Scotia, which said that because Trinity Western was a Christian university and because they had a Christian code of conduct that prohibited sex outside of marriage. If you want, so that's part of, every, every university in Canada has a code of conduct of some kind, right? But the Trinity Western's code of conduct was Christian because it's a Christian university.

So they said, there's no sex outside of marriage. So if you want to study here, you've got to sign a community covenant or sign a contract saying that, you know, no drunkenness, no gossip, no marijuana, no sex outside of marriage. you know, it was one of, it was kind of a, you know, just a code of conduct. If you don't like the code of conduct, don't go to Trinity. There's all these other schools to go to. Now, Trinity Western's Code of Conduct said no sex outside of marriage, and they define marriage as being between a man and a woman. So by necessary implication, they're saying if you're same sex attracted, if you're welcome to counter Trinity Western, but if you want to be sexually active, then not allowed because there's no sex outside of the marriage of a man and a woman. So that was their Christian code of conduct. On that basis, and that basis alone, the law societies in BC, Ontario, and Nova Scotia said, Trinity Western should not be allowed to have a law school, even though the law school has been approved, pre-approved as academically sound and professionally competent. They should not be allowed to have a law school because they have this Christian code of conduct.

And that's just unacceptable because that discriminates against LGBTQ people. And so this ended up making its way through the courts. You know, we had victories and losses along the way. Ultimately, it got to the Supreme Court of Canada, which said that the law societies could trample on the freedoms of religion and conscience and freedom of association of Trinity Western University. And so the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 2018 that Trinity Western was not allowed to have a law school because,

it has a Christian code of conduct. One of the worst court rulings I've I've read in all my years of since I went to law, since I started going to law school 30 years ago, it's one of the, it's a woke, politically correct. It kind of reads like a very lengthy 65 page NDP tracked and it's all about equity, diversity, inclusion. And there's very little respect there for the charter freedoms of Trinity Western University and it's, it's members, students, staff, faculty, whatever. Yeah, very little respect for for charter freedoms. I guess I'm I shouldn't be dumbfounded because like on this show we've talked to lots people throughout Canada, but you know, different events. But I, this one I'm like, they're

not saying you got to go to Trinity one, one, to be. become a lawyer. You can go to like any number of universities become a lawyer. In order to go to that school, you have a code of conduct to go to, as you've pointed out so clearly, to go to any other university, you have a code of conduct. Why does Nova Scotia and Ontario get to weigh in on what's happening in a BC school, specifically in law and not, I don't know, say nursing or other things? Or have they tried? The Supreme Court totally reversed itself in 2008.

I'm not sure of the year, but it was about 10 years previous or maybe 15 years previous, no more than 15 years, max. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in a nearly identical case. Trinity Western University had a teaching program where you could go and you can become accredited certified teacher after completing the teaching program. And there was, I don't know if it was the BC Teachers Federation, or some group in BC had a problem with this and said,

well, this is a problem because, and they didn't say it in these words, but they said, Trinity Western is going to graduate a bunch of hateful homophobic bigots that are going to treat students who are same-sex attracted like garbage. And, you know, we can't have this in Canada because we are woke and progressive and we believe in equity, diversity, inclusion.

So Trinity Western University should not be allowed to have a teacher's program because they have a community covenant, and the community covenant says that if you're a student at Trinity Western, there's no sex outside of marriage, or more specifically, there's no sex outside of the marriage of one man and one woman. And if you want to go to that university, you sign on the dotted line, you agree to that code of conduct. If you don't like that code of conduct, you've got dozens and dozens of other places to go to to get your teaching qualifications,

including in the province of British Columbia. So this went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled eight to one in favor of Trinity Western University. And they noted among other things that there was no evidence that any graduate of Trinity Western University had ever mistreated anybody. And, you know, even if there had been that, you know, how do you, you would need to prove that that's actually caused by. You could have somebody come out of, sorry, U of A, you could have somebody come out of the U of A and do something like that. And they're not shutting down a program because of one student. Well, and, you know, and if the, again, apologies to U of A, but if if the U of A teaching program, if a lot of the graduates were a bunch of means, hateful bigots that were mistreating students.

I mean, it's pretty hard to prove, you know, is that actually caused by the nature of the code of conduct of the University of Alberta? I mean, it's a big stretch. So the key point there is the Supreme Court of Canada ruled expressly, eight to one, they ruled in favor of Trinity Western University. And so you can have your teaching program. There's no evidence that there's any problems that are, you know, there's any kind of a link between, first of all, there's no evidence that students are getting

mistreated by Trinity Western University teaching grads. There's no evidence to that. Secondly, if there was, you'd have to prove that there's causation there. So there's just no evidence. Trinity Western is allowed to have their teaching program and they're allowed to have their code of conduct, which prohibits sex outside of the marriage of one man and one woman. they can do that. And they probably also said in that ruling, I haven't read it recently, but that there's other options, you know, if you don't want to go, if you don't want to sign onto a community covenant code of conduct to abstain from SACS for, you know, while you're a student at some place, well, go study somewhere else. You know, there's lots of other universities.

So the Supreme Court completely reversed itself. They came up with some just crazy, they were really grasping at straws, but they, they found, you know, if you want to rule a certain way, you can always find a justification for it. So they, they, they grasped at, at some straws and said that this law society thing was completely, totally different from the teaching college, which it wasn't at all. But, you know, they, they, they, uh, wanted to, to make a political ruling. And so they, they found excuses to, to reject the prior precedent. So roughly in a, in a decade span and in a 10-year span, they went from ruling 8 to 1 to flipping the other way.

The other way was 7 to 2. We had Justice Russell Brown, who's no longer on the Supreme Court, and Justice Suzanne Cote, who still is. Those two ruled in favor of the charter freedoms of Trinity Western University, but the other seven judges. So I'm assuming where we're at today,

none of it really surprises you then with seeing certainly Trinity Western and things like that. happening you could kind of make out the red flags of where we're heading to or am i misinterpreting that well things got a lot worse a lot more quickly after march of 2020 when the lockdowns were imposed uh i had i've seen ideological bias from you know it's been around for a long time and it had been slowly getting worse where you know if you fit the woke oppression narrative and you're a member of an oppressed group like you're female or you're you're female or you're

gay or dark-skinned, you're more likely to win your court cases. That had been a problem for a long time. Where things really went off the rails in 2021, 22, 23 is we got court rulings where judges, Canadian judges wrote the media narrative that they had heard dozens of times, or probably hundreds of times. They wrote the media narrative into their court rulings, and it was not supported by evidence placed before the courts. And so that was, I've written a book on that called corrupted by fear. And I go through some of these court rulings. So things got a lot worse with COVID because a judge is supposed to rule based only on

the evidence that's placed in court. They're supposed to disregard media reporting. And yet we had one judge like Glenn Joyal in Manitoba declared in his ruling that COVID was the was unprecedented and it was the worst pandemic in the 20th century. there's no evidence to support either assertion. He had heard that on the news. And in fact, we had the Spanish flu of 1918, which was many multiples worse than COVID.

We had the Hong Kong flu of 1957, the Asian flu of 1958. I think I've got the mixed up Asian flu in 1957, Hong Kong flu in 1968, both of which were more deadly than COVID. And yet he just writes into, he just parrots what he's heard on the six-clock news, And he writes into his court ruling that COVID was the the worst global pandemic in, in a century and it was not true.

And so this is this was yeah, things got worse after lockdowns. Forgive me because I haven't read your book, but now I'm like, well, I know what I'm ordering, you know, because I'm curious. When you sit there as a lawyer and you're watching this playoff. Now, forgive me because I'm not a lawyer. I'm just the lame man looking at this. But I think what a judge is supposed to do, he's supposed to sit in there and look at the evidence

and they make a ruling. Not bringing the outside world, just take a look at the other. Okay, yeah. And sometimes that's going to go with the way certain people want. Sometimes it's not because the evidence doesn't support it. And, you know, maybe I'm making this way too Hollywood. But to me, a judge is supposed to be impartial and just look at the evidence and go, wow,

that's pretty darn compelling right there. That doesn't sound like what you just said. No, and it, you know, the way it's supposed to be is even if the public gets outraged, like you could have media reports. Let's say some guy is accused of a horrible crime. He's accused of, you know, kidnapping, raping, murdering, a little girl. And the media is, you know, going on and on. And he looks really guilty in the media. But if the evidence before the court, if the crown can't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this guy actually committed the crime, the judge is going to acquit.

And you get this from time to time. judges would acquit somebody who has definitely been found guilty by the media and the public's outraged because the public says, well, it's obvious that he was guilty. But the judge is going on the evidence in the courtroom and say, well, the crown did not prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. So I'm going to acquit this person, even though, you know, the media made it look obvious that he was guilty. So the other thing with COVID rulings, not only were the judges parroting what they heard on the CBC and other government-funded media. We also had one judge, Renee Pomerantz, in Ontario in the Trinity Bible decision.

She ruled in favor of government lockdowns, the Ontario government lockdowns that were violating the religious freedoms of churches and other houses of worship. And she actually wrote in her ruling. It was amazing. She said, I am neither equipped nor inclined to resolve scientific controversy. regarding COVID-19.

There's many questions, you know, how deadly is COVID really? Because there's different scientists. Some people say, you know, it's really, really deadly. Other people say it's a bad annual flu. How effective are the lockdowns, right? The government says, oh, yeah, they're saving lives. Other scientists, medical doctors are saying, no, the virus is going to spread everywhere anyways.

You've got all these issues. But she said, I'm neither equipped nor inclined to resolve scientific controversies. and then she just went ahead and ruled in favor of the government. And it was just astounding because if in 2019, if myself or if another lawyer had written a letter to the editor saying Justice Renee Pomerantz is neither equipped nor inclined to resolve scientific controversies when she's ruling on cases, we would have gotten a threatening letter from the Law Society

telling us that we were out of line for being disrespectful of a judge. And here she says this about herself in her own court ruling. She says, I'm neither equipped nor inclined to resolve scientific controversies. When that is her job description and when the government was violating our rights and freedoms, which the government admitted in court, every court action, the government said, yes, lockdowns do violate the freedoms of religion, conscience, association, peaceful assembly. Governments admitted that, but they said it was justified. And so it's the job of the judge to look at the scientific evidence and rule on whether the government's violation of charter freedoms was actually justified yes or no.

And the courts, for the most part, they never explained why they accepted the government's evidence and rejected the evidence put forward by Canadian citizens fighting for their charter rights. If we fast forward to today, I just had them on last week, Sean Foyt, the American Christian singer-songwriter going across Canada and having everything canceled and everything else. What do you make of a guy coming through singing? I haven't heard, maybe I'm wrong on this. I haven't heard of riots going on at his concerts. I haven't heard of people burning buildings down or anything wild like that. But here they go. They just, you know, off they go one by one.

They're all getting canceled. I just watched the mayor of Saskatoon talk about, you know, public safety. They're all worried about public safety. And I'm going public safety. There's nothing that he's done to this point that would suggest you have to worry about public safety. Even talking to Sean, it sounded like he'd been coming up to Canada for 20 years. Maybe that's a stretch. Maybe it's been 10.

But regardless, he's been coming here often or not. Haven't ever heard of his name before. So it's not like he's got this huge track record. What do you make of Sean Foyt? Well, the censorship problem is censorship spreads like a cancer. I saw this 20 years ago on campus when there were students who had a very unpopular opinion. They were pro-life students and they were peacefully advocating for that on campus, including setting up displays, some of which had graphic photos showing abortions at different.

stages of pregnancy. And at that time, they were the only group that was getting censored. And I had, I defended free speech rights for some pro-life students at the University of Calgary. They were threatened by expulsion if they kept on putting up their display on campus. And ultimately, this went to court. And we won. We got a court ruling against the University of Calgary. But I remember saying at the time, if we as a society or if the universities are okay with pro-life, getting censored just because it's a very unpopular opinion and a lot of people find it very upsetting it's like no you can't talk about that if we allow that to be censored then the censorship will spread like a cancer so here you've got you know fast forward 20 years you've got sean foie

foy who also happens to be against abortion as well but the the the the cbc and the government funded media and a lot of elected politicians they can't stand the fact that this guy is openly pro-Trump. Even though he's not going on a pro-Trump speaking tour, he's actually coming to Canada to sing religious worship songs. They can't stand that. So they want to censor him because they don't, it's like free speech for me, not for thee.

That kind of sums it up, right? I believe in free speech. I should be allowed to say whatever I want. But if I don't like what you're saying, then I should be allowed to shut you up. Because what you're saying, I think it's hateful, it's misinformation, whatever. What, I'm curious, why is it important to have free speech?

A number of reasons. One is that it furthers the progress of science and art and literature and music and politics and theology. When you've got a clash of ideas, it forces everybody to think. When you have no free speech, everybody thinks alike. When everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks very much. So it's important for having good laws in Canada. So if you are, let's see you're the Premier of Alberta and you put forward your law number 17, right? But if there's no free speech, the law is going to get passed.

It won't even be improved. But when you get a lot of pushback and you've got people saying, oh, law 17 is terrible for these reasons. You have this debate back and forth. At the end of the day, you might withdraw your law 17 and say, we're not doing it. or you might modify it and change it based on criticism. So we end up with better laws if we have free speech. That's a big reason. And I would say one of the things I noticed in COVID was that discussion portion of like solutions to get away from COVID from just everything.

One side was allowed to talk. one side was definitely not allowed. And we see that over and over again now in a ton of forums. When it's a government-controlled narrative, that is allowed and everything else is misinformation, roughly. Yeah. There are plenty of doctors who thought that lockdowns were useless. Well, in fact, if you had asked 100 doctors in the year of 2019, if you'd asked 100 doctors, Is it possible to stop a virus from spreading everywhere in society? Almost all of them would have said, no, you could temporarily slow down the speed at which the virus spreads. Yes, you could.

But ultimately, the virus is going to go everywhere. It's going to reach everyone. And you can't just lock down society for months on end and expect to be saving lives. That's what the doctors would have told you in 2019. But that became effectively illegal in 2020. And doctors were threatened sometimes overtly. usually in a more subtle way, they were threatened by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta, which basically told doctors if you don't support lockdowns.

Or you have to at least, maybe you don't have to support them, but if you speak out against lockdowns, you risk losing your license to practice medicine. And if you oppose mandatory vaccination policies, if you come out with kind of a pro-choice, you know, people that want it, should be able to take it, But, you know, others shouldn't. If you're against mandatory vaccinations, you're going to lose your license. If you issue medical exemptions to people over mask wearing or getting injected, you risk losing your license.

It was just they were fascists, is what they are, modern fascists doing what the fascists did in Europe 90 years ago. This college thing, this like governing body of all these different areas, right? you're talking about doctors but you know uh we talked right before we started about um here in alberta a lawyer challenging the law society over compelled courses to take in order to practice being a lawyer these governing bodies seem to be like really big choke points they have a lot of control over what happens underneath uh your thoughts on that like it like because obviously it's not just happening in law or with doctors i mean we talked uh briefly before

before we started too, about Jordan Peterson, some of the challenges he's faced here in Canada. And it seems to go to every profession at this point that has a governing body. Yeah. Yeah, it's a huge problem. I know lawyers that have had threatening letters, received threatening letters from the Law Society of Alberta over something that they said in public that was just a political opinion.

But the unwritten rule, you're allowed to say whatever you want, as long as it's woke, progressive, you know, NDP, liberal, equity, diversity, inclusion, as long as it's the right speech or the correct speech, you have total freedom of speech. You can say whatever you want. But if you want to put forward conservative or Christian or libertarian or other nonconformist opinions,

so the Law Society of Alberta has mandated a course called The Path. And in order to practice law in Alberta, a lawyer has to take this court. It's an online course. And a lawyer has to kind of check off the boxes saying that he or she agrees that colonization never clearly defined is a bad thing. And decolonization also never clearly defined is a really good thing. And so, you know, by the way, I've got no problem with people advancing their opinions.

You know, if somebody, I will, as Voltaire said, you know, I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. If people want to argue decolonization and that it was just a huge mistake for the Europeans and Africans and Asians to come here and, you know, second class, ethnicity should all go back to where we came from and whatever. I will go to bat to defend anybody's free speech, whatever they want to advocate for. But here you've got the Law Society, which is a government body, which is saying that lawyers cannot practice law in Alberta unless,

they express agreement with this woke, you know, this woke decolonization perspective. So that's a problem. And you've got the same tyranny, college of physicians and surgeons. In so many professions, this woke ideology is creeping in. And, you know, engineers and teachers and accountants are asked to pay lip service to political notions rather than just focusing in on competent professional practice. So where does that sit right now here in Alberta, like with this course? Well, the government of Alberta has been working on and talking about,

I don't know where the status is at, but we're going to, very likely, we're going to see some changes to legislation in Alberta, which is wonderful because it is, you know, we can correct this problem. It's not that hard to do. All of these bodies, you know, the teachers, you know, the teachers colleges and association of professional engineers and, you know, accountants, everybody, these are all provincial bodies. And so the provincial government can amend the legislation and tell the college of physicians

and surgeons that they are not to censor or threaten any doctor who speaks out on any topic and that we've got free speech, including free speech on medical and scientific issues, like are lockdowns doing more harm than good? Should vaccinations be mandatory? So the legislation, I believe, is coming to force the College of Physicians and Surgeons to take a scientific approach and welcome debate. And the legislation is also going to amend the Legal Profession Act and other legislation to restore freedom of speech for professionals of all kinds. Um, is that under like in the government, if I'm sitting here once again as a layperson, is that under one of the ministers or is that got to come directly from Premier Smith? Like how does that actually break down so that a person can follow and I don't know,

encouraged that it be done? How it usually works with legislation. I mean, sometimes you have private members bills that make it to a vote and sometimes to become law, but that doesn't happen too often, but they are part of the picture. What usually happens is that there's a particular minister, the health minister, the education minister, the transportation minister, they and, you know, with the advice of other MLAs, with the advice with input from citizens, probably with lots of input from the bureaucracy, the health minister will come out with legislation pertaining to health care.

the education minister will come out with legislation pertaining to education, so on and so forth. And then the Justice Minister, who in Alberta's Moe, Amory, is heavily involved and plays a big role in all of the legislation as well. So these particular amendments to these regulatory bodies, I think, will be coming from the Justice Minister, Moe, Amory, as far as I know. And I guess just one more thought on this or one more question is like, is there a timeline? Like you, you sound relatively confident there's going to be legislation coming through at some point. Like, I'm just curious. Like, is there dates or anything that you could share with the audience or you're like, listen,

you should probably be paying attention in October or anything that gives like, I don't know, some hope that these changes are actually in fact coming? Well, people should pay attention to the legislature being in session, you know, anyways, whether this kind of legislation is coming much. Fair, yes. But I would expect, I would not be surprised if some of these bills were being introduced in the fall session, which will be starting in September, October in Alberta. And Premier Smith herself has stated publicly that the government is looking at making, you know, making changes. to the legislation to essentially to force these woke power hungry ideologues to respect free speech and respect the scientific process. Another hot topic of recent times is Nova Scotia. This whole not hiking, you know, the big fines 25 grand for being caught out in a forest, right, walking around where.

You shouldn't go because, you know, like, where do you go with this? But I assume like you're thinking, well, I don't know. What do you think of this? It's just, it's evil. It's wicked. It's a power trip. It's irrational. It's detached from common sense.

I understand that there's fire hazards. I mean, that's nothing new. That's been around all of our lives. I remember as a child, I grew up in British Columbia. And, and they had the fire hazard. And they had like red was extreme and orange was severe. And, you know, green was like, you know, don't worry too much about it. And they had a little arrow that would get moved.

You know, so like we're, what's the state of the, are we on green where, of course, you should put out your campfire properly. But, you know, if you don't, we're probably not going to see the whole forest burned down because we've had a lot of rainfall, whatever the reasons. So it's totally legitimate for governments to want to. protect the forests from fires. A rational way, a rational connection would be to say, well, because the fire hazard is high or extreme, total ban on all campfires. Maybe you could have a campfire in your own backyard if the municipality that you live in allows it. Maybe that,

but other than that, you know, province-wide ban, no campfires. Province-wide ban on smoking, cigarettes, cigars, marijuana, whatever. No smoking allowed anywhere except on your private property or maybe, you know, within the boundaries of a city. I guess if you put a butt out on a sidewalk downtown, it's probably not going to cause a forest fire. So those would be rational ways. What they're doing here is they're just violating that basic freedom and liberty and human dignity of people by saying, you can't go marching in the woods when what fire hazard is caused by you or me or anybody else, just walking in the woods if you're not smoking a cigarette and you're not setting a campfire,

You're not creating any fire hazard whatsoever. So this is just, it's a fascist power trip on the part of the premier who I suspect gets a psychological kick out of oppressing people. Yeah. Sorry to be. I mean, that's very kind of crude language. No. No. I remember it was in the middle of COVID or maybe it was just after the lockdowns had officially come off and having a guest on them talking about the next

emergency will be climate. And I at the time was thinking, yeah, I could kind of see that, you know, like I see all the push around climate and, and, you know, the planet's going to burn and lots of different things. And then you had some bad forest fires. And I keep reiterating this. I brought on forest management specialists who talked about, you know, like when you manage a forest properly, you know, there's no way you can, there's no possibility of. of preventing every forest fire. You know, you have lightning strikes for Pete's sake that are going to happen off in a four off place, remote, and it's going to set in motion a series of events.

But there are some logical ways in which you can help prevent forest fires, etc. You've listed off a couple, you know, like if it's a dry season, campfires have been normally just like you can't have any. I don't know of a camper out there that hasn't dealt with that at some point. But like to just be like, you can't go in a forest. You cannot go anywhere. It's like, that doesn't make any logical sense. Other than a couple years ago, I heard, and I forgive it, I got to go back and check

out which guest or a series of guests had talked to me about it. Because to be sitting here and watching it in Nova Scotia, I'm like, this is pretty wild. I get it that you want to make a statement about we have to be careful out in dry conditions, but to eliminate people from walking on trails and stuff. Well, harkens back to taping off playgrounds and closing down gyms and different things that make us healthy in the middle of COVID. That's the comparison I can make. Well, and ticketing people, the Justice Center provided lawyers for a teenager in Ottawa. He was 17 years old at the time.

He was playing basketball outside alone. He's alone by himself. and there was, you know, like a basketball hoop up against some wall, some building. He's by himself gets a $700 ticket. People arrested for sitting on a park bench. Ocean Wiseblad arrested for being on an outdoor pond. Outdoor pond. And these are like young healthy guys who are not threatened by COVID at all.

I mean, 99.9% of the population was not seriously threatened by COVID, but especially not young guys. And then it's not transmitted outdoors. I mean, it was so irrational on so many levels, and you get this aggressive foul-mouthed police officers just cussing away a storm and dropping multiple F-bonds and assaulted this guy and arrested him for playing hockey outside. So this is what we're seeing.

A ban on people walking in the woods is on the same level as these lockdown rules. It's really scary that people enjoy the power. And then you've got, you know, as a starting point, yes, we should obey the laws, absolutely. And we also need to use our heads. And because those who can make you believe absurdities can also make you commit atrocities. Well, that's it. That's a heck of a line.

I remember Ocean Wise Black in particular because I remember being on this show and I'm in the same province, right? We're in Alberta, happens there near Calgary or maybe even in Calgary and thinking, oh, that's, you know, one-off. This will never come to Lloydminster, right? We'll never have any craziness like that. That's just crazy old big city. And, you know, then the rest of the COVID hysteria continued. And when I watch a different province do this, I have no, I'm not naive to think that that can't transfer across a country. We have seen it in this country how crazy it can get. So the fact that

they have a snitch line in Nova Scotia, if you see anyone doing anything, give us a call. I'm like, this is getting to insane proportions or insane circumstances all over again. To the audience here in Alberta, you know, I assume we assume,

I assume we think this can't come to Alberta. What would you say to that group of people when you see different provinces and to doing this. Well, we saw pastors locked up in jail by Premier Jason Kenney, who had, you know, previously throughout his political career had always held himself out as a friend of freedom and a friend of common sense. And he imposes lockdowns, which in Alberta, we're a little bit less severe than in other provinces. Alberta did not have a total ban on people meeting together in a house of worship, which under Bonnie Henry in British Columbia,

there's total ban on meeting in houses of worship, even while bars and restaurants and gyms and strip joints were open. Everything was open except churches were shut down. So Alberta was better that way. The houses of worship were not completely closed. However, the Premier of Alberta went to court to get a specific injunction to create a legal situation where if Pastor James Coates or Pastor Tim Stevens or Pastor Art Pavlowski or any other pastor, if they violated the COVID rule, rather than just getting a ticket for a provincial offense, like a speeding ticket, they would actually be found in violation of a court order and they'd have to go to jail.

So it was Jason Kenney who saw to it that pastors were locked up in jail. So anybody who says this can't happen in Alberta, sure it can. We're, maybe it's less likely to happen here, but to say that it can't. No, it's, that's just, that's naive. Another thing that I was chuckling about what to talk to you about, because I'm like, I come back from holidays and I swear, coming from the, US back into Canada. It takes five minutes of looking at the news cycle and you're like, what is going on? And another one, well, it started out with Evia Chippiac. That's the first one

that came across my plate. But then I have a note here about Evan Blackman, but regardless, it's around the freezing of bank accounts. Walk me through what's happening on this front. Well, the banks are federally regulated. The charter does not apply to banks directly because they are still private entities, right? So the charter only applies to government. So banks can freeze bank accounts for political reasons. That's what's happening. I've known Evachip Yuck a long time and, you know, she's not, she's good lady and she's not, you know, financing terrorists. If she was, that would be illegal and she should get in trouble for that. But she's a, She's a freedom-loving, peaceful person.

She worked for the Justice Center as one of our staff lawyers at one point in time. And she's getting debanked for political reasons. So the federal government could fix that simply by amending the federal banking laws or the regulations either way and say banks cannot discriminate based on political opinion or based on peaceful political activity. So that's a big problem. what was even worse was in in 2022 in February where the banks hundreds of bank accounts hundreds were frozen because the prime minister issued this edict that people contributing to a political group that he disliked which had not been found guilty of any misconduct it was not a terrorist group right we've got legislation against terrorist financing and so we should

the amount of harm it did to us economically as well. I mean, we turned into, this is what you would expect in a banana republic or some repressive regime, right? That somebody criticizes the president or criticizes the prime minister. And a day later, suddenly they're charged with fraud or they're charged with rape or they're charged with something and they're locked up in jail. And everybody knows it's because they criticize the prime minister. And this is what we descended to in 2022, where you got bank accounts frozen on the political preferences of the prime minister. It was disgusting. How this Evan Blackman then, he was a convoy participant that seems to be a growing trend in people having their bank accounts frozen.

Where does this sit? So he was acquitted at trial. He was a peaceful protester. the Crown didn't have compelling evidence that he was obstructing justice or, you know, doing anything illegal. Unfortunately, the Crown appealed and the appeal judge ordered a new trial. So where this is at is it's going to, Evan Blackman is going to be placed before trial as well. He was actually kneeling down before the police with his hands up in the air and had one hand over his heart and he was singing, oh, Canada. and at one point he had his arms backwards to tell the other protesters to, you know, cool it and keep the peace, whatever.

So if he is convicted, then the lawyers representing Mr. Blackman are going to bring an application for a stay of proceedings on grounds that he is a victim of the violation of his constitutional right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. And so we've brought this application and in respect to the freezing of Evan Blackman's bank account. And so our argument in court will be that because the government behaved so egregiously by violating his bank account, sorry, by freezing his bank account, there should not be a conviction and he should not have a criminal record. And in that context, we were successful. the judge ordered the TD Bank and the RCMP to turn over documents to the judge for his review to see if they were relevant to the freezing of bank accounts. And so the RCMP and the TD Bank have done this and they've given the documents to the judge to review.

We may or may not see them in open court down the road. That remains to be seen. I guess I'm curious. The JCCF, this group of. lawyers. It feels like you're doing yeoman's work. Like you're you're you're taken on you know in other countries. I don't know what they're dealing with but here in Canada I hear some of the cases you're dealing with it seems like it's an open and shut case and yet in our system that's not quite the case all the time. It's it's become very unclear the which way we're

going to we're going to go here in the next few years when you talk about the federal government I have less than zero faith. Zero faith. When it comes closer to the provincial, I'm like, I feel like there's some hope there. And that we can have things changed and provincially, things can get better. With the JCCF, I guess is there an importance to take on the cases nationally when it just seems like it's crumbling and focus on everyone across Canada?

or is it better to draw in provincially and fight those cases to keep the provinces strong? I don't even know if that's a large question. Well, the hockey analogy that might be applicable is you miss 100% of the shots that you don't take. And so we, the Justice Center tries to take on as many cases as possible. Of course, we've got 10 full-time lawyers in our network, full-time paid staff lawyers to take on. dozens of cases. And it sounds like a lot, and it is great, but in a country of 40 million people, 10 lawyers is actually a very small number. And so we do that legal work, thanks to donations received from the public and we're registered charity. We issue official tax receipts.

In terms of the success rate, federal versus provincial, I'd have to really look at, you know, where we've been at the last 15 years. But you are correct that we've had so much cultural decay, we have this decline in respect for and appreciation for our fundamental human rights, civil liberties, constitutional freedoms. We're now seeing the fruits of 50 years of cultural decline in Canada. So even what should be a slam dunk case, like the Justice Center is providing lawyers for Jeff Evely in Nova Scotia who got the $28,800 fine, we're providing legal representation, we're going to challenge that law. So as they prosecute Jeff Evely, they're going to have to come up like the government will have to justify this ban on

on like prohibiting people from walking in the woods. I would like to, I'd love to say, oh yeah, it's a slam dunk. We're going to win that for sure. Well, I can't and I won't. I can't say with certainty that we're going to win that case. Well, if you go back to what you said about the, the, the, judge saying, you know, going back to the COVID, and forgive me, I forget the line that she said that you pointed to very clearly and succinctly. It's like, if she looked at the evidence, it would be an open and shut case because the evidence before her would probably weigh heavily on the fact that a lot of it was unconstitutional, doesn't work, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So if you fast forward to the fact that walking in a forest doesn't prevent a forest fire in any way,

shape or form, it should be open and shut. But you said earlier in this that they just parroted what they'd heard. Like to me, I just, and the fact that Nova Scotia is one of the provinces that fought Trinity years ago, I'm like, it just doesn't seem like it can even be remotely open and shut. Well, the people of Nova Scotia, if I lived in Nova Scotia, I would contact my elected representative. I don't know if they're called MLA or it's House of Assembly member of the House of Assembly MHA, but whatever they're called. People in Nova Scotia should contact their provincial representative and say this, this is, this is completely unacceptable. And if there's a public backlash, sometimes not always, you see politicians reversing course. Sometimes they put

something out and they're kind of, you know, they're, they're testing the wind. They're testing the wind. And so it's up to the people in Nova Scotia to push back. But if they don't, and if people, if we don't push back against the violation of our freedoms, we're just going to lose them. And we're going to slide further and further into this totalitarian tyranny where you just got the government running and managing your lives. And you've got no freedoms left for, you know, speaking your opinions, practicing your faith, living your life according to your convictions, associating freely with people you want to associate with,

having the freedom to walk in the woods, having the freedom to travel within Canada, to enter and leave Canada, having the right to bodily autonomy where you don't have politicians or health officials pressuring you to get injected with, you know, the latest substance of the day that the government thinks is really good.

If we don't push back, it's going to get worse. John, I appreciate you. coming on today. And you'd mentioned, I hope I'm not letting anything out of the bag, that you might be in the Lloyd Minster area at some point, which I think would be very fascinating to actually get to meet you and hopefully have you in studio. But if people want to support what you're doing, find out more about what you're doing, where would you direct them to? So our website is www.jCCF.ca.com. So JCCF is Justice Center Constitutional Freedoms, JCCF.ca.com. We have a free email newsletter. We send it out only twice a month.

So if you sign up for that, you'll get it in your inbox twice a month with updates on our cases. And we welcome donations. The more money that we receive, the more lawyers and paralegals that we hire. Conversely, when there's a dip in our revenues, we have to lay off lawyers and paralegals. So if you like the work, you know, every donation helps. So, you know, some people give us $1,000 a year. Some people give us $100 a year, whatever. It all goes into one bank account and that money is used to defend freedom in Canada.

Very, very similar. I don't know if this is a right comparison, but it sounds very similar to the Canadian Taxpayers' Federation. Yes? Yes. They're fighting for lower taxes, which is a form of economic freedom. And we're fighting for the freedoms of expression and association and all the civil liberties and human rights that we should all have. Appreciate you hopping on today, John. Look forward to, you know, hopefully meet you in person. Either way, thanks for, thanks for hopping on and discussing a few of the, I don't know, hot topics of Canada today. Thanks for having me. on your show, Sean, and look forward to the next time.